Bishop George Berkeley

No, it's because you have little or no imagination!

Yeah, sure ....that's people with little or no imagination making that judgement of someone else who happens to have a great imagination.

Baron Max

 

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The guy in your head told you to say that didn't he.

Actually having a great imagination makes it even easier to tell the difference because its easier to note the irregularities.

 

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Do you not see how illogical that stance is? One side (mine) has observation. The other (yours) has a hypothetical. If my observations are indeed in my dreams, it would still be illogical for me to assume they are, because there is nothing about our reality that would lead us to believe that.

 

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Yeah, that's because your mind has created such a complex dream, that "...nothing about [that] reality that would lead [you] to believe that."

The mind is a complex thing, and yet you're basically denying that.

Baron Max

 

Is the distinction between dreaming and being awake so clear?
How do people know whether or not there are elements of their day to day waking experience that are clouded by, heightened by, distorted by dreamlike functions?
Can one not realize after a time that one was dreaming, to some degree, in relation to someone else? You saw that she was standing in the kitchen in a waking way, but all the significance you placed in her stance, facial expression and tone of voice was a dream.
(not that I disagree at all with Baron Max's approach - to take on the whole certainty in a total way - but I also want to point out that there is a whole spectrum of possible confusions here)

 

I liked this line. I don't agree with your certainty that this is true in his case, but I loved that you raised the issue. There is often this assumption that one is really dealing with the same thing AND BETTER. It's good when this assumption is challenged.

 

We have plenty of reason to believe there is a material world. Our thoughts are material.

 

Ha, but you don't know that it actually is. I'm just imagining you are claiming that.

 

So if I were to tell you that Grimmy, Invisible and Silent King of all the Elves created "love" and presently lives in your house when you are not home, you would . . . refuse to believe in it (one hopes) Deep down, would you not believe me because you know that I cannot produce a shred of evidence to back up my supposition. Even you must have enough empiricism in you to want something more before buying into my tales of this magical elf-king. More mundanely no religious person can prove that the Hindu gods are not real entities, yet I know no (nada, zip) Christians who believe that they are.

I do agree that that the existence of God (or many gods, or no gods of any sort) is a non-falsifiable proposition. That's just logic. That said, "religions" often hold falsifiable beliefs and hose can be disproven. In effect, what you see is that the religions, although often positive that their understanding of the world is the Divine Truth, generally either move on to a new Divine Truth or they develop a stubborn resistance to the evidence and never let the scales fall from their eyes. For example, the Bible says that God created the universe, the Earth and life in six days. Modern science has many bits of evidence that contradict that. (N.B. "Evidence" is merely a circumstance that tends to make a proposition more or less likely to be correct....evidence need not render the story of Genesis completely disproven in order to make the truth of Genesis less likely to be correct.) For example, the fact that we can see galaxies 10 billion light years away, and that the light form those galaxies could not have traveled 10 billion light years in 6000 years, tends to contradict Genesis if you make one perfectly natural assumption, that supernatural forces (God or the Devil) are not actively trying to trick us by "speeding up light" or creating the universe with the light streams already permeating it. Another is the fact that we can see fossils of a vast array of animals that the Bible never mentions, which tend to be confined to rock layers that appear, by process of induction, to be older than the Bible claims the world to be, and that fossils of those the Bible does mention are generally confines to rock layers that appear to be far more recent.

At most, the defenders of the Genesis story have nibbled at the edges of such evidence, and there are countless pieces of evidence for the Old Earth and Old Life and limited (though not by any means non existent using the definition of evidence above) evidence that tends to support of veracity of the Genesis account.

In the end, you are absolutely right that it comes down to how you weigh the two masses of evidence. But it also comes down to the fact that the religious viewpoint invariably falls back on supernatural causes for natural phenomenon. It's the key to the falsifiability, because supernatural forces can do anything and have no constraints. Scientists are at a disadvantage because they are limited to actual and identifiable evidence.

The Christian religions have been so desperate to give God a role in the physical universe (and science so good at developing naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena) that they created the "God the Gaps" First god created everything and was responsible for everything. Then it turns out that the hydrological cycle (first theorized by the non-Christian Greeks) can make it rain without Him, and plants and sparrows seem to be able to grow and thrive through a complete web of ecological relationships and without god watching each and every one. Sure god may have created the universe, but our theories now pretty much explain everything, without referencing God, from 10^-47 seconds after the creation of the universe onward...and some hypotheses might not need Him even before then to work.

Christians have posited (and many still believe) that God punishes the bad and the impious and rewards the good (especially impious Christians) here on earth, despite a lot of evidence of pagans thrive just as well and are often just as happy as Christians. That has caused some to retreat yet again, and assume that god rewards and punishes in an invisible place that we can never falsify. That's an interesting story, but why isn't that just Grimmy, King of Elves, transmogrified into a location called "the afterlife?"

That does not actually follow. It's possible, but not a necessary reason for logic to exist. It is entirely possible for order to exist without an intelligence behind it. Logic is very much fundamental (to our universe), but the argument that it can only come from a pre-existing order is flawed because you assume God is that order. Perhaps logic is the eternal source of order and God just a myth. Perhaps there is no eternal source of order and the only order sprang randomly out of chaos. (The issue with the first cause theory is "why does there need to be a first cause?" Causal relationships might be a result of this universe we are in, and in a grander metaphysical sense there may well be universes where causes occur without effect. There is no way to prove that untrue either.

The big problem with unfalsifiable speculations, is that there are at least, let's say, 10^100 of them, and no human can hope to devote time to believing them all in one lifetime. Assuming one pays them heed at all, we all need a system for selecting which to hold dear.

For all your pride in Christian scientists, you seem to flee the largely Christian French all of the sudden.

Actually on the scientists, who do you count? When I think of ancient scientists I thing of Anaxagoras, Aristotle, Empedocles, Aristarchus, Thales (of course), Al-Khwarizmi (from whom we get the word "algorithm," as a corruption of his name), Alhazen, Biruni and the like. I don't start hitting Christians until Roger Bacon (well, Robert Grosseteste, right before him). It's possible that you are waiting for "the scientific method" to dub anyone a scientist (although Biruni and Alhazen had a lot to do with that too). I am sure there were some (of whom I do not know), but the big names in science from "BC" to about the 10th century seem largely non-Christian to me. The Christian scientists seem, to draw heavily from that Greek tradition through Martianus Capella (father of the "seven liberal arts" that became the backbone of medieval European education, and himself not Christian).

I am sure we could with some research rattle off an impressively long (if not well known) list of Christians involved in science pre-10th century, but the point is that the fundamental impulse does not seem to me to have derived from the Bible, but from the Greek view that the world can be rationally understood and not simply assumed to be a collection of supernaturally driven forces.

That is a fair point. That said, it does not prove that the atheism somehow caused the disaster, but it is strong evidence that atheism doesn't make one moral.

That is a debatable point. Antisemitism that culminated in the Nazi death camps was not invented by the atheists. The pogroms and crusades and inquisitions were Christian endeavors, and Christianity, through the focus of a particular religions tradition, let them to hate Jews. There are those who would argue that but for the Crusades the middle east would not be the cesspool it is today. (An unfalsifiable position itself, so therefore one that can't be rejected.)

Science exploded in Greece first, and then in the Golden Age of Islam and then it came to the Renaissance. The root seems to me to be the traditions of the empiricist pagan Greeks, not the "world is a vale of tears" Christians. The best thing Christianity did in that regard was allow St. Augustine to convince them that the Greeks philosophers had much to add, as that paved the way for the domination of Europe by Aristotle.

That is true is you select the time periods to weed out the philosophical roots of science. The modern western tradition is not really a "Judeo-Christian" one, it's a Judeo-Roman-Christian-Greek one. Those early modern scientists struggled with the likes of Aristotle because he was so very basic to the philosophy of science. I am not sure that the west would be at all scientifically inclined without the Greeks. OTOH, the pagan Greeks were clearly scientifically inclined without Christianity.

The universe may not have had a unique beginning, a "first moment" at it were. there are rational arguments for a closed time-like loop at the beginning where every instant would be indistinguishable as a candidate for the "first moment." Granted, that is not a popular speculation, but it is a possibility. Even if there was a big bang, there are theories about what caused it and there are "only" three possible answers (i) that there is an infinite chain of causal relationships and never a first cause because there are are always an infinite number of causes that let you to any other cause, (ii) that there is no first cause, that just as vacuum fluctuations and nuclear decay appear to happen randomly and without direct causal triggers, the universe might be the same, like an enormous, random, vacuum fluctuation that just "happened" or (iii) there is a first cause and it itself has no cause because it has always existed. The problem with that is, those are the three classic answers, but there are more, like (A) there is no "first" cause because "first" is a temporal concept and the whole theory that there is, in some sense, infinite stretches of time is wrong or (B) a related thought, it's pinned on the notion that logic, which is important in this universe, have any meaning at all outside of the universe. In either of those cases, we are like fish caught in the water unable to imagine other environments because they are too alien to our limited universe and time bound experiences.

I agree that it must have been denser in the past, and I do agree that the evidence supports its having a beginning (albeit not necessarily a unique first moment), but that it is expanding doesn't get me there by itself. Still, it is good to see that you embrace my definition of Evidence too.

No it doesn't. The Hindu gods are henotheistic entities. They are often thought of as all aspects of a unified cosmic force. Similarly, the universe had a first cause in greek mythology, and the first cause was not omnipotent. The omnipotent beings came later.

This is a straw man, though you may not have noticed it. He was criticizing a particular god, not your abstract definition of God, lets try this:

Premise: Everything which has a beginning has a cause
Premise: The universe had a beginning
Conclusion: The universe had a cause (i.e. God)

Conclusion A: God must be intelligent. (Nope, that doesn't follow.)
Conclusion B: God must be omnipotent. (Nope, that doesn't follow.)
Conclusion C: God must have had a direct hand in creating the Earth. (Nope, that doesn't follow. He could have caused the universe and then the earth was just an unintended consequence of that.)
Conclusion D: God must have made man in His own Image (umm, BUZZZ!).
Conclusion E: God must love us. (A true pessimist might well see the creation of the universe as the very opposite.)

If you use your definition, many things that you clearly believe about god do not follow. If your definition were the totality of what defines God, then "The Bible accurately describes him" is just as unsupported as "He is a red paperclip" I'm afraid, so you must define him in a broader sense.

Okay...so maybe you did understand that using your definition as the basis of a syllogism was setting up a straw man for you to knock down...At least you agree that the dubious assertion that there "must be" a first cause that is "God" does not imply, if true, that the Christian God exists any more than it implies the existence of te universe creating red-papaer clip.

I am in a similar boat, and it seems to me (purely subjectively, mind you) that you must have a very strange sense of the evidence. The fossil evidence alone is suggestive, that it is corroborated by the DNA evidence so exactly (a type of evidence entirely unconceived of at the time the theory was developed). Most of the perceived "holes" I see in evolution are little more than that, anomalous holes and hard to explain elements of in a massive structure.

Every opponent of evolution I have ever seen essentially hammer at those holes. Because the evolutionary biologists can't explain that whole (and the critic can, usually by saying "God did it", it is taken as a refutation of the whole system. When evolutionary biologists (as they often do) speculate about the evolution of a particular trait, it is decried as a "just-so story" even though "God did it" is no better, just far less detailed and imaginative.

In the end, I cannot bring myself to accept supernatural explanations for phenomenon in the natural world because I see no evidence of supernaturalism in the world. The most I do see are things that I can't currently explain, which can be taken equally as evidence of the supernatural and evidence that there are natural forces I cannot explain. Neither theory is falsifiable, but the rise of science is itself evidence that natural explanations undergird the world.

 

That could be possible. I don't deny the possibility, because I can never know one way or the other. All I was saying is that it's far more logical to believe the reality around you, rather than the hypothetical reality you can never be sure of.

How am I denying that?

 

What reality? And that's just the point, isn't it? Your mind creates both your dreams and that condition that you call "reality" ...but in the end, both are just imaginations.

Reality? Stand in front of a fast-moving train ...you'll be splattered all over the tracks. Oooooh, but will you really be splattered? Or will you just "wake up" in another dream of reality?

Geez, this is sorta' fun, ain't it? Anything that anyone says can be turned around and shown to be nothing but imagination of your mind. Yep, sorta' fun.

But, excuse me, I have to go tend to some "reality" now.

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Baron Max

 

Again, I'm not able to refute that it's possible, because I don't know if it is or isn't. But I feel like I need to point out that you haven't "shown" anything. All you've done is provide baseless hypotheticals. Not knocking you, just saying you didn't "show" anything. It takes more than saying it for it to be valid. You have to have some kind of evidence.

 

Oh, I agree! And we're both in exactly the same boat ...simple belief, nothing more.

Baron Max

PS - no, I don't belief all that bullshit, but neither do I take life so seriously anymore. I'm an old fart, and I've seen and heard most of the bullshit that people spew forth many times before.

 

You're oversimplifying it a bit. My belief that the reality around me is real is at least based on observation. Now, maybe that's all just a bogus observation created by a computer program for all I know, but at least my stance has some substance. The idea that we're all dreaming...that's really just a proposed hypothetical that has no basis in observation. I know you're not well-versed in things like this, but that detail does make a difference when presenting ideas.

 

I'm now imagining that baron max is actually a qergian. It must be so!

 

Well, the conclusion that dreams are not real is made by comparing dream reality with waking reality. So actually the position most people have has already made a decision that they can tell real from not real and then parsed up the experiences. I certainly observe things in dreams.

 

Maybe it's because I just woke up (it probably is...I'm not a morning person) but I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at. I do agree that while dreaming, often times we can't tell. But there are a couple of things that let us know the difference. First, when we wake up, we immediately know that what just happened was a dream, and not something we actually experienced. Secondly, I think it's safe to say that most people have also had dreams where they did, in fact, realize they were dreaming at some point. I've had it happen, as I'm sure you've had it happen.

But maybe I didn't state the "observation" point clearly enough...what I meant was that the contention that we are dreaming now has no basis in observation because none of us have ever woken up from this, understand? We've never witnessed anything that would make us think that the experience we all deem as "real" would be anything other than what we perceive it to be. I'm not saying it isn't possible; I have no idea if it's possible or not. But there really is no basis for it.

 

Well, perhaps that's just your imagination trying to convince you to believe that "life" isn't just a dream.

Maybe that's what it means to die? None of us have ever come back from that, either, have we? So we have no idea what's on the "other side". It might be that we do, in fact, wake up from this dream that you insist on calling "reality".

You're placing a large emphasis on "observation" without the slightest clue that it's actually anything but mental imagery. In dreams, you "observe" things all the time, so how can you place such emphasis on it as some kind of "evidence"?

Baron Max

 

Very well could be, for all I know.

It's an interesting philosophical point that I'm sure smarter people than I have discussed at length. Without knowing exactly what is possible in this funky thing called the universe, I can't rule it out.

You understand that it's all we have, right? All I know is that I wake up from a dream and I know it was a dream. I know that this state I've woken into is the real world. Is it really? I don't know, maybe, maybe not, but this is all I have to go on. On the other hand, your idea that perhaps even this is just a dream isn't based on anything. At the very least I can look around and touch the desk I'm sitting at, I can feel feelings, I can know that I'm really here...where is any of this experience in the supposed "real" reality that you speak of? That's all I'm saying. Again, I'm not saying it isn't possible, I'm just saying that even if this is a dream, there is nothing that would make me think it is.