Sleeping in dungeons? Man, I haven't done that since 2ed days.
Clever players know how to conduct resource management, and unless you're running the world's largest dungeon, shouldn't have any issues dealing with the standard 3 fights a day guideline. Especially if you powergame correctly -- a dead monster doesn't waste healing resources.
My main issue with 4ed is that it seems like 3.5 still has a lot of legs left, with a bunch of interesting stuff that just came out. The Book of 9 Swords, as you said, is awesome, and has a lot of potential builds that still bear exploring. While it was obvious they were testing stuff for 4ed for a while now with crap like the Tome of Magic and Incarnum, I think it's just too soon for a new edition, and most of the players I know (which runs into the thousands, I play a lot in the RPGA) feel the same way. While 4ed might be cool and all, it just feels wrong. You can only piss off your customers so much before they leave for something else, or just quit.
>>But you don't seem to be arguing it's truth. At least, not here. I think that's noteworthy. You offer a great deal of criteria for belief but none of them are especially relevant - there's one reasonable criteria for taking a position or not, and that criteria is whether or not it's true.
Which is a different argument entirely. I was saying that it is rational to believe in God, and that a rational, scientifically-minded person cannot be faulted for believing in God, since the two are quite compatible. Perhaps not compatible in the ignorant Bible-thumping sort of way you perhaps perceive Christians as, but more the highly educated Jesuit sort of way.
There's rational and emotive Christians, and rational and emotive atheists. Emotive atheists often times being the people that hate God, and therefore claim he doesn't exist, which is a wonderfully hypocritical stance I've always found amusing.
>>If you want to be a Christian because it makes you happy, regardless of its truth, you've given the game away
That's not the point at all -- encouraging people to believe something that is false in order to make them happy is not Christianity, nor is what I'm saying. You're missing the point in that it that the truth value of the proposition "God exists" is not known, though there are reasonable arguments both for and against it. Certainly if it was proven beyond a reasonable doubt to all people that God exists, then only fools would not believe in God, and vice versa. The reason that it's an issue at all is that it is not known, so the question becomes how to act and what to believe in the absence of overwhelming proof on one side or another.
This is a dilemma that crops up in, well, pretty much every interesting debate, ever. Because if one side of the debate had 100% proof, it wouldn't be much of an argument. Medicine, history, religion, whatever.
The pragmatic argument (which you take exception to) comes into play in these cases -- if I don't know the truth value of a proposition, I at least can look at the outcome of the proposition, and use that to help me make up my mind. While you'll probably howl this doesn't make the proposition true -- I'd agree. With the caveat that at least that happiness and internal peace is one of the things promised by Christianity, and which it does seem to deliver.
Consider the case of taking echinacea for a cold. There are studies showing it works, and studies showing it doesn't work. The evidence is unclear. Therefore, one may decide either way to take it or not without feeling like he's being irrational. And it is certainly the logical thing to do to weigh the cost ($5 for a bottle) against the potential benefit (shorting the duration of a cold), and factoring that into the decision making process. The alt-med "atheists" (mainly western medicine doctors) have been proven wrong hundreds of times, as drugs with unknown mechanisms of actions are proven to be effective. And alt-med "believers" have been proven wrong many many times, too, as they ingest nothing more than placebos. So it's very hard to say which person is the more foolish -- the alt-med atheist, or the alt-med believer, though it is important to note that 18th century doctors rejected the old fashion of hand-washing before surgery since it didn't make rational "sense" to them.
>>The perfect island is defined precisely the same way. It has to be - it's perfect!
You're making the same errors that first year philosophy students make when studying the problem. We could talk about a perfect man or a perfect unicorn, and have them still not exist. It is the concept of God, and only the concept of God only, the most perfect possible entity, whereby the definition alone lets us know it exists.
As I said, there's arguments against it, but this isn't one of them. I'm sure you can read a web site somewhere and copy and paste one.
>>Sourceless assertions.
Right.
>>To the contrary; it seems highly improbable. We know that consciousness is what brains do, in the same way that vision is what eyes do.
And yet you are there in your body, and I am here in my body. There was a function that Abbey called I() (who formulated this argument) that is to say, the instantiation of the I, wherein the consciousness appears within a being. From nothingness to consciousness. There's nothing to say that after you die, and your brain ceases to exist, the same process couldn't repeat itself, and the new I (you) arises in a newborn baby. No memory of course of your previous self, since you don't have the neurons for that, but even if you deny the reality of the consciousness, you must recognize the illusion of consciousness. After all, we all appear to have consciousness. If you admit Abbey's argument that reincarnation is possible, if not probable (since it happened to us once already), you must also acknowledge that consciousness could arise in a different dimension or state of being, especially if the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body is true.
>>Logically, there is much more reason to reject the idea of an "afterlife" than to accept it.
Do you exist? Then you have to admit that at some point the 'you' sitting in your body arose from nothingness, which is equally as unbelievable as saying the 'you' might appear again out of nothingness, though in a different shape or form.
My point about superstitious atheists was in order to answer your claim that if atheists had a yearning for God, then they'd be Christians. I think that it's fairly clear that they still feel that yearning, but sublimate it in different ways. Plus, it's amusing.
>>Why don't you ask yourself how happy you would be, starting from a position of knowingly lying to yourself. I'm sorry but knowingly believing falsehood can't make anybody happy.
If you think it's a lie, then don't be a Christian. I'm not arguing that people should believe in something they believe to be a lie. I'm arguing that Christianity is a rationally coherent position, that there are good reasons to believe in God, and that it has pragmatic reasons as well.
>>Seriously. I've been a Christian, so I'm speaking from a position of knowledge about your position. You, on the other hand, seem to have no knowledge of mine. Why don't you try it?
I understand atheists quite well, counting a number of them as my friends, and debating with them over drinks. In fact, I have more non-religious friends (of various flavors) than religious friends.
I also used to spend quite a while debating people without rancor on the IIDB philosophy and existence of God forums, since the place generally only attracts fundamentalist trolls, and some of the concepts they bandy about there are quite easy to demolish.
Fundamentally, though, you are right -- people that have experienced the divine vary in their types of religious experiences, but are convinced of the truth of it, and are arguing across a large gulf to atheists on the other side. Which is why I limit myself to picking apart especially egregious errors that the atheists there make, acting as sort of a umpire apologist. Or I used to, at least -- haven't posted there in a year or so -- as it got to be too tedious watching the same mistakes over and over.
>>I've destroyed every one, as any reasonable person would conclude.
You've certainly shown that you don't want to accept them -- this is different that providing a counter-argument. Proposition / Counter-proposition, attacking premises, etc., is what argument is all about. This is abuse -- argument is down the hall.
Your statement about Hawking is a good crack at it, but one can logically show the world had to have a beginning, which there's not really a good answer for. I heard a guy propose anti-time as a solution to this problem, but I've only seen that referenced in Star Trek.
>>Timeless/= God.
Good, you're finally starting to grasp the point of the argument. However, whatever it was that created the universe must 1) Be rather powerful (though not necessarily so -- there's a finite though large amount of energy in the universe) 2) Be capable of creating a singularity and 3) Not have a cause itself.
It's not necessarily God, but the result of the logical argument rather resembles God in certain ways.
>>But, as I said, that's false. Simply defining something doesn't bring it into being. Just because you've communicated to me a definition doesn't bring anything into being; otherwise you must conclude the existence of the "perfect island" just as soon as I speak those words to you.
Like I said, you're missing the point of the argument. The concept of God is precisely unique in that the concept of God, and only of God, can one know is true simply because you understand the definition. There are arguments against it, but this isn't one of them. The argument itself says that, you're right, talking about a perfect island does not make it into being. God is unique in this regard, as he is the apex of all perfection.
>>The Bible is of no use in understanding the will of God, because the Bible has nothing to do with the will of God.
Back to that whole assuming your conclusion thing.
>>The consensus of Christians, yes
Consensus of all serious scholars, atheists and Christians alike.
>>None of the Bible is contemporary with Jesus. There's no written record of his statements - only make-believe not first written until seven decades later - or as many as twelve.
Furthermore, the Christianity as Myth hypothesis fails for a variety of reasons.
>>The fact that I'm talking with an ideologue, here, is not lost on me. I hold no hope of convincing you, the delusion is too great. But any reasonable spectator must see that each of your so-called "proofs" is bereft. They're fallacious in every case, I've proven it.
A person who rejects logic so that he can believe whatever he wants to believe is the true ideologue. Believe it or not, I'm actually convinced by logic and reason, and have changed my mind on several critical things in the past, and which is why you have no hope of convincing me, as you're just repeating over and over, "I believe Christianity is a myth, therefore Christianity is a myth." Bad reasoning, on the other hand, never fails to raise my ire.
To answer your point that if Atheists had a yearning for God, they'd be Christians: All of the atheists I know believe in something really bizarre, from ESP to aliens to being able to empathically talk to plants. She heard plants screaming because of CO2 emissions. Regardless, that, to plants, CO2 was kinda like food. I think that most atheists sublimate their yearning for God with these other pursuits. And I literally mean all of them. I had one lecture me for half an hour on how there is no evidence of anything beyond material reality, and then go on to say that she believes in being able to read auras from photographs.
Further on the topic of Materialism, and an argument from consciousness: One thing that does in Materialism is the phenomenon of consciousness -- one
Unless ICANN is changing their fee from 20 cents to 100 bucks, the registrars will get the increased fees, who are as corrupt as any business I've seen. More so, since their antics are sponsored by ICANN.
If they made it $100 bucks for a 3 year registration, that would shut down most of of the domain speculation (though big-ticket names would naturally still be reserved). Domain tasting / kiting is just absurd, and even more absurd that ICANN actually put together a focus group to explore and explicitly allow it.
>>Oh, wait - I think I get it. You think that stuff actually is philosophy. Hilarious!
Every person lives by a philosophy. If you don't think you have one, then you're just a tool.
>>Much in science is understood to be uncaused; for instance, atomic decay. Secondly, argument by special pleading - if everything must have a cause, and God is the ultimate cause of the universe, then God too must have a cause
Incorrect. First of all, I was tempted to get into pair formation, and similar things, but it turns out to not make a difference to the argument at all. Secondly, the answer, which you missed, was that something timeless had to be the answer. Hence not special pleading at all -- that is the consequent of the argument, and something that philosophers like Bertrand Russell missed. The universe cannot be infinitely old; it must have had a beginning. You try to sidestep the issue, but I'm not letting you get away with it.
>>Anselm's ontological "proof" was dismissed almost immediately for being fallacious
{{Citation_needed}}
On the contrary, it was largely accepted as true by his contemporaries, at least from what I've read. Various people have attempted answers to them, none of which are particularly successful, beyond saying that it is rather too clever for it's own good.
>>simply defining things does not bring them into being. Otherwise I could bring into being the "perfect island" simply by uttering the word.
Hence you miss the entire point of the argument. According to the ontological argument, God is unique in that once a person knows the definition, he must know that God exists.
>>No, of course we don't. For all you know God wants people to use their brains, and be atheists... You have no basis on which to contradict me.
Except we have a thing called the Bible, which is the best thing we have to understanding the will of God. Once you stipulate God, you get into trouble if you ignore scripture wholesale. And while he probably wants us to use our brains (Fideists would disagree), he certainly doesn't want us to be atheists. It's rather clear on that point, so your argument is rather invalid.
Want to have another go at it?
>>And no, atheists don't have a greater belief in the supernatural than theists.
Slashdot ran the story last Halloween; I'm sure you can find it.
>>There's no historical evidence for Jesus
On the contrary, the overwhelming consensus is that he did live. Just because you don't want him to exist doesn't mean he didn't exist. This is the same sort of blind faith that atheists accuse Christians of overindulging in... turning a blind eye to the obvious, only accepting facts that fit in with your world view.
>>But belief in God is irrational and self-contradictory; that's been proven for as long as there's been atheists. It's proven every time Dawkins and Hitchens write books.
Ah, I see. It's proven.
If you're going to make a sweeping statement, you should at least attempt to support it. Given that Dawkins and Hutchens can't even string two sentences together without contradicting themselves, referencing their books to a theist doesn't seem to be very plausible.
>>If I put a gun to your head and ask you to decide whether or not a teapot is currently in orbit around Alpha Centauri, the fact that there's no evidence either way does not make both alternatives equally reasonable
Not a momentous decision, though a forced one. I'd recommend reading the link, it's quite good, and isn't really a theistic work, as it supports atheism as well.
>To believe that the teapot is there is significantly more irrational than to believe it is not there; both positions are not supported equally by the lack of evidence.
>>Imagine being able to "taste" a house and only pay for it when people wanted to rent/buy it, how stupid is that?
Domain kiting is even worse -- imagine the government says that you can move into a house free of charge for a week without a deposit or fee. Then you get evicted, but you move back in -- you can permanently live in the house without ever paying rent.
IMO, domain tasting was the stupidest fucking idea ICANN ever came up with. Or, sorry, SUPPORTING THE IDEA OF DOMAIN TESTING. Which should have been painfully obvious to anyone with half a brain that it was a terrible idea, as the entire point of it was for people who were speculating on domains, not actually using them.
Quite a few, actually. As I said, it's a bell curve, but the tendency really is towards more trustworthy-ness in officers than the general population. It's something I've always noticed, even when just talking to one at a party or something.
>>Nonsense. I know philosophers like to take credit for other people's work - like they way they take credit for science - but here you are trying to take credit for my whole life when you've done none of the work of actually living it.
Did I say that *I* wrote the philosophy you follow? Obviously, not. But every person does have a philosophy they follow, though as nebulous and contradictory as it may be. You've heard Socrates' phrase, "The unexamined life is not worth living"? It's fairly true -- if you haven't even taken the minimal amount of self-examination needed to determine what principles you are living by, then you're closer to the animals than humanity, reacting only to your own desires and external stimuli. And certainly not the rational creature you pride yourself on being.
Here's some classical rational arguments for God which atheists have attempted to answer since Aquinas, Anselm, Descartes, Pascal, Lewis, and James posited them, using my own paraphrasing of them to make them short. I think Pascal's and James' are probably the ones that will interest you the most, as the others, while interesting, are rational arguments *for* the existence of God, but these pragmatic arguments say that it is rational *to believe* in God. An important difference. (Most people confuse Pascal's wager as an argument in the first case, not the second, as it was intended -- he wrote it for Christians, not trying to convince atheists.)
1) Aquinas: Everything in science has a cause. What caused the big bang? If you say nothing, that is a less scientific statement than saying something. Therefore, rationally, something caused the universe. Since that something must stand outside of time, the only thing which fits our concept of a powerful entity sitting outside of time is God. Though you could posit something else that fits those shoes, like an omnipotent 8th grader in a higher dimension creating our universe as a science fair project, whatever it is will resemble God to some degree. Note: The universe cannot be infinitely old. If the universe started an infinite amount of time ago, we could not get to the present one second at a time.
2) Anselm: Unlike with unicorns and fairies, we know that God has to exist simply from the definition of him as the most perfect being, as existence is one of the required attributes for perfection. Certainly a god that exists is more perfect than a god that doesn't exist.
3) Descartes (heavily adapted): God or evolution made us (or maybe space aliens). Therefore, we were made either with a purpose, or survived by being be more fit than other species, with useful traits retained and harmful ones pruned. All humans have a yearning for God, hence atheists' greater belief in the supernatural than theists, as they attempt to fill their need another way. But this need makes no sense in any creation method (unless we were made by aliens, I guess, who wanted religious slaves to tend their stargates...) unless there was a God. A creature who has blinded or deceptive senses is useless evolutionary, and wouldn't be done by a kind and loving God. Therefore, since in both cases we are given facilities which we should be able to trust, the yearning for God should be seen as actual evidence that God does exist.
4) Pascal: We don't know if God exists or not. However, we *do* know what the consequences of belief and nonbelief are. When dealing with uncertainty, the rule is to ignore the non-quantifiable probabilities and focus on the consequences in order to make a rational decision. In this case, it is a very simple decision, as with even a small (but non-zero!) chance of God's existence, the rational decision is to believe.
Note: this means that if you think there's a 0% chance that God exists, you shouldn't believe in him. In any event, trying to believe in something that you think is completely false is stupid, and probably impossible to boot.
However, it does mean that if someone thinks that there is a chance that God exists, that you
802.11a 802.11b 802.11g 802.11n (MIMO) Three different wireless routers Four different wireless adapters Endless hours spent relocating and fiddling antennas and changing channels, wireless settings, etc.
Doesn't matter, work machine can't reliably connect to the wireless router 25' away (although through two walls).
The only way I can get it to work at all is by lowering the broadcast strength down to 25% or 50% (any higher and latency flies through the roof and drops half the packets), but even still it disconnects once every couple hours.
Solution? Either snake a 50' ethernet cable around to the router, or deal with the 802.11 nonsense.
Imagine a bell curve. It represents decency or honor or whathaveyou. Left side is scumoftheearth, right side is Mother Theresa. The one for the general population is the norm. The one for people in the military is shifted to the right a ways, and IMO, for officers it's a bit further to the right.
That smells a bit like behaviorism. Is it possible for someone to drive a car who has never driven one before? And how does that explain that the muscles contracting are quite different when the hand is at different positions on a steering wheel? I drive with my left hand at the 7 o'clock position, which is different from the 10-and-2, but I can transition between them without even thinking about it.
>>I think maybe you haven't studied much of either. The conclusions of logic are axiomatic conclusions, which means you have to assume the axioms for the conclusions to be true.
More than you, apparently. A logical conclusion must be true, regardless of anything else. A logical conclusion drawn from starting premises must be true whenever the premises are true. It can also show when a position is illogical or contradictory, like saying "I only believe things that science can prove... Even though I can't scientifically prove that statement."
>>It's a word-game. That's what philosophy is, a word-game.
It's the foundation for a person's life. Hardly a word game, though I guess you could say that email is all just a word game, so we shouldn't bother sending emails either.
>>Except that it is the case, I can construct examples that prove that it's the case, and both Hitches and Dawkins have done so. Atheism doesn't "get" people to believe anything except in the power of reason and scrutiny to get at probable truths about the universe.
They haven't done so convincingly, and have actually done so in exception to the historical record. Essentially, they are engaging the intellectual dishonesty you so love to accuse Christians of, which is a willing blindness to the truth in order to support their flawed position. They "get" people to believe in it by engaging in deception, and writing books and going on speaking tours about it. Reason and scrutiny are the enemies of Dawkins and Hutchens.
They live in the world of fairy tale princesses waving magic wands, wishing the world was just-so.
>>If you believe otherwise then you have a lot of explaining to do, like the fact that high divorce rates are associated with high religiosity. Or the fact that atheists are underrepresented in prison.
Or the fact that more atheists believe in supernatural bullshit than religious people.
>>Are we going to inspect claims, or accept them without testing?
No -- all claims should be inspected for logical weaknesses, or tested if possible. What of it?
>>I don't understand someone who refuses to decide, and seemingly lives two lives - a professional life where they search for rigorous knowledge, and a personal life where they simply believe whatever they'd like to believe.
Which belies your weakness of understanding. You're making the fundamental error that a believer must be non-rational, which James exploded around a hundred years ago. A rational person must accept a sound logical argument (that's the definition of a rational man, really).
There are rational arguments for and against God, with the argument rather obviously unsettled, and with no clear resolution in sight. However, a person is forced to choose if they believe or not -- they simply cannot let the issue let-be. Like you could when faced with other problems that have two answers which could both be true, such as P = NP, or P != NP... nobody is holding a metaphorical gun to your head and forcing you to pick.
When faced with a forced decision between two live options, a rational person may choose to believe either without shame, and without compromising his rationality. It's not clear that always choosing to not believe something is more honest or more productive than always choosing to believe. Consider a person debating if he should take Echinacea for a cold -- there have been studies which show that it is effective, and other studies showing it is not. It's a forced decision, since refraining from deciding would be no different than choosing to not take it. Therefore, a rational person could take it, or not take it, and not be called irrational either way.
>>I'm horrified at the idea that you've swallowed the advertising that says morality and ethics are the sole province of religion
I'm more horrified by atheistic morality when it gets in charge, like, you know, in the USSR, Cambodia in the 70s, or China under Mao. Unfortunately, atheists have a much worse track record than Christians when it comes to these sorts of things.
>>1. There is no evidence that god does exist. >>2. Unrelated to 1., when something "weird" happens, we [scientists/skeptics/atheists/intellectuals] say "That's weird. I wonder why that happened," and set out to learn why.
And they set out to find a naturalistic cause. Every time. They don't ever admit the possibility of divine intervention, and thus, assume their conclusion.
>>3. Therefore, no observations yet have been so resistant to causal explanation to be classified as evidence of god's existence.
Even your wording admits the error: "So resistant to causal explanation", indeed. After looking for all possible natural explanations... well, just write it off to chance.
If you'd like to see the honest way of going about it, read up on how the the Catholic Church investigates miracles. They have a department devoted to investigating possible miracles. They have a team of scientists and doctors that look for normal natural explanations for an event happening, and reject it if one is found. Unlike your team of scientists/skeptics/atheists/intellectuals, this team of scientists/doctors/intellectuals admits the possibility that God might intervene, and only admits something as a miracle when the odds of God causing something appears to be much higher than random chance or a natural cause. This is the honest approach to it.
You can try it at home!
Take whatever odds you want on God intervening in a certain event. Take for example the case of my very religious friend (it's not a hypothetical example) who was diagnosed with a few months to live... and the tumor vanished. There could be a natural explanation. There could be some immune system response that we don't know about that destroyed it - I am a rationalist and a scientist, and I say this easily could be. But I also hold that there is a possibility that God intervened in his case, even if you want to call it a low probability.
After you have those two odds estimated, it's just a Bayesian inference step: Take the odds of divine intervention -- it's your prior. (If you give 0% odds of divine intervention, then you're fundamentally dishonest, since with a 0% prior probability of divine intervention, you'll even reject a real miracle.) Call it some very low number instead then. Try to come up with the probability of the event happening naturally. Compare the conditional probabilities of the event E happening due to natural causes N (P(E|N)) with the probability of E happening with divine intervention DI (P(E|DI)), and there you have the relative probability a miracle happened.
You seem to be confusing "evidence" with "100% proof that something is true", which in and of itself violates the rather fundamental point that science is not in the business of providing 100% proof, but rather probable proof.
>>The improbability you cited is a good indication of how extraordinary your claim is, which logically indicates that absent such extraordinary evidence, your argument should not be taken seriously.
The point was rather to show the illogic of the non-believer, who could look at a wildly improbable event and claim it caused by natural forces. If God wrote in the clouds and told everyone to eat chocolate on Sundays, the intractable non-believer would call it a trick of the weather.
Let's flip the argument around. Assume a miracle did occur, and something spectacularly unlikely happened -- would your test for miracles detect it? Yes or no? If your test would always answer 'no', then it's just as error-laden as the fatuous believer who sees everything as a divine intervention.
I'm not saying it's mysterious, per se, but that this doesn't prove what the summary says (no surprise, eh?), which is that we treat pliers as hands. All its shown is that we visualize doing stuff the same way with tools as with hands, such as "open the bag". It doesn't get to the more interesting part where it connects the intention to do something with the hands controlling the tool.
Suppose that all the atoms of air in a room move to one corner of the room and a person suffocates to death. (An event which is less likely than the age of the universe.) A believer would say, "Maybe that was caused by God -- the odds of divine intervention are much higher than the odds of the brownian motion of billions of atoms all synching up with each other at once." The nonbeliever would say there was a scientific explanation.
It is dishonest since the nonbeliever will then say there's no evidence for God -- it's circular reasoning: 1) God doesn't exist (he says) 2) Therefore when something weird happens, God cannot be the cause 3) Therefore there is no evidence that God exists 4) Therefore God doesn't exist.
You could also call it assuming your conclusion.
>>your extraordinary claims without equally extraordinary evidence
A popular phrase, which is, frankly, wrong and irrational, since it would discard completely mundane observations of things which simply happen with a vanishingly low probability. Say, a guy looking through a telescope that witnesses some wildly rare astronomical phenomenon.
When people say this, they don't mean it -- they just are restating that circular argument above.
>>God, I hate philosophy. The problem with so many of you people is that you talk yourself out of knowledge, and into ignorance.
Philosophy and logic are interesting in that you can study what *must* be true, regardless of, well, anything. Even in a whacky world with 23 dimensions and no light, a circle is still a circle.
>>The "realness" of reality is irrelevant; regardless of the reality of Reality, the Reality that we perceive is the "only context in which anything is meaningful."
Except our *understanding* of reality is critically important. The basic questions about life (you know, stuff like What is the Meaning of Life) have different answers for different people, and essentially shape the entire direction of a person's life. A person who says that the Meaning is to spread the Word of God will live a very different life than the person who says that it is to enjoy life as much as we can, and then get out while the getting is good. Philosophy can help differentiate these stances, and reveal problems and contradictions in them.
>>The problem with religion is that it gets people to believe things that are demonstratively false - "abstinence-only education prevents pregnancy and STD's" - on the basis of no good evidence.
Atheism gets people to believe things that are patently false, like Hutchens saying that religion is irrational and bad (for some definition of bad in a world that doesn't involve a moral law, naturally), or Dawkins claiming that religion doesn't change how people act, or, hey, your statements implying that religious people must be blind to the real world in order to believe in God. Which is not at all the case. There is no contradiction between saying, I am a Scientist and a Man of God.
Gould's NOM model is primitive... while I think there is quite a very large lesson people should learn that religion teaches religious matters and science teaches scientific matters, there is a non-negligible area that overlaps between the two. Buddhism claims that the world is without end, and has lessons which rely on this key point (be nice to everyone you meet, because since the world is infinitely old, everyone has probably been your mother and your child at some point). Christianity claims that the world was created. If science can conclusively rule one way or another, that would make a tremendous difference for religion. Christians don't claim primacy of religion over scientific matters -- if the Bible says Pi is 3, well, that's because it was rounded off to one digit, not because it was 3. When a Christian scientist learns more about God's creation, that is an act of worship, not an attack on religion.
Islam has a different approach to science, though. The great Islamic scholar Averroes pointed out in the 1100s that there is only one truth -- there cannot be a contradiction between religious truth and scientific truth (such as it is). In later years, though, Sufi mysticism has sort of permeated Islamic culture, and so claim that every electron only moves because the Will of God commands it to be so, and thus it is pointless to study things scientifically, since it is impossible (and incredibly hubristic) to predict the Will of God. Even more recently, there has been a resurgence in scientific thought in Islamic worlds, but in my opinion, that was one of the major reasons Islamic scientific progress stalled after the 1100s or so.
On the other hand, religion can and should inform scientific decisions when it comes to making certain decisions. This probably horrifies you to no end, but science in the absence of all morality and ethics leads to much worse tragedies and horrors than religion ever created.
>>Which is a pretty good indication that those books have little that is useful to a rational society.
Whether or not you believe in God, which it's pretty (adamantly) clear that you don't, it should be rather obvious that religion is the only thing that lets mankind transcend the real world as we know it, and achieve those Herculean heights of greatness that would never happen if we were all just concerned with the real world. Where is the Mother Theresa of the atheists?
Nonsense. By your lights, critical thinking is in principle impossible given the existence of 'unprovable postulates'. "I exist" and "Time flows" and "Cause and effect exists" and "The information my senses provide me is accurate and true" are all testable and can all be corroborated with evidence.
Oh really? I'm sure 2500 years of philosophers would be interested in your answer to these problems. Solipsism and cause and effect are two of the most intractable problems, so much so that we have to just stipulate they're answered in order to make almost any arguments at all. Descartes was interesting precisely because he started with Solipsism and actually derived the exterior world from it.
The bit about bringing a sword wasn't a literal statement. Analogies... you know them?
As far as the law goes, Jesus said that he wasn't there to change the law, but fulfill it. While he never broke the law himself (the pharisees criticizing him for breaking the law were actually in error), his point was this: "The law was given to man for man's benefit. Man was not given to the law. God wants a merciful heart, not blind obedience to the law." Does that make sense to you? It does to me.
The question after Jesus was whether non-Jews would have to follow the law, as the covenant was with the Jewish people. Peter and the others held it did (i.e., you'd have to be circumcised to become a Christian). But Paul's viewpoint won, which is that the law doesn't apply to Gentiles, but the greater moral law does.
>>And of course, there's zero evidence to support any of these religious claims anyway.
Is there? Certainly people act differently when highly religious, and that is measurable. If a religion's claim is that it makes you happy (or not care about being happy, like with Buddhism), you can test and measure that.
>>As an engineer, if I doubt something, I can set up an experiment and determine if it works or not.
You can test electrons. It's rather different trying to test God. More importantly, most statements of this sort are dishonest -- even if an experiment of some sort showed that God might have intervened, the doubter would doubt it anyway. You know, like with a religious friend of mine with a terminal brain tumor that vanished between two visits. There's an infinite number of explanations to this, but a doubtful person will always select the one that doesn't involve religion, making the test fundamentally dishonest.
Seems to me that they solved some of the problem, but not the problem they were looking for. The F5 neurons in question appear to be the sort of task visualization center. As in, when you're operating a tool, from the remote crane on the space shuttle, to playing Super Mario Brothers, you imagine the task happening. If you're opening a ziploc bag, the opening task will be the same regardless of if you're using your hand, pliers, or reverse pliers (which close when they open and open when they close, according to the article) -- you imagine the ziploc bit getting prised apart. Apparently, since these neurons fire exactly the same way when they do their task, this is probably what they found.
The more important part, how the brain can sublimate operating complex machinery so that it doesn't require conscious thought to operate, isn't explained here. Shuttle operators are actually trained to treat the crane like an extension of their arm, video game players eventually move past the controls to directly control the player on the screen, experienced skiers just imagine themselves turning without consciously having to weight their skis or edge, etc. All of these tasks originally required a lot of conscious control and expenditure of brain power (and in the case of skiing, a lot of bruises). And as long as it stays at this level, it stays awkward and stilted. It is at the point in which you transcend the raw mechanics and are capable of controlling it at a higher level (which is what this study found), that the skier becomes graceful, the video game player can race through flaming rotating death traps in super mario brothers, and the space shuttle control can quickly and adroitly manipulate stuff.
The human brain really is a fascinating thing, and capable of really amazing feats, if you think about it.
A PS3 upscales video as well as PS2 games as well as plays Blu-Ray discs.
The XBox 360 (which reads HD-DVDs) bizarrely doesn't play HD-DVD movies. If they'd enabled it to play movies instead of requiring a second HD-DVD drive to do this (and I don't care what their excuse was), the battle might have gone differently. There were a LOT of 360s sold.
We learned all about Gren-ich (how it's pronounced) and the observatory there. Maybe not the technical details or whatever, but this was in elementary school, after all. In more recent times, when we sign up for a BB, we specify "UTC-8:00 PST" when signing up, so we're peripherally aware of that, too.
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Sleeping in dungeons? Man, I haven't done that since 2ed days.
Clever players know how to conduct resource management, and unless you're running the world's largest dungeon, shouldn't have any issues dealing with the standard 3 fights a day guideline. Especially if you powergame correctly -- a dead monster doesn't waste healing resources.
My main issue with 4ed is that it seems like 3.5 still has a lot of legs left, with a bunch of interesting stuff that just came out. The Book of 9 Swords, as you said, is awesome, and has a lot of potential builds that still bear exploring. While it was obvious they were testing stuff for 4ed for a while now with crap like the Tome of Magic and Incarnum, I think it's just too soon for a new edition, and most of the players I know (which runs into the thousands, I play a lot in the RPGA) feel the same way. While 4ed might be cool and all, it just feels wrong. You can only piss off your customers so much before they leave for something else, or just quit.
>>But you don't seem to be arguing it's truth. At least, not here. I think that's noteworthy. You offer a great deal of criteria for belief but none of them are especially relevant - there's one reasonable criteria for taking a position or not, and that criteria is whether or not it's true.
Which is a different argument entirely. I was saying that it is rational to believe in God, and that a rational, scientifically-minded person cannot be faulted for believing in God, since the two are quite compatible. Perhaps not compatible in the ignorant Bible-thumping sort of way you perhaps perceive Christians as, but more the highly educated Jesuit sort of way.
There's rational and emotive Christians, and rational and emotive atheists. Emotive atheists often times being the people that hate God, and therefore claim he doesn't exist, which is a wonderfully hypocritical stance I've always found amusing.
>>If you want to be a Christian because it makes you happy, regardless of its truth, you've given the game away
That's not the point at all -- encouraging people to believe something that is false in order to make them happy is not Christianity, nor is what I'm saying. You're missing the point in that it that the truth value of the proposition "God exists" is not known, though there are reasonable arguments both for and against it. Certainly if it was proven beyond a reasonable doubt to all people that God exists, then only fools would not believe in God, and vice versa. The reason that it's an issue at all is that it is not known, so the question becomes how to act and what to believe in the absence of overwhelming proof on one side or another.
This is a dilemma that crops up in, well, pretty much every interesting debate, ever. Because if one side of the debate had 100% proof, it wouldn't be much of an argument. Medicine, history, religion, whatever.
The pragmatic argument (which you take exception to) comes into play in these cases -- if I don't know the truth value of a proposition, I at least can look at the outcome of the proposition, and use that to help me make up my mind. While you'll probably howl this doesn't make the proposition true -- I'd agree. With the caveat that at least that happiness and internal peace is one of the things promised by Christianity, and which it does seem to deliver.
Consider the case of taking echinacea for a cold. There are studies showing it works, and studies showing it doesn't work. The evidence is unclear. Therefore, one may decide either way to take it or not without feeling like he's being irrational. And it is certainly the logical thing to do to weigh the cost ($5 for a bottle) against the potential benefit (shorting the duration of a cold), and factoring that into the decision making process. The alt-med "atheists" (mainly western medicine doctors) have been proven wrong hundreds of times, as drugs with unknown mechanisms of actions are proven to be effective. And alt-med "believers" have been proven wrong many many times, too, as they ingest nothing more than placebos. So it's very hard to say which person is the more foolish -- the alt-med atheist, or the alt-med believer, though it is important to note that 18th century doctors rejected the old fashion of hand-washing before surgery since it didn't make rational "sense" to them.
>>The perfect island is defined precisely the same way. It has to be - it's perfect!
You're making the same errors that first year philosophy students make when studying the problem. We could talk about a perfect man or a perfect unicorn, and have them still not exist. It is the concept of God, and only the concept of God only, the most perfect possible entity, whereby the definition alone lets us know it exists.
As I said, there's arguments against it, but this isn't one of them. I'm sure you can read a web site somewhere and copy and paste one.
>>Sourceless assertions.
Right.
>>To the contrary; it seems highly improbable. We know that consciousness is what brains do, in the same way that vision is what eyes do.
And yet you are there in your body, and I am here in my body. There was a function that Abbey called I() (who formulated this argument) that is to say, the instantiation of the I, wherein the consciousness appears within a being. From nothingness to consciousness. There's nothing to say that after you die, and your brain ceases to exist, the same process couldn't repeat itself, and the new I (you) arises in a newborn baby. No memory of course of your previous self, since you don't have the neurons for that, but even if you deny the reality of the consciousness, you must recognize the illusion of consciousness. After all, we all appear to have consciousness. If you admit Abbey's argument that reincarnation is possible, if not probable (since it happened to us once already), you must also acknowledge that consciousness could arise in a different dimension or state of being, especially if the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body is true.
>>Logically, there is much more reason to reject the idea of an "afterlife" than to accept it.
Do you exist? Then you have to admit that at some point the 'you' sitting in your body arose from nothingness, which is equally as unbelievable as saying the 'you' might appear again out of nothingness, though in a different shape or form.
My point about superstitious atheists was in order to answer your claim that if atheists had a yearning for God, then they'd be Christians. I think that it's fairly clear that they still feel that yearning, but sublimate it in different ways. Plus, it's amusing.
>>Why don't you ask yourself how happy you would be, starting from a position of knowingly lying to yourself. I'm sorry but knowingly believing falsehood can't make anybody happy.
If you think it's a lie, then don't be a Christian. I'm not arguing that people should believe in something they believe to be a lie. I'm arguing that Christianity is a rationally coherent position, that there are good reasons to believe in God, and that it has pragmatic reasons as well.
>>Seriously. I've been a Christian, so I'm speaking from a position of knowledge about your position. You, on the other hand, seem to have no knowledge of mine. Why don't you try it?
I understand atheists quite well, counting a number of them as my friends, and debating with them over drinks. In fact, I have more non-religious friends (of various flavors) than religious friends.
I also used to spend quite a while debating people without rancor on the IIDB philosophy and existence of God forums, since the place generally only attracts fundamentalist trolls, and some of the concepts they bandy about there are quite easy to demolish.
Fundamentally, though, you are right -- people that have experienced the divine vary in their types of religious experiences, but are convinced of the truth of it, and are arguing across a large gulf to atheists on the other side. Which is why I limit myself to picking apart especially egregious errors that the atheists there make, acting as sort of a umpire apologist. Or I used to, at least -- haven't posted there in a year or so -- as it got to be too tedious watching the same mistakes over and over.
>>I've destroyed every one, as any reasonable person would conclude.
/= God.
You've certainly shown that you don't want to accept them -- this is different that providing a counter-argument. Proposition / Counter-proposition, attacking premises, etc., is what argument is all about. This is abuse -- argument is down the hall.
Your statement about Hawking is a good crack at it, but one can logically show the world had to have a beginning, which there's not really a good answer for. I heard a guy propose anti-time as a solution to this problem, but I've only seen that referenced in Star Trek.
>>Timeless
Good, you're finally starting to grasp the point of the argument. However, whatever it was that created the universe must 1) Be rather powerful (though not necessarily so -- there's a finite though large amount of energy in the universe) 2) Be capable of creating a singularity and 3) Not have a cause itself.
It's not necessarily God, but the result of the logical argument rather resembles God in certain ways.
>>But, as I said, that's false. Simply defining something doesn't bring it into being. Just because you've communicated to me a definition doesn't bring anything into being; otherwise you must conclude the existence of the "perfect island" just as soon as I speak those words to you.
Like I said, you're missing the point of the argument. The concept of God is precisely unique in that the concept of God, and only of God, can one know is true simply because you understand the definition. There are arguments against it, but this isn't one of them. The argument itself says that, you're right, talking about a perfect island does not make it into being. God is unique in this regard, as he is the apex of all perfection.
>>The Bible is of no use in understanding the will of God, because the Bible has nothing to do with the will of God.
Back to that whole assuming your conclusion thing.
>>The consensus of Christians, yes
Consensus of all serious scholars, atheists and Christians alike.
>>None of the Bible is contemporary with Jesus. There's no written record of his statements - only make-believe not first written until seven decades later - or as many as twelve.
Around 30 years, but who's counting?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel
Furthermore, the Christianity as Myth hypothesis fails for a variety of reasons.
>>The fact that I'm talking with an ideologue, here, is not lost on me. I hold no hope of convincing you, the delusion is too great. But any reasonable spectator must see that each of your so-called "proofs" is bereft. They're fallacious in every case, I've proven it.
A person who rejects logic so that he can believe whatever he wants to believe is the true ideologue. Believe it or not, I'm actually convinced by logic and reason, and have changed my mind on several critical things in the past, and which is why you have no hope of convincing me, as you're just repeating over and over, "I believe Christianity is a myth, therefore Christianity is a myth." Bad reasoning, on the other hand, never fails to raise my ire.
To answer your point that if Atheists had a yearning for God, they'd be Christians: All of the atheists I know believe in something really bizarre, from ESP to aliens to being able to empathically talk to plants. She heard plants screaming because of CO2 emissions. Regardless, that, to plants, CO2 was kinda like food. I think that most atheists sublimate their yearning for God with these other pursuits. And I literally mean all of them. I had one lecture me for half an hour on how there is no evidence of anything beyond material reality, and then go on to say that she believes in being able to read auras from photographs.
Further on the topic of Materialism, and an argument from consciousness:
One thing that does in Materialism is the phenomenon of consciousness -- one
Unless ICANN is changing their fee from 20 cents to 100 bucks, the registrars will get the increased fees, who are as corrupt as any business I've seen. More so, since their antics are sponsored by ICANN.
If they made it $100 bucks for a 3 year registration, that would shut down most of of the domain speculation (though big-ticket names would naturally still be reserved). Domain tasting / kiting is just absurd, and even more absurd that ICANN actually put together a focus group to explore and explicitly allow it.
>>Oh, wait - I think I get it. You think that stuff actually is philosophy. Hilarious!
Every person lives by a philosophy. If you don't think you have one, then you're just a tool.
>>Much in science is understood to be uncaused; for instance, atomic decay. Secondly, argument by special pleading - if everything must have a cause, and God is the ultimate cause of the universe, then God too must have a cause
Incorrect. First of all, I was tempted to get into pair formation, and similar things, but it turns out to not make a difference to the argument at all. Secondly, the answer, which you missed, was that something timeless had to be the answer. Hence not special pleading at all -- that is the consequent of the argument, and something that philosophers like Bertrand Russell missed. The universe cannot be infinitely old; it must have had a beginning. You try to sidestep the issue, but I'm not letting you get away with it.
>>Anselm's ontological "proof" was dismissed almost immediately for being fallacious
{{Citation_needed}}
On the contrary, it was largely accepted as true by his contemporaries, at least from what I've read. Various people have attempted answers to them, none of which are particularly successful, beyond saying that it is rather too clever for it's own good.
>>simply defining things does not bring them into being. Otherwise I could bring into being the "perfect island" simply by uttering the word.
Hence you miss the entire point of the argument. According to the ontological argument, God is unique in that once a person knows the definition, he must know that God exists.
>>No, of course we don't. For all you know God wants people to use their brains, and be atheists... You have no basis on which to contradict me.
Except we have a thing called the Bible, which is the best thing we have to understanding the will of God. Once you stipulate God, you get into trouble if you ignore scripture wholesale. And while he probably wants us to use our brains (Fideists would disagree), he certainly doesn't want us to be atheists. It's rather clear on that point, so your argument is rather invalid.
Want to have another go at it?
>>And no, atheists don't have a greater belief in the supernatural than theists.
Slashdot ran the story last Halloween; I'm sure you can find it.
>>There's no historical evidence for Jesus
On the contrary, the overwhelming consensus is that he did live. Just because you don't want him to exist doesn't mean he didn't exist. This is the same sort of blind faith that atheists accuse Christians of overindulging in... turning a blind eye to the obvious, only accepting facts that fit in with your world view.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_myth_hypothesis#Scholarly_response
>>But belief in God is irrational and self-contradictory; that's been proven for as long as there's been atheists. It's proven every time Dawkins and Hitchens write books.
Ah, I see. It's proven.
If you're going to make a sweeping statement, you should at least attempt to support it. Given that Dawkins and Hutchens can't even string two sentences together without contradicting themselves, referencing their books to a theist doesn't seem to be very plausible.
>>If I put a gun to your head and ask you to decide whether or not a teapot is currently in orbit around Alpha Centauri, the fact that there's no evidence either way does not make both alternatives equally reasonable
Not a momentous decision, though a forced one. I'd recommend reading the link, it's quite good, and isn't really a theistic work, as it supports atheism as well.
>To believe that the teapot is there is significantly more irrational than to believe it is not there; both positions are not supported equally by the lack of evidence.
No, without any evidence that humans had b
20 cents a year is not enough, they need to drop tasting completely.
You can write to their RFC person here:
domain-tasting-2008@icann.org
>>Imagine being able to "taste" a house and only pay for it when people wanted to rent/buy it, how stupid is that?
Domain kiting is even worse -- imagine the government says that you can move into a house free of charge for a week without a deposit or fee. Then you get evicted, but you move back in -- you can permanently live in the house without ever paying rent.
IMO, domain tasting was the stupidest fucking idea ICANN ever came up with. Or, sorry, SUPPORTING THE IDEA OF DOMAIN TESTING. Which should have been painfully obvious to anyone with half a brain that it was a terrible idea, as the entire point of it was for people who were speculating on domains, not actually using them.
Let's see:
http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-2-10aug07.htm
http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-29jan08.htm
Yep, about 10.5 years for them to come to this conclusion. Lord, I love committees.
According to Richard Branson, the best way to become a millionaire is to start as a billionaire and found an airline.
Quite a few, actually. As I said, it's a bell curve, but the tendency really is towards more trustworthy-ness in officers than the general population. It's something I've always noticed, even when just talking to one at a party or something.
>>Nonsense. I know philosophers like to take credit for other people's work - like they way they take credit for science - but here you are trying to take credit for my whole life when you've done none of the work of actually living it.
Did I say that *I* wrote the philosophy you follow? Obviously, not. But every person does have a philosophy they follow, though as nebulous and contradictory as it may be. You've heard Socrates' phrase, "The unexamined life is not worth living"? It's fairly true -- if you haven't even taken the minimal amount of self-examination needed to determine what principles you are living by, then you're closer to the animals than humanity, reacting only to your own desires and external stimuli. And certainly not the rational creature you pride yourself on being.
Here's some classical rational arguments for God which atheists have attempted to answer since Aquinas, Anselm, Descartes, Pascal, Lewis, and James posited them, using my own paraphrasing of them to make them short. I think Pascal's and James' are probably the ones that will interest you the most, as the others, while interesting, are rational arguments *for* the existence of God, but these pragmatic arguments say that it is rational *to believe* in God. An important difference. (Most people confuse Pascal's wager as an argument in the first case, not the second, as it was intended -- he wrote it for Christians, not trying to convince atheists.)
1) Aquinas:
Everything in science has a cause. What caused the big bang? If you say nothing, that is a less scientific statement than saying something. Therefore, rationally, something caused the universe. Since that something must stand outside of time, the only thing which fits our concept of a powerful entity sitting outside of time is God. Though you could posit something else that fits those shoes, like an omnipotent 8th grader in a higher dimension creating our universe as a science fair project, whatever it is will resemble God to some degree.
Note: The universe cannot be infinitely old. If the universe started an infinite amount of time ago, we could not get to the present one second at a time.
2) Anselm:
Unlike with unicorns and fairies, we know that God has to exist simply from the definition of him as the most perfect being, as existence is one of the required attributes for perfection. Certainly a god that exists is more perfect than a god that doesn't exist.
3) Descartes (heavily adapted):
God or evolution made us (or maybe space aliens). Therefore, we were made either with a purpose, or survived by being be more fit than other species, with useful traits retained and harmful ones pruned. All humans have a yearning for God, hence atheists' greater belief in the supernatural than theists, as they attempt to fill their need another way. But this need makes no sense in any creation method (unless we were made by aliens, I guess, who wanted religious slaves to tend their stargates...) unless there was a God. A creature who has blinded or deceptive senses is useless evolutionary, and wouldn't be done by a kind and loving God. Therefore, since in both cases we are given facilities which we should be able to trust, the yearning for God should be seen as actual evidence that God does exist.
4) Pascal:
We don't know if God exists or not. However, we *do* know what the consequences of belief and nonbelief are. When dealing with uncertainty, the rule is to ignore the non-quantifiable probabilities and focus on the consequences in order to make a rational decision. In this case, it is a very simple decision, as with even a small (but non-zero!) chance of God's existence, the rational decision is to believe.
Note: this means that if you think there's a 0% chance that God exists, you shouldn't believe in him. In any event, trying to believe in something that you think is completely false is stupid, and probably impossible to boot.
However, it does mean that if someone thinks that there is a chance that God exists, that you
802.11a
802.11b
802.11g
802.11n (MIMO)
Three different wireless routers
Four different wireless adapters
Endless hours spent relocating and fiddling antennas and changing channels, wireless settings, etc.
Doesn't matter, work machine can't reliably connect to the wireless router 25' away (although through two walls).
The only way I can get it to work at all is by lowering the broadcast strength down to 25% or 50% (any higher and latency flies through the roof and drops half the packets), but even still it disconnects once every couple hours.
Solution? Either snake a 50' ethernet cable around to the router, or deal with the 802.11 nonsense.
If you're near a router, FFS, run a cable to it.
Imagine a bell curve. It represents decency or honor or whathaveyou. Left side is scumoftheearth, right side is Mother Theresa. The one for the general population is the norm. The one for people in the military is shifted to the right a ways, and IMO, for officers it's a bit further to the right.
That smells a bit like behaviorism. Is it possible for someone to drive a car who has never driven one before? And how does that explain that the muscles contracting are quite different when the hand is at different positions on a steering wheel? I drive with my left hand at the 7 o'clock position, which is different from the 10-and-2, but I can transition between them without even thinking about it.
>>I think maybe you haven't studied much of either. The conclusions of logic are axiomatic conclusions, which means you have to assume the axioms for the conclusions to be true.
More than you, apparently. A logical conclusion must be true, regardless of anything else. A logical conclusion drawn from starting premises must be true whenever the premises are true. It can also show when a position is illogical or contradictory, like saying "I only believe things that science can prove... Even though I can't scientifically prove that statement."
>>It's a word-game. That's what philosophy is, a word-game.
It's the foundation for a person's life. Hardly a word game, though I guess you could say that email is all just a word game, so we shouldn't bother sending emails either.
>>Except that it is the case, I can construct examples that prove that it's the case, and both Hitches and Dawkins have done so. Atheism doesn't "get" people to believe anything except in the power of reason and scrutiny to get at probable truths about the universe.
They haven't done so convincingly, and have actually done so in exception to the historical record. Essentially, they are engaging the intellectual dishonesty you so love to accuse Christians of, which is a willing blindness to the truth in order to support their flawed position. They "get" people to believe in it by engaging in deception, and writing books and going on speaking tours about it. Reason and scrutiny are the enemies of Dawkins and Hutchens.
They live in the world of fairy tale princesses waving magic wands, wishing the world was just-so.
>>If you believe otherwise then you have a lot of explaining to do, like the fact that high divorce rates are associated with high religiosity. Or the fact that atheists are underrepresented in prison.
Or the fact that more atheists believe in supernatural bullshit than religious people.
>>Are we going to inspect claims, or accept them without testing?
No -- all claims should be inspected for logical weaknesses, or tested if possible. What of it?
>>I don't understand someone who refuses to decide, and seemingly lives two lives - a professional life where they search for rigorous knowledge, and a personal life where they simply believe whatever they'd like to believe.
Which belies your weakness of understanding. You're making the fundamental error that a believer must be non-rational, which James exploded around a hundred years ago. A rational person must accept a sound logical argument (that's the definition of a rational man, really).
There are rational arguments for and against God, with the argument rather obviously unsettled, and with no clear resolution in sight. However, a person is forced to choose if they believe or not -- they simply cannot let the issue let-be. Like you could when faced with other problems that have two answers which could both be true, such as P = NP, or P != NP... nobody is holding a metaphorical gun to your head and forcing you to pick.
When faced with a forced decision between two live options, a rational person may choose to believe either without shame, and without compromising his rationality. It's not clear that always choosing to not believe something is more honest or more productive than always choosing to believe. Consider a person debating if he should take Echinacea for a cold -- there have been studies which show that it is effective, and other studies showing it is not. It's a forced decision, since refraining from deciding would be no different than choosing to not take it. Therefore, a rational person could take it, or not take it, and not be called irrational either way.
>>I'm horrified at the idea that you've swallowed the advertising that says morality and ethics are the sole province of religion
I'm more horrified by atheistic morality when it gets in charge, like, you know, in the USSR, Cambodia in the 70s, or China under Mao. Unfortunately, atheists have a much worse track record than Christians when it comes to these sorts of things.
>>1. There is no evidence that god does exist.
>>2. Unrelated to 1., when something "weird" happens, we [scientists/skeptics/atheists/intellectuals] say "That's weird. I wonder why that happened," and set out to learn why.
And they set out to find a naturalistic cause. Every time. They don't ever admit the possibility of divine intervention, and thus, assume their conclusion.
>>3. Therefore, no observations yet have been so resistant to causal explanation to be classified as evidence of god's existence.
Even your wording admits the error: "So resistant to causal explanation", indeed. After looking for all possible natural explanations... well, just write it off to chance.
If you'd like to see the honest way of going about it, read up on how the the Catholic Church investigates miracles. They have a department devoted to investigating possible miracles. They have a team of scientists and doctors that look for normal natural explanations for an event happening, and reject it if one is found. Unlike your team of scientists/skeptics/atheists/intellectuals, this team of scientists/doctors/intellectuals admits the possibility that God might intervene, and only admits something as a miracle when the odds of God causing something appears to be much higher than random chance or a natural cause. This is the honest approach to it.
You can try it at home!
Take whatever odds you want on God intervening in a certain event. Take for example the case of my very religious friend (it's not a hypothetical example) who was diagnosed with a few months to live... and the tumor vanished. There could be a natural explanation. There could be some immune system response that we don't know about that destroyed it - I am a rationalist and a scientist, and I say this easily could be. But I also hold that there is a possibility that God intervened in his case, even if you want to call it a low probability.
After you have those two odds estimated, it's just a Bayesian inference step:
Take the odds of divine intervention -- it's your prior. (If you give 0% odds of divine intervention, then you're fundamentally dishonest, since with a 0% prior probability of divine intervention, you'll even reject a real miracle.) Call it some very low number instead then. Try to come up with the probability of the event happening naturally. Compare the conditional probabilities of the event E happening due to natural causes N (P(E|N)) with the probability of E happening with divine intervention DI (P(E|DI)), and there you have the relative probability a miracle happened.
You seem to be confusing "evidence" with "100% proof that something is true", which in and of itself violates the rather fundamental point that science is not in the business of providing 100% proof, but rather probable proof.
>>The improbability you cited is a good indication of how extraordinary your claim is, which logically indicates that absent such extraordinary evidence, your argument should not be taken seriously.
The point was rather to show the illogic of the non-believer, who could look at a wildly improbable event and claim it caused by natural forces. If God wrote in the clouds and told everyone to eat chocolate on Sundays, the intractable non-believer would call it a trick of the weather.
Let's flip the argument around. Assume a miracle did occur, and something spectacularly unlikely happened -- would your test for miracles detect it? Yes or no? If your test would always answer 'no', then it's just as error-laden as the fatuous believer who sees everything as a divine intervention.
I'm not saying it's mysterious, per se, but that this doesn't prove what the summary says (no surprise, eh?), which is that we treat pliers as hands. All its shown is that we visualize doing stuff the same way with tools as with hands, such as "open the bag". It doesn't get to the more interesting part where it connects the intention to do something with the hands controlling the tool.
Suppose that all the atoms of air in a room move to one corner of the room and a person suffocates to death. (An event which is less likely than the age of the universe.) A believer would say, "Maybe that was caused by God -- the odds of divine intervention are much higher than the odds of the brownian motion of billions of atoms all synching up with each other at once." The nonbeliever would say there was a scientific explanation.
It is dishonest since the nonbeliever will then say there's no evidence for God -- it's circular reasoning:
1) God doesn't exist (he says)
2) Therefore when something weird happens, God cannot be the cause
3) Therefore there is no evidence that God exists
4) Therefore God doesn't exist.
You could also call it assuming your conclusion.
>>your extraordinary claims without equally extraordinary evidence
A popular phrase, which is, frankly, wrong and irrational, since it would discard completely mundane observations of things which simply happen with a vanishingly low probability. Say, a guy looking through a telescope that witnesses some wildly rare astronomical phenomenon.
When people say this, they don't mean it -- they just are restating that circular argument above.
>>God, I hate philosophy. The problem with so many of you people is that you talk yourself out of knowledge, and into ignorance.
Philosophy and logic are interesting in that you can study what *must* be true, regardless of, well, anything. Even in a whacky world with 23 dimensions and no light, a circle is still a circle.
>>The "realness" of reality is irrelevant; regardless of the reality of Reality, the Reality that we perceive is the "only context in which anything is meaningful."
Except our *understanding* of reality is critically important. The basic questions about life (you know, stuff like What is the Meaning of Life) have different answers for different people, and essentially shape the entire direction of a person's life. A person who says that the Meaning is to spread the Word of God will live a very different life than the person who says that it is to enjoy life as much as we can, and then get out while the getting is good. Philosophy can help differentiate these stances, and reveal problems and contradictions in them.
>>The problem with religion is that it gets people to believe things that are demonstratively false - "abstinence-only education prevents pregnancy and STD's" - on the basis of no good evidence.
Atheism gets people to believe things that are patently false, like Hutchens saying that religion is irrational and bad (for some definition of bad in a world that doesn't involve a moral law, naturally), or Dawkins claiming that religion doesn't change how people act, or, hey, your statements implying that religious people must be blind to the real world in order to believe in God. Which is not at all the case. There is no contradiction between saying, I am a Scientist and a Man of God.
Gould's NOM model is primitive... while I think there is quite a very large lesson people should learn that religion teaches religious matters and science teaches scientific matters, there is a non-negligible area that overlaps between the two. Buddhism claims that the world is without end, and has lessons which rely on this key point (be nice to everyone you meet, because since the world is infinitely old, everyone has probably been your mother and your child at some point). Christianity claims that the world was created. If science can conclusively rule one way or another, that would make a tremendous difference for religion. Christians don't claim primacy of religion over scientific matters -- if the Bible says Pi is 3, well, that's because it was rounded off to one digit, not because it was 3. When a Christian scientist learns more about God's creation, that is an act of worship, not an attack on religion.
Islam has a different approach to science, though. The great Islamic scholar Averroes pointed out in the 1100s that there is only one truth -- there cannot be a contradiction between religious truth and scientific truth (such as it is). In later years, though, Sufi mysticism has sort of permeated Islamic culture, and so claim that every electron only moves because the Will of God commands it to be so, and thus it is pointless to study things scientifically, since it is impossible (and incredibly hubristic) to predict the Will of God. Even more recently, there has been a resurgence in scientific thought in Islamic worlds, but in my opinion, that was one of the major reasons Islamic scientific progress stalled after the 1100s or so.
On the other hand, religion can and should inform scientific decisions when it comes to making certain decisions. This probably horrifies you to no end, but science in the absence of all morality and ethics leads to much worse tragedies and horrors than religion ever created.
>>Which is a pretty good indication that those books have little that is useful to a rational society.
Whether or not you believe in God, which it's pretty (adamantly) clear that you don't, it should be rather obvious that religion is the only thing that lets mankind transcend the real world as we know it, and achieve those Herculean heights of greatness that would never happen if we were all just concerned with the real world. Where is the Mother Theresa of the atheists?
Oh really? I'm sure 2500 years of philosophers would be interested in your answer to these problems. Solipsism and cause and effect are two of the most intractable problems, so much so that we have to just stipulate they're answered in order to make almost any arguments at all. Descartes was interesting precisely because he started with Solipsism and actually derived the exterior world from it.
Do you have a paper or something I could read?
Wish I had a mod point. That's a great post.
Wow, talk about picking and choosing.
The bit about bringing a sword wasn't a literal statement. Analogies... you know them?
As far as the law goes, Jesus said that he wasn't there to change the law, but fulfill it. While he never broke the law himself (the pharisees criticizing him for breaking the law were actually in error), his point was this: "The law was given to man for man's benefit. Man was not given to the law. God wants a merciful heart, not blind obedience to the law." Does that make sense to you? It does to me.
The question after Jesus was whether non-Jews would have to follow the law, as the covenant was with the Jewish people. Peter and the others held it did (i.e., you'd have to be circumcised to become a Christian). But Paul's viewpoint won, which is that the law doesn't apply to Gentiles, but the greater moral law does.
>>And of course, there's zero evidence to support any of these religious claims anyway.
Is there? Certainly people act differently when highly religious, and that is measurable. If a religion's claim is that it makes you happy (or not care about being happy, like with Buddhism), you can test and measure that.
>>As an engineer, if I doubt something, I can set up an experiment and determine if it works or not.
You can test electrons. It's rather different trying to test God. More importantly, most statements of this sort are dishonest -- even if an experiment of some sort showed that God might have intervened, the doubter would doubt it anyway. You know, like with a religious friend of mine with a terminal brain tumor that vanished between two visits. There's an infinite number of explanations to this, but a doubtful person will always select the one that doesn't involve religion, making the test fundamentally dishonest.
Seems to me that they solved some of the problem, but not the problem they were looking for. The F5 neurons in question appear to be the sort of task visualization center. As in, when you're operating a tool, from the remote crane on the space shuttle, to playing Super Mario Brothers, you imagine the task happening. If you're opening a ziploc bag, the opening task will be the same regardless of if you're using your hand, pliers, or reverse pliers (which close when they open and open when they close, according to the article) -- you imagine the ziploc bit getting prised apart. Apparently, since these neurons fire exactly the same way when they do their task, this is probably what they found.
The more important part, how the brain can sublimate operating complex machinery so that it doesn't require conscious thought to operate, isn't explained here. Shuttle operators are actually trained to treat the crane like an extension of their arm, video game players eventually move past the controls to directly control the player on the screen, experienced skiers just imagine themselves turning without consciously having to weight their skis or edge, etc. All of these tasks originally required a lot of conscious control and expenditure of brain power (and in the case of skiing, a lot of bruises). And as long as it stays at this level, it stays awkward and stilted. It is at the point in which you transcend the raw mechanics and are capable of controlling it at a higher level (which is what this study found), that the skier becomes graceful, the video game player can race through flaming rotating death traps in super mario brothers, and the space shuttle control can quickly and adroitly manipulate stuff.
The human brain really is a fascinating thing, and capable of really amazing feats, if you think about it.
A PS3 upscales video as well as PS2 games as well as plays Blu-Ray discs.
The XBox 360 (which reads HD-DVDs) bizarrely doesn't play HD-DVD movies. If they'd enabled it to play movies instead of requiring a second HD-DVD drive to do this (and I don't care what their excuse was), the battle might have gone differently. There were a LOT of 360s sold.
We learned all about Gren-ich (how it's pronounced) and the observatory there. Maybe not the technical details or whatever, but this was in elementary school, after all. In more recent times, when we sign up for a BB, we specify "UTC-8:00 PST" when signing up, so we're peripherally aware of that, too.