Atheists believe in miracles more than believers

[It Aint Necessarily So]

You want to bet he trusts his GPS unit?

I found this on the Internet somewhere which you and @ratiocinator might enjoy:

"You stare into your high definition plasma screen monitor, type into your cordless keyboard then hit enter, which causes your computer to convert all that visual data into a binary signal that's processed by millions of precise circuits.

"This is then converted to a frequency modulated signal to reach your wireless router where it is then converted to light waves and sent along a large fiber optics cable to be processed by a supercomputer on a mass server.

"This sends that bit you typed to a satellite orbiting the earth that was put there through the greatest feats of engineering and science, all so it could go back through a similar pathway to make it all the way here to my computer monitor 15,000 miles away from you just so you could say, "Science is all a bunch of manmade hogwash."- anon

The Oxford Dictionary describes agnostic this way: "a person who believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence or nature of God or of anything beyond material phenomena; a person who claims neither faith nor disbelief in God."

That's how the word is commonly used and understood. When someone calls themselves an agnostic, it's assumed that they mean agnostic about gods.

I always felt agnostic means "I don't know.. if there is a God."

That's how I use the word. The following is from post 1157 of this thread:

"When I tell you that I am agnostic regarding the history and possible origin of our universe, you see that as a semantic trick to shift the burden of proof? Agnosticism is an evolved position whenever we can neither prove nor disprove a hypothesis. The natural tendency seems to be to guess an answer, but where's the value there short of comforting a mind uncomfortable with not guessing? I can tell you the danger of doing that, and I'll bet that you can as well. Note that agnosticism refers to more than just questions about gods. It's applicable whenever one answers, "I don't know," which is what the roots of the word say - not knowing."

"agnostic atheist" gets a bit complicated as far as I'm concerned.

That's the proper term for somebody who neither asserts that gods exist nor that they don't.

You've defined superstition such that all religious people are superstitious and all "scientific" people are not ... Superstition is a belief. Whether you believe in religious miracles or "survival of the fittest" it's all the same

As was already noted, that was a copy-and-paste definition of superstition: "a widely held but unjustified belief in supernatural causation leading to certain consequences of an action or event, or a practice based on such a belief"

That's how I use the word and probably what most others mean as well. It applies in religion but not in science.

The miracles in which Dawkins believes are that with virtually no knowledge we can exclude the existence of a Creator

Dawkins is an agnostic atheist. He does not claim that there is no god. He says he considers it highly unlikely:

"On a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 is certitude that God exists and 7 is certitude that God does not exist, Dawkins rates himself a 6, leaning toward 7: “I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there" (source)

I would quibble with that a bit. First, "God" is an ambiguous word when capitalized. If he's referring to the god of Abraham as described in scripture, that god can be said to have been ruled out by scientific knowledge. But if he means what I mean by a god or gods, such as say the deist god, who is said to have intelligently designed and created the seed from which the universe began to expand, I don't think any comment can be made about the likelihood of such a thing. All we can say is (in the words of Laplace) that we "have no need of that hypothesis," but nothing at all upon which to base an estimate of its likelihood, since that universe and the one described by philosophical naturalists are indistinguishable.

We are given "greed is good" as the only morality

I'm a humanist. My moral code is utilitarian for societies and basically the Golden Rule combined with empathy (kindness) on a personal level. The following summarizes it well: Affirmations of Humanism | Free Inquiry This is the result of reason applied to evidence and to love, by which I mean not a feeling, but rather action intended to promote the well-being of another.

If someone wants to make a definition of "superstition" that can apply only to religious people and not to believers in science then that's OK

Superstition is not limited to theism. If one believes horoscopes or think four-leaf clovers bring luck, he is also superstitious.

But once again, superstition is not part of empiricism, which includes formal science. I say formal to mean what scientists do and which is usually just called science. This is also what we all do in our daily life when we gather evidence and then create and test inductions drawn from that experience such as where to get a good Italian meal. I call the latter informal science. Together, they describe empiricism. Together, they are the only path to knowledge about reality. And strict adherence to critical thinking and empiricism excludes creating or accepting superstitions and other false or unfalsifiable (in the Popperian sense) beliefs.

And when I refer to Popper's meaning of the word, it is to distinguish it from a different meaning. One also cannot falsify correct beliefs. Popper is referring to the "not even wrong" meaning of the word.

 

[ratiocinator]

I don't think you understand how a dictionary works. Every individual chooses the best definition he can remember to express the meaning of a word in a sentence he composes. But EVERY definition of the word and every definition of every word in the definition still apply.

The problem is that if you just arbitrarily completely change the widely understood meaning of a word, and then tell everybody that they're wrong and accuse them of making up a definition, you look a bit...... err...... artichoke (where I've just decided that 'artichoke' now means 'rather silly').

 

[Pogo]

And so? Would you say according to science or what you think that the earth formed as a big sphere right from the start of its existence rather than a speck from explosion of whatever it was that started as a "Big Bang"? Do you believe the earth in its present size was always there? I mean, of course, without green grass and animals. Just as a big round-ish mass. Did it start as a speck of whatever? I'm asking about the size when it started,not proteins.

look up the word accretion and quit making a mockery of yourself.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

Ok last try……… if you don’t understand this I will no longer have a conversation with you on this topic.

You might tone down the passive aggressive attitude btw.

For example

If the first computer had a cause, then by definition that cause had to be a “non-computer” otherwise it wouldn’t be the first computer………….

If the first computer was caused by another computer, then it can´t be the first computer

up to this point do you agree?.............do you see anything controversial?



Before answering with your nonsense and with your semantic games, please make an honest effort and try to understand …….this is your last chance



..

By that logic if the universe (the natural world) had a cause, then by definition the cause has to be non-natural (supernatural) otherwise it would be the cause of the natural world.

If “nature” had a cause this cause cannot be “nature” otherwise it wouldn’t be the cause of “nature”………….this is true by definition, it doesn’t matter how you define nature, this is true regardless of any definition that you use

Ok. You continue to use the word "universe" though, which is confusion.
Can I assume that you understand that "the natural world" might not be restricted to just the universe we inhabit?

If that is the case, then when you say a "cause of the natural world", what exactly are you talking about?
Would it even need a "cause"? If you remove the universe (the space-time continuum) from existence, does a temporal phenomenon like causality even still make sense?

 

[gnostic]

btw, @YoursTrue

The Sun, like any star, is a sphere, and made of layers of differential properties, plasma of mainly hydrogen, but at different densities at each different layers, with its core being the densest part of the star.

The Sun’s dense core is where the proton-proton chain reaction occur because this is where the massive and hottest layer of the star is, and it is these mass, density (hence gravity) and heat of the core that trigger this proton-proton chain reaction - a thermonuclear fusion of the lighter hydrogen nuclei into heavier helium nuclei. The proton-proton chain reaction is a type of Stellar Nucleosynthesis; there are many other types of Stellar Nucleosynthesis, but I won’t go into details about other types of stars.

Anyway, the mass and density of the star’s core is what the outer layers of mostly hydrogen plasma together through gravity, and thereby forming the star’s spherical shape, including the outermost layer, the star’s surface - the photosphere.

Rocky planets that orbited more closely to the Sun, attain their spheroid shape (they are not “perfect sphere”), due to accretion at the beginning of solar system formation. The proto-planets collide with other objects as it clear the orbital paths…objects, as I mentioned earlier thread, asteroids, comets & planetesimals. The proto-planetary rotational motion also help shaping the planets.

The more masses of objects that the proto-planets collected, the more mass they will each.

Unlike the Sun’s core which are made of very dense masses of hydrogen, our Earth‘s core is made of very dense iron and nickel plasma. The Earth’s mantle layer is more like ocean of magma. The core and mantle are what cause much of the Earth’s geomagnetic fields, and cause the Earth to rotate on itself, and moved along the orbital path around the Sun, kept in place by the gravity of Sun and gravity of other planets.

I didn’t talk much of gas giants, like Jupiter and Saturn…they have different physical compositions and properties than rocky planets like the Earth.

much of gas giants atmosphere are made of hydrogen (about 89% with Jupiter, 96% with Saturn), and we will really don’t know much about the interiors of these 2 planets. They may or may not have solid cores. They attained their spherical shapes, also due to gravity, their rotational momentum and their orbital paths.

But as @Pogo said, look up accretion, or accretion disk.

 

[YoursTrue]

btw, @YoursTrue

The Sun, like any star, is a sphere, and made of layers of differential properties, plasma of mainly hydrogen, but at different densities at each different layers, with its core being the densest part of the star.

The Sun’s dense core is where the proton-proton chain reaction occur because this is where the massive and hottest layer of the star is, and it is these mass, density (hence gravity) and heat of the core that trigger this proton-proton chain reaction - a thermonuclear fusion of the lighter hydrogen nuclei into heavier helium nuclei. The proton-proton chain reaction is a type of Stellar Nucleosynthesis; there are many other types of Stellar Nucleosynthesis, but I won’t go into details about other types of stars.

Anyway, the mass and density of the star’s core is what the outer layers of mostly hydrogen plasma together through gravity, and thereby forming the star’s spherical shape, including the outermost layer, the star’s surface - the photosphere.

Rocky planets that orbited more closely to the Sun, attain their spheroid shape (they are not “perfect sphere”), due to accretion at the beginning of solar system formation. The proto-planets collide with other objects as it clear the orbital paths…objects, as I mentioned earlier thread, asteroids, comets & planetesimals. The proto-planetary rotational motion also help shaping the planets.

The more masses of objects that the proto-planets collected, the more mass they will each.

Unlike the Sun’s core which are made of very dense masses of hydrogen, our Earth‘s core is made of very dense iron and nickel plasma. The Earth’s mantle layer is more like ocean of magma. The core and mantle are what cause much of the Earth’s geomagnetic fields, and cause the Earth to rotate on itself, and moved along the orbital path around the Sun, kept in place by the gravity of Sun and gravity of other planets.

I didn’t talk much of gas giants, like Jupiter and Saturn…they have different physical compositions and properties than rocky planets like the Earth.

much of gas giants atmosphere are made of hydrogen (about 89% with Jupiter, 96% with Saturn), and we will really don’t know much about the interiors of these 2 planets. They may or may not have solid cores. They attained their spherical shapes, also due to gravity, their rotational momentum and their orbital paths.

But as @Pogo said, look up accretion, or accretion disk.

My point is that I truly doubt the earth "emerged" from that Big Bang (or whatever it was) in the form it is today. What do you think? Here is what one website says about this: "The Earth was formed about 4.6 billion years ago, that's 4,600,000,000 years ago. It was formed by collisions of particles in a large cloud of material. Slowly gravity gathered together all these particles of dust and gas and formed larger clumps. These clumps continued to collide and gradually grew bigger and bigger eventually forming the Earth. The earth at this time was very different to how we know it today."

The Earth through time

 

[cladking]

Superstition is not limited to theism. If one believes horoscopes or think four-leaf clovers bring luck, he is also superstitious.

What experiment shows that natural law exists? What experiment shows how life or reality came into existence? What experiment shows there is no free will? What experiment explains why science should change one funeral at a time?

Why do you think only beliefs founded in science have validity and reflect reason? How do you think every hypothesis, every experiment, and beliefs in a Higher Power came into existence without reason and logic?

Why are only YOUR beliefs not superstitious?

 

[cladking]

What experiment shows that natural law exists? What experiment shows how life or reality came into existence? What experiment shows there is no free will? What experiment explains why science should change one funeral at a time?

Why do you think only beliefs founded in science have validity and reflect reason? How do you think every hypothesis, every experiment, and beliefs in a Higher Power came into existence without reason and logic?

Why are only YOUR beliefs not superstitious?

By your own definition;

"a widely held but unjustified belief in supernatural causation leading to certain consequences of an action or event, or a practice based on such a belief"

Belief in natural law is superstitious and living a life based on this belief is superstitious.
Believing in any natural origin of reality or life is superstition.
Believing that it's natural that science changes one funeral at a time or ignoring the fact is superstition.
Believing in every extrapolation of experiment is superstition.
Believing that science arises through genius or human progress is superstition.
Believing that any logical and reasonable process can not end up at truth is superstitious.

Living a life holding onto superstitions will lead into circles; if you believe it will come true. But it's only true for the believer and not anyone else.

You're welcome to your beliefs but I don't accept them. There are far worse things to believe in than science but science isn't supposed to be a belief system. It's not supposed to generate miracles. It's supposed to give insights into reality through an understanding of its experiments in terms of its definitions and axioms.

 

[cladking]

I say formal to mean what scientists do and which is usually just called science. This is also what we all do in our daily life when we gather evidence and then create and test inductions drawn from that experience such as where to get a good Italian meal.

I invent hypotheses and perform experiment. I don't do inductions. I don't believe in induction and even avoid abstraction. I don't believe in taxonomies, categories, and types because they are convenience and mnemonic rather than a reflection of reality.

"Science" isn't some monolith with a single "correct" way to model or pursue it. As a generalist I try to do it all at once but to each his own. I'm concerned with the big picture so to me reductionistic science has always been an attempt to piece together all of reality all at once and create models that grind out the fewest possible anomalies. To each his own. But none of us are justified in going beyond experiment and those with all the answers and the holiest of thous go far beyond experiment and cross over into a land of miracles where everything is known and science only needs to tie up a few loose ends. To such individuals science never changes but merely advances. It is unrealistic. Not seeing the obvious until someone finds it for us and being unable to see that science is continually being revolutionized is believing in miracles; that nature wants us to peek under her dress. It's believing that we can behold nature in all her glorious beauty except for a few remaining bits of garment.

The world is falling apart because of specialization and the belief in greed. We are approaching Tower of Babel two point 0 which will spare not even the greediest or the wealthiest because this time there is no fall back position. There is no viable means to communicate between specialists nor with the uneducated or those who don't speak "science". We're already seeing it with widespread incompetence and an inability to make quality products. It will get worse even if we can fix an educational system already in shambles.

 

[Pogo]

My point is that I truly doubt the earth "emerged" from that Big Bang (or whatever it was) in the form it is today. What do you think? Here is what one website says about this: "The Earth was formed about 4.6 billion years ago, that's 4,600,000,000 years ago. It was formed by collisions of particles in a large cloud of material. Slowly gravity gathered together all these particles of dust and gas and formed larger clumps. These clumps continued to collide and gradually grew bigger and bigger eventually forming the Earth. The earth at this time was very different to how we know it today."

The Earth through time

Only you have ever suggested that the earth emerged directly from the big bang. There is 8 or so billion years of galaxy, star etc formation in between.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

I am not claiming that you are wrong…………I am accusing you for using creative semantics to refute the argument, instead of actually responding to the point made in the argument.

Besides the truth of your claim doesn’t affects any of my claims………..so you are just throwing a dishonest red herring

I am not. I'm trying to be clear on terminology. You should try it sometime.

I agree………….I simply established that there is another possibility (time is infinite)

Based on what did you establish that as a possibility?

So

1 was time caused by nothing

Or

2 did time had a cause

This makes little sense to me.
Causality is a temporal phenomenon. Causes happen before effects. Effects follow after causes.
To ask if time had a cause, is to invoke a phenomenon (time) which didn't exist yet.
If a cause occurs, it means time already exists. The cause must occur at some time and the effect (time, in this case) follows after it.
Do you see the problem?

Also, it's space-time. So to ask about the "cause" of time, is to ask about a cause for the universe itself.
But previously you said that with "natural world", you don't mean just the universe. You mean the universe + whatever else might exists.
And yet you are talking about the "cause" of time / the universe.

See, this is why I try to be clear on terminology. You call it "semantics", I call it "clarity".

Which of the 2 options do you think is more likely to be ture?

I think both options have their own problems and it's a false dichotomy also.

In both, you imply "causes" which require temporal conditions to exist to try and "explain" the origins of temporal conditions.
I have no idea how the universe occurs. And even if a physicist would know and explain it to me, I likely wouldn't understand it.
Whatever happened there, I figure it was something that will end up being very weird and counter-intuitive.

Whenever conditions with extreme gravity, speed, energy and weird time stuff are present, our brains tend to clock out and our intuitive feel for reality is seriously challenged. So I would expect the big bang event to be the very Queen of physics weirdness.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

And so? Would you say according to science or what you think that the earth formed as a big sphere right from the start of its existence rather than a speck from explosion of whatever it was that started as a "Big Bang"? Do you believe the earth in its present size was always there? I mean, of course, without green grass and animals. Just as a big round-ish mass. Did it start as a speck of whatever? I'm asking about the size when it started,not proteins.

This comment is so over the place. You might want to decide what you wish to talk about and not mix all those things up.

 

[ratiocinator]

Ok last try……… if you don’t understand this I will no longer have a conversation with you on this topic.

For example

If the first computer had a cause, then by definition that cause had to be a “non-computer” otherwise it wouldn’t be the first computer………….

If the first computer was caused by another computer, then it can´t be the first computer

up to this point do you agree?.............do you see anything controversial?



Before answering with your nonsense and with your semantic games, please make an honest effort and try to understand …….this is your last chance



..

By that logic if the universe (the natural world) had a cause...

This is the point in your 'argument' where it becomes incoherent.

Causation itself is a part of the universe/natural world. It requires the structure of space-time to make sense. Trying to make it universal is where you are making 19th century, Newtonian assumptions, that we now know are false.

To use your own analogy, you are doing the equivalent of saying that "being a computer" is universally true, so the first material computer must have been made by a magic, non-material computer.

 

[cladking]

Nonsensical. Many theories are tested countless times every minute when anybody uses technology (like posting on this forum). The device you are using to post here uses semiconductors which test quantum mechanics and every time you use GPS, you test both special and general relativity.

This would be a miracle because because God is always proving himself to believers as well. It's a miracle that we each see what we expect and are always being proven right by what we see. A shaman can see the bad karma in his patients and then excise them proving his beliefs in good and bad karma. You don't know why gravity doesn't seem to affect the flow of electrons in conductors or why two identically made transistors have distinctly different characteristics. You don't know why most of it works at all or how these "laws of nature" arose but you believe they all come together to allow "science" to invent and program computers to do your bidding. Can you explain how even religious zealots can both use a computer and understand that it works either scientifically or in terms of God's law? Do you believe that no one who believes in the "supernatural" ever contributed to the invention of computers?

You are looking around and seeing everything only in terms of your beliefs as surely as we all do. You believe in omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence and you see the miracles it generates with every gaze at every single thing. You are missing the anomalies and every single thing of which you are ignorant because your eyes are full of beliefs. The ancients said thing we attend to are in the center of our eyes because that it what appears to observers. What is in the center of our eyes is our beliefs. This only changes with experience and then what we know appears in them and almost like magic. Anyone can understand this paragraph by actually reading it, trying to parse it correctly, and taking it literally. But nobody has the time to consider other peoples' words and certainly not those of a crackpot or fools on or off of hills. You've already been composing a response for several sentences now. Of course the response won't address much of anything at all in this post because this post is not really even being read.

 

[cladking]

You believe in omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence and you see the miracles it generates with every gaze at every single thing.

Most people now days have elevated science to the divine. What other than a "god" can create all these miracles. We see humanity as a God that has created science which operates on genius and omniscience. Just being part of such a powerful species elevates us far beyond any other species and confers to only us consciousness which is also god-like. Imagine being able to know everything about a rabbit by just conjuring the word "rabbit" and now if there's something we've forgotten about "rabbits" all we have to do is ASK SIRI whom knows everything.

We live in a miraculous age where everyone knows everything and can prove it just by saying the word "computer" like some sort of virtual talisman or spoken symbol of our omniscience.

We are truly homo omnisciencis, hear us boast.

 

[cladking]

The ancients said things we attend to are in the center of our eyes because that it what appears to observers.

...And despite their having said such things linguists overlooked it because it doesn't fit their beliefs. Linguists believe ancient people were less evolved, less human, far more ignorant, and wholly superstitious so they see the same sentence and believe the ancients mustta believed that strange things go on inside the eyes of men and gods. Linguists never even noticed there were no words that meant "belief" in ancient writing. They can't notice because linguists' beliefs get in their own eyes and exclude everything else. This is our species! Homo omniscience sees only its beliefs.

Maybe if linguists knew anything about firing air to air missiles or making computers for quadriplegics they could have correctly parsed such a sentence. A poet might have a better chance understanding Ancient Language than a linguist.

We are a different species than anyone who said such a thing.

 

[ratiocinator]

This would be a miracle because because God is always proving himself to believers as well.

It's a miracle that we each see what we expect and are always being proven right by what we see.

Except scientific experiments and observation do not always see what is expected, and it's when we see the unexpected that progress is made. The technology we use now, and the very reliable underlying theories, are the result of a long series of seeing unexpected results and trying to make sense of them.

Can you explain how even religious zealots can both use a computer and understand that it works either scientifically or in terms of God's law?

Science works for everybody, that, along with the fact that it draws conclusions, moves forward, and makes progress, is why it's totally different to religion.

Do you believe that no one who believes in the "supernatural" ever contributed to the invention of computers?

Oh look, a straw man!

 

[firedragon]

Like I said yesterday and numerous other times, no fish ever morphed into an ape. Maybe you should jot that down and you won't need to ask me again.

Where do you believe Tetrapods evolve from? What does Tiktaalik provide insight for?

 

[cladking]

You just keep ignoring the points.

Except scientific experiments and observation do not always see what is expected, and it's when we see the unexpected that progress is made.

Yes!!! ONLY experiment appertains to reality yet with every gaze you see far more than experiment.

What experiment shows that the ability to build and program computers proves every contention made by scientists is correct? What evidence do you have that we understand everything in a computer and how it works? Do you believe there will never be improvements in computers and even revolutionary changes going forward? Do you believe that if we ever understand the fundamental forces of nature that this understanding won't affect how computers work?

What exactly beyond scientific omniscience does the existence computers demonstrate?

 

[leroy]

It would help if you read my posts before 'answering':-

You were told before, none of my claims presupposes Newtonian time, nor excludes relativity, nor any other theory of time