ju'iblex

so luvluv, are you suggesting those who are religious have a sixth sense? or that we should believe everything we can concieve of, even if we have absolutely no proof of its existence?

rainbow walking

LL: Let us suppose that the sense of sight is an accident, and not a universal one.

Rw: Then your supposition drifts shy of the mark already. Sight is a product of environmental forces upon survival of the species.

LL: Let us further suppose that there is a planet on which the sense of sight never emerged; i.e. a totally sightless planet. Let us suppose that on this planet, sightless intelligent creatures evolved. Given Occams razor, would these creatures have any reason to believe in the phenomenon we call color?

Would they not, by their limitations, have to be illogical (their logic being constrained by their senses) to believe in color, since they would have no means of detecting it's existence. In short, though they would literally be surronded by color, they would consider it as illogical and imaginary a concept (a pink unicorn, the pet celebre of this board) as you folks believe God to be.

Rw: Logic is not based on limitations but seeks to over-come them. The implications of your argument are derived from the fact that color is something definable from your current perspective. You equivocate a known, definable concept with an incomprehensible one. It is illogical to believe in something that defies definition. Are you saying that humans lack a sensual perception that would enable us to verify the existence of god? If true, this then would be the fault of your god and not humans. God could not then be perfect or have created perfect beings, now could he?

LL: Isn't the belief that we can detect everything which exists, and even the belief that we have no reason to believe that anything exists which we cannot detect, a bit chauvinistic? If all of our senses are the result of random and accidental process, who is to say that we have evolved every means of detecting the universe?

Rw: If our senses are the product of our struggle to survive in a competitive environment and something exists outside our environment, there would be no pressure for a special sense to evolve to detect that which has no environmental impact on our survival, hence further evidence that no such god exists. Are you arguing for the existence of a god who has had no environmental impact on our survival? It is not our responsibility to detect a god that might exist beyond our sensual perception. It is the responsibility of this god, if indeed it exists beyond our sensual perception, to make its existence empirically known within the constraints of such sensual perception as we do have. Additionally, you cannot impute any special design purposes to the attribute of color so the analogy doesn’t work.

LL: I suppose you could say that we can explain all the phenomenae in the universe without need of some unseen force or property, but could not the sightless beings say the same thing about the "pink unicorn" of color?

Rw: They could, and without contradiction. If they have evolved and become intelligent creatures they did so in tune with the environmental forces that designed their evolution. If they made it that far without eyesight why would they need it for further progress? But, as I said above, unless you attribute some special “will” to the attribute of color it is not analogous to a god, which is saddled with many contradictory attributes. If your god defies logic and perception how do YOU propose to validate a claim for his existence? The burden, after all, rests with the claimant.

Ovazor

Colours are not a very good example, because colours are not something that exist outside the visual systems capable perceiving them, i.e. they are not an universal phenomenon. Wavelenght-distribution is not colour, colour is something that happens in the brain. But, if the postulated blind race talked to human beings the phenomenon of colours could be explained to them. If the aliens were sufficiently advanced technologically and they had a human subject to experiment with, they could verify that human beings do in fact experience something they call "colour." They could even construct accurate stimulus-response rules for determining which kind of EM radiation produces a sensation of "red" and which "green" on humans, although the blind aliens are not capable to experience colours themselves.

I don't see how it can be chauvinistic to think that that anything that we cannot detect does not exist. We certainly haven't developed every means to detect the universe, and there very probably are countless phenomena we haven't encountered yet.
Most likely they are phenomena that we haven't even conceived yet.

There is difference whether detecting something is technically impossible (we just haven't the means to detect this thing, but we could think ways in which the detection was possible if we had the equipment) or fundamentally impossible (which means that this thing cannot be detected, no or later by any means that may become available.) If a thing can affect us in any way, detecting it is a technical question. If a thing is fundamentally undetectable it cannot affect us in any way and is trivial. This is not chauvinistic, because "to affect us in any way" includes affecting us indirectly. Thus, if there was something that we can not detect but some other being perhaps could, we can detect it indirectly by observing that being.

If we start thinking that things that cannot be detected exist the question rises "How do we know which undetectable thing exist and which does not".

Jayhawker Soule

If an existance is, in principle, both directly and indirectly undetectable, it is entirely irrelevant and a wholly worthless object of belief and worship.

BTW, what do Occam's Razor or chauvinism have to do with any of this silliness? I'm really starting to get mad at you!

phlebas

Hmmmm... the "humans don't know everything" argument. Must be Thursday.

I gotta wonder about a belief system when the best argument is "humans don't know absolutely everything there is to know." It always seems to be a bit of a leap from establishing that to believing the Bible.

But that's just me. I don't know everything. Praise Jeebus.

Writer@Large

Absolutely correct. Luvluv, "color" is a human concept. Do you really know what "pink" is? Really? "Pink" is a culturally agreed-upon language label we use to describe electromagnetic wavelengths of a certain size, in order to better our ability to communicate in a social setting. But that label--as the label color--is completely arbitrary. "Color" is just a human language label [an English-speaking human language label, at that!] for a portion of a much larger electromagnetic spectrum; the portion we can "see," i.e. that we have developed direct detection sense organs for. In reality, "pink" is a form of "microwave" or "radio."

So, luvluv, do you "believe" in radio waves? You can't see them; you have developed no organs for the direct detection of electromagnetic waves in the "radio" portion of the spectrum. God is the being who creates WKLM for your morning drive to work; He creates the morning show daily.

The flaw in your argument, IMO, is the correlation between "see" and "exist." "See" itself is just a human conceit; the rub is detection. Any intelligent being anywhere in the universe must IMO have the ability to detect that which is around it. therefore, an intelligent race could create (or have created for it) a machine capable of detecting electromagnetic waves of the "visible spectrum" and converting it into some sort of forum the being could directly detect (much like we have developed radios to convert those EM waves into sound waves we can directly detect). Once that was accomplished, it would be a simple matter of explaning to these beings that we humans label EM waves of a certain range of wavelengths "visible" because we can directly detect them, and that we call the sensation/experience of directly detecting these wavelengths "color." Thus, beings with no ability to see color could be appraised of its existence.

--W@L

Writer@Large

Isn't it "Prince Spaghetti Night" too?

--W@L

Automaton

1. You can't disprove X.
2. X could, maybe, possibly, kinda be true.
3. Therefore X is true.

Sickening.

HRG

Do you think that the neutrino is a hypothetical speculation, since we never came into contact with neutrino-perceiving beings ?

IMHO there is a basic flaw in your argumentation: there is only a gradual difference between our observation of visual photons and of infrared photons through a photomultiplier, or of voltages with the help of a voltmeter. In both cases, we have a chain connecting an actual event with the excitation of some nerve cell or cluster of cell in our brain; in the case of seeing infrared, this chain is just a bit longer.

Similarly, the large experiments at Kamiokande etc. let us see neutrinos. Looking at a voltmeter lets us see voltages, looking at a litmus strip lets us see acidities etc.

<snip>
How can you say that ? The sightless intelligent beings can detect color in the same way we detected radio waves or X-rays.
That's not the point. The claim you oppose is that for X to exist, it is necessary that X can be detected in principle. No one requires that this must be possible for H.sapiens in 2002!

<snip>

Regards,
HRG.

phlebas

If there's a God up in Heaven who loves us, then no.

*sigh* Pass the garlic bread