Calling Darth Wong or anybody really. Need help.

[bobalot]

Apparently he calls himself an atheist.

[Darth Wong]

Apparently he calls himself an atheist.

That's no different from the "I can't be racist, many of my friends are black" fallacy. It's an attempt to use group-identification to deflect criticism of his arguments. His reasoning is that he can't possibly be using broken fundie logic if he claims to be an atheist: a special case of the "attack the messenger, not the message" fallacy. In this case, it's the "agree with the messenger, not the message" fallacy.

[bobalot]

The guy replies. He has cut out some of my stuff and replied to it.

I have read through your waffle of a response.

In short, you did not understand.

FYI - I am providing a response to your objection which is grounded in Dawkins' reductio qua the "Flying Spaghetti Monster" (you provided equivalent hypothetical beings). If you cannot reply to my response I will just take it that your initial response has been defeated.

This is a direct reversal of the burden of proof, which is called the Negative Proof Fallacy

Uh-huh. But I am not asking the atheist to rule out God, I am just challenging the assumption that all possibilities can be ruled out. Some can be - e.g. the Judeo-Christian God - but other non-specific constructions of God cannot be. This has nothing to do with burden of proof - how can one prove or disprove a logical possibility? It may not be empirically valid (with respect to what is evidentially the case), but it is logically valid as an explanatory option.

You say you read through my response, but if you has you would have seen that i said:

I am not, by the way, saying that the atheist must provide evidence disproving this explanatory option - that is plainly absurd. The burden of proof is not on the atheist here. My point is that science will not do ALL the work for the atheist. If you want to show that the very concept of God as an explanatory agent makes no sense, you will need to appeal to something other than science. Here I think logic will do the job - but not the logic just cited.

Hopefully, this will clarify the issue at stake with regard to burden of proof.

It would be good if you could drop the dogmatic attitude at some point.

Please god, cleanse the world of amateur philosophers.

[bobalot]

I have replied already.

I'm getting tired of this crap about God being a 'Logical argument' as well as a 'scientific argument' , in one swift stroke he takes the argument out of the realm of physical measurement and study and into realm of intellectual wankery.

He has posted elsewhere that "Empiricism can only take you so far', what the hell is that supposed to mean? That we should base our judgment on processes that cannot be tested?

I have failed to understand how 'God' is more logically sound than the tooth fairy. I have reread his post and It sounds like a load of shit to me.

Or how logic can be applied to a supernatural entity?

I'm a regular bloke, not all that clever compared to some of the guys I have seen post here. I do know bullshit though, I can sense it a mile off.

I can sense a whole lot of bullshit from this guy, I really want to pin him down in it. It's frustrating dealing with this guys word games.

[General Zod]

More reversal nonsense. Have him explain why an explanation with God is superior to an explanation that does not depend on God's intervention.

[Darth Wong]

Uh-huh. But I am not asking the atheist to rule out God, I am just challenging the assumption that all possibilities can be ruled out.

Any possibility which is not useful is useless by definition. God is a useless concept. Science has no interest in useless concepts; it has a real job to do. Unlike religion, whose primary function is self-perpetuation and fleecing suckers of their money.

Some can be - e.g. the Judeo-Christian God - but other non-specific constructions of God cannot be.

See above. Utterly useless vague pseudo-ideas can be dismissed until such time as they as proven to be useful. There is no difference between the tooth fairy, the flying spaghetti monster, and Mr. VagueGod here. They're all equally useless, despite his empty and utterly false attempt to characterize Mr. VagueGod as an "explanatory" concept.

This has nothing to do with burden of proof - how can one prove or disprove a logical possibility?

The phrase "logical possibility" is meaningless. Logical conclusions either follow from facts or they don't. In the case of Mr. VagueGod, he does not follow from any particular fact.

It may not be empirically valid (with respect to what is evidentially the case), but it is logically valid as an explanatory option.

If the greatest attribute of Mr. VagueGod is that he's too vague to be disproven, what makes him think he is "explanatory" in any way?

[TC Pilot]

Yeah, I'm almost certain now he's trying to apply the new design argument (explaining why he keeps saying science falls short of explaining the creation of the universe where a god doesn't). It's just that the context doesn't allow him to argue it well, so he's just cramming a square peg in a round hole.

[Wyrm]

Looking back over Hamtarou's wafflings, I notice that his main thrust is that we propose some sort of Deist god that cannot be ruled out by philosophy. The principle weakness of this argument is that it rules out all but an Aleph-2 number of possible Deist gods:

I propose that there is a set of Deist gods out there with the power to create universes capable of intelligent life, whose raison for creation is for mathematics to develop, so that he could observe the mathematicians' analysis of a particular function that he chooses ahead of time. (We might suppose that the purpose of this particular universe is to investigate the Weierstrass function, but literally any function will do — it doesn't even have to be an interesting function, as we are not proposing to know the motives of these gods.) But there are an infinite number of functions — an infinity larger than the continuity — and there's one god for each of these functions, watching out for our development of them.

That's a lotta gods.

So the ungrounded philosophizing has narrowed the number of gods to at least the Aleph-2 infinity. But that's still too many. So much for philosophical wafflings.

[PeZook]

Layman to engineer: I don't understand how this engine works.

Engineer to layman: Oh, it's simple. A fuel-air mixture is ignited by a spark plug, and this pushes the piston down...

Layman: But what causes the mixture to combust?

Engineer: Temperature and chemical properties of the mixture.

Layman: I don't understand that. I think God is a better explanation. Yeah, we should explain explosions as God's intervention. It sounds simpler.

Layman goes away, satisfied with his deep understanding of the underlaying principles of the universe. Even better is the fact that his understanding does not require actual though - anything can be "explained" by saying "God did it!"

That's what all these argument are.

[JBG]

Darth Wong has it right on Occham's razor. It is often much misunderstood by over simplification but it has real and devastating application here.

Further, from Mr Wong:

"Any possibility which is not useful is useless by definition. God is a useless concept. Science has no interest in useless concepts"

This almost sounds like eliminative materialism, which considers religion to be "metaphysics" and accordingly meaningless.

TC Pilot wrote:

"Yeah, I'm almost certain now he's trying to apply the new design argument (explaining why he keeps saying science falls short of explaining the creation of the universe where a god doesn't). It's just that the context doesn't allow him to argue it well, so he's just cramming a square peg in a round hole."

David Hume would be rolling in his grave to hear that there were people that still didn't get his argument against design. Then again the religious right would have had him spinning like a top already before Bobalot's tormentor (!) even learnt to read or write, though he/she still has to learn to think.

Jonathan

[RIPP_n_WIPE]

Any possibility which is not useful is useless by definition. God is a useless concept. Science has no interest in useless concepts; it has a real job to do.

I'm really not trying to be an ass. However this is a posistion I take all the time "If it doesn't have use then you don't worry about it."

However when using this argument couldn't one say "How can you determine what's useful or not. Can't you throw theoretical science in the same boat since it's not useful?". I've yet to come up with this with anothe person and it's mostly been an argument I've come up with to counter my own position (in order to better strengthen it by countering the counter).

[PeZook]

However when using this argument couldn't one say "How can you determine what's useful or not. Can't you throw theoretical science in the same boat since it's not useful?". I've yet to come up with this with anothe person and it's mostly been an argument I've come up with to counter my own position (in order to better strengthen it by countering the counter).

Theoretical science is useful, since it creates models that allow us to predict the behavior of the universe. Raw data gathering is useful because it allows us to verify those models.

It may not be immediately technologically useful, but it's useful all right.

For example, let's take Tschiolkovsky's Equation. It's pure theory: it describes the Delta-V of a rocket based on its mass, the mass of the fuel and the fuel composition. Is it useless?

How about all the basic equations for, say, kinetic energy?

God, on the other hand, does not allow us to predict anything, to explain anything or to verify anything.

[Darth Wong]

Any possibility which is not useful is useless by definition. God is a useless concept. Science has no interest in useless concepts; it has a real job to do.

I'm really not trying to be an ass. However this is a posistion I take all the time "If it doesn't have use then you don't worry about it."

However when using this argument couldn't one say "How can you determine what's useful or not. Can't you throw theoretical science in the same boat since it's not useful?". I've yet to come up with this with anothe person and it's mostly been an argument I've come up with to counter my own position (in order to better strengthen it by countering the counter).

The term "useful" with regard to science means that it is useful for achieving the objective of science, which is to improve the accuracy of our predictive model of the universe. An objective is always implicit in the term "useful". The fact that one cannot see an immediate technological application is irrelevant because that is a different objective.

Interestingly enough, religion once had the same objective as science, until people started to realize a few centuries ago that it absolutely SUCKS at it. Now it has shifted the goalposts and I'm not even sure if it has any clear objectives other than self-perpetuation. Instead of objectives and methods, all it has nowadays are "talking points", which is just a modern term for salesmanship.

[Surlethe]

The finishing touch of the argument is this: given that the goal of science is to continually refine an empirically accurate model of objective reality and given that science works, if an entity exists objectively, then it will exist in the model. Therefore, if an entity does not exist in the model (e.g., it is superfluous or disproven), it does not exist objectively.

[TC Pilot]

David Hume would be rolling in his grave to hear that there were people that still didn't get his argument against design. Then again the religious right would have had him spinning like a top already before Bobalot's tormentor (!) even learnt to read or write, though he/she still has to learn to think.

Nah, that's the old design argument. This is the new one!

[bobalot]

Here is the link to the forum. A crap you may have to wade through if you can be bothered.

[bobalot]

Correction: Here is the link to the forum. There is a lot of crap you may have to wade through if you can be bothered.

I shamelessly stole your responses in this thread to be used on this guy.

[pskouson]

It seems like such a waste of time to be talking about God and science at the same time. Doesn't everyone know that science can't have anything to say about God whatsoever*? That's the thing that really irks me about the creationism/ID stuff**. It's a waste of time, and it distracts people from what they should be thinking about. It it changes the way people think about both God and science, and in a bad way.

What Wong said about 'God did it' not being an explanation at all is probably right on. It begs the question, "How did He do it?" Well, even if you think he works in ways of science about which we know nothing, it still doesn't help unless He reveals these methods. Even such revelation might not even help us because it would be so far over our heads at this point, wouldn't it?

I just reread my post, and I am afraid it sounds disrespectful to any who are reading and believe in God. It was not intended to be disrespectful. I just think that creationism and ID are a waste of time. If you believe in God, that's great! Just don't drag science into it. None of the prophets did, did they?

*The personal search for revelation might be considered a scientific experiment, because it is repeatable (anyone can do it, and many have done it), but I think it doesn't pass the test because most people see it as being too subjective. Even if this is accepted, I don't think it's useful to science; thus it doesn't belong in science class or in a science discussion.

**Note that it's my #1 irk because it is NOT taught in science class in my state. If it were part of my state core, I'm sure it would bug me a lot more.

[Rye]

It seems like such a waste of time to be talking about God and science at the same time. Doesn't everyone know that science can't have anything to say about God whatsoever*?

What makes you think that?

What's the best explanation for someone talking to a disembodied voice and hearing someone speak back in their head, and when another person observes, there's only the person talking? How would a scientist try to determine how many people were talking in that conversation?

I just reread my post, and I am afraid it sounds disrespectful to any who are reading and believe in God. It was not intended to be disrespectful. I just think that creationism and ID are a waste of time. If you believe in God, that's great! Just don't drag science into it. None of the prophets did, did they?

The prophets were around in primitive times and advised their followers to kill thousands of people. If you believe in God, you have rejected your senses and reasoning in favour of an ideal that you desire to be true, and that is not great. That is especially dangerous when it's attached to value systems, especially ones governing life and death. You can believe anything for no reason and from no evidence at all. Of course, most of the time, people just believe what the rest of the tribe does.

*The personal search for revelation might be considered a scientific experiment, because it is repeatable (anyone can do it, and many have done it), but I think it doesn't pass the test because most people see it as being too subjective. Even if this is accepted, I don't think it's useful to science; thus it doesn't belong in science class or in a science discussion.

It'd be useful to psychology wouldn't it?

[Sir Sirius]

It seems like such a waste of time to be talking about God and science at the same time. Doesn't everyone know that science can't have anything to say about God whatsoever*? That's the thing that really irks me about the creationism/ID stuff**. It's a waste of time, and it distracts people from what they should be thinking about. It it changes the way people think about both God and science, and in a bad way.

Bullshit! The notion of a god, especially the creator god of Abrahamic religions, is without a doubt a scientific hypothesis. After all it makes a very profound assertions about the nature and origin of the Universe. And as the notion of a god is a scientific hypothesis, it is a matter in which science most definitely has a say in. Unfortunately for the faithful, the value of the god hypothesis can be summed up with just one word; superfluous. Which is why the (smarter) religious folk like to pretend that god and science are entirely separate and unrelated. And why they would prefer that the matter not be discussed at all.

After all, does anyone actually belief that if scientist discovered something supporting the god hypothesis the religious would simply say "nah, everyone knows that science can't have anything to say about god" and make nothing more of it?

[Kanastrous]

What's the best explanation for someone talking to a disembodied voice and hearing someone speak back in their head, and when another person observes, there's only the person talking? How would a scientist try to determine how many people were talking in that conversation?

Sounds like a job for a psychiatrist, or a neurologist.

No need to appeal to any discipline, outside the physical sciences, there.

[Darth Wong]

It seems like such a waste of time to be talking about God and science at the same time. Doesn't everyone know that science can't have anything to say about God whatsoever*? That's the thing that really irks me about the creationism/ID stuff**. It's a waste of time, and it distracts people from what they should be thinking about. It it changes the way people think about both God and science, and in a bad way.

Bullshit! The notion of a god, especially the creator god of Abrahamic religions, is without a doubt a scientific hypothesis.

I couldn't even count the number of people I've run into who have said similar things. It seems to be a very popular way of reconciling science and religion: simply declare that the two of them occupy completely separate and distinct spaces, and that there's no overlap. The problem is that the moment a religion declares that its deity exists and influences physical events, then it becomes a scientific claim. It's just a lousy one.

[RIPP_n_WIPE]

The finishing touch of the argument is this: given that the goal of science is to continually refine an empirically accurate model of objective reality and given that science works, if an entity exists objectively, then it will exist in the model. Therefore, if an entity does not exist in the model (e.g., it is superfluous or disproven), it does not exist objectively.

I almost spooged when I read that. I think that's totally bad A. However I do have some more questions.

But wouldn't we be limited by what we can observe? How does a god not fit in the model? How can you contend that a god idea is superfluous? Wouldn't that be considered an opinion?

[General Zod]

But wouldn't we be limited by what we can observe? How does a god not fit in the model? How can you contend that a god idea is superfluous? Wouldn't that be considered an opinion?

As far as contending why God is superfluous. . .why is God necessary to explain anything? Explanations for everything else work just fine without any kind of God, so why is the creation of the universe any different?

[PeZook]

A burning, talking bush spontaneously appearing in front of a couple hundred people and recorded with camera phones et all would require a "God" explanation.

Or, at least, someone very powerful with access to incredibly advanced technology, like Q.

Evolution of life doesn't.