Atheistwatch

Answering Brap on Software analogy

2012-02-02T07:44:00.000-08:00

Meta said:"I think in the computer world there is a useful distinction between soft ware and hard ware. The program is not the monitor."

Our friendly neighborhood space alien* visiting earth has commented on the software analogy I used in answering brain mind issue:

BRAP

I agree that the distinction between hardware and software is very useful. But it's useful because it would be impractical, not impossible, to have that distinction. It would obviously be very difficult andy cumbersome to describe the arrangement of those magnetic bits or those surface imperfections in terms of their physical properties ("hardware") instead of in terms of what they do ("software"). But it could be done, so it seems to me like software reduces to something physical. The word "software" is a shorthand way of describing something physical.

I can't believe you are harping on this. the original idea is some phenomena (ie consciousness) is thought to originate as a side effect of brain chemistry. This is like thinking the math problem we might see displayed on the screen of a monitor originate in the monitor and are just soemthing monitor does on its own until you hit it with a bat and break it. In reality the math is part of a word processing program lie a word doc that's written by someone who did not make the monitor and it can be saved on a disk and used on another computer if he do bash the monitor. It relay in fact has nothing to do with the monitor accept the monitor enable us to access it. That's the real point here is access and how we can be fooled about the role of the brain in accessing consciousness. The point of course is that the simplsitic athist answer "If you hit someone in the head it changes their consciousness" is not proof that consciousness is reduce able to brain function.

For you to go off on this tangent is not useful.

Brap:

The word "book" is a shorthand way of describing a physical object that consists of mostly paper and ink (before ebooks, anyway). I believe words like "mind" and "consciousness" are shorthand ways of describing what the brain does.

that's begging the question. to make hat assumption you have to accept a prior assumption not in evidence, ie the issue being debated, thus making it a question begging.

Brap:

Since I have four or five books about the mind, consciousness, and the brain sitting on my table right now, patiently waiting for my eyes to focus on the ink between their covers which will then lead to a series of events resulting in physical changes within my brain, there's no point in my getting too much deeper into this topic. I hope my current knowledge on this subject will seem infantile to me in the near future.

This is not your usual quality of reasoning. Are you trying to insinuate that becuase being expose to a text will change your consciousness then there's no distinction between brain and mind? That doesn't follow.

Brap

For now, I think the hardware/software analogy holds, although the brain/mind relationship is orders of magnitude more complicated. But there was a time in history when people thought it would never be possible to describe how the stars got in the sky, or how the earth was formed, or how humans could have evolved from other species. History seems to indicate there may not be anything that is impossible to know.

Argument from analogy. that doesn't back up reductionism. The answer about the stars doesn't lend credence to reductionism.

________________

*Brap is a sometime regular commenter on Metacrock's blog was his original story, the he was a space alien visiting earth and asking questions. it allowed him to use the anthropological technique called "playing the stranger" which means asking "stupid" questions that everyone "knows" the answer to to make us realize we don't know all the answers we think we do. He's kind of dropped that over the years but it was a great come on in the beginning.

"Blondie" Lies about My Honesty With Evidence.

2012-02-01T09:21:00.000-08:00

ON CARM in an exchange on the moral argument:

Originally Posted by Metacrock

you don't understand the moral argument. I'm not surprised. this is the kind of third rate attempt we get when we are content to stop with the surface of level of ideolgoical sloganizing.
I understand the moral argument.

Blondie:

I doubt you do because you have never been able to defend any position.

I still remember when you pulled a quote from some quy off the Internet and actually went in and changed a word to make is sounded like he supported your point. When I caught you you said I was stupid and that you we're modifying it or something and I was too dumb to know what that meant. I have never seen anyone do anything so nakedly dishonest and shameful on one of these forums.

when challenged he can't come across with the skinny.

Originally Posted by ferengi

Evidence please.

Even if it were true - you cannot say what he did was wrong - because your feelings are not a basis for a moral law - objective or otherwise.

Blondie:

In you subjective opinion because, like so many Christians, you have a broken moral compass.

Like I said. People that believe in objective morality often end up justifying things we all believe to be wrong. Atheists just end up getting tongue tied or saying human happiness or something is the foundation for morality.

several things to notice:

(1) I have repeated remakes that I don't argue for objective ethics I think that is not a valid concern of major ethicist such as Kant, ect. so I don't use it.

(2) the fact that tries to stick me with it shows (a) he has never actually paid attention to any of my arguments. (b) I've denied over and over that I"m into objective ethics (c) he clearly doesn't care about truth, he thinks in stereotypes the real facts of a situation are secondary to him.

(3) the real issue is his bid to assassinate my charter. This twister little guy is a street fighter. He goes for the jugular. he knows my work as a scholar is improtant to me so tha'ts what he tries to destroy from day one. He began attacking my scholarship and my reserach ability (which are so clearly better than since he used 100 year old articles in documentation about Lourdes) That's what he's out to destroy is the understanding that I'm a scholar and that's what I'm good at. He's lied in many ways to try and destroy that reputation.

(4) I don't care that most atheist her hate my guts, I don't care if you think you have a valid reason, which you don't. I don't give a damn. I understand why I fight back against your bullying I understand why can't admit that you bully.

I will now allow this aspect of it to be destroyed without taking the character assassin down with me.

(5) please notice how totally unfair this is to make this kind charge and not have any evidence. He could be totally making this up. I'm willing to think he's just not a very good researcher so he doesn't understand something, or it was typo and it's too good to pass up.

a mistake that plays so into his hands is too good for him to not use somehow.

think of the unfair nature of it to say that and not have proof. It's just destructive he could lie about it so easily. If no one cares that it's just and someone is being hurt unfairly then its so easy to do. what are you going to do when someone does to you?

If there was any reality to it he would at least have a name. he doesn't offer any kind of info. We don't know when it happened, what the issue was no idea.

I's so obviously just propaganda.

when someone demands that he makes good he just plays off of stereotypes and general hatred for Chrsitians.

The meaning of "Free Thinking:" Free thinking is slave thinking

2012-01-27T07:33:00.000-08:00

Originally Posted by Jim Morgan

Sam Harris has some good arguments that the mind and brain are one of the same thing. I like to use beer as an example, Beer is a physical thing, it contains chemicals and if you drink enough of it you can potentially change the way which you behave indicating that a physical thing has changed your mind. Some people have the natural tendency to be quiet when sober but violent when drinking, thus the physical certainly has a great deal off effect on the mind. Sam harris has a Video on free will which I think you might find interesting.: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRIcb...eature=related

that's argument from analogy. Analogies don't prove anything and arguing from them to prove somethign is a fallacy.

there is no way to prove that brain = mind because there is no way across the epistemological gap. you can't get outside your own perceptions and check them. When they try to make that kind of augment they start using bait and switch. The substitute brain function for conscoiusness.

That's highly ideological potion anyway. The whole naturalistic world view depends upon that bait and switch. you are ideologically compelled to deny the basis of reality as mind.

asking an atheist to think fairly about that is like asking a John Bircher to think fairly about the Communist Manifesto.

Originally Posted by blondie

You can prove it as well as you can prove anything.
Nope. no evdience to support and lot that goes against it.

The attempt to discredit evidence is just an attempt to equate things that are not true with stuff that is true. I believe this form of apologetics is very weak because it can obviously be applied to things which you will reject out of hand.

O yea that's the way ideological propaganda works. when it's there stuff thinking about it and paralyzing it is real improvident. criticizing it is that's skepticism is about. it's all good to do that as long as it's agaisnt Christianity.

when it's against atheism then it's unscientific and it's wrong.

free thinking means slave thinking. when it's against them it's fine when it's against us then it makes you a lunatic and new age wirdo and it's unscientific.

Atheist Ideolgoy: Deniel of the "Science Only" Viewpoint

2012-01-24T05:00:00.000-08:00

no atheist ideology?

I posted this about culture clash on CARM in thinking about the reasons atheists can't accept God arguments.

I think a lot of this stuff, the war between atheists and theists, is really just the result of different cultural expectations. Cultural change is coming at a frantic rate, the mazeways are shifting too fast for a lot of people to get their bearings. That doesn't just mean conservative theists. A lot of atheist might be atheist becuase they can't grasp anything solid n the shifting sands of cultural constructs.

Atheists have this ideology that tells them to deny it's an ideology, but it tells them there's one form of knowledge; scinece. Basically atheism is about replacing God with science worship. its' still a clash two different religions it's just God of the bible vs scinece. One thing that angers me the most is that becuase they only accept one form of knowledge they wont accept answers that don't come from that form of knowledge.

Somewhere along the way atheists shifted from cultural relativists to totalitarians. They went form liberal to librarian and became narrow minded. In refusing to accept any other form of knowledge you are just stipulating that only your views will do, that's ideology. That's exactly what ideology is.

Take for example the question "where did God come form." We basically have two answer. the primary answer is "God didn't come from anywhere. God is eternal." Yet in saying that we are actually saying a bit more. we are saying that there is some eternal basis of existence that's primordial. Then we have several logcial ideas about what that would be, and the most engaging one is mind.

There's nothing illogical about it certain atheist go ape becuase it's so removed from the approved received for of knowledge that the priesthood of knowledge (science) authorizes. Search yourselves honestly and you will have to realize that you are just reacting against things that aren't part of your world view.

hsmithson says "strawman," then adds.

That's a pretty bold claim. I challenge you to point out just ONE of my posts that says science is the only form of knowledge or that we should worship science. Otherwise, please retract your assertion that every post I make has those characteristics.

1337

Which atheists are you talking about? Is this yet another case of you assuming what your opposition thinks and arguing a position that you made up?

It certainly does seem like a strawman.

problem: I am always seeing statements by atheist that imply that science is the only form of knowledge and the only way to think about things and that this is the major reason why they can't accept God arguments; becasue they write out of reality any kind of evidence that doesn't' support their conclusion.

then when I point it out they go "O we don't say that. what's wrong with you can't you can't quote me saying that."

Examples:

Brainw on an old thread started me "Atheist Contradiction: fortress of facts vs mutliverse."

post 2

I know you are going to agree with what he says. That's not the issue. The issue is this statement shows exactly the fortress of facts and the kind of thinking I'm discussing.

God apparently does exist only in minds.

And theoretical physics has a long history of predicting things using pure mathematics that are later verified by experiment.

Theology has no such track record.

That's not true, it does. That's the beside the point right now. The point is that saying this is exactly perfectly a statement of what I'm talking about; that is the fortress of facts. "we have the only way to know things." that's just what he's saying.

they are saying "only our method is valid, your method isn't worth anything even though we don't know anything about it."

Therefore we can put more confidence in the predictions of theoretical physics than the unsubstantiated claims about what different people feel inside their brains alone.

You lose.

It's not about truth its about we are going to get you. we are better than you. its not about truth it's about revenge. but look at his statement! he says we have the only way to really know stuff. that's a perfect example of teh fortress of facts.

Of course I can show theologies ways of knowing stuff I can show contradictions to this and disproof of it but you just write them off without reading a single study becuase it's not part of the ideology.

atheists have a dictum: we will NOT Accept anything that counts against our view.

(1) science the only knowledge

(2) the only scinece agrees with us.

Proof: I've talked about 200 studies for five years no one has read a single one. they lied about it, they confused articles with studies but the never read an actual study, (maybe in the last six months someone read one, but after five years of bitching about it) they still don't make valid methodology attacks.

Example 2:

Liza” public opinion expressed by commenter on blog “Apple Eaters,” no date given. UTL: visited 8/26/2010

"The question of God’s existence is incredibly loaded because, if God doesn’t exist, the majority of people in the world derive meaning in their lives from a lie. For this reason, the capacity for natural science to explain why things happen without appeal to the supernatural is threatening to religion and to religious believers. After all, if we can explain everything without appeal to God’s intervention, why introduce Him into the equation at all?"

This is an anecdotal example of how deeply ingrained the scientistic view point is at the popular level. Again from the popular level, a website called God is Imaginary:

Website God is Imaginary . URL http://godisimaginary.com/i11.htm visited 8/26/2010

"There is no scientific evidence indicating that God exists. We all know that. For example:

• God has never left any physical evidence of his existence on earth.
• None of Jesus' "miracles" left any physical evidence either. (see this page)
• God has never spoken to modern man, for example by taking over all the television stations and broadcasting a rational message to everyone.
• The resurrected Jesus has never appeared to anyone. (see this page)
• The Bible we have is provably incorrect and is obviously the work of primitive men rather than God. (see this page)
• When we analyze prayer with statistics, we find no evidence that God is "answering prayers." (see this page)

• Huge, amazing atrocities like the Holocaust and AIDS occur without any response from God.
• And so on…
Let's agree that there is no empirical evidence showing that God exists.
If you think about it as a rational person, this lack of evidence is startling. There is not one bit of empirical evidence indicating that today's "God", nor any other contemporary god, nor any god of the past, exists. In addition we know that:
1. If we had scientific proof of God's existence, we would talk about the "science of God" rather than "faith in God".
2. If we had scientific proof of God's existence, the study of God would be a scientific endeavor rather than a theological one.
3. If we had scientific proof of God's existence, all religious people would be aligning on the God that had been scientifically proven to exist. Instead there are thousands of gods and religions.
The reason for this lack of evidence is easy for any unbiased observer to see. The reason why there is no empirical evidence for God is because God is imaginary."

this is part of the idea they are saying if there isn't any scientific evdience then no reason to believe it. that means there is no other kind of of evidence that matters. that has to mean scinece is the only from of knowledge.

HRG on carm basically lets the cat out of the bag by admitting scinece is the only valid form of knowledge.
Originally Posted by Occam

By empiricist standards, I doubt that you have evidence that anything causes anything, let alone that the brain causes the mind.

HRG:

We have evidence that it makes it highly likely - just like we have evidence that it is highly likely that sufficiently heated carbon compounds cause combustion.

Apparently many people still suffer from Plato's view - that only 100% knowledge is knowledge.

Hes' saying that all knowledge isn't really important. only scientific knowledge matters. so all the time time they say "we don't say scinece is the only form of knowledge they really means 'it's the only valid form."

Blondie adds to it:

It has nothing to do with science. Science is the best way we have of figuring stuff out simply because it is objective.

That's just what I said. When they deny that they think science is the only knowledge they are really thinking (it's not the only kind but it's all that works).

what do the cowards say to this? they refuse to read it. see the admission by Aussie guy:

Originally Posted by Aussieguy

No, we don't. We atheists by definition do not believe in God. How therefore can we believe he wrote any of the bible? It would be like believing that Bilbo Baggins actually wrote The Hobbit, despite not believing in Hobbits.

I have no idea what the rest of your post was about, but it didn't appear to have anything to do with what I said.

Blondie:

There is magic in mythology. Do you think mythology is a way of acquiring knowledge? How about poetry?

ibid:

So the new meme among apologists is that atheists are into "scientism." I would agree that scientists are particularly lionized in the new atheist movement, but so what? Science is just a method of figuring things out. It is the best one that I am aware of. We need to turn this argument aroung and get the theists to admit they are really arguing for the validity of revealed "truth" and gut feelings. What other methods are there of acquiring knowledge? Are any of these better than science?

In saying this he's already excluded any kind of knowledge that's not scientific. Of course the arts are a kind of knowledge. The arts have their own magisteria, they are a discipline in their own right, this guy doesn't value them. "Science is a method of figuring thing out," we see from the things he says in the thread they give no credence ot any other form of figuring things out.

Ibid

That is the point of this thread. To flesh this out. You are communicating with other people and are certainly gathering knowledge. So what we really need is a way of gathering correct or truthful knowledge.I could tell you I am 12 feet tall.

ibid

Science can't answer things outside its domain. No kidding. Science can't tell me which movie to go see at the matinee. How about a truth claim that science can't tackle? One that doesn't involve meaningless words or value judgements.

like that's the only form of knowledge aside from scinece, just little matters of entertainment and personal tastes. so ethics and meaning in life and the search for why we are here all of that is just BS to them becasue they have accepted an ideology that answers that stuff for them.If I was not a believer in God I would stil oppose this totalitarian nonsense with all my will and all my heart. If I didn't believe I would be a social Christian just to thwart this fascistic movement.

Of course you don't becuase you are scared to death to read proof that disproves your position. you research with your eyes closed.

the quote you quote from is misconstrued and taken out of context. I didn't say "o they don't hu" to "Atheists don't believe God put it in the Bible." Obviously I know that. I said that to "we don't think science is the only form of knowledge."

the quotes I quoted, which you are afraid to read, are examples of atheists saying "science is the only form of knowledge." what Blondie says about "it's correct or trutful knoweldge" makes this clear. Other forms of knowledge aren't truth. They can deny believing that it's the only form of knowledge when in reality they do believe that, they just rationalize it by saying "it's not the only one just the only one that's truthful."

Originally Posted by shunyadragon

I disagree that history and historical methods 'are' science, they use the objective methods of science in historical methodology. They are not better, just another source of knowledge about the world we live in.

Poetry is not a way to acquire knowledge, it is medium ot express and share knowledge.

BrainW takes the prise for stupidity:
post 33

Which still has it's basis in observation, the collection and analysis of forensic evidence..etc It's not a bunch of weirdos sitting around making stuff up, like theologians.

A bunch of "wirdies?" The atheists expelled form CARM who formed AARM were into everything form gay bondage to rapping dolls and yet it's theologians who are "wiredies!" why? Obviously becuase they are not brian washed by the ideology, they are not on template and they don't point the rhetoric or the slogans. This guy has read no theology, he's saying this about theologians becuase they not part of the ideology he serves. Throughout this thread and the whole board in general they are constantly shooting their mouths off about things of which they are totally ignorant.

Originally Posted by Occam

I think this discussion needs to begin with a definition of "science." I know "science" is a really hard word to define, though, so maybe you could just describe it or something.

Keith (ibid) observes:

Agreed. Because what I have observed is that when someone offers X as another form of knowledge, the response is "Well X is actually science". So what is science? Or a better question is what isn't science (according to some atheists)?

That's a good observation. They are so stuck in thinking only in scientific terms that when an alternative is presented all they do is try and compere it to scinece. the only valid form of thought is scientific.

Atheist IQ Scam: Bad Science and Racist Assumptions: Kanazawa, Nyborg, Lynn, Hamilton

2012-01-22T09:44:00.000-08:00

Nyborg

The major figures in the new round of atheist IQ scam are:Helmuth Nyborg, Richard Lynn and Satoshi Kanazawa (from psychology today). There have been several articles critcial of both their not so hidden assumptions about race as well a their alleged scientific methodologies. Kanazawa and others (Templer, Arikawa) claim to link estimates of national IQ with estimates of reproductive strategies, temperature, and geographic distance form Africa. This approach is criticized by Jelte M. Wicherts,Denny Borseboom, and Connor V. Dolan (Blog: Scieverse--"why Natioanl IQ's Do Not Support Evolutionary Theories of Intelligence"), of Department of Psychology U. Amsterdam.

Assumptions: No Flynn Effect

The major Scientific assumption made by Kanazawa et al, that misses the boat, is the failure to take the Flynn effect seriously. The Flynn effect finds that IQ's are rising over time, which ultimately means that what is being tested is not intelligence but cultural literacy. This is because our grandfathers were running the world with IQ equviolant to retarted yet obviously they were not restarted. So what happening was they had not yet developed the same level of cultural contribute around concepts of scientific-cultural ideology. Thus by our standards they appear stupid becuase they didn't have the same kinds of answers we had. Natioanl IQ's have actually, according to Wicherts, been subject to and correlate with all the variables hat make for the Flynn effect.

The Flynn effect directly challenges the validity of IQ tests as a valid measurement of intelligence. It basically says they are not measuring intelligence but cultural constructs such a scientifically ideological truth regime. These Brave New World Atheists make assumptions that write the effect off even though its' been scientifically established and is accepted by psychologist the world over. They also make assumptions about migration and reproduction that don't account for modern develoepments.

The Savanna theory.

This is a racist theory, developed by Raymond Dart (1925) which assumes percent and insurmountable brain shrinkage by tribes (African) who moved to the savanna. It seems to have been an attempt to explain racial differences:

Belayneh Abate (PDF)
November 10, 2006.

[4, 5] What this theory in simple terms, asserts is that early
homids (perhaps Lucy and her neighbors), were faced with lack of forest. To overcome this problem our ancestors went
to the Savanna (grass land) and adapted themselves to that environment. However, as it was mentioned in Kanazawa’s
paper [1] for a man to learn this adaptation measures, the exposure (for example, shrinkage of the forest) has to occur at
the early developmental stage of the brain. One can derive from this assertion that Africans who are deprived of any
kind of modern technology during their early brain developmental stage will remain stupid or idiots no matter what!
Recommending “googling” the critics of Savanna Theory, I will leave the judgment about the plausibility of this theory
to the readers.

Kanazawa uses the term "savanna principle" for the idea that the brain evolved on the savanna the extremely differnt enviroment form our urban one created "difficulties." (^ Kanazawa, Satoshi (2004) The Savanna principle. Managerial and decision economics, 25 (1). pp. 41–54. ISSN 0143-6570) I documented Kanazawa's adherence to the Savanna theory when I first discussed his articles on the Psychology Today Blog on this blog in "Atheism's Psychology Today Scam."

Flawed Data Collection:

Still dealing with Kanazawa, as I have pointed out before, he barrows his data second hand from different places. These guys make different assumptions.

ibid

Data Collection Problem: Kanazawa admits borrowing secondary data from different places. He borrowed the IQ data from Lynn (Northern Ireland) and Vanhanen (Finland) Table-1. According to him, IQ was directly measured only
in eleven Sub-Saharan African Countries and the rest was predicted using prediction methods Kawakawa tried to show that the IQ measurement was valid by analyzing the directly and indirectly measured data separately. It is true that no method of measurement is perfectly accurate or precise. However, one has to ask how the samples were drawn, and how the results of the sample IQ’s were translated in to national average. Whether IQ measures general intelligence
or not is another story. For the moment, let’s assume it does. Most IQ tests include both verbal and written tests. How valid will be the IQ test in Sub-Saharan countries where almost all sense organs of the people are turned dysfunctional
by dictator rulers who are supported by major powers of the world? In addition to that, IQ measurement is not entirely objective. Our daily life proves how people are prejudiced towards one another irrespective of educational status.
Therefore, to what extent should we believe the validity of the IQ measurements of Lynn and Vanhanen? What about the possibility of differential misclassification errors in the IQ measurement?

Intentional insult or lack of common sense? We understand Kanazawa borrowed the data from others. However, he
failed to relate the computer generated data (table-I) to the objective reality on the ground. Whether it valid or not, here
is one way of classifying mental retardation based on IQ. Table-2.
Table 2. Welchler Adult Intelligence Scale Class IQ

Profound Below 20
Sever 20-34
Moderate 35-49
Mild 50-69
Borderline 70-79

Kanazawa provided only the mean IQ. I did not find any of the other measures of dispersion. If you look at the average IQ of most Sub-Saharan Counties most of them lie below 72. Table-1 That means majority of the Sub-Saharan
Country people are suffering from profound, sever, moderate, mild and borderline mental retardation. Is that so? I wonder how Africans’ build up the Pyramids of Egypt, the Castle of Aksume and Fasiledus, the monasteries of Lalibela
and Lake Tana in Ethiopia. I wonder how this mentally retarded brain developed the Ethiopian alphabet and the Ethiopian Calendar! It looks Kanazawa is excited just because the computer provided him with profoundly flawed thicker effect estimates and smaller p-values. It is obvious that these statistical measures are just a bit part of causalassociation. The Confounding Problem: For those of you who are not familiar with confounding variable, in simple terms, it is a
factor the affects the outcome of interest. For a variable to be a confounder, it hast to be related to both the independent variable (in this case IQ) and the dependent variable (in this case life expectancy). It looks that Kanazawa is obsessed
only with GDP, IQ and economic inequality. What about other factors, which are related to both IQ (whatever it may
be) and life expectancy? All sorts of disease conditions, cultures, traditions, not to mention, lack of freedom of speech, the scars of colonialism, slavery and other inhuman atrocities that Africans experienced for centuries? Flaws in the Discussion: Kanazawa stated in his discussion “… there appears little that education can to do
significantly with the general intelligence of the population.” Even if we assume we have clear definition of general intelligence, can any one buy this argument? When they test for IQ, don’t they ask for words? Don’t they ask to write something or play certain kinds of games? Are not these things something we acquire through learning? In fact IQ directly measures (if it measures any thing at all) what we have already learned not what you are going to learn in the
future.

Conclusion: Kanazawa immersed himself in the ocean of shaky psychological theories. He started from unsettled definitions. He asked a eugenic question. Then he borrowed invalid measurements and tried to answer his question. He ignored confounding factors in the design and analysis stage. Therefore, the results of his study can be explained only with one word: bias!

Other criticisms along these same lines, that data is all second hand and some is not really the finds made form actual IQ tests. The book is based upon a limited number of studies. Other sources gathering data first hand have made mistakes. There are not very many such studies and some of the data is not really from IQ tsts but from estimates based upon surrounding nations. Since Kanazawa doesn't use first hand data,it's important to know that the major sources of such data are also criticized. one such source is a book IQ and the Wealth of Nations. This is a work by Richard Lynn, whose data Kanazawa uses and who co-author with Nybrog and Hamilton in their IQ scam. Tatu Vanhanen, at University of Finland is Lynn's co-author.

Book Review in Heredity
(2004) 92, 359–360.

This book starts with the 'hypothesis' that differences in IQ are (partly) responsible for differences in national wealth around the world. It ends with the claim that the gap between rich and poor 'will be impossible to eradicate' (p 195). In between is a remarkable creation and moulding of data to show the statistical correlation the hypothesis requires. But there is circularity in the whole exercise.
As the authors acknowledge, national wealth reflects industrial development, which requires an ever-expanding middle class, and IQ scores simply reflect middle class membership. It is a widespread error to treat IQs as values on a simple biometric trait, as these authors do. There is no scientific basis for it. The Parisian Alfred Binet originally devised the IQ test to screen children for educational difficulties, and made clear its conceptual foundations: 'Psychologists do not measure...we classify', he said (quoted by Zenderland, 1998, p 96). This is because IQ tests are not constructed on the basis of any scientific model of intelligence: they are simply created (by statistical manipulation of item content) to identify individuals who have already been deemed to be 'intelligent' by other, more subjective, criteria. Test items are devised impressionistically by middle class psychologists and simply mimic psycholinguistic structures of schooling and middle class (eg clerical/administrative) occupations. This cultural embedding is as much true of the (superficially concealed) structures in nonverbal tests like Raven's Matrices, as of those requiring little more than simple factual knowledge (see Richardson (2002) for review). Test performance also requires certain class-related affective dispositions such as self-confidence and self-efficacy beliefs, and even status consciousness (Lovaglia et al, 2002). Of course, test preparation is much assisted by the more active encouragement for school learning found in middle class homes.
Good IQ scores thus simply reflect the educational aspirations and the cognitive, linguistic, and affective dispositions that go with middle class background. They have been shown to be quite unrelated to the truly complex cognition demanded in everyday social and practical tasks. Perhaps, the best evidence for this is the so-called 'Flynn effect'. This refers to the huge secular increases in average IQ test performances over many decades in all countries where records are available. Scarcely mentioned in this book, because fatal to its basic thesis (see below), and baffling psychologists who still think of the IQ as a biometric test, it simply reflects the rapid expansion of the middle classes, and their associated psycho-linguistic/affective dispositions. It is not a reflection of increased mental ability as such, as Flynn agrees.

In other words all they are really measuring is the size of the middle class, the rapidity of industrial development, and some sort of collective aspiration. One might be suspicious merely by considering the difference between testing an individual for intelligence (mental maturity) and trying to translate that into a national average. What they are not doing is averaging IQ tests of every person in that coutnry in a standardized set of data the reflect the same assumptions about intelligence. It's a creative construct that lends itself all too well to ideology and manipulation.

Kanazawa

Kanazawa's career Plagued by Radical Ideas

Kanazawa is a reader in management at the London School of Economics, he has set him about the task of doing battle with what he calls "political correctness." He bases his theoretical orientation in evolutionary psychology. Meaning, behind his assumptions lurk the dragon of sociology biology, so we should suspect a link to the "Bell Curve" sort of thinking. LSE has forbig him to publish in non peer reviewed sources for a year as a result of the controversy surrounding his work.(BBC News London, 16 September 2011 Last updated at 06:41 ET "LSE Lecturer Dr. Satoshi Kanazowa Tells of Race Blog Regret"). He was fired Psychology Today for the Blog (which I criticized on Atheistwatch) "psychology today," it was Savanna principle primarily that got him the sack (Colorofchagne.org, changing the color of Democracy June 1, 211).

Nyborg Racist Connection

Andrew Brown in the American Guardian (Andrew Brown's Blog) demonstates the racist background of the atheist assumptions.

So I did a little digging around. I downloaded the paper, which costs, alas, $37.50 with VAT, and read it carefully through. It turns out that Nyborg is an enthusiast for scientific racism. It's not just believers who are more stupid, in his world: it's black people and women, too. In a collaboration with Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster, he measured religiosity against IQ in 137 countries, and concluded that low IQ countries always had higher rates of religion. It's not religion that makes you stupid, he told a Christian paper at the time: but if you live in a very religious country, you are very likely to be stupid. And of course the correlation of religion and poverty is in global terms very clear, while the most religious continent of all is Africa.
In the paper under review, he writes,
The ultimate causal level presumes that geographically separated peoples were subjected to different evolutionary pressures over extended time-periods. Those living under the hardest of evolutionary pressures, in cold or arctic areas, were gradually and over many generations selected for enhanced g (for details of the Climate Theory, see Lynn, 2006; Rushton, 2000). They had to replace ancient pre-rational supernatural beliefs with more effective rational approaches in order to survive under the harsh conditions given. People living in warm or tropical areas enjoyed in general more relaxed selective conditions, and low g individuals were not severely punished, as their survival was not seriously compromised by uncritical reference to ancient supernatural thinking, irrational beliefs in souls, invisible worlds, Gods, forces, angels, devils, hell, or holy spirits. A contemporary belief that supernatural forces control behavior, feelings and thinking is accordingly seen as a reminiscence of pre-historic animism and magical thinking.
Oops!
(In case anyone is tempted to take this seriously, it's worth pointing out that one of the most demographically successful populations in human history were the New England puritans, many of them descendants of Vikings, who managed to combine life in a very cold climate with fervent religiosity.)
But Nyborg is entirely serious. He argues – in the spirit of Murray and Herrnstein's Bell Curve – that intelligence is IQ; IQ is biological, and biology is destiny:
(Brown quoting Nyborg)

High g individuals will gravitate towards atheism or science, will discard supernatural phenomena, and will learn fast and prosper. Average g individuals will ﬁnd one of several moderate liberal denominations more to their taste, will display average learning, and will accordingly assume an intermediate socio-economic standing. Low g individuals will to submit to one of the many dogmatic denominations, will be slow learners, and will attain a low socio-economic status that accord with their limited cognitive
complexity and closed mind. Variations in disbelief, denominational complexity, educability and income are accordingly expected to follow from essentially heritable g differences, and to manifest themselves as today's mainly biologically brain based religious class differences.
By now I imagine that you are recoiling from these ideas. The belief that religion can simply be explained by stupidity suddenly looks a lot less attractive when it is presented scientifically by an intelligent man who also believes that poverty, too, can be explained by stupidity, and stupidity in its turn by race.

Abate ends her pdf file with to all humanitarian schoalrs:

Einstein did not develop E = mc² formula to create weapons of mass destruction. Neither the French Alfred Binet
developed IQ measurements for the purpose of Eugenics in the early 20th century. However, as we misuse the legacy of
Einstein to produce weapons that kill innocent people in the world, we are manipulating the works of Binet to
discriminate [6, 7], and to facilitate atresia of certain segments of the world population. History teaches us that the
Nazis misused the Idea of IQ and suggested to destroy “inferior” humans, retarded people, and any one with genetic
defects. [3] More than half a century later, Kanazawa emerged with another idea. He claims that in certain parts of the
world people die early because they are mentally retarded. Further, he asserted that education couldn’t significantly
alter the general intelligence. Should he remain unchallenged? Is the 21st Century the revival time of Eugenics?

I've commented on Kanazawa's racism in the psychology today article trying to imply that atheists are superior genetically. That's what he's really building toward.

Atheist Circular Reasoning

2012-01-17T04:42:00.001-08:00

Atheist "Guru" HRG argues for the Multiverse. I put up the thread that says multiverse is not backed by emprical evdience that is a contradiction to the atheist credo "don't believe things without empirical evidence." Harris says "to believe things with very little empirical evidence shows something is wrong with your mind." HRG argues that our universe serves as a sample of the multiverse so we can know the MV would be life bearing.

I argue the problem is that's not empirical evidence of the multiverse. Before you can assert that our universe is a sample fof the MV you must first prove there is a MV and prove it not with math or theory but with actual empirical evidence! Overwise you are believing stuff without empricial evidence. Of course they mainly try to get out by using theoretical evidence to correlate to the idea of empirical. I can do that with God arguments.

I charge this tactic of trying to assume we live in a sample of the MV then using that prove that the MV exits is circular reasoning.

post 11

Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
that's just rationalization. I didn't experience myself I experienced something way beyond me. Me and millions of others and it's not indifferent.

HRG:

There is no objective evidence that you did not just experience an alternative state of consciousness.

Meta:

you are speaking drivel. that's a term with very little real stable meaning. Assuming you mean some irrational blick that has no objective content then such a state cannot be transformational and therefore mystical experience is proved by hundreds studies not to be a "mere alternative state." That's a chimera. The concepts of the same reality. you can't decide them up they are conceptualizing the same thing. the experiences are proved to the same.

HRG:

By what objective measuring device ? And the interpretations of this kind of experience are certainly different.

Meta:

get it through your head right now, stop your childish prattle and face the facts: ALL THE WAY.M SCALE IS OBJECTIVE IT IS AN OBJECTIVE MEASUREMENT. I'VE TOLD YOU THIS TIME AND TIME AGAIN THERE'S NO WAY IT CAN BE AN ACCENT. IT'S GOT CROSS CULTURAL VERIFICATION IN DOZEN CULTURES. THE FINDINGS ARE CONSISTENT.

It passes the rational test of being an objective replicable representative means of measuring an experience for matching criteria pertaining to that experience.

(due to the "M scale" which is a means of testing mystical experience)

that does not make it proof. that is begging the question.

HRG

OK. I'll spell it out slowly for you:

1. If the MV concept is instantiated in reality, then our local universe is a part of the MV (by definition).
2. Our local universe makes life possible (observation)

I'LL SPELL IT OUT FOR YOU! You can't prove that without circular reasoning.

you are using the assertion that we are part of it to prove that it exists based upon data form us. if we are only the universe there is then we are not part of it and you have not proved anything. YOU ARE TRYING TO USE THE THING IN QUESTION TO PROVE THE QUESTION AND ITS CIRCULAR REASONING!!!!

OF COURSE THAT'S THE DEFINITION OF CIRCULAR.

HRG:
Conclusion:

If the MV concept is instantiated in reality, then part of the MV makes life possible.

Meta

YOU HAVE NO EMPIRICAL PROOF THAT IT IS. SO YOU CAN'T CLAIM US AS EMPIRICAL PROOF BECAUSE YOU DON'T KNOW THAT WE ARE PART OF IT.

Atheists Caught in Contradiction can be Danderous

2012-01-15T13:15:00.000-08:00

The atheists have told me over and over that there is no "fortress of facts." It's a phrase I narrowed to describe the atheist reliance upon a self selected process of accepting only the facts that support the atheist project and ignoring those that count against it.

The atheist son this board refuse to admit they they have this concept. Yet it's proved every time Big Thinker writes. He's a "one trick pony" no offense. BT's one trick is "we have gobs of facts about nature and stuff but you don't have any facts to back up God. Since God is an idea in the mind and you have no facts to prove he's real then he's just an idea in the mind!

that is exactly the fortress of facts. So you can't argue that it doesn't exist and isn't used when BT uses it all the time.

http://forums.carm.org/vbb/showthrea...33#post2480533
post no 14:

"The argument is that your God doesn't exist outside of your imagination. That's why all you can produce is arguments instead of factual evidence."

he had a whole thread "why aren't the theist hammering us with facts about their God?" that's saying the exact idea.

even HRG helps spread the propaganda:

post 11: ""God" is obviously a concept in human minds. It may be instantiated in reality, but where is the sufficient evidence to believe that it is ?"

here he looks to evidence in the from of "facts" as the deciding factor. Of course I've given facts for years and they are totally ignored because anything not counting for the atheist view is automatically discounted as nonsense.

Contradiction!

HRG has no facts that support Multiverse yet that's his openly real argument agaisnt God arguments. He may argue that they prove but he doesn't have any kind of positive proof except the multiverse. Yet there is no factual basis for any proof favoring it. There's no empirical evidence of it.

Its' all theoretical. mathematically based arguments are not empirical proof. Not only is he contradicting the atheist credo that we cant' believe without proof but he's also contradicting BK's one and only trick. Because without empirical proof the MV is just a concept in the mind. Apply what he says above:

MV" is obviously a concept in human minds. It may be instantiated in reality, but where is the sufficient evidence to believe that it is ?"

Ditto dark matter
string theory
ect
ect

Some of the atheists responses to this are very instructive. essentially they went ape. One tried to jack up mathematics to the level of empirical proof calling it "factual." "Mathematics are facts" he says. Therefore, the mathematical proofs of multivariate are facts too. It doesn't work that way I can do it too. Logic has facts It's a fact that an illogical argument is deemed untrue.

another such attempt is where some try to claim an "empirical bounce" for MV theory becuase it's derived from other theories that are empirically based.

Sithdoughnut says:

If this counts as empirical, why are you dismissing my examples? I can only conclude that you didn't understand me.

Let me explain: just like you're based the CA theory upon another theory, the MV is also based upon other theories. I believe (but I may be wrong), that quantum mechanics is one of them. In other words, an MV based upon QM cosmology is emprically based.

By "this" he means my big bang cosmology dependent cosmological argument. There's a huge difference. The big bang and singularity are derived from empirical data that directly demonstrates their truth. The theory of the mulitverse is derived from theories that have empirical elements, such as QM particles, but that doesn't mean there's any empirical evidence for mutliverse. They are trying to produce this "empirical bounce" where the empirical nature of one theory rubs off on another. It doesn't work that way because it's still not directly empirical. The big bang is.

Faith is Not Belief Without Proof

2012-01-11T06:40:00.000-08:00

Originally Posted by aussiedave
Faith is a belief and does not require any intellectual basis. An "intellectual belief" is still a belief.
Neither have any facts to substantiate them.

One finds atheists saying things like this all the time. Atheists tend to define faith as "belief of soemthing without any evidence or a valid reason." for support they sometimes turn to Webster's on-line Dicitonary

Definition of FAITH

1
a : allegiance to duty or a person : loyalty b (1) : fidelity to one's promises (2) : sincerity of intentions
2
a (1) : belief and trust in and loyalty to God (2) : belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion b (1) : firm belief in something for which there is no proof (2) : complete trust
3
: something that is believed especially with strong conviction; especially : a system of religious beliefs faith>

Of course it usually doesn't dawn on them that this is three different definitions and not a collective one. The third one can't be taken as indicative of all religious faith. There's another reason not to let them use Wesbter's, not at all. That's because it's only indicative of popular use and not theological teaching. Because they don't use a technological dictionary atheists make a straw man argument. They are not dealing with the way the teaching authority of Christian theology uses the term "faith." They are only reflecting the general conception, or misconception of faith, apart from Christian teaching. The whole idea of their argument is that Christian teaching accepts faith as belief with no evidence, when in reality there is no such dictum in any Christian teaching.

The theological authoritative dictionary for Christian Theology is called Westminster's Dictionary of Christian Theology (ed Alan Richardson and John Bowden SCM pres ltd 1983) (on Amazon). That is to the theology what the Oxford Unabridged Dictionary is to the English language. It's what Black's Law Dictionary is to the Lawyer. Really all Chrsitians should own a copy. There are two volumes one is about theologians the other about doctrines. I will concern myself today only with the latter.

The Westminster dictionary of Christian Theology has a long article on faith starting on page 207. Believers often use the term faith as a short hand term for those living according to apostolic teaching (207). The Dictionary points out that the only actual Biblical definition of faith is found in Hebrews 11.1 (evidence of things not seen) and that it "does not encapsulate all that the Bible says on the subject."(ibid). Westminster translates Hebrews 11.1 as "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." This changes certain nuances but reinforces other. I have always liked to point that that faith is a kind of evidence in its own right. That's becuase something has to prompt faith. It's insane to assert that faith is ever held for no reaosn at all. Of cousre the atheist wants to assert that the reason is stupid but that's his burden of proof. What is the stimulus that prompts the response of faith?

Westminster's Dictionary understands faith in many contexts and constructs a complex picture of the term.Faith "...is an obedient confident trust in the reality love of God known through his acts, and awaiting their future consummation." (ibid). The dictionary brings out a variety of nuances from scripture. In OT faith is comparatively rare. When it is used it indicates faithfulness or loyalty rather than passive reliance. Yet dependence upon God and not human powers is important for Issiah (7:9, 30:15). Faith is concieved as Obedient action. (Dud 6:1) Faith as trust is also echoed in the psalms. In the NT belief and trust in Jesus' salvation is referred to as faith.(Mark 2:5, 5:34). Unbelief is hardness of heart, so the opposite of faith, unbelief, involves a refusal of the heart. Again making faith more a matter of some deep relationship than just a passive acceptance of an affirmation. (Mark 6:1).

There's no particular reason to understand this notion of faithfulness as bestowed for no reason. There is no statement about "faithfulness with no proof for no reason." Indeed the whole concept of faith in being about a condition of the heart is removed a step from this idea of accepting an intellectual proposition for no reason. In the Johonine epistles we see doctrinally oriented faith in a credal formula. In that community faith took on doctrinal proportions. Christ came in the flesh, Jesus is he son of God, (20:31, 1 J. 5:1). There is no indication that this is a matter of belief for no reason. NO reason is given but it's obvious the reason is bound up with the faith of the community as a community. One sees the community itself as the witness. The community as a whole testifies "we saw this, we heard this."

In Pauline Theology faith is utter reliance upon God's grace. The person of faith is the one who knows that grace cannot be obtained by works, that justification is only through union with Christ and reliance upon God's grace rather than works or by the law. Faith is not merely assent to an intellectual proposition but a relationship of trust culminating in the acceptance of God's Grace. Grace through faith means reliance upon God's ability to make us holy, nothing of our own effort.

The article points out several tensions that emerge from the centrality of faith to Christian doctrine. This is the kind of subtle theological idea that makes theology interesting and maddening to atheist who can't think subtly. Tension is mistaken for contradiction by skeptics but it's not contradiction. It's a good thing in theology to have tension. As one of my professors at Perkins (school of ethology SMU) put it "if you have no tension on your kite string your kite is not in the air."

One such tension is between weather faith is the response of trust in God or the acceptance of doctrinal propositions.The issues clearly transcend the notion of faith as rule keeping or merely an acceptance of intellectual propositions.

The article winds up with a discussion of Kierkegaard's notion of the leap of faith. This mind tend to make one think that faith means the irrational acceptance of of a proposition with no evidence.SK says faith is irrational and that it's achieved by an irrational leap. Yet one must note that the leap itself is an epistemological ploy, it's an attempt to get over the final chasm which can't be bridged by evidence or logic. The road up to the final gap can be paved with argument and reason. One can make a find philosophical diving board to prepare for the leap. The point at which one makes the leap can be narrowed. The leap is always there. Even in the world view there are epistemic blind alleys from which there are no returns. So in the final analysis there is no basis to the atheist straw man definition of faith as "believing things without evidence."

Forged Statistics and Bait and Switch: Are Chrsitians More LIkely to Commit Crimes?

2012-01-08T05:00:00.000-08:00

I came accross a blog Atheism Recourse. com which after all these years is still preading the Paul stuff.

Congratulations atheists… you are more well-behaved than the rest of society. No, this isn’t a “pat you on the back” piece. But, I think it’s important for us to remember that we ARE moral people that know how to be good citizens without a divine babysitter telling us what’s right and wrong. And, there is evidence to show that this is correct.
In 2005, the Kripke Center released a detailed study called, “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies.” Long title, I know. But, what it said was very important and gets overlooked by many atheists. Keep in mind, the Kripke Center ISN’T secular and has no reason to promote a secular view. According to their own website, “The Kripke Center is dedicated to facilitating scholarly activity in the areas of religion and society. Special attention is given to promoting understanding between and among faith communities, including especially Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The Kripke Center’s primary audience is the academic community, but its scholarship and services are available to all who seek them. The Center is named in honor of Rabbi Myer and Dorothy Kripke.” The study had some amazing discoveries. They concluded:

The sturdy they quote (Jensen, Vanderbuilt) sites the Paul "study" for it's factual basis (2005). That so called stud is totally disparaged by sociologists. Paul was not a social scientist and his alleged study was panned by critics as methodologically disastrous.

Jensen himself says Paul's study was too simplistic:

That analysis, however, was based on scatterplots
for eighteen “prosperous nations” and focused primarily
on the United States compared to Asecular@ nations. Because
there are numerous dimensions to religiosity and a variety of
alternative explanations of homicide rates, a more complex
analysis is required before more definitive conclusions can be
reached. This study attempts such an analysis for a much
larger sample of nations and tests Durkheim=s hypothesis that
religious passion as a variable characteristic of nations is a
positive correlate of homicide rates

He does a multiple regression analysis. There's enough scholarly caution in the Jesen conclusion to argue that the original Atheist resource.com article's conclusion is totally unwarranted.

There are obvious limitations to this analysis, and just
as sociologists should not over-generalize about the positive
effects of religion based on prior research, negative
consequences have not been established conclusively. The data
are cross-sectional and the temporal links among the variables
studied have not been established. Moreover, the analysis is a
secondary analysis of data that have already been collected
which limits their applicability to more complex arguments.
Yet, this analysis is the first step towards a more
meaningful specification of the complex links between
religiosity and homicide rates at the ecological level using
nations as units of analysis. Some of the results are
remarkably consistent with Durkheim=s passion hypothesis about
religion and homicide and are contrary to over-generalizations
about religion as a barrier to crime. On the other hand,
relatively secular nations do not have lower homicide rates
than nations where people accept God and Heaven, but do not
embrace their malevolent counterparts, the Devil and Hell.

Of cousre they don't quote that. There's more reason than that to suspect the data. The article on the Atheist Resource Blogs goes back to a tale of statistics not in the Jensen study but quotes a bogus table of statistics that was cmpied by Denise Golumbaski, Research Analyst for the Federal Bureau of Prisons released the following numbers in 1997 under the Freedom of Information Act. Atheists have been kicking around this research for a long time Its' proved by adherents.com to be bogus. The explanation on Adherent.com

David Rice has written to us (23 October 2002) concerning the origin of the data in the table below: The data came from Denise Golumbaski, who was a Research Analyst for the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The data was compiled from up-to-the-day figures on March 5th, 1997. (Note that as of the year 1999, Analyst Golumbaski is no longer working for the Federal Bureau of Prisons; I had telephoned Analyst Golumbaski to request the latest figures, and was told by another analyst that Golumbaski was no longer employed there.) The data was requested by Mr. Rod Swift, who passed it on to me for my web site. I later called the Federal Bureau of Prisons and confirmed that the data did in fact come from their database.

This data was put up on Boyd Swift's website. strangely enough it changed. The atheists don't quote Golumbasky they quote from the Swift site so the facts are wrong. Read all about in my pages on Doxa. I can't put up a

This is the actual data Swift had to work wtih and Rice documents that fact, here it is:

19.908%

Response	Number	%
Catholic	29267	39.164%
Protestant	26162	35.008%
None/Atheist/Unknown	18,537
Muslim	5435	7.273%
American Indian	2408	3.222%
Nation	1734	2.320%
Rasta	1485	1.987%
Jewish	1325	1.773%
Church of Christ	1303	1.744%
Pentecostal	1093	1.463%
Moorish	1066	1.426%
Buddhist	882	1.180%
Jehovah Witness	665	0.890%
Adventist	621	0.831%
Orthodox	375	0.502%
Mormon	298	0.399%
Scientology	190	0.254%
Atheist	156	0.209%
Hindu	119	0.159%
Santeria	117	0.157%
Sikh	14	0.019%
Bahai	9	0.012%
Krishna	7	0.009

One attempt at this bogus atheist social sciences is a site by Boyd Swift. Swift, thought he would be a wrote the bureaus of prisons for stats, but unfortunately he doesn't know how to read a table.

Response	Number	%
Catholic	29267	39.164%
Protestant	26162	35.008%
Muslim	5435	7.273%
American Indian	2408	3.222%
Nation	1734	2.320%
Rasta	1485	1.987%
Jewish	1325	1.773%
Church of Christ	1303	1.744%
Pentecostal	1093	1.463%
Moorish	1066	1.426%
Buddhist	882	1.180%
Jehovah Witness	665	0.890%
Adventist	621	0.831%
Orthodox	375	0.502%
Mormon	298	0.399%
Scientology	190	0.254%
Atheist	156	0.209%
Hindu	119	0.159%
Santeria	117	0.157%
Sikh	14	0.019%
Bahai	9	0.012%
Krishna	7	0.009%

---------------------------- -------- Total Known Responses 74731 100.001% (rounding to 3 digits does this) Unknown/No Answer 18381 What's really intereting is what Adherents.com has to say about these stats and Swifts website. Here is a letter by researcher on Adherents.com who checked out Swift's data: Adherents.com

I have represented both talbes exactly as they appear on the adherents.com website.

Several interesting points. The original says "National of Islam," Swift's Version says "Nation" only. The Original puts Muslims at 5.837% While Swift's version puts them at 7.273%. Swift's has Mormons as seventh from bottom. The original doesn't have Mormons on it.

What's really interesting is the major difference for our puposes, the original includes "none/ahteist/unknown as third from the top. Swift puts them much further down. The Originals give the atheist category almost 20% while Swist tives it 0.2% or less.

Examine this table with the one above.

Swift's Table

On Swift's table there is no mention of atheist in the first five and atheist is listed fifth from the bottom. In that table atheist is 0.209%. Now here is the table sent by the Bureau of prisons to Rice, first five:,br>

In this table Atheist/unknown/none is third form top and has 19%! Fifth from the bottom on this version is not atheist but "Hindu." So the version sent by the Bureau of Prisons is significantly different than the version put up by Swift.

It seems Swift misrepresented the data.

So in other words, the actual number of atheists is about a quarter as high as the Christians. It's not this tiny 0.something percent, it's actually pretty high.
It's pretty clear he fabricated the data. These mistakes are too far off to be merely mistakes in recording.

Swist goes on to expalin how the disproportionate number of atheists in prison from the general population means they are so far better behaved than Christians.

Now, let's just deal with the nasty Christian types, no? "Judeo-Christian Total 62594 83.761% (of the 74731 total responses) Total Known Responses 74731 Not unexpected as a result. Note that atheists, being a moderate proportion of the USA population (about 8-16%) are disproportionately less in the prison populations (0.21%)."

Of course he's distorting these figures too because it's not 8% certianly not 16%. He's including people who believe in God but don't like organized religion as well as agnostics as atheists. He's also dealing with his flase figures. The actual figure is 20% atheists in prison and 3% in society. So what does this tell us? Atheist are a lot less well behaved.

adherents.com
answers Swift's page directly:

One atheist web page (http://holysmoke.org/icr-pri.htm) presented statistics stating that 0.209% of federal prisoners (in 1997) stated "atheist" as their religious preference. This site said that this is far less than the 8 to 16% of the American population that are atheists.

The atheist site, however, provided no source for the notion that "8 to 16%" of Americans are atheists. This statistic is completely without support from the available data. Gallup polls which include questions about religion have consistently shown that between 93 and 96% of Americans say that they believe in God. Presumably atheist writers would not suggest that up to half of their claimed "atheists" believe in God. The actual proportion of atheists in the United States is about 0.5% (half of one percent). This is the figure obtained from the largest survey of religious preference ever conducted: the National Survey of Religious Identification (Kosmin, 1990), which polled 113,000 people. The religious preference questions were part of questioning completely unrelated to religious preference (consumer preferences, entertainment, etc.), so the frequent retort of atheists that their numbers don't like to admit to atheism, and hence are undercounted, is unlikely.

Atheists play a little game where they refuse to accept the fac thtat there are distinctions between really have a devotion to a faith and merely having a passing identification. They play this game so they can say that all the bad things of history are done by Christians and Christians can't say "O but they weren't real Christians." Yet real sociologists (which is more than just a matter of dedication but of real credentials) say that there is a valid distinction and not all people who say "I am a Christian" are really examples of dedication to that faith. The refusal to account for depth of commitment is a real flaw in Swist's thinking and this is exactly what adherents.com points out:

Thus, some commentators on one side have claimed that being religious is associated with incarceration. This is based only on religious preference statistics. American sociologists are well aware that nearly all Americans profess a religious preference. But there is a major difference between those who are actually religious affiliated, that is, members of a congregation (approx. 45 to 65% of the population, varying by region), and those who merely profess a preference, likely the name of the denomination that their parents of grandparents were a part of. (One of the best discussions of this phenomenon can be found in The Churching of America, 1776-1990, by Roger Finke and Rodney Stark; New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992.)

On that same page adherents.com quotes Bureau of Justice Statistics (National Census of the Jail Population 12/31/95):

72% affirm Christianity

54% actually declare themselves religious

Only 33% actually pracitce their faith (by attending chruch).

Sociologists would laugh themselves silly over the simplistic nature of Swift's thinking. It's just not enough to assume from raw data on the afflictions of prision population that some belief system leads to crime. From that same adherents.com page:

Thus, some commentators on one side have claimed that being religious is associated with incarceration. This is based only on religious preference statistics. American sociologists are well aware that nearly all Americans profess a religious preference. But there is a major difference between those who are actually religious affiliated, that is, members of a congregation (approx. 45 to 65% of the population, varying by region), and those who merely profess a preference, likely the name of the denomination that their parents of grandparents were a part of. (One of the best discussions of this phenomenon can be found in The Churching of America, 1776-1990, by Roger Finke and Rodney Stark; New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992.)

As that same article points out someone on a survey answering "Im a Methodist" is virtually meaningless, not sociologically it is meaningless, becuase that person may be just remembering the affliction of the family or the grandparents or parents, not his own actual feelings. A more reliable indication is enrollment on chruch rolls. Even more reliable than that is chruch attendance.

What this guy has done on the Atheist resource Blog is to recognize the need for complex data analysis, pretend like he has it in quoting the Jensen study, but instead of quoting the conclusion which is doubtful about proving anything he substitutes (bait and switch) the bogus data. Here we have before our eyes a very sloppy attempt at leisure De main a bit and switch in which he sticks in the propaganda with te phony data in such a way (although badly done) as to give the impression that it's in sink with the study he sites.

Category: Athesits Say the Dardest Things: Now I've heard it all.

2012-01-02T06:53:00.000-08:00

On CARM The little attack dog "Blondie" (aka Steve Smith) is involved in trying to prove that Chrsitians have persecuted more people than communism did. He argues that he doesn't have to use documents to prove that Christians murdered thousandth of people because "everyone knows it."

see post 20

The simple fact that the Roman Empire went from pagan to Christian in one generation is proof of widespread persecution and murder. Lots of examples were listed in the OP and if you bother to do a little research you can find a lot more.

Then he accuses me of special pleading.

I would like to move on to serous articles but I just have to show some of these statements he's made becuase I can't believe how absurd they are. In trying to prove that Christians have persecuted more than atheists he actually tries to argue that Christians were in charge of communism!

post 20 again:

The communist/atheist argument is stupid. I'm glad you are not above resorting to the fundamentalist thinking you seem to hate more than anyone. Theists killed more people in the 20th century than atheists. This is assuming that the entire USSR was atheist. Given the fact that this was never the case and the majority of the USSR was always Christian your point is even more wrong.

This is the "simple fact?" The majority were Christians but that doesn't mean they were in charge of anything. They lived in an oligarchy, remember? At this point I was spitting milk through my nose. So he tries to explain how the figures it.

Originally Posted by Metacrock

that's a totally ridiculous statement. that's not proof of any kind. That requires that most of your assumptions you must prove in themselves before you can advance them as proof.

Blondie

Your ignorance of easily researched facts is not an argument.

You can either believe I have already looked it up or do it yourself.

So I'm supposed to just believe his word because he tells me to, and I"M SPECIAL PLEADING!??

Originally Posted by Metacrock

are you saying the non communist people of USSR had a big say in their movement?

Blindie:

No, I'm saying that theists killed a lot more people than atheists in the 20th century and this argument that fundamentalists like to bring up about atheist killings is just stupid. It is factually wrong. It shows how apologists just parrot these things without even bothering to think about them or look it up.

The fact about the USSR being mostly Christian is just icing on the cake.

icing on what cake? one on Mars!?? here' his most rational statement.

wonderboy:

"The Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 forced Stalin to enlist the Russian Orthodox Church as an ally to arouse Russian patriotism against foreign aggression. Russian Orthodox religious life experienced a revival: thousands of churches were reopened; there were 22,000 by the time Nikita Khrushchev came to power. The regime permitted religious publications, and church membership grew."

Like I said. This is just icing on the cake.

The fact is theists killed more people than atheists in the 20th century. Please stop saying otherwise. It just makes you look ignorant or dishonest.

So all the soldiers defending Stalin are Christians becuase the Orthodox chruch was asked to raise an army. That magically makes Chrsitians responsible for all of Stalin's murders? That's a hyperbolic and rhetorical question. Could he really be so dense as to think there's a comparison between people defending their country form attack by Nazis and Communists murdering people for their faith? They weren't murdering Nazis for their faith they were defending their country form invasion. They didn't do it because the chruch commanded them to but becasue they were forced to by Stalin.

This guy is truly living in his own private world if he thinks he can transform victims of Stalin's rule into murderers themselves because they fought in a war? This is the great genius who wants to prove that I'm so stupid I have no scholarship.

incredibly atheists are actually defending this guy. this shows how totally without honor they are. So totally sold out to hating Chrsitians they can't be honest about the mot obvious things.

asked if they agree that Chrsitians were in charge in the USSR
drugstar says:

humans are beings. god is the ground of being. therefore god killed them all.

others of them are going "I don't understand what you are saying." The famous HRG actually argues with Bondie that Christians were in charge of the USSR!

What's really funny is read the other thread I put up where I ask atheists in general if they agree. They are all hard at work avoiding admitting that he said crazy things.

atheist have no honor and no morlaity: Mat Hunt attacks me when I banned so I can't defend myself.

2011-12-29T07:54:00.001-08:00

While I'm banned from CARM that's the time to say a bunch of stuff about me so I can't fight back. That's exactly what the little cowards have done.

Mat Hunt says:

As you may be aware, metacrock and I have been to-ing and fro-ing about his argument about fire in the equations, which essentially states: The laws of physics remain constant and don't change therefore god basically. I answered all his objections despite his bogus claims that I didn't answer any of them, he changed his argument and I answered that one as well and I think that the people on this board understood what was going on and agreed that Meta had indeed lost the challenge to show that his fire in the equations argument works. I still have unreplied to posts explaining why the laws of physics don't change.

However Meta will still crow that although he is a theologian, his knowledge of science is superior to mine, a working scientist. So I don't think much of his argument and I personally don't think he's honest at all in his arguments.

This statement is so full of lies.I can't understand how it is that a Ph.D. candidate and grown man can't read what people say and reflect it accurately or honestly. The things he's claiming I have said I have denied saying many time. He's dogmatically pretending like he got it right and he's full lying. I've always observed that have very reading compression, this is really basically lying.

(1) My argument has never been "the laws of phsyics remain stable therefore God" that is a totally dishonest and stupid lie. the reason he says that is because he's basically not capable intellectually of understanding the real argument. It's totally different.

nowhere have I never stupid enough to say "laws of phsyics therefore God." I also have backed off the original position stating that perhaps Mat does know more about it than I do. that's not good enough for him or maybe he just doesn't get what it means. The original position was that laws of phsyics determine what happens, not that they change. Assuming that laws of physics are necessary to make things happen, then I ask where are the laws of phsyics? What makes them work, where are they kept. they can't be laws floating about apart form any structure and theorized that's a good reason (I didn't claim it as a proof) to think that a mind houses the laws as ideas in a mind.

Hunt is such a poor thinker that the transmutes that into "physical laws therefore God." I also admitted that my understanding of the laws of phsyics was not as good as his since he studies in Graduate and perhaps I overstated the extent to which they are laws. I reformulated the argument with a totally different focus, which something else he conveniently leaves out.

(2) "I answered that one as well and I think that the people on this board understood what was going on and agreed that Meta had indeed lost the challenge to show that his fire in the equations argument works."

O yea I lost that so bad. here's what really happened:

..........(a) he never listed to my arugment, he couldn't understand what it was about. he said a bunc h of things that didn't apply. He got everyone on his side (the majority of hte board) to back him up and say "O he's winning' He kicking Meta's ass" even though hone of them could say what the major issues were. When asked to recite what issues beat my argument none of hem had any answer! Like hte typical little liars they are they can't face truth.

mmm(b) I quoted several physicist who backed up exact what I was saying. Mat never quoted any authority or source. all he said was things like "I'm a scientist you must believe me" that constituted about 90% of the arguments he made.

..........(c) the rest of the argument he made said things like "the laws are in the sub atomic particles that's why they act like they do." which is not an answer of any kind becuase it just asserts a meaningless statement, what do you mean to "the laws are in the particles?" again what's makes them laws, how did they get into the particles? he could never say.

...........(d) I quote Martian Rees who he admitted he admires, and I quoted him saying exactly hwat I was saying. I quoted it about five times. every time mat refused to admit that I quoted it and he never answered. O yea they beat it so soundly!

,,,,,,,,,,,,,(e) he never mentions the fact hat I re-wrote the argument. What did he say to the re-write? he said "I'm a scientist you must believe me."

(3) "However Meta will still crow that although he is a theologian, his knowledge of science is superior to mine, a working scientist."

This is another distortion, I think probably becuase he doesn't understand my response. I never said my knowledge of science is supirior to his. This is after many times that he kept saying "I know more about science than you do so you must believe me" and that as substitute for real argument. I said I understand the history and philsophy of science better than he does. and I do. I will stick by it and prove it.

here's where one can find my re-booted argument "fire in the equations."

here's the new abstract to the re-boot version:

There's a contradiction in the framework scinece takes to physical law as purely descriptive, the fact that the description is our perceptions, and the order and regularity we see in nature. Obviously the description is that of something ordered and organized at a certain level, but also something that contains elements of random event and uncertainty. That suggests an ordering principle but one that is of a mind.

That's ok, I still stand behind every statement. The problem is it's always met by atheist claims that laws of physics are no longer seen as perspective, they don't 'make thing happen. They are just descriptive so they are not even laws at all in any way they are just descriptions.

That's really the reason I said "organizing principle" instead "laws f phsyics." I knew that but I didn't realize how fastidious they would be in insisting on their terminology and their way of framing things. you can't say organizing principle beuase it's not scientific. We don't dare use our minds if scinece doesn't tell us we can then only in exactly the way it says to.

I have been arguing that there had to be some kind of structure or soemthing to make the regularity that brought the universe into being. But no it's just popped up for no reason, its' all just pure description and anything can happen,. there's no regularity, no reason for it. It's just what we observe. So I then I would go the other way. If it's just observation then your observation can be incomplete, there could be miracles, nothing to stop them. O no they never happen because "we" don't see it. I say "I do." they say "no I don't' so that means 'we ' don't."

In the final analysis they are just arguing form authority. Science says "you didn't say 'science may I' so you can't believe this." This is why I feel the need present the argument in a new way.

Atheist is in a dilemma.

Either:

I. The has to be a principle of ordering or organizing to account for the regularity we observe in the universe.

A. Can't exist apart from universe it describes

B. where is it located? Mind is the best candidate

or, if we accept that laws are only descriptive

II. The field is wide open, anything can happen, they open the door to God in scinece:

A. Change naturalistic paradigm
The paradigm of natural was based upon the idea of perspective laws of phsyics that told everything in the universe how to behave, and thus replaced God as the major explanations for the way things are.

(1). Materialism based upon cause and effect

Dictionary of Philosophy Anthony Flew, article on "Materialism"

"...the belief that everything that exists is either 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) http://www.ctns.org/Information/information.html Is the Big Bang a Moment of Creation?(this source is already linked above)

"...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 untestable."

CARM lies and atheist lies

2011-12-27T18:01:00.000-08:00

I got banned on carm because that shit hole "Blondie" aka Steve Smith aka MIv aka Deiest who has been hounding me for weeks goaded me into making insults and then turned me in after telig me that I did wrong to turn him in .

the message board thing is really stupid. I have been a fool to post on that toxic carm Math Slick is an idiot and the atheists who post there are stupid as dirt.

The last exchange I had one of them was saying something about no evidence God I reminded him that I had 200 studies that none of them will read. Then he asserted that they have read them, again. that is a lie that have told over and over again. Every time I've looked what they claim is a study it's not. They have to read one. those who claim have read either a summary article that talks about all the studies (but the author did a study so the name being the same they same they assume it's the study) or a study that is ot one of the 200 but it in fact a study. So then assert that they know all about it because they read 2 studies, weather they fit or not.

They are not intellectuals they are not thinkers. They are trying to be thinkers they are trying to get their rocks of by venting their hatred for God via bullying Christians.

Dawkins and Atheist Straw God part 2

2011-12-23T13:26:00.000-08:00

Dawkins.net

This part 2 of the previous post. I was considering an argument that Dawkins makes to the effect that evolution doesn't leave God anything to do. The idea that evolution is a counter to God belief is so sophomoric it's hardly worth arguing against, but the fact that Dawkins is willing to argue it seroiusly is very telling. The "new atheists" or "Dawkies" as I call them (Dawkamentalits) take the same tact mocking and ridiculing real, serious, advanced and sophisticated liberal theology. But he augments the simplistic contradiction between God and evolution by trying to turn it into a basis for probabilistic analysis ruling out the probability of God.

Wouldn't we be tempted to fall on our knees and worship them, as a medieval peasant might if suddenly confronted with such miracles as a Boeing 747, a mobile telephone or Google Earth? But, however god-like the aliens might seem, they would not be gods, and for one very important reason. They did not create the universe; it created them, just as it created us. Making the universe is the one thing no intelligence, however superhuman, could do, because an intelligence is complex—statistically improbable —and therefore had to emerge, by gradual degrees, from simpler beginnings: from a lifeless universe—the miracle-free zone that is physics.

So he uses this notion to create an opposition then leverages out the God concept on the basis that it's primitive and superstitious. The lever is the probability analysis. Evolution is the competing er zots creator. He then asserts the astounding concept that a mind can't create evolution. This is supposedly the case because as a statistically complex thing a mind would be improbable since it has to be the product of evolution and develop. That would god is the product of evolution. That would make evolution and the who understands it best (Dawkins?) would be God's "Keeper." Aside from that aspect, Dawkins thinking here is extremely silly. But let's take it in stages. First I'll deal with the original allegation that God has nothing to do in an evolving universe, secondly I'll deal with the inane probability argument.

The basic assumption he makes is that God is a big man in the sky. The reason I think he assumes this is because he treats God as though God were a big man; men need "tings to do." Of cousre if God created evolution one would have to think that he understood this would leave him with time on his hands. Rather than postulate the existence of a huge heavenly golf course with angelic caddies, perhaps we might just suspect that God doesn't need to "do things" in the same way that we do. Tilehard de Chardin theorized that God is the strong force. The strong force holds together atomic structures. In that case God would have a lot to do, assuming he "needed something to do." But not being a big man beyond our understanding we might just assert that God doesn't get board, doesn't have to challenge himself with meaningless activities and if he is trying to draw people to Christ he has his hands full anyway trying to convict people like Dawkins of their arrogance, and also teaching logic to atheists. That ought to keep him busy for an eternity or two.

Notice that Dawkin's arguments don't stem from the idea that God would not be capable of making a universe, but that he needs an activity, what he really mean is that in our understanding of argument for the existence of god there's nothing for him to do (that assumes the best implication because he does not say this). He may really mean there's nothing we can see that would give us an idea of the difference between God and no God. Stephan Hawking's argument is not based upon the probability scam but upon a question prompted by his own theory which removes the singularity in favor of a no boundary condition of the universe; in other words the universe did not begin in time.

So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose that it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator? (quoted byCTNS)

This is different from Dawkin's argument, but the answers overlapp. Keith Ward Takes issue in God, Chance and Necessity (quoted on CTNS site, Ibid.)

"On the quantum fluctuation hypothesis, the universe will only come into being if there exists an exactly balanced array of fundamental forces, an exactly specified probability of particular fluctuations occurring in this array, and existent space-time in which fluctuations can occur. This is a very complex and finely tuned ‘nothing’... So this universe looks highly contingent after all, and a creator God might well choose to create a partly probabilistic universe by choosing just such an origin for it."

Drees points out that in fact the Hawking-Hartle proposal accords well with a theology which emphasises that every space is equally created by God, ‘“sustaining” the world in all its “times.”’ R.J.Russell has shown, moreover, that at the core of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is the principle of ontological dependence - that all matter, all energy, and the laws that govern the universe all depend for their existence on a God whose existence is not dependent on anything. The discovery of an actual temporal beginning to this material universe would not prove this doctrine (since the doctrine rests on metaphysical convictions about God and existence) but only provide an additional gloss to it

Russell, Ph.D. Physics Santa Cruz,
prof Theology and Scinece
Founder and director CTNS

This means there are still things for God to do, just in case he needs them. Form the standpoint of apologetic there are still "earmarks" of God's work. But with Dawkins argument the rationale is quite different. His probability mess does not lend itself well to the God argument proof issue. He's not just looking for a hint of God's handiwork to compare to regular nature, but is actually trying to subject God to the needs and habits of a big man. He's creating his own Staw God concept and trying to wedge that in to the Christian argument. Dawkn's strwa God is a big biological organism subject to the same needs for challenge and stimulation that humans possess. He has a human mind that can be compared to our own reasoning processes so that a probability can be fixed to it's existence. Of course it would have to be the product of evolution because in Dawkin's world straw God is the product of higher forces, not the ground of being or the primordial aspect of reality upon which all other things depend, but the Dawkamentalist er zots God of science, evolution, has to create the straw God. In so doing Dawkins has tipped his hand, it is apparent he doesn't understand the Christian concept of God nor is he working within it's philosophical boundaries. He's not only created a straw God but he's placed it under jurisdiction of his own er zots god.

Of course weather one is a Tillichian, a Lutheran or a Thomism, even a protestant evangelical God is not a product of anything. No Christian group anywhere would accept this. That aspect alone marks Dawkin's straw God as a straw man argument. Of course as the last post parted out (part 1) it makes so much more sense to understand God as the progenitor of physical law, and perhaps directing to toward evolution, rather than the product of it, because otherwise you have these disembodied laws that most modern scientists don't even see as perspective anymore, no way to explain what they do or where they are located prior to the universe. That also means that the universe itself lacks explanation. Thanks to this maneuver Dawkin's idea actually highlights the real need to understand God as the basis of reality rather than to posit a big man with nothing to do. For this reason his argument is circular as the premise (God is a big man with nothing to do) rests upon the conclusion (viewing God in which way disproves the existence of God).

That God is subject to evolution Dawkins predicates upon the human understanding of the universe about the nature of complexity. Complexity serves a key function in the argument because with it probability might favor God. But in using it he opens the door to another means of destroying his argument. He wants to say that God would have to be complex because as far as we know only complexity can produce more complexity. Thus a complex universe would have to be the process of a more complex God:

To midwife such emergence is the singular achievement of Darwinian evolution. It starts with primeval simplicity and fosters, by slow, explicable degrees, the emergence of complexity: seemingly limitless complexity—certainly up to our human level of complexity and very probably way beyond. There may be worlds on which superhuman life thrives, superhuman to a level that our imaginations cannot grasp. But superhuman does not mean supernatural. Darwinian evolution is the only process we know that is ultimately capable of generating anything as complicated as creative intelligences. Once it has done so, of course, those intelligences can create other complex things: works of art and music, advanced technology, computers, the Internet and who knows what in the future? Darwinian evolution may not be the only such generative process in the universe. There may be other "cranes" (Daniel Dennett's term, which he opposes to "skyhooks") that we have not yet discovered or imagined. But, however wonderful and however different from Darwinian evolution those putative cranes may be, they cannot be magic. They will share with Darwinian evolution the facility to raise up complexity, as an emergent property, out of simplicity, while never violating natural law.

He just asserts that natural law is all there is and thus God must be a product of natural law. This astounding conclusion is arrived at how? By using human understanding based upon, his own words, "Darwinian evolution is the only process we know that is ultimately capable of generating anything as complicated as creative intelligences." And how much of the universe have seen? Up close we know some stuff form one planet, how much? We don't know, we are still amazed by our own planet. Off planet we've made remarkable progress through telescopes and other long range means, but what do we really know?

John Polikinghorne Q and A (question about cosmological argument)
John Polikinghorne's Websiet
the answer of his assistant

However since it is known that only 4% of the matter and energy in the Universe is made of what we understand as matter, and most of the universe seems, on current understandings, to be “dark matter” and “dark energy” about which we know nearly nothing, and no-one knows how to reconcile Quantum Mechanics with General Relativity (the much-hyped String Theory looks increasingly like a dead-end) it is unwise to assume that current understandings of cosmology represent the last word.
I’ll see what John has to add. John said he had nothing to add to this reply

We can take this to mean we know only about 4% of the universe. Actually it might be a lot less but this s a good illustration of one aspect of which we know almost nothing, and that aspect is major. So Dawkins standard for fixing human knowledge is pretty feeble. But the fact he's willing to do it is interesting because when we use the same kind of standard in God arguemnts, it means nothing to an atheist. We say "not one single example anywhere in all of reality shows a non contingent aspect of the natural world" but they dont' care. As far as they are concerned that tells us nothing about the universe being contingent. they are willy to shout "fallacy of composition" on that one but totally ignore what the limited data base does to their assumption about complexity and human knowledge.

(1) tries to force God under the jurisdiction of the physical by just asserting the universal necessity of physical law, he abhorrence of Magic, of course making out that supernatural is "only magic" which can't exist because it's opposed to the ideology of physcialism and lack of a God forbid that anything should contradict that! We know that's the only real truth how do we know it? by the same circular reasoning that allows us to hide proof of miracles under the same dictum and to assume through circular reasoning that there is no God.

(2) Of course attaching a probability to something like God woud be totally impossible since there's nothing to compare to. the very concept of the probability of the foundation of reality is impossible understand.

In addition to this there are also a couple of problems with the "complexity" and applying it to God.

(1) No basis for comparison.

How could one say if the basis of reality is complex or simple? This would especially be perplexing if creation has a moment in time. If God existed "before" creation (if creation is done in time then there can be a "before") as opposed to placing it in a spacial coordinate such as "beyond event horizon." In either case to what do we compare God? Let's say we have car in an eternal void of nothing. This is true absolute nothing, no vacuum flux, no germs no nothing. Just pure darkness and this care. Now how fast is it moving? Is it moving at all? Say it's 0 mph. But wait, no landmarks to measure miles, no time to measure hours, hwo can we even say it's moving at all, must less how fast? This is the same problem we have in consider God's complexity. What is complex compared to God? Does the term have a meaning. What is simple compared to the only thing that is? On the other hand suppose there's nothing but a singularity, a mathematical dot. The dot would be complex compered to nothing, but compared to us it would be simple.

(2) God is simple

Thomas Aquinas believed that God was simple, the "primary act of existence," extremely simple.

(3) Their premise contradicts evolution which has complexity coming from simplicity

Dawkins says as quoted above that evolution would mean God has to be complex and to have developed by physical laws. On the other hand evolute posits origin from extreme simplicity and the simplicity evolves into complexity. We begin the universe with a singularity and life with a single cell organism. It looks like the principle of complex from the simple is not a contradiction to evolution. Since God is not a biological organism and can't the product of a process that would suggest that God is simple and the complexity of the universe evolved. Moreover, God does not have a physical brain and thus what is it exactly that would need to be complex?

Come to that Dawkins is willing to use human data base, limited though it is, to argue absolute analogy for things beyond our observation, so why isn't he wiling to accept the notion of a contingent universe?

(4) If God was complex it would have no consequances because God is not vulnerable to the probelms of complexity

a. wont wear out no entropy

b. doesn't have to be the result of a process

Where does that leave God? The kindest thing to say is that it leaves him with nothing to do, and no achievements that might attract our praise, our worship or our fear. Evolution is God's redundancy notice, his pink slip. But we have to go further. A complex creative intelligence with nothing to do is not just redundant. A divine designer is all but ruled out by the consideration that he must at least as complex as the entities he was wheeled out to explain. God is not dead. He was never alive in the first place.

Of course I've already demonstrated quotations above that show God would still have a lot to do as the strong force, setting target levels for fine tuning. But of course there's no reason to believe God needs to do anything. This requires the notion of a God of liberal theology. When confronted with this reality Dawkins shows his true dishonestly. Dawkins seeks to head off a liberal God concept but he just can't quite bring himself to face a real one:

Now, there is a certain class of sophisticated modern theologian who will say something like this: "Good heavens, of course we are not so naive or simplistic as to care whether God exists. Existence is such a 19th-century preoccupation! It doesn't matter whether God exists in a scientific sense. What matters is whether he exists for you or for me. If God is real for you, who cares whether science has made him redundant? Such arrogance! Such elitism."

That's a straw theologian argument because no one says that. There are some who hinted at it in the 60s God is dead movement, but there are plenty of modern theologians still working and none of them really say this. Tillich certainly didn't say it. Tillich says God is a concrete reality not just a wishful thought in our minds. No theologian I know of says that. But plenty of them say that is not a big man in the sky. But Dawkins is not brave enough to take on those guys.

Well, if that's what floats your canoe, you'll be paddling it up a very lonely creek. The mainstream belief of the world's peoples is very clear. They believe in God, and that means they believe he exists in objective reality, just as surely as the Rock of Gibraltar exists.

Yea but that does not mean that it's subject to the laws of physics, which He created, nor does it mean he's a big man in the sky either.

If sophisticated theologians or postmodern relativists think they are rescuing God from the redundancy scrap-heap by downplaying the importance of existence, they should think again. Tell the congregation of a church or mosque that existence is too vulgar an attribute to fasten onto their God, and they will brand you an atheist. They'll be right.

Most of those churches don't believe God is subject physical law or the product of evolution either. Dawkin's arguemnts are convoluted, circular and dishonest he really should be selling securities and making loans for mortgage company.

Dawkins and The Atheist Straw God part 1

2011-12-21T08:27:00.000-08:00

Richard Dawkins.net posts an article:saturday setp 12, 2009

article entitled:

"Richard Dawkins argues that evolution leaves God with nothing to do"

Before 1859 it would have seemed natural to agree with the Reverend William Paley, in "Natural Theology," that the creation of life was God's greatest work. Especially (vanity might add) human life. Today we'd amend the statement: Evolution is the universe's greatest work. Evolution is the creator of life, and life is arguably the most surprising and most beautiful production that the laws of physics have ever generated. Evolution, to quote a T-shirt sent me by an anonymous well-wisher, is the greatest show on earth, the only game in town.

Here we see the atheist willing to take the prescriptive side of physical law, whereas most of them time they will demand that physical law is only descriptive. Notice how Dawkins seems offer physical law and evolution almost as an er zots alternative to God. This is practically a liturgical statement one awaits the following hymns. Yet in taking the prescriptive view Dawkins leaves his view open to my God argument "Fire in the Equasions:

Argument:

1) Naturalism assumes cause/effect.
2) c/a governed by laws of physics.

3) Laws of physics must have orgnaizing principal

4) Mind is the only example for organizing principal

5) An Organizing principal based upon Mind that creates everything is called "God."

Analysis:

1) Naturalists assume necessity of naturlaistic cause and effect (from empirical observation).

Dictonary of Philosphy Anthony Flew, article on "Materialism" "...the belief that everything that exists is ethier 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) http://www.ctns.org/Information/information.html Is the Big Bang a Moment of Creation?(this source is already linked above) "...One of the fundamental assumptions of modern science is that every physical event can be sufficiently explained solely in terms of preceding physical causes.." 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. ... sciene which is employed in their deveopment [modern thought] is based upon a philosophy which asserts that physical casation is supreme, and which disjoins the physical cause from the final end. It is not popular to dwell upon the absolute contradiction here involved."[Whitehead was an atheist]
http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gr/public/qg_qc.html Cambridge Relativity and Quantum Gravity. 1996, University of Cambridge The physical laws that govern the universe prescribe how an initial state evolves with time. In classical physics, if the initial state of a system is specified exactly then the subsequent motion will be completely predictable.

2) Therefore, if we agree with them, it is logical to assume naturalistic cause and effect as background concition to the emergence and/or production of the universe.

Dr. Sten Odenwald (Raytheon STX) for the NASA IMAGE/POETRY Education and Public Outreach program

Q:Which came first, matter or physical laws?

"We do not know, but matter is derivative from energy, and energy is derivative from 'field' so in some sense, the physical laws that determine the quantum dynamics of fields must have been primary, with matter as we know it coming much later."

3) Since physical laws would have to proceed matter/energy, they would have to reside in some organizing principle (such as a mind?) since they could not reside in the workings of universe that did not yet exist.

This leads to a Dilemma:

a) Either the laws of physics are general law like statements demanding a law giver (law implies a law giver)

b) Or they are mere tendencies which mark conventional frames of reference for our observations of the uiverse.

*If the former, than since all products of the natural world require a cause, what causes the laws of physics? It seems there must either be an infinite regress of causes for physical laws, or a single organizing principle capable of directing physical law; such as a mind?

*If the latter, than the skeptic loses the lock on scientific rationality and with it, the basis upon which to critique religious belief as “unscientific.” After all, just because we don’t notice regular tendencies toward supernatural effects does not mean that they are impossible, if physical laws are nothing but mere tendencies.
4)Major Physicists propose Unitive principle they call "God."

Meta List on Science and religion

Stephen Hawking's God

In his best-selling book "A Brief History of Time", physicist Stephen Hawking claimed that when physicists find the theory he and his colleagues are looking for - a so-called "theory of everything" - then they will have seen into "the mind of God". Hawking is by no means the only scientist who has associated God with the laws of physics. Nobel laureate Leon Lederman, for example, has made a link between God and a subatomic particle known as the Higgs boson. Lederman has suggested that when physicists find this particle in their accelerators it will be like looking into the face of God. But what kind of God are these physicists talking about? Theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg suggests that in fact this is not much of a God at all. Weinberg notes that traditionally the word "God" has meant "an interested personality". But that is not what Hawking and Lederman mean. Their "god", he says, is really just "an abstract principle of order and harmony", a set of mathematical equations. Weinberg questions then why they use the word "god" at all. He makes the rather profound point that "if language is to be of any use to us, then we ought to try and preserve the meaning of words, and 'god' historically has not meant the laws of nature." The question of just what is "God" has taxed theologians for thousands of years; what Weinberg reminds us is to be wary of glib definitions.

Ok These guys are not talking about the God of the Bible, but the fact that they do resort to organizing principle proves my basic point. They can't just leave the laws of phyiscs unexplained, they have to resort to organizing principle that ties it all up in one neat package. But why assume that principle can't be the personal God of the Bible? The rest of this Website argues that it is. But the main point here is that it is very logical to assume an organizing principle such a mind which orgainizes and contians physical laws.But "which god" is dealt with else where. at the very least this argument gives us a Spinza-like God.

5) Mind is best explanation for organizing principal.

This principal would not dwell in any location, since it must proceed the existence of all physical matter and objects. It cannot resides in any location, or in the actions of a energy and matter, since it must proceed them for them to come to be, or to exist. Mind is the only thing that explians:

a. non physical location--no topos

b. Organizing function; organizing information and sturctures. The major element of mind is organization and containment of information. Like a genetic structure has to reside in genes, where does an organizing pricipal for the universe reside? In a mind that creates the universe?

6) A mind that contians physical law can be said to be creator and thus God. Therefore,if we assume physical law there must be a "lawgiver," therefore, God exists QED

Corollary:Science cannot Explain Laws of Physics

A. Cause of Physical Laws Unknown

1)Physical Law Merely Assumed to Exist.

OFFICE OF DR. ROBERT C. KOONS Post-Agnostic Science:How Physics Is RevivingThe Argument From Design

Robert C. Koons

Associate Professor of Philosophy
University of Texas
Austin, TX 78712
koons@phil.utexas.edu

"Some have objected that the anthropic coincidences cannot be explained, since they involve the fundamental laws of nature. The laws of nature are used in explaining other things -- they themselves cannot be explained. They are rock-bottom, matters of physical necessity, immutable and uncased. This objection is sometimes based on actual scientific practice -- scientists seek to discover the laws of nature and to use these laws in constructing explanations of phenomena. They do not try to explain the laws of nature themselves. There are several points to make in response to this."

2) Skeptics object, but Some scientist now Ask.

Paul Davies, Author of God and The New Physics, and The Mind of God, skeptic turned believer due to the new evidence on design. From First Things, Tempelton Award address:

"All the richness and diversity of matter and energy we observe today has emerged since the beginning in a long and complicated sequence of self- organizing physical processes. The laws of physics not only permit a universe to originate spontaneously, but they encourage it to organize and complexity itself to the point where conscious beings emerge who can look back on the great cosmic drama and reflect on what it all means."

"Now you may think I have written God entirely out of the picture. Who needs a God when the laws of physics can do such a splendid job? But we are bound to return to that burning question:
Where do the laws of physics come from? And why those laws rather than some other set? Most especially: Why a set of laws that drives the searing, featureless gases coughed out of the big bang toward life and consciousness and intelligence and cultural activities such as religion, art, mathematics, and science?"
Koons, (Ibid.) "...It is no longer true that scientists never seek to explain the laws of nature. Much of recent cosmology and unified force theory has attempted to do that. ...even if scientists never did attempt to explain the fundamental laws, it would still be an open question whether they should do so. Finally, whether something can or should be explained is itself an empirical matter, to be decided on a case by case basis, and not on the basis of dogmatic, a priori pronouncements. The anthropic coincidences are themselves excellent evidence that the laws of nature can and should be explained. If the laws really were absolute rock bottom, inexplicable brute facts, then we would be faced with a set of inexplicable coincidences. If the only price we have to pay in order to explain these coincidences is to revise our beliefs about the rock-bottom status of physical laws, this is a small price to pay."

B. How do Physical Laws make a universe?
Stephen Barr

"The laws of physics are proposed by some, as brought out by Furgesson, as constituting a "final cause" in place of God. This view is actually suggestive of an inversion and can be turned around into an argument for the exist of God. Barr states "The more serious problem with this idea of laws of physics as necessary first cause is that it is based on an elementary confusion. At most the laws of physics could be said to be the 'formal cause' of the physical universe, whereas by first cause is meant efficient cause, the cause of its very existence. Hawking himself asked precisely the right question when he wrote 'even if there is only one possible unified theory is it just a set of rules and equations? What is it that breaths fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science constituting a mathematical model cannot answer the question of why there should be a universe for the model to describe.' That is decisive--crushing...." (in First Things)

But Dawkins has more mistakes to make in his insistence upon a atheist straw man God. I'll follow that trajectory in part II...coming soon to a blog new you.

Ironically Dawkins makes a most telling statement:

Wouldn't we be tempted to fall on our knees and worship them, as a medieval peasant might if suddenly confronted with such miracles as a Boeing 747, a mobile telephone or Google Earth? But, however god-like the aliens might seem, they would not be gods, and for one very important reason. They did not create the universe; it created them, just as it created us. Making the universe is the one thing no intelligence, however superhuman, could do, because an intelligence is complex—statistically improbable —and therefore had to emerge, by gradual degrees, from simpler beginnings: from a lifeless universe—the miracle-free zone that is physics.

Of course he thinks he's making a comment on the primitive superstitious mind and how it turns ordinary things we understand into "supernatural." But the irony is this statement really tells us more about Dawkins and the atheist than about medieval peasants. Rather than describing the mind of primitive mind it is rather a window in the atheist mind and shows what they deify; themselves, their own control of nature, their gadgetry, what the assume "primitives" would worship that they so easy understand (making them the objects of worship). It also shows us their need of God. They have jacked down the glamor of the divine from an eternal mystery to something they think have a handle upon, laws of physics, but of course they can't really tell us anything about them. Where are they kept? what makes them happen? How can they exist before there is a universe to describe? The faint trace of mystery and thus of deity lingers in Dawkin's liturgical praise of his own interests.

stupid atheist trick of the week

2011-12-17T14:42:00.000-08:00

I can't believe anyone would be this dumb. yet here it is. In a discussion on carm where an atheist is drawing an analogy between spreading the gospel and passing a chain letter (I figured "they must be hard up for hate speech if they have to use this--but the fact that it was an analogy is important) another atheist chimes in:

Not just fundies engage in chain letters. Regular ole people do. They get an email saying something like "If you believe, pass this on and you will be rewarded witernal life and ice cream every day while you count your billion dollars, or if you don't pass this on, you get dirt to eat and suffering for all eternity."

Lots of people pass it on. This has to be how Christianity started. The original chain letter. Good example, troxel.

He actually takes it literally and claims that people are really willing to pass on letter believing they get eternal life. These guys must be really hard up to find things to criticize Christianity about if they have to resort to such balderdash. This was by "Diest" who has graces these pages with similar brilliance in the past.

The Religious A prori and the Trace of God

2011-12-14T07:03:00.000-08:00

The discussion on method in the comment section of the last posts prompts me to post a couple of discussions from Metacrock's Blog that deal with theological method. Instead of proof and scientific verification of God we have the co-determinate. The co-determinate is verifiable. The relation between it and God is a matter of the religous a prori. These are understood in the sense of phenomenology.

Firt, no I The religious a prori

(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 apologetic 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 literal 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 thousands of years and observe millions of drops and then we couldn't say it was truly 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 Kuhns paradigm shift. The challenges are absorbed into the paradigm until 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 (bloodspots) 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 discardable 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 naturalistically 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 nonobservable, 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 constructs, 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 reifying 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 naturalistically, 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 reification.William James, The Verities 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-intoxication 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 inter subjective 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 correlation 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 reality the numinous and the phenomenal. The numinous is not experienced through sense data, and sense God is not experineced through sense data, God belongs only to the numinous. The problem is that this robbs 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 entreated 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.

apologetics, existence of God. Arguemnts, Philosohpy of Religious, Religious a priori

II. The Trace of God

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, phenomonology and other approaches.

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 (bloodspots) 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-detemrinate," 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-subjectvely 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-detmiernate 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 Chrisian Theology (498)

The religious a priroi deals with the speicial nature of religion as non-derivative of any other discipline, and especially it's speicial reiigious 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 discardable 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 naturalistically 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 nonobservable, 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 constructs, 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 reifying 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

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-theorectical pre-cognitive realization of what Anselm 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.

Payul 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 inter subjective 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 reality 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 estreated 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.

Anti-Intellectual Tendneicies in Atheism

2011-12-12T08:42:00.000-08:00

Adolf Von Harnack, 1851-1930
Major liberal Bible scholar

This is a statement by a troll on a Message board:

In reply to this post by jimbo
Last edited by Metacrock : Today at 03:06 PM .

Fact is, "exegesis" was developed and honed just to thwart such attacks as mine. They are just specious explanations that ARE NOT BIBLICAL! THAT IS NOT WHAT IT SAYS, FOLKS! It is what it says and not just when it is convenient for your position! I don't fall for that "commentary" BS! I now well how to read and interpret things for myself, including the Bible! What we have here is the phenonenon described in the book WHEN PROPHCY FAILS. Read it!

I realize that this guy does not represent all atheists. But I have seen many other atheists reflect this same idea. In fact the whole concept of the "Courtier's reply." This response shows such extreme ignorance. He thinks textual criticism was made up to answer atheists. That's so excessively stupid. Textual criticism of the Bible goes back well before there were any atheists to speak of (Renaissance). If one has to attach a conspiratorial reason to its existence it would be morel likely to have been invented as a means of thwarting faith in the Bible. This just has no sense of history, he knows nothing about the topic he's discussing. Textual criticism is a tool of liberal theology and liberals are perceived as "non believing." That's a wrong perception but that's the way they are seen by fundamentalists.

Atheists are always coming up with little gimmicks. Anytime you trump them with real knowledge they get up set and find a gimmick. The Jesus myth theory was such a gimmick. Jesus was such a compelling figure and there is some decent evidence he rose from the dead, so to counter that they just pretend he never existed, and give it a little name and make up some pseudo intelligent sounding crap pertaining to it. The "default" and the "extraordinary evidence credo" these are all gimmicks atheists made up and they are passed off as pseudo official sounding quasi logical tactics that in actuality mean nothing.

The latest is the Courtier's reply. This is it:

I recently referred to the "Courtier's Reply", a term invented by PZ Myers to rebut the claims of believers who insist that their superstitious beliefs are ever so much more sophisticated than the simple version that Dawkins attacks.

PZ's response deserves much more publicity because it goes to the heart of the debate between rationalism and supersition. I'm going to post his original Courtier's Reply below (without permission, but I'm sure he'll understand) but before doing so I need to remind everyone about the original fairy tale [The Emperor's New Clothes]

This is a statement by a reductionist scientism king. Larry Moran is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto. He's on a blog called Sand Walk.

So What this courtier's reply is saying is that if the skeptic says stupid things about theology and demonstrates that he knows nothing about it and the theist says "O your criticism is invalid because you don't understand what you are criticizing" then all the atheist has to do is say "that's the courtiers reply" and the theist is supposed to go "O my God, I've violated a law of logic!" and give up and stop believing in God. But in realty it's into a log of logic, I never heard it in a logic class.It's not in a logic text book, and the meaning of it is silly. I'ts just saying 'You can't point out my ignorance of theology because I will not allow theology to have any kind of validity or importance and religious people may not not any sort of human dignity." That's all it's saying. It's nothing more than anti-intellectual stupidity.

Sanders lauds PZ Myers's version of the tactic,Here is Myers statement about it:

The Courtier's Reply
by PZ Myers

I have considered the impudent accusations of Mr Dawkins with exasperation at his lack of serious scholarship. He has apparently not read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor's boots, nor does he give a moment's consideration to Bellini's masterwork, On the Luminescence of the Emperor's Feathered Hat. We have entire schools dedicated to writing learned treatises on the beauty of the Emperor's raiment, and every major newspaper runs a section dedicated to imperial fashion; Dawkins cavalierly dismisses them all. He even laughs at the highly popular and most persuasive arguments of his fellow countryman, Lord D. T. Mawkscribbler, who famously pointed out that the Emperor would not wear common cotton, nor uncomfortable polyester, but must, I say must, wear undergarments of the finest silk.

Dawkins arrogantly ignores all these deep philosophical ponderings to crudely accuse the Emperor of nudity.

Personally, I suspect that perhaps the Emperor might not be fully clothed — how else to explain the apparent sloth of the staff at the palace laundry — but, well, everyone else does seem to go on about his clothes, and this Dawkins fellow is such a rude upstart who lacks the wit of my elegant circumlocutions, that, while unable to deal with the substance of his accusations, I should at least chide him for his very bad form.

Until Dawkins has trained in the shops of Paris and Milan, until he has learned to tell the difference between a ruffled flounce and a puffy pantaloon, we should all pretend he has not spoken out against the Emperor's taste. His training in biology may give him the ability to recognize dangling genitalia when he sees it, but it has not taught him the proper appreciation of Imaginary Fabrics.

In other words, knowledge of theological subjects is just plain bull shit and it doesn't matter if Dawkins doesn't understand it because it's not worth understanding. So it's not valid criticism of him to say that. Except the problem is, if he understood theology he would see that his criticisms are wrong. The criticisms he makes are almost always about fundamentalists views. Since he refuses to accept that there are other non fundamentalist types of theology, when you point it out he just says O that's ridiculous because all theology is crap so it doesn't matter--but if he knew that he might not make the criticisms becasue they don't apply. But it's not worthing knowing that. he's just reasoning in a cirlce.

Here's his logic:

Him: religion is evil superstiion because fundies believe X

Liberal: we don't beileve x

him: that doesn't matter becasue religion is all crap no matter what. so even if you don't believe the thing I say is crap you still your own crap that must be stupid because you are religious. I know it's stupid because religion is stupid. Of course that's based on the stuff that you don't believe but that doesn't matter.

Narrow minded anti-intellectual brinkman ship in a most unsophisticated manner.

A very emotionally immature atheist tried this on me recently. Here's how it went.

Brent: All religious people believe in big man in the sky.

Me: process theology doesn't believe in big man in the sky

Brent: that's nonsesne all religous people do so they mustt.

Me; you clearly don't know enoguh about theology to say that

Brent: Courteiers reply! Courtiers' replay!

Like some magic king'x X that's suppossed to mean something. Clearly it's stupid because they are only trying to dodge the fact that their criticisms are based upon things they don't understand and that don't apply. Its' an attempt to hide their ignorance. They are committing an informal fallacy with the use of this gimmick. It's called "ipsie dixit." It means "truth by stipulation." They are saying in effect "I simply stipulate that I will not allow you to have knowledge. AT this point on your knowledge is now void becasue I declare to be so, since it's religion and religion is stupid."

Again their reasoning is quite circular since the reasons they would give for reducing religion to superstition don't' apply to modern sophisticated theology, but the fact that it can be labeled "theology" and they don't even know what that means, they stipulate that it must be stupid. So even though their reasons don't apply they just demand that they must do so any way.

Again they are merely stipulating truth and insisting they are right without any just reasons. It's idiotic to try and criticize a whole field you know nothing about. To make up for appalling ignorance they imply a third rate gimmick that is actually made up of two informal fallacies: ipsie dixit and circular reasoning.

This anti-intellectual tendency is not confined to this one tactic. The new tactick, which I have noticed for a few years now, is to deny any sort of discipline of scholarship that has developed within the theological community. So any self defense that a believer could make is automatically suspect and wrong merely becasue it is theological. But then one wonders how the skeptics knowledge that theology is all bull shit could ever have developed in the first place? When we consider the history of Biblical scholarship it becomes clear that the atheists are merely arguing in a circle.

The history of scholarship shows us that it was not invented in answer to pressing atheist attacks on the bible. There was no body of talented intelligent atheists pressing for a logical reading of the bible in the days before modern Biblical scholarship. Modern scholarship grew out of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment in answer to the re-birth of classical learning and the advancement of scientific knowledge. One of the first modern textual critics was Erasmus. Erasmus, who live din Rotterdam in the Northern Renaissance, never had a body of atheists to contend with. The major scholars who created modern Biblical scholarship in the 19th century were arch liberals and practically skeptics themselves, such as Von Harnack. So clearly scholarship is a trick to protect the bible from the "brilliant, Penetrating analysis" of these arrogant know nothing who are too lazy to read a couple of books.

This tendency in atheism, the revenge of the trolls shows the true intellectual bankruptcy of Dawkamentalism. They are actually spitting on their own roots when they say since, since modern skepticism and modern Biblical scholarship both grew out of Renaissance humanism. Clearly so when they don't even know that just ten years ago their predecessors on atheist boards (secular web for example) lauded liberal Bible scholars such as John Dominick Crosson. They will quote the Jesus seminary guys without even know these are Bible scholars, this is the product of Biblical scholarship.

Victor Stenger's Straw God Arguments

2011-11-30T06:19:00.000-08:00

The arrogance of man is no where more apparent than in the works of atheism. We have noticed over the last few years atheism has gotten stupider as it has grown more arrogant. Nowhere is this more than in the many tendencies to treat God as a big man in the sky and try to subject him to scintific analysis. This is a move that most thinkers of the century would have laughed themselves silly over. Anyone with half a brain wold have said "don't thse idiots know what all of us know as elementary, you can't second guess the nature of the divine by insisting that God operates under rules like a biological organism? Dawkins is a major pervayer of this garbage but Victor Stinger is even more so. Stinger, in his God the Failed Hypothesis, is the genius who stated the "who created God" thing, one of the hallmarks of atheist ignorance.

The method is super simple. Stenger does mess with trying t probe the heavens or reaching beyond our tiny little expousre to the world on this dust mote, he does it the "obvious way" by creating a straw man argument for God then knocking it down.

Simply Einstein
Reviews: Stenger's God, The
Failed Hypothesis.

says Victor Stenger in "God: The Failed Hypothesis." The book is subtitled, "How science shows that God does not exist." Chapter by chapter, the author shows that the existence of God would suggest certain realities in the world that would be verifiable by scientific inquiry. But the data don't support these would-be realities, thereby providing evidence that no God exists.
Stenger, retired professor of Philosophy at University of Colorado and of Physics and Astronomy at University of Hawaii, is successful in this line of reasoning because of his clearly stated definition that he is not just talking about any kind of god, but specifically the capital-g God of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition.

^ "Conspicuous by His Absence". Skeptic. April 4, 2007. http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/07-04-04.html. Retrieved 2007-10-17.

"Stenger lays out the evidence from cosmology, particle physics and quantum mechanics showing that the universe appears exactly as it should if there is no creator."

How does he reckon it should if there is no God? He constructs his own fundamentalist driven version of what God would e like. Of course he has no knowledge of that. It's really a disproof of the atheist big nightmare of the fundie God not a real disprove of anything valid.

Beyond that, which is a deal braker--becasue how you set up the iquiery in the first place determines everything-- there are other criticisms. For example his take on the issue of prayer studies. This is also proof of the "fortress of facts" concept which I am always pointing out that atheist ideology teaches. No atheist has of yet accepted the notion when I point it but it's clear that they argue from it all the time. The idea scinece gives them a big pile of facts but we believers have no facts.

Simply ibid

For instance, he tackles the question of the efficacy of prayer, in which the followers of these faiths fervently believe. If God exists, he argues, prayers could be shown to have been answered, using verifiable, replicable studies. And indeed, such studies have been conducted, with universally negative results. (Some studies, which supposedly yielded positive results, used flawed methodology and thus the conclusion is dismissible.) "If prayer were as important as it is taken to be by Jews, Christians and Muslims, its positive effects should be obvious and measurable," Stenger concludes. "They are not. It does not appear - based on the scientific evidence - that a God exists who answers prayers in any significant, observable way."

The idea that the other 14 studies that found prayer works* had "methodological flaws" but we don't say what they are, is really crucial. The real issue is the one thing that dogged those other studies which otherwise were fine was the issue of control for outside prayer. Think about it, you have two groups one is prayerd for and one is not. If the prayed for group does better that's an indication that prayer works. The problem is the people in the control group (the one's not prayed for) know people in life. The people they know might well be praying for them. The people not in the study could easily say to themselves "well old Fred needs help, he said not pray for him but he's just not a believer I'll pray anyway." Or some people pray for "everyone in the hospital" and so on. There's no way to control for outside prayer.

The irony is back in the day (the 90s) when the other studies (Byrd, Harris, Targ) were going around the atheist were arguing "you can't control for outside prayer." That was the atheist argument. The new studies were attempts to control for outside prayer. The problem is there is no way to prove that it worked. Now taht those studies show prayer didn't have an effect the atheists argue "you can certainly contorl for otuside pryer." Now I came to the conclusion that you can't. When the next study shows that prayer works they atheist will switch again, maybe i will too. The truth is just think about it, how could one ever eally control for outside prayer? What about mystics and great spiritual people who pray for everyone in the world. Billy Graham once said that every morning he prayed for everyone in the world. How could one ever be certain that the control group was selaed off form that prayer?

The assumptions that Stenger has to make to make his straw man work is that God is exactly as he wants him to be. The reviewer at Simply Einstein (ibid) defends him against the charge of straw man.

The logical purist may object that one can't "prove a negative," that one can no more disprove God than disprove the existence of Santa Claus or an invisible unicorn in the backyard. But the fact that most people do believe in God while rejecting the latter two is part of the point. Given no real reason to believe in Santa Claus or invisible unicorns, people reject such beliefs. Yet they hold tenaciously not only to belief in their God, but specifically to the tenets that their religion teaches about him. It is really these tenets that Stenger is addressing. By showing that they are wrong, like the efficacy of prayer or the notion that God fine-tuned the universe specifically for the sake of existence of humanity, the author demonstrates that belief in God is equally unfounded.

Yet this is not much of a defense. The so called "tenets" are self selected to be one's he picks out that he thinks he can beat. No religious creed or Bible passage commands us to believe on the basis of the fine tuning argument. No scientific argument can disprove the notion that God has fine tuned the universe to bear life. The only thing science can prove about fine tuning is that we can't prove it. On the other far greater scientists than Stenger say his arguments agaisnt fine tuning are not so good. The person answering mail for John Polkinghorne (formerly physicist at Cambridge second only to Hawking, who retired to be a Christian minister) says:

Stinger did some marginally useful scientific work but his claims are far too dogmatic. As for his suggestion that Anthropic Fine tuning is a non-problem because of his simplistic program MonkeyGod that purports to simulate universes and “show” that anthropic universes are commonplace, I know of no serious cosmologist who takes this seriously. Martin Rees’s “Just Six Numbers” is a good guide to the real science.

Polkinghorne himself says: I have read several of the books expressing the current outburst of militant atheism, but not the two you mention. My impression is that they are polemical rather than presenting reasoned arguments of a truth-seeking kind, and that they largely depend upon attacking caricature distortions of religious belief.

Others find the straw man to be Stenger's usual method, such as David Sharf, received his Ph.D. in 1986 from Johns Hopkins University, in the philosophy of physics. The title of his dissertation was: Quantum Mechanics and the Program for the Unity of Science:

Stenger—a retired physicist who is leveraging his scientific background to try to discredit anything and everything that smacks of spirituality—doesn’t respect his intellectual opponents enough to get their positions right; in some instances he appears to deliberately misrepresent their views; and, most important, his own reasoning is characterized by unremitting carelessness. Moreover, there is a method to his carelessness—it enables him to systematically avoid addressing the tough arguments of his opponents. Hence we find him frequently setting up a straw man by misrepresenting the debate as a simple matter of science and reason versus superstition. Once having defined this as the issue, all he needs to do is assume the attitude of an outraged scientist and heap on the ridicule. But if he had done his homework and taken the trouble to really understand the science and logic supporting quantum spirituality, he would have discovered that it is harder to dismiss than he had imagined. Indeed, the more carefully—and yes, critically—one considers the issues, the more one finds quantum spirituality to
be eminently worthy of serious consideration, as a plausible and measured approach to the most long-standing and intractable questions at the basis of science.

Stenger doesn't deal with what I consider to be the major God arguments, the ground of being stuff of Tillich and Schleiermacher. Like most of the cult of atheism he's in thrall to his own version of science which is laced with metaphysics. Like most of them they think they are being scientific and philosophical when they denounce philosophy and theology and talk about how scinece is the only form of knowledge, then they are bringing ontology in through the back door to put fiber into their world view. Stenger's straw man making is standard procedure for the new atheist. They are always spitting out some line with a dashing air of how theology is stupid so they don't have to read it. They know it's stupid even though they haven't read any. The whole point of showing they haven't read is usually becuase they are getting the ideas wrong but they never seem to care.

Is Christianty Dying Out? Part 2: Will We Lose the Next Generation?

2011-11-27T15:25:00.000-08:00

The other day on a message board an atheist confidently asserted to me that Christianity will be gone in one generation. He asserted that the next generation is going to just leave chruch in mass and that will be the end of it. He also asserted that studies by Ken Ham proves this scientifically. He talked like Ham is an atheists but he's actually a Christian minister and his goal is stop the mass defection.The implicit correlary to the guy's argument is that if they are leaving chruch they are becoming atheists.

Already Gone: Why your Kids will quite chruch
and what you can do about it

If you look around in your church today, two-thirds of the young people who are sitting among us have already left in their hearts; soon they will be gone for good.
This is the alarming conclusion from a study Answers in Genesis commissioned from America's Research Group, led by respected researcher Britt Beemer. The results may unnerve you - they may shake long-held assumptions to the core-but these results need to be taken seriously by the church. Already Gone reveals:
Why America's churches have lost an entire generation of believers
The views of 1,000 twenty-somethings, solidly raised in the church but no longer attending-and their reasons why

Ham's studies are real and the results are troubling.

NNYM post

"Are we losing Teens

before graduation?"

Are we losing teens while they are still right in front of us?

According to a study by Ken Ham, founder and president of Answers in Genesis, we’re losing the next generation of believers before they even graduate from high school (details here).

He found that:

95 percent of 20- to 29-year-old evangelicals attended church regularly during their elementary and middle school years. Only 55 percent went to church during high school. And by college, only 11 percent were still attending church.
Nearly 40 percent of the surveyed twentysomethings first had doubts about the Bible in middle school. Another 43.7 percent said they first doubted that all of the accounts and stories in the Bible are true during their high school years. Only around 10 percent said they first became doubtful about the Bible accounts during college.

What do you think? Are we losing teens, even while they are still attending church?

The issue in the min of the atheist is that atheism is going to grow and replace Christianity as the major world view. We do need to be finding reasons why this is happening and work on keeping young people interested in the faith. For me that does not translate into going to church per se. I'm not trying to persuade anyone to stop chruch. My concern is just for now that this is not the end of belief in God or even of Christianity by any means. This atheist is making the same mistake that pollsters make in assuming that non chruch affiliation means atheist. It does not. The young people still have a great deal of belief.

by Metacrock on Sun Apr 18, 2010 8:59 am

from the Pew article about their study linked in the article Fleet quoted:

Pew Forum Religion Among the Millennials

Yet in other ways, Millennials remain fairly traditional in their religious beliefs and practices. Pew Research Center surveys show, for instance, that young adults' beliefs about life after death and the existence of heaven, hell and miracles closely resemble the beliefs of older people today. Though young adults pray less often than their elders do today, the number of young adults who say they pray every day rivals the portion of young people who said the same in prior decades. And though belief in God is lower among young adults than among older adults, Millennials say they believe in God with absolute certainty at rates similar to those seen among Gen Xers a decade ago. This suggests that some of the religious differences between younger and older Americans today are not entirely generational but result in part from people's tendency to place greater emphasis on religion as they age.
A Note on Sources
and Methods

This report is based on data from a variety of sources, including Pew Research Center surveys, which are used primarily to compare young adults with older adults today. General Social Surveys and Gallup surveys are used primarily for cohort analysis, which compare young adults today with previous generations when they were in their 20s and early 30s. While the surveys explore similar topics, exact question wording and results vary from survey to survey.

Present-day comparisons are made between adults ages 18-29 and those 30 and older. By contrast, the cohort analysis define generations based on respondents’ year of birth. There is significant - but not complete - overlap between the two approaches. That is, in the present-day analysis, depending on the year of the survey being analyzed, some in the 18-29 age group are actually young members of Generation X (defined here as those born from 1965 to 1980) and not true members of the Millennial Generation (defined here as those born after 1980).

In their social and political views, young adults are clearly more accepting than older Americans of homosexuality, more inclined to see evolution as the best explanation of human life and less prone to see Hollywood as threatening their moral values. At the same time, Millennials are no less convinced than their elders that there are absolute standards of right and wrong. And they are slightly more supportive than their elders of government efforts to protect morality, as well as somewhat more comfortable with involvement in politics by churches and other houses of worship.

It's a big mistake to think that young people represent the same views they will hold in middle age. It's common that their rates of disaffection for traditional affiliation will be higher in youth than in middle age.

Notice on the chart at the bottom of the page on the Pew article it shows the percentages for young people. the total for 18 to 29 is 68%. That's the general Christian category. Meaning all Christian groups taken together. Note: the chart is showing not the percentage of identification but the percentage of young who accept Bible as literal word of God!

Total for over 30 81%

18-20

for Evangelical 22%

Mainline 12%

30+ 27

19 respectively.

The older group always has a higher level of identification to the group. Look at the chart it's true across the board.

What we see above shows that Generation X is increasing (somewhat) it's identification, we find that the older generations are always more identified with an institution or tradition than young people. young people in America still possess the core values necessary for Christianity.

Notice that the charts in the article from the blog were not about the percentage identification but the percentage of young people believing the Bible is literal and inerrant. When the Pew article shows us their worth with young people we find 18-30 is still above 60%. It goes up as the ages go up. What this tells us is, it's not slipping that far with the youth and it's not hopes that they will come back as they get older.

The actual figure (pew) of percentage of disaffected is 22% and that does represent a doubling of the 70s. The 70s were the "Jesus freak ear" the great revival the Charismatic movement began. We should not expect that to be the norm of participation of youth a religious tradition. So we really shouldn't care the current era to the 70s. There is cause for concern and the disaffection I would think is lately due to hypocrisy. There is always going to be hypocrisy in the chruch, the Regan era galvanized the fundamentalists for the right wing making it worse.

The pew study shows an age distribution for religious traditions. There is a table. It shows that among 18-20 year olds 31% are in the unaffiliated category. While in 30-49 year old group 40% are in the unaffiliated. In other words the unaffiliated went down 10% between those two age groups. That means fewer young people are unaffiliated. why is that not the end of unaffiliated?

None of this indicates dying out of Christianity.

Here's an exchange on my board with a guy called "Ophir's Gopher"

OG

It's definitely morphing into something unrecognizable and far more liberal.

Meta:
I doubt that. O am I know it will eventually. Its' done it before. A Christian Palestine in 332 would not recognize a Christian from England in 1242, who would not recognize a Christian in Teas in 1852 who would not understand or recognize me and I believe.

There was a time when the average popular conception of Christianity was that you had to die for your faith to go to heaven. change is not death. It doesn't' matter how it changes the reality of God is there.

That was my point all along. Perhaps these religions aren't dying. Maybe only the dogmatic/fundamentalist core is collapsing. either way, it's incredibly interesting to watch and certainly nothing to be threatened by or depressed about. This is a good thing, and I'm priveledged to see it happening.

Meta

Yea, I'll go along with that.

That's what I think it shows. It's the rigid fundies who are declining. While the stats in Seminary they told us about showed the Methods were in big decline and the charismatics growing that's affilciation with membership, but the figures at the same time indicate that the ideas about religion are changing. They are not changing in the sense that young people are becoming atheist. Yes they are disillusions with fundamentalism and with churches. That doesn ot equate to giving up belief in God.

quick glance at carm

2011-11-26T08:45:00.000-08:00

Here's an honest appeal I made on carm to the atheists to actually discuss ideas rather than try to insult personal wounds on individuals. How will these "free thinkers" respond? First I pointed out a local contradiction. Then I though in an appeal to reason.

Meta:

I see a thread that says "God is losing on CARM" the idea behind it is that the arguments the atheists have are better they win the arguments.

Several people in worming out of debating me have said "debate is no good, it doesn't prove anything."

the kind of argument we have that the first comment refers to is not as systemic or rule governed thus not as orderly or valid as a formal debate. So if winning those arguments means that atheism is winning that would mean that debate would be an even better way to know truth.

debate is better because you have to be a gentleman and not insult and not get off on tangents.

If the first statement is true (atheists winning) then the second statement (debate is no good) can't be true. this is a contradiction.

In reality it's my feeling that it's sophomoric to worry about who is "winning." We should not be seeking to show "i am smarter" but merely to find truth.

I am truly not seeking to just beat up on people to show how smart I am. Yes it's a habit I've gotten into through the need to defend myself. Yet it's a bad habit and one I'm trying to break.

I would rather discuss and learn than to "win." I suggest that worrying about who wins is sophomoric.

I want discussion not competition. I assume I can learn form anyone.

If one is really intelligent one will learn form any and all encounters with other humans.

Madmax:

Your persecution complex is far beyond ridiculous.

Assuiedave

Debate WITH accompanying evidence is how we decide court rulings. It is good enough for our justice system, it is good enough for us all.

Gentlemen don't repeatedly infer that the other person is silly either.

As I stated above, debate with accompanying evidence is sufficient. So if the debate your debaters were referring to in your op was lacking in said evidence, then that debate was likely "no good".

You are only average in intelligence Meta - you are just experienced at your form of debate, giving you the self-delusion of above average intelligence.

Meta:

gentle don't' deflect the augment form reaosn to belittle individuals every chance they get. Gentlemen don't pu up websites saying "people who agree with me have IQ's than those who don't." Gentlemen don't mock and ridicule the sacred beliefs of others just because they disagree with them.

gentlemen don't substitute lies and innuendo for study methodology. they don't pretend to know all about a whole body of academic work when they have no read a single study in that body of work.

Not a single one of you has ever made a single ethological analysis of any study.

My IQ is 142. that's not average. You have no knowledge of me. you dot' know who I am or who my family is. you have no knowledge of my history. you are totally wrong about that. your judgment is based entirely upon your need to bleieve that you are smarter than religious people because you hate yourself and you hate god for making you as you are.

why you would think that my op which open and honest an invitation to friendship and discussion needs to met with ridicule and abasement and putting down is just so telling. you are the epitome everything I'm denouncing aren't' you?

you don't want discussion you don't want friendship you need desperately to prove that you are smarter than religious people.

Keith

Imagine how many case of carpel tunnel syndrome the Christian God could prevent by coming down from the sky once a year to visit his earthling children so that atheists and Christians would not have to type for hours on end debating his existence. The Christian God obviously does not care about carpel tunnel syndrome which proves he does not love us.

what does this tell us students? they immediately go for the jugular and attack the person rather than answering the contraction.

they have this grappling contradiction there but instead of answering it they go "you are not good. yo ear a no goodnkci,k you are bad, we don't like you." that's not an answer is it?

they can't answer it.

being an atheist is not about thinking or reasoning it's about hate.

Is Christianity Dying out? What do the Stats REALLY show?

2011-11-22T09:04:00.000-08:00

Many atheists seem agree with this idea, it's the fruit of bogus atheist social sciences.

On my board Doxa Forums

by Ophir's Gopher on Sat Apr 17, 2010 1:10 am

I never thought I'd witness it in my lifetime. We're actually witnessing the death of the major fear-based religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It's fascinating and beautiful to behold these creeds collapsing under the weight of dogmatic fundamentalism and completely untenable perceptions of reality. Pick any Abrahamic religion, and I can explain how it undid itself and why, at least in its current state, it cannot gain back any of the momentum it had. These modes of belief are dying; if they are not dying then they are simply evolving into extremely liberal beliefs that are a vapor of what they once were.

On poster sites an article, from Daily Kos Blog "Beleif in God Pumbits among younger generation."
by Ukit

Sat Apr 17, 2010 at 01:17:48 PM PDT

In reading the article one can see things are not always what they seem.

that article quotes my Pew study and shows a rise from 90s to the oughts. So it's actually going up for generation X. That's going to be important latter. At this point observe the optimism of atheists in the past have led them to misread studies:

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! He failed to read the decimal.

(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.

___________________________________

new piece:

More Christian Found in Japan

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.

Christians, please help boycot the ridicule artists.

2011-11-17T07:41:00.000-08:00

I've been trying for years to start a serious boycott of atheists on message boards. we should just totally refuse to talk to them as long as they play their little stupid games of mocking and ridicule.

Look at this little game they play. They ask a serious question, then you try to answer it they just mocking. Of course the carm admins have to bear a huge load of the guilt becuase they wont stop it. I stopped all such behavior on my boards. No one my boards ever asks that way. That's becuase I said in the very beginning "I will not allow this." Of cosrue the price I pay for that is that I have very few active members. Yet most of them highly intelligent so we have great discussions and no pissing contexts.

On carm thread:
"why is God good."

It has just occurred to me that when arguing for the existence of God, his moral perfection is just kind of assumed. The standard god arguments give you a bare theistic god, which could be completely benevolent, malevolent, or some where in between like us. I would say it appears the latter is true.

So I am interested, what arguments or evidence do Christians have for a maximally good god?

Occam tried a brilliant answer about eternal values being simpler, but it needs his defense badly because I don't understand what he's thinking, it sounds like he has some thought behind it. He's not around to defend it. So I made my own answers:

Meta:

Lance, one doesn't have to extract all of one's beliefs about god from whatever argument one uses to argue for the existence of God. It's not like that argument becomes the whole religious tradition in itself. it's just a beach head for belief its meant to replace beliefs. I think that assumption may come from the assumption that philosophy is like a scientific experiment and it's done to determine how things turn out. Of course that's a false assumption.

philosophical arguments are just arguments. We assume God is good in Christian tradition as part of revelatory truth about the nature of God. then we do our own correlation bewteen the argument and the God of the tradition.

the philosophical argument is just a attempt to give the non believer some sort of stepping stone through which he/she can grasp the belief. What we already got through phenomenological means.

Immediately the hate Metacrock squad begins their little antics.

Accelerator:

That makes sense to me. I use philosophical arguments to help a-Leprechaunists to understand my relationship with the Great Leprechaun who lives on the moon.

I resort to shame:
Meta:

Of course you are think you really made a big clever point but all I see is when you are confronting with thinking you fold up and start insulting because you can't really unction on an intellectual level can you?

this guy ask a question. I tried to answer it. so that make really really stupid because I believe something Soyuz don't' believe hu?

that's an excuse to mock if you are real stupid and you can't think about the issues.

stupid people resort to mocking ideas they can't comprehend.

you want this level of animosity don't you? You don't want meaning and understanding because you know that atheism can't compete intellectually with real ideas.

he continues:
Accelerator

If you had the Great Leprechaun in your life you wouldn't be so hateful. I know you don't believe me, but that's because you haven't had the same phenomenological experiences that I have had.

then we are off to the races, it's becoming a rieicule gauntlet, meaning a feeding frenzy of similar stupidity.

Deist
(who is no deist)

Has anyopne ever proved that you didn't have a Great Leprechaun in your life? How can they say he doesn't exist iof they can't disprove him. A certain Chaplain here using that reasoning, and if he can use it, I don't see why you can't. Mormonism was started with just one guy, whom "god" chose to reveal himself to. Now, Mormons, who fall under the protective Christian umbrella, number in the millions. Their apologists make a very compelling case, too. The Great Leprechaun? Is he as mean as the Christian God?

He's just continuing the taunt and no mention of the serious attempts to answer the question.
Of course this is because they can't answer it. They can't deal with ideas. The atheist movement doesn't exist to answer questions and find turth, it exists to give the members a feeling of power when they bully the targeted hated group (Chrsitians).

We are only giving them the opportunity to play their little games when we try to engage them in real discussion.

there's this one called "phizzel" who just spits back song lyrics at me as it fo say "you are usless you can't think you are not worth a real response."

phizzal

If God exists and is omnipotent then he sets the moral standard. To question his moral perfection would imply that there were a set of moral guidelines that he had to follow himself and that would mean that he wasn't God. If God were to, say, decide that it was morally justified to eat tacos made of babies then eating tacos made of babies would be morally justified.

One of the most compelling reasons against the Christian God, IMHO, is Christian mistreatment of homosexuals. In our modern society there is absolutely no practical reason that homosexuals should not be allowed to do as they please but God abhors them so to even condone what they do makes you a Godless heathen who will burn in hell since you are disagreeing with God.

in response I said this, which I meant as a totally serious comment:

Christianity is a hospital. The patients in this hospital sometimes, when they start getting better become cocky and start thinking they are superior to all the people who have not gotten treatment yet. So that's a human mistake because the hospital treats humans, so the patients getting are still human.

That doesn't make the hospital bad or the treatment unnecessary.

God doesn't set the moral standard arbitrarily. It's based upon his character of love.

in my foolish little foolish thinking that is being magnanimous to admit that we are sick. Not enough for little selfish monster who has to have it all his own way.

he says:

Drunk driving is no joke
It is no accident
Drunk driving can get you into a collision
It can also get you killed for the gravedigger

-Wesley Willis

that's the only response he makes to me. To me that just says he is not looking for answers he' just a little game playing monster who can't think. We should be boycotting these guys becuase we need to cut off their supply endorfins. they get high from bullying Christians. so let's stop giving them Chritians to bully.

Atheist Outdoes His Movement in Stupdity.

2011-11-15T03:52:00.000-08:00

atheist study theology

Someone who doesn't list his name, writing on a blog called "Why Evolution is True" wins the prize for stupid atheist tricks. He's talking about how he's reading theology, so he knows it's really stupid becuase he's reading it so he sees it's stupid. How does he know it's stupid? He doesn't understand it! Of course, if you don't understand it then it must be stupid. It can't possibly be that you haven't learned enough to understand what it's talking about can it?

Under the tutelage of the estimable Eric MacDonald, I have spent several weeks reading Christian theology. And so far, I have learned only three things:

1. I am spending my middle age reading drivel about beliefs that have no basis in fact. This seems a total waste of time. I could be reading books about real things instead.

2. Theologians can’t write. A lot of what they have to say is postmodern or obscure bafflegab, and I’m starting to believe that this obscurantism is deliberate because of reason 3 (below). I have for example, just opened my book (An Introduction to Christian Theology, edited by Roger A. Badham) to a random chapter, which turned out to be “Process theology and the current church struggle” by John B. Cobb, Jr. (Process theology holds that god is not immutable but changes over time, and so does his creation, not totally under his direction.) And there I find this, in a discussion of Alfred North Whitehead (one of the founders of this “school”):

But each occasion transcends the causality of the past by responding to it with more or less originality. This requires that physical prehensions are supplemented by “conceptual” ones. Thus, in addition to prehending past events, an occasion also takes account of possibilities ingredient in those events or closely related to them. Just how it relates these possibilities to the actualities it feels is its “decision.” That means that in a situation that is inherently indeterminate, there is a determinate outcome Other possibilities are cut off.

Believe me, the book contains paragraphs far more obscure and pretentious than this one. Can you imagine reading this stuff night after night? Do you see why my head feels about to explode? Eric, why are you doing this to me?

3. There seems to be no “knowledge” behind theology, and I haven’t learned anything—not even any clever philosophy. One gets the strong sense when reading theology (and granted, I am biased) that everyone is just making stuff up.

Get that last paragraph. Weeeeeeellll dogies Uncle Jed, there ant no learn'n's thar cause I ant learned nutt'n.

Of course he doesn't know who Alfred North Whitehead was because only an idiot uneducated hick would think there's NO learning behind something Whitehead helped to start. Whitehead was an atheist and Bertram Russell's partner in Pricipia Mathematics which is one of hte most advanced books ever written. what a fool one one have to be to make such dumbass assumptions.

Can't we see at this point what's going on? This is a movement of little unlearned louts who are angry as hell because learned people are getting away with something by being learned. They are just rebelling against against education. It's not about religion it's about hating learning. What kind of fool would assume that the whole 2000 year old tradition is transparent and if you don't get it and tape into it anytime you read any product of it then there's nothing there?

I'm telling you, I went ot seminary for three years. I studied process theology. It's utterly idiotic to say there's no learning there. The problem with it is clear too much learning. It's not transparent becasue there's so much there you need a full four year education in general liberal arts and scinece just to understand enough to be a beginning. The quote he uses above I guess sounds like gibberish to him. It has a meaning. I agree that process theology is bad about off putting language and dense think paragraphs with huge antecedent principles that have to be drug out which lie hiding behind innocent seeming phrases. A lot of seminary work seems designed to put off the unwary the uncommitted. I would echo that as a criticism of modern theology, it's the opposite of inviting, it's off putting. Yet it is just pure stupidity to say there's no learning behind it. Especially since his reason for saying it seems to be that the stuff isn't transparent to him; it doesn't even dawn on him that it might just because he's far enough along in educational achievement to understand advanced ideas. How does this guy respond to non theological philosophy?

Judging from the fact that he seems to think that proving evolution true is disprove of God, and that any sort of criticism of religion is a proof of evolution (the title the blog "why evolution is true" presumably refers to all the material on the blog) indicates that he doesn't know shit from shinola about theology or religion. One must know a lot of philosophy to understand process thought. One needs Hegel to understand process, and Hegel is pretty complex. I would be willing to get this guy has never read a page of Hegel of Whitehead.

The quote listed above is no the starting point for process. Before one can understand that quote one must learn a vocabulary specific to the process theology. "Occasions" are a specific concept for the process thinker. They deal with the appearance of entities in reality. What we are talking about here is sub atomic particles.

Boston Collaborative Encyclopedia
of Western Theology
Alred North Whitehead
Editor: Derek Michaud,
incorporating material by
David L. McMahon (1999).

Whitehead's metaphysical vision is grounded in the primacy of experience of the world. It thus seeks to unify in one conceptual scheme the perennial problems of the One and the Many, subjective and objective reality, and dynamic and substantive understandings of entities. The experience to which Whitehead looks is not merely the sensory experience of self-conscious organisms. Rather, such experience is seen as a rather complex and high-order manifestation of an even more fundamental form of experience. This primordial experience is the experience of becoming and of creativity, the experience of the world as a process in which each individual participates. It is an experience of both profound relationship, of contingency, of the dependence of the self upon the cast history of our cosmic epoch. Yet it is an experience which is subjective. While conditioned by the past, the individual experiences freedom in self-determination. Subjectivity and creativity are the fundamental characteristics of reality.

The fundamental constituent of reality for Whitehead is the actual occasion, sometimes termed the actual entity or occasion of experience. "'Actual entities' - also termed 'actual occasions' - are the final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real" (PR, 18). Actual occasions constitute the basic fabric of our reality. The laws which govern our reality, indeed time and space itself, are the products of the history of actual occasions in our cosmic epoch. Each occasion is an atomic and concrete entity. A useful analogy for the actual occasion is the pixel on a computer screen. The broader patterns are made up of individual points. Each point has an existence, a facticity of its own, but each also contributes to the elaboration of more complex structures. Reality is the coming into existence of such occasions. The world thus envisioned is dynamic, bubbling over everywhere with outbursts of creativity. Hand in hand with this vision of a dynamic reality grounded in actual occasions is the ontological principle. Whitehead states this principle in a variety of ways: "All real togetherness is togetherness in the formal constitution of an actuality" (PR, 32); "It is the principle that everything is positively somewhere in actuality, and in potency everywhere" (PR, 40). Perhaps the clearest explanation is Whitehead's simple assertion that, "The ontological principle can be summarized as: no actual entity, then no reason" (PR, 19). That is, to be real and to exert influence is to exist in an actual entity. As we shall see, the ontological principle is fundamental to the necessity of God in Whitehead's system.

From there my understanding of process is too weak to disclose the rest of the quote. What I do know is the stupidity of starting with that quote. One can make mathematics seem pretty stupid by starting with the advanced stuff.

E = mc2 what does that mean uncle Jed? that's just a bunch of hanckern's after what ant never was.

The new atheist movement is about ignorant uneducated people taking revenge upon educated people for their success. They lean to worship science and vest everything in scinece as the only form of knowledge, since they know nothing of philosophy, literature, art, or any other matter, they must tell themselves they are brilliant for hating God (atheism is about low self esteem) then they must wind up hatted education and wanting to destroy liberal arts. Their rebellion agaisnt religion and theology is just the place where the rubber meets the road in their lives; that's where the educated have rubbed their noses in it.

Here's a pretty intelligent article about Whitehead's ideas by someone who understands them and isn't reading them just to put them down.

from that article:

At Cambridge, Whitehead's formal studies were quite focused. He writes that "during my whole undergraduate period at Trinity, all my lectures were on mathematics, pure and applied. I never went inside another lecture room. But the lectures were only one side of the education" (Whitehead 1947, 7). Whitehead cultivated a coterie of close friends in a variety of disciplines, and they would spend their nights in lively discussion of a wide range of topics. Whitehead became particularly enamored of philosophy, claiming to have committed sections of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason to memory, and writing that "I have never been able to read Hegel: I initiated my attempt by studying some remarks of his on mathematics which struck me as complete nonsense" (ibid.).

Whitehead was awarded a fellowship at Trinity and began to teach there in 1885. He would continue to teach there, eventually rising to the position of Senior Lecturer, until 1910. During his tenure, Whitehead would make two acquaintances which would greatly influence his personal and intellectual development. First, in 1890, Whitehead married Evelyn Willoughby. The impact of Evelyn's presence in his life has often been cited by admirers and biographers, although it is perhaps best to let Whitehead speak for himself on the subject.

Yes there ant no learning behind Whithead feller's work. He's just one of stupid theology guys whut ant never been to school, like I have with my amazing six grade edgeamacation.

Stupid Monkey Responds

2011-11-12T04:25:00.000-08:00

atheist reasoning is circular: like
a dog chasing it's tial

He starts out by saying "you are dense" to me. It turns out he's saying it because he doesn't know what circular reasoning is, so he's just saying that since I don't cow tow to a bunch of badly understood atheist slogans such as "the believer has the burden of proof" which had nothign to do with the circular reasoning issue. Now he comes back demonstrates even more ignorance about the major points of contention for Atheistwatch.

Stupid Monkey

Another comment that you made that I must address is that atheism is an ideology. Although you have (or claim to have) a PHD in theology, I see things still have to be defined for you.
An ideology is a set of aims and ideas, especially in politics. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things (compare Weltanschauung), as in common sense (see Ideology in everyday society below) and several philosophical tendencies (see Political ideologies), or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to all members of this society.

Ideology is more than aims and beliefs. I have actually quoted other sources in defining it.

Wiki defeines it as:

i·de·ol·o·gy/ˌīdēˈäləjē/

Noun:

A system of ideas and ideals, esp. one that forms the basis of economic or political policy: "the ideology of republicanism".
The ideas and manner of thinking of a group, social class, or individual: "a critique of bourgeois ideology".

That's hardly the most authoritative. I did say nothing that would contradict the idea that ideology is a set of ideas and aims. He's actually to criticize my understanding of it knowing about my understanding of it.

Webster's online:

Definition of IDEOLOGY

: visionary theorizing

a : a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture b : a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture c : the integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program

— ide·ol·o·gist \-jist\ noun

See ideology defined for English-language learners »

See ideology defined for kids »

This is a far cry from his assertion that atheism is just the absence of a belief. Take his definition of ideology asw ideas and aims, that's more than just the absence of a belief. So when I say that atheism is an ideology am I contradicting his definition? No, nor is his definition an argument agaisnt my assertion that atheism is an ideology. they have a set of ideas and aims that they are working to enact, the destruction of religion, and the totalitarian control of ideas and thinking in relation to reality.

this whole website is proof that atheism is an ideology. All one need do is read the site to see that I've proved over and over again.

Atheism is simply a nonbelief in a deity.

that's bull shit. I've disproved it over and over again. Go the ideology page on my site "on the Barricades" where I list the greatest hits of Atheistwatch.

Ideology of the New Atheist Movement
Marxist writer for the Guardian points out the
New Atheist Ideology.

Clear and Present Danger
atheist attitudes toward mocking and ridicule of opponents
cross references on "Atheist hate and bullying."

Orwellian Atheism
several articles on how atheist propaganda uses
language and it's similarity to George Orwell's
totalitarians.

Atheists Use Mocking and Ridicule as Brian Washing
This is how they brain wash on message board, through the use of
mocking and ridicule.
see more on mocking and ridicule as brain washing under organized
hate and bullying.

That's it, plain and simple. What sir, I ask you, does this make you believe atheism falls into this category?

I have proved that it does. read the articles. read the website. The several hundred spots on this blog from a gain patchwork that proves it.

Please don't make the common mistake that most do. Do not combine things like Secularism, humanism and Naturalism to atheism. Can atheist be those things; yes. Are they mutually exclusive to one another? The fact that you think they are shows your ignorance no matter what level of education you claim to have.

That's just part of the propaganda of atheism to deny their complicity. Obviously those are all the same. Who are naturalists? they are atheist. what philosophy do atheists share? naturism. Most of they are humanists although there are anti- humanitist atheist. There is no orgaized clearr cut philosophy of naturalism in America. So that' just a catch all phrase and mos of the people it would apply to are atheists.

The rest of your comment is nothing but blathering ranting about social atheistic agendas with nothing to back it up. Small minded insults from a small mind.

You have such a great track record of ignoring ideas and not getting the point, when you say this it's a sure sign you don't understand. you are just erasing the evidence fo my view probably.
You can't deal with something that's over your head so like a child you call it stupid and tell it to get a life, that way you don't have to read about it.

Now on to your original blog post. Yes you have a point; circular reasoning and burden of proof are NOT the same thing. Yeah, duh! The contrived example you give of atheistic circular reason is set up specifically to put one point of argument in a light that favors your point of view and is not a real representation of an argument. The argument would go more like,

well Duh that's the point I was making! That was the issue I was dealing with. It's pretty wide spread since it covers the whole naturalistic rejection of miracles, SN and anything not naturalistic and not in their ideology.

you come on with that stupid atheist all purpose attack "you have the burden of proof." which is misapplied because that does not mean that anything I say it automatically unproved. Secondly, becuase it's not true except the rare circumstanced that I claim to be able to prove something. The burden of proof for any argument is always with the person who asserts the argument. A lot of atheists think the believer in God always has the burden to prove God exists before rationality can attributed to that person as a whole. That's errant nonsense. It applies if you say "I can prove God exits."

If you say "God does not exist" you have the burden to prove he does not exist. He who asserts an argument must prove that argument!

Atheist: "there is nothing beyond the materiel realm. There are no proof of the SN, No evidence for God, no nothing.

Believer--Here's some, here's a whole pile facts from which one might deduce the existence of God.

Atheist: "those can't be evidence for SN or for God." <--this is the change. The question is then, what pile of fact do you have. Show them to me.

Your base has a structural fallacy and you know it.

nope that is the way the conversation had developed on message boards over and over again. I've done it hundreds of times. I've been arguing with atheits on boards since 1998 and I've had conversation at least several hundred times.

I do find it hilarious as you sit there on your computer (which science has given you)

this is anther stupid little bromide atheists use. ti's meaningless but they think it's cleaver. that in itself should prove they are intellectually inferior to Christians. why should I be grateful to science as though it's some kind of god or deity giving me a blessing of the computer? If the atheist world view is true, there's no deity called "science" to be grateful too, and there's no deity of fortune that conspired to make computers. There's only human intelligence that figured it out. There's more to that statement. their basic reason for making it that they think it backs the fortress of facts. They are saying "hey this is proof that we have the scientific facts on our side becasue we can prove science works, since we have this gadget and ou can't prove God works becuase God believers didn't make computers. (which is an assertion they can't prove).

The basic assumption here is (1) science gives them a fortress of facts, works for them and not for believers.

(2) that the fortress of facts proves they have all the facts on their side.

(3) science is somehow atheist.

All of these concepts are fallacious. Science is not a fortress of facts, it's not intrinsically atheist it's not anti-religious and it doesn't' prove anything about the atheist world view that computers work.

If we want to be grateful for scinece let's be grateful to God who gave us brains so we can invent scinece and discover his creation.

Here's a statement me makes that's going to confirm my assertions about his statements above.

and knock the validity of it. Is science the only truth? Perhaps not for there are no absolute truths. But for practical reasons, yes science is the only truth that can be validated and tested. Your belief in jeebus cannot be. Atheism is not a belief, religion or ideology.

where is your proof that there are no absolute truths? He who makes an argument prove it. So where is the proof? "Science is the only truth that can be validated and tested." This is a total misunderstanding of the nature of scinece. We validate scientific concepts through verification and falsification because we can't prove them. That's what Popper says about scientific proof, all we can really do is disprove we can't actually prove anything. Science is not a big fortress of facts. The fortress of facts concept is selective. It excludes facts and scientific work that disproves atheist concepts. When you find something like the 300 studies that prove religious participation is good for you they dismiss them compelled without investigation.

but the whole argument I originally made about circular reasoning of naturalism also proves this. They are not disproving miracles, they aren't proving that miracles don't happen, they are dismissing miracle claims dogmatically because they don't jibe with their ideology of naturalism. He does nothing at all to disprove this. All he's doing is diverting our attention form the original issue by inserting the stand athist propaganda slogans about being grateful to scinece.

then to prove how cleaver he is he profanes the name of his savior which is in emulation of Homer Simpson. That's a fitting comparison, this guy who doesn't understand the issues he's playing into is so proud to bel ike Homer Simpson.

The fact that you state an atheist agenda is purely absurd. Let me ask you this. Scientist have been looking for the answers for centuries now. As it is not a perfect system, yes findings are changed and reevaluated on the facts and evidence that are in existence. Science is fluid in its pursuit of knowledge, not static.

This bull shit betrays a total ignorance of scinece. The idea that scinece is looking for some batch of propaganda called "the answers" implies that there's some single set of truths that open up the universe for us and explain everything. He's already ruled that out by saying there's no absolute truth. When blessed by the scientific quest this conglomeration of non absolute turth somehow becomes 'the answers!" what does this mean but that they have an ideology!

That is not scinece. Science has not board of elders that set's out a unified quest for "the answers." That is ideology. Convoluted, historically tainted, derivative of 1939 world's fair reasoning.

If any evidence was good enough to be viewed as life changing, where are the peer review papers, the journals etc.

In the journal articles that I site obviously. You might try reading the evidence for a change. It's in a little thing I like to "old no 7." No 7 on my God argument list, argument co-determinate.

Research Summary

From Council on Spiritual Practices Website

"States of Univtive Consciousness"

Also called Transcendent Experiences, Ego-Transcendence, Intense Religious Experience, Peak Experiences, Mystical Experiences, Cosmic Consciousness. Sources:

Wuthnow, Robert (1978). "Peak Experiences: Some Empirical Tests." Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 18 (3), 59-75.

Noble, Kathleen D. (1987). ``Psychological Health and the Experience of Transcendence.'' The Counseling Psychologist, 15 (4), 601-614.
Lukoff, David & Francis G. Lu (1988). ``Transpersonal psychology research review: Topic: Mystical experiences.'' Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 20 (2), 161-184.

Roger Walsh (1980). The consciousness disciplines and the behavioral sciences: Questions of comparison and assessment. American Journal of Psychiatry, 137(6), 663-673.

Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar (1983). ``Psychedelic Drugs in Psychiatry'' in Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered, New York: Basic Books.

Furthermore, Greeley found no evidence to support the orthodox belief that frequent mystic experiences or psychic experiences stem from deprivation or psychopathology. His ''mystics'' were generally better educated, more successful economically, and less racist, and they were rated substantially happier on measures of psychological well-being. (Charles T. Tart, Psi: Scientific Studies of the Psychic Realm, p. 19.)

Long-Term Effects

Wuthnow:

*Say their lives are more meaningful,
*think about meaning and purpose
*Know what purpose of life is
Meditate more
*Score higher on self-rated personal talents and capabilities
*Less likely to value material possessions, high pay, job security, fame, and having lots of friends
*Greater value on work for social change, solving social problems, helping needy
*Reflective, inner-directed, self-aware, self-confident life style

Noble:

*Experience more productive of psychological health than illness
*Less authoritarian and dogmatic
*More assertive, imaginative, self-sufficient
*intelligent, relaxed
*High ego strength,
*relationships, symbolization, values,
*integration, allocentrism,
*psychological maturity,
*self-acceptance, self-worth,
*autonomy, authenticity, need for solitude,
*increased love and compassion

I don't mean papers written here and there by creationists (which I understand that you claim you are not), but the articles and studies done by main stream science?

None of them are creationists junior. I am not a creationist. you have to learn to think so stop pretending like your enemies are all the same villain. All you need to do is label someone and you win the argument. that's doesn't work when you come up against a real scholar. so you have to actually do some reading here. All the studies I site are done by psychologists, not creationists, real actual social scientists and they are all published in valid academic journals, all 200 of them.

Scientists would be winning Nobel prizes for showing the existence of god or any deity for that matter.

That shows total ignorance of the way science works. You know scinece only through atheist slogans. Many nobel winners are Christans or other believers in God but no one does scietnific work to prove the existence of God because Go dis not in scietnifc domaon, that's understanding flat out. If you knew anything about science you would know about domains. God is in philosophy domain not scinece. God is the basis upon wihc reality coheres that means he's too be to be empirical. God is not a thing in creation he's not naturalistic so he can't be an object of empirical research.

Religion has never had a leg to stand on by itself. It attaches itself to social and political venues to make itself seem correct. Alone, it falls apart.

that's the atheist propaganda ideology that you are reciting. you don't know what it means but it's a slogan derived form the ideology of scinece. It's based upon the fortress of facts misconception it's just total bull shit.It has no facts to support it because all the alleged facts of the fortress are merely propaganda slogans.

The kicker is you are saying that is just an example fo the same kind of circular reasoning I was talking about to begin with. You are merely asserting on the basis of past dismissal that nothing had been established. that's the becasue the evidence was ignored in the first place. It's just circular reasoning.

StOoPiD MoNkEy Displays Typical Atheist Ignorance.

2011-11-11T05:09:00.000-08:00

On the post the circular nature of atheist ideology this character calling himself "StOoPiD MoNkEy chimes in to show us that he doesn't know what circular reasoning is.

his comment:

This example of circular reasoning that your attribute to atheist does not work. What exactly was the evidence that the theist presented. Personal experience perhaps? If that is the case, well then yes...that is not evidence. Please remember, the burden of proof is on those making a positive claim. As far as CARM goes. It has been shown already that Matt Slick is full of it and most of, if not all, his arguments have big issues with them.

Here we see the problem immediately. He's reciting slogans form the atheist propaganda wagon without thinking about how they apply or what they mean. For example who has the burden of proof has nothing to do with weather or not the argument they make is circular. The only issue in relation to circular reasoning is "does the premise rest upon the conclusion." I'll show momentarily that in the case I discussed it does. That's a totally separate issue form who has the burden of proof. He says the example of circular reasoning doesn't work but then he doesn't bother to say why. He goes off reciting propaganda slogans and doesn't deal with the issue.

Of course he recites the ignorance programed into him by his atheist brain washers, that personal experience can't prove anything. That has nothing to do with the circular nature of their argument, which is what my blog spot was about.

here is the post in question.

The Circular nature of atheist ideology

Atheism wants to pass itself off as "scientific." So they cling to the scienistic idea that science is the only form of knowledge. They truncate the nature of truth to that which can be produced by their own methods. Anything else they reduce until they lose the phenomena. So at that point atheism can't have truth all it can have is circular reasoning.

atheist: "there is nothing beyond the materiel realm. There are no proof of the SN, No evidence for God, no nothing.

Believer--Here's some, here's a whole pile facts from which one might deduce the existence of God.

Atheist: "those can't be evidence for SN or for God."

Believer--why not?

Atheist: Because there can't be any such evidence.

Believer--how do you know that?

Atheist: because there aren't any

Beleiver--what about the stuff I just presented.

Atheist: I disproved that, it can't be evidence because there isn't any.

that little hypothetical exchange Demosthenes the circle in the reasoning, the premise rests on the conclusion because he starts form the premise that there can't be any proof for SN because it's SN and that doesn't issue in proof. The proof of that statement is that based upon excluded all examples, there are no examples. That's obviously circular reasoning; the conclusion is the same as the premise.

it doesn't make any difference if other aspects of theistic argument are wrong or badly done that who has the burden of proof is irrelevant to circular reasoning. he's not even thinking about logic as a subject of it's own, but just as an aid to further propaganda..

(1) Atheists selective rule out as 'fact' anything that doesn't match the ideology.

(2) Atheists reduce to a point of losing the phenomena any phenomena that stands against the ideology.

(3) Atheists use mockery and ridicule to shut down any discussion that is not in line with the ideology.

(4) Atheists exclude from reality any form of knowledge would give results contrary to the ideology.

(5) Atheists construct a false paradigm of knowledge based upon scientistic (not scientific but scientistic) assumptions.

(6) All thinking must be filtered through the ideology of atheistic sceintism.
__________________

Here's the rational, logical, factually oriented rebuttal of an atheist on CARM

NWRT- not worth responding to. And nothing you've written here changes that. I'll start taking you more seriously as an intellectual once you start addressing our actual arguments.

Go back and look over what you just wrote- now apply it to yourself. You do nothing but post ridiculous arguments (like your little "co-determinate" joke), insult people when they present legitimate disagreement, and present strawman versions of atheist's positions. Why on earth would anyone be interested in trying to have a genuine, serious discussion with you?

I asked him what's ridiculous about it:

I've explained it to you a million times- strong belief is not controlled for. And, true to form, you've only answered your strawman version of my argument.

Holy Irony Batman, doesn't this actually prove what I was saying? I have 300 studies he has 0. He decides this 'strong belief' which he can't define without a single study to back it up. Isn't this really a case of declaring my fact to be "no facts" because they differ form the ideology?

A Typical Atheist Hate minute

2011-11-10T07:16:00.000-08:00

this is the only way they can deal with the facts when they disprove their world view. The issue is Lourdes. They are demanding that miracles can't happen. Present evidence of Lorudes of course they have to crush that immediately. They begin demanding that it has to be bad evidence and pretending that it's all Vatican sources when in reality it's fro reporters.

this is with Steve Smith the idiot I debated who publishes the rag Berminham Free Press and who has written so many hate males to my blog. He's now going under "Blondie" because he was banned, but he also put up a page on me calling my mother a whore. He's really such a brilliant mature adult thinker.

CARM, today, no 11

Meta:

Here is my description of what's going to happen:

here's the little mocking ridicule. instead of examining the facts and argument logically.

first they insist it has to be wrong because otherwise they would be wrong so that cant' be true. then they start ridiculing the opponent he's so stupid that he can't see that have to be right.

the meantime the opponent who they ridicule for being so stupid has presented a huge amount of data proving his point and they just laugh at it and call it names and then they tell themselves this makes them thinkers!

so now what do we see:

Originally Posted by Metacrock

guy's dying. his lung's ravaged by TB. he's prayed for , his lungs grow back over night. That's totally inexplicable by any natural means.

Bull Shitter Smith

explain it then if you disagree.
I would love to get some evidence for this. The same kind of evidence one would expect from any extraordinary claim. Not some conspiracy theory about how the medical community is hiding all this evidence of miracles like the government is hiding all the UFO evidence.

Just some regular proof.

he says he wants "regular proof" so what does he do when he get's it:

Meta:

just to prove that I didn't make up the existence of the case there was documentation for it. it's not on the site anymoer but if you really wont to prove it you an get the way back machine and prove it.

Society for the Little Flower (Website) FAQ (visited 6/3/01)
St. Theresse of Lisieux

http://www.littleflower.org/therese/faq.html#4

"Regarding St. Therese, in 1923 the Church approved of two spontaneous cures unexplained by medical treatment. Sister Louise of St. Germain was cured of the stomach ulcers she had between 1913 and 1916. The second cure involved Charles Anne, a 23 year old seminarian who was dying from advanced pulmonary tuberculosis. The night he thought he was dying, Charles prayed to Therese. Afterward, the examining doctor testified, "The destroyed and ravaged lungs had been replaced by new lungs, carrying out their normal functions and about to revive the entire organism. A slight emaciation persists, which will disappear within a few days under a regularly assimilated diet." These two miracles resulted in Therese becoming beatified."

"Once she was declared Blessed, it took only two years for the necessary next two miracles to be approved. In 1925, two cures had been investigated and judged to be supernatural, through the intercession of St. Therese. The first involved Gabrielle Trimusi from Parma, Italy. Gabrielle had suffered from arthritis of the knee and tubercular lesions on the vertebrae. The final cure involved Maria Pellemans of Schaerbeck, Belgium. Maria suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis which had spread, as Therese's illness had, to the intestines. The diagnosis of pulmonary and intestinal tuberculosis was made by a Dr. Vandensteene, who also examined Maria after she came back from visiting Therese's grave. The doctor testified, "I found Miss Pellemans literally transformed. This young woman, out of breath from the least movement, moves about without fatigue; she eats everything given to her, with a very good appetite. The abdomen presents no tender point, when formerly the least pressure produced severe pain. All symptoms of tubercular ulceration of the intestine have disappeared." In reports predating Maria's return to health, two other physicians confirmed Dr. Vandensteen's diagnosis of pulmonary and intestinal tuberculosis. On May 17, 1925, Therese was officially declared a Saint by Pope Pius XI."

I know that's not as good as having the X-Ray. The next best thing is that I spoke with someone who has seen it and knows it's true.

MODERN MIRACLES HAVE STRICT RULES

BY DAVID VAN BIEMA

"The paradox of human miracle assessment is that the only way to discern whether a phenomenon is supernatural is by having trained rationalists testify that it outstrips their training. Since most wonders admitted by the modern church are medical cures, it consults with doctors. Di Ruberto has access to a pool of 60 - "We've got all the medical branches covered," says his colleague, Dr. Ennio Ensoli - and assigns each purported miracle to two specialists on the vanquished ailment.

They apply criteria established in the 1700s by Pope Benedict XIV: among them, that the disease was serious; that there was objective proof of its existence; that other treatments failed; and that the cure was rapid and lasting. Any one can be a stumbling block. Pain, explains Ensoli, means little: "Someone might say he feels bad, but how do you measure that?" Leukemia remissions are not considered until they have lasted a decade. A cure attributable to human effort, however prayed for, is insufficient. "Sometimes we have cases that you could call exceptional, but that's not enough." says Ensoli. "Exceptional doesn't mean inexplicable."

"Inexplicable," or inspiegabile, is the happy label that Di Ruberto, the doctors and several other clerics in the Vatican's "medical conference" give to a case if it survives their scrutiny. It then passes to a panel of theologians, who must determine whether the inexplicable resulted from prayer. If so, the miracle is usually approved by a caucus of Cardinals and the Pope.

Some find the process all too rigorous. Says Father Paolino Rossi, whose job, in effect, is lobbying for would-be saints from his own Capuchin order: "It's pretty disappointing when you work for years and years and then see the miracle get rejected." But others suggest it could be stricter still.

There is another major miracle-validating body in the Catholic world: the International Medical Committee for the shrine at Lourdes. Since miracles at Lourdes are all ascribed to the intercession of the Virgin Mary, it is not caught up in the saint-making process, which some believe the Pope has running overtime. Roger Pilon, the head of Lourdes' committee, notes that he and his colleagues have not approved a miracle since 1989, while the Vatican recommended 12 in 1994 alone. "Are we too severe?" he wonders out loud. "Are they really using the same criteria?"

try to follow an issue for more than a few sentences. this quote says that the medical guys are good and they follow the rules, which are good.

Leadership

Franco Balzaretti

Vice Presidente Nazionale -
Associazione Medici Cattolici Italiani (AMCI)
Membre du ComitÃ© MÃ©dical International de Lourdes (CMIL)

http://www.leadershipmedica.com/scie...10balzaing.htm

"And therefore, in this case it will be possible to close the medical report supporting a Â“certain and medically unexplainableÂ” recovery, only when:

1) The diagnostics and authenticity of the disease has been preliminarily and perfectly assessed;

2) The prognosis provides for an impending or short-term fatal outcome;

3) The recovery is sudden, without convalesce, and absolutely complete and final;

4) The prescribed treatment cannot be deemed to have resulted in a recovery or in any case could have been propitiatory for the purposes of recovery itself. These criteria are still in use nowadays, in view of their highly logical, accurate and pertinent nature.

They undoubtedly and straightforwardly set out the standard features of an unexpected recovery and have actually made it impossible to put forward any objection to any form of lack of scientific exactitude on the part of the medical practitioners belonging to the Bureau and to the LIMC. The rigour of the Lourdes medical practitioners, whose scrupulousness throughout the years has been centering on the suddenness of recoveries, on the relative effectiveness of the therapies administered, on the objective evidence of the disease found, or on the shorter or longer length of the monitoring period (depending on the disease), has always been exemplary and appreciated by all the Diocesan Canonical Committees that have been called to express their opinion.

Compliance to such criteria has corroborated the seriousness and objectivity of the former Bureau des Constatations and, today, it continues to guide the ComitÃ© MÃ©dical International de Lourdes, whose conclusions have always represented an indispensable expertÂ’s piece of evidence generating and motivating any further canonical judgements required to acknowledge the real Miracles amongst the thousands of recoveries ascribed to the intercession of Our Lady of Lourdes."

Bull Shitter Smith:

Do you have any idea what qualifies as an objective source?

he linked to some ridiculous page about shape shiting Lizzards. Does he show why source is Bad of course not. He assumes it's Vatican but it's not. Van Beama is not. He's assuming anyone supporting my position has to be wrong. It's a reporter and a major guy on the medical committee. He also ignores the fact that the medical committee is independent of the Vatican and that they have skeptics on the committee. He's just arguign from incredulity.

Originally Posted by blondie For one thing I didn't ask about Lourdes. Secondly, do you

have any idea what even qualifies as evidence?

I have stated many times as an example, the most widely documented miracle in the history of the world is the Hindu Milk Miracle.

that's stupid to say he didn't ask about Lourdes. that's my evidence. he asked for evidence. Hindu Milk miracle is fallacy of guilt by association. there's no basis for thinking that becasue one thing is a fraud that all things like it are. this is the typical sort of piss poor logic they use.

then the little bugger says:

Originally Posted by blondie

Where is this evidence of the guy growing his lung back overnight?

up at the top stupid. that's proof they don't read the material. I put it up but of course they don't need to read it because whatever it says they are just going to deny it.

atheists can't think they are argue from incredulity and that's all they do. who the hell would want to be part of that dumb person's convention?

Spiritual Truth is not A Democratic Proposition

2011-11-09T07:21:00.000-08:00

this is short but I think it's an important point. I am always running up against the atheist answer to anything I argue that "but the majority of Christians don't see it that way."

This has happened many times in many forms but most of the time it's in connection with the concept of God. The atheist says in trying to summarize Christian belief: "There exists a superhuman agency which many people refer to as God, the LORD, etc. that is, at the very least, extraordinarily powerful, wise, and loving." I say Christian belief has never been about believing that God is a big man in the sky. They will say "O but I was a Christian growing up and that was my conception." Or "the majority of Christians believe this."

Do you realize how many times atheist worm their way out of issues by saying "the majority of Christians don't see it that way." Like for example in the thread about a septic tries to explain Christianity. He quotes a straw man version that assumes God is a big man in the sky.

I say there are tons of major Christian thinkers who don't see it that way, they go "but the majority of Christians do."

what they are saying is like saying if you poll all the illiterate peasants who believe in Christianity there are more of them then then there are graduates of Notre Dame and Oxford, so if the illiterate peasants believe in some superstition then Christianity is based upon that superstition even though Jesus didn't teach it, the chruch hierarchy teaches against it and no theologian accepts it.

Is what we are doing here seeking truth or ragging on Christianity? If it means so much to you to be able to say "Christianity is stupid" regardless of what it's major thinkers say, then ok Christianity is stupid, that's because you are limiting it to illiterate peasants.

That would be like saying the majority of math students all over the world think that kind of math HRG does is stupid. That's becuase we polled students from first grade up and there are a lot more grade school kids than than graduate students.

Higher math is really stupid. you say "but that's not what the professors of math say" I say "but that's what the majority of people studying math say." of course the majority of people studying math are between six and twelve years of age.

Spiritual truth is not a democratic proposition. you have got to stop this game of dismissing ideas just because you can find the majority of illiterate peasants don't know them.

If you are not willing to attack a tradition at it's strong links, where its major thinkers do their work, then you are just being cowardly. If it means more to you to be able to say "Christianity is stupid" than it does to say "belief in God is true/false" then there's no point in doing this.

anything can be made stupid if you limit your understanding of it to it's intellectually weakest members.

More Than Half The Scientists Believe in God

2011-10-30T14:56:00.000-07:00

pie charts from Pew study

In the late 90s atheists began making the argument that less than a majority of scientists believe in God. In addition to this they argued that National Academy of Sciences had only about 5% members who believed in God. All of this was due to the publication of a 1998 an article "Leading Scientists Still reject God." In that article got hold of a survey done in 1914 by a guy named James Henry Luba and Nature Magazine noticed that the stats had not changed. So the conclusion that scientists are such great priests of knowledge, if they don't bleieve in God there must not be one.

Research on this topic began with the eminent US psychologist James H. Leuba and his landmark survey of 1914. He found that 58% of 1,000 randomly selected US scientists expressed disbelief or doubt in the existence of God, and that this figure rose to near 70% among the 400 "greater" scientists within his sample ^[1]. Leuba repeated his survey in somewhat different form 20 years later, and found that these percentages had increased to 67 and 85, respectively ^[2].

In 1996, we repeated Leuba's 1914 survey and reported our results in Nature ^[3]. We found little change from 1914 for American scientists generally, with 60.7% expressing disbelief or doubt. This year, we closely imitated the second phase of Leuba's 1914 survey to gauge belief among "greater" scientists, and find the rate of belief lower than ever — a mere 7% of respondents. (Nature,ibid)

Atheists made the most of this since Luba echoed the fallacious conclusions they themselves drew from the data. "Leuba attributed the higher level of disbelief and doubt among "greater" scientists to their "superior knowledge, understanding, and experience" (ibid). Of course this is fallacious, scientists don't have any special knowledge that would tell them God doesn't exist, or that he does. It was Nature that polled the NAS. One of the things that I argued at the time was that the questions were rigged to slant the discussion toward the fundamentalist concept of God portrayed in a literal understanding of the Bible. I argued that if you factored in a more liberal concept of God belief among scientists would go way up.

There are now several studies or surveys that reflect this assumption and anew set of findings changes the ball game. Several studies:

(1) Trow, Martin and Associates. 1969. 35% of scientists do not believe God exists. This is a lot more than the general population but a lot less than the over 50% promised by Luba and Nature. It also raises the question if the Luba and/or nature weren't confusing the issue by assuming that "un-churched" or "non-affiliated, no religious affiliation" means the same as don't believe in God. It does not. Over and over again that distinction is made clear in the better studies.

(Carnegie Commission National Survey of Higher Education: Faculty Study [computer file]. Berkeley: University of California at Berkeley, Survey Research Center [producer]. Ann Arbor, MI: University Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor].

(2)Elaine Ecklund, and Christopher Scheitle:disbelief in the existence of God was not correlated with any particular area of expertise:

Disbelief in God by Academics⁴
Discipline	%
Physics	40.8
Chemistry	26.6
Biology	41.0
Overall	37.6
Sociology	34.0
Economics	31.7
Political Science	27.0
Psychology	33.0
Overall	31.2

(tabel is from GodandScience.org article)

That contradicts the findings of nature which had most unbelief in hard scineces (physics and biology) and more belief in 'soft' or social sciences. Elaine Ecklund, and Christopher Scheitle" questioned 2,198 faculty members in the disciplines of physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, economics, political science, and psychology from 21 elite U.S. research universities.⁴ Overall, 75% of professors contacted completed the survey."

Euklund and associates also found that in a sample of 21 major universities only 15% of scientists found that Science that religion were always at odds. Euklund's findings show that factors which lead scientists to be unbelieving are not usually related to scinece but to personal aspects of their lives, such as being emigrants, or being raised in atheist households. It's a cultural thing. Think about it, if a kid is bright he wants to excel in the things to which he is exposed, he going to be more likely to go into a religious vacation if he's exposed to religion and less likely if he's form an unbelieving background. The odds are a bright kid will go into scinece rather than business if his temperament doesn't lead him/her into liberal arts.

"Instead, particular demographic factors, such as age, marital status, and presence of children in the household, seem to explain some of the religious differences among academic scientists... Most important, respondents who were raised in religious homes, especially those raised in homes where religion was important are most likely to be religious at present."

3) Pew Forum on religion in pubic life: (2009) 51% of scientists believe in some form of diety

According to the poll, just over half of scientists (51%) believe in some form of deity or higher power; specifically, 33% of scientists say they believe in God, while 18% believe in a universal spirit or higher power. By contrast, 95% of Americans believe in some form of deity or higher power, according to a survey of the general public conducted by the Pew Research Center in July 2006. Specifically, more than eight-in-ten Americans (83%) say they believe in God and 12% believe in a universal spirit or higher power. Finally, the poll of scientists finds that four-in-ten scientists (41%) say they do not believe in God or a higher power, while the poll of the public finds that only 4% of Americans share this view.

The finding here totally contradicts Luba and the atheist argument. They would have it that more than half don't believe. It's much less than the general public but much more than Luba thought.

A surprising finding is that medical doctors tend to be very religious. A new study finds 76% believe in God and 59% believe in after life.

The first study of physician religious beliefs has found that 76 percent of doctors believe in God and 59 percent believe in some sort of afterlife. The survey, performed by researchers at the University and published in the July issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine, found that 90 percent of doctors in the United States attend religious services at least occasionally, compared to 81 percent of all adults. Fifty-five percent of doctors say their religious beliefs influence how they practice medicine.

These results were not anticipated. Religious belief tends to decrease as education and income levels increase, yet doctors are highly educated and, on average, well compensated. The finding also differs radically from 90 years of studies showing that only a minority of scientists (excluding physicians) believes in God or an afterlife.

“We did not think physicians were nearly this religious,” said study author Farr Curlin, Instructor in Medicine and a member of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University. “We suspect that people who combine an aptitude for science with an interest in religion and an affinity for public service are particularly attracted to medicine. The responsibility to care for those who are suffering and the rewards of helping those in need resonate throughout most religious traditions.”

In the general popularization belief my decline with increases in education but this is not so among the most educated. Professors across the board (all subjects) reflect belief in God similar to that of the General Population. My own explanation is that people who get degress and go into non acadmeic jobs know just enough to be dangerous, they don't continue the life of thought they know the old image of atheism was an intellectual image but they don't keep up with learning and thinking as professors do.

Tim Radford writes an article for the Guardian (sept 2003) on how science doesn't have all the answers, give several examples of scientists who have religious beliefs:

Colin Humphreys is a dyed-in-the-wool materialist. That is, he is professor of materials science at Cambridge. He believes in the power of science to explain the nature of matter. He believes that humans - like all other living things - evolved through the action of natural selection upon random mutation. He is also a Baptist. He believes in the story of Moses, as recounted in the biblical book of Exodus. He believes in it enough to have explored Egypt and the Holy Land in search of natural or scientific explanations for the story of the burning bush, the 10 plagues of Egypt, the crossing of the Red Sea and the manna that fell in the wilderness -and then written a book about it.

"I believe that the scientific world view can explain almost anything," he says. "But I just think there is another world view as well."

Tom McLeish is professor of polymer physics at Leeds. Supermarket plastic bags are polymers, but so are spider's silk, sheep's wool, sinew and flesh and bone. His is the intricate world of what is, and how it works, down to the molecular level. He delights in the clarity and power of science, precisely because it is questioning rather than dogmatic. "But the questions that arise, and the methods we use to ask them, can be traced back to the religious tradition in which I find myself. Doing science is part of what it means in that tradition to be human. Because we find ourselves in this puzzling, extraordinary universe of pain and beauty, we will also find ourselves able to explore it, by adopting the very successful methods of science," he says.

Russell Stannard is now emeritus professor of physics at the Open University. He is one of the atom-smashers, picking apart the properties of matter, energy, space and time, and the author of a delightful series of children's books about tough concepts such as relativity theory. He believes in the power of science. He not only believes in God, he believes in the Church of England. He, like Tom McLeish, is a lay reader. He has con tributed Thoughts for the Day to Radio 4, those morning homilies on the mysteries of existence. Does it worry him that science - his science - could be about to explain the whole story of space, time matter and energy without any need for a Creator? "No, because a starting point you can have is: why is there something rather than nothing? Why is there a world? Now I cannot see how science could ever provide an answer," he says.

Radford expresses surprise that so many scientists believe in God, even with the old figures that gave atheists such solace. The figrue he uses is the outdated 4 in 10. We have to keep in mind atheism is not a rational choice made by thinking machines who feel nothing. It's an emotional choice made by people with low self esteem. They need to feel put themselves up by putting Christians down. They can't say they hate God, even though they hate themselves and thus they must hate at least the idea of a creator, so the next best thing is to hate those who believe in God. It's very important for them emotionally to believe that they are smarter and that all intelligent people validate their world view. The atheist ideology suggests that scinece is a priesthood of knowledge and scientists are the only people who know anything. These are not rational analysis based upon empirical data form studies, but articles of faith.

Atheists Think Ignorance is a Badge of Honor

2011-10-23T06:51:00.001-07:00

What if I came up to you and said "everything you say it stupid." you said "such as" I said "I don't know, I don't' bother to listen to what you say because I know it's going to be stupid."

that's real impressive hu?

candidates are gathered to debate for the Presidency. One gets up and makes a fine speech about the state of the country the other sticks his fingers in his ears and goes "lalalalaalalal" real loud while his opponent is talking.

When he get's up and says "I didn't prepare becuase I know my opponent is stupid I don't have to listen to him. I didn't listen to him and I never have. I don't know anything he says and I will not debase myself by listening to him. I know everything he says is stupid. vote for me."

would you be impressed with that candidate? the press asks him "if you don't know anything he say how do you know it's stupid?" he says It's the kind of thing that would be stupid. you gonna vote for this guy?

this is the little gimmick that atheists are using on ever single message board. They get it from their moronic guru Dawkins who himself is an idiot.

They don't bother with logic, they violate logical norms in every argument they make then worm out by saying "logic doesn't tell us nothing about the world." It's beginning to look like the new atheist movement is based upon being stupid.

One of the worst, this atheist once asked me to tell him about my concept of God. "what god do you worship" he says. So put up a link, "these are my pages on my site where I describe my views." he said "I don't have to read that I know it will be stupid."

he asked man! he has me! the link is just a better way of answering. so he didn't' want an answer to begin with did he? they do this all the time. It's dumb.

by their fruits you shall know them. Jesus said. Their fruits are ignorance and laziness.

Then that atheist goes "I read your stuff it's so standard it's the same old stuff they always say." It's not. I have a Masters degree from a major seminary I know what is standard. How many times do you find the average Christian apologist on a message board saying God is being itself? In 13 years of doing apologetic on the net the only one's ever seen talk about it are those who were influenced by me.

the allegation that my stuff is like all the others is obvious bunk. The refusal of atheists to read the martial presented is becoming epidemic. They don't even read more than two lines of a post. They wont read the arguments being arrayed against them and yet they pretend to know all it. It's ridiculously intolerable. They should be banned from every message board. I urge Christians to boycott. Have nothing to do with atheists. Don't talk to them on message boards.

2011-10-19T05:02:00.000-07:00

This guy, Nemo (12/26/10) thinks Christianity will wither away but that it would be a calamity to go right from theism to new atheism

What would “victory” look like?

http://richarddawkins.net/discussions/568825-what-would-victory-look-like

Complete victory of New Atheism would be a calamity, and the nature of the question suggests the (a)theocratic false ambitions of the New Atheists, who have been hyped into thinking atheism some kind of scientific proof to it.

The passing away of Xtianity is probably inevitable, over a very long time, but the next stage of consciousness should be a robust study of the history of religion, the development of self-consciousness, and a kind of Kantian wariness at the tendency of all groups, religious or atheists, to create dogamatic or totalitarian cults out of metaphysical beliefs.
The intolerance of the new atheists, even to agnostics or other types of atheists, is an important warning that they are the same idiots in a new disguise as the Christians.
Lest this seem exaggerated consider Michael Parenti’s ‘new atheist’ book in the wake of the others, with its diatribe against Tibet: there ‘atheism’ means looking the other way at the destruction of Buddhists through murder ethnicide, and indoctrination.
The only safe stance is an intelligent agnosticism, and the intolerance toward even that shows the new atheists in their cultic infatuation, a mood created by Dawkins and his clever promotions of pseudo-science.
So let us fear this victory, and not let it happen. There is no need for victory. All that is needed is a pluralistic society where opinion is not controlled.

It's doubtful Christianity will pass away and even if it does I'm not sure that prove what most atheists think it would prove.

true this is a ID source, so take it with a grian of salt, but it does document that New Atheism and old Atheism are fighting. Irrationality of new atheism vs rationality of old.

e g r e g o r e s

UK Guardian attacks Harris as Totalitarian
Posted by Apuleius Platonicus on August 2, 2009
http://egregores.wordpress.com/2009/08/02/embryonically-totalitarian/

I was beginning to wonder whether or not this issue of Francis Collins’ nomination to be NIH Director had played out, but then I just saw that Andrew Brown begins his August 2, 2009 column in the UK Guardian like this
Anyone tempted to believe that the abolition of religion would make the world a wiser and better place should study the works of Sam Harris. Shallow, narrow, and self-righteous, he defends and embodies all of the traits that have made organised religion repulsive; and he does so in the name of atheism and rationality. He has, for example, defended torture, (“restraint in the use of torture cannot be reconciled with our willingness to wage war in the first place”) attacked religious toleration in ways that would make Pio Nono blush: “We can no more tolerate a diversity of religious beliefs than a diversity of beliefs about epidemiology and basic hygiene” ; he has claimed that there are some ideas so terrible that we may be justified in killing people just for believing them.

And he ends it like this:
But militant atheism, of the sort that would deny people jobs for their religions beliefs, doesn’t actually believe in real science at all, any more than it believes in reason. Rather, it uses “science” and “reason” as tribal labels, and “religion” as a term for witchcraft. Any serious defence of the real, hard-won and easily lost enlightenment must start by rejecting that style of atheism entirely. What use is it to be right about God and wrong about everything else?
Parenthetically I want to say that I feel especially indebted to Brown for drawing my attention to yet another example of just how incredibly godawful the writing of these New Atheists can be:
But, obviously, Brown’s critique of Harris has far more to do with substance than style. Brown correctly condemns Harris’ arguments (“To the extent that Harris has any argument at all”), as “fantastically illiberal”. But personally I believe that Brown gives too much credit when he also characterizes the posture that Harris has assumed as only “embryonically totalitarian”. That embryo hatched when Harris published his first book, if not before.

The Chronicle of Higher Eudcation
Jan 21, 2011,
The New Atheist's Narrow World view
By Stephen T. Asma

new atheists world view is narrow minded and has nothing to say to the 3d world and people struggling to survive in dire poverty. from the Chronicle of higher education

With tongues in cheeks, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett are embracing their reputation as the "Four Horsemen." Lampooning the anxieties of evangelicals, these best-selling atheists are embracing their "dangerous" status and daring believers to match their formidable philosophical acumen.

According to these soldiers of reason, the time for religion is over. It clings like a bad gene replicating in the population, but its usefulness is played out. Sam Harris's most recent book, The Moral Landscape (Free Press, 2010), is the latest in the continuing battle. As an agnostic, I find much of the horsemen's critiques to be healthy.

But most friends and even enemies of the new atheism have not yet noticed the provincialism of the current debate. If the horsemen left their world of books, conferences, classrooms, and computers to travel more in the developing world for a year, they would find some unfamiliar religious arenas.

Having lived in Cambodia and China, and traveled in Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Africa, I have come to appreciate how religion functions quite differently in the developing world—where the majority of believers actually live. The Four Horsemen, their fans, and their enemies all fail to factor in their own prosperity when they think about the uses and abuses of religion.

A sacred banyan tree outside a temple in Bangkok.

Harris and his colleagues think that religion is mostly concerned with two jobs—explaining nature and guiding morality. Their suggestion that science does these jobs better is pretty convincing. As Harris puts it, "I am arguing that science can, in principle, help us understand what we should do and should want—and, therefore, what other people should do and should want in order to live the best lives possible." I agree with Harris here and even spilled significant ink myself, back in 2001, to show that Stephen Jay Gould's popular science/religion diplomacy of "nonoverlapping magisteria" (what many call the fact/value distinction) is incoherent. The horsemen's mistake is not their claim that science can guide morality. Rather, they're wrong in imagining that the primary job of religion is morality. Like cosmology, ethics is barely relevant in non-Western religions. It is certainly not the main function or lure of devotional life. Science could take over the "morality job" tomorrow in the developing world, and very few religious practitioners would even notice.

It's becoming rather common place to see people, not fundies, leftists and liberals and humanists recognizing the narrow mined totalitarian nature of new atheism.

what's the real differnce in "getting hard to tell the difference in new atheism and fascists" and "facists?"

2011-10-19T04:34:00.000-07:00

I used Jeff Sparrow, a Marxist writer from Australia as an example of one who points out the totalitarian nature of new atheism. Hermit has been using his typical approach, get in your face and scream and sawqk about any and every trivial problem with the point utnil he scores a victory of any kid, however trivial, driving a wedge (however banal) bewteen the claim and the truth of the claim, the demanding that since he's scored a victory the whole thing is wrong. It doesnt' mattter to him that Sparrow said "it's getting hard to tell fascism from new atheism," he didn't say it was fascism so that must mean it's ok. Let's look at what he did say, understand his real argument is that New Atheism has a big totalitarian streak down it's back. That's not the way he puts it though. He uses the one issue of racism and Islamaphobia.

Sparrow:

In fact, the only accuracy in Myers’ sentence comes between the quote marks. I did, indeed, write that many of the main speakers in the two conferences scheduled for Melbourne in 2011 are very, very right wing. That’s because … um… they are...

I provided quotes from Christopher Hitchens about the need to kill the Taliban without pity and to wage the war in Afghanistan more ruthlessly to support what seemed to me a fairly uncontentious point – that Hitchens is today the most high-profile warmonger active in literary circles, essentially a traveling mouthpiece for that wing of the American elite still wedded to neoconservative foreign policies.his politics are so far to the right as to make genuinely mystifying the support he receives from self-identified progressives, but also because, in Australia, at least, he’s the most high-profile of the New Atheists.

He’s not some fringe hanger-on, the crazy old uncle in the atheist family, but a major draw card, a keynote speaker, who will no doubt be featured extensively (as was the case during his last tour) on television, radio and in the press, opining about the need to plunge further into Afghanistan or launch a new war in Yemen or whatever the current neocon talking point might bethough Hitchens is more overtly political and more unashamedly bloodthirsty than some of the other New Atheists,

the Islamophobia he promulgates is widespread in the movement.

That was why I quoted Sam Harris (again, not a fringe figure but another of the so-called ‘Four Horsemen’) on how the ‘people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists’, an argument with which Christopher Hitchens says he agrees (in, mind you, a largely approving review of a book by the far right demagogue Mark Steyn, which claims that Muslims are breeding their way to a takeover of Europe!)..

contrasted the rhetoric used by neofascist ideologues (as well as a conservative Australian politician) with that employed by major New Atheist speakers, not to prove that Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins and the rest were fascists (indeed, I explicitly said they were not) but rather to illustrate that they embrace an Islamophobia more usually associated with the far Right – which was, after all, the very point that Harris was making

This is typical of Hermit's hair splitting to ignore the meat of the matter and just go for the letter of law. The overall point Sparrow was making is that the New Atheist movement has a lot of modes of thought in place that are far right wing modes of thought. Hermit is content to feel ventilated that they are not out and out fascists but he's just missing the point about how totalitarian they are. He tries to make it sound like Sparrow was misquoted therefore he didn't say anything that would impune the New atheist and he sure as hell did.

Sparrow's views were attacked by those Dennison of limited mentality, the atheists who can't think, saying things like

Besides Sparrow’s obvious hypocrisy, he makes some rather puzzling assumptions about atheism. To Sparrow’s mind, an atheist should not oppose superstition and religious bigotry. It’s not the job of the atheist to challenge religion at all. It is, rather, the atheist’s job to embrace left-wing politics and “build the kind of society in which religion no longer seems necessary.” I won’t speculate here on whether that’s an effective strategy. Instead, let’s look at his conflation of atheism and leftism.

That's that guy's version of what it means to say atheist shouldn't rail against religion like fanatical clowns who can't allow people have their own views. It doesn't make any difference to Hermit that New Atheism is clearly totalitarian, clearly exist to vent hate against religious people. In other words Sparrow's bellweather against a racist position in New Atheism is met with so much Hermit like refusal to consider the meaning of what's really being said, so much typical atheist "them and us" kind of thinking, that they were pracitally accusing him of being an evangelist for Christian fundamentalism. That's why he was making clear his position, which was not without it's criticism of new atheism.

Like Hermit most new atheists can't take any sort of criticism and his tactics are typical, get in your face and cream about nit picking and hair splitting until you for once one little trivial difference between the claims of the the opponent and some little trivial mistake they made, then claim that you've destroyed their evil lies.

problem: Hermit is flaming, the site is not posting comments

2011-10-18T13:50:00.001-07:00

I've lost a bunch of comments because they thing doesn't work right.

One of the main one's I want to talk about is where Hermit quotes Jeff Sparrow saying "I didn't day that New atheism is facist."

here's what he said:
Where have All the Progressive Atheists gone?
New Matilda.com

Melbourne is bracing for an influx of atheists next year - and that means oh so many right wing war-mongerers. It's getting hard to tell a New Atheist from a neo-fascist...

so he says it's hard to tell them apart from fascists. So Hermit can wipe the sweat from his brow feel good that he's not in a group that's labeled as fascist by a left wing journalist, he can ignore the fact that the journalist is obviously saying that New Atheism is stupid, totalitarian, narrow minded, has fascist-like tendencies. all of that is problem lost on Hermit, as long as his liberal conscience can do the typical atheist obfuscation of facts he doesn't have to feel tainted.

It is odd to me that it doesn't bother him that his group is clearly close to being like Facists but as long ass they are not called Fascist then that's ok.

Book Review of Fifty Voices of Disbelief

2011-10-18T07:43:00.000-07:00

article in first things that new atheism is a passing fad.

David B. Hart
In First things:

I think I am very close to concluding that this whole “New Atheism” movement is only a passing fad—not the cultural watershed its purveyors imagine it to be, but simply one of those occasional and inexplicable marketing vogues that inevitably go the way of pet rocks, disco, prime-time soaps, and The Bridges of Madison County. This is not because I necessarily think the current “marketplace of ideas” particularly good at sorting out wise arguments from foolish. But the latest trend in à la mode godlessness, it seems to me, has by now proved itself to be so intellectually and morally trivial that it has to be classified as just a form of light entertainment, and popular culture always tires of its diversions sooner or later and moves on to other, equally ephemeral toys.

first he points to the book Fifty Voices of Disbelief. It's trivial, the contributors are just the usual suspects, and what they have to say is said by atheists on message boards everyday on the net. There's nothing deep or new or hard to predict being said. It's all the same old ideological propaganda slogans. Of course it has to be the same old stuff because if it wasn't it would be off template. What do I mean by "off template?" Atheists on only think according to an ideolgoical template they learn form the echo chamber, constantly spitting back the same slogans on message boards. that's their standard of truth, on template is the definition of truth, off template is crazy wired stuff no matter how well supported it might be.

Yet the book that hails as the magnum opus of a movement is shallow and predicable.

Nicholas Everitt and Stephen Law recycle the old (and incorrigibly impressionistic) argument that claims of God’s omnipotence seem incompatible with claims of his goodness. Michael Tooley does not like the picture of Jesus that emerges from the gospels, at least as he reads them. Christine Overall notes that her prayers as a child were never answered; ergo, there is no God. A.C. Grayling flings a few of his favorite papier-mâché caricatures around. Laura Purdy mistakes hysterical fear of the religious right for a rational argument. Graham Oppy simply provides a précis of his personal creed, which I assume is supposed to be compelling because its paragraphs are numbered. J.J.C. Smart finds miracles scientifically implausible (gosh, who could have seen that coming?). And so on. Adèle Mercier comes closest to making an interesting argument—that believers do not really believe what they think they believe—but it soon collapses under the weight of its own baseless presuppositions.

The scientist in the book give the same indications of scientifically minded atheists on board who are unimaginative and totalitarian in their thinking, yet allow themselves to assume wild flights of fancy as proved fact while anything a believer thinks is just "unscientific and ridiculous."

Victor Stenger is the most recklessly self-confident, but his inability to differentiate the physical distinction between something and nothing (in the sense of “not anything as such”) from the logical distinction between existence and nonexistence renders his argument empty. The contributors drawn from other fields offer nothing better. The Amazing Randi, being a magician, knows that there is quite a lot of credulity out there. The historian of science Michael Shermer notes that there are many, many different and even contradictory systems of belief. The journalist Emma Tom had a psychotic scripture teacher when she was a girl. Et, as they say, cetera. The whole project probably reaches its reductio ad absurdum when the science-fiction writer Sean Williams explains that he learned to reject supernaturalism in large part from having grown up watching Doctor Who.

The great thinkers of their movement are no deeper than the rank and file. The author derides their constant triumphalist tone and their need to score cheap victories. Their conceptual understanding of theology remains childish and undeveloped. That would be because they think they don't need to read theology. It's enough to just insist that it's stupid and not learn about it.

As a rule, the New Atheists’ concept of God is simply that of some very immense and powerful being among other beings, who serves as the first cause of all other things only in the sense that he is prior to and larger than all other causes. That is, the New Atheists are concerned with the sort of God believed in by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Deists. Dawkins, for instance, even cites with approval the old village atheist’s cavil that omniscience and omnipotence are incompatible because a God who infallibly foresaw the future would be impotent to change it—as though Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and so forth understood God simply as some temporal being of interminable duration who knows things as we do, as external objects of cognition, mediated to him under the conditions of space and time.

The problem is the criticisms are just as predictable and samie as are the things being criticized. This is actually a book review, not an article about the passing of New Atheism. I think Atheistwach has it all over this book review because we have gone past these obvious observations about the banality of the New Atheist. We have delved into their psychology, cracked the secret of the organizing and their funding (at least part way), and systematized thier ideology. I don't see how their movement can last in the long run except as a subculture that feeds off of the disillusionment of former fundies.

That Mat wont Hunt: Debating Fire in the Equasions Argument

2011-10-15T12:28:00.000-07:00

This was my last debate about a God argument on CARM before I decided to leave the echo chamber. Notice the double talk from this guy who claimed to be a scientist!

23 posts, I was just daring responses. they would nto respond then: before he answers like this:

Vestpa:

So speaketh ye olde verbose Master baiter...

that's his brilliant comment. he's trying to make pun saying that I master bait. that's this guy's idea of being serious about arguments. Then they wonder why I insult them. They just can't figure out what they do to set me off.

Brain W:

You've received answers meta, and Matt is FAR out of your league when it comes to physics..though you may have an edge when it comes to constructing fairytales (theology) based on your rudimentary understanding of physics. You are just being childish as usual by moving the goalposts after receiving your answers, molding a completely unfalsifiable position for your invisible friend to occupy, and always insisting on having the last word. Grow up.

the answers he's talking about were " on the original thread. three 3 I don't know. One "I have a scinece degree and you don't. four "laws of physics are descriptive" no elaboration or answer the actually questions I posed.

this post is what emerged form about a six post exchange that took place after their 23 posts of crap:

Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
why couldn't you do this on the 1x1 board?

Why does it have to be a debate?

you kept insisting you 'beat' my argument and came out swinging when I was busy and told I was. So you set up the idea that you wanted a contest, then you run away when time comes to for it.

Obviously there's some reality there because no scientist is ever willing to blow explaining causes. they don't say "we don't need a theory of orig because theres' no origin to explain we are just imposing order because that's what we do."

People are naturally curious.

that's not an answer to my argument. It doesn't answer what I said. It's a reason to think about it, not a reason to dismiss it.

actually it contradicts scinece itself. Why bother to make systemic observations about he way things work if there's no order, we are just imposing it from within ourselves? Not only that but it contradicts the idea of a descriptive law of phscis, why bother to describe if it's just us imposing order instead of a real description?

I see you are using the term order without actually defining it.

I see you are playing your tricks of language again.I did define it. don't you know an operational definition when you see one?

You are incorrectly making the assumption that the reason why scientists measure, they make observations and perform experiments and from their results they see that the universe consistently behaviours according to some fixed rules, so far we have not observed anything different.

the same observation Whtiehead made, the same one Newton made, the basis of kicking God out of Science that LaPlace made. you are using the ideological prlaform of the cop out period after atheism abandoned LaPLace because it could no longer justify observations without assumptino of physical laws, brought on QM theory.

As the laws of physics are just man made descriptions, the constancy of the way that nature are inbuilt into the equations.

which also means it's a cultural construct, it's relative, it's not truth and it can be argued with.

I think I do. I say why don't things fall up? why aren't thing repelled by mass? why don't universe pop into my tea cup. I think we get an idea what I mean.

Actually you don't. I want a precise definition from you on the matter. It wastes times if we are using different notions of the word. Matt Slick accused me of this, but he really didn't understand the importance of it.

those are very simple questions why don't you answer them. The way I'm using "order is obvious I've explained it two oar three times. I've explained it in terms of the very things I"m asking you to explain.

when we argue about the resurrection Hans say "we don't see people getting up from being dead." that's a from of order. why don't see that? because apparently it never happens. you want to just leave it there it's just a coincidence that it never happens, but there has to be some kind of principle that prevents it. Otherwise we would see it. Since you admitted that's a human observation it can also be wrong. there can be other observations that you are just ignoring where in rare cases some people do get up from being dead.

when it comes to what you don't want to happen you assert it never does, when it comes to what you don't want then you assert a rule of some implication of a rule.

no it doesn't. I can assuming without necessarily having an idea of deity. you are rather balking at the conclusion not at the premise.

It does but you just can't see it.

you didn't read very carefully. I was talking about early modern scinece when LaPlace used perspective laws to take God out of scinece.

I did read it as a matter of fact. Laplace never invoked the notion of a deity because he didn't need to. He modelled the observations as he saw them.

Of cousre Laplace didn't evoke a deity, to the contrary, he kicked one out! that's what he's infamous for! you don't get it? He's is my all time candidate for fink of the ages becasue he took God out merely for a stupid reason like "I have psychical laws instead." Of course he took out the reason for having them.

I never said he appealed to deity, try reading the words next time.

part 2

that contradicts above, why do that if it's imposed by us? you are also not answering what I said about descriptive is a framework to hide order.

Not too sure what you're saying here.

that is not applicable to my original argument. that's why your answer was irrelevant to begin with. It's also not right because it's not true nothing. but it was that area of nothing I was talking about. that was supposed to be an answer to my questions.

Okay, you brought up the argument in the first place.

I asked a question. you claimed you answered it but your answer didn't apply to what I was talking about. then wont listen to see what it is.

It contradicted your point. you were saying something from noting it says no nothing it is something anyway. it doesn't' really matter because your answer is about the wrong thing.

If you think it did that then a) you don't understand what I was saying and b) you didn't understand what the quote was saying and c) you are misrepresenting what I was saying. I said there was a possibility that the model that Krauss spoke about was an accurate description of the universe.

no stop blathering you are still answering the wrong thing.

Yes that's why it's a paradigm and it's going to shift. so it's not absolute it's not the fortress of facts. its' a description based upon a limited sample so you can't use to rule out God.

Science isn't going to "shift" to something else, it is going to keep using the same methodology as it always has, trying to describe the universe from their experiments and observations, refining the models with more data.

NO no no no no no np! stop pretending like you understand Kuhn, you don't know anything about him. He doesn't scinece becomes something other than scinece, he says scientific confusions are incommensurable becasue standards by which they are judged are based upon paradigms that shift when scientific revolutions happen.

that's what shifts, paradigm. we go from one to another. not to none scinece but to new paradigm.

operationally I have. these are common issues in arguments atheists I'm not using in any wired way that people done usually use them.

You haven't.

talking about defining order? I think it's pretty obvious when I explain by saying "why don't things flee the center of mass" what I"m calling "order." the regularity by which things happen over and over the same way everything we observe them.

are you going to answer it or are you going to pull another little track and say "you didn't define "mean," what do you mean by mean?"

that's just slough. because otherwise you have the gall and temerity to rule out belief in god yet you obviously haven't thought about it.

I rule out a deity because there is no evidence for one, moreover there is evidence that there is no such deity, evolution is a strong argument that there is no deity in my opinion

obviously there is. the order and regularity that you can't explain!

he takes out arguments he can't answer. name calling them rather than dealing with them logically.

but hat could just as easily be the mind of God. you have no empirical evidence.
you are just speculating but if a theist said that atheists would be chiming "there's no before the big bang."

you are obviously just speculating too becasue you agree there is no order, your observations and just man made and limited. You are to observing anything orderly you are just imposing an ideolgoical Meta narrative.

We have no definite answer to the question, "What was before the big bang", there may be some scant evidence around that there was (Penrose's cyclic universes)
you are basing your answer on ideological propaganda and speculation.

Speculation possibly, but science has a proven track record for solving problems and answering questions

only when it' limited to it's own domain. It has no tacking record in ruling out God or explaining the underlying order of things. you are doing a bait and switch.

your observations you admit are "man made" and you are not observing any kind of structure or ofer, you already said that. so you have no track record at all in terms of the larger picture beyond the purely physical workings of the world.

Not really. all you mean by that is that within tine narrow sub framework you use to mark what you are talking about you don't have a neat little A = B kind of causality. bu ti the larger framework it's not coming of total nothing. it's in the realm of physical aw and time, and vacuum flux.

No, there really is no cause for the radioactive decay of a nucleotide. Deal with it. Some things you can only do statistics and probability with, there is no deterministic model that we can apply.

(1) that's not an issue, there doesn't have to be because as I said that's just as much evidence of Mind in creation as causes are.

(2) you don't know that.. your observations are only man made and limited.

Now as a theist I'm not obligated to for causes necessarily it just depends upon what argument I want to push. my new reboot of FITE argument does not require that we disprove all a causal understanding.

So previously, you said that the cause/effect argument required a "mind" now you are throwing all that out?

you are not listening. I said C/e is evidence ordering principle. if QM events are not caused that is not evidence against God becuase the use of non causal and uncertainty principles also require mind, in the context of an ordered universe. Otherwise it would be a deterministic universe.

see? done this way where the mind knows just when to control and just when to let it ride it makes a free will universe. otherwise everything would be real determined.

my argument that the weirdness of a causal principles in the framework with the ordering principles are evidence of mind. Evidence because only a mind would know when to control and when to let it go random. in other words God might play dice with the universe but a non thinking set of deterministic causes could not pay dice.
It is just one description on the phenomena that we see, however it might not be the only way of describing the world that we see. Causality is only one possible way of describing the observed phenomena.
see the point? you need a mind to stop and say "hey this is the place to throw the dice."

I only see that you have stated your opinion, but provided a coherent argument for it.

Obviously I stated my opinion. that' not an answer. I base my onion upon the qaualia we discuss so avoiding a discussion of that qualia is not an answer.

I'm saying a science is fine and good but nature is not impressed. God is not impressed it doesn't mean you know. you may know better than I certainly sure that's true in many ways but you don't know the ultimate answers. you don't know what the framework is or how it got there. you don't know what is being described.

This just seems to be special pleading to me.

how could it be special pleading when I'm taking into account all the phenomena and you are trying to lose the phenomena that embarrassing for you?

I just did. Human attempts at knowledge. Its' a metaphor.

Actually you didn't define anything. I am using specific concepts of scales and you are using some ill-defined ideas and using that to your advantage.

would you know a definition if you saw one? why do you suppose every time you ask I say things like "the order and regularity we observe such as things don't' flee the center of mass." how is that not defining hat I mean by order?

"Center for Inquiry" Poll of religion is Atheist Propaganda.

2011-10-14T06:42:00.000-07:00

Today an estimated sixteen percent of Americans—or about 49 million American men, women, and children—live without religious affiliation.^* As a group, religiously unaffiliated Americans are more numerous than any single religious denomination except Roman Catholics.

They are more numerous than Hispanic Americans or African Americans ... more numerous than the estimated gay and lesbian population … more than seven times as numerous as American Jews … more than fifteen times as numerous as religiously active American Jews.

Not all of the religiously unaffiliated would describe themselves as atheists or agnostics, but recent studies suggest that the actively nonreligious make up about two-thirds of this population, with spiritual seekers and persons between church affiliations making up the rest.

How do we know these things? Recent—and authoritative—data comes from the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) and from surveys conducted in association with the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. ARIS studies in 1990, 2001, and 2008 documented the doubling of “nones” (people declaring no religious affiliation). Studies by Pew and other researchers have confirmed this pattern and offered more detailed information on the makeup of this fast-growing group. For example, a 1994 Pew-University of Akron study gave us our most detailed portrait of the people who make up the unaffiliated 16 percent. It found that about a third of this group identifies itself using labels like atheist and agnostic. Another third does not use these labels, but when asked about their lifestyle (church attendance, beliefs about life, and the like) is otherwise almost identical with the first group; pollsters call these the hard seculars. Combined, self-identified atheists and agnostics and the hard seculars make up 10.7 percent of the total population, equivalent to two-thirds of the unaffiliated. Spiritual seekers and persons without current church affiliation make up the balance.

Many Americans imagine that they don’t know a single person who lives without religion. Yet if confirmed nonreligious people compose 10.7 percent of the population … and if one American in six has no religious affiliation … how likely does that seem? Or is it more likely that you already know neighbors, friends, colleagues, schoolmates, or family members who live without religion?

* NOTE: According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Popclock, as of February 22, 2011, the U.S. population is 310,868,110. Sixteen percent of this = 49,738,898 religiously unaffiliated Americans of all ages.

Back to Home

New atheist study fudges data to create propaganda. This is a poll done by Center for Inquiry. CFI is nothing more than an atheist propaganda machine and their mission statement basically say so. I'll get to that in a minute. Their poll came up first on Google when I put in the question "what percentage of Americas are self defined atheists?"

The big head line of the study "one out of every Six Americans has no religious affiliation." Assuming that was true, (which it's not becuase it's assinign if you know the studies) it seems totally taken for granted that having no religious affiliation is a bad thing for religion. I'm not sure that's true. They are equating it with unbelief and that's not right. Here's their pie chart break down:

Unaffiliated 16%.
Evangelical Protestant 12%
Evangelical Baptist 11%
Other religions 37%
Catholic 24%

What's wrong with this picture? Do we really think that with the tea party blazing and right wing hysteria foaming that the largest religious group in America is "other religions?" This is totally ludicrous. I fyou study the Pew study, which is the major valid best study done in 2007 (to date the state of the art) on religious land scape in America one can see how they have fudged on this. for one thing all studies give Chrisiantiy at least 75% or more. This one gives it (adding all the Catholic, protestant, and Baptist(?) Christinty as a whole only has 44%.

It is inconceivable to me that just since 2007 things changes this drastically. Here's the Pew findings:

unaffiliated 16%
Evangelical protestant 26% *(not 12)
Catholic 23%
Mormon 1.7%
Historically Black chruches 6.9%
Mainline Protestants 18.1% (separate from Evangelical protestant)
Other Christian 0.3%
Other religions 0.3% (Pew also adds to "other" Jews 1.7%, Muslim 0.6% what it calls "other faiths" as distinct from major world religions, in that slot they put unitarians, new age, mind scinece and so = 1.2%). While CFI has a whopping 37% the better study by far, Pew, has abotu 2%. How

Breaking down the unaffiliated at the top, Pew lists atheists as 1.6%. not 16, but 1.6. If you see my page on Doxa about how atheists inflate their numbers, there are several studies that show atheists down around that figure. Pew figure is the most conservative. Adherent's.com gives them 4%. Gallop in May 2008 give 3% with 3% margin (so between 3-6%).

you see they split Baptist from Protestant for some absurd reason because Baptists are protestants of course. Makes both groups seem smaller. Then they just ignored half the Christian population.

The reason for these discrepancies is not far to seek. CFI is a propaganda wing of the Atheist movement and all do to know this is look at their mission statement. One might also take note they own Skeptical Inquirer Magazine.. Their mission statments pulls no punches in admitting they are out to destroy religion.

mission Statement of CFI.

The mission of the Center for Inquiry is to foster a secular society based on science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values.

That's the head line on the mission statement. That's no atheist propaganda is it? It's even touting their rhetoric.

To oppose and supplant the mythological narratives of the past, and the dogmas of the present, the world needs an institution devoted to promoting science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values. The Center for Inquiry is that institution.

To oppose and supplant. Supplant means to replace, to destroy. Like all good little dawkies they confuse scinece with hating religion. Their aim they state clearly to destroy religion. why should we believe they are above lying to achieve that end? We know they don't believe in truth. Their little solider have fabricated data before. I have no evidence on CFI but I have shown atheist websites that just out and out fabricate the statistics. If this is guilt by assocaition one might look at the wildly off target statistics above. Giving 34% to "other religions" when the valid study gives 2%. This survey wasn't done yesterday. Things couldn't change that much since 2007.

more of the mission statement:

At the Center for Inquiry, we believe that evidence-based reasoning, in which humans work together to address common concerns, is critical for modern world civilization. Moreover, unlike many other institutions, we maintain that scientific methods and reasoning should be utilized in examining the claims of both pseudoscience and religion. We reject mysticism and blind faith. No topic should be placed off limits to scrutiny—certainly not fringe science and religion, which have an enormous influence on beliefs and conduct.

If they knew anything about mysticism they would know that it's backed with empirical scientific evidence. They are using that as a pejorative catch phrase that means any and all religion.

We also maintain that values are properly the subject of study and discussion as much as empirical claims. The Center for Inquiry studies and promotes human values based on a naturalistic outlook. Ideological doctrine and religious dogma have no more right to dictate our moral norms than they do to influence scientific research.

That's exactly what their rhetoric has spelled out, ideological doctrine. Look at the obvious philosophical contradiction: "values are properly the subject of study and discussion as much as empirical claims" that means we will teach you to hate religion too. then they ahve the gall to say "Ideological doctrine and religious dogma have no more right to dictate our moral norms than they do to influence scientific research." That statement is ideolgoical in and of itself. To make good on that they have to argue for a philosophical ethical position that has to be justified by argument. They are merely presenting their own ideology and dogma. When they talk about values they stepping beyond the limits of science. Science is not about teaching values.When religious believes talk about values they holding up the progress of science.

The Center for Inquiry supports research, but our mission activities go far beyond sound scholarship.

they sure do! there you have it folks a frank admission of what I'm saying. Going beyond includes lying and fabricating numbers!

The Center for Inquiry, and its affiliates, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and the Council for Secular Humanism, also carry out their work through education, publishing, advocacy, and social services. The Center for Inquiry has established dozens of regional centers and communities, which provide a means of delivering educational programs and services on a local level and provide a venue for like-minded individuals to meet and share experiences. In addition, the Center for Inquiry has affiliates and sponsors programs in many different countries. A secular society ultimately should embrace all of humanity, not just selected countries.

what they are describing is the actives of a political campaign. I think this violates their 501c(3)

that statement tells us they are a propaganda machine. I am not trying to accuse all "humanist" of being in a conspiracy, but it's obvious there is an organized group making war on Christianity. We have to oppose them by spreading truth.

ABC Poll = 38% of Americans are Christian, 48% of world.

Eighty-three percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians. Most of the rest, 13 percent, have no religion. That leaves just 4 percent as adherents of all non-Christian religions combined — Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and a smattering of individual mentions.
That's quite different from the world at large: Fifty-two percent of the world's population is non-Christian, compared to 4 percent in the United States; and one-third is Christian, compared to 83 percent in the United States. (These are rough comparisons, because the world figures, reported by the Encyclopedia Britannica, are for the full population, while the U.S. figures are among adults only.)
Non Christian religions given 4% no Religion in America 13% (somewhere in that 13% is the atheists).

CNN (not the best)= 75% say Christian in America (2009)

Seventy-five percent of Americans call themselves Christian, according to the American Religious Identification Survey from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1990, the figure was 86 percent.

Newswek Poll = 81% self identified Christian in America (2009)

By Audrey Barrick

Christian Post Reporter

Wed, Apr. 08 2009 11:50 AM EDT

A new Newsweek poll reveals that although most Americans are still holding on to their faith and describing themselves as Christians, fewer believe religion can answer today’s problems.
According to the poll of 1,003 adults, released Tuesday, 60 percent of American adults say religion is very important in their lives and 78 percent say prayer is an important part of their daily lives.However, less than half (48 percent) believe religion can answer all or most of today’s problems. The percentage is the lowest number Newsweek has recorded since it began polling Americans on that issue in 1957 (when 82 percent believed religion could answer the problems of that time).

Washington Post reports on poll in 2009 that finds the group that says it has no religion is at 15% That doesn't mean atheits are at 15%. 12% of the "no religion group" doesn't' mean they don't believe in some kind of God it means they have organized religion. Most polls don't bother to make that distinction but the better one's do.

Gallop = self id Chrsitians in America at 77%. this is probably the same survey all those above are keyed to, it was actually done in 2008, just a year after the Pew study came out.