Athiesm and disproving God

[Jayhawker Soule]

In the multiverse "theory" it would be infinite which would encompass all.

Infinite does not equal "encompassing all".

 

[Monk Of Reason]

Infinite does not equal "encompassing all".

According to the theory there would be an infinite number of universes to the point that every possibility is fulfilled. In this case it would be all encompassing. Again this is not a truth claim about the multiverse or that we even have evidence for it. Just simply letting him know that it is possible. Mainly because the whole of his argument is based upon "It has to be god or total luck" which is a false dichotomy.

 

[suncowiam]

CERN May Not Have Found Higgs Boson, But They Found A New Director-General : PHYSICS & MATH : The Science Times

yyyyup

I rather read these articles then having to discern your eloquent quotes. You're actually adding to my point. Science will refute itself when and where needed. It doesn't conclude itself in the face of new evidence and admits to its previous mistakes.

What is your point exactly? Please be specific as opposed to a net that is fine-tuned for a fish...

 

[Erock13]

I believe the obvious evolutionary advantages conferred by promiscuous, immoral behavior over a life of self sacrifice should give pause to reasonable beings considering that altruism may be a phenomenon brought about by evolution.

What you're stuck on is this notion of evolution providing the best possible means of successful reproduction for the individual. This is simply a faulty way of looking at the process. Evolution has no "ultimate" goal, and therefore no "ultimate" survival tactics that are favored more than any other. There are plenty of examples of animals that live almost completely solitary lives and only cooperate with another of its own species to reproduce. The bottom line is that altruism in communal species works, and that's all that matters.

 

[Erock13]

I am fairly certain I could more completely insure that my genes live on by practicing self-interested promiscuity rather than practicing selfless sacrifice, but maybe I'm just weird for thinking that.

Also, I should point out that "altruism" and "self-sacrifice" even operate at the molecular level--it's called apoptosis. Cells literally commit cell suicide in order to benefit the larger organism; this is done for many reasons, for example there are too many cells of a particular kind, or the organism is changing (think tadpole to frog). This is a basic type of "altruism," granted, but its evolutionary implications are pretty clear. Those living things, operating as a community, benefit (and thus survive and reproduce) when acting in concert, even to such extent as for some components to kill themselves for the greater good. Your focus is too much on the individual. Compare the number of progenies from a single subject to the total progenies from a large community; now, the single subject could spend its time mating profusely, but if it were to self-sacrifice for the continued survival and well-being of the larger community so that the other individuals could procreate...well, do the math.

 

[Harikrish]

Also, I should point out that "altruism" and "self-sacrifice" even operate at the molecular level--it's called apoptosis. Cells literally commit cell suicide in order to benefit the larger organism; this is done for many reasons, for example there are too many cells of a particular kind, or the organism is changing (think tadpole to frog). This is a basic type of "altruism," granted, but its evolutionary implications are pretty clear. Those living things, operating as a community, benefit (and thus survive and reproduce) when acting in concert, even to such extent as for some components to kill themselves for the greater good. Your focus is too much on the individual. Compare the number of progenies from a single subject to the total progenies from a large community; now, the single subject could spend its time mating profusely, but if it were to self-sacrifice for the continued survival and well-being of the larger community so that the other individuals could procreate...well, do the math.

Altruism is the strongest force behind Islam. It is what makes Muslims sacrifice themselves for the good of Islam.

 

[Ouroboros]

Also, I should point out that "altruism" and "self-sacrifice" even operate at the molecular level--it's called apoptosis. Cells literally commit cell suicide in order to benefit the larger organism; this is done for many reasons, for example there are too many cells of a particular kind, or the organism is changing (think tadpole to frog). This is a basic type of "altruism," granted, but its evolutionary implications are pretty clear. Those living things, operating as a community, benefit (and thus survive and reproduce) when acting in concert, even to such extent as for some components to kill themselves for the greater good. Your focus is too much on the individual. Compare the number of progenies from a single subject to the total progenies from a large community; now, the single subject could spend its time mating profusely, but if it were to self-sacrifice for the continued survival and well-being of the larger community so that the other individuals could procreate...well, do the math.

Also, the fact that every life has an end benefits the overall process. Cells have a limited lifetime, and cancer is usually a sign of cells where this mechanism doesn't work, i.e. cancer is an example of "eternal life." The self-destruct code has stopped working in them, and you have uncontrolled growth.

 

[Guy Threepwood]

I rather read these articles then having to discern your eloquent quotes. You're actually adding to my point. Science will refute itself when and where needed. It doesn't conclude itself in the face of new evidence and admits to its previous mistakes.

What is your point exactly? Please be specific as opposed to a net that is fine-tuned for a fish...

Eddington's point, and The Higgs was a multi billion $ example- can't get much more specific than that..

 

[Monk Of Reason]

Altruism is the strongest force behind Islam. It is what makes Muslims sacrifice themselves for the good of Islam.

Misguided altruism is worse than no altruism.

 

[Monk Of Reason]

Scientists Raise Doubts About Higgs Boson Discovery
Huffington Post-Nov 10, 2014
particles, UPI ...

So, the Higgs boson might not have been discovered after all
The i100-Nov 9, 2014
Techni-Higgs: European Physicists Cast Doubt on Discovery of ...
Sci-News.com-Nov 10, 2014
Minuscule mistake? Discovered Higgs boson may appear to be a ...
RT-Nov 9, 2014
Techni-Higgs: European Physicists Cast Doubt on Discovery of ...
Sci-News.com-Nov 10, 2014
CERN may not have discovered elusive Higgs Boson: study

Particle discovered by CERN may not be elusive Higgs Boson
Zee News-Nov 7, 2014


Exactly. The folks who bought the net are the only ones who think they caught the fish it was designed for.. That was the point was it not?

Misunderstanding of the science behind it is showing.

First point is that even if they had not found the "HIggs Boson" it would have been revolutionary. They found new particles that were never before seen that had similar characteristics as hey had predicted. However there was several things that were not what they thought it would be. This means that some changes would have to be made. So they "found it" but it is different than what had been originally predicted. To what degree is another matter. Some scientists have questioned if it is the higgs boson or something completely different or if the differences were as great as what they had measured should it even be called the "higgs boson" anymore but some new name and discovery?

It gives them no profit or motive to lie about not finding it if they found something else of potentially greater value. Undermining what we know and finding something deeper is what science is all about. Even your article was praising the scientists and their incredible discoveries.

 

[Prophet]

I used the word "real" differently from the above use of "realism". I'm opining that morality is the result of evolution (genetics & culture). It's "real" in the sense that Boyle's Law is.....we observe it.

This comparison falls flat. Exactly when, in your opinion, did Boyle's Law "emerge"? Bid Boyle believe that this law suddenly came into existence upon his discovery or some other point in the past, or, rather, did Boyle form his law with an inkling of scientific realism? The correct answer is certainly the latter. Boyle believed that the relationship between temperature, pressure, and volume of gases has ALWAYS been as his law denotes.

That's not what I mean. I use "absolute morality" to describe morals which are true everywhere & always. Perhaps "moral universalism" would be a better phrase, eh?

Very well.

Why must there be absolute morality? (I can see that it would be a wonderful thing, provided it was my morality.)

It would be very odd to see hedonistic people ever claiming moral superiority over selfless people, but it is completely normal to see the inverse. Why is this? If morality is merely relative, from the perspective of the hedonist, he should find himself morally superior to the one who practices self-sacrifice as the hedonist follows his relative hedonistic morality much more close than does a self-sacrificing being.

There is a common misconception that moral relativists would tolerate all possible moralities. Au contraire! I can loathe Nazis as much as you do. The difference is that I don't see them as violating some absolutely true & inerrant morality.

Yet, you believing morality to be a mere social construct that might have been made any other possible way SHOULD empathize with the Nazi position. Sure, you might have to exterminate the Nazi pestilence, but while doing so you would be in no good philosophical position to justifying loathing them as your moral ideas are just a matter of taste and are no truer than theirs. You should not be able to blame them any more for murder than for the color of their hair.

Let's consider another evil group...Al Qaeda. They definitely believe in an absolutely true morality, it leads them to commit heinous acts. I, a moral relativist, view those moral absolutists as wrong. I bet you do too....which points to the problematic question: Which absolutely true morality is the true one?

You, a proclaimed moral relativist, viewing people who don't share your views as wrong sounds a lot like something coming from a moral absolutist. Rather than characterizing Al Qaeda as a group who commits universally heinous acts, you should be viewing their conduct as relatively good from from their own perspective and relatively bad from yours.

On the surface, they are different enuf. But dig deeper, & we find that they have great variety within. If there is a universally true morality, which one is it?

The golden rule of treating others as you would treat yourself runs through every religion you named.

To find something likely shared by all does not defeat the claim that there are major differences. Some prohibit women from formal education. Some condone abuse of lower classes. Some condone abuse of infidels. Some....you get the picture.

All of which you should empathize with as merely different from you as you are a moral relativist. Rather, you appeal to the universally "heinous" nature of some religious beings actions like a moral absolutist.

What you might see as a post hoc rescue, I view as improved understanding. This is hardly a criticism of evolution's legitimacy, because many scientific theories become more complex as anomalies are discovered. Would you say that the theory of gravity is bogus because Newton's failed to handle Mercury's orbital precession? Is general relativity to be dismissed as merely the result of being "forced to become complex"? Of course not. Newton's laws worked well enuf in limited circumstances. Special relativity worked well enuf, despite limitations. And general relativity works better. But it isn't the theory of everything either.
Science is a work in progress. Consider all theories as being useful in their predictive value & insight, but they all stand ready to be replaced by better ones as new observations are made. They aren't "true"....they're just useful.

When Darwin wrote evolution, it was a passive force which shaped species by working over long periods of time through the eventual deaths of individuals who possessed inferior survival traits or "survival of the fittest". Passive evolution as written by Darwin was unable to care less which beings, traits, or species persisted. When you folks felt it was necessary to pervert evolution to explain the concept of moral perception, evolution was forced to become an active force which picks and chooses the traits which will make certain species stronger.

Your version of evolution is a God concept.

 

[Prophet]

Language is another one. If everyone is only dependent on his or her own survival, there's no need to communicate. We know that animals communicate, and species that do, survived in numbers.

The ability to communicate SHOULD arise from "survival of the fittest" as the inability to communicate would be a detriment to individual evolutionary fitness.

This is not a "perverted picture" of Darwin's theory. Darwin's theory has been modified and adjusted many times since he proposed it. Some of the articles I linked you show what Darwin didn't understand and what we now understand. One of the articles is referring to mathematical evidence. Another to experimental evidence from research using robots.

The evolution of traits that benefit whole species has been researched for the past 50 years, and there's much written about it, only if you take some time looking for it.

Well, I went to the trouble of reading two of the articles you posted, and stopped reading when the second article proclaimed that a conclusion reached by the first article was completely wrong. That's when I knew you were just linking whatever your google search brought up that appeared to agree with you.

Again, if you wish to quote a certain article you claim agreeance with, I'll address it, but also, again, I feel no duty to address "research" you won't specifically ascribe to.

 

[Guy Threepwood]

Misunderstanding of the science behind it is showing.

First point is that even if they had not found the "HIggs Boson" it would have been revolutionary. They found new particles that were never before seen that had similar characteristics as hey had predicted. However there was several things that were not what they thought it would be. This means that some changes would have to be made. So they "found it" but it is different than what had been originally predicted. To what degree is another matter. Some scientists have questioned if it is the higgs boson or something completely different or if the differences were as great as what they had measured should it even be called the "higgs boson" anymore but some new name and discovery?

It gives them no profit or motive to lie about not finding it if they found something else of potentially greater value. Undermining what we know and finding something deeper is what science is all about. Even your article was praising the scientists and their incredible discoveries.

Forbes: (Not) Finding The Higgs Boson Cost $13.25 Billion

You can't think of anything of greater value that could have been done with 13.25 Billion?
That's a lot of profit for somebody

how much to verify the new 'Technicolor forces' don't really exist either?

At least static, steady state, big crunch, M theory, string theory and multiverses were cheap guesses

but we have even more expensive guesses than Higgs failing also, record cold today, 1 foot of snow, so I must go plow drive, earliest I've ever had to do that.. . just saying...

 

[Monk Of Reason]

Forbes: (Not) Finding The Higgs Boson Cost $13.25 Billion

You can't think of anything of greater value that could have been done with 13.25 Billion?

how much to verify the new 'Technicolor forces' don't really exist either?

At least static, steady state, big crunch, M theory, string theory and multiverses were cheap guesses

but we have even more expensive guesses than Higgs falling flat also, record cold today, 1 foot of snow, just saying...

Except it wasn't simply falling flat. And even if it HAD we have tremendous amounts of new information about the sub-atomic world than we ever have before. We were learning something new every day for a while there. I think it is still true today.

BTW the estimate of the cost of just the US in the middle east since 2001...is roughly 4-6 trillion dollars. So that is worth roughly 300-500 times more than what we spent FINDING the Higgs Boson.

 

[Ouroboros]

The ability to communicate SHOULD arise from "survival of the fittest" as the inability to communicate would be a detriment to individual evolutionary fitness.

You do know that "survival of the fittest" was a phrase invented by Herbert Spencer and not Darwin. And you do know that it's not a phrase that is fitting for how the natural selection works. It's actually misleading.

Also, you do know that the theory of evolution has changed and evolved too the last 150 years. Many scientists don't even like to call it "Darwinism" anymore because of how much it has changed.

Well, I went to the trouble of reading two of the articles you posted, and stopped reading when the second article proclaimed that a conclusion reached by the first article was completely wrong.

Uh. I didn't see that. You mean the article brought up some scientists who had a different view? That's called balanced reporting, give both sides. But even so, you claimed there are no explanations at all, and I gave you several articles with explanations, and even if they were conflicting, it's not the same as "no explanation." Too many explanations or conflicting explanations are still not the same as no explanation.

That's when I knew you were just linking whatever your google search brought up that appeared to agree with you.

Well, you didn't even bother Google any of them. I could give you book references if you want to, or scientific articles from JStor or ProQuest but then you have to pay for them.

Again, if you wish to quote a certain article you claim agreeance with, I'll address it, but also, again, I feel no duty to address "research" you won't specifically ascribe to.

What I was giving you was one or more explanations to contradict your claim that there are no explanation.

 

[Bunyip]

This is the second time Bunyip has referenced vague studies that make him right and me wrong, completely regardless of the actual mechanics employed by evolution. While self sacrifice and altruism will no doubt "help" a social species, evolution cares very little about what "helps" species but rather what kills individuals.



What Bunyip is actually saying here can be paraphrased, "No, you're wrong, because I'm right, and everyone agrees with me." This is what fundamentalism is in a nutshell.

LOL No little buddy - no need to get all paranoid.

Your confusion is that you think evolution is about the individual - it isn't. Evolution is about the species.

 

[Revoltingest]

This comparison falls flat. Exactly when, in your opinion, did Boyle's Law "emerge"?

Perhaps your use of "emerge" is unrelated to "emergent" in this context.

Emergence: A process whereby larger patterns arise through interactions among smaller or simpler thingies that themselves don't exhibit such properties.

But Boyle's law would've been noticeable as soon after the big bang as particles formed.

It would be very odd to see hedonistic people ever claiming moral superiority over selfless people, but it is completely normal to see the inverse. Why is this? If morality is merely relative, from the perspective of the hedonist, he should find himself morally superior to the one who practices self-sacrifice as the hedonist follows his relative hedonistic morality much more close than does a self-sacrificing being.

People, believers & nons alike, are always claiming moral superiority over others. Everyone prefers their own personal morality. Why bring this up?

Yet, you believing morality to be a mere social construct that might have been made any other possible way SHOULD empathize with the Nazi position. Sure, you might have to exterminate the Nazi pestilence, but while doing so you would be in no good philosophical position to justifying loathing them as your moral ideas are just a matter of taste and are no truer than theirs. You should not be able to blame them any more for murder than for the color of their hair.

- I've clearly said that morality is both genetic & cultural, therefore not purely a social construct.
- You reason that I should sympathize with Nazis. But I don't. The problem must be in the 'reasoning'.

You, a proclaimed moral relativist, viewing people who don't share your views as wrong sounds a lot like something coming from a moral absolutist.

It might sound the same, but it isn't. Even we relativists can have strongly held beliefs/preferences. But we know they aren't absolutely true.

Rather than characterizing Al Qaeda as a group who commits universally heinous acts, you should be viewing their conduct as relatively good from from their own perspective and relatively bad from yours.

Exactly! I do view it thus.

The golden rule of treating others as you would treat yourself runs through every religion you named.

It does not. Think of treatment of untouchables in India.

All of which you should empathize with as merely different from you as you are a moral relativist. Rather, you appeal to the universally "heinous" nature of some religious beings actions like a moral absolutist.

But you're wrong....I don't empathize with them. Once again, my relative morals are still strongly held...I just don't call them "THE TRUTH".

When Darwin wrote evolution, it was a passive force which shaped species by working over long periods of time through the eventual deaths of individuals who possessed inferior survival traits or "survival of the fittest". Passive evolution as written by Darwin was unable to care less which beings, traits, or species persisted. When you folks felt it was necessary to pervert evolution to explain the concept of moral perception, evolution was forced to become an active force which picks and chooses the traits which will make certain species stronger.

Evolution is no more active than it ever was. But it is fleshed out with much more systemic elegance, eg, DNA.

Your version of evolution is a God concept.

No....it's a stochastic process with a reproductive fitness function concept.

 

[Cephus]

who wrote the code, nature or a code writer?

So far as we have any evidence, nature. Until there is evidence for a code writer, there's no reason to assume one exists.

 

[Prophet]

This is false. It is about what genes get passed down. If we have someone with the altruistic gene who assists his family's survival and sacrifices himself for his children rather than let his children die then those children carry on his altruistic gene while he himself does not. Once you have a group of ind individuals rather than a single individual with these genes then we have a huge advantage over a group that does not have an altruistic gene.

Yes, and then if you have one hedonistic, manipulative being infiltrate a group of altruistic, trusting beings, is it not obvious that this individual receives the greatest advantage of anyone, gaining evolutionary fitness from everyone who gives freely and offering them nothing in return?

That is how it evolves. Evolution is never about the "individual". It is always about the "species". The only case this isn't true is when you have the original mutant and his survival. In fact there are probably a countless number of great genes that could have survived except by chance the mutant who first mutated these genes may have died prior to producing offspring.

Evolution, as a passive force will allow traits that are a survival disadvantage to individuals to die off, in the long run shaping the species. Evolution, as a God concept will allow beings of lesser evolutionary fitness to overtake those of greater because this version of evolution does not work passively but rather has aims and desires for the development of species.

 

[Prophet]

I think I know what you're looking for.

Examples of other traits in nature where the individuals interests have to be put lower than the interest of the group. Swarms of birds, I've seen it personally how they can fight off and tire out predators by acting in unison but for the risk of the fringe individuals in the actual swarm. Schools of fish, same thing. Herds of horses (and other animals). Antibodies in our body sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the rest of the body. Ants are another example. And many others. Then you have the opposite of the spectrum where sharks, lions, and predators in general act only in self-interest, but even some animals will hunt together and share the food. Some animals let their young eat first, not the strongest. And so on.

This is not what I asked for. I asked for examples OTHER than morality of evolution giving rise to traits that benefit the species and hurting the individual.... and you supplied me with examples of birds, fish, horses, antibodies, ants, etc. acting MORALLY.