"Science and Religion are Philosophical Viewpoints"

SLAM: debunk creationism, pseudoscience, and superstitions. Discuss logic and morality.

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McC
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Post by McC »

Oh, this just gets better and better. More people have joined the discussion, and one person is now saying that faith is ever-present, such as having faith that the sun will come up tomorrow. I then shot back "That's not faith, that's a logical prediction based on an enormous body of empirical evidence." To which the new person then replied that he wanted logical proof that the sun would rise tomorrow without relying on data from today or any previous day. Obviously, I could respond with the math and so forth, but is there any way to just dismiss this argument out-of-hand with a fallacy?
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Post by Darth Wong »

McC wrote:Oh, this just gets better and better. More people have joined the discussion, and one person is now saying that faith is ever-present, such as having faith that the sun will come up tomorrow. I then shot back "That's not faith, that's a logical prediction based on an enormous body of empirical evidence." To which the new person then replied that he wanted logical proof that the sun would rise tomorrow without relying on data from today or any previous day. Obviously, I could respond with the math and so forth, but is there any way to just dismiss this argument out-of-hand with a fallacy?
Without relying on data from today or any previous day? His argument literally relies upon suppression of evidence!

The big difference between science and religion is the fact that science is ultimately based upon empirical observations while religion is not. Taking away the empirical observations from science and then declaring that the two are now identical only proves the point; it proves that big difference between science and religion is the fact that science relies on empirical observations.
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Post by Darth Lucifer »

McC wrote:....To which the new person then replied that he wanted logical proof that the sun would rise tomorrow without relying on data from today or any previous day. Obviously, I could respond with the math and so forth, but is there any way to just dismiss this argument out-of-hand with a fallacy?
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacie ... ading.html

I think this logical fallacy may apply.
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Post by McC »

He's basically saying that he has no way of knowing the sun will come up tomorrow, beyond his own experience that it has every day in the past, so he has faith that it will continue to do so. That's why he's "suppressing the evidence" -- he views the evidence of the sun having always risen to be common to both a scientific reasoning and a faith-based conclusion, so inadmissable.

In short, he's saying that expecting something to happen because it always has is faith.

The stupid burns, but I don't know how to actually attack it without just resorting to saying "the stupid, it burns!"
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Post by Darth Lucifer »

McC wrote:He's basically saying that he has no way of knowing the sun will come up tomorrow, beyond his own experience that it has every day in the past, so he has faith that it will continue to do so. That's why he's "suppressing the evidence" -- he views the evidence of the sun having always risen to be common to both a scientific reasoning and a faith-based conclusion, so inadmissable.

In short, he's saying that expecting something to happen because it always has is faith.

The stupid burns, but I don't know how to actually attack it without just resorting to saying "the stupid, it burns!"
That's like saying "I've flipped this coin 1000 times, one time each morning, and it's come up heads every time. Because of that, it will be heads tomorrow morning." :roll:
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Post by General Zod »

McC wrote:He's basically saying that he has no way of knowing the sun will come up tomorrow, beyond his own experience that it has every day in the past, so he has faith that it will continue to do so. That's why he's "suppressing the evidence" -- he views the evidence of the sun having always risen to be common to both a scientific reasoning and a faith-based conclusion, so inadmissable.

In short, he's saying that expecting something to happen because it always has is faith.

The stupid burns, but I don't know how to actually attack it without just resorting to saying "the stupid, it burns!"
Idiots like this are fun to deal with. Tell him to jump off a sky scraper. By his reasoning, he has no way of knowing for certain that he'll die when he hits the concrete from 50 stories up.
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Post by Darth Wong »

McC wrote:He's basically saying that he has no way of knowing the sun will come up tomorrow, beyond his own experience that it has every day in the past, so he has faith that it will continue to do so.
He's obviously channeling Hume by relying upon the false dilemma fallacy of absolute certainty and zero certainty. We cannot have absolute certainty that the Sun will rise tomorrow, but the accumulation of vast amounts of data consistent with that hypothesis means that the logical probability of this event is extremely high.

In the end, his argument is simply nothing more than the dressed-up black and white fallacy that all hypotheses lacking absolute certainty are therefore of equally poor reliability, hence "faith".
That's why he's "suppressing the evidence" -- he views the evidence of the sun having always risen to be common to both a scientific reasoning and a faith-based conclusion, so inadmissable.
Except he's wrong. Faith requires no evidence whatsoever.
In short, he's saying that expecting something to happen because it always has is faith.
No, it is logical induction. Contrary to Hume, logical induction is not always wrong; we can test Hume's argument against induction by pointing out that its logic leads to the conclusion that there is just as much probability of the Sun rising in the West as there is for it rising in the East tomorrow, and then noting that this is manifestly false. I made a post about this a long time ago in the SLAM forum.

There is also Popper's falsification argument, which runs closer to the philosophical underpinnings of the scientific method.

Also, even if one accepts his absurd argument that logical induction is the same thing as "faith" (even though it's not), the fact would remain that a "faith" based on physical evidence is still vastly superior to a "faith" based on nothing but itself.
The stupid burns, but I don't know how to actually attack it without just resorting to saying "the stupid, it burns!"
It's not stupid, it's dishonest. He knows perfectly well that it doesn't take religious faith to think that the Sun will rise tomorrow.
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Post by Surlethe »

The only faith necessary for believing the sun will rise tomorrow is faith that the universe is rational and consistent -- i.e., the faith we all use to function in our everyday life by rejecting solipsism. Religion adds extra terms to the same basic faith everyone has in common, and therefore requires more faith than science, so his entire argument relies on the dishonest assumption that everyday functioning requires the same amount of faith as religion, which is, of course, patently false: any atheist is a handy counterexample.
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Post by Darth Wong »

Accuse him of lying when he says it's pure faith rather than reason which tells him that the Sun rises in the East rather than the West. By way of proof, ask him how much money he is willing to wager on the Sun rising in the West rather than the East tomorrow. Indicate that you are perfectly willing to bet every penny you own that it will rise in the East :wink:
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"you guys are fascinated with the use of those "rules of logic" to the extent that you don't really want to discussus anything."- GC

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Post by McC »

I can guarantee you that he will say, "I have faith that the sun will continue to do what it's been doing, so I won't take that bet." He's basically changing the definition of faith to mean induction in this case, and he's getting pissy that I keep calling him on it (saying that I have an annoying habit of telling people what they're saying). My response included a quote from Lincoln: "How many legs does a dog have if you call a tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg."
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Post by McC »

And predictably, he exited the debate and called me an extremist.

Because rationalism is extreme. "This keyboard is really real!" Riiiight... :roll:
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Post by Metatwaddle »

McC wrote:And predictably, he exited the debate and called me an extremist.
I think you've just won. Congratulations! :D
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Post by McC »

I disagree. I didn't lose, but I didn't win either.

"True victory comes when you show your opponent they were wrong to oppose you in the first place."

In other words, I haven't won until he's a rationalist.
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Post by DPDarkPrimus »

Maybe after he takes a high school philosophy course, the instructor will bitchslap some sense into him.
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Post by McC »

DPDarkPrimus wrote:Maybe after he takes a high school philosophy course, the instructor will bitchslap some sense into him.
Little chance of that. He's in his early 30s.
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Post by McC »

We've moved off the whole inductive sun topic, and I've moved on to discussing religion and science from a purely philosophical perspective with someone else.

Is there a pursely philosophical refutation of religious philosophy? By which I mean one couched exclusively in logic, that shows religion (in general, not just one breed of it) to be internally fallacious? This particular argument is interesting to me, because it refuses to "allow" for empiricism, which is part of the philosophy of science. The individual in question is actually more or less like me -- an ignostic of sorts, who is mostly playing philosopher and Devil's Advocate at this point in the discussion, and purely for the joy of indulging in philosophical discussion.

So far, I haven't figured out a way to discredit religion on a purely philosophical level. DW, you keep mentioning that it's a "bad" philosophy. Is there a way to show this, without resorting to another philosophy (i.e. religion is bad because it isn't useful is an aspect of utilitarianism, in that something's merits are based on its usefulness, which is itself another philosophy, so that refutation doesn't work)?
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Post by Darth Wong »

Religion is an inferior philosophy because it has no way of rejecting bad ideas. Logic is an example of a philosophical system which does not rely upon empirical observations, but it does have mechanisms for rejecting bad ideas. The problem with religion as a generalized philosophical approach is that it literally has no way of deciding that an idea is a bad one. Any idea, no matter how absurd or even illogical, must be taken seriously by religion as a generalized philosophy.

Of course, certain specific religions have plenty of methods for rejecting bad ideas (such as fundamentalists, who can quote chapter and verse), but those mechanisms are self-contradictory because the source material is self-contradictory, not to mention being based entirely upon a massive Appeal to Authority fallacy, which makes fundamentalism into a different kind of inferior philosophy.

No matter how you slice it, religion is an inferior philosophy. Vague religion has no way of rejecting bad ideas, and fundamentalist religion is fallacious.
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Post by Rye »

Surlethe wrote:The only faith necessary for believing the sun will rise tomorrow is faith that the universe is rational and consistent -- i.e., the faith we all use to function in our everyday life by rejecting solipsism.
That isn't faith, faith cannot apply to the acceptence of reason itself as a basis for knowledge, faith is the rebellion against evidence and extrapolation as the means of gaining knowledge, replacing it with desire for something to be true and self-referential delusion. It's also impossible to recognise solipsism through knowledge; rendering it metawank, rather than reasoned or discovered.

The idea that the universe could turn inconsistent at any moment is not based on anything, it is an unfounded hypothesis, thus we've got no justification for contemplating it as realistic without shooting ourselves in the foot by doubting all our knowledge, including the concept of consistency.
Religion adds extra terms to the same basic faith everyone has in common, and therefore requires more faith than science, so his entire argument relies on the dishonest assumption that everyday functioning requires the same amount of faith as religion, which is, of course, patently false: any atheist is a handy counterexample.
I regularly argue with an idiot that thinks that atheism is faith-based because "an ant is to human what human is to x" is a logically valid argument for God(x)'s existence. Since the atheist is denying this "valid" inductive argument without a definitive disproof, they're going on faith. :lol:
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Post by Pint0 Xtreme »

McC wrote:I disagree. I didn't lose, but I didn't win either.

"True victory comes when you show your opponent they were wrong to oppose you in the first place."

In other words, I haven't won until he's a rationalist.
Most people are too arrogant to concede defeat when they've lost an argument. To that extent, the opinions of your audience is a better criteria for determining victory. Of course, if you were debating in a highly rabid right-wing forum (ie. Protest Warrior), you've "lost" before you even started arguing.
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Post by DPDarkPrimus »

Pint0 Xtreme wrote:Of course, if you were debating in a highly rabid right-wing forum (ie. Protest Warrior), you've "lost" before you even started arguing.
But laughing your ass off with some of the staff via PMs over the tantrums they threw made it entertaining for a while. :P
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Post by wolveraptor »

You're laughing with the staff over tantrums the staff threw? Are they laughing at themselves? Somehow, I thought they took politics and their own alignments seriously at Protest Warrior.
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Post by DPDarkPrimus »

wolveraptor wrote:You're laughing with the staff over tantrums the staff threw? Are they laughing at themselves?
"Over the tantrums some of the posters threw", it should read.
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Re: "Science and Religion are Philosophical Viewpoints&

Post by PainRack »

defanatic wrote: Religion is the sole cause of some wars. What would convince a Guv to go out and conquer a piece of worthless land thousands of miles away. That bit of worthless land is also heavily defended for the same reasons the Guv wants it. That reason would be religion (Crusades..? Heard of them? No?).

The evidence for religion is silly.
Hate to disagree here, but while the justification of the Crusades were religious, the cause wasn't. After all, throughout the centuries, the Church and Europe had been content to let the muslims pillage and conquer their way throughout the Middle East and Spain.

One can argue that it was the control of the spice routes and the debiliating outflow of a trade deficit that provided much of the impetus for war.
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Post by mr friendly guy »

McC wrote:I disagree. I didn't lose, but I didn't win either.

"True victory comes when you show your opponent they were wrong to oppose you in the first place."

In other words, I haven't won until he's a rationalist.
He is too stupid you effectively can't win. I will consider it a victory if you humiliate him such that he runs away.
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Post by wolveraptor »

DPDarkPrimus wrote:
wolveraptor wrote:You're laughing with the staff over tantrums the staff threw? Are they laughing at themselves?
"Over the tantrums some of the posters threw", it should read.
Ah, I see. Off topic: do you know how to stop Protest Warrior from flooding your inbox with e-mails on watched topics? Is there any way to turn off that function? I stopped posting there partly because of the dumbasses, and partly because my inbox had aroun 200 new messages a day.

On the subject of victory: I consider McC's definiction of victory to be impossible 99% of the time, especially over the internet. The guy may have forgotten your argument in an hour.
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