I dont think he misunderstood atheism at all. Some atheists treat their atheism just like a religion, complete with proselytizing, etc. They push what they consider the “truth” just like religious zealots do.
There are no such methods available that can arrive at any abstract “truth”, let alone any facts. What you have instead are mental gymnastics designed to support what you already believe.
That’s an unproven assertion that creates an untestable hypothesis. Poor science. Assuming the truth of the assertion, simply because such a method has not currently been discovered, that does not mean that such a method could not be devised in the future and it seems to me to be worth the time to attempt to find it.
Simple test: Using non-physicalist methods, what do we know about ghosts?
We know very little. We know that large numbers of people claim to have experienced some sort of contact with them. We know that there is an emotional component to many of these contacts. We know that there is documentation of these contacts going back thousands of years. We know that people generally regarded such contacts as forbidden in some way, but that this isn’t a universal belief. We know that most of these contacts are believed to be related to people who have died previously in some way. They are sometimes thought to be related to specific places, but sometimes not. I don’t believe that any philosophers have actually attempted to address the topic of ghosts, but one could research that. Unfortunately, I’m not an expert in ghosts.
You only say that because modern people define their “God” to never interact with the physical world in a detectable way.
If I’m starting from scratch and describing what a world with a god would look like, it would almost certainly be detectable - hell it would be blarin’ obvious to everyone. The only reason we’re in this situation where people say God is undetectable is that no one has ever detected a god.
So, a bunch of collected stories with no conclusions. A high school statistician could have come up with that much. Can you point to any supernatural event where “non-physicalist methods” have given us something of substance that couldn’t have been arrived at using the scientific method?
Back when people were more “innocent” God would supposedly make regular appearances. Now that we have methods to check things out and verify them, God hides.
What do Ghosts have to do with Religion?
This is false. The scientific method has no capability to address the fictional - or more precisely, it has no way to demonstrate, prove, or predict things that aren’t real, and may or may not be able to disprove them based on available data. But supernatural things? If you can detect them or react to them, science can detect them and react to them - including studying them. Because all science is is an organized way of people noticing things, organized in such a way to filter out the biases and bullshit.
If your “supernatural” stuff can’t be addressed by science, then that’s because your supernatural stuff is bullshit.
It’s an extremely common slander to pretend that atheism/science and religion. Theists employ this slander to draw a false equivalence between the two, with the intent of implying that atheism/science is as flimsy and unsupported as the religions they’re accusing it of being.
I don’t believe I said anything counter to that.
The thing is, when it comes to stuff that actually matters, science does have an argument.
On the other hand, attempting a frontal assault to invalidate religion or God or whatever is a fool’s errand, as it’s far more likely to entrench those who live on woo.
There really are enough battles that we can win without having to take on the task of elimination of religion.
Of course. There are plenty of other examples. For instance, the twelve tribes were certainly not begun by a child of Jacob with the same name. Each culture has founding myths, including America.
The question is what you do with this information. If it is only shared by members of the culture, fine, but if members of the culture use the myths as justification for exploiting another culture, it behooves us to expose the belief as a myth.
Which often pisses off the holder of the myth.
Additionally we know that, going back thousands of years, people have claimed to interact with gods, demons, elves, fairies, brownies, and nature spirits. We know that people have claimed to learn things from these claimed interactions that contradict both each other and objective reality. We also know that humans have a marked demonstrable tendency to anthropomorphize, misjudge coincidences and statics, and fall for biases such as confirmation bias.
I believe there’s ample evidence to suggest that humans have an inherent tendency to imagine all kinds of crazy shit, and to believe all kinds of crazier shit. There is not much evidence suggesting that these things become real because humans imagine them up.
I doubt we know what we would do if we were God.
We’re just not that smart and we don’t have the information.
That’s why I said Davidic empire, not David himself. I can buy that there was a historical David, but if his empire was of the size stated in the Bible we’d have plenty of evidence for it. We don’t.
Well, there goes my plans for the weekend. If I’m not going to eliminate all religion, I guess I should spend the time vacuuming instead.
Who is trying to do that?
You said
If this isn’t asking us to abandon the scientific method just to avoid a conflict, then what do you mean?
Actually I think they say he made regular appearances back in time before anyone living remembered it. And that he would appear tomorrow, to prove them right.
God yesterday and God tomorrow, but never God today.
We do have information about what God supposedly told people. Now if you think that this is all bogus, what do you think god is?
Even if some atheist was trying to prove that your personal deity didn’t exist, what the hell is the problem? All your god has to do is pop out of his inter-dimensional hole and say “Here I am-You lose!!”