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1holycatholic
Guest
A causal chain necessarily has to have a first efficient cause. Asking “Then who created God?” indicates that the argument from efficient causality is not understood.
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Leela
Guest
I have reviewed the posts and found nowhere where you explained what you think scientism is and at least one place where I defined it and explained why I don’t subscribe to it.
You can yell “Scientism” as loud as you want. It is completely unhelpful until you say what you mean by the term.
It looks like you finally did when you said scientism is appealing to science for proof of the existence of God. I haven’t done that. (Why would I when I don’t believe in God?)
I just said that if you claim to have a proof of the existence of God, then that proof would be of interest to science. If your argument were convincing, the existence of God would be part of our scientific understanding of the universe. I’ve asked why you think your argument is not convincing enough to be part of science. Your response is just “scientism, scientism, scientism.”
I also find your definition of scientism to be disengenuous. I doubt that if scientists were able to demonstrate that Jesus had no earthly father through some sort of DNA testing that you would say, “Science can’t prove anything about religion, that’s SCIENTISM!!!”
As I explained before to Charlemagne, scientism is the self-defeating philosophical position that the only way to establish truth is through the scientific method. It is self-defeating because the truth of the scientific method itself cannot be demonstrated by the scientific method.
I have also stated that I take the broad view of science as our human endeavor to have good reasons for our beliefs. Science as a body of knowledge includes everything we have good reason to believe. I’ve never claimed the scientistic view that there is any particular method for determining what is good to believe.
You you quote me where you see me doing that? I recall describing a general trend toward basing beliefs on evidence instead of on authority or tradition. Is that what you mean?
I haven’t done anything wrong. For some reason it seems very important to you to convince me that I have. Why is that? If you can find fault with me, will that make you better than you are?
Best,
Leela
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Sair
Guest
Would just like to thank you for your posts on this thread - amittedly I haven’t read all of them yet, but those I have read are notable for their clarity, intelligence, balance and courtesy
I agree that the concept of ‘proof’ is problematic when it comes to the rather strained relationship between science, religion and atheism. It seems to me that too many people try to ‘prove’ the existence of God, and then claim - first of all - that anyone who doesn’t believe on that basis is either a fool or doesn’t understand the laws of logic, and second - and possibly even more grating - is that they often fail to explain that they are beginning from a position of faith, or from wanting to believe, and then trying to rationalise it. I can’t help feeling that there is intellectual dishonesty at work here. Surely, if you have faith, and you understand the scope of science, you can see there is no need to attempt to ‘prove’ the existence of God in order to believe.
Furthermore, as an atheist who has seen the futility of going down the path of attempting to argue against faith, I also understand that there is no need to disprove the existence of God in order to question religious faith. I have yet to find any common ground on which atheists and Christians can have an ongoing rational - and courteous - discussion, but I know there are those of both dispositions who desire a productive dialogue - which is one reason I find your posts so admirable.
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Touchstone
Guest
Oh, I know my Aquinas. It’s not lack of understanding Aquinas, but the caprice Aquinas helps himself to that dismisses him.
Per Aquinas:
**1. There is an efficient cause for everything; nothing can be the efficient cause of itself.
**
Whoops. Forget that this is simply asserted without warrant (why would anyone accept such a generalization??), it’s a wonderful bit of irony as it reduces God to “nothing”, as God is held by Aquinas to be uncaused or his own efficient cause. If Aquinas were right, then the Christian God cannot be what he supposes.
2. It is not possible to regress to infinity in efficient causes.
This is an unknown, and an assertion without warrant. Like #1, Aquinas starts with universal axioms which are superficially apparent (indeed it seems like all the effects we can observe have some cause associated with them), but all one need do for both of these is ask “Why not?”, and Aquinas grinds to a halt.
The First Cause idea only works for those who intuitively accept it. That’s fine, but it can’t support itself as necessary or self-evident when more than intuition is applied (critical thinking).
I’m familiar with Aquinas, just not aware that he’s done much more than hand-waving, as a matter of rigorous thinking, on this matter at least.
-TS
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1holycatholic
Guest
:coffeeread:
:hypno:
…]
You are very efficient. You have refuted yourself in just three sentences.
:doh2:
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Most universities would have, at a minimum flunked you for such behavior. Many would have expelled you as well.
You have done something wrong and are unrepentant. You have hurt all of us, but most of all you hurt yourself.
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1holycatholic
Guest
:ehh:
You are rejecting the scientific method.
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Touchstone
Guest
Yeah, to argue against faith is to misunderstand what “argue” and “faith” entail, I think. As a Christian for some 30+ years, I have a deep understanding of the futility of trying to “disprove” desire, preference, emotion. But what I have learned, and what was instrumental for me in gaining some insight into my own basis for belief/unbelief was just having the “faith” nature of my worldview pointed out to me, as faith, and not rationalism. I certainly had many thick layers of rational analsysis heaped on top of my subjective, desire-driven “axioms”, which provided me with a useful veneer of rationalism, but as we see in these conversations so often, when you strip things down to first principles, the desire and subjectivity is fairly easily exposed.Would just like to thank you for your posts on this thread - amittedly I haven’t read all of them yet, but those I have read are notable for their clarity, intelligence, balance and courtesy
I agree that the concept of ‘proof’ is problematic when it comes to the rather strained relationship between science, religion and atheism. It seems to me that too many people try to ‘prove’ the existence of God, and then claim - first of all - that anyone who doesn’t believe on that basis is either a fool or doesn’t understand the laws of logic, and second - and possibly even more grating - is that they often fail to explain that they are beginning from a position of faith, or from wanting to believe, and then trying to rationalise it. I can’t help feeling that there is intellectual dishonesty at work here. Surely, if you have faith, and you understand the scope of science, you can see there is no need to attempt to ‘prove’ the existence of God in order to believe.
Furthermore, as an atheist who has seen the futility of going down the path of attempting to argue against faith, I also understand that there is no need to disprove the existence of God in order to question religious faith. I have yet to find any common ground on which atheists and Christians can have an ongoing rational - and courteous - discussion, but I know there are those of both dispositions who desire a productive dialogue - which is one reason I find your posts so admirable.
Many just refuse to look at it, and that’s fine. It’s a desire, and if that’s what they desire, they are welcome to it (so long as it’s not injurious to others). But there is common ground for honest participants in owning up to the primacy of desires and emotions here, rather than “rationalism all the way down”. Once a Christian and I reach an understanding that their faith, and my skepticism are both primarily choice-driven, aimed at different goals, things can and do go well.
It’s just getting the conversation to a point where that can be honestly assessed that’s problematic. It happens, though, and it’s edifying all around when it does.
-TS
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warpspeedpetey
Guest
i think that is little more than a slap in the face.
if you were unable to support your belief as rationalism, thats not ourt condition. i would be happy to disabuse you of the notion.
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edwest2
Guest
So the engine of creation is randomness and selection. All of this just happens to tend to increasing complexity? Why?
And the brain-mind. How did it determine what was what in its environment? Like opening your eyes for the first time on an alien world. What is edible? What is not? Is that shadow a hole in the ground or just a shadow? What happens if I walk off that cliff?
Spiders don’t go to spider web making school. Birds do not go to flight school.
No, I think human beings know that there is something other than themselves. The mind of man is limited. God has revealed Himself to the world. I pray that those who don’t know Him, accept Him.
Peace,
Ed
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Touchstone
Guest
Well, I’m saying its applicability ends at the limits of our physical universe. The scientific method is a heuristic for physical phenomena. A means of building models for how this universe works.
To say that the universe itself must have a cause, just because effects inside the universe are observed to have causes, is a logical error, the mistaking of the dynamics inside a system for the dynamics outside it.
It may help to think of this in terms of a computer simulation. From inside a computer simulation, you might observe all sorts of rules and laws that hold perfectly inside the simulation (the ‘universe’ as seen from inside the simulation). But what Aquinas asserted, and what you are apparently committed to, is that the rules that apply in the simulation necessary apply in the outer context, in this case the real world that the programmer exists in.
If, in the simulation, all movement is constrained to right angles (0, 90, 180, and 270 degrees normalized to some absolute set of axes) as a constraint of the programming, an actor inside the simulation might well assert:
Since every movement belongs to a rectified vector… {0,90,180, 270}
Fair enough. In his world, that holds across the board. That’s what the programming (i.e. ‘physical laws’) dictate. But the actor inside that universe is completely unwarranted in supposing that things work that way necessarily in the outer context, in the real world.
So, I happily endorse the use of the scientific method, but understand it to only be useful as a tool for building and testing models of our “simulation” – this universe. Outside of this universe, we just do not have any way to know what rules and dynamics apply. It may be, as a brute fact of the metaverse, that universes simply occur, “uncaused” in the most profound way we can imagine that idea. It may be that some Creator created this universe, and right along the lines of what we receive in some sacred text or another. But none of that proceeds from necessity, as necessity, and even logic itself, are physical notions, rather than metaphysical ones.
-TS
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Touchstone
Guest
Well, randomness is an important factor in the overall process, but it is not the engine itself. As far as complexity, randomness is the theoretical maximum for complexity. There is nothing more complex that a random stream of bits. So, to the extent you have stochastic processes involved, you can expect complexity as a potential result. If you write simple algorithms that apply structured processing to random (name removed by moderator)uts, you get all sorts of complex and ornate outputs. That’s the nature of random variation being worked on by algorithms and constrained processes.
Through the extravagantly expensive processes of variation, trial and error, over vast, vast number of experiments, and lots of dead, failed experimentors. A small, slightly-more-sensitive-to-light patch on the head of a “pre-Trilobyte” may provide some navigational or food-acquiring advantage that would tend to preserve the genes of that configuration than others that do not have a “light-sensitive-spot”. Some time far into the future, a descendant with an even more light-sensitive “bump” will have a significant survival advantage due to the increased information processing about its environment garnered from improved photo-sensitivity.
On and on it goes. If you eat things that are not edible, as in “deadly not-edible”, you pull yourself out of the gene pool. Other organisms that make better choices, by luck or otherwise, are preserved. Over time the instincts and behaviors are “trained” by the environment; their genes reflect a distilled knowledge of the environment gained the hard way, over long periods of time, and the death of organisms that did not have beahvior patterns that were compatible with survival and fecundity in that envrionment.
No, but their ancestors did, across a million generations and more. The environment is a harsh schoolmaster, but a very effective one. The animals we have around to day are just those that have “made the grade” at the School of the Natural Envronment™.
What do you suppose provides the impetus for a sparrow to build a nest? It’s instinct, the legacy of learning through variation and experimentation toward survival across all those eons, distilled (suubstantially) in one’s genes. They’re “wired” that way by the process of evolution.
I say “substantially” above because in the case of a sparrow and other animals (spiders would be more purely instinctual, I think), there is some schooling that goes on, as young ones in the brood observe the behavior and strategies deployed by adults. The baby otters that live by the water’s edge in my back yard are keen students of the parents techniques, so that is a kind of “school” for some animals.
None of this can disprove the idea of God, or any possible God’s ability to reveal himself to humans he creates. No matter how much we come to understand about why the sparrow builds her nest as she does, your hypothesis is, and will remain, immune from refutation.
-TS
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Touchstone
Guest
I can read this two ways. Either you are supposing that faith is fundamentally rational conceptually, in which case I think we can quickly get down to basic assumptions and see that faith is predicated on something other than objective analysis, or you are saying that faith never claims to be reasoning all the way down, and affirms its own subjectivity.
If it’s the latter, then I think we have accord; faith is something outside of beyond reason.
I was never dependent on rationalism as the basis of my faith, but I was quite confused at points about my faith’s compatibility with rationalism. People typically desire compatability with rationalism, for it has a stellar reputation in at least some areas, so there is often a strong motivation to “rationalize” the faith of the believer… not predicating faith on it, but making efforts to “integrate” with it, for lack of a better word.
That’s fine as far as it goes. But it often doesn’t go very far, and faith and rationalism march off in different directions.
-TS
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1holycatholic
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How is that you know that applicability of the scientific method extends to the limits of the physical universe? You are (unknowingly) presupposing a Judeo-Christian metaphysical assertion about the rationality and orderliness of the universe in the scientific method. That same assumption does not exist in Islam, whose scientists are crippled by occasionalism. I’m curious why an atheist would make such an assertion since it is empirically non-verifiable.
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Leela
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You’ll have to explain how I’ve refuted myself. I appluad you for not simply saying, “scientism” like you usually do, but please make a case for your belief that I’ve refuted myself. I didn’t say anything that I didn’t mean, but you may not have understood what I said.
I’ve never confused this forum with a university. But the idea does make me wonder what sort of grades you could expect for responding to arguments over and over again with “SCIENTISM!!!” Please try to stay on topic and explain your positions.
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edwest2
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To TS,
I think your worldview depends on a lot of accidents coming to a conclusion. All of this is buried in the idea that ‘given enough time, anything is possible.’ In the dim past, things just sorted themselves out. But it doesn’t work.
As a professional storyteller, I’ve come up with a lot of plausible scenarios, and bumped into the ideas behind writing propaganda along the way. Assigning to nature any goal, will or direction is not logical. All I’m seeing is the biological robot scenario. Genes + environment + interaction = potentially successful adaptive behaviors. Those who score on the high end, and reproduce, pass this on to their children.
I think it’s a mistake to look at a computer program and random (name removed by moderator)uts and decide, you know, this must be how it works. This ignores the intelligence that created the computer and the intelligence that created the program.
As Pope Benedict stated, “Creation is an intelligent project.” He also said we are not haphazard mistakes. You may be skeptical about God or anything outside of your senses but faith is evidence of things unseen. It is unfortunate that buried in the infinite wonder of the universe and the freedom to choose anything, that God is not an option for some. Or people have simply become indifferent: you believe this, I believe that, it’s all good. But we all need to know there is an eternal truth which is good and just.
Peace and God’s blessing,
Ed
I think your worldview depends on a lot of accidents coming to a conclusion. All of this is buried in the idea that ‘given enough time, anything is possible.’ In the dim past, things just sorted themselves out. But it doesn’t work.
As a professional storyteller, I’ve come up with a lot of plausible scenarios, and bumped into the ideas behind writing propaganda along the way. Assigning to nature any goal, will or direction is not logical. All I’m seeing is the biological robot scenario. Genes + environment + interaction = potentially successful adaptive behaviors. Those who score on the high end, and reproduce, pass this on to their children.
I think it’s a mistake to look at a computer program and random (name removed by moderator)uts and decide, you know, this must be how it works. This ignores the intelligence that created the computer and the intelligence that created the program.
As Pope Benedict stated, “Creation is an intelligent project.” He also said we are not haphazard mistakes. You may be skeptical about God or anything outside of your senses but faith is evidence of things unseen. It is unfortunate that buried in the infinite wonder of the universe and the freedom to choose anything, that God is not an option for some. Or people have simply become indifferent: you believe this, I believe that, it’s all good. But we all need to know there is an eternal truth which is good and just.
Peace and God’s blessing,
Ed
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1holycatholic
Guest
Let me spell it out for you:
Here you hawk scientism.
And the very next sentence you deny it!
:hypno:
You are off topic. The topic is “Does Science Support Atheism?” Your posts are scientism, not science. Please try to stay on topic and drop the tiresome scientism.
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Touchstone
Guest
We don’t. It’s an inference based on the uniformity and symmetry we find in the parts of the universe we can explore and test. Science is metaphysically committed to the idea that the universe is at least partly rational, intelligible. It might not be, but if it is, science has a methodology which should produce testable predictions, performative models and the like.
But (we think) there are vast sections of the universe that we cannot observe and will never be able to observe that are governed by the same laws and symmetries we see all around us. There’s no way to empirical means to process all that is, so we rely on the best tool we are aware of – induction. And it’s turned out spectacularly well, so far. The more we explore new parts of the universe (at big scales and small), the more we validate the inductive conclusions we came to previously. Every new telescopic measurment fits in with the inductive idea that the universe is uniform with respect to translational symmetry for physical law, for example.
I’m knowingly presupposing the intelligibility and rationality (at least to some degree) of the reality around us. To say that is a uniquely Judaeo-Christian idea is to make a bad hash of man’s history – ever hear of the Greeks, for example? Christianity certainly incorporates a measure of rationality and intelligibility in its view of nature (as a kind of manifestation of God’s character or essence), but it’s an idea that’s as old as rational thought itself, and is in fact the very basis for our concept of ‘rational’!
It’s transcendentally non-verifiable, as it is a metaphysical hypothesis, but it certainly can be assessed in terms of performance. As a model or description of the world, various ideas and theories can be tested for consistency and coherence with observation. In that sense, we do have verifiability, subject only to solipsistic incredulity that the correspondence between theory/prediction and observation is merely an illusion.
As for Islam and occasionalism, that’s a good example of the invincible power of the hypothesis that cannot be falsified. Christian and atheist ideas alike fall powerless before it, so long as falsifiability isn’t required. Christianity is just an attenuated form of occasionalism, though, as if God was not needed directly as the agent of miracles, miracles would have efficient natural causes, and thus not be miracles (or at least miracles-as-works-of-God, anyway). To see the problematic nature of Christianity’s “occasionalism-lite”, looking at a full-blown case in Islam is instructive.
-Touchstone
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edwest2
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To Touchstone -
Does science support atheism?
Peace,
Ed
Does science support atheism?
Peace,
Ed
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Touchstone
Guest
It’s difficult to talk precisely about this, I know. For example, you use the term “accident”. That’s problematic, I think, as it presupposes some expected or telic result, when that’s the very thing in question. A mutation is not an “accident”, at least in the conventional sense of the word, because there is no expectation of accurate transcription, and no “expecter” in the first place.
I won’t push harder on that just now, but even the way you phrase this is a problem: your worldview calls for all these things happening that shouldn’t really happen, or have no reason to happen! But that expectation is just a beg to the question. Statistically, based on physical law (so far as we can tell), new information is created by a transcription “error”, and any number of “accidents” occuring in nature. All of this gets cast in telic, anthropomorphic language, because, well, we are anthropomorphs, we are storytellers, and thus see the world around us that way.
Not sure what you mean by logical there, but it seems it hardly matters. “Goals” are built-into the laws themselves, or maybe it’s more accurate to say that a law is a statement of a goal.
When you look at a puddle of freshly melted snow on the road by your house, why is it level on top? That seems a trivial question, but it’s actually a very deep one, and one that speaks to the “goals” of nature – to conserve energy, or to seek the lowest-energy point of equilibrium it can.
Why does a beam of light refract through a pane of glass at the angle it does? Herem too, nature has a goal – economy – and the crazy reality of that phenomena is that a robust wave function probes all possible routes, out into the far reaches of remote galaxies for the optimal one, which gets realized in pursuing that “goal”.
Yes, that’s what happens at one level of description. But at higher levels, conceptually, humans have all sorts of beahviors and dispositions that can run contrary to that, or orthogonal to it. We are not just our genes. So, from the perspective of, say, aesthetic gratification, a choice a self-aware, reasoning mind may embrace, may propel a person toward a vocation as an artist, and maybe in such a way that he has no offspring, and thus no “evolutionary success”.
Fine. For him, the score isn’t calculated according to fecundity, and as wonderful as kids are (I have six, who are all homeschooled, which is like double whammy in the “having children experience”), fecundity is not by any means the full measure, or even any measure of a life well lived. That’s where I think the ‘robot’ idiom breaks down – it ignores the decoupling and indirection that the human brain affords from raw biological urge.
First, I don’t look at the dynamics of stochastic (name removed by moderator)uts to structured process and conclude “This must be how it works”. Rather, I view it as a candidate model for how things may work. It’s not necessarily that way, but it’s definitely a model to consider and apply.
Second, I don’t think my own efforts in writing code that simulates this or that is ignored at all. It’s hard work! But the effort and design I put in, in the kind of simulations I’m talking about anyway, is efforts to replicate (in essence, if not totality) the dynamics of “automatic” processes.
I agree, but only because of the prejudicial language being used. It’s perfectly not haphazard, but driven by law, in the materialist view. That’s as “non-haphazard” as it can get, I should think, and even special creation, while not willy-nilly, perhaps, incorporates far more will than does the pure law of an impersonal materialist view of our history.
Calling the materialist view “haphazard mistakes” then is really just announcing that the materialist concept of our history is widely misunderstood, or being widely misrepresented.
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Leela
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Thanks for spelling it out. Now I can see how you’ve misunderstood, so I can try to be more clear. You’ve taken these two sentences to be self-refuting:
“Science as a body of knowledge includes everything we have good reason to believe.”
“I’ve never claimed the scientistic view that there is any particular method for determining what is good to believe.”
You’ve read me to limit science to only that which can be proven with the scientific method, whereas I defined science as the body of knowledge that we have good reason to believe. Anything that we have good reason to believe is part of science whether ior not it can be demonstrated with the scientific method. For example, mathematics is part of our scientific understanding of the universe, but mathematics canot be proven with the scientific method. Also, as I’ve pointed out a couple times now, the sceintific method itself cannot be demonstarted to be true using the scientific method. The scientific method is a particular part of science that only has to do with verifying hypotheses, but it is not the whole of science. I would be guilty of scientism if I thought that the only things we have good reason to believe are those that have been proven with the scientific method.
I hope you now understand that when I say, “our scientific understanding of the universe” I do not refer to the subset of human knowledge that has been demonstrated with the scientific method, but rather everything we have good reason to believe. So again, if the First Cause argument is proof that God exists, then why is the existence of God not thought of as part of our scientific understanding of the universe? Why is the existence of God generally believed to be unprovable? If you prefer not to view science with the broad definition I’ve given, then why don’t philosophers agree that the First Cause argument is proof of the existence of God? Is the proof of the existence of God more difficult to comprehend than the theory of relativity? If not, why is the existence of God not a settled issue like relativity among those capable of understanding such ideas?
Best,
Leela
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