エル.;569849 said:
No. You took my non falsifiable statement and inverted it and made it falsifiable. Yes, "no blue beetles exist" is falsifiable because its inverse is affirmable. "Blue beetles exist" is non-falsifiable because its inverse is non-affirmable. I'm not sure if you're not paying attention or think I'm stupid.
Blue beetles exist is falsifiable too. As long as I can, as opal said, scour the entire universe - theoretically - for blue beetles, and get a hold of every beetle in the universe, and show that it's not blue - then I can falsify it.
The point you made towards opal below doesn't really hold because that assumes there is a universe outside of the universe. I don't really want to get into multiverse theory because, you know, I'm not a physicist and I don't know all too much about the deep complex mechanisms governing the universe outside of this one. But let me put it this way - the point of falsifiability, is that you can, theoretically (and this is important) set up an experiment that disproves the statement. I'm not concerned with it being practical - I should just be theoretically able to. And extending this to multiple universes is just extending my experiment to include methodology that will cover the outside universes.
Aside from the fact that this was based off a misconception about the beetle statement, I completely disagree with sentence four. If God does not physically interact with this world, then he did not create life on Earth. And God need not violate the laws of physics, only the laws of probability to the degree that we can deem certain actions the result of intelligence. And if God has never interacted with this universe in any way including creating it, he he can't be the God of this universe. By a Deistic approach, something had to cause the universe, and we might as well call that thing God, animate or not (DO NOT CONFUSE WITH COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT).
The problem with this statement is the following - how do you actually prove that God interacted with the physical world and that it's not something much simpler going on? Furthermore, they are laws of probability.
I'll put it this way: the chance of getting struck by lightning is maybe one to a hundred thousand (I don't know the exact odds, they might vary a bit, but there's a good estimate). These odds are really small, but each year, you'll still find, on average, a bunch of people are struck by lightning. Now, let's say, on average, in the US (and I don't know the exact value, but I can't be bothered to look it up atm), 1000 people get struck by lightning every year. The point is, we have an average, and we're taking it to be a thousand. Now, let's say, in the year 2023, there were 4948 cases of lightning recorded. By all means, this is a pretty anomalous result (given that in all other years, lightning-strike incidents hovered around the 1000 mark). Now, we could say, this anomaly in the laws of probability (it's obviously an outlier) can be attributed to God. But this is a STOCHASTIC probability, and that means that 4948 deaths are also a possible value of occurrence - just much lower than 1000. It's much more likely that there was a congregation of people outside somewhere when lightning struck, skewing the results. Or the year 2023 had a disproportionate amount of lightning storms. Whatever you can think of, for every outlier that occurs statistically, there's a good enough reason to explain it.
Now, when could you attribute this to God? Maybe, if lightning struck and killed the population of the US in one go. (And even then, that could happen if there was an extremely severe natural disaster or something). My point is, it's going to take a lot before God is going to trump a good, simple, common sense explanation.
If we're going by the deist argument, you can call pretty much anything God and get away with it. I am using God in the standard monotheist definition, not the deist one. If you want to define God your way, you can find him in a lump of coal.
I think you could present a much better case for a deist God than a theist God, but, it still suffers from the terminal regression phenomenon - which I'll get to later.
Unless you have a non-complex view of what God is. Then it's not a terminal regression or un-elegant (quite the opposite!). And as I have touched on in my last paragraph, positing God exists could explain why certain "random" actions seem intelligent, if that be the case.
Yeah. But what I mean by terminal regression is the following - the thing about positing God means the following - introducing a God as creator asks so many questions of its own that it becomes really, a lot more burdensome to explain it. Why? Because you now have to ask why that God is there in the first place. You're allowing yourself a lot of luxury positing God and then having him float around doing no explaining whatsoever. What the hell is God doing in our universe? Well, you could say another God put it there (this is really the only viable solution - if God can interact materially there needs to be something else materially to create God). Ok, so you've now posited Super-God. But where did Super-God come from?
As you can see, that's an endlessly complex explanation to which evolution is infinitely preferable.
Now, the other point - God wasn't created by anything at all, God has just always existed. Basically, God is the universe. But then we get back to that deist point and ask ourselves - if God is basically in everything (if it's outside, something must have put it there, you can't create something from nothing), why are you calling it God? Why don't you just call it the universe, which is a perfectly good word for the same concept? God then just becomes superfluous.
Note that we can never rule out God's existence. I am not saying you can disprove his existence exactly and to do so would be a very far-fetched conclusion. Merely that it is so unlikely to to the point that anything is pretty much a better explanation than God to whatever the hell is going on on our pale blue dot.
And I'm all for selecting the most elegant explanation given in science, but not shutting out new ways of explaining things. Different explanations are elegant in different ways, like I tried to demonstrate in my response to Butterfree.
They sure are. I like different explanations for things. In fact, I did research on something scientific a while back for a university. I later was told by the professor whom I did the research for that it eventually was a fruitless path and they needed a different explanation, because mine was not quite elegant enough (even though what I was doing was based on a pretty neat idea).
But here's the thing - there's just no way you can get away with positing God and calling it elegant. It's the most clumsy explanation ever. Just because it's intuitively simple (something put something there) doesn't mean it's actually simple, because then you require something to explain why it was putting things there in the first place. God cannot do this by building it up from building blocks - it does it top down instead, and that's just an overly cumbersome way of working.
But personal evidence does not extend to outside observers. That's what makes it personal! If Fred sees the great blue banana on the moon and takes chemical samples, tries to communicate with it, verifies his brain chemistry is balanced, etc. until he is thoroughly convinced, and then comes home with no pictures and the chemical samples have expired and the banana has gone back to it's own dimension, all he has is personal evidence.
The point is not that Fred comes back. The point is he should be able to invite his friends John, Terry, and Maximilian and they should be able to see the same thing. That's what's more important here. If Fred comes back with no evidence, even if he's done the tests, everyone is going to be skeptical for a reason. (Also, the evidence he would use would likely be printed out in some form - the sample could expire, but he'd still have test results, which he could send back as evidence.)
The thing is, it's just an unlikely occurrence, so people will be skeptical about it, for good reason. Extraordinary occurrences require extraordinarily good explanations and you're going to need a boatload of evidence far beyond what you'd usually require to convince anybody else of the statement before you start Blue Banana Tourism Co.
That makes you justified in accepting them over God, not rejecting the idea God exists.
Which is my problem with atheism.
Yeah, but I don't inherently reject the idea God could exist - I just think it so marginally likely that I might as well act as if he doesn't. You might call it de facto atheism - which I think is a very big proportion of all atheists, actually. I think you're going to find a select overzealous few who're going to claim God has been disproven and does definitively not exist. Not gonna happen. Like I said, if you could posit God in a way that makes perfect sense, we're all okay with this. There's nothing wrong with that at all, it'd make the world a better place. The reason it's not happening though is because we haven't found such a way, and the way we think about God and the way we define him just precludes such a possibility.
I was clearly mentioned their discussion wasn't trying to convince you, only each other. Logic also operates independently of correct premises, which is why the deficiency in my example opaltiger pointed out doesn't matter and also why consensus matters.
In this case, I would simply not enter the discussion, really. I'm not that much of a hard-ass idiot I am going to walk up to the priests and tell them they're wrong. That's just lame. The priests have gotta come to me first. Live and let live. The only thing I'm hardline about is separation of church and state because religion and politics obviously just do not mix.
Premises matter, actually - the logic functions the same way, that I'll give you. But wrong premises lead to wrong conclusions. Just because you apply the logic correctly does not mean you have the right conclusion - it requires the starting premises to be validated. So when you attack an argument, you can do a few things:
a) attack the premises. If you show even a single premise is false, you've proven the argument wrong (the conclusion could be correct due to a different premise, but this particular argument doesn't work)
b) attack the logical conclusion (the premises are correct, but the logic used yields a false conclusion).
Even if you've found b) works, there's still a).
Aaand you just crossed the line into insulting their actual intelligence.
Sanity and intelligence are not the same thing. I think if you met me, you would hardly assume I'm actually sane in any form or way, the methods I use to behave. Really, most atheists are insane too. We're all insane. Just some people are more insane than others. However, I find the far-fetched illusionistic approach of religion to be of such outlandish and bewildering proportions that it's just confusing. There's insanity and there's "whoa, cloudcuckoolander explanation inc!". And that's what I'm saying - there's one thing to dream it up, but to actually believe in all these stories requires a lot of tolerance for bullshit and I'm simply not up to the task.
Interesting, but that didn't answer my question about personal evidence.
It does. Because even if people pray for healing, to solve their cancer issues, this means it actually gets worse. There's no such thing as a theoretical possibility for a healing effect of religion, and that's what's so nasty for this experiment. Note, that it was the Templeton foundation who sponsored this - a Christian organisation (NOT a secular one). If anything, they should have been able to curry God's favour, and they didn't.
Um, no, I don't know what you're talking about. Most churches in America are very casual!
Don't forget - I'm Dutch. Over here we are far less religious than the States. Atheism isn't the norm, but it's quite accepted, and a lot of people I know just look upon religious people with bewilderment. It's just going to confuse people.
Ok. Then I misused the word "dogma". You are not dogmatic. You have simply chosen religion as your scapegoat for the world's problems.
Not per se. I don't really like having a single scapegoat for the world's issues, but I won't deny I think religion has a pretty pernicious effect on the world. Despite the fact individuals may benefit from it (how, I don't understand, but my mindset is different).
And I agree with what you said, but not all religious people are dogmatic.
Why? They're still abiding by the Bible. The fact they interpret it loosely doesn't mean they still won't put it above anything else they believe in. There are religious people though that are so vaguely religious that they believe in a theistic God, but tell the scripture to fuck itself. Those people exist.
No, religious people stop being religious. And it's usually not because they change, it's because conclusion of the sum of the evidence they have observed changes.
I know. My parents absolved themselves of religion for this reason. They were raised Catholic, but really, once my parents became adults, they've just stopped going to church. My dad doesn't talk about religion except if he sees something funny about fundamentalist Christians which he is just bewildered by, and my mother's an atheist (she's not so vocal about it at all). They just concluded it was fiction, wasn't for them, and went on their merry way. My dad's a physicist though and scientists have notoriously high non-religious rates. But it requires a good deal of effort to break away from it, and a supportive environment.
Only one out of twelve people or so break with their religion so firmly. In my dad's case it was eased by the fact his parents stopped being religious themselves. My grandmother unsubscribed from the Catholic church (her son turning out to be gay probably was a factor). In other words, it was a normal, slow process. My grandfather wasn't church-based anymore either in his later years.
My mother's parents were devout Catholics, but my mother entirely broke with the religious tradition. They never mentioned it to her, they just let it be. I guess it just wasn't talked about. I was not baptized, which I am sure was not appreciated, but not a word. Probably just a case of letting a grown up do their thing.
All in all, it really depends on how it's approached. You must remember that this was the late 70s in the Netherlands - we're known as a hippie country for a good reason - this was much more accepted here than in the US or even in say Canada (which, when my parents moved there in the early 90s, had so many religious communities it baffled my parents, especially my mother. We had maybe one friend who was non-religious during that time).
The turning of the tide here came much earlier than it came anywhere else, and this means that I am from a country where non-religion is normal and seen as a Good Thing in general. But in an environment where religion is a Big Thing, the peer pressure to resist this change will be a lot bigger. I think my parents were just lucky to be in the right place at the right time.
But I doubt you'll believe me because I doubt you've ever seen someone stop being religious. So take me as an example. But then I'm not a great example because I've only been in "Serious Business" for a few months...
The problem with this is indeed that I grew up in a very non-religious environment where religion hasn't played any role of significance. My parents disavowed religion when they young. See story above. I only know the story of my parents. My parents let me be free in my decision, and I did go to a nominally Catholic school, but even there the religious studies teachers refused to be preachy about it. I actually had a good time studying it - my teachers were more concerned with teaching us about religion, its history, and the theories behind it than they were concerned with winning souls for the cause.
With the exception of a few, most of my friends are non-religious and the ones that are not are so vaguely religious that it's not really a difference in daily life.
That's a useful piece of information for some people I have to deal with. Could I get a source?
I got it from the God Delusion, but I don't know which source Dawkins used. So you're gonna have to double check that.
I think I already covered this. You're looking at the wrong points in time regarding atomic theory when applying Occam's razor. I will repeat what I said before: two theories that explain the same thing and have no observable contradictions have the same validity. If you can prove me wrong on this, I'll believe anything you say regarding Occam's razor.
They're not two theories. They're the same model, just with added things. They're an adaptation of the same model. That doesn't really count as a different theory. It's a perfectly normal scientific way of working when you have a theory that's incomplete, that you fix it to make it better (or you adopt a new model).
But the thing is that Occam's Razor works under the condition that both theories actually
explain the phenomenon. In your atomic model example, the first, incomplete theory did not
explain anything anyway; it had so many flaws it was an inaccurate model, which means it needed to be modified. This made the model more complex, but a model's not a good model until it explains what it's supposed to explain (in this case, atomic structure). So your comparison is really not a very good comparison.
The conditions for Occam's Razor imply
ceterus paribus (all other things being equal). In your example, not all things are equal, because one model simply doesn't have the explanatory power required to fulfill the phenomenon. That's what makes it drop off - Occam's Razor would come into play if they were both equally capable of explanining atomic structure. They weren't, so we took the more complex option, because that one was accurate.
Science is a) accuracy first b) simplicity.
Of course, the atomic model we use now is still relatively simple, else we couldn't teach high school kids to use it. Really, atomic science isn't the hardest thing to predict. Human behaviour is tougher.
All I can say is... of course you can't. I don't even know what point you're trying to make with this.
When someone suggests the idea that the world was created Last Thursday the correct response is, "yeah, but if it is we might as well go on with life the same way".
I'm saying, that if the book on my desk could be an illusion, I could also posit that your entire life is one big illusion. But, like you said, correctly, even if it is, we might as well go on with our lives. The point is, even if it was an illusion, that's entirely irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Everything could be an illusion, but if we assumed it was, it would be impossible to live our lives in a decent humane way. The reason we don't assume everything is an illusion is because it's just cumbersome to work with.
That being said, the brain is a good illusionist, when it wants to be, and it's quite able to trick you into seeing things that don't exist. It's good to be a little bit suspicious of your brain, but not to the extremes.
You live your life the same way regardless of your life being illusory or not. This makes my point - you know that the sun doesn't have to rise tomorrow, but you live as if it does anyway.
This is exactly what most de facto atheists do - they are aware things could be different, they just wouldn't care if it did because it's not impacting our daily life. Even if there was a deist God - he would be deist and not doing anything, so it's not important to meditate on it while living. You have just proven that you, yourself, use the same arguments to invalidate Last Thursdayism as we use to invalidate any other form of religion. It's not a different argument, it's an equally outrageous position to take, and you don't take Last Thursdayism seriously either. So why are you asking any atheist to take the existence of God so seriously? I doubt we are going to all instantly prove it's impossible that he exists. We just don't think it's likely and therefore we find it hard to take seriously.
