Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!
I know so many theists that it is difficult to say that theism has no evidence. What there is no evidence for, is the object of their beliefs.Well, that is the irony of forms of claims of evidence and what not. They are cognitive.Including this one.
that really didn't address the question.Not "who". Instead: "what". And the answer is evidence, ironically.
So, what evidence do you think should be found if the object of their beliefs existed? Can you give me some example as a starting point?
Thank you for organizing atheistic beliefs into one post, However, the questions that are ultimately more important to a theist is not Does God Exist? or Can God Exist? I think it wastes far too much time to try and dispute this subjectively drenched yes or no question. To a theist the answer will always be yes based on simple observation that evidence will always remain inconclusive as the universe is theoretically infinite and properties on Earth or even the galaxy, may be completely different in another galaxies or star system. In the end, we are left with only one other concept, Do we want God to exist? or Do we not want God to exist? These are the real controversial question that Theist will need to answer in their lives. If we want God to exist, than we are left with the task of proving His existence personally in our lives. Personal relationships to Scriptures or Books about God, Natural Human Behaviors, Natural Life experiences, and Internal responses to emotions such as Joy and Sadness and Truth and Fallacy, culminates a personal evidence that God exists. The desire for wanting God to exist, is usually for a desire to simplify many difficult or complex issues of Life in general. The desire for God not to exist is usually because of a negative occurrence of the former. Atheist will say it is much easier in my life that God is a fictitious creation of Man's ignorance to reality. That God is a hinderance to scientific discovery. It is my belief, that all atheist are really just theist that quickly gave up proving God exists, where Theist are continuing to experiment the infinite outcomes and possibilities that God does exist. Theist should use the concept of God, not as a scapegoat for scientific discovery, but as an important formula to discover how many possibilities are out there in the Universe and reality. Ultimately, Atheist and Theist should recognize how infinitely small our knowledge of the Universe or God is.
How so? What is it's claim? How is it you understand that in order to say it fails? What qualifies as evidence for you?
So then would you say that direct firsthand experience helps us discern between merely imaginary ideas, baseless speculation without foundations, and something actually existing in reality? Would you accept empiricism as a valid approach to understanding what is real, versus imaginary?
I agree that a pantheist view is not the same thing as a scientific view, even though both are looking at the same thing. Pantheism is not, nor should be considered just another word for science. It's not "sexed up atheism" as Richard Dawkins ignorantly referred to it as.
For what areas of life? Personal relationships? Meaning making? Finding personal happiness? I don't think science is the best framework to talk about love, do you? If so, how's your love life working out for you?
In what domain of human life experience do you see the scientific method being applicable? Obviously the material, sensory domain is a given. How about the mental domain of human experience? How about the spiritual domain of human experience? How do you see it being applicable to the latter two?
So mental data is evidence then? You did not mention physical data, only mental data, like math. Correct? So the scientific method is useful for not only having physical conformation, but also for mental confirmations.
Yes, this is how I understand the spiritual domain to be. Not supernatural, but it reflects "a deeper understanding of some part of reality". That exactly describes my view.
Sure it does, if you understand that theism is a way in which transrational experiences can be understood. Those experiences are in fact real experiences, and they have been researched, mapped out, and understood by qualified researchers and practitioners.
Untrue, as I have just laid out. "Deity mysticism" is a category that can be examined by the scientific method. 1. Learn how to do the experiment. 2. Do the experiment. 3. Collect the data. 4. Compare the results with others who have done the experiments themselves. 5. Propose a model. Test it. Use it for predictions, etc.
Those who are using theistic views of reality as a substitute or a competitor to the natural sciences to explain things like the origin of the species for instance, are neither doing valid science or valid theology. It's bad science, and bad theology.
Sorry for my long post too. I hope my response can be helpful to people as well, including your own understanding.
Because there is no evidence that there are 'transmental or spiritual domains' to examine.
I wonder what these researchers were studying then? Transpersonal psychology - Wikipedia
Apparently their peers in the APA wondered that as well.
You can disregard whatever doesn't fit your beliefs if you wish. It's not just this research, which is considered valid, regardless. There's lots more. But regardless of that. People do have these experiences. I have these experiences. If you choose to disregard them, I consider that not based upon the evidence. Experience is considered evidence. That makes it empirical data. How you interpret that data, needs to be done with care, not dismissiveness. If the latter, that's just religious bias. Like some other poster recently called meditation something along the lines of oxygen deprivation making you woozy, or such. I have no time for that nonsense.
Apparently is=t is not considered valid by the APA. I'm sorry, but you don't get to dump on me just because their process does not measure up to scientific standards of their profession. If they come up with a testable and repeatable method for demonstrating their hypotheses, that the APA accepts then I will accept it, too. Don't grump at me because they have not done so, yet.
Do you have citations for this? From my understanding, Carl Jung, William James, Abraham Maslow, etc, are all considered highly regarded in their research into these areas. That mainstream may have problems with it, is not always the end all be all of the validity of the work, as though they were the Pope or something.
The article you linked.
There are a lot of crap ideas out there. Merely complaining about the mainstream not accepting your pet groups ideas is not persuasive. When they can convince their peers of their position and achieve mainstream consensus, then I will accept it. You are free to think that scientific consensus is like the Pope if you like.
I do most of my research these days in interdisciplinary fields and quantum foundations (and related areas). A nice thing about foundations is that questions which were largely "taboo" in physics (and often provoked open hostility) regarding what our best theories tell us about reality (or whether, in fact, they do this) are now asked quite readily and even urgently.
This method is largely a list adapted from a 1910 work from Dewey on critical reasoning entitled How We Think. Of course, the idea that there exists a method that characterizes scientific inquiry is older (e.g., Pearson's The Grammar of Science or going back to widely over-simplified but heavily referenced classics we have e.g., Francis Bacon or even Aristotle). And naïve Popperian ideas have also featured largely in pre-college as well as introductory college textbooks and science education more generally (actually, naïve Popperian falsification is something that a lot of practicing scientists were taught and many preach at least nominally).
I hear this all the time and every time I imagine some alchemical process where a tiny hypotheses that has grown by being fed critical experimental tests has finely reached maturation and burst from its chrysalis at some International Conference of Real Scientists in Lab Coats to emerge as a fully grown, beautiful "theory."
This is closer to the truth. Prediction is indeed an incredibly important part of scientific inquiry. However, most of the time that we do things like build working airplanes or computers it has considerably less to do with "facts of reality" and considerably more to do with "incorrect/inaccurate pictures of reality that as approximations have a useful domain of validity in application". Also, while prediction is key, it is simply not the case that "the fact that [scientists/science] can predict things we don't yet know about reality is the hallmark of science" nor does this guide "discoveries about the facts of reality." You are throwing the term "reality" around quite carelessly given that your thread topic is about evidence and specifically concerned with a standard of evidence that tells about reality itself. We don't understand yet what it is that makes solids as we can't yet approach the kinds of solutions to the quantum many-body problem that would perhaps inform us why we have "bronze" in a why that is less qualitative than Aristotle's. But we use bronze and other materials and use classical mechanics and other theories that do not correspond to reality when we do things like build airplanes.
For the most part, neither is evolutionary theory (there are huge caveats here, of course, but it is still a core principle of evolutionary theory that there are unpredictable, essential random elements that preclude predictive models even without the worry about ascribing teleological status to natural processes). But theism isn't a model. So far, you've laid down a level of evidence that science can't meet, and for some reason argued this tells us something about the lack of evidence for theism. Granted, I don't spend a lot of time with theists, but I do know some and I've been here for years and most theists don't think of the evidence that they rely on as the kind that is used in the sciences. Also, different sciences use evidence differently (and treat things like theories and models in fundamentally different ways), while there are entire disciplines that are concerned with understanding reality and with evidence (like history) which don't use scientific methods either.
Fallacies allow for false conclusions or poor arguments, they do not reliably lead there.
Ok, this is what I should have said.
So far, all of it.
In 1801, Young did the first experiments that showed (contra Newton and therefore widely held beliefs) that light was not corpuscular (composed of particles) but was a wave. During subsequent decades, one of the most successful physical theories ever devised grew out of this knowledge that light was a wave and with the study of such waves, leading to the unification of theories of magnetism and electricity into the elegant, powerful framework of classical electromagnetism. Light was not only a wave, it was just one out of a spectrum of electromagnetic waves that explained (and continue to "explain") all sorts of phenomena from stellar astrophysics to modern medical technology and more.
And Maupertuis's theological physics predicted that God would by his perfect nature create a universe with laws that obeyed the principle of least action. As this is a cornerstone of essentially all modern physics, by your logic his prediction is support for theism.
One of the points of the thread being, however, that even you should admit that your evidence is not substantial nor worthwhile if you cannot demonstrate its link to reality to other people. If all you have to convince others is poor evidence then you should at least admit that that is what you, yourself are willing to believe this thing on.
