An afterlife for Atheists?

[pastafarian]

i am 99.98% convinced there is no afterlife.0.01% of me wishes there was so i could see my mum one more time and the other 0.01% of me is terrified that there could actually be an afterlife,at least based on the christian model,having to spend eternity with jesus,their cruel god and every corrupt lying christian fool would be a complete nightmare.

 

[Brovion]

At the moment I'm really really hoping that there is an afterlife for dogs

 

[User removed 4]

There is a pre life / life / after life, it's just that we're not (in our human existence) capable of understanding it.

I think what you say is correct, there is so much that the human brain is incacpable of understanding , how did everything get here ,i dont mean the big bang that greated our universe, i mean in the infinite reaches of space, is there an end to it all , if so what is it etc, what existed before, so the idea of an afterlife , and some form of super intelligent creator doesnt seem all that implausible to me.

 

[Titus]

I don't want another life after this one. It might be even shittier.

 

[jgmcdee]

I think what you say is correct, there is so much that the human brain is incacpable of understanding , how did everything get here ,i dont mean the big bang that greated our universe, i mean in the infinite reaches of space, is there an end to it all , if so what is it etc, what existed before, so the idea of an afterlife , and some form of super intelligent creator doesnt seem all that implausible to me.

 

[k2bluesky]

Fear of Eternity has no meaning when time does not exist, rather like when you are asleep, a state we voluntarily enter every night.

 

[User removed 4]

no, really not fishing.

 

[djlazyness]

The Day I Died-BBC Documentary - YouTube

 

[Jimmy boy 69]

Fear of Eternity has no meaning when time does not exist, rather like when you are asleep, a state we voluntarily enter every night.

Exactly that u could sleep for 1 million years say but when you wake up it would feel like any sleep u ever had, you will never have proof of an after life because it is beyond what we can comprehend. Everything that ever was, ever is and ever will be, is constantly around us u don't need proof for that. Open your mind to the possibilities that anything and everything can exist,after all we do....

 

[Gilliver's Travels]

What a truly excellent and thought-provoking thread - NSC at its best.

As someone else hinted earlier, there's a good question for anyone promoting the idea of an afterlife. When alive, you were only ever a baby to your grandparents, and only ever an old man to your grandchildren. So, how old are all those people meeting up again in heaven?

Anway, forget all that. If there isn't an afterlife, I'll blame Barber.

 

[Monkey Man]

I don't believe in an afterlife but I am intrigued by this idea of infinity making everything that seems improbable, possible.

The way I've heard it expressed is that there must be an infinite number of universes and an infinite number of variations, some big, some small. So there's a parallel universe where NSC is controlled by a Palace fan, or where Brighton play at Selhurst, or Glenn Murray is a transvestite - simply because all these things are possible in theory.

Going back to the simpler analogy of the roulette wheel, I struggle with the idea that if you had an infinite amount of time, the same number would eventually come up a trillion times in a row, simply because it's possible. To me it seems more likely that this would never happen, even though it was possible, and you had an infinite amount of time.

But I suspect there are bigger brains than mine that can see the logic of the argument.

 

[The Antikythera Mechanism]

To give a feel to how insignificant we are in the scale of things, I read recently that if you place a grain of sand on your forefinger and hold it, at arms length, against the night sky, the area of sky obscured by the grain of sand will contain 10,000 galaxies, each containing 100 billion stars.

 

[Phat Baz 68]

Do you have a dog called Cleo?

I have a cat called Cleo if that's any good to you

 

[vic123]

I don't believe in an afterlife but I am intrigued by this idea of infinity making everything that seems improbable, possible.

The way I've heard it expressed is that there must be an infinite number of universes and an infinite number of variations, some big, some small. So there's a parallel universe where NSC is controlled by a Palace fan, or where Brighton play at Selhurst, or Glenn Murray is a transvestite - simply because all these things are possible in theory.

Going back to the simpler analogy of the roulette wheel, I struggle with the idea that if you had an infinite amount of time, the same number would eventually come up a trillion times in a row, simply because it's possible. To me it seems more likely that this would never happen, even though it was possible, and you had an infinite amount of time.

But I suspect there are bigger brains than mine that can see the logic of the argument.

The idea of the infinate roulette wheel creating all possible sequences was something I struggled with too, until I read about the coin flip theory (can't remember where I read it.) It basically goes something like this;

Image you flipped a coin ten times in a row and wrote down the results. Which of these three records would you most expect to see?

*T, H, H, T, H, H, H, T, H, T
*T, H, H, H, H, H, H, H, H, T
*H, H, H, H, H, H, H, H, H, H

It might appear that the first set of results are the most likely with the likelyhood dropping as we move down the list. After all, a run of 8 heads flanked by two tails is pretty unlikely, but surely it's not as unlikely as ten heads in a row right? Not quite. Let's pretend that we are to add a further result to the end of list three. Can we claim that since row three has ten heads in it, the next result is more likely to be a tail? No! A coin has two sides and that will never change. The coin has fixed parameters with no conscious memory and as such the odds will ALWAYS be 50/50, no matter what the preceding spins created.

Suppose my task was to, by pure chance alone, recreate any of the three lists by randomly flipping the coin. List 1 now becomes just as likely or unlikely to come about than either of the other 2. We can also be certain that if we never stop trying to create our pre-determined list, that is we never stop flipping the coin, we will at some point flip ten heads in a row. It may take all day, but it'll happen at some point. If we want to double the amount of consecutive heads we would like to see, then perhaps we'll have to double the amount of time spent flipping.

Time, it seems, is the key to all of this. The roulette wheel works because, just like our coin, the wheel has no knowledge of preceding results or seemingly "unlikely" patterns. Having all of the numbers 0 through to 36 land in a row might seem incredible, but that's simply because people have arranged those numbers in this exact order independantly of the roulette wheel. Roulette doesn't care about 1, 2, 3... any more than it cares about 5, 36, 22 and BOTH of those combinations are just as likely to fall as each other.

 

[Monkey Man]

The idea of the infinate roulette wheel creating all possible sequences was something I struggled with too, until I read about the coin flip theory (can't remember where I read it.) It basically goes something like this;

Image you flipped a coin ten times in a row and wrote down the results. Which of these three records would you most expect to see?

*T, H, H, T, H, H, H, T, H, T
*T, H, H, H, H, H, H, H, H, T
*H, H, H, H, H, H, H, H, H, H

It might appear that the first set of results are the most likely with the likelyhood dropping as we move down the list. After all, a run of 8 heads flanked by two tails is pretty unlikely, but surely it's not as unlikely as ten heads in a row right? Not quite. Let's pretend that we are to add a further result to the end of list three. Can we claim that since row three has ten heads in it, the next result is more likely to be a tail? No! A coin has two sides and that will never change. The coin has fixed parameters with no conscious memory and as such the odds will ALWAYS be 50/50, no matter what the preceding spins created.

Suppose my task was to, by pure chance alone, recreate any of the three lists by randomly flipping the coin. List 1 now becomes just as likely or unlikely to come about than either of the other 2. We can also be certain that if we never stop trying to create our pre-determined list, that is we never stop flipping the coin, we will at some point flip ten heads in a row. It may take all day, but it'll happen at some point. If we want to double the amount of consecutive heads we would like to see, then perhaps we'll have to double the amount of time spent flipping.

Time, it seems, is the key to all of this. The roulette wheel works because, just like our coin, the wheel has no knowledge of preceding results or seemingly "unlikely" patterns. Having all of the numbers 0 through to 36 land in a row might seem incredible, but that's simply because people have arranged those numbers in this exact order independantly of the roulette wheel. Roulette doesn't care about 1, 2, 3... any more than it cares about 5, 36, 22 and BOTH of those combinations are just as likely to fall as each other.

Thanks, you put it eloquently. The bit I still can't get my head around is that improbable events will NECESSARILY happen because of an infinite amount of time. Couldn't it be argued that however long time lasts, some things will never happen, simply because chance hasn't made it so?

The chimpanzee/typewriter thing is a case in point. I maintain that however long the chimps type, none of them will write the complete works of Shakespeare, because it's so massively improbable. You might get the occasional coherent sentence, maybe even something longer. But the complete works of Shakespeare? A version of Hamlet that ends with a custard pie fight? I'm struggling. (I realise this isn't an analogy you've put forward, but many do.)

 

[sten_super]

PEDANT ALERT

It may take all day, but it'll happen at some point. If we want to double the amount of consecutive heads we would like to see, then perhaps we'll have to double the amount of time spent flipping.

If you want to add one to the number of consecutive heads then probability suggests that it'll take twice the amount of time. If you want to double the number of heads from 10 to 20 then you'll need to spend 1024 times the initial amount of time (on average).

 

[sten_super]

Thanks, you put it eloquently. The bit I still can't get my head around is that improbable events will NECESSARILY happen because of an infinite amount of time. Couldn't it be argued that however long time lasts, some things will never happen, simply because chance hasn't made it so?

The chimpanzee/typewriter thing is a case in point. I maintain that however long the chimps type, none of them will write the complete works of Shakespeare, because it's so massively improbable. You might get the occasional coherent sentence, maybe even something longer. But the complete works of Shakespeare? A version of Hamlet that ends with a custard pie fight? I'm struggling. (I realise this isn't an analogy you've put forward, but many do.)

The maths is a lot easier around tossing a coin, because there's only two possible events (heads or tails). But you are right - all probability is based upon (effectively) the law of averages. Maybe I'm tossing a coin looking to get a head - I could toss it 10,000 times and get nothing but tails. However if I did that 'experiment' (i.e. tossing a coin 10,000 times) itself 10,000 times, on average across those 10,000 occurrences I'd get an average of something approaching 5,000 heads and 5,000 tails.

Using your example, if we state that a chimp has an equal chance of hitting every key (not true, but stick with it for the simplicity of the maths), and that there are 50 keys on a keyboard - and let's say that there's ten million characters in the complete works (probably a lot more than that!). Effectively for the whole thing to be typed out correctly you'd need the 50-to-1 to come in 10,000,000 times consecutively. 50^10,000,000 is apparently a horrendously large number (my calculator won't give me an answer!) - but if you asked a chimp to input 10,000,000 characters into a typewriter at random, only once in that horrendously large number of times would you get the complete works of Shakespeare - and it'd take you so long to do it as to be completely impossible, to all intents as purposes.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that you are right - there are many, many events which are so unlikely to happen that them happening at any point in the limited time that human beings are in existence is still ridiculously unlikely.

 

[matthew]

We rot in the ground like every other living thing

 

[k2bluesky]

Everyone take a look around at the amazing complexity of life on this planet, then look out there at the rest of our solar system and universe beyond. Maybe it's just a chance in a billion that we have an atmosphere which makes all this life possible and that it all grew from a primordial swamp or whatever the evolutionists say, follow it back to the 'Big Bang' theory v a creator (even if you find God outdated try a 'super energy life force' as you might see in Star Trek as a creator). The longer I live the less I see this planet and humans on it as just an evolution that has happened, with nothing behind it other than nature itself.

 

[dangull]

for athiests a question. Why is there something and not nothing ?