Tarski,
You do a lot of defending of something whose meaning you not sure of.
You're either playing a game of semantics or just can't keep up with how the word
means is being used. In either case, you can't seriously fault with me for your confusion. Your initial question asked me about the "religious means" to gaining religious knowledge. In this sense, means refers to a
method. I responded by asking you to clarify what you meant by
means. Now you're pretending we were talking about what
religion means, in the sense of what it signifies?
Seriously Tarski, is this the kind of discussion you had in mind?
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.
No not all atheists or even most atheists. This is just my impression from radical atheists on this forum, as well as the New Atheists when I watch them debate. Anyone who has this much time to attack religion online day after day, monhs after month, year after year, can't be a happy camper. Speaking of which, has anyone ever seen Sam Harris' teeth? I was wondering if they were as hideous as Dawkins' teeth, but he never smiles or laughs. The guy looks like a personality-free zombie rehearsing a skit.
Just curious, but how do you explain the overwhelming data suggesting atheists do not even reproduce at a rate to secure their continued existence? What's up with that? Of course I don't expect you to say you and other atheists are unhappy, and I'm not saying all atheists or even most atheists are unhappy.
I'm saying atheism does not offer anything to create happiness in life, whereas religion most certainly does. Whether we're talking about every day people, those suffering in hospitals, those trying to rid themselves of addictive habits, or those suffering in prisons, religion has a well established track record of making good people better for both society and their family. Atheism has no hope of ever doing this. This is an empirical fact that flies in the face of anyone trying to say society wold be better off without religion. When asked to define "better," all they can come up with is something about no belief is justified without empirical evidence.
This reminds me of the atheist, Scott Atran, who in response to the for horsemen of atheism, said they made him embarrassed to be an atheist and a scientist. I'll go ahead and provide the quotation in context:
"I find it fascinating that among the brilliant scientists and philosophers at the conference, there was no convincing evidence presented that they know how to deal with the basic irrationality of human life and society other than to
insist against all reason and evidence that things ought to be rational and evidence based. It makes me embarrassed to be a scientist and atheist. There is no historical evidence whatsoever that scientists have a keener or deeper appreciation than religious people of how to deal with personal or moral problems. Some scientists have some good and helpful insights into human beings' existential problems some of the time, but some good scientists have done more to harm others than most people are remotely capable of. " (
http://www.globalwebpost.com/farooqm/st ... elief.html)
Priceless!
Religious people are unhappy too, but their unhappiness is generally grounded in the unfortunate nature of social organization, along with the mechanisms of misery that exist in the world. Ask a Mormon why he or she is depressed, and you're likely to find out that it has more to do with the social pressure, feelings of inadequacy, failing to meet certain expectations from the group, a loved one died, and absolutely nothing to do with their "unjustified belief" in the three Nephites. The New Atheists delude themselves on this point.
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.
There is no other way to say this, but you choose to call it religion because you have a poor understanding of the sociological fundamentals that prove this is not unique to religion. This is precisely why the evolutionary biologist Michael Ruse said Dawkins' book "makes me embarrassed to be an atheist." I'm going to start another thread to further address this point.
What are they? The word of God or the words of men telling stories of a religious nature?
Clearly the latter. And no, none of them are close to being infallble.
Yes. You feel free to pick and choose among God's word? OK. Me too.
The difference is that you do so in ignorance. The Bible is a joke to you so for you it will always be used as comic material. But there is a rather intricate and sophisticated science devoted to its understanding. If you appreciated this you probably wouldn't come across as ignorant whenever you start telling people what it says and worse of all, what it must mean to them. The worst part about it is that you know you're ignorant about biblical scholarship, but don't seem to care. Because when attacking religion, anything goes.
Which brings me to the point of your questions. I realize now that the purpose of this thread was to provide a diversion from the fact that your New Theists are frauds. This was being demonstrated on the previous thread, and it was tearing you up. So you responded, not by addressing the points against Harris, but by attacking me - attacking my religious beliefs, as if that had anything to do with the fact that Richard Dawkins is a proven liar. But now you're realizing I don't really have many religious beliefs for you to mock, but you're still going to milk this for what you can. So go ahead and make fun of the Bible, demons, the Moonies, the Mormons, the JWs, the Baptists, heaven, hell, the eucharist, etc. I don't care. I know that these are the typical ploys used to rally the sidelines to applause, but ultimately they do nothing to address my position on God.
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?
Yes, this has been humanity's way of addressing our own perceptions of the divine. As humans, naturally we have attributed anthropomorphic or even zoomorphic to what has not been seen, but rather perceived. Who are you to say humans have not perceived God? As a Darwinian you should know that animals have various senses unknown to us. There are probably others we haven't discovered. But for you these experiences can't be true unless it is verified through one of the known senses: sight. Yeah, you're all about appreciating the complexities of reality and perception. LOL!
that's what they assumed. It was a natural notion.
Actually, that is only
your assumption.Your pie in the sky is to be able to prove religion is just a Darwinian phenomenon, but you're unable to demonstrate this. Your New Atheists are tripping over themselves trying to forward wild theories on this thesis. But the result is not science, only blind bigotry and a wreckless usage of peripheral scholarship they clearly do not appreciate or understand.
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?
Here you are again asserting as science, what the New Atheists only wish to be true. It is baseless Darwinistic drivel that is essentially contradicting itself. Why would humans need morals at all to survive if other species clearly don't? Game theory is interesting but it doesn't explain all kinds of moral awareness/activity.
OK, that's like pointing out that women aren't equal in ancient monotheistic religions (or even now in many ways).
All human life is equal and sacred, and we get that from universal morality, which happened to be revealed trhough religion. That doesn't mean there aren't other moral principles unattainable without religion. But we didn't get this from atheistic systems of morality. In fact there is no reason to believe we could have. It seems the only time atheists are interested in developing a code of ethics is when trying to replace one that is religiously based. In these cases their concern seems to be more about religion than ethics.
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.
Morality
does come naturally to us, but not for the reasons you think. And don't even pretend science has proved that evolution explains morality. Yes, much has been written, but little has been established with respect to higher types of morality. Altrusim and morality are not synonymous. And even some evolutionists can admit natural selection doesn't explain why people act altrustically towards complete strangers.
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?
Of course it helps, because we know from science that the laws of the universe are mathematically tied together and they have been, long before mankind came onto the scene. So naturally this requires a mathematician to have existed before us. This was Einstein's position as well. The more the universe is understood, the more it becomes obvious that it was fine-tuned by some kind of higher intelligence. Natural science is incapable of explaining this because it is limited by its very nature. "All the worse for you", eh?
The brain does not directly percieve how it does what it does. How could it. Why would it need to for survival?
I didn't say the brain perceives what it does and how. You seek to explain every aspect of the human being in terms of survival. That's quite pathetic. There is no reason to believe many of the things making us unique, were required for our survival or reproduction. Cearly they weren't since other species without them also survived. It is rather humorous how you guys try to water it all down as a matter of survival, as if that explains everything. Just admit this is not established scientific fact. It is simply the philosophical musings of Darwinian fundamentalists, observing animal activity and trying to explain human activity accordingly.
That isn't science. It is a philosophical paradigm run amuck. Even when our uniqueness is illustrated is astonishing detail, you only look at these as opportunities to go find out how the animal kingdom gave us these traits. That's not science. That's hunting for conclusion-driven evidence.
Dawkins tells us that our genes manipulate us and make us do certain things. OK, so the scientific method would be to test it. So it gets tested, and it turns out that our genes don't manipulate us to do things according to survival and reproduction. So Dawkins just responds by saying, well, that's because we have evolved into beings that can rebel against our genes! LOL!
So when there are examples that seem to fit, it is explained by our manipulating, "selfish" genes (Which - the joke's on us! - aren't even selfish to begin with). When the examples don't go along with his theory, well, that's OK too because we were acting rebelliously during those instances! How does he know all this crapola? What scientific experiment verified these things? Where is the science that demonstrates this? It doesn't exist. He's just asserting it as science, expects a blind followng to just go along with it while he makes up philosophical putty to fill in the holes.
So we'll just keep calling it science even though it is obviously a self-contradicting philosophy that decided to change the rules of science when the evidence didn't turn out to be what was expected. Imagine if the ID nuts were allowed to employ this logic.
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.
Is there a point here? I sense a straw man on the horizon.
Alternative to what? Saying that God exists but not knowing what he/she/it is?
Oh, that gambit again? And yet, another page from Dawkins, which you've never read of course (wink wink, nod nod). This is called following the evidence where it leads. One does not have to know the details of a designer to know a designer exists. This argument only works if I had said, "I saw a painter but I don't know what he looks like." Instead, I am saying, "I see the painting but I don't know what the painter looks like."
I swear, if photos from space showed us an image the size of texas in the sands of Mars that said, "GOD WAS HERE," you'd be telling us that we cannot conclude anything from this since there is no scientific theory to explain what exactly God is. LOL. You really would, wouldn't you?
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?
At this point, yes. And yes, for all I know God could hate us and there might not be an afterlife. But I doubt it. The difference between us is that my mind is open to other possibilities. Yours is safely put away in a lead box of materialism, welded shut on all sides.
I believe in a God (but do not know what God is). Is that it? The end of the story?
What's wrong with that? Oh I know what's wrong with it; it doesn't give you much to ridicule. But maybe you just need to try harder. I have faith in you Tarski.
Uh huh. Are you under the delusion that you percieve clearly all of your own motives?
Do you not even realize how pompous you sound? I just told you that I don't even believe in hell, and you respond by telling me I am just deluded and cannot perceive the fact that I really do belive it. Why? Probably because it has become a popular claim among atheists that hell's existence "explains" why people believe in God. They're just too damned scared not to! (grin -pun intended).
For you it is important that I believe things I don't, otherwise it is a waste of your time because you're only here to tear up straw and ridicule. Again, I suspected this was all malarky. You did not come to this discussion in good faith, nor were you genuinely interested in knowing where I am coming from. You were only interested in opening me up so you could start mocking away at every little thing I said. Does it make you feel good? Chap, are you taking notes?
Whoa! OK. Now....here we go. What were they? What was the content? What did you bring down from the mountain so to speak?
What's the point Tarski? I gave you the benefit of the doubt when chap damn near convinced me that I was the one acting inappropriately and less than cordial in the previous thread. But your contempt and condescension is overt thus far, so we both know that no matter what I tell you, you're just going to tell me I was deluded the way you used to be when you were on acid. This is what you said before about a year ago when we were talking about such things. Your own hallucinations were all the evidence you needed to excuse legitimate beliefs of others. Everyone else must be hallucinating as well. So why pretend you're genuinely interested in why I believe what I believe? It doesn't matter I guess. Maybe there are other readers who are genuinely interested, so excuse me while I drop my pearls...
When I came to the knowledge of the fined-tuned universe, that for me was a religious experience. When I began to understand consciousness and realize it could not be a product of the natural processes of a mechanistic, material world, that for me was a religous experience.
As far as evidence for the supernatural, I have personal family related experiences that pretty much solidify that for me as fact. Extra sensory perception is something I have some experience with. My grandmother experiences it every few years or so, but the instances are so powerful, the superntural realm is the only explanation. I believe that as humans evolve, these perceptions will become gradually stronger, to the point that we will be able to know God clearly. It could be a few hundred or even a thousand years. But I don't think coincidence adequately explains these things.
I have to provide specifics? Well, my grandmother knew precisely when her oldest son died, when her daughter was pregnant, when my father had a boating accident, and when a sink hole opened up, nearly causing her death. If these were just stories passed down from grandpa, I'd be skeptical to the point of rejection. But I was present during some of these instances. What materialistic argument explains this? You don't have one, so at this point it is probably best if you just accuse me of lying.
OK, give the evidence so we can see for ourselves.
I have, on numerous occassions. The fine-tuned universe. I've heard the counter-arguments,
a la Dawkins, Stenger, Harris and I find them unpersuasive, even ridiculous. Dawkins operates from the premise that Darwinism applies to the universe. If God exists, he must be extremely complex, and Darwinism tells us that living entities start simple. So if God started it all, he can't be simple. Since theists agree God cannot be simple, then he cannot exist. But again, this reasoning is circular since is begins with the premise it sets to prove. Even if Darwinism does apply to the universe, if God exists at all he would necessarily exist outside the universe.
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.
You're right, and yet it somehow knew the world has a beginning. It knew time has a beginning. Pretty wild stuff considering religion isn't doesn't formulate scientific facts about our reality. It was making a religious claim that happened to overlap into science. When science finally came around to discovering these two truths, atheistic scientists fought tooth and nail to prove otherwise. Why? Because they knew of its religious implications. They knew these theories, if proved true, would constitute very powerful arguments for God. And they do, as even Stephen Hawking implied. Robert Jastrow provides several examples of the disturbia in academia when the Big Bang was discovered. He said that their reasons were that they feared the religous implications. So what's all this nonsense about how science hasn't found God and therefore God must be hiding? This is what Dawkins said. Well, maybe God isn't hiding and science is intentionally trying to avoid him?This is certainly what it seems like. Lewontin said precisely this, and Jastrow's "God and the Astronomers" pretty much settled it.
But you're responding by saying religion didn't know about other things. So? This is not a valid counter-argument, because religion isn't supposed to do these things. I know you came here hoping to show how science has managed to discover truths without religion, but the fact is religion has also managed to discover truths without science. Those ancient, animal sacrificing, fortune telling, God worshippers knew things scientists had believed to be false for more than a thousand years.
The "universe always existed" was the assumption in science. Big Bang cosmology upset many an atheist, that's for sure. Now they are trying to rely on Darwinism to save them, by applying it from everything from sociology to home economics. But for me the most impressive correlation between science and religion is that modern science was born in Christian civilizaton. The most important scientists over the past few centuries have been overwhelmingly devout Christian. Funny how Harris doesn't apply his causation arguments here. Without Christianity, modern science would not be what it is, and scientists would still be arguing that the universe always existed.
How does that stick in your craw?
No. Where do you get this?
You haven't been paying attention. This was Brandon Carter's greatest contribution. I typed out an entire chapter from Patrick Glynn's book, "God the Evidence" a while back. This post will probably be too long as it is, so I will just provide the link: (
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=7243&p=185145&hilit=glynn#p185145)
What??? On what? Physics? The constants of nature? The quantum?
No of course not, and that is not what I said. But you knew this. What makes their knowledge all the more astounding is that they were not doing science. They had no access to our science, and yet they got some things right when there would be no reason to expect them to. It just came to them. They weren't performing experiments. They were simply relying on revealed knowledge. Naturally we'd expect them to make stupid coments like, "people live on the sun," but we'd never expect ancient theists to know time had a beginning or that the universe had a begining, or that vegetations preexisted humanity - especially given the religious dictum that man is the most important of creations. If God were going to create something in his image, you'd think he's do that first.
Example of revelation that definitely scooped science.
Scooped? It predated modern science is what I said. I'm not saying it proves anything, I just find it intriguing.
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 a difference between morality and altruism, but altruism towards strangers is not supported by natural selection. So why do we do it? Last year I was talkng about a TIME article about where morality came from. It discussed this at length, and said science thinks it cn explain lower forms, but higher forms of morality do not occur without some kind of cultural indoctrination (i.e. donations to the starving in Africa). Religion can and does provide this, atheism has not and cannot.
From what I understand Kin selection deals with lower kinds of altruistic behavior towards relatives, and reciprocal selection is very speculative and limited, but humans take it to another level in ways that evolution cannot explain. For instance, why would someone jump in freezing lake to save a complete stranger from drowning? In all liklihood, he just killed himself. So where is the advantage to him? Where is the expectation of reciprocation? He wasn't acting on instinct. He used his brain, is mind, thought about those suffering in the lake, and risked his life to try saving theirs. I'm remembering an incident back in the early 90's when a plane went down in the Hudson bay in the dead of winter. The guy lived, but suffered from a severe case of hypothermia. Now if animals did something like this, we can explain it as instinct because we can pretty much be rest assured that an animal is not performing cost-benefit analyses in its head. It doesn't know the risks of jumping into a freezing lake. A human however, does precisely that and relies on a sense of morality in making the decision.
With respect to kin selecton, how do we know it is because of kin and not social attachment? This was the point I was making to Moniker a while back. She kept telling me "science" tells us the reason we have sex is because or genes are trying to make it to the next generation. Yeah, these tens of millions of tiny genes are conspiring to overide the machine that houses them! What scientific experiment verified this? Sexual pleasure means nothing apparently, and the ubiquitous usage of birth control means nothing either. Genes want this because Dawkins says so.
I was also informed that when a mother tries to save her child, it is based on a desire to see her genes passed on. Outrageous nonsense. Yeah, like she couldn't have another child to resolve that issue. And I guess we're going to go ahead and redefine a mother's "love" by reducing it to nothing more genetic determinaton. There are many examples of derelict fathers who want nothing to do with their biological children and don't look after their safety to make sure their genes get passed on. There is so much sociological data that flies in the face of the kin selection theory among humans, but then, when the data contradicts, they try to account for these incongruities with more theory. That's crapola science.
I can understand observing bees and ants and see how they appear to be sacrificing for the community, but like I said this is expected with insects and animals. My point is that science does not demonstrate that human morality must be an extension of this, simply because we're all related. Individual inscets taking a hit for the team is hardly the same thing an choosing right over wrong,
because it is right. Morals cannot be determined without some kind of moral standard to work from, and animals don't have moral standards. A dog might save a little girl from a snake bite, but is the dog thinking hey, it would be the right thing to do becuse she is just a child? Of course not. Maybe the dog is just hungry? Maybe protecting its owner is just something dogs do? The female gorilla that protected the child who fell into the pit back in the 90s. Was that morality too, or was it just looking for a new pet? How do we know that if given another hour, it wouldn't be trampling on the baby and eating its face?
Evolution. (yes yes I know you can't see it, but so what? All the worse for you)
Saying it comes from evolution still doesn't explain where morality comes from. This is the same silly logic that says evolution explains life. No, it only explains how life evolved, it explains the path life took. It doesn't explain where the path started, why life exists at all, nor does it explain why morality exists.
What do you know about gravity Dart? Poorly understood by who? You? Hawking?
I know atoms have a tendency to attract one another, but I don't know why. And neither do you. Nobody knows why gravity exists at all. Its only reason seems to be that it is necessary to be what it is, so life on earth can exist.
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
Again, I belong to none of these religions. All the worse for you.
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?
My reasons for believing in the supernatural are based on experience. Are they verified? How could they be? It was just dumb luck that I happened to be in the presence of my grandmother when she jumped out of bed and ran to the telephone to call my Dad who she had not spoken to in weeks. She didn't know the specifics of what was wrong, but she knew something. She called him at 7:12pm. But he wasn't home. He was on a boat off the coast of Savannah. At 8pm his boat hit a sand bar and he nearly died after suffering internal and external injuries. I would have said coincidence if it were not for the fact that this is a repeated occurance.
How a I supposed to explain this? The only way I can. There is a supernatural realm that occasionally feeds knowlege in a muddled way, to certain individuals. It is not predictable, therefore it is untestable. You just have to be there when it happens, kinda like Haley's comet I suppose. Personally I believe it is related to genetics because it seems to exist only on my father's side. But then how do genes transfer the ability to have awareness of events thousands of miles away and many minutes into the future? It seems idiotic to even begin thinking like this, but this is the only way materialists know how to think. They begin with this assumption, and spend the rest of their time fighting to keep it.
Slipperiness is an unbecoming tactic.
I agree. So why don't you deal with the devastating evidence against the integrity of your New Atheists and stop pretending to be genuinely interested in my personal beliefs. I don't think you're fooling anyone anymore. For instance, you asked me to provide a citation proving Dawkins lied about Einstein, while pumping out the usual decontexualized citations found on the atheist web. Well, I just provided, and you ignored it. But ridicule comes before discussion. Bluster before concession. Arrogance before humility. You do, after all, have your priorities.
I want to close with a response to the popular atheistc claim that God "explains nothing" because God would need explaining. The problem of "where did God come from?"
This is a problem that exists with or without God. For example, something scientists have been trying to come up with is the unified theory, the "theory of everything." Stephen Hawking states the problem well enough:
"Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations.
What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?... Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Or does it need a creator, and, if so, does he have any other effect on the universe? And who created him?"
So it doesn't matter if science manages to finally offer scientific explanations for everything. The problem will always be, what explains the explanation? Whatever materialistic explanation is offered, none of these can disprove God exists because these explanations would always need explaining. What breathed fire into it all?
“All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it...Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality." - Albert Einstein