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Old 03-07-2011, 09:36 AM
 
16,294 posts, read 28,534,911 times
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Atheists: Is our future pre-determined?

Yep, we are all going to die. The was determined the moment we were born. What happens until then is purely chance.
Oh wait, that just life............
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Old 03-09-2011, 03:35 AM
 
Location: Bradenton, Florida
27,232 posts, read 46,663,996 times
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Maybe if you just believed that you would live forever, you could.

Maybe the only reason you die is because you become infected with the belief that you will, because you allowed someone else to tell you that we all die.
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Old 03-09-2011, 08:48 AM
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TKramar View Post
Maybe if you just believed that you would live forever, you could.
I don't practice self-delusion.
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Old 03-09-2011, 09:12 AM
 
Location: NC, USA
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Originally Posted by Asheville Native View Post
I don't practice self-delusion.
Dang!!!! ya beat me to it!
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Old 03-09-2011, 09:24 AM
 
Location: Bradenton, Florida
27,232 posts, read 46,663,996 times
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Originally Posted by Asheville Native View Post
I don't practice self-delusion.
It wouldn't be a delusion if it was true. Perhaps the delusion is that you MUST die sometime.

If you only believed that you could live forever, then you would. "Physician, heal thyself."
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Old 03-09-2011, 10:58 AM
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TKramar View Post
It wouldn't be a delusion if it was true. Perhaps the delusion is that you MUST die sometime.

If you only believed that you could live forever, then you would. "Physician, heal thyself."
Ain't you the guy that keeps going about "if I ain't seen it, it doesn't exist"?
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Old 03-09-2011, 11:00 AM
 
Location: Bradenton, Florida
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No, I'm saying if I haven't seen it, I can't make a determination of whether it is possible or not, that I cannot confirm OR deny its existence.

There's a difference.
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Old 03-09-2011, 01:54 PM
 
Location: Metromess
11,798 posts, read 25,189,686 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TKramar View Post
It wouldn't be a delusion if it was true. Perhaps the delusion is that you MUST die sometime.

If you only believed that you could live forever, then you would. "Physician, heal thyself."
That is patently absurd. The body's parts wear out. One can't "heal" that by willpower.
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Old 03-09-2011, 03:17 PM
 
Location: Bradenton, Florida
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Originally Posted by catman View Post
That is patently absurd. The body's parts wear out. One can't "heal" that by willpower.
I must live right...I've never been sick, even, much less had anything "wear out".
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Old 03-10-2011, 05:22 AM
 
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
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Originally Posted by Mattos_12 View Post
I think I have to be honest here, I'm not a Ph.D level physics student, and I can't comment of the complexities of quantum physics, but I can't see how there is a universe without cause and effect. If one accepts cause and effect then there can be no theoretically unpredictable events.

To give a simple example, if one were to throw a set of dice then the results would seem random, and would be unpredictable' to the person throwing the dice. However, if one were to know the forces involved and properties of the dice precisely, then the result is totally predictable. I think that the universe is similar, unpredictable in practical terms, but totally predictable in theory.
I'm not Phd level in physics either, but having entered this debate before I've picked up enough to form an opinion. Certain things (Quantam related) behave probabalistically rather than deterministically. For instance, the decay of a radioactive isotope behaves probabalistically, there is no law that can predict exactly when an unstable atom will release ionizing radiation. It is only possible to describe the exact moment of decay in probabalistic terms rather than deterministic ones. e.g. There is an 80% chance that the isotope will fire off a gamma partical in Direction X within the next 1 minute. This has implications for a strictly deterministic view of the universe because if, for example, if you were walking past a radioactive isotope which discharged gamma radiation which subsequently damaged one of your cells and caused you to develop cancer, then your development of cancer was probabalistic rather than deterministic. Even in theory it would not have been possible to predict with certainty that you would develop cancer.

However said that, I'm on your side as regards the broad thrust of what you're saying. Even though in the minutiae, radioactive decay is random, it is not entirely random because the law of large numbers allows us to say with relative certainty what the radioactive half-life of a particular isotope is. So in that sense, random behaviour becomes broadly predictable over time even though it is probabalistic on the micro level.

Ultimately when discussing "free-will" type questions, the answer has to be that we can't have any. (In the common understanding of the term.) We might not be strictly deterministic (rather we are probabalistic) but that doesn't leave scope for us to have any sort of free-will. It just means our behaviours are probabalistic rather than deterministic, though in the macro-world, and again referring to the law of large numbers, if you had all the data and infinite processing power you could do a pretty good job of predicting everything.
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