Tricking people with poor argument skills into believing in your god is pretty fucking low.
If I believe Thor is golden, then he must be an Au-Thor.
Not with lines like that, he ain’t.
Maybe he’s just low-key.
You are a loon.
Well, the argument thing is new.
The used to use lions.
One can not overstate your contributions to this thread.
Well, now you’re on notice that you’re a loon. That’s a contribution. 
Your analogy totally fails because you cite a phenomenon that is amenable to a scientific explanation. Whatever may be the merits of the line of thinking that I outlined, if we lived in a world where there was a widespread belief in Thor as a magical deity responsible for thunder and lightning, that line of thinking would lead to the conclusion that this is extremely silly because there’s obviously a natural physical explanation for it. And that would be true even if we didn’t yet understand what that explanation was. Cosmic creation is fundamentally not like that.
Right, it does. And the fact that “God” means a great many things to a great many people is precisely my point and ends your argument. I’ve indicated what it means to me.
And now you’ve contradicted yourself and offered the anthropomorphic omnipotent being as the required definition. The only thing missing is the white robe and the booming voice out of a burning bush. And I would find it incredible – and depressing – if there were many intelligent people old enough to no longer believe in Santa Claus who believed literally in that claptrap. I think most people just put the whole idea on a back shelf in their minds, regarding their religion as more or less a cultural aspect of their lives, and engaging in a kind of cognitive dissonance when it comes to belief in literal magical beings.
To be fair, this is the traditional Biblical concept and more or less the definition in most religions. But I think it’s also reasonable to expand the definition into a less dogmatic and more spiritual and philosophical realm. You may be right that it’s a “terrible” definition in the sense that it doesn’t have a lot of practical utility, but at least if someone asks “do you believe in God?”, it’s possible to answer “that depends on what you mean by ‘God’, and here’s a concept that makes it possible for me to answer in the affirmative”.
I’m keen on this point only because proselytizing atheists annoy me. Their arguments are full of holes, philosophically and scientifically. In laying their claim to having embraced science instead of religion, they take the position that ultimately science can explain everything, and since there is no God in scientific understanding, there cannot be any kind of God. I take the position that this is a sadly mundane and myopic view, that science can only explain the natural world, and natural laws cannot explain the origin of the cosmos, and therefore their argument is stupid.
I have no problem with the kind of atheist who quietly rejects the idea of the anthropomorphic Biblical God without also rejecting the fact that science has inherent limitations and cannot explain how the universe came into existence, at least, not in ways that are falsifiable and that don’t raise even bigger questions. The annoying kind of atheists are the kind I just described, who also are often the biggest loudmouths about it.
I think the greatest arrogance of all is the claim that science cannot do something, is incapable of doing something, made by those lacking the intellectual authority to do so. Who the fuck are you to declare limits on what science is ultimately capable of?
I think it is rather firmly established at this point that Science has accomplished a very great deal and is a valuable tool. Yes, there are questions that it cannot answer. To most of those, the retort is “Yet”.
Rejecting science and choosing ignorance and superstition is pretty goddamned stupid but I wouldn’t have as much of a problem with it if those people didn’t fucking vote for anti-science pro-ignorance politics.
These are the people who would be in that building at the beginning of Justice League, believing that the only way to “save” humanity from aliens and cosmic evil would be to plunge the world back into ignorance and darkness. They’ll be the ones trying to blow up aliens and screaming for them to go back to their own worlds rather than accept that our world has changed and we’re now part of something larger. ESPECIALLY if those Aliens don’t share certain beliefs.
That’s a useless point that misunderstands the fundamental question, much like when Lawrence Krauss called critics of his book “moronic philosophers”.
Science has already told us amazing things about the evolution of the universe immediately after the Big Bang. No doubt there will be further insights. Perhaps it will turn out that something like the Hartle-Hawking state is the true reality, where the universe exists in “imaginary time” and what we perceive as the Big Bang is just a coordinate in Euclidian spacetime no different than any other. Such a universe if we could perceive it that way would be finite but unbounded, static, and eternal, and the origin of the universe would no longer seem to be a problem. Suppose science could establish this to be the true reality, a possibility I readily concede. Now what?
Well, what we have now is an entirely different question: where did this four-dimensional Euclidian spacetime come from? What caused the universe to be like that? What it comes down to very fundamentally is that science cannot answer ultimate “why” questions except to say “it just is”. Thinking that it can is precisely the mistake made by proselytizing atheists like Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins (in fact, Krauss’ book is subtitled “Why there is something rather than nothing”).
Sean Carroll made some interesting comments on these issues. Carroll is a renowned cosmologist and physicist at Cal Tech specializing in dark energy and general relativity, and I would say he has the “intellectual authority” to comment on these matters (emphasis mine):
Do advances in modern physics and cosmology help us address these underlying questions, of why there is something called the universe at all, and why there are things called “the laws of physics,” and why those laws seem to take the form of quantum mechanics, and why some particular wave function and Hamiltonian? In a word: no. I don’t see how they could.
Sometimes physicists pretend that they are addressing these questions, which is too bad, because they are just being lazy and not thinking carefully about the problem …
And I particularly liked his concluding comments (link at the end):
… after David’s review came out, Lawrence [Krauss] took the regrettable tack of lashing out at “moronic philosophers” and the discipline as a whole, rather than taking the high road and sticking to a substantive discussion of the issues. In the Atlantic interview especially, he takes numerous potshots that are just kind of silly. Like most scientists, Lawrence doesn’t get a lot out of the philosophy of science. That’s okay; the point of philosophy is not to be “useful” to science, any more than the point of mycology is to be “useful” to fungi. Philosophers of science aren’t trying to do science, they are trying to understand how science works, and how it should work, and to tease out the logic and standards underlying scientific argumentation, and to situate scientific knowledge within a broader epistemological context, and a bunch of other things that can be perfectly interesting without pretending to be science itself. And if you’re not interested, that’s fine. But trying to undermine the legitimacy of the field through a series of wisecracks is kind of lame, and ultimately anti-intellectual — it represents exactly the kind of unwillingness to engage respectfully with careful scholarship in another discipline that we so rightly deplore when people feel that way about science. It’s a shame when smart people who agree about most important things can’t disagree about some other things without throwing around insults. We should strive to be better than that.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2012/04/28/a-universe-from-nothing/#.WuOfPnaQw-W
Yes, good advice. To which I would add, for your benefit, it’s good to understand the fundamental question that’s being discussed before throwing around insults.
Where is the lie? The people I am talking about choose to believe that the universe was created by an unknowable god who does not interact with us after that, in other words a god which can’t be falsified. I don’t believe in this god, but it makes them feel better. And they are honest enough to not pretend that they get any kind of moral guidance from this god.
Anyone who claims that god has told him what we should do, but refuses to give enough good evidence for this god to prove his existence in a legal sense can go jump in the lake. That obviously includes all creationists who deserve worse than getting wet.
So, a lake of fire for them?
‘k.
I feel like I’m in a bizzaro world where it’s arrogant not to believe in something for which there is no evidence.
But anyway, isnt a better answer to “do you believe in God” to say “no, but I do wonder how the universe came into existence”.
Right, and you can define things however you want. I can define “chair” as “small, pointy metal object with a flat base”. But it’s a shite definition. If you sit on my chair, you’re going to regret it, because I’ve chosen to define a word in a nonsensical manner and attach all sorts of baggage to it.
It’s not required, but when you say “god”, 9 times out of 10 the first thing people think of is not whatever deists are talking about, they think “literal entity with a mind that is in some way analogous to our own capable of interceding in reality”. This is, inherently, the baggage attached to the term. You can change the definition, sure, but when you pull in something completely unrelated to any of the numerous existing ideas about what “god” is and call it god… Well, it’s just straight-up confusing. And it only gets worse if the connection is tangential, because people turn around and use your argument in support of their concepts of god, for which it does not apply at all.
Like I said above, it’s a bit like referring to a low-level janitorial position as “CEO”. I mean, sure, you can do that. There’s no law saying that “CEO” has to refer to “Chief Executive Officer” and not, I dunno, “Cleanup: Extras Outsourced”. But if you’re talking to someone else about how you’re gonna call the CEO down to clean up the clogged toilet, you’re going to get some really confused look. And if that janitor flashes his ID card to prove he’s actually a CEO, well… now you’re really confusing people, and helping to deceive them.
Whatever you’re talking about above, it has fuck-all to do with god. Why call it god? Why not call it Arkleseizure, or Flimblim, or Blegg, or use any term other than one containing such a huge amount of baggage?
How would you go about establishing the existence of something that your epistemology cannot touch? And if you say that your epistemology can touch it, how did you expand your epistemology beyond science and empiricism and how did you establish that your expansion actually works?
Maybe there are things science can’t explain. But how could we establish that, and what alternative methodology can we reach to in order to explain them? We’re kinda stuck with empiricism at the moment until we can figure out something better. And I’m certainly open to there being something better, but so far every time I ask the response has either been not forthcoming or utterly unconvincing.
The nice thing about limiting yourself to things you can explain through the natural world is that you don’t end up taking flights of fancy into being full of shit. Why yes, I can’t explain the origin of the universe. Maybe it’s impossible to know through empiricism alone. But then we just don’t know, because once we eliminate empiricism, we’re pretty much out of functional epistemologies. There just isn’t more in the toolbox.
(Speaking of which, I have no idea how you established that natural laws cannot explain the origin of the cosmos. Even if you disagree with Krauss, the fact is that he and others in his field are coming at this from the scientific perspective, and the results they come up with are at least testable.)
EDIT: your latest post explains it. Okay, I guess? I don’t really know why we should care about unanswerable questions that have no bearing on… anything.
There is a wide gap between thinking there is a verifiable answer and throwing up your hands and saying “it just is.” If one of the several hypotheses lead to insights that can be tested in our universe, it would not give the answer but it would be both useful and might give a hint that we are on the right track.
As far as I can tell, you are offering one more hypothesis, “god did it.” There are two possibilities. One is that god did it on the other side of the event horizon and never interacts with us. Why is that a better hypothesis than any of the others? It is just as untestable - more so in fact since it cannot lead to any insights.
The second is that a god created the universe and also interacts with it. In that case you are invited to give some evidence of this interaction.
God is not the default for when we cannot know something for certain.
Beliefs inform actions. If I believe the light is green when it is in fact red, I’m going to have a rude awakening a month later attached to a breathing apparatus. And if I believe that there is a God, and that God hates homosexuals and may punish my country for tolerating them, you’re damn right I’m going to vote for the biggest bigot I can find (usually someone whose name is synonymous with a frothy mixture of shit, lube, and cum which is a common aftereffect of anal sex).
But even beyond that… Belief in an abrahamic god will be found in a rational, well-tended mind the way a palm tree will be found on a glacier. It doesn’t happen. And in order to make room for it, you have to start making allowances. You have to start breaking down the rules that would prevent you from holding a belief like that. And those rules are really fucking important, precisely because they’re the rules that insist that you believe true things, reject false things, know what your biases and fallacies are, et cetera.
Beliefs inform action, but they also inform epistemology, and that’s where things get dangerous. If you spend a while watching Christians call into The Atheist Experience, you often see this in action. These people don’t understand why it’s important to not believe things without evidence. If anything calls their god into question, they tend to go looking really hard for good reasons to dismiss it, regardless of how crucial it is to understanding the world. Rules like occam’s razor, “beliefs should be informed by evidence”, etc. This is part of why this sequence is so valuable.
Mostly to oneself - that this is a reasonable thing to believe, or that we shouldn’t care whether things we believe are reasonable things to believe. Just ignore the phrasing, it’s a lousy quoting on my part.
The point is that this isn’t a harmless belief. Even stripping out all the things that would typically make a belief in any kind of deity harmful - arbitrary religious morality, devaluation of human life, taking easy answers to hard questions that stops us actually finding the real answers, etc. - you’ve still got to deal with the effects that this belief has on your epistemology! Why do they believe that? Is their reason for believing it good? And if not, how can they be sure that this won’t leak through to the rest of the things they believe?
I see the question of God as being comparable to the question of Alien Life. There is a vast difference between believing that (a) Life exists on other planets somwhere in the universe, and believing that (b) Aliens visited earth, helped build the Pyramids, make crop circles, experiment on people plucked from lonely roads, and are kept at Area 51.
You don’t get to use (a) to support (b).
Similarly, you don’t get to use a vague notion of a supernatural being to support belief in the various stories/commands from the Bible/Torah/Koran, etc. Nor can you equate them when discussing Atheism. It’s unfair to criticize an Athiest whose entire life has been immersed in (and impacted by) the various things God supposedly demands that people do, because their denial of God happens to include a denial of the most inconsequential version of God imaginable.