Hmm. I have nothing against homosexuals, but I would hesitate to hire someone who publicly posts graphic sexual comments intended to shock. Something about indications of a basic personality defect... The compulsion to shove your sexual preferences (whether raging homo or right-wing repressed hetero) into other peoples' faces, is sick.
Who says they're meant to shock? Within his social circles that could well be normal banter, and the fact that in an interview the most you'd get would be the "hint" that he's homosexual shows that he's aware that it's inappropriate for the workplace and is able to maintain proper professional standards there -- clearly not shoving his sexuality in the face of those who don't want to know. The fact that you think it's designed to shock and see it as a problem says more about your attitudes than his suitability for the job.
Okay, then I'll get a loan from a company with decent statisticians who recognize that your friends don't determine how safe a debtor you are.
And if it turns out having friends with poor credit scores actually does indicate how safe you are (I really doubt it) then I'm all for that information being used appropriately.
So all those folks on the skids tend to hang out together and are all bad credit risks, and all the millionaires tend to hang out together and are good credit risks, so there's a correlation. Unfortunately, if anybody with a good credit rating turns philanthropist and starts working with and befriending those down on their luck their credit rating is going to take a hit, so they're not going to do that. Way to discourage good works, folks.
Sorry to pedantic, but this is Slashdot after all.
Corn syrup is not sugar
Are you sure? Last time I checked, glucose and fructose were both sugars. Or did you just mean that it's not pure sugar (just like Demerara/turbinado sugar isn't)?
Fast-food work is as physically dangerous, emotionally debilitating,
unregulated, lacking in any benefits, controlled by highly abusive bosses and as associated with severe social stigma as prostitution.
Fast-food workers across the world are typically as desperate for money as prostitutes.
At the farming end of the fast-food industry I'd say that was a pretty accurate summary.
Hai digi, I'd like to jump in and say that if I were caught in your "my vivid and continuous memories are starkly inconsistent with slowly mounting thorough physical evidence" scenario, I would actually fold quite early lacking any corroborative evidence or alibis of my own.
That's the sort of thing that I meant when I said that what constitutes "too much" contrary evidence is a subjective matter. But however early you fold, you can't rule out memory completely and still do reasoning, because all reasoning requires that we retain some chain of premises and conclusions and some facts to feed into that chain. That's why classical foundationalism (and most scientism) fails. It sees things as too absolute, failing to recognise that it's not always (usually?) possible to draw nice tidy boundaries, and that that's not due to the fact that our techniques aren't good enough yet, it's a necessary consequence of the fact that science is done by fallible subjects.
You talk about "specialists," as if there was some intellectually rigorous body of knowledge and technique, with underpinnings that experts had agreed on based on objective criteria. What "specialists" would these be? If they're philosophers, then I suspect you will find roughly zero academic philosophers these days who think that proving or disproving the existence of the Christian deity is a meaningful exercise.
Only true for remarkably large values of zero. A recent survey reported in Philosophy Now magazine identified that roughly 20% of academic philosophers believe in one or more gods, and philosophy of religion is still an active field. I've been researching the literature in the field recently (earlier this year) and there is a lot still being done on the arguments for and against the existence of God. The general public might think that the issue is trivially decided, but academia doesn't.
Sorry, I'm not catching the distinction you're making. I'm internally defining: proof = data = evidence.
That's a fundamental problem, and I find it hard to see how you could construct any coherent argument with that understanding. In their normal meaning they are very different things.
"David Cameron is Prime Minister of the UK" is data, but it's not proof of the existence of God, and few would even consider it evidence of the existence of God.
Perturbations in the orbit of Neptune were evidence of an object in an orbit further out, but not proof of it. Observation of Pluto was proof of such a planet, but the perturbations turned out to be caused by relativity, not by Pluto.
Has it occurred to you that a persons upbringing might influence what data is readily available to them?
Faith is belief without proof, as you say. Why do you then go on to treat it as if it means belief without data, which is not the same thing at all? And why do you assume that religionists have not looked at the data and drawn conclusions based on that data? Have you so much faith in your own data gathering and analytic skills that you believe anybody who comes to different conclusions can't have done those things?
Joe Smith has been accused of murder. You don't know Joe Smith, but you take an interest in the case and decide to investigate it.
You talk to one person who says they believe Joe Smith is innocent. But they can't point to any actual evidence that supports that. They deny the oppositions evidence, replacing it with illogical theories of their own.
See? That's what talking to someone who argues there is a god is like. They swear there is a god, but they. have. no. evidence.
Yes, absolutely: no evidence that they can offer you. But they may have evidence that satisfies them. It's rational for them to believe (if they have the experience they claim), and it is just as rational for you not to believe. Our thought experiments don't contradict each other in any way unless you believe that reason will infallibly lead everybody to the same conclusions. And if you do believe that, what is the foundation for that belief?
The fact that many smart people believe in Christianity doesn't automatically mean that there are good, intelligent reasons for believing in Christianity.
Not in itself it doesn't; you have to look at the arguments. And it turns out that there are arguments on both sides that are a lot more subtle and involved than most non-specialists realise. It gets rather tiresome to see folks treating anybody who disagrees with them as having not thought about the subject with enough care or intelligence, when there are people on both sides of the argument that have put in a degree of care and intelligence that few if any here could match.
I can accept personal experience as a reason for someone to have a belief in something, though I have plenty of reservations there, because personal experience can be potentially fallible.
Yes, but it's still rational to act on it unless you have reason not to.
One of the other major problems with personal experience is it's personal. I'm not the type to tell someone else that my knowledge trumps their experience in a realm where facts can't apply, but if I haven't also had that experience myself I'm still left without any real evidence.
Absolutely, and it's an important point. It can be entirely rational for one person to believe something and for another person to reject that belief. Reason doesn't mean that everybody who uses it will come to the same beliefs -- something that often gets missed in these arguments.
I simply can't take her ghost noises stories as authoritative.
And if you had an experience that you interpreted as a ghost then others may not accept that interpretation. Models of explanation help, of course, but the models you accept will in part depend on your experiences.
First, it presumes that you (or the person claiming there's money in one box) are credible. That is to say, that there isn't a large possibility that there's no check in any box.
If the cost is low (your next point) then credibility doesn't matter much (as long as you trust me enough to be sure that the cost is low).
Second, it presumes that the cost of choosing a box is low or nothing. In your analogy, that's true. In terms of picking a faith, I don't think it is.
That depends on the faith. Some of them only demand stuff that I think is pretty good to do anyway.
Third (and this is one of the big problems with Pascal's Wager as well), it presumes that either people can choose what they believe, or that God is a sucker that you can bluff.
I wasn't trying to defend Pascal's wager in general, only to show that one particular argument
against it was flawed. I agree that one can't choose to believe something, one either believes it or not (something that both the religionists and atheists seem prone to forget as they recommend their adversaries to change their beliefs). Yes, I think that is a more serious flaw in Pascal's wager; although it might be possible to change one's belief (by engaging in some sort of brainwashing program) the cost is no longer low.
But that's passing the buck from the logical argument to the logical system. It still leaves open the question as to whether or not the logical system applies to reality, in which case it is still up to observation to determine whether or not the premises (or conclusions) are true.
Not quite, because the difference between the modal logics is necessarily metaphysical and can't be decided by observation. The differences relate to what can be and what must be, whereas observation only tells us what is.
As for the "meaningless statement" issue with regard to omnipotence, if we take the classic one, "Can God make a rock so heavy he can't lift it?" this is far from a meaningless statement, because I can make a rock so heavy I can't lift it (granted, I can't create it from scratch, but I can form it from existing rocks). The statement only becomes ridiculous when you apply the attribute of omnipotence to the god.
It's not that it becomes ridiculous, it's that it becomes contradictory (and therefore meaningless) when applied to an omnipotent being. "A rock that an omnipotent being cannot lift" is already self-contradictory and so meaningless. Tagging "Can God create" in front of it doesn't give it meaning. It's a category error to think it says anything about the possible omnipotence of God.
Anyway, even if you don't accept the argument from evil, you still can't demonstrate that a god is actually possible, because to do that you'd have to show how such a god is consistent with the fundamental rules that underly reality, which we don't know. So the assumption that such a god is possible at all is still an unfounded assumption.
Yes -- but no more so than the assumption that such a god is not possible.
There's a final problem with this sort of logical argument that makes the whole thing just plain stupid instead of subtle: the whole thing boils down to, "The most amazing thing I can imagine must exist, therefore god exists." And no, that's patently absurd, because there is absolutely no guarantee that just because we can imagine it, it must be possible. This sort of logical argument, in other words, boils down to a play on words to disguise just how ridiculous it is.
But that isn't what the ontological argument does. The ontological argument refers to the "greatest" thing, and carefully defines "greatest" in such a a way that anything that exists is by definition greater than anything that doesn't. There's a problem with the notion of "greatest" beyond that point, though, which I think is one problem with the ontological argument (is a hearty meal greater than a comfortable bed?) If you can resolve that issue then the ontological argument most certainly leads to something that exists (if anything at all exists) and defines that thing as "God", although (and here's the second problem I have with most proofs of the existence of God) it's not clear that the thing is anything like what anybody actually thinks of as God. In that sense I agree that it's a play on words. It proves the existence of God by redefining "God" to be something it can prove the existence of.
ZARNIWOOP: But don't you see that people live or die on your word?
MAN: It's nothing to do with me, I am not involved with people. The Lord knows I am not a cruel man.
ZARNIWOOP: Ah! You say . . . the Lord! You believe in . ..
MAN: My cat. I call him the Lord. I am kind to him.
ZARNIWOOP: All right. How do you know he exists? How do you know he knows you to be kind, or enjoys what you think of as your kindness?
MAN: I don't. I have no idea. It merely pleases me to behave in a certain way to what appears to be a cat. What else do you do? Please I am tired.
But if you believe in those religions, are you REALLY having faith in God himself...or are you putting your faith in those people who are telling you what God wants?
Ultimately everybody -- religious, agnostic, atheist -- is putting faith in themselves making the right call. I don't see any way around that.
Slashdot Mirror
Since the boilerplate is not a copyrightable work
Why not? Somebody at some point created it.
Ooh, you little thief!
Hmm. I have nothing against homosexuals, but I would hesitate to hire someone who publicly posts graphic sexual comments intended to shock. Something about indications of a basic personality defect... The compulsion to shove your sexual preferences (whether raging homo or right-wing repressed hetero) into other peoples' faces, is sick.
Who says they're meant to shock? Within his social circles that could well be normal banter, and the fact that in an interview the most you'd get would be the "hint" that he's homosexual shows that he's aware that it's inappropriate for the workplace and is able to maintain proper professional standards there -- clearly not shoving his sexuality in the face of those who don't want to know. The fact that you think it's designed to shock and see it as a problem says more about your attitudes than his suitability for the job.
Okay, then I'll get a loan from a company with decent statisticians who recognize that your friends don't determine how safe a debtor you are. And if it turns out having friends with poor credit scores actually does indicate how safe you are (I really doubt it) then I'm all for that information being used appropriately.
So all those folks on the skids tend to hang out together and are all bad credit risks, and all the millionaires tend to hang out together and are good credit risks, so there's a correlation. Unfortunately, if anybody with a good credit rating turns philanthropist and starts working with and befriending those down on their luck their credit rating is going to take a hit, so they're not going to do that. Way to discourage good works, folks.
I believe last time this happened, beheading was involved....
Nope.
The East will rise again!
Are parents really so stupid that they don't realize this?
Some British parents are.
(mass starvation is mostly due to bad politicians/leaders)
True, but not always the leaders of the ones who are starving.
Sorry to pedantic, but this is Slashdot after all.
Corn syrup is not sugar
Are you sure? Last time I checked, glucose and fructose were both sugars. Or did you just mean that it's not pure sugar (just like Demerara/turbinado sugar isn't)?
At those prices, he needs to.
Sandwiches are named after a person, not the place (although the person was in turn named after the place).
Fast-food work is as physically dangerous, emotionally debilitating, unregulated, lacking in any benefits, controlled by highly abusive bosses and as associated with severe social stigma as prostitution.
Fast-food workers across the world are typically as desperate for money as prostitutes.
At the farming end of the fast-food industry I'd say that was a pretty accurate summary.
Because he knows there aren't any, and though this stuff often masquerades as religious in reality it's purely cultural.
Hai digi, I'd like to jump in and say that if I were caught in your "my vivid and continuous memories are starkly inconsistent with slowly mounting thorough physical evidence" scenario, I would actually fold quite early lacking any corroborative evidence or alibis of my own.
That's the sort of thing that I meant when I said that what constitutes "too much" contrary evidence is a subjective matter. But however early you fold, you can't rule out memory completely and still do reasoning, because all reasoning requires that we retain some chain of premises and conclusions and some facts to feed into that chain. That's why classical foundationalism (and most scientism) fails. It sees things as too absolute, failing to recognise that it's not always (usually?) possible to draw nice tidy boundaries, and that that's not due to the fact that our techniques aren't good enough yet, it's a necessary consequence of the fact that science is done by fallible subjects.
You talk about "specialists," as if there was some intellectually rigorous body of knowledge and technique, with underpinnings that experts had agreed on based on objective criteria. What "specialists" would these be? If they're philosophers, then I suspect you will find roughly zero academic philosophers these days who think that proving or disproving the existence of the Christian deity is a meaningful exercise.
Only true for remarkably large values of zero. A recent survey reported in Philosophy Now magazine identified that roughly 20% of academic philosophers believe in one or more gods, and philosophy of religion is still an active field. I've been researching the literature in the field recently (earlier this year) and there is a lot still being done on the arguments for and against the existence of God. The general public might think that the issue is trivially decided, but academia doesn't.
Sorry, I'm not catching the distinction you're making. I'm internally defining: proof = data = evidence.
That's a fundamental problem, and I find it hard to see how you could construct any coherent argument with that understanding. In their normal meaning they are very different things.
"David Cameron is Prime Minister of the UK" is data, but it's not proof of the existence of God, and few would even consider it evidence of the existence of God.
Perturbations in the orbit of Neptune were evidence of an object in an orbit further out, but not proof of it. Observation of Pluto was proof of such a planet, but the perturbations turned out to be caused by relativity, not by Pluto.
Has it occurred to you that a persons upbringing might influence what data is readily available to them?
Faith is belief without proof, as you say. Why do you then go on to treat it as if it means belief without data, which is not the same thing at all? And why do you assume that religionists have not looked at the data and drawn conclusions based on that data? Have you so much faith in your own data gathering and analytic skills that you believe anybody who comes to different conclusions can't have done those things?
Ooh, the modding war on that post is fun, isn't it? Almost as if some people don't want the argument to be noticed!
But if you assume God cannot exist then there is no possible argument. My disagreement with Plantinga is over the choice of S5.
Consider this thought experiment:
Joe Smith has been accused of murder. You don't know Joe Smith, but you take an interest in the case and decide to investigate it. You talk to one person who says they believe Joe Smith is innocent. But they can't point to any actual evidence that supports that. They deny the oppositions evidence, replacing it with illogical theories of their own.
See? That's what talking to someone who argues there is a god is like. They swear there is a god, but they. have. no. evidence.
Yes, absolutely: no evidence that they can offer you. But they may have evidence that satisfies them. It's rational for them to believe (if they have the experience they claim), and it is just as rational for you not to believe. Our thought experiments don't contradict each other in any way unless you believe that reason will infallibly lead everybody to the same conclusions. And if you do believe that, what is the foundation for that belief?
The fact that many smart people believe in Christianity doesn't automatically mean that there are good, intelligent reasons for believing in Christianity.
Not in itself it doesn't; you have to look at the arguments. And it turns out that there are arguments on both sides that are a lot more subtle and involved than most non-specialists realise. It gets rather tiresome to see folks treating anybody who disagrees with them as having not thought about the subject with enough care or intelligence, when there are people on both sides of the argument that have put in a degree of care and intelligence that few if any here could match.
I can accept personal experience as a reason for someone to have a belief in something, though I have plenty of reservations there, because personal experience can be potentially fallible.
Yes, but it's still rational to act on it unless you have reason not to.
One of the other major problems with personal experience is it's personal. I'm not the type to tell someone else that my knowledge trumps their experience in a realm where facts can't apply, but if I haven't also had that experience myself I'm still left without any real evidence.
Absolutely, and it's an important point. It can be entirely rational for one person to believe something and for another person to reject that belief. Reason doesn't mean that everybody who uses it will come to the same beliefs -- something that often gets missed in these arguments.
I simply can't take her ghost noises stories as authoritative.
And if you had an experience that you interpreted as a ghost then others may not accept that interpretation. Models of explanation help, of course, but the models you accept will in part depend on your experiences.
First, it presumes that you (or the person claiming there's money in one box) are credible. That is to say, that there isn't a large possibility that there's no check in any box.
If the cost is low (your next point) then credibility doesn't matter much (as long as you trust me enough to be sure that the cost is low).
Second, it presumes that the cost of choosing a box is low or nothing. In your analogy, that's true. In terms of picking a faith, I don't think it is.
That depends on the faith. Some of them only demand stuff that I think is pretty good to do anyway.
Third (and this is one of the big problems with Pascal's Wager as well), it presumes that either people can choose what they believe, or that God is a sucker that you can bluff.
I wasn't trying to defend Pascal's wager in general, only to show that one particular argument against it was flawed. I agree that one can't choose to believe something, one either believes it or not (something that both the religionists and atheists seem prone to forget as they recommend their adversaries to change their beliefs). Yes, I think that is a more serious flaw in Pascal's wager; although it might be possible to change one's belief (by engaging in some sort of brainwashing program) the cost is no longer low.
But that's passing the buck from the logical argument to the logical system. It still leaves open the question as to whether or not the logical system applies to reality, in which case it is still up to observation to determine whether or not the premises (or conclusions) are true.
Not quite, because the difference between the modal logics is necessarily metaphysical and can't be decided by observation. The differences relate to what can be and what must be, whereas observation only tells us what is.
As for the "meaningless statement" issue with regard to omnipotence, if we take the classic one, "Can God make a rock so heavy he can't lift it?" this is far from a meaningless statement, because I can make a rock so heavy I can't lift it (granted, I can't create it from scratch, but I can form it from existing rocks). The statement only becomes ridiculous when you apply the attribute of omnipotence to the god.
It's not that it becomes ridiculous, it's that it becomes contradictory (and therefore meaningless) when applied to an omnipotent being. "A rock that an omnipotent being cannot lift" is already self-contradictory and so meaningless. Tagging "Can God create" in front of it doesn't give it meaning. It's a category error to think it says anything about the possible omnipotence of God.
Anyway, even if you don't accept the argument from evil, you still can't demonstrate that a god is actually possible, because to do that you'd have to show how such a god is consistent with the fundamental rules that underly reality, which we don't know. So the assumption that such a god is possible at all is still an unfounded assumption.
Yes -- but no more so than the assumption that such a god is not possible.
There's a final problem with this sort of logical argument that makes the whole thing just plain stupid instead of subtle: the whole thing boils down to, "The most amazing thing I can imagine must exist, therefore god exists." And no, that's patently absurd, because there is absolutely no guarantee that just because we can imagine it, it must be possible. This sort of logical argument, in other words, boils down to a play on words to disguise just how ridiculous it is.
But that isn't what the ontological argument does. The ontological argument refers to the "greatest" thing, and carefully defines "greatest" in such a a way that anything that exists is by definition greater than anything that doesn't. There's a problem with the notion of "greatest" beyond that point, though, which I think is one problem with the ontological argument (is a hearty meal greater than a comfortable bed?) If you can resolve that issue then the ontological argument most certainly leads to something that exists (if anything at all exists) and defines that thing as "God", although (and here's the second problem I have with most proofs of the existence of God) it's not clear that the thing is anything like what anybody actually thinks of as God. In that sense I agree that it's a play on words. It proves the existence of God by redefining "God" to be something it can prove the existence of.
ZARNIWOOP: But don't you see that people live or die on your word? .
MAN: It's nothing to do with me, I am not involved with people. The Lord knows I am not a cruel man.
ZARNIWOOP: Ah! You say . . . the Lord! You believe in . .
MAN: My cat. I call him the Lord. I am kind to him.
ZARNIWOOP: All right. How do you know he exists? How do you know he knows you to be kind, or enjoys what you think of as your kindness?
MAN: I don't. I have no idea. It merely pleases me to behave in a certain way to what appears to be a cat. What else do you do? Please I am tired.
But if you believe in those religions, are you REALLY having faith in God himself...or are you putting your faith in those people who are telling you what God wants?
Ultimately everybody -- religious, agnostic, atheist -- is putting faith in themselves making the right call. I don't see any way around that.