It’s possible, but what’s your point? Are you saying we should ignore all currently available evidence, and just believe anything and everything, just in case it turns out to be true someday?
I think you’re confusing skepticism with narrow-mindedness:
A skeptic would say, “I don’t see any valid reason to believe x is true”.
Whereas a narrow-minded person would say “I refuse to believe x is true despite the evidence”.
yup.
If there were no evil there could not be good because there would be no such thing as not-good. You can’t have up without down, left without right.
And, as stated previously, I never said science is evil, and I’m not saying that faith can’t (or shouldn’t) be changed by experience.
And when was the last time you went looking for a new fact or possibility with no belief that the fact or possibility might exist, despite a lack of evidence? Positing something makes it much easier to find it - isn’t that what the hypothesis is for?
You’ve missed my point.
Of course science would incorporate and move on; as it has and as it will. But history has shown that the scientific establishment does not readily embrace that which is leaps and bounds beyond its current knowledge base.
That poor schmuck who felt that ulcers were caused by bacteria was ridiculed beyond belief until the science was developed to back him up.
I’m saying that many of you seem as rigid in your mindset as my scientists of 1600 scoffing at radio waves.
I embrace the possibility that there is a lot of science yet to be found. I don’t think we’re asymptotically approaching absolute scientific knowledge. There surely must be gaps. Gaps big enough to allow for something like a soul to be proved empirically.
Maybe souls have something to do with those curled up extra spacial dimensions that are often talked about…I have no idea, but I am open to new ideas, even ones that don’t seem to have any clear connection to present science.
These posts are an interesting example of exactly the phenomenon I’m describing.
We’re all arguing with each other, based on the words we’ve typed, based on an attempt to be reasonable - and at the same time we’re arguing with or promoting on behalf of our experiences and our beliefs about our experiences beyond this forum. Those constructs exist only in our minds, yet they’re real. You can call your constructs knowledge, but someone else who has witnessed the same phenomena will describe it differently.
For example, some really negative qualities have been attributed to people of faith who aren’t present in this argument - someone said that true believers’ minds are locked in a read-only position (which I think applies to some people of faith as well as to some who follow an empirical doctrine; but anyway). And I believe you that you have met people like that.
So your reality, the position from which you’re making statements, includes and incorporates these experiences that are beyond the material reality of this argument. You’re bringing your beliefs to the table as you describe reality. I don’t see it the same way, your reality is not mine - and you can’t prove your reality entirely within the confines of this message board, the written word. It’s tautological.
And a skeptic becomes narrow-minded when he says that his way of seeing, his idea of validity, is the only one.
The constructs are real, yes. But not necessarily the things to which the constructs refer.
You’re getting way off-topic here anyway.
What we’re saying is that you have another “way of seeing” then you need to justify it as a system that can in some way discern false claims from true ones.
I mean, look at BwanaBob’s example:
The problem is, Bob, that you are assuming that, because there ARE such things as radio waves, you were eventually proven right. But actually, it doesn’t work like that at all. The actual truth of falsity of the assertion is not what makes something knowledge: it is having REASONS to show that a certain claim is true or false. Anyone can make assertions, and some assertions will turn out to be right. But that doesn’t retroactively justify the assertions.
Here’s a little scenario to illustrate:
You put a gun to your head, and ask me whether there are any bullets in the gun.
I say, no, I know for a fact that there are not.
Believing me, you pull the trigger, and nothing happens: there were no bullets in the gun.
But, as it turns out, I didn’t actually know whether or not there were bullets in the gun. So I was lying when I said that I knew there weren’t any bullets in the gun, and the fact that there weren’t any doesn’t at all absolve me of that lie.
Likewise, there are a gazillion loonies out there suggesting all sorts of theories about all sorts of things. The vast majority are likely very very wrong. But, purely by chance, one or two might be right. However, they had no actual KNOWLEDGE demonstrating that they were right, and that makes their claims just as worthless as when we didn’t know they were correct. ANYONE can make claims: that’s pathetically easy. The really really hard part, the real work, is finding ways to establish the truth of those claims.
As Michael Shermer once pointed out, the argument “you can laugh at me, but remember: they laughed at Einstein and Newton once” is a rather poor one to “prove” one’s genius. People also laughed at the Marx Brothers. And when you look back through the history of claims, there were always way way more people that were wrong than were right.
Absolutely not. A good scientist does not just pull his hypothesis out of a hat. The hypothesis is based on some material observation. As in your planets example; someone didn’t just say “Gee, I think there ought to be more planets.” They either saw something through a telescope, or observed an irregularity in the orbit of a previously known body that allowed them to infer the existence of a new body.
BwanaBob:
Your accusation lacks substance. Please tell us exactly which statement you believe to be “rigid”, and then show us precisely which objective evidence you feel the person who made the statement is ignoring.
Of course there are gaps in our knowledge. But if you are using the word “soul” simply as a place-holder for “things we don’t know”, then the word is devoid of meaning.
And you do understand the difference between “There isn’t any reliable evidence for the existence of souls, and the concept isn’t well-enough defined to even discuss”, which is what we have been saying, AND “It is impossible for souls to exist”, which nobody here has said.
You’re correct, I have the benefit of knowing that radio waves do exist.
I was trying to emphasize that I was open to ideas that may not be anchored in current science.
You’re right in that I could postulate that there are mushrooms growing on Pluto and perhaps it would be a stretch to give it much creedence.
I guess I’m cutting more slack to something like a soul.
I’m hearing that you’re equating the idea of a soul as “one of a zillion crazy ideas”.
Personally I think the Plutonian mushrooms are crazier.
You’re missing the point. It’s not that you are cheating by knowing that radio waves exist: you’re letting that fact blind you to the reality that being able to claim it is not the same as having any good justification for calling it knowledge. That’s the difference between being open to possibility (which is great) to claiming that you know something when you don’t (which is not great).
Like fessie, you’re simulatenously trying to play up our lack of knowledge, but then all of a sudden, ignore that lack and push a claimed aspect of knowledge through without any good reason to justify it.
I don’t know about crazier, but at least with the Plutonian mushrooms we can at least know what the heck is being posulated, and how we’d go about verifying whether it was true or not.
So if Good couldn’t exist without Evil, does that mean that Evil is actually good, since it makes Good possible? Or is Good actually evil, since Evil could not exist without Good?
The way I look at things, Good and Evil are simply different points on a scale of morality. Neither one actually exists. If we lived in a Utopian world, Evil would still exist – It would just be defined differently. Maybe the Utopians would view littering with the same horror that we view mass genocide.
My point is that all these things that you are defining as polar opposites (good/evil, up/down, left/right, tall/short, etc) are not opposites at all. They are simply different measures of the same property. You don’t need one for the other to exists, because neither of the pair exists at all, except as an abstract point/area on some scale designed to measure some property.
No one is saying that faith and belief are worthless; just that they are not the same thing as knowledge. When you go from “I believe that I have a soul” to “I know that I have a soul” without any sort of testing or method of verification, then you have short-circuited the fact-finding process, and your conclusion can not be labled as “knowledge”.
But no one is saying that. We’re only saying that we see no valid reason to believe that our idea of validity isn’t the only one. No other concept of validity has been presented so far. Would you care to present to us a new way of determing validity, and telling us why it is better or more useful than the one we are currently using?
Just for the record, nowhere did I ever claim as knowledge that souls exist.
I’m just open to the possibility.
I wish there was a clearcut path to empirically proving it.
How about this - Many types of knowledge, and many ways of getting there:
Factual - empirical observation of quantifiable phenomena
Emotional - personal experience as a human being
Spiritual - personal experience of a higher power
Philosophical - reason
Belief - that which precedes knowledge, gives it meaning, and creates additional possibilities; can be individual or collective
BwanaBob I thought your examples made perfect sense, but I don’t agree with your last post. Why should all of life exist on the empirical plane? That would take away a lot of the fun.
If I’m not allowed to speak for all ironworkers & artists, then surely you can’t speak for all scientists. Hubby just confirmed that yes, he does sometimes follow gut instincts.
How else did the Wright brothers figure out they might be able to fly?
What does fun have to do with this? You lost me on that one.Anyway, my point of view is that there is no evidence that anything other than the emperical plane even exists. If you want to postulate life on a non-empirical plane, you first need to show the existance of such a plane. If, for one concept to be true, it requires that a second concept be true, and if that second concept cannot be shown to be true (or even be well defined), then arguing the validity of the first concept is nothing more than a thought excercise. It might be entertaining or even enligntning, but it would have no basis in reality.
They were given a rubberband-powered flying toy by their father when they were children. They postulated that if a small weight were able to fly, it should be possible to do so with a larger weight, as well.
I’m sorry, but I really can’t see where this discussion is going. What does the inspiration of the Wright brothers have to do with spirituality, beleif vs knowledge, or any of the other main topics of this thread? I understand that even those who work with the empical can be inspired; no one is denying that. But what does that have to do with the discussion at hand?
I’m not trying to dismiss what you’re saying. I just think that this discussion is starting to lose its focus.
The biggest problem with this type of thinking in my view is that it is akin to specualting that the sun may have a conciousness or the trees have eyes.Creatures develope eyes as evolutionary adaptions for one of two reasons 1)To see prey and 2)to AVOID predators.To speculate that maybe trees have invisible eyes begs the question :why?So they can see the danger which they cannot avoid or the prey which they cannot catch?
What need do we ahve for a soul?What observation has anyone made that infers the existence of a soul and cannot be explained by the purely natural?
That at least can be easily answered. If a soul allows an organism to be reborn into another physical body with even a tiny portion of previous knowledge, then it could provide a huge evolutionary advantage. If a soul can provide guidance to its descendants, as all religions suppose, then that too provides a huge evolutionary advantage.
The biggest probem I see with your argumment GodlessSkeptic is that it relies on an implicit assumption that survival of the fittest is the primary driver of all processes, even in BwanaBob’s “curled up extra spacial dimensions”. This is a totally unwarranted assumption isn’t it?
Most religions suggest that the physical body exists for the benefit of the soul, not the other way around. They all seem to believe that some form of ‘uber-soul’ preceded life and either created or modified life in order to provide a home to the soul. As such you are putting the cart befre the horse in asking what use a body has for a soul. The theological question is what us does the soul have for the body, and every religion has its own answers to that question.
I agree that no one has ever made an observation that can’t be explained away by physical causes. Of course with sufficiently complicated orbits and fudge factors there are no observations that can’t be explained away within the geocentric model of the universe.
Just because we can explain something using a specific frame of reference doesn’t prove that that is the explanation. Nor does it prove that that frame of refernce is the one we should use.
This debate can’t be settled precisely because the two sides can’t agree on a common reference point. On the one hand you seem to be starting form the point that the body must have ‘evolved’ a soul, and that the body is the highest point. The opposition is starting from the point that the soul is the ultimate expression of life, and the body is a container.
There are observations that suggest the existence of a soul, and to people like myself they are compelling because of the point we start from. I freely admit they can all be explained away with sufficiently complicated and largely unprovable theories based on the physical body. That doesn’t make those explanations correct, and it certainly doesn’t make them more elegant or compelling.
And that has what to do with anything?
No. Reason, when properly used, brings factual knowledge. As for emotional, spiritual and philosophical knowledge, as far as I can see they don’t exist.
Of course he does, he’s human. Ask him to make honest notes whether he’s right or wrong every time he follows a gut instinct, and then compare that (honestly, again) to the times he uses empirical knowledge. It’s going to be seriously lopsided.
Are you saying you think Orville woke up one morning with a sudden iron belief that flying a heavier-than-air machine was possible, and rushed to tell his brother? Really?
[quote]
As for emotional, spiritual and philosophical knowledge, as far as I can see they don’t exist.[/qote]
So you don’t believe that anyone has ever garnered personal experience as a human being? That seems very odd. I have personally amased a huge wealth of such knowledge: people I have loved, events that have terified me, jokes that have amused me and so forth. Given that the vast majority of humans claim to have had such experiences (you are the only one I know of who doesn’t), upon what do you base your belief that such experiences don’t exist?
You’ve misunderstood me. Obviously emotions exist. Obviously philosophy exists. However, I resist the notion that “knowledge” brought through emotions or philosophy is a kind of knowledge different from factual knowledge. It’s either non-knowledge (as with much philosophy) or factual knowledge (such as the events that terrified you and jokes that amused you).
Simply put, I don’t understand what “emotional knowledge”, “spiritual knowledge” or “philosophical knowledge” are supposed to mean, if they’re not factual knowledge. I think I need fessie to explain what she meant.
I’ve never claimed not to have loved people, been terrified or been amused. That’s your interpretation, and it’s wrong. That’s my main problem with all of this; everyone has his or her own definitions of everything. Someone says he doesn’t believe in a soul, and fessie says
No-one ever said any of those things, just that they don’t subscribe to an irrational, mostly undefined belief. fessie, with her own notions of what a “soul” is, made this interpretation, as you did now.
I was just using fesie’s defintion for factual knowledge, which she presented above. You claimed that you didn’t think knowledge fititng this description did not exist at all. Not just that it was a subset of factual knowledge, but that it is non existant.
So tell me, what defintion of facual knowledge are you using?
And that should of course read “fessie’s defintion for emotional knowledge”.
Preview.
Preview.
You’re right, I didn’t read fessie’s post closely enough (or rather, fell for the same error I was complaining about, ie enforcing my own definitions).
So: I resist fessie’s definitions of factual, emotional, spiritual and philosophical knowledge on the grounds that there is only one kind of knowledge, and no meaningful distinction can be upheld.
[sub]By the way, I missed my 1000 post party by a post. Do I still get to learn the handshake?[/sub]