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Where do you sit on the Dawkins belief scale?

Started by Tank, August 04, 2011, 07:23:35 PM

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j.woodard24

QuoteOne way that He's proven himself to me is that when my mother was pregnant, she had double pneumonia, and the doctors said she wouldn't make it through the pregnancy. On top of this, she had a tumor in her uterus so it was unlikely that I'd be here too. They ended up not bothering to even give her medication anymore, claiming that, "It'll harm the baby." I ended up killing the tumor, (Mom says that's why I've got such a mean right hook.) and about 8 months after I was born, she woke up one morning feeling fine, no sickness, no nothing. You may just write it off and say it's a medical mystery, but I'm gonna believe it was God intervening. We can agree to disagree though, right?

Well, the thing is, that doesn't adhere to any empiricist's standard for evidence. What it essentially boils down to is "I don't know, therefore god did it." In the infancy of our species, we postulated gods because we didn't know what caused things like thunder. It's the same psychological phenomenon.
Furthermore, I know (and was close to) a good man, who was a devout Christian all his life, who prayed fervently and went to church and taught his children to be Christian. He also just died after a horrifically grueling and painful battle with cancer, his prayers and the prayers of his family and friends and church having gone unanswered. If we apply the same criteria to this situation as to your mother's, then it would be evidence that god does not exist. Of course, I don't think it's evidence for any such thing. I'm saying the criteria is insufficient.
Some shameless self promotion - An Atheist Amnesiac: http://www.youtube.com/user/24arimar.

not your typical...

Quote from: j.woodard24 on November 13, 2011, 06:20:46 PM
Well, the thing is, that doesn't adhere to any empiricist's standard for evidence. What it essentially boils down to is "I don't know, therefore god did it." In the infancy of our species, we postulated gods because we didn't know what caused things like thunder. It's the same psychological phenomenon.
Furthermore, I know (and was close to) a good man, who was a devout Christian all his life, who prayed fervently and went to church and taught his children to be Christian. He also just died after a horrifically grueling and painful battle with cancer, his prayers and the prayers of his family and friends and church having gone unanswered. If we apply the same criteria to this situation as to your mother's, then it would be evidence that god does not exist. Of course, I don't think it's evidence for any such thing. I'm saying the criteria is insufficient.
I can understand that, but might I add that I not once mentioned prayer. So many people think that the only way it is possible to communicate with God is though prayer. If applying the basic principles of Christianity, in which God knows you hearts desire and knows all of your thoughts, and I do believe this to be true for the record, then he will act accordingly. If you pray with the mindset of, "Well, heal me Lord if it's your will." then He may or may not. I've seen this happen with my grandmother, who passed almost 2 years ago. Not once did anyone declare healing on her life. And I do believe in the power of speech. You speak it, and it will come back around to you, and not necessarily in the way you'd expect. I'm not saying that it's your friend's fault that he died, and I am sorry for your loss, but I do believe that there could have been more done to at least improve his dying days. My condolences though.
"Accepting the truth and keeping faith is a strong thing to do. Mixing the two however, is the dumbest thing you've ever attempted." - Radical Ostriches Bringing Eternal Requiem Tonight
Advocate for the abnormal.

j.woodard24

Quote from: not your typical...I can understand that, but might I add that I not once mentioned prayer. So many people think that the only way it is possible to communicate with God is though prayer. If applying the basic principles of Christianity, in which God knows you hearts desire and knows all of your thoughts, and I do believe this to be true for the record, then he will act accordingly. If you pray with the mindset of, "Well, heal me Lord if it's your will." then He may or may not. I've seen this happen with my grandmother, who passed almost 2 years ago. Not once did anyone declare healing on her life. And I do believe in the power of speech. You speak it, and it will come back around to you, and not necessarily in the way you'd expect. I'm not saying that it's your friend's fault that he died, and I am sorry for your loss, but I do believe that there could have been more done to at least improve his dying days. My condolences though.

Prayer was hardly relevant to my main point. The fact is that healings, deaths, or anything in between cannot be used as evidence for a god without something more substantial, much less a specific god, like Yahweh. What you said about the power of speech is an unqualified claim (I presume you mean powerful in some supernatural way - of course it's powerful culturally. I can't imagine that anyone would deny that.), with no evidence to back it up. In regards to my friend, you're simply mistaken. I can't imagine what you mean when you say "there could have been more done to at least improve his dying days". Do you mean a different type of appeal to god? If god is truly omniscient, then he shouldn't at all care about "declaring healing". That would be a silly and useless endeavor, and even more silly for god to make it some kind of qualifier for who he heals and who he doesn't. Furthermore, if god really is so benevolent, and goes about healing diseases and whatnot, then why do diseases even exist? If god created everything, then that includes childhood leukemia and HIV and Alzheimer's and SIDS. That includes earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes. And do not tell me that those things only happen to the wicked, or the faithless, or the spiritually bankrupt. I mean no disrespect, but why your mother? Surely some of the people in the world trade center deserved a little divine intervention. Or the victims of the Haitian earthquake. Or one of the many African children who have been given HIV by their mothers. Why do they not wake up and find themselves miraculously cured? Pneumonia is a bacterial infection that may be killed by the human immune system. AIDS is not, and this is why there are no purported "miracles" in regards to people with AIDS. Unless, of course, we submit that god only intervenes in cases where self-healing is entirely plausible, anyway. We may not pick and choose. We may not say "here are a thousand unjust deaths, but look! Someone improbably survived. It's a miracle! Praise god." To do so is to ignore the facts before us.
Some shameless self promotion - An Atheist Amnesiac: http://www.youtube.com/user/24arimar.

not your typical...

Quote from: j.woodard24 on November 13, 2011, 08:41:18 PM
I mean no disrespect, but why your mother? 
I'm not gonna bullshit and answer to that, or give you some lame ass quote about how 'God works in mysterious ways.' Or how 'Everything happens for a reason.' In all honesty, I have no clue as of why my mother lived and yet so many people died in 9/11. All I can really say on that is that when I happened, I was 5, pissed off to think that there is a God who'd allow it to happen, and wanted to kick some asses, punch a wall, cry, and puke. To this day, I still don't claim to even begin to understand why shit happens, but it does. And shit will keep on happening as long as the world turns. But I can say this, while there we're a ton of people who unjustly lost their lives that day, there were also a lot of people who almost lost their lives that day, but instead, lived to tell the tale. As with regards to you friend, I'm not going to deny that personally, I did mean in a spiritual aspect that words have power, but also in a non-spiritual sense.
"Accepting the truth and keeping faith is a strong thing to do. Mixing the two however, is the dumbest thing you've ever attempted." - Radical Ostriches Bringing Eternal Requiem Tonight
Advocate for the abnormal.

Heisenberg

#124
Quote from: not your typical... on November 13, 2011, 08:54:25 PM
In all honesty, I have no clue as of why my mother lived and yet so many people died in 9/11.
There is no why. Things happen randomly and your mother survived because she was lucky. Nothing more. The people on 9/11 died because they were unlucky. Wrong place wrong time. Why is irrelevant.

If everything that was improbable was attributable to God, then statistics and probability wouldn't exist or be verified experimentally.
"No one I think is in my tree, I mean it must be high or low"-John Lennon

DeterminedJuliet

#125
Quote from: Heisenberg on November 13, 2011, 09:41:37 PM
Quote from: not your typical... on November 13, 2011, 08:54:25 PM
In all honesty, I have no clue as of why my mother lived and yet so many people died in 9/11.
There is no why. Things happen randomly and your mother survived because she was lucky. Nothing more. The people on 9/11 died because they were unlucky. Wrong place wrong time. Why is irrelevant.

If everything that was improbable was attributable to God, then statistics and probability wouldn't exist or be verified experimentally.

Yup.

And I like your SIDS example. Parents, who are doing everything right and love their child, wake up one morning and their baby is dead. There is nothing they could do to prevent it and absolutely no reason for it. Instant, senseless death of a perfectly healthy child without any warning whatsoever. SIDS doesn't happen more to bad families, or atheist families, or abusive families. It happens completely at random and destroys lives. WTF kind of psycho must God be?
"We've thought of life by analogy with a journey, with pilgrimage which had a serious purpose at the end, and the THING was to get to that end; success, or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you're dead. But, we missed the point the whole way along; It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing, or dance, while the music was being played.

Pharaoh Cat

I chose the wishy/washy 50/50 answer.  Thing is, it's hard to figure how so much order arose out of chaos unaided, but it's also hard to figure how a highly complex entity arose without antecedents.  So I shrug and get on with my life.  Bad things happen to believers and unbelievers alike, so the question seems moot unless we factor in an afterlife, and here again, it's hard to figure how psychological processes dependent on chemical reactions can continue without those reactions, but it's also hard to figure how chemical reactions all by themselves can generate psychological processes.  So I shrug and get on with my life.  Oh, and assuming there's an afterlife, we have no way of knowing how life on earth factors into life as a ghost, unless we pick a religion arbitrarily and by sheer luck pick the right one - so I shrug and get on with my life.

 
"The Logic Elf rewards anyone who thinks logically."  (Jill)

Asmodean

Quote from: Pharaoh Cat on November 18, 2011, 07:53:13 PM
I chose the wishy/washy 50/50 answer.  Thing is, it's hard to figure how so much order arose out of chaos unaided,
Have you considered that the "chaos" you are refering to may just be another state of order? I'll give you a simple "for instance": I have a few playing cards. I sort them as follows: 2, A, an empty space, 5, A, 8 and 5. Does seem rather chaotic, yes? However, the cards are actually ordered to spell out my birthday: 21 05 85
Quote from: Ecurb Noselrub on July 25, 2013, 08:18:52 PM
In Asmo's grey lump,
wrath and dark clouds gather force.
Luxembourg trembles.

Pharaoh Cat

Quote from: Asmodean on November 18, 2011, 09:04:13 PM
Have you considered that the "chaos" you are refering to may just be another state of order? I'll give you a simple "for instance": I have a few playing cards. I sort them as follows: 2, A, an empty space, 5, A, 8 and 5. Does seem rather chaotic, yes? However, the cards are actually ordered to spell out my birthday: 21 05 85

Or hand a book to someone who has never seen words or even letters and has no inkling what they might represent.  The squiggles on the page would be chaos to that person.

Or show yours truly the engine of an automobile.  All the doohickeys would be chaos to me.

So then I look at DNA... yup, chaos, at least to me.

Here's the thing.  I think the answers to life's mysteries are behind door number three.  Door number one leads to the idea of a super-complex entity arising fully made out of nothing, uncaused, able to cause a universe.  Door number two leads to the idea of super-complex organisms arising out of brute matter by myriad fortuitous accidents.  Door number three leads to some third idea, one we haven't imagined yet, perhaps because we've fixated on the first two ideas, believing we need to pick either the first one or the second one.

Meanwhile, I'm not smart enough to formulate the third idea, so I shrug and get on with my life, occasionally checking the latest science to see if someone smart enough has proposed the third idea.

"The Logic Elf rewards anyone who thinks logically."  (Jill)

DeterminedJuliet

Quote from: Pharaoh Cat on November 18, 2011, 11:50:35 PM
Quote from: Asmodean on November 18, 2011, 09:04:13 PM
Have you considered that the "chaos" you are refering to may just be another state of order? I'll give you a simple "for instance": I have a few playing cards. I sort them as follows: 2, A, an empty space, 5, A, 8 and 5. Does seem rather chaotic, yes? However, the cards are actually ordered to spell out my birthday: 21 05 85

Or hand a book to someone who has never seen words or even letters and has no inkling what they might represent.  The squiggles on the page would be chaos to that person.

Or show yours truly the engine of an automobile.  All the doohickeys would be chaos to me.

So then I look at DNA... yup, chaos, at least to me.

Here's the thing.  I think the answers to life's mysteries are behind door number three.  Door number one leads to the idea of a super-complex entity arising fully made out of nothing, uncaused, able to cause a universe.  Door number two leads to the idea of super-complex organisms arising out of brute matter by myriad fortuitous accidents.  Door number three leads to some third idea, one we haven't imagined yet, perhaps because we've fixated on the first two ideas, believing we need to pick either the first one or the second one.

Meanwhile, I'm not smart enough to formulate the third idea, so I shrug and get on with my life, occasionally checking the latest science to see if someone smart enough has proposed the third idea.



I can't remember who, but I remember a poster here arguing that it's possible that there has been no cause. Of anything. By anything. And that existence has always been and is the natural state of, well, existence. That idea kind of blew my mind and since then I've thought I'd like to hear some real cerebral types hash that out with regards to scientific theory and whatnot.
"We've thought of life by analogy with a journey, with pilgrimage which had a serious purpose at the end, and the THING was to get to that end; success, or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you're dead. But, we missed the point the whole way along; It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing, or dance, while the music was being played.

Pharaoh Cat

Quote from: DeterminedJuliet on November 21, 2011, 06:20:37 PM
I can't remember who, but I remember a poster here arguing that it's possible that there has been no cause. Of anything. By anything. And that existence has always been and is the natural state of, well, existence.

Makes sense to me.  Matter just always was and always will be.  Life, of course, had an origin, and consciousness did as well.  These origins intrigue me.

"The Logic Elf rewards anyone who thinks logically."  (Jill)

Ecurb Noselrub

Quote from: DeterminedJuliet on November 21, 2011, 06:20:37 PM

I can't remember who, but I remember a poster here arguing that it's possible that there has been no cause. Of anything. By anything. And that existence has always been and is the natural state of, well, existence. That idea kind of blew my mind and since then I've thought I'd like to hear some real cerebral types hash that out with regards to scientific theory and whatnot.

That was Attila (R.I.P.).  We joined about the same time, and then he left after a conflict with Earthling, who also disappeared.  To quote Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz - "People come and go so quickly here."

DeterminedJuliet

Quote from: Ecurb Noselrub on November 22, 2011, 02:52:38 AM
Quote from: DeterminedJuliet on November 21, 2011, 06:20:37 PM

I can't remember who, but I remember a poster here arguing that it's possible that there has been no cause. Of anything. By anything. And that existence has always been and is the natural state of, well, existence. That idea kind of blew my mind and since then I've thought I'd like to hear some real cerebral types hash that out with regards to scientific theory and whatnot.

That was Attila (R.I.P.).  We joined about the same time, and then he left after a conflict with Earthling, who also disappeared.  To quote Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz - "People come and go so quickly here."

Right! Thank you!
"We've thought of life by analogy with a journey, with pilgrimage which had a serious purpose at the end, and the THING was to get to that end; success, or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you're dead. But, we missed the point the whole way along; It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing, or dance, while the music was being played.