Author Topic: On religion, atheism and changing thread titles....  (Read 32893 times)

0 Members and 16 Guests are viewing this topic.

Offline Herra Tohtori

  • The Academic
  • 211
  • Bad command or file name
Arguments go in, arguments come out. You can't explain that. There's always a miscommunication...


Ok, joking aside for this is srs bsns.


For the reasons mentioned before, science really doesn't have anything to say about the accuracy (much less truth value) of any non-falsifiable claims.

They may be valid, or they may be invalid, but as long as there are no ways to disprove them, they really don't matter much at all.

It would, however, be just as unscientific to claim them untrue as it is to claim them true - making any kind of statement about them is against scientific method. The correct answer is "don't know" or, as I prefer, THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.


Furthermore, there is a concept called "explanatory value". It is used to describe how much value a hypothesis has in explaining certain things.

God hypothesis, by virtue of explaining everything, explains exactly nothing. Its explanatory value is less than nothing.


Example:

Universe spawns into existence. Two competinc hypotheses are that it A) came out of nothing, and B) God did it.

Hypothesis A has more explanatory value than B, because it opens new questions about how exactly can something come out of nothing, and answering those questions has advanced our physical knowledge infinitely more than extrapolating hypothesis B... which basically cannot be done. Except you'd have to consider the possibility of god coming out of nothingness in the first place.



Further problems in the God hypothesis and reasons why it's not falsifiable include:

-no clear definition of the terms included in the hypothesis (primarily, what is entity called "god")
OR
-all definitions given for entity called "god" are metaphysical properties that can not be observed

-problem of original cause getting, actually, more complicated than without god hypothesis

-lack of predictive value (closely tied to explanatory value, but not exactly the same - basically means that you can't really do mathematical formulation of a model if all you say is God Did/Does It)


From the perspective of scientific world view, God hypothesis has just as much or little relevance as Russel's Teapot, Invisible Pink Unicorn, or Flying Spaghetti Monster. All of these can be interchangeably used to explain everything... yet none of them explains anything at all.


My personal viewpoint is not to concentrate on the question "does God exist" and rather try to ask people how they define God in the first place, ie. what properties do they consider an entity to have to be called "God".


If our universe is a simulation, does the  user on the computer system that runs the simulation count as "God" to us simulated entities?

I would argue there's nothing divine in such a position despite the huge amount of control and power that the simulation-running person would have over us.

Would a sysadmin of the computer that the simulation runs on be a bigger God than the user who runs our universe simulation?

How long would it take until some jackass within the simulated universe would start running an universe simulator?

How would it affect the amount of stress on the original computer?

How many universes could be simulated recursively before a system crash?

How likely is it for civilizations to develop computer technology capable of simulating an universe?



Would it be of any benefit to science if we encounter a phenomenon and can't explain it, but instead just say "It's just the way the simulation is" or "Admin made it that way"?

Wouldn't it be more beneficial to us as simulated entities to try to figure out the underlying mechanics of the simulation software?

For example, we can observe that gravity seems to be proportional to the product masses and inversely proportional to square of distance. This has a lot more predictive value than "Admin made things fall at 9.80665 m/s^2 acceleration.

Then we can start to think, what makes things fall... rather than just say "Admin made things do this thing we call falling".


Point is - maybe the "that's how simulator works" is the final answer. It could be. It's very possible we are living in a simulated universe (although the recursive universe simulation thing sort of limits things on that regard). But, until we have completely reverse engineered exactly how the simulator works, science cannot accept "that's how the simulator works" as a valid hypothesis as it does not have explanatory or predictive value.

And even then we can never be sure we have completely reverse engineered the simulator... so we have to keep looking for things we may have missed, observing the universe to find inconsistencies in our models of it... and when we found them, we try to explain them and if our old theories can't explain them, we try something new.
There are three things that last forever: Abort, Retry, Fail - and the greatest of these is Fail.

 

Offline NGTM-1R

  • I reject your reality and substitute my own
  • 213
  • Syndral Active. 0410.
Wait, so when I say it, I fail science forever, but when MP-Ryan says it, it's true?

When you say it, you assume the absence of evidence is evidence of absence. MP-Ryan does not.
"Load sabot. Target Zaku, direct front!"

A Feddie Story

 

Offline karajorma

  • King Louie - Jungle VIP
  • Administrator
  • 214
    • Karajorma's Freespace FAQ
Thank you for that injection of sense.  If I had to read anyone else say science proves anything to be true, I might scream.

The real problem is when you start adding words like believe into that mix. Believe is a dumb word to use in any kind of scientific conversation because it carries different meanings for different people. Hell this whole argument got started because of two people using different meanings for the word and got compounded by people mixing lay and scientific uses of other words.


That said, I don't think you should need to write an essay to say why you are an atheist. "I'm an atheist cause science can't prove God exists so I go with the simplest explanation" is a perfectly reasonable answer.

As far as I'm concerned there is nothing wrong with a lay person saying that science has proved something true or false. You just have to remember that it means that whatever has been proved true simply is the only currently viable hypothesis as all the others can't support all the available evidence and are thus much less probable. The problem has never been people using the lay definitions. The problem is people mixing the two together in one sentence so that it ends up a confused mess.
  If you try to then use the more scientific definition to prove the lay one wrong you end up with this cluster**** of stupidity. On the other hand, if people try to insist on everyone only using the scientific terms, they're going to come off as pretentious arseholes.
« Last Edit: November 09, 2011, 06:50:19 pm by karajorma »
Karajorma's Freespace FAQ. It's almost like asking me yourself.

[ Diaspora ] - [ Seeds Of Rebellion ] - [ Mind Games ]

 

Offline Mongoose

  • Rikki-Tikki-Tavi
  • Global Moderator
  • 212
  • This brain for rent.
    • Steam
    • Something
Everything else aside, this was a fantastic thread to sit back and munch popcorn to.

  

Offline MP-Ryan

  • Makes General Discussion Make Sense.
  • Global Moderator
  • 210
  • Keyboard > Pen > Sword
It would, however, be just as unscientific to claim them untrue as it is to claim them true - making any kind of statement about them is against scientific method. The correct answer is "don't know" or, as I prefer, THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.

As an aside (and to slightly stir the pot), this is why agnosticism is a better position for a reasoning scientist to take than [militant] atheism (of the Dawkins, etc variety).
"In the beginning, the Universe was created.  This made a lot of people very angry and has widely been regarded as a bad move."  [Douglas Adams]

 

Offline Goober5000

  • HLP Loremaster
  • 214
    • Goober5000 Productions
1) Even if Christianity was proven false by any of those criteria, do you really believe anyone would stop being a Christian?
Well, Mormonism was falsified, and look how that turned out.  I'm quite confident Christianity itself won't be, of course.

Quote
2) Many of those while falsifying Christianity aren't exactly experiments that could be carried out.
Quite a few high-ranking Jewish and Roman leaders had the means, motive, and opportunity to do #5 when it would have been the easiest time to do so.

 

Offline karajorma

  • King Louie - Jungle VIP
  • Administrator
  • 214
    • Karajorma's Freespace FAQ
Maybe (though doubtful that they would have bothered), but the simple fact is that it's going to be pretty hard to do it now, and even if it was done, no one would believe it.
Karajorma's Freespace FAQ. It's almost like asking me yourself.

[ Diaspora ] - [ Seeds Of Rebellion ] - [ Mind Games ]

 

Offline Ghostavo

  • 210
  • Let it be glue!
    • Skype
    • Steam
    • Twitter
Wait, so when I say it, I fail science forever, but when MP-Ryan says it, it's true?

When you say it, you assume the absence of evidence is evidence of absence. MP-Ryan does not.

No I didn't. I presented an argument that you still didn't answer.

Either it is reasonable to assume an unfalsifiable statement as false OR the answer to almost every single possible statement is "I don't know.".

One can come up with any number of unfalsifiable statements for any number of situations. Yet when people ask, for instance, how does the double-slit experiment work, I don't see anyone saying "I don't know, His Noodly Appendage may be changing my results!".
"Closing the Box" - a campaign in the making :nervous:

Shrike is a dirty dirty admin, he's the destroyer of souls... oh god, let it be glue...

 

Offline Luis Dias

  • 211
Science doesn't deal with `true' and `false', unless by `true' and `false' (or correct and incorrect, or whatever you want to call it) you mean `probably' and `probably not'. These sets of words mean very different things in just about every context.

I can't believe this is directed to me.... go ahead. Preach the bible to a priest please.

Quote
There is no way to possibly determine the existence of a deist god, likewise there are no scientific tests you can do to either confirm or hurt that idea. You just can't figure it out, and given how meaningless it is, no one really cares unless you make an equally meaningless claim that you know such a god either exists or doesn't exist. (well of course he either doesn't exist or exists, but hopefully you know what I mean :p )

Oh, I don't detest from a single moment the Ignostic position. It's just too "convoluted" to speak in everyday's terms, and in practice it ends up being exactly the same as atheism: ignoring the question or saying "No" to it (and then ignoring it) is exactly the same, and it has, mind you, the exact same metaphysical consequence wrt the main religions: either you end up equally in hell or "anihilated" in the pit of fire or smth.

Splitting hairs is a nice hobby, be my guest. I happen to think that atheism is a much more fun position than the "holier-than-thou" semantical approach of ignosticism... And I think roughly the same about Agnosticism: it's just Atheism in Coward Clothes.

Quote
In contrast, you can make fairly strong inductive arguments that a Judeo-Christian god doesn't exist, and there are scientific ways to test for his existence. This, however, doesn't absolutely prove anything, especially considering how ill-defined `god' is not matter what religion you belong to.

It's ill defined not by design, but by evolution. All the "well-defined gods" are dead for a long long time, and for obvious reasons. We are left with the more ambiguous semantical rubbish versions.

 

Offline Luis Dias

  • 211
For the reasons mentioned before, science really doesn't have anything to say about the accuracy (much less truth value) of any non-falsifiable claims.

They may be valid, or they may be invalid, but as long as there are no ways to disprove them, they really don't matter much at all.

This is all theoretically fine and dandy, except that in the real world we live in, they *do* matter a *lot*, since many "null hypothesis" that people have in their brains include metaphysical unfalsifiable shenanigans that no one could ever prove true or false. And yet, they steer human actions and morals, as if they do exist.

Quote
It would, however, be just as unscientific to claim them untrue as it is to claim them true - making any kind of statement about them is against scientific method. The correct answer is "don't know" or, as I prefer, THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.

I c wot u did thar. And I agree, for sure. However, there are some claims that we think are above scrutiny that perhaps aren't at all. For instance, the afterlife. I'd argue that there is a ton of materialistic empirical evidence for its inexistence, and most people are aware of it.

Quote
Then we can start to think, what makes things fall... rather than just say "Admin made things do this thing we call falling".

Yeah, nice text. I also abhor the "goddidit" meme that religion spews for everything, while opening the arms in an awestruck fashion.... as if curiosity and wonder was really the underlying forces behind religion...

 

Offline Polpolion

  • The sizzle, it thinks!
  • 211
Quote
I happen to think that atheism is a much more fun position than the "holier-than-thou" semantical approach of ignosticism... And I think roughly the same about Agnosticism: it's just Atheism in Coward Clothes.

Fun has nothing to do with it. Saying that agnosticsm is just atheism in coward clothes is not only wrong, but fails to address any the issues of truth. But if you find that boldly asserting things you don't know is existentially satisfying, I'm happy for you and I respect your beliefs.

 

Offline Flipside

  • əp!sd!l£
  • 212
Agnostics are simply people who have not found a religion that suits their own personal spirituality, that's not Atheism as in 'not believing in a God', it is more a case of 'not believing in a religion', problem is, religions don't like being thought of as something seperate from the deity they represent, and so this mis-interpretation of Atheism is spread around as though all agnostics were 'Christian-Lite' or something.

Edit: Thinking about it, the last word I'd use to describe an agnostic is 'coward'. They are brave enough to admit ignorance, spiritual enough to want to believe in something bigger than themselves, and yet strong-willed enough to not 'go with the crowd' whilst looking for those answers. Some could argue that they are foolish for having any kind of spirituality, and maybe they are, but for the main part, I'd rather see more personal interpretation of 'right and wrong' and less dictated interpretation of it in the world.
« Last Edit: November 10, 2011, 08:31:48 am by Flipside »

 

Offline Luis Dias

  • 211
Quote
I happen to think that atheism is a much more fun position than the "holier-than-thou" semantical approach of ignosticism... And I think roughly the same about Agnosticism: it's just Atheism in Coward Clothes.

Fun has nothing to do with it. Saying that agnosticsm is just atheism in coward clothes is not only wrong, but fails to address any the issues of truth. But if you find that boldly asserting things you don't know is existentially satisfying, I'm happy for you and I respect your beliefs.

Of course, that is the usual thing one agnostic says. In truth, most atheists are technically agnostics, they just dont suffer the silly proclamations religious people are known for and wont try to give them a 50-50 chance of being right, which, for obvious reasons would have been ridiculous. The coward accusation isas old as the term itself, whose sole purpose was to get Darwin out of trouble from his own time.

 

Offline redsniper

  • 211
  • Aim for the Top!
Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.
"Think about nice things not unhappy things.
The future makes happy, if you make it yourself.
No war; think about happy things."   -WouterSmitssm

Hard Light Productions:
"...this conversation is pointlessly confrontational."

 

Offline Herra Tohtori

  • The Academic
  • 211
  • Bad command or file name
Ok, let's see if we can make some sense out of the terminology.

There seems to be some confusion about what atheism and agnosticism are.

Atheism is not denying of God's existence, it's denying the existence of divine on a conceptual basis.


This is pretty much what I tried to illustrate with my example about a simulated universe in my earlier post.


For the sake of the conversation, let's assume that a single entity existed before our universe, and created our universe with all the mighty computational powers at their disposal, and our universe is running on their computer system, and that the entity either has or doesn't have direct access to simulation parametres (it doesn't relevantly change the analogy as both points of view exist about God in theism).



Most would argue there would be nothing divine about such a being, yet it would be exactly identical to the concept of God in most monotheistic religions when viewed from the simulated universe. So, what exactly is it that makes a being qualify as a "god" or "divine"? Sufficiently long oral tradition or old enough written text describing the entity and names them as divine god, rather than simply a being with extraordinary (from our point of view) powers?


Atheism takes a point of view that divine does not exist, that division between "divine" and "mundane" is completely arbitrary and needless. In other words, the position of a-theism is that theism (as in, concept of divinity) is fundamentally flawed way to describe the world around us. In atheist's perspective, theism creates a baseless border between different parts of the universe; as the polar opposite of theism, atheism favours a more holistic world view that doesn't automatically create any fundamental difference between sentient beings just based on their power levels or other attributes. We are all the same, gods, humans, aliens, animals, people, beings... wouldn't a God to us be just a regular person among his own people?


In other words, I can't really say for certain that a being described as "God" in judao-christian tradition does not or can not exist. There is, even if rather unlikely in my opinion, the possibility that such a being does exist, and it would be rather unscientific of me to claim with any absolute certainty that it doesn't exist.

But I can say pretty certainly that (in my opinion) there would not be anything divine in it; such a being would be a natural phenomenon just as ourselves, or gravity, or the rest of the universe, or the universe that houses the computer system running our universe as a simulation.


If someone wants to claim there is something divine in something, the burden of proof is on them, just as the task of falsifying the hypothesis falls to those who can do experiments related to it. As an example, it was long thought that flies spawn out of nothingness and that was to some seen as an example of divine life-creating force in action.

Further inspection revealed the microscopic eggs that their larvae hatch from, which put quite a crimp to the divine life-creating force hypothesis, as you may imagine.





TL;DR: Atheism doesn't really bother denying the existence of individual deities. It just says if they exist, they are not divine, and questions whether it is appropriate to pledge servitude to a being arbitrarily named God, when the concept of "divine" loses its meaning.

Some atheists also criticize churches of mismanaging the religions, regardless of the perceived pointlessness of religions in the first place, and urge people to think to themselves rather than submitting blindly to dogmas thrown at them by authority figures (parents at first, later also religious leaders). But, I would view that as more of a socio-political issue than a theological or metaphysical one.




Agnosticism, on the other hand, takes a more of a middle ground position about the existence of divine. What agnosticism says, quite simply, is that we can not gain objective knowledge about the existence of the divine, by the definition of the divine. It is a position that, due to some properties typically associated to divinity, says that since the divine cannot be researched, we can not and shouldn't form and definite statements about its existence one way or another.

Or, as Neutral President would say: "I have no strong feelings one way or the other".


Now, where would I position myself with regards to these definitions? I'd have to say I'm an atheist first and foremost. However, there is one single thing that I could acknowledge as divine, and that is the sum of everything that exists (nested universes or not, this definition includes everything that exists). That is the only thing I could consider "divine", as every other subset of it is smaller than the full set of existence.

Now, if that superset of existence happens to possess a mechanism of being sentient, that sentience I would consider a divine being, and might even dub it "God" if the word had meaning for me.

My position at the moment is that the existence of such superconsciousness is unlikely, but completely denying the possibility of its existence is something I don't want to do either.

As such, you could call me an agnostic, with a provision that the only theism I could find acceptable is pantheism, and even that I find unlikely.



If you have trouble defining what you are, or what someone else is, start with asking how you define the concept of "divine" and whether or not you believe such thing exists. That is much more sensible approach than asking "do you believe in God (which one)?"
There are three things that last forever: Abort, Retry, Fail - and the greatest of these is Fail.

 

Offline Polpolion

  • The sizzle, it thinks!
  • 211
words

Hmm... I've only ever seen atheism and agnosticism defined in terms of deities, though these definitions do seem to be much better. Problem is I'd think it's more difficult to define divine than to define god, though I suppose such definitions should be unavoidable in discussions on the topic regardless of which definitions of atheism and agnosticism you use.

 

Offline karajorma

  • King Louie - Jungle VIP
  • Administrator
  • 214
    • Karajorma's Freespace FAQ
There seems to be some confusion about what atheism and agnosticism are.

That's cause it means different things to different people. As far as I'm concerned your entire definition was wrong because it doesn't match the one I've always used.

One definition I've always liked for its simplicity is that a theist believes in a specific god, an agnostic believes that there is something out there but that it is either unknown or unknowable, and an atheist simply has no belief, deciding that there is no point in acting as if there is something out there without proof.

Again, once you go away from a simple definition like that, you get into a massive cluster**** of competing definitions that vary wildly in how atheists and agnostics there are.
Karajorma's Freespace FAQ. It's almost like asking me yourself.

[ Diaspora ] - [ Seeds Of Rebellion ] - [ Mind Games ]

 

Offline jr2

  • The Mail Man
  • 212
  • It's prounounced jayartoo 0x6A7232
    • Steam
Quote from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheist
Atheism, in a broad sense, is the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athiest

theism is the belief in a god or gods... polytheism = many gods, monotheism... yada yada

atheism is the belief that there is no god(s).  Nada.  Does not exist.  Not the belief that there is no proof of such a being, but that there is proof that there is no such being(s).  Hence the a, meaning "not".

It's simple word definitions, they are based from their root meanings in older languages.

 

Offline Flipside

  • əp!sd!l£
  • 212
Well, we wander back into the minefield of 'proven' and 'not proven' a bit there ;)

I can readily accept that a deity is not proven, however, it's risky to say that the non-existence of one has been proven. It's one of the tricky ones because it cannot be proven because any question can be hit with the 'omnipotent' wildcard.

Maybe the term that should be used rather than 'Deity', which is a very wide-ranging term, is 'Creator'? I think the main bone of contention between Atheists and Religions is the matter of Creation, whether we owe our lives to some entity, whether the Universe only exists because it was made by a being etc. I think those are the real abrasive issues involved. Things like Slavery, Abuse and Empire Building a far more an aspect of Human Nature and can, as has been mentioned, been done for a variety of reasons of which religion is included, but is not exclusive.

 

Offline Herra Tohtori

  • The Academic
  • 211
  • Bad command or file name
But a theist can be monotheist, polytheist, deist, or pantheist... :p

The broadest definition of theist is that they believe in at least one deity. That's a pretty good definition. Atheism would be denying the existence of any deity. However, my definition avoids any problems with actually denying existence of the beings described as gods - instead of denying their existence (no matter how unlikely), I deny their divine status.


Hence my analogy about the person running a simulated universe, and the concept of God in said simulated universe. Miracle occurs? Nothing divine about it, and in fact it wasn't a miracle at all, the admin just typed in a few commands and changed a few variables.

Though, considering the vast scale of the universe, thinking that the universe's creator would have the time or effort to focus on individual civilizations, much less individual nations or individual people is vanity of the highest order and I really don't get why people seem so dead set on divine beings having such a deep and unnatural interest in my life or soul or both.
There are three things that last forever: Abort, Retry, Fail - and the greatest of these is Fail.