Hawking says there are no gods

[JoeMorgue]

You approach this debate as if it were an ego-reinforcement exercise. You're projecting onto others the role you want them to play in it. We are neither your students nor your teachers. We are your critics and opponents in debate.

The total inability of the Philosophizers to not get out of this headspace and their continued rejection of any debate that isn't just a bunch of hangers on stroking their egos over how "Deep" they are as "rude" is telling. One major factor that separates the Philosophizers from the real Philosophers is this, it all being about them taking on the role of a wise old master talking down to the unenlightened.

Tommy, David. You are not our teachers. We are not your students. You don't occupy a place of intellectual superiority over us. You are not Yoda, Mr. Miyagi, or Morpheus, hell you aren't even the Sphinx from Mystery Men.

 

[David Mo]

Who cares what you think of it? It exists in large amounts, despite your insistence that such things are "rare."



Straw man. But if that's your best response, then Its existence is of interest to our debate because it challenges your knowledge of what science consists of and how it's done. And that erodes the credibility of your attempts to preclusively define it. Your ad hoc dismissal of science that contradicts your belief is based on others accepting your authority to proclaim what is and isn't science. You seem to lack the knowledge that would supply such authority, so others have properly rejected it as a basis of argumentation.

Of course, we have to believe that in a hidden engineering department (?) hidden experiments have been carried out that do not follow the scientific guidelines that we know and demonstrate that gods do not exist.
One day you will tell us the story of Dr. Mabuse.

 

[JoeMorgue]

The fact that nobody can demonstrate that Gods exist and that they can demonstrate a logical, scientific reason for everything Gods are supposed to be needed to do demonstrates that they don't exist just fine.

Your understanding of "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is skewed and wrong. You're treating an off-hand argumentative rule of thumb as some fundamental law of the universe.

In reality made up things that don't exist don't wait around for some scientist to appease some philosophers made up impossible standards of proving an undefined negative before popping out of existence.

 

[Tommy Jeppesen]

...
No, it doesn't. You approach this debate as if it were an ego-reinforcement exercise. You're projecting onto others the role you want them to play in it. We are neither your students nor your teachers. We are your critics and opponents in debate.

Yes and that works both ways.

I am critical of your claim of authority to knowledge and you claim I have none. Yet I do know something. For certain aspects of reality we are different and that is a fact. You then attach a different value to that than I do and that is a fact.

 

[JayUtah]

...that do not follow the scientific guidelines...

Straw man. Also circular, since your proclamation of "scientific guidelines" is what's in question.

...and demonstrate that gods do not exist.

Not the point. The point was to challenge your knowledge of scientific practice. What you claimed, on your authority, to be rare is actually commonplace, and you didn't know it. Therefore your authority is questionable. And all the arguments you've made on the basis of that authority, including whether there exists valid science that addresses where beliefs in gods come from, are also in question.

One day you will tell us the story of Dr. Mabuse.

And maybe one day you will accept that you can't bluff your way past everyone.

 

[JayUtah]

I am critical of your claim of authority to knowledge and you claim I have none.

Not my claim, either one.

Your desire that everyone accept your self-proclaimed proficiency is inconsistent with the manner in which you are willing to substantiate it. Further, you are defensive and evasive when questioned about it, so we conclude you are deliberately attempting to deceive. You have a double standard, and it's likely that you know you do.

 

[Belz...]

Now I notice that some of you want to learn me something and other resent that I want to teach them something.

We resent being taught by the ignorant, especially those whose ignorance has bred in them an insufferable confidence that is wholly unjustified.

So it seems it goes both ways both for willingness to learn oneself and willingness to educate others.

Oh, don't worry. I'm sure you're very desperate to paint your opponents here as guilty of exactly the same sins you've committed. It's a signature of the guilty to claim that everyone does it. Creationists calling science a religion, partisans calling others partisans, etc.

 

[JoeMorgue]

I figured "Oh yeah well... you too!" would have been left behind on the schoolyard.

I see it is alive and well in philosophy.

 

[Belz...]

I could never be better than you, because you are better than me living your life. And so in reverse.

You do understand that empty platitudes constitute neither a good argument nor an interesting talking point, right?

 

[Belz...]

Of course, we have to believe that in a hidden engineering department (?) hidden experiments have been carried out that do not follow the scientific guidelines that we know and demonstrate that gods do not exist.
One day you will tell us the story of Dr. Mabuse.

Ok I take it back. Rather than regretting saying it to Jay, you're doubling down. Sunken cost fallacy, I suppose.

 

[Belz...]

I am critical of your claim of authority to knowledge and you claim I have none.

Don't play with words. You convince no one but, perhaps, yourself with that. Your inability to put a convincing argument into coherent words is what shows that you don't know what you're talking about. Either that or you have a communication disability.

For certain aspects of reality we are different and that is a fact.

It's barely a sentence and certainly gibberish, so it's probably not a fact, actually.

 

[David Mo]

Straw man. Also circular, since your proclamation of "scientific guidelines" is what's in question.



Not the point. The point was to challenge your knowledge of scientific practice. What you claimed, on your authority, to be rare is actually commonplace, and you didn't know it. Therefore your authority is questionable. And all the arguments you've made on the basis of that authority, including whether there exists valid science that addresses where beliefs in gods come from, are also in question.



And maybe one day you will accept that you can't bluff your way past everyone.

According to you there is a science that is not published in scientific papers. But if that science is science it will work with the scientific method. If not, say how we can know what other method follows.

If that supposed science has not studied the subject of God, we are not interested. If it has studied it, say how we can know and contrast.
If neither one or the other, stop teasing us.

 

[JoeMorgue]

According to you there is a science that is not published in scientific papers.

Nothing anybody has said is even close to that. Stop lying.

Appeal to authority is your domain. The rest of us understand that things don't patiently wait to be written down before deciding to be true.

We see the map and describing the terrain. You keep trying to get us to argue in your framework of the terrain not existing until someone draws a map of it.

 

[Belz...]

Nothing anybody has said is even close to that. Stop lying.

Appeal to authority is your domain. The rest of us understand that things don't patiently wait to be written down before deciding to be true.

We see the map and describing the terrain. You keep trying to get us to argue in your framework of the terrain not existing until someone draws a map of it.

Meanwhile Tommy is trying to drink from the drawn rivers on the map.

 

[JayUtah]

According to you there is a science that is not published in scientific papers.

There is science being done that is not published in the public academic journals to which you have referred and elevated as the sine qua non of scientific knowledge. You claimed that such science, if it were being done at all, is a rare occurrence. That claim ignores the facts. It is not at all rare, and in fact constitutes a significant portion of all scientific research.

But if that science is science it will work with the scientific method.

The science to which I refer indeed employs the hypothetico-deductive method. I have never suggested otherwise.

If that supposed science has not studied the subject of God, we are not interested.

Asked and answered.

Your rejection of the science that has studied the subject of gods is based on your authoritative declaration that it is not science. You give various criteria for what, in your estimation, constitutes valid science. In the course of delivering that criteria, you have shown yourself to be ignorant of how science is actually done. Therefore the reader has no reason to believe your criteria are properly informed. If your criteria for what constitutes valid science are ill-informed, then your rejection of the sciences that have studied the subject of gods is more likely to be self-serving and ad hoc than it is to be properly informed and widely accepted.

 

[JayUtah]

Nothing anybody has said is even close to that. Stop lying.

I have said something close to that, but I don't know exactly what David means here by "in scientific papers." David buttresses the premise behind his rejection of Skeptic Ginger's examples by asserting that little if any significant science is being done that isn't published in journals. I understand he means the well-known academic journals, available to the public. His argument requires those sources to be authoritative and complete. To emphasize it, he made an off-hand general assertion. Evidently having now realized his error, he looks to be retroactively trying to manipulate its scope.

The point I've made is that David made a comment that reveals his inexperience with scientific practice. My point is not whether non-public science has proved the existence or non-existence of God; that's the straw man he's now trying to convert my argument into. The point is whether David's standard for what constitutes valid science is based on a comprehensive and correct understanding of the field. He slipped and revealed that it isn't.

 

[xjx388]

You're circling around not to get into Kant's moral argument. You clearly don't know what you're talking about.

This isn’t the thread for me to educate you on how Kant arrived at his moral conclusions. Your misunderstandings are not my problem, here. Maybe you’d like to take the “Kant’s Morality by Reason argument has nothing to do with his arguments about The Phenomenal World and the Noumenal World” argument to another thread?

I'm glad you recognize that the existence of gods is denied with common sense, not with science. Whatever you want to call it, common sense is shorter. We have already reached a consensus on at least one point.

Not as long as you think that “common sense” is detached from scientific knowledge. For example, I know that Jesus did not multiply fish, walk on water or turn water into wine. I know these things because such things are physically impossible. Therefore, I can deny his godhood. I can also examine the historical record and find that Jesus probably didn’t exist at all and most of the stuff in the Bible is questionable as well. I can therefore say that Christianity is based on myth. I can make a similar analysis for every religious thought out there. I am not engaging pure reason; I am using my reason to sort through the knowledge gained through scientific endeavor. If I lived in the days before such knowledge was acquired, I would likely come to very different “common sense” conclusions. This is evident in the historical record: As science matured, religious explanations fell by the wayside, clung to only by those unwilling to let go of superstition. Those people lacked (and still lack) “common sense.” They were unable to integrate new knowledge to come up with new conclusions.

But I don't think there is empirical evidence to refute the existence of gods, as in the case of Santa Claus. Just as the cultured Greeks did not believe that the sun was a chariot guided by the god Apollo, today's cultured believers do not literally believe the biblical myths. So it is no use you showing them that Joshua did not stop the sun.

We need search in other places.

No true religious person?

I will agree that most people today don’t put much stock in mythology. That’s why religious attendance is falling. But that came about because scientific explanations supplanted religious explanations and most people are smart enough to realize that this probably means religious ideas are invalid.




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[The Norseman]

I have said something close to that, but I don't know exactly what David means here by "in scientific papers." David buttresses the premise behind his rejection of Skeptic Ginger's examples by asserting that little if any significant science is being done that isn't published in journals. I understand he means the well-known academic journals, available to the public. His argument requires those sources to be authoritative and complete. To emphasize it, he made an off-hand general assertion. Evidently having now realized his error, he looks to be retroactively trying to manipulate its scope.

The point I've made is that David made a comment that reveals his inexperience with scientific practice. My point is not whether non-public science has proved the existence or non-existence of God; that's the straw man what he's now trying to convert my argument into. The point is whether David's standard for what constitutes valid science is based on a comprehensive and correct understanding of the field. He slipped and revealed that it isn't.

I submit that David's already told us about his emotional investment in wishing that science cannot prove god(s) doesn't exist both in this thread and others. He wants philosophy to continue to reign supreme über alles. Hence, the projection, the denial, the rudeness, the fear... all is explained when one feels attacked because one self-identifies so strongly with a particular concept or thought or idea.

Just like a common theist who will project their own belief structure onto everyone else, no matter how ill-fitting or ill-advised in order to gain some semblance of "equality" most likely to save face, so too with this particular group of philosophers.

David is forced to continue to misunderstand science and its methodologies simply in order to keep the idea alive that philosophy is much more valuable in the 21st century than it really is.

 

[fuelair]

Accepted.
Now I notice that some of you want to learn me something and other resent that I want to teach them something. So it seems it goes both ways both for willingness to learn oneself and willingness to educate others.

Just curious about your (and other pontificators) credentials/knowledge base/proofs on the topics you cover...…………..

 

[Myriad]

The issue raised by the OP is the question of generalizing from experience.

We examine a volcano and find that it's caused by subterranean heat and pressure, rather than by the anger of a volcano god. We examine fifty volcanos and find that all of them are caused by subterranean heat and pressure, and not one by the anger of volcano gods. But then a new volcano erupts somewhere that we've never examined before. Can we say with any confidence that that one's also caused by subterranean heat and pressure, and not by the anger of a volcano god?

Most people (nowadays) would say yes, though some of them would also caution against absolute certainty, and suggest we should probably go there and take a few measurements.

Now instead of fifty volcanos, let's say we've investigated the causes of fifty different natural phenomena. In all cases where we could identify causes, we found causes other than gods. How justifiable, how rational, is the conclusion that no natural phenomena are caused by gods?

On the one hand, the pattern established by experience so far is clear. On the other hand, the fifty-first, fifty-second etc. phenomena that remain unexplained aren't just randomly chosen phenomena that we haven't got around to looking at before. They're unexplained because for whatever reasons, they're harder to examine or explain than volcanos and the rest of the previous fifty. Those reasons might be complexity, scale, remoteness, etc. but one of the conceivable reasons certain things might be hard to explain is the involvement of gods.

The question of how far we're justified in generalizing isn't specific to science. It applies to all learning. It's a fundamental issue in all learning.

Under-generalizing is "not getting the concept," not seeing the pattern or "not seeing the forest for the trees." When I studied machine learning in the early 80s it was the crux of the "open minded learner" problem demonstrating that built-in biases were necessary for all but the crudest of learning. A completely open-minded learning algorithm could be told that for an input of 1, the correct output is 1; for an input of 2, the correct output is 2; ditto for 3, 4, 5, and 7. But if then told to figure out the correct output for 6, it could only output "unknown" because it hadn't been taught that specific rule. In other words an open-minded learner cannot learn; or more precisely, it can learn only in the sense of being able to parrot specifically taught instances. That falls under our definition of learning (a multiplication table, for instance) but doesn't encompass all that we mean by learning. To go farther the learning algorithm needs a "model" which amounts to a system of biases. For instance if programmed to find the shortest computation that relates output to input for all known instances, the learning algorithm will no longer be "open minded," instead having a strong bias toward simpler rules, but will quickly learn the rule "output = input," and will offer the output of 6 for an input of 6.

Over-generalizing is "jumping to conclusions" or "mistaking the map for the territory" or "comparing apples to oranges" or "every problem seeming like a nail." Fictional AI-gone-wrong scenarios usually feature something to that effect. HAL is programmed to "protect the mission" and tries to do so by killing the astronauts. Colossus is programmed to "defend the nation" and does so by taking over the world.

Both possibilities loom in every learning situation. Both are the basis for jokes, sometimes but not always about silly things children do. From my own childhood, a comedy bit on Laugh-In by Totie Fields stuck in my memory: a toddler-age character (much like Lily Tomlin's "Edith Ann" character, but different) recites a series of laments: "Nobody TOLD me I shouldn't paint the baby. They said not to paint the walls, or the floor..." That's failure to generalize, which we associate with cognitive immaturity. (Fields' character appeared to be regressing in age with each transgression in the series.) In other family comedy bits, toddlers do things like try to feed the goldfish by dumping dog food in the bowl. That's generalizing too far, which we often associate with inexperience. It's the reason why "a little learning is a dangerous thing." It's usually the reason for the problems the "FNG" causes at work. FNGs know the dozen fundamental rules for how things should be done, but not the eight hundred exceptions.

Clearly the issue goes way beyond early childhood learning. Every romance is about learning not to generalize. "Can't you see Broody McLeatherpants isn't like all the other vampires?" Every recovery narrative is about learning to generalize. "I've just realized that every time I reach this point and go get a bottle of cheap whisky and open it up and drink it, it doesn't help! Maybe I should try something else instead."

The issue of this thread is not how science should be done, but how we should or should not learn from it. Some want to limit our learning to only the specific results investigated, like the "open minded learner" algorithm that can only repeat what it's been taught. "Be open-minded! That fifty-first volcano might have a god in it!" Others want to take models that might be shaky or incomplete and extrapolate them literally to the ends of the universe (I'm looking at you, cosmologists, though some other examples come to mind, such as the "central dogma of genetics" that proved over-generalized).

More specifically, some see only a small distinction between "no volcano gods" and "no gods at all," while others see a huge gulf. The first view can be justified on the basis of volcanos once being among the natural phenomena that were very consistently and solely attributed to the actions of gods. (They're even among the events that insurance companies technically term "acts of god" to this day.) The second can be justified on the basis of the still-unexplained things such as conscious experience, the origin of life, and the origin of the universe being, in present day eyes, so much very more mysterious than mere volcanos.

Hawking's viewpoint adds a bit of a new wrinkle: the suggestion that even if the second view is correct, and there is a huge divide between "no volcano gods" and "no gods at all," that science has succeeded in crossing it. That is to say, "no gods exist" is a reasonable generalization to have learned by now.