An Essay about Atheism in Latin

[The Grand Nudger]

I love it, this poor guy is arguing against reality. How very intellectual. Boy, it must take a real uninterested dummy to say true things that shitcan his schtick.

Anywho..if you want to learn about theology, the absolute worst source of factual info are believers. They will faithfully recount the establishment myth of their religion..but expecting more than that, from them..is ludicrous. Get thee to an accredited university's anthropology department.

[EgoDeath]

Why anthropology? Religion would be a pretty small slice of that very broad study, no?

[The Grand Nudger]

Hard no. Its impossible to understand the development of human culture without some exploration of the defining chunk of cultures in contrast.....which would be their religious beliefs. Anthropology's approach to this is multidisciplinary and probably the largest portion of the field.

Or...you could go ask some shaman in a dress.

[EgoDeath]

Interesting. Something to consider.

[The Grand Nudger]

The world needs more anthropologists. If you've got the bug you should go for it. They study human beings, specifically their behaviors and beliefs, which is an evergreen question.

[Belacqua]

hypotheses that are tested need to be reasonable, they need not to appear to contradict our experience.

I think there's another layer to this. What science tells us very often ends up contradicting our experience. 

My experience of the stars is that they are tiny twinkling points of light. This is what my senses tell me. 

It's not my experience which tells me that the stars are a zillion miles away, huge hot spheres. It is the reporting of researchers who create hypotheses, collect data with instruments that differ a lot from what my eyes tell me, test the hypotheses against the data, etc. There is a lot of thinking that goes into this, far more than just experience. 

Then to tell us the truth about the stars (i.e. not just what our eyes tell us) scientists present quantified data. How far away, how big, how hot, the percentages of various elements, math formulae to tell us how the nuclear fission goes on. In science, the guy who knows most about the stars is the one who is most familiar with these quantifications and formulae. 

But numbers aren't something we experience. Numbers are idea -- abstracted from the reality of the star. The star still looks like a point of light, but the numbers on the computer screen -- which look nothing like anything -- tell us the truth. 

So paradoxically, scientific knowledge is abstracted, taken from real objects into theory and abstraction. The scientist who knows most is the one who has the greatest grasp of abstractions. 

All of that, though, doesn't fill in the picture of what a star is like. What is it like to be that big? That hot? That long-lived? To get this stuff, you just need a vivid imagination. You need to close your eyes and picture what stars are like. Even the sun looks like a bright disc about the size of the moon. It takes imagination to get beyond that. The numbers point toward what we should imagine, but numbers are not real. 

So I would say that complete knowledge requires extreme and detailed capacity to imagine stuff. And for this you need poets, artists, etc.

[FlatAssembler]

hypotheses that are tested need to be reasonable, they need not to appear to contradict our experience.

I think there's another layer to this. What science tells us very often ends up contradicting our experience. 

My experience of the stars is that they are tiny twinkling points of light. This is what my senses tell me. 

It's not my experience which tells me that the stars are a zillion miles away, huge hot spheres. It is the reporting of researchers who create hypotheses, collect data with instruments that differ a lot from what my eyes tell me, test the hypotheses against the data, etc. There is a lot of thinking that goes into this, far more than just experience. 

Then to tell us the truth about the stars (i.e. not just what our eyes tell us) scientists present quantified data. How far away, how big, how hot, the percentages of various elements, math formulae to tell us how the nuclear fission goes on. In science, the guy who knows most about the stars is the one who is most familiar with these quantifications and formulae. 

But numbers aren't something we experience. Numbers are idea -- abstracted from the reality of the star. The star still looks like a point of light, but the numbers on the computer screen -- which look nothing like anything -- tell us the truth. 

So paradoxically, scientific knowledge is abstracted, taken from real objects into theory and abstraction. The scientist who knows most is the one who has the greatest grasp of abstractions. 

All of that, though, doesn't fill in the picture of what a star is like. What is it like to be that big? That hot? That long-lived? To get this stuff, you just need a vivid imagination. You need to close your eyes and picture what stars are like. Even the sun looks like a bright disc about the size of the moon. It takes imagination to get beyond that. The numbers point toward what we should imagine, but numbers are not real. 

So I would say that complete knowledge requires extreme and detailed capacity to imagine stuff. And for this you need poets, artists, etc.

Those things don't actually contradict our experience, you'd need to be an idiot to think they actually do.

[Mister Agenda]

It is reasonable to believe that stars are little lights in the sky until evidence accumulates that our direct observations are not an accurate portrayal of the actual situation. In a sense, stars ARE little lights in the sky, from our point of view. Thanks to empirical discovery we know now that there is far more to them than just that.

[The Grand Nudger]

-and thanks to empirical discovery, we know why stars present as such in our experience. Good luck figuring that out by pure reason, lol. We wouldn't even know there was something to figure out if it weren't for sense experience, the fundamental basis of all human knowledge...regardless of whether or not some other creature has some other indescribable and incomprehensible avenue to the same.

This is the position of empiricism...not that all propositions can be empirically validated. There are propositions that can't be validated at all by any means...because they're incoherent or malformed...but the existence of one or one hundred of these propositions doesn't move the chains an inch in criticism of the actual position of empiricism.

Pico chew english walnut aluminum is yesterday.

True or false?

[Belacqua]

Those things don't actually contradict our experience, you'd need to be an idiot to think they actually do.

My experience tells me that stones are solid.

Physics tells me they are mostly empty space.