Hawking says there are no gods

[Tommy Jeppesen]

I've started by asking you whether it's wrong for you to systematically misrepresent the arguments of people with whom you disagree. Granted that won't make a dent in your estimate of 90%, but it will serve to put this particular thread on a more useful course.

Simple question, simple answer. Go.

So how do you few people deal with all these wrong people?

And how do you deal with these wrong people?
https://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/0_0_0/whatisscience_12

Where is the scientific site for SG's claim of science can do morality? Can you point me to where I can read about that?

The only authoritative site I have found about science and the supernatural is this:
https://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/0_0_0/whatisscience_12

You are good at science. Point me to other sites, which shows the opposite of morality, the supernatural and this:
"Science doesn't tell you how to use scientific knowledge"
So if it was a scientific fact, that there is no God, science can't tell what to do with that?!!
Back to the OP:
"I think the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science," Hawking, who died in March, wrote. "If you accept, as I do, that the laws of nature are fixed, then it doesn't take long to ask: What role is there for God?"
Please answer that with science.

 

[JoeMorgue]

So how do you few people deal with all these wrong people?

Not by lying about what they are saying, that's for sure.

 

[Tommy Jeppesen]

Start a new thread and we'll discuss it. You're way off topic.

No, it goes back to the OP:
"I think the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science," Hawking, who died in March, wrote. "If you accept, as I do, that the laws of nature are fixed, then it doesn't take long to ask: What role is there for God?"

There are reasons for all those beliefs and what they claim are the same asked this way:
What role are there for something, which is not a fact?

It has nothing do with God in particular, that is a subset!

 

[JayUtah]

So how do you few people deal with all these wrong people?

Can't give a simple answer, can you? You have to pretend that you got some irrelevant question in edgewise that somehow your critics are now obliged to answer first. What does psychology say about people who refuse to face their own shortcomings?

How do I deal with all these wrong people? One at a time. I'm starting with you. You have consistently (and, I believe, deliberately) misrepresented my argument. I have told you so on several times, and given specific corrections to your misrepresentations. Do you agree that means you're wrong?

 

[JoeMorgue]

"God has to exist because we need a cause for all the magic I'm making up."

 

[Belz...]

No, it goes back to the OP:
"I think the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science," Hawking, who died in March, wrote. "If you accept, as I do, that the laws of nature are fixed, then it doesn't take long to ask: What role is there for God?"

There are reasons for all those beliefs and what they claim are the same asked this way:
What role are there for something, which is not a fact?

It has nothing do with God in particular, that is a subset!

No, it has nothing to do with God in general, either.

Start a new thread and instead address the actual questions here. Your evasions are very telling.

 

[ynot]

Preferring science to philosophy doesn't make sense to me because each of them has different objects and methods. It's like saying that I prefer mathematics to physics. If it's a matter of subjective taste, it doesn't concern me.

I specifically defined that most people prefer the objects and methods of science rather than the objects and methods of philosophy as a pathway to truth (to establish what is actually true). Please provide a single example in which the objects and methods of philosophy are better than the objects and methods of science at establishing what is actually true.

Would it make no sense to you to fly in a plane designed and built by the objects and methods of science rather than the objects and methods of philosophy? Would that be a mere matter of subjective taste that wouldn’t concern you?

 

[ynot]

Just had an amusing moment trying to imagine what a plane designed and built by the objects and methods of philosophy might look like. Assuming it would ever even get off the drawing board .

 

[MRC_Hans]

Just had an amusing moment trying to imagine what a plane designed and built by the objects and methods of philosophy might look like. Assuming it would ever even get off the drawing board .

Well, that would, obviously, not be the purpose of the whole thing. Instead there would be endless learned discussions about the definition of concepts like "wings".

Hans

 

[JoeMorgue]

Philosopher's Chess. Your pieces just sit there not moving until one side proves the King piece is worth saving.

 

[MRC_Hans]

There are reasons for all those beliefs and what they claim are the same asked this way:
What role are there for something, which is not a fact?

It has nothing do with God in particular, that is a subset!

It has to do with God as a fact. It has to do with whether there are facts outside the laws of physics. If yes, God is possible (albeit not necessarily a fact), if no, God is not possible.

Hans

 

[Tommy Jeppesen]

Every time I reflect your own "logic" back upon you, to expose your hypocrisy, you respond by trying to ask me an unrelated question.

Why are you deliberately avoiding questions designed to detect hypocrisy?

We are both evading.
Here is how you and I are evading - I ask questions, which you don't answer and you ask questions, I don't answer.

Here is one which has nothing to do with me.
https://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/0_0_0/whatisscience_12
Please explain this:

Science doesn't draw conclusions about supernatural explanations
Do gods exist? Do supernatural entities intervene in human affairs? These questions may be important, but science won't help you answer them. Questions that deal with supernatural explanations are, by definition, beyond the realm of nature — and hence, also beyond the realm of what can be studied by science. For many, such questions are matters of personal faith and spirituality.

You can do philosophy, because you know what a real philosopher is, so engage with this.

Cognitive relativism consists of two claims:
(1) The truth-value of any statement is always relative to some particular standpoint;
(2) No standpoint is metaphysically privileged over all others.

https://www.iep.utm.edu/cog-rel/#H3

You never engage any of that. You never explain, how real philosophers for which some of them must be claiming something false, how you decide, who are the real philosophers?
You never followed up on the link about biology and morality by SG and answered the different positions on meta-ethics.

You just to the effect keep claim a lot of negative personal charismatics of me. They don't invalidate the claim of cognitive relativism in itself
You never ever answer the claims in the links.

Forget me, I am lost course.
Tackle some real philosophy
https://www.iep.utm.edu/cog-rel/

Cognitive relativism asserts the relativity of truth. Because of the close connections between the concept of truth and concepts such as knowledge, rationality, and justification, cognitive relativism is often taken to encompass, or imply, the relativity of these other notions also. Thus, epistemological relativism, which asserts the relativity of knowledge, may be understood as a version of cognitive relativism, or at least as entailed by it.

Tackle that!

On Kant's view, the concept of "objective reality" is employed speculatively and hence illegitimately if it is taken to refer to reality as it is independent of our experience of it. This obviously has implications for the traditional notion of objective truth. The judgments we call true are true for us and of our world; but to claim they are true in the sense of describing an independently existing reality is to go beyond what we can meaningfully or justifiably assert.

What about that?

Relativism is the radical offspring of non-realism, which is itself descended from the idealism of Berkeley and Kant. Non-realism holds that we cannot meaningfully talk about they way things are independent of our experience of them: to use Michael Dummett's formulation, what makes a statement true is not independent of our procedures for deciding it is true. The main argument in favour of non-realism is essentially negative: it avoids the difficulties endemic to metaphysical realism (a.k.a. "objectivism" or "absolutism").

... But they argue that it loses coherence if it is elevated to the metaphysical level. For what is really happening, even when we are confirming the most mundane belief about the empirical world, is that we are satisfying ourselves that this belief coheres with our other beliefs. We confirm that the sea is salty by tasting it or by conducting a chemical analysis of seawater. But these procedures only confirm our belief about sea water in the sense of showing it to be compatible with or even entailed by a host of other beliefs: for instance, that the sample we are examining is typical; that nothing else tastes quite like salt; that our sensory faculties are trustworthy on this occasion; that salt tastes roughly the same at different times. What we can never do, argue relativists and other non-realists, is check the degree of correspondence between our judgments and reality as it is independent of our experience of it.

That goes right back to the OP, which is metaphysics.

You know what philosophy is, because you can do it. Now do it. I won't ask for your degree in philosophy. Just do it.

 

[JayUtah]

Please provide a single example in which the objects and methods of philosophy are better than the objects and methods of science at establishing what is actually true.

Philosophy correctly argues that its duty is to investigate what truth actually means, what knowledge actually entails, and so forth. It's proper to pursue that by deconstructing and abstracting concepts that we previously held mostly by intuition. What's happening here is the pseudo-philosophical exercise of pretending a refutation appears by sole virtue of the deconstruction. They omit the step of reconstruction and contextualizing. You can take the lawn mower apart, whereupon it no longer resembles a lawn mower. Since one can do this, it makes no sense to talk about lawn mowers, or the parts of a lawn mower in terms of the role they formerly played in that lawn mower. None of that is actually philosophy, of course.

Just had an amusing moment trying to imagine what a plane designed and built by the objects and methods of philosophy might look like.

Real philosophy would realize that an appropriate set of axioms can be adopted which would result in a calculus that's able to achieve the desired result. The pseudo-philosophy being thrown around here would simply continue to insist that no such machine could ever be built. Philosophy does not eschew the practical.

In another thread Tommy fell into the trap of insisting that 2+2=5 was not possible. I pointed out that he claimed his only because he assumed a common algebra, out of all the possible algebras that could be formulated. The ploy here is to deny that the search for God can be practical, that it can proceed according to axioms and other lines of reasoning that are consistent with the ones under which the believers in God operate. Science can employ a philosophical calculus to arrive at useful and practical conclusions, but it cannot do so with God because that's somehow a different worldview, despite that this is not what believers in God believe. That's how it turns into special pleading.

 

[JayUtah]

We are both evading.

No, just you. Every time someone asks you a question which you cannot answer honestly without losing face, you respond with an irrelevant question which you insist takes precedence. Not falling for that painfully obvious ploy doesn't make someone else negligent or evasive.

I'm not playing your game, Tommy. You keep misrepresenting my arguments. I keep having to correct you. Does this mean you're wrong?

 

[xjx388]

I have said many times that believing in gods is irrational. You can believe in an undetectable thing if you have rational hints of it. This is not the case of gods.

What I am defending here is that only science cannot show that gods don't exist. The arguments against the existence of god are basically philosophical. Of course, science aids as in many other philosophical issues.

The discussion about the gods of the Greeks raised when I demanded a scientific article about the inexistence of gods. If the issue is scientific it should be studied in some scientific paper. Logic, is it not? As they don't find anyone someone claimed that a photo of Olympus (science?) can show that Greeks' gods don't exist. I was trying to explain that Greeks' concept of gods was more complex that that and would not be refuted simply by a photo.
It seems that they think that this explanation implies that I believe in Zeus and Aphrodite.

I think that their problem is an irrational hate of philosophy --which they don't really know-- and the admission that if one don't accept his reasons to believe X this is because he doesn't believe in X.
Since they worship science if you say that our reasons to be atheist are not only science, you are a camouflaged sanctimonious or worse.

It is not easy calmly discuss with some people. They are dogmatic believers and never listen. Sometimes I would rather argue with Mother Teresa of Calcutta than with them.

Science isn’t in the business of exploring non-falsifiable claims. Asking for a scientific paper proving the non-existence of something is backwards. Hawking’s point is that all the science he has known has not given these “rational hints” of God. As such, he does not believe that there is a God. I’m sure if someone had pressed him, he might concede that he can’t rule out God completely; but that strikes me as a very minor quibble, not the “Gotcha,” many here seem to be arguing. There is no rational hint to rule god in in the first place.


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[Tommy Jeppesen]

...
Real philosophy would realize that an appropriate set of axioms can be adopted which would result in a calculus that's able to achieve the desired result. The pseudo-philosophy being thrown around here would simply continue to insist that no such machine could ever be built. Philosophy does not eschew the practical.

In another thread Tommy fell into the trap of insisting that 2+2=5 was not possible. I pointed out that he claimed his only because he assumed a common algebra, out of all the possible algebras that could be formulated. The ploy here is to deny that the search for God can be practical, that it can proceed according to axioms and other lines of reasoning that are consistent with the ones under which the believers in God operate. Science can employ a philosophical calculus to arrive at useful and practical conclusions, but it cannot do so with God because that's somehow a different worldview, despite that this is not what believers in God believe. That's how it turns into special pleading.

How decides the appropriate set of axioms for morality?

I have given links to other God beliefs than the ones you refer to. Check them out. Simple version; God created Universe and there is Heaven and Hell. The rest we understand with reason. One core version of Deism.

Here is a reconstruction of morality, which is not objective. It is a matter of belief as it is not even an axiom, they are more like guidelines:

1st Principle: The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
2nd Principle: Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
3rd Principle: Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;
4th Principle: A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
5th Principle: The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;
6th Principle: The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;
7th Principle: Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

https://www.uua.org/beliefs/what-we-believe/principles

The reconstruction is simple. Achieve coherence in your beliefs and understand that morality is nothing but beliefs. And don't do metaphysics as knowledge. That is not knowledge, look upthread.

 

[JayUtah]

How decides the appropriate set of axioms for morality?

Irrelevant. Is your entire performance in this thread no more capable than latching onto single words and phrases and pontificating mindlessly on them?

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

....
What I am defending here is that only science cannot show that gods don't exist. The arguments against the existence of god are basically philosophical. Of course, science aids as in many other philosophical issues. ...

This completely ignores what I said:

The evidence is overwhelming that humans make up god myths.
There is no evidence of actual gods.
There is enough evidence to conclude all gods are human generated fiction.

Your only answer to that is the nonsensical claim you can't find any science addressing fictional gods.

You chop whole sciences of anthropology, sociology, psychology and related sciences out of your reality and declare, "The arguments against the existence of god are basically philosophical."

You have not supported your premise.

... Where is the scientific site for SG's claim of science can do morality? Can you point me to where I can read about that?....

You and DavidMo both act like to satisfy you, you need to see some single paper, that perfectly explains an entire body of scientific study to you. David wants something vague, showing there are no gods in volcanoes or on top of Mt Olympus, and showing the creation of Cargo Cult god fiction isn't direct enough, I guess. I only see denial, not a basis for a claim.

And you want the entire field of study of where human morality comes from dismissed because you don't understand how science deals with measurements like deviation from the mean.

Both of you deny science you appear to not understand, that which requires a cumulation of research, a body of knowledge, rather than some link on the Net that spells something out for you. It also appears part of this is your refusal to consider the field of philosophy is not the end all and be all you've adopted.

Stop digging your heels in and you might actually learn something from this thread.

Philosopher's Chess. Your pieces just sit there not moving until one side proves the King piece is worth saving.

That is perfect, worth a nom.

 

[LarryS]

No, it goes back to the OP:
"I think the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science," Hawking, who died in March, wrote. "If you accept, as I do, that the laws of nature are fixed, then it doesn't take long to ask: What role is there for God?"

There are reasons for all those beliefs and what they claim are the same asked this way:
What role are there for something, which is not a fact?

It has nothing do with God in particular, that is a subset!

You're technically correct in that the Big Bang theory requires as much of a belief in a miracle as does believing in a God . . . that all the matter and energy and a fixed set of laws of nature came into existence in (less) than an instant.

 

[JayUtah]

You're technically correct in that the Big Bang theory requires as much of a belief in a miracle as does believing in a God . . . that all the matter and energy and a fixed set of laws of nature came into existence in (less) than an instant.

No.

The proposition of a Big Bang is a conclusion drawn by extrapolating what we can observe about the universe, i.e., that it is expanding. If we were to observe it to contract, we would instead conclude a Big Crunch. If we were to observe it at a steady state, we would instead conclude an eternal universe. The properties of the singularity are a deducible consequence of the conclusion.

This is vastly different than faith in the God that people actually worship.