[quote=“begbert2, post:279, topic:555682”]
[li]If you roll a 1000001-sided dice once, the odds are a million to one that any specific side will come up. Nonetheless, beating all the odds, one does. Supposing the number that comes up is “1”, or “123”, or “666”, does that mean it wasn’t rolled randomly?[/li][/QUOTE]
And keep rolling that die over and over again for billions and billions of years.
Given sufficient time, the improbable is inevitable.
[quote=“acsenray, post:281, topic:555682”]
Well, yes, but that’s a different (and already mentioned) explanation. It remains possible that the dice was only rolled once, and that it happened to come up all aces for life. Obviously if you roll the dice over and over again ad infinitum it becomes downright likely that our universe would turn up sooner or later, but it remains the fact that there needn’t actually have ever been any other universe for our specific universe to have happened.
I haven’t heard many that couldn’t be explained away by a daydream or ordinary coincidence, myself.
And lying.
ALL of them could be explained by lying, in theory. However, daydreams and ordinary coincidences cover a wide swath on their own, with just those two categories. (Particularly in the case of ones where ITR might go looking into ‘obscure neurological disorders’ - those are a shoo-in for the ‘zoned out for a moment’ explanation.)
My point is that when someone claims that they had a subjective experience “proving” something they desperately want to believe is true, something that is physically impossible according to all we know, but they can provide zero evidence beyond their unsupported word then suspecting them of lying is a reasonable position.
I disagree, rather strongly! The defining property of a lie, as opposed to ‘mistake’ or ‘delusion’, is that the person telling the lie is consciously aware that it is untrue. Rather obviously, if they know it is untrue, then they will not be able to satisfy their desperate desire to believe it is true. Which kind of shoots the whole thing in the foot. So the only people who could possibly be plausibly accused of lying are those who are gaining direct benefit from what they say, such as leaders and the like; but certainly not the average believer.
Of course, the minute you start to say things like “delusion”, the ITRs of the world’s hackles rise and the teeth come out. Not that you care, as you are more interested in showing your distaste than in getting your point across, but it becomes a delicate issue for those that want to actually debate. There are a variety of more precise terms for various kinds of cognitive and memory errors, none of which require a person to be actually insane, but all of which boil down to telling the theist that their thinking is wrong. Which never goes over well, especially when it’s true.
But it goes over better than incorrectly telling them they’re lying.
I worded that poorly. It’s a common feature of believers that they don’t just want to believe themselves, they want others to take their beliefs seriously, and ideally to convince them of the “Truth”. And if they have to lie to convince others, well that’s just a little fib they are using to convince less enlightened people of the much more important Truth. The lie in this case is at least as much to convince you as them.
And true believers of all sorts seem happy to accept even blatant lies if they support their ideology. Look at all the tyrannical groups and individuals throughout history who have forced people to express support for this religion or that dictator using threats and torture. There is a mentality out there that finds even the most blatant of lies satisfying.
None of what you said disagreed with what I said. If the universe formed in such a way that it wasn’t conducive to life, we wouldn’t be here debating it. If it formed in a way that was conducive for very different sorts of life, we might all be giant blobs of goo and hence not debating the issue. Assuming the universe was designed exactly for our existance is the water in the puddle deciding the mud was formed perfectly to fit the shape that the water is in.
No. There is no such assumption. If the universe was differnt there could have well been no intelligent life. The fallacy in the fine-tuning argument is in the assumption is that there is any necessity for life to exist at all. There isn’t. Life is molded to the confines of the universe, but that’s not remarkable. The universe doesn’t care if life exists, and a universe without life is just as valid as a universe with it. It’s completely beyond me how anybody is remotely convinced by the fine-tuning argument. It’s so obtuse and backwards that I can’t even really get a handle on why the believers think it’s persuasive. Douglas Adams’ puddle analogy is right on target. Yes, a different universe could have well been a lifeless universe. So what? How is that anything more than the most simple-minded tautology? If the universe was different, it would be different. Yes, and…?
You’re still quite wrong it you think that any significant percentage of believers are deliberately making up “little fibs” in order to better sell their beliefs to the unbelievers. Why should they? The truth (as they know it) was convincing enough to convince them; why should it need to be gussied up for anyone else?
Yeahhhh…no. The vast vast majority of theists aren’t deliberately lying. They just believe lots of strange stuff, and maybe have had some nifty dreams and mental adventures and maybe had lots of spiffy coincidences happen that totally could not have been coincidence. That’s all.
As for them accepting blatant lies…‘blatant’ is a relative term. Crudulity can be trained. And I haven’t the faintest idea what point you were trying to make with the tyrant/torture thing.
Let’s see it.
No you don’t. At least not on this board. You get told that the classic “religious” experiences are neurological in nature, but that doesn’t mean they have to be cause by disorders (certainly not “obscure” ones. Schizophrenia, for instance, is hardly obscure). Psychotic episodes (and that’s what these are, by definition) can also be caused by drugs, epilepsy, meditation, fasting and other things, but having a single psychotic episode does not mean a person necessarily has a disorder, just that they had a psychotioc episode.
I don’t know what disorders you’re looking up, but religious hallucinnations are among the most common psychotioc experiences. I’m aware that you have, in the past, attempted to define religious hallucinations as being in a sperate category from other psychotic episodes simply by fiat, but that doesn’t alter the fact that they are psychotic episodes. We can induce them pretty much at will by stimulating certain parts of the brain.
No, you get told that the fine tuning agument attempts to draw a bullseye around an arrow and then exclaim about the excellent aim of the archer.
Cite for a “documented example” of “miraculous healing?”
You don’t have any evidence and atheists don’t need any.
You are almost certainly a poor judge of what constitutes evidence. Do you want to link me to a thread where you’ve hashed this out before, or should we do this dance again?
I wouldn’t say that one requires a “neurological disorder” to be religious or have a religious experience. It’s obviously extremely common, and since we define our disorders and diseases based on the abnormal most people probably wouldn’t describe it that way.
But let me try this from another angle. There are people who have religious experience that greatly differ from yours. They worship gods who are completely different from your god, and often in direct contradiction. And yet they believe with just as much faith as you do. They feel like they see the work of god(s) just as much as you do, that they’ve been touched by the hand(s) of gods, etc.
Now, how do you reconcile this? Do you think that both your gods exist, therefore there’s evidence for both of you to see your own god? Do you think that their religious experience is just a result of the psychology of believing such a powerful thing, whereas yours is inspired by the real divine?
My explanation is that you both believe equally. That the things that motivates religious thinking are so strong, that they affect your perceptions to the point where you can legitimately be having “religious experiences” that move you in very real emotional and psychological ways.
If there are dozens or hundreds of religions in history, with sincere followers who all had religious experiences, who all felt like they were touched by gods and so sincerely believed they knew the truth - you’re essentially asking us to believe that, oh, sure, their religious experiences were explanable because they wanted to believe so much, but my religious experiences are because I’m right and I’m really on to the right god.
Multiple universes are unnecesary. On the very first shot, as I explained above, you could get a lifeless universe where no one is around to ponder why the universe wasd designed for them, or you get a different kind of life, which may be intelligent enough to ponder why the universe was custom designed for them. You can’t lose - you never end up with a form of life that seems unwanted by the universe.
Do people of religions that aren’t yours also experience these miraculous healings? Do their gods exist to heal them, or in that case was it just spontaneous remission that those silly bastards credit to their monkey gods?
Almost certainly nothing you’ve brought up meets any scientific definition of useful evidence, but since you’re only summarizing it I can’t say for sure.
So - just to be clear - you think the idea of aliens creating space ships that look exactly like DC-8s because even though DC-8s are logical contemporary plane designs, they were actually designed out of the racial memory of little float souls who were trapped in volcanos and nuked until they were able to inhabit humans … you think this idea is far more plausible than the idea that the brain evolved in such a way that obeying social pressure and having ideology shaped by your parents was selected for?
This is besides the silly generationalizations you’re making. Dawkins does not speak for all atheists. Sharing his beliefs on multiple universes or evolutionary psychology are not a necesary step to being an atheist. Whereas believing in xenu and DC-8s and all that are necesary to being a scientologist.
But even discounting all that, the idea that because you can come up with some beliefs that a single atheist holds, which really aren’t all that out there, and then use it to say “see! atheists are kookier than religious folk!” when you don’t hold them to the same standard by randomly bringing up stuff you consider silly believed by religious people, makes the whole declaration so ridiculously unfair that I have a hard time believing you sincerely believe what you’re saying. But upon further reflecting, given your extreme cognitive biases, I suppose it’s plausible.
No, only you know if you have it or not. It cannot be proven, it just is.
Lying still belongs on the list of possibilities that can’t be ruled out, though, and I think it’s more common than you may suspect. Not that it’s a majority of believers, but , at a petty level, there is quite a bit of faking it with things like speaking in tongues or being overcome by the spirit or hearing messages from God. There is also (in my opinion) a lot of self-delusion and massaging of ordinary events to make them more and more extraordinary. Also, there is denial about mental illness.
No, all it requires is for a single universe to exist for a very long time. The dice analogy tells you that everything that is conceivable in that universe will eventually come about b
‘Denial’, as you seem to be using it, ain’t lying. And neither is self-delusion, nor do the usual cognitive biases qualify.
It’s even my understanding that that ‘speaking in tongues’ stuff isn’t deliberate deception, but instead getting swept up in the moment and popping open the cap on your brain’s ability to generate gibberish. High-emotion mob situations have a recorded tendency to lead people to act pretty odd.
So yeah - you’re including a lot of stuff that’s I wouldn’t call ‘lying’, which naturally pads it to the point of being ‘more common than I may suspect’. But if you take out all that stuff and limit yourself to actual lies, I don’t think I’m underestimating it at all.
So, these people aren’t all dishonest scuzzy liars. They’re just wrong. Really, emphatically, wrong. Isn’t that good enough?
When it’s genuine, yes, it’s an altered state of consciousness and high emotion, but if you’ve ever been around those kinds of churches, you’ll see that there are people who really are “under the spirit” and people who are faking it. In a given service, I suspect that about half the people speaking in tongues are faking it.
This also happens in other religious traditions (and not just Christianity) involving attempts to alter consciousness. Faking ecstatic states happens with Quakers, Buddhists, Hindus, etc. I didn’tmean to give an impression that I don’t believe ecstatic states exist (I’ve experienced them myself), but that a lot of people pretend to be in them when they’re not.
Because the evil scientists/liberals/communists have falsified evidence proving them wrong. Or the Devil has. They know better than to trust the evidence of their eyes over what the True Faith says, but the weak minded might not.
And I think it is fairly common.
That there’s no lie more blatant than one that you yourself threatened or torture someone into telling, yet people go ahead and force such lies and appear to consider them evidence of the correctness of their beliefs. There ARE people who find outright lies, lies they can’t help but know are lies supportive of their beliefs.
Hmm, that raises an interesting point: in this case, they’re not lying to fool themselves, and they’re not lying to fool the atheists: they’re lying to fool the believers. And there is a rational reason for the average theist to tell this sort of lie: social acceptance. Pretend to be more theisty than you are, to gain status and avoid censure.
Heck, I gather that atheists have been known to do this.
Okay, I take it back. Theists all lie all the time, to each other. Which naturally could result in them lying to atheists too, if there’s a chance the other believers would otherwise hear about it and kill them. (I’ve seen the opposite, though: I’ve had religious apathy ‘confided’ to me, with the expectation I wouldn’t tell.)
Though I maintain that if they actually tell the lie often enough that they convince themselves it’s true, then (suddenly) they’re not lying about it anymore. At that point, they’re just messed up.