To keep in the spirit of Peanut Gallery for the "Evidence" Great Debate thread I will cease on this thread, and anyone who wants to discuss a topic with me can start a new thread, although I do think most of these issues have been beaten to death.
Whether you close this monster thread and start a new Peanut Gallery for the "bluegenes hypothesis" Great Debate is your call, but it would provide an opportunity to refocus.
In other words: ... the absence of evidence is not by itself (negative) evidence (of absence), rather it is evidence of the absence of (positive) evidence - in the areas where evidence has been sought, and with the methodology\technology used to look for (positive) evidence" -- curiously, it really is basic logic.
In that context, he has made the claim that human imagination is the only source of supernatural beings.
He has proposed the falsifiable theory that human imagination is the only source of supernatural beings. This is based on inductive scientific reasoning (of the sort you have demonstrated your inability to comprehend) and the fact that the human imagination is the only known source of such concepts.
RAZD writes:
Once you make this claim, then it is incumbent on you to show that existing religious documents, and reports of religious experiences documenting supernatural sources, cannot be due to supernatural communications.
"Cannot"? What does "cannot" have to do with anything? You never did grasp the idea of lacking absolute certainty in science did you?
RAZD writes:
You cannot ignore these documents and then assume that your conclusion has any validity.
He hasn't ignored them. Bluegenes theory predicts that where the source of a particular supernatural concept becomes known it will be the human imagination. Do you know of any instance where this has not been the case? A theory with 100% success prediction rate seems like a rather strong theory.....
RAZD writes:
This conclusion of the value of subjective evidence has nothing to do with deities, but everything to do with the value of subjective evidence.
And the validity of that form of evidence is absolutely key to your anti-atheistic arguments. You owe me an apology you stubborn old goat you.
RAZD writes:
I had to post that banner so that you could be induced to talk about other subjective experiences, where you finally admitted that they could be used to suggest possibilities for further investigation, rather than obsessively concentrate on deities.
Your conflation of religious experiences with things like courtroom testimony continues to be untenable.
Surely you aren't really going to great debate petrophysics are you? What is that about? Bluegenes has you by the bollocks so you are going to go and shoot some fish in a barrel to boost your ego?
In other words: ... the absence of evidence is not by itself (negative) evidence (of absence), rather it is evidence of the absence of (positive) evidence
Other than the nonsense where you confused the absence of something with evidence of its absence you are basically correct when you stipulate 'by itself'.
There are cases where the absence of evidence does not give evidence of absence. Such as - when you don't go looking for evidence.
There are cases where the absence of evidence is all the evidence for absence we need. Such as when you look for something you would expect to find if it was there.
The statement 'an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence' is not true in all cases. The only option for you here seems to be to argue that the statement is a meaningless tautology (ie., the absence of any evidence whatsoever is by definition not evidence for anything).
It's not just me, right? RAZD did just finally agree that an absence of evidence can be evidence of absence? He did just agree with something he's argued against for months?
No, there's none at all, which is why rigorous philosophy appears in the exact same journals alongside non-rigorous philosophy. The notion of "rigor" is simply optional in philosophy, which is why the field as a whole lacks it.
One can only assume we read vastly different philosophy journals. Maybe you are reading 'crapshoot philosophy monthly'. I'd throw that over there with the Creation Science and ID journals
It's not just me, right? RAZD did just finally agree that an absence of evidence can be evidence of absence? He did just agree with something he's argued against for months?
I don't know: you see, my head has recently imploded, and I'm not sure I can tell what he's saying at all.
I feel like we're on the precipice of an infinite regress of sorts, and, any time now, a post is going to appear that says something like, "absence for a lack of an absence of evidence is evidence that there is no evidence for an absence of a lack of evidence."
I don't know: in the meantime, I'm just going to assume that the lack of evidence for food on my desk is reason enough to believe that I should go home for dinner now.
Once you make this claim, then it is incumbent on you to show that existing religious documents, and reports of religious experiences documenting supernatural sources, cannot be due to supernatural communications.
"Cannot"? What does "cannot" have to do with anything? You never did grasp the idea of lacking absolute certainty in science did you?
Agreed. And this is falling into the pit of proving a negative. Bad, bad, bad way to word this, brother RAZD.
RAZD writes:
You cannot ignore these documents and then assume that your conclusion has any validity.
He hasn't ignored them. Bluegenes theory predicts that where the source of a particular supernatural concept becomes known it will be the human imagination. Do you know of any instance where this has not been the case? A theory with 100% success prediction rate seems like a rather strong theory.....
True dat...but now I wonder: is this EvC forum considered to be a good place to publish things and get the proper peer reviews? I am thinking "NOT".
Your conflation of religious experiences with things like courtroom testimony continues to be untenable.
Surely you aren't really going to great debate petrophysics are you? What is that about? Bluegenes has you by the bollocks so you are going to go and shoot some fish in a barrel to boost your ego?
bluegenes does not have RAZD by the bollocks. RAZD may have his faults, but the point remains - we have yet to see "hands getting dirty" aspects from bluegenes to support "plenty of evidence". I do like his YEC evidence (the age of earth > 6000yrs, ruling out the YEC Yahweh, an argument so thoroughly pulverized by RAZD himself over these years & threads here). But the predominant type of evidence presented thus far is nothing more than the lovely philosophical conjecture of a post-dinner drawing room discussion - in those famous comfortable armchairs, coupled with mankind's current forays into the knowledge of logic. Sitting in a room without windows and telling us the weather outside by relying on equipment mounted miles away and extrapolating that it is the same outside without actually getting up and looking outside is Shirley (poor girl) walking naked into a huge embarrassment.
Again, may I remind you of the Van Gogh painting scenario I brought up eons ago...an exhibit of Van Gogh paintings....one of the paintings is of the moon landing by Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin. Armchair aficionados sitting on the opposite side of the exhibit room will quickly latch onto the fact that Van Gogh was very dead by the time the moon landing was made and therefore he would have had to have been Clairvoyant Beyond Belief or Lucky or something that BASICALLY could not have really really happened and that THEREFORE the painting is a fake. They smugly smile and nod around to each other "yup - a fake". But wait - here's a chemist examining the painting under scientific equipment actually at the painting and finding out it isn't even dry yet. Heck, here's the town drunk lurching into it and smearing the paint. The difference? Enormous difference. In these cases we have have to rely on some kind of probability assessment in our heads. In the 1st case we have a weatherman seated in a windowless room reading his out-of-town barometer & such, which sent remote electronic signals over telephone lines received and then portrayed on his PC screen in livid color - all state of the art equipment & software - and concluding it's not raining outside. In the 2nd case we have a weatherman actually getting up out of his chair and going outside and looking up at the sky and, not completely relying on his eyes and his skin, holding out, say, a huge sheet of something like ordinary litmus paper for a few minutes looking for drops upon this sensitive paper and concluding it's not raining. In the 3rd case we have philosophers arguing that the odds on clairvoyance or sheer coincidental hallucinatory flat-out dumb luck rule against it being anything more than a fake, while not being able to drive the chance completely to 0.0. In the 4th case we have clear & present objective evidence that the painting is a fake that drives it orders of magnitude closer to 0.0. Who has the greater probability of being wrong? Isn't science all about getting the best evidence possible? Isn't science about getting your hands dirty (or at least wet)? (Or maybe getting some paint on your shirt?) Science is not done from an armchair.
"A good idea, a little too simple perhaps - but on the right track.", says Pascal Boyer. No, not really. But he did say
The findings emerging from this cognitive evolutionary approach challenge two central tenets of most established religions. First, the notion that their particular creed differs from all other (supposedly misguided) faiths; second, that it is only because of extraordinary events or the actual presence of supernatural agents that religious ideas have taken shape. On the contrary, we now know that all versions of religion are based on very similar tacit assumptions, and that all it takes to imagine supernatural agents are normal human minds processing information in the most natural way.
Knowing, even accepting these conclusions is unlikely to undermine religious commitment. Some form of religious thinking seems to be the path of least resistance for our cognitive systems. By contrast, disbelief is generally the result of deliberate, effortful work against our natural cognitive dispositions hardly the easiest ideology to propagate
In this sense, religion is vastly more natural than the sleep of reason argument would suggest. People do not adhere to concepts of invisible ghosts or ancestors or spirits because they suspend ordinary cognitive resources, but rather because they use these cognitive resources in a context for which they were not designed in the first place. However, the tweaking of ordinary cognition that is required to sustain religious thought is so small that one should not be surprised if religious concepts are so widespread and so resistant to argument. To some extent, the situation is similar to domains where science has clearly demonstrated the limits or falsity of our common intuitions. We now know that solid objects are largely made up of empty space, that our minds are only billions of neurons firing in ordered ways, that some physical processes can go backwards in time, that species do not have an eternal essence, that gravitation is a curvature of space-time. Yet even scientists go through their daily lives with an intuitive commitment to solid objects being full of matter, to people having non-physical minds, to time being irreversible, to cats being essentially different from dogs, and to objects falling down because they are heavy.
Or J Anderson Thomson gives a good overview for the hypothesis currently being explored by cognitive scientists, psychiatrists etc. Rather than the simplistic 'human imagination' it is basically that religion acts a super stimulator for our evolved brain (much like soft drinks and big macs are superstimulating versions of protein and sugar which we evolved to pursue). Supernatural agency is part of this this theory. Here is a somewhat informal presentation of the ideas in case you hadn't watched it.
Is this the ballpark you were looking towards? There are lots of papers out there, spread around discussing agency detection, counterintuitive concepts and so on, I can't see much in the way of review material. Still, given we're talking about getting dirty in the brain which is still a complex hard to understand place - I think the work so far is pretty good and generally supportive of bluegenes' theory if we're open enough about 'human imagination'.
Good morning to all. Hate to interupt your discussion but I just thought this was to good for the peanut gallery not to contribute to. In the "Did the biblical exodus ever happen" thread Jar posts an objection to Ron Wyatts image of a supposed alterd image of a man worshipping a golden calf. Message 415 I just thought I would repost the image I found of the same scene here and see what responses from the gallery I could solicate. Personaly I don't see how this image could be anything other than a person "worshipping" a calf.
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