Deism - a few questions.

[transferosome]

I know there's at least one Deist on the board. Hopefully there are more - or this'll be a short thread.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism

I stand as pretty much a 'pre-inflationary-period-agnostic.' We have no data, so it's not possible to make a really scientific, rational guess. Using the rationality I have, I would lean towards the thinking that, just as all the processes of creation we've found so far are forces or nature without a personality, the process which created the universe we inhabit doesn't need a personality either.

However, I'm open to 'universe as computer simulation' ideas and similar, perhaps Deistic theories, in principle.

I guess what I'm asking is:

Deists, does your belief system hold any kind of advantage for you? (Theist thinking has heaven, hell or reincarnation to ease the perception of mortality...) Or is it just a belief sitting on its own?

Is there any rational thought behind it, or is it just a 'feeling'?

Finally, if physicists managed to see beyond the creation point of the universe and found a large body of evidence showing our universe to have been created by a natural, personality-free process in a 'larger' arena, would you:

a: ditch your belief in a creative god?
b: assume he created that arena, and that the scope of his creation was just orders of magnitude greater?

[Kilgore Trout]

To preface things, I call myself a 'Deist' but probably for lack of a better term. I went with my understanding of things first, then tried to fit the term to match, rather than vice versa. As such, I probably don't ascribe to all the ideas behind deism, but (to me) it seemed a close match.

Originally Posted by transferosome

I know there's at least one Deist on the board. Hopefully there are more - or this'll be a short thread.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism

I stand as pretty much a 'pre-inflationary-period-agnostic.' We have no data, so it's not possible to make a really scientific, rational guess. Using the rationality I have, I would lean towards the thinking that, just as all the processes of creation we've found so far are forces or nature without a personality, the process which created the universe we inhabit doesn't need a personality either.

I'm not sure what you mean by personality in this context, but I don't know that it figures into things either. It may, if you're wondering why I think the universe is as it is, but this is just an aside anyway.

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However, I'm open to 'universe as computer simulation' ideas and similar, perhaps Deistic theories, in principle.

I guess what I'm asking is:

Deists, does your belief system hold any kind of advantage for you? (Theist thinking has heaven, hell or reincarnation to ease the perception of mortality...) Or is it just a belief sitting on its own?

I'll shamelessly say that it does, and that is an afterlife.

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Is there any rational thought behind it, or is it just a 'feeling'?

To be honest, both. I think it does let me sleep a little easier, but it's minor. To say it just seems like it ought to be that way doesn't win many arguments, but in being truthful it figures in a little. More to it, though, is a philosophical understanding of things; a lot boils down to arguments of omnibenevolence (though that also requires a lot of defining) and best possible universe.

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Finally, if physicists managed to see beyond the creation point of the universe and found a large body of evidence showing our universe to have been created by a natural, personality-free process in a 'larger' arena, would you:

a: ditch your belief in a creative god?
b: assume he created that arena, and that the scope of his creation was just orders of magnitude greater?

I'm not quite sure I understand, but off hand I think I'd go with 'b'. I think there has to be a start somewhere. If it's shown that there was something natural that set off the big bang, for example, I'd wonder what started that something.

To say that that seems impossible is an extremely pompous idea, but as of now, that's my understanding. I'd be open to new ideas, like the Higgs boson, but right now I think once you get to that singularity of the big bang, it's seems impossible to even describe physics prior to that. (I bring up the Higgs boson, but it's quite over my head, really; I think I read somewhere that it may lead to an understanding of the big bang itself and/or prior events, so if experiments and theories do show such an understanding, I'd be curious to learn about them.)

[Jimbo07]

Originally Posted by transferosome

Deists, does your belief system hold any kind of advantage for you? (Theist thinking has heaven, hell or reincarnation to ease the perception of mortality...) Or is it just a belief sitting on its own?

I am an agnostic, based on the limits of what we can claim to know about the physical universe. However, when I'm being political (in mixed company), I will admit to a soft spot for deism. It allows a door to discourse to be left open.

However, while I'm amenable to a Deistic belief, it adds nothing to my conception of our wonderful, natural, physical universe. It merely adds another entity. Some people feel that this claim should fall to Occam's Razor. I say, 'meh.'

[Beleth]

I suppose I should post here since I am the "at least one Deist" mentioned in the OP.

I am a Deist because I used be a fence-sitting agnostic, and it got uncomfortable being perched on that fence. God either exists or not, and I found ending my train of thought at "therefore I don't know" rational but not rigorously logical. I would rather be wrong than to not come to a conclusion at all.

There are certain tenets of Deism given in the Wikipedia article that I don't quite adhere to. I don't believe in an afterlife. I believe that there are things that exist which are not translatable into any of the handful of sensory inputs our consciousness can process. I believe in what I call the "minimum possible Creator" - one whose only two knowable properties are "He had the ability and desire to create the material universe" and "He did so". Anything beyond that is conjecture. Heck, even those two properties are conjecture, but they are of a different type -- a "lower level," if you will -- of conjecture.

Does it give me comfort? Not especially. It answers questions I have, like "why is it that no matter how much we study the universe, there's always at least one more thing that we need a bigger telescope / more powerful supercollider / different mathematical system to investigate and describe?"

Yes, it's the very epitome of a God of the Gaps. And as long as there are gaps, there will need to be a God to fill them.

[Z]

I have to say I agree with Beleth, for the most part; but in my humble human vanity, I think part of our personality lives on, through that supreme entity, somehow.

It's a little crutch of comfort, in a sense.

But I also think such a being is above such concepts as 'good and evil', or 'crime and punishment'... in fact, I think that such a being pretty much ignores these petty little microbe infesting one of her lovely lumps of mud.

[Gord_in_Toronto]

I am not a Deist by any means (more like a "Badass Atheist with Attitude) but my mother was. I think, though I never specifically asked her, she was to a considerable extent a "Child of Her Times" having been born in 1913. She was too smart to believe in the Christain claptrap but not able to give up religion. Thus I see Deism as a sort of have way point on the road to TRVTH,

HMMV.

[lightcreatedlife@hom]

Originally Posted by Kilgore Trout

To preface things, I call myself a 'Deist' but probably for lack of a better term. I went with my understanding of things first, then tried to fit the term to match, rather than vice versa. As such, I probably don't ascribe to all the ideas behind deism, but (to me) it seemed a close match.

I'm with him.

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I'm not sure what you mean by personality in this context, but I don't know that it figures into things either.

Me too.

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I'll shamelessly say that it does, and that is an afterlife.

I believe in an afterlife, though I am pressed to prove it.

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To be honest, both. I think it does let me sleep a little easier, but it's minor.

Me too.

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I'm not quite sure I understand, but off hand I think I'd go with 'b'. I think there has to be a start somewhere. If it's shown that there was something natural that set off the big bang, for example, I'd wonder what started that something.

Me too.

[Tanstaafl]

Originally Posted by Gord_in_Toronto

I am not a Deist by any means (more like a "Badass Atheist with Attitude) but my mother was. I think, though I never specifically asked her, she was to a considerable extent a "Child of Her Times" having been born in 1913. She was too smart to believe in the Christain claptrap but not able to give up religion. Thus I see Deism as a sort of have way point on the road to TRVTH,

HMMV.

So Deism is sort of methadone for Christians?

[Kilgore Trout]

Originally Posted by lightcreatedlife@hom

I believe in an afterlife, though I am pressed to prove it.

Although in a debate, I imagine someone might bring up Occam and shaving, not to mention trying to rip apart Augustine and/or Thomas Aquinas, my take is that an afterlife helps answer 'why did God even bother?' and 'the universe is optimally good, a universe with an afterlife would be better than one without.' That, to me, is proof by reason (alone) which is how I base my philosophy, for the most part.

Material proof? I believe cannot exist at all. If there were material proof of an afterlife, it would mean people like Sylvia Browne could be right (or some other such nonsense). If Sylvia Browne is right, I want no part of this universe.