Which came first...logical analysis or intuition?

Not at all. They have, as you put it, the intrinsic purpose of perpetuating themselves. The development of the Universe is a purpose inherent to the universe itself, and life is part of that development process, and so part of that inherent purpose.

To claim that a purpose that arises from the inherent nature of existence makes an argument for the existence of God reduces your own argument to 'something exists, therefore God must'.

Well, 'immortality' strongly implies continued existence with unending movement through time. Time, being a property/dimension of the physical universe, can only apply to things subject to physical laws, including the laws of thermodynamics, which indicate that eventually, everything breaks down. And if everything breaks down, then immortality... isn't.

Paisley:

Aside from the other weaknesses your argument suffers from, this seems to be the central thrust of it:

"With atheism, life is meaningless and without purpose.  Therefore god exists."

If I have this is partially or entirely in error, please advise.

If I do fairly accurately have your argument down:

Respect first that this is a non sequitur; without demonstrating the falsehood of the statement "life is meaningless", you cannot logically proceed to your conclusion.

As you prepare to debate that point, would you please answer this direct question:

What is the purpose of god's existence?

For a fuller understanding of this question:  You make the naked assertion that our lives must have a purpose, which you take by non sequitur to imply god's existence.

Should we for the moment permit these logical breaches, we can extrapolate that correspondingly, the purpose of god's existence must be bestowed by an even higher consciousness.  Should you contend that god requires no higher consciousness for purposefulness, I fail to see why I require one either.

This is the first (1^st) time I am posing this question to you.  The number of iterations until a well-premised response is provided will be clearly noted.  Thank you.

I never read any of that from Sam Harris. The link you put up is balnk, and anyway wikipedia isn't a reliable source. Cite Wikipedia in a school paper, you will probably receive an "F."

10 Myths-and Truths-About Atheism by Sam Harris, December 24, 2006:

http://samharris.org/site/full-text/10-myths-and-10-truths-about-atheism1/

See particularly truth number 1

 EDIT:  click "articles" at top of page, then scroll down.

Yeah by supervenience physicalism I meant the original supervinience + token which I originally described. It is considered that in cooperation they establish physicalism. Just to remind I don't subscribe to token+supervenience material monism at all because of its dependence on time, space and objects, which are all found, probably, to be ultimately illusions.

Okay, so that basically translates to, what mediates physical thought inasmuch as it is a consecutive process? I've come to this point in another thread where I was debating ShaunPhilly on the Mind/Body problem, though we established it differently through a theory of computation basically it came out the same in saying that P1 establishes a matrix within which M1 is a result, so then half of the information of M1 is stored in P1 and cannot be known without the information stored in P1. In the context of the debate I was having this established that everything anyone said was necessarily nonsense, not because it couldn't be passed verbally from one person to another without lossiness, but because it couldn't even be passed from my mind to my mouth without lossiness. 

In any case, I hadn't ever thought physicalism was as firmly established as some would hope. The empirical argument is thoroughly compelling, we do see primordial physical components developing complexity over a dimension of time, that's exactly what we see therefore there must be some truth in it. However, given multiple other observations I'm quite comfortable in my opinion that fundamental material monism is just not that truth.

Unfortunately, Harris has already gone on record in his first published book "The End of Faith" by stating that life may well have a purpose.

  Buddha fan Sam and the "sacred" word. IMO

Of course we are sacred, that is just a word for our life consciousness of  WOW and AWE , but that is not a "judgment" of purpose or plan .....  

I love life , I hate life , as we judge god ..... and evolve, as god , as we are ONE .....

, man this stuff of human communication is primitive .....    <-- see G O D ! ((( totally dogma free ..... be atheist as the god you are friend .... hey, ever heard the message of jesus ???? No no, not dumb ass Paul ......          

Try again, you'll get it .... stop inventing a master ..... You are the master, the center, and the ALL of the entire infinite cosmos ..... that's you baby ! You are the ONE, there is nothing more, nothing less ..... nothing is separate .....     

Zero Judgment ..... Decisions are a different thing ..... ummm damn it,   words are failing me , fucking words .....     

1. Your first hand experience? I have no idea what story you're referring to, since I've only been reading our exchanges, but an isolated subjective experience doesn't hold much weight toward the kind of conclusion you're vainly groping at.

2. Who made the case that a thought was "a physical object?" Sounds strawman-ish.

...and in the very next sentence Harris stated:

"But we will find that it requires no faith in untestable propositions----Jesus was born of a virgin; the Koran is the word of God----for us to do this"

This statement unequivocally slams the door on any metaphysical / spiritual approaches to a "higher purpose".

Objective immortality is that which exists in the divine memory; it's not extended in time or space.

Nonsense. Immortality itself requires time, as does memory.

You'll keep coming back to this conclusion no matter what, won't you?

Materialism as a school of thought is supported by scientific fact, but it's just a school of thought. Like you say, a philosophy. Scientific fact, however, is a high-degree-of-probability truth. That's worth much more than faith.

Where am I placing my faith if my belief is in atheistic materialism? Where is the faith? If I want to participate in the scientific method, I can conduct any simple scientific experiment. If I doubt the truth any part of the body of scientific fact, I can call it into question all by myself. The scientific method thrives on doubt, not faith.

Atheistic materialism is ultimately based on DOUBT.

Yes, I will. The fact is that everyone operates based on beliefs. Without them, we would not be able to function.

It's a metaphysical position. If you don't want to engage in metaphysics, then you shouldn't take a metaphysical position.

No, that's simply "faith" in the scientific method.

Once again, you exercise trust or "faith" in the method. So, it actually thrives on faith.

Okay. Have it your way. To be without faith is to be without hope. Therefore, the atheist lives in a hopeless state because he lives without faith.

Everything in the article is cited. So if you think it is unreliable, then I suggest you point out which statements are false and why.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Harris_%28author%29

I don't. I operate on perception. I can only interact with the universe I perceive. I have little choice but to accept that if I wish to do anything, I must do it within the framework of the universe I can interact with. This does not mean I believe that my perceptions are true, only that I cannot interact with anything beyond them. In fact, I don't know if what I perceive is true. I could be completely wrong. I could be delusional. I could be the victim of a grand deception. I simply don't know, and so I can form no actual beliefs.

Actually, since the scientific method requires us to question all conclusions, including those regarding the effectiveness of the scientific method, that would seem to undermine the kind of 'faith' people hold in religion.

Again, this makes no sense. I have no faith. I have hope. For example: I hope my perceptions of reality are at least somewhat in alignment with reality. I don't know that they are, but I really would like it if they turned out to be right, and I dearly hope that they are. But I don't have faith that they are. I simply don't know.

  Geezzz, I fucking love you so much right now,  BMcd         

Because by my observation, your "stating the logical conclusion of the atheistic worldview" stands in as your refutation of the "atheistic worldview".  While you have never explicitly said "...therefore god exists", your prosecution of the "atheistic worldview" does not go past the "logical conclusion" that life is absurd.  You have not shown how the conclusion that life is absurd is itself fallacious or contradictory (although I did entreat you to do so).  As you have not done this, it appears to me that you are content to present this as your refutation of atheism, and therefore your premise for believing in god. 

Mind you, I am alert to the possibility that I might misrepresent your statements, wherefore I ask you to advise me if I have in fact done so.  Mind you further, the risk of misrepresentation would be greatly reduced should you make statements of more worth and less vagueness than you have ("Why is there something rather than nothing"; "Only consciousness qualifies as being both 'something' and 'nothing.'";"god is love" ).

This is effectively an admission of a circular argument.

Did you mean to ignore the 3^rd point, or did you need more time to address it?

My position is irrelevant to the fallacies in your argument, but since you asked:  Yes, life is ultimately meaningless, or if you prefer, absurd.  The material universe is all there is.  I am not so overcome with anguish at this absurdity that I feel a need to concoct some higher consciousness to petition for a purpose-driven life.

You will have to read the post...which I provided a link for.

C'mon Paisley, you've got those materialistic atheists backed into a corner now !  Just  a few thousand more pages of posts and I think you'll have these bastards convinced !  

Behold your God !!!

So ... faith seeks understanding of what, now? And how do you know the intrinsic nature of God?

Wait ... ARE you God?

Solipsism is a rather lonely metaphysics. As an epistemology, it is ultimately absurd, to use your phrase. So, if we can discount solipsism as an epistemology (though not as a metaphysics), let's consider science.

Do you agree that our sensations of the universe are actual observations of the universe? That is, are we observing an objective reality? If not, you subscribe to some form of solipsism, and I'm afraid our discussions end here, as our worldviews are too divergent.

Making the assumption we are observing a reality:

By Kant's logic, there are two kinds of truth-statements. There are analytic truth statements, which are statements that are assumed to be true. He has many examples of them, but the basic criteria for these is that assuming the opposite results in contradiction. Analytic statements are beyond observational evidence. Mathematic axioms fall into this realm.

So does the assumption that the scientific method works. It is assumed to be true, because assuming the opposite is contradictory (unless you are a solipsist, in which case anything goes).

The other truths are synthetic. These are the truths that are built up on analytic truths, and must be supported by observation. Scientific hypothesis fall into this category. Scientific theories are just hypothesis that have always accurately predicted new things.

However, about fifty years ago, Willard Quine presented logic to indicate that analytic statements are indeterminate, at least for a subset of analytic statements. This was later extended by others to include all analytic statements.

This has been further extended into a better philosophical understanding of the scientific method. Basically, all analytic statements are tested when the synthetic statements based upon them are tested. This is a revolutionary idea. It means we no longer have to assume something is true. We have evidence to support its truth every time it is not contradicted. Every time it fits our current ontology, it is further "proven."

This holds for the scientific method. Every time it doesn't fail, its effectiveness is supported.

So, here's where we come to the interesting bit:

Science as an ontology is extremely congruent with observable reality. It has been tested and supported many times. As all knowledge is contingent on observation, yes, I have faith in science. I have faith in science the same way I have faith I'm not going to fall up into the sky tomorrow and out into airless space. I have faith in science the same way I have faith that the earth revolves around the sun. It's a faith grounded in observed reality, based not on some idea in my head, but in the observed facts around me. So, yes, I have faith in science.

Science has given us a coherent ontology that is highly congruent with reality. Oh, don't get me wrong: there's still a helluva lot we don't know. Many physicists wrestle with string theory, for instance. There are many competing hypothesis in string theory at the moment. And we're not even sure string theory is really a theory, as it hasn't been properly tested yet. Then there's the whole acceleration of our long-range spacecraft. There's a delta on their velocity we don't understand yet. And there's the whole black hole thing, too. We have some clear models of what a black hole is, and how it behaves, but we still don't have a clear idea of all the processes that go into the creation of a black hole, nor exactly what happens on the inside once its formed.

And, there's the whole open world of human psychology. We're still in the alchemical stage of studying ourselves, still giving the equivalent of tinctures of mercury trying to heal a wounded id. So, no, there's a lot we don't know.

I will promise you this: in each of these areas of ignorance, it will be science that gives us practical answers that align with observation. Not belief in some watered-down God. Not some desperate hope that your life extends beyond this one. Not in some churlish proclamation that atheism is an absurd worldview (which is an assertion, not a truth statement).

It'll be science.

(Will: This Quine's for you.)