Question on Atheism

[Touchstone]

Touchstone,

I would agree with your reply for the most part except for the following:-

I think you might have misidentified the cause of the problem. The problem is not in doubting reality but wanting everything to be inductively proven true.

There are truths which are Scientific and truths that are not.

I think that’s true, but we’re equivocating on our terms, or more specifically, equivocating on our epistemology. A “non-scientific truth” is not the same as a “scientific truth”, epistemically, in the same way an objective proposition is not the same as a subjective proposition. They are both propositions, but are fundamentally different.

A non-scientific proposition like “God is love”, for example, may be “true”, but only if we construe “true” in a much different (and conflicting) sense than we use it if we say “mass exerts gravitational pull on mass”. The former is not only problematic just in terms of its formal qualification, but is also only “true” in a more casual sense, if it is true at all; it’s non-intersubjective, epistemically, and it’s not subject to falsification. Indeed, many of the “non-scientific truths”, like our example here (“God is love”) are declarative, not descriptive, as a scientific truth would be. Tautologies, rather than empirical principles, in other words.

You can call that “equally true”, or “more profoundly true”, if you like. That’s a subjective classification. What’s objectively true about such a non-scientific truth is that its “truth” does not have the qualities that are valued in scientific truths – intersubjectivity, predictive power, explanatory scope and economy, falsifiability, etc. A scientific truth can “show its math” and “demonstrate itself”, where a religious proposition cannot – by definition: if it could show its math in some intersubjective way, we’d consider it science not religion!

I hear this all the time – “therre are more truths and other kinds of truth” – and perhaps they are. But they do not have the qualities and properties that scientific truths do, or they would be scientific truths. The value of intersubjectivity and falsifiability is a subjective matter, I guess, so I’ll leave it to each to value the kinds of truth that pass the epistemic rigors of science.

I think this claim is way off. Science is not anti-religion at all. Science deals with a different class of truths that are falsifiable.

That’s right. But really, that’s like saying that science deals in the “truthy” forms of truth, or the “solid” or the “serious” forms of truth. Lack of falsifiability is a debilitating feature; It eviscerates the “true” part in “true”, epistemically. Part of what we mean when we say “true”, I suggest, is “not false”. That is, the semantics of “true” entail “not false”. Of necessity. By affirming the a proposition as non-falsifiable, even in principle, you’ve rendered the “true” part impotent, by virtue of removing the possibility of its negation. What can’t be false isn’t true as a statement about the real world. It’s a trivial truth, a tautology. That’s a major bug, not the feature many religious folk suppose their non-falsifiability aspects of their propositions might be.

It has no say on the matter of ‘non-scientific truths’ or on whether ‘Only scientific truths are valuable’.

Or are you trying to say it does?

God Bless

See above. Subjective values are a crucial, and foundational part of the human experience. Nothing wrong with that. The trouble here is just the equivocation between “true as an intersubjective, falsifiable” proposition, built on epistemology that demands those things (among others), and “true as subjective, non-falsifiable propositions”.

Both have utility and place in human thinking and action. But they are not interchangeable. And if where we do value some sense of “true” that applies and obtains beyond our fancies, our parochial minds and its whims and preferences, then scientific truth is king. It’s not necessary to value truth that way, and one may value “personal truth” and “truth as preference” more than something grounded in skeptical objective analysis.

But if one does value the “kind of truth” that intersubjectivity and falsifiability enable, then “truths” (if they are truths, even on their own terms) like “God is love” just can’t compete, and cannot rise to that kind of valuation.

-TS

Edited to Add: If it’s not clear, the above is why I referred to the scientific approach as “anti-religion”. The scientific epistemology reviles the very thing that religious credulity celebrates and calls “higher”; it is precise what produces that kind of affirmation that science understands to be the cardinal source of error, the corrosive element of anti-knowledge that cannot be tolerated or indulged if science is to maintain its own epistemic integrity.

 

[tonyrey]

This, I suspect, is quite a different process to throwing up one’s hands and declaring that a supernatural entity must have caused something; such an ‘explanation’ is not informative - a supernatural entity by definition is not subject to any natural limitations, therefore can behave in any way in any given circumstances.

I beg to disagree. If a supernatural entity is rational it must be consistent. Its activity must fit into an intelligible pattern and serve a specific purpose - or purposes. That is the hallmark of events which are intended rather than due to physical causes.

 

[CollegeStinks]

I just want to put this out there: Scientists aren’t these grand philosophers who look to the stars every night and ask these deep questions about faith and religion. We’re just normal people trying to make a living. The overwhelming majority of us don’t have the ego of people like Richard Dawkins who have to be on TV in order to feel better about ourselves. Probably 99% of science has virtually nothing to do with religion or theological issues. Many of my peers are Christians, albeit most aren’t very committed, none of this relates to the work they do. The most atheist professor I know is hardly an atheist, rather in his own words he says, “I’m not going to answer whether or not there is a God, I don’t know if there is, nor do I care to find out.” He is theoretician of quantum mechanics. Contrary to popular opinion, his work has nothing to do with theology nor does it seek to dispel theology.

Similar to the way a plumber is specialized to figure out why your toilet won’t flush, a biochemist such as myself is specialized to figure out why a certain cell won’t function, etc. We are merely problem solvers, just like many other professionals on this planet. We do not have crystal balls. Quit glamorizing science. It’s just as easy for a scientist to be a devout Catholic as it is for a mail man.

 

[tonyrey]

Just for the record, I’d like to point out that whilst I identify as a pantheist, owing to my reverence for nature, I would probably still qualify as an atheist to most religious believers. I’m a metaphysical naturalist and I lack belief in a personal, anthropomorphic god, so I think that pretty much covers the main bugbears of supernaturalist and humanist believers…

There must be a reason for your reverence for nature unless it stems entirely from emotion. I guess it is due to your appreciation of its value and beauty - which must outweigh your awareness of its harsher elements.

 

[Touchstone]

I just want to put this out there: Scientists aren’t these grand philosophers who look to the stars every night and ask these deep questions about faith and religion. We’re just normal people trying to make a living. The overwhelming majority of us don’t have the ego of people like Richard Dawkins who have to be on TV in order to feel better about ourselves. Probably 99% of science has virtually nothing to do with religion or theological issues. Many of my peers are Christians, albeit most aren’t very committed, none of this relates to the work they do. The most atheist professor I know is hardly an atheist, rather in his own words he says, “I’m not going to answer whether or not there is a God, I don’t know if there is, nor do I care to find out.” He is theoretician of quantum mechanics. Contrary to popular opinion, his work has nothing to do with theology nor does it seek to dispel theology.

Similar to the way a plumber is specialized to figure out why your toilet won’t flush, a biochemist such as myself is specialized to figure out why a certain cell won’t function, etc. We are merely problem solvers, just like many other professionals on this planet. We do not have crystal balls. Quit glamorizing science. It’s just as easy for a scientist to be a devout Catholic as it is for a mail man.

The argument atheists typically advance, or at least the argument I seek to advance is NOT that God or theology can be disproven or “dispelled”. That’s an impossible task, as the hallmarks of such theology and the God idea itself is that it is utterly impervious to falsification. You can’t prove a universal negative like “God does not exist”. It’s not possible in principle. And this is the reason a Catholic can be a scientist as easily as a plumber; so long as the Catholic does not admit of propositions that are accountable or even relevant to scientific analysis, then no problem; one is trafficking in non-falsifiables, safely out of searchlight beam of science which illuminates through falsification.

Instead, science just makes Catholic theology (and all theology) more and more superfluous, irrelevant, extraneous, notional. That is NOT disproof, but rather just “hemming in the magisterium” bit by bit, so that theology has less applicability and relevance. Rather than falsify religion, science just tends to render it inert, impotent.

That’s why evolution is such a bogeyman here. One of the great “deep questions” that religion used to speak to was “how did we get here, how did we get the forms we have?”

That used to be a compelling question, asked in a big enough knowledge vacuum that religion could opportunistically jump in and say “Why, Goddidit, of course!”

Since Darwin, the relevance of religion and theology has shrunk way, way done, and now must confine itself to live in the “God of the gaps” spaces of ignorance around abiogenesis and points prior. But the creationist idea, which was hard to contend with 300 years ago, given the dearth of knowledge we had then, is laughable now, to think that man and the other species were just “poofed” in some kind of cartoonish way, across six days of creation or even billions of years. Darwin’s dangerous idea hasn’t disproven God, it has just banished God from the discourse on how the species diverged and developed. God isn’t disproved; he’s just not interesting or needed to look at the question in a serious way.

That resonates with the quote from your professor, above. It’s a fool that supposes the God idea can ever be disproved, even rationally, let alone for people emotionally invested in such beliefs. Instead, the more serious we get in looking at these particular questions, the more ridiculous and irrelevant such concepts are. There’s just no interest due to such claims any more.

None of that should or will interfere with your Catholicism. You can maintain your non-overlapping magisteria in perpetuity. But where science goes, God retreats even further. He’s not refuted, he’s just ignored, because God adds nothing to the knowledge base on those questions.

-TS

 

[ddarko]

I think that’s true, but we’re equivocating on our terms, or more specifically, equivocating on our epistemology. A “non-scientific truth” is not the same as a “scientific truth”, epistemically, in the same way an objective proposition is not the same as a subjective proposition. They are both propositions, but are fundamentally different.

A non-scientific proposition like “God is love”, for example, may be “true”, but only if we construe “true” in a much different (and conflicting) sense than we use it if we say “mass exerts gravitational pull on mass”. The former is not only problematic just in terms of its formal qualification, but is also only “true” in a more casual sense, if it is true at all; it’s non-intersubjective, epistemically, and it’s not subject to falsification. Indeed, many of the “non-scientific truths”, like our example here (“God is love”) are declarative, not descriptive, as a scientific truth would be. Tautologies, rather than empirical principles, in other words…

What do you mean? There is only one truth which corresponds to reality. It seems like you want to say there is no reality now but just subjective notions apart from scientifically revealed reality?

My point is that there are truths, both scientific and non-scientific.

Might I ask how you are so sure that the proposition ‘non-scientific truths are not as true as scientific ones’ is true? Are you talking about a ‘different’ kind of truth here?

All I am saying is that just as much as you are sure that ‘Science does best on Scientific truths’, I am sure about other non-scientific truths. It makes no sense to me to separate them in to different categories of truth.

God Bless

 

[ddarko]

…
Instead, science just makes Catholic theology (and all theology) more and more superfluous, irrelevant, extraneous, notional. That is NOT disproof, but rather just “hemming in the magisterium” bit by bit, so that theology has less applicability and relevance. Rather than falsify religion, science just tends to render it inert, impotent.
…

Please explain to me how this logically follows from ‘Science is doing well with respect to scientific truths’? Is this a Scientific conclusion or a mere emotional statement by you?

If you mean that all this scientific success is getting to ones head and making them erroneously conclude that Scientific truth is all that matters, then I completely agree with you. But logically speaking, what you state about the conclusion on religion does not follow.

God Bless

 

[fakename]

Fakename,

Then there seems no alternative but to expand one’s enquiry in order to increase knowledge. It’s better to have a theory falsified or adjusted than to persist in thinking that some explanation is true when it isn’t - only consider, for example, the theories of humours and of miasma as explanations for the treatment and proliferation of disease.

This seems like a one-way street to me. Once a negation of a theory has been observed, then the theory as it stands is invalidated. It would take a significant alteration in reality for the original theory to become valid again.
**
The original theory is strong not due to its explanatory power vis-a-vis all data but only relative to the data that it originally explained. It is stronger in probability terms.
**

Things that are self-evident are still evident - that is, learned and validated by observation and experience. That a statement is true by definition only follows from the existence of language, of words and other symbols with agreed definitions. The source of the language is still observed realities about which we wish to communicate. I’m not sure what you mean by the ability of the soul to intuit things - this still points to an external, objective reality about which we may have intuitions.
**
Yeah, I would state self-evident propositions are indeed supremely true and certain which makes them supreme starting points for deduction. Though they are acquired through the senses they don’t need to be proved by the senses. Indeed, self-evident statements do not need proof of any kind they are “obviously” true. **

 

[Charlemagne_II]

ddarko

Please explain to me how this logically follows from ‘Science is doing well with respect to scientific truths’? Is this a Scientific conclusion or a mere emotional statement by you?

Since he is an atheist, it is an emotional statement from him. He cannot demonstrate by science or by reason that religion is hemmed in by the progress of science. All he can affirm is that he would like to think that is so. That is emotion, not logic.

So long as men can believe that God exists, science will never overcome religion. That isn’t to say it won’t overcome the atheists.

Remember, atheism is not really a proven truth. It is only an act of defiance rooted in the desire for the atheist to think there can be no Ego so big as his own.

 

[fakename]

Haven’t been here in some weeks (stuck in the “crunch time” cycle of software development for a while), but was referred here by a friend who hangs out here regularly.

I didn’t even go look at the status of the “sticky” threads, but “atheism” as an overt topic was problematic on this forum last I checked. That might be one factor.

But really, I think your basic message is here is confused enough that it seems difficult to even get a handle on it in response.

It’s true to say that every relevant bit of evidence is a “hurdle” a theory must clear, and as such, it provides another case where the theory might be falsified or at least challenged. A performative theory has to “pass all the tests”, so the more tests a theory takes, the more opportunities is has to fail.

But there’s an old saw that observes: “reality has a liberal bias”, a statement which is not meant to steer this in a political direction, but rather to point out that challenges are not evenly distributed among competing ideas and theories (right wing theory, according to the aphorism, is inherently more likely to fail because it is less isomorphic to the state of the real world).

The point of that being: for a solid, performative theory, more tests are not actual threats. The test is not a flip of the coin, but a test of the model. If the model is accurate, within tolerances, the model is at no risk at all to being subject to more tests. Our theory of gravity is not “more likely to be falsified” by my doing repeated tests of rates of falling objects in my basement, day in and day it.

The more powerful a theory is, the less trouble it has in predicting future outcomes, and accounting for present and past measurements and observations. For a “true” theory, more tests are better, and only serve to discredit inferior competing theories who cannot match its predictive prowess or evidential accounting.

Your idea is only problematic if the world is wholly intractable for science; not law based at all, impervious to model-building, mathematical abstraction, isotropy, symmetry, etc. That’s a metaphysical scenario that’s logically possible; we have no way to say that metaphysically, the world must be intelligible via science, a priori.

To the extent we trust our senses, though, (and to a significant degree, we cannot “untrust” our senses), science does indeed appear to be a successful enterprise to some degree. The world is intelligible in some measure, and admits of model building, mathematical abstraction, description by law, etc.

Given that, then, we expect that models that are “true” will prevail no matter how many tests of empirical observations are thrown at it. The “threat” of new evidence is only an actual threat for false or inaccurate models. A robustly performative theory is under no theat of new tests or evidence gathering. It can only be validated if it is a truly performative theory.

**
Granted all of the above, as long as the theory seeks to explain a lot, so in proportion is its chance of failure -newtonian physics is gone (not entirely but for my purposes), and general relativity faced some problems with, I believe, quantum level physics. This much is mathematical certainty -if you had a 99.99 chance of being correct once, you sure are not going to have a 99.99% chance of being right 1000 times in a row. So eventually the theory, as long as it is admitted to be not-absolute truth, will weaken the more it covers.**

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

Please explain to me how this logically follows from ‘Science is doing well with respect to scientific truths’? Is this a Scientific conclusion or a mere emotional statement by you?

No, it’s the metaphysical predicate for science itself. If science is to succeed, at all, nature must be intelligible to some degree, amenable to model building. A priori, it might not be, we don’t know. It’s a “metaphysical gamble”. That bet appears to have paid off pretty well, as we have models that are performative and consistent in many different domains now. Science is successful in that made that wager – “reality is amenable to model-building that works (provides predictive power, etc.)” – and has a considerable number of “truths” established by its own epistemological constraints that it can demonstrate. We don’t know up front if science will work as an enterprise at all. That’s the intractability of metaphysics as a prioris. But looking back on the results of science as a research program, the “scientific truths” it has produced are considerable, and a post-facto validation of the metaphyiscal wager that reality is real and amenable to model building.

If you mean that all this scientific success is getting to ones head and making them erroneously conclude that Scientific truth is all that matters, then I completely agree with you. But logically speaking, what you state about the conclusion on religion does not follow.

God Bless

Well, how would you evaluate the “truths” of Catholic religion by comparison. What would be the measure applied to conclude God doesn’t exist, that no such place as Heaven or Hell exists, etc.? There isn’t any “putting to the test” there, or any intersubjectivity that underwrites the conclusion. Which is not to say that such propositions, subjective and unfalsifiable (and worse, not even cast in coherent semantics) cannot be valued; manifestly, by many they are. But they are (ostensibly) valued precisely because they preserve what science dissolves: propositions that are subjective, immune from falsification, non-model based, intractable.

I think Pink Floyd is “the greatest rock band ever”. I maintain and value that belief. I don’t think science can tell me otherwise. But I don’t confuse that for knowledge, or at least knowledge beyond what my personal subjective preferences are about rock music. Keeping things straight doesn’t mean I don’t value that conviction, or value and appreciate a great guitar solo. It’s a bit of “me” that I value that is different from intersubjective knowledge, knowledge that transcends me and my biases and preference. “God is love” doesn’t transcend any more than “Pink Floyd is best”. These are valuable by their owners as beliefs, and may be more carefully or less carefully reasoned as personal, non-falsifiable, subjective conclusions, but they are not valuable in the same currency as natural, intersubjective knowledge – that which science produces.

-TS

 

[Charlemagne_II]

"God is love" doesn’t transcend any more than “Pink Floyd is best”. These are valuable by their owners as beliefs, and may be more carefully or less carefully reasoned as personal, non-falsifiable, subjective conclusions, but they are not valuable in the same currency as natural, intersubjective knowledge – that which science produces.

That would only be so if you are an atheist.

 

[shoe]

The argument atheists typically advance, or at least the argument I seek to advance is NOT that God or theology can be disproven or “dispelled”. That’s an impossible task, as the hallmarks of such theology and the God idea itself is that it is utterly impervious to falsification. You can’t prove a universal negative like “God does not exist”. It’s not possible in principle. And this is the reason a Catholic can be a scientist as easily as a plumber; so long as the Catholic does not admit of propositions that are accountable or even relevant to scientific analysis, then no problem; one is trafficking in non-falsifiables, safely out of searchlight beam of science which illuminates through falsification.

Instead, science just makes Catholic theology (and all theology) more and more superfluous, irrelevant, extraneous, notional. That is NOT disproof, but rather just “hemming in the magisterium” bit by bit, so that theology has less applicability and relevance. Rather than falsify religion, science just tends to render it inert, impotent. -TS

It was great Catholic minds such as Blaise Pascal, Louis Pasteur, and Isaac Newton that invented modern science. It was Christianity that directed science into the analysis of experimentation, verification, falsification, and quantitative data. I find that just a cursory glance at history shows that almost every branch of modern science can be traced back to those scientists who operated within a Christian framework, and that modern science is actually rooted in Christian theism’s belief in One God.

 

[Touchstone]

Hi fakename,

I don’t know if there’s a handy link on CAF for working the QUOTE tags for your post, but it makes it hard to respond to your posts without them. Perhaps take a look here as quick intro to it:

vbulletin.org/forum/misc.php?do=bbcode#quote

Granted all of the above, as long as the theory seeks to explain a lot, so in proportion is its chance of failure -newtonian physics is gone (not entirely but for my purposes), and general relativity faced some problems with, I believe, quantum level physics.

No, not gone. Improved, and superceded, but as it is, very much alive as practical effective physics. You can land a ship on the moon, or launch a n ICBM from across the world and land it in a dictator’s backyard pool using Newtonian physics. Einstein upgraded the theory significantly (and GR still has challenges at the borders on its own), but Newton is only “wrong” insofar as it is a crude approximation compared to Einstein’s model. If I’m trying to plot the path of a baseball from pitcher’s hand to catcher’s mitt, Newton’s as “right” for me as Einstein, even today.

This much is mathematical certainty -if you had a 99.99 chance of being correct once, you sure are not going to have a 99.99% chance of being right 1000 times in a row. So eventually the theory, as long as it is admitted to be not-absolute truth, will weaken the more it covers.

I don’t recognize “absolute truth” as a meaningful concept – truth as a proposition about the extramental world is necessarily relative to its context, its frame. But “objective truth”, truth propositions that admit of no contingency on mind or will, I think might work for what you mean, and what I can understand. With your probabilities, you are mistaking stochastic or random dynamics in the model for some kind of “randomness of nature” in the metaphysical sense. A body of mass will distort spacetime (and attract other mass to it) 100% of the time, according to our model of gravity (and physics overall). That is not probabilistic in model, that gravity may “happen or it may not”. It’s a perfect certainty that it will, everywhere, everytime, in all places that qualify as “places” (i.e. as part of our spacetime).

That model may be wrong. We don’t know unless we test it, and the more we test it, the more confident we can be that it’s “not-false”, as it passes more and more chances to be false. The model has held up, after lots and lots of tests, perfectly; no known exceptions are known for this dynamic of the model.

If that model is right, then, science has identified what you call an “absolute”, a universal property of physics. We can make accurate predictions and account for all of our tests and data by incorporating a 100% chance of gravity being gravity, everywhere, always, with uniform consistency.

When you subject that to testing, you don’t degrade the probabilities. It should work every time, and it doesn’t matter how many times you try. If nature is something different than what physics supposes, and just “wigs out” every here and there, then our model is wrong. But so far so good as it happens, and we don’t have such problems to accommodate like that for the theory as we currently have it.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

It was great Catholic minds such as Blaise Pascal, Louis Pasteur, and Isaac Newton that invented modern science. It was Christianity that directed science into the analysis of experimentation, verification, falsification, and quantitative data. I find that just a cursory glance at history shows that almost every branch of modern science can be traced back to those scientists who operated within a Christian framework, and that modern science is actually rooted in Christian theism’s belief in One God.

Understand. The belief in alchemy was another powerful engine and catalyst toward scientific progress, too. The Astrologer’s Intuition played its role, too.

Science is a research program, so it’s wonderfully gracious and egalitarian about the provenance of ideas it turns into hypotheses and eventual testing that will discredit it, or promote it to working theory. You can propose a hypothesis from anywhere, for any reason, so long as it is amenable to testing, falsification and empirical review. You can be a Christian, or a aboriginal witchdoctor, or a Cambridge atheist professor, doesn’t matter – just the qualification as amenable to the method matters.

If you look at Newton, for example, a man who was a devout Christian (and also one enamored of ideas about alchemy, as it happens), the contributions he gave to world are perfectly secular as science. Nowhere in his models or theory is God implicated, relied upon, factored into equations or models. That he credited God with his motivation or inspiration is fine and good – the witchdoctor has a different claimed source of inspiration, but no matter, as this is irrelevant to science. Methodological naturalism insulates science from the corrupting and distortive effects of those kinds of subjectivity and bias.

Which is not to deny those background features of many of history’s great scientists. It’s just a credit to the method and the epistemology that it has an architecture which isn’t ruined by such factors, and “nets them out”, no matter whether you are Christian, Buddhist, Zoroastrian or atheist.

That Christianity promoted discovery and “naturalism as a method” to the extent it did (Galilleo had no “God variable” in his model for heliocentric solar system dynamics, for example), is to its credit. It is one of the profound ironies of history that Christianity proved such fertile soil and seeds for the enterprise that would develop over many centuries to become a golem of sorts, a program that ends up marginalizing and obsolescing the culture and philosophy that in some ways birthed it.

-TS

 

[ddarko]

No, it’s the metaphysical predicate for science itself. If science is to succeed, at all, nature must be intelligible to some degree, amenable to model building.

Ok so how does this logically follow as a necessity for Science to succeed? You are basically saying that the proposition ‘Science is making religion impotent’ is a metaphysical predicate. I fail to see how this either logically follows or how this is a ‘metaphysical predicate’. All one needs for Science is that ‘Science works for scientific truths’. So please explain.

Well, how would you evaluate the “truths” of Catholic religion by comparison. What would be the measure applied to conclude God doesn’t exist, that no such place as Heaven or Hell exists, etc.?

This is rather a meaningless question. What is the measure of the certainty of mathematical axioms and those of logic/reason itself?

Religious truths can only be evaluated by reason and logic. Not science.

I think Pink Floyd is “the greatest rock band ever”. I maintain and value that belief. I don’t think science can tell me otherwise. But I don’t confuse that for knowledge, or at least knowledge beyond what my personal subjective preferences are about rock music…

Ha? Are you equating the proposition ‘Pink floyd the greatest rock band ever’ with things like ‘principle of contradiction’?

Existence of a God is comes from using deduction on what we know self-evidently. If you are having a crisis on believing self-evident truths, religion isn’t the only thing you will have problems with. Anyway, this is not even relevant to what we are talking about.

Even if there were no criterion to evaluate non-scientific truths, it does not logically follow that there are no non-scientific truths. Does it?

God Bless

 

[Touchstone]

"God is love" doesn’t transcend any more than “Pink Floyd is best”. These are valuable by their owners as beliefs, and may be more carefully or less carefully reasoned as personal, non-falsifiable, subjective conclusions, but they are not valuable in the same currency as natural, intersubjective knowledge – that which science produces.

That would only be so if you are an atheist.

If you are correct than you have some way falsify the idea that “God is love”. Do you suppose you have that? If not, you are just indulging conceits, aren’t you? That your particular subjective notions are, ahem, the universal truths, even though such propositions are non-intersubjective and non-empirical and non-falsifiable.

I know it feels good and happy to walk around that way, but if you step outside of that for a moment and look at it apart from your emotional investment in it, it’s quite straightforward to see one’s conceits like that for what they are.

-TS

 

[fakename]

Hi fakename,

I don’t know if there’s a handy link on CAF for working the QUOTE tags for your post, but it makes it hard to respond to your posts without them. Perhaps take a look here as quick intro to it:

vbulletin.org/forum/misc.php?do=bbcode#quote

No, not gone. Improved, and superceded, but as it is, very much alive as practical effective physics. You can land a ship on the moon, or launch a n ICBM from across the world and land it in a dictator’s backyard pool using Newtonian physics. Einstein upgraded the theory significantly (and GR still has challenges at the borders on its own), but Newton is only “wrong” insofar as it is a crude approximation compared to Einstein’s model. If I’m trying to plot the path of a baseball from pitcher’s hand to catcher’s mitt, Newton’s as “right” for me as Einstein, even today.

I don’t recognize “absolute truth” as a meaningful concept – truth as a proposition about the extramental world is necessarily relative to its context, its frame. But “objective truth”, truth propositions that admit of no contingency on mind or will, I think might work for what you mean, and what I can understand. With your probabilities, you are mistaking stochastic or random dynamics in the model for some kind of “randomness of nature” in the metaphysical sense. A body of mass will distort spacetime (and attract other mass to it) 100% of the time, according to our model of gravity (and physics overall). That is not probabilistic in model, that gravity may “happen or it may not”. It’s a perfect certainty that it will, everywhere, everytime, in all places that qualify as “places” (i.e. as part of our spacetime).

That model may be wrong. We don’t know unless we test it, and the more we test it, the more confident we can be that it’s “not-false”, as it passes more and more chances to be false. The model has held up, after lots and lots of tests, perfectly; no known exceptions are known for this dynamic of the model.

If that model is right, then, science has identified what you call an “absolute”, a universal property of physics. We can make accurate predictions and account for all of our tests and data by incorporating a 100% chance of gravity being gravity, everywhere, always, with uniform consistency.

When you subject that to testing, you don’t degrade the probabilities. It should work every time, and it doesn’t matter how many times you try. If nature is something different than what physics supposes, and just “wigs out” every here and there, then our model is wrong. But so far so good as it happens, and we don’t have such problems to accommodate like that for the theory as we currently have it.

**Eventually (if there is a grand unification of all science), everything could be stated, as a conditional and everything would be falsifiable. Now if that is the case, then either absolute truth exists (because science has literally modelled everything to 100%) which is contradictory, or there is still more to falsify in which case every scientific idea would be destroyed w/one falsification because it was logically unified. Gravity is such an idea, and it would be destroyed too. So if anyone wants a series of propositions that describes the universe, then they will either have to admit that no falsification can exist or that every scientific idea is not certain. Neither of these choices would mesh with the idea that gravity is (even practically) 100% true, eventually, if science is to be one, gravity would have to be on the chopping board.
**

-TS

 

[Charlemagne_II]

Touchstone

If you are correct than you have some way falsify the idea that “God is love”.

You appear to be absolutely certain there is no God. It would be interesting to know why you think science forces us to draw that conclusion. God is not subject to falsification?

Ahem. God is not subject to the scientific way of thinking. He exists as a person, not an entity in a laboratory that you can study under a microscope.

As Pascal said, when he dismissed Descartes notion of God as Prime Mover and not much else, he wanted not a Thing, but a God “of love and consolation.”

Your god is the god called Science, a thing without love or consolation. Your god is so loveless that in the hands of loveless men it has given us the means by which to blow ourselves to smithereens. The only one who can stop that from happening is the God of 'love and consolation."

To him we pray, not to Albert Einstein.

 

[warpspeedpetey]

…Well, how would you evaluate the “truths” of Catholic religion by comparison. What would be the measure applied to conclude God doesn’t exist, that no such place as Heaven or Hell exists, etc.? There isn’t any “putting to the test” there, or any intersubjectivity that underwrites the conclusion. …

Verificationism is a self refuting statement, a logical contradiction and therefore invalid. The various books of the Bible were gathered together because they document the relationship of G-d and man. There have been thousands of witnesses over thousands of years. That is the criterion by which we accept any historical event as a real occurrence. To back it all up the fulfillment of Messianic Prophecies places the veracity of the Christian faith beyond any kind of reasonable doubt. We have undeniable reasons to accept that G-d exists.