Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Atheists like to inflate figures

Atheists have always been super sensitive about how many they have in the population. This is because they have never been more than 3%. So they try to adopt all Buddhists as atheists, recently they have started to adopt Hindus become ancinet sects of Hindus didn't emphasize the idea of Gods, although they didn't say there was no God. One of their main tricks is to just lie about the statistics. Usually this is done by confusing the issues between those who actually "I am an atheist" and those who they say are atheists because they don't like religion. With this last trick they have gotten as many as 12% of U.S. Population. When we sort out this last group, those who don't like religion from those who don't like religion but still believe in some form of God, or "something out there," you get 3% atheists!

Atheist Empire, a militant atheist hate group site has a very impressive looking array of lies with charts and graphs it goes all down the page and looks so pretty, scientific and impressive. When you compare adherence.com or some other more established group that's been giving valid demographics for a long time you realize that they are playing the same game over at the hate group atheist empire.

With all their fancy charts and BS all they've done is to blur the distinction between non religious and belief in God. When you look at adherence you see this on the pie chart, where it says 16% world pop are non religious: "including agnostic, secular humanist, atheist, people answering 'none or no religious preference' half of this group is theistic but non religious." That's ot my  words that what it says on the chart. So the Atheist Empire guys are just playing the same old game of blur the distinction. One might also notice they don't percentages they give it in numbers so it sounds real impressive to say "800,000,000 atheists" in the world,, what percentage? 3%? 15%? (but they include theists who aren't' religious."

CARM (02/28/2008)

a thread called

"Good News--New Study supports rising tide of non belief!"


The Study in Question is the Pew Forum on Religion and public Life study

Title:

U.S. Religious Land Scape June 28, 2008.



Great news--new study supports the rising tide of Nonbelief


The Pew Center for Religion and the Public Life just came out with a new large poll on religious affiliations in the U.S. http://religions.pewforum.org. Tally up the numbers, and you'll see that Christians make up about 76.8 percent of the U.S. population, and those with no affiliation (atheists, agnostics, don't identify with any religious group but may consider themselves vaguely "spiritual") was 16.1 percent. Another .8 percent said the don't know or refused to answer--since that is not what any God-fearing religious person would say, I would add it to the "No Affilation" side of the ledger. Rounding, we have Christians as 77% and the non-religious at 17%. All other religions are in the low single digits.

The study overall found that people move around quite a bit religiously and a large percentage don't have the same religion as their parents. However, the "no affiliation" group was clearly growing and were losing far few people than they were gaining. The non-belief crowd is like a slow rising flood--there was a time we would have been in the low single digits, but now we are up to 17% overall and are an even higher percentage of the young. With each passing generation, more and more people are considering themselves as non-religious.

In my lifetime, I expect to see this number get up to 25% or more overall, and my kids could see a USA where the majority of Americans are finally secular rather than religious in their world view. Hallelujah!



Despite the positively stated title and the exultation in the closing line, some atheists actually said "no claim has been made."


he's trying to claim atheism at 17% this is such folly. They are assuming affiliation is synonymous with belief in God! So clearly foolish and when one examines the study the breakdown of unaffiliated the actual number given to atheist population in America is 1.6%! they are counting anyone not a Christian as an atheist!

(for the first page of the study).




This study actually shows atheism shrinking as the research I have done previously indicated it was at 3% of US pop. they have at 1.6%.


I find atheists doing this all the time. I've seen them count all of Buddhism as atheism so they can say they are a major world religion. IF they really believe they are right, why aren't they just content to be right? why do they take such solace in bogus inflation of numbers? Gallop shows more people in Japan are Christian than ever before.

The category of "non affiliated" leaves room for religious belief. but to be fair, he wasn't just ignorant of what decimal points do. The whole category happened to be 16% and the atheists 1.6% so he was going by the category, not taking out the decimal.

still, he should have known.


*Adherents.com = 4% U.S. Pop is Ahtiest


Adherents.com shows Atheists at 0.4% of U.S. Population.


Atheist 1990 adult pop: 902,000 2004= 1,272,986 Percentrage of Pop = 0.4%

a note on this statistical table says:



*Gallup polls show 6% U.S. Pop with 3% error


Gallup organization

finds 6% atheist in U.S. 2008, within 3% margin of error this agrees with the other polls.

May 9-11, 2008.

Which of the following statements comes closest to your belief about God -- you believe in God, you don't believe in God, but you do believe in a universal spirit or higher power, or you don't believe in either? (findings: 6% say Neither, 78% believe in God, 15% beleive in universal spirit, 1% no opinion).



*Pew Study at top = 1.6% U.S. Pop



2004 total population numbers were calculated by multiplying each group's percent of the total adult 2001 population (207,882,353) by the 2004 total population (using the June 1, 2004 U.S. Census Bureau extrapolated estimate of 293,382,953 total Americans). The U.S. Census Bureau total U.S. population estimate for 2000, based on the actual 2000 Census, was: 281,421,906. The U.S. Census Bureau total U.S. population estimate for July 1, 2001 was: 293,655,404. The adult (ages 18 and over) population estimate for July 1, 2001 was: 220,377,406. The total adult population for 2001 used in the 2001 ARIS study (apparently counting only adults aged 21 and over) was: 207,882,353. For 2001 figures, see: 293655404http://www.census.gov/popest/states/asrh/SC-est2004-01.html. This method of extrapolating the 2004 total population of each religious group from the 2001 adult population of each group does not factor in differences in the average number of children per adult for each religious group.



While stats on Christian population have been underrated! New study finds more Christians in Japan than previous thought.

Moe People Claim Christian Faith in Japan

By
Audrey Barrick
audrey@christianpost.com
Sun, Mar. 19 2006 10:24 AM ET


The latest Gallup poll revealed a much higher percentage of Christians in Japan compared to previous surveys, including a surprising high number of teens who claimed the Christian faith.


More People Claim Christian Faith in Japan



Japanese people walk along Omotesando, a fashionable street in Tokyo, March 8, 2006. The latest Gallup poll revealed a much higher percentage of Christians in Japan compared to previous surveys, including a surprising high number of teens who claimed the

In a country where only one percent is Christian among those who claim a faith, findings from one of the most extensive surveys of the country ever taken showed a Christian population of six percent. Meanwhile, the most popular and traditional religions – Buddhism and Shintoism – suffered declines.

Of the 30 percent of adults who claimed to have a religion, 75 percent considered themselves Buddhists, 19 percent Shintoists and 12 percent Christians, according to the Gallup Organization. Japanese youth revealed even more alarming statistics. Of the 20 percent who professed to have a religion, 60 percent called themselves Buddhists, 36 percent Christians and Shintoists.

"These projections mean that seven percent of the total teenage population say they are Christians," said George Gallup Jr. who called the numbers "stunning."

The study - the single largest study ever attempted, according to the social scientists in Japan - examined preteens, teens, young adults, adults and seniors.

"When they saw the design of the questionnaire, Japanese experts argued that the Japanese would never answer the socially delicate and/or the highly personal questions," said Bill McKay, project research director. "However, it was our professional hunch that the Japanese were ready to talk and when they did they told us more than we had asked for. The data is the most revealing look behind the face of Japan and shatters many WWII myths of the Japanese culture."

McKay is also one of the producers of a documentary that is slated for release later this year. The poll was conducted in association with American Trademark Research and MJM Group in 2001 for use in the documentary.

"In my 50 years of polling, there has been no study that I would consider as important as this one, because it provides insight into a fascinating culture," said Gallup.

Delving into more specific attitudes, the poll also found a note of hopelessness in the responses to questions related to morality, spirituality and general views about life.

"And there is little evidence of eternal hope, although a considerable number do believe in some form of life afterlife," noted Gallup. And "there is little belief in 'absolutes,' and this is true across the all-generational groups."

In comparison to teens in the United States, Japanese teens showed a pessimistic outlook on life. Previous studies found that 85 percent of teens in Japan wondered why they existed while 22 percent of U.S. teens had the same thought. Additionally, 13 percent of Japanese teens always see a reason for their being on Earth compared to 76 percent of teens in the U.S, and 11 percent of Japanese teens wished they had never been born while 3 percent of U.S. teens wished the same.

Within an estimated population of 127.4 million in Japan, academics estimate that 20 to 30 percent of adults actively practice a particular faith, but the Agency for Cultural Affairs reported in 2003 that 213,826,700 citizens claimed a religion, according to the U.S. Department of State's latest International Religious Freedom Report.

Monday, June 28, 2010

Amazing Randy, the center of the atheist universe

Photobucket
not so Amazing Randy

On an atheist message board I was giving an account of an incident that happens to me years ago involving the Amazing Randy. I had asked him if he studied Lourdes in an email and he sent one back cursing me.

I was polite. I didn't say "hey Jerk..." I was a polite as I could be. I asked him if he had studies the Lourdes miracles. He sent an email backing saying that he had not. It should have let it end there but since they had goaded me about the money I added something to the effect that if he did study the miracles maybe he would find he should give the money to the Catholic chruch. I mean after all, if they fit the conditions why not? I didn't curse I did not saying rude or hateful.

He did come back a string of curing calling me names telling me I was this and that and the other thing. So I sent one back showing him I have as a vocabulary has he does. We exchanged a couple like that I don't remember how many. I really don't blame him that much because he probably gets jerks and cranks and peple harassing him and he probably I was such a person. I really wasn't trying to do that. I think it was suggesting the Catholics should get the money that made him think I was a Catholic I guess, and perhaps a troll or something.

I know another guy who had a very similar experience with him. It was another issue and I don't know what the issue was.

The atheists on that board just accept the fact that this happened. It had to be my fault or it didn't happen at all. When I produce all sorts of proofs and insist it did then one of them just resorts to insults:

I did not do that nor did I say I did. Read what I said above (that's on the first page of the thread and this is on the second) I clearly stated that I began asking him if he studied Lourdes. I don't have the authority to make a claim on behalf of the Catholic church so I did not. I merely suggested that he should study it. So this guy can't read. Then he comes out with this:

The fact that you would initially present the claim might have been due to the fact that you hadn't researched into the requirements (i.e. read the application) prior to submitting the claim (which seems evident).


The fact that after presented with the reason (by me, just a few days ago, in this very thread) as to why this claim doesn't qualify, that you then attribute to Randi (with an "I") some ulterior excuse, indicates to me that you have a tendency to see things that aren't really there. Perhaps you are genetically disposed to such delusions, and it's not something you can overcome. If so, this is no moral fault of yours. My mother has the same problem, so I'm very aware of the symptoms. I'm not sure if there is any medication or therapy that helps with this, or not — I know that a weekly dose of "Jesus doesn't like liars" seems to have been helping her a bit lately, but hasn't completely taken care of it. If I were in the same position, though, and someone pointed this out to me, I think it would be in my best interest to try as many things as I could to overcome the problem. I know it has caused her much heartache, personally and professionally.
Well damn. His little hero is besmirched so he has to become insulting. He invents this little fiction about my sanity rather than believe that his little idol would do something wrong. See how this just shows that they are infected with the brain washing and they handle what's real? They can't accept facts so they invent things do any sort of excuse just to avoid admitting one little truth.

If the Amazing Randy is a Jerk does that mean God exists? No of cousre not. Does it mean all atheists are bad. no of cousre not. So why is this guy so unable to handle reality that he has to invent this little insulting theory rather than admit one little hero could have a bad day?

In fact I actually tried to let randy off the the hook. I said it was just a bad day i don't hold it against him. But that's not good enough for this little self serving asshole who whose mother is insane. Why is he throwing this little tirade?

Sunday, June 27, 2010

Example of Atheist Hate group no 574

In response to my comment about the Couriter's thing someone sends this:




Anonymous  Derek Porter  said...
You sicken me, you lying scumbag. Why must I waste my life  sharing a planet with lousy shits like you? Because make no mistake,  every second, every minute, every hour, every day, every week, every  year, spent in the same universe as you IS wasted. And wasted through no  fault of my own, but ENTIRELY through your fault. You loathsome piece  of vomit. 


Meta:
Hey but other than how do you really feel about me?

all that because I want people to read and understand the kind of things they trying to criticize. That's such an outrageous demand. That guy knew so little about theology he got everything he said wrong because he believed that he doesn't have to know anything to criticize soemthing. That's the kind of stupid little bs that comes of ignorance. He's so fucking proud of his ignorance he wont let you critize it!

He said point blank that I was lying when i said process theology has an impersonal God. so easy to find out! all you have to do is Google "does Process theology have an impersonal God" but the very idea that one should find out seems to through into a tail spin.

This is clearly not because I"m wanting people who know what their talking about it's because I don't embrace his ignorance and pretend that his little but hge ego amounts to intelligence. He thinks "My desire for recognition is equal to and synonymous with my greatness." But it's not!

It's my recognition that it's not that he can't stand.

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Continued from last post: The Rants of "Paradoxical"

Originally Posted by Paradoxical View Post
meta, Christianity has recently come out with the minority pity card, and want to use it just like racial minorities use the race card. Your group is only a minority in the world, but is a majority in the U.S.
Meta:
 spoken like a true ideologue. you want to put a spin on human decency such that your hate, lies, slander, and garbage are permissible based upon what you imagine your opponents have done wrong. About the 100 million you murdered? why don't they get little ideologues mourning them?



Thus, your group still gets to espouse their nonsense by virtue only of the fact that Christians are a majority in the U.S. 

Meta:
are you not espousing the satan poison you bleieve in in? who is stopping you? You really think your slander is synonymous with your beliefs? so you can't spout your beliefs without your hate right? That means your beliefs are hate doesn't it?


And you know what, Metacrock, i get tired and bored of that word apologists use....strawman.
Meta: that would be because you hear it a lot right? And you hear it a lot because your arguments are straw men. you have as much respect for logic as you do for people who disagree with you. you don't have any logic to your views they are running logic fumes and hate.


It's a debate topic that people like you use skillfully and I've seen many other debaters no ot challenge this word. Ever hear of an analogy, Metacrock? One such as "Believing in Christianity is like believing in Santa" being one easily understood. 

Meta:
You want it easy don't you? You don't want to have to work against other views. you just eliminate them by hating them and ridiculing those who believe them. You can't defend your position with logic so you turn and ridicule the notion of logical phrases and logical arguments. Isn't that rather crude and cave man like to lash iout in hate against logic itself because you are not able to use it as well your opponents? To resort to slander and hate for that reason is even more pathetic. tha's as much as admitting your cause is wrong!

I'll use analogies all I want, and i'll listen to the apologists continually saying "straw man, straw man" because they don't want any analogies that compare beliefs in talking snakes, a woman being turned into salt, humans being swallowed by big fish, an ark that can fit every animal on earth, etc. etc./ Christians simply don't want their faith compared with analogies because it sheds a spotlight on how childish and silly their beliefs are. 

Meta:
analogies are not proof. bad analogies are not even eloquence. mocking and ridicule the beliefs of others is not a valid form of argument it's nothing more than a bardic admission that one cannot defend one's views.


Don't worry, though, Meta, your beliefs are routinely protected on this board and many others like it. Matt Slick has allowed atheists to post in these corners and in doing so, has sheletered Christians from non believers views. I have no criticism of this because he owns this site. I am merely stating a fact.
I can just almost hear the longing to wear a brown shirt and beat the crap out of anyone using logic right? do you ever try goose stepping when alone in secret?

Meta:
But, why is it you don't like and can't handle your beliefs being ridiculed and scrutinized,
Because hatred is unfair. Ridicule is nto a valid argument it's sign of cowardice. It shows that you are not willing to defend your beliefs in the open market and take your risk of losing the argument because you know your beliefs are silly and they cant' stand up. If you know that the other side is better educated and knows logic better perhaps that's a sigh you should study more and re-think your position rather than getting angry like a neanderthal and wanting to beat up the mean old logic users.

thugism and bullyism are evil and sick. mocking and ridiculing are the weapons of bullies not of honest men who stand up for their beliefs. Its' a coward's weapon.


just as you do to the atheists? You are even MORE bigoted against atheists than the other way around. You have a deep, deep hatred for them. They can't harm you, Meta. Nor can they harm a fellow believer. If you really DO have the truth why worry? It's because you DON'T that you worry.
You mistake self defense for hatred. you are just the brown shirts who could not tolerate Jews fighting back. anytime a Jew tried to fight back they accused the Jews of using violence. Never what they did the Jew's home and failing just the fact that he fought back made him evil. that's the mark of a cowards and the tool of atheists.
Meta: I doesn't hate the misguided saps who are atheists. I hate the static evil that is atheism.

when you admit that your case needs the use of ridicule you admit that it cant' stand on it's own merits.



Originally Posted by Paradoxical View Post
meta, I haven't gotten down the quote enclosing thing yet, but I don't believe every single one of your comments deserve a response, anyway. you and others like you want to equate Christianity with "god", and want the othe side to accept those words interchangeably. About the only thing that I would agree with is that Christians believe in a god.

Meta:
You obviously don't know anything about my views and you are so into stereotypes and bad analogies and hate that you don't bother to find out what I believe. It's well know among long time posters on CARM that I always argue for the idea that God is working in all cultures and that all faiths re metaphors for a reality, the same reality behind them all.


Your arguments, and other arguments I've seen here attempt to put the other side on the defensive by making claims that, since a person can't prove how everything got here, and can't disprove "god", that Christianity is therefore true by default. 
Meta:
you really don't understand logic, becuase that's not what my arguments attempt to do. That's so simplistic my arguments are much more sophisticated than that. (nothing wrong with putting the other side on the defensive logically or rhetorically).

You have a hatred for atheists. When I was believer up to about 21, I did also. I couldn't imagine that there would be non believers, and felt that they were bad people and had it all wrong. Thus, I understand your disdain for non believers. I am NOT an atheist, for whatever its worth to you. Thus, your arguments that attempt to make me disprove god or attempts to use Christianity and god in the same vein don't work with me. 

Meta:
I was an atheist. I know you want to believe that I'm some leve it beaver guy who is shocked by atheism. you want to believe you are shocking. you are not shocking, ok. I know people who would eat your for breakfast, literally. you are not scholastic you are not cool and you are not amazingly different or anything. I was an atheist I'm not shocked by the idea of being one.

totally obvious that guy hates theists.


I know you hate analogies, and like all good apologists want to stop the use of them, but here I go again, and in question form. Why is a belief in Islam any more ludicrous than a belief in Christianity?
when did I say it was? you want to arguer from analogy because you don't nkow logic. go take a logic class. logic is sset of ruels i't a language you can learn it. arguement from analogy is a fallacy, it's a logical no no.
Meta: your assertions about my beliefs only put you in a bad light, because you are not wily enough to find ou what your oppoent believers, you want to feel that you are always smarter than any opponent you face so you underrate them. That's always a mistake.(becasue I say analogies re not proof he says I hate them--he doesn't how to use them properly).

They both believe in god? They both claim to be backed up by historical records. They both contend prophets connected directly to god, among just a few similarities. Why is Heavens Gate any less believable? Mormonism? 

Meta:
so what? The same reality exists behind all religions so why is it so difficult for me to accept Islam in the same boat? (his argument is guilt by association)

The upshot, Meta, is that all you have is a BELIEF. That's IT! YOur relgion is no better than any other. 

Meta:
For me it is, because I believe the others. But it's not and doesn't have to be. It's clearly more than must a belief because it's a world view, it's a life chaining transformation power. He says all I have is a belief but all he's demonstrated is hatred for people on the other side, which he mistakes for proof of the problem with their beliefs.


They believe just as you do. A belief is NOT a fact, Meta. 

Meta:
the way it effects your life is a fact. The world it puts you in is a fact. hatred for your opponents is not proof of your position.

It is only a belief, that Christians and Muslims try to force on other people with their threats of eternal retribution.
No it's a world. try reading some Heidegger before get off the planet. It's a life world. A belief is a life-world.


I thought you didn't believe in hell, Meta, and ridiculed me for saying christians believe people will fry. Your last post mentions satan as if he is a real entity. And you don't consider a belief in this sort of entity silly? And you call non believers illogical? Any PROOF of a devil, Meta, save for the one that exists in mind only? 

Meta:
Satan, he's my neighbor. He moved back here and took up residence near my house after finishing his term as 43 President of the U.S.

Monday, June 21, 2010

Hate Group Atheism Continues to Spread it's Lies

 on carm 6/21/10 by Paradoxical
post 361

Hate Group atheism has not gone away. The garbage this demoniac throws up (literally) on everyone has gone on unabated for 361 posts, filled wtih lies. slander back lgoic and twisted facts.

Meta, you have it all backwards. Christianity is evil for a whole host of reasons, one of which is that it makes mental midgets out of humans, as can readily be seen by reading any number of the posts here written by christians. How many christians in the entire world, meta? 30% of the worlds population? thus god creates a race knowing that only 30% will be saved? What kind of sadism is that? Can't your god get it right? He had to destroy an entire human race because he screwed up one time. Like some star ship that zapped out all of the inhabitants on a planet because the inhabitants displeased them and didn't believe the invaders could really do it.

Atheists are far more intelligent and courageous than any christian alive, metacrock. 
 we all know that's a sack of shit. The studies are 17 to 6, 17 showing either no correlation between intelligence and belief or that religious people are smarter.


Counting all the studies together, both those presented as negative and those presented by Francis which are either neutral or positive, 17 to 6 in favor of the thesis being unproven. But more importantly, Hoge was listed wrongly, so what else can we not trust about those studies? Moreover, the sample size for the positive or neutral correlations are much larger in many instances. None of the negative sample sizes come close.

negatives: 1448, 532, 354, 315, 613, 400 (not all listed)

Largest positive or neutral:381, 1400, 200, 158, 165, 44, 2272, 711, 3040, 1194, 362.

The Positive or neutral studies would tend to be the better studies since they have more with larger samples sizes, and Francis controls for the Freudian bias which taints all the negative studies. Poythres (1975) sets the differences within the context of psychoanalytic theory.(Francis 188). We also notice that the negative studies tend to be older, ranging mainly form the 1930s to 1968, while all of the positive or neutral studies tend to be set in the 1960s to the 80s and one as recent as 98. This is explained by Hoge in terms of increasing socioeconomic status and greater exposure of religious people to new ideas at a younger age.

"The long discussed shock of freshmen encountering Atheistic professors at college and the transition problems from childhood beliefs to intellectually defensible beliefs have been reduced in recent years. Today the shock comes earlier and with less force than in decades past."(in Francis 188). (This capitalization is a matter of mild controversy. If Atheism is a religion, then it is capitalized as Buddhist, Moslems and Christianity are.)



We really have to ask ourselves, in studying students, especially freshmen in college, they are getting kids when they are the most rebellious? For those in early college they are going off to school for the first time, away from home, no longer under the strictures of Mom and Dad, they tend to rebel against Mom and Dad. It's a time of experimentation. Naturally we should expect to find that bright kids are experimenters, that they are willing to try new ideas.

Secondly, how long did these kids remain unbelieving? How many are no in middle or even old age having had a life time of religious commitment gained in graduate school or beyond? Not a single one of these studies gave any indication of being longitudinal! That is extremely important, because it makes sense that students in late high school and early college will be rebellious and more inclined to question their upbringing. How many of them were actually still atheists 20 or 30 years latter? We don't know and not a single one of the studies even tried to find out. For all we know the vast majority of them might have become believers in 10 years out of college! In fact we have good reason to suspect that this is the case; after they got married and started raising families, they probably began to believe again, and this seems to be the pattern. That conclusion would also be supported by the quotation form Hoge above, the shock of leaving home, encountering atheist professors, dealing for the first time with serious challenge of new ideas could for time lead the unwary into doubt, but latter they recover.
ranting slander of the hate group continues:

Why? It's because they heard the story, they have weighed the evidence and lack thereof, and have decided that your god doesn't exist. They made this decision with the full knowledge (based on what Christians tell them) that they will either go to hell, or be excluded from the kingdom upon death. This decision takes the utmost bravery, meta. It says that you have used your brain (that christians assert god gave them) and deduced that the bible god is a complete fabrication wrought from the tortured and feeble minds of fearful men, probably illiterate goat herders. These brave humans are taking their chances, and not even hedging their bets, knowing full well what is in store for them if they are wrong.

Could an atheist believe as you and others do to save his royal hide? He could if he wanted to fake it. If he had this false belief, your god would know it, because he is all knowing. Thus, if an atheist COULD believe, he would meta. But a true atheist cannot make himself believe. there is no magic clicking of the heels that would turn a non believer into a believer. And, for this choice, you contend that it is THEY who are the evil ones.

Of course that's a straw man argument. Christians don't believe just to save themselves, that's ignorance of truth based upon what the carnal mind would assume. It's not based upon the facts of actual belief.

You have your bdoubts yourself, meta. I know it. Other christians here have their doubts, too. This is why you go to such lengths in your thirst for any little tidbit of knowledge, no matter how mundane or obscure so that you can do battle with the non believers. It's because you have very grave doubts. But, let's just assume for the moment that you are perfectly 100% sure of this bible god. That gains you entry, right? Whereas a non believer doesn't get in because he couldn't force himself to believe. You either do, or you don't, right? And for this a creator of all that is says NO...you made a mistake. You didn't believe. are we living in the Wizard of Oz movie or saomething where we have a creator that is so insecure he requires a belief?

of course this is further straw man bravado based upon the hateful warped understanding of people who know nothing of Christianity. They imagine that belief in god is some pristine state divorced from doubt, so if one feels they think that''s the think end of wedge. All believers have doubt, of course they do, that's human nature. That's not an undermining of truth of Christianity its just a natural part of being human it's also a prelude to stronger faith. Faith that survive debut is strong faith. Therefore, doubt is merely a part of the faith process.

For this, and many other reasons, i find your religion so preposterous that I think many believers are insane. they toss out all rationale in order to save their skin. In the ultimate, THAT is why you believe, meta. You are afraid, and you want to save your skin. How much courage does that take...to save your skin? It takes not one bit of courage, and on the part of many christians, it takes forced and fake beliefs just so they can get in. If you tell me this is not true, and these believers all believe with 100% certainty, then it's real easy for them, right? They get in. God gives em a pass because they said the magic words. Whereas the atheists that used the reasoning power they were born with to conclude it's all a bunch of bunk, they are excluded because of that non belief.

Highly illogical, and foolish, IMHO.

Look at the anger. The things he's saying are clearly propaganda becasue all he's doing is spitting out hateful bromides to slander a whole group of people. this is what atheists think is courage and brave and intelligent? I think even really stupid people can see hwo one sided this is. If this theri concept of courage they are in real  trouble.

Friday, June 18, 2010

The Religious A Priori

pray_stgw


Argument:



(1) Scineitifc reductionism loses phenomena by re-defining the nature of sense data and quailia.

(2)There are other ways of Knowing than scientific induction

(3) Religious truth is apprehended phenomenologically, thus religion is not a scientific issue and cannot be subjected to a materialist critique

(4) Religion is not derived from other disciplines or endeavors but is a approach to understanding in its own right

Therefore, religious belief is justified on its own terms and not according to the dictates or other disciplines



In my dealings with atheist in debate and dialogue I find that they are often very committed to an empiricist view point. Over and over again I hear the refrain "you can't show one single unequivocal demonstration of scientific data that proves a God exists." This is not a criticism. It's perfectly understandable; science has become the umpire of reality. It is to scientific demonstration that we appear for a large swath of questions concerning the nature of reality. The problem is that the reliance upon empiricism has led to forgetfulness about the basis of other types of questions. We have forgotten that essentially science is metaphysics, as such it is just one of many approach that can be derived from analytical reasoning, empiricism, rationalism, phenomenology and other approaches.


Problem with Empiricism


Is empirical evidence the best or only true form of knowledge? This is an apologetics question because it bears upon the arguments for the existence of God.

Is lack of empirical evidence, if there is a lack, a draw back for God arguments?
I deny that there is a lack, but it has to be put in the proper context. That will come in future threads, for this one I will bracket that answer and just assume there no really good empirical evidence (even though I think there is).

I will ague that empiricism is not true source of knowledge by itself and logic is more important.

True empirical evidence in a philosophical sense means exact first hand observation. In science it doesn't really mean that, it implies a more truncated process. Consider this, we drop two balls of different size from a tower. Do they fall the same rate or the bigger one falls faster? They are supposed to fall at the same rate, right? To say we have empirical proof, in the litteral sense of the term we would have to observe every single time two balls are dropped for asl ong as the tower exists. We would have to sit for thousnds of years and observe millions of drops and then we couldn't say it was truely empirical because we might have missed one.

That's impractical for science so we cheat with inductive reasoning. We make assumptions of probability. We say we observed this 40,000 times, that's a tight correlation, so we will assume there is a regularity in the universe that causes it to work this way every time. We make a statistical correlation. Like the surgeon general saying that smoking causes cancer. The tobacco companies were really right, they read their Hume, there was no observation fo cause and effect, because we never observe cause and effect. But the correlation was so tight we assume cause and effect.

The ultimate example is Hume's billiard balls. Hume says we do not see the cause of the ball being made to move, we only really see one ball stop and the other start. But this happens every time we watch, so we assume that the tight correlation gives us causality.

The naturalistic metaphysician assumes that all of nature works this way. A tight correlation is as good as a cause. So when we observe only naturalistic causes we can assume there is nothing beyond naturalism. The problem is many phenomena can fall between the cracks. One might go one's whole life never seeing a miraculous event, but that doesn't mean someone else doesn't observe such things. All the atheist can say is "I have never seen this" but I can say "I have." Yet the atheist lives in a construct that is made up of his assumptions about naturalistic c/e and excluding anything that challenges it. That is just like Kuhn's paradigm shift. The challenges are absorbed into the paradigm unto there are so many the paradigm has to shit. This may never happen in naturalism.

So this constructed view of the world that is made out of assumption and probabilities misses a lot of experience that people do have that contradicts the paradigm of naturalism. The thing is, to make that construct they must use logic. After all what they are doing in making the correlation is merely inductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning has to play off of deductive reasoning to even make sense.

Ultimately then, "empiricism" as construed by naturalist (inductive probabilistic assumptions building constructs to form a world view) is inadequate because it is merely a contract and rules out a prori much that contradicts.


The A priori


God is not given directly in sense data, God transcends the threshold of human understanding, and thus is not given amenable to empirical proof. As I have commented in previous essays (blogspots) religion is not a scientific question. There are other methodologies that must be used to understand religion, since the topic is essentially inter-subjective (and science thrives upon objective data). We can study religious behavior through empirical means and we can compare all sorts of statistical realizations through comparisons of differing religious experiences, behaviors, and options. But we cannot produce a trace of God in the universe through "objective" scientific means. Here I use the term "trace" in the Derision sense, the "track," "footprint" the thing to follow to put us on the scent. As I have stated in previous essays, what we must do is find the "co-determinate," the thing that is left by God like footprints in the snow. The trace of God can be found in God's affects upon the human heart, and that shows up objectively, or inter-subjectively in changed behavior, changed attitudes, life transformations. This is the basis of the mystical argument that I use, and in a sense it also have a bearing upon my religious instruct argument. But here I wish to present anther view of the trace of God. This could be seen as a co-determinate perhaps, more importantly, it frees religion from the structures of having to measure up to a scientific standard of proof: the religious a prori.

Definition of the a priori.

"This notion [Religious a priori] is used by philosophers of religion to express the view that the sense of the Divine is due to a special form of awareness which exists along side the cognitive, moral, and aesthetic forms of awareness and is not explicable by reference to them. The concept of religion as concerned with the awareness of and response to the divine is accordingly a simple notion which cannot be defined by reference other than itself." --David Pailin "Religious a pariori" Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology (498)



The religious a priroi deals with the spacial nature of religion as non-derivative of any other discipline, and especially it's spacial religious faculty of understanding which transcends ordinary means of understanding. Since the enlightenment atheist have sought to explain away religion by placing it in relative and discernible terms. The major tactic for accomplishing this strategy was use of the sociological theory of structural functionalism. By this assumption religion was chalked up to some relative and passing social function, such as promoting loyalty to the tribe, or teaching morality for the sake of social cohesion. This way religion was explained naturalistic and it was also set in relative terms because these functions in society, while still viable (since religion is still around) could always pass away. But this viewpoint assumes that religion is derivative of some other discipline; it's primitive failed science, concocted to explain what thunder is for example. Religion is an emotional solace to get people through hard times and make sense of death and destruction (it's a ll sin, fallen world et). But the a priori does away with all that. The a priori says religion is its own thing, it is not failed primitive sincere, nor is it merely a crutch for surviving or making sense of the world (although it can be that) it is also its own discipline; the major impetus for religion is the sense of the numinous, not the need for explanations of the natural world. Anthropologists are coming more and more to discord that nineteenth century approach anyway.

Thomas A Indianopolus
prof of Religion at of Miami U. of Ohio

Cross currents

"It is the experience of the transcendent, including the human response to that experience, that creates faith, or more precisely the life of faith. [Huston] Smith seems to regard human beings as having a propensity for faith, so that one speaks of their faith as "innate." In his analysis, faith and transcendence are more accurate descriptions of the lives of religious human beings than conventional uses of the word, religion. The reason for this has to do with the distinction between participant and observer. This is a fundamental distinction for Smith, separating religious people (the participants) from the detached, so-called objective students of religious people (the observers). Smith's argument is that religious persons do not ordinarily have "a religion." The word, religion, comes into usage not as the participant's word but as the observer's word, one that focuses on observable doctrines, institutions, ceremonies, and other practices. By contrast, faith is about the non-observable, life-shaping vision of transcendence held by a participant..."



The Skeptic might argue "if religion as this unique form of consciousness that sets it apart form other forms of understanding, why does it have to be taught?" Obviously religious belief is taught through culture, and there is a good reason for that, because religion is a cultural construct. But that does not diminish the reality of God. Culture teaches religion but God is known to people in the heart. This comes through a variety of ways; through direct experience, through miraculous signs, through intuitive sense, or through a sense of the numinous. The Westminster's Dictionary of Christian Theology ..defines Numinous as "the sense of awe in attracting and repelling people to the Holy." Of course the background assumption I make is, as I have said many times, that God is apprehended by us mystically--beyond word, thought, or image--we must encode that understanding by filtering it through our cultural constrcts, which creates religious differences, and religious problems.

The Culturally constructed nature of religion does not negate the a priori. "Even though the forms by Which religion is expressed are culturally conditioned, religion itself is sui generis .. essentially irreducible to and undeceivable from the non-religious." (Paladin). Nor can the a priori be reduced to some other form of endeavor. It cannot be summed up by the use of ethics or any other field, it cannot be reduced to explanation of the world or to other fields, or physiological counter causality. To propose such scientific analysis, except in terms of measuring or documenting effects upon behavior, would yield fruitless results. Such results might be taken as proof of no validity, but this would be a mistake. No scientific control can ever be established, because any study would only be studying the culturally constructed bits (by definition since language and social sciences are cultural constructs as well) so all the social sciences will wind up doing is merely refication of the phenomena and reducing the experience. In other words, This idea can never be studied in a social sciences sense, all that the social sciences can do is redefine the phenomena until they are no longer discussing the actual experiences of the religious believer, but merely the ideology of the social scientist (see my essay on Thomas S. Kuhn.

The attempt of skeptics to apply counter causality, that is, to show that the a priori phenomena is the result of naturalistic forces and not miraculous or divine, not only misses the boat in its assumptions about the nature of the argument, but it also loses the phenomena by reduction to some other phenomena. It misses the boat because it assumes that the reason for the phenomena is the claim of miraculous origin, “I feel the presence of God because God is miraculously giving me this sense of his presence.” While some may say that, it need not be the believers argument. The real argument is simply that the co-determinate are signs of the trace of God in the universe, not because we cant understand them being produced naturalisticlly, but because they evoke the sense of numinous and draw us to God. The numinous implies something beyond the natural, but it need not be “a miracle.” The sense of the numinous is actually a natural thing, it is part of our apprehension of the world, but it points to the sublime, which in turn points to transcendence. In other words, the attribution of counter causality does not, in and of itself, destroy the argument, while it is the life transformation through the experience that is truly the argument, not the phenomena itself. Its the affects upon the believer of the sense of Gods presence and not the sense of Gods presence that truly indicates the trance of God.

Moreover, the attempts to reduce the causality to something less than the miraculous also lose the phenomena in refication.William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (The Gilford Lectures):

"Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-minded system of thought which we are considering. Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox's discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle's organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal catarrh. All such mental over-tensions, it says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of various glands which physiology will yet discover. And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such personages is successfully undermined."

This does not mean that the mere claim of religious experience of God consciousness is proof in and of itself, but it means that it must be taken on its own terms. It clearly answers the question about why God doesn't reveal himself to everyone; He has, or rather, He has made it clear to everyone that he exists, and He has provided everyone with a means of knowing Him. He doesn't get any more explicit because faith is a major requirement for belief. Faith is not an arbitrary requirement, but the rational and logical result of a world made up of moral choices. God reveals himself, but on his own terms. We must seek God on those terms, in the human heart and the basic sense of the numinous and in the nature of religious encounter. There are many aspects and versions of this sense, it is not standardized and can be describes in many ways:

Forms of the A priori.

Schleiermacher's "Feeling of Utter Dependence.

Frederick Schleiermacher, (1768-1834) in On Religion: Speeches to it's Cultured Disposers, and The Christian Faith, sets forth the view that religion is not reducible to knowledge or ethical systems. It is primarily a phenomenological apprehension of God consciousness through means of religious affections. Affections is a term not used much anymore, and it is easily confused with mere emotion. Sometimes Schleiermacher is understood as saying that "I become emotional when I pay and thus there must be an object of my emotional feelings." Though he does vintner close to this position in one form of the argument, this is not exactly what he's saying.

Schleiermacher is saying that there is a special intuitive sense that everyone can grasp of this whole, this unity, being bound up with a higher reality, being dependent upon a higher unity. In other words, the "feeling" can be understood as an intuitive sense of "radical contingency" (int he sense of the above ontological arguments).He goes on to say that the feeling is based upon the ontological principle as its theoretical background, but doesn't' depend on the argument because it proceeds the argument as the pre-given pre-theoretical pre-cognitive realization of what Anslem sat down and thought about and turned into a rational argument: why has the fools said in his heart 'there is no God?' Why a fool? Because in the heart we know God. To deny this is to deny the most basic realization about reality.

Rudolph Otto's Sense of the Holy (1868-1937)

The sense of power in the numinous which people find when confronted by the sacred. The special sense of presence or of Holiness which is intuitive and observed in all religious experience around the world.

Paul Tillich's Object of Ultimate Concern.

We are going to die. We cannot avoid this. This is our ultimate concern and sooner or latter we have to confront it. When we do we realize a sense of transformation that gives us a special realization existentially that life is more than material.

see also My article on Toilet's notion of God as the Ground of Being.

Tillich's concept made into God argument.

As Robert R. Williams puts it:

There is a "co-determinate to the Feeling of Utter dependence.


"It is the original pre-theoretical consciousness...Schleiermacher believes that theoretical cognition is founded upon pre-theoretical intersubjective cognition and its life world. The latter cannot be dismissed as non-cognitive for if the life world praxis is non-cognitive and invalid so is theoretical cognition..S...contends that belief in God is pre-theoretical, it is not the result of proofs and demonstration, but is conditioned soley by the modification of feeling of utter dependence. Belief in God is not acquired through intellectual acts of which the traditional proofs are examples, but rather from the thing itself, the object of religious experience..If as S...says God is given to feeling in an original way this means that the feeling of utter dependence is in some sense an apparition of divine being and reality. This is not meant as an appeal to revelation but rather as a naturalistic eidetic"] or a priori. The feeling of utter dependence is structured by a corrolation with its whence." , Schleiermacher the Theologian, p 4.



The believer is justified in assuming that his/her experiences are experiences of a reality, that is to say, that God is real.

Freedom from the Need to prove.

Schleiermacher came up with his notion of the feeling when wrestling with Kantian Dualism. Kant had said that the world is divided into two aspects of relaity the numinous and the phenomenal. The numinous is not experienced through sense data, and sense God is not experienced through sense data, God belongs only to the numinous. The problem is that this robs us of an object of theological discourse. We can't talk about God because we can't experience God in sense data. Schleiermacher found a way to run an 'end round' and get around the sense data. Experience of God is given directly in the "feeling" apart form sense data.

This frees us form the need to prove the existence of God to others, because we know that God exists in a deep way that cannot be explicated by mere cultural constructs or reductionist data or deified phenomena. This restores the object of theological discourse. Once having regained its object, theological discourse can proceed to make the logical deduction that there must be a CO-determinate to the feeling, and that CO-determinate is God. In that sense Schleiermacher is saying "if I have affections about God must exist as an object of my affections"--not merely because anything there must be an object of all affections, but because of the logic of the co-determinate--there is a sense of radical contingency, there must be an object upon which we are radically contingent.

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

more about the Big bang.

Photobucket

this is the graphic Craig used for this article


On his most recent Q/A William Lane Craig deals with the Question about is the standard model (Big Bang singularity) still the prevailing model. Here's what he says:

Question from reader:

I recently was told by some physicists whom I had the chance to interview for a paper that the standard big bang model of the universe does not include a singularity anymore. That may have been the case twenty five years ago, they said, but nowadays physicists say that the big bang extends only back to Planck time. Can you PLEASE clarify the confusion I’m having on this?
God bless,
Glenn

Dr. Craig responds:
I’m just in the process of wrapping up an article on the kalam cosmological argument co-authored with James Sinclair for a forthcoming volume with Blackwell entitled Companion to Natural Theology. Jim is writing the section on the empirical evidence of astrophysical cosmology for the beginning of the universe. He does a marvelous job of summarizing the current state of the field, a preview of which I’ll give you here.
First, though, in answer to your question, the standard Big Bang model includes an initial singularity. The model cannot lose that feature and remain the same model. So there’s no question of the standard model’s not including a singularity anymore. Rather what the physicists you interviewed meant is that the standard model is no longer the prevailing view today. Their claim is that while the standard model was the accepted view 25 years ago, that is no longer the case today.

Now in one sense that’s true. The standard Big Bang model needs to be modified in various ways. For example, the model is based on Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. But Einstein’s theory breaks down when space is shrunk down to sub-atomic proportions. We’ll need to introduce quantum physics at that point, and no one is sure how this is to be done. That’s what your physicists meant when they said that the Big Bang extends back only as far as the Planck time. (That, by the way, is no new realization; everyone always knew that General Relativity breaks down by that point.) Moreover, the expansion of the universe is probably not constant, as in the standard model. It’s probably accelerating and may have had a brief moment of super-rapid, or inflationary, expansion in the past.
But none of these adjustments need affect the fundamental prediction of the standard model of the absolute beginning of the universe.
Indeed, Jim’s survey of contemporary cosmology reinforces just how robust the standard model’s prediction of an absolute beginning continues to be. He considers three broad research programs being currently pursued based on possible exceptions to the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems, which support the standard model’s prediction of an initial cosmological singularity. These are (1) Closed Timelike Curves, (2) Violation of the Strong Energy Condition (Eternal Inflation), and (3) Falsity of General Relativity (Quantum Gravity). The first of these postulates an exotic spacetime which features circular time in the past and so is not taken very seriously by the vast majority of cosmologists. The real work has been on the other two alternatives.
With respect to the alternative of Eternal Inflation, it was suggested by some theorists during the 1980s that perhaps the inflationary expansion of the universe was not confined to a brief period early in the history of the universe but is eternal in the past, each inflating region being the product of a prior inflating region. Although such models were hotly debated, something of a watershed appears to have been reached in 2003, when three leading cosmologists, Arvin Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin, were able to prove that any universe which has, on average, been expanding throughout its history cannot be infinite in the past but must have a past space-time boundary.
What makes their proof so powerful is that it holds regardless of the physical description of the universe prior to the Planck time. Because we can’t yet provide a physical description of the very early universe, this brief moment has been fertile ground for speculations. (One scientist has compared it to the regions on ancient maps labeled “Here there be dragons!”—it can be filled with all sorts of fantasies.) But the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem is independent of any physical description of that moment. Their theorem implies that even if our universe is just a tiny part of a so-called “multiverse” composed of many universes, the multiverse must have an absolute beginning.
For whatever its worth.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Good Old Atheist Incredulity

Here's a guy on a website trying to convene a bunch of know nothings, (I mean atheists) that there is documentation for miracles. I admit the claims are pretty wild. He actually has a site that claims an amputation grew back. But they don't really dismiss it for that reason. they dismiss it for no reason reason except that whenever he meets their burden of evidence they can keep coming up with more criteria.

these guys just illustrate so perfectly what liars atheists are. Everything they say about Catholic chruch and it's miracles is a lie, or it's an example of how they refuse to believe regardless of what the evidence shows. You can see this because they are obviously not willing to even give the evidence a chance and examine it.

http://www.matchdoctor.com/thread_87_18612_1/Medically_documented_Miracles.html

some message board. 
the miracle defender is named "bevrice"
I guess Bervely Rice. and is called "bev."

Bev:
Storm, there is an email address on there, email him, he will document it for you. I have another that has doctor's names and addresses on it, will post it. I put this on here because some said that there were no medically documented miracles.

This one has doctors names and addresses and ex rays.




eastham: (atheist)



This still doesn't make the documentation guidelines.
post reply view eastham's threads



Posts: 11,144 It has ex rays, doctors names, doctor's notes. the works.

I found many Catholic ones that pass that test according to the Catholic church.
post reply view bevrice's threads
Apr 5, 2007 @ 8:42 PM Medically documented Miracles
eastham
eatham

 I don't care about the denomination, documentation means the ability to written up in peer-reviewed journals. Less than that is a testimonial and not documentation.
post reply view eastham's threads
(in other words his excuse for not accepting the words of the doctor "yes I found this to be true" is because it has come from a journal. But the RCC has an academic journal that hey post stuff about Lourdes in, of course that's not good enough it have favors mriacles so it must be wrong and he rejects it. So he actually don't care about even "documentation.")

Kajae:
And the Catholics have proven soooo reliable. I really wouldn't use them to validate ANYTHING.
guilt by association. It must be wrong because it's catholic so it doesn't matter what the evidence shows. When they say they want evidence they don't mean it.



Except of course, child abuse laws.

quip about the Catholics, so they hold the scuttle butt of the day above the level of real evidence. Yea these guys such free thinkers, so so fair minded. they haven't got any concept of fairness. I was trust a pig in the mud to know more about fairness than an atheist.


Bev
Certainly, I would pray for someone who was dying.

eastham
But not help, typical.

(hateful scum just asserts that becasue she would pray she wouldn't help and then asserts a value judgment about her as a person based upon his foolish idiotic assertion that has not support. that's the atheist concept of "fair.")

storm bay
Bev your a complete joke,I've read through that site and nowhere does any doctor in any medical reports state or confirm her leg has grown back. They did operate to remove spurs from the bone, but all the rest relates to other procedures and cover all the other illnesses and complaints she has. Certainly not a healthy women by any stretch of the imagination.
he resorts to mocking and ridicule. He makes a comment about her worth as a human, based upon what? that her opinion differs from his. That's real fair! who can read this and deny that atheism is a hate group? This is no different than  KKK gay talking to a black person and saying "you are worthless because of you color!" You are worthless because you believe what I don't agree with! By this way this big thinking rationalist guy thinks that "your" means you are, as in "you're." "your" a complete is using the possessive form of you (yours) in place of "you are."



In other words Bev, its a fake, just like you nothing but deceit.
bev
I found many Catholic ones that pass that test according to the Catholic church.
storm bay
The catholic church, only requires 3 witnesses and doesn't need to include a medical doctor, but must include a representative of the church. The church has never been able to convince the scientific or medical profession that a medical miracle has happened, just the opposite.
post reply view stormbay's threads
Apr 5, 2007 @ 8:51 PM Medically documented Miracles
12knots
that's a lie of course. they don't just require that. they have a complex system of verification that certain does require very stringent use of medical evidence.



what follows are sites Bevrice gives that show miracles

post reply view 12knots' threads
Apr 5, 2007 @ 8:53 PM Medically documented Miracles
bevrice


Posts: 11,144 Carole's Doctors


Dr. James F. Coy, M.D.
Sunstate Preventive Medicine Institute

310 Nesbit Street

Post Office Box 511315

Punta Gorda, Fl 33951-1315

(941) 575-8080

Dr. James F. Coy M.D. is now the physician in complete authority over all medical decisions regarding the creative miracle of completion of my left leg.



Dr. Kenneth Levy M.D.
Advanced Orthopedics Center

1641 Tamiami Trail

Suite 1

Port Charlotte, Fl. 33948

(941) 629-6262





Orthopedic Specialist since 1986, Dr. Levy amputated my left leg below the kneecap in 1995. In the year 2000, Dr. Levy documented that my amputated left leg is growing back and is a creative miracle from God. There is no other explanation! (Dr. Levy is now retired and no longer involved in my case.)



Dr. David S. Goris, CPO


American Board Certified Prosthetist Orthotist

Sonlife Prosthetics and Orthotics, Inc.

6111 Deltona Blvd.

Spring Hill, Fl. 34609

(352) 596-2257



bev

Dr. Goris is the President of Sonlife with extensive experience in both Prosthetics and Orthotics. He received his bachelors degree from Calvin College in 1976 and went on to receive his degree in Prosthetics and Orthotics from Northwestern University in 1980. He is certified by the American Board for Certification and meets their requirements for continuing education on a yearly basis. Some of his most recent studies include custom prosthetic restoration and implementation of Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing (CAD/CAM) technology. Dr. Goris also certifies that my leg is a creative miracle from God.



Dr. Harvey Tritel, MD, FAC


Florida Heart Associates

2675 Winkler Ave.

Suite 460

Fort Myers, Fl 33901

(941) 936-3896





My Cardiac Specialist since 1989. Please refer to documents in the book regarding this miracle.



Todd D. Nowell, O. D.


After-image Eye Care. P.A.

Spring Hill, Florida 34606

(941) 352-688-1102 Phone





Examination July 17, 2006 Vision 20-20



Click here to download the free book to learn more about the miracles.


Okay, storm, here you go, call them.


post reply view bevrice's threads
Apr 5, 2007 @ 8:55 PM Medically documented Miracles
bevrice


Posts: 11,144 Buddha didn't believe in miracles.
post reply view bevrice's threads
Apr 5, 2007 @ 8:56 PM Medically documented Miracles
12knots


Posts: 6,400 Of course.

Nothing special about them. Kids play.

post reply view 12knots' threads
Apr 5, 2007 @ 8:56 PM Medically documented Miracles
eastham


Posts: 6,409 At least Storm, there is room built into the system for those who make the oppositive arguement. The opposing side must/should be represented. For example, Christopher Hitchens was interviewed and questioned extensively during discussion about Mother Theresa being cannonized.

Not so with Bev. That line was to make me expressly feel uncomfortable...not that it worked.
post reply view eastham's threads
Apr 6, 2007 @ 1:44 AM Medically documented Miracles
bevrice


Posts: 11,144 Catholic miracles at Lourdeshttp://www.geocities.com/meta_crock/other/Miracles2.htm

Catholics always make sure their miracles are medically documented, you know.
They won't even call it a miracle unless it is. They have rigid rules.

[Edited on 4/6/2007 1:54 AM]
post reply view bevrice's threads
Apr 6, 2007 @ 2:16 AM Medically documented Miracles
stormbay


Posts: 695 Bev there is no medically verifiable documents on either site, to support what you or they say, none whatsoever. If there were, then it could be accepted if the doctor states its a miracle but there is nothing. Believing the catholic church has any credibility is gullible in the extreme, when you see their history and the desperate efforts they go to in trying to lie, cheat and deceive their way out of anything they get caught out on.
that's a lie because there certain is. they have vast evidence and rules of evidence and medical exprints who judge the evidence. see my miracle pages on Doxa

atheist know all
Trolling to find evidence so desperately is not the sign of someone who knows their subject, just someone who clutches at straws without proper research. The sane of the world Bev, aren't as gullible and superstition as you.
 one of them just asserts that she's only trolling and doesn't' know these things even though she said one of those is her personal doctor. These know nothings are not willing to examine the evidence, not even willing to look at a single source.

post reply view stormbay's threads
Apr 6, 2007 @ 6:28 AM Medically documented Miracles
bevrice


Posts: 11,144 not trolling, you have doctors you can check with and phone numbers.

The Catholic Church calls very few healings miracles, they have to be medically certified.


here's the run down on Catholic miracles:


The claim for a miraculous cure is first examined by a medical board at the local level were it is claimed. The medical tribunal determines whether the disease was well-documented, had no hope of cure, that it is without any scientific explanation (no possible other causes, including the effects of medical care already received or spontaneous remission), and that it has continued (that is, it wasn't temporary). If it passes muster the decision is commited to a theological tribunal at the diocescan level.

The theological tribunal must determine whether it meets the criteria of a supernatural intervention. To be judged supernatural it must be beyond the power of created nature (including angels, good and bad). A disease might be caused by a fallen angel and then a "cure" result from the demon withdrawing his influence. The disease would remit with no explanation. For theologians, therefore, there is a clear preference for spontaneous cures of terminal or otherwise hopeless cases: the person with MS, Parkinsons, tuberculosis, cancer, etc. who is cured from one moment to the next, with diseased tissue becoming healthy instantaneously. Since the angels (good or bad) cannot create tissue, such cures are evidently beyond their power. Cancer that remits, with healing resulting over time from the recuperative powers of the body, would not be conclusive.

After a positive finding at the local level, the case is sent to Rome where it goes though the same two-stop process with new scientific and theological experts.

I know of no such rigor being applied to claims of miracles outside the Catholic Chuch.




post reply view bevrice's threads
Apr 6, 2007 @ 9:04 AM Medically documented Miracles

12knots


Posts: 6,400 Science is the miracle maker.

this last little 12 knots has to kick in this irrelevant rejoinder that means nothing "science is the miracle maker" what? I thought atheists ay there aer no miracles. now they think scinece is a miracle what?

these people are criminals. they should be in jail for crimes against reason. They don't even have the guts to look at the evidence.

Sunday, June 13, 2010

Atheism Vanishes

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Merriam-Websetr's Online dictionary

www.secularhumanism.org/


Main Entry:
athe·ism Listen to the pronunciation of atheism
Pronunciation:
\ˈā-thē-ˌi-zəm\
Function:
noun
Etymology:
Middle French athéisme, from athée atheist, from Greek atheos godless, from a- + theos god
Date:
1546

1archaic : ungodliness , wickedness2 a: a disbelief in the existence of deity b: the doctrine that there is no deity





Atheists sure insist upon the notion that atheism is just a natural lack of belief in something, yet nothing could be further from the truth. Almost every dictionary definition before the 1990s said that Atheism was the rejection of belief in God.

Now most include two things (1) rejection (2) mere lack. Why? Because with he advent of the Internet age atheism got a new lease on life and was given this organizing tool, it began crowding out agnosticism. Agnosticism began to appear in the guise of "weak atheism." Then atheism became a mere lack of belief that sees itself as a natural default position. Atheists love to think that all people are born natural atheists, which is obviously disprove by the recent studies about brain structure and innate ideas of God.


Atheism has never been merely a lack of belief. If you were honest about what you really think, your behavior and tendencies, it always accompanies certain assumptions about the nature of the world, about naturalism and about physical laws.Atheism is clearly more than just the lack of a belief, which really should be called "agnosticism."




Among the many assumptions that go into atheist position is the one about a default assumption. Atheists like to tell themselves that since atheism is merely a lack of belief, babies are born with no belief, thus babies are born atheists. They like to say that because they are so  overwhelmed by the general population that's the only way they can feel good about their numbers.  Seriously, that's a joke, but really it is indicative of the notion of a "default" assumption. They think that since atheism is merely lack of belief then there must be a default, a position one falls back upon in the abases of proof, and that position is, of course, atheism since lack of proof should logically yield lack of belief--i.e. "atheism" in their view.

Of course the default assumption is undermined by the evidence on "God Pod" and other evidence which makes it clear that there is a religious instinct.


I've always thought the atheist default position was pretentious and presumptive, and designed by someone who just lionized atheism. But there should be a religious default position to the extent that there's no particular reason to assume naturalism over any other position. The world doesn't come to us wrapped in philosophical labels. We have to go to school and teach them, and most of the time they play on our prejudices. There's no reason to validate one over another form the outset.

But my religious a prior argument would argue that religion is not derivative from other disciplines but is a valid thing in itself own right. As such we can assume the properly basic nature of religious belief as a 'default" position


1) The notion of something from nothing violates basic assumptions of materialism


a. Materialism based upon cause and effect


Dictionary of Philosophy Anthony Flew, article on "Materialism"

"...The belief that everything that exists is ether matter or entirely dependent upon matter for its existence." Center For Theology and the Natural Sciences Contributed by: Dr. Christopher Southgate: God, Humanity and the Cosmos (T&T Clark, 1999) Is the Big Bang a Moment of Creation?

"...Beyond the Christian community there was even greater unease. One of the fundamental assumptions of modern science is that every physical event can be sufficiently explained solely in terms of preceding physical causes. Quite apart from its possible status as the moment of creation, the Big Bang singularity is an offense to this basic assumption. Thus some philosophers of science have opposed the very idea of the Big Bang as irrational and intestable."



b) Something from nothing contradicts materialism


Science and The Modern World, Alfred North Whitehead
NY: free Press, 1925, (1953) p. 76

"We are content with superficial orderings form diverse arbitrary starting points ... science which is employed in their development [modern thought] is based upon a philosophy which asserts that physical cessation is supreme, and which disjoints the physical cause from the final end. It is not popular to dwell upon the absolute contradiction here involved."[Whitehead was an atheist]



c) Causality was the basis upon which God was expelled from Modern Science

It was LaPlase's famous line "I have no need of that Hypothesis" [meaning God] Which turned the scientific world form believing (along with Newton and assuming that order in nature proved design) to unbelief on the principle that we don't' need God to explain the universe because we have independent naturalistic cause and effete. [Numbers, God and Nature]


2) Materialism Undermines Itself


a) Big Bang contradicts causality (see quotation above)


b) QM theory seems to contradict cause/effect relationship.


c) Rejection of final cause


3) Probabilistic Justification for assumption of Cause

We still have a huge justification for assuming causes inductively, since nothing in our experience is ever uncased. The mere fact that we can't see or find a cause isn't a proof that there isn't one.


4) Therefore, we have probabilistic justification for assuming Final cause

Thus, the basis upon which God was dismissed from scientific thought has been abandoned; the door to consideration of God is open again. The reliance upon naturalistic cause and effect in consideration of ultimate origins is shattered, but this does not make it rational to just assume that the universe pooped into existence with no cause. Since we have vast precedent for assuming cause and effect, we should continue to do so. But since naturalistic cause and effect seems unnecessary at the cosmic level, we should consider the probability of an ultimate necessary final cause.


I've been attacked by atheists saying that this position betrays modern science. But it is modern atheism that betrays modern science, because this position flows right out of a historically conscious take on materialism. The problem is atheist ear OT historically conscious. They have already abandoned the basic philosophical premises which took them into the modern world and which seemed to give them an edge over Christianity and religious thought, and most of them don't seem to care. Like my argument on "Materialism vanishes" I think modern atheism vanishes.
We don't have atheists anymore. What we relay have is a bunch of people with a default assumption for not having a belief.

Friday, June 11, 2010

Big Bang 3: Paraidgm shift undermines atheist position

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Thomas S. Kuhn




The Falling away from the Big Bang theory undermines the entire atheist paradigm since the enlightenment. This is so because the atheist ideology depends upon viewing scinece as the only form of knowledge. The corollary to this idea is that scinece is a factual view of the world made up of real concrete progress in knowledge. Many times atheists on CARM and elsewhere have contrasted their construed notions of scinece with ideas the atheist straw man of religious thought to argue that "we have the factual knowledge, we have world view that based upon facts, rock solid facts of knowledge discovered by science. In the late 20th century a view of scinece developed by historians and philosophers of science. This view says scinece not cumulative progress of knowledge. Science is a social construct, it's relative and its human and its based upon the way we see the world at the moment, becuase it based upon paradigms. When the paradigm shifts the world changes. Science Can't be cumulative because it changes as a world view all the time. Abandonment of the Big Bang theory proves this. The theory is being proved is that of Thomas S. Kuhn.

Before Summarizing Kuhn, a couple of basic things need explaining. Many people have trouble understanding what a "cultural constuct" actually is. The best example I've heard is a very simple one. I once heard a professor giving a talk. She said that at a restaurant thewhere she once ate, the rest room doors did nt say "Men" or "Women." They said nothing to indicate which was which, all they had was a picture of a crab and picture of a butterfly. Yet, no one ever went in the wrong door? How is it that everyone just automatically understood that crabs are masculine and butterfly are feminine? There is no particular reason to think of crabs as masculine, or butterfly's as feminine, except that they each fit the general "feel" for what we think those words indicate; the crab is hard and tough and stubborn, the butterfly is soft and floats along in beauty. These trigger chains of cultural references that give us an indication without having to be told. That's because they trigger cultural references.

A Cultural Construct, then, is a reference based upon culturally appropriated symbols and signs which is nested in a complex set of ideas, and which is given completely through cultural assimilation, not through genetics or instinct. Cultural constructs are ideas about the the world, or about feelings, or about the way we look at things, that are given by culture and that change from culture to culture.

Science Not Cumulative Progres
Because the "cultural constructivist school" has said that science is a social or cultural construct (really the same thing) this has been understood to mean that "science is wrong," or "science doesn't work." He is not saying that Science doesn't work, but he is saying that science is not cumulative progress. The old image of the scientist faithfully stacking one fact upon another, facts patiently gathered from totally objective and therefore totally true observations, is old hat and has to be replaced. Sorry to break the news to the reductionists, but the concept of "progress" is, itself, a cultural construct. There is nothing in nature called "progress." That is a Western notion that comes to us through philosophy and is not strictly speaking, a scientific term. Scientists don't record in their experimental observations "I found the progress in my subject matter." Progress is social and cultural, and it is a relative notion. When we think we are making progress it is always at the expense of someone else's notion of progress.

Due to the nature of paradigm shifts, science does not stack up facts one upon another until x amount of progress is achieved. Science regularly wipes the slate clean and starts over on new paradigms and each new bust of "progress" has to be judged relative to many factors, such as it's social effects.

Summary of Kuhn

Kuhn theorizes that scientific revolutions develop cognitively through the acquisition and refinement of paradigms (vi). Scientific disciplines, in their early stages, struggle to unify themselves around a single paradigm, such as the mechanical model of the universe. Once having achieved a single paradigm, however, the discipline orients its professional growth, theoretical study, and research priorities around the preservation of the paradigm. Contradictions to the paradigm (anomalies), are treated as puzzles to be solved, and are absorbed into the paradigm. It is only when the discipline fails to solve certain anomalies over time that a sense of crisis emerges, new theories are proposed, and a new paradigm is accepted. This development marks the nature of scientific "revolutions."

Kuhn developed this theory as an alternative to the former historiographical model, the major inadequacy of which was its tendency to view scientific development as a series of obstacles overcome by the accumulation of knowledge, bit by bit, in the face of error and superstition (2). Kuhn interjected an anthropological method into the history of science, but, in using the notion of a "paradigm" he drew upon Piaget's theory of cognitive childhood development (vi).Kuhn first constructs a description of "normal science," "research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements...that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice" (10).

The Nature of Paradigms

Scientific achievements constitute a paradigm when they meet two criteria:

1) they must be solid and foundational enough to draw researchers away from other models and other approaches;

2) they must be open-ended enough to allow for further problem solving to continue;

in this way, paradigms guide research priorities and dictate a set of shared rules within the scientific community (10). Kuhn likens the development of a paradigm to a judicial decision in common law, it is always open to further elaboration (23). The procedure of "normal science," then, amounts to what he calls a "mopping up operation," or attempts at fine tuning (24).

Meanwhile, the discipline itself grows up around the paradigm. Research priorities are set, new instruments are developed with the paradigm in mind, and the discipline incorporates or weeds out that which does not lend itself to the needs of the paradigm. This process entails what Kuhn calls "paradigm based research" (25), fact-gathering operations, experiments and observations, based upon the accepted facts of the paradigm, oriented around prediction according to the paradigm (27). This fact-oriented nature of paradigm based research constitutes the procedures of "normal" scientific activity. That is to say, after the establishment of a paradigm, "normal science" consists of the attempt o "mop-up" or solve puzzles, to make the anomalies fit the paradigm (35). Anomalies are not treated as "counter instances," that is, they do not count against the paradigm, but are treated as mere "puzzles," to be solved through further research. Only a solution within the paradigm is treated as "scientific," only that which is in accord with the paradigm is presented as a real scientific question worthy of research, all else is "metaphysics" (37).

In chapters VI through VIII Kuhn elaborates upon the assumptions of the community with regard to paradigm-based research. Chapter six deals with discoveries in particular. Discoveries are made all the time, but it is only when they help to elucidate the paradigm that they are regarded as significant. Paradigm shift results from discovery when anomalies cannot be incorporated into the paradigm, and further elaboration of fact is required. Until that time, a discovery is not a "scientific fact" (53). In other words, data contrary to the expected outcome is not, a priori, a discovery, a fact, or anything but a mishap, until it is either solved as a puzzle within the paradigm, or the paradigm itself is replaced with a new paradigm. In order to demonstrate this point, Kuhn details the historical problems involved in the "discovery" of oxygen.

Three different researchers claimed to have discovered oxygen at different points in time: Scheele, Priestly, Lavoisier. Each found some aspects of oxygen, but no one researcher can be said to have discovered oxygen on a given day (although all three were working in the 1770s) (54).The point Kuhn is making is that discovery is cumulative process of conceptual assimilation against the background of the paradigm (55). But, the actual paradigm shift is not cumulative, it does not just happen after a certain number of new findings pile up. Scientists do not simply record data, and the data does not simply happen to include new discoveries; discoveries are anomalies, and thus, they are only truly known as "discoveries" in retrospect, in relation to the new paradigm (56). Priestly and Lavoisier had basically the same results in discovering oxygen, only Lavoisier was able to fully see what had happened in producing oxygen. The major point is that paradigms constitute the scientific world, and the shift from one paradigm to another is a shift, for the researcher, from one world to another. Rigid acceptance and enforcement of the rules is essential, even to the exclusion of new theories. This is not necessarily norrow-minded professional "climate of opinion," but a necessary means of guiding research priorities. It is only against the background of the paradigm that anomaly is known.The more precise the paradigm, the greater the ability to find anomaly, and fewer are the distractions for researchers (65).

Anomolies
Chapters VII and VIII are pivotal chapters because they set up the notion of crisis and allow Kuhn to prepare to talk about revolutions in science. It is through crisis that new paradigms emerge, when old paradigms fail to solve the growing anomalies. At this point, even though Kuhn does not state it in this manner, one can see a developmental process, or stages of cognitive formation; from discovery, to theory, to paradigms (67). Anomalies don't just pile up until one day a new paradigm emerges, they are incorporated into the existing paradigm, or dismissed as an unscientific, but over time, a sense of crisis emerges when the paradigm fails consistently to solve a "puzzle," or a type of problem. Eventually, new theories emerge from a sense of crisis and a new paradigm is substituted for the old. a classic example is astronomy. The Ptolemaic system lasted for a long time without crisis because it was reasonable, and it satisfied astronomers. Over time, however, problems solved in one area were often found to show up in another, until it was observed that the complexity of the system was growing much faster than its ability to accurately disclose information about the heavens. Eventually, the Copernican system was offered in its place (68-69).

Dilemma in Nature of Science
There is a dilemma in the nature of science itself. On the one hand, counter-enstances cannot be seen as counting against the paradigm, because they are always turning up, and the paradigm is essential as the basis for shared rules of the community of science. On the other hand, a paradigm without anomalies (counter-enstances) fails to produce research questions and ceases to be an important area of scientific work (79). There is, therefore, a tension between anomaly and paradigm, which must be preserved. "Tension" may be a good description because counter-enstances must arise, but they cannot count against the paradigm, not until a new paradigm is ready to replace the old one. This is a crucial concept because it constitutes the nature of a scientific revolution (90).

Sciencetific Revoutions: Paradigm Shifts
In chapters IX and X Kuhn discusses scientific revolutions. Kuhn compares scientific revolutions to political revolutions in two important ways:
1) both grow out of a sense of crisis,

and galvanize themselves when segments of the community come to feel that existing institutions no longer function to resolve the problems which they are expected to solve;

2) revolutions "aim to change institutions in ways that the institutions themselves prohibit" (93).

The choice between paradigms is a choice between "incompatible modes of community life" (94). The clash of paradigms entails a circular debate, in which one must enter the inner logic of the new paradigm in order to understand the nature of it, but no reason can be given from outside the paradigm why the opponent should enter the circle. Each paradigm is used to argue in its own defense (94). In order to settle a paradigm debate, one must go outside the normal course of science. Kuhn argues that paradigm debates are like debates about values, they can only be settled through a system of value, not of fact (110). In the case of science, the value would be that which is placed upon answers to certain questions, those which demand new paradigms, those that are solved by the old.

Moreover, paradigms are even more fundamental than values because they constitute the world of our understanding. A paradigm shift is a world view shift (111).In Chapter XI Kuhn takes up a discussion of textbooks. Scientific textbooks are written from the perspective of the current paradigm and orient the student to an interpretation of the world and the discipline based upon the current paradigm. "More than any other single aspect of science, that pedagogic form has determined our image of the nature of science..." (143). Kuhn calls this chapter "the invisibility of revolutions." After the revolution, the "new" paradigm is fact, the revolution goes away and its findings become "normal science."In Chapter XII, Kuhn takes up his famous debate with Karl Popper over the nature of scientific verification. Popper believed that there could only be falsification, no phenomenon could be positively verified.


A.Paradigm Shifts


To take up this philosophical position, and then to try and justify it through appeal to its "scientific" nature, is to misunderstand the nature of science itself. Science is not a totally objective endeavor capable of yielding 100% truth Science is a human endeavor and, thus, is limited to human cultural constructs. One of the major culturally constructed positions of science is the notion of the paradigm shift. Science works according to paradigms. One model, the paradigm, explains the nature of the world in a given area. An example of how paradigms have changed is that of the chemical vs. the mechanical model. In the 15th and 16th centuries some thinkers thought that the world worked by chemical correspondence, the laws of alchemy. This notion gave way to the view of the universe as a big machine, and that has been transformed into the view that the universe is like a giant organism. At each stage along the way, the paradigm shifts and the facts of the old paradigm become anomalies under the new. Conversely, observations which were made before the shift which were viewed as merely anomalous (observations which contradict the paradigm) become "facts" under the new. Perhaps the major historian of scientific thought today is Thomas S. Kuhn who worked out the theory of paradigm shifts in TheStructure of Scientific Revolutions [University of Chicago Press, 1962].



1) Paradigm not chosen based upon factual data


Kuhn argues that anomalies are normally absorbed into the paradigm and explained way as anomalous. Hence, when supernatural effects happen, and if they cannot be explained by scientific means they are thought of as "unexplained." Scientists do not, and cannot declare them as "miraculous" just because they cannot find a naturalistic explanation. For this reason, paradigm shifts are not the result of passionless rational argument and are not predicated upon "fact" nor can they be. Rather, they are the result of a change in sociological factors. This is so because the system which makes one set of data "facts" as opposed to "unexplained anomalies" is the thing under dispute.



2) Science not cumulative progress

A sense of urgency builds until the paradigm shifts as the old paradigm collapses under the weight of so many anomalies. He uses the analogy of political revolution precisely because of its sense of urgency and disorder. The notion of a urgent need to change, a great struggle fought on other than rational basis is the point of the whole thing. The major conceptual changes which happen in science are not the result of cumulative progress, and are not brought about through disinterested and rational discussion of the facts, and they are not predicated upon "scientific proofs." Granted all of these things are involved, but all they can function as is a regulator concept for the debate. The real change comes through a shift in perception, and thus, it scientific knowledge is not a cumulative endeavor.Thomas S. Kuhn(d. 1995)Kuhn himself tells us:
"scientific revolutions are here taken to be those non-cumulative developmental episodes replaced in whole or in part by a new one..." (Thomas kuhn The Structure of scientific Revolutions, 92). "The choice [between paradigms] is not and cannot be determined merely by the evaluative procedures characteristic of normal science, for these depend in part upon a particular paradigm, and that paradigm is at issue. When paradigms enter as they must into a debate about paradigm choice, their role is necessarily circular. Each group uses it's own paradigm to argue in that paradigm's defense...the status of the circular argument is only that of persuasion. It cannot be made logically or even probabilistically compelling for those who refuse to step into the circle." The Structure of Scientific Revolutions(94)In section X we shall discover how closely the view of science as cumulative is entangled with a dominate epistemology that takes knowledge to be a construction placed directly upon raw sense data by the mind. And in section XI we shall examine the strong support provided to the same historiographical scheme by the techniques of effective science pedagogy. Nevertheless, despite the immense plausibility of that ideal image, there is increasing reason to wonder whether it can possibly be an image of science. After the pre-paradigm period the assimilation of all new theories and of almost all new sorts of phenomena has demanded the destruction of a prior paradigm and a consequent conflict between competing schools of scientific thought. Cumulative anticipation of unanticipated novelties proves to be an almost nonexistent exception to the rule of scientific development.The man who takes historic fact seriously must suspect that science does not tend toward the ideal that our image of its cumulative nature has suggested. Perhaps it is another sort of enterprise.

(A.) Paradigm shift.

Kuhn-- Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 96. Kun was not a Christian. He represents the more rational end of a movement in academia, in some cases very much opposed to Christianity, which was big in the '80s and '90s: Postmodern social constructivism.The cultural constructivists realized that science is just another human endeavor, and as such it is not the essence of "objective fact." Rather, it is assigned a cultural role in our agreed upon definitions of fact.There are precursors to Kuhn among the great 20th century historians of science, who, while they did not say exactly the same thing, and while they did not develop a theory of change of scientific revolutions along the lines of developmental psychology, did observe that science is a social movement, that it develops along certain hap hazard lines which involve development of ideas from detailed work and the inability of former paradigms (though they did not use the term) to withstand repeated contradiction.These are contemporaries. Westfall is still writing as far as I know, and was a contemporary of Kuhn's (both began careers in 50s or early 60s). Collingwood and older contemporary and wrote in the 40's. Two such thinkers were, R.G. Collingwood: The Idea of Nature. London, NY: Oxford, 1947, and Richard Westfall. The Construction of Modern Science, (Cambridge University Press 1971)Collingwood looks at major eras of scientific advancement beginning with the Greeks.He begins with a description of relation of developments between philosophy and Science which sounds a lot like Khun.

(B). Three periods when idea of nature gained focuss:

(1) Greeks.

(2) Renaissance

(3) Early modern.



That is where the p. shift comes in, though he doesn't use the phrase. But he says it is not that a detailed and abstract view of nature is worked out as a whole then people take it and go out to do science with it (intro p. 1) nor is it that a period of thought is followed by a period of investigation. But,

"in natural science, as in economics, or morals, or law, people being with details. They begin by taking individual problems as they arise. Only when this detail has accumulated to a considerable amount do they reflect upon the work they have been doing and discover they have been doing it in amethodical way, according to principles of which hither to they have not been conscious...the detailed work seldom goes on for any length of time without reflection intervening. This reflection ...upon the detailed work: for when people become conscious of the principles upon which they have been thinking or acting they become conscious of something which in these thoughts and actions they have trying, though unconciously to do--namely to work out in detail the logical implications of those principles. To strange minds this new consciousness gives a new strength namely new firmness in their approach to the detailed problems."

Richard Westfall, The Construction of Modern Science. (Cambridge University Press 1971).Westfall examines the two major themes which dominated scientific revolution of 17th century. The Platonic-Paithagorian tradition, emphasizing nature and as geometry, cosmos constructed by mathematics, and the Mechanical and Philosophical model: nature as huge machine, sought hidden mechanism to find order. These two major forces represent paradigms essentially and the struggle between these schools resolved itself in argument and in social spheres. The Scientific revolution was social phenomenon. Westfall believes ideas following own internal logic was central element in foundation of modern science. This is essentially one example of a social construct reading of early modern science.




The Social Constructivist Movement:
Evidence of new paradigm shift


Taken together with Kuhn, on face value, these two works form the basis for a cultural analysis of scientific fact-making. Kuhn forms the general theoretical landscape which Shapin and Schaffer help to fill out in greater detail. Neither of these works claims a disruption of the stability found in historical narrative, much less a deconstruction of truth or logic as stable categories. Although, as will be seen, Lukes argues that Kuhn comes dangerously close to doing so (and, one might argue, so do Shapin and Schaffer). Both works require an historical understanding of their subject matter. Both lay bare the process of making scientific fact; it is not a matter of simply discovering how things work, but of manipulating (and being manipulated by) a cultural understanding of how things work. Yet, without a historical understanding, there is no sense to either work. Both are dependent upon conventional understandings of chronology, and upon conventional notions of historical event such that one can say "this is what happened, and this is why." Kuhn's examples wouldn't make sense without the notion that three different people worked on the problem of oxygen throughout the 1770s, and after that time, one of them actually discovered something. Nor would Shapin and Schaffer's notions make sense if one examined the events in textual isolation, with no regard for historical context or event. What would be the point of saying that Hobbes was written out of the history of natural philosophy, if the text is all that mattered? If the text itself is history, the history of natural philosophy never included Hobbes.On the face of it, the claim that chronology is meaningless seems like an absurd idea, yet, there are those within the postmodern and social constructivist camps who make this claim: i.e. Derrida, Baudrillard, Benhabib, and to some extent Foucault (Rosenau, 63).

Moreover, it is more common for the constructivist position in general to find the content of scientific discovery challenged, and to find categories of truth and logic ascribed purely to social agents and cultural understanding rather than any sort of stable, universal categories. "Criteria of truth, or logic, or both, arise out of different contexts and are themselves variable...[they are] relative to particular groups, cultures, communities" (Lukes, 231). "In this view," [postmodern social constructivism] "the whole point of the sociology of scientific knowledge is that there is no such thing as an accurate representation of an external and objective reality" (Fuchs, 11). "Nor do these [skeptical] postmodernists view history as periods of time that unfold with regularity, that can be isolated, abstracted, represented, described in terms of essential characteristics...they reject history as reasoned analysis focused upon the general or the particular because both assume 'reality,' `identity,' and `truth.'" (Rosenau, 63).

Since about 1996 the fortunes of Postmodernism have fallen. Almost as soon as Kuhn died major denunciations of and attacks upon his work began. He was at the summit of fame and fortune int he last two decades of his life, he is now largely forgotten and rejected. Part of this is due to the guilt by association from lumping him in with the more radical Postmodernists. Once the stigma of being "no longer in fashion" wears off, I believe that he will be resurrected and will come to be seen as a great thinker. His theories need revising and re-work, but I'm convienced they hold the key to the best understanding of the nature of science.



What Does This Tell Us?


What Kuhn tells us that is of crucial importance for understanding the relation between science and religious belief, is that science is not all knowing. It is not a replacement for religion, it is not an objective means of probing to the depths of the meaning of life or of being human.It is a human activity, it has a relation to social paradigms and is socially constructed. As such it is not a "truth detector." We can discover the workings of the physical world, and that can, at times, correct our misimpressions about the nature of God, but it cannot tell us that God does or does not exist, and it cannot take the place of God.

The paradigm shift from Big bang theory to other cosmological origins such as mirror the old previously abandoned steady state, merely show that science is not the ultimate hard core truth atheists which it was. Kuhn shows that paradigm shifts accompany political battles over the paradigms, and that's what we see going on now with atheists with no scientific expertise arguing stridently for cosmologies they know nothing, they are functioning as brown shirts and shock troops as one would find in any political battle in 1933.