The difference between science and religion (or philosophy) is that if n scientists try something, n-1 will get more or less the same answer, which shows what the real answer is. That’s why so many results indicating that esp happens disappear when skeptics observe or when the experiment gets repeated. In religion, or philosophy, you split into two schools.
For instance, if the question of what God felt about women as ministers could be resolved scientifically, you wouldn’t get splinter groups. Ditto gays in the ministry.
As for truth, to combine two branches of this thread, I assume John means the truth of Jesus, not truth as an abstract. Does truth really set you free? Not at all clear to me.
Virtually everyone who’s ever said they believed in God. Something you are well aware of, whether you choose to admit it or not.
Placebos don’t get people jobs.
I already have; I’ve pointed all the people who SAY they believe in a God that’s a being outside themselves. You are the one spouting a bizarre definition of God that no one uses; a definition that I suspect you made up solely so you could argue that God is subjective.
What we feel brings up to ethics, which is another thing that never gets resolved. What God feels would theoretically be possible to determine, if God existed and ever cared to contact us. That it has never been is my point.
This path gets us into what is truth and is truth always good. No time now.
So what if it’s simpler? What’s your scientific evidence to support Occam’s razor? Second, sure, it works–but who’s to say it’ll keep working starting next second? Who’s to say it’s not just a series of coincidences that has provided the illusion of working? If it is, our entire understanding of statistics needs to be thrown out. We therefore can’t use statistical theory to support the claim that things are operating reasonably. Third, what’s your scientific definition of “better”?
Look, of course I think the universe is operating reasonably. I just recognize that this isn’t a claim science can prove without assuming a reasonable universe: it’s axiomatic, not proven. Axioms aren’t scary. They don’t bite. Everybody’s got 'em. Some systems with axioms are a lot more useful than other systems with axioms. That doesn’t mean the useful systems are axiom-free.
It’s a matter of practicality, not scientific proof. Working from the simplest set of assumptions outward lets you eliminate the simpler explanations that happen to be wrong. If you instead just make up explanations with many unproven assumptions, you are virtually guaranteed to be wrong. That’s what religion does - which is one reason why if anything it’s less likely to be right on any subject than flipping a coin.
The fact that the whole idea of quintillions of quintillions of coincidences for billions of years makes no sense. It’s not a possibility worth worrying about.
Statistical theory is abstract mathematics, not a scientific theory. If the universe behaves differently, that doesn’t invalidate statistics, it just means that something other than statistics is happening.
A theory that more accurately reflects the known facts about the world.
And again you’re assuming that which I’m challenging.
And again. I’m challenging the idea that the universe makes sense.
This is a trivial hairsplit: obviously I’m referring to the application of statistical theory to our world.
And again. A particular religion might well more accurately reflect the known facts about the world, if we’re willing to ignore scientific axioms such as reason, the existence of an objective universe, etc.
Not so obviously. You appeared to be saying that a sudden change in the world would throw out statistics, which it wouldn’t.
Wrong. At that point, there is no “accurate”, and no reality, and no us to argue about the issue, for that matter. You are speaking of conditions which couldn’t support life, much less mind.
Not to mention that if we are to throw out reason, why should I listen to you ? I mean, you ARE using reason, after all, which if your argument is right is worthless.
And the fact that you have to go so far as to literally deny reality and even logic in order to pretend that science is just as defective as religion is shows just how worthless religion is.
Emotional honesty on subject. A believer would recognize their emotional attachment to a certain denomination or belief system. Seeing and recognizing this attachment they are better able to let go of traditional beliefs and traditions or at least put them in perspective. Emotional honesty would help them separate “this feels good” from a more logical approach to the facts. For some people “this feels right” and the emotional reward they get from their church of choice is more important than the factual details. They may not examine the details of doctrine closely because it’s just not important to them.
For the non believer emotional honesty might be recognizing how an emotional repulsion of certain religion and practices have affected their outlook on all religion.
Emotional dishonesty for the believer would be a refusal to recognize or acknowledge their attachment to dogma. For whatever reason they need to be certain they are right and resist any suggestion that they might be mistaken. I see that as a combination of emotional and intellectual dishonesty.
Emotional dishonesty would also be valuing your social position within the group so much that you refuse to question doctrine and policy, or acknowledge same.
I think from there you can imagine a non believer example.
I hope that makes sense. I see the emotional investment as very integrated with the intellectual aspect.
The objective value is the purpose of the belief system for the individual believer and how it affects their actions.
Precisely to set the boundaries of reason–to show that reason cannot argue in its own favor. No more, no less.
Only to someone who is convinced that the axioms of science (an objective universe, a universe that operates according to principles of logic and reason, a universe whose reality can be ascertained by the senses, etc.) is real. What’s being denied isn’t “reality”, it’s those axioms. You seem to be unaware that they’re axioms, which may account for your dismissal of religion.
That doesn’t sound very objective. What if the God-worshipper is generally a good person, obeys the law, pays his taxes and spends part of every Sunday in church, while the Zeus-worshipper is generally a good person, obeys the law, pays his taxes and spends part of every festival day at the temple?
Their actions are pretty much indistinguishable. Does this mean God = Zeus?
It’s rather obvious. How can you have a mind without reason or consistency or stability ? How could you complete a single thought, or have any memories ? How could you have anything at all ? Even if a universe like that just appeared, it would disintegrate instantly - there’s nothing stopping it, after all.
Your argument destroys itself. If reason is invalid, then reason is valid because I declare it so - no it doesn’t make sense, but by your own argument that doesn’t matter.
Of course there’s an “objective universe” that works according to logic and reason; we are here. Something keeps us stable, whether it’s the world as it appears or some computer simulating us in some universe with laws we don’t know of.
I dismiss religion because it’s garbage. It has no evidence beyond the baseless and contradictory declarations of it’s followers - it doesn’t even have consistent axioms. And whenever it speaks on the real world, it’s virtually always wrong. That’s why it’s defenders, like you, are required to deny the validity of rationality and reality, as you are doing.
Funnily enough, I don’t know the history of formal or symbolic logic. I presume that some philosopher was diddling around with the idea of “what is truth”, and then stumbled onto the idea of 1) defining it the obvious way, and 2) drawing up a few truth tables.
Regardless, it didn’t come from mathematics; but is a lot like it in that it’s a completely separate abstract and artificial system. It has no assumptions about reality - just abstract definions and abstract axioms.
Of course they can’t, if you’re talking about matching it to the real world.
Religion, on the other hand, does try to justify its beliefs as being true and applicable in the real world based on nothing but its own say-so. Which is why, unlike math and logic, we shouldn’t believe its claims.
You’ve moved the goalposts - where did I say anything about objective comparison?
Regardless, I maintain that my “value judgement” is true. Because artful and imiginative reinterpretaions and reimaginings of remembered internal mental phenomenon are worthless as a source of objective truths about reality outside your imagination, which is, objectively, not better than reading your alphabet soup. The fact that this is a judgement about the [lack of] value doesn’t change the fact that it’s true. Regardless of whether you don’t want to admit it.
Actually I think that the definition of the word true assumes that if P is true, then ~P is false -at least in standard english and first-year logic. I gather that there are those who redefine the term “true” in their own logic systems to better codify uncertainty or ‘gradiations’ of truth, but such redefinitions rather obviously are reserved to the systems that contain them, which doesn’t include science (which uses the english definition).
I guess I don’t see what the problem you have with this is.
What’s happening here is that there are three or four different ‘stages’ where our observations might be questioned - but that all these questionings are answered by exactly the same answer, which applies at all levels. Observed reality is too damn consistent to be random.
What I was objecting to was you seemed to be moving the questions around like a game of cups - suddenly my answer to #2 was bad because it didn’t also explicity answer #4? I wasn’t going to start down that road - it’d end with me having to answer each question with an essay that answers all possible questions. I don’t want to go there.
No - the descriptive power of statistics assumes that the abstract system of math is functional - it has no dependency on the rational universe to function. It works in every universe for which you can take enough sample observations. The only effect of it being used in a random universe is that the results would be reflective of that randomity.
They’re not. Quite decidedly.
I don’t believe it’s true either, but faith has nothing to do with it. The preponderance of evidence against it is so powerful that the odds of the universe to date being completely random are, essentially, zero.
Consider this example. A perfectly random coin when flipped has a 50% chance of landing on heads. This is true for every single coin flip - so it’s perfectly possible for the coin to land on heads 10, 20, 100, or even a hundred million billion times in a row.
But the odds are against it. If you see heads coming up with such consistency, you’re almost certainly dealing with a two-headed coin - that is, one with no randomity at all.
Because the odds of seeing 10 heads in a row are worse that 1/1000. And the odds of seeing 20 in a row are worse than one in a million. And that’s just 20 flips! The odds of seeing 100 in a row (on a random coin) are appreciably worse than a thousand million billion trillion to one. (There’s not space enough in this post to write the odds against 100,000,000,000,000,000 random flips coming up all heads.)
Now, for every instant that goes by I see a visual image that remains decidedly unrandom. (Were it random, it should look like television snow.) Now, from technology I know I’m processing at least 25 frames a second of visual information, with at least 2000x1000 distinct elements of visual data, with a color acuity that represents at least 1000 different shades. So, using these very low numbers, I rake in at least 50 trillion bits of visual information a second. The odds that that’s happening at random and still forming a coherent, consistent-appearing view onto an apparent environment -any environment!- are so low as to be beneath consideration. And every additional second that goes by, the odds get even worse.
I can’t think of anything that requires less faith to believe.
And things started going haywire, it would just be more data, more observations. At that point, given the volumnous preponderance of evidence that things were orderly in the past, I would assume that something had changed, not that my past observations were all random hits at an infinity-to-one chance.
Actually it bases it on observations, and it only assumes it passively, in the same way it assumes there are no black swans until you come up with one. That’s just he nature of science; large chunks of it are held quite provisionally, really, just waiting for somebody to come along an prove things otherwise. And by “large chunks” I mean “all of it”. It has no axioms, really; anything may be disproven, and anything that looks like it might be an axiom is quite solidly proven (at least so far).
You’re confusing explicit axioms in abstract systems with statements about objective reality. Euclidean geometry has axioms. Science is not Euclidean geometry.
I think this is more like a common misconception among you. Nobody minds that abstract systems like math and logic have axioms and defined truths. And science doesn’t rest on the back of axioms. (The scientific method does, but that’s an abstract system that’s distinct from the body of observations and discoveries commonly known as science.)
However, making up axioms about objectively reality (like religion does) is another beast entirely - one which I think alphabet soup is as good a source for as anything else anyone has come up with. But neither science, math, nor logic does anything like that.
It’s best to be intellectually honest about your emotions. Admitting that they’re an internal effect of your mind and not a magical conduit to fairyland would be a fine start for many people.
If you have some other meaning for the phrase “emotionally honest”, I’d be interested in hearing it. Preferable something short and simple, please.
Wha? What are you talking about? In reality, bodies with brains drink, brains are effected by the physical contact with alcohol. If souls existed, bodies with souls would drink but not be effected (especially not in their personality) because souls would not be effected by physical contact with alcohol, due to the lack of physical contact between the alcohol and the soul. This is not hard to comphrehend.
And how is the soul “attached” to the body, supposedly? Physically? Is the soul physical?
The odds aren’t necessarily against it; it depends on your prior probability distribution for modelling the behavior of coins. As it happens, most people have assumed probability distributions on the behavior of coins in which “1000 heads followed by a tail” is much less probable than “1000 heads followed by another head”, so they can say P(next flip will be heads | all 1000 so far were heads) is very close to 1. But this is just another way of saying that they have adopted axioms of inductive inference; there’s nothing in probability itself demanding that distributions satisfy this property.
This is fallacious reasoning; just because the probability of A given B is very low, it does not follow that the probability of B given A is very low. [Rather, they are related through Bayes’ Theorem, P(B|A) = P(A|B) * P(B)/P(A)]. In this case, just because the probability of 100 heads in a row given a “fair” coin is very low, it does not follow that the probability of a coin being “fair” given that it has come up heads 100 times in a row is very low.
To illustrate, flip a coin in a row 100 times, and write down the sequence of heads and tails you get. Now, calculate, what were the odds you would get that exact sequence. Extraordinarily low, right? Does it automatically follow that the odds of the coin being fair are extraordinarily low? Certainly not.
If you wrote down any sequence of head and tails a priori and came up with it, you’d wonder about the coin, wouldn’t you? In this context the all heads and all tails sequences are considered more interesting a priori than any given sequence of heads and tails, so your statement, while correct, isn’t relevant. What we’re doing is splitting the universe of results into all heads, all tails, and everything else. That’s why getting one of those two results feels wrong.