Posted on 03/30/2007 6:20:58 PM PDT by buccaneer81
What about the times you weren't nice?
Does it bother you that Jessica's murderer got away with it?
I know what you're referring to. Such people define themselves by their opposition to what they consider to be religion--and they oppose religion for ulterior motivers having nothing to do with the core issue.
Fortunately for me, I rarely actually have to deal with such people. And once they hear I'm an atheist, they leave me alone. One of the advantages of being an atheist, I guess :-)
"once they hear I'm an atheist, they leave me alone. One of the advantages of being an atheist, I guess :-)"
You see,... alot of it may just be semantics; you view being left alone to be an "advantage", while I wound have to consider it to be a profound "blessing". ;0)
An gnostic is just a person too lazy to intellectually defend his atheism.
Godspeed,
No, you probably won't
I really don't see what it is you're trying to say and John Couey has been sentenced to death.
Atheism... the Official Religion for the most murderous ideology ever on the planet. 100 MILLION murders and counting.
It's both. Epistemology is "a branch of philosophy that investigates the origin, nature, methods, and limits of human knowledge." Ontology is "the branch of metaphysics that studies the nature of existence or being as such." I used 'epistemology' because it includes ontology (in the same sense that semiotics includes semantics,) and because the point I am trying to make is in fact an epistemological one.
The point I'm trying to make here is this: the claim that evidence is the sine qua non of reality has at its heart a very large assumption: that sensory evidence (e.g. the "photons of light" in your example) actually exist and bear some relation to an external reality. In other words there is no way to demonstrate from evidence that sensory "evidence" means anything. For all you or I know, everything we see, hear etc. could all simply be part of a dream, or a hallucination, or some computer simulation. ...of course, you and I believe that the things we experience via our senses ('evidence") correspond to Real things in the Real world, but we have no way of demonstrating that to be true. We believe in the Real World, but belief is an act of faith. Experience is a subjective process, since it relies on our subjective senses. Therefore, even the "objective" scientific method is ultimately a faith-based system of thought.
Firstly, the question of whether or not human senses faithfully report 'real' information about 'the real world' to the human brain is an example of the issue of the interpretation of tokenized information I spoke of earlier. Wrongly believing that sensory data represents information about 'the real world' would be an example of an interpretive error. The information would be true, but wrongly interpreted. The sensory signals received by our brain are what they are. It's up to us to figure out what they mean. That's one of the central issues of epistemology.
Secondly, 'believing in the actual existence' of what we like to think of as 'the real world external to ourselves' may or may not be an act of faith. To paraphrase a certain former President of the US, it depends on what the meaning of 'believe' is. I address that more deeply below.
So what can one know? We can only know that which we apprehend without recourse to the subjective (and uncertain) physical senses. ...Logically, therefore, only those things we apprehend directly can be known to be real. ...Placed in a sensory deprivation tank, a man might come to doubt the existence of the sensible world, but he will never doubt his own existence. Therefore, the only thing we can know with 100% certainty is that we ourselves exist. Cogito ergo sum — I think, therefore I am.
The epistemological problem goes even deeper than that. Remember, epistemology is all about what can be known, and how it can be known. As it turns out, what can be known also depends on what the meaning of 'know' is. But again, I'll go into that more deeply below.
But I will point out that a person placed in a perfectly effective sensory deprivation tank would have no way of knowing whether he was alive as a biological entity, or simply a simulation being run on a computer the likes of which doesn't yet exist (in our time and place.) Nor would he have any way of knowing which of his thoughts were his, and which were injected by some external agent.
The scientific method might seem to be a foolproof way to absolute certainty — but rest assured, it only seems that way. At the heart of the scientific method lies an axiom very much unprovable — that the evidence of our senses corresponds to an external reality in some meaningful way. It may be easy to believe that statement, but by the very "rules" of the scientific method itself, its truth is not demonstrable from evidence, and therefore it is very much an article of faith.
Yes and no. Yes, the truth of the belief that "the evidence of our senses corresponds to an external reality in some meaningful way" is not provable. No, that doesn't mean it has to be taken on faith.
What can be proven? You can prove things to be true by definition. And you can formulate a system of logic, and statements that are well-formed according to the syntactic rules of your system of logic can be proven to be true or false (or perhaps undecidable,) according to the rules of your system of logic. And that's it. Nothing else can be 'proven' in any absolute sense.
Note that the meaning of the terms 'true,' 'false,' and 'prove' in the above paragraph are defined by a formal system of logic, and that systems of logic are inherently based on the manipulation of symbols. Also note that 'true,' 'false' and 'prove' are themselves symbols.
Reality is composed of tokens that aren't symbols. This matters because symbols can be used to state that which is not true--and in the case where such statements are about 'the real world,' there's no way to prove in any absolute sense that what the statement says about 'the real world' is true--even if you can 'prove' it's truth according to the rules of logic. A logical proof is still a statement composed of symbols.
Absolute proof requires symbols, and is necessarily restricted to the domain of symbols. Once one goes beyond the symbolic domain, 'absolute proof' does not exist. Statements made up of symbols that are about 'the real world' serve as maps or models of reality. But the map is not the territory, and there's no way to prove (in any absolute sense) that the map or model is an accurate reflection of what is being mapped or modelled.
For any statement that purports to state an absolute proof about 'the real world,' one can always ask, "And why is that true?" There is no assertion of fact that is not subject to such a challenge. The answer to any such challenge must itself be another assertion of one or more facts, each of which will again be subject to the same challenge. There is no transitive closure. That's why there is no such thing as absolute proof, outside of the domain of symbols.
A lot of confusion has been caused by the fact that logic and science both use the term 'prove,' but don't mean the same thing by it. So what's the difference between a logical proof and a scientific proof?
Ultimately, a logical proof shows that something is true or false by definition. A system of logic can be considered to be a symbolic machine whose purpose and effect is to compute the meaning (definition!) of a statement, where the meaning must be one of the possible truth values permitted by the system (usually these are 'true,' 'false' and 'undecidable/undefined,' although the latter is often tacked on as an afterthought.)
In contrast, a scietific proof of a theory shows that the theory is more likely to be true than any alternative so far considered. Science is not a definitional system based on symbols, but an obersvational system based on the most probably (or even the most scientifically useful/productive) interpretation of the evidence (non-symbolic tokens.) Science can't work any other way, precisely because absolute proof does not exist outside of the domain of symbols. So logic and science use different epistemological paradigms. In logic, it's all about what can be absolutely proven or disproven. In science, it's all about which theories best stand up to criticism--and that can and does change over time.
As long as the scientist understands that ALL his beliefs are subject to criticism, and that the result of that criticism may be that he will come to prefer a different belief, and that that applies equally to each and every one of his beliefs, then he can fairly say that his beliefs are not based in any way on faith.
Note that belief in rationalism and objective evidence must be one of the beliefs held to be subject to criticism (and hence falsifiable.)
We're all sentenced to death. If that's all there is, he got away with it.
But if that isn't all there is, and his victim is actually still alive in Heaven, then did he actually kill anyone?
According to you atheists it really doesn't matter does it?
Why would you think that? I highly value life--both my own and others.
Jessica lost her life as a biolical organism. We can impose the same fate on her killer. Whether either of them will have some form of existence after losing their biological life is not something we have any control over, nor does it properly serve as any justification for either believing or disbelieving in any sort of deity.
The idea that Jessica is an angel in heaven, and that her killer is suffering eternal torment in Hell, may be emotionally satisfying, but reality is what it is, and doesn't care what we may prefer.
Because you were the one questioning whether Couey killed anyone.
but reality is what it is, and doesn't care what we may prefer.
What makes you think Hell isn't real?
Get real.
Firstly, there's no question he killed someone as I define 'kill' and 'death.' (It's beyond any reasonable doubt, which is the legal and appropriate standard.)
Secondly, the question I posed was not about my view of the world, but about yours.
And thirdly, my question was a rhetorical device meant to illustrate the inconsistency with your own beliefs behind your statment to GraniteStateConservative in post #129, namely "We're all sentenced to death. If that's all there is, he got away with it." You religionists like to dishonenstly use the term 'death' with two different meanings: biological death versus the fate of the soul after biological death. Based on the biblical principle "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," one biological death is the appropriate punishment for another.
He is objected to, to this very day. Why? He was considered by the Roman government as an insurrectionist too dangerous to live, hated by the religious leaders of the day who called Him a drunk, He confused the politicians, and He offended everybody in sight, when He wasn't teaching, healing and ministering to the sick and lost.
That's MY kind of leader. He is My Savior. No one else comes close to who He is!
Interesting:
National Day of Reason's site:
http://www.nationaldayofreason.org/
Katrina Hurricane, August 28 2005 - A few months before on
"1 April 2005 The New Orleans Secular Humanist Association has secured a National Day of Reason Proclamation from Mayor C. Ray Nagin."
http://www.nationaldayofreason.org/activism.html
Coincidence or what???
Not if you are not there! ;-)
Atheists are nothing more than skeptics. Religion should be evaluated and put under scrutity just like any individual that makes extraordinary claims.
So your belief is triggered by your sense that some crimes are so bad that only punishment of the criminal in the afterlife can make things right? Well, that's not a good reason to believe because it makes as much sense for death in this life to be the end of the road for criminals like that as it does for criminals to be able to commit the crimes in this life in the first place. If there was a true cosmic structure regarding right and wrong, justice and injustice, good and evil, then little girls like Jessica would be kept from spending the last few days of her life as she did. Since we have no rhyme or reason to bad people getting their just desserts in this life and none to good people having over-the-top bad things happen to them, there can be no expectation that things are different when we die.
Belief in God is all about hope, which is a selfish motivation-- although it's natural. Having hope makes us more comfortable. It's not grounded in reality, though. It's a sort of crutch to get through the day. Jessica's family knows now what Jessica discovered inside a trash bag-- there is no hope. It's not real.
I'm reminded of the miner story last January. Here's the thread. Everyone declared how that this was a result of answered prayers and the power of God that the miners had survived. Of course, they didn't survive, except for one. Did this make those posters believe this was evidence that God doesn't answer prayers, that God isn't powerful? I doubt it. It's because they like the hope despite the evidence to the contrary.
I never really thought of it as such, but good and evil exist and we have an innate understanding of them. And since good and evil exist there will be a meting of justice to make things right.
Since we have no rhyme or reason to bad people getting their just desserts in this life and none to good people having over-the-top bad things happen to them, there can be no expectation that things are different when we die.
It is silly to think there can be any kind of expectation of what things are like after we die basing our assumptions on this life.
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