orogenicman
Darwin was a pastafarian
- Jul 24, 2013
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I can agree that you haven't put forth much of anything. You acknowledge that your beliefs are absent support yet you insist that those unsupported beliefs are somehow defendable in some sort of alternate reality.
I can only come to conclusions about reality based upon the empirical data. Your beliefs in spirit realms and supernaturalism is absent support, as you admit. We use our reason to perceive existence, and so far no other method is known to be able to adequately replace it. So I don't look as knowledge and reason as goals-- knowledge is all we can attain, and reason is the only means. Anything Mankind attains can be classified as "knowledge" (although there are degrees of certainty, probability, and possibility) and reason fundamentally is the only method we have of attaining it.
Ideally, we modify and adapt our models of reality to accommodate new information, but in practice this can be quite difficult and painful. As a direct result of our irrational attachments to inadequate models, which may have been well intentioned in the past, we have a tendency to alter our perceptions instead of our models. Reason, the great author of our models of reality, then, can interfere with our perceptions, particularly if we fail to recognize our emotional attachment to certain pivotal ideas.
I have never insisted my beliefs are defendable nor have I ever bothered to defend them. Again, that is entirely in your head. I suspect you don't even know what my beliefs are.
You speak of knowledge, and that is what I am speaking of. Specifically as to how it differs from belief. Knowledge requires information, belief does not. Any position taken in the absence of information can not be called knowledge, it can only be called belief. You can apply knowledge to a particular belief to determine its validity, but that only speaks to that belief. For example, I can apply our knowledge of the workings of the solar system to conclude the belief the sun is Apollo in his chariot is invalid. But that knowledge does not mean there never was a being called Apollo, just that that particular belief about Apollo is invalid.
So, drop the insistence on referring to belief and apply reason to what you actually know. You have made it clear that your position is "gawds" do not exist. What exactly is a "gawd" and how do you know there is no such thing. Please don't reference any beliefs, this is about what you know about the thing itself.
Not true. Scientists use null hypotheses all the time. They are vary useful in eliminating 'noise' and redirecting our attention to more useful information. As for your apollo analogy, that is a claim based on superstition and myth. As such, there is no reason at all to suppose that Apollo is anything other than supertition and myth, and can certainly be discounted as invalid. In other words, while there may not be direct physical evidence to discount the existence of apollo based on our understanding of the sun and the solar system, there certainly is plenty of evidence that the mythical accounts of apollo are made up and so, based on our understanding of mythology and supersitition itself, are not real.
A hypothesis is a proposed explanation for a phenomena. This is what you start with and is not a conclusion. The sentence you underlined referred to a position, which is pretty much the same thing as a conclusion. I doubt you are going to find many scientists who will agree that an untested hypothesis - one for which there is an utter lack of evidence - constitutes a valid conclusion.
I agree with you on Apollo, which was my point. Now please point to the evidence about god beginning by telling what it is. What is it that you claim isn't there.
I highly recommend that you read this article:
God s and the null hypothesis Secular Woman
Read it. I nice little justification for her beliefs, but there wasn't a single shred of evidence provided in support. A null hypothesis is useless without evidence. Otherwise, I could prove you were a red head simply because there was no evidence to claim you were blond.
She completes her article with the following: "And it seems to me if gods really did exist, providing evidence of their existence wouldn’t be so hard."
Really? How does she arrive at that conclusion? Precisely what evidence would she expect and why? Her entire position is based upon the assumption she knows the attributes of something she has absolutely no evidence for. This is pure belief.
I sweat you are like a broken record. Nothing sinks in, does it? I hate that for you. Try reading up on what a null hypothesis is:
Null hypothesis - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Rubbish. Do you believe in tooth fairies, Zeus, goblins, or a flat Earth? No? I suspect that you don't believe in thos things because there is no evidence that they exist. Likewise, there is no evidence for the existence of the supernatural. So my position is not a belief, it is a skeptical disbelief based on what we know of the world around us.
No, I don't. Tooth fairies - I had kids and know who puts the money under the pillow: evidence. Zeus - harder because that myth could have been based upon something else, but I believe it to be just another man made fiction. There is no sign of a residency at the top of Mt. Olympus: evidence. Goblins - see Zeus. Flat earth - this has been shown to be untrue with evidence. Evidence is what makes your examples different than this subject. So let's stay on topic.
Now, once again. Tell me what god is. What are its attributes? What evidence should we look for? And, more importantly, what are you basing that on? Your position you stated quite clearly - it isn't there. So don't dance about with a cop-out word like "disbelief" as if that gives you a get out of jail free card. Tell me what isn't there and the evidentiary basis for that position. Because if you can't, then it is belief and nothing but belief.
There is also no sign of residency inside of any church, synogogue, temple, or mosque. There is no universal definition of "god". Each religion has it's own definition. Having said that, there are certain characterisitics they have in common. Such as omnipotence, immortality, omniscence, all powerful, etc. These traits are used to explain real world events and phenomenon, such as hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, disease, and death (it is the will of god, god is punishing man for his sins, etc), events and phenomena mankind could not explain any other way for thousands of years. They are also used to create rules to control the lives of worshippers. The problem with all these characteristics is that we see no evidence that anything in the universe has these traits. Moreover, science has rather successfully explained these phenomenon without resorting to "god did it". And so we see that these religions resort to the "god of the gaps" argument, where their god is assigned to ever decreasing bits of the natural world that science has yet to explain, or else they claim that their god is not of this world, in which case one can ask what motive would a being from some other world have for intervening in this one? One can also argue that if this god is not of this world (and how would anyone ever know this to be true?), he doesn't have a stake in it, and so why would anyone worship it?
The fact is that personal revelation is, by definition, first person in nature. As such, no one is under any obligation to believe one personal revelation over that of any other. Farmer Bob may be the most honest, law abiding, religious man anyone has ever known, but we still need evidence that the virgin Mary visited him while he sat on his combine in his back field.
None of that is relevant. I have already said there is no evidence to support either side of the issue, so pointing out there is no evidence for the Theist side doesn't matter. You have stated that Atheists acknowledge that what isn't there - isn't there. That is a claim and any claim requires support - or it is just belief. The issue here is not whether the Theistic side is based upon pure belief - it obviously is. My position is that the Atheistic side is also based upon pure belief. That the two position differ only in their conclusion, not in how they arrive at that conclusion.
So I ask again.... what is it you claim isn't there and how do you know that? If you can't answer that question, then all you are doing is making a statement of pure belief. No more evidence based or rational than claiming God did it all.
In case you were unaware, you simply declaring my response irrelevant, and that there is no evidence to support either side doesn't make it so. It is your opinion, nothing more. My claim does have support in the same way that statements claiming that the tooth fairy is not real has support. Absence of evidence is not always evidence of absence, but dude, it is very clear from a scientific standpoint that if there was ever a grand landlord, he left the reservation a long time ago, leaving no trace behind that he ever existed, I might add. And so clutching onto a minute possibility that a god exists despite the utter lack of affirming evidence is not only desperate, but may even be a kind of neurosis.
I declare there is no evidence to support either side based upon experience.
You can declare that dinkleberries are more valuable than diamonds for all I care.