Stephen Hawking

You coulda fooled me . . . in fact, you did.



No one needs coffee . . . i'd like a cup, though.



The problem you have with your different standards of proof argument here is that in matters of scientific theory, the body of the theory is predictive, many aspects may be subject to replicability, and all of it will be subject to falsifiability. So, for example, if a theory either explicitly or by inference predicts a result, and the result does not occur, or is not observed, it has been falsified, and must either be modified to account for the new datum, or abandoned. I urge you to look up the Michelson-Morley experiment for a classic example of how this works. Before Einstein got bored in the Swiss patent office, and began doodling in the margins, it was held that there was "luminiferous aether" to account for the transmission of light in the cosmos. Light was held to have wave properties, but it was considered that such an aether were necessary to account for the transmission of the light waves. (Einstein proposed that light has a particle property, too, with light "particles" being referred to today as photons, which is to say, quanta of light with particle properties.)

So, in the United States in 1887, Messrs. Michelson and Morley set up an experiment to detect the luminiferous aether. It was a spectacular failure. Without going into details, many, many other physicists attempted to replicate the experiment, convinced, as Michelson was himself, that the failure to detect the aether was a methodological flaw. But it was such a spectacular failure, that Michelson was awarded the Nobel prize in science twenty years later, in 1907, because he has so thoroughly falsified what had been considered one of the first principles of physics.

That's how science works, Neo. Scientific theories are not actually about proof, they're about disproof. Any theory which accounts for all the data, which is successfully predictive, which explicitly states that effects can be observed by experimentation or infers as much, and which has never been falsified functions as scientific truth.

But your imaginary friend superstition does not meet any rigorous standards such as that. It is enough for you, and any other theist, that you believe it. You would never admit that your thesis had been falsified, you provide no basis upon which to test for it, and far from your god thesis being predictive, you (or at least this is the case with many theists) sink to saying that your boy god "moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform" whenever the putative actions of the alleged deity contradict the first principles of whatever religion it is to which the theist adheres.

Anecdotal evidence is not sufficient for establishing a scientific theory--it can only be establish by being predictive, producing testable results, and failing to be falsified. Once your anecdotal evidence can be established as having been successfully predictive, or replicable, it ceases to anecdotal evidence, and becomes a verifiable datum, upon which an hypothesis might be raised to the level of scientific theory.

"Hey, i think that breeze was the passage of an angel!" "Oh yeah, me too, i think so, too."--does not constitute anything like the same category of evidence as is required by the rigorous testing of scientific theory.



I already understand what you mean, and i don't accept it because you are attempting to conflate unsubstantiated belief (faith) which the requirements of empirical evidence.



As i pointed out, scientific theories are never, in fact, proven. They can only be disproven. So this is not a "battle" of proofs--this is not a case of polar opposite but otherwise equivalent belief sets. Faith is "i believe" in the absence of evidence; there is, however, a type of belief which is based on evidence, and it is upon that that science is founded.

Many theists will take this opportunity to rush in and say that neither i nor anyone else can "disprove" the existence of god. Although that is certainly so, it is still not an equivalent statement about two aspects of empirical investigation. Your god theory is not predictive, and for that reason, is not falsifiable. Your god theory does not lend itself to testing, beyond someone asking you if you believe, and when you say you do, and asked why, your basic response, no matter how you tart the old whore up, is no more than " 'Cause i wanna."



No, i don't have to prove anything of the kind. The reason i am an atheist is not because i know that there is no god, but because i don't know that there is, and have no good reason to care.



Yes, thank you . . .

Notice I used the word 'would' to indicate motivation on your part.

To prove or disprove according to your own carefully evaluated standards.

I suppose I don't get the point about the "demonstration", then. It seemed to imply something other people appreciate...

Feel free to bash me with a bag of bricks.

Setanta wrote-



That is because to do so would scandalize the Mother's Union.

You are hiding behind the skirts of your "sweet pretty things" who are "in bed now of course" and you either know it or you don't know it and it's hard to say which is the worst. Probably the latter.

You have chosen your religionists to disparage.

There is no reason why i "would" do that. It "would" be a meaningless exercise, as i see no reason why it "should" impinge on my life.

Some people you'd least expect are religionists. Despite what some Christian scientist promoting Christys would have you think, religion, on average, is inversely proportional to education.

Science does not take the stance that there is no god in the universe. Instead, I think it illustrates quite clearly that all that exists in the universe does not require a god or gods or any facsimile thereof.

If in firing up the Large Hadron Collider we accidentally wake up the old geist, maybe all will benefit, but it's childish to pretend that a being is all knowing observing and performing miracles.

Why doesn't God give the limbs back to amputees? He apparently by the claims of many cures Cancer and every other disease when he wants. How come not once has he grown an foot back on a African child who stepped on a land mine?

Are we to then theorize that once you have lost a limb there is no way for you to receive that healing? What reason should a blind man get his slight back? Seems like the same reasons a man should get his arms back.

I don't think god is cruel, I think that if god is real, it's powerless. If god is powerless, what is the point in god?

T
K
O

Recently I attended a lecture by Francis Collins an MD and PhD in Physical Chemistry who was the head of the Gnome Project. It was quite interesting. Especially so when he spoke of growing up unchurched, then becoming an athethist and finally while practicing medicine became a Christian. The book is very good, full of facts about DNA, evolution, and finally his personal belief about God.

The Language of God by Francis Collins

TilleyWink--Just out of curiosity, where did you see that lecture? I see you're not California (the "Golden State"). I saw Collins give that talk at Stanford, where I'm at college, which is why I'm curious. I don't remember hearing if he was giving at more than one occasion or not.

You gotta love a good out-smarting!

Drinks on me Thalion

Just so I'm clear - in your construct, the most religious person is the most uneducated?

Good questions.

Which god and in what period of time?

If I told you that our current state of affairs is not the fault of the God who created us, would you wonder if that God, the one who calls himself "He who causes to become", will ever bring about a restoration?

Not neccessarily. I did say "generally" indicating a trend, not an exact, individual measure. Just because, for example, taller people generally weigh more, doesn't mean the tallest person is also the heaviest.

But if you look at the middle ages, where everyone had very little education, you will also find that everyone was religious. Atheism was almost unheard of. Now people are far more educated, and hence we find far more atheists. If you look at impoverished African countries, you will find that everyone subscribes to the local religion. And there is always a local religion. Nowhere will you find an atheistic tribe. Finally, I think you will find that almost all of today's famous atheists are very educated and intelligent people (many of them are scientists). Conversely, not all famous Christians are educated or intelligent. There are some, of course, but the proportion is far less than that of atheists.

This is so ridiculous a generalization, not to say bizarre, that i cannot pass it by in silence. This ignores so many realities of life in Europe in the middle ages (as one assumes, absent any other indicator, that you are propounding a Euro-centric view). Many people of a great deal of temporal, political power were illiterate, and many others in those same positions of power proudly amassed considerable libraries. One could not, however, use that as a basis to determine who would defy the power of the church, and who would not. On several occasions, rulers, or the leaders of rebellious movements, would defy the Pope himself, and papal legates, despite being under bans of excommunication. In the history of England, probably the most prominent example would be Simon de Monfort, the sixth Earl Leicester. He was briefly victorious in a rebellion against Henry III, in the 1260s (which i'm sure you would consider the middle ages), and he and his followers had already been laid under a papal interdict of excommunication. The adherence of barons and peers to his cause cannot be said to have been influenced by the education, or lack of it, of his adherents. Their reaction to the interdict was uniform as well, it was ignored, for so long as de Montfort could effectively govern. The claim that education, or the lack of it, determined whether or not any particular person were religious, or whether any particular person were an unquestioning supporter of ecclesiastic authority is simply without foundation.

More than that, the peasants of the day did not live very long. To reach actual adulthood was to have beaten the odds and to have been the member of the minority; and to live very much past 30 even after having reached adulthood, was out of the ordinary. Most people bound to land lived and died within a few miles of the place of their birth, and their experience of the wider world, and of "great ideas," was sketchy at best. Sophisticated doctrinal adherence to religious belief was not required of peasants, any more than were adherence to political ideology. You worked, you paid your dues in kind to the lord of the manor and to the church, and you kept your mouth shut. To make pronouncements on what the common run of people believed or didn't believe stretches credulity more than just a little. No one knows what the vast majority of people believed, because no one asked them, because no one cared. So long as you did what you were told, you never came to the attention of anyone who were likely to write a single word about you. Those who did come to the attention of the literate did so because they came to the attention of people in power, and that was almost invariably a bad thing.

We just cannot say with any certainty that the majority of people had any but the vaguest, most superstitious notion of religion, and were as likely to believe the ancient superstitions of their individual regions as that they believed Christianity, if the records of examinations by the Inquisition are anything to go by--and those are the only records, vague though they were, to which we can refer.



How do you know? Given how very quickly you would find yourself afoul of the Inquisition (which was not just a Spanish institution convenient to the comedy skits of English comedy troupes), and how very convenient it would be for local authority to fall in with the church to eliminate you, and engross your property, the likelihood is that anyone who were an atheist and who were not a complete idiot kept his mouth shut.

Personally, i suspect that there have never been very many atheists, and that all too often, it was all their lives were worth to have made public such a lack of belief. I also suspect that far, far more people doubted the literal teachings of any organized religion than were willing to admit it. After all, on balance, humans aren't stupid, which means they are unlikely to swallow religious mumbo-jumbo hook, line and sinker, and also just as likely to keep that to themselves.

By the way, defenses of the concept of divine creation have been common for more than two thousand years--the earliest i know of is Cicero well over two thousand years ago. If theistic belief were universal, or nearly universal over the last two thousand years, it hardly seems likely that anyone would feel compelled to make an intellectual defense of theistic creation. I doubt that anyone publicly challenged the notion, for the reasons i have given above, but certainly a healthy skepticism must have been known of, or people wouldn't have been so concerned to defend the proposition.

No doubt because anyone with enough sense to doubt the powers would also be smart enough to keep his mouth firmly shut.