posted
No. What I'm trying to say is that Jefferson would almost certainly be an atheist had he access to modern knowledge.
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* I'm using "greater religious faith" to mean "more fundamentalist." In other words, a young earth creationist has greater religious faith than a mainstream "modern" Christian who accepts evolution and does not take all parts of the Bible literally.
Well that's certainly an example of writing your definitions to support your conclusion.
Religious faith is not a quantitative measure so that's the only definition that made sense to me. You could have posted your own definition. I'd be more than happy to discuss it. I made it clear that I didn't know Tresopax's definition of "greater religious faith" so I don't know why you felt the need to be a jerk and accuse me of intellectual dishonesty.
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quote:Barring personal revelation of some kind, I think atheism is pretty much a necessary condition of rationality, yes.
So a person cannot be rational unless they are atheist? I can see why this puts you in the awkward position of having to claim historical figures are "atheist" when they openly state a belief in God.
I'd have to disagree though. I think perfect rationality inevitably leads one to faith, of one sort of another. Which one depends upon one's starting assumptions and observations. Two different perfectly rational people could easily come to different rational conclusions about the universe if they had different starting assumptions and observations. A rational person could conceivably make observations or accept starting assumptions that lead them to be atheist, but it would still entail having faith in some other unprovable beliefs about the fundamental nature of the universe. Or a rational person could conceivably observe things and accept assumptions that would lead them to accept theism, which also would entail other unprovable beliefs about the fundamental nature of the universe.
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quote:Originally posted by pooka: It's a barb on the ethnocentrism of considering the influence of China on the grand edifice of Western philosophy.
I think the Romans were pretty sure that their civilization represented the pinnacle of social progression.
Wait wait what? I'm not quite following what you are saying here. First I saw that Western Philosophy was poisonous to China and I was not sure how it connects to this statement. It seems like there is an extra word in that sentence that is throwing me off.
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quote:So a person cannot be rational unless they are atheist? I can see why this puts you in the awkward position of having to claim historical figures are "atheist" when they openly state a belief in God.
In the modern era, absolutely. There's no remaining rational argument for God. This is not to say that irrationality is a serious flaw; lots of irrational people are also good, fully functional people. But supernaturalism has been rendered unnecessary.
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quote:I made it clear that I didn't know Tresopax's definition of "greater religious faith" so I don't know why you felt the need to be a jerk and accuse me of intellectual dishonesty.
Sorry, by "greater religious faith" I simply mean they are more confident in a religious belief system.
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quote:There's no remaining rational argument for God.
Sure there is! At least there is as much as there is a rational argument for there not being a God.
I could give you several rational arguments for God if you want.
quote:But supernaturalism has been rendered unnecessary.
Here is a mistaken leap you are making. "Unnecessary" does not equal "Irrational". There is no logical necessity to believe in the existence of the past, for instance - but that doesn't mean it is irrational to believe in it. There is no logical necessity for you to believe I have an uncle, but it is not irrational to believe so. Atheism is also unnecessary in the same fashion.
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posted
Everyone was considering whether China (or more broadly, Eastern thought) had an effect on Western philosophy. I was turning it around and saying what is the West's impact on China? And the most prominent thing that came to mind was Marx and communism.
I was then acknowledging that I was just doing this to barb people for assuming their own culture to be at the center of everything.
quote:There's no remaining rational argument for God.
Of course there are. Primary mover, for one. Jsut because your faith in materialism counters them doesn't mean that they are irrational. Materialism is not equivilent to rationality.
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quote:I made it clear that I didn't know Tresopax's definition of "greater religious faith" so I don't know why you felt the need to be a jerk and accuse me of intellectual dishonesty.
Sorry, by "greater religious faith" I simply mean they are more confident in a religious belief system.
That makes sense but, just to clarify, can a deist with no official religion have greater religious faith than a Jewish, Christian, Muslim, etc. fundamentalist?
My initial reaction to your claim that "if society is progressive, the trend from one century to the next of our most iconic and effective leaders is headed in the direction of greater religious faith, not towards atheism." was that my own experiences and knowledge don't support that conclusion. In general, while your definition makes sense, I feel that both yours and mine are too difficult to quantify to make a reasonable trend prediction.
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quote:There's no remaining rational argument for God.
Of course there are. Primary mover, for one. Jsut because your faith in materialism counters them doesn't mean that they are irrational. Materialism is not equivilent to rationality.
The problem with the primary mover argument is that the only thing it argues for is a primary mover, which doesn't have to be a god.
Nothing in the argument says that the primary mover had to survive the big bang, or had to have any features other than to set it off.
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quote:But supernaturalism has been rendered unnecessary.
Here is a mistaken leap you are making. "Unnecessary" does not equal "Irrational". There is no logical necessity to believe in the existence of the past, for instance - but that doesn't mean it is irrational to believe in it. There is no logical necessity for you to believe I have an uncle, but it is not irrational to believe so. Atheism is also unnecessary in the same fashion.
I think what Tom meant by "unnecessary" was that supernaturalism has not been shown to be necessary to explain any observable events. Therefore, it is an unsatisfactory model for gaining insight into the universe/life/etc.
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posted
But several events in the split seconds following the big bang were as improbable as the big bang itself, so if the primary mover were separated from this universe by the big bang, it is still not a compelling cosmology.
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quote:Originally posted by pooka: Everyone was considering whether China (or more broadly, Eastern thought) had an effect on Western philosophy. I was turning it around and saying what is the West's impact on China? And the most prominent thing that came to mind was Marx and communism.
I was then acknowledging that I was just doing this to barb people for assuming their own culture to be at the center of everything.
Sorry it didn't quite work.
OK, understood. Two things.
1: It seems a bit pointless to chastise the West for thinking it was the center of everything, when China's traditional stance for thousands of years was, "We are the center of everything, everyone outside our country are barbarians, they have nothing to offer us." For goodness sake China's name in Chinese still means, "Center Country/Kingdom." It's very much a pot calling the kettle black. Not that you embody the essence of Chineseness. Just as the Mongol Hordes came from the East and blew apart the West's concepts of superiority, the Europeans came from the West and blew open China's doors of ethnocentrism and elitism.
2: Marxism and Communism could not have polluted Chinese culture as much as they did were it not for many other aspects of Chinese culture that left them wide open for sickness. Many of these aspects are poison in of themselves.
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quote:I don't know about Tom, but I want to hear them.
Here's a really really basic one: 1. The Bible says God exists. 2. Things the Bible says are more likely true than false, unless some known piece of evidence contradicts them. 3. There is no known evidence that contradicts the claim that God exists. 4. Therefore it is more likely true than false that God exists.
Conclusion #4 follows from premises #1-3. Thus, as long as you accept the premises, the conclusion is a rational extension of those premises.
OF course, you can deny the premises - but in the same fashion, one can deny the premises for any argument for atheism. That is why I said "at least there is as much as there is a rational argument for there not being a God". Both theism and atheism depend upon unprovable but not provably false assumptions. You can call this "rational" if you want, or you could claim that is "irrational", but either way it is the same for theism as it is for atheism.
quote:I think what Tom meant by "unnecessary" was that supernaturalism has not been shown to be necessary to explain any observable events. Therefore, it is an unsatisfactory model for gaining insight into the universe/life/etc.
Yes, that is pretty much what I meant by "unnecessary" to. (It is unnecessary to you that you believe I have an uncle, since you have made no observations that such a belief would explain.) But unnecessary does not imply irrational or unuseful. For instance, if God exists, believing that may be useful for getting to heaven even if it explained no observable evidence.
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quote:I think what Tom meant by "unnecessary" was that supernaturalism has not been shown to be necessary to explain any observable events. Therefore, it is an unsatisfactory model for gaining insight into the universe/life/etc.
But neither of those claims are necessarily true.
The first depends on what you mean by observable.
The second depends on 1) the assumption that Occam's Razor is a reflection of reality, rather than a short-hand rule for a certain type of epistemology and 2) that events that aren't "observable" by the restrictive definition you'd need to use for the first part are not part of the life, the universe, and everything.
Atheism and materialism are choices on how to see the word. They are not more valid than many other sorts of choices, as judge by rational epistemology.
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quote:Originally posted by pooka: But several events in the split seconds following the big bang were as improbable as the big bang itself, so if the primary mover were separated from this universe by the big bang, it is still not a compelling cosmology.
Can you give examples?
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quote: But several events in the split seconds following the big bang were as improbable as the big bang itself, so if the primary mover were separated from this universe by the big bang, it is still not a compelling cosmology.
We actually don't know how improbable the big bang was. For all we know, we could live in a universe that lends itself to big bangs. Maybe not. But it's certainly interesting.
quote:Yeah, but none of that precludes it from being a rational argument for the existence of God.
Perhaps. But again, it seems like it would only be an argument for a very simplistic god, because that's all that is required to have god be the primary mover. You need other arguments to fill in the 'extras' of what god is, if you happen to believe that.
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quote:Originally posted by Threads: so I don't know why you felt the need to be a jerk and accuse me of intellectual dishonesty.
I suspect it's somewhat similar to the reason you felt the need to be a jerk and accuse me of having less religious faith than someone who sticks their fingers in their ears and goes "LaLaLa" whenever science says something that doesn't fit into their world-veiw.
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quote:Perhaps. But again, it seems like it would only be an argument for a very simplistic god, because that's all that is required to have god be the primary mover. You need other arguments to fill in the 'extras' of what god is, if you happen to believe that.
I wasn't countering a statement that required anything more than to show that rational arguments for this did exist.
In general, my main bone of contention is these discussions is to challenge the epistemologically absurd claims made by people who assume that science and rationality supports their materialism.
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quote:I don't know about Tom, but I want to hear them.
Here's a really really basic one: 1. The Bible says God exists. 2. Things the Bible says are more likely true than false, unless some known piece of evidence contradicts them. 3. There is no known evidence that contradicts the claim that God exists. 4. Therefore it is more likely true than false that God exists.
Conclusion #4 follows from premises #1-3. Thus, as long as you accept the premises, the conclusion is a rational extension of those premises.
I think this is logical, but not rational. Two different things.
I can logically say that because 2+2=5, it means I'm Mitt Romney. But it's still not rational.
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posted
I think the assumption that there is a beginning to the universe, is not accurate, and makes discussion on the nature of God needlessly complicated.
A beggining to the universe presupposes that were there a God, he was created by some process, or else exists outside the universe. Both suppositions have never been observed, much less understood.
If we assume that the universe and as an extension God have always existed, for me at least, it's much easier to rationally accept God.
edit: I accept that there being a beginning to the universe and that the universe has always existed are both equally likely in my mind.
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quote:Perhaps. But again, it seems like it would only be an argument for a very simplistic god, because that's all that is required to have god be the primary mover. You need other arguments to fill in the 'extras' of what god is, if you happen to believe that.
I wasn't countering a statement that required anything more than to show that rational arguments for this did exist.
In general, my main bone of contention is these discussions is to challenge the epistemologically absurd claims made by people who assume that science and rationality supports their materialism.
Well, it kind of does. I don't see how science and rationality doesn't support materialism. (Unless you're using a different definition of one of those words than I'm familiar with, which is completely possible.)
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quote:I wasn't countering a statement that required anything more than to show that rational arguments for this did exist.
Let me be more precise: if you start with assumptions that accurately reflect reality, there are no rational arguments for God. Your definition of "rational" is of course accurate to a point, but it amounts to the old logic gate bit about "if all Nazis were bright purple, Hitler was a panda" being true; it's a "true statement" in a very narrow and specific way, but is otherwise ridiculous. In the same fashion, the premises required for a "rational" argument for God are, with a handful of exceptions that revolve around personal experience, ones that are no longer honestly supportable.
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Javert, Squicky's using a very narrow and specific definition of "rational" that you might not recognize. It's closer to your definition of "logical."
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quote:Originally posted by BlackBlade: I think the assumption that there is a beginning to the universe, is not accurate, and makes discussion on the nature of God needlessly complicated.
A beggining to the universe presupposes that were there a God, he was created by some process, or else exists outside the universe. Both suppositions have never been observed, much less understood.
If we assume that the universe and as an extension God have always existed, for me at least, it's much easier to rationally accept God.
I happen to think that the universe is eternal as well. But I'll accept the idea that there was a beginning for the sake of argument.
Anyway, the evidence seems to indicate that the universe that we know of and that currently exists had a beginning, the big bang, but that says nothing about what may have happened before.
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posted
It might be better if you explain to me how they do. Science works inside the materialistic scope. It is largely incapable of saying anything meaningful outside that scope.
Rationality, in general, is somewhat against materialism as it is inconsistent with perceived reality and assuing that it's all just an illusion without some justification is a violation of Occam's Razor.
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quote:Javert, Squicky's using a very narrow and specific definition of "rational" that you might not recognize
I'm pretty sure I'm not, you know.
If you're going to involve yourself in the dicussion, could I request that you contribute more than "Nuhuh!" when someone disagrees with you?
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quote:Anyway, the evidence seems to indicate that the universe that we know of and that currently exists had a beginning, the big bang, but that says nothing about what may have happened before.
I don't see any soft, much less hard evidence. Well to be accurate I think people look at the universe where everything we can observe has both a beginning and an end, and think EVERYTHING must therefore have it's beginning. But no matter how many trillions of things we observe with a beginning and an end that in of itself does not rightly make the universe a new development.
I just think the concepts of God, creation, and people make more sense in an eternal context than in a finite one.
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posted
I was thinking of the inflation event, though I don't have that book in front of me so I forget whether that came before or after the emergence of time.
I mean, how rational is it to rely on a theory of the creation of the universe that suspends the assumption of time?
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quote:Anyway, the evidence seems to indicate that the universe that we know of and that currently exists had a beginning, the big bang, but that says nothing about what may have happened before.
I don't see any soft, much less hard evidence. Well to be accurate I think people look at the universe where everything we can observe has both a beginning and an end, and think EVERYTHING must therefore have it's beginning. But no matter how many trillions of things we observe with a beginning and an end that in of itself rightly make the universe something that is a new development.
I just think the concepts of God, creation, and people make more sense in an eternal context than in a finite one.
I don't think we're actually disagreeing on this, but I just want to be clear:
The two best examples of evidence that occur to me at the moment are the background radiation, which is theorized to be a remnant of the big bang, and the fact that everything is drifting away from everything else. Which implies that, if we reverse it, everything started in one spot.
It's nothing huge, but it seems to suggest a 'beginning' of a sort. I don't think it was the beginning in any ultimate sense. And I don't think the evidence is terribly conclusive on the subject, but it's the best explanation I've seen.
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pooka: extremely, if we have evidence that time is influenced by things that affect the shape of space, which we have a lot of evidence for, and evidence that the shape of space was radically different early in the universe.
We have no context for evaluating the probability that these events would happen, given the conditions just before they happened. It is currently impossible. It is illogical to conclude that they were improbable (or that they were probable), absent additional assumptions. There is just insufficient information. Now, we can talk about the probability they did happen given the information we have available to us, but that's very different.
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quote:Originally posted by MrSquicky: The first depends on what you mean by observable.
Observable has a standard definition so I'll just use wikipedia's.
quote:In physics, particularly in quantum physics, a system observable is a property of the system state that can be determined by some sequence of physical operations.
quote:Originally posted by MrSquicky: The second depends on 1) the assumption that Occam's Razor is a reflection of reality, rather than a short-hand rule for a certain type of epistemology and 2) that events that aren't "observable" by the restrictive definition you'd need to use for the first part are not part of the life, the universe, and everything.
Occam's Razor is not meant to be a reflection of reality. It is meant to identify the best theory for the subset of reality that we currently have information on. This is an important distinction because it means we are looking for theories that best fit existing data. In other words, there may be existing theories that better model reality as a whole but that make assumptions that are not supported by any data. It's silly to put faith behind these beliefs because they aren't supported by existing evidence. A modern physics theory that fits this later example is string theory.
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quote:The two best examples of evidence that occur to me at the moment are the background radiation, which is theorized to be a remnant of the big bang, and the fact that everything is drifting away from everything else. Which implies that, if we reverse it, everything started in one spot.
Would there not be radiation were it not for a big bang?
I have only a passing understanding of everything in the universe is drifting further apart. Are we certain EVERYTHING is drifting further apart or are we certain EVERYTHING we can see with our telescopes is drifting further apart.
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posted
To follow up on something related to what I'm talking about, lets look at a continuous number wheel with a spinner.
The probability of any particular number (as in, a place on the wheel) being landed on in a spin is zero. The probability of some number being landed on in a spin is one. So, after each spin, some number, which had a probability zero of being landed on before we made the spin, was landed upon.
Now, imagine the wheel divided into tiny slices, so each slice has a very, very small, but positive, probability of being landed on. Now imagine that we're looking at the wheel from a great distance and trying to determine which slice was landed on.
We can't be certain, because it is so far away. But by improving our instruments (perhaps a telescope? or bouncing a laser off and trying to catch the difference between the spinner and the background?) we can have greater and greater confidence in which slice was landed on.
So, beforehand, the probability of the particular number being landed on was zero, and the probability of the particular slice the number is in was tiny. Yet something did happen, and we can determine the slice (and thus, the approximate number) with potentially a very high degree of accuracy. Furthermore, no intervention was necessary to bring about this highly improbable particular event.
To make it even funkier, imagine that we came into existence after the spin was made, and we only come into existence if one of the tiny portions of the wheel was pointed at. Given that we are there, making the measurement, can we conclude that some other entity stopped the pointer in that region?
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quote:Observable has a standard definition so I'll just use wikipedia's.
Observable has many different definitions. You gave me one from a specific context.
quote:In physics, particularly in quantum physics,
This specific context does not encompass all of reality. This is important because my point was that, in order to make that statement work, you need to limit the scope of what you are talking about to defined subset of reality.
I'm not sure what your point about Occam's Razor is. We weren't talking about reality, but rather rational beliefs about reality.
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quote:How do you know which starting assumptions accurately reflect reality?
I'm personally a fan of the scientific method.
That answer only pushes the question back one level. The scientific method justifies your claims only by using other starting assumptions to do so. How do you then know those starting assumptions reflect reality?
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quote:Originally posted by BlackBlade: Would there not be radiation were it not for a big bang?
I have only a passing understanding of everything in the universe is drifting further apart. Are we certain EVERYTHING is drifting further apart or are we certain EVERYTHING we can see with our telescopes is drifting further apart.
As for the radiation: Don't know. I think (and I could be completely wrong) is that there seems to be a pervasive level of background radiation that is everywhere we have looked that doesn't seem to be coming from any specific source. Which suggests an explosion that sent this radiation everywhere. Again, that suggestion could be wrong.
For the drifting, I believe it is everything we can see. And since we can't make assumptions about evidence we don't have, it's reasonable to extrapolate from it and say that everything is drifting.
But it is, of course, tentative. Like all knowledge derived through the scientific method. If we come across evidence that contradicts our current evidence, then we'll reevaluate our theories.
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quote:Would there not be radiation were it not for a big bang?
quote:Perhaps the most conclusive (and certainly among the most carefully examined) piece of evidence for the Big Bang is the existence of an isotropic radiation bath that permeates the entire Universe known as the "cosmic microwave background" (CMB). The word "isotropic" means the same in all directions; the degree of anisotropy of the CMB is about one part in a thousand. In 1965, two young radio astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, almost accidentally discovered the CMB using a small, well-calibrated horn antenna. It was soon determined that the radiation was diffuse, emanated unifromly from all directions in the sky, and had a temperature of approximately 2.7 Kelvin (ie 2.7 degrees above absolute zero). Initially, they could find no satisfactory explanation for their observations, and considered the possibility that their signal may have been due to some undetermined systematic noise. They even considered the possibility that it was due to "a white dielectric substance" (ie pigeon droppings) in their horn!
However, it soon came to their attention through Robert Dicke and Jim Peebles of Princeton that this background radiation had in fact been predicted years earlier by George Gamow as a relic of the evolution of the early Universe. This background of microwaves was in fact the cooled remnant of the primeval fireball - an echo of the Big Bang.
If the universe was once very hot and dense, the photons and baryons would have formed a plasma, ie a gas of ionized matter coupled to the radiation through the constant scattering of photons off ions and electrons. As the universe expanded and cooled there came a point when the radiation (photons) decoupled from the matter - this happened about a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang. That radiation cooled and is now at 2.7 Kelvin. The fact that the spectrum (see figure) of the radiation is almost exactly that of a "black body" (a physicists way of describing a perfect radiator) implies that it could not have had its origin through any prosaic means. This has led to the death of the steady state theory for example. In fact the CMB spectrum is a black body to better than 1% accuracy over more than a factor of 1000 in wavelength. This is a much more accurate black body than any we can make in the laboratory!
quote:Originally posted by Tresopax: That answer only pushes the question back one level. The scientific method justifies your claims only by using other starting assumptions to do so. How do you then know those starting assumptions reflect reality?
We test them and see if they work.
From there you could argue that we can't know our senses reflect reality, which is why we have independent verification.
Back another level, we may all be brains in jars. But we have to assume that we exist as our senses tell us, or else we wouldn't have the incentive to do anything.
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quote:I'm personally a fan of the scientific method.
Which is based on non-rational assumptions.
quote:What are you perceiving that doesn't have electrons in it? Emotions have mass, dude.
No, they don't. The brain states may have mass, but assuming that the brain states aer equal to the emotion is just another assumption.
You keep begging the question. If materialism is true, then your proofs of materialism are true. But what you offer as proof relies on the very thing you are trying to prove.
It all comes down to cogito ergo sum. People perceive themselves as making choices, creating things. These perceptions have objective reality. What you have to offer is "No, they are delusional, based on how I assume reality works." but you have no rational reason to believe that reality necessarily works that way. It's a choice.
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