Skeptic Michael Shermer: Skepticism shaken to its core

  • Thread starter Thread starter PRmerger
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
tonyrey said:
You have not explained how we have the power to choose if we are biological computers. Are computers responsible for what they do?
Click to expand...
If you don’t understand how the process works, or worse still, if you have a problem with it, then take it up with God. He designed it.
 
Bradski said:
If you don’t understand how the process works, or worse still, if you have a problem with it, then take it up with God. He designed it.
Click to expand...
Right on. It is tony’s standard “question” to avoid answers. Next to demanding a detailed “blueprint” on how to design a world without evil. I tried to explain him several times, but he still does not get it. Your approach is better. 🙂
 
Bradski said:
If you don’t understand how the process works, or worse still, if you have a problem with it, then take it up with God. He designed it.
Click to expand...
If you don’t understand how the process works, or worse still, if you have a problem with it don’t claim it has a **physical **explanation. (Your argument is a two-edged sword… 😉
 
Pallas_Athene said:
Right on. It is tony’s standard “question” to avoid answers. Next to demanding a detailed “blueprint” on how to design a world without evil. I tried to explain him several times, but he still does not get it. Your approach is better. 🙂
Click to expand...
Pallas’s favourite trick is to evade a request for an explanation by an appeal to obscurity:
"Only to those who not comprehend the significance of it. But I will not explain it. I had enough of this.
Click to expand...
I wonder who belong to the enlightened few!:bowdown:
 
tonyrey said:
All negative beliefs have positive implications. If you don’t believe in God you live as if there is no God. As Sartre pointed out, in life you can’t sit on the fence. Even doing nothing is a form of commitment.
Click to expand...
Well said. A negative belief is the opposite of a positive belief, but both are beliefs.

Perhaps this is why, strange as it seems, if religion is to be defined as a conviction based upon belief rather than demonstration, the American courts have defined atheism as a religion rather than a philosophy, and have ruled to protect this odd religion by allowing prisons to set up atheist ministries for atheist inmates. 🤷

wnd.com/2005/08/31895/
 
Charlemagne_III said:
Well said. A negative belief is the opposite of a positive belief, but both are beliefs.

Perhaps this is why, strange as it seems, if religion is to be defined as a conviction based upon belief rather than demonstration, the American courts have defined atheism as a religion rather than a philosophy, and have ruled to protect this odd religion by allowing prisons to set up atheist ministries for atheist inmates. 🤷

wnd.com/2005/08/31895/
Click to expand...
Wonders never cease! Still it has its advantages. Why should atheists get away with pretending they have no faith and do not proselytize? Dawkins is filled with evangelical zeal in his hatred of religion and even non-believers have criticised him for degrading his academic status.
 
tonyrey said:
Wonders never cease! Still it has its advantages. Why should atheists get away with pretending they have no faith and do not proselytize? Dawkins is filled with evangelical zeal in his hatred of religion and even non-believers have criticised him for degrading his academic status.
Click to expand...
Sounds like you are specifically talking about activist.
non-activist may be a little harder to pick out of a crowd.
 
ThinkingSapien said:
Wonders never cease! Still it has its advantages. Why should atheists get away with pretending they have no faith and do not proselytize? Dawkins is filled with evangelical zeal in his hatred of religion and even non-believers have criticised him for degrading his academic status.
Click to expand...
I’m sure Dawkins stands out from the crowd!
**Is Richard Dawkins destroying his reputation? ** The scientist and bestselling writer has become the face of a new crusading atheism. But even his closest allies worry that his online provocations do more harm than good.
Click to expand...
Over the years, Dawkins, a zoologist by training, has expressed admiration for Darwin in the way a schoolboy might worship a sporting giant. In his first memoir, Dawkins noted the “serendipitous realisation” that his full name – Clinton Richard Dawkins – shared the same initials as Charles Robert Darwin. He owns a prized first edition of On The Origin of Species, which he can quote from memory. For Dawkins, the book is totemic, the founding text of his career. “It’s such a thorough, unanswerable case,” he said one afternoon. “[Darwin] called it one long argument.” As a description of Dawkins’s own life, particularly its late phase, “one long argument” serves fairly well. As the global face of atheism over the last decade, Dawkins has ratcheted up the rhetoric in his self-declared war against religion. He is the general who chooses to fight on the front line – whose scorched-earth tactics have won him fervent admirers, and ferocious enemies. What is less clear, however, is whether he is winning.
Click to expand...
theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/09/is-richard-dawkins-destroying-his-reputation
Click to expand...
 
tonyrey said:
I’m sure Dawkins stands out from the crowd!

theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/09/is-richard-dawkins-destroying-his-reputation
Click to expand...
Dawkins is also a self identified atheist activist. Activist tend to be more expressive and active about the intention of changing the views and behaviors of others. Given a group of people that identify as atheist if you also know that specific people within the group also identify as atheist activist and had to make a guess on which ones might be more proactive about spreading their views go with the ones that identify as “activist.” This same expectation may be applicable to other labels (ex: a gay woman and a gay rights activist, an environmentalist and an environmentalist activist, so on…).

Not every one that takes a certain stance on an issue is an activist. Of those that are there can be many ways to go about engaging others on the issue. In acting on their activism there are people that chain themselves to trees and structures, people that hand out flyers, people that write their representatives, and people that have one-on-one conversations.
 
ThinkingSapien said:
Dawkins is also a self identified atheist activist. Activist tend to be more expressive and active about the intention of changing the views and behaviors of others. Given a group of people that identify as atheist if you also know that specific people within the group also identify as atheist activist and had to make a guess on which ones might be more proactive about spreading their views go with the ones that identify as “activist.” This same expectation may be applicable to other labels (ex: a gay woman and a gay rights activist, an environmentalist and an environmentalist activist, so on…).

Not every one that takes a certain stance on an issue is an activist. Of those that are there can be many ways to go about engaging others on the issue. In acting on their activism there are people that chain themselves to trees and structures, people that hand out flyers, people that write their representatives, and people that have one-on-one conversations.
Click to expand...
I agree. Many members of this forum, including myself, are activists but hopefully not aggressive unless faced with aggression. Sarcasm needs a generous response because not sharing our medicine is miserly. 😉
 
PRmerger said:
Er, no. Neither of those sites have anything where Dawkins self identifies as an atheist activist.

Sources for that, please!
Click to expand...
I can’t say how much he self-reflects, since it isn’t included as part of the scientific method that he sees as the the giver of light. So, that sort of information may be hard to get. I infer it from his behaviour. Self-reflection by proxy.
 
Aloysium said:
I can’t say how much he self-reflects, since it isn’t included as part of the scientific method that he sees as the the giver of light. So, that sort of information may be hard to get. I infer it from his behaviour. Self-reflection by proxy.
Click to expand...
Well, I do like being the atheist to atheists…🙂

…and if an atheist says that Dawkins has self-identified as an atheist activist, I’d like to use their criteria: something that is written in his pen that declares himself to be an atheist activist.
 
PRmerger said:
Don’t you think that Shermer, as a scientist and a skeptic, ought to have the exact OPPOSITE reaction that he has to this, which is, “Let’s embrace the mystery.”

There is absolutely no other phenomena, when scrutinized by a scientist, in which this woud be acceptable.

No scientist looked at electricity and thought, “I don’t really know how it works. And, frankly, I’m fine with enjoying the results of electricity without having to examine it microscopically.”

No scientist looks at leprosy and thinks, “It just happens. Why do we need to know how it is caused?”

But for some mysterious reason, this mystery is ok to not investigate…by a person whose raison d’etre is to investigate mysteries.
Click to expand...
Shermer’s not a scientist, never has been. He’s a science historian.
 
tonyrey said:
You have not explained how we have the power to choose if we are biological computers. Are computers responsible for what they do?
Click to expand...
Unsurprisingly there has been no response to this question from any of those who believe the mind is simply the activity of the brain. It suggests they may not be responsible for what they do, but why should they be exceptional in that respect? 😉
 
tonyrey said:
Unsurprisingly there has been no response to this question from any of those who believe the mind is simply the activity of the brain. It suggests they may not be responsible for what they do, but why should they be exceptional in that respect? 😉
Click to expand...
Not identifying myself as part of that group,
but wanting to exercise my mind and
in the process reinforce and build up my neural connections,
I thought I’d try to put together some thoughts on the matter of matter.

Who is thinking, is the person. He/she utilizes his brain in doing so.

I’m a fan of seeing all this as a unity, which can be understood in accordiance to different structural frameworks:
On the one hand, we have what is currently described as matter: electrons, protons, atoms, molecules, proteins, nucleic acids, mitochondria, cellular membranes, cells, organs, organisms, species, life, the universe.
On the other, sensations, feelings, thoughts, memories, desires, relationships, families, societies, politics, economics, entertainment, humanity.
I ran out of hands, but we also have our very being and its connection to all else that is and the Source of all that is. Associated with this realm are the manifestations of this relational reality - truth, wisdom, knowledge, the appreciation of beauty and goodness.

For some reason there are people who cannot seem to get beyond a particular framework - everything is translated into that metaphor. But, to say that all there is, is physical activity is equally bizarre to suggesting that this is all mystical illusion.

If we choose to focus our attention to these words, we may wish to contemplate their physical reality:
  • as pixels,
  • as photons travelling though the space between the monitor and the eye,
  • as chemical reactions occurring within the rods and cones of the retina,
  • and those neurons which interconnect in the retina
  • bringing about the basic signal that travels down the optic cord
  • onward to the thalamus and other brain centres,
  • to the the occiput where visual perceptions are processed as such,
  • and temporal areas where words “exist” ( for want of a better way to describe it)
  • including all the prefrontal and other attentional areas of the brain that are involved.
    All this and more is what is happening physically within the experience that we are having.
Note however, the untiy of the experience.

The object of our intellect/attention can be directed by the will,
to this element and that,
by one’s choosing,
and, as it has been through the partial surrender of that choice to my direction,
by these words.

This free-flowing attention/being can focus in on itself or be vaguely dispersed, unaware as in deep sleep.
It is who one is at the surface and in one’s depths,
having no dimensions, temporal or spatial.
It just is, and contains all there is within the length and breadth of one’s existence.
And, Who contains me? From Whom do I spring in every moment, self-aware or otherwise?

This post is way too long. For those who stuck through it, I hope the trip wasn’t a waste of time, which is in short supply. One might wish to make the best use of it. That is if it is going somewhere, achieving something and not swallowed in oblivion.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top