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Science Cannot Prove the Existence of God
StartsWithABang writes: This past weekend, Eric Metaxas lit up the world with his bold article in the Wall Street Journal, Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God. As a scientific counterpoint, this article fully addresses three major points of that "case," including what the condition are that we need for life to arise, how rare (or common) are those conditions, and if we don't find life where we expect it, can we learn anything about God at all?
God, like an unseen hair
Untouched by intellectual stare
Refuses bending to mortal will
Yet teasing the human soul still
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
So is Nietzsche. But you know who's alive? Kim Kardashian. Where's the justice in that?
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says man, "[that article in the Wall Street Urinal says that science] proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
– excerpted from Douglas Adams (for the cretins in the audience)
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
... violates how language works, when one defines a concept in language it's drawn from the environment, there is no "god" to point to in our environment. If I say house I can point to it, if I say car, I can point to it. The same cannot be said for god. The word god defines nothing, because it's definitions have no coherence in terms of the natural world. All truths are natural and drawn from the environment. This is how people 'argue' that the other persons god is wrong, they use nature. You can use nature to disprove all ancient gods and their claims about reality.
If a god like being exists, this does not justify religion in any way. The idea that 'evidence for god exists' somehow proves the doctrines of the bible or koran or any other superstitious nonsense is laughable.
"If there is a God then lie is a miracle. If there is no God then life is an even bigger miracle". A brainier human than me came up with this line. The universe is in charge folks. Sit back and enjoy the ride.
Logic can't explain intuition, and intuition can't explain logic. They're two different ways of looking at reality, and each is perfectly valid in its own way, and they happily coexist within each of us.
For "science" (that is, a logical, rational approach) to try to explain "God" (a matter of faith, intuition, or myth, depending on your point of view) makes about as much sense as describing a piece of music in terms of odors (I know, some music stinks). Most of us have no problem surfing between levels of consciousness, or realizing that it's silly to try to describe the effect of a piece of abstract art in terms of the chemical composition of the paints.
Be rational, be irrational, enjoy them both, but don't try to explain one in terms of the other.
And they say atheists can't be fundamentalist extremist asshole, too.
Which of those categories does UNIX editors fit under?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Isn't arguing with a WSJ editorial writer roughly the equivalent of racing a team of thalidomide babies, or beating a crack team of retards at Jeopardy? Easy, sure, and likely even an indication of your superior aptitude. Just... Somehow unseemly.
"If there is a God then lie is a miracle. If there is no God then life is an even bigger miracle".
I disagree: God+life is a bigger miracle than life alone.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Just love the argument from incredulity. "It's more amazing than my puny brain can handle, therefor God!"
No, stupid. Try proving the claims that your religion makes are true. Prove miracles. Prove life after death. Prove Jesus rose from the grave. Hell, Prove Jesus ever actually existed. Prove that humanity came from a single breeding pair. Find the genetic bottleneck in our genes from when the world was reduced to Noah and his family.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Within our scope there doesn't seem to be a God (except for people who say every sunset = god's miracle, etc).
But if we consider that we barely know our universe, maybe there is some kind of God in a way that we don't understand. I seem to recall, but could be wrong because I'm not a "bibleist", that Jesus said something along the lines that we can't understand the nature of God so don't try(*). Perhaps then there is a form or Divine Intelligence out there that exists in a time frame or physical scope we have yet to see.
Consequently, my position is non-religious but open, and hopeful without having my hopes up, to the possibility of something more. I also consider hardcore atheists (not to be confused with secularists) to be a form of religious zealots, a kind of arrogant gnosticism by people who think too much of themselves.
(*) I noticed that conservative Christian organizations often do the opposite of what Jesus preached, which I don't understand.
Religion, you Emacs lover, you!
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
It is also impossible to disprove the existence of anyone's god(s).
FTFY
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If God actually came down to Earth and showed Himself, maybe that would be evidence?
But, be ready, He may not be what you are expecting!
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Actually, science "states" (or rather, simply recognizes) that it can't investigate anything that doesn't leave any observable evidence. It's religion that works hard to ensure that their cherished phenomena all stay in that category.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Saying God doesn't exist is like saying that lunch time doesn't exist, or money doesn't exist, or the United States doesn't exist. You can't disprove the existence of an idea; and dismissing the real influence of that idea (both good and bad) and the potential influence of that idea (both good and bad) is asinine.
I've noticed that Atheists seem to have a much more dogmatic axe to grind than most religious people about what is an undecidable proposition either way. You never know if they are just being asshat trolls (Protesting holiday displays in public spaces) or just people with a different religion who are every bit as intolerant as the people they complain about.
Sweet, sweet Emacs. To the Deuce x 3 with all ye vi cretins!
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Dude, you're never going to sell any books with THAT simplification.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
It's not that hard. Somehow I make sure that I use the science part to understand the physical world and not poison living things or get hit by a bus, and I simultaneously use the spiritual part to understand people can behave and how to treat them better. But I don't make the mistake of using science to worry about which bed linens might be Jesus' and I don't use the religion part to pray my way out of jams or explain why butterflies look nice. I know science is always subject to new data, and that the Bible was a milleniums-long game of telephone (OT) and written by at least four people each with an agenda (NT). So take it all with a grain of salt and read for deep meaning - it's not a day planner.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Wait. That's like saying the scientific method is a tool, characterizing the "what" of existence, leaving the "why" to others.
You're not going to get any kind of shooting war going with a rational approach like that, sir.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
It's a takeoff on the Anthropic Principle, which says that the Universe has to be set up for intelligent life because otherwise we couldn't be observing it. The idea is that, since there's a whole lot of ways the Universe could be set up in ways that would make intelligent life impossible, God must have set it up.
One problem is that this, by itself, means nothing. We don't know how many Universes exist in some sense, and it's quite reasonable that infinitely many do, with all possible variations. (This is, of course, unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific, but if true it would completely nullify the divine argument.) It's also possible that physics is set up without all of the independent parameters. It may be that there's a necessary relation between the charge on an electron, the mass of the bottom quark, the gravitational constant, and Planck's constant, so that they aren't all independent. It wouldn't be the first time that physics had found ways two things depend on each other.
Fundamentally, though, it's an appeal to ignorance. The author doesn't know why all this would have happened without God, so there must be a God, right?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
that there was _tons_ of proof that God exists (e.g. Miracles) right up until the invention of the camera, the jet airplane and the t.v. journalist...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I figure that if God were interested in dropping a closed-form mathematical proof, there are any number of simpler ways to go about it than a few dozen Jews and the odd Greek composing The Bible.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Those books actually have some rules that are drawn from the environment. ...
Religions sometimes codify social and physical survival strategies, don't mess with the neighbor's wife, don't eat that type of sea creature, etc.
Sure. Those books hold some good advice. And some bad. A little useful knowledge. And some outdated knowledge. (We have replaced "don't eat pigs" with "just check for parasites first", for example.) And these books have ridiculous fantasies about supernatural powers.
In short, those books are mix of so much - only a little of which is useful. Not particularly worthy of respect, and they wouldn't be remarkable at all if they weren't chosen as underpinnings for some religions. (You can find a lot of other religious manuscripts that nearly nobody cares about - chapters that didn't make it into the bible and so on. The same kind of stuff - a few pieces of good advice, lots of religious mumbo-jumbo.)
when one defines a concept in language it's drawn from the environment, there is no "god" to point to in our environment.
When one points at one thing and sys "red", and another then says "green", but a red/green colorblind person sees the same thing... where is your language then?
Words have always meant differing things to different people to varying degrees, that sure doesn't stop at God.
Also curious what you do with the word Wind, when it cannot be seen directly (normally), only by it's secondary effects - which is exactly what would be the argument for showing God exists...
I'm not religious myself, I just find your argument poor and out of touch with how language is used.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I choose to define "God" as the intelligence/life force of the universe itself. Seeing as that's something that can never be seen nor measured, there's no proving nor disproving it. It's simply the way *I* choose to look at things.
That's not to say that I believe in "man in the sky" mythos. My definition is different than that of traditional religions.
The same goes for anyone arguing about the existence of God. Before you can argue about existence, you first have to agree with each other as to what the theoretical God *is* that you're trying to prove/disprove. Good luck getting different theologies to agree on that point. :P
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Increasingly science has been coming to the conclusion our universe is much larger spatially than previously imagined, (areas that have expanded out of our causal connectivity) and may in fact be infinite. If so, then a reasonable robust set of physical laws would probably lead to intelligence somewhere, somehow, but more than this, the universe is probably infinite in multiply definable ways (see: Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothosis) including how you can define physical laws, and all those universes large enough with complex enough laws probably all lead to intelligent life. The solution to Fermi's Paradox may be that sufficient advanced beings have escaped to the other extra-dimensional Universes.
I'd say Quantum Mechanics is a strong indicator of infinite overlapping Universes and if the Universe is infinite in this way, why not infinite in all ways including how to cook up physical laws? With the God theory you get one highly anomalous and inexplicable Universe. Whereas if you just allow everything, well then – here we are, with infinite Universes we'd have had to pop up somewhere.
Letter To Iran
God is a metaphor. It doesn't even make sense to ask whether God or a god exists or doesn't exist.
In 1966 Time magazine ran a cover story asking: Is God Dead?
Nodody thinks even Time Magazine would try to run anything like that today.
Since proof in science can only be found in mathematics, should we please burn this article for it contains nothing but sophistry? Just to point out: "make a case for" isn't equal to "prove".
Nice try, Slashdot.
There is a recognized atheist church in the United States. Tax exemptions and everything. In fact, they've recently had a schism, so technically, there's two atheist churches. At least.
Do you feel manly when you make fun of people on the internet? Does it make your dog horny to see you so masculine and shit?
Arguing from personal incredulity.
This dude falls for the old trap that he doesn't understand something, therefore "God did it". Personal incredulity
We haven't found life on other planets, therefore we must be the only one. Therefore we are the only one. Therefore God.
Most people have no idea how cell phones work. Does that mean God made cell phones?
Most people don't understand the quantum. Does that mean that those devices that work on hte quantum don't exist, or that God actually intervenes every time we use them? Once upon a time, illnesses were punishments from God. Some people still think so. Are they? We now know about germs and viruses. We know about biology, and are continuing to learn. As we learn we effect cures, by attacking those things that make us sick, validating the biology. Or is it still God making us sick, and all the biology just a trick of the devil, not unlike those who believe that fossils were put in the earth by the devil or by God to tempt us, or prove our faith,
The God of the Gaps is silly, as we find the gaps getting smaller and smaller.
People who were schizophrenic or psychotic were "posessed by demons" Now we treat them with drugs. Do the drugs drive the demons out? Or do they help to control issues of chemical unbalance or other problems. Can an exorcist cure the insane as well as psychopharmacology? That somehow, this foolish man's thinking that his lack of knowledge proves that God exists, if true, means that His god needs people to be as ignorant as possible. Then everythinig they do not know about makes God more and more legitimate and powerful. A person who knows almost nothing can then know that almost everything is proof of God.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Scientific discoveries tend to make the universe seem even more amazing, and reveal even more limitations to human understanding.
To theists, the more amazing the universe is, the more obvious it is that God must exist. Similarly, the more limited humans are shown to be, the more obvious it is that God did it all.
That is why theists keep insisting that science makes their case for them. Emotionally they are right. Logically they are not.
Many theists also get this strange idea that something intrinsic to science makes the enterprise itself "out to disprove God's existence." Science doesn't disprove God so much as start by assuming God doesn't exist, and operate within the boundaries of what we can actually demonstrate (which will never be God). Some specific scientists want to disprove God's existence (good luck proving a negative!), but science itself just doesn't include God in the equation at all. Theists receive this very reasonable assumption of mechanism over intelligent agency as an attempt to disprove, and go on the counter-offensive, claiming that these attempts are self-defeating.
So, that is what is going on.
I contend that anyone who achieves true objectivity on this issue will opt for agnosticism and just leave the debate behind.
Science also cannot disprove the existence of God.
with a God?
Douglas Adams said it best:
The WSJ's entire premise is based upon the idea that space is small enough that we could search it for other inhabited planets in the time we've been looking.
Space isn't that small.
Space is so big that BILLIONS of years will pass before we even see the light shining from a sun in a different galaxy.
The universe could have 10,000 intelligent species that we will never know about because they are just too far from us.
Two atheist churches! Do they believe in two different not-Gods?
Religions sometimes codify social and physical survival strategies, don't mess with the neighbor's wife, don't eat that type of sea creature, etc.
And sometimes they tell you to kill gay people, or a disrepectful teenagers, or your wife if she doesn't mess up the blankets so you can display them on the morning after you are married, or witches or blasphemers or someone you see working on the sabbath, or that you are supposed to kill everyone from the neighboring town except for the young virgin girls or offer your daughters to be raped by people at the door or that it's okay to have children with those same daughters.
I'll take my chances with the bacon and the seafood instead of trying to pick and choose who I have to kill.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/ao...
"During the last century, and part of the one before, it was widely held that there was an unreconcilable conflict between knowledge and belief. The opinion prevailed among advanced minds that it was time that belief should be replaced increasingly by knowledge; belief that did not itself rest on knowledge was superstition, and as such had to be opposed. According to this conception, the sole function of education was to open the way to thinking and knowing, and the school, as the outstanding organ for the people's education, must serve that end exclusively.
One will probably find but rarely, if at all, the rationalistic standpoint expressed in such crass form; for any sensible man would see at once how one-sided is such a statement of the position. But it is just as well to state a thesis starkly and nakedly, if one wants to clear up one's mind as to its nature.
It is true that convictions can best be supported with experience and clear thinking. On this point one must agree unreservedly with the extreme rationalist. The weak point of his conception is, however, this, that those convictions which are necessary and determinant for our conduct and judgments cannot be found solely along this solid scientific way.
For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly.
The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition. It is a very high goal which, with our weak powers, we can reach only very ina
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
And, like god, we also can't agree on definitions of love, beauty, or freedom either.
Actually that is not true, beauty has a basis in mathematics and biology. Certain symmetries, ratios and proportions are considered attractive across cultures; strong correlations to genetic and physical health exist.
I've noticed that Atheists seem to have a much more dogmatic axe to grind than most religious people about what is an undecidable proposition either way. You never know if they are just being asshat trolls (Protesting holiday displays in public spaces) or just people with a different religion who are every bit as intolerant as the people they complain about.
I feel the same way about those guys in the KKK (not an atheist in the crowd) or those lopping off infidel's heads. But yeah, those fucking atheists are the worst. Who the fuck do they think they are anyhow?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Which of those categories does UNIX editors fit under?
Under the turtle at the bottom of the stack.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I am often amazed at how these radical conservative evangelicals who blindly profess that God exists because they have faith, turn around and try to suggest science proves their "faith."
Obviously their "faith" is a bunch of bullshit, and they have neither faith in God, nor faith in their own faith in God. Ive also often thought that is a God is so insecure he has to have a bunch of uneducated idiots running around professing his existence with every breath they take... he must not be much of a God in the first place.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Someone made up that supernatural/natural thing. Science can certainly prove the existence of god, if you care to define god in any kind of concrete terms, in principle. He might have to cooperate though.
If some dude shows up one day who can perform real magic, create planets out of thin air, and make it rain a lot, then science can examine him closely and be pretty sure god exists.
If a kid appears who can, without technological aid, turn water into wine, walk on water and reconstitute himself after dead, there's the new testament god.
Science doesn't require that the phenomenon it studies be "natural." Only that they be observable and consistent.
...so annoying that not even He can be bothered to try to get to the article hidden behind it?
Every time someone mention how "perfect" our solar system is, this blog post comes to my mind. You think one habitable planet is cool? How about 24?!?
I'm not Christian. Never claimed to be. So stop lying about what other people have said. Atheists seem to do that a lot.
You seem to be have some kind of demonic picture in your head about what an atheist is. Simply not believing in a deity does not magically transform everyone into a cunt, you know.
I disagree: God+life is a bigger miracle than life alone.
And therefore much more unlikely.
Would love to.
Apparently I have to sign up to do so.
Makes you wonder why someone would bother to post the link and the article really, when I have to sign up elsewhere to actually read the damn thing.
You forgot about infanticide (Psalm 137:9)
You seem to be have some kind of demonic picture in your head about what an atheist is.
If I do, it's because that's what I see from pretty much everyone who calls themselves an atheist. I can only comment on what I see.
Simply not believing in a deity does not magically transform everyone into a cunt, you know.
Perhaps you're confusing cause and effect. Maybe being a cunt magically transforms you in to an atheist.
I can't read the first article, but the second goes on way too long getting into the likelihood of life existing elsewhere in the universe, and... then says that it doesn't matter, because-- the article asserts-- the outcome of all that reasoning has no bearing on whether you can prove there is a God. I agree, personally, but it simple asserts it without presenting much of an argument, and it makes me wonder what the point was of trying to read any of it.
Instead, the author says that he thinks it's better to have faith in something that can't be proven or disproven. He doesn't bother going into an actual argument regarding the question that was raised, i.e. whether science can prove the existence of God. And then he concludes by saying that faith shouldn't interfere with science, which didn't seem to be the issue he was talking about, but seems to be the conclusion that he's most interested in.
I don't mind his conclusions, but for someone who seems to be arguing in favor of rationality and scientific rigor, you'd think he'd have a more rigorous argument. From my (admittedly superficial) reading, his argument is structured like this:
Premise 1: Someone presented the argument (which has been argued for and against many times by smarter people):
Premise 1: It is unlikely that we should exist
Premise 2: We exist
Conclusion: God exists, and he made us on purpose
Premise 2: Our existence actually is likely. I think. Or maybe not, because I don't really know for sure.
Conclusion: The argument is bad because I don't think faith should should be based on things we don't know for sure, shouldn't be based on science, and we'd all be better off if we didn't allow religious belief to hold back scientific progress.
That is to say, while you might prefer the conclusions of the second article, the method of argument is just as bad. Maybe worse-- I'm not sure, because as I said, I haven't been able to read the first article. He asserts things without support, and allows his unfounded opinions to be substituted in as a conclusion, despite having no relation to the premises.
And it's really shocking to me that whenever this argument comes up (and believe me, it's not new), people keep missing the obvious questions:
1) What is "God"?
2) What does it mean to "exist"?
3) Why should an unlikely occurrence be counted as proof of the "existence" of "God"?
Because really, at least some religious people do not claim that God is a physical entity that has a shape, occupying a particular place at a particular time. When we talk about things existing, we're usually talking about whether those things are physical things which "exist" in an actual location. So it's not actually clear to me at all that religions are claiming that "God" "exists", unless you think "God" is an old man who lives in the sky. (I suppose Christians would argue that Jesus "existed", in that he was a physical man who lived at a certain time, but for that much, many historians would agree)
Whether unlikely events can be taken as proof of "God"... well... it seems to me that it depends on what we're supposed to think you mean by "God". Is he an old man with a long beard who lives in the sky? Or is "God" the force that allows unlikely things to exist? When a person wins the lottery, since it's unlikely that that specific person would win the lottery, is that also proof that God exists?
Sorry for the rant. It's just... this is an argument that has been going on, in some form, for thousands of years. There's a lot of information to draw on, and a lot of arguments that have already been made. I wish people like Ethan Siegel would bother to become the slightest bit informed.
If you agree, publicly, that the vast majority of theists aren't wingnuts, sure.
There is evidence of the existence of all things which exist, whether that evidence has been discovered or not. There is no evidence of anything which does not exist, nor any evidence to prove that a non-existent thing does indeed not exist. Evidence can be used to determine whether something not known to exist is possible to exist. So far as I've been able to determine, reliable evidence indicates it's not necessary for God to exist, and no evidence that God does exist, therefore, it's entirely reasonable to assume God probably does not exist. It's also entirely reasonable to respectfully tolerate those who believe in the existence of that which isn't or can't be proven to exist, so long as they behave in a manner that doesn't cause harm to others, and who respectfully tolerate those who do not share their beliefs. In conclusion, this argument is stupid, and you suck.
1.Netcraft confirms:In Soviet Russia all your base welcomes a beowolf cluster of CowboyNeal overlords. 2.? 3.Profit!!1!
I believe the dispute was mainly of the distribution of money.
Which is to say, just like most other church schisms.
Agnosticism and theism are not incompatible. Agnosticism and atheism are not incompatible. Gnosticism is a statement of knowledge: I *know* that there is a god. Theism is a statement of belief: I *believe* that there is a god. One can be both atheist and agnostic: I *believe* that there is no god, but I do not *know* this for certain. That being said, it seems perfectly rational to be atheist, in light of the utter lack of evidence that an omnipotent, omniscient entity of any kind exists.
Rhapsody in Numbers
If you had nothing in the way of science, then those rules might be better than nothing.
Of course, we've been better informed that that for many thousands of years now.
And these books have ridiculous fantasies about supernatural powers.
So you have never read the Qur'an, but you assume that all religions are the same.
According to historian Denis Gril, the Qur'an does not overtly describe Muhammad performing miracles. The supreme miracle of Muhammad is finally identified with the Qur'an itself.
Source: Islamic_view_of_miracles
"Maybe being a cunt magically transforms you in to an atheist." But, I thought you stated you weren't atheist?
.
Religion is answers that may never be questioned.
KJV Hebrews 11
1Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law he tore his robes.2Kings22:11
Without such missions we would not have had the Blues Brothers. Think of all that we would have missed without the inspiration of a just and kind God.
It is not for us to say God is capricious when She puts airplanes in the ocean and sets fire to ocean going vessels. We are not qualified to judge It when It chooses to rain ebola, aids and a thousand pestilences upon the poorest people on the planet. Our place is to be grateful for the benevolence of our Lord and Master, to be thankful that we are not smote even as we tap our undeserving fingers on the keyboard.
Ouch!
...omphaloskepsis often...
All you're pointing out is that some atheists are willing to game the tax system. Much like some theists do.
Sorry I must have missed when the KKK became a church.
If you think atheists didn't go around killing people for not following their beliefs I'll gladly point you at Soviet Russia, or Mao's China. They show just how epic a death toll atheism can rock up.
Try not be ignorant all your life.
"Science Cannot Prove the Existence of God." This is not news. It was not news a hundred years ago. This is pretty standard stuff from any general education philosophy class in any decent university. Don't people go to school any more?
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
KJV Matthew 24
23Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not.
24For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.
25Behold, I have told you before.
ceoyoyo, when satan/antichrist/the beast shows up with "observable and consistent" signs and wonders will you know it for who it is, or will you declare it God and follow it?
I tell everyone here the same as I tell my only child: Noone should dictate your faith to you, but to remain ignorant of the content, mysteries, truths, and overall scope of the Holy Scriptures in this day and age is perilous if for no other reason than to protect oneself from those who will exploit your ignorance, possibly at the price of your eternal soul.
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law he tore his robes.2Kings22:11
Yossarian ducked behind his arm for protection while she slammed away at him in feminine fury for a few seconds, and then he caught her determinedly by the wrists and forced her gently back down on the bed. "What the hell are you getting so upset about?" he asked her bewilderedly in a tone of contrite amusement. "I thought you didn't believe in God."
"I don't," she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. "But the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be."
Yossarian laughed and turned her arms loose. "Let's have a little more religious freedom between us," he proposed obligingly. "You don't believe in the God you want to, and I won't believe in the God I want to. Is that a deal?"
That was the most illogical Thanksgiving he could ever remember spending...
"Intelligent"? Since when is "I don't know; therefore, god." intelligent?
[read aloud for best effect]
The vertical line of God interacts with time we see along the line of our lives.
Hard to discern, you'll agree, as through The Valley we've trod, dodging the Evil One's knives.
Could we our futures foresee, as each of us forward strives, the same path should we have trod?
And who among us conceives, if our will truly be free, a brutal trip to the sod?
No, we would rather have wives; kids by a dozen shoes shod; bouncing them all on the knee.
Swimming among the world's cod, world to make meaning contrives: to locate the core of "be".
Those who're forgiven stand awed, realizing they've no plea: God only real meaning gives.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Therefor all men are Socrates.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
Don't forget children making fun of bald men are to be mauled to death by bears.
You only think it's a stack, it's actually a doubly-linked list.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
Turtle? Stack?
Come Forth, Logo!
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
You're right. But you're wrong.
In many ways, Maoism or soviet style Stalinism are religions in about the same way we consider Confucianism or Taoism a religion. They are closed belief systems with a fundamental set of dogmata, they appeared preconceived by their founding fathers and all following discussions were just about how to correctly interpret the holy scriptures.
Everyone except some pantheists is an atheist. Only some of them think that there is one god more which doesn't exist.
René Descartes begs to differ.
The point I was making and it looks like you are agreeing with is any memetic virus can turn destructive, and there is very little to distinguish aggressive atheism, from other aggressive belief systems. It's inappropriate to use the word religion because that word literally means a belief in a supereme being. Aggressive atheists seem to think their belief has some how given them a cosmic get out of jail free card, from the common psychological traps people who believe in god fall into. If anything they are considerably more annoying than the very mildly religious religions most western nations have these days.
To me, there is a huge difference between saying "There must be some greater, universal intelligence" and "This particular entity showed up last night and told me anyone who isn't just like me must DIE." The first one I can buy, the second one no. Even if God was "proven", if He is a psycotic genocidal murderer I still refuse to "worship" that, even if I was staring at the Pit of Hell itself. If God isn't willing to come clarify His "rules" and would rather just hang back while we kill each other in His name then He can piss right off.
It happened because it has happened is tautological rubbish. That is akin to finding a car in a tree and deciding cars grow in trees because it has occurred. Just state we don't yet know how this occurred and remove this half-arsed explanation
Using the car-tree analogy isn't a good one. If a tree starts growing under a car it could very well become part of the tree. The tree will adapt to this foreign object.
You see it all the time (in pictures at least) items of all sorts being part of a tree. Well not a part of the tree, but embedded within.
I still can't find a definition of my beliefs. I think there are powerful entities that occasionally mess ("help") with us, but I don't think they are some all-power "I created all of reality" creatures. I also feel they don't have our best interests in mind, and also are not omnipotent and can't really "see the future". If there is some real, all-creating entity it's pretty obvious that 1) it doesn't like us much 2) doesn't care enough to intercede 3) when it DOES intercede usually many people end up dead. So, IMHO, it's better to NOT poke at God and ask for intervention...your just as likely to receive a plague of locust than you are to receive deliverance.
Never a truer statement, you can pray all you want, but that leak in the ceiling isn't going to stop until you yourself take care of it.
You may be surprised just how much disdain scientists (and science students) hold for the discipline of philosophy. Whenever they hear a ridiculous bit of groundless conjecture, they say "that's not science, that's philosophy." Often they mistakenly refer to philosophy as a "soft science" by which they mean "so sloppy as to be worthless." Those who have studied enough history to get the faintest inkling of the interrelationship between the two disciplines say things like "philosophy might have been useful in the early days, but science has completely supplanted it. You may as well study phrenology and alchemy too!"
Most Christians have equal disdain for philosophy, but for opposite reasons. Inasmuch as they recognize that any of the critical-thinking methodologies cast doubt upon their faith, they reject it as worldly lies. Paul even wrote specifically about "worldly philosophers" in the Bible, and how they are full of folly and lost.
Of course, both camps are *entirely ignorant* as to what philosophy is all about. Utterly clueless, and both consider themselves perfectly qualified to pass judgement on the discipline (albeit at a high level) as not worth their time.
You obviously know better. And you are not alone. But you are a member of a depressingly small minority.
The matter whether somebody is an asshole is not tied to religion, but it is one of the known amplifiers, especially in its fundamentalist forms. But so is any other fundamentalism, religion is just the most prevalent form of fundamentalism. Assholes are drawn to fundamentalism, as it gives them some perceived superiority. That is often direly needed, as many of them are underperformers with limited capability for insight and limited success where it counts. The Dunning-Kruger Effect is also a lot stronger with them, because of that superiority effect.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You have no frame of reference, hence your statement is nonsense. It does show that you have some mental affliction of the religious kind though. Logic is usually one of the first casualties.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I usually do not use vi ("VI VI VI, the editor of the beast") or emacs ("escape meta alt control shift"), but joe, since I learned the WordStar commands first. Does that make me an agnostic?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
No. But it happens to be the only reliable fact and only for me (Solipsism being a possibility).
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
... the doctrines of the bible or koran or any other superstitious nonsense is laughable ...
Don't laugh too hard, you are proving yourself quite ignorant as well.
Those books actually have some rules that are drawn from the environment. Some of those rules essentially define a regional survival manual for a society at a certain technological level. Even today some of those rules apply. Want to know what is safe to eat in the Red Sea, those old books have a few rules that will provide quite useful information.
Religions sometimes codify social and physical survival strategies, don't mess with the neighbor's wife, don't eat that type of sea creature, etc. To get wrapped up in the "stories" used to deliver the "lessons" and to dismiss a lesson because you didn't like the associated story is quite superficial and ignorant. Those old books are more useful than you believe despite the lack of literal truth to various stories.
See, "Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches: The Riddles of Culture" by Marvin Harris." Read it for a social anthropology class back in the mid-1970s. In a nutshell, Harris claimed and did a reasonable job of showing that many of the quirks of various religions/cultures actually were ways of adopting the culture to the environment it existed in.
Note that he didn't show that each culture's $DEITY therefore existed since they had handed down these wonderful rules. Only that various societies encoded their rules as religious beliefs. Much easier to get the ignorant to go along by saying $DEITY will smite thee if you don't obey the rules than going through the years of cultural evolution that led to the rues.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
"sometimes they tell you to kill gay people"
You made that shit up. Not one of the big 3 guys said to kill gay people.
If only I had made it up.
Leviticus 20:13 "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them."
That's from the King James version. There are several other mentions, but that is one that's pretty direct.
side note: I wonder why the Christian Fundamentalists who use this as their rationale for promoting things like th edefense of marriage act don't pay any attention to the abomination that is marrying a non virgin woman. You're suppose to display the bedsheets so you can see her hymenal blood.
That one is seriously creepy, I think,
But these fundies, always a hoot, believe that gay marriage demeans the sanctity of their fourth marriage.
Perhaps you or I are confusing who 'they' are. If by they, you mean zealots and people who make war, then yeah; fucking people. Gotta hate 'em.
True enough. I always note that people make God in their own image, as their God just so happens to hate the very same things they do. So the zealots do their evil in the name of their God who happens to, well you know the rest..
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
More like subscription bait.
"sometimes they tell you to kill gay people"
You made that shit up. Not one of the big 3 guys said to kill gay people. And I'm pretty sure Buddhists are okay with gays so there's 4.
Leviticus 20:13 (King James version):
If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them.
Not that I agree with it, of course. I'm just pointing out that you're wrong.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
> I'll take my chances with the bacon and the seafood instead of trying to pick and choose who I have to kill.
You are doing that thing that extremist athiests do - miss the fact that it doesn't take religion to convince people to kill and otherwise mistreat one another.
No, I'm not missing that. People have a genetic flaw in that we really really really enjoy killing each other. Our hyper aggressive trait is probably going to be the source of our extinction.
But using one's God as the rationale for killing others is just as bad as athiests using whatever reasons they use.
In my mind, it is worse, because when your God wants you to kill people it makes it pretty easy to do
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
If you could scientifically force God's hand to always act in a certain way, the engineers would have a field day with it. :)
I'm a dude who knows God is real. I don't try and prove him. I just say he is real, and that we all should love each other more because that is what my Bro Jesus said. Just about everyone will conclude the world needs more love.
God spoke to me
Science can prove nothing. The scientific process is all about coming up with a theory of how things work and then looking for evidence that disproves it. If such evidence is found, then the theory is refined to take it into account. In that way, ideally, scientific theories converge on the truth... but there's no way to prove they're true.
Linking science with god is ridiculous. It's like saying we can prove mathematically the existence of invisible pink unicorns. The sentence may be syntactically correct, but it has no meaning.
Make sense. I had to use Vim once, and it felt like I was in Hell.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Someone made up that supernatural/natural thing.
Yeah. Physicists. The term "physics" in fact literally means "knowledge of nature", i.e. knowledge of those things in the natural world (this is an old definition, of course, from back when physics was considered a philosophical discipline, but while the methods used in physics have changed the subject matter has not). As opposed to supernatural objects, which would fall under the purview of metaphysics and/or theology.
Science doesn't require that the phenomenon it studies be "natural." Only that they be observable and consistent.
Believe it or not, "observable and consistent" and "natural" mean almost literally the same thing (using the term "natural" to refer to "things in nature", not to natural vs. artificial: in any case, all artificial objects are at some level made up of natural stuff anyways). All natural objects are observable in some way (i.e. have observable properties: mass, volume, location, etc... something that can be quantified, in other words), and the word "nature" in one of it's oldest definitions in physics means "how something acts always or for the most part", i.e. it acts in a consistent fashion (not sure most modern physicists would even bother giving a definition of "nature", but when we speak of the "nature of an object", that definition is essentially what we mean). Supernatural objects, by definition, lack both (actually, having one generally (always?) means you have the other as well).
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Miracles still occur. It's just that too many skeptics are busy taking pictures, flying places and getting their news from secular TV's talking heads to notice.
All you have to do is do a search for miracles on one of the major Christian denominational websites. I just did one on the Assemblies of God website. You'll get many references to modern day miracles. Since you weren't present at any of them, you'll still have to take these modern day accounts on faith, just like the historical accounts in the Bible, but they haven't stopped occurring - and they have modern day witnesses of them who you could talk with if you were really interested.
One, religion asserts that God exists. Existence itself, but perhaps not meaning or other intangibles, certainly seems open to scientific enquiry.
However, it's hard to turn up evidence of existence of God.
Two, many religions assert origin stories for the universe. None of these match the physical evidence we have obtained without VERY liberal interpretation.
It is these types of assertions that the scientifically minded question the truth of. Softer assertions, like "people ought to be good to each other" don't find the same sort of opposition from science and logic.
"René Descartes was a drunken fart: 'I drink therefore I am.'"
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
This whole argument is so tired. If God wanted science to prove it, it would. If he doesn't, they won't. God gets to roll like that.
>And I'm pretty sure Buddhists are okay with gay
Whilst there are variations, the primary "Thou Shalts", and "Thou Shalt Not" mandate celibacy.
Of course, those precepts do not apply the masses, becuase they are unwilling to do the work required for spiritual progress, preferring the insecurity of their delusions.
Wind Beneath Thy Wings
How does the conclusion that there may be life on other planets disprove the existence of God?
Just because we as humans hope that God made life only on one planet does not make it so.
Just because we don't have accurate records in every religious book on possible life on other planets does not dispreove God's abilty to create life elsewhere.
Even IF ONE religious book postulated possible life on other planets is possible is grounds for DISMISSING the "There is no God if there is life on other planets" theory.
However, IF ONE religous book that DID mention possible life on other planets or even other planets from an illiterate goat herd that wouldn't know the first thing about science, the universe or planets or even that the world was round would be sufficient grounds to prove the existence of God.
Occam's Razor: In the absence of all othre explanations, the simplest explanation holds.
Chapter 1, Verse 1 of "The Opening" from the Qur'an reads: Al hamdu lillaahi rabbil ‘alameen (Praise be to God, Lord of all the worlds)
Sceince postulates NOW that there may be life on other planets. They did not have the technology to know that there were worlds back then. Therefore, God exists.
Ok - let the religous wars commence. :)
I'll go one further and say that scientific reasoning can lead to high confidence in the position that god does not exist. Science can not make the assertion that god does not exist just as it can not asset that leprechauns do not exist. It can lead, however, to the conclusion that the probability for either of these existing is vanishingly small. If we approach the idea of god as a hypothesis, we have to ask, is there enough credible evidence in favor of god's existence to reject the null hypothesis that god does not exist? Since there is not, belief in god is not scientifically rational, but, if you stop here, belief that god does not exist is not rational either. To understand why god's existence is exceedingly unlikely that god exists, we have to consider the enormous problem of explaining god's existence in the first place. We understand how intelligence arose through natural selection, so the complexity of our brains is not improbable. The complexity of something like god simply existing, however, would be a considerable challenge to explain, especially with a seemingly infinite number of other possible outcomes of universes existing without gods. I would compare it to this : If a magician asked you to pull a card at random from a deck and was then able to correctly tell you which card you had and then repeated the trick several times with the same result, you might presume that, by random chance, the magician was able to correctly guess your card. That presumption offers an explanation in the same way that a god presents an explanation, but it is highly implausible.
Athiest: There is no god.
Theist: There is a god.
Polytheist: There are many gods.
Gnostic: I know.
Agnostic: I do not know.
Claiming a theist is an athiest, becuase said theist appears to doubt the existence of one diety, whilst accepting the existence of another diety, is as illogical as it is irrational, as it is delusional.
Wind Beneath Thy Wings
Science is really bad at proving things. The way science works is you take an idea and try to disprove it. You want proof, go with math. Mathematics is all about proof.
> Sorry I must have missed when the KKK became a church.
They can be reasonable considered a cult: an extreme Christian sect. With several million members at their peak, with regular church and prayer meetings, and frequent invocations of God's support for their actions, I'm afraid they fitted most definitions.
The members of the church are not as monolithic as the curia. At ground level there's a healthy debate about a lot of things. That barely makes the news. I've spent long hours in knock down / drag out discussions with abbots, bishops and other hifalutin clergy about interpretation of church teachings. We always part amicably and live our lives as we see fit. I even teach evolutionary bio, historical geology, genetics and natural selection in Catholic schools and attend mass sometimes even in the same day. And get thanked for each by the same people.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
> There is no evidence of anything which does not exist, nor any evidence to prove that a non-existent thing does indeed not exist.
There is _enormous_ evidence of things which do not exist. Please, please, look into the problems of experimental skew and the inevitable rates of error sof even the best statistical sampliing. It can be as simple as tossing a coin 5 times in a row: this has a statistically reasonable chance, roughly 1/16, of coming up all heads or all tails. Most of us experiencing that would call it reasonable proof that the coin toss is faked, but misleading results like that happen _all the time_.
Of course it can't - just as hockey cannot prove the existence of football.
There's just confusion because dumbed down religion wants to expand to take over every aspect of life and it sees descriptions of reality as competition.
Thor Heyerdahl described his local Lutheren Pastors views in the 1930s as being along the lines of God creating life and Darwin described what he'd found out about God's plan. Nowhere near incompatible despite what Christianity-lite screeches. Science is physical while religion is spiritual. Somewhere along the way we've ended up with a pile of people that cannot tell the difference. It's done a lot of damage to societies, and not just in the middle east.
Guess how I know I'm not? Because it's nowhere in my post. The ten commandments (that tiny part of the OT that you're referring to) were written for a bunch of people allegedly wandering in the desert for a long time. To paraphrase Lewis Black, you see how we behave now with police and cameras - can you imagine how depraved a few thousand people in the desert could get? Those people probably needed a rule book. The stuff in the bible is more than the commandments - just like the stuff in Greek mythology is more than the script of one story. But we still see underlying truths in many forms of stories - from the Bible to Steinbeck to White to Salinger to Homer etc. I don't know if David and Bathsheba existed. I do know Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn didn't, but the stories about them are still valuable even though they're made-up tales of nonexistent humans. Much of human literature is fiction, and it still has value - if for no other reason than "lessons will be repeated until learned". East of Eden is hardly considered scripture, but it still illustrates basic truths about human behavior, and is in no small part a retelling of some of the Bible.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
on a fool's errand, but he did get the ball rolling with regard to reconciling dogma with reality. It's overblown solution to a (now known to be) inflated problem, but imagine where things would be without him. A modern parallel would be only Nixon could go to China.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
True enough. I always note that people make God in their own image, as their God just so happens to hate the very same things they do. So the zealots do their evil in the name of their God who happens to, well you know the rest..
"What God wants, God gets! God helps us all!" (from Radio K.A.O.S.)
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
that Hume blew a great big hole in empiricism. Being a scientist is irrational on that level. Fact is, every system of thought falls apart if you pick at it long enough. You use what works, and there are a lot of variations of that. It's part of what makes it cool to be a human. Personally, I take my reductionism by the bagful rather than wholesale - there are reasons Vulcans are a fiction and computers don't run the world.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
saw a value in churches and what they could provide to a person's emotional wellbeing, specifically those in need. Is it rational to demean Sperbels for his comment? Or maybe your response is not demeaning - provided you can provide a clinical, rational definition of "well and truly f'd up"? Do you make personal judgements that transcend rationality? How do you reconcile those? You can answer those or not, point is there is more to human understanding than the dimension of rational / irrational. Humor is irrational. Music. Art - whew - Jesus Waterskiing Christ is art ever irrational - don't know about you, but it'd be a sad world without a whole lot of things that are not necessarily rational.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
these days without having to be the yardstick for extremist behavior!
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Supernatural events could easily be observed and established as much (example method: the Randi prize) -- that would at least prove the supernatural which would make god seem much more possible. Religions have constantly made many testable predictions of the supernatural, it just happens that every single one of them has been shown wrong as knowledge and tech advanced enough to check them out. So religions withdraw each supernatural claim and move to another one that we don't yet have the ability to check.
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I am atheist... My defense of religion is only in respect to the comment made that "there's no reason to believe in it.". And I didn't "slip up". I very deliberately said "social superiors". The social hierarchy is important among social animals. We take pleasure when our betters are pleased with us.
Increasingly science has been coming to the conclusion our universe is much larger spatially than previously imagined, (areas that have expanded out of our causal connectivity) and may in fact be infinite. If so, then a reasonable robust set of physical laws would probably lead to intelligence somewhere, somehow, but more than this, the universe is probably infinite in multiply definable ways (see: Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothosis [wikipedia.org] ) including how you can define physical laws, and all those universes large enough with complex enough laws probably all lead to intelligent life. The solution to Fermi's Paradox may be that sufficient advanced beings have escaped to the other extra-dimensional Universes.
I'd say Quantum Mechanics is a strong indicator of infinite overlapping Universes and if the Universe is infinite in this way, why not infinite in all ways including how to cook up physical laws? With the God theory you get one highly anomalous and inexplicable Universe. Whereas if you just allow everything, well then Ã" here we are, with infinite Universes we'd have had to pop up somewhere.
But wouldn't infinite possibilities also include the possibility of God?
miss the fact that it doesn't take religion to convince people to kill and otherwise mistreat one another
That is true. But religion provides a very powerful organizing principle for sociopaths to justify their actions and to convince others that they're right. In this way, religion is similar to other theoretically-fine but practically-disgusting ideologies such as communism.
But the desire to kill comes from within
Yes. But it takes an organizing philosophy to rally others around you to commit atrocities. Religion is very, very good for that. As such, religion is highly dangerous. It's like ordnance left lying around, just waiting for the right terrorist to come along and use it.
that's not spirituality that's psychology/psychiatry and that is another science.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
One, religion asserts that God exists. Existence itself, but perhaps not meaning or other intangibles, certainly seems open to scientific enquiry.
Oh, existence is the easy part. It's trivial to prove that at least one god exists.
Consider a Sun worshipper. By any reasonable definition, the Sun is that person's god. By any scientific test you care to name, the Sun exists. Therefore, at least one god exists. QED.
Feel free to substitute a nature worshipper, or an idol worshipper, or someone who worships a living or dead person as a deity, and the same argument works.
Two, many religions assert origin stories for the universe. None of these match the physical evidence we have obtained without VERY liberal interpretation.
This assumes that said origin stories are intended to be interpreted scientifically or proto-scientifically. Where I live, we have indigenous people who tell animist origin stories, and exactly none of them (to my knowledge) believe that those stories are scientifically accurate.
Yeah, I know, revisionism and all that. I refer you to my previous post on the topic.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Agnosticism alone is only about the contention that the existence of gods are unknowable and says nothing about the belief of the person.
The real category are IMNSHO :
* gnostic theist , I believe in god(s) existance and I know god(s) existence are knowable
* gnostic atheist , god(s) non existence is demonstrable (and logically do not believe in gods existence)
* agnostic theist , I believe in god(s) existance but god(s) existence cannot ever be demonstrated e.g. it is faith only, all the rest miracle and so forth is bunk
* agnostic atheist , god(s) are a construction of human mind, but this cannot ever be demonstrated to the point of knowing that god(s) do not exists.
In the very end if you shrug and say I do not know, but live your life without any token prayer , then you are de facto agnostic atheist. There are a few agnostic theist I met, they are quite rare, the vast majority of self declared "agnostic" I met, are actually agnostic atheist, but unwilling to admit the atheist part to themselves. I am an agnostic atheist by the way.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
nope, those political crimes where not in the name of atheism or because of atheism. i know its hard for you to understand the difference. Stalin was a product of Catholic parents and attended a seminary (so he had good training at how to be nasty), Mao was a fan of Stalin(Catholic) and Hitler (Catholic) and their policies but it was not in the name of atheism.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
No, its just lucky that the elements happened to exist and then logical because if 2 things blend they create something new
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
there should be a full stop after "for" and the rest dis-guarded.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
no-one should teach a child "faith", they should be taught its belief without evidence and its a crock of shit until its proved. believing in the holy scriptures is exploitation of your ignorance.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
On the other hand, even the tiniest effect that ignores the laws of thermodynamic can be taken as proof of god-hood. If any entity can freeze even a drop of water without increasing the universes entropy, it should be considered a god for all intents and purposes.
It's interesting that people believe in creation / intelligent design and use the "odds are so infitessimally small it couldn't happen by chance" reasoning, when the problem with having any being or force responsible for creating everything is you then have to ask who created the creator?
There are approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets in the observable universe, and even if you say that habitable zones of galaxies are quite small, so really we should talk about the chances of a galaxy sustaining life, then that planet count comes from there being 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe.
1 in 200 billion are quite infitessimally small odds.
And the odds that we were created by "chance" are far higher than there being an intelligent creator that would design our planet, our galaxy in order to sustain life, and yet create over 200 billion other galaxies without any life, because what would be the point of that?
And fail. Sure, if there where a choice in the matter, you would be right. But there is not. Or have you just claimed that you fantasize God into existence? (Which would be halfway correct...)
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The 3 properties that God has, according to Scripture, is that he is omnipotent, i.e. can do everything, he is omniscient, i.e. he knows everything, and he is omnipresent, i.e. he is everywhere.
Logic (of the mathematical kind :-)) says the above cannot exist, because it is contradictory to itself.
If a being is omnipotent, then it certainly can create something stronger than itself, can it? But then it is not omnipotent. But if it cannot create something stronger than itself, then it is also not omnipotent.
If a being is omniscient, then it certainly knows every person's future, and hence our future is prewritten, and so it is also prewritten if we are good and go to heaven or bad and go to hell. But the scripture also says we should try to be good...but if the future is predetermined, the word 'try' is completely meaningless.
If a being is omnipresent, can it create anything? If it can, then it is not omnipresent, because there was free space for creation. If it cannot create anything, then it is not omnipotent.
The above might sound like wordplay, but it is not. It is actually math disguised as wordplay. It is math that talks about sets and infinity. And it is indisputable mathematical proof that there cannot be an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent God.
This is why I still think they should make "Science and Sanity" or something else about general semantics required reading in school.
Confusing the map with the territory, are we? The imagination with the real? The what-I-can-describe-in-words with the what-exists-in-the-world?
Science will eventually be the death of religion not because of Darwin or space flight, but because it provides and alternative solution. The space of magic, mysticism and religion (in historical order) always was to provide answers where we couldn't find any. Science isn't just brilliant in finding answers we couldn't find before, it also offers a new alternative to answers we don't yet know. Instead of wonder and amazement at an assumed superior force that must be responsible, we have wonder and amazement and the complexity and depth of the universe per se. With a history and culture (and most likely psychology) deeply rooted in an agent assumption (i.e. "if it is there, someone must be responsible") we have trouble switching, but exposure to science makes it easier to understand that not every apple that's falling from a tree was thrown down by someone.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
...but humans require spirituality.
why should you respect "beliefs"? you can tolerate them as long as they are benign and not a risk to health
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
When I was at school, we had an assembly by the chaplain who insisted that life on Earth was evidence of God, because the amino acids had to react in exactly the right order to produce DNA and that couldn't possibly have happened without divine intervention. It struck me then that his faith was based on a complete lack of understanding of scale. The number of amino acids in the sea when life arose was huge. The sea itself is enormous and yet the process still took a billion years or so. And the sample size that we have is precisely one planet where this happened. It looks like the conditions that will lead to seas containing amino acids are not that uncommon, so expecting DNA to exist in at least one place in the universe seems like a reasonable bet. Add to that the survivor bias: if the universe had managed to exist without life, no one would have remarked on it.
The universe is really, really big. Big enough that any plausible chemical reaction is likely to have happened somewhere at least once. Expecting something with the complex properties that we call life not to exist somewhere would be a miracle.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Sorry your personal ignorance of the communist manifesto and their relationship to religion doesn't make for a convincing point.
When they were at their peak they had more in common with the Rotarians or the Elks than anything else, and if you want to insist that invoking the name of god makes you religious, you're obviously not familiar with the concept of a "Tinker's Damn"
From where I sit, I see the Atheists as having very little difference from the religious. They both want to believe adopting a set of beliefs will make them better people and allow them to shed guilt from being asshats.
Science cannot prove the existence of flying pink elephants either.
You need LSD.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
"What God wants, God gets! God helps us all!" (from Radio K.A.O.S.)
Psst: it's from Amused to Death
What evidence does he provide?
He's pointing out the lack of Darwinian evidence. In a way, this A/C reply criticizes itself, as it didn't put much effort into discovering Nagel's argument.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_reason No belief is rationally inferred if it can be fully explained in terms of nonrational causes. C.S. Lewis
Artificial intelligence is the study of how to make real computers act like the ones in the movies.
the difference between a church and it's leadership. I already know about all of the things you mentioned. And they range from miserable to horrible. Your assumptions about what I know and what I support is your issue, not mine. The Catholic hierarchy is all wrong about a number of current things - their war on women religious (nuns to you), their insistence on single priests and their exclusion of women from ordination are long-time ones, and their new-found nonsense about health insurance payment is a huge black eye. If we're going to start divesting ourselves of affiliations based on atrocities committed by this or that group, then you'll likely need to spend the rest of your life as a self-proclaimed box turtle, because "humanity" is on that list.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Yes, you can have those things without a church. And also churches do those things. Community does not need religion. But for some stubborn reason people tend to be spiritual, often expressing that through organized religion. How do you explain an enduring need for this? Are modern humans just stupid / irrational / uninformed? By your claims, things that have no rational basis are irrational. So art, music, humor, fiction... buh bye.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
There may or may not be a God, his properties other than omnipotence and omniscience would be unknown and probably unknowable to us. There is probably some reason for the Universe, call that God if you must or want, it isn't anything you can do something with in the real world.
When people get worked up about “You can't prove God doesn't exist,” it's usually because they assume if you concede there could be some kind of God any kind of God, then their version of religion is somehow validated and that you must be talking about a God that intervenes in our lives.
Fine, there may be a God, but all major religions are still hogwash.
Letter To Iran
> In my mind, it is worse, because when your God wants you to kill people it makes it pretty easy to do
Yeah... when you say that it convinces me that you are absolutely missing the point.
"God" is no different from any other ideology
You win one internet for accusing me of missing the point, then going on to prove my point exactly.
Well played, AC.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Religion is very easy to reach and abuse.
Flip it around - there are billions of religious people who don't kill anyone
How many of them don't kill because they just think it's wrong? And how many say "Wow, I sure would have liked to have killed someone except my religion says it's wrong." Only in the latter case does religion deserve any credit.
religion is about faith. science without proof is faith. religion with proof is not faith.
lose != loose
psychology / psychiatry as not-really-science. Your comment would seem a great leap of progress to some. So a lot of people claim that Shakespeare's work informs a lot about human behavior and provides object lessons in a creative way. Do you see value in that? BTW I'm down with Randi. Had him on our TV show. Twice. He eloquently describes a system of dealing with the fascination and inspiring parts of our world without using religion. It's brilliant. I use it a lot. Also I have personal beliefs that he does not hold. We did not need to cross swords.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
it's godless *and* illogical! Win win!
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Here's your problem. God never said that "without faith I am nothing." In fact, even in a world where nobody will praise his glory, "the stones will cry out." (Luke 19:40). God also never said that "I refuse to prove that exist" either:
Your problem is that you don't understand how logic works. You can follow all the modus ponens; that's purely mechanical and nothing intelligent about it. What you need to be careful is which axioms you introduce to your reasoning. If you introduce a false axiom, your logic becomes inconsistent, and it allows you to prove falsehood.
I once had a signature.
what isn't there.
Odd's are mitigated by time.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Sounds interesting; thanks for the recommendation.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
"The Four Witnesses." Prolly at a library. Gives a lot of context about the personalities and agendas for the four traditional books.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I doubt that the universe has Multiple Personality Disorder. We are the universe asking itself what it is. The universe has risen to self-awareness and we are it. I suspect there can only be one consciousness at a time and as one falls another rises. It is sequential, not parallel. Otherwise the universe would be mentally ill. And Multiple Personality Disorder is probably very rare in the realm of universes.
E Proelio Veritas.
would concede there's a tad more possible value to the major religions than the FSM or what was likely started in a bet by a third-rate SciFi author. So what is it you truly believe? Beyond the stuff that can be derived by F=ma, PV=nRT, A-T / C-G... why do you do what you do? You've already eliminated free will. What's left to work for? What can be considered "evil" (you refer to it pretty regularly) and why work against it?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
"Blessed is the mind too small for doubt." I know for a fact that God exists, and is protecting us from the high perch of his Golden Throne.
"sometimes they tell you to kill gay people"
You made that shit up. Not one of the big 3 guys said to kill gay people. And I'm pretty sure Buddhists are okay with gays so there's 4.
Leviticus 20:13 (King James version):
If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them.
Not that I agree with it, of course. I'm just pointing out that you're wrong.
Explain? From reading Leviticus Chapter 20, which starts out : And the lord spake onto Moses, saying:
Then in verses 2 through 27, a litany of direct orders, as evidenced by verse 1
2. Giving seed onto Molech - Death by stoning
3-5. Not killing that man who gives seed onto Molech, God would cut those people off
6. Cut off people such as wizards
7 - 8 Orders to sanctify ourselves, and an admonition to keep the lord's statutes
9. Cursing your or mother - penalty is death
10. Adultery - penalty is death
11. Sex with one's father's wife - penalty is death
12. Sex with one's daughter in law - penalty is death
13. Sex with other men - penalty is death
14. Sex with wife and her mother - penalty is death. I confess, I forgot that three ways were specifically mentioned in Leviticus.
15. Beastiality by male - penalty is death, both male and the beast
16. Beastiality by female - penalty is death, both female and the beast
17. Seeing his sister, his father's daughter or his mother's daughter naked.and her, his nakedness - penalty is to be cut off from his people
18. Having sex with a woman during her period - penalty is to be cut off from his people
19. Seeing his aunts naked (specifically his mother's sister. - penalty is to be cut off from his people (note this is an extrapolation from "they shall bear their inequity, which in other cases has been to be cut off).
20. Sex with his uncle's wife - penaltiy infertility
21. taking one's brother's wife - penaltiy infertility
Skipping ahead to Leviticus 21:27
27. Having a familiar spirit or being a wizard - penalty stoning to death.
Most of the commands also mention that "their blood shall be upon them", probably a way of saying that they are to blame for their own deaths as opposed to them being bloodied by being stoned or burnt as the command might be. Minor point whether simply describing the killing, or to assuage any guilt felt by those who follow God's command.
Got my King James version of the bible in front of me. Care to tell me what I paraphrased incorrectly? If you need me to, I can quote it verbatim for you to refute the bible's contents.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Galileo ridiculed the Pope, so he was put under house arrest until his death. The church actually funded Copernicus' research as a clerk; his work lead to calendar reform. Many prominent figures of the Science Revolution received education and conducted research in an academic institution with church roots; some of the figures were theologians themselves. The Christian missionaries translated the Bible to many languages, many of which are the only written form of a minority language or regional dialect that would have been extinct as an oral language.
You're right about anti-semitism. It is not the attitude that Christians should have towards Jews, for it is written:
You're also right about birth control. It's God's blessing to "be fruitful and multiply." (Genesus 1:28, 9:7)
I once had a signature.
... on whether you define God as evolving from and with the Universe, or being its puppetmaster creator.
But the desire to kill comes from within
Yes. But it takes an organizing philosophy to rally others around you to commit atrocities. Religion is very, very good for that. As such, religion is highly dangerous. It's like ordnance left lying around, just waiting for the right terrorist to come along and use it.
And the most amazing thing is that the Organized religions actually use the fact that some non religious have killed people to justify the fact that they have used their religion as the driving force and justification for them killing people
b Killing people is fucking wrong. If you use your religion to do it, you are just as evil as those evil atheists, no better. You just have a "better" excuse. That God told you that was what he wanted you to do.
If I say that killing people in the name of religion is wrong, and people try to bring Stalin, Hitler or Mao into the equation as if that means something, sorry, Hitler Stalin and Mao were evil assholes. So was the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, flying into the WTC, the endless war in the Middle east or the people burning witches at the stake in Salem.
It does not mean that religions are given immunity just because they think some God told them to do the same thing.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The situations where we have God and life are a proper subset of the situations in which we have life, Therefore, the probability that we have God and life cannot possibly be greater than that we have life.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
like "infallibility". That word does not mean what you think it means. There are several meanings to the concept of "infallibility" as regards the pope, the most commonly used one wasn't cemented until 1870. It's not as simple as "the pope is infallible" and generally refers to specific matters. It's not like being bitten by a radioactive spider. There is a long tradition of dissent on the matter from members of the church. As for catechesis, with Vatican II, there is much more official use and direction within the catechism on interpretation of the scriptures - including literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogic understandings. Far more latitude than a passing consideration could claim. In short, it's not the strict take-it-or-leave-it situation that many conclude it to be.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Somewhere along the way? When science was starting to emerge as a discipline, several centuries ago, many scientists thought they could find truth by examining the world and the Bible. There has never been a period in which science was always perceived as irrelevant to religion.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
There was lots of evidence for phlogiston, and the concept helped chemistry along. There are disagreements between scholars in all fields, and approximately everybody has evidence to support their case. There's plenty of evidence for things that don't exist. That's what makes science hard: rather than reasoning "There's evidence that unicorns exist, therefore they exist" it's necessary to consider the nature of the evidence for and against.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I found the link to lead right into a paywall. I got around it by Googling for the title, since Google requires search results to lead into the actual page.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Religion is very easy to reach and abuse.
Flip it around - there are billions of religious people who don't kill anyone
That is a case of man making God in his own image.
It's good that these religious people aren't killing people in the name of their religion, but generally we don't get prizes for not killing people
I certainly don't have a problem with people believing in whatever they want to believe in. They can believe in the Christian god, or crystals, or whatever. You can pray to Jesus, Dagon, or your ancestors, makes no difference to me
But there is a large movement to control what everyone else does in some religions, and when they don't get to enforce their views on others, they claim discrimination, But if I may, my experience in living under a system controlled by the religious tells me that it ain't pretty.
I went to Public school in a small town in Pennsylvania. A lot of churches in my little town. High school was early 70's.
The curriculum was scrubbed clean of anything that might suggest that the world was older than 6000 years.
This is not easy. We never studied dinosaurs, and Chemistry class was interesting. Isotope halflives were bordering on heresy, so they tried to avoid that.
Mandated sex education for my class was 1 day in 10th grade, nothing of use, very close to saying if we had sex outside of marriage, we'd die.
This was in the 70's man, no Scopes monkey trial stuff here, something like modern times. In the end, I had access to the local University, where I saw and read the books of forbidden knowledge, such as evolution and fossils, and science. Even the touchstone of religious control, the regulation of sexual knowledge. Between that and finally sitting down and actually reading the Bible, that pretty much took care of religion for me.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
From where I sit, I see the Atheists as having very little difference from the religious. They both want to believe adopting a set of beliefs will make them better people and allow them to shed guilt from being asshats.
My lack of belief in your god defines me just as much as your lack of belief in invisible pink teapots defines you.
For now anyway..
EMACS stands for "Eat My A--, C-ntS"
I was all about nano until I started to figure out vim. But since I don't use any of them for anything beyond basic text editing, my opinion might not be all that relevant.
Sheesh, I wonder if accountants can prove the existence of numbers?
Can't RT first FA, but God has always been our fallback explanation of natural phenomena. As we learn more and more about how the world works, the less we need the actions of the gods to explain things. Because the theists want to continue to use the gods to explain natural phenomena by supernatural agency, they find themselves with less and less ground to stand on. This is just a search for a final toehold, something "science" can't explain, and it seems like a good spot because, at this point, we know nothing about the origin of life.
I always advise those who want to cling to the notion of a God to place him at the Big Bang. I think they'll be safe there for a long time.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
The proof God exists has already been made in front of many witnesses: ( Matthew 3:16,17) After being baptized, Jesus immediately came up from the water; and look! the heavens were opened up, and he saw God’s spirit descending like a dove and coming upon him. 17Look! Also, a voice from the heavens said: “This is my Son, the beloved, whom I have approved.” Scientists are not as smart as they make themselves out to be. They cannot even explain the Design in DNA or the intricate design in the Brain... A member of the French Academy of Sciences stated: “Natural order was not invented by the human mind or set up by certain perceptive powers. ... The existence of order presupposes the existence of organizing intelligence. Such intelligence can be none other than God’s.”—Dieu existe? Oui (Paris, 1979), Christian Chabanis, quoting Pierre-Paul Grassé, p. 94.
Scientists have identified over 100 chemical elements. Their atomic structure displays an intricate mathematical interrelationship of the elements. The periodic table points to obvious design. Such amazing design could not possibly be accidental, a product of chance.
Illustration: When we see a camera, a radio, or a computer, we readily acknowledge that it must have been produced by an intelligent designer. Would it be reasonable, then, to say that far more complex things—the eye, the ear, and the human brain—did not originate with an intelligent Designer? Design comes from a designer....
God doesn't exist...
Or is that Barbers don't exist?
A man went to a barbershop to have his hair cut and his beard trimmed. As the barber began to work, they began to have a good conversation. They talked about so many things and various subjects. When they eventually touched on the subject of God, the barber said: “I don’t believe that God exists.”
“Why do you say that?” asked the customer.
“Well, you just have to go out in the street to realize that God doesn’t exist. Tell me, if God exists, would there be so many sick people? Would there be abandoned children? If God existed, there would be neither suffering nor pain. I can’t imagine a loving a God who would allow all of these things.”
The customer thought for a moment, but didn’t respond because he didn’t want to start an argument. The barber finished his job and the customer left the shop. Just after he left the barbershop, he saw a man in the street with long, stringy hair and an untrimmed beard. He looked dirty and unkempt.
The customer turned back and entered the barbershop again and he said to the barber: “You know what? Barbers do not exist.”
“How can you say that?” asked the surprised barber. “I am here, and I am a barber. And I just worked on you!”
“No!” the customer exclaimed. “Barbers don’t exist because if they did, there would be no people with dirty long hair and untrimmed beards, like that man outside.”
“Ah, but barbers DO exist! The problem is that some people don’t come to me.”
“Exactly!” affirmed the customer. “The same thing is true of God.”
If you don't believe in God because you cannot see him....Go to the edge of a cliff and jump off....You cannot see gravity so it must not exist....
Some scientists are just plain idiots...
Science can't prove it, neither can religion.
Well, you repeatedly (here and other threads) establish that is something is not rational, then it is irrational, and that logical arguments are necessary. I listed other things that have no rational, logically necessary basis, wondering if you object to them as well. Guess not. I'm trying to see why your reaction to irrational religion / spirituality is so visceral while you seem to have no parallel reaction to other things that meet your criteria. "Modern humans? Humans as a whole were always stupid, irrational, and uninformed." I think you may find a lot of people are able to draw a gradation of the sophistication of human thought, and that we seem to be betting on that gradation increasing.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Descartes presented an argument. Philosophers since then have been poking holes in that argument. I have never heard a modern philosopher state that they consider his argument a valid proof.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
I thought some of you might be interested in Lawrence Krauss' response on this article, which was not published by the WSJ. https://richarddawkins.net/201...
The ability of humans to make decisions that are not solely a result of deterministic (physical -> chemical -> physiological) or irresistible outside processes.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Or you could try and be clearer.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
The response to the Metaxas article gives his argument far too much credit. His argument was much more effectively and simply discredited by Richard Dawkins by simply stating the obvious fact, that no matter how unlikely it is for the universe to exist in its current form and for life to have developed as it has, the existence of a being that is capable of creating it must be far more unlikely as said being would have to be far more sophisticated than anything known to exist in the universe. As for the old Thomas Equinas argument "it looks like it was designed, therefore it must be." that was also mentioned, evolution explains the apparent "design" of life on earth.
AC is right: I was defending Ol Olsoc from towermac. Ol Olsoc defended himself four minutes before I did, but I didn't see his post until after I submitted my own. As AC said, he probably mixed up the threads.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Religion was born when the first con man met the first fool
Casteism
People start off with a belief and a prejudice, we all do. And the job of science is to set that aside to get to the truth.
Casteism
Your defensiveness is telling, just as your jumping to wrong conclusions. I am not religious, nor atheist, just in the camp that says neither has a particularly compelling argument. I also find it laughable that people who say they are against "Faith" have their main premise as a matter of faith.
Rejecting ideas from personal incredulity is far less scientific than pursuing a plausible hypothesis.
Certainly has a historical basis, though. Descartes is one of Christianity's better philosophers (and mathematicians), but he did one incredibly flawed philosophical experiment, which was to try to logically prove the existence of God. It's been a few decades, but I remember being a bit shocked when it mostly boiled down to: "By definition, God is the only thing that is perfect. Existence is a requirement of perfection, and therefore, God must exist." There were all sorts of supporting axioms, and it couched it up in more flowery language, but that's sort of the jist of it. It was not one of Descartes's better days.
Thanks for the correction and reminding me those were separate albums.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
Nothing with fundamentalism, it is just my right to read coherent things in the morning is sacred. Last time I checked, this is slashdot, not LOsservatore Romano. Such ramblings about existence of dog just fit there. And America is becoming more religion wise stupid by the day.
Atheism is about not believing in any kind of supernatural beliefs, a supreme entity and not wanting nothing to do with (organised) religion AT ALL. The atheist "churches" are just trolling for your money, paid by your taxes.
Saying atheists are believers is like saying a homeless has an invisible home.
That just means you've never heard of Lourdes.
Of course I have. She's a 45-year old male geologist.
What "science" should be exploring is why we get those feelings of the supernatural. The phenomenon of the transcendental across our entire species manifests itself in myriad forms, and seems quite elusive to being pinned down. Bottom line, are these moments anything more than an echo of an ancient danger sense? It's impossible to de-program ourselves completely on a mass scale...so how do we mitigate the risks?
I'm an agnostic apatheist. I don't know and I don't care.
This is a naive, literal interpretation that does not reflect any of the traditional thought.
In the Talmud, "abomination" is explained that it is not the act that is dangerous but the torment that it can cause. A man may leave his wife and children to pursue it, to be drawn astray from the community and studying the Torah. A man who pursues a homosexual life-style is compared to marrying a barren woman and given that it is a commandment to marry and have children, the pursuit of a homosexual life is considered a violation.
How fascinating, yet more proof that man makes God in his own image, when you tapdance and gyrate and just make stuff up when you have to, in order to take something as direct as Leviticus 20, and reinterpret it to suit what you personally think it should mean.
So tell me, does God have some sort of mental issue that he cannot communicate what he means? Dyslexia or what?
Is there something ambiguous about specific commands to kill people for certain specific reasons?
Being "cut off", now there is some ambiguity there. That's about as far as I'll budge in the zero tolerance hatefest written down there.
But hey, I didn't write this stuff, and eventually when you have to spend more time on interpretation than simply reading the original works, then maybe you are just doing what the original authors did, make stuff up.
Then again, one of the worst things ever for the bible was when people became literate and could read it for themselves. Because when direct commands written down on the page somehow aren't direct commands, and don't mean what they mean, all that means is that if I want to believe, I'll just pick the interpretation I like best, and consider that interpretation to be the true word.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
So? Some scientists are looking at owl feathers to understand how to make quieter aircraft. Those scientists are not going to start eating mice are they?
Similarly metaphysics and physics are different areas. It should be obvious but the manipulative that want religion to be in control of everything - a very shallow and wide interpretation of the idea of religion - wish to pretend otherwise mainly in the pursuit of personal political power. Far too many people are falling for that shit.
It is likely to be true that modern science developed as a result of a montheistic society instead of one with many Gods, for the reason that there was the belief in only one set of rules for reality instead of several sets or changing ones. However that just laid down the social environment where science could thrive and is not part of science itself. Those English clergymen who were amoung those who disproved the flood fossil theory and showed the earth was far older than expected knew that they were doing geology as a sideline to their theological duties and did not confuse science and religion. Similar when Mendel laid the foundations for Darwin's theory, or the Vatican astronomer today.
Science is about finding out the rules of reality, not about who wrote them. Data not metadata. Physics for the first, metaphysics for the latter.
'Before the modern period, Jews, Christians and Muslims all relished highly allegorical interpretations of scripture. The word of God was infinite and could not be tied down to a single interpretation.
And then literacy happened.
God spoke to Moses in the language and culture of the time, communicating in the way that the people of his generation would understand. Hebrew is a language full of metaphores and death, while not the literal meaning, was indicative of the severity of the consequences.
Really though, it beggars the imagination to think that the very specific lnguage isn't being specific. That you just get together with like minded people and decide that when he said kill these people he didn't mean kill them.
As for allegory, I can handle that easily, much of th bible is clearly allegory, and it is fun to watch the fundies trip all over themselves trying to say that the flood happened exactly as described or Usher's declaration of the age of earth was the word of god. taking a human's calculations as the undisputed word of their god, then come up with variable speed of light and other easily disproven ideas in support of that canard.
When you read the scripture it in context it is very clear. When you take words out of context and splice them together its muddled.
Your explanation sounds like a manual that tells you to plug a 12 volt DC device into a 120 VAC socket, it blows up the device, and you say the author didn't really mean you were supposed to plug it into a 120 VAC socket, but that 12 volts DC is less voltage than 2400 VAC, or than a lightning strike. That the author of the maunal wanted you to keep the device out ot th rain.
When you take a translation from one language and culture to an entirely different one, the meanings can be lost.
I've heard that one before. It's just saying that unless I learn to read Hebrew, I'll always have to have the bible interpreted for me. That's pretty handy.
When you take it from a source known to have intentional changes that corrupt the scripture for political reasons, then you lack any substance to argue with.
It would appear that all versions have something that says the same thing, nothing ambiguous. Except for that Hebrew version that someone has to tell me what it says. Note I do a little bit of that already.I have King James, and Douay versions of the bible, a legacy of my strict Catholic upbringing, and my Southern Baptist Grandparents. Given that the online versions match my two references, I have good confidence of the others.
All read basically the same, with a few words here or there different. The common thread is kill, put to death, stone with stones. Interestingly enough, a quick perusal through an online Hebrew bible in English on the web - Leviticus 20 looks much like the King James Version. Checking another version because I am not terribly familiar with Torah, smae thing (chabad.org and machine-mamre.org.
And please, I was brought up strict Catholic, and even entertained the idea of becoming a priest, but as the joke in bad taste goes, I wasn't gay. But seriously - I do know the difference between allegory, and specificity.
The idea that it says in the bible that (essentially pi = 3 isn't proof of any malfeasance or error on a Supreme being's part, it's just an example of a mistake somewhere along the line. It is a little amusing to see the aptdance the literalists try yo put on it though.
The prophets denounce literalistic views. They tell us that it goes against the meaning of the word if a man intentionally sins with the expectation that paying the sacrificial offering is all that God wants for absolution.
Now there is an interesting thought. Would it then therefore follow that a man who "believes in God" as a matter of hedging his bet - so to speak - is doing something very similar?
One is supposed to ta
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Ok... your lack of belief in your god defines you just as much as your lack of belief in invisible pink teapots defines you, is that better?
Me not believing in something is not a faith.
ps. I'm not a militant atheist, I was raised C of E, and still go to some services (I feel a little hypocritical praying, so I don't, but I do sing). I don't believe in any kind of christian god though. I don't believe in lots of things, god is just one of them.
Fair enough,
What would posting billboards designed to troll people celebrating the holidays,
Or filing lawsuits to prevent displays in holiday displays in public spaces,
make someone ?
All tha says is that scientifically, one cannot proe the existence of God simly trough appearance of design, because evolution is capable of producing the same appearance. It does not say, however, that such an appearance is necessarily illusory, however, and it is not unreasonable to conclude that an appearance of design makes a relatively strong case that it *was* deigned. Not proof, of course, but not an entirely irrational case for it either.
the only retort to this merely echoes the sentiment hat there are alternative explanations for that appearance, which doesn't refute the point that life was designed can nonetheless still be a perfectly valid conclusion from the observations without assuming that you first allegedly somehow know that there isn't any designer in the first place
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You know, you think that God could have given us more than *one book* (of dubious historical provenance) with which to assert his reality. I mean really, one book? Just one? Something more thorough like an encyclopedia would have been better, if you're going for just one. But really, continued output would be more convincing. "Publish or perish," right?
And anyway, it's been nearly 2000 years since that book was written. No updates for modern issues? No edits? No recent editions (save for language translations)? No further tales or stories? Nor more commandments? ("Thou shalt not waste more than 20% of your time on the Internet!")
How come nobody sees burning bushes any more? Or gets turned into pillars of salt? Evangelicals have had to resort to blaming random *natural phenomena* on various alleged lapses in so-called morality. Where's the accuracy in that?
God really needs to get back to work and write another book.
Metaxas fails to define or even mention *which* God it is that Science allegedly proves exists.
Bit of a shocker for him if "Science" showed that Buddha was real, but not Jahweh or Allah.
Great question; but if you've figured out some of the pieces of the framework, you're further along in explaining the nature of God than if you haven't figured out some of the pieces of the framework.
That's why I tell people to study a physics book if they want insight into the mind of God.
Makes perfect sense: everyone who believes in God believes that God authored the laws of physics, but not everyone who believes in God believes that the Bible is divinely inspired.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
I guess I read that in my own context, because I took the article to mean that JHVH-1 exists, therefor "Bob" also exists.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
There seems to be a recurring straw man on this thread. I'm not sure where the WSJ article claims that science 'proves' the existence of God. It is not coming to a strict scientific conclusion,but a logical and reasonable conclusion based on legitimate current scientific observations of the universe. That is in no way a claim that science has proved Gods existence,but that scientific discoveries,based on the current data,logically point to the truth of a First Cause,a Creator, God (despite modern expectations). Science on its own, cannot prove God exists,nor disprove it,it is too limited in its scope. It limits itself to the material. Its very method of proof depends on this limit.