Thursday, May 30, 2013

Discussion with Athesits on Mircles

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v.blow fly

Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
Many atheists will shift to the side that claims physiological laws are only descriptive to avoid the necessity of a mind to house physical laws that are prescriptive.


Blow fly

Of course the physical laws are merely descriptive. To say that the equation e=mc^2 is prescriptive is to say some mathematical entity is performing this computation in order to work out what the universe is supposed to look like next, which is nonsense.


Meta:
you have no basis for saying Of cousre. I know this will come as shock to you but there is no law in scinece that says there's no creator not mind over the universe no basis for thinking of a higher power. it is not the founding assumption of scinece that these things can't be true. there's Of cousre to it! its' your opinion to assert this.

The problem is unless you can guarantee that your descriptions are 100% accurate then anything that goes against them (such as miracles) is just more detail that you didn't get.

blow fly
The descriptions aren't 100% accurate, and more importantly they are increasingly *probabilistic* - eg. various quantum "laws" describe (very accurately) the probabilities of a state of affairs.


Meta
That is not an answer to my argument. you cannot just wave the magic word "quantum" and assume you beat the argument. Everyone assumes quantum states that is not an answer! Quantum theory actually backs my argument because it shows that the state of the universe is more contradictory and defy s accurate description.

Blow fly:
Alleged violations of the laws of physics imply a lack of our knowledge of the physical world, rather than miracles.

Meta:
Why can't miracles be part of the inadequacy of knowledge? you want to assume you know with absolute certainly there can't be miracles but you take out any barrier to having them.

you have also nixed any means of explaining the regularity of the natural. Since the basic quantum state is to hover between real and unread (particle and wave) then there's no basis for your assertion on any level.

Blowfly
Plus, I'm sure you recognize a qualitative difference between the known laws of physics being violated in some highly contrived physics experiment, as compared to the known laws of physics being violated by (say) an angel appearing in a hospital and healing everyone of cancer before disappearing.

Meta
You are making biased assumptions about the nature of healing. why did you write an angle into the process? where do you come off making the assertion that we know for a fact there can't be an angel? you just making up assumptions that we know up say that the atheist position is 100% true and nothing can ever violate it and we don't know that. I don't necessarily believe in angles. But why should I assume there can't be any?

No miracle claim that I know of sticks an angle into it so you are just loading the senerio agaisnt belief and being more imponderable by multiplying entities beyond necessity.


The only answer atheist can make to this is to argue that either their descriptions are prefect, (in which case just one miracle invalidates your whole world view) or they have to beg the question and just there are no other descriptions which is easily disproved.

either way atheism has no basis in fact for a world view.


how about that wave-partial duality? How can you claim to have a 100% description when you have incredible contradiction that basically makes the ultimate nature of reality untenable?

Blow Fly
Huh? This is a problem in physics, one which there are several plausible answers to, how does this state of affairs imply the supernatural?

Meta:
what makes you think your world view is immune to problems in physics? You seem somehow to think that the "them vs us" mentality is a valid part of logic. that's ludicrous. Your position is as much on the line with physics as with anything else.

Blow Fly
If anything it simply suggests that the nature of physical reality is much stranger than we initially thought (eg. multiverses etc), which is something we've started to suspect for quite a while now.

Meta:

So why would you still have the arbitrary line that says "we can be surprised by any thing but it can never never never be supernatural?" what is supernatural? anything religious. That's just biased as hell. you are just setting up a truth regime don't' you know that that means? It's mean your view is exactly what you accuse theology of being, just a bunch of made up stuff that you evoke like fake little rules that are only important for you because they give up a pretense at ruling out the view you don't like.



Meta vs Darth Prengle

Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
Unless you accept prescriptive laws of physics you are merely asserting that your description is 100% actuate.


DP:
Absolutely false. The physics of General Relativity is a more accurate description of the universe than that presented by Newtonian laws. Ergo, General Relativity offers a more accurate description. However, General Relativity is only a partial theory and thus, cannot be considered 100% accurate.
Meta:

I think those alternatives do not define the dichotomy. In other words, we can have prescriptive physical laws in a quantum universe, we can have descriptive laws in a quantum universe, ditto for relativity universe. So appealing to modern physics does not resolve the question. As I understand it physicists are not 100% agreed upon which it is.

You have not come to terms with the logic of my statement. If you choose descriptive you must either claim 100% accuracy or you must be willing to accept that there aer other descriptions you didn't get. That's a prori. except or not that's obviously the choice. So I should have said that, either claim 100% or admit to other options.

It can always be overhauled with more description.

DP:
Yes, and that is what happens.

Meta:
right-ee-0! that means if part of the new description is miracles you can't rule it out. If laws are not barriers to what can happen you have no basis for saying what can and can't happen other than the accuracy of description!

So it just boils down to the fact that reductionism and naturism are circular reasoning. you lose the phenomena in reductionism then based upon that pretense the notion that there is no counter description.


DP:
Where did I do that? Can you provide a quote? Erm, no. In fact, in another thread I clearly told you that I'm not a reductionist and hold to emergentism. Plus, you have done nothing to tackle the probability argument.

Meta:
Probability is going to depend upon the accuracy of descriptions. If your descriptions leave out miracles on the grounds that you wont accept them, then use the fact that they are left out as proof that they don't happen (no evidence--when the evidence has been there it's just ignored) then that's circular!

that's also reducationst, whether you like the label or not. You are either reductionist by fact or by label, unless you are willing to admit all the phenomena into the analysis.

DP:
1. If miracles occur then they are statistically unlikely events (if this were not true then we would see them happening all the time).


Meta:
true by definition--worse than that they are by definition impossible. Now that may mean they are no improbable. It means they are things we previously thought can't happen.

DP:
2. Natural occurrences are extremely likely events (we see them happening constantly and on a daily basis).
Meta:
you are dealing with events that by definition can't comply with the norm.

DP:
3. Therefore, any claimed event (miraculous or otherwise) is more likely to have a natural explanation.

Meta:
that's fine but it can't be used to rule out the possibility. what most atheist do is play a shell game where they admit to the possibly will never neve never ever be fair about the evidence!

your argument does not change the fact that the consequence of descriptive laws is either claim 100% accuracy or admit to the possibility.

DP:
Ergo, a bias towards natural explanations is justified. It has nothing to do with appealing to partial laws (descriptions) already in our possession but would influence the development of new ones.
Meta:
That's a misleading argument. It doesn't answer the logic of my argument it totally side steps it. Saying that being "biased" toward natural and assuming naturalistic c/e is not a damper on belief in miracles. My own procedure is to prefer the natural solution as well! My first recourse is not to allege a miracle. My first action in dealing with miracle evidence is to look for naturalistic solutions. The problem comes in with the dishonesty that occurs when naturalistic solutions are not found.

Its' then the atheist starts games like "there never been any evidence in the past therefore this can't be evidence now." Or the evidence is just wrong, it has to be wrong it must be. The doctors liked the x-ray is faked ect ect. I will never under sany circumstances I have to be right (they pull that all the time man. You may not but other do).

Do you not see what I have proved here?

DP:

Nothing much as far as I can see. You haven't even tackled the probability argument that I presented in the previous (and now this) post. I see very atheists on here saying that miracles are impossible.
Meta:
that is not an answer to my argument. Its' just show. its side stepping the logic of my argument.


Most seem to be saying that miracles can't be ruled out a priori but then justifying their bias towards natural explanations.
their justification is based upon circular reasoning in two ways:

(1) they assume an absence of evidence which is based entirely upon merely hiding the evidence of the past becuase the same sort of circular assumptions were made about it, then the alleged absence of evidence is used as a justification for hiding the new evidence.

(2) The assertion that incredulity is an argument against any evidence.

I've proved that It's a truth regime that atheism have created. It's a construct based upon hiding the phenomena.

DP:
You've proved nothing of the sort because the brand of atheism you appear to be attacking bears little resemblance to the brand of atheism held by myself and many atheists on this board.

Meta:
I'm sure that your view is different than most. You are one of the good one's. The problem is you are still using the justification process based upon the artificial absence of counter evdience, which is nothing more than the instances in the past where the same circular reasoning has been applied. Now it's become a coda, the absence of evidence rather than the ignoring of it (which is what it really is).

with all of this you hare totally ignored the problem of discretion. If the only barrier to miracles is past discrimination and you admit that your description can miss things then there's no reason not to take seriously the allegation that there has been evidence in the past that got ignored.

Since I can name that evdience that makes the argument even stronger.


DP: Meta, you have studied the history of science so what I'm about to type really shouldn't need to be pointed out to you by a novice like myself. However ....

There are currently two theories which explain different aspects of reality which are General Relativity (large phenomena) and Quantum Mechanics (miniscule phenomena). These theories are known to contradict each other which is why the search is on for a unified theory of everything.

How could a set of contradictory and partial laws be considered prescriptive? The reason why any atheist with a basic knowledge of scientific history will argue that scientific laws must be viewed as descriptive rather than prescriptive is because they are aware of the above problem. We know that our current description of reality is contradictory and incomplete and thus, needs improvement.


Meta:
You are overlooking the possibility of assuming that the laws are prescriptive as a preliminary course of assumption, but not assume we understand the relationship between the two theories--yet! When we do come to understand that relationship in a unified way it will be within [B][I]a frame work involving prescriptive laws.

We can also work on the possibility of augmenting what we mean by preservative laws. We don't necessarily have to mean by that a determinism. There can be an uncertainty principle along with prescriptive laws.

Descriptive laws don't explain the regularity of the universe or how something can come to be without a process to guide it. The concept of natural law evolved out of the Church's understanding of nature and involved the concept of preservative laws. It's hard to see what meaning "natural law" has if not law like. In deep what is "nature" if it is not something set on a course by some pre ordinared establishment.



the concept of a miracle is going to be relative to the concept of possibility. miracle means something happened we don't understand that seems to violate our concept of what is possible. But without prescriptive there is no way to say what's possible and what is not. (I think I said this, right?)

DP:
Again, unless a claimed miracle is logically contradictory then it is possible and no atheist is in a position to rule it out a priori. The dismissal of the claim that a miracle has occurred and a bias towards natural explanations is not based upon possibility or 100% knowledge but on the basis of likelihood.

Meta:
That's only because when the concept of natural law came to replace God in the mind of modern scinece (Laplace in the Napoleonic era) it was in light of prescriptive natural law that it did so. That's largely why scientists spent such a long time refusing to theorize or philosophize about natural law. Until Einstein they just memorized Newton and assumed somehow these laws were in place and they did ask how they could be in place. Two profs form UT should read on this score, Robert Solomon and Robert Koons.

Your assertion that an atheist is not in a position to rule out a miracle a preori unless it contradicts (?what?) is a good point. Because by the same token we don't have to think of God as working outside the lines that "he" created in natural law. So the blowfly idea of angels dispensing miracles is out. It could as well be God works through natural law just by beginning the probabilities, working the Tao.

1. Miracles are statistically unlikely events (even if they occur) whereas natural occurrences are highly likely.
Does not necessitate being outside structures of norm.

2. Because of (1), any claimed event (x) is more likely to have a natural explanation.
Does not necessitate the assertion that the more detailed description can't include the opposite--the extremely unlikely. Nor does it justify assuming ignored evidence is lack of evidence.

And even then, we need to be clear on what we mean by "explanation".
O now you are getting around that hu? you can't deal with that without accepting the fact that you can't factor in a lack of evidence since evdience int he past has been ignored.

DP:
In the same way that, "James dropped the ball" doesn't form a part of a scientific explanation as to why the ball dropped when I let go of it, "God did X" does not provide a scientific explanation of X. The reason why "God did X" claims are often dismissed (often in favour of "I don't know") is that there is no real difference (in terms of understanding) between "God did X" and "I don't know" and natural explanations are proven to have greater explanatory power.
that's an evasion. that's an excuse to use the perennial excuse machine of atheism and always assert another possibility however unlikely. the most ridiculously unlike scenarios must be accept before anything miraculous. That's based upon the past ignoring of evdience.


You can say what is normative but normative and possible are not the same. do you understand?
Meta:
you don't understand. if you suddenly assumed that all the past evidence has been covered up was admitted as evidence your case for no miracle would look totally different. you would have to be saying things like "even though there are thousands of examples of miracles we still find this one is irrational and not probable."

DP:
But normative does govern our sense of what is likely or probable and will have a direct impact on which explanations are preferred.

Meta:

that contradicts everything in your other deal. Normative would mean probable in this case.

DP:
Something you are thus far ignoring. We don't embrace explanations simply because they are possible and if we are faced with a number of competing possibilities and no empirical evaluation is possible then we will be biased towards what is more probable.


Meta:
I'm not ignoring that. you are ignoring the consequence that obtains form saying that physical laws are only descriptions of what happens. That means that the limit on what can happen disappears and you are left with only probability. Probability can be deceiving because you are basing your view of what is probable on a lie, on all the hidden miracles that have been ruled out.

you are also ignoring the process through which ruling them out transforms them from ignored to a variable in calculating the probability.



so if natural laws are NOT PRESCRIPTIVE but merely DESCRIPTIONS OF WHAT HAPPENS, THAT OPENS THE DOOR FOR THING THAT WE DIDN'T THINK COULD HAPPEN. iT'S JUST A MATTER OF DESCRIBING THINGS BETTER. DON'T YOU SEE?

DP:
"God did X" is not an explanation of X (where X is a claimed miraculous event).


Meta:
Now that's moving beyond basing descriptions upon evidence or using probability to determine explanation that's moving back into the realm of ruling out miracles a prori the reason there's never a case where you will be wiling to consider divine action. As long as that's the case (it always will be) then you always have a structure that's ready made to deny miracles. when you ad to that the idea that you can't say God did something it ceases to be defacto and become dejure. (sp).


DP:
It merely takes something that is mysterious (X) and attributes it to something (God) that is even more inexplicable than the thing (X) that was being explained.


Meta:
But you see that is an ideologically conditioned stilted rendition of how the attribution of miracles takes place. the Lourdes committee is made up of scientists and researchers who are much too sophisticated to just say "God did it" every time something is unexplained. There's a lot more to it than that.

One can make a whole scinece of just determining when it's valid to claim miracles, aside from getting around to presenting evidence for them.

The last time we had a big argument about Charles Anne's lungs the atheist declared that the x-rays have to be made up and he would not believe until I gave him a copy of the x-rays. I said I have actually talked to a guy on the committee who assures me that the x-rays are true,l he's sense them. He just said "he has to be lying because he's religious." when I accused him of belief that miracles are impossible he says NO of course I don't think ti' just that there are never any happening.

So when push comes to shove they always transmute the evidence into doubt then the doubt into presumption against miracles. That's still a contradiction to the basic assumption of descriptive laws.

Sunday, May 26, 2013

Stupid atheist tricks! no.897. Turning beautiful answer into a curse

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On a discussion on CARM (where else) I write about my own testimony which happened to come up. at one point someone I knew who was close to me was 'freaking out' on a bad acid trip. I was real upset and didn't know what to do. he refused to  let me call medical help or to go to a hospital. I didn't know what else to do so I thought I hope my parents are right and Jesus is real. I said "if you are really there," I said "Jesus the way my parents believe in, "if you are really there please stop him." He stopped. he wound down and went to sleep. that got my attention. that's not all there was to my conversion but that got my attention. Read about it here. I wasn't just telling this to impress and covert. It fit into a larger point. Then the dopy atheist decides this is a bad thing. At first he tried to make into a conceitedness. writ it off. then he tries to turn into a curse.

 Originally Posted by Fanghur View Post
That would be a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. So your brother calmed down, so what? Sometimes it happens. It proves nothing. Did Jesus appear bodily and place a hand over your brother's face or cradle him in his arms and transfer some kind of visible energy into him or something? Did you get this experience on film so that we can examine it?
Meta: that's like saying when you say "hey!" the other looks around and says "what?" you should just say to yourself, he's not answering me, it's just a coincidence that he just happened to look when I said that to him." That's what you are saying. we should never undertand any event as a direct response to prayer regardless of how improbable it is. He had been rampaging and writhing and screaming and he was throwing things and he said all sorts of things to indicate he was in a bad way he was not stopping he showed no sign of letting down. I have no reason to assume it was a coincidence the only reason one would think that is if on was biased against belief that there is a God who would answer.


Originally Posted by Fanghur View Post
No, that is not what I am saying, and that is not a valid comparison in the least. If you call to a person across the room, you can see that you're there and they can see that you're there. Therefore it is entirely reasonable to assume that they are responding to you. Your analogy is totally invalid.

Meta:
when I call out and say If you are really do X and X is done immediately I should conclude the same thing.



Fanghur
Yes, and a god who apparently doesn't give two hoots about helping him until you asked.

Meta:
you have no proof that God doesn't' care until you ask, that's just ingratitude. Intsead of saying "thanks' you say "what took you so long?"
that is irrational. To try and turn into a indictment of God's compassion because he wait utni we called. Of course it crosses his mind if it was to show me he's there than waiting until I call would be the kindest thing because how else would I know he did it. Of course then we start the reduction process to slippery slope and argue why don't God hold a press conference and let us all in on the gag.

It must take a real burned out fool to think this way.


getting back to the major discussion he adds:

And this is where you say our morals come from? And you are absolutely wrong. You are making an extraordinary claim. 
 Meta
slipper slope. without knowing anything about it you are to build it not some horrendous dopy assumption about God, or put in a bad light instead of building it as a good motive. What's the logic there? the basis of the Good answered my pleas so i'm going t turn into a reaosn not to believe? how assign!
Here's where he really starts going over the edge.


Fanghur
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.By far the simplest explanation is coincidence; Occam's Razor, the simplest explanation is typically best. And I have extremely good reasons to be biased against such a thing, because what about the millions of people every day who DON'T get helped by this magical anthropomorphic immortal of yours, hmm?
I was there an you weren't. It's obviously extraordinary. who wouldn't want God when you call? what kind of fool would seek to turn that into a bad thing?
So now he's not only going to complain about God's timing but he's actually going to use as an argument against the existence of God. I'm supposed to think God must not be there because it's a big enough miracle. I think it's pretty extraordinary and he's jealous. God did something for me everyone would like, he answered when I called. who would not want that. This guy takes it as a sign god doesn't care and complained it's not proof enough. I said he has a phobia about accepting God. he says:

Fang
No, it is not a phobia.

Meta:
o come off it. who are you trying kid? one of the most beautiful things in any one's life hapepned to me and you tryign to spit it as a curse just because you are jelogus is that? or you hate God or that ever the hell your problem is. no one in their right mind would try to turn that into a reason not to bleieve.

o yes God answered me when I called in respiration I guess that proves he doesn't exist! only a fool would say that!

This speaks volumes about the way atheists think. nothing can ever be good enough, you have to doubt everything no matter how amazing it is.Always think negative about God at all costs, learn to always see the dark of every situation. the Glass is not only half empty but what's there isn't worth drinking anyway.

Friday, May 24, 2013

Atheism's Psychology Today Scam

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Psychology Today is a popular magazine, it's like the Time Magazine of psychology. It's not a scholarly source but I used to read it in my college library back in undergrad days ("daze" is more like it). There articles about things like are fat people insecure because they are fat are they fact they because they are insecure? Now I find a blog calling itself "Psychology Today" it seems to be related to the magazine but I have trouble believing it is. This is because almost everything in this blog is about why Atheist are better than Christians or why Christianity is untrue. Those who think atheism is not a movement need to look at this.

The Article that caught my attention is entitled "Why Atheists Are More Intelligent than the Religious." see the link above. The article that follows is the most confused and disjointed, undocumented and silly bit of pseudo science I've ever seen. Knowing the Magazine form the 70s I would expect a large dose of pseudo science dressed to mascaraed as real science. On the other hand this blog is nothing more than a cheap window dressing disguising a outlet for the evolutionary psychology fan club. Evolutionary psychology is toughed here the cutting of edge of true scenic,e while in "true scinece" evolutionary psychology at this level of fandom is defined thought of as pseudo scinece. This particular article. Their approach is like saying "we all know astrology is not scientific and ti's false and misleading, I can prove with my numerology." The author (Satoshi Kanazawa ) asserts that a bell curve view of religion and IQ. He's arguing that being atheistic is evolutionarily novel, that' why most people have been religious throughout history and are so today. He denies a gene for religion but sees it as a combination of other genetic factors (he calls "agency detector mechanisms--I have seen others call "spandrels"). He's working according to a hypothesis called "the hypothesis" and links the same article several times (actually the full name for the theory is "Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis ").


If general intelligence evolved to deal with evolutionarily novel problems, then the human brain’s difficulty in comprehending and dealing with evolutionarily novel entities and situations (proposed in the Savanna Principle) should interact with general intelligence, such that the Savanna Principle holds stronger among less intelligent individuals than among more intelligent individuals.  More intelligent individuals should be better able to comprehend and deal with evolutionarily novel (but not evolutionarily familiar) entities and situations than less intelligent individuals.

Thus the Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis (hereafter “The Hypothesis” in this blog) suggests that less intelligent individuals have greater difficulty than more intelligent people with comprehending and dealing with evolutionarily novel entities and situations that did not exist in the ancestral environment.  In contrast, general intelligence does not affect individuals’ ability to comprehend and deal with evolutionarily familiar entities and situations that existed in the ancestral environment.

Evolutionarily novel entities that more intelligent individuals are better able to comprehend and deal with may include ideas and lifestyles, which form the basis of their preferences and values.  It would be very difficult for individuals to prefer or value something that they cannot truly comprehend.  So, applied to the domain of preferences and values, the Hypothesis suggests that more intelligent individuals are more likely than less intelligent individuals to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel preferences and values that did not exist in the ancestral environment and thus our ancestors did not have, but general intelligence has no effect on the acquisition and espousal of evolutionarily familiar preferences and values that existed in the ancestral environment.


I'll get to the IQ thing soon,not today, this is just an overview concerning the blog. Everything on it is aimed at destroying religion. The first article "Scientific fundamentalist." He's wiling to hook up fundamentalism if it's in line with the atheist ideology. None of this bs about fundamentalism is always the extreme, these guys (new eightieths?) are fundies. they just pitch for their brand of fundism like any good fundie would.

In other words intelligence is defined as the ability to cope with the novel. Most animal on the Savina can deal with the familiar, that's not hard, it's not as crucial to survival, so it's defined as average intelligence. Intelligence is  defined as the ability to solve problems that are crucial to survival. Dealing with the novel is more crucial and fewer organisms are equated to do so. Those who have that are more intelligent and thus intelligence is possessed by the smaller group. It's like the bell curve. The majority are in the middle where curve makes the bell. The smart people are on the right slope where it goes down and the smarter you are the fewer you are with and the further down the curve you go. So therefore, the majority are average.

This holds many implications for what we know about atheism. First of all atheist are always frantic to enlarge their numbers because of the typical fallacy of appeal to popularity would say being a little 3% minority makes them marginalized cranks. But this guy is rationalization being a marginalized crank by concluding that he's genetically superior because he's so much smarter than the  majority. Does this mean atheist will being insisting up on shrinking their ranks? That would be interesting test of my hypothesis that atheist are emotionally scared people who need to mock and ridicule those who disagree with them in order to feel special and important. If this doesn't catch on and atheists continue demanding that their ranks are bigger than they are perhaps that will disprove my view. On the other hand if they are truly smarter wouldn't they have thought of this already and shouldn't they already be doing it instead of insisting that there are more than them than there are?

It's a pseudo scientific argument. The assertion of the "hypothesis" is based upon an ideology not real scinece but "evolutionary psychology" which is basically sociobiology warmed over. The assertion that since novelty is harder to handle it must be the fewer who can handle it therefore the more intelligent is certainly a fallacious argument. If religions is genetically endowed, (weather there is a religious gene or not--just being a combination of other traits is still a genetic endowment) it's an adaptation and it belongs to the majority because it enables them to cope with their environment. The idea that those who don't have it are Superior or smarter because they are a smaller group is abhorrently fallacious. First of all he's defining not being religious as coping with novelty but it could just as easily be the case that religious people are better at coping with novelty. What he's calling "coping with novelty" is just his own vindication for his own lifestyle. In the quotation above he tells us coping with novelty is dealing with values and lifestyles. This has either nothing to do with survival or actually is negative and drag on survival and the majority have an adaption to lave destructive lifestyles  alone that's why they are the majority, they survived. If anything atheistic lifestyles would make one more open to disease and overdose, alcoholism and so forth than would belief, if by "belief" we construe "fundamentalist morality.". He's trying to put a spin on "sin" that makes it seem like an innovation in evolution that's totally his own value derangement one can can look at it the other way around.

Moreover,the attempt to attach a value of "intelligence" to lifestyle is nothing but Lamarkian evolution. He's trying to make evolution goal oriented, evolution is working to bestow smartness on people (that's the way sociobiology understood genes, like little guys inside you telling you want to do). He will admit being religious doesn't make you stupid but that more highly intelligent people tend to flock to non religious values and lifestyles. On the other hand that all depends upon how one looks at it. Fundamentalists do not tend to be as intelligent as open minded people, that's funny that this editors of this blog want to be thought  of as "science fundamentalists." It's perfectly plausible that some religious people handle novelty better than do non religious people but the statistic don't show it becuase they are swallowed up in the bell curve since so many more are religious and deal well with novelty. The same principle as the class average being brought down and reflecting badly on the one really bright kid in the class. We can also go on and talk about the aptness of IQ scores to reflect intelligence which is very much in doubt. I will deal with that when I deal with the over all IQ issue.

The blog is a morass of links each one leading to another set of articles and more morass of links, all about the stupidity of religious belief and the intellectual superiority of the atheists. For example linked up in the article are links to two articles upon "why we believe in God" of cousre putting an evolutionary spin on it to make it seem like a silly thing to do now. In the side bar holds a set of article under the title about IQ:

side bar in article on "the hypothesis."
IN the side bar of the original article

The whole blog is strongly oriented to discussing religion form an atheistic point of view. This is big time propaganda.

owned by Sussex Publishers:

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This is not just some guy who reads the secular web. I'm not saying it's Thrush. I'm not saying it's a vast conspiracy. It is part of a movement that's a lot more powerful and better connected than it would be if atheism was truly nothing more than "the lack of a belief." The next time you are on a message board and you hear atheists say that just remember someone thought up that slogan about 25 years ago and convinced a group of people to start spouting it and it has no more to do with the new atheism than the man in the moon. Atheism in America is big business, it's publishing, it's  institutions, it's law suits it's an organization with a ideology and propaganda.

In coming days this week I will focus upon the articles linked in this article, especially the IQ stuff.

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Discuss with Atheists on Miracles


This discussion took place in 2011 on CARM (where else?) I dug this up on Metacrock's blog and thought it was an interesting discussion.

v.blow fly

Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
Many atheists will shift to the side that claims physiological laws are only descriptive to avoid the necessity of a mind to house physical laws that are prescriptive.


Blow fly

Of course the physical laws are merely descriptive. To say that the equation e=mc^2 is prescriptive is to say some mathematical entity is performing this computation in order to work out what the universe is supposed to look like next, which is nonsense.


Meta:
you have no basis for saying Of cousre. I know this will come as shock to you but there is no law in scinece that says there's no creator not mind over the universe no basis for thinking of a higher power. it is not the founding assumption of scinece that these things can't be true. there's Of cousre to it! its' your opinion to assert this.

The problem is unless you can guarantee that your descriptions are 100% accurate then anything that goes against them (such as miracles) is just more detail that you didn't get.

blow fly
The descriptions aren't 100% accurate, and more importantly they are increasingly *probabilistic* - eg. various quantum "laws" describe (very accurately) the probabilities of a state of affairs.


Meta
That is not an answer to my argument. you cannot just wave the magic word "quantum" and assume you beat the argument. Everyone assumes quantum states that is not an answer! Quantum theory actually backs my argument because it shows that the state of the universe is more contradictory and defy s accurate description.

Blow fly:
Alleged violations of the laws of physics imply a lack of our knowledge of the physical world, rather than miracles.

Meta:
Why can't miracles be part of the inadequacy of knowledge? you want to assume you know with absolute certainly there can't be miracles but you take out any barrier to having them.

you have also nixed any means of explaining the regularity of the natural. Since the basic quantum state is to hover between real and unread (particle and wave) then there's no basis for your assertion on any level.

Blowfly
Plus, I'm sure you recognize a qualitative difference between the known laws of physics being violated in some highly contrived physics experiment, as compared to the known laws of physics being violated by (say) an angel appearing in a hospital and healing everyone of cancer before disappearing.

Meta
You are making biased assumptions about the nature of healing. why did you write an angle into the process? where do you come off making the assertion that we know for a fact there can't be an angel? you just making up assumptions that we know up say that the atheist position is 100% true and nothing can ever violate it and we don't know that. I don't necessarily believe in angles. But why should I assume there can't be any?

No miracle claim that I know of sticks an angle into it so you are just loading the senerio agaisnt belief and being more imponderable by multiplying entities beyond necessity.


The only answer atheist can make to this is to argue that either their descriptions are prefect, (in which case just one miracle invalidates your whole world view) or they have to beg the question and just there are no other descriptions which is easily disproved.

either way atheism has no basis in fact for a world view.


how about that wave-partial duality? How can you claim to have a 100% description when you have incredible contradiction that basically makes the ultimate nature of reality untenable?

Blow Fly
Huh? This is a problem in physics, one which there are several plausible answers to, how does this state of affairs imply the supernatural?

Meta:
what makes you think your world view is immune to problems in physics? You seem somehow to think that the "them vs us" mentality is a valid part of logic. that's ludicrous. Your position is as much on the line with physics as with anything else.

Blow Fly
If anything it simply suggests that the nature of physical reality is much stranger than we initially thought (eg. multiverses etc), which is something we've started to suspect for quite a while now.

Meta:

So why would you still have the arbitrary line that says "we can be surprised by any thing but it can never never never be supernatural?" what is supernatural? anything religious. That's just biased as hell. you are just setting up a truth regime don't' you know that that means? It's mean your view is exactly what you accuse theology of being, just a bunch of made up stuff that you evoke like fake little rules that are only important for you because they give up a pretense at ruling out the view you don't like.



Meta vs Darth Prengle

Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
Unless you accept prescriptive laws of physics you are merely asserting that your description is 100% actuate.


DP:
Absolutely false. The physics of General Relativity is a more accurate description of the universe than that presented by Newtonian laws. Ergo, General Relativity offers a more accurate description. However, General Relativity is only a partial theory and thus, cannot be considered 100% accurate.
Meta:

I think those alternatives do not define the dichotomy. In other words, we can have prescriptive physical laws in a quantum universe, we can have descriptive laws in a quantum universe, ditto for relativity universe. So appealing to modern physics does not resolve the question. As I understand it physicists are not 100% agreed upon which it is.

You have not come to terms with the logic of my statement. If you choose descriptive you must either claim 100% accuracy or you must be willing to accept that there aer other descriptions you didn't get. That's a prori. except or not that's obviously the choice. So I should have said that, either claim 100% or admit to other options.

It can always be overhauled with more description.

DP:
Yes, and that is what happens.

Meta:
right-ee-0! that means if part of the new description is miracles you can't rule it out. If laws are not barriers to what can happen you have no basis for saying what can and can't happen other than the accuracy of description!

So it just boils down to the fact that reductionism and naturism are circular reasoning. you lose the phenomena in reductionism then based upon that pretense the notion that there is no counter description.


DP:
Where did I do that? Can you provide a quote? Erm, no. In fact, in another thread I clearly told you that I'm not a reductionist and hold to emergentism. Plus, you have done nothing to tackle the probability argument.

Meta:
Probability is going to depend upon the accuracy of descriptions. If your descriptions leave out miracles on the grounds that you wont accept them, then use the fact that they are left out as proof that they don't happen (no evidence--when the evidence has been there it's just ignored) then that's circular!

that's also reducationst, whether you like the label or not. You are either reductionist by fact or by label, unless you are willing to admit all the phenomena into the analysis.

DP:
1. If miracles occur then they are statistically unlikely events (if this were not true then we would see them happening all the time).


Meta:
true by definition--worse than that they are by definition impossible. Now that may mean they are no improbable. It means they are things we previously thought can't happen.

DP:
2. Natural occurrences are extremely likely events (we see them happening constantly and on a daily basis).
Meta:
you are dealing with events that by definition can't comply with the norm.

DP:
3. Therefore, any claimed event (miraculous or otherwise) is more likely to have a natural explanation.

Meta:
that's fine but it can't be used to rule out the possibility. what most atheist do is play a shell game where they admit to the possibly will never neve never ever be fair about the evidence!

your argument does not change the fact that the consequence of descriptive laws is either claim 100% accuracy or admit to the possibility.

DP:
Ergo, a bias towards natural explanations is justified. It has nothing to do with appealing to partial laws (descriptions) already in our possession but would influence the development of new ones.
Meta:
That's a misleading argument. It doesn't answer the logic of my argument it totally side steps it. Saying that being "biased" toward natural and assuming naturalistic c/e is not a damper on belief in miracles. My own procedure is to prefer the natural solution as well! My first recourse is not to allege a miracle. My first action in dealing with miracle evidence is to look for naturalistic solutions. The problem comes in with the dishonesty that occurs when naturalistic solutions are not found.

Its' then the atheist starts games like "there never been any evidence in the past therefore this can't be evidence now." Or the evidence is just wrong, it has to be wrong it must be. The doctors liked the x-ray is faked ect ect. I will never under sany circumstances I have to be right (they pull that all the time man. You may not but other do).

Do you not see what I have proved here?

DP:

Nothing much as far as I can see. You haven't even tackled the probability argument that I presented in the previous (and now this) post. I see very atheists on here saying that miracles are impossible.
Meta:
that is not an answer to my argument. Its' just show. its side stepping the logic of my argument.


Most seem to be saying that miracles can't be ruled out a priori but then justifying their bias towards natural explanations.
their justification is based upon circular reasoning in two ways:

(1) they assume an absence of evidence which is based entirely upon merely hiding the evidence of the past becuase the same sort of circular assumptions were made about it, then the alleged absence of evidence is used as a justification for hiding the new evidence.

(2) The assertion that incredulity is an argument against any evidence.

I've proved that It's a truth regime that atheism have created. It's a construct based upon hiding the phenomena.

DP:
You've proved nothing of the sort because the brand of atheism you appear to be attacking bears little resemblance to the brand of atheism held by myself and many atheists on this board.

Meta:
I'm sure that your view is different than most. You are one of the good one's. The problem is you are still using the justification process based upon the artificial absence of counter evdience, which is nothing more than the instances in the past where the same circular reasoning has been applied. Now it's become a coda, the absence of evidence rather than the ignoring of it (which is what it really is).

with all of this you hare totally ignored the problem of discretion. If the only barrier to miracles is past discrimination and you admit that your description can miss things then there's no reason not to take seriously the allegation that there has been evidence in the past that got ignored.

Since I can name that evdience that makes the argument even stronger.


DP: Meta, you have studied the history of science so what I'm about to type really shouldn't need to be pointed out to you by a novice like myself. However ....

There are currently two theories which explain different aspects of reality which are General Relativity (large phenomena) and Quantum Mechanics (miniscule phenomena). These theories are known to contradict each other which is why the search is on for a unified theory of everything.

How could a set of contradictory and partial laws be considered prescriptive? The reason why any atheist with a basic knowledge of scientific history will argue that scientific laws must be viewed as descriptive rather than prescriptive is because they are aware of the above problem. We know that our current description of reality is contradictory and incomplete and thus, needs improvement.


Meta:
You are overlooking the possibility of assuming that the laws are prescriptive as a preliminary course of assumption, but not assume we understand the relationship between the two theories--yet! When we do come to understand that relationship in a unified way it will be within [B][I]a frame work involving prescriptive laws.

We can also work on the possibility of augmenting what we mean by preservative laws. We don't necessarily have to mean by that a determinism. There can be an uncertainty principle along with prescriptive laws.

Descriptive laws don't explain the regularity of the universe or how something can come to be without a process to guide it. The concept of natural law evolved out of the Church's understanding of nature and involved the concept of preservative laws. It's hard to see what meaning "natural law" has if not law like. In deep what is "nature" if it is not something set on a course by some pre ordinared establishment.



the concept of a miracle is going to be relative to the concept of possibility. miracle means something happened we don't understand that seems to violate our concept of what is possible. But without prescriptive there is no way to say what's possible and what is not. (I think I said this, right?)

DP:
Again, unless a claimed miracle is logically contradictory then it is possible and no atheist is in a position to rule it out a priori. The dismissal of the claim that a miracle has occurred and a bias towards natural explanations is not based upon possibility or 100% knowledge but on the basis of likelihood.

Meta:
That's only because when the concept of natural law came to replace God in the mind of modern scinece (Laplace in the Napoleonic era) it was in light of prescriptive natural law that it did so. That's largely why scientists spent such a long time refusing to theorize or philosophize about natural law. Until Einstein they just memorized Newton and assumed somehow these laws were in place and they did ask how they could be in place. Two profs form UT should read on this score, Robert Solomon and Robert Koons.

Your assertion that an atheist is not in a position to rule out a miracle a preori unless it contradicts (?what?) is a good point. Because by the same token we don't have to think of God as working outside the lines that "he" created in natural law. So the blowfly idea of angels dispensing miracles is out. It could as well be God works through natural law just by beginning the probabilities, working the Tao.

1. Miracles are statistically unlikely events (even if they occur) whereas natural occurrences are highly likely.
Does not necessitate being outside structures of norm.

2. Because of (1), any claimed event (x) is more likely to have a natural explanation.
Does not necessitate the assertion that the more detailed description can't include the opposite--the extremely unlikely. Nor does it justify assuming ignored evidence is lack of evidence.

And even then, we need to be clear on what we mean by "explanation".
O now you are getting around that hu? you can't deal with that without accepting the fact that you can't factor in a lack of evidence since evdience int he past has been ignored.

DP:
In the same way that, "James dropped the ball" doesn't form a part of a scientific explanation as to why the ball dropped when I let go of it, "God did X" does not provide a scientific explanation of X. The reason why "God did X" claims are often dismissed (often in favour of "I don't know") is that there is no real difference (in terms of understanding) between "God did X" and "I don't know" and natural explanations are proven to have greater explanatory power.
that's an evasion. that's an excuse to use the perennial excuse machine of atheism and always assert another possibility however unlikely. the most ridiculously unlike scenarios must be accept before anything miraculous. That's based upon the past ignoring of evdience.


You can say what is normative but normative and possible are not the same. do you understand?
Meta:
you don't understand. if you suddenly assumed that all the past evidence has been covered up was admitted as evidence your case for no miracle would look totally different. you would have to be saying things like "even though there are thousands of examples of miracles we still find this one is irrational and not probable."

DP:
But normative does govern our sense of what is likely or probable and will have a direct impact on which explanations are preferred.

Meta:

that contradicts everything in your other deal. Normative would mean probable in this case.

DP:
Something you are thus far ignoring. We don't embrace explanations simply because they are possible and if we are faced with a number of competing possibilities and no empirical evaluation is possible then we will be biased towards what is more probable.


Meta:
I'm not ignoring that. you are ignoring the consequence that obtains form saying that physical laws are only descriptions of what happens. That means that the limit on what can happen disappears and you are left with only probability. Probability can be deceiving because you are basing your view of what is probable on a lie, on all the hidden miracles that have been ruled out.

you are also ignoring the process through which ruling them out transforms them from ignored to a variable in calculating the probability.



so if natural laws are NOT PRESCRIPTIVE but merely DESCRIPTIONS OF WHAT HAPPENS, THAT OPENS THE DOOR FOR THING THAT WE DIDN'T THINK COULD HAPPEN. iT'S JUST A MATTER OF DESCRIBING THINGS BETTER. DON'T YOU SEE?

DP:
"God did X" is not an explanation of X (where X is a claimed miraculous event).


Meta:
Now that's moving beyond basing descriptions upon evidence or using probability to determine explanation that's moving back into the realm of ruling out miracles a prori the reason there's never a case where you will be wiling to consider divine action. As long as that's the case (it always will be) then you always have a structure that's ready made to deny miracles. when you ad to that the idea that you can't say God did something it ceases to be defacto and become dejure. (sp).


DP:
It merely takes something that is mysterious (X) and attributes it to something (God) that is even more inexplicable than the thing (X) that was being explained.


Meta:
But you see that is an ideologically conditioned stilted rendition of how the attribution of miracles takes place. the Lourdes committee is made up of scientists and researchers who are much too sophisticated to just say "God did it" every time something is unexplained. There's a lot more to it than that.

One can make a whole scinece of just determining when it's valid to claim miracles, aside from getting around to presenting evidence for them.

The last time we had a big argument about Charles Anne's lungs the atheist declared that the x-rays have to be made up and he would not believe until I gave him a copy of the x-rays. I said I have actually talked to a guy on the committee who assures me that the x-rays are true,l he's sense them. He just said "he has to be lying because he's religious." when I accused him of belief that miracles are impossible he says NO of course I don't think ti' just that there are never any happening.

So when push comes to shove they always transmute the evidence into doubt then the doubt into presumption against miracles. That's still a contradiction to the basic assumption of descriptive laws.

Monday, May 20, 2013

Outrage and Incredulity: The Atheist Charge of No Evidence

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What is all this stuff really about? It never ceases to amaze me how passionate atheists can be about nothing. I mean by that, atheism is supposed to be nothing more than an absence of belief, right? Yet so many times I see them full of fire and arrogance, blowing their little minds just because someone holds a view they don't like. Why? Consider this tirade by Arizona Atheist on Atheist Watch:


Arizona Atheist


Faith is bullshit. Your claiming it's "complex" does nothing to solve your problem. Theists have no evidence for their beliefs and that's that. All "arguments" are simply "god of the gaps" arguments and nothing more. Due to the tremendous lack of proof/evidence for all theistic claims it's all based on "blind faith." So, yes Loftus is correct. Faith is nonsense.
Clearly outraged by belief, but why? The major thinkers in Western culture have been religious, only a tiny handful of great thinkers throughout history have been true atheists, yet to look at such comments (which are a dime a dozen) one would think that belief was the most idiotic thing anyone ever thought of. One of the things that really strikes me as absurd is their insistence that "there's no evidence at all..." This is bound to strike me the wrong way when I have 42 arguments for the existence of God (of course we all know the importance of the number 42). No evidence, except these 42 arguments! Why the histrionics? here I will argue two things: (1) The reason it seems that there is no evidence is because atheists value only the methods that give them the answers they want, they do not accept evdience for God because it has to come from the wrong methods, and they reject the methods becasue they are mining their data. (2) They are angered by the concept that other methods may be valid because would imply that they are only looking at the surface of the issues. Why that should I alarm them so I'm not sure. I think it's a cultural thing, the hate group derives some sense of superiority from deriding the target (according to the standard FBI model).

As I have pointed out numerous times, belief in God is not merely adding a fact to the universe. The question of God is not a question about just the existence of one more thing. It's a question of orientation to being as a whole, especially to one's own individual being. If God exists then all of reality is something other than we think it is. If God is real then I am more than myself I am a creature of God. Atheists and theists live in two different worlds. Thus no amount of empirical data is valid as an answer. So the kinds of answers that would count cannot be sought though scientific evidence alone. The atheist approach is to see this as a limitation or an indication that there is no God. That approach obviously fist what they want to see in the first place. Now many of them wills ay "I was a Christian for 20 years." None of them ever follow that up by saying "I scored real high on the M scale, i had mystical consciousness and union with Christ and Baptism of the Holy Spirit and then I realize it was all false and delusion and made up.The only people who come to this conclusion are those are didn't have it in the first place.

I'm not arguing that they weren't "saved" or they weren't "real Christians." Being a "real Christian" and having Baptism of the Holy Spirit, or "mystical experience" are three different things, they are not three different names for the same thing. Nor am I saying that strong Christians can't give up their faith. Bu strong Christians tend to give up their faith because they fall into sin, they outgrow their milieu and don't go on to higher understanding, or they suffer grave disappointment (such as death of a spouse) and never work through it. No one that I know of ever gave up belief in God just because some intellectual argument was hard to answer, or some body of work intimated that it wasn't true, and here I am speaking of those who had the advanced personal experiences. Those sorts of experiences indicate that it is real. These are such deep confirmations in the heart of hearts that they cannot be easily denied or given up. Of course atheists don't even value this form of knowledge. Deeply fearing the subjective, they just ascribe it to "psychology" and for them that term is as good as saying "lie."

The difference in these two ways of thinking is striking. But the atheists can offer no evidence or arguments to invalidate the phenomenological approach. Faith is an existential response to an phenomenological apprehension. This means that faith is personal individual response, not one formed by education or trained through opponent conditioning; it is a response of the individual although course cultural and learning and even genetics come into it. It is a response to the apprehension of sense data apart from the organizing principles imposed upon sense data by genetics, culture, trainnig, psychological pre disposition. It's a response to the suggestions made by the phenomena themselves as we apprehend them. By "existential" it is fundamental to our existence and within the moment of perception. What exactly is being perceived? That we can't know, but it varies from person to person. Or I should say the vehicle of it varies from person to person. One person may find that a full blown mystical experience is what brings them around, another may be exposed to just one phrase or one image and find that merely a pang of the heart is all that is needed.

Atheists draw such a hard and fast connection between science and the world. One could easily get the impression that the world comes with little labels on rocks and trees that say "naturalistic." If religion was true the labels would say "trees by God." But when I argue my Transcendental Signifier argument they will say that we are just imposing meaning. That's one tier standard response. Human brain sees pattern and imposes meaning upon pattern it's just ink blots. The world is a big ink blot. But they don't apply that to science. They seem to think scinece is just straight forward and literally true and unlimited in its ability to know all of reality that ever be. We derive the kind of certainty from scinece that we do because it's dealing mainly with things that can be observed. These are relatively easy questions. No one thinks a question like "where did the universe come form" is easy. Atheists seem to infer that it is easy and if challenges that sense of certainty they become irate. I often wonder why certainty is so important to them. But have totally obscured the truth of scinece, that it is culturally constructed and not absolute. Their ire is such that when I argued this on CARM once one of them said "you are scum!" Of course they pronounce the basis of knowledge (epistemology) to be 'bull shit" because it's philosophy, but they never try to undersatnd the philosophical basis to their empiricism. They take that as absolute proof beyond question.


Science is a relative cultural construct. It is not absolute knowledge, it is not progress based upon cumulative effects. It works by paradigm shifts, with each shift the whole ground changes. Every time it changes we start over. It is not linear or progressive.

Example: Top down causality in brain mind.

top down means something above the brain is directing causal states in brain function: the mind is not reduced to the brain because its directing the brain. Top down causlity is a scientific fact, it was proven log ago, but because it disproves the reductionist ideology it is ignored as though its not true:


Quote:
Rosenberg (from journal of conscientiousness studies)

"Take the matter of 'downward causation' to which Harman gives some attention. Why should this be an issue in brain dynamics? As Erich Harth points out in Chapter 44, connections between higher and lower centers of the brain are reciprocal. They go both ways, up and down. The evidence (the scientific evidence) for downward causation was established decades ago by the celebrated Spanish histologist Ramon y Cajal, yet the discussion goes on. Why? The answer seems clear: If brains work like machines, they are easier to understand. The facts be damned!"[Miller quoting Rosenberg, Journal of Consciousness Studies, op. cit.]


e.Consciousness as a basic property of nature.

JCS, 3 (1), 1996, pp.33-35

Naturalism loses its ground.


This is a probabilistic justification argument; It does not seek to directly prove that God exists, but that it is rational to believe in God and that there are good reasons to. In a nut shell the argument says that the concept of materialism has been changing over the years. It has now incorporated so many idea that were once lumped in with magic, supernatural, or generally "unscientific" categories that the old concept of materialism as an objection to God belief and a refutation of religion is now obsolete. Essentially there are 10 areas:


(1) Quantum Theory (no need for cause/effect)

(2) Big bang Cosmology (realm beyond the natural)

(3) Medicine (healing)

(4) Consciousness (invites concept of dualism)

(6) Maslow's Archetypes (universal ideas)

(7) Miracles (empirical evidence)

(8) Near Death Experiences (scientific evidence)

(9) Esp Research (the fact that they do it)

(10) Validity of religious experience (Shrinks no longer assume pathology)


The argument turns on the basic historical fact that atheists have lost the ground upon which they dismissed God from science in the first place. In their book Lindberg and Numbers demonstrate that the moment at which this happened was when La Place said "I have no need of that hypothesis," meaning the idea that God created the universe. What he meant was that God was not needed as an explanation because we now have naturalistic cause and effect, which explains everything. But the atheist has cashed in cause and effect to over come the Big Bang.

Naturalists are now willing to consider ideas like the self caused universe, Hawkings unbounded condition which removes cause completely as a consideration; or based upon quantum theory they are willing to accept the notion that causality is an illusion, that the universe could just pop up out of nothing. With that commitment they lose the ground upon which they first removed God from consideration. Now, perhaps they still do not need God as a causal explanation, but in the Religious a pirori argument, and in the innate religious instinct argument I say that belief was never predicated upon a need for explanation in the first place.

Nevertheless, the fact still remains, the reason for dismissing God was the sufficiency of natural causation as explainable, with that gone there is no longer any grounds for dismissing consideration of God from the universe.I will argue that more than that is going. There is a paradigm shift underway which demonstrates a total change in scientific thinking in many areas and over many disciplines. That change demonstrates that the materialist concept is wrong; there is more to reality than just the material world. There are other aspects to the material world wich are non-deterministic, non-mechanistic, and which call into question the whole presupposition of excluding the supernatural from consideration.

The groundwork for understanding this shift was laid by Thomas S. Kuhn in his theory of paradigm shifts. Kuhn's famous theory was that scientific thought works through paradigm acquisition, and that paradigms change when they can no longer absorb anomalies into the model and must account for them in some other way. This theory entails the idea that science is culturally constructed; our ideas about science are culturally rooted and our understanding of the world in a scientific fashion is rooted in culture. For this reason he thought that science is not linear cumulative progress. "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)

"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 cumulativeness has suggested. Perhaps it is another sort of enterprise."(Ibid,94)



What all of this means is that science is not written in stone. We do not pile one fact upon another until we get to the truth. We formulate a concept of the world and we hold to it and defend it against changed until there are too many problems with it then we move to another totally different world view. This is what has been going on in science since the French enlightenment. Materialism replaced super-naturalism and Materialists have been defending it against change all this time. Now there are too many problems, they have brought in so many ideas contrary to materialism it is not meaningful anymore; paradigm shift is immanent and has begun in many areas. This is not to say that Kuhn had anything to say about the supernatural, he was a materialist. But his theory shows us that change in the concept of materlaism is on the way.


Kuhn is not alone in these observations, major scientific thinkers have questioned scientific 'pretense of objectivity' throughout the century:


This 'bigger' aspect can also be seen in Rosenberg's 'liberal naturalism' [CS:JCS:3.1.77]:

"The question of scientific objectivity becomes more compelling when one considers that doubts about the reductive paradigm are by no means new. William James (1890), Charles Sherrington (1951), Erwin Schrodinger (1944, 1958), Karl Popper and John Eccles (1977)--among others--have insisted that the reductive view is inadequate to describe reality. This is not a fringe group. They are among the most thoughtful and highly honored philosophers and scientists of the past century. How is it that their deeply held and vividly expressed views have been so widely ignored? Is it not that we need to see the world as better organized than the evidence suggests?


"Appropriately, the most ambitious chapter of this section is the final one by Willis Harman. Is the conceptual framework of science sufficiently broad to encompass the phenomenon of consciousness, he asks, or must it be somehow enlarged to fit the facts of mental reality? Attempting an answer, he considers the degree to which science can claim to be objective and to what extent it is influenced by the culture in which it is immersed. Those who disagree might pause to consider the religious perspective from which modern science has emerged.


"There is reason to suppose that the roots of our bias toward determinism lie deeper in our cultural history than many are accustomed to suppose. Indeed, it is possible that this bias may even predate modern scientific methods. In his analysis of thirteenth-century European philosophy, Henry Adams (1904) archly observed: "Saint Thomas did not allow the Deity the right to contradict himself, which is one of Man's chief pleasures." One wonders to what extent reductive science has merely replaced Thomas's God with the theory of everything."

Science lacks the absolute guarantee that many atheists think it has. The more complex and removed from immediate observation the question is the less certainty it has. This means that it is not a fit vehicle to tell us about god.God is not a scientific question. Science is not prior to philosophy but the other way around. Science evolved out of philosophy, it used to be called 'natural philosophy.' While science does offer a sense of "working" its what it works for that matters. It does not work to give us any understanding of ultimate reality. Thus is it not a fair question to ask why there is no proof of God scientifically? Of cousre not, because God is not a scientific question. The reason God is not science is because God is not empirical. God is not given in sense data. Now atheist may ask why that is, they sometimes ask "why doesn't God make himself better know," that's because God is not a big guy in the sky. The same reason why he's not empirical. Because he's not a "he" the "he is just a metaphor. God si beyond our understanding, the basis of reality. God is prior to even epistemology. That would be like expecting evidence of the eloctro-magnetic spectrum to tell us about the basis of existence itself. Atheist continually treat God as though he is a big man in the sky, although for some this may be because they want to take on the fundies most of all. Such an atheist is John Loftus.

John Loftus

We’ve argued against the concept of faith many times before, but let me try again. I have argued that the Christian faith originated as and is purely human religion completely accountable by humans acting in history without needing anWy divine agency at all. But setting that important discussion aside, faith is a cop out, especially when it comes to the number of things Christians must take on faith in order to believe. Let’s recount some of them.

Here is a typical example of an atheist ragging on faith. That is to say, he is not analyzing the basis of faith at a deep level, but merely dismissing it as some sort of non answer. It will become clear in a moment that the specific reasons he gives are those that view God as an empirical object of knowledge and thus a big man in the sky. I know that Loftus will say this is because he's concerned with the fundies more than with liberals. But true though that may be it still gives a mis-impression to only deal with faith at such a superficial level and never acknowledge that it is a much more complex process than this. Consider his argument about questioning why God created:



No reasonable answer can be given for why a triune God, who was perfect in love neither needing nor wanting anything, created in the first place. Grace and Love are non-answers, especially when we see the actual world that resulted. For Christians to say God wanted human creatures who freely love him is nonsense, for why did he want this at all? If love must be expressed then God needed to express his love and that implies a lack.
He speaks of "he" and "want" and so forth as though God is just a big man. This is part of his incredulity over the Trinity because how could a big man in the sky be three big men in the sky and yet just one big man in the sky? He's basically arguing here that god can't be a big man and thus can't want anything. But assumes that he must know what form God could take if he isn't a big man. That means he has to regard God as an object of empirical knowledge, of course it would never apply to anything beyond our understanding. If we regard God as the ground of being these questions are all moot, thus we have to frame them differently. We could begin by not asking "why would a God who has no needs craete in the first place?" That question is unanswerable for the ground of being, since we don't even know if we can speak of "creation" in the same sense. By what can't be answered can't be answered negatively either. We can't rule out the love answer on the premise that God can't love becasue he's the ground of being. Indeed most of the major theologians who speak of God this way (Tillich, McQuarry and Von Balthsar) find a link between being and love in the first place. Of course we can't speak of God "needing" but we could speak of God producing. Or we can speak of being producing the beings. McQuarry speaks of "being lets be." We have to ask a different set of questions to begin with if we conceive of God as the basis of reality rather than an object of knowledge.

Loftus goes on to play the same game in relation to the three in one aspect:


It’s hard enough to conceive of one person who is an eternally uncased God, much less a Godhead composed of three eternally uncased persons. There are some Christians who maintain the Father eternally created the Logos and the Spirit, while others claim that three persons in one Godhead is simply an eternally brute inexplicable fact. Why is that brute fact more reasonable to accept than accepting the brute fact of the laws of the universe, which is all that’s needed to produce the universe? There are social Trinitarians and anti-social Trinitarians. Both sides accuse the other side of abandoning the Chalcedonian creed, either in the direction of tri-theism, or in the direction of Unitarianism.
First of all his knowledge of Orthodoxy is slipping here. Either that or he doesn't care to define Christianity by the ruels of the Christian community. No Christian believes that the Logos and the Spirit are created, as that is a violation of the creeds. His appeal to the laws of the universe is not applicable here because it is not a competitor for God's position as transcendental signifier. In fact laws of nature are totally inexplicable and we do not know what they. They no longer carry the same wight they did in the enlightenment. Thus they are a dandy reason to believe in God, because the supposition of a mind an notion of a set of disembodied laws is pretty had to grasp (see the previous article). But the argument he makes is absurd in light of the Ground of Being. we don't have to ask how can a big man in the sky be three big men in the sky and yet one big man in the sky. As ground of being God can easily contain within his divine economy three persona which share the same essence as all three are merely reflections of the one ground of being. McQuarry makes this point himself where defines the Trinity as having to do with the one and many and the notion of being as the ground of diversification of existence (see Principles of Christian Theology).

Atheists storm about the suppossed lack of evidence, yet they put all their marbles on issues such as string theory and mutliverses, matters for which there is no empirical data of any kind. Then they rail against God because there's no empirical data! Belief in God is a realization that comes from understanding about the nature of being, especially one's own being. It is not the result of empirical data, nor can it be. The concept is misguided and that expectation is a waste of time. There two trajectories that inform us of the nature of being such that we might associate it with the sense of the numinous. These are deductive understanding fo transcendental signifiers on the one hand, (matters such as the ontological argument), and then personal experience on the other. Mystical experience, the sense of numinous these are matters of realizing God. They offer a deep seated conviction that can't be refuted by mere circular reasoning or question begging of atheist assertion. On the other hand, deductive arguments demonstrate the logical necessity of thinking about being in religious terms.