WTF, I can believe whatever I want to. I see no reason to stop believing in what i do, I can seperate science and philisophy. Not all can be explained by science.
Name one thing that can be explained by any other method.
Little long, but I love Dara O’Briain’s commentary on science and evidence, which somewhat ties into sisu’s comment. Up through about the first 3 minutes.
It’s not like science explains some things, and religion explains some other things.
It’s like science explains some things, and religion makes up random crap about other things.
Making up random crap is not “explaining”.
Sure it is, it’s just a lousy explanation. And these people don’t think it was made up, They think it was revealed by God. They believe this is true even for scientific knowledge they accept – God allowed it to be revealed to the scientist. A lot of scientists used to believe this too, and some probably still do.
Its not the atheism that is new. Whats new is that religious hardliners can no longer lock people up, run them out of town(for the most part) or worse: such things as burning them at the stake.
And we atheists know that. You cannot shut us up with your old trump card of punitive actions. We neither fear your divinities retribution nor your social engineering.
Thats just like people to pretend their weakness doesnt exist by inventing pejoratives for their foes.
- Prove you exist. Define “exist.”
- Resolved: Murder is wrong. Define “wrong.”
- Explain why the universe should be governed by regular, mathematical laws.
I’ll grant you, philosophy and religion don’t explain these things with scientific rigor, but science doesn’t touch them. To paraphrase my old moral philosophy teacher, if you try to analyze them, you’ll use philosophy and religion, know it or not; and if you don’t know it, you’ll do it anyway, but you’ll probably do it badly.
Q. What was Hemingway getting at in A Farewell to Arms?
A. He was trying to say Catherine dies. I read the book 20 times and she dies at the end each time.That’s 100% correlation coefficient, with a Χ[sup]2[/sup] of . . .
Completely wrong.
You can prove I exist the same way you prove anything else exists: by identifying the experimental feedback that you would expect if I do exist, and find out if that feedback occurs. In this case, you post something on the internet that I would find offensively ignorant, and the feedback is someone using my username responding to your post.
All philosophy is good for is constructing stupid, incorrect excuses for why that evidence doesn’t count.
Philosophy does have a place in answering such a question. Religion does not. All religion amounts to is claiming X is moral or immoral because a fictional character (“God”) says so.
You’ve got it ass-backwards. The default position is to assume the evidence available to you is equally valid elsewhere, until you find evidence to the contrary. It’s up to you to prove that the universe doesn’t follow the same laws everywhere as it does here.
Cite that religious moral principles don’t go beyond divine command theory?
Isn’t it a philosophical question, rather than a scientific question, what the “default position” is, and what’s up to whom to prove?
I never said otherwise, but just because you can, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
And if it’s false, you just don’t care? Or is that an objection only to non-religious ideas?
So what? Unless you’ve got some other way to explain stuff.
All I need to do is walk up to someone and poke them to “prove they exist”, as far as anything outside mathematics gets proven.
Science has quite a bit to say about psychology and the origin of morality actually. As for why murder is wrong; it’s because we don’t want to be murdered.
Because we wouldn’t be here to comment on the matter if it wasn’t.
Philosophy doesn’t explain anything, at best it just defines terms and procedures; often it is just hot air. Religion of course is even worse since it actively defies facts and logic.
And no, making things up doesn’t count as explaining them.
How, precisely, am I supposed to provide a cite for something not existing? Should I go through every moral principle held by every religion and demonstrate that they are either arbitrarily defined by a god, or derived from secular philosophy?
No, it’s the basis of the scientific method. The scientific method requires that the experiment be repeatable in all its fundamental properties. There would be no such thing as a repeatable experiment if the default position was that things are different until proven otherwise.
What are you askng me to explain here?
What are you asking me to explain here? There is a great deal of scintifically derived information on the cultural and evolutionary reasons for humans having a taboo on murder. The reasons are not magical or inexplicable.
What do you mean by “should be governed?” It just is. We know tis from scientific method.
I don’t think you understand what I was saying. Science is a method for discovering information. Name any other another method for discovering information besides the scientific method.
I don’t understand what you think needs to be explained about them. Give me any alternative at all to scientific method for discovering information about the universe. Religion sure as hell doesn’t give you any information.
How exactly is that “new”? Are you implying that religious hardliners could “lock people up, run them out of town, or burn them at the stake” ten years ago? Or a hundred or two hundred? If so, you’re flat wrong. (In England & USA, just so you don’t resort to the desperate tactic of pointing to places like Afghanistan.) So again, please explain what you meant by this statement.
Interestingly enough, the laws against blasphemy were only repealed in the UK in, IIRC, 2008.
And in my liberal drugged up country of the Netherlands, where same sex marriage is legal, and people generally don’t care about religion, there is still a blasphemy law on the books, and in fact some of the Christian politicians have suggested strengthening them and increasing their enforcement (nobody’s been convicted since the 70s, and I’m not aware of any prosecution since that time either).
Ireland passed a blasphemy law THIS YEAR, which provides a penalty of up to twenty five thousand pounds.
[QUOTE=Superfluous Parentheses;12981357But that’s hardly a “positive argument”.[/quote]
Yes, it is a positive argument. Positive means “explicity stated or explained”, according to my dictionary. Dawkins explicity states that he has a reason why I should believe that God almost certainly does not exist.
Think back to the Bush administration. Do you recall how, when Shrub or Cheney said things like “we are witnessing the last throes of the insurgency”, the 'Pubs on television had ways to explain that it was true we were witnessing the last throes of the insurgency, but this wasn’t supposed to mean that the insurgency would end soon? And likewise, half the other things that they said, they insisted were true but tried to avoid facing the contrary facts by changing definitions and twisting logic. To those outside the Dawkins camp, the ceaseless attempts to defend the man by insisting that he didn’t mean the straightforward interpretation of the words on the page look equally ridiculous.
All that demonstrates is that there are sociological advantages to not murdering anyone. That doesn’t answer the question of whether murder is right or wrong.
“But murder is bad for society!” one might say. Perhaps that’s true, but it doesn’t answer the question of right or wrong. After all, why should you place the welfare of society above your own personal desires?