Slashdot Mirror
Richard Dawkins to Appear on Doctor Who
Ravalox writes "In an interview with The Independent, current curator of the Doctor Who legacy Russell T. Davis announced that distinguished evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins would be making an appearance in the new season of Doctor Who. To quote Davies: 'People were falling at his feet ... We've had Kylie Minogue on that set, but it was Dawkins people were worshipping.' Dawkins is the author of many best-selling non-fiction books, from The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker to The God Delusion, and a renowned advocate of both Darwin's evolutionary theory and the merits of atheism."
I just thought I'd mention that Richard Dawkins is married to Lalla Ward, who played the Time Lady Romana (second version) in the original series. She was also married to Tom Baker for a short time.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
He is going to be holding a toilet plunger and be shouting "Exterminate!! Exterminate the believer!!"
Dr Who: Richard, what are you doing with that fish, duct tape and four lizard legs?
Dawkins: What, you think evolution *just happened*?
Task Mangler
He's already been on South Park.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
There is no god, and Dawkins is his prophet.
This is NOT a signature.
Mod me down if you think this is too far off topic, but does anyone else wonder how much Dawkins' popularity (as related by Davies) applies specifically to the Who audience and others like it?
I can't imagine the average person would get excited over the guy if he appeared on an episode of Friends or Deal or No Deal.
Luckily Mr. Dawkins seems to know his audience, and the Who fans' natural tendency towards the geekier, more analytical side of the human personality spectrum makes his appearance on the show a stroke of publicity genius.
"it was Dawkins people were worshipping."
Mister Dawkins, my daughter is deathly ill. Could you please heal her? [waves his hand] Oh, thank you sir. Praise be to the flying spaghetti monster!
I never really understood atheism anyway. They mock theists for their faith, but there's certainly no way to prove that there's not a god, so aren't they also believing in something independent of scientific proof? IMO agnosticism is the only tenable position for the non-theist.
Strange then that your god uses the same strategy, isn't it ?
This is NOT a signature.
We've had Kylie Minogue on that set, but it was Dawkins people were worshipping.
Kylie Minogue was on the set and people were chasing Richard Dawkins??? Wow, that show really IS for geeks.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Agree with the message above, priest/xaman/rabi is the only job where your boss doesn't exist.
That someone can be famous in the 21st century for being an "advocate of Darwin's evolutionary theory".
sic transit gloria mundi
Even Dawkins admits that, strictly speaking, he's an agnostic. He doesn't know that God doesn't exist. But there's any number of things that could just as easily apply to. No one says they're an agnostic with respect to unicorns. They just say "Unicorns aren't real." Only when it comes to this "God" concept, does everyone become such a pedant. If we applied the same standards to God that we did to unicorns, no one would take Dawkins to task for saying he's an atheist. He explains this all in "God Delusion." I suggest you read it.
View his call to arms: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/113
Have we ever done a poll on religious beliefs on Slashdot?
Do you have any supporting evidence for that theory?
I agree that it may apply in certain fields (politics springs to mind) - but speaking for myself, religion (or lack thereof) has not influenced any of the things in my life that I feel make me 'successful in society'. I also know a lot of other people for whom this applies.
I work in IT in Australia, your theory might apply more in different industries or countries.
Here's another thought - if things were reversed, and more people in the world were athiests (even a slim majority), would you say the best thing would be for everyone to be an athiest?
That's because it's only an important distinction when talking about God. Because some people really do believe that it's impossible for a god to exist and they operate under that assumption. Some people (like Dawkins) don't accept that and call themselves agnostic, but it's just intellectual and they're really atheists.. their world would be shattered completely if they learned that they were wrong. Agnosticism isn't just some technicality, it's a completely different way of thinking.
By the way I'm not promoting agnosticism; I think that you have to make a leap of faith somewhere, and on this issue the options seem to me theism and strong atheism.
http://freethoughtpedia.com/wiki/Atheism
http://freethoughtpedia.com/wiki/Atheism_is_a_belief
Most atheists are aware that you can't prove the absence of God, anymore than you can prove his presence.
So most atheists could be called agnostics, but we are as agnostic about the Christian Yahweh, as we are about Thor or Shiva.
So yes we are technically agnostics, but that may confuse us with those who actually give some credibility to these superstitions.
Almost all atheists, are saying "There is no (credible reason to believe there is a) God"
Remember, Atheism is "Free of Theism", not "God does not exist"
This is NOT a signature.
They mock theists for their faith, but there's certainly no way to prove that there's not a god, so aren't they also believing in something independent of scientific proof?
What a novel and exciting argument, no one's thought of that before!
Theism and agnosticism are orthogonal (as the kids say) concepts. Most atheists are agnostic, most theists are gnostic (not to be confused with Gnostic). There are some gnostic atheists out there, but not many - like you say, it's a hard position to end up in.
sic transit gloria mundi
It's because of Occam's razor. Theism posits that a God or Gods exist(s). However, observable evidence doesn't necessitate that one exist; that is, a God is an 'extra', if you will, there's no phenomena that cannot be explained without the existence of a God. As such, the principle of Occam's razor - do not make theories more complicated than necessary - eliminates the existence of a God, because the world is simpler without one. This leaves atheism as the remaining scientific theory. Another way of thinking about this is that all parts of scientific thought have doubt inherently as a part of them, not just ones surrounding God. So, atheism and agnosticism are essentially equivalent - few atheists would argue that they can prove that there is no God.
There is also no way to disprove that the universe was created by a tea pot orbiting Venus. There is no readily available tool to scientifically disprove that.
We atheists simply think that it is plain silly to believe in the tea pot because some ancient scrolls written by some guru says so. Now, if someone were to find the tea pot, or any trace of it, it would be interesting.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Part of the idea is such that, most of the mono-theists think God is really all about them. God is so they can justify what they want. It justifies the suppression of the rights of minorities, It justifies the abuse of women, and children.
Its a little bit selfish to think that you matter so much to the creator of the universe, if there is such a thing, that he cares about small pointless things, that Humanity and its Earth somehow hold some special place in the cosmos. If there is a "First one." does it not stand to reason that we really wouldn't matter?
For example. Christians argue against abortion. but that has nothing to do with God really. It has everything to do with Muslims not outnumbering Christians because of population control.
Its even more self centered to think that a creator of the Universe would want to entertain or torment us until the end of time. Thats completely and utterly pointless.
You see where I'm going with this? its a Huge huge universe. Human beings are small, insignificant. The creator of the universe if he exists wouldn't blink twice at what Humans care about.
Theists are not more socially adapted to survival. Quite the opposite. The rational survive in an emergency. The religious panic and pray, and as a result die. As a result of religion, we have county school boards embroiled over "intelligent design." We have propoganda that claims that Evolution is completely random. We have politicians telling students that condoms don't work (They can break/tear but thats different.)and as a result STDs are rampant. Religion is a mad house that delights in psychotic behavior of all kinds. Its a cauldron and opiate.
I'm not agnostic about the sun coming up tomorrow either.
The only thing interesting about the parent is how people still don't bother to look up the meaning of words they don't understand, and prefer to just make them up.
Atheism is a _lack of belief_ in deities. They aren't taking anything just on faith.
Also an atheist here. I haven't read his books, but I have read overviews of his general ideas, and he seems to be too much of a biological determinist to me. Since he apparently argues that people believe in God because of genetics and attributes many social behaviors to genes, I think his ideas lends itself to a belief in social Darwinism.
I think the way agnostic people think would vary just as much as the way religious peoples thinking does.
Occams razor is supposed to be applied to scientific theories.
Most religious persons would not claim that belief is a scientific theory.
Your argument just fuels creationist "science".
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
Dawkins should promote theism, as those who embrace God are the fittest to survive in our society, due to social stigmatism on atheists..
Dawkins should promote a homogeneous population based on currently prevailing environmental conditions? Methinks someone needs another crack at understanding evolution.
Can't say I agree with your premise, either: the only place where that stigma actually matters is politics, and it's easy enough to fake it there.
(also, the word you are looking for is "stigmatization", but it's still kind of an awkward turn of phrase)
sic transit gloria mundi
By your reasoning, we should believe every religious claim that has ever been made. IMO agnosticism is the only tenable position for the non-theist. Everyone is an agnostic, including you.
As for "non-theist", that's exactly what a-theism means. (The Greek alpha privative is in fact cognate with our "non".)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I do think Dawkins does do one thing that is harmful: he attacks theism without understanding it. He makes the common mistakes atheists make that faith is synonymous with belief and that that belief an arbitrary, unreasoned choice.
Many Slashdot posters do something else that is both harmful and dishonest: associating atheism with evolution. The vast majority of Christians (and most people I meet of other religions) accept the theory of evolution as well proven.
In fact, creationism is more of an characteristically American belief than a Christian one: every Christian creationist I have ever come across is either American or belongs to a heavily American influenced evangelical church. The other major stronghold of creationism is in the Middle East, where Islamic fundamentalists have a very similar mindset to Christian ones (or intolerant groups of any religion, or none, in general).
"Learned" implies evidence, and if there were any evidence they would simply change their stance to the appropriate form of theism. That's the rational way to go about things. To date there has not been any single piece of credible evidence for the existence of God(s).
Like the other poster said: Please just read The God Delusion, it explains all of this.
HAND.
Which is why you should stop reading crappy reviews and just read the damn book. And read the selfish gene while you are at it - in my humble opinion its one of the best books ever written.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
No, see, the point is that that creator of the universe DOES care, and in fact specifically created it to put us here.
I'm important, I'm here for a reason! In the grand scheme of things, I'm not an insignificant speck that doesn't have any real effect on anything! Please, I want to be a special snowflake.
I would personally rather risk the unbeliever's malady of loss of self-worth leading to personal illness and/or death than the believer's malady of ruining everyone else's lives with their bullshit (see: crusades, jerry falwell, that "god hates gays" church (all of them amirite?))
If you can see that much, how can you not see that agnosticism is the ONLY rational choice?
That's disingenuous: He was rejected because he stated that he would be compelled to force his religiously based views on others -- it had nothing to do with him being Catholic.
This is a fallacy. You positively do not have to be understand very much about Norse mythology to realize that's it's a silly belief system. The same applies to other gods.
HAND.
Dr. Who: Where's Dr Watt? And I also need Dr. Hu right here real soon!
Dr. Watt: I'm here, and I can see Dr. Hu coming over there.
Dr. Hu: Whew, I really had to run fast! Hi, Dr. Watt, glad to see you. What's up, Dr. Who?
Dr. Who: I'll tell you in a minute, but first let me say how glad I am that this did not disintintegrate into some sophomoric cavalcade of misuderstood names.
Dr. Hu and Dr Watt: Say no more, we've all been there...
sig? Oh, that sig...
siener's youtube channel
Doctor: I will defeat you Credulons!
Credulon leader: I have faith we will prevail!
Doctor: (smugly) Meet my secret weapon - the Professor.
Dawkins: Hello.
Credulons: No! The skepticism! I'm melting!
Dawkins: That was simple. Now, how does this TARDIS thing work, exactly?
Doctor: No! The skepticism! I'm melting!
Dawkins: Oops. Time for a new title.
Close Credits, including "Next Week on Professor Who..."
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
Poseidon is great! - he totally whooped Odysseus's ass. None of this eternal torment after death rubbish, the wrath is here and now!
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
... and Who is this God Person Anyway?
Don't confuse Social Darwinism with Biological Darwinism.
Unfortunately, it was the Darwinists themselves who started this confusion (See the Desmond and Moore biography). Part of the appeal of evolutionary theory in the nineteenth century was that it appeared to challenge conservative social orthodoxy, showing that everything was in a state of flux. Evolution was a substantial plank in Liberal ideology.
Of course, it still isn't a valid inference. The fact that organisms might be competitive overall does not mean that humans are, any more than individual ants compete with each other.
All the same, it's not accurate to say that Social Darwinism is an abuse of the theory.
You know what they say about opinions. They're all fabulous!
Dawkins thinking : "Hmm... I'm pissing off believers already and I've made this video with me and 3 other atheists, what to call it...what to call it...".
"Oh I know : http://youtube.com/view_play_list?p=A490902178E6854D"
He's got a wicked sense of humor, he's the hybrid offspring of the person who invented "yo momma"-jokes and Dr. Kleiner from Half-Life 2.
From the Dick to the Dawk to the Ph.d.
What makes you think he attacks theism without understanding it? I hear this clam often and am enquiring as to the reasoning behind it.
As another point what is faith if not belief (or any such related word)? The definition of faith incorporates the notion that its a choice not based on proof. In fact the second definition on dictionary.com is exactly this: "2. belief that is not based on proof:". To argue that this is a mistake to say as such is to say that our current definition of faith is wrong.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
Since nearly the entire human sphere is made up of theists of one stripe or another, this is rather like saying, "People do better in society". Though, I can't help but think that society might be a whole lot better off if those people would stop sacking one another's cities over matters of religious difference.
Those who 'embrace god' are usually and typically really just embracing whatever nonsense and demonstrably false religious text has been provided them by their local equally lost-in-the-woods cult leader, usually spoon fed to them from a young enough age that the brainwashing is so deep they would rather spin forever in denial and a broad application of the most ludicrous arguments rather than consider the possibility that they are in fact psychological abuse victims.
God is certainly real; it's you and me and the earth under your feet and yeah, it's even the concept of a bearded maniac in the sky which so many people build churches and temples and mosques to sing euphoric praise to. God is everything under the Sun. And above the Sun. And the Sun too, while we're at it. --But the Spanish Inquisition would have cut my nuts off for suggesting such a thing, which is why the following is worth repeating. . .
Religion as it stands and as it has stood since its dawn is a crippling disease of the mind perpetrated by fools and villains designed to keep humanity stupid, depraved and forever blind to their own true history and potential.
But that's just my take. Maybe the current war in the Middle East has absolutely nothing to do with whose god is bestest.
-FL
1) His name is "Russell T. DaviEs"
2) "Curator of the Doctor Who legacy"? Bollocks. RTD is offically "writer and executive producer". Similar to a US "showrunner".
"But he's only famous/infamous for his atheism"
Yeah right, and Hawkings is only famous for his wheelchair.
"Theists do better in society"
Which society? - India for instance has at least twice as many polytheists as the entire population of the US.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Of course you realise that atheists (such as myself) don't actually believe in the devil, so we're not worried...
Usually "agnosticism" means someone who actively believes you cannot know whether God exists or not. Atheism comes in two flavors: strong and weak.
"Strong" and "weak" refer to the comprehensiveness of the propositions encompassed, not to the degree of conviction or its vigor. A weak atheist position is that of a person who is without a belief in God. They don't "actively disbelieve" in God any more than you "actively disbelieve" in the brown chicken in my attic. There is no reason to think such a chicken (or God) exists--you simply lack belief in it, without "denying" the chicken. Or God.
A strong atheist position is the position that no God exists, supported by proof, evidence or belief. Whether this is the sort of thing that can be proved is perhaps open to debate--reasonable people disagree on whether it is a religious belief or not.
In my view, it's pretty slam dunk to see that any time a religious belief has resulted in something testable that could be offered as proof or disproof of God's existence, we have found that that sort of God doesn't exist. I don't know how many times you need to be told by someone that there is a chicken behind this door, no really, only to find when you open it that there is no chicken, before you suspect that there probably aren't any chickens here at all.
demi
Whenever there is something 'supernatural' in Doctor Who, it is now always Extra Terrestrial aliens. Plots involving G-d, spirits, daemons or anything that used to be supernatural or involve a place of worship is now explained away as a parallel universe being who's away from home. It just so happens that it all occurs with alien powers that look suspiciously like possession, dragons, ghosts. Doctor Who and others conveniently take refuge in Churches, mainly because as we know they're excellent defence against ET.
:: Steering clear of any mentions of G-d as such ; but there definitely could be G-d equivalent aliens out there doing any freaky stuff that cannot be explained by evolutiuon.
So the perfect place for Dawkins
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
Remember, Atheism is "Free of Theism", not "God does not exist"
My position is that God does not exist. How am I not an atheist?
Agnosticism is likewise the only tenable position for theists.
Play Command HQ online
I think you would find that most atheists would accept that you can't prove that personal gods do not exist.
But that doesn't mean the odds are the same as a coin toss. If we take Christianity for example, each time we find an inconsistency in the Bible (no walls around Jericho, no reports of anyone outside the middle east reporting a global flood, no town of Nazareth at the time Jesus was supposed to be alive, no reports of graves opening and the dead walking in anything but the gospels) then it lowers the probability of a biblical god.
And people of faith take a much more extreme attitude than most atheists. They insist that the probability of their god existing is 100% exactly, while the probability of anyone else's god existing is 0% exactly.
They need to realise that if you can't disprove that Yahweh exists then you can't disprove that Zeus, Odin or Atum (at least he had fun creating the world) exist either.
"But he's only famous/infamous for his atheism
He has published a set of highly readable books on evolution over many years.
He certainly wouldn't be invited to be on "Dr. Who" if he wasn't an Atheist.
Where is your evidence for this statement ? I find it sad that those of religious pursuasion are prepared to make definitive statements without the facts to back them up.
Theists do better in society,
Again: evidence ?"
How the hell can I give you evidence for that statement, it's opinion. I don't have access to an alternate universe. I made a logical inference. You didn't back up any of your suppositions, or even countered my claims. Plus you took a huge leap by implying that I said Dawkins hasn't done work on evolution which I didn't. But did those books sell as well as "God Delusion"? Doubtful.
Societies worse off 'when they have God on their side'
It turns out that wallowing in ignorance is actually harmful to society. Who would have guessed, huh? Oh well. C'est la vie!
I think a lot of the people with a lot of money are Scientologist. That doesn't make them "more fit to survive" than Christians, Buddhists, or atheists, and it certainly doesn't mean we should subscribe to their dubious dogma.
Ability to make money means nothing in the wild. Ability to lead the sheep may be a good trait, but it has nothing to do with religious beliefs. It has more to do with the ability to manipulate the hearts/minds of the people by whatever means available. Religious leaders have a leg up in that area because they are taking advantage of a common thread in humanity (that Dawkins attempts to get people to dispel).
No, the greatest cunning of the devil was to destroy the word of God by forming a church around it that would "interpret" it for the people, just as some formed a supreme court around the constitution to "interpret" it.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
There is no distinction at all between any fictional beings, except perhaps that deities happen to be less likely to exist than unicorns. With the unicorn, the FSM, or the yet unseen sub-atomic particle you only need to admit (as a skeptic) that you cannot prove or say much about it, since no evidence for the positivity of it's existence has been shown.*
.22 that religion cannot win.
With gods and such, particularly the monotheist version,you just have to sit back and ponder on the entire scheme of the religion at hand to see how bizarre the underlying philosophy is. People think it's the tenets of faith/the law that makes religion un-likable, but that's not really it. I would be willing to accept any of that, but it is the "god" bit itself that is disgusting. Thousands of religions, each thinking they are "right", the others are wrong, their god is the Truth, all of them required of "believe" that. All of them expected to live and die by those respective "beliefs", those "leaps of faith" that become a microcosm of existence for each, sending them to the limits of insane behavior. And all of them not recognizing that it is their respective god that is responsible for this sick scenario, assuming we forget everything we know about physics and the dynamics of the world. Islam, the most philosophically advanced theology of the monotheist faiths(abstract god, non-deification of humans including prophets..etc), had its second Caliph arrest and kill anyone who talked about destiny/determinism debate. He had good reason to do so. The only gods that are not six-year-old in mentality happen to be the ones that do not "want" you to do things.... they sidestep the philosophical debate entirely. And by doing so, they warrant no attention from us as well - i.e the only sensible gods do not matter. It's a catch
Religion is a simplistic, silly idea that has no place in the free world of today. We have strong instincts for it, sadly, but I hope one day we no longer need them to emotionally survive. The world is beautiful without deities. Let's grow up and forget about them.
* This is in contrast to mathematical logic, where you can indeed make statements about provability, both negative (there does not exist...) and positive(there exists...).
I never really understood atheism anyway. They mock theists for their faith, but there's certainly no way to prove that there's not a god
July, 1998
A juror in Judge Esmond Faulks' court in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, eagerly asked the judge for the defendant's date of birth so he could draw up a star chart to help him decide the case. He was removed.
There ya go. Presuming that you agree it was *appropriate* to forcibly eject that juror, presuming you consider that juror mockable and perhaps even a dangerous loony-toon, now you completely understand atheism.
To elaborate, probably half the other people on the jury read their horoscopes during lunch. Silly, irrational, but Mostly Harmless entertainment value so long as they don't take it seriously and start fucking over other people based upon their faith in magical messages from the sky.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Hey if God was proven to be real one day, I think every major religion would be shattered, not just Atheists.
All those religions. Not all of them can be right.
By proving that God exists you destroy hundreds of faiths overnight.
Atheists do not "believe there is no god", instead, Atheism is the absence of belief in any deity.
Not believing something exists and "believing something does not exist" are two very different states of mind.
Wrap your head around that and you will understand atheism.
It's not an important distinction because the set of all possible Gods is infinite, but Theists rarely believe that any kind of a God exists, they believe in their specific flavour. Jehovah, Allah, Zeus, Osiris, Freya, Thor, Ahulane ... there's no specific evidence to support the existence of any of them.
Likewise when you look in detail at the behaviour of the universe and physics, there's no need for a God of any kind to keep it all running. Whether there was a need for a God to start it all 13.7 billion years ago is irrelevant today.
For all his putative omnipresence, God is as elusive as the Unicorn. There's no more reason to believe in any God than there is to believe in Unicorns.
That's the problem right there. Religion isn't logical. Applying a logical device to an inherently illogical construct doesn't work. In short, you can prove that the universe would be simpler without a god. But what's the point of arguing it, if the people you're trying to convince aren't going to accept the reasoning anyhow?
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I disagree; I think agnosticism is not the best option for the non-theist, as it would still implicitly hold the concept of 'God' as having some type of meaning. I would think, depending on which interested non-theist you're talking about, that either Ignosticism or theological non-cognitiveism would be a better option. Consider:
"Theodore Drange sees atheism and agnosticism as positions which accept "God exists" as a meaningful proposition; atheists judge it to be "false or probably false" and agnostics consider it to be inconclusive until further evidence is met. If Drange's definitions are accepted, ignostics are neither atheists nor agnostics. An atheist would say, "I don't believe God exists"; an agnostic would say, "I don't know whether or not God exists"; and an ignostic would say, "I don't know what you mean when you say, 'God exists' ". -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignosticismlinks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignosticism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theological_noncognitivism
" To quote Davies: 'People were falling at his feet ... We've had Kylie Minogue on that set, but it was Dawkins people were worshipping.' "
Did anyone else notice the irony?
It's a matter of simple probability analysis.
I as an atheist don't deny the chance of there being a god, just as I don't deny that there could actually be fairies in our well.
It's just so unlikely (in my opinion).
IMO, that's the *only* viable option. On one extreme, no one can prove that no gods exist. On the other, if you lower your standards of evidence to accept one religious claim, you have to accept them all (or else be hypocritical about it). So the only options are ordinary atheism (as in "I don't believe anyones religious myths") and self-delusion.
FWIW, 'agnostic' seems to have come into use due to a shift in the popular meaning of 'atheist'. Acording to Wictionary, the term didn't even exist before 1870. If people would try to quit reading more into a-theism than the word actually suggests, we wouldn't need a term for the neutral category.
But in excessively religious societies like ours, people tend to interpret atheism as yet another competing claim, rather than merely a rejection of other people's claims. For me, atheism isn't a religious belief; it's a *lack* of religious beliefs. I suppose you could call it "a belief", but only in the same sense that my lack of any particular reason to believe in Bigfoot is "a belief" about Bigfoot.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The Flying Spaghetti Monster will whip both of them. At once.
Dawkins is the atheist analogy of a religous nut. His argumentation when it comes to religion is just as fanatically against religion as an american TV-preacher is for...donations.
Seriously, after 9/11 he went out in british media and used the terror acts as a springboard for his anti-religous campaigning, how extremist isn't that? I have no problem with people questioning faith or being agnostics, atheists or whatever, but claiming to be a rationalist and then going all atheist-jihadic like Dawkings has does not add up.
When is someone going to see through this man, he obviously has some profound issues to take care of.
http://www.webmd.com/content/Article/78/95776.htm/
I think your reasoning is clouded by your suspicion of religion (which is reasonable) and your distrust of anything to do with God.
But to claim that atheism makes sense isn't very logical.
Read:
http://www.anointed-one.net/atheism.html
I sprained a mussel when I read "The Shellfish Gene."
I'm not suggesting they are exclusive. You can of course be free of theism, and believe god does not exist. I'm saying the statement "God does not exist" is as valid as "God exists".
Neither can be proved true.
This is NOT a signature.
Some people (like Dawkins) don't accept that and call themselves agnostic, but it's just intellectual and they're really atheists.. their world would be shattered completely if they learned that they were wrong. Agnosticism isn't just some technicality, it's a completely different way of thinking.
;-)
How's that? I'm pretty much in the same field myself, thinking the whole thing is a lot of hogwash.
However, if one of the gods decided to actually show up and do some, you know, godly stuff, and I'm not talking the ambiguous kind but serious, honest-to-whatever god stuff, heck, I'd be cool with that. Assuming he/she/it doesn't mind being poked by scientists for a bit anyway
Obviously that would take out the whole "belief" part though...
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
No, Richard Dawkins is the one true prophet and we will roast the theists in the flames of derision on the internet ;-)
Actually the wittiest version of an athiest shahadah is James Watson's "DNA is God and RNA is his prophet".
I dont know how to put it as pithily as that but it seems to me that most of the attributes of a Judeo Christan good apart from consciousness fit quite well with evolution. Omnipotent, omnipresent and Omniscient? Well it acts on every organism with herditity and improves its ability to reproduce. Evolved organisms seem to exploit every physical effect humans understand and probably all the ones we don't. And if you are omnipotent and omnipresent and omniscient, how conscious can you be? Consciousness to me implies that you constantly learn and change, and that implies that you are not all of the three Os.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Thats a reasonable supposition.
A hypothetical question, and keep in mind, I'd like to know what you think. Its not that I actually believe this is the way it is, its just, a what if.
What if 500 years from now we are a space fareing species that travels to other planets in space ships, and so on and so fourth. We start exploring the unknowns of the galaxy. Well, eventually, we find... something.... it wanders the universe exploring just like we do, only its been around a lot longer than we have.
More accurately, when we find it, and figure out how to talk to it, it explains to us that when it reached its level of sentience, nothing else that was living could think for itself. This creature was the first thing to ask "Why am I me and not someone else." "Why is there something and not nothing."
The question then becomes, what have we found?
On the other hand there is a universe that we live in, and so far no solid (i.e. testable) scientific theory for its origin. The root cause of existence is certainly questionable. It's unlikely to have been an Abrahamic God, Greek Titans, Vishnu, Raven, Aslan, Eru or any other creator and creation process described in human creation myths. But it's certainly possible that something existing outside of our concept of space and time created the universe. While it may seem that only shifts the question to how did that something originate, the whole idea of origin is based on a directional time dimension that may not apply to such a creator. So the idea that a creator may exist can't be completely logically dismissed even if it's well beyond current scientific understanding.
However, an understanding of the scale of humans with respect to the structures of the universe makes the idea that such an creating entity would be interested in meddling in the evolution of life on planet Earth, let alone the affairs of the human race or even individual humans, to be of such an incalculably low probability that you may as well be talking about unicorns.
Now there's a completely different question of whether competitive evolutionary pressure could have made us evolve to need to hold belief systems with creation myths and concepts of afterlife. The ability to hold and share such beliefs could have encouraged the development of societal systems beyond the small tribal groups prevalent in primates so that we could develop civilization. Those beliefs sometimes also appear to help relieve the mental stress of existential angst and knowledge of one's mortality. However the latter might also be a side effect of evolutionary selection if those least emotionally invested and most capable of challenging the belief system would be the most likely to leave the protection of the greater group against the dangers of a primitive world. It really sucks to be an agnostic and realize that we may have evolved to live longer and happier if we hold religious beliefs in an afterlife even if there is no such thing. But that's another story.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
yeah, i can prove unicorns don't exist due to a statistical imposibility. same way i can prove dragons, chimeras, and three-headed dogs don't exist.
there are about 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out dragons, unicorns, chimeras, or three-headed dogs, which by the way, no one has actually seen. statistically speaking, the chance there is not a unicorn in existence today is probably better than 99.999%. it's not impossible, but come on, the chances of one being in existence today is basically zero.
however, i can't now apply this same argument to god because i don't have much proof either way. i'm not saying it's 50-50 whether god exists or not, it's not anywhere near as one sided as the evidence against unicorns. furthermore, there are valid arguments (as in attempting to dis/prove god's existence with logic and facts as opposed to faith) on either side of the god debate. can you say the same for unicorns, dragons, chimeras, or three-headed dogs?
everyone becomes a "pedant" when it comes to god because there is no conclusive evidence or one argument to rule them all like there is for the existence of mythical creatures. that's why we still debate the existence of god, but no one debates the existence of unicorns. people just use it as a straw-man argument to disprove god.
> the universe was created by a tea pot orbiting Venus
don't they call that Scientology?
Human beings are small, insignificant. The creator of the universe if he exists wouldn't blink twice at what Humans care about.
Well, maybe that's true if you assume someone like me created the universe and got bored. Christians believe that this God fellow had his only begotten Son nailed to a giant plus sign to destroy death for us. I'll leave as an exercise to the reader what this implies.
If there is a creator, it's entirely possible that he does care for us. To steal a "quote" from higher up on the page for comedic purposes: It's all explained in this nifty book called the "Bible" - I suggest you read it instead of listening to crappy reviews about it.
"Christians argue against abortion?" Did we all agree on something while I was out?! I know Christians who are "pro-choice." I know Christains who think anyone who would believe in such a vile, horrific act cannot possibly be Christian. And I know Christians who think that no one who's such a judgmental prick us a Christian - "Judge not, lest ye be judged."
That I know of, the Bible makes no specific mention of abortion - but most Christians like to think that they (should) value life as a gift from God.
This kind of stuck-up, human arrogance is where our whole idea of "human rights" come from. If we truly are insignificant - and you, therefore, are 1-nine-billionth of "insignificant" - does it really matter all that much if I kill you? Beliving that, could you muster indignance with a straight face? Deal with it - we're special. (Just like everybody else.) It's a required assumption for society to function.
Religion is a mad house that delights in psychotic behavior of all kinds
Stupid people are found everywhere, and they're free to label themselves whatever they want. Some sects of Christianity are saner than others, but thats not the point - saying religion is the sole source of all our modern-day consternation is ignoring the necessary human element that makes it all possible. Do guns kill people, or do people kill people? Would no one be killed if we got rid of guns? Would no one "delight in psychotic behavior" were there no religion?
You forget that religion is also a poweful motivation for good. Like that St. Mary broad who keeps building all those hospitals - I don't think she's Wiccan. Or the youth groups who joined everyone else after Katrina. Or those missionaries who selflessly do more for the television-less parts of the world than I ever will.
I guess I should bring my rant to a close, and end with the magic formula of "I can smell my karma burning" or whatever gets you the +5 Insightfuls around here. To bring everything to a point: Most Christians are rational, sane people. Just like you and me. They're not the ones you see on TV because the "Christians" who bomb abortion clinics make better news. YLPMMNRRCYLL. (Your Local Programming May or May Not Reflect Reality, Consult Your Local Listings. [Pronounced "yulp-MIN-ur-syl." {No, really}]).
DATABASE WOW WOW
How about Buddhism? We do acknowledge people have gods, and many local gods in various countries were historically incorporated as bodhisattvas, but according to most schools of Buddhism, gods are not the point - and are living under the same laws of buddhism as the rest of us.
True, he rejects (as all thinking people should) all religion, but as I recall it, his point at the time was that fundamentalism is a bad thing.
Belief in gods is just silly and childish anyway - it's time that adults put away childish things - after all, even Saul the Zealot saw that :P
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
Yup. A nice quote about this:
"An atheist doesn't have to be someone who thinks he has a proof that there can't be a god. He only has to be someone who believes that the evidence on the God question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question. -- John McCarthyWe live, as we dream -- alone....
Also, that statement can be logically ruled out rather easily, by what some people call "causality" (yes, damn experimental verification). The argument roughly follows as below:
1) The sun is at the very least a second-generation star, because it has too many heavy elements around it to be a first generation star (which would be formed entirely from hydrogen).
2) Venus, because it orbits the sun with relatively circular orbit (i.e. low energy for its angular momentum), it should have formed around the sun (i.e. it's not an extra-solar object caught by Sun's gravity, as we suspect some of the comets to be).
3) Universe began (... there are still some on-going debates on this, but let's suspend our sense of scientific doubt and disbelief and say that Big Bang marks a definite beginning of our universe) before the formation of our sun (if only to provide the space-time in which to exist, not to mention the raw material
4) Therefore, the tea pot orbiting Venus, if it exists, existed after the creation of universe, and what did not exist before universe began could not have created the universe.
I'll leave disproving God as an exercise for the reader.
Does that make me an extreme ignostic?
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
That the force which caused our universe to happen is beyond our current level of understanding no one is denying. However when people start insisting that that force was sentient, is eternal and is very fussy about the mating habits of a partially evolved chemical scum on "the third planet of a disregarded sun" things get a bit iffy.
I would describe myself as an a-theist in much the same way as previous poster who declared themselves a-unicornist and a-FSMist. What we call religion is a combination of tribal myth and social conventions dressed up to scare children into acceptable behaviour. I would be surprised by the evidence of a deity but I suspect not half as much so as the average professional holy-man.
Suppose an old guy with a beard approached you on the street and claimed to be Zeus. Would you believe him? What if he said he could call down a lightning strike, and then did it to demonstrate it. Would you then believe it was Zeus?
No, there are too many other considerations. Your first assumption would be that you are dreaming. Failing that, then hallucinating. Or maybe some con artist who figured out that giving the appearance of calling down lightning is as easy as giving the appearance of bending a spoon with your mind. Last resort, an alien with "sufficiently advanced technology". Would *anyone* capable of rational thought ever consider the possibility that he actually was Zeus?
Unfortunately (or not), this whole God thing is such a slippery concept that it will never be proven, any more than it will ever be disproven.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
.... is that they have this "assholier than though" air about them.
I've actually read "The God Delusion"....or tried to. A great big bulk of the book seems dedicated to saying how smart and wonderful you, the reader, are for buying the book and being an atheist. I couldn't stomach it, and put it down.
For the record, I am an atheist. I was just interested in a bit of philosophy, not self-congratulatory nonsense.
I'm not a big fan of Richard Dawkins. He is a terrible, terrible spokesman for the atheist philosophy.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Perhaps if we could make the theists believe that if they mention God, their cockle fall off, they'll clam up.
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
Oh I'm not particularly interested in this entire discussion anyway. It's been done to death here and I see it often enough on Ebaums to make me a trolling God on the subject. It's just boring, and Slashdot posters can't manage to even make logical and consistent arguments, so the whole thing is a wash anyway. I was just pointing out to that this guy is an idiot.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Jag ska dräpa dig framför altaret i templet i Uppsala, ditt förbannade troll!
Atheism as you present it is a straw man. No one is saying that there definitely is no incredibly abstract god whose only properties are that it exists and that in some way this god causes the universe to exist.
However most theistic individuals don't believe in that kind of god. They believe in a god who impregnates virgins, who brings people back from the dead, who has a chosen people die by the millions in camps, who has something against people who eat pigs, who hates women, whose retirement plan for suicidal mass murderers is a bed full of maidens.
Weak atheists are people who say there probably is not a god. Strong atheists say there is no god. Most atheists lie somewhere on this spectrum. You are picking the most extreme version of atheism, the kind not even Dawkins subsribes to, and are using that as a straw man.
However, I can say with a considerable degree of certainty the Christian God does not exist. Nor does the Jewish God. Nor do any of the Hindu Gods. I can say this in the same way I can say with a considerable degree of certainty that werewolves and unicorns do not exist.
Only insane atheists who I would denounce as logically flawed claim with absolute certainty there is no god. However the Gods of the Christians, the Jews, the Muslims, the Hindus and the Zoroastrians are just as absurd as Zeus ever was, and I have considerable confidence in saying they do not exist.
What is more, most theists agree with the last assertion, assuming you drop their specific god from the list. We are all atheists, it is just that some of us are atheists about more gods than others.
The teapot just popped the sun/universe in to appearance with those properties to fuck with non-believers. Last Thursdayism is a very powerful and impossible to disprove argument. Short of god(s) showing up and personally calling me a intellectually dishonest douche bag, there is nothing you can say that I can't refute with a generic god(s) made it that way to screw with the non-believers.
I'm as atheist as the come, but I'm just pointing out that you can't win. For real fun as your theist friends about your favorite Norse/Greek/Roman god.
Actually, "God did it" is a much simpler explanation than the sum of present scientific knowledge. I doubt there's any one person in the whole world who understands every intricate detail of, for example, general relativity AND quantum electrodynamics AND string theory AND cosmology AND all of biochemistry AND all of fluid dynamics (that one even caused Einstein headaches). It does not automatically make "God did it" the right explanation but invoking Occam's razor is perhaps not wise in this case.
it's = it is
its = belonging to it
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
That's a great quote - where is it from?
You know they call 'em fingers but I've never seen 'em fing. Oh, there they go.
sure there is. statistics. and things that are older than venus.
i can show that the chances of a teapot orbiting venus has better than a 99.999% chance of not being why the universe was created. actually, now that i think about it, 100% since there are things older than venus in the universe (therefore, the teapot could not have orbited venus and your hypothesis is false), but i'll ignore that to answer your basic argument of [ridiculous thing] created the universe. the chances of [ridiculous thing] creating the universe are so statistically small that it is basically zero. in your case for example, a teapot is something made by humans for humans to hold hot water. i doubt any existed before the beginning of the universe since they weren't even conceived of until humans existed.
but your argument still sort of exists: a [ridiculous thing] could have created the universe. however, if it did actually create the universe, whatever [ridiculous thing] is, it would not be a normal [ridiculous thing]; it would be immensely powerful. much more powerful than anything humans can conceive of. now, if [ridiculous thing] did create the universe, what is the matter with worshiping it as a show of respect for its intense power? is there any reason not to worship it? is there a reason worshiping it is stupid?
the only difference between your [ridiculous thing] and religious people is that they call it god, you call it a teapot orbiting venus.
Well, most conceptions of God are of an infinite being. Indeed, if God were as finite as you or me, he would eventually get bored of watching what's going on this little planet on one of the spiral arms of a largish galaxy when there's probably so much else going on around the vastness of the universe that would probably be far more interesting. But no, the Bible has this to say about God: even the very hairs of your head are numbered (Luke 12:7) by him. To an infinite God, everything in the universe matters, from electrons and quarks to you and me all the way to galactic superclusters and the large scale structure of the universe. He would not consider anything in his creation insignificant, that is if he truly is infinite as he has been conceived; in fact if he is infinite then all of creation would be much too small to even fully hold his attention.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
"If one of the gods decided to actually show up and do some, you know, godly stuff". I refer you to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Granted, you may not wish to believe the event or the accounts, but it is a central claim of Christianity that God has involved himself directly and personally in the world.
I don't really care who he invites as guest stars, as long as he keeps his hands off the Dr Who legacy. When Torchwood was first announced, I had high hopes. An adult version of Dr Who? Bring it on! As it turned out, Torchwood was Dr Who without the humor, and plus an agenda. The end result was, IMO, rubbish.
So, is Dawkins a decent actor? References to evolution had better be along these lines. Dr Who is not the place for a lecture.
You quote only one dictionary.com definition. The others are very different. It makes it very clear which is the relevant one here: "8. Christian Theology. the trust in God and in His promises as made through Christ and the Scriptures by which humans are justified or saved.", this is very close to "1. confidence or trust in a person or thing: faith in another's ability." and obviously implies "3. belief in God or in the doctrines or teachings of religion: the firm faith of the Pilgrims.".
The definition of faith is not wrong, but there are several and it is important to pick the right one.
Seriously, that guy is a Sex God. I get all warm and fuzzy every time I think about him.
Funny, that sounds exactly like a Catholic to me...
Bonus: Captcha = aliens
The original teapot argument is not about a teapot god, it's about the reasonability of believing the unprovable (a teapot orbiting Venus). The teapot of the thought experiment doesn't have god superpowers. For the unprovability, make it a teapot on wheels hiding from us on the hidden side of Venus.
On the other hand there are many people who claim to have experienced God, in many different times and cultures, some have written about their experiences, some are happy to talk about what they experienced. etc. Many of these people are reliable witnesses (e.g. you would probably quite happily accept their evidence in court), who are sceptical about evidence in many areas, and who have put a great deal of thought into whether their experiences were genuine of delusional.
Dawkins has been invited on Dr Who because
a) He is well known
b) He is a fan of Dr Who
c) He was a good friend of one of the writers and script editors (Douglas Adams)
d) He is married to an ex-assistant (Lalla Ward)
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
> Theists do better in society, so that's what he should remind people of, "survival of the fittest".
I don't know where you made that little leap of faith from?
The guy beside me. I am his boss. He is deeply religious, I am not at all. I can only assume that his God hates him in some way. Although most "rewards" you get from religion tend to come after you are dead.
As a Philosophy undergrad, I find Dawkins pretty irritating. There is one nice podcast that pretty much summarises a lot of my problems with Dawkins, it's a podcast between him and David Quinn, and it's pretty much the first time I've seen Dawkins talk to anyone who even knows a little Philosophy.
I used to but I don't any more.
His early books were great, they were all about science and how you didn't really need god or fairies or any of that nonsense - and you would say 'Oh yeah' I see where you are going with that, that's really cool.
His latest book (the god delusion) seems to be just an invective against people who believe in god and I didn't like it.
I find he is becoming more a self-appointed spokesman for atheists (a priest, if you will) - and is presenting just the one point of view (dogma), in exactly the same way the various churches do.
In fact, as scientist, I find atheism in general to be more and more repulsive to scientific thinking - in that it rejects without proof any possibility of gods, fairies etc rather than just rejecting the theories as unproven - I suppose that makes me an agnostic now. Oh well.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
If I were to tell you this entire universe was created by an invisible cosmic teddy bear who lives in the center of our sun, would you take me seriously? You certainly couldn't prove there's not an invisible teddy bear in the center of the sun, so wouldn't you be believing in something independent of scientific proof, as you put it?
"God" was something cooked up by bronze-age goat herders to explain elements of nature they didn't understand. It's what scientists call "unfalsifiable." Unfalsifiable means there are no conditions where the premise would be false. If something can't be proven false, it can't be proven true, and is therefore not science.
Not even Richard Dawkins is in the "strong atheist" camp, the people who believe to a 100% certainty there is no God. I don't know of anybody at that point. In reality, most atheists are in the 99.999% sure camp. We hold the likelihood of God to be the same as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, so in all practical purposes, we don't believe in God. It's just easier to say "I don't believe in God" than to say "I'm 99.999% sure that there isn't a God." There really is no practical difference between atheism and agnosticism.
Richard Dawkins is cool
The only gods that are not six-year-old in mentality happen to be the ones that do not "want" you to do things.... they sidestep the philosophical debate entirely. And by doing so, they warrant no attention from us as well - i.e the only sensible gods do not matter. It's a catch .22 that religion cannot win.
What if "they" (these gods of which you speak) want us to be strong minded, independent and critical thinkers? Is that a six-year-old mentality? And if not then do they still merit no attention from us? Perhaps you are thinking of a catch-33.
Religion is a simplistic, silly idea that has no place in the free world of today. We have strong instincts for it, sadly, but I hope one day we no longer need them to emotionally survive. The world is beautiful without deities. Let's grow up and forget about them.
What is this "beautiful" of which you speak? Let's grow up and forget about such things... we don't need them. Hmmmm, and what about religions that don't include deities? Should we discard them as well? Perhaps we could just call them philosophies and still keep them.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
"scientific proof"
Apparently you think scientific proof is something absolute. It is not.
In fact the core of science is allow for renewed insight, and merely is a method to try predict future accurately.
You are making an implicit assumption that all religions have an equal amount of (or lack of) supporting evidence.
What about people who believe that there is more supporting evidence (usually strong supporting evidence) for particular beliefs? That is the usual case for people who do believe a religion to be true.
Dawkins writes, "...some very important gaps really are due to imperfections in the fossil record. Very big gaps, too...the major gaps are real, they are true imperfections in the fossil record...the only alternative explanation of the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era is divine creation and (we) would reject this alternative." After realizing the fossil record isn't imperfect and the missing links really aren't missing at all, he declares, "The 'gaps', far from being annoying imperfections or awkward embarrassments, turn out to be exactly what we should positively expect." Right.
It seems the only objection Dawkins has with the explanation that God created life is "...it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer." This is a bizarre point of view because God (the Designer) by definition does not have an origin.
So coming to your point - Religion may be simplistic, but even a prominent scientist like Dawkins still has to rely on a miracle as the explanation for the origin of life. What he grapples with and refuses to acknowledge is the source of the miracle.
http://www.anointed-one.net/begin.html/
However, what distinguishes mathematics here is that those statements are clear, unambiguous and definite in their truth value, even if it is unknown to us. In any religion, all statements are opaque, vague, and have their truth values, and even meaning, subject to interpretation.
It's like a kind of anti-mathematics, which is surprising considering the number of mathematicians that have left their stamp on the field.
May the Maths Be with you!
Suppose an old guy with a beard approached you on the street and claimed to be Zeus. Would you believe him? What if he said he could call down a lightning strike, and then did it to demonstrate it. Would you then believe it was Zeus?
:P
I'd be skeptical, but it's definitely a start. The fun would only start there though, since if he is indeed Zeus, I'd be pretty damn curious as to what it is he's actually expecting of the lot of us, if anything at all.
And I'd definitely be looking into getting a date with some of the more attractive members of his family
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
We are all atheists, unless you hapeen to believe in all the 1000s of gods out there. You may just be a theist in one god, and atheist about the rest.
If this seems like a reasonable way to be, then you are delusional.
Listen.
There is no evidence at all for the existance of any god never mind a specific type of one
There isn't now and never has been any evidence for any type of god like entity
There is nothing at all which requires anything like any sort of god like entity for us to understand it
At least unicorns would be a sort of an animal and we do know that animals exist whereas we have never seen any evidence for, never seen any examples of, never seen any hints of any sort of god like being at all and until we do the argument as to whether "he" exists or not is totally pointless because "he" obviously doesn't in the real world, only in the demented minds of the terminally deluded.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
People that discuss matters like religion and faith are perhaps not very surprisingly religious zealots which make them hardly distinguishable from religious zealots. They are obviously not aware of the fact that you cannot prove existence of deity either way so their arguments are rather futile.
Interestingly there are merits for a group when its members believe (in God or in holly pumpkin). The group members that show that they believe are more likely be good mates for producing an offspring (or many) for instance. The believers are also better canon meat and heroes etc. without which no society would be able to face hard times (and other societies).
Even more interestingly it is not only the hard times when believers show their value. Apparently somebody had a look at the gated communities in US and analyzed their life length. The longest lived one was built on (Christian) faith and it is still there after some >100 years. From the ones that had no apparent religious connection the longest surviving lasted 50 years.
Now I do not even go to the church but I see the point here. It does not help of course as you cannot be a believer by reasoning only. I only hope that by believing that I know what is good and bad and by believing in common values I somehow arrive at the merits without the bad parts of religion.
Now I wonder how fast I will be demoted to \.'s hell.
Comparing the existence of "unicorns" to a "God"-like being is not the same.
We can say that unicorns do not exist on this earth because we have explored pretty much the whole globe and we have encountered any evidence that says otherwise. We know enough to be able to make that statement.
However, it's presumptious to say that "God" or beings with God-like attributes do not exist at all. As it stands we simply do not know enough to claim that for sure (ie, extraterrestial life, or some other form of life beyond our current understanding of the universe).
For all his putative omnipresence, God is as elusive as the Unicorn. There's no more reason to believe in any God than there is to believe in Unicorns.
Actually there are all sorts of reasons to believe in a "god"... some having nothing at all to do with whether or not "he" actually exists.
I find it somewhat interesting that we expend very little effort in trying to determine the existence of (a) "god". Science conducts investigations of the physical world in such a way that it would only be by sheer accident that the existence of a deity would be determined. And the religious spend no effort trying to determine the existence of a deity because they assume it. Ah well, good thing we have all those philosophy departments at universities.
And where exactly did you come by the certainty that it is irrelevant today whether or not a deity was required 13.7 billion years ago? I would have thought that would be pretty big news. If that turned out to be the case I'd sure like to know.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
You, on the other hand, are using "miraculous" to mean an event that violates the laws of physics.
It's all very well to say "I define God to be an entity with no origin," but that doesn't explain it does it? This is all too similar to Descartes "proof" of God's existence. Just because you can formulate a description of something doesn't mean it exists.
Do you really think we have the ability to detect a tea pot orbiting Venus?? Even if we could send a probe there, it would be to difficult. And in fact, the tea pot could be orbiting Venus at several light years distance, which would make it almost impossible to detect.
here is the article from the economist that describes the issue with the possible merits of religion and science of religion as it stands:
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10875666
Unfortunately, those books result in silly comments of slashdotters on evolutionary topics they hardly understand. And when I try to counter their arguments they flame me down and tell me to read Dawkins...His books are his opinion and interpretation people, it is NOT science (not that I necessarily disagree with everything he says, but there are, like in any field, differences of opinion).
And yes IAAEB.
Yes.
Because one of the things about rational thought is that it requires you to consider all possibilities. We don't always do so in practice, but we should. To fail to consider the possibility that he may be Zeus is to wilfully ignore a branch of possibility, which is a distinctly irrational thing to do.
On the other hand, no one says you have to devote a lot of time to the question. On the balance of probabilities, it's likely you're being conned.
-- Note to Mods: There is a good reason there's no "-1 Disagree" option. --
Atheism wouldn't be half as "shattered" as it would just cease.
Every true atheist would do the switch nonviolently, without any trouble from the fact that they were atheist.
Who cares what Occam thought? It's his problem that his idea invalidates his own belief if applied consistently.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I think that's the entire point, it fails the falsifiability test and therefore lies outside the realm of science. At this point you have to accept that science cannot provide the answers to all the questions a person might ask about the universe. The choice then is to decide whether these questions can be answered by other means (i.e. religion), or if they simply cannot be answered. It's possible for a person to consider science the be-all and end-all of knowledge, but some might also (erroneously IMO) extend that to the be-all and end-all of existence.
I usually consider myself an atheist, and I'm quite aware that this is a belief. I don't believe that it is possible for a true god to exist in our 'plane of existence', if you can call it that. Some say that one could have existed before the Big Bang, but Stephen Hawking has a nice analogy: asking what came before the Big Bang is like asking what is North of the North Pole. So I discount the possibility of a god existing before the Big Bang, because it is a concept invented by human minds.
I am coming round to the simulated reality argument, ever since I read The Algebraist by Iain Banks. It's an idea that I can easily visualise. Of course, making the leap from atheism to agnosticism is only half the battle if anybody wants to convert me to a full-blown religious nutjob, as I still need to be persuaded that any god deserves my worship, or has moral authority over me.
I think people forget something when discussing things like this. It probably has to do with the current concept of rationalism in the western world. I might as well put this point of view here although I doubt it will be understood. It may be that there is another rational option, namely that it is not important whether or not something is true, but whether people believe whether something is true. Unfortunately, I am sure most atheist will claim that the world would be all peaceful without theists, and v.v. (and have a big fight over it). However, without good evidence for either, I like to think that it is everybody's personal decision what to be. Since both choices seem rational to me, I will not judge one or the other as more viable.
Back on topic: because of the above I never understood the point Dawkins wants to make.
...On the other hand there are many people who claim to have experienced God, in many different times and cultures, some have written about their experiences, some are happy to talk about what they experienced. etc. Many of these people are reliable witnesses (e.g. you would probably quite happily accept their evidence in court), who are sceptical about evidence in many areas, and who have put a great deal of thought into whether their experiences were genuine of delusional. For the word God in the above paragraph you can so easily substitute the words 'Alien Abduction' or 'Ghosts' or 'The Devil' or many other subjects that are liable to appear in the pages of the Fortean Times....oh, and yo momma's so fat, her Schwarzchild radius is visible to the naked eye.
It's pretty idiotic to proclaim "waiting for evidence" on a matter that is an equivalent of existence of fairies and unicorns. Would you honestly say that you are "waiting for evidence" of fairies, or would you simply proclaim that they are fictional entities not worth the attention of a non-retarded adult person? So are gods.
The fact that religion has political power and kids who believe in fairies don't have it, is the only difference.
And yes, there is a very remote possibility that something or someone (say, an alien from independently developed advanced civilization with an odd sense of humor) is indeed present on Earth and acts to imitate the exact properties and abilities of a fairy, and succeeds doing so using massive amounts of energy and advanced technology.
It's still an extremely silly thing to expect, or "wait a proof" of -- no one ever seen an evidence of advanced aliens, fairies or gods, and if there may be some (extremely weak) expectations that space aliens of some kind might exist, nothing at all suggests that the other two are anything but figments of imagination.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
But Richard Who?
80 CC D8 AF AE D3 AB 54 B7 2E CE 67 C7
What is "the point" of religion, does not matter -- I can have a religion that is entirely focused on the claim that longcat is long (oh, and Satan is your master, but it really isn't important).
What matter is making stupid unprovable (or proven false) claims, and Buddhism does that just like any other religion.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Unicorns exist. It's just that we NOW call them Rhinos. Or "Compassionate conservatives..." Or "honest politicians..." Or "trustworthy talent agents..." Or "a recording Industry association that truly seeks to protect the rights of the individual artist..."
In the context of science -- yes.
Compared to religion -- FUCKING HELL NO. Anything that scientists claim as certain, likely or even uncertain is still millions of orders of magnitude above the certainty of religious dogmas.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Invisible Pink Unicorn
-- Note to Mods: There is a good reason there's no "-1 Disagree" option. --
It's the soul. But then when does the foetus get a soul? Too early and many pregnancies are terminated by God (natural failure to carry to term) after he's given them a soul. Too late and you'll get some very early premature babies who have no soul (at least to begin with).
It really is about having as many babies as possible.
If you doubt that, what about the story about Onan? He was told to pork his brothers wife and when he said no, to show that he really DID mean "no", he shot his wad over the floor rather than use it to make is sister-in-law pregnant. So god killed him.
Dawkins is the atheist analogy of a religous nut. His argumentation when it comes to religion is just as fanatically against religion as an american TV-preacher is for...donations.
Seriously, after 9/11 he went out in british media and used the terror acts as a springboard for his anti-religous campaigning, how extremist isn't that? I have no problem with people questioning faith or being agnostics, atheists or whatever, but claiming to be a rationalist and then going all atheist-jihadic like Dawkings has does not add up.
When is someone going to see through this man, he obviously has some profound issues to take care of.
Not quite. Dawkins' coming across as being fanatically against religion isn't because he's so pro-atheist or anti-religion per se. If you actually read some of ihs books, most notably The God Delusion, he provides the following thought process:
1. It is impossible to prove or disprove the existance of god/a god.
2. With the inability to prove the existance of god/a god, what is it that causes people believe in god? By default we come with no belief system, and yet somehow many people end up believing in god/gods even despite the lack of evidence of existance. He then goes into a long discussion of the psychological and evolutionary roots of belief in mysticism and gods, along with disproving most of the claims of "proof" of god.
3. What's wrong with Pascal's wager? In other words, if god can't be proven or disproven, then why not hedge your bet by believing? If it turns out that there is a god, then you're good to go, if not, no harm done. The problem with that line of thinking is you can't really believe in all gods, you have to choose one set of beliefs (monotheistic or multitheistic, etc) to the exclusion of the rest, so if it turns out that there is a god you still might have backed the wrong candidate.
4. Then he goes on to point out the tremoundous amount of hatred, division, strife, and death that religious belief is responsible for, both historically and in our present world. His position is that if people didn't believe in god/gods and have these religious dogmas then the world would be a better place.
It is point number 4 above that I think is the biggest drive in his efforts to educate the world about atheism. It's not because he hates religion, or is a nutter. It's because he honestly believes that people have deluded themselves into believing in god/gods, and that their delusions are far from being harmless to the rest of the world. Whether or not you believe that theists are deluded, it's impossible to argue with the second half of that point, namely that religious belief has a negative impact on civilisation. The events of 9/11 just put a giant exclamation point to that claim, and Dawkins was using it to say "this is what I'm talking about, there are now 5000 dead people who wouldn't have been killed had it not been for religion." When you add up the number of people who have been killed in combat in the US response to 9/11 you're looking at tens of thousands of people.
Maybe the next time you want to claim that someone has issues or doesn't add up, you ought to at least find out what it is that they're saying so that you can make a coherent argument.
I can't tell you how many times my Christian friends have argued that me being an atheist is the same as "believing that there isn't a God" despite explaining no, I am "not believing that there is a God", which is quite a different thing. Discussion of the etymology of the word "atheist" doesn't seem to help in these cases, because they've already latched onto something that they believe about me and won't let go of. Maybe I should simply accept that this is par for the course.
So, are you saying that The Church of Scientology and the FSM might hold truth? You have to. While we're at it, how about The Matrix? Yeah.. let's just throw a bunch of other stuff in there. You can't disprove it, after all. : ) I'll leave the reason I'm being sarcastic as an exercise for the reader.
What day is it? Could you please tell me?
> This kind of stuck-up, human arrogance is where our whole idea of "human rights" come from. If we truly are insignificant - and you, therefore, are 1-nine-billionth of "insignificant" - does it really matter all that much if I kill you? Beliving that, could you muster indignance with a straight face? Deal with it - we're special. (Just like everybody else.) It's a required assumption for society to function.
We accept that we are 'special' so society can function, but a 'higher' being has no need for our society, so that being will probably not consider us special. I like to think cows consider themselves 'special' so the herd can function, but I don't mind eating beef...
You can just skip the whole 'special' part and go straight to the statement: We need to accept the idea of "human rights" for society to function. I am not special. You are not special. If you were to kill me, society would continue to function as normal, and nothing would change (although you would probably piss off my family (or I'd like to think so)). But we cannot accept you killing me, cause when everyone starts killing people, it DOES become a problem to society. Therefore we have the Human Rights.
or Perpetual Motion.
He just used the unicorn example AS AN EXAMPLE.
Finding one that works for you is up to you.
PS there were PLENTY of example of REAL naturalists coming back with pictures of unicorns.
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
--Stephen F. RobertsOnce Rebbe Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev saw the town apostate approaching. With a loving smile, he drew near him and embraced him: "Don't worry," he told him. "The God whom you don't believe in, I don't believe in either."
"Indeed, it is wise never to consider any form of electronic data as final." --Arnold Robbins
Dawkins is the author of ... The God Delusion
And apparently also a victim of delusions of godhood.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
You seem to have associated Christianity itself with a vocal group of small minded people who are prone to pop off in the press saying things that have little to do with Christianity. I assume that most people that post to Slashdot are reasonably intelligent in spite of the tendency here to be argumentative and often extreme in viewpoint. If so many here are intelligent as the nature of the content would imply, I would expect more of the community to do a modicum of research before stating facts on behalf of something they know so little about. I'm not suggesting that if you do a little research about Christianity you'll suddenly start believing it, but you're doing yourself a disservice to continue to attack something that's not Christianity while calling it Christianity.
If I ever want to learn evolutionary biology seriously I'll take a real textbook, not
a pop biology book for dummies.
Whether there was a need for a God to start it all 13.7 billion years ago is irrelevant today.
Now there's a rational, scientific perspective for you. Guys, stop thinking about evolution and the beginning of existence, it's all irrelevant today. Sorry Hawking, you've been wasting your time.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
All the same, it's not accurate to say that Social Darwinism is an abuse of the theory.
It absolutely definitely is.
It is well known that many species of evolved to form communities of co-operatively behaving individuals. That made their whole communities, or entire species more likely to survive while they competed with other communities and species (remember, in evolution it doesn't matter which individuals, or all of them, survive and produce offspring -- what matters is which genes do they mostly pass to the next generation), and both humans and insects are examples of this very mechanism.
With insects' colonies it's obvious because colonies are composed mostly of clones -- worker bee can never produce an offspring by herself, but a queen (who has the same genes as workers) can if worker bees are successful in supporting the hive, so successful worker bee promotes passing her genes by supporting the survival of queen and offspring, competing with other hives or other species of insects.
With humans the collective nature of all activities involved in survival (hunting, agriculture, building of shelters, development of technology, medicine), and combination of long lifetime and a tradition of having stable families, places a hostile, aggressive individual that is ready to rip throats from everyone he meets including other humans, at a huge disadvantage compared to the rest of society, so humans ended up much less naturally aggressive than most of animals -- even less than animals that perform some activities collectively (hunting, migration) but remain highly competitive against each other within the same species.
Therefore a society that emphasizes co-operation between humans is actually a result of evolution, and "Social Darwinism" goes against the mechanism that humans developed over their evolution -- it promotes development of society that is hurting its own survival by wasting resources and shutting out individuals depriving others from use of their abilities in collective activities.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Hmmm, rather ironic. Mr Dawkins denounces religion and preaching blind faith, but quite happily takes part in a very popular quasi-relgious TV show that has very serious devotees, he also enjoys standing in his scientific pulpit preaching the word of science to the point of becoming a lunatic-fanatic. Don't get me wrong, I despise religion and the awful things done in it's name and I do have a grudging admiration for Mr D, but find it all rather amusing!
Windows guys please stop pissing on everyone and the Linux guys stop pissing in the wind, hoping to hit Windows guys!
I'll backup the 'plenty of atheists' for you: based on the current world population, and the often quoted statistic that 95% believe in a higher power, that yields 330,111,208 atheists worldwide. Seems odd that Dawkins would get special treatment just for that, so obviously he's famous for more than being just one out of a 330+ million strong group.
stuff |
We are all atheists with respect to specific theologies and gods we don't believe in. You know that feeling you get when people start talking to you in all earnestness about how great Poseidon is?
That's nonsense. Atheism is a specific term, not just another word for "doesn't believe in". Someone who doesn't believe in the Christian god isn't an "atheist in regards to Christianity", they're a non-Christian. A-theism: no gods. You can't be an atheist and still believe in a single specific god - it means "no gods".
Interestingly enough, you can still be religious and atheistic - any religion that centers around a non-personified cosmic force is atheistic.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
That's funny because people that tell me that religion is the drug of the people usually
take "chemical" drugs themselves then go around explaining why "chemical" drugs are cool.
Actually in The God delusion he brings up specific arguments why God can't exist (at least in the creator of everything, beginning of all version of things). In short he argues that anything that can deliberately create the universe has to be at least as complex. Which creates the question where God came from.
Oh my Go...er, ah god, rather.
I've never seen a better criticism of religion.*
It's one of the more bigoted, closed-minded views of religion I've read in awhile. At least on slashdot.
For example. Christians argue against abortion. but that has nothing to do with God really. It has everything to do with Muslims not outnumbering Christians because of population control. Thank you for pointing out this indisputable fact. And to think, all this time I thought being opposed to abortion had to do with respect for life. Sheesh. What the hell (heck?) was I thinking.
God is so they can justify what they want. It justifies the suppression of the rights of minorities, It justifies the abuse of women, and children. And this one too. Wow. I mean, without a G/god what rights would ANYONE have? Again, to think I thought that people had unalienable rights endowed by their creator. I like your way better: Your rights are whatever the government says they are at any given time.
Just look at Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, Guevara, Castro. I mean, just think of how many people they would have killed had they been atheists!
The creator of the universe if he exists wouldn't blink twice at what Humans care about. I had no idea anyone of this Earth had that kind of insight into God's mind. You are a truly astounding individual.
I can not believe someone labeled your post insightful.
-john
* Yes, that is sarcasm.
Slashdot: you'll not find a more wretched collection of villainy and disreputable types...
atheist -noun a person who denies or disbelieves the existence of a supreme being or beings. [Origin: 1565-75;
--Synonyms Atheist, agnostic, infidel, skeptic refer to persons not inclined toward religious belief or a particular form of religious belief. An atheist is one who denies the existence of a deity or of divine beings. An agnostic is one who believes it impossible to know anything about God or about the creation of the universe and refrains from commitment to any religious doctrine. Infidel means an unbeliever, especially a nonbeliever in Islam or Christianity. A skeptic doubts and is critical of all accepted doctrines and creeds.
Online Etymology Dictionary atheist 1571, from Fr. athéiste (16c.), from Gk. atheos "to deny the gods, godless," from a- "without" + theos "a god" (see Thea). A slightly earlier form is represented by atheonism (c.1534) which is perhaps from It. atheo "atheist."
Please have a commonly defined set of terms or else all arguments are are useless as the incorrect definitions.
You can't believe in one God or set of gods and by denying others be an atheist as some in these threads have said. As to which belief system is correct, have fun arguing.
Another way I like to put that idea is: I'm not an expert on car crashes, but I can still assert that I don't want to be in one. The visible results of theism are sufficient reason for me to avoid it - without needing a reason that would satisfy a professional theologian.
One important point about Dawkins has been overlooked: for years he wrote primarily about biology, with the issues of religion taking a back seat. I get the impression that The God Delusion and the surrounding debates are almost a retirement project for him, a decision to "push the boat out" and have a little fun with something not strictly scientific. His title at Oxford is Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, and it is IMHO logical to start the promotion of science by attacking anti-scientific beliefs such as "Intelligent Design". Plus, he wrote his book after the Dover School Board case, which was reported widely in the UK, and was an eye-opener about just how nuts things had gotten in the USA.
(this is not a
While there have been many good articles posted here, I can get them elsewhere without the hateful intolerance I find on this site. A great deal of you are every bit as rabid and narrow-minded as the ignorant creationists.
On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods."
I don't think it was the fact that they were drawing up a star chart to decide the case so much as the juror was indicating they were not basing their decision on the facts of the case presented in the trial. The juror would have likely been just as likely to be removed if they asked the judge for a coin to flip to make their decision with.
Um, well, actually, it's possible to argue that religion has been a net benefit. David Sloan Wilson does so in his book, which I recommend, "Evolution For Everyone".
Wilson makes the useful distinction between beliefs that are "factually realistic" (actually correct) and "practically realistic" (false but motivating useful behaviors). Religion may not be true, but historically it has helped organize societies and regulate human behavior in socially useful ways. However, Wilson points out that it's not clear that we must give up factual realism for practical realism. And he also notes that behaviors that are adaptive in one context can be useless or maladaptive in other contexts.
An example (these aren't in "Evolution For Everyone", they're my own observations): Jewish dietary law prohibits mixing milk and meat in the same meal. Rabbis have taken this as far as prohibiting eating meat too soon after drinking milk, to allow the milk to have made it past the stomach. Now, storing cheese too close to meat, particularly without refrigeration, is a bad thing - the meat will go bad very quickly. So, a rule that has the effect of keeping meat and cheese stored separately is a good thing. Even if the rule has useless side-effects, it can be a net benefit if the side costs aren't too great.
Another example: it appears that sex during menstruation leads to increased risk of endometriosis. A rule prohibiting sexual contact during menstruation is - to that extent - a good thing. Of course, the religious rules tend to go way beyond that, prohibiting all physical contact whatsoever, even to not sitting where a menstruating woman has sat. But the rule is "practically realistic" to an extent, even if it's not "factually realistic" that a menstruating woman is really 'ritually unpure'. (Here's a rule that tends to lead to the denigration of women, to the point of that silly prayer for men thanking God that they weren't born women, etc.)
In both of these cases, understanding the facts leads to rules that are factually realistic and also a good deal more practically realistic. So, it's possible to say that religion has historically been a net benefit while also concluding that it's no longer such a great benefit, and in many modern cases does real harm.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Please mod parent up. I'm a secular atheist (recovering Catholic), but I recognise the significant contributions that numerous schools of theology have provided to the world. Thomas Aquinas, Maimonides, Thomas More, etc all built upon foundations of philosophy and rational thought established by the greek philosophers; in turn their works were inspiration for subsequence generations e.g. the natural rights of man coming out of the Enlightenment period. Its all well and good to jump upon the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades as 'christianity is teh evil!', but if you do that you throw the baby out with the bathwater... no preservation of greek and latin learnings during the dark ages, no reformation and all the advancements in human individualism (fairly unique concepts owned by the western world), no Renaissance, no Enlightenment. Religion as a social force must be understood in the context of its time.
Dawkins' criticisms of organised religion are valid IMHO and worth debating, but I agree that he goes too far arguing religion has not provided immense benefits to civilisation. I think its more apropos to ask whether we continue to benefit from organised religion given our current sociological makeup, and this stage of our intellectual capability.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
Maybe you're ok, then...
Just try to act like an atheist in public, and you can stay.
I wonder if the set crew were eating symbolic pieces of bread that represented Dawkins. It would have been fitting. Dawkins donuts, maybe.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I agree. The technical term is "weak atheism". I've never met a "strong atheist". Most theists think that atheists are strong-atheists. the term "agnostic" implies, at least to me, that there is at least some evidence for the theist position and so it needs a special word. That's not the case.
Atheism (which is technically "weak atheism" in the real world as I've said) is like skepticism without a God-exception. Skeptics generally don't believe something until (if ever) evidence comes along. Where an agnostic claims that he can't know either way, an atheist claims that something isn't worth believing in without evidence.
Believing it doesn't make it so. If that was an attempt at sophistry or some other intellectual sleight of hand, then don't give up the day job.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
Saying that Richard Dawkins is an "advocate of the merits of atheism" is like saying the Pope is an advocate of the merits of religion. Dawkins refers to himself as a "militant atheist".
Scandalously, Dawkins doesn't believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny either.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
Please read my post fully. Dawkins made that comment about the miraculous origin of life. I have given the exact quote in my post for your reference.
As to the whole subject of God, the question of God arises because you have a miraculous event which cannot occur if there wasn't someone/something causing that event - hence God comes into the picture.
If you ask the question - doesn't God have a beginning? Well, the answer is No. Because that really is the definition of God. God is a being with no beginning and no end.
That may not be the explanation you *like* to hear though.
You used 'china is doing fine' as an example of how socially successful atheism is? China is doing fine? Nice one. One of the worst human rights countries in the world is my example for atheism?
Next you'll tell me its atheistic groups China invites back to run orphanages.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
It absolutely definitely is.
...
No it's not, Alex. You ignored my post
I totally agree with your criticisms of Social Darwinism, which, you don't seem to have noticed, I actually made myself (albeit briefly).
Social Darwinism is obviously the Naturalistic Fallacy all over again. I said that the Liberals saw Evolutionary theory as a way of attacking Conservatism with its theocratic hierarchy. But in doing so, they didn't want a completely mobile society - they wanted a new type of hierarchy, analogous to the Food Chain. It just happened that they saw this new hierarchy as one they would benefit from.
I said that Social Darwinism is not a misuse of Darwinism overall, in the sense that the original Darwinists fully intended this application of Darwinism.
You know what they say about opinions. They're all fabulous!
Dude, if an old guy with a beard approached me on the street and claimed to be Zeus, and then called down a lightning strike, you're right, first assumption is dreaming, then hallucinating, then con artist.
But you know what? Science is about eliminating the possibilities until you're left with certainty.
Dreaming? Pinch me.
Hallucinating? Do you see that too?
Con Artist? Do you mind doing that again under controlled conditions?
Alien with sufficiently advanced technology: Which is more likely: That aliens with technology indistinguishable from magic are claiming to be ancient manifestations of human myth or that the guy claiming to be Zeus - and can back up his claim - is claiming to be Zeus because he is Zeus.
Science is about evidence and models - not proof.
Case in point, let's say Zeus IS an alien, but the best guess for integrating him into our model of the universe is that he is, in fact, Zeus. A few years later when the the lighting technology is no longer "sufficiently advanced" and you find new evidence, you change your theory.
Ultimately, at the very least, a guy on the street claiming to be Zeus and calling down lightning on command is a new avenue of investigation, and the claims do not have to be taken at face value immediately. However, if the evidence holds up to scrutiny, then go ahead and call the guy Zeus.
This works for any god: Show me evidence, then we'll start investigating.
I used to work for NetQoS. I no longer do, but want to keep the excellent karma attached to this account.
"The definition of faith is not wrong, but there are several and it is important to pick the right one." Yes, it is, and christians have a very good record of cherry picking the ones they want! I have heard more than one preacher use the alternative definition you reject. Nice thing, christianity - let's you pick and choose those beliefs you personally like, so you can reject all the others. And, no, Dawkins doesn't really use the word "evil", but he does paint them as bad for society. That is not silly, given all of the wars, pogroms, persecutions and state sanctioned human rights violations that religion has caused in just Western history alone. Come to think of it, if I had to pick a word, "evil" wouldn't really be a bad word to use after all...
"Money is truthful. If a man speaks of his honor, make him pay cash." Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Robert A. Heinlein
You wouldn't be able to see a teapot with Hubble. Just letting you know.
I used to work for NetQoS. I no longer do, but want to keep the excellent karma attached to this account.
Theists do better in society,
Again: evidence ?^_^ Mmmm, irony. "Evidence? THIS IS THEISTS!"
I steal signatures. This one used to be yours.
There are an infinite number of concepts that cannot be disproved - that is not a good reason to believe in any of them. I have literally no more reason to believe in a god than to believe in the tooth fairy and in my mind they rate about equal on the believability scale.
It is important that you theists out there understand this. I find the idea of a bunch of grown adults WORSHIPPING a god as utterly bizarre as you would find a bunch of grown adults putting lost teeth under their pillow and sincerely, honestly expecting money to appear there in the morning as a result - more than that - building their entire lives around the idea that there is a tooth fairy. Committing large fractions of their lives to supporting missionaries to head out into deepest Africa to make sure that the little children there have pillows and hide their teeth in the prescribed manner. I don't mean that in a comedic sense...suppose that actually happened and millions of people had that deep seated belief. You'd find that pretty bizarre...and that's EXACTLY how I think of you guys. You are deeply weird people with very little grip on reality who believe in the tooth fairy.
There are big things that we cannot disprove (the parallel worlds hypothesis) - there are small things that we cannot disprove (that there really is a Tooth Fairy). Not only can we not disprove the existance of any particular god - but even the believers in that god cannot disprove the idea that (say) this god will damn to hell anyone who eats raspberries. This is a serious problem with religion. It's all very well to believe in something unprovable - but why that particular, very narrowly defined, unprovable thing? Sure you may have had some bizarre 'revelation' about the existance of a god - but how do you actually know that raspberries either are or are not OK? After all - a good fraction of the world believes that their god has this thing about drinking alcohol - and another good fraction thinks that it's actually shellfish and pork products that are out of the question. How do you know it's not raspberries too?
When there are an infinite number of unknowable things (note: "unknowable"...not "unknown") how do you pick and choose which of those unknowable things to believe in? I'd really like to know that.
It seems to me that when faced with a literal infinity of unknowable things - the only rational course of action is to believe only in the known (and to seek to test the unknown in order to make it known). But the totally unknowable...well, I guess it's worth some small amount of thought to speculate about it - but to launch your entire life on the basis of belief in some small, arbitary subset of the unknowable is just bizarre.
KILL THE WISE ONE!!!
While I understand that it is not an argument for or against theism, I don't see the beauty in a universe in which all that I am and all that I love will disappear into oblivion in just a few short years (or at all). On the contrary, I find it to be quite ugly.
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
Of all the atheists i know (most of my friends) only one of them is scornful of religious people.
As for agnosticism, i agree as far as deism goes- since we don't know what happened before the big bang, we cant say one way or the other if an intelligent agency created the universe. However that's as far as the agnosticism can stretch. We certainly can't be agnostic about the veracity of the bible or any of the religious texts for any religion. The bible is flat out false. Any serious biblical scholar will tell you, it is demonstrably a collection of mutually contradictory bronze age myths, that has no bearing on the reality of the history of the universe or anything in it. There is no agnosticism to be had there. The same goes for all other texts that purport to explain the existence of man. This is not intended as scorn or mockery on my part, merely a statement of fact that I have to make in order to explain my position as an atheist.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
IMO agnosticism is the only tenable position for the non-theist.
What, the belief that God's existence is unprovable? Sounds like a statement of faith to me.
I don't believe in invisible elephants either, even though I can't prove them don't exist? So does that mean I'm "believing in something independent of scientific proof"? Of course not - you appear to be confusing "believing" with "not believing".
And what does "non-theist" mean? Try reading your post again with "atheist" replaced by "non-theist" to see how little sense it makes.
He said that too. So he should not (and was not) censored AS AND INDIVIDUAL but he was disbarred from a POSITION where his decisions would have the effect of making HIS personal belief structure imposed on others.
I think religion should be banned and all the religious people should be put into prisons or made rebuild dams in New Orleans. Would you agree?
/. oblivion - the agnostic or the religious ones.
SARCASM SARCASM!!!
What I wonder now is what sort of fanatics will mod me into
SARCASM SARCASM!!!
What do you personally think should be done to me for my skepticism of Dawkins' ideas?
I don't know why you got modded flamebait, but if I had points I would mod you up. There are multiple ways to define atheism - one is to believe that there is no god, another is to not believe that there is a god. I think there's a subtle difference. Personally, I'm an agnostic atheist - I believe that there is no god, but I also believe that it is impossible to prove whether or not there is a god. Any atheists who actively mock theists for their belief should take a long look at their own beliefs, and also go read some Kant.
Seriously, after 9/11 he went out in british media and used the terror acts as a springboard for his anti-religous campaigning, how extremist isn't that?
It's not as extremist anywhere near as 9/11, that's how extremist it isn't.
I have no problem with people questioning faith or being agnostics, atheists or whatever, but claiming to be a rationalist and then going all atheist-jihadic
What on earth does that mean?
I'll be the first to say that not all religious people should be judged by the actions of extremists, but this popular anti-atheist tactic is absurd: that someone who writes books and gives talks is anywhere near comparable to religious extremists, just because you don't like what they say!
I would like to say (from a monotheist perspective) that I'm sorry for all the wrong done (past, present, and future) in the name of Christ. I'm appalled at some of the comments made here on /. How do you justify the stereotypical remarks about Islam and Christianity that are posted without regards to the feelings of the readers? It's no better than the unintelligent comments posted on YouTube. I *thought* the /. community was above this level from an intellectual perspective? If someone made a comment "all Spanish people are bums" it would be viewed as insensitive and untrue. Just because you don't believe in something does not give you the right to speak half-truths about the subject. The Christians that I know don't go around bashing homosexuals, atheists, agnostics, etc... It's quite the opposite, we are sympatric towards those who don't understand/believe. Yet, 9 out of 10 times when I read these postings it paints the picture that monotheist believers are intellectual inferior to those who don't believe in a supreme creator. Why is this? Is the following man blinded by the "Fairy Tale"? http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/03/collins.commentary/index.html
Well, we haven't found any "unicorn bones" that didn't involve the horn of a narwhal. So there's a complete lack of evidence or reason for the belief in the existence of a unicorn.
On the other hand there is a universe that we live in, and so far no solid (i.e. testable) scientific theory for its origin.
But not knowing how something happened isn't by default evidence for a particular made up explanation. You could apply this argument to unicorns - if I find rubbish has been mysteriously disappearing out of my bins, then I could claim this is evidence for the existence of unicorns who come about eat out of my bins.
Of course this would be absurd - just because I can make up a story involving unicorns doesn't mean the mystery is itself evidence for unicorns. A mystery is just that - a mystery, whether it's missing rubbish, or where did the Universe come from.
So the idea that a creator may exist can't be completely logically dismissed even if it's well beyond current scientific understanding.
Ah, well now you've switched the argument to the idea that god may exist. Sure, we shouldn't dismiss the idea that god may exist, just as we shouldn't with unicorns either, in fact. But in both cases, there is no evidence, and it is reasonable to reject belief in the existence of both on those grounds.
Trust me, I work for the government.
It's not as extremist anywhere near as 9/11, that's how extremist it isn't.
I'd say it's rather extremist to take the actions of someone quite obviously seen as an extremist, even by the standards of most people even within the same religion, and use as an illustration of how screwed up religous people are.
As for the atheist-jihadic, the meaning of that is that someone taking a purist rationalistic stand, such as Dawkings does, that then spends so much effort as to even get in the 9/11-debate (that have nothing to do with the evolutionist-creationalist, which is what Dawkings normally meddles in) and get all bug-eyed about how this is what happens when religion poisons people, he has, by far, left the realm of rationalism.
I'm looking forward in great excitement to the evidence you will provide for your explanation.
Trust me, I work for the government.
Unless he has a banana in each ear, of course.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
http://calgary.rasc.ca/moonscope.htm
I used to work for NetQoS. I no longer do, but want to keep the excellent karma attached to this account.
Read all you want:
http://www.anointed-one.net/atheism.html
I'm not religious. Religion annoys me, actually. But I don't NOT believe in God. Why? Because Atheism requires stronger faith than I can muster. Some people will tell you that there is no positive evidence of God. Having science explain just about everything we used to attribute to gods, I tend to agree with this. Others will tell you that there is no negative proof against God. Given an appropriate definition of God, I would tend to also support this position.
Let's consider some attributes of God, should s/he exist:
- God is not a meddler. Random stuff happens. People die or not. Catastrophic events happen or not. The universe is a relatively unordered, chaotic place, and as Newton's laws tell us, it's getting more unordered as time progresses. Life is the product of a pocket of relative order due to a surplus of local energy. That is all. God does not reach in and change things.
- God does not define moral code. Human morality is a product of human history, and everyone's got a different one. There are no universal moral laws that we can identify. Killing is wrong or not. Rape is wrong or not. Stealing is wrong or not. No one's moral code can truly claim any superiority to any other; viewed objectively, they all suck in some way or other.
- God does not dictate the structure of things in the universe. Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that the physical laws of the universe were defined by God. Fine. But as far as we can tell, the universe has obeyed these laws without deviation from the beginning of the big bang. In one sense, the fact that humans evolved from mammals (as opposed to reptiles) is quite random. On the other hand, reptile physiology (as we know it) wouldn't have supported the energy requirements of the human brain. Either way, there's no special reason why life should have evolved here in the first place, except that the right chemicals and supply of energy just happened to be suitable for it.
The idea to draw from this is that if there IS a God, this God is absolutely nothing like the gods made up by the many human religions. Man made God in his own image. But this "God" of the humans doesn't exist; anything we come up with is by definition going to be too limited to encompass a being that could have created the universe. I mean, imaging knowing what the physical laws of the universe are, rather than having to figure them out by inference from inside.
Does God care about us? Non sequitor. Caring is a human concept. Does God influence people's lives? Non sequitor. Influencing lives is a human concept. Hell, LIFE is a human concept. Did God even expect life to evolve in the universe he created? Oh wait, that invokes the concept of time, which God probably transcends.
As a species, we should be mature enough to realize that the universe does not run according to our preconceived notions. Many ideas that seem self-evident to me here in America simply don't apply in Japan. But Japanese and Americans are the same species. Now try applying your preconceived notions to an alien with absolutely no genetic history in common with yourself (or even genes for that matter). That alone is hard to imagine. You watch TV and see human actors playing aliens and get the idea that the human form is 'natural'. Far from it. If we ever meet aliens, sci fi writers will look at them and say "holy crap, I would never have thought of that in a million years." But an alien would be subject to the same physical laws as us. At least we have SOMETHING in common. Even that flies out the window when you try to imagine what God might be like.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that God is undefinable. But I would suggest that whatever you think God might be like is probably very limited and almost completely wrong. The same goes for me. I'm talking out my ass, using what limited brain power I have, and I know I'm not getting very far. But on the other hand, I think, for humans, this kind of speculation is healthy because it expands our
I will answer that question. We don't ask orurselves if there is a teapot orbiting venus because
even if there was one, we would not care at all. Proof: nobody write books
about "the teapot delusion" because nobody cares whether there is a teapot
orbiting venus or not.
Your faulty reason omits one very important point: God is conceived of as a mental, non-physical being. ie, He has thoughts, but no physical body. The size of matter is irrelevant compared to the life of a mental being.
Imagine, for example, you have a daughter, and next to her you have a pile of dirt twice the size of your daughter. Is that dirt more meaningful in virtue of its size? What about your daughter vs a clone of her that is dead? Or a clone that is living but devoid of any mental life? You can see the difference between a daughter and inert matter of any size.
What makes us special, noticeable, and of concern to God is that unlike most matter in the universe, we like Him possess a mental life. The universe could be 10^2000 times larger than it is and it still wouldn't matter, since we have thoughts and rocks do not. That is why we are special. We have more in common with God than a rock does, or a billion galaxies do.
Arguments based on the size of the universe fail on so many levels.
One might enquire then, if religious belief is so unhelpful, why this trait managed to insinuate itself so effectively through most of the human population, if natural selection is more likely to weed it out?I object strongly to your implication that there is a necessary distinction between "the rational" and "the religious". These terms are unrelated, and only in your mind are they mutually exclusive.
More importantly, a grandoise claim like "the religious panic and pray, and as a result die" is so pathetically and obviously false, one wonders why you think you could claim that and still appear rational. It seems you are prone to making unsubstantiated, indeed claims that cannot be substantiated, to support your view. I mean, do we ignore all those religious people who pray, panic, and survive through action? Do we just need one positive example of a religious person praying and as a result dying to confirm your statement? What about people who don't pray and "act rational" and as a result die? Would that be a counter-example?
One can only conclude that you are trying to score points by asserting the absurd to the choir.
I think it is high time to post this xkcd link.
Technically, that'd be pantheism. An atheistic religion would be one that believes in the spiritual nature of existence, but not in a god or a 'creation force' or whatever in neither a personified nor abstract sense. For example, you might believe in reincarnation without believing that there's a god who decides what you will reincarnate as.
Nobody expects the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal.
Correlation != causation, remember? Unless you're like most of slashdot where correlation != causation until it proves your point.
Mod me up, you know you must do so to remain logically consistent, even if it refutes a data point you REALLY like.
He's using the same logic and intelligence he would bring to bear on any other subject, the difference being that religious people basically freak out and act like it's a hate crime if you treat their pet beliefs with the same rationality and common-sense that you bring to other subjects. They expect a special pass, which up till now they've generally gotten. If someone believes in an invisible unicorn that talks to them and protects them, we damned well know that that's delusional. If they talk to Jesus everyday, how exactly is that different? It's not, and rationalists are tired of pretending otherwise.
If Dawkins used exactly the same logic and tone to skewer belief in invisible unicorns, you wouldn't consider it divisive, spiteful, inflammatory, or even controversial. Changing the noun to "God" doesn't suddenly change commonplace, logical observations into howling invective.
"Science is about evidence and models - not proof"
Can I get this on a t-shirt?
You see, I consider "probably false" to be a form of Agnosticism.
There's one step further in the original definition, if I remember -- the assertion that not only do we not know if God exists, but that the question is unknowable. See:
That is testable, at least in so much as you can gather evidence for this unicorn. It could actually be anything, but ultimately, by the time you've caught the unicorn on infrared, or whatever works to capture an image of it, you've pretty much proven its existence.
Not so with God. Most definitions of God are logically inconsistent (the three Omnis), and many more are not only unprovable, but impossible to prove. No amount of fire and brimstone can prove to me that I am dealing with the actual creator of the Universe, and not merely a technologically advanced impostor. Even real magic would prove nothing -- perhaps he's simply a talanted magician, but ultimately human. The fact is, God simply has too many claims which are untestable, and which we cannot logically derive from any other evidence. How would you prove that such a God is benevolent? How would you prove that he truly knows everything, or is capable of doing anything, and is not simply very knowledgeable and very powerful?
It also means, by the way, that God is not even a valid hypothesis, and thus has no place in science, even long enough to accept or reject the idea.
Now, can we please get over this? It's a semantic argument, at this point -- I would call you an agnostic, and you would call me an atheist.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
In terms of logic, he's saying that atheism means you're a member of the group 'does not believe in god' ie. atheism (of course, the precise definition of the term is just, well, semantics). Those who believe that there is no god are members of the group 'believes in non-existence of god'. Any member of the latter is automatically a member of the former, but a member of the former is not necessarily a member of the latter. Thus, anyone that is a member of group 1 is an atheist, and all members of group 2 are also members of group 1.
Nobody expects the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal.
Which, as I understood the gp, is exactly the point.
Nobody expects the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal.
Can I get this on a t-shirt? Why, are you a model?
Yes, who would have thought that the real god is actually some noddles and two meatballs that first created a midget.
But here's the real paradox, how can there be meatballs before cows...
how long until
I disagree. I suspect we disagree because you don't find Christians nearly as interesting as I do, and no amount of discussion or reason is going to change your mind. Knowing full well the futility of the effort, I respond to your comments as follows:
Part of the idea is such that, most of the mono-theists think God is really all about them. God is so they can justify what they want. It justifies the suppression of the rights of minorities, It justifies the abuse of women, and children.
Can you point to any evidence or studies which demonstrate that MOST mono-theists think this way, or are you relying on anecdotal matters?
Its a little bit selfish to think that you matter so much to the creator of the universe, if there is such a thing, that he cares about small pointless things, that Humanity and its Earth somehow hold some special place in the cosmos. If there is a "First one." does it not stand to reason that we really wouldn't matter?
I agree with your observation that, in the grand scheme of things, people are insignificant. I think the christians do too. That is, to my knowlege, the whole reason they dedicate so much time to worshiping that creator.
For example. Christians argue against abortion. but that has nothing to do with God really. It has everything to do with Muslims not outnumbering Christians because of population control.
Again, can you point out a study or other evidence to support this? In South Dakota (one of the United States) the abortion question is frequently brought to the voters. According to the ever-reliable wikipedia, South Dakota's total non-christian population is around 3%. It seems unlikely that the muslim share of this 3% of the population is the motivating factor for South Dakota's Christians to oppose abortion.
Its even more self centered to think that a creator of the Universe would want to entertain or torment us until the end of time. Thats completely and utterly pointless.
What evidence do we have that time even applies to this "creator of the Univers" of which you speak? It seems silly to assume that time matters at all from that perspective.
You see where I'm going with this? its a Huge huge universe. Human beings are small, insignificant. The creator of the universe if he exists wouldn't blink twice at what Humans care about.
Again, the only point where you and the christians disagree is whether or not this creator actually DOES care about these little humans.
Theists are not more socially adapted to survival. Quite the opposite. The rational survive in an emergency. The religious panic and pray, and as a result die.
Which is of course why the theists died out long ago, right?
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
I see what you did there.
Although too many will think you just made a typo.
Nicely done.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Your brain is not a computer.
I think you underestimate the power of Dawkins.
I don't think he's famous for being an Atheist, he's famous for being a rational thinker. How he goes after the irrational is the most important part of his fame, its just Religion gets hyped up due to the constant irrationality of it.
I like your definition of "good." I have a similar definition of evil: Anyone who is willing to fuck over another for personal gain.
As an atheist, I can only repeat what a poster a couple of posts up the chain said: "We're all in this together."
Amen, brother.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Na, I'm not agnostic about the christian god. A 'general' god, sure, but the christian god claims to love everyone, know everything, and be all powerful. The existence of evil allows a logical proof that the christian deity doesn't exist, as described in the bible. And if the bible doesn't describe god or leaves so much room for interpretation that you could argue the christian god isn't all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving, then it's not the christian god, but rather a general god.
You are making the same mistake the original poster made mixing social and biological Darwinism. I'm definitely not saying I agree with China's social policies. I don't. Nor do I see their social policy stemming from their atheism. It stems from other elements of the philosophy (and it just so happens they are atheistic). But _biologically_ they are obviously doing fine from an evolutionary point of view. My point is that atheists all around the world continue to breed and survive. China is just one very large, easy example to cite. I'm personally another one, but I don't think citing myself as an example of a surviving breeding atheist would have quite the same scale of impact.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
For example, if a person being quoted disagrees with some position, a quote miner will present quotes that suggest that instead, this person is supportive of this position.
You can't take the sky from me...
You may think you are a Christian, but you are clearly a heretic who preaches that some of your Bible's most clearly laid out laws can be ignored.
However, you sir, appear to be displaying the behavior we've come to expect from Christians! Congratulations on showing up your brother!
Tweet, tweet.
Well, how are you defining these terms?
It is my understanding that agnosticism is a position regarding whether or not a thing can be known. To be agnostic with respect to god is an intellectual position that holds that it is impossible to know whether or not god exists, at least given our present information and intellectual capacity. I don't think it is proper to regard it as a "middle ground" between atheism and theism.
Atheism is a position of doubt with regard to gods. It does not necessarily completely exclude the possibility that a god exists, but the non-existence of god is the basic assumption or default position for atheists.
Theism, on the other hand, accepts the idea that god exists either on the basis of a "leap of faith" or some rational or empirical argument for that god's existence. The theist can still harbor some doubt about whether or not their belief is true.
I am not so sure that Dawkins' world would be "shattered" if he learned that god exists, but then you are using figurative language and it is difficult to understand exactly what you mean. He would have to reconsider many of his past arguments and methods of reasoning, but then, that's something a good scientist should be in the habit of doing anyway. I can't speak for Dawkins, of course, but I imagine the extent of his shock and distress would also probably depend on the type of god he learned of. A basic deistic, hands-off creator probably would not be too hard to cope with. On the other hand, if he learned that a god such as the one described in a literal reading of the Old Testament were in existence (one that created the world 6,000 years ago), he would likely be very surprised and troubled, as would many people (Christians included).
Why should one "have to" do this? What about agnosticism (or weak atheism) makes it an unreasonable or morally unacceptable position, as compared to theism and strong atheism?
All those religions. Not all of them can be right.
By proving that God exists you destroy hundreds of faiths overnight. Yes, but they are all silly fairy tales... except his.
You can't take the sky from me...
As a "practicing" atheist, I would disagree that other atheists (including Dawkins) would have their worlds shattered upon discovering the any gods actually did exist. On the contrary, we would have so much new terrain to explore; it would be very exiting. Many folk are under the impression that it is god/ gods that atheists have a problem with. That is not the case. It is the fact that people devote their lives, and the lives of those around them, to fanciful, non-verifiable, wishful thinking that bothers us. The fact that "believers" use their ancient tomes to justify all sorts of behaviour, from benevolent to malicious, greatly disturbs minds that operate using the scientific method. /~rant
Now, if some kind of, I dunno, lemur came along and sexed up my girlfriend? That sounds like Zeus.
You can't take the sky from me...
But even in your hypothetical example, the fact that group B's bizarre belief helps them survive is just pragmatic and convenient. Their ability to survive in your example has no bearing on the truth of group B's specific claims. For example, for the sake of argument let's assume Christian fundamentalists are breeding and surviving more effectively than evolutionary biologists. That still has no bearing whatsoever on the validity of the claims of a virgin birth, resurrection, turning water into wine, or the existence of an afterlife.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
If you're agnostic, the distinction may be as important as the one for unicorns.
Who ordered that?
Need I remind you of Goedel's Theorem:
For any consistent formal, recursively enumerable theory that proves basic arithmetical truths, an arithmetical statement that is true, but not provable in the theory, can be constructed.
Just because something can't be proved, doesn't mean it's not true - hence Mathematics' own Catch-22. So with Mathematics, so with Theism.
Darwinism is a theory on how the species on earth evolved. Period. It's got nothing to do with ethics or morality. Social darwinism, which is what you speak of, is simply a perversion of biological darwinism. A confusion between science and ethics. It's about as rational as saying that Newton's law of gravity implies that people falling down stairs and breaking their necks is natural and thus good.
They'll say that the horrors of the 20th century were worse than any horrors of the past, and they'll say they were driven by atheists.
They'll conveniently ignore that Hitler was a Catholic and that Nazis had "gott mit uns" on their belt buckles, and they'll ignore the fact that the communist totalitarian regimes, far from being free of religion, enforced a cult of personality of their great leaders, deifying them shamelessly.
And they'll ignore the fact that the reason the number of deaths was greater in the 20th century wars were better weapons and more population density to cull from, but they're really good at cherry picking facts.
Nothing is impossible to argue for those who replace facts with faith.
You can't take the sky from me...
which is why no atheist ever proselityses his belifs about god because he lacks beliefs in god. Oh wait....
You can't take the sky from me...
Occam's razor is a rule of thumb, something for assessing probability. It isn't a law which eradicates the improbable.
Loose lips lose spit.
Actually, "god did it" is not a simpler explanation. In fact it's not an explanation at all unless you include what god is, how he got there and how he did it.
You may as well say "it just happened", that's even simpler as there no extra entities involved and yet it increases the sum total of human knowledge by exactly the same amount.
If we take "atheist" to mean "someone who doesn't believe in a god", then what do we call the annoying zealot who feels the need to loudly and continuously declare that not only does no god exist, but anyone who believes in one is stupid, delusional, childish, even outright crazy; or perhaps a devious schemer dastardly subverting the minds of the weak-willed to become his devout brainwashed slaves ?
The meanings of words change, sometimes for good reasons.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
You can't take the sky from me...
The gods claim that X will happen if Y, do Y, see if X happens. Rinse, repeat.
You can't take the sky from me...
But what if I have photographic proof that Santa Claus exists? Will you change your(and other hate spewing bigoted atheists) opinion then?
In which case, wouldn't it be simpler to just say that life itself doesn't have an origin, instead of inventing a designer? The evolutionary explanation - in contrast to the spontaneous existence, and ornamental spontaneous existence theories - makes accurate predictions.
Who ordered that?
You're muddying the waters a little with rhetoric versus fact. The fact is that rational is not the key trait for survival any more than religious fervor is. In fact the key trait for survival is exactly the opposite of rational e.g. fight or flight response. That's a base reaction that is not connected to anything rational at al. Our ancestors were predominately religious, caused in some part because of our biology, and yet here we are today, still surviving, thanks in part to that fight or flight response.
You are painting a large group of people with a very broad brush. It's similar to saying that all atheists are smart, or blond haired blue eyed children are the master race. Neither of which are true. There are wide and varying degrees of what religious people will tolerate and find socially acceptable. While you will find niches that believe in child rape, dancing with snakes, ethnic slaughter, honor killings, etc., you will also find moderate and free thinking groups and individuals that also happen to believe in God, but not necessarily every letter of the Bible or religious text.
An additional mistake is casting a creator with the same motivations or responses that you yourself might have. Similar to anthropomorphizing your vehicle when it behaves badly. How would you know what an entity capable of creating a Universe would care about or be capable of administering? Since you do not have those capabilities you are making assumptions. Since those capabilities are well outside of something you can attain then those assumptions in turn become simply wild ass guesses. You project and assume behavior that you cannot reliably model and have no basis in fact, and since a religious person can simply overlay there own assumptions about a kind and generous creator over yours, your argument becomes moot.
Dawkins is one of these arrogant "know it all" individuals, who think they know better than the rest. A true scientist is supposed to keep his/her options open. You do not like the naive idea of a personal God that gives and takes? There are other views of God, just look at the Eastern philosophies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taoism There are some fundamental problems in Natural Sciences for which there is no simple solution. Darwin's Theory of Evolution explains how species evolve from other species and its basic premises have been confirmed time and time again. But what is the origin of Life itself? Currently there is no viable answer. There is not a single shred of evidence that something that is alive can appear from something that is not alive. The definition of what is "life" is itself a touchy subject, but let us say that we can draw the line somewhere (an amoeba let's say). It could be that life had always existed in the Cosmos in one form or another (you know, the Force, the Tao, Vril etc.). People cannot comprehend infinity and limitless, because we are ourselves weak finite bounded creatures. Here are some things to think about (Phyllotaxis): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllotaxis People also usually do not distingush the subject of religion, as a social practice, from theism as a philosophy. There is a huge difference. For example Islam-Christianity-Judaism are religions, Taoism is more of a philosophy. It is the blind worshipping of ancient tribal rituals and unquestionable submission to authority, that forces more open minded individuals towards atheism. But atheism has its own problems. Samuel Beckett once said that an atheist is not someone who does not believe in God, but someone who wants to believe but he can't. Sometimes it gets pretty lonely out there. "The Kingdom of God is spread out on Earth, but people do not see it."
Anybody on this list read Dawkins's stuff? Agree with it or don't, it's like the man himself - bitter, repetitious, and self-serious. I think his fans like the ideas they think he represents, when they see them summarized or quoted third-hand. Actual readers will be disappointed.
> a stroke of publicity genius
Now you're talking about Dawkins's real talent.
God told me he hates you.
You make an accusation but you haven't backed it up with facts. There is a term for this too - should I mention it?
If we believe that the world formed in a Big Bang, then life must have a beginning, wouldn't it?
The evolutionary explanation only starts from the point when a self-replicating, self-organizing life form was already formed. That is, after life itself came into existence.
But how exactly did that life come into existence? Dawkins discusses this in some depth in the Blind Watchmaker and that is what I refer to in my previous posts.
UbuntuDupe's point (and though a major socially-inept asshole, he seems to be very smart
That is, you compare:
A) all life evolved from one common ancestor N billion years ago + single-celled became multi-celled + organisms use these strategies to spread their genes +
to
B) you should have lots and lots of kids starting at a young age[1] + you shouldn't drink alcohol or dance + you should discipline your children harshly[1] + the earth is 6000 years old[2] + jesus was born from a virgin[2] + jesus performed miracles + life was designed by a supernatural being +
Now, like U/D said, group A claims to have an intimate understanding of how and why genes are spread. Yet beliefing B) is a better strategy for that. Belief set B has more accurate predictions in that field, in other words, than A.
Your claim now is, that, okay, B's, you found a better strategy than A -- but that doesn't get you the claims labeled [2].
But, [2] is part of a more accurate belief *set*. So the best you can say is, hey, you're successful -- but that's only because of the beliefs labled [1]. You could accomplish the same faster gene spreading without the [2]'s, so by Occam's Razor, you have to discard them, which is what you seem to be saying.
HOWEVER -- and here's the kicker -- would fundies do [1]'s without believing [2]'s?
Insofar as comparing belief *sets* (worldview, theoretical model), yes, the virgin birth belief *does* have a bearing on gene spreading rate, as counterintuitive as that might be.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
I'd love to have a source for that story. I found this, which matches you word for word, but they don't give a source.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
You clearly don't understand what that phrase means. Strong correlation does most certainly imply causation. It doesn't prove it however.
Who ordered that?
yep, they would all be shattered. and then lawyers, insurance people and similar would move in to take their place by broker deals with god.
that is, if said entity was at all contactable.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
You're confusing deity with mortality. There's nothing incompatible with the existence of a deity and the non-existence of you. Unless, the deity in question, has some objection to your non-existence. Maybe he'd want you to exist, so he could torture you in perpetuity instead, because you believed in some other deity.
Who ordered that?
There is also no scientific theory for the origin of the universe prior to the big bang. Where does all matter and energy come from? Saying "It just is" is one possibility, but not a provable one, or even a provably best possibility.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
sounds like your unfounded hatred of Christians allows you to justify anything against us
Menus: Linux=function, Windows=vendor, OS X=as little as possible. Makes a statement, don't you think?
What about people who believe that there is more supporting evidence (usually strong supporting evidence) for particular beliefs? That is the usual case for people who do believe a religion to be true. And yet somehow they can never deliver when asked.
This is exactly what I'm talking about: people lower their standards of evidence enough to accept the lame "proofs" offered by the proponents of their own religion, but do not extend the same courtesy to competing religions. That's not a viable option for the intellectually honest.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I fail to see how our worldviews significantly differ or why you "had to comment on my post", apart from the fact that you deliberately use emotionally loaded and antagonistic language. I don't see how that approach does anything to help theists see the fallacy in their worldview, and I think the antagonism does rather the opposite.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
The meanings of words change, sometimes for good reasons. Indeed they do. But in this case the change is propagandistic, and leaves us without a term for what the word originally meant, and the actual position a lot of atheists seem to take.
Not everyone is on a crusade.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Scientific, or natural, laws are theories that have been used to reliably predict outcomes in applicable situations. When a law is violated by a result which is not expected or accounted for by any other means, research is used to determine the cause of the unpredicted outcome. If the law is proven to be untrue in a particular situation by its own nature, and not by another explanation, the law is thrown out, and new theories are developed and tested in order to account for the new cases.
This is basic scientific process, and yet I see time and time again people trying to prove god exists by claiming scientists believe something they don't. Do any of you people remember 5th grade science class?
The day you present non-hypothetical evidence to the scientific community that stands up to scrutiny is the day gravity, thermodynamics, or whatever law you are disproving is totally thrown out of the window. I wish you luck, 'cause it's gonna be pretty tough to find.
Menus: Linux=function, Windows=vendor, OS X=as little as possible. Makes a statement, don't you think?
Would you consider the possibility that he's a Nazi from inside the hollow earth, coming out to display the technology they've developed since WWII?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
So with all binary logic. Thanks for pointing out that Goedel's Theorem deals with this...
As I understand it, the tradition started because it was considered sacreligious (or at least disrespectful) to vandalize or destroy a textual representation of the name, but since paper and other media have a finite life, almost any written representation would eventually wear out and be destroyed. Better to just not write it down in the first place and not worry about whether it's disrespectful when it gets worn out and illegible, scribbled over, or disposed of.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
I don't even know anyone (as a friend) who is a theist anymore. It's just not an issue.
That said, while I appreciate the solidity of his reasoning, I find Dawkins' writing style to be too dry and academic. I much prefer Hitchens and Harris for their entertaining style of writing, and I suggest Dennet to curious theists who might appreciate his "softly, softly" approach.
"Creationist! Exterminate! Exterminate!"
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
I disagree with your assessment.
First, you state that God is about justifying what believers want. I doubt that to be true. In my experience (and in the testimonies I have heard from other Christians), it is quite the opposite: one must make his or her life conform to what God wants (which usually requires giving up some sinful behavior). Granted, there are people who use religion as a tool to achieve their own agendas, and perhaps such people form the majority of people professing to be mono-thesitic believers, but to say that their view of religion is what religion is supposed to be about (when the religion clearly states otherwise) is simply incorrect.
Second, you argue that mono-theistic believers are self-centered by asking why a singular God would care about us little old human beings? Well, why not? Value is a completely arbitrary thing. Some people really want to own a Jag; others would rather have a hybrid that uses less fuel. These people value different things. You seem to suggest that a god would value the vastness of empty space and the wonder of the cosmos more than human beings. Value is arbitrary, and having it the other way around would be just as likely (and to me, far more plausible. Planets don't hold good conversations).
Third, you state that Christians are interested in the abortion debate due to population control concerns. Where did you get this idea? It's the first time I've ever heard of it. No Christian I know objects to abortion because it would lower the number of Christians. They object to it because they simply feel that it is taking a life that one is not morally allowed to take.
I think your last paragraph is perhaps the only one that makes any real sense. Mono-thesists have done stupid things and have been duped by authority figures to go along with stupid policies. Some have even used their belief as an excuse to do things which their own code of ethics says is wrong. Many have used religion as an opiate. However, is that really true faith? Is it an artifact of their beliefs, or could it be a lack of education or critical thinking skills?
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Why? What's wrong with continuing to suspend judgment in the lack of evidence? I don't know whether my next-door neighbor wears underpants to bed, but I don't take a "leap of faith" just because I'm compelled to hold uninformed opinions about issues I don't know about.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
I agree. You might want to try God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens instead, it's a much better anti-religion book.
It would be well deserved.
Menus: Linux=function, Windows=vendor, OS X=as little as possible. Makes a statement, don't you think?
Not especially true: many Nazis were occultists who were more committed to pre-Christian German paganism. Hitler's personal beliefs aren't especially well-known since religion wasn't a motivating factor for him, simply one of many propaganda tools.
and they'll ignore the fact that the communist totalitarian regimes, far from being free of religion, enforced a cult of personality of their great leaders, deifying them shamelesslyYes but they were still atheistic. Turns out getting rid of religion doesn't solve the problem after all. This is basic troubleshooting: if removing religion doesn't remove the unwanted behavior, then religion isn't the source of the unwanted behavior.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Fairy Tales, Myths, and Fables do serve good purposes for people at certain phases of their development. Sadly, some people do not develop to the point where they out grow all of it.
If I had children (which I wont and with more education those odds get even worse) I WOULD give them a church experience as well as all the other childish BS as long as it serves a fruitful purpose at that point. (Catholic- because most people who broke free that I know were raised catholic.)
It is a difficult leap when you learn everything you know was a myth and lose that security and simplistic certainty one has as a child. Better as a gradual process as your able to cope with it.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
It has a negative impact (what you and Dawkins point out). It also has positive impacts. The question is what the net effect is.
Really, the problem with religion is that faith is not a reliable process of forming accurate beliefs, nor is it a reliable process for forming beneficial beliefs. However, tradition is at least a partially reliable process for forming beneficial beliefs, due to processes similar to natural selection. This has the surprising result that popular, long-established religions are on average better than newer religious movements. When you consider the evangelical/fundamentalist Christianity is a relatively new religious movement, and consider the effect of cults compared to that of older religions, this indeed seems to make sense.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
I suppose I'll bite, but I smell a troll..
Anyhow, scientifically speaking, skepticism is the only tenable position. Proving the lack of something is not the question. To believe in something's existence, one must be presented with either: sufficient evidence of its existence, or logical necessity of its existence. God has neither.
To "disprove" God would be starting from a logically untenable position in initially taking his existence on faith.
My Babylon
He was talking about individuals, not societies.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Using logic, you can't prove a negative.
Can you prove to me that there isn't a magical entity that is magically immune to empirical observation that defecates in your bed every night? If you can't prove against it, it must exist right?
And for a claim C to be a scientific truth means nothing more and nothing less than, "Making predictions based on C will have a higher accuracy than making predictions based on not-C."(I'd work it out in Bayesian terms if I had the time.)
So, for example, it would make no sense to say, "C is true, but all observations will appear as if it is not."
I claim that it is likewise non-sensical to say, "A and B both persue goal G with the same resources, and B is consistently more successful, but A has a better understanding of it." The reason is that to be more successful (beyond a one/two/three-time fluke) means to have a better understanding of how to pursue the goal (assuming, again, roughly the same resources, which holds here.)
Now, I would agree that higher evolutionary success due to a philosophy that includes flat-earthism wouldn't imply the earth is flat. But look at the change in circumstances: the scientific field judging the shape of the earth does not necessarily make claims about evolutionary fitness. So beating them at evolutionary fitness would not prove better understanding. The (say) astronomers would still be superior at understanding how to travel, to launch satellites, etc.
Contrast this with evolutionary biologists, who most certainly DO claim to intimately understand all of the intricacies of what does and does not lead to a gene's propogation. Propogating your genes at a higher percentage rate than they do, when both camps want that, would certainly prove -- as per the standard of scientific truth -- a greater understanding.
So, like I said before, the best you can do is appeal to Occam's Razor to "shave off" the mythological assumptions that "clearly" aren't necessary for propogating genes. But I claim that from the mind of a Christian fundamentalist, these beliefs can't be so easily decoupled.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
This is a bizarre point of view because God (the Designer) by definition does not have an origin.
Oh really? Do tell.
Dawkins still has to rely on a miracle as the explanation for the origin of life.
No he doesn't, since he doesn't explain the origin of life.
What he grapples with and refuses to acknowledge is the source of the miracle.
Dawkins seems to define a miracle as the random occurrence of an extremely rare event. In what way do such things have sources?
Play Command HQ online
What beautiful thing is ever saved?
Play Command HQ online
Those experiments are done and gone. God theory dominated science for thousands of years. It wasn't very fruitful and didn't hold up in the long run.
Play Command HQ online
What's your point? You think no-one in the Church was an atheist?
Play Command HQ online
New Flash: Societies are made of individuals!
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
Agreed. And yet, if you did understand very much about it, you might realize that it's not all that silly. What's more, it probably agrees more with typical /. belief systems than Christianity does -- it does not encourage the building of churches or other edifices of religious wealth and power, for example, and it does not recognize a "professional" priesthood. But in other respects you are absolutely correct -- ignorance really is bliss.
Breakfast served all day!
So you're unwilling to believe in a tea pot because some ancient guru said it, but you are willing to believe in some scientist that you have never met and whose statements you cannot prove? How is your belief different from the person that believes in the teapot? Why are you so quick to dismiss his guru in favor of yours?
There's a very strong distinction between the physical and metaphysical. If unicorns live on Earth, it's *extremely* likely that we would have found physical evidence of them. People can create hypothesis about unicorns (or Bigfoot, Nessie, etc.) and those hypothesis can be tested by observation of physical phenomena. Even though we can never strictly prove unicorns do not exist, we can accumulate evidence that makes that possibility very unlikely.
But the God "theory" posits that God is outside of physical phenomena. There's no way to accumulate physical evidence and formulate scientific studies about God's existence, so there is no way to deny the theory. There has not been, nor will there ever be, a single piece of evidence even *suggesting* God does not exist. It's logically impossible.
So while someone might *effectively* be an atheist, it's not useless to make the distinction between atheism and agnosticism. It shows a more thorough understanding of the philosophy behind the science.
What I love about the Flamebait mod is that it tells me that somewhere out there, someone knows I'm right, doesn't like it, but cant' come up with a suitable counterpoint. Nice.
The link you gave is the very source I got it from. It is such a perfect explanitory analogy that I bookmarked it. I had a feeling I'd want to quote it sooner or later :)
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
"I find it sad that those of religious pursuasion are prepared to make definitive statements without the facts to back them up."
You mean like, "There is no God"?
Dude, that's like saying we should all become nazis because there's anti-semitism in the world.
Not sure what your statement has to do with mine.
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
An "agnostic" is apparently an atheist (someone who lives without a belief in gods) who thinks the label atheist offends religious people.
But as others have ponited out, the strong believers among religious people tend to be 99% atheist anyway, since there are probably a hundred gods they don't believe in...
And your answer to that is to invent immortality? There are beautiful things about the world regardless of whether they last forever or not. I will not tell you that the "meaningless" or "purposeless" universe is not grim. Heck, that's why religion exists in the first place (to counter the irrational and destructive emotional reaction to this fact). But once you delve deeply enough into meaning and "purpose" you realize that
:)
a) They are precisely what religion lacks
b) you as a sentient being have the most reason to actually go through with this "life" thing. You can abstract, and learn, and write. You can love. You can do science.
It is much more worthwhile, trust me, than handing your life over to some deity and relying on fiction to comfort yourself.
Immortality consists largely of boredom. -- Zefrem Cochrane, "Metamorphosis", stardate 3219.8
I'm not sure he does it "rather well" so much as "very loudly". Most of his arguments lack basic rigor, and he comes off as nothing more than a political campaigner appealing to quasi intellectuals and high-school graduates. He doesn't seem to understand that non-belief is a belief system in itself, and that he's relegated himself to being Yin to theisms Yang with very little overall value.
;) The whole Dawkins fad is great popcorn viewing though.
Meanwhile... real scientists, with their minds on science rather than saving or not-saving our souls, are getting in and doing actual real work trying to figure this whole thing out.
2. A theory - no.
A scientific theory is a theory which conforms to very strict rules. A theory in general does not.
My objection to Dawkins principles is that he suggests that all theories of god should be rejected without any critical assessment. So if a theory of god appears tomorrow which conforms to scientific principles (I'm not saying it will - I am merely hypothesizing) then we must reject it because it refers to supernatural beings. I'm sorry but that lacks the plain objectivity of the scientific mind. The problem herein seems to stem from lack of understanding of what a scientific theory _is_. In science, "theory" refers to an explanation for observable phenomenon that has been tested so rigorously and so many times without being disproved that the probability of its being disproved is near zero. (A scientific law is essentially a theory that is so fleshed out that there are few unknowns left. IE, the theory of evolution is not a law because there's still plenty of room for more details on how it works, while gravity is a law because it's almost entirely complete.)
In scientific terms, theory pretty much = fact. What most other laypeople confuse for theory is actually conjecture. (Sometimes hypothesis, but not where religion is concerned, for a hypothesis by definition must be testable.)
There do not exist any theories backing religion. Period. There are many conjectures out there, but never has someone come up with a testable (can be proven or disproved) hypothesis that has not been disproved.
By reading this you acknowledge that you have read it.
Yes, I am waiting for all the "atheism is a faith" claimers to come up with a refutation to the common "is not collecting stamps a hobby?" counter argument/analogy, or to come up with various Greek terms for all the other non-provable things people can or can not believe in...
Or to show that there is any difference between an Atheist not believing in Jehova and a Christian not believing in Zeus.
Of course your logic fails because of these points you overlooked:
1) Religion defies logic. Think of the Genesis 1 counting of days before there was a difference between night and day...
2) It should be obvious that, in order for the teapot to orbit Venus there had to be a Venus and accompanying universe. Therefore it was necessary for the teapot to create the universe and Venus to orbit, and it follows: that is precisely what the teapot did!
3) Any competing theories to Teapot Creationism is heresy. What do we say about places where there are heretics? Kill them all and let the Teapot sort them out!
Because if agnosticism is the only choice then so is not denying UFO observations, ghosts, ESP (clairvoyance, telepathy, telekinesis, telempathy etc.), the Leviathan, Bigfoot, that Atlantis and Lemuria were actual continents that vanished, and so on and so forth...
Why? There are several UFO observations from credible sources yet it is perfectly acceptable to deny the existence of UFOs. Why is it any less credible to deny the existence of (non-observed) gods?
Anyway, an atheist lives a life with no faith in gods. The only way there would be a difference between an atheits and an agnostic cwould be if the agnostic "hedged his bets" by the occasional prayer to Yahweh, a sacrifice to Ganesha for good luck or an offering at a Shinto shrine.
But there will be more: According to the JW, on the Day of Judgement 144,000 will ascend to Heaven, 144,000 will go to Hell, and the rest will live in the (now God-less) world they left behind... :)
Yeah, but we don't have Greek words to add "a-" to for those...
Do we?
If you excuse me I have to go back to my hobby of not collecting stamps. Busy, busy.
baby.
They just say "Unicorns aren't real."
It depends on the situation. If you are having a chat over a pint in the pub then that's fine. If you were engaging in a scientific debate about the existence of unicorns then you should get taken to task. Since this is what Dawkins claims to be doing about god then he should expect to get taken to task.
I find the sad thing with Dawkins is that he often comes across as irrational as the fundamentalist nutters he arguing with - although I expect that goes some way to explain his popular appeal: it is 'fun' to see two people getting really mad at each other. He needs to remember that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
I think, this has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING with "Liberals" or "Conservatives" on either side of this argument, hierarchical or egalitarian society, etc. -- Social Darwinism is simply invalid and does not properly derive from either evolutionary biology or cultural evolution of modern society. It's primitive survivalist crap that has no place in either science or politics.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
"For one thing Dawkins claims that all religion is fundamentally evil"
Is there some other edition of that book that is only available to religions people or are you all just not bothering to read it before you claim to know what its says?
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
I will rephrase it for you. The ancient Greeks believed that everything that happened was caused by one or more Gods. If the winter was particularly cold, it was because some God did it. If you stubbed your toe, it was punishment from a God. As time passed and we learned more about how things work, we formulated laws of physics which predict very accurately how physical things behave and the physical state of a system changes over time. The laws of physics have no need for a hidden God to make things happen in the universe - stars shine due to the nuclear reactions of their constituent atoms under gravitational pressure, not because a God made them do it, and so on.
Current theories of the origin of the universe posit that when you trace the current state of the universe back in time you reach a singularity about 13.7 billion years ago, in which the laws of physics break down, and particularly beyond which the concept of Time does not exist. Creationists seize upon that singularity and assert that "because we don't understand what happened at or before the singularity, that must mean that God created the universe!". This is a weak argument no better than the ancient Greeks could muster - because we don't understand something, God must be the reason.
But my point on irrelevance was that current physical laws do not require the existence of a God. We don't know how the singularity worked, but whether it was caused by a God or not does not affect the universe today.
And it should be obvious that Hawking and other cosmologists are not studying the beginning of the universe to look for the existence of any God.
If you want to find a God, look inside yourself, because you won't find one in the universe.
Perhaps you better stick with Dr. Seuss
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
Yes but he said atheism is group 1 and NOT group 2, hence my question.
Stop arguing from ignorance!
PrincetonUniversity
April 25, 2002
New Theory Provides Alternative to Big Bang
A new theory of the universe suggests that space and time may not have begun in a big bang, but may have always existed in an endless cycle of expansion and rebirth.
Princeton physicist Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok of Cambridge University described their proposed theory in an article published April 25 in an online edition of Science.
The theory proposes that, in each cycle, the universe refills with hot, dense matter and radiation, which begins a period of expansion and cooling like the one of the standard big bang picture. After 14 billion years, the expansion of the universe accelerates, as astronomers have recently observed. After trillions of years, the matter and radiation are almost completely dissipated and the expansion stalls. An energy field that pervades the universe then creates new matter and radiation, which restarts the cycle.
The new theory provides possible answers to several longstanding problems with the big bang model, which has dominated the field of cosmology for decades. It addresses, for example, the nagging question of what might have triggered or come "before" the beginning of time.
You can't take the sky from me...
And you provided the facts back up there, I don't need to mention them again.
You can't take the sky from me...
by Herman Hesse. Of course, that works under the assumption that God has already shown himself to you time and time again and you just didn't recognize him.
Yes. Because people making definitive statements without the facts to back them up is unheard of on the internet, except for those rascally religious people.
"Polytheism is a form of theism. So your point is what, exactly?"
Nice try, but both are forms of religion, not forms of each other. My point is you don't have a clue.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I wonder what proof Mr. Dawkins has to support his contention that there's no God. What proof does he have that God doesn't exist?
You are confused about the difference between religion and theism. Judaism and Hinduism are both theistic religions. The former is monotheist and the latter is polytheist. To fully burn your error into your mind, consider this definition:
Belief in the existence of a god or gods, especially belief in a personal God as creator and ruler of the world.
See how belief in many gods also counts as theism? You should save the clever arrogance, like telling me I have no clue, for times when you're actually right. As it stands, you've just set yourself up for a bigger fall.
Wouldn't matter if the person you responded to had named a specific religion anyway. His claims could easily be taken as implicitly referring to the culture in which they live. You've just interpreted him(/her) as making a universal claim when there's no reason to suppose that's the case. Perhaps they'd freely admit to you that in India, yes, it would be better to promote Hinduism than Christianity. After all, adaptation is influenced by the environment we're in, not some hypothetical environment we might one day encounter.
I'd say it's rather extremist to take the actions of someone quite obviously seen as an extremist, even by the standards of most people even within the same religion, and use as an illustration of how screwed up religous people are.
Let's see: criticising treating faith as a virtue, versus flying planes into buildings.
Nope sorry, still can't see that these are anywhere near on the same level of extremism.
As for the atheist-jihadic, the meaning of that is that someone taking a purist rationalistic stand, such as Dawkings does, that then spends so much effort as to even get in the 9/11-debate (that have nothing to do with the evolutionist-creationalist, which is what Dawkings normally meddles in) and get all bug-eyed about how this is what happens when religion poisons people, he has, by far, left the realm of rationalism.
No, that's not a "jihad". Atheists don't have jihads by definition. Where is he behaving irrationally?
If this is flamebait, then atleast have the courage to explain why it is so. Haven't you folks ever watch Doctor Who?
I knew I should have compared the Evolutionists to Cybermen.
If anything, add a little Doctor Who to the argument. Suppose the Cybermen were Evolutionists as they clame to be "Human Mk II". Suppose the Daleks were Creationists as they come out of no where from their "Ark" prison. The Doctor would be the Flying Spaghetti Monster, flying around in the TARDIS.
Daleks would rather "exterminate" (excommunicate non-believers) just about everyone they deem a heritic than allow peole to explain why they exist, while the Cybermen make people conform or be "deleted" (disprove any whimiscal theory that science can not prove of how man was form). Then there is the Doctor, who only cares that people are happy and have the free will to choose what they want to believe. And when it is all over, they get to ride the TARDIS to a world of beer volcanoes and a stripper factory. Ramen!
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
Don't discount the power of rationalization. People in general, not just theists, will tend to research their ideas *just* enough to satisfy their preconceived notions. If someone were to find the best-evidenced religion and study it, then, they would not be forced to accept any others rationally, even if the evidence is silly: one sets the bar of confirmation individually.
An interesting comparison would be how much one believes in a religion based on little evidence based on any number of other silly things which nevertheless have *better* evidence for them, like racism or extreme laissez-faire economics. This is obviously ignoring the evidence against those two concepts mirroring reality, but then again that's precisely how religion tends to work.
That argument applies just as incorrectly to anything.
You positively do not have to understand very much about capitalism to realize it's a silly economic system. (in USRR)
You positively do not have to understand very much about communism to realize it's a silly economic system. (in America)
You positively do not have to understand very much about Barack Obama to realize he's a silly presidential candidate. (Clinton, McCain)
You positively do not have to understand very much about Hillary Clinton to realize she's a silly presidential candidate. (Obama, McCain)
You positively do not have to understand very much about John McCain to realize he's a silly presidential candidate. (Obama, Hillary)
Highlighting the details that others, who are already predisposed against them, present to you, does not form a solid base of knowledge. And no, I don't think you could accurately call Norse mythology silly without considerable knowledge and understanding. You say so simply because everybody else has already dismissed it out of hand, aand that improper dismissal adds emotional, not rational, weight to your argument.
Really, both Atheism and Agnosticism come in strong and weak varieties.
Strong Atheists hold that a God categorically CAN NOT exist.
Weak atheists simply do not believe that a god does exist. This can include anyone who doesn't believe in a god simply because no positive evidence is available.
The weak agnostic doesn't believe that we know the nature of god(s)
The strong agnostic believes we CAN NOT know the nature of god(s).
Wrong! try again.
Soylent green is made out of individuals too, but what's best for a batch of soylent green isn't what's best for the individual!
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
I generally agree with you, but if a guy walked up to me, claimed to be Zeus, and then called down honest-to-god lightning to hit a target of his choice, I'd call him whatever he wanted to be called.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Secondly, when you talk about "miraculous events which cannot occur if there wasn't someone/thing causing that event," well, name one. The trouble with "miracles" in the sense you mean is that there is no situation in which sufficient evidence exists that the event occurred rather than the claim being merely a mistake or an outright falsehood.
Third, it's all very well to ascribe properties to some kind of ideological construct. "God is a being with no beginning and no end." OK. Invisible Unicorns are Pink.
Demonstrate, in a logically consistent way, how "God is a being with no beginning and no end." has any more relevance as a statement that describes the state of the world than "Invisible Unicorns are Pink." or, for that matter, "Elvis Lives."
Merely because you can define some object doesn't mean it exists. I can declare that there exists on a Cartesian plane a square with 6 sides. That doesn't make it true. I can claim that there exists a chest in my closet filled with solid gold bars, wave a wand over the door and chant "So mote it be!" That doesn't make it true either. Similarly, you can chant over and over that there exists a "God" who is "a being with no beginning and no end" but that doesn't make it true.
You are engaging in "truthiness" of the most ridiculous sort. You want "god" to be real, so you assert it over and over, but that has no effect on whether "god" describes any phenomena that exists in the Universe.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
I can appreciate that a person's spiritual experiences can be very compelling to them, but I can't help but notice that there are just as many people who have had experiences that are just as compelling that lead them to completely different religious beliefs that they hold just as strongly. They can't all be right, and there's no rational way to distinguish them.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
No, the idea that you don't have to understand something to recognise silliness is fallacious. How can you dismiss an idea which you do not grasp?
If a child says gravity is silly because he can't see it, you would argue that he simply doesn't understand it and therefore can't make a valid judgement. If a caricature theist without any formal scientific education says evolution is silly you would argue that his view is similarly invalid on the grounds of ignorance. Why then can Dawkins make dogmatic declarations on philosophical matters which fall squarely outside his field of expertise?
Dawkins has no background in philosophy whatsoever, let alone theology. He can't even give you a workable definition of "truth". He is universally dismissed by philosophers the world over as an amateur upstart without the faintest clue about that against which he rants.
While the smoke is still coming from the error burn I might just add that the point of my reply was that atheisim did not make Dawkins famous, if anything it was the other way around.
I don't know the answer to the question about the assumed evolutionary advantages bestowed on theists. Is it more advantageous to follow the preist or the prophet, or is more advantageous to do a bit of both and let god/evolution sort it out?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
He's always annoyed me. As said elsewhere, he presents half-baked arguments as facts, glossing over technicalities or other possible explanations. It makes for impossible reading as you don't know which bits can be backed up and which can't. In my opinion, we need a better poster boy for Science Vs. Religion.
Be careful! If evolution created us, then religious tendencies were produced by evolution and therefore important in some evolutionary sense. Therefore, religion has an important use to humans, just looking at if from your own evolutionary standpoint. Of course, it is also possible that those with a religious "gene?" have a tendency to clan against those who don't.
I was very careful not to imply that I was arguing for the existence of immortality or for the existence of a deity, at least in this thread. You agree that a meaningless universe is grim. I would go further and say that by definition a meaningless universe is not worth the trouble. Perhaps I am just a mental weakling, but I don't see anything particularly cool about abstracting, learning, writing, loving, and doing science...and then becoming nothing. If there is nothing transcendent, then it is not "much more worthwhile than handing my life over to some deity." In fact, it is exactly equal in worth...both are worth nothing. Even the love I experience is just a trick of natural selection.
;-)
Yes, I know I am not the first to express such ideas, and am not even expressing them very well. This is slashdot...you get what you pay for.
Oh, and regarding your Cochrane quote, see my sig. My fictional character can kick your fictional character's ass.
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
Yeah, I was just hoping to find an original news article or something. I'd be interested in reading more about what happened.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Point well taken and I agree. But even if it could be shown that religion produces an evolutionary advantage in some contexts (a claim definitely worth investigating), it doesn't mean the specific claims a religion makes about the world are true. An example I've used in another thread: I can believe the world is flat and perhaps for some strange reason during some epochs it helps me propagate my genes to believe that (to the degree that our ancestors thought about such things, this was the successful model for 100k+ years). But it does not mean the world is flat. The actual flatness or roundness of the world is a separate objective claim that must be tested by some other means than the evolutionary success or failure of the adherents.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
I find it sad that those of religious pursuasion are prepared to make definitive statements without the facts to back them up.
Um, doesn't "definitive statements without the facts to back them up" pretty much define what a religion is?
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Ultimately it is too difficult for us to predict which traits will be most useful. I think if you're an atheist you really can't comment meaningfully about which traits are better for our race. There's simply too many variables, possibilities, and environments to consider. As you essentially said, let god/evolution sort it out! As a theist I don't think survival is the greatest good anyway. It's just interesting to see atheists act as though it is important that we identify which traits are most advantageous. Why should they care if theism succeeds? Obviously it's the most successful in this given environment if it succeeds. Let the chips fall where they may.
So let me get this right. If the teapot is smaller than a stone, a duck will be able to see it?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Great, so if this being is conscious and follows everything going on in the Universe with interest, it seems to be pretty much OK with pain and suffering, random violence, disasters, and so on. Sweet!
So, if it's not disinterest, and not "non-interference", and not impotence, is it like a game of The Sims 2 with autonomy on full?
No, they are not the same problem at all. Provability in mathematics is axiomatic, provability in physical reality is subject to empirical satisfaction. That is why I was pointing out the distinction. Religion does not satisfy any conditions of provability, of any chosen "genre", in any SINGLE true statement, let alone all of them(which as Godel showed, is impossible given the current notion of logic).
"Dawkins is perhaps most famous for his atheism"
As a qualified old fart, I think the emphasis on his belief (or lack of belief if you prefer) is a recent thing (since 'the god delusion' hit the bookstores), in my mind he will always be famous for 'the selfish gene', my 1989 copy says it was first published in 76.
"I think it's quite useless to postulate about which behaviours or ideas should be spread more, because of presumed evolutionary benefits."
Exactly, and if you bring the psudeo-science of eugenics into it then it's worse than useless.
"As a theist I don't think survival is the greatest good anyway."
I'm not a theist but that doesn't mean the existance of the Universe is anything less than a miricale. Deep down I don't belive in good and evil, although I instinctively recognise the behaviour and firmly belive there are things worth fighting and dying for. What I have come to accept is that the Universe 'just is', as such I have no argument with a theist who likewise accepts that god 'just is'.
IMHO Dawkins (along with S.J.Gould) will be remebered as giants of 20th century biology, but philosphy and religion are about wisdom not intellect.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.