BilliardsBall
Veteran Member
If the God possibility approaches zero, as you wrote, then over 90% of persons should be put into asylums. Welcome to MY asylum, sir!
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Fact, Belief, and Faith
- Thread starter Skwim
- Start date
If the God possibility approaches zero, as you wrote, then over 90% of persons should be put into asylums. Welcome to MY asylum, sir!
Sapiens
Polymathematician
Last refuge of the incompetent would-be-thinker ... the logical fallacy known as argumentum ad populum. I had hoped for something better from you.
gnostic
The Lost One
Science don’t deal in “possibility” (well, except the theoretical physicists and psychologists); what they do is they deal in “probability”.
And probability is a matter of statistics and statistical analysis of the data gathered. Data is the quantifiable evidences.
Possibility concern itself with belief (subjective reasoning, wishful thinking) as to what is possible and is impossible...except that believers think the “impossible” is possible.
Examples of the “impossible being possible”, belief in miracles, afterlife, reincarnation, magic, alchemy, divination, prophecies, gods, angels, demons, etc.
taykair
Active Member
After being battered and bruised on a thread I started here recently concerning science and religion, I am loathe to enter this thread, and yet the masochist in me drives me forward...
To me, the universe (or multiverse, if you prefer) is so vast that it would seem a mistake to classify any statement as absolutely - in all places and at all times - true or false. There are statements which approach zero (absolute impossibility) or one (absolute certainty) so closely as to make no real difference locally, but there are no real "zero statements" or "one statements" out there to be found. (Yes. I see the internal inconsistancy in what I just said, but I can live with it.)
So, what is a fact? If we mean "a statement which is absolutely true, in all places and at all times", then I don't believe there is such a thing. The closest thing we have to facts are beliefs - the truth or falsity of such determined by their closeness in probability to either one or zero in local space and time.
Look folks, it should be obvious to you by now - especially those of you who are scientists or mathematicians - that I am neither one, nor will I ever be. I may bumble and stumble when I try to appropriate your jargon to explain myself, but I do the best I can. Please be kind...
To me, the universe (or multiverse, if you prefer) is so vast that it would seem a mistake to classify any statement as absolutely - in all places and at all times - true or false. There are statements which approach zero (absolute impossibility) or one (absolute certainty) so closely as to make no real difference locally, but there are no real "zero statements" or "one statements" out there to be found. (Yes. I see the internal inconsistancy in what I just said, but I can live with it.)
So, what is a fact? If we mean "a statement which is absolutely true, in all places and at all times", then I don't believe there is such a thing. The closest thing we have to facts are beliefs - the truth or falsity of such determined by their closeness in probability to either one or zero in local space and time.
Look folks, it should be obvious to you by now - especially those of you who are scientists or mathematicians - that I am neither one, nor will I ever be. I may bumble and stumble when I try to appropriate your jargon to explain myself, but I do the best I can. Please be kind...
Skwim
Veteran Member
I've always liked Stephen Jay Gould's definition:
"In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent."
.
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BilliardsBall
Veteran Member
It's not an ad populum to note that practically all persons and at all times disagree with you. It's not even close to "popular" from the Latin but rather, universal, so much so, that theists tend to believe atheists are in some kind of bizarre denial.
As important, you would need to explain why this is the only delusion most people believe in, in modern times. Most people believe the world is round and that man landed on the moon and etc.
BilliardsBall
Veteran Member
I don't understand. All science is axiomatic on metaphysics. Science can only exist/work because we first accept math and logic, which are not tangible things but invisible things, as axiomatic.
Thief
Rogue Theologian
FACT.....an item we both agree toSeveral definitions I put together tonight while bored and watching Frasier. ... (Put in the Science Religion forum because facts are the operational basis of science whereas faith is the operational basis of religion.)
Fact: A thing that is indisputably the case.
Belief: The acceptance that a non-factual thing exists or is true.Fact is rooted in conviction that a thing is confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold acceptance* The core of science and day-to-day living.
Faith: Trust in a belief.An occasional encouragement in our day-to-day musings. It serves as the basis of faith.
For some, the balm of everyday concerns. Most notably, the trust put in the supernatural and some religious writings. For others, it's simply the confidence that the other guy at the intersection isn't going to T-bone you as you proceed.
Okay, it's bedtime, any deletions, revisions,or
* With a nod to Stephen Jay Gould
.
(almost all things can be disputed...even items of science and logic)
BELIEF.....a sense of certainty, usually arrived at for careful thought
but could be held for having trusted the source of the idea
FAITH.....holding a belief even when objection and rejection are dealt
conviction to an idea typically optimistic even when adverse conditions are at hand
It's an ad populum fallacy if you are using the numbers of people who agree or disagree with an idea to argue for or against the truth of that idea. We are rational skeptics and empiricists. Our positions are based on reason properly applied to all of the available, relevant evidence. We are uninterested in how many people that choose their beliefs by faith disagree, whether those beliefs come from Ouija boards, ancient holy books, or tea leaves.
Back atcha.
It's probably too late to try to go back and learn to live knowing that your consciousness may be permanently extinguished after your death, or that in all likelihood, nobody not on planet earth is watching over you, loves you, or cares about your welfare. These existential truths can be assimilated if one starts early enough, but there appears to be a window of opportunity for most people that closes by the last third of life if not sooner.
Sapiens
Polymathematician
For all your bragging on your collegiate background you seem to have been out having a beer when basic logic was being taught, you are, in fact, committing a logical fallacy.
People have many delusion, thus Trump and the Birthers. I know the world is round because I have circled it several time. I know that man landed on the moon because I know men who did so (that's Buzz Aldrin with me at the Explorers Club Annual Dinner, in my current avatar. He was one of the first two humans to land on the Moon.)
BilliardsBall
Veteran Member
How does a rational empiricist deal with the fact that it is a near-universal that people have always believed in a god or gods, including in modern, educated nations? What do scientists call it when observation provides the same results 99% of the time, for thousands of years, through billions of trials/tests?
Why not say you are an irrational empiricist instead? Thus, atheist denial.
BilliardsBall
Veteran Member
Other than just being silly and conflating an "ad populum" with something different, a universal with only a tiny percentage of people in denial (
), I would say that you have some strange understandings of what truth and fact are:You know that man landed on the Moon because you talked with Buzz? (Which is super-cool, by the way, I commend you.)
I know man landed on the Moon because not having met Buzz, I appreciate his writing and statements on the matter and find him utterly honest. I believe the Bible writers were likewise honest, but I have "no skin" in the game--that is, I don't have a reason to disbelieve them because I'm in denial, embittered or in grave sin . . .
Put another way, since you haven't met Lincoln, did he exist? How do you know this without reliable evidence that you yourself personally acquired, please?
Sapiens
Polymathematician
With respect to Lincoln we have all sorts of contemporaneous records from identifiable individuals all of which harmonize, that is not the situation with the gospels, is it? The problem is that you have no idea of who the actual "writers" where, nor have you any provenance for their product, not to mention the fact that there are no viable claims that the product represented a contemporaneous record.
What's there to deal with? Religion and religious people have no effect on my life.
Maybe you are asking how I feel being in the minority when it comes to god beliefs. If so, the answer is that it has worked out very well for me.
Most of the world is also relatively uneducated and impoverished by my American standards. Being part of the majority is not always desirable.
Reproducibility.
Because of the two of us, I am the rational, empirical one. My beliefs are the result of reason applied to evidence.
Faith is the irrational position - by definition. It avoids reason, which is why anything can be believed by faith. Or its opposite. Obviously, faith cannot be a path to knowledge for that reason.
The difference between faith and reason accounts for the fact that there are countless religions, but only one periodic table of the elements. Reason is a path from premises to conclusions. That makes it like a road that takes you from one town to another. Reason brought us to the periodic table. There was no other destination ever possible as long as the chemists continued to apply reason to physical evidence.
Faith isn't a path at all. It's more like the open sea. You can go in any compass direction. That's why there are so many gods and denominations. Faith based thought is undirected. As I said, faith is not only not a path to knowledge, it's not a path at all.
I deny that there is any reason to believe in gods. I deny that religion has anything to offer a person like me who has learned to live without it.
BilliardsBall
Veteran Member
Wow. It does sound like you have all answers to all my inquiries. Thank God you no longer need to live with sacred mysteries like "What is the weight of love?" or "What happens when we die?"
I think the best part of your answer was when, being a person who hasn't had faith for a long time, you completely disdained my personhood and told me how my faith works or doesn't work and how's it's useless.
Here's a mystery! Why you don't understand faith after several rounds of explanations from me. Faith = trust. You can trust your lover, your mother or 100 different gods, you can have faith in yourself. I trust Jesus Christ.
I'm not sure what your point is.
I have enough answers to navigate life. I know how to decide what is true and what is good. I know enough about how the world works to function in it safely and happily, and what to expect from various situations.
And I am comfortable with not having answers to unanswerable questions.
If you think a criticism of faith based thinking diminishes your personhood, that's on you. You criticize atheists, but you don't diminish our personhood when you do.
You seem to be unwilling to grasp the distinction between justified belief and unjustified belief as you demonstrated yet again conflating your beliefs about your god with my beliefs about my lover or mother. You continue to make that error.
As far as faith being an error, I explained why. You chose to not rebut the argument. You probably know what that means. There is no reason to discuss the matter further with you. My position is unchanged as would be expected following dead air from you. My mind is only changed by compelling arguments applied to relevant evidence.
You haven't tried that approach yet. You just give unsupported claims, ignore arguments made against them, and then repeat the claims.
I wonder why you think that's enough. Is that enough for you?
BilliardsBall
Veteran Member
I get you, I do, I do understand.
You are proud of your rational, empirical mindset.
If I have less of that mindset than you I have the love of Christ, which trumps empirical knowledge. Knowledge/relationship of the holy One, love, salvation, these trump hitting everybody with a rationalist's stick all the time.
Sapiens
Polymathematician
No, you do not.
Proud? No. Convinced? Yes. "Proud of your mindset" is a construct you and your's.
You have been saying that for ages but have failed to present any evidence of your claim.
Bizarre description even stranger concept. Where's the Beef?
gnostic
The Lost One
The only thing you said right, is "I don't understand".
Time and time again, people have been explains to you the differences between usual use of the word “theory” and scientific theory used by scientists, the differences between theory and hypothesis, between evidence and proof, between evidence and faith, between fact and faith, between experimental science and theoretical science, and so on...and so on, for the last 5 years, and like every other creationists here, you still haven’t learn a damn thing about what constitute science, fact or evidence.
You don’t understand science, BB. And apparently you never will.
Even to this day, you are still equating atheism and science as one and the same.
Atheism only deal with the question of the "existence of a deity or deities", and nothing else.
Atheism have nothing to do with science. Theism and agnosticism also have nothing to do with science. All three only concern themselves with theism, which is the "existence of deity":
- Theists believe in deity's existence,
- atheists don't believe in deity's existence,
- and agnostics think the existence of deity is unknowable.
- theists have the conviction that their belief is true,
- atheists have no conviction to that belief,
- and agnostics...well, agnostics are a mixed bag, because some lean towards theism, while others lean toward, so whether they have "faith" or not, depends on the individual agnostics.
In science, atheism, theism, agnosticism, belief in god or no belief in god, religions and spirituality, they are all irrelevant because they are UNTESTABLE.
Falsifiable mean the ability to TEST and REFUTE any statement or assertion, being able to QUESTION or CHALLENGE the hypothesis or theory.
When scientists do their experiments, they are not merely trying to validate their hypotheses. The main purpose is to refute the hypotheses, to challenge it.
Science, especially those with "scientific theory" that is backed by verifiable evidences, are falsifiable, because scientific theory has been questioned, challenged and tested, and because of that, science isn't "axiomatic".
As to math and logic. Yes, there are some maths and logic involved in science, but for those have evidence-backed scientific theories, math isn't higher priority than the evidences.
It is evidence (a number of evidences) that can turn a “potential” hypothesis into a fully-fledged “SCIENTIFIC THEORY”.
And only experimental or empirical science (eg scientific theory substantiated by empirical evidences) are the real science.
Without the evidences, the hypotheses are -
- either proven by mathematical statements (solution from complex equations),
- or refuted hypotheses, thus unscientific explanation,
- or worse, refuted and fall under the category of “pseudoscience”.
As I have said many times before, proofs are not the same as evidences.
Proof is a logical or mathematical statements or explanations used in THEORETICAL SCIENCE, like theoretical physics; examples of fields in theoretical physics:
- String Theory (also known as “bosonic string theory”, which also include the infamous M-theory).
- Superstring Theory (based on the highly theoretical “Supersymmetry”).
- The variety of Multiverse models.
- Oscillating cosmological model (also known as the Big Bounce), which the universe undergo a series of Big Bang and Big Crunch.
These theoretical fields may name it “Theory”, but they are not “Scientific Theory”, because of the fact they cannot be tested and verified.
I don’t consider theoretical science to be “real science”, because it cannot meet the requirements of Scientific Method.
Even with theoretical fields, the proof-based theories are not “axiomatic”, because they also be challenged.
Nothing in science, whether it be experimental/empirical or theoretical, are not unquestionable.
New evidences can update existing scientific theories, or replace existing theory with new ones. And new equations can either replace or expand existing theoretical models.
In my previous list of points, Creationism (of any kind) and Intelligent Design, do not even fit the bill of being theoretical science, because of the faith-based belief in the imaginary “Creator”, “God” and “Designer”, thus ID and Creationism fall into the category of being “pseudoscience” (point 3).
Creationism and ID are akin to other pseudoscience, like alchemy, divination, numerology, astrology, alien abductions, fairies.
I don’t expect you to learn anything today, since you can’t seem to even grasp the basic differences between the empirical and theoretical.
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BilliardsBall
Veteran Member
While I understand the difference that concerns you between empirical and theoretical, you never addressed my point, which is that science cannot "work" unless we accept certain axioms, for example, that empirical proof works, that observations may be false or true and etc.
These require that we accept that math and logic are real. Math and logic may be theorized and inductively observed, but are metaphysical.
Will you deny or instead affirm that science must rest on metaphysics?