Incorrect. And that makes you wrong. Nope. You keep right on assuming! Clearly you rely on assumptions, rather than any sort of data or proof, for everything you claim. I didn't use the word "image." Are you confused again?
Of course you don't. You are immune to any viewpoint but your own. Must be hard to see out of that box.
There is no such thing. (The "origins" of "causes" are not other causes, for starters). By the overwhelming evidence here, proclaimed belief in the Abrahamic version of such a thing corrupts the soul - makes a person fundamentally dishonest, has them living a life of bad faith, has them undermining what is good and true in other people. Alternatively, fundamentally dishonest people interested in recruiting others into their degradation, or attacking others they regard as a threat to themselves, may be drawn toward proclaiming that belief here - a chicken and egg problem. That's interesting. If we assume that is a feature of this place - a science-oriented discussion forum - and such belief does not manifest itself in that way elsewhere, it's even more interesting here.
I think Jan does a wonderful job causing folk to realise how many religious nutters are out there and the nonsence that goes on. I have never been interested in religion thinking it was somewhat harmless but now lookung around the net I find it alarming that there are so many who are captive to the fable. Still I now have a way of instantly qualifying folk by determining if they are one of the zombies of faith. I know not to raise science for a start. The call for evidence as always goes unanswered.. it no longer frustrates or annoys me that nothing is offerred...crazy to expect evidence of something that is made up...cant happen...all that can happen is sidestepping and trickyness from our believer members...the key is not to let them annoy but use the opportunity to assess the various degrees of hypocracy exhibited. Alex
Musika: This is from a while back. Economy. If the category includes things that all fit the definition of the word, it's a convenient way to talk about the whole lot, rather than having to split it off into individual discussions. You assume I am speculating. Anthropological studies have been done, for starters. Yes, I see examples. But theists do it in certain characteristic and consistent ways, as a matter of course. I'm still waiting on anything that might count as evidence of any "reality" other than the physical world and its contents. I thought a theist might have presented some such thing in this thread by now, but no luck there. If you are saying the natural/supernatural distinction is a false dichotomy, you are destroying the meanings of the words. Something can't be both natural and supernatural at the same time. If, on the other hand, you are complaining that God is not really "supernatural" after all, then you ought to be able to provide some recognisable evidence for God from "nature". No, it's a scientific hypothesis. (Roughly speaking, since we need to expand on your description a bit to make it a workable hypothesis.) It's a claim that shouldn't be expressed as a fact (yet). Like I said, it's a hypothesis, at the moment. Something "transcendent" is outside the limits of usual human experience or understanding. God is supernatural by description, so transcendent in the secondary sense of being outside the limits of natural law. Pointing out God's supernatural nature is more specific, like I said. How so? Newton stated up front that he proposed no "mechanism" for gravity. What he put forward was a description of gravity - that is a quantitative means of predicting the effects of gravity that could be empirically verified or falsified. Newton was also a mystic, of course, into alchemy and bible exegesis as much as he was into physics. There's no doubt that he had personal views on the supernatural, but they do not appear anywhere in his Principia Mathematica. Not that I am aware of. There are threads like this one where scientists are open-minded as to the possibility of evidence of non-natural phenomena, for example. Some might make that claim. It is not a tenet of atheism. Atheism just holds that there's (probably) no God. Atheists claim that there is no evidence of God. But they could be wrong. Still, we're almost 1000 posts into this thread and no theist has yet presented convincing evidence of God. Most of their time has been spent trying to dodge the question. Funny about that.[/quote]
(continued...) I don't see how it "stands to reason" that anything "pre-big bang" must have supernatural elements. Why do you draw that conclusion? Oh, no! You've clued me in on that a number of times now. Yet, strangely, you have yet to employ a suitable non-empirical method to produce evidence for God in this thread. I don't recall you presenting any example of non-empirical evidence in regards to islanders, bakers, mechanics, etc. Admittedly, it's been while since I visited this thread. Please refresh my memory. What would be one example of such evidence? You'd need to unpack what you are asking me to believe in terms of history. Are you asking if I believe that certain primary or secondary historical sources of history exist? Are you asking whether I believe all the contents of a given primary source, being a story told or recorded in some way by somebody? Are you asking whether I believe in a particular overarching historical narrative that has been constructed using a variety of sources as evidence? Or what? It would be fair to say that I believe history insofar as it is well evidenced, bearing in mind the human biases and errors and limitations that all impact upon the accessibility and reliability of that evidence. Hypotheses are not knowledge. They are more like educated guesses. The scientific usage of the word "theory" is different to the lay usage of that word, however. A theory in science is a well-evidenced explanation of empirical data (among other things). Knowledge is generally taken to mean a justified true belief, so scientific theories can count as knowledge. Hypotheses, lacking appropriate justification, generally do not. There's only one way to get from a hypothesis to theory or knowledge, which is to collect the requisite evidence. You picked a bad example, then, because science is attempting to answer those pre-big bang questions you mention. It will only be able to do so, of course, if pre-big bang physics has measurable effects post-big bang, which seems very plausible. Right now, the field is at the stage of putting up multiple hypotheses for testing. So, this particular example not being out of bounds for empiricism, have you got anything else to present from your bag of "unlimited contenders"? There are innumerable events that have occurred on Earth that we have no direct empirical access to. That can make it that much harder to convince somebody that those events actually occurred, depending on the particular event that is claimed. Are you telling me that God is one of those things for which there is no good evidence, after all? See, I was under the impression that you theists were saying that there is some good evidence for God to be had. But then, 1000 posts later, you still haven't presented any.
From post #7: 1. The cosmological fine-tuning arguments. This one appears to me to be a recent (last few decades) eruption of the traditional design argument in new ostensibly scientific guise. But I'm put off by how it's dependent on what I consider highly speculative theories of mathematical physics, incomprehensible to laymen and hence a matter for religious-style faith. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_Universe https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fine-tuning/ 2. The class of more traditional cosmological arguments, derived from Aristotle by way of Aquinas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_argument https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmological-argument/ This class of arguments seems to me to revolve around a whole class of unanswered metaphysical questions. (How did reality originate? What is the source of its order?) It doesn't really point to a theistic-style deity unless one introduces the deity as an additional premise which would seemingly render the arguments circular. 3. Religious experience. This class of evidences has the advantage of being exceedingly empirical, assuming that we allow 'empirical' to range over all experience and not just sensory experience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_experience https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/religious-experience/ This class of evidence faces serious epistemological difficulties in my opinion. (But so does mathematics, and atheists love mathematics.) 4. Miracles. A great deal depends on what we interpret this word to mean. Strong Humean violation of the natural order interpretations make the reality of miracles hard to demonstrate (certainly by science, whose methodological naturalism always assumes the existence of natural explanations), while weak interpretations weaken the inference between the miracle and a deity, unless that premise is initially added, once again rendering the argument circular. (The young couple who think of their new baby as a miraculous answer to their prayers aren't committed to believing that the baby is a violation of the laws of nature, nor does their thinking of their baby as a miraculous answer to their prayers logically imply the existence of a deity.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/miracles/ I'm inclined to give "natural" a physicalist spin, applying it to the realm in which physics and physical explanations hold true. Or perhaps to the realm accessible (at least indirectly) by sensory experience, the realm of space-time-matter. (Which may or may not be identical with the idea preceding.) The reality with which we can (at least in principle) physically interact. (Lots of questions and problems implicit in all that.) That leaves us with problem cases like mathematics and the laws of physics themselves. It still isn't clear what kind of reality those have or precisely how human beings know about them. Which suggests that the natural/supernatural boundary might be a fuzzy distinction. Regarding evidence of God from nature, the goal of the cosmological arguments seems to be to point to unanswered metaphysical questions whose answers don't seem to lie within the natural realm (as defined above): The reason why anything exists at all, the source of cosmic order and so on. In other words, the physical world doesn't seem to be a closed system so much as an unanswered question. Throw in an implicit assumption that everything has an explanation, define 'God' as the missing explanation, and there you are. So the common atheist demand that God present "himself" for inspection by mankind's physical senses (that he be visible in the sky or something, like the flying saucers in Independence Day) would seem to contradict that sort of transcendence. (Which many religious traditions insist upon.) The cosmological arguments avoid that difficulty by arguing that physical reality (the realm of the senses in principle including all the possible instrumental extensions) requires an explanation beyond itself, an explanation of a different sort. What about the purported objects of religious experience? Practitioners of yoga, Muslim sufis and Christian religious contemplatives sometimes claim to have tapped into some kind of higher reality. It's usually something ineffable, something that can't be described in words or conventional concepts. They take those kind of experiences as evidence for their various religious beliefs. That's exceedingly empirical in its way, assuming that we allow the word 'empirical' to range over all experience and not just sensory experience. One of the things that struck me about early Buddhism was exactly that, how empirical it is. Don't believe just because a teacher tells you or because you read it in a "scripture" somewhere, or because you concocted it as a result of a chain of reasoning. (The famous Kalama sutta.) Withhold final judgment until you actually experience it for yourself. While at first glance that seems to be entirely subjective, the yogin might argue that if you devote years to yoga practice then you can experience it too, that confirming evidence is available to anyone who puts in the effort. Which isn't unlike science really. Scientific evidence is exceedingly arcane, perceptible only to a chosen few. But scientists argue that anyone who pursues years of university education and then gets access to the right research group, can have these confirming experiences as well. Or at least access to the data sets that confirm hypotheses after elaborate chains of inference are applied to them. So problems of circularity start to leak in and the public/private distinction gets fuzzy too. That might indeed be the minimum qualification for being an atheist, atheism's defining characteristic. But atheists typically go well beyond that in real life. Atheists will typically insist that atheists have good justification for their belief that there is no God. Many of them will omit your 'probably'. They will typically insist that conversely, there is no good justification for belief in the existence of God. Or divine beings or transcendent realities, or something. One of the profound problems with atheism is that it's typically blurred together with anti-Christianity. Divine realities are conceived in very Biblical ways. You haven't lived until a room full of atheists start spouting Bible quotations at you as if they were protestant fundamentalists, which many of them probably were until they lost their faith. (I'm not and never was a Christian, so Bible quotations don't move me. The Quran is just as dim.) I'm most emphatically not an atheist in that image. I consider myself an agnostic in Thomas Huxley's original sense. I feel that I'm constantly surrounded by mysteries that not only do I not have the answers to, I strongly suspect that no one does. I'm fascinated by the philosophy of religion, not because it offers me something to smash and feel superior about, but because it presents no end of interesting problem cases on the epistemological and metaphysical margins.
Possessing faith is not even evidence of possessing faith, since we only have your word for it So it in no way shape or form evidence of god Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Please provide your definition of life I don't mind if, a(ny) net dictionary matches your definition, if you copy and paste Or if you have a distinct definition feel free to wax lyrical Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
