No, we are not dealing with different things. We are dealing with belief. The goal of belief is truth. The norm governing belief is whether it is based on evidence. That is the case in all of our truth-seeking practices. But religion, to the extent that it relies on faith, wants to exempt itself from this requirement. At the risk of being boringly repititious, this is an ad hoc exemption and merely a case of special pleading on the part of religion. Why should religious belief get to be judged as different, and be exempt from the standards that govern other sorts of belief?
You still don’t get the difference between trusting scientific experts who can, independently of each other, replicate each others results, and religious ‘experts’ who can do no such thing. Fine. I won’t try to explain the difference to you any more.
It is true that some theologians pursue another alternative–they believe that the existence of God can be known a priori. But it is safe to say that rationalism quit being a viable epistemic theory many moons ago. And having studied the a priori arguments for God’s existence, I can say with some confidence that they are no good. And this is the overwhelming consensus of philosophers who have studied these arguments.
You don’t have to take my word that religious belief usually involves special pleading. I gave you examples of moves commonly made by believer. If you have read even a handful of threads on religion in GD, you will have seen all of these moves made. And they are all cases of special pleading.
I don’t think we could do a canine brain transplant, but we can do and have done human heart transplants where the memories of the donor are somehow in the receiver.
Science tells us nothing about these things, because these are normative assertions and not the proper province of science. But that doesn’t at all mean that there must be a God. Not that you would think that.
We have no reason to believe that a soul exists, and no lack of explanation that a soul explanation fits. There is no reason to assert that a soul doesn’t exist, because there is absolutely no evidence for its existance.
Yes, if the physcial aspects of your brain change you change. Drugs, damage, anything that physically changes your brain can change you. This is quite well documented, if not perfectly understood by medical science. You are arguing from ignorance.
Wrong. The assertion that god doesn’t exist doesn’t need to be made, as god has never been shown to exist in first place. An athiest does not need to say god doesn’t exist, they don’t have to, because there is no evidence of god in the first place.
If there is no evidence for and there is any evidence against, then all evidence is against.
Of course. All religion is purely subjective. Everyone has a different idea of what is good/bad even within a supposed rigid moral structure.
Aparantly a solid grasp of the standards of grammer, spelling and the importance of the preview post will also not follow. Oops :smack:
This again is a Negative Proof Fallacy. If existance is posited then, regardless of where the burdon of proof lies, the concept exists. Proving it does not exist due to the fact that there is no evidence of something that does not claim to have physical properties in the first place does not prove that it does not exist. An example would be the extra dimentions proposed by M-Theory. Their physical properties are not detectable and the hypothisis that they exist is purely mathematical but there is no direct evidence that they do not exist.
Just because an event “can” change you does not mean that the event “will” or necessarily “has to” change you. And even if the event causes a significant change that does not mean that the person is a completely different individual in the end. There are no absolutes here or elsewhere.
Again this is the Negative Proof Fallacy. That the assertion has ever been made that God exists grants a foundation to the debate. Again, without assigning onus, just because there is no evidence of the existance of something that does not have physical properties that does not prove that that something does not exist. A good example is the Pink Unicorn Theory. While this theory does not match my personal beliefs I do understand that it is equally logical and probable in terms of any other established thiestic theory.
This trys to skate around the Negative Proof Fallacy but fails due to one significant point: There is no a priori evidence against.
I think you need to find a less biased source. From Nexus Magazine’s homepage:
Why does the evidence against God have to be a priori? Just as there are a posteriori arguments for God’s existence (e.g., the cosmological and teleological arguments), there are a posteriori arguments against God’s existence (the argument from evil, Dawkins’ ultimate 747 argument, etc.).
It doesn’t matter if the concept exists, I am not asserting that souls do not exist. I do not assert that god does not exist either. I don’t need to, there’s no more actual reason to think god exists than to think santa claus exists. I am open to the idea that god may exist, but since we have absolutely no evidence whatsoever for that contention, I feel free to dismiss the idea out of hand. I’m not going to say ‘god doesnt exist, never has, never will, etc.’ I don’t need to. Since we have no reason to believe god exists in the first place, no believing in him should be the default position.
Of course not, why are you talking about absolutes? I claimed that things like drugs and brain damage can change the things you claim makes a person a person. This is well documented in medical science.
Wrong. I am not asserting that god doesn’t exist. The onus of proof is not on me. I freely admit that should proper evidence be presented showing that god existed, I would acknowledge god’s existance. But none has, ever, so I can dismiss the idea. If something is just an idea, and has absolutely no evidence to back it up, then non-belief should be the default position. Once again, I am not asserting that god does not exist.
Of course there is. This is an argument from ignorance. Just because you don’t of any doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Given the definitions of god put forth by the major religions, if you can’t find a reason against god existing then you aren’t looking. It depends on what you’re going to take as ‘fact’ about god, which conveniently changes from person to person, but there are all kinds of contradictions, violations of the laws of physics, and outright silliness in the thing called god.
I would argue that a posteriori arguments don’t hold water on either side. The Argument from Evil is relative only from a universal definition of Evil. Without a universal definition this argument falls apart logically. Dawkins restated the 747 argument from Hoyle in defence to the Teleological arguments. The 747 argument can be answered with: “Why yes, the odds are exactly the same, yet casuality allowed one to happen and the other to not happen (not yet anyway).”
My position reflects Gould’s Non-Overlapping Magisteria without his inherent agnosticism. My belief structure is a priori based on my perception of a series of personal events. A posteriori arguements (again, from either side of the issue) may serve to counter the point they were conceived to counter but do nothing towards addressing the parent issue.
Popper was most definitely a philosopher - but he does have a point, even if it is a bit simplistic. Does science tell scientists what math to use? No, no more than it tells them what hypotheses to come up with. You search around for mathematical methods that work for a particular problem. One of the biggest stumbling blocks in Einstein’s work on relativity was finding the right math to help analyze the problem. Who tells you which tools to use when fixing a car? You pick the one that does the job most effectively, and people invent new ones to make things more efficient.
Which data to collect? That’s a continuing discussion. Sampling theory tells us how much data to collect, and tells us that we can’t collect biased data, but which data depends on what’s available. If you do it wrong your paper will get rejected. Standards of reliability are a convention. p <= 0.05 is not written in stone, you can compute p for anything. It’s just an indicator of how strong the results are.
Might I ask what direct experience you have in this area? I studied science and philosophy in college, btw. As for the Biblical stuff, do you not understand my point?
You are confusing a statement of knowledge about souls and god with a statement of belief. You are correct that it would be fallacious to say with knowledge that god and the soul do not exist, and few atheists do this. However, given what we know, the lack of evidence for the soul and evidence against, it seems perfectly reasonable to say that we don’t believe in these things, so long as we’re open to changing our opinion if more evidence shows up.
For M-theory, I’ve read that the extra dimensions are theoretically detectable, since I believe gravity can leak between them. We are not capable of doing the experiments yet. If they were theoretically undetectable, any hypothesis using them would be worthless.
More than that, anything claimed in a scientific paper has to be traceable back to original data. People keep lab notebooks, in pen, and scandals have involved people changing data in their notebooks. Things from others are traced through references, but data in the paper should be able to be found directly. Replication is important to ensure that results are not due to chance or error.
Imagine a paper giving a theory whose basic information was recorded 40 - 60 years after the experiment were done. it would get rejected so fast it would be returned before it was sent. So I agree with you - imagine how much stronger the case for religion would be if there were documentation from the time of the events.
But the argument from evil gets to help itself to a universal definition of evil–the one provided by the theist. One way of looking at the argument from evil is as a way of showing that theism is internally inconsistent. If you accept the theistic definition of God, and if you accept the *theistic * definition of good and evil (as defined by God’s nature/commandments/whatever), then the existence of evil in the world introduces a contradiction: you can’t have evil and this definition of God and this definition of evil (which, again, is provided by the theist, not the atheist).
As for Dawkins’ 747 argument, I think you are badly misrepresenting it. His point is that order can only arise slowly and piecemeal. We have at least a partial account of how order can arise slowly and piecemeal in the universe through naturalistic processes; the theist has no such account of how God can have arisen. (And for the theist to refuse to provide one is another case of special pleading.)
Non-overlapping magisteria is the biggest case of special pleading ever. Never in a thousand years did any theist ever suggest that religion was not in the business of making factual assertions whose consequences could be observed in the natural world. And theists have only been driven to this position by the triumph of science and the failure of religion. So suddenly some theists say, “That’s okay; religion is a different magisterium where we don’t need evidence or anything, or empirical verification.” Bullshit. Special pleading.
I think this is a very important point–scientists are in general not very impressed by a single study which seems to demonstrate a given conclusion. As a general rule, they wait for the result to be independently replicated. The ability of scientific results to be independently replicated by separate observers is one of the most powerful arguments we have for accepting scientific authority. And since there is not anything even remotely analogous on the part of religion, I think it is a grave misrepresentation of the facts to try to draw parallels between scientific and religious epistemology.
Well okay then. I’ve always thought that was the correlation between science and the true spiritual journey. Both seek the truth. Science deals with our physical world while the spiritual journey deals with the inner person.
Organized religions do have a lot of beliefs that are grounded in the physical world and it seems reasonable that those should be examined by the same standard of evidence as anything else. The Bible itself says
So the priority should be to promote truth rather than tradition. That’s fine when dealing with the facets of religion and spirituality that rest within the physical world but when it comes to the inner person and the true spiritual journey science doesn’t even apply. As you note yourself.
You are correct, that doesn’t mean there God exists, however, if God communes with us spirituality, through the inner person, then it is out of the province of science and there’s no sense in demanding scientific evidence that God exists.
Other than a few traditions people’s relationship with God is about the inner journey and the search for truth about ourselves and our relationship to our world and each other. That’s fairly obvious in the words of Jesus in the NT.
So, the question becomes can we deal with the physical beliefs separately from the the questions of love for our fellow man, justice, equality, etc. Can the Sermon on the Mount be separated from the mythology and leave religion viable and meaningful. I think so. I think Voyager has helped show how.
I think you hit on something important here. I’ve been saying for months that many of those who agree with Sam Harris that religious beliefs should not have a special protected status and should be examined in the same way as other beliefs were not really doing so, because they still categorized beliefs as religious beliefs and faith as religious faith. My observation has been that a lot of the same internal mechanics for a belief system occurred within believers and non believers.
We all seem to apply faith in dealing with day to day life. I don’t see how we can live our lives without it. We all seem to cling to some beliefs for emotional reasons rather than purely logical and evidence based. So, do we say, it’s wide open , believe whatever you want, it’s your right as a human being, or do we try and find a way to evaluate belief systems in some way where we are trying to judge them equally.
For one I think we can talk about belief systems as a shared universal experience. We all have one. We can explore where they come from, how they develop, and how they can change and improve.
From there we can look at the details of belief and separate those beliefs that have objective evidence from those that are more subjective. We an also examine emotional attachment to tradition or simply concepts and how that affects a belief system. As you point out, is a belief system , or faith, able to change and grow based on new evidence and experience? It seems far healthier to me if they can.
So, is the “all religion is a bunch of superstitious crapolla” meme, any more useful than the “all you heathens will burn in hell” meme. Neither strikes me as very useful if we are trying to fight ignorance and progress.
By speaking of belief systems we can look at all religions and even the non religious from an equal playing field. We can apply the same standards to all.
What do you think?
I totally agree with you. In fact, this gives an explanation of the Communism as religion problem. It isn’t a religion so much as an example of the non-changeable belief system much like evangelical religions. Same for political philosophies that get implemented, fall on their faces, then get defended by their proponents who say the experiment failed because the philosophy was not followed exactly.
We can also distinguish between a “real” atheist (one I feel sympathy for) versus someone like a child in the Soviet Union who is an atheist through indoctrination. Someone who is an atheist based on faith alone is just as dumb as the worst fundamentalist. The typical theist canard about atheism being based on faith (which is rarely true) comes from a lack of understanding of the alternative, being belief based on evidence. I’m not saying that people can have different beliefs based on analysis of the same evidence, but that the problem is lack of analysis at all.
What an unappealing tautology. I’m sure it’s more fun to argue against the least charitable understanding of “faith” possible, but that fun comes at the expense of the people who read DT’s posts. Those who disagree with them are annoyed. Both those who agree and disagree, I’ve found, tend to get bogged down in a nasty semantic argument without realizing it (though there are plenty of exceptions, of course).
Anyway, the point is that there are other conceptions of faith besides the one that makes Der Trihs so angry. Some are completely opposed to his preferred conception. Example: