• Security incident: ISF was recently accessed by intruders. Please change your password, and change it anywhere else you used it. Read more

Hawking says there are no gods

Status
Not open for further replies.
Diablo said:
My bold. That seems to be badly phrased because the man hasn't asked a question, he merely believes something. If he were to ask, is it true, and refuses to research the answer scientifically or even logically, then there's not much to be said except that he doesn't want to know the answer.

And there's the problem: most people who follow a religion aren't interested in a critical anaysis of whether it is true or not: they are just happy to believe what they have been told.
Click to expand...

More simple: What scientific article can I recommend to a friend that says that he believes that God exists and is present to him by means of faith, revelation or similar? Answer. No one. My friend is agnostic fideist. He is happy with this answer. I am not.
 
Last edited:
David Mo said:
Aha... But this kind of sentences make my mind a damned imbroglio. Do you know: La razón de la sinrazón, que a mi razón se hace, de tal manera mi razón enflaquece, que con razón me quejo de la vuestra fermosura (El Quijote).Use Google Translator, please. I have another job now and I am in a hurry.
Click to expand...

I will make it short and it is to short in a sense:
The universe is combined:
  • The unknown(metaphysics)
  • The objective(observation)
  • The inter-subjective(language, logic, reason)
  • The subjective(the individual beliefs)

It is subjectively true that I am a humanist, because I believe in humanism.
The condition for something subjectively true is a belief about something, which is subjective.
Now we can go n-rounds about Reason versus reason and if reason has a limit like human mobility. We don't have to.
But stop saying I believe that a belief alone can make something true. It is a straw man version of my argument.
 
David Mo said:
Depends on what religion you are talking about. But the religion of the people I'm talking about is quite different. For example, those who believe in fairies believe that they can be photographed or perceived directly, and the persons I am speaking of believe that the sacred is not perceivable by the common senses. It's a big difference.
Click to expand...

And why should we treat the claims of the latter more seriously than those of the former? 'The sacred cannot be perceived by the common senses' sounds an awful lot like the eponymous invisible pink dragon in the garage...
 
David Mo said:
More simple: What scientific article can I recommend to a friend that says that he believes that God exists and is present to him by means of faith, revelation or similar? Answer. No one. My friend is agnostic fideist. He is happy with this answer. I am not.
Click to expand...

Best to let him believe then, provided he doesn't want to argue about it, on an internet forum or elsewhere where he may encounter atheists.

Provided his beliefs don't impact other people badly, spread hatred or fear, or influence public policy. As long as he keeps it to himself no one should care. Religion should be like sex, done in private between consenting adults.
 
David Mo said:
I can argue with you with more patience than Saint Job's, but if you start lying this way, the conversation ends right now. For compulsive liars we have enough with the Big Dog in this forum.
If it's not a lie but an obfuscation, I'll repeat it once again and I hope you don't go back to the same thing: I don't believe that believing one thing makes it true. I am not TommyJ. Lets make it clear once and for all.
Click to expand...

You're making the same arguments as Tommy and are operating on the same intellectual level. Don't mistake loquacious for correct.

With him it's pidgin English gibberish, with you it's word salad and "This philosopher says..." and both of you get haughty and snippy when called on it. At the end of the day you both think you can argue magic into being real. The differences is in tone and style, not content.

What is the correct answer you give to a man that that believes that the host is the true body of Christ, but the science can not refute this because It is a divine body? This is the same question I have done you during more than three thousand comments. Without answer. Give the correct answer, please.
Click to expand...

"You're wrong, such an event cannot and does not happen."

The rest is just special pleading nonsense, more "I can make magic real if I rearrange the words" that is your stock in trade.

Your opinion on philosophy is superfluos.
Click to expand...

You know for all the act you and Tommy put on of being the "Gatekeepers of Philosophy" you seem to think all it means is "I can use words to make magic real."
 
Last edited:
David Mo said:
What your beloved Wikipedia says is that Christ's body is not a common human body. It seems you read the text in the reverse sense. Trans-substantied, other substance, you know.

I suppose you know St. Paul's doctrine which states that in heaven even the blessed souls will have a body, but spiritual. If it were not so, it would be a mess of past, present and future livers and kidneys .

So the transubstantiated flesh, that is, of another substance, is not seen under the microscope. Religious stuffs.

NOTE: You cannot tell me the catechism stories. I endured the thing till my teen age.
Click to expand...

I'm not getting my info from wiki; I got my info from having grown up around Catholics. The wiki was linked to for you to learn something, as impossible of a dream as that is.

The "changed substance" refers to the change from bread into the literal flesh of Jesus.
 
Last edited:
David Mo said:
More simple: What scientific article can I recommend to a friend that says that he believes that God exists and is present to him by means of faith, revelation or similar? Answer. No one. My friend is agnostic fideist. He is happy with this answer. I am not.
Click to expand...


I can recommend the four comics Prototipo, Arqueotipo, Antitipo and Once mil vírgenes by the German author Ralf König. They are not particularly scientific, but they are hilarious. Ralf König is a member of the Giordano Bruno Foundation, which "pursues the “Support of Evolutionary Humanism.”"
 
Roboramma said:
Look at the worldline of an object.
Click to expand...
I'm not sure I can, but I'll try. LOL I can recite the definition of a worldline and all sorts of facts about them in a rote memory sort of way, but I only have a vague idea of what it actually really means, I think. :o

It's not "moving" through time, it simply exists within spacetime. So in this sense there is no motion forward or backward through time. To put it another way, if you want to draw an arrow on that worldline and say that the object is moving through time, you can equally well draw it forward as backward. Once you've drawn it in one direction, though, the way that the physics works, you're never going to get it's trajectory to curve through more than 45 degrees (which would equate to traveling at the speed of light). That inability to curve beyond 45 degrees is what it means to say you can't go back in time. This is the way in which the geometry of time differs from that of space.
Click to expand...

Looking at this animation, I think I *might* be following you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_line#/media/File:Lorentz_transform_of_world_line.gif

I see the 45 degree limit. It's actually kind of annoying. It makes me want to grab it and spin it 360 just to see what happens. LOL

What's really perplexing (assuming the animation is accurate...it is, right?) is that the falling "event" dots DO move up and down, forward and backwards in time when the observer radically shifts left or right in space. Some of the events even move from future to past back to future relative to the observer's POV! That can't be right, can it?


That the laws of physics work the same no matter where you are in space.
Click to expand...
Aah, thanks!
 
kellyb said:
What's really perplexing (assuming the animation is accurate...it is, right?) is that the falling "event" dots DO move up and down, forward and backwards in time when the observer radically shifts left or right in space. Some of the events even move from future to past back to future relative to the observer's POV! That can't be right, can it?
Click to expand...

No, that's right. That's the relativity of simultaneity: that different observers will disagree about the order of events, and even about what is in the past and what is in the future. But what they will never disagree about is the order of causally connected events. If it's possible to get from event A to event B, then all observers will agree about which comes first. It's only when they are separated in space and time by a large enough separation that it's impossible to get from one to the other that these is disagreement about their order. But in that case one can't affect the other, so there's no real problem that comes out of that ambiguity.


Anyway I don't think I've done a particularly good job of getting all this across, if I have some more free time later today I'll try to write something with more clarity.
 
Roboramma said:
No, that's right. That's the relativity of simultaneity: that different observers will disagree about the order of events, and even about what is in the past and what is in the future. But what they will never disagree about is the order of causally connected events. If it's possible to get from event A to event B, then all observers will agree about which comes first. It's only when they are separated in space and time by a large enough separation that it's impossible to get from one to the other that these is disagreement about their order. But in that case one can't affect the other, so there's no real problem that comes out of that ambiguity.


Anyway I don't think I've done a particularly good job of getting all this across, if I have some more free time later today I'll try to write something with more clarity.
Click to expand...

You're doing a great job getting it all across! It's just really complicated and fantastically psychedelic stuff. Heh. Thanks for explaining it!
I found a really useful animation on the "relativity of simultaneity" that also helps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relat...File:Relativity_of_Simultaneity_Animation.gif

I noticed that in the first animation, about how events close to you in space don't waver back and forth, from future to past back to future to past, in time, no matter how fast you move. It seems very "unfair" that you can do something that's almost the functional equivalent of time travel into the past, but only with events that are on the other side of the universe (or wherever far away.) lol
 
Garrison said:
And why should we treat the claims of the latter more seriously than those of the former? 'The sacred cannot be perceived by the common senses' sounds an awful lot like the eponymous invisible pink dragon in the garage...
Click to expand...

Because the hypothesis of the dragon in the garage is not really believed by anyone. It's a mental experiment. And the famous fairy photos are a naivety easy to dismantle. But if someone tells you that he feels that life has a transcendental meaning or that there is a deep mystery in the universe this is something more complex. If you don't see the difference in complexity I don't know what I can tell you. But if you want to argue honestly with him outside of a favorable environment you won't get the giggles or your song and dance to be applauded by the audience. Then you have to polish your dialectical weapons. What weapons? I doubt that science will be the ultimate bomb in this case.
 
Diablo said:
Best to let him believe then, provided he doesn't want to argue about it, on an internet forum or elsewhere where he may encounter atheists.

Provided his beliefs don't impact other people badly, spread hatred or fear, or influence public policy. As long as he keeps it to himself no one should care. Religion should be like sex, done in private between consenting adults.
Click to expand...

I am speaking under the supposition of a debate. They exist.

Of course, the main concern is the possible negative outcomes of theism. Specially in its radical forms or converted in a church. I have a justified allergy go churches.
 
JoeMorgue said:
You're making the same arguments as Tommy and are operating on the same intellectual level. Don't mistake loquacious for correct.

With him it's pidgin English gibberish, with you it's word salad and "This philosopher says..." and both of you get haughty and snippy when called on it. At the end of the day you both think you can argue magic into being real. The differences is in tone and style, not content.

"You're wrong, such an event cannot and does not happen."

The rest is just special pleading nonsense, more "I can make magic real if I rearrange the words" that is your stock in trade.

You know for all the act you and Tommy put on of being the "Gatekeepers of Philosophy" you seem to think all it means is "I can use words to make magic real."
Click to expand...

I'm sorry, I'm not interested in all this. Go back to the debate whenever you want.
 
kellyb said:
I'm not getting my info from wiki; I got my info from having grown up around Catholics. The wiki was linked to for you to learn something, as impossible of a dream as that is.

The "changed substance" refers to the change from bread into the literal flesh of Jesus.
Click to expand...

You will understand that meat that is not digested is not meat like any other. I insist, if the bodies of the blessed in heaven are not like ours, but "spiritual" bodies, how do you want the flesh of Christ in the host to be like yours? Only this: ask to a priest whether the sacred host is seen as human flesh under a microscope.
 
David Mo said:
You will understand that meat that is not digested is not meat like any other. I insist, if the bodies of the blessed in heaven are not like ours, but "spiritual" bodies, how do you want the flesh of Christ in the host to be like yours? Only this: ask to a priest whether the sacred host is seen as human flesh under a microscope.
Click to expand...

I guess at no point did any of your esteemed respected philosophers explain the concept of special pleading to you.

"You can't see this meat because it's special magical meat that doesn't act like real meat" is a farce.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Share this page

ISF - Join now!

Every member here is approved by hand. No bots, no spam, just people who care about evidence and honest debate.

Membership is free!

Create your free account

Back
Top Bottom