Hawking says there are no gods

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The word "real" is not universal, it is context driven and if you change the context, you change the function of "real". The problem is that it breaks down of everything.
Someone: Everything is real.
Me: No.
And e.g a hallucination is both real and unreal depending on context.
 
Tommy Jeppesen said:
The word "real" is not universal, it is context driven and if you change the context, you change the function of "real". The problem is that it breaks down of everything.
Someone: Everything is real.
Me: No.
And e.g a hallucination is both real and unreal depending on context.
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Gibberish.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Translation: it doesn't. :rolleyes:
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Your belief in what the universe is, doesn't decide what the universe is and your reasoning doesn't cause the universe to be anything.
You believe that your reasoning decides what the universe is. That is a woo-belief. The universe is what it is independent of your reasoning, because your reasoning is caused by the universe and not in reverse.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Bottom line, you can speculate all you want about the role evolution played in humans adopting god beliefs. Just don't cite research as supporting your hypothesis that doesn't support it.

Given it appears that all cultures included god beliefs as humans evolved, it's safe to say there must have been a benefit somewhere. But it could be as simple as the artifact of brains that evolved to see patterns and conclude causation. I don't believe anyone has done the research we'd need to understand why so many people still cling to god beliefs now that we know better.
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My bold. I'm not so sure it's that difficult to understand. Most people who believe in god were brought up that way, indoctrinated if you like, live in families and communities which also believe, and crave acceptance above all. Do they even question their beliefs? I doubt it. How many people look for the truth when they are comfortable enough where they are?
 
Diablo said:
My bold. I'm not so sure it's that difficult to understand. Most people who believe in god were brought up that way, indoctrinated if you like, live in families and communities which also believe, and crave acceptance above all. Do they even question their beliefs? I doubt it. How many people look for the truth when they are comfortable enough where they are?
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That's a cop-out. We're not talking cults or extreme cases of social isolation. Nobody here grew up just not knowing that not believing in God was even an option.

My mother told me green bean casserole was amazing my entire childhood. The second I left home I never ate a bit of it again. It ain't that hard.

ETA: And it has absolutely zero bearing on whether or not it's true or not, it's just yet another "Don't be mean" argument.
 
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JoeMorgue said:
That's a cop-out. We're not talking cults or extreme cases of social isolation. Nobody here grew up just not knowing that not believing in God was even an option.

My mother told me green bean casserole was amazing my entire childhood. The second I left home I never ate a bit of it again. It ain't that hard.

ETA: And it has absolutely zero bearing on whether or not it's true or not, it's just yet another "Don't be mean" argument.
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I don't think it's anything to do with cults, just a statement of fact. You can take a look at at childhood indoctrination if you like. I think many people have never questioned their belief.

Maybe you're more questioning or intelligent than most with regard to casseroles or anything else; many are not.

It's not a don't be mean argument, just a statement of fact.
 
Tommy Jeppesen said:
Your belief in what the universe is, doesn't decide what the universe is and your reasoning doesn't cause the universe to be anything.
You believe that your reasoning decides what the universe is. That is a woo-belief. The universe is what it is independent of your reasoning, because your reasoning is caused by the universe and not in reverse.
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Clearly you don't understand what I believe because it's not that highlighted claim you make there.

Perhaps that's part of your problem, you are projecting beliefs on other people then arguing them. Hmmm, there's a word for that...
 
Tommy Jeppesen said:
Kant, the world and “das Ding an sich”



This is going to be long and I will link it to the OP as for this part:
"I think the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science,"

So here is TL;DR The world can't be described and explained using only one methodology, which gives correct answers/explanations for all aspects of the universe.

The rest is the reasoning for this:
No, I don't reject "das Ding an sich", but let us take a closer look. We will start with metaphysics and how it is that metaphysics and ontology is not knowledge of what the world actually is, but rather a form of psychology.
So what is "das Ding an sich"? It is a form of knowledge, but it also a form of tautology and vacuous.
E.g. 2+2=4 or A is A (Ayn Rand) are true with reason, but empty for the rest of the world. "Das Ding an sich" works in the same manner, noumena is independent of human sense and/or perception, but empty/vacuous for what it is other than independent of human sense and/or perception, expect for causation. Note causation is also sort of a belief/psychology; i.e. David Hume.
The noumena causes human sense and/or perception. Solipsism is not correct, because it gets the causation wrong. More about that if you want that.

Now for what the world is, I believe that the world is fair(no gods, Boltzmann Brain, The Matrix and what not) and it is in general as independent of me also as it appears to me. That is all you can say about metaphysics, you state what you believe in. Now ontology is a catalog of how thinking works and existence is empty in itself, because it always human sense and/or perception.

Now we, you and I, are in the world with all the rest. Let us start with logic and the 3 classical laws of thought. I will concentrate on the law of non-contradiction and how to use it in an over-reductive sense. I am I (a sense) and since you are not me, you are false. The problem is you and I are in different parts of time/space and senses.
So for all cases of the world is X and not something else, it is over-reductive. You just have to answer non-X.
The world is not physical, it is also, but not physical and that connects to chemistry, biology, humans, culture /sociology/psychology/religion/philosophy and so on.

As for epistemology you integrate all four aspects in a limited sense for each of them individually: Rationalism, empiricism, foundationalism and skepticism. You also include Agrippa's Trilemma and Protagoras: “Man is the measure of all things: of the things that are, that they are, of the things that are not, that they are not.”
The world is not reason, observation, certainty or uncertainty individually, it is a combination.

As for all cases of positives and negatives they are all in part cognitive and a form of qualia. You understand them, because of they make sense, but that sense is a quale, an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us. E.g. you know what meaningless is, right?!!
But you can't obverse it, you know it otherwise.
Now what positives and negatives are about, can vary depending if it is objective, inter-subjective or subjective or where these 3 categories interconnect.

So some positives and negatives are about the brain independent world, e.g. gravity; some are about the commonly shared; e.g. 2+2=4, 2+2=11 and 2+2=5 and some about what ends as individual; e.g. good/bad and right/wrong.

Then there is the aesthetics of the beautiful and ugly. Even the ugly can be aesthetic and to me true and false are both beautiful, even if false is also sort of ugly.

So everything is not the Darwin awards and just because if you and I can't agree on what the world is for all cases, because of the subjective part of “Man is the measure of all things: of the things that are, that they are, of the things that are not, that they are not”, doesn't mean that neither you nor I are a potential candidate for the Darwin awards.

I am not a westerner anymore in the common sense, because I don't believe in reality as some humans in western culture do. And that is not particular for reality, it also relates to a lot of cognitive words like reason, logic, evidence, real, knowledge, wrong, better and so on. I am in some sense my own sub-culture outside science versus religion.

So the world is not that simple, but it is simple one you understand that it is always a lot of interconnected categories, which can't be reduced down to one category. And that includes science, philosophy and religion. It is some form of combination, when you look closer and it always involves the quale of making sense. That is always in some sense subjective.
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Thank you very much for that. I have been very busy with RL, so I will need to look through this in detail to see where we may not agree 100%, but after a quick perusal I don't really understand where you and others here disagree -- aside from possible language confusions.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Bottom line, you can speculate all you want about the role evolution played in humans adopting god beliefs. Just don't cite research as supporting your hypothesis that doesn't support it.

Given it appears that all cultures included god beliefs as humans evolved, it's safe to say there must have been a benefit somewhere. But it could be as simple as the artifact of brains that evolved to see patterns and conclude causation. I don't believe anyone has done the research we'd need to understand why so many people still cling to god beliefs now that we know better.
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The fact that the trait persists since we evolved to speak might be a good place to start. As with everything, it's probably not a specific isolated change, but a combination of many different variables that led to religious belief in a personal God whether that's Shiva or Jesus.
 
Jodie said:
Here is an article that discusses religion as a byproduct of evolutionary adaptation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/magazine/04evolution.t.html
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From the link:
And what would God say? No matter what their age, the children, who were all Protestants, told Barrett that God would answer, “Rocks.” This was true even for the older children, who, as Barrett understood it, had developed folkpsychology and had used it when predicting a wrong response for Mother. They had learned that, in certain situations, people could be fooled — but they had also learned that there is no fooling God.
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I wonder what the answer would be if they asked the kids, "would Santa know?"

Which leads me to call for the brakes on this conclusion:
The bottom line, according to byproduct theorists, is that children are born with a tendency to believe in omniscience, invisible minds, immaterial souls — and then they grow up in cultures that fill their minds, hard-wired for belief, with specifics. It is a little like language acquisition
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Yes and no. You'd have to understand that an invisible person sees all, but carrying that over to 'immaterial souls'. No, that's a version of anthropomorphizing, adding 'souls' to the language but there's no evidence that's what's going on.

If you tell a three yr old Santa can see them, I'm pretty sure at that age they believe it. That doesn't mean much beyond they believe what they are told/taught and aren't thinking about the how.

In much the same way, he says, we are born with an innate tendency for belief, but the specifics of what we grow up believing — whether there is one God or many, whether the soul goes to heaven or occupies another animal after death — are culturally shaped.
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No, not buying that hypothesis at all. You can propose it, but then you have to design research to test the hypothesis.

There is a common research error when you explain results to fit what you want, but didn't set the study up to test what you now conclude.
 
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Jodie said:
Here is an article that discusses religion as a byproduct of evolutionary adaptation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/magazine/04evolution.t.html
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Further along in the article, this was relevant to the thread:
Richard Dawkins had a history of spirited arguments with Gould, with whom he disagreed about almost everything related to the timing and focus of evolution. But he reserved some of his most venomous words for nonoverlapping magisteria. “Gould carried the art of bending over backward to positively supine lengths,” he wrote in “The God Delusion.” “Why shouldn’t we comment on God, as scientists? . . . A universe with a creative superintendent would be a very different kind of universe from one without. Why is that not a scientific matter?”

The separation, other critics said, left untapped the potential richness of letting one worldview inform the other. “Even if Gould was right that there were two domains, what religion does and what science does,” says Daniel Dennett (who, despite his neo-atheist label, is not as bluntly antireligious as Dawkins and Harris are), “that doesn’t mean science can’t study what religion does. It just means science can’t do what religion does.”
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Then they talk about Justin Barret who states:
What can be made of atheists, then? If the evolutionary view of religion is true, they have to work hard at being atheists, to resist slipping into intrinsic habits of mind that make it easier to believe than not to believe. Atran says he faces an emotional and intellectual struggle to live without God in a nonatheist world, and he suspects that is where his little superstitions come from, his passing thought about crossing his fingers during turbulence or knocking on wood just in case. It is like an atavistic theism erupting when his guard is down. The comforts and consolations of belief are alluring even to him, he says, and probably will become more so as he gets closer to the end of his life. He fights it because he is a scientist and holds the values of rationalism higher than the values of spiritualism.
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He might struggle but I sure don't. A lot of atheists I know say they can't make themselves believe in an afterlife even when they want to.

This is a theist POV and premature:
The presumption was that as science was able to answer more questions about the natural world, God would be invoked to answer fewer, and religion would eventually recede. Research about the evolution of religion suggests otherwise. No matter how much science can explain, it seems, the real gap that God fills is an emptiness that our big-brained mental architecture interprets as a yearning for the supernatural.
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Just because religion hasn't died out yet doesn't mean it isn't on the way out. Evolution on the large mammal scale is very slow.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Just because religion hasn't died out yet doesn't mean it isn't on the way out. Evolution on the large mammal scale is very slow.
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There's good evidence that having your material needs met fosters "secularism". The member here named dann has a lot of that info in his signature, iirc.

There's also this (I seriously recommend reading the whole thing):

https://www.theatlantic.com/interna...ificial-intelligence-religion-atheism/565076/

Another project, Forecasting Religiosity and Existential Security with an Agent-Based Model, examines questions about nonbelief: Why aren’t there more atheists? Why is America secularizing at a slower rate than Western Europe? Which conditions would speed up the process of secularization—or, conversely, make a population more religious?
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Using a separate model, Future of Religion and Secular Transitions (forest), the team found that people tend to secularize when four factors are present: existential security (you have enough money and food), personal freedom (you’re free to choose whether to believe or not), pluralism (you have a welcoming attitude to diversity), and education (you’ve got some training in the sciences and humanities). If even one of these factors is absent, the whole secularization process slows down. This, they believe, is why the U.S. is secularizing at a slower rate than Western and Northern Europe.
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JoeMorgue said:
There is no "Non-scientific" way of proving anything. If it hasn't been proven by science, it isn't proven it's just another creative writing exercise.

All this crap that everyone is talking about "existing out (my narrow strawman version of) science" doesn't exist.

There are no questions, topics, ideas, concepts, whatevers that exist outside of science. Sure they exist outside of "Strawman Science" that is nothing but beakers and labcoats. But nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing exists that has to be, or indeed can be, discussed outside of the concepts of falsifiability, collection of evidence, logic, reason, and so forth.

I humbly await your "Well some philosopher said so and so this one time..." argument.
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I don't know what you mean with "a question" doesn't exist "out of science". I can ask: "Is my girl cheating me?" Is there a theorem about girls who cheat? I doubt that I can solve scientifically this question.

Then, there are many questions that science cannot solve. Sometimes because we don't know the implied facts, sometimes because there are questions out of science, that cannot be solved with experimental means. But we cannot wait to science arrives or not and so we have to solve the problem by other means. Sometimes common sense, sometimes philosophy. Of course, the outcome never would be so reliable as science, but we have to live with. Life is hard, mon cher.

By the way, you are so confuse yourself that you included among the scientific features a philosophic one at least. Falsiability against verificability is a tipical philosophical problem of the 20th century. How about that? You have become philosopher without know it!
 
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