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Split Thread Atheism and lack of belief in the afterlife

GDon said:
Creationists would claim that they are doing science. They even have articles published in peer-reviewed publications. From here:
https://www.discovery.org/id/peer-review/



Lots of others in the list.
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Religious people, snake-oil peddlers, flat-earthers, 911 truthers, etc., etc., all claim science for their views, but they are lying (or, possibly, mistaken). We can say this for certain because "doing science" requires sticking to specific, well-defined rules and methods. We don't have to believe in people who claim to do science, because we can examine their methods (* and determine if their science is sound.

Hans

(* Provided they publish their methods, but if they don't, rest assured they don't do proper science.
 
GDon said:
Is that what you want to believe about the list of peer reviewed papers supporting Intelligent Design? I doubt you've looked into any of them for yourself, beyond cherry picking examples?
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You're making a big deal about "peer reviewed papers". Have you actually read any of them yourself?

In fact, did you know that there are more than a few "journals" which will publish (and claim to peer review) literally anything you pay them to?

GDon said:
Personally I think Intelligent Design is rubbish. What I'm trying to do is highlight a somewhat hypocritical approach to "science" as something that we do, producing results that we agree with. But someone else coming to different conclusions are made into "anti-science". And therefore it is ironic that they use computers and mobile phones.
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I appreciate that you think ID is rubbish. With that out of the way, what "results" have IDists produced? Because unless you have any examples, you're comparing apples to oranges with "scientific results" and "intelligent design conclusions".

Also, the reason it's ironic is that were their rejection of science correct, computers and mobile phones wouldn't work.

GDon said:
Sure. For all I know, that's what Intelligent Design scholars are doing. Part of peer review is knocking out any obvious errors.
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Why, with all of the evidence we have to the contrary, are you assuming that intelligent design scholars are working in good faith? They literally only exist as a workaround to shoehorn creationism into science classes.
 
GDon said:
In an ideal world, that's certainly true. But people decide for themselves what is considered scrupulous use of the scientific method all the time, unfortunately. The scientific method isn't political but people are.
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No they don't. The rules for correct use of science are objective, well-defined, and well-known. You can examine their protocol, their data, and see if their conclusions hold water.

That is the whole idea of science.

Hans
 
Thermal said:
Yet there you were, making **** up and putting words in my mouth and radically altering my argument, which by your own admission, you have not the foggiest ******* idea what it has been or if it had changed. That's not ok to do on this thread, that thread, or any ******* thread anywhere at any time.



No, it's being honest. You (and others) want a god described like a beer can. Simple, comprehensible, and measurable in the fridge or garage. Ok. I'm sure that would be argumentatively convenient. I find it ridiculous.
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Ok, so your god isn't undetectable, he's just not measurable? Dude, do you seriously not even understand your own argument? Or do you not understand that if something is not measurable in any way then it is undetectable and unobservable?

Thermal said:
To repeat, you made claims about my argumentation that were wholly imaginary, by your own admittance. You made them up out of thin air and claimed they were mine. There is only one word for that, whether you like that word or not.
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Dude, you've now tripled down on repeating the same claims you said I made up out of thin air.


Thermal said:
Jesus Christ, you're doing it again. Putting words in my mouth after you just acknowledged that you have not the foggiest idea what my position is or has been. Just stunning.
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At no point did I say I had no idea what your position has been. Please do read for comprehension. I've also quoted you multiple times taking the very position you claim I made up. Either you don't understand that unobservable and not affecting the universe are the same ******* thing, or you're just arguing to argue. Or you're lying, since you insist on accusing everyone else of that.
 
The god that does stuff but leaves no evidence is a load bearing copout in theology apologetics.
 
Roger Ramjets said:
Beware - when scientists use the word 'believe' something they mean that they have evidence for and (possibly) theories that explain it. This is the opposite of faith, which is belief without evidence.

Personally I avoid using the word 'believe' in the scientific sense, because it causes confusion. Scientists use a lot of other phrases that could be misinterpreted too. Don't be someone who does that.
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Matt Dillahunty says faith is the reason people give for why they believe when they don't have any other reason to believe.

So in that usage, yeah, faith is a subset of belief, but makes the distinction between what reason there is for it.

Merely equating faith with belief is pretty disingenuous.
 
Thermal said:
Why? Why in the name of every stupid strawman set forth on this thread would a god...say , a universal creator of time and space...leave a trail of ******* breadcrumbs?
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Hm. Sorry, Thermal, not to pile on; and, like my earlier post here addressed to JoeMorgue, this is just a one-time pointing-out of an obvious and glaring error in reasoning, and after this post I'll stand down: but don't you see that a God (or, as you call it, a universal creator of space and time) that does not leave "breadcrumbs" is, like, the exact thing that Carl Sagan was pointing at with his dragon? Like, exactly? Just think about it a minute: the argument that you've presented in this post, that corresponds exactly with what the dragon thing was all about. After all, Carl Sagan hasn't actually shown that the dragon doesn't exist, he hasn't ruled it out with 100% certitude; but what he's done is to show, very very clearly, why it makes sense to dismiss that claim, and why it is silly to continue to hold on to that claim.

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Also: I don't think "Why would (He/it) leave breadcrumbs?" is the correct question to ask. That teleological slant kind of begs the question, and already presumes that this hypothetical creator you're discussing is possessed of intelligence, and therefore of purpose. That's ...well, insupportable as an a priori assumption, right from the get-go.

Or, of course, it could be that you used that "Why" loosely, and actually only meant "How". Well, if that be the case, then the answer is obvious. Anything that exists does tend to leave some kind of evidence; and while certainly it is possible that something exists for which so far we haven't found evidence, and while certainly there's nothing stopping us from continuing to look if we so wish, but that for which there is no evidence, isn't that kind of how one might define that which (we would assume/conclude) doesn't exist?
 
Chanakya said:
... but don't you see that a God (or, as you call it, a universal creator of space and time) that does not leave "breadcrumbs" is, like, the exact thing that Carl Sagan was pointing at with his dragon? Like, exactly?
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Yes. A God who intervened in the universe would be detectable through His interventions. If bad things (like, say, disease) happened more to bad people than to good people then we could measure God's justice statistically.
 
GDon said:
There are qualified academics producing peer reviewed articles for intelligent design. In what way is that not science?
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No, they're not. Intelligent design is not science. It only masks itself as science. It is creationism in a labcoat. They don't submit their articles for scientific peer review.
 
Roger Ramjets said:
There was a talking donkey in Winnie the Pooh too.

But did the 'uneducated peasants' really believe that donkeys could talk, or did they understand that it was just a literary device? The Bible is full of stories that are clearly fictional - some even stating it outright. Aesop's Fables, which predated the Christian bible by over 500 years, are full of talking animals and moral messages. The people who passed on those fables knew they were fiction, but they still took the messages seriously.

It's not the Bible that claims animals really spoke, but the people who read it and draw that conclusion. It is this slavish and laughable insistence on taking everything literally that is the problem. You don't have to be educated to know the difference between fact and fiction. I bet the vast majority of 'uneducated peasants' would have been rather skeptical of claims of actual talking animals.

Religion was iS more about political power than belief. 'God' was just the personification of the laws and morals of a society (flaunted by many when they could get away with it). Uneducated peasants 'believed' what the church told them because there would be repercussions if they didn't. Many were superstitious too, but most of those beliefs were evidence based (with bad reasoning perhaps, but still...).
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You've nailed it. Anyone who insists on literal inerrancy of the Bible is either a gullible idiot or a con artist peddling BS.
 
"Intelligent design is a Trojan horse to get creationism into classrooms" is a fact, admitted by the people who developed it, and is not in dispute.
 
Darat said:
I wouldn't. Look at the authoritative texts from the middle ages - the bestiaries in particular. Although often as much about Christian morality as opposed to facts it is clear people believed in those beasts from other texts and the like. We have claims over written history of many animals talking to people, it's not limited to the biblical accounts. It seems to have been a widely held belief that under some circumstances beasts could talk.
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And considering the daily amount of beer consumed by common people at the time (because the water was not drinkable), it is perhaps not surprising to find tales of, e.g. talking animals. :p

Hans
 
Chanakya said:
Hm. Sorry, Thermal, not to pile on; and, like my earlier post here addressed to JoeMorgue, this is just a one-time pointing-out of an obvious and glaring error in reasoning, and after this post I'll stand down:
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It is an obvious and glaring error in reasoning. Just not the one you think it is, nor is it on my part. We'll flesh it out below.

but don't you see that a God (or, as you call it, a universal creator of space and time) that does not leave "breadcrumbs" is, like, the exact thing that Carl Sagan was pointing at with his dragon? Like, exactly? Just think about it a minute: the argument that you've presented in this post, that corresponds exactly with what the dragon thing was all about. After all, Carl Sagan hasn't actually shown that the dragon doesn't exist, he hasn't ruled it out with 100% certitude; but what he's done is to show, very very clearly, why it makes sense to dismiss that claim, and why it is silly to continue to hold on to that claim.
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No, because you are making the same obvious, glaring error of reasoning the others are.

I have said, and repeatedly, that I think a god would be incomprehensible. Why do you add on undetectable to that? I mean, seriously. You genuinely can't conceive of detecting something you don't/can't comprehend?

So the question logically extends to "why don't we see any evidence?", which is countered with "where would you reasonably look?" A creator of time and space (phrased that way for the sake of argument), would not be...inside...that time and space, to my reasoning. And that's the only way we currently know how to detect things.

We are hanging out on a rock orbiting a medium sized star in the unfashionable Western arm of a typical galaxy. You would expect to find a god hanging out here with us? He would even fit anywhere within our current observational abilities? Serious question: why would you expect a universal creating thing to be even visible inside our observable universe? You think, as one of our colleagues does, that he should be expected to be just like a beer can in the fridge?

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Also: I don't think "Why would (He/it) leave breadcrumbs?" is the correct question to ask. That teleological slant kind of begs the question, and already presumes that this hypothetical creator you're discussing is possessed of intelligence, and therefore of purpose. That's ...well, insupportable as an a priori assumption, right from the get-go.

Or, of course, it could be that you used that "Why" loosely, and actually only meant "How". Well, if that be the case, then the answer is obvious. Anything that exists does tend to leave some kind of evidence; and while certainly it is possible that something exists for which so far we haven't found evidence, and while certainly there's nothing stopping us from continuing to look if we so wish, but that for which there is no evidence, isn't that kind of how one might define that which (we would assume/conclude) doesn't exist?
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Of course I meant it in the "How" sense, not that there is much important difference.

What kind of bread crumbs would you expect (say) a creator of time and space to leave laying around as evidence? A celestial hammer or screwdriver floating in the cosmos? Maybe a coffee cup and a couple cigarette butts? Again, dead serious question: what would you expect to find, that a creator would leave hanging around for eons? Maybe an Instagram page?

Why would you expect a creator of time and space to be doing hanging around that time and space, of course also conveniently in our current comfortable viewing area and within the confines of our current technology?

Remember, incomprehensible =/= undetectable or any of the other weird add-ons. Also, whatever interactions with such a thing that you guys are trying to pile on are not the question, either. And most importantly, this doesn't have anything to do with how you live your life. It's just the simple musing of whether there could or couldn't be something out there we would call a god. How we would or should proceed from there is a separate question. Don't be like the doorstops posting here who try to lump 8 or 9 entirely different issues all into one.
 
Again so we don't get pulled into the weeds and showy faux-anger since that is all the other side actually can do, yank it back to the discussion.

1. Expecting god to actually provide literally any evidence for his existence is not unreasonable.

2. No you can't invoke a god who does stuff but is still undetectable and a god that doesn't do anything is a god that doesn't exist. Either god is falsifiable or he doesn't exist.

3. None of this is about a god anyone actually believes in, it's a copout. "You, hey you, shoot up an abortion clinic" is not a god that doesn't interact with the universe.
 
This is one of those "I'm saying we have no capacity to observe it but how dare you say it's unobservable", "I'm saying we can't detect it but if you say I said it's undetectable to us you're lying" times where we just pretend words mean anything we want them to, huh?
 
Again jumping back and forth on the line between "currently known" and "I'm defining this thing through nested special pleadings to be inherently unknowable as a concept" and using the terms interchangeably depending on what they want to mean at that moment is a key part of the apologetics game.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Again jumping back and forth on the line between "currently known" and "I'm defining this thing through nested special pleadings to be inherently unknowable as a concept" and using the terms interchangeably depending on what they want to mean at that moment is a key part of the apologetics game.
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And the main thrust of the invisible dragon analogy that the guy proposing a dragon god we can't detect, doesn't interact with the known universe, and who leaves no traces nor even has the possibility to leave a trace says doesn't apply to his argument.
 
Yeah I know. I'm done playing along with people who pretend the dragon analogy is just soooooooooooooo hard to follow. It's piss simple and I can't make it any simpler.

"There's a dragon in garage but I have no evidence and an excuse why any test you want to run won't work."

"There's a god in the universe but I have no evidence and an excuse why any test you wan to run won't work."
 
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