Context. In most cases, when we’re talking about ordinary life and experience, it’s tacitly assumed that we’re all operating with the same rational-materialism ground rules. Rational materialism is the lingua franca of modern human communication, at least for most people, most of the time. Whatever personal idiosyncracies of belief we may have concerning the nature of reality, we put them aside to be able to communicate about common experience in a common frame of reference.
But when somebody’s talking about religion, that’s a flare signal that we are leaving the common frame of reference and moving into the territory of personal belief. Pretending that the rational-materialism ground rules of ordinary communication still apply in that situation would just be obtuse.
If you dislike acknowledging that the scientific premises of rational materialism are fundamentally an assumption that by its very nature excludes supernatural claims from the realm of valid knowledge, then by all means, feel free not to discuss religion with people who don’t already agree with you.
“Your claim is wrong” is, itself, a claim. No way around this.
That’s basically all I want here. There is a nonzero chance of there being houris in heaven when we honk. To say, “The claim is false” is not science’s job; science doesn’t even have the tools to begin looking at the question.
In substance, sure. But I’m rejecting his claim of proof. In substance, in practice, in day-to-day living, damn right there aren’t any houris, nor gods, devils, heavens, spirits, blessings, ghosts, or superheroes either. Doggonit.
If he’d made the capital blunder of saying, “Science has proven that fairies don’t exist,” damn right we’d be piling on him, and saying exactly that. Here’s a hint for the wise: don’t make that kind of blunder.
I agree with the former stance, although I have some dubiety regarding the latter. I’d say, rather, don’t go pissing in another guy’s ornamental fountain. Okay, it’s a fantasy. It’s his fantasy, and what business have I junking it?
But that isn’t what this whole highjack cycle is about. It’s rebutting his titanic blunder in having said that science has proven there is no God. You don’t say junk like that around here, because people who really know science (Kimstu) and jaspers who know just enough to debate a valid point (me) are here to pile on.
Actually it isn’t quite as trivial as that. When these fundamental assumptions and the predictions that they lead to come into conflict, we can see which set of assumptions provides correct answers. In any such conflict science has always emerged superior, so much so that I contend it is the former question which has the more trivial answer. You pick science.
Let’s take the supernatural communication with Allah as an example. It is based on the assumption that a supernatural superpowerful entity exists and can talk to Muhammed. Can we prove that such an entity doesn’t exist? No. But we can, with a very high degree of confidence, given that no evidence has been offered for this claim, given our understanding and degree of confidence in how mankind has evolved and what senses and modes of communication we possess, given our understanding of how human brains work, given numerous other such claims and their tendency to say pretty much what any person without supernatural prompting would have said, reject this claim as (provisionally) false.
And here again I disagree. To say that picking a supernatural epistemology over science is just a matter of personal preference and not a debate worthy position strikes me as a really odd* thing to say, especially when you go on to say(and I agree) that it is important to have an agreed upon set of ground rules on where and how you can use the tools of rationality. Unless we discard this epistomological relativism, it becomes tougher and tougher to agree that tools of rationality are the ones that we should use to approach answers to important questions in the public sphere.
*Odd is not a precise word, but I can’t quite express how I feel about your position, so it’ll have to do
Sure, I have no problems with what people believing what they like, as long as they don’t also believe that it is just a matter of personal preference whether those beliefs are right or wrong, because I also ask of them that we use rational tools in matters that impact public policy, and a recognition that these tools are superior is implicit in such a request.
Sure, but rejecting an untestable claim as false is not ‘making a claim’ as tomndebb keeps insisting, it is a recognition of the proven superiority of an epistemological method that rejects as false all claims for which good evidence is not offered. The statement that “This claim cannot have any evidence” should not stop us from rejecting it as false, *until and unless * someone comes along and shows that claims which cannot have any evidence offered are useful in any way.
I don’t dislike acknowledging that at all. What I dislike is people holding the position that any assumption is as valid or as useful as any other assumption and we need to kowtow to each and every one. The assumption that the world works in predictable ways that can be understood through observation and experimentation is a much more sound one than the assumption that little fairies push everything hither and yon because they feel like it, because it has shown itself to be so useful. The moment people arguing against the summary dismissal of god as a fairy tale show how their assumptions are anywhere near as useful we can consider elevating their claims to being just ‘outside the purview of science’ instead of false.
Science has, by its existence, its methodology and its usefulness, shifted the default position to “There is no god”. Anyone arguing that there is a testable god has to show evidence for it. Anyone arguing that there is an untestable god, or that science cannot address the existence of god, has to demonstrate the value in an untestable god, or the value in an epistemology which can address things that science cannot. CP’s blunder is not as titanic as you think it is. It is, ironically, mostly pedantic.
Agreed. “Shifting the default position” is not the same as “Proving.”
The value may be entirely subjective. They believe because they want to, or because they were taught by someone they love, or because it makes them feel better, or because other people around them believe.
Well, that’s what we’re here for. Even small mistakes are still mistakes, and get pounced on energetically by the afficionados of this most abstruse art-form – arguing with strangers over definitions. (But I disagree: I think that claiming “Science has proven there is no God” is a major league blunder, right up there with Pascal’s Wager, the False Trilemma, the Ontological Proof, and some of the other boners that theologians have committed.)
But he hasn’t made such an unqualified statement anywhere, and in general he’s backed up his statements quite well where he has made statements about proof. For instance
Emphasis mine. In reponse to this, Monty posts “Anyway, as I understand the term, those are beings which happen to exist, according to some, in the afterlife. Care to show the scientific experiments which have proven that they do not exist?”
And you choose to argue against CP instead of the guy saying that belief in an afterlife ought to be given enough credence that we need experiments showing Houris don’t exist.
In defense of the Houri’s non-falsifiability by science you are going to split the linguistic hair of “effectively nonexistent” and “falsifiable”? Well; at least you are making progress. But “scientifically falsified” is just fine.
Let’s take the Tooth Houri, so as not to offend Monty and tomndebb.
The Tooth Houri is the post-mortem companion thought up by a child old enough to hear about Houris, understand sex is fantastic and–were he to die today–unavailable to him. So he comes up with the Tooth Houri who does cool things like give him money for his lost teeth until such time as he is sexually mature, at which point he swaps over to intercourse with a creature who has vaginas front and back, for double the pleasure. (This particular boy is not one of those destined to attend others post-mortem; he gets to grow up in the afterlife instead of spending it in eternal servitude.)
OK: At issue is whether or not science falsifies the Tooth Houri.
Science takes the approach I have mentioned above to falsify that consciousness exists when the brain substrate supporting it is gone. It’s not that hard to demonstrate that thoughts are created by processes in the brain. So science–to the satisfaction of science–completely falsifies the Tooth Houri.
Now along come Kimstu, Monty, tomndebb,Trinopus and others to defend the notion that science does not falsify the Tooth Houri.
But as I glance through the arguments above, I see repeated acceptance (I think) that the Tooth Houri is absurd. And the only argument worth examining that I see in favor of non-falsifiability is Kimstu’s, which if I understand it can be distilled as follows:
It is an epistemologic failure to falsify the Tooth Houri because such a falsfication requires an assumption–in this case, the premise that science assumes reality “assumes only what is consistent…<read above, by Kimstu>.”
But I’m not interested in whether an epistemologic paradigm entertains the possible reality of the Tooth Houri. I am interested in whether science entertains the possibility. It does not.
What I am insisting upon so vehemently is that science falsifies the Tooth Houri. I am not insisting that any given epistemologic construct does so.
Of course science assumes certain premises. Perhaps we are all imaginary and when we think we are picking our nose we aren’t because we ourselves are simply the manifestation of a Tooth Houri’s dream, and it’s actually the Tooth Houri that is “real.” That’s what science is uninterested in examining.
That’s fundamentally the problem with philosophic mental masturbations about epistemology’s power grab for deciding what reality is. They are entertaining diversions for the sixth grader learning about knowledge, the philosopher opining in his cave, and Timothy Leary.
Science ignores the Tooth Houri because it falsifies it; not because science thinks there may be an alternate reality. The philosopher may weigh in with an opinion on whether or not the approach science has taken to falsify is an acceptable epistemologic approach, but from a scientific standpoint, it’s just philosophic blather that requires completely alternate starting premises from the ones science uses.
Defenders of the Tooth Houri have grown very confused about the difference between science and epistemologic meanderings. In that battle for truth, the philosopher generally comes crawling back to science when her epistemologic meanderings take her so far afield that her cancer gets out of control while she was getting hands laid on it.
Science has premises, yes. Among them is an approach to reality that falsifies the Tooth Houri. Epistemologic paradigms not embracing the same premises as science may well entertain Tooth Houris, and such paradigms are themselves discarded by science as false.
The claims I have been making (unless I made a clerical error) is what science falsifies. I personally accept (arbitrarily) the starting premises of science.
Someone else may accept as a starting premise that a scientific approach to reality is bullshit. They are then free to promote the Tooth Houri as unfalsified by their epistomology, although I caution that beyond the Land of Science lie demons.
I am pretty sure (OK; positive, with no chance that I’m wrong ) that both you and your Science Adviser Monty are confubbled about the difference between science and some other epistemologic paradigm.
And you are further confused that, should an alternate epistemologic paradigm make different starting assumptions from the ones science makes, then science then does not falsify something.
It’s an easy mistake to make, but neither you nor your Science Adviser should be making it on a Board that prides itself on fighting ignorance and labels itself the Straight Dope.
I suspect, without being able to prove it, that the driver for these ridiculous claims that the Tooth Houri is not falsifiable results from a psychologic need to avoid reality. But hey…
I have posted, in quotes, what you posted, and then paraphrased it. You may want to be more concerned about how you present yourself than about how I misrepresent you.
I find the idea they exist very off-putting, especially since my approach to what is real starts and ends with science, and science falsifies them.
So I have this compulsion to remind the " science leaves giant white vaginas being pleasured by post-mortem permenent erections non-falsified" crowd exactly what kind of nonsense they are promoting.
I will try to switch to Tooth Houri as a summary concept so you don’t keep seeing “vagina,” but more seriously, I do think it’s good to step back from detached musings about how we create our epistomologic paradigms in the abstract and remind ourselves where that sort of mental masturbation actually leads us.
Science falsifies these types of mythologies, even where a given scientist might be tempted to forgo her scientific training and indulge herself in a belief contradictory to science. That’s a commonly observed human trait. ( I myself have probably broken the record for believing six impossible things before breakfast.) But reminding folks we are talking about mythological giant white vaginas is an easy way to focus the point back to science, versus the alternate approaches to reality which render that kind of inanity non-falsifiable.
The Board has a long history of mocking silliness clothed in linguistic finery. Lest we get too tempted to mistake wordsmithing resplendence for argumentative weight, I am inclined to occasionally remind those whose science paradigm is so feeble it cannot banish a single myth, that what their particular science paradigm finds non-falsifiable is a giant hairless perineum being boinked by the dead.
Nope. Not true at all. By that logic, when Jack Smith dies, he takes the entire cosmos with him, because only thoughts in his brain have reality. Your arguments are getting weirder and weirder.
And we know what we’re talking about. Your ontological proof is simply screwy.
“Ontological arguments are arguments, for the conclusion that God exists, from premises which are supposed to derive from some source other than observation of the world”
Well; at least you are making progress. But “scientifically falsified” is just fine.
