matthew wrote:thanks Weissenberger....just try not to pander too much

I will continue to pander as long as you continue to substitute self-serving assertions for evidence and logical rigor.

matthew wrote:No, faith is neither subrational nor irrational, but superrational. It informs and contains human reason.

WOW. Super-rational, you say?
Let's take a brief tour of epistemology, shall we?
We have two types of knowledge - a priori and a posteriori. A priori means the knowledge is gained/justified by reason alone. A posteriori means knowledge to which the attainment or justification of which requires reference to experience.
We experience the world through our sense perception and take that information, abstract and process it, and gain knowledge of the world around us. We also can obtain along the way opinions, beliefs, religion, whatever. But knowledge is what I'm concentrating on. Knowledge is that which is a)obtainable through sense perception and b)verifiable by sense perception. The tool we use for processing/verifying is REASON. Reason is not some abstract concept. It is, at it's base, recognizing the immutable: The Law of Identity : If any statement is true, then it is true.
The Law of Contradiction : No statement can be both true and false.
The Law of Excluded Middle : Every statement is either true or false.

So this is what we mean by RATIONAL - a rational means of acquiring knowledge. An irrational means of acquiring knowledge is easier to delineate - I wake up, imagine a magic elf on my shoulder (something which has no basis in sensory perception, or information gleaned and processed from my environment) and believe it as fact.

What the heck is SUPERRATIONAL?

Reason ALONE cannot come to know God. Reason enlightened by faith can lead us towards Him. We need God to know God, and that is why Christ came into the world- because he is both God and Man: He shows us The Father......read John's Gospel.

I've read all the Gospels, and even did a very large paper on the Apocraphyal Gospel of Timothy (which contains my favourite Jesus line ever "Be passerby". But I digress). What about Jesus' line in Matthew about becoming children...to become "like little children" one must eschew critical thinking and make no use of any higher education. . And Paul, who has a bigger influence over Christian thinking than Jesus to my mind says things like "For I determined to know nothing among you save Jesus Christ and him crucified," (1 Corinthians 2:2). THAT certainly strikes me as a purposeful shutting out of reason, of knowledge, and embracing only irrational faith. And I remind you of something you just ignored, Colossians 2:8, "Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy..." - it does NOT say "Learn the philosophy, and amend it with God's love" or anything like that. Nowhere is that suggested.

steve wrote:My fundamental problem with the God's existence debate is that it supposes that there is some special value in considering whether or not something so utterly un-knowable (and to my mind, indefensible as any form of reasoned construction) should get special consideration as to its possibility or likelyhood.

...The only reason anyone considers a God is that those who have actively assumed the mantle of faith keep raising the issue. It is their argument that I am answering, not my own.

The fact that they alone keep the "debate" alive is enough for me to brand them as desperate and delusional. I see it as an indulgence that agnostics like yourself feel obliged to pamper them with considering these ridiculous notions, and this kind of babying can get us as a race nowhere. It weakens intellectual rigor to have to keep making these qualifications to the patently true as an appeasement, and it then becomes leverage for the theists to assert some sort of intellectual parity with people grounded in reality. They question "reality," and "truth," and the quest for advancement in many arenas stagnates.

I only left that first paragraph in there to point out that you misspelled "likelihood". I keed! Who cares about these speeling? Is of no consequence. Still, I keed! Do I think you are more smorter than me? Without question! So I will take my shots at you where I can find them.

So Steve, you seem to assert a position similar to what Gramsci so aggressively asserts over and over, namely that people who believe in God are more or less mentally deficient, and uncapable of rational thought... that believing in God is something done by dummies who are not grounded in reality. It feels like that's what you cats keep saying, but with more and bigger words.

Solely as an act of antagonism, and to help keep this sexy discussion alive, I will rebut with the following:

"God does not play dice".

Anybody remember who said that? It was a guy who knew reality pretty goddamn well, and could outscience any one of you motherfuckers in his sleep. He was really, really smort. Probably a little smorter than all y'alls. And he managed to come up with some really rad science that pushed scientific discovery to whole new realms. Yet he said this quote that begins with the word "God"! Quelle horreur!

Granted, later science showed that he was wrong in his assertion, and another really, really smort scientician rebutted that quote with a very witty one, "Not only does God play dice, but... he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen" which also includes a reference to "God".

As a guy who unequivocally believes in God, I find it sort of amusing that you guys keep at this debate, seemingly only to slap your cocks against the faces of dumbass "believers". Nobody's gonna change anybody's mind, right? I mean, we all know that, right? To quote another guy who's maybe not so smort, but still threw down a good line now and again, "Let it be."

First of all, on Einstein's statement - it is the condition of many geniuses who, revolutionizing the way people think, cannot accept just one more revolution - I'm also thinking of Edison and alternating current. Anyway, you're trying out a 'proof by authority' - "This guy said it, so haha, you're a sucka" is fallacious at best.

I am not saying, as you put it, "people who believe in God are more or less mentally deficient, and uncapable of rational thought... that believing in God is something done by dummies who are not grounded in reality". Indeed, many, many intelligent people have believed in God and have thought about these issues without resorting to vulgarities like that. My point is that belief in God is faith, and faith is irrational. And if you look at the Bible, it's not a new concept at all. Coming back to this ORIGINAL THREAD, faith in God is actually dependant on lack of proof/evidence - if there were blindingly obvious hallmarks of God's existence in the Universe, faith in him would mean nothing. You can choose to believe there is no God based on the evidence around you, or you can believe - have faith - in God. It makes no difference to me. However (again, coming back home to the original topic) it's FAITH, not fact, and should be kept seperate (not to even start on church&state, etc).

scott wrote:So Steve, you seem to assert a position similar to what Gramsci so aggressively asserts over and over, namely that people who believe in God are more or less mentally deficient, and uncapable of rational thought... that believing in God is something done by dummies who are not grounded in reality. It feels like that's what you cats keep saying, but with more and bigger words.

No, no, no, no my friend. I am not saying that. Well, not entirely. I would put theists into three camps:

People who don't know any better. Children, people that haven't been exposed to the idea of critical thinking etc.

People who are wishy-washy, you know, who don't really think about it, but say things like, "I believe in something...". They can be forgiven because they don’t really give a shit and if pushed generally will side with secularism.

And then there are people like Matty. Who's arguments are so inconsistent and blinded by a very narrow and exclusive form of dogma that mental flexibility and critical thought has been crushed either by an act of will or by a natural extension of my first point.

The key problem with Matty, is his incredibly arrogant view of metaphysics, I'm not sure whether you caught this, but he said earlier that the existence of the Christian God had been proved. Yes, that's right Thomas Aquinas sat down and worked it out with pen and paper in the 13th century so you should shut and accept it. Matty clearly thinks that Christian Theocracy should be forced on the general population, just ask him if he is pro-choice and you'll see how he would like the Church to have control over a women's body -people, this is not an invitation to a debate on abortion, so don't start, I live in Europe that debate ended 20 years ago, people like me won it-.

Myself, and I think Steve, are merely stating an absence in belief in the idea of a God and no one has offered a quantifiable reason why this Christian God is any more worthy of belief than Zeus or Baal. If we think a few people aren't really thinking very hard about it, I don't think that is really hurting anyone. Whereas people like Matty, as much as they will deny it would force Christian law on you given half the chance.

Who's hurting, who here?

M_a_x wrote:The Law of Identity : If any statement is true, then it is true.
The Law of Contradiction : No statement can be both true and false.
The Law of Excluded Middle : Every statement is either true or false.

So this is what we mean by RATIONAL - a rational means of acquiring knowledge. An irrational means of acquiring knowledge is easier to delineate - I wake up, imagine a magic elf on my shoulder (something which has no basis in sensory perception, or information gleaned and processed from my environment) and believe it as fact.

What the heck is SUPERRATIONAL?

How about light moving as a wave... and a particle? It's a wave when you don't look at it, and when you do look at it, it's a particle? How does that fit in? It's okay because it's only one of the two contradictory positions at any given instant? Or when you're looking at it, one statement is true and the other false, and then they switch validities when you're not looking at it? So it's not really true and false at the exact same instant?

What scientific measurements were used in coming up with theories about time dilation? When some dumbass woke up one morning and imagined that time comes to a stop at the speed of light (something which has no basis in sensory perception, or information gleaned and processed from [his] environment) and believed it as fact, what rational means of acquiring knowledge was employed?

If there's no big-C Creation, and no intelligent design, and the Universe just happened to come together the way it has, how do you resolve that against the scientific concept of Entropy, which says that things *don't* arrange themselves into more complex and more intricate systems over time, but rather do the EXACT OPPOSITE? Are you comfortable suspending disbelief long enough to say that the idea of Entropy applies to everything in the presumedly-closed system that is the physical, material world, *except* for living things that can reproduce? And also that those living things somehow spontaneously came into being and grew over time to be more complex and more diverse, the very idea of which seems to go against Entropy?

BTW, I think that the three laws you spelled out here are rubbish. If you can't see how they are, then that's fine. At the very least, I would hope you can recognize that there are a virtually unlimited supply of statements that can never be proven as true or false, thus rendering these laws as pure speculation. For example, take my statement, "The smartest person on the planet is a woman". Is that true or false? And what if, hang with me here, the smartest person on the planet is an archetypical hermaphrodite? Then the statement is both true AND false, in a sense. I'm sure there are countless better examples. This one was just fun.

Gramsci wrote:No, no, no, no my friend. I am not saying that. Well, not entirely. I would put theists into three camps:

People who don't know any better. Children, people that haven't been exposed to the idea of critical thinking etc.

People who are wishy-washy, you know, who don't really think about it, but say things like, "I believe in something...". They can be forgiven because they don’t really give a shit and if pushed generally will side with secularism.

And then there are people like Matty. Who's arguments are so inconsistent and blinded by a very narrow and exclusive form of dogma that mental flexibility and critical thought has been crushed either by an act of will or by a natural extension of my first point.

I assume then that you put a guy like C.S. Lewis in the third "Matty" camp? Where is the fourth camp for people whose arguments *aren't* inconsistent? Where is Descartes? Where is the Dalai Lama?

scott wrote:

Gramsci wrote:No, no, no, no my friend. I am not saying that. Well, not entirely. I would put theists into three camps:

People who don't know any better. Children, people that haven't been exposed to the idea of critical thinking etc.

People who are wishy-washy, you know, who don't really think about it, but say things like, "I believe in something...". They can be forgiven because they don’t really give a shit and if pushed generally will side with secularism.

And then there are people like Matty. Who's arguments are so inconsistent and blinded by a very narrow and exclusive form of dogma that mental flexibility and critical thought has been crushed either by an act of will or by a natural extension of my first point.

I assume then that you put a guy like C.S. Lewis in the third "Matty" camp? Where is the fourth camp for people whose arguments *aren't* inconsistent? Where is Descartes? Where is the Dalai Lama?

Just because someone is a "great writer/thinker" or a "really nice guy" doesn't have anything to do with their religious beliefs. Unlike some theists I judge people on their actions, not what they claim to believe. Anyway the Dalai Lama is an atheist, assuming that he is a Buddhist.

scott wrote:How about light moving as a wave... and a particle? It's a wave when you don't look at it, and when you do look at it, it's a particle? How does that fit in? It's okay because it's only one of the two contradictory positions at any given instant? Or when you're looking at it, one statement is true and the other false, and then they switch validities when you're not looking at it? So it's not really true and false at the exact same instant?

Ah, Aristotle of course came upon the same problem (though not with particle physics per se). He solved it for all of us. You can either go read Aristotle, or ask me nicely.


Go on.


Go on.


Okay, fine. I'll tell you. NO STATEMENT CAN BE TRUE AND FALSE IN THE SAME TIME AND RESPECT. Take a round stone. You look at it and say "This is round". Okay, now imagine yourself shrinking, very very tiny, and crawling on the desk towards the stone...now you're on the stone...at which stage does it stop to lose it's 'roundness'? Aha, but you're in a different respect to the stone, aren't you?

Same with photons.

What scientific measurements were used in coming up with theories about time dilation? When some dumbass woke up one morning and imagined that time comes to a stop at the speed of light (something which has no basis in sensory perception, or information gleaned and processed from [his] environment) and believed it as fact, what rational means of acquiring knowledge was employed?

Einstein, of course, was a master theorist. To a lesser degree, Feynman was the same way. No one knows how their brains worked. But they would imagine the universe, imagine some theory, and then TEST IT. This is very important. Until it was tested and proven, it was just a theory. To test his theory, Einstein had calculated what he thought the light from a certain eclipse would do if I remember the science right....and he set up the test, and was very nervous. He was at heart an empiricist, as all good physicists are. (the eclipse helped prove relativity).

This may confuse you..but we can imagine it by illustrating a similar thing on a smaller scale. A Greek philosopher notices ships descending on the horizon. He figures the world is round, suspended in air, with the sun as a secondary object. To test this out, he calculates the difference in the angle of the sun from a couple different distances, at the same time...and figures out (to an amazing degree of accuracy for the day) the size and curvature of the planet.

If there's no big-C Creation, and no intelligent design, and the Universe just happened to come together the way it has, how do you resolve that against the scientific concept of Entropy, which says that things *don't* arrange themselves into more complex and more intricate systems over time, but rather do the EXACT OPPOSITE? Are you comfortable suspending disbelief long enough to say that the idea of Entropy applies to everything in the presumedly-closed system that is the physical, material world, *except* for living things that can reproduce? And also that those living things somehow spontaneously came into being and grew over time to be more complex and more diverse, the very idea of which seems to go against Entropy?

This shows more a misconception about thermodynamics than about evolution. The second law of thermodynamics says, "No process is possible in which the sole result is the transfer of energy from a cooler to a hotter body." Now you may be scratching your head wondering what this has to do with evolution. The confusion arises when the 2nd law is phrased in another equivalent way, "The entropy of a closed system cannot decrease." Entropy is an indication of unusable energy and often (but not always!) corresponds to intuitive notions of disorder or randomness. Creationists thus misinterpret the 2nd law to say that things invariably progress from order to disorder.

However, they neglect the fact that life is not a closed system. The sun provides more than enough energy to drive things. If a mature tomato plant can have more usable energy than the seed it grew from, why should anyone expect that the next generation of tomatoes can't have more usable energy still? Creationists sometimes try to get around this by claiming that the information carried by living things lets them create order. However, not only is life irrelevant to the 2nd law, but order from disorder is common in nonliving systems, too. Snowflakes, sand dunes, tornadoes, stalactites, graded river beds, and lightning are just a few examples of order coming from disorder in nature; none require an intelligent program to achieve that order. In any nontrivial system with lots of energy flowing through it, you are almost certain to find order arising somewhere in the system. If order from disorder is supposed to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, why is it ubiquitous in nature?

The thermodynamics argument against evolution displays a misconception about evolution as well as about thermodynamics, since a clear understanding of how evolution works should reveal major flaws in the argument. Evolution says that organisms reproduce with only small changes between generations (after their own kind, so to speak). For example, animals might have appendages which are longer or shorter, thicker or flatter, lighter or darker than their parents. Occasionally, a change might be on the order of having four or six fingers instead of five. Once the differences appear, the theory of evolution calls for differential reproductive success. For example, maybe the animals with longer appendages survive to have more offspring than short-appendaged ones. All of these processes can be observed today. They obviously don't violate any physical laws.

BTW, I think that the three laws you spelled out here are rubbish. If you can't see how they are, then that's fine. At the very least, I would hope you can recognize that there are a virtually unlimited supply of statements that can never be proven as true or false, thus rendering these laws as pure speculation. For example, take my statement, "The smartest person on the planet is a woman". Is that true or false? And what if, hang with me here, the smartest person on the planet is an archetypical hermaphrodite? Then the statement is both true AND false, in a sense. I'm sure there are countless better examples. This one was just fun.

Boy, I miss galanter's politeness. Alright. The law of contradiction doesn't state we have to know if something is true or not, just that it must be. "The smartest person on the planet is a woman" is either true or false. The statement is indeed either TRUE or FALSE. That's what the law states - it can't be both.
Now, the statement could in theory be proven true or false, to a degree of accuracy. You could, for instance, take the last 50 Nobel Prize winners and give them all IQ tests. There'd be assumptions and valid reasons for not taking the results too seriously, but it could be done.

You're not understanding what those laws are supposed to do. They enable you to process information. For instance, you have a pencil. It appears a certain width. Now you put the pencil in water, and see it larger (an optical illusion). Instantly your brain, capable of rational thought (well, other people's perhaps) perceives something is wrong - the pencil cannot be both small and large at the same time. So perhaps you then investigate, through theories and experimentation, to find out how light diffuses through water. Now the contradiction disappears and you have gained knowledge about the universe.

These three laws are NOT arbitrary. They are the bedrock of reason. If you take one out, just for fun, do you have some bizarre alternate system, like non-Euclidean geometry? No. You have NO SYSTEM AT ALL. You have a world where everything can be it's opposite, a convention is also a non-convention, and you reach Aristotle's vegatative state, where no statements at all can be made. Those laws are what give us the capacity to communicate in the first place.

M_a_x, I am very humbled by your responses! I will ask only this, and then take my own advice and "Let it Be".

If the statement "the smartest person on the planet is a woman" is indeed either true or false (in whatever context we agree "smartest" is to be measured), but it can never actually be known without applying this standard to all 6 billion people, something that will never be accomplished, then we are agreeing that the statement is either true or false, and we have no means by which to measure it, so it remains either true or false, though the precise answer will always remain unknown to us because we don't have the means by which to test whether it is indeed true or false. How is this any different than the testing of the statement "God exists"?

Gramsci wrote:Anyway the Dalai Lama is an atheist, assuming that he is a Buddist.

So he doesn't believe in some form of Intelligent Design then?