BILL NYE VS KEN HAM: TONIGHT AT 7 PM

[DeistPaladin]

It’s not a red herring at all to point out that your personal desires have no ontological bearing on reality. Whether or not science produces the results that you want is utterly irrelevant in regards to how you know science “works”.

Oh dear. My point couldn't have flown higher over your head, it seems.
Let me try again, a little more slowly this time. Let's try to use an analogy:

Let's pretend for a moment that both of us try to enter a room but use different methods. My method is to use the door, open it, and walk in (metaphor for science) while your method is to close your eyes, imagine the wall that separates you from the room doesn't really exist, and try to walk through with all the faith you can muster (analogy for faith). I am able to successfully enter the room while you look silly continually bonking into the wall.

After the exercise, we discuss which approach was better. I argue that mine was because I was able to achieve the desired results while you were not. You retort that this is circular reasoning, saying that walking through a doorway "works because it works" and, after all, how could I really be certain I was in the room since I can't know anything if I don't subscribe to Walkthroughwallism.

You see, it's not just that science gives us what we want (our desires), it's that science CAN be used to produce results (practical application or perhaps you would say "ontological bearing on reality"). Because the scientific approach has practical application and predictive capabilities, it clearly gives us a superior method to understand reality than religious faith.

If believing that Yahweh exists produces the results I want does this mean that Yahweh exists?

I'd like to see that application of your beliefs in Yahweh. Can you lay on hands and heal the sick? Can you speak in foreign languages and be understood by a non-English speaker? Can you bring back the dead? Can you perform any of the miracles that people of faith in the Bible performed? Many Christians believe that prayer is a powerful force. The effects of prayer have been studied and proven as ineffective as talking to yourself. I would sincerely be interested in reviewing any evidence that you can offer that your faith produces anything but hot air and philosobabble.

What are you talking about? The addition was added much later on than the rest of Mark. It has no effect on the original text because we have manuscripts of Mark that predate the addition.

Additions are still changes.

I am sorry but that is not going to fly. When I ask how you know your current understanding of the evidence is correct your appeal to your current understanding of the evidence is indeed begging the question.

Not if the evidence comes from different sources, hence my analogy of writing a book and footnoting another book. The reason using books to support the assertions in other books is not circular reasoning is the books have different sources.

You've mentioned in previous posts that you've seen the movie "A Beautiful Mind". In the movie, Nash experiences vivid hallucinations of people, including his best friend, his friend's niece and a general. To him, these imaginary people seem every bit as real as the people in the real world. So how does his discern which of his sensory inputs are true and which are not? The girl never grows up. This fact is completely outside the norm of his experiences everywhere else in life. He is able to discern hallucinations by this contradictory data.

He might also know who is real based on which characters could actually affect other parts of his perceived world. Let's say his wife could bring him a glass of water but his friend could not. Maybe his hallucinated friend would offer excuses but he could not pick up a glass of water and bring it to him. This is also a good analogy of science being able to affect our reality but faith having no effect and hence why science is much more trustworthy than faith.

Now let's apply this understanding to a hypothetical situation where you and I meet face-to-face. I see you (sight). I hear your voice as we greet one another (hearing). We shake hands (touch). These are three separate but mutually supporting information sources that tell me you're real. Now let's suppose I saw and heard you but when I reached out to shake your hand, my hand passed through you as if you were an apparition. Now I become confused and begin to doubt my senses because of the contradiction. Or let's say you bid me farewell and flapped your arms and flew away. Again, this is outside my understanding of how reality works and again I have cause to doubt my senses that you were really there.

It is the fact that my senses, memory and reason are internally consistent about the world around me and science and reason offer both prediction and application that we can conclude that science and reason are superior to religious faith and superstition. But even if reality weren't really real, if I were just a brain in a vat under a computer simulation, how would that matter? I would still be operating in the same world that operates by the same rules and your faith would be just as unable to either predict or affect how that world operates.

Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to appeal to yet another hostile witness…

I'm starting to worry about you. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result. By now, you should be able to predict precisely how I'll respond because I've only tried to jackhammer this point into your skull.

It doesn't matter what names you drop, how many degrees they have or whether or not they agree with me on other things. It only matters what you or they can prove.

Do I really have to repost that scene from "A Few Good Men" one more time? I'm getting really tired of trying to drum this into your head.

“...But all of us began our important careers in that form, and every needful encoding for life is already present in the apparently inchoate..."- Christopher Hitchens

Summary of what he offers: the "hey c'mon it's potential life" canard. Gee, I never heard that argument before.

The study of a world that is ultimately illusory is also fruitless. You’re traveling down rabbit holes now; the point is that you possess the axiom, “the exterior world is knowable” and yet you cannot justify this belief.

Actually, yes I did. But you just go on believing that my beliefs that "reality is real" are somehow equal to your beliefs about Jesus and that you can call it a draw because "shucks, it looks like we both have our own faith".

You could not be more wrong. Belief in the veracity of scripture justifies all other beliefs. Without believing that we live in a Biblical universe you have no reason to believe that your senses accurately depict reality, that logic discerns truth, that future uniformity will exist in Nature, that our memories are generally reliable and so on. Without the Bible you are philosophically hopeless. Only the Christian has a reason to believe in any of these things.

Repeated assertions of this kind will not make them true.

On the other hand, trying to argue that I am not allowed to adhere to Biblical veracity as an axiom all the time while possessing many times more axioms yourself is the fallacy of special pleading. Nice try though.

Um, (1) I don't have "many times more axioms", (2) my axioms are justifiable, (3) your "axioms" offer neither prediction nor practical application and (4) your "axioms" are absurd on many levels.

The basal assumptions actually presuppose the veracity of scripture.

You keep asserting that but have yet to explain, never mind prove.

Ironically enough you’re actually presupposing that Yahweh exists by making the basal assumptions.

No, I'm not.

That’s funny considering that fact that you need my ultimate axiom to be true in order to even do the science you claim to love so much. Funny old world isn’t it?

Funny alternate world you live in. Explain and then prove.

The Christian, or more specifically, the presuppositional justification for their assumptions usually are variations on the themes of "God-Verb-It". These three word flippant assertions are neither elucidating nor are they needed to justify anything.

Another bare assertion from the bare assertion hater.

Pssst. This is the part where you provide some kind of example where "God-Verb-It" is elucidating or necessary. Good luck.

Where did God say anything like that?

God didn't say anything. Yahweh didn't say anything because he doesn't exist. Humans that wrote the Bible wrote:

Deut 21:15-17 If a man have two wives, one beloved, and another hated, and they have born him children, both the beloved and the hated; and if the firstborn son be hers that was hated: Then it shall be, when he maketh his sons to inherit that which he hath, that he may not make the son of the beloved firstborn before the son of the hated, which is indeed the firstborn: But he shall acknowledge the son of the hated for the firstborn, by giving him a double portion of all that he hath: for he is the beginning of his strength; the right of the firstborn is his.

If you're God, why regulate what you want to outlaw?

(Yahweh's) redemptive purposes started with Adam

Yahweh's religion started with Abraham and it's the religion and its laws that we're discussing.

The verse doesn’t say David never violated (Yahweh)’s will.

Actually, the verse says that David DID violate Yahweh's will in the matter of Uriah, but never any other time.

1Kings 15:5 Because David did that which was right in the eyes of the LORD, and turned not aside from any thing that he commanded him all the days of his life, save only in the matter of Uriah the Hittite.

What part of that was unclear to you?

So? You’re debating with a Christian; you’re going to have to debate the entire Bible and Jesus says, “in the beginning”.

The religion had changed, adapting to Greco-Roman traditions. That's why we're discussing the OT. If the NT says otherwise, it means the big guy upstairs had a rethink... or it was written during a different era with different values. Either way, bringing up how things changed in the NT doesn't help you.