I am talking about things that have to be assumed before you can know anything at all. For instance, we all have faith in the laws of logic before we engage in any kind of scientific endeavor. If we don’t have this kind of faith, we can’t know anything.
That’s not “faith”, that’s a combination of earned trust and practicality. We trust logic because it works, and because we don’t have any choice if we want to accomplish anything.
Faith in logic would be following logic if logic consistently failed, or at best accomplished nothing. Faith is believing things that are baseless or wrong, not in things that work or have evidence for them.
so you question my assertion that the life of an ape is less valuable than the life of a human. and this is why atheism is a scary world to live in.
so is it irrational to believe that something can come from nothing? or is there really no such thing as nothing?
well yes, religion has an explanation for this. they claim that a moral God imprinted His morality on the soul of human beings. you may not like this explanation, but is it irrational? can science disprove it?
Granted there are ethicists who do this. but no scientist is using his test tubes and microscopes to try to find out if causing people pain is evil.
I agree there is some mysterious kind of connection between body and soul. but it is very unscientific to believe that mind comes from matter. no scientist has ever observed this in a laboratory or anywhere.
well we have different defns of faith. I take faith in this context to be accepting something to be true without proving it to be so. We can’t prove logic to be true. We have to accept it as true before we can know anything at all. and again, science is of no help here. science cannot prove logic to be true. so, all knowledge that we have is not the result of observation.
you are still operating under the assumption that we can only know observable things. I don’t accept that. I have pointed to first principles and morality as two things that we know but are not observable.
I really wish that people with this sort of frame of reference would actually read the science on this topic before they posted such nonsense.
First: It is utterly false to claim that there is “nothing but the fossil record” to support the Theory of Evolution. If you are not aware of that, you need quite a bit of study before you join this sort of debate. There is the fossil record, (which probably has more information that you can imagine). There is also the DNA record that presents an equivalent documentation to the fossil record, even going so far as to support it where it has been compared. Then there are the examples of evolution that we have actually witnessed, (ever wonder why they need a different set of flu shots each year?).
Second: Your misunderstanding of what would be available in the fossil record is demonstrably wrong. It takes a specific set of conditions to create a fossil. The overwhelming majority of plants and animals die without ever being subjected to those conditions. To create a fossil, we must have an animal that is swiftly buried in an anaerobic situation (so that they do not rot through bacterial action) and are not torn apart and eaten by scavengers. The soild in which they re buried must not bee too acidic, causing them to be “burnt” away. The soil in which they are buried must be of a composition that will permit it to harden into stone, so that it does not simply erode away. In the 19th century, millions of bison were killed on the Great Plains of the U.S. It is likely that not one of them will ever become a fossil. Throughout the history of the world, the vast majority of plants and animals were eaten by scavengers or bacteria, were torn apart be erosion, or were deposited in acidic soil in which they were dissolved. So there cannot be as many fossils as you would like to conjecture. Despite that, of course, we do have an enormous number of fossils that provide a detailed history of various life forms as confirmed by the stratigraphic record of the earth in which they are found.
Your claims about hoaxes is nonsense. There have been a very few actual hoaxes, few of them actually accepted by the scientists at the time they were planted.
In contrast to your absurd clam of a “19th century” science soon to be overthrown, Darwin’s theory did not yet have sufficient evidence in the 19th century to confirm it, but it was confirmed by Dobzhansky in the twentieth century and nothing discovered in the 21st century has come close to disproving it.
Yes. One word. “Sociopaths”.
What do I win?
*If “A implies B” is true and “B” is true, then “A” must also be true. *
Why are you considering logic statements like the above to require faith but “combine hydrochloric acid with sodium hydroxide and you get water and sodium chloride” not to require faith (if you do in fact consider basic chemistry to also be faith then it seems like you consder all science to be faith, which makes any discussion rather pointless).
so I assume that bad consequences mean an action is immoral. but what is a “bad” consequence? what is badness? Can science tell us what makes something bad or good? Science can certainly tell us what kind of consequences a given action is likely to have. but how does science help us identify which consequences are evil and which are good? Science is of no help.
Is a sociopath a good thing or an evil thing? what answer does the scientist give to this?
If your a true believer in evolution then you would have to admit that religious people are the product of millions of years of evolution and they are the fittest. Non religious people must be the weak.
All the ancient peoples believed in one or more gods. Why did evolution favor religious people? What advantage did being religious give them over the non religious weak?
The basic law is A = A. The law of identity. We have to assume this to be true before we can find out if combining hydrochloric acid with sodium hydroxide results in water and sodium chloride. You also have to assume that your senses are feeding you correct information and that some playful demon isn’t playing games. Then you have to assume that the universe is uniform and that tomorrow combining hydrochloric acid with sodium hydroxide will result in salt and pepper. Then you have to believe the truth that people have minds with which to understand what you are claiming.
So…no I am not saying that chemistry is faith. I am saying, that the whole endeavor of chemistry rests upon some very basic principles that are not themselves provable by science.
Rand was wrong, and so are you. Photons are both particles and waves at the same time. Quanta are both here and there at the same time. A = ~A
Are you unaware of Godel’s Incompleteness?
Here is a quote (I have no idea what his 2nd sentence means):
Whitehead wrote, “All science must start with some assumptions as to the ultimate analysis of the facts with which it deals. These assumptions are justified partly by their adherence to the types of occurrence of which we are directly conscious, and partly by their success in representing the observed facts with a certain generality, devoid of ad hoc suppositions.”
Ah, the old “atheists are all evil monsters” routine.
And I fail to see why living under the rule of an omnipotent egomaniac isn’t scary.
Yes it’s irrational; claiming that gods exist and making claims about what they want is irrational. That’s why it’s called faith. Nor is “God” as normally portrayed remotely moral, nor do such claims match reality, nor is there any evidence for those claims whatsoever. And claims about the various gods* nature and powers go against pretty much every scientific discovery there is; that’s about as close to disproving something as science ever comes.
*And of course you are still talking like the Christian god is the only possible one.
Nonsense; scientists who study the brain see it all the time.
It’s plenty of help. Telling us the consequences lets us judge what is good or bad instead of making a wild guess.
And religion is utterly worthless on this matter, so your complaints about science are useless. Religion corrupts people morally, it doesn’t improve them; it distorts their judgement massively, and has no basis for any moral claims it makes. Claiming that science is useless doesn’t make religion useful; religion is worthless regardless of what science can or can’t contribute.
As for where our morality comes from; it’s a combination of instinct, millennia of collective experience, and the unspoken rejection of religion. Because yes, being moral requires that a person reject or ignore religion, regardless of if they admit that’s what they are doing or not; a person can’t be moral while they follow the falsehoods of religion. Being moral requires that you pay attention to the real world and the real people in it; not the fantasies of religion.
some people think it is irrational to believe this since it contradicts all of their experience of how this world works. is that ok?
never heard of him.
So, in other words, you have no idea what evolutionary biology actually says.
No, religious memes have showed increased fitness relative to other memes due to factors that can be debated, but the prevelance of memes does not speak to the fitness of genes.
You do realize that as there were no atheistic societies, that there were no selection pressures which could have acted on that kind of a homogeneous population group?
I’ll admit it - science has disproved God for all practical purposes, though by indirection in leaving fewer places for “God” to hide.
What, that you’re dodging a factual refutation? Probably not okay, no.
That people want to ignore reality because it conflicts with their errors? Probably not okay either, no.
Read more.
Post less.
The God of the Gaps is a constantly fleeing invisible friend.