(March 2, 2015 at 1:32 pm)Norman Humann Wrote:

(March 2, 2015 at 1:24 pm)YGninja Wrote: Would any of that evidence not require me to have blind faith in the authority informing me of it?

Faith is belief without evidence. When you have evidence, believing something isn't blind.

Faith is trust, or belief without proof, not evidence. Proof shows a position to be true, evidence suggests a position might be true.

Faith can be based on evidence (I have faith my gf is not cheating on me because it seems to be inconsistent with her character). In this sense, 'faith' is a synonym for 'trust'. Religious faith is a different matter and a different sense of the word, it is strong belief in a religon based on 'spiritual apprehension' rather than evidence. Using faith interchangably in both senses in the same conversation is apt to get confusing.

Never wake a faith walker.

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(March 2, 2015 at 12:07 pm)YGninja Wrote:

(March 2, 2015 at 11:37 am)watchamadoodle Wrote: I used to believe in Noah's Ark and so forth, because I had been indoctrinated and had never bothered to reexamine these beliefs as an adult. I believed in evolution, dinosaurs, etc. while I simultaneously believed the Bible stories were based on real events. I didn't see the cognitive dissonance.

However, when I went to college and began to discuss these issues with friends, I rapidly woke up to the stupidity of my beliefs. It wasn't instantaneous, but it happened eventually. This was in the days before internet, and I was ignorant of comparative religion, philosophy, etc. that might have accelerated the process.

I just don't understand how people today can believe in Noah's Ark in spite of all the resources available through the internet (such as AF). How is that possible? I'm pretty gullible, but I eventually woke up. Many of these Christians are smarter and better educated than me, but they keep believing things that are ridiculous.

EDIT: I especially don't understand how fundamentalists can come to atheist forums and debate these issues without realizing that their beliefs are silly. This is different from those fundamentalists who don't think much about their beliefs.

Sure you weren't indoctrinated at college and told the truth during childhood? Do you think that your college is impartial, or your professors, or the ones deciding their wages and the curriculem? What do you ground that belief on?

Admittedly, only on all too uncommon sense. So go right on about your business believing whatever to hell you like. I have no evidence that your fantasies are not real, leastwise no evidence which you can't twist, spin and turn on its head. This is 'murica damn it. You have a right to your own reality just the way you want it. Pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain. You know the great gOZd is real by faith, all we have is reason. Pity us.

When it comes to Holy Scripture, literal minded people find themselves forced to choose between fundamentalism and scientism.

The thing about science is that you given the right tools you can check that its true.
With religion you just have to take some peoples word on it that he heard it from a bloke who heard it from someone that swears his cousin saw this thing.

(March 2, 2015 at 1:36 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote:

(March 2, 2015 at 12:07 pm)YGninja Wrote: Sure you weren't indoctrinated at college and told the truth during childhood? Do you think that your college is impartial, or your professors, or the ones deciding their wages and the curriculem? What do you ground that belief on?

Reading the Bible cover-to-cover twice is what broke me of being a Christian, and it was in college that I realized that at some point I had become an atheist, through a combination of learning more about science, more about logic, and more about religion.

I can even recall the exact semester, though not the day, that it happened: I was taking Logic 201 and Introduction to Religion the same semester. My religion professor was an Orthodox Christian and big on apologetics. My logic professor was big on fallacies. As I learned the various fallacies, I watched my other professor making them in every single one of his arguments. He was an intelligent, learned man, and he had to turn his mind into a pretzel to try to justify his belief. And I see that over and over in theists, especially literalists: perfectly good minds, twisted into pretzels trying to convince themselves that their faith is reasonable.

Some professors may try to indoctrinate you, my religion professor certainly did. But the thing that breaks people's faith in college is finding out what their parents and ministers didn't tell them. Of course, the effect of preparing a child for the revalations of college just means you endanger their faith sooner, if you're a fundamentalist.

Of course, going to college tends to have little effect on the faith of liberal Christians, who weren't taught that evolution is a lie and science is a conspiracy to perpetuate that lie and everything in the Bible actually happened exactly as portrayed. A certain comfort level with ambiguity is a strong defense against new facts breaking your faith.

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(March 2, 2015 at 1:24 pm)YGninja Wrote: Would any of that evidence not require me to have blind faith in the authority informing me of it?

Far from it. In college (except for Bible college, of course) one is generally rewarded for fact-checking.

And Appeal to Authority is only a fallacy if the authority appealed to is an inappropriate one. Appeal to Einstein on the General Theory of Relativity, and you've committed no fallacy. Likewise if you refer to Stephen Gould on a matter concerning biological evolution. It isn't possible to be more of an authority than the people working in the field concerned on everything. Where you run into trouble is appealing to Einstein on theology or Gould on celestial mechanics.

But if you really have a problem with, say, the Theory of Evolution, there is nothing preventing you from learning it backwards and forwards and seeing the evidence for yourself by visiting museums, laboratories, and active digs. Get a Ph. D. in evolutionary biology or paleontolgy and expose the conspiracy from the inside!

The Bible is an ancient book, parts of it over 3000 years old. Reading it cover to cover is not really sufficient, if you have no contextual understanding.

It seems like one of the reasons for you leaving the faith is, in your mind, witnessing your religious professor committing fallacies in his apologetics. But that would be a fallacy in itself, namely, the fallacy fallacy, ie that a claim is wrong because a fallacy was used in support of it. Breaking faith because of things your parents didn't tell you would also be a fallacy fallacy.

The issue with the science conspiracy thing is quite interesting, because there used to be no such thing as "science", it used to be "the philosophy of x", ie biology, physics etc. Science introduced apriori naturalism, the answer must be naturalistic else it is not plausible. This is the synthetic science paradigm and why that paradigm has always generated atheists. It is this paradigm which is the grounds for such theories as of evolution, by way of circular reasoning.

"Only naturalism exists",
"Life needs a naturalistic explanation",
"The only plausible naturalistic explanation is that somehow tiny molecules came alive and gradually grew more complex",
"Evolution is true because it is the only reasonable explanation",
"Evolution disproves God",
"Only naturalism exists".

And it is the paradigm which zealous devotion to it as an explicator for all things is dangerous, is if the explanation is not naturalistic, science will never find it. Relying on science as an explicator for all things also necessarily relies on human cognition to be able to explain all things, and such a position is self defeating, as you assume infinite cognition - a supernatural property. Kinda reminds me of "I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High." - The most core principle of Luciferianism.

The truth is that there is a conspiracy, but its not something im going to labour on because i think most of you have too strong normalcy bias to be able to acknowledge it. Essentially it was catalysed during the enlightenment and has its roots in the ancient mystery schools of Babylon. Who supplied the light for the enlightenment? Lucifer the Light-Bearer, ofcourse. In essence, the science paradigm was born out of Luciferianism, for the purpose of creating atheists, who are in principle indistinguishable from Luciferian, although don't self-acknowledge it.

I think it's generally preferring a comfortable delusion to accepting reality on its own terms. The pathetic, ludicrous arguments people throw up to try and defend these stories can't be convincing even to themselves. They just want them to be true, I think. And they don't want to face the consequences of having to admit they've been deceived.

(March 2, 2015 at 2:13 pm)downbeatplumb Wrote: The thing about science is that you given the right tools you can check that its true.
With religion you just have to take some peoples word on it that he heard it from a bloke who heard it from someone that swears his cousin saw this thing.

Yes. With science, most people come to a consensus, given enough time. It unites people in truth. With religion, it's the other way around. The more time passes, the more people split apart. I'll go with science over spirituality.

(March 2, 2015 at 2:14 pm)YGninja Wrote: Relying on science as an explicator for all things also necessarily relies on human cognition to be able to explain all things, and such a position is self defeating, as you assume infinite cognition - a supernatural property.

That part in bold is where you fail severely. You seem to think that because you claim a divine source for your beliefs that you are exempt from this problem, but the truth is that all we have to go on is human cognition. Even claims of god need to be interpreted through this lens, and when we examine these supernatural claims, all we are left with is the problem of the fallibility of human cognition.

That is why there must be a process in place to evaluate the truth value of a claim. What we have come up with and has repeatedly demonstrated its validity over and over and over again is science. The fact that a process that has proven itself on many, many occasions shows your claims to have no merit is not the fault of the process.

Religious people need to steer away from the fallibility of human cognition argument, because it only weakens their position.

(March 2, 2015 at 2:07 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: When it comes to Holy Scripture, literal minded people find themselves forced to choose between fundamentalism and scientism.

Yeah: better to just make something up, pretend that it's what the scriptures mean without any evidence that it's reflective of the author's original intent, and then deride anyone not willing to take your baseless "interpretation" as perfectly factual, right?