I’ve read and re-read that paragraph four times now, and I’m doggoned if I have a clue what it is you’re trying to say.
How, exactly, do you propose expanding our thinking beyond the limits of science, without opening it up to every personal revelation and individual inspiration that occurs to…anybody? How is truth arrived at if you expand thinking beyond testable, repeatable, falsifiable, and objective criteria?
What is “God-abstraction” and where is the “intersection of cosmology and spirituality?” Do the Hindus have it right, or the Rastafarians? Why? Why one, but not the other?
Seriously, what are you trying to say here, because it sounds a lot like woo.
That’s terrific. So now we know that the municipal boundaries of LA which define where your municipal taxes are paid are exactly the epistemological equivalent of understanding the origin of the universe and the nature of God. It’s always good to have these difficult questions distilled down to the basics for the benefit of the intellectually feeble.
You didn’t answer my response to this exact point above. If there’s evidence that’s unrecognisable as evidence, it’s not actually evidence then, is it? Evidence must by definition be evident (not necessarily instantly, no-one said that).
In over 2,000 years of thought and observation we would have found some evidence, if it existed. We haven’t, ergo one must proceed on the basis there is none, ergo one must proceed as if there were no god or gods. That’s as close to proof of the non-existence of god(s) as it’s possible to get.
How people can not have an opinion on the single most important question in the universe, just staggers me. There must either be or not be a god or gods, there is no third option. Absent evidence of existence one must come down on the side of non-existence.
One word: philosophy. A rigorous academic discipline.
Not woo. For instance the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has more solid hard science about disciplines like cognitive science, cosmology, and quantum physics than I’ve seen anywhere outside of specialist sites. In searching for a link to give you, I came across this article that I had not seen before, whose final phrase in the final sentence seems to echo exactly what I just said: " … contemporary cosmology is fascinating precisely because it has such intricate logical relations with traditional metaphysical and theological issues."
I’m willing to expand “evidence” to include testimony that is not, in fact, “evident.” If a guy comes forward and says he saw God, that is evidence. It’s remarkably weak, not verifiable, not repeatable, and hopelessly subjective. But it is evidence.
Trouble with philosophy is that you can get any answer from it you want. Holism vs. Dualism, for instance: philosophy is incapable of telling us whether “all is one” or “all is many.” There are people arguing seriously in favor of both views.
I think cosmology is fascinating because it’s a real science, based on solid evidence. The sort that is verifiable, independent, repeatable (at least the observations and measurements are) and objective.
The metaphysical and theological issues are none of the above. Nothing in modern cosmology can tell us whether the cosmos has a “guiding consciousness” – a God of sorts.
I started to read the article you linked to, until I hit this bit: “Our subsequent discussion will be restricted almost completely to the case of western monotheism—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and even more specifically to variants of Christianity.”
Why the fuck? What gives them the hubris to throw out the great Pantheons of antiquity, or the vast and rich theology of Hinduism? What makes them so cock-sure that Buddhism is to be discarded? Why is Christianity elevated to the prominent and favored position in cosmological interpretation. This absurdity made the rest of the article completely pointless. Talk about assuming what was intended to be proven! Circularity in all its naked glory.
This stupid argument only works if you assume determinism from the start. This is what it is: Me: If some events are truly random,** how can causality and universal determinism be true**? And your answer is: Assuming universal determinism and causality are true, these can’t be truly random events.
You know that fallacy you were colloquially misusing all those posts ago? The one where you assume the conclusion? That’s what you’re doing here. This is textbook question-begging. A circular argument writ large.
Yes, exactly! Why would you think it would be otherwise?
Unless, of course, you start out privileging theological questions as somehow different from other questions about the nature of reality. Which is why agnosticism involves special pleading.
Atheism is a claim about reality. Agnosticism is a claim about epistemology.
Atheist: There is no God.
Agnostic: It’s *impossible *to know if there’s a God.
Me: Well, yes, it’s impossible to know if there’s ANYTHING. Making up special rules for the knowability of God is special pleading.
Some varieties of God certainly could exist. They just don’t. So it’s not really appropriate to equate atheism with the claim that God is impossible. Saying there are no four-foot-tall professional basketball players is not a claim that it is impossible for a four-foot-tall professional basketball player to exist.
This is simple pragmatism. And I’m not clear why you’re suggesting that agnostics are not doing this. What agnostic would say, “I don’t know if there is a God, so I’m going to proceed as if there were one.”
A lot of this seems to boil down to conflating “allowing for the possibility of” with “assuming the existence of”.
Agreed. However, I would suggest that most agnostics would say it’s just not close enough for me to consider the case closed. And most atheists would say that it is. However, they are also working from different paradigms (please see my following post for more on this).
I am going to try another one of my perspicacious rephrasings of the debate:
Atheist: Scientific inquiry is the only tool that we have for understanding the universe. Anything that we can’t resolve scientifically is not worth considering, because there are no valid conclusions to be had. If I can’t poke it with a stick, then it doesn’t exist in any meaningful way. Sure, it’s possible, but it’s not likely enough for me to care.
Agnostic: There may be things that science can’t resolve, and odds are that we’ll never resolve them. But that doesn’t mean they’re not worth considering. If it turned out that our universe served the purpose of some God Being, well, that would be really different than our universe serving no purpose at all, even if it didn’t have any effect on how I “proceed”.
Atheist: You’re wasting your time thinking about this, and it really pisses me off.
Maybe we have different notions of what an argument is, but how can one side be making a claim if they’re not arguing for anything?
Atheist: Because of x, y, and z, it is obvious that there is no God.
Agnostic: I am unconvinced by your reasoning.
Atheist: Stop your special pleading.
Agnostic: I’ll stop answering the door, if you’ll stop knocking on it.
There is a mental leap that happens here (alluded to above) that keeps getting elided in the debate, and I am beginning to suspect that the whole thing hinges on it. It’s the pragmatic decision not to pursue unprovable hypotheses.
Here is what I believe to be the thought process you’re following:
“It’s impossible to know anything. However, scientific inquiry creates repeatable results, so I’m going “proceed” accordingly. Proceeding otherwise is a waste of time. Assuming that things exist that I can’t scientifically “prove” is a waste of time and so they may as well not exist. Or, if they do exist, they don’t matter.”
The decision to approach scientific inquiry in this pragmatic way makes perfect sense to me, because I can’t imagine how you could “proceed” otherwise.
That being said, Pragmatism is not a scientific conclusion in and of itself. Rather, it is a “philosophical” decision that allows scientific inquiry to proceed. And when you are pursuing scientific inquiry, you can’t arbitrarily take the decision back, because the whole thing falls apart. I believe this is the “special pleading” issue you keep mentioning.
However, and I think this is the key, when agnostics are saying we don’t know whether God exists, we are not trying to pursue any kind of scientific inquiry. We are not trying to rip the pragmatic foundation out from under science. We’re basically saying that, while the decision to be Pragmatic was a good one, that decision never established that God doesn’t exist. We’re basically acknowledging that the decision to be pragmatic was arbitrary.
While you are thinking in a pragmatic, scientific paradigm, then you can hardly say anything other than “God doesn’t exist.” Atheists refuse to consider things any other way. I’ve decided to be pragmatic and, by damn, I’m sticking to it.
Agnostics (I think) are saying that we agree that God doesn’t exist to science. But that doesn’t prove It doesn’t exist at all. Needless to say, it also doesn’t prove that God does exist. To the extent that we’re “claiming” anything, we are reminding you that the decision to be pragmatic was (philosophically) arbitrary.
[QUOTE=Smartass;18411293
Not to say that you’re lying, but I don’t believe this statement is entirely correct. In fact, I would say that this is a good statement of MY position. However, all the evidence I have seen suggests that the atheist position is much stronger than “I just don’t believe in it.” There are continuous aggressive denials of the possibility, and much heckling of those of us who use “I’m not denying the possibility” as their lede.
[/quote]
As I said, strong atheism is believing no gods exist, not just disbelieving. As for aggressive denials of the possibility, it depends on which God someone claims is possible. The tri-omni god? I can aggressively deny the possibility of that one. The God who created the universe 6,000 years ago? Yeah. The deistic god who created the universe and vanished? I don’t recall anyone denying the possibility. Denying the necessity, yes. Not believing or believing no such god exists, yes. Saying that universes with and without that god are equivalent, yes.
If everyone were a deist, we’d be doing a lot less preaching. In our country, one response to God supposedly being against something is show me the God before you pass laws enforcing his supposed will.
Threads here that start out with “ha ha, religion is stupid” don’t get a lot of support from theists or atheists. But sometimes believers consider themselves baited by pretty innocuous things. Try mentioning the IPU sometime.
I started a thread asking moderate theists (ones who are definitely not literalists) how they decide which parts of the Bible to accept. I got some of “how dare you accuse us of being literalists” and mostly evasion. I finally got one answer of “what feels right, and I don’t believe hardly any of it anyway.” I’m sure someone out there thought I was baiting.
However, drive by witnessers get laughed at.
They were deists - but probably agnostic also. (These categories are orthogonal.) They seemed to believe in a deistic god for the same reason you do.
Remember, we were talking about defining god. The point was that believers deny the possibility of more gods than atheists do. (They believe in one more god.) The creator god you were talking about is impossible in their universe.
And the Wager fails because they don’t consider the multiple god hypothesis. One of my options was you missing the point - that seems to have been the case.
What does rejection mean? Not believing in something means rejecting it in some sense, but not denying it. I can believe that the Warriors will will the championship, but I’m not denying the possibility that something awful will happen. I’ve done experiments based on belief in a given outcome, but have designed them to show I’m wrong. Which I frequently am.
We’ve had umpteen threads on the definition of atheism and the difference between it and agnosticism. Atheism is about belief, agnosticism is about knowledge.
Well, atheists take that there is not as a working hypothesis. Everyone takes there are no gods of other planets as a working hypothesis also. And remember, being certain about one god is not the same as being certain about all gods. You’re making the “there is only one god to consider” mistake again. Easy to do for us brought up in a monotheistic culture.
No one does, since this is by definition unknowable. Rejecting the deistic god (as opposed to the possibility) on the other hand is perfectly reasonable given the total lack of evidence for one.
My mistake, but you have been talking about him so warmly.
This is a great example of the impact of religion on our culture. We don’t run around talking about the possibility of unicorns or fairies or dragons in our garages, but a lot of people want to talk about the possibility of random deities.
I’ve done experiments based on belief in a given outcome, but have designed them to show I’m wrong. Which I frequently am.