religious knowledge (of Dart)

[_dartagnan]

It seems that dartagnan is reluctant to enunciate any religious propositions, except perhaps for the following.

I object to this because "reluctant" suggests I have more, but that I'm hiding them. I have other reasons why I believe God exists, but the only religious propositon I have is that God does exist.

(a) There is an entity that dartagnan calls "God". The only specification given for the nature of this entity is that " it/he/she is responsible for our present reality".

Correct.

(b) This entity has, during the period for which we have some historical information, been trying to tell the human race "of his/her/its existence and [to give them] a sense of purpose in the world".

Well, not exactly. I think humans have the capacity to perceive God from one degree to another, and God will be perceived because he exists, the same way the sun exists.

(c) Morality is derivative from the religions based on claims for the existence of one or more of the entities referred to in (a) (we might call them "theistic" religions; there are others of course), to whose alleged revelations dartagnan refers in (b). We would not have morality without them.

Let me clarify, and this is a slippery topic that needs constant clarification. I think morality is obtainable without religion, but its source is divine. The fact that our modern standards of morality derive from religious sources, is of no surprise.

(d) The argument from design is part of the case for belief in the entity referred to in (a).

Yes, teleological arguments impress me greatly, as does the argument from consciousness.

How does religion differ from and (it is claimed) complement science?

Relgion is mankind's attempt to answer questions unanswerable by science. I think religion can complement science in the sense that it explains important aspects of our reality that science cannot. These explanatons are often teleological, and not "scientific" in our modern sense. Bu teological explanations resonate with people, especially when science hits a brick wall. Not a stumbling block, but a brick wall.

For example, human consciousness and experience. Evolutionary biologist, and atheist, Michael Ruse put it this way:

Why should a bunch of atoms have thinking ability? Why should I, even as I write now, be able to reflect on what I am doing and why should you, even as you read now, be able to ponder my points, agreeing or disagreeing, with pleasure or pain, deciding to refute me or deciding that I am just not worth the effort? No one, certainly not the Darwinian as such, seems to have any answer to this.... The point is that there is no scientific answer.

Another atheist Steve Pinker said, "virtually nothing is known about teh functoning microcircuitry of the brain... The existence of first-person experience is not explainable by science." Daniel Dennett tries to simply dismiss the problem by declaring consciousness a cognitive illusion.

I believe science is showing that mind and brain are two different things. JP Moreland discussed some of these scientific experiments, and noted also that if physicalism is true, then there is no way we could have free will since our decisions and cognitive skills would be reduced to physical processes alone, which are subject to the natural laws. So whatever choices we made, we could not be held accountable for them since we were simply programmed robots acting according to the laws of nature. And there goes the basis for morality and justice. Who could blame Hitler if he had no choice in what he did? That is why the insanity plea is a popular one in court of law. It relinquishes one of any accountability.

Have I got that more or less right?

More or less.

There is one bit of dartagnan's writing that I cannot seem to grasp the sense of: Is he saying here that "ancient writers' explained the values of universal constants (of physics, presumably - things like Planck's constant, the value of the universal gravitational constant, and so on) thousands of years ago?

In a sense, yes. The moment they insisted the universe was created for us, this fully explained why the laws of the universe are as they are. This is the logical force behind Brandon Carter's dicovery of the Anthropic Principle. The only shared value among the hundreds of fundamental constants throughout the cosmos, is that they are as they are for life to exist on earth. If any one of these were altered in the slightest degree, our universe would not be capable of producing life. More interesting to me is that the universe seems to have known we were coming, because the laws are so mathematiclly tied together that the age of the universe has to be exactly as it is. The weak and strong nuclear forces have to be exactly as they are. The speed of light, the force of gravity, etc.

Since dartagnan plainly cannot be claiming that (e.g.) Plato had a discussion of the value of e/m in the Timaeus, what does he mean?

That when the apostle Paul said the heavens (cosmos) declare the glory of God, he was possibly referring to something science has only recently been able to figure out. After all, that is where much of the evidence is coming from. Coincidence? Possibly. But intriguing nonetheless. And who was this ancient author of Genesis who claimed, without any scientifc training, that the universe had a beginning, and that plants and animals preexisted mankind? Concidence? Possibly. It seems the more we learn about the universe, the more it looks like a put up job.

I can't remember being taught the truth of that proposition when I studied science. Different syllabus from dartagnan's, no doubt.

Probably because it would be forbidden in class to begin with, else the atheists would have a conniption fit about breaching the separaton of Church and state. We know how that goes.

Kevin stands in good company with his statement. The majority of truly great scientists would agree with him.

Indeed. One might consider Einstein a great scientist. This is what he had to say on the matter, and I agree completely:

My religiosity consists of a humble admiration of the infintely superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God...Everyone who is seriously engaged in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that the laws of nature manifest the existence of a spirit vastly superior to that of men, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.

I am not an atheist, and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist (note: Spinoza was a pantheist). We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of those books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being towards God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.

And just think, the is the guy whom Dawkins referred to as an "atheist" on several occasions in his "God Delusion." That's astounding.

This might be my last post for a couple of days.

[_Tarski]

I was hoping to have a serious, perhaps celestial discussion, mainly because I knew it would get polluted with the usual sideshow antics. But here goes...

This might come as a disappointment, but I do not have any religious claims to make aside from my belief that a God exists. Why should I feel obligated to go beyond the evidence? I've said this on other occassions, and it seems to frustrate many an atheist. I'm not sure why. Maybe it is because they had certain straw men set in their minds, and my lack of relgious convictions took the wind out of their sails. I've never once tried to convert anyone here to any particular religion, quite simply because I myself don't belong to one.

What information, knowledge or facts about the world is available by specifical religious means that is not available to the nonreligious and is not accounted for without religious or supernatural assumptions.

Well, I am not sure what you mean by religious "means."

You do a lot of defending of something whose meaning you not sure of.

But wil try to touch on some of the things that has convinced me God exists.

OK. Shall I expect evidence?
Let's see.

I do believe a God has been providing "revelation" to humans throughout history.

OK, you believe it. Check.

By revelation I mean knowledge of his/her/its existence and a sense of purpose in the world.

I have never met anyone without a sense of purpose (such a creature would not likely have the motivation to get out of bed)

Religious people tend to cling to religon becase it makes them happier.

Yes, that's what they think. Of course.

And generally speaking, they are happier because of it.

Maybe. This is an empirical question.
But, I have never met an atheist who seemed less happy than the rest of the people in the room.

The problem is that with religion comes the negatives of any organized system of belief; authority, dogma, ritual, social outcasting, loyalty, obligation, blind devotion, degrees of control, etc.

Assign a word to that, and you have what I am opposed to. I call it RELIGION but you may invent a new word if you like.

I think I understand scriptures well enough to accept them for what they are.

What are they? The word of God or the words of men telling stories of a religious nature?

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None of them are infallible.

Are they close?

The people who wrote these books were just men trying to make sense of their own religious experiences in print.

OK, this is certainly true at least in part.

Most of the content is fluffy literature written for purposes that have nothing to do with our times.

Yes. You feel free to pick and choose among God's word? OK. Me too.

I believe the existence of modern religions is the natural result of humans trying to make sense of God's existence in a systematic manner over the course of several thousand years.

god or gods (male, female, or animal) or other supernatural forces that stood in for what they were not in a position to understand. Yes?

It could be that one of them is true and the rest false, but I think it more likely that all of them have truths and all of them also have falsehoods and none of them is the "one" true Church.

They must have some truth since they were invented by intelligent beings with living experience. But that is a given.

The one thing they have in common is the premise that got them started to begin with; a knowledge that something greater than themselves exists and it/he/she is responsible for our present reality.

that's what they assumed. It was a natural notion.

When do we get to the reasons for believing tha you promissed? (Or what exactly you even believe)

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As far as what religion gives us that atheism can't, well that would be coming off as presumptuous so I prefer to just look at history to note what it has given us that atheism didn't. It is easy to say moral systems can exist without religon, but the simple fact is most of our modern moral principles derive from ancient religion. 

How can you tell? Couldn't it be better said that religion codified moral principles which a social species needs anyway to survive and therefor already had in some uninstitutionalized state?
No it, was to gradual to describe that way. Institutions, religions, societies, evolved in tandem feeding off each other.

I've heard some atheist refer to the Greeks who had their own system similar to Utilitarianism, but in Greek culture humans were not equal and it was considered moral for men to sexually molest boys who they would repay with intellectual wisdom.

OK, that's like pointing out that women aren't equal in ancient monotheistic religions (or even now in many ways).

It is hard to see how the universal standard today, that all human life is sacred and created equal, could have been implemented without a religious basis.

It is hard to see? Is it also hard to understand when explained?

There is certainly no reason to think science could have given us this moral principle.

It need not try. Morality comes naturally to us (and inchoate forms of it come natural to some other animals). It is to our biological advantage and much has been written on (the long and necessarily complex) evolutionary path to moral behavior.

In fact science gave us Darwinism and Eugenics which tells us we are not equal. It tells us we're nothing special at all.

Come on! Science gave us Darwinism (good!) and science gave us the ability to manipulate nature and attempt eugenics. Science also gave as various poisons and guns and the internet full of porn and the rants of Vox Day? So what?
Science gave us knowledge.

We're just animals who evolved a different way.

Take out the word "just". Saying it this way is tendentious. Why not say that the Grand Canyon is no different that a creek or an ant no different than your dog?.

Our sense of purpose and sense of morality is just a delusion we created for ourselves.

The line between created and discovered is as blurred here as it is for mathematics (created or discovered?). We can argue about that, but positing the supernatural doesn't help. Does it? Do you have a detailed story to tell us with some real explanitory power?

Even our consciousness is a delusion.

The brain does not directly percieve how it does what it does. How could it. Why would it need to for survival? We necessarily suffer a users illusion. I don't need to understand MSwindows code to use it and I am sure children haven't a clue--they think it's all as it appears on the screen, plain and simple.

Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.

Good advice right out of the Bible (and yes it was intended that way).
Your advice: Starve, go thirsty, and be sad?
Nah, can't be.

You get the point. I find atheism to be a miserable alternative

Alternative to what? Saying that God exists but not knowing what he/she/it is?
Perhaps there is a God --who hates us and there is no afterlife. It can't be merely the assertion of a superbeing can it?

I believe in a God (but do not know what God is). Is that it? The end of the story?

, and my interactions with atheists have done nothing to change that perception.

I think you create situations that lead to your expectations. You attack, insult and bluster. Then your opponent act just as you planned.
You will never know how happy and reasonable most atheists/agnostics are. How we feel or who and how we love and what brings us joy.

Not because I am fearful of a nonexistent hell or look forward to rewards,

Uh huh. Are you under the delusion that you percieve clearly all of your own motives?

but because I cannot ignore my own religious experiences and blow them off as delusion.

Whoa! OK. Now....here we go. What were they? What was the content? What did you bring down from the mountain so to speak?

And then there is also the matter of teleological evidence that no atheist has been able to address.

OK, give the evidence so we can see for ourselves.

How does science explain the common values of the universal constants? Why are they as they are? How did religion know the answers to these questions thousands of years before science figured them out?

Religion didn't know. Religion knew nothing of the constants of nature nothing about irreducible representations of Lie groups, nothing of the renormalization process and nothing of the curvature of spacetime.

The earth turns out to be central to the universe after all, the universe turns out to have been created after all, etc.

No. Where do you get this?

These ancient writers were clearly correct on these issues,

What??? On what? Physics? The constants of nature? The quantum?

so I can only explain it as evidence that they also received revelation from God.

Example of revelation that definitely scooped science.
No, we need more, we need that it happened at a rate better than chance.

There are reasons, even if you don't accept them.

Give two.

I'm reluctant to get into the morality argument that you raised becase it always gets misunderstood, but I think a decent case can be made. Why do humans act altruistically? The act flies in the face of Darwinism.

No it's quite the opposite. In fact, a very sophisticated kind of mathematics called "game theory" models things nicely. I've seen amazing things come right out of the math.

There is simply no evolutionary advantage or benefit to its practice,

Who told you that and how did you avoid reading the myriad papers and books that explain the exact opposite?

Kindness in a cruel world - Nigel Barber

The Evolution of Altruism and the Ordering of Love -
by Stephen J. Pope

and yet we do so because we have a very different sense of morality than the rest of creation.

Not as different as you think.

Where does it come from?

Evolution. (yes yes I know you can't see it, but so what? All the worse for you)

Is it one of the poorly understood laws of the universe like gravity?

What do you know about gravity Dart? Poorly understood by who? You? Hawking?

In short, science tells us what things are, and how they operate, whereas religion expains why they are.

It tells us. But is it true? The religion disgree on what reall matters---the rubber meets the road specifics. Baptism or not? many wives or one? Jesus or Mohamed? Who is the infidel? What are the laws of God? Historical and Active (Judaism) or passive and timeless (Buddhism)

The content you refer to, well that varies in degree with each person, according to his or her religious experiences.

Tell us the content of your religiously aquired nonscientific noncommon sense knowledge unavailable to us godless beings. How is it verified and why are the beliefs warrented?

Again, if you're expecting me to offer a systematic religion according to Kevin, well you're going to be disappointed.

Slipperiness is an unbecoming tactic.

[_ludwigm]

By revelation I mean knowledge of his/her/its existence and a sense of purpose in the world.

It is interesting, isn't it?

So many "revelation", "appearance" happened during our few thousand year of written history and they were not enough to determine which personal pronoun to use in english and other languages which use gender.
Fortunately, this problem doesn't exist in hungarian. Our third person singular personal pronoun is "ő", as we don't use gender.

The religious part of the world doesn't know a lot about god/s). We have one problem less. We don't care the gender (in speaking only, not in thinking about god/s ).

by the way is there something people know about god/s ?)

[_Chap]

On the question of the claimed priority of religion to ethics:

It appears that vampire bats will share blood with other vampire bats that have not been successful in obtaining any. And any unfairness in sharing is noted and punished:

It is somewhat expected, that the individual that was shared with will share in the future. If an individual cheats, or takes blood but does not give any in return, then others will cease sharing. This type of sharing has previously been called reciprocal altruism.

http://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/2009/ ... omics.html

To explain this quite complex proto-ethical social pattern, is it necessary to posit that vampire bats have a religion of some kind? One would think not.

So why do human ethics have to be dependent on religion?

[_EAllusion]

It varies a lot, but Greek thought is probably best associated with virtue ethics, not utilitarianism. Thomas Aquinas was a virtue ethicist as a consequence of his efforts to understand Christian thought in terms of Aristotelian philosophy.

You gotta remember that Greek thought was pretty diverse, too. Epicureanism isn't a far cry from utilitarianism, for example.

That's why I said it varies a lot. I just think virtue ethics is probably what is best associated with the Greeks.

Chap -

Dart is making two distinct arguments.

One is that the metaethical basis for believing in real morality is dependent on belief in a diety. Grounding ethics in God is widely considered to be refuted (by theist and atheist philosophers alike) by the Euthyphro dilemma. Kevin also seems to be quite ignorant of the actual state of metaethics, an essentially secular discipline.

The second is that moral behavior/altrusim could not have evolved, therefore it must've been designed (by a god-like figure). This looks like a moral argument, but is a design argument at its heart and fails for all the reasons the other design arguments do (e.g. http://philosophy.wisc.edu/sober/design ... 202004.pdf). It's also a bad anti-evolution argument, but that's a different topic.

[_Some Schmo]

I find atheism to be a miserable alternative, and my interactions with atheists have done nothing to change that perception.

There are a couple of striking features contained in this nugget:

1) Again, it is worth noting that belief in the divine is largely (if not entirely) about comfort. We see here that truth takes a back seat to happiness, assuming that, were it to be proven there was no god, dart would prefer to still believe in a god because not believing is "a miserable alternative." I'm not sure why he'd bring this up as support for his knowledge of god, given we know that comfort does not equal truth (otherwise, bad/uncomfortable things would never happen).

2) It's interesting that dart seems to let his bias against a certain subset of individuals dictate his belief system. If it were proven to me that, for example, the Christian god did exist, I would have no choice but to believe in him, despite numerous negative interactions I've had with Christians. Part of this is that I value truth over comfort, and part of this is that I am not so clouded in my judgment that I haven't also recognized numerous positive interactions with Christians, and that my interactions with people, whether positive or negative, have no bearing on whether I agree or disagree with certain propositions they may/may not hold.

[_Chap]

Chap -

Dart is making two distinct arguments.

One is that the metaethical basis for believing in real morality is dependent on belief in a diety. Grounding ethics in God is widely considered to be refuted (by theist and atheist philosophers alike) by the Euthyphro dilemma. Kevin also seems to be quite ignorant of the actual state of metaethics, an essentially secular discipline.

The second is that moral behavior/altrusim could not have evolved, therefore it must've been designed (by a god-like figure). This looks like a moral argument, but is a design argument at its heart and fails for all the reasons the other design arguments do (e.g. http://philosophy.wisc.edu/sober/design ... 202004.pdf). It's also a bad anti-evolution argument, but that's a different topic.

Of course it is the second type of argument that my vampire bat example is directed towards.

I do agree that both arguments are faulty.

[_Analytics]

...The moment they insisted the universe was created for us, this fully explained why the laws of the universe are as they are. This is the logical force behind Brandon Carter's dicovery of the Anthropic Principle. The only shared value among the hundreds of fundamental constants throughout the cosmos, is that they are as they are for life to exist on earth. If any one of these were altered in the slightest degree, our universe would not be capable of producing life. More interesting to me is that the universe seems to have known we were coming, because the laws are so mathematiclly tied together that the age of the universe has to be exactly as it is. The weak and strong nuclear forces have to be exactly as they are. The speed of light, the force of gravity, etc.

One part of this that I find a bit funny is the claim that "the age of the universe has to be exactly as it is." As far as I can tell, the age of the universe hasn't always been exactly as it is, and won't be that way in the future, either. But now it is as it is, therefore the universe knew we were coming?

I'm not sure what to make out of the "Anthropic Principle." It seems a bit redundant--if things were different, then they'd be different, but since they aren't there must be a god? Is there any known stochastic process for how the constants came to be as they are? In other words, is there a theory that in the first nth of a second after the bing bang, "a die was rolled", the result of which established the value of constant x? In other words, if there was a strong likelihood that the constants of the universe ought to be something other than what they are, I could see a good point here. But if there isn't a theoretical basis for saying that the laws of the universe could be different, the fact that they are what they are doesn't indicate design.

[_Tarski]

The strong anthropic principle is woolly and almost certainly false.
The weak anthropic principle is nearly a tautology and really works to explain away the need for a creator not the other way around.

This should be read by anyone starting down the anthropic thinking path:

http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vste ... intel.html

Oh but he is an atheist so we can assume his is a stupid biased liar-- right? Ya, but maybe he wouldn't be an atheist if the logic and science led elsewhere (don't put the intellectual cart before the horse)

[_marg]

Dart you say "you have no religious claims aside from God exists". I'm skeptical of that. For one you say God has provided revelations to men that it exists, so that's another religious claim greater than just God exists. You say morality comes from God revealed through religions, so that would mean morality is not innate. So this would mean your God would be communicating morality to certain men via organized religion, again that's a religious claim greater than "God exists". You also say "athesim is a miserable alternative". Well what is it about your belief in God which makes you happier than an atheist? What do you think God is doing for you or going to do for you? An afterlife? if so again that's a religious claim greater than just God exists. A sense of purpose? Well how does a belief of only " God exists" give you any more purpose than an atheist unless you thought God was going to interfere in some way on your behalf.

So I've very skeptical Kevin that your belief is limited to just "God exists".