What belief is weirder?

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It's a laudable, yet ultimately futile, quest to seek the thing that created the thing that created the Big Bang.

I have no faith in the existence of gods or other phenomena.

I'm not defeated. I just concentrate on other things.

Whoever finds the Origin gains my admiration.

I guess it depends on how you define skeptic and atheist. I would say somebody that is an atheist but has a deep belief in the paranormal is probably is a probably a pretty confused individual.

It is possible that there is a multiverse. Every possible universe exists. This coincideswith the Everret many worlds hypothesis. An infinite amount of universes explains why the constants in our universe are so perfect for life (amazingly so!). The anthropic principle explains why our universe APPEARS to be designed. The odds of me winning the lottery are tiny. However, the odds of someone eventually winning the lottery are 100% certainty. Similarly, it is not amazing that the universe I live in is so perfect for life. Its that anyuniverse with life must have constants suitable for life.
Imagine a library with an infinite amount of books. Each one is typed randomly. The math says that one of those books will be an exact copy of Hamlet! There is no design, or designer.

I like paleoanthropology.

Creation from nothing makes sense at the quantum level. 0=+1-1 When nothing is separated into positive and negative ,we get 2 somethings.
There is a thing called paraconsistent logic (google it, sometimes it is called quantum logic). It was created because at the quantum level logic breaks down ( A does not =A). This creates a difficulty because from a contradiction everything results. The queen of England eats gerbils etc.
This weltershaung explains, the creation of the universe, the creation of a universe so perfect for life (the constants APPEAR fine tuned).
Unfortunately (or fortunately if you like your reality wild,) these valid* ideas make one realize that everything is ultimately absurd.
* Validity and truth are different.
Here is a valid but untrue syllogism
1. All Martains eat snakes
2. Bob is a Martain.
3. Therefore Bob eats snakes.
Here is a true but invalid syllogism
1. Nixon was president.
2. Carter was president
3. Therefore Eisenhower was president.
In other words, the above posts of mine (explaining life and the creation of reality) are obviously valid. Are they true? An infinite amount of universes cannot be empirically verified. However, I will say that either there is a God or there is a multiverse. Those are the only two options. The multiverse is the only way to explain why our universe APPEARS to be finely tuned for life that does not require a designer (God).

You'd have to clarify what kind of atheist you're talking about.

There's a particular guy I listen to on Youtube when I can who's a Hermetic Qabalist, teaches modern alchemy and spagyrics, and considers himself a metaphysical atheist.

You can, truthfully, hold an atheism were the nothing is the No Thing. In a way it actually stays quite well in line with the Kabbalistic doctrine of the Ain/Ain Soph/Ain Soph Aur as well as the philosophical concepts of the point, line, and circle. To the later the point is the first corruption because it's the least defined thing. As a thing starts taking on definition it takes on its descent into corruption (please - no jokes about my writing style here ).

So non-materialist atheists really aren't a freaky or fluky thing, they just rarely have much cultural association with what most people in the west think of when they hear the term 'atheist'. Perhaps a Buddhist is a more accessible analogy because many of them believe in spirits, gods (albeit they see them as a bit like big lost souls), reincarnation, but really a journey toward something so indescribable that annihilation is their best metaphor for it.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 05 Jan 2016, 7:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.

What you said right here is the very reason I practically loose it when I hear people say "bald is not a hair color" or "off is not a television channel" - atheism IS a metaphysical assertion. When people try implying otherwise it's a pretty crass evasion.

I'd say smarmy cultural believers for the win in this case.

Agreed! Atheism is a metaphysical assertion. Reminds me of those that criticize philosophy. They think that wondering about the ultimate answers is somehow useless. They are pragmatists, a subset of philosophy! You cannot escape philosophy and you cannot escape metaphysics!

Reminds me of Hawking. GREAT physicist but would fail philosophy 101! He is a logical positivist, a form of pragmatism. The fundamental and core assertion of logical positivism is that if a proposition is neither analytical or empirical it is meaningless. Is the proposition "if a proposition is neither analytical or empirical it is meaningless " analytical? NO! Is it empirical? NO! Therefore by its own guiding principle logical positivism is meaningless!

Only *mildly* OT: Since we're on the subject of alternate belief systems and "proof", alchemy turned out to be very real just over 100 years ago. Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy were extremely reluctant to publish their findings that Uranium turned into Lead and Helium (and so on down the decay chain) for fear of being labelled quacks.

I'd also think that enriched uranium in that quantity would also be worth more than the gold it would produce - hence making that a worthless endeavor.

They were afraid to use the T word: "transmutation" because thats what the alchemists of old called their quest to turn base metals into gold. Everything else here is both off topic and wrong.

The decay of Uranium ENDS with lead. Its doesnt start with lead. It goes through a series of unstable elements like radon, and radium, before ending with the stable isotope of lead 206.

Uranium "transmutates" naturally without human help. So even Rutherford and his partner were not being "alchemists".

We could do transmutation today at a lab like Cern. Just bombard a wad of aluminum foil with protons so that some of the protons stick to the aluminum atomic nuclei and turn the nuclei into heavier gold atomic nuclei. The cost would be a zillion times the value of the gold you would create, but it could be done. But that doesnt have anything to do with making "alchemy real".

Thank you, for the clarifications and corrections, I was being really sloppy with my typing and edits; clearly I should have proof-read before clicking on Submit!

My point was that after a thousand years of philosophers and proto-scientists and then finally scientists assuming that it could be done and claiming it could be done, one metal indeed was observed to turn into another. Yes, I agree that in the case of spontaneous "transmutation" of Uranium into Lead, the people observing did not actually do anything, but since when does that matter to people who don't understand science? A quick perusal of popular literature of the era indicates that the announcement of "transmutation" indeed spurred a flurry of fictional stories and charlatans. It was truly an amazing, optimistic era in that respect.