You wrote “I suspect those questions, themselves, can be quite silly.”
It’s implied, as if I was unaware or disregarding the utility of science.
Sure “you seem so adamant in your insistence that folks qualified to pursue scientific inquiry are so prejudiced by assumptions that the totality of the results arrived at are suspect.”
You attributed something to me that I never said, I have not insisted any such thing.
Right but you misinterpreted that to mean “you seem more willing to accept that which cannot be overtly demonstrated as truth yet dismiss that which actually has been demonstrated is astonishing.”
Everything I accept has a sound basis, can be demonstrated to my satisfaction at least. I have not dismissed anything that is demonstrable either, so on both counts you are mistaken.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha … aaaaaaaaa fuck No fucking wonder you are being laughed off the site.
METAPHORE: (HINT) a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally* denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or between them as in drowning in money) Oh fuck, the lowest form of criticism… Then again, you are the one with the stupid attempt at a metaphor.
(You can drop the ‘E’) - Yes, I used the term “chicken” as a general metaphor for an egg laying animal. Look:
See that word “symbolic”? go and look it up.
Yes but only to an intelligent audience, when the audience are poorly educated or indoctrinated or just stupid, then it’s often quite a challenge, but one must never give up.
How would you recognize evidence if it were presented to you? How do I know you have any way to recognize it, for all I know you’ll take anything and everything presented to you and say “Nah, that’s no evidence”.
Rather than embark upon a potentially fruitless undertaking, explain to me your own criteria for recognizing evidence for God.
If you don’t know of such criteria then how can you even claim to be an atheist?
Many people here are better described as anti-theist rather than atheist. They have a clear hostility to any ideas there might be a God, they claim there’s no evidence for God yet at the same time cannot explain how they analyze proffered evidence.
They expect the theist to take it on faith that they are being honest, that they can reliably scrutinize something and recognize it as being evidence or not.
I suspect that most if not all of these anti-theists have no idea, no criteria and their entire position is based on rejecting anything that is presented to them.
If they are open minded and truly rational they will be able to prove that something is not evidence for God because if they cannot prove it to be so then they are just relying on belief, the belief that everything they can potentially be shown can never be evidence for God.
Define what you mean then “objective fact” surely before we can argue whether some proposition is an objective fact, we’ll need to agree upon what that means.
@Sherlock-Holmes … this is bullshit plain and simple. Not least, because I’m on public record both here and elsewhere, as welcoming evidence for any real god type entity that exists, not least because said evidence, it if ever arrives, will almost certainly falsify all of our pre-scientific mythologies at a stroke.
Indeed, I’ve presented ideas on this topic, that mythology fanboys are incapable of even fantasising about, and which would cause them to blow an artery if they examined them.
Apparently you are unaware of the rigorous distinction between dismissing specific “god candidates” (including ones that are asserted within the requisite pre-scientific mythologies to possess contradictory or absurd properties, and which can be dismissed safely on that ground alone) and dismissing the god concept wholesale. The former is performed here all the time. The latter far less frequently, and usually by people who need a lesson in rigour.
But why should I accept your claim? For all I know you are pretending, insisting that you would “welcome” evidence when you have no intention of doing any such thing.
If you do not have criteria then say so. If you do then tell me what it is, surely this is not an unreasonable request?
What characteristic in your own words, would distinguish evidence for God from not evidence for God?
You do realize how your reticence to answer me looks…
Which begs the question of what exactly is meant by “consonant with observational data”. For example until around 1916 Newton’s law of universal gravitation was regarded as an objective fact. It was consonant with observation data and had been tested extensively.
But if that was really an objective fact then how could that law have been abandoned and replaced by a different on in 1916?
Or consider the law of biogenesis, surely by your own definition above, this is an objective fact yes?
If the truth of some claim can fluctuate, be true today but not tomorrow, then we have no business referring to such claims as objective facts, facts are always true not conditionally true.
Oh please, I’ve been covering the transition from Newtonian mechanics to general relativity in detail in past posts. I’ll enjoy what is to come shortly …
Apparently you’re either unaware of salient facts, or deliberately ignoring them for dishonest apologetic purposes.
The reason newton’s view of gravitation was so successful, was because it was consonant with the observational data available at the time. However, Newton’s physics ended up being killed by its own success, because it allowed us to develop the technology that enabled scientists to alight upon new data previously unavailable, which called into question Newton’s ideas.
But of course, there’s another issue here. Namely, that the difference between the Newtonian view of the universe, and general relativity, is only detectable in everyday circumstances, when one can measure quantities to FIFTEEN DECIMAL PLACES. Even in the modern era, this is an expensive and time consuming matter. Which is why for example, we had to wait until atomic clocks existed, before testing directly ideas such as time dilation.
Indeed, one of the reasons Newton’s ideas are still taught in classes today, is that they remain an excellent approximation when dealing with weak gravity fields and low velocities, and have the advantage of mathematical simplicity compared to general relativity (no need to dive into tensors, for example). So, even though Newton’s basic axioms were fundamentally wrong, the system derived therefrom remains a useful approximation whose error in everyday circumstances is too small for most of us to measure.
Once again, do you bother checking real scientific facts before posting?
Oh, and your attempt to reject scientific postulates, on the basis that new data might require revision thereof, is utterly specious and dishonest. Indeed, the willingness of scientists to revise their postulates in the light of new data, is one of the reasons science has been so successful. As opposed to mythology fanboyism, which treats uncritically as fact, mythological assertions even when those assertions are known to be wrong.
Meanwhile, it’s time to deal with this piece of mendacity:
Oh look, it’s Canard #13 from my list of creationist canards - the Pasteur canard!!!
Pasteur proposed his “law of biogenesis” as a rebuttal of the mediaeval notion of spontaneous generation. A notion which included such fatuous ideas, as the idea that mice arose fully formed from dirty wheat.
Pasteur was alive before prebiotic chemistry existed, and as a corollary, his ideas were NOT a critique thereof. That you have to resort to well-known instances of duplicity such as this, to prop up your apologetics, speaks volumes about the worthlessness thereof.
Indeed, being the thorough experimentalist he was, if Pasteur had lived long enough to observe the emergence of prebiotic chemistry, he would have accepted the experimental results arising from that discipline.
When are you going to stop lying about these topics?
I’m sorry, but I have to tell you that this point is nonsense . . . or a strawman, and here is why.
You are referring to classical physics vs. special relativity, and how they are different from each other.
To explain why they don’t conflict, imagine the roundness of the Earth.
In classical antiquity, Eratosthenes was a theatre critic and librarian at the library in Alexandria, and he used the shadow of a stick, the reflection of the sun at the bottom of a well (and he also hired someone to pace out a distance between two cities), and geometric reasoning to measure the size of the Earth . . . and he was off by perhaps 5% or so.
So, he decided that the Earth was a perfect sphere.
Isaac Newton predicted that the Earth should have a slight bulge at the equator, which reduced the error from about 5% to maybe 2% or so.
When the Vanguard satellite was launched in the 1958, this bulge is slightly bigger below the equator then above the equator, which made an accuracy to about + or - 11 feet or so.
My point is that this steady refinement doesn’t mean that Eratosthenes was wrong. It seems that you’re comparing the difference between classical physics and modern physics like thinking that the Earth is a cube this century, a pyramid next century, and was shaped like a torus (or doughnut) last century.
Classical physics is a subset of modern physics, which means that classical physics wasn’t wrong . . . just not as refined as our modern understanding.
In other words, there are degrees of what is right or wrong. Right and wrong are fuzzy areas, not absolutes of black and white.
When NASA communicated with the Voyager probes around Neptune, the math worked out by classical physics vs. math worked out with special and general relativity meant that there was a difference of less than a second as to when the space probe arrived at a specific point.
Just so you know, these ideas are not my own. Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan made these points in their writings, as I don’t plagiarize.
Please see a copy of Asimov’s essay at the following link, as he expressed these ideas better than I do.
That an objective fact is no more reliable than an unevidenced subjective religious belief is risible nonsense. However let’s test your risible generalisation;
There is overwhelming objective evidence that the world is not flat.
Now please tell me which worldview I am using to subjectively interpret the shape of the earth, and what alternative interpretation(s) you think are viable and why?
Which method can be objectively demonstrated to be better than science?
Are you seriously saying religions haven’t championed the closed minded bias of faith? You’re wrong.
Straw man fallacy, since I made zero claims about quantum mechanics. Here’s a tip for you as I’m in a generous mood, best methods does not remotely suggest those methods are infallible. Here’s another tip, picking one straw man example we do not as yet fully understand, does not in any way suggest that it will never be understood. You see again that it is you who are oversimplifying in order to draw a mendacious conclusion.
What is the different worldview and interpretation of my belief that the world is not flat? Please explain how these interpretation(s) are valid? You are using Inductive fallacy by drawing a conclusion from premises that only lightly support it, by oversimplifying by implying that because all ideas must by their nature involve some subjectivity, makes religious beliefs that are entirely subjective somehow comparable to objective facts, and irrefutable scientific facts.
The worldview changed to accomodate the objective evidence, you’re doing it the other way around, and their ideas were not based on unevidenced subjective beliefs like your religious beliefs, as not only did their ideas have to be ratified by the global scientific world, and that a consensus on them be achieved based on the evidence, before being accepted theories, they also had to be falsifiable, as do all scientific ideas, otherwise they are meaningless, as of course are unflaisiable beliefs and ideas.
So how would one falsify the idea of the existence of any deity exactly, if of course it is untrue?
This does not mean there won’t be, and even were this to remain the case, it is of course not true of innumerable ideas that the methods of science has understood, put simply you are using one example to draw a risibly dubious and sweeping conclusion about the entire method, it is a poisoning of the well fallacy if ever there was one.
Subjectivity is a scale, it’s not either or, you are implying objective facts are no more reliable than say a belief for which no objective evidence can be demonstrated. Your example is an irrelevant straw man.
That’s a factual statement. One of the methods greatest strengths is the insistence that even the most objective irrefutable facts remain open to critical scrutiny and amendment or even be discarded in the light of evidence, if that evidence demands it. Unlike religion which will never ever alter the core dogma no matter how many of its claims are palpably untrue.
Look the words up in any dictionary, they are synonymous.
Then you either don’t know what those words mean, or you’re lying, I can’t conceive of a third option? Again the words theism and religion are synonymous.
It is not a straw man, as the words theism and religion are synonymous. Theism is defined as belief in the existence of a god or gods, specifically of a creator who intervenes in the universe, and religion is defined as the belief in and worship of a superhuman power or powers, especially a God or gods.
@CyberLN clearly did not say any such thing, and she used the words “can be” as a qualifier as well.
That is laughably untrue.
I have seen that very assertion from flat earthers, I remain as dubious about any deities as i do that the earth is flat. What subjective method you use to satisfy yourself that a deity exists, clearly doesn’t include any objective evidence, or you’d have demonstrated some by now.
It was a poor metaphor as many species lay eggs, this is what @Cognostic is trying to help you understand, your poor metaphor rather highlighted your poor argument. In point of fact an egg does not suggest a chicken, though it might if we had more evidence, you were oversimplifying again, it is a recurring theme in your spiel that is laughably implying your religious belief has any sort of parity with objective facts or the scientific methods that discover them.
I might not, and I certainly don’t need to do this in every instance in order to disbelieve. Again this is why methods like science rely on consensus, as that consensus is indicative that the evidence is sufficiently robust to accept an idea. Whereas the number of people who hold a subjective unevidenced religious belief like yours, tells me nothing about its validity, as they can demonstrate no objective evidence for any deity or that a deity is even possible.
Lack or absence of belief need not be based on knowledge, since lacking belief is the default position, I was born an atheist, (as are we all) and I remain so as I am aware of no objective evidence for any deity.
It doesn’t matter, any objective fact will do to demonstrate the point.
They’re not mutually exclusive of course. I can only speak for myself, and while I would rather people didn’t waste time, energy and resources on unevidenced superstition, I wouldn’t be opposed to such beliefs unless they were demonstrably pernicious.
I am not hostile to bad ideas or poor arguments unless they are pernicious, but I am of course dubious about them. Instead of answering each new generic ad hominem you’re directing at atheists, why don’t you:
demonstrate some objective evidence for any deity or deities, or failing that offer the best reason you think to believe a deity exists, and I will give it due diligence. You are again resorting to a poisoning of the well fallacy.
Nope, that’s an argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy. I also don’t need to know something is untrue in order to disbelieve it, for example the only rational and open minded position is for me to disbelieve all unfalsifiable claims, and remain agnostic.
A belief is simply the affirmation of a claim, that something exists or is true. Beliefs can be entirely subjective with no objective evidence at all, like theism for example or they can be based on objective evidence that is so overwhelming it would be unreasonable not to hold that belief. The best method we have by far for validating beliefs is methods of science. Religious beliefs are at the other end of that scale if the dearth of objective evidence is any indicator.
You can Google both words?
No you are confusing irrefutable with immutable, if the evidence makes something irrefutable it can be described a fact, nothing in science can be described as an immutable fact, as the method demands all facts, remain tentative in the light of new evidence, even where the likelihood an idea will be substantially reversed is so low it is effectively nil. This is in stark contrast with theistic religion of course, which for millennia has touted the risible notion it has immutable truth, even when the facts (there’s that word again) directly contradict their “immutable” claims.
