RE: When Faith and Science Clash
September 20, 2012 at 1:05 pm
(This post was last modified: September 20, 2012 at 1:17 pm by Darkstar.)
(September 20, 2012 at 7:01 am)Reasonable_Jeff Wrote: If I am driving down the road wanting to get to Orlando, FL and I see rocks on a hill near the road that spell out "Welcome to Orlando" I can either assume:
a.) the rocks were placed there by intelligent design
b.) the rocks rolled there by unguided processes and just have the appearance of design
If I assume (a) then it is rational to believe that the message spelled out by the rocks really is true since an intelligence placed them there. It is rational to believe that I really am entering Orlando.
However, if I assume (b) it is irrational to believe that the message spelled out by the rocks is true. They just happen to look like a message, but they really aren't a message. It would be irrational to believe that I really am entering Orlando.
Given atheism, if your own cognitive abilities have evolved, they have evolved with the aim of survival. On this system calling your conclusions "true" seems arbitrary and irrational....an act of blind faith.
...huh?
Are you really trying to suggest that truth is inherently arbitrary, and therefore unreliable? If that is the case, then I guess nothing we ever do can matter because we can never prove if anything has any meaning. This reminds me of David Hume a bit. He is the perfect example of what happens when one becomes too skeptical (ironic, in that I am comparing him to a theist). David Hume
Quote:...he argued against the existence of innate ideas, concluding instead that humans have knowledge only of things they directly experience. Thus he divides perceptions between strong and lively "impressions" or direct sensations and fainter "ideas", which are copied from impressions. He developed the position that mental behaviour is governed by "custom", that is acquired ability; our use of induction, for example, is justified only by our idea of the "constant conjunction" of causes and effects. Without direct impressions of a metaphysical "self", he concluded that humans have no actual conception of the self, only of a bundle of sensations associated with the self.
Reasonable_Jeff Wrote:The fine tuning of the initial conditions of our universe to support life is simply incredible.
About that...two things:
1. We don't know that other forms of life couldn't have appeared in a different form of universe.
2. If the conditions that need to be met in order to support simple organisms are great, and the conditions are greater for superior life forms, like humans, wouldn't the conditions for an omnipotent being to arise be infinitely more strict?
John Adams Wrote:The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.
