Bible Interpretation Part The Second

[Ser Greguh]

Because my post was composed and ready to go seconds before locking:

The hypothetical person-with-a-valid-religious-experience does have evidence for it that you keep dismissing as invalid because of your faith that it falls under some scientific principle that you know about but this hypothetical person does not. There is no claim that humans have intuition like that, that is a projection of your prejudice against God: the claim is that God has the power to be felt. Accepting the current explanations of science and rejecting, even on a hypothetical basis, the possibility of new ones is antithetical to rational and scientific thought.

This quote shows that you very clearly do not have even the first idea what the word "evidence" means. Evidence must be falsifiable and repeatable.

The part you forgot is "unless new evidence shows otherwise," but apparently that part is counter to your faith-based atheism.

It is implicit. Show evidence of a god and I will believe. But it must be actual evidence, not the pathetic caricature of "evidence" that you attempt to prop up one person's spooky personal experience as. Evidence must be falsifiable and repeatable, else it is not evidence.

- Again, it is only the atheist that claims the seer-of-God manifests extraordinary mental powers (of self-deception). The seer-of-God is, according to his perspective, only a witness of God's extraordinary power.

Nobody except you is claiming that the supposed seer-of-god's powers of self-deception are anything extraordinary. To the contrary, they are quite bland. Everybody's brains play tricks on them. Doesn't make you special. The entire purpose of the scientific method is to negate the effects of those tricks via a focus on empiricism; to differentiate between what "feels real" and what can be tested for. This process, and not any claims to personal infallibility, is why the scientist produces results and the witch doctor doesn't. The scientist's mind is just as fallible and just as subject to all the usual suspects, chief among them confirmation bias. It is the process, not the individual person, that weeds those biases out over time.

This is why your abuse of scientific language like "evidence" to describe one person's personal interpretation of some spooky internal perception that they can't otherwise explain is so galling. You are making the exact sort of argument that the scientific method exists to correct against and you are hijacking the language of the Scientific Method to do so.

Nobody is asking you to do anything. You are defending the position that it is not possible to be Christian for rational reasons.

Nobody is defending that position. Arguing that it's "not possible to be a Christian" for any reason would be exceedingly stupid. What we are arguing is that our rationality provides a very compelling reason to be skeptical of the claims of Christianity (or any other religion) and that many of the claims of Christianity do not survive that skepticism.

I am providing a counterexample. At no point is your belief in God expected or desired, only the concession that a belief in God may be warranted in a situation other than your own.

You are not providing a counterexample. You are providing an obfuscation, deliberately (I suspect) conflating evidence with faith when "faith" is defined precisely as belief in the absence of evidence.

Plenty of people have reconciled physics and God. I'm hardly an expert, but I have no idea how they conflict, since God is beyond all that.

Nobody is saying that Physics is incompatible with Theism in general. And just because plenty of people have been able to reconcile physics with specific stories that posit times in which the laws of Physics have been temporarily suspended does not mean that the process of that reconciliation is reasonable nor that the stories have any basis in fact.

No, the thesis that 'belief in God is necessarily irrational' requires proof. The thesis that 'belief in God can theoretically be rational' does not require anything but a demonstration with possibly-false premises, which I have provided. There is no such thing as proof unsusceptible to human error; the premise specified that the presence of God was felt as convincingly as I perceive anything inarguably 'real'. In other words, that God was observed. Whether any actual occurrences of 'observing God' are this rigorous is not provable in the negative.

This is a standard-issue strawman. Nobody is claiming that "belief in God is necessarily irrational." If God were to announce her presence (I flipped a coin for the gender designation there, literally) in a way that was empirically verifiable, then belief in said god would be quite rational. The claim is that no such announcement has taken place in a context that even remotely allows for empirical verification. If God was "observed", she was done so in a way that cannot be construed in any sense as "evidence". That something "felt real" is not "evidence."

[emberling]

This is the stuff that the hypothetical was created in response to:

I understand when someone's bullshit detector is not present, and I understand when it rejects both stories, but I do not understand a bullshit detector that allows one to pass but blocks the other.

...

I'm marveling how the skepticism and rationality that causes you not to believe in Santa Claus doesn't also apply to your religious faith

My claim regarding the 'evidence' does not go beyond that it is sufficient to explain this discrepancy in a generally rational human being. Attempting to bring the rigor of the scientific method into it is pretty silly; I'm pretty sure none of you go through the process of scientifically verifying that the person you have just met is a hallucination, even if they seem a bit improbable. Claiming that the word 'evidence' is specific to Science! is likewise absurd.

[Ser Greguh]

My claim regarding the 'evidence' does not go beyond that it is sufficient to explain this discrepancy in a generally rational human being.

The problem with your statement here is the use of the deliberately vague phrase "Generally rational." Let me explain.

It is not enough to say that a supernatural explanation is sufficient to explain some observed thing, whether that thing be a personal "experience with God" or a child finding presents underneath the tree on Christmas morning. Supernatural explanations are always sufficient to explain something in that sense; they are constructed precisely to explain that observed thing! Santa Claus is a perfectly sufficient explanation for the presents under the tree, to a child that did not see his parents purchase them, store them, wrap them, or put them there. All one has to do is posit that it's possible that a being such as Santa, capable of suspending the laws of Physics for a night and bending time and space (remind you of anyone?), slipped down the chimney while you were asleep.

The problem with that claim, and the reason why we would dismiss, say, an older teenager that persisted in believing in Santa as being deluded, isn't that the explanation is not "sufficient", it's that we would judge that the adult had never gotten around to subjecting the Santa-claim to proper critical examination. They were never skeptical enough toward the claim to stay up late and see if a fat guy in a red suit really came out of the chimney.

Yet we do not treat someone that does not subject the God-claim to the same sort of skepticism with the same disdain. This is where your careful "Generally rational" qualifier comes in. I suspect you don't have any hard metrics for what qualifies someone as "generally rational". Someone that treats the same supernatural stuff that you do without skepticism is "generally rational." Someone that treats the supernatural stuff you dismissed as children without skepticism is not.

We laugh at someone that says "I can't explain my Christmas presents, therefore Santa" but treat seriously someone who says "I can't explain X, therefore God." That's the discrepancy.

Attempting to bring the rigor of the scientific method into it is pretty silly; I'm pretty sure none of you go through the process of scientifically verifying that the person you have just met is a hallucination, even if they seem a bit improbable.

This is how skepticism works. When my girlfriend says she had a good day at work, I don't grill her for empirical points of data to support that claim. It's unnecessary. It's in a simple pattern of everyday life and doesn't require that energy. When she comes home from work and says "God Karen at work is such a bitch!", I press her for details as to why she makes that claim, because it's out of the pattern. Similarly, someone I encounter on the streets doesn't need to be subjected to some scientific test for me to confirm that they really exist, because I've done that comparison in the past and that person fits the pattern. A being that is capable of the things that the God of Christianity is capable of, on the other hand, is very much outside of the pattern of things that I have observed in my life, and thus the claims to its existence is very much subject to skeptical scrutiny.

Claiming that the word 'evidence' is specific to Science! is likewise absurd.

I never claimed it was specific to science, just that you were using it in a way that hijacked the scientific rigor that the word implies. "Evidence" is not synonymous with "Observation." By definition it is an observation that has been subjected to scrutiny. This applies whether the context in which it is being used is scientific, legal, or something else. Describing someone's personal religious experience as "Evidence" implies that their observation has been subjected to scrutiny, when it has not.

[Castel]

From kurokaze:

You're again describing a caricature of Christianity derived from literalists/fundamentalists. I would expect it to be more along the lines of There's a God -> I'm pretty sure he's this one, and will act accordingly -> but that stuff they say in that one thing is wrong. Or There's a God -> All the denominations are the same as far as I'm concerned but this church has nicer people -> though they say some weird things sometimes.

I was speaking in general but fair enough. My experience has been with Islam, which is taken literally by pretty much everyone I've met, and has far fewer denominations (if any at all) so the concept of Christians and their casual disregard for their canon (if they even consider it such) is weird. It may slip into my arguments.

But I don't see why the beliefs of fundamentalists and literalists are invalid either.

But the leaps are still there. Let's see

There's a God

Based on your gut feeling.

I'm pretty sure he's this one, and will act accordingly

Based on what information? Your gut feeling again? Why act either way? God exists as a cloud of infinite possibilities, he can just as easily hate religious people, or love them and want to send them to hell or hates people with your eye color-we can go on forever. That person is basically declaring by fiat that the God he wants is the real one.

You have no reason to act except by creating certainty where there is none.

but that stuff they say in that one thing is wrong

Unless it's something that's been disproved by science how would you know? Oh right, by guessing.

There's a God -> All the denominations are the same as far as I'm concerned but this church has nicer people

And you leap straight from God, to Christian God as I said. Or by denomination do you simply mean religion? Because that would be weird.

[emberling]

Someone that treats the same supernatural stuff that you do without skepticism is "generally rational." Someone that treats the supernatural stuff you dismissed as children without skepticism is not.

We laugh at someone that says "I can't explain my Christmas presents, therefore Santa" but treat seriously someone who says "I can't explain X, therefore God." That's the discrepancy.

It's interesting that you appear to have assumed that I believe in God. Apparently there is no difference between failing to rule out the possibility of God and actually believing in a particular God. This tracks, since I have also observed that you guys have trouble distinguishing between scriptural literalism and the things people actually believe. It's all othered.

There exists a hypothetical where I would consider belief in Santa by an older teen to be rational. It would require a significant culture shift, though, while belief in God does not. That's the key difference - it's difficult to imagine a person for whom no significant evidence* against Santa appears, whether or not that person has deliberately chosen to question Santa. It's trivially easy to imagine a person for whom no significant evidence against God appears (partly because God cheats**), and it's not too hard to imagine a person who questions God's existence and answers in the affirmative based on the patterns they (NOT YOU - THIS IS IMPORTANT - NOT YOU) have observed in their life.

When she comes home from work and says "God Karen at work is such a bitch!", I press her for details as to why she makes that claim, because it's out of the pattern.

Do you really do this? Approach that statement skeptically? She wants to vent some frustration and instead you try to catch her inevitable fundamental attribution errors? Wow.

As for the leap from any God to a specific one - again, it is my observation that this is not a significant thing to many Christians. I may have a skewed perception because the vast majority of my church experience is UU, but the details don't seem to matter much. Whether God is three-in-one or one or one of many isn't something people think about. They think about: are the people nice here? Is it easy to get to? Are the sermons boring? Do they seem to believe anything I strongly object to***? And you know, turning down a good community because it asks one to not openly scoff at the idea of a trinity - not necessarily rational.

*'Observation' doesn't parse here. I will use the goddamn word that does.

**this is, of course, a reference to how God is defined as ineffable and outside human comprehension, not a statement of actual action on the part of God

***NOT YOU

[Castel]

There exists a hypothetical where I would consider belief in Santa by an older teen to be rational. It would require a significant culture shift, though, while belief in God does not. That's the key difference - it's difficult to imagine a person for whom no significant evidence* against Santa appears, whether or not that person has deliberately chosen to question Santa. It's trivially easy to imagine a person for whom no significant evidence against God appears (partly because God cheats**), and it's not too hard to imagine a person who questions God's existence and answers in the affirmative based on the patterns they (NOT YOU - THIS IS IMPORTANT - NOT YOU) have observed in their life.

We obviously have very different opinions on what exactly "rational" means if you think that there being no evidence (yeah) against the existence of God is a rational reason to believe in one. Or that subjective patterns (because the human brain is good at that) are an indication of God.

The logical leaps required for that to make sense seem to disqualify the person from having a rational belief.

[Ser Greguh]

It's interesting that you appear to have assumed that I believe in God.

Various canards you have repeated, such as "Faith-based atheism", I have only ever heard from believers. If it's not true then it doesn't particularly matter; the same arguments still apply, and you may substitute pronouns for nouns as you see fit.

Apparently there is no difference between failing to rule out the possibility of God and actually believing in a particular God.

Nobody I know believes this. I have not ruled out that we're living not in a physical universe but in a brain-vat neural simulation ala The Matrix. I don't believe there is any way to disprove this, since such a theory short-circuits the very powers observation that we use to lay claim to our knowledge of our perceived universe. I cannot objectively rule out solipsism - the notion that the world exists only in my imagination. I cannot objectively rule out a god that has created the universe in its present state right ... wait for it ... NOW! with all of creation, including the biochemical signals that I interpret as my memories (including the memory of composing the first half of this post), just being an aspect of that creation. I cannot rule out a Deist god, a universal prime-mover that put the Big Bang in motion and sat back and watched, like a SimCity player off taking a crap while the first few billion years roll by on his computeruniverse game.

I do not believe in any of these things. This is not a matter of faith, simply a matter of my not finding any of these stories particularly useful. Elaborate as they are, none of them have any actual explanatory power because none of them are falsifiable.

This tracks, since I have also observed that you guys have trouble distinguishing between scriptural literalism and the things people actually believe. It's all othered.

I have no trouble whatsoever distinguishing between scriptural literalism (which a great many people do actually believe) and the things you claim people actual believe. To say otherwise is just silly.

There exists a hypothetical where I would consider belief in Santa by an older teen to be rational. It would require a significant culture shift, though, while belief in God does not. That's the key difference - it's difficult to imagine a person for whom no significant evidence* against Santa appears, whether or not that person has deliberately chosen to question Santa. It's trivially easy to imagine a person for whom no significant evidence against God appears (partly because God cheats**), and it's not too hard to imagine a person who questions God's existence and answers in the affirmative based on the patterns they (NOT YOU - THIS IS IMPORTANT - NOT YOU) have observed in their life.

Ah, so the guiding star is the story's falsifiability. This is a very important point. The Santa-question is, you are saying, a scientific hypothesis. Something is observed (presents appear beneath the tree where they were not the night before), a mechanism is proposed through which the observed something happens (fat guy, red suit, chimney), and a test is proposed through which the mechanism can be determined to be true or false (perhaps, stay up late, watch for fat guy, red suit, chimney?).

What you are hand-waving as "rationality" is actually an application of the Scientific Method.

Well, let's adjust the Santa mythos just a bit, to say that Santa provides the presents just like the myths say he does, to all the good little girls and boys except those for whom someone else is already providing presents. Now how do we test for this? Our stay-up-late experiment now fails, because if we observe our parents distributing the gifts, well, the mythos accounts for that. And if we observe no presents at all, well, that must mean we weren't good little boys and girls, now, mustn't it?

Now how do we argue for or against Santa's existence? We can't, except to say that it's not particularly useful because now the hypothesis is unfalsifiable. So now, because we can't rule it out, mustn't we put this particular Santa in the same place as God?

And if we must do that, what makes your particular God-hypothesis special as opposed to all the other possible stories that could be concocted to explain the original observation?

Do you really do this? Approach that statement skeptically? She wants to vent some frustration and instead you try to catch her inevitable fundamental attribution errors? Wow.

It wows you that I prefer the people I'm with to justify their value judgments against other human beings? I'm not saying I give her the third degree or go out of my way to catch her in a lie, but I also would expect such a statement to be backed up with a story as to why Karen deserves such a nasty label (and most of the time, such a story will come without any prompting from me).

[emberling]

*matrix blah blah* I do not believe in any of these things. This is not a matter of faith, simply a matter of my not finding any of these stories particularly useful. Elaborate as they are, none of them have any actual explanatory power because none of them are falsifiable.

But if you wake up one day and you're in the Matrix's 'Real World' then suddenly one of the stories becomes useful. Or maybe you just sit there in faithful certitude that it's definitely a dream because it contradicts Science!. Which you choose is based on - hm - faith. Preconceptions versus perceptions, detached broad consensus versus individual experience and the couple of people next to you in the moment. Which do you trust more? (Or do you make the pragmatic choice? Do you say 'if it's a dream, it doesn't matter, so I'll assume it's real'? Church of some type - whatever type is available - is the pragmatic choice for a spiritual person.)

The Santa-question is, you are saying, a scientific hypothesis. Something is observed (presents appear beneath the tree where they were not the night before), a mechanism is proposed through which the observed something happens (fat guy, red suit, chimney), and a test is proposed through which the mechanism can be determined to be true or false (perhaps, stay up late, watch for fat guy, red suit, chimney?).

This is a truly bizarre proposal. It's certainly a narrative that exists, it's a story that's been told, but to actually expect a non-fictional person - or worse, to expect all rational persons - to go to that length (staying up, watching the fireplace) is simply alien to me. If that is your criterion for rationality, I'm proud to be irrational.

(All right-thinking children attempted to sleep as early as possible so that they would get presents 'sooner'. Obviously.)

[Mr. E]

The thread is getting dangerously close to mentioning Shroedinger's Cat; if it does, I shall have to slap someone.

[Kynokephalos]

Did someone mention Schroedinger's Cat yet? Because this really reminds me of that. *runs*

[Ser Greguh]

But if you wake up one day and you're in the Matrix's 'Real World' then suddenly one of the stories becomes useful.

This would be the equivalent of finding empirical evidence of a god, which believers insist is not necessary to have faith. In any case, let's just say that I'm not holding my breath.

Or maybe you just sit there in faithful certitude that it's definitely a dream because it contradicts Science!.

Kind of like how Einstein sat back in faithful certitude that the experiments that showed the speed of light was constant in all reference frames were false because they contradicted Science!?

Oh, wait, that's right ... nothing empirically observable can contradict Science! because Science!, unlike faith, adapts to any new empirical data.

And yes, waking up in the real world of The Matrix would indeed constitute "empirical data".

Which you choose is based on - hm - faith. Preconceptions versus perceptions, detached broad consensus versus individual experience and the couple of people next to you in the moment. Which do you trust more?

Atheism is the "none of the above" choice. I don't claim to have evidence of anything beyond what can be empirically observed in my own reference frames, and I don't claim to have knowledge of anything beyond those reference frames that is meaningful. It's not about picking one choice and rolling with it, it's about admitting the difference between what I know and don't know and eliminating blind faith in anything I don't know.

(Or do you make the pragmatic choice? Do you say 'if it's a dream, it doesn't matter, so I'll assume it's real'? Church of some type - whatever type is available - is the pragmatic choice for a spiritual person.)

I agree that church is a pragmatic choice for a spiritual person. Spirituality, however, requires a departure from empiricism, unless one truly believes that whatever "spiritual event" one has experienced can be empirically observed, at which point it no longer requires "faith".

This is a truly bizarre proposal. It's certainly a narrative that exists, it's a story that's been told, but to actually expect a non-fictional person - or worse, to expect all rational persons - to go to that length (staying up, watching the fireplace) is simply alien to me. If that is your criterion for rationality, I'm proud to be irrational.

No, but it's how we must address the question if we're treating it as an actual scientific hypothesis, which is what you're must be implying when you said, and I quote, "it's difficult to imagine a person for whom no significant evidence against Santa appears". Your shift to the passive voice here is fascinating. How does that evidence "appear"?

This brings us back around to my original comment on bullshit detectors. Really, most people don't believe in Santa (at least, not past the age of reason), because the Santa mythos doesn't pass their basic smell test. Their bullshit detector. It violates Occam's Razor, and spectacularly so. This alone is not enough to call it unscientific (the stay-up-late test is necessary for this), but it is how most people recognize that the elaborate Santa mythos has no bearing on the real world.

Yet the same is also true of the God mythos. What you are saying is that when someone experiences an Internal Revelatory Event that they cannot immediately explain away with Science! that it's perfectly reasonable - nay, Rational! - for them to leap immediately to God as an explanation, despite no empirical data that leads them to that conclusion. With no other critical thought applied to the situation they find themselves in, it's perfectly Rational! for them to jump to the conclusion that their Internal Revelatory Event has no explanation other than the assumption of an omniscient, omnipotent being that sent his only living son to die on a cross so that mankind's sins might be forgiven. Talk about violating Occam's Razor! Holy shit!

So here we have one story (fat guy, red suit, presents) weighed against another story (omniscient creator, son on a cross, sins of humanity), where belief in one is completely Rational! (thanks to your conveniently reflexive definition of the word, which is all I can explain it as since you've overtly rejected the notion that Rational! has anything to do with Science!...) while the other is a silly children's story.

This is, in a (rather large) nutshell, what I mean when I say that it's bizarre that for so many people, one story passes the bullshit detector and the other gets flagged by it.

(All right-thinking children attempted to sleep as early as possible so that they would get presents 'sooner'. Obviously.)

Which, poetically, brings us back to Einstein.

[Castel]

And yes, waking up in the real world of The Matrix would indeed constitute "empirical data".

Does it? This drives me crazy. What if the previous world was real? What if the new world is fake? What if it's a hallucination? All the information you have about the human brain comes from a source that can no longer be trusted right? At best, all that's been proven is that something is capable of constructing elaborate realities. You have no idea which is real.

It goes round and fucking round.

/derail.

[Ser Greguh]

Does it? This drives me crazy. What if the previous world was real? What if the new world is fake? What if it's a hallucination? All the information you have about the human brain comes from a source that can no longer be trusted right? At best, all that's been proven is that something is capable of constructing elaborate realities. You have no idea which is real.

It goes round and fucking round.

/derail.

It would not give you evidence that the new environment was "real" (imo nothing can give you that in any context), but it would give you evidence that what you previously perceived as reality was a simulation. There was a lot of speculation about the Matrix movies as to possible hints that the "Real World" as depicted in the movie was just a Matrix-within-a-Matrix.

[Elder Sister]

Does it? This drives me crazy. What if the previous world was real? What if the new world is fake? What if it's a hallucination? All the information you have about the human brain comes from a source that can no longer be trusted right? At best, all that's been proven is that something is capable of constructing elaborate realities. You have no idea which is real.

It goes round and fucking round.

/derail.

Thank you. That movie drove me nuts because of that very thing. I thought I was being paranoid.

[Castel]

It would not give you evidence that the new environment was "real" (imo nothing can give you that in any context), but it would give you evidence that what you previously perceived as reality was a simulation. There was a lot of speculation about the Matrix movies as to possible hints that the "Real World" as depicted in the movie was just a Matrix-within-a-Matrix.

But that's my point, how do you know that your previous life was a simulation?It could have been real and the aliens/machines have put you under with implanted memories so the anal probing is more humane -and ironic of course.

[emberling]

Science! is distinct from science, and defined (by me, because I said so) as 'blind faith in the world suggested by science', or more broadly 'the trappings of science taken to the point of absurdity'. I thought this (second one) was relatively standard interwebs usage.

Atheism is the "none of the above" choice. I don't claim to have evidence of anything beyond what can be empirically observed in my own reference frames, and I don't claim to have knowledge of anything beyond those reference frames that is meaningful. It's not about picking one choice and rolling with it, it's about admitting the difference between what I know and don't know and eliminating blind faith in anything I don't know.

And you don't know a damn thing about another person's experience of God, or their view of and level of faith. It's entirely beyond your reference points. The "none of the above" choice does not include judging that person as irrational for their belief, as if you knew enough about their experiences (both the God-vision and their prior exposure to religions, science, skepticism, and philosophy of mind) to conclude that.

You're guilty of faith. Everyone is, unless they are some kind of extreme meta-solipsist (I think I'm a solipsist, but I'm not sure!) You speak instead of eliminating blind faith. But somehow believing a God one sees before oneself is blind faith, while believing the appearance of having left the Matrix is not. Somehow believing in a God that one's community accepts is blind, but believing that the blade of grass in front of me is actually a bunch of subatomic particles and largely empty space is not. How do I know it's actually subatomic particles? Because people told me so. The science exists to prove it (or so I'm told), but it's beyond my understanding or my desire to understand.

Spirituality, however, requires a departure from empiricism, unless one truly believes that whatever "spiritual event" one has experienced can be empirically observed, at which point it no longer requires "faith".

How are we defining empiricism here? External verification through scientific method? I was never there in the first place, and I think you'll find many spiritual persons do not give half a shit about anyone externally verifying them, as long as people refrain from doing things like calling them names. Or is it defined as basing belief off of one's perceptions? No need to depart from there.

No, but it's how we must address the question if we're treating it as an actual scientific hypothesis, which is what you're must be implying when you said, and I quote, "it's difficult to imagine a person for whom no significant evidence against Santa appears". Your shift to the passive voice here is fascinating. How does that evidence "appear"?

What, do you need a list? Some kid says it on the playground, others agree. The mall santa has a crappy fake beard. Your parents don't lie well. You never get expensive things your parents don't approve of. The handwriting on FROM SANTA tags is suspiciously familiar. Etc, etc. You live, and stuff happens, and you notice stuff, and it inevitably chips away at the illusion until it's gone. Yes, if Santa cheated like God does, most of this would be invalid. But that's not the case.

As for what that quote has to do with the scientific method, I'm entirely mystified.

Yet the same is also true of the God mythos. What you are saying is that when someone experiences an Internal Revelatory Event that they cannot immediately explain away with Science! that it's perfectly reasonable - nay, Rational! - for them to leap immediately to God as an explanation, despite no empirical data that leads them to that conclusion.

If a person changes into a wolf in front of me, it is rational to leap immediately to the explanation that she is a werewolf. If she then attempts to bite my face off, and I am wearing a silver cuff-link or something, it is rational for me to attempt to defend myself with the silver. If bitten, it is rational for me to suspect that I might become a werewolf, and to seek out someone to help. If I find a nice werewolf pack that says, yes, you will become a werewolf, it is rational to believe them and accept their help. If instead I had assumed that she was a shapeshifter unrelated to known myth, and assumed that the bite was harmless, I would consider that irrational behavior, denial. The data is not empirical; that does not make the entertaining of the data irrational.

(thanks to your conveniently reflexive definition of the word, which is all I can explain it as since you've overtly rejected the notion that Rational! has anything to do with Science!...)

Wait, do you actually think 'logic' and 'the scientific method' are the same thing? (Rational means 'justified by logic.')

This is, in a (rather large) nutshell, what I mean when I say that it's bizarre that for so many people, one story passes the bullshit detector and the other gets flagged by it.

How well does your bullshit detector work with science? How did it respond when you first read about quantum physics? It didn't engage, did it? Mine didn't. I was all, "whoa, weird." Because the source is trusted. And which source to trust is an extremely subjective judgment that depends in large part on who has knowledge of the field - be it physicists, priests, or werewolf packs.

[Castel]

Damn. kurokaze is back, we have to go back to grown-up topics :(

[felice]

Does it? This drives me crazy. What if the previous world was real? What if the new world is fake?

The new world provides an explanation for how and why the old world was fake, whereas the old world doesn't have any good explanation for the new world (late 20th century technology wasn't capable of creating such convincing virtual realities, and there's no obvious justification for subjecting a perfectly ordinary random person to such an elaborate and expensive hoax), so it makes sense to accept that the old world was a fake. The new one certainly can't ever be trusted, though!

[felice]

How well does your bullshit detector work with science? How did it respond when you first read about quantum physics? It didn't engage, did it? Mine didn't. I was all, "whoa, weird." Because the source is trusted. And which source to trust is an extremely subjective judgment that depends in large part on who has knowledge of the field - be it physicists, priests, or werewolf packs.

Scientific sources can generally be trusted for good reason; superficially, it's obviously compatible with the world we experience around us, and we have the option of carrying out our own experiments to confirm or attempt to contradict what science tells us. And even if we personally don't have the aptitude, inclination, or resources to investigate more complicated scientific claims, there are others who do, and can reasonably be expected to point out any flaws. But how do you judge how trustworthy or knowledgeable a priest is? Or a werewolf or vampire? It's rational to expect a werewolf pack to have some knowledge of werewolves, but they're also likely to be wrong or ignorant about many things (as humans are about humans!) and may well have reason to act against your best interests. Have you read Fevre Dream? That gives plenty of examples of the problems on relying on mythology about vampires/

[Ser Greguh]

Science! is distinct from science, and defined (by me, because I said so) as 'blind faith in the world suggested by science', or more broadly 'the trappings of science taken to the point of absurdity'. I thought this (second one) was relatively standard interwebs usage

I don't know what kind of bullshit you've been exposed to that was sold to you as Science!, but the science I've been exposed to is repeatable. If I don't trust the result that I hear from silence, guess what! I can verify the experiment myself! I've done so more times than I can count. No faith required!

And you don't know a damn thing about another person's experience of God, or their view of and level of faith. It's entirely beyond your reference points. The "none of the above" choice does not include judging that person as irrational for their belief, as if you knew enough about their experiences (both the God-vision and their prior exposure to religions, science, skepticism, and philosophy of mind) to conclude that.

You are the one obsessed with the word "irrational", not me. And you don't know whether or not another person's experience of God is beyond my reference point or not. What evidence do you have that I have not experienced the exact same impetus that led another person to their "faith" but dismissed it as low blood sugar?

You're guilty of faith. Everyone is, unless they are some kind of extreme meta-solipsist (I think I'm a solipsist, but I'm not sure!) You speak instead of eliminating blind faith. But somehow believing a God one sees before oneself is blind faith, while believing the appearance of having left the Matrix is not. Somehow believing in a God that one's community accepts is blind, but believing that the blade of grass in front of me is actually a bunch of subatomic particles and largely empty space is not. How do I know it's actually subatomic particles? Because people told me so. The science exists to prove it (or so I'm told), but it's beyond my understanding or my desire to understand.

I am most certainly not guilty of faith, nor is any atheist. All faith is blind by definition. I know the properties of the blade of grass in front of me based on data that I can verify. I understand the properties of subatomic particles because I have verified their properties and effects: the evidence of their existence. If the science is beyond your understanding or desire to understand, but speak for your fucking self. I have dedicated a substantial chunk of my life to understanding it. And here, in one fell swoop, I have some jackass on the Internet conflating all of those years of very hard work - all of that evidence - with their faith and telling me that because they don't understand the evidence, that I must not understand it either.

Some people do put their faith in science, yes. They don't understand it but, at best, they see that it seems to produce results so they pick it as their object of faith. This does not mean that everyone who believes in science does so out of faith, as you so capriciously and smugly insinuate. Don't tell me I don't understand this shit just because you don't.

How are we defining empiricism here? External verification through scientific method? I was never there in the first place, and I think you'll find many spiritual persons do not give half a shit about anyone externally verifying them, as long as people refrain from doing things like calling them names. Or is it defined as basing belief off of one's perceptions? No need to depart from there.

Empiricism meaning a belief only in things that can be empirically verified. Perhaps not verified to the rigors of the scientific method, but that at least work at the process. Anything that can't be empirically verified gets the "I don't know" or "not enough data" tag.

If a person changes into a wolf in front of me, it is rational to leap immediately to the explanation that she is a werewolf. If she then attempts to bite my face off, and I am wearing a silver cuff-link or something, it is rational for me to attempt to defend myself with the silver. If bitten, it is rational for me to suspect that I might become a werewolf, and to seek out someone to help. If I find a nice werewolf pack that says, yes, you will become a werewolf, it is rational to believe them and accept their help. If instead I had assumed that she was a shapeshifter unrelated to known myth, and assumed that the bite was harmless, I would consider that irrational behavior, denial. The data is not empirical; that does not make the entertaining of the data irrational.

I sincerely hope you are not losing sleep in favor of preparing these contingencies.

Wait, do you actually think 'logic' and 'the scientific method' are the same thing? (Rational means 'justified by logic.')

No. Logic is a language. The scientific method is a process that sometimes involves logic.

How well does your bullshit detector work with science? How did it respond when you first read about quantum physics? It didn't engage, did it? Mine didn't. I was all, "whoa, weird." Because the source is trusted. And which source to trust is an extremely subjective judgment that depends in large part on who has knowledge of the field - be it physicists, priests, or werewolf packs.

I wasn't taught quantum physics as an article of faith. I was taught it from the ground up. I was told of the observations that didn't make sense based on the pre-quantum models, and taught how quantum theory developed around those observations, how it was tested and verified, and performed some of that verification myself in the lab. It's mind-blowing stuff but at no point does it trigger the bullshit detector, precisely because the way in which quantum theory was developed was entirely empirical: testable and verifiable.

If you were taught science as just another form of dogma, I'm sorry, because science is much more than that. When someone tells you about evolution and just says "this evolves into that and that's just the way it is", they're depriving you of the journey that Darwin took as he made his first observations about the similarities and differences between species and used his testing of those similarities and differences as the foundation of the unifying theory of biology.

Suffice to say that if it requires faith, it's not science.