However, simply asking that question doesn't preclude an answer. Maybe there is a purpose to the guessing game.
The only reason I am agnostic rather than atheist is simply because I one day looked around and found it amazing that anything exists. Anything at all. Just the basic point that we take for granted. Why does anything exist at all? Where did even the potential for existence come from?
And then to watch a colorful plant come out of a seemingly formless ground; yes, we can reduce much of the mechanisms to systems of knowledge; but just the fact that it can happen. The fact that chunks of dust and steam from supernovae can come together and become aware of themselves and everything around them. It sounds trite until you think about it, but it really does suggest an author.
Maybe the author is only as far as a rough draft.
Or, maybe it is random and void of any meaning or purpose.
I don't know.
But dialectical materialism, of which I used to believe vehemently, is simply an attempt to state that there is a purpose and meaning, but avoid the inevitable question of a source of that meaning. It's just "there." If we start trying to look beyond for a causation, we risk losing a grip on the tenant of "materialism."
Materialism is what allows us to assume that morality is relative, except where we choose to impose it.
Yours,
Eric
"Henry C.K. Liu" wrote:
> Daniel:
>
> Your story of the human constructed solar system is enlightening about the
> existence of God, until one asks who made God.
> Christian theology's answer is that God is so omnipotent that he needs no
> creator and the atheist's counter is that any being so powerful cannot be so
> invisible.
> Agnostics are on firmer grounds since they reason that God is merely a concept
> within man's imagination, thus any proof of God's existence is by defintion
> illusionary, because the conceptual characteristics of God exceeds to man's
> ability to imagine them.
> When Christians claim God made man in his own image, it follows that man is a
> failed God, or God is the ideal of man.
>
> Henry
>
> Daniel wrote:
>
> > Caroll worte: "The main problem I have with Dawkins's enjoyable work is that
> > bothering to try to *prove* atheism* tends to undermine a privilege many of
> > us born in the 20th century have - that (to turn a phase of Milton's inside
> > out) of being atheists by birthright more than merit. That is, all
> > acceptable arguments begin with materialism as their premise, and any
> > attempt to prove atheism or materialism is redundant or incoherent."
> >
> > Caroll, if I understand you correctly, it seems to me you haven't turned
> > Milton inside out at all. But, I must not understand you. Do you mean that
> > the materialist premise is in some way true on a level that is unique, i.e.
> > not requiring proof?
> >
> > Quincy