Proof that God exists

[Conspiracy_of_reason]

Yeah, I chunk it up for clarity most of the time.  There is no such thing as a "common reality of religion", as all of the warring sects and every apologist who comes here with a different story about the same magic book makes perfectly clear.  Every religion has it's fair share of devils, the rituals never work.  

You and I seem to be having a perfectly intelligible conversation with the inclusion of 'Religion', we are not struggling with the concept, are we. Basic linguistics would suggest without a common understanding we could not be having this conversation. We would appear to have a common reality of religion.

There's a crushing mound of evidence the sun will rise tomorrow as well.  It's a fun little chestnut we call orbital mechanics.  

This is an interesting approach.

I'm suggesting that the sun might not rise tomorrow because science and its observations are historical and do not provide any evidence of future events, observations like orbital mechanics. Your response to this is the sun will rise because of orbital mechanics?

This is the kind of circular reasoning a Christian might deploy when saying the bible is real because god says so in the bible. Somewhat unconvincing.

It doesn't matter what I believe.  All that matters is that by referencing examples we are setting metrics.  If a person mentions progress..you ask them what they mean..and they say x, y, and z....there you go.  We could only insist that we haven't made progress or that it's some murky non-thing -before- a person lists off what they're using as metrics.  After that - it's just an issue of checking the numbers.  

No, we are not setting metrics, we are plucking arbitrary notions out of thin air. This is not empirical nor is it scientific, it's just made up. Mind you, if we wrote it all down you could create your own 'magic book' of progress.

Why would humanity have to have some universal goal for there to be progress?  Most of the time that's not how progress is made...though I'm sure it would help if we all came together to do something.  Just an interesting thing that stuck out, sidebar. 

When Flemming discovered penicillin was good for killing bacteria he and pretty much the rest of human thought it was progress, in fact, he won the Nobel Prize for it. On the face of it, this looks like progress, people can get cured of bacterial infections fairly easily with a course of antibiotics, we relax our behaviours around wound cleaning and general hygiene because infections are not a big deal. Fast-forward to today, bacteria have mutated, evolved to be resistant to antibiotics, but we have fallen out of practice on how to keep wounds clean and general hygiene. so what once looked like progress has turned out to be nothing of the sort, in fact, it's made the situation worse because these new strains of bacteria are super resilient to basic hygiene and are getting stronger. The situation is so bad the WHO has issued a warning.

Unless we use some kind of Universal measure that is independent of humans we cannot measure progress objectively.

Progress doesn't always bring the happy feels, ask the luddites.  Does how you feel about something change the fact that we've raised the global life expectancy?  If you felt differently about it..would it go down, or up?

Here's a fun one, why isn't the desire for life an "objective measure"?  You either do or don't want to live.  You either are or are not alive. Objectively desiring something objective seems like a hell of alot of objectivity for something that isn't an "objective measure".  

Because 'desire' is a personal subjective experience.

IDK, 365 days...12 months, 1 year.  Seems like an independent universal measure.  Either you can expect more of them or you can't, and it doesn't seem to matter how you or anyone else feels about it. 

How is this example related to progress?

You reject science or human progress?  You can reject the latter if you like...but not because there's no such thing, or because it's a victorian word that has no place in science, or because there's no "universal goal", or because there's no objective or independent standard.  There is such a thing and here we are (and all that we are) as a testament to it.  Lots of words and concepts are putatively victorian.  We haven't had to band together into a universal goal to effect it as of yet, and it abounds with needling detail on the specific and objective metrics we use to assess it.  

I reject the notion of progress and by extension that science drives progress.

Imagine everything else is shit.  We're doing no better anywhere else......but we live longer.  Isolate that one metric from all the noise.  Can you tell me, without irrelevance and rationalization...why a level headed person might hesitate to call that progress?  Just that alone?  Of course that's not the only metric being referred to when a person discusses human progress, is it?  If we listed every category we're doing better in it would take us eons.

You could -only- be insisting that the things we call progress...while they objectively do exist and have occurred and are an improvement over old metrics..aren't all that we make it out to be.  They just aren't so awesome, lol.   Well...the luddites didn't think so either...and yet the very things they destroyed, and the very force they attempted to resist....was a component of human progress all the same.  You won't find me smashing up any cotton mills.

Longer life = faster resource depletion, faster transmission of pandemics (black death took hundreds of years to get across Europe, bird flu took days to arrive from China), less living space, more disputes and wars, more poverty, more extreme poverty (right now more than half of the world's population lives in poverty, over 1.1 Billion live in extreme poverty any increase in Western longevity negatively impacts these figures)... do I need to go on.

Your point is predicated on your own very narrow, very privileged worldview. For every item you call progress there are hundreds of issues why others would not see it that way because it is an individual viewpoint and not a paradigm for the human race.

You have no idea what living longer will do for our great, great, great grandchildren, but they are humans too and you cannot call 'progress' without acknowledging the potential impact of what we have wrought, and you simply do not have the information to do that. We may well be back to cotton mills if we exhaust the ability to produce power (resource depletion). I don't know if any of this will come to pass, neither do you and any call is one of pure belief, but I'm not the one calling religion out am I? We could call arbitrary measures, just call them out without recourse to reason or logic, or even science, but that way lies religion and you can't have your cake and eat it.

cor

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Like the "human need" to accelerate particles to near light speed, have them collide with other particles, and then record what happens in the aftermath?

No, like the need to observe it and theorise about it.

FTFY

Very kind but it was better the way it was.  

That's what people say in defence of science. What drives science first and foremost is intellectual curiosity. The thing that drives religion is a lack thereof.

Firstly, I'm glad you finally see science serves human needs. To be fair your comment about religion is unfounded, anthropologically speaking religion is far more likely to have been driven by the need to protect the individual by forming larger social groups (not that we know for certain). Society is a great defence strategy though.

You may have a point about faith giving us the hope to cling on... I am reading some philosophy right now that is trying to make this case. I am going to post a thread about it in the next week or two. Hopefully, you'll respond to it. For now, I will simply say that, yes, for battered and broken individuals, religion may provide a sense of transcendence which endows them with the enthusiasm to press on despite difficulties. But at the societal level--in modern times--religion is little more than a stumbling block.

Don't underestimate how deeply the structures of belief are embedded in the human psyche. There must be an evolutionary reason why religion, in some form or other, has sprung up across the globe in disparate cultures*, and why science has successfully supplanted it in the West. It seems an unlikely coincidence when there are plenty of other social constructs that arose before science that didn't challenge it. A good scientist never misses a clue.

*I have read somewhere (but I can't remember where) that there have only been two recorded incidents of isolated cultures with no formal religious structures (although they had informal belief structures similar to 'luck' and 'fate'). That is a statistic worthy of scientific attention.

cor