Brain = personality. There’s plenty of evidence.
And you can explain why I’m wrong ?
Prove it. And while you do it, I’ll point out that the brain determining personality is not the same as the brain = personality.
Now, let’s get cracking on those cites.
I doubt that yet another explanation to you about why science and religion are unrelated will have any different result than the first 100 times it’s been tried. You’d just reject it, which, by the way, doesn’t make you right.
Der Trihs might be more convincing in his insistence on rationality in regards to relgion if his view of religion was at all rational.
Once again, proof =/=evidence and vice versa. Are you denying that there is evidence that personality comes from the brain? You can change personality by messing with the brain-they are not separate from each other.
Just because two things are related does not mean they are equivalent.
I finally got it from the library, and am starting the last chapter. Condescending? Perhaps in the professor at Oxford way. But maybe you consider his unwillingness to treat religion with the respect it has come to expect on our society as condescending.
As for strawmen, having read some of the discussion on the book I was expecting to find far more than I did. He very specifically does not claim all religious people are literalists. He very specifically admits that religion can do good in some respects. A lot of religious people here believe in a more pantheistic or deistic god than he discusses, so those people quite rightly think that his model of the God he refutes isn’t what they believe in. It would be interesting to see what he says about that kind of god, but he is clearly addressing the mainstream one.
Do you remember any particular strawmen, even vaguely?
The Blind Watchmaker (and Climbing Mt. Improbable) are against the ID or Creationist argument about the improbability of evolution, which he addresses very briefly in The God Delusion. I hope that Creationist argument isn’t one of your strawmen - we’ve all heard it hundreds of times.
I’m not trying to “win” jack shit, because I’m not playing a game. I’m trying to get straight answers by asking questions, If you don’t wish to answer questions, just say so, but don’t try to pull the old “bait and switch” by crying that there is no way to prove that your deity exists when what is asked for is evidence. If your deity interacts with with the natural world, evidence of that interaction must exist(unless, of course, your deity is a deceptive S.O.B. that erases the evidence, in which case I suggest you find something else to worship). If your deity doesn’t interact with the natural world, she/he/it might as well not exist, and isn’t even worth thinking about.
Now, do you want to make another snide and dismissive “joke”, go with the standard “I’d show you evidence, but you’d only dismiss it”, or do you want to seriously debate the subject?
What he said.
For me to have evidence I have to show it in relation to other examples where that same evidence doesn’t apply. If God is actively interacting with the world at every level all the time, then I cannot show evidence because there is nothing to contradistinguish one bit of evidence from.
Then it isn’t evidence.
Shrug. ‘Cuz the voice in my head told me to’ is a reason, but I wouldn’t call it a very good one.
Oh, good grief. How many times do we have to say that no one thinks that we could prove God does not exist, even to the level that an appearance by God doing his tricks would prove he did, in the loose sense. Even Dawkins said that he was presenting a very strong argument against the existence of God, but specifically not proof.
BTW, the reason that I am just now reading the book is that I didn’t expect anything new in it, and I was right. It is better than Sam Harris’s first book, which I found poorly reasoned and more of an attack on religion rather an argument against God.
As far as evidence, the lack of the evidence that would be expected if Bible stories were true is good evidence against that particular brand of god. The evidence in support of a naturalistic explanation is good evidence why god is not necessary to explain our world.
I don’t think anyone disputes that the concept of a higher power exists. What’s at issue is whether that higher power really exists.
Much interesting science is at the point where there are two ways of interpreting the evidence, and thus there are plenty of scientific debates. Evolution has gone well past that as a foundational theory, though not in the details.
But, speaking of strawmen, which god are we declaring not to exist again? I lack belief in any gods, and I even go beyond that in believing no gods (provisionally, like I believe all things) but there are only certain gods I’d feel comfortable making declarations about.
Now your just full of shit. Saying that a surgeon operates on a person with the intent of doing anything to thier personality is just bullshit. You know DT, there was a time I felt a little bad for you, what with your aspergers and whatnot but shit like this just shows me you act like an ass on pretty much a daily basis. I hope you posses the common sense to keep your mouth shut about controversial matters when interacting with others for your own safetys sake.
Brain and personality are ‘related’? Really. Ok, fine. Is there anything else in the equation? Is the brain & personality ‘related’ to anything else?
Cuz last time I checked, there was mountains of evidence for brain = personality, while there was absolutely no evidence whatsoever for brain =/= personality.
This is one big obviously stupid strawman. He never said anything about surgeons operating on someone with the intent of doing anything to their personality. If a person’s personality is their brain then anything that pokes into their brain pokes into their personality, surgeon was just an example. You clearly do not possess the common sense to keep your mouth shut when it interacting with others.
… and so this thread goes the way of all the others. :smack:
Well, I agree that Der Trihs uses this kind of argument, but I don’t use the “there is no evidence” argument as my whole argument.
My argument has two strands.
- We can explain everything in the natural world, up to the limit of our understanding, without need for a god. The amount we can explain keeps on increasing. The predictive value of our explanation is good. There are things we can’t explain yet, as we dig deeper, but no things that we should be able to explain but can’t. Some things that might have fallen into that category are irreproducible complexity and a fossil record falsifying evolution and supporting a Biblical timeline.
The second strand is construction of a model of the world with a particular god in it. We’ve got to do this for each god. The traditional Western God fails this test in many ways, since any model I can construct is contradicted by reality. (Which is why I became an atheist in the first place.) The model for a deistic god is not, but it is identical to the non-god model anyway, so I don’t believe in it by Occam’s Razor - a heuristic to be sure.
As for yours, I don’t but much credence in the “flowers are pretty so god exists” position.
No one has provided his vaunted evidence.
Apparently, “OMG Cite” is only ok when atheists do it. 
Also, since you seem to not understand the concept, one cannot prove a negative.
The traditional Western God is rarely brought up in these debates, as the ‘traditional’ western God is hard to pin down as to how it’s actually defined. There is no ‘Bearded man in the sky.’ definition within western tradition, that’s just sort of a folk accretion.
As far as it goes, if you can explain in the natural world, explain to me what it was like before the Big Bang.
Not believing something for which no evidence has been found doesn’t imply a belief that no evidence can be found. It is perfectly ok to change a belief based on new evidence - scientist do this all the time. What’s not ok - well, not logical, is to believe because maybe someday evidence will be found.
What evidence are you waiting for, and what are you doing to find it?