Evolution vs Y.E.C

[Muizer]

they believe that since they don't adhere to a known religion, that this means they don't hold any religious beliefs at all. In fact, they are religious, as every thinking human being is, it's just their religious beliefs are unconscious and undeveloped.

Perhaps, but whether or not there's some "philosopher's god" is actually quite irrelevant and I'm quite happy to assume there is one, if only for the sake of argument. Consider me a religious person looking for a religion to adhere to but not finding one because of the vast gap scientific enquiry has opened up between a philosopher's god and the gods of scripture. Over to you.......

[Iskar]

I mean, we're pretty good at high resolution active MRI being able to predict very stunningly specific things when it comes to thoughts and dreams. We can more or less see how someone feels about something, we can retrace patterning and applying machine learning to firing patterns reveals some pretty interesting realizations. For example we can prove that certain neurons encode single concepts (for example green) and are wired in such a way to increase the activation potential of related concepts to the point that we can identify with certainty when a subject may for example, think of a green apple. However consideringly the vast amount of concepts the brain can hold the ability to look at specifics to that degree is only possible within a limited few areas and only with specific subjects (no two brains are identical) but it does move us far closer to being able to "see subjectivity" than I think anyone on the "religious" side wants to admit we are.

You're taking the physical brain activity to be identical with thought as perceived by the subject, which is probably not that
surprising from a materialist position, but has a crucial weakness: You can only ever establish correlations between brain activity and specific outer stimuli or thought patterns subjectively reported by study participants, not with their actual thoughts as experienced by themselves. You're facing the Kantian problem that you can never get through to the thing-in-itself (or thought-in-itself here). Furthermore, since the only mind you can examine without the subjectively distorted reports of another is your own, you have a quasi-quantummechanical problem of observation interfering with the observed, in that your examination of your thoughts overrides the latter by the examining thoughts.
Once you've deciphered the reaction every pixel of the Mona Lisa causes in the brain, will you be able to reconstruct the aesthetical experience? I doubt it.

The result of ignoring metaphysics isn't that you will lack a metaphysics, it is that your metaphysics will not be sound and properly developed. This is what our irreligious friends fail to understand; they believe that since they don't adhere to a known religion, that this means they don't hold any religious beliefs at all. In fact, they are religious, as every thinking human being is, it's just their religious beliefs are unconscious and undeveloped.

Metaphysics is any general understanding of reality. "Metaphysics is false" is a general statement about reality and hence a metaphysical statement itself. It is impossible to escape metaphysics. Human thinking is inherently metaphysical. The only way to avoid having a metaphysics would be to not think at all.

Science as a method of epistemology relies on extra-scientific assumptions about the nature of reality. As philosopher and historian of science E. A. Burtt states in, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science:



That's why science is the second philosophy and metaphysics the first. Metaphysics is the foundation on which science (and epistemology in general, and ethics, and more) stands.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dict...d%20philosophy



https://www.merriam-webster.com/dict...t%20Philosophy



https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/metaphysics



Without metaphysics, there is no science. The choice isn't between metaphysics and no metaphysics, it's between sound metaphysics and bad metaphysics.

God is the Ground of Being; good luck developing a sound understanding of Being without believing in God.

Two things:
Firstly, if you want to use metaphysics synonymously to religion then you cannot put it above other fields of experience/conscious conduct, but you have to juxtapose them. The different Einstellungen of conscious conduct are functionally differentiated, not hierarchically. In that case you may use "metaphysics" as an alternative name for the religous Einstellung, but that is really redundant and leads to misunderstandings with people who do not share that special terminology.

Secondly, metaphysics as "first philosophy" is bullcrap. "Examining being as being" is just an empty concatenation of words that means nothing. Philosophy is, despite the many people that abuse the term, a strict science that examines the conditions of possibility and the necessary structures of our thoughts and perceptions. Discussing notions that are supposedly ante rem and above proof or falsification is just a waste of time as it is epistemologically worthless, yielding no reliable knowledge or arguments to base further enquiries or activities on.
Either you do science (natural, structural, humanities) or you don't. Inventing useless "metaphysical" concepts will only hinder your advance in understanding by forcing your scientific arguments to conform to concepts that have nothing to do with them - just like the book I once read on the philosophy of physics, where lots of philosophy people struggled vainly with quantum mechanics because they had their preset notions on ontology and tried to force quantum mechanics into it, instead of questioning their stupid assumptions in light of a working physical model.

I may disagree heartily with the materialist position, but I cannot dispute that it is intrinsically consistent and a viable alternative to the idealist one. Metaphysics, however, is just bollocks.

@Muizer: How is my God a mere philosopher's god? I believe just as well in the triune God, as is the faith of the Holy Church. I just differentiate properly in what Einstellung I make which statement, so that I do not confuse statements like "The curvature of space is proportional to the energy-momentum tensor." and "Christ is risen, alleluia." to be subject to the same way of confirmation/falsification.

[Elfdude]

You're taking the physical brain activity to be identical with thought as perceived by the subject, which is probably not that

I'm struggling with this statement because I do not agree. Thought as percieved by the subject is a complex set of inter-related stimuli which kick off. We know for example if we remove the stimuli to that neuron (green) the subject ceases to consciously comprehend green although they can clearly still perceive it, recognize it as a color etc. Now heuristics and simultaneous processes complicate the picture quite a bit so what you mean by "thought as percieved by the subject" is a bit of a pile of hard to define ideas.

surprising from a materialist position, but has a crucial weakness: You can only ever establish correlations between brain activity and specific outer stimuli or thought patterns subjectively reported by study participants, not with their actual thoughts as experienced by themselves.

This is essentially the same thing all science does. We can test these correlations via neural networking experimentally (although we lack the current ability to replicate a human brain). All of science is a best fit correlative approach which dissects an ever shrinking margin of error through greater and greater specificity. While I agree this does complicate the process immensely and means we must acquire far more data than we'd ordinarily need to to make a conclusion in say chemistry etc., the basic ability to answer the question of what is thought scientifically is definitely not a scientific impossibility as some like to pretend it is. Furthermore it's far closer than those laymen want to pretend in this very thread.

So while I appreciate your sentiment, I think you extend it's implications far too much.

You're facing the Kantian problem that you can never get through to the thing-in-itself (or thought-in-itself here).

That's not true unless we accept that thought is unrelated to a physical process. Most scientists and medical professionals would scoff at that concept. The question is how it's related, a question we're chillingly close to answering.

Furthermore, since the only mind you can examine without the subjectively distorted reports of another is your own, you have a quasi-quantummechanical problem of observation interfering with the observed, in that your examination of your thoughts overrides the latter by the examining thoughts.

It's interesting to me you advance this point when it's essentially the same one Dr. Legend is trying to advance. Ultimately subjective distortion is meaningless to the scientific method because the method never purports to eliminate subjective distortion but rather to progressively reduce it through the inclusion, relation and replication of data. Now don't get me wrong, the data required to make sense of our brains even at a general level of per neuron of our brains is monumental, the data when we realize each neuron acts as it's own network and processor is even more monumental. However it is not something which is impossible to do nor is it behind some invisible wall.

Once you've deciphered the reaction every pixel of the Mona Lisa causes in the brain, will you be able to reconstruct the aesthetical experience? I doubt it.

Why? This seems like a random assertion.

@Dr. Legend, others have crushed your arguments suitably.

[Muizer]

@Muizer: How is my God a mere philosopher's god?

Because that is what your assertion that god's actions conform to the laws of nature and therefore are beyond detection leaves us with. A god incapable of divine intervention in the way that's pivotal to every religion ever conceived by or revealed to (if you wish) man.

[Prodromos]

You're taking leaps of faith as if you were doing parkour. Let's see: Epistomology is important->entire metaphysics are important. I believe in god->god exists. Conjunction: god exists and god is metaphysical concept->god is source of metaphysics.

How did you get that from my post? I'm pretty sure I never made these rather silly arguments. It sounds like a parody of logic.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Neighbor 1: "Hi, there, new neighbor, it sure is a nice day to be moving."
New Neighbor: "Yes, it is and people around here seem extremely friendly."
Neighbor 1: "So what is it you do for a living?"
New Neighbor: "I am a professor at the University. I teach deductive reasoning."
Neighbor 1: "Deductive reasoning, what is that?"
New Neighbor: "Let me give you and example. I see you have a dog house out back. By that I deduce that you have a dog."
Neighbor 1: "That is right."
New Neighbor: "The fact that you have a dog, Leads me to deduce that you have a family."
Neighbor 1: "Right again."
New Neighbor: "Since you have a family I deduce that you have a wife."
Neighbor 1: "Correct."
New Neighbor: "And since you have a wife, I can deduce that you are heterosexual."
Neighbor 1: "Yup."
New Neighbor: "That is deductive reasoning."
Neighbor 1: "Cool."

Later that same day...

Neighbor 1: "Hey, I was talking to that new guy who moved in next door."
Neighbor 2: "Is he a nice guy?."
Neighbor 1: "Yes, and he has an interesting job."
Neighbor 2: "Oh, yeah what does he do?"
Neighbor 1: "He is a professor of deductive reasoning at the University."
Neighbor 2: "Deductive reasoning, what is that?"
Neighbor 1: "Let me give you an example. Do you have a dog house?"
Neighbor 2: "No."
Neighbor 1: "Fag."

These arguments would be more reasonable:

P1: Epistemology is important
P2: Epistemology is rooted in metaphysics
C: Metaphysics is not unimportant

P1: It is rationally warranted to believe things for which there is evidence
P2: There is evidence for God
C: Belief in God is rationally warranted

P1: There is contingent being
P2: Contingent being can't be its own ground
C: There is a necessary/non-contingent ground of contingent being (which we name "God", which is an entirely different concept from contingent small-g gods like Odin. The name God is not capitalized out of reverence, it's just good English to capitalize proper nouns, like America, Seinfeld, Gotham, Frodo)

[Sar1n]

How did you get that from my post? I'm pretty sure I never made these rather silly arguments. It sounds like a parody of logic.



These arguments would be more reasonable:

P1: Epistemology is important
P2: Epistemology is rooted in metaphysics
C: Metaphysics is not unimportant

Leap of faith number one. Epistemology is important out of sheer necessity, but like the rest of metaphysics, it's inherently subjective. The entire field of metaphysics is simply nothing but playing "what if" on infinite field of possibilities that open by knocking out one of the essentials I mentioned above, and thus going off the rails of reason and evidence.

P1: It is rationally warranted to believe things for which there is evidence
P2: There is evidence for God
C: Belief in God is rationally warranted

Leap of faith #2. Any evidence for god is inherently subjective. Idea of god, by principle, is not subject to physics. Anything you can ascribe to your god can also be ascribed to yet undescribed principles of physics. In short, unexplained=/=unexplainable.

P1: There is contingent being
P2: Contingent being can't be its own ground
C: There is a necessary/non-contingent ground of contingent being (which we name "God", which is an entirely different concept from contingent small-g gods like Odin. The name God is not capitalized out of reverence, it's just good English to capitalize proper nouns, like America, Seinfeld, Gotham, Frodo)

Oh, lookie, a double this time.

First, you're applying principles of physics-essentials-on metaphysics. Second, you define God so broadly that it covers almost entire spectrum of metaphysical possibilities, among which are some that nobody would call God or god, and then taking a leap of God=my god.

[Prodromos]

Perhaps, but whether or not there's some "philosopher's god" is actually quite irrelevant and I'm quite happy to assume there is one, if only for the sake of argument. Consider me a religious person looking for a religion to adhere to but not finding one because of the vast gap scientific enquiry has opened up between a philosopher's god and the gods of scripture. Over to you.......

While it goes without saying that there is a God, the journey from plain Deism to fleshed-out Christianity isn't as easy to make purely rationally. There's a leap of faith involved (as with any other belief), but it isn't groundless, and it justifies itself afterward. Most likely, your worldview is heavily influenced by modernist myths about reality and a priori rules out Christianity. The first step would be to reexamine this worldview and see whether it's actually rationally warranted. As for the gap between Christianity and science, I am unaware of any such gap, you might be just misinterpreting the Bible. There's usually several possible interpretations to each story, if you think one interpretation is more scientifically grounded than another, there's generally absolutely nothing preventing you from believing that one over the others, as long as it doesn't detract from the ultimate meaning of the story.

[Gaidin]

I mean, we're pretty good at high resolution active MRI being able to predict very stunningly specific things when it comes to thoughts and dreams. We can more or less see how someone feels about something, we can retrace patterning and applying machine learning to firing patterns reveals some pretty interesting realizations. For example we can prove that certain neurons encode single concepts (for example green) and are wired in such a way to increase the activation potential of related concepts to the point that we can identify with certainty when a subject may for example, think of a green apple. However consideringly the vast amount of concepts the brain can hold the ability to look at specifics to that degree is only possible within a limited few areas and only with specific subjects (no two brains are identical) but it does move us far closer to being able to "see subjectivity" than I think anyone on the "religious" side wants to admit we are.

Storytime with Gaidin: Had to have my functional MRI done twice. Why? The first time they spent a whole lot of time had me pressing buttons in response to what's on screen. I literally told them before hand, that look, give me questions to respond to. Because I've been playing video games since god damn elementary school(solid thirty years). The part of my brain that does what they want it to there is locked into instinct. Unfortunately, the tech running the test was locked into orders and over half the test had me playing the medical version of a video game. A month later I get a call saying we have to retake the test because there wasn't really anything readable. Second time, every god damn thing I did was just a verbal response to a question.

[Muizer]

There's usually several possible interpretations to each story, if you think one interpretation is more scientifically grounded than another, there's generally absolutely nothing preventing you from believing that one over the others, as long as it doesn't detract from the ultimate meaning of the story.

Yes, multiple interpretations of texts are possible, but it is bad practice in history to disregard the people with whom they origininated and the way they perceived their world. They lived in times when gods and demons were omnipresent. When they describe the miraclulous there's no need at all to think they were speaking metaphorically.

[Iskar]

I'm struggling with this statement because I do not agree. Thought as percieved by the subject is a complex set of inter-related stimuli which kick off. We know for example if we remove the stimuli to that neuron (green) the subject ceases to consciously comprehend green although they can clearly still perceive it, recognize it as a color etc. Now heuristics and simultaneous processes complicate the picture quite a bit so what you mean by "thought as percieved by the subject" is a bit of a pile of hard to define ideas.



This is essentially the same thing all science does. We can test these correlations via neural networking experimentally (although we lack the current ability to replicate a human brain). All of science is a best fit correlative approach which dissects an ever shrinking margin of error through greater and greater specificity. While I agree this does complicate the process immensely and means we must acquire far more data than we'd ordinarily need to to make a conclusion in say chemistry etc., the basic ability to answer the question of what is thought scientifically is definitely not a scientific impossibility as some like to pretend it is. Furthermore it's far closer than those laymen want to pretend in this very thread.

So while I appreciate your sentiment, I think you extend it's implications far too much.



That's not true unless we accept that thought is unrelated to a physical process. Most scientists and medical professionals would scoff at that concept. The question is how it's related, a question we're chillingly close to answering.



It's interesting to me you advance this point when it's essentially the same one Dr. Legend is trying to advance. Ultimately subjective distortion is meaningless to the scientific method because the method never purports to eliminate subjective distortion but rather to progressively reduce it through the inclusion, relation and replication of data. Now don't get me wrong, the data required to make sense of our brains even at a general level of per neuron of our brains is monumental, the data when we realize each neuron acts as it's own network and processor is even more monumental. However it is not something which is impossible to do nor is it behind some invisible wall.



Why? This seems like a random assertion.

@Dr. Legend, others have crushed your arguments suitably.

From a materialist perspective I think you're even right in that the mind is completely decipherable. From an idealist perspective it is impossible for the thinking instance to deconstruct itself, simply due to the scientific Einstellung in which this would be done constituting only one aspect of its conduct. Either perspective is, as a scientific one itself (if you do philosophy properly as a strict structural science), subject to being tested over time and the latter will tell if either is to be falsified. While we wait for this epistmemological armageddon I thank you for your high-quality arguments.

How did you get that from my post? I'm pretty sure I never made these rather silly arguments. It sounds like a parody of logic.



These arguments would be more reasonable:

P1: Epistemology is important
P2: Epistemology is rooted in metaphysics
C: Metaphysics is not unimportant

P2 is false. Epistemology is rooted in systematic philosophy and requires no metaphysical premises or preparations. All you need is a Cartesian Cogito-ergo-sum to start with. The rest is logics. (Logics isn't rooted in metaphysics either, it is itself a partly acquired, partly innate structure or thought that we use because it works, for no other reason.) Hence C fails.

P1: It is rationally warranted to believe things for which there is evidence
P2: There is evidence for God
C: Belief in God is rationally warranted

P2 is false, unless you stretch the word God so much it becomes meaningless. By definition there can be no evidence for the transcendent. Hence C fails.

P1: There is contingent being
P2: Contingent being can't be its own ground
C: There is a necessary/non-contingent ground of contingent being (which we name "God", which is an entirely different concept from contingent small-g gods like Odin. The name God is not capitalized out of reverence, it's just good English to capitalize proper nouns, like America, Seinfeld, Gotham, Frodo)

P2 is false, there is no reason to assume that existence is necessary. In fact, all our observations only encompass contingent being(s) based on other contingent being(s) or even effects based on no observable cause as in quantum mechanics. Hence C fails.

Nice try at playing the Aquinas-card, though. The quinque viae only lead to questioning metaphysical assumptions rather than to God, however. Also, that notion of God is the actual philosopher's god Muizer was deploring, and is entirely bereft of meaning.

Because that is what your assertion that god's actions conform to the laws of nature and therefore are beyond detection leaves us with. A god incapable of divine intervention in the way that's pivotal to every religion ever conceived by or revealed to (if you wish) man.

If I believe in a transcendent God unbound by the laws of nature and even spacetime then the fact that I cannot uniquely distinguish his interventions from world-immanent phenomena does not mean they are impossible. In fact the different Einstellung is key here: When conducting myself religiously I can regard something as divine intervention (even though it does not take me to the closest Imperial Cult shrine - Morrowind, best game ever!) that I would regard as an ordinary natural phenomenon when conducting myself scientifically. Prime example: I believe firmly that during mass bread and wine are truly transsubstantiated to the blood and body of the Lord. However, I won't ever claim you'd see anything but bread and wine when examinig them scientifically under the microscope.

Yes, multiple interpretations of texts are possible, but it is bad practice in history to disregard the people with whom they origininated and the way they perceived their world. They lived in times when gods and demons were omnipresent. When they describe the miraclulous there's no need at all to think they were speaking metaphorically.

Hermeneutics isn't everything. The effect and content of a text lie with the reception by the reader, regardless of the intentions of the author.

[Prodromos]

You're taking the physical brain activity to be identical with thought as perceived by the subject, which is probably not that
surprising from a materialist position, but has a crucial weakness: You can only ever establish correlations between brain activity and specific outer stimuli or thought patterns subjectively reported by study participants, not with their actual thoughts as experienced by themselves. You're facing the Kantian problem that you can never get through to the thing-in-itself (or thought-in-itself here).

Well-put. You could say the mind can be studied, but only indirectly.

Firstly, if you want to use metaphysics synonymously to religion then you cannot put it above other fields of experience/conscious conduct, but you have to juxtapose them. The different Einstellungen of conscious conduct are functionally differentiated, not hierarchically. In that case you may use "metaphysics" as an alternative name for the religous Einstellung, but that is really redundant and leads to misunderstandings with people who do not share that special terminology.

It's important to define our terms, otherwise we might spend pages talking over each other's heads (an EMM specialty). That's why I made sure to define my terms early on. But for what it's worth, my definitions aren't completely made up. Aristotle's original name for First Philosophy wasn't metaphysics; that was a later invention a few centuries after his death. His original name for it was theology.

Secondly, metaphysics as "first philosophy" is bullcrap. "Examining being as being" is just an empty concatenation of words that means nothing. Philosophy is, despite the many people that abuse the term, a strict science that examines the conditions of possibility and the necessary structures of our thoughts and perceptions. Discussing notions that are supposedly ante rem and above proof or falsification is just a waste of time as it is epistemologically worthless, yielding no reliable knowledge or arguments to base further enquiries or activities on.
Either you do science (natural, structural, humanities) or you don't. Inventing useless "metaphysical" concepts will only hinder your advance in understanding by forcing your scientific arguments to conform to concepts that have nothing to do with them - just like the book I once read on the philosophy of physics, where lots of philosophy people struggled vainly with quantum mechanics because they had their preset notions on ontology and tried to force quantum mechanics into it, instead of questioning their stupid assumptions in light of a working physical model.

It goes without saying that certain first principles form the basis of reasoning, and should be taken to be true without demonstration. But these axioms are still metaphysical beliefs. If you claim that science can be rationally warranted without being grounded in a metaphysics, i.e. an extra-scientific theory of reality, that's a claim that needs to be demonstrated. It's an untenable position, and I haven't seen any arguments to support it. These are important questions that you can't wave away by calling them a waste of time.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Scientism is the view that all real knowledge is scientific knowledge—that there is no rational, objective form of inquiry that is not a branch of science. There is at least a whiff of scientism in the thinking of those who dismiss ethical objections to cloning or embryonic stem cell research as inherently “anti-science.” There is considerably more than a whiff of it in the work of New Atheist writers like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who allege that because religion has no scientific foundation (or so they claim) it “therefore” has no rational foundation at all. It is evident even in secular conservative writers like John Derbyshire and Heather MacDonald, whose criticisms of their religious fellow right-wingers are only slightly less condescending than those of Dawkins and co. Indeed, the culture at large seems beholden to an inchoate scientism—“faith” is often pitted against “science” (even by those friendly to the former) as if “science” were synonymous with “reason.”

Despite its adherents’ pose of rationality, scientism has a serious problem: it is either self-refuting or trivial. Take the first horn of this dilemma. The claim that scientism is true is not itself a scientific claim, not something that can be established using scientific methods. Indeed, that science is even a rational form of inquiry (let alone the only rational form of inquiry) is not something that can be established scientifically. For scientific inquiry itself rests on a number of philosophical assumptions: that there is an objective world external to the minds of scientists; that this world is governed by causal regularities; that the human intellect can uncover and accurately describe these regularities; and so forth. Since science presupposes these things, it cannot attempt to justify them without arguing in a circle. And if it cannot even establish that it is a reliable form of inquiry, it can hardly establish that it is the only reliable form. Both tasks would require “getting outside” science altogether and discovering from that extra-scientific vantage point that science conveys an accurate picture of reality—and in the case of scientism, that only science does so.

The rational investigation of the philosophical presuppositions of science has, naturally, traditionally been regarded as the province of philosophy. Nor is it these presuppositions alone that philosophy examines. There is also the question of how to interpret what science tells us about the world. For example, is the world fundamentally comprised of substances or events? What is it to be a “cause”? Is there only one kind? (Aristotle held that there are at least four.) What is the nature of the universals referred to in scientific laws—concepts like quark, electron, atom, and so on—and indeed in language in general? Do they exist over and above the particular things that instantiate them? Scientific findings can shed light on such metaphysical questions, but can never fully answer them. Yet if science must depend upon philosophy both to justify its presuppositions and to interpret its results, the falsity of scientism seems doubly assured. As the conservative philosopher John Kekes (himself a confirmed secularist like Derbyshire and MacDonald) concludes: “Hence philosophy, and not science, is a stronger candidate for being the very paradigm of rationality.”

Here we come to the second horn of the dilemma facing scientism. Its advocate may now insist: if philosophy has this status, it must really be a part of science, since (he continues to maintain, digging in his heels) all rational inquiry is scientific inquiry. The trouble now is that scientism becomes completely trivial, arbitrarily redefining “science” so that it includes anything that could be put forward as evidence against it. Worse, it makes scientism consistent with views that are supposed to be incompatible with it.

http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/03/1174/

What "being qua being" means is that metaphysics is the study of Being (reality) as such. Whenever you make a statement about the nature of reality, or what Being is, you're engaging in metaphysics. As philosopher and historian of science E. A. Burtt points out, the very attempt to refute metaphysics necessarily involves metaphysical propositions. When you say metaphysics is bollocks, you're saying that Being is such that we can make no general statements about Being. That's... a general statement about Being. You are attempting to refute metaphysics by making use of metaphysics.

I may disagree heartily with the materialist position, but I cannot dispute that it is intrinsically consistent and a viable alternative to the idealist one.

I'd argue that materialism, like scientism and similar ideologies, is actually incoherent and self-refuting because it holds that everything is caused by matter, but if that's true, then what caused matter?

There's simply no escape from the Ground of Being.

[Prodromos]

Yes, multiple interpretations of texts are possible, but it is bad practice in history to disregard the people with whom they origininated and the way they perceived their world. They lived in times when gods and demons were omnipresent. When they describe the miraclulous there's no need at all to think they were speaking metaphorically.

Ah, I thought you were referring to things like evolution or the Earth orbiting the Sun.

Well science doesn't really disprove miracles. Science is a method of epistemology that utilizes methodological naturalism, but it doesn't follow from this that metaphysical naturalism is true (which would be self-refuting). Science is only one method of epistemology. Just because science can't detect something -- such as divine intervention, ethics or even epistemology itself, which is extra-scientific -- doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. There is no scientific evidence for consciousness, for example, but you believe that other human beings are conscious, don't you?

[fkizz]

Just because science can't detect something -- such as divine intervention, ethics or even epistemology itself, which is extra-scientific -- doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. There is no scientific evidence for consciousness, for example, but you believe that other human beings are conscious, don't you?

Good point, the irony is, such mindset, applied to 1700s or 1600s, would mean the "sceptic rational mindset" would discard the existance of electromagnetism as mere supersticion for primitive people.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

The exception would consist of a few alchemists

[Elfdude]

I'm amused you find that to be a point worth making, fkizz. Or rather, maybe I don't understand why that's a relevant point... what's your point?

Dr. Legend, science is perfectly capable of detecting and measuring anything which can be rigorously defined. Ethics can be detected because we can define it and measure it versus outcomes which allows us to define it scientificially. Similarly epistemology itself and etc. Your points fail because you have no real idea what science is so you vainly try to construct strawman about what science can or cannot do. There's plenty of scientific evidence for consciousness depending on how we define consciousness. There's plenty of evidence to assume (again dependent on the definition) that others are conscious actors.

[fkizz]

I'm amused you find that to be a point worth making, fkizz. Or rather, maybe I don't understand why that's a relevant point... what's your point?

True Scientists, with capital S, are never real sceptics.

They are outside of the box thinkers, easily get bored with the "knowledge establishment" and therefore it's not by chance they come up with completly new theories rather than just replicating and repeating what their science-book said.

[Elfdude]

Your expert definition of scientist is noted. It's wrong but believe what you want.

[Diocle]

I find bizarre that there is still someone trying to prove the inexistence of God/s on scientific basis.

I mean that this whole thread is pretty meaningless, to say at least, because if you are atheist, you MUST think that life/universe/and everything (?) have natural origin, in the same way, if you believe in God, you MUST think that life/universe and everything (?) have been created by the entity you consider God, end of the tale.

So, seen that I can't believe that the guy who has opened this poll is so naive to be unable to see the evident idiocy of the question, I must think that this is just another thread trying to prove in scientific term the non-existence of God. But sadly this is impossible because even a five years old child would answer you that God doesn't belong to the same universe understandable using rational data, maths can't prove or disprove anything about God.

I highly suggest a (re-)reading of Emmanuel Kant to fully understand the inherent naivity (euphemism to avoid the term "idiocy") of this poll.

[Muizer]

You could also wonder who exactly in this thread is trying to reduce the poll question to 'can science disprove god', thereby pushing for the conclusion you just drew (and most people, probably including the OP would).

Alternatively, you can interpret the question as "does scripture (i.e. a concrete religious practice, not the concept of a god per se) betray any understanding of the physical realm as we understand if through science, or is it at most (with no small amount of intellectual acrobatics) not in outright contradiction?"

[Diocle]

Alternatively, you can interpret the question as "does scripture (i.e. a concrete religious practice, not the concept of a god per se) betray any understanding of the physical realm as we understand if through science, or is it at most (with no small amount of intellectual acrobatics) not in outright contradiction?"

No, sorry but I can't.

The scripture can't betray the physical understanding, because the scripture comes before the scientific understanding, indeed we may say that the scripture is the factual origin of the scientific undertanding of the world, being the scientific understanding of the world the direct son of the religios control of the structures (universities) forming the scientific knowledge; Galileo was professor at the University of Padua founded by Jesuits, Copernico studied at Krakow and Bologna, Newton studied at Trinity College and Cambridge and so on, every scientist and every intellectual of the ancien regime in Europe was formed by the Christian culture controlling the structures of the knowledge. Rationalism has Christian basis, the Razor of Occam is a Christian concept created by William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347), who was an English Franciscan friar, scholastic philosopher, and theologian. In Europe, Science is legitimate daughter of the Christian faith.

This thread is just another silly attempt to disprove the existence of God on scientific basis, for this reason this thread is inherently idiotic, so, I repeat, instead of opening silly threads on TWC about God, why don't you guys use your precious time to (re-)read Emmanuel Kant? It's a good reading, believe me.

[Muizer]

To be certain, you do understand I am using the word "betray" here in the sense of "give hints of" or "reveal something of", not "rat on" or "back-stab"?

Anyway, I certainly am not trying to disprove the existence of a god. I am questioning the relevance of human religion when considering the nature of god and creation.