Comparing faith to the Scientific Method.

You are incorrect.

 

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I know very little about this subject, but from my understanding, they are both Abrahamic religions. So it would not be surprising if they had many things in common.

 

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They recognize the same prophets. How can the same prophet be describing a different God? It would be more accurate to say that Christians reject Islamic theology, not that the Gods are different. I think it's mostly because they use different books.

 

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It all depends on why you want to 'deal with it'. Why?

While I don't believe in the Gods (or Goddesses, or Alien Overlords, or Prophets, etc....) I have some beliefs that, as of now, Science cannot provide an answer to. Take Hume's "Problem of Induction". While it'd be nice to have a handful of pure distilled 100% causation, it's (as of yet), simply not going to happen

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Being atheist doesn't mean I don't have my own beliefs, I'd say, if I were to pick a belief system, mine may be Bayesian Epistemology. Whenever I'm asked 'What's your religion" I reply Bayesian Epistemologist. Written or otherwise.

To answer the "Why?" I posed, for me it was primarily a means for argument analysis, but also because I was taught to believe in magic sky people as a child and there's always going to be some push back against that. Perhaps the only reason I'd want to deal with those sorts of belief systems now, is to develop inoculates that immunise children against the God/s-meme. Other than that, I can't see any other endeavors being anything other than a waste of time.

That said, IMO, should society continues to progress, and there's no other major wars or Armageddon-like catastrophe (like a total collapse of the environment) then I suspect we'll watch as superstitions in Gods naturally die out leaving behind something like a zen Buddhism to fill that built-in need for belief, possibly mixed in with Bayesian Epistemology, I mean, if we have to have a belief, that's 99.95% as good as any other

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Jesus probably spoke Aramaic and the word for God in Biblical Aramaic is 'Elaha'. So Jesus probably addressed God using a word that sounds very close to its Arabic cognate. Arabic speaking Christians today use the word 'Allah' for what English-speakers call 'God'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allah

 

And Christian bibles in Arabic use the word Allah.

School Recites Pledge in Arabic, One Nation Under Allah?
\http://radio.foxnews.com/toddstarne...-pledge-in-arabic-one-nation-under-allah.html

 

Why isnt science able to prove/disprove god? I think science has done a good job of taking away god attributes (all we have to base the existence of god on). Without those attributes, what evidence of god exists? Yes, I know they will fall back on "thats what faith is".

How does holding a 50/50 chance god does exist translate into denial of science? Sorry but I know plenty of believers who turn to the weatherman (as an example) rather than the bible when planning their weekend. Most of them go to the doctor when sick rather than turning to their clergy. I do not see that as a rejection of either science or god.

So maybe its your approach when discussing these matters with believers. I have explained evolution to a number of people who didnt understand the basics and had a positive experience when the listener exclaimed " well if my science teacher had explained it like that...", though the people I was talking to were adults and not children/teens at the time, so more mature in their thinking process.

For me, when I hear someone claim goddidit, I translate that into 'oh, they dont know why/havent the time or inclination to wonder about it'. And I dont (well no longer) meet that not knowing why with an attack on what they have been conditioned to believe. It doesnt work and gets the listener defensive.

 

Doesnt Islam reject the Christian (and Jewish) theology also?

I guess I am saying they all think they have one god, but its not the same god as the others.

Christians think Jews are wrong.
Jews think Christians are wrong.
Muslims think Christians are wrong.
Jews think Muslims are wrong.
Christians think Muslims are wrong.
blah blah blah...

 

http://www.asa3.org/ASA/education/think/scientific-method.htm

----> http://www.dianedew.com/islam.htm

"For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life."For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. He who believes in Him is not condemned ; he who does not believe has been condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.……He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father. He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him."Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears My word, and believes Him who sent Me, has eternal life, and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life.…"

 

Um, because the odds are nothing like 50/ 50.

 

umm
Thats the best you can do? Scoff.... What are you 13 years old?

Its not my claim 50/50. It was in the OP and you still dont answer the question I asked. How does that [someone claiming a 50/50 chance of god] indicate a denial of Science?

 

Quite simple: any claim that it's 50/ 50 denies (or shows a vast ignorance of) science, since such a claim, by its very nature, is unscientific.

 

~~Dr Stephen Unwin has used a 200-year-old formula to calculate the probability of the existence of an omnipotent being. Bayes' Theory is usually used to work out the likelihood of events, such as nuclear power failure, by balancing the various factors that could affect a situation. ~~

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2004/mar/08/highereducation.uk1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes'_theorem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse

 

Hmm, "the theory starts from the assumption that God has a 50/50 chance of existing".
Not very scientific, is it?
By that "logic" I wonder what odds he'd up with for there being an elephant in my sock drawer if we start by assuming 50/ 50?

 

oh good grief. Do the baysian math anyway You see fit and come back with a refutation of his theory.

Or simply do a google search and post a link:

http://ravingatheist.com/2004/03/atheist-calculates-probability-of-god-at-4/

I am done with you, your boring.

 

Oh look.
Someone else who says that a 50/ 50 initial assumption is incorrect.

For what?
"What are the initial odds of god existing?"?
"How does an unverifiable subjective experience alter the odds of PROVING god exists?"?

*you're*.
Au revoir.

 

Bayesianism has become very trendy in academia in the last few years, kind of an academic buzz-word. There's Bayesian this and Bayesian that. As a result, I find myself getting skeptical whenever I hear it. It isn't unlike 'quantum', since anything can be made to sound more credible to the ears of laymen if it's associated with words like these.

So how does one determine all the factors relevant to the existence of an omnipotent being? Creating an exhaustive list would seem to be impossible in principle, since there will likely be factors beyond a human ability to know and understand. And how does one then assign all of these factors numerical values?

Presumably Unwin is thinking that there are just two options (God exists, God doesn't exist) and imagining them like flipping a coin. But as Dywyddyr points out, what justifies assigning those two alternatives equal weights?

There's another problem too. What if there are more than two options, for example what if an omnipotent being exists but it isn't God? After all, the concept of God incorporates lots of disseparate ideas. God is supposedly a 'person', a human-like psychology with purposes, ideas and emotions, the kind of being to which words like 'love' apply. God is supposed to be the source of moral goodness. God is supposed to be concerned with beings like us, willing to communicate with us and form personal relationships with us. God is our postmortem judge and our source of salvation. So even if there is some ultimate cosmological principle that might appear omnipotent from our viewpoint, why must it share all these other divine characteristics? Why can't it be the 'big bang', string-theory or the 'laws of physics'?

Once we admit more than two possibilities, the initial likelihood of a traditional-style personal-theistic God existing (especially any of the individual ones from particular religions) would seem to be less than 50-50, even if we choose to weight all the possibilities equally as Unwin apparently did.

I'm not clear about how 'Bayesian math' would even be applied to a question as vague and poorly defined as this one. The Guardian wasn't very informative. What we need to see is a detailed description of what Unwin actually did, revealing all the (probably unjustified) assumptions that went into it.

 

Go back to the OP and read my response to that.

I got pulled into a side issue and have withdrawn my participation in the derailing of the topic. Sorry you spent so much time on a post that I am going to ignore.

BTW I am an atheist.

 

See my reply to Fraggle.