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Is your atheism predominately a science success or a theism fail?

The Big Dog said:
While one does enjoy a surfeit of exclamation points, I notice that this claim appears to be made up of whole cloth.

You don't really think that Newton secretly did not believe in God but could only transmit that knowledge to us in this day and age by wishful thinking?
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'k

:rolleyes:
 
The Big Dog said:
There is no requirement that love, hope, beauty, empathy, good taste, hell political beliefs have evidence or verification.

Say, I love my kids.... so let’s get out the test tubes and run that through the old verification process.

How ridiculous.
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acbytesla said:
No, your post is ridiculous. Love, hope, beauty, empathy, good taste etc are descriptive words for feelings or ideas. They aren't really an existential claim. Comparing that to a God claim is comparing apples to oranges.

In contrast, you claim that the Bible is the word of God and that we should follow it. For me, the mere assertion that there is a God and the bible is God's word is not enough. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and yet none has ever been provided.
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The Big Dog said:
anyone else get whiplash from that change of subject??

My post expertly showed that many things most of us directly experience every day are not subject to "scientific" "verification," despite being so claimed in this thread.

Rather than getting an attempt at a response, we get cherry picking.
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You'll have to explain how this is a change of subject.

Your making a false analogy. You are comparing a feeling or a thought to an existential claim. That really is the change of subject. We can prove that your kids exist. You can show us pictures or videos of them. We can also monitor your physiological responses and identify electrical and chemical patterns that are associated with what people refer to as love.

I'd also say that you could have similar feelings about the idea that you call God. But your physiological responses do not prove anything other than a thought in your mind. I concede that you have thoughts. They are most certainly real. But thoughts and feelings prove absolutely nothing about whether there is an underlying true fact.
 
The Big Dog said:
........ much as I have done so with the false dichotomy in the opening post by demonstrating that religious faith and science are not incompatable........
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They are not, so long as you squint a bit and overlook the unscientific guff in most of the holy texts around the world.

If you accept that "religious faith" is dependent upon those texts, then faith and science are incompatible*. If you insist on clinging on to faith, then you have to accept that the religious texts are junk. I'd have a bit more patience with the religious if more of them were prepared to say "the (insert your favourite religious text name here) is full of absolute nonsense, but I have separate reasons for accepting the existence of a deity".

As for my own atheism........it's because even at the age of 6 or 7 I had a functioning bull-**** detector. A series of religious types tried to over-ride this detector, but failed. By the age of 10 or 11 I was the one kid in the school who would sit with eyes open during school prayers whilst everyone else knelt and mumbled out the responses supposed to keep them from burning in hell for eternity. I thought it hilarious.



*In strict terms, faith and science are mutually exclusive concepts. Science is a way of working out how stuff happens without having to rely on unevidenced assertions. Faith is acceptance of unevidenced assertions.
 
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acbytesla said:
Your making a false analogy. You are comparing a feeling or a thought to an existential claim. That really is the change of subject. We can prove that your kids exist. You can show us pictures or videos of them. We can also monitor your physiological responses and identify electrical and chemical patterns that are associated with what people refer to as love.
.
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No, I was replying to a claim that beliefs require evidence and verification. Do people really not bother reading the posts to which i was replying for the ESSENTIAL context.

Your contention about "monitoring" is obviously specious because that is not love (further you are ignoring cause and effect). Indeed there was a study mentioned hereabouts not too long ago that noted that atheists have a negative effect when they take the name of our Lord God in vain.
 
acbytesla said:
The first thing that is necessary when creating a valid scientific hypothesis is that the hypothesis is necessarily falsifiable. And I have never heard hypothesis for testing that a God exists that is. Usually they fail when they try to define God. Feel free Ginger to come up with one that doesn't start out with false premises or fallacies. I bet you can't. Every time I have ever heard anyone try, it's always filled with unproven assertions and special pleading.

So back to what I'm saying. It is impossible to apply the scientific method to the question AND prove or disprove it.

Unfalsifiable
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It takes a paradigm shift and not everyone has made that shift... yet. ;) You may or may not but it's not about arguing my falsifiable hypothesis, it's about letting go of the wrong question or scientific problem.

Hypothesis: Human god beliefs are fictional creations. Human gods are mythical creatures. It's not only easily tested, we can even go the next step in Koch's Postulate and put the hypothesis to the test. This was done albeit not purposefully when the Cargo Cults developed.

What gets in the way of this paradigm shift is the argument one cannot prove that is the case for all god beliefs. It's a rather stupid argument, IMO, because we don't do any such thing with say for example evolution theory. Does anyone say one cannot conclude all mammal lifeforms on Earth are DNA based because one has not yet tested every lifeform? That's not how we word scientific conclusions.

Is it falsifiable because you can test every lifeform even if the task is immense? What about extinct animals? At some point we say we have tested enough mammal lifeforms that we develop a theory.

And evolution is a theory because there is always potential for new evidence.

But we don't say we can't 'prove' that fact therefore evolution theory is not falsifiable. We say one can generate falsifiable hypotheses within evolution theory.

The whole idea we can't let go of fictional god beliefs because we can't prove no gods exist is a ludicrous argument. Fiction is fiction, it's not evidence. It's not something one has to constantly remind ourselves or others of that there is no proof every god is a fictional creature.

We could test every god belief but it is an immense task. So like genomes, at some point we conclude there is a pattern.

What other 'no evidence for X' do you do that with?

Life on other planets? No, that is not something we have no evidence for, we have evidence life exists in the Universe, it is all around us. So that 'X' is a where and how much, not a 'no evidence for'.

String theory? That's above my pay grade but it's my understanding that is a theory to explain evidence that doesn't fit into current particle physics.


Back to testing the 'gods are fictional' hypothesis? How do you test that? Now you have the problem of hard science vs what is so-called soft science. Contrary to what people not involved in sciences such as anthropology might believe, the scientific method applies and there are ways to test multi-variable human behavior problems.
 
The Big Dog said:
No, I was replying to a claim that beliefs require evidence and verification. Do people really not bother reading the posts to which i was replying for the ESSENTIAL context.
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Of course they do. I'd argue that you require some evidence of virtually every belief you have except God. Feelings and thoughts are not beliefs. They are simply human reactions. You love your children because you touch them and interact with them. They have audible voices and an image pattern that you recognize. Whereas God is simply an idea in your head.

The Big Dog said:
Your contention about "monitoring" is obviously specious because that is not love (further you are ignoring cause and effect). Indeed there was a study mentioned hereabouts not too long ago that noted that atheists have a negative effect when they take the name of our Lord God in vain.
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Really? Then what is love? Are you saying it is more than an idea or physical reaction? As for the so called study? So what? I don't deny that humans have physical reactions to ideas in their heads. Whether it be negative or positive, their emotions are real. My mother passed away when I was 15 and I still have physical reactions when I think about her. But my mother is not real. She ceased to exist 30 years ago.

With God, I'm assuming that you have never actually seen God or had an audible conversation with it. Have you? I bet you have no pictures or videos of God playing in your backyard. Or do you? All you know of it are shared ideas from other believers and what you have read in an old book. Now again, I concede that you may have emotions about those ideas. But that is not, nor should it be enough. I don't ask you to prove your thoughts and emotions, but if you tell me that you or your ancestors conversed regularly with leprechauns, fairies or gods and that I should embrace and obey these rules put down in 2000 year old writings, I'm going to REQUIRE CREDIBLE evidence.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
It takes a paradigm shift and not everyone has made that shift... yet. ;) You may or may not but it's not about arguing my falsifiable hypothesis, it's about letting go of the wrong question or scientific problem.

Hypothesis: Human god beliefs are fictional creations. Human gods are mythical creatures. It's not only easily tested, we can even go the next step in Koch's Postulate and put the hypothesis to the test. This was done albeit not purposefully when the Cargo Cults developed.
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You are already starting off on the wrong foot. The hypothesis has to be for proving or disproving whether a God exists, not people's beliefs.

I grant you everything else in your post is true.

It ends up going around in circles. Ever ask a theist to define exactly what a God is? It always ends up being incomprehensible immeasurable being outside of time and space. You are 100 percent right in my assessment but i doubt many thests would agree to your terms.
 
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acbytesla said:
You are already starting off on the wrong foot. The hypothesis has to be for proving or disproving whether a God exists, not people's beliefs.
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It's not the wrong foot, it's the whole point! Think paradigm shift, put the 'can't prove there is no god' on the shelf it belongs on: that's an unnecessary question regardless of how many people believe in gods.

acbytesla said:
I grant you everything else in your post is true.

It ends up go around in circles. Ever ask a theist to define exactly what a God is? It always ends up being incomprehensible immeasurable being outside of time and space. You are 100 percent right in my assessment but i doubt many thests would agree to your terms.
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Then why do we agree with it when it comes to evolution theory and hypotheses?

Think: you can't prove evolution theory because you can't prove the negative: irreducible complexity might exist, we can't prove it doesn't.

No one talks that way about evolution theory. Lots of people believe in creation myths of various varieties. That doesn't create a whole posse of scientists saying we can't prove irreducible complexity doesn't exist somewhere on the planet. It's ludicrous.

At some point one can say, we have overwhelming evidence gods are mythical beings, human created fiction. Why do we keep going on with this no true atheists/you can't prove there are no gods/what ever way it is worded?

We know what gods are: fiction. It's not a hard concept. Paradigm shift: don't ask if there any gods, ask what the evidence says gods are.

Once you shift to the position that gods are fiction from the position of can't prove it, the god belief problem becomes much clearer.


And yes I understand scientific theory vs mathematical proofs. Don't let that argument sidetrack the analogy.
 
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MikeG said:
They are not, so long as you squint a bit and overlook the unscientific guff in most of the holy texts around the world.

If you accept that "religious faith" is dependent upon those texts, then faith and science are incompatible*. If you insist on clinging on to faith, then you have to accept that the religious texts are junk. I'd have a bit more patience with the religious if more of them were prepared to say "the (insert your favourite religious text name here) is full of absolute nonsense, but I have separate reasons for accepting the existence of a deity".

As for my own atheism........it's because even at the age of 6 or 7 I had a functioning bull-**** detector. A series of religious types tried to over-ride this detector, but failed. By the age of 10 or 11 I was the one kid in the school who would sit with eyes open during school prayers whilst everyone else knelt and mumbled out the responses supposed to keep them from burning in hell for eternity. I thought it hilarious.



*In strict terms, faith and science are mutually exclusive concepts. Science is a way of working out how stuff happens without having to rely on unevidenced assertions. Faith is acceptance of unevidenced assertions.
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This is essentially my take on the subject regarding the incompatibility of science and religion. Although science can't prove the non existence of god/gods, it can disprove the validity of many things asserted as true by the religious doctrines we can refer too.

The Abrahamic God is the one most in favour now, and although he has been seasoned differently the flavour is essentially the same, with the original ingredient of the creation, big flood and so on.

The creation is easily falsifiable by science as is the big flood, so the Abrahamic God is rendered somewhat indigestible. Does anyone know of other god entities that do not carry some baggage that is refutable by science?
 
The Big Dog said:
While one does enjoy a surfeit of exclamation points, I notice that this claim appears to be made up of whole cloth.

You don't really think that Newton secretly did not believe in God but could only transmit that knowledge to us in this day and age by wishful thinking?
Click to expand...

This has moved a bit, but I was not thinking of any specific but do know of burned scientists. I was more thinking inquisition and similar. I have no knowledge of what Newton thought except on science. And I know of nothing remotely proving any religion.
 
fuelair said:
This has moved a bit, but I was not thinking of any specific but do know of burned scientists. I was more thinking inquisition and similar. I have no knowledge of what Newton thought except on science. And I know of nothing remotely proving any religion.
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More precisely, I know of nothing proving any god/god collective, but religions clearly exist - there is simply nothing supporting the beliefs that underly them.
 
Skeptical Greg said:
This reminds me of one of my favorites, which was supposedly said by a young child, when asked what ' faith ' was ..

The child reportedly said: " Faith, is when you believe in something, you know to be untrue. "
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:thumbsup:

That sounds about right.
 
The Big Dog said:
I believe we will have to agree to disagree!
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Silliness.

At best, you are conflating two different meanings of the word "belief". And you are far too intelligent and language proficient not to understand that.

Which comes across to me as deliberately dishonest. We have had that before, haven't we.
 
Oystein said:
Silliness.

At best, you are conflating two different meanings of the word "belief". And you are far too intelligent and language proficient not to understand that.

Which comes across to me as deliberately dishonest. We have had that before, haven't we.
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Liars for Jesus.
 
I'm allegedly conflating things by not picking a version of a word that our correspondents would find ever so much more convenient, which (absolutely shockingly) makes me a liar.

Cripes fellas, if you have literally nothing with which to counter my arguments other than pedantic nonsense and personal attacks, why bother? Next time just run up the white flag, it'll be easier
 
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