Almost all of the people who claim the existence of the supernatural, believe that this supernatural thing interacts with the natural world. People who believe in the Christian version of God universally believe this God not only created the natural world, but continues to interact with it.
If something has an effect on the natural world, then it’s in the domain of science.
It sounds like you’re saying that this supernatural something that you believe in has no interaction with our world. Since we can only observe stuff in the natural material world, then the difficult question for you becomes: How do you know? You’re saying on the one hand that you believe this thing exists, while at the same time acknowledging that there would be no way for you to know it if it does. How do you reconcile this?
I’m almost certain DT is taking exception to the semantic baggage that might accompany the term ‘extreme’. He’s at the extreme of the spectrum here, but he’s not an extremist.
I didn’t say it did. That’s up to each and every person for whatever reasons they may find make sense to them.
I do take issue with labeling it fiction. The disregard of some for the evidences recorded in the scripture has no weight of proof to me. You can claim it to be fiction, but I see it as ignoring evidence. You got some proof that Moses was a liar? Or will you talk about “extraordinary evidence” while ignoring that the record we have is the best possible proof of what happened, meaning, Moses didn’t have a camcorder and had no better means to record the events he wrote of? Yet you lack any counter-evidence, period–there are no records from another person along the lines of, “hey I was there and this Moses fella was making it up.”
Or will you give me Ockham’s razor and tell me that this reasoning device dealing with presumptions where evidence is lacking is instead a device to replace evidence when you choose to deny evidence?
Nevertheless, I’d like for you to address my point about morals. Do you value truth, or make up false claims about the claims of people you debate with? If you do make up those strawmen I think you have moral issues.
I would like to clarify that neither here nor in my earlier post do I mean to claim any specific poster on this board is a liar, I just mean to convey a generality about morals and telling the truth. Not directed at anyone specific.
:rolleyes: Nobody said the USSR was formed so that all secularists could gather together in one country. I have no idea how you got that out of anything I wrote.
Ain’t babbling, dude. Just pointing out that most of the crazies ranting in public aren’t religious these days, they’re mostly political, and they’re on your end of the political spectrum.
I don’t need counter evidence because you don’t have anything to counter in the first place.
Science approaches things with little to no assumptions. It records evidence as impartially as possible and draws conclusions based upon testing that can be repeated. There is no more evidence for the veracity of Moses’ accounts than there is for Sumerian myths. Hell, we have more “evidence” of ghosts, bigfoot, and UFO’s than we do to corroborate anything supernatural in biblical scripture.
Extraordinary evidence, Occam’s razor and the like aren’t old canards trotted out to protect the debater. They are simply problems that the religious opposition cannot overcome, but normal everyday reality has no issues with.
As to your strawman question, the answer is: “No, we aren’t lying or making up strawmen to knock over.” From a scientific perspective there is exactly as much evidence for gods as there is for leprechauns; and they should be treated the same.
ETA: I’m off to work shortly and will check in after 5 EST.
Well, too bad; calling it “fiction” is being polite about it. “Delusion” or “fraud” would be more accurate; which of those two it is would depend on whether or not the person claiming it believes it of course.
In a sense. His story makes impossible claims that are contradicted by the historical records and archaeological facts. But he probably never existed, so was technically not a liar.
We have the records left by the Egyptians, we have the archaeological evidence - or in this case a lack of evidence that would be left by so many people in a desert - showing that the whole Moses story never happened. No slavery in Egypt, nothing. And of course the various claims of miracles are contradicted by known physical laws.
Mockery or humor isn’t the same as a straw man. We don’t compare Jesus to a zombie because we think you believe he was.
David, you are aware that, to be charitable, the jury’s out on whether or not Moses of the bible actually existed, with recent archeological evidence suggesting he probably didn’t, right?
Communism is a secularist movement. The movement’s ideology is distinctly secularist. It is, of course, only one form of secularism among many. Secularism is the set, Communism is a subset of the set. Got that?
Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, all that bunch were sincere secularists. For that matter, most Communists before about 1960 or 1970 were entirley sincere about their ideology.
This leaves both you and Der Trihs in a very awkward position. You guys claim that secularists have never committed massive crimes against humanity; yet it its quite clear that a secularist political movement killed a hundred million people in Eurasia. Your response has been to pretend that movement was somehow not really secularist. And that pretense is every bit as silly as insisting that the Nazis somehow weren’t really anti-Semitic.
I am not blaming all secularists for the massive atrocities of the Communists. I am disputing the claim that secularists have never committed large scale atrocities, as the historical record makes it quite clear that some secularists did indeed commit large scale crimes against humanity.
The Communists did. Specifically. That’s why the defenders of religion keep bringing them up and trying to equate them with unbelievers in general.
No, they just threaten people and attack them. The Republican party is overwhelmingly composed of thugs, fanatics, bigots and lunatics. The Democrats aren’t. There’s no comparison between the two.
Yet our secular courts put people to death on the testimony of one person alone and call it evidence. If what people write in books cannot be evidence, we’re gonna have to reexamine our entire paradigm of knowledge.
So, is your claim “The failure to find evidence is certain proof that no such evidence can ever be found in the future?”
It’s the absolute certainty that the scripture is false that I take issue with.
Seems to me, if I recall correctly, that certain archeologists have made fools of themselves before by claiming, for instance, that “Troy is a myth” despite having received evidence to the contrary from Homer. True, Homer also made some fantastic claims. But he also claimed the existence of ancient Greece which no-one ever doubted. It’s obvious that some of what Homer claimed is true. Now, which parts can you PROVE are true and untrue?
Part of the problem here is that many people fail to employ cultural relevancy when viewing ancient documents and pretend that the writers are invalid for the reason that their viewpoint doesn’t jibe with our modern sensibilities. You have to read the documents on the terms of the author, not your own. If you do not you will fail to grasp what the author meant.
And only in religion is this considered a bad thing.
Story from a guy:
There was this beautiful woman who hung around where I did. I liked her, a lot, and while I had no proof she liked me, or even evidence, I had faith she did because it made me feel better.
One day she told me that she loved me, and we went out to dinner, and it was great, and we went to her place, and it was fantastic.
Other guy: So, you’re going out with her?
Guy. No. She destroyed my faith by proving it, so I split.
In life, the guy’s a schmuck. In religion, he’s devout.
Your example is solidifying a bad thing. I can see religious people refusing to believe evidence that there is no life after death, that gives hope. But not wanting evidence that their greatest dream is true? That’s like refusing to believe you’ve won the lottery because you enjoy the dreams of winning more.
It claims impossibilities, contradicts known facts, and is internally contradictory. So yes, it’s false. Of course not every single word is false but so what? No one is claiming that anyway.
Since you asked. Now, it is clearly impossible to prove or even demonstrate the non-existence of the supernatural, since it is so poorly defined. But, are you familiar with J. Rhine? He was a professor at Duke who believe in ESP, certainly something supernatural, and conducted many experiments with the deck of five types of cards to see if he could detect it in anyone. He was not trying to explain this supernatural thing, he was just trying to demonstrate its existence. There are some issues with his experiments, but he more or less was doing the right thing, and he was enough of a scientist to not try to create a theory about something before its existence was demonstrated. People have also done all sorts of experiments testing the predictions of astrology.
As for God, you need to give us a definition of your god. If you like the deist god who create the universe and then vanished, we can’t demonstrate him by definition, but he might as well not exist. If your God created the universe 6,000 years ago, we have plenty of contradictory evidence. If your God initiated the Exodus, and spoke to Moses, we have no indication that any large number of people in the Sinai, not even any dried out mummified Hebrew poop. There are certain cases where absence of evidence is evidence of absence if the evidence should be found. Similarly, no one in Jerusalem in 32 CE seems to have heard about someone getting resurrected, and no one noticed an earthquake or marauding zombie saints. In fact, the people living there seemed more immune to recruitment in the new cult than the boobs in the sticks.
Seriously, dude, WTF?