Probably not coincidentally, Chris Hayes will be devoting his show on Sunday to exploring atheism in America. The only announced guest so far is Richard Dawkins, but the panels typically have a good mixture of intelligent voices. If you haven't seen the show yet, Up With Chris Hayes is widely considered (by me) to be the best place on television for in-depth, serious, insightful discussion of culture & politics. The show airs Saturday and Sunday mornings from 8am-10am (ET) on MSNBC. For those who don't have access to MSNBC, each show is promptly put up on their website in its entirety... http://upwithchrishayes.msnbc.msn.com/
You do? Premise: All women need to be stabbed to death. So assuming I accepted that premise, I could kill as many women as I was capable of and still be a rational person? I don't think so. I fundamentally disagree that all premises are the same. No, you need to have good reasons to accept a premise. Simply stating that you have faith is not enough, faith is not a proper justification. I find it funny that it's one theist tactic to argue from moral consequences (this is not directed at you ASF, this is more of a general statement towards other theists who argue or think like this), that without god there are no morals, that everything is allowed. Yet it's this elevation of "faith" that leads to absolute relativism. Because you can have faith in anything and use that as foundation for whatever you believe. Let's take the example above and imagine a possible dialogue: A: I have to kill all women, I have to stab them to death and spill their blood. B: That's horrible, you mustn't do that! A: Of course I do, God told me so. B: But think about it, why would he tell you such a thing? That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Why would he create women in the first place if he wanted them to be killed, and why doesn't he kill them himself? Think of what these women would have to go through, how terrible that is, nobody would want that and certainly not a kind being like God. Think of all the pain you inflict upon their families...[enter a myriad of arguments here]. A: God's ways are mysterious. It might not appear to be sensible to us, but who are we to question God? Are you telling me you're smarter than God, that your fallible human opinion is worth more than his absolute and perfect knowledge? We have got to have faith, that's why I need to kill all women. What could a Christian possibly counter to that in terms of reasonable discourse. Sure, he could just tie him up and have him sent to a mental asylum. But with what justification? Ultimately, the Christian is saying the exact same things, only that they replace "killing women" with "accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and savior" (and a host of other things of course, like "gays don't deserve equal rights"). How can I as a neutral bystander find out who's right? How do I know that it's not he Christian who needs to go to the mental asylum? The answer is: I can't, not if I assume that we can just accept suppositions on faith. Sure, you can overall be a rational person, yet suspend your rationality when it comes to religion and simply have faith. On the other hand you can be the most irrational person and stumble upon atheism for all the wrong reasons.
So it sounds like you are saying that the rationality of a premise may depends on whether it leads to a conclusion that is not harmful to society. It doesn't sound like what's been argued here by anti-faith people intent on ridiculing people of faith, but at face value I see the point in that position. If I learned that somebody accepted such a dubious premise that leads rationally to such harmful conclusions, I wouldn't touch that person with a ten foot pole. I'd probably keep an eye on them. A real-life example would be if I knew somebody who was a Jihadist and who accepted as a premise the belief that by becoming a martyr he'd retire to his 70 virgins in heaven. If it looked to me that the guy was determined to act on his beliefs, I'd report it to the authorities, because rationally I can see where his premises would lead. Conversely, lets say hypothetically it was determined by accepting only a scientific approach and no other assumption whatsoever that our world could not sustain human population and the best chance for the human race to survive was to reduce the earth's population by 90 percent. That may logically lead to the conclusion that in order for humanity to survive we must start killing people or at the very least limiting reproduction urgently. Would this be also irrational thinking based on the fact that it leads to an unsavory conclusion? What I'm asking is, can we in your view judge whether a premise is rational based on whether we like or not the conclusions it leads to?
Well, if it was agreed by experts in their scientific fields throughout the world, that the human race would end if 90% of the population were not reduced, and evidence was presented and agreed upon, and all other possible solutions explored were not viable...then if it was for the survival of the human race as a whole...it could be seen as rational (though to be honest, such a situation would probably see 90% die out without actual intervention). On the other hand, followers of a group of people who write a book saying that the creator has told them to kill as many women as possible on any day it rains, and telling all followers to take their word for it (faith) and do likewise or they will be going against the wishes of the creator....I would say, are being irrational.
Who cares whether a belief is rational or irrational? People have all kinds of irrational beliefs and superstitions when it comes to sports. Life wouldn't be as interesting or fun if people were rational about everything.
No, actually it's the exact opposite. What I tried to explain is that the theist has to act that way, unless he wants to call everybody rational. That's what your definition boils down to, either you end up with special pleading, or you cannot possibly call anybody or anything irrational as nobody acts in a way that he thinks is false, rendering the term useless. I think I explained that with my example, though I guess I maybe wasn't clear enough. To me, the Christian and the women killer are equally irrational, because both their world views are equally based on faith. If "God wants me to do X" is your justification, then it doesn't matter what X is, whether it's "killing all women" or "treating sick children in Africa", it means that you're irrational in that regard, because your premise is based on faith, not on reason. As I said above, no we cannot. Having said that, I think we can make a simple case against murdering people. The point is that it's against the interest of every individual to accept living in a world where murder can be justified. If you'd argue that you can kill people at random for whatever reason (like bringing down world population), then you're essentially arguing that others can kill you for that same reason and that is against your own best interests and therefore irrational.
doing something that is against your best interests is the only way we can define real love. anything else is self-interest. only through sacrifice can we express real love. what Jesus said ("greater love hath no man but this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" ) is true. if you think that it's irrational to love, then i guess you're right.
More of a dmonstration that you don't understand biology and that you refuse to read what benz or others write (to love is irrational?)
i taught two weeks of Biology in a local highschool recently, and one of the statements in a video i showed was "life developed in the sea". the statement wasn't "the best scientific estimate is that life developed in the sea", or "evidence suggests that life developed in the sea", or "to this point in scientific investigation, it is uncertain how life developed, but it is likely that it developed in the sea". the categorical, but unverified and unverifiable, statement was that life developed in the sea. now, i ask you this: how much more difficult would it be for a science curriculum to present information that is more scientifically transparent? why would anyone want to make a statement in a video for high school students that is patently false? btw, i didn't make any comment about the statement in the video. that's not my place.
"The best scientific estimate is that gravity is the force that binds us to the earth." "To this point in scientific investigation, it is uncertain how the sun shines, but it is likely that it is through nuclear fusion." We don't actually know either of these things for certain, and by your standard of "unverified/unverifiable," we never will. There may be some other force currently unaccounted for in our THEORY of gravity. There may be a process we don't understand, since we can't go inside a star, in our THEORY of nuclear fusion. If science textbooks, films, or whatever phrased everything the way you want, there wouldn't be any time or space for dialogue or copy about the actual subjects. So, the fact of the matter is that this statement is far from patently false. Rather, it is so overwhelmingly supported by the evidence--as well as, less importantly, being overwhelmingly accepted by the 99% majority of experts in biology--that simplifying it as the producers of the video did is about as benign a decision to make as can be. As an aside, sea water and blood have many chemical similarities. This is one singular, very accessible piece of evidence for the link between the development of life over time, and the ocean.
the similarities between blood composition and sea water aren't evidence. they are observations that don't lead to any reasonable conclusions, and to think that they are evidence is faulty reasoning. i would expect better from someone who apparently knows something about science. it isn't a benign decision to make a false statement. it's deception. it would have taken 3 more seconds to make a qualified statement, which would have been much more honest. what one piece of evidence is there that life developed in the sea? one piece? please. Ombak says that i don't understand biology. what he means is that i disagree with fundamental assumptions that are made by "scientists". to disagree is not to understand in his estimation. since i disagree that there is evidence that life developed in the sea, i don't understand biology. maybe the fact is that i understand biology quite well, and you don't have any idea that the suppositions that support some of your unfounded theories are just that: without any evidentiary support.
The chemical similarities between blood and sea water are "one piece" of evidence. By themselves, they're very weak evidence. Of course, there's a hell of a lot more than that, which if you actually knew anything about biology or the scientific method, you'd realize. Some guy didn't one day just say "oh shit, blood and sea water are a lot alike, therefore life came from the sea!" and then everybody said "oh yeah, that makes sense" and therefore all of science now assumes life came from the sea. What the hell is wrong with you? I wanted to believe for a second that you might actually want to engage in a legitimate discussion. I was, surprise surprise, wrong. In spite of how ridiculous my optimism has proven to be, I'm going to once again recommend an actual biologist to you. A devoutly Christian biologist: Ken Miller. Please go get a clue. Please. [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVRsWAjvQSg"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVRsWAjvQSg[/ame]
so. you. cannot. produce. one. piece. of. evidence. and you thought you wanted to be part of a legitimate discussion.
What do you mean by being scientifically transparent? Do you want teachers to explain over and over again how the scientific method works every time they teach a conclusion that scientists arrived at? Of course if you take a biology course about the origin of life you will be taught that life developed in the sea. Because, by using the scientific method, the evidence that scientists have gathered up to now strongly supports the hypothesis that life on earth -as defined scientifically- originated and began to develop in the sea. If you take a science course about the origin of life, it is understood that you are learning what science was able to discover by using the scientific method. By studying fossils, bacteria and so on scientifically, scientists arrived at this conclusion. So what else would you expect them to teach? This is what you will be taught, because it's what the available evidence supports. If in the future new evidence is uncovered that is determined by scientists to cast doubt on that theory, then I'm sure the curriculum that is presented to students in biology class will be changed.
here is the famous video from Richard Dawkins about the evolution of the eye. [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUjd8x-1xM0&feature=related"]Evolution of the Eye Part 1 - YouTube[/ame] notice the faulty suppositions: a simple sheet of light-sensitive cells. oh, really? connected to what? we don't see with our eye. we see with our brain. how did the information get to the processing center? and did the predator have eyes? maybe, maybe not. shallow cup. oh, really? the shallow cup is where the photo-sensitive cells are? how fortuitous. and again, how is the information getting to the processing center? can you say "optic nerve"? i knew you could. as an aside, i love how the blood vessels are painted in on the developing eye. we can just see how evolution works. it has a paint brush. a pin hole. i think it's obvious that the creature in question ran headlong into a spiny thing and poked a hole in the "eye" so that it could see better. it's really fortuitous that it didn't poke its eye out. it could have, you know. it's good that it wasn't too careful. as an aside, did the predator have a hand as well as have eyes? hard to know the answer to those kinds of questions, and was the predator named Bryson? probably not. i could go on, but i'm tired of poking Dawkins' eyes out.
"Scientists"? And you complain that Justin Z pointing out one piece of evidence as far as he understands it is not wanting to have a serious discussion? You're poisoning the well. You're trolling whether you intend to or not. It's unlikely that anyone saying "scientists" instead of scientists understands biology quite well. It's demonstrable that you don't. If you're so serious about biology and how well you udnerstand it, why aren't you on a science forum debuking these awful theories? If you are, share with us the reaction from "scientists". And finally, if you think "scientists" aren't doing good work, why are you using all of their applied knowledge?
Here Stilton, here's a good article that gives a more detail explanation on the eye: http://jhered.oxfordjournals.org/content/96/3/171.full
Thanks, Ombak--I need to spread rep. Between Stilton's troll posts and yours he did actually make an attempt to engage in a discussion, so I must respect that. Here's what I have to say: The lack of imagination you possess, Stilton, is actually quite startling. I don't mean that as an insult. It's just surprising how stark it is. The problem for you seems to be one of conceptualization. You appear incapable of stepping outside your own preconceptions and into an objective mindset where evidence is viewed with neutral skepticism. For a long time, I was that way too. My decision to change and be intellectually honest led me to atheism, so I can see why you're afraid to do so. A simple sheet of light-sensitive cells. There are many modern bacteria that react to light in one way or another. Light sensitivity is an extremely primitive trait. The ancestor that Dawkins proposes is many thousands of steps ahead of the first single-celled organisms that reacted to light (a trait that arose by chance, through mutation, and was selected for because it was advantageous to possess). Remember, these are very, very primitive creatures. Modern analogues (though many many times more complex) might be a hydra or a sea fir. A shallow cup. If a mutation occurred that caused this sheet of light sensitive cells to have a sag in the middle, that would absolutely be selected for, because as explained in the video, it would add directionality to this primitive vision. As Dawkins states: "It is easy to see how that shadow effect . . . would work progressively and gradually as the cup gets bigger." Now again to this problem of conceptualization you have: there is no "processing center" in creatures this primitive--no optic nerve, no brain. That is literally billions of steps down the evolutionary lines that led to us and other creatures! Remember: Modern bacteria--one celled organisms!--which plainly do not possess brains, react to light. You're looking at things as they are now in macro-sized creatures, and assuming something like an optic nerve and a brain are necessary to make sight work. We have mountains of extant evidence that this is simply not the case. A pin hole. Lamarckian evolution (the creature ran into a spiny thing, and it passed this physical defect, acquired during its life, onto its progeny) is not being discussed here. That statement shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that you do not understand how evolutionary biology works. The pin hole is the end result of the "cup [getting] bigger . . . progressively and gradually." I am not sure what the point of your questions about the hypothetical predator are, so I'm not going to answer them, aside from that we may be talking about a creature that was a predator. Of course, eyes have arisen in various forms numerous times throughout evolutionary history. Octopi and other cephalopods have eyes that ended up wired "correctly"--with the optic nerve behind the retina instead of burrowing through it, as they do in mammalian eyes (and which is why we have a blind spot). There is a simple evolutionary reason for why their eyes developed that way and ours, the other way with the blind spot. I challenge you to investigate this for yourself if you actually do have any intent of learning about these things. Still, I once again must give credit where it is due for the minimal effort you made to address the topic. However, as you can see, your objections are easily dealt with. It is up to you now to decide whether you want to begin an honest pursuit of scientific truth.
I think that's a good example of what I was trying to say. It sounds like your father is a rational person but to me, what you'd probably describe as his core religious belief was not arrived at by rational thought. I would imagine it was something he was, more or less, 'born into' and has attempted to rationalise after he'd accepted it as the central premise. I'm not saying it's good for us all to be 'rational robots' as I don't actually think that's a good way to live but for most people, the central core of their religious beliefs were simply not reached by rational thought.
First of all, "Religious beliefs" is too big a tent to put it in such a simple statement. When you talk about "the central core of their religious beliefs", are you talking about philosophical concepts such as for example the existence of God? About more specific doctrinal ideas such as for example Jesus being God and the Pope being his representative on earth? About the moral values that a particular religion may espouse, and a person's decision to abide by them? Because I don't think they all belong in the same category. I think doctrinal ideas are obviously arrived at by making a conscious decision to accept the authority of those who established them. A family or a society may choose to accept certain principles and build on them. I don't believe it's irrational to do so, particularly if it works well within the context of that society. It's a bit like Americans accepting the democratic principles established by their founding fathers. Nothing irrational about that. I find it particularly problematic to call religious principles irrational, since most of the moral principles and practical insight on human behavior that are preached by the major religions today have been arrived at primarily by observation about human behavior which took place over many generations, observation which led to determining what worked better within human society. The choice to accept such moral guidelines is no different than making a choice to obey the laws of the country that you are born in -in the US accepting the principles that our founding fathers set forth- For example, choosing to give money to your church is no less rational than paying taxes, except that it's voluntary in most places. There is nothing irrational about choosing to behave a certain way by following certain moral precepts. But going back to the type of metaphysical philosophical questions that we were discussing before we brought up religion. (While religions obviously take sides on some of these questions, they are not necessarily religious questions.) These are the questions human beings have which science cannot address, because they are not part of the natural philosophy that can be addressed scientifically by analyzing the empirical data we are constantly bombarded with through our senses. One such question that's been asked by humans since prehistory is the one about the existence of God. And that's what I was discussing before I got sidetracked by talk of religion. But the existence of God does not fall into the category of "natural philosophy" and therefore it is meaningless to try to address it by looking at empirical data. I sometimes think that the problem some people have is that they've come to equate "rational thought" to "analyzing empirical data". It seems like there is a current of thought among some contemporary intellectuals that is bent on destroying any traces of non-empirically based thinking, as though any other form of philosophical and conceptual thinking that human beings have engaged in throughout their existence must be discarded as irrational. And it is this particular current of thought that you and some fellow posters seem to have accepted, and it seems to have led you and some other posters to assert that other posters who have not accepted this particular assumption are irrational. It has led you not only to discard the concept of God, but to discard as irrational anybody who might not reject the concept of God, and it took some of you to go as far as to compare deep philosophical matters to a silly idea of some little Leprechaum hiding under my bed. That is where this "Deists are not rational" current of thought comes from. Well, I just don't think it's rational to expect all rational human beings to agree with all that.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xATi_9seuk&feature=related"]Magic[/ame] Of course they do, although part of that is the way we remember dreams. They share features with the physical world, otherwise they'd be totally incomprehensible and impossible to remember, that doesn't mean they're "merely" a mirror. You know, if you'd said this was your non-negotiable opinion from the beginning then we could've saved ourselves a whole lot of trouble. What about the awareness of what takes place within our minds? That certainly doesn't correspond to our 5 classic physical senses. And while I know I keep referring to the distinction between physical/non-physical, material/non-material, I don't actually like to make that hard distinction, it's similar to what I complained about with natural/supernatural. Not really, I don't think there's a "correct result" other than remaining open to possibilities. The reason I mentioned the example with the mantra is because that's a technique that aims to allow you to remain open rather than settle on a particular interpretation, whether that interpretation is reducing the experience to brain chemistry, identifying with the omniscient godhead, or whatever. My point was that there's a common expectation among many scientists that we should be able to remove an experience from its original context and be able to reproduce that experience at will or else that experience isn't real. And I think that's a very naive view. Only if you assume you understand the nature of it already and that it conforms to your expectations about how it works. I disagree that that explanation suffices, so let's end it there because we're just going in circles. It wasn't a great example, but the only reason blind men would bother investigating color is because they live in a community of sighted people. What if the majority of people in a culture were blind as well? Wouldn't they think the people describing this feature of reality they had no frame of reference for were nuts? You misunderstood the bolded part, what I meant was that if I had to put money on the specifics of people's religious beliefs being incorrect I probably would. And I include as religious beliefs the notion that our interior worlds are entirely an epiphenomenon of brain chemistry. And since you got started on graphs, consider this one, taken from Ken Wilber's Integral Theory: It maps experience according to four quadrants, two of which are external and two internal, two of which are personal and two collective. Where you and benztown are arguing that the right-hand side is all that is "real" and anything on the left-hand side is merely a byproduct, I find that they complement each other and see no reason to belittle interior experience in the name of exterior.
People often go with their "gut feeling" on a lot of issues, even if there is no proof to back it up, or even if the evidence hints at them being wrong. It might be technically irrational, but there's often evidence in some form to back up that gut feeling. It's not just something plucked from the air. That evidence tends to be more in the form of life experiences rather than scientific proof, which makes people trust their instinct rather than more "rational" evidence. I would say (based on my own gut feeling) that people who have a deeply ingrained instinctive belief about anything are prone to noticing instances which back up their instincts, and glossing over the others.
Sorry to interrupt this excellent discussion, but for anyone interested watching the show, it's now available online. Here's the lineup... Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins), author of The God Delusionand The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True. Steven Pinker (@sapinker), cognitive scientist, professor at Harvard University's Department of Psychology, and author of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Susan Jacoby, author of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. Jamila Bey (@jbey), host of The Sex, Politics, and Religion Hour on the Voice of Russia Radio Network and contributor to the Washington Post blog "She the People". Robert Wright, author of The Evolution of God and senior editor at The Atlantic. Jamie Kilstein (@jamiekilstein), comedian and co-host of Citizen Radio. [ame="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/46848244#46848244"][FONT="]http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/46848244#46848244[/ame][/FONT]