I fully and unreservedly acknowledge that absolute, total, and utter lack of any scientific evidence at all for the existence of God, heaven or the Real Prescence. It bothers me not at all.
This was in the context of his nonetheless believing in those things. If you decide to believe in something for which there is no evidence, that’s ipso facto irrational, but at least, you may not realize that lack of evidence. If you realize that lack of evidence but choose to believe anyway, that’s having the power to reason (in the most fundamental sense: what is true/real and what is not), but deliberately sabotaging it. It’s like purposely driving the wrong way on a one-way street–less forgivable than a mistake.
I have not been insulting–just accurate.
You, on the other hand, have continued to both post in an insulting manner and display ignorance.
You have now doubled down on your misunderstanding of the Sadducees and some Jews, today, who hold no belief in an afterlife, backpedaling from what you actually posted.
You have dodged your error regarding the silly claim that “religion” proclaims that the Earth is only six thousand years old.
You have now gone on to further errors regarding Bruno and Galileo, missing the recognition of heliocentrism by a matter of a few centuries. (The 1994 statement was only an acknowledgement that Galileo’s second trial was done badly, not a recognition of the Earth’s orbit that had been acknowledged for a few hundred years.)
I have, thus far, attributed your blatant errors to simple ignorance. If you are telling me that they are, in fact, deliberate, that would change the nature of your posts.
I have no interest in the ten thousandth feud between believers and non-believers regarding the “truth” of their positions. However, the culture of the Straight Dope promotes the idea of getting one’s facts correct and you have singularly failed to do so.
I am not scientifically illiterate (I would venture to say probably rather more literate than the average American) but there are a great number of scientific principles that I have no PERSONAL evidence or proof of existence (sub-atomic particles, dwarf planets, flesh-eating bacteria) but I believe in the existence of these things because people I trust and respect tell me they exist, even if I can’t see them, touch them, or interact with them.
Likewise, many people that I trust and respect tell me that our mortal existence is just one part of a total reality that we have the ability to experience, and that there are things and forces in this universe that are beyond my comprehension but that exist nonetheless, even if I can’t see them, touch them, or interact with them.
To embrace wholeheartedly the truth of the former while categorically rejecting the truth of the latter seems to me to be faulty logic. Can someone please explain to me why I should accept the “truth” of science but reject the “truth” of a higher power?
Well, for one, people in the former group can show you their work. You may not understand it, but it’s based upon the scientific method, and can be proven.
Can the people in the latter group show you their work? No, they cannot. They have feelings, and revelations, and traditions…what they don’t have is anything external to themselves.
Science and the technology based upon it works; religion doesn’t. Miracles always turn out to be falsehoods or easily explainable by natural phenomenon, claims that religion makes about the world turn out to not be true, faith healing and other alleged abilities granted by gods are always frauds. We’re communicating over the Internet, not Soulnet.
Being wrong - factually or morally - is a central, consistent feature of religion. If an actual god did actually show up and start working miracles that wouldn’t even qualify as a religious event, because it would be real and therefore not religious. If someone makes a religious claim, you can be virtually certain it’s false even knowing nothing else about it because that’s what religious claims always are; wrong. No one slaps the religion label on things that are true.
EDIT: And before anyone gives me the speech about how unfair I’m being, go ahead and prove me wrong instead of trying to shout me down. Just come up with all those (virtually nonexistent) times that religious claims turned out to be true and science was wrong after all.
I am sick to death of people invoking the sanctity of “the scientific method”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of it, but its only useful for PHYSICAL evidence.
In a court of law, if an eyewitness to a crime states “I saw Mr. Smith shoot Mr. Johnson”, and that eyewitness upon direct and cross-examination is found to be credible… well, a lot of people are going to believe that Mr. Smith shot Mr. Johnson, whether or not there is any physical evidence. Everything the eyewitness says is “internal”, but the fact that it can’t necessarily be corroborated by physical evidence doesn’t automatically make it untrue.
Lets say we had absolutely no physical evidence that Mr. Smith shot Mr. Johnson, only eyewitnesses (for the sake of argument lets say we have 20 such witnesses). Just because we can’t prove it with physical evidence doesn’t mean the jury can’t return a finding of fact that Mr. Smith is guilty. In fact very few people would doubt it and would accept it as truth DESPITE THE FACT THAT THEY HAVE NO PERSONAL OR FIRSTHAND KNOWLEDGE whatsoever. But we wouldn’t call those people delusional, would we? If we had 12 jurors hearing this case, and 11 of them voted “guilty” but 1 said “not guilty, because there is no proof!” who would be considered delusional then?
Oh, and how’s this for logic… absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because you can’t prove something exists doesn’t mean it doesn’t. Nor does if prove that it does exist. Absence of evidence (or inability to reproduce results or whatever else you got) is exactly that… no evidence. You can’t draw a conclusion either way. Yet pro-science types consistently want to declare that because there is no objective proof that God exists, then its a win for them. Its not. Its a draw.
Whereas claims that science makes about the world always turn out to be true.
Google at your leisure: Piltdown Man, the Cardiff Giant, Shinichi Fujimura, the Fiji Mermaid, Archaeoraptor… or just search “Scientific Hoaxes” and stroll around while.
Point being, scientists are not above scamming people (nor are religionists) and there are plenty of people who believe what they are told if it seems credible at the time.
In in every damn one of those cases it was poor science or outright fraud that brought them to the forefront, and good strong science that brought them down.
To convict, there’d have to some physical evidence: Mr. Johnson’s body, for example, with a gunshot wound. People shooting other people is well-established to happen, so if Mr. Johnson gets shot and 20 people say they saw Mr. Smith do it, that’s a pretty strong case.
But what if the 20 witnesses say they saw Mr. Smith kill Mr. Johnson with heat vision, something that’s not been known to ever occur, and there’s no body? Are you just as confident in voting guilty, as a juror? See, that’s the equivalent of religious claims, not someone witnessing a mundane event like a shooting: extraordinary things, with no known physical explanation, or evidence outside the human mind.
Are you familiar with the concept of a null hypothesis? The default position that claims are untrue until proven true? If there’s no evidence for or against a claim, it can be safely ignored.
Do you hold this same position with regard to talking dogs? There’s no proof that they exist, but they could. Is it a draw?
I’ll go one further. Scientific evidence of my god would make me an unbeliever. The god I believe in should not be scientifically testable.
No, you haven’t. You’ve given your personal feelings, but not describe on any way shape or form how you would ascertain the existance of the universe after you die. You know ther is no answer, your brain won’t be working and you will not be able to use the scientific method. If you want to chicken out, go ahead.
Yeah, it’s a “hijack”, isn’t it?
“illogical and hypocritical”, whatever gets you through the night-
But when YOU personally die, what then? Does the universe still exist?
If the answer is yes, how would you gather such evidence?
The screaming and scratching does it for me. I prefer a hammer.
The same logic applies: in the absence of some evidence that the existence of the universe is uniquely linked to me, the null hypothesis is that the universe will persist without me, as it has for everyone else.
I’m gathering evidence every time someone dies and the universe persists, and every time I go to the doctor and he fails to find that I am a some sort of ubermench that controls the universe.
Unless you’re suggesting, what, that all possibilities, even hypothetical and impossible ones, are equally likely to occur, evidence be damned?
Again, I’m not saying that the death of any person ends the universe. I’m saying that your death, i.e. the human behing Human Action, does it; nobody else’s.
Even if I were to accept your “null hypothesis”, it would be, for you an unprovable hypothesis. Unprovable hypotheses are faith, the same faith that I’m accused of having.
Why would you not? That there is no relationship between two measured phenomena is the null hypothesis, and it applies perfectly in this case, the measured phenomenon being my state of being alive and the universe’s state of existing.
Consider a syllogism:
When humans die, the universe continues to exist.
I am a human.
Therefore, when I die the universe continues to exist.
I have evidence for both premises, and the conclusion follows from them. Evidence that human death ends the universe, or that I am not human (or super-human, or the only real consciousness, or whatever) is non-existent.
I know where I’ll stack my chips.
Faith, sure, you can call it that if you wish. It’s not, really, though, as faith is generally defined to include some element of “unshakable belief” (which this isn’t, if you can show me evidence that my death will end the universe, I’ll modify my beliefs accordingly) or “belief that is not based on proof”…while this belief isn’t provable as such because of its conditions preclude that, again there is evidence.
It’s not the same faith you’re accused of having, as that without evidence, as you’ve informed us (unless you’ve had some personal revelation or divine contact, which would be evidence, just weak evidence).
No, they aren’t. But science corrects itself while religion just keeps making the same false claims over and over. Science is right enough that we can build our technological civilization on it; religion is wrong, relentlessly. And it clings to those errors forever unless forced with great effort by non-religious forces to do otherwise.
Religion is wrong by nature, that’s part of the point of it; when a belief is wrong but people don’t want to admit it they slap the “religion” label on it and demand everyone take it seriously. No one is likely to call a belief religious if it’s actually true since there’s no point to doing so.
Which is why you can’t just prove me wrong by listing off all the nonexistent times that science was wrong and religion was right about something.
What does all of this have to do with the simple fact that ALL religion is a silly delusion, and that the basic difference between religion and reason is that the latter insists on empirical testing to verify the truth of something, while the former doesn’t, and in fact, rejects empirical evidence if such evidence contradicts its assertions?
You can dance around this basic problem all you want, but you should realize that whatever I say, right or wrong by your lights, won’t change the reality of it–so jumping up and down on my head won’t change the basic nature of religion–foolish delusion-- one iota. Even if I DID make “blatant errors,” as you put it, religion is still–inarguably–incontrovertibly–irrefutably–a pathetic, unreasonable delusion that shames anyone who preaches and/or believes in its tenets. What I have to say, or what you have to say, will not alter that basic truth. So whether I’m wrong or right in your religiously motivated mind matters not. At all.
If no other single statement made in the history of human discourse proves the lunacy of religious belief, that one does. If I paraphrase correctly, if absolute proof of your god’s existence became evident, you would STOP believing in him/her?
It’s enough to make one shudder. Such people reproduce. Gaah.
If you worship a god who saves only good people it makes no difference to an omnipotent and omnipresent god that you pretend to be good working at a soup kitchen.
And yet, and you find this unbelievable, doing something good can make a person feel so good that they do it for its own sake.
Seriously, religious people speaking honestly often scare me.
Whatever you say on this message board about Democrats will never be true because we all have different beliefs, therefore whatever observation you make is meaningless.