Split Thread Atheism and lack of belief in the afterlife

[pgwenthold]

Infinitely boring, in fact.

There is a Sesame Street Christams special where someone (Elmo maybe?) wishes it was Christmas every day, and his wish comes true. They cut to a year later, and everyone is like, "It's Christmas again. Yay." in the most unhappy way possible.

See, even Sesame Street realizes that a "happy day every day" gets boring.

 

[acbytesla]

I just want know what kind of mind thinks that just because it says in an old book that a snake or a donkey spoke thinks that somehow it must be true.

 

[Darat]

I just want know what kind of mind thinks that just because it says in an old book that a snake or a donkey spoke thinks that somehow it must be true.

You mean there are not people with the head of a dog? But it was in a book and everything!

 

[acbytesla]

You mean there are not people with the head of a dog? But it was in a book and everything!

You mean that helicopters can actually fly inside a tunnel? Mission Impossible.

Not in a book.

You have to love it when they think a talking snake is true, but geneticists aren't to be believed.

 

[Leumas]

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?

I doubt you did... and very much know that you won't be able to spot the pseudo-science infused in them even if you did.

Personally I think Intelligent Design is rubbish.

Yes... you are right... and it is not "doing science" whatsoever.

But I get it... what you are doing is yet another version of the incessant EQUIVOCATION attack on science of saying that it is just as bad as theism.

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.

Again with the "atheism/science is belief/religion too" incessant attack on science.

Sure. For all I know, that's what Intelligent Design scholars are doing [lying]. Part of peer review is knocking out any obvious errors.

Not if the "peers" pretending to be doing the reviewing are peer-liars and hoodwinkers for hawking Jesus too.

 

[bruto]

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.

Nonsense. We know life is possible. We have many obvious reasons to believe life exists, and many reasons to believe that somewhere in the vast universe conditions for some sort of life are likely to arise. This differs entirely from the situation for gods, which do not exist so conspicuously in our midst.

 

[Leumas]

...
You have to love it when they think a talking snake is true, but geneticists aren't to be believed.

Oh... they believe "geneticists" when they tell them the Europeans who are sure the book with the talking animals is the word of the maker of the universe, are themselves descendants of the mythical GENETICALLY IMPOSSIBLE characters whom the talking donkey was advocating for when he talked.

 

[Leumas]

It's a statement about a belief in the limits of knowledge. Agnostic means that even in principle we can never have knowledge that god exists. See my earlier post for a fuller explanation.

What is the difference of saying "I don't know this" and "There is a limit to what I can know and this is beyond that limit so I don't know it"?

 

[GDon]

There are qualified academics producing peer reviewed articles for intelligent design. In what way is that not science?

I suspect you have not looked closely at who the "peers" of believers in intelligent design actually are. More than a little confirmation bias in the rather closed group.

See the list of journals I provided earlier in this thread. The journals use peer review and are definitely not established to promote ID.

 

[GDon]

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.

Yes they do. I gave a list of articles earlier in this thread that have been published in scientific journals that use peer review.

I'll point out that this is science in action. Science is self-correcting. It can only be self-correcting if people question the scientific consensus, going through the peer review process. Passing peer review doesn't mean "it's true!" It means it is being looked at seriously. Lots of hypotheses that are looked at seriously get rejected. ID has been rejected. Seriously rejected.

Anyone who appreciates science as science should be celebrating the publication of ID articles in peer review. It's the difference between religious claims and scientific claims.

If anyone has a problem with the idea that ID claims have been published in scientific journals and have passed peer review, then they have a problem with science.

 

[acbytesla]

See the list of journals I provided earlier in this thread. The journals use peer review and are definitely not established to promote ID.

Why don't you post the list again. I GUARANTEE they are not respectable science journals.

 

[acbytesla]

Yes they do. I gave a list of articles earlier in this thread that have been published in scientific journals that use peer review.

I'll point out that this is science in action. Science is self-correcting. It can only be self-correcting if people question the scientific consensus, going through the peer review process. Passing peer review doesn't mean "it's true!" It means it is being looked at seriously. Lots of hypotheses that are looked at seriously get rejected. ID has been rejected. Seriously rejected.

Anyone who appreciates science as science should be celebrating the publication of ID articles in peer review. It's the difference between religious claims and scientific claims.

If anyone has a problem with the idea that ID claims have been published in scientific journals and have passed peer review, then they have a problem with science.

BULL CRAP.! Intelligent Design is Nonsense with a capital N.

The creationist community is famous for creating it's own publications with names that sound serious but are in fact echo chambers where little if any actual science takes place. But feel free to list the articles and the journals.

 

[Leumas]

See the list of journals I provided earlier in this thread. The journals use peer review and are definitely not established to promote ID.

Not true...

Also... "peer" review is a scam if the "peers" are themselves fellow Imbecilic Design peddlers.

What you are doing is just like people who keep harping on about "scholarly" consensus about Jesus' resurrection.

All the books and articles asserting Jesus resurrected are also "peer" reviewed and published by publishing houses and the "scholars" of the seminary schools in the departments of hawking Jesus all agree.

Do you think they are doing science too?

Is it "doing science" to say that Jesus resurrected and then hopped onto a cloud-spaceship to outer space to go sit on one of two sequined thrones next to himself?

Well... the "science doing" of the DiscoveryHoodwinking Institute For Hawking Jesus is of the very same type of "doing" those seminary schools' "scholars" are doing.

 

[Leumas]

If anyone has a problem with the idea that ID claims have been published in scientific journals and have passed peer review, then they have a problem with science.

No... they have a problem with PSEUDO-SCIENCE and with the perfidious charlatans and mountebanks who promulgate it.

 

[Leumas]

...
Anyone who appreciates science as science should be celebrating the publication of ID articles in peer review. It's the difference between religious claims and scientific claims.

Imbecilic Design is a pseudo-science not a science... "celebrating" its perfidious pretenses of fake "peer" reviews in fake publications is like "celebrating" Flat Earth publications and their "peer" reviews on TikTok.

 

[Leumas]

...ID has been rejected. Seriously rejected.

So has the resurrection of Jesus.... yet this has not stopped the DiscoveryHoodwinking Institute For Hawking Jesus and the "scholars" of seminary schools from publishing incessantly and indefatigably about both as scientifically proven facts if only scientists were not so prejudiced and closeminded and bigoted.

 

[Roger Ramjets]

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.

And those circumstances were generally stories that were not intended to be literally true.

Bestiary

A bestiary... is a compendium of beasts. Originating in the ancient world, bestiaries were made popular in the Middle Ages in illustrated volumes that described various animals and even rocks. The natural history and illustration of each beast was usually accompanied by a moral lesson...

As most of the students who read these bestiaries were monks and clerics, it is not impossible to say that there is a major religious significance within them. The bestiary was used to educate young men on the correct morals they should display. All of the animals presented in the bestiaries show some sort of lesson or meaning when presented..

The writings of religious scribes are not a survey of peasants' beliefs about the abilities of animals. They might have been ignorant, but they weren't stupid. I'm sure they would have noticed that their own animals never spoke. To them stories of talking animals would be just that - stories.

 

[Roger Ramjets]

The creationist community is famous for creating it's own publications with names that sound serious but are in fact echo chambers where little if any actual science takes place.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Imitating science is an admission that it is superior and their faith is on shaky ground. A true believer has no need for it. But that's theists for you. They spend a lifetime trying to convince themselves that fairy tales are real, and yet still fear death like it was the end of everything.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

See the list of journals I provided earlier in this thread. The journals use peer review and are definitely not established to promote ID.

You keep missing the point. Getting published, even in a peer-reviewed journal doesn't make something 'science' if the researchers and readers refuse to acknowledge the hypothesis failed.

Intelligent Design is not a valid scientific hypothesis because the research to confirm it failed.

Move on. All the but...but... blah blah blah isn't going to get you anywhere in this forum. Most, if not all, of us are well acquainted with the Intelligent Design hypothesis and Behe's work.

 

[GDon]

Why don't you post the list again. I GUARANTEE they are not respectable science journals.

Sure! This is the link: https://www.discovery.org/id/peer-review/

This is the first four entries. I'd already checked them and they seem legit. Please let me know what your own investigation shows.

* Stephen C. Meyer, “The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories,” Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, Vol. 117(2):213-239 (2004)

* Michael J. Behe, “Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations, and ‘The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution,’” The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 85(4):1-27 (December 2010).

* Douglas D. Axe, “Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds,” Journal of Molecular Biology, Vol. 341:1295–1315 (2004).

* Michael Behe and David W. Snoke, “Simulating evolution by gene duplication of protein features that require multiple amino acid residues,” Protein Science, Vol. 13 (2004).