Religion and Atheism

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Of course the existence of god is beyond the mechanisms of science, the existence of god is an unfalsifiable hypothesis, and thus, by definition, ridiculous.

SAH,

Proton Decay hasn't been falsified after decades, rediculous?  String theory posits strings too small to ever be seen, rediculous?

[Seli]

The facts are these:

There are logical proofs, based on reasonable assumptions, for the existence of God.

There are logical proofs, based on reasonable assumptions, for the non-existence of God.

Therefore belief, or not, in the existence of God comes down to preference, and more specifically preference about what assumptions you regard as being valid.

Then of course you have anecdote. Given the question of God is beyond the mechanisms of science to validate or invalidate, which means you can't gather objective evidence through repeatable experimentation, anecdotal evidence from a trusted source becomes a valid consideration. And of course personal experience is also valid, to the person. If you, or a person who's honesty and sanity you trust, has had an experience or experiences which strongly suggests the existence of the Divine it is rational to interpret said experience as reasonable evidence of the divine.

Which in my experience true for a definition of God that has nothing to do with the one most religions and religious people use. In practice most religions make claims on the effect of their god(s) on the real world, which is open to testing and not only to logic. Most religions make claims about the uniqueness of their interpretation of god(s), which is of course open to a Bayesian analysis of the likely validity of those claims.

So in real circumstances, sorry there is a lot more to this than mere preferences. The fact that the concept of god-of-the-gaps exist is a clear indication of that.

[Ser Arthur Hightower]

SAH,

Proton Decay hasn't been falsified after decades, rediculous?  String theory posits strings too small to ever be seen, rediculous?

Neither is really an unfalsifiable hypothesis though, I'm not familiar enough with string theory to be comfortable passing comment, though for proton decay; we must say that at them moment there isn't any rational reason to believe it takes place. Proton decay is one of a few cases where, because of the timescales likely to be involved if the hypothesis is correct, it is impossible to confidently dismiss the hypothesis, however evidence could be produced to falsify the theories which suggest that proton decay should or must take place.

In any case I wasn't referring to the idea in a truly scientific sense but rather in the manner in which it is used to describe other ideas, such as the young earth creationist viewpoint that the earth formed with the appearance of age, which are largely debunked and are recognised as ridiculous for their unfalsifiable nature.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

SAH,

I agree YEC is crap my point is that there are hypothesises out there in science that are either unfalsifable or the next best thing.  Yet, they are not called rediculous.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

But is it common sense to conclude that life is a random outcome and not a planned outcome? The more often life is seen throughout the universe the less random it appears to be, and it starts to appear more and more to be planned. What's the tipping point between life seeming to be more likely to be randomly caused than seeming to be more likely to be deliberately caused? Life is evidence of God, but with a sample size of just one it is very weak evidence right now. My conjecture, therefore, is that eventually science will conclude God is more likely rather than less likely because of the overwhelming evidence of life being abundant in the universe.

First bolded: Yes, it is. There is a wealth of data that indicates the human brain prefers patterns over randomness.

Second bolded: That is just silly. And it's a completely unproven assumption.

Third bolded: Life doesn't mean there is a god.

Look, believe what you want. And as long as it doesn't harm others. then whatever you believe is fine. But your logic here is dramatically flawed and self serving. Maybe there is a god (or gods) and maybe there isn't. But there has never been a shred of evidence to indicate they exist. And if they do exist, it's highly unlikely religion, any one of them, are correct in their depiction of the god(s) and what they want/mean/inspire/indicate. Because they all have one thing in common. They're man made.

[Altherion]

While I agree that religion doesn't conflict with science in the field of ethics, the two do conflict in a whole lot of other disciplines, like cosmology, geology, evolutionary biology, paleontology, mammal anatomy, human history and so on. For instance, the bible clearly states that Moses divided the Red Sea. This is a historical claim, that could at least in principle be studied scientifically. Whether prayer works or not can be scientifically tested. 

Sort of. There are a few problems with the study of miracles. The first is one of practicality: the miracles from the religious books happened a long time ago and it's not obvious that we can tell whether a sea had been parted thousands of years after the fact. Second, we don't really know what to expect. How exactly was the Red Sea divided? What was the mechanism? The Bible is about as helpful as one would expect from a book written by people with an understanding of technology several thousand years behind ours: it mentions only a strong east wind which cannot be the primary mechanism (a wind strong enough to separate water would also be strong enough to make walking between the separated waters impossible). So, was there a sort of tunnel where the air near the walls of water is moving fast enough to hold them up, but at the center there's only a strong wind? Or was the wind a side effect and the real mechanism something considerably more exotic? For example, one could imagine inserting a slice of extra space between the waters such that it offers a seamless transition from the sides of the paths and can only be entered and exited along the direction of the crossing. In this case, you would not even find the remains of the hapless pursuers (which is the most obvious attempt at verifying the story). Or it could be something completely different -- even now our speculation is constrained by our level of technology.

Modern miracles lack the first of these problems, but the second is still there. People have tried to test prayer, but since religion doesn't actually say which kinds of prayer will be answered, it's not obvious what is being determined. Is it just a matter of saying the words or does the thing being prayed for matter? How about the moral qualities of the person praying? Or maybe the intensity of their desire to see the prayer answered? Or the extent of their faith? It's extraordinarily difficult to make meaningful scientific statements about the supernatural.

And I'm not 100% convinced that the existence of God itself isn't, in principle, a scientific question. Science seeks to explain what the world looks like - it might not be able to tell whether there's a god or not, and likely it never will, but that fact wouldn't move the question out of the realm of science, just out of its reach.

It's outside the realm of science as we currently know it. All of science relies on certain tacit assumptions. For example, we assume that the laws of nature do not change with time. Most (though not all -- pantheism offers a counterexample) versions of God are capable of breaking these assumptions and then some. Thus, it is impossible to tell the difference between "God doesn't exist" and "God exists, but does not want to be seen."

[TrueMetis]

I guess what I'm saying is wrong is people who cherry pick verses out of the Bible to justify an assertion about the Bible, which, when read as a whole, is wrong.

At best, it's honest misunderstanding, at worst it is blatant misunderstanding.

According to you one has to read as a whole, but why's that interpretation right? The bible is made up of separate books. Many of which cover the same thing. So why were the authors so incompetent that they couldn't manage to get across what they wanted to in one book?

Mixed fabric is something that is outside a person and not from the inside of a person's heart. Hence, it is not something that defiles (meaning to make unclean).

 The mixed fabric bans say nothing about defilement, just not to do it.

 Can science explain moral and value judgments?

By giving us knowledge on how the world works science can inform our moral and value judgements. It cannot explain what is the right moral or value judgement because such a thing doesn't exist. Or if you mean can it explain why we have moral and value judgements, that's tied up in being a social animal. Some of the basics like "don't murder" are rather important for keeping a social group working together.

There are logical proofs, based on reasonable assumptions, for the existence of God.

I disagree, all the assumptions I've seen have been entirely unreasonable.

But is it common sense to conclude that life is a random outcome and not a planned outcome?

This is a false dichotomy. Is a crystal forming a random outcome or a planned outcome? It's neither, there is randomness involved yes but the formation of a crystal is not a random outcome. It is an inevitable outcome given the correct starting conditions. And given how many potential starting points their are, those conditions are going to come up a lot.

The more often life is seen throughout the universe the less random it appears to be, and it starts to appear more and more to be planned.

Or the inevitable set up of how the universe works, if the chemical reactions that lead to the basic components of life are natural and happen on their own, which various experiments show, than no planning needed. Life is like the crystal.

What's the tipping point between life seeming to be more likely to be randomly caused than seeming to be more likely to be deliberately caused? Life is evidence of God, but with a sample size of just one it is very weak evidence right now. My conjecture, therefore, is that eventually science will conclude God is more likely rather than less likely because of the overwhelming evidence of life being abundant in the universe.

Life is evidence for life, it is not in of itself evidence for the explanation of life.

[Altherion]

Or the inevitable set up of how the universe works, if the chemical reactions that lead to the basic components of life are natural and happen on their own, which various experiments show, than no planning needed.

Correct. If we assume that life arose on Earth due to the random interactions of nonliving matter and that there are hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way and hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe, it stands to reason that some form of life would also show up on some other planet. The more interesting thing is that we haven't seen any signs of extraterrestrial intelligent life yet. Very conservatively, we should be able to develop interstellar travel in the next millennium and, given the mechanics of star formation, there should be many civilizations that had multi-billion year head starts and should have colonized the galaxy by now... but we've seen none. This is called the Fermi Paradox.

[Gears of the Beast]

There are logical proofs, based on reasonable assumptions, for the existence of God.

Name one. 

 There are logical proofs, based on reasonable assumptions, for the non-existence of God.

Name one

[The Anti-Targ]

 

I disagree, all the assumptions I've seen have been entirely unreasonable.

 

What is your criteria for reasonableness? Is it whether or not you agree with an assumption or is there some objective criteria by which you can judge reasonableness. Like does not rely on magical thinking, and does not cause the universe to violate the laws of physics, for example, are possible objective criteria.

[The Anti-Targ]

 

Name one. 

 

Name one

Hatcher's Proof.

Actually I'm assuming, but I figured it was a safe assumption.

[TrueMetis]

What is your criteria for reasonableness? Is it whether or not you agree with an assumption or is there some objective criteria by which you can judge reasonableness. Like does not rely on magical thinking, and does not cause the universe to violate the laws of physics, for example, are possible objective criteria.

Well let's examine one of the assumptions I've heard used to point to a god. "everything that's created must have a creator" but for either definition of created either from preexisting material or ex nihilo this is unreasonable. We have example of things being created from existing material without a creator, the crystals I mentioned earlier for example, and no examples of anything ever being created ex nihilo.

So if we have examples that contradict the assumption for one definition, and no examples of the assumption in anyway for the other it's unreasonable to conclude it's true. Though I suppose I could have just pointed to the definition of assumption, because a "reasonable assumption" is an self contradiction.

I could also point to "Life is evidence of God" when there's nothing about life that requires a god as also an unreasonable assumption.

[Stubby]

Stubby,

[snipped the lecture about civility]

But to the point, you keep using this expression, "philosophical hand-waving," but you realize that's all this thread can be about, right?  Philosophy, one's philosophical approach.  You use a dismissive, sneering term in contrast to your shining, concrete "real-world", but again, your examples are merely data.  Your data can't tell me how to feel about the subject, it's numbers or words on a page, full stop.  You then color those facts with your philosophical approach to the world, assigning value to the elements and telling a story.  What is being pointed out is that there is not only one valid philosophy in the world, and those differences of philosophy will take the same facts, color them differently, and reach a different conclusion.  What you call hand-waving, I call an attempt to introduce you to the concept of more than one valid point of view.

In any event, I've realized this morning that I have again spent several posts here in what is essentially a semantic argument.  You have adopted your values in the absence of a religious doctrine, and you have correlated your values so strongly with your self-image as a scientist (by philosophy, if not by profession), that you will not hear of science being separated out of the equation.  You have convinced yourself that science gave you your values, and that's totally fine. I really shouldn't bother trying to dissuade you, since our values and our conclusions, I think, largely align.

I just disagree with your definition of science.  If you're interested in the semantics still, then let me just say this: no one can base their judgment on all of the facts, and weigh them all equally.  Differences in weight are not suspensions of the scientific method, they are simply intrinsic to the existence of differing philosophies and points of view.  Ignoring a fact does not make one un-scientific, because scientists ignore certain facts all the time, in order to reach their conclusions.  They call these facts "outliers" or they say that the connection to why (x) happens has not yet been made, but they still draw inferences from the data that someone else, someone who believes those outliers must be more significant than that, will challenge.  Who is more scientific?  The answer is not absolute; it depends on what you value.  Science will give us the data, but which data we choose to believe are important is not scientific, but personal.

Hand waving means that someone is using some diversionary tactic to avoid answering questions. That is with all due respect, all that I see my opponents - including you - doing this particular discussion.  I reach that conclusion because of the refusal to provide real-world examples.  You may not like it, and you can call "sneering" and all that but again, with all due respect, provide some evidence that shows what you intend instead of just theories and I might pay more attention.

Applying your so-called "valid" point of view, one can justify any sort of compulsion on other humans to live by the beliefs of the oppressor.  I see that as invalid.

I also note your reduction of issues in which people die or are forced to comply with others' beliefs as "semantics". I do not disregard my fellow humans enough to do that.

Stubby,

Okay.  So.  Uh, sorry, sorry.  Dead horse, and all that, but upon further review, this point struck me forcibly, and I have to respond.  Thank you. 

Emphasis mine.

Can you please show me where I said or suggested it was okay?  I merely said it was not necessarily in conflict with science.  I think it highlights the center of our disagreement, when my attempt to bring you around to seeing a religious position as not necessarily in conflict with science suggests to you that I'm saying that the religious position is therefore "okay" -- as if not being in conflict with science would confer moral legitimacy.

Not being in conflict with science is not morally proper or improper; it's a thing unto itself.  Science doesn't care where we get our personal values from, or what we do with those values.  Science will just measure the impact that a realization of our values has on the world.  And that's it, really: science is just an instrument to measure.  Science cannot tell us what is moral, only what the consequences of a given morality will be.  We can disagree over which consequences, and therefore which morals, are most desirable, but at some point that will come down to personal preference.  I would argue that not all personal preferences are morally equal, but that is of course wholly subjective.

You endorsed it with your philosophical point being carried to it's logical conclusion.  I have already explained this.

If you really want to take this "discussion" further, please answer all my outstanding questions and provide some evidence that - sticking with the abortion example - justifies the death of the mother to satisfy the "values" and "morals" of the lawmakers.

[Gears of the Beast]

Hatcher's Proof.

Do you think this proof is valid and sound, do you think this proof demonstrates the existence of god?

"Actually I'm assuming, but I figured it was a safe assumption"

Uhhh. so you assert that "there are logical proofs, based on reasonable assumptions, for the non-existence of God" while not being able to name one, instead assuming that is the case. Okay. That is bizarre because let's look at what you said: 

The facts are these:

There are logical proofs, based on reasonable assumptions, for the existence of God.

There are logical proofs, based on reasonable assumptions, for the non-existence of God.

Therefore belief, or not, in the existence of God comes down to preference, and more specifically preference about what assumptions you regard as being valid.

Are you still going to assert the bold or have you realised why it is flagrantly wrong?

[Altherion]

Well let's examine one of the assumptions I've heard used to point to a god. "everything that's created must have a creator" but for either definition of created either from preexisting material or ex nihilo this is unreasonable. We have example of things being created from existing material without a creator, the crystals I mentioned earlier for example, and no examples of anything ever being created ex nihilo.

Oh, but there's certainly at least one example. The question is exactly the same as has no doubt been asked by children in many ancient cultures: where did the Egg come from? The only difference is that they thought of it as a World Egg whereas we have expanded the idea to a Cosmic Egg.

[TrueMetis]

Oh, but there's certainly at least one example. The question is exactly the same as has no doubt been asked by children in many ancient cultures: where did the Egg come from? The only difference is that they thought of it as a World Egg whereas we have expanded the idea to a Cosmic Egg.

That's not creation ex nihilo. The universe expanded from the "cosmic egg" but there's no evidence the cosmic egg itself came from nothing.

[Altherion]

That's not creation ex nihilo. The universe expanded from the "cosmic egg" but there's no evidence the cosmic egg itself came from nothing.

Well yes, that's why I said the question is where the Egg came from -- if you assert that no thing comes from nothing, that is the most common example of a thing in need of a creator (you can try to make do with major revisions in the laws of physics, but these are not significantly more plausible).

[TrueMetis]

Well yes, that's why I said the question is where the Egg came from -- if you assert that no thing comes from nothing, that is the most common example of a thing in need of a creator (you can try to make do with major revisions in the laws of physics, but these are not significantly more plausible).

Why does it need a creator? What are you basing this on? Not the laws of physics, the laws of physics break down as you get closer to the big bang. And I didn't assert the no thing comes from nothing, I pointed out that there are no examples of something coming from nothing, and still isn't the cosmic egg isn't such an example, as such there's no reason believe something can come from nothing. That is not the same as saying "no thing comes from nothing".

[Altherion]

Why does it need a creator? What are you basing this on? Not the laws of physics, the laws of physics break down as you get closer to the big bang.

It does not necessarily need a creator, but one would explain a lot of things. The alternative is to give up on something big (one of the laws of thermodynamics or perhaps time itself a-la Hartle-Hawking) and then explain how you get it back later.

And I didn't assert the no thing comes from nothing, I pointed out that there are no examples of something coming from nothing, and still isn't the cosmic egg isn't such an example, as such there's no reason believe something can come from nothing. That is not the same as saying "no thing comes from nothing".

Sorry, I thought you were talking about the argument from first cause where this assumption is used to justify a creator. Never mind.

[TrueMetis]

 

It does not necessarily need a creator, but one would explain a lot of things. The alternative is to give up on something big (one of the laws of thermodynamics or perhaps time itself a-la Hartle-Hawking) and then explain how you get it back later.

I don't think it does, at best it pushes the question back. Okay so the cosmic egg was created by a creator. Where did the creator come from?