Atheism is harder to believe

Author: Fallaneze

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Fallaneze
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We live in a world that's so full of information. Think of it like graphics in a game. If the world we see really arose from mindlessness, why is it so intelligible, beautiful, creative, rationally structured, purpose-driven, and complexly ordered? If there's zero intellect behind the world we see I'd expect it to be blank, unimaginitive, dull, distorted, obscure and unintelligible, aimless, absurd, haphazard, unprincipled, plain, and disjointed. 
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@Fallaneze
Sometimes reality is counter-intuitive. 

I'm used to the idea that the complexity in the world stems from the action of mindless processes - it is now my intuition that it is so.   I probably did think otherwise a long time ago, but now I'm comfortable with it and uncomfortable with the idea of a 'grand plan'.   I'd say its a matter of psychology.

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@Fallaneze
Because it's the world our brains evolved in. Finding it intelligible and interesting is evolutionary beneficial.
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@drafterman
i don't think that works, DM!  Understanding the world is beneficial, but that doesn't seem to explain why the universe is understandable in the first place.
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@keithprosser
It exactly does. Organisms that understand the world have a distinct survival advantage over those that don't.
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It exactly does. Organisms that understand the world have a distinct survival advantage over those that don't.
Undoubtedly,but its only possible to understand the world because matter is stable and the laws of physics are regular.  As it is, we can rely on that if B follows from A today, it will also do so tomorrow. If the world was totally chaotic it would be impossible to understand.  
   

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@Fallaneze
The world is not full of information. The world is full of the world. We as humans have amassed information about it. We have evolved specifically to do so.

We could not expect any particular outcome over any other if the world arose from mindlessness. A mind would (assuming we could detect it and understand its goals) be cause to expect that the world was in keeping with the goals of that mind but the goal could just as easily be a blank unimaginative and disjointed reality as a complex one. All we can surmise from the evidence is that reality exists as it does and not in some other way which is not enough evidence to assign a probability to a universal conciousness.

Even assuming we can determine such a conciousness this would justify a belief in deism at most and it would still be beyond our epistemology to say that it was some particular god(s) responsible.

On a side note harder to believe is a subjective opinion not an objective fact.
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@keithprosser
Undoubtedly,but its only possible to understand the world because matter is stable and the laws of physics are regular.
We don't that matter is stable or that the laws of physics are regular. We assume it, but we don't know it's the case. Also, entropy ensures that configurations of matter grow inherently more chaotic.

  As it is, we can rely on that if B follows from A today, it will also do so tomorrow. If the world was totally chaotic it would be impossible to understand.
Or we would create false "understanding" which we certainly do in any event.


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@Fallaneze
If there's zero intellect behind the world we see I'd expect it to be blank, unimaginitive, dull, distorted, obscure and unintelligible, aimless, absurd, haphazard, unprincipled, plain, and disjointed. 
Most of that is true, that is what is going on in the universe around you.