Please don’t attempt to tell me what defines my outlook on life.
You seem to be talking about rational skeptics, not necessarily atheists. Religion makes A LOT of unfalsifiable claims, which science can’t touch. The afterlife is one claim and atheists do bring up the science regarding this. Let’s look at this though - scientifically speaking, a load of biblical claims have been shown to be false.
What happens? Believers change what they believe to indicate a more metaphorical belief or they ignore the science. God can do anything, including deviating from the natural.
DT and I both do it constantly.
There afe a lot of atheists who do point out the impossibility of surviving consciousness (i.e afterlife beliefs), but when you’re talking to people who believe in magic, it doesn’t really matter.
The non-existence of the non-physical is just a definitional truism. Existence, by definition, has to be physical.
The studies being referenced are those proving that consciousness is a physical, emergent property of the brain, and, as such, inseparable from it.
I’m curious as to why, in this particular case, Dawkins would use such weasel words. I haven’t read his work, but from what I understand of him, he usually isn’t afraid to call a spade a spade, metaphorically speaking.
Genuine question, then: religious people live and structure their lives on the assumption that their religion is true, which affects what they do, how they do it, how they spend their money, what they support politically, what they teach their kids, and so on.
Atheists do not.
Please explain how and why that difference is not defining, especially as (for example) a member of Congress who is a member of one group is likely to make far-reaching decisions that affects the nation (and perhaps the entire world) much more differently than a member of Congress who is a member of the other group.
Well, now you are making me curious. 
I might have to go looking for some debates. As I said, I read this years ago. It might have been in Shermer’s “how we believe”, but maybe not.
I don’t know specifically what Dio is talking about. As far as scientific proof goes, it seems as though you feel that this means it’s a deductive certainty (if not, my mistake). That’s not how science views proof though. They view it as reasonably certain - as certain as we can be without 100% certainty (which we can’t really achieve).
So, I suspect this leaves believers with more wiggle room.
Hmm. Then perhaps I’m more thinking about the framing of those assertions. I just don’t remember hearing that science has proven that the Big Three religions are lies, not even as rebuttal from the religious side.
Double hmmm. If this means what I think this means, then I think I’m starting to see some light on this issue.
Well, it seemed to me that Dio was presenting it as a deductive certainty. If I’m misinterpreting him, then I myself apologize. If it is, though, that ties in to my confusion on tactics and such.
I don’t believe that any of your questions have been genuine ones. If you feel like started a GD thread someday, I might join. But I don’t feel that you are interested in doing more than playing.
They’re not weasel words, they’re necessary scientific qualifications. From a purely scientific standpoint, you can never say that anything is absolutely impossible, only astronomically unlikely.
I think it’s a false premise to say it really makes any difference. Basic ethical concepts and feelings are biological in nature, not religious. There are, of course, some religious rules that some people order their lives around, lacking those rules does not mean one’s life is defined by lacking them. Are the lives of non-Muslims defined by not praying five times a day facing Mecca? Do non-Muslms go around thinking, “it’s time to not face Mecca and pray?” People’s lives are not defined by what religious rules they don’t follow. That’s absurd.
I suspect he’s not (don’t know), but this stance is often confused about science. People use it to suggest that science is full of holes (If science was wrong about Newton -a la Einstein- then it could be wrong about this!). The trouble is that people don’t realize that we build on previous knowledge. It’s not that we were empirically wrong, it’s that we had a narrower view of what reality consists of. Google The Relativity of Wrong, to get a much better written explanation then what I’m saying.
Basically, science generally works off of abduction, induction, and falsification. Only very few disciplines are truly deductive in science. So science works to achieve a reasonably certain view of the world, not a 100% certain one…because, well, how would you go about doing that?
Then I must’ve been misinterpreting the post that originally brought the basic question to mind, then, because I thought you were asserting absolute impossibility as proven by science. But in combination with your previous clarification on definitions, I’m guessing you must’ve meant “impossible” insofar as science has the ability to prove.
ETA: The post before mine seems to back this up, assuming you agree with Meatros. My apologies, Dio.
Aha. I thought at first that jsgodess’s original reply to a previous paragraph of mine was a bit of a non-sequitur. But I see where she/you is coming from now.
I guess there’s a bit of a definition difference, then, because what I was thinking was “Since, for example, the objections to gay marriage are almost entirely religious, how can the difference between Christians and atheists on subjects such as this (and subjects such as the afterlife and whether what we do in life affects whether we’ll spend an eternity happy or in hellish torment) not be outlook defining? How can it not be outlook defining that an atheist KNOWS he won’t have to stone a witch or take away the rights of a gay person just to satisfy some unseeable and unknowable God?” The Mecca thing felt to me more like the trappings of religion.
Am I making sense? 
(And I knew I should’ve paid more attentions to those GD threads over whether morality/ethics are inherent or a function of culture…)
That’s not how science works. It doesn’t draw conclusions about philosophical/religious implications. It can (and has) proven that consciousness is a purely biochemical phenomenon, but the religious implications of that are not for scientists to draw conclusions about.
In scientific terms, nothing can ever be presented as an absolute certainty, but in practical terms, we can say that some things are so close to certain as to render qualifications functionally unnecessary (for instance, we can just say the earth revolves around the sun, we don’t have to say it almost certainly revolves around the sun), and we can say some things are so astronomically improbable that we are safe in saying it’s “impossible” for all practical purposes (i.e we can say it’s “impossible” for me to levitate my Dodge Grand Caravan over the Cathedral in St. Paul, we don’t have to say, “it’s extremely improbable”). There are orders of probablity/improbability so great that we can dispense with qualifications in ordinary conversation, but science always has to technically leave the door open.
As an FYI - I’ve been just farting around the intrawebs trying to figure this out - it seems there are multiple versions of astrology - some claiming a heliocentric model. I’ll have to find my original source before I’m confident in my claim. I believe it was regarding western astrology and maybe the zodiac.
Speaking of astrology, Meatros, these days people aren’t even the signs they’re told they are.
Wellllll … I understand what you’re saying and I qualifiedly agree, but strictly speaking, scientific practice says nothing about the probability of an explanation’s correctness. All one can do is pose theories subject to (hopefully) many harsh potential falsifications. Someone might want to argue that surviving lots of tests implies a greater propensity toward truthfulness, but – for any test – there are an infinity of theories which are not falsified by the result. Arguing that the truth of a theory (say, of the origins of consciousness) is essentially one puts you on fishy epistemic grounds.
The choice between “Theory A” and “God did it, but made it look like Theory A” is not one that can be made within science.
(Assuming you’re even after truth at all, as opposed to, say, predictive power.)