Nemesis_lxix
Drunk Lord's Greasy $@#%*
This is more a matter of stupid fanatics.I have seen people kill each other in the name of their soccer team !NeverIsForever said:
Howcome so many people still believe in God?
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Demilich
Remember
Natural law is based on evaluation of reality is it not? The acceptance of something that contravenes natural law necessitates a reworking of the law, does it not? My point remains: Essentially, anything could exist outside of our conceptions of natural law, but making up old bearded guys in robes with prophecies, commandments, etc. sounds silly to me.
NeverIsForever
Member
I'm reminded of the argument by parody against intelligent design, involving a Flying Spaghetti Monster 
derek
Grey Eminence
Nemesis_lxix
Drunk Lord's Greasy $@#%*
We still don’t know anything about the natural low nor do we know what exists outside this law !Demilich said:
And I still don’t find something too silly to be true !
Thoth-Amon
Hypochondriac
- Apr 4, 2006
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proglodite said:
Notice that I had qoutation marks around the words "religious experiences" indicating that they were not in fact religious experiences but emotional and psychological experiences which I mistook for religious ones.
Thoth-Amon
Hypochondriac
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WNxScythe said:I'd love to hear some examples of these "obvious falsehoods". I promise you I can refute every single one.
On the topic at hand, I cannot understand how someone could not believe in some sort of supreme being, or "God". After all, if it all just "happened" what caused this "happening"? You can't get something from nothing, that's the basic law of thermodynamics. Somewhere along the line, there *must* be a being, entity or whatever you want to call it that was never created or caused to be brought into being by something else... this 'something' would therefore be eternal and exist outside the realms of natural law. I fail to see how one could explain this without recourse to the supernatural and divine realm. (i.e God!)
So you see, to me, atheism takes far more faith than belief in a God. Faith in human logic and reason, both of which I doubt any of us can deny has many, many holes. Are we so full of arrogance that we think humanity's logic is the be-all and end-all of reason? I find it amusing that humanists who firmly believe that they are essentially intelligent, four-legged brute animals can presume to measure the infinite universe with the scale of human reasoning and demand "proof" that fits into human standards.
Throughout the Bible (and I'm using the bible because I'm a Christian... I couldn't very well defend my point using the Qu'ran could I
First off I have never espoused atheism here. Why do people assume that because I am criticizing Christianity that I must therefore be an atheist? Read my earlier posts, I am a deist.
Secondly I'm not going to get into a bible mud-slinging contest with (I did that for years with 'heretics' and 'unbelievers') as I know that it will only make you and I more defensive and more convinced that our view is right and the other person is obviously wrong. Having read numerous Christian apologetics on biblical problem verses I am well aware of the ways in which Christians get around biblical difficulties and for the most part they are strained and go against the clear meaning of the text.
Anvil
Brain Bubbled
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I find it funny that you bring up the bible when talking about proof of a superior being. If a God did exist, why would his only proof of existance be a book? One of you will probably try to say something along the lines of, "The world must have been created by a deity," Which, by the way, was easily thrown down a few posts ago by someone else.
If you can somehow prove that a superior being exists, without using the bible, or "We're here, so he must exist", then you should be given a microphone.
If you can somehow prove that a superior being exists, without using the bible, or "We're here, so he must exist", then you should be given a microphone.
Justin S.
Member
In the ethics thread, Demiurge summed up why "science" is in no way a response to religion, how it operates in a different realm.
Demiurge said:
Justin S. said:
I don't think mankind is supposed to be able to prove that God exists or not. Science is not in any way meant to counter religion. And religion isn't meant to tell people what to believe in, or who to listen to.
Science is meant to help people learn more about the world around them and learn how to help make it work for them. Apparently, it's taken a horrible turn, and become a means by which we destroy eachother and destroy our world.
Religion was never meant to be an opposition to science. Actually, quite the contrary. Religion is really one of the earliest forms of Science, in that explained the unexplainable. Sure, it might be extremely blind and one sided Science, but it still offers people explanations for things that nobody at that time could explain. There was no way to explain what made the sun rise and set. Nobody can explain how the universe was created. Science says they have evidence of the "Big Bang Theory", but it's still just a theory. A theory which I've chosen to accept, but mixed with my personal views of religion.
Mankind is not meant to prove i God exists or not. People say that they have proof in the stories in the Testaments, but they're stories. Science isn't supposed to be a way to disprove the existence of God, but nor is it a way to prove that God exists. The 2 have nothing to do with one another. It's like saying that the size and amount of radiation from a nuclear blast is relative to how many oranges I've eaten in the past few days. (That had to be the worst comparison I've ever made in my entire life.) It doesn't work.
derek
Grey Eminence
When science itself takes on the characteristics of religion, that distinction between the two becomes more blurred.
Cythraul
Active Member
- Dec 10, 2003
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I don't care to offer my own speculations as to why people continue to believe in God. There are a variety of reasons that various people give. Some say it's hardwired into our psyche, others say it acts as a "meaning giver", for lack of a better term. Still others think it brings coherence to a set of intuitions that can't be accounted for by a materialist/physicalist outlook, even in principle. Others just think it's rational in the absence of suitable defeators, but that opens up a whole epistemological can of worms which would probably take this thread way off track. Anyway, the latter point doesn't so much tell us why the ordinary guy on the street still believes in God; it's more the result of a development in epistemology. There are a lot of reasons. I think, right now, the main battleground is a metaphysical debate concerning materialism vs. non-materialism, but I might be totally mistaken since I don't look into these matters very much. Well, at least not at this point in my life.
derek
Grey Eminence
Cythraul said:
It's interesting you said that. I have a hunch that many folks that are strongly anti-Christian are generally pre 20's. I think when reasonably smart people become older, they can see the transparency in such a position and adopt a a more complex stance.
Thats just my opinion, though.
That's a really good philosophy, but I feel I need to add that this varies from person to person. Some young people are able to see flaws in arguments easier than some adults, but I do understand what you mean in terms of personally becoming easier as time progresses.
derek
Grey Eminence
AnvilSnake said:You better not be saying EVERY person under 20, Derek.
Of course not, just generalising somewhat.
Explaining God is like running laps on a track...you don't get anywhere you haven't been before, but you are better for the exercise.
Many people, more intelligent than I am, have put forth myriad explanations and proofs for the existence of a Greater Being (or some derivation thereof)...and all such arguments have been (IMHO) thrown down.
This is not necessarily because God is an untruth, but because such an agrument is unproveable -- try and argue, say, solopcism and you meet with same-such results.
Many people, more intelligent than I am, have put forth myriad explanations and proofs for the existence of a Greater Being (or some derivation thereof)...and all such arguments have been (IMHO) thrown down.
This is not necessarily because God is an untruth, but because such an agrument is unproveable -- try and argue, say, solopcism and you meet with same-such results.
ARC150 said:
True. however as Popper states, everything, even science, is based on some sort of faith, because nothing is totally provable.
ARC150 said:
Oh Karl Popper. He was a critical rationalist, who argued (well Im just going to quote this--the first paragraph is the most important)
holding that scientific theories are universal in nature, and can be tested only indirectly, by reference to their implications. He also held that scientific theory, and human knowledge generally, is irreducibly conjectural or hypothetical, and is generated by the creative imagination in order to solve problems that have arisen in specific historico-cultural settings. Logically, no number of positive outcomes at the level of experimental testing can confirm a scientific theory, but a single genuine counter-instance is logically decisive: it shows the theory, from which the implication is derived, to be false. Popper's account of the logical asymmetry between verification and falsification lies at the heart of his philosophy of science. It also inspired him to take falsifiability as his criterion of demarcation between what is and is not genuinely scientific: a theory should be considered scientific if and only if it is falsifiable. This led him to attack the claims of both psychoanalysis and contemporary Marxism to scientific status, on the basis that the theories enshrined by them are not falsifiable. His scientific work was influenced by his study of quantum mechanics - he has written extensively against the famous Copenhagen interpretation - and by Albert Einstein's approach to scientific theories. Popper's falsificationism resembles Charles Peirce's fallibilism. In Of Clocks and Clouds (1966), Popper said he wished he had known of Peirce's work earlier.
In All Life is Problem Solving (1999), Popper sought to explain the apparent progress of scientific knowledge—how it is that our understanding of the universe seems to improve over time. This problem arises from his position that the truth content of our theories, even the best of them, cannot be verified by scientific testing, but can only be falsified. If so, then how is it that the growth of science appears to result in a growth in knowledge? In Popper's view, the advance of scientific knowledge is an evolutionary process characterized by his formula:
In response to a given problem situation (PS1), a number of competing conjectures, or tentative theories (TT), are systematically subjected to the most rigorous attempts at falsification possible. This process, error elimination (EE), performs a similar function for science that natural selection performs for biological evolution. Theories that better survive the process of refutation are not more true, but rather, more "fit"—in other words, more applicable to the problem situation at hand (PS1). Consequently, just as a species' "biological fit" does not predict continued survival, neither does rigorous testing protect a scientific theory from refutation in the future. Yet, as it appears that the engine of biological evolution has produced, over time, adaptive traits equipped to deal with more and more complex problems of survival, likewise, the evolution of theories through the scientific method may, in Popper's view, reflect a certain type of progress: toward more and more interesting problems (PS2). For Popper, it is in the interplay between the tentative theories (conjectures) and error elimination (refutation) that scientific knowledge advances toward greater and greater problems; in a process very much akin to the interplay between genetic variation and natural selection.
In his earlier work Conjectures and Refutations (1963), Popper abandoned his previous rejection of the idea that truth is not a particularly relevant goal for science to pursue. He adopted the semantic theory of truth formulated by the logician Alfred Tarski in 1948. According to this theory, the conditions for the truth of a sentence as well as the sentences themselves are part of a metalanguage. So, for example, the sentence "Snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white. Although many philosophers have interpreted, and continue to interpret, Tarski's theory as a deflationary theory, Popper explicitly refers to it as a theory in which "truth" must be replaced with "corresponds to the facts."
He bases this interpretation on the fact that examples such as the one described above refer to two things: assertions and the facts to which they refer. He identifies Tarski's formulation of the truth conditions of sentences as the introduction of a "metalinguistic predicate" and distinguishes the following cases:
1) "John called" is true.
2) "It is true that John called."
The first case belongs to the metalanguage whereas the second is more likely to belong to the object language. Hence, "it is true that" possesses the logical status of a redundancy. "Is true", on the other hand, is a predicate necessary for making general observations such as "John was telling the truth about Phillip."
Upon this basis, along with that of the logical content of assertions (where logical content is inversely proportional to probability), Popper went on to develop his important notion of verisimilitude. In words, the intuitive idea behind verisimilitude is that the assertions or hypotheses of scientific theories can be objectively measured with respect to the amount of truth and falsity that they imply. And, in this way, one theory can be evaluated as more or less true than another on a quantitative basis which, Popper emphasizes forcefully, has nothing to do with "subjective probabilities" or other merely "epistemic" considerations.
The simplest mathemical formulation that Popper gives of this concept can be found in the tenth chapter of Conjectures and Refutations.. Here he defines it as:
where Vs(a) is the verisimilitude (or truthlikeness) of a, Ctv(a) is a measure of the content of truth of a, and CTf(a) is a measure of the content of the falsity of a.
Knowledge, for Popper, was objective, both in the sense that it is objectively true (or truthlike), and also in the sense that knowledge has an ontological status (i.e.–knowledge as object) independent of the knowing subject (Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, 1972). He proposed three worlds (see Popperian cosmology): World One , being the phenomenal world, or the world of direct experience; World Two , being the world of mind, or mental states, ideas, and perceptions; and World Three, being the body of human knowledge expressed in its manifold forms, or the products of the second world made manifest in the materials of the first world (i.e.–books, papers, paintings, symphonies, and all the products of the human mind). World Three, he argued, was the product of individual human beings in exactly the same sense that an animal path is the product of individual animals, and that, as such, has an existence and evolution independent of any individual knowing subjects. The influence of World Three, in his view, on the individual human mind (World Two) is at least as strong as the influence of World One. In other words, the knowledge held by a given individual mind owes at least as much to the total accumulated wealth of human knowledge, made manifest, than to the world of direct experience. As such, the growth of human knowledge could be said to be a function of the independent evolution of World Three. Compare with Memetics. Contemporary philosophers have not embraced Popper's Three World conjecture, due mostly, it seems, to its resemblance to Cartesian dualism.
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