Thank you for sharing that–it helps to hear the experience of another person.*
Thank you. It is my prayer that my faith will eventually chip away at his disbelief. It’s a tall order though–the father/daughter relationship
I am happy to share, however, I am wondering what the best way is to do this? I don’t want to break a forum rule. (Nor do I want to get flak or flames from those who will not believe what happened to me.) Would PM be the best way?
ive raised a little girl for before. it the most important and emotionally powerful relationship that a man has aside from his wife, is with his daughter. never under estimate what your love can do for him.
sure, you can PM me if you like.
Could you elaborate? What would be “sufficient” evidence?
I’d be interested to hear your conversion too, if you’d be willing to share with me as well. Thanks.
Please understand that those are two entirely different questions.
you have the same collection of witness statements in the various books of the Bible that we have. it is sufficient for us, and we are just as astute as you.
Huh. I get a lot of grief about this from my older kids and friends who know GnR, but I think Chinese Democracy is by far the best GnR album of them all. By far. *Use Your Illusion I & II *stayed in my CD player for a long time, but I’ve been playing this one pretty heavily since it came out. Staying power, that one has.i can completely respect any reference to Axl. did you get Chinese Democracy? its way overdone, but pure Axl, he needs slash to temper his production values a little. i still like the album, i only waited 17 years for it. iwas gonna like it, if it was a static hiss.
Well, let’s apply that. How would the historicity of the resurrection be established as objective fact, or whatever it is about Christianity you were referring to as being affirmed by ‘objective analysis’? I appreciate your drawing this distinction, but I would say your words upthread suggest just this problem, the conflation of objective facts and wishful thinking. Maybe you will say Christianity is not fact but ‘objective inference’, or something like that. If so, I think the confusion still applies; there’s no objective means of affirming the basics of Christian belief, not even close, so far as I can see, and to say there is signals the very confusion you are here telling me is not a problem.
No one has said – certainly not I – that empiricism is the “only” or a “sure” measure of truth. That’s a metaphysical claim, and if there is one thing I’m consistent on in my posting in this forum, it’s that that kind of metaphysics is either meaningless or completely speculative, or both.
Metaphysics is self-indulgence, a form of self-flattery posing as high-minded thinking, for all I can see. Offering me something from a “metaphysician’s view” doesn’t do anything more than does medical advice from a “homeopath’s view” or physics from an “alchemist’s view”. It’s a discipline that has no credibility at all. We use metaphysical assumptions as needed, where needed, because we must, and that’s it. Anything beyond that is playing a fool’s game.
i like chinese democracy, but not as well as the other work. i wore out my appetite tape. i played it all day every day. i even took it prairie dog hunting with me, so if nobody popped up, it could still listen to it and plink. Guns N’ Roses is and will be the best rock band of all time.
neither, im going to tell you that the ressurection was established as an objective fact to the observers who left a number of witness statements concerning their experiences, that both predicted the Messiah, and then described it from several different peoples points of view, and then ask on what basis you reject it.
thats not a metaphysical claim, it comes from the fact that empiricism is maqueraded as an objective standard, when its really just an assumption, they dont dispel in highschool. they really should teach philosophy.
that doesnt move the ball at all, empiricism is still not empirically valid. its an assumption, where you call it the best arbiter of truth we have available, that is the bald assertion that fools some people. you have no idea if it is the best arbiter of truth, because you dont know if its true.
and yet the application of empiricism to metaphysics, is the root of all the sciences. no metaphysics, no science. funny that.
medecine comes from homeopathy, chemistry comes from alchemy, and science comes from metaphysics.
so what? you like science dont you?
according to your standard ‘empiricism’, which is not empirically verifiable. how credible is that? the emperors new clothes are quite fine
your standard, isnt actually a standard, its an assumptionn that cant cut it once we leave behind the purely physical.
empiricism is the discipline that lacks credibility, after all metaphysics stays strong while empiricism falls apart when we come to things like free will, conciousness, and other studies of being. a car mechanis skills dont impress me, a mathematicians does.
Yeah, I’ve heard a hundred decent covers of Sweet Child, but noone can play that opening riff like Slash… even Slash can’t play it like Slash anymore, actually.
Well, there’s all sorts of problems attached to event even as you describe it, but accepting, arguendo, that such a thing happened and was witness by a bunch of disciples and others, the basis for that being accepted as an objective fact has long since disappeared. Now, it’s objectively much more economical and parsimonious to understand it to be a completely non-miraculous story, based on the evidence we can verify objectively at this point. What was potentially verifiable at the time is now totally unreasonable to accept.
It is a metaphysical claim, and a very strong, ambitious one – that some heuristic is the “only sure” means of discerning truth. That is profound statement about the nature of truth, the nature of being. It doesn’t adress what is, but rather how things “is”. Metaphysics. Folly. Might as well amuse ourselves talking about “essence”.
It is valid, in that it performs. That’s the goal of the empirical enterprise, to build models which are predictive and performative against experience and observation. And in that pursuit, empricism has produced much success. If by “valid” you mean something other than “matches experience and observation” I can’t think what you would mean by it.
I can say I have no other paradigms that produce models that perform better against observation and experience. I don’t think you do, either. If you do, let me know what it is, and we can see how that model performs against the vagaries of experience and observation. There may be better models, one could not ever rule that out. But we don’t have any available. If they exist, they remain unknown to us.
That’s what predictive and explanatory power is. If you can develop a model – a set of rules and processes that can anticipate outcomes based on particular (name removed by moderator)uts, you have predictive power for sure, and explanatory power to the extent you can describe the rules and processes that comprise the model. If you can apply the mathematical construct, you necessarily have predictive and explanatory capital in that construct.
It’s a lot more than observation. Go read about Einstein and the Mercury perihelion predictions for example. Absolutely nailed it, and via “mathematical construct”. Observation is the (name removed by moderator)ut, and the validation of the output. But in the middle, a model must be constructed, a set of rules and constraints that get applied to anticipate novel outcomes.
I don’t know many empiricists who give metaphysics a second thought in this regard, nor should they, so far as I can see. Really, it’s no more serious than talking about astrology, that. Empiricism is just about building models that map (name removed by moderator)ut phenomena to output phenomena with some calculus in the middle. It turns out to be a very useful tool for understanding and navigating the world around us, but it’s out of scope, and a venture into la-la land to start talking about that as the “only sure source of truth”. It begs the question, and it’s not needed, or meaningful in any case. For the empiricist, using the correspondence theory of truth has sufficient practical utility. No metaphysical commitments beyond that are needed, or even meaningful.
The dependency works in the other direction. Science is a research program to see what quality of natural models can be built for predicting and explaining natural phenomena. No justifications or methaphysical commitments need be made up front. Science might not work, or produce any performative models. It appears to have produce a wealth of performative models, but that is the result of discovery, not something we begin with.
Yes, knowledge grows from ignorance.
I think you are getting your apologetics retorts mixed up. Empiricism cannot justify itself up front epistemically, that’s how the charge goes. But it doesn’t need to – it’s a bogus requirement, it’s a research program! After the fact, it does “self-verify” as using its own principles – observation and experience – confirms the performative qualities of models based on observation and experience!according to your standard ‘empiricism’, which is not empirically verifiable. how credible is that? the emperors new clothes are quite fine
Cut what? I do not know anything to cut, or for which “cutting it” even makes sense behind or beyond the natural.
Credibility in what respect? What ground ‘credibility’ for you? All these phrases that just seem completely empty, devoid of meaning. “Metaphysics stays strong”? What does that mean, to “stay strong” as metaphysics.
i wish that axl and slash could get past it, not that there is any hope, but they were a heck of a good team.
thats a fallacious argument from incredulity.
where do you find that claim at? that is generally the position of the empiricist. that there standard is the only one that matters. even the rest of this qoute signifies that. as to essence, what do you want to talk about? its a character of being. what makes a thing what it is. ergo, G-d whose essence is existence, is the maximal state of being. it seems difficult and strange, because you think only in empirical terms. though empericism isnt empirically verifiable, you still want to apply it to things that dont deal with empirically observable fields of study.
first, it only performs in the narrow slice of reality.
my model arent based in empiricism but rationality. observation and the related experience are hall marks of empiricism. a superior way too build models of the physically unobservable is metaphysics.
all those rules and processes can be explained mathematically and that is not empirical in and of itself. when you have a model from observation, and then apply a mathematical construct, you have left empiricism behind, and are now relying on the rational process, mathematics to gain information that did not arise solely from the senses.
yes, the mathematical construct, not something that could be gained by pure empiricism.
of course they dont, they arent interested in metaphysics, but if they care to discuss G-d and the related phenomenon, they should. empiricism is pretty much the astrology of that field. to steal a turn of phrase. (bait, thrown back in boat)
then why do empiricists do it? we both see a great number of kids who show up thinking that is the case. i assume its because that is all they are educated in. its litterally all they know.
as long as they are only talking about the observable world, thats fine. but thats not where they go with it. they all seem to think that science addresses the non-empirical. yet it obviously doesnt.its just plain rotten education.
and this too is fine, until someone tries to address the the non-empirical. but it doesnt change the fact that science, is based on metaphysics. making it difficult to dismiss metaphysics.
so what? you like science dont you?
its not a research program. its a belief, that doesnt meet its own standard of validity. simply because it gets some things right doesnt verify it, it loses all coherence when we get to those immaterial aspects like free will, self-awarness, the nature of being etc.
it cannot address issues such as free will, why is there something rather than nothing, etc.
they mean empiricism is obviously flawed. we reach its bounds when we get to things such as free will, etc, as ive mentioned.
Do you know what historiography is?
What did you miss???After all the science, scripture, and “proof” has been debated ad nauseum to a stalemate, it seems to come down to faith, hope, and love.
Most of society’s problems center around the above. The human brain cannot find an adequate reason to place love of others ahead of love of self unless a “Covenant of Behavior” exists between God and the individual, such that the individual believes there is someone else of the opposite sex out there in the world who also subscribes to the Covenant, such that each individual, separately, barring undue surrender to the temptation of pop culture’s lifestyle, has a reasonable belief that both parties will come to live by the Covenant, where the Covenant of God serves as a bridge of behaviors and beliefs between man and woman. In this way, man and woman can feel reasonably comfortable sacrificing for the greater Good (God) by sacrificing for each other and their kids. In this way, families should live by God’s Covenant. Ideally, children are raised in a family of where their role models display sacrificial love, and the children learn sacrificial love, and learn to pass it on to the next generation. This fails in our modern society where, with our free will, if God’s Covenat is not taught or learned properly, we have enough free will to choose to allow pop culture’s influence to become stronger than God’s covenant. In this way, it’s only logical that the individual places self ahead of others, the individual runs from responsibility, duty, sacrificial love, in favor of the simple, shallow basic instincts of primarily focussing on the pursuits of orgasmic sex, mind altering substances, more money, bling, and other superficialities.
- Faith: One needs to choose to believe, or choose to disbelieve
- Love: One chooses primarily love of others ahead of self, or primarily love of self ahead of others.
- Hope: One either hopes for more superficiality or hopes for more depth
What did I miss?
This is not a thread discussing the merits of atheism vs. faith. I said this wasn’t supposed to be a debate. I just wanted to expose myself to the opposing perspective on a specific issue- the existence of God. warpspeedpetey and Touchstone have created their own thread within this one discussing the validity of empiricism and Guns N’ Roses. You and ManOnFire have brought this thread to the tipping point of arguing about what’s good about atheism.
That article was well done.
Why aren’t you allowed to explain. Please do.
Discussing atheism is banned right now and proselytizing Catholics is not allowed. Plus, it’s not germane to this thread.