If that is what he meant, then this completely begs the question. If his evidence that people have NDEs is that they cannot have or remember any conscious experience when dead because he simply declares all such memories to be NDE and not natural memory… well that’s pretty much assuming your conclusion pretty directly.
I saw an hour long special on near death experiences. They are caused by oxygen deprivation and can be duplicated. They are a chemical not a spiritual experience. I still think you could get there easier with LSD or peyote. Those drugs were once touted as gateways to religious experiences. Now we know they are for recreation. Some are into choking your partner during sex for a near death and sexual high. That would also not qualify as a visit to god. Near death has been relegated to crop circle realm.
I thought Left Hand was channeling Nietzsche in saying that even the most rational and logically ordered systems of belief are, if one goes down far enough, at least in part based upon assumptions that are purely subjective and unverifiable, thus rendering the entire “web of belief,” however elegantly constructed, completely unstable and untrustworthy, like a beautifully engineered skyscraper built upon a foundation of slime. A similar argument, but it goes further than Hume.
But all atheists have a belief system don’t they?
Is theism by itself a belief system? Just believing “god is” doesn’t strike me as a belief system.
I agree: simply being a theist is not itself a religion or a belief system. It might be inconsequential to the theist that they are a theist, for instance.
Hey, I didn’t invoke Goedel, YOU did :). And I don’t think you can prove an axiom using the axiom: assuming that which you set out to prove is a logical error.
As you rightly suggest, though, some axioms common to rationalists include the idea that similar causes beget similar effects, and that if P is true, ~P is false. I myself assume these to be true, but I cannot prove them to be true within my system of beliefs.
Daniel
You’re overstating the facts. Yes there have been similarities noted and documented between certain chemical reactions and what people describe as spiritual experiences. That doesn’t make them the same thing.
The other question is whether the chemical reaction causes the experience or whether then experience triggers the chemical reaction. The fact that it can be artificially induced isn’t proof that the spiritual experience is purely chemical. You are free to draw your own conclusions but that doesn’t make it a better conclusion than anyone else’s.
The body is unconscious or dead, but the spirit is wide awake and experiencing being out of the body and doing many other things. You are not your body, nor your thoughts, emotions, etc. You are eternal and will live after the death of your body. Great isn’t it. Nothing to be afraid of, no one will hurt you.
Synopsis;
Argument 1: Atheism is a belief system.
It is a rejection or absense of a belief system.
2. Neardeath is proof of afterlife.
Neardeath is equivalent to proof as alien abduction is to proof of .we are not alone. Not even close. So far outside the realm of proof and logic that it is an embarrasing argument. It does not even require rigorous discussion.
3. Science like religion is based on a proofless base. That axioms are made up.
Absolutely rediculous. The base of science is observation of a phenomena, measurement, and repeatability. None of the requirements in science are met in religion. That is why it is a belief system. That is why science is not.
What you saw is wrong and no way provable. No one has been able to induce a near death experience. Here I am talking about a real full-blown near death experience. Sure, if you get hit by a baseball bat you will probable see light. Using drugs will allow you to see some elements of a new death experience, like the light, and love, and some others. But a real near death experience contains a conversation between a spirit entity and the experiencer concerning “coming back to life or not.” These presentations like you saw are lies and frauds put out by skeptics that know what real near death experiences are like but are in denial.
I strongly suggest you read near death experiences written by near death experiencers themselves if you want to know the truth.
Look back to one of my first posts in this thread which has the characteristics of a real near death experience and you will see the vast difference.
How about quoting who you are responding to specifically? Has anybody made these claims as you state them?
Gonzomax, if you repeat an experiment many times and the same thing happens each time, will that enable you to better predict what will happen in the future?
Prove it.
Daniel
Another problem is that his assertion was wrong. The proof about undecidable propositions applies only to systems of Peano arithmetic.
This appears to be more-or-less accurate, on a brief reading of the proof (the proof actually applies to systems capable of contianing Peano artimetic). Nonetheless, I think it’s fair to say that a similar situation applies to science, as commonly practiced. Virtually everyone who relies on science does so in the belief that past experiments can predict future events; this is why we get behind the wheel of our car without fearing that the car will turn into an alligator and devour us. Such a belief cannot be proven scientifically, but it is fundamental to the practice of science.
Daniel
I think that’s a fair thing to say, and a fair way to say it. In fact, the foundation of the scientific method is falsification, which itself is an unfalsifiable philosophical principle. The unfortunate thing about the analogous application of Godel’s theory to broader systems is that too many people lose sight of the fact that it is just an analogy. I’ve seen people right here on this board argue that they can prove 1+1=2 through scientific experiment! They honestly believe that they can validate an analytic statement through empirical means. These are largely the same people who demand empirical proof (or evidence) for the existence of God. The problem these days with science, in my opinion, is that its students have lost sight of its roots. They know a lot about the technology of science, but virtually nothing about its philosophy. That’s a generalization, to be sure, and exceptions are notable, including people on this board like you, Voyager, Darwin’s Finch, and SentientMeat.
Thanks for the compliment–but I wanna respond to this. 1+1=2 can be proven through scientific experiment, as long as your standard of proof is a scientific, not mathematical, standard. In order to do so, you simply need to define what the various terms mean in the empirical world (and, having taught addition to first graders, I firmly believe every term in that equation has a meaning in the empirical world), and then devise a series of means by which to test the equation.
Sure, you won’t achieve a mathematical proof through this standard, but you can achieve a scientific proof. And your terms will be defined in a fashion that is not perfectly acceptable to high-order mathematics. But not only is it good enough for a first-grader, it’s absolutely essential for teaching the concept to a first-grader.
Daniel
Atheism can be a belief system and can be not a belief system. It contains within itself two concepts. I: The belief that there is no god. That is a belief system. II: The absence of a belief in god or gods. That is not a belief system, any more than being from New York makes you a Yankees fan.
That said, if you asked someone from New York if they were rooting for the Yankees when they were in the World Series, you’d get a positive response. If you ask a type II atheist something religious, they might respond in a similarly positive manner, simply as social lubrication.
How many people have no actual belief in god, but merely mouth the words?
E-Sabbath, have you ever described an inanimate object as atheist? What about a squirrel–has it ever occurred to you that squirrels are atheist? Infants: atheist or not?
The word is overwhelmingly used to describe humans with belief systems that do not include a belief in a god or gods. It’s not used to describe entities that lack belief systems.
So sure, atheism is not a belief system, really–but it is a descriptor of belief systems, describing specifically those systems that do NOT contain a particular type of belief.
Daniel
IMHO belief that there is no god or gods, strong atheism, is not a belief system .
It is one belief. I think it takes more than one belief to make up a belief system.
Given that the assumptions that science relies on are the very same assumptions that allow people to put on a pair of pants and find their mouths with the cereal spoon, I think science is in pretty good shape. 
We’ve actually had this very debate. And yes, it’s quite accurate to say that squirrel infants and rocks are atheists in the same WAY that I am an atheist: we none of us do the thing called “believing in god.” Of course, I am the only one capable of doing so if I became convinced to do so, but that’s a moot point from the perspective of simply describing what we all DON’T do.
We don’t generally count or care that these other three things are non-believers because it doesn’t really matter.
I’m not sure this really makes sense either. It’s like saying that non-basketball playing is a description OF sports playing. You might well argue that for some definition of belief, all atheists have beliefs (and for some definition of sports, all non-basketball players play sports), but I’m still not sure it makes sense to call not believing itself a “descriptor of belief systems” because what it’s explicitly describing is a particular group of people. You might as well call it a “descriptor of spinal cord havers” since all people have spinal cords.