Wrong. Pain is a subjective experience, and therefore our own sensation of pain is enough to prove it exists. And there’s plenty of neurological data about pain as well. For that matter, our inability to measure “qualia like pain” is probably only a technological limitation, not a fundamental one. Wait ten, twenty years.
Claims about God are claims about something that ISN’T a subjective sensation, and something for which we have zero evidence beyond people’s subjective, contradictory word. So no, they aren’t the same.
Yes, it does. There is NO evidence for God; only that “revealed truth”. God itself is one of those “revealed truths” that you claim aren’t relevant; there’s precisely zero reason outside of that “revealed knowledge” to believe in a God. And plenty of reasons not to.
Der organized religions invoke god concepts but god concepts are believed to have existed before organized religions and can and do exist outside of organized religions today. And sometimes the god concept ends up as peripheral to the organized religion - actual belief being immaterial to the structure of the religion which functions only in order to maintain its power. (If you’ve never read PTerry’s Small Gods you should.)
As to my points regarding morality, well I can’t be any clearer - my limitations I am sure. So I’ll drop that line with you if you do not understand what I am trying to say.
Honestly though I think that you have a very limited understanding of what a god concept can mean to other people, you seem stuck in arguing against this image of a Man in the sky who was going to punish you if you weren’t a good little boy that you may have shoved in your face as a child. It is an immature concept that many outgrow but it seems to be the only one you can entertain, so enjoy it.
Again, even if I had no personal experience of pain due to a genetic neurologic disorder, it would be rational for me to consider others descriptions of it. And no, qualia are never directly measurable even though technology currently exists to measure biologic correlates of those qualia with reproducible accuracy.
Whether they are “organized” or not doesn’t matter; their belief in God all comes from the same source. “Revealed knowledge”; aka their unsupported word.
I understand what you are trying to say; that God = morality. I just think you are wrong. And from my viewpoint, you look more like you are trying to avoid answering my questions on that.
That’s the view held by most people. Few people hold to your God that doesn’t do anything or ever show up view. And the one thing that all versions of God have in common is that there’s no basis for any of them beyond some guy somewhere saying “Because I say so !”.
In other words, even if we have devices that can measure such things, it doesn’t count because it offends you philosophically to admit that the mind is as material as everything else.
I can certainly observe people and animals reacting to certain stimuli, and the change in recations when the stimuli is removed. Pain exists in a similar manner as gravity - we can experience it ourselves, we can observe others experiencing it, and this happens so consistently that alternate explanations are hugely more improbable.
If I felt I was the only one who actually experienced pain because I could only directly experience my own pain then, heck, maybe I’m the only on on Earth who actually experiences gravity. Everyone else is being pushed by invisible angels or is faking it in some immensely complex fashion.
This level of consistency is not even remotely approached by any religion I know of. Some faiths describe a merciful and loving God, for example, even as children die of cancer. Someone claims a plane’s emergency landing with no injuries is a miracle and ignores the many crashes with no survivors.
Yes it does, as long as “personal experiences” are being submitted as evidence of God. I have a “personal experience” that prompts me to write an eight-day Genesis. Did it come from God? mswas’s suggestion regarding the KJV (“What if it just so happens to be correct…”) isn’t really all that convincing.
No, you do not, as that is not what I have been saying, but as I said I am dropping it with you.
And no, I very much see mind as a material thing, or more precisely as an epiphenomenon - resultant of a material thing (I would and have argued against the concept of the soul, for example), but I am well enough trained in science to know that measuring a correlate of something is not the same as measuring the something. This bit is for you too Bryan. Actually a psychology professor I had in college used pain as an example of how easy it is to be fooled into thinking that you are measuring something that you are not - his example showing that we can measure nocisponsiveness easily enough but that we only can infer what that means about nociception. Maybe the subject still feels the pain but now no longer cares? Or can no longer respond effectively? etc. Correlates are not the thing itself.
Ah Bryan, now you are disputing the quality of the evidence - it would be of higher quality if you yourself experienced it and if you had reported to you multiple other individual’s experiences of it. And I’ll not dispute that as evidence goes reports of religious epiphany is poor evidence to those of us like me who have not had the reported sensations and who would likely interpret said sensations differently than religious epiphany if I did experience them. I dismiss it myself. But again, saying that it is not convincing evidence is not the same as saying it is not evidence at all.
Which pretty much eliminates that line of argument. Why won’t you answer my questions ? And if you weren’t equating God and absolute morality - a common religious viewpoint - then why exactly did you keep bringing them up together ?
That just means we need better technology.
As for your attempt to claim that measuring brain activity can’t ever be anything other that “measuring a correlate”; what exactly do you thing a subjective mental phenomenon viewed from the outside is going to look like, but brain activity ? It’s just looking at the same thing from a different perspective, not looking at two different things.
Oh, please. For anything but religion, that would be called “no evidence”. People’s unsupported word isn’t evidence.
DSeid thanks for clarifying your position a bit more. I really do appreciate the mental effort that you’re putting in here.
I must say, that the presence of true EVIL would in fact be evidence FOR some Kind of deistic or religious postulate… but the fact that “bad things” (events that cause harm to individuals and groups) happen has never been a terribly important reason for me to disbelieve.
I find the most compelling evidence against is the complete lack of evidence for, coupled with the obvious payoffs of being a head honcho in a religion(motive), and i would suspect that I am in the majority.
So it’s only inductive by default, for lack of any way to deduce the truth.
…But, eventually, it will be determined what the geometry and fundamental rules of the universe are in a wholly consistent way. One of these two postulates, or possibly another option, is true. That they are the best we can do for some theories for the time being does not make them both true.
Conversely empirical methods of data collection will always have utility… whereas revelation and magic only have utility when you are able to push emotional buttons and pull psychological strings.
The OP doesn’t establish how empiricism and mysticism are connected. The first analogy is tied together by mathematics, but empiricism and mysticism are as closely related as text messaging and a ham sandwich.
I would also point out that atheists don’t really induce that there is no god… they don’t see any evidence for unicorns, trolls or fairies, and so they god don’t consider them to be valid postulates. They never get brought into it.
You have repeatedly asserted the epistemological equivalence between theism and atheism, but you haven’t yet brought forward an argument for it; so you seem to take it as a kind of axiomatic element to your personal world view, but axioms can still be wrong. I’ve above given an example where an atheistic world view ought to be logically preferred, and in my other thread, I give a couple of more arguments why I think that should be the default view in attempting to form a consistent picture of the world, and I don’t want to hijack this thread with all of that stuff; however, just to illustrate why I think equivalence is not the default stance, let’s consider the nature of knowledge in both frameworks. For somebody in a world with an omnipotent god, no knowledge is ever certain, since in principle, god could always change the underlying facts; to an atheist, his knowledge is at worst incomplete. How does that not point to a fundamental difference in epistemologies?
Half I have brought forward an argument - you just are duly unimpressed by it! Fair enough. And please note that I am not quite putting it forward as my worldview. Personally I waver. I am a theist of the softist sort - pantheist-lite - and unsure if there is an objective morality or not. I certainly acknowledge that my personal desire to believe that there is an objective morality in no way makes it so and that my half believing that there is may very well be a little fairytale I want to tell myself. My point here is that some of the characterization of the theistic stand as completely irrational is unfair (even though I clearly acknowledge that some its defenders arguments are not very rational).
As to your other comments - I have not argued for or against an omnipotent or even an omniscient god but I actually take the exact opposite take. The biggest problem for a religious epistemology as a tool for understanding the material world is that knowledge is always “certain”. Truth about the material world is not discovered but revealed and is true by definition lest the whole structures truths be at risk. The advantage of a the empiricist worldview for learning about the material world is that knowledge is never certain, never subject to complete faith, and always open to some doubt. Indeed the empiricist worldview is open even to the possibility that the rules of the universe may change at any moment, that the basic forces are not consistent across time or space. It would take extraordinary evidence to make that claim, but there is still always enough doubt extant as to convincable.
Catchy, I would disagree that in reality most atheists do not induce that there is no god, just have never brought it into it. Oh I can buy your argument that as a matter of rational thinking the fairest default is no-god, but atheist are no more completely rational creatures living in isolation than are fundamentalists. They are raised within families and cultures and generally grow up exposed to and accepting a god concept of some sort. It may be that we are wired to accept a god delusion as our default state, or that cultures have mostly used religion as a tool to create themselves so god belief is consequently extremely pervasive, but most of us begin our rational lives with a god belief of some sort from which we moved. It may not be the fairest position from rational analysis but it an extant belief always gets the advantage and requires evidence to be moved from. Most atheists I believe are moved from a god belief state. To describe it mockingly (since many atheists here have no desire to respect those beliefs) a child grows up believing in Santa Claus - they start to not believe only when enough evidence is accumulated for them to infer that they are wrong, not because there is no evidence of Santa Claus.
I’d say that an atheist’s knowledge is always incomplete, not “at worst incomplete”. And, as you know, many theists say that human knowledge is incomplete. They also say that some things are certain, but those claims are typically claims about the metaphysical, not the physical.
It doesn’t because you haven’t demonstrated your claim that “in principle” god could always change the underlying facts. Which principle are you referring to? Or, even more specifically, whose principle?
It seems that you’re telling theists (and telling them very emphatically) that you understand their principles better than they do; you understand their epistemology better than they do. Perhaps you do, but you haven’t demonstrated that you do.
One point for DSeid, though. You said:
I think that’s Half’s point: That’s what theists say, but they are wrong, fundamentally wrong.
It’s not that I find your argument unconvincing, it’s just that I think it doesn’t actually make the point you take it to – it establishes by example the existence of (what can be taken to be) epistemologically equivalent frameworks, and that it does fairly convincingly, seeing as how there’s not really anything more convincing than an example of what you’re trying to convince people of. However, you assert that it in fact shows atheism and theism to be two such frameworks, yet it doesn’t actually contain a statement about that – it doesn’t establish either to fit within the categories your argument uses. You’d have to derive a direct relationship between atheism and Euclidean, and theism and non-Euclidean geometry in order to make a statement of the form if Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry are equivalent frameworks, then so are atheism and theism, however that part is entirely absent from your argument; in its current form, that conclusion simply does not follow.
Faith-based knowledge is presented as being certain, yes, however that assertion has little implications towards it being actually true or not; it’s just another layer in a veritable onion of mutually obscuring beliefs that tend to cluster around any given faith.
Again, yes, in an empirical picture, there is always the possibility of knowledge being incomplete, of the next observation invalidating all prior hypotheses.
However, that distinction is to my mind a rather superficial one, predicated only on the limits of individual cognition; what I am trying to get at seems, to me at least, to be more fundamental: if there exists a definite state of the world, and an atheist has absolute knowledge of that state (which he wouldn’t necessarily need to know), then that knowledge is never subject to change; however, to the faith-based epistemologist, even the knowledge of that fundamental state isn’t unchangeable, and can be undone at the whims of some god (not even, and that’s probably a key point I haven’t yet mentioned, necessarily one he himself believes in – faith in one supernatural entity always admits the possibility of the existence of any given other supernatural entity, since there’s no way to prefer one faith over another). That’s a fundamental theoretical limit on the degree of certainty with which one can know anything in the respective epistemologies, and the reason why I find it hard to think of them as equivalent.
Well, could an omnipotent god (or wizard or whatever) make all sheep pink or couldn’t he? And wouldn’t that falsify the knowledge that sheep are white (which can’t necessarily be known to be absolutely true, but nevertheless can be)?
And as for ‘whose principle’, I still consider that to be an immaterial point; each faith admits every other faith, thus if you believe in invisible pixies, you’ll have to acknowledge the possibility of the existence of an omnipotent god, as well.
Yes, to your first question, and No, to the second. It doesn’t “falsify” anything. All it means is that sheep *were *white (and my knowledge of that “whiteness” was “complete”) and now they *are *pink. Does anyone know that the sheep are now pink? How?
Why? Your “thus” does not follow.
Half, I have a question for you: Do you think that you have formulated an original, distinctly different argument against the existence of God?
So, your knowledge that the sheep are white, that was correct when they were, is false now, that they are not. Agreed?
Because there’s no way to logically differentiate between different faiths, much less assess their correctness. Say you’re a Christian. Your faith dictates that your religion is the right one, but does that logically mean it can’t as well be Zoroastrianism?
What am I supposed to answer to that? “Does too!”? Why do you think it doesn’t follow?
No, I have not formulated an argument on the existence of god.
It’s not false. When the sheep became pink, I no longer had knowledge that they *are *white. I know that they *were *white, and now they *are *pink. (Although, I’m not sure that I know that they are. You didn’t answer my question about who knows and how, in your analogy.)
I understand your analogy has another layer, but it’s not clear.
Okay, what do you mean when you say that “there’s no way”, when, in the same paragraph you mention Christian and Zoroastrianism? Why are you using two words, when the two faiths can’t be differentiated? Are you differentiating “illogically”? Are you saying that the concepts of Christianity and Zoroastrianism are equally meaningless?
Well, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that you haven’t presented a reason for accepting the truth of one your premises, namely, “Each faith admits every other faith”.
Perhaps if you lay out* all *of the revelant premises more formally, then the validity of your conclusion will be clearer.
Do you consider it to be an original argument, i.e. one that has never before been formulated by someone else?
You don’t know; god changed the colours of the sheep while you weren’t looking. At any point before the great colour change, you could have formed the statement ‘all sheep are white’, and it would have been true. At any point after the colour change, if you make the statement ‘all sheep are white’, it will be false. Such is not possible without a god able to change the basic facts about the universe.
Aw, come on, don’t just string me along like that. I don’t imply it’s impossible to give them different names or anything like that. It’s just impossible to tell them apart according to their correctness. You can’t logically say ‘faith A is right, and faith B is not’; that’s why believing in faith A means there’s at least the possibility of faith B being correct.
It’s at least not one I have often encountered before, or I would not have bothered to make it. Other than that, I don’t make any claim towards its uniqueness. Maybe everybody thinks about it some morning in the shower, sees its logical inconsistencies, and dismisses it with a smile, and I’m just the last imbecile to not get it. I don’t think that’d make much of a difference.
What am I supposed to answer to that? “Does too!”? Why do you think it doesn’t follow?