Elwed:

Consi, I’m just about done feeding you…

I didn’t know I was even at the table.  Had I, I would’ve ordered off a different menu and I sure would’ve wanted to break bread with GM as well.  She’s much more charming.

What you have to do is to show that it cannot have a naturalistic explanation.

Not exactly.  You seem to believe that to establish a belief in a HP that is not irrational I have to rule out a naturalistic explanation for abiogenesis.  That is playing with the burdens to stack the deck.

By that standard, what you have to show that atheism is rational, since you can’t establish with any material evidence a scientific explanation for abiogenesis, is that it cannot have supernatural explanation. Pshaw! Under your rules, we are all irrational. Makes much more sense to me to believe that you and I are both rational, at least most of the time. 

When examining the question about a creator the question is properly posed as follows:  Is it more likely than not based on what we know that there is an explanation for the existence of matter and life (separate issues for each) that does not require a creator?  The question is one for a trier of fact. 

My evaluation of the question is this: At this time, science tells us that life does not arise from spontaneous generation.  In fact, everything we know about life is that living organisms begat other living organisms.  Moreover, things don’t pop into out of existence from another plane, unless one has a mental illness.  One certainly may hypothesize that under certain conditions those rules might operate differently.  However, hypothesizing how things might operate differently when a theory is untestable is equivalent to saying the Pink Unicorn did it or that maybe there was a Creator. 

DOF:

The theistic claim is

I’m not one to speak for you DOF, but if you want to be truly accurate about the characterization that you are making you should have said: one hypothesis about a Creator claims

I’m not one to speak for you DOF, but if you want to be truly accurate about the characterization that you are making you should have said: one hypothesis about a Creator claims

You’re right, of course.  There are other theistic claims, even sillier than the one I characterized. 

Damn, I’m a bit behind.

In response to elwedriddsche’s earlier comments…

If a claim isn’t supported by evidence that meets the standards of rational and scientific inquiry, then there’s no reason to believe it to be true.

True, but that doesn’t deny possibility, either. There is a difference between rationality and possibility.

That’s not worth thinking about.

How lazy. The last time I heard that excuse, I was six, and asking my Sunday School teacher how the entire world’s population descended from Adam and Eve. I have to say, I expected better from you.

You have to consider everything, no matter how inconceivable it might appear on the outside. Let’s take Comfort’s “banana argument” for example. Sure, it’s flawed in many ways. However, if instead of responding to it by explaining how it is flawed, you only say “it’s not worth thinking about,“ then people dumber than you will think that you simply cannot answer, and believe the banana argument. You obviously think that you are smarter than me, so why not try explaining to me why my idea is wrong?

Just because something could exist is not good enough reason to believe it really does exist.

So I suppose you don’t believe in life outside of our planet, then? I mean, there is a nigh infinite amount of space out there, chock full of planets that could sustain life. Maybe there’s even another race of creatures who have advanced to a similar point of human beings. It is probable, but then again, we don’t have any evidence of such, do we?

I’m not trying to convince you that “it” does exist, whatever “it” might be. All I am saying is that absolutely anything could exist, whether it falls within the realm of our rational understanding or not.

Phrased like this, it’s anti-intellectual special pleading.

Phrased like that, you’re also taking my words out of context. As I was saying before, there is nothing wrong with trying to understand the universe in which we live in. That curiosity is what makes us human. However, as humans, much like microbes on the skin of a blue whale, there is much of our universe that will more than likely never be understood by our scientific observation or rationality. Does that make these aspects any less real?

Consi, there’s just one thing I’m going to address:

At this time, science tells us that life does not arise from spontaneous generation.

You either exhibit a profound misunderstanding of science or you deliberately erect a straw man.

At this time, science doesn’t tell us that it does not happen, all it tells us is that we don’t yet know how it could have happened or did happen.

I have no particular desire to ride this merry-go-round again (let’s face it: you can only ride it a certain number of times before it just gets boring), but I wanted to address this morsel from Consi:

When you dress up propositions that lack material evidence, well, they are faith based beliefs no matter who holds them.

You keep claiming that it is the atheistic, materialistic side of this debate that is making extraordinary claims. Do you not see that the claims that your side makes are at least as extraordinary as ours (and in my opinion, substantially more so)? Like it or not, there is at least some empirical evidence behind scientific theories of abiogenesis, though admittedly it is far from complete or overwhelming at this date. Ten years from today I suspect we will have gathered a wealth of additional evidence corroborating our claims.

Thought Criminal:

Elwed: Just because something could exist is not good enough reason to believe it really does exist.

So I suppose you don’t believe in life outside of our planet, then? I mean, there is a nigh infinite amount of space out there, chock full of planets that could sustain life.

The problem is that you are comparing belief in extraterrestrial life with the existence of a supernatural entity. Not only is there reason to conclude that the existence of extraterrestrials is probable, but the claim that extraterrestrials exist is ultimately testable and verifiable. The same is not the case with theological or supernatural claims.

Also, to the best of my reading comprehension, Elwed did not claim that a lack of evidence should entail disbelief, simply that it does not warrant a leap of faith toward belief.

Does that make these aspects any
less real?

No, it makes them inconsequential to all observations. I can’t say we know everything. I can say that for anything that can be known, scientific inquiry is the only method by which it can be known. To say that we cannot know everything - including all that cannot be known - is not a thwart to science in any fashion, much less a defense for irrational beliefs. To believe that there is life outside of Earth seems appealing, and, on a cursory guess, probable. However, none of this is a defense for believing anything other than what evidence currently indicates. It is to this degree that science is not making assumptions, because to assume that there is “something more” demands the evidence that “something more” exists. This is the reason the uncertainty principle is accepted in QM, rather than some neo-relativity. Neo-relativists propose the existence of some set of mystery mechanics that explain quantum behavior in a non-random fashion, and have been doing so since the Einstein-Bohr debate in ‘29. They have yet to provide any hypothesis that is simpler and equally or more accurate in testing. In nearly 80 years, no advances have been made.

All I am saying is that absolutely anything could exist, whether it falls within the realm of our rational understanding or not.

But you don’t know that; that’s the thing. That’s not to say that it is possible or isn’t - it draws no conclusion on the possibility of things. All it says is that the truth of this thing, or the nature of it, is undetermined. Therefore, we cannot ascribe some trait to a thing which is not known a priori.

But if you ascribe doubt to things where no doubt is motivated by evidence, and ascribe truth to a universe of things we have no knowledge of whatsoever, then there can be no discourse - you spite reason for its own sake.

(Thought Criminal) True, but that doesn’t deny possibility, either. There is a difference between rationality and possibility.

And there’s a difference between a infinitesimally small possibility and a strong probability.

How lazy. The last time I heard that excuse, I was six, and asking my Sunday School teacher how the entire world’s population descended from Adam and Eve. I have to say, I expected better from you.

Whatever, dude.

Sadie: Yep, she and I are very close. No embarrassment received on this side. I’m only wondering what’s taken KPG so long… wink

Just very distracted right now, darling. My wife is leaving for Russia on Wednesday morning and it’s kind of got me freaked out. She’s going to be gone for six weeks and it’ll be the first time I’ve lived alone for more than a day or two in over seven years. Very weird….

At this time, science doesn’t tell us that it does not happen, all it tells us is that we don’t yet know how it could have happened or did happen.

a/k/a: More will be revealed.

Do you not see that the claims that your side makes are at least as extraordinary as ours…

Sadie, I do, and quite well.  My goal was only to take the edge off the blade of supposed rational superiority that occasionally raises its ugly head. That was not directed at Elwed, so you know.

I’m way behind, but here goes:

QUESTION. What is science?
ANSWER. It is the only way of determining what is true and what is false.

QUESTION. How does science operate?
ANSWER. Hypotheses must be testable and within the framework of naturalism.

QUESTION. Can science alight upon the supernatural?
ANSWER. No, the supernatural is outside sciences domain.

QUESTION. Then if the supernatural does exist, is science not a limited
tool for discovering the whole of reality?
ANSWER. The supernatural cannot exist, for when it is discovered it becomes
natural.

This seems to be the crux of the issue. If I understand you right, you say that the supernatual is outside of the domain of science, and then say for anything to exist, it must within the domain of science. Isn’t that just an assumption that the natural world is all there is? But why do you assume that?

QUESTION. Do you regard our five senses, whether bare or with the aid of
instrumentation, as the key to uncovering the whole of reality?
ANSWER. Yes, since we have nothing else. Science is our only way of
knowing.

QUESTION. Would you say deaf people are justified in regarding the world of
sound as truly, objectively, really nonexistent?
ANSWER. No, their reliance upon their senses does not make objective
reality so.

Here again, how do you know there is not something that we cannot uncover by our five senses? How does not being able to know it by science make it nonexistant? Maybe I’m just not getting it, and if so, please be patient with me, but it seems like this whole catechism is just saying “I believe that everything can be explained by science, therefore, there is no supernatural.“ But why do you believe that everything can be explained by science?

Science is not, per se, mere philosophy. Planes fly because we got our
numbers right, not because there’s some philosophy we believe in that
makes them fly. Sure, we have no guarantees that we aren’t making a
mistake somewhere, outside the universe of discourse for which these
things are tested to hold true. That’s more of a question of knowing
to what degrees it holds true and testing for them than a flaw in
philosophy.

I think I would make a distinction between the science involved in, say, gravity, or air flow, and the science involved in evolution. The science involved with planes flying can be done with observations, tests, and is repeatable. We can all see planes flying. But evolution, abiogenesis, and the big bang deal with events that happened in the past. They deal more with the question of “what happened?“, then the “what happens?“ question that science is more frequently used to answer. So what happened? Well, if we assume that the world has always behaved according to the natural laws that we observe today, then we would be forced to come up with theories such as those scientists have proposed. So I guess what I’m saying is, I don’t see why I should assume that there is no supernatural domain that could sometimes, on isolated occasions, supercede the natural law.

It’s a case of ‘this is what we consider the most probable explanation if
everything strictly abides by our rules’. Anyway, one thing that has me
confuddled about how life started is how primordial cells managed to gain
stereochemical
purity when there is no chemical reason to favour one enantiomer over the
other, that is where science might struggle, but what you have to
understand is that it’s all too easy to say ‘god did it’ to terminate
the arguement, the patern of science is such that there is often more depth
to that which puts scientists off resorting to ‘god did it’. Also no
scientific paper is going to suggest an uncertainty because of the way
things are, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true…

I agree that ‘god did it’ would be, and has been, a serious deterrent towards understanding the world around us better. I’m not sure why thiests have been responsible for this, but I think it comes from a basic fear of the unknown. But I think it would be equally dangerous for scientiests to writethe entire history of the world from a purely naturalistic point of view, dangerous in the sense that, if there is a God who transcends this world, then they are likely to get the story wrong. In the same way, I think scientists and others insist on a strictly natural world because of a fear of the unknown. Maybe not, but that’s the way it seems to me.

So I’m very skeptical of scientific explanations like
evolution, ...

You kill any credibility that you have. DOA.

Well, I’m sorry that you feel that way. It seems to me that evolution belongs in the same category as abiogenesis and the big bang, since they deal with events that have happened, not with events that we observe today. And maybe I should clarify that when I talk about evolution, I mean the idea that life evolved from simple organisms to the complex ones we see today. I’m sure one day science will have a theory about abiogenesis as well, and everyone will accept it, because it’s science, and if someone says they don’t buy it, people will tell him, “You kill any credibility that you have. DOA.“ But that’s not a very serious response. Other than that, though, I think you’ve made some good points.

Just because something could exist is not good enough reason to
believe it really does exist.

cuts both ways. The faith
principle of the atheist that life originated from non-life, also known as
spontaneous generation, is where the atheist must take refuge at the
present. Granted, there are some underlying assumptions that are likely to
make one more predisposed to accept such a heretofore and currently
unproven proposition that has not been replicated in any meaningful
fashion. Yet, those assumptions are lack of faith in one area that
manifests itself as faith in a different area. We all choose to believe.
The only question is in what.

Here’s what I’m trying to do. We have both ended up in very different places, a lot of you believe that there is no God, I believe that there is. I’m trying to figure out, where in our reasoning about the world and our life, did we part paths? All I’ve been able to figure out so far is that you assume that the natural world is all there is, so there’s no God. But what was it that led you to that assumption? I haven’t been able to see a reason to assume that, and so I believe in God, because that brings ultimate meaning to my life and to the world, and that, well, is more meaningful. Isn’t that the point of searching for truth, in order to find meaning? It has led us to ask all sort of questions about the world and life. More than any question that science can answer, what is more important than the question, “why are we here?“ Wouldn’t it be strange to reach the end of all knowledge, and find out, oh, there is no reason we are here? Why would you be willing to stop short in the search for ultimate truth, right there at the most important question of all?

But let me again clarify my question. Why, when the only evidence I’ve seen for a purely natural world is only evidence when you assume that the natural world is all there is, why do you assume that the natural world is all there is?

I think I would make a distinction between the science involved in, say, gravity, or air flow, and the science involved in evolution.

The science involved with planes flying can be done with observations, tests, and is repeatable.

The observations of evolution are indirect, as are the observations of quantum mechanics. We get direct measurements of phenomena that indirectly indicate the state of things. Yet QM is not a matter of any faith - as Feynman has pointed out, we have an exactitude comparable to the thickness of a human hair on the distance from New York to Los Angeles.

We can all see planes flying. But evolution, abiogenesis, and the big bang deal with events that happened in the past.

That they are in the past is not an issue - you do not dispute what you did only a moment ago on scientific grounds. The issue is, “how do you know?“, and you don’t - not with any natural science. That said, there is no equivocation between an unevidenced claim to the supernatural and an evidenced claim to a natural process.

Evolution actually works - in that it possesses both an explanatory capacity for new data as it appears, without modification, and a predictive capacity that says “we are likely to discover Y data during a test X for some set of indicators”.

It seems to me that evolution belongs in the same category as abiogenesis and the big bang, since they deal with events that have happened, not with events that we observe today.

This is exactly where you get it wrong, and why I dislike formal debate. It takes pretending that the truth of things exists in a vaccuum. It doesn’t. Evolution is the basis of biology, not an ad-hoc explanation. We rely on its truth every day in labs around the world. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to make any claim of the existence of a material something that does not have implications for some field of science. Any claim to explain what has happened has to work in tandem with the things we observe today - if it doesn’t it’s wrong.

I don’t see why I should assume that there is no supernatural domain that could sometimes, on isolated occasions, supercede the natural law.

The natural domain is a class; it has no larger container; it is the largest possible categorical group for all things which we observe to exist. This is as a matter of definition, not assumption. I’ve made the case before that, given a natural law, even supernatural entities, which purport to, somehow, exist outside of all that there is, can only meaningfully exist through natural phenomena. I don’t know why you’d bother inventing a supernatural anything; the question remains only what happens in nature. Anything beyond that is beyond the scope of any human experience. It’s like debating whether or not we’re in the Matrix.

One more thing before I’m out for the night:

Why, when the only evidence I’ve seen for a purely natural world is only evidence when you assume that the natural world is all there is, why do you assume that the natural world is all there is?

If we assumed that angels and demons controlled everything arbitrarily, we would have no basis for testing, and thus, no basis for advancement of human knowledge. It would not be possible to harbor knowledge because there is no truth in such a world; only the whim of capricious invisible entities.

It seems to me that evolution belongs in the same category as abiogenesis and the big bang, since they deal with events that have happened, not with events that we observe today.

Not quite, Aaron.  It’s true that cosmology, abiogenesis, and evolution are historical sciences, insofar as they attempt to reconstruct our past.  But they all rely on events we observe today as well- indeed, they wouldn’t be possible without it.  It’s only our understanding of how physics, chemistry, and biology work today that enable us to extrapolate into the past.

While macroevolution cannot be observed in living organisms, because the timescales involved are simply too long, there is overwhelming evidence for it.  I won’t attempt to present it here, since it’s available elsewhere (for instance here), but I’ll just mention two things for you to ponder.

One- we can and do observe microevolution all the time.  And there is absolutely no evidence for any built-in limits on how far it can go, no mysterious boundaries of “kind” that prevent a lineage from evolving further.  In other words, macroevolution is simply microevolution writ large.  And of course there’s lots of fossil and biochemical evidence for macroevolution.  But go see for yourself.

Two- the vast majority of scientists believe in macroevolution.  And the vast majority of scientists who do not are religious.  Isn’t that an amazing coincidence?

All I’ve been able to figure out so far is that you assume that the natural world is all there is, so there’s no God. But what was it that led you to that assumption?

The same thing that led us, and presumably you, to assume (until we see evidence to the contrary) that there’s no teapot orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter, that there’s no Santa Claus, and that we’re not in the Matrix: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, or some other such principle of parsimony.  That is, entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.  There’s no evidence for the existence of these entities, and they don’t explain anything we can observe better than competing theories, so we simply assume they don’t exist, along with the infinite numbers of other imaginable entities.

Of course, you might object, as Thought Criminal also has, that we can’t rule out such entities a priori.  Of course we don’t and can’t know everything about the Universe, so we can never be absolutely certain that something doesn’t exist.  But that’s life- we do and must live with uncertainty.  If you want absolute certainty, you will find it in circumscribed systems such as mathematics.  In normal arithmetic, two plus two is certainly four.  But in science, nothing is that certain.  But we can be fairly certain, for instance, that the Sun will rise tomorrow, and fairly certain that we’re not brains in vats.

I’m fairly certain that Thor and Jehovah and cherubim don’t exist, since I’ve seen no evidence for their existence, they have no explanatory power, and there’s lots of evidence that people make up such stories all the time (look at cargo cults for a modern observable example of the birth of a religion).

Wouldn’t it be strange to reach the end of all knowledge, and find out, oh, there is no reason we are here?

I’m not sure what you mean by “reason we are here”.  If you mean “explanation for our existence”, I would say that we are here because the Universe is here, and under the right conditions life evolves into intelligent beings.  I don’t have an explanation for the existence of the Universe, but no one does so far.  And please don’t tell me that the Universe is here because God created it, and that God somehow magically doesn’t have or need an explanation.  That is no answer at all- you might as well just say that the Universe needs no explanation:  that has just as much explanatory power, and it’s a lot simpler.

Why would you be willing to stop short in the search for ultimate truth, right there at the most important question of all?

What do you mean by “ultimate truth”?  If you mean “the origin of the Universe”, science is working on it.  There’s no guarantee that we’ll ever know, of course.  It might also be that the question is meaningless, since all such questions depend on the existence of time, and it seems that time does not exist without matter.  If, by “ultimate truth”, you mean some sort of purpose for us, I’ve already answered that: purposes are evolved entities, and while the Universe has lots of local purposes in the form of strategies of living beings, the Universe as a whole has no purpose, since it is not (as far as we know) a living entity.  But science, and I as a natural, are open to new evidence.

A couple more things, then I really have to get to work.  Thought Criminal, you said

Let’s take Comfort’s “banana argument” for example. Sure, it’s flawed in many ways. However, if instead of responding to it by explaining how it is flawed, you only say “it’s not worth thinking about,” then people dumber than you will think that you simply cannot answer, and believe the banana argument.

This is a legitimate question, and everyone will answer differently: when should we respond seriously, and when is it permissible to poke fun at an idea?  Back on the first page of this thread, Psychromorbidus responded seriously to one flaw in the banana-proves-God argument.  But for me and most of us here, this argument, presented by an adult, is way over the line, well into the realm of risible wackiness, so it is fair game.

And while some may choose to never make fun of anything because it might offend someone, I feel that while sarcasm is often counterproductive, sometimes it’s just the thing to puncture self-importance.  And it’s fun.  Of course, it’s easy to go overboard and do harm if you’re not careful.  But the banana argument is just too silly to not lampoon.

Elwed- while I agree with most of the Griswoldian Catechism, some of the answers are a bit pat.

QUESTION. Would the world be better off without religion?
ANSWER. Certainly. Most wars and massacres are caused by religion.

I would say that there are many possible worlds without religion, and that religion cannot simply be excised leaving the rest of the world unchanged, so it’s hard to imagine what “a world without religion” would be.  Religion is a big part of our history, for good and for bad.  As far as saying that the world would be better off without religion, that’s hard to predict.  I would like to believe we’d be better off without religion, but there are many imponderables, so I think it’s not so obvious.

QUESTION. So can then war have an other cause than religion?
ANSWER. The cause was the same: irrationality. Rationality is the only thing that can stop humans from flying planes into office buildings.

Again, too pat.  While “rationality” might cut down on suicide terrorism, many of the reasons people go to war are “rational”- from their point of view: self-defense, greed, righting ancient wrongs…  I’m afraid it will take more than just booting religion and embracing “rationality” to stop war.

Aaron-

(adressing elwed) This seems to be the crux of the issue. If I understand you right, you say that the supernatual is outside of the domain of science, and then say for anything to exist, it must within the domain of science. Isn’t that just an assumption that the natural world is all there is? But why do you assume that?

Good point, if science is to explain the universe it can’t dismiss possibilities. It can’t favour what hasn’t been proven but sometimes it’s forced to find an explanation. The supernatural does not make itself evident as the only possibility to scientists, so here’s food for thought - that would meen that if god were causing science to look repeatable and beleivable, then it must be his intention for atheism to exist - but why would he do this? Possibly because the mindset enables a different mode of thought that’s unavailable in heaven - you have to get away from knowing god exists in order to fully study and question how and why he might exist.

Here again, how do you know there is not something that we cannot uncover by our five senses

For something to interact with these senses it must make itself evident in the physical world because those senses operate in the physical:
Sight is from light, a physical thing
Touch is from physical pressure/force
Sound is from vibrations of physical air molecules
Smell+taste are from physical chemicals
Even balance is movement of a physical spirit-level in our ears
In order for the metaphysical to become physical it has to transcend dimensions, and if our conciousness was from a metaphysical source (other dimension) then in order to create the physical electrical signals in our brain to control our body it must also be transcending into the physical somehow. Maybe mass micromanagement of the uncertainty principle would allow this, or more easily, that rules might be broken when we’re not looking, anyway a metaphysical conciousness is a condition of metaphysical things influencing you without trancending into the physical.

They deal more with the question of “what happened?”, then the “what happens?” question that science is more frequently used to answer. So what happened? Well, if we assume that the world has always behaved according to the natural laws that we observe today, then we would be forced to come up with theories such as those scientists have proposed. So I guess what I’m saying is, I don’t see why I should assume that there is no supernatural domain that could sometimes, on isolated occasions, supercede the natural law

True

I’m not sure why thiests have been responsible for this, but I think it comes from a basic fear of the unknown.

Agreed, there is a mindset that’s absolutely petrified of it’s own extermination, and some of science and philosophy forces that extinction, so it responds by closing the mind to protect itself, and setting up negative emotional barriers like fear of death, etc, that make the victim disinclined to think along the lines of what might threaten this mindset. The minset is very adept at hijacking the vulnerable and carefully placing emotional barriers, it has in essence evolved.

But I think it would be equally dangerous for scientiests to writethe entire history of the world from a purely naturalistic point of view, dangerous in the sense that, if there is a God who transcends this world, then they are likely to get the story wrong. In the same way, I think scientists and others insist on a strictly natural world because of a fear of the unknown. Maybe not, but that’s the way it seems to me

If god were behind this universe then he made it so that there was doubt on his actual existence and confusion over the actual sequence of events, in such a case it wouldn’t be reasonable of him to punish people for falling for the system that was jiggered to fool them. There will always be some open minded scientists, but unless anything from outside the physical made itself evident, science would have more or less reached it’s climax anyway, and you’d never know if there was more out there - you’d never know if, say, heaven, was jiggered to fool you in an even bigger system, you would never know what might exist in dimensions that you have no way of looking into.

I’m sure one day science will have a theory about abiogenesis as well, and everyone will accept it

Disagree - As you said, science is looking at the past here, and when so there will always be doubt. If science is capped off and trapped in these physical dimensions (by relying on observation) it couldn’t introduce a metaphysical component, especially if the interaction was different in getting it started as to now because it wouldn’t be a current observation.

And you’re correct later on to question the psychology behind atheism, because like all stances people sometimes have to question why they take the stance in order to realise stuff they need to think about. In case you’re wondering I only tend to adress the competing stance (when I’m not it) out of laziness to read and respond to everyone else - there are a lot of people of similar mindset and it’d take a long time to talk to them all, it’s not ideal but it’s not feesible to produce ideality in an unideal world (ie one with physical constraints and needs with a time and physics limiting scope to satisfy all needs)

LH and Zilch just saved me from writing a lengthy reply, but I wanted to address a couple of Aaron’s questions:

Here’s what I’m trying to do. We have both ended up in very different places, a lot of you believe that there is no God, I believe that there is. I’m trying to figure out, where in our reasoning about the world and our life, did we part paths? All I’ve been able to figure out so far is that you assume that the natural world is all there is, so there’s no God. But what was it that led you to that assumption?

I can’t speak for all atheists, but for a good number of us that assumption is based on the total absence of any objective evidence in support of the God hypothesis in addition to the growing knowledge base on how the human brain interprets reality.

Knowledge tends to be poisonous to religious faith because the more you know the less the explanation of “Goddidit” makes sense.

I haven’t been able to see a reason to assume that, and so I believe in God, because that brings ultimate meaning to my life and to the world, and that, well, is more meaningful. Isn’t that the point of searching for truth, in order to find meaning?

As has been said, it depends on what you mean by “truth” and “meaning.“ Both are subjective and purely human constructs.

More than any question that science can answer, what is more important than the question, “why are we here?”

This assumes A) that the question of why we are here is particularly important and B) that there’s an answer that provides some insight into existence. There’s no reason to assume either of those conditions is true.

But let’s take a look at the answers provided by, say, the Christian God to the question of why we are here: Based on my reading of the Bible we’re here to live by a set of rules arbitrarily chosen by God and to spend a lot of time and effort telling God how great he is when, really, he should already know how great he is what with being God and all. And if we doubt his existence due to the complete lack of evidence then we risk spending the rest of eternity being tortured in Hell.

So the reason why I’m here is because some divine being with an inferiority complex needs me to sit around and tell him how wonderful he is and prove my love for him by believing without any good reason to do so otherwise he’ll have “no choice” (despite his ability to do whatever he wants by his very nature of being a God) but to send me to a place of unending pain and suffering for ever and ever.

Wow, I feel so much better about my existence now. What a great reason to exist! How could I have ever doubted the truth of that?

Consi,

a/k/a: More will be revealed.

Thank you for conceding your error.

In summary, you have tried to show that a naturalistic/materialistic world view requires belief without evidence that any number of outlandish claims are false. So?

If I understand you right,

You don’t. It also seems to have escaped your attention that I didn’t writethe Griswoldian Catechism—a Wiccan going by Heathen Dawn did and it is quite a frustrated rant.

you say that the supernatual is outside of the domain of science, and then say for anything to exist, it must within the domain of science. Isn’t that just an assumption that the natural world is all there is? But why do you assume that?

Science encompasses the natural, observable world. If something doesn’t have a demonstrable interaction with the natural world, the question of its existence is moot. The assumption isn’t that the natural world is all there is, but that the natural world is all that matters.

The source of Heathen Dawn’s frustration is that a materialistic world view defines the supernatural away. Anything that interacts with the natural is by definition natural itself; anything else is irrelevant.

Here again, how do you know there is not something that we cannot uncover by our five senses? How does not being able to know it by science make it nonexistant? Maybe I’m just not getting it,

Our senses, augmented by instrumentation, are the only interface we have to the natural world. It bears repeating that we take it for granted that our senses accurately reflect the natural world and indeed, that there is a world out there and we’re not brains in a vat.

To repeat, anything that can’t be shown to interact with the natural world and thus lacks objective evidence is irrelevant. To believe that something that doesn’t interact with the natural world exists is irrational.

think I would make a distinction between the science involved in, say, gravity, or air flow, and the science involved in evolution.

That’s DOA. Take yourself to talk.origins and read up on the pertinent scientific literature.

So I guess what I’m saying is, I don’t see why I should assume that there is no supernatural domain that could sometimes, on isolated occasions, supercede the natural law.

a) You still have to show the when and where.

b) Given a), you have to prove a negative and conclusively rule out a naturalistic cause. It doesn’t suffice to say that a scientific answer is outstanding—you have to show that there cannot be one. In other words, you have to prove a negative, using one of the two possible approaches.

c) To blindly assume it means to propose a “solution” that is vastly more complex than the original problem.

All I’ve been able to figure out so far is that you assume that the natural world is all there is, so there’s no God.

Wrong. The natural world is all I have reason to believe to exist and there is no problem that requires “god” as an answer. Always assuming you can define god in a way that’s free of metaphysical and epistemological problems and that such a definition is palatable to you as a religious believer.

I’m not sure all comments are showing in this thread unless I specifically click on the missing comment in the most recent comments thing

Yeah, there’s something funny with the pagination: if you link to the most recent comment in a thread, you get a last page with only that comment.  Les?

Yeah, there’s something funny with the pagination: if you link to the most recent comment in a thread, you get a last page with only that comment.  Les?

That’s by design.

(Technical note: Comment pagination is implemented by using a (SQL) query tag. There’s an alternate implementation that would be based on a plugin which could align the comment pages on their “natural” boundaries and would also solve two other problems—positioning of the last comment if there’s less than a page’s worth of comments and the difference between the back (<<) links and the numbered pages.)

That’s by design.

As in “intelligent design”, or “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature”?

As in “intelligent design”, or “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature”?

Thank you for asking.

The starting point was the heavy resource usage incurred by long threads if comment pagination is not used and the lack of a built-in facility to link to an individual comment when comment pagination is used.

The first cut at the solution was to note that the comment pagination links do not have to fall at a page boundary, to use a query tag to pull some crucial bits of information from the database, and use this information to construct a link that’s supposed to display a page starting with the comment in question.

As it turns out, the above way of linking to paginated comments has a few deficiencies and needs to be refined. What we need to do is pray hard, really hard, until god changes the template code to make it work right. We don’t know how god would physically manipulate the bits of the template code, but it’s a miracle and we mustn’t be inquisitive or second-guess divinity.

Does that answer your question?

You see, the problem is that this website is much too complex to have been created by nature or that bullshit excuse of how we came to be, evolution.  It must of had a creator due to it’s complexity.  It’s really just that simple!

All hail the one true god Jenkins!

Maybe if each page was treated like a seperate hidden thread of sorts, the resource usage would be capped off at 1 page length’s worth, maybe at the end of one page that thread closes and ___ p2 thread opens, or comments directed at a finished page automatically go to the last page. It could call up a whole page without calling up a whole thread, maybe