Oh. Heh. Sorry. I guess I’m a little trigger happy on the defense lately.
I don’t get the OP. Is this a look for a rebuttal or something? If so there is none. Faith is, by definition, without proof. You can just say “I choose to have faith.”
The reason I asked is that your claim that “We don’t have any other reliable method for discovering information than science” struck me as, not just wrong, but obviously and undefensibly wrong, according to what I thought was the most reasonable interpretation of it. Hence, I wanted to know what your interpretation of it was.
Here are just some of the easy rebuttals I could throw at it:
If I want to know the phone number of the nearest pizza place, or the schedule of the local movie theater, or who the current governor of Nebraska is, I can look it up or google it or ask someone who knows. I will thereby have discovered information, but I wouldn’t call what I was doing “science.”
Science is a relatively recent invention, in terms of human history and pre-history. Humans have known things—i.e. discovered information—for a lot longer than what we think of as “science” has been around.
Mathematical reasoning is one example of a way we gain information which does not involve science or empirical research.
You would be doing the equivalent of asking somebody, and that somebody might or might not have the information, but if they did have the information, it would have ultimately seen scientifically derived. All information is scientifically derived or it isn’t information. If you consult a data base of that information (such as Google), you are relying on science, since those data bases themselves are part of the fruits of scientific method.
Science has always been around, in that using observation and trial to discover information has always been around, it just hasn’t been formalized and purified until recently.
What is “mathematical reasoning,” and what information does it give us about the unoverse?
math is a tool, which can be used to infer information, but it is not information in and of itself, and any information which mathematics can be used to help us find has to be based on data which has already been empirically derived.
No, that is what makes it wrong. Or rather the fact that as a species humans don’t want to be murdered. The fact that we all agree on that is what makes it immoral, for humans at least. Not the fortunately imaginary opinion of some murderous bronze age demon-god.
Criminals (well, unethical ones) are moral hypocrites however, since they are behaving in ways toward others they don’t want to have inflicted on themselves. Murderers don’t want to be murdered, thieves don’t want to be robbed, rapists don’t want to be raped.
And children are children; ignorant and without fully mature brains.
The way we typically acquire day-to-day information about the world is through observation and induction. We take a piece of sensory data and extrapolate a potential cause. If I ask someone who the governor of Nebraska is, their answer arrives as a set of vibrations in my ear that, through a long inductive chain, I take as evidence for a fact about the world.
Science follows exactly this same process, only proceeding more systematically.
Well then, that makes your statement a tautology.
No, it’s just a truism.
That’s the social contract. You hope that by refraining from murder, and from advocating refraining from murder, you create a society in which less murder happens, and hence, there’s a lower chance you’ll be murdered.
Thinking that you need a defense for find tuning is erroneous in the first place. The best analogy I’ve heard regarding this is… imagine there was a bit of rain that left a puddle on the ground. And imagine the water in that puddle said “how amazing is that! The shape of this hole in the ground is the exact shape I am!”. The water thinks the hole was finely-tuned to be the same shape as the water.
We’re fine tuned to the universe because if we weren’t, we wouldn’t be here to debate it. Like the puddle, we fit what’s already here. If the universe were not at all suitable for life, no one would be here to ponder it. If it were suitable for a different kind of life, and they were capable of pondering it, they would also think the universe was fined tuned for them.
This is really just a language issue - if you replace “science” with “critical empiricism” it doesn’t really change anything but you lose the association the word “science” has with guys with beakers. We’re just talking about the information you can gain from objectively observing your surroundings. That’s all you’ll ever need to understand the world.
By my read of the OP, it is asking for counterarguments to the “new atheist” arguments that purport to show that there is no god. It’s isn’t asking us to opine whether the theist should run, hide, pull out a gun, or ignore them.
I could be wrong, of course, but I don’t think so. If I am though, the obvious correct response by a theist to New Atheism is to immediately discard their faith and become a New Atheist too. If you can’t beat 'em, join 'em!
I don’t purport to prove that murder is wrong. And as far as this thread is concerned, I was merely addressing the claim that science can explain why murder is wrong. It can’t. It might explain why we have certain feelings about murder, but that has no bearing on whether murder is actually wrong or not.
Let us recap, shall we? sisu said, “Not all can be explained by science,” to which you replied, “Name one thing that can be explained by any other method.” coffeecat then levelled multiple challenges, including the challenge of proving that murder is wrong via science. It is in that context that you uttered your statement about the morality of murder.
If your goal was merely to explain why we *feel *that murder is wrong, then your answer does nothing to answer his or her question. And if you don’t honestly think that murder is wrong, then something is seriously amiss here.
Oh, no you don’t. You don’t get to dodge the burden of proof, as typically happens in these discussions. You’re the one who said that science is the only way to explain anything. You don’t get to defend that by foisting the burden of disproof onto other people.
Talk about dodging the question:
Can you?
I did not say anything at all about the morality of murder. That is false. I said there were empirically explicable reasons for why humans had cultural taboos against it. The question “is it wrong” is empirically senseless, and is a non-sequitur regarding my challenge to show an other method for discovering information than the scientific one.
You clearly are not reading my posts. I did not offer a personal opinion as to whether murder is “right or wrong,” and never said how I “felt” about anything at all.
Excuse me, but “Name another method” was my response to the assertion that “not everything can be explained by science.” If that is the case, then let’s see another method.
What other method can prove that murder is wrong?
This is a VERY long thread, so if this question has already been discussed, please ignore this post. But if a “new atheist” is an atheist who “pushes his views on other people”, should we not define what constitutes “pushing your views on other people”?
For example, I know of many, many theists who will fight to keep “In God we Trust” on US money. That, to me, is pushing views on others.
Are atheists who ask that it be taken off “pushing their views”?
Do you know of any atheist who has seriously proposed that “In God we Trust” be replaced with “There is no God.”? That, it seems to me, would be pushing atheist views on everyone.
Currency is currency. Is it an appropriate place to push religious views? Simply asking that the secular government refrain from promoting the God concept on currency sounds pretty reasonable to me.
How exacktly is Dawkins pushing his views? By publishing books containing those views? What do you suppose is the relative number of atheist books compared to the number of Bibles and other religious books published?
I have never heard of a hotel that put copies of Dawkins, Hitchens or other “new atheist” authors in every hotel room, whether you asked for it or not. But I HAVE seen Bibles, the Book of Mormon, Buddhist writings and the Koran in hotel rooms. So who is being pushy here?
Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and other assorted theists come to my door to ask for money or to try to convert me. The Roman Catholic parish in my town regularly has mass-mail-outs of requests for financial support and/or invitations to join them for worship. I have yet to see atheist organizations do anything of the kind.
Many Muslims believe that apostates from Islam should be killed, and many Muslim states provide such a punishment in their laws. Can you imagine the outcry if atheists threatened any amount of force or violence against an atheist who decides he now believes in God?
Mohammed received the mandate to fight until the entire world had submitted to Islam and worship was for Allah alone. Can you imagine the outcry if an atheist association declared they had a similar mandate?
Why is it that Christians “witness” or “preach the word” or “share their faith”, but atheists who speak up are “pushing their views on other people”?
Of course science can prove that murder is wrong - assuming you actually got around to defining “wrong”. (And assuming that by that definition murder actually was wrong.)
I mean, pick one. What is “wrong”? How can you tell? What defines wrong? Once the word has a meaning, we can scientifically and analytically establish the degree to which ‘murder’ meets this definition. And until you define the word…you’re not really saying anything at all.
No such claim has been made, at least not by me. “Murder is wrong” is an assertion with no innate truth value one way or the other. It’s just a personal opinion.
It was more a list of requests for definitions, masquerading as a list of requests for explanations.
Well now, that kinda depends on whether and how you define “wrong”, now doesn’t it? I mean, if you define “wrong” as “in opposition to maintaining the size of the population”, then murder is certainly ‘wrong’, but if you define “wrong” as “a bad way to break the ice at a party”, then murder is probably ‘wrong’…depending on the type of party.