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@3RU7AL
I look at it as estimating probabilities. I don't grant any proposition except perhaps "we exist" a 100% probability. When I say I know something, that means I grant it an extremely high probability of being true: above, say, 99.99%. Anything with higher probability than this, I know is true, even though I recognize that it is not true mathematical certainty. I know the Earth rotates around the Sun. I know there are billions of stars. I know I had eggs for breakfast this morning. That is to say, all these things I grant such a high probability of being true that I might as well be certain of them. Sure, they might all be false if life is all a dream, or a simulation, or something like that, but in everyday life requires that we act as if certain things are true.
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@janesix
No one knows for sure what objective reality is. We can only make reasonable estimates based on our senses and past experience.
That's not to suggest that all methods are equal at estimating reality. Some methods obviously work better than others.
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@3RU7AL
I didn't say that objective reality was always knowable.
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@janesix
I would say that objective reality is the only true reality.
The consensus can be wrong.
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A former pastor who wrote a bestselling book on traditional relationships has confirmed the end of his marriage, apologized for opposing LGBTQ rights and announced he is no longer a Christian.
Joshua Harris' book "I Kissed Dating Goodbye", which railed against sex before marriage and homosexuality, sold over 1 million copies and became a fixture in Christian youth groups after coming out 22 years ago.
But Harris now says the 1997 work "contributed to a culture of exclusion and bigotry," and that he has "undergone a massive shift in regard to my faith in Jesus."
Writing on Instagram, he added: "By all the measurements that I have for defining a Christian, I am not a Christian."
"I have lived in repentance for the past several years -- repenting of my self-righteousness, my fear-based approach to life, the teaching of my books, my views of women in the church, and my approach to parenting to name a few," Harris wrote in the post.
"To the LGBTQ+ community, I want to say that I am sorry for the views that I taught in my books and as a pastor regarding sexuality. I regret standing against marriage equality, for not affirming you and your place in the church, and for any ways that my writing and speaking contributed to a culture of exclusion and bigotry. I hope you can forgive me," he went on.
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@SkepticalOne
What made the U.S. unique is that it was the first nation founded on the principles of the Enlightenment. The founding fathers explicitly rejected longstanding religious principles such as the divine right of kings and the acquisition of knowledge through revelation instead of reason, and emphasized the natural rights of individuals.
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@Dr.Franklin
That's why I'm asking you.
Is there some reason you're unable to answer the question?
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@Dr.Franklin
What is the purpose of union with God?
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@mustardness
Actually, the word "lunatic" comes from the notion that changes in the Moon's phases caused insanity.
Taking space exploration money and putting it toward the environment instead might sound like a good idea, but again ignores the fact that throwing money at a problem is not guaranteed to help with the problem.
If nothing else, the long-term future of humanity depends on us spreading into space. The Earth is only habitable for another 2 to 3 billion years.
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@Mopac
You are looking at things backwards. You are taking your understanding of the "Abrahamic God" and disouting that this is The Ultimate Reality. Rather, you should instead believe what we say, and that is that the scripture which is all you are working with chronicles a people who are struggling with God. That is what "Israel" means.
Translation: Believe first, then make the evidence fit your belief.
You are the one who is looking at things backwards.
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@mustardness
How could you know you would find food and water outside the cave? Sure, you know it now. But what about before anyone had ever ventured outside? That's the whole point of exploration--you don't know what you will find.
It's not simply a matter of priorities. Viewing it that way assumes that spending X dollars on a problem will fix it X amount. Sorry, but just throwing government money at a problem usually fails to solve the problem, and too often causes worse problems.
It's not huge chunks of the budget we're talking about. Even at the peak of the space race in 1966, NASA's budget was only 4.4 percent of the total federal budget. Today it is a mere 0.5 percent.
Also, who knows what technologies will result from space exploration. Currently NASA has produced more than 2,000 spinoff technologies, including LASIK surgery, cochlear impants, firefighting equipment, memory foam, dustbusters, highway safety grooves, and the computer at which you sit. Taking 0.5 percent of the budget and putting it toward world hunger is not going to solve world hunger. But technologies developed for, say, a self-sustaining Moon colony, might.
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@Mopac
Superstitious: having excessive credulous belief in and reverence for supernatural beings.
You would have to go out of your way to find an adjective that fits atheists less well than "superstitious". Sometimes the mental contortions that theists go through are baffling.
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@Mopac
But what I just said is obviously true, and cuts through all delusion.
And says virtually nothing beyond "reality exists." Yet you keep repeating it like it's some momentous insight.
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@n8nrgmi
i can't prove it, but i suspect humans will never create consciousness. they may mimic it with AI, but it won't be self aware and free thinking and philosophical.
How could you tell the difference between a very good mimic and actual consciousness?
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@mustardness
The analogy is apt. It is extremely short-sighted to think that, because exploration won't immediately solve some of our most pressing problems, we therefore should not explore.
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@keithprosser
They did light the Washington Monument to look like Apollo 11.
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@mustardness
There will always be the short-sighted who insist on fixing every problem in our little cave before we explore outside it.
It's a good thing their view doesn't usually prevail, or we would still be living in caves.
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@keithprosser
It remains the crowning achievement in all human history.
Hopefully we see it topped within our lifetime.
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@Mopac
Even if true, as you admit, it has nothing to do with the correctness of doctrine.But there is no religious institution or any institution for that matter as old as The Apostolic Church.
And it is quite obviously not true, for the simple reason that there are religions that precede Jesus and the Apostles.
The church, just as Jesus did, teaches in parables. Jesus' very incarnation and life was a parable. That is why we say The Truth is a person.
So you believe that Jesus was not an actual person, but is just a story?
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@Mopac
I understand that you omit a huge portion about what you believe about God when you say that Christianity is just about truth worship.
Are you really making the argument that the older the church, the more correct its doctrine? If so, then that would make Hinduism more correct than Christianity, since the oldest Hindu Vedas were written more than 1,000 years before Jesus.
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@Mopac
I understand your language just fine. God with a capital G may mean Ultimate Reality,, but God to Christianity means much more than that..It is the "much more" part that I reject. I don't see any justification for treating reality as a person which whom to have a relationship.
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@Mopac
You are the one redefining God to fit your convenience. First, you define God as nothing more than the Ultimate Reality so you can argue that denying God is denying reality. But it turns out you don't really conceive of God that way--you add all kinds of theistic claims to your definition as well: salvation, Jesus, the trinity, the holiness of scripture, etc. When you do that, you define God as something much more than merely Ultimate Reality.
The claim that Ultimate Reality exists is not what I reject. What I reject are claims that the Ultimate Reality has properties of a theistic God. What I reject are claims that this Ultimate Reality cares what we do, wants our worship, and intervenes in our affairs.
Yet you admit God exists when you agree The Ultimate Reality exists. What keeps you from admitting God exists? An aversion.
Yes, an aversion to unjustified assertions.
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@Mopac
Over 20 million(lowest estimate, btw)of my people were killed by a government that had "scientific atheism" as state religion.
Blaming all atheists for the horrors committed by the Soviet Union is like me blaming all Christians for the horrors committed by the Inquisition.
Your language, your entire philosophy was constructed to destroy us by making what we believe unintelligible. It is not innocent. It is not an arbitrary thing.
Sorry to burst your egocentric bubble, but the goal of skeptical inquiry and critical thinking is not to destroy your particular religion. It is to discover truth, period. The fact that your beliefs appear unintelligible when examined critically is the fault of those beliefs, not the fault of some philosophy.
But if you will remain insensitive to that, realize that I absolutely cannot respect your satanic worldview. You do not get to say what God means. It means The Ultimate Reality, and your superstitions concerning our theology will not change that, neither will we ever respect the way you define our God.
Making no attempt to even understand what someone else means is the very essence of close-mindedness. With such a mindset, it's little wonder you engage in rampant straw mans whenever you try to characterize atheists.
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@Mopac
I do not respect your right to pervert language in order to make your position out to be anything other than the abominable superstition and open declaration of war against my people that it is.I spit at your worthless respect, you are a dog until you repent of this wickedness.
Seriously, now you're sounding like a rabid cultist. One thing cults emphasize is an "us against the world" mindset. It's very unhealthy.
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@Mopac
No, I'm an atheist. I reject all theistic claims. When atheists say they don't believe in any god, it is not your definition of god they mean, but a theistic definition.
You're welcome to use your definition of God when describing your beliefs. Grant me the same privilege.
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@Mopac
You both recognize The One True God.Eternal life is then in knowing Jesus Christ.If you don't want to believe in Jesus, I can't help you on that.
Congratulations, you may finally be starting to understand the atheist position. We don't reject Ultimate Reality. We reject theistic claims about it.
There is no rational, logical way to go from "Ultimate Reality exists" to "Jesus gives eternal life." It requires faith. Atheists believe as they do because intellectually they cannot force themselves to believe such things without evidence or justification.
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@Dr.Franklin
I did, how can that be a coincidence
It's due to the law of truly large numbers, which states that a large enough sample size is all but certain to contain extremely unlikely coincidences.
When flipping a penny, 10 heads in a row is extremely unlikely.
Flip a penny 100,000 times, and it is a near certainty you will get 10 heads in a row somewhere.
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@Mopac
I don't reject Ultimate Reality or Truth. What I reject are claims that Ultimate Reality cares what we do, wants our worship, metes out reward and punishment, answers prayers, can be described as a trinity, helped write one of our books, or can have its nature discovered by fasting and purifying one's heart.
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@Mopac
I know what the words mean. I just think it is not possible to fully grasp the concept of "knowing everything" without actually knowing everything. For instance, it may entail a mind-state of which we cannot conceive.
Us saying "to know everything" is like a computer program saying "I love you." The computer can give you the dictionary definition of the words, but does it really understand what it is saying?
Anyway, all that is tangential to the point you've dropped, which was how we can comprehend anything about the nature of something that is incomprehensible.
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@mustardness
You understand that this thread is about pseudoscience, not science, right?
Astrology's underlying premise is that studying the movements of celestial objects can yield information about the course of everyday human events. On the surface it looks like science, because it purports to study something systematically. It is, however, pseudoscience, because no such effect has ever been demonstrated and, in fact, whenever astrology has made testable claims, those claims have been falsified.
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@mustardness
See the following Wikipedia article on pseudoscience in which astrology is explicitly mentioned no fewer than 17 times.
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@Mopac
Do you know what it means to know everything?You sure do.
Um, wrong. I don't know what it means to know everything, and neither do you.
But even if I did, that would mean that everything is at least partially comprehensible. The question, however, was how you can know anything about something that is incomprehensible. If you know anything at all about it, then it is not entirely incomprehensible.
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@Alec
It's not really a definition at all, just a statement, and not one I would really agree with. Often pseudoscience contains unfalsifiable claims, which by definition are impossible to contradict.
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@Mopac
How do you know anything about its nature if it is incomprehensible?
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@Mopac
Special pleading: Applying standards, principles, and/or rules to other people or circumstances, while making oneself or certain circumstances exempt from the same critical criteria, without providing adequate justification.
Claiming a rule is universal ("everything has a beginning") then exempting something from that rule ("except God") without justification is textbook special pleading. Why exclude God? And if there is one exception to the rule, why not others?
It doesn't help to distinguish between "created" and "uncreated" things--"created" is just another way of saying something had a beginning.
In fact, to say, "The Ultimate Reality began to exist" does not even make sense. All things began to exist, but it would be silly to say existence itself began to exist. There would always have to be some form of existence.
Why? What is the justification for the statement in bold? Are you just giving an argument from incredulity, or is there some logical reason?
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@Dr.Franklin
I looked and replied.
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@Dr.Franklin
Quran coincidences?
- The statement of “seven heavens” is repeated 7 times. “The creation of the heavens (khalq as-samawat)” is also repeated 7 times.
- The word “Day (yawm)” is repeated 365 times in singular form, while its plural and dual forms “days (ayyam and yawmayn)” together are repeated 30 times.
Now for the amazing number 19!! Again, just a sampling:
- The first verse of every sura (chapter) known as “Basmalah” (bismillah al-rahman al-rahim) consists of 19 letters.
- The Quran consists of 114 suras, which is 19 x 6.
- The total number of verses in the Quran is 6346, or 19 x 334.
- 6234 numbered verses & 112 un-numbered verses (Basmalahs) 6234+112 = 6346. Note that 6+3+4+6= 19.
- The Basmalah occurs 114 times, despite its conspicuous absence from Sura 9 (it occurs twice in Sura 27) & 114= 19 x 6.
- The Zakat charity is mentioned in [a number of verses that] add up to 2395. This total does not quite make it as a multiple of 19; it is up by 1.The Hajj Pilgrimage occurs in 2:189, 196, 197; 9:3; and 22:27. These numbers add up to 645, and this total does not quite make it as a multiple of 19; it is down by 1.Thus, Zakat and Hajj, together, give a total of 2395+645 = 3040 = 19×160.
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@Dr.Franklin
Second, we should consider the matter of significant figures. On a physics test, if a circle is said to have a diameter of 10 feet and the student is asked to compute the circumference, the correct answer is 30 feet—not 31 feet. The reason 31 feet is an incorrect answer is because it implies a precision that is unwarranted by the given information. The value 10 feet indicates that the diameter has been rounded. Perhaps it has been rounded up from the exact value of 9.5 feet, in which case the exact circumference would be 29.845. . . feet—which rounds up to 30 feet.
This is such a desperate stretch that I can't believe even Answers in Genesis would offer it as a serious explanation. Sometimes I wonder if the apologetics there actually believe their own explanations.
No physics or geometry test worth its salt would reject 31 as an incorrect answer, certainly not because of some precision the test-taker is supposed to infer. The worst part is AIC says 30 is the correct answer and 31 is incorrect because "perhaps it has been rounded up from the exact value of 9.5 feet." Well guess what? It could just as easily have been rounded down from the exact value of 10.49 feet, in which case 33 feet would be the correct answer. There is no way to know from the question. Saying 30 is correct and not 31 because "perhaps it was rounded up" is laughable.
When biblical inerrancy is your axiom, it's amazing the mental gymnastics you must perform.
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@Dr.Franklin
3.14159 rounds to 3.142.
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@EtrnlVw
Energy channeling you mentioned, see this should not be something that's labeled "pseudoscience" yet......energy exists, we know everything we do and think or put our attention on produces energy...energy can be focused and utilized, it can have an effect on something....so why would that be in the pseudoscience category? I'm not into crystals and things like that but they do possess condensed energy, and it's obvious we ourselves can put our energy to things and manifest what we want. As a matter of fact the frequencies of energy are everything and within everything, it's where everything becomes possible and where the potential to change something becomes a reality. Energetic frequencies are also where the conscious soul can have different experiences outside the normal physical sense perception. Now go ahead and label what I just wrote pseudoscience lol.
Ok, I will call what you wrote here pseudoscience.
What makes it pseudoscience? Mainly it's the use of vague or obscure language (see #8 in my list in post #3 above) that on the surface looks scientific. Examples here include the words "energy" and "frequency", both of which have precise definitions in science. Here you don't use them in any well-defined way, though. The bold sentences especially stick out as woo. What is "frequencies of energy" and are they the same as "energetic frequencies"? The way you are stringing together the words, no one knows what they mean. What effect do you claim these "energetic frequencies" have, and how would one design an experiment to measure them?
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@Dr.Franklin
it equals Pie!!, 3.146, wow!
Pi, rounded to three decimals, is 3.142.
Not that such minor details matter to the true believer.
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@Dr.Franklin
God sent Gad, to threaten David with how many years of famine?
2 Samuel 24:13: SEVEN years of famine.
1 Chron.: 21:12: THREE years of famine.
When David defeated the King of Zobah, how many horsemen did he capture?
1 Chron. 18:4: David took SEVEN THOUSAND horsemen
2 Samuel 8:4: David took ONE THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED horsemen
How many stalls for horses did Solomon have?
I Kings 4:26: FORTY THOUSAND
2 Chron. 9:25: FOUR THOUSAND
The Temple contained how many baths?
1 Kings 7:26: TWO THOUSAND baths.
2 Chron. 4:5: THREE THOUSAND baths
How old was Jehoiachin when he became king of Jerusalem?
2 Kings 24:8: EIGHTEEN years of age
2 Chron. 36:9: EIGHT years of age
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@BrotherDThomas
My point was that monotheists believe all those other gods are not true gods, so in their mind there is no ambiguity.
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@BrotherDThomas
Most religious people here are monotheists. They believe there is only one God, so specifying which one they mean is unnecessary. They mean the one true God.
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@Athias
"Bald assertion"? We are discussing the nature of knowledge, and therefore what proof, other than reason, could I possibly provide which would make my "assertion" less "bald"?
You stated:
A "random" reality necessitates observation of the metaphysical...
Without justification, this is a bald assertion. There is no obvious reason why a random reality requires or needs observation of the metaphysical. Maybe you can reason you way there, but the steps are not at all obvious, so as it is it is an assertion without justification.
And your fallacy of division was not committed when you stated that the theory of evolution came about due to evidence because it is a branch of science, a claim I never claimed you made (not to mention it doesn't make much sense.) Your fallacy of division was committed when you stated:"My point was that evolutionary theory works just like any other branch of science. Theories do not ultimately change because people's ideologies change. Theories change to fit current evidence."You were using a supposed truth of a whole (Science) to inform a supposed truth about its part (evolution.) Your claim has nothing to do with the development of evolutionary theory individually, but more so your generalizations of science. That is textbook fallacy of division. (And I should've mention this before: no one claimed that the theory changed. Evolution is the theory. I claimed that its ideology changed (e.g. orthogenesis to natural selection.))
You have it backwards. My implication was not that evolutionary theory works like other branches of science because it is a branch of science. My implication was that evolutionary theory is science because it works like other branches of science. If it did not work like other branches of science, it would not be science.
The fossil record is evidence only unto itself (not to mention, its riddled with loss of information); and mendelian inheritance is evidence only unto itself. Your reference to them without contextualizing their significance in evolutionary theory (and no, not that sophistry "things change over time") renders your mention as description.
So the fossil record is not evidence of dead organisms? The fact that most species in the fossil record are no longer extant is not evidence of extinction of those species? The distribution of fossils in rock layers is not evidence of species changing over time?
You have an odd definition of evidence.
"Up to the 1930's, the biggest weakness for natural selection was the lack of a mechanism for inheritance. It was only once population geneticists demonstrated mathematically that the variety in evolution could be accounted for with Mendelian inheritance that natural selection became the overwhelming consensus."Or are you going to retroactively suggest that you meant "variety of species in nature"?
What else would "variety in evolution" mean but "variety of species in nature" in the context I used it?
No it did not. That is your interpretation and assumption. If it fit the facts better then a shift in "consensus" would be trivial.
Historical accounts support my position, including the article I cited. Thus far you have provided no source to support your position.
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