As noted in the article you linked to, “falsifiable” in the Popperian sense is still subject to the problems I hinted at; any belief can be made unfalsifiable through suitable tricks of confirmation holism. All it takes is for one to be able and willing to continue entertaining the belief no matter what observations may come. This is no trouble at all for the 9/11 conspiracy theorist, as is easily empirically seen.
Yes, you may. 
Yes. Yes. What is the “it” in “prove it”?
What’s the connection with my questions about evidence?
I used to get hung up on the same pedantry, but nowadays, I’m more willing to say “Well, ‘parallel’, like so many other words, has a variety of meanings, and who am I to complain that they chose it to express ‘lines which are oriented in the same direction at some points’ rather than ‘lines which have no intersection’?”. Cooperative communication and all that…
as per your link
Theism
: belief in the existence of a god or gods ; specifically : belief in the existence of one God viewed as the creative source of the human race and the world who transcends yet is immanent in the world
Deism
: a movement or system of thought advocating natural religion, emphasizing morality, and in the 18th century denying the interference of the Creator with the laws of the universe
I’ll break it down for you… Theists believe in a god or god who interacts with the universe (in ways which should be testable) “viewed as the creative source of the human race and the world who transcends yet is immanent in the world”
Definition of immanent? I’m glad you asked:
remaining within; indwelling; inherent.
…and deists do not believe in interaction with a god or gods. It’s basically naturalism lite (my words) for those with a weak stomach. “…denying the interference of the Creator with the laws of the universe”
The difference is in the interaction… would you care to cede the point now?
… and you don’t have to be religious to have a tenancy towards over attributing causation to conscious forces. It’s a psychological limitation for most human beings, including myself. And I would love to argue with you over the purpose of a deity… but you are right and that is not this thread.
I would add that both theism and deism can be regarded as self consistent and logical belief systems within their respective frameworks, but i would also point out that the a priori assumptions of those frameworks do not follow from any external rational observations of the physical world but are, essentially, appeals to emotion.
(That is, taking “parallel lines” to mean “lines which all make the same angle with some implicit crossing line” seems just as defensible a formalization of common usage as taking it as shorthand for “lines which have no intersection”; that the one and not the other tends to be the typical use of the term in the specialized vocabulary of mathematics need not be any cause for censuring the ordinary language.)
None of those are evidence. People’s unsupported word isn’t evidence, nor are “holy books” written by ignorant primitives, especially since those claims and those books contradict each other. And the universe certainly doesn’t qualify as evidence for God; why would it ? And neither are miracles that conveniently always fit the prejudices of the believer who witnesses them, and can never be objectively verified as miracles at all ( or often as even having happened ).
No, it’s not. It’s gibbering lunacy. An opinion you’d probably share if the subject was anything other than God. Is believing that invisible dinosaurs secretly run the world using telepathy just as rational as not believing ? Of course not; and the Dinosaur Illuminati Theory is more plausible than God.
Catchy, I fail to see how the definition of theism as given in my link mandates that god(s) actively interact(s) with the universe. What about transcends or immanent necessitates actively interacting? Spinoza, for example, argued cogently for an immanent god that was noninterventional. Deism, OTOH, specifies noninterfernce. It is a specific form of theism.I am wishing to use the phrase that is as nonspecific of specific sort of god-concept as possible. Theism is that term.
My apologies on my sloppy understanding of lines in non-Euclidian space. Ignorance duly reduced.
Der, “lunacy” is an interesting and inaccurate term to use discussing religion, as lunacy is of course a state of mind in contrast to normative behaviors and beliefs. To some degree all that defines any of us as sane is that we share our delusions with a majority of the rest of humanity. So yes, it is the fact that god-belief of one form or another is the default state for the human mind operating within human societies (and that is hard to argue against given the paucity of societies that developed without some sort of god concept for most of their history and the fact that the vast majority of humans still believe in one or another god-concept), that defines holding a god concept as the “saner” i.e. more normative position - even as it says nothing about how much it reflects objective reality.
It is rational to believe that parallel lines can exist - lines that never cross no matter ow far you follow them out towards infinity. It is rational because we as individuals see little bits of lines that look as if they could do that and because others around us also believe that it is true. It may of course be false in reality but it is rational to believe it nevertheless. And it is rational as well to experience some of the mystery of the universe, to experience family and community accept god as a postulate, and to then accept the postulate yourself. It may or may not be an accurate reflection of reality as well. But it is not irrational to hold that belief within that context.
Now I’m confused. I thought your point was to dissolve the question, in certain cases, as to which of several possibilities actually was the accurate reflection of reality; that is, I thought you were trying to suggest that, in certain cases, there is no external criterion for truth, but only our own postulates. But now it looks, instead, as though you want to say “It is rational to believe X, even though ‘NOT X’ may in fact be the more accurate reflection of reality”; that is, you are accepting the notion of an external criterion for truth, and merely defending the rationality of holding false beliefs.
Which seems odd.
I mean, no one doubts that it can be rational to form a false belief starting from evidence of a fallible but generally trustworthy sort (e.g., for a host of reasons, it is rational of me to believe that the couple who raised me are my biological parents; even if I should turn out wrong about that, as is possible, it will still have been a rational belief of mine, its falsehood notwithstanding). But surely the argument is all about what is rational to believe after confrontation with challenging reasons to disbelieve.
To use your parallel lines analogy (though I don’t actually think it’s particularly edifying), it may initially be rational to believe in them because, hey, it sure looks like they exist (just like it looks like the earth is flat). But it stops being rational to believe in them the moment significant evidence appears to the contrary.
Meh, actually, I don’t think I’m engaging particularly well with this thread. I’m just gonna bow out.
I thought it obvious enough - when something is based on “personal experiences” or scripture or anything that can’t be verified, competing “personal experiences” of scripture can effortlessly replace it, and these experiences/scripture could be the result of divine inspiration or entirely and knowingly made up, and there’s no way to tell the difference.
I thought you were talking about the lady.
If a million, or a billion people believe a crazy thing, it’s still crazy. And even if I were to buy your definition, all that does is devalue “sanity” - by your definition, if enough people have the same hallucination that qualifies as sane.
Alright then. “Stupidity, ignorance or lunacy.” VERY ignorant if they aren’t aware of how many contradictory religions there are.
Or it’s merely a problem of models. It’s neither Euclidian nor Non-Euclidian. We are trying to say the map IS the territory, when it’s not, the map no matter how complete is still a ‘model’ of the territory.
It’s like if one person build a model of Chartres out of Popsicle sticks and another build a model of the Large Hadron Collider out of Tin Foil, and then both of them argued knives out about which one was more accurately true to the thing that was being modelled.
This is why the irony of ironies when people argue angrily and violently that religion is the source of human suffering, they don’t hear the inquisitor in their own voices. It is the angry confrontation itself that is the source of suffering, and not that people have different models to which they adhere.
It’s not believing intently, it is not believing intently in groups, but the desire to FORCE people to conform to your way of thinking that is the source of inter-party suffering.
So it comes back to a problem of models, and you have precocious children vociferously arguing about which one has the correct view of it, when the reality if anyone sat down and analyzed their own capacity for observation with any honesty they’d realize how little of the universe they themselves can actually analyze in a full lifetime.
Ah, how typical of the defenders of religion. Try to excuse religion by demonizing humanity. It’s just pure coincidence that a religion happens to call for the death of unbelievers when it’s adherents do just that. Religion can’t possibly be the motivation for their violence; it has to be that they are vile human scum who are unworthy to follow anything as pure and noble as the One True Faith.
I was thinking of your brand of intolerance when I wrote it.
Because of course demanding evidence and disrespecting religion on a message board puts me on the level of an “inquisitor”. :rolleyes:
And in what way am I “intolerant” ? Have I called for religion to be banned ? For the religious to be shot ? No. However much you want it to work that way, “tolerance” doesn’t mean “suck up to”.
Name dropping Spinoza is insufficient to support your point.
Spinoza essentially believed that God = nature.
And how exactly would one differentiate between a non-interventionist deity and no deity at all. Why bother? Does the concept even make sense. Obviously if he’s entirely hands off then there is no difference in effect between athiestic and theistic assumption, but that there IS a significant difference in effect, and that it should account for different scenarios (geometries) is exactly the thrust of your OP. It would appear that not even you are buying into your analogy (wanting to have a non-specific god with no particular characteristics or rulesets, but not setting out precisely how such a player would change the game.) Just saying theism is not good enough… Theism implies that god has some sort of characteristics… if you had some in mind please present them for debate…
Also, a god that is strictly non-interventionist in a general sense is EXACTLY deism. A theistic god would have some sort of theology or moral code or something attached to him. It’s the reason why there are two terms… and the reason why you should stop muddying the waters between those concepts.
I have never seen anyone on this board arguing violently… in fact I would be hard pressed to cogently visualize what “arguing violently” would look like.
No, you are not being persecuted… sometimes you are just plain wrong.
I do agree, partially, that it is nasty things that people do, as apposed to ridiculous beliefs that they hold, that leads to human suffering, but it should be obvious that holding ridiculous beliefs (for example, gays are evil, sex is dirty, prayer is better than antibiotics) can lead directly to behaviors that qualify as “nasty things that people do.”
People should strive to think rationally, because it would eliminate much of the suffering that these beliefs cause, by eliminating the source of the motivation (to harm).
So we should seek to both moderate the tone of our arguments, AND to correct/update/challenge beliefs that may incite us toward harm.
That would, however, mean that the universe is indistinguishable from one where no god exists, since any differences could be pointed to as evidence. That right there is thus a framework in which atheism is preferred to theism through parsimony, since it’s the hypothesis that posits fewer entities and fits the observations.
Any way, I still think the argument at the beginning of this thread is fallacious – look at it this way:
“Some people drink coffee for breakfast; others prefer tea. There is no inherent superiority to either. Hence, atheism and theism stand on the same footing.”
That doesn’t follow; tea and coffee are both valid breakfast drink choices, but we don’t know that, for instance, faith is a valid way to arrive at a picture of the world, yet the argument presupposes that. Tea and coffee do not have any epistemological implications towards atheism and theism, and neither do Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry.
Your argument shows that there are entities that are (epistemologically) equal to each other, but it doesn’t establish atheism and theism as two such entities, it just assumes that they are.
Writing your argument on a brick and throwing it at the other guy’s head ?
