We've been seeing an amazing amount of press given to something as simple as atheist signs on public transport, and here's another thing that makes the apologists for religion tear their hair out: Russell's teapot. They don't get it. They read the idea with dumb incomprehension, and when they do try to explain it, they just expose their own silly misinterpretations. Case in point, Ross Douthat, who puts a goofy gloss on it.
This analogy - like its modern descendant, the Flying Spaghetti Monster - makes a great deal of sense if you believe that the idea of God is an absurdity dreamed up by crafty clerics in darkest antiquity and subsequently imposed on the human mind by force and fear, and that it only survives for want of brave souls willing to note how inherently absurd the whole thing is. As you might expect, I see the genesis of religion rather differently: An intuitive belief in some sort of presiding Agent seems to be an extremely common, albeit hardly universal, feature of human nature; this intuition has intersected, historically, with an enormous amount of subjective religious experience; and this intersection (along with, yes, the force of custom and tradition) has produced and sustained the religious traditions that seem to Richard Dawkins and company like so much teapot-worship. The story of our civilization, in particular, is a story in which an extremely large circle of non-insane human beings have perceived themselves to be experiencing an interaction with a being who seems recognizable as the Judeo-Christian God (here I do feel comfortable using the term), rather than merely being taught about Him in Sunday School.
Michael Drake has his own pithy reply:
Shorter Ross Douthat: Comparing belief in God to belief in the Celestial Teapot is absurd, because it's like comparing a belief only some people know is absurd to a belief everyone knows is absurd.
I have my own version:
Shorter Ross Douthat: If enough of us imagine it, it must be real.
When I was about 10 years old, I went to see a late-night horror movie (Die, Monster, Die with Boris Karloff, if you must know; it had face-melty mutants produced by a weird meteorite kept in an old mansion), and afterwards my uncle drove me home in his old 50's era Ford with the big bench seats high up off the floorboards. I vividly recall a terrible dread that there was something, a horrible monster, hiding under the seat, and if I let my legs dangle down, it was going to rip my feet off. I knew there wasn't — the seats weren't that high that Boris Karloff could fit under them — but my perfectly normal, non-insane mysterious agency perception was simply set tinglingly high by a few hours of jump-and-twitch at a monster movie, and I was imagining supernatural beings where there weren't any.
Look. I was ten years old, high on Coca-Cola and jujubes, and I could figure that out. How old is Ross Douthat?
If you actually read Dawkins, or any of us other critics of religion, you will discover that we do not think the majority of humanity is insane, and we also don't believe religion was cobbled up by a shadowy cabal of power-mad priests. Douthat almost has it: we know that human beings readily imagine agency even where there is none, and that it is extremely easy to feel a sensation of the existence of unseen entities, especially when you've been primed by an exercise in the imagination, whether it is a horror story or preacher in his pulpit. However, we do not have agency sensors, we have agency interpreters. Imagining a boogey man or a god is perfectly normal, but it does not make them real. Taking your boogey man and wrapping him up in layers and layers of ritual and tradition and over-reaching apologetics does not make him any more real.
That's our message. It's time to look under the car seat, gang, and see there's nothing there. And don't you feel silly, spending millennia going on and on about the all-powerful beastie, and finding it's nothing but cobwebs and darkness and your own hyperactive imagination?
As for Russell's Teapot, I have to add a little fillip to that tiny porcelain entity. As it goes trundling in its circuit about the sun, I must imagine that there is painted on its side a little sign: "There probably is no teapot. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." It definitely won't make it any more real, but it will infuriate those who believe the manifestations of imagination must have some objective reality.
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But there is a Cosmic Teapot.
Now stop worrying and enjoy your life (the weekend is here after all).
Douthat misses a more important point that Russell's teapot is intended to illustrate. There is absolutely no point to give credence or worship to something that doesn't demonstrably exist. The illustration scence from Chasing Amy comes to mind...
The stupid moron unwittingly summed up the whole irrational existence of religion. What the hell can we add to that? Now if he would only realize what he stated and believed, then he may come to his rational senses and see and understand the obvious. Can we hope for such eventual and final enlightenment? Or will it remain the same old "bible"?
PZ, I always wondered how the Teapot was interpreted by these kinds of people.
It's a great philosophical devise, but those of us who have the reasoning capacity to understand evolution (as well as its necessity to pretty much all of the sciences) and physics are already leaning heavily towards the side of unbelief.
Russell's Teapot, I've personally found, is a little too cerebral to explain why we don't believe. I've found Dawkins' use of the "atheist with regard to fairies" argument to be a little simpler and more easily understood (though similarly objectionable).
Still, I'm not shocked that they have trouble with this concept.
Cosmic Teapot: So the Cosmic Teapot, instead of having a long list of contradictory commands and requirements, simply tells us to stop worrying and enjoy life. Sounds like a god much more worthy of worship than the one described in the Judeo-Christian bible or its Islamic offshoot. I think I'll become a teapotist.
I wouldn't be surprised if Professor Meyers isn't enjoying it a little early, given the time of this post...
Great blog, BTW, I should read it more often.
It's always painfully clear that they (albeit not all religionists) don't get Russell's teapot.
I mean, ID is predicated on exactly the same kind of default to unevidenced "entities" that the teapot is to overthrow, and they even made a movie about how mean and Nazi-like people are for not letting such a "new idea" be considered equally with hard science in classes meant to teach science.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
WHAT????
The teapot isn't porcelain! It's bone china!
Note that the Italian city which had prohibited atheist signage on buses (while simultaneously allowing 5000 posters in the city libelling atheists), is now allowing a modified sign.
"The good news is there are millions of atheists in Italy. The excellent news is they believe in freedom of expression."
Now, I believe in freedom of expression, but it seems like a rather obvious forced obsequiescence. Sort of a "atheists are here, but don't worry because we won't threaten your dominance, we'll just sit quietly in the corner" kind of sentiment.
Unless, of course, one contrasted it to the religious lack of belief in freedom of expression.
Shorter version yet. "We imagine it, therefore it is"
Wow, thanks Ross. You see, all of us who are atheists are just incapable of getting religion. Not one of us ever actually spent any time in church, ever felt the hair on the backs of our necks stand out at particularly moving hymns or even Bible stories. Not one of us ever felt the rapturous joy that comes from contemplating the wonder and mystery of a beautiful, all-powerful being that actually talks to you because he loves you.
None of us have ever felt that--we couldn't possibly have, otherwise we'd be defending that feeling that there just golly gee! must be something out there just as hard as you are, right?
Right.
By the way PZ, I'm confused by your Boris story; was there a monster under the seat? I mean, you felt it, right? And I daresay most people here (and even those of Rossie's church, whatever and wherever it may be) have had that feeling too. So, there must have been a monster, right?
Right.
I used to believe there was a green hairy monster under my bed (until I was about 14!) so at night I would have to run and jump from the doorway to make sure my feet didn't get eaten. Then in the morning I would lower this big stuffed dog that I kept in bed with me to the floor by my bed to check if the monster had fallen asleep.
The silliest thing is,even though I now KNOW there is no ugly green monster under my bed, I still feel a slight twinge of trepidation every time I stand near a bed and I am now 27 years old.
I think their problem is "how does the teapot gives me power over other people? It can't, god can."
None of us are as dumb as all of us.
Shorter version still: Argument ad populum.
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But neither is it evidence of existence."
Carl Sagan, Gifford Lectures
"An enormous amount of subjective religious experience."
One million Elvis fans can't be wrong.
Here's what happens when you look under the seat: Nothing is there, of course. You sit back up, and just as you breathe your sigh of relief it (puts flashlight under his face) JUMPS UP FROM THE BACKSEAT AND GRABS YOU! YAAAHHHH!
Y'know, this analogy would make a great double feature with Die, Monster, Die. Throw in White Zombie with Bela Lugosi and I'll bring popcorn enough for all.
I would add that a lot of people believe because they WANT to believe. They believe in a designer and an afterlife because it makes the feel better, which is fine, as long as they don't force me to live my life according to that.
Ross Douche-hat sums it up thusly: I feel it, everybody else is doing it, that settles it.
I think that our devices of Russell's Teapot and the FSM are simply our ways of showing monotheists how their faith looks to an outsider. They tell us, pretty much: "Our God is an awesome god! He loves all His creation! You can't see, hear or otherwise detect his presence, so you've got to have faith. Oh, and, if you don't worship Him, preferably the way I tell you to, you will spend an eternity of torment in Hell. What? Of course I can't prove He's watching over us! That's why you need faith! If we didn't have faith, He wouldn't love us! Honestly, you secular heathens."
And, to someone who's given up the holy ghost, that kind of mentality makes about as much sense as the idea of the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the orbiting teapot. If you can neither prove nor conclusively disprove the existence of one, why not accept the others while we're at it?
you will discover that we do not think the majority of humanity is insane
I personally think a belief in a magic god fairy is a mental illness, and I would call the religious extremists (creationists and terrorists) completely out of their minds, a danger to themselves and others.
We must see to it that those "There is probably no teapot" teapots become commercially available.
Good post, Alyson, it made me realize another problem with the analogies is that the teapot doesn't put anyone in Hell, and the FSM is also represented as largely beneficent so long as you wear pirate regalia. The FSM should really have more of a fire and brimstone side as well.
an extremely large circle of non-insane human beings have perceived themselves to be experiencing an interaction with a being who seems recognizable as the Judeo-Christian God
Depends on under what definition of "non-insane" and "recognizable"; and implicitly presumes that the perception of an experience necessarily has direct correspondence to the underlying nature.
It's interesting how theists can so thoroughly miss the point of analogies. I suspect it's part of why they find the tornado airplane argument so convincing (as an example). It seems to me that Russel's teapot is primarily a response to the "you can't disprove God/it takes as much faith to be an atheist" arguments. Taking it out of context as this twit has misses the point entirely and sets the argument up as something far more than it is meant to be.
PZ - I think you are wrong. People that believe in The Magic Sky Faja ARE insane. Does this make me a Type A++++ Atheist?
Thanks, I'll hang up and listen to my answer.
"idea of God is an absurdity dreamed up by crafty clerics in darkest antiquity and subsequently imposed on the human mind by force and fear, and that it only survives for want of brave souls willing to note how inherently absurd the whole thing is."
That pretty much sums it up.
True, Teapotism does not embrace the concept of Hell, but those who break It's commandments will be slowly brewed in an aromatic Darjeeling blend...
Argumentum ad populum. That's all he's got? Oh, and Argument by Age too, I guess.
How dare you ridicule the teapot worshippers in this way? Why don't you go pick on the muslims instead?
Gah, sorry for the multipost.
"An intuitive belief in some sort of presiding Agent seems to be an extremely common, albeit hardly universal, feature of human nature..."
An intuitive fear of the dark seems to be an extremely common, albeit hardly universal, feature of human nature.
Therefore, the dark is something to be feared.
Hear me now from the Invisible Opera Company of Tibet...
Have a cup of tea, have another one, have a cup of tea
High in the sky, what do you see?
Come down to Earth, a cup of tea
Flying saucer, flying teacup
From outer space, Flying Teapot
...
They got a Flying Teapot, don't need a taxi
They're from the planet of love, the Pot Head Pixies
Ding dang dong, singing the song, it's pretty catchy
They just can't give you enough, the Pot Head Pixies
...
I'm a real Pothead Pixie
The green planet Gong is my home
I live everywhere but in case I'm not there
You can reach me by Radio Gnome
...
Now so
Now you know
Here and now
They come and go
Bom bom bom bom...
Good afternoon
I see the genesis of religion rather differently: An intuitive belief in some sort of presiding Agent seems to be an extremely common, albeit hardly universal, feature of human nature;...
No, religion evolved. At first there was animatism, where a tree, or spring, was believed to incorporate a spirit. That evolved into animism, where a spirit was believed to take up residence in a tree, or spring, or rock, which became its home, and the object became sacred. This then evolved into polydemonism, which later evolved into polytheism, when some of the demons took on individual identities.
It's all documented by biblical scholars, aided by a bit of archaeology & anthropology.
Andrew Sullivan posted an equally vacuous letter on the FSM earlier this week:
"...but those who break It's commandments will be slowly brewed in an aromatic Darjeeling blend..."
Blasphemer! Earl Grey is the only blend worthy of our beloved and terrible Teapot!
Many religions start with the assumption that (their particular) God is real... and therefore all experience and thought has to be viewed through this belief.
Many philosophies start with a particular assumption (e.g. free will exists, therefore...) and this shapes the argument supporting that belief.
Even some atheists start with the assumption that there is no god.
The common feature is that many of these people do not care to examine their initial assumptions, or even acknowledge that they exist. They cannot be reached by rational argument because their beliefs are driven by emotions, not reason.
Me? I'm a teapotist. It makes sooo much sense.
Andrew Sullivan posted an equally vacuous letter on the FSM earlier this week:
Gah, sorry for the multipost.
I am a cosmic teapot
Short and stout
Here is my handle
And here is my spout
I always knew! Praise be!
/Mandatory.
I thought he made a fair bit of sense there actually. Doesn't deserve the full Gumby. Maybe half a Gumby for the last bit.
I've often thought similar things; that there's a good percentage of people who 'sense', somehow, ...something not quite them that's fairly important to the structure of things that's completely intangible.
What it is, of course is up for debate and it doesn't really escuse or justify religion. But it might explain it a bit.
I liken it to an abstract "external" point in "space" in relation to which people can get their bearings, so to speak. A prop for consciousness (that's function not form).
It's become pretty clear that lots of people like PZ, probably have no experience of this and find it completely unecessary (but it's a lot more fundamental than a fear of imaginary monsters under the seat).
What is it then? There I don't know. Strange neurological/psychological structure the mind feels the need to explain? I don't know enough about that stuff. But as a lapsed churching sort its a vague notion I find potentially more satisfactory than a lot of the dismissive things said about faith. And it goes to why people just keep coming back for no other discernable reason (The Bloom article linked there goes into this a little but it mostly about dualism). Thin, but it there it is.
And thus began the great and terrible wars following the Teabag Schism, which settled into a centuries-long pattern of grudging tolerance (marked by occasional sectarian flareups) following the Diet of Lipton.
That was me. I was gathering "lucky human's feet" to sell to superstitious rabbits.
@crypticlife #22
The FSM (pesto be upon him) does have a hell for non-believers. It's the same as heaven, but the beer is stale and the strippers are ugly and have STD's. His Noodliness is a benevolent god, after all.
Goheels@26. No, it probably doesn't sum it up. God is an absurdity cobbled together out of perfectly natural fear and the human tendency towards mind projection and then co-evolved with the self-interested ideologies of the powerful (and also occasionally of the weak). No-doubt the concept was sometimes subject to deliberate manipulation, but there is zero evidence that it was invented on purpose by some shadowy cabal. Theism was not intelligently designed.
Re: #32
I never expected to see Gong quoted in a science blog, but I must admit that I always hoped to.
Look, it's, like, a metaGah.
The thing about the teapot, though, is that it's only necessary as an argument if "God" has no detectable attributes.
This is certainly what the Goddists claim, in order to get you to accept the ever-popular "God is undetectable, so I can't prove he exists but you can't prove he doesn't exist, so maybe he does!" argument -- but then once you swallow that, they start making claims about the nature of "God": he thinks X is sinful, he really wants people to do thus-and-so, he has a Plan (like the Cylons!), he Loves us -- and nobody seems to catch on to the fact that the Goddist has just invalidated her/his original claim that God's existence is undetectable.
If God can't be detected, where is all that information about God's nature coming from? And what in the world makes anyone think that they know what God wants, if they can't even detect God's existence?
Being a teetotalling strip club non-attendee, I see FSM's hell as being nothing but win for me.
Oh, wait, it's probably all reality shows on tv. Fuck. Time to get right with His Noodliness.
Jujubes:
I heard you the first time.;)
SUllivan vacuous?
Andrew Sullivan is a proud apologist, who has compartmentalized his rationale for belief. Colbert seems to like him since he has had him on the Colbert Report a few times.
Most of what I read from Andrew usually produces a reaction of "meh, so what?", that is when he's not simply a link whore. He's out of the closet when it comes to sexuality but still in denial over religion. Sad.
Or, it could be just teapots all the way down....
Standard apologist trick.
He sidesteps and ignores the actual argument behind russel's teapot, which is about the burden of proof, and writes all about... well something else entirely.
I'm sure he then claims to have handily dismissed the teapot argument!
I would also really like to own a "there is probably no teapot..." teapot.
Godless Peeps:
I heard that the sign on the tea pot actually says "Believe it or not the cat ended up in here."
: )
jim ellis
Why is it that I've been seeing them use this term more and more, and yet they still hate Muslims?
The letter wasn't of Sullivan's writing; it was email from a reader, which he posted after other (atheist) readers sent him their thoughts on the meaning of the Teapot and the FSM. I don't deny that Sullivan makes about as much sense as Douche-hat in defending religion, but he posts letters from all sides.
It's always a hoot to watch atheists whistling past the graveyard, supremely confident that they've got the answer to the God question right. Personally, I've never been able to muster enough faith to be an atheist. Could one of you unintended products of the blind evolution of matter explain to me how you came by your faith-based conclusion that there is no God?
Not to piss on this happy parade, but the celestial teapot & flying spaghetti monster analogies are amusing ways to express one's conviction that religious belief is absurd; as arguments, however, they're blatantly question-begging, and this, rather than stupidity, is why a lot of believers react to them as Douthat does.
Note that Douthat says: "several scoffing readers have directed me to Bertrand Russell's famous teapot analogy, which supposedly settles once and for all the question of whether nonbelievers should give any credence to the possibility that God exists." The analogy settles nothing, because it contains the assumption the atheist needs to prove: that belief in God is absurd. Any intelligent theist, when handed the teapot or the FSM as a slam-bang argument-ender, will rightly respond with irritated derision.
Because there is exactly zero evidence for one.
Jackie, so a belief in a deity or deities is the default position. How do you know that your deity of choice is that right deity out of the thousands that has been worshiped by humanity over the many thousands of years?
Talk about supreme confidence.
Also, tossing in evolution as if it is some kind of insult shows that you have no idea what you are talking.
Just keep whistling past the graveyard.
Oh, I get it! With enough intuitive belief and subjective experience (reinforced by, yes, the force of custom and tradition), the teapot, too, would also certainly exist.
(But could the teapot drown us in Darjeeling -- or Earl Grey -- or its acolytes beat us to death with stale scones for failing to knit a proper cozy for it?)
I went to church every Sunday like a good Christian kid, and the churchgoing was a largely positive experience, except that what they kept telling me just didn't add up with what I saw outside. I took the Magic Skydaddy out of the equation, and suddenly the world made a lot more sense. I kept going to church until I was 20, and yet the idea of the Magic Skydaddy never became any more convincing. No faith needed. Nice try, though.
We should take up a collection to put a teapot in orbit around the sun -- then we could have an evidence-based faith.
Russell little guessed. No matter how absurd it is, some religious wingnut will worship it. Just take a look at this:-
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/.stm
Wow. Pascal's Wager. Never seen that one before.
Where fractal wrongness meets Wernike's aphasia.
Shorter Aaron Baker: It is up to you to disprove my beliefs.
"how you came by your faith-based conclusion that there is no God?"
I can't help you. I didn't come to a faith-based conclusion that there is no god. I don't have faith in the lack of god. I don't *believe* in the lack of god, I fail to believe in god because I fail to see a good reason to believe or have faith in god. Big difference, right?
"I heard that the sign on the tea pot actually says 'Believe it or not the cat ended up in here'."
So, Mr. Ellis are you saying that it's not Russell's Teapot, but rather Schrodinger's Teapot?
Aaron Baker@59: I think you are missing what Russell's Teapot and FSM are arguments for. In both cases they were offered as a response to the idea that because a claim was not provably false (in Russell's case the god hypothesis in the FSM's creationism) then, by that very fact, it deserved to be taken seriously.
They aren't meant to prove that god is absurd; only that (the very common bullshitting trick of) claiming that because we don't know for sure whether there is a god it can't be absurd doesn't hold.
God's absurd for other reasons.
"how you came by your faith-based conclusion that there is no God?"
I can't help you. I didn't come to a faith-based conclusion that there is no god. I don't have faith in the lack of god. I don't *believe* in the lack of god, I fail to believe in god because I fail to see a good reason to believe or have faith in god. Big difference, right?
Scotty B #56: perhaps we should make an effort to always say "Judeo-Christo-Islamic". Not only is it more accurate, it'll piss them off further. Maybe eventually we can work Mormonism into it as well. "The Judeo-Christo-Islamo-Mormonic God"... that sounds hilarious!
You can see the cosmic teapot in the constellation "Saggitarius".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius_(constellation)
Wouldn't that phrase fit the definition of an oxymoron?
Atheist just treat the "god" question with the same skepticism as we'd treat any extraordinary claims. If you want to convince us, show us some objective, unmistakeable evidence. Doesn't seem like a hard thing for a god to do.
How hard is it to muster "none"? How much faith does it take for you to not believe there are elves living behind your couch?
I am sorry, Professor Dawkins but the link leads to a dead end.
I'm guessing Jackie a troll of the standard Drive By theist idiot variety.
I'd be surprised if she came back to answer anything.
Sorry, the url I gave doesn't work. You can find it (it's quite funny) if you google "Malaya" "Teapot" "Cult" and it should be the first hit that comes up. BBC news story about a teapot cult.
Impossible! My teapot is right here in zis box... Vis zis hammer, und zis Geiger counter...
(/Or, then again, it might not be.)
His close:
But it is one thing to disbelieve in God; it is quite another to never feel a twinge of doubt about one's own disbelief. And just as the Christian who has never entertained doubts about his faith probably hasn't thought hard enough about the matter, the atheist who perceives the Christian God and the flying spaghetti monster as equally ridiculous hypotheses really needs to get out more often.
First, FSM is not really a descendent of Russell's Teapot. As I recall, the revelation of His Noodlyness was intended as a parody of the "equal time" nonsense the Kansas Kreationists were peddling c. 2003, specifically in regards to ID and the high school curriculum. A reductio ad absurdum. If equal time for God, then Vishnu also, and Mithras, and... FSM!
Russell's teapot is an epistemological argument. It's not that it's "equally ridiculous" as the Christian god (if anything, it's much less ridiculous), it's that we "disbelieve" in an infinite number of things, without a "twinge of doubt," every day, all the time, and we must do so just in order to go about our existence. Fairies at the bottom of a garden, Last Thursdayism, etc.: all these are ways to make the same point. The theist claim needs to be justified by more than appealing to "an extremely large circle of non-insane human beings have perceived themselves to be experiencing an interaction with a being who seems recognizable as the Judeo-Christian God," unless hysterical mobs are now going to be given privileged epistemological insight. Crowds act on the basis of nonsense all the time; we should be even more skeptical of things "everybody knows."
Jackie: "Could one of you unintended products of the blind evolution of matter explain to me how you came by your faith-based conclusion that there is no God?"
Rev. BigDumbChimp: "Because there is exactly zero evidence for one."
An argument from ignorance is no argument, dearheart. Google "argumentum ad ignorantium" to brush up on your logic.
Where fractal wrongness meets Wernike's aphasia
I had to look it but, but that right there is good stuff.
PZ
Excellent post, I can't believe I haven't used the "look under the bed" idea before...so obvious.
kudos.
Right now, as I type, my customized radio station is playing God's Song(That's Why I Love Mankind) by Randy Newman. This must mean something.
Well said, PZ. Douthat's statement has been bugging me ever since Andrew Sullivan used it to lash out at his atheist readership. (Sullivan has been doing much of that recently. I am starting to think he may be going through a slight period of apostasy after the canceling of the excommunication of the Holocaust denier.)
The whole final statement is totally backwards; it is Christians (not all, however) who are afraid to doubt their own belief, not atheists. This impenetrability to doubt is very easy to test in Christians, just tell them that you would be willing to try to believe in their god if they would be willing to believe that their god doesn't exist. They won't likely do it out of fear because it would be heretical to the church and treasonous to their god.
Yet here we are having fun after considering the real possibility and consequences of not only the existence of a god but of cosmic teapots, invisible pink unicorns, fairies, witches, shadow monsters, and flying spaghetti monsters, and it is fairly clear from all our undertakings that none of these things exist. I guess Douthat can't understand that we've been there, done that and are as confident in our knowledge that these things don't exist as Douthat is confident that his perceived interactions with the Judeo-Christian god are real.
Religion, like any superstition, arises from our innate ability to get things wrong.
Aaron Baker, #59: ...the celestial teapot & flying spaghetti monster analogies are amusing ways to express one's conviction that religious belief is absurd....
No, the Celestial Teapot are ways of showing the absurdity of the claim, "well, you can't prove that my beliefs are wrong, so they are just as sensible as your non-belief."
Sorry you didn't understand that, but it seems that you're in good company.
As several commenters have pointed out, the teapot analogy is not making God analogous to a teapot: it's making faith in God analogous to faith in a teapot -- if the apologist is arguing fideism (that belief in God is irrational, and therefore should rest on an act of faith.) It's pointing out that we put a burden of proof on acts of faith in areas other than religion, so fideism is special pleading.
"An intuitive belief in some sort of presiding Agent seems to be an extremely common, albeit hardly universal, feature of human nature ... "
Yes, indeed. In every life, ever since we can remember, we've always had a vague sort of idea that there was some powerful Person watching over us. This Agent knew when we were hungry; knew when we were wet; magically seemed to know what we were unhappy about. From seemingly nowhere it would appear to provide for us. Sometimes it wouldn't, and that would make us angry, because we knew this Powerful Being was completely concerned with us and our good at all times. Getting angry was naughty, then. We had to do what this presiding Agent wanted. Saying 'no' was naughty, too. The rules always seemed arbitrary to us, but there may have been a deeper reason beyond our ken.
Some of us felt that there were many powerful, all-knowing Agents watching over us, both aiding and thwarting us, doling out gifts and punishments. They would set up a world made just for us, filled with things brought down to our level, for our entertainment -- and yet they would magically know what we were thinking if we left that world, and set off crawling towards the machines with the buttons we were not allowed to touch, because those were sacred, higher things.
We've had this deep, pervasive, instinctive, intuitive belief in presiding Agents or Agents since babyhood. Where the hell would we have gotten it -- if there wasn't really a God out there?
Has anyone actally looked at the criticisms of Russel's teapot.
1)It's a category error.The teapot is an entity contingent on the universe while a theist makes the claim the universe is contingent on God.
2) A celestial teapot has nil explanatory. For example A theist may claim that God is a good explainaton for complexity and design in the universe. While you may disagree with this claim, it shows that at least God is able to explain something. What does this teapot explain? nil.
Dear, I know exactly what and argument from ignorance is.
Do you believe in Thor?
If no, tell me why not.
Dear fellow Atheists,
The time of our resurrection will come soon; in my home country of the Netherlands, some nitwits of religion have actually taken the trouble of starting an "anti-evolution theory" print campaign. Well, let me rephrase this: they will start distributing over 6.5 million copies in February of pamphlets stating that the Evolution theory is just another "belief". A seizable amount of influential Christians have come up with the idea that pre-, middle- and high school children are entitled to or should be eligible for both 'theories': Creation and Evolution.
And the beauty of it all, they will deliver the pamphlets to all households in the Netherlands, unless you've been able to acquire a sticker on your front door that unequivocally states you don't want to receive the pro-Creation pamphlet.
Like they will care!
I personally find it's just frustrating, because apart from the fact that the 'stickers' have long been sold out, the whole idea is just too much: another sign on the wall that Christians are being discriminated in favour of non-believers. What's going on?
But my fellow Atheists, our time will come when pro-creation actions like described above, will give us momentum in finding ways of letting the theists know we're still here, and we're the fuck not dodging!
Come on people – it's our world as well!
I say: Let's start a worldwide initiative to distribute a counter campaign, and let the Spain atheist-buses guide us to resurrecting our scientifically correct attitude towards the origins of life.
Jackie, #58: Could one of you unintended products of the blind evolution of matter explain to me how you came by your faith-based conclusion that there is no God?
In the same you come to the conclusion that there is no milk in your refridgerator. Contrary to what some people think, absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
I have no faith as an atheist. In fact, I even understand that there is a chance that I might even be wrong about the whole god thing. However, I conclude on the weight of evidence for the existence of gods and the balance of probability regarding anything that exists yet leaves no evidence whatsoever that there are no gods.
As for the thinly-veiled restatement of Pascal's wager regarding the graveyard, please note that PW makes a single false assumption - that unfounded belief in a God comes at no cost. Personally, I feel that it comes at great cost.
So properly stated:
If you believe in God, and there is a God, you win.
If you don't believe in God and there is no God, you win.
If you don't believe in God, and there is a God, you lose big (eternity in Hell).
If you believe in God, and there is no God, you lose big (atrophied your thinking, wasted your life in guilt and sacrifice, etc.).
Of course, Blaise Pascal never did explain why the Christian God was such a better choice than any other God, weird philosophical wagers notwithstanding.
Richard Harris @ 33
You're going to make their heads explode by saying their religions evolved.
Are you going to say that they are still evolving, too? Where are the transitional forms? God created all Religious Kinds at the same time. You know, Judaism in far BCE, Christianity at BCE/CE transition point and Islam in the 600's - all together, created fully formed and different. They all know that they are completely different species that have no common ancestor (oh, wait...)
And then there's the irreducible complexity of the Cracker?
once again and / an
Janine, Leftist Bozo wrote:
"Shorter Aaron Baker: It is up to you to disprove my beliefs."
Two responses: 1) they're NOT my beliefs; 2) I'm not saying it's up to someone else to disprove them; I'm making the very different point that calling those beliefs absurd is not the same thing as proving they're absurd.
Matt Heath wrote:
"Aaron Baker@59: I think you are missing what Russell's Teapot and FSM are arguments for. In both cases they were offered as a response to the idea that because a claim was not provably false (in Russell's case the god hypothesis in the FSM's creationism) then, by that very fact, it deserved to be taken seriously."
That may have been Russell's sole intent; though I suspect that the obvious absurdity of a teapot in orbit with no human agency was part of his point. But I'm referring here to how, according to Douthat, the teapot was being used by some of his atheist correspondents. I'd also venture to say that with the FSM, one very obvious part of what its creators were getting it was this: belief in such an entity is obviously absurd.
Facilis, #88: The teapot is an entity contingent on the universe while a theist makes the claim the universe is contingent on God.
That is question begging. The theist has no more right to claim that we respect her belief that God must exist if we can't definitively prove it than we have to demand that she must respect the belief that a teapot is in orbit about Uranus just because she can't prove it. This gobbledegook about "contingency" doesn't add anything to the argument and just confuses the logically impaired.
-
While you may disagree with this claim, it shows that at least God is able to explain something.
No it doesn't. Unless it leads to a greater understanding of the phenomena in question, it is just more words tacked onto the phrase, "gee, it's complex" that don't add anything.
"Personally, I've never been able to muster enough faith to be an atheist.""
"How hard is it to muster 'none'?"
You don't lack faith, sweetie. You have unbounded faith in the creative powers of unintelligent material causes, to which you attibute your very being. I've never been able to muster your boundless faith, which is shared by all atheists.
"Religion, like any superstition, arises from our innate ability to get things wrong."
Is that right?
The Church of England is well aware that The Celestial Teapot is up in the heavens (although whether its orbit is between Earth and Mars or not is a matter of some teaological debate). This belief is acknowledged each Saturday in summertime when Garden Parties are held in the gardens of rectories and vicarages, and gallons of tea are drunk from sacred shining urns presided over by the handmaiden of the local divine (well, the vicar's wife).
A theist may claim that God is a good explainaton for complexity and design in the universe. While you may disagree with this claim, it shows that at least God is able to explain something. What does this teapot explain? nil.
Presumably, an explainaton is a sub-elementary particle containing the entirety of the explanatory power of theism.
"God did it" explains everything, which explains nothing, adding exactly nothing to our understanding of anything. The celestial teapot is not an explanation, but an analogy.
Jackie -- Yep, it's a "faith-based conclusion" -- faith in probabilities and data. Note that Richard Dawkins, along with all atheists who are also scientists, say that there is almost certainly no god. Leaving that vanishingly tiny possibility of god existing is not a bow to the tradition of the god mythologies, its what we assert about all human knowledge -- that it carries some uncertainty.
We see no data, no evidence, that a supernatural intelligence exists that could have any effect on the real world that we can observe -- any more than we see evidence for the celestial teapot. We do see a very long history of claims that "oh, here's where a god just had to intervene," but they never pan out to be anything but stories and misconceptions. Every time the hypothesis fails again, the probability of it having any validity is reduced yet again, until it becomes just perverse (like asserting the existence of the teapot) to cling to it.
To science, it is as Victor J. Stenger put it in the title of his recent book: God, the failed hypothesis. If you don't understand that, all I can suggest is that you school yourself in the sciences: biology, physics, chemistry, cosmology... With science, he world makes sense; but with the god hypothesis, it only makes nonsense. How do you maintain your belief in the god nonsense? Oh yeah, you do it by never trying to understanding what we can know about the world and universe through observation and telling each other (and ourselves) the truth about what we have observed, as best we can express it; which is all science is.
Jackie @ 58
"Faith based conclusion"? I think you meant reason-based conclusion, for this is what tells us that faith is based on the belief in the non-existent and irrational, mixes together and the result is insane religious morons, as you seem to brand yourself with the frequent use of that crap word, faith. Do you have the unequivocal faith to get your imaginary god to come down and kick the crap out of us, and perhaps kick faith into us? When we die, we will go nowhere except into the ground to feed the uncaring worms which will give you morons equal treatment, your imaginary god chewed along with you and shat out with the other detritus. Now doesn't this just piss you off, to be reduced to the evolutionary offal that your god has no control over? You will lie there with no place to go, without a prayer, and you and your imaginary god will die together, unknown, and just an imaginary memory. And your steadfast, moronic faith will avail you no longer. Better get your god to prevent this resultant folly of faith before you are totally insane.
Posted by: Buford | January 30, 2009
You're going to make their heads explode by saying their religions evolved.
Are you going to say that they are still evolving, too?
That was the theme of a collection of short stories by Harlan Ellison, Deathbird Stories.
You did seem confused.
So are you saying it is not reasonable to say complexity resulted from design?
Oh Jackie, why must you dress up atheism in theistic drag?
If the only hypothetically discernible difference between a universe created by a God, and one not created by a God, is "the one not created by a God would not be able to exist," then the God "explanation" is not only question-begging, but empty. There is no reason to take it seriously.
I agree that a lot of atheists somewhat misuse the Teapot Analogy to equate God with the teapot, instead of keeping it all on epistemic ground. But I suppose there can be different teapots, if a different argument is your cup of tea.
Chiroptera wrote:
"No, the Celestial Teapot are ways of showing the absurdity of the claim, "well, you can't prove that my beliefs are wrong, so they are just as sensible as your non-belief."
Sorry you didn't understand that, but it seems that you're in good company."
See posting #95 above; as often happens, I may not be in good company after all.
It's called special pleading.
Facilis, #103: You did seem confused.
Yeah, you can't explain how "contingency" makes a cogent criticism of Russell's teapot analogy, so I must be confused.
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So are you saying it is not reasonable to say complexity resulted from design?
No. Are you having problems comprehending what you are reading?
IST #2,
Except that wasn't Russell's point at all. Russell's work was more sophisticated and far superior to “new Atheist” challenges to theism of our day. He wouldn’t and didn’t make such a simpleminded playground argument. His teapot was to point out, correctly, that is absurd for theists to place the burden of proof that God does not exist on atheists.
So are you saying it is not reasonable to say complexity resulted from design?
`You might just as well say,' added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, `that "I breathe when I sleep" is the same thing as "I sleep when I breathe"!'
@ Sastra #87
Parents -- that's one answer.
Read what you just said over again one more time. Who do we believe watches over us and provides for us? Parents.
The concept of "god" is a sort of cosmic parent, more or less. "Our Father"?
I don't see much of a leap from "wait until Dad gets home and he hears about this!" to "wait until god comes back and he hears about this!"
perfect illustration of completely missing the point. The point of "the teapot" is to illustrate that it is ridiculous to use absence of evidence as evidence of existence. That is, you can't prove the teapot doesn't exist so therefore you are going to assume it does? It is an answer to the charge, "you can't prove god doesn't exist". And neither can you prove he does. So the atheist takes the least complicated solution and concludes god does not exist. Provide some proof that he does and every rathional atheist will become a theist.
If every phenomenon we experience can be explained without invoking the existence of god, then, no, god does not have any explanatory power. Russell's teapot is not meant to explain the universe, but to illustrate a point of how logical inference works, and so it does indeed have explanatory power.
"You have unbounded faith in the creative powers of unintelligent material causes, to which you attibute your very being. I've never been able to muster your boundless faith, which is shared by all atheists."
Not to speak for anyone else, but what part of the word "faith" don't you understand? I don't have "faith" in unintelligent material. Much less that it's creative.
There is evidence of evolution. Hard, vigorously tested evidence. It's what leads me to understand that this is far and away the most likely cause of our existence. No faith involved. All we ever ask of your ilk is that you show us evidence to the contrary, since you seem so sure of yourself. You never have. Unless you can do so now, it might be a good time to walk away from an argument lost.
Physician, heal thyself. Saying "there's no evidence" is an inference to the best explanation. Using the Latin doesn't automagically validate your assertion.
This, is a textbook "argumentum ad ignorantium":
Right: "evolution doesn't explain us, therefore Goddit"
Fuckin' A!
It's always a hoot to watch atheists aleprachaunists whistling past the graveyard, supremely confident that they've got the answer to the God leprachaun question right. Personally, I've never been able to muster enough faith to be an atheist aleprachaunist. Could one of you unintended products of the blind evolution of matter explain to me how you came by your faith-based conclusion that there is are no God leprachauns? - Jackie
In the same way I came to the conclusion that there are no leprachauns. No evidence for them, no sound argument for their existence, they play no explanatory role. Of course, when you come to specific gods, such as the Christian one, the position is a lot clearer: that particular entity cannot possibly exist because its description is logically self-contradictory.
>>imposed on the human mind by force and fear
This has always been my experience, crusades, spanish inquisition... or more personally, bullies on the playground, etc. An endless list.
Fear shapes lives in unspeakable ways, often permanently.
But now, it is tea time. Where'd I put the pot?
Facilis - design is a perfectly reasonable initial inference, until you start to look closer and realize that the organized chaos of what you are seeing looks nothing like design and exactly like the product of common descent, random mutation and environmental selection...
Aaron Baker, #106:
I saw that comment after my comment finally got posted.
It could be that some people are misusing the teapot analogy. In that case, Douthat could have a point. But, then, he could also have explained what Russell's original intent was.
Incidentally, who "whistles" pasts graveyards anyway. At least when I'm in England*, I don't, I hang around, look at the statues, enjoy the quiet. (*Portuguese graveyards are oddly sucky in my experience)
Facilis #103:
Sure, it's quite reasonable -- an empirical argument which can be examined pro and con.
Given up on presuppositionalism, have we?
>>imposed on the human mind by force and fear
This has always been my experience, crusades, spanish inquisition... or more personally, bullies on the playground, etc. An endless list.
Fear shapes lives in unspeakable ways, often permanently.
But now, it is tea time. Where'd I put the pot?
@ Sastra #87
Furthermore, I felt it was critical that you used the words "since babyhood" to describe how we have these feelings of a higher Agent taking care of our lives.
I feel strongly that this is emblematic of parental care. As I said earlier, I feel that one could make a very strong case that part of what gives us such a strong, fundamental urge to seek for agency is the agency of our parents.
Almost everything you said in your comment could be applied to parents almost equally well as it could be applied to a god. Most of us grow up with the idea that there is someone taking care, looking after our needs. Why not extrapolate that to a cosmic scale?
Just for the record, I'd buy a t-shirt with a picture of a said teapot in orbit with PZ's slogan on the back.
I would buy millions of them.
~LW~
Translated: justified and reasonable confidence based on the actual observation that localized complexity can be and is distilled by natural algorithmic processes, and noting that certain other explanations have multiplied entities unnecessarily beyond this despite a want of evidence for them, and thus dismissing or ignoring them on this basis, shall be understood as 'unbounded faith'.
Oh, and it's all too true... It's terribly arrogant and 'faith-based' of y'all, y'know... Observing a phenomenon and taking that understanding and the vast and lengthy natural history demonstrating its potential and inferring they do explain a great deal, and noting that so far they're actually all you've really got for an evidence-based explanation as to how you got here... See, if you were sophisticated thinkers (yet so humble) like our deep thinker, here, you'd ridicule such naive notions as getting terribly ahead of yourselves... I mean, you're so casually dismissing (or at least ignoring) any number of these perfectly valid (and ever so cautious, themselves) alternative explanations involving all-knowing cosmic intelligences which themselves came from... Well...
Okay... We won't get into that. But anyway. You're all so 'faithy', doing that. So there.
"I'd also venture to say that with the FSM, one very obvious part of what its creators were getting it was this: belief in such an entity is obviously absurd."
Well the comedy of the Flying Spaghetti Monster does help in its propagation as an internet phenomenon. But I think it spells out well the fact that the FSM is as "disprovable" as Yaweh. Douthat does not grapple with the central prong of the argument, and instead attacks, as you do, the easier and trivial set-dressing: the comedy. Yes, we know it's a comical thing. That's *A* point, but it's not *the* point.
If you say to a theist that Yaweh is as provable and as disprovable as Zeus, they act offended that you would compare their God to pagan mythology. If you say Yaweh is as provable and as disprovable as the Great Pumpkin, or the FSM or the teapot, they laugh it off as you being silly and not serious. Or they say, like Douthat, that "you need to get out more."
Come off it.
Just for the record, I'd buy a t-shirt with a picture of a said teapot in orbit with PZ's slogan on the back.
I would buy millions of them.
~LW~
@Facilis
(S)He's confused that both the formal Universal Unchanging Laws of Logic, and your formal modeal logical proof for belief in God as a properly basic belief, are conspicuous by their absence.
I get to start each day with: "I wonder--as soon as they're pointed out to him--which errors in reasoning Facilis will run away from today!"
I've never been able to muster your boundless faith, which is shared by all atheists. - Jackie
Jackie, you're a crashing bore. We've all heard this "atheism requires faith" crap more times than we can count. Find something new to say, or shut up.
explain to me how you came by your faith-based conclusion that there is no God?
Invalid question, as it assumes that I have some sort of "faith-based conclusion".
It gets back to the whole difference between "I believe there is no God", which IS faith-based, versus "I do not believe there is a God", which is a simple statement of fact. When you ask me why I do not believe, I will tell you that I've been given no reason or evidence upon which to do so.
And saying that things are too complex to have just happened (itself an unproven notion; maybe it DID "just happen") does not automatically lead to "God did it." That's a shrug right there, an abdication of reason, saying that something is too complicated to figure out, so I'm going to hang a big label on it that says "God" and quit thinking about it.
Absence of evidence may not be evidence of absence, but if we're going to swap cliches, then extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
heddle #109 wrote:
Agree.
Jackie does seem to have made several trips to the logical fallacy buffet, n'est-ce pas?
At this point, we may expect "Jackie" to do the following:
* "bless us" all and inform us that she's far too busy to respond to our comments, as she is preparing dinner for her 6.5 children (praise Gawd for overpopulation!),
* or she will "bless us" and tell us that she will offer an invocation to her Imaginary Sky Friend on our behalf (if you do, could you ask it to bless me with the following men: Eric Bana, LL Cool J, Justin Timberlake, Blaine Bishop, Hugh Jackman, and, oh, throw in about five bodybuilders? Kay, thanks!)
* of she will lament how mean and awfully closed to open discussion we Big Bad Mean Old Atheists are.
...of course, now that she'll read this, chances are she'll take another tack, but it will be no less lame than the ones listed above.
Teleprompter: I'm fairly sure Sastra was deliberately describing the parent-child relationship as an analogy to belief in a god.
Meanwhile, I find Douthat's sniffing that atheists "need to get out more" especially amusing. Does he not realize that many atheists (if not most) are, in fact, the offspring of monotheists? That many of us had religious upbringing? It isn't as though we haven't given organized religion a chance to make the case for their God to us. We were brought up learning about how God is watching over us, we thought about it, and we still don't buy it. Even better, does it not occur to him that believers in the monotheist God are the majority of our society? That we are well into the minority and that the assumption of their God is all around us, every day, and that most of us have already been told that our immortal souls are in grave danger if we don't accept Jesus into our lives? The difference in the "new atheism" is that now we're noisy enough to show the majority how their belief system looks from the outside. How dare we.
Jackie is just willfully confused. She hasn't figured out that faith is not the same thing as trust so she projects her boundless faith in the unprovable deity lacking any empirical evidence on to us.
weak sauce.
Well, I do, but that's not related to religious belief.
That last paragraph sounded as if it were written by Douglas Adams
Personally, I've never been able to muster enough faith to be an atheist.
What this means is that you do not have enough courage to face a world where you are not protected from imaginary demons by a benevolent parent. It means that have not rid yourself of those childish fears and so cling to the idea of a god to protect you. It is kind of ironic that the Bible itself says
Belief in god is a psychological artifact of an evolved behavior of children to seek the protection of the parent, to inherently trust the parent so as to learn how to survive. That is what "faith" and religion are all about.
Teleprompter #122 wrote:
Yes, that was my point.
For an interesting examination of this argument on the origins of religion, I suggest psychologist M.D. Faber's The Psychological Roots of Religious Belief: Searching for Angels and the Parent-God.
More than one have told me they still cannot comprehend -- and think there's something 'magical' about -- an aircraft flying (apparently unsupported) through the air. Never underestimate the credulity of the great unwashed.
@ Teleprompter #111
... an idea taken up by Eric Satie in "peccadilles importunes". Roughly:
"Taking advantage of the corns on his feet to take his hoop from him - if God sees that, he'll be furious ... It's something you must never do, unless you're told to."
Jackie @58:
I don’t want to rain on your parade there Jackie, but I have $50 that says:
You have never seen an atheist whistle and another $50 that says nor have you seen an atheist whistle anywhere near a graveyard.
Atheists are confident that they have the answer to just about every imaginary critter you can name. How many can you name? And how much time do you have?
Personally you are ignorant (and I say that with all due respect to what you think you know) of everything regarding atheists. For starters we don’t excite our ‘faith’ neurons to be atheist. It’s more of a, “So, what you’re saying is that there’s a big sky daddy up there watching us masturbate, really?!” with a furrowed brow and a couple of blinks just to make sure you aren’t some illusion spouting a canoe load of crap out of your mouth when you start babbling on about some god-pig floating around in space.
Blind some of us may be but through a tiny bit of optics (science to you morons) most of us can have our vision corrected to nearly 20/20, or better. You, on the other hand, by using your faith, will always be completely and totally blind.
“Faith-based conclusion”? You didn’t really intend that for us, did you? Or was that a little bit of your own psychological projection leaking through your trousers? OK, I’ll bite: Most of us came to our ‘faith-based conclusion’ that there is no god/gods because, well, frankly, there simply aren’t any. Plain and simple. Difficult for some to grasp. But there were no gods, there are no gods, and there will be no gods.
To summarize: Your ignorance knows no bounds and I have probably been hosed by a Poe.
Deerliver, I--I mean Jackie, please stop saddlebacking in front of us.
I'm not sure I agree with everyone's assessment on what the teapot analogy means.
I don't think it's an argument for atheism, necessarily. Of course, it takes an atheist perspective as it asserts there is no evidence for God.
What it seems to be most effectively is an argument against agnosticism - pointing out the folly of saying one is agnostic about a flying teapot, and it then follows that if you see similarly little evidence for God's existence, then it is lunacy to say you are agnostic about a deity too.
Of course, it is founded on the not unreasonable central thesis that evidence should dictate beliefs. But I'm not sure that's what Russell's analogy best illustrates.
I'm probably being a bit of a pedant here.
Similarly, I've heard many express wonder at how a huge ship (tanker, car-carrier, etc.) can ride so high on the surface of the sea withou toppling over. It seems the concept of 'ballast' is eternally beyond their comprehension.
It's unfair not to quote or allude to the rest of Ross's piece:
He's not saying "If enough of us imagine it, it must be real." He's saying if enough of us imagine it, it's worth knowing about. It's a humanist statement: even atheists should take enough interest their fellow humanity to understand the religious impulse, not as a guide to the reality of the cosmos but as a part of human nature.
You can disagree with that, but calling the guy a moron is off-base.
Andrés Diplotti:
I agree. The more I know of people, the better I like my dog. -Mark Twain
KnockGoats @128:
Jackie's not a bore this time. She's a hoot! If she wants to call "faith" the process of reasoning that people go through to conclude the universe is without a god, we should encourage her. It's the same process, really, that everyone uses in their day-to-day lives, which really strips "faith" of all of its alleged specialness.
In other words, Jackie is asserting that her faith in God is no different from my "faith" that my furniture doesn't dance around the house while I'm not looking. Such statements should be seen as an epic fail (Jackie turning what seems to be vitally important to her into the pathetically mundane), and thus a real good "point and laugh" moment.
The part of Douthat's apologia that struck me was his bit about "experiencing an interaction with a being who seems recognizable as the Judaeo-Christian God" being a major part of "the story of our civilization". I don't read the guy, so don't know what he considers to be "our" civilization, though this does resemble the various recent statements by pols about the US (or "America" if they're going back to the Pilgrims/Puritans) being founded on Judaeo-Christian religion.
The founders, some of whom were at most deists and many of whom were well-informed admirers of pre-Christian, non-Judaic ancient Mediterranean civilization, would have been able to give him a good argument -- an argument that would hold good for European civilization in general. If he's talking about the story of human civilization worldwide, he's far, far out in left field. Out of the ballpark, in fact. I'm no scholar in comparative religion, but I've read enough to know that the patterns of Christianity/Judaeism/Islam are not shared by other religions that are followed by millions and have been for centuries.
But it is one thing to disbelieve in God astrology; it is quite another to never feel a twinge of doubt about one's own disbelief. - simea mirans quoting the moron Ross Douthat
Tosh is tosh, however many people believe it.
Maybe it should be Magrit's teapot "C'est ne un teapot"
Douthat says -
"An intuitive belief in some sort of presiding Agent..."
What better definition have you ever seen for what a biosociologist might call "ancestral human tribal instinct?"
#103: "So are you saying it is not reasonable to say complexity resulted from design?"
Agents capable of design clearly produce complex things.
Before designing agents were around, complexity could hardly have resulted from design.
"Do you believe in Thor? If no, tell me why not."
I see no reason to believe in a god of thunder. I see many reasons, on the other hand, to believe in the God of the Bible.
"...they will start distributing over 6.5 million copies in February of pamphlets stating that the Evolution theory is just another 'belief'."
Horrors. The Netherlands should act swiftly to halt this exercise of free speech.
"Note that Richard Dawkins, along with all atheists who are also scientists, say that there is almost certainly no god."
Oh, well. Silly me. If Richard Dawkins said it, it must be true. Google "argumentum ad verecundiam" to brush up on your logic.
"There is evidence of evolution. Hard, vigorously tested evidence. It's what leads me to understand that this is far and away the most likely cause of our existence. No faith involved."
Science never proves its theories, dearheart. The problem of induction never goes away, regardless of how persuasive the evidence might be to those who are eager to be persuaded. Brush up on what the scientific method can deliver and you'll understand that science, like religion, is steeped in faith.
By the way, what vigorous testing has been done to confirm that men and apes share a common ancestor and that Darwinian mechanisms fully account for human existence?
Also, in the Darwinian scheme of things, your thoughts - like my thoughts - can be nothing more than evolved survival strategies. On what grounds, then, do you trust that anyone's thoughts correspond to external truths? If Darwinian evolutionary theory is true, how could it deliver minds capable of knowing that it's true?
Tell me the difference in what you just said and what I said?
"Note that Richard Dawkins, along with all atheists who are also scientists, say that there is almost certainly no god."
Oh, well. Silly me. If Richard Dawkins said it, it must be true. Google "argumentum ad verecundiam" to brush up on your logic.
Missing the point for 1000 Alex.
Meant to blockquote jackie's quote from "Note ...to...logic"
#145
Really? I didn't read it that way at all. I read it to mean, "if enough of us imagine it to be real, it is more likely to be real (i.e., it is not "equally ridiculous" as the FSM)."
Totally fallacious.
simea mirans, #145: He's saying if enough of us imagine it, it's worth knowing about.
Well, that much I agree with as far as it goes. Enough of "us" imagine that the earth was created 6000 years ago and was perfect until a talking snake mucked things up, and so I agree that those beliefs are worth knowing about. But one can acknowledge that a lot of people share a certain belief and so it may be a good thing to know more about those beliefs and also point out the inherent silliness in those beliefs.
Personally, I think that he's saying that since enough people believe that God exists, that belief must be acknowledged as a reasonable opinion. I disagree with that. Now, perhaps one should acknowledge belief in God as a reasonable opinion, but not just because so many people believe it.
Only until the evidence is found. Then there is a solid evidential footing, which religion can in noway copy. Evolution is so solid the chances of it being overturned are about the same as you flying off the earth and into space in the next ten minutes.
You see faith where none is needed. And your silly god doesn't exist.
This person professes to "see many reasons to believe in the God of the Bible" yet asks "what vigorous testing has been done to confirm that men and apes share a common ancestor?"
Are you serious? Can it really be possible to so thoroughly misunderstand the extremely basic concept of "evidence"?
Which is more troublesome to you: the "problem of induction" or the "problem of just making shit up"?
Richard Harris: Exactly. What really annoys me about most folks like Mr. Douthat is that they, by choice, continue in an ignorance that a single semester of Intro to Classical Civilization or a single, complete reading of Dr. Freud's Totem and Tabo could dispel, and no matter how often you point out the actual history of religion, they refuse to take the step to actually educate themselves.
When, for the second or third or eleventy billionth time, the dog refuses to hunt, you should stop offering to take him to the duck blind.
If the religious were not actively trying to force consensus reality to conform to their "impulse", then you and Douhat would have a point. But they do, so you don't. Well not as strong a point. Think of it as conversational intolerance.
@Jim A
You meant: "Ceci n'est pas un théière"
Wow sugarbuns, you kind of dodged the question didn't you? Do you have evidence of your god?
Heh. Right. Seems you're pointing to the wrong page... Believe you meant to direct the audience to 'bad faith misdirection', sport.
... aaaand we retreat again, as is inevitable, to appeals to solipsism...
And oh, look. We're back in teapot territory. How very a propos.
I see no reason to believe in a god of thunder. I see many reasons, on the other hand, to believe in the God of the Bible.
Do share.
Also, in the Darwinian scheme of things, your thoughts - like my thoughts - can be nothing more than evolved survival strategies. On what grounds, then, do you trust that anyone's thoughts correspond to external truths?
Uh, because we survive? It's kind of like the ultimate test. The strategies work.
<>If Darwinian evolutionary theory is true, how could it deliver minds capable of knowing that it's true?
What grounds do you have to doubt it?
Aww, Jackie calls us petnames and thinks she's putting us down like mad dogs with the famous Problem of Induction! Isn't she just the cutest widdle thing? *pinches cheeks*
I have always felt this entire 'feeling' can best be relayed as a remnant ancestral primate behaviour. We are conditioned to look to the alpha male or 'troop' leader for direction, needs, protection, etc. As humans evolved away from alot of this the physical need to submit remains.
The hypothesis also helps explain why far more women then men are religious and feel the need to do so because of emotion. It also helps explain why there are fewer atheists than theists(at least for now) as perhaps these individuals are variations that could be selected for or against in the population.
Good grief how silly.
By the way, what vigorous testing has been done to confirm that men and apes share a common ancestor and that Darwinian mechanisms fully account for human existence?
Jackie, sweet cheeks, you really are a fool.
Jackie @ 153
Oh well, silly you. To imagine a non-existent god and never produce one in the flesh or as smoke. We tell you with more than conviction and reason that your made up god is a figment of unsound minds, and you insist that all that nonsense is valid to the point of madness. You have only to get your imaginary god to appear before us and you have our word we will laugh in good humor and state that we thought it was all a joke. Come on Jackie, your phony god must have at least the ability to show itself, and I don't mean in a cow turd or an intelligent designed tornado that is indiscriminate in its slaughter.
to Muzz@40
I haven't finished reading all of the comments yet so apologies if someone has covered this point already. I think a lot of the 'religious feeling' can be chalked up to a few different neurological processes.
First, you have the child's ability to make up reality. All of us as children played a version of pretend where you made up situations and friends and the like, I view religions as a different facet of that. Most adults don't have imaginary friends because at some point we realized that they were made up (excluding of course the more traditionally insane) but as we grow older some individuals fill that gap with a god or a spirit or what have you. They feel empty without it so they want to believe something is there watching them all the time.
Add to that the tendency all humans have to make everything seem more human; when we see random images we make them into face, we imagine animals have human like feelings, etc. So we (as humans in general) put a human face on some being that's always watching us and trying to make sure we do the right things.
If I really thought about it I'm sure I could make a list of a dozen or so reasons why these traits would be selected for back in the beginnings of modern type humans and all of them would probably be accurate to some degree. I'm sure someone has already done the footwork on it though, so maybe I'll spend some time searching around later on tonight to find a good article or paper on reasons that these traits developed.
More fractal wrongness.
The goal of scientific theories is not "proof", but "inference to the best explanation", so the problem of induction is no impediment. Read Chalmers, you dolt. Arguing against naieve empiricism is so last-century.
People already study that. There is literature out there, a number of competing hypotheses about where god-belief comes from. There was an article mentioned by PZ just a few days ago, in fact. He's also ignoring the significant proportion of atheists who used to be theists and so have first-hand experience with god-belief.
Then why bring up FSM or Russell's Teapot at all? Those are completely unrelated to the thesis you believe he's presenting. They are simply analogies demonstrating the misuse of logic.
He's being called a moron for the statements he actually makes, not the ones you are putting into his mouth. Maybe that's unfair. Perhaps he's just a very bad writer and didn't revise his essay after he changed topics partway through.
First of all, it's great that you see no reason to believe in Thor but many reasons to believe in God. Now answer the question and actually explain why.
Secondly, I'm sure you would be "horrified" if a group went door to door, leaving 6.5 million pamphlets outlining the various reasons that god probably does not exist. You'd certainly have some complaint that a child could find said materials and be brainwashed--well, we feel the same way about your beliefs, so stop forcing them down our throats. And no one is saying the Christian group should be legally prohibited from exercising their free speech, just that the speech they are exercising is most probably incorrect.
Secondly, the Dawkins quote was not mentioned to try to validate atheism because someone important beleives it (as an appeal to authority), it was mentioned to illustrate the skeptical yet not totally close-minded nature of many atheists' ideas about god. And by the way, using Latin words doesn't make you sound smarter.
Thirdly, you are correct in saying that science does not definitely, absolutely prove its theories. That is because if the evidence changes, the theories change. How often has your theory of God changed due to new evidence (or lack thereof)? Also, in science, the word theory doesn't mean the same as it does in popular parlance. For an idea to become a theory, it must have overwhelmingly positive evidence for it's validity. So again, where is the evidence for God? Show me and I'll take it into consideration. I guarantee that your "evidences of god" are not anywhere near as solid as the evidence for evolution.
And finally, the "testing" you ask of Darwin's idea, though not the same as a recreation in a lab, is no less important or valid. Developmental biology, geology, paleontology, etc all have found evidences of evolution. And some examples of evolution actually have been observed, in organisms like bacteria or fruit flies, which have shorter life spans. You can read this article and "brush up" on such scientific discoveries (that we've known about for years
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/06/science/06conv.html
Sorry, one last thing. The overly sweet, condescending "pet names" you use to address people are not cute, honey.
"And just as the Christian who has never entertained doubts about his faith probably hasn't thought hard enough about the matter, the atheist who perceives the Christian God and the flying spaghetti monster as equally ridiculous hypotheses really needs to get out more often."
The reason atheists tend to use an argument originally meant to critique faith to critique God is because theists themselves are confused. The two big arguments out there are
1.) Based on the evidence, it is more reasonable to conclude that God exists than that it doesn't.
and
2.) In order to believe in God, one must go beyond what the evidence warrants, and make a leap of faith.
And these usually come from the same people. But it should be either one, or the other. Not both at the same time.
Point out that leaps of faith and cautious agnosticism would apply equally well to Russell's teapot, and they start screaming that no, atheists are ignoring #1! It's not just faith, we've got tons and tons of evidence and argument and reason!
Point out that the evidence, argument, and reason do not lead to the conclusion they say it does, and then they sigh and note how the silly atheists are forgetting the importance of #2. God doesn't want to compel people, after all. Can you prove God doesn't exist? The least you should be is cautiously agnostic, and admit it could be true -- and then God leaves that leap up to you.
Apologists need to pick a horse and ride it, and then maybe we'd stop throwing the crockery around.
If you can't use your own personal experience, critically examined, to arrive at truth, whose can you use?
"Tell me the difference in what you just said and what I said?"
Reasons and evidence are not the same thing, sweetie. We have reasons, for example, for thinking that Hoffa was murdered, but we have no evidence for that hypothesis. Does the absence of such evidence entail that Hoffa wasn't murdered? Of course not. When the search area is large (as it is with respect to the God question), absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (as it might be when the search area - a refrigerator, perhaps - is quite small). If you know of no evidence for God, you're entitled to say that you know of no evidence for God. You are not, however, empowered by logic to say that your ignorance of any evidence for God entails that God does not exist.
If you'd like to acquaint yourself with the evidence for God, why don't you avail yourself of one of the many books written on that subject? To name but one of them, you might read "Evidence for Faith: Deciding the God Question," edited by John Warwick Montgomery.
Why do only really, really ignorant people choose to talk about things they have no understanding of?
I think the evidence has shown Darwin incorrect on many things but yet his basic elemental idea sound.
Jackie Sweetie, your god doesn't exist without physical eveidence. Otherwise, all you have is a delusion between your ears. No physical evidence exists for your god. And he won't exist until you present some. Get cracking and present some, as we have been waiting a long time for the evidence that will pass scientists, magicians, and professional debunkers as being of divine origin. Until then, you are loony toons.
I am empowered by logic to say that the evidence so far presented to me does not convince me of the existence of any gods. There for I do no accept that gods exist. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise.
So far nothing has done so.
I don't take the default position that something exists because it hasn't been shown to me to not. Invisible dragons in garages and such.
Do you?
Why do you reject the Hindu or Norse gods?
Jackie, sugar dumpling, you analogy is flawed. We have proof that Hoffa existed. Then one day Hoffa was no longer around. Reason enough to assume that he might have been murdered. But we have no proof that your deity exists.
Get it, sugar plum? We have proof of Hoffa's existence. Not so much for your sugar daddy.
At the risk of starting a schism can I say that I believe 100% in NASA's toolbox?
And so we have the silly christianists, here to stand up for their faith. You don't get it, do you? We don't believe in your god, we don't believe in any god. No faith recquired. It's scarcely our fault if you need to tap into superstition and your programming to interpret the world - we're really not responsible for your lack of imagination and understanding or your refusal to put childish beliefs behind you. I mean, look what happens when you're confronted with evolution, which is both true and awe inspiring; you just can't handle it.
And the worst is, you're here simply to proselytize, to show off your faith. Well, your nonexistent god is laughing at you.
Worse, this is just another tiresome attempt at christian apologetics. Well go on then - fucking apologize!
Then fuck off.
Dear.
No atheist, I think, denies that God may exist. Just that the evidence as currently understood presents no case that a God exists or a particular version. Hence the default position.
You deride evolution but trumpet this book. You are silly.
@Jackie
We're not relying on logic. We're relying on epistemic responsibility and intersubjective empiricism. In other words:
@Jackie
Uh, well there's about 112 years worth. How long do you have?
"Which is more troublesome to you: the 'problem of induction' or the 'problem of just making shit up'?"
Why should the latter bother someone who worships in the Church of Darwin, whose sacred texts are full of "shit" that is just made up? Read, for example, Darwinian accounts of the evolution of the human eye - accounts that are as full of imagination as they are devoid of rigorous, testable data.
"There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact." - Mark Twain
nice
If I'm not very much mistaken, instruction in the use of condescending saccharine endearments is covered in chapter 4 of the Internet Troll Handbook.
Jackie-
rea⋅son
/ˈrizən/
–noun
1. a BASIS OR CAUSE AS FOR SOME BELIEF, action, fact, event, etc.: the reason for declaring war.
2. a statement presented in justification or explanation of a belief or action.
ev⋅i⋅dence
/ˈɛvɪdəns/
noun, verb, -denced, -denc⋅ing.
–noun
1. that which tends to prove or disprove something; GROUND FOR BELIEF; proof.
2. something that makes plain or clear; an indication or sign: His flushed look was visible evidence of his fever.
I think a basis for belief and ground for belief sound pretty similar.
"If you know of no evidence for God, you're entitled to say that you know of no evidence for God. You are not, however, empowered by logic to say that your ignorance of any evidence for God entails that God does not exist."
And if YOU know no evidence of god, how does that empower you by logic to say that your ignorance of any evidence for god entails that god DOES exist? That's makes even less sense.
To acquaint yourself with arguments against the existence of god, I suggest you read "The God Delusion" written by Richard Dawkins.
Jackie, why you poor dear (if you're from the Southern USA you'll understand the implied meaning: "Jackie, you retard"):
What do these many reasons look like, oh wise and faithful one?
Induction? What the fuck are you talking about?
You keep using that word, "science" - I don't think you know what it means.
Jackie: noun, today's example of willful ignorance steeped (teapots again!) in boiling hot cognitive dissonance served up with a heaping helping of chocolate coated Dunning-Kruger Effect scones.
Orrrr...
You, Jackie, could give me your reasons right now for knowing that God exists but not Thor. I'm still waiting on that one. "I know that the Bible is true because the Bible says so" does not settle the issue here, btw.
Pookums you are skiing way out over your tips now.
Projection is not an appealing trait.
and
I'm waiting for Jackie to disappear in a puff of logic.
Tons. What do you want first: DNA similarity? Paleontological evidence? Anatomical correspondence? Neurological comparisons?
On what grounds do you? How do you even know that there are external truths? Because something external tells you? How is that any different that what science does?
Jackie #153 wrote:
I think you're equivocating on the meaning of "faith." Science forms working theories, explanatory models open to disconfirmation, given new evidence or argument. Pragmatic reliance is not the same as religious "faith," which has to do with hope, need, and a firm commitment to believe one's own conclusions.
If you think they're the same thing, I'd be interested to know what sort of new evidence or discoveries would cause you to throw out God, as an inadequate hypothesis, and accept a thoroughly natural reality?
Would it be conclusive evidence for evolution?
If so, then you agree that we need to consider God as we would consider any other scientific hypothesis.
If not, then drop the arguments against evolution. You'd just as gladly argue for theistic evolution as you'd argue for Intelligent Design, and those folks are on the same side as the atheists in the Evolution vs. Creationism debate.
As you've already pointed out, evolution could not give us minds with Direct Access to Absolute Truth and Certainty. It would only give us the kinds of minds which needed to be cautious, careful, and use methods like science to correct themselves when in error.
@Jackie
Serious SIWOTI territory.
How about you read accounts of the evolution of the human eye. You really ought to know at least a bit about what you presume to criticise.
Posted by: Jackie | January 30, 2009
Why should the latter bother someone who worships in the Church of Darwin, whose sacred texts are full of "shit" that is just made up? Read, for example, Darwinian accounts of the evolution of the human eye - accounts that are as full of imagination as they are devoid of rigorous, testable data.
Jackie, that delectable strawberry shortcake, knows that all you scientists spend your time in your monasteries, sitting on your asses and making shit up.
Give it up! Jackie is one smart cookie. She knows!
Jackie, ever hear of "Modern Synthesis". It is the up-to-date version 150 year improvement of evolution that includes genes, DNA, and all that good stuff that solidified evolutionary theory into something as solid as the Theory of Gravity, that Darwin knew thing about. Continually harping on Darwin just shows your ignorance of the subject.
"Agents capable of design clearly produce complex things.
Before designing agents were around, complexity could hardly have resulted from design."
Presumably, dearheart, you have in mind intelligent design theory. If that is so, you should know that design theorists do not argue that complexity signals design. They instead argue that *specified* complexity is a reliable hallmark of design. If the distinction is not clear to you, you've got some homework to do before you can knowledgeably criticize ID theory.
People used to 'intuitively believe' that the sun went around the earth or that my physics textbook is going to fall faster than my cell phone (I wish).
Galileo et. al. pretty much put an end to that nonsense. Science wins again.
Jim A: Merde alors! Shouldn't that be "Ce n'est pas un teapot!" But enough of this storm in a teapot. I came to the U.S.A. from England 46 years ago as a refugee from the teapot wars. Andrew Sullivan's knowledge of mathematics, among other things, is pathetic: See my letter to Atlantic Magazine last year in which I pointed out he doesn't know logarithms from a hole in the ground.
Jackie, dumpling,
With your regurgitating the nonsense you think you know about the human eye, you have just convcinced me that you are no more than a garden variety godbot. That is, weapons-grade stupid. Impervious to reason, logic, sanity, or science. I am astonished the regulars have been so patient with you. Now, produce your god, or run along. The grown-ups have better things to do.
Thank you, Janine, for stating exactly the concept behind the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
And as long as we're slinging quotes from one of my favorite observers of the human condition:
...and...
Jackie, the key lime pie, sure is proud of the fact that she has no idea what she is talking about.
Jackie, sweetums, look up Facilis. I see the beginnings of a beautiful friendship.
They instead argue that *specified* complexity is a reliable hallmark of design.
Okay. Let's say you find a pocket watch laying in the grass. How much *specified* complexity is there in the watch, and how much is there in the grass?
Please, show your work.
For the last time, Darwin is NOT OUR GOD. He is our PROPHET. Our gods are the Holy Trinity of Physics, Chemistry and Chaos Theory. When are you trolls going to grasp that?!
Care to share? Oh, nearly forgot--care to share, poopsie?
There's another quickie atheist parable that I find Christians don't get that we've all probably used: "Why doesn't God heal amputees?"
But then, this guy doesn't get much of anything:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=de7kisfQ1vY
Of course, the problem is that not all Christians go to faith healers. Some of them also think Peter Popoff, W. V. Grant or Pat Robertson for real.
Jackie,
Darwin is not a god. He did not die and rise again. He does not grant wishes. He does not damn you to hell or send you to heaven. The book he wrote is not sacred or mystical. HE did not create the world. Doesn't sound too much like your god, does it?
Also, no one thinks Darwin's specific ideas of how evolution occurs were 100% correct, it's the general idea that he developed that is important. He didn't know all the other things we now know that further support evolution. Again, that's what is great about science, when evidence turns up, theories change and grow. Evolutionary theory has developed, but never disproved.
Are you even reading all these posts? It seems your "responses" are just rehashing the same tired ideas.
Naked Bunny, I did not say that.
I may be mistaken but wasn't Jackie here a few months back?
I think she has a blog. If that is her I'm curious why should doesn't link back to it.
Jackine you never answered my questions from post 177
@39
I'm a cosmic teapot, orbiting about.
Here is my handle, here is my spout.
At ambient space temperatures, I don't steam.
Ice won't pour and they can't hear me scream.
It's pretty much the standard Gish Gallop. Throw out a lotta shit, hope some of it sticks. If called on anything you can't answer or shows up the dishonesty of any part of your game, either answer with misdirection, or ignore it entirely... Keep on shoveling it, try to present a moving target... And bam, you a straight-from-central-casting creationist shill, muffin, and you go!
Jackie, lovely, sugar-sweet, darling, hunny-bunny, dear, you ask that I "Brush up on what the scientific method can deliver and you'll understand that science, like religion, is steeped in faith." That's like a Kalahari Bushman telling an airplane mechanic that he should look into that "flight" thing sometime. Perhaps well intentioned, but showing an ignorance of epic proportion.
You make me sad. Really. I hate ignorance. I wish to cure it. That's one of the reason's I'm an educator. I know your type. Your ignorance is willful. You don't wish to really know things, not if they don't fit with how you wish them to be. In your mind, ignorance is truly bliss. That's very sad.
I've watched you here use terms and words you obviously have no understanding of. I think there is some dim part of you that is aware that everything you hold dear is just smoke and mirrors. Because you can't refute this, you convince yourself that all others do the same. Pathetic.
I hope you'll get some help. Really. Real, psychiatric help. It may not be to late! Until then, try not to make yourself look any more of an idiot than you have already. Put the bottle down.
Goodbye dearheart and fuck you (I mean "god bless!").
Great -- now I'm picturing a large slimy egg-shaped teapot...
Jujubes!!!
Are they still around? I haven't seen them in ages. I loved how they'd stick to your teeth.
Ill bet dentists loved them too.
Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp | January 30, 2009
Jackine you never answered my questions from post 177...
Oh, thank you, oh King Of Typos! I am going to have nightmares that somehow, that delicious cream filling, Jackie and I were merged and became one. This is more scary than Cronenburg's version of The Fly.
Sorry, Janine, I meant Jackie. I'd tell you to spank me for that mistake, but I think you know that would not be a punishment.
Since I have personally observed lightning, I think there's probably more reason to believe in Thor than in Yahweh. Jackie?
Jackie,
"There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact." - Mark Twain
OK, since you think quotes change reality:
"Faith, is believing in something you know just ain't true." - Mark Twain
Damn, you are an idiot.
That's not idiomatic Christian. "I'll pray for you" is usually translated as "fuck you".
"God bless" is usually rendered as "go fuck yourself".
Rev.BigDumbChimp,
Yes, Jackie was here a couple of months ago. Did a quick search and found similar adolescent ramblings spouting her certainty and ignorance of just about everything that she writes. Didn't come across a blog link but then I didn't search too carefully. That amount of willful, moronic, imbecilic, cask-strength stupid (h/t Emmet!) is dangerous and might go critical if too much is gathered too closely together.
Where’s my revolver when I need to make the village idiot dance? ;)
Naked Bunny, how about I tie you up and tickle your feet with a feather.
Rev.BigDumbChimp,
Yes, Jackie was here a couple of months ago. Did a quick search and found similar adolescent ramblings spouting her certainty and ignorance of just about everything that she writes. Didn't come across a blog link but then I didn't search too carefully. That amount of willful, moronic, imbecilic, cask-strength stupid (h/t Emmet!) is dangerous and might go critical if too much is gathered too closely together.
Where’s my revolver when I need to make the village idiot dance? ;)
Mothra, I so want to get my nieces and nephews to recite that.
"Also, in the Darwinian scheme of things, your thoughts - like my thoughts - can be nothing more than evolved survival strategies. On what grounds, then, do you trust that anyone's thoughts correspond to external truths?"
"Uh, because we survive? It's kind of like the ultimate test. The strategies work."
Why in the world do you suppose that a thought that promotes survival must correspond to truth? Indeed, if thoughts are mere survival strategies (as they must be, if Darwinian theory is true), the very possibility of knowing objective truth is ruled out. As you suggest, a mind produced by Darwinian evolution evolves towards survival strategies that work. But such a mind has no grounds for trusting that the ideas it forms correspond to truth ("What works" does not necessarily equate to "What is true"). By reducing thoughts to mere survival strategies, Darwinian theory gives us no grounds for thinking that it's objectively true. The same applies to any thinking used to try to validate Darwinian theory. The Darwinian explanation of the mind cuts its own throat.
Rev.BigDumbChimp,
Yes, Jackie was here a couple of months ago. Did a quick search and found similar adolescent ramblings spouting her certainty and ignorance of just about everything that she writes. Didn't come across a blog link but then I didn't search too carefully. That amount of willful, moronic, imbecilic, cask-strength stupid (h/t Emmet!) is dangerous and might go critical if too much is gathered too closely together.
Where’s my revolver when I need to make the village idiot dance? ;)
"If you know of no evidence for God, you're entitled to say that you know of no evidence for God. You are not, however, empowered by logic to say that your ignorance of any evidence for God entails that God does not exist."
And once again, back to the teapot. Round and round she goes...
Trouble is now I can't read "evidence" without thinking of that Holocaust-denying bishop from a few threads ago. "IVVIDENCE."
Also, the Faith No More song of the same name.
IIRC, Yahweh was a thunder god too, just after getting out of his pantheon's mailroom. Along with Zeus, Thor, Susa-no-O, Shango, Apocatequil, and Indra.
Jackie still hasn't told why he/she thinks Yahweh is provable while the others are not. Is it because I haven't tried using a passive-aggressive cutesy nickname in my requests that this question be answered?
Now I feel compelled to get a ceramic teapot, paint "Russell" on one side and "There's probably no teapot. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." on the other.
It'd make a great conversation piece.
Jackie, Hostess Cupcake, before you can offer a coherent criticism of evolution, you must know what you are talking about. All you serve up is word salad.
Heliobates @ 218,
Oops! Thanks for the correction. My ignorance shows. It is a tricky language though.
Oh hell, not another woman who does that!
Er, I mean, that wouldn't bother me at all. *coughs and fidgets*
How am I supposed to enjoy my life if there's no tea?
I see Jackie hasn't learned the first rule of holes. When you are in over your head, stop digging. She has been in over her head for an hour now, and it is time for her to stop digging.
Jackie, evolution is a sound scientific theory with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of scientific papers backing it up. Your belief is irrelevant both to science and to the validity of evolutiion. Your silly imaginary god has zero evidence, except in your delusional mind.
Russell's Teapot is a silly illustration, but for a different reason (and to appreciate the fallacy of his argument is independent of whether any particular thing exists or not.) The RT, like FSM, is a case of straw man argument. Of course imaging something, anything at all, was real wouldn't be enough to make it so. The whole point in wondering about God, ETs, "other universes", whatever, is to see if you can come up with a supporting argument (if you don't have direct evidence.) How convincing would depend on just what was proposed and how good the argument is.
Jebus, tap-dancing Christ pogo-sticking on a cracker, what's up with the multi-posting?
Post once, get an error, close browser window just for safety, go back to PZ's blog, scroll down to the Jackie pile-on story, and there I am in all the triumvirate glory. Praise be and pass the beer!
Oh, apologies everyone. Except you, Jackie you tiny brained godbot.
So why has the mind produced by God turned out to be so faulty? I mean, none of the minds he created figured Him out until about 4,000 years ago, and even now, the majority of minds on the planet have apparently got Him wrong in some way.
The Darwinian explanation of the mind cuts its own throat.
Jackie, sugar walls, whoever it is whose mind you're wasting, would you return it to them before you damage it any further, please? All you're doing with it is getting it kind of damp and moldy.
Reminds me of those arguments about who would win in a fight: Superman vs. Son Goku. But, but, God has x-ray vision, so he can see Russel's Teapot trying to sneak up on him, and dodges the scalding tea attack.
I think "sugar walls" is my new favorite term of condescending endearment. I'm still waiting to hear Jackie-pie's "reasons" for believing in the God of the Bible. Let me see if I can guess this one:
"I believe in God because the Bible tells me so. I accept the Bible as inerrant because it was written by God."
In other words, the dog chases its own tail!
I gave a reasonably short answer (though it's not really a short post--these things require some argumentation) to the old Plantinga BS about evolution and "truth", at SMUDailycampus a few months back. Here it is:
The funniest, most entertaining thing about the godbots is their insatiable need to paint atheism as a religion and Darwin as the false god. It's as if they can't come to grips with anyone on other than purely religious grounds. That way, it boils down to "My faith is stronger than yours! My god is stronger than yours! My daddy can beat up your daddy, any day!"
The teapot is more likely than God.
Figure, Russell lived some time ago, right? And, since then mankind has thrown quite a few things into space.
If I were in a position to do so -- an astronaut in NASA or something, I'd be tempted to bring a teapot with me, even a tiny, keychain-sized one, and dump it into orbit. It seems far more probable to me than a semi-extradimensional nontangible being of unlimited power, knowledge, and lifespan setting up dimensions for punishment and reward of particular creatures occupying a very small part of the existence of one universe based on internal mental states of those creatures.
I am always amused by the "..but, PHILOSOPHERS have discussed proofs for the existance of god."
Am I the only one who finds much philosophy to be intellectual masturbation?
Dr Matt. Astronauts vs. cavemen?
OK. I've had my fun. My main purpose was to give the Pharyngula chorus an opportunity to demonstrate yet again that they are a pack of supercilious assholes.
Mission accomplished.
Ta, ta.
Jackie:
Gods Neil B, when heddle gets the point of it and you don't, it's over.
Jackie, #223: Why in the world do you suppose that a thought that promotes survival must correspond to truth?
And how in the world can we arrive at the truth if there is an omnipotent God who can make us see and believe anything that he wants? Seems that access to the "truth" is a bit more problematic for God-believers.
On the other hand, I "know" that when I "hit" my "knee" against the "table" it "hurts". So I'm careful not to do that. I may not know the "truth", and to be frank, I don't much care what the "truth" might be. Not "hitting" my "knee" against the "table" works in keeping me pretty happy. I'm not sure what your problem with this is.
P.S. I got a submission time out, but I can't see that this comment made it through. I am going to submit it again -- my apologies if it shows up twice (once without this P.S.).
Oh, thank you, oh King Of Typos! I am going to have nightmares that somehow, that delicious cream filling, Jackie and I were merged and became one. This is more scary than Cronenburg's version of The Fly.
Long live the king!
sorry about that
Jackie, my delectable gumdrop, my luscious caramel topped profiterole, my interlacing pile of multi-flavored licorice ropes, my twice-baked biscotti, you are a twit. And no, none of us want to develop and embrace the mind-crushingly, disingenuous, intellectually dishonest perspective that you have. You must be at the bursting stage after having stuffed yourself with so many red herrings—go pop a Pepto, OK, my little fruitcake?
give the Pharyngula chorus an opportunity to demonstrate yet again that they are a pack of supercilious assholes.
*ka-BOOM*
There goes my irony meter again.
Shorter Jackie: I can't answer they're questions, so I'm pulling out and declaring victory.
HMM, "Mission Accomplished" Where have I seen that before?
Jackie again:
And now Jackie sweet cheeks has gotten into granny's rheumatism 'medicine'. Put the jug down Jackie honey and back away from the keyboard - it's making you all flibberty gibberty.
Did those words just plop out of the keyboard like that and in that order or were you trying to say something coherent? Personally, I’d choose ‘plop’ because that list of characters is 100% fermented manure gone bad.
Sure, because how could Bronze Age goat herders possibly be wrong about this? I mean it's not like they're Vikings or something; those guys were idiots...
That's Christian for "Run away! Run away!"
That's Christian for "Fuck that was a close one! I was, like this close to having to make a substantive argument!"
Jackie, #245:
Jackie, you would look better if you just quit posting. Announcing that you are leaving because you think that everyone else is an imbecile just makes you look like the imbecile. No, really. I cringe even when someone I agree with does this.
We had a bit of fun with this one a while back, during the heyday of "Crackergate":
"Oh, yeah, well I'll pray for you too!"
"Yeah, well, I prayed for your mom last night!"
"Shut your pray-hole, or I'll pray for yo' sister until she's like, 'Oh God oh God oh God oh God'!"
HMM, "Mission Accomplished" Where have I seen that before?
To unwind at the end of the working day I come onto this fantastic blog and watch the likes of "Jackie" get eaten alive in a manner not alike the young lady who gets shoved into Blofeld's piranha pool in "You Only Live Twice".
Could someone clarify whether it is a single religious twat who comes on here all the time under different names, or that there is more than one of them out of the asylum???
PZ, if you were British I'm sure we could all club together and buy you a knighthood for services to reason, common sense and pissing off the Catholics big time.
Jacky really doesn't see why systematically believing false things might threaten your survival? Wow. I guess in Jacky-world, believing that tigers are vegetarian, fire is cold, and you can fly by wishing hard enough, is fine and doesn't lead to your being eaten, incinerated or splat.
And the standard "I can't dodge around the questions anymore, so I'm outta here".
Nice work.
Damn, that was weird. I caught my typo and thought I'd stopped the process in time to correct it, but instead it printed the typo after the corrected posting. Strange.
"OK. I've had my fun. My main purpose was to give the Pharyngula chorus an opportunity to demonstrate yet again that they are a pack of supercilious assholes.
Mission accomplished.
Ta, ta."
translation: "I can't answer your questions"
Oh, we're sorry. Can we call you a whaaaaambulance?
When you can't refute the substance, refuse the style.
Ah, you meanies have made Jackie mad. Dearheart is her expression of frustration, notice how she began to repeat them?
She's throwing out things she doesn't really grasp because she thinks she grasps it. To her, it's all a "he said/she said" kind of debate because she doesn't understand how anyone can not have a godhead figure. If you won't accept her god and dogma then obviously you've just substituted Darwin, who must have dogma rather than empirical data, instead because all knowledge is dogmatic to her way of thinking. Science is no different than History, you just memorize a bunch of subjective facts.
She's not an idiot, but she is a willfully ignorant equivocator as Dahan pointed out.
Prepare for denials that she's pissed and more mangled logic from Sweetums.
Jackie #223 wrote:
And our minds shouldn't "trust" that our ideas correspond to objective Truth. Instead, we should recognize that the human mind is subjective, and doubt ourselves when our conclusions lie only on our personal selves. In order to be more accurate and objective, we need to use tools like the methods of science, and inter-subjective checking.
Otherwise, a personal intuition that one's in direct contact with a Higher Intelligence outside the self could be mistaken for direct knowledge that is 100% certain. Without our recognition that our brains evolved through a process which will not give us absolute reliability in all our interpretations, we might accidentally think we had a sense divinus that could not be wrong.
The Darwinian explanation of the mind doesn't cut its own throat, because we can already easily see that humans are fallible, and we need to check our quick and simple conclusions. It does, however, cut any claim that man can 'Know' God through an encounter with the Holy Spirit off at its knees, though.
"If I were in a position to do so -- an astronaut in NASA or something, I'd be tempted to bring a teapot with me, even a tiny, keychain-sized one, and dump it into orbit."
Assuming it matches the tea cup and saucer on his desk in the McMasters University Russell archive, you are looking for a rather small but cheerful green striped porcelain Richard-Ginori teapot and he specified an elliptical orbit around the sun between earth and mars.
I think it would be a hilarious for Pastafarians to lead a Quest for 'Russell's Teapot' through the second hand shops of Wales. Upon it's discovery they can throw aside their fedoras, whips and wherewithal holding it up to the light and declare "Now that's the teapot of a Mathematician!"
Posted by: Alyson Miers | January 30, 2009
I think "sugar walls" is my new favorite term of condescending endearment.
At the risk of being really condescending, you must be young. Here is Sugar Walls.
Jackie #223 wrote:
And our minds shouldn't "trust" that our ideas correspond to objective Truth. Instead, we should recognize that the human mind is subjective, and doubt ourselves when our conclusions lie only on our personal selves. In order to be more accurate and objective, we need to use tools like the methods of science, and inter-subjective checking.
Otherwise, a personal intuition that one's in direct contact with a Higher Intelligence outside the self could be mistaken for direct knowledge that is 100% certain. Without our recognition that our brains evolved through a process which will not give us absolute reliability in all our interpretations, we might accidentally think we had a sense divinus that could not be wrong.
The Darwinian explanation of the mind doesn't cut its own throat, because we can already easily see that humans are fallible, and we need to check our quick and simple conclusions. It does, however, cut any claim that man can 'Know' God through an encounter with the Holy Spirit off at its knees, though.
Ah, yes. Sheena Easton attempting a dance that consists of only moving her facial muscles.
I'm just waiting for Janine to morph into Janine, Supercillious Asshole
I thought using a genitalia reference was verboten after the *unt brouhaha.
*sigh* Sorry for the double post. I opened another window, and saw that it hadn't gone through. Even the Previews were failing to go through.
Scienceblogs is tricksy.
Actually, I believe the correct term is a sphincter of supercilious assholes. Please make a note of this for future reference.
Pssst. Neil B cannot grasp what a "straw man argument" is, he thinks Russell's Teapot is an example of such. Why am I surprised?
False beliefs might threaten one's survival, but not always (heck, it's been argued that religious belief is adaptive, for example). The better response to sugartits is Glen's -- we don't need "The Truth", just predictable, intersubjective agreement.
Indeed, we can't even know "The Truth", and positing a god doesn't really help here, since such a god could be fooling us into believing things that aren't true. Heck, we could all be in a god's version of the Matrix.
Posted by: CJO | January 30, 2009
I'm just waiting for Janine to morph into Janine, Supercillious Asshole
Oh dear! I have to reread Shooting The Elephant by George Orwell.
What do you mean it's not real, of course it's real! It's just not in the correct orbit.
Well, not yet...................
http://sneerreview.blogspot.com/2008/05/wegwood-document.html
I'm sorry, but I think Michael Drake's reply is almost as far off the mark as Douthat's. The celestial teapot argument has little to do with the absurdity or the unpopularity of belief in the celestial teapot. It has to do with the fact that the celestial teapot is a claim specifically constructed to be very difficult to disprove. And yet, we can hardly be blamed for doubting it. The same applies to God.
Michael Drake seems to have reduced the celestial teapot argument to "Because God is absurd, God is like the celestial teapot, and therefore as absurd as the celestial teapot." This is begging the question. If we keep on misstating the argument, how can we expect people like Douthat to do any better?
Surely not when there's a Sheena Easton reference involved:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiJElPRnz54
(supercilious - one l)
In the future, I think I will retain the right to name myself.
I'm just waiting for one of the Space Shuttle crew to take a microminiature teapot up with them. Hey, what about that bag that contained a wrench that drifted off on the last space mission? Contraband teapot inside?
SC@#283:
But it was written by Prince.
If it hadn't been for the Washington Wives, I might never have heard the phrase...
But I posted that video first. E.V.
pout
OK. I've had my fun. My main purpose was to give the Pharyngula chorus an opportunity to demonstrate yet again that they are a pack of supercilious assholes.
Mission accomplished.
Ta, ta.
I'll take that as your concession statement.
Wow, how completely surprising!!! I didn't see that coming at all. I'll bet no one here did, since it is so uncharacteristic of you fucknut christians to come by this blog, poop out a few faithbombs, cry victory, and run before it becomes too obvious that you do not, in fact, have a leg to stand on. Never happens, nope.
Oh, and Jackie, snookums? I hope the doubt eats away at your soul.
you must be young. Here is Sugar Walls.
I'm 28; I suppose that's too young to have been a contemporaneous fan of 80s music. But thanks for that cheese-tastic link, it was hilarious!
I thought using a genitalia reference was verboten
Well, I have no problem saying C-U-Next-Tuesday out loud, when we're actually talking about sexual anatomy. Must that be verboten?
"I see no reason to believe in a god of thunder."
Yet many folks did...quite popular was Thor...in fact it has been suggested that the first alien religion to reach the American mainland included Thor in the pantheon of delights that was the religious predisposition of the finders.
" I see many reasons, on the other hand, to believe in the God of the Bible"
And yet some do not...illogical fallacy does not a persuasive argument make dearheart!
""...they will start distributing over 6.5 million copies in February of pamphlets stating that the Evolution theory is just another 'belief'."
Horrors. The Netherlands should act swiftly to halt this exercise of free speech.'
That is not free speech it is a campaign organised out of desperation!
"Science never proves its theories, dearheart."
Science does not have to the evidence does...as soon as the evidence indicates another possibility that is taken into consideration dearheart...unlike the dogmatic weed infested concrete of religion...Science can move and breath fresh ideas....
'The problem of induction never goes away'
Only if you want it to be a problem...which you seem to advocate.
"regardless of how persuasive the evidence might be to those who are eager to be persuaded"
So you get an answer that does not suit and therefore it is wrong...nice reasoning but par for dearheart ...I would wager!
"Brush up on what the scientific method can deliver and you'll understand that science, like religion, is steeped in faith."
After a bit of textual diarrhoea like that it would appear that it is you that needs a refresher course in scientific method dearheart!
"By the way, what vigorous testing has been done to confirm that men and apes share a common ancestor and that Darwinian mechanisms fully account for human existence?"
By the way, would you accept the research if it was given to you...must try harder dearheart! ...you are showing your ignorance and prejudice and moving goal posts is a symptom of a hopeless position...which when given such data you will inevitably instigate such a scraping sound as to deafen the departed!
"Also, in the Darwinian scheme of things, your thoughts - like my thoughts - can be nothing more than evolved survival strategies."
Nearly right dearheart...but you stopped when on a roll...Survival strategies also evolved further in to modern thought processes...not so much now 'fight or flight' but more 'believe or go to hell'
"On what grounds, then, do you trust that anyone's thoughts correspond to external truths?"
Hoisted by your own petard dearheart...on what grounds do you salivate after jeebus?
"If Darwinian evolutionary theory is true, how could it deliver minds capable of knowing that it's true?"
By the same process that convinces creotards that the Earth is only 6000 years old...
Abstract thought was an extension of the cognitive process...only these days the cognitive seemingly is bypassed for the barking amongst the mentally challenged and rather bizarre assumptions squeeze into the gaps left by reason...but you know that god exists apparently...how do you know that is true dearheart?
All of this talk of genitalia references, it reminds me of one of my favorite Chicago centric jokes.
Q) Name the three streets that rhymes with vagina.
A) Paulina, Regina and Lunt.
One thing I'll say for moronic godbots like Jackie; they are certainly worth their weight in entertainment. Reading one of their posts is like a day's recommended allowance of stupid!
Are you certain of this?
You know, Jackie understands the basics, but is too wrapped up in the certainty of her own faith and her misapplied logic to understand the implications of her own words. She skips right past the fact that Dawkins says there "ALMOST certainly," is no god, pretending that if Dawkins' name is mentioned, then its an argument from authority. And then she proudly crows that "Science never proves its theories, dearheart. The problem of induction never goes away.." (Well, yeah, that's the point). Then she comes up with the zinger: "If Darwinian evolutionary theory is true, how could it deliver minds capable of knowing that it's true?" It can't, and no modern biologist or neuroscientist would say that it can. It can only deliver minds capable of knowing that naturalism and evolution are highly probable, and that supernaturalism and creation stories are highly improbable.
But Jackie is so strongly committed to believing that she has a pipeline to absolute knowledge that she doesn't even understand when she is supporting her opponent's point. Her faith in the infallibility of her own god and her own point of view makes her ineducable, and like all true believers, ultimately dangerous.
Roger, the fact that Facilis commented after you is so damned funny.
Jackie, Facilis, Calm down! Get a hold of yourself!
Fixed that for you...
Oh, let me guess. You have been blessed with magical Direct Access to Absolute Truth and Certainty.
Am I right? Do I win anything?
Is this Facilis?
Words: "never, absolute, certain." Bad form, no points. However, the original poster used the words correctly, your use of 'certain' simply shows humor (I hope) or a lack of understanding (if this is the real 'Facilis').
*breaks out the popcorn* Fallacious is here! I'll be entertained all weekend!
Science teaches us we can't ever be perfectly, conclusively, inflexibly certain of anything--but after a certain amount of evidence, we can be fairly confident that we're looking in the right direction. Certainty as Facilis defines it is antithetical to knowledge, which makes it a very appropriate part of most organized religions, come to think of it.
Facilis absolutely mangles logic and knows nothing.
Jackie: By way of a magic 8-ball of course.
"MY SOURCES SAY NO"
How do you KNOW that we are NOT in the Matrix?
Aaaaaaaaand, having crapped all over the board, the chess-playing pigeon known as "Jackie" flies back to her flock to declare victory!
Facilis, #303: Could an omnipotent God reveal some things to Christians in a way they can be certain of it?
Suppose that an omnipotent God (we'll leave aside for a minute that problematic nature of "ominpotence") could do this. How could the rest of us tell the difference between the certainty and mental illness? I'm not sure that this is getting you where you want to be.
-
Does atheism allow for epistemic certainty?
Let us suppose that it doesn't. Why does this matter? Why does anyone, atheist or theist, need epistemic certainty?
Janine:
LOL! Lived in Chicago my whole life and never heard that one. Thanks!
And how would Facilis know anything? His god doesn't exist. Poor lost soul.
Nerd of Redheat, #308: And how would Facilis know anything?
And why does he keep phrasing everything as a question? Is he trying to learn something? Does he not have a real point to make? Is he a contestant on Jeopardy?
How do you know that I am not just dreaming that I don't know whether or not you are actually imagining that I might really be in the matrix?
A few weeks ago it was getting really tedious because bored regulars were posting poes. Thank Darwin that we've got some real fuckwits (and some...errr..ladies'...sugar walls) to argue with at last Hooray!
They must be spending time at home.
Could this be the Christian crunch?
And when oh when are some of those churches going to start going out of business?
Oy... All this shows is that theists are able to claim something. It doesn't imply that God actually explains anything.
Are ya really a complete idiot, or do you just play one on the Internets?
[Does he not have a real point to make? ]
My point is that atheism is a bankrupt philosophy that cannot allow for certain knowledge , logic , reason ,morality ,induction or science and to prove the Christian worldview by the impossibility of the contrary.
Sorry, Janine! Please don't pout! I should've known. That's what I get for jumping onto a thread as I'm on my way out the door. ...Well, I was on my way out the door, but when I thought about the cold, snow, slush, ice, and dark,I changed my mind, even though I was looking forward to going where I was going.
I HATE winter. :( :( :( :( :( :( :(
***
Intelligent Person: I don't believe leprechauns exist.
Facilis: Did a leprechaun tell you that? That's what you're saying, isn't it?
*Stares, not for the first time, agape and slack-jawed at the silliness of this person*
Chiroptera, Facilis keeps asking questions because he thinks he has proven his argument, and wants us to try to disprove it. We conclusively disproved it weeks ago. He really doesn't have a clue. Personally, I intend to keep mocking him until he either provides physical evidence for his imaginary deity, acknowledges his argument failed, or goes away.
Yeah don't forget Norse gods, Islam, Judaism, Hindu, and every other religion.
What a fucking idiotic statement that was.
Every time I meet someone who is a member of one of those religions I ask him how he accounts for logic and reason according to his worldview.
God reveals certain things to me in such a way that I can be epistemically certain of them.
That's your argument?
Logic and reason; therefore, the Christian God?
"But God talks to me."
"Yeah, God talks to you. Hey Charlie, here's a candidate for an 'I love me jacket'."
Unless, of course, you're a fundamentalist, in which case the proper response is apparently "Yeah, Jebus is really down on them liburls. He told told me the same thing."
shorter facilis
I am insane therefore god.
such as
Whether something is a straw man argument can depends on which group is referenced, since someone somewhere may believe in whatever representation is put out. But if this characterization is true,
The point of "the teapot" is to illustrate that it is ridiculous to use absence of evidence as evidence of existence. That is, you can't prove the teapot doesn't exist so therefore you are going to assume it does? It is an answer to the charge, "you can't prove god doesn't exist".
then it's a straw man because few people use absence of evidence as evidence of existence. Some religious believer do just assume God, but the teapot is still a straw man relative to arguments like those from Paul Davies pertaining to why the laws of the universe are the way they are, etc. The point made by Facilis,
It's a category error. The teapot is an entity contingent on the universe while a theist makes the claim the universe is contingent on God.
was a very cogent rebuttal to the whole teapot fluff. The RT being a fallacious comparison is true whether or not the universe is contingent or not, as a mistake of form.
Facilis, #313: My point is that atheism is a bankrupt philosophy that cannot allow for certain knowledge , logic , reason ,morality ,induction or science...
I've seen many people try to make this point. All have failed so far. You are welcome to try to make this point, but experience leads me to believe that you won't succeed.
-
...and to prove the Christian worldview by the impossibility of the contrary.
Unfortunately, even if you succeed in "proving" the impossibility of the contrary, that doesn't mean that Christianity is accurate -- it just means that you conclusion follows necessarily from your premises. It remains possible that one or more of your premises are wrong.
That is the problem with trying to gain "certainty" by rigorous proof. You can never be certain that your premises are correct.
That's nice, sweetie, but the grownups are trying to talk. Why don't you go into the living room and watch the TV. I think your favorite cartoons are on!
PEOPLE! Don't feed the willfully stupid troll. Starve it of attention and it will go away
Here's another one for the rubber room, Charlie. This wacko actually thinks that 'god' tells him stuff.
And yet, the One True God Sideshow Bob has done exactly the same, and declared your silly Christian God to be false.
It's a pity you're actually epistemically corrupt. Oh, well.
That is true.
If any religion could produce half the volume of evidence that supports any of the Theory of Gravity, the Theory of Evolution, or the Germ Theory of Disease, I'd probably join up right quick.
I'd say the fossil record combined with gene sequencing pretty much nails that one.
Untrue. You have revealed your complete lack of understanding of how evolution works. However, if we must look at it that way, one could argue adaptive intelligence - let's call it thoughts - has an obvious evolutionary advantage, as evidenced by the fact that the top level predator on the planet is certainly in the top 5 most intelligent, thinking creatures on the planet. Since our intelligence has allowed us to have time that isn't permanently devoted to solving the problem of how to not be on the business-end of the food chain, it stands to reason that the thinking can be spent in other, potentially less-productive ways.
Why not? What reasons does the Christian god have that the pantheon of Norse gods does not? Personally, the idea of hot, blonde, blue-eyed valkyrie taking me to Asgard at my death is much more appealing than standing trial in front of a hairy desert carpenter. I see a multitude* of reasons not to believe in the Christian god even before you get to "but there's no evidence that god even exists".
In Thor's (Odin's really) pantheon, people who are good to their fellow man are taken to paradise. People who are shits are punished. There's no cosmic whitewash of deathbead repentence, and Odin doesn't care if you believe in him or not because he knows he's the boss. He doesn't have a bizarre inferiority complex that compels worship on pain of eternal celestial punishment. It's been a while, but I don't think the Norse had a concept of eternal punishment at all - do the crime, do the time, but eventually everyone gets to some level of paradise.
I can only speak for myself, but I am confident that as a former Christian and having studied a certain amount of philosophy, I have put more consideration into my atheism than nearly every religious person has put into their fairy worship.
* The men who wrote the Bible would be proud I squeezed that word in.
Logic and reason,some morals, the fact that he exists and Jesus is his son, the fact that the bible is his word, the assurance of salvation for his elect. Stuff like that.
Facilis #294 wrote:
Given that evolution is an undirected process which retains what works, it's the most reasonable conclusion, with no convincing evidence otherwise. Jackie asked the question on the assumption that this view of evolution was correct. We agreed on the frame.
Facilis #303 wrote:
They're reasonable inferences, and likely to be accurate. Lack of absolute certainty =/= cluelessness. There are degrees, as you surely recognize. The more intersubjective agreement, the less likely are errors of subjective bias.
Absolutely certain? No. The problem isn't with God not having enough 'power.' It's with human beings being admittedly error-prone in so many ways -- particularly when there are no checks in reality on what it is they think they know. Even if God could grant them "certain knowledge," they could not be sure that was what they had.
Only with math, logic, stipulated definitions, and direct, uninterpreted, unmitigated experience.
I think we could be mistaken in thinking that we don't have a sensus divinus -- but I don't think we could be mistaken in doubting it.
Yes, I think we've all rather thoroughly checked and cross-checked the theory that "humans are fallible." In which case, as counter-evidence, you're going to have to produce a human who is not capable of error. A human being, in other words, who claims to be God.
No hearsay evidence.
(by the way, it would be a lot easier if you focused on maybe one or two questions.)
Facilis,
Sye TenB or whatever your name or the person you're getting your presuppositionalism from is this week: we know the routine.
To save everybody's time, people please look up 'presuppositional apologetics' respectively the dialogue philosopher Stephen Law had with a presupp on his blog page.
Facilis, if God accounts for logic or morality, they are not absolute. If they account for God, he isn't necessary to account for them. You're constructing God as a specially pleaded exempt concept to avoid things like the Euthyphro dilemma.
Of course now you're going to ask 'in your worldview, how do you account for the logic that special pleading is a fallacy' or something similar. I think that's playground level arguing, and no I don't account for that with any logic. If you think God is pleased with that silly sort of word game, be our guest.
Meanwhile, you could tell us what predictions presuppositional apologetics makes that can be verified with evidence from observational reality.
This has probably been pointed out before, but it's fitting that Facilis has chosen a name (from the Latin for easy) closely related to the English facile, one meaning of which is "readily manifested and often lacking sincerity or depth (facile tears)."
Here's another one for the rubber room, Charlie. This wacko actually thinks that 'god' tells him stuff.
I can see from the comments that facilis (I have him killfiled) is back to his old, failed non-argument.
I've got two words for you, facilis: Sideshow Bobhad a bat or a ball - or we actually wanted him around in the first place...
Logic and reason,some morals,that he gave me reliable senses, the fact that he exists and Jesus is his son, the fact that the bible is his word, the assurance of salvation for his elect. Stuff like that.
ok
and this
So god exists because he exists and I know this because the bible is his word.
That's awesome. That logic you think you get from god, well you just failed it miserably.
Which version of the bible and at which point in history?
Facilis, #319: God reveals certain things to me in such a way that I can be epistemically certain of them.
Yeah, me too. He revealed to me that he doesn't really exist, and he revealed it in such a way that I am epistemically certain of it.
Facilis,
Sye TenB or whatever your name or the person you're getting your presuppositionalism from is this week: we know the routine.
To save everybody's time, people please look up 'presuppositional apologetics' respectively the dialogue philosopher Stephen Law had with a presupp on his blog page.
Facilis, if God accounts for logic or morality, they are not absolute. If they account for God, he isn't necessary to account for them. You're constructing God as a specially pleaded exempt concept to avoid things like the Euthyphro dilemma.
Of course now you're going to ask 'in your worldview, how do you account for the logic that special pleading is a fallacy' or something similar. I think that's playground level arguing, and no I don't account for that with any logic. If you think God is pleased with that silly sort of word game, be our guest.
Meanwhile, you could tell us what predictions presuppositional apologetics makes that can be verified with evidence from observational reality.
Facilis, more lies that you can't prove. When will you learn your argument is a failure, and we know that?
In other words you believe in fairy tales. Sorry, but I grew out of that stage before I reached puberty.
... And Neil B swings and misses.
"And why does he keep phrasing everything as a question?"
It's the infinite regress of insipidity. No one can really know anything except facilis, because he's got a book of ancient fairy tales that tell him.
Facilis,
Sye TenB or whatever your name or the person you're getting your presuppositionalism from is this week: we know the routine. It's old and a dime a dozen. Nice trick, but that's all it is.
To save everybody's time, people please look up 'presuppositional apologetics' respectively the dialogue philosopher Stephen Law had with a presupp on his blog page.
Facilis, if God accounts for logic or morality, they are not absolute. If they account for God, he isn't necessary to account for them. You're constructing God as a specially pleaded exempt concept to avoid things like the Euthyphro dilemma. And claiming special certainty of revelation only counts in the real world after you've substantiated your premise. Otherwise you're talking about a revelation within your construct, which is no more than a model or concept unless you prove the premise to be valid in observational reality.
Of course now you're going to ask 'in your worldview, how do you account for the logic that special pleading is a fallacy' or something similar. I think that's playground level arguing, and no I don't account for that with any logic. If you think God is pleased with that silly sort of word game, be our guest.
Meanwhile, you could tell us what predictions presuppositional apologetics makes that can be verified with evidence from observational reality.
With apologies to everyone else, I gotta ask: What do Jewish people answer about their like, totally different god?
sorry for the mostly double post. had that error thing, hit back and refreshed, didn't show my post, so I resubmitted with a slight addition. some code doesn't work right here.
"And why does he keep phrasing everything as a question?"
You know that game little kids play? I call it the "Why game".
It's the same thing.
No I believe in logic ,reason, science , morals, knowledge and the necessary precondition for those things.
Ok, I’ll bite.
How does god reveal?
How does god reveal certain things?
How does god reveal certain things to you?
How does god reveal certain things to you in such a way?
How does god reveal certain things to you in such a way that you can be epistemically (using knowledge – isn’t that redundant, if not oxymoronic?) certain?
But first, using your all-powerful fallacious skills: How god?
How many here suspect Facilis is some sort of AI class project bot trying out their newest iteration of the Turing Test?
How do you KNOW that we are NOT in the Matrix?
Same as the Deist God of the philosophers.
Unlike the Christian God, the Deist God has never sent bears to murder 42 children for yelling "Baldy!" (He's not the Die-est God, after all)
Oh? You mean you have absolute epistemic certainty that God exists and can have a child? Just like that?
And I note that the Greek philosophers had absolute reasoned epistemic certainty that the Deist God exists.
Just like Deists have absolute epistemic certainty that nature is the work of the Deist God.
So... you have absolute epistemic certainty that even if you had never read the bible or heard of Christianity, you would still have absolute epistemic certainty that it was all true?
Facilis, logic and morals are defined by men. Anything else, is a lie, like your god. Failure after failure. Your have no integrity so everything you say is a lie. Why stay?
Facilis, do you know your god doesn't exist? You need to go look for him. Take a few years to find him.
F:
I don't. In what sense does it matter?
Facilis, I think you should go and engage in mutual masturbation with Rhology (search for his blog, Rhoblogy). He's been doing the presupp schtick for years, about a hundred times better than you (so he's only pathetic).
Tell him I sent you ;)
Has that ever worked before?
I will feed the troll. I intend to feed it till it blows apart.
Here goes:
We don't know that we're not in the Matrix. And neither do you.
Even solipsism is unfalsifiable; I have no way to be absolutely certain that I am not the solipsist.
However, unfalsifiable hypotheses are worthless. It's impossible to do anything with them. They can't explain anything (because they're compatible with everything and its opposite). We are forced to ignore them.
You said you believe in science. Very revealing choice of words: you believe that science exists, but you have not the slightest inkling of what it is.
We don't KNOW.
How do you know you aren't a figment of my imagination?
We can go one with questions like this eternally. That's a ridiculous exercise in mental masturbation.
What we can do is look at the evidence before us.
Does your version of God interact with the Physical world?
John Morales,
Are Sye TenB and scmike over there too? Sometimes I wonder if they're just one person or two, because I almost cannot believe that more than two people would be dumb and silly enought to think presuppositionalism has any value.
Hmm, my post #336 seems to lost a paragraph.
What I meant to say what, once we start asking facilis to justify why Sideshow Bob can't be responsible for the thing he claims his god is responsible for he gets upset because he doesn't have any answers. The beauty of his so-called 'impossibility of the contrary' argument means that anything he can claim for his god I can claim for my Bob - and there ain't a Bob-damned thing you can do about it, is there facilis?
So he takes his bat and his ball and goes home. Which might be an issue if he had a bat or a ball - or if anyone wanted to play with him in the first place.
@Facilis
Hey, could you ask them if they have the full formal explication of the Universal, Unchanging Laws of Logic? And maybe the formal modal proof that the existence of God is a necessary presupposition? I've asked Sye for them. I've repeatedly asked you for them and so far I got bupkis.
Oh, and while we're at it, could you explain how the UULL encompass or somehow include the two other logics (modal and paraconsistent). I'd of course need to their formal treatments as well, because I, and every other non-presuppositionalist, including the vast majority of the academic philosophical profession, truly cannot follow your reasoning without them.
Perhaps the reason that no presuppositionalist has them (despite making constant reference to them) is that all the believers in other gods stole the products of God's common grace from y'all. Yeah, that must be it.
Or might Facilis be one of those poor chaps on the playground who fell for every ruse already known to everyone else?
Hey Facilis,
Did you know that gunpowder tastes like cherries?
We’re going on a snipe hunt tonight – do you want to hold the bag?
Did you know that if you rub a nickel on your belly for an hour every day you will be given a larger dinner roll at the cafeteria?
Did you know that if every night before you go to bed you eat a raw turnip from the stem end first the monsters under your bed won’t eat your feet?
Did you know there’s a magic man in the sky who loves you, likes to watch you masturbate, and he is very lonely and wants to talk to you?
Did you know there is a funny-looking old man at that fancy building down the street that also speaks to the magic man in the sky and he says the magic sky man wanted you to give him 10% of what you earn?
Etc.
Gullible may not be in the dictionary but it sure applies to Facilis.
Well, there's a case to be made that the universe is computationally intractable, so there's some reason not to consider the craziest brain in a vat/evil demon/matrix possibilities. But against self-delusion we must be ever vigilant. Fatuous helpfully provides us with an object lesson on that score.
"My point is that atheism is a bankrupt philosophy"
Only it is not a philosophy just the absence of hysterical reaction to fear of the unknown.
"that cannot allow for certain knowledge"
Knowledge is only provisional on evidence...it is subject to change..there is no such critter as 'Certain knowledge'
"logic"
Atheism is broadly based on logic...that is why there are atheists!
"reason"
Atheism is broadly based on reason...that is why there are atheists!
"morality"
And what does a godbot know of morals?
Atheism is more moral in a figurative sense anyway...Atheists have no bigotry or hatred to disguise as morality.
"induction"
Induction into what?
"science"
Grabbing at red herrings makes your post no sweeter!
"and to prove the Christian worldview by the impossibility of the contrary."
Nope that is a disparate attempt at ignoring the evidence...
The Christian world view can never be 'proved'...even by Christians...and because of their asinine attempts at just rubbishing the competition their world view looks much more like wishful thinking then a valid religion...in fact the incompetence of Christians to forget they are supposed to be Christian is legendary...you do not need atheism to 'prove' anything either way...because Christians are doing a damned fine job of obliterating their own cult all on their lonesome!
Carry on... atheists do not mind!
So you believe in reason. So why do you cling to the fairy tales about The Big Guy In The Sky and his son Jebus?
Look! Facilis has a fan club!
Sometimes I think that if somebody on Pharyngula told Neil B that the gun was loaded, he'd point it at his head and shoot just for the contrarian cussedness of it.
Actually, I stole epistemic certainty, and gave it to the epistemically impoverished.
You probably know how that turned ow-ow-ow-ow-ow!-out.
Curse all heparotrophic eagles, anyway.
Well, that was fun. I was almost convinced for a moment that Jacke was a Poe. I mean "Mission Accomplished"!??! Srsly?! I mean, is that a nod and a winking giveaway or what?
But then again, no, she's probably just a sweet sugar-coated cream-filled republican moron.
Did I read this here recently?
If there is a god,why did he make me an atheist?
Sums it up neatly,really.
Agree that many religionists dont get the teapot analogy at all.
"I see no reason to believe in a god of thunder. I see many reasons, on the other hand, to believe in the God of the Bible."
"By the way, what vigorous testing has been done to confirm that men and apes share a common ancestor and that Darwinian mechanisms fully account for human existence?"
Seeing those two sentences as part of the same argument almost made my head explode, trying to fathom what standards of "evidence" this person could possibly be using. I was reminded of a great line from my mother, an ex-fundie herself:
"Jesus walking on water? That's a historical fact.
Oh, but evolution? THAT's just a THEORY."
It's funnier to hear her say it, but you get the idea.
My point is that atheism is a bankrupt philosophy that cannot allow for certain knowledge , logic , reason ,morality ,induction or science and to prove the Christian worldview by the impossibility of the contrary.
Sounds like an ambitious project. You'll be sure and let us know once you've gotten started researching it, won't you?
Oh my lack of absolute certainty, Prometheus killed Kenny!
You bastard.
Facilis, put away the apologetics and read some Quine, or Wittgenstein for that matter (a Christian no less). Formal logical systems are (valuable) human abstractions, not essential parts of the universe. Your failure to even conceive of the possibility of this (while I believe everyone here can conceive of you "god" scenario- at least a spirit of fantasy fiction) makes you seem unimaginative and unintelligent. You may well actually be unimaginative and unintelligent, but you would be taken more seriously if you were able to hide the fact behind some thin veneer of learning.
Facilis,
We wait with baited breath for your enlightenment. You claim that:
"I believe in logic ,reason, science , morals, knowledge and the necessary precondition for those things."
What are these preconditions? An omnipotent god? Where did it's reason, morals, knowledge, etc. come from? Did they evolve or did some other being give your god these? Or did this vast amazing entity just happen to always be, with no beginning?
We have an answer as to how intelligent life could exist, you don't.
BTW, Neil? You may not be aware of this, but accusing facilis of making an argument that is very cogent is not going to convince facilis that he should let you into his fan club, since cogency is a measure of the success of an inductive argument, and facilis rejects induction (science, he claims, depends on it, so it's icky).
How can you be certain ?
How can you be certain of your certainity?
How can you be certain of your certinaity of your certainity?
How can you be certain of your certinaity of your certainity of your certainity?
.....
.....
See, anyone can play this pseudo-Socratic, recurssive word game.
black wolf, I'm not familiar with those handles, sorry.
I think Facilis is one of those people so are so upset by uncertainty that they latch on to wishful thinking and doublethink and suspension of disbelief to avoid existential angst*.
For them, it's easier to believe it all makes sense and has purpose (even if such is ineffable or vacuous and can only be validated after death) than to accept that, so far as we know, the uncertainty and indifference of reality. Apologetics fail because they're trying to justify something by other than its true rationale and only utility. It's a comfortable but unsupportable assumption, and I respect the religious only inasfar as they admit their rationale is only an act of faith rather than make spurious claims.
* I seem to be one of those who never felt such angst. I'm comfortable with being yet not knowing.
Big deal, even my dog can do that. :)
Mr Facilis,
Not to do with religion, but when you post here, do you wear any umm...unusual underwear of any sort...restictive, kind of? And are you often a naughty boy? Is punichment, for you, the answer?
Just wonderin'
Mr Facilis,
Not to do with religion, but when you post here, do you wear any umm...unusual underwear of any sort...restictive, kind of? And are you often a naughty boy? Is punishment, for you, the only answer?
Just wonderin'
Neil B,
Oh, fuck. We're in for a night* of fallacious, philosophical arguments. Get ready for word games, word salads and four letter words.
* It's night because North America is the world.
If Facilis got his logic from God, then holy crap, that God is seriously dropping the ball.
This one has me giggling like a Tickle Me Elmo doll:
My point is that atheism is a bankrupt philosophy that cannot allow for certain knowledge , logic , reason ,morality ,induction or science and to prove the Christian worldview by the impossibility of the contrary.
Okay, first off? Atheism is not a philosophy. Atheism is a negative definition. The word "atheism" defines only what one does NOT believe. All atheists are not the same. There are atheists who worship at the altar of science, and there are atheists who wallow in shameless New Age woo. All our philosophies are not the same, so your "atheism has no morality" drivel is utterly meaningless. The rest of your litany is simply hilarious. Also? You've been trying for weeks to show us "the impossibility of the contrary" of the Christian belief system, and so far all you've accomplished is to show us how energetically you can chase your own tail.
But nothing tops this:
Rev. BDC says:
Yeah don't forget Norse gods, Islam, Judaism, Hindu, and every other religion.
To which Fallacious replies:
Every time I meet someone who is a member of one of those religions I ask him how he accounts for logic and reason according to his worldview.
EVERY TIME?! Damn, you must be reeeeeeally popular among all non-Christian groups, huh?
Now, you do realize, don't you, that Jews and Muslims worship the same god as Christians, right? Right? They may call Him by different names, and they have different ideas about who's represented Him, and how He should be worshipped, but it's all the same Abrahamic deity. How is the father of Jesus any more self-evident, based on what you call "logic and reason" than the god of Moses or Muhammad? And while we're at it, how is your God any more valid than the Hindu or Norse gods? Why couldn't they have written the laws of logic?
Oh, and certainty is to knowledge what alcohol is to proper hydration. Briefly empowering, but rapidly counterproductive.
Alyson Miers, #380: Now, you do realize, don't you, that Jews and Muslims worship the same god as Christians, right? Right?
Don't you realize that logic doesn't work unless Jesus rose from the dead? Self-evident, really.
I like certanaity; it's just the thing for the laity. I'll bet it's made of explainatons, which must be what the god-of-the-gaps is composed of. Certanaity does not help us with any understanding of the nature of consciousness, since consciousness is made of unexplainium and Our Structureless, Irreducible, Precious Essence.
"No-one knows the reason for this, but it's probably quantum." --Gaspode the Wonder Dog
Facilis Fallacious,
Please see here.
To everybody else: his proof is not "impossibility of the contrary" but an argument from ignorance . I have told him that dozens of times but he has yet to even respond. I think he honestly believes if he keeps repeating it it will come true.
This is my first time actually reading anything this "Facilis" godtard has written. I declare his writings to be the written equivalent of an episode of "American Idol": a lot of flash and bang, but no substance. He's (I'm assuming it's a male) hardly worth the task of deconstruction and is seemingly impervious to logic, reason, and non-godbottery.
Alyson got it right. Clap, Clap, Clap, brava.
Not that Facilis the Fallacious Fool can figure it out.
@ Jay
Now, now... Philosophy is fun, naturual behavior and is nothing people should be ashamed of.
50/50 my HTML will be full of fail
Ah, but see, he gets to stop because God lets him stop.
Of course, that implies that he's claiming to be God, but that doesn't stop him. Because God lets him get away with it.
As have I, and others. He's too ignorant to realize that he's ignorant, thought.
God lets him get away with not knowing what he's talking about.
Really? Is he that silly? Induction is thoroughly unscientific. It doesn't work.
"Shorter Ross Douthat: If enough of us imagine it, it must be real."
Where does Douthat say anything whatsoever about god's reality?
You have to keep your eye on the ball.
Ross acknowledges in the very first sentence that RT is about whether the *possibility* of god's existence is to be given "*any credence*." He also says clearly that arguments from the *number* of people who have religious experiences isn't dispositive (actually, he says it more robustly -- it isn't "anything like" dispositive) when it comes to the issue of god's existence. That's a far cry from "it must be real."
He simply claims -- quite legitimately -- that it's silly to compare a belief that's obviously absurd to everyone with a belief that's not at all obviously absurd to nearly everyone and think the issue is settled. Now, you can make the comparison and follow it up with an argument for the absurdity of belief in god -- that's fine; however, when you simply throw out a comparison like this one and consider the issue settled (again, read the first sentence: "...Bertrand Russell's famous teapot analogy, which supposedly *settles once and for all* the question of whether nonbelievers should give any credence to the possibility that God exists"), you should expect reasonable people to think it's a bit ridiculous.
I haven't read through all 380+ comments, so I apologize if I'm addressing issues that have already been settled.
Presuppositionalism doesn't work, either. (At least, not if you want to make sense to someone who doesn't already march in lock-step with you.) It makes about as much sense as claiming you know God is out there because you hear Him talking to you.
Immaterial, disembodied voices reveal themselves to me, too, and tell me stuff. I think of them as characters and insert them into these things called novels and call it fiction. But I don't give them credit for writing the laws of logic.
"Shorter Ross Douthat: If enough of us imagine it, it must be real."
Where does Douthat say anything whatsoever about god's reality?
You have to keep your eye on the ball.
Ross acknowledges in the very first sentence that RT is about whether the *possibility* of god's existence is to be given "*any credence*." He also says clearly that arguments from the *number* of people who have religious experiences isn't dispositive (actually, he says it more robustly -- it isn't "anything like" dispositive) when it comes to the issue of god's existence. That's a far cry from "it must be real."
He simply claims -- quite legitimately -- that it's silly to compare a belief that's obviously absurd to everyone with a belief that's not at all obviously absurd to nearly everyone and think the issue is settled. Now, you can make the comparison and follow it up with an argument for the absurdity of belief in god -- that's fine; however, when you simply throw out a comparison like this one and consider the issue settled (again, read the first sentence: "...Bertrand Russell's famous teapot analogy, which supposedly *settles once and for all* the question of whether nonbelievers should give any credence to the possibility that God exists"), you should expect reasonable people to think it's a bit ridiculous.
I haven't read through all 380+ comments, so I apologize if I'm addressing issues that have already been settled.
Certainly, a lot of philosophers do wear glasses!
Sorry for the double post.
Eric you've missed the point of the teapot... at least in my estimation.
It's not about whether god exists or not its about who's burden of proof it is.
Rev BDC,
I prefer Sagan's The Dragon In My Garage.
I like it too
For Facilis, god rest his non extant soul.
"I don't wonder why I don't wonder why.
I don't wonder why I don't wonder.
I don't wonder, why I don't wonder why.
I don't wonder why, I don't wonder."
Thanks Feynmaniac for the inspiration.
The Rev. BigDumbChimp, heddle, and Sastra agree. Not only is the burden of proof not on atheists, the Celestial Teapot twits agnostic mugwumps. While there is no valid deductive argument refuting the non-zero probability of the existence of Russell's Teapot, neither is there anything stronger than an utterly feeble argument to be made for the equivalent likelihood of its existence.
slight revision (posted too soon) :}
"I don't wonder why I don't wonder why.
I don't wonder why I don't wonder.
I don't wonder, why don't I wonder why.
I don't wonder, why don't I wonder."
For Facilis with its' dead problematical soul- Nothing kills the soul of wonder like certainty of a god.
Thanks Feynmaniac for the inspiration.
I think Jackie raised an excellent question with regard to the trustworthiness of our thoughts if we are simply the products of the blind evolution of matter, although none of those who responded seemed to get her point. Perhaps the following quotes will shed some light on her question:
"The horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust the conviction of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?" (Charles Darwin, Letter to W. Graham, July 3rd, 1881, in Darwin, F., ed., "The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin," 1898, Basic Books: New York NY, Vol. I., 1959, reprint, p.285)
"If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true.and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms." (J.B.S.
Haldane, "Possible Worlds," Chatto & Windus: London, 1927, p.209)
"The idea that one species of organism is, unlike all the others, oriented not just toward its own increased prosperity but toward Truth, is as un-Darwinian as the idea that every human being has a built-in moral compass - a conscience that swings free of both social history and
individual luck." (Richard Rorty, "Untruth and Consequences," The New Republic, July 31, 1995, pp. 32-36)
"The Astonishing Hypothesis is that 'You,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." (Francis Crick, "The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul," Scribner's, 1994, p. 3)
"I am astonished that otherwise intelligent and informed people, including physicians, are reluctant to believe that mind, as part of life, is matter and only matter." (Arthur Kornberg, "The Two Cultures: Chemistry and Biology," Biochemistry 26, 1987, pp. 6888-91)
"On Kornberg's own premises.his astonishment was unjustified. Presumably, one kind of chemical reaction in the brain causes Kornberg to accept materialist reductionism, while another kind of reaction causes those
physicians to doubt it." (Phillip Johnson, "Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law & Education," Intervarsity Press, 1995, p. 65)
"(If the) mind is a product of the irrational (which
materialistic-naturalistic evolution claims it is) then how shall I trust my mind when it tells me about Evolution? What makes it impossible that it should be true is not so much the lack of evidence for this or that scene in the drama as the fatal self-contradiction which runs right through it. The Myth (of Evolution) cannot even get going without accepting a good deal from the real sciences. And the real sciences cannot be accepted for a moment unless rational inferences are valid: for every science claims to be a series of inferences from observed facts. It is only by such inferences that you can reach your nebulae and protoplasm and dinosaurs and sub-men and cave-men at all. Unless you start by believing that reality in the remotest space and the remotest time rigidly obeys the laws of logic, you can have no ground for believing in any astronomy, any biology, any palaeontology, any archaeology. To reach the positions held by the real scientists - which are then taken over by the Myth - you must, in fact, treat reason as an absolute. But at the same time the Myth asks me to believe that reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of a mindless process at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. The content of the Myth thus knocks from under me the only ground on which I could possibly believe the Myth to be true. If my own mind is a product of the irrational - if what seem my clearest reasonings are only the way in which a creature conditioned as I am is bound to feel - how shall I trust my mind when it tells me about Evolution? They say in effect: 'I will prove that what you call a proof is only the result of mental habits which result from heredity which results from bio-chemistry which results from physics.' But this is the same as saying: 'I will prove that proofs are irrational':
more succinctly, 'I will prove that there are no proofs': The fact that some people of scientific education cannot by any effort be taught to see the difficulty, confirms one's suspicion that we here touch a radical disease in their whole style of thought. But the man who does see it, is
compelled to reject as mythical the cosmology in which most of us were brought up. That it has embedded in it many true particulars I do not doubt: but in its entirety, it simply will not do. Whatever the real universe may turn out to be like, it can't be like that." (C.S. Lewis,"The Funeral of a Great Myth," in "Christian Reflections," 1967, Hooper, W.,
ed., Fount: Glasgow UK, Fourth Impression, 1988, pp.117-118)
"Here is a curious case: If Darwin's naturalism is true, there is no way of even establishing its credibility let alone proving it. Confidence in logic is ruled out. Darwin's own theory of human origins must therefore be
accepted by an act of faith. One must hold that a brain, a device that came to be through natural selection and chance-sponsored mutations, can actually know a proposition or set of propositions to be true. C.S. Lewis puts the case this way: 'If all that exists is Nature, the great mindless
interlocking event, if our own deepest convictions are merely the by-products of an irrational process, then clearly there is not the slightest ground for supposing that our sense of fitness and our consequent faith in uniformity tell us anything about a reality external to ourselves. Our convictions are simply a fact about us - like the colour of our hair. If Naturalism is true we have no reason to trust our conviction that Nature is uniform.' (C.S. Lewis, 'Miracles: A Preliminary Study,' 1947, Fontana:
London, 1960, Revised Edition, 1963, reprint, p.109] What we need for such certainty is the existence of some 'Rational Spirit' outside both ourselves and nature from which our own rationality could derive. Theism assumes such a ground; naturalism does not." (J.W. Sire, "The Universe Next Door: A Basic World View Catalog," 1976, InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove IL, Second Edition, 1988, pp.94-95)
"The validity of rational thought, accepted in an utterly non-naturalistic, transcendental (if you will), supernatural sense is the necessary presupposition of all other theorizing. There is simply no sense in beginning with a view of the universe and trying to fit in the claims of thought at a later stage. By thinking at all we have claimed that our thoughts are more than mere natural events. All other propositions must be fitted in as best they can around that primary claim." (C.S. Lewis, "A
Christian Reply to Professor Price," Phoenix Quarterly, vol. 1, No. 1, Autumn 1946)
Oh great, Phillip Johnson AND CS Lewis?
Our brains evolved to deal with the various challenges we come across day to day. Those who could not trust most of their thoughts were more likely to not make it to fecundity over the given long time frame in given populations.
Why is this so hard to understand?
Why did you bother? You could have just typed, 'I, the person posting here as JohnDoe, am a complete tool.' This would have saved you the effort of posting that block of irrelevant nonsense and us the effort of ignoring it.
Come back with evidence* to suggest that a soul or a spirit can exist independent of a human body and maybe we will listen.
*By evidence I mean evidence, not quotes from more people who didn't have the answers but didn't let that stop them from prattling on as if they did.
Oh, look. More presuppositionalism.
I'm not going to address everything raised in that Huge Wall o' Text™ (which I am certain contain plenty of quote-mines), but I will point out that C.S. Lewis, at least, is simply wrong:
"Materialistic-naturalistic evolution" most certainly does not claim that the that the way that nature works is "irrational".
And all of the other arguments by theologians make the same mistaken assumption that Lewis did; that nature in and of itself would somehow work against itself to prevent "mind" from arising.
Bah.
"Our brains evolved to deal with the various challenges we come across day to day. Those who could not trust most of their thoughts were more likely to not make it to fecundity over the given long time frame in given populations."
You've missed the point: Minds that evolve to deal with challenges are not necessarily minds that can know truth. Indeed, as Darwin himself worried, there's really no reason to trust the validity (in an epistemic sense) of the ideas arising in minds that evolved simply to enhance the survivabiity of the organisms possessing those minds.
Try again.
What is this "truth" of which you speak? Empirical, real-world truth? In can be deduced from our interactions with the real world. Mathematical and logical truth? It can be inferred from empirical correlation, and from basic, basic axioms, such as noncontradiction.
Anything more abstract than that... well, you have no basis on which to infer that there is any truth that abstract.
Got anything else in mind?
Why?
Minds that come from a "gift of God" are not either. How do you know that God isn't tricking you?
"Eric you've missed the point of the teapot... at least in my estimation.
It's not about whether god exists or not its about who's burden of proof it is."
RevBigDumbChimp, I was responding to PZ, who mistakenly thought that Douthat took it to be about the reality of god's existence ("Shorter Ross Douthat: If enough of us imagine it, it must be real." Nowhere in the article does Douthat come anywhere near saying this). Douthat clearly says that it's about how credible it is to consider whether god's existence is possible.
Note that Russell is making not one but at least three points with his celestial teapot (as philosopher William Vallicella points out here: http://maverickphilosopher.powerblogs.com/posts/1169851433.shtml). Vallicella's formulation of Russell's third point is identical with Douthat's: "But the real appeal to atheists and agnostics of the Teapot passage rests on a third move Russell makes. He is clearly suggesting that belief in God (i.e., belief that God exists) is epistemically on a par with believing in a celestial teapot. Just as we have no reason to believe in celestial teapots, irate lunar unicorns (lunicorns?), flying spaghetti monsters, and the like, we have no reason to believe in God."
Well, no, Mr. Teal Deer Herder, we can't very well trust our own minds to know the truth when left to their own devices. The prevalence of religion, alone, is plentiful evidence of the human mind's natural gifts of self-delusion. That is why we developed the scientific method and laws of formal logic. These are not ways of giving ourselves what we want; these are battles we wage with our own consciousness. These are ways of keeping our powers of self-deception in check. Without these checks and balances, we end up being left with...faith in imaginary beings that will punish us for not believing in them. What is the beginning of your argument, anyway? Is it that we can't really know the truth of our world because our minds evolved naturally, or that we can't have evolved naturally because we know the truth? Pick one and stick with it.
John Doe wrote:
You've missed the point: Minds that evolve to deal with challenges are not necessarily minds that can know truth. Indeed, as Darwin himself worried, there's really no reason to trust the validity (in an epistemic sense) of the ideas arising in minds that evolved simply to enhance the survivabiity of the organisms possessing those minds.
There is a technical term for this kind of writing — bullshit, defined by Harry Frankfurt as the words of someone who "is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are".
"Materialistic-naturalistic evolution" most certainly does not claim that the that the way that nature works is "irrational"."
Owlmirror, Lewis corrected this error after it was pointed out to him by Anscombe. Later editions read 'non-rational,' which is quite accurate.
JohnDoe wrote:
That would imply you have one. You don't. All you're doing is trying to show there's a gap - presumably into which you can cram your increasingly irrelevant magic sky-fairy.
You're facing the same hurdle that tripped up facilis and saw him land flat on his face, over and over again.
What you're trying to do is get two-for-one, to sneak your god in through the fire exit while the ushers aren't looking. A logical/philosophical possibility is one thing; going from that broad possibility to your assumed specific certainty is another.
Even if we were to accept the premise 'evolved minds are unable to know truth' we have no reason whatsoever to tack on 'therefore, the God of the broader Judeo-Christian belief system, and only that god, can be responsible.'
Perhaps it is you who should try again.
JohnDoe #400
If we posit that "god" invented our minds, then how can there be atheism or even different religions? It would have been a trivial matter for "god" to have programmed our minds to automatically accept "its" existence. Since atheism and a multitude of religions exist, then either "god" is a sloppy programmer or else there isn't such a critter.
"But," I hear you say, "god lets us have free will. We can believe anything we want." Calvin and Cornelius Jensen would disagree, but the Jesuits and other metaphysical libertarians* cling to this view. However there is no practical difference between a hands-off god allowing free will and the "blind evolution" decried by Jackie. So the end result is either a non-omniscient god or blind evolution. A difference that makes no difference is no difference.
*Note to politico-economic libertarians, metaphysical libertarianism has nothing to do with your ideology other than the name.
Jebus. It isn't the full moon, but the batshit insane people were out in force today. Jackie, Facilis, Pilty, Neil B, John Doe. All in need of some good old fashioned mental health. I recommend mental floss. It's supposed to remove those thoughts giving one cognitive dissonance.
There's no reason to distrust them either.
And what better way to see how far they are to be trusted than empirical investigation?
Coherentism FTW
I think John Doe's point is more serious than some here seem to think. See Plantinga's 'Naturalism Defeated' or Victor Reppert's 'C.S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea.'
http://www.calvin.edu/academic/philosophy/virtual_library/articles/plan…
I've got about 300 photos I have to process and upload for a client.
Care to give me the cliff notes on that Eric?
I can trust my mind a lot more, to be quite honest, while accepting that it evolved naturally. If we were all "intelligently" designed by the Magic Skydaddy, there's no telling what kind of crazy shit He's hiding from us. A mind without a conscious creator is one that is allowed to comprehend anything it finds, if it observes honestly. And if there are some things that my poor limited monkey brain is simply too small to comprehend, I can trust that there is no deliberately chosen reason for that restriction. I can take responsibility for that which I cannot understand. I am no one's puppet.
OK, which Eric is saying John Doe has anything? Too many Erics for me to keep track of. I recall one trying the god of gaps argument.
John Doe, physical evidence will eventually be required. No physical evidence means you are a liar and bullshitter.
That there is an avenue for speculation on the nature of truth or consciousness or morality or whatever other concept you'd like to discuss is, as I noted in #411, one thing; the proposition that, because we can speculate about such things, the god of the broader Judeo-Christian belief system must exist is another, critically different one.
I'm okay with the proposal that unanswered philosphical questions may mean a god might exist. I will not accept that it must mean their god does.
I don't think I can't read past Plantiga's introduction. "Oddly enough." Charming.
I always think of the proverbial teapot as being made of brass. More difficult to shatter than porcelain, for sure, as are the religi-myths that currently infect the masses. Plus, it just appeared that way in me thoughts upon me first exposure to the Celestial Teapot™ tale/analogy.
#413: In the words of Flewellyn, "Are there a whole bunch of full moons all lined up in a row somewhere, shooting Bozo Beams into people's heads?"
Wait! No, dude, wait!
How do YOU know that I'm not, like, in the Matrix? Like, dreaming that I'm not? Like, in the Matrix? And, like...how do you know, man?
@Eric
No it isn't
Dear theists who think that God is necessary for us to know stuff: Please explain how it's possible that
1) most people think they're better than average drivers
2) we know that not all of them can be right.
I mean, i might be, like, dreaming that I might be in the Matrix, right? Only I'm not in the Matrix.
Or am I?
Nerd of Redhead: "Jebus. It isn't the full moon, but the batshit insane people were out in force today. Jackie, Facilis, Pilty, Neil B, John Doe. All in need of some good old fashioned mental health. I recommend mental floss. It's supposed to remove those thoughts giving one cognitive dissonance."
I don't mean to singly you out, Nerd, but your comments are such a fine example of the repellent postings that are so typical of Pharyngula's herd of independent minds. I came to the blog because I'd heard that it's a hot-bed of hilarious presumptuousness, and I've not been disappointed. I'd be glad to debate the issue of mind and matter raised by Jackie, but I've found no reason to respect - and thus engage - anyone in the Pharyngula herd. My visit here has not been for nought, however. As someone who has doubts about Darwin, I'm delighted to see that the apologists for Darwinism (or neo-Darwinism, or The Modern Synthesis, or whatever you want to call it) who post here write in ways that ensure that no one outside of the herd will pay any attention to them. It's apparently never occurred to members of the Pharyngula herd that their light (if they have any) is obscured by their repellent heat. From what I've seen, few who aren't in the herd stick around Pharyngula for long. Who can blame them? Pharyngula is clearly an incestuous intellectual circle-jerk, given to orgasmic self-congratulation among members of the herd.
Have a nice day.
John Doe, you forgot your football.
Okay, Reformed Epistemologists; if Plantinga and Reppert are right, please use the resulting theory of mind to account for Phineas Gage, and the neurocognitive degeneration caused by diseases such as Alzheimer's Disease, brain tumors, or damage due to strokes?
What happens to non-physical "mind" in these circumstances and how do you know?
Show your work.
Dunning-Kruger cleanup in Aisle 10.
Posted by: JohnDoe | January 30, 2009
I think Jackie raised an excellent question with regard to the trustworthiness...
At this point, I realized that there was no reason to read any more by John Doe. Sugar glazed Jackie had point? Never.
At this point, I had to get a John Doe I liked. Some people give me the creeps.
I got yer C. S. Lewis right here, pal:
If Susan Pevensie had only saddlebacked like a good Christain, she might have survived the Last Battle to live with Reepicheep and Aslan in Narnia forever. Therefore, God.
JohnDoe, don't forget to let the door hit your quote-mining, science-denialist ass as you smugly scarper away, unable to stand the heat.
Genetic fallacy, and modo hoc. Also, conflation of justified belief with absolute certainty.
Been there, done that.
hell yeah
Also, about 80-90% (can't remember the exact figure) of people think they have above average intelligence.
Anyway, I'm of something Kaderie wrote:
"you forgot your football."
IT'S A STONE, LUIGI. YOU DIDN'T MAKE IT.
JohnDoe:
Heh. How quaint. You seem to imagine that Pharyngula is about proselytising and we care about your opinions.
(my bold)
Love it.
Such civility! Thank you.
Incidentally, did it occur to you that you're part of this "incestuous intellectual circle-jerk" no less than I, by virtue of having comments here?
Aww, poo! The Teal Deer Herder is picking up his ball and self-important bat and going home! He was just getting fun to play with, too.
I'd heard that it's a hot-bed of hilarious presumptuousness,
*kablooey*
Will you goddicted self-righteous twerps stop doing that to my irony meter! These things are expensive to replace.
I believe in Russell's teapot.
I also am totally enthralled with Battle Star Galactica.
It must be part of the plan.
No, seriously, stay with me dude...
If I'm NOT in the Matrix, but THINK I MIGHT be DREAMING about being in the Matrix, how would I know I wasn;t, like, dreaming I wasn't? In the Matrix? OR NOT?!
More than any other place on the 'net I have been, the folks here are very aware of what they mean and how they say it. We don't pull punches, and if that hurts your little feelings, tough. That's what happens when you play with the big boys and girls.
Oh, and suck my ass, you oxygen thief.
Oh mutherfucker.
I totally spaced it was on tonight.
bah shit
So much about this post and the comments thereafter is just pure gold. But I was most intrigued by Jackie's use of the term dearheart. I'd never heard it before, so I had to look it up (using the only dictionary I trust). My irony meter almost couldn't take it:
dearheart: an affectionate soubriquet for the person that has woken your heart and dispelled your misgivings about the world at large
If only!
I won't pay for cable, but I'll pay for BG eps as they show up for download at Amazon. I figure it'll show in about an hour. Until then stay tuned for our next episode of Animatrix, in which Karl Popper finds out the hard way whether or not reality is disprovable, in Animatrix-Kid's Story.
"Reality can be a pretty scary thing for some people."
I think that Jackie, JohnDoe and Facilis have demonstrated that right here on this thread.
JohnDoe (if that's your real name),
People are frequently claiming scientists have poor public relations skills. Maybe, maybe not. What I think is interesting is that to succeed in each field you need vastly different strategies.
Ideas in science are critically challenged when presented. They depend heavily on evidence, logic and facts.
In public relations the goal is to win over hearts and make your company, organization, politican, etc. look good. This isn't always done with well reasoned arguments. Lying by omisssion, using fallacious arguments, appeals to emotion are all alright if the conclusions support your goals.
I don't mean to pick on people in public relations. My beef isn't with the field so much as how it's currently being used. We need to be reminded that there are powerful people trying to manipulate the public through disingenuous means. Otherwise, countries get invaded, woo gets published in the press, and corporations get to do whatever the fuck they want. However, being good at public relations doesn't make you good or competent. It won't insure that you will be greeted as liberators, science standards will hold and smoking will not cause lung cancer.
In short,
"[R]eality must take place over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
Like, if I was in the Matrix, would these Doritos still be as munchable? SERIOUSLY, dude!
It was a pretty good episode.
Dude, can I get 10 g of whatever you are smoking?
Damnit, I knew I should have produced my cartoon of Karl Popper applying falsifiability to the idea of reality before somebody stole the idea.
"Dearheart" is a phrase used extensively amongst my "kin".
They hail from Pigeonroost, KY. Methinks Jackie is from the same sort of area. Back up in the "hollers".
My Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs loving heretic of a grandpa thankfully moved his family out of Appalachia. I'm proud to be the first to graduate from college.
My grandpa taught me how to clean a chicken, clean a fish, and to imagine the the beautiful immensity and randomness of the Universe.
I sure was lucky that my spirit was nurtured by a freethinker who believed in reality rather that a superstitious fearful self-centered religious sheep.
"As someone who has doubts about Darwin"
Darwin doesn't flatter John's pretty mind enough.
Glory to God! Johndoe and Jackie have convinced me that God exists! All I needed was just one little tiny itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny crumb of truth and they came through! Where so many others have failed, they succeeded. Unlike all the others, they came here and presented to me and everyone else real-world evidence. Let me just find the quotes... Hold on, just take a second. Hmmm. OK. It was here, I swear. Something about a thing...
Drat! OK. Maybe I was wrong. I guess they failed like everyone else has. Oh! But wouldn't it be fun to be able to believe such batshit-crazy talk! I hold out hope. Someday...
As DaveL noted:
Ross's failed logic can be easily dismissed.
The obvious problem with "historically" as Ross fixates on it is that he is considering only the tiniest, most recent sliver of the entire history of human nature. How could this supposedly extremely common feature of basic human nature, belief in a Judeo-Christian god, only start showing up in the last several hundred generations?
"An intuitive belief in some sort of presiding Agent seems to be an extremely common, albeit hardly universal, feature of human nature"
Russel's intuition of a cosmic teapot has to come from somewhere. Something can't come from nothing, right? I know he was British, therefore the teapot was an important although ordinary object for him. But why is it so? Why is the teapot a quasi-sacred object, linked to a quasi-religious ritual, among the British? That also has to come from somewhere...
"this intuition has intersected, historically, with an enormous amount of subjective religious experience"
Many, many people have, at least once in their life, felt the existence of the Cosmic Teapot. They can't say so, for fear of ridicule. But deep inside, they KNOW.
"and this intersection (along with, yes, the force of custom and tradition) has produced and sustained the religious traditions that seem to Richard Dawkins and company like so much teapot-worship."
It's ok, my dear. Have a nice cup of tea (sugar or no sugar?). Oh, and by the way, Russel's teapot was not an example of worship. Just a reflection about proving something's existence.
John Doe, not only did you forget your football, but also your brain. We know Darwin existed. We know Darwin first proposed the Theory of Evolution. We also know Darwin got many things wrong. He just did not have the data that was discovered after his death. When all that interesting data, like genomes, genes, DNA, and the like are added to Darwin's original idea, it becomes the "Modern Synthesis". Note no mention of Darwin. The fact that you can't get past Darwin, unlike scientists, says a lot about you, none of it good.
Mr Doe (is that is your real name - please, on behalf of my fellow commenters, let me apologise for the circle-jerk of orgasmic self-congratulation you have found here. But, having just had a wank and feeling rather pleased with myself, may I just caution you to judge not, lest ye be judged.
Anyone coming on here spouting a list of quotes from christian apologists and theologians (and please note that C.S.Lewis, for one, did accept evolution), expecting us to take him seriously, merely sets himself up for ridicule and that (having another wank) I think we do rather well - don't we guys!
But we don't take quasi-philosophical bullshit about evolved minds and presuppositoinal nonsense - personally, I'm more of a post-neo-presuppostionalt - in any way seriously.
As for your central "argument", of course the product of an evolved mind can be mistaken - see religion and the perception of a personal god as evidence.
Now I feel another bout of self-pleasure coming on. Anyone care to join me?
Oh, so you're saying that humans evolving by natural selection doesn't entail that we are capable (or inclined) of discovering truth? That's quite a profound revelation, and not trite, obvious or irrelevant at all.
If our mind is an evolutionary adaptation, it's possible it's not capable of discerning truth. If it's not an adaptation, it's possible that it's not capable of discerning truth. Clearly, then, the only way we can ever justify belief in anything else is by first embracing Jesus.
Evolutionary epistemology. If our thoughts about reality weren't trustworthy, we'd have died out long ago.
Next question!
In the fucking eighth line, Plantinga writes "current evolutionary doctrine". What reason can you give me for reading on, now that Plantinga has shown he has no idea what science is? How does he get his shit published? -- Oh, I see: he publishes books that never go through, say, peer-review or anything...
Well, I've found a reason for reading on: to add further evidence that Plantinga is an incompetent (because ignorant) nincompoop. And that's easy. For example:
Near the top of the second page, he says most mutations are deleterious. Wrong. Most mutations are neutral, and if Plantinga had any understanding of genetics, he'd know that full well.
Footnote 7: Mutations are random in the sense that they are "perhaps" not predictable? They are not predictable, period, except probabilistically.
In the same footnote, Plantinga demonstrates his ignorance of the principle of parsimony. In other words, he demonstrates his ignorance of fully half of the entire scientific method.
On the fourth page, he demonstrates his complete ignorance of evolutionary epistemology. This is truly astonishing, because it concerns the very topic of his article and was worked out decades ago!
On the same page, he fails to make a distinction between what I'm used to call reality and truth: the former is what science is concerned with, where the argumentum ad lapidem is not a logical fallacy; the latter consists of boring (untestable) questions like whether I'm the solipsist, and there, the argumentum ad lapidem is a logical fallacy.
I agree with Plantinga that minds that are the product of evolution don't necessarily give us access to truth (as opposed to reality -- a distinction that, see above, Plantinga seems not to make). But we don't have access to truth anyway. Sure, we could figure it out, but if we had done so, how could we find out that what we have found is indeed the truth? By comparing it to the truth, which we don't have?
Major science theory fail.
I gave up on the seventh page, skipped to near the end, and found no new argument. Have I missed anything?
OK, OK, wait...
What if it's, like, Plantinga who's only dreaming that he thinks he's not in the Matrix? You know?
Wow. Epic thread. That's some good atheist-argument shit right there. Bookmarked for future reference.
JohnDoe, Jakie et al: Truth? What are you talking about? The truth is what you see, perceive, measure and prove through experiment. "Truth" is that which is proved through experience. "External Truth"? "Epistemological Truth"? These are nonsensical concepts. Yesterday I thought about saying as much but, because Jakie wasn't explicit in his/her Platonism I figured I'd just keep quiet. In applying "truth" to evolution, it is those who defend the research, the analysis, the centuries of careful study, the lifetimes of careful study and prudent decision building one atop the conclusions of another, verifying, clarifying, correcting, who are standing up for real, concrete truth. It is you and those like you, apologists for dumb opinion, refusing to acknowledge the achievements of others out of your arrogant championing of such metaphysical and empty concepts as ideal truth who refuse it in favor of self-congratulatory flagellation.
Plato, Augustine, Hegel, Marx; One-thousand years of arguing that the world is governed and mirrors something ideal, apart, and outside of our experience and what has such worshiping of ignorance got us but one-thousand years of suffering and pain? I put to you this question; What use is a truth we cannot prove, test, or experience? What value does it have when it can in no way affect our lives? Even if every chair were some example of an ideal chair, why would it matter? You can't sit in an ideal chair, or see it, or touch it. What value then is god, a concept which in Christianity has merely become an ideal human? Even if god existed, it has no impact on our world or our lives, has no traffic with us, so why spend our time on it? Science is just a fancy word for knowledge, in other words, a quick way of saying "that information we have gathered to improve our lot". You argue that it is unreliable in a naturalistic system because it is the product of the mind; that a natural, imperfect process will produce imperfect results. So what? Our lives are what we experience and we can only experience, and learn of, those things which we perceive. If due to an imperfection in our minds we are unable to perceive or interact with something of a "higher" reality, then it might as well not exist at all. In fact, in that we cannot experience it, it really doesn't.
And how silly is it, really, to argue that a naturalistic explanation must be flawed because it includes an imperfect mind? How prideful to say that, because a philosophy doesn't assuage your ego by telling you that your concepts are perfect, it must be incorrect? What aid would humanity gain from a system of belief that refused to admit the possibility of error? The scientific process is built upon the acknowledgment that humans are flawed; that we are intensely personal and social beings and that only through constant unbiased examination can knowledge be gained and assured. You argue that such a process is foolish because it doesn't accept the perfection of the human mind? Poppycock! The imperfection of knowing is precisely why we have the scientific method; the success which constantly rechecking our assumptions brings is precisely why we trust in the products of science. Your argument is absurd, contradictory, and childish. Perhaps you should actually read some philosophy before you go around the internet acting as if you understand it.
"How could this supposedly extremely common feature of basic human nature, belief in a Judeo-Christian god, only start showing up in the last several hundred generations?".
The rise of agriculture, and ergot in the bread.
CG @ 169.
Hiya. Yeah, I see what you're saying and I am pulling stuff from all over the place that probably falls under a lot of well identified structures.
At the same time, merely being good at imagination and having structures for pareidolia doesn't seem to do this effect justice for mine.
A little background: I started stewing on this some years ago after a spirited argument with a philosopher type, a rigourous pure logician who was (I think) a born again christian (He was doubtless a christian, and upon hearing his arguments I wonder if it's a little like the phenomenon of engineers becoming creationists in their old age, but that's by the by).
His arguments basically fall under the transcendental argument for god and the presuppostional apologetics. They no doubt have plenty of ways to be side stepped or swatted. But this guy was pretty interesting all the same.
Most versions of that argument are sort of bullet points that reason from god on down like most of them (some of which appear in the thread here, I notice. Like John Doe's quotebomb). This one went from logic and reason on up, which was a change. That all knowledge and reason, morality and even consciousness must depend on some "external" fixed position or be ultimately self defeating.
Now, I'm not representing this argument very well and I can't remember the details. It sounds silly like that, and it did go to those cringeworthy places like "You presuppose god just by having this conversation, you just don't know it yet", and why you're supposed to just default to christianity at the end of it is a bit of a mystery too. Still at the time it was well laid out (the guy was actually a total ninja in all philosophical facets. This wasn't some bible basher standing on the corner running the playbook) and following the logic gave food for thought, take my word for it.
The trouble was, after all that brilliant logic being followed though the convolutions of my head with barely a missed step, at the end I didn't believe in god. I knew already what that was like and, nope, nuthin' sorry (and yes, transcendentalist arguments are basically saying that not believeing in god is cognitive dissonance).
I did, however, think I got a sense of the thing at the end/beginning of every train of thought that seems incomprehensible to our conscious mind and it's inexplicable-ness kind of gnaws away like a sense someone is watching you.
This all probably sounds batshit and maybe it is. I just wish some of the big brains around here were there to follow the same logic and see where it went so I could hear what they had to say about it as that would be very interesting.
Anyways, as I was saying, this is my partial suspect for what Douhat is talking about (the recurrence of religious belief) and I agree with him that it's interesting.
The reflexivity of mind isn't without its problems and evolutionary developement doesn't create perfect things, so my current favourite analogy is the blind spot in your eye (or perhaps what the blind spot "sees"). Fear of imaginary monsters and so forth may spring from the same structural quirks of mind, but a sense of a god is big enough to warrant more attention if you ask me.
There's a few oddments to note; one, as I said, is that a lot of people sense no such thing and never have. Another is the changing forms of 'god' over time and culture. Then there's the point that the logic mentioned above is or comes from really old school monkish solipsism. We can see in this thread many retorts to believers along the lines of "where's the evidence" for god et al. This to me speaks of a social, evidence based framework for consciousness that is/has perhaps neatly sidestepped or rendered irrelevant the old logic.
I haven't really thought that one through yet, so I'm getting ahead of myself. And I could well be barking up the wrong tree with the rest (and should be looking at some other oft climbed tree back up the road a bit). But it's good string a bit of yarn now and then.
I am sorry but rationality is the product of minds (can gravity be rational? Can mutation be rational?)
Unless you are some sort of pantheist or you believe in design from some sort of alien mind I don't think you can ascribe rationality to nature.
Facilis, you can't put rationality to god, because your god only exists between your ears. Nowhere else. And you call yourself rational? No wonder we see you as a deluded fool.
You could numinous agency", or something like that.
When the philosophy-speak gets too thick, you can fight back using the same lingo:
[from a thread a while back]
There's also the point of that old chestnut of an algebraic "proof" that 1=2. It relies on slipping in an invalid divide-by-zero operation. Cleverly argued logical arguments that end with "... and therefore Jesus is God and Christianity is true!" are hiding similarly invalid logical operations.
Are you certain I don't know.
But I do you see. God revels certain things to me in a way that I can be absolutely certain of it . You should admit that my worldview allows for such things while youyrs doesn't.
Is this statement falsifiable?
Consider these 2 statements.
"Logic and reason exist"
"Truth and falsehood exist"
In either case you could not falsify these because In order to falsify logic and reason you would have to presuposse it and in trying to falsify the second you would presuppose falsehood.
Do you agree?
Quite to the contrary. I enjoy doing science because my worldview can account for the reasoning which underpins the scientific method and makes it possible for me to obtain knowledge. Your worldview cannot even tell you if you are in a matrix or not.
Facilis the fallacious fool, you are not doing science. Science does not allow for the existence of god. God is ignored. I know, I've been doing science for 30+ years. You don't ignore your imaginary deity, so it cannot be science by definition. Another lie from the fool.
How do you know this?
@David
Is this statement true?
(People in this thread make a lot of self-refuting statements)
Most of them post under the "Facilis".
God, being omnipotent reveals it to me so I can know it for certain. Do you admit that an omnipotent God can reveal to me things so that I can know them for certain?
How do you know this?
"Atheists - there is doubt and argument about everything.
Therefore god exists and Jesus is your saviour."
I paraphrase, but I think that's it.
That's it?
Fucking morons.
In or out of the Matrix?
I admit if there is such a thing yes, but how do you know he isn't tricking you to get you to do his bidding. And the actual truth is far from what you think it is as a result of what he tells you?
@472 - I though Walton was winning the Pantload of the Day trophy, but you just vaulted to the championship.
But could God give us his revelation in such a way that we could know it was from him and not our error-prone minds?
But you only checked it with your fallible mind. Everyone else could be correct and you could be the only fallible one.
The word "rational" has different definitions, and it is from equivocating and juggling those definitions that Lewis, and other theologians, and you yourself, bring forth logically indefensible arguments.
The number 2 is defined as being a rational number. Does that mean that the number 2 has a mind? The number √2 is defined as being an irrational number. Does that mean that the number √2 has an insane mind?
God revels certain things to me in a way that I can be absolutely certain of it . You should admit that my worldview allows for such things while youyrs doesn't.
I will admit that your worldview allows you to believe that your thinking is as good as your spelling, that it allows you to believe that you are close personal friends with a Pooka pal named Harvey or whatever it is you imagine your certainty-bestowing playmate to be, even that your worldview allows you to believe that you are not 5150, a danger to yourself and others; where our worldview, constrained by observation and evidence, does not.
@Sven
Can god reveal to me that I am not in the matrix?
Facilis, your god only exists between your ears. Therefore, it appears you are calling yourself god. If you mean something else, why can't you provide physical evidence for your imaginary companion? Your argument was disproved, so you have nothing except your continued ranting.
So how do you religious types know absolutely that what you think your omipotent god tells you for certain is in fact true?
How do you know this Facilis?
My argument is more like
"Atheists , God is the necessary precondition or logic , reason ,knowledge and certainty.
Denying him gives way to great doubt and illogical argument"
And to the guy above who called my argument an argumen from ignorance, that is like saying 2+2 (in base 10)=4 is an argument from ignorance. It is proven by the impossibility of the contrary.
If David's statement is interpreted as "We don't have access to Platonic truth with metaphysical certainty", then the answer to your question is "probably". Fallibilism is true in the strongest sense that fallibilism allows (and no stronger).
We can applying fallible epistemologies to attach Bayesian probabilities to statements. Sometimes we can get those probabilities high enough that we can reasonably call what we have "knowledge of the truth" and that is IT. To hold that you have absolute certainty of anything is simply childish refusal to face up to your (and our species') own limitations.
Facilis, the fact that you continue to need your imaginary deity just confirms you are delusional. Your god doesn't exist. Believing in non-existent beings is not mentally healthy.
Sure, in your "worldview." God could also reveal to me that Jerry Garcia was wearing a space helmet throughout the second set in Grand Rapids, 8/24/80.
But would an omniscient god reveal to you that s/he was actually an omniscient trickster god?
Could you be certain of the lack of such revelation?
But to first make observations you have to account for the reliability of your senses. In order to interpret evidence you must use logic and reason.
I can account for these things, while your worldview cannot.
Atheists cannot even know if they are in a matrix or not.
But could God give us his revelation in such a way that we could know it was from him and not our error-prone minds?
Facilis with his error-prone, wasted mind, cannot distinguish between God-given certainty, and God punking facilis by allowing God's close personal pal and co-conspirator Satan leave to fuck with the tiny little brainlet facilis is so proud of, as God did with Job, and making facilis believe it was God giving him a revelation when it was actually from a denizen of the demon-haunted world in which facilis believes.
God, as famed in song and lore, is clearly an asshole with a sick sense of humor, and pulls shit like that all the time.
Facilis, reason and logic do not require your imaginary deity. Time to stop repeating your nonsense. It makes you sound like a petulant teenager.
Because he told me in his revelation.
At best true for an extremely vague definition of "God" and unrealistically strong versions of "logic , reason ,knowledge and certainty". In any case the any help in gaining absolute certainty apparently given by asserting a god vanishes in less you claim a way of obtaining certain (in the same strong sense) knowledge of said god. Note that this strong certainty has to rule out arbitrarily unlikely and ridiculous scenarios (such as the Matrix or temporary insanity caused by the bombardment of your brain by cosmic rays), else we are merely back to fallible human reasoning. What process do you propose for obtaining such knowledge.
Facilis, you do know that hearing voices is a sign of mental illness? So you are acknowledging to us that you are mentally ill? That would explain a lot.
We don't need your imaginary friend for anything. Why don't you both go home? Your mommy is calling.
And around we go.
petitio principii
Moreover, your god seems to want you to make a fool of yourself on a rationalist forum like this.
Talk about mocking the afflicted.
And I, for one, am unable to share your pain.
But then you apologists seek to share Christ's pain, do you not?
It's at times likes this that I almost wish he hadn't been crucified, but merely died an agonising death from old age, as is man's lot, then and now, and despite his "sacrifice".
Muzz @ 463:
I can understand being gobsmacked by dealing with a fundie apologist who isn't one of the gibbering morons most of us are used to encountering all the time. Logic sounds much more convincing than bible-thumping, spittle-flecked screaming.
I think a big problem is the one exhibited by Facilis and Bertrand Russell. Did I really mention them in the same sentence? That is, taking logic as some sort of ground from which everything else in the universe must be derived.
Millennia of experience in counting objects and measuring land led, through a process of abstraction, to the invention of mathematics. Then, centuries of experience doing mathematics led, through a similar process of abstraction, to the invention of logic. This is why Russell and Whitehead's attempt to derive mathematics from logic in the Principia Mathematica was such a bass-ackwards enterprise from the get-go, but that's another rant.
Logic is not a "God-given" constraint on how the universe works; logic is the product of observation of how mathematics works, and that's several layers from the basic ground of everything, the way some philosophers would have it.
So, no, Facilis: God is not necessary to give us logic in order to understand the way the universe works. We invented logic to help keep our thinking organized. It's served us well so far, but it has come into problems, especially in dealing with infinite quantities. This doesn't bother me as much as it does some, because I don't believe there are any such things as infinite quantities, and therefore we're under no obligation to explain how they behave. But that's just me.
"Because he told me in his revelation."
And if you read/heard wrong (due to recurrent idiocy)? Or if the revelation is fake or corrupted? Or if he was testing your gullibility for his own mysterious reasons?
Note (and please acknowledge or deny this) you are claiming access to absolute>/em> certainty. Simply saying the above are unlikely is worthless to your argument.
"Atheists cannot even know if they are in a matrix or not."What you mean is "atheists are typically admit that they cannot know with metaphysical certainty that they are not in the Matrix".
If we were in the matrix, and it was running 2009 in simulation do you claim that the Facilis there would not be making the same arguments that you are making?
"Postulate", not "presuppose".
What do think "truth" and "falsehood" mean?
No.
The axioms of logic are postulated as universally true (although sometimes somewhat provisionally). But if God reveals things to you in addition to things that are universally true, then those things should be either in accordance with the axioms of logic, or derivable from them. But you insist on the truth of Scripture, which is neither in accordance with the axioms of logic, nor derivable from them. Therefore, your insisting that God has revealed Scripture to you as absolute truth is self-refuting.
QED
In addition to the above, if God could reveal things to you, he should, by your own reasoning, be able to reveal empirically demonstrable things as well. But you cannot provide an empirical demonstration of any revealed truth from God, therefore, a more general claim that God reveals things to you is self-refuting.
QED
It is precisely an argument from ignorance because it is not proven by the impossibility of the contrary.
You have not shown that logical axioms would be false if God did not exist.
Patricia: I though Walton was winning the Pantload of the Day trophy, but you just vaulted to the championship.
To everyone: I admit I've made some poorly-worded statements over the last couple of days, and I've been unnecessarily rude and irritable when people called me out on them. Please accept my general apologies.
I would admit that I'm not the brightest or most articulate person in the world, and I am young. And I sometimes get things completely wrong. I can only plead ordinary human fallibility.
There is more entertainment to be had reading Philip K Dick's twisting of reality and perception.