Three Claims of Uniformitarian Naturalism

We can never truly know about any projection into the very distant past, except to say, the evolution of the universe from t+10-43 seconds seems reasonably accurate. But many cosmological occurrences projected into the future have been verified. This of course conflicts with your stupidity and actions in keeping on asking for proof. We have no "proof" [in your baggage laden eyes] for any scientific theory, but we are pretty confident about the outcomes etc, as continually shown. Do you accept the theory of gravity?
And again, you havn't answered the question I asked you...why? afraid? because the answer is negative?

No one has ever said it was. [With the exception of the theory of evolution which is fact] You see all theories do grow in certainty over time, and as they continue to match observational and experimental data.

I sure hope so!! Because this is why science, scientific theories and the scientific methodology, will always surpass the stagnant, unmoving, unevidenced notion of some sky daddy or other ID notion upheld by religious orders and their overlords..

Science describes and educates us about the universe, life and everything else. It continues to progress, move forward, reveal more data and knowledge, re the universe and the evolution of life.

It does a far, far better job then any religious/IDer mythical notions that you can mention. It faces the facts and what the evidence points to, without fear nor favour.

See previous answer.

 

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Two reasons...

1. You already know the answer to your own question.

2. It is off topic and irrelevant to this thread.

 

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Sure I know the answer...so do you!

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You won't answer because the answer is negative.

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And no, it is not off topic, you simply don't want the blow torch on the inadequacies and mythical nonsense that is religion.

 

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My Faith or Trust in God’s character is based on both historic and current day physical evidence, on the written testimony of many from the past, on the very real miracle which occurred when my own father was healed, on the testimony of miracles that are happening to others around the globe today, and on my own life experiences.

All it takes is one single miracle and Atheism fails.

Just one.

That is why Atheism will never allow even one to exist.

 

It depends on your belief entirely.
So there is an Earthquake hundreds die and yet one child is pulled from the rubble..it's a miracle...sure pity god could not have prevented all the other deaths don't you think?
I guess the dead folk we sinners.
Anyways happy cherry picking.
Alex

 

I think you are wrong and I am sure if you could study evolution without your godism glasses you would understand why you are wrong.

Perhaps you could outline how you account for everything..the diversity of species and the various mass extinctions..I don't know how you can account for the various mass extinctions and I expect you will not even bother to attempt to answer my question.
One thing I notice, in general, is how theisist simply ignore aspects of reality that in any small way can only shake their faith.

However I get it..you need it to manage life and see no other way I expect.

You try very hard to make the God myth real and I wonder why.
I hear theists say you must have God or there can be no morality is that it for you?

Alex

 

You know what would be interesting is to present a miracle so we can deal with something specific and then establish how those claiming the miracle is due to god know that the event was a result of divine intervention.
And if you have the time the big question for me..actually I have a few..is why out of the thousands of gods that have been invented by humans you can be sure you have picked the correct one and how yours is different and real rather than invented.
Main question..are you aware of the various human gods invented with astrology in mind...all those human gods invented and mimicking the Sun..twelve followers death and resurrection.
Yes or no...I just would like to know if you are aware of the history at all...and if knowing it how do you get around the obvious conclusion one must arrive at...
I can accept the Old Testament because no one in it claims to be god but that new testament...fancy claiming to be god..just does not seem right...and the sad irony is those who follow the New Testament have a terrible history of persecuting those who follow the Old Testament..like look at the Nazi persecution of Jews...do you think that came about from being a Nazi of a couple of years or generations of following a religion that hated the Jews.
Touchy subject such that one can't even raise it..lucky we can blame the Nazi..all their fault..nothing to do with the generations of non Nazi Jew haters.
Christianity was invented by the Romans for the Romans and it's invention was mainly to sort out..guess who.
Alex

 

Believe what the bloody hell you like, but don't try ramming it down the throats of people that generally appreciate science and the scientific methodology, on a science forum no less, where the scientific method and scientific scrutiny over rides everything...even in the fringe sections.
Before this latest exchange with you, I did mistakenly believe you would not stoop to lying, purposely misinterpreting, and asking for proof when you know there is none, having in mind of course to shove in your god of the gaps. That was mainly the line/s Jan and the other self appointed "expert" took.
Science works matey...science may change as observations and experiments may dictate. It aint stuck in the mud. A shame you cannot see that superior advantage.

 

I'm not convinced that the word 'science' always refers to one single thing, to one defining essence that everything that we call 'science' possesses and nothing that we wouldn't call 'science' possesses.

The natural sciences (physical and biological) provide an extraordinarily good conceptual framework for things like engineering. They are very good at generating predictions and techniques upon which technologies are based. More abstractly, they provide us with a great deal of knowledge about what the physical world contains and how those things interact with each other. We have learned a great deal in biology about how life functions on the histological, physiological and molecular levels. And we have uncovered lots of sometimes rather arcane mathematical correspondences between particular physical variables and other kinds of physical variables in physics.

But natural science is far less effective as a metaphysics, as a fundamental account of reality itself. since it begs as many questions as it answers.

I don't have a whole lot of confidence in the so-called "social sciences" at all. They seem to me to be 'sciences' only by courtesy. They have very little explanatory or predictive power. (I do have quite a bit or interest and respect for cognitive science though.)

The past is the easier of the two, since it leaves traces, however fragmentary and ambiguous. So we can produce hypotheses about what occurred in the past based on our historical evidence. Those hypotheses may or may not be true (correspond to what really happened in reality) but we don't seem to have any way of knowing for certain whether or not they do. So there's an iffyness to our knowledge claims about the past.

The future is a tougher problem, since the nature of the future is more mysterious. Is the future fixed as the past at least seems to be? Or is the future a superposition of a whole host of possibility states? So if we make a prediction about what's going to happen tomorrow, does that prediction even have a truth value until tomorrow rolls around and makes it either T or F? (Aristotle first wrote about that 'problem of future contingents' some 2300 years ago and it's still an open question today.)

People today often pretend to have knowledge of the future, based on models of how they believe the future will unfold. They justify it by pointing to things like celestial mechanics where we can predict the positions of planets in the future with great accuracy.

The problem is that these kinds of predictions are only accurate for the simplest sorts of physical systems. As systems grow more complex, they typically grow more unpredictable. That's why engineers have to build and test prototypes. Something unforeseen almost always appears and makes the system do something what wasn't predicted.

The likelihood of that increases as complexity increases. There are also difficulties like nonlinear dynamics.

Yes, I'm inclined to agree.

Well, I guess that I'd define a 'fact' as an existing state of affairs. I think of facts as the truth-makers that make propositions true or false. So a proposition (including a statement of a scientific hypothesis) is T iff it corresponds to the facts. The sentence 'Paris is the capital of France' is T iff it's a fact that Paris is the capital of France. So sure, a theory is never equal to a fact, though the variables of true theories would need to include all true facts of whatever sort the theory is addressing as its substitution instances. (By that I mean that a theoretical statement like F=ma would need to be true of all relevant real life instances of forces, masses and accelerations.)

The problem, especially when we are talking about the future, is that we typically have no way of knowing what the facts will turn out to be. We can perhaps narrow in on what the facts are likely to be probabilistically with models, but not always and rarely with total accuracy. Estimating those future probabilities exposes us to the problem of induction as well and itself rests on shaky foundations.

Yes, I think so.

I strongly agree. It's ironic when self-styled atheists attack the supposed evils of "religion" but then turn right around and put science on a pedestal as if it was their evangelical new religion, somehow synonymous with reason itself, a supposed source of ultimate truth that non-scientists must unhesitatingly believe based on nothing more than authority and faith, on pain of being denounced as "deniers" and "anti-science".

Of course not.

 

Obviously the more bodies involved, the more difficult the mathematics are, approaching and perhaps surpassing the limts of our present technology. But you can bet your short n curlies, that any result, no matter how difficult, or even impossible to calculate, will fully align with the Newton's laws of gravity, and Kepler's laws of orbital motion.
The predicted presence and position of Neptune is an example of the accuracy and ability of our laws.

 

Which, if you remove the a priori assumption that God exists, amounts to nil.

Testimony is just words. It can be as accurate as the Sunday Times, or as Lord of the Rings. If you assume a priori that it is truthful, however....?

That rather depends on how one defines a "miracle". Something possible but unlikely? Or something where the explanation of "miracle" is more plausible than any other mundane explanation?
As Hume put it:
Premise 1: Reasonable people always proportion their beliefs to the strength oftheir evidence.
Premise 2: Every law of nature is such that the evidence that it has never been violated is stronger than the evidence that it has been violated.
Premise 3: If a miracle has occurred, it is a violation of a law of nature.
Conclusion: Consequently, reasonable people will never believe that a miracle has occurred.

Sure, how one interprets one's life experiences goes a huge way to informing your beliefs. But your interpretations are not fact.

Then define what you think a miracle is, and show that there has been a phenomena that can only be interpretated as a miracle. But don't expect people without all the information of that phenomena to jump on board "It's a miracle!" when "I don't know" remains a more honest option.

The fact that atheism is still around should therefore tell you something, should it not? I guess we could all be in denial of what you (or other posters on this site) consider to be undeniable fact. Or maybe, just maybe, no "miracle" has ever actually happened.

It's not a matter of allowing one to exist or not. It is a matter of examining the evidence and reaching a reasonable conclusion. Miracles don't "exist". The underlying phenomena either exists or not, and "miracle" is an interpretation of that phenomena.
If you wish to intepret something as a miracle, that is your prerogative. But that doesn't make the phenomena a bona fide act of God, or prove undeniably that God therefore exists. It merely means you have interpreted it as such, and that you find that interpretation convincing as being proof of God.
Of course, if you already have an a priori belief that God exists, it makes interpreting things as miracles more likely, and also of less value to anyone who doesn't hold that same a priori belief.

 

Or alternatively, an example of the accuracy and ability of God’s laws.

 

I think both sides are capable of this same kind of logic, and that both need to be more critical of, and careful with, using it.

Is that possible?

Would you agree that a person should challenge and question his own a priori beliefs? I think they should!

And also that a person should be skeptical even of his own skepticism? I think this is also very important.

Would you agree that these are normally appropriate and wise approaches for both Theists and Atheists?

They are both critical for me, at least in my own personal life. It is how I grow and improve beyond what I am today.

 

If your looking for an unscientific explanation based in myth and unevidenced assumptions.
I'll play your game though and substitute a big fat magical spaghetti monster!

 

Good for you!! But again, I don't you trying to ram that down my throat along with Jan and Vocerferous...I can listen to the local preacher and his fire and brimstone next Sunday if I chose.

 

Sure, but I would hold that someone who has been honest with themself when applying it would not conclude upon theism as a result of any evidence. To me the only honest conclusion is one of agnosticism - the "I don't know" conclusion. From there, if one doesn't have the knowledge to conclude upon the veracity of proposition X, why believe that it is true, or why believe that it is false? With respect to the proposition "God exists", if one doesn't believe that it is true, one is an atheist, irrespective of whether or not they believe God does not exist. Agnostic atheism.

Of course. At least when it comes to sufficiently important matters. In most practical matters those beliefs are probably not an issue.

If you mean that they should be wary of taking skepticism to an extreme: it really comes down, as with all things, to whether or not it interrupts one's ability to function reasonably.

To an extent. It depends upon how far one is willing to follow where it leads. If it highlights to you that you have no reasonable justification for holding a belief, would you honestly actually change it, or simply justify the holding of the belief with something else that you don't subject to the same level of skepticism? Most would say the former with all good intentions, but be unable to stop themself from the latter.

Personally I think there is a vast and beautiful landscape between knowledge and total ignorance, but too many people consider it to be a chasm and seek to avoid it by clinging to belief in the absence of knowledge. People are scared of "I don't know" and what it might mean.

Good luck to you. But be sure to mix it with genuine honesty for it to mean anything, even to yourself.

 

I don't share your belief in or trust in God, But just from a philosophy of religion perspective, I personally think that the best religious evidences are religious experience.

But I agree with the point that you may or may not be making that the often-voiced atheist shriek that "there's no evidence!!!" is flat out wrong. There's lots of evidence. There's just no evidence that atheists are willing to accept.

They may or may not have good reasons for not accepting the proffered evidence. I typically find myself agreeing with the atheists most of the time. But my point here is that my skepticism about the reliability of the evidence or about what we should or shouldn't conclude from it doesn't justify the claim that the evidence doesn't exist at all.

David Hume defines 'miracle' to mean a violation of the laws of nature. But that's an exceedingly strong and tendentious definition, which is one of the places that his argument can be attacked. (The miracle argument isn't original with Hume. Others made it before him.) Many theologians would probably favor St. Augustine's account of miracles, which suggested that God always works in accordance with the hypothetical "laws of nature", simply using very obscure ones put into creation for that express purpose to work the particular miracle. Augustine's motivation in arguing that way wasn't to defend "science", but rather to defend the idea that God is consistent and doesn't contradict himself by breaking his own rules.

Augustine's account opens up the possibility (contra Hume) that a miracle may indeed happen in accordance with the "laws of nature", but nevertheless happen as the result of divine intention. God simply rigged creation to turn out that way for God's own purposes. So an atheist arguing that a miracle has a "natural cause" doesn't necessarily constitute an argument that an event wasn't a miracle at all, if miracles needn't be violations of the "laws of nature".

The idea of "laws of nature" is far older than "science" and is ultimately derived from analogy with the edicts of ancient kings. That's where the idea that "laws" are spoken into existence by the "word" of the "Lord" comes from. (An idea found in the Bible and in much of ancient Middle Eastern religion which made use of that political analogy.) That's why I say that atheists still believing in the existence of "laws of nature" while not believing in God is kind of like the Cheshire cat's grin in Alice.

If we go with the strong definition of 'miracle' as violation of the seeming "laws of nature", then I'm inclined to agree with Sarkus. If we exclude some religious experience claims, we can't directly perceive the divine. Certainly not with our normal senses. So if we perceive some event that seems to us to violate our current understanding of how the universe works, all we would seem to have on our hands is an anomaly. We don't really know whether it had any "supernatural" explanation, let alone whether or not that 'supernatural' explanation had anything to do with a religious deity. So I strongly agree with Sarkus that by far the most justifiable position to take on these matters is agnosticism.

Yes, I think that's true. They seem to fear that if their belief system isn't hermetically sealed and absolutely complete and authoritative, if they accept even the possibility of anomalies happening that aren't consistent with their current beliefs, then they are sliding down the slippery slope to religion. I think that we've seen that in the UFO threads.

 

Yes, Atheism has always been the minority view.

 

I can substitute a primordial (spaghetti monster) soup of the gaps, based on ignorance, fabricated myth, and unevidenced assumptions, and that is without proof, with a can of Chicken Soup.

Chicken Soup probably has a better shot at creating life.

 

That's an interesting question. How can somebody recognize a miracle in the first place?

That in turn depends on how one defines 'miracle'. In a broad sense, 'miracles' might be said to be divine interventions. These might come in two different kinds:

1) Divine interventions that are inconsistent with the "laws of nature". This is David Hume's version of 'miracle' and I sense that it's what SetiAlpha was talking about.

The problem that I personally have with this one is that I don't have any way of perceiving God. So if I perceive a violation of some physical "law", I just perceive what appears to be an anomaly, unless there's some additional reason to associate it with the divine.

There's also the problem that humanity's current understanding of reality probably isn't the last word on the matter. So what appears today to be a violation of the "laws of nature" might not look like that in the future. Which delivers us to...

2) Divine interventions that don't violate any "laws of nature", and that might even have been brought about by some divine agency by employing those laws.

This is Augustine's version and it's typically what a young Christian couple means when they say their newborn baby is a "miracle" and an "answer to their prayers". They aren't for a moment suggesting that they think that their baby is a violation of the laws of nature.

So, if a candidate miraculous event is consistent with the "laws of nature", whether currently known ones or ones yet to be discovered, then the decision whether or not to consider it a miracle would seem to be a matter of how it is interpreted. It would seem to be a matter of whether the one doing the interpreting imagines any meaning or purpose in it.

So I guess that I have to disagree with SetiAlpha that a single miracle would disprove atheism.

On #2, miracles consistent with the "laws of nature", all the atheist would perceive is an entirely natural event.

On #1, miracles that do violate the "laws of nature", all that the atheist would perceive is a currently unexplained anomaly.

In both cases, the atheist would probably continue right on with their atheism.