Hawkingfan

Tell me, bd, what describes reality better? Science or religion?
Yes, it will. Because no credible scientist back then pulled the theory of black holes out of his ass. Black holes were thought to exist because the mathematics told them so. It wasn't until much later that it was confirmed by observation.
It's not MY axiom system. And not all scientists exclude X(in this case God) from the possibility of existing, yet they cannot fit him into a solid theory. You yourself say that if there is no evidence of X, it is justified to believe it isn't true. Doesn't the absense of evidence you keep talking about exclude X from the possiblilty of existing? Look down at your pink unicorn example below. The later part of your question depends on what X is in order for me to respond.
I don't think so. Let's do it. Where do we start?
I don't care if they believe it or not. There are scientific absurdities meant to be serious and are not in the context of miracles ALL THROUGHOUT THE BIBLE. Do YOU disagree with that?
What we are talking about here is whether something is reasonable or not. That is what I thought this thread was about. Theist claims are NOT "immune" to science. If the theist (and you) claim that they are, then IT IS NOT REASONABLE TO BELIEVE IN IT.

I'm glad you like Randi, too. But he does do religious testing all the time. He has tested faith healers. It is not restricted to ESP and psychics.

THANK YOU!!!! That's what I've been saying all along. But don't stop there! Tell me, if someone asks your opinion of do you think it is reasonable to believe it or not, what will you base your decision on? If it is not on science, or if the "supernatural" claim is "immune" to science, then what? It would be equally reasonable to say that it is impossible to know or that we never can know and therefore remain uncertain. My answer would still be: if it is not scientifically plausible then it is UNREASONABLE to believe it.
Amen. I agree with this 100%. But isn't what you're saying imply scientific reasoning? I hope we may be on the same page but just don't know it. See how you argued with me above, "Don’t you need to justify the adoption of an axiom system that excludes the possibility that X is true in the first place? And doesn’t this justification have to include a demonstration that X isn’t true?" Couldn't you argue that against yourself for what you said of the unicorns?
I don't understand why you are arguing against science when you yourself are saying, "The fact that there is no evidence is quite sufficient to justify positive disbelief". What evidence? If not scientific evidence, what? And if the evidence is supernatural or "immune" to science and reality or "beyond human comprehension", then how are you going to understand it?
You also say, "But this is itself an extraordinary claim, and the burden of proof is on them."
What proof? If not scientific, then what? If it is "immune" to the laws of science, then how would you know it was proof? The only way is to measure it using science in the first place. Figure out how the claim or test holds up to the laws of science.
Oh, please! Do you not know that math and science go hand in hand? That everything in the universe can be described by mathematics?
I didn't say this! Christians did! Haven't you read the Bible? God interacts with his creation in spritual AND physical forms, even in the OT. Have you studied the history of religion? Catholics believed God lived just beyond the stars and that heaven was a physical realm.
If you know something that describes reality better than science, then spit it out. Otherwise, shut up and quit trying to flatter yourself with lame-ass sarcastic remarks made toward me.
Do YOU know something to exist outside of the laws of science? (BTW, other universes are NOT outside the laws of science. You think other universes are supernatural? Why do you equate "outside our universe" with "outside of science"? Does quantum mechanics forbid other universes? No. Therefore, they are not only possible, but highly probable).

Hawkingfan

A universe created by chance operations in quantum mechanics means that no God was behind it.

The universe's existence is "a fairly significant consequence of" quantum mechanics, not God.

Volker

Energy and matter is undestroyable. That is evidence enough to show that it will exist in eternity. And because it can't be neither destroyd nor created, that is enough evidence I need to assume it has existed eternally. If the universe existed eternally, than it had no creator.

I don't even need QM to disprove a creator.

Jobar

bd, Hawkingfan, please start another thread if you want to continue this discussion. It's not precisely off topic, but I don't think it's a profitable direction to explore in understanding theistic belief.

Kenny

Hawkingfan, that remark was, shall we say, “unwarranted.” . Bd-from-kg is not claiming that religious beliefs provide a better description of reality than scientific ones. In fact, from what he has said here and elsewhere, Bd considers most religious beliefs to be irrational and absurd. Bd is not arguing that it is reasonable to believe in supernatural claims – quite to the contrary. Bd is pointing out that your underlying philosophical assumptions and methods of argumentation are philosophically naïve and in many places incoherent. You should pay attention to him and think about what he says because there is a lot that you could learn from him --he’s a smart guy and he is very knowledgeable about these issues. Don’t assume that reading a few popular level science books (or even being quite knowledgeable about some area of science) makes you an expert on all matters of philosophy and religion.

In the mean time, if you are interested in my perspective on the relationship between science and religion, here is a written version of a talk I gave about it my senior year of college to some of my fellow college students as part of a program sponsored by a Christian organization I belonged to. Other than that, I do not wished to be side tracked from the topic of this thread by engaging in a discussion of that issue.

Bd-from-kg, sorry its taking me so long to produce my response. It’s been a busy week. I’m about half done at the moment.

God Bless,
Kenny

Hawkingfan

This will be my last post here because of what the moderator has said. I love how you haven't answered a single thing I said in my last post, and even when you were told to stop replying (about this topic), you reply anyway (making me have to give one last response). You have not refuted anything I have said, or shown that it is naive and incoherent. Don't tell me I'm wrong. Show me. I don't think either one of you have. I have been willing and pleading with you to let me show you I have proof for some of my claims (the claim of scientific absurdities outside of a miraculous context in the bible), yet neither one of you has wished to pursue it. And I'll be damned if I let someone who ends their posts with the words "God Bless" tell ME that I'm philosophically naive. I'm not interested in your posted arguments elsewhere. Can I cross examine them? I'm right here talking to you now. Talk to me. And BTW, I'm not the only one who believes that nothing can exist outside of science. When diana became a moderator and someone asked her to define her beliefs, one of them was that she does not believe in any concept "outside of science". And one does not have to be an "expert" in order to be reasonable. To suggest such a thing is ludicrous. Bye!!

Kenny

I think bd-from-kg has shown you. At the very least, the attitude you have demonstrated in your posts towards his comments is entirely unjustified. But, you do have a point. I should not call your ideas naïve and incoherent unless I am willing to argue such (and I am not at the moment because I don’t want to get side tracked from the main discussion). For that, you have my apology.

God Bless,
Kenny

bd-from-kg

Jobar, ReasonableDoubt, Selsaral, The AntiChris, Kenny:

Thanks for the great compliments and the vote of confidence. When I seem to be taking on everyone in sight it’s nice to know that some people, at least, think that I’m making sense some of the time.

Jobar:

OK, I’ll just take a couple of Hawkingfan’s representative statements and answer in a way that relates clearly to the original question.

Hawkingfan:

The following exchange, I think, illustrates your confusion as well as anything:

First off, my point was that it doesn’t make sense to say that you are 100% certain of something because it’s entailed by something that you “strongly believe”. A conclusion cannot be more certain than the premises.

Now to answer your question. Of course I think science describes reality better; in fact, I don’t think religion describes reality at all. But this is an opinion. I don’t claim to know with “100% certainty”. In fact, if you were as dedicated to scientific methodology as you pretend to be, you wouldn’t claim to know anything with 100% certainty. Science can only discover (and only claims to be able to discover) the “simplest” or “most elegant” or “most parsimonious” hypotheses that “fit the facts”. I believe that it’s rational to accept such hypotheses (pending further evidence) because I believe in the validity of Ockham’s Razor. But I can’t prove it, nor am I 100% certain of it. And Ockham’s Razor is not a “discovery” of science; it’s an essential presupposition of the scientific enterprise.

This is another illustration of a point that Kenny and I have been making for some time: it is clearly justified to believe some things without evidence. Science itself requires certain presuppositions or assumptions just in order to “get off the ground”. If one insists that no belief is justified without evidence, you wind up with radical skepticism – the position that no beliefs of any kind are justified, period. You have to start with some foundational assumptions (a.k.a. presuppositions) in order to be able to justify any conclusions. If you take the position that these presuppositions are not rationally justified, you’re forced to take the position that all of the conclusions are at least equally unjustified: even a clearly valid argument cannot make the conclusions more justified than the premises.

What you’re really doing here is an elaborate form of question begging. Plantinga and other theists (like Kenny) are basically arguing that it is justifiable to presuppose certain things (in particular the existence of God) which are not (or at least not obviously) essential presuppositions of the scientific enterprise. What your argument amounts to is that these presuppositions are not conclusions that can be arrived at by the scientific method. Well, of course they’re not conclusions, at least not in that sense; that’s why they’re called “presuppositions”. Whether a given presupposition is rationally justified is not a scientific question; it’s a philosophical question. It can’t be decided scientifically – i.e., via observation and experiment - but only by philosophical arguments.

You have a point. My last sentence was careless. I should have said that the justification for adopting axioms that exclude the possibility of X must involve appropriate reasons for doing so. If the axioms in question are part of a formalization of a scientific theory, then you should be able to demonstrate that X isn’t true (i.e., that the “X hypothesis” is falsified convincingly by some evidence). But if they’re intended to be metaphysical axioms – a formalization of the basic presuppositions being used as the basis for the entire enterprise – then the justification would not involve evidence; it would have to philosophical in nature.

As for invisible pink unicorns, the IPU hypothesis is superfluous – i.e., it is not part of the most parsimonious explanation for what has been observed to date. Reasonable persons will conclude from this that there almost certainly are no IPU’s. But (Plantinga and others will argue) the God hypothesis is fundamentally different from the IPU hypothesis; it is reasonable (they say) to accept it independently of any evidence, as part of the set of fundamental presuppositions which one uses to understand and interpret reality, and not a conclusion based on a set of presuppositions which does not include it.

Needless to say, I reject this argument. I regard it as a clever but sophistical attempt on the part of theists to shift the burden of proof (which they know they cannot meet) onto nontheists (who can’t meet it either, but who don’t have the burden of proof in the first place). But before you reject an argument, it’s best to try to understand what the argument is.

Theli

bd-from-kg...

First off, I'm sorry for the extreme delay. I've been having difficulties with my account. If you feel you are not up to discussing this topic, or if you have forgotten the arguments then I understand. This is a post that has been lying around on my harddrive for almost a week.

Are you refering to objective things? What (appart from the human mind) decides what is a certain thing, and what is not that thing?

That truth is subjective, just like language is subjective, and thoughts are. It's an understanding of our surrounding reality, but it isn't our surrounding reality. We do not observe truth, we make it from observing reality. The concepts on wich we base that understanding does not exist inside the objects we observe no more than the words we apply to them. We create them, and we create the connections between them, the truth, all in our minds. I don't think I can make it any clearer. As your own example also states, one person's "truth" can differ from another person's "truth" depending on how they view and express what they have observed.

Could you please show me this circle in my argument? The only thing I can draw from your text above is that you don't think evidence can support an hypothesis once it has been formed. I'm probably mistaken, but that's all I can extract from your complaint.

Kuyper

bd-from-kg,

First of all, I apologize for seeming to have fallen off the face of the earth. I've been on a work related road trip...

Now, to the points you make above, a couple of comments.

The general principle that 'the further a claim is removed from ordinary experience, the more evidence we will demand before believing it' is, on most counts, a good one. But is theistic belief of this sort? That is to say, is theistic belief of the sort that is "removed from ordinary experience"? To say that an omnipotent being or a being with all the claimed attributes of God is beyond all human experience runs exactly counter to the claim of theistic belief in general and Christian belief in particular. The claim of the Christian (and I'm in that camp) is that we humans can and do experience God every day. His attributes are not considered impossible to imagine at all.

To argue that these claims about God are beyond all human experience seems to beg the question. There is no a priori self-evident reason why we must accept that any claims made about God are beyond our experience. Millions of our fellow humans (myself included) would claim that they've had just such experience with God. They would further claim that such experiences of God are perfectly ordinary.

The objection, then, doesn't seem grounded in whether or not concepts of God are beyond all human experience; rather, the objection seems to be grounded on whether or not such claimed experiences are, in fact, experiences of God. That is a very different issue.

If I understand your objection correctly, you seem to be saying that theistic belief is just the sort that is beyond ordinary human experience and therefore requires extraordinary evidence (about which, more to folow). But the theistic claim (or the Christian claim, at least) is that such belief is perfectly ordinary; that it is, in fact, what we were designed for. That is, I think, the essence of Alvin Plantinga's argument in his book "Warranted Christian Belief". The real objection seems to be that the source of such claimed experiences of God isn't God at all, but something else; something that, by definition would fall well within the bounds of the material. Just what that 'something' would be, though, has never been satisfyingly made clear.

But exactly what kind of evidence is required here? Put another way, what evidence is required to justify moving from atheism to theism? Putting aside for the moment the utter subjectivity involved in placing the evidential bar, what elements constitute the evidence out of which the evidential bar must be made in the first place? What are these "ordinary evidentiary standards" of which you speak? Not to put too fine a point on it, but what evidence would convince you?

Thanks much,
K