What actually do JREF religious believers believe?
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Irony
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Indeed. If one were to go to an aviation forum and proclaim that airplanes move by pushing against the ground I would imagine one would get a lot of very similar responses, no doubt complete with dismissal of your "opposing opinion" by these so-called "high-priests".
dafydd
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Beth
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Most skeptics are willing to accept testimonials such as "I did action A and result B followed" as evidence, especially when the experience is repeated by many different people in many different circumstances. When the results are inconsistent or other explanations exist, they won't usually accept such evidence as proof. I agree with that assessment. What I'm objecting to is your characterization of all testimonials and experiences over many centuries and civilizations as being "no evidence". I think that's inappropriate. Particularly because it's an assessment that seems to be applied only to 'spiritual' or 'religious' experiences.
So sure, you can claim there is no evidence to support the other side by redefining 'evidence' to exclude everything the other side presents. But that doesn't come across as particularly rational or scientific. Much better, IMO, to accept that evidence exists and to explain that it isn't sufficient to prove the hypothesis.
But we've had this discussion before. We agree that such evidence it isn't sufficient for belief in the hypothesis that god exists. We just disagree whether or not it deserves the appellation of 'evidence' in support of that hypothesis.
Skeptic Ginger
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You know where this is going, we've been here many times.
There is evidence of an experience. Believing the experience is due to a god is a conclusion. Just as myth best explains god beliefs, something other than a real interaction with a god best explains said experiences.
We are back to zero evidence gods exist, only conclusions that they do. Conclusions are beliefs, not evidence.
bruto
Penultimate Amazing
Not so necessarily or so simply. I surmise that few skeptics at least since Hume pointed out the causality problem inherent in pure epistemology have believed that hounds chasing a rabbit constitute cause. Some of us are just a tiny bit smarter than that even if we didn't get any Hume in school.
People since the Indians and Samuel de Champlain have claimed to see "Champ," the Champlain lake monster. Is that proof that there is a Champ, or is it proof that people have always made the same kind of mistakes and hoped the same kind of vain hopes? There's a bit of evidence for the latter conclusion, but no body, bones, fur or good photographs for the former. Indeed, one cannot say for sure, 100 percent, that there is no Champ, but a person who proceeds expecting not to find one will lead a much much less disappointing life than the one who hopes to find one.
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George 152
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I believe I'll have another beer
Halfcentaur
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You are conflating skepticism with human behavior. We all are victims of confirmation bias in our thinking and must strive to overcome that confirmation bias to see reality. No group is free of this, but a few of schools of thought happen to be founded on the very idea of overcoming that fault in human thinking, despite some who subscribe to these ideas falling victim to bias.
There seems to be a reward for some people in pointing out the instances they see bias happening in skeptical thinking groups, because it's ironic I suppose, but to say you regard "skepticism" as just another religion because you've seen examples of dogmatic thinking in skeptics is just ham-fisted blanket disregard seemingly for self aggrandizement.
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Halfcentaur
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I do see people on this forum at times giving atheism quite a dogmatic quality I find distasteful.
People who enter a religious discussion with no regard for what is being discussed just to announce for the thousandth time "there is no god so it doesn't matter", as if that has any bearing at all on the context of the discussion where atheists are engaged in discussing theism with theists which takes a degree of hypothetical acknowledgment for the sake of argument alone.
Off the top of my head Tsig and Daffyd regularly seem to do this on this forum, where for the sake of argument non theists are discussing gods and religions with theists when they enter the thread and pick some isolated statement to quote simply to reply with something which is basically the equivalent of "but there's no such as god". As if such a statement was news to the people on this forum.
There is no good reason for that kind of behavior here, other than for someone to reassert their own convictions for the thousandth time. It offers nothing to the discussion, and renders the efforts non theists go to here in order to discuss theism with theists as meaningless.
I wish they'd stop doing it as it seems like dogma to me, but it's not against the rules to my knowledge.
HansMustermann
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@Halfcentaur
While that is so, nevertheless, I don't see how that justifies the statement that it's like a religion with dogmas and high priests. I've had people do that in my threads, and I'm sure at various times I've done something close enough in other people's threads, but still, nobody has to agree with them. There is no high priest of Athe to excommunicate you if you disagree with them.
While that is so, nevertheless, I don't see how that justifies the statement that it's like a religion with dogmas and high priests. I've had people do that in my threads, and I'm sure at various times I've done something close enough in other people's threads, but still, nobody has to agree with them. There is no high priest of Athe to excommunicate you if you disagree with them.
Skeptic Ginger
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I was sure I'd be on the list.
I am also not dogmatic, just insistent that the evidence of mythical origin not be swept under the rug all the time.
Dogmatic refers to assertion with lack of evidence, not just firmly convinced by overwhelming evidence.
dog·mat·ic (dôg-mtk, dg-)
While there are skeptics who argue, no amount of evidence that gods are fiction is enough, that to me is the dogmatic position, not the position that the evidence is overwhelming gods are fiction.
Beth
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I think you misread my calling something 'evidence' with 'proof'. Yes, it's evidence for a Champ. No, it is not proof of a Champ. To say that the evidence is not sufficient seems justified to me. To say that there is no evidence for a Champ is to completely discount the testimonial evidence people have provided. I think that's incorrect.
Yes indeed.
You are playing word games to justify your sweeping dismissal of all testimonial evidence. Why are you so reluctant to call that evidence? Why the insistence of such a complete dismissal of all the evidence that does exist?
qayak
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I disagree. You have to admit that anecdotal evidence is the weakest of all. You also have to admit that the anecdotal evidence for god has been around for a long time. Finally, that anecdotal evidence has been examined, the fallacies pointed out, the science discovered, to the point that anecdotal evidence for the existence of god is pretty much no evidence at all.
As examples:
When someone employs Pascal's Wager it isn't unfair, or a word game, to dismiss this "new evidence" out of hand. The fallacy debunks the claim.
When someone uses the Blind Watchmaker argument, it isn't evidence. The argument has been debunked to death.
When someone uses the "I dies and saw a white light" argument, it's been debunked to death.
None of that crap is evidence. Someone has to come up with something new before we could ever call it testimonial/anecdotal evidence. Regurgitating debunked anecdotes doesn't fit the definition of evidence.
bruto
Penultimate Amazing
No, not really. I am suggesting that what some people count as "evidence" is not really evidence at all. It's something less and always will be. If someone dreamed of Champ and later a body turned up, the dream would not suddenly become evidence. If someone sees what looks to him like a Champ but cannot distinguish his sighting from an otter or a sturgeon or a log, then it's not evidence even if it's right. An anecdote that can never get beyond an observer's account is not evidence no matter how wonderful it is. A bad photograph is nothing more, even if it's later found to have been a bad photograph of something exciting and new. The proof will be found elsewhere from actual evidence, and an anecdote will continue to be of no use at all in making the determination, even if the thing it's about is real.
HansMustermann
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@Beth:
That seems to be a common confusion, possibly stemming from the different meaning that "evidence" has in justice.
In justice, anything that was presented by one side or the other, and was admitted in court, is evidence. It may be inconclusive evidence, or false evidence, but it is nevertheless called evidence.
In logic on the other hand, evidence is something that actually supports or refutes a claim. I.e., you have to have some logically sound way of connecting it to the conclusion. If it doesn't do that, it's not evidence at all.
It's a VERY different meaning of the same word.
To further illustrate the fundamental difference, technically there is no such thing as false evidence in logic. If it's false, or really even not supported as true, you can't by definition have a sound argument (i.e., both valid and the premises are supportable as true) from it to any conclusion whatsoever, hence it's not evidence at all.
Also technically there is not such thing as having evidence but not a proof. If you showed that X => Y and X is true, then you have a proof. If you don't have a proof, you don't have an argument or evidence at all.
You probably mean that you don't have a formal logic kind of proof, where something is either true or false, and there is no room for probabilities somewhere in the middle.
That's ok though. You can just as well go informal logic on its rear, or do an inductive proof, or a bayesian proof if you want to be rigorous about induction. You can even go fuzzy logic (which has states like "very" or "somewhat" in addition to just true or false), if you can pull that off.
None of them is really easier than formal logic, though; they just go by different rules. You'd be surprised how much of what is a fallacy in formal logic, is still the same fallacy or has an obvious equivalent, in informal logic or statistics too. And actually on top of that, both of those have fallacies of their own. So, yeah, actually having a proof or argument but not by formal logic, is actually not much easier. Still, if one of them is the only thing that works on that data, you do what you have to do.
But, still, you need to have some sound argument between the premises and the conclusion, or those premises just aren't evidence at all. They're just irrelevant fluff.
Hope that helps.
That seems to be a common confusion, possibly stemming from the different meaning that "evidence" has in justice.
In justice, anything that was presented by one side or the other, and was admitted in court, is evidence. It may be inconclusive evidence, or false evidence, but it is nevertheless called evidence.
In logic on the other hand, evidence is something that actually supports or refutes a claim. I.e., you have to have some logically sound way of connecting it to the conclusion. If it doesn't do that, it's not evidence at all.
It's a VERY different meaning of the same word.
To further illustrate the fundamental difference, technically there is no such thing as false evidence in logic. If it's false, or really even not supported as true, you can't by definition have a sound argument (i.e., both valid and the premises are supportable as true) from it to any conclusion whatsoever, hence it's not evidence at all.
Also technically there is not such thing as having evidence but not a proof. If you showed that X => Y and X is true, then you have a proof. If you don't have a proof, you don't have an argument or evidence at all.
You probably mean that you don't have a formal logic kind of proof, where something is either true or false, and there is no room for probabilities somewhere in the middle.
That's ok though. You can just as well go informal logic on its rear, or do an inductive proof, or a bayesian proof if you want to be rigorous about induction. You can even go fuzzy logic (which has states like "very" or "somewhat" in addition to just true or false), if you can pull that off.
None of them is really easier than formal logic, though; they just go by different rules. You'd be surprised how much of what is a fallacy in formal logic, is still the same fallacy or has an obvious equivalent, in informal logic or statistics too. And actually on top of that, both of those have fallacies of their own. So, yeah, actually having a proof or argument but not by formal logic, is actually not much easier. Still, if one of them is the only thing that works on that data, you do what you have to do.
But, still, you need to have some sound argument between the premises and the conclusion, or those premises just aren't evidence at all. They're just irrelevant fluff.
Hope that helps.
zeggman
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How do you propose the ancient Jews were to distinguish undercooked pork? Meat thermometers? In a culture in which both giving and receiving hospitality was important, if your host offered you pork would it be easier to refuse it outright or determine whether or not it was undercooked?
Also, toxins produced by clams are not destroyed by cooking, so banning their consumption would provide at least the health benefit of not being poisoned by them on occasion.
HansMustermann
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1. Are you serious that you can't distinguish well done meat from rare or even medium-rare? That if I put a rare steak in front of you, you'd actually be confused as to whether it is rare or not? That if a God told his people to only eat well done meat, they'd be totally lost as to what that means?
Or here's an idea: command them to only eat it boiled for an hour. Or in terms even the most uneducated and mentally retarded can understand, tell them to boil until it comes apart easily. It takes only 74C (165F) or so for 15 seconds to kill Trichinella larvae.
2. It seems to me like it still doesn't actually do much, since even of Trichinella there are species adapted to infecting birds, bears and other wild game. So a restriction strictly about pigs doesn't even really take care of that.
3. It's still taking care of the least threat. There are other pathogens that are far worse. E.g., incredible numbers of people died in the middle ages from beef from cattle dead of anthrax. E.g., consuming sheep brains can give you brain damage if they had that prion. And yet God doesn't find time to warn about those too. He has time to worry about mixed fiber clothes and other nonsense, or insane nonsense about how to purify and atone yourself after touching a menstruating woman, yet somehow he has no time to deal with ways to prevent actual problems.
4. You can know some apology is nonsense, when it ascribes to a group of ancient people knowledge that (A) took scientists with microscopes decades to figure out, because (B) the cause and effect are far enough apart in time to not be obvious, and (C) sure enough we don't find anyone else before modern times knowing that.
To wit, even after the discovery of trichinosis was discovered in 1835 (and, yes, it took a microscope) and the findings became well known enough, it took A DECADE until a scientist on another continent connected it to pork. And that's with relatively modern knowledge and all.
So, you know, I have no time for nonsense which just postulates such knowledge among ancient people that just somehow never wrote anything about it. It's up there with ancient astronauts on a ridiculous nonsense scale.
Or here's an idea: command them to only eat it boiled for an hour. Or in terms even the most uneducated and mentally retarded can understand, tell them to boil until it comes apart easily. It takes only 74C (165F) or so for 15 seconds to kill Trichinella larvae.
2. It seems to me like it still doesn't actually do much, since even of Trichinella there are species adapted to infecting birds, bears and other wild game. So a restriction strictly about pigs doesn't even really take care of that.
3. It's still taking care of the least threat. There are other pathogens that are far worse. E.g., incredible numbers of people died in the middle ages from beef from cattle dead of anthrax. E.g., consuming sheep brains can give you brain damage if they had that prion. And yet God doesn't find time to warn about those too. He has time to worry about mixed fiber clothes and other nonsense, or insane nonsense about how to purify and atone yourself after touching a menstruating woman, yet somehow he has no time to deal with ways to prevent actual problems.
4. You can know some apology is nonsense, when it ascribes to a group of ancient people knowledge that (A) took scientists with microscopes decades to figure out, because (B) the cause and effect are far enough apart in time to not be obvious, and (C) sure enough we don't find anyone else before modern times knowing that.
To wit, even after the discovery of trichinosis was discovered in 1835 (and, yes, it took a microscope) and the findings became well known enough, it took A DECADE until a scientist on another continent connected it to pork. And that's with relatively modern knowledge and all.
So, you know, I have no time for nonsense which just postulates such knowledge among ancient people that just somehow never wrote anything about it. It's up there with ancient astronauts on a ridiculous nonsense scale.
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John Jones
Penultimate Amazing
Cook it over a slow, smoky fire until it falls off the bone/can't pick it up with a fork. If it's pink on the inside, smoke it some more.
As far as clams and oysters and the like - I don't eat them, but cultures have thrived on them.