Do atheists believe in magnetism?

[Polymath257]

That approach assumes that God wants to jump our hoops.

Not at all. I am simply saying what is required to say that there is evidence for *anything*, whether it is a God or not.

If God does not want to 'jump through our hoops', then there can be no knowledge of God. In particular, there is no reason to even suspect that there is a God at all.

 

[Sheldon]

Well those who don’t look won’t find. Those who have found may not be able to force others to believe (or bother trying), but we know.

This claim keeps being reasserted, but fails to address the fact it is firstly an unevidenced and subjective claim, and secondly seems to validate very different religions and deities, and appears to any neutral observer therefore to be demonstrably biased and unreliable.

Beyond that the method is not reliably testable, does not present any objective data, and appears to be unfalsifiable.

 

[Polymath257]

trying to control for a lot of factors is doable in some sciences, but not others. I can’t control for every variable at a high school yet we do studies in that setting.

A person believing or not is a major factor. We would not expect the same results of people rating their experience with a political speech when they have differing views.


Expecting the believer and non believer to have the same experience is just as far fetched.

I don't expect such. You can make the claim that non-believers are 'spiritually blind' and simply can't experience what believers do that justifies their beliefs.

Fair enough. Let's take color blindness as an analogy.

Color blindness was first described by Dalton of atomic theory fame. He noticed that other scientists were talking about color distinctions that he didn't observe. So, they would say one thing was green and another was red and Dalton didn't see them as different colors.

Now, how could Dalton know that the other scientists were not just lying or deluding themselves? One aspect, of course, is the previous trust built up. But there is another, even more skeptical level.

Dalton could design experiments verifying that other scientists could reliably see and report *the same colors* even when Dalton himself didn't see a difference. he could do this by having one 'color sighted' person describe the colors of a scene and then have another come in and describe the colors of the same scene. By making sure that the two color sighted individuals didn't discuss the scene, he could find that their descriptions were consistent.

So, here is a question: do people that claim to have 'spiritual sight' give consistent descriptions of important things like God?

And the answer is a resounding NO. Is God a trinity? Christians say yes (except for the Nestorians) and Moslems say no. Is there only one God? Abrahamics say yes, others say no. Is it possible to see God and live? Different versus of the Bible say opposite things.

So, there is NOT the consistency between religions that would be expected if there was some sort of 'spiritual sight' involved.

On the other hand, I experience tomatoes differently than many others. I find them to be noxious and vile tasting. other people experience them differently.

In this, we have *opinions* and not *knowledge*. I can agree that tomatoes are healthy to eat. But I think they taste horrible. That is my *opinion*. In this, there is no 'knowledge' about the taste of tomatoes: different people have different opinions, possibly due to something genetic or developmental.

And, this is what we see in religion: different people have different tastes and that determines which religion they gravitate to, thereby showing their *opinions*. But there is no *knowledge*. There is no way to resolve the disagreements through testing and observation, so there is no science.

 

[Polymath257]

Yes, fiction is fun.

And it is fun enough some people raise it into a religion.

 

[SkepticThinker]

I asked for specific evidence you clearly are not providing it. And my pouting that out drives people away from Christianity?

I really don’t think that is supported.

You've been given evidence.

 

[SkepticThinker]

Well those who don’t look won’t find. Those who have found may not be able to force others to believe (or bother trying), but we know.

What about those who look and don't find?

 

[SkepticThinker]

Personal attacks???

kind of tired or it. I’m not wasting more of my time.

This is not a personal attack, as it is a point against your argument, and not yourself, as a person:
"That statement is both foolish and willfully arrogant."

This is a personal attack, as it is a point against you personally:
"You are both foolish and willfully ignorant."

See the difference?

 

[SkepticThinker]

I disagree. I’ve seen many times here in the past few weeks avowed atheist who have traditions and beliefs. They don’t label them religious, but they are views and ways of looking at stuff. Label aside I see no difference between their beliefs and religious ones.

Atheists lack a belief in God(s). That's the one and only thing all atheists have in common.

Atheists can and do believe (and don't believe) all kinds of other things unrelated to God claims. Atheists can and do (and don't) have all kinds of traditions that they like to engage in, unrelated to God claims.

But when it comes to God(s), we simply lack belief. Which of course, is not a belief.

 

[Ostronomos]

No, you can't. Time passes normally at the rate of one second per second from within all frames of reference. If you aren't experiencing time, you aren't conscious.



Nothing exists outside of time.

I've given you my argument. You haven't rebutted it. You just dismiss it with the wave of a hand making comments like that one. The argument stands unrebutted.

Do you want to know what kinds of statements can't be rebutted? Correct ones. A rebuttal is a counterargument explaining why the rebutted argument can't be right, not just that one doesn't like the idea or doesn't accept it. Those are irrelevant in dialectic, which ends with the last unrebutted plausible argument.



There's that incoherence again. You say it can enter time from outside of time? Entering requires a before and an after state, the time before you entered and the time after. When did this deity, which experiences no time and therefore cannot change even its thoughts much less its location, begin this transition? This is incoherent. That's what the word means. One can't make sense of it. It's alleged internal features are self-contradictory, like the married bachelor. Your arguments are the equivalent of saying that such a thing is possible. When asked how he can be both married and a bachelor, you answer he can because he's outside of time and space, and you're absolutely certain of it based on your logic and experience.



The nonexistent exists? You're probably going to want to remove that comment from your post before somebody tries to leave the universe to find Santa Claus.

Yesterday, another poster asked if the impossible was possible with miracles. People seem to have trouble with privative prefixes like non- and im-. Also, with the law of noncontradiction.



That makes you a theist by my reckoning. And a believer. A theist is anybody with a god belief, even those who won't call it a belief. For me, a belief is any idea one considers correct.



I don't believe that you have empiric evidence for a deity, and since you believe in one anyway, your logic isn't as good as you think. If you want to be believed by a humanist, you'll need to present your evidence and valid argument derived from it leading to a sound conclusion.

Since you don't have that, my go-to hypothesis is that you have a feeling that you feel is evidence of a deity and interpret as experiencing a deity due to a common cognitive bias combining projection and the tendency to assign agenticity to natural phenomena.



I still don't believe you.



I wrote, "How do you think a god belief would improve a content humanist's life? Let me answer for you: it wouldn't. It wouldn't be an intelligent thing to do." I also explained that hope doesn't require a god belief, yet the reason you offer for why theism could improve a content humanist's life is to give hope. Hope for what? An afterlife? I'm fine with the prospect that death is the extinction of consciousness. I've had decades to reach acceptance. I also am content that there may be nobody answering prayers or protecting me, and that we may live in a godless universe. My life has been characterized by a series of hopes and dreams. I hoped to become happily married. I hoped to acquire a good education and a satisfying career. I hoped to learn to play guitar and contract bridge. I had hoped to be financially secure and in good health. I had hoped to travel much of the world. All without a god belief.

So what does a god belief offer such a person? Nothing.

I apologize that I am not intelligent enough to continue this conversation. But I will continue on my merry way with the evidence for God firmly in place and one of these days when I boost my intellect to supreme levels once again I will provide a thorough mathematical proof using the maths that I currently know, partial Calculus and Set theory.

You seem to have a conviction that the real world is all there is. I do not see any way to convince you otherwise. I personally happen to know it is an illusion. But formulating an argument to support this claim is currently beyond me. I will just say this; what you see is not all there is. To comprehend God you need to think on scales as vast as the entire cosmos. You only seem to be thinking only on scales that characterize lifeforms. A fatal error that all atheists make. I'm not saying that theists are perfect. Just that they are more true to themselves. Thank you for engaging me.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

What about those that look earnestly, yet God hides from?

That's easy. It's the so-called seekers fault. His effort was defective. It's always that way. Everything good is God, everything bad Satan and man. Why does man have to work the fields rather than live in paradise? man failed. Why did the earth need near sterilization by flood. Man failed. Why do we speak different languages? Man failed. Why is there leukemia? God works in mysterious ways, but whatever the answer, it's good. Why didn't a particular man find this deity? He failed. He didn't look hard enough. His faith was inferior. God is good and is waiting for you to just open your heart and reach out (translation: cease thinking critically, skip the evidence part, and just believe).

Well those who don’t look won’t find.

See above.

Those who have found may not be able to force others to believe (or bother trying), but we know.

No you don't. You just believe with insufficient evidence. If you want critical thinkers to believe anything including god claims, you don't need to force anything. All you need to do is present compelling evidence. If you can't do that, then you are guessing, not knowing.

And here's a difference between us: if you could inject a god belief into my head without my consent, you would, and you would worsen my life in so doing. I might have to start threads "proving" that God is real and that atheism is really a religion, and becoming offended and frustrated when I was disagreed with, calling it an ad hom attack. That doesn't sound like fun at all.

You would think that you were saving my soul and making me a better person, because you've been told so and that's how you think. But what you miss is that religion has nothing to offer those content without it, and as we see on this forum, it is damaging to many. Your changes in me would have me reading the Bible, praying, spending Sundays in church, and tithing - none of which are in my interest or of any value to me now.

By contrast, I understand that extinguishing the god belief from you would do you harm, and wouldn't do so if I could. Yet I'm just as sure that my humanistic worldview is superior to the one you offer as you are in reverse, but you'd have needed to acquire it decades ago to benefit from it. You would have needed to adapt to the possibility of a godless universe, and I know how difficult that is, how difficult it was for me some forty years ago. But I did, and have reaped the benefit since. Some things need to be done in the first half of life to be valuable or maximally valuable, when we are better able to adapt and when so many decision lie ahead that would benefit from a better way of making decisions. Travel fits into this category. See the world before you retire, when the education will inform future decisions, as was the case with me. Expatriation from America upon retirement was a good decision based in seeing the world, a world my untraveled family back in the States never saw and is still afraid of.

And this is the same - humanism versus Abrahamic theism. If I had just come over to the former now in retirement, what value would it have? I've already made the important choices for my life - career, marriage, pastimes and hobbies, diet and exercise, how to interact with people, how to evaluate character (seeing a fish on somebody's business card does not say to me what it does t a believer about trustworthiness or integrity). I'd have probably would not have been able to retire for at least another ten years had I been tithing to the church all those decades, and stopping doing that at this age would have little impact on the rest of my life.

So, just as there is nothing in your way for me, there is nothing in my way for you, and neither of us ought to be giving life advice to the other.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

So like parting the Red Sea, healing the blind, easing the dead. Maybe predicting events thousands of years ahead of time??? It’s there, but not everyone pays attention or understands.

Agreed. Like all skeptics, I understand it. It's mythology. Some people believe it. As you say, not everyone pays attention or understands.

That approach assumes that God wants to jump our hoops.

No, the atheist doesn't expect gods to jump through hoops, and really, what does that even mean with a tri-omni deity that can allegedly create universes with thought alone? Once again, it's framed as man's failure. He expects too much from this god that doesn't jump through hoops, obviously an unreasonable desire and one that won't be fulfilled because of the arrogance of asking for anything from this deity and expecting a reasonable or loving response.

The skeptic expects all of these gods to remain indistinguishable from the nonexistent as they always have. Nothing nonexistent jumps through hoops, so nothing indistinguishable from the nonexistent will, either.

Expecting the believer and non believer to have the same experience is just as far fetched.

But you do. You expect the critical thinker to find your god. That's not possible if it can only be belied in by faith. This is the crux of the difference - the theist will believe by faith and the humanist will not. Naturally, that difference will lead to huge differences in belief sets between the two. They have different ways of processing information and deciding what's true. When you refer to trying harder or seeking harder or opening your heart, what you mean is to let down one's epistemological defenses and start believing without criteria for belief.

The fanatical assumptions of anything uttered by a person who claims to be a a scientist being right on the other hand is disturbing.

This is typical from a believer. Imagine the same type of language coming from the humanist. You can't. It doesn't happen. Nobody here is writing to you using emotional hyperbole. I'm not. Nobody is calling you fanatical or calling your way of thinking disturbing. The humanist just dispassionately points out the errors in fact and reasoning. How many times do we see religious apologists get to this stage? About 80% of the time. Along with the countless hours and dollars that would have been lost as a theist, this is something I was spared thanks to my transition out of theism.

Science is supposed to be about evidence questions and learning, but over and over I hear “shut up believe what we tell you”.

You're projecting. That's your preacher, not empiricists. That's the very embodiment of faith - shut up and believe.

the cult of scientism is scary.

Have a cookie. It's your "cult" is the threat right now, threatening freedoms.

 

[Polymath257]

Well those who don’t look won’t find. Those who have found may not be able to force others to believe (or bother trying), but we know.

There have been many accidental discoveries, where someone wasn't looking, but still found something important.

But let's look at the flip side. Suppose someone *does* look. Are they guaranteed to find? or do they have to believe *before* they can find?

So, I don't have to believe in magnets to find out the existence and basic properties of magnets. The evidence itself is convincing once someone decides to investigate.

Are you claiming that the same is true about deities and the supernatural?

Or, do you have to believe *first* and then any skepticism is enough to eliminate any possible observation? Because, if this is the case, you are simply saying people are subject to confirmation bias. And that is not a reliable way to discover the truth.

I might also suggest that if you can't convince a skeptical person who is honestly looking, then you don't have knowledge of anything other than your own psychology.

 

[Polymath257]

Outside the universe there is not time. Consider the law of time dilation for instance. You can experience the passing of time in a very compressed manner so as to become timeless and immortal.

Nope. That is not how time dilation works. You would experience time as proceeding at the normal rate no matter what reference frame you are in.

Yes. The deity is ethereal not material and exists outside the universe and thus outside of time. Thus it simultaneously does not exist in the sense that we are familiar, It can enter the time and space of this world but not at will. Reality int = Reality ext. Greater reality = All reality. Mind = Reality. Try not to be deceived by the illusion of the real world.

Somehow that says it right there: 'the illusion of the real world'.

I'm not disputing that. And I never said I have a "huge brain" at all times. But I'm intelligent enough to know that the non-existent exists outside the universe. This translates to a realm of pure potential.

I think you are confused about existence. The non-existent doesn't exist.

 

[Polymath257]

"every one" no. But I do talk a tons of people and find many of their stories to be credible.

Let's say I take a walk in the woods and I find an unlikely creature like an albino moose. I see it I know that it is there. Others come out looking for it, and while stomping about making tons of noise. They don't see it. Is my sighting invalid?

We know moose exist and we know that albinos exist for most mammalian species. While I might have some skepticism about your siting, I would be willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, at least temporarily.

On the other hand, if you claimed to see a manticore, I would say that you are either lying or, more likely, that your eyes deceived you. if you said that you talked with this manitcore, I would be likely to say that you hallucinated or are flat-out lying.

If you claimed that gnomes invited you into their den, where they fed you, sang songs, and had a wonderful party, and that they gave you advice for the coming year, I would suggest that you see a professional.

 

[Truth in love]

I must have missed this on the thread. Can you point to some specific examples where you were told to "shut up and accept scientific explanations without question"? That is not a valid approach to science, learning or reasoning.

It's happened many times. I forget the exact thread might have been one on evidence for God or an evolution one. The exact words differ at times, but the core message is the same.

 

[Truth in love]

Anything specific that you would be able to share. I know that pseudoscience exists and have seen it, but that isn't usually the product of scientists, though a few have fallen into that. I don't know of any scientists in my career that have supported the idea that the untestable (believed views) is science.

I don't know about this cult you talk about.

When you say believe, do you mean without any evidence or reason or do you roll in existing knowledge in that as well? There is a difference between believing in something with no evidence and believing in something based on prior work and existing knowledge of phenomena.

I have subjective views, but I cannot verify them with absolute certainty even to myself and I believe them.

Evidence types differ some.
I've seen people insist that species changing from one to another is a "proven fact" even through we can't actually observe this event.
Many a time I've been told about 'facts" of human evolution only to find them in error when the next discovery comes along.
Man made global warming (oddly enough we did not all die in 2014).
Over population etc.

 

[SkepticThinker]

Evidence types differ some.
I've seen people insist that species changing from one to another is a "proven fact" even through we can't actually observe this event.
Many a time I've been told about 'facts" of human evolution only to find them in error when the next discovery comes along.
Man made global warming (oddly enough we did not all die in 2014).
Over population etc.

I gave you evidence for what you were asking for (macroevolution) - ring species.
You never responded.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

Evidence types differ some.
I've seen people insist that species changing from one to another is a "proven fact" even through we can't actually observe this event.
Many a time I've been told about 'facts" of human evolution only to find them in error when the next discovery comes along.
Man made global warming (oddly enough we did not all die in 2014).
Over population etc.

This is all rather vague and without detail to discuss informatively

I take it you reject biological evolution, climate change and concerns about unabated human population growth, but I have no idea why or what others have said to you about it.

 

[Truth in love]

Not at all. I am simply saying what is required to say that there is evidence for *anything*, whether it is a God or not.

If God does not want to 'jump through our hoops', then there can be no knowledge of God. In particular, there is no reason to even suspect that there is a God at all.

We accept observational evidence for many things, we accept people reports of events for many things. But not if the person mentions God. Why?

 

[Truth in love]

I don't expect such. You can make the claim that non-believers are 'spiritually blind' and simply can't experience what believers do that justifies their beliefs.

Fair enough. Let's take color blindness as an analogy.

Color blindness was first described by Dalton of atomic theory fame. He noticed that other scientists were talking about color distinctions that he didn't observe. So, they would say one thing was green and another was red and Dalton didn't see them as different colors.

Now, how could Dalton know that the other scientists were not just lying or deluding themselves? One aspect, of course, is the previous trust built up. But there is another, even more skeptical level.

Dalton could design experiments verifying that other scientists could reliably see and report *the same colors* even when Dalton himself didn't see a difference. he could do this by having one 'color sighted' person describe the colors of a scene and then have another come in and describe the colors of the same scene. By making sure that the two color sighted individuals didn't discuss the scene, he could find that their descriptions were consistent.

So, here is a question: do people that claim to have 'spiritual sight' give consistent descriptions of important things like God?

And the answer is a resounding NO. Is God a trinity? Christians say yes (except for the Nestorians) and Moslems say no. Is there only one God? Abrahamics say yes, others say no. Is it possible to see God and live? Different versus of the Bible say opposite things.

So, there is NOT the consistency between religions that would be expected if there was some sort of 'spiritual sight' involved.

On the other hand, I experience tomatoes differently than many others. I find them to be noxious and vile tasting. other people experience them differently.

In this, we have *opinions* and not *knowledge*. I can agree that tomatoes are healthy to eat. But I think they taste horrible. That is my *opinion*. In this, there is no 'knowledge' about the taste of tomatoes: different people have different opinions, possibly due to something genetic or developmental.

And, this is what we see in religion: different people have different tastes and that determines which religion they gravitate to, thereby showing their *opinions*. But there is no *knowledge*. There is no way to resolve the disagreements through testing and observation, so there is no science.

There is a great poem about the blind men and the elephant that goes into people having different experiences.

There is a lot of confusion and disagreement no two ways about it.
We also find some consistencies like the Golden rule, a belief in a life after death and being judged for our actions. These are not quite universal, but fairly close.

The reality of a fraud or liar does not eliminate a honest person. Errors are quite common in both religion and science, people make mistakes. I would not take the fact that some people error as a indications that there is nothing good or true in an entire field.