Atheism revisited

[IheartTesla]

[quote name='The Anti-Targ' post='1656562' date='Jan 21 2009, 05.37']Does it not behove the atheist to examine this essential uncertainty, which has been openly proclaimed by it's self-appointed spokes-people? Doesn't embracing something as truth in the absence of absolute, objective certainty essentially meet the definition of faith? Odd then that so many of the adherents of the atheist faith should deride the term with such scorn when applying it to religion. Hypocrisy I name thee atheism.[/quote]

Oh yes, I examined this essential uncertainity. It was because the British government wouldnt allow the ads to be placed unless the certainity in them was removed. I think this was mentioned in the [b]FIRST[/b] post of the previous thread and the links therein.

It was because YOUR government tried to impose their own ideals on those brave atheist souls. Ergo: no hypocrisy, only more government discrimination.

In other news, evolutionary theory works best for all the data we have at our disposal.

[Deluge]

Oh, yes, because after the clusterfuck that was the Prop 8 thread, this is exactly what we need.

[IheartTesla]

Lets all sit in a circle and sing Kumbaya then.

If you dont like this thread then you can sit out. I still want to play!

[Multaniette]

whey...wait, what's this all about?

[MinDonner]

*holds nose, jumps back in*

I was in the middle of composing this when the last thread got locked. I didn't want to start a whole new topic just to continue the argument, but seeing as cyrano already did the honours, well.........


(in response to the last post of the old thread)
Gosh! This almost got a *headdesk* from me, but I find that I have not much else to do this morning, so will nobly take a closer look at your post.

[quote name='The Anti-Targ' post='1656562' date='Jan 21 2009, 10.37']Lets see, a probability of something being true means something less than 1 (certainty) which in this case is as yet unquantified. This means the probability of the converse being true is an similarly unquantified probability greater than 0. Therefore Atheism.org is affirming there is a non-zero, unquantified probability that God exists.[/quote]

"Unquantified" is probably the key word here. Yes, it is currently impossible to prove the existence or non-existence of God; however, this does not make the probabilities equal. The complete lack of evidence would suggest that the probability of a God existing is very, very much smaller than the reverse. Probabilities are not that hard to understand if you use more concrete examples; for example, there is a non-zero chance of being struck by a meteorite, and even plenty of evidence to support the existence of meteorite strikes, but I would suggest that most people agree that you are rather less likely to be struck by one than to die of natural causes, and that the danger is so vanishingly small as to be irrelevant.

As a side note, what is this "Atheism.org" of which you speak?

[quote name='The Anti-Targ' post='1656562' date='Jan 21 2009, 10.37']They have just introduced uncertainty into the atheist concept,[/quote]

Who's "they"? Our atheist leaders, whose word we must obey? And what's with this "just introduced"? An jokey advert goes onto a bus and suddenly its the "new" mission statement of all atheists? I think you'll find that an element of uncertainty has been quite common throughout the history of atheism, mostly with variations on the "vanishingly small probability" theme.


[quote name='The Anti-Targ' post='1656562' date='Jan 21 2009, 10.37']yet they suggest one should embrace atheism with unwavering certitude ("stop worrying";[/quote]

Min: Hey, stop worrying about the chances of meterorite strikes!
You: But meteorites kill about 2 people every century! You can't be certain I won't be struck!
Min: I'm pretty damn certain, now put that steel-reinforced umbrella down before you do yourself an injury.


[quote name='The Anti-Targ' post='1656562' date='Jan 21 2009, 10.37']of course I'd suggest theists are not particularly worried: while many of those who reject the notion of God are wondering if humanity will survive the next 100 years or so, I have it on good authority that our species will continue at least another 500,000 years.[/quote]

Ah, but you personally won't survive for 500,000 years. Probably. :P. What if you go to Hell? What if you're wrong about the 500,000 years because of a misprint in 1352? What if God decides to go all Sodom and Gomorrah on your town before that?

Seriously, I'm glad that you're not worried, but the same is certainly not true for all religious people, many of whom are terrified of failing one of their faith's arbitraty tenets. Ask any teenage boy who's been told that wanking is a terrible sin.


[quote name='The Anti-Targ' post='1656562' date='Jan 21 2009, 10.37']This means we'll probably (oops uncertainty again) last a heck of a lot longer than that, and we are certain to get through our current collective tribulations to achieve a sustainable and stable civilisation. Though I freely acknowledge that the authority from which I derive this assurance requires an article of faith).[/quote]

Well, quite.

[quote name='The Anti-Targ' post='1656562' date='Jan 21 2009, 10.37']Does it not behove the atheist to examine this essential uncertainty, which has been openly proclaimed by it's self-appointed spokes-people?[/quote]

Again, no atheist organisation, no spokespeople. The bus campaign was just organised by a comedy writer and journalist, and supported in much the same way that thousands of people put "Jedi" as their religion on the 2000 census. Re the uncertainty, we've examined it, thanks.


[quote name='The Anti-Targ' post='1656562' date='Jan 21 2009, 10.37']Doesn't [b]embracing something as truth in the absence of absolute, objective certainty [/b]essentially meet the definition of faith? Odd then that so many of the adherents of the atheist faith should deride the term with such scorn when applying it to religion. Hypocrisy I name thee atheism.[/quote]

So wait, are you still complaining about the use of "probably"?

Oh yes. The twisting of the word "faith" to mean anything you want it to mean. If you downgrade the word to such a level that even examining the highly skewed balance of probabilities becomes "belief", then what's the point in using it at all? Can we release all the prisoners because their sentencing was based on "faith", not facts? After all, we don't KNOW that no two people have the same fingerprints, we haven't examined them all yet.

Absolute, objective certainty is almost impossible to come by. The best we can do is to make educated judgment based on the facts at hand. This is somewhat different from making an uneducated judgment based on some ancient book which totally contradicts the facts at hand. Does this help you at all?

[VarysTheSpider]

Last night I finished watching [b]The Genius of Charles Darwin[/b], a three or four-part series presented by Richard Dawkins. For the first couple of episodes I was a little irritated with Dawkins as he kept taking pot-shots at religion when he was talking about evolution, but in the final episode it kind of came together, and I was taken-aback by the strength of argument that the theory of evolution is a direct challenge to the supernatural. Obviously the cop-out response is "that's how God done it" but I think this falls flat on its arse since evolution is still on-going and it requires the creator to have direct control over countless billions of organisms since life began, in opposition to the oft-repeated doctrine of "free will" that apparantly gives such a creator the right to judge, reward and punish. I've been an atheist for quite a while, but this series still gave me a new perspective on the reason for our existence.

[Galactus]

[quote]Last night I finished watching The Genius of Charles Darwin, a three or four-part series presented by Richard Dawkins. For the first couple of episodes I was a little irritated with Dawkins as he kept taking pot-shots at religion when he was talking about evolution, but in the final episode it kind of came together, and I was taken-aback by the strength of argument that the theory of evolution is a direct challenge to the supernatural. Obviously the cop-out response is "that's how God done it" but I think this falls flat on its arse since evolution is still on-going and it requires the creator to have direct control over countless billions of organisms since life began, in opposition to the oft-repeated doctrine of "free will" that apparantly gives such a creator the right to judge, reward and punish. I've been an atheist for quite a while, but this series still gave me a new perspective on the reason for our existence.[/quote]

To be honest, it doesen't. It just requires god to be Omniscient (which he is according to most versions of God) and being able to set initial conditions. Theoretically any development should be predictable given sufficient information. (no, Chaos theory doesen't deny that either)

Whether or not this kind of determinism negates Free Will is a question of how you define "Free Will".

[VarysTheSpider]

Galactus - true. It's quite interesting though. The more gaps humans fill in - like the evolution of man - the less there is for god to fill. Once upon a time the gods of the world walked alongside us, today they're quiet omniscient observers. I wonder if tomorrow god might be a metaphor.

[Guest Other-in-law]

from the previous thread:
Silent speaker,
[quote]You think a cursory upbringing is enough to dismiss all of religion as a crutch, anti-intellectual, incapable of subtlety of thought? Seriously? How is that any different from what Wolf King is doing? I don't see how this comment does anything other than confirm my point.[/quote]
[url="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/12/the_courtiers_reply.php"]The Courtier's Reply:[/url]
[quote]I have considered the impudent accusations of Mr Dawkins with exasperation at his lack of serious scholarship. He has apparently not read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor's boots, nor does he give a moment's consideration to Bellini's masterwork, On the Luminescence of the Emperor's Feathered Hat. We have entire schools dedicated to writing learned treatises on the beauty of the Emperor's raiment, and every major newspaper runs a section dedicated to imperial fashion; Dawkins cavalierly dismisses them all. He even laughs at the highly popular and most persuasive arguments of his fellow countryman, Lord D. T. Mawkscribbler, who famously pointed out that the Emperor would not wear common cotton, nor uncomfortable polyester, but must, I say must, wear undergarments of the finest silk.

Dawkins arrogantly ignores all these deep philosophical ponderings to crudely accuse the Emperor of nudity.
............................

Until Dawkins has trained in the shops of Paris and Milan, until he has learned to tell the difference between a ruffled flounce and a puffy pantaloon, we should all pretend he has not spoken out against the Emperor's taste. His training in biology may give him the ability to recognize dangling genitalia when he sees it, but it has not taught him the proper appreciation of Imaginary Fabrics.[/quote]

[Ouroboros]

That....wasn't the moral of the Emperor's New Clothes.

[Guest Other-in-law]

[quote name='Ouroboros' post='1656914' date='Jan 21 2009, 12.31']That....wasn't the moral of the Emperor's New Clothes.[/quote]
Wasn't it? That people should actually use their ability to reason and the evidence of their senses to inform their understanding, rather than accepting bald, unsupported claims that happen to be widespread?

[TerraPrime]

Re: SWK

[quote]Williams isn’t trying to falsify science, he is falsifying materialist evolution. And if you are ruling out deductive reasoning with respect to historical inference, you have just ruled out Darwinian evolution.[/quote]

That's patently false. Evolutionary theory, to the extent that it is part of the accepted scientific explanation of the natural world, is what Williams and other Intelligent Design people seek to discredit. I know not the verbal game you play to then call their effort as something other than an attempt to falsify science.

I am not ruling out deductive reasoning, at all. Show me which argument I made so far gave you that impression. My argument is that those who criticize evolution theory as a way to support intelligent design often fail to understand the science of evolution, thus rendering their criticism invalid.

I read the Williams article you linked. It's full of misuse and abuse of scientific findings. The conclusions he drew are not born out by the evidence. For example, Williams argued that "redundancy is powerful evidence for design" because "if naturalistic experiments are unlikely to produce an organism with sufficient functionality to survive and reproduce, then they are even [i]less[/i] likely to produce one with [i]more[/i] functionality than is needed."

There're so many things wrong with these few sentences. I'm rather impressed actually at how much inaccuracies one can pack into a small paragraph.

First, he either did not understand the study he cited or he deliberately misused the data. His two citations that preceded that line was 18 and 19 in his second paper, which is Becker et al. in Nature 440:303-307 and the wikipedia article on knock-out mouse, respectively. Let us tackle the second bit first.

Williams said that since only 15% of the genes are "developmentally lethal" when conducted in single knock-out experiments, that means that "85% of the mouse genes can be knocked out (one or a few at a time) and still produce a viable adult." First, his citation is wrong. Here's the wiki page as of June, 2006, the date he cited for his access, compared to the current page: [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Knockout_mouse&diff=57979681&oldid=56267775"]http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...;oldid=56267775[/url] . You will notice that on this page, there was no information pertaining to the 15% figure. Second, his conclusion is wrong, regardless of the percentage cited. If X% of genes lead to dead embryos, i.e. developmentally lethal, that means (100-x)% can be nullified and still yield a "viable adult." It's more than possible to survive embryonic development and die soon after birth. For example, mice with defects in DNA repair will survive, but develop cancer much more rapidly than normal mice. This does not mean that DNA repair genes are "redundant," as his following conclusion claimed.

With regards to the first article, the line that Williams cited saying that the study reflects "extensive metabolic redundancies and access to surprisingly diverse host nutrients" for [i]Salmonella enterica[/i] was lifted from the Abstract of the article. It was nowhere to be found in the body of the article. This is the equivalent of someone quoting the Cliff's Note. Setting that bit of academic laziness aside, the article itself is a dense report on the proteomics of [i]Salmonella[/i] in the context of drug discovery. It contains many excellent pieces of data (as most articles in [i]Nature[/i] do), but none of it spoke to why redundancy is evidence for design. In fact, the report doesn't even speak so conclusively on reundancy, if one pays attention to the actual data.

So, what we have here is one fabricated citation, and one technically correct citation but out of context, to support one of the author's argument on why evolution theory is wrong. Setting the non-existing scholarship aside (seriously, I will fail the student on their effort to find citations if that's what they hand in on their term paper- this is Highschool level work) and focus on the argument, for we know that there is redundancy in genes and gene functions in nature, even if Williams was incapable of finding the right sources to support that claim. How does redundancy argue in favor of intelligent design? Williams' answer is that if natural selection and evolution cannot create life, then certainly, it cannot create life with multiple redundant parts. Therefore, the presence of redundant parts is evidence of design. The obvious circular nature of the argument should not be hard to spot.

First, of course, evolutionary theory says nothing of the creation of life, only what happens to life after it existed. Second, we have naturalistic mechanisms for redundancy on the molecular level. Transposable elements, viruses and phages, strand slippage during replication, translocation mutations, illegitimate cross-overs, auto-polyploidy, are all ways in which we get gene duplications, i.e., redundancies. Again, here, intelligent design explanation is not needed. Nature is capable of providing methods of generating redundancies on her own, and we can observe these methods, quantify them, and study them in our laboratories.

This is why I asked those questions, questions which you side-stepped with a rather non-sequitorial response. This also affirms my impression that Intelligent Design supporters who criticize scientific understanding of our world do not themselves know the science they criticize. What they do, like Behe, is to collect scientific information, then miss-attribute or misinterpret them to fit their existing worldview. Frequently, the so-called scholarship in that field are shoddy and sub-par, riddled with inaccurate interpretations of what the science said. The fundamental principle of intelligent design is flawed, so the only way that its supporters can find evidence to support their argument is to either be ignorant of science or to use scientific findings in an abusive and twisted manner. Intelligent Design is not, and will never be, a scholarly field of study because the premise is intellectually bankrupt. Attempts to write scholarly articles on Intelligent Design, like what Williams had tried, result in something akin to putting a chimpanzee in a tutu and calling it a ballerina - it is unflattering to the chimp, though it is hilarious to the onlookers.

[Slick Mongoose]

[quote]Attempts to write scholarly articles on Intelligent Design, like what Williams had tried, result in something akin to putting a chimpanzee in a tutu and calling it a ballerina - it is unflattering to the chimp, though it is hilarious to the onlookers.[/quote]

You've got an amazing turn of phrase. :rofl:

[GoN]

All I have to say is:

YAY SHAFT MONGOOSE

[Guest thebadlady]

[quote name='VarysTheSpider' post='1656852' date='Jan 21 2009, 10.44']Last night I finished watching [b]The Genius of Charles Darwin[/b], a three or four-part series presented by Richard Dawkins. For the first couple of episodes I was a little irritated with Dawkins as he kept taking pot-shots at religion when he was talking about evolution, but in the final episode it kind of came together, and I was taken-aback by the strength of argument that the theory of evolution is a direct challenge to the supernatural. Obviously the cop-out response is "that's how God done it" but I think this falls flat on its arse since evolution is still on-going and it requires the creator to have direct control over countless billions of organisms since life began, in opposition to the oft-repeated doctrine of "free will" that apparantly gives such a creator the right to judge, reward and punish. I've been an atheist for quite a while, but this series still gave me a new perspective on the reason for our existence.[/quote]


Where did you watch this? I am wanting to see it too.

[potsherds]

[quote name='TerraPrime' post='1656958' date='Jan 21 2009, 17.57']Intelligent Design is not, and will never be, a scholarly field of study because the premise is intellectually bankrupt. Attempts to write scholarly articles on Intelligent Design, like what Williams had tried, result in something akin to putting a chimpanzee in a tutu and calling it a ballerina - it is unflattering to the chimp, though it is hilarious to the onlookers.[/quote]
Awesome. :thumbsup:

[Iskaral Pust]

Fantastic post by TerraPrime. More please.

[Ouroboros]

This is a bit off-topic but this seems to be the appropriate thread.

To be honest I'm tired of people complaining about atheists, or insisting that atheists should admit they don't know if there is or isn't a god. Atheists should be allowed to complain about religion as much as the next man, and be allowed to voice their beliefs as passionately as anyone else.

If I asked or demanded that an atheist admit that the did not know whether or not there was a god, when they clearly believe, and are certain that there isn't one, I'd feel like a hypocrite. Because I believe in God, and I personally would never concede that same point. I believe and am certain of the reality of God (Christian that is) and would never back down from that belief. It is something I believe, and am certain of strongly enough, that for anyone to demand that I admit I might be wrong is a little bit offensive to me. Not that I might be wrong (I'm wrong about a dizzying amount of things) but because to me that would be a concession on my personally integrity, it would be a personal lie for me to say that.

I'm sure its the same for many atheists. I would be more than a little annoyed if everyone kept demanding I at least admit unicorns might exist, because I cannot disprove their existence, or be told to provide proof of their non-existence. Or even more annoying, be told continually that because I don't 'believe' in unicorns that one day a unicorn would show up and kill me with its magic horn.

It would drive me up the wall, and I would be very quick to put unicorn lovers in their place.

So in closing.....unicorns are annoying. Yeah, kind of didn't think this post all the way through.

I guess in a roundabout way, despite being a (more-or-less) devout Catholic....I support atheists? :dunno:

[Starkess]

[quote name='Ouroboros' post='1657171' date='Jan 21 2009, 15.21']I'm sure its the same for many atheists. I would be more than a little annoyed if everyone kept demanding I at least admit unicorns might exist, because I cannot disprove their existence, or be told to provide proof of their non-existence. Or even more annoying, [b]be told continually that because I don't 'believe' in unicorns that one day a unicorn would show up and kill me with its magic horn.[/b][/quote]

Bingo. It's extremely frustrating.

[The Anti-Targ]

[quote name='cyrano' post='1656751' date='Jan 22 2009, 04.22']Oh yes, I examined this essential uncertainity. It was because the British government wouldnt allow the ads to be placed unless the certainity in them was removed. I think this was mentioned in the [b]FIRST[/b] post of the previous thread and the links therein.

It was because YOUR government tried to impose their own ideals on those brave atheist souls. Ergo: no hypocrisy, only more government discrimination.[/quote]

Wasn't my govt, I'm not a Brit. However I think it was pretty bad form to not allow whatever wording this crowd wanted. It's not like anything that can be said on the side of a bus is going to threaten soomeone's belief in God.

[quote name='MinDonner' post='1656802' date='Jan 22 2009, 05.11']Seriously, I'm glad that you're not worried, but the same is certainly not true for all religious people, many of whom are terrified of failing one of their faith's arbitraty tenets. Ask any teenage boy who's been told that wanking is a terrible sin.[/quote]

Oh shit! wanking is a sin? Man am I screwed.

It's gonna sound like a cop out, but I don't have time to respond to the points that have been raised and by the time I do this thread will be well into page 20 and I will have missed the mark. I really wish I could have a real time discussion with you folks some time about this, it's a lot of fun.