ID is officially dead.

Subduction Zone

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That wasn't a try; I was being funny —at least to me it was funny. I knew quoting the Bible would not be an answer, to your mind. Nice comeback, though.

You said,
"Subduction Zone said:
What is a reasonable test for your beliefs in God?"

What is that but testing God? You will no doubt say that testing my beliefs is not the same as testing God. Perhaps, but I have no way (as I said) to test my beliefs until God shows up.

Maybe it is fair to say I can test them well enough for myself, as my beliefs concerning God include, for example, his trustworthiness. My parents had 9 kids, and seems like always there was a cousin or someone else or two with us. They were missionaries, living by donations as they taught at a Bible institute and had other duties such as maintenance, etc. In other words, they were always well below the poverty level, yet I don't recall ever going hungry, nor being in any other serious need. That may not mean anything to a scientist, but it did to them. Their beliefs were affirmed. Something like that has happened for me too, many times. God has proven himself faithful to me. Yeah, I know —confirmation bias. Ok.

That is only testing your beliefs. In no way is it testing God. In fact as I said, you appear to be conflating yourself with God. That is not a good thing.

And you need a reasonable test. Experience has shown that it is very easy to fool ourselves. Your only suggestion would be very vulnerable to that.

Once again, do not test God. How do you test your beliefs? You need to avoid confirmation bias and other fails.
 
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Mark Quayle

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That is only testing your beliefs. In no way is it testing God. In fact as I said, you appear to be conflating yourself with God. That is not a good thing.

And you need a reasonable test. Experience has shown that it is very easy to fool ourselves. Your only suggestion would be very vulnerable to that.

Once again, do not test God. How do you test your beliefs? You need to avoid confirmation bias and other fails.
For the third time, I will say it again. There is no way for me to test my beliefs to YOUR satisfaction. When you see God in person, you will see my beliefs were right, but not quite how I anticipated. But at that point, I doubt you will be thinking of my beliefs very much.
 
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Subduction Zone

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For the third time, I will say it again. There is no way for me to test my beliefs to YOUR satisfaction. When you see God in person, you will see my beliefs were right, but not quite how I anticipated. But at that point, I doubt you will be thinking of my beliefs very much.
No, you are just changing your story now that you can see your error. It is not to MY satisfaction. It is to the satisfaction that anyone that can reason rationally, including yourself. And please, why try to claim that your God is immoral and unjust? Why the empty threats? I think that you are merely mad at me for making you face the facts that your beliefs are not rational.
 
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Phred

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It wasn't underhanded in the least! Nor was it a threat. Just a statement of fact. If you perceive threat from it, then take it as a warning. Either way, if there is a threat, it is not from me.
Of course it's a threat. "Believe what I believe or you will suffer for all eternity." Who made that threat? You did.

When asked you do what religionists always do. You cower and pretend you aren't responsible. Some deity someplace is responsible. You didn't type those words. You didn't use them like a club. Except... you did.
 
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driewerf

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When you see God in person
Or not, if there isn't any.
You seem to take for granted that there is one. I don't, now provide any evidence,. Will not be accepted
  • I believe so
  • when you find out it'll be too late. (or anything with the same meaning)
 
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Ophiolite

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As I always say, the worst part of being an atheist is that I won't get to say "I told you so."
I'm holding out for the hope that this is a simulation, wherein I 'wake up' to learn I've been playing a game called "How to be a Billionaire". My reaction: "Ten times I've played this game and every time I wind up as an underpaid geologist!":)
 
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Kylie

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I'm holding out for the hope that this is a simulation, wherein I 'wake up' to learn I've been playing a game called "How to be a Billionaire". My reaction: "Ten times I've played this game and every time I wind up as an underpaid geologist!":)

I feel like I've been playing the prat version of Rimmer...
 
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PhantomGaze

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Intelligent Design, a pseudoscience which claims life has the appearance of design.

Science changes based upon the needs of culture and philosophical underpinnings of the reigning paradigm. It just so happens that the current paradigm doesn't favor ID. If they had or eventually do succeed in a paradigm shift, then the very definition of science will change (as it has in the past), so saying something "isn't science" doesn't amount to much in principle, especially when it's the very thing under contention.

Silly me thought ID was the ID Discovery channel.
Well, the Discovery Institute has been its primary advocate, sure. I can actually understand the mistake.
 
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Kylie

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Science changes based upon the needs of culture and philosophical underpinnings of the reigning paradigm. It just so happens that the current paradigm doesn't favor ID. If they had or eventually do succeed in a paradigm shift, then the very definition of science will change (as it has in the past), so saying something "isn't science" doesn't amount to much in principle, especially when it's the very thing under contention.

Well, the Discovery Institute has been its primary advocate, sure. I can actually understand the mistake.

No, science changes based on evidence. It is based on what works in the real world. And the real world doesn't change depending on the "needs of culture and philosophical underpinnings of the reigning paradigm."

You appear to dramatically misunderstand what science is and how it works.
 
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PhantomGaze

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No, science changes based on evidence. It is based on what works in the real world. And the real world doesn't change depending on the "needs of culture and philosophical underpinnings of the reigning paradigm."

You appear to dramatically misunderstand what science is and how it works.

Obviously the real world doesn't change ontologically. What changes is the definition of science, and what science "is", what is allowed to be discussed, and what thoughts are considered "scientific".

The misunderstanding is common (and actually important), but after reading The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Kuhn, and being somewhat familiar with Popperian understandings already, I think it's fair to say that the history science tends to teach is often very... selective, in order to create a narrative of progress. That isn't to say that it doesn't make progress, rather to say that the reigning narrative determines the particular problems science 'progresses' by solving.

For example while we normally think of science as replacing 'occult' or outdated superstitious beliefs:

The impact of Newton's work about the normal seventeenth-century tradition of scientific practice provides a striking example of these subtler effects of a paradigm shift. Before Newton was born, the "New Science" of the century had at last succeeded in rejecting the Aristotelian and scholastic explanations expressed in terms of the essences of the material bodies. To say that a stone fell because "nature" drove it toward the center of the universe had been made to look like a mere tautological wordplay, something it had not previously been. Henceforth the entire flux of sensory appearances including color, taste, and even weight was to be determined in terms of the size, shape, position, and motion of the elementary corpuscles of base matter. The attribution of other qualities to the elementary atoms was a resort to the occult and therefore out of bounds for science."

and a little ways down:

“Gravity, interpreted as an innate attraction between every pair of particles of matter, was an occult quality in the same sense as the scholastics' "tendency to fall" had been”.

In reality, the mechano-corpuscular view of the world in Newton's time was far and away more materialistic than our current understanding of the natural world, but that is part of the narrative we've created to interpret scientific progress.
 
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Kylie

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Obviously the real world doesn't change ontologically. What changes is the definition of science, and what science "is", what is allowed to be discussed, and what thoughts are considered "scientific".

The misunderstanding is common (and actually important), but after reading The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Kuhn, and being somewhat familiar with Popperian understandings already, I think it's fair to say that the history science tends to teach is often very... selective, in order to create a narrative of progress. That isn't to say that it doesn't make progress, rather to say that the reigning narrative determines the particular problems science 'progresses' by solving.

For example while we normally think of science as replacing 'occult' or outdated superstitious beliefs:



and a little ways down:



In reality, the mechano-corpuscular view of the world in Newton's time was far and away more materialistic than our current understanding of the natural world, but that is part of the narrative we've created to interpret scientific progress.

I fail to see what part of this refutes my claim.
 
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