Is a belief in god(s) Irrational?
I mean, just look at questions 2 and 3:
2) Do you believe that the creator designed the universe with us in mind?
3) If so, at which point in our evolution did the creator start to take extra interest in our species?
Let's suppose for a moment that there is a creator that designed the universe with humanity as the ultimate goal of the entire project. If that's the case, then at what level does it make sense to say that the creator "started" to take "extra interest" in our species at a moment in time?
"So yeah... I built this thing with the singular goal of creating widgets. But I don't really care about the widget building process, so after I built this thing I just kind of zoned out until the widgets started appearing."
Maybe if you ask questions that aren't stupid, you'll get a more meaningful answer.
Edit: I mean, this might be even more baffling than jeccross' "OMG - What's a fossil? Explain THAT!"
I'm just trying to find out what you actually believe. You believe in the resurrection. You believe that Jesus is the son of God and that he died for the sins of humankind. You presumably believe that if you are a good person and/or if you accept Jesus Christ in your heart you continue to exist in some form in a not-unpleasant afterlife.
This presumably only applies to humans though, not to any other species. That makes us special.
The notion that God, several billion years after his creation of the universe, would send his only son to die for the sins of one primate species on one planet in one tiny part of the universe just seems wildly implausible to me. What makes us so special?
This presumably only applies to humans though, not to any other species. That makes us special.
The notion that God, several billion years after his creation of the universe, would send his only son to die for the sins of one primate species on one planet in one tiny part of the universe just seems wildly implausible to me. What makes us so special?
I'm just trying to find out what you actually believe. You believe in the resurrection. You believe that Jesus is the son of God and that he died for the sins of humankind. You presumably believe that if you are a good person and/or if you accept Jesus Christ in your heart you continue to exist in some form in a not-unpleasant afterlife.
This presumably only applies to humans though, not to any other species. That makes us special.
The notion that God, several billion years after his creation of the universe, would send his only son to die for the sins of one primate species on one planet in one tiny part of the universe just seems wildly implausible to me. What makes us so special?
This presumably only applies to humans though, not to any other species. That makes us special.
The notion that God, several billion years after his creation of the universe, would send his only son to die for the sins of one primate species on one planet in one tiny part of the universe just seems wildly implausible to me. What makes us so special?
(*Understood to be means that the existing understanding is like this. If we discover other intelligent forms of life out there, it could be that there will be a reevaluation of this particular statement. Or maybe not. I'm not a fortune teller. I don't know what the future will bring.)
And even if it were true that humans are somehow special, I don't really see any specific issues with that, either. Some rich guy's dog probably gets better treatment than the dogs of people living in rural Mexico. Why did that dog get special treatment, but the other one didn't? Sometimes that's just how things are.
I'd like to encourage the same from you. Or that you stop willfully misinterpreting my questions. With that in mind I will be very specific.
What is your interpretation of the fact that carbon dating shows that the earth is far older than suggested by the Bible and indicates that significant time passed between the creation of earth and the creation of man, and that many creatures existed before man.
What is your interpretation of the fact that carbon dating shows that the earth is far older than suggested by the Bible and indicates that significant time passed between the creation of earth and the creation of man, and that many creatures existed before man.
address the subject.
Care to try again?
I would say that it's not necessarily the beings that we differentiate as 'humans' that are special. What's special is the category of being that is able to aim at the transcendent. It just so happens that humans are the only beings that we are aware of that fit that category. That distinction fits well within the evolutionary framework.
This particular act is understood to apply only to humans, yes*. It seems presumptuous that God can't have other interests, and I know of no part of Scripture that says God loves humans to the neglect of other creatures. God may have other plans for other creatures. I don't think I need to declare one way or the other.
(*Understood to be means that the existing understanding is like this. If we discover other intelligent forms of life out there, it could be that there will be a reevaluation of this particular statement. Or maybe not. I'm not a fortune teller. I don't know what the future will bring.)
And even if it were true that humans are somehow special, I don't really see any specific issues with that, either. Some rich guy's dog probably gets better treatment than the dogs of people living in rural Mexico. Why did that dog get special treatment, but the other one didn't? Sometimes that's just how things are.
(*Understood to be means that the existing understanding is like this. If we discover other intelligent forms of life out there, it could be that there will be a reevaluation of this particular statement. Or maybe not. I'm not a fortune teller. I don't know what the future will bring.)
And even if it were true that humans are somehow special, I don't really see any specific issues with that, either. Some rich guy's dog probably gets better treatment than the dogs of people living in rural Mexico. Why did that dog get special treatment, but the other one didn't? Sometimes that's just how things are.
"God's plan" is not very kind for many species in the animal kingdom. If antelope heaven, chicken heaven and shoebill heaven existed, they would be filled with martyrs.
If only humans go to heaven then it really sucks to be a chicken or the younger shoebill chick right?
This does not add anything in the way of plausibility for me.
"God's plan" is not very kind for many species in the animal kingdom. If antelope heaven, chicken heaven and shoebill heaven existed, they would be filled with martyrs.
If only humans go to heaven then it really sucks to be a chicken or the younger shoebill chick right?
"God's plan" is not very kind for many species in the animal kingdom. If antelope heaven, chicken heaven and shoebill heaven existed, they would be filled with martyrs.
If only humans go to heaven then it really sucks to be a chicken or the younger shoebill chick right?
I never claimed it would.
Sure. You're free to hypothesize whatever you want. I'm not going to stop you.
Given that I already can't adequately imagine what it's like to be a different creature with a different form/type of intelligence, I'm really not sure it makes sense to try to venture into that while also carrying along some sort of hypothetical philosophical perspective.
But you can go ahead and imagine whatever you would like. Pretend you're a chicken for a while and let me know how it goes.
"God's plan" is not very kind for many species in the animal kingdom. If antelope heaven, chicken heaven and shoebill heaven existed, they would be filled with martyrs.
If only humans go to heaven then it really sucks to be a chicken or the younger shoebill chick right?
But you can go ahead and imagine whatever you would like. Pretend you're a chicken for a while and let me know how it goes.
* Can immaterial interact with material? - There is nothing that is 'immaterial', it doesn't exist. This question is not relevant in the scientific paradigm. My point throughout the thread.
More importantly, you should realize here that you're making assertions about the universe that you can't prove.
You're right that it's not relevant to the scientific paradigm. However, that's not the point you've been making in this thread. You've been quite clear that you're saying more than irrelevance. You're now demonstrating that you don't even have your own thoughts worked out carefully. You need to stop being stubborn, accept that you're wrong, and try to work on this some more. You're right on that cusp being arrogantly wrong (where you're wrong, but so certain of your rightness that you start to come off as having your head up your rear end). You don't want to go there.
You are wrong about science. You don't know what you're talking about.
* What does it mean to have a "natural explanation"?[/I] - Please refer to multiple previous explanations ITT.
* Does "useless" imply "not existing"? [/I]It doesn't imply anything, it explicitly states that something is useless. Since it's useless, you can't draw any meaningful conclusions from it at all.
I would consider this a type of independent verification that you haven't actually described what "natural" is in a meaningful way.
MB, I'm not unsympathetic to some of what you're saying, but I think of 'supernatural' as being a category that defies definition, perhaps a form of non-cognitivism, so it wouldn't make any sense to reject the undefined /undefinable.
Where did you get the basis of your claim, that the majority of scientists reject the supernatural as a necessary requirement of 'doing science'? Is it a conclusion, or do you think you've seen or heard it somewhere? I'd be surprised if any scientist mentioned the supernatural when talking about the scope of their work.
I had asked earlier "If it required the outright rejection of the supernatural, how could miracle-believing theists honestly go into science?" and you responded "You tell me". But either the work they are doing is scientific or it isn't. Could you (or more importantly, peer review) differentiate the science done by a miracle-believing theist vs. a non-believer? Obviously not. This should tell you that it's the method rather than the person that make something 'science'.
You have a concern that it leaves the door open for some underlying supernatural cause. But any such possibility needs to have sufficient reason to be considered, in a way that's no different to considering some undiscovered natural explanation for whatever phenomenon is being investigated. You cannot put something forward without a reason, that is a core of the scientific method. Anything unfalsifiable, arguments from ignorance, god of the gaps, etc are already dealt with and dismissed by science. There is no reason for this concern.
I'm referring to life + afterlife
Sucky life + no happy afterlife = sucky totality of existence
Sucky life + no happy afterlife = sucky totality of existence
Given that I already can't adequately imagine what it's like to be a different creature with a different form/type of intelligence, I'm really not sure it makes sense to try to venture into that while also carrying along some sort of hypothetical philosophical perspective.
But you can go ahead and imagine whatever you would like. Pretend you're a chicken for a while and let me know how it goes.
But you can go ahead and imagine whatever you would like. Pretend you're a chicken for a while and let me know how it goes.
Why does 'God's plan' for the animal kingdom involve so much suffering?
1) If you transfer 'rational' from being a property of the thinking behind the belief, to being a property of the belief itself, you leave us needing a new way to assess the thinking, something to replace 'rational'. You haven't said what that would be.
2) You make the concept of 'justified' redundant as a property of the belief since it has been replaced by 'rational'. Where does 'justified' fit into your viewpoint?
3) This is the fatal problem for your definition. 'Plausible' is something that can't be assessed without coming to a belief about the belief itself, rather than the thinking behind it. But as soon as you have this belief, we now have to assess whether or not your belief that the belief is plausible, is itself plausible. And then that belief has to be checked, and we end up in a never ending chain of assessing belief for plausibility. A final verdict on the rationality of a belief could never be achieved in reality.
With my definition, we can at least assess the thinking behind the belief and decide whether or not the person is rational to hold that belief, regardless of the truth value of the belief. This is useful in a way that your definition isn't. If we decide that the thinking isn't rational, we can fix that problem before having to assess the belief itself, just as you would fix an invalid deductive argument before examining the truth value of the conclusion/premises.
No, this really isn't about induction. It's about probability.
And it's not really a problem in the sense of rationality. Rational conclusions can be wrong. That's a perfectly acceptable condition. (There are "problems" with inductive reasoning, but they're not problems of the type you think they are. Inductive reasoning is perfectly rational.)
And it's not really a problem in the sense of rationality. Rational conclusions can be wrong. That's a perfectly acceptable condition. (There are "problems" with inductive reasoning, but they're not problems of the type you think they are. Inductive reasoning is perfectly rational.)
Inductive reasoning can be irrational too, and it's not always easy to tell the difference (Goodman's problem) you can't claim that "Inductive reasoning is perfectly rational". That's trivially wrong.
What we can say reasonably and 'rationally', using the available evidence is that probability shows that the distribution should be roughly long the lines of 50/50 heads and tails. It's irrational to go beyond that and claim with certainty that a specific pattern will emerge, and you would be ruling out possibilities not closed out by the evidence e.g. that a million tails could come up.
You're right that it's not relevant to the scientific paradigm. However, that's not the point you've been making in this thread. You've been quite clear that you're saying more than irrelevance. You're now demonstrating that you don't even have your own thoughts worked out carefully. You need to stop being stubborn, accept that you're wrong, and try to work on this some more. You're right on that cusp being arrogantly wrong (where you're wrong, but so certain of your rightness that you start to come off as having your head up your rear end). You don't want to go there.
Provide evidence to back up your claims, or don't make them.
This is huge comprehension failure by you and does not fill me with confidence. Whether you agree with my viewpoint or not, I would have hoped that at this point you would at least understand it.
There's no such thing as the luminiferous ether. But it explained something. It wasn't useless. It turned out to be wrong. But not useless. It spurred the Michelson-Morley experiment in search of it. We drew some very important conclusions from it. We concluded that it didn't exist.
See above.
Nor 'supernatural'. I'm not sure I'd want to define either of these terms!
MB, I'm not unsympathetic to some of what you're saying, but I think of 'supernatural' as being a category that defies definition, perhaps a form of non-cognitivism, so it wouldn't make any sense to reject the undefined /undefinable.
MB, I'm not unsympathetic to some of what you're saying, but I think of 'supernatural' as being a category that defies definition, perhaps a form of non-cognitivism, so it wouldn't make any sense to reject the undefined /undefinable.
Where did you get the basis of your claim, that the majority of scientists reject the supernatural as a necessary requirement of 'doing science'? Is it a conclusion, or do you think you've seen or heard it somewhere? I'd be surprised if any scientist mentioned the supernatural when talking about the scope of their work.
Eminent scientists reject the supernatural: a survey of the Fellows of the Royal Society
I had asked earlier "If it required the outright rejection of the supernatural, how could miracle-believing theists honestly go into science?" and you responded "You tell me". But either the work they are doing is scientific or it isn't. Could you (or more importantly, peer review) differentiate the science done by a miracle-believing theist vs. a non-believer? Obviously not. This should tell you that it's the method rather than the person that make something 'science'.
So yes, I entirely agree with your final sentence and it's what I've been arguing throughout the thread.
You have a concern that it leaves the door open for some underlying supernatural cause. But any such possibility needs to have sufficient reason to be considered, in a way that's no different to considering some undiscovered natural explanation for whatever phenomenon is being investigated. You cannot put something forward without a reason, that is a core of the scientific method. Anything unfalsifiable, arguments from ignorance, god of the gaps, etc are already dealt with and dismissed by science. There is no reason for this concern.
You are even running around proving negatives, which empiricism can't do.
You are also repeatedly conflating "methodological" with "ontological", claiming that naturalistic method implies that "science" rejects the supernatural. Seriously, the entire point of coining "methodological naturalism" was to not make the unsupported claims of ontological naturalism. Your only reply to this has been to claim that you are aware of the distinction, only to two seconds later go back and make those claims again. Why? If you are truly aware of the distinction, why do you insist on ignoring it?
It seems rather obvious that you either do not understand the terms you are throwing around or that you can't be bothered to use them correctly.
Why does 'God's plan' for the animal kingdom involve so much suffering?
And again I'm going to point out that I've made a number of criticisms and asked you several questions about it and you've roundly ignored them all. Are you not seeing them? Don't want to answer them? What?
That there are scientists that don't use a 'full' version of MN doesn't change what it is.
Seriously, the entire point of coining "methodological naturalism" was to not make the unsupported claims of ontological naturalism. Your only reply to this has been to claim that you are aware of the distinction, only to two seconds later go back and make those claims again. Why? If you are truly aware of the distinction, why do you insist on ignoring it?
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Methodological_naturalism
Shrugging off the immaterial means shrugging off mathematics. Shrugging off mathematics is much closer to undermining science than a religious person doing science according to the expectations of the peer review process.
Round and round and round you go. When will you learn, nobody knows.
Okay.
And here's my response:
Now let's take a look at something you've said.
So, you are CLEARLY going beyond just "irrelevance" to stating that a truth claim is being made.
See above.
http://www.pewforum.org/2009/11/05/s...ts-and-belief/
More than half of scientists as of less than a decade ago believe in God. Do you think that more than half of scientists are doing science disingenuously?
The fact that you use words doesn't imply that you know what they mean. Up to this point, I've been assuming a shared vocabulary. As the conversation has progressed (especially with the word salad post) it has become clear to me that we aren't. So at this point, I'm asking you to bring clarity to the conversation by explaining what you mean.
Your defensive reaction here is an indication that you can't actually do it. I'm pretty certain that you can't because I know that I can't clearly define it. However, I recognize that my inability to carefully define it is an indication (at a certain level) of the utter irrelevance of the labeling method. This tells me in particular that science doesn't need to make a declaration about what is and is not "natural" or "supernatural" in order to advance.
You, on the other hand, seem to be insisting on it. And that's another reason why I think you're wrong in your understanding of science.
I don't care about your confidence. And that you think I don't understand what you're desiring to say is simply you being wrong again. I know that what you're trying to communicate is wrong information. Your misunderstanding of science (that list of capitalized words you keep throwing around), your misunderstanding of the difference between methodological and philosophical naturalism (and how they are and are not related to each other), and the fact that you literally don't understand what the word "redundant" means all tell me that you've got huge failures of understanding of the topic that's being discussed.
You're failing to understand that I'm not making any assertions about the universe, I'm explaining what the scientific paradigm is.
Yes, it's the point I've been making throughout the thread, but if you disagree then please quote where I've said anything that contradicts anything else I've said...
Provide evidence to back up your claims, or don't make them.
Provide evidence to back up your claims, or don't make them.
Originally Posted by you
There is nothing that is 'immaterial', it doesn't exist. This question is not relevant in the scientific paradigm. My point throughout the thread.
Originally Posted by me
You're right that it's not relevant to the scientific paradigm. However, that's not the point you've been making in this thread. You've been quite clear that you're saying more than irrelevance.
Originally Posted by you
MN is the application, through the scientific method, of Philosophical Naturalism which does reject the supernatural. Specifically, it makes a truth claim, that the natural world is all that there is. MN is applied, on that basis, by the majority of scientists
Originally Posted by me
You are wrong about science. You don't know what you're talking about.
More than half of scientists as of less than a decade ago believe in God. Do you think that more than half of scientists are doing science disingenuously?
At this point in the conversation, 214 posts in, you're thinking to ask me what I mean by 'natural explanation' despite me having used terms like this since post 13, and you can't understand how I could be using the word 'natural' in the context of the multiple references to Philosophical naturalism and methodological naturalism and the fact that throughout the thread I've done nothing but talk about how science doesn't deal with the 'supernatural' but only with the physical, material and the 'natural world'.......
Your defensive reaction here is an indication that you can't actually do it. I'm pretty certain that you can't because I know that I can't clearly define it. However, I recognize that my inability to carefully define it is an indication (at a certain level) of the utter irrelevance of the labeling method. This tells me in particular that science doesn't need to make a declaration about what is and is not "natural" or "supernatural" in order to advance.
You, on the other hand, seem to be insisting on it. And that's another reason why I think you're wrong in your understanding of science.
This is huge comprehension failure by you and does not fill me with confidence. Whether you agree with my viewpoint or not, I would have hoped that at this point you would at least understand it.
By your definition, any belief that you don't agree is plausible 'to a high enough degree' (from your "plausibility of the correctness is too small." comment), is not rational. There are three obvious problems with this, that you still haven't addressed even though I've mentioned them twice now, perhaps you could deal with them this time.
1) If you transfer 'rational' from being a property of the thinking behind the belief, to being a property of the belief itself, you leave us needing a new way to assess the thinking, something to replace 'rational'. You haven't said what that would be.
1) If you transfer 'rational' from being a property of the thinking behind the belief, to being a property of the belief itself, you leave us needing a new way to assess the thinking, something to replace 'rational'. You haven't said what that would be.
2) You make the concept of 'justified' redundant as a property of the belief since it has been replaced by 'rational'. Where does 'justified' fit into your viewpoint?
For example:
http://www.iep.utm.edu/epi-just/
Epistemic justification (from episteme, the Greek word for knowledge) is the right standing of a person’s beliefs with respect to knowledge, though there is some disagreement about what that means precisely. Some argue that right standing refers to whether the beliefs are more likely to be true. Others argue that it refers to whether they are more likely to be knowledge. Still others argue that it refers to whether those beliefs were formed or are held in a responsible or virtuous manner.
Because of its evaluative role, justification is often used synonymously with rationality. There are, however, many types of rationality, some of which are not about a belief’s epistemic status and some of which are not about beliefs at all.
Because of its evaluative role, justification is often used synonymously with rationality. There are, however, many types of rationality, some of which are not about a belief’s epistemic status and some of which are not about beliefs at all.
3) This is the fatal problem for your definition. 'Plausible' is something that can't be assessed without coming to a belief about the belief itself, rather than the thinking behind it. But as soon as you have this belief, we now have to assess whether or not your belief that the belief is plausible, is itself plausible. And then that belief has to be checked, and we end up in a never ending chain of assessing belief for plausibility. A final verdict on the rationality of a belief could never be achieved in reality.
I can accept that "If P then Q is true when either P is false or Q is true" and that I can accept this as being absolutely 100% true, and not really feel the need to question whether or not this is a plausible belief.
If plausibility is a requirement for rational, and that the plausibility has to be of at least a high enough degree for that belief to be rational, then you're saying that a highly plausible belief can be wrong, and this is just a further demonstration of how useless the 'must be plausible to be rational' requirement is.
By claiming with certainty that at least one head *will* come up every million tosses, you're actually committing the gambler's fallacy here.
The gambler's fallacy is a reaction to previous data, that because the previous data was such-and-such, the future data will be (or is more likely to be) such-and-such. I'm going into this with a claim BEFORE any data has even appeared.
I don't remember if I've read the word 'rejects' anywhere, but it's a clear implication of the assumption in the scientific method that there are only 'natural' causes. And then there are plenty of sources to support that idea like this one;
Eminent scientists reject the supernatural: a survey of the Fellows of the Royal Society
Eminent scientists reject the supernatural: a survey of the Fellows of the Royal Society
I believe that there is a strong likelihood that a supernatural being such as God exists or has existed.
-----
But beyond that, this doesn't actually even speak to what you're talking about. The personal attitudes does not indicate what you need, which is that the practice of science itself requires such a philosophical commitment.
Mightyboosh, I doubt you could pass a Method-101 course.
That in itself isn't a big deal, but please stop posting about what "science thinks of X".
You have also just repeated yourself over and over since I first replied to you in this thread, basically echoing your first dubious OP. I don't think it is worthwhile to try and discuss this issue with you, as you a ) don't understand the concepts you are talking about b) seem incapable of understanding that you don't.
Adios.
That in itself isn't a big deal, but please stop posting about what "science thinks of X".
You have also just repeated yourself over and over since I first replied to you in this thread, basically echoing your first dubious OP. I don't think it is worthwhile to try and discuss this issue with you, as you a ) don't understand the concepts you are talking about b) seem incapable of understanding that you don't.
Adios.
Feedback is used for internal purposes. LEARN MORE