Why "Immaterial Pink Unicorns" are not a logical argument

RAZD,This is all semantics, to accept one proposition without a reasonable level of evidence but reject others is special pleading, & intellectually hypocritical. You can twist & turn like a twisty turny thing, but it won't change this fact.I don't know why you are arguing.Mark

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There are 10 kinds of people in this world; those that understand binary, & those that don't

onifre responds to me:

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If RAZD, or anyone, is saying that they can "interact" with said god outside of their experience

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Who said anything about "outside of their experience"? If there is an experience, then there is necessarily an interaction. Again, just because it was experienced only by an individual doesn't mean it is necessarily unreal. Uncorroborated, yes, but not unreal.

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Re-read my posts in their entirety, you'll see that my argument has not been in support of god, but in support of the experience itself.

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Re-read my posts in their entirety and you'll see that my argument has not been against the experience but rather to point out that the IPU (BBHH) satisfies all the same criteria as this "god" of those who claim deism.So why is "god" considered a (potentially) valid conclusion while the IPU (BBHH) is dismissed out of hand?

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

Yes, for that person.Enjoy.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand
Rebel American Zen Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.

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Black and white. No grey. Just like the fundamentalist creationist, it seems. I guess that means no real agnostic possibilities either, no matter how much it is claimed.Enjoy.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand
Rebel American Zen Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.

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• • • Join the effort to solve medical problems, AIDS/HIV, Cancer and more with Team EvC! (click) • • •

see reply here

No argument from me there. Fuck! Finally we agree on something.But does that mean in any way that the IPU actually exists as an objective entity distinct and seperate from the person having the experience?If your answer to this question is 'No' then welcome to the atheist conclusion.Come RAZ. Join the dark side..........(Hssssss Hssssss - Darth Vader breathing noises)

Concepts either have an objective evidential basis or they do not. This much at least is black and white.Lets be frank here.Even you seem to have given up the ghost on this topic. The IPU and the possibility of alien life are not evidentially equivalent. The IPU and deities are. Given that the IPU was specifically created for the purpose of demonstrating the irrationality and illogic of belief in the unevidenced it would be surprising if this were not so.You were onto a sure fire loser from the start in this thread. It is to your credit that you have dragged it out this long.The reason that you were onto a sure fire loser is because you are coming at this from a different, and I believe flawed, angle to everyone else.I would summarise (and I am genuinely attempting to be fair here) your whole argument as something along the following lines:There is a sliding scale of evidence. All conclusions are based on evidence and subjective world view. The more evidence there is available the less subjective world view plays a part. The less evidence there is available the more subjective world view plays a part. Thus any conclusions made in the absence of all evidence are 100% subjective world view. Hence deistic and atheistic conclusions are wholly equal. "Equal sides of the same coin" as I believe you put it.You have then gone on to attempt to show this sliding scale of evidence, your "shades of grey", through the use of ever less evidenced examples - alien life, alien visitation etc. etc.Is this a fair summary of your argument to date?If so you should take note that it is not a case of me not understanding your argument.Rather it is that I find it completely flawed with regard to wholly unevidenced claims derived purely from subjective "evidence" for the following reasons:1) There is no such thing as a vacuum of ALL objective evidence. You may dismiss the argument that "people make things up" as trivial and superficial but it is actually both highly evidenced and incredibly powerful. It is also the only thing that distinguishes your deity from the IPU in any remotely evidential sense at all.Why do you reject the IPU out of hand? Because it is so obviously made up? Absolutely. I could not agree more.Why is your deity less easy to reject? Because it is much less obviously a made up entity? Absolutely. I could not agree more.People seem to have an almost limitless capacity for creating concepts that are not 'real'. It comes to us as easily as breathing.Given motivation to do so - e.g. to make a fellow debator and his irrational belief in the unevidenced look foolish - and we will create an endless array of such concepts. Hence the IPU and all those other examples you were besieged with early on in the other thread.The difference between me and you is that I apply the same logic to your deity too. The motivation for creating your deity may be more sophisticated than that for creating Wagwah, or the face sucking jellyfish or whatever. It may be more complex. It may, arguably, even be more valid.But at the end of the day there is the motivation to create such a concept there. There is also arguably motivation to create this concept in such a way as for it to be effectively immune from disproof.Given the motivation to create such a concept the ability to do it is so humanly innate that there is little doubt it will be created. Lo and behold that is exactly what we are being faced with.Hence the "deities are almost certainly human inventions" line.I don't really see how anyone can refute this.2) To me evidence is the means by which we distinguish truth from falsehood. Using anything oxymoronically known as subjective "evidence" to do this is demonstrably pointless. We always base our empirical decisions on some evidence. Even that which we call gut instinct is more of an attempt at an ill informed educated guess 99% of the time.The sort of wholly subjective "evidence" required to conclude that gods exist would not be employed to reach any other conclusion in life. It certainly would not be used to draw verifiable or refutable conclusions? Why?Because they would be repeatedly proved wrong. That is why faith only ever applies to those things which are designed to be irrefutable. If anyone tried to apply faith based thinking to anything that could be refuted there is little doubt that they would soon give up on it as a method of establishing truth on the basis of it being wholly ineffective.So why would anyone think that subjectively derived faith based conclusions are any more likely to be correct regarding the objective existence of supernatural undetectable beings than they would be regarding the any other physically verifiable conclusion?Would we use subjective evidence and faith to determine whether or not the Higgs boson actually exists? No? Why not if this is a valid form of evidence?Would we use subjective evidence and faith to determine the spread of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation across the universe? No? Why not if this is a valid form of evidence?If subjective evidence and faith were valid means of establishing truth we could save ourselves a hell of a lot of money on expensive experiments. Instead we could just know.Subjective personal experiences are just that. Personal subjective experiences. This does not lessen their meaning or diminsh their validity as personal experiences. But it does mean that they are of little value in determining and establishing objective truths.Objective truths such as the actual existence of supernatural beings distinct and seperate from those humans that experience them.So is it possible that gods and other wholly unevidenced phenomenon exist? Yes it is.But everything we know suggests that such claims are human inventions and that the likelihood of someone having stumbled across an objective truth on the basis of no evidence at all is about as likely as a nomadic hunter gatherer from the dawn of humanity conceiving quantum mechanics.Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

I get it, I’m not wanted but as all this interests me, will try one last time without any attempt at subtlety and then crawl back in my cave.Is it possible for a Turing machine to do science, or did Einstein have a vision of an IPU so beautiful that he then back-filled the logic?If the latter then by extension, what if someone has a vision of an IPU that takes many years to fully post-rationalize, such as strings.Then by one more extension, can there be IPUs so magnificent, so beguiling, that words just don’t do them justice and further explanation is/should be superfluous.Call them coping mechanisms, call them viruses, call them Starry Night or Beethoven’s 7th. My contention is just that all branches of thought have their limitations, and that some ideas cannot be objectively, rationally, expressed and yet can still be meaningful because we evolved that way. Perhaps it’s baggage or maybe it’s because we can see more than Turing machines, time may tell.Thanks if you read this far, and onifre, just for you, different sig.

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Can we ever truly know when our philosophy assignment is due?

Hey Straggler,I think you're pretty close, but you have some misconceptions on how someone thinks the IPU argument is different (at least in how it pertains to me). Not only is it much less obviously made up, but my own personal subjective experience of god wasn't made up at all. To me it was real and that is convincing. That other people are having very similiar experiences (even if we interpret them differenctly), while not technically showing that they're not made up, allows me to believe that they don't have to be made up. And for things that we probably will never know the veracity of, and cannot obtain objective evidence for or against, you can abandon the effort to distinguish or you can keep searching through the subjective evidnence. Its not that god definately exists objectively, its that they are convinced and believe that it does.It makes sense to them. Because the determination is unreliable and future scientific descoveries would be riding on it. Its very important and it matters.Determining if you believe in god or not only really matters for yourself. Is god's existence really trying to be established as an objective truth though? But my subjective experiences tell me otherwise. I know I didn't make mine up so I can also believe that others haven't made their's up.

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Science fails to recognize the single most potent element of human existence.
Letting the reigns go to the unfolding is faith, faith, faith, faith.
Science has failed our world.
Science has failed our Mother Earth.
-System of a Down, "Science"He who makes a beast out of himself, gets rid of the pain of being a man.
-Avenged Sevenfold, "Bat Country"

Nobody is suggesting that the experiences are fabrications (well nobody in this thread, except perhaps RAZD). I have had many religious experiences all of which were convincing. Those experiences were definitely real.The IPU argument is a handy way to open the door of discussion to why we are associating these experiences with certain culturally convenient ideas such as God or Allah, or Deity, or Vishnu, the Elders, a Leszi etc etc and whether it is wise, consistent, rational or whatever to believe that those associations meaningfully correspond to an external entity. You might not have made up the experience (as in, the experience happened) but the entity you associated that with might well have been a human invention (deliberate or inadvertant). Just as if someone had a religious, subjective experience that the IPU visited them and rescued them from the Purple Oyster it doesn't follow that either of those entities should be believed to exist.If a person, upon confronting the IPU argument, agrees and says "Yes, I could have associated that experience with the IPU had I grown up in a culture infused with the IPU or had I been contemplating the IPU at the time.", then the IPU argument has pretty much served its purpose.If, on the other hand, they dismiss the IPU as an illogical argument with perhaps the suggestion that the IPU is intrinsically silly whereas the Garage-Dragon or the Leszi, the Domovoi or the Djinn is not - then we have something to debate. Such as why that is the case.I think, thought I'd be interested to see data on it, that almost all humans have some kind of 'religious experience' at least once in their lives - Maybe I'm lucky in that I have had many. I know the power that lies behind them and the desire to explain what just happened, even if in only symbolic or metaphorical or poetic kinds of ways. I know how it feels to associate those experiences with a menagerie of entities and 'levels', 'states', 'planes of beings' and so on. The question is: is it a good idea to believe that the poetry is real?Sometimes I am lead to wonder: If everybody had multiple religious experiences with a variety of different metaphysical flavours, if everybody had experienced the power of the brain to fool itself - would there be less belief in deities?Then I realize: Human sight should do the trick, but it never (or rarely at least) does. We 'experience' a wide angled, hi resolution 3D real time full colour visual world. And yet that's a convenient lie when we examine the actual 'data' that our brain receives. Not much of it is in anywhere near the sharp acuity we think it is at any given time, there is plenty of it that is 'blind' (more is completely blind than sharp enough to read with) quite a lot that is colourless: many of the experiences are shortcuts and tricks that can be exposed by optical illusions or even just flat images with a 3D appearance.Now we could say "but I experience full colour vision therefore I believe that it is", and for any given individual that might be true. It would require believing that the individual in question is an exception to the general rule provided to us by the collection of individuals we have studied in detail that all have colourblind peripheral vision and so on and so forth.As far as I am aware, religious experiences are a little more difficult to understand than human vision. But we know enough to be able to recreate them in a lab a statistically significant amount of the time, some people (myself included) can voluntarily invoke one. Certain drugs and certain brain malfunctions (such as those caused during epilepsy) can also result in powerful religious experiences.We can, if we desire, dismiss all that evidence, dismiss the evidence of the quick tendency for the brain to make associates and spot patterns and see conscious intention behind the otherwise unexplained events in our lives, and declare "But my subjective religious experience really did point to a divine external entity of some kind, even if I make no claims about that entity's characteristics!"The IPU is getting left behind though - since her original purpose was to simply show that there needs to be more said than 'I believe in such a such unverifiable unfalsifiable entity' and we are now getting into the territory of saying much more than that. She can be extended to show up a cultural bias with our associations, she can be extended to show that subjective experiences don't necessarily mean what we want them to mean (or think that they mean).Most importantly though the IPU serves her inherited purpose when she shows that it is the believer that has to justify their belief, not the disbeliever who has to justify their disbelief in an entity that there is no way to 'point' at. Believers have to justify why they believe that alien life likely exists - and they have to justify why they believe the Garage-Dragon exists, or the Leszi or the Domovoi or the Djinn - if the believer wants/expects anybody to seriously consider their beliefs. To go full circle and quote Russell:

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If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense...
If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

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To conclude - the IPU isn't a logical fallacy when used to argue against a faith-based belief. On the contrary this thread has perfectly show the contrary: that she forces the believer to confront the reasons why they believe and if the believer wants to be seen as having justification for that belief it puts the believer in the position of having to explain themselves.For the most part the IPU gambit exposes a level of defensiveness, some denial and then, with persistence, the admission of subjectivity and perhaps even arbitrariness in choice (eg., special pleading) on behalf of the believer. Can she be misused? Sure she can. A lot of the time though, she is just misunderstood.

Wow. That's really long, Modulous.I've printed it off and'll read it over some lunch. I'll edit this message with a reply when I get back.

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Straggler has been saying that peoples' tendencies to make things up lends weight to the position in god not existing. Right, if say you're using your subjective experience to conclude that its Jesus.But to conclude a general non-descript god-like thing, especially when the experience is corroborated by many people, doesn't match up as directly to the IPU argument. That's why it doesn't work against the Deist position. Again, with the Deists' god's lack of description, it doesn't leave us much to be invented. It doesn't fit on the argument. Agreed. Again, the Deists' god doesn't fit. On the contrary, is it a good idea to think its bullshit?I don't think it really matters that much in day-to-day life. Those results don't reduce a god being behind some of them.Lets say a ghost opens a door, walks into a room and reveals itself to someone and then disappears. If someone else then comes along and the door opens, that doesn't mean that a ghost had to have walked into the room. It rules out that every time the door a ghost has walked in, but it doesn't rule out the time that the ghost did walk into the room. Are people really expecting others to seriously consider their beliefs based on their own, not the other's, subjective beliefs alone though?

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If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense...
If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

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Who's claiming that "it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it"? As long as those beliefs contian specifics and are expected to be seriously considered.For me to say that my subjective experience has convinced me that some general kind of god-like thing exists is different than the IPU argument. But the pleading is special in that my experience tells me that a god exists but it does not tell me that the IPU exists.Edited by Catholic Scientist, : No reason given.

I accept everything you say about your experiences being real experiences.Nobody is denying this.But that does not mean that the conclusions that you draw from those experiences are objectively valid in the sense that the entities experienced actually exist in any sense that is distinct and seperate from you. If subjective evidence is that unreliable why do you believe anything at all on this basis?RAZD castigates me with mocking accusations of cognitive dissonance for refusing to acknowledge a form of "evidence" so woefully undeserving of the term that even it's proponents refuse to actually use it to form any conclusion that can be verified, refuted or that actually matters in any objective sense.Meanwhile in nearly 600 posts spanning two threads RAZD fails to even once acknowledge the overwhelmingly objectively evidenced fact that deities are quite possibly purely human inventions.Go figure.Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

But they are to me. I don't expect them to be to you. Do I really have a choice? If an experience convinces me then can I choose to no longer be convinced? Its seems more responsive than initiative.

Sorry about the length, I'm procrastinating. Yes, and I reiterated a similar point so I agree. But that doesn't mean your experience was a fabrication. Your experience and god are separate things, yes? The IPU's specific intent in design was to show the absurdity of believing in an entity with contradictory properties. As I have said already on this thread - in this it doesn't really map to an entity with only one property 'divine'.Still 'god-like' is a specific assessment of the cause of the experience isn't it? If we want to utilize an IPU-like counter I could just say why don't you think of it as being an entity that is 'unicorn-like'? (or squid-like, dragon-like, domovoi-like, teapot-like etc)Remember - RAZD opened this thread to talk broadly about the IPU, not about the IPU in relation to Deism specifically. If we're going to generalise we can just talk about 'unfalsifiable and unverifiable entities that are postulated to be the agents behind certain experiential phenomena'Why call these entities 'god' and not 'unicorn', 'noumena', 'Granglepoyvoloks' or... 'unknowns' or 'unexplained', or 'exciting and interesting mysterious experience causers'. No it is not necessarily a good idea to think it is bullshit. But not believing a metaphor is real doesn't translate to thinking it is bullshit, of course.No - it doesn't matter if you think your visual experience is a real reflection of your visual input for most times in your day to day life. Indeed - constantly questioning it would just get in the way. It is, as I said, a convenient lie.Then again, seeing a rain god behind weather patterns is a convenient lie, too.But if you walk into a philosophical argument, you've almost certainly walked into a non-typical element of your day to day life. In such an argument, within its perimeter, it does matter. Of course not. Nor do those results reduce a unicorn being behind some of them, or a Garage Dragon, pixies, elves, face-raping squid, an evil metaphysical 'matrix' scientist. As I said:We can, if we desire, dismiss all that evidence, dismiss the evidence of the quick tendency for the brain to make associates and spot patterns and see conscious intention behind the otherwise unexplained events in our lives, and declare "But my subjective religious experience really did point to a divine external entity of some kind, even if I make no claims about that entity's characteristics!"You want to do that? Fine - go right ahead. I'll point out that it might not actually be true, that there is reason to think it isn't. I might discuss other entities that don't infuse your culture to point out that you might be spinning it with a cultural metaphor and 'believing the poetry'. You might agree. Or you might not. We might argue about it, or we may go our separate ways.If you start thinking I'm being somehow unreasonable or making some kind of error for being sceptical that your experience points to a real (if generic) divine entity - then I'll tell you why I don't think that is the case. And this latter situation is this thread (and a lot of the other one) in a nutshell Some people are, yes. Nobody is claiming exactly that, however the IPU often rears her equine yet indescribably pink head when somebody says "I believe in entity x and those that don't believe in entity x are making error type y". Indeed - this whole debate stemmed from such a pronouncement made by RAZD.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

Yeah, but the context was that the entity was made-up, not the experience.

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Why do you reject the IPU out of hand? Because it is so obviously made up? Absolutely. I could not agree more.
Why is your deity less easy to reject? Because it is much less obviously a made up entity? Absolutely. I could not agree more.

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At least we agree there. For one, its simply because the experience didn't yield that result (Which could take us down the path of just how culturally biased it was. And that's where we get to the corroboration that spans cultures, and we could then get into it possibly spanning species if we wanted to argue about whether or not the Neadertals too had religious beliefs)Additionally though, 'god-like' is kind of a catch all term. Its really not that specific of an assessment (at least not as specific as your other examples). All these people are experiencing things and a lot of them attribute it to something outside of their mind that is spiritual and powerful and a lot like a god. Well then, when we're walking within philosophical arguments then I do think it is a good thing to think the poetry is real. Otherwise the philosophy will be too limited to be able to cover all the plausible possibilities. I don't have a problem with that, but I think that the IPU argument doesn't fit against the Deists' god. I don't know what you're specifically referring to from RAZD.But is he really saying that the error is made for not believing in the same thing he does or is he claiming the error is in thinking that the IPU argument fits against the Deists' god?