Then why should we believe what Christianity or Islam has to say about anything? Clearly they are flawed epistemologies. They claim to provide access to the truth, but the process they use to arrive at the truth is broken.
Interesting, is it not? Both religions are broken when it comes to uncovering the true nature of the universe. And both also forbid their followers from using other means to find it.
Again, the problem is claiming that your entrance is the ONLY entrance, as both Christianity and Islam do. If Christ has said “Believe in me or not, it doesn’t matter. Everyone goes to heaven.” then I wouldn’t be using this particular example to illustrate my point.
I kind of feel the same way when people talk about Big Bang Theory, especially what came before the Red Shift.
As a religion of personal conscience I don’t think it’s necessarily useless. As for the forbidding about finding other means to find it, I don’t see that as being true.
Right. I understand your point, but the thread isn’t about why you should convert to Christianity, but about the efficacy of models and whether you can have two mutually inconsistent models that are internally consistent in parallel.
I’m not talking about whether particular individual religious assertions are true or not. I’m talking about the capacity for religion in general to undercover the truth.
Do you believe that empiricism in general is a flawed epistemology? Does it consistently produce contradictory answers the way that theology and spiritualism do?
It was a “fireball” for about 100,000 years before that as I recall. Too dense for light to pass through, thus nothing to redshift.
Redshift in general has no particular time period associated with it as you seem to think; as the universe is expanding it’s seen all over, for most objects we can see. It’s just an optical effect caused by objects receding.
Where does this number 100,000 come from and how is it measuered?
Well I admit I don’t really understand it, but as Sentient Meat once explained to me, you could measure the frequency of the red shift and thus derive how long it was since the event that caused the initial red shift.
My memory - so don’t take it as a hard number. As I understand it, it comes from calculating how long it would take for the expanding universe to cool and rarefy, until it became transparent enough for light to pass though.
…and you may find that argument unsatisfying(emotionally)… but that has little bearing on it’s accuracy.
But you certainly are right… objective morals standards are exactly like god. They are not supported by the evidence.
This does not mean that extremely strong and compelling subjective moral standards to not exist… in fact our inbuilt genetic moral disposition is so strong that it is often confused with an objective moral standard.
as you said… the statement is extremely trivial… but there is no equivalence between the utility of these 2 systems.
And in fact, I will never understand how people cannot be more satisfied with the realisation that we are largely moral in and out of ourselves, rather than being the often failing subjects to some transcendental discipline. It almost seems as if those feeling the need for an external measure of right and wrong can’t be too sure of their internal ones.
Pochacco you may find the issue of whether or not there is morality that is more than what those who hav won declare to right or wrong to be a trivial concern, but some of us do not.
You are also arguing against religions which is not the subject of this thread. No doubt to me that religions are the inventions of humans, are used as tools for good and for evil as are most tools made by humans, and are generally falsifiable. So what? It has nothing to do with this thread other than that some of you have a knee-jerk Pavlovian response every time the word “god” is uttered. This thread is not about any religion per se. Take your religion bashing elsewhere please.
Der also insists on fighting a fight that is not in this thread - against the revealed truths of specific religions. I do not assume in this discussion that God has communicated moral codes accurately or an interactive God in any form. Merely that they exist; that if Hitler had won the war and had absolute control killing off all those who disagreed, that he’d still be evil by some objective standard. If that seems to be a reasonable belief to you, then to me it follows that some sort of God-concept must also seem like a reasonable assumption.
Catchy is consistent in his/her reasoning. Yes, that may be true. The existence of objective moral standards is not supported by the evidence. Those of us who believe they exist, for example that in reality there are some truths that “are self-evident”, may be only deluding ourselves. Moral codes may be only subjective products of biologic and cultural selection. It is fair to accept no god as a postulate if you believe that and I respect that. But if you accept that some objective moral standards do exist then it is fair to accept a god postulate (that has little to do with any of the “revealed truths” of any organized religion). And I respect that as well.
Empiricism is the way to go for understanding our physical world. Scientific method rocks for making predictions of what will happen in the future and how to influence events. A god postulate should stay out of science’s way in these matters. Call this Euclidian space.
But while the scientific method can perhaps explain the means by which various moral imperatives became engrained in our genetic heritage and in our cultural heritage as well, it has no ability to comment on what is ethical or moral. For these questions we need to rely on postulates, even if they come not from religions but from secular texts, such as the Declaration of independence or the UN’s declaration of human rights. And accepting those postulates as objective implies the god postulate. This is non-Euclidian space and science has little role here.
Pain typically has some observable biological cause. It responds to medication. The field is not wholly explored, of course, there’s a mysterious psychosomatic aspect to it, but I see no reason even that won’t eventually be analyzed by our increasing understand of the brain and how it works.
The kinds of personal experiences relevant to this discussion, however (I thought), are those along the lines of people who claim to have had epiphanic communications with deities. A person claims, for example, to have spoken to Jesus or angels who advised him to write a book that supplements the New Testament. Do these beings exist and is the person a prophet? Is the person delusional? Is the person lying? Does the person think he’s lying or delusional but is actually inspired? What conceivable test could we run to find out?
Please tell me how you, if presented with a KJV version of Genesis and my alternate version in which God rests on the eighth day, would know which (if either) truly told the story of creation?
What if it just so happens to be correct that God rested on the seventh day, and yet there is no possible way to verify it?
The problem with science is that it examines the mechanism from within the clockworks. So all you can see is gears and shafts and such, but not to what purpose they exist. It may also be true that there is no ultimate purpose, but it might be true that there is.
And you haven’t answered the question : How does God change that ?
God is a purely religious concept; bring up God, you are bringing up religion.
Of course the so-called “revealed truths” of specific religions matter in this thread. “God” is one such “revealed truth”. You might as well bring up transubstantiation and pretend that Catholicism is irrelevant to the thread.
First, your unknowable non-interventionist version of God means that his moral opinions are irrelevant since they by definition cannot be communicated to us. And second, even if God showed up and started talking, so what ? What makes you think that God’s opinion on morality is better than ours ? Assuming that there is a God AND absolute morality, how do you know he follows it ? And assuming that there is an “absolute morality”, so what ? Are you going to follow it if it disagrees with your own ? If this “absolute morality” held that Hitler was in the right would you say "Oh, well then, ‘Go Nazis !’ " ? Somehow I doubt it.
And why isn’t that good enough ? We are the product of our biology and our culture; it makes sense that any morality relevant to us is at the least going to be heavily influenced by those things.
Once again, that makes no sense. What makes you think that absolute morality implies a god of any kind ?
And, we need to rely on science, not religion for good moral decisions. Science can tell us what the real consequences of our actions are; religion tells us to factor imaginary things like souls and God’s will into our moral judgements. Therefore, religion inevitably undercuts good moral judgement.
Wrong, and wrong. There is no connection between objective morality and God; if God think something is moral, that’s just his opinion - and again, you assume that God’s moral in the first place. And God is either real or not, which is an objective fact and therefor relevant to science; and if you are right and objective morality exists, again, that means it becomes a subject for science.
What if say about 201 decades ago, some being from the outside opened the clock face and wound the clock? We have records of him doing it but the standards of record keeping at the time were rather low.
Bryan your response assumes that pain exists. But all you have to base that belief on is your own personal experience of that sensation and others reports. You cannot measure pain, or any other qualia for that matter. You can only measure that which correlates with reports of the experience of that sensation. Yes, it is reasonable and rational to take your personal experience of pain and the reports of others, as evidence that pain exists. It would be rational for me to consider your report of painful personal experience as evidence of pain’s existence, even if by some freak of nature, I had never myself experienced it (maybe I have some neurologic disorder). Similarly others’ personal experiences that they attribute to communication with god(s) are evidence. High quality evidence certainly not, but evidence nonetheless. I may choose to dismiss that evidence, accepting a more worldly hypothesis than a religious one, but that is a different question than whether or not it is evidence at all.
As to your Genesis question … do I need to shout? This thread is not discussing the veracity or fallaciousness of any so-called revealed truth contained in any organized religion’s sacred texts. I do not claim or defend as rational any belief that any religion’s texts actually represent the word of God or gods. See the post above yours. Falsifiable fictions. No debate from me. And that opinion HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS THREAD.