whew, for a second there, I thought i’d have to share the Crown of Enlightenment.
So you deny that it really seems like [your] senses are portraying a reasonably consistent reality?
You should put down the bong, then.
People feel the need to define that which they cannot understand.
It’s all good and fine as long as they use good logic to reach their definitions.
It’s problematic when they make leaps, skipping over lacks of evidence one way or another, to make proclamations.
It’s one thing to be an atheist and simply not believe. It’s quite another to be an atheist and believe that gods cannot exist. While we can easily argue to a point of agreement that any given god goes not exist by all accepted definitions of that god, we cannot disprove that which we cannot define clearly.
Therefore:
Something Exists.
Is it sentient? Who knows.
Understanding human perception, its absurd to think we always percieve reality with 100% accuracy. i suppose “reasonably consistent” is almost acceptable
Forget 101-someone needs to take a remedial logic course.
Way to go - bringing up spelling in a philosophical debate…
Atheism isn’t a religion; it’s simply the disbelief in gods. And people who only have atheism in common don’t really organize well enough to be effectively evil. Nor, unlike the religious do they have the motivation.
It’s pretty trivial to prove that it’s self-aware, at least…
And seriously, if you’re George hunting the firebreathing Hard Atheists, you might be a long time hunting, because they’re rarer than you think. It’s easy to find people who don’t believe in Og, the invisible pervert who does nothing but spend his time watching women in bathrooms but never intervenes or effects observable reality in any way, and you’ll find lots of people scoffing at the idea of believing in such a thing, but I think when push came to shove even Der Trihs would admit it’s possible such a creature exists, while in the same breath deriding (justifiably) anyone who would have convinced themselves to believe in something for which there is not and can be no evidence.
I didn’t say that we have reason to believe that our perceptions are consistent - I said with those perceptions we have reason to believe that reality is reasonably consistent*. There’s a difference.
- which means things like “the existence of things persists” and “things aren’t completely random”
True.
But almost no one actually believes in a noninterventionist god the first place. About the only time you see this god-that-affects-nothing brought up is when people are trying to justify religion. Then outside that scenario, they go right back to the interventionist God. It’s the religious equivalent of the terrorist-with-a-nuke scenario you see torture advocates bring up; a scenario that largely only exists to defend a fundamentally indefensible position.
How should we look upon people who claim they do know, and want their knowledge written into law and passed onto impressionable children?
Ok then prove my religion wrong
I say: something exists
that’s my religion
if you cannot prove me wrong then you must forfeit you atheistic beliefs and covert to panism
Teach your children as you wish but don’t force religion through law
Define the “something” you are referring to, so that I might properly dispute it.
How does this belief influence how you live your life?
Remedial logic: A does not prove not-B. Something existing is not inconsistent with (nearly) any other belief system, so nobody has to abandon the rest of their beliefs just because one single of those beliefs can be proven to be true.
Thanks. Now get everyone trying to get creationism into science classes to agree, along with everyone trying to block gay marriage and gays serving in the military. I don’t care what beliefs anyone holds, I just want them to keep them private.
Preach it Brother Bryan . . . oh, no wait - AMEN! oh, no wait . . . 
Logically speaking, the “something” he’s proving must, pretty much by definition, be himself - because the only place you’re going to cobble together a belief system that consists only of “something exists” is by having overheard somebody mention Descartes and running with it like an intercepted football.
Obviously, getting from there to pantheism isn’t something you’re likely to do if you’re aware of how “something exists” is acually derived - he grabbed the football and then turned and ran the wrong way.
I agree with this. In fact, that exact thinking leads to disagreement from skeptics all the time, as in this post.
Honestly, most of this post to me just confirms what I said about the scientific method being unable to tackle the higher levels of our existence. Or in other words, I’m in agreement with Keenenaw and JThunder when they say that what you’re describing is not the scientific method by any stretch of the imagination. There is the detail that despite the strong adherence it gets from so many people, “the scientific method” is not rigidly defined. But if we say that any scientific results must objective (all researchers get the same results), replicable (the experiment produce the same results every time), and quantifiable (the results are precise measurements rather than vague assessments), then none of the approaches that you’re describing involve the scientific method. In fact, they fail on all three counts.
To take the girlfriend example, your description shows exactly why the scientific method won’t work in that situation. You say: “If she does love you, she will say it, she will want to be around you, and she will treat you reasonably well.” But it’s wrong it both directions. Firstly, a woman could say she loves a man, spend time around him, treat him reasonably well, and yet not love him. Second, a woman might love a man and not do any of those things if circumstances intervened, or if they had a particular relationship which didn’t center on those things. The point being that the experience of the love between two people cannot be quantified, cannot be replicated, and cannot be objectively assessed by outsiders. In other words, it is not subject to the scientific method. It is a unique experience between just those two people, and it may be vastly different from what any other two people in love experience. Anybody who searched for love by trying to exactly replicate some sort of average of what others did would be setting him/herself up for failure.
Or for another example, take “models of how the American public behaves”. Well, the big banks had highly sophisticated models which predicted that only a certain percentage of homeowners would default. Investment firms had models showing that they could earn certain percentages from subprime mortgages. The government had models showing that easy credit would only boost the economy. The only problem was that the models turned out to be wrong, because they were based on math rather than on human behavior. They could not predict that entry-level homeowners would become overconfident and take out mortgages that were too large. They could not predict that the major banks would sneak Ccc investments into Aaa bonds. They could not predict that government regulators would simply fail on a massive scale. In short, they could not predict the human element. They demonstrated what Gandhi said, “It is one of the chief follies of western man that he thinks he can devise a system so perfect that no one will need to be good.”
You can take a survey of 500 homeowners and see how many of them default. You can even take ten such surveys. But the results don’t tell you what homeowners are going to do in the future. Humans live in social networks that are too complicated to understand; no one could account for and predict all the variables. So placing too much emphasis on replicable, objective results, without trying to actually understand the decisions that individuals make, can lead to disaster, as it did in this case.
That doesn’t mean you can understand the human mind just by looking at what drugs and hormones. They’re blunt instruments; their effects broad; they don’t explain the detailed decisions and behaviors of individuals. I can affect my computers behavior with a baseball bat, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good way to explore my computers behavior. The best way to learn about computers is to use them; same with the human mind.