Actually, if I’m not mistaken, unicorns are mentioned in the bible several times… 
…
3 Likes
Your goat herder mythology enjoys no scientific or historical support. As for “eyewitness accounts”, accounts written decades after the facts aren’t “eyewitness accounts”, especially when some of them were written by people who weren’t even born when the supposed events were taking place.
Your disingenuous attempt to erect a fake “symmetry” between acceptance of evidentially supported postulates, and unsupported assertions treated uncritically as fact, is duly noted.
4 Likes
But you’re going to continue to try to have a serious conversation with him anyway?
2 Likes
And people think I am mean to ratty. LOL He is nothing but nonsense from the ground up.
Yes I will try, sometimes out of sheer stubbornness no doubt, yet other times I may learn something. It certainly can’t hurt for me to gain some knowledge or understanding as I need all I can get. My frustration and limited intellect sometimes gets the better of me to be sure, but that really shouldn’t worry me, since it is perhaps inevitable. I can only examine the arguments, and keep trying to understand what makes arguments strong or weak.
At the very least I get to examine my ideas and arguments from a different perspective, if that makes sense?
1 Like
Like the scorpion and the frog?
It’s in the nature of the scorpion to be a scorpion it cannot be otherwise?
Kind of; except the frog and scorpion are saved (over and over again) but the frog keeps getting convinced by the scorpion that it will be different next time.
1 Like
Well, that’s bolllocks for a start off.
Laws for every human which every single person breaks… your ‘god’ makes ‘laws’ which are easily contradicted… people kill, people sleep about and cheat, people steal… so on and so on… yet the laws on nature and physics which require no divine wizard seem pretty good don’t they? It’s almost like there is no need for a celestial saddam Hussain.
The quote you attached to this regarding faith was linked to your friend platelets which is easily understood without needing your cosmic mage.
As said above, this is a fallacious comment, we have very different meanings regarding having ‘faith’.
Your faith in your God is essentially belief without any single shred of empirical evidence.
It’s a completely differently outlook.
I have faith in science as your put it, because its testable and provable.
1 Like
Scientific support? Haha good one. Nice try. There’s no empirical evidence. In fact there’s no evidence of any kind behind the mythology of your bible. The bible can’t even back up it’s own claims. None. There is an absence of evidence.
What objective evidence can you demonstrate for the existence of ANY deity?
1 Like
Like mama used to make 
Well. You’re going to have to follow me down the rabbit hole if you want to find out the truth.
Ready? Let’s go!
We don’t have to understand it in order to understand the implications. Ie. conscious observation alters physical reality (objects external to the brain) on a quantum level.
This much has been well established. The simple step forward by making the claim “the mind exists outside the brain” is demonstrated by the facts. Ie. external reality is altered on a quantum level by perceptual observation. I’m repeating myself here because you don’t seem to appreciate the extent to which this should change your view on your identity in the world (and indeed the nature of the world itself).
Consider, for example, that every visual experience you’ve ever had exists by virtue of your own mind altering its reality. Every visual experience of photons is one of them collapsing their wave function to behave like a particle (ie. the kind of object that is focused by your cornea, enters through your pupil, creating an electrica impression on your optic nerve).
Sartre was perhaps the first to describe the existential implications of this phenomenon in his chapter called “the look” in his section of “the other” in his essay “Being and Nothingness”.
Part 3, Chapter 1: The lookEdit
The mere possible presence of another person causes one to look at oneself as an object and see one’s world as it appears to the other. This is not done from a specific location outside oneself, but is non-positional. This is a recognition of the subjectivity in others.
Sartre is careful not to wander into superstition when explaining how we all seem to know that someone is looking at us.
We cannot successfully objectify ourselves, but the look of the other does successfully objectify our pure subjectivity. We know when we are being looked at and we are aware that an other is observing us because our non-appropriated appearance is externally modified by observation.
The results of the double split/photon experiment also does a lot to explain dreams.
We are not fully conscious in dreams. Nor are we generally able to remember the contents of a dream much longer than a day. The experience of a dream speaks to the non-collapse of the visual world inside the dream. The facts of the dream are hazy. The eye moves rapidly, unconsciously observing these weird realities which seem to evade all concepts of time.
Moreover, the double slit results explain the disappearance of the body during the unconscious dream state. We do not collapse the wave function of our physical body while unconscious. It is only when we are conscious observers that we even have a semblance of an objective and real body.
All of this is due to the fact that we are not collapsing wave functions during states of unconsciousness.
One last remark regarding the illusion of motion and Zenos paradox. Zeno was right. We never do arrive at the destination. The destination at t1 is a function of our observation of it. Ie. we collapse the original wave function into a set of photons which behave like particles (and thus are available to the eye). The actual position of, say, a “bridge” as we approach it does not change in reality. The light it emits exists as a wave. However it is only when we collapse that wave that we are able to discern “far” or “near”. This is the essence of the gross perception of motion (ie. the sickness which is the perception of closing distances).
Now, if I am an object for others and, indeed, the objectivity of my being is defined by the observation of others, it also stands to reason that the external effect of the other being is likely to effect the quantum position of my mind. We can go into why the mind is a quantum phenomenon later. But for now, assuming that the quantum mind is the case, we have no other recourse but to accept that the existence of others is an ontological threat to the subjectivity/objectivity of my mind.
When we have accepted this to be the logical outcome of the extent to which the mind affects external reality, it becomes a trivial matter to explain voices in my head which have their own disembodied agency. It’s a mere extension of that disembodied agency’s ability to moderate the wave function of my mind. Sometimes the superior agency of that being “collapses” the wave function of my mind and I therefore “hear his or her voice” - and at other times that agency desists from positioning an effect on my mind and I remain imperturbable (with a mind that has no thoughts; is silent; remains a wavefunction).
Here, we have what medical science does not; a working hypothesis on the origins and mechanisms of “voice hearing”. We have already established that the mind is not confined to the brain. We have already established that the existence of others modifies the existence of our inner subjectivity. We have allowed for a mechanism that would create the real “impression“ (if you like) of an external, powerful, disembodied, external agency.
Whereas my personal understanding and objective reasoning on the origins of voices describes a mechanism for them in alignment with the nature of the quantum world and observation (ie. consciousness), the medical proposition that “voices are hallucinations originating from inside a brain that does not extend beyond the skull” is A) mechanically deficient with regards to the nature of consciousness and wavefunctions; and also B) currently without testable descriptions of underlying mechanisms to support that very same assertion. At best, medical science can boast that horse tranquilizers “seem” to dull the extent to which a voice hearer experiences his voices.
Now, my working hypothesis is dependent on the mind being a quantum process in and of itself. Owing to the nature of neurons, electrical impulses, and the manner in which brain activity works it is compelling to entertain that the mind is in fact a quantum computing device and is also certainly worth looking into on a scientific level (as the proposition that the mind is quantum computing machine allows for falsifiable hypothesis).
That is the rabbit hole, Sheldon. Consider the implications of the double slit/photon experiment and get back to me. I will refrain from continuing our little talk on “morality” until this point is well understood.
No it isn’t, that is simply an unevidenced assumption you’re tacking on. To use vernacular you’ll understand: that is the point where the facts go bye bye, and you start adding unevidenced superstitious woo woo.
One can almost hear the words Abra cadabra being uttered there.
Indeed, wild unevidenced assumptions and speculations.
It’s difficult after all this time to imagine you can’t see what an obvious oxymoron you’ve produced there?
Working hypothesis? Have you been published, is it ina worthy peer reviewed scientific journal?
Ah, so that’s a no then.
No argument here, I can’t imagine a more apropos description for it. What it is not is objective evidence for any deity or anything supernatural, or that either of these superstitious claims is even possible. You even seem to miss the obvious response that were your unevidenced assumption correct, your mind could just as easily be argued to be distorting your reality, and your woo woo disappears using the very same rationale you’re trying to assert evidences it.
However we needn’t speculate, I shall simply stay with medical science, and limit what I accept based on the objective evidence that supports it.
Ok I’ve considered the claim, and you seem to be tacking on unevidenced assumptions and speculations in tandem, when you have some objective evidence get back to me.
That talk was done long ago, you seem to be the only one who doesn’t know this.
1 Like
Well then. I’ll just tuck my tail behind my legs and find my way home. Hmph 
Truth by definition excludes
1 Like
Excludes what? Can you offer a more cogent less cryptic observation.
Truth is defined as that which is in accordance with fact or reality. No woo woo, or woolly platitudes are needed to understand what that means.
1 Like
Simple fact is that man has been killing each other since the beginning of time over what they believe is Truth .
Fact-Reality - Whose ? Yours Mine Theirs ?
1 Like
Well you’ve come here to an atheist debate forum, declared yourself a theist, one assumes you have something to debate. You could start by doing what no other theist has managed thus far, and offer some objective evidence for any deity or anything supernatural, or that they are even possible.
Maybe spare us the word salad about what your subjective opinion on what represents truth, as it comes across as preaching.
1 Like
Truth by definition excludes. Pretty simple
Case - Your Truth excludes a Creator .
1 Like
Correction - FACTS tell us that a cartoon magic man from a goat herder mythology isn’t real. Stop trying to misrpresent this as a “doctrinal position”.
4 Likes
You don’t understand atheism is a philosophical viewpoint. It is. It’s an interpretation on scientific theories a lot of which are not supported by actual science. For example, take natural selection and how unscientific it is. Here is what an expert in thermodynamics said: life is a state of very low entropy it’s very improbable and a state of very high energy. So for simple chemicals on an early earth to become a cell they have to have a low entropy which is very improbable and they have to absorb energy from the environment to increase their free energy which is an impossibility which never happens unless it has help. So for a cell to function you have to have energy provided and machinary that directs the energy in such a way that allows a cell to function and you have to have highly specialized control systems to control these chemical processes or else the whole system destabilizes and that’s information in dna. This is acknowledged by origin of life people, so the way they deal with it is is by appealing to natural selection. The problem is you can’t have natural selection if nothing isn’t reproducing. So they appeal to natural selection as a demigod.
This is from an origin of life paper:
" We claim in particular that it is untenable to hold that life-relevant biochemistry could have emerged in the chemical chaos produced by mass-action chemistry and chemically nonspecific “energy” inputs, and only later have evolved its dauntingly specific mechanisms (as a part of evolving all the rest of life’s features). Instead, we claim, it had to have been launched simple and “specific” and thereafter have been forced by the scythe of natural selection to maintain the necessary specificity standard at each evolutionary increment in complexity. More specifically, all the devices of life, metabolic and structural, must have been invented by it, “in situ,” step by step, and “while in flight,” starting from the simplest possible inputs (e.g., CO2, H2, CH4, NO, etc. see Figure 1) and “learning itself,” by trial and error, which small changes, themselves occurring by chance, were useful: each incremental step in this “evolution by creeps, 41 complexity-building process necessarily being vetted by the system both for “fitting in” and for “contributing” more utility than cost.42 Nothing beyond the simple input kit, no “building blocks of life,” could have been imported. The chemical chaos of cometary detritus, for example, could not, in principle, have played a role.”
Here are the origin of life papers:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bies.201700179?saml_referrer
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bies.201700182