Is Religion A Force For Good?

Debate Room
23

It must be your “scientific training” that can group all ideas together in a false equivalence fallacy like that.

So in which philosophical tome are you claiming your favourite colour, and a scientific law are equally subjective? Fucking hilarious fair play.

That’s another spectacularly stupid lie from you then, as anyone can see I not only did not assert a belief is valid based on a bare appeal to numbers, I very specifically said the amount of objective evidence is more important.

For extra hilarity that’s not an appeal to authority fallacy either, it is an argumentum ad populum fallacy.

stupidity meter

Straw man fallacy, since I never remotely claimed otherwise. Incidentally in the scientific method this would be validated by a shift in the consensus of scientific support based on the objective evidence demonstrated by that minority.

I know, this doesn;t mean every claim by a small group that challenges a consensus is true though see, now if only we had a method that could critically scrutinise it, and then validate or invalidate it, and then the prevailing view would shift based on, oh I don’t know, the fact that sufficient objective evidence be demonstrated.

Indeed, but what has this straw man fallacy to do with anything I have said?

Sigh, is there now a consensus on this, think hard now, and then ask yourself how this was achieved?

It’s like herding cats, particularly dense cats with learning difficulties.

I am not putting a limit on it after that post, because alongside his bombastic and unevidenced appeal to authority fallacy that he is “scientifically trained” it is fucking hilarious.

Lets try bullet points:

Claim 1 - I have some magic beans.

Claim 2 - For every action (force) in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction. Newton’s third law of motion…

Now take your time @Sherlock-Holmes, are they EQUALLY subjective ideas? If not then making a facile generic comparison is a false equivalence fallacy. Thank fuck he’s sulking, and has stopped dishonestly mangling my posts.

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24

That makes two of us then, last time I looked I was not the only posting in those threads.

You’ve not been following then have you, I have stated definite, clear unambiguous positions on at least these:

a) Atheists seem unable to differentiate between evidence FOR God and evidence NOT FOR God.
b) There cannot be a scientific explanation/theory for the presence of laws of physics.
c) Circumcisions of babies is genital mutilation.
d) Physical infinities don’t exist.
e) Only will/intent can explain the presence of a rationally intelligible universe.

There are more but there’s five positions I’ve stated so far in this or other threads.

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25

That’s still a no true Scotsman fallacy, you are simply biased and want to insist anyone who doesn’t share your position must be using flawed reasoning, but given you are using a known logical fallacy to express it, and nothing else, not one shred of objective evidence to support the claim, or your claim a deity exists outside of your imagination.

Worse still when asked what your criteria then is, for all the thousands of deities you disbelieve, the same number as me but one, you answered with a single word “evidence”, if you can’t see how risible that is, then accusing atheists of poor reasoning is equally laughable.

You cannot demonstrate this, what’s more You can’t offer any explanation of how your deity exists, where it came from, how it created anything. So the double standard is again risible.

I am inclined to agree unfortunately the pernicious influence of religions is adept at creating closed minds that reason poorly in its followers.

That we know of, and of course neither do deities that we know of, outside of the human imagination.

Circular reasoning fallacy., that of course would not evidence a deity anyway. This claim would have to be demonstrated not asserted, and again we now know your god claim explains nothing.

  1. How is a deity possible?
    @Sherlock-Holmes [Which part are you struggling with?]
  2. Where did this deity come from?
    @Sherlock-Holmes [I don’t know]
  3. How is the supernatural power to create a universe possible?
    @Sherlock-Holmes [Why is anything possible]
  4. Where does the supernatural power to create a universe come from?
    @Sherlock-Holmes [From outside the universe]
  5. How did a deity use supernatural powers to create the universe.
    @Sherlock-Holmes [By the use of will]

That explains nothing about the origins of the universe.

And all of them are weak, poorly reasoned or irrational.

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26

He’s already been told repeatedly, that Hawking and Hertog’s no-boundary theorem is an explicit attempt to provide the explanation he blindly asserts is purportedly “impossible”. But his response thereto has been more canards and whingeing.

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28

If you foolishly interpret Hawking and Hertzog as arguing something can come from nothing then, as I’ve made clear to you repeatedly, you are mistaken they do not and nor can it.

29

The circular reasoning is all coming from the atheists. It is that school of thought (if I can be generous and use that term) that insists the universe can be used to explain its own existence.

You don’t seem to grasp science at all, I’ve met not a single person here who does. Science does not “explain” anything - I’d hope the Richard Feynman conversation would have helped you with this but it seems not.

Science is an exercise in reductionism, an X is “explained” in terms of Y, W and Z. These in turn are either themselves unexplained or explained in terms of further sub categories. Because there are always abstractions somewhere in that tree that have not been explained it is true to say nothing is explained. If there are any questions which remain unanswered then obviously we can’t claim to understand it can we.

I answered these questions already, you didn’t like the answer, that’s because it wasn’t a scientific, reductionist answer and it can’t be because that domain has no application to philosophical questions.

As Feynman pointed out, each answer we give throws up further questions this is true in science and other disciplines.

You ask “where did this deity come from” the answer is “I am who I am”, that’s the answer, but you can’t handle it because it’s not reductionist but reductionist explanations are infinite regress and thus really don’t explain anything at all.

30

A demonstrable lie, it’s right there for everyone to see, you assumed your conclusion in your opening premise. The fact you responded with a straw man fallacy I’ve never made is doubly ironic.

I shan’t even feign surprise you decided not to revisit those.

I neither like nor dislike them, and your answers are quoted right there in my post, for a reason.

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31

No it isn’t, please prove that I knowingly made a false statement with an intent to deceive, or retract the insult. You believe it is demonstrable, so demonstrate it.

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32

A lie need not be intentional, you just quoted the definition and the secondary definition plainly says “to create a false or misleading impression”.

That was your claim, since in that very post I quoted a circular reasoning fallacy you had posted, your claim they are all coming from atheists is demonstrably false. So either you don’t know what all means, or it was deliberate.

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33

So in your mind “to create a false or misleading impression” does not require intent? surely one has to intend to create a false or misleading impression? This is the kind of verbal excrement we hear from Trump and his cohorts, it shouldn’t be encouraged in a supposedly intelligent forum.

This is just ridiculous now, I’m done with your insults and exaggerated self importance and cavalier attitude to basic customs of courtesy.

There’s a huge difference between calling out a mistake or an error and calling that person a liar. This is why if you disagreed with a coworker about some thing at work, you’d not go around saying “She’s a liar” and “but that’s a lie” only a coward sitting at a keyboard will communicate that way.

We both know that you’d be fired or dragged into HR if you conducted yourself as you do here.

34

It need not require intent correct, did you think the secondary definition was there by accident?

Is that vapid rhetoric meant to be an argument? Despite your sententious attack, and based on your posts I’d be prepared to bet I have at least as good a grasp of language as you, but if you want to believe otherwise then fill your boots.

Don’t lie and I won’t point it out, and I don’t need a sententious lecture from you (of all people) on self importance thank you, and if you think constantly lying about what people have posted, think or believe is courtesy then it’s clearly another word you need to learn the definition of.

I did not call you a liar, I very specifically highlighted a lie you posted, now tell me, do you think your mischaracterisation of what I’d posted was honest? Don’t lie and I won’t point them out.

More ad hominem, I shall simply highlight your duplicity again then:

That was a lie, as you were responding to a post where I highlighted and explained a circular reasoning fallacy you had made, a fallacy which of course you never addressed. It was either deliberate mendacity on your part, or you expect us to believe that you don’t know what the word all means.

So what, this is a debate forum, and I’m pretty sure a HR dept. would have something to say about relentless duplicity in written form. You either stop lying or accept they will be pointed out, you don’t get to dictate your own subjective views of what constitutes courteous debate.

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35

Except I never did this, this is another of your duplicitous ex recto apologetic fabrications. Stop lying.

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36

The irony.

Even we had a fairly respectful dialog until you hit the wall of being able to answer a question, then resorted to hand waving and disrespect.

You claimed that science and scripture weren’t at odds, whilst knowing that you had no proof that god had any influence upon scripture.

That was a lie.

And only a coward would wilfully try to weasel out of answering very basic question’s in order to maintain the integrity of their imaginary friend.

Again, the irony.

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37

The Big Bang theory does not mean that “something came from nothing.” The Big Bang is the beginning of the current presentation of the Universe, which is vastly different from claiming that the Universe came from nothing.

Personally, I think that the orgin/cause of the Big Bang is a lot simpler than we think it is.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is a function of statistical probability. So, if the Universe has existed and will exist for an infinite amount of time, then any possible event (no matter how unlikely) will come to pass.

This is like me claiming that if I play the Powerball lottery an infinite number of times, then there will also be an infinite number of occasions when I win the Powerball a trillion times in a row . . . regardless of how unlikely this is.

So, I’ve been working on the idea (on and off) since I was a teenager that the Universe spends most of it’s time in a state of maximum entropy (or “heat death”) and–every once in a very, very great while–a statistical anomaly occurs when it shuffles itself into a state of minimum entropy, which we interpret as the Big Bang . . . and here is also where a discussion of the Anthropic Principle (both weak and strong versions) becomes relevant.

It’s an idea that I have been trying to refine, but there are a few counter arguments to this idea, which I’ve been trying to work out for decades.

In any case, the idea that an infinitely old Universe periodically reshuffles itself into a state of minimum entropy (from a strange, statistical anomaly that is 100% likely to occur given an infinite amount of time) seems a lot more likely than claiming that “God did it” while–at the same tme–addresses the objection that “scientists claim that the Big Bang came from nothing.”

There is nothing in these ideas that require the existence of God but–for all I know–God may, indeed, exist . . . even if such existence isn’t required.

So, it always circles back to faith.

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38

Well someone had to say it, kudos sir, since his rather petulant ad hominem was directed at me, I was determined not to rise to such obvious bait.

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39

I call it as i see it chap, the double standards on display are insane.

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40

Damn! I go away for a few days and the world has exploded! :rofl:

UK Atheist

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41

This is a rather interesting question in and of itself. And why do religionists believe so strongly that they have to defend the honour of their god by exterminating the non-believers and blasphemers, as history has shown they are quite capable and willing to do? If that god is so powerful and almighty, why doesn’t she defend her own honour by exterminating the worst blasphemers in a spectacular fashion? That should show them, and should certainly make a lot of people start believing really quick, I’d imagine. But no. No traceable interference. It’s as if this god just doesn’t exist, and the followers of this non-existent god see this, and to save their own embarassment, they have to take it into their own hands to punish people and utterances they do not like, in the name of their make-believe god.

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42

No no no, first you prove no deity exists, then @Sherlock-Holmes will give you the evidence you missed, and not before. What we’ve had so far is a mere “amuse bouche”, trust me, the starters and main course are cocked and ready to fire at us poor incredulous fools. Testing the existence of god, heathens…I despair I really do…

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43

This struck me as pretty funny, since I offered a cogent and concise explanation of the semantics involved, citing the dictionary definition offered by @Sherlock-Holmes himself, and he responds with petty insulting rhetoric.

Now in all honesty which of those seems more reminiscent of the duplicitous Tango man, vapid childish rhetoric, or carefully reasoned argument citing facts and evidence?

Says the man comparing me to Trump. As for insults lets take a look at the latest batch…

Pop quiz time then:

  • Was this assertion true?

  • Was this assertion a lie?

0 voters
  • Is that claim true?
  • Is that claim a lie?
0 voters

Since my exposure of your duplicity is being balked at as unfair or incivil, lets ask others how they view it?

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