Faith vs Science

It does address the point - you just missed it.

If you wish to conclude an agent, you must have evidence of the agent.

The agent may be your Christian god or Zeus. It may be aliens or it may be a natural process. You have no evidence for your particular choice.

It's not relevant what others believe or don't believe; you have no evidence for your tooth fairy.

The atheist's claim is quite different, I don't want to get into the agnostic v atheist thing again but an atheists says that we don't know, so to ascribe it to an un-evidenced agent would be random and most probably wrong (because it's a matter of birth chance which agent you believe in).

We go further and say that the evidence that we do have does not support the existence of any agent. Ergo, the agent most probably doesn't exist. It's not a faith or a belief in anything, it's a conclusion from evidence and from lack of evidence.

Yes, you've switched the argument from the original one of there being an exact equivalence between faith in your god and 'faith' in science, to the existence or otherwise of an unspecified intelligence. I assume you'll now abandon that original claim.

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What is the evidence that you talk about. You can come up with numerous processes such as evolution to explain how life arose but if there is anything that smacks of intelligence it is the evolutionary process.

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But GDR, we can watch evolution happening naturally in, for example, viruses and we can track all its componants in, for example, the peppered moth. We know that the process requires no godly intervention. You have been given other examples of complexity not requiring intelligent intervention, crystals, snowflakes, planets - whole galaxies. It's been raised before that people like Stephen Hawkings claim that the mathematics behind the universe demonstrte that it could pouf itself into existence without any intervention.

Despite hundreds of years of scientific enquiry, no supernatural involvement in our world has ever been shown. In fact exactly the opposite has happened, superstitious and religious beliefs in every area of human life have been shown to be specious and often deliberately fraudulent.

So we have evidence for our environment to have come about entirely naturally, no evidence for it not to have and plenty of evidence that supernatural belief systems are simply wrong.

On top of that, your personal belief has nothing to do with these arguments, you don't believe in a generalised, non-interested, theistic God. You believe in a specific interventionist God who you wouldn't believe in if you'd been born in a village in the Atlas mountains. You're cherry picking and rationalising. You simply have a faith and that faith is the exact opposite of a 'faith' in science.

Yes you have. You responded to this:

To confirm, the scientific 'faith' in evidence based answers to questions is based on KNOWLEDGE not belief. We KNOW things to be facts, we do not have faith in them. I have given you V=I*R as an example of something we know based on evidence and the entire world relies on that knowledge to make everything electrical that we own work. You have not challenged that so let's just accept that as non-controversial should we?

Right, and then you say that I and other atheists must, as a consequence of your irrational belief, have a similar irrational belief to the contrary. It's a non-sequitur.

You have a faith in a Christian God. Because of that faith you claim a intelligent creator. It was in that order wasn't it? You, like millions of others had the belief first and then attempted to rationalise it.

My own experience is that I had a belief because I was taught it at a time before I was able to think for myself - that is the process for all religions everywhere. As I learned more about the world it became obvious that these ritualistic and primitive belief systems were all unsupported human inventions. All their claims are either flat out false or reliant on pure belief. So much is obvious - it simply can't be otherwise; if you study comparative religions objectively you see immediately that people can and will believe anything and everything - we have a superstitious, social mind.

So that's religion written off as bonkers with no supporting evidence whatsoever and plenty to show that it's nothing more than another evolved trait being exploited by people with personal and political ambition.

You obviously disagree with that analysis but it doesn't matter because It still leaves the backstop of an ultimate cause - the final problem - that you now rely on to justify your own superstition.

There's lots of problems to sort out with it. My personal big one is the way this supposed intelligence has deliberately fucked us up. Inorder to survive on this world that this intelligence has created, everything has to kill and eat everything else. This competition for survival and the short, painful lives of disease and tribulation that comes with it, accuses this so called 'intelligence' of being evil. This is a problem that no religion has solved.

So the intelligence if it exists is either non-benign or disinterested. Neither is a useful result, but if I had to choose I'd go with disinterested. The very last thing I want is an ugly supernatural mind taking an interest in me.

But the clincher is that nothing we've ever found points to anything supernatural and science has debunked virtually every piece of magical thinking from dowsing to prayer healing. So the working hypothesis is that everything is natural.

This is where your confusion arises between your faith in something supernatural and my lack of faith in it. it's that way around, I lack your faith, I do not have a faith that everything is natural. I have evidence that everything we've found so far is natural. I expect that to continue. It's a hypothesis, not a belief. "I don't know yet" is quite different from "I believe". Please stop trying to make your belief equivalent to my lack of it.

Childish. If you wish to delete that silly comment I wouldn't object.

As you're addressing this at me, I need to remind you that I haven't the faintest interest in what scripture says - it's not evidence for anything other than people had a mythology a few thousand years ago. It's of no consequence today apart from its extant delusional effect on the superstitious. It's just one of many mythological beliefs.

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Problem being that they demand evidence before they will allow themselves faith.

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if there was evidence faith would not be required. It's the lack of evidence that's the drives the need for faith.

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Why would God care if we believed that he exists or not?

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Well, quite.

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What does Strongs say about substance and evidence.

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Who is Strongs and why should I care about him?

You're now equating a belief in the Loch Ness monster to my example of V=I*R? Really?

I refer to then as superstitions because that's what they are. Your belief in a resurrected Christ is the same to me as my friends belief in Fate. No different at all.

It's not difficult, it's impossible - people cleverer than us have struggled with it for thousands of years. And the end result of all this effort are comments like this:

Blind, unreasonale faith in the face of the evidence.

Sheesh, that's some argument. 'Everything we have found is natural' - and I would add that everything we have been able to test that was thought to be supernatural isn't - is supposed to be evidence of a supernatural intelligent cause? Only the truly deluded could create such an arse-about-face argument. In fact what it tells us is that it's highly probable that everything is natural.

Well sure. What puzzles me is that you need to justify your beliefs further.

You're forgiven my child ;-)

Well I appreciate you attempt, I'm sure it's well-meant. But you've totally ignored everything I've said and you're still trying to make my mental picture of the world similar to yours. It would help a lot if you accepted at face value that it's not.

The bible and Christians do indeed talk a lot about faith - I never use the word outside these fora. Try to understand that this thing you feel is vitally important to you and you Christian friends, that you bang on about day and night and live your life by, has no part in my life. To the extent that it's of any consequence to me, it's a concern, it bothers me that so many people are so deluded. In your case the belief seems benign, you appear to have a liberal, even benevalent belief, in others the belief is harmless and in others it's extremely dangerous. But the core of all faith systems are nonsense - a belief in invented, random systems for no reason other than birth origin is long past it's usefulness to us, no matter how benign.

And you think wrongly. You're doing it again - pushing your belief system onto others. STOP IT! The golden rule has nothing whatsoever to do with faith.

The desire to do both good and harm is totally natural for all of us, they're both completely explicacable as evolved traits caused by a balanced necessity to compete to survive and to co-operate to succeed beyond mere survival. We have violent emotions that society has tamed over time for the greater good. If you want to see the evidence for this I suggest you read Pinker's book 'The better angels of our nature, why violence has declined.' We also have empathetic emotions that allow us get on together - mostly.

The point of these reductionist explanations is not to give away our humanity, it's to show you that I do not think about our life here the same way as you do, and to encourage you to stop trying to making an equivalence.

Where we do have common ground is that we both know that people are capable of enormous good as well as enormous harm and if there's a useful purpose to what we as individuals do here, it's to encourage the good and discourage the bad in order to build better societies for our children to benefit from. We just have different reasons for feeling that way.

aarghhh.....is there any point discussing this with you? You take absolutely no notice of what is said and fall straight back to the same errors of thinking. Watch my lips

I DO NOT HAVE A FAITH OR A BELIEF.

Why can you not just accept that? Explain.

It's the entire reason for your belief. If you were born elsewhere you simply couldn't and wouldn't have it. That is utterly undeniable.

I had the same beliefs and the same influences. I rejected them on evidence and lack of evidence. Our world views differ entirely, our real lives overlap perfectly because we're made of the same biological stuff and have been brought up by similar societies with similar values. It has nothing to do with faiths or beliefs.

Of course I 'believe' that. In exactly the same way I 'believe' that i'm typing this on an iPad. ie I'm not using the word in the same way you do when you say you believe in a Resurrected Christ or my cleaner says she believes in dowsing. Please, please make the distinction.

Nearly. I can't rule out a non-interventionist god - that's purely rational. As is my view that the evidence is overwhelmingly against there actually being one. But I'm also an atheist which means I don't believe that there is one; that's "believe" in your sense.

Of course. Christianity is at the base of both of our societies. But so too is democracy, law, education etc etc. But there's no core differences between peoples of whatever race or religion.

You're dissembling. You know that had you been born in a village in the Atlas mountains you would be a Muslim. [ABE: and so would I] At least be honest.

Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Come off it! If that was the point you were trying to make, I wouldn't be diagreeing with you would I? The disagreement was that a beliver's faith is the equivalent of 'faith' in science. Or in your example, a belief in the Loch Ness monster is the same as a 'belief' in V=I*R.

Technically, we can't rule out anything, but practically we can and do. In fact we have to to get anything done. We reach a standard of proof and accept that position until there's a demonstrable reason not to.

But an uninvolved god is undetectable so can't be ruled out.

An involved god though, must, by definition, be actively interfering with reality. In most believer's views their God does this routinely and frequently. If that was actually the case we'd be able to detect it. We have never been able to do so and when claims have been made of physical supernatural interventions they've been found to be false or fraud.

This is your rabbit in the Cambrian, one single non-controversial supernatural event would prove your case. You haven't got one.

That's not the comparison I'm complaining about. You keep claiming that an atheist has the same sort of faith in science as you have in God - s/he doesn't.

Do'h....hardly non-controversial....Given that supernatural events are routine for your belief, you'd think that just one of them might be available. As for voices in your head....well, least said about that the better.

I'm pretty certain that an instantly regererated limb would convince me. How about a levitating statue? Real transubstantion instead of pretend. Prayers that actually work. It's simple stuff. An easy challenge to meet I'd have thought.

Science has only just started on this problem. Science itself in no more than 250 years old. Your side has been making stuff up for several thousand of years and most of its nonsense has already been debunked.

150 years ago the origin of species was one such problem, now we know that the Christian beliefs held so certainly by all Christians - and for that matter Jews and Muslims too - were wrong. So eventually all but the seriously puddled accepted that evolution 'created' the species - even that bastion of Christian conservativeness the Catholic church.

Science WILL create life from chemicals at some point, possibly in the next decade. That will push 'origin' arguments back to questions about who or what made chemicals instead of life. Religion is finding its areas of movement very restricted, it's being pushed further and further into a corner. Pretty soon now all that will be left as a religious explanation for creation will be theism and eventually some physicist with the brain the size of a god will crack that one too.

Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

It's a good job you're not then Phat because otherwise you'd lose an awful lot of money. Hearts aren't terribly good at thinking.

You quote chunks of biblical bollox at me? In a science thread? Do you really expect me to even read it?

You guys are terribly impressed with celebrity. I really don't care who questions or doesn't question god. It's only facts that matter.

Yes they would - with their 'heart' ie without rational argument. Lots do - they're human but they don't let that get in the way of their science.

You've already heard a million times that science's conclusions are tentative. There's nothing to debate here, everybody agrees.

What we would disagree on is the likelihood of those tentative conclusions being wrong. By tentative we don't mean 50:50, to be accepted as significant science requires a minimum of p=.05, and if it's a contentious result it needs verification by third parties and by a number of different methods. And that's social sciences - physics has much stronger requirements. Properly veryfied conclusions are hard to totally overturn, they're far more usually modified or improved.

So this argument that you can't dismiss 'goddidit' is totally spurious. A scientist is forced to agree simply because the methodologies of science necessitates it. Does it actually think that god did do it?

Here's a clue, part of the process of submitting a scientific paper is to include its limitations - say what hasn't been tested that might be an alternate answer to your conclusion or not produce as generalisable result.

I have yet to read one that said god might have done it.

Well it does to me. Just as you can't answer why all life depends on organisms eating other creating competetive, painful and short lives for everything, you can't even reconcile the stories in your books. And it's not as though they're minor problems - genocide vs love thy neighbour. The reason of course, is that people made up the stories to explain their beliefs and justify their actions at the time. God had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

But.....cough..... This is a science forum, take your biblical bollox elsewhere ;-)

I've read what Hawking says several times thanks.

The problem is that neither you nor I understand it. Nor does all but a handful of people in the world. We have to take his maths at his word, which I do to some extent. But they're mathematical hypothesises - important but not conclusive until confirmed empirically. We'll have to wait - possibly forever - as some of his and his colleague's imaginings may be impossible to confirm. At the level of big physics these things approach belief.

Oh give over Phat. There's absolutely nothing new to be found in the bible. It's been exactly the same for 2,000 years. I studied it for years and believed in it the same way you do now. It was my world view - been there, done that.

See above.

No, but most of their beliefs are idiotic.

The mistake that you and your chums continually make is to assume that by seemingly being clever, other people can know something they don't about this god thing. No-one, that's no-one, has any special knowledge of god; not those on my side - Dawkins, Hawking etc or those on yours - the pope and that charleton favourite of GDR's, C S Lewis. They're all as clueless as you and I.