Hare Krishna

[LastPoet]

I guess the more vague their religious arguments are, the more they grow alike. It all ends up like Linus's security blanket, a surrogate word for the unknown.

[Cyberman]

Science can't talk about God.

Why?

Channelling AronRa again: "Anytime a supernatural entity reaches into the prime material plane, it should pull its arm out dripping with physics. It should leave evidence. But it doesn't."

In other words, an entity which can interact with our Universe in any tangible way whatsoever, however small, must be detectable and thus falls squarely into the remit of science - whether or not our level of science is high enough right now to make such detections is irrelevant, and is in fact relabelling the entity from "supernatural" to "natural that we haven't found yet". I contend that such an entity is beyond all knowledge, yours included, thus you can make no honest truth claims for it.

[Mister Agenda]

Here's an argument I think is funny, for example:

( P ) Modern science, by their standard of achieving knowledge, has no evidence for God
( C ) Therefore there is no reason to think there is a God

What's missing from this argument is that there may be other ways of knowing if God exists or not. You certainly haven't proved that the modern scientific method is the only way to know anything that may be knowable. That's a claim science can't prove. I've heard respected scientists entirely agree with this point.

Science is great when it stays within the bounds of what it can talk about. When it starts making claims about things it can't talk about, like spirituality, or makes the claim that there is nothing else to talk about, that's like an intellectual foul.

The reason science is a superior way of knowing is that it is based on falsification. Scientific claims have to be potentially falsifiable, and then survive attempts to falsify them. This gives us an extraordinary power to sift what is closer to the truth/reality from what is farther away, and it has given us modern civilization.

Direct observation is also a good way of knowing, but we spend our early lives testing (arguably, scientifically) the limits and reliability of our senses. We verify the accuracy of our perceptions, which justifies relying on them in most familiar situations. You don't have to publish a scientific paper to justify believing you have a bed in your bedroom if you've seen it.

Logic lets us evaluate reasoning. It suffers from garbage in, garbage out, but if we have a good reason to believe a premise is true, and it's used in an argument that is valid, the conclusion will be sound. The conclusion might be true even the premise is false and the reasoning is fallacious, but that would essentially be a coincidence.

Intuition is a product of applying experience to a situation on an unconscious level. You may not be conscious that someone reminds you of the guy who sold you that bridge that time, but something tells you not to trust him. Sometimes you don't have time to go through a whole conscious observation and reasoning process and you have to make a snap decision based on intuition, which is unreliable, but better than nothing. Intuition can be invaluable in coming up with a hypothesis. Which you then very much ought to test, because intuition is only a little better than flipping a coin when it comes to arriving at a correct conclusion.

The fault with 'other ways of knowing' is that they don't give us a way of verifying that they're true. Not even a little bit. Which means it's a stretch to call what you learn that way, 'knowledge'. A feeling that you're in contact with a greater intelligence is...a feeling that you're in contact with a greater intelligence. You have no way of knowing that you're not just tapping into your intuition, you have no way of knowing that you're not just tapping into your imagination, and you have no way of knowing, if you ARE in contact with something outside yourself, what it really is. You have no way to differentiate contact with Krishna from contact with telepatich aliens. You have no way to know that Krishna is completely truthful. And you don't have to be able to verify your belief if you're content with it. If you want me to believe it, I'll need more than anecdotal evidence, because it's an extraordinary claim.

[Annik]

If there really was a god bending the laws of physics, can you imagine how screwed up our universe would be?

A theory is kind of an explanation of a group of laws/observations.

Peer review, peer review, peer review.

[Mister Agenda]

Another point is, you clearly don't want to know that God exists. It would mess up your style if God existed. It would take the fun out of your life. It would mess up the idea that you can do whatever the hell you want. You're clearly not ready to be balanced, detached and objective about the possibility.

That's fine. That's what this world is: an illusion, where rebellious souls can live in the fantasy that there is no God.

This is very disappointing. I can get this from any rabid right-wing Christian or Muslim fundamentalist so locked up in their own belief system that they can't even imagine that anyone could just freakin' honestly disagree with them, they must have an ulterior motive. I'll admit the arrogance about being superior in terms of balance, detachment, and objectivity at the end was a nice touch.

It's so laughably easy to turn this around that I won't bother. Is every theist who doesn't make theists sound like they get their talking points from Ken Ham here a moderator?

[Cyberman]

I can't stress how disappointed I am, though I concede that my level of appointment is irrelevant to anyone but me and was never the point of the thread. Regardless, I was looking forward to being exposed to a religious mindset of which I am unfamiliar and perhaps learning something new. Sadly, all we have seen so far is the same warmed-over theist crap, including virtually word-for-word clichés and platitudes. There must be a script somewhere online or something.

[The Grand Nudger]

Of course there's a script......in fact...that's all there is.

[downbeatplumb]

Lets be clear.

I don't not believe in god just because science supports that view.

I do not believe in god because it is a silly idea.

Whenever I hear what theists believe I always look sideways at the screen and think to myself "seriously?".

[Mister Agenda]

It sounds like your religion is asking me to accept an authority too. Why? Aren't all authorities bad and suspect?

Of course not. The fallacy would more accurately be named 'Appeal to Inappropriate Authority'. Citing Einstein on the theory of relativity is valid, especially if you don't have a deep understanding of the physics involved yourself, as Einstein is verifiably an expert on this topic. Citing Einstein on theology is invalid, because although he was very smart, this was not his area of expertise.

In some fields of knowledge, citing an authority is ALWAYS problematic, because even the experts can't verify that their positions are true. In these cases, citing a learned rabbi on details about the Jewish position on YHWH can be valid, but citing him as an authority on what God really thinks is fallacious because being an expert on the Torah doesn't automatically grant inside information on whether there is a conscious being who created tha universe and what that being thinks.

[Darkstar]

So...Bobby Henderson is an authority on the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Does that make it real? Everyone claims to know what their god wants while simultaneously calling it unknowable. Exclusive knowledge to those who seek god, sure, then why are there so many different interpretations of the bible?