<p>There are too many spectacularly poor arguments on this thread for me to count, along with a good amount of erroneous assertions. There are some remarkably pragmatic posters on the first few pages, but then this thread descends into a pitiful mishmash of curiously conceived ideas.</p>
<p>Anyway, this was a good way to procrastinate - back to reading for Spanish.</p>
<p>You didn’t really answer the question…</p>
<p>Not to mention I would really like to know what exactly is MY way, and how do you know this?</p>
<p>Oh and public schools=/=socialism</p>
<p>^Since this thread turned into a Christianity vs. Athiesm: Battle of the IQ’s thing I haven’t been following it… but unless I’m mistaken, you were one of the ones claiming that you can’t have morality without God right? Well, that falls under DCT. I did answer the question, by asking YOU a question. Personally, I believe you are able to have morality without the concept of God because murder is still concievably wrong without it. </p>
<p>Public schools, much like the roads, are funded by the government and paid for by our taxes, which makes them…survey says…SOCIALIST. If you’re gonna mock socialism, remind yourself that many liberties we enjoy are socialist endeavors.</p>
<p>If you allow stuff like killing, stealing, etc, you’re allowing for a society that isn’t very sustainable or able to grow and prosper. We also experience great levels of grief/suffering/etc when these things happen. Typically, things that cause mammoth levels of harm to others for selfish, personal gain (or no gain at all) are deemed “wrong” because everyone pretty much agrees upon it as something deleterious to the nature of our society/wellbeing. The details here and there may differ depending on the situation (e.g. when is it okay to have someone killed/when is it okay to steal/etc).</p>
<p>Even things like altruism (which MANY typically associate with religious/holy/righteous concepts) have evolutionary/biological underpinnings and are generally seen as “good.”</p>
<p>But anyways, none of this right/wrong business has anything to do with a God.</p>
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<p>I agree entirely. Those roots, however, are assumptions; this fact cannot be escaped. Ultimately, one cannot use science alone to justify any system of morality without making some assertions, e.g. the continuation of the race is good or some such. </p>
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<p>I was operating under the assumption that people believe what they believe. If you do not believe there is a God, then I don’t understand why at the same time you would consider the possibility of a God. In the same way, if I believe murder is wrong (to take your example), why would I also simultaneously consider the possibility that it is right, even if it is unlikely?</p>
<p>Baelor: Sure – clearly we’d rather live well and happily than horribly and unhappily. This is a more general way of expressing my fundamental view that almost everything, at the very basic level, stems from utility (fancy word for “happiness/what we like”).</p>
<p>And you can choose not to believe in something while still acknowledging its possibility. I don’t believe that when I leave work today, I’ll run into an old friend I haven’t seen in years. But I can’t deny the possibility, since such a thing isn’t impossible. It’s generally bad scientific practice to say something’s impossible if there’s no data to support/deny such a claim.</p>
<p>God is typically defined in a way where science cannot technically disprove him, but since there’s no evidence in favor of him, we can’t say he’s impossible with certainty. But we do have lots of natural explanations for things that do not require a God, making him less and less likely.</p>
<p>This is different from believing that murder is wrong because we know all about the implications of murder, unlike God. We can pretty exhaustively show that murder is not something we want, assuming we want to live well/perpetuate our society/etc. But we may also believe that murder is right if someone is threatening those fundamental desires/assumptions in a massive way (e.g. certain high-profile terrorists, etc).</p>
<p>The point is, Baelor, is that everyone either believes God exists, or he doesn’t exist. Then there is a spectrum of your confidence, and your belief in whether the truth can ever be known or put to rest.</p>
<h2>Whatever, must we debate semantics on every thread? It’s pointless…</h2>
<p>By the way, on to the morality debate—</p>
<p>Why is killing or stealing deemed “wrong”?</p>
<p>Quite simply, you think its wrong because YOU don’t want to be murdered or robbed! So you’ll go around telling everyone how wrong it is!</p>
<p>You personally don’t kill or steal because there is social stigma against it (see above). You also self-identify as a good person (the ego at work) and are accustomed to working cooperatively in a social environment, like most of the apes! It’s biology!</p>
<p>God’s system is: because he said so.</p>
<p>BUT - there are moral dilemmas that have no been covered by the Bible. How do you act then?</p>
<p>What if the choice were ---- save your best friend or brother or sister or mother, or save the lives of 20 nuns and children?</p>
<p>Biology predicts your likely response: A.</p>
<p>What would you choose? No need to say it out loud, what would you choose, deep down? What would God say to do? Does he have an answer?</p>
<p><strong>Consider</strong> Was your “God’s justification” or “God’s true answer” invented by you to justify your biological response? Aaahhh, and there we have it.</p>
<h2>God = tool and justification of biological responses, created for not only purpose (to satiate the ego), sooth fear and pain (deal with mortality), and most importantly, to manipulate and control others around you (power).</h2>
<p>If I hate homos, I say God hates homos.
If I hate brown people, I say God hates brown people.</p>
<p>If I hate the fact that telemarketers call me at 8.00 pm late at night trying to sell me something, I say that GOD HATES people who call at 8.00 trying to sell people things, and that they will BURN IN HELL if they do it again! Look at me, <em>I’m</em> not calling people to sell at night, the Johnson’s aren’t calling people, BE A GOOD CHRISTIAN AND STOP CALLING ME.</p>
<p>Whew, my lies worked and they stopped calling. If they didn’t, let’s just ostracize them or kill them… …er, uh, IN THE NAME OF GOD!</p>
<p>There you have it. Exaggerated for effect, but that’s how religion works.</p>
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<p>How does this make him less likely? Occam’s razor isn’t some cold hard fact. It’s just something that helps you formulate empirical rules (which may not be strictly true) that are useful and easier to deal with. A more complicated theory, all other things being equal, isn’t necessarily less likely to be true.</p>
<p>You, silence_kit, live in a house with your brother and a goldfish you bought, which normally swims around in a tank gleefully.</p>
<p>In your house, one day, you find your goldfish dead, floating belly-up in the tank. He was just fine an hour prior. You think your brother, who has a penchant for malicious deeds, committed the act. You test the tank and fish for toxins/poisons/etc and find nothing. You look for your brother only to find a ticket printout showing that he left for a 10-day trip across the country a few days ago. You pick up the phone and give him a call to find that he is indeed across the country. You call the airline and, after a lengthy and in-depth verification process, find that your brother was telling the truth and took a plane across the country miles and miles away. You call friends (who do not know your brother and vice-versa) who are near his location to report back, and they indeed tell you that he is present.</p>
<p>You also recall that you have secret video cameras set up in each room except the room with the goldfish. You watch the footage and note that nobody except you has been walking around the house recently. You also check archival footage and note that, as a matter of fact, your brother has <em>NEVER</em> been in the room with the goldfish ever since you brought him into the home. You also dust the goldfish room for fingerprints/scrape for DNA and find only evidence of your presence.</p>
<p>So, what do you say? What killed your goldfish? Do you think that this information has made it more or less likely that your brother did it?</p>
<p>^ This sums up my feelings regarding God and religion more eloquently than I’m capable of given the limited amount of time I’m willing to spend formulating posts on a college forum… so I’ll just throw my support behind it and let this thread be.</p>
<p>@legend</p>
<p>Off the top of my head, I could add to your little story that the brother is omnipotent…then what? I think the problem with saying that what we consider to be increased understanding of our universe entails less probability of God existing is that it assumes pure naturalism in the first place–basically, the idea that if something can be analyzed and explained via “natural” means, there need not be a supernatural explanation for it at all. This is certainly a philosophical position on existence itself, and one that not everyone necessarily holds. You can argue that it is the most pragmatic and utilitarian position; but you must prove that pragmatism and utilitarianism are necessary virtues.</p>
<p>This illustrates my point though. You’re taking what is known/true (e.g. the stuff presented in the story) and just making up something and saying “it could be true that the brother is omnipotent.” </p>
<p>Sure, it “could be true,” but are you saying that it’s likely? You can’t think of any other explanations that are more probable given the situation? You’d seriously say that the probability of the brother being omnipotent is equal to that of the brother not being omnipotent? </p>
<p>If I were to ask you what you think happened regarding the brother and the goldfish, you would seriously tell me that the brother could have been omnipotent?</p>
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<p>The “appeasement”? Really?</p>
<p>Obama handed over a chunk of another country’s sovereign territory to the terrorists?</p>
<p>Get an education. A proper education. Then talk.</p>
<p>How do you calculate an accurate probability, though? One not based on intuition or “common sense”? I could come up with other scenarios besides the brother being omnipotent… but still; how do you accurately calculate the probability of one scenario occuring over another?</p>
<p>The argument that a supernatural being, or several supernatural beings, may possibly exist is an entirely separate argument from the argument that a Christian God exists (or whatever religion you belong to).</p>
<p>It’s more difficult to argue that a god of a particular faith is indeed the god of the universe, than to try to argue for the existence of a god in the first place.</p>
<p>If you somehow come up with a good reason for the existence of god, you still have a million lightyears to go before proving that Yahweh or Allah or Vishnu is indeed that god.</p>
<p>The god of your cultural upbringing is one of an infinite number of possible gods in a theistic universe. Just because mommy and daddy told you so doesn’t make your own viewpoint any more valid than anybody else’s.</p>
<p>^If that was directed at me, I would let you know that I would probably best be identified as a Deist, and not a member of any particular organized religion.</p>
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<p>It wasn’t directed at you. It was directed at those religious types who feel that any hint of proof at the existence of a god automatically means that the god of their cultural myth is indeed that god.</p>
<p>Sithis: You’re dodging the question. Given the situation, what is your answer? Do you think it’s likely that the brother was omnipotent?</p>
<p>I’m not going to get into a retardedly-long explanation lecturing about probability – but the idea is that you can find relationships between variables in a variety of ways (e.g. regressions to see the effects of variables on other variables), only in this case you’d have to test all possible variables in the universe to find the ultimate effects on whatever you’re testing. There’s nothing in favor/against God specifically since he is by definition supernatural, but there is plenty in favor of other explanations (technically the entire data set would consist of natural explanations since there isn’t anything in favor of anything supernatural, but that is besides the point).</p>
<p>It’s not even about finding a specific probability. In this case, it’s about probability being so extreme that it doesn’t require any sort of specific calculation because we already have an excellent feel for its magnitude (say far above 99% but obviously not as high as 100%). People trying to ask others to “put a number to it” is a really dishonest and underhanded way to try to bypass the point of what is meant by “likely/unlikely” – Ben Stein tried pulling it on Dawkins in an interview to discredit him.</p>
<p>You may have a “common sense” answer for the goldfish example. You may even feel really certain that a handful of explanations are really, really plausible. But the point is that that type of “common sense”/conviction is just as strong in atheists/scientists/etc when it comes to a variety of functions in our universe. Much like you have a decent grasp of the goldfish-situation parameters, many atheists/scientists/etc understand science well enough to understand WHY God is unlikely and how other explanations fit everything much more elegantly/correctly/etc. </p>
<p>To truly understand what makes one situation more likely over another in the goldfish example, you have to know a bit about goldfishes, planes, how long it takes people to get from one place to another, the concept that people can’t be in two places at once, how cameras work, how doorways/hallways/walls/floors/ceilings work, etc, to fully construct the framework that allows you to evaluate the causal links.</p>
<p>To truly understand what makes one situation more likely over another regarding God, though? You need to understand physics, chemistry, biology, genetics, evolution/natural selection, statistics, psychology, logic, mathematics, philosophy, ethics/utility, geology, history, quantum mechanics, quantum cosmology, and so on. It can be overwhelming to really delve into all those subjects and have a decent grasp of everything, but the more you do, the more you’ll understand peter_parker’s assertion that educated/smarter people TEND to be atheist.</p>
<p>It’s just like most people would TEND to assert that it’s really unlikely that the brother was omnipotent and killed the goldfish.</p>
<p>It’s much easier to just shrug and say “God did it – you can’t disprove him and he’s always possible, and he makes my life pleasant,” but that doesn’t make it likely to be true.</p>
<p>I think something far easier to discredit - something infinitely improbable - is the idea of an afterlife.</p>
<p>And if you can disprove that (although the premise is frightening to many people, and they will cling to that belief tighter than grim death) – then the whole question of the existence of God is largely irrelevant, especially if you are a deist.</p>
<p>Maybe it’s not completely irrelevant, but if God doesn’t intervene in our universe except for its initial design, creation, rules — and there is no afterlife, then it doesn’t matter whether he exists or not.</p>
<p>I always felt that using a computer/laptop as an example was a good way to help show how the afterlife is a very improbable thing. It has audio/visual inputs/outputs, processors, memory, processes, etc, much like humans do, and yet we don’t think of it as being anything more than the sum of its parts – let alone would we consider it as somehow being inhabited by a sort of supernatural internal entity (such as a “soul”) that somehow goes elsewhere after it dies/breaks/etc.</p>
<p>Humans, really, are just very elaborate biological computers.</p>