Lol have you seen pen and tellers show on abstinence, that pretty much sums up how it works over at your place. Why religion is so popular. Learning is hard! Seriously Religion is the easy way out. Its like having a note to not participate in gym class. Religion makes the world simpler and exempts you from learning how it works. I know how stressful the courses I take at the university are! reading books and sh*t Now If I could just brainwash myself to always just be happy and expect to go to heaven just by praising jesus. Nothing I really do in life matters as I am going to heaven, as long as I follow some arbitrary rules. This is also why the ONE god system prevailed over older multi god systems. Like the popularity of consoles and simplification of computer games lately. Less effort and easier to play/understand sells. So evolution even exists within religion. Easier to market a one god system KEEP IT SIMPLE. That’s what also makes them so strong and able to unite. Their uneducated borderline retardedly simple world view. The world is not 6000 years old. Study anything like geology, botany, biology and you can watch, even test it. Do specific stress on plants and animals and see evolution in action. Like breeding animals or selecting plants. Now seeing how I dont really see life as having a purpose you would think life only has the purpose that you yourself make, so I should be fine with religion as it does not matter. But that is just impossible. Saying it doesnt affect me what others believe in, is just total BS. They constantly stand in the way of progress lobbying against things like stem cell research and what not. Trying to impose their values on me everywhere. Their lack of logic in their "arguments" is like antimatter to the logic scientific way of thinking. It is just superstition and indoctrination tada! so obvious that its painful to think about.
Honestly, just tell them that you object to the question. That question uses a plurium interrogationum, which is a logical fallacy of a presupposition, a "complex" or "loaded" question - you yourself have already identified it as having a bias. Just object to the question and state the reason for your objection. If they don't understand, advise them to look up the fallacy, and if they ignore you, then so be it. It's their loss, and they shouldn't be expecting a logical answer to an illogical question. I must say, this is quite an ignorant take on agnosticism vs atheism. I also don't think you should be associating a derogatory meaning with agnosticism, without properly understanding its relationship to atheism. I have created this simple orthogonal matrix to demonstrate atheism, theism, agnosticism, and gnosticism. Though there are lines, it is probably better represented as a gradient, because I imagine you could be somewhere in between atheism/theism, and between agnosticism/gnosticism. Optionally, you could add other rows for such things as: deism, monotheism, polytheism, specific religions, etc. I describe myself as an agnostic atheist, meaning that I lack a belief in a god/figurehead, but acknowledge that I don't and can't know for certain, with any degree of precision, that one doesn't exist. I just find it so highly improbable that I don't, and won't believe in any god or its subsequent religion. Should irrefutable evidence ever surface that validates a religious claim or deity, I would likely become a gnostic theist, and should evidence surface that invalidates a religious claim or deity, I would likely become a gnostic atheist (or if I reach a degree of subjective personal certainty at which I go ahead and consider myself to be a gnostic atheist). I also consider myself to be a secular humanist, and believe in following my moral compass without religious convictions. Though I do like what Rex is saying, I think some people could take his description of science out of context. Science isn't an arrogant body of knowledge though, and I think this quote represents it best: "Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge." -Carl Sagan Science isn't some tell-all account of the universe and everything within it. Rather, it's a tool we use, to gradually determine what's true, and what's false. Science persistently attempts to prove itself wrong (prove portions of the scientific bodies of knowledge wrong), so that it can determine what is true. There are likely to be quite a few things we hold to be true in current scientific bodies of knowledge that will later be proven false, or will later be refined, through the continued application of the scientific method (even in its simplest form). Science is our tool. It's how we proved that the world is indeed spherical and not flat, that the Earth revolves around our star and not vis versa. It's how we landed on our moon, it's how we can cure many more diseases/injuries, it's how we can perform corneal transplants and give a blind person the gift of sight. It's also how we know that tornadoes, thunder storms, avalanches, volcano eruptions, mud slides are indeed natural disasters and not acts of entities. So far, science hasn't let us down... it's just been slow going, and we need to continue to give it a chance. I recommend spending a few minutes to watch the Baloney Detection Kit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUB4j0n2UDU
Of course science can be wrong. I had a 3 month course about fallacy and morale/ethics and such. That is also why science isnt able to unite as one like a religion. We dont all have the same purpose or interests. The religious people just seem to think that they can tumble the entire thing by "disproving" one tiny fraction of a scientific field. But what pisses me of the most is that they mostly dont use logic or reason. They wont even calculate or test anything. They often use entirely subjective claims to counter everything I have ever learned. Like this Science is wrong because a banana fits our hand and the color tells us when its ripe. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Of90cKxSeuw&feature=player_embedded What he is sitting with is a selected breed. That has clearly been artificially ripened using ethylene gas. We made that not some magic man in the sky. Also having some tard tell me that the moon is what keeps me from having gravity crush me. OH really then what happens when the moon is on the other side of the earth. Now I spend an entire year learning basic astrophysics. These people dont put in any effort and therefore I cannot respect them. BS like There is no water in space. We would all die if earth moved like 50m closer or further away from the sun. All their claims are just untested brainfarts. I can calculate the change in energy we would receive and the change in gravity from the moon depending on its position and I did. This also gets them special treatment. People tip toe around them all the time over here. Like the muhammed drawings. Just because something is holy to you it doesnt make YOU holy at all. Death threats are unacceptable. But no we had to show sensitivity. The church gets almost 1% of income taxes over here and you are automatically enlisted if your parents are. Also over here they start the indoctrination at 3rd grade in Christianity lectures. A child that age is rarely intelligent enough to counter argue anything a grown up says. When I was about 13 the school even arranged the bus to go to church every week for like a month before getting confirmed. At the time I wanted the presents/money. Most places do not have true separation of church and state. Now I have managed to get out of the registry and have become exempt from the church tax. Luckily my parents dont care, but many other would not dare to do so.
Well, when it comes to religion family turns into one big hatemachine. I refused to take Confirmation when i was 14 (i think) and i thought that my grandparents are going to die. I just couldn't take it because i would have to argue every goddamn five minutes. If you read any science magazines/books. it shows you how wrong they are
Actually agonosticism is the most scientific standpoint. A good scientist should remain agnostic about everything because he should be acutely aware that certainty is impossible, and be very careful to always remember that what you have in science is probability, not yes/no. If you accept that you cannot or currently do not know for sure if there is a god, that's agnosticism, not atheism, atheism is the assertion that there is no god and asserting that something does not exist is extremely unscientific. In science you include all things which have been 'proven' (for want of a better word) to positively exist, but you don't assume that everything else doesn't exist, you just don't act as though it does until it has been proven to. Basically, you remain aware that nothing can be proven or disproven, and work based on probabilities, like the quite high probability that gravity exists for example. If you don't know the probability of something you don't say 'it doesn't exist' you say 'I don't know, let's try and find out'. 'I don't know' is the most fundamental statement in science, because it is the most accurate one in the majority of situations.
so I suppose you're agnostic toward zeus, odin, santa claus, and any other number of imaginary characters as well?
When I say god I mean anything which fits the definition of a god, as in an all powerful intelligent force which hides itself from humanity or is simply inherently beyond our abiility to detect and which can, although does not neccesarily interfere with the world and effect changes. When I think of 'god' I think of the concept, the set of criteria which qualify a god, not any god in particular, so I am agnostic towards those in as much as they constitute gods, although I don't think about them any more than I do the abrahamic idea of god, or the egyptian pantheon, or whatever. It's like if you say 'book' to me I think of many sheets of paper bound in leather. I don't think of any book in particular. Yes, anything which has 'impossible to detect' as one of its defining characteristics. Just as I am agnostic about russel's teapot. I don't act as though these things exist becuase as I said, I don't have any information on the probability of their existence, but equally I have to concede that it is possible they exist because if they are by definition impossible to detect, that means that there is nothing that stops them existing, because a lack of any supporting evidence would be perfectly natural for something which is impossible to detect.
Well, Chris is right that it's a very scientific standpoint and that it yields to probabilities rather than booleans, but I would like to reiterate that agnosticism and atheism aren't mutually exclusive (neither are gnosticism and theism), which I really think is best understood with the orthogonal matrix I created and showed in my previous post. Though some use the term atheism for their position that deities don't exist, atheism isn't an assertion that there is no god, it's the lack of an assertion that there is a god. In essence, it's just a rejection of theism, which is an assertion that at least one god exists. If an atheist posits that there is no god with a strong degree of perceived certainty, then that person would be a gnostic atheist, despite whether the person is right/wrong. Lack of belief in a god isn't the same as belief in the absence of a god. It's more like the middle mark between Yes and No, more of a "Maybe" (either way) if you will.
I suppose I don't see any reason to add 'atheist' into my description anywhere even though I probably would qualify as what you call an agnostic atheist. I don't view gods as being any sort of exception to the rule, I am committed to agnosticism in everything, so 'agnostic' describes me perfectly because I am agnostic to the exclusion of more or less everything else.
Chris, your method of acquiring knowledge is incompatible with the scientific method. A scientific theory takes a series of facts and attempts to make generalizations out of those facts, ergo, in situations X, Y, and Z, there have been no observations made which prove the existence of santa claus, and therefore, it can be concluded in Z+1, no observation will be made which proves the existence of santa claus, or that no observations will EVER be made which prove the existence of santa claus and therefore santa claus does not exist. What you are suggesting is that scientists only conduct their affairs entirely in the realm of deduction. If science did this, it would be 100% accurate all of the time, but almost completely useless - if its not formulating theories which attempt to make predictions, then what is it doing? it sounds more like a study of history than anything else.
The higgs boson has thus far not been observed so far as I know. Therefore, it will never be observed. So let's stop building particle accelerators. If you assume the reason you haven't found something is because it doesn't exist then you will never be able to make progress because you will have to assume that we are at the limit of what there is to find, because clearly anything which hasn't been found yet doesn't exist. Not only that, but the lack of evidence for something previously can be used as an opposing theory agaisnt new discoveries. If someone says 'I discovered a new planet' the rest of the astronomers can say 'we didn't discover it, and we haven't discovered it in all of human history, so your discovery runs entirely contrary to our theory of non-existence which has worked for the past 4000 years, you're just some stupid radical who can't science properly'. Lack of evidence must by neccesity be discounted, otherwise you get all sorts of problems, this is simply an neccesary extension of that logic. You can still formulate theories based on probabilities, for example if I drop a rock and it hits the ground, I have positive observational evidence of rocks hitting the ground when I drop them, and I can posit that it will do that if I drop another one, I can also then work on extending the theory to things which exhibit rock-like properites, such as bricks. Saying you have never seen a rock hit the ground when dropped therefore you should never waste time dropping them to see what happens has obvious issues.
this is exactly what you're saying when you state that god cannot be proven/disproven based on observation. to turn your example on its head, you could replace the word 'planet' with the word 'god': Not only that, but the lack of evidence for something previously can be used as an opposing theory against new discoveries. If someone says 'I discovered a new god' the rest of the scientists can say 'we didn't discover it, and we haven't discovered it in all of human history, so your discovery runs entirely contrary to our theory of non-existence which has worked for the past 4000 years, you're just some stupid radical who can't science properly'.
Planets are not by definition 'impossible to detect'. Gods usually are. They certainly are for my generalised definition of the word 'god' which I defined in an earlier post. You can't discover something which is impossible to detect because then it's not impossible to detect, is it? You could discover something very powerful which is possible to detect, and you could probably call it a god too, my agnosticism about gods is not entirely that they are and always will be impossible to detect, although for a lot of them this would be true, because that's part of what they are supposed to be, the abrahamic god is usually said to be beyond human comprehension and therefore if you were to discover him, he wouldn't be the abrahamic god becuase the abrahamic god is by definiton undiscoverable. Those sorts of gods I have to adopt a position of unknowability about. However, I do not think that extremely powerful entities in general are unknowable, it is entirely possible that at some point in the future humans might discover something which fits some definitions of the word god (because not all gods have to be unknowable) and if you can observe it and provide positiive evidience of its existence then I would say it's very probable that it exists. You can't discover a god which is by definition unknowable, but you can discover one that is just really powerful, it depends on what definition of god you're using.
do you agree, then, that if something is by definition unknowable, no amount of scientific inquiry will ever reveal its truth?
If something is unknowable no amount of anything will elicit any sort of truth relating to it, by definition.
then explain to me again exactly why you feel as though agnosticism (the profession that god is unknowable and not worth scientific inquiry) is superior to positive atheism (the profession that god doesn't exist and nonexistant things are not worth scientific inquiry) from the perspective of a scientist?
It is neccesary, scientifically, to assume that lack of evidence is not proof of non-existence, because you have to say that everything we haven't already discovered doesn't exist and cannot be found and we should stop looking. An extreme extension of the purely practical (as in you can't do science without it) idea that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence is that you can't scientifically say 'god doesn't exist' because you can't prove anything doesn't exist. I don't think it's pointless to look for super powerful entities with the power to do whatever they want (although I do think there are more immediate concerns, as finding such creatures probably wouldn't do much good) but I see no reason why they cannot be found. Extremely powerful godlike entities are not inherently unknowable. Specific gods however are, and therefore it is logically impossible to find those specific gods because if you find anything, it can't be them, because if you find it it isn't unknowable and therefore not that specific god.
I wasn't asking for a summary of what was already discussed, I'm asking you specifically why you think it is better to believe that god is unknowable than it is to believe that god doesn't exist exist from the perspective of a scientist, because this was your initial position. That is to say, you seem to believe that agnostic scientists, in general, can conduct their jobs better than atheist scientists; I'm just trying to understand why you seem to believe this.
