What does this post contribute to the thread?
Why do so many theists think they can back up their faith?
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What does this post contribute to the thread?
crazy monkey
Banned
generalization.
Aizu_Itsuko
Member
Or we can try to have a productive conversation.
It may not solve the current economical crysis but something good could come out of it.
Aizu_Itsuko
Member
But it's not just a handful; there has been some pretty big pressure to stop or slow down certain researchs.
Keep in mind I'm not talking about any specific religion and I find other non-religious believes can be quite damaging too even if they are not as influential.
I'm also not condemning all religious people or religion, just the irrationality of going against medical research that could help human beings be healthier, no matter the source.
Machspeed007
Member
Interesting how something that doesn't exists can have serious consequences in real life.
cutmeamango
Banned
Honestly, capitalist fundings hurt 'science' more than religious institutions.
What exactly do you mean by this?
Right... which is why those non-capitalist or theocratic societies are churning out those great innovations and advances that put everyone else to shame.
I think you're conflating pantheists with atheists. Understandable, since the belief systems in practical terms are similar... I personally like to think of pantheists as poetic-atheists, because when you cut through the guff, it amounts to much the same thing (except the silly ones that imbue the universe with anthropomorphic intent - that's just a more hippy view of theism)
They're also typically not as hard edged skeptical as a proper hard edged skeptical (agnostic) atheist, but some just like to view the universe and life with a sense of romance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheism
But I don't get where you're coming from with the "I don't believe in nature" line? Does it actually relate to my post, or did you just riff off my post to make some completely tangential point?
Oh, the idea of god well and truly exists. There's no disputing that.
But it's completely unnecessary for god to exist for the idea of god to hold sway.
cutmeamango
Banned
Oh my
As in scientific fund companies abort (or don't even begin to fund) more researches than religious institutions like the official catholic institution and it's variants manage to halt.
If I was saying what you read, it would go like this
"Capitalism hurts science more than theocracy
which is a whole different beast by the way
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Edit: What a great post samus i am.
Your statement is only true solely on the basis that every form and method of research is based on cost-benefit allocation of capital resources and that religious institutions can only claim to be offended by things they comprehend to oppose their worldview.
This makes the claim pointless. Abandoning research for capital reasons is not the same as abandoning research solely because it offends the worldviews of religious adherents. One has a rational basis, the other, often rooted in nonsense, does not.
Well it's a valid argument in the form of a witty picture. Problem is, if you summarize the Christian dogma like this (which I don't think is inaccurate if you go past the snarky tone) it's going to sound ridiculous. Might say something about it.
cutmeamango
Banned
Nah, my statement was quite simple: which one 'hurts' science more.
Doesn't matter if one is more ignorant than the other, since that doesn't account for the amount of 'hurt'.
Not all christian sects swear by trinitarism.
Yeah yeah I know, but that's still the majority.
Still if you replace "kill myself" with "kill my only beloved son" it doesn't really make it a lot less ridiculous and that would apply to pretty much all sects.
I don't quite follow this reasoning. It is generally considered within religion that god is infinite, so why would he be subject to finite laws? you seem to be defining existence based on how we perceive reality.
What is reality exactly? It is a strange question where there is no definitive answer. We cannot fully know what reality is because we cannot look at it outside of our own perception. Our perception of reality is flawed because it is limited by the way our brain perceives it.
What is reality to a bat? A bat navigates its world by use of sonar. The way it perceives reality is vastly different to the way we perceive reality. A brick wall may seem solid to us, but at the microscopic level it actually is not.
We see the world around us based on the way our eyes capture that information and our brain interprets it. Light reflecting off objects hits our retina and that information is then converted into electrical signals and passed on to the brain. The brain then interprets what ever it is you see. How we see that object is not necessarily how other creatures see that object. It is based purely on the tools we have at our disposal. If someone is colour blind they cannot distinguish between certain colours. That person's perception of colour is different to other people's perception of colour.
What if god is infinite consciousness? In this sense the finite universe is a mental construct. It exists within the mind of god.
cooljeanius
Member
Wow, Shanshan got banned for this? Seemed like a reasonable post to me...This forum, and the world, would be a much nicer place if people just kept their nose out of other people's religions and stopped being so damn judgemental, on all sides. I'm so sick of hearing all this complaining and shitting up the forum with snarky comments. In the past there has been some interesting discussion but often it just devolves into pointless bitterness, usually to the tune of "Christians are dumb and I'm smart".
I certainly don't. Can't you just accept that some people see the world differently and move on?
As much as I enjoy reading Shanshan's posts, it was already pointed out that you can't go into a thread and simply say "Who cares about this topic, I don't care, I don't care so much that I am coming into the topic and posting about how much I don't care about this topic". This goes for any thread on gaf.
I did wonder about that when I noticed shanshan got banned in the Ladygaf thread. I can see how it could be potentially inflammatory, but at the same time, I kind of think the same way she does. For that reason I sympathise with her. I don't think there was any bad intention there.
It does make me wonder how easy it could be to get yourself banned completely unintentionally, just because you felt like saying your mind. I probably wouldn't have expressed it the same way she did though. Mainly because I can predict the sort of response it might get.
Monocle
Member
Are you suggesting that the idea of god doesn't exist and doesn't have actual consequences in terms of people's thinking and behavior? What? That's self-evidently untrue. I'm not sure if you honestly misinterpreted my statement or if you're feigning incomprehension, but come on. This stuff is so basic it hardly merits critical attention.
I'd say it's pretty safe to asume the majority are not in favor, otherwise how would one reconcile the fact that it is not legal, yet we are in a democracy where supposedly the majority thinks it should be legal. Politicians build a giant portion of their campaigns on guaranteeing that they will continue denying the right to marriage to gay couples - and they want to appeal to the broadest demographic possible so that they can be elected.
What benefit is it for governments to be surpressing gay marriage exactly? Regardless, even if religion was being manipulated to achieve such aim, that still makes it a "religious problem". AND it IS being resisted by religious people for religious reasons anyway.
Are you pro gay marriage? If not, on what grounds?
You don't seem to have addressed the concept of religiously motivated homophobia, hate speech, and even violence either. These things are real, and they impact people, psychologically, physically, and sometimes fatally http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/28/world/africa/28uganda.html
What does that even mean?
That link demonstrates that religiously motivated attempts to undermine science is an ongoing issue. It shouldn't even have to be challenged, over and over again. It wastes people's time.
Here is an example of what "one guy" can actually do http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2009/11/20/ray-comforts-anti-darwinian-travesty/ There are now thousands of copies of this misleading book out there now, all distributed in a perfectly legal way.
I do all my charity work with children and make related donations to children's charities. I do what I can, and I can't be everywhere, sorry.
But rather than me go about fixing African problems, how about the Catholic Church just doesn't make that particular issue worse by misleading people in the first place.
AgentP
Thinks mods influence posters politics. Promoted to QAnon Editor.
Faith is believing in something without evidence, how does that explain why they try to rationalize it? They should just say "I believe" nothing more.
TheExplodingHead
Banned
I have a very strong dislike for weak atheists, i.e. those who do not state strongly that Gods do not exist, and this sounds like that. One of things I find is that there's a lot of opposition to the argument that Gods do not exist, a lot of people in regards to strong atheism feel extremely uncomfortable asserting that Gods do not exist (in real life). Or to be more precise they feel extremely uncomfortable telling Christians or Muslims that the Christian/Muslim God does not exist. Rather than confront faithful believers with the hollow falsehood of their beliefs, they redefine within their own minds the concept of God as a potential form of matter or energy that hasn't been discovered yet or that which could exist in an alternate universe or something like that. This allows them to continue breaking bread or at least avoiding open conflict with people who cling to superstitious beliefs.
However it could be argued that this is a fairly cowardly position. Either a criteria for determining truth exists, or it does not. If such a criteria exists it must be objective and based on the evidence of the senses and reason, which precludes the existence of any form of religious deities. If no such criteria for truth exists, then both everything and nothing is true and agnosticism, atheism, theism, superstition and the steadfast belief that brooms can fly and sing songs are all equally valid.
If an objective criteria for truth exists than it cannot be logically applied according to whim, expediency of the moment or only in situations where it feels emotionally comfortable. If you wish to take a stand for rationality and truth, I certainly sympathize with the social difficulties that arise from that. If however you want to take a stand for rationality and truth, but sit down whenever anyone gets upset, then in my opinion there's very little point in getting up to begin with.
DeathIsTheEnd
Member
As I presume you are a strong atheist, would you care to lay out your arguments as to how you reached the conclusion there are no gods?
Lionheart1337
Member
- Is Big Foot real
- No hard evidence
- I`ll live then with the assumption that he isn't
- Weaken or strengthen stance as evidence or lack of evidence presents itself
How does a world filled with order and reason derive from complete nonreason and nonintelligence? The fact that the universe can even be studied indicates there are laws and there is a sense of order and that there are repeated patterns that exist all throughout. How did this come from complete randomness?
Lionheart1337
Member
God. Now stop asking fucking questions.
DeathIsTheEnd
Member
A god could simply be a creator. To say that does not exist is something we can not do.
We do not know, but just because we do not know something does not mean positing God as the answer is correct or even helpful.
Lionheart1337
Member
But we can. Doesn't mean it's right or even reasonable. What most people do is live with the assumption that he does not exist, be it a strong assumption or a weak one. I believe in god as much as I believe in Narnia. I think both are unlikely to a point that the possibility that they might exist is hardly if at all worth thinking about. This is the basic logic we apply to the question of existence, why is god exempt from the criteria?
If there is a creator, and it is a creator that interferes in human affairs, these interferences would be measurable. If it does not interfere, who cares if it exists or not, since there is no way to measure it, and we do not know what its intentions are since there are no measurements, it seems futile to randomly guess.
Then there is Occam's razor - We know there is a Universe, we perceive it. To suppose that the existence of the Universe is predicated on the existence of a creator, we can also make the supposition that the creator needs a creator, and that creator a creator, ad infinitum. It seems much more reasonable, to base our understandings of the universe on things which we do know.
DeathIsTheEnd
Member
I also live my life as though gods do not exist. Gods are not exempt from the criteria and for certain definitions of gods I am an a strong/positive atheist over their existence, but when we move into the realm of timeless omnipotent beings things get much more complex and we can not currently state as a fact they do not exist.
I completely agree with all your points. You'll find there is at least one argument that some might use against your first point which is that that gods could choose to interact in the universe with a manner identical to that of how things normally work. That would of course mean that god is a bit of an arse and it would be impossible to know whether they do anything or not.
Lionheart1337
Member
So you're basically saying that a deist god is a lot more likely than an intervening god?
DeathIsTheEnd
Member
That's an inadvertent part of my point. I don't know enough about probability or how one would even evaluate something like that, but to my somewhat ignorant mind it certainly seems more likely a deistic god would exist than for example God of the three main monotheistic religions.
Lionheart1337
Member
I don't think it's unreasonable to say that a deistic god is more likely than one who's an asshole.
I do, however, think that in terms of probability, the disparity isn't very discernible at all.
It could be subject to relativity as well, maybe a deist god is twice as likely as an Abrahamic one. .2% isn't that bad.
There are many questions that I get from your post. Why do you suppose that it was complete randomness all of this emerged from? What is complete randomness? What does intelligence even have to do with this, being an emergent product of natural selection?
Most importantly, isn't this an overtly human way to look at these things? Do we have any reason to believe that what we perceive as 'order' isn't just some way for our brain to process data as opposed to a wonder of the universe?
But if you use God to explain order in the universe, don't you have to use something else to explain order in God?
We can also make the supposition that whatever caused the universe to come into being also needed a cause, which in turn needed a cause, ad infinitum. It doesn't really solve the problem by removing god out of the equation. You still have the problem, if there was truly and absolutely nothing, how then can the universe come into being?
As an argument for why god doesn't exist, it simply won't do. In most religions god is seen as infinite. There is no before and after, beginning and end, he simply is. He cannot be added to or subtracted from as there can be nothing outside of him. As there would be no substance, matter, or energy outside of god in which the universe was created or made out of, then perhaps there is another possibility. The universe was created by infinite mind. Not like how we create in our mind of course, as our minds are finite.
As a model for how the universe came into being, can it really be proven false? Is it any less likely than any other explanation?
I would state strongly that "god does not exist," but I have to add a caveat. I believe "god" as a concept can manifest itself differently to different people. It's something that you individually find to place importance on. I don't believe in a creator or religion, but I still consider myself spiritual. I don't necessarily believe in a "soul," but until more is discovered about what sets the mind of a person above general chemical reactions in the brain, I will hold a belief in the human spirit.
The most important thing to me though is to question things and rule my own life. I am in charge of my own successes and mistakes. With that mindset, there is no place for God.
The most important thing to me though is to question things and rule my own life. I am in charge of my own successes and mistakes. With that mindset, there is no place for God.
Well, god is a vague term. There are many ways you could define a god.
The argument of causality is philosophically outdated and also invalidated by modern physics. The gist of it is that causality breaks down when there's no time, and time as we know it started existing with the big bang.
You can define anything you want. Most religions define God as infinite and eternal, okay. That doesn't mean that definition takes preference over my definition of the infinite and eternal stapler that caused the Big Bang. It's all pointless as long as there's nothing indicating any preference. Besides, if things can be eternal and infinite, why can't the Universe itself be that, so that we don't need a God. Occam's Razor gives that theory a lot more precedence.
Also, what does infinite mind mean? It sounds fancy, but apart the fact that I can't attribute it any evidence I can't attribute it any meaning either. There's no reason to think that a thing causing the Big Bang had to have any 'mind' (infinite or not) in any respect. That's just projecting human qualities on it for no reason.
No explanation of the universe can be proven false at this point. It is a less preferable explanation at this point because of both Occam's razor, however. Furthermore there was more going on at the beginning of time than simply stuff that started happening - there was also inflation, which is likely a consequence of the conditions of the creation event itself. That part is often simply ignored by deist creation models.
Besides, I wouldn't call 'God did it' a model. It's not a description of a process like physics is, it's just pointing the responsibility of it to some other mystery. Although that doesn't mean anything for the truth of it, I find that not very satisfactory.
Lionheart1337
Member
Very little is vague about it. When people take the concept and definition of god and run off and do their own thing with it, they're doing just that, ignoring the fundamental ideas of the term. I might call it disingenuous. Why even call something god if it's some personal definition? It's pretty misleading and creates this pesky conundrum of ideas. As for spirits, I don't see anything wrong with the idea so long as it's based in reality (it often is), not thought of as some white cloudy mass that floats to heaven when you die.
cutmeamango
Banned
Are you mixing God (capitalized for abrahamic purposes hehe) with god?
ThoseDeafMutes
Member
How can intelligence and reason exist without brains to arise from or an ordered, lawful universe to reside inside of? More to the point, how can something with no rules governing its behavior (abstract, extra-universal "intelligences") express any behavior at all? If they do exist, why do they exist, and where did they come from?
Yeah. You're attempting to answer an imaginary question I never asked. My point was mainly about why it is not a good argument. I will still respond to your post though.
Okay you seem to be talking about the singularity here where all known laws of physics break down. I'm not really sure what point you're making. It breaks down because physics cannot deal with infinity. In a finite universe where space and time exist, there is always change. In nature everything is growing and dying; there is creation and destruction; everything is changing and evolving. There is constant action and reaction.
The problem with causality is, it is very hard to avoid dealing with infinity. If there was nothing before the big bang, then the reality of nothing is beginningless and without time. One can assume then that it is not subject to change. Change requires space and time. To state there is change, is to state that there can be an end to infinity. That infinity has limits.
Because out of what does the infinite universe create the finite one? I will get to that answer in a minute.
And this is the answer.
Well, It would be beyond comprehension so I can't give it attributes. The reasoning behind it is based on the nature of infinity itself. If god exists, and is therefore infinite, then nothing can exist outside of him. There cannot exist an outside agent (matter, energy, etc) as then god would not be absolute. In the same way, you can't say he created the universe with a part of himself because you cannot subtract or divide from him. There is another way we know of in which we create: we create mentally.
Okay you seem to be talking about the singularity here where all known laws of physics break down. I'm not really sure what point you're making. It breaks down because physics cannot deal with infinity. In a finite universe where space and time exist, there is always change. In nature everything is growing and dying; there is creation and destruction; everything is changing and evolving. There is constant action and reaction.
The problem with causality is, it is very hard to avoid dealing with infinity. If there was nothing before the big bang, then the reality of nothing is beginningless and without time. One can assume then that it is not subject to change. Change requires space and time. To state there is change, is to state that there can be an end to infinity. That infinity has limits.
Because out of what does the infinite universe create the finite one? I will get to that answer in a minute.
And this is the answer.
Well, It would be beyond comprehension so I can't give it attributes. The reasoning behind it is based on the nature of infinity itself. If god exists, and is therefore infinite, then nothing can exist outside of him. There cannot exist an outside agent (matter, energy, etc) as then god would not be absolute. In the same way, you can't say he created the universe with a part of himself because you cannot subtract or divide from him. There is another way we know of in which we create: we create mentally.
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