@ Zabedee:Before I start replying to your post I want to thank you for engaging in a civilized and well mannered discussion
I don't know how you could have possibly inferred that I don't know that given that my previous post was all about ideologies and doctrines with specific reference to communism and religion.
OK, so the dogmatic ones and the ones who take authority from some kind of daddy figure are irrational, especially the pious.
Well, because even non-religionists likewise believe in things? The term 'believer' is somewhat inadequate in that it assumes non-religionists are not believers, but this is just the way the word has come to be used. Do not think that this merely conventional linguistic usage truly expresses the realities of both the religionist 'believer' and the non-religionist.
Yes, even non-religious people are believers, they believe in something sometimes but that is totally different from being RELIGIOUS or being a religious believer, being a non religious believer like waking up in the morning and believing u will have a good day is not the same as believing homosexuals are an abomination or there are Jins made of smokeless fire and an Angel made of light called Jibril(Gabriel) came to Mohammed in a cave and whispered him in his ear the holy words of god.
Besides the non-religious beliefs can change in a couple of hours and we are free to doubt them and test them whereas the religious beliefs can't be questioned, you can't question God, you can't say what if there is another God because u are committing Shirk, you can't doubt the Quran or the Bible, it the word of God, religion and faith encourages u to not question it and claims with an "accuracy" of 100% that it is the word of God, that means it makes u delude urself, and if u take a deeper look into it u will see that people who believe their holy books are the work of an Omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and omnibenevolent being have no rational explanation about that, they will throw the usual argument, it is the word of god because it is written right here in my holy book, a bunch of circular arguments.
And as you said we are talking about Religious Believers with dangerous set of beliefs, not I believe I will have a coffee this morning.
Depends on the religious person, doesn't it? I suppose I too am a 'religious' person but I am still reasonably capable or looking at things from an atheistic perspective.
So you saying you are religious???
If you are religious then u must believe all the stuff written in the Quran or Bible depending if u r a Muslim or a Christian.
If you associate yourself with a religion then you must believe one of those books was introduced to the prophet by a burning bush, angel, talking snake, God or whatever.
So you look at the things from an Skeptic's perspective and u are still a religious??? you still came to the conclusion that your holy book is the infallible word of God ?
That is irrational.
Well, you nevertheless may find libertarians who are so blinkered by their beliefs that they refuse to accept that, for example, laissez-faire and *actual* freemarket capitalism aren't the economic panaceas that some of them seem to think.
I don't think they refuse to accept that there are holes in their ideology and the way of dealing with social problems, I think u have mistaken it, I think u are mixing the disagreement of a Libertarian when they tell u this is the right way to deal with a problem and not necessarily meaning that it will always be the right way and that they are not aware of their foibles and defects and they will never accept to change if something doesn't work with the claims or the pious telling u that there is NO OTHER WAY EXCEPT GOD'S WAY which wrote this infallible unchangeable book.
At least Libertarians won't impose anything on u since it will be totally against their ideology, they won't claim to know the truth 100% and if they do they are stupid Libertarians, in the other hand even the most intelligent religious people will tell u that they know the absolute truth which is not the case with intelligent Libertarians.
I'm not interested in debating these ideas, I sympathise with some ideas of libertarianism, but the above are just examples of where libertarians might hold biases on account of their beliefs.
It is not about belief, it can be tested and if that shit fails we will change the rules, you can't do that with religious people, no matter what u tell them, they will still regress and find some other type of logical fallacy to "support" their argument.
Also how is it a belief? If he thinks that Libertarianism is the right way to deal with socio-economic issues it doesn't mean he is telling u that Libertarianism is infallible and perfect, it simply means that Libertarianism is the right way to deal with socio-economic issues even though it has its own flaws and problems where people will strive to deal with them whereas in the other hand religious people tell u that this is it, IT HAS TO BE LIKE THIS, this is the perfect way, it is the word of god and if u follow it u can't go wrong and whenever u go wrong it is because of ur ego, shaitan(devil) or other nonsense.
According to your belief.
according to reasonable arguments.
According to your definition of 'deluded,' which seems to be the belief in any notion that you personally find incredible, regardless of whether its some caricature of a particular religious idea/concept/event or the belief in God itself.
I find delusion as a belief in any notion which is based on logical fallacies or contradictory assertions.
I don't think that's necessarily a bunch of nonsense. One would expect a book authored by a profoundly wise and benevolent being to contain wisdoms, parables and proverbs.
I think it is, it is nonsense because you ( not personally you ) are willfully imputing an unnecessary divine author to something that most probably has a way more naturalistic and rational explanation, that is one thing, another thing is that it is not just an unnecessary attribution but also a dishonest one because you have no basis at all whatsoever to prescribe a scripture to a contradictory divine deity.
And I wouldn't say using this as an argument is dishonest unless the person making the argument does not believe it themselves, and I wouldn't say it's necessarily 'deceptive,' although it may be an unsound inference.
I wouldn't say it is dishonest if the person making the assertion was a low IQ douchebag, then he would have an excuse, but if the person is someone with normal mental capacities then it would be dishonest for him to deliberately make such assertions.
I recede my argument about it being deceptive, I should have used a better terminology.
The discussion was about the 'idols' of secularism, and scientists, I believe, are among them.
No they are not, at least not in the sense of the idols that religious people worship, first of all no one worships scientists, looking up to them doesn't mean worshiping them, maybe you could say they are some kind of role models who we look up to but not Idols, I think the word Role model would be more fit to describe the situation.
Personally I don't worship I don't either believe in scientists, I admire their work, it wouldn't make any difference to me who the scientist is or what he is, I admire their work and effort.
Depends how broad your definition of 'reason' is, but if it's taken to mean one's conscious ability to infer and use deductive reasoning then one is left also with intuition, moral sentiment, etc., with which to make specific kinds of judgments. But of course, most importantly, human reason is of course fallible, and it is this which must always be borne in mind
My personal definition of reasonable human being would be someone that bases his decisions and knowledge on proofs, facts and evidence, of course there is no one 100% reasonable as I already mentioned before.
We decide what is moral and not on basis what works for us, what is profitable for us, what is not deleterious to ourselves and people around us.
What if human reasoning is fallible ?? tell me something infallible, except your notion of the invisible omnipotent sky idol.
The 'secularist' assertion of the primacy of reason (asserted as if religionists eschewed reason, no less) is, when it's not uttered simply as a vacuous slogan, the idolising of the highly useful but necessarily limited human faculty.
I understand but then in the end human faculties are the ONLY thing we have which help us come to reasonable judgments based on facts, proofs and evidence.
I've already explained how I believe people 'worship' these non-religious concepts. When one makes a particular idea or belief system, religious or not, the basis of all of one's thought and action then the subsequent pervasive influence of that idea or belief system on that person's psyche will surely be observable. In this sense, 'worship' isn't just doing sujood in the direction of the Qiblah, it is the more subtle notion of 'prostrating' oneself to any doctrine and giving it the power to dictate one's thoughts and actions. If anyone holds to a particular idea, whether religious or secular, with such devotion, is it wrong to equate it with worship given the influence it has over the individual?
You did explain except that as I said before your definition of worship seems to be basically everything we see or come into contact with, which of course is not. Again you are mixing some stuff up here, you can make ideas based on intuition and faith and you can make an idea based on observable logical and sound proofs and evidence, two different things, you seem to put them in the same bag. I think you are trying to narrow down the definition of worship so you have a lot of leverage to encompass everything as a form of worship, belief or intuition, that is not the case though, ideas and any system of thoughts based on sound, logical, tangible and observable facts and proofs is not prostration or worship, it is simply how we work, you can't say I worship the sky because I know the sky is here and if someone argued that it is not there I would do everything possible within my abilities to show him every single argument, fact, proof that the sky exists and this doesn't mean I am religious and worship the sky just because I am arguing there is a sky which I CAN ACTUALLY PROVE and I can observe it and whatnot, that is what reality is like, of course our faculties are fallible but then everything we know if pretty much fallible except my invisible underwear gnomes who dwell in black holes and create universes.
I don't know if I am making myself clear enough.
Because the premises of science are philosophical, not empirical. We may say that because these premises, when adopted as the basis of one's epistemology, yield productive results that therefore the premises (the scientific method) are sound and confirmed by empirical observation, but even so the premises are distinct from any empirical confirmation of their soundness, as they cannot themselves be examined/analysed empirically, being strictly conceptual.
So??? Are you trying to tell me that the only right way to deal with things is to start from the ex nihilio starting point???
of course those premises can't be examined because we could be brains in a tube or plugged into some kind of matrix, I think you have to assume in the beginning that your faculties are at least sometimes or most of the times accurate otherwise we can't even talk about anything then, it would be useless to discuss anything if we didn't assume that we exist and out faculties are sometimes or most of the times accurate.
Those type of assumptions are done even by religious people, how would a religious person know that his brain is right??? or that he can actually read, see and touch his holy book, he has to assume his senses are right as well, doesn't matter if u are religious or not, you still have to assume these things otherwise we can't say anything about being real or not real.
What is illogical, is to make a COLOSSAL leap of assumptions and assume there is a God and that you know it because a 7th century arab or prehistoric Jewish Shepherds told u it is so, that is illogical and irrational.
Ideally yes, and the same will be the case with religious scientists.
I don't think there is ANY difference at all between secular and religious scientists, all scientists use the scientific method to come up with judgments and conclusions which are testable and observable.
I have never heard any scientist to come up with any kind of theory based on the Assumption that an Omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient and omnibenevolent god exists.
But scientists are fallible human beings too and are every bit as likely as anyone else to have their own biases and predilections.
Of course.
They are human beings, and they are not, and cannot be expected to be, agnostic and skeptical scientists with respect to every belief they have and in all parts of their lives.
I don't care if a scientist is Agnostic, Muslim, Christian, Deist, Satanist, Santanist, Atheist or Nihilist, all I care about is his work and all I care about is if he used the scientific method to come up with his theory or invention.
Even now accepted scientific theories must have began their lives as beliefs, hypotheses that were submitted to testing, some parts of which will have been correct and other parts false.
I will correct u here, all accepted scientific theories we know were begotten as ideas which in a scientist's brain based on observable facts and proofs who already exist out there and can be detected by our fallible faculties, still the basis of every hypothesis is a set of facts which can be tested whereas religious people don't base their hypothesis like that, I won't even call them hypothesis in the first place, religious people ONLY assume that there is an all powerful and all knowing god that has always existed uncaused and is perfect and doesn't require space, time or anything which of course is a bunch of untestable and illogical infallible nonsense.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HypothesisBut of course, it would be absurd to think that, for example, Darwin truly knew that the theory of evolution was correct before he, at least in part, verified its accuracy (assuming it is accurate). He had a belief, a presumably correct inference, at least in part, but he did not know it before fully verifying it, and indeed much has been learned since his time.
The theory of evolution is way older than Darwin's one, Darwin just established it as a scientific theory based on a heap of facts and arguments and today it is stronger than ever with the coming of genetics and so on, i assume we won't be discussing evolution now.
The idea that living animals and species change over time is very old, that idea is based on observable phenomena.
Well, they vary from person to person. For a secularist they may be that God does not exist because science has superseded it as an explanatory hypothesis, God is just the defunct explanation of people who didn't know any better.
I don't think any reasonable Atheist would make an assertion that God does not exist because then the onus would be on him, they simply don't believe in God due to the lack of proof and evidence.
On the other hand, a religionist may be convinced that there is a God because the physical world requires a creator and designer, which is God.
Not really, it does not require any creator or designer. We know based on empirical data that humans were not created by any designer neither was earth neither was the sun, if they were we would simple be able to detect the "fingerprints" of the designer, all we know is that every existing star, planet and organism is the result of a long process guarded by different laws, like the law of natural selection in evolution and so on, no where in the universe we see ANYTHING that has been designed, as I said every existing thing leads us to a process that caused it to exist under different set of laws of nature, I know you might be mentioning the Big Bang but I am not willing to discuss that since I am not a qualified Quantum Physicist and I think it would be a waste of time if u wanted to discuss Quantum physics with me even though I know something about it, but I am still no expert.
Whatever the merits of these inferences, these are the kinds of things that people surmise on the basis of their reason.
Except that those inferences are textbook assumptions based on intuition.
M-hm. And how many people ever could nevermind actually do this? Could you personally verify everything, empirical or analytical, that you accept as being true? And even then, having to educate yourself enough to conduct valid experiments and to look for specific phenomena would itself require that one be educated by other people who know the subject matter, so you'd still be dependent on the knowledge of others.
hmmm, not too many. I could possibly not verify everything in order to accept them to be true but at least I can read something about it, recently I read 2 Books on Evolution, I have one more to go and I got 2 books on Genetics, of course that will not make me anywhere near an expert or qualified but at least I will have the idea, I will read and try to understand the empirical analysis they used to come to those conclusions, I will try to examine their arguments and how sound they are, if I find them illogical or nonsensical I might go even deeper into the issue if I have the will and time to do so and if not then I will just shrug my shoulders and try to leave it for some other time, are you by any chance insinuating that if we don't know it then God did it ?? what if we don't know it, the only thing we have to know is that the premises and arguments of the theists for their God are a bunch of nonsense and even if u r a believer, even if u happen to believe in God will u just go around and claim that God makes it rain, God makes the sun rise and so on
there are many Religious Scientists and I don't think they would dare to claim that.
Yes, 'all you have to do' to be truly epistemologically autonomous is personally verify every single thing you accept as being true completely by yourself. What could be simpler?
Hmmmmm yes, otherwise you will have to say I DON"T KNOW and that is who I am, I am an I don't know person ( Agnostic ), it is way more honest than strutting around and acting like u know it.
Seriously, just look at what you wrote. You write you don't have to 'listen to scientists' and then in the same sentence you state that you just have to refer to 'some books,' which would of course have to be written by scientists.
You got it all wrong, I never said I was referring to the scientist, maybe that is how it seems but it's obviously not what I meant, since I have been constantly bragging about facts and evidence you could have easily assumed that the thing I wrote meant that someone did a research, gathered evidence and proofs, examined it, experimented, verified it and u can read and try to understand based on what u know what the scientist did, I referred to the work of the scientist which is based on empirical analysis and experiments and so on and forth, I also said take a look at the evidence I never said BELIEVE THE ALMIGHTY DAWKINS.
There are no doubt quite a few events that happened in the past, of both historical and naturalistic phenomena, that cannot be verified, but this does not mean that they never happened. Even the scientific search for purely empirical phenomena that occurred both in the past and that continue to happen today is limited in terms of what it is capable of confirming.
Of course, I can't say that Alexander the great never had anal sex, I don't even have any way to prove it, it is HIGHLY possible and quite logical and sound that Alexander the Great loved taking it up in the ass, it is physically and logically possible, if you told me Alexander the great could shoot laser rays out of his eyes while flying with his unicorn I would call u crazy because there is simply no evidence whatsoever for such kind of phenomenon and it is in the same time illogical but there is evidence of people taking it up in the a-hole and it is logically possible.
And yet past events like the Tunguska event or the subatomic phenomena being researched at CERN are both real and yet highly mysterious in terms of what is known about them, and perhaps even what can be known.
They are real at least and they are being tested and verified, of course there is a lot of mystery but that does not mean my Unicorn did it, does it ?? What you are referring is the God of the Gaps Argument.
Well, again it depends. If the person adopting the 'scientific' and 'evidence-based' ideology is only doing so on account of social conditioning then it hardly qualifies them as being analytical thinkers really, does it? But yes, faith is not an analytical process, though a person may also take an analytical approach to their own religion and to God, as believing rationalist philosophers have done in the past.
Referring to your question, yes.
I don't know any rationalist believing philosopher that proved the existence of God in the past, I like Kant, as far as I know he is one of those few who were believers who never took the Ontological Arguments seriously and said:
"It always remains a scandal of philosophy and universal human reason that the existence of things outside us ... should have to be assumed merely on faith, and that if it occurs to anyone to doubt it, we should be unable to answer him with a satisfactory proof."
- Immanuel Kant
Source: "Transcendental Arguments (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)". Plato.stanford.edu. 2011-02-25. Retrieved 2011-10-22.
And to characterise faith as delusion is a crass simplification. The word simply means 'trust' as one might trust that the word of a particular book is inspired with a numinous message or as one may trust in the veracity of certain claims made by scientists or philosophers. But it's true that faith is used particularly within a religious context and is not simply an epistemological credence given to a set of particular religious ideas.
I don't think it is, even if we say Faith is Trust which is not we are still left with a reasonable trust and unreasonable one.
The difference between the claims of a scientist and the religious is the fact that scientists rely their judgement and knowledge on empirical analysis and evidence whereas the religious reply it on sheer assumptions and circular arguments.
Well, I've given the reasons as to why I think people believe most things they hold as true, rather than know them. It's a complicated debate anyway and I don't care to attempt to resolve it now.
yeah I know, I understand what u saying, I think u have many valid points, I am also trying to express myself and why I say the things I write here.
You don't have to but most people do, don't they? You don't just take an agnostic position with regards to evolution or the approximate age of the earth or universe, do you? Nevermind the question of whether the Bible or Qur'an are divinely inspired.
yeah most people do, maybe they are to arrogant maybe there is some other reason they claim to know, who knows.
And no I don't because I have read and studied many concepts of evolution and the universe, I really don't have any Idea how did they come up with the 4.5 Billion years old Earth though, I am planning to read something on that matter soon or in the future, I never engage in any discussion about the age of the earth, I could engage in some discussions about Evolution because I have read about it, I am not an expert of course but I know the basics of it, I read how did they come up with the theory, why does it work like that and so on, of course I am not the one who will teach u evolutionary biology but what I have read is enough to convince me that it is true, we should mind the question if the bible or the quran are divinely inspired because it is very serious stuff, it wouldn't make any difference if evolution was true or not, it wouldn't affect my life at all but the religious scriptures have the potential to affect the lives of people and society and it does matter a lot, especially when u are trying to restrict me from doing something I wanna do based on your holy scripture.
Again, I'm not interested in getting into great detail about this. It will simply suffice to state at this point that it is possible to believe something, on the basis of evidence, and yet still be mistaken, and therefore one cannot be considered to know that evidence-based belief, because of course a person cannot know something that is false.
Yes but at least u have some proof and evidence and u have the chance to fix it later, you have no proof of the Quran being divinely inspired or that Mohammed talked to Gabriel or that Moses split the sea and in the other hand Mohammed split the moon and so on and forth.
Here's an example of a certain kind of crystal thought to be impossible, on the basis of evidence:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16393296Presumably, the scientists concerned only believed that this phenomenon was impossible, but they did so on the basis of evidence. So a belief can be evidence-based but knowledge requires that the thing that is believed in be true or correct.
My point is simply that 'belief' is a complicated thing, and again I'm wary about making generalisations concerning it and other things.
Ouch, sorry, too lazy to go through that now.
In any case, that's far more than I wanted to write on this subject. Those are my views, respond as you will, take them or leave them.
Thanks for engaging in this discussion, I appreciate it
Topic: Religious Faithfuls reject analytic thinking!!!