(January 2, 2014 at 1:56 pm)FreeTony Wrote: In my post I didn't say that the supernatural doesn't exist. I'm saying it is impossible to demonstrate that it does. I don't think I am making any assumptions about the existence of a supernatural realm.

The list doesn't make a lot of sense. Theists tend to do this as they are not generally interested in finding out what is/isn't true, rather they try to justify their own beliefs in any way they can. The list is a long argument from ignorance. "If you can't explain everything on my list, we must assume the supernatural exists".

I agree, "supernatural" is a totally undefined, senseless concept. I would say that all ideas and beliefs, being determined by time and energy, chance and necessity, are oftentimes unjustifiable at a fundamental level.. I just don't see how inserting God into the mix solves anything. But then of course, he might assert that Theism and Naturalism are both equally borne out of unjustified assumptions (or rather, theists are justified if God exists).

(January 2, 2014 at 2:00 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote:

(January 2, 2014 at 1:56 pm)FreeTony Wrote: In my post I didn't say that the supernatural doesn't exist. I'm saying it is impossible to demonstrate that it does. I don't think I am making any assumptions about the existence of a supernatural realm.

The list doesn't make a lot of sense. Theists tend to do this as they are not generally interested in finding out what is/isn't true, rather they try to justify their own beliefs in any way they can. The list is a long argument from ignorance. "If you can't explain everything on my list, we must assume the supernatural exists".

I agree, "supernatural" is a totally undefined, senseless concept. I would say that all ideas and beliefs, being determined by time and energy, chance and necessity, are oftentimes unjustifiable at a fundamental level.. I just don't see how inserting God into the mix solves anything. But then of course, he might assert that Theism and Naturalism are both equally borne out of unjustified assumptions (or rather, theists are justified if God exists).

It's all just shifting the burden of proof. I lack belief in the supernatural, but I also can lack belief in the claim "The supernatural does NOT exist". I'm therefore not assuming anything in regards to the supernatural.

So so many people can't get their head around "I don't believe claim A" is not the same as "I believe claim B" where A and B are the only options.

(January 2, 2014 at 2:32 pm)FreeTony Wrote: It's all just shifting the burden of proof. I lack belief in the supernatural, but I also can lack belief in the claim "The supernatural does NOT exist". I'm therefore not assuming anything in regards to the supernatural.

So so many people can't get their head around "I don't believe claim A" is not the same as "I believe claim B" where A and B are the only options.

Whereas we find the idea of "supernatural" to be a meaningless concept, do you think "natural" is too ambiguous? Could this be where their arbitrary distinctions are born from?

I completely agree that the natural is too vague and miracles is just another word for confirmation bias (only if it's really rare and really good for me, is the honest way to put it).

Supernatural is just the tv show with the really hot guys. I believe in them!

(January 2, 2014 at 1:19 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote:

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(January 2, 2014 at 12:17 pm)pocaracas Wrote: hehe... it happens... tese people do make us loose our marbles every now and then!

In all seriousness pocaracas, I think I am losing my marbles in dealing with my theist brother (or all religious hacks... scratch that, all hacks). You see, I have also gone through many of the same points you offer with him and there's always some incoherent philosophical retort that is so befuddled in bad logic and abstract thought but mixed with enough "commonsense" premises that make it tedious to dissect...over and over. That's my opinion anyway but then again, when theist philosophers often speak on ontologies I think its bullshit. Daniel Dennett summed it up perfectly when he described William Lane Craig:



Essentially I see my brother's argument as "theism is true because I assume it is true." This is the last response he gave me (his posts are always obnoxiously lengthy):

On the list (1-10), (3) and (4) are of particular importance. (3) is explicit to naturalism (it cannot be denied without denying naturalism since it is the very definition of naturalism or what makes naturalism distinctively naturalism). (4, determinism) is necessarily true if (3) is true. So on naturalism, though in my view I do not think that we would exist, granting that we would for the sake of the argument, we might have an apparatus for holding some true beliefs. That is to say, if it were possible that the law and constants necessary for permitting life came into being with time, space, and energy 13.8 billion years ago, and then by a chance of 10 to the 40,000th power life began according to Fred Hoyle (note: the number of atoms in the observable universe is 10 to the 78th to 10 to the 82nd power), and eventually produced creatures with minds like ours, I grant that I would be able to have true beliefs. That is to say, I may be able to hold the belief that there exists in front of my condo a tree, and the car in the parking lot is not a red Dodge Viper but a grey Toyota Corolla, and so forth. These beliefs are grasped empirically, and so since we have the ability to transfer short-term memory into long-term memory, and later in the evening when I am writing a response to you, I can access these memories and then use them to reply to your response. In this way the imprint of the event of observing the grey Toyota Corolla can be poorly reproduced as an abstraction. Logic, mathematics, and any belief that is not presently empirical (the computer in front of me for example) is held in some mental way either sub-consciously or intuitively, or as an abstraction. So let us grant all of this on naturalism. However, on naturalism the method of obtaining all of our present abstract beliefs (as opposed to data that we do not presently observe is by (3), a natural phenomenon occurring that causes something rather than nothing and (4) determinism from those early moments in which laws and energy came into being.

So let us take (3) and (4) and consider them for a moment in how they would relate to our apparatus for knowing truth on naturalism. On naturalism, a physical event causes a mental event, which generates a particular non-empirical idea or belief (or abstract thought). The physical event always proceeds the mental event and the generation of a particular idea. That is to say, on naturalism, there is no genuine free thinking. A belief that Christianity is false is the result of nothing more than a build up of electrons in the brain and a particular arrangement of neurons that produced the belief that Christianity is false. You made no genuinely free choice in this particular manner whatsoever as the physical event proceeds the generation of that belief or idea. As the naturalist must hold, his or her belief is the result of a physical event (the event caused and coerced your mind into the present belief that Christianity is false and in my case that Christianity is true). Well, then this would apply to series (1-10) on naturalism. Beliefs (3) and (4) are are held on the basis of a physical event, which caused neurons to fire in such a way to generate the idea that (3) and (4) are true. However, (3) and (4) are ideas, they are not held as an immediate or present empirical experience like in the case of the grey Toyota Corolla, the tree in front of my house, or my computer when I am observing them (nor have they ever been observed or shown to be true in any way that would amount to evidence for believing naturalism or rejecting the apparent truth that humans can act intentionally). So, not only are they non-empirical, we have no good reasons to think that any single part of the series (1-10) is true. Further, some of them are apparently false such as is the case with 4, 6, and 7 (and I personally hold 1 and 3 as well).

So, the argument was not that we could not have a reliable cognition to hold true beliefs but that granting the idea that naturalism is true and thus determinism is true, I must also hold that a physical event preceded and caused my belief in naturalism (1-10, and thus 3 and 4). If I hold that these particular ideas were imposed on me as the result of a physical event that caused me to think that they are true (since this is the way in which I am constrained to believe that I developed my metaphysical worldview on naturalism), there can be no justification for holding that these ideas would be very likely to be true ideas granting the kinds of ideas that we are presented with on series (1-10) on the basis of the means by which the naturalist must believe that he or she holds them. Rather the means provide justification for disbelieving that they are true. And so it follows necessarily that there could be no justification for believing that naturalism is true. That is, the idea arising in our minds that naturalism is true in itself provides a defeater for believing in naturalism.

On Christian theism the series 1-10, could look something like this,

1. A personal God exists.
2. Miracles have occurred.
3. Natural processes exist and account for all regularities within the universe.
4. Determinism applies to physical processes but limited human freedom exists.
5. Jesus Christ is the Son of God.
6. Humans have objective value and this can be subjectively apprehended.
7. In coherence with 4, we have objective moral obligations and can partially carry them out.
8. There is a resurrection and thus life after death.
9. The universe has an objective purpose or meaning.
10. Every person's life has an objective purpose or meaning.

Granting (1), (4), (5), the dilemma is not in any way applicable to Christian theism as beliefs are not merely the result of a determined process in which physical events determined all of my worldview beliefs. Notably, human freedom, God himself being personal (revelation of himself, and then the possibility for specific self-authenticating revelation), his providence in guiding persons into truth, as well as (4), (6), and (7) being apparently true, demands the conclusion that not only does "Naturalism vs. Naturalism" not apply to Christian belief, but series (1-10) could be justifiably be held provided that (1) and (5) are true. So then, even if the Christian granted physical and mental determinism, (1-3 and 5-10) could still be justifiably held to be true provided that (1) and (5) are true. That is to say, the proposed argument is unique to naturalism by way in which a naturalist is constrained by his or her belief, (if they think it through) to also find within their belief a defeater for their belief.

Sometimes I wish I had more atheist friends who enjoy debate because all of my debates with him are on Facebook and there is usually a Christian buddy or two that chime in with their sheer stupidity. It is very annoying and yet I am compelled to engage because I personally would like to see the lack of critical thought promoted by religion eliminated from serious dialogue.

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What a wall of text!!! O.o

I didn't get to watch the video, but it reminds me of one of Dennett's words: deepity.
Your brother appears to say many deepities, but they all amount to air. Or, in the Game of Thrones wording, words are wind.
He talks too much while saying nothing. A standard tactic to get the other party to just give up....

I tend to be the sort of person who sums up every text into the bare minimum... making me a very un-verbose writer.
So, from all those things your brother wrote, I kept: abstract thinking leads to the existence of abstracts which lead to the existence of something beyond the natural... and the typical fine tuning argument -.-'
Wrong and wrong.

Humans have believed in deities for thousands of years. Way back then, the fine tuning argument wasn't available, so that's not a valid reason to start believing in them.... even if the argument was valid, which it isn't.
Humans didn't arrive at deities through the notion that their heads could think up abstract ideas, so that is also an invalid way of getting there.
Try again, bro!
How did mankind arrive at the "knowledge" that any god exists?
How did the ancient egyptians arrive at the "knowledge" that all their gods exist?
How did the classical greeks arrive at the "knowledge" that their pantheon exists?
How did the ancient assirians arrive at the "knowledge" of the existence of their pantheon?
How did the jews arrive at the "knowledge" of the existence of their god? (do note that this "knowledge" appeared quite some time after some of the previous peoples...)

How does this jive with the christian god?

Finally, the mere requirement of belief lends the notion of god no credence whatsoever.

(January 2, 2014 at 2:57 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: Whereas we find the idea of "supernatural" to be a meaningless concept, do you think "natural" is too ambiguous? Could this be where their arbitrary distinctions are born from?

With these conceptual ideas that Theists come up with, I find it only makes any sense when you/they try and give a practical example of what they are talking about, rather than just writing sentences that mean nothing. Like the neutron example I gave. Longwinded waffle is very tedious and rarely worth reading.

It's not about understanding the universe better, it's about them reinforcing their beliefs in any way they can.

I'm just going to voice my comments in no particular order without quoting the original.

First off, nature does not imply randomness. Natural processes are stochastic, that is, they combine lawful, ordered behaviors, and random behaviors. Thus to say that rationality, and the hypotheses derived from rationality are the product of randomness is incorrect in at least three aspects.

First, the laws of nature are possessed of symmetry of action, which, as proved by Noether's theorem, means that their action will result in laws of conservation (such as conservation of momentum). The consequence of this is that the laws of nature will result in lawlike behaviors. This violates the assumption that the effects of natural law are random.

Secondly, the stochastic behavior of natural processes permits the phenomenon of self-emergent order in natural systems (magnetic polarization being a prominent example). Thus, since even random natural processes can give rise to order, to suggest that all nature and rationality are necessarily the result of randomness is false.

Third, evolution is not a random process as natural selection itself is not random, but is ordered and given direction by the relationship of the instrumental utility of the phenotype of biological beings with respect to the useful resources of the environment in terms of extracting useful work in the form of reproducing copies of itself. (In other words, how "fit" for the environment a particular variation is determines whether or not that "type" will succeed or not; the match between the type and its environment is not random.) Religious people often get confused on this point because they're distracted by the fact that evolution depends on random mutations, and they infer from this that evolution is therefore a random process. It is not, because it combines non-random and random processes, it too is stochastic, not random, and it too can result in forms of self-emergent order, possibly including rationality.

Your explanation states that because naturalism entails atheism, but atheism does not entail naturalism, that therefore naturalism is the stronger hypothesis. Hypotheses aren't ranked according to the quality of "strength," and to the best of my knowledge there is no meaningful interpretation of the concept of strength with regard to hypotheses and proposition. What there is, however, is the property of scope, being the size of the class of things described and explained by the hypothesis or theory. For example, a theory of everything (TOE) would have greater scope than either a theory of relativity or of quantum mechanics, as it would describe both the big and the small, whereas the others only describe the big or the small. As a result of the entailment, naturalism would have greater scope than atheism, which is obvious. A theory or hypothesis having greater scope does not in itself imply it has greater validity, and thus naturalism isn't more true because it has greater scope.

As noted, evolution can give rise to order, and thus rationality isn't necessarily random, nor is its likelihood of arriving at the truth therefore necessarily random. What it is, is imperfect. Rationality cannot guarantee that its conclusions are correct, but it can increase the probability of its conclusions being correct by applying principles and processes which it has discovered and verified to be orderly and have lawlike behavior, to develop ordered and lawful predictions of probable character.

Your brother's argument is a variant of the argument from rationality, and there is a considerable body of literature on this apologetic argument. You might want to research the pre-existing responses to that argument before re-engaging your brother on his points and his version of it.