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You
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like the ones you are displaying, thinking, questions etc…
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MPat
Guest
Well, such stories do have their uses. A made up story under which some statements A and B are true can show that A and B are not incompatible. So, it was OK for you to use such story to show that materialism is not necessarily incompatible with existence of religions, just like it is OK for Catholic apologists to use the story about weak rope to show how claims that Judas Iscariot hanged himself and that he fell on rocks are not incompatible. It’s just important not to forget that it was the main use of the story.Oh darn… caught with my pants down!
But I’d say that making up an explanation of the way the Universe got started is a bit different from the guess I made, which uses some known psychological traits that most people have.
But you’re right, that story I offered as a guess is not confirmed. It is not certain. What is certain is that, at some point(s), mankind acquired the belief in gods, afterlife and other mythological entities.
I provided a general reasonable guess as to how that may have come about.
To me, it’s enough to put that matter to rest, but if you’d like to discuss further, by all means, let’s.
But yes, let’s move on to something more interesting.
Um, so “extraordinary” means “non-ordinary”…? Looks rather circular…
Also, “extraordinary” can mean many things. For example, would you say that claims about “Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops” held last year need more evidence than claims about “Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops” held this year…?
Um, so finding out what evidence is extraordinary is also almost impossible? I’m afraid that it makes the whole “rule of thumb” very hard to use…
Unsurprisingly, in cases when it really is used, “extraordinary claim” often becomes “claim I do not like” and all evidence is always found to be ordinary…
Anyway, the point that evidence can add up is very good. For that matter, at one point Edward Feser has posted an outline of steps one should make from materialistic atheism to Christianity “the right way”: edwardfeser.blogspot.lt/2014/05/pre-christian-apologetics.html. Just the outline leaving out most of the actual arguments is long enough to overwhelm any thread here… And reaching Catholicism (as opposed to Protestantism, Eastern Orthodoxy) would require going through still more evidence.
The problem is that if you have to examine all evidence to find out if the claim is “extraordinary”, what are you going to do in order to find out if the evidence is extraordinary? In that case we would have a different “rule of thumb”: “Extraordinary claims are wrong.”.
First of all, it seems a bit too vague to do that. Second, note that you did not say that it is more likely to result in acception of true beliefs and rejection of false beliefs, only that it would be “more profitable”. Let’s look at the next answer:
Well, if we want to “maximise profit”, why isn’t Pascal’s Wager that tries to do just that explicitly the way to go? It is even more moderate, since it is only meant to come into play when we have no way do decide which claim is more likely to be true.
Also, is is primarily meant for “decision-making”. For example, in case of question “Should I go to Mass this Sunday?”. You can act as if you believed in God and go, you can act as if you believed that God doesn’t exist and refuse to go. No “agnostic option” exists (going halfway doesn’t look reasonable) and the decision has to be made. If you really lack both the belief that God exists and belief that God doesn’t exist, those options fit your beliefs equally well, thus they are equally honest, none of them is “pretend belief”. And anyway, Pascal promises that choosing the “theistic option” consistently will result in a very real belief - eventually.
We also use something similar in other fields - for example, in medical screenings the inconclusive result is treated as if it was positive, as false positives are less costly than false negatives (failing to diagnose present disease).
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MPat
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Yes, that’s a good example. Yet finding out what evidence is “sufficient” still needs a “rule of thumb” of its own.
So, how about the “rule of thumb” from Conan Doyle’s “Sign of Four” - “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”?
Actually, it looks like in real Criminalistics the methods are similar (for example, the first book “Google” found: “Principles and Practice of Criminalistics: The Profession of Forensic Science” by Keith Inman, Norah Rudin, around p. 172, books.google.lt/books?id=6OTqqqGooccC&pg=PA171&lpg=PA171&dq=Criminalistics+hypothesis&source=bl&ots=8dmQ1fqzbj&sig=eNPwpJw8BCCHqZ6k4AZYqHQpgT4&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Criminalistics%20hypothesis&f=false).
This “rule of thumb” avoids all problems with finding out what claims are “extraordinary”.
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PRmerger
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Randy_Carson
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poca-So I’m an atheist, yippee!
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Feel free to pick my atheism apart… I welcome you!
As you know, we’ve talked a fair bit here and elsewhere, but refresh my memory…WHY are you an atheist?
Be concise and specific. In as few words as possible, tell me what your biggest, bottom-line objection is to the existence of God.
Thanks.
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ThinkingSapien
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I think it’s a religious classification but not a religion. A parallel might be that “transparent” might be used in classifying items by colour but “transparent” itself isn’t a colour.
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ericc
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All the statements above basically say that you arrived at your belief system without requiring any justification.
" I just arrived at the state of non-belief and found it was ok."
But then you also said
“my mind is satisfied as it allows for everything that we see and experience to be caused by natural means.”
So if “natural means” can not explain or don’t have an explanation for everything you see and experience, would you still stick to your belief? Is this the basis for your belief? Since you challenge us to pick apart your atheism, I’d give it a go. But obviously, if you have no basis for your belief, then there is no way I can pick apart your atheism because it is based on nothing that can be debated on. It is just a choice of no consequence because you can also switch the next day to believe in God because “you arrived at the state of belief and found it was ok”. I am sure you wouldn’t accept religious people to rationalise their belief that way either.
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ericc
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Many people arrive at their religion because they have done extensive study and came to the conclusion. They are not less intelligent than you. They may have done more research than you. Your statement “Once you believe what you’re told, you then believe in the concept that was conveyed and live out your life as if that is true.” presupposes that they are not capable to discern what they believe. That smacks of arrogance and inability to accept that there are people who can arrive at conclusions that are different from yours.
Do we always believe what our parents tell us? May be once upon a time when we were very little. But as one grows older, goes to college and perhaps receive more education than our parents, we don’t do that any more. Of course we may give in to them to stop their nagging but that doesn’t make it true. Do you still believe everything that your parents tell you?
We shouldn’t engage in fallacious reasoning. Argumentum ad populum doesn’t tell you it is the truth, just a large number of people believing in something. So I will not use the argument there are X billions Christians in the world and so they are right. But I will ask why so many billions Christians believe in what they believe.
Yes, I am wondering why many are still attached to theories that seems to have run out of validity but irrational people refuses to let go, such as Darwinism. If the evidence does not support it, it is time to let go and find a new theory, rather than presupposes it is right except evidence hasn’t been found yet. It really requires a lot of blind faith.
How did you arrive at that conclusion that belief is first arrived via “emotional connection”? Please provide evidence!
Is religion based on base desires? You think it may be so but there is no evidence that you presented that it is so. Some religions don’t promise life forever. Some aim for nothingness. Many don’t want to be special. Monasteries and convents are place where they are out of the public’s eyes. There are many that do good quietly. Many people want to help others, religion or no religion. So that is not a good reasoning. Prayers and wishing people well are nice gestures but that is a poor excuse for a religion.
You don’t seem to know much about religious people but making a number of assumptions that you think they are such and such. I suggest you do more research before coming to those conclusions. There are too many types of religious people that it is almost futile to put them in silos with tags.
So according to you, belief is not rational. And that would applies to you equally. You believe in your belief system and you have not provided that it is the rational thing to do.
“I just arrived at the state of non-belief and found it was ok”. Is this rational?
You conclusion on Pascal’s Wager is irrational and actually emotive. It asked which option has the higher pay back. If the maths works out, then the correct answer is the one that has the higher payback. An answer that is not to your liking is not emotive. How did it became emotive? It became emotive because you chose the wrong answer and you didn’t want to be wrong.
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Bradski
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I’m forever bemused by the insistence of Christians to tag atheism as a religion. Presumably so that they can counter the ‘faith’ claim.
A: But you have to believe it on faith.
C: Yeah? Well, so do you buddy!
Uh? I don’t believe something on faith? Does that make any sense? Notwithstanding that we are continuously confusing what one person means by belief and what another means by it. It may be more accurate to state the matter quite simply. As in: Does God exist?
The Christian will say: ‘Yes, I believe that he does (I am absolutely certain)’. I would suggest that that takes faith. Which is hardly a derogative statement. Indeed, faith is required. You are meant to have it.
The atheist will say (well, at least this one): ‘No, I don’t believe that He does (although I could be wrong)’. There is no faith there. There is a degree of conviction, bordering on certainty. But no faith.
I contend that when a Christian says that he or she believes in God then they are saying that they are certain that He exists. When an atheist says that he or she does not believe in God, they are saying no more than the evidence is not convincing enough to make any statement to the contrary. Again, no faith required.
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Bradski
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It is emotive. It asks you to discount reason and pretend to believe. And then it will happen.
“Follow the way by which they set out, acting as if they already believed, taking holy water, having masses said etc. Even this will naturally cause you to believe and blunt your cleverness”.
I think that would possibly work for a lot of people for most things if they really wanted to believe it. Hardly a path to the truth, is it…
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PRmerger
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I don’t.
Religions require a creed, a code, a community and a cult. Or, as Peter Kreeft puts it: Words, Works and Worship.
Clearly, atheism has some of the above, but not all of them.
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PRmerger
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Pascals Wager simply is either the beginning or the end of one’s search for God.
That is, it is either an impetus to get you started–kind of like an appetizer that whets the palate for considering the** actual** arguments for God’s existence…or after one has considered all the arguments and one is still wavering,
PW simply pushes one to the “Belief” side because of logic.
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Bradski
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This strikes me as an extremely unreasonable proposition.
If you use it to ‘start your journey’, then you are attempting to believe something without accepting any of the evidence so far presented as being valid. Or at least, not accepting enough of it so that you would believe. Or even, in the most extreme case, without having been presented with any evidence in the first place. As discussed earlier, this is impossible.
And if you use it to try to tip the balance in favour of belief if you don’t find the evidence convincing, then this is nothing short of telling yourself that, despite not being convinced of something, it really seems like a good idea, so I will pretend to believe it (‘acting as if you already believed’ as Pascal puts it) until I actually do. I hope that no-one posting here would think that that is an acceptable way of determining the truth of anything at all.
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Graceful_Lamb
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I was mainly talking about humans with the male versus female anatomy.
God created everything, the insects, trees, humans, animals, etc. God doesn’t make mistakes.
I don’t believe God “tinkered” with anything. God is flawless, sinless, and as I said before, doesn’t make mistakes. God has and always will get it right, regardless of what anyone may think. It is His will that matters. His will is perfect. His timing is perfect.
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ericc
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Ok. you were just wishing then.Yes, you’re right.
I keep telling this. Any thing we say about pre-big-bang conditions (if a pre-big-bang makes any sense) is only speculation.
We’re dealing in hypotheticals.
However, it’s nice to mention that some of those do not require a pre-existing consciousness, like a god. Thus allowing us to live happily and care free.
That’s the same as asking “what created the big bang?” I don’t know… anything we say about that is pure speculation.
Crystals do not have life, can not create life. They do not replicate. 1 pound of sodium chloride cannot replicate to 2 pounds of sodium chloride. They crystallize because of physical conditions. Remove those conditions, and they are no longer crystals. Put the conditions back, they form crystals again. Like water/ice/snow flakes. They do not contain information that they can make use of.
You presuppose that those elements already know how to self replicate. How to join together , became alive with RNA from unknown (name removed by moderator)uts of information and violating other natural laws in the process. How did it know how to metabolise, how to reproduce? How can nature provide the information to do it when nature does not have the information in itself?
Exactly which piece of information is bogus? I’ll go and smack them.
And a guy whose expertise is not in fossils should not tell those folks who do fossils how to do their job. But evolution scientists commonly agree that the earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old. The first sign of life appeared 3.5 billion years. And for 3 billion years life is just these simple organisms e.g. algae/cynobacteria. Then the last 500-600 million years, the Cambrian explosion, biology equivalent of the Big Bang. Massive new life forms with new body parts, diversity, variety with NO precursors. We have fossils of bacteria and single cell organisms belonging to the pre-cambrian times and suddenly boom, new life forms with no intermediate forms. Darwin couldn’t explain this and decades later still no explanation. Your gradual small steps carbon replication theory ends up in the garbage bin.
Neither am I and I am also providing a layman perspective. And it would serve you well to know that Gaps of the Fossils does not sound like the scientific method. If, the scientific method says it must be there, and you look at fossils before and after the period in question, and it is not there, the logical conclusion is that the theory is wrong. No predictive value.
If I am eating a ham sandwich, the label says so, I bite into it, didn’t feel like a ham sandwich, I remove the bread and I saw lettuce and tomato but no ham, can I still call it a ham sandwich while I look around for the missing ham (for decades)?
The Cambrian explosion lasted about 5 to 10 million years, some claim 20. In evolutionary terms, that is nothing. So how did life forms get so sophisticated in so short a time? Pre cambrian data doesn’t show the evolution to those life forms. Pre cambrian life forms were just simple soft bodied organisms. Can your carbon-based self replicators do it in 5-20 million years?
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ericc
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Fossil records show single celled organisms (various types of algae) and bacteria. They don’t have hard shell exoskeleton. That argument was used trying to avoid the explanation of the missing fossils. But evidence didn’t support that escape hatch.
columbia.edu/~vjd1/precambr_life.htm
Why RNA? Because it was there. You need RNA to self replicate. Then tell us how did your carbon crystals became alive and replicate then? How did it assemble itself? How did it know what to do. What got it going?
The Hebrew people wrote it down. You want to argue with history? Their books are all over ancient near east.
Symbols don’t make a religion. But if you want to look at them, they are there in archaeological digs. But I won’t spoon feed you. What do you know about the god that people worshiped back there? Tell us.
Obviously , spiritual experiences require a living person who has a working brain. If that is what you mean. Oh I am not denying that people couldn’t have mental problems. They do. Even atheists do have mental problems. But is the mental problem caused by their (dis)belief? All I am asking is that can you prove that people that experienced spiritual experiences have a mental problem? Science can test for mental problems. There is no point in making a sweeping statement that says people who have encountered a spiritual experience are nuts. That is at best your hypothesis. The scientific method require you to conduct certain standard tests to determine whether a person is suffering from a mental disorder. It is not "are you a Christian? And if the answer is “Yes”, deserving a "you are nuts’ conclusion.
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Bradski
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Let’s agree that God created the universe. Literally everything in the cosmos. And we know how He did it. We can observe and document it. We can formulate theories to predict how He caused things to happen, are happening and will happen.
We can look at star and galaxy formation and see how God did it. Entirely using the natural processes that we can understand. We can look at how He caused the formation of planets and how He caused atmospheres to form and how the face of this planet was formed by plate tectonics and continental drift and erosion.
And when life had actually started, we can see the natural processes He used to organise the vast variety of life we see. We can see how He does it. We can see the natural process He has organised whereby we have blue whales and mosquitos and penguins and cats and everything else.
Before we knew how all this happened, people used to say: Well, God did it. Well, OK, let’s run with that. yes, God did it. And as we know more and more about His creation, we can see HOW He did it.
Galaxies didn’t just pop into existence. Stars didn’t suddenly appear on a divine whim. It wasn’t the case that a planet wasn’t there yesterday and then suddenly was. There is almost nothing that we see that wasn’t part of a natural process. That followed the Rules Of Nature. Rules that we could agree that God set in motion. And why not? He can do anything.
So everything that we can see when we look up in the night sky, the billions upon billions of galaxies, each with countless stars, each with planets, and planets with moons, the immensity of it all, unfurling over billions of years, we can see that all He had to do was say: Let There Be Light. Then it simply happened as He had planned.
Oh, with one exception. Apparently He couldn’t include Life in His flow chart of existence. He could allow the whole entire universe to form by natural processes, but He couldn’t do that with life.
I don’t know why. Above my pay grade I’m afraid. Maybe He hadn’t allowed for the right mix of chemicals. Or maybe he’d set up the wrong conditions. Or maybe He just ran out of time. Who can say…
But we have apparently found something that God couldn’t do.
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You
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but a human brain did not appear out of itself… like those other things… they needed the complex brain to become real.
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PRmerger
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Really? I don’t see it that way. You’re not attempting to believe without accepting the evidence at all. You’re simply using logic to say: let me find out more.
Kind of like dating.
You see someone who intrigues you, you decide to look into it further.
Oh, no. If you don’t find the evidence convincing then PW won’t work for you at all in the end.
But that’s not what I said anyway.
I said in the end, after you’ve evaluated all the arguments, and you find them good, but aren’t quite there yet…PW pushes you in the direction of belief.
Kind of like: She seems interested in me. She’s single. But I don’t know if we have anything in common…
And then you find out that she, just like you, thinks mashed turnips is the best thing since sliced bread!!!
Voila! You have just made your decision to ask her out.
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