"We've evolved to be creationists"

Great Debates
141

I disagree. I would say that man has believed in greater intelligences and afterlives. Plus of course there’s those who believed in greater but not necessarily greatest intelligences.

I agree, except i’d use the word “believe”. Because, as I said, these experiences are inconsistent. There are many people who would say they have had spiritual experiences or feelings of same that plain don’t jibe with yours. Of course, this doesn’t make you, or them, necessarily wrong - all it says is that at least one must be. But when people report experiences as truth, and they cannot both be true, then it seems reasonable to treat all as a “belief” and not as “knowledge”.

I could say exactly the same back to you. Apparently your methods impart omniscience to you, allowing you to judge the most private, personal, yadda yadda. You’re the one claiming knowledge, claiming certainty, and doing so in a fun dismissive way.

Besides, science doesn’t claim to “know”. That’s the point of a scientific theory (stay with me on this one, I know you tend to have a bit of trouble). Science holds that you can’t *prove * anything - only disprove it. Science doesn’t say that gravity as a theory is fact, or that evolution is a fact. All it says is “Here is all the evidence we have got; it points towards this theory as being true. But we could be wrong”. As there is no definitive disproof of NDEs, the scientific approach would have to be “The evidence doesn’t prove it, but it is a possibility”. Compare that to your “These people knew their experiences were real just as I know mine were, and are, real.”, and I think we can see who’s really claiming omnscience here.

Yes, they must be! After all, all scientists are damnable atheists, believing in nothing other than the true cause of SCIENCE. No scientists are religious, of course, nor do they have moral values.

I highly suggest you take back your insult.

Pray, tell me, my lord; might I venture from mine humble abode to the market today? My eldest-born is sick with plague; I muste visit the apothecary for some grounde liver of frogge.

142

Yet again, lekatt, you display in post #137 that you have absolutely no understanding of what Science is.

143

No I can’t Tom, not a single example you would acknowledge.

144

I am sure this post meant something to you, but I just don’t understand what you are getting at.

145

I will be happy to answer your post when you put what I said back together as I wrote it and tell me one thing at a time what I did wrong.

146

It is in large part a reference to the old fable from India, The Blind Men and the Elephant. (I changed the items somewhat as I was working from memory, and was clearly dealing with more modern Indians :stuck_out_tongue: ).

The main thrust is, every time you, lekatt, reference the widespread supernatural and religious beliefs of humanity as one big monolithic thing, you are ignoring the fact that this army of supporters you’ve gathered don’t actually agree with each other about what they’re talking about. (To the point of having killed each other over it.) Heck, based on what I’ve gathered about your religious beliefs, the vast, vast majority of those believers would deny that you and they are even referring to the same thing.

When you lump all religious people together like that, you underscore the fact that they clearly aren’t reliably experiencing god or the supernatural, since they don’t report the same thing as each other! Every religious story and reported ‘experience’ is discredited by the mass of religious experiences that contradict it. Science doesn’t have to judge religious experience reports as unreliable - that mass of other contradicting religious experiences already has proven that they are unreliable.

Since no matter how you slice it the vast majority of you believers are wrong, we of an analytic bent wonder why we should think any of you are right, since the things you’re claiming are true based on these experiences are so outrageous and unlikely. It’s much more plausible that the delusion each sect claims is present in the cult nextdoor is common to all.

147

I thought I had told you “one thing at a time” - that was the point of seperating it out, to make it clear what point of yours I was addressing. But ok, i’ll do it this way.

  • I would characterise this as “believed in greater intelligences and afterlives”, since people generally seem to believe in quite different gods, demons, spirits, and the like, and have different ideas as to what an afterlife is like, or how many there are in both cases.

** This follows on from the first point. People believe in different, contradictory things. A Christian, a Jew, and a Muslim cannot *all * be right. Either they are all wrong, or only one is right. Yet all these people would characterise their experiences and beliefs as true, as real. This means two things; firstly, you can’t say you “know” yours are correct, since we can see that humans can be mistaken (indeed, the majority of the world, in the best case example, are mistaken). The second point is that we can’t really put one experience above another purely in terms of anecdotal data, because they all rely on anecdotal data and all say they’re the correct one. I can’t take your word that you are right because there are plenty of other people with contradictory beliefs that would say the same.

*** A couple of problems here. Science doesn’t claim omniscience; the whole point of the idea of a scientific theory is that it is only what the current evidence suggests is most likely to be true. Theories aren’t accepted as fact; gravity is not a fact, evolution is a not a fact. There is always the point, with a scientific theory, where the right amount of evidence will mean a new theory needs to be adopted. If you can see that even with things like gravity science still says “Well, we can’t be 100% sure”, I think it’s clear that it does not claim omniscience. Always it is prepared for new, radical data that will mean a change. That’s the point. On the contrary, it’s you that has stated you “know” what is truth and what is real; you who claim to be able to know that spiritual experiences are 100% gospel. You who claim to know that all such experience aren’t delusions. You who claim omniscience.

The second point is that it isn’t the *events themselves * that don’t follow the scientific method, but the study. Scientists don’t care what you study, as long as it’s done so using the scientific method, including the points **Voyager ** brought up. It’s not the events themselves that mean they aren’t used in scientific papers, but the lack of reasonable study methods. If you make a decent study of an NDE, use rigourous examining methods, and submit it to an appropriate peer-reviwed journal, then great! That’s excellent, and that’s what science is all about.
**** Most scientists are actually religious. I would wager more still have a moral code. So no, they don’t treat science as “the true path of science and only science”. In fact, to suggest that they do is somewhat insulting.

***** But the world does change. I didn’t take a horse and cart to get home from blacksmith apprenticeship; I took a car back from university. And science changes; who would you say is the most famous scientist ever? I’d go with Einstein, myself. And why is he famous? Because he proposed a radical change to our concepts of relativity. We have antibiotics instead of exorcisms. We have better antibiotics instead of former ones. We can build skyscrapers - and we can build them higher. We aren’t typing to each other on a Difference Engine. Science has a long history of accepting new ideas - to claim that is is a monolithic entity unaccepting of change is to misunderstand the whole basis of science and indeed history. Scientists have no motivation to hide newly discovered truths, and they have all the motivation in the world to do the opposite.

148

A slight, pedantic nitpick:

Gravity and evolution are facts. It’s our theories about them which are conjectural and open to falsification. Lamark (according to Mayr anyway) deserves credit for discovering the fact of evolution. It was Darwin who came up with the correct theory. Again this is very pedantic, but I think it’s important to distinguish between phenomena and our theories about them.

149

But they’re not *listening * to him. The inventors of perpetual motion machines and space drives have the same complaint.

As Sagan said, they laughed at Galileo, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

150

Actually, your last clause is simply a CYA you through in because you cannot provide any, at all.

Do you ever post honestly?

151

After lunch, I will answer the post by Revenant Threshold and answer your post by doing so, please be patient while I eat.

152

No one is denying that people think their experiences are real. People who think they have been abducted by aliens think those experiences are real also. Feeling something is real doesn’t mean it has happened, and certainly doesn’t mean people are lying.

This sentence is the smoking gun that proves you don’t understand science. Any scientist who thinks he is omniscient, or even close to it, is a bad scientist. The scientific method you pooh-pooh so loudly is all about recognizing that we make mistakes, and that we can fool ourselves very easily. We publish experimental protocols so others can pick holes in them, and can reproduce anything interesting. You are the one utterly convinced he is right. Everyone else in this thread is asking you for good evidence, which you seem to have trouble producing.

Don’t you think someone who could really prove life after death would be more famous than Einstein? Do you think that even atheist scientists wouldn’t prefer to stick around forever in some way or another? All scientists, religious or atheist, are trained to look reality in the face and report what we see, whether it is what we expect or not.
You should try it some time - it is refreshing.

153

Good point, and I wouldn’t want to give the wrong impression. Things do fall down. Things do mutate into other things. That it happens is observable, it’s the why and the how and the when that change from theory to theory. Slightly pedantic, yeah, but it’s important to be pedantic with things like this. :slight_smile:

154

Wow, you leave a thread for a few days, and it all goes to hell.

Where did it go wrong? Ah, here:

Well, now here you’re positing the existence of a soul separate from the body, which is far from established. New evidence, and all that.

Let’s take a pair of identical twins and kill one of them.

There, wasn’t that fun? Oh, wait, there was another point I was making.

Comparing the two otherwise nearly identical beings, one certainly seems to be missing something now. A certain vitality, an energy. The dead one seems insensate and unresponsive. And yet the person, in some sense, is still there, because we can see and (if we choose to) touch them.

It is reasonable, in a world where only living beings seem to display this dichotomy, to conclude that there is something within us when we are alive that departs our bodies in some fashion when we die. The question is, what is it and where does it go? Thus, the basis for spirituality and the religions that have brought more death, destruction and misery upon humanity than all other causes combined.

For centuries we have assumed a soul or spirit that carries some sort of life force with it, and invented realms for it to inhabit, and beings which govern such realms.

But within the past century, we have cause for doubt.

Let’s take two identical 2007 model automobiles, with every option imaginable, like voice-response, GPS, climate control, etc., and make sure they are both running. Now turn one of them off. That one is suddenly lacking a certain vitality, a certain energy, it seems insensate and unresponsive. We notice similar results with television sets, computers, and, hell, even candles.

Unless you are willing to postulate that there is a “spirit world” where the souls of running cars, functioning TV sets, and burning candle flames go, then even a slight bit of intellectual honesty will cause you to admit that the possibility must exist that the human body, complete with consciousness, is no less an automatic mechanism. It must cast doubt on the long-held notion of a separate spiritual force, and by extension, the myriad dimensions in which the “spirit world” exists.

I remember stuff too, like the time I had sex with my co-worker on the back of an elephant. Of course, if I proceeded as though that were fact, I might end up with a red handmark on my face, because that was a dream.

Long have we sought to distinguish what separates humans from the other beasts, and until I heard last year that dolphins may be able to engage in gossip*, I was prepared to declare, “Man is the animal that tells stories”.

We possess astounding faculties for placing vivid descriptions of people, places, things, feelings, memories and events in the heads of other people, or even our own heads. We know from millennia of experience that these entities need not even be real for us to picture them in our minds in minute detail.

Unless you are willing to postulate that all dreams describe actual happenings, and that the fiction section of the bookstore is collected documentation of eyewitness accounts to history, Or that New York really has as few minorities as shown on Friends, then even a modicum of intellectual honesty will cause you to allow for the possibility that outlandish things people describe as having experienced are merely inaccurate creations of their imaginations, no more real than dreams.

Excuse me if I don’t fill out the membership form for your nascent suicide cult. :eek:

*brief news item for the curious

155

Basically I said people have always believed in a higher intelligence and an afterlife. You countered with, because all these different societies of people call their gods by different names and worship them in different ways this creates a great contradiction and therefor can not be real. I think that sums up the argument. My turn: why does this make spirituality false, by your logic “corn” would be false because it is called by different names and used in many different ways which creates a great contradiction and therefor “corn” is unreal. Great logic?

These societies also spoke different languages, therefor language is unreal. They wore different clothes, ate different food, well you get the idea. So your logic is irrational and therefor not real.

156

I will try to answer at least some of this post.

One would have to believe in his own omniscience to say he knew that the personal experience of someone he had never met was false. Then to take that to its ultimate egotism and have him say that for all time people who claimed to have personal spiritual experiences were just hallucinating, and self-deluded. He could not have possible even heard about the experiences let alone examine them. Yes. I will stay with my assessment of scientists who believe they are right even though they know nothing of what they are talking about.

157

I really tried, but I can’t see the connection between what I posted and any of the things you posted. I don’t have any followers, none wanted.

158

The problem is, a lot of people are pretty specific about the nature of their religious experiences, and these experiences are inherently different and contradictory. The problem is not that people are calling it corn or maize, the problem is that one man’s corn is nothing like another man’s corn, and they’re both calling it corn. One man’s corn has lots of lyaers and makes them cry when it’s cut. Another man’s corn is brown-skinned with a white, starchy interior. Another man’s corn is orange and stake-shaped. Another man’s corn moos. Most of these folk recognize the contradictions, reject everyone else’s corn, and declare their corn to be the one true corn. You, on the other hand, are summoning the entire grocery store in support of your corn-related statements.

159

I bet he’d accept the experience. I also bet he’d provisionally find the reality behind the experience false since it goes against tons of data, unless the person reporting the experience gives a lot of supporting data. If someone told you they had the experience of flying, in a dream, say, you’d accept the experience without actually accepting they flew, right.

I’ve read a number of reports of scientists looking for physical explanations of the experiences reported. I think I read about someone finding the part of the brain that lets you position yourself. When this is turned off, you think your consciousness is floating outside your body. That seems a far more plausible explanation than there being real OBEs.

160

Most people are pretty specific about everything. I call them literalists. They either can’t or won’t try to understand concepts.

Now you haven’t addressed the question as to why, when there are differences of opinions about spiritual things, or anything at all, why does that make it false?

You might tell me how scientists know spiritual things are all false without knowing and examining all spiritual things. Maybe they are psychic?