I shouldn’t but I can’t resist butting in here. ITR champion, submitting a couple of papers does not make you an expert in the publications process. I’ve published a bunch of papers, have reviewed well over a hundred (probably a couple of hundred) and I’ve read thousands of reviews as a program commttee member, progam chair, and journal editor. I’m not a physicist, but I can’t believe physics is much different from my field.
First, please support your statement that some journals only contain material know for decades. This sounds extremely unlikely.
The statement about science being self-correcting does not mean that no errors are ever published. Not all reviewers take days to reproduce the math in a paper. In fact, in my experience, the more senior the reviewer the less time is spent. I get sometimes three or four papers at once to review, which I need to find time for. You look for originality, a good logical argument, and plausibility. If a paper seems really important you might find more time for it, but those are very, very rare. I’ve seen way too many one line reviews. Grad students and new PhDs seem to spend more time, though they often are big nit pickers.
Most papers are published to be forgotten. Errors in them will never be corrected, but it won’t matter. Errors in papers people actually use will be discovered and corrected fairly quickly. I can give you a few examples if you wish. And using code as an example is just laughable.
Not work in the sense of botching an experiment - no. Not work in the sense of an experiment not turning out as hoped. Yes. Anyone with 100% success in demonstrating hypotheses is not being creative enough.
Here’s the real kicker. When you’ve been on the Editorial Board of a journal, get back to us. No one is hiding physics papers from non-physicists - I can go to the Stanford library and read all I want. Authors in my field typically put their papers on their web sites. Journals and professional societies can’t afford to give away stuff for free. In fact, more mass libray type of on-line subscriptions is a real problem for journal budgets. Reviews are done for free, authors pay page charges, but there is usually a professional editorial staff who must get paid, in addition to publication and distribution charges. Specialized journals have low circulation - in my field, the more archival a journal is, the fewer people read it. You’re hardly the first young scientist who wants everything on the web for free.
I’m not saying the prices of for-profit journals aren’t outrageous, but I don’t know their cost model. I’ve been involved with journals published by professional societies, which are cheaper but which get subsidised by broader circulation more popular magazines.
Fine, since you seem reluctant to set forth an actual argument and completely fail to actually make a point, Ill start.
Why dont we start with Aquinas five proofs of gods existence. Ill assume youve read them.
The argument from motion.
Fails on its own logic: if there is an unmoved mover, then the first part of the argument is false.
The causation of existance.
Exact same thing: if there an uncaused cause, then the first part of the argument is false.
Contingent and necessary objects.
Again, same thing.
The argument from degrees and perfection.
Appeal to emotion. He feels there should be an ideal, so he states there is, and that ideal is god.
The argument from intelligent design.
Finally, his arguments only attempt to show a superior being. Even if one his points was true, all it would show was there was something superior, not that his version of god existed.
Appeal to ignorance. He doesnt understand how the universe works, so he states that something must have made it, and that something must be god.
There. This is something that can be found anywhere. Id like to be able point to a book and say ‘here he wrote it’, but I cant, Ive read it in lots of places.
No, thats still the definition of an ad hominem attack. Youre questioning my argument not the basis of the argument itself, but on the idea that I Im too stupid to be able to say what I did.
No, it only takes a correct person to have their single opinion outweight the opinions of billions. Smart has nothing to do with it.
Even more. Youre just not very good at this argument thing are you?
Bwahahahaha is that your argument? Really? Billions of people believed that the sun went around the earth, and then it was proven that it didnt. Did their opinions make them right? Did the number of people who thought it make it so? If billions of people believe that a table is made of oak, will it make it so, regardless of what it is actually made of? How many people have believed the tenets of Islam, or Bhuddism, or Egyptian mythology? Did thier belief make it right? This is textbook appeal to popularity.
So Im an angry teenage athiest am I? Well, 1 out of the 3 isnt bad. Oh wait, it is. Is this really all you have? Ad hominem after ad hominem? I had hoped for more with someone with so much fire, so much anger. Wait, anger. Hmm… nah.
Even more. Look, this is getting old. Name calling in the guise of big words is still name calling. You know jack shit about me, and judging by the quality of your posts Id like to keep it that way. Is this what passes for intelligent debate where you come from?
Are you serious? Do you actually think that I would claim that someone today would burn me at the stake for contradicting a belief? Wow. Youre just looking at tiny little things to attack me on arent you? Youre not even worried about the argument anymore, youre just screaming diatribe over the internet to someone who dared to call you wrong.
Should look like this:
Why dont we start with Aquinas five proofs of gods existence. Ill assume youve read them.
The argument from motion.
Fails on its own logic: if there is an unmoved mover, then the first part of the argument is false.
The causation of existance.
Exact same thing: if there an uncaused cause, then the first part of the argument is false.
Contingent and necessary objects.
Again, same thing.
The argument from degrees and perfection.
Appeal to emotion. He feels there should be an ideal, so he states there is, and that ideal is god.
The argument from intelligent design.
Appeal to ignorance. He doesnt understand how the universe works, so he states that something must have made it, and that something must be god.
Finally, his arguments only attempt to show a superior being. Even if one his points was true, all it would show was there was something superior, not that his version of god existed.
I just to point out (again) that not every belief has to be held up to the scientific method. I gave the example loving your mother. You do not need to use science to justify that belief.
hotflung, I love you dearly, and agree with a lot of what you’re saying here, and I certainly don’t want to start a separate thread about it . . . But will you please take the extra second or two and put apostrophes in your contractions? Your posts are really hard to read as-is, and as unfair as it seems, your arguments are not being helped by the lack of punctuation.
Why not? If your mother were horribly abusive, for example, understanding that “love” is a biochemical process that everybody naturally feels for their relatives despite what they sometimes may do may make it easier to deal with your conflicted feelings about her.
Are you trying to say that I’m fallaciously appealing to authority? I’m telling you that everyone appeals to authority. Ev. Er. Y. Body. And comparing peanut butter to God is not a reasonable analogy; that’s independently verifiable. More comparable is believing in atoms, if you don’t happen to have one of those spectacularly expensive microscopes. Have you seen an atom? I haven’t. I believe in them anyway. Based on arguments to authority. Is everyone who believes in atoms based only on what they learned in high school insane?
And, regarding the ‘having to have bearing on belief conferred’, in virtually all cases the indoctrinating parent claims to have first-hand, personal experience with god. Just like that guy with the peanut butter. (Not to pretend that your average small child requires ther mommy to have a degree in a subject to believe them about it.)
And any theist worth his faith will inform you with absolute honesty that prayer works, and has worked for him in practice. They’ll even have anecdotes. They prayed to get better, and lo and behold, they’re not dead. They prayed for strength, and survived. They prayed that they’d get a job, and they got it.
A prayer didn’t get answered? There’s already a half dozen apologies for that at the ready, written right into their faith. “It’s just 'cause it’s Windows.” “Must be a line down.” “A fuse blew.” (Oh, wait, those are your apologies.) Between a ready-made explaination for prayer failure, and the ‘van on the corner’ effect, what you call random chance of success they call working.
While this argument is not fallacious, it is also not valid, on account of premise B being false. Everyone operates on insufficiently proven princibles and has insufficiently proven beliefs. Therefore, by premise B, everyone is insane. (You’re not the first person here to call yourself insane. Don’t worry about it too much; just discard the crappy argument.)
Part of the problem with this whole ‘war on religion’ thing we’ve got going on here is that it’s too broad-based. If you want a prayer (heh) of a chance of establishing a supportable position, focus! Call literalists insane. Call 6000-year crationsists insane. (The most you can actually hope for is deluded, but you’d have a better shot at least.) But don’t try to nail that theistic scientist over there. It’s a losing battle.
Sort of, I guess its not quite what you were doing. I agree that people normally accept things taught to them by their parents, but I also think that after a certain point it becomes blind acceptance. Parents arent authority by expertise, theyre authority by trust. If you never question anything they say, then youre taking that too far, and it could be considered insanity. My parents told me about Santa Claus, and no one is upset that I stopped believing in him.
It is a valid comparison precisely because god is not independently verifiable. I was trying to point out the level of authority required for different claims. If god isnt independently verifiable, who can be an authority on it?
But the difference between authority saying ‘theres a god’ and authority saying ‘there are atoms’ is that the people espousing the atoms can actually give you real evidence and demonstrations based on that idea. Nuclear power, etc. The authority espousing god cannot. I trust an authority that actually has evidence much more readily than one that does not. I question that there can be an authority on god.
But do they actually have first hand personal experience with god?
Yeah, those are ‘apologies’, not known repeatable cases. If something goes wrong with my computer, I can fix it. If a part breaks, I can replace it. Then it works again.
Comparing computer problems with prayer problems is laughable. Prayer behaves exactly as if the prayer prayed to god, cthulhu, a horseshoe, or did nothing at all. If something good happens, they praise god for answering the prayers, and how well prayer worked. But when nothing happens, you get to hear all kinds of excuses proclaiming things they have no knowledge of to begin with: god has a plan, sometimes the answer is no, etc.
I dont think premise B is false. If someone has incorrect justification for a belief, and believes it anyway, thats insanity. An exception would be someone who doesnt know that their justification is incorrect. Of course, I would say that blind acceptance is a bit insane. There is no evidence for god, prayer, etc. And in spite of this, holding the belief that god, prayer, etc is real, is insane. I’m not really sure how to put this in logical format. I’ll have to think about it.
Isnt delusion a form of insanity? I think thats whats being said here. Its the belief in the face of absolutely no evidence.
Of course, you only stopped believing in Santa Claus because a seed of doubt was planted in your mind by something, and you then proceeded to find further adequate evidence to support your new conclusion. Religious people are told not to look for such evidence, and are given explanations for most of the problems they might encounter. Following such advice, while perhaps inadvisable, is not insane.
Oh, so that was what your point was. To a child who (so far as they know) cannot independently verify God, accepting the assertion of a person who claims to have personally experienced God is no more farcical than you believing the dude who claims to have seen the peanut butter. It’s first-hand witness testimony either way. Of course, sooner or later your average religoius person graduates to relying on the battery of their own personal experiences as interpreted by the rules of the world as they understand it. (The doing of which is, again, not insane.)
Not the people who told me there were atoms. I assure you there was not a single nuclear reactor in my high school classroom. (We didn’t even have a particle accelerator! Lousy cheap school…)
Your average church has a few hundred thousand testimonials as to the truth of it, including your beloved parents. Anecdotes abound, as well. (“I prayed and then got better!” can be absolutely true, and is only bad if you’ve been trained to default to coincicence as an explantion.) Whether you like it or not, all of this falls under the definition of ‘evidence’. Is it good evidence? Probably not as good as meeting God personally, but it’s better than nothing.
Also, the person espousing god can give you a test to run; pray with all your heart, and you’ll get results. If you don’t get results, the problem is not in the principle; it’s in the text; you didn’t follow the steps properly. First get credulous enough to believe anything, and then try again. Maybe add in a dash of emotional breakdown and desperation, that usually helps. It’ll work eventually. (Or maybe you’ll die first, but that’s your failure, not the principle.)
I assure you, you don’t have enough evidence to answer this question in the negative, and neither does anybody else. It’s simple unverifiable first-hand testimony, and unless you can catch them making blazing factual errors in their claims, they cannot be proven to be lying. Unless somebody’s proven that we know about everything that exists in and out of our universe when I wasn’t looking?
And they pray again, and it maybe works this time. If not, get more faith, or accept that it’s better overall if you don’t get what you want.
And if you pick up your phone and get no dial tone, I seriously doubt that you go out to the main line and repair the break. No, you get on some other phone and appeal to a higher power, and lo and behold, based on the capricious will of the phone company and whether you’ve been faithful with your payments, your service may be restored. Or not. AT&T works in mysterious ways.
With me, my car is the same (as I’m no mechanic). I presume that the reasons for the failure are knowable, but I don’t know them myself. So I appeal to a mechanic, and sometimes his efforts are immidiately successful, sometimes not. (I recall the month I went through four alternator belts.) Because he is not perfectly reliable, am I insane to think that my auto mechanic knows more about cars than I?
To a person with little knowledge of computers, the computer is as inexplicable and capricious as your average diety, and depending on your OS, perhaps less helpful. And if you think that’s bad, look at the Lotto! People keep praying to that and coming up dry. Perhaps they’re stupid to do so, but are they insane to think that it is possible that one day their appeal will be rewarded with magnificent reward and riches? Is belief that the lotto occasionally pays out insane?
Infrequency of success is no guarantee that the suppositions feuling the attempt are false.
Take your time. It should be noted, though, that many of the reasons people have for believing in God are impossible to prove false. So, anybody believing based on such a rationale would fall under your exception.
Curse this english language! I am using ‘deluded’ as its past-tense verb form, not in its noun form. I understand that form (as in ‘he deluded her’) to mean something like ‘very badly decieved’. That was what I intended, anyway. And I don’t think that’s the same as being insane.
Now, I’m not saying these people are right. (They can’t possibly all be right.) I’d even be perfectly happy with you declaring that they’re stupid. (Particularly if you focus on ones that are disregarding other more conventionally compelling evidence due to preference for their testimonails and whatnot.) But insane? No. That’s too far; nothing more than an unfounded ad-hominem. And who needs those?
Jesus is acknowledged in america everyday. Just look at a calander and tell me where the date derives from, " Jesus Christ". So when you look at a calander right a check or get your pay check thank Jesus for the date.
Days of the Week: In English all the days of the week are named after the ruling luminary, with most of the names coming from Anglo-Saxon gods and goddesses. Sunday and Monday are named directly from the Sun and Moon, although the Anglo-Saxon goddess Sunne is implicit in the name of the Sun itself. Saturday is the only day named directly after a Roman god, though the Germanic god associated with each day is generally a syncretic calque of the corresponding divinity from the Roman calendar.
Months:
January
Named after the Roman god of beginnings and endings Janus (the month Januarius).
March
This is the first month of the Roman year. It is named after the Roman god of war, Mars.
May
The third month of the Roman calendar. The name probably comes from Maiesta, the Roman goddess of honor and reverence.
June
The fourth month was named in honor of Juno. However, the name might also come from iuniores (young men; juniors) as opposed to maiores (grown men; majors) for May, the two months being dedicated to young and old men.
July
It was the month in which Julius Caesar was born, and named Julius in his honor in 44 BCE, the year of his assassination. Also called Quintilis (fifth month).
August
Originally this month was called Sextilis (from sextus, “six”), but the name was later changed in honor of the first of the Roman emperors, Augustus (because several fortunate events of his life occurred during this month).
Do people really pray to the lotto? I think they play the lotto and then pray to some god to help them win. They are not insane to think they have a chance to win. They do have a chance to win probably about a one in a hundred million chance of winning (I am sure of what the chances of winning different lotteries is). They would be completely justified to believe they have that chance of winning. On the other hand if they thought praying to a god increased their chances they would win they would not be justified in that belief.
The same is true of other forms of prayer. A person is justified in believing the things they pray for may come true if it is possible they will. If a million pray for their family member’s cancer to go into remission some of them will get what they prayed for. But there is no evidence it had anything to do with prayer.
The situation with an auto mechanic and prayer are totally different. Sure the mechanic is not perfect, but we do know that taking your car to a mechanic greatly improves the chances of the car being fixed. This is backed up tons of evidence.
This is not true of prayer. We see this in the report linked above about prayer and medical issues. Except for a same placebo effect we see prayer does nothing. This is just not true of mechanics. We know that mechanics greatly improve the chances that your car will be fixed. But there is no evidence that prayer works. We see the things that people pray for happening at the rate we predict they will regardless of the prayers.
Not only that, but the mechanisms of car repair are known. You may not know them, but you could study them and see they are based on evidence and rational thought. This is not true of prayer.
You know there is a difference between the auto mechanic and prayer. If you don’t, the next time your car needs a new alternator belt try praying for the car work instead. See how far that gets you. The bus would be my guess.
I see. I suppose you can keep refining your definition to make yourself right. I don’t see why a new interpretation isn’t still something new. That doesn’t mean they are all positive. It’s all part of seeking.
How about the Nag Hammadi Library? Ancient books about Chjrsitianity not included in the NT discovered in 1945? Would that qualify? This discovery has had a direct effect on how people view the bible and the history of Christianity. How about the thousands of new copies of the books of the NT that have been discovered. Those have shed new light on where the bible came from and changed doctrine for many.
Your original claim was that religion offers nothing new. I think there’s some pretty serious doubts about that assertion.
Perhaps. The rules might be constant but you wouldn’t explain them in the same way and certainly they would not be percieved the same. Your talking about the commandments of God not being constant but you are judging that by the varied perceptions of the children.
I confess a profound ignorance about Judaism and the OT. When I read through Leviticus it seemed to me that religion was being used by the priests to try and lead the people and exert some control over them. If you see certain practices are harmful to the culture or even believe they are, then tell people God forbids it.
It seems obvious that religion is not just the inner journey but interwoven with the temperament of current society, traditions and myths. It seems to me that Jesus simply elaborated and tried to clarify the rules already handed down. To not covet they neighbors wife or his ass {assuming he had a nicer ass than his wife} wasn’t just to not take them, but to even examine your heart to the point of not wanting them.
In the Mormon Doctrine and Covenants there’s an interesting section where Joseph Smith is asking God for clarification about the sacrament of Communion. How often is Oft? God’s reply is basically, It’s up to you. Every Sunday is okay. Once a month, Once every two months. You can work out the details.
I think a lot of the details of the rules are like that. It’s mans mistake to put the letter of the law before the spirit of it.
I did a little reading on the 10 commandments and found something. In Luke 10 a man asks Jesus “What must I do to have eternal life?” and Jesus asks him about the law. He replies Love God and love my neighbor as myself. Yet when I look up the ten commandments they actually don’t say that. Thoughts?
In the ten commandments I found this in
This is presented as an act by and the will of God but I think it speaks to how things work. Our lives touch the lives of others and parents pass on to their children and future generations not just genetic features but by their actions and example certain subjective traits that either need to be overcome to grow, or built upon to grow even more. It’s a slow process but we see it’s effects.
Well, I do agree that if the laws and the Bible are not accurate reflections of what God said, all bets are off.
Well, clearly I agree that it is all made up, but I don’t agree that it was a matter of control. Many of these laws were for keeping Jewish/Hebrew identity in an increasingly diverse Middle Eastern culture. Much as we might scoff at these very detailed laws, over 2,000 years later we have people like me who are Jewish, while we don’t have Assyrians or Phoenicians running around. Descendants, yet, but no national identity. So the priestly strategy worked.
But as far as god goes, if they made up the Sabbath they could have made up God just as easily, couldn’t they? We’re again left with the problem of how much of what is written is inspired. If God intended us to guess, it’s pretty much all up in the air. Saying that the Bible is either all true or not true at all seems to be the only consistent positions. This does not mean that no gods exist - just that the Bible is an unreliable pointer to god.