Do atheists believe in magnetism?

[Dan From Smithville]

Nobody tries to get me to accept that magnetism is real by handing me a 2000+ year set of bronze age writings, then tells me to read about a bunch of guys shouting about how great magnetism is and how I must worship it or else.

If someone wants me to accept magnetism, they stick a magnet to my fridge. Or they hand me a 6V spring top battery, a length of wire, and a nail. Like my dad did when I was 4. Which is also when I started going to Sunday School. If there was 1/1000th and weighty evidence for any god as there is for electromagnets, I would still believe that some god exists.

Nice demonstration of electromagnetic phenomena by the way.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

1. Belief occurred before we made the device to see stuff. If we did not think there was more to see we would not have put in the effort to look. Before beloved in the Higgs long before it was found.


What I find odd is the often hostile attitude towards things people believe while accepting many things that we can’t see, hear etc.

I am not quite clear on what this post was supposed to convey, but it seems you are lumping disparate concepts under the heading of belief when they are not belief in the sense of believing by faith without objective evidence.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

Your posts betrays confusion on two points: first a lack of understanding of science and second a confusion of science with atheism.

The key points are that, as you say, we can observe the effects of magnetism and, crucially, we can predict what we should expect to observe from it.

Science relies on reproducible observation of nature (i.e. observation that give the same result, regardless of who observes and where). Its theories are predictive: in the case of magnetism we can predict how much magnetism is generated by a given electric current, what direction it points in, how strong it will be at a given distance from the wire, and so on. This allows us to design a wide variety of electrical machines, e.g. the electric motors we rely on so much in modern life.

So magnetism can be shown to be real, even though you can't see it directly with your own eyes. The same is true of other ideas in science, e.g. molecules. They are too small to see, but we have lots of evidence that they exist.

None of this applies to religious ideas. There are no reproducible observations that are predicted by religion. So religion belongs in a different category of ideas from natural science.

Please note, this has nothing to do with atheism. Plenty of scientists are religious believers or religious sympathisers.

Some atheists are physicalists. In other words, those that consider the only reality there is consists of the scientifically observable world of nature. That is a different matter.

it has been pointed out, and I agree with the conclusion, that those that operate on a largely belief basis are very baffled by science.

 

[lewisnotmiller]

I doubt that. Many atheists believe in atoms.


Truth is believed in.

I'm a big fan of truth, but pretty suspicious of Truth. Heh.

 

[lewisnotmiller]

Some Scientists' dispute Gravity exists.

I'd be interested in evidence of that. Some dispute its nature, or how we believe it works, yes.
But it's existence?? That sounds fringey at best.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

I'd be interested in evidence of that. Some dispute its nature, or how we believe it works, yes.
But it's existence?? That sounds fringey at best.

I fear the gravity of such a situation that would create.

 

[lewisnotmiller]

I fear the gravity of such a situation that would create.

The risk with gravity jokes is that they fall flat...

 

[joelr]

What is different?
When set conditions are met an electromagnet exerts an invisible power to impact life as we know it. This is widely accepted, but God communicating or helping man is not???

No God is helping man. People die from predictable mortality rates. So if someone has an illness that has a 75% mortality rate in 1 year then they may live even only having a 25% chance to survive 1 year. They may call it help from their deity, Allah, Krishna, Yahweh, or others.
But when 10,000 of the cases are looked at we see 75% of the cases died within 1 year. These probabilities are always followed. So ~7,500 people didn't survive. Meanwhile out of ~2,500 people, the religious will say they were helped.
They were not. If a deity was helping the statistics would be all over the place, impossible to map. What is happening is probabilities play out exactly as they should.

Sadly this is also true for children. There are many in cancer wards and many will not make it. Despite entire families begging for help in prayer. There is NO evidence of outside intervention.
Yes sometimes you lose a job and find a better one by coincidence and so on. That happens likely because you are suddenly speaking out about your situation. But it feels like divine intervention. Meanwhile there are families in shelters and vans because no job was found.
Revelations are not believed, ever, except in your own religion. If Christian you are fine with Abraham and Paul but you know Gabrielle didn't speak to Muhammad, Moroni didn't speak to Joe Smith, John From didn't speak with the Cargo Cults and so on.


And then prayer studies have been done. Controlled experiments with several types of test subjects and a control. Didn't help.
The people who survive something and are religious will say they were helped. Atheists who survive somehow survive without help and the people who didn't survive don't get to tell the story. so you only hear from the survivors.
So there is no evidence for theism.

Also billions of people claim help from Yahweh, billions claim Allah, billions say Krishna.....

To demonstrate God communicated with a person you would also need a scientific test. One person reading the thoughts of the examiner, getting long strings of numbers and the ability to repeat the test anytime.
That would be a start.

 

[joelr]

God communicating and helping man is a fact. But Atheists have never experienced this, hence their "lack of belief". It's as simple as that

I can't blame them, because I also find it hard to trust and belief people and God.

After I finished my engineer degree, I decided "Engineer study took me 5 years, so God study is of course not as easy, hence I decided to dedicate 10 years of my life to it; so for almost '24/7' I immersed myself in Spiritual life".

By His Grace He provided me with many proofs during these 10 years, so now I know. But not all have the time or dedication to do this.

I didn't get my proof by demanding proof without doing the prescribed needed sadhana (spiritual practices). It was really hard work, but also fun, and I am grateful for this opportunity I got and took

Or, things happened and you used confirmation bias to decide it was God.

 

[PearlSeeker]

I made these simple, but really cool little electric motors with my kids using some paper clips, a AA batteries and some neodymium magnets.

 

[stvdv]

Or, things happened and you used confirmation bias to decide it was God.

I know

You will never know

 

[joelr]

I know

You will never know

Right, I do know up to now I have not seen convincing evidence for any Gods or anything supernatural. I have seen many cases of confirmation bias. Many. I have also seen how probability works as well.
So I have a pretty good idea. If you feel you have good evidence then present it?

 

[stvdv]

Right, I do know up to now I have not seen convincing evidence for any Gods or anything supernatural.

Of course it's impossible to find evidence online. Would be too easy, you need to acquire evidence yourself if you want 'Spritual evidence' , as we don't talk about relatively simple Scientific evidence. Different Science, hence different protocols

 

[Clara Tea]

A common sentiment from atheists is that they won’t believe in things that can’t be shown.

We cannot see it, we can’t touch it. In the case of electromagnetic devices it is not always there. Yet one can observe its effects being inline with a given theory.

So is it believed in?

Atheists "can" believe in magnetism based on its effects.

Atheists don't feel that there are affects that can only be attributed to God.

Once could argue that a man named Atlas is holding up the world. But that begs the question, what is holding up Atlas. The answer is that he is standing on a giant turtle. But what is the turtle standing on (etc).

It is much like a Superman movie in which Superman caught Lois as she was falling from a tall building and he said "Don't worry, Lois, I've got you." Then Lois said "you've got me, but who has you?"

There are an infinite number of things to speculate about, but they likely are not all true (we could speculate that Santa exists).

But, if we take careful measurements of magnetism, and see how it interacts with other variables, we can write formulas about them.

If you had three equations, and they all had three variables, you could solve for one variable at a time. So, you could determine, for example, x, y, and z.

James Clerk Maxwell was teaching a high school class when he wrote the four known laws of electromagnetics, and noticed that there were four variables. This, he thought, might mean that two of the equations might be linearly dependent. For example, x + 2y = 3z, and 2x + 4y = 6z are really the same equation (one is twice the other).

When Maxwell tried to find out which of the two electromagnetic laws are duplicates, he ended up showing that any three will derive the fourth. Thus, there are no unnecessary laws, but they all are interdependent.

The science of electromagnetism started with careful measurements, from which we derived formulae, and we found that 4 of the formulae are co-dependent on each other.

 

[stvdv]

I have seen many cases of confirmation bias. Many. I have also seen how probability works as well.

Why spending so much time "seeing many, many cases of confirmation bias?". That would be a waste of my precious time, as my goal is "to know the truth about God".

Probably you have a different goal than I have, hence you take a different approach. Well that's fine too of course.

I believe it's best to follow our own conscience and our own goal. I can only advice others to stick to their own goal. Don't listen to my goals

And above all "Be Happy"... very important

 

[stvdv]

So I have a pretty good idea

Well, I am glad to hear that

If you feel you have good evidence then present it?

No need to do that, as I just read that you have a "pretty good idea" already.

Anyway, I am not into proselytizing business. I am totally fine if others don't believe me, or believe differently or do not believe at all.

All people know for themselves which path to choose. For some it is the path of Atheism and for others it's the path of Theism.

I rather tell others "stick to your own (non) faith", and don't let others belittle your choice or worse. You know best what is best for you

 

[Sheldon]

No, I said that you better get your own experiences, and don't think too much about mine

Of course, only if you have genuine interest to experience God

If you start from the assumption there is a deity to experience, you're introducing subjective bias straight away. I can't see how one could hope to objectively validate anything in this way. Which might explain why the method works so well in validating any belief religion or deity one uses this "method" on, and arrive at validating that belief.

 

[ImmortalFlame]

When set conditions are met an electromagnet exerts an invisible power to impact life as we know it. This is widely accepted, but God communicating or helping man is not???

Wait, you believe in magnetism?!

Don't you know about the invisible goblins? Whenever anything supposedly "electromagnetic" exerts its supposed "power", it's really just invisible goblins moving things around. And this must be the case, because how else could these "so-called" magnets do what they are claimed to do? I ascribe the cause to goblins, so therefore you must agree that if the effect of these "magnets" is real, then you must agree with me that the cause is invisible goblins, correct?

 

[Sheldon]

A magnet, as shown above, is modeled as having both a North and South Pole. Ironically, science has never seen or isolated a magnetic monopole. This means magnets are modeled using two imaginary monopoles.

We can still demonstrate objective evidence for magnetism.

"The quantum theory of magnetic charge started with a paper by the physicist Paul Dirac in 1931. In this paper, Dirac showed that if any magnetic monopoles exist in the universe, then all electric charge in the universe must be quantized (Dirac quantization condition). The electric charge is, in fact, quantized, which is consistent with (but does not prove) the existence of monopoles."

<More here>

I also found this:

"Evidence for magnetic monopoles in spin ice - the bottom row shows predicted neutron scattering data and above is the real data gathered at the ILL, using experimental apparatus that was recently improved by UK funding (the so-called Millenium Programme)."

“These recent papers provide overwhelming proof of the existence of magnetic monopoles in spin ice,” says Prof. Steve Bramwell of the LCN, ”in particular we have measured the monopole charge and observed monopole currents analogous to electricity. We have also used neutrons to measure the length of the so-called Dirac strings that run between North and South monopoles. ”"

I don't think unicorns is a credible analogy. Then again I am not a theoretical physicist.

 

[Sheldon]

This affect is connected to a 2-D tree of knowledge of good and evil; subroutine illusion, that started with Adam and Eve. The subroutine of there brain, makes the brain divide reality into opposites, even where nature is not divided in reality.

That's woo woo, or I've lost my ability to spot irony?