Split Thread Atheism and lack of belief in the afterlife

[Skeptic Ginger]

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.

What the Discovery Institute is doing is not science because they've continued to promote Intelligent Design despite the failed hypothesis that Irreducible Complexity exists.

Michael Behe published a paper on what he claimed was the irreducible bacterial flagella. It was at the time a breakthrough in genetic research made genome analysis inexpensive. It turned out the flagella was not irreducible, rather the precursor bacterial organelle was a transport mechanism, not a version of a precursor flagella.

Intelligent Design which is the 'science' supposedly of Biblical Creationism, has been shot down time and time again: How did the eye evolve, how did the liver evolve, how did the gut evolve etc. We know how all of these things evolved. Creationists don't want to educate themselves. They prefer to not look under the hood so to speak.

The latest claim I heard (which has been years ago now) was that supposedly there was no precursor to mitochondria. It was another unsupportable claim.

Genetics essentially put the nail in the coffin of irreducible complexity. Behe has yet to admit his life's work trying to prove Intelligent Design has failed.

BTW, the Discovery Institute has an office in Seattle. I have been there and gone to a number of their events.

My favorite response to Intelligent Design came from a researcher who looked at fruit fly wings. There was a lot of flexibility in the genetics, you could change this and that within a certain range and you'd still get functioning wings. But if you take the schematics of something like a transistor radio which is intelligently designed you can't change a single thing. If you do the radio no longer works.

It's not that some god designed lifeforms, it's that you can get there by selective pressures and random mutations just fine.

 

[Thermal]

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?

No, you get called a liar only when you are caught lying. Those times are racking up.

Just out of curiosity: in the school you went to, did they ever go into the difference between what unobservable and unobserved meant?

 

[catsmate]

Dave if we apply Occam's razor you can use the same logic for alien life.

IE: Believing in Alien life requires the postulate that there is an entirely unknown class of alien life of which we have never directly observed a single one, with abilities and characteristics of a type we have never observed, despite having extensively searched for any such observations.

We have a good idea how life on the Earth works, we can't create it out of the basic building blocks yet, but we know how its put together. Yet there is no evidence that life exists anywhere else in the Universe. Though we can hope, and have faith that there may be.

This is complete drivel.

 

[Darat]

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.

And you have to remember that most of the gods folk in our countries believe and claim exist are interventionist.

 

[Nessie]

I got bored today. Really bored. An infinite afterlife would be seriously boring.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

It happens all the time! Here is the news from 2003. Two men heard a fish talking, so that means corroboration by two people. Three, if you include the fish!:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2854189.stm

Explain that one, "science"!

Someone tricked them and they fell for it, or, they misinterpreted a voice they heard as coming from the fish, or they made it up for publicity of their businesses, or the fish actually talked.

If one wanted to look at these two testimonials scientifically, one would develop those four hypotheses into questions and proceed to test them.

What I like about the story is that they still killed and sold the fish.

Which suggests the 4th hypothesis failed. It also suggests only claiming it for publicity is a potential explanation. If they actually believed what they claimed they almost certainly would have kept the fish.

 

[Darat]

The hilite is intellectually dishonest. There is zero data for the existence of both.
One can neither prove nor disprove either with current data. The best you can hope for is faith in both, or one over the other if you choose.

There is incontrovertible evidence that life is possible in this universe. We have no such incontrovertible evidence that gods are possible in this universe.

 

[acbytesla]

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 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...).

I've read from highly respected biblical scholars that literal biblical interpretations is more of a recent phenomenon. That ancient peasants absolutely didn't believe these ridiculous stories.

My point wasn’t to say that they or anyone did. I was just explaining why I didn't put much stock in the Bible. The book starts out with a talking snake ffs. The moment I read such fantastical stories I immediately KNOW I'm reading fiction.

Now to fully enjoy a fictional story humans engage in self deception. They suspend "disbelief" for the purpose of experiencing the story fully. The problem arises when the suspension goes full throttle into insisting on disbelief. Take GDon's point. He KNOWS snakes and donkeys don't talk, but to keep his self-con of this ridiculous story going he insists on suspending reasonable disbelief. He gives himself a ridiculous out.

Something science would NEVER EVER DO! Although some scientists have and do engage in that sort of thing. For example Newton used God as an out when his calculations weren't quite right. Newton might just be the smartest person who ever lived. Yet this was not only stupid it was beneath him. Newton was easily smart enough to get it right.

I knew as a child almost immediately there was no such thing as Santa Claus but we always insisted that Santa Claus was real. Not because we didn’t know the truth. But Christmas was more fun if we played along.

I have to wonder just how many theists treat their religion the same way. They know reality but if they admit to that reality they no longer can play. I remember the fun things my church did. I remember people I genuinely liked. But to keep enjoying the camaraderie and the events I had to keep to the script.

I couldn’t do that. Especially when it denies science and is used to divide humanity.

 

[Jack by the hedge]

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.

Quoting myself as I'd like to add a corollary: A potential rebuttal to the above might be that we humans can't be sure who the genuinely good and bad people are as God can, so it may be that God does indeed mete out justice with suffering and diseases but we can't see His reasons.

If this were the case, to the extent that we can detect absolutely no hint of a correlation between the things we know people have done and their chances of getting horrible illnesses, then we would need to conclude that God is either not intervening or is using definitions of good and bad that do not match our own. So at the very least God's followers should knock off telling us what they reckon their God thinks is good or bad behaviour.

I'm content with the null hypothesis that God is just pretend.

 

[wareyin]

No, you get called a liar only when you are caught lying. Those times are racking up.

Brah, you've accurately caught me lying exactly zero out of the multitude of times you've thrown the accusation.

Just out of curiosity: in the school you went to, did they ever go into the difference between what unobservable and unobserved meant?

This is where you didn't say "unobserved" : "Serious question: why would you expect a universal creating thing to be even visible inside our observable universe?"

And cue the "waah, you're lying, I said it wouldn't be possible to observe I didn't say unobservable" in 3....2....

 

[JoeMorgue]

You're never lying if you never have the intellectual courage to say what you really mean.

Anyone can be honest if all the say is wishy-washy mush mouthed non-answers. That's not impressive.

"God this vague thing except when he is except when he isn't except when he is." isn't a lie, it's gibberish.

 

[Thermal]

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.

Claims, wareyin. The dragon works well against claims of something that defies detection. I am considering a possibility.

Do you understand the difference between "I can fly" and "can I fly?"

 

[JoeMorgue]

No we are not having a debate about "claims versus arguments."

We're not looping back to JAQing off being this thing we don't understand.

 

[wareyin]

Claims, wareyin. The dragon works well against claims of something that defies detection. I am considering a possibility.

Do you understand the difference between "I can fly" and "can I fly?"

Dodging and missing the point like you are here is Matrix level talent. But Matrix Resurrections, old, been done before, and trying too hard.

 

[wareyin]

No we are not having a debate about "claims versus arguments."

We're not looping back to JAQing off being this thing we don't understand.

See, it isn't JAQing off we don't understand, it's Thermal's "possibility" of an invisible dragon....er, sorry, god.

 

[Leumas]

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."

You are wrong... the last two sentences are not the same... there is one word difference which is such a profound word that renders the two statements totally different because the word "god" is the cause of my acute and chronic Cognitive Dissonance pangs while "dragon" is not.

Thus to alleviate my Cognitive Dissonance agony... instead of just admitting reality and dropping the wishful thinking delusions... I am going to do all I can to warp reality and logic and contort and wriggle and wrangle and wring things to be unrecognizable and thus no one can notice anymore how dragons and gods are delusional stuff humanity is always coming up with to entertain or grift or beguile or inveigle or subdue or pacify or fleece or motivate or or or.

 

[Leumas]

You're never lying if you never have the intellectual courage to say what you really mean.

Anyone can be honest if all the say is wishy-washy mush mouthed non-answers. That's not impressive.

"God this vague thing except when he is except when he isn't except when he is." isn't a lie, it's gibberish.

Not honest if they are doing that deliberately in order to befuddle and do apologetics for the god they are peddling but do not want to be appearing as obvious god-hawkers.

 

[Steve]

I got bored today. Really bored. An infinite afterlife would be seriously boring.

Infinitely boring, in fact.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Infinite pleasure / infinite suffering is just one of those things that sounds impressive until you put literally a single second of thought into it.

 

[Steve]

Infinite pleasure / infinite suffering is just one of those things that sounds impressive until you put literally a single second of thought into it.

I think the im you are searching for is impossible. And when you put literally a single second of thought into it the best descriptor remains impossible. I for one find nothing impressive in the concept. I think a god is needed for that type of thing.