Hawking says there are no gods

[Chanakya]

kellyb, sure, CS's point obviously wasn't about hard and soft atheism, I agree.

But you've read those words of his, that you quote from my post in your post #1848. (Pardon me, am posting from my phone not my computer, and using the quote function is a bit tedious, so perhaps you could turn to your post #1848?)

Sagan clearly says there that the conclusion he suggests is that we don't "reject this outright" -- so, NOT the hard atheist's stance -- and also that our conclusion is only "tentative", etc.

That looks exactly like the soft atheist's stance, wouldn't you agree? Irrespective of whether he had that word in mind? He's clearly rejecting the hard atheist's "outright rejection" for the soft atheist's "tentative" conclusion, isn't he?

 

[JoeMorgue]

That looks exactly like the soft atheist's stance, wouldn't you agree? Irrespective of whether he had that word in mind? He's clearly rejecting the hard atheist's "outright rejection" for the soft atheist's "tentative" conclusion, isn't he?

We don't "outright reject" the possibility that there's some form of undetectable new form of chair in a room with no chair either. We just don't bring it up. Because we aren't expected to.

The difference we aren't expected to explicitly point that out. It's implied.

There's "Sure if everything we know about the universe is wrong I'm wrong" statement already implied in everything we say. We're expected to explicitly say it with God.

All your points don't matter until you explain why you think we have to go other them step by step when talking about God but not every discussion we ever have ever.

 

[Nonpareil]

Sagan clearly says there that the conclusion he suggests is that we don't "reject this outright" -- so, NOT the hard atheist's stance -- and also that our conclusion is only "tentative", etc.

That looks exactly like the soft atheist's stance, wouldn't you agree? Irrespective of whether he had that word in mind? He's clearly rejecting the hard atheist's "outright rejection" for the soft atheist's "tentative" conclusion, isn't he?

Whether Sagan himself outright rejected the existence of garage dragons or not is irrelevant. The point stands regardless.

If you disagree, and think that we must be open-minded about the existence of undetectable entities, then you must be able to show that undetectable entities even can exist.

That is, you must be capable of answering the question: What is the difference between a garage dragon and no dragon at all?

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Your ignorance of the scientific method doesn't mean that I am saying that "God exists".

Project much?

Have you ever considered that ... there might be a limit to logic, reason, cause and effect, and evidence and if so, you simply admit that?
If knowledge has a limit, you then answer when you hit the limit: I don't know.

No. 'I don't know' is a common phrase in the scientific process. It is a temporary condition and does not mean a "limit" has been reached.

Yes, but that is not all gods, so while science is able to deal with most gods, there might be some, which science can't deal with.

That would be the irrelevant god.

You are not good at logic.

Something unobservable is not logically equivalent with non-existence. And yes, just as per definition unobservable is non-existence, Nonpareil is non-existence. I have just defined it so. So you don't exist, because the words say so. Period.
That is your problem.

Something unobservable (by any means) doesn't do anything at all. How is that not irrelevant? Please describe the relevance? And you can't use any belief in gods that are supposed to do observable things like answer prayers.

You don't understand how words work.

And, Nonpareil: About what you say re. my alleged special pleading and alleged appeal to popularity, I believe you are mistaken, but I will readily accept it if you can show how this is so. I am happy to learn from my mistakes, if mistakes they really are!

Apparently not because you are wrong, it's been described how/why, and you dig your heels in.

Instead of saying, "this is an XYZ fallacy", and ending up talking past each other, would you please clearly define the fallacy you think I am committing, and then clearly show how what I have said fits that definition?

It's been defined multiple times.

I'm guessing you saw me menion 6 billion people, and immediately rushed to the "popularity fallacy" conclusion, without clearly grasping my actual argument. That is why I ask you to take this trouble.

If you're right, then I'll have learnt something, and I'll readily accept it with my thanks.

We do grasp your argument. You think god beliefs are significant because they make up a large part of the world. But that makes it a social/cultural issue, not a 'gods exist' issue.

And that's what I've said from the beginning. Based on overwhelming evidence God beliefs exist. Gods don't.

... I am aiming for precision in how I formulate and express my views on this.

Regardless of how precise you believe you are, you are not making a convincing argument.

... On the other hand, it would bother me just as much to make the statement that God is true, in the absence of evidence for that claim.

I wouldn’t claim someone is guilty of a crime if I were not sure of it. It would bother me to say that if I weren’t sure. Nor would I claim someone is innocent unless I were myself sure of this; and if I were not sure, then to claim someone’s innocence, that would bother me too. Although absolutely, I could well recognize and well say that there were no clinching evidence against them, and that they were “(to be considered) not guilty”.

(And all of this whole guilty-innocent-not-guilty hairsplitting would apply, so far as I am concerned, if and only if that particular person and that particular case were of enough importance and/or interest to me to warrant that kind of precision. Not otherwise)

This analogy is a straw man making it a fail.

... As I see it, absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence.

(And yes, evidence of absence is indeed a thing. One can indeed prove negatives in certain cases. This doesn’t seem to be one of them. In some specific instances within the broad category, yes, but not in general for the entire category.)

We are all well aware of that statement. It needs to be followed with: Absence of evidence when you would expect evidence is evidence of absence.

In this case, we have evidence. We have evidence people make up fictional gods.

In addition, there are many scientific theories where one does not test every single potential entity yet we still draw conclusions about the untested entities based on the ones that were tested. Evolution is one such theory.

[more to come]

 

[Diablo]

Maybe there is a god but it's fading over time. There used to be miracles all the time, like the garden and the flood, and walking on water and feeding the 5000, and raising the dead and other stuff, like the burning bush and the parting of the sea, but now there's nothing at all. There's remission from disease but nobody believes that.

God could settle the argument easily by a few more people coming back from the dead or stuff like that, but it doesn't. Maybe god is fading away.

 

[JoeMorgue]

And this is when I start to get annoyed, when people pretend like they can't understand how a statement like "X doesn't exist" doesn't trigger an existential crisis in everybody when it's literally how every statement about the non-existence of something happens in every other scenario.

"Hey Bill is there any beer in the fridge?"
"One second Ted, let me check... nope."
"Gotcha."

See? Ted didn't suffer an existential crisis over whether or not there is no beer in the fridge given that information. He didn't freak out until Bill clarified whether there was beer in the fridge or he had proven there was no beer in the fridge, to say nothing of pitching a hissy fit over whether or not it was proven or "scientifically proven" as if there's other forms "proven" out there. He didn't demand Bill define every possible variation of beer both real and imaginary that might have possibly existed in in the fridge (despite Ted not specify which beer he wanted, odd that) before declaring the fridge empty of beer. Ted doesn't demand Bill rank his sureness of the lack of beer in the fridge into some chart of different "beer believers." Nobody is expected to go through every possible way a magically undetectable invisible can of previously unknown beer variation could be hiding between the butter and the asparagus and disprove that.

Bill says "There's no beer" and the goddamn ever loving godforsaken conversation stops how bloody hard is that.

But 30 page now of "God is different because I say so" special pleading and hope for nothing but 30 more pages of the same.

 

[kellyb]

kellyb, sure, CS's point obviously wasn't about hard and soft atheism, I agree.

But you've read those words of his, that you quote from my post in your post #1848. (Pardon me, am posting from my phone not my computer, and using the quote function is a bit tedious, so perhaps you could turn to your post #1848?)

Sagan clearly says there that the conclusion he suggests is that we don't "reject this outright" -- so, NOT the hard atheist's stance -- and also that our conclusion is only "tentative", etc.

That looks exactly like the soft atheist's stance, wouldn't you agree? Irrespective of whether he had that word in mind? He's clearly rejecting the hard atheist's "outright rejection" for the soft atheist's "tentative" conclusion, isn't he?

Here:

"you don't outright reject the notion that there's a fire-breathing dragon in my garage. You merely put it on hold. Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge you're prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you."

He further says, "the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion."

I live in the Bible Belt and was Christian till age 25 or so. I know why people hold these delusions about deities. None of it is very mysterious to me.

I've considered the pro-deity arguments and rejected them. And again, the whole "to be open to future physical data" thing is not exclusive to soft atheism. I'd reconsider even bigfoot and vampires with sufficient evidence.

I'm pretty sure if Sagan were here, he'd applaud your curiosity and then note that skepticism is about always keeping an open mind towards evidence, and that deities are no different from ghosts or alien abductions or whatever, so he'd reject the strong/hard atheism distinction.

 

[Nonpareil]

I've considered the pro-deity arguments and rejected them. And again, the whole "to be open to future physical data" thing is not exclusive to soft atheism. I'd reconsider even bigfoot and vampires with sufficient evidence.

Say it louder for the people in the back.

 

[Jodie]

Your conclusion about what that article says is quite a stretch from the conclusion drawn in the paper:

I'm not sure how it's a stretch. My original comment was that religious/spiritual belief might be an evolutionary step for further development of consciousness regardless of the validity of the belief.

 

[ynot]

If you are referring to the belief that you can communicate with God that is different to saying that God is "visible".

Anyone that thinks "observation" is all about "visible" in an optical sense maybe needs to take a course on logic.

 

[ynot]

I want to know about more important things like what colour Garage Dragons are.

 

[Jodie]

One big problem with that is the finite speed of light. Your body is a single system that regulates itself and necessarily interacts with itself. If it weren't possible for those interactions to take place, it couldn't be a single organism.

And at the scale of the universe it takes billions of years for information to get from one part to another, and for some such regions it can't get back again because the expansion of the universe will have separated those regions to beyond the cosmic horizon before that's possible. We can also look at the sorts of interactions that do take place between distant regions. We can look at the large scale structure of the universe. The process of life is an information rich complex process full of feedbacks. The large scale structure of the universe amounts to some regions having higher density and others lower density because gravity works over large distances.

It's a fun idea, but the universe at a large scale is not a scaled up version of a living thing. And the reason is basically that the laws of physics do not obey a scaling symmetry: things behave differently at different scales, as Galileo pointed out in On Two New Sciences.

So does that mean that the universe can't exist as a living thing/entity/ or whatever you might want to call it?

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

I'm not sure how it's a stretch. My original comment was that religious/spiritual belief might be an evolutionary step for further development of consciousness regardless of the validity of the belief.

First and foremost, a study of "Fifteen normal male subjects, ages 20–45 years" is a pilot study. Beyond suggesting future research it's fairly meaningless.

binding potential correlated inversely with scores for self-transcendence, a personality trait covering religious behavior and attitudes.

You are concluding cause when the conclusion makes no statement about whether the finding is the evolutionary cause or the effect of spirituality. There's a correlation that's all, and a weak one at that given the study population size.

CONCLUSIONS: This finding in normal male subjects indicated that the serotonin system may serve as a biological basis for spiritual experiences. The authors speculated that the several-fold variability in 5-HT1A receptor density may explain why people vary greatly in spiritual zeal.

The study just says they found serotonin correlated with spiritual experiences. They speculate it might explain variation in spiritual zeal.

You are taking that a step further and imagining evolution of religious beliefs. They would have had to find it before the subjects were exposed to religion to suggest causation.

And development of consciousness? Where is the basis for that?

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

I want to know about more important things like what colour Garage Dragons are.

Blue, duh! Unicorns are pink so the dragons have to be blue.

 

[psionl0]

Anyone that thinks "observation" is all about "visible" in an optical sense maybe needs to take a course on logic.

Ok then, let's say "consistently observable or detectable when a scientific test or a series of scientific tests are conducted".

Happy? Or is there a loophole that I have missed?

You said “It doesn't rule out a God can choose to be unobservable (except to a select few)”. I asked which god this was as it doesn’t match with the definition of the many of the gods people claim exists. Which god has the properties you stated?

Repeating your earlier news flash doesn't answer the question.

(ETA it appears that somewhere along the line, you attempted a sleight of hand and replaced the word "visible" with "accessible").

 

[JoeMorgue]

If there's no chair in the room does it bloody matter if the chair in invisible or inaccessible?

The qualities of things that haven't been sufficiently evidenced to exist do not matter because they don't exist.

 

[ynot]

Ok then, let's say "consistently observable or detectable when a scientific test or a series of scientific tests are conducted".

Happy? Or is there a loophole that I have missed?

No. Let's merely say "Observable or detectable in any way at any time by any credible method".

You seem to be claiming a loophole that "when a scientific test or a series of scientific tests are conducted", some things aren't "consistently observable or detectable" due of some mysterious effect of being scientifically tested. No more than a convenient/pathetic excuse to explain results being no better than dumb-luck.

 

[psionl0]

No. Let's merely say "Observable or detectable in any way at any time by any credible method".

OK let's go with that.

BTW "visible" was Darat's choice of word.

 

[psionl0]

If there's no chair in the room does it bloody matter if the chair in invisible or inaccessible?

QFT

The qualities of things that haven't been sufficiently evidenced to exist do not matter because they don't exist.

"Not proven to exist" =/= "proven to not exist".

Just say "I don't see a chair" and stop pretending that science is on your side when you say the chair doesn't exist.

 

[ynot]

OK let's go with that.

BTW "visible" was Darat's choice of word.

Only very recently. I believe the original word used in the "Garage Dragon" analogy was "observable".