The evolution of an atheist.

True...I was lazy in defining the problem and made an invalid assumption - schoolboy error in fact. (especially since I was discussing Cantor's hierarchy of infinities not that long ago on the science forums :-) )Obviously the last part of that argument (last para above) falls.Edited by Bikerman, : No reason given.

OK first I absolutely accept that many scientists are far from enamoured with philosophy. In fact at first I thought you might be one of the science forums regulars because this debate is very reminiscent of many similar ones we have had.

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Why do you think that's a problem with empiricism and not with logic? Maybe it's the notion of axiomatic derivation that has the fundamental flaw, not the notion of empiric gathering of knowledge.

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It certainly isn't a problem with empiricism, simply a suggested change of focus. Better to try to gather the one piece of data that disproves the hypothesis than gather a million supporting examples...therefore design the tests to falsify the hypothesis not simply to confirm it (choose boundary cases or make bold predictions at the limit of the hypothesis).

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Much valid science predates Popper. We even continue to use Mendel's genetics from over 100 years from before "The Logic of Scientific Discovery." Bayes has done far more to prevent fundamental errors in the practice of science than anything Popper has done.

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I agree that much valid science predates Popper but there has been an paradigm shift because of his work.
Falsifiability is now generally understood as a key element in scientific demarcation and scientific method. The notion that an hypothesis should be testable and potentially falsified to be considered scientific is pretty universal now. Also the notion that the power of an hypothesis is a function of how easy it is to refute flows directly from this. Until Popper science was infested with pseudo-science like Freudianism simply because there was no agreed way of saying what was and was not science. There were vague notions of empiricism, but no clear line in the sand. Popper provides that and in doing so frees science from many of parasites that used to cling to its coat-tails with impugnity.

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Every scientist I've ever met has heard of Bayes; I can think of only one who had heard of Karl Popper before I brought it up. (Largely their response to my description of his philosophy is something akin to "...and what's the punchline?")

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That surprises me. I would have thought that most undergrad science courses would have had at least a module on scientific method and demarcation/philosophy. I suspect that the 'what is the punchline' comment means 'it is obvious' - but it wasn't. Yes, it should be obvious to anyone studying science now because it has been absorbed so that it is no longer even notable. Go back to pre 1930 and there is no clear scientific demarcation, and a scientific method which Aristotle would have recognised and which was unclear and over-reliant on inductive method. Popper et al clarify, simplify and set the basis for modern scientific method, peer-review and demarcation. You don't need telling that one reading/observation can refute a hypothesis and require it to be modified or ditched. Scientists of the 18th and 19th century DID need telling so because they generally did not look to falsify but to confirm. That is a much weaker method and leaves too much chaff surviving. Attack the theory head on, and determined to falsify it (just as most juries on the professional journals do) and you quickly cut through the bull.

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If there's a way to resolve these questions, they'll be resolved by scientists doing science, not philosophers doing philosophy. In the meantime philosophers will borrow the language of biology and physics to produce stuff indistinguishable from Sokal's classic hoax.

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No, scientists will do what they get grants to do. Meanwhile their grant awarding bodies will be influenced by philosophy, economics and a range of other considerations. Yes, I agree that philosophy can be a refuge for pedants, sophists and those with nothing to say but an overwhelming urge to say it. I don't think it is either fair or accurate to characterise the whole discipline, or even the majority, in that way.

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And yet I can't find any philosophers in any science labs. I can't find Kant next to the lab manuals in any science course. My wife's new Nanodrop spectrophotometer didn't come with a manual on the philosophical implications of Beer's law. I can't find a single scientist who turns to Popper when he has a question about experimental design.

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Again I am surprised. Do the designers not seek to push the boundaries and go for cases where the hypothesis should be stretched, rather than the safe middle ground? Actually I know they do because I speak regularly to physicists, biologists and chemists in the science forums. If they don't then they are not designing their experiments as well as they could or should.

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But I can find legions of philosophers like Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini who evince less than a freshman understanding of the science of evolution, yet pen a ridiculous strawman attack against it:

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Yes but come on - I can find large numbers of computer 'scientists' and engineers who are avid creationists (I don't know what it is about computer science or engineering, but it is certainly the case). It means nothing. We don't damn engineering because a proportion of engineers have loony-tunes views, nor should we do so for philosophy.

OK I started a new thread on this segment - Philosophy and Science

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Even though the brain may not be as quick as it was, it hasn't changed the essential me.

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That is common to most if not all people but it doesn't actually tell you anything. I'm pushing 50 and I still feel 'me' (who else?) but I kjnow intellectually that I am not. I can look back at things I wrote 20plus years ago and wonder who the hell it was who wrote them - even though I know it was me. Your views on lots of things change, but they change incrementally over time and you don't notice until you have reason to.
You can't test the feeling of 'me-ness' but you can test all sorts of related things - beliefs, opinions, mental agility, memory/recall, spatial reasoning etc etc and they all change with age.I also still don't see how you can equate believing in nothing with a belief. Most of us don't believe in Thor, Hermes, Rah (and another few thousand Gods). Are all those lack of beliefs themselves beliefs? Did you have a belief regarding Rah until I mentioned the name?

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You say that you are an atheist which means that you believe that there is no god(s). You can't prove it so therefore you have to believe that you are correct. Atheism is a belief just as much as Christianity is.

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Not believing in something is not the same as asserting it does not exist.
Do you believe in the Invisible Pink Unicorn?
Are you sure she doesn't exist?
Since I have not asserted that God does not exist, yet I do not believe in God, I see no contradiction and I see no belief.

Yes I can define it.
I know that it is possible, however remote, that God exists, in the same way that I know it is possible, however remote, that there is an aether. I do not think any of them is true and I am prepared to make my case that neither is, but I will not say that I am certain of either.
Hence I deny that I have any belief in either case. I am persuaded by the evidence, and if the evidence changes then my position will change. If you want to use the word belief for this then I can see how it can be defended, but not as a synonymous term for belief in god. Belief can be regarded as adopting a position without proper evidence, based on emotional or unsubstantiated opinion. I have no such position.
Deists like to classify atheism as a belief because it puts it on the same footing as belief in the supernatural - or so they believe. It doesn't. I have no belief either way about Gods. I accept the poor evidence for any God, just as I accept the poor evidence for any aether.The word 'faith' is even more problematic. Faith is best defined, I think, as belief even in spite of evidence. I do not adopt faith positions as a rule.I also completely reject the use of faith as being necessary to define an ethical stance. As I have explained before, the Universal ethic is based on entirely rational principles and that is the ethic I follow (or try to).Edited by Bikerman, : No reason given.

I'm sure I've explained this before..maybe it was another forum...
OK, the notion that atheists are somehow nihilistic forlorn people with no central meaning to their lives is commonly put about by theists and it is ridiculous. Most theists probably spend a few minutes a day (if that in many cases) thinking about God. The rest of the time they do what I do - get on with life.
It is doubly stupid because, let's face it, very very few religious people actually believe what their church tells them. For catholics to use contraception would be crazy if they really think there is a heaven and hell. It would be certifiable to even think about condoms and face an infinity of torment. Yet Italy has one of the lowest birth rates in the world - and don't tell me the rhythm method has suddenly started working better :-)The only people I see who really believe what their scriptures and clerics tell them about the afterlife are Al-Queda and the Taliban. They KNOW that this life is nothing, and it is all about the next one. They really do believe it. As for the rest? It is a social club with a bit of singing on Sundays.As for the universal ethic:
http://www.foldvary.net/works/ue1.html

The problem is entirely semantic conditioning. We have a language which is deficient in this particular area - which is our own fault, of course. The word belief is used ambiguously all the time, until it doesn't actually have an unambiguous use any more. That's why I try to avoid the word altogether - it is worse than useless since it allows easy deciet.I accept what I understand the best evidence to propose. If there is more evidence for A than B then I will tend to accept A. I am trying to think of exceptions but non come to mind. What does come to mind is that there are 2 situations when this approach does not work.a) When the competing possibilities cannot be separated by evidence.b) When dealing with philosophical areas - right/wrong/justice/fairness - basically the human squishy bits rather than physical non-living systems.I don't want to fire this thread on a sidetrack, having started another on philosophy already, but I genuinely think that is a sensible statement of the situation.Obviously science can feed into the squishy bits. The scientific method can ensure that what data we do have is as good as it can be. But the decision is ultimately one of judgement/experience and, yes, belief (but only to the extent that anything is ultimately axiomatic, including science - science starts with a few axioms - that the universe will behave consistently, or relatively so. I mean, if the physical constants DID actually change over time then science is screwed. We don't think it is reasonable that they did - and if they had then it must have been in specific ways, but I cannot state with certainty that c is constant back to t=0).There, though, the similarity ends, because science has one crucial advantage - it is constantly referenced/tested against observation/experiment. No other subject or mode of thought is, or can be. That alone is a clinching argument for preferring the scientific method, where it is applicable, over any alternative.Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Add more blank lines.

Indeed, and we are surrounded by examples - children. Dawkins fumes about infants being called 'Christian' or 'Jewish' and he is dead right. We wouldn't call a toddler a marxist or a conservative, so why is it ok to call them Catholic or Anglican? They are atheists in any real definition since even if they have a coherent conception of God is, which is doubtful, it is not 'belief in a deity' in any sense that would be understood by most people...Edited by Bikerman, : No reason given.

So you believe what your church teaches. Do you believe what other Christian churches teach? What about the catholics? Do you think they are just doctrinally incorrect? If I look across the scope at what various Christian churches teach then I'm struck by the lack of a unifying theme. We go from the Gnostic end - Jesus was a good man, but not Divine, and the philosophy is the real message; to the ultra-literalist end - the bible is the literal word of God and must be interpreted literally.

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Do I believe in God's message of love, truth, mercy, forgiveness, justice etc, while living it out in my life for its own sake, or is my life based out looking out for number one.

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A completely bogus suggestion. False dichotomy.

Indeed it isn't distributive (ie a=NOT b does not mean b=NOT a).You cannot reject solid fact and still be rational. You can reject personal testimony and assertion

But it isn't a 2-way choice, and it has bugger-all to do with religion. You seem to be implying religion is the meaning and therefore atheism = no meaning.

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There is a case to be made for the existence of that intelligence

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What case is there for the existence of such an intelligence? I have seen none produced yet...
The case against is easy. We know that life evolved on earth. We have several possible mechanisms for how it could have got going in the first place. We know pretty well where the universe originates, and though the theory is developing, there is no requirement, or even role for, a designer - other than possibly setting the quantum numbers on a dial and pressing a button, and even then there are more parsimonious explanations.
Given, then, that there is no requirement for a designer then to propose one it has to be justified in that it brings something to the table. Occam tells us that given the same phenomenon and two or more possible explanations with equal explaining 'power' , the explanation with the fewest additional entities is to be preferred.
So this Creator idea must earn its keep. It makes no predictions that I can think of that are refutable, so it adds no information to that already known. Therefore.....(and the case just becomes even more clear when you take into account that you have added a whole new layer of complexity and not actually solved the basic assumption which leads you to propose the designer - viz who designed the designer. It is just regression in the name of avoiding it)Edited by Bikerman, : No reason given.

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Let's assume that science can produce a chemical solution to abiogensis. We would think ourselves very clever but in order for that to happen someone would have to reproduce the situation that first brought life into the world. In other words the scientist in question would be the initiator or the designer if you like of this second abiogenesis. That then begs the question of who or what caused abiogenesis all those millions of years ago.

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This is a nonsense argument. Firstly you don't have to show something happening for it to be scientifically valid. And secondly it doesn't beg any question - begging the question is a fallacy. Any such explanation has to setout what steps are involved and I'm pretty sure none of them will be 'Miracle' or 'Designer'.

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o even after that huge leap forward in science we are still left with the question of whether all things have a material cause or whether there is a cause from an external intelligence.

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No, we aren't. You are, but the logic of your position is unsustainable. Your entire justification is that if we can invent something then it implies any natural analogue requires design. That is classic begging the question. There must be a designer because a designer is required. So like most instances of begging the question, it is also completely tautologous and therefore adds nothing.
It completely misses the point that this is no argument at all because it is regressive - it simply shifts the problem down a stage, it doesn't actually answer the question which you seem to think science needs some help with...Science isn't agnostic. An agnostic is one who doesn't believe the existence of God can be proved or disproved. Science is a way of thinking about things and to that extent it admits no such pre-conditions.The fact is that you still haven't given an answer to 'what evidence'.
The choice is between coherent, logically consistent and self-consistent theories, and nothing at all. There isn't any evidence and science doesn't deal with personal revelation. So there is a scientific explanation, sometimes several competing ones, or there is faith in a creator intelligence, unevidenced. It isn't a choice...