Besides, being so sure that nothing could ever change your mind is not the right attitude. You should always allow whatever you currently believe to be open to question, no matter how many years you've spent studying said belief. To say that you are very sure of your belief is one thing, but to say that nothing could convince you that you are wrong is the defense of one who simply wants to believe what they want to believe.
Indeed. To quote Yudkowsky:Originally Posted by Frostball
Of course, one of the "tricks" of having your brain end up in the same state of belief is confirmation bias. You go into an issue already "knowing" the answer, so you accept very loosely evidence that supports that answer and ignore or put undue pressure on contradictory evidence.This is why rationalists put such a heavy premium on the paradoxical-seeming claim that a belief is only really worthwhile if you could, in principle, be persuaded to believe otherwise. If your retina ended up in the same state regardless of what light entered it, you would be blind. Some belief systems, in a rather obvious trick to reinforce themselves, say that certain beliefs are only really worthwhile if you believe them unconditionally— no matter what you see, no matter what you think. Your brain is supposed to end up in the same state regardless. Hence the phrase, "blind faith". If what you believe doesn't depend on what you see, you've been blinded as effectively as by poking out your eyeballs.
Last edited by MorpheusSandman; 12-13-2013 at 03:39 PM.
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being." --Carl Gustav Jung
"To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due." --Neil Gaiman; The Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists
"I'm on my way, from misery to happiness today. Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh" --The Proclaimers
Just google
youtube Giordano Bruno awesome history
for a real hoot.
How many ever heard of Giordano Bruno before this post?
The Pope doesn't want you to have heard of he, that's why most ain't.
Better yet here's the URL
youtube.com/watch?v=2j2NKHgZrGo
God is like Santa, only some people never came to the awareness that they're both fairytales. Parents and churches told them there was a god. They believe the stories without evidence. They believe them even though human beings are fallible and frequently make mistakes. They believe that a bunch of people living in deserts, without internet, without electricity, without powerful telescopes, without paved roads or floors, with no awareness that the earth was round, with no running water, with no toilets, with poop on their butts, with peyote buttons and shrooms; they believe that these backward, naive, underdeveloped ancient humans somehow communicated with an invisible man in the sky and then wrote his words in a book.
If people living in the middle east tried to do this again today, if they claimed Jesus/Yahweh was speaking to them now, and that he was commanding them to write a new bible, the bible part 2, we would ALL collectively laugh our asses off at such nonsense. The middle east of today may seem uncivilized to some, but the people living there now are lightyears ahead of the old bible-writing shepherds of yore, and we still would not buy tales of religious discovery from them. Modern Christians would think it ridiculous, yet somehow can't make the connection to the ridiculousness of a dark and depressing age supposedly figuring out the meaning of life by magic.
God, Santa or many worlds or Matrix-like universes or block universes of space-time or determinism: There are people who will believe in anything, especially after they think about it for some time, even if they are so-called "scientists".
That doesn't mean they're wrong. The real problem is how to tell if something can be dismissed or not. The fact that the idea occurred thousands of years ago among people who didn't have access to the internet is not real evidence that it is wrong.
Well, large portions of the bible have been proven very wrong. Large portions of it are open to interpretation and manipulation. With that being the case, I might as well not believe a single thing in it. Even if there is still some minute possibility that it is not wrong, it is still infinitely improbable. We have much more evidence that there is no god and that magic never happened here than we have that there is a god. It is equally likely AND unlikely that there are hundreds of gods. So, for the majority of the planet to pick one idea from a time and population with a narrow view, and to say THIS IS IT! THE ONE TRUE GOD! THE REAL ANSWER...it's preposterous. It's egotistical and naive, sadly. It's unfortunate that as a species we're held back from seeking real answers because of this veil of delusion that's binding us all. If there's a god, I want evidence of that. I demand evidence of that. I won't blindly put my faith into a flimsy premise. We've been here for a while. God hasn't shown himself. Until he does, we should be a more open-minded society. Maybe we're missing out by putting all of our eggs into one basket.
I agree with your perspective on religion, but I think you're overselling its ability to hold anyone back. I'm guessing you might be from USA, because the rest of the western world is largely irreligious, and even in USA and the fundies trying to teach creationism, it doesn't hold back scientific progress in any way.
Islam is a different story, however.
Go to work, get married, have some kids, pay your taxes, pay your bills, watch your tv, follow fashion, act normal, obey the law and repeat after me: "I am free."
Anon
One of the big things some religious traditions got right is that the universe had a beginning (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dating_creation), although they did not get the date correct (assuming we have it correct today). Just because they got that right doesn't mean one has to believe everything else presented by each of those religions. They can't all be literally true, but the universe having a beginning presents a challenge to those don't believe in any sort of God to explain why it began at all.
I agree with you that it is inappropriate for one group to try to force their cultural ideas about God(s) on others. That goes as well for cultural ideas that claim there are no Gods. The most tolerant answer is no one knows and each of us are welcome to live our lives as we see fit.
The main evidence for or against gods comes from how we interpret our own experience and the metaphysics we find believable. There is no obvious reason why we are here at all and yet we are. As far as "delusion" and "evidence" goes, I can't think of anything more delusional or supported by no real evidence than some of the pseudo-science that gets promoted today. I'm particularly thinking of things like "many worlds" and "superdeterminism".
No more than it presents a challenge to those who believe in a God.
And, again, the non-scientist who doesn't even understand the relevant science gets to decide what is pseudo-science rather than actual scientists, and that's not egotistical or naive in the slightest.
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being." --Carl Gustav Jung
"To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due." --Neil Gaiman; The Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists
"I'm on my way, from misery to happiness today. Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh" --The Proclaimers
It would depend on what those beliefs are. If the belief system insists on a different time frame, then it has been invalidated. If it emphasizes the key point that the universe had a beginning, then the religious belief system just has to associate the beginning of the universe with its own creation story.
The atheist on the other hand has to come up with a process explaining how this beginning occurred without any choice being made by some superhuman agent (God, demigod, or demon). For the atheist, the universe's beginning has to occur by chance. Not only that, since the current evidence puts a range within a few hundred million years on the age of the universe, change within the universe has to be explained without superhuman agency as well, that is, by chance not choice. The problem for the atheist, given the age of the universe, is to show that 13.7 billion years is enough time for chance to do its magic.
The scientific evidence for the big bang is just one of the discoveries that changed the relationship between science and religion. They are not in such opposition as the title of the thread assumes. Or to put this another way, we are no longer in the first half of the 19th century when that opposition was being promoted.
We all get to make up our own minds on what is pseudo-science and what is real science as well as who are the pseudo-scientists and who are the real scientists. This also illustrates that the tension is not between science and religion, but between science and pseudo-science.
This is irrelevant to my point. The "First Cause" problem is synonymous with the problem of infinite regress, which simply means someone can always ask "how/why" to whatever cause is found or even proposed. God doesn't get around this. For most it's nothing more than a semantic stop-sign, a way of halting the questioning process; but for a thinking person there's nothing to prevent us from asking why God can exist without having been created (or with no beginning) but universes can't. The only thing that a believer has accomplished by saying "God!" is to back the question up another step, regardless of whether it's even the correct answer or not.
No, they don't. The only thing an atheist has to do is note that there's not a stitch of evidence for any supernatural hypothesis, and certainly not enough to believe in one. They don't actually have to propose an alternate origin to the universe; they can be completely agnostic on the issue. You never seem to understand that atheism only entails the disbelief in God, nothing more.
Wrong again. An atheist can believe in a deterministic process that we don't understand that creates universes in a way we don't understand.
I have no idea what you're saying with your first sentence. The response to your second sentence is given above (though it find it odd to think that a 13.7 billion year old universe somehow argues for a supernatural creator, assuming life and us were its ultimate purpose: why in the cosmos would they need 14 billions years?)
No we don't, and how asinine of you to say so. What is and isn't science/pseudo-science is not subjective, no more than what is/isn't a mammal is subjective. These are clearly defined terms, and either a subject fits within one category or the other, there are no grey areas. They certainly are not terms that a non-scientist who has repeatedly demonstrated their gross ignorance of a subject gets to use because one subjects accommodates their beliefs and another doesn't.
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being." --Carl Gustav Jung
"To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due." --Neil Gaiman; The Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists
"I'm on my way, from misery to happiness today. Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh" --The Proclaimers
Our current universe is 13.7 billion years old according to extrapolation of observations of galactic red shifts, and other such indirect time/distance methods. According to General Relativity theory, time began with the Big Bang, *but* General Relativity is only a theory, and we know it breaks down at Quantum dimensions, i.e., it isn't a theory of the very early moments of the universe, and we haven't any observations going back that far, so we know *nothing* about these first moments, we don't know if there was something before these moments, what happened in these moments, or anything else about them.
Exactly, mal4mac (though I'd be cautious with the "it's only a theory" talk, since "scientific theories" mean a "rigorously tested hypothesis that has withstood every attempt at falsification," not in the same way that, say, conspiracy "theories" are "only theories"). Most scientists are quick to point out that we know the universe had a beginning to its expansion, but that everything "before" that is speculation based on other things we know. EG, quantum field theory can explain how we COULD get a universe from mere quantum fluctuations, but not, necessarily, that we did.
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being." --Carl Gustav Jung
"To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due." --Neil Gaiman; The Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists
"I'm on my way, from misery to happiness today. Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh" --The Proclaimers
It is not so much a first cause as whether some form of consciousness made a choice out of which our universe arose. That consciousness could be eternal.
By the way, the many worlds approach is also a way to halt the questioning process, but having the "correct answer" is what is important. We are betting our lives on the answer we each choose to follow.
Our existence is the evidence. If atheistic metaphysics were correct, we would not be here at all.
I agree that the atheist needs either (1) chance or (2) an unknown deterministic process. Since that deterministic process is unknown, I restrict the options to chance. Since the universe has been in existence for less than 14 billion years, I eliminate chance as well. There is not enough time.
An atheist cannot have some agent making a choice, which is the only remaining alternative, since the atheist doesn't believe in the existence of such agents.
I don't know why the cosmos needs 14 billion years for consciousness to reach the state we are in now. What seems reasonable is that it would take an eternity if it were up to chance. And even then it wouldn't happen.
I think it might be useful to view pseudo-science in terms of social psychology, specifically cognitive dissonance. Scientific evidence shows that the universe has only a short existence. Scientific evidence shows there is uncertainty at the quantum level. Both of these discoveries fit better into a religious context than they do into an atheistic context. Because of the need to resolve cognitive dissonance atheistic metaphysics gets transformed into pseudo-scientific speculations such as many worlds and superdeterminism.
I'm not sure why you think a consciousness "making a choice" out of which the universe arose is NOT a question of the First Cause. Anyway, you'd have to demonstrate how a consciousness could be eternal or exist outside the bounds of spacetime, especially when we only know of/experience consciousness via spacetime and our material brains.
It doesn't halt anything. MW proponents would still be "questioning" a model for early cosmology, quantum gravity, and the origin of the Born probabilities. All QM interpretations lead to more questions; MW just leads to fewer that seem more solvable.
Our existence isn't evidence for squat except that we exist. It's as much evidence for God as fire is evidence for phlogiston. And feel free to prove that atheistic metaphysics renders our existence impossible.
What makes you say there's not enough time?
An atheist could be agnostic on the issue of possible agents outside our universe that aren't, in themselves, supernatural.
This is you being your typical non-sequitor self. It has nothing to do with what I said. Many Worlds is not pseudo-science. It's not even science; it's an interpretation of science. Scientists don't call it a theory or a hypothesis, they call it what it is, an interpretation. Like all interpretations, it fits the existing evidence. Like all interpretations, it creates other questions/problems that need to be addressed by science. The point, though, is that it creates FEWER problems than other interps., it is compatible with what else we know, and obeys Occam's Razor and other mathematical models for how we should treat competing interpretations that fit the evidence.
Last edited by MorpheusSandman; 02-10-2014 at 09:58 AM.
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being." --Carl Gustav Jung
"To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due." --Neil Gaiman; The Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists
"I'm on my way, from misery to happiness today. Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh" --The Proclaimers
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