Hawking says there are no gods

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fuelair said:
belief as an idiot idea for the topic. Believing in some godthing is a bleef.
Oxygen is necessary for human life is a belief as it is rational and clearly demonstrable.
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You don't have to believe in the Big Bang to have a life. If that was so, there would be no humans as pre-science humans knew nothing of the Big Bang, so you can live fine without it and that is the difference in regards to oxygen.
 
"How dare the system and process we explicitly created and have refined for hundreds of years to give us answers have the utter gall, the unmitigated audacity, to actually give us answers!"
 
JoeMorgue said:
"How dare the system and process we explicitly created and have refined for hundreds of years to give us answers have the utter gall, the unmitigated audacity, to actually give us answers!"
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Or give us answer we don't like!
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.
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https://www.iep.utm.edu/cog-rel/#H3
 
Belz... said:
...otherwise known to the rest of us as just 'science'.
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Indeed, I put "hidden" in cautionary quotes when I first mentioned it, and now he's applying as many derogatory connotations as he can. He didn't know it existed, so therefore it has to be demonized at all costs. Otherwise he'd have to concede that he's not the expert in scientific practice that he insinuated himself to be.
 
JayUtah said:
Indeed, I put "hidden" in cautionary quotes when I first mentioned it, and now he's applying as many derogatory connotations as he can. He didn't know it existed, so therefore it has to be demonized at all costs. Otherwise he'd have to concede that he's not the expert in scientific practice that he insinuated himself to be.
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Explain how 2 or more experts can either claim that the universe came from nothing OR a multiverse. With logic one is false as a contradiction.
 
Tommy Jeppesen said:
Explain how 2 or more experts can either claim that the universe came from nothing OR a multiverse. With logic one is false as a contradiction.
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No because you won't understand it and will misconstrue your not understanding it into some personal revelation of wisdom.

You lack the intellectual framework to discuss the things you are trying to disprove.
 
Belz... said:
Yes, such as "there are no gods".
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Well, I am an atheist, so I don't believe in gods. But in the end some versions of a god are metaphysical and that is unknown.
If something is truly and really independent of the mind it is unknown. Independent of the mind is in practice about about objective, inter-subjective and subjective or if you like control or the ability to do something.
 
Tommy Jeppesen said:
Well, I am an atheist, so I don't believe in gods. But in the end some versions of a god are metaphysical and that is unknown.
If something is truly and really independent of the mind it is unknown. Independent of the mind is in practice about about objective, inter-subjective and subjective or if you like control or the ability to do something.
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Jesus and we're right back down to the "Prove reality is real and magic doesn't make stuff happen when we're not looking" level.

Why is it every Naval Gazer thinks they are the first person in history to have an Existential Crisis?
 
JoeMorgue said:
Wrong.
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You do know as certain you are that it is wrong, as certain I am that it is a fact.
So what now?
With reason, logic and what not you know there are no gods and I know with reason, logic and what not, it is unknown what reality really is.

Without taking one position as correct and the other as incorrect now explain how we both do as we do. Go objective and explain us both as natural.
 
Tommy Jeppesen said:
Explain how 2 or more experts can either claim that the universe came from nothing OR a multiverse. With logic one is false as a contradiction.
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No, that's not a contradiction. You just don't understand what it means.

If something is truly and really independent of the mind it is unknown.
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That might be the first true thing you've posted. Regardless, if it's entirely independant of experience then it's exactly as if it were non-existent, which is why the label applies. Believers can't claim to experience god if he's outside of possible experience, and the entire concept, and any claim made about it, become irrelevant.
 
Tommy Jeppesen said:
You do know as certain you are that it is wrong, as certain I am that it is a fact.
So what now?
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Easy. You're wrong.

Your position is unsupported by evidence, logically contradictory, and... well you've been literally wrong about everything so far.

I don't give a crap how certain you are about it, you are wrong.

You are not special. You don't get be right without evidence or logical cohesion just by being really, really certain.
 
Tommy Jeppesen said:
You do know as certain you are that it is wrong, as certain I am that it is a fact.
So what now?
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You're still wrong but you don't realise it. That's what now. There are plenty of people out there who are wrong about something but either don't realise it or refuse to accept it. What do you propose to do, if they are immune to reason and evidence? Same to your question above.
 
Tommy Jeppesen said:
...it is unknown what reality really is.
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Except that you simply ignore this when your self-esteem is at stake. You want others to accept the "reality" of you being an expert philosopher, even though that exists only in your head. You want others to accept the "reality" of what you think their argument should have been, rather than object to your rewriting of them. You impose your judgment all the time in this debate, and then sanctimoniously forbid others from asserting theirs. So yeah, no one really is obliged to believe your nonsense.
 
Myriad said:
I called it a conceivable reason. My evidence for that is that many people have conceived it as a reason since time immemorial and continue to do so today.

That said, when did "X must be shown to exist before it can be postulated as a reason for observed phenomenon Y" get added to the Rules of Science?

Erwin Schroedinger certainly wasn't following any such rule, when he helped kick off the search for the material basis of genetics in 1944 by suggesting the heredity substance must be an "aperiodic crystal" despite no such crystal being known to exist at the time. (There are more obvious examples—hi again, cosmologists!—but that one is really cool.)
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What's missing from "X must be shown to exist before it can be postulated as a reason for observed phenomenon Y" is that we've seen time and time again that those 'conceived by many people' gods turn out to be fiction. And where gods were postulated as a cause, natural explanations continue to be found.

How many god myths do you need to demonstrate before you stop looking for gap gods.
 
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Myriad said:
It's not actually that simple, though.
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Yes, it is that simple.

Myriad said:
If all you had to address was religious narratives, which are artifacts whose likely historical and psychological origins can be investigated, then maybe it would be.

But to make it that simple you must disregard people's experiences with gods.
By that I mean experiences that people have that they comprehend in terms of gods, not just to explain their cause but to express their nature. And because they're experiences, all scientific observation of them is frustratingly indirect.
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Experience is one thing, concluding the experience is evidence of X is not evidence. By your standard we should consider all those woo beliefs to be evidence of whatever the person believes it is. Surely you've been down this double standard road before.


Myriad said:
Some but not all of these experiences are subject to falsification. "God cured my cancer" can be challenged with "the chemotherapy you also had while you were praying cured your cancer" if you have access to the medical records. (Though you're unlikely to move past that impasse once you've reached it, as far as the cured individual is concerned.) But "I felt Jesus's presence and received God's grace and it turned my life around" cannot be. It can be dismissed, shuffled aside ("eh, probably some brain chemical or psychological trigger, assuming you weren't just high") but not meaningfully addressed. That is to say, you can perhaps address the experiencer's after-the-fact narrative of the experience in such ways, but it's much more difficult to address the experience itself. (It doesn't help that few people are any good at relating such narratives with any clarity.)

That's why everybody on both sides of the question want to argue about bleefs. (That's a disrespectful rendering of "beliefs," demonstrating my disdain for their overrated importance.) Bleefs are easy to compare and talk about. It also happens we currently have two major world religions whose scriptures emphasize bleef. In the larger scheme of things, this is a bit odd, to the point where it's affected even the dictionary definition of religions as being e.g. sets of bleefs instead of, more accurately, interrelated sets of narratives, experiences, and practices.

I think investigation of religious experiences will advance eventually, but it's far from simple and I haven't seen much progress. That avenue tends to get pushed toward the fringe, e.g. Persinger. "You're investigating God?!" skeptics and theists both say in unison with equal incredulity (though with differing inflections, one implying "what an unsuitable subject for investigation!" and the other "what an unsuitable way to treat the Lord of Lords!").
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Why are religious experiences any different from homeopathy experiences?

By the way, we can test if prayer works. Turns out it only works when the person knows they are being prayed for.
 
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