The Interpretation of Evidence Colored by "GodSenseless" worldview

The question is whether a person let’s his worldview dictate how he interprets what he sees or whether he lets what he sees dictate his world view. The former is hide bound to a subjective vision independent of the real world, the latter is objective.Rational Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com
Irrational Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com Thus if the argument follows logic from A to B it is rational, and if it rejects or ignores such logic it is irrational.Take up this argument with Daniel Webster or his descendants. The nonsense quotient — if a worldview is dependent on declaring that whole fields of knowledge are nonsense in order for the worldview to be valid, it is necessarily irrational per above, but it is also encumbered by a high nonsense quotient versus a worldview that says that a couple of verses in one little book are nonsense, regardless of which book one is concerned with. Throw in a few semi-ad hominems while you’re at it ... truth is self evident. Such as the self evident truth of my signature that says Deist in it:Deist Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com That kind of covers my position on how to look at the world and evaluate what is real and what is not. Scientific methodologies are only rational evaluation of evidence based on reason. Why should I care whether evidence proves or disproves one or two elements of one book full of stories, some possibly based on historical happenings, but that never claimed to be a book of science? It seems to me that the only people that require genesis as part of their worldview are those who believe in it beforehand. For me, if the evidence points in one direction then that is where the evidence goes.Ideas of Reality are part of everyone’s filter — and each is ultimately subjective because after an experience all you have is the memory of it. I have written an essay on this and could quote it (very long) or provide a link to it, however that is against board policy. I may need admin to advise on how to proceed on this matter. Hmmm .... not done yet ...

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

that would explain why my long-winded reply had trouble finding the thread when I hit send ...One question I have is why is "godsenseless" allowed to refer to "literal-christian-god-senseless" as it seems to ignore other "godsenses" of other faiths.that would be a shortcoming to the term for willowtree to explain.

using the word in the definition of the word is bad form isn't it.

It is also possible to believe that god created the world according to the thousands of other religions and cults and splintered beliefs.Thus one cannot take a religious belief as a de facto guide unless each one of those beliefs have the same results.If one rejects logic and reason then we are left with religion being necessarily insane by definition.Certainly rejection of evidence is irrational: the earth does orbit the sun and the sun is not at the center of the universe; the universe is at least 13.5 billion years old and the earth is only 4.5 billion years old.Enjoy

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

yes. I was reinforcing it with additional comments.

Yes rationalFirst off your post blatantly assumes that only your religion has the godsense to see the supernatural and incorporate it. That is obviously a ridiculous position.The fact that other religions have not problem reconciling science and faith, rational and superrational, would mean that yours must not be correct.By your own logic: Aside from supernatural being excluded by the definition of science, the obvious conclusion is that any TM that fully supports SM in it's totallity and does not need to make exceptions would be superior to one that does, as it MORE fully supports SM.Again you speak of evidence but do not present any.

perhaps you are not being clear in what you are saying if I have misinterpreted so badly. so far this is just a claim. what error?

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

pure ad hominem verbal abuse.this means you have no other argument left.you presumed an exclusion from evidence based on faith, and it was shown to be non-productive due to the number of other faiths that had none of the problems with evidence that you have.you have been refuted.you're options:(1) admit your error
(2) deny your error and call other people bad names.hmmm.and we have not even begun to get into the question of what ideas of reality are about, how they can extend beyond the scientific and how those can be validated or cooroborated.on any other board I would look to see if your name was trolled (say a zero instead of the cap "O" - by someone pretending to be you) just to be sure this came from you instead of someone malicious.enjoy your world view.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

life, the universe, and everything?For any search for truth beyond the realms of science the rules of logic must still apply or we are like blind people in a cave throwing dead fish at a wall and seeing if one sticks, to accept one idea as more valid than another.The question is what can one use to deduce those greater truths, what differentiates truth from fiction?Certainly it cannot be any one single source, in fact the more sources point in one direction the more likely the truth is in that direction.But equally certainly it cannot just be a popular opinion, as that is liable to change, and 99% of the population can still be wrong.This is where I come to my use of the "nonsense quotient" - the measure of what has to be "nonsense" for a {supposed truth} to be valid.Let us start with ideas, and what they are, how they confine reality ... from an essay of mine: Each person will evaluate new ideas according to their accumulated (world view) ideas and either accept them as valid or reject them as nonsense.Those that need to reject more ideas as nonsense than others means that they are having more trouble fitting the available information into their world view.Perhaps this will add to the debate rather than stimulate name-calling.Enjoy.This message has been edited by RAZD, 10-22-2004 03:11 PM

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

now reply to message #43http://EvC Forum: The Interpretation of Evidence Colored by "GodSenseless" worldviewtry without the name calling? as you accuse others of doing?

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

postmodernism? so it may seem. or practical reality? this is what people do. you can't avoid doing it once you go beyond scientific knowledge, because the only frame of reference you have is your accumulated ideas about reality.every experience you have had is remembered as an idea of that experience.in a practical sense there is little difference between a person with a lifetime of experiences well tethered in a real world billions of years old and one created in the last second with all the memories as if they were the first person, the ultimate "god-did-it" scenario: they will behave the same.and we are talking about concepts beyond testability and observation, where scientific methods fail to produce results because they cannot test the concepts.this is an area willowtree wanted to get into. I wait.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

Do you mean Wallace? What proof do you have of this bald assertion?This of course means that his whole world tour was a fraud then? all the journals that he wrote and specimens he took? the specimens collected by other people on the trip that he used later to confirm one of his concepts?And of course this faceteous ad hominem assertion does nothing to the fact that evolution is found everywhere, the science has grown substantially since the days of Darwin and Wallace, but the core concepts remain: things change. Over time things change a lot, and some changes survive and others don't.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

now reply to message #43 ... if you are able?http://EvC Forum: The Interpretation of Evidence Colored by "GodSenseless" worldviewtry without the christian name calling this time? as you accuse others of doing?

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

Thanks willowtree. Other than mixing up the relative authors of the different blue boxes (first one is a direct quote from Gary Zukav's book, the second is my writing) this is a good answer. How you get to that is a mystery to me. Not only is the bible not mentioned at all, it specifically allows for a world view in which the bible plays a prominent role in the interpretation of ideas -- "The individual combines all previous ideas into a reality map against which new ideas are tested" -- that reality map can just as easily contain a strong belief in the bible as not. In fact I see this as the crux of the problem between such divergent views of the world -- very different reality maps based on different basic accumulated ideas — each one internally valid.The problem is how to discern which is closer to your realist viewpoint that "Eternal truth exists" and to search for what those "unseen eternal truths" actually are -- how do you "peel the layers off the onion" when there are no {logical \ rational \ scientific} methodologies to guide one. (ignoring the fact there is only one layer to an onion). And yet {you\we} cannot prove it: any proof you could have would be based on some manner of "listening" and so you take it on faith that it makes a sound based on your experience with past falling trees and their sounds of falling (though each makes a different sound? and certainly you could not predict what the exact sound would be ... but that is a different issue). This is your worldview based on the ideas you have of past experiences. It is also the worldview of most people, and as such does not present a conflict in ideas between those people.The problem is not when there is a concordance in {idea worldviews}, but when there is a discrepancy. Arguing that one (or the other) is THE true view and the other is false will not make that discrepancy go away nor resolve the conflict. The only thing that can do that is a new idea, and as I said before: "The new idea can either be a test to see which perceived truth is correct (or more complete), or it can be a new way of structuring the old ideas so that the conflict is resolved."This is where I get to my "nonsense quotient" -- again from Zukav's book: What is true for me may not be true for you and vice versa. The test of the truth of any view is how well it explains everything in a consistent, logical, manner versus how many things are label as "nonsense" - the higher the "nonsense" quotient the more inconsistent the view.Thus almost everyone would agree that it is nonsense to say that the tree does not make noise if there is nobody there to hear it (or nor manner or method of perceiving the vibrations caused by the fall), because that does not fit their worldview.Now consider a person who claims that it is nonsense for the tree to make a sound: he needs to claim that the relation of sound to falling tree in every previous experience is just a coincidence or the result of some interaction between the tree and the listener and not a basic part of the release of energy of the falling tree: that all those previous associations are nonsense, that the concept of energy causing sound is nonsense, possibly that there is a conspiracy of people who are associating the sound with the falling tree.Enough for now ...

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

and there is the question also of which theistic toes are being stepped on ... the fundamentalist hindus think that the scientific age of the world and universe is wrong because they are not old enough, and many religions do not have any problem with evolution and other sciences ...... so for the comment to have validity it would have to apply to all religions wouldn't it?

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}