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"If the former, then isn't the absurdity enough to conclude the falsity of theism?"
The fallacious argument from personal incredulity, also known as argument from personal belief or argument from personal conviction, refers to an assertion that because one personally finds a premise unlikely or unbelievable, the premise can be assumed not to be true, or alternately that another preferred but unproven premise is true instead.
What you're talking about is the balance of evidence, and is a question that scientists are singularly disadvantaged at dealing with, being unfamiliar with situation where evidence is fragmentary or incomplete. A scientist is used to being able to locate all the required evidence, or in its absence assume absence of evidence is equivalent to evidence of absence. Typically in science this is a valid approximation, but not always. However, in other fields, such as law or history, where one can never assume that absence of evidence is equivalent to evidence of absence, concepts such as the balance of evidence are given more consideration. Questions such as what evidence would we expect to find given some third party wilfully concealing evidence are routine. Many lawyer friends of mine, and also historians say that they find the evidence of the resurrection in particular "compelling", which is not the same as conclusive, but that's the difference between a scientist and a lawyer. A lawyer is prepared to live in world of uncertainties, probabilities and incomplete evidence, and being prepared to accept that situation is better able to evaluate incomplete or fragmentary evidence.
If science was the only way of determining truth then the courts would be staffed by professors and PhD's, but they are in fact populated by judges and lawyers. This should alert us to the possibility the science is not the be all and end all of knowledge.
What do you mean "conclusive"?
Something that would enable a hypothetical rational person to reach that conclusion? Or something that will convince everyone?
If the latter, then remember there are people who believe that the Earth is flat, that dinosaurs and humans coexisted, that the whole universe was created in 7 days, etc, despite ample proof to the contrary.
If the former, then isn't the absurdity enough to conclude the falsity of theism? If one can believe in God in the absence of any evidence at all, how is that different from believing in a Giant Budgie creating the universe? Or an infinite stack of turtles? Or any of a literal infinitude of absurdities? Given that an infinite number of such unfounded beliefs must contradict an infinite number of others, only a vanishingly small proportion of them could even theoretically be true (at once). Hence any particular such belief must be infinitely unlikely.
Why are you bringing theism into this ? This isn't the 19th Century! What's the bible got to do with anything ?
That a set of axioms in engineering called evolution have a set of assertions that is mathematically provable is *not* proof of anything but the relationship between the axioms.
It certainly doesn't prove that "natural selection as the mechanism of evolution" nor that it is proved "once again".
I suspect you think I am looking for disproof or are making assumptions of what my opinions are. I'll let you into a secret :
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
So what's an agnostic's hair like? Strong agnosticism: "I don't know whether or not I have hair, and neither do you."
Mild agnosticism: "I can't see if there's hair on top of my head."
Militant agnosticism: "I can't see if there's hair on top of my head, and neither can you."
Apathetic agnosticism: "I don't know if I have hair or not, but why would it matter?"
Model agnosticism: "I don't know about this whole hair thing, but perhaps we could find a way to figure it out?"
Agnostic theism: "I don't really know, but I think I have hair."
Agnostic atheism: "I don't know for sure, but I don't think I have hair."
Ignosticism: "We need to figure out what hair is or might be before that question can be answered."
Which explains the relative geographical stability of religious beliefs over ti..oh, wait, no. The other thing. Doesn't explain.
A search for "deconversion" on Debunking Christianity yields several counterexamples:
And why does a religion have to be anthropocentric? When I was on my mathematical christology kick, 'the saviour of elm trees' was one of my standard test constructs. "Can trees be 'saved'? Might they benefit from it? What the f*** would that mean to a human Christian? And what would Jesus of Nazareth signify to a tree?" I would ask myself. But if your religion hands you avatars (as opposed to the standard Christian trinitarian incarnation structure, which is clearly species-indexed), your god can quite easily be a tree, I should think, even if you aren't a tree yourself.
I have no problem with areligious atheists (after all, a creator-god is unobservable by construction, so intellectually honest deism [perhaps even metatemporal theism] and areligious atheism are the same, up to isomorphism), but devout atheists who turn off their imaginations and disallow thought experiments when discussion religion hurt my head. How they think they can have certain knowledge (as opposed to a personal, but not persuasively communicable, belief) about the unobservable is beyond me. They're nuts in exactly the same way as the intelligent design crowd.
Let me put it this way: why would one suppose that Occam's razor is the right tool for answering the question 'what's your favourite story?' How can someone be wrong about their own imaginary friend?
Of course, when people start saying 'God told me to kill you,' it's time to lock them up. Weird thing is, organised religions - being, whether you hold to them or not, evolved social structures as well as metaphilosophical frameworks - will even agree with you on this. Of course there are plenty of homicidal maniacs who pretend otherwise - but they are, for the most part, consciously lying, and should no more be laid at the door of the religions in question than people who get their instructions from their gerbils.
"The funny thing is, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and followers various other faiths also, by and large, believe in those things, yet liberalism seems to hate only Christians, while simpering at the feet of radical Islam and claiming its attacks are not because it is evil but because its victims. Go figure. Liberals claim to be about "tolerance" but are terribly intolerant of Christianity, while at the same time not only tolerating radical Islam and its atrocities, but blaming those atrocities on the victims rather than the perps."
...What.
I'm sure Papa Bear has been able to conjure up a couple of examples of people who sympathize with radical Islam (and then labeled them as 'Liberals' because I guess everything that isn't conservative and godfearing is radical leftism to you people.) However, it's pretty dumb of you to claim that leftists hate Christians but give Muslims a free pass. It implies that you think a group of people are educated enough to be aware of history's countless atrocities committed in the name of the bible, but stupid enough to think it's okay to kill a few thousand civilians to satisfy your grievances which most of these victims weren't even aware of. Please.
Honestly? I'll be the loudest to admit that I'm intolerant of many forms of theism, Christianity included, because there are too many theist religions that are themselves intolerant by doctrine. Quite frankly, I'd argue that if theism and all theist texts and artifacts disappeared tomorrow, the only people who would start worshiping God(s) again would be the insane.
But you couldn't use Buddhist subset as an example that atheism is a "religion". And you could say the same about theism, though I believe the possible set of conditions under which a theist could be considered non-religious is far more limited.
"One shouldn't be so touchy about strawmen when being so quick to set one up yourself.
Neither theism nor atheism are religions by themselves."
That was why, as is obvious from what you pasted from my post, the word "religion" was in quotes, so your your accusation of a straw is itself a straw man!
"A comprehensive belief system may even be atheist and a religion if it requires faith in something that cannot measured or falsified (Buddhism, New Age-ism and such)."
See above.
One shouldn't be so touchy about strawmen when being so quick to set one up yourself.
Neither theism nor atheism are religions by themselves. A comprehensive belief system may even be atheist and a religion if it requires faith in something that cannot measured or falsified (Buddhism, New Age-ism and such).
and Hammurabi's code is >3700 years old, which makes the GP's statement that "Moral codes existed long before the gods," very false.
Atheism is derived from theism, which is why theists aren't called anihilists.
taken from http://www.carm.org/atheism/noevidence.htm. I don't see any convincing evidence for the existence of God, That does not mean there is no God. Since you cannot know all evidence, it is possible that evidence exists that proves God's existence, or at least supports his existence. Therefore, it is possible that God exists. If it is possible, then faith has its place. If it is possible that God exists, then you should be an agnostic (an agnostic holds that God may exist but no proof can be had for His existence.) It is possible that there is no evidence at all for God. But this cannot be stated absolutely, since all evidence would need to be known to show there is no evidence. Therefore, since all evidence cannot be known by any one person, it is possible that evidence exists that supports theism. Then what kind of evidence would be acceptable? If you have not decided what evidence would be sufficient and reasonable, then you cannot state that there is no evidence for God. If you have decided what evidence is sufficient, what is it? Does Christianity fit within that criteria? If not, why not? Is it possible that your criteria for evidence is not reasonable? Does your criteria put a requirement upon God (if He exists) that is not realistic? For example Do you want Him to appear before you in blazing glory? Even if that did happen, would you believe he existed or would you consider it a hallucination of some sort or a trick played on you? How would you know? Does your criteria put a requirement on logic that is not realistic? Do you want him to make square circles, or some other self-contradictory phenomena or make a rock so big He cannot pick it up? If God exists, the laws of logic would be a product of his nature since he is absolute, transcendent, and truth (logical absolutes are conceptual, absolute, and transcendent, which reflect a logical, absolute, and transcendent mind). He did not create the laws of logic. We simply recognize them because God exists. Therefore, God cannot violate those laws because he would violate his own nature -- which he cannot do. Are you objectively examining evidence that is presented? Granted, objectivity is difficult for all people, but are you being as objective as you can? But, do you have a presupposition that God does not exist or that the miraculous cannot occur? If so, then you cannot objectively examine the evidence. Therefore, the presuppositions you hold regarding the miraculous may prevent you from recognizing evidence for God's existence. If so, then God becomes unknowable to you and you have forced yourself into an atheistic/agnostic position. Do you define the miraculous out of existence? If so, on what basis do you do this? If you assume that science can explain all phenomena, then there can be no miraculous evidence ever submitted as proof. If you made that assumption, it is, after all, only an assumption.
No, and yes, respectively.
There is plenty of evidence in favour of the former. You can count up a large finite number of primes such that p and p+2 are both prime, and there has been lots of this direct easily reproducible evidence since the time of Euclid. Moreover, since the time of Polignac there has been lots of evidence in favour of at least two or three generalizations of the conjecture with respect to paired primes.
The point of the twin-prime conjecture is that anybody could sit down and start writing out evidence in the form of twinned primes, by brute force, even without a computer. 1,3; 3,5; 5,7; 11,13; 17,19; 29,31; 41,43; 59,61; 71,73; 101,103;
Furthermore, the problem has been attacked throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, and the evidence in favour of there being an infinite number of such pairs is now considered overwhelming.
In fact, and this is important, there is a singular lack of evidence against the twin prime conjecture. Disbelieving in it is therefore foolish, even if there is there is no formal proof of the conjecture as posed by Euclid. This situation is the reverse of the theism one: there is a singular lack of evidence in favour of divinity that is easily reproducible by anyone using common writing implements.
The P=NP also suffers from a singular lack of evidence in its favour, and a substantial amount of evidence in favour of P!=NP since the relationship between the complexity sets was formalized by Cook in the early 70s.
It is true that the evidence is asoverwhelming in the P!=NP case as in the twin-prime case, however after decades of attacks on the complexity-class(es) relationship (e.g. Karp, and exhaustive search algorithms generally) there is little reason to believe P=NP, even though there is the possibility of evidence in some currently unknown deep maths.
This is very different from Fermat's Last Theorem which also was unproven without deep maths that have only recently become available, because one could produce -- even by hand -- lots of evidence against a^n + b^n = c^n; n > 2; a, b, c in non-zero integers. More importantly, one could not produce by hand any evidence in favour of this relationship.
Therefore, "believing" in P!=NP may end up being wrong (that would be way cool), but there is as yet no reproducible evidence that P=NP and therefore it is better to investigate methods for partial solutions to or alternative approaches to problems in the NP complexity class.
Likewise, there is lots of evidence that supports the non-existence of an interventionist god, and no readily reproducible evidence in favour of it. Resources should thus reasonably be diverted away from prayer and other requests for intervention towards natural-world solutions to the problems involved.
No, my position is that if there is ample evidence in favour of one conclusion, and no evidence in favour of its opposite, then the former is so likely to be true that remaining "open-minded" is irrationally wasteful.
Evidence should be in the form of obvious observations that can be reproduced by anyone using the same well-described and maximally reduced method, and should be retested from time to time.
Please make such a demonstration.
Why is this irrational?
I deny the existence of any theistic entity because given many opportunities there has been no evidence that can be explained only by theistic (i.e., supernatural) interference.
I also deny the existence of fluffy pink unicorns or little green men on the moon for the same reason: no evidence despite many opportunities for discovery.
If you can present clear evidence of the existence of any of these three, I will stop denying the existence of whichever one demonstrably exists.
Go ahead. Demonstrate.
Fluffy pink unicorns and little green men on the moon have a clear advantage in that it will probably be possible to construct them (genetic engineering) and place them (in a lab, or on the moon in a very binoculars-friendly fashion) at some point in the future. These constructs would be natural, not supernatural -- they would be consistent with our well-established understanding of physics.
I also reject deism simply because a creator who does not interfere in the post-creation universe is of no consequence whatsoever.
I also reject the idea of "ultra theism" (including pantheism and panentheism) in which there is conscious interference in every interaction at every level in the universe, because these reduce to deism.
Our best attempts at counting galaxies in the observable universe gives is about 1e11, each containing on average between 1e10 and 1e11 stars. A divine being choosing to interfere with some natural interactions involving small numbers of one intelligent species on this one planet seems pretty trifling, and again there is a serious lack of tangible evidence that this happens.
So why is irrational to conclude therefore that it is not happening?
"Communist societies forced atheism to get rid of competition for "the party". "
They also replaced theism with the "cult of personality". Same drug in a different bottle.
I'm more of a Deist than Theist. I believe in a God. However, my belief is that he is outside of this Universe. He does nothing to alter our lives. He gave the Universe a start, and then left it to run its course.
My viewpoint could have answered your question to your Theist friend. Of course, many Theists consider a Deist to be an Atheist in denial. So, any statement from me during you and your friends conversation would have been looked upon as odd.
To use a movie viewpoint, consider the end of Men In Black. Our entire Universe was only a marble inside another entity's bag. Whatever is outside of this Universe is unknown to us. I cannot disprove God. I cannot prove God. I cannot disprove His Noodly Appendage, nor prove him.
However, under a Deist viewpoint any life found outside of the planet Earth would not require a rewrite or a review of what was written thousands of years ago.
Note: I am not so into Deism that I can answer all questions. However, I do feel that if you look too far into Deism that you make it a religion and therefore it falls under Theism.
......at least we've never seen it in apes......
That is exactly my point. Apes have many physical and even arguable cultural traits in common with man including possibly tool making. We have OBSERVED that sort of thing to some degree in Apes. The ONLY thing which we have NEVER observed in their or any other animal's behavior is the kinds of activity defined as religious.
The fact is that ALL humans are religious, even atheists. They BELIEVE in the religious opposite of theism. They can't prove their religion any more than the Christians or Moslems.
Religion is an activity that goes against the very foundations of evolution. Anyone who "wastes their time and energy" on religion will always be at an evolutionary disadvantage compared to an otherwise alike organism that doesn't carry such religious baggage. According to evolutionary dogma, religion in humans should have evolved out of the human race by now. The existence and even the increase of religion in our modern times, is evidence against evolution.
Atheism is a belief system, despite what you claim.
Atheism is not the lack of belief in a god or gods. This is Agnosticism. Atheism is the belief in the lack of god or gods.
Or here, for a better explanation: http://www.atheists.org/Atheism/
"Atheism is a doctrine that states that nothing exists but natural phenomena (matter), that thought is a property or function of matter, and that death irreversibly and totally terminates individual organic units. This definition means that there are no forces, phenomena, or entities which exist outside of or apart from physical nature, or which transcend nature, or are "super" natural, nor can there be. Humankind is on its own."
Note that there are other Atheist doctrines as well, such as the Communist regimes of the 60's in China and Russia. I'm just linking to a more modern one based probably in the U.S. There are probably very many different types of Atheists as there are people of other religions in the world.
I wasn't part of this conversation, but a little bit of politeness and seperation of emotion would be more becoming of an Atheist who seemed to have decried Theists as being illogical and/or irrational.
Disclosure: I am not an Atheist.
Atheism is lack of belief in a god or gods. The etymology is "a" (without) "theism" (belief in a god or gods.) It is not a a "belief system", any more than lack of belief in Santa Claus is. Which is to say, not at all.
I have no such desire. I desire to have religious symbols removed from government operations, not "public life." You want to put up a cross or a giant voodoo doll? Fine. Put it on your lawn; put it on your place of worship, face it to the street and have at it. What I don't want is government showing any favor whatsoever to any particular religion. As an example of the tensions this causes, imagine a Jew or a Muslim being asked to swear on the Christian bible in a US court. Imagine a patriotic atheist being asked to swear to god - to outright lie - to qualify for a military or political position. There is every reason to separate religion from government. That is not the same as separating it from the public, nor do I advocate any such thing.
The intent of the authors of the constitution is precisely known from the other papers they left as a legacy; that is why the concept of an absolute wall between church and state was established. It isn't there to put religion down; it is there to protect all practitioners of all religions equally. As soon as the government begins to favor people of one religion (as it has, that religion is Christianity) then it begins to marginalize and disadvantage people of other religions. This is best avoided. If you had any idea of how the constitution was crafted, you would have known this.
I hold no belief in a god or gods. This is not a belief system. There's no system involved. If I ever encounter any evidence at all for a god or gods, I'll take another look. Until then, I have no more reason to believe in one of these religions claims than I do in the claims for the Easter Bunny. This position is better for me. It may very well not be better for you, and I do not claim that it is. However, the government not pushing religion on people is better for everyone, and that includes you and me.
I'm not in the least interested in "enforcing" anything on any citizen. I'm just interested in seeing to it that the government doesn't either. Got it now? Or are these concepts too difficult for you?