[Matt - split from the young earth crationism thread as this is going to go OT]
STIAD the ‘science is religion’ argument is getting so utterly boring now. You don’t believe in induction, well whoopie for you. Unfortunately that’s pretty much every single branch of philosophy you can throw out, not just science.
Here’s my challenge to you, build any complex philosophical argument using purely using a priori arguments. Or perhaps, go wack your head against a rock for a couple of hours and then lets see if you’re so ready to believe that there’s no such thing as induction.
In reality your stance on science is vapour, impossible to disprove but utterly meaningless and substanceless.
Almost as boring as you having nothing to say on the subject, I imagine…
You are free to stop reading this post at any time. Please bear that in mind.
That’s a massive simplification of my position. Rather, I’m happy to keep on with induction as long it is merely practical to do so. When we get into the realms of comparitive epistemology and theology and the ‘war against science’ and the ‘war against religion’ and so forth then I demand higher standards. It isn’t just a case of not believing in induction. If you think that then I suggest that you’ve misread (or not read) what I’ve written.
Yes, and if there were posters here arguing that empiricism meant that we should take babies away from idealists or Aristotelians saying we should destroy Berkeley and Fichte and claiming to be rational while those they disagreed with were irrational and stupid and so on then I’d probably be found explaining to them why their generalisations and hypocrisy undermined their arguments. And maybe you’d be there telling me that it was boring, I dunno. Like I say, you are free to stop reading my posts at any time, and I don’t mean that in the sarcastic, aggressive way that it might sound.
Why? That isn’t what I’m asking of scientists/atheists. Evidence is fine - assuming that a set of processes that happen some of the time are always happening, and then using that assumption as the basis for bashing other people’s beliefs and wanting to destroy certain beliefs is something I feel any good philosopher should criticise. Obviously you don’t. I’m not going to bother trying to change your mind.
You see, the more you get angry, the more you show how irrational those who believe in induction really are. I’m sure that this response will frustrate you, but maybe you’ll take my point.
At a time when the very nature of education and the trust we impart on our epistemic leaders is so heavily scrutinised and where there is a lot of headless aggression and ignorance on all sides, my stance could not be more substantial. But fine, you either don’t get it or you completely disagree.
It’s just that you hijack every science thread with your ‘Dawkins is a moron’, ‘science is no more than religion’ propoganda, and I’ve just had enough of it. So I’m calling your bluff, your argument is utterly unsound and it’s time to settle the matter.
Unfortunately there’s no simplification in my characterisation, in the end you just don’t accept induction. If there really is more to it than that, what is it?
Ok, so if I’ve read that correctly, you do accept induction, except for in the realm of science. What kind of position is that? After all Epistemology is just the very study of knowledge so is intrisically linked, and induction is utterly irrelevant to theology as it’s the study of an un-empirical realm.
Where does this hatred for science come from? Yes of course there are arrogant pr*cks in science, Newton is a perfect example, but it doesn’t detract from the intellectual rigour behind the subject. What’s the intellectual rigour behind Christianity? We accept this book to be true.
You’ve asked why trust a scientist more than a priest. Assuming you mean in explaining how the world works, there’s a simple answer to that, because a scientist is trying to understand, where a priest is not.
This seems to boil down to you being uncomfrtable with the war against religion, as if science is doing something underhand. But science didn’t start the war, religion has been fighting the war without any response for far far longer.
What is so worrying about the resurgance of creationism, or id, and even just the resurgance of religion as a whole, is that it’s based on nothing more than a few simple moral rules. As a way to live your life, perhaps it’s ok, but as a way to view the world! It’s breath-takingly wrong.
And if science doesn’t stand up and say, “hang on a sec, but our stuff is based on solid evidence, your stuff’s been made up on the back of a cardboard box by someone with a few screws loose!”, the evil that is carried out in the name of religion, like the massacre of millions in Africa by Aids by the Catholic church by forbidding the use of condoms, will continue. And yes it is a massacre and if there really were a hell John Paul II would be in it right now.
It was a pun, a play on Samuel Johnson’s counter-argument against Berkley, not an attack. I’m not angry, I just want to be able to read a discussion about science on these boards that doesn’t get hijacked by your ‘science is no better than religion’. Unfortuantely I don’t have a button I can press which filters those posts out, and most of the other stuff you say is very interesting. It’s just this that I, and quite clearly so many others on the boards, find so frustrating.
i happen to agree; siatd as i’ve already said you’re too agnostic !
There are stuff to be unsure of… yes… but not the stuff we have hard evidence for.
This whole thing’s gone too far.
I don’t think you’ve read siatd correctly; s/he accepts induction where it is practical and rather benign, hence ‘merely practical.’ Is that right siatd?
Further, when it comes to setting up one dogma against another (and that’s not ‘science against religion,’ it would be empiricism against some particular religious perspective), siatd demands that induction be not merely practical but pretty much absent (i would imagine.) If it is used it is done so sparingly, by necessity, and preferably on some reasonable grounds. Here i would raise the meditative flash as a real and measurable event at the level of the human individual; and abstractly it would be reasonable to theorize about larger scale flashes, how they might present.
'Course, i like myown the most; but siatd seems on rather firm ground. You, sir, are a puppet; at best.
I don’t mean to detract from the hardship being experienced around the world; rather, i’d ask how long can we let it go on? We have to talk openly about the secret groups.
Whatever; look, we appear to have sacrificed principle for an illusion of peace. When you look close, you’ll see that everyone acknowledges the secret groups and ignores them. The general result is that people don’t believe they exist; and that suits them just fine.
I’m sure some groups are good and some aren’t; my issue is with the fact that they’re secret. The general public should at least be able to try to move away from them. Spiritually, a conspiracy of agencies is an important topic.
Most importantly, from an objective, functional perspective is the fact that their oath is secret. Christ says don’t make the oath; Krishna says break it.
I love it when someone calls my bluff, so I thank you for that.
Dawkins is a moron - every idea of his that I’ve come across in my own reading is nonsense, and every time I come across someone following him like he’s the next messiah (not the irony of a cult following of Dawkins if you haven’t already) they also speak a load of nonsense. ‘Children believe everything that their parents tell them’ - never come across it myself so I don’t know if this is a fair rendering of his position or not. Either way, it is nonsense for reasons I’ve explained elsewhere.
I’ve already been through this but for the sake of quick recap
Science (and atheism for that matter) are only as ‘good’ as the hands that use them. A scientist per se isn’t correct about anything. Science per se is not correct about anything. It is all contingent. ‘Laws of nature’ and so forth are a deceit, and a potentially dangerous one.
Science and militant atheism are obviously dangerous. The lack of pressure from outside of these things (e.g. from agnostic fundamentalists, like me) would allow them to run wild. No offence, but this is the same knowledge form that brought us Eugenics, Thalidomide and Chernobyl. It is not only possible, it has happened on a large scale that when we give too much credence to science it can (not will, but can) produce absolutely horrific results.
I’m staunchly opposed to any single knowledge form ranking itself as the greatest, as all knowledge forms do this only at a time when they are powerful enough to do so, irrespective of validity or soundness. If I were born in the Italy of Galileo then I’d probably be arguing strongly against the dominion of the Catholic Church. If I was born in, say, Ancient Greece circa the time of Aristotle then I’d probably have joined him in trying to overthrow the Platonist dogma. I wouldn’t call myself a Nietzschean because it’s mostly idiots who’ve either not read or not understood him that do that, but this is all in Nietzsche. This has precendent.
The logic of scientific progress is nothing short of a joke. ‘We were wrong in the past, so we’re right now’ actually runs against induction, against the very scientific method. That we’ve been wrong so many times in the past would actually indicate that we’re still wrong and will remain wrong, not that we’ve ‘progressed’ and magically got it right this time. Nonetheless, this exact logic is used on a daily basis to justify science’s authority.
We in the west are allowing technoscience to dominate all discourses, which is potentially very dangerous. Mass media is particularly guilty of this - when we get a discussion on, say, stem cell research we usually get a theologian or religious person who is vaguely and generally opposed to such research and a scientist who is in favour of it. Neither have the slightest training in ethics and as such neither have the necessary knowledge or skills to make the judgement call. The religious type will oppose it because it potentially threatens certain religious notions and therefore religious authority per se. The scientist will be in favour because it means more research grants, more prestige, and a reassertion of scientific authority. I’ve quoted this a couple of time here recently but I’ll do so again for your benefit.
“’Truth’ is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it.†(Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p133)
All knowledge forms, indeed, all beliefs whatsoever, tend to follow the same historical path of ascension, declaration of absolutism, fade and decline. Science in some of its present manifestations (and I’m well aware that within ‘science’ or ‘scientists’ there is variation and contrast) is becoming arrogant - the claim that ‘there’s no scientific proof for God’ is arrogance of a very stupid nature. It’s making of science a closed circle - because you can’t prove that to me on my own terms I’m allowed to declare it false. This sort of arrogance is the bedrock of totalitarianism. We’ve seen it with Catholicism. We’ve seen it with the British Empire. We’ve seen it with the Nazis. The Eternal Return (like I say, this is all in Nietzsche). Another example would be the confusion (most common among non-scientist adherent of evolution) that evolution is the only process (or rather, set of processes) governing the development of life. The radical opposition by adherents of evolution to any other theory, no matter what it is, betrays this arrogance and this single-mindedness in clear terms. Put simply, I’m opposed to this attitude and I’m not willing to let these people define everything.
You’ve read it incorrectly. I said that I’m happy with induction as far as it is practical to do so. The example I keep using is that given a choice between an engineer who says ‘that bridge cannot be built and you’ll probably kill many people trying to build it’ and a priest saying ‘have faith, it can be built safely’, I go with the engineer. But given the choice between a scientist telling me that a technology is vital to the future of the world when it blatantly isn’t, and a philosopher (or other) pointing out that we’ve heard this in the past and then things went drastically wrong, I’ll retain my scepticism. It’s all a matter of contingency.
A strawman one that you invented to try to ‘settle the matter’. I find it very funny that you clearly haven’t a clue what my position is, so your claim that it’s unsound and a load of baloney is automatically invalid from the start. That you’d get so pissed off about this that you’d delete one of my posts (thus indicating your incompetence as a moderator) is also very funny. You are getting angry at what you patently do not understand, which only proves right everything that I’m saying about human flaws and contingency.
As I’ve said before - the soldier that carries the least can move the quickest and most freely. Science carries a lot of baggage. So does religion. I’ve not got much to do with either, no matter how much proponents of each tell me that these things do impact on my life whether or not I believe in them.
Nowhere as trivial as those people who hate religion because they were ‘forced’ to go to a few religious events when they were younger and therefore actually hate their parents, not religion, and use atheism and science as their excuse. That’s for sure.
That’s exactly what it does. All knowledge is made by humans. All knowledge is used by humans. The quality of the humans defines the quality of the knowledge. It’s pretty simple, really.
I’m not a Christian, nor have I advanced a Christian agenda. Ergo this is another strawman displaying that you don’t even know what or who you are arguing against, making your claim that you’re going to ‘settle the issue’ arrogant in the exact way I’ve been talking about. Kindly stop putting words in my mouth just to try to shoot them out again.
And there we have it - ‘presuming you mean in explaining how the world works’. I don’t even believe that the world does ‘work’. Ergo there are far more important questions to me than those that science can provisionally answer. I ask ‘why trust a scientist more than a priest?’ and you answer ‘presuming you mean when asking a scientific question, I trust a scientist more because scientists do science’. Do you see the circularity, contingency, lack of a need to be doing any of this?
Science, no. Scientists? Yes, some of them. Atheists definitely - they are generally as stupid, illiterate and ignorant as religious fundamentalists, yet make of themselves a justification for wanting to destroy someone else’s beliefs. I’m not uncomfortable with this - I simply won’t tolerate it without pointing out the massive hypocrisies and contradictions.
Hardly. There has always been resistance to religious dogma. There’s always resistance to any dogma. The quality of that resistance is the single most important factor in determining what will eventually replace that dogma.
creationism and ID aren’t the same thing. I’ve pointed this out so many times but you still get ‘scientists’ claiming that they are one and the same. This is, once again, a strawman.
Wow. No, you’ve convinced me. Yeah, they must be wrong. It’s not like Creationism actually fills in the gap regarding the origin of the life on which evolution operates, which evolution cannot answer (and isn’t designed to). You’ve really convinced me. Breath-takingly so…
Assumption based on ignorance isn’t the sound basis for an argument.
Incorrect. Catholic dogma regarding contraception is only one of a dozen major reasons for the spread of AIDS in Africa (I’m not here to teach you about the others - do your own homework). That you’d use such a point in such an irrational and unscientific manner only proves my points yet further.
Cool. Is this the sort of argument you atheists find to be valid?
And I’d like to be able to read a thread abotu science on these boards that wasn’t hijacked by morons declaring that all religious people are stupid (or, in your case ‘have screws loose’) and that science is the supreme means by which we will rid the world of religious dogma. Indeed, you may notice that on the threads where there is no bullshit, hypocritical, ignorant and contradictory atheist propaganda that I’ve not brought up these issues - the one about the Hypothetical Interstellar journey being a good recent example.
That’s because I challenge the dogma of militant atheism that so many of you take on faith. I find all sorts of things frustrating, particularly people who have never been religious telling me that as a non-scientist I’ve no right to talk about science or assess scientific theories. Again, this is hypocritical, contradictory, stupid, arrogant, unsound, taken as a matter of faith and is common to the discussions on these boards.
So, Matt, what remains of your aim to ‘settle the matter’?
You deleted a post of mine for no obvious reason other than that you disagreed with it. For this alone you should be kicked off the staff but I’m not going to make an issue of it because you aren’t here often enough to have a significant influence.
You clearly haven’t a clue what my position is or how I’m arguing for it, so your premature ejaculation about how it’s insubstantial etc. is just pathetic.
You’ve used several strawman arguments that only prove my point about a knowledge form only being as ‘good’ as those who make/use it.
Check out Rounder’s last thread in the philosophy forum, on this very issue. I didn’t even have to get involved in that one for people to start tearing his bullshit to shreds. Clearly there are others here who share my concerns - possibly also people who’ve read Orwell and Nietzsche and Foucault, I dunno. The point is that all of this has precedent and (significantly so) in the work of atheist or agnostic philosophers.
I now consider this issue to be settled so feel free to not respond.
We’re ‘advancing’ with technology in many people’s eyes, but really what we’re doing is merely advancing a thought – at least Heidegger would say so. Thoughts can keep their coherency while still going astray. There are no parallel race lines between science and religion; I imagine at this point the aesthetic diagram would be a series of nonsensical curves and spirals. Induction is nothing more than a physical type of logic, a psychological componant for trying to understand the mystery of the causal mechanism.
In this sense, the so called ‘reliable’ technolgy produced by science isn’t so reliable. Just because it exists and works in the physical world doesn’t give it much credit. It’s like driving a car which runs on paint chips when there is the potential for a car which runs on metaphysical concepts. Sure the paint chips car ‘runs’ but this inductive truth, in my mind at least, is flimsy at best.
It’s funny too, as we have these conversations in a classical manner in many instances. The quantum beast throws induction to the wayside anyways.
How does that arguement even start to defeat evolution, or the theory of memes, or quantum theory. All you’ve said is you don’t like some sort of militant scientific elite. How does it follow that scientific reasoning is false from the above.
Point 4 is as close to an argument as it gets, but its an exaggertion, each time science takes 5 steps forward it needs to take 1 step backwards, but much of it is preserved. There’s no ‘lets throw everything we ever thought about it’.
All you’ve got outlined above is a fear of science, not a refutation of its proofs.
A priest is trained in morality just as a philosopher is. Part of the point of religion is that it is a moral system based on blind belief.
And where did the engineer get that knowledge? Scientists, engineering is the practical application of science. And again this strawman of the big bad scientist saying we have to become robots! There are few scientists who would work on a project to create biological weapons, but there are plenty who would work on a project to develop counter-agents. But in the end it’s still not an argument to say that Science is like a Religion.
Theoretical science doesn’t drive technology, engineers do using the scientific theories to create new technology. The people you should be raging against aren’t the Scientists, but the Engineers.
Oh come off it, you’ve clearly used the anti-induction argument plenty of times. But now you’ve stripped yourself of that weapon, there’s nothing left but some sort of indignant rage about scientists destroying all the bollocks associated with God.
It started with showing that there’s no fiery chariot driving the sun around us, continued showing that the sun is just like any other star and we’re not the center of the universe. Charlatans have been unmasked, miracles explained by science, healing miracles shown to be no better than placebos, every ‘proof’ of God crumbles under scrutiny.
Maybe some want to remain ignorant and waste their money in paying for kiddy fiddling priests, or go commit suicide in some death-cult, but what for? But I’m guilty of exagerration here, there are many good parts about religion, but there root is in human nature and not the divine, and it will still exist without a God to believe in. But God never cured a single disease, extended our lives, gave little Jimmy a chance to live. Religion has massacred millions as effectively as any scientific weapon. Where is God and what has he done?
Religion erodes while science grows, that’s another fundamental difference between religion and science. There will always be the inexplicable, but that isn’t a challenge to the validity of scientific reasoning. Morality belongs in the realm of the philosopher and sociologist, not the priest.
Where did I say I thought you were a Christian? The same argument applies to all religions, the point I was making is that there is logic and reasoning behind science, but not behind religion. Religion is blind acceptance. With science anyone can follow the reasoning from simple observations. And if all our knowledge were lsot, the same discoveries would be made again. But I can bet that there won’t be a Christ again, or a buddha, or an Allah. He’ll have a different name, different myths. There’s another fundamental difference.
No, because you aren’t using the ‘Science is a Religion’ argument in the context you claim. You are using it precisely in saying that Science cannot explain the world. I don’t claim that Science is the root of Morality. But you do claim that scientific theories are invalid because it is as baseless in truth as Relgion.
That just sounds like ‘they don’t agree with me, ergo they are stupid’. The arrogance you’re exuding here is nauseating. Atheism usually requires an active choice, something that thought and intelligence has got to be put into. Just because you disagree with them doesn’t mean they are stupid.
I did distinguish between them. However, many flavours of creationism imply ID by their very nature. However, there are very few people outside of religion who accept either as a viable theory, especially extreme creationism (e.g. young earth) or ID. Their very existence is down to Religion, not first principles.
I deleted a post which other posters found offensive and complained about. Get over it, you aren’t above the rules even at 100,000 posts. I work and have a life, so basically I can post or I can mod, I spend far more time modding than posting.
Articulate yourself, don’t throw personal insults.
They were only strawmen because you read with prejudice. As I display above, you have discovered no strawmen.
Science isn’t just another religion; but i understand how if you acknowledge that you’ll have to acknowledge Truth: then you’d look really stupid. The power from it comes because the community forces true expression by consesus of observation, which in turn forces an expression of physical truths.
Honestly; once you acknowledge the conscious possibilities of selfless ritual in ecosystem (a consequence of giving spirituality a chance) there becomes two kinds of magic, grounded but incomplete understanding and slight of hand. But you all are way too smart for such a fruitless avenue of discourse. That Agamemnon might have a lineage that is bound to the fire by its garment, its culture of duty, is just not possible; is it?
So what? When I ask detrop what his problem with philosophy is and he replies ‘Philosophy is a discourse dominated by a bourgeois elite and is primarily a tool for that elite to perpetuate the structures and dynamics that ensure their own safety’ I don’t then respond ‘How does that even begin to defeat Virtue Ethics, or Ring Determinism, or Transcendetal Idealism?’ Do you know why? If you don’t, then fine, it just proves that you’re looking for a different answer to the one I’m prepared to give you.
It doesn’t. You asked me for my problems with science, I highlighted the dangers of it’s militant form and some of the assumptions that are used to support this form.
Again, you ask a general question, I give you an answer, you criticise my answer for not answering a different question to the one that you asked. It’s not a very impressive strategy because it just makes you look like you haven’t actually got any counterarguments to the points that I’ve made.
Great, a proverb masquerading as reason. You’ve both misunderstood the argument and provided a proverb by way of a response. Again, this isn’t an impressive strategy.
No, I’ve outlined much more than that. You’ve misunderstood it, but I don’t believe that you are yet capable of understanding it, so I’m probably wasting my time.
Blind belief in, say, one set of laws and processes to the exclusion of all others, eventually in a militant form? The religious attitude, as such, is common to all humans, scientists or otherwise. Like I say, knowledge forms are only as good as the hands that make and use them. In the absence of an overriding criterion for ranking the sets of hands (and as a philosopher you should know that we’ve been looking for such a criterion for at least 3000 years and never come close) all we have are conflicting and competing knowledge forms. I see a lot of bad in science and a lot of good in religion (and vice versa, incidentally, though no one ever stopped to ask about that), and I’m radically opposed to either destroying the other. I also see a lot of similarities in the logic behind the two, but you seem to not want to get into the topic of induction so I won’t bother.
An assumption. Not an argument.
If you can’t see both our increasing reliance on technoscience and the dangers of that and consider all such claims to be fairytale strawmen then I can’t be bothered walking you through it.
You are so wide of the mark that I can’t be bothered devoting the effort to taking you through all the stages in between.
Are you familiar with Gettier and the problem of Justified True Belief?
Yes, and it’s the only part of this argument that you even begin to understand.
And without science as a shield all you have against religion is your rage at the ‘bollocks’. What have we proven? The first point of my argument. That you leaped into this response without considering that in doing so you’d actually be supporting my argument in the clearest possible terms demonstrates just how far apart our respective positions and strategies are.
God is a faith-based notion, ergo proof is irrelevant either way. Indeed, one might argue (indeed, a great many have argued) that the presumption of natural laws - processes that perpetually govern life and the universe - and the desire to look for them is intrinsically associated with faith in God, both logically and psychologically. But that gets beyond any discussion that you are willing to have, so I won’t elaborate further.
Okay Mr pro-Scientist, I want you to justify this generalisation by proving that a significant proportion of priests have been kiddy-fiddlers. I’ll leave it to you, as someone obviously capable of being rigorous and objective about such things, to define ‘significant proportion’. In fact, I assume that you should already have collated and analysed the evidence, as a scientific person who only believes things on the basis of evidence and doesn’t just assume them to be true just because it conveniently supports his desires. So, kindly present the objective evidence for this generalisation (cough! cliche! cough!)
Given your predisposition to reject anything told to you from a religious perspective it is useless to try to explain it to you. I’m not religious, but I’ve come to know a lot of religious people and appreciate a hell of a lot about what they are trying to accomplish. That you’ve clearly never been religious (and I mean sincerely so, not ‘made to go to church’ or whatever because loads of us have been there and it didn’t turn us into militant religion-haters) demonstrates that the limits of your experience (your evidence) do not allow you to make the claims that you do. Which is unscientific. Funnily enough. Again proving the first point in my list.
You don’t say…
An assumption based on no evidence.
Western medicine of the 20th century almost exclusively followed the logic of ‘find single thing to blame, pay pharmaceutical company to construct putative ‘cure’, pay pharmaceutical company to construct ‘cure’ for side-effects of first ‘cure’’. Excuse me for not finding this to be a particularly effective solution. Admittedly, medicine is finally getting over this now, but it does demonstrate how knowledge is, as I said, bound up with power structures that it serves and that serve it.
Assumption
Assumption. i.e. we did something that we believed would work - we got the desired conclusion, therefore we assume that it was our intervention that produced the desired result. Witchdoctoring also tends to work on this same logic, or lack of logic. This is without getting into the problematic causality of an ‘intervention’ because we’d have to trek through Nietzsche for that.
Indicating that they are both as bad as each other and that the agnostic fundamentalists will inherit the earth…
Dunno. I never posited a God. You did. Once again, I attack science for attacking religion, your response, as such, is to attack religion.
More metaphors. More assumptions.
That’s precisely what it is, particularly to those who say ‘evolution is a known fact’ etc.
The sociologist? Most sociologist have even less training in ethics than scientists…
Nowhere - but attacking God or Christianity does nothing to lessen the arguments of the agnostic.
Back into the old chesnut. This is induction and you know it.
Reasoning and observations are two quite different things and it is the relationship between the two that is assumed by science but never justified, yet this (like the notion of God(s)) is central to the whole thing having any authority at all.
You’ve got to be kidding - do you honestly think that this is a sound argument? If you do, then you’ve got a lot to learn about reason.
See above.
You miss the point. Science is both logically dubious in explaining the world and is dangerously used as the justification for a morality (perhaps not by you) and I object to both for different reasons. Nonetheless, the reasons are linked but through a very complex series of associations that I needn’t get into.
Terrific.
Vom-it! Vom-it! Vom-it! Vom-it! Do you think that ILP should employ cheerleaders?
If this is true then why is it that so many atheists repeat the same garbled mantras over and over despite not understanding them? This has been recorded here on ILP, by myself and others.
No, them claiming to be rational (which I don’t regarding myself), freethinking (which I don’t regarding myself), intelligent (which I do regarding myself, but not on the grounds of being secular) and so on, when they aren’t, is what makes them stupid. Yes, religious people often take dogma to be true. This is equally true of non-religious people. Religion and stupidity may have convenient relationships, but so do atheism and stupidity.
The watchmaker analogy goes back as far as Cicero. You act as though there were absolutely no evidence, or way of interpreting the evidence, that suggests a designer of some sort. In fact, going back to an earlier point, does not the existence of natural laws imply a designer?
Funny how a certain other pair of posters were allowed to repeatedly post personal attacks and obstructive bullshit, which I know there were complaints about because I made them, and you didn’t remove a single post, but there are complaints about a post of mine and rather than asking me to edit it (as the competent moderators have done and never had a problem with doing) and remove the offending parts, you just delete it. This is incompetent moderation and smacks of a blatant bias. This is also a scientific argument based on the evidence. Rammed back down your throat, so I hope you take it to heart.
You’ve misunderstood my argument and leapt before you looked. And abused your moderating privileges. I couldn’t care less about your personal well-being and if I’ve insulted you. You couldn’t care less about insulting me…
You’ve consistently misunderstood my arguments from the very first post. This fails to interest me anymore - your strategy has been to ask for one thing and attack whatever arrives as an answer for not being something else, when you didn’t ask for that something else. And to keep attacking religion when I’m not defending it, I’m displaying the attacks on it by militant scientists and atheists to be false, contradictory and hypocritical. You don’t seem to even understand what this argument is about, so I’m wasting my time I think. Thanks for this discussion.
I’m just interested where you getting this definition of ‘religion’ from. Do you actually think that that’s what religious thinkers consider faith to be? Whenever I’ve spoken to a religious person, they don’t consider ‘faith’ blind acceptance or anything like that.
Presumably, if religious people consider faith to be “blind acceptance”, I imagine they will have written something on the subject. Have you got a definition of faith from a mainstream theologian that tells us that faith means “blind acceptance”? Because if you haven’t, it would appear that you and the religious person are not talking about the same thing. To then attack their position using your definition would be something of a strawman, wouldn’t it?
I didn’t ask for your problems with science, and neither was your original reply in such a vein. I asked for your counter-arguments and you came up with those 5 points. To just claim I don’t understand is pretty lame, for such a huge post you’ve said nothing but that.
I have been hinting in the preceding posts that I believe your arguments against science are nothing but irrational hatred, and now I’m saying it explicitly. You are unable to provide any counter arguments that don’t rely on an attack on induction. And yet you claim that you don’t need it.
I’ve seen you write that you’ve been through all the arguments before, that you’re tried of saying it again and again. But I can’t find that big explanation. All I can find are wild unsupported statements like these below:
That’s where I’ve got my understanding of your position from. But you never provide a rational or well formed argument to back these statements up. And then, when people challenge you, you do exactly what you’ve just done to me, an argument that boils down to ‘I’m too good for you, I don’t have to justify my position. I’m bored now, I’m going.’
It’s me who sees no point in continuing this discourse, you don’t have anything to say on the subject, the position you occupy seems to be one of deliberate antagonism, not intelligent choice.
this discussion is rather long and I would have to re-read many plots but in my opinion science cannot be religion cause science consists of thesis and proves. Religion is something to…believe.
