June 03, 2006

Why did God ignore Colonel Steve Austin? Logic and theology dancing around the "may" pole holding hands.
  • Logic? Not likely...
  • God hates amputees?
  • God lets prayers go unanswered in order to test our faith. Any suffering exerienced by amputees or anyone else on Earth is trivial in comparison to the eternal bliss that awaits us in heaven.
  • I'm a pretty confirmed atheist, but that line of reasoning isn't very compelling. Stan the Bat's response counters it nicely by rejecting all instances that are supposed to demonstrate the efficacious of prayer on earth, yet still keeping a place for both prayer and God.
  • True, but considering that the anecdotal support for God's answering of prayers through healing is large and well documented (with everything from chronic pain to terminal cancers having healed spontaneously and said healing often having been ascribed to God), the lack of a documented case of spontaneous limb regrowth is notable in that context.
  • My point was that there aren't any lines of reasoning that are compelling. Religious belief is compelled by faith, not reason. No one living, dead nor yet unborn knows the answer to the Ultimate Question of life, the Universe, and everything, and God's existence can neither be conclusively proven nor disproven. People feel differently about it, and there's nothing to be done but to identify the people who feel differently than you do, and kill them.
  • Agreed, chimaera, it does provide a way to question that anecdotal evidence.
  • What kind of sick god would pass judgement condemning one to eternal damnation or eternal bliss based on whether or not one believed in one of humanity's five major religions. Would this god condemn all worshippers of any others simply because one was born into one of the 'wrong' religions? Surely then, atheism or agnosticism are potentially the most pious systems of belief simply because one then knows for a fact that he/she is not worshipping the wrong god(s).
  • Yeah, the whole idea of hell has got some problems. There's God, see, and God is is the all-knowing Source from which flows all light, life, and love. God sends his beloved children to live on Earth, where there are a whole bunch of books written by a whole bunch of prophets, and if you pick the wrong one he will roast your ass in hellfire for an infinite period. Because he loves you. Now, does that sound like an all-knowing, all-seeing kind of a construct to you, or does that sound like something that was thought up by the monkeys with firearms?
  • Prayer is heresy -- you're assuming you know better than God what is better for the Universe and asking Him to alter natural physics to make it happen. Just STFU and let Him do His thing... (...which appears to be exactly how the Universe would operate without the existance of God. Funny, that.)
  • Clearly the germane point here is that god loves earthworms and lizards more than us.
  • God sent him Oscar Goldman?
  • Chimaera, scientists have been reporting a lot recent about the power of the mind-body connection (There was a Newsweek about it, but I cant locate it) and the effect that the mind (prayer) can have on the body. Placebo effect! And God dosen't intervene in the lives of us mortals, he just lets it all flow. It is up to us to do what we need. Prayers are just for our reassurance. We don't really need it. (What Stan said.) FiftyPoints let me quote a Hindu mantra: "Truth is One, but the sages call it many." All religions come down to the same basis, because we are all human. (Universal ethics anyone?)
  • Faith is beyond reason and logic, like any person at some point in their life, or humans in general.
  • If one wants to bring logic into it... God supposedly created Man in his/her image, specifically giving Humans free will. As a result, however, God cannot perform any miracles that would obviously break well understood laws of nature in a way apparent to the whole world. If God were to perform any act that confirmed his/her existence to humankind at large, this would subvert free will. How you ask? Simple. For many humans, if not most, if they knew that God, for certain, existed, then they would feel compelled to act in accordance with 'God's will'. After all, if one knew for certain that H-E-double-hockey-sticks existed you would almost certainly jump through any number of earthly hoops to ensure an eternity in Heaven. The result, however, would be the subversion of Free Will. It's no different than a cop promising to shoot you in the head if you don't confess, and no respectable human court recognizes those confessions. If one thinks about it, this becomes a logical strategy for a God to take, rather than a limiting dilemma for the deity. After all, if God does exist then as humans learn more about the universe, then God is more and more constrained in her/his actions to avoid the above paradox. The result, however, is the continued encouragement of humanity to strive for more knowledge and advancement. The continued lack of confirmation of God's existence goads us to become our own gods, and reach our maximum potential.
  • God ignores amputees because She doesn't need limbs to do Her magic work. And neither should you, unbelieving heathen infidels!!!!!
  • Um ... cos Steve Austin was fictional?
  • Hope you don't mind me clarifying this: "Faith is beyond reason and logic unreasonable and illogical, like any person at some point in their life, or humans in general." Yep, pretty much.
  • Sorry to derail a sincere discussion.
  • MonkeyFilter: ...does that sound like something that was thought up by the monkeys with firearms? MonkeyFilter: Clearly the germane point here is that god loves earthworms and lizards more than us. Gimmie Catholic hellfire any day over that Mormon heaven where women get to be preggers for all time and eternity. **shudders**
  • Pish Nal, Christanity. Pish. =P
  • It may be that the God of Abraham doesn't answer such prayers due to the nature of free will, or it may be that He doesn't answer prayers to cure amputations because He only exists in the imagination, just the the myriads of forgotten gods which came before him and those which will come after he is forgotten. I note that an all-powerful creator god could set up free will or the logic of the universe in such a way that divine intervention wouldn't subvert man's free will, thus the free will argument doesn't really answer the argument but just pushes it aside. This is why my bet is on the imagination explanation -- Occam's razor and all.
  • Don't assume. I never stated that I personally endorsed Christianity. I just enjoy a good gedankenexperiment. ;)
  • I note that an all-powerful creator god could set up free will or the logic of the universe in such a way that divine intervention wouldn't subvert man's free will, thus the free will argument doesn't really answer the argument but just pushes it aside. Well, that's nice for you. For the rest of us, though, do you think you could explain how such a world would work?
  • Smo: Answer yourself this: does an all-powerful god have to bow to logic or does logic bow to an all-powerful god?
  • In other words, can God create a rock so large he can't lift it? Or whatever, there are lots of examples to this effect. But they're alll silly. Contradictory statements are meaningless. They cannot describe possible states of affairs because they do not describe anything.
  • god may be everywhere without will or intent adrift in the spaces once occupied by limbs.
  • To answer your question directly: of course God can't violate the laws of logic. An assertion to the contrary isn't really an intelligible assertion.
  • Or, more to the point, the "can God create a rock so large he can't lift it" and the question of is an all-powerful god bound by rules, and as you note "lost of examples to this effect", all seem to be silly contradictory questions because they illuminate that an all-powerful god is not logical. But, rather than accept that the concept of an all-powerful god cannot be correct according to the rules of logic (a personal and highly regarded core belief of may people) most believers would rather throw away the questions. It's not the questions that are illogical, it is the definition of all-powerful gods which is illogical. While most ignore the questions rather than examine their beliefs, there are several real answers to the question. These answers tend to make one more uncomfortable, though. One way to resolve this is to limit the god's abilities. Another way to resolve it is to conclude that logic doesn't apply to gods. (This is already the accepted case, btw, as supernatural agencies are by definition beyond the scope of both science and logic.) This has the unfortunate side effect of making any rational inqury into the nature of said god as moot. Rationality just doesn't apply in this case. (But, note that believers already do this when they say "one cannot know the mind of god" and other such statements.) But in the end, you're still left with the tool of Occam's razor and what that implies: gods only exist in the imagination.
  • One believes what one believes. Evidence and logic have nothing to do with it.
  • Fes: EXACTLY!
  • No. Your arguments are fallacious and unsound. Omnipotence does not include the ability to violate the laws of logic because statements that violate the laws of logic are meaningless. The question about the rock is no more intelligible than this question: "Can God make aldskfsj dsklfskdlfkjg gjbioa oerwe?" It's no more possible for God to make a rock so heavy he can't lift it than it is for him to make aldskfsj dsklfskdlfkjg gjbioa oerwe. Which is to say that God can do all of those things that are possible to do. This is what omnipotence is. God can't do the impossible, but so what? The impossible is impossible. Ironically, I think this line of thought -- when you assert that God should be able to violate the laws of logic as an argument against theism -- actually helps to further the hypothesis that God exists. For why should his ways be explicable, if he can violate the laws of logic? For that matter, why should we trust logic, if we think it's possible that it might lead us astray (i.e. if we believe that its laws could be violated, if only in principle)? What reason, moreover, does the atheist have for her position if reasons themselves, even logically sound reasons, can't necessarily be trusted? Anyway, all of this is silly, since, contrary to your claim, hardly any serious theist philosophers or theologans have ever argued that God should be able to violate the laws of logic.
  • The words "aldskfsj" and "dsklfskdlfkjg" and "gjbioa oerwe" have no individual meaning. "all-powerful" and "god" and "logic" all have agreed upon individual meanings. Each word taken together to form the sentence "Can God make aldskfsj dsklfskdlfkjg gjbioa oerwe?" has no meaning as each individual word which makes it up has no meaning on its own. Each word taken together to form the sentence "Can and all-powerful God subvert the rules of logic" does have meaning as each individual word which makes it up each as understandable and agreed upon meanings which form a whole. Your assertion does not apply. "Anyway, all of this is silly, since, contrary to your claim, hardly any serious theist philosophers or theologans have ever argued that God should be able to violate the laws of logic." Argumentum ad Populum is not grounds to dismiss an argument.
  • As for the first part, I can rephrase my question like this: "Can God make banana stereo window yesterday?" That question is meaningless, even though all of its terms have meaning. That doesn't mean the sentence itself has meaning. To argue otherwise is to invoke the fallacy of composition. Of course, you can simply assert that God can create a rock so large he can't lift it -- that the question is meaningful -- but that rather obviously begs the question. As for the last part, no, it's not a reason to dismiss an argument, only to illustrate that yours attacks a strawman.
  • "As for the last part, no, it's not a reason to dismiss an argument, only to illustrate that yours attacks a strawman." Which position have I misrepresented? Since we're pointing out strawmen, note that "contrary to your claim, hardly any serious theist philosophers or theologans have ever argued that God should be able to violate the laws of logic." is a strawman as I never once brought up theist philosophers or theologians, thus that cannot be my claim. My claim is that supernatural agencies are by definiton outside the scope of science and logic.
  • But God has violated natural laws: see the burning bush, the parting of the Red Sea, the Flood, etc. Why was it OK for him/her to violate them them then and not now?
  • can God create a rock so large he can't lift it One potential answer is both yes and no. God created the framework, the rules by which this universe is governed. If God chooses to confine himself within this framework, he is then bound by the rules he created for this space. In this case, he could not create a rock so large that he couldn't lift it. Of course, once outside the framework he is omnipotent. It would be similar to writing a computer program. Since you are creating the framework, you can program in whatever limitations are required for your purposes. Once outside the limitations of the computer, however, you are free to act as silly as you like. Since we don't understand the framework that God exists in, there is no way we can state with any assurity that he is or is not omnipotent. The real question, however, is whether Santa Claus could create a toy so large that he couldn't deliver it.
  • The existance of God is unverifiable, as has been noted by posters above. There are no substantiated consequences of the existance or non-existance of God. This alone is a staggering realisation for a lifelong believer. It seems to me that the concept of God is unintelligible. There is no one idea of what 'God' means; it means so many things to different people. What are you talking about when you talk about God? What are the attributes that you assign to this being? This last question is usually enough to set off dozens of little sub-arguments among people. :) I have come to realise I don't know what people mean when they talk about God, because there seem to be so many different versions of this God. Everyone invokes the name, assuming that there is this collective understanding of what God is, but in fact, there are lots of competing versions of God in different peoples' minds, even among the same community. There is the layman's concept of God, & the theologians. George W. Bush's idea of God, & the Pope's. And everything in between. So, until the idea of God is defined, what point in discussing it? And anyway, as the subject of this thread points out, the consequence of God existing or not is impossible to verify. Impossible! So it's not worth caring, really.
  • fatbobsmith: I agree with your interpretation. Theists who invoke free will to explain the decisions of their god remind me of cosmologists who invoke the anthromorphic principle to explain life in the universe. Both my be elegant thought experiments but both are also are post-hoc rationalizations which don't explain anything.
  • I usually prefer not to talk about God and instead talk about the supernatural. That means that the question I tend to ask is whether there is any reason to believe in the existence of anything that is not at least potentially explainable by natural laws.
  • Here at MoFi we try and take things in a new direction. Rather than argue about whether God exists, we have created an argument about the semantics of 'dsklfskdlfkjg'. (On the other hand, if the true name of God turns out to be Dsklfskdlfkjg, we all get to be prophets. I hereby claim the Book of Nal as the repository of All Things Good About Ice Cream.)
  • I'm not english major, but I'm fairly certain that "dsklfskdlfkjg" is an adjective.
  • I must learn to stop typing in word-salad, or learn to proof read better. Just sayin.
  • and just to reiterate my point, not only am I "not english major," but I'm also "no english major" as well.
  • Well, at least you're coherent. I re-read some of my sentences and was I like WTF?
  • See.
  • And yea, God smote the wicked denizens of MoFi with bad grammar and typing skills, and there was much rejoicing and ice cream.
  • But God has violated natural laws: see the burning bush, the parting of the Red Sea, the Flood, etc. Why was it OK for him/her to violate them them then and not now? Yes, I think there are good counterexamples here. I mean, there are attempts to answer arguments like yours. But I don't think I've read any that are actually successful, which is one of the many reasons why I don't think a literalist interpretation of the Bible works. But if you don't take the Bible literally, there's no problem here. And you certainly don't need to take the Bible literally to be a theist, or even a Christian. Thus, a theist who invokes the free will defense is not necessarily inconsistent.
  • If the Bible is accurate, then God is an imbecile. That much is true simply from Genesis.
  • There are no substantiated consequences of the existance or non-existance of God. So says Nietzsche. But it's definitely debatable (e.g. morality, meaning of life, etc).
  • But if I can't take the supernatural claims of the Bible seriously, what parts should I take seriously? Why should I believe any of it and, even more importantly, how do I differentiate this particular book from anyone else's book, books that may make quite contrary claims about how human beings ought to behave? Moreover, without any evidence of the supernatural here on earth, why should I have any belief in the supernatural in the hereafter, or any belief in the hereafter in the first place? A claim for the existence of the supernatural is an extraordinary claim, and such a claim requires extraordinary proof. But if we deny even the supernatural claims in the Bible itself, upon what should I base any belief in the supernatural?
  • LordSludge: it works out the same either way.
  • I thought it was Diderot? Logical positivism, anyway. I don't know much about Nietzsche.
  • One does not need gods to have morality.
  • God is love Love is blind Ray Charles is blind Therefore: Ray Charles is god!!!!!
  • sfred: You could base your belief in God on an a priori argument, if you think any of them are valid; or you could base it on a personal revelation, if you've had one. My point is only that belief in God is not necessarily illogical. Whether or not God exists -- and whether or not any good (publically available) reasons exist to demonstrate his existence -- is another question. I'm not much interested in making affirmative arguments on that score. Chyren: God Logical positivism is dead. Nomen: I know. But knowledge about the existence of God might alter the nature of morality, as in Kierkegaard's theology. Or maybe it doesn't. It's debatable.
  • Smo: I'll accept that answer since I don't know anything about Kierkegaard or his theology. BTW, earlier you said I had erected a strawman. I really don't see where I may have done so. If I had done so I'd like to correct it. However I don't see it so could you point to which position I may have misrepresented? Thanks.
  • "Whether or not God exists -- and whether or not any good (publically available) reasons exist to demonstrate his existence -- is another question. I'm not much interested in making affirmative arguments on that score." That's what I've been saying! It appears you simply don't care. It doesn't matter whether God exists or not.
  • Nomen wrote: Another way to resolve it is to conclude that logic doesn't apply to gods. (This is already the accepted case, btw, as supernatural agencies are by definition beyond the scope of both science and logic.) I interpreted this (wrongly?) to mean that most people accept this position. Which may or may not be true. I don't think it is, but I know it's not true of most sophisticated thinkers. If I misread you, I apologize. Chyren: I do care about whether or not God exists. But I'm an atheist, so I don't think any good reasons exist, except maybe personal revelations (but those aren't gonna convince me unless or until I have one). That's why I'm not interested in making affirmative arguments. I don't think they work.
  • Smo: Ah, I see. Now that I read it I see it is ambiguious -- I should have worded that differently. It would have been better if I'd written that people who believe miracles were real physical events recorded in a historical document rather than symbolism in a moral story already accept that their god has at one time or another subverted the laws of physics or logic. All Christians would fall into this group (even if they don't view the Bible as a totally factual historical document) as they must believe in the real physical miracle of the ressurection of Christ.
  • This page references an article in Wired, A Prayer Before Dying, which I found supremely engaging. I expected to read just a bit of it but sat entranced for the entire six pages. Also, Fes said: One believes what one believes. Evidence and logic have nothing to do with it. I disagree, slightly. I think that our personal evidence and logic have something to do with it, but also that we ignore other kinds of evidence and logic. Most Xtians are instructed at a young age to Believe or Burn Forever; yet most also find some kind of personal experience to back this up (actually significant, or simply made significant by the desire to believe). I won't get into my unusual and hard-to-explain-briefly faithset here, except to say that I was firmly agnostic until the age of 18, when I had an experience which was relatively minor in its emotional impact, compared to other moments in my life -- but which gave me significant personal reason to take a little leap of faith. That said, I remain an utterly rational person, and I keep myself open at all times to the glaring improbability of the myriad extensions this leap can bring. To put it another way, my god is a god of logic -- and while this puts the kibosh on either prostelytizing or delusion, it does allow me to consider faith a tangible reality, which need not exist absolutely independently from reason. Sorry for being so long-winded. I've been meaning to write about this for a while, but school keeps getting in the way. I got into some of this stuff in a dialogue I wrote in 2000 called "Imposition".
  • The purpose of religion is to enable the sane to quickly and accurately identify the insane.
  • Smo, unambiguous personal revelation is a possibility in that it would be clear evidence of the supernatural: I want to see some talking shrubbery. As for a priori approaches, certainly that is notionally possible, but what if a provable proposition is at variance with the observable world? What if, upon reflection, we prove that 2+2=3 but when we do the experiment we always get 4? The lack of verifiable supernatural claims in the real world puts a priori proofs of God in something akin to that position in that they are at variance with the observable world.
  • "God is love Love is blind Ray Charles is blind Therefore: Ray Charles is god!!!!!" Therefore, with apologies to Neitzsche, God is dead.
  • "There are no substantiated consequences of the existance or non-existance of God." Sure, there are four: Cosmological Proof Of God a. Everything seems to have caused to exist by something that came before it. b. Thusly, God had to start the entire chain somewhere. "God began it, and nothing began God" Teleological Proof a.The existence of the world proves God. b.Teleology- the study of design or purpose in nature. c."Watchmaker" Metaphor- If you are walking along the beach and find a watch, and examine it, you know that there must have been a watchmaker at some point along the line. You don't need to know who the watchmaker was, or what he is like to know that there was a watchmaker. The Earth and all it's creatures are a big metaphorical watch. Ontological Proof a. Onotology is the nature of being or existing. b. "The idea of God is the only idea that requires existence of the thing we are thinking about." Moral Proof a. Based on the assumption that humans choose between good and evil as opposed to animals. b. Because the human morality doesn't come from nature, because animals don't have morality, it must come from God.
  • If there is a God, s/he's probably reading this thread for a good chuckle right now. If there is a God, s/he doesn't post. Therefore, if there is a God, s/he is a lurker.
  • All of your arguments, Vertex, appear to have serious faults. The Cosmological Argument is a non sequitur, two equally plausible answers are "the chain goes back infinitely (which we know by observation is likely untrue), and "the start of the chain is undefined and undefinable, therefore premise A is false." The Teleological Argument is tautological -- "the existance of a Design necessitates the existance of a Creator. The world appears to have been Designed, therefore it was Created. That Creator is God." The premise is loaded, and presumes intelligent agency in its design. The Ontological Argument is also a non sequitur. B does not follow from A no matter how you slice it. The Moral Argument is also a non sequitur. There are several plausible answers to B which can follow from A, therefore it's logically weak. One is "humans are unable to apprehend the mental states of animals and cannot adequately assess whether their motivations stem from a sense of morality." Another is "humans, by virtue of their superior intellect and capability of abstract reasoning at levels far higher than animals correspondingly have a far more sophisticated and nuanced moral structure." And also, whence morality? Bertrand Russell asserts (and I agree) that morality is just the name for the emergent behavior of a system in which humans must interact which maximizes the likelihood of progress and "good" for each. Be careful about making so-called logical arguments with loaded premises.
  • 1. we are limited by our perception 1.1. we are limited by our invented system of logic (and or science) 2. god, even loosely defined, is not limited by our perception 2.1. god, even loosely defined, is not limited by our invented system of logic (and or science) to take it any further may be satisfying at some level but will be fruitless.
  • Hey look, a miracle! (via boingboing)
  • But doesn't any definition of God stem directly from our limited perception and systems of logic/science? God, even loosely defined, is defined to be beyond the bounds of a flawed system by the flawed system itself. Sounds fishy.
  • I'm nut sure if god originates from systems of logic and science. I would say any gorm of God comes from more from emotion than logic.
  • Is God just about hope then? One can think of hope as a selective trait, and a highly desirable trait in an animal in that it keeps it functioning where there is a very small chance that it will survive to reproduce where it might otherwise give up. Perhaps a belief in God is simply part of our evolutionary heritage.
  • > God, even loosely defined, is defined to be beyond the bounds of a flawed system by the flawed system itself. Sounds fishy. i'd rephrase: the flawed god system, even loosely defined, is defined to be beyond the bounds of flawed system 1 by flawed system 2. all three systems derive from the same flawed system of origin. and this makes any "logical" investigation or god largely pointless. these (logic/science, belief, and god) are different systems with different boundaries and parameters. it's difficult to make any progress in trying to argue logically with radical theists or radical atheists because there's always some faith-based position they can fall back on.
  • sfred wrote: What if, upon reflection, we prove that 2+2=3 but when we do the experiment we always get 4? Well, I would argue that this is impossible. 2+2=4 is true by virtue of the meaning of the terms. Thus, it cannot conflict with the real world. I would argue that something like this is true for all conclusions that are the result of valid deductive arguments. Now, whether or not any such arguments can be made for the existence of God... well, I don't think so. But some very intelligent people who have thought deeply about these issues do. I think they at least deserve respect. The lack of verifiable supernatural claims in the real world puts a priori proofs of God in something akin to that position in that they are at variance with the observable world. Ah, but what could count as evidence for God, in your opinion? Okay, talking bushes might cut it. But can any natural phenomena count? What about, say, quantum mechanics? If none of this could ever count, why not? Or, to ask the hardest question, why is there something rather than nothing? On the other side of the coin, what could count as evidence against God? I'm not sure any such evidence could exist, except maybe the existence of evil. But even that doesn't necessarily close the door on the issue. roryk wrote: 2.1. god, even loosely defined, is not limited by our invented system of logic (and or science) Logic is "invented" by us only in a trivial sense. I would need to see a very strong argument to convince me that anything "outside" the limitations set by logic and reason remains meaningful. I am not at all convinced that atheism involves faith of any kind, since your conception of God is, in my view, meaningless.
  • Perhaps a belief in God is simply part of our evolutionary heritage Yikes... you might want to replace that word "God" with "the supernatural".
  • an uncertain god like some odd quark is and is also not in an altered state once observed
  • Smo as you say, valid deductive arguments won't conflict with reality, but invalid ones will. As to your second point, perhaps one way to look at it is to follow Popper and ask whether a claim for the existence of God generates any falsifiable claims. If it doesn't, then it can have no epistemological validity. If it does, then it is a scientific statement and can be tested. In other words, the existence or nonexistence of God has to have consequences or the concept itself is meaningless because it cannot have a truth value. InsolentChimp is quite right and I've been equating God with the supernatural. I've been doing so because a claim in the existence of the supernatural is testable in that leads to two hypotheses: that supernatural events occur, or that they don't. I can falsify the proposition that they don't occur by finding a single supernatural event. Since supernatural events are at least exceedingly rare, I think I'm reasonable in holding any claim of supernaturalness to a very high standard. I can't prove that the supernatural never happens, but I can say that its existence has never been demonstrated.
  • And as for the notion of an evolutionary basis for a belief in the supernatural, it isn't mine nor is it new: God Gene. I don't entirely know if I buy it myself since it is sort of simplistic, but it is useful to think about how much of what seems reasonable to us is driven by our past as a species as well as our cultural heritage.
  • I only meant that it was sort of dangerously Judeo-Christian-centric to associate an evolutionary predisposition to belief in supernatural things with belief in "God." Consider the paths of populations in the "Out of Africa" and "parallel evolution" human evolutionary models and their associated belief structures and you are left with using "supernatural" in order to increase the accuracy of your statement and prevent offending people. In short: be careful about the use of the phrase "evolutionary heritage," you can't be exclusive without mucking up the entire works. Hamer's "God Gene" theory seems to follow that crude path by isolating groups which believe in higher powers and devaluing their cultural norms through the combination of title and concept of his theory, but that's Pandora's box, forget I said anything about that... Anyways...
  • Ack! Change "parallel evolution" to "Multiregional." Sorry so sloppy!
  • The God Gene theory is interesting--It can be viewed on several planes--a hypersensitivity to events, just not being wrapped too tight, whatever. It is hardwired for the human brain to be afraid of the unknown, seek explainations, find patterns, and create metaphor.
  • > Logic is "invented" by us only in a trivial sense. no. logic is invented by us in every sense. it is a way we use to describe the world. it has an internal consistency that we've worked on for many years, but that does not mean that it has an existence outside human consciousness. > I would need to see a very strong argument to convince me that anything "outside" the limitations set by logic and reason remains meaningful. that's essentially a faith-based statement, but now i'm getting into semantics. > I am not at all convinced that atheism involves faith of any kind, since your conception of God is, in my view, meaningless. i didn't offer you a conception of god. i presented two simple statements concerning definitions of god, as i understand them. i don't have my own conception of god, but i recognize that i'm making a faith-based decision to espouse atheism. perhaps the most faithless position is agnosticism. of course atheism involves faith; at some level, you put some amount of blind trust in empiricism, in science, in logic.
  • I don't think atheism involves faith, at least for the fairly weak kind of atheism I espouse. To me, it simply represents the most economical choice of a model of the world on the basis of what evidence I have to work with. If the evidence begins to support a deity, then I'll modify my model as needed.
  • sfred wrote: If it doesn't [generate falsifiable claims], then it can have no epistemological validity. Surely not all propositions need to generate testable claims to have meaning or epistemological validity. What about, for example, moral statements? It seems implausible to think that we should be able to study these scientifically, but that doesn't mean they're meaningless or unimportant. Maybe all value statements are immune from scientific study, but that doesn't mean we should eliminate or distrust all values! Why can't God claims sit in the same boat? Anyway, I think Popper's view of science is way too simplistic. Falsifiability is one important criterion for theories, that's true, but there are others. Belief in the existence of God might, for example, allow people to hold a more coherent view of the world. Coherence with experience might be as important as falsifiability in theory choice. Of course, God might not make a world view more coherent. That's debatable. roryk: You're arguing that trust in reason and logic is "blind" and requires "faith;" but I'm not sure that makes any sense. Consider what would be required for such trust not to be blind. Presumably, there would have to be some very good reason to trust reason and logic. But since the efficacy of reason and logic are at issue, obviously no such reason can be produced without begging the question (i.e. without already assuming that reason and logic can provide justification). So there's no possible way to show that reason and logic are sound, not so much because justifications for them don't exist, but because justifications can't exist for very deep, structural reasons. What should we conclude from this? I don't think we should conclude that reason and logic require "faith." Instead, we should recognize that an assumption in favor of reason and logic is part of the basic structure of explanation and justification. In other words, the whole enterprise of knowledge-gathering presupposes the supremacy of reason and logic, and this assumption is not simply useful, but necessary for the project itself. Therefore, before we ask whether or not God exists -- before we ask any question -- we have to assume that reason and logic are justified. To use Kant's jargon, reason and logic are transcendentally justified. No human being can disagree without talking nonsense.
  • logic is invented by us in every sense. it is a way we use to describe the world. it has an internal consistency that we've worked on for many years, but that does not mean that it has an existence outside human consciousness. Yet your rebuttal does not lead us to believe that it couldn't exist apart from human creation/discovery. If I'm not mistaken, you're postulating a relative existence of logic; in order for the tree to make a sound it requires a listener. Logic exists much in the same way that math does without conciousness, and both make sounds like trees do in a forest devoid of listeners.
  • I thought this post was going to be about this guy.
  • Smo, Popper is trying to explain how reliable statements can be made about the natural world. Moral statements as you've described them would be outside that calculus. That doesn't mean they aren't important, but it does mean that they can't be verified to be true using his epistemology. The cans still be studied using the scientific method, however, whether by making them the objects of study or by recasting them as true (social)scientific questions. A claim about the existence of god or of the supernatural more generally is not a claim about human values but rather a claim about the world at large, so Popper's epistemology does apply. More broadly I do agree with you that Popper has his critics and his limitations. For example, Lakatos changed the scale at which falsification operates and the sociologists of science following Kuhn have found that scientific practise doesn't seem to follow Popperian patterns. In my own work I'm much more partial to this sociology of science approach. Still, some notion of falsifiability seems to be buried in most models of science, so to a certain extent I think it's reasonable to use Popper's construction as a sort of a shorthand. Sorry for being so long-winded. This stuff is all sort of peripherally related to the area I work in so I've managed to get more caught up in this discussion than I intended. It's been a really interesting discussion and quite fun.
  • Smo, i'm in broad agreement with your position. however, i don't see any way around the conclusion that in the context of theism (i.e. once the existence of a god has been postulated/promulgated), a preference for atheism based upon logic/science must reside on a bedrock of faith in, for example, the scientific method. this becomes especially important with respect to the christian god, as nonbelief after exposure to "the word" is punishable. i don't think trust in reason and logic is blind (i wrote that it's been tested over time); i do think that there's a very basic decision to make between systems and that this decision resides upon faith. InsolentChimp, i don't think i'm taking a relativist position. i consider logic a derivation of natural phenomena that exists within human consciousness. it's largely a syntax that makes it possible to describe a reality to varying degrees of accuracy. i'd classify mathematics similarly. to return to my original point: these are basic systems, let's call them theism and logic. we're in the unfortunate situation that these systems were long mixed. by the way, it's since the separation of these systems that the most progress has been made. applying logic to theism or theism to logic can be interesting up to a point but is ultimately fruitless because the systems reside upon a fundamentally exclusive choice: a theist gives primacy to belief in god; a logician gives primacy to belief in logic (or the power of logic).
  • This just in: God hates prayer!!
  • This just in: God hates Daniel.
  • lowered himself by a rope into the enclosure, took his shoes off Well, that was his mistake right there. Obviously the lions had a "shoes-on" rule.
  • True, but considering that the anecdotal support for God's answering of prayers through healing is large and well documented (with everything from chronic pain to terminal cancers having healed spontaneously and said healing often having been ascribed to God), the lack of a documented case of spontaneous limb regrowth is notable in that context. Stephen Barrett on Faith Healing