Knowledge and belief in God

[Harris]

I'm getting a lot of mileage out of this video.

I explain again why arguments without evidence do not establish anything outside of your imagination.

Anyhow, people can have the "concept of" things all they like, it doesn't mean it's got anything to do with reality.

http://youtu.be/inw1fNItjdU

In the video your main focus is on EVIDENCE and you talked nothing over logic and reason. Without the use of logic and reason EVIDENCE is just a meaningless sound.

[Harris]

This is basically some sort of appeal to popularity combined with a non sequitur. Lots of people think about it, so it must be real.

ALL matured and healthy people (including you) know what is God whether you agree that God exists or not.

The thing that we naturally have is a desire to ask questions; which is not matched by our ability, as a species, to answer them. This makes many people uncomfortable. So much so that they make up a proxy answer. People just happen to use the most popular three letter word going around as the current mental pacifier. But there's so little in common between what different theists carry around in their brain that to even refer to it as the same thing is a stretch.

The scope of your rationale is primitive because it works only within the range of your perceptual experiences. All of your so called evidences are based on the generalised views of other people.

Reason is what makes us distinct from animals.

Reason is the faculty of consciousness, a form of awareness, and a cognitive capacity. Reason is a capacity to think beyond the range of what we can perceive through our senses. It is the capacity to acquire objective knowledge on a wider scale from atoms to galaxies. Reason gives us the ability to generalise from perceptual observation and identify causal regularities that are not evident to the naked eye. It was reason through which we have discovered indiscernible black holes.

Reason gives the ability to invent new products and technologies by imagining the things that do not yet exist.

If you are an empiricist, you could trust your senses but that would not do as much good as you might think. Science and Technology, business and finance operate only on the bases of reason. They exploit the power of reason to expand knowledge, health, wealth, and other human goods.

“From the wheel to the sky scraper everything we are and everything we have comes from the single attribute of man the functioning of his reasoning mind.”

Ayn Rand
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/58643-ma...e-comes-on

[Harris]

1)  The concept of god isn't innate.

You have not given any case that may properly represent your assertion.

2) I don't have a good enough knowledge of fundamental physics to reply to this one but it's a fine tuning argument which I've seen people like Neil Degrass Tyson deal with before.

Watch this video and see yourself how stupid examples Neil De Grasse Tyson is giving and how desperate he seems to refute the Fine Tuning Argument. Also read the comments below the video to have a better idea about what load of crap he talked in this video.

He is arguing against Fine Tuning Argument by totally undermining the fact that he is living a comfortable and enjoyable life thanks to the Fine Tuning. Little change in any of the physical constants and the world along with him would perish in no time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mij4DYYnkF8

[Harris]

How to prove god using science against itself:

1) Find some scientific theory that sounds like it might support your position. Accept it is true, even though you don't understand it.

2) Use this theory to try and disprove another theory, which you also don't understand, that sounds like it doesn't support your position. Misrepresent both theories as much as you like.

3) Having "dealt with" the scientific explanation, insert your own unsupported magical load of garbage into the hole you think you've made.

The problem of FINE TUNING ARGUMENT is bursting right in the faces of scientists and they do not know what explication they give to explain FINE TUNING without referencing it to God.

“… we really do have a big problem to explain in the apparent fine-tuning of the fundamental constants.”

Page 142
The God Delusion
Richard Dawkins

“… the special properties of the physical universe are so surprisingly fine-tuned that they demand explanation.”

Preface
The Cosmis Landscape
"String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design"
Leonard Susskind

"The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron. ... The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life."

Page 125
A Brief History of Time
Stephen Hawking

“A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that THERE ARE NO BLIND FORCES worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”

Fred Hoyle
"The Universe: Past and Present Reflections,"
Engineering and Science,
November 1981

[Harris]

If God is innate in human consciousness, why did it take thousands of years of human existence for monotheism to arise?

Besides, even if you could prove that God was innate in our consciousness(which you can't), it would prove nothing more than human beings are hardwired to assign agency to the world around us.  The ubiquity of a belief says nothing about its veracity.

This is just another smoke and mirror attempt to distract people from the fact that theists are no closer to proving god's existence than they were 6,000 years ago.

“Human beings are hardwired to assign agency to the world” and the ubiquitous concept of God are in fact evidences in themselves for the innate idea of God.

The concept of God was always there and it will not die in whatsoever circumstances. However, what way one choses to approach God or if someone totally rejects the existence of God, that is a different story.

[Harris]

Also, "Mr Bland" the deistic God has no relation to characters in popular story books. Mr Bland is irrelevant until we actually know something about him.

You think we wouldn't notice you going *cough* Quran verse *cough* Allah at the end?

Why not go *cough* pasta cookery book *cough* FSM?

You don't believe in Allah because of any of this nonsense. Even if he was real, he can fuck off. I don't negotiate with terrorists.

Hmmm! “TERROISTS!” So that is how you COUGH to give some relief to yourself?

[Harris]

What do people like this hope to achieve?

They're showing their God is so irrelevant, so hidden, so powerless that it needs their help just to get us to acknowledge its very existence.

Then what?

No one can give the experience of brilliant and vibrant nature to a blind person.

[paulpablo]

1)  The concept of god isn't innate.

You have not given any case that may properly represent your assertion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNajfMZGnuo