Thomas Nagel on the existence of God

Thomas Nagel on the existence of God

"I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about human life, including everything about the human mind.... This is a somewhat ridiculous situation.... [I]t is just as irrational to be influenced in one's beliefs by the hope that God does not exist as by the hope that God does exist." 1


Nagel, Thomas, The Last Word, pp. 130-131, Oxford University Press, 1997. Dr Nagel (1937- ) is Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University.

Note: Thomas Nagel is an American philosopher, currently University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, where he has taught since 1980. His main areas of philosophical interest are philosophy of mind, political philosophy and ethics.

HIGGS BOSON

This is the latest news report: "The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to two physicists, Francois Englert and Peter Higgs, who independently proposed the mechanism that gives subatomic particles their mass. Without this mechanism, physicists say, subatomic particles would ping around the universe at the speed of light without interacting and forming atoms and molecules, the building-blocks of matter."

Supposedly one experiment using the Hadron cyclotron observed the Higgs boson. Other researchers are skeptical of it. I think the whole idea is questionable.

This confirms my belief that the Big Bang theory is made-up story with no physics support. If you had a Big Bang that released atomic particles like electrons and protons, in my mind they would just expand into the vast expanses of space forever. There are no forces to cause the particles to come together and form larger molecules. I don't understand why intelligent physicists can't see the obvious. The Higgs boson is their answer. That is why it is called "the God particle". They need intelligence to make their theory work, but deny that God had anything to do with it.

The whole concept of immense times and evolution forming matter, stars, galaxies and eventually living plants and animals is so far-fetched as to be completely ridiculous.

KILLING JESUS

I just finished reading Killing Jesus by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard. I was dreading reading it because of a book I had read by Kathleen and Richard Gear that created a fiction based on their research that had Jesus living after the crucifixion married to Mary Magdalene with children. I was afraid O'Reilly would use the "historical" material they had used.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that the book follows the Biblical story closely but adds a lot of material about the persons who were in his life like Tiberius and the other Roman rulers. They also told about the life of Jesus and the apostles. He tells how the toilet was a hole in the ground outside homes with a shovel near a pile of dirt. He details the horrendous actions of the crucifixion that were illustrated in the movie about Christ.

I am feeling great and my oncologist upped my Gleevec dosage from 200 to 300 mg, still below the recommended dose of 400. He wants to see whether it has any more bad effect on my kidneys. My creatinine jumped when I started but I have increased my water intake and reduced my sodium intake and the creatinine came back down some. I now have a kidney doctor along with the oncologist and have a urologist that I will meet with Monday.  I had a CAT scan and a Sonogram in the last couple of weeks. My tumor hasn't decreased, but it also hasn't increased. The sonogram was for my kidneys that look OK but found I have an enlarged prostate. Thus the urologist appointment. I am not experiencing the problems I had years ago before my prostate resection operation so I feel all right about the current situation.