No such thing as God.

[Didymos Thomas]

I will 'try again' to help you to understand what i'm actually saying. It's the inclusive/exclusive dynamic of religious belief that divides humankind into distinct and isolated groups. Believers are included - non-believers, and believers in other religions are excluded. There's no real or factual basis for this division - it is false to reality, a baseless denial of the fact we're a single species.

So you are criticizing the divisiveness of religion. I applaud you for this; however, you are not alone. You do not have to look far to find prominent voices within the religious community calling for harmony between the various faith traditions. Universal love is essential to many faith traditions around the world. The fact that some people abuse religion and create division is no evidence against God, nor even against the usefulness of religion as we humans do this in all of our endeavors. The divisiveness is a result of greed and ignorance, not something essential to religion or belief in God.

Further, religious disagreement is fundamentally different in consequence from a disagreement about which football(?) team is better - Patriots or Packers. Religion not merely excludes, but morally condemns and even demonizes the excluded. Thus, while a patriots fan might marry and have children with a packers fan, religious division is translated into an evolutionary pseudo-reality, again, not premised upon any actual reality, fact, truth or sound reason.

I agree that religious disagreement is sometimes more significant than disagreement about which sports team is better. Often religious disagreement leads to violence, then again, so do sports disagreements.

Religion does not necessarily exclude, demonize or morally condemn. This does happen, but is not an essential trait of religion. Humans hate one another for many reasons. Yes, this sometimes happens under the guise of religion as a result of greed or ignorance, but greed and ignorance corrupt everything, not only religion. Exclusion and hatred is not something essential to religion.

Religious divisions are the basis of nation states - religious identity forming the basis of a distinct ethnicity, language and culture practiced within a disputed geographical area.

I do not think this statement is accurate. By your logic, culture would be the basis of nation states. Language, ethnicity, and religious identity are components of cultural identity.

The machinery of the nation state came into being to defend this identity and geographical area - originally, in Europe, after a century of religious wars between Catholics and Protestants. And to this day, France is largely Catholic, and Germany is largely Protestant.

Because in France, the Catholics won, and in Germany, the Protestants. The rebellion against Catholic dominion did not divide some single state into France and Germany, the civil war was fought over the future of already existing national identities.

The claims made about the nature of reality are made by the way we live. They are tacit claims, rather than explicit cliams, but we would not behave this way if we honoured a valid understanding of reality. We would not be divided by falsity but united by a common relation to the actual nature of the reality we inhabit, common needs and wants, and a common interest in the continued existence of the species.

For the most part, I agree with you. But I do not think we need "valid" understanding so much as we need 'useful' understanding. Of course, I think useful understanding is valid, so enough of the semantics on my part.

As the interest being pursued is as you say unity "by a common relation to the actual nature of the reality we inhabit, common needs and wants, and a common interest in the continued existence of the species" we can agree that we should pursue an understanding of reality that achieves these ends. In this context, debates about God are trivial. What is preeminently important is an investigation of how we should interact with one another. So, it isn't a matter of what particular beliefs we have, the important issue is the way we should conduct our lives.

I think part of the sort of understanding we should pursue is the realization that people believe many different things, and that we should be tolerant and appreciative of those beliefs because only tolerance and good will will keep us on course for unity by our common needs and wants, and a common interest in the continued existence of the species.

[nameless]

Originally Posted by iconoclast

nameless, Couldn't disagree more. I'm not a blind man sexually assaulting an elephant and pretending it's a coconut palm.

If you think that I was literally talking of a blind man sexually assaulting an elephant and pretending that it is a coconut palm (your words, not mine) then you are indeed 'blind'.
You are perspective and therefore incomplete/limited (to one extent or another). We are indeed blind men dangling from the elephant.

Originally Posted by Ruthless Logic

There's an actual reality we are able to have valid knowledge of,

Really? I know that you cannot prove a 'one-size-fits-all' 'reality'. Not according to science. Not according to logic. It seems like simple naive realism. Refuted successfully centuries ago. Just because you have a perspective doesn't make it 'universal'. Sounds like a 'belief' to me. And I never argue with a 'belief', as 'beliefs' are not rational or logical, and are always symptomatic.

and apply that knowledge to create technologies that function.

Because there is consensus, an overlapping of perspective doesn't prove that your perspective is anything other than unique. Because you see blue doesn't mean that my seeing the same object as green is 'wrong' or 'incorrect'. Consensus does not make it more real. And the closer all the 'consensus makers' examine the 'object' (which has its existence in your mind) the more 'unique' their view. The cops question ten witnesses and get ten different stories.

I'm not trained in formal logic either - but, for reality to have definite characterisitics,

Perhaps you can define 'reality' for me, as you use it. And 'definite characteristics'.

I agree that actual reality does exist based on our ability to test our empirical environment for axioms that continue to be unequivocally consistent,

Blah, nonsense. The whole empirical nonsense was made obsolete by the double slit experiment. Quantum put the nails in the coffin. The 'consciousness' of the individual experimenter affects, uniquely, the results of the experiment.

[Aedes]

Originally Posted by nameless

The whole empirical nonsense was made obsolete by the double slit experiment. Quantum put the nails in the coffin. The 'consciousness' of the individual experimenter affects, uniquely, the results of the experiment.

And the masterful writing by Kuhn put the nail in the coffin of empirical scientific epistemology.

That's not to dismiss the practical importance of empirical science, which is necessary at a certain level of resolution. Put 500 people on a drug and 500 on a placebo, blind the subjects and the experimenters, and then calculate the difference in mean between groups -- that's bread and butter empirical science and it helps you make practical decisions. But when we're talking about truth rather than pragmatism the limits of empirical science become enormous at the quantum level.

[Doobah47]

Originally Posted by nameless

Blah, nonsense. The whole empirical nonsense was made obsolete by the double slit experiment. Quantum put the nails in the coffin. The 'consciousness' of the individual experimenter affects, uniquely, the results of the experiment.

Well to say that empiricism is obsolete because a human can't comprehend the behaviour of light is absurd.

How could we be having this conversation if the empiricism we use in daily life was "obsolete"; it is not obsolete in any way - I'm sure that biologists/psychologists would prove to you it is not obsolete.

Do you not see the hypocricy in what you've said? "empiricism is obsolete because the consciousness of the experimenter affects the result of the experiment" - you have studied the experiment and your consciousness has affected the outcome of the experiment (to your mind), so you say 'that type of experiment is false', which is false.

What is obsolete is assumption based on empiricism - we cannot assume truth. So in fact it is the truth that is obsolete and not empiricism.

[Aedes]

Doobah, read my reply just before yours. As I say empirical science is critical for making decisions and coming up with "truth" at a concensus level.

But it's abundantly clear that an observation, especially at the quantum level (to which all matter is reducible) is inherently biased by being observed -- and this means (as you seem to say) that empirical observation yields NO access to absolute truth.

Fortunately we don't actually need absolute truth for anything other than arguing with one another on philosophy forums.

[boagie]

Originally Posted by Aedes

Doobah, read my reply just before yours. As I say empirical science is critical for making decisions and coming up with "truth" at a concensus level.

But it's abundantly clear that an observation, especially at the quantum level (to which all matter is reducible) is inherently biased by being observed -- and this means (as you seem to say) that empirical observation yields NO access to absolute truth.

Fortunately we don't actually need absolute truth for anything other than arguing with one another on philosophy forums.

Aedes, Doobah,

You fellows need to distinguish between apparent reality and altimate reality. Apparent reality is that which is directly relative to a subject, as such, it is proper that the experiment is effected by the subjects biology. If it is ultimate reality one is considering, it is not relative to the subject on that level, I would suggest, that pehaps it is not the subject that is effecting the matter but the measuring device used which is effecting the subjects biology, in effect altering the experimental matter. If the results are only presentable to the subject through a medium, it is then effecting, affecting the medium. Perhaps in future there will be a way found to observe said matter through many mediums, in which case a probablity factor could be worked out.

[nameless]

Originally Posted by Aedes

And the masterful writing by Kuhn put the nail in the coffin of empirical scientific epistemology.

There are many nails, some quite old...

That's not to dismiss the practical importance of empirical science, which is necessary at a certain level of resolution. Put 500 people on a drug and 500 on a placebo, blind the subjects and the experimenters, and then calculate the difference in mean between groups -- that's bread and butter empirical science and it helps you make practical decisions. But when we're talking about truth rather than pragmatism the limits of empirical science become enormous at the quantum level

Thats pretty much the way that I see it. At the deeper levels (quantum's foundation) empiricism is shown to be an invalid 'tool' for discerning 'Reality'. So, at the 'pragmatic' level, it seems to have uses, but is not 'worshippable' but by 'fundamentalist believers'...

[Ruthless Logic]

Originally Posted by nameless

If you think that I was literally talking of a blind man sexually assaulting an elephant and pretending that it is a coconut palm (your words, not mine) then you are indeed 'blind'.
You are perspective and therefore incomplete/limited (to one extent or another). We are indeed blind men dangling from the elephant.


Really? I know that you cannot prove a 'one-size-fits-all' 'reality'. Not according to science. Not according to logic. It seems like simple naive realism. Refuted successfully centuries ago. Just because you have a perspective doesn't make it 'universal'. Sounds like a 'belief' to me. And I never argue with a 'belief', as 'beliefs' are not rational or logical, and are always symptomatic.


Because there is consensus, an overlapping of perspective doesn't prove that your perspective is anything other than unique. Because you see blue doesn't mean that my seeing the same object as green is 'wrong' or 'incorrect'. Consensus does not make it more real. And the closer all the 'consensus makers' examine the 'object' (which has its existence in your mind) the more 'unique' their view. The cops question ten witnesses and get ten different stories.


Perhaps you can define 'reality' for me, as you use it. And 'definite characteristics'.


Blah, nonsense. The whole empirical nonsense was made obsolete by the double slit experiment. Quantum put the nails in the coffin. The 'consciousness' of the individual experimenter affects, uniquely, the results of the experiment.

The inherent Potentiality of Dynamism suggests that exact repeatability on the Quantum Mechanics level is theoretically impossible. There is no contradiction to the Double Slit Experiment and the empirically predicable realm of macroscopic dimensions. If you have any understanding of Quantum Physics, then your "consciousness" claim, and your ability to explain how it would influence an outcome will become apparent with your furthering detail (prove you understand), but I suspect the only repeatability that is going to occur is your plagiaristic response.

[iconoclast]

Didymos Thomas,

It amazes me how blind religious people are to the role of religion in most of the worst episodes in a long history of man’s inhumanity to man. Stand on the border between Israel and Palestine and tell me about universal love – or on the border between Northern and Southern Ireland, between the Catholics and Protestants and tell me it’s just like football violence. Read up on the partition of India along religious lines after the withdrawal of the British and tell me religion isn’t the foundation of nation states. Acknowledge the fact that the Pilgrim Fathers justified a systematic genocide of the Native American people on the basis that they were heathens who knew no Christian God. Read up on century after century of bloody conflict between human groups defined by religious ideology and then tell me ‘some people abuse religion and create division.’ Bull****. I am certainly not convinced, but furthermore, I don’t think you can possibly believe what you’re saying either. It’s simply not acceptable to deny valid knowledge in favor of ideological convention, or even to hold ideological convention and scientific fact in the same secular, relativistic regard – because you cannot claim, in all seriousness and good conscience to believe these lies.
Tell me, are you really satisfied with your worldview – or are there not a thousand facts and questions you have to close your mind to in order to maintain such blatantly false beliefs? Does it not appeal to your reason – given that evolution can be shown to have occurred, that at some point in time primitive man sought to explain his existence by imagining a creator of the world and himself?
Does it not appeal to your reason – given that it can be shown that Ancient Greece, Egypt and Rome, the Myans, Incas and Aztecs and so on – all these past civilizations had their own concepts of God – that there’s no more validity to your concept of God than there was to theirs?
Are you entirely unaware of the theory of evolution, or big bang theory? Do you think these are the just the opinions of primitive people – or are they the hard won discoveries of an intelligent species at last emerging into the light of true belief?
Do you not see that the scientific principles underlying technology enable the technology to function – and must therefore be valid? There are no divine spark plugs, prayer powered hot-air balloons or divine light bulbs are there? Why not? Because it’s not valid knowledge. Religion does not describe reality.
You say: ‘But I do not think we need "valid" understanding so much as we need 'useful' understanding.’
But didn’t you already state that people disagree. Thus, what’s useful for you isn’t useful for me. Here’s where science comes in. It’s objective, the same for you as for me. Furthermore, it’s valid of reality and can thus be practically applied to address real world problems.
I’m not people asking for unity, or for universal love – that’s ridiculous and inhuman. People just aren’t like that. But universally, people have a very intimate, if currently twisted relationship with truth. I’m saying we need to straighten out that relationship in order to survive and prosper. That’s why arguments about God are important – because it bares upon our whole idea of the nature of the reality we inhabit, and upon our relationship to truth.
On the basis of a scientific understanding we’ve got one chance to get this right – or we continue as a species divided by these obvious lies, pursuing the political and economic interests of the group thus defined, are unable to address the energy crisis, climate change, overpopulation and environmental degradation, and consequently become extinct. Now it may just be that we all float off up to heaven – but I wouldn’t bet the existence of the species on the unproven hypotheses of our distant ancestors. Alternatively it may be that humankind dies absolutely and forever. To borrow an argument called Pascal’s Wager – what have we got to lose? In face of threats of extinction now looming like huge dark clouds on the horizon, we might as well accept scientific truth as a basis for common action as deny it in favor of our personal favorite ideas – that are clearly not working out too well for the planet or the vast majority of the people on it.


nameless,

It was me who wrote and originally posted the words ‘there’s an actual reality we are able to have valid knowledge of, and apply that knowledge to create technologies that function’ and most of your other quotes. I’ll therefore respond to quotes you attribute to Ruthless Logic. But to begin at the beginning…

I’m aware of the meaning of the analogy – and agree that all human knowledge is, in various ways and to various degrees inadequate to reality as a whole. That’s why I use the term ‘valid’ a lot more than I use the term ‘true.’ I still use the term ‘false’ quite a lot – particularly in relation to religious ideas – but consider ‘truths’ variously valid statements, where some are more valid than others. Further, I agree that my perspective is incomplete – for instance, I know very little about soap operas, sport or pop music. I know quite a lot about science however, and have considered at length, and in great depth the philosophical nature of knowledge. On this basis I consider your analogy not merely flawed but ridiculous in the sense that it makes no distinction between one ‘view of the elephant’ and another. It’s this absolute relativism that’s a ridiculous epistemological approach – as if to say any one assertion is as valid as any other. That’s why I asked you ‘are all analogies equally flawed?’

I notice you trot out another tired old nag of a relativist argument where you say ‘the cops question ten witnesses and get ten different stories.’ Hardly laboratory conditions. Consider, the witness sees an event, possibly quite traumatic. Some time elapses. They then have to describe the event verbally to an authority figure, while the officer asks questions and writes it down. Even if it were the same officer who questioned all ten witnesses, rather than ‘the cops’ – there’s a dozen reasons why, under such conditions, witness statements should vary. Even so, ten different stories? Or ten variations of the same story, with few, if any fundamental incompatibilities?
This is a very soft argument – poor proof of such massive claims about the nature of truth, perception, reality and so on. To use another animal analogy, the horse is dead – stop flogging it.

When I use the term ‘reality’ I refer to the universal environment I inhabit, whilst recognizing that I myself am made from the same stuff. This stuff is essentially time, space, matter and energy. The term definite characteristics refers to the physical, chemical and biological nature of reality – essentially, the way space, time, matter and energy are configured.

Quote: Blah, nonsense. The whole empirical nonsense was made obsolete by the double slit experiment. Quantum put the nails in the coffin. The 'consciousness' of the individual experimenter affects, uniquely, the results of the experiment.

As quantum mechanics and classical physics have not been reconciled one to another – to say that the failure of empiricism on the quantum level refutes empiricism on the classical level is simply false. Working on an atomic and sub-atomic level quantum phenomena are so far removed from the classical level that the failure of empiricism is quite possibly due to an inability to adequately observe. Furthermore, empiricism is more than adequately proven on the classical level.

As I say, it was me who stated ‘there’s an actual reality we are able to have valid knowledge of – and apply that knowledge to create technologies that function.’
For example, consider a heat difference engine. A heat difference engine is essentially a big tube, filled with liquid or gas, looped through environments of different temperatures. Due to the fact that liquids change into gasses and expand when heated, depending upon how the system is configured, mechanical energy can be generated, or heat dispersed, or collected. The thermodynamic expansion and contraction of liquids and gasses are known and constant quantities, mathematically predictable in relation to the difference in temperature. You’ve got one in your refrigerator – and there’s a refrigerator in just about every household in the western world that works irrespective of whether the occupants are aware of these principles. Therefore, there are two things that require explanation – function and predictability. These are not just conceptual conventions but empirically established facts indicative of a reality with definite characteristics.

Aedes,

As I say above: As quantum mechanics and classical physics have not been reconciled one to another – to say that the failure of empiricism on the quantum level refutes empiricism on the classical level is simply false. If you’ve read Kuhn, I’m surprised you didn’t note this incommensurability. Personally I don’t buy Kuhn’s thesis in SSR because it fails to acknowledge that science is directed toward the understanding of something that actually exists – as opposed to merely developing concepts. For example, Kuhn contrasts mass as understood in Newton’s and Einstein’s physics, mass being unrelated to velocity in the former, and variable relative to velocity in the latter. This might constitute a paradigm shift for a classically trained physicist such as Kuhn – but it’s better explained as conceptual development, enabling fuller and better understanding of mass, than as an incommensurability ultimately falsifying the whole empirical endeavor.
Conceivably, if these were merely free-floating philosophical concepts it might be argued that invariable mass and mass that varies relative to velocity are paradigmatically distinct, but just because Newton failed to appreciate this quality of mass does not invalidate empiricism. If we follow Kuhn’s argument to its logical conclusion here – science would have to present a complete understanding of reality in order to claim any statement were true.

You say: That's not to dismiss the practical importance of empirical science, which is necessary at a certain level of resolution…but when we're talking about truth rather than pragmatism the limits of empirical science become enormous at the quantum level.

I’d argue that it’s yours, and presumably Kuhn’s concept of truth that’s at fault. I use the term ‘valid knowledge’ specifically to avoid using the term ‘truth’ – which for me has absolutist connotations that reflects poorly the real nature of human knowledge. Empiricism is a proven means of establishing valid knowledge – and continued observation, theorization and experimentation will improve the validity of that knowledge. Take Evolutionary Theory as an example. Darwin’s ideas have been superceded in many ways. The accepted view is now quite grandly entitled the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis. The synthesis is with genetics – the mode of transmission of information from one generation to the next entirely missing from Darwin’s ideas.
Crick and Watson were eventually able to photograph DNA in 1952 thanks to advances in other sciences, presumably optical physics because they used an x-ray microscope - enabling observations that were previously not possible to be reconciled in terms of the theory.
Explanation in the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis begins with DNA replication and reproduction, and works toward the ontogenetic and phylogenic phenomena observed, and put into a systematic framework by Darwin – so it’s a fairly substantial re-conceptualization, but it doesn’t invalidate Darwin’s theoretical explanation of the phenomena he observed, only develops his explanation by reconciling a far greater number of observations in these terms. Thus, I’d argue that there are continuities located both in reality, scientific method and understanding thus arrived at that refute incommensurability, even while I’d acknowledge that empiricism doesn’t establish truth in the absolute sense. It establishes valid knowledge and improves upon the validity of that knowledge by the continued application of empirical method, and this has far more than a mere pragmatic value.

[Solace]

Forgive me if I misunderstood the gist of your argument here, iconoclast, but I think you're inferring that religion and/or religious values have contributed, and still are contributing, to the eventual extinction of mankind. Cetainly I wouldn't argue. However, if your argument suggests that the only way to avoid that extinction is to remove said religious influence, I think you're basically condemning us, the human race, to an early grave. To be blunt, you debunk God, but without divine intervention, we'll never get rid of religion. As you pointed out, it's part of our evolution even, and in some ways mankind will never evolve beyond that point. Not as a whole anyway, and not even nearly enough to remove the influence of religion and religous beliefs from those who don't evolve.

So, is there a way to avoid that extinction that doesn't involve the race doing the impossible (or at least, the extremely unlikely)? Can we endure the damage that religion has done and still accept the liklihood that religion will, not only continue to exist, but will continue to influence the race in the same harmful manner that it always has? Is there a solution that is even remotely attainable?