Question on Atheism

[fakename]

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

Every statement can be said as a combination of negations and the word “or” and vice versa. So conditional statements can be made from this, that talk about God. But every conditional is “falsifiable” since by its nature as a statement P–>Q is false when Q is false. But by the same token it is true when P is true. So if someone were to say If God exists then creation exists and he knows that God exists, observations that seem to imply that He doesn’t exist are not to be accepted. The point is, anything you say can be falsified, but as long as you know the antecedent then the consequent follows.

 

[Touchstone]

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.

First, the metaphysics of science. A priori, we do not know and have no warrant for assuming that nature is this way or that. We have our experience to chew on, but before we process that, we can’t deduce that nature is “model ready”, that it is amenable to scientific theory development and intelligible in that sense.

That’s the “metaphysical predicate”. We don’t know up front, but we have to assume, necessarily, that nature is amenable to model-building and intelligible to some degree, or science can’t get off the ground at all. It’s a requirement to believe that, provisionally. It might not bear out, but we have to act like it’s true to get any results to judge either way.

On “science hemming religion in”, that’s a different dynamic. As science produces models that are effective, predictive, falsifiable, consilient with the evidence, it becomes generally persuasive, for the very reasons that it is built with those features. So, in the absence of Darwin’s dangerous idea, the is a “knowledge void”, and this is where religion flourishes, in the absence of real knowledge. As real knowledge advances, religion has to retreat, as it has the overwhelming advantage over science in the absence of knowledge – it thrives where ignorance prevails – but similarly cannot compete (creationist and young earth-like intransigence notwithstanding) where science has staked out solid answers.

So, where several centuries ago the belief that “God made all the species in one day” and “fashioned them specially, species by species”, etc. was acceptable, where our knowledge vacuum on that question made religious imaginations hard to resist, now, religion retreats, and relegates its superstitious answers to areas behind the perimeter of scientific knowledge (like how abiogenesis happened). Science slowly, carefully grinds out real knowledge, and religion has to change its story to accomodate that, and/or retreat to remaining areas of ignorance (and there are many, so religion has plenty of refuge yet) in which to sell its imaginations.

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.

The proof is in the pudding, so they say. Science provisionally accepts that reality is real and amenable to model building, when it has no warrant to do so non-provisionally. The merit of that assumption is proved out by the results of the program. Does science produce working, performative, models, providing accurate, entailed, economical predictions, etc? Manifestly it does. So to the extent we have produced “intelligbility” in scientific terms, we understand that provisional assumption to have borne out in practice as a sound one.

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 don’t know of a way to evaluate them with reason or logic, unless one just supposes that one is “self-authoritative” on what is reasonable and logical. If you allow that evaluation is a purely subjective exercise, then sure, your reason and logic is as “true” as your favorite color is your favorite color. But so long as you hold that reason and logic are intersubjective somehow, then I think you have given up your measure for evaluating religious truths by reason and logic. If you doubt this, propose one and we will see how it plays out in intersubjective methods of evaluation.

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

No. That would be a dialectical/reasoning tool. “God is love” and “Pink Floyd rules” are not that.

Existence of a God is comes from using deduction on what we know self-evidently.

Which is to say we claim to know what we do not know in any intersubjective, accountable or falsifiable way. I might as well say “Pink Floyd is the best”, and suppose that is self-evident. And in fact, it is self-evident!

Bingo, I have arrive at an religious absolute, no? Or is Pink Floyd’s “bestness” really not self-evident to me?

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.

“Self-evident” is the go-to tool in deceiving the self. There is a persistent (and convenient) level of confusion and evasion on the qualifications of “self-evident”, but any chasing of that would be pretty deep digression, here.

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

No, that would a clear fallacy to assert that because we cannot identify or distinguish truths, that they do not exist. Something like supposing that if one closes one’s eyes, so one cannot see the tiger a the edge of wood, or know where he is, if anywhere, that the tiger doesn’t exist.

Those truths may exist as truths. But affirming that, over and over, doesn’t help me (or you) a bit. Because a truth that exists as a truth, which we CANNOT IDENTIFY as a truth is, in practice, as a matter of epistemology, not a truth. It may just as well be falsehood that we mistake for a truth, or simply desire to be truth.

Not being able to tell, to distinguish truth from falsehood, doesn’t deny the existence of truths, it makes their existence intractable, inscrutable, irrelevant as resources for our knowledge and reasoning.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

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.

Then you don’t need faith. I’m always amazed at how quickly and efficiently Christians will rush in like this and destroy their own paragraph, right in that very paragraph. You have an undeniable case for your faith. Think about that for 30 seconds, please.

Big extra credits for actually invoking “self-refuting statement” in your self-refuting statements there. That’s actually pretty cool.

I’m not sure what triggered your “verification” keyword response here, but the operative principle here is falsification, and this is a principle that doesn’t fit whatever apologetics tract you are working from on vertificationalism. Is the falsifiability principle of science itself falsifiable?

Why, yes it is. mirabile dictu. If that constraint wasn’t effective in upholding epistemic integrity of scientific knowledge, we’d do as well in terms of models and their perform without it, or better. But dropping that requirement handicaps the whole enterprise. Hypotheses and models that indulge non-falsifiable propositions and conclusions degrade the explanatory power, integration with other theories and the empirical performance of the project, and quickly. It’s a simple way to quickly bust science down to theology, with all the performance problems that go with it.

Science succeeds by eliminative methods, and that statement itself is subject to eliminative methods, falsification.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

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.

I’m not certain. There may exist a god. I’ve said that here and elsewhere repeatedly. I am, conversely, quite confident (if not certain) that certainty about the non-existence of god or gods is unattainable, even in principle.

So not only am I not certain that there is no god, I’m confident it’s not possible to 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?

God, at list in the Christian (orthodox/Catholic) understanding of the term, is perfectly unfalsifiable. Could not be more unassailable or unaccountable as a proposition. It is proposition at zero risk for the bearer.

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.

I don’t know what you suppose “personhood” entails. I suppose that might entail attributes that are falsifiable – the Greek understanding of Zeus might be falsifiable as a “god-who-is-a-person”. But the Christian God can be perfectly invisible, unreal, immaterial, non-existent in terms of this universe, and still be – per Christian metaphysics – supervenient upon it. Transcendent in some enclosing sense, as a person. In which case, God is “real” per the Christian, but perfectly beyond any kind of inquiry or testing by a human mind.

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.

Science is just a tool. Math is not a god, either. It’s just a tool. We can value our tools for their utility, and be frustrated with them for their limitations (neither is a perfect tool). But they are just tools, and you appear to be projecting your desire for some other person to worship onto others.

It’s just tools. Impersonal tools.

-TS

 

[ddarko]

First, the metaphysics of science. A priori, we do not know and have no warrant for assuming that nature is this way or that. We have our experience to chew on, but before we process that, we can’t deduce that nature is “model ready”, that it is amenable to scientific theory development and intelligible in that sense.

This is really not relevant here is it?

That’s the “metaphysical predicate”. We don’t know up front, but we have to assume, necessarily, that nature is amenable to model-building and intelligible to some degree, or science can’t get off the ground at all. It’s a requirement to believe that, provisionally. It might not bear out, but we have to act like it’s true to get any results to judge either way.

Once again, I understand what ‘PREDICATE’ means. But I fail to see how what you say is a ‘metaphysical predicate’ i.e. Scientific success leaves religion impotent.

Scientific success only requires that the Material Universe is intelligible in Scientific terms. But it does not logically follow that religion is impotent as you said. Do you understand what I am saying?

On “science hemming religion in”, that’s a different dynamic. As science produces models that are effective, predictive, falsifiable, consilient with the evidence, it becomes generally persuasive, for the very reasons that it is built with those features. So, in the absence of Darwin’s dangerous idea, the is a “knowledge void”, and this is where religion flourishes, in the absence of real knowledge. As real knowledge advances, religion has to retreat, as it has the overwhelming advantage over science in the absence of knowledge – it thrives where ignorance prevails – but similarly cannot compete (creationist and young earth-like intransigence notwithstanding) where science has staked out solid answers.

Again, please show me how this result logically follows. I can very much understand if you mean this is an emotional conclusion. But I fail to see any reasoning behind what you are saying.

Religion does not flourish in the absence of knowledge either. It might in some individuals in the sense science seems to flourish in your mind due to erroneous reasoning. But in actuality, Science and Religion flourish in their own right.

So, where several centuries ago the belief that “God made all the species in one day” and “fashioned them specially, species by species”, etc. was acceptable, where our knowledge vacuum on that question made religious imaginations hard to resist, now, religion retreats, and relegates its superstitious answers to areas behind the perimeter of scientific knowledge (like how abiogenesis happened). Science slowly, carefully grinds out real knowledge, and religion has to change its story to accomodate that, and/or retreat to remaining areas of ignorance (and there are many, so religion has plenty of refuge yet) in which to sell its imaginations.

? I fail to see how God can’t have fashioned creatures and how ‘one day’ is merely a literary device used by the author.

On a serious note though, I can see another logical error in your reasoning. You seem to believe that Science explaining abiogenesis for an example leads to the conclusion that there is no God. God could just well have used such methodology. So the truth about religion does not hinge on there being no scientific explanations.

Which is to say we claim to know what we do not know in any intersubjective, accountable or falsifiable way. I might as well say “Pink Floyd is the best”, and suppose that is self-evident. And in fact, it is self-evident!

Bingo, I have arrive at an religious absolute, no? Or is Pink Floyd’s “bestness” really not self-evident to me?

Thats funny in a lot of levels But jokes aside, I am a little puzzled at how you are equating self-evident truths with propositions such as ‘Pink Floyd is the best’.

“Self-evident” is the go-to tool in deceiving the self. There is a persistent (and convenient) level of confusion and evasion on the qualifications of “self-evident”, but any chasing of that would be pretty deep digression, here.

Forget about the chasing. Do you or do you not understand that the non-existence of a methodology to verify non-scientific truths does not lead to the logical conclusion that they are irrelevant? Because quiet honestly I am not concerned about anything else here.

Those truths may exist as truths. But affirming that, over and over, doesn’t help me (or you) a bit. Because a truth that exists as a truth, which we CANNOT IDENTIFY as a truth is, in practice, as a matter of epistemology, not a truth. It may just as well be falsehood that we mistake for a truth, or simply desire to be truth.

That is not really true. All epistemological systems start with somethings as ‘obvious’/self-evident. Those things are not scientific truths. It would be circular to claim they are. You are really not making sense here.

God Bless

 

[Touchstone]

Every statement can be said as a combination of negations and the word “or” and vice versa. So conditional statements can be made from this, that talk about God. But every conditional is “falsifiable” since by its nature as a statement P–>Q is false when Q is false. But by the same token it is true when P is true. So if someone were to say If God exists then creation exists and he knows that God exists, observations that seem to imply that He doesn’t exist are not to be accepted. The point is, anything you say can be falsified, but as long as you know the antecedent then the consequent follows.

You are not grasping the concept of falsification, here. You are thinking about negation, which is not at all the same concept. Falsification is the finding of incompatibility of a proposition and the entailed consequences of that proposition, as determined empirically.

The feedback systems of the extramental world – your senses and experience that comes from outside your mind – are the normative element for falsification. If I believe that heavier objects fall faster in a vacuum under the pull of gravity, that is trivial to negate as a proposition, dialectically. But falsification is something different, entirely. Falsification occurs when the proposition is put to empirical testing.

When you run the tests, and see that a bowling ball falls at the same rate as a feather in a vacuum, and all the other test permutations of the test come back as inconsistent with ‘heavier objects fall faster in a vacuum’, then you have falsification. The empirical tests are determinative, not your syllogism. The real world has the final say.

Just as a rule of thumb, if you can’t imagine a real world test that you could run, or some set of observed conditions in the extramental world that would discredit your proposition, even in principle, you are dealing in unfalsifiable propositions, propositions that are “not even wrong”.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

This is really not relevant here is it?

It’s crucial. Science has no warrant, and needs none for its program. It just assumes, provisionally, (‘just because we wanna!’) that nature is science-ready, model-amenable. We don’t need to or care to justifying the metaphysics up front (and can’t anyway), so we simply look to see what the results produce, and judge from that.

It’s that loop, the validation loop and the feedback it produces, that makes it “anti-religion”, or epistemically antithetical to religious belief. The “assume provisionally, but require falsification and validation on the back end” architecture makes science fundamentally opposed to the religious belief heuristic. The scientist can be religious, but these are fundamentally different and opposed heuristics that the religious scientist maintains separately.

Once again, I understand what ‘PREDICATE’ means. But I fail to see how what you say is a ‘metaphysical predicate’ i.e. Scientific success leaves religion impotent.

Pre-Darwinist accounts of species development, proferred by religionists or others, just don’t cut it, just don’t hold up under examination. The scientific knowledge gained since Darwin makes “species formed on the Fourth Day (as a 24-hour day)” childish, ignorant, incorrigible. Not all Christians remain incorrigible that way (although even here at CAF, a Catholic forum, where it’s OK to accept science as science, many Catholics can’t bring themselves to abandon their superstitions and conceits on this issue), but Christianity yields, and accomodates at that point. It is impotent against performative science, and must make peace with it, else one fall into “flat-earth”/YEC-like denialism and intransigence. Christianity can’t outsay science on science’s ground, where it performs. So it “goes along to get along”, amending things as necessary along the way.

Scientific success only requires that the Material Universe is intelligible in Scientific terms. But it does not logically follow that religion is impotent as you said. Do you understand what I am saying?

I follow, but any “potency” you would be offering there seems to be either a) handwaving (i.e. "trust me, it’s potent in these other ways! Really!), or b) just a subjective exercise. Potent as a way to fill in the blanks for you in terms of the “deep questions” where knowledge is not available according to your intuitions and preferences.

I won’t quibble the semantics, there. If b) is “potent” to you, have at it.

Again, please show me how this result logically follows. I can very much understand if you mean this is an emotional conclusion. But I fail to see any reasoning behind what you are saying.

I keep reading back to see if you are responding to the post of mine I think you are. There’s nothing implicated as emotion here. Maybe this will help capture the sequence.

A. If nature is amenable to building models (i.e. intelligible somewhat), then we should expect to make some progress in building performative models in our scientific efforts.
B. We observe significant success in building performative models for the natural world.
Ergo: Nature is intelligible somewhat.

Note, here, that this puts “intelligible” as the conclusion, not an a priori premise. We only engage it provisionally in A).

What part of this syllogism are you having a problem with?

Religion does not flourish in the absence of knowledge either. It might in some individuals in the sense science seems to flourish in your mind due to erroneous reasoning. But in actuality, Science and Religion flourish in their own right.

I don’t know that that means, ‘flourish in their own right’. If you look at aboriiginal tribes, for example, as the “modernize”, they gradually abandon the superstitious explanations and stories that have sufficed traditionally in the absence of scientific knowledge. Ancients used to “pray for rain”, or worse, sacrifice animals or human beings to appease the gods as a means of securing the rain they needed for their crops to flourish. This religious practice becomes obsolete as the real knowledge of climate and meteorological dynamics gets socialized and digested as a more effective and economical answer – the tribal chief who really really wants his crops to flourish will pay attention to climate and weather knowledge as more effective in anticipating and managing the growing season and its activities.

Appeasing the rain gods succeeded as the “belief of choice” prior to that. It succeeded as a religious conjecture in the absence of knowledge, exploiting a “zone of ignorance” for the community. As science advances and its knowledge gets disseminated, religious answers like that become archaic, quaint. They don’t flourish in the presents of real, natural knowledge. People still pray for rain, but that’s “cost free”, compared to the heavy costs of prior commitments like human sacrifice. That’s not ascendant or persistent practice, and in fact a nearly eradicated one, from what I understand.

? I fail to see how God can’t have fashioned creatures and how ‘one day’ is merely a literary device used by the author.

He could have! If God exists in the way Catholics typically imagine him, that is a distinct possibility.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

ddarko:

On a serious note though, I can see another logical error in your reasoning. You seem to believe that Science explaining abiogenesis for an example leads to the conclusion that there is no God. God could just well have used such methodology. So the truth about religion does not hinge on there being no scientific explanations.

No, see my error to another poster upthread (to… “Collegestinks”??). Neither the goal nor the effect of this is to disprove the existence of God. Can’t be done, no how. Instead, God just becomes increasingly irrelevant to the question at hand. Superfluous. Extraneous. It converges over time to the point which understands that God’s existence doesn’t even matter anymore.

(This is what Nietzsche meant by “God is dead”, by the way. It wasn’t a denial of God’s existence at all, but rather the realization that God has ceased to be an operative principle for organizing society, or organizing one’s thinking about the world.)

Thats funny in a lot of levels But jokes aside, I am a little puzzled at how you are equating self-evident truths with propositions such as ‘Pink Floyd is the best’.

We can flesh this out (although I may have to queue it, here, as I have yet one ‘unfinished thread’ to attend here as soon as I get time and stop goofing off on this one) for your particular claim, but my experience is that Christians (including myself as a Christian) were quite self-serving and ad-hoc in deciding what they considered “self-evident”. Or to put it bluntly, I suspect what you suppose is “self-evident” is really “self-deceptive”.

Forget about the chasing. Do you or do you not understand that the non-existence of a methodology to verify non-scientific truths does not lead to the logical conclusion that they are irrelevant? Because quiet honestly I am not concerned about anything else here.

“Relevant” isn’t well defined here. Or perhaps better to say, that is the point where we must part ways into subjective preference. It may be “highly relevant”, given your values, the questions about origins or God’s existence or any number of other propositions which are inscrutable and intractable as intersubjective knowledge. You have nothing to go on but your self-satisified intuitions, but that is sufficient – nay, perhaps primary for you.

The question that perhaps advances this is: relevant with respect to what?

That is not really true. All epistemological systems start with somethings as ‘obvious’/self-evident. Those things are not scientific truths. It would be circular to claim they are. You are really not making sense here.

God Bless

Self-evidence is established by impossibility or absurdity of its absence. Self-evidence is warrant when and because it cannot be otherwise. That turns out to be a very high bar to clear, and good that is, because it is a “loophole”, epistemically, a means by which we admit premises without test/warrant/support. That’s why it’s such a dear resource for the credulous, because it does beat the system, does exploit an epistemic loophole if you can pass off your non-necessity as a necessity.

Using the adjective ‘obvious’ is a kind of tip that this problem is actively at work in my experience. But that may well be something to hold off pursuing until it has its own thread.

-TS

 

[Al_Moritz]

and now must confine itself to live in the “God of the gaps” spaces of ignorance around abiogenesis and points prior.

No, recent research in the last decade has made an origin of life by natural causes (abiogenesis) highly probable, see my article on the leading evolution website Talkorigins.org:

talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/originoflife.html

In my opinion the question will be decisively settled by science within 20 to 30 years from now.

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.

Really, is that so? Evolution has rendered God unnecessary? No that’s an interesting notion!

On the contrary: while evolution explains the origin of species, evolution is only possible in the first place because the laws of nature that allow for it to occur are so exceedingly special. The fine-tuning argument for the laws of nature completely and utterly destroys the argument from evolution in favor of atheism. With it, scientific findings have put God very much on the forefront again. Not that God is a scientific proposition (neither is atheism), but theistic philosophy has been enlightened by scientific findings very much indeed.

The fine-tuning argument is one of several lines of evidence that render atheism completely impotent and unacceptable for me. All naturalistic arguments against it fail, see my article:

home.earthlink.net/~almoritz/cosmological-arguments-god.htm

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?”

And that question is as burning now as ever.

 

[fakename]

You are not grasping the concept of falsification, here. You are thinking about negation, which is not at all the same concept. Falsification is the finding of incompatibility of a proposition and the entailed consequences of that proposition, as determined empirically.

The feedback systems of the extramental world – your senses and experience that comes from outside your mind – are the normative element for falsification. If I believe that heavier objects fall faster in a vacuum under the pull of gravity, that is trivial to negate as a proposition, dialectically. But falsification is something different, entirely. Falsification occurs when the proposition is put to empirical testing.

When you run the tests, and see that a bowling ball falls at the same rate as a feather in a vacuum, and all the other test permutations of the test come back as inconsistent with ‘heavier objects fall faster in a vacuum’, then you have falsification. The empirical tests are determinative, not your syllogism. The real world has the final say.

Just as a rule of thumb, if you can’t imagine a real world test that you could run, or some set of observed conditions in the extramental world that would discredit your proposition, even in principle, you are dealing in unfalsifiable propositions, propositions that are “not even wrong”.

-TS

I never thought that I would say this, but I suppose I must be in favor of falsification even in Theological realms. I do think that if you had some sort of God’s-eye-view you would be able to falsify His existence depending on what you mean by God’s existence. But the point is, I do not think that one could object that if you had a God’s eye view that you wouldn’t be able to perform such a test -if you see all and know all (except the proposition being tested) then you can just look at all evidence and come to a conclusion and there would be a limit to problems that necessitate the scientific method’s different procedures.

 

[Windfish]

Then you don’t need faith. I’m always amazed at how quickly and efficiently Christians will rush in like this and destroy their own paragraph, right in that very paragraph. You have an undeniable case for your faith. Think about that for 30 seconds, please.

You misunderstand what we mean by “faith.” It is not belief without evidence (or, as Dawkins would have you believe, in spite of evidence). That has never been the definition. Faith is believing what God has revealed because he is God, who can neither deceive nor be deceived. This is, more or less, the infallible definition of the First Vatican Council, and it presupposes 1) that the existence of God can be known through reason with certainty and 2) the fact of revelation. Our tradition makes the claim that we do not have to make a blind leap to believe that God exists or that he is revealed through the Catholic Church. These are things that can be known. That God exists or that he is love or not subjective value judgments. And even if we grant that all of this is unfalsifiable, which we do not, so what? Falsifiability fails its own test, positivism is DEAD, Touchstone. Get with the times.

 

[Touchstone]

No, recent research in the last decade has made an origin of life by natural causes (abiogenesis) highly probable, see my article on the leading evolution website Talkorigins.org:

talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/originoflife.html

In my opinion the question will be decisively settled by science within 20 to 30 years from now.

It does appear to be a just a matter of time. But not being one to count my eggs before they hatch, I think we can say that for now, the mechanism or pathways of abiogenesis remain a mystery. I certainly don’t have the empirical evidence and attending model that would convince a reasonable but otherwise-inclined person that it happened this way, as a particular specific mechanism.

And maybe the best we can hope for are demonstrably capable pathways, and we’ll never know which particular one (or ones) were the actual historic pathways that led from non-life to metabolizing, self-reproducing organisms. That would certainly push the creationist narrative back some more.

Really, is that so? Evolution has rendered God unnecessary? No that’s an interesting notion!

I was speaking on the issue of species development. God’s miraculous and direct intervention used to a popular and competitive answer, centuries ago. Now, as Laplace would say “We have no need of that hypothesis”. That’s where I pointed back to abiogenesis, which we are discussing just above, here. On abiogenesis, “Goddidit” is still competitive, as our scientific knowledge is still lacking on the basics and particulars. In other areas, areas where natural knowledge is till absent, God as an answer does quite well, and matters in that sense. He’s a player in that area.

On the contrary: while evolution explains the origin of species, evolution is only possible in the first place because the laws of nature that allow for it to occur are so exceedingly special.

Right, I am well familiar with that narrative, of course, being a theistic evolutionist for more than a decade myself. I won’t go into all the facets of the anthropic principle, and fine tuning, etc. here, but will just note that your perimeter is collapsed significantly from the narrative, of say, 200 years ago. Now, God’s not the direct agent in species formation, but the indirect agent, through some prior and front-loaded design. Science has pushed the miracle story further and further back. When abiogenesis emerges as a model with compelling empirical pathways, the “theistic origin of life” will have to recede (in terms of its supernatural appeals" up even higher into the mountains, back into the cosmological parameters and pre-biotic physics “configuration”.

The fine-tuning argument for the laws of nature completely and utterly destroys the argument from evolution in favor of atheism.

Wince. Ouch. You were doing fine til here, and you went right off the rails. I suppose that’s a different thread, but if you are familiar enough with TalkOrigins to be a contributor, it’s hard to believe you aren’t familiar with the contemporary science and philosophy which makes “utterly destroys” dissonant at a kind of Ken Ham level.

With it, scientific findings have put God very much on the forefront again. Not that God is a scientific proposition (neither is atheism), but theistic philosophy has been enlightened by scientific findings very much indeed.

I’m sure it has, and would toward that it be more thoroughly enlightened. I think the disagreement is over whether things work the other way – where has science retreated in light of the overpowering demonstrations of religion, for example? Where does it retreat from what it claims as knowledge, or used to claim as knowledge, having been bested by the objective performance of religion?

Maybe there are some examples, none come to mind at the moment. It seems to be a ratchet, with since going one way, and not the other, something like entropy never decreasing for the system as a whole, but instead knowledge increasing as whole (and maybe that’s not even apt, as in thermodynamics, overall increases in entropy are not jeopardized by local accumulations of structured energy).

The fine-tuning argument is one of several lines of evidence that render atheism completely impotent and unacceptable for me. All naturalistic arguments against it fail, see my article:

home.earthlink.net/~almoritz/cosmological-arguments-god.htm

Well, I’ll have a look. That’s got all the earmarks of the exuberant overreach that WAY WAY gets ahead of itself and fails to earn and maintain serious attention, though. It’s kind of Ken-Ham-triumphant in your presentation here, and that doesn’t bode well.

But I’ll go read it and judge it on what’s there.

And that question is as burning now as ever.

But it’s not, on the question of the formation of the species, which is what we were talking about above. The “burning” part has been pushed back, way way back, because the miracle-mystery-God factor has been made obsolete. That question is no longer a burning one as it was for centuries and longer, prior.

-TS

 

[tonyrey]

You misunderstand what we mean by “faith.” It is not belief without evidence (or, as Dawkins would have you believe, in spite of evidence). That has never been the definition. Faith is believing what God has revealed because he is God, who can neither deceive nor be deceived. This is, more or less, the infallible definition of the First Vatican Council, and it presupposes 1) that the existence of God can be known through reason with certainty and 2) the fact of revelation. Our tradition makes the claim that we do not have to make a blind leap to believe that God exists or that he is revealed through the Catholic Church. These are things that can be known. That God exists or that he is love or not subjective value judgments. And even if we grant that all of this is unfalsifiable, which we do not, so what? Falsifiability fails its own test, positivism is DEAD, Touchstone. Get with the times.

Indeed! The demise of logical positivism was due to the realisation that:

1. The verification principle cannot be verified by observation.
2. All our knowledge is based on our intangible thoughts, emotions, feelings, decisions and perceptions.

 

[ddarko]

No, see my error to another poster upthread (to… “Collegestinks”??). Neither the goal nor the effect of this is to disprove the existence of God. Can’t be done, no how. Instead, God just becomes increasingly irrelevant to the question at hand. Superfluous. Extraneous. It converges over time to the point which understands that God’s existence doesn’t even matter anymore.

This is exactly what I keep asking you to show but you just give me sentences with different adjectives every time. That is hardly a logical argument. Please show how you go from “Science is doing great” to “God is irrelevant”.

If you cannot do so, then it seems like you are being emotional in this matter. Am I right?

(This is what Nietzsche meant by “God is dead”, by the way. It wasn’t a denial of God’s existence at all, but rather the realization that God has ceased to be an operative principle for organizing society, or organizing one’s thinking about the world.)

To the contrary, Nietzsche had great trouble reconciling morality with the absence of God. But again, I don’t know why you bring up these things because none of them show the conclusion of which you said.

We can flesh this out (although I may have to queue it, here, as I have yet one ‘unfinished thread’ to attend here as soon as I get time and stop goofing off on this one) for your particular claim, but my experience is that Christians (including myself as a Christian) were quite self-serving and ad-hoc in deciding what they considered “self-evident”. Or to put it bluntly, I suspect what you suppose is “self-evident” is really “self-deceptive”.

Um… this is not about my claim. I have made no claim and in fact this whole discussion is me attacking your claim that “Science is doing great” logically leads to “God is irrelevant now”. I think it might be better if you ‘stop goofing off’ on this one because you don’t seem to be sure what you are doing.

“Relevant” isn’t well defined here. Or perhaps better to say, that is the point where we must part ways into subjective preference. It may be “highly relevant”, given your values, the questions about origins or God’s existence or any number of other propositions which are inscrutable and intractable as intersubjective knowledge. You have nothing to go on but your self-satisified intuitions, but that is sufficient – nay, perhaps primary for you.

Listen, we don’t have to part ways. It’s a very simple argument here that you are making overly complicated. Just show me how “Science is doing great” logically leads to “God/Religion is irrelevant”. I noticed you write a lot along tangential issues in your replies. Lets just concentrate on one thing and it will save you some time too.

Self-evidence is established by impossibility or absurdity of its absence. Self-evidence is warrant when and because it cannot be otherwise. That turns out to be a very high bar to clear, and good that is, because it is a “loophole”, epistemically, a means by which we admit premises without test/warrant/support. That’s why it’s such a dear resource for the credulous, because it does beat the system, does exploit an epistemic loophole if you can pass off your non-necessity as a necessity.

Ok first, I am not passing off anything here. I am attacking your position that ‘‘Scientific success means God/religion is now irrelevant’’.

You say ‘Self-evidence is established by impossibility or absurdity of its absence’ but you first have to define absurdity in order to do that. Are you trying to say what is absurd is proven by absurdity as well? That’s circular reasoning.

Even if we grant your definition of self-evident truths, it just proves that we have set of truths that are ESSENTIAL for any knowledge YET are non-Scientific truths which are very much RELEVANT for Science it-self.

So I don’t think you are paying attention to your own arguments here. I don’t appreciate that. If you have multiple threads you partake in and cannot multi-thread, take your time to reply rather than give me something for really fast for the sake of “goofing off”.

God Bless

 

[Touchstone]

You misunderstand what we mean by “faith.” It is not belief without evidence (or, as Dawkins would have you believe, in spite of evidence). That has never been the definition. Faith is believing what God has revealed because he is God, who can neither deceive nor be deceived. This is, more or less, the infallible definition of the First Vatican Council, and it presupposes 1) that the existence of God can be known through reason with certainty and 2) the fact of revelation.

Yes, but there is where deniability obtains. If you have not the revelation – as manifestly multitudes do not, the reason is inadequate. That is why you (er, the Vatican) has to supply 2). On it its own, reason won’t get you there, and God is eminently deniable, reasonably rejected as a matter of intersubjective analysis. Your private claims of revelation don’t help the person who has no such private experience; if they were reckless enough just to accept their claim, they’d be Mormon or a Jehovah’s Witness or a Raelian or a Scientologist if on those representatives got to them first.

You are stuck precisely where you were, and private revelation claims won’t help, won’t attenuate the deniability of the God belief at all for people who have no such private experience.

Our tradition makes the claim that we do not have to make a blind leap to believe that God exists or that he is revealed through the Catholic Church. These are things that can be known.

But, by your own words above they can only be known in ways that are perfectly deniably, where a reasonable person without such a private revelation has every warrant that could be needed for denying the belief. Your personal superstitions are not a defeater for me, and do not make anyone who does not share those superstitious any less grounded in denying your claims.

That God exists or that he is love or not subjective value judgments. And even if we grant that all of this is unfalsifiable, which we do not, so what? Falsifiability fails its own test, positivism is DEAD, Touchstone. Get with the times.

You are confusing falsification with positivism and/or verificationism. It’s neither, and not contingent or depend on the dynamics of either of those. I addressed this above in some detail, if you read back a few posts.

I think your apologetics tracts are behind the times, as it happens. I’m not a positivist, nor a verificationist, nor have I invoked or relied on them here. Falsification is an eliminative epistemic process, and, as I said above, does very well when you apply its principles to its own claims. I suggest googling a bit and reading up on falsifcation. If the sources you have are conflating falsification with verificationalist frameworks, you need better sources.

-TS

 

[warpspeedpetey]

Then you don’t need faith…

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1) You are mistaking the theological virtue of faith, for some sort of belief in the unjustified. We are required to have the theological virtue, not to believe without reason.

… Is the falsifiability principle of science itself falsifiable?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-refuting_idea#Verification-_and_falsification-principles Verification- and falsification-principles
The statements “statements are meaningless unless they can be empirically verified” and “statements are meaningless unless they can be empirically falsified” are both claimed to be self-refuting on the basis that they can neither be empirically verified nor falsified.

…Science succeeds…

We aren’t practicing science. In fact one can only practice the scientific method empirically by definition.

 

[Touchstone]

I never thought that I would say this, but I suppose I must be in favor of falsification even in Theological realms. I do think that if you had some sort of God’s-eye-view you would be able to falsify His existence depending on what you mean by God’s existence. But the point is, I do not think that one could object that if you had a God’s eye view that you wouldn’t be able to perform such a test -if you see all and know all (except the proposition being tested) then you can just look at all evidence and come to a conclusion and there would be a limit to problems that necessitate the scientific method’s different procedures.

Heh. That puts an interesting twist on the problem, because as you have it, in order to achieve falsifiability, you would have to BECOME the very thing you are trying to falsify, or “enable falsification of”.

Or, only by becoming God could you acquire the powers necessary to determine there is no God.

That’s pretty nice as one of those “strange loop” self-referential and self-interfering arguments. And as far as it goes, I grant that you are right. But that is my point, that for us – non-god humans – it remains perfectly unfalsifiable as a proposition. I can’t think of a more firm granting of this that saying “One would have to become a god to determine…”. We don’t and can’t have a “god’s-eye view”, and that puts paid to the notion of falsifiability.

-TS

 

[ddarko]

You are stuck precisely where you were, and private revelation claims won’t help, won’t attenuate the deniability of the God belief at all for people who have no such private experience.

With all due respect, I think you might have missed his point in your rash fit to reply again.

The existence of God is not merely an article of faith. It can be attained through reason. And I mean from real reason and not any use of adjectives.

But we cannot attain any logical certainty through reason on God’s promises. Therefore our belief in God’s promises and revelation IS indeed religious FAITH.

Please don’t confuse the two.

God Bless

 

[Windfish]

You are stuck precisely where you were, and private revelation claims won’t help, won’t attenuate the deniability of the God belief at all for people who have no such private experience.

I am not talking about private experiences - you are reading that into 2).

But, by your own words above they can only be known in ways that are perfectly deniably, where a reasonable person without such a private revelation has every warrant that could be needed for denying the belief. Your personal superstitions are not a defeater for me, and do not make anyone who does not share those superstitious any less grounded in denying your claims.

Again, no one is talking about private religious experience. When we move from the existence of God to the fact of revelation, we move from natural theology to history. Using historical methods, we can judge if God is acting in history through miracles.

I think your apologetics tracts are behind the times, as it happens. I’m not a positivist, nor a verificationist, nor have I invoked or relied on them here. Falsification is an eliminative epistemic process, and, as I said above, does very well when you apply its principles to its own claims. I suggest googling a bit and reading up on falsifcation. If the sources you have are conflating falsification with verificationalist frameworks, you need better sources.

-TS

What you are suggesting, that knowledge is only knowledge if it can be falsified, is positivism. Self-refuting, and you did not address that when warpspeedey brought it up.

 

[ddarko]

Falsifiability fails its own test, positivism is DEAD, Touchstone. Get with the times.

God Bless