These are both true. And they don’t support, in any way, your absurd conclusion that science has disproven all religious statements, or that science has proven the non-existence of God.
Science has rolled back some of the specific tenets of some older religious claims, such as the age of the earth. Science cannot address the existence of God. How would it even begin?
That is not a bizarre position, it is the legitimate position of science.
Nope. That is your personal belief about what science does, based on your religious faith in what you want it to do. Science addresses the physical world. It does not address the spiritual world. Even if the spiritual world is utter nonsense, science does not address it. You are taking a materialist philosophy, (which is one legitimate perspective), and trying to co-opt science into the beliefs that spring from that philosophy).
To say that science does not support beliefs expressed about a spiritual realm is legitimate. To go further and make a claim that it has demonstrated such a realm to be unreal is simply an attempt to impose your belief system on science.
Further, it is legitimate to note that science has effectively erected a barrier between the spiritual and the material, not well perceived before the Enlightenment, by showing that the material can be examined while the spiritual cannot. If you choose to draw the philosophical conclusion that this indicates that there is no spiritual realm, you are welcome to embrace that philosophy. However, your claim goes further and relies on you appealing to materialist philosophy to make claims about science that science does not, itself, make. If a proponent of the spiritual makes claims about the spiritual acting upon the material, you are quite correct in demanding that they demonstrate that effect through science. However, when you declare that science has shown that the spiritual does not exist, you are spouting religious nonsense that is not supported by science. (And this is not a claim that all proponents of science are making a religion of science; it addresses only your own silly attempt to pretend that science has disproved the spiritual.)
People have repeatedly predicted the demise of religion and such predictions have consistently proven premature.
Well, compared to the commanding role religion had in previous centuries, religion has gone away in some western countries.
No one has ever come around with constables behind him, asking why I wasn’t in church on Sunday, and mentioning that the stocks are currently untenanted. Even liberal England had rules like that, not so very long ago.
Yeah, but my point, with which you seem to agree in at least one of your posts, is that science *does not need *to prove the non-existence of god for CP to say Muhammed’s claims about supernatural communication with god in a cave are bullshit. The very existence of the scientific method and what it has taught us about the world around us makes it so that people who state that Muhammed’s claims are NOT bullshit, or the ones that are objecting to CP’s usage are the ones who have the burden of proof and evidence.
It is absolutely true that a person insisting that the claims of Mohammed (or Paul or the Evengelists or anyone else) are true has the burden of proof to demonstrate that they are true.
It is absolutely false to claim that science has already proven them false.
This was the set of posts that started this conversation
CP makes a strong but not unreasonable statement, given our understanding of the natural world, and especially the way we have reached this understanding. *Especially *the bit about Muhammed suffering from delusions. If a man goes into a cave and claims to have received divine communication, that claim can very reasonably be characterised as bullshit according to science, in particular if it is structured in unfalsifiable ways.
You snark him for it.
He clarifies with statements that can even more reasonably be supported as being ‘according to science’.
Other people then jump in and snark him for these statements as well, without appreciating the fact that you *do not need * science to specifically disprove every claim to call it out as bullshit according to science. Claims of violation of natural laws(laws which have been discovered through the scientific method) are bullshit by default unless they come with the ability to be tested. No claim about the world around us deserves any respect just because they haven’t been proven false, particularly not ones that cannot be proven false. And that IS according to science.
I missed this post entirely earlier.
You are wrong about who is making a claim and who is demanding the proof and where the burden of evidence lies here. CP is NOT making a claim. CP is rejecting a claim made by religion. If a proponent of the ‘spiritual’ (whatever that is) makes any claims at all, we are well within our right to ask this proponent to vet these claims via the only method that has given us consistently useful and verifiable information about the world around us - science. If the proponent claims that this method is not applicable to their claim(because their claim would be nonsense according to that method), we are equally within our rights to dismiss these claims as bullshit, and the burden is on the person making the claim about the ‘spiritual’ to first demonstrate that they have a method via which these claims are not bullshit, and show that method be at least somewhere close to science in its usefulness.
The null hypothesis is that the effect you are claiming does not exist unless you show evidence for it. Any special status you seek to give ‘spiritual’ claims is not valid.
If you consider what crimes have been perpetrated on the Muslim world. You might understand how they might seek revenge. re/ the U.S;s support of dictators and puppet :leaders". Like the Shah of Iran. Saddam Hussein and Karzhi.
Not to mention the sanctions on Iraq that killed 1/2 million women and children.
And 9/11 the Islamic world was scape goated on that crime. When it was obviously an inside job. visit; www.ae9/11truth.org/
for more.
As above, I’d like the word “bullshit” to be defined.
If it means “A claim that is not falsifiable and thus of no interest to the scientific method,” then I agree. A great many religious claims are of this kind.
If it means “false,” then you’re wrong. Mohammed’s claims have not been shown false by any scientific observation, test, experiment, or deduction. This is because they aren’t “falsifiable.” The claims are abstract and spiritual, and outside the realm of any empirical examination.
Which of the two uses are you employing?
“Fighting fire with fire” does not equate to “fight stupid with incredibly stupid”. First, the entire Muslim world was not scapegoated for the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001; the individual terrorists–who happened to be very bad Muslims–were identified as the attackers. Second, your link to a whack job site is not helpful.
I have laid out my position at great length in multiple posts. If a claim is not structured in a way that is testable or falsifiable, it is worthless as knowledge, has no truth value and can be rejected out of hand. The burden of evidence for the claim falls on anyone making the claim or anyone demanding that such a claim is to be accorded respect.
A claim being not ‘falsifiable’ does not make it somehow different but eqaul to a scientific claim. It means the claim is such gibberish that it does not even rise to the standard of a testable hypothesis.
I love the smell of empiricist fundamentalism in the morning.
No, I am not.
If anyone posts that such and such spiritual phenomenon is true, it is up to the speaker to provide evidence of it.
In exactly the same way, a person who makes a positive assertion that there is no spiritual realm has the burden of proving that point.
One is perfectly free to assert that they have discovered no evidence of a spiritual realm. One may even point to discoveries of science to demonstrate why he or she has reached that philosophical conclusion.
If one wishes to appeal to various philosophical arguments to support that assertion, that is fine. However, it is nothing but an idolatry of science to claim that science has proven that there is no spiritual realm.
Since science addresses only the material, it is nonsense to claim that science has (or can) make any observation about the non-material.
This thread is not the place to initiate a hijack promoting Conspiracy Theories about the WTC/Pentagon attacks.
Do not pursue that line of discussion in this thread–and everyone else refrain from addressing it in this thread, as well.
[ /Moderating ]
What you are getting whooshed by in this argument is that science can make claims about *belief *in the non-material, since belief is something that is a product of the biology of one of the organs in our physical body. Science tells is that claims originating from, and depending on, a belief in the supernatural are total bullshit.
The fount of all scientific discovery is to be ridiculed now?
Lovely to see liberals now detest reason such to provide apology for their darling intolerant religion.
This is a remarkable (and remarkably ridiculous) equivalence, but what’s more, it doesn’t even apply in this case. Islamic (and other religious) claims have been around for hundreds of years. There are religious claims about an Islamic god and his communication with Muhammed that CP noted are fantasy or Muhammed’s lies/delusions . You are saying that it is on him to show that science has ‘disproved’ these claims. You are mistaken. CP did not come into the thread and say that science has shown that invisible purple dinosaurs do not exist. He addressed specific claims made by a religion for hundreds of years. These claims have neither any evidence to support them, nor perhaps any means by which such evidence could even exist. In such a situation, the burden of evidence is not with him when he characterises these claims as fantasies, delusions or lies.
The reason why your equivalence is ridiculous and why it shows off your ignorance is because it is impossible to prove a negative. As a matter of fact, I think it is impossible to prove anything at all which is not mathematical. You can only hold provisional views with a certain degree of confidence(which can be very high). The person holding the default view that a spiritual realm does not exist is NOT required to prove that such a realm does not exist. The people holding the view that invisible, undetectable dinosaurs are not looking over all our shoulders as we type are NOT required to prove it. That is the default null hypothesis.
We CAN (provisionally) reject as false those claims for which there are no testable hypotheses and evidence. Our degree of confidence in this provisional belief goes up as those claims contradict things that we do have evidence for. For many religious claims, that degree of confidence in the falsity of those claims can be quite high indeed, and it comes from the store of scientific knowledge that has been built up over the past couple centuries. This is why the burden of evidence is not CP’s. What you have to do characterise CP’s view as wrong is to provide evidence for the existence of Allah and his supernatural cave communication with Muhammed that would permit us to change the provisional view we hold.
I’ll wait.
I find extremism troubling, whatever its basis.
I also find your snarky insinuations insulting and tedious. I do not “detest reason,” and I would appreciate your not suggesting otherwise in the future. Islam is not my “darling,” and I would appreciate your not suggesting otherwise in the future.
I owe you no explanations, but I’m feeling charitable: I am a humanist. I am an empiricist. I have been a scientist, and in my profession I use evidence-based practices.
And I do not believe that empiricism or the scientific method are the sole routes to truth about the human condition. (Indeed, I do not believe they address *truth *at all, only fact. And they are exceptionally good at that.)
“If a claim is not structured in a way that is testable or falsifiable, it is worthless as knowledge, has no truth value and can be rejected out of hand.” This is an extremist position, a fundamentalist one. And, as I said, I find extremism troubling, whatever its basis.
You are very confused about what it means to prove something is false.
You seem to think that the postulate in question must somehow be physically testable, and if it isn’t then it remains unaddressed as opposed to false.
When I say “bullshit,” what I mean by that is false. Provably false.
The way science proves that pure bullshit–imagination of things opposed to physical principle–is false is by:
The idea that science cannot falsify a pink unicorn governing the world from a cheese house inside jupiter, or giant large-breasted white women getting pleasured by men with permanent erections is just ridiculous.
It is bullshit, and it false, according to science. Not unexamined; not uninteresting; not outside of science. Just plain false.
There was a time–before science, mostly–that the ignorant were easier to persuade of these sorts of bullshit proclamations. But science batch disposes of them, and discards them as false. There is no requirement in science that the only path to what is true is empirically subjecting it to some sort of experiment.
Trying to make a distinction between what science cannot prove and what is some other sort of bullshit (I still haven’t figured out what distinction is trying to be made here) is a pitiful attempt to allow the weak-minded to cling to a non-disproven belief.
Scientifically, very pitiful. It is an article of completely uneducated faith that science has somehow not been able to disprove the various blatherings of the supernaturalists.
If you want to reject science, you can–on faith–accept whatever you want. If you do accept science, you have to reject bullshit as bullshit–not as something somehow truer than that which has been empirically disproven.
You cannot have science cake and expect to eat your houris too. 
You only get one or the other, depending on whether you want to accept science or fantasy as your belief structure.