Did you read post 209? I am not going to quote myself in entirety but. What you seem to be suggesting is that when someone says “there is outside of our universe a creature that tastes like chocolate milk and has dog fur for eyes” we can’t point and laugh because that is an unexplorable by science kind of subject.
Without evidence of SOME kind to even begin with every hypothesis is inherent nonsense.
No, you can point and laugh to your little heart’s content. “Tastes like chocolate milk” and “has dog fur for eyes” are both empirical claims. If we define “universe” as being, or including, the totality of all empirically observable things then, if such a creature exists at all, it is within our universe. The claim is self-contradictory, unless it employs some non-obvious sense of “universe”.
(You don’t need to call on science to justify your mirth, of course.)
PS I did read post #209. I’m sorry I haven’t replied in detail; I’m struggling to keep up here. But I will just say this about the post; the claim proposed in Russell’s teapot is not a supernatural claim, and not analogous to a supernatural claim, and this rather deprives the conceit of any weight as a response to claims about the supernatural.
It is a supernatural claim though, when it was proposed there was no possible way you could have put a teapot into orbit. It is also a way of thinking about absurd claims, We have no reason at all to have faith in the teapot or its existence because of the total lack of evidence. Like other claims about the supernatural, no evidence to support them leaves you with no reason to believe.
Which we do on the basis that the scientific method has demonstrated itself time and time again to be reliable and accurate.
Le me be clear here - when I say science is the only pathway to truth, I don’t mean “there is no other possible pathway to truth”. I mean “there is no other pathway to truth that we are aware of”. If anyone has an example of a pathway to truth which can be shown to consistently work, then pass it my way! But it has to actually work.
This does nothing to assuage my concerns about “supernatural” being a meaningless term, though.
Except that that’s math. And math is clearly something different. We start from clearly defined axioms and work forward from them to determine things. However, it’s entirely possible to create such a system which has no value whatsoever. We tend to avoid that in mathematics. Indeed, the whole point is modeling reality in a useful way!
But we can point out that they are contradictory. Faith-based “truths” contradict each other constantly. Faith is therefore not a reliable pathway to truth in any meaningful sense. Never mind that many of these questions are not applicable in that way - whether or not a god exists is not true “for you”, it’s either true or it’s not. And faith tells us nothing. “I Like Cheese” is a statement of opinion - until we can see inside your head we can’t say whether or not its true, but we generally take you on your word because, well, some people like cheese and there’s no reason for you to lie about it.
Religion offers an answer in the same the gibbering hobo down the street offers an answer - it is technically an answer, but we have no way to verify it and absolutely no reason to believe that it’s true. If you care whether or not the answers you’re getting are true, then religion is simply not the place to look.
Wait, what?
The scientific method has shown us:
- Consciousness is heavily linked to physical brain function
- Thoughts manifest as electrical signals through said brain
- Electrical signals cease upon brain death
- There is no current way known to “reactivate” a dead brain
- There is no known entity beyond the brain that has anything to do with consciousness or thought
The scientific method has already told us all we need to know to reject the concept of life after death! Now, sure, you could posit that there’s a soul, and that it lives on after death, or any number of an infinite set of “supernatural” claims, but I’d see absolutely no reason to believe you unless you could provide evidence.
“Currently impossible due to technological limitations” does not equal “supernatural”. A teapot is very definitely part of the natural order, no matter where in the solar system it is located.
Or disbelieve, given that no evidence is to be expected of such claim. If you want to take a defensible position on metaphysical claims, you have to find a rational basis for doing so. The absence of empirically observable evidence is not such a basis.
On the planet where I live, saying “I don’t know” is a better answer than making shit up.
[tangent]
I don’t know what Scientology says about the afterlife, but its core claims that there are souls that invade your mind and cause you to do things you shouldn’t are definitely supernatural, in the common sense of the word. But it wouldn’t be supernatural in the sense that you have been using it, since those souls have an observable effect on our world.
And Scientology’s claims of space aliens are a tack-on creation myth, not central to the belief system AFAIK.
[/tangent]
Sorry, I thought you had said that.
But you just said it again! If something has an effect on the world we live in, then that effect is observable!
It’s mainstream in the dishonest world of Christian apologetics, where they intentionally use the fallacy of equivocation to sidestep the real questions. On the one hand, this God is an ineffable Ground of Being that we can’t really say anything about, but on the other hand, he definitely made Jesus rise from the grave and he is really against treating gay people as valid humans. Which is it?
They are? There’s conflict between the two all the time. Just one example:
Pointing to examples of conflict doesn’t tell us that they aren’t able to exist together without conflict, just that they don’t always do so.
By which the term ‘compatible’ has grown even more useless.
As I posted in the very first reply in this thread: “This is a vague and ill-defined question.”
You can’t teach a kid faith-based, unscientific things about the nature of reality and expect that they will exist in a vacuum. Silly beliefs affect actions and other beliefs. This is going to affect scientific progress and that’s a conflict.
Ok at this point I have to ask you to give us an example of a supernatural claim that is somehow outside the purview of Russell’s Teapot. At this point I cannot figure out what you are talking about.
Maybe a transcendent toaster would work better?!
CMC fnord!
Life after death is certainly a scientific question. But, since you agree that religion has no valid way of evaluating this, I’m satisfied.
Since I said that it was possible for their to be evidence to falsify the null hypothesis in this case, I don’t understand why you think I said it was a universal account of reality. More often than not in papers the null hypothesis gets rejected (otherwise there would be no paper.)
We know from information theory that information processing takes energy. A consciousness after death would thus require an energy source. So that’s one reason to reject the idea. And if it were possible for the dead to interact with us (the common view) then there could be evidence. If not as far as we are concerned life after death is equivalent to no life after death. And is rejected in favor of the null hypothesis.
Parsimony is if not scientific proof is a good thing to use to direct our search.
Absence of evidence is evidence for absence if the hypothesis involves us seeing some evidence. It isn’t if the hypothesis does not involve us seeing evidence. In this case it is wishful thinking - but I wonder how attractive the idea of you are isolated after death would be for getting recruits to a religion.
Sure, they are compatible. Like my ex-wife and I were. But we were a mismatched set and produced crazy offspring. Same as happens when science and religion attempt to mix. Science and religion don’t even belong in the same sentence, much less co-mingling in society or philosophy. Oil and water can be “mixed” much like vinegrette. But it is an unnatural union and bound to unbind.
True.
Well, what do you want “meaningful” to mean? (“What the definition of ‘is’ is.”) For the faithful, religious ideas are meaningful, because they give emotional support and comfort, and help them find their way in a perplexing world.
I like Cheese…and Jack the Catholic loves God. He believes in God. He even drills down to a fantastic degree of specificity about God’s nature and quality. Both are statements of opinion.
Well, yes. I agree completely. But if someone were to ask me, “Is science compatible with the gibberings of the hobo down the street,” I would say yes – providing those gibberings were sufficiently abstract as not to trespass against testable facts. If he says, “Obama is watching me right now with drones and cameras,” then, no, that isn’t compatible. If he says, “Obama is the Antichrist, prophesied and written!” then, shrug, yeah, it’s compatible. It’s batshit, but it’s compatible.
I’m an atheist, and a bit of a positivist. I think science is the second greatest social institution the human race ever came up with. (The best being representative democracy.) But science just isn’t interested in some questions, and, perhaps to our sorrow, billions of people are vitally obsessed with those questions.
When they’d rather listen to the gibbering hobo than Carl Sagan, one may be sad about it. It prompts one to learn more about human psychology (a real science!) But…the two are still compatible…if only in the sense that Fiji and the Canary Islands are compatible, because they largely ignore one another!
So, a claim from a hobo that Obama is watching him with drones and cameras is not compatible with science, but a claim that he is the Antichrist is? Are you sure that you don’t have that backwards?
We can find many things within specific relgions that are not compatible with science. Bible literalism for one. The OP is not that specific. Certain questions science doesn’t address or address adequately. Is their a God, some supreme being or intelligence? Does part of us, our soul or consciousness live on after physical death? Am I and are we, here for a purpose other than procreation , or are we completely random?
Seeking the truth is is taught by many religions as crucial to spiritual growth. Seeking the truth is also crucial and the primary purpose of science.
IMHO they are completely compatible.
We can test for drones. There would be evidence available (even if classified.) Other people (the pilots, commanding officers, etc.) would know. There is a real answer that is knowable.
How do we test for Antichrist-ness? What would serve to falsify the hypothesis? It’s a “nonsense” hypothesis – “Not even wrong.” It’s compatible with reality-based knowledge…in the trivial sense that all nonsense hypotheses are: they can never be falsified.
(I agree that there are different models of the Antichrist. Some do make specific claims about the real world. But not all. You can find web sites via Google that claim that Benedict XVI and Francis I were the Antichrist. Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan were accused of it. It sometimes functions as an evidence-free accusation, and that’s the sense in which I was using it.)
(As earth-based space-scanning radar gets better and better, Russell’s Teapot may have to be scaled down to Russell’s sugar-cube…)
We can always restate the argument by moving the Teapot to cygnus x-1.