RE: Attn: Theists - What would it take to prove you wrong?
August 11, 2013 at 6:55 pm
(This post was last modified: August 11, 2013 at 6:57 pm by Tonus.)
(August 11, 2013 at 3:16 pm)Locke Wrote: Your argument that believing something until proven otherwise.. I don't find it convincing. I think about how science proves that something is reasonable to believe, but it does not necessarily prove it without any doubt. The longer a scientific theory holds, the more stock we put in it, but there are many scientific theories that have been proven wrong later on. However, the reason they were proven with certainty to be wrong is because we put them into practice until then, since it seemed reasonable for them to be correct.I don't have a problem with the example of unicorns and Santa, those are used often here. But we can use other examples, such as the concept of the existence of multiple universes, which may be reached through black holes. I've heard the concept described but have no reason to believe that it's true, based on my understanding of black holes. If it can be shown that there are indeed multiple universes, then I'd accept it to be the case.
And you are right, science doesn't have all the answers, and our limited knowledge at any given time means that we will sometimes have explanations or ideas that are incorrect. Those can be corrected, because we understand that we continue to learn more and sometimes that means discarding things we previously believed. I think this includes religious beliefs and ideas based on them, and in this I also think that religion is at a disadvantage because most (all?) religions presume to have absolute knowledge of many things...
Quote:But morality is tied to God....including morals. I think the part that is tied to god is the concept that any particular action is moral and immoral because god commands it. To me, this means that there cannot be an absolute moral code.
I agree that an atheist is effectively free to determine his own moral code, though I think that most will follow a humanist code that tries to respect the rights and freedoms of others. Whether it is the selfish desire to prosper that forces a person to observe societal morals or a conscience affected by a strict and lawful (or even religious) upbringing that does so, people can follow a moral code. I don't think that atheists take their atheism into account when determining morals, which I think is the point you are making.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould