I have so far stated that the possibility of the existence of realities surpassing man's capacity to comprehend them is reasonable given the abundance of examples in nature of such barriers to comprehension.
That violates several rules of intelligent discussion. First is the one from freshman English that states "Thou shalt not be vague." Second is the hijacking of the actual English world "reality" and declaring it plural, which is an offense to the reader, who uses the term to mean "the state of things as they actually are". Third, there is nothing in nature that says "nature is not in the state it's actually in".
Your interpretation of this as fundamentalism, pseudoscience and "Creation Science" simply demonstrates your own lack of familiarity with these terms,
Christian Fundamentalism is the strict literal interpretation of the Bible. It's atrociously ignorant and dishonest. It's also highly phobic, loathsome of the perceived threats coming from atheism and science. So you get a check in that square. Pseudoscience is the false representation of science, usu. by a person not formally trained in the field, to deliberately convince naive people that something which is false is true, and vice-versa. Check to that. Creation Science is the movement born out of fundamentalism to exploit pseudoscience in order to propagandize the congregations and incite them against academia, which is notoriously represented by the Scopes monkey trial and the dozens of attempts to return the present world to the ignorance of a hundred years ago (or more). So check to that.
and as mentioned previously, anger and confusion on your part.
Not at all. The assumption is that you're not thin-skinned, that you can take what you dish out.
Rather, it is a humble admission of human limitations.
There's nothing humble about declaring the English language your private property and imposing the glorification of ignorance on readers.
Many of man's intellectual faculties are absent/severely limited in primates, from which man diverged just 5-10 million years ago;
No, that's equivocating. Humans
evolved from ape-like ancestors. The statement is absurd anyway since humans obviously acquired their intelligence as a survival gain over the ancestral form. So that's a gain, not a loss. The rest is meaningless since there is no basis for claiming an unspecified generalized and hypothetical superman as the putative benchmark that humans don't measure up to. For all you know this is as good as its gets for intelligence anywhere in the universe. You don't get to just invent a premise. It has to be grounded in reality. That is--to bring that idea back home again--it has to reflect "the state of things as they actually are".
that is to say, relative to the age of the universe (13.77 billion years), our intellects are in their infancy.
I guess if it's child's play you can waltz through all the post-doc programs at all the major universities and clean up. Let us know how that turns out.
(BTW start with English.)
A more specific example related to man's intellectual capacity to comprehend the possibility of an infinite God would be the ability to count to very large numbers and to subsequently contemplate 'infinite' as a concept:
Here we go with the pseudoscience. If you're worried about intellectualizing the metaphysical, start with the history of the fundamentalism you are advocating. Trace the historical origins of your own religion. Go ahead. Before worrying about the infinite, let's just start with the facts. The rest is useless.
indeed some argue that Cantor was driven to insanity in large part from his mathematical endeavors to understand the concept of infinity,
So? Who cares about him. That was an odd digression.
which in evolutionary terms our brains only very recently developed a capacity to understand.
That's absurd. The evolution of
H. sapiens sapiens was completed millions of years before there was even a written language from which any estimate can be made about when the earliest conceptualization of infinity arose.
Does this not suggest that man may be incapable of comprehending higher realities?
No, it just sounds like you're full of yourself. Let's go back to common vernacular and establish the meaning of reality: "the state of things as they actually exist." Try to rehabilitate your arguments from that position and see where it leads you.
It means just that, realities superior to those immediately perceptible and comprehensible to man.
No, it means you're filling these pages with styrofoam. Give us our daily bread. Put something digestible on the table.
The context here would is the existence of God and difficult concepts surrounding such a higher reality, including "birthless", "deathless", and "infinitude".
If your plan was to advocate for the existence of God (initially evident by your attacks on atheism) then the honest thing would have been to open with that as your first post instead of all of this weed whacking. None of the things you list above “actually exist” so you don’t get to equate them with “reality”. You are treating the English language as if it’s proprietary, which is just about the same as saying you’d prefer to be conversing with yourself.
You're debating the rejection of the Big Bang with who exactly?
It's not evident from my statement
The rejection of the evidence of evolution and the Big Bang in deference to superstition, myth, legend and fable also speaks to the limitations of humans, but neither of these is an indictment against atheism?
But nice fade from the actual argument which was against your insistence that human limitations are a rationale for accepting God.
You say this because it is imperceptible to your senses.
No, as explained to you, this is a myth imported into Judeo-Christianity in roughly the Maccabean era and evidently from Persia. If you want to impose your religious beliefs onto intelligent discussion, please first give us a historical accounting of where they came from. You certainly didn't invent them, did you.
You may find comfort in knowing that the cow in the field agrees with you and fully accepts your logic.
If that kind of oblique speech makes you happy, run with it. But it does a disservice to the readers. Try a bathroom wall if you just need to vent.
The nature of my argument however is that the inability to perceive or comprehend a higher reality does not disprove its existence.
If you were being frank you would come out of the closet and profess your fundamentalism and proceed to address the laundry list of fallacies we have enumerated against it. If you are attempting to claim that atheists are too dim-witted to swallow the fundamentalist fallacies then you might want to develop that idea. That would make for some good entertainment.
[Heaven] is a myth incorporated into Judaic tradition probably in the Maccabean era and probably imported from Persia. It obviously had a huge impact on the Christian movement. But it's not native to Judeo-Christian tradition, contrary to popular belief. I will continue to address the pathetic state of fundamentalism--that it doesn't know it's roots. It's hugely ignorant of world history, among other things.
Interesting, but even without historic tradition man has converged upon and arrived independently at such beliefs as a result of logic and contemplation.
Au contraire, you are entirely a product of history and tradition. Your belief that you have independence is admirable, but far from reality. Or is this one of those alternate realities we are supposed to buy into, the one that pretends that Christianity was just invented by you a few days ago.
No, you're entirely chained to the culture of antiquity that you have chosen to enshrine above all others. The belief that Heaven is a universal concept is going to require you to rewrite all of the other holy books and to indoctrinate all of the lesser religions, and then to deal with the atheists as well. The word used in the New Testament is 'Uranus', which best translates as 'sky'. The term 'the heavens', as in the sentence 'He gazed into the heavens' obviously means 'He gazed into the sky'. Thus, for most of all of Christian history, the holy books used the word
caelis which is Latin for 'ceiling' or 'sky', as in
pater noster qui es in caelis 'our dad who is in the sky' (hence the term 'sky-daddy'). Similarly the English versions of the Hebrew need to be updated, beginning with Gen 1:
Once upon a time the gods made the ground and the sky (etc.) The modern translators have abandoned the term "firmament" which is the more correct notion of the sky of antiquity. This was a dome of some uncertain construction which covered a flat earth. And the gods who inhabited it were the Sun, Moon, stars and planets. The Egyptians and Persians had their sun-gods and these figure into your present belief more than you think. The God of the New Testament is Theos, a Greek concept (compare to Zeus). We could go on with this but if you're striving for accuracy, you'd have to go back to your roots and imagine yourself like the guy who is poking his head through the dome of the sky from his flat earth, checking out the stars and planets and trying to decide which one is Sky Daddy. That's your Heaven. Just a state of confusion that existed before we had Astronomy.
In the simplest terms: atheism places overconfidence in the intellectual and perceptive faculties of Homo sapiens.
That's equivocating. Besides it's fallacious. It's equivalent to saying "now I'm going to apply reason to explain why reasoning is invalid". It's logically absurd. Words like "overconfidence in intellectual and perceptive faculties " are meaningless. These are your personal forays into renouncing logic altogether since you already know religious argument withers under the scrutiny of valid logic. But then logic is the tool for discovery of truth, and you'll exploit logic just like the next guy to arrive at any common sense deduction of what is real and what is not. The moment you step out of your car on the freeway to check a flat, only to discover you've stepped into the path of an oncoming semi will be the kind of moment when you dispense with the horseshit. You'll get real then. You will quickly lose your religion and return to your application of logic as a matter of survival.
When a plant can not comprehend an animal, that doesn't prove the non-existence of the animal. But according to the atheist, if Homo sapiens can not comprehend a reality, then that reality does not exist.
In the first place a plant doesn't comprehend anything, which is not a premise for any conclusions you are attempting to draw. So you are egregiously violating the rules of logic. The second part of that is invoking a foregone conclusion but dishonestly casting it as a proposition with an inference, which is also a violation of logic. Aside from the bogosity of that kind of speech, which is found all over the Creation Science boards, when we remove the victim from the I-beams you've twisted around him, here's what we find: reality is the state of things as they actually exist. Now go deal with that and get over it.
If I equated theism with "hearsay, cults, superstition, myth, legend and fable" then I would dismiss it as passionately as yourself.
When you advance the euphemism 'theist' you are suggesting that you might be polytheist which can't possibly be true because these are not the folks who have a gripe against atheism. It's one of those signals that reveals your reluctance to admit your religious heritage as discussed above. I borrowed the phrase "hearsay upon hearsay" from Thomas Paine, who is characterizing the fallacy of literal interpretation of the Bible. And that was in the Colonial Era. People were waking up even that long ago. Back to your remark: as long as you avoid tracing your religious roots to the cults of antiquity which you've chosen to enshrine (above and beyond the likes of the worshippers of Marduk or any other deity), then yes, you'll remain in denial about your cult roots. And as long as you avoid tracing the history through artifacts and other evidence of that and related cults, you'll remain in denial of the superstition, myth, legend and fable that created the legacy you are chained to.
This view is of course entirely fallacious. The task of unraveling the diverse ideas you have conflated into a single, abhorrent effigy you have confused with "theism" is likely to require an investment of time and effort at least as great as that needed to arrive at this level of confusion in the first place.
Aha. So now you're going to play the logic card after calling the house a cheat. You keep alleging my state of confusion without any grounds. I suppose that's because you have nothing to shore up your claims. My summary of the fundamental characters of the cults of antiquity, and their texts, are: superstition, myth, legend and fable. If you wish to propose that the Canaanites/Israelites who founded the Judaic cult and the (probable) Zealots/Essenes who founded the Christian cult are immune from superstition, and the writings of both cults are clear of myth, legend and fable, then feel free to entertain us.
I'm a wellwisher, but not the person you refer to.
You have me at a disadvantage since you're demonstrating the same violations of logic, the meaningless analogies and metaphors, the vague speech, equivocation and euphemisms, the hijacking of English, and the reluctance to speak frankly and carry on intelligent discussion.
The reason you accuse me of "casting aspersions against science, academia, and the evidence of nature" is that you regard these laudable domains
Anyone who respects the truth seeks best evidence (science) and learns how to best apply available information to solve practical problems(academia). It's not a matter of casting these activities as 'laudable'. It's just the natural state of a sane mind. You may notice that while you rail against human incompetence, people in the world all around you are struggling to improve themselves through the study and/or application of science --and academics in general. Most either simply can't afford your brand of cynicism, or else they are well-off but have no desire to stoop to that level, having long ago matured out of their teen angst.
"laudable domains as exclusive to atheism" sounds like wellwisher. When are you planning to get off the gas? Just speak common English and you'll get down the road much faster. Atheism excludes nothing but the specious and fallacious claims advanced by religions. Other than that I have no idea what you mean to say. Perhaps you don't either, or you would have done us the courtesy of at least attempting to be clear and frank.
, and my use of them to challenge atheism is perhaps provoking some cognitive dissonance. Good luck with that.
No, your dissonant speech is provoking common English speakers to indict you for violating the rules of English 101. You haven't challenged atheism. All you've attempted to do is to advance a vague twisted proposition based on the mangling of the word "reality" into your undefined "realities", then you've used that as a basis for bashing atheists, claiming humans are not advanced enough to understand what you mean. So far you're just spinning your wheels, bogged down in a reluctance to use clear speech, and not really caring if there are any rules to logic or not, because you're simply not interested in being logical. Hence the "intelligent discussion" aspect of the thread lands in the dumpster never to be dusted off and rehabilitated. Why on earth you want to engage random readers that way is beyond me. :shrug:
