Here's my long post for the week.
No, it's when you assume the conclusion in the premises, not just avoiding the question. It's a specific material fallacy, (Aristotle, ~350BG). if you're arguing for something (in this case the existence of a deity), you can't pre-suppose that thing. Applies to all arguments. This is begging the question: "badtim is an atheist. how do you know? because he doesn't believe in god." Fallacious logic doesn't really have grey areas, only bad usage.
I know that... I just had a review of the logical fallacies in my advanced writing class (made an A on the test, BTW). I didn't feel like getting into it. Many of the logical fallacies can be summed up as not answering a question.
I'm not a big fan of the concepts, though I think they can be useful in formal settings. It seems to me like another excuse for secular thinkers to attack religion.
What's wrong with saying that you're an atheist because you don't believe in God? Why is it wrong to say that? Isn't that the number one criteria of being an atheist?
And for the sake of an argument, why is it wrong to presuppose something? How could any Christian ever argue their views if they always have to prove their God exists first?
No, it is the responsibility of the person making the claim to prove it right, see your legal example above. And anyway, one of the main advances we have made in the last several hundred years has been consistently proving superstition and religion wrong. That's a huge part of the history of science, and a main reason why some religious people are scared of it.
It's been a
goal to disprove religion, but that cannot be done. This is one reason why I find Animal Planet to be so obnoxious, especially those dinosaur specials where they narrate in a "as a matter of fact" kind of tone about stuff they couldn't possibly know.
Science is geared to be anti-religion, and has become much of a religious view on its own. God is not welcome in science.
Scientists make a ton of claims that can never be verified, such as when they try to age the earth. It's not like we can travel back in time to see if the method actually works.
Ok, so unless you can devise a solid methodology for testing this, that is both rational and repeatable, i will stick to my guns and say that was your own mind. If you can devise a truly solid experiment to prove what you have just said, then i will change my tune and convert immediately back to christianity -- if you can prove it was YHVH who told you this, and not Ahura Mazda, Odin, Athena, or Baron Samedi.
I don't know if I can prove to you that my experience was real, but it was enough to convince me.
It happened when I was with a certain group who practiced supernatural gifts, such as the "word of knowledge" thing I did. When I'm around them, something always happens.
One time, I came in with an aching right foot. It wasn't bad enough that I couldn't ignore it, so I didn't limp around or wince or anything like that.
Near the end, someone (not even a regular member of the group) said that God told them that someone's right foot was hurting. We weren't a very big group, so it wasn't like they could throw any kind of symptom out there and always find somebody who has it. Either these people were psychics, or someone was tipping them off about these things.
What would Odin have to gain by fooling us into believing that the Christian God exists?
If you're adventurous enough to give it a try, I could attempt to try the word of knowledge thing with you. I'm not very experienced, and I haven't been able to do it very consistently, but I'm okay with possibly making a fool out of myself on the Internet. Couldn't hurt just to give it a shot.
You do realize there was no such thing as the "Catholic Church" as we know it today until into the middle ages right? I'll check out the thread, but if you're referring to the predestination thing, it was heretical from the beginning in the early church, does not occur in Judaism, and still is an extreme minority view (basically only some types of american protestantism). The vast majority of christians, worldwide, reject it and always have. It also brings up serious logical issues with core tenets of christian belief (salvation being one).
Funny. Back when I believed in free will, atheists were always trying to convince me that what the Bible teaches was contradictory to that. Now that I've changed my mind, they're arguing the opposite.
The idea that God determines our destinies (Predestination) is found throughout the whole Bible, New and Old Testaments. We see it in the Old Testament when God hardens the heart of Pharaoh. We also see it in the New Testament when Paul teaches that God selected some of us before time, long before we existed, and that our salvation is, therefore, not our own responsibility. It is God who saves us, not ourselves.
Who we are is determined by two factors: nature and nurture. God gave us both, and His knowledge of the future means we cannot ever have the power to act on free will. We can't do anything apart from reacting to the previous events which created us and continue to mold us, and we certainly cannot ever contradict God's foreknowledge. There is no room for freedom.
True. The Catholic church did not exist until the Middle Ages, but it did a lot of harm to Christian theology when it appeared. It turned Christianity into an organization, and inserted a ton of ideas which were not Biblical.
However, even from the time of the Apostles, the church was always threatened with false ideology which tried to seep its way in. The had teachers who tried to claim that Jesus was not really flesh, but that He was only a spirit. They had people who tried to claim that one needed to be circumcised to be saved.
Even through the natural process of each new generation taking over for the older, the religion fought against decay, as words were misunderstood, and ideas were made that weren't meant to be made.
Today, the only way to have an idea of what the first century church believed is to read the Bible for what it says, using reliable supplements to bring it into context and to clarify on some things which may be lost in translation.
Baruch Spinoza? Did he ever say anything about how God, who is infinite, could separate Himself from something?
I'm not quite sure I understand it yet. It's not as if God is physically anywhere, so He's not moving from one place to another. And if He has infinite knowledge, He's always going to know what's going on. So maybe He's not really physically limiting Himself so much as He is choosing to have no part in something.
Usually, the way I hear it explained is that when God separates Himself from someone or someplace, He's really just becoming inactive there.
that's because christian ideas of god are couched in contradictory infinities. that's not his fault, it's the fault of the people that made him up.
Now you're really voicing your own opinions rather than arguing fact. I see no contradictions.
he also makes mistakes, and shows regret, and must change, because otherwise why did jesus come and fiddle with the law, which was originally eternal and unchanging?
God doesn't make mistakes. When you say He shows regret, you're probably referring to when God was becoming angry with the Israelites and threatened to destroy them. God knew before He even took them out of Egypt that He would become fed up with them, and He wished He had never created them.
Here we see a conflict between God's perfect will and His permitted will. God's perfect will calls for a perfect world where everything would be just as He would like it to be. But God's permitted will is what He must allow to happen for the good of His ultimate plan. While God wanted to destroy the Israelites, He chose not to because He knew it would be worth it down the line.
Jesus didn't "fiddle with the law." Jesus fulfilled the law. From the very beginning, God promised that He would fix what had been broken between Him and mankind by sending a Savior. When Jesus came, He did that.
Many of the OT laws and customs were made to symbolize Jesus and what He would do. Such as with the sacrificial lamb, which was perfect and spotless, which was killed to take away the sins of the people. Jesus came as a sinless man, and He took the place of the sacrificial lamb to do what the lambs sacrifice could not do. That is, to permanently wash away sins.
Hold on, God, a perfect being, hates? Hates that which he created? Don't you see a problem there?
No, I don't. A perfect God who loves what is good must hate what is contrary to what is good (i.e. evil). God is love, but He is also justice. These two things are inseparable.
Yes, but i was speaking of straight causality and not that kind of stuff. If you want to learn about 4+ dimensional constructs, study differential geometry. I'd ask my fiancee to explain it, but i think i will need a few years (or decades) for her to explain it to me!
Your fiancee sounds like my cousin. He's always talking about things I don't understand, though he's very good at explaining things. I'm still not even entirely sure what he's studying. It has something to do with light and some materials I've never heard of.
I don't believe that causality is all that simple. Rather, I think some things tend to lead to certain results because some things have a greater degree of affect than others. If I drop a ball, we expect that it will fall. But there are a lot of complex factors which lead to this event. It's not just that my fingers relaxed, but my brain sent a current of energy through my body, telling my finger muscles to relax. The presence of the earth's gravity then allowed the ball to do what my fingers previously restricted it from doing.
Even then, it won't fall in a straight line. The slightest wind current would redirect the ball. The factors I listed are only worth noting because of their strong influence on the event. The cars driving down the highway a few miles away probably had some immeasurable degree of influence, but that influence was still there.
All this is to say that I believe that everything has a cause, but it's impossible to take every factor into account.
True. Scale-wise, the average distance between a minimum energy state electron and the nucleus is huge. We can observe particle behavior in a number of ways -- and what heisenberg discovered was actually that for certain pairs of physical measurements, such as position and momentum, we cannot discern both at the same time, to very high degrees of accuracy. In this case, if you measured position to 10^10 decimal places, your measurement of momentum would be limited to 10^2 decimal places, and vice versa (not real numbers, just for illustration).
Interesting.
I never said not to dream or theorize; only not to believe, as proven fact, extreme statements with no backup. Hell, I'm a poet! Creativity, dreaming up explanations and meanings, is a core part of what makes us human. Without that, we are nothing. For me, it's the difference between fiction and non-fiction -- the dreams and desires of humanity, whatever they are, end as soon as they contradict reality. Here's a great example:
GOP’s Beard wants more coal plants because God will fix global warming | Twin Cities Daily Planet
this guy is
NUTS. he is deranged. he is a dangerous ideologue who seems to actually believe that his own odd reading of an ancient book trumps the entire history of mankind, the entire body of science, as well as obvious limitations like the VOLUME OF THE EARTH. that is what i have huge problems with, because when cultures get like that, they tend to
die.
There's requiring proof for extreme statements, and then there's taking it a bit too far -- look up the Piraha (
Pirahã people - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) -- i think they take it too far. They're total atheists btw, though do believe in forest spirits and the like. They seem to have backed themselves into a corner -- total mastery of their ecological niche, but zero possibility for expansion. No number concepts past 2 or 3 even. Oh and they're also 100% immune to conversion -- in fact, they tend to convert missionaries that are sent to them, to atheism.
I'm not sure Daily Planet really gave Beard's views an unbiased review. I would agree with him that I don't believe we are doing any real permanent damage by burning coal. Global warming, I think, is a myth, and many scientists do no believe in it the way the media portray it. The earth does know how to balance itself very well. When we release greenhouse gases, more plants grow. Those plants then reduce the amount of greenhouses gases in the atmosphere. Then there are natural events which are contributing to increased carbon emissions, which will probably cycle and start reversing itself soon.
If Beard doesn't believe in global warming, that's one thing. But if he does believe it exists and is testing God by saying He'll fix everything,
then he's just being reckless.
As for the Piraha, they just seem like hypocrites to me. They believe in things they cannot see, such as the spirits, and I'd bet they have legends of their forefathers (who they never met, yet still believe existed). But when a foreign idea is introduced, they want evidence.
I have never met a single scientist who has held this view, out of the hundreds i have known. If you're talking about adherence to pet theories in the face of contradictory evidence, sure. That's another human trait, and one that is widely studied, and constantly corrected for (sometimes effectively, sometimes not).
Scientists aren't the only one's who use science. Laymen tend to trust science blindly, giving full confidence in the ability of human beings to understand our world. They don't understand the science, but they look up to those who do in a similar manner that tribesmen might give look to their spiritual leader, witch doctor, or shaman.
Ah, so you've experienced corporate research programs then. Or post-modernist sociology.
Not too much, but a little. I'm not too familiar with post-modernist sociology. Is that the kind of stuff based on the idea that there are no absolutes, but that people and morality vary by culture?