Now if your a die hard pragmatist where whatever hypothesis proposed must somehow produce immediately useful information about reality that mankind can manipulate to its benefit your not gonna care much about it.
OK. That describes me. I don't consider an idea knowledge until it has been demonstrated to be correct. A hypothesis is an imagined idea about what may possibly be the case in reality. Assuming that it is falsifiable, the next step is to consult reality for confirmation or discrediting the hypothesis.
why care about theories concerning the Big Bang, the beginnings of life, or evolutionary theory?
Those are not hypotheses. God is a hypothesis. The multiverse is a hypothesis. The universe and the life in it are facts.
Why hypothesize about anything whose practical return is not immediately apparent?
Correct ideas are distilled from the set of possibly correct ideas empirically. Hypothesizing is the creative part of science, but without empirical support, a hypothesis should not be considered correct. Knowledge comes from experience, not imagination alone.
Why hypothesize about aesthetics, morality, or justice? None of those add to our understanding of nature beyond speculation.
They don't? I disagree. They're integral aspects of the human experience, and intimately connected to that which matters most in evolved minds. Maybe you misunderstand my relationship with empiricism and what I call knowledge. These are tools for modulating experience, for maximizing the euphorias (feeling loved, feeling safe, feeling comfortable, experiencing beauty, the spiritual experience, self-respect) while minimizing the dysphorias (fear, anxiety, shame, guilt, humiliation, alienation, despair). We can call this the affective manifold, distinct from the cognitive manifold - the two aspects of mind that get to work evaluating any phenomenon that grabs our attention (evidence), one to tell us the implications of the evidence, and the other to tell us how we feel about it.
Think of the affective manifold as the pigments on the palette and the cognitive manifold (knowledge, reason) as the brush that selects among them and arranges them. It's the pigments that give life meaning, not reason. What happens when one loses the ability to feel pleasure, as with the anhedonia of major depression. If reasoning is all that remains - if one's colors have run dry - then that last bit of reasoning is often used to end life (suicide).
So what do you mean exactly by understanding and how did you conclude that the God Hypothesis can't ever add to our understanding?
Understanding means having useful knowledge - knowledge which allows one to more accurately predict outcomes and thus to control the affective manifold (the evolving state of the euphoric and dysphoric pigments).
What does comfort have to do with reality?
It's a potent motivator of behavior.
So you don't find comfort in religion. And?
I don't have one for that reason.
Your comfort says absolutely nothing about the hypothesis being true or false.
It speaks to its value to me. Since religions and god beliefs do nothing for me - meet no unmet needs - they have no value to me. In fact, I count myself fortunate to NOT take comfort there, just as I consider myself fortunate to not benefit from corrective lenses. If I needed glasses to read, I would wear them, but I prefer to not need them.
I'm willing to bet - if your not some mindless automaton - that whatever you do find comfort in to keep you from going insane or completely incapacitated can be reduced at its core to simple faith. What you put that faith in is your decision but its still faith.
I don't call it faith when an idea graduates to knowledge. The decisions I make every day are based in prior experience, which has proved to be a reliable means for navigating life comfortably.
And this is a typical example of an atheist tying to somehow diminish what follows that a theist has or had to say.
OK. Yes, I am often rebutting what a theist has to say. But I'll do it with a counterargument, not an attempt to silence or intimidate him. The theist toolbox incudes tools intended to do just that. The freethinker is chastised for freethinking. What else would be your purpose in informing me that, "You must indeed be most intelligent and wise to be able to think on those cosmic scales." This is a form of "If you don't know everything, you don't know anything." We see the puny-mind argument when skeptics are discussing the ethics or intelligence of the deity, as in, "Who do you think you are to second guess God?"
did I mean to restrict your thought here?
Restrict? I thought that you wanted to diminish my position, which is fine. That's what debate is about, but only if it is done using dialectic rather than using other persuasive measures.
How does claiming the skeptic to be wrong translate into claiming the skeptic to be unqualified to be right?
One morphs into the other. The belief that the skeptic is wrong is expressed not with rebuttal, but with persuasive measures as I just called them. I have a large collection of the efforts of believers to disqualify the opinions of skeptics about scripture. Here's a piece of it:
[41] You get your biblical passages from Atheist web sites.
[42] A copy/paste from Biblehub does not make one a biblical expert.
[43] Don't bother quoting Scripture to me, atheist. You don't even know what you're doing.
[44] Your lack of belief in God coupled with your lack of experience with God means you are not qualified to comment on God.
[45] He believes he is qualified on the basis that he has been inside a church and picked up a bible.
[46] The word of God can not be understood no matter how many times it is read without the help of the Holy Spirit.
[47] Out of context arguments are presented by narrow minds that refuse to take in the bigger perspectives and the greater all encompassing truths.
[48] You're cherry picking scripture.
[49] You can't just read the Bible to understand it, you need to study the scriptures.
[50] You don't know what Jesus was talking about. Typical atheist.
[51] If you are going to quote Scripture for support for your claims then you need to tell me what the context is.
[52] Your ignorance of the Bible, its laws and customs and what applies to Christians today is embarrassing. You should be red faced for making this comment in public.
[53] You have no biblical expertise, your word on the Bible is strictly a layman's opinion.
[54] You want to convince me you have knowledge of the Bible. 1) Provide 5 examples of slave liberation in the Old Testament. 2) King Saul was merciful to the merciless and subsequently merciless to the merciful. Explain.
[55] You are a heretic with little if any understanding of Scripture. If you did study the Bible it was in a Laurel and Hardy College in Tijuana
[56] Like I say there are no errors in the bible only skeptics that can't read and comprehend.
By what criteria are you judging the intelligence and moral fiber of the Christian God?
By my standards - an idea that upsets many of the faithful, who are trained to read that as arrogance and rebellion, as an immoral attempt at a power grab by a hedonistic upstart trying to usurp God's role. If that's your opinion, you don't need to express it. It wouldn't have any effect on me.
That being said...the point is that we don't know everything! The nature of being human limits our capacities.
Whenever I read that, I see it as an attempt to stifle freethinking. It translates to you don't know enough to have an opinion. It's a variation of, "If you don't know everything, you know nothing," which is seldom stated explicitly, but that's intended message.
if we are to get to the truth of a matter we must somehow go beyond mere appearances.
They're the same thing, if by appearance we mean evidence appearing before the senses. This is another attempt to redirect thought from empiricism to something else, to special ways of knowing that are said to transcend reason and evidence. It's the impetus for the use of words like "myopic," "scientism," and "materialist" to describe those who don't drink from the faith cup. I'll stick with interpreting appearance.
What appears to be true on a local scale and what is true of reality are often two quite different things.
We live at a local scale. Reality is only interesting to the extent that it impacts experience.
Think of Plato's cave. Reality is symbolized by everything outside the cave, and experience is limited to seeing shadows on the cave wall. Things outside the cave are irrelevant if they can't cast shadows or modify the shadows of things that do. The objects that don't affect the shadows in the cave are the unfalsifiable objects (the noumena unrepresented by corresponding conscious phenomena), which can be ignored for their lack of impact on experience (Popper's Razor).