Is it your position that you don't have a paradigm? We know you reject the Christian one, and so in that sense am a non-Christian which doesn't commit you to anything else, but is it also your claim that you don't have other positive beliefs about the nature of the world that you accept in lieu of Christian beliefs?

Strange, huh? It is almost as if your thesis about the relation between scientific theories and religious theology is not an accurate description of religious beliefs.

When was this time? Name me one person who was killed by the church because he or she accepted heliocentrism or was actively researching alternative explanations.

This is patently not true. There isn't a single religion that actively seeks alternative explanations for what we observe than that their god(s) is/are responsible.

Since it's undeniably obvious that people have been executed for heresy, I'm still waiting for the gotcha. I thought that if you didn't agree with me using 'heresy in matters of theology' to describe people who were questioning 'goddidit' you'd have done it already but you haven't, so here's a list - List of people burned as heretics


I don't think that religion is a paradigm either, 'goddidit' is the paradigm that I'm discussing. My argument is that goddidit prevents progress toward the 'truth' because it assumes that is already has the truth. That's new wording because I've been thinking about how to articulate it in a way that you don't consider it 'arbitrary and biased'. I don't think that scientific naturalism is as limiting, and possibly, that it's not limiting at all because if anything spiritual or supernatural can actually be demonstrated, then it would become natural and be encompassed. At least science would be prepared to accept that and not simply deny it because it disagrees with what it already thinks it knows.

True and I'll accept that without asking you to list examples. At some points in history, some religious leaders and institutions have done more than anyone else to destroy information and prevent scientific learning.

I didn't bring it up, you did with your Communism/atheism comment. I'm happy to not use it. Do you actually have something that you consider the 'right' comparison?

I believe that god created the earth and everything on it exactly as it is 6000 years ago. Questions like 'Is this dinosaur 65M years old, or 320M years old are not relevant because the earth is only 6000 years old. Answers like 'we evolved', are meaningless. I can never make progress to understanding the truth because my paradigm won't allow it 9truths that we know exist that creationists deny). In a world full of creationists, those truths are never discovered.

Now, I've use an extreme example (unless you consider that hundreds of millions of people believing exactly that is not extreme) but your paradigm isn't far different. You can't ever need an answer to 'what made the universe' because you already know, you know goddidit. So if there is actually another truth, you can never seek it, or find it, your paradigm prevents that. so, it is limiting your progress, and let's face it, the possibility that your religion is wrong about this is undeniably real, it's been wrong about many things before.

Not sure why you're responding to a reply I made to NR.

Sure I have a paradigm. 'I want the truth'. I don't completely reject Christianity (the Christian god), I simply haven't agreed that they have the truth.


Sorry I don't understand what you mean here.


Giordano Bruno

That's not a paradigm.

My central criticism is that you have a mistaken understanding of the relation between religion and science. Here you are confused because people are not acting as you would expect them to act if your understanding of this relation were correct--providing evidence that your understanding is incorrect.

False. Try again.

Edit: from your own link:

How do you define paradigm? I define it as an underlying theory or concept that determines what questions are relevant and what answers meaningful, it's a model by which one can view reality. My paradigm is that I want to view reality with an understanding of what is true. To do that I have to be prepared to initially accept any and all possibilities as part of determining what is true. A paradigm that contains the assertion that X is true and anything that disagrees with X is false, that isn't even prepared to consider any alternatives, is a limited and inhibitive paradigm that can only impede progress towards truth.

There are two issues here, first is my 'understanding of the relation between religion and science' and I'm really not sure what you think that I think here, can you elaborate?

Second, you seem to be basing a conclusion that my understanding is false on the premise that 'people are not acting as you would expect them to act' but that is not true. I'm amazed by, but fully understand, why people ignore contrary evidence and believe what they want to believe, it's Confirmation bias in action. So my expectation is that people act exactly as they do.

For the record, I didn't get this from Cosmos, I haven't even watched it (except some of the first episode), I found it quite painful actually. But, I'm not interested in side conversation about Bruno, or even about people being put to death for 'general' heresy (which I think is trivially easy to prove) because I don't need either to disucss the inhibitive effect of a paradigm that doesn't except anything that contradicts 'goddidit'. I'd rather retract the comment about people being killed than waste our time on this.

I'm not really sure what you mean by this. Religions generally speaking don't do science. Thus, they don't seek alternative explanations for what we observe. But then, neither to bowling leagues. My disagreement with you is not whether they are searching for alternative explanations, but rather with your claim that all religions seek to explain everything by appealing to a goddidit principle or by claiming that God is responsible. I think this claim is false.

It is trivially false in the case of nontheistic religions like Buddhism. Not really sure how you forgot about this when you made your claim that not a single religion...etc.

It is also false in the case of liberal versions of theistic religions such as Unitarianism, (some) Quakers, United Church of Christ, Reformed Judaism, etc. These variants generally claim that the experiential or moral aspect of religion is what is essential and the doctrinal content is either otiose or optional. For instance, SEP says this about Friedrich Schleiermacher:

However, most fundamentally, I think it is false because you misunderstand the kind of explanation that god is generally taken to be. As noted by duffee somewhere upthread, god is understood as a kind of ultimate (or transcendent) explanation. This means that when you get down to the first cause, or the most basic question of why something is the way it is, that is where you'll find an appeal to god. But that is not the same thing as saying that god is the explanation for everything. Rather, a Christian would say that God is behind everything that happens, but that how it happens is according to the natural laws he put in place when he created the universe.

Here's an analogy: if you want to know about the most basic particles and forces that govern the universe, you study physics. In this sense, the laws of physics function as a kind of ultimate explanation of physical causation--some people will even claim that all other physical laws and objects ultimately reduce to these basic particles and laws of physics.

However, that claim is not the same as saying that we should study only physics. We find laws and objects at higher levels of organization, such as the principles of evolution, that have explanatory value even without any appeal to physics. Perhaps you think these evolutionary principles reduce to physics, perhaps you don't. It doesn't really matter much because either way there is still value in us explaining the world at the level of the gene, or the organism, and so on.

I think something like this is how many religious view the explanatory power of god. Yes, at an ultimate level god is the first cause of the universe. However, there is still much to be learned at less basic levels about how the causation of the universe works. And this is where science comes in, as the best way to investigate how the universe works.

And here I think we can see more clearly a point that I think you missed earlier. The goddidit criticism was originally raised by theologians because they thought people were making a theological mistake by treating questions that need a physical explanation as if they were ultimate questions about god. It was not just a criticism of any kind of explanation by reference to god, but specifically bringing in god to try to answer scientific questions. This mistake--using god to answer scientific questions--is a mistake avoided by many religious people. Among Christians, it is primarily fundamentalists and their conservative evangelical relatives that make this mistake (and should criticized for doing so!), whereas most mainline Protestants don't (or at least, only in a more subtle way).

OF course, what you are accusing them of is something even worse, of trying to answer all questions this way. That is something that not even fundamentalists do.

You are contradicting yourself. A heretic is someone who proposes an alternative religious doctrine (to be distinguished from an apostate--someone who rejects the religion). According to you, religious thought necessarily appeals to goddidit thinking. Thus, none of these heretics were (on your own grounds) exploring alternatives to goddidit and so none of them are work as examples of people killed by the church for exploring alternatives to goddidit.

Anyway, stop being coy. I am asking for someone killed by the church for doing science, not coming up with some different religious claim. That is the claim you need to defend.

I challenge you to put your criticism into the terms actually used by Christians and other religious people rather than using the goddidit formulation.

Do you not see the relevance of my point to your thesis? You are making a historical claim: religion necessarily inhibits the search for truth. Examples of religion encouragingthe search for truth show this claim to be false.

Sure, there are lots of examples: Platonism, pragmatism, scientific materialism, Hinduism, Judaism, etc.

"I want the truth" is not a paradigm under the definition you provide here. That statement specifies no theory, no concept that determines what questions are relevant and what answers meaningful, no model by which one can view reality. A paradigm would minimally include things like, what you mean by "truth," how you search for it, how you know when you've found it, and so on and none of that is listed here.

You think that religious people must believe that god is responsible for everything and so their investigation into how the natural world works must appeal to god as the explanation for everything.

I was mocking your prejudice against religious people. You expect religious people to act this way because you think they are idiots.

Good.

Your criticism here is not in religion, it is a criticism of those who believe the earth is 6000 years old.

Your other criticism seems scientifically trivial, since God is used as an ultimate explanation, not as a substitution. Goddidit is not a God of the gaps. Yes, religions believe God created the universe, but we can still investigate the universe.

This is what I'm saying, MB, and why I don't see any meaningful hinderance in knowledge as a result of religion.

You must be confusing me with someone else, I don't think that this is true at all. I'm embarrassed by atheists who think that this true. In fact, I think it's an idiotic position to hold.

A paradigm is a perspective or a PoV and I would consider a desire for truth (and a rejection of paradigms that limit the possibility of discovering that truth) to be a way of looking at something, in this case, reality.

Goddidit precludes the possibility of any other explanation for reality. Since there are many and varied godiddits, each rejecting the other, the limitations of such a perspective are readily apparent. Religions can't accept the possibility of any truth except their own, not even the truths which most resemble and come closest to what they believe, let alone a truth that doesn't require gods at all.

I don't think you're being very nice when you say things like this. Since I'm aware that 40% of scientists are theists, and as far I'm aware those scientists are not offering 'goddidit' as an explanation for anything and everything that they investigate (for starters, it wouldn't be considered scientific, and therefore not science), what you're saying can't be true.

What do you understand by 'goddidit' and what is your view on it?

When the majority of the forum would say that you think religious people are idiots, then it might be worth at least looking at how you communicate your positions?

It's an example of a constrained paradigm. I was trying to show that creationists like Ken Ham can never make discoveries about Evolution, for example, because their paradigm simply discounts it as a possibility. It's not even worthy of investigation, it can't be true.

Do you consider Ham's paradigm to be constrained and limited and accept that it prevents him making discoveries that could improve his understanding of what is true?

What other possibilities do you accept as alternatives to your god creating the universe?

It's also what I'm saying. But, 'god is behind everything that happens' is where your paradigm stops you from learning what might really behind everything that happens, if in fact god isn't. You can never discover that if you're not looking for it and not only does your paradigm make it pointless to look for another explanation, but it might even be considered heretical to look in the first place, a further discouragement to looking.

Mightyboosh can never make discoveries about religion for example, because his paradigm simply discounts it as a possibility. Its not even worthy of investigation. it can't be true.

At the level of explanation at which we might say "God is behind everything", the alternative as far as I know is "It just is". And I don't mean that to be derisive. The alternative is that there is no "behind" or "before".

In any case, since it's three words I think we can call this paradigm "itjustis", which goes nicely with "goddidit"

itjustis is a paradigm that stops you from learning what might really be behind everything that happens (if you assume the paradigm is wrong, of course)

We've already had that conversation. From the thread linked before:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/13...truth-1297473/

Furthermore, it was pointed out to you again by me in another thread:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=156

[Incidentally, these were both BEFORE you had me on ignore, so you don't really have an excuse.]

And this makes me wonder...

Is your retraction of this claim a true admission of error, or is it a device you are using to avoid having to confront the errors in your understanding?

The reason I'm challenging this is because this isn't the first time you've done this.

In a thread that is all about the nutritional content of fast food, you said:

Things like this make you appear intellectually dishonest.

Sigh. I already said ITT that ' I don't completely reject Christianity (the Christian god), I simply haven't agreed that they have the truth', because my paradigm doesn't rule out that gods might exist, you really need to pay more attention. I'm only bothering to reply for the benefit of anyone else who doesn't read threads properly.

You don't actually think they're idiots. You only like to portray them that way.

So do I, I agree with your wording that goddidit is another way of saying 'god is behind everything' but it's not an explanation for everything. As you say here:

My claim is not that theists switch off their brains and trot out goddidit anytime they're asked to explain anything, clearly this isn't the case.

I don't consider Buddhism to be a religion.

Hopefully we can agree now that I'm not doing that.

God is behind everything, so we don't need to search for what is behind everything. God gave us our morals, so we don't need to examine what morality is or consider alternatives to what is written in the bible or the Qur'an etc etc.

Religions have added to the sum of our knowledge while simultaneously having a detrimental overall effect. They're only searching for truths that don't contradict what they consider to be the truth, that god exists and is behind everything. Science will consider anything to be true if it meets basic scientific requirements. For that reason I consider science to have a much more open paradigm, one much more likely to discover the truth.

Ye, ok, but this is just lip service, to help you avoid taking up a potentially uncomfortable position. All this talk about paradigms etc is just bs.

I would guess that there are YEC who would accept that "they dont completely reject evolution, they just dont accept the truth of it". Its clear that you mean by this , a less than 0.000000000000000000000001% chance of being true, and Im sure even YEC's would admit theres no way to be absolutely sure.

Interesting... I would be interested in seeing the distinction, and in particular your characterization of what a religion is. Presumably, you're going to call Buddhism a "philosophy" and so it would be interesting for you also explain what you think a philosophy is.

And then good luck taking whatever is you've said and squaring it up with things like folk religions and new age religions.

Gee... that's not an intellectually dishonest representation of anything at all.

It might not be a perfect generalizable fact, but most of the religions that we discuss on this board and their respective mainstream denominations do not have an overly friendly view towards contradiction. In the religion we debate the most, Christianity, apologetics is even a recognized and very broadly used intellectual approach. Proponents of this approach is very often touted and quoted in debate on this forum.

If someone thinks as a part of their religious beliefs the earth is 6000 years old how is it not in religion?


Statements like this make religion empty in the end. As far as i can tell if true nothing is in religion.

The approach is no different than philosophers debating what other philosophers have said. What MB is saying is something fundamentally different.

I think Original Position has already illuminated this error with his physics analogy.