[Paracelsus]

"The Bible tells me so" is not impressive to thinking people.

Let me make a few observations here regarding this line of thought; these should not be taken personally. We're also going to leave aside the supernatural element of it.

This phrase, along with "Which authority is the right one?" indicates a mode of thought known as epiphenomenology, which in short means I can tell everything I need to know about how a future event will turn out by studying past behaviours.

There isn't anything wrong with it as such, it's been practiced fairly successfully in the West since roughly the time of Aristotle. But it also contains a blind spot, one that people like Nassim Taleb have identified: the conceit that the future is wholly definable and knowable from what has already happened in the past. The answer to this conceit is contained in Taleb's book The Black Swan: because of reasoning blind spots and our tendency to rationalise past disasters, we do not appreciate that complex systems often set up disasters much larger than occurred in the past, and that these disasters are not, in fact, predictable from previous data. Thus, the subprime crisis.

In its most pure, and flawed, form of scientific philosophy, this form of epiphenomenology is called determinism - the idea that if we collect sufficient knowledge about how the world behaved up until now, we'll eventually know the precise future position and velocity of all particles into the future. Fittingly, then, it was in the realm of pure physics that this idea ended -- in the realm of quantum mechanics, where subatomic particle positions and velocities cannot correspond, i.e. you can never know a photon's position and velocity at the same time, you can only determine one with certainty and assign a probability to the other. This is not a matter of having refining our instrumentation, Einstein's own law that nothing travels faster than light combined with the knowledge that we can only observe particles via photons sets this as a hard limit on what we can know about the universe.

This shift from certainty to probability is important in these discussions, too, because it allows atheists to understand that religion has much, much more to do with heuristics that work rather than absolute rules of reality as such. Indeed the great conceit that atheism goes through when it idolises science as the ultimate arbiter of reality is that atheism then believes it's discovered an absolute truth to existence ... something it lambasts religions for.

The next concept to understand is that life has a potent way of winnowing out those heuristics that work and those that don't. It's called time. In general, if something has been around a long time, it's lasted either because it does no harm to the human condition or is beneficial to it. The same can be said of practices, and in particular, religious practices. Taleb goes so far as to suggest that it's a workable rule of life to take the presumption that something you encounter - a book, a piece of art, a government, a religion - is generally in its middle age, halfway through its life. Things that have been standing up for a long time as a general rule will tend to stay standing up the longer they last.

Religious or religious-form practices are no different.

And now I'm going to let Taleb take over entirely.

Quote:

Rory Sutherland claims that the real function for swimming pools is allowing the middle class to sit around in bathing suits without looking ridiculous. Same with New York restaurants: you think their mission is to feed people, but that’s not what they do. They are in the business of selling you overpriced liquor or Great Tuscan wines by the glass, yet get you into the door by serving you your low-carb (or low-something) dishes at breakeven cost. (This business model, of course, fails to work in Saudi Arabia).

So when we look at religion and, to some extent ancestral superstitions, we should consider what purpose they serve, rather than focusing on the notion of “belief”, epistemic belief in its strict scientific definition. In science, belief is literal belief; it is right or wrong, never metaphorical. In real life, belief is an instrument to do things, not the end product. This is similar to vision: the purpose of your eyes is to orient you in the best possible way, and get you out of trouble when needed, or help you find a prey at distance. Your eyes are not sensors aimed at getting the electromagnetic spectrum of reality. Their job description is not to produce the most accurate scientific representation of reality; rather the most useful one for survival.

Ocular Deception
Our perceptional apparatus makes mistakes –distortions — in order to lead to more precise actions on our parts: ocular deception, it turns out, is a necessary thing. Greek and Roman architects misrepresent the columns of the temples, by tilting them inward, in order to give us the impression that the columns are straight. As Vitruvius explains, the aim is to “counteract the visual deception by an change of proportions”[2]. A distortion is meant to bring about an enhancement of your aesthetic experience. The floor of the Parthenon is curved in reality so we can see it straight. The columns are in truth unevenly spaced, so we can see them lined up like a marching Russian division in a parade.

Should one go lodge a complain with the Greek Tourism Office claiming that the columns are not vertical and someone is taking advantage of our visual weaknesses?



Ergodicity First
The same applies to distortions of beliefs. Is this visual deceit any different from leading someone to believe in Santa Claus, if it enhances his or her holiday aesthetic experience? No, unless the person engages in actions that ends up harming him or her.

In that sense harboring superstitions is not irrational by any metric: nobody has managed to reinvent a metric for rationality based on process. Actions that harm you are observable.

I have shown that, unless one has an overblown and (as with Greek columns), a very unrealistic representation of some tail risks, one cannot survive –all it takes is a single event for the irreversible exit from among us. Is selective paranoia “irrational” if those individuals and populations who don’t have it end up dying or extinct, respectively?

A statements that will orient us for the rest of the book:
Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later

In other words, you do not need science to survive (we’ve done it for several hundred million years) , but you need to survive to do science. As your grandmother would have said, better safe than sorry. This precedence is well understood by traders and people in the real world, as per Warren Buffet expression “to make money you must first survive” –skin in the game again; those of us who take risks have their priorities firmer than vague textbook notions such as “truth”. More technically, this brings us again to the ergodic property (I keep my promise to explain it in detail, but we are not ready yet): for the world to be “ergodic”, there needs to be no absorbing barrier, no substantial irreversibilities.

And what do we mean by “survival”? Survival of whom? Of you? Your family? Your tribe? Humanity? We will get into the details later but note for now that I have a finite shelf life; my survival is not as important as that of things that do not have a limited life expectancy, such as mankind or planet earth. Hence the more “systemic”, the more important such a survival becomes.

Three rigorous thinkers will orient my thinking on the matter: the cognitive scientist and polymath Herb Simon, pioneer of Artificial Intelligence, and the derived school of thought led by Gerd Gigerenzer, on one hand, and the mathematician, logician and decision theorist Ken Binmore who spent his life formulating the logical foundations of rationality.

From Simon to Gigerenzer
Simon formulated the notion now known as bounded rationality: we cannot possibly measure and assess everything as if we were a computer; we therefore produce, under evolutionary pressures, some shortcuts and distortions. Our knowledge of the world is fundamentally incomplete, so we need to avoid getting in unanticipated trouble. Even if our knowledge of the world were complete, it would still be computationally near-impossible to produce precise, unbiased understanding of reality. A fertile research program on ecological rationality came out of it, mostly organized and led by Gerd Gigerenzer, mapping how many things we do that appear, on the surface, illogical have deeper reasons.

Ken Binmore
As to Ken Binmore, he showed that the concept casually dubbed “rational” is ill-defined, in fact so ill-defined that much of the uses of the term are just gibberish. There is nothing particularly irrational in beliefs per se (given that they can be shortcuts and instrumental to something else): to him everything lies in the notion of “revealed preferences”, which we explain next.

Binmore also saw that criticism of the “rational” man as posited by economic theory is often a strawman argument distorting the theory in order to bring it down. He recounts that economic theory, as posited in the original texts, is not as strict in its definition of “utility”, that is, the satisfaction a consumer and a decision-maker derive from a certain outcome. Satisfaction does not necessarily have to be monetary. There is nothing irrational, according to economic theory, in giving your money to a stranger, if that’s what makes you tick. And don’t try to invoke Adam Smith: he was a philosopher not an accountant; he never equated human interests and aims to narrow accounting book entries.


^^^^
An illustration of the Bias-Variance tradeoff. Assume two people (sober) shooting at a target in, say, Texas. The top shooter has a bias, a systematic “error”, but on balance gets closer to target than the bottom shooter who has no systematic bias but a high variance. Typically, you cannot reduce one without increasing the other. When fragile, the strategy at the top is the best: maintain a distance from ruin, that is, hitting a point in the periphery should it be dangerous. This schema explains why if you want to minimize the probability of the plane crashing, you may make mistakes with impunity provided you lower your dispersion.

Revelation of Preferences
Next let us develop the following three points:
(1) Judging people on their beliefs is not scientific
(2) There is no such thing as “rationality” of a belief, there is rationality of action
(3)The rationality of an action can only be judged by evolutionary considerations

The axiom of revelation of preferences states the following: you will not have an idea about what people really think, what predicts people’s actions, merely by asking them –they themselves don’t know. What matters, in the end, is what they pay for goods, not what they say they “think” about them, or what are the reasons they give you or themselves for that. (Think about it: revelation of preferences is skin in the game). Even psychologists get it; in their experiments, their procedures require that actual dollars be spent for the test to be “scientific”. The subjects are given a monetary amount, and they watch how he or she formulates choices by spending them. However, a large share of psychologists fughedabout the point when they start bloviating about rationality. They revert to judging beliefs rather than action.

For beliefs are … cheap talk. A foundational principle of decision theory (and one that is at the basis of neoclassical economics, rational choice, and similar disciplines) is that what goes on in the head of people isn’t the business of science. First, what they think may not be measurable enough to lend itself to some scientific investigation. Second, it is not testable. Finally, there may be some type of a translation mechanism too hard for us to understand, with distortions at the level of the process that are actually necessary for think to work.

Actually, by a mechanism (more technically called the bias-variance tradeoff), you often get better results making some type of “errors”, as when you aim slightly away from the target when shooting. I have shown in Antifragile that making some types of errors is the most rational thing to do, as, when the errors are of little costs, it leads to gains and discoveries.

This is why I have been against the State dictating to us what we “should” be doing: only evolution knows if the “wrong” thing is really wrong, provided there is skin in the game for that.


he classical “large world vs small world” problem. Science is currently too incomplete to provide all answers –and says it itself. We have been so much under assault by vendors using “science” to sell products that many people, in their mind, confuse science and scientism. Science is mainly rigor.

What is Religion About ?
It is therefore my opinion that religion is here to enforce tail risk management across generations, as its binary and unconditional rules are easy to teach and enforce. We have survived in spite of tail risks; our survival cannot be that random.

Recall that skin in the game means that you do not pay attention to what people say, only to what they do, and how much of their neck they are putting on the line. Let survival work its wonders.

Superstitions can be vectors for risk management rules. We have as potent information that people that have them have survived; to repeat never discount anything that allows you to survive. For instance Jared Diamond discusses the “constructive paranoia” of residents of Papua New Guinea, whose superstitions prevent them from sleeping under dead trees. [1] Whether it is superstition or something else, some deep scientific understanding of probability that is stopping you, it doesn’t matter, so long as you don’t sleep under dead trees. And if you dream of making people use probability in order to make decisions, I have some news: close to ninety percent of psychologists dealing with decision-making (which includes such regulators as Cass Sunstein) have no clue about probability, and try to disrupt our organic paranoid mechanism.

Further, I find it incoherent to criticize someone’s superstitions if these are meant to bring some benefits, yet not do so with the optical illusions in Greek temples.

The notion of “rational” bandied about by all manner of promoters of scientism isn’t defined well enough to be used for beliefs. To repeat, we do not have enough grounds to discuss “irrational beliefs”. We do with irrational actions.

Now what people say may have a purpose –it is not just what they think it means. Let us extend the idea outside of buying and selling to the risk domain: opinions in are cheap unless people take risks for them.

Extending such logic, we can show that much of what we call “belief” is some kind of background furniture for the human mind, more metaphorical than real. It may work as therapy.

“Tawk” and Cheap “Tawk”

The first principle we make:
There is a difference between beliefs that are decorative and a different sort of beliefs, those that map to action.
There is no difference between them in words, except that the true difference reveals itself in risk taking, having something at stake, something one could lose in case one is wrong.

And the lesson, by rephrasing the principle:
How much you truly “believe” in something can only be manifested through what you are willing to risk for it.

But this merits continuation. The fact that there is this decorative component to belief, life, these strange rules followed outside the Gemelli clinics of the world merits a discussion. What are these for? Can we truly understand their function? Are we confused about their function? Do we mistake their rationality? Can we use them instead to define rationality?

What Does Lindy Say?
Let us see what Lindy has to say about “rationality”. While the notions of “reason” and “reasonable” were present in ancient thought, mostly embedded in the notion of precaution, or sophrosyne, this modern idea of “rationality” and “rational decision-making” was born in the aftermath of Max Weber, with the works of psychologists, philosophasters, and psychosophasters. The classical sophrosyne is precaution, self-control, and temperance, all in one. It was replaced with something a bit different. “Rationality” was forged in a post-enlightenment period[2], at the time when we thought that understanding the world was at the next corner. It assumes no randomness, or a simplified the random structure of our world. Also of course no interactions with the world.

The only definition of rationality that I found that is practically, empirically, and mathematically rigorous is that of survival –and indeed, unlike the modern theories by psychosophasters, it maps to the classics. Anything that hinders one’s survival at an individual, collective, tribal, or general level is deemed irrational.

Hence the precautionary principle and sound risk understanding.

It may be “irrational” for people to have two sinks in their kitchen, one for meat and the other for dairy, but as we saw, it led to the survival of the Jewish community as Kashrut laws forced them to eat and bind together.

It is also rational to see things differently from the “way they are”, for improved performance.

It is also difficult to map beliefs to reality. A decorative or instrumental belief, say believing in Santa Claus or the potential anger of Baal can be rational if it leads to an increased survival.

The Nondecorative in the Decorative
Now what we called decorative is not necessarily superfluous, often to the contrary. They may just have another function we do not know much about –and we can consult for that the grandmaster statistician, time, in a very technical tool called the survival function, known by both old people and very complex statistics –but we will resort here to the old people version.

The fact to consider is not that these beliefs have survived a long time –the Catholic church is an administration that is close to twenty-four centuries old (it is largely the continuation of the Roman Republic). The fact is not that . It is that people who have religion –a certain religion — have survived.

Another principle:

When you consider beliefs do not assess them in how they compete with other beliefs, but consider the survival of the populations that have them.

Consider a competitor to the Pope’s religion, Judaism. Jews have close to five hundred different dietary interdicts. They may seem irrational to an observer who sees purpose in things and defines rationality in terms of what he can explain. Actually they will most certainly seem so. The Jewish Kashrut prescribes keeping four sets of dishes, two sinks, the avoidance of mixing meat with dairy products or merely letting the two be in contact with each other, in addition to interdicts on some animals: shrimp, pork, etc. The good stuff.

These laws might have had an ex ante purpose. One can blame insalubrious behavior of pigs, exacerbated by the heat in the Levant (though heat in the Levant was not markedly different from that in pig-eating areas further West). Or perhaps an ecological reason: kids compete with humans in eating the same vegetables while cows eat what we don’t eat.

But it remains that whatever the purpose, the Kashrut survived approximately three millennia not because of its “rationality” but because the populations that followed it survived. It most certainly brought cohesion: people who eat together hang together. Simply it aided those that survived because it is a convex heuristic. Such group cohesion might be also responsible for trust in commercial transactions with remote members of the community.
This allows us to summarize

Rationality is not what has conscious verbalistic explanatory factors; it is only what aids survival, avoids ruin.

Rationality is risk management, period.

[1] “Consider: If you’re a New Guinean living in the forest, and if you adopt the bad habit of sleeping under dead trees whose odds of falling on you that particular night are only 1 in 1,000, you’ll be dead within a few years. In fact, my wife was nearly killed by a falling tree last year, and I’ve survived numerous nearly fatal situations in New Guinea.”
[2]Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture Book III, Chapter 1, v. 4, 1 A.D.

The overall point being: the salient fact so far as survival is concerned isn't which religion, it's religion itself. Atheists can say that the source of these behaviours is not divine: too bad, that's not a scientific question and therefore the statement has no weight. On the other hand, the survival rate of atheist cultures (zero) versus religious cultures (too many to immediately count) does seem to indicate which one is the more rational course as Taleb would put it.

Beyond that, science has nothing to say about the existence of God. It's not a falsifiable concept. And when you start missing religion as belief and practice, you wind up being the same tired old nerd who sneers that Pascal's Wager Is Not Logically Supportable. Pascal's Wager isn't a rule of logic, it's a rule of heuristics.

[Sherman]

The men who have been the leaders and changers of the world have been accused of being atheists. Both Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln were called atheists in their time and even Socrates was accused at his trial. Paul Tillich, who is considered the greatest Christian theologian of the 20th century, believed that Christianity only made sense as a metaphor and all literal interpretations of the Bible were wrong. Conservatives say that he bordered on atheism.

The intelligent way to proceed is to accept the current state of scientific knowledge and go forward with beliefs that respect the truth. That is what all smart people did in the past. Even Descartes took the trouble to dissect a human being and find the pineal gland to support his mind/body duality theory. He was wrong, but the important thing to notice is his commitment to empirical evidence and mastering the current state of scientific knowledge. If Descartes were alive today, he would be studying cosmology and evolution.

[Paracelsus]

^^^^^

Are you able to make a better argument than one shot through with appeal to authority fallacy?

[fenetre]

(04-10-2018 01:57 PM)Sherman Wrote:  

The men who have been the leaders and changers of the world have been accused of being atheists. Both Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln were called atheists in their time and even Socrates was accused at his trial. Paul Tillich, who is considered the greatest Christian theologian of the 20th century, believed that Christianity only made sense as a metaphor and all literal interpretations of the Bible were wrong. Conservatives say that he bordered on atheism.

The intelligent way to proceed is to accept the current state of scientific knowledge and go forward with beliefs that respect the truth. That is what all smart people did in the past. Even Descartes took the trouble to dissect a human being and find the pineal gland to support his mind/body duality theory. He was wrong, but the important thing to notice is his commitment to empirical evidence and mastering the current state of scientific knowledge. If Descartes were alive today, he would be studying cosmology and evolution.

Reminds me of the people who point to the handful of famous women throughout history to support their argument that women are equal to men. Atheism is blue-pill.

Taleb is so brilliant because he shows that atheism fails by its own standard. Atheists believe in natural selection but natural selection selects for religion. Atheists hold beliefs that will render them extinct. Not to mention observable behaviours in many of them.

This is why I suspect atheism is more to do with psychological issues than "empirical evidence", "truth", "scientific method", "rational thinking", and whatever other scientism virtues and dogma they preach.

Someone mentioned above about weak relationships with their fathers. I listened recently to E Michael Jones expound on the same angle. In a metaphysical sense one's father is the representation of the logos to a child, and is responsible for guiding the child on his first steps towards discovering the truth.

[Doppelganger]

Everybody believes in what he/she wants to believe. Personally, I think that we are here just by mere casualty.

[Piankhi]

People are naturally superstitious. Golems, witches, elves, demons etc etc. God is just apart of that ensemble.

[Paracelsus]

I agree, God can be set entirely apart from superstition.

[Piankhi]

^You got me there. Let me try again.

People are naturally superstitious. Golems, witches, elves, demons etc etc. God is just a part of that ensemble.

[fenetre]

(04-11-2018 06:24 AM)Piankhi Wrote:  

^You got me there. Let me try again.

Please don't. Your posts border on parody.

[RatInTheWoods]

Dupe

[RatInTheWoods]

(04-09-2018 09:52 PM)Fortis Wrote:  

I'm largely skeptical of extreme atheism since it seems to be in league with dumbing us down, pushing relativism (Islam is the religion of peace), and other useful idiocy. Not to mention, many proponents of it are just as Homo and Pedo as the catholic crooks they love to point out.

Fortis my mate, assuming you have faith in a god, and also assuming you don't have faith in the hundreds of other god we know of...

You are 99.9% atheist my friend. You are atheist to the hundreds (thousands?) of god, religions and belief systems that various humans have had faith in since the dawn of time.

Does that make you a Homo/Pedo? Islam apologist?

Do you really need to hate on us, because we went 0.1% more atheist than you?

I mean you understand how its possible not to have faith in hundreds of gods, what is it that inspires such hatred and mistrust of me not having faith in one more?

[Paracelsus]

But atheists don't actually believe in 0 gods. They believe in [1,2] gods, the endpoints of that range being
(1) science; and
(2) themselves.

[fenetre]

(04-12-2018 12:41 AM)RatInTheWoods Wrote:  

(04-09-2018 09:52 PM)Fortis Wrote:  

I'm largely skeptical of extreme atheism since it seems to be in league with dumbing us down, pushing relativism (Islam is the religion of peace), and other useful idiocy. Not to mention, many proponents of it are just as Homo and Pedo as the catholic crooks they love to point out.

Fortis my mate, assuming you have faith in a god, and also assuming you don't have faith in the hundreds of other god we know of...

You are 99.9% atheist my friend. You are atheist to the hundreds (thousands?) of god, religions and belief systems that various humans have had faith in since the dawn of time.

Does that make you a Homo/Pedo? Islam apologist?

Do you really need to hate on us, because we went 0.1% more atheist than you?

I mean you understand how its possible not to have faith in hundreds of gods, what is it that inspires such hatred and mistrust of me not having faith in one more?

What kind of blithering babble is this?

You atheists really are intellectual heavyweights.

I’m signing out.

[debeguiled]

Don't you mean blithering Babel?

[RatInTheWoods]

(04-12-2018 12:57 AM)Paracelsus Wrote:  

But atheists don't actually believe in 0 gods. They believe in [1,2] gods, the endpoints of that range being
(1) science; and
(2) themselves.

Well you dodged the actual question.

And no, science isn't a god that you can worship or have blind faith in...

But why the massive hate for someone that just doesn't have faith in 0.001% more gods than yourself? How does that minor detail suddenly make them a hated pedo/homo object of hate?

It's not like theists irrationally hate on other people who worship a different god, is it?

oh wait.

[RatInTheWoods]

(04-12-2018 04:22 AM)fenetre Wrote:  

What kind of blithering babble is this?

You atheists really are intellectual heavyweights.

I’m signing out.

Thank 'god'!

You were crucifying me with your logical arguments.

Exorcising me with your knowledgeable answers.

And blessing me with your wisdom.

I was losing 'faith' in my devote atheism wherever you posted!

I can only hope you resurrect your divine presence in the thread.

[Paracelsus]

(04-12-2018 05:03 PM)RatInTheWoods Wrote:  

(04-12-2018 12:57 AM)Paracelsus Wrote:  

But atheists don't actually believe in 0 gods. They believe in [1,2] gods, the endpoints of that range being
(1) science; and
(2) themselves.

Well you dodged the actual question.

Well the question is invalid. This accusation seems to be your standard defence whenever someone calls you out on a bullshit argument you make is to start blathering that they're not answering your question. As said, atheists don't believe in zero gods, so to ask why you're "persecuted" for believing in one less god than theists is not a question you get to ask.

(04-12-2018 05:03 PM)RatInTheWoods Wrote:  

And no, science isn't a god that you can worship or have blind faith in...

You can certainly have blind faith in science. Most of the population does, as I've demonstrated before - because science is no more intelligible than religion (edit: and/or theology) to the vast majority of people on the planet, and therefore is taken on blind faith by the majority. Unless you'd like to postulate that most people on the planet actually understand, at an intimate level, the mechanics of quantum mechanics, evolution, thermodynamics, etc? And given in social "science", for example, most experiments and findings are not reproduced actually demonstrates the blind faith that people take in science.

The typical argument made by atheists is along the lines "Science will explain all the shit that religion currently talks about eventually." That's the equivalent of a God of the Gaps fallacy, and it's a potent marker of someone who takes science as their religion. Plenty of people worship science when you're prepared to look at their actions, not their lies.

(EDIT: Or take the average delusion that a miracle is something that science has not yet explained. That statement has the underlying premise that science will eventually explain it. As said, the scientific version of the God of the Gaps fallacy.)

(04-12-2018 05:03 PM)RatInTheWoods Wrote:  

But why the massive hate for someone that just doesn't have faith in 0.001% more gods than yourself? How does that minor detail suddenly make them a hated pedo/homo object of hate?

Your projection is at IMAX levels here. Has anyone called you a paedophile or homosexual in this thread? Have you been called before any boards of the Holy Inquisition yet? I can point out any number of people who've been persecuted by secular authorities for their religious beliefs, can you point to anyone who's been similarly persecuted by secular authorities for their scientific beliefs?

[RatInTheWoods]

(04-12-2018 07:00 PM)Paracelsus Wrote:  

As said, atheists don't believe in zero gods,

lol, thats the fucking definition of an atheist...

(04-12-2018 07:00 PM)Paracelsus Wrote:  

You can certainly have blind faith in science. Most of the population does,

Well you can read back to the much more civilised chats I had with the now banned Laska about this topic, but if you think 'having in blind faith in science' is even possible, then you don't understand science my boy.

A fundamental principle of science is that 'no blind faith' is allowed -everything is up for challenge - which is diametrically opposite thought paradigm to religion.

(04-12-2018 07:00 PM)Paracelsus Wrote:  

Has anyone called you a paedophile or homosexual in this thread?

My post last page is in direct response to exactly this, learn to read...

[Paracelsus]

(04-14-2018 06:13 PM)RatInTheWoods Wrote:  

(04-12-2018 07:00 PM)Paracelsus Wrote:  

As said, atheists don't believe in zero gods,

lol, thats the fucking definition of an atheist...

I prefer to judge by actions rather than words, and most atheists quite clearly behave as though they believed in science as their god or, as you rather interestingly omitted, themselves.

Quote:

(04-12-2018 07:00 PM)Paracelsus Wrote:  

You can certainly have blind faith in science. Most of the population does,

Well you can read back to the much more civilised chats I had with the now banned Laska about this topic, but if you think 'having in blind faith in science' is even possible, then you don't understand science my boy.

A fundamental principle of science is that 'no blind faith' is allowed -everything is up for challenge - which is diametrically opposite thought paradigm to religion.

Well, unless the idea goes against the prevailing paradigm in many cases. Then it's quite clear certain scientific principles are not, indeed, up for challenge when you judge by scientists' actions rather than words, and indeed there appear to be any number of sacred cows in science that it is not wise to challenge. Global warming, for one. Poor old Chandrasekhar learned how much his ideas were open to challenge when he dared to be an upstart little Indian up against Arthur Eddington. "Oh, but they eventually agreed Chandrasekhar was right." The Catholic Church agreed Galileo was right too eventually, I don't see any credit given for that.

And that aside: I've posted before -- and indeed alluded to one post ago -- how most people require translation, interpretation, of both science and religion. They cannot know it themselves, so they must take scientists' assertions wholly on faith. And the very fact that there are morons out there who engage in what has been called 'scientism' (n. thought or expression regarded as characteristic of scientists; excessive belief in the power of scientific knowledge and techniques) makes the point for us: people can and often do have blind faith in science. Or are you suggesting the average person can assemble their very own cyclotron and spin up a few Higgs bosons for themselves? Slam a couple of bits of enriched uranium together and start the chain reaction on their own?

Quote:

(04-12-2018 07:00 PM)Paracelsus Wrote:  

Has anyone called you a paedophile or homosexual in this thread?

My post last page is in direct response to exactly this, learn to read...

I did. And I see there Fortis's suggestion that many proponents of atheism are just as homo and pedo as the Catholic crooks they criticise. I didn't see anyone accuse you specifically.

That aside, Fortis's point seems to have been about a seeming concordance between butt and/or childfucking and atheism. You seem to have found that an offensive assertion. On the other hand, given what you've seemed to assert in this thread in the past--

Quote:

"His wisdom" always gets handed down by some corrupt, shady, self interested, altar boy fiddling intermediate.

.

--I'd say if you can't take it, don't dish it out my friend.

[RatInTheWoods]

(04-15-2018 10:56 AM)Paracelsus Wrote:  

how most people require translation, interpretation, of both science and religion.

Key point to note here is that you can do an experiment yourself, but you can't measure, test or religious dogma or teachings.

Finding and holding up a few dickheads that do science badly and using them to tar the scientific paradigm is like me dismissing religion based on people to believe in the Easter Bunny. (which I do, but that's also unfair and disingenuous)

You are a smart guy, somewhere deep in your understanding of the scientific principles I am sure you understand how it all works, no matter how many times you have seen people mangle the approach.

I am sure you are smart enough to compare that to religious faith and understand that they stand starkly at opposite ends of a thought paradigm.

Most clever religious people admit this as well, and I am fine with them being two separate themes.

I think it's dishonest and shows a lack of understanding of scientific principles to suggest that people have "faith" in it, or require blind adherence to anything. Lack of evidence, proof or repeatable objective observations is dismissed by the true scientific mind.

This is the polar opposite of the religious process, which requires "faith" in the absence of evidence, no possible observation or repeatable evidence.

I have always thought this is the internal dilemma for rational, objective, non-emotional men. It goes against everything they know about the world they live in, and runs opposite to their modus operandi of daily life.

Imagine for a moment my bewilderment of working with highly intelligent engineers that effectively believe in the Easter bunny.. I struggle to understand.

(04-15-2018 10:56 AM)Paracelsus Wrote:  

--I'd say if you can't take it, don't dish it out my friend.

haha Thats a fair cop guv.

[Paracelsus]

(04-16-2018 10:46 PM)RatInTheWoods Wrote:  

(04-15-2018 10:56 AM)Paracelsus Wrote:  

how most people require translation, interpretation, of both science and religion.

Key point to note here is that you can do an experiment yourself, but you can't measure, test or religious dogma or teachings.

One could facetiously respond to that in one of two ways:

(1) As I've been saying, whilst in theory I can do an experiment myself, the reality is that I still have to take scientific insights mostly on faith. I can't independently verify the existence of the Higgs Boson for myself, I don't have a spare few billion dollars to build my own LHC and then elbow the physicists and engineers out of the drivers' chairs to throw those subatomic particles at one another. I have to rely on the integrity of those scientists. Hence, I must have faith that when a scientist says that he has seen The Risen Boson, he has done so since it's virtually impossible for me pragmatically to do the Doubting Thomas and stick my finger in the atomic gap for myself.

(Countering that my iPhone works because of quantum mechanics is not really an answer: Nassim Taleb observes in Antifragile that most progress of technology happens from engineers and inventors tinkering and finding things that work; the single most common delusion amongst academics is that lectures on avian flight results in birds flying. That is, the correct view is that people see something that happens and find an explanation for it that fits the limited set of factors that allow them to reproduce the phenomenon. Also see: that big picture above wherein science and the real world are compared. Anyway.)

(2) As said, I could facetiously also answer that the most fundamental religious dogma is testable: you can sit down and pray and see if you get an answer.

But that answer would demonstrate the issue: I believe it is disingenuous at best and misleading at worst to say "Science is testable, religion is not". The two ideas are not in conflict in that way, it's bragging that an apple is red but an orange is not and that the apple is therefore inherently superior to the orange, because of its redness.

Science does not apply where an idea is not falsifiable, period. That feature of it as a concept does not make it inherently superior as a means for navigating the world, it is just a hard limit that the discipline sets on itself. Emerging from that idea are the factors that Taleb mentions above: science is of very little use where the evidence is not (1) reliable, (2) sufficient, or (3) in the presence of a high degree of opacity.

This last factor -- opacity -- is why physics is most scientific and for the most part psychology and all other social sciences are not. We can go into this in more detail if we must, but the point is that the real world - as Taleb points out metaphorically in that picture far above - is highly opaque in that causes for events are generally multifactorial, unpredictable, and not easily discernible outside controlled circumstances, i.e. why scientific experiments typically must be designed to eliminate other intervening causes before any sort of suggestion of cause can be advanced. Science is not competent to assess causes for events outside that very narrow window, which is why it's only middlebrow populists like Dawkins who do it.

The enlightened scientific mind understands these limitations well because they are inherent to science as a discipline. With them should come a profound humility and a philosophical refusal or reluctance to comment on religious beliefs, since they are not falsifiable concepts and indeed a good contingent of scientists themselves concede there actually isn't a conflict between science and religion. A true scientist recognises that which is not falsifiable is not a matter for science or the scientific form of rigor and no more carries that approach to dealing with the vast array of matters within human experience than a man who walks on his hands for money in a circus carries that method of ambulation into his ordinary life (to abuse some Dr. Johnson).

Quote:

I think it's dishonest and shows a lack of understanding of scientific principles to suggest that people have "faith" in it, or require blind adherence to anything. Lack of evidence, proof or repeatable objective observations is dismissed by the true scientific mind.

I'll repeat the point one more time: you can think that as you will, but judging people by their actions rather than the words is the best way to assess whether they have faith in something or not. People have blind faith in science because most do not understand it without an interpreter. The same feature is that of religion.

Quote:

This is the polar opposite of the religious process, which requires "faith" in the absence of evidence, no possible observation or repeatable evidence.

See all the above, but also note the point I have made repeatedly through this thread and will make it again: faith has far more to do with heuristics and with the idea of commitment, loyalty, engagement. See what I've said in the past about how St. Jerome translated pistis from the Greek into fides and credo in particular.

Quote:

I have always thought this is the internal dilemma for rational, objective, non-emotional men. It goes against everything they know about the world they live in, and runs opposite to their modus operandi of daily life.

Taleb has the simple answer for that:

Quote:

So when we look at religion and, to some extent ancestral superstitions, we should consider what purpose they serve, rather than focusing on the notion of “belief”, epistemic belief in its strict scientific definition. In science, belief is literal belief; it is right or wrong, never metaphorical. In real life, belief is an instrument to do things, not the end product. This is similar to vision: the purpose of your eyes is to orient you in the best possible way, and get you out of trouble when needed, or help you find a prey at distance. Your eyes are not sensors aimed at getting the electromagnetic spectrum of reality. Their job description is not to produce the most accurate scientific representation of reality; rather the most useful one for survival.

[Vladimir Poontang]

The existence of God can be proven quite easily.

Everything that happens, happens for a reason. In other words, everything has a cause. Cause and effect.

The universe (and by universe, I mean literally everything that exists, not just the physical universe), has a cause. It could be the big bang or some other physical event, or it could be God.

Atheists like to argue "if God is the creator, then who created the creator?" That's a way of saying that you can't have infinite regression, and that if there's a god then that god must have a creator, therefore infinite regression, which is impossible, therefore there's no god.

But who said that God has a creator? The whole point of being God is that you have no creator because every thing is created by you, and you can't be created by one of your creations. Theists don't believe in a created God. They believe in a self-existent god. Self-existence is one of God's attributes.

So, if the universe is an effect of a cause, then what is the cause?

If it's a physical event, then you have infinite regression, because in the absence of a god, that physical event must itself be the effect of another prior physical event, ad infinitum (infinite regression - impossible).

The only resolution is a self existent thing. So, whatever the cause of the universe is, it must be self existent.

But is it conscious? Yes. If something happens, it's either because it was caused to happen, or it itself chose to happen. If something creates the universe, it can't be because it was compelled to by some other thing, because there is no other thing.

Nothing caused the ultimate cause of all things to cause anything. There's nothing that could have. This means that the cause of the universe (everything that exists) is both self-existent and conscious.

When the cause of all things causes things, it can only do so from itself. There's nothing outside of itself from which to get what it needs to create anything. It all comes from itself. Therefore the universe is a direct manifestation of its own cause. If there's a God, then the universe is its manifestation.

The cause of the universe causes all things to come into existence. This means that the cause itself doesn't exist. Does that mean that God doesn't exist? No. It means that existence in this sense means manifestation. The cause of the universe is unmanifest, and everything it creates is a manifestation (of itself).

This means that the cause of the universe is all potential. Potential : possibility, potency, power, strength. The cause of the universe is self-existent, conscious, and omnipotent.

As the cause of everything, it isn't dependent on anything, bound by anything, or subject to anything, which again makes it omnipotent, and also transcendent, mysterious (because it's not bound by logic), and incomprehensible.

Why did the cause of the universe choose to cause the universe? The only explanation is that it chose to express itself, to create a manifest version of itself. Seeing as it didn't need to do it (as it's not compelled to do anything) he only explanation for this is love.

So, the cause of the universe is :

Self-existent
Conscious
Omnipotent
Transcendent
Mysterious
Incomprehensible
Loving

All of God's other attributes can be seen the more you think about it.

[AnonymousBosch]

(04-16-2018 10:46 PM)RatInTheWoods Wrote:  

Key point to note here is that you can do an experiment yourself, but you can't measure, test or religious dogma or teachings.

Try viewing the Bible via a Social Science - the most trenchant work of human psychology and social interaction ever written.

Then work on the theory that "Oppositional actions reliably-guarantee psychological and social dysfunction".

Observe your lived experience, collect the data, and with the wisdom of age study what the data suggests.

Then, watch the theory being tested around you, day after day, and see how reliable it is.

Quote:

This is the polar opposite of the religious process, which requires "faith" in the absence of evidence, no possible observation or repeatable evidence.

Climate Change is, therefore, a Religion, as are many other Progressive Beliefs that stand in opposition to observable lived experience. However, these beliefs are sold as science by whomever controls both the dissemation of information and is given teaching authority over others. This is why a lack of replicability in science has been consistently-ignored for decades - as in the case of Climate Change - when the true results would contradict the gatekeeping group's religious beliefs.

https://reformjudaism.org/jewish-views-environment

What if the ecology movement of the 70's, and the Gaia movement of the 80's were seeded as ways to make Gentiles practicing Reform Jews without their conscious knowledge of being converted?

Some friends were watching 'Black Panther' the other day. I have no interest in modern movies, but noted the isolationist rhetoric in passing as I worked around the house, then, arrived back at the end for a scene at the United Nations, where the writers were carefully programming the black community with the Reform Judaism concept of Tikkun Olam as being 'heroic', once again, not informing the audience that they are being religiously-indoctrinated.

Modern Scientific Journals are Religious Texts. As such, basing public policy upon them observably-increases societial dysfunction.

[Scoundrel]

(04-21-2018 03:26 PM)Vladimir Poontang Wrote:  

The universe (and by universe, I mean literally everything that exists, not just the physical universe), has a cause.

Literally everything that exists has a cause. Got it.

(04-21-2018 03:26 PM)Vladimir Poontang Wrote:  

The whole point of being God is that you have no creator because every thing is created by you, and you can't be created by one of your creations.

God exists, however God does not have a cause. God has always existed.

This is not a serious effort to be logical and understand the universe. It's a sad attempt to rationalize as true that which one already believes.

[Vladimir Poontang]

(04-21-2018 07:27 PM)Scoundrel Wrote:  

(04-21-2018 03:26 PM)Vladimir Poontang Wrote:  

The universe (and by universe, I mean literally everything that exists, not just the physical universe), has a cause.

Literally everything that exists has a cause. Got it.

(04-21-2018 03:26 PM)Vladimir Poontang Wrote:  

The whole point of being God is that you have no creator because every thing is created by you, and you can't be created by one of your creations.

God exists, however God does not have a cause. God has always existed.

This is not a serious effort to be logical and understand the universe. It's a sad attempt to rationalize as true that which one already believes.

Your counter argument is well thought out, and eloquently expressed. I concede.