Ouroboros
Coincidentia oppositorum
So then you agree that Jesus wasn't the son of God since 2/3rds of the world is not Christian?
And that evolution is true since 99.999% of scientists are convinced that evolution is true based on the evidence?
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can you proove there isn't a deity?
- Thread starter kloth
- Start date
And that evolution is true since 99.999% of scientists are convinced that evolution is true based on the evidence?
1robin
Christian/Baptist
What? Why are you placing my claim into a context it was not made in nor is applicable to anything.
1. Jesus could have been just as much the son of God even if no one believed it. Perception does not determine truth.
2. Perception in large enough numbers of those who have met the criteria is used constantly as indicative of truth but never as a creator of truth.
3. There is no arbitrary line above which a claim is true based on it. It is indicative only.
4. Only the data set containing those that have met the criteria to experience x are applicable. So, strictly you may only use those with actual faith as a data set.
5. In the exact same way a data set including non-astronauts would not be meaningful in explaining what lunar gravity fells like those that have never attempted faith in God have no input on experiencing God. The Bible says you must diligently seek him to experience him. The data set would include al who have done so.
6. However let's pretend we had all done that. Is 1/4th - 1/3rd of the population answer in the affirmative capable of being dismissed. If even a single person was being truthful and accurate then God exists. IN billions making the claim even you could not insist no sincere and accurate claims are likely.
I have no idea what evolution is doing in this discussion. I believe evolution occurred specifically because many scientists say it did. The evidence is hit and miss. I doubt 99.9999% of them believe it but enough do to make it a claim that is not dismissible in the exact same way most of those that meet the criteria and many of those in general claimed to have experienced God makes it non-dismissible and indicative of truth.
Since no one will actually answer this I will give it again to you and see what you do. It is a very good analogy to theological experience claims. Will you actually answer it?
You go to an unfamiliar town with 1 million citizens.
1. 300 - 400 thousand of them claimed to have met a man named Bill. He was a great moral teacher and his teachings had inspired those people to build hospitals, feed the towns poor, and become a more generous and content group of citizens.
2. Another 300 - 400 thousand said they had not met Bill but had enough evidence to conclude Bill existed (even though their descriptions of him may differ a bit in details from those that had met Bill). They all had a very common core of belief about Bill.
3. 200 - 300 thousand said they never met Bill and did not believe he ever existed.
1. Which group has the most and best evidence to make a decision about Bill's existence upon?
2. Is the evidence more reliable that Bill existed or that he did not?
Ouroboros
Coincidentia oppositorum
It's still hearsay and secondhand accounts.
If it's so important for me to believe in Bill without having to meet him myself, I'd ask for more evidence than word of mouth.
It's still just hearsay. I don't consider hearsay very strong "evidence." Hard evidence is required if the importance of converting me to a Bill-believer is so big.
AmbiguousGuy
Well-Known Member
Wow. Still claiming no one has answered it, even though I answered it quite directly and made you retreat from my arguments?
Goodness. I hope you're just having memory problems.
FunctionalAtheist
Hammer of Reason
No I can not! Neither Zues, nor Thor. FSM or HailBop. I can't disprove the existence of Alah or Jehovah, neither Baal nor Dionyses.
Thing is, when I decide to stop believing in any of them, I find it hard to find any criteria that dismisses any of them, that doesn't dismiss all of them.
1robin
Christian/Baptist
That is not part of the questions. I asked which group is in the best position to know the actuality of Bill?
You as all others on your side have done and sidestepped the question in it's entirety and introduced an answer to a question not asked. I did not ask you how good you thought their testimony is, I did not ask you what would be required for you personally to believe, and I did not ask you about whether their testimony was all that was available. I asked given only those facts which group is best qualified to know. The perfect consistency in not answering the question strongly suggest the obvious answer is so ideologically abhorrent that simple deductions will not be conceded if inconvenient.
That is a reasonable analogy to supernatural experience claims and very conservative. It does not involve any questions about what you need or desire. If you could have stomached answering this question I could have set up an analogy to illustrate the quality of evidence or what could reasonably be expected as evidence. However with this level of aversion to inconvenient answers there would be no point. Quite discouraging.
Yeah the exact same kind of testimony used in virtually every court room, every day, in every nation for thousands of years to determine truth when life and death is on the line. I did not ask you to evaluate how strong or what the quality of the evidence was. I gave you three very similar analogies to claims of faith and asked you to pick what the most evidenced conclusion would be. Even if a billion claims to experience was weak it was certainly far stronger than claims from silence. yet you could not answer or would not but again avoided the whole inconvenient but obvious conclusion. Not only did you refuse to answer the question you sided with the group that had the least access (in fact no access) to Bill's reality which has no justification possible outside a preference driven conclusion.
I asked my questions specifically to eliminate these exact obfuscations and still could not get an answer. Is it any wonder you do not find the Bible convincing?
When it will not be admitted that 2 + 2 = 4 if 4 is inconsistent with the narrative then on what basis is resolution about less obvious evidence possible.
1robin
Christian/Baptist
People have replied in various ways. None of them addressed what was asked. In fact the only thing not appealed to was what I actually asked. It is not a hard question. It is not an ambiguous question. It is a simple deductive exercise with specific choices that has a rational and obvious conclusions. I was actually using the first question to see if a true but inconvenient fact could be acknowledged. The second part was the real question but no less obvious and sound. So far I have had no one actually give the obvious answer or supply an actual reason it would have not been obvious. I will simply file this away wit the other ten thousand reasons to conclude a lack of faith is a preferred not a reasoned potion guarded jealously. You actually answer the question and then we can have the discussion you attempt to have here without actually answering here or anywhere else.
AmbiguousGuy
Well-Known Member
That's a bunch of gobbledegook to avoid admitting that I answered your question quite directly and clearly.
If Bill is invisible, then the skeptics are the best people to decide.
If you're unhappy with this answer, clarify whyso. Ask me a followup.
But please don't claim again that no one has answered your question.
Ouroboros
Coincidentia oppositorum
And then you asked: "2. Is the evidence more reliable that Bill existed or that he did not?" Which is not a question about if they feel they have a better position to know of Bill, but rather if the evidence for Bill existence can be based on their knowledge.
Along with corroborating physical evidence that's not hearsay or eyewitness. It's usually not enough just with people's say-so.
I was Christian for 30 years. I used to find it convincing, but not anymore.
With that being said, I do find the Bible to contain certain types of stories and myths that are very explanatory and interesting from a spiritual point of view.
Well... whatever. I think we won't get any closer to understanding each other. Peace out. :beach:
Runewolf1973
Materialism/Animism
The reason that I am convinced there is no deity is the fact that there is no need for one. Why would a god bother with us if we didn't need it? Nature has the capacity to do everything it needs to do all of it's own accord.
Another reason (more personal) is that my girlfriend is one of those extremely rare individuals that have the ability so see and talk to the spirits of the dead...quite literally. She has a true Sixth Sense. She found out she had this ability shortly after one of her best friends in high school comitted suicide. Her friend actually came to her after she had died, but before my girlfriend (not at the time) had even known she had died. What a way to find out your best friend just died. This is not a psychic ability, she does not "sense" them, nor is this a phsychological disorder (she's not mentally disturbed in any way) she literally sees them and can talk to them and has demonstrated this to me many times. She has long since been over he friend's death, but she still sees spirits. She knows they are not just illusions because she sees them only after someone has died or was killed. She sees their wounds or tell-tale signs of what caused their death. They come to her when they are confused or lost. They are in fact alll around us, even animal spirits but very few people ever actually see them. Many people can "sense" them, but very few people can literally see them and have actual intelligent conversations with them. Yes, they are inrelligent, no differently that normal "living" humans, and they can generally remember their past lives or how they died, but many are too confused to even care or understand. Why I believe there is no God is because that was in fact one of the the first questions I asked her when I found out she had this ability... Have any of those spirits ever seen or encountered God? She asked them... The overwhelming response was NO. As far as the "dead" were concerned, none of them have ever seen or encountered God or anything even remotely so...and some of them have been searching for a very loooooooong time.Those spirits do go somewhere though...they in fact cross over into another life. Whatever they are does not cease to exist, but the transformation of crossing over takes a heavy toll on the soul and they virtually lose all previous life information. That's why some are reluctant or afraid to cross over, they don't want to lose their previous memories or previous life's ties, but it is inevitable. It's actually much like a cleansing of sorts. The soul or spirit is cleansed of all previous life ties before it enters a new body. So no, I do not believe in a God, but I do believe in an afterlife of sorts.
The way I see it, the spirit world does exist, but remains a natural unknown to science. It is completely understandable that others might not believe it though. I don't believe in what I would consider the "supernatural" however, and that to me means God.
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nilsz
bzzt
Your story illustrates why I am sceptical of accounts of personal experiences with God.
Runewolf1973
Materialism/Animism
Funny... Even the "dead" don't believe there is a God.
Enai de a lukal
Well-Known Member
Unless and until you actually provide an argument rather than a name, this is not an argument, it is a fallacy, and even if you were right that others use such an appeal in other venues, this simply means that it is fallacious when they do it as well. "So-and-so says X, therefore X" is a fallacious argument, despite your refusal to acknowledge the existence of quite a few undisputedly fallacious argument forms.
Which part was false? Is physics not a technical field? Are you qualified in it? Do the objections of laymen to technical aspects in a given field carry any weight? Looks like a pretty good narrative to me.
Yes or no- do you have a degree in physics?
Right; this is basic logic. Validity is a property of the form of an argument, which does not concern the truth or falsity of any of the premises. And arguments cannot really be true or false, that's a category mistake- an argument can be valid, and it can have premises/a conclusion which are true, but it cannot itself be true or false any more than the number 4 can have a hair color.
Basic deductive logic is not "fringe science". You're really grasping now.
Well no, not if it is a deductive argument; an invalid deductive argument is just a bad argument. A valid deductive argument needn't be a good one, but a good one must be valid.
On the other hand, inductive arguments are not deductively valid, and there are good inductive arguments. But the causal argument is not an inductive argument, so this is basically just a footnote.
Validity is a necessary condition for soundness. All sound arguments are valid, and no invalid arguments are sound. If the causal argument is not valid, it cannot be sound either. (a sound argument is one that is valid, and whose premises are true)
Give some examples then.
Validity is basically a procedural property- as I said, its a formal property of arguments or their structure, not their content. In other words, this is an entirely toothless objection.
Definitions are not generally considered true or false, they just are. If they don't suit us, we modify or reject them. And that just is what the definition of validity is in the field of logic. Asking if it is true doesn't make any sense (we could never know whether the definition of "valid" was true, i.e. accurately described valid things, unless we already had a definition of "valid", and so on ad infinitum)
Still confusing validity and truth. Hopefully this has been solved.
For every political, news report, online article, etc., that uses stats there are a dozen studies published in countless journals across the sciences. The problem is that the social & behavioral sciences (as wonderful as they were at developing experimental paradigms) did not ever have a lot of researchers with a background in mathematics (with the exception of economists, only even they are the butt of jokes as being failed mathematicians). In fact, the emphasis on the logic of experimental design was partially motivated by the restrictive capacity to employ sophisticated statistical techniques.
That has all changed. Across the board, from the mathematically disinclined researchers in the medical sciences to the sociologists and psychologists, we find increases in graduates as well as (and partly because of) new research areas. This increase in specialization (among other things) drives up the amount of information required to learn more central to a field than research methods (let alone statistical analysis or models used in these methods). However, most importantly the need to know mathematics to employ extremely sophisticated statistical analysis on high-dimensional data sets has become a matter of supreme ease: simply hit the right buttons or input a few commands in SPSS, SAS, STATISTCA, MATLAB, etc. So we have an increase in research fields corresponding to an increase in research corresponding to an increase in publications, but none of this is correlated with an increase in time spent on the logic behind data analysis. Instead, undergrads and graduate students learn just enough to recognize general statistical methods given some general type of research question (i.e., which buttons to press).
I've addressed problems with the research behind religiosity claims (including the misuse of stats) on this very forum (e.g., Cognitive & Personality Tests or How to Publish Pseudoscience in Mainstream Journals). That doesn't make what you said a matter of statistics.
Did you go to college before the widespread use of statistical software packages? Because I tutored those in college (before I taught; I got paid a small amount by my university as an undergrad to tutor my peers) who knew the least about stats, and this generally meant an equal or lesser capacity to abuse them. I can teach undergrads to churn out highly technical data analyses in a few days. That's because it involves pressing buttons, not understanding anything.
Ok, but this isn't statistical inference, modelling, or analysis.
Great. So what statistics did you use here?
Statistics are not, in general, used to ever demonstrate the existence of entities, but processes, phenomena, tendencies, etc. Witness testimony is so problematic that the literature on analyses of structured interviews (like cognitive interviews) is filled to the brim with cautionary tales, stringent conditions and methods, and in general how to use as a secondary method.
On the other hand, the existence of the countless ways that all humans are subject to experiential biases is vast indeed.
No, you'd find Big Foot. Witness testimony is for historians and journalists, not statistical analyses to indicate the existence of an entity by anybody.
The CRU at East Anglia and NASA are probably the main producers of global temperature records, including temperature data in the Antarctica. The problem is that spatial coverage even in specific land regions is irregular, and thus we require more advanced analyses of measurement data than e.g., simple averages. For places like Antarctica in particular, measures of ice-sheet growth and decrease are taken often (in various forms, including satellite which, since the 1970s has also been used for hemispheric temperature records thanks to Christy & Spencer's award winning work using MSU to give us a locally unbiased measure of temperature).
That's what we use to find out Antarctic temperatures. Not witnesses.
If these are humans, than they are necessarily fewer than the number of humans who have frequently experienced perceptual/cognitive biases (i.e., experiential biases/misperceptions). Because whatever your number is, the frequency for biased interpretations of experiences is 100% among humans.
No, it isn't.
1robin
Christian/Baptist
No you did everything possible, and threw everything you had, and amplified ambiguities that do not exist in an attempt not to answer the simplest and relevant question I could think of. It had two choices available, you selected neither of them. The next multiple choice test you receive and do not select any of the answers will be returned with a F. Tell them you answered them and see what happens. I did not say anything about Bill being invisible and even if he were skeptics or those that did not meet the criteria to have experienced Bill (diligently and persistently seeking him) are the absolute worst possible group to use. That is a false conclusion made, given an invented and non-existent premise.
There is little justification for additional questions if the most simplistic was avoided at all costs.
However let me illustrate how even your distortion was wrong. Dark matter cannot be detected by any known instrument or process. yet it has become a virtual certainty based on only the word of a very small portion of the scientific community. Now would the tiny fragment of scientists who are trained to look for things like dark matter and it's theoretical effects or a cult somewhere who refused to believe in dark matter be the best source to determine if it exists? No matter what you do, the one thing you will not do is choose what you should alone. If by some miracle you actually choose the obvious answer you will do everything in your poser to make it not applicable to faith. Have fun, I think that is your singular goal anyway.
1robin
Christian/Baptist
Hold the phone. The first question was designed to see if an obvious answer would be given even if it was inconvenient for your position. Once that test was failed the rest became unimportant. However I am bored so let's see about the rest anyway. I asked no question about how any group felt. I asked simply, if given two groups one that met the criteria to have experienced X and one that did not. Then if a vast majority who had met the criteria had also experienced X, then the best explanation for the data set we have is that X exists unless some very very good reason exists to discount the mountain of data we have.
This is a quality of evidence or threshold issue. It was not what was asked. Like most decisions in life faith requires we make informed decisions without perfect knowledge. I was not asking what amount of evidence would convince and extremely skeptical person. I asked given my data sets what is the best conclusion based on them. This is exactly what we do in almost every other decision we make. We take the information we have (which is almost never enough to know for certain) and make informed decisions. That was not a claim about evidence sufficiency. I can make an analogy that would include that but without even being able to get admissions to straight forward and obvious questions there would be little point in making more complex analogies.
On what basis do you claim to have been a Christian? Intellectual consent to an intellectual or historical proposition is not the basis for being a Christian nor was it the basis for my analogy. My analogy deals strictly with experience claims. I can debate anything you wish but what I actually brought up was not what you are discussing. I certainly sympathize with the difficulties of maintaining faith based on intellectual agreement in the modern world. That is why Christian faith is supposed to be based of experience with God primarily and doctrinal agreement secondary. The former is permanent, the latter is subject to the winds of change even if perfectly true.
I would argue that the Bible is the most textually accurate work of ancient history, of any kind, many times over. I would argue there is more textual evidence for Christ than any figure in ancient history of any type. I would also argue that is not what my faith is based on. My faith is based on having experienced the born again supernatural event described by billions and in the Gospels. I can argue either but I was not doing so here. I was first giving a test for bias and then making a very relevant analogy concerning experience.
That is certainly a strange attitude to have in a religious education site. Unfortunately it is al too true. BTW I understand you perfectly. I just do not agree and I think the evidence supports my disagreement and my analogy illustrates it.
1robin
Christian/Baptist
1. Nature has the capacity to end your life.
2. Nothing in nature has the capacity to overcome that fact.
3. If life after death is of any interest to you nature will not help.
4. Nature can also never provide moral truth.
5. Nature can never supply a reason for it's own existence.
6. Nature alone cannot even explain the reality we see around us every day.
Nature is also a human contrivance. The term does not change anything about reality. Even if you improperly used the word nature to describe things that natural law cannot it has no bearing on whether those things exist or not. Angels have the same probability of existence no matter what label or category you place them in.
BTW the Bible strictly forbids consulting the dead. I am not sure how it works. My best guess is that demons are impersonating the dead and using the trust of that relationship to deceive people. I know this every story I have heard about this kind of stuff ends very badly.
1robin
Christian/Baptist
Now that is invalid logic. Would the speculative an unproven nature of claims to bigfoot mean that all claims to a new species are invalidated?
There is always a very small fringe group that will claim to have experienced anything. However when those numbers start climbing into the hundreds of millions they become impossible to dismiss. There is not even a meaningful fraction of those that claim to have experienced God that claim to have talked with the dead or whatever. You cannot lump them all together and condemn them at one time. I as many Christians (especially those Catholics who's job it is to validate miracles) are extremely skeptical. I rule out probably 90% of claims before hand. However that still leaves such an enormous number that I can find no fault with to indicate there is truth behind their claims.
1robin
Christian/Baptist
I doubt there is anyway to know that with any reliability. However if those that had no faith in life die they are eternally separated from not only God but even the things of God. Their lack of faith might be easily explained if the claim was ever reliable to begin with. I think your were mainly being rhetorical but thought I would chime in anyway.
AmbiguousGuy
Well-Known Member
Yikes. You're serious. Yikes.
Yeah, I had a teacher once who asked on a test whether the moon was made of A) cheese or B) flour dough.
When I answered that I thought the moon was made of rock, she gave me an 'F' and insisted that I was 'amplifying ambiguities that do not exist in an attempt not to answer the simplest and relevant question I could think of."
Then she went around boasting that no one had ever answered her simple test question.
Weird world. Weird people in it.