What do the greats have to say on the subject? Adam Rutherford reminded me of this inspirational message:
For me however, the entire message of life is much better encapsulated in these two lines:
Last week at Atheist Society, Heini presented a talk entitled “Disproving God With Philosophy”.
So I’m sitting here at work thinking “how late do we have to be here until we order Chinese into the office?” I say thinking, I’ve just said it out loud, then after that we had a conversation about it.
Anyway, the problem is this. We don’t know how long this problem is going to take, it could be solved in the next 30 minutes, it could be we’re here until 10pm. If we solve it at 6pm then it will have been pointless ordering Chinese because we can just go home and have dinner. But if we don’t order it and we’re stuck here till 10pm then we’ll be really hungry. But at what point do you say, right, this is the point I’m going to order Chinese food even though I still don’t know how much longer I will be there.
This problem occurs regularly with pub trips. You wonder if people are going to be there for a while because you don’t want to get there as they are leaving but the longer you leave it the more likely that is of happening. And at the end of the night, when you haven’t gone you say to yourself “if I had gone at the start I would have been there drinking for ages – but now it’s too late because they will be leaving soon.” Indeed this could well be applied to almost any point in the night.
The thing is, I’m sure this is some kind of grand philosophical problem that I am just applying to pub and takeaway activities. Anyone know what it is?
Having got out of work earlier than planned I headed over to The Terrace to meet Raby have have a bit of a catch up as we’d not seen each other in a month or so. All seems well in the School of Computing, the closure of 24 hours labs is more a change in official policy than something that has actually happened.
Afterwards we headed over to The Park Horse for the talk organised by the Philosophy Society entitled “atheist arguments aren’t much good.” The room was packed out which made for some fantastic photos to add to the A-Soc gallery (what, it was an A-Soc event to attend the talk :p ).
The talk was very interesting and I was impressed by how fast moving it kept with the basic premise being that atheist arguments don’t really work because disproving a specific god doesn’t disprove the idea of a god, it simply disproves that god but you can simply change the definition of god to get round that (for example, he doesn’t need to be all powerful, as this is never said in the Bible, he could just be rather powerful).
Of course this argument doesn’t hold up because if you accept there may be some kind of god but choose not to believe in any of the specific gods then you’re an atheist. It isn’t Atheism with a capital T (or positive atheism or whatever you wish to call it) but it certainly is atheism but regardless it was an interesting talk and well worth attending.
I’m not sure John took too kindly to my thoughts on philosophy as a subject though lol.