emotional

No. Dawkins, and all other atheists, in claiming that the universe with all its natural laws could arise with no external supervision (with no legislator for the natural laws) are the ones making the extraordinary claims. If you claim that the laws of nature require no legislator, then you're making an extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. The burden of proof is therefore on the atheist.

Laws require a legislator. Design, even evolutionary, requires a designer to initiate it. Dawkins himself proved that: in his Blind Watchmaker he made simulations of evolutionary design -- the "Methinks it is a weasel" and the biomorphs simulations -- but these simulations of evolutionary design still require an intelligent designer to initiate them in the first place! So, while I believe in evolution, I believe in theistic evolution, which was initiated in the first place by an external designer, the author of the laws of nature. I see myself perfectly rational in making such an assumption.

Kimpatsu

Rubbish. That the universe arose naturally is bourne out by the evidence; the universe looks exactly as it would have to if there were no external hand.
This is amphiboly. If we have this conversation in Japanese, the problem will go away, because Japanese has two different words for the two different concepts of natural law and jurisprudence.
But there is no design! Not like you mean. There is only natural selection. Read Climbing Mount Improbable for an explanation of how evolution is completely natural, with no external agency guiding it.
And stop usingthe amphiboly.

Paperstreet

how can you have the screen name Tyler Durden, and not use soap?

Starboy

IIRC the other fictional Tyler towards the end of the story didn't use it either.

Infinity Lover

God is a word that can carry a lot of authority (of the absolute kind even), and therefore potentially lends itself as a lame threeletter- excuse for all sorts of questionable thoughts and deeds. Religion can bring out the best in people but also the worst, including ignorance.

Kimpatsu

What is the "best" it can bring out that cannot be found rationally elsewhere?

abe smith

(once more into the breach....).
There're at least two generally-defined *kinds* of law(s), and if you'll bother to look the word *LAW* up in a grown-up dictionary, you'll maybe be able to distinguish..... No. None of the batch of books here behind me does this adequately and tersely enough; >>> to distinguish between
*DEScriptive* law
and
*PREscriptive * law.
I'd like to suggest you ask our member *STEPHEN MATURIN* to make this distinction for you, and for everybody else here. Meanwhile >>>
The "laws of nature" = scientific "laws", are DEScriptive; they describe what we human beings (think we) observe to be the case in a very large number of observed instances. ( Cf. what L.Carroll's "Alice" thought about these.) The "laws of nature" (so-called) are therefore only PROVISIONAL, pending the next observed event which may either substantiate OR contradict them. E.g. there may turn-out to be exceptions to those.

The other sort of laws , called PREscriptive laws , are those *made* by human beings (and they include the ones allegedly
"given" by "god" or "gods" to humankind). In fact, this sort of laws are of course also *provisional* = subject to abolition and/or amendment *by human decisions*.

It is at least useful and very-often necessary carefully to distinguish between the two sorts of laws, in order not to be talking nonsense...

If this explanation doesn't clarify, please ask the good Doctor Maturin to assist. Stephen?

Kimpatsu

I still say, go with the Japanese.
Kisoku and horitsu.
Two words. Two different concepts.
What could be easier?

Tyler Durden

Feh! One man's insult is another man's compliment! Now the midnight oil has long extinguished and the assignments, hopefully coherently written, are now in the professor's clutches, i can post freely.

Then that would be the end of religion, philosophy, and all sorts of education. Plug in and play vis a vis the Matrix is every technojunkie's wet dream!

FYI, i'm taking your first (likely unjustified) division between belief and knowledge, not "faith." Do and try to keep up!

I don't confuse abstract nothings with a philosophical definition of reason. Maybe the term "unconditioned condition" is awkward and doesn't chime quickly to vulgar common sense language, but i could explain better.

The illusion of reason is a search for the unconditioned, a "pseudo-rational" inference of reason that does not have any empirical worth. In empirical reasoning, an idea requires an object that corresponds to sense experience, but an idea of reason does not, because the goal of reason is to arrive at the absolute totality in the series of "conditions" for the empirically given.

Reason is never satisfied with a partial or incomplete explanation for any state of affairs, and constantly pushes at, hints at a complete or exhaustive explanation. So, reason leads the intellect to seek for more and more basic condition until we reach an "unconditioned" condition that is the most basic, primary datum of knowledge, something that supports the entire field of discourse, but does not require any support itself - e.g., the structure of subatomic particles, the anger of a malignant God.

So, reason pushes our intellect beyond the limits of possible experiences, until there isn't any intuition to correspond it and render it at all intelligible. (intuition i mean the presupposition that anything has a spatial and temporal property)

Reason is what breeds transcendent metaphysics that cheats by leaping over the limits of all experience, and we will never, ever locate the adequate object to correspond with that transcendental ideal.

It most certainly is animal faith if there's no deductive reasoning behind the conclusion (the belief). If we cannot be a hundred percent certain in the supposition that an event will take place in the future, then we have only a probable estimate, given the number of repetition the event has taken in the place, that it may happen again. So, animal faith is precisely a belief.

It is reasonable, yes, on probabilistic grounds, sure. But that "reasonable" is not quite a deductive one, isn't it? We're operating within the parameters of a posteriori reasoning, which means it is contingent. And furthermore, we haven't been around 15 billion years, so the inference that the regularities of our nature stretches beyond our experienced time (say, 6000 years of history) to some 15 billion years is exactly what i wrote about "reason" earlier. We just have to make assumptions, and the justifications for such assumptions is what i'm interested in.

I'll share with you something a visiting professor once remarked: "Falsificationism is not quite as a transparent concept it was once believed." Of course i could've spat back on the lines of there are three, o professor - naive, sophisticated and the edition in Lakatos' scientific research programme. Which one do you mean?

No, they are rationalists. Rationalism is not opposed to theological speculation, especially with the definition of reason i have outlined above, and how it routinely leads us beyond the bound of empirical sense to transcendental illusions.

I don't see the difference. Religious institutions operate within the same type of crowd psychology, that if it is the consensus belief of the majority, then it must be true. The differences between scientific and religious methods in ascertaining what is truth is academic - one cites sacred text and authorized interpretation, the other cites theory-laden evidence and authorized theories. The motives and the crowd behavior in both spheres remains the same.

Not quite. I wouldn't limit the definition of religion to the petty fears of the defender of science. Religious beliefs are a matter of expressing the aesthetic beliefs of the psychology of its constituents. The reason why people gravitate towards religion far quicker and more often than science is because of the appeal to their desire of centerness, a sense of purpose, a meaningful relationship between themselves and the forgotten "Other" most people form in their childhood. That causes a belief in universal necessity for all other human beings to share their perspective, however ill-advised and unjustified that really is, and the clashes between religious and scientific ways of thinking is bound to happen. Both science and religion are not as dramatically different as most people on the secular web would like to believe, given the philosophical reasoning behind both field of discourse, and the common psychology of the people who subscribe to either one.

How about this - i'm willing to forego Zen Buddhism as a piss poor example and submit "theothanatology" as a substitute I've heard it practiced here a few years back. Buddhism is atheistic at heart, by the way.

Starboy

Tyler science is not based on a philosophy; it is based on a method. Science is not in competition with religion, reality is in competition with religion. The more a religion is out of sync with reality the more they seem to think that science is at odds with them. This is because science is the human endeavor to explore reality and such explorations simply point out just how out of sync with reality most religion is.

I wish you were right as to why people seek out religion. The uses and results of religion show you to be misinformed. I guess that's the difference between being a philosopher and being a scientist. Not that I would really know since I have yet to get a reasonable definition of philosophy from a philosopher.

Starboy