Can theists be rational?

[Herzblut]

See my recent post. We most definitely can directly sense the acceleration due to gravity.

Not at all.

The crew of the ISS cannot sense any gravity or acceleration whatsoever, although the gravity up there is not much weaker than it is here on Earth. And the guys are permanently accelerated.

Edit: But I see how easily people extrapolate from a single point (Earth) to the whole Universe, ie because it makes them feel happy how crowded it is with intelligent beings. That's fine, we should be tolerant to any positive belief.

 

[fls]

But only for a few moments.

Damn stuff getting in the way.

Linda

 

[Herzblut]

Also, if you deny that we can sense gravity, then do you also deny that we see objects as I mentioned above?

When I say "observe", I mean "measure". Just read "measure", please.

 

[Herzblut]

Sure, we observe the affects of gravity. If observing the affects of something is enough to conclude that we can know the mechanism by which it operates, then if we were to observe the affects of a god then we could know the mechanism by which it operates.

-Bri

Falling is directly caused by God, some folks say. That's called Intelligent Falling (IF), if I remember correctly.

 

[Herzblut]

Damn stuff getting in the way.

Linda

Yep, life is full of obstacles. BTW, if you jump off a plane your friction with the atmosphere will quite quickly reduce acceleration to zero while you're falling down. But eventually, that doesn't help you too much in the light of the problem you mention above.

Eh .. let me check out how the hell we got to this point of the conversation...

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

Can you post a link? I have lost touch with the thread, but I have vbeen surveying statisticians, and so far have found none who think the use of Bayesian Stats is actually flawed - it does what any Bayesian analysis does, as Bri keeps saying. If I can find a definite argument or attempted refutation I can check it out, and maybe learn enough to argue if it is correct or not?

It was in post number 1158 of this thread. The argument you posted requires the probability of the proposition, "The universe is inhabitable" to be nearly zero and 1 which, of course, is a contradiction.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

Not at all.

The crew of the ISS cannot sense any gravity or acceleration whatsoever, although the gravity up there is not much weaker than it is here on Earth. And the guys are permanently accelerated.

I'm sorry, but you're just wrong.

The ISS is in a stable orbit (as far as I know), and is not accelerating. A positive acceleration would push it into a higher orbit, and a negative one would drop it into a lower one (or a death spiral destined to crash to the Earth).

ETA: To explain further--the gravity between the EArth and the ISS is a force that would otherwise pull the ISS down to the Earth. It is exactly equalled to the part of the ISS's forward velocity which, in the absence of the Earth's gravitational pull would otherwise send it flying in a straight line (away from the Earth at a tangent to its current orbit). Since these forces equal out, there is no net acceleration to be felt.

If it were accelerating--like its rockets fired, or the engines on an attached spacecraft fired), that acceleration could be felt (at least if it were enough acceleration--I myself am extremely sensitive to it). The tiny otoliths are responsible for this.

Humans can directly sense acceleration due to gravity (or any other acceleration).

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

And the guys are permanently accelerated.

If this were true, they would continually increase velocity (that's what acceleration means) and go into higher and higher orbit until they eventually escaped the Earth's gravity well altogether.

But it's not.

 

[yy2bggggs]

Guilty as charged.

That's enough to take you off the hostile list (see below though).

Is it compelling evidence? Should I go back and see if you've made the same mistake?

You're not teasing me are you? Absolutely!

I'll help.

• Start of this exchange
• Me: "Do not make a straw man out of this" (hah! hindsight...) "this is not an argument that there is life on another planet--this is an argument that there is a critical difference."
• Asking you what evidence was, but...
• Me: "You, and only you, are talking about 'compelling evidence'." Apparently, you didn't believe me. Apparently, you're browsing my posts because you still don't believe me. "Meanwhile, the rest of us are trying to have the discussion you are having when you aren't chasing rabbits about this--that there's a critical difference."
• Making the point that the sun rising at a particular day matters
• More
• More

I'm not hostile at all, but feel free to treat me that way if you like. I'm starting to get used to it by now.

Bah, I meant more in terms of the mock legalese for hostile witness^WP (browse for the rules of engagement if you're curious).

Evidence in its broadest sense includes everything that is used to determine or demonstrate the truth of an assertion.

Alright. So what sort of things count as this kind of evidence? That's what I've been talking about (believe it or not) all this time.

Compelling evidence would be "strong" evidence, or evidence that clearly points to the truth of an assertion.

...not so interesting.

Uncompelling evidence would be "weak" evidence, or evidence that does not clearly point to the truth of an assertion.

...not so interesting.

Alright, but I'll use your notion of compelling evidence. Let's compare two scenarios. You don't seem to be compelled by single pieces of evidence... that's fine. That's a different issue about what compels you--and is not what I'm discussing.

But, suppose you have two pieces of evidence. You already contended that this was mildly, somewhat, compelling. Let's just call that "minimally compelling".

So, I'll introduce these two scenarios. Now, however, we'll speak of them hypothetically... in both scenarios, there are exactly two pieces of evidence that the sun will rise tomorrow, and you're to consider them to the exclusion of other evidence. Do you find both of these scenarios "minimally compelling"?

Scenario A
Evidence is:

1. The sun rose yesterday.
2. The sun rose today.

Scenario B
Evidence is:

1. The sun rose yesterday.
2. I flipped a coin, deciding that if it landed on heads, the sun will rise tomorrow; otherwise, it wouldn't. It landed on heads.

I propose that there is a salient difference between Scenario A, and Scenario B. Both of them have that the sun rose yesterday as evidence (slapped in there just to make them "minimally compelling", since I apparently can't have a discussion about evidence in the singular). But Scenario A, I could find minimally compelling.

Scenario B, on the other hand... well.... it's kind of missing something.

Don't you think?

And I'll have you note--in both cases, we have the "same" amount of evidence. In both scenarios, the pieces of supporting evidence are independent from each other--so we have exactly two pieces of evidence. And in both cases, we need to make a metaphysical assumption. Somehow, though, the metaphysical assumption doesn't bother me a whole lot in Scenario A.

But that coin flip... that doesn't sound like it should even count.

• We have compelling evidence that the sun will rise tomorrow.
• There is no compelling evidence that there is intelligent life elsewhere.
• There is evidence that the probability of there being intelligent life elsewhere is near 0

Right. Now keep in mind that I'm not talking about "compelling evidence", but rather, some other difference; but this other difference is so fundamentally related to "sound judgment" that I think it has some significant bearing to this thread.

Now, look at the other two scenarios in terms of this difference. In the Drake scenario, we're extrapolating from a single data point. In the Cosmological Fine Tuning argument for God, we're extrapolating from a single data point.

But...

...well... as I said here:

Uhm... extra terrestrial intelligence is an extrapolation from a single data point, but it is a data point. You don't need to speculate that something entirely different from your experience occurs--only that something happened again, that you know happened once (not any particular thing, but something happened once).

Terrestrial intelligence counts.​

 

[cj.23]

We've gone over this. You're using a different meaning of "rational" than most of us--and clearly a different meaning than the one in the question in the OP. You're arguing that logical possibility is sufficient for belief in something to be rational. The rest of us say that logical possibility is necessary but not sufficient.

Yes, I know. That is what I am disputingg - you are imparting a false value to rationality, claiming it is a propert yo persons. It clearly can not be a property of persons, who evolved, though theoretically it could be a property of persons who were "created". However as humans and their brains evolved, persons can not be rational/irrational binary opposition - to impart rationality or irrationality to a class of persons is by definition an irrrational argument. Furthermore by isntituting a false binary opposition it simply reinforces a in-group/out-group dyadic dynamic, which actually in no way reflects the fact that all human behaviours are partially rational/partially irrational, by ascribing totality, rathe rthan acknowledging the spectrum of rationality and ones own varying position on the scale which varies by millions of topics and behaviours. To assign an arbitrary label of rational or irrational to people is a nonsense, and one i am surprised to find among critical thinkers. What are you going to do, average the rationality of each person in each behavioural and ideoplogical position? Professor X is very rational on qyuestions of qyuadratic equations, but reacted irrationally when her bay fell of fthe cliff, so we will give her irrational +2? It's simply ludicrous!

Hence my point - rationality is a property of an argument, not a person or group of persons. To claim otherwiseif to do violence to the very conecept of rationality, and resort to crude sloganeering and sloppy thinking.

Again, if not, you must conclude that it's rational to believe in every Nigerian scam e-mail you get.

Why? One looks at the email, and performs a cost/benefit analysis, taking in ot account what one knows of such emails.

Please read the thread title. It clearly is asking if the person (theist) defined as someone holding a particular belief or conclusion (theism) can be rational. There's no way that question can be construed to mean that the person can be rational but still maintain that "rationality has to be a property of an argument not a conclusion".

Yes. I am saying the thread title never made any sense, for the reasons given, in this and my previous examples.

cj x

 

[cj.23]

Well, it's really a custom made question, but I don't see why not.

Are you saying the sun won't rise tomorrow? Or that your belief it will rise tomorrow has nothing to do with it rising yesterday?

If I was born the night before last, and my experience is limited to the sun rising yesterday, then I have one piece of data. I might make an inductive inference it will rise again today, but I do not know this to be so: it does not follow deductively, only inductively. Given that my experience is so limited, I would have no reason to assume a pattern anyway, or make the induction.

cj x

 

[RevDisturba]

Stated like that, the Cosmological Argument reduces to the statement that "a caused thing has a cause".

Colour me unimpressed.

With all due respect my friends I see so much misinformation and lies by omission here that I don't know where to start. The really horrible thing is that it all looks unintentional. People relying on wikipedia quoting as if its credible source! Its not credible at all! Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. I noticed you quip that according to wikipedia the KCA has 'fatal flaws'. How quaint! How wrong!

Anyway your statement above is correct, but you should be impressed! It solves infinite regression neatly! A first cause argument like the KCA states anything that begins to exist has a cause for its existence. So the cause that caused the universe to begin to exist did not have a cause. It existed before time existed (time was created in the big bang). So infinite regression stops with the 'cause' that caused the universe to begin to exist!

; {>

 

[RevDisturba]

Good posts defending the KCA #1803 etc you are correct and accurate.

; {>

 

[fls]

I don't know whether that is technically possible. Is it?

I dunno. That's what they say at the SETI site, but can you really trust a bunch of know-nothing pseudo-scientists?

You can make logical arguments for either one, and the validity of the conclusion is as valid as the premises. In the case of aliens and gods, such arguments don't result in compelling evidence because there isn't enough compelling evidence to support the premises. People who make logical arguments might claim that there is scientific evidence to support at least some of the premises (and in the case of gods and aliens, they'd be correct) but they don't usually claim that logical arguments are compelling scientific evidence unless they have compelling scientific evidence for all of the premises (which is rarely the case with logical arguments).

Then I have to ask just what you think a logical argument is?

They didn't bring it up. Fine-tuning has been known about and discussed by scientists long before it was ever used as evidence to support a premise for a logical argument for a god. In and of itself, fine-tuning is considered to be a scientific problem and has little to do with gods.

I meant the argument that fine-tuning supports the presence of a fine-tuner. That seems to be an argument presented by scientist believers.

No, I'm sorry, that's not what begging the question means. But now I understand why you thought what I said was an example of begging the question.

Then I have to ask just what you think 'begging the question' is?

Together, yes.

Yes, they are characteristics of the search for aliens.

So you explicitly assumed the search for aliens had the characteristics of 'not science' in order to assume that the search for aliens was 'not science'.

• The hypothesis "aliens exist" is unfalsifiable.

If a careful and thorough search of the galaxy revealed no patterned electromagnetic radiation, would we not alter our conclusions about the possibility of intelligent aliens in our galaxy?

• The hypothesis does not explain any observation.

Would the hypothesis not explain the observation of an information containing electromagnetic transmission?

• There is currently no compelling evidence that aliens exist.

Does that matter? Science hardly confines itself to studying only what we already know.

But you do understand that no such transmission has ever been observed, right?

But how is that relevant? If I perform a research study in order to test a new drug, no one suggests that I can't proceed until I already know what the results of my testing will be.

Why would you try to explain something that has never been observed and for which there is no compelling evidence?

Aren't you putting the cart before the horse? The point of hypothesis testing is to suggest that we search for an observation that could only be explained (or could be best explained) by our idea.

Would you consider it a scientific endeavor to search for teapots orbiting Jupiter without any compelling evidence of them?

Why would you search for something that you already have compelling evidence of? Wouldn't that be redundant?

So you're saying that any conjecture about anything that I might pull out of thin air would be a valid scientific hypothesis, worthy of devoting time and money to prove even if it could never be disproved?

I have spent 47 pages saying that that is exactly what we shouldn't be doing.

I have to ask. Do you have any experience whatsoever with Science or the Scientific Method?

No we didn't. Searching every location in a possibly infinite universe for aliens would not be possible. Even if it were theoretically possible, it's still practically impossible.

But we're not really talking about searching an infinite universe, but rather this galaxy. And even then, we're starting closer to home and then moving outward.

Really? What are they?

Examples:
Solid surface
Energy source
Solvent
Organic materials
Transmissible characteristics
Variation
Selection

Oh, so we don't know the conditions under which intelligent life formed here.

I'm curious as to why you have this idea that if we are uncertain about something, we are uncertain about everything?

Nobody's erasing any other explanations.

Well, we started by inserting supernatural causes wherever we saw complexity. This was gradually supplanted by removing complexity through recourse to natural causes. If you wish to go back to inserting supernatural causes, you are back to maintaining, rather than removing complexity.

The argument simply says that any other explanations are less likely, but of course it's possible that there is a perfectly reasonable explanation that nobody has thought of. But it isn't irrational to argue that perhaps aliens is the most likely explanation for a building on Jupiter even though other explanations might be possible.

I don't understand your point here. It seems to me that proposing aliens as an explanation for buildings on Jupiter would be a rational process.

I disagree. Considering that the constants are called "constants" because they don't change, it would not be unreasonable to assume that a being that could set the constants of the natural universe wouldn't be governed by the rules imposed by those constants.

-Bri

But why wouldn't you include whatever it was that constrained the constants to particular values as part of the universe? We consider Gravity part of the universe, or the Big Bang part of the universe.

Linda

 

[fls]

So if we were to observe a god interacting with our world, then we can know the mechanism by which it occurs. So to say that we cannot possibly know the mechanism would be untrue.

-Bri

How can we possibly observe a god interacting with our world, when you say that by definition we cannot observe a god interacting with our world?

We can observe interactions and thereby know about the mechanism. But we can't know anything about the part that we can't observe (except to know that it's made-up).

Linda

 

[RevDisturba]

I didn't say they couldn't. I said they had difficulty. But bending one's beliefs for the sake of argument is not the same as doubting them.

You take much artistic license with language.

My point is that you can't stuff words in my mouth until I actually say them. It's a big no-no in debates, because more often then not you'll just irritate people, and very often you'll simply be wrong.

I did not say you said you assumed I said you said, and please save your lectures for someone that wants to hear it.

I didn't err. I was joking.

Sure you were.

Oh, yes I do. Absolute knowledge is of no interest to me. Gods and supernatural entities, beyond reasonable doubt, do not exist. That's a falsifiable statement. Prove me wrong.

I never say that anything is 100% certain, I don’t know where you come up that I do. I can build a case for a belief that does not mean I can prove anything. If you reject the evidence its at your own peril.

Yes, indeed. What's wrong with admitting you don't know everything ?Besides, I was saying it MAY be harmful. It isn't ALWAYS harmful, obviously.

Uh huh

What does that have to do with anything ?

You seemed to be suggesting otherwise.

Which is odd. The Bible should contain all the knowledge you need.

I have a MA in comparative theology and can tell you with confidence that the bible is a manual that describes how to save your soul everything else is secondary.

Then you're bound to hate me..

I love you I do not hate anyone. I may not like your attitude nor your beliefs because I know they will harm you, so sorry if you do not understand that.

I have no respect for religion, whatsoever. I also never know when to shut up

I can assure you, using your replies as evidence you don’t. BTW, I happen to respect all beliefs, even secular humanism, the bane of the western world. (yes I know I have already said that).

; {>

 

[fls]

If this were true, they would continually increase velocity (that's what acceleration means) and go into higher and higher orbit until they eventually escaped the Earth's gravity well altogether.

But it's not.

It was my understanding that change in direction is also a form of acceleration.

Linda

 

[RevDisturba]

How can we possibly observe a god interacting with our world, when you say that by definition we cannot observe a god interacting with our world?

We can observe interactions and thereby know about the mechanism. But we can't know anything about the part that we can't observe (except to know that it's made-up).

Linda

Prophesy is one way we can see god working in our world indirectly. Israel becoming a nation state as prophesied was not made up.

; {>

 

[PixyMisa]

Prophesy is one way we can see god working in our world indirectly. Israel becoming a nation state as prophesied was not made up.

Hardly an impressive prediction, though, is it? Took thousands of years and a large group of people working to make the prediction come true.

If the Bible had given the exact date and vote counts for the election of Golda Meir, then perhaps you'd have something. Much better if it included a table of all the particles in the Standard Model, with mass, charge, and spin.

 

[PixyMisa]

I have a MA in comparative theology and can tell you with confidence that the bible is a manual that describes how to save your soul everything else is secondary.

And the Tanakh? Koran? Rig Veda? Tipitaka? Kojiki? Tao Te Ching?

What are they, chopped liver? Or did you sleep through the comparative part of your MA?