<p>Biden’s not stupid, but I’m positive he’s dyslexic. Bush intentionally dumbed himself down to win votes (compare his 2000 speeches to 2004) and Romney is very intelligent. Palin is dumb, she had like an 800 on the old SAT and doesn’t know how to make any speeches besides talking points.</p>
<p>John Thune will be the 2012 Republican nominee.</p>
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<p>You know he’s mormon, right?</p>
<p>not to mention he’s an <em>ADULT</em> who chooses that belief system</p>
<p>silence_kit: You seem to be missing the driving points behind these arguments, and so we’ll have to agree to disagree.</p>
<p>I don’t think I am. you are arguing that as we get more scientific results in an attempt to understand the universe the likelihood of god existing is less and less. your argument only makes sense if god’s ‘sole purpose’ is to be a device that explains physical phenomena.</p>
<p>I think you misunderstand the role of belief in god. he isn’t a scientific theory. his purpose isn’t to explain physical phenomena. he’s a lot more than that to believers. to many believers, he doesn’t even play the role as ‘device that explains why physical things happen’. to many believers, your argument doesn’t even register as a criticism of their god.</p>
<p>It is when you consider that the “physical phenomenon” aspect is what perpetuated God so fervently in the first place.</p>
<p>Even aside from that, if what you say is true, then this means there is nothing physical to justify a belief in God – meaning the belief has to reside as a result of something “non-physical/non-external,” which namely leaves behind the mind. Many people believe in God because it gives a sort of emotional utility. </p>
<p>For instance, the concept of no life after deaths scares most people. It’s much “easier/soothing” to believe that an afterlife might exist since it’s not possible for us to directly disprove it (even though we can show it’s extraordinarily unlikely).</p>
<p>It’s pretty simple: If there’s no “evidence” for God, then what is driving one’s belief in God? It has to be something internal to the nature of the mind, which is, as we’ve shown, a purely physical thing.</p>
<p>If God “helps you” get through the day happily, then I have no qualms with that. But it’s silly to say that such a God is likely to be true much in the same way it is to believe that the brother omnipotently killed the goldfish.</p>
<p>Well then, if God has no effect on the physical world (once he’s created it) — then what is his purpose? What is his meaning?</p>
<p>Is it to prove the existence of an afterlife?</p>
<p>Well, no. One does not follow from another. Because God exists, why would an ‘afterlife’ for us exist? That requires more assumptions about God.</p>
<p>And the idea of an afterlife, sadly and quite simply, is preposterous. I myself wish one existed (maybe, there may be more problems with it than you think) – but it is just impossible.</p>
<p>What if you were born mentally ■■■■■■■■? Or you destined, by grim fate, to live out eternity in your condition?</p>
<p>What if you died while a baby? Would your mental capacities ever develop?</p>
<p>Are your family members there? What if you murdered them on earth? Would you WANT them to be there? Who decides this b.s.?</p>
<p>In what condition do you appear in the afterlife? Can the mind even exist without the body? Can your memory exist without your hippocampus? Can your sight function without your eyes? Can you touch or feel anything without your body?</p>
<p>What would a world, deprived of all senses, feel like? Utter darkness. Utter silence. Not even the basic proprioception or balance from your inner ears to even tell you if you were upside-down or horizontal. You can’t even feel yourself draw a breath.</p>
<p>And yet, without your brain structures, your mind would not function. Not even a 10 second memory would exist, or even the remotest acknowledgment of anything at all.</p>
<p>Then again, to be a little uplifting, here’s a quote from Mark Twain that might help you come to terms with it.
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<p>Oh and legend of max, I don’t think you understand what I mean by consciousness. I do not mean a soul. And you are right, our mental processes or what have you do govern our mind.</p>
<p>But we do have a consciousness separate from a computer. A dog does, too. At least I’m pretty sure, I can’t be certain.</p>
<p>Your consciousness is you. It’s the observer sitting behind your mind. It’s the entity that hears your thought and experiences them, the one observing the thinker, if you will.</p>
<p>Your consciousness is the fact that you are aware of your thoughts, but mostly, its the fact that you are the person in the movie theater, taking in the thoughts and perceptions.</p>
<p>It’s it novel that your consciousness was placed inside the body and mind of legendofmax, and no one else?</p>
<p>Everyone can be proven to have mental processes and cognition, like a computer, but only YOU are certain that YOU have a conscious mind, and it is unprovable to anyone else. That is what I mean by consciousness, and those that have tried to explain it have almost always failed.</p>
<p>Well from everything I have read, science hasn’t proven how the world came into existence. At some point nothing existed- no planets, not sky, no living thing. Or certain things existed forever. Either way, science doesn’t know why or how everything came into being. </p>
<p>Evolution does not disprove god. There are also flaws in the theory, and it can’t be prven on the sense that you can’t time Travel and see if himns derived from monkeys. Even so, maybe there is a god and all he created were simple organisms, and he allowed everything to evolve to more complex beings. </p>
<p>I don’t like it when young people just throw away the idea of a god as irrational, when science doesn’t offer a better explanation. I don’t think a thing can always have existed, it had to be created. And science hasn’t proved how or why things came to be. Religion has been part of most socities, and many people have had out of body experiences. Science tends to find rational explanations because a lot of people want them. Some people want to believe that there are things science can’t account for, and want to believe morals came from something. I don’t think god is irrational, or that a supernatural being exists. It sounds stupid, but there have been times when people have experienced supernatural occurances. Science thinks in a way that we need an explanation for everything, so they create one. People will accept it, even if it’s not sound or is abstract, because they believe in science. That’s fine, but that is sill placing faith in a higher power. Instead of god, it’s a scientist.</p>
<p>This isn’t God vs. science. This is God vs. everything, and it all says no.</p>
<p>Here’s some more Mark Twain quotes:</p>
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<p>I understand what you’re saying and I don’t mean to imply you necessarily mean a “soul” (I use “soul” in the same way here as I might use “observer”). But I am saying that the “consciousness” IS the internal processes that result from the sum of the subcomponents. When you put together the parts that comprise legendofmax, that person is legendofmax. To ask “why was that mind placed in that body” does not make much sense because legendofmax’s mind is local to legendofmax’s body because the mind IS a product of the body.</p>
<p>It’s not like we’re some sort of “pure point-charge observer type” that is sitting in a movie theater watching through eyes and hearing thoughts and feeling senses, etc. We <em>ARE</em> those processes. I ask: Imagine a human being that doesn’t have a “man in the movie theater.” They have eyes that see, a nervous system that reacts to the environment, a brain that processes signals and generates thoughts/internal algorithmic subroutines for making decisions based on environmental and internal parameters, etc. What would the difference be between this human and the one you propose?</p>
<p>You might say, “Well, it wouldn’t have the sort of first-person ‘perspective’ we have – it would just be a structure reacting to the environment.” But I argue that they are in fact one in the same.</p>
<p>We feel like a “man in a movie theater” because of the nature of our consciousness. A tree “sees” the field it sits in but at the same time it does not, because it has no eyes for gathering the light and turning it into a form that a (nonexistent, in this case) brain can process. “Consciousness” as we define it typically, is a very human thing, but I argue that various structures have their own “forms” of “consciousness” even if it isn’t of the same nature. At the very basic level it is a system of managing information (where information can be in any form).</p>
<p>What does it mean to be conscious? If it’s simple self-awareness, then you have to consider what it means to be self-aware and what a structure would require in order to BE aware. “Awareness” in itself is pretty complex, but with respect to humans, “awareness” is pretty easy to define. It’s harder to define for other entities even if it exists in different ways.</p>
<p>^I find this topic immensely fascinating and would love to debate it more if you have more to say about it.</p>
<p>In Soviet Russia, God created humans.</p>
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<p>These are pretty typical arguments.</p>
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<li><p>It doesn’t make sense to invoke an arbitrary explanation when you don’t know something. It would be like if we both saw something bright shoot across the sky, and you ask me, “What was that!?” “I don’t know.” “Hah! You don’t know! Therefore it must be an alien ship!” No, science doesn’t know what “caused” the Big Bang even though we have some very interesting explanations involving quantum mechanics (namely, it doesn’t make sense to ask what came “before” something that generates time as we interpret it). Regardless, there’s nothing wrong with saying “We don’t know yet, but we’re looking for the answer – that’s the best that ANYONE can do.” Just because science can’t answer one question doesn’t mean that what we DO know should be discredited, as many people seem to do.</p></li>
<li><p>Nobody says evolution disproves God. It just shows that a God isn’t necessary to show how humans have become what they are today. Abiogenesis doesn’t disprove God either. It just shows that God isn’t necessary to create life out of inorganic materials. Nothing ever disproves God. But we can show he isn’t necessary for anything. A world with God looks the same as a world without God. </p></li>
<li><p>We don’t need a time machine to “go back and see if humans derived from monkeys.” We have tons of genetic evidence, anatomical evidence, chemical evidence, fossil evidence, etc to support evolution as 100% indisputable fact (and, yes, we can even show evolution via faster evolutionary rates in labs) – just as factual as the sun rising/setting. Yes, evolution IS a fact – it isn’t “just a theory,” which is the common refutation. For someone to question evolution is akin to someone questioning whether or not the Earth is actually flat or whether or not humans are actually born via the Stork Theory. Rejecting evolution is along the same vein of thought.</p></li>
<li><p>Except science typically <em>DOES</em> offer better explanations. “Out of body experiences” also do not support anything – I can deprive myself of sleep, take down a bunch of caffeine and salvia, and experience a variety of completely unreal sensations that I might misinterpret otherwise had I not known the cause. Not to say such experiences always require drugs, but the mind is VERY good at generating abstractions (i.e. that’s what it DOES). Personal “supernatural experiences” are not proof of anything other than messing around with the internal processes of the mind. Science is universal. What’s true for me is true for you and everyone else.</p></li>
<li><p>Science is not faith. Science is based on evidence and observation. Again, if you believe it’s all so “faith-based,” step outside your window if you think something like gravity is so loose-leaf.</p></li>
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<p>Well, I think the concept of consciousness is pretty simple to know and experience but harder to explain.</p>
<p>I don’t mean self-awareness as many conscious living things may not have self-awareness.</p>
<p>And I realize our reality and perceptions and thoughts are completely within the realm of the cognitive mind.</p>
<p>A computer is pretty much exactly the same, or can be, theoretically.</p>
<p>But there is an observer, or entity, trapped inside your mind, if you will.</p>
<p>The real you, perhaps you might say, that cannot escape legendofmax’s mind. All your thoughts whatsoever are your mind. Your realization of this, your gut reaction to this, is all your mind. But there is still an entity behind is, experiencing it.</p>
<p>Like, it was possible for your being to exist within another human being, not you. The fact that you are within legendofmax, a young college-educated man existing in the 21st century in the United States, was arbitrary. But there you are. You could have been the entity behind the mind and body of Genghis Khan. You may have ‘existed’ in the mind and body of a dog.</p>
<p>The mind and body are clearly unique, and inseparable, and codependent. And this theory is not meant to somehow claim that your mind is not responsible for itself, or something like that. But, you are not your mind. I guess I’m trying to say.</p>
<p>Like I said, I can only be sure of my own consciousness, but I’ll have to assume that at least other human beings have it, though I can never be 100% sure (hah), I’ll try not be that arrogant. I also assume many higher animals have it, even if they have no theory of mind whatsoever. Having self awareness or realizing what a mind is has nothing to do with consciousness.</p>
<p>The fact is, consciousness is strange because it is really not necessary. Then again, I may be mistaken I’ll have to think it over more.</p>
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<p>Yes. Just like your belief that there is nothing but the physical, which is totally unsupported by science. You most likely hold other views of a similar nature, probably about ethics and other stuff.</p>
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<p>I don’t think you’ve shown that it is a purely physical thing. I think because you assume that the physical realm is all there is, you are sympathetic to the idea that the mind is purely physical. I agree (I think) that the physical is all there is, but I’m at least honest enough to admit that it is something I accept a priori, instead of saying, ‘well my beliefs, they’re science, that’s that’.</p>
<p>Many people believe that science was/is the tool used by God to create life, so for many people science and faith can perfectly coexist.</p>
<p>Personally, I believe in a soul, and because of that it’s hard for me not to believe in a higher power. </p>
<p>I have religion in my life, but I don’t live my life according to a religions beliefs. Like most people, my morals and opinions vary concerning the topic and often times don’t fall in line with my religions opinions - so be it.</p>
<p>I enjoy having religion in my life because I enjoy the environment and atmosphere. Some of the stereoptypes on this board concerning religion is very insulting, and I think it fuels the fire in these sort of debates. People on the left just say all religion is evil and everyone who has religion in their life is also an evil bigot. </p>
<p>Believe it or not, on Sunday mornings at mass we don’t have routine meetings about homosexuals or other hot topic issues. Church is a very comforting and peaceful experience. It’s good to build friendships and strengthen ties within your community. </p>
<p>Mass is very therapeutic. It gives a person time to reflect on their lives, ponder what is important in life and what their values are. You pray for other people in need, donate money to good causes and try to better yourself internally.</p>
<p>I also enjoy reading the Bible. There Bible is full of wonderful moral tales on building character and values. Even if you aren’t a “believer” or “religious”, few could disagree with the Bible’s 10 Commandmants or many of the other parables concerning how to treat others and live a life that improves society and yourself.</p>
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Oh, so there’s automatically something mentally wrong with a person if they choose an “unlikely” explanation over a “likely” one? Again, I could come up with more “likely” scenarios, ones which are probably more complex than “the brother was not involved”, but your scenario is not a science experiment–the law of parsimony does not apply.</p>
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No, evidence stands alone. If you are refusing to use an actual calculation for a specific probability, then you are basically intuiting that it is a very high/low probability.</p>
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No, we can make “reasonable claims” just not empirical claims that are true with 100% certainty. I don’t think there is anything with “countless” amounts of evidence in favor of it.</p>
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Deduce a murderer? That is a weird phrase. Obviously the only way to prove who the murder is with 100% certainty is to have such scenarios occur, assuming you trust the witness/tape/your own senses.</p>
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How do you know it is “much higher than 99%?” What is your line of reasoning/empirical evidence/calculations for this assertion??? Since you presume to argue from a position of sound reason/logic/scientific principles, it is incumbent upon you to construct an argument for this probability using reason/logic/scientific principles. Arbitrarily declaring things likely or unlikely has no valid significance whatsoever. I don’t understand why it is so difficult for you to grasp this.</p>
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Hmmm, well that’s not very persuasive.</p>
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This is silly. Does <em>everyone</em> think <em>gravity</em> exists? I don’t believe in the effect of gravity because of Newton or Einstein, or because my buddies tell me about it… so, no, I have no cause to jump out of a fifth-story window unless I doubt my own senses or personal history.</p>
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Not with anything approaching absolute certainty, no.</p>
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Specific sources? This essentially seems to imply that just because one does not remember something, it did not occur.</p>
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I don’t even recall the experience of being born, or any number of experiences in my lifetime–doesn’t mean that they did not happen or cannot be recalled given the right conditions. Still, I have no interest in what death will probably be like…either it will be as you say, in which case I won’t notice, or it will be something else, something perhaps utterly inconceivable.</p>
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The reproduction of humans, human anatomy, and the growth of humans was designed by other humans? Huh! And there I thought evolution brought these things about. I guess I must be waaay behind in my science.</p>
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Not necessarily, but I guess some people do.</p>
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Ahhh, yes. But not necessarily for the “utilities” you are implying. Both you and peter_parker seem to have this belief that one ought not to believe in a God if he is not personally useful, i.e. if he doesn’t provide an afterlife and is not guiding my life, I have no use for him so why believe? This seems awfully egotistical…</p>
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Maybe I’m a silly person? Perhaps I engage in magical and childish thinking on a number of subjects? Am I a bad person now?</p>
<p>…wow, these theism vs pure naturalism debates are the Herpes of CC.</p>
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<p>I guess what I am trying to say is that the observer depends entirely on the function of the body. I could have been Genghis Khan if I were Genghis Khan. That is to say, I would be him if the atoms/processes that eventually brought life to me were actually in another place identical to the place of the atoms/processes that eventually brought life to Genghis. It’s like asking why is the tree on the left not the tree on the right. The left tree is on the left because it’s on the left. It sounds like a bit of a tautological answer, but that is why I am legendofmax and not peter_parker.</p>
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<p>Right, but I say the “entity experiencing it” is really just a collection of processes. We can knock out any one part of those processes and alter the way we experience things – even consciousness. We can be “unconscious” and yet reactive via our more basic brain functions, etc. The nature of what we call “experience” is quite specific to the way our brains are built.</p>
<p>Consciousness is “necessary” in the sense that otherwise we would be creatures doing nothing but seeking/evading heat/cold in search of fuel that keeps us going (for example). We eventually evolved consciousness/intelligence that allowed us to process things internally in a more sophisticated way that gave us evolutionary advantage.</p>
<p>silence_kit, I am not longer replying to your posts. I’ve told you repeatedly the nature of my stance and you keep replying with the same sort of logic (which is basically “We don’t have proof that something doesn’t exist so therefore I invoke all these other assumptions that rely on such a basis”). If that sort of logic is sufficient for you, then again, we agree to disagree. Science doesn’t assume something is true just because it could be. There are infinitely many things that <em>could</em> be true in the realm of the unknown. Science pursues truth by trying to figure out which thing, out of that infinite set of possibilities, IS true.</p>
<p>Yeah, there MAY be more than the physical world. There MAY be a God. There MAY be unicorns under my pillow. Lots of possibilities, but that doesn’t mean they’re worth believing in.</p>
<p>Sithis:</p>
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<p>You’re sidestepping the question and trying to derail what the point of the example was meant for. What is your answer to the question? What do you think was the cause of the dead goldfish? Stick to the analogy, please.</p>
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<p>What is the probability that gravity will always “pull” things down to Earth when you drop them outside your window? Hint: The answer is not 100%. Do you need a calculation to know that it is still very high? Again, answer the question and do not sidestep this.</p>
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<p>Then I go back to my earlier claim that you are likely unaware of the evidence. There are plenty of things in this universe with staggering amounts of evidence in favor of them. Do you think our Earth is spherical or flat? Where do babies come from? Does the sun rise and set? Do we need food to survive? These are easy questions. There are harder questions that have just as much evidence, too.</p>
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<p>But the point of my question is not to ask for “100% certainty.” Have you ever actually gone up in space and seen the Earth with your own eyes? How certain are you that the Earth is not flat?</p>
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<p>It’s not that I’m not grasping it – you’re constantly dodging the questions. Answer the question DIRECTLY: Do you agree that the probability of there being unicorns under my pillow is less than 1%?</p>
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<p>MUCH of the evidence you can see for yourself. Science isn’t just “taking someone else’s word for it.” If you doubt a hypothesis, you can test it yourself. </p>
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<p>So you will reject something that doesn’t have absolute certainty (>99%, for instance) and accept something that has NO certainty at all (0 evidence) because it “could be true because we haven’t disproven it yet”?</p>
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<p>Again, you’re appealing to the “you can’t disprove it so it could be true” logic. We know certain people didn’t experience anything <em>because certain parts of the brain are simply not functioning</em>. If you want to assume that people can experience things outside of their brain functions, then you are again appealing to that same illogic.</p>
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<p>Considering that God is, typically, an emergence of the ego, I find your statement ironic. When we say “he has no use” that means in the broadest sense of the word. Consider a gas that is undetectable by any human means. It is odorless, colorless, and takes up no space/volume. It is also massless. It has absolutely no effect on you or any other entity in this universe. That gas, therefore, “has no use” or purpose in this universe. The universe without that gas is the same as the universe with that gas.</p>
<p>legendofmax, i have been repeatedly telling you why your critique of god is flawed, and you really aren’t responding to what i am saying. the failure of this argument definitely isn’t purely on my part.</p>
<p>part of it is the same problem as in the previous discussion: you are having trouble separating what we observe with the symbols and ideas we use to talk about them. earlier, it was separating the concept of ‘two’ from the representation ‘2’, and the idea that although we can talk about irrational numbers, which require infinite precision to resolve, they never actually happen in real life, along with other abstract math concepts. </p>
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<p>I’m just bothered that you think that doing science allows you to make philosophical pronouncements with authority. when it comes to interpreting scientific results to make conclusions about what is, ideology gets involved. i don’t think you realize this. even worse, you claim that the data support your favorite ideology, with no analysis required. i don’t think it is suprising that i am so up in arms about this.</p>
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<p>the example is totally flawed. you are arguing against a bogus, strawman concept of belief in god. i’m not surprised that sithis isn’t sticking to your analogy.</p>