To our animals we are as gods, and a lot better ones than the gods of human religions are. We have the power of life and death. We produce food from nothing. We put them in metal boxes and magically transport them to heaven (the pet store) or the vet. Plus, unlike human gods, no faith is required to know we exist.
Please, not the “science can be wrong, so we don’t know anything” argument. DerTrihs qualified his answers in exactly the right way. From our observation of stars billions of miles away we can be fairly sure that the laws of physics are unchanged far away and long ago. A scientist 500 years ago would have asked for evidence of quantum mechanics. He’d probably say, who can tell?
Good. And all we’re asking is for convincing evidence (not proof) of the existence of any god. Is this too much? DerTrihs doesn’t expect you to believe without evidence, how come you expect us to?
Bright.
How do most atheists view “creation” as coming into being? Don’t really know, since we aren’t really organized. This atheist is waiting for more evidence to come in before I make any decisions about it.
Thanks for the link to Brights. I like it and I think I’ll monitor it for a while before deciding on anything just yet.
Also, the gene splicing idea I got from an old sci-fi movie called Hangar 8(18?) starring Darne McGavin. The special effects are a little dated by it deals with socio/political/religious conflicts that arise from the realization. Everybody either wants it for themselves because to the advanced technology or they want to blow it up and obliterate. Highly recommended and I hope they do a remake.
Just because it invalidates your objections to agnosticism, and prevents you from acting all superior doesn’t make it wrong.
I assume then you have evidence to back up your assertion that the stars, and things detectable with telescope is all there is.
He’d either laugh in your face, ask for evidence, or walk away from the crazy person.
All I want is convincing evidence that what we can currently sense and test is all there is. While the default is not proving a negative, it doesn’t change whether that negative is right or wrong. The accuracy of human perceptions of reality are never truly certain and while it’s practical to assume they are it isn’t absolute truth.
So, until all possible evidence is acquired, you won’t be convinced?
Using this line of reasoning, what is your opinion concerning the existence of Bigfoot?
And even more importantly, for me, is the fact that I’m intellectually curious, but I don’t care. It doesn’t affect my daily life, and there is zero chance of discovering something that will rethink my views on my own personal Big Ugly In The Sky.
-Joe
Will you please send me $50? My leprechaun is hungry. You won’t forget about him for the next 364 days like the rest of humanity, will you, laddie?
-Joe
How do religious people know that God isnt really an alien?
Sure seems alien, compared to us humans…
Convinced of what?
There isn’t a god or gods? I’ll say there isn’t any good scientific evidence but who can know for sure?
There can’t be a god? Well that’s a hard claim that requires one to establish absolute truth to prove.
While the default is to prove a positive, like I said before, it change whether something is true or not.
Therefor I take the position that it is inconclusive.
Highly unlikely?
Your metaphor fails. Big foot is a specific instance of something, a testable something that would leave behind scientifically examinable evidence.
A being beyond the laws of physics wouldn’t necessarily leave physical evidence science could evaluate. The nature of such a being would depend on the nature of the universe. Where as a big foot, would have mammalian philology, leave behind dung, caucuses, hair, and bones.
We know the universe has fundamental laws, but what enforces those laws? How come mass is conserved? Why can’t things pop out of nothing?
I’m sure they all explanations, this is a consequence of that, which happens because of x, but what is the bases for which it all depends?
To use a computer term, what bootstraped reality, the universe, and everything?
It’s the question of why something instead of null? To know that is to know the nature of the universe.
I don’t know. Until I know for sure I can’t say for certain that what we can sense is all there is.
Yes that makes perfect sense if you take the brain dead position that given the choice of true/false/unknown, picking unknown means you believe in leprechauns.
Oops, that should be billions of light years. There is only one star within a reasonable number of billions of miles.
The question is whether the laws of the universe work the same way out there. I’ve given evidence that they do. Got anything to say they don’t?
That’s not the way science works. Anyone coming up with a hypothesis needs to provide evidence supporting it. Science and scientists don’t have to worry about proving it wrong. We actually are pretty sure that the stars and things detected by telescopes are not all there is, since there is evidence for dark matter. That is how science follows the data.
If he was a good scientist, he’d ask for evidence. If you don’t have any, he is justified in ignoring the hypothesis. The Greek and Roman atomists were as wrong as anyone else. They got something right by accident, which doesn’t count.
Obviously no one is saying we are or should be limited by human senses. We can find evidence of things we need to explain, we can predict the existence of things based on theories and models. But if the only reason you believe in any sort of god, and expect us to, is that no one has disproven it or it makes you feel like the universe has meaning, you need to work a lot harder. There is no need for any god, outside your head. There is no evidence for a god, and, unless you come up with something, there is no reason for anyone to believe in any god.
Evidence things aren’t always as they appear?
Isn’t science full of stories like that?
To restate in simpler terms as an agnostic my claim is things may not be what they seem then there’s no way to know for sure.
Let me ask you this. Could you prove the universe is real, and not a simulation, delusion, or false facade?
If you can’t answer such a basic question of the universe with absolute provable certainty then you don’t know the exact nature of the universe, and therefor can’t really make any authoritive claims on what can and can’t exist with in. You might be able to make some really good guesses,but philosophically that’s all they are. Guesses and opinions.
Which is a default assumption by convention, not an automatic truth.
“Pretty sure” isn’t a logical proof.
Which is exactly my point. The appearent truth of Quantum Mechanics wasn’t discoverable or testable with the tools and know how they had back then.
I agree they’d be justified for the response to QM back then, but testability and proof, while hallmarks of good Science, aren’t absolute truth.
“and expect us to”?
I don’t know if you built that straw man accidentally in the heat of the argument, but all I’ve been arguing here is agnosticism (the belief the nature or existence of god is unknown) isn’t illogical, or irrational.
Yet you seem to think I’ve been arguing in support of some god, would you kindly quote the portion of my argument that lead you to believe I expected people to believe in a deity of some sort?
No, they aren’t. “This is true, according to the evidence” is not the same as “guesses and opinions”.
Your arguments demonstrate just how untenable and ridiculous religion is. In order to defend it ( and that IS what you are doing ), you are essentially retreating into solipsism. All the facts are against religion; so in order to defend it, you are forced to pretend that facts don’t matter, that everything is just opinion.
Your arguments also demonstrate one of the major reasons I oppose religion; it so utterly ridiculous that defending it as something worth taking seriously, much less believing it requires that one denigrate rationality and objective reality.
Because that’s the point of agnosticism; to defend religion, or avoid criticising it at least. As I’ve repeatedly pointed out, it’s not a position people are likely to take on other subjects than religion.
I wouldn’t say I was retreating in Solipsism, because Solipsism (the idea I think therefore I am, and anything else is more or less conjecture based on potentially unreliable senses) is the basis of my reasoning.
Saying I retreated into it is like saying Pizza Hut retreated into the pizza making business.
Yes, I looked up agnosticism in the dictionary and that’s exactly what it said.
It doesn’t call religion baseless either, even though it is.
Really? If you’re not with us you’re against us? After Bush you really wanna spread more of that sentiment?
Just for kicks I looked it up on an online dictionary
Looks to me like it calls all kinds of claims baseless.
Truth is truth. Religion is baseless and irrational; supporting it or claiming that it deserves respect therefore requires that you show respect for irrationality and disdain for objective reality. Religion is hostile to everything but itself, by nature; it’s demonstrated that since the beginning of history.
“Uncertain” isn’t “baseless”.
I’ll combine my response. The only thing that gets me more frustrated than a fundamentalist is a radical skeptic, having wasted a Theory of Knowledge class listening to a bunch of students whining “but you can’t prove it.”
Let’s get this straight: science has nothing to do with logical proofs. The Greeks tried science that way, and pretty much got everything wrong. Science has to do with collecting evidence and making and testing hypotheses. It makes no claim to perfect knowledge, it just claims provisional explanations, and always accepts the probability that new evidence will cause a change in the accepted hypothesis, as relativity amply demonstrated.
That there is no way to know for sure is a given. Where we diverge is that you seem to think that we should act as if we don’t know at all, while I think (and science thinks, inasmuch as science can think anything) that the logical thing to do is to act as if it were true up to the level of confidence we have in the hypothesis. I don’t know for sure that some small meteor we haven’t detected is not heading for my town, but I’m not keeping my bags packed to flee just in case.
Things like whether the laws of nature hold in the universe are not just guesses and opinions. The hypothesis is that they do, and then observations are taken which might be able to disprove that hypothesis. All the observations taken so far confirm it, and more observations are taken, and we continue to look for structures out there that tell us about the nature of the early universe. I never claimed we know for sure. I did say all the evidence points to it.
The reason I mistook you for a theist, is that your argument is similar to the arguments of some creationists, who say “we don’t know for sure” about evolution or “you can’t prove evolution.” Or even better, “you can’t prove God doesn’t exist” as if that eliminates the need for them to provide evidence that he does. Whichever god they are talking about, of course, we can’t know until they tell us.
You can look at the evidence and accept it, and you are of course welcome and encouraged to do so.
You can look at the evidence and reject it, as long as you have some good reasons to, and you are welcome to provide evidence for another point of view.
Or, you can say you don’t feel like learning about the subject, and have no opinion about it. No one has time to study everything.
But it is not reasonable to respond to a hypothesis based on evidence and testing by rejecting it because it could be wrong.