As for the Vikings, all I have to do is die in battle and I'll be okay. Again, not believing is not the same as denying. I don't deny the fact that there's anything beyong physical reality. I claim that I don't see a lot of evidence for it, therefore I think it is unlikely it exists, therefore if I would claim that I believe in it I would be lying. To reinforce the patriarchal model of society that possibly came to Europe with the indo-european languages. No. We can be pretty sure that there are no pink elephants on the moon, because we can look at the moon pretty well, and some of our species already have been on the moon. As for other planets, we have not even looked at other planets yet, how can we deny the existence of other intelligent life? Depends on how you see the Leprechauns, and if they are invisible and can't interact with us but do exist the comparison is still valid I think. We have seen signs that can be explained by the existence of other planets, and if life came into existence on this planet it seems feasible that it may have also happened somewhere else. Especially if the accept the idea that there has been life on Mars before (leaving a bigger 'margin of error', so to say). Now, we don't know whether something exists beyond our known reality. So how are we to know whether such a far removed god exists? It seems as likely as the leprechauns, since we can't interact with either. Going from evidence I disagree. Well, partly: I find it entirely possible that there is a superior intelligence in this universe, I just don't think that this intelligence (well, likely it is more than one guy) is a god. Back to evidence: We have pretty good indications that there are other planets. It is a concept we can explain observations with. The far removed concept of god is so far removed that we don't need it to explain any observation. Or at least it is not the most likely explanation to the observations we made that it is used by others to explain. I think you should replace intellectually with scientifically. I think that many persons that are religious are capable of being intelectual regardless.
But now you shifted definitions. You're not talking about the meaning of the thing itself, but about the meaning it inspires in others. Like the force in Star Wars might not have any real meaning to any of us, it doesn't correlate to anything we can put our finger on, it's only a movie narrative after all, but it can inspire meaning, it can inspire people to do things, regardless of whether it's real or not. Paradoxes are all fun and games, but once you use one as an explanation, you commit a fallacy.
I am not sure why you consider someone closed off simply because they do not seriously entertain the likelihood of a given concept until they are given reason to do so so. The reasons you give above are somewhat spurious. I mean, the existence of human intelligence is no more reason to seriously entertain the possibility of a higher intelligence than the existence of kangaroos is a reason to entertain the possibility of super-kangaroos that are invisible and can fly. All an atheist says is 'give me an intellectually coherent reason to take your idea seriously'. What's closeminded about that? Sure. That doesn't make their religious belief intellectually sensible though. Theism is a fundamentally irrational position. That's just the nature of the beast.
I don't think that analogy does enough for me - but in the rest of your post you actually do develop the idea in a more concrete way. Sure but in the context of the argument we're having using words like this becomes problematic - it makes ideas harder to understand because people then make unwarranted leaps due to how they use the words in other situations. You may say we're little gods, someone else may associate outside of the universe with god... then a third person comes along and says "awesome we're outside the universe" and we have to work on setting things back to the proper context again. We have consistently pointed out that we don't shut oursevelves off either. I can imagine a million things. But it is not ridiculous. One is adding different properties to concrete things - making an elephant pink instead of grey. The other is adding properties to less concrete things - adding "superiority analagous to the difference between us and, say, ants" to "intelligence". Yes it's cool to imagine, but you aren't doing anything that allows us to assign probabilities to them. If we say the little green guy is invisible and undetectable then he IS as equal as your made up idea. Benztown can deal with when assigning probabilities i reasonable far better than I can but I disagree that these comparisons are unreasonable. The biggest difference is that the ideas you considered have a privileged status.
When it comes to imagining things no. When it comes to making or accepting claims about the likelihood of something, yes.
But we have concrete evidence, namely life on earth. Every additional claim is made in front of that backdrop. That is the fundamental error in your analogy. A better analogy would be something we don't have concrete evidence of. For example: Are there invisible human beings on the moon? Or somewhere in the universe? Now the universe is obviously bigger, so the chance (P) would be better to find invisible humans there, rather than on the moon. However, the idea can be shot down before we even get that far, because in both cases there's no reason to believe that invisible human beings can even exist. So when you multiply P with zero (or a number real close to zero), then it doesn't matter how big P is, you'll still end up with zero.
Coming back to the initial question that spawned this thread, I remembered that I saw a great YouTube vid on this some time ago: [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Urgj8pV42DM"]Pascal's wager, Odin's loophole and the afterlife preview challange - YouTube[/ame]
Take some other legitimate scientific questions. Are there other dimensions in space? Are there other universes? What will happen at the "end" of our universe? Most laypeople, including myself, don't have nearly the specialized knowledge or training to think about these questions on a scientific level the same way theoretical physicists do. Does that mean I can't sit down with my buddy in a bar and think about it or talk about it? We exist. Our lives are short and our abilities limited, so we'll never know everything. Part of being alive is pondering our own existence and the world around us and opening our minds to possibility. I'm here, so I'll think about things, just because I can. I'm not a Vulcan or a robot, I'm a human being. Who cares whether I can prove things to my buddy at the bar through mathematics or observation? If my creative mind can think about it and I decide I like the idea that there is a parallel universe where I lead Luxembourg to the World Cup title, I don't really care if other people think the idea is irrational. You can't prove I'm wrong.
I didn't ask anyone too. But if my drinking buddies thought the idea was swell and we decided to get together every week on Sundays to toast Luxembourg's victory we could start a club. Sure, the wife will probably say, "You guys are all idiots" and I'll reply "Your loss. We're making t-shirts. Do you want one?"
There's a difference between making t-shirts and selling your house or mortgaging your future and that's where most people have issues with this kind of thinking. It's very clear over the last few pages that no one has an issue with it if it's not offered as a claim of knowledge. Personally I love thinking along these lines only I don't frame it in religious terms.
Sounds like fun. This discussion was about some religious people claiming that atheism is not logical, and that the atheist claim that religion is not logical is not true instead, though.
The thing is, when you believe something that you have absolutely no reason for believing other than it being a swell idea, you'll rightfully be regarded as irrational. When you then act upon this belief, people might think you're insane. Whether or not you care about it one way or another is a different matter altogether. Although in your specific example, an argument can be made that a universe exists in which you lead Luxembourg to the WC title, based on the evidence, which of course has no bearing on your existence in this universe (and of course there's the philosophical question whether your different instances would even be the same person, I'd argue that they're not, so technically it wouldn't be you who leads Luxembourg to the title but another version of you, comparable to a twin who might not have branched off in the womb but at some later point).
Considering what Christian theology boils down to, your choice of words may not have been the best. Now frankly, when becoming an atheist (I was formerly a Christian), I didn't specifically ponder the absurdity of a god creating a world where failing to believe in him results in eternal torture--and where the belief option was only available to humanity because he decided to sacrifice himself/his son in human form to himself/his father, to atone for a sin that was committed by two people thousands of years ago, a sin that doomed the entire world to hellfire, including everyone who lived between the time of this sin and the time of the sacrifice (sucks to be them I guess). These stories, of course, are described within the only evidence available to support this god's existence--a collection of Semitic writings between two and three thousand years old that reflect this god being in ways intimately tied to the time period and geographical location of each work. They show a progression of ideas as the culture who created them encountered other religious traditions. But looking back on that from the outside made it pretty obvious how superstitious and reflective of its authors it was. Tell ya what. Try this one out--it's a bit longer and goes into some more detail--and see what you think. ETA: Dave, your book is just the latest in a long line of efforts to explain away the absurdity and cruelty in the Bible. There is nothing fundamentalist about reading this so-called holy book and recognizing it for what it is--a book of horrors, a tome in honor of a tyrant. That you choose to ignore these things, and instead treat the words in the Bible as devotional, twisting them into something that makes sense in the context of your modern, American life, is your prerogative. But don't tell people who choose to not basically make shit up about it post facto to make it happy and loving, that they're ignorant. [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKtuk0ZpnbY"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKtuk0ZpnbY[/ame]
That's one way of interpreting it. You're right, and I wouldn't expect you or anybody else to accept an idea described as such. Are you saying you can? I mean I've seen people try, I've taken the college courses and so on, but the explanation is not the poem, otherwise the poem would not need to exist. Funny. Well, I think those amazing, beautiful experiences are all part of living in an inherently spiritual universe. But no, I don't think you need to be living that kind of cosmology to be experiencing such things, not even remotely. I agree with Sam, whoever he is. And I wasn't attempting to express an essential dualism, but that in the mind of a person who in whatever way believes there is an intelligent presence at the root of all existence the comparison to a probably fictional creature within that existence is just absurd. And how that person "gets" that insight/awareness/belief is generally unique to that person. Sure, but none about these leprechauns being the ultimate cause of the universe being as it is. Okay. Okay. No, I think internal consistency is essential. And I also believe rational thinking can only take you so far. If that's as far as you want to go, I have no problem with that. Okay. Fortunately I'm not trying to sell you anything. I'm not saying you're incapable. What I'm saying is that you might entertain the notion that other people are not just interpreting experience more or less identical to your own differently but that they're actually perceiving in ways that to you (or me) would seem entirely alien. I'm not really trying to convince you of anything. I just know that at certain points in my life, through drugs, through sex, through meditation, through profound conversation, I've come to the realization that there are drastically different ways of perceiving and being in the world. And each of those occasions reminds me to stay humble in my assumptions about my place in the world and the perspectives of others, including those who live with some sort of divinity as a guiding presence in their lives. I wouldn't say "incapable", but we by our nature cut ourselves off from certain kinds of experience all the time; we couldn't survive without narrowing our perception to that which is relevant. I'm only arguing for the possibility that there are valid ways of perceiving the world by which you can experience things that under ordinary conditions are imaginary or impossible. No, it's actually just an argument in favor of authentic empathy. From my perspective your apparently strictly materialistic worldview is just as at odds with the actual nature of things as any number of religious believers'. But your hardcore stance does at least make sense to me, although I think your antagonism toward those with differing worldviews is anything but rational. Depends on the person. I've talked to believers who believed very different things than me but whose beliefs make perfect sense within the context of their experience. I mean chances are we're all dead wrong.
I do not consider closed-minded those who do not seriously entertain the likelihood of a given concept and don't see a reason to do so. I respect people for doing that. I only consider close-minded those who are derisive of others who do entertain alternative likelihoods, and who attempt to diminish other thoughts and experiences by bringing up meaningless analogies.
Obviously if one of the properties of human being is that we are visible, then by definition we can't be invisible. As far as invisible beings in general, if you mean beings that cannot be detected by a human eye, then I would imagine they can exist. And what if there was a world in which the sense of sight didn't evolve at all? Would all beings over there be invisible? And I grant that P multiplied with zero or a number close to zero is zero. If I was to multiply P by a fraction made up of 1(myself)/(space*time), -meaning all known space and all known time- then the number I would come up to would be so close to zero as to end up as zero in any calculation. The odds of my own existence are in fact astronomically close to zero. And yet I think that I do in fact exist.
Hang on a second. I can empathise perfectly with people who turn to religion for any number of reasons. It's perfectly understandable. What it isn't is rational. It is quite literally an intellectually indefensible position. Religious belief cannot be justified by any rational argument. I find it quite bemusing that people like you and ASF find me stating that to be antagonistic or close-minded. It's simply a statement of the reality of the situation. I don't laugh and jeer at religious people, or attempt to convert them to my point of view, or regard them as lesser people than me. Quite frankly they can believe what they like and it matters not a fig to me. But I am not going to pretend that someone's beliefs have credibility when they quite demonstrably don't. Being intellectually honest is neither antagonistic or close-minded.
Funny, even in my hypothetical you try to go down the semantic road... You make my point better than I possibly could But now you're misusing probabilities. The probability of a specific individual existing at any point might be minuscule, but the probability of an individual existing is not. Example: When you play poker, any 5-card hand you may get has the probability of 0.0000385%. That is minuscule. However, the probability of you getting such a hand is 100%. In your calculation, you start out with yourself, so your existence is a given, 100%. Then you divide it space and time in order to find out the probability of you existing in this place at this time. That number will be minuscule no matter where and when you are, but that doesn't matter, because we already know that there's a 100% chance of you existing in the first place. This is basically the same logical error as before, you're calculating probabilities on the backdrop of our existence. But our existence has a probability of 100%. You can't compare that to the existence of something that has a close to zero probability. In other words, you're arguing that existence and distribution are comparable. They're not. The difference to before is that now you reversed your argument. Going from "If we look at a big enough frame of reference, we're likely to find even rare things so god is likely to exist" you went to "In a large frame of reference, everything is unlikely, so one thing is as good as any other." Both are false and the fact that you can make these two completely opposite claims shows how important it is to not entangle different categories.
To be fair that's my take on theology, not on interfaith practical efforts like charity work done by multiple religious groups. What does inherently spiritual universe mean then if you can experience all of it without spirituality? I sense we're about to argue over the meaning of spiritual. Except that the belief in an intelligent presence at the root of all existence IS a belief in a fictional creature (whether the definition of creature works or not depends on how wooey and esoteric that "creature" is in the person's mind). Many people who believe in this fictional thing do see an essential dualism so it's no surprise that I interpreted your posts here as supporting that dualism. How a person gets that insight may indeed be unique but if you're going to argue that these are all different ways of obtaining an actual truth then you've wandered into misunderstood post-modernist BS that is demonstrably false and relies on wordplay to survive. Then insert Flying Spaghetti monster. Because it fits the "ultimate cause of the universe being as it is" criteria. Actually we get that. You seem to be nitpicking on how you or other perceive we treat theists, then discover we don't take that approach. Now what, what are we actually arguing about? We understand different people have different beliefs. We understand different people have different approaches to understanding truths. These are all interesting to me, to scientists, to plenty of atheists. But the existence of ideas is not the existence of those things the idea represents. Does whether something exists or not come into your arguments? None of this addresses the points in these discussions. As pointed out, we are always open to new evidence. So... was "humble in my assumptions about my place in the world and the perspectives of others" meant as a contrast? Are those things real? If no, then we're all agreeing already. If yes, then we disagree. If you can't define real then you are functioning as a troll in this discussion whether that's your intent or not. This idea that materialism is a negative or limited view is... well... not demonstrable? It's a holdover from post-modernist woo talk. About what? That just sounds like a meaningless catch phrase.
This isn't the proper way to do the math. You don't multiply the probability of the event by a single large number, you account for each trial (in your example presumably the number of moons in the universe). To illustrate, consider playing the lottery. The odds of a single person choosing all the numbers correctly and winning the lottery is extremely low. If enough people play the lottery and they do it repeatedly, there are enough trials that it becomes a virtual mathematical certainty that someone somewhere will eventually win the lottery. Or, take your 5 card poker example. What are the odds of me drawing a royal flush? What are the odds of me drawing three royal flushes in a row? Low. What are the odds of someone in the world doing it if we all played poker every day? What are the odds of someone in the universe doing it if there were countless billions of poker players in different solar systems playing poker constantly? With enough players and enough hands, it might happen several times each day.
I don't understand what exactly you're objecting to. That's exactly what I did. Although I guess my usage of the variable "P" might have been misleading as it usually means something else, that was a mistake I guess. But to use the poker example again, no matter how often you play, you won't get 5 aces.
I am not misusing probabilities. My point is that another intelligence somewhere in the universe might using your argument find my own existence just as unlikely as I might find theirs. And yet I do exist, so I know that using such an argument as the one you propose the other intelligence would certainly be wrong. Likewise, using that same argument I could potentially be wrong. And as you say, the less specific we are, the more likely we are to be wrong. From the vantage point of the other intelligence, my existence is much less likely than the existence of the human race, which is much less likely than the existence of sentient life in the Milky Way in general. All would nevertheless probably be deemed by that other intelligence to be extremely close to zero. That's the problem with probabilities. Anything we don't know about can be say to be highly improbable, close to zero improbable, until it's not. If you want to go through life believing that anything which has a probability close to zero cannot exist until proven otherwise, I respect that, but surely you have to see that such a supposition does not have to necessarily be a given for all of us. I mean, in terms of probabilities, I choose to believe that playing the lottery is a waste of time due to the low probabilities, but if my wife wants to play it weekly and dreams of spending millions, I respect that point of view as well. And as much as I don't think it will happen, I do hope she wins it.