I should have said “could be proved.” If God existed, and chose to provide evidence of his existence through actions and words, he could be proven in this sense. We never see the Sun directly after all - we see its light nine minutes after it left the sun. There are plenty of things that we know indirectly - God could easily be in this class.
A few burning bushes, a travelling cloud, and manna falling from nowhere would sure as heck convince me - after I looked for the strings and sfx people, of course.
Nope. That’s not the point of this discussion. The point is that you recognize that your belief that faeries do not exist is, in fact, a belief. You’d make a poor scientist.
Wow, you’re off in your own little world, aren’t you? The probability of something has nothing to do with the evidence of that thing. Let’s say I show a naive sort, unfamiliar with US currency, a quarter. I only show him the face. I tell him… “Now watch me flip it, you might get to see an eagle when it lands!” He has no evidence that it has an eagle on it. And yet, the probability remains 50%. Also, new species are discovered all the time without prior evidence they exist. The lack of evidence doesn’t seem to have affected the fact of their existence, does it?
No, I don’t think rape and genocide are good. I was poking fun at your off-center, off-topic, and factually questionable point.
False analogy. A better one would be, you hold up an empty hand, and say there is an invisible, intangible , twelve dimensional coin from Middle Earth in it; you flip it and say there is an eagle on one side. Should he believe you ? The chance of there being an eagle is the same as the chance you are telling the truth; so near zero that there is no practical difference.
Your other example is just as bad; we know species can and do exist; we know that we don’t know them all; therefore, the chance of new ones being discovered is near 100%. The opposite of gods, for which we have no examples and no reason to believe they are even possible.
I find it amusing to see someone defend religion ( and belief in fairies ! ) claim I’m in my own little world, since the essence of religious faith is that the believer wraps his fantasy about himself. You are the one arguing that being in your own little shell of insanity is a good thing, and perfectly reasonable.
And in that case we should assume he doesn’t exist, since he effectively doesn’t.
Sure, but then that God had better not get upset by people not believing in him. And believers should stop trying to make laws to enforce his commandments.
Deists believe in a god for which there is no evidence. I don’t know of any deists who want to close stores on Sunday, ban abortion, or tell me I’m going to hell. So I have no problems with them. I don’t believe, but if all god-believers were deists this would be a much better world.
You can’t compute a probability without evidence. It is meaningless to talk about the probability of a new species existing without knowledge of whether the species does or does not exist. (In which case it becomes 1 or 0.)
So you’re both wrong. However, this has nothing to do with whether it is reasonable to believe in something without evidence.
Just because Mr. Spock flung random probabilities around is no reason we should.
It’s not meant to parallel the god situation, so the “falseness” of the analogy is not an issue. It merely illustrates probability has nothing to do with the evidence.
Wrong again! At some point in the future, we discover the last species. Despite whatever evidence is present for more species existing at that point, the probability of finding more drops to zero.
I’m not defending the belief in fairies. You’re either debating in bad faith or not bothering to read my posts. When you catch up or decide to behave and address the actual points, let me know. Till then, toodles!
You’re half right. In fact, you’re three-quarters right. You can’t compute a probability without statistics. But yes, the probability of X existing is either 100% or 0%, and does not vary based on the amount of evidence collected by the would-be observers. Just like I said.
Uh, yes you can. Here is a nice little discussion about the differences between them. Probability is when you have all the choices, but are uncertain about the outcome of experiments. Statistics is dealing with incomplete data on populations. If you polled 100% of the country, you can state the probability of someone giving a response, with no uncertainty. You know the distribution of answers exactly. When you sample, you can give an estimate of the distribution, and you give the chance that you’re wrong.
In your case, you can only give a conditional probability of the species existing or not - conditional upon knowing. You cannot give the probability before you find out.
If you toss a coin, you can say the probability of getting a heads is 50%. (Given a fair coin.) After you toss it, the question is almost meaningless.
That is the keystone for success for any con game to succeed. The sucker has to believe. In religion’s case, some of them believe so strongly that they join the con and help inflict it on others.
Problems:
-hypocrisy
-fallaciousness
-subjectivity
-antiquated (the big three, anyway)
-self-contradictory
-encourages enforcing religious beliefs on others
-discourages science
-encourages ignorance
-backpedaling to make excuses for things it gets wrong
Adverse effects:
-continuous setbacks in scientific research (flat earth, heliocentrism, creationism)
-has caused invasions and bloody wars
-encourages a prejudiced society (unbelievers are either to be killed, converted or considered stupid or pathetic)
-has encouraged oppression of women, slavery, murder, destruction of art and historical documents, seizure of property, torture
If I had to create a new religion, it would simply revolve around reverence for the natural world, with no deity or built-in morality. Holidays would occur with natural events, such as equinox or solstice and would be solely for enjoyment and acknowledgement of the cycle of life rather than worship. No one would be obligated to participate. There would be no figurehead or positions of power or physical trappings of any sort.
I for one thought the original question was very interesting, and worthy of a wide-ranging discussion. It is a shame, given the number of obviously intelligent people on this board, that questions about religion always seem to devolve into the tired “God exists/no he doesn’t” shouting match, complete with the usual patronizing/sniping–a thin veil for the deep frustration each side has with the other. But I digress…
The original question is broad in scope, and for the sake of time my personal answers will be equally broad. At its core, religion has dealt with the ultimate questions mankind asks (whether it does this well or poorly is immaterial at this stage of the discussion), questions which are in some sense objectively unanswerable. That “unanswerable” part will immediately cause some of us to get off the train immediately–if it can’t be answered, there’s no point in asking–but I believe the majority of humans find these questions so profound that they ought to have an answer of some kind; to put it coldly, they believe a rigorous demonstration that these questions could not be answered would lead to a bleak and pointless existence.
Up to now I’ve not addressed what these profound, unanswerable questions are. The reason for that is because the list has changed with the evolution of the human mind. Questions which to primitive man had no objective answer–“where do this terrible, destructive flashes in the sky (lightning) come from?”–were naturally swept up with the other unanswerables. The urgency of all these questions, questions which couldn’t (either at the time or even now) be truly answered led some people (not surprisingly) to answer them.
The application of our minds to these questions has, in many cases, led to objective answers; it appears not all imponderables will remain so forever. One would have to also concede that, along the way, a number of answers that were once considered sound were finally seen as, well, ridiculous once the true, objective answer is known (I still can’t help but laugh at the mental image of an old man hurling thunderbolts to the ground, but let’s remember some people a few thousand years ago took this image seriously, not metaphorically). In the modern age this has led us to two conclusions: (1) All these unponderable questions will, in due course, yield to our inquisitive minds, and (2) many of the so-called “answers” provided by religion, answers which even religions concede are only “a matter of faith”, are bunk, and will be shown to be such some day.
The main problem with religion today (at least in the West) is that it is ill-equiped to deal with this skepticism. Major organized religions have relied too long on answers that at best are provisional, and have failed to adapt to the objectivity brought to bear on some of these questions. To put it glibly, they have not reacted well to the scientific age and the attendant philosophical approach of science (a statement that will strike many on this board as patently obvious). Religion has taken a defensive posture, sequestering the faithful behind walls of dogma, nervous to answer any intellectual threat to the battlements. It’s inevitable in a culture which constantly challenges authority to justify its continued existence (or,. at least, values such challenge). In short, religion is going to have to come up with a way other than cutting itself off from the world if it hopes to remain relevant or useful.
In my opinion, many on both sides of the religious question see debate about isolated questions–e.g. where did man come from?–as mere opportunities to refute or overthrow an entire opposing world view. Others can give cogent reasons why thats a shaky goal at best, but in my opinion the search for answers to questions that are today profoundly unanswerable is at the heart of religion, and that mission is still a valid one–as long as it remains a question of man’s need to journey toward knowledge, rather than arrive at a specific destination (forgive the corny metaphor; it’s a sign of my mellowing age:)).
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for bearing with this lengthy post, one that I’m sure will either be swiftly ignored or decrypted and refuted point by point. Either way I don’t mind; I realize I may never know for sure whether or not God exists, whther or not there’s a purpose to life, but the lifetime of exploration that such questions raise is its own comfort and happiness.
No, you really can’t. If you poll 100%, you just have really thorough … statistics. So your probality estimate becomes really, really good. You have to have statistics to compute a probability. The more statistics you have, the better your computation will be.
I enjoyed your post. More relevant to the OP than the last 20 or so. I think you make an important point. I’ve said in threads gone by that the portion of our nature seeks to answer questions is necessary for religion and for science. First we had myths about flight. Later Da Vinci made sketches of machines for flight but the technology wasn’t ready. Now we are able to fly. I think the myths were a part of the actual development of flight.
I also agree that much of organized religion fights against the natural information process of the age we live in. People defend religious tradition over truth. They will resist the evidence before their eyes or explain it away to hold onto the accepted doctrine. There are powerful reasons for doing this. Even those reasons are based on false notions. Christians fail to see how doctrine has changed over time. They assume the basic principles have remained the same since the time of Christ, If they see how religious doctrine has evolved then they might be more willing to let their own evolve as well.
To me an important change will come when more Christians accept that the Bible is* not * the inerrant word of God. Facts about the the history and source of our modern Bible will become more common knowledge and gradually that belief will fade in coming generations. That will lead to other changes but it’s a slow process.
I don’t agree with this. Acknowledging the what we don’t know, and seeing things as “our latest theory” when that’s all they are is important. There’s lots of things we know exist now that we didn’t suspect 100 years ago isn’t there? Did they not exist then? Yes they did, we just had little or no understanding of them and no way to measure them.
Do you have any evidence for this comment or is it just some more unsubstantiated opinion? As far as I can see some religions thing other religions are wrong, but that’s not the same as silly
ORTODOXISM IS THE ANSWER.Thruth is one:you can not say (and say the truth)that 2+2=5(only 4 it is the truth) .So only one religion is the true one.However the debates are many.For Iraq an entire alliance was sent in battle.For powers like GOD ,ANGELS,satana,devils …you expect to be small(maybe ,ideally for you,unexistant)?
