Why I became an atheist: Why did you not?

Discussion in 'Comparative Religion' started by Dinosaur, Jul 5, 2013.

  1. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    Non-overlapping magisteria means that you live in two separate realities you create in your head. It's the opposite of compatibility.
     
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  3. arauca Banned Banned

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    Who the hell is La place just an other opinion of a mathematician who works with imaginary numbers.
     
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  5. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Well, without imaginary numbers you wouldn't have a cellphone, so I wouldn't be too quick to sneer . . . .
     
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  7. gmilam Valued Senior Member

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    But the concept ("You're gonna need some evidence before I pay any attention to your whacky idea") is fairly straight forward.
     
  8. thecalling Registered Member

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    I am Godless, Abrahamic religions crack me up.
     
  9. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    The Rule of Laplace is pretty straightforward and its validity is obvious.
    • It you tell me you saw a fly in the bathroom this morning, I'll just take your word for it because I've seen flies in there myself.
    • If you tell me you saw a cockroach in the bathroom this morning I'm going to ask you if you're sure, because this building is kept very clean and there's never been a cockroach here. Nonetheless, cockroaches are clever and sneaky, so one could have been there. If you describe it in detail and it really was a cockroach rather than a cricket or a stink bug or any of the other kinds of insects we often find in this building, I'll believe you.
    • If you tell me you saw a raccoon in the bathroom this morning, then I'm going to ask to see the evidence myself, since all the entrances to this building are secure and it's not easy to enter, no matter how small you are. If you take me out back and show me a dead raccoon in the trash can, I suppose I'd believe you if you have a reputation for honesty, since raccoons are famous for being sneaky. Notice that as each report is a little more extraordinary than the previous one, I am a little more skeptical and require a little more evidence before I believe you.
    • So what if you tell me that you saw a polar bear in the bathroom this morning? That is an extraordinary assertion. The only polar bears within 500 miles of Baltimore are the ones in the National Zoo in Washington. If one had escaped, the police would be warning everyone and I would have already known about it. Furthermore, polar bears are large, strong, hungry and vicious. If you had walked into the bathroom and found a polar bear there, you would not have walked out of the bathroom. So in order for you to convince me to believe you, you have to provide extraordinary evidence to support the extraordinary assertion. Tell me who else saw the polar bear so I can talk to them--he could not have walked through the door and walked all the way to the bathroom without fifteen other people seeing him. And tell me where he is now--did you call the County Animal Control office, so they came and tranquilized him and took him back to the zoo? Why did I not hear all this commotion? Why weren't people screaming?
    What I am doing is peer-reviewing your hypothesis. The hypothesis about the fly is not extraordinary so I'll accept ordinary evidence: your word of honor. But the hypothesis about the polar bear is extraordinary, so before I believe you, you have to provide extraordinary evidence.

    That's the Rule of Laplace: Extraordinary assertions must be supported by extraordinary evidence before anyone is obliged to treat them with respect.

    If you have no evidence for the polar bear, I will assume that either you are telling me a joke and I should laugh, or you are hallucinating and I should call a doctor.
     
  10. Joe Fox Registered Member

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    I think the error you are describing is the notion that if ideas have NOT been tested by the scientific method then they cannot exist and cannot be true. That has to be false, or there would be no future scientific advances. We feel pretty confident about what we do know. We don't know what we don't know. And we rely on science to slowly chart the path from here to there. We also depend on inspiration, sometimes in very spiritual ways, to form hypotheses that will eventually become accepted theories and part of our understanding of reality. But why is it so important to so many to describe what ultimate reality is, before we could possibly know? To me, that's the real question.
     
  11. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    Alexander2: Welcome to SciForums.

    I hope you browse around to become familiar with the type of issues discussed. Feel free to voice opinions, make nasty remarks, initiate new Threads, et cetera.

    Note that there are some interesting & informative discussions as well as some very silly issues.

    There are lucid arguments, nasty remarks, & fallacious arguements.

    BTW: I am not a multi-ton carnivorus reptile-like creature.

    I call myself Dinosaur because I existed prior to the the first computer & once used slide rules, mechanical calculators, & pencil/paper calculations.
     
  12. arauca Banned Banned

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    I am not against his mathematician skills , I am against people idolatrizing man , If a man is famous then we are supposedly bow That was my expression in regard to La place
     
  13. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    No, you don't have to bow. Just respect what he has done. As Newton once said, we are all indebted to the people who have proceeded us and made modern science possible. "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." Even today we have such giants - Hawking, Watson, Dawkins - who will create the foundation for tomorrow's scientists to see even further into the mysteries of the physical world.
     
  14. wellwisher Banned Banned

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    My approach was to keep on growing as a human being. I began more religious, but since I always had an affinity for science I got a science and engineering degree or two. The pendulum swung from right brain to left brain, with my becoming atheists after I graduated, mostly to develop the other side of my brain and personality. But eventually I could learn no more from atheism, but felt limited and regressed. So the pendulum began to swing again from science and reason back to religion, but with the POV that both were part of the whole. The goal was to be consistent with both at the same time.

    For example, science shows the invention of writing is about 6000 years old, the same as the universe in the bible. If one assumes both mean the same thing you merely need to translate. The bible begins, in the beginning was the word and word was God. The first written word. There is no conflict.

    Conflict is needed to maintain dependency, with leaders who teach conflict only half brainers. Real science teaches one to question everything even the dogma of science. Science is not about a substitute religion with new dogma. Dawkins preaches evolution, but how does he include the impact of water, which is the dominant molecule and phase within all of life. How can you leave out a main variable, which can't be substituted by anything else? That is why the sale pitch is dogma.

    Math skills are useful to science. I was an honorary mathematician back in the day, but don't take that approach. Math is like the cart that follows the horse, with the horse your conceptual model. If you allow the math cart to lead the horse, you can do magic tricks. Science began as magic.

    For example, gravity is an attractive force in terms of Newtonian physics. Say I wanted to change the horse/concept and say it was a repulsive force where matter is pushed together due to a repulsion from space. Conceptually, this would not be right, however, one could develop the math, with sort of the reverse of what we already have. If this math adds up, does that automatically make it right?. The answer is this case is still no because we can see the trick.

    But say the trick was far more clever and not easy to see. We do the same thing and make the math perfect and consistent. With this cart leading the fuzzy horse/concept we may accept it since the math looks perfect. Say the math is so complicated only one hundred people can follow and replicate it. You have no say, either way, such that any trick can be supported.

    Once you understand that you need to look at science theory at the conceptual level first, the math can be left for the math experts to do the right thing. As a support team math is very powerful and needed for applied and practical science, but only after the concepts are sound. Leaving out water in evolution is not sound science. They prefer to start at the statistical empirical so they can avoid addressing the lack of conceptual consistency. This allows magic.
     
  15. Stoniphi obscurely fossiliferous Valued Senior Member

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    Succinct explanation of the Rule of Laplace, Frag - kudos to you.

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  16. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    No one here is encouraging us to idolize Laplace. Merely to utilize his work, now that it has been peer-reviewed by other scientists and found to be true beyond a reasonable doubt.

    I don't know what country you live in, but in the USA nobody bows to anybody, except entertainers to their audience.

    I'm sure that's the first time anyone has accused me of being succinct.

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  17. Walter L. Wagner Cosmic Truth Seeker Valued Senior Member

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  18. kwhilborn Banned Banned

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    @ Fraggle Rocker, and others.

    Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

    I agree this is a great scientific assumption.

    Now I have and will to my dying breath maintain I have participated in and believe wholeheartedly in some PSI subjects such as Telepathy and Clairvoyance.

    Now because of the human nature of the equipment used, there is no "evidence" at all.
    (not true. There is probabilities, and hardly any likelihood of chance at play, all of which conveniently (for skeptics) is not always 100% repeatable fitting with our scientific method)

    Now....

    It is the claim of the OP that there is no god?

    Please show me evidence that there is no god.

    Please show me evidence that telepathy is impossible.

    Please show me mass consciousness is an impossibility.

    These are your claims, now support them.

    Someone suggesting radio waves a thousand years ago (or hundreds) would have been dismissed as "full of woo". Anyone could easily disprove his theory by building a faulty radio and a faulty transmission station and show how they do not work. This is similar to a variety of experiments "James Randi" has "evaluated".

    My point is that; it is as problematic to disprove god as it is to prove god, and anybody not realizing this simple truth must themselves be "full of woo".
     
  19. arauca Banned Banned

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    O like your point.
     
  20. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    You're shifting the burden of proof. These are your claims, it's up to you to show evidence for these things.
     
  21. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    wiki:

    The proper name Jesus /ˈdʒiːzəs/ used in the English language originates from the Latin form of the Greek name Ἰησοῦς (Iēsous), a rendition of the Hebrew Yeshua (ישוע), also having the variants Joshua or Jeshua

    I'm not convinced that this is just a rendering. I suppose if it correlates with references to other Joshuas that's one thing. But it seems rather unlikely that something as crucial as a sacred name would suffer this much mangling. The other point of view is that the Gospels were largely uttered in Greek before they were ever recorded, which I think could mean that the religion wasn't exactly born in Judæa after all, not as we know it today.

    This word "word" is something I don't exactly buy. The actual word used was

    Logos (/ˈloʊɡɒs/, UK /ˈlɒɡɒs/, or US /ˈloʊɡoʊs/; Greek: λόγος, from λέγω lego "I say") is an important term in philosophy, psychology, rhetoric, and religion. Originally a word meaning "a ground", "a plea", "an opinion", "an expectation", "word," "speech," "account," "reason,"[1][2] it became a technical term in philosophy, beginning with Heraclitus (ca. 535–475 BC), who used the term for a principle of order and knowledge

    It also had special meaning for Stoics. Since Christ manifests the characters of a Stoic, I would lean on their definition:

    the philosophy holds that becoming a clear and unbiased thinker allows one to understand the universal reason (logos). A primary aspect of Stoicism involves improving the individual's ethical and moral well-being: "Virtue consists in a will that is in agreement with Nature."[6] This principle also applies to the realm of interpersonal relationships; "to be free from anger, envy, and jealousy,"[7] and to accept even slaves as "equals of other men, because all men alike are products of nature."

    If I am correct (who knows) then this would require a completely different interpretation of John 1:1. It would seem to be telling Greeks that Jesus is the new Logos. Thus it changes John 1:1 into a sensible introduction to something no one in their right mind would take at face value as truth - a demigod with powers not even matched by the greatest of the Greek gods. I think they needed such an introduction in order to get them to hear the rest of the story.

    Left intact, and by meditating on the power of words as ancient people might have done, we are left with:

    In the beginning was Logos, and Logos was with [possessed by? ]Theos, and Logos was Theos.

    If you can grasp how a 1st century AD Greek might have understood this statement, in light of what I said above, The Logos was Theos is a way of saying "meet the new definition of God".
     
  22. kwhilborn Banned Banned

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    @ spidergoat,
    your request is illogical.

    Also it is the OP that is making claims (in this instance) there is no god.

    Just because mankind has not yet invented a tool for measuring something; as in the Radio wave example I gave. Does not mean it is beyond future science.

    You are asking me to prove science of the future will still have discoveries to make.

    I know the quote beside my name says, "Finally we know everything.", but I actually do not subscribe to that belief.

    Claiming that proof of a god or telepathy must exist seems very silly to me. Please think before answering because it is a very flawed premise.

    This is one of the reasons I usually prefer to avoid religious debates as there is no way of proving either side, but when people start saying proof must exist then I must point out the realism.

    If somebody claimed an Iphone would exist 150 years ago it would have been seemingly been an equally ridiculous claim. The Skeptics then would have said it was an "extraordinary claim". They would have labelled it woo/cesspool.

    re-read post 117.

    I don't think it could be explained much clearer than that by anyone, yet you still don't grasp the problems with your thinking. It is flawed. Realize it.
     
  23. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    This is a "God of the gaps" hypothesis. Also known as Russels Teapot.
     

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