Inductive Atheism

I took "supernatural experience" to mean something more concrete and objective than perhaps RAZD and CS meant, in which case we have been talking at cross purposes.

If god-concepts are the product of human imagination, then each particular god should be transmitted by ordinary human means. However, most proposed gods are not geographically restricted and could easily contact humans all over the world.Therefore, if god-concepts are found to spread by ordinary human communication it would be significant evidence that they are the product of human imagination.

This is true for any given very specific god concept but it fails to take into account just how widespread such beliefs are in human culture. A better bet would be an evolutionary explanation for the origins of such beliefs. LinkI should point out that this excerpt and link was itself taken from Mod's post Message 1018 all of which is absolutely relevant to this thread.

If the specifics are not communicated or misread then surely they are the product of human invention. If a god wishes to communicate its nature to us then we surely should expect specifics, should we not ? And if it does not then the specifics must come from somewhere else anyway.Or to put it simply, the only common features are those which can easily be explained on the hypothesis of human invention - but if there were real gods communicating with people it is very likely that that would not be true.

Having seen a great deal of the positions put forward by RAZD, Catholic Scientist etc. etc. I am gonna try and play devils advocate here. Depends if it wants (or is able to) to communicate specifics I guess. If we are talking about a deistic "something" then - No not necessarily. The specifics are human inventions. Only the ardent adherents of specific religions will dispute that. But "consilience" demands that the common factors suggest "something". Or there is a common "something" supernatural that various peoples are all experiencing and interpreting differently in terms of the specifics.Man - I should become a deist!!!!

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The specifics are human inventions. Only the ardent adherents of specific religions will dispute that.

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Isn't RAZD disputing that ? Isn't that what the current Great debate with Bluegenes is about ?

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But "consilience" demands that the common factors suggest "something".

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A true consilience requires DIFFERENT lines of evidence,not just one, so there is no consilience here.And the "something" suggested by the commonalities could as well be human psychology. Isn't that more likely than vague communications from an entity that has no interest in communicating ?

I don't think so. RAZD is promoting what he calls the "Hindu hypothesis" which basically suggests that the combined specifics of various supernatural beliefs point to some wholly unspecific actuality of supernature. In other words "consilience" of some sort. I don't think so. It mainly seems to be about RAZD's inability to differentiate high confidence theories from logically derived facts. The different lines of evidence would be the different specific beliefs. RAZ is fond of the blind men and the elephant analogy. As Jon (of all fucking people!!!) so aptly put it - "Is there any reason we should discount a naturalistic explanation?"So much for my devils advocacy....

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I don't think so. RAZD is promoting what he calls the "Hindu hypothesis" which basically suggests that the combined specifics of various supernatural beliefs point to some wholly unspecific actuality of supernature. In other words "consilience" of some sort.

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But does RAZD concede that the "gods" that are believd in are mainly human inventions ? If so, he has to agree with a lot more of bluegenes' theory than he seems to be comfortable with.

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The different lines of evidence would be the different specific beliefs. RAZ is fond of the blind men and the elephant analogy.

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If that's what he's saying it's very weak. For a true consilience you'd be looking for unrelated lines of evidence (e.g. for evolution even Darwin had biogeography, the patterns of taxonomy and the fossil record demonstrating that the fauna and flora on Earth had changed dramatically over time). He'd have to show different and unrelated commonalities to have any argument at all (and that would be hard to do rigourously).

Hi Slevesque,You seem much more willing to answer questions than RAZD is, so I'll pose this question to you, as I was going to eventually ask RAZD but his evasive debate tactics never lead us to it. Even if there is a genuine real supernatural "thing" that you can experience somehow - (and lets call it a "thing" because we don't yet know what it is) - how then is the human imagination not the producer of the concept/ie. God that said thing is now represented as?- Oni

A good point. And one you should put to RAZ in this thread or elsewhere. Another good point. Let's se if RAZ will raise his head above the parapet on these issues.

slevesque responds to ZenMonkey:

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Afterall, correct predictions are one of the criterions we use to intuitively judge which theory is more successful, not just the shortcomings of competing theories.

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Indeed: Proving one hypothesis false does not make another necessarily true. This is a common fallacy among creationists who seem to think that if they can prove evolution to be false, that means their pet description of god and creation are true.However, two hypotheses (both alike in dignity) who can predict the same result through all experimental protocols cause us to try and find some way to distinguish them: What do they predict that does or does not happen. This allows us to discard one in favor of the other. While we definitely the positive aspect showing that A -> B, but we also need the dispositive aspect that A -> B, C, and D which we have seen while Z -> B and C, but not D which takes it out.As we often say, theories need to remain consistent with all previous observations. The theory can (and does) change. Apples did not stop falling from trees simply because we had to study how gravity works to come up with a more accurate model, waiting for us to make up our minds. As we progressed from Aristotelian to Newtonian to Einsteinian mechanics, things still moved as they always had. Our theories changed, but the facts did not. Instead, we just got more of them that had to be incorporated into the whole.

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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.

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Minds are like parachutes. Just because you've lost yours doesn't mean you can use mine.

No! Most emphatically, he is not. He's a fictional cartoon character.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Having argued this with Straggler myself, I think he means that the concept of a ghost like casper, which is claimed to do the things it does, is a supernatural concept. Now, it is a concept found in the arena of fictional books and movies, or what have you.Jesus, which was your supernatural concept that you introduced in the Peanut Gallery, would be a supernatural concept found in religious texts, etc.- Oni

The forensic processes are repeatable. The fingerprints can be examined by others.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

God only knows! {Parenthetically, I think you meant the "experiencER", not the "EE", who might have been killed in the process.)I think the main point is that all of these sorts of evidences are only coming into play when the desired objective scientific evidence is simply not available.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d