I'm not in the damning-to-hell business. That is just a ridiculous assumption and strawman you guys create in post after post when you really don't know how else to respond. Veedz pulled out the "hell-card" above, too. Usually it has no contextual relevance at all, and it is getting tired.

As for your first posting, the children in Africa are mainly victims of the actions of evil and repressive gangs of men who hijack food shipments and never allow it to reach those who need it. Mankind is at fault here, not God.

I guess it is curious though that the two subjects are presented here so neatly. If anyone deserves to go to hell, it is probably those people.

Technically there's more than that. A scientific theory should also be Predictive, in that it can make falsifiable predictions and that over time it can be adapted and modified to take into account new knowledge. It's how many discoveries have been made in Theoretical physics, for example, the Higgs Boson and Black holes. There was no actual evidence for either originally but previous theories predicted them. They were consistent with and added to those previous theories.

Faith cannot do that since it's based on an unquestioned premise, there IS a god. That theory is not parsimonious, useful, testable, falsifiable, progressive, externally consistent or tentative. You accept it without question, or you don't, and you can't make predictions since we can't possibly describe a supernatural being.

This is not how our species will progress, it's how we'll be stifled and inhibited by religious 'learning'.

Despite the temptation, I will avoid the unscientific mess that is the definition of a 'bona-fide' miracle, and ask you something else. If neither your example, nor my example could be classified as a 'bona-fide' miracle then by what criteria have you rights to compare them in your previous posts? They're both miracles to the people who have experienced them. So through your example, one experiencing a miracle can conclude that God is real, and through my example, one experiencing a miracle can instead conclude that the sky exists - simply by changing a single word in their interpretation of a miracle.
Friedrich Nietzsche once said: "A casual stroll through a lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."
Apologies for the assumption.
Yes, people still did bad things. Instead, they just used God to justify them. Without 'God' its difficult to justify certain behaviors to oneself.

I'm constantly amazed by the way that religious types appeal to their various gods for reprieve from some awful situation that their gods allowed to happen in the first place. If it wasn't inexplicable in it's pointlessness, it might be considered somewhat presumptuous...

I'm starting to think that belief in the 'efficacy of prayer' is just another form of the Gambler's Fallacy or Illusion of Control.

Were we wicked, we might fix your post thus.

As we speak, thousands of scientists work on a theory that has no supporting evidence at all (and may never have any), just because it feels right to them.

This definitely depends on how loosely you're defining 'scientist'.

I imagine that his point is not about whether various groups of people believe without evidence. It is about claims of the a necessary dearth of evidence. Scientists generally aren't saying "string theory doesn't need evidence". To help illustrate the difference of positions I'll use two examples from within Christianity.

1) Young Earth Creationists (say, Ray Comfort) believe that there IS evidence for god. Comfort goes as far as to claim everyday objects like the banana are proof of god. While I'm sure they don't deny the role of faith, they do claim that evidence is a good thing, and that they have it.

2) Sophisticated Christians, on the other hand, will often claim that there is NOT evidence for god, and that fact is consistent with the necessity of faith.

These two positions are mutually contradictory.

What Lestat is saying (I think) is that some religious people just vacillate between these positions depending on the specific issue. For example, they might claim in one thread that the Ontological Argument deductively proves that god exists (which is congruent with position 1) but in another thread claim that the failure to demonstrate the efficacy of intercessory prayer is because evidence would nullify the required faith (which is congruent with position 2).

Or perhaps, a less strong form of Lestats argument might be that while certain theists currently hold position 2 in a consistent manner, they would jump ship if some compelling evidence became available.

Which if the evidence is compelling they would have to.

I dunno. If they genuinely believe that purported evidence for God is necessarily false (as faith must be preserved above all) then it might make more sense to deny the evidence.

If it wasn't clear, I don't think Lestats issue is with those who believe on faith in the absence of evidence, per se, but those who claim that evidence is anathema to the core of Christianity and hold that view inconsistently.

If one's position is "God doesn't want there to be evidence so there isn't any.. oh wait, there's some evidence, guess He does want it after all" then it's somewhat rigging the game.

I don't have a strong view on all this, but I do feel that Lestats argument has not been treated with charity, hence me playing Captain Save-a-Bro

So I agree with most of that and I don't want to question you on Lestats argument so I'll just say it doesn't correspond to my own experience.

says who? i work daily with people who have committed all sorts of crimes and i can guarantee belief in god or lack thereof has no influence at all on their behaviour or decision-making. without 'god' i can still find 100 reasons to justify stabbing, raping, robbing or assaulting you. please spare us the "if there was no belief in god the world would be peaceful" bollocks. pure armchair hyperbole.

How about homophobia, assault or abuse of homosexuals? Or suicide bombing?

Sure, even atheists can be homophobic but its far more prevalent among those who believe in God

I'd want to take the suicide bombing off the table there because it's a different issue and one slightly more complex than anyone who would raise it in this context would suggest.

Not wanting to go all godwin you can imagine where the challenge to theistic homophobia comes from?

amongst a random sample of american adults? what is this crap? we live on a planet called earth and not everyone is american. i've seen entire documentaries about the type of lowbred hillbilly motherf**kers who are bound to skew results of studies like this into the ground. you kinda don't really get those people most other places. all the dumb ignorant f**ks I know are as atheist as you can get, never gave a toss for religion because it didn't inhabit that space between their eyeballs and the end of their nose.

Yeah, but non-Americans don't count. Didn't you know that?

I don't think string theorists are excluded by any definition of "scientist" that's reasonable, although you could certainly come up with a definition that did exclude them.


I think you are likely right about what he means and wrong about string theorists, some of whom I've definitely seen saying that it doesn't need evidence because it works so well.

Some scientists believe their models have merit the closer they tend to reality; others believe they have merit the more elegant and comprehensive they are. No doubt the latter believe that the better the theories, the closer they will tend to reality coincidentally, because they have the tacit belief that the universe "chooses" the most elegant solutions.

In a way, they are themselves religionists.


Yes, this is at least partly true, although isn't it also true that (1) is largely motivated by a desire to compete with science on its own terms?

(2) is not on the face of it very sophisticated though.

I think Comfort would likely agree that God does not need to furnish proof of his existence, but that there are things that are evidences of God regardless. I think he'd suggest his position is a synthesis of (1) and (2) since he does not believe in God because of any evidence for him, but purely on faith.

I don't think these are at all contradictory positions though. God's unwillingness to furnish proof does not mean there is no evidence. It should go without saying that all Christians believe there to be evidence of God's existence, at least in as much as that god appeared on Earth etc.


I think they'd rather say that while there is evidence, that is not why they believe in God, which is neither inconsistent nor contradictory.

I think most scientists (even the ones working on string theory) would agree that the word "theory" is used primarily for public consumption. String "hypothesis" doesn't have the same ring to it.

It's not a "scientific" theory, because it's not testable. It cannot falsify predictions. And it it certainly isn't the best explanation for what is observed (although it would be neat if it were true). Of course, I'm speaking off the cuff here. Can you name a legitimate scientist who actually does think any of these things or that string theory should be considered an actual scientific theory?

Seriously? Even the wiki quotes Hawking as saying that "M theory is the only serious candidate for a complete theory of the universe". They believe it's not complete, not that it's not a "real" theory.

And I rather think you have it the wrong way round. It's not a hypothesis because it's not testable, but it's a theory because it's an explanatory framework for, well, everything apparently.

Most cultures other than America (particularly the 3rd world) are far more homophobic and misogynist because of what their holy books help them to justify.

yeh those third-world people are terrible aren't they?

The key word being candidate. A candidate for something is not yet that something.

Explanatory framework is not enough. There's a reason why string theory has remained in the shadows of mainstream science despite years of hard work and even some encouraging progress. It is NOT an accepted scientific theory and never will be until it's testable. Until then, it's only slightly better than invoking god as the best candidate for a complete theory of the universe. God has the same explanatory power as string theory does. A deistic god, that is. A theistic god poses more questions than it answers.

Cite?

It sounds like you are conflating the realism/anti-realism/structuralism/instrumentalism debate and the arguments for simplicity in philosophy of science. I'm not aware of any significant group of scientists claiming that the universe "chooses" elegant solutions in any sort of teleological way. Arguments for favouring elegance are more often using some formal mathematical application of Occams Razor, e.g. Solomonoff induction or Minimum Message Length / Kolmogorov complexity.

Well, fideism vs evidentialism is an open question in theism. It's also worth pointing out that the idea of a faith as an form of epistemology is not the only version. For example, in Catholicism faith is "man's obedient response to God's revelation" whereas "Reason can show that that there is a God and can demonstrate his primary attributes such as his power and divinity. Reason lays the foundation for faith and makes revelation 'credible.'" That is not a view that relegates reason/evidence to a non-causal role in belief. We'll move on to the different ways that evidence could play a causal role now...

The difference between evidence and proof might be making this more complicated than it should be. Think of it in terms of Bayesian updating; let E be some piece of evidence for the existence of god (G).

P(G|E) > P(G|~E)

In a evidentialist framework, if E increases our subjective posterior probability that god exists, then the lack of E must reduce the subjective posterior probability of god. Therefore we should have more confidence that God exists if we have many Es and less confidence that God exists if we lack many Es. However, this can be contrasted with the claim that we should expect G to entail a lack of E (in order to preserve faith):

P(G|E) < P(G|~E)

A theist could hold either hypothesis to be true, but not both at once. The third option would be to claim that evidence is absolutely irrelevant to their belief in god. This option was not what Lestat was discussing. He was talking about

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lestat

religious people love evidence if it can even be remotely construed as confirming a belief they hold

To illustrate the problem further, we can take the example of conspiracy theorists. Let E be some piece of evidence that JFK was killed by Martians and T be that conspiracy theory. The conspiracy theorist will argue that E increases the posterior probability of T (by demonstrating that the event went down as they claim) whereas ~E also increases the posterior probability of T (because ~E proves they are covering up the evidence zomgconspiracy).

It's not like there is no way out of this for the theist. But if one wants to claim that evidence supports the existence of god then lack of evidence must count against Him. There are plenty of Christians who are not afraid to admit that, say, the existence of suffering is a problem for theism, and that a world without suffering would better support the God hypothesis. That is a rational position that is open to theists. Equally, one can claim that evidence has no confirming role in belief. I'd take issue with that sort of epistemology, but it can be consistent.

No-one has claimed that that position is inconsistent or contradictory.

You are splitting hairs. Clearly Hawking thinks it is a theory even if it has not been fully worked out. This is pretty standard in science.



wat

Seriously no. It's a leading research paradigm. You are not just splitting hairs but ignoring reality here.



Not accepted by you.


I don't disagree with you but we're not talking about what you or I think but what people who work in string theory think.

I don't have one to hand but this is not an uncommon thing for string theorists to suggest at all, given that there is no evidence for it.


I have no idea what you're talking about.


You may have misunderstood what I said and in any case I can't answer your peacocking since I don't know what those things are, or care.

If I understand this paragraph correctly, it flatly contradicts your original assertion.

And the rest is TL;DR, sorry. I think you are set on proving something that isn't in contention.