How can we be sure that all religions are wrong?

I'm responding to your proselytization.

You don’t have an answer then.Fair enough.

Unfortunately, 'knowing' in this sense is just not available to us. All we can know really, in the sense of knowing is our feelings. Like i feel pain, or hot or cold, we can know those things because they are, in a sense, self-referential. They do not require any outside confirmation of what they are.

But we cannot know about other things, ideas, like God, because that would require outside confirmation. To whit: you have a feeling. You associate that feeling with the Holy Spirit. How do you know it is the HS? There are a number of ways you might think you know:
1) Everyone around you tells you that's what it is.
2) You read a book and that book tells you that's what it is.

These are really the same thing, but you get the drift. If you had that same feeling and never heard of the Gospel or even Judaism, what would you attribute the feeling to? At best probably a vague sense of 'otherness' or some 'transcendent' or 'spiritual' hebee jeebees, but certainly not the definition of God a la Christianity. You don't get doctrine from feelings. So, you have to refer that feeling to something else.

So, we're down to reading a book or being told by someone (essentially the same thing) and an understanding of its doctrines which, after reading, you say you know to be true. How do you validate that knowledge? Once its inside your head and you have ascertained that you believe it, what do you reference, beside yourself to know its truth? If you say the Holy Spirit confirmed it for you, how do you ascertain that the HS confirmed it for you? Did you hear a literal voice? Was it a feeling? And even if a literal voice, (and i can believe you without issue that you did hear a voice), how did you confirm that it wasn't just you doing the talking to yourself, your own brain speaking 3rd person to 'you'? (this does happen to people - and it can be induced by drugs or by electrodes).

The basic problem is that there is no way to get our of your head to confirm that what you are experiencing (whether literal voices or feelings or some combination of the two) refers to something real.

So, i get that you believe. That is not the same as knowing. And also, if you take away one single thing from this, then it is this: My saying that you cannot know in the formal sense is not the same as saying you are wrong. You could be correct, but its just that you cannot know you are correct.

For you to know that you are correct, logic (the logic the very God you believe in either created or emanates from his being - whatever that migt mean!) dictates that you must have a reference outside yourself for validation. This isn't a diss on knowledge, its just the way things are, the way they either 'just happened' if you are an atheist or the way God made them if you are a theist.

Either way, your particular God beliefs or lack of God belief do not matter to this question of knowledge. Even were God to be true, even if it turns out after you die that the HS did give you the truth, you still cannot be said to have 'known' it here on Earth. Blame your God for creating logic/emanating logic that way.

You sound like you might be confused about what knowledge is. You should read Hume (Enquiries concerning Human Understanding) as a primer. He had much to say about what the different kinds of knowledge and what we can know and what we cannot be said to know. Though Hume was an atheist, his ideas stand on fall on their own merit, non-withstanding his lack of God belief (i.e. because they deal with the logic of how we know).

While it isn't a big deal speaking colloquially, it matters a great deal that these concepts are understood when speaking philosophically (or scientifically for that matter) - regardless of whether you agree with their point of view or not.

One thing i have found though, is that many Christians do not want to accept this logic. They think that if they admit they cannot know, then it is a black mark on their faith in God. So, their minds will not allow them to see the truth of this logic because it would cause too much dissonance and uncertainty and shake their faith.

I have answered.

You have not answered the question I put to you because you don’t have an answer....you don’t understand .....you remain trapped in your reasonings....embroiled...entangled within them.

Very nicely put. It often helps to simplify a question to its most basic terms.
All that remains is to work out which answer makes sense and which does not.

You're trapped in your rationalizations. I'm merley responding to them.

Unfortunately Leddy, at root, neither one makes sense to us, we just don't have the faculties to understand either proposition. We cannot make sense of what we call eternity. We cannot make sense of what happened 'before' time.

Probably the immediate reason is that our intellectual capacities depend on our language (try to explain eternity with langauge - our tenses fail us miserably) and our language is far too crude for the job at hand. Incredibly complex relative to what surrounds it, but childishly simple for the big questions. We might as well go back to grunting..

'Your' God is in the same boat. You have just taken the universe and moved its complexity, ineffability, inscrutable-ness and passed all of that onto a god and then given it human characteristics on steroids. This statement doesn't depend on the truth or non-truth of that god. If your god is true, then it made it this way, made things ineffable, made our inability to sort things out and to boot, threw a **** ton of contradictions in the mix to make it even harder.

And Leddy, you don't have what's 'more sensible'. There isn't a way to compare what's more sensible. The beginnings of a god-free universe are just as insensible to us as a god-filled universe.

Again, this doesn't mean there isn't such a god. It just means that our level of understanding will always keep us from knowing if there is such a being and if god is not believed, we'll never know how things got, uh, er, 'started'.

I am not trapped at all...I was once....I am now free.

Sounds like defeatism. I suck at that.

Its not defeatism, its logic. Its what i'm compelled to believe by the logic presented to me about this. I do not choose my beliefs. Data comes in and my brain compares that data with an internal logical analysis (this shouldn't be controversial - it has been demonstrated and should be obvious to those who don't even know the science) and then it presents me with the outcome of the items it has evaluated.

If this is too abstract, let me present it another way: can you believe that two plus two isn't four? Can you not believe that we are having a conversation? You can say that you don't but you (probably - ha!) really do, evidenced by the fact that you are responding to me!

Its probably possible to 'believe' things that are not dictated true by logic, where not knowing the answer you 'go' with one particular answer. But i'm not sure exactly what 'to believe' means in that case. Simply believing something cause it can't be shown to be incorrect is dubious. I'm not suggesting your god belief is exactly in this manner - i do believe there is at least one logical positive reason to believe in god (its just that there are a **** ton more to **not** believe as well) - but i think that its worth considering what belief means in light of things we have imperfect/dubious knowledge of..

I have no option to believe what is presented to me as logic. If however, you have truck with what i consider the logic of the situation, that is another story. But i don't think those logical beliefs are anything special. They are what i would consider trivially true.

Your sense of what you call 'defeatism' is an emotional sense. Defeatism is defined by **not** being logical, is defined by it being precisely an emotional state. That is to say that defeatism is by definition an emotional state that by its usage is a negative state. An emotional evaluation that is not warranted by the facts. i.e. you have a 50-50 situation or better for some good to outcome and you choose the lower odds for the bad outcome. That would be defeatism as i understand it. Maybe you have a different definition.

So, i don't have the emotional state of defeatism as you put it. I have a logical propositions presented to me which tell me what i consider to be the case about an idea or theory. My conclusions do not dictate to me by default or by necessity whether or not i feel bad about the conclusions. I mean, i might feel bad about them, but not by necessity.

Perhaps that is one of the differences between me and you. It does not bother me that there is no god. And even if it turned out when i die that i discover there was a god, it does not effect my life here on earth one whit.

And before you present Pascale's Wager to me, present it to yourself as well, cause if the Muslim god is true you and i both are up **** creek after we die..

First you plead helplessness when faced with the question at hand and now you come boasting of your powers of logic and immunity to emotion.

Pick a side man.

No, I don't know if what I posted is 100% certain and yes it's just my view. But that was the point. All I did was answer the question of "How can we be sure that all religions are wrong?" You Jasper10, did nothing but try to refute my answer with your non 100% certain answer. Which pretty much proves my point of God's 'can't listen' creations. Listen to yourself once, maybe you'll find that your 100% certainty is worse than your 50% knowing.

My 100% certainty...now you are making things up....all any one has is HOPE whether they like this or not or even accept this or not is totally irrelevant.....and the reason for this is ..............and ...........ONCE AGAIN................................Nobody can prove one way or the other whether a God exists or not.PROOF of a God or BELIEF in a God who may or may not exist are “red herrings”....You need to look elsewhere.

Again, you use an emotionally charged word inappropriately. I don't 'plead' helplessness unless you consider not knowing something 'helpless'. I don't perceive its usage in the same sense that you appear to. That word comes with baggage. I don't go around telling people i'm helpless because i don't understand something. I just say i don't understand it and then we have a beer..

And i don't boast of powers of logic, this is a philosophy forum so, yah, ya might get a healthy dose of what i i perceive as logic. You can either see it, perceive it like you would a math problem or a winning chess move or not. Of course, my logic could be faulty. If it is, i'd like to know..

I have no immunity to emotion. I enjoy life. I try to live it too its fullest. I'm a musician, a programmer, a chess player, a psychologist, a soccer player and a writer. There is no shortage of emotion in the things i enjoy. Its just that the articulation of what i consider logic requires what appears to be unemotional analysis. If you had a beer with me and we talked about say music or football (both American and English style), you might see another side..

Cheers Leddy..

First round is on me Cat.

I was of course using hyperbole to get to the point, no insult meant.



Not bad, That gives us six out of eight things in common. If you happen to be interested in biology as well, we could talk about why we do or do not think that 'all this' 'just happened'. Have you run across my argument from biology and information technology for why it couldn’t have? It may not have been in this thread.

I haven't seen your particular argument on why this couldn't have just happened, but you must have a noble prize for this?

I kid, but seriously, speaking of hyperbole, when you say "..why it couldn't have" - that is a pretty bold statement. Mostly because in your or any evaluation of why this stuff couldn't "just happen" (that alone is also fraught with assumption as well - not the least of which is that it might not have "just happened", it might be that it necessarily happened!), it assumes that we have all the knowledge needed to make that evaluation. Only your God has the point of view necessary for that all inclusive evaluation.

Included in that assumption is also that we understand what we mean by "information" and "biology" (or "life"). I put these in quotes as while we understand from a practical and colloquial pov what these things mean, when we try to understand them fundamentally - so as to more properly discuss things like beginnings, ontology and epistemology - things get trickier than Nixon on a meth bender..

You must also understand - even if were to be maximally generous in accepting your conclusions, that doesn't put us one whit closer to knowing there is a god. That proposition is entirely separate from whether or not "things couldn't just happen".

The reason should be obvious from a basic understanding of epistemology: the concept of God is just as absurd as the universe 'just happening'. You are saying essentially, it is absurd that the universe created itself, so i'm going to use a place holder i'm going to symbolise with the word 'God' and call that an explanation, completely excusing yourself from having to explain that God except perhaps by asserting that there must be an unmoved mover (you may be correct - but that unmoved mover doesn't logically have to be 'God' as you define it). And then to add insult to injury by granting it all kinds of properties that are fundamentally unproveable and worse, incapable of being investigated or proven wrong!!!

So, even if you convince me that evolution or abiogensis is all wrong. I would accept that, but as the late Hitchens was fond of saying (paraphrased): "you still have all your work ahead of you to convince that it is a 'god' that did all this and further that it cares about what food i eat, with whom i sleep and in what position.."

That said, you can lay your idea on me..

Cheers!

No argument about that being a bold statement, but nevertheless, I stand by it. But I have no expectation of a Nobel. However, please note that no one else has collected one for explaining life, in spite of assertions that we do know how it originated. It’s not an oversight by the Nobel committee. No one has explained it in the scientific community. Theories abound, of course.

I'll post my argument below but before we go further, please note that you are the only one to bring up the subject of 'God' in our conversation so far. I have only argued that it (biological life) couldn’t have 'just happened'. I was hoping you had some interest or education in biology because that as well as information technology is required to follow the logic. If you find any flaws in it I’d be glad to hear them.

————————————-
Why I believe life couldn’t have 'just happened':

The simplest example that illustrates the basic problem of 'accidental life' is to understand what a protein is and how it is made. Search 'life of the cell' on YouTube for visual references to proteins. Without at least some grasp of proteins, a simple explanation is impossible. A protein in biology has little to do with the dietary term 'protein' so don’t think 'the stuff in meat'.

There are thousands of different types of proteins for doing different jobs in a cell. Anything that happens or gets done inside a cell is done either directly or indirectly by a protein. It is the most basic functional unit in a cell.

A protein is a molecular machine. I use the term 'machine' because of its interrelated combination of chemical, electrical and mechanical characteristics and the fact that it is very specific and functional.

A protein is made of amino acids. Amino acids are called the 'building blocks of life' for this reason. Making these 'building blocks' in the lab is as close to creating life as we have come, even though amino acids can potentially form naturally. This is why one theory of life emerging is called 'protein world' since it seems logical that the 'simpler' protein came before the far more complex cell.

There are hundreds of different amino acids and each one comes in right and left handed versions (mirror images). Proteins are made of only 20 of them and all are left handed. This creates a problem for 'naturally occurring' proteins because if you mix in any of the other amino acids, or even a single right handed one of the 20, the protein is broken and will not function. And there is no mechanism in nature to prevent such contamination. But we are not yet to the real reason why biological life had to be designed.

Each protein is a very specifically ordered chain of amino acids between about 150 and 3500 long, depending on the protein. They do not function in this string form. In order to be functional, they must be 'folded' into a complex physical three dimensional shape, which is another barrier to 'natural' life forming. But we are still not at the crux of the problem.

Let’s say that in spite of the odds, the right order of only the correct amino acids does link up by chance. Let us further say that they accidentally fold into the correct functional configuration. If you are into math, the chances of that happening have been calculated at 1 in 10^77. For perspective, there are about 10^50 atoms in the entire planet of earth. But still, we are not at the bottom of the problem.

Remember that we are only talking about a protein so far. it takes hundreds to thousands of different proteins working in a coordinated fashion to make a single cell function. But for now let's ignore the mathematical improbability of that first protein and the hundreds of others needed.

You have probably noticed that I have not mentioned DNA yet. It is the nature of what DNA is that makes accidental life virtually impossible. Bill Gates compared DNA to a computer operating system, only DNA is far more complicated. It is the most complicated thing we know of and we have only begun to understand just how complex it is.

But it is NOT the complexity itself that explains why it had to be designed. It is the multiple hierarchical levels of symbolic representation in DNA that demands a design. DNA has a LANGUAGE with syntax, words, punctuation, definitions, etc.

Here is the breaking point. It is possible for a human mind to imagine something as complex as a protein forming as a result of naturally occurring chemical processes even if the odds are vanishingly small. Then multiply that by the thousands of protein types needed. Still you could say, well given enough time, multiple universes, etc. it could happen. It sounds desperate to me but You can’t say the odds are zero. I should add that even the 'evolution explains everything' crowd can’t defend this 'Protein World' scenario, so they usually default to something like 'RNA world' as a precursor to first living cell. RNA is basically half of a DNA strand.

But to accept that this happened by random chance you would have to believe the following:

By random linking up of nucleotides (the four molecules that are in DNA), a machine language containing the words, letters, syntax and punctuation necessary for defining all the needed proteins for 'life' came about. Notice that I said 'defining' the proteins, not the proteins themselves or even the amino acids needed to make a protein.

To over simplify, DNA is a ‘recipe', an ordered list of instructions and ingredients on how to build thousands of different proteins. DNA itself cannot do anything with these instructions. In order to be built, the DNA instructions have to be transferred to a Ribosome, which in turn is a very complex protein itself (hopefully you see the chicken and egg problem here).

The Ribosome reads the symbolic list of the recipe and begins gathering the required amino acids called for in the list. It assembles the amino acids into a string in the order specified in the DNA strand sent to it. (in the form of what’s called ‘messenger RNA')

After the amino acids are strung together, Some simpler proteins will spontaneously fold into their final three dimensional shape but most require yet other proteins to actively form them in the correct way. If they are not folded correctly they will not function and are often toxic.

Hopefully you followed that but to summarize, complex combinations of amino acids are possible given enough time and material. The odds are not what I would call possible but you can’t say that a protein by accident is impossible, in spite of its complexity.

What cannot be reasonably believed is that 'nature' took that first accidental protein and then invented a symbolic language (encoded in DNA) that was able to be read and executed by yet another different protein in order to make more proteins.

A protein by accident - maybe.

A symbolic language describing all the needed proteins for life and simultaneously a molecular machine that understands that language and able to build them according to the instructions by accident? - Nope.

It is the symbolic nature of DNA's language that required 'design'.

First, Leddy, that's a bit disingenuous. There are many assertions out there, but can we agree that many scientists do not assert that we know how life originated? You're always going to be able to find folks who assert stuff when it is clear that they lack the evidence. That is why they haven't got a nobel prize, the committee is scientific and no scientific evidence has been presented. To my knowledge, we have no good knowledge about abiogenesis - yet. And may never. But we might also..



I'm not a biologist. I do not know this stuff in depth. However, i do understand the fundamental flaw in this statement. Do you see it? Yes, i thought you might. DNA is not code. It is DNA. We might choose to loosely call it that as a model or something to help us understand what's going on. But DNA isn't information or code or programming. These are symbols imposed on it by an agent (us). DNA is DNA at root, nothing more, nothing less. When you call it code, you are poisoning the well, imbibing it with characteristics that may or may not belong to it, as we view what we call 'code', 'information' or 'programming' as created by ourselves. This is as apparent as Hume or Kant's 'Thing in Itself' and is very important to understand since huge philosophical mistakes have been made viz a viz the reification of 'things'.

However, that said, to the main point, it might be pretty implausible for life to start on its own. You might have a point. To us, it looks pretty damn implausible for any of the processes as we can conceive them thus far, starting life as we know it. But the kicker is: as we can conceive them thus far. Maybe we will figure this stuff out eventually. Who knows? Maybe we won't.

I don't know, but ever since we have figured out that figuring out how life came from what we call non-life was frickin' hard as frick, it is trivial that we cannot assert logically that it could not happen. To whit: It just might be that given the conditions of the universe, life necessarily has to happen. And maybe we can't figure it out here because maybe life didn't start on earth. Maybe if it started via pan-spermia, the conditions for abiogenesis wherever (plural or singular) would reveal themselves more readily.

But yes, i don't deny that with our current knowledge we cannot scientifically show abiogenesis. We only have hints, guesses, which if we are allowed to keep going for the next 500 years, may yield scientific answers or maybe not.

But no, for the above reasons, i cannot conclude that it is impossible - that would be illogical of me. As i mentioned, we do not have a 'god's eye' view of the universe where we could possibly take in all of the factors and essentially infinite combinations of interactivities between those factors to make such a negative statement. You, me, none of us have the requisite information, we don't know all the properties of the things and the universe to make properly definite statements.

The correct answer is: I don't have enough information to make sure a positive assertive statement. That isn't recalcitrance, that is logic. 'I don't know' is the truth searchers friend. Anything else is just a guess - and yes, it could be a correct guess - but then at that point because it can't be proven, can't be verified, who cares? Without confirmation, its campfire shroom talk. It just assertion. Nothing to back it up, to give it teeth. You say yes, i say no and round and round we go..

Ok, you have convinced me here. You don’t know enough about biology or information technology to discuss the argument.

So what kind of programmer are you?

Try Googling “Bill Gates quote about DNA”. Unless you know more about programming than him.