The New Atheist Movement disagrees with this philosophy. They believe that religion is a testable hypothesis and feel that such testing has shown God not to exist.
You need only look up half a page in this thread to see that this is false.
Quick question, Samnell.
How do you know whether you are insane or sane?
You might be right; I might be crazy. It just might be a lunatic you're looking for. ...sorry, Billy Joel is as hip as I get. I'm considerably less funky than the chess club. :)
But seriously, I am not completely sure that I'm sane. Who could be? Sanity is a problematic psychological category to say the least. Like most people, I have maladaptive personality traits and fairly functional personality traits. Sometimes certain of the former make my life more difficult, but that's true of everybody.
What I have observed is that I am not dysfunctional to the extreme generally exhibited by those who have serious mental problems. Rather I seem to be roughly average in my dysfunctionality. Or maybe instead of dysfunctional and maladaptive, I should be saying abnormal. I guess it depends on whether one is asking about axe crazy insane, mad genius insane, or gibbering lunatic insane. I trained as a teacher, though not a special ed teacher, which gave me a little bit more nuanced view of mental illness than just crazy/not crazy.
If you are asking in a roundabout way if I think religious people are nuts, I would have to ask which religious people and about what. I do think the lot of religions are delusions. I do think that in the legal sense of the term insanity, which is the ability to tell right from wrong, plenty of religious leaders seem so far gone that to express it efficiently we'd need to measure in light years and use scientific notation to cut down on the zeroes. But does just believing in a religion make you crazy? No, not necessarily. It's possible to be mistaken, even obstinately in the face of contradictory and conclusive evidence, and not be insane.
Of course it's also possible to do all those things and be insane. Or do none of them and still be insane. Crazy doesn't ask for your papers before it makes a deposit. :)
You said that we know objective reality from experiencing it - but that's the definition of subjective (not objective) reality. So, I'm trying to figure out how you tell the difference.
Close. We know objective reality from examining it carefully and in a methodical way, constantly revising our tentative understandings in the light of new evidence and rejecting them if the evidence calls for it. In short, we know objective reality from science. We perform rather informal and haphazard observations as a kind of low rent version of this all the time. Your story about the zen master whacking the guy with the board describes something of that sort.
When I said, "we evolved to feel the numinous" I meant it in the same way one might say "we evolved to feel love". The numinous is a feeling.
Ok, I think I understand you now. At least as long as we allow that the purposefulness and foresight presumed in the language is a rhetorical flourish and not some kind of deliberate, organized plan by which evolution is proceeding. :)
1. Yes. Gould advocated "non-overlapping majesteria" (NOMA) -- science is supreme in matters of the natural world, religion supreme in matters of the supernatural, and neither is any good for the other. Sadly, there is no real definition for "supernatural," which means that Gould sort of painted religion into a corner: if "supernatural" phenomena do not follow natural laws as we know them, but are predictable, then they're susceptible to scientific inquiry, and the "supernatural" suddenly becomes "natural" once we adjust those laws to encompass them (like general relativity). On the other hand, if "supernatural" phenomena do not follow natural laws as known and can never be predicted, then religion can't predict them any better than science can.
I haven't read the book Gould wrote on the subject (and probably will not because I've found his writing very tedious and his thinking rather confused in other contexts) but isn't it the case that he owned up to creating NOMA not as a sound principle of science, philosophy or anything else, but rather as a PR position that appeased his many religious friends?
That would certainly explain NOMA's obvious failures. I think Gould was often confused and tended to think rhetorical strawmen he created to illustrate points by contrast were actual positions people in biology currently held, but a balk at the idea that something as obvious as the fact that religious largely adhere to cause and effect and make claims about the universe did not occur to him.
I'd like to step in and comment, as I myself am an active New ("Gnu") Atheist -- I regularly correspond with many of the more prominent proponents. Much like Benjamin Franklin wrote that tracts against Deism made him become a Deist, I was formerly an "accommodationist" -- an atheist who believes in ceding authority and importance to all religious claims, in hopes that the religious majority will graciously allow at least some scientific discoveries to stand -- until I read the views of both camps, and became convinced that the New Atheists, if a bit less polite, were a whole lot more honest about things.
Fine. Though I'll note that not all the world is dealing with the cultural context you are. When I was taught genetics there was not any pussyfooting it around to accommodate other points of view. If you want that go to Sunday School. But I live in a liberal area of Canada.
2. No; this is totally inaccurate. We believe that many specific truth claims made by religion (e.g., "the Earth is 6,000 years old," or "prayer makes people get better") can be tested, and most of them have indeed been shown to be false. That doesn't mean "religion" is false. As to God, there has never been any real evidence presented for His existence. Just as we provisionally assume that there are no fairies (since there's no evidence of their existence), we feel the same way about God. You can't "prove" that God does not exist -- you can only indicate how unlikely His existence is. Even Dawkins says "I'm 99.9% sure there's no God."
You make my case for me. Dawkin's does not come to that 99.9% statistic based on faith or a gut feeling. Instead he uses the methods and terminology of science.
3. It's not controversy for its own sake...
Nor did I claim that it was. Instead I contended that the New Atheist Movement is pretty much a reaction to the growing influence of the Christian right in, particularly, America, but also in the UK (but not really, as a comparison, France or Canada).
The New Atheist Movement disagrees with this philosophy. They believe that religion is a testable hypothesis and feel that such testing has shown God not to exist.You need only look up half a page in this thread to see that this is false.
Depends on the ground rules one chooses to play by. Once you allow that 'Does God Exist?' is something that can be a hypothesis its possible to argue, from a scientific perspective, that the answer is 'No'. All you really need to do is make a compelling case that the null hypothesis for 'Does God Exist?' is 'No'.
There is something of a historical case for doing this sort of thing. Starting with the Protestant Confessions of the 1500's (The Augsburg Confession and the two Helvitia Confessions) you'd note that they in fact ask that very question 'Does God Exist?' (probably use different words but the concept is there). They essentially come to a conclusion of 'Yes' from what is felt by the proponents to be a more or less rational method. From a modern perspective they pretty much argue that the null hypothesis is 'God does exist' basically because how else are you supposed to explain life, the universe and everything.
This line of reasoning, wrapped in different packages, gets used again and again right up until, roughly, Darwin. After that we really start to get this concept of a God of the Gaps and once that is in play one can start to argue that the null hypothesis ought to be 'no' or, alternatively, one can decide that rational arguments for the existence of God, at least using modern scientific methodology does not apply. Which begs the question...'why did it use to apply?'.
No, it holds that it is impossible to create a logical system which is perfectly consistent with itself and from which we can derive all possible true statements.
So far as I understand the theorem, it holds that it is impossible to create a logical system which is perfectly consistent with itself. Am I right so far?
Ok. But you are neglecting a point about it that I have discovered on repeated reading of the much-loathed wikipedia article and elsewhere:
The conclusions of Gödel's theorems are only proven for the formal theories that satisfy the necessary hypotheses. Not all axiom systems satisfy these hypotheses, even when these systems have models that include the natural numbers as a subset. For example, there are first-order axiomatizations of Euclidean geometry, of real closed fields, and of arithmetic in which multiplication is not provably total; none of these meet the hypotheses of Gödel's theorems. The key fact is that these axiomatizations are not expressive enough to define the set of natural numbers or develop basic properties of the natural numbers. Regarding the third example, Dan E. Willard (Willard 2001) has studied many weak systems of arithmetic which do not satisfy the hypotheses of the second incompleteness theorem, and which are consistent and capable of proving their own consistency (see self-verifying theories).
Well ok, looks like not all logical systems need apply. Since Godel is also telling us that if we had a system that did tell us everything (again within his narrow framework) about its subject it will also include false positives, I'm afraid science is plain off the hook. Science has methods for detecting and eliminating false positives. That's even aside the fact that far from all statements in science qua science are about natural numbers (In fact, precious few of them are. They're about the observation and measurement of the universe and its behavior.) and thus fall under the theorem's remit.
Sorry, but science doesn't reduce to math. It uses math, but that's the end of it.
Is it safe to say that the careful and methodical way you use has nothing to do with mathematics or logic? If so, can you explain this careful and methodical way?
We know objective reality from examining it carefully and in a methodical way
Not that it has nothing to do with them, a proposition I have repeatedly dismissed. Rather that they are mere among the tools it uses. Science is empirical, in the formal philosophical sense, not rational, also in the formal, philosophical sense. Logic can help it clarify and clean up its findings, of course. And math can be useful in describing them. But they are adjuncts to the actual work of experimentation, observation, repetition, and falsification. Their role is akin to that of test tubes and computers.
Pure math, or formal logic for that matter, in the absence of real-world referents is just irrelevant except as a source of entertainment. Who cares about P and Not P if P has no real meaning? Nobody, of course. It's literally mental masturbation.
What purposefulness and foresight are you talking about?
At least as long as we allow that the purposefulness and foresight presumed in the language is a rhetorical flourish
The idea that evolution has some kind of plan or goal to which it is proceeding, as if some consciousness cooked the whole thing up and sculpts it like a topiary. Evolution is not a person. It has no consciousness or plan. It doesn't care if we live or die. It's not working towards anything. Feeling, be it the numinous or a really nice meal, isn't something it had on a checklist that it wanted to accomplish.
You make my case for me. Dawkin's does not come to that 99.9% statistic based on faith or a gut feeling. Instead he uses the methods and terminology of science.
Your case was, "he thinks he proved there's no God." Proof was your word, not his. In conflating "reasonable certainty" with "proof," you make an egregious misstatement of his (and my) position.
Did you skim over this part, "The key fact is that these axiomatizations are not expressive enough to define the set of natural numbers or develop basic properties of the natural numbers"? The exceptions you point to are extremely restricted in what they are able to express and depend on a tightly defined sample space. You and I, howewver, are discussing the real world - something requiring much more powerful axiomizations than the natural numbers.
Well ok, looks like not all logical systems need apply.
Right, so again Godel is irrelevant. And actually, math is exactly what I would describe as an extremely restricted, tightly defined space of ideas. (Ideas which, I repeat, are in their pure forms meaningless and irrelevant.) Reality is much, much, much bigger and simplifications in pure maths can't help but be irrelevant to it.
Which, I note, I managed to figure out without any of the considerable help you absolutely refuse to give me in seeing how Godel has any relevance to science at all. I'm starting to suspect this is another one of those nauseating cases of a person in the humanities thinking they understanding something outside them and wanting to apply it haphazardly. Please tell me you weren't one of those philosophy students who did everything possible to avoid learning about science so you could attack the analogies used to explain it to laypeople instead of, you know, being principled and responsible.
Or is it one of those the other way around where an engineer thinks he knows science and the biologists have it all wrong? Whichever.
This doesn't even make sense. You argue that Godel tells us that a system that did tell us everything about it's subject will also include false positives. You point out that science has methods to identify false positives. Therefore, according to Godel's theorem, it is not a system capable of telling us everything about it's subject.
I remain convinced of nothing but the complete inapplicability of the theorem to science. You have not made the case. I'm left to play with words and stab at whatever tiny bits of your thesis you want to share. Shadowboxing is a bit tedious, but it's what I've got to work with. Seriously, make your damned case already. I can't read your mind and I'm not going to go back to school and get a PhD in maths so I can expel piles of set notation or whatever for your amusement.
If it were empirical but not rational, then, again, how do you know that the facts you pick up through empiricism aren't simply the hallucinations of insanity? You already said you don't know if you're insane. It doesn't sound like your method is careful at all. No, this isn't an attack on science, it's a criticism of your erroneous understanding of what science is.
Replication of experiments. When multiple independent groups perform the same experiment and get the same result, we can safely eliminate hallucination as a factor. Furthermore if we came to a mistaken notion, it would eventually out even if it the results were replicated when new data came to light which indicated that we'd been mistaken previously. This isn't just careful, it's the ultimate in all epistemological standards.
If science were rational, how would you know it had anything to do with reality at all and wasn't just an internally consistent system of make believe, like Platonism or a TV show with a really good continuity editing department.
I have absolutely no idea what this has to do with our discussion. I was rather strictly and (I think) clearly discussing the numinous in terms of its evolutionary advantage, not in terms of where it was on some imaginary checklist.
You asked about the language of purposefulness and I explained. I do not understand the source of your confusion.
I'm going to try to explain this one more time and if you're still not getting it, I'm going to give up.
I'm still not convinced you started, but ok. I almost gave up when you said that science was rationalist.
This is really, really easy to understand. The only reason you aren't understanding it is because a.) you don't understand that science is based on a logical system of enquiry and b.) you don't understand Godel's theorem. Not understanding these things is fine, one can learn. However, you've said that you have no desire to take the time or make the effort to learn Godel's theorem. The problem lies in the fact that I tried to make the effort to explain these ideas to someone who has no desire to learn them. What I should have done is saved myself time and just let you wonder off.
I think the problem is more that you think you get to play priest to me and not have questions asked back, but so it goes. I conveyed your position to a practicing linguist of my acquaintance, who certainly has more math and science than my teacher college brain does. (I ought to have thought to ask someone with more expertise earlier on. Obvious, really.) His answer:
I do not see any way that Godel's incompleteness theorem can say anything coherent about science, which is not strictly speaking logical. Godel's theorems are about axiomatic systems, although it is true that scientists use mathematics to model aspects of nature. But science is about inductive reasoning, not deductive reasoning. It is only a method for distinguishing between alternative hypotheses, not yielding absolute proofs.
I would not ordinarily resort to calling on the testimony of a guy I know from another message board, what with Google and all and because I could certainly be making it all up, but I was unable to find anybody making your specific claims or offering a response to them before I tired of paging through the search results.
I am left with the same impression I had when I read a creationist trying to use information theory to dismiss evolution. He could never swing establishing a meaningful connection either. When asked what he meant by information, in a biological sense, he outright refused to answer. Informed that in the absence of such a foundational definition, he could not simply assert that information theory was applicable, he declared that his opposites were deliberately misunderstanding or refusing to listen.
Familiar, eh?
And now for something a little fun...
That was great on several levels. I think I might rewatch it later to get some more.
I haven't seen the show in about six months. Is it just this bit or as Stephen's character shifted? Back in the day I would have expected him to agree with Bill and just carry in so that the statements were obviously absurd to the viewer, as though he were so clueless as to be unaware of the fact. I saw less delusional idiot there and more angry Sunday School teacher.
Also: Jesus was not self-destructive. Ha!
You make my case for me. Dawkin's does not come to that 99.9% statistic based on faith or a gut feeling. Instead he uses the methods and terminology of science.Your case was, "he thinks he proved there's no God." Proof was your word, not his. In conflating "reasonable certainty" with "proof," you make an egregious misstatement of his (and my) position.
This is becoming a silly semantic argument.
I did not use the word proof but a sentence more broad then that.
"They believe that religion is a testable hypothesis and feel that such testing has shown God not to exist."
Its an accurate statement regarding, broadly speaking, the New Atheist's methodology and their conclusions. If you feel the statement could use some caveats and foot notes fine but its by no means "an egregious misstatement".
This is becoming a silly semantic argument.
"They believe that religion is a testable hypothesis and feel that such testing has shown God not to exist."
Its an accurate statement regarding, broadly speaking, the New Atheist's methodology and their conclusions. If you feel the statement could use some caveats and foot notes fine but its by no means "an egregious misstatement".
It's not semantic; it's the essence of the matter. There exists no "test" for something as poorly-defined as "God." All there is, is a total lack of evidence FOR one. To anyone with an ounce of scientific background, the difference there is night and day. If you can't see that, I'll be happy to explain at greater length when I have the time. In essence, it's like someone claiming that cars work by sympathetic magic: a metal dinosaur is filled with "dinosaur blood" in order to work. The rejoinder of course is that the auto's shape is irrelevant, and that oil isn't made of dinosaurs at all, etc. If that, too, is nothing more than "a silly semantic argument" to you, then so be it.
You've also conflated "religion" with "God" -- another fundamental, non-trivial error.
This is becoming a silly semantic argument.
No, it's not. It has been said several times, very clearly, that the existence of God is NOT testable. Dawkins himself has come out repeatedly and state that it is IMPOSSIBLE to disprove god.
In other words, your assertion is incorrect on the most fundamental level. There's nothing semantic about it -- it's just flat out wrong.
First off, appeals to authority don't work in geek circles. I don't care if you claim to be Godel's love child or if you claim to have spoken to Noam Chomsky/Stephen Hawking/John von Neumann's ghost/or some other celebrity researcher.
It will also, of course, be an appeal to authority if I read a textbook and cite it as disagreeing with you. If you want to accuse me of dishonesty, that's fine. You have no way to confirm that I actually consulted the linguist I know, or even that I know a linguist. But you don't understand the fallacious appeal to authority if you're trying to use it against me for consulting someone with relevant expertise on the issue at hand.
Second, I don't want to be in the position of being a "priest". I've wanted you, if you're at all serious about this discussion, to take the time and effort to learn Godel's theorem so that I can have an intelligent and reasoned argument with you on how it relates to undecidability within knowledge paradigms.
You want me to educate myself but continually stand in the way of my doing so. In fact, the first effort I made at it got nothing but disdain from you. Your words say 'yes' but your actions say 'no'.
Instead, you expect me to have a discussion with you on fairly complex subjects (e.g. the numinous (which you thought was something more than a feeling), Godel's theorem (which you've said you don't want to understand), etc.).
LilithsThrall, I'm getting my information on the numinous from you. I pointed out to you exactly what gave me the impression of what you meant by it in your own text. Complaining about misunderstandings generated by your own ambiguous and self-contradictory prose is a bit hypocritical, isn't it?
Your linguist friend should know that Godel's theorem applies to any axiomatic system which is consistent and claims to be a universal truth machine (and that science is based on axioms - empiricism, parsimony, repeatability, etc. are all axioms of science). Godel's application isn't restricted to deductive reasoning.
Yet oddly, he does not. How do you explain how a practicing scientist, who has a pretty good command of math to, is so ignorant?
Science isn't math, one cannot just assert that the inherent limitations of mathematics apply a priori. Even if they did it would be trivial since science will chug along and self-correct regardless. As long as there is evidence, science proceeds. If it's the case that the universe is infinitely complex, it might take an infinite amount of time for science to get to it all. But so what? We'll all be dead (and in all likelihood the universe and time with it too) before there would be any practical relevance. I could agree with every single word you said and still find the whole thing meaningless. Only a fool would expect to gain omniscience from science. There's not enough time in a human life.
If you want to accuse me of dishonesty, that's fine.Telling you that appeals to authority don't work isn't the same as accusing you of dishonesty. The very reason I haven't brought up the fact that I've got a degree in Anthropology is because it'd come off as an appeal to authority and no more relevant to this discusion than the fact that you know some linguist.
Actually that would have been very helpful. I would at least have had an idea where you get some of your ideas from.
What I will accuse you of, however, is arguing about things you know absolutely nothing about (and I point to the fact that you were arguing over the numinous without even knowing it is a feeling, the fact that you are arguing over Godel's theorem while knowing nothing about it, etc.).
When you say "numinous" to me without explanation I simply dismiss it as wishful thinking (since after all there's no divinity and the word means feeling of the divinity) and hope you'll say something that might be interesting instead. When I asked you for clarification of your statements, you provided it. Then now you are complaining because, apparently, I couldn't read your mind. Again.
I will note that I have in past posts taken the time to explain what I meant by terms when I thought there was ambiguity, and I wasn't an ass to you because of it.
You want me to educate myself but continually stand in the way of my doing so.
How the hell am I standing in your way of educating yourself? I'm sure you can go visit the local college library and pick up a couple of books. I don't know how I'm keeping you from doing that.
I ask questions you don't answer. I request information you refuse to provide. And this is about your own positions. You ought to be forthcoming. Saying "go read a book" does not constitute an argument. I am not interested in mathematics for its own sake for reasons I have explained. You must first demonstrate its relevance (not merely assert it) in order to garner my interest. I'm not going to waste my time just to entertain you. There are other things I'd rather be reading.
Anyone with even the most rudimentary skill level in research knows to study from many sources - so as to reduce the possibility of what you did (depend on one source which you misread).
Anyone with even the most rudimentary skill in conversation knows that if you don't understand what a person means by a term, the first thing you ought to do is ask them. After all, they ought to know. Call me a crazy fundamentalist, but I don't think that's nuts.
If you had said, for example, that you were using the term in the formal sense in which it's used in anthropology, then I still would have asked you (since after all, I am failing to have a conversation with you) but might also have consulted elsewhere.
But it occurred to me a few minutes ago while I was out getting some fast food like a good American that given the unfamiliarity I have with the theorems in question that I approached the suggestion you made from entirely the wrong angle. You said that Godel's theorems proved (even though science doesn't use proof in the mathematical sense) that there would always be some truths we could not know through science.
What would a truth that we could not know through science look like? (We shall assume science consistent and Godel applicable for the purposes of argument, so the option for science is to be perpetually incomplete.) It obviously can't arise from observation of the universe, or we could know it. It can't be some fact about a particle or whatever, since we can (or at least could potentially) measure those things using the conventional methods. It can't be something that interacts with matter, since we could study that too. It couldn't be something that is done by matter as an emergent property, since we can study that. It can't operate by cause and effect, since we can study those too.
We have something that cannot ever be observed.
We have something that cannot ever interact with anything we can observe.
We have something that, even if the above were true, operates with perfect randomness.
If you can't say anything about that with science, it's only because you can't say anything about it with anything. Even if it did exist, and these criteria are pretty much a description of nonexistence, it could not ever possibly be relevant to us anyway as it has no way with which to interact with us.
Given that, I request the presentation of the truth you consider beyond science and an explanation of why if it is we should care since it's physically and logically impossible for it to matter to our existence.
This is becoming a silly semantic argument.
"They believe that religion is a testable hypothesis and feel that such testing has shown God not to exist."
Its an accurate statement regarding, broadly speaking, the New Atheist's methodology and their conclusions. If you feel the statement could use some caveats and foot notes fine but its by no means "an egregious misstatement".
It's not semantic; it's the essence of the matter. There exists no "test" for something as poorly-defined as "God." All there is, is a total lack of evidence FOR one. To anyone with an ounce of scientific background, the difference there is night and day. If you can't see that, I'll be happy to explain at greater length when I have the time. In essence, it's like someone claiming that cars work by sympathetic magic: a metal dinosaur is filled with "dinosaur blood" in order to work. The rejoinder of course is that the auto's shape is irrelevant, and that oil isn't made of dinosaurs at all, etc. If that, too, is nothing more than "a silly semantic argument" to you, then so be it.
You've also conflated "religion" with "God" -- another fundamental, non-trivial error.
Fine lets do this your way then. Rewrite the sentence so that its accurate in regards to the New Atheist Movement and we'll call it a day.
And now for something a little fun...
Good stuff. Easy for a liberal like myself to find lots of laughs in this.
"They believe that religion is a testable hypothesis and feel that such testing has shown God not to exist." Rewrite the sentence so that its accurate in regards to the New Atheist Movement and we'll call it a day.
I've sort of already done so, but how about this:
"The New Atheists believe that many of the truth claims* made by religions have in fact been shown to be false, that many of the admonishments in the sacred texts are immoral on the face of them, that the various religions tend to contradict one another regarding critical and even central tenets and details, and that there is no mechanism inherent in religion for correcting these errors -- leading to the conclusion that religion, as a "way of knowing" facts and/or morality, is not useful. They therefore attack the aura of majesty and protection from criticism that religion traditionally enjoys."
"The New Atheists believe that many of the truth claims* made by religions have in fact been shown to be false, that many of the admonishments in the sacred texts are immoral on the face of them, that the various religions tend to contradict one another regarding critical and even central tenets and details, and that there is no mechanism inherent in religion for correcting these errors -- leading to the conclusion that religion, as a "way of knowing" facts and/or morality, is not useful. They therefore attack the aura of majesty and protection from criticism that religion traditionally enjoys."
That deserves a round of applause for on the nose, succinct writing. So, constraints of the medium being what they are:
*applause* :)
Many claims shown to be false, immoral, and contradictory? The same thing can be said of science.
Good thing science claims are testable, and that the entire process of science is based on continued testing (indeed, the easiest way to gain prominence as a scientist is to demonstrate an existing claim to be erroneous). As to contradictory claims: within the scientific community, there are no major "sects" regarding things like plate tectonics, the age of the earth, or the evolution of life -- not because of dogma, but because constant efforts to overthrow these paradigms have instead resulted in more evidence that they are correct. On the flip side, how many major world religions are there, the central tenets of which are that, in essence, the others are all wrong?
And, yes, there is a mechanism inherent in religion to correct errors. To pick one example, you've heard, perhaps, of the Reformation?
The Reformation was an escape from the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, but didn't, in and of itself, change any of the truth claims. A far better example than yours would be Joseph Smith, who added quite a number of truth claims which Mormons accept and most Christians don't -- or Muhammad, likewise with respect to Muslims. So I'll go a step further in my description:
"The New Atheists believe that the so-called knowledge gained from personal revelation cannot objectively be determined from personal delusion, as it is not verifiable -- if discoveries cannot be verified by others, they cannot be trusted."
---
Again, all of this implies simply that revelation is not a valid way of knowing. Over 200 years ago, Ethan Allen and Tom Paine were writing pamphlets saying much the same thing -- they believed in God as an unknowable quantity that does not interact with the world, but in science as a means of learning about the world.
1. Not everything of value is testable. How do you test morality? How do you test good art? Should you even test love?
2. You're wrongly equating religion to Biblical creationism.
3. Outside of the United States? Very few. For example, Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism have peacefully co-existed for about two thousand years.
4. I grew up in a cult. I assure you that having discoveries verified by others is absolutely NO indication they can be trusted.
1. You could look at the results, and apply some rubric such as "results in net increase in suffering" or something. Sadly, the social sciences are lagging far behind the physical sciences in terms of development of applications.
2. I chose YEC examples, but take any other testable truth claim and the point still holds: e.g., "Disease is caused by the arrows of Rudra."
3. Outside the U.S.? Let's look at two of the three largest world religions: Islam and Hinduism, which most emphatically do NOT peacefully co-exist! If you pick three religions that (a) don't involve a supreme god, and (b) have a minimal number of truth claims about the physical world, then, yes, there's likely less strife. Although even then you need to adjust your timeline as well: there was major Buddhist-Taoist-Confucianist strife in China in 845 CE, for example, during the T'ang Dynasty.
4. "Believed because someone says so" =/= "verified by testing." Or, in the words of (prominent New Atheist) Christopher Hitchens, "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."
Islam and Hinduism? You do know, I hope, that the strife between India and Pakistan isn't based on religion?
Sure. And why was Pakistan partitioned from India to begin with? Oh, yeah. Also, check out the Hindu vs. Muslim riots within India some time. I'm sure you can come up with a host of secondary reasons for them if you try, but the primary one is fairly glaring.
If memory serves, I asked you awhile back to read up on Marvin Harris' work on the sacred cow of India. Have you done so?
Your memory fails you -- I personally recall being asked no such thing. Still, I've read a bit of Harris (studied a fair amount of anthropology at University), and I fail to see why a useful custom that was subsequently co-opted into the existing religion makes a good case for religion as a "way of knowing." (I'm also surprised you didn't also mention the ban on shellfish in Leviticus, which is a very similar example.) Religion as a way of maintaining potentially useful cultural traditions? Sure, but it equally tends also to preserve non-useful ones (unless you personally feel that stoning rape victims, for example, is "useful" for society).
---
In any event, I was asked upthread to summarize the New Atheist viewpoint. I have done so. Your subsequent disagreement with many of those viewpoints is of course a separate topic.
To pick one example, you've heard, perhaps, of the Reformation?
Which settled things so well that there are still roughly a billion Catholics, and the Protestants didn't disappear either.
It was an excellent way to get a lot of people dead and rip up a few countries for a century, though.
Not everything of value is testable. How do you test morality? How do you test good art? Should you even test love?
I actually have answers to those questions, but I'm not convinced you want to hear them. I've found that arguing for the sake of argument, to use Kirth's phrase, "results in net increase in suffering".
Here's what appears to be our basic point of disagreement in this thread. You think religion is 100% absolutely poisonous.
That's not what I believe. I do think it's 100% wrong, factually speaking. (At least insofar as religions make fact claims. Many of their doctrines are simply incoherent or irrelevant.) But that's hardly news. I don't think all forms of religion are necessarily morally perverse. I don't think that all forms of religion invariably destroy any useful or redeeming traits that their adherents might otherwise have possessed.
I do think all religions are bad for various reasons, but some are certainly almost infinitely worse than others.
While I've said that it'd be pathological to put faith in the church, I also believe that religion can serve a useful and productive purpose.And the Reformation changed the Catholic church just as much as it created Protestants.
And how did that settle the religious differences? The Catholics certainly did not come to agree with Sola Scriptura. Nor did the Protestants of various stripes agree that the Magisterium should instead be the final word on the same subjects. One or the other of these must be the case; they are mutually exclusive.
Compare this with phlogiston. How many physicists and chemists take phlogiston seriously? How many that you can talk to without getting a shovel and visiting a graveyard?
How many Catholics still believe that the Bible is not the sole intermediary between humans and their god? Roughly a billion. Had the Reformation actually managed to correct errors, as you assert, then one or the other of these positions would have become extinct, at least for practical purposes.
|
Had the Reformation actually managed to correct errors, as you assert, then one or the other of these positions would have become extinct, at least for practical purposes.I suspect that, if the Reformation had managed to make Catholicism extinct, you'd be pointing to it as an example of how different religious beliefs can't peacefully co-exist.
They also seem to forget about the counter reformation.
LT I applaud the effort but your wasting your time.
Had the Reformation actually managed to correct errors, as you assert, then one or the other of these positions would have become extinct, at least for practical purposes.I suspect that, if the Reformation had managed to make Catholicism extinct, you'd be pointing to it as an example of how different religious beliefs can't peacefully co-exist.
Since I never claimed that, it would be a surprise if things played out that way. You said religions have methods of correcting error and cited the Reformation as an example. I pointed out that if any errors were involved in the Reformation, they were not resolved at its end or even today. The only progress, after a century of intermittent warfare and slaughter, was that everyone was exhausted and just wanted to stop getting killed, so therefore would agree to stop killing. The differences remained.
As for beliefs that have fallen out of favor in European religions, there's a long list from the Divine Right of Kings to the white man's burden to the defense of slavery.
Quite right, but these are not things the Reformation solved. My position is not that religion is eternally unchanging, which is obviously false, but rather that religion has no mechanism by which conflicts are resolved build into it. Instead it piggybacks on politics (often warfare but this is lately out of fashion) or other external methods. It must do this since there's no way to resolve conflicts of faith otherwise. The guys who believe differently than you are at least as faithful as you are. They generally have at least as many Bible verses they can cite. The list goes on.
You said religions have methods of correcting error and cited the Reformation as an example. I pointed out that if any errors were involved in the Reformation, they were not resolved at its end or even today.And you are, once more, wrong. As Crimson Jester just brought up, you should read more about the counter reformation.
Is Sola Scriptura or is it not a dogma of the Catholic faith? This isn't hard to understand if you're not commited to avoiding the question, thrall. If it isn't, and the Protestants haven't accepted the Catholic Magisterium, then obviously the Reformation didn't solve that issue. What issues do you think it did solve if we still have Protestants and Catholics? I mean, find a scientist who thinks phlogiston is real. See the contrast yet?
And hey CJ, since you're apparently posting here again are you ever going to answer those questions I asked months ago?
Maybe you and I have different views regarding the value of diversity.
If your criticism comes down to differences of opinion regarding how many angels can dance on the head of a pin (which is about as relevant as Sola Scriptura is), you really are reaching to make an argument. Come back when you've got something that's actually relevant to the social good (like equality, freedom, social responsibility, etc.)
Dude, you're the one who said religion corrects its errors. What did you think I was going to ask you about if not religious controversies?
I agree with you that sola scriptura is a pile of meaningless verbiage we ought not care about in the least (and that anybody who thinks its worth killing people over deserves a one-way trip to the nut house too) but that was one of the issues of the Reformation. I could have picked others, like the sale of indulgences, but it's the first that came to mind.
If it's a matter of error, then one or the other party must be wrong as their positions are mutually exclusive. Diversity is simply irrelevant. If religion really has that error-correcting method you say it has, why has it failed so totally here? The issue is important to the religious, since it's about knowing God's will. It's clearly a case that one party or the other is right. So why isn't the error corrected?
Things that are actually important.
Dude, you're the one who said religion corrects its errors. What did you think I was going to ask you about if not religious controversies?
I listed an issue over which people were killing each other. People do lots of crazy things, but it's virtually impossible to get them to go way out of their way and put themselves at risk of life and limb (while doing the same favor for others) over something they don't think is important at all. You and I might think they're insane to do so, but they hardly required our approval to do it. And do you, as a religious person, really think that the correct method of knowing your god's will is a meaningless triviality?
Because that sounds rather, well, actively irreligious. Not that I'm complaining since I think everyone should be sensibly secular so we can close up all those temples and use the time and resources for things I think are actually important, but every theist I've ever met from crazy-ass fundamentalists to bra-burning liberals has told me that knowing, or trying to know, God's will is of utmost importance.
The Reformation and the Counter Reformation addressed actual issues of importance (for example, the Counter Reformation focused attention back on to the parish level - thus putting priests more in touch with the people). Those are errors. Arguments over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin aren't.
I don't see how customer service is a religious controversy. It sounds like an administrative and political issue, the type of thing that could face any organization. Which, as I said previously, just goes to show that religions don't actually have error correction methods but rather borrow them from elsewhere. I mean you're so up on the Council of Trent, you should know they decided things by vote. Political issue, political solution.
A religious solution would involve everyone praying and getting a convenient revelation that one party or the other is correct, which settles the issue. I mean that's the religious method: Pray and get an idea then ascribe it to God. Temporarily impairing oneself through fasting, drugs, or whatever, is optional. It's no accident that this more or less never works.
And do you, as a religious person, really think that the correct method of knowing your god's will is a meaningless triviality?This is about as relevant to religion as phrenology is to science.
You mean actual observations of religious people and their historical behavior in the field as to what's important to them are irrelevant?
There will always be people looking for an excuse to oppress others. The church is hardly unique in this regard.
And you will not hear me say otherwise.
I think that god's will is pretty clear and killing people over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin isn't it.
The thing is that they thought the same thing. How, using religion and only religion, does one resolve this controversy? It's certainly not obvious to this outside observer that you're in the right. I prefer your position since, however ignorant, I'm not evil. But I can find as much justification in theology and holy books for the killing as for not killing.
Let's do this one at a time.
Should you even test love?
Yes! Like the bible says, "Test everything, keep the good." (Timothy IIRC).
First of all we have to define love, because it's a rather nebulous word in English. I'm going to discuss interpersonal love.
Like anything you have to test love in good faith (so to speak). You can't test love a priori: e.g. "If you love me you will do this..." That's bad science and unloving on one's own part.
You can test love a posterior. "She made this sacrifice for me, so she probably loves me." That's a point of the story of the Good Samaritan: The Priest may profess love, but he doesn't stop. The Levite may profess love but he doesn't stop. The Samaritan, who we're suppose to hate for some reason, is the one who stops and helps. Who really is expressing love here? Now tell me Jesus isn't describing a test for love?
Everything can be quantified. Maybe not to the degree of this is more than that. For this discussion, the erroneous "who do you love more?". But everything that is can be defines as there/not-there. When someone says they love someone, and then they abuse that person, their actions demonstrate that their words are untrue. Without that, the most basic of tests, love has no meaning.