This is an argument that could only be had in religious and philosophy departs.
It is of no substance, the reality is everything is physic's and so everything can be investigated using the scientific method.
What knowledge can't be explored through reduction is knowledge not worth having, in the sense that it will not help us materially.

Sorry this is just so confused it is hard to know where to start. The "supremacy" of science is a study in epistemology - the study of the question "what is knowledge".

There is no definitive answer to the question - nor is there a definitive answer to the question "What is this thing called Science?" Alan Chalmers excellent book by that title traverses the field well.

Science does, however, have the following "principles":
1. The theory needs to be "consistent" with all the known observed instances
2. The theory needs to have explanatory value - it is not just an equation that relates input A to output B but describes a mechanism by which it occurs.
3. (Desirable but not necessary)the theory is capable of making predictions the accuracy of which can be observed.

Science makes no claim to completeness - it doesn't have an answer to everything. Science acknowledges that it is a growing study - that there will be events that conflict with theory. How these are handled is a large part of the debate in philosophy of science (Popperians regard it as the moment a theory is abandoned, Kuhn identifies a paradigm that simply ignores anomalies till it is overthrown in a revolution, Feyerabend claims scientists simultaneously use a range of incommensurable theories for specific events, Bayesians regard the data points as building to a probability of accuracy).

Perhaps the word "Scientism" can be used for those who overclaim for science - but real science does not claim perfection nor completeness. It does claim to a systematic method.

PS Art is not "knowledge" it is however "communication" - very different.

Most brilliant scientist are not dumb enough to ignore the fantasy of order from chaos. They also don't have to imagine in their mind the idiotic notion that one species becomes another species. These are simple facts that expose to a 2 year old the foolish fairytales that pseudo science has as its dogmas.

Remember everyone in"runners" world it's the angles that keep the planes in the sky.

Another thought-provoking piece, thanks Peter.

David Deutsch has taken on the problem of reductionism and of causality with his Constructor Theory approach. I won't bore the reader with an explanation here, if anyone is interested they can look his work up. It's in early stages, but is intended to be a completely general approach to both the epistemological and ontological bases of Popperian philosophy with the intent of defining a new language of physics.

In a nutshell, in that model the fallacy you point out in Hume's reasoning disappears :

Everything which is directly observable is the result of interactions between things that may not be directly observable.

If there is a conceivable way that something could be possible [the product of an interaction], then it must be assumed to be real unless it is already known to be impossible through experiment.

In fact, this is now becoming a very common view among scientists, especially physicists and mathematicians. Feynmann certainly held strongly to a very similar view.

You might be interested in looking up Sir Roger Penrose's musings on the subject as well.

Craig,
Thanks, I will look into your suggestions. I was going to include something on indeterminacy but found myself out of my depth. It appears that unstable nuclei decay at random and that they do out of the usual effective/final cause structure of scholasticism. It seems to me that not knowing about causality in this instance is no excuse for separating cause and effect.
Peter

The only absurdity here is the article, which would replace inconvenient science with convenient metaphysics?

Which is what you get when you replace logic and reason with dogma and ideology!

Nor can one separate the immutable law of cause and effect. i.e., a stone thrown into a still pond will always create ripples, that go on and on until they reach the shoreline.

Or that everything in the known universe is energy in one transformed form or another.
Or that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, merely transformed; meaning, all that we now see as transformed energy, as the known or knowable universe, had to exist in another form, before it became the universe? Dark matter?

Today's Archaeologists are finding increasing evidence of the presumption, that the exodus probably din't occur.

Bringing into question a whole series of possible fables, including the parting of the seas, manna from heaven, the 14 commandments handed to a myth from a burning bush, written in a language 99% of the populace couldn't read.

Because regardless of the language, they were for the most part, entirely illiterate, and conveyed all their fables via their oral history; which has been seriously embellished as it seems, was the then custom, when this or that inconvenient fact disturbed the story, or rendered it entirely nonsensical/without foundation/contradictory/fabricated!?

If I were to start a brand new religion, it would be based on indisputable fact and science, which in no way could be misrepresented by ideologues, merely placing derogatory labels on it!

As their only recourse to being confounded by the increasing emergence of factual data!
Rhrosty.

I suggest you go back and read the article again, Rhrosty.

Sells, when are you going to stop writing all this BS.
David

David,
It is not often that I get such informed comment! You have obviously grabbled with the issues, read deeply, thought long to produce such an inspiring comment. I really admire the sort of intellectual involvement with readers of my posts that yours represents. In answer to your question, when they carry me out in a box.

"But as useful as the sciences are they will not tell me who I am or what my life might mean. They will not tell me why my wife loves me even when I am unlovable. They will not tell me why one painting reaches an understanding with my intellect and desire and why others leave me cold."

Why do you feel the need to know these things? Life is meant to be lived - not analysed. People who have the time to ask these questions are obviously not living their lives to the full. Why do you need to know who you are? Aren't you content with the fact that you just are? Why do you need to know what life means? What difference would it make? You are living and that is all you need to know. Why do you need to tell us that you are sometimes unlovable - is this a cry for help? Why do you need to know why one painting effects you and another does not? Can't you just enter into the experience of interacting with things without needing to question? All the while you are questioning you are not living and that is sad.

People who claim to be philosophical or metaphysical or theological are not searching for answers to life's big questions. They are searching for the answers as to why they feel the way they do. Why am I sad or angry or frightened or guilty? These are the real questions behind their intellectual posturing. That posturing becomes a drug that numbs them from the reality of the pain they feel in their bodies and which can be measured by science as stress and anxiety.

You ask all the wrong questions. You are merely trying to create an environment where you can feed the need to numb yourself from the reality of what is going on in your body.

"The reason that science cannot give us a complete description of reality is that it is, by its nature, quantitative. Physics can only capture those aspects of reality that are "susceptible of the prediction and control of characteristics of quantifiable phenomena." "

I am sorry all of reality is quantitative. If there is no possibility of measuring something, it does not exist.

Scientism itself is an invention that caricatures what science does. Scientific inquiry determines the likely correctness of hypotheses and that is how we are able to accurately know the real world. That does not tell us what to do with that information. Science also does not replace imagination and art as means of expression and enjoyment. It might tell us why we enjoy things.

The caricature of science presented in this essay is merely an excuse to hold on to religion.

Agronomist, you say

“All of reality is quantitative. If there is no possibility of measuring something, it does not exist.”

So how do you quantify falling in love, or Beethoven’s ninth symphony, or the awe and delight an astrophysicist feels at the images of the horse-head nebula?

I agree scientism is a caricature of science, but it is not a straw man. Many non-scientists, and a few scientists, treat science as if it is self-evident and exhaustive: necessary, sufficient, and exclusively capable of explaining every phenomenon. Science is treated almost as religious authority. Look at the fringes of the debates over climate change or GM crops (ab)use science to claim authority for their positions.

I don't think Peter is attacking science, just pointing out its limitations.

Science certainly does have its limitations. I believe that there are things we cannot and will never be able to measure. Feelings, art, philosophy can only be subjected to scientific analysis in part.

However, Peter's religion asks the unreasonable. Some branches of it demand that one believe that a human female can be impregnated without contact with a male sperm. Are we to accept that? Does Peter himself accept that?

Science has its limitations, but most religion is founded on myth, unsupportable propositions and superstition.

There are mechanisms for ridding science of its errors, but there are no comparable mechanisms in religion.

Sells

"The attempt by biologists to describe this phenomenon in terms of evolutionary theory or human psychology etc. will always fail to provide a complete description of the phenomenon. Such attempts are always reductive. They attempt to describe complex human behaviour in terms of lower levels of physical causation be that evolutionary theory, biochemistry or physiology. What we get is a jumble of lower order explanations but we do not get the whole picture."

...

"They will not tell me why my wife loves me even when I am unlovable."

Evolutionary theory is not trying to "describe" the "whole picture" of why your wife loves you even when you are unloveable.

It's trying to explain cause and effect in the origin of species.

Any theory is only ever an attempt to extract out of the complex reality a simpler explanation. It never tries to be as complex as the reality it is trying to explain, because then it would serve no purpose.

So it is not a valid criticism of evolutionary theory that it doesn't explain the particular form that attraction takes between male and female in every individual action in every individual case. It doesn't need to. It is enough that it explains how we got here, and how our liking for art, beauty, and metaphysics is a result of it.

Jardine,
I have no problems with the theory of evolution, just with the theory being pushed too far.

Dear Sells,

Do you have any problem with the virgin birth, transferability of sin, the trinity and God needing an assistant?

What do you mean by evolution pushed too far?

Those who desire to know about the world ought to use science.

Peter Sellick mentions that there are other ways to know about the world and this is indeed supported by Patanjali in his Yoga Sutras, accordingly, if one concentrates deep enough and long enough on a physical object, they may get to know all its properties. However, warns Patanjali, that would be a despicable waste, for one who after so many years of effort attained such rare powers of concentration should use them to concentrate on God instead.

Phanto asked an important question: "Why do you feel the need to know these things? Life is meant to be lived - not analysed." - now I extend this question to the objective: while the best and safest method to know about the world is science, why that need to know about the world in the first place?

First of all,
If science cannot be used to answer your question, you are asking the wrong questions.

"Why is moo?" is a stupid question that science cannot answer, however I'm sure many people could explore this matter using philosophical, artistic or other methods. Similarly "Who am I" "Is there a god" "When will yellow?".

Here is just one example of this:
"We get some details about the activation of certain areas of the brain during mental activity but this does not give us any idea of the nature of thought production."

Or to put it another way:
"We get some details about the noise a cow makes, but this does not give us any idea of "Why is moo?"."

If you stop asking stupid questions, you wont need to resort to stupid methodologies to try and get answers.

Second,
If, as you argue, there exists some part of this world that will never be able to be detected by any means, then its relevance to the world is exactly the same as thought it didn't exist!

You seem to want to define reality, not as what is real, but some combination of the real and unreal, which we will never know exists. I suppose you suggest we have faith in this second aspect of your "reality". Now I see where you're heading with this...

David F,
My goodness, no wonder you are cross with me. Where do I start? The virgin birth is a story with profound consequences invented by the writer of Luke. It is often the case that fiction is more profound than nonfiction, that is why we are all addicted to stories. The trinity is bedrock Christian dogma. It tells us that god is not described by an undifferentiated monotheism but consists of historical truth projected into the future. The transferability of sins is not on my radar at all.

I think that the most common problem in understanding what Christians believe is that we all wear the glasses of natural science and we have lost the ability to see poetically, narratively and that limits us tremendously. That is the essence of my article. Science has become a limiting dogma of its own.

By "pushing evolution too far" I mean that we think it will explain all biological phenomena including the complexity of the human family. Under extreme Darwinism all culture will be eventually be explained as an advantageous adaptation. That will never happen!

I recently read Paul Ham's 1914, a history of the roots of WWI. I was surprised at how important social Darwinism was in Germany and how it was a major contributor to the push for war. Some said that it was Germany'd duty to eliminate "lower" races so that evolution to a higher state could be aided. Pushing Darwin too far?

with best wishes
Peter

Sells
So-called social Darwinism is not Darwinism of any kind because
a) Darwin never advocated the elimination of the weak etc., and
b) is/ought dichotomy. Evolutionary theory only purports to explain what happened and happens, not what should happen.

"By "pushing evolution too far" I mean that we think it will explain all biological phenomena including the complexity of the human family. Under extreme Darwinism all culture will be eventually be explained as an advantageous adaptation. That will never happen!"

Man has never been able to bridge the gap between mind and matter: to reduce all complex human behaviour to ultimate material causes. However science has certainly pushed back the boundaries, and we have gone from magical god-stories about nature, including human nature, to a much better understanding based in science. Progress in the physical sciences has been accompanied by progress in our scientific understanding of man and society, even if not to the same degree of rationality or predictive competence.

During all this, there have always been those who said of any particular achievement "That will never happen!" and been proved wrong. (In last week's news, scientists are working on a cure for the common cold, HIV and Hep C - all some kind of RNA code-deciphering mechanism. Thank God the job of making it happen was in the hands of evolutionists and not priests and theologians eh?)

Evolutionary theory does indeed seek to explain mental as well as physical characteristics as the results of evolution. That "they will never succeed!" is indeed an excellent null hypothesis. But it behoves the theists to at least understand the theories they criticise. For example, one theory of evolutionary psychology is that religion is a mental adaptation resulting from sexual selection - differential sexual and reproductive success. Have you considered that?

Craig Minns,

Thanks for David Deutsch’s Constructor Theory (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1210.7439v2.pdf ), that I have not known about. Deutsch is a very readable author and populariser. This theory seems to be aimed at dealing with epistemological enigmas that arise from quantum physics. Am I right?

My question concerns your sentence:

“If there is a conceivable way that something could be possible [the product of an interaction], then it must be assumed to be real unless it is already known to be impossible through experiment.”.

Is it a quote from Deutsch’s article, or a consequence from it, or your construction? To me it sounds much like Max Tegmark (c.f. his “Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality”) or at least related to it.

David F, I wonder if you could explain why you are so concerned about the dogmatic axioms of Peter's faith?

To my way of thinking the "truth" or otherwise of these axioms is not a very interesting question anymore, but what they tell us about some important aspects of being human is fascinating. They are part of a long struggle to understand the nature of our complex species and to explain the obvious qualitative difference between us and other animals. As well, they represent some attempts to provide a framework to define some limits on our endless capacity to justify counter-productive (anti-social) behaviours by deriving an ethos of individual responsibility to cognitively bias decision-making.

From those beginnings have sprung all of the great science and philosophy that you are able to draw on in seeking to disparage.

I wonder if any of those who are so eloquent in doing similarly, here and more broadly, have really considered the nature and source of their own cognitive biases?

Peter, JKJ, et al, evolution is nothing special. It is simply a fairly well understood and limited case of self-organisation through recursive iteration. The same systemic principle underlies everything we see.

Hi George, that is my own formulation, but is intrinsic to the ontological model of the "constructor" which is at the heart of Deutsch's model. It must be remembered too that Deutsch is an information theorist by long professional affiliation and is one of the most influential thinkers in that field.

I'm not sure of the nature of the relationship between Tegmark and Deutsch but you're quite right to say that their ideas overlap.

Craig
"Peter, JKJ, et al, evolution is nothing special."

It's special to me.

Edward Feser is of course a completely unhinged all American loon, as described here:
http://encyclopediaofamericanloons.blogspot.com/2011/01/1285-edward-feser.html
He is also quite sympathetic with the kind of politics and "culture" promoted by the sado-masochistic cult opus dei.

Dear Sells,

I am not cross with you at all. I am fairly sure we could have a pleasant meeting. Having very different ideas does not mean we could not enjoy each other’s company. I have been annoyed with you in the past but am used to you now.

You characterised the Trinity as bedrock Christian doctrine. Although some had maintained it previously it was not adopted as Christian doctrine until Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea in the year 325. My daughter goes the Unitarian Church which does not accept the Trinity.

You wrote: “The transferability of sins is not on my radar at all.”

I thought Christian doctrine maintains that Jesus took upon himself the sins of the world. If that is not something you believe or is not doctrine we need not discuss it.

The virgin birth was not invented by the writer of Luke. We agree that it is fiction, but we disagree that it is profound. We also apparently agree that Luke was not the author of Luke. The virgin birth is a common occurrence in pagan and other non-Christian mythology. Mithra, Adonis or Tammuz, Attis, Krishna and other gods were all born of virgins.

continued

continued

From “Pagan & Christian Creeds: Their Origin and Meaning” by Edward Carpenter

“Justin Martyr again, in the Dialogue with Trypho says that the Birth in the Stable was the prototype (!) of the birth of Mithra in the Cave of Zoroastrianism; and boasts that Christ was born when the Sun takes its birth in the Augean Stable, (1) coming as a second Hercules to cleanse a foul world; and St. Augustine says "we hold this (Christmas) day holy, not like the pagans because of the birth of the Sun, but because of the birth of him who made it." There are plenty of other instances in the Early Fathers of their indignant ascription of these similarities to the work of devils; but we need not dwell over them. There is no need for US to be indignant. On the contrary we can now see that these animadversions of the Christian writers are the evidence of how and to what extent in the spread of Christianity over the world it had become fused with the Pagan cults previously existing.”

IMHO one gross defect in Christianity is Jesus. I am an atheist, but if I were to accept a God it (logically it would be sexless) would be a presence not in human form. In that sense Judaism, Islam and Buddhism are all more reasonable than Christianity. However, the reason that Jesus was born of a virgin seems to me a device to render the new cult acceptable to people who were accustomed to divine figures resulting from virgin births.

As I understand most pagan religions had nothing to do morality. One worshipped the gods and sacrificed to receive their favours. Morality was determined by community standards or philosophy.

Therein lies another major flaw in Christianity. It incorporated the Jewish Bible and fused that morality with the new religion. The Jewish Bible is not all bad.

Leviticus 19:18 Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the LORD.

continued

From my earlier post (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=5580#154255):

>>The Jesus figure just seems a more recent version of pagan legends of a redeemer born of a virgin and put to death. Jesus is an analogue of Adonis, Mithra and Apollo.<<

In view of the above about cultural evolution, this is as world-shattering for me as the discovery that I share 95% of my DNA with a chimpanzee. Christians - except for literalists - have learned to accept that man was not created in one go as described in Genesis, so (Jews and) Christians should not be surprised that what they see as God’s self-revelation was also subject to an evolutionary process.

continued

Not only should you love your neighbour as yourself, but should not vex a stranger who is not your neighbour.

LEV 19:33 And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. 19:34 But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.

However, the Jewish Bible also accepts slavery, is intolerant of homosexuals, is patriarchal and reflects the stone age morality of its time. One problem with any religion is that it incorporates the mythic structure of its founding and continues it in a society where it is no longer appropriate.

One of our current problems is that our uncontrolled population growth is destroying our environment and making the world less habitable for future generations. What does the Bible tell us:

Genesis 1:22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.

That is very bad advice in today’s world. The Catholic Church ameliorated the effects of the bad parts of the Bible by filtering its injunctions through church doctrine. Unfortunately the printing press encouraged general literacy, and people got the Bible raw.

IMHO the mixture of a humanoid god with stone age morality was toxic. The humanoid was supposedly perfect. Christians were supposed to imitate this perfect person. Since humans could not a neurotic guilt was inculcated. I read St. Augustine’s “Confessions.” His speculations on time and space were sublime, but he agonised that he had stolen pears from an orchard as a teenager. Pelagius had more sense in maintaining that we are born without guilt. However, faced with a choice Christianity appears to choose the less reasonable alternative, and original sin was adopted as a doctrine. The lugubrious moan, “We are all sinners.” pervaded Christianity. Of course we all are also good, kind and generous, but Christianity focuses on guilt and sin.

continued

continued

One can wear the glasses of natural science and still appreciate poetry, mystery and the wonder of life itself. One doesn’t need religion for that. From Darwin’s Origin of the Species:

“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

Darwin clearly had a poetic being, and his view of nature expressed it.

Social Darwinism was not Darwinism, but it was popular in Germany. Social Darwinism appeared in the nineteenth century. Far earlier than that Jews were massacred by Crusaders in the eleventh century. Centuries of Christian inspired Jew hatred followed. Hitler merely followed an ancient German tradition far older than Social Darwinism. With a few notable exceptions both the Christian clergy and the churches supported the Nazis. The Vatican signed a Concordat with Hitler.

In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote: "I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.." As a boy, Hitler attended to the Catholic church and experienced the anti-Semitic attitude of his culture. In his book, Mein Kampf, Hitler reveals himself as a fanatical believer in God and country.

From what I read on the period Christianity had a much greater influence on Hitler than Social Darwinism.

continued

continued

I read Diarmaid MacCulloch’s “A History of Christianity”. In it he wrote:

“I still appreciate the seriousness which a religious mentality brings to the mystery and misery of human existence, and I appreciate the solemnity of religious liturgy as a way of confronting these problems. I live with the puzzle of wondering how something so apparently crazy can be so captivating to millions of other members of my species.”

That is the way I feel about Christianity. I am both fascinated and horrified by it. I am presently reading “From Jesus to Christianity” which tells of Christianity’s early history.

Craig Minns asked, “David F, I wonder if you could explain why you are so concerned about the dogmatic axioms of Peter's faith?”

Dear Craig,

Some of what Christians are asked to swear that they believe is contrary to reason. Yet the religion promotes honesty. Can anyone in good faith say that they believe that a human female was impregnated without male sperm? To swear that one believes such a thing is dishonest, but many do it. Some Christian creedal statements demand stating one believes in the virgin birth.

Dear George,

Sells posted on page 4 of comments, “The virgin birth is a story with profound consequences invented by the writer of Luke.” I responded to that. You know better.

We had a very relevant saying when I was doing "nasho",
"BS baffles brains."
Too true.

David

Dear david f,

>>Sells posted on page 4 of comments, “The virgin birth is a story with profound consequences invented by the writer of Luke.” <<

I don’t think this necessarily contradicts what I said, namely that God’s self-revelation - includiung through (or culminating at) what Luke, or his interpreters, saw as his invention - was also subject to an evolutionary process.

>>That is the way I feel about Christianity. I am both fascinated and horrified by it.<<

This is what I have often heard said also about mathematics.

In both cases this is an undertandable personal attitude, whatever the motivations, or life experiences that led to it.

In my view Christianity - like other religions to some extent - is a narrative about ultimate reality. It is neither just a philosophical orientation that can inspire arts, science and morality (as well as act against them), nor a fairy tale (mythology) to be taken verbatim by the philosophically unsophisticated, nor a “mystical experience” comparable to the more developed Oriental versions, nor a pain killer (“opium for the masses”). Christianity is all of these things taken TOGETHER, and more. And that is a problem for those who try to understand it but do not have “insider knowledge” (Polanyi’s indwelling).

Davidf, natural science is derived from religious impulses. All of the great natural philosophers were and are interested in the same questions as religious thinkers, ultimately.

Whether religion is "necessary" is a profoundly uninteresting question. It exists in some form in every human culture; it is a feature, not a bug.

Whether Hitler was Christian is,with respect, a red herring, as was Peter's initial raising of "social Darwinism". Neither are relevant and both reflect more on your respective cognitive biases than on the subject.

Yes, religion can lead to profoundly flawed social outcomes. Yes, it can be hijacked by horrid people to justify abhorrent actions. Yes, it can be stultifying.

The same may be said of the natural sciences. One of the main reasons for science's rapid development over the past 500 years and for advances in earlier times has been the demand for improvements in technology to enhance military capability. Many great advances in science have been actively suppressed by elderly greats who wished to preserve their own status, or perhaps could simply not grasp a new paradigm after having spent a lifetime devoted to an older one.

Trying to stand on such soggy moral high ground is a pretty fraught endeavour on both sides of this discussion.

Personally, I'm trying to find a bit of firmer footing between the two camps.

VK3AUU, you must feel fortunate that nature has equipped you with such a small target for bafflement.

Dear George and Craig Minns,

Thank you for taking the trouble to read my posts.

In my opinion science, mathematics and religion come from the same impulse, the desire to understand and explain the world. The natural sciences are not derived from religion. That is confusing correlation with causation. In my retirement I decided to investigate some area of natural science. I chose mycology and joined the Queensland Mycology Society. QMS goes on forays to investigate and classify fungi found in Queensland. They occasionally find a new species. At 89 I no longer go out with them. Some of the terrain is rough and too much for me.

The taxonomy associated with fungi is not as advanced as that associated with that of other biota. Much of the pre-twentieth century work was done by clerics who saw the study of nature as a means of learning more about the work of God. However, many saw fungi as the work of the devil. That is a reason why the knowledge of fungi is not as extensive as the knowledge of other life.

Religion has encouraged and discouraged science. Unfortunately it has discouraged the science of astronomy in imprisoning Galileo and killing Hypatia, Servetus and Bruno. At present the Vatican astronomical observatory is furthering astronomy. Gregor Mendel came from a poor family and would not have had an education were it not for the Catholic Church. His experiments revealed that hereditary traits were transmitted in discrete items not in blending of traits from both parents as Darwin thought. He published before Darwin did, but Darwin was unacquainted with his work. The problem of the fragmenting of knowledge is even greater today because of the vast outpouring of publications.

I agree with you, Craig Minns. I responded to Sells comment on the adoption of Social Darwinism by Germany and its justification for the acts of Nazi Germany. I countered with the influence of Christianity on Nazi Germany. They both reflect more on our respective cognitive biases than on the subject.

Continued

Continued

I am also horrified and fascinated by science and its applications.

I was part of a team that designed the LARC (Livermore Atomic Research Computer) and went to California to supervise its installation. While there I felt more and more guilty about my part in it. The Quakers picketing exacerbated my guilt when I talked to them. Although only part of LARC's usage was to study the making of nuclear weapons and their effects I felt uneasy about taking any part in it at all. Having been a soldier in WW2 and having worked in rocket and computer design it was easiest for me to find work in the development of weapons. I refused any more to work in any area connected with any war effort. My life changed greatly including a marital breakup.

Much of science and technology has been furthered by its military applications. The resources devoted to trips to the moon would not have been there had it not been for the competition with the Soviets. Yet I am fascinated by space travel.

Although religion is not the only cause for war the idea that “We have the final truth” seems to make them worse. Religions have also worked for peace. John Ferguson wrote "War and Peace in the World's Religions". He found tendencies toward both in all the religions he examined.

To justify our destruction of the other we think of them as evil. If we are religious monotheists we can reflect that all things come from God.

The Bible contains: Isaiah 45:7 I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.

If we are not religious we can reflect that we would probably be like our enemy had we been subjected to the same circumstances.

I have rejected any form of belief in any supernatural entities but will continue to read about the history and politics of those influenced by those ideas.

At 89 I can’t do too much more damage.

Craig Minns,

I think your use of the word “hijacked” here incorrectly implies that there is a right way and a wrong way to practice religion.

<<Yes, religion can lead to profoundly flawed social outcomes. Yes, it can be hijacked by horrid people to justify abhorrent actions. Yes, it can be stultifying.>>

Sure, the nutcase who goes on a shooting spree and claims to have done it in the name of Jainism has clearly hijacked Jainism, but the holy books of the Abrahamic religions - the ones we generally hear of being supposedly hijacked - are contradictory enough, and close enough to a choose-your-own-adventure book, to justify just about any interpretation.

That aside, though, this comparison I think is too flawed to have any invalidity…

<<The same may be said of the natural sciences.>>

Not quite. No-one kills in the name of science, and science doesn’t have a set of tenets that can drive people to do crazy things. Science is completely neutral and makes no claims about the nature of reality or what should or shouldn’t be done. There is nothing about science that convinces someone who doesn’t have all the answers to think that they do.

This is part of what I was getting at in that other thread, and your claim here only helps to confirm to me that we weren’t talking at cross purposes.

Most of the parallels you draw between science and religion are not valid. The only similarity between the two is the fact that they both attempt to describe the world we live in, and that the pursuit of them is, in part, driven by a need for answers. But that’s where it ends.

I used the word "hijacked" because it fits. Those who seek to distort ethical/moral ideas (religious, philosophical, whatever) to justify actions that are immoral/unethical are hijackers.

"No-one kills in the name of science"

Mengele is the classic example of one who did. In fact, that statement is disproven by any number of experimental regimes over the years, which have lead to the formation of ethics committees and legislative regimes designed to try to minimise the negative outcomes. Even today, the ideal model of Popperian philosophical purity is given the lie by the fact that some 80% of published papers contain serious errors of either evidence, statistical inference or conclusion.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/
http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1439

I could go on and on.

Personally, at the risk of being accused of betraying confidentiality, I have been told by the Managing Editor of The Conversation (a publication which does not use peer review, but services the academic community) the following:

"Happy to read it but I should be clear that the rule about being an academic [with a teaching position at an academmic institution] is hard and fast. We’re trying to be more strict about who qualifies to write, not less so, in part because of some of the types of issues you’ve identified (people writing outside their area of expertise and using us as a soapbox).

So even if the piece is brilliant sadly we’ll have to reject it."

It is obvious that Misha was being sincere and that he has the best of intentions, but the fact that a publication which purports to be about "Academic rigour" can say "even if the piece is brilliant sadly we’ll have to reject it." speaks volumes. It's the sort of thing one might expect to get from The Watchtower or The Catholic Leader, not a publication funded by Australia's universities.

"The only similarity between the two is the fact that they both attempt to describe the world we live in, and that the pursuit of them is, in part, driven by a need for answers."

Which is precisely what I have been arguing.

Craig Minns,

I think you might have missed my point.

<<I used the word "hijacked" because it fits. Those who seek to distort ethical/moral ideas (religious, philosophical, whatever) to justify actions that are immoral/unethical are hijackers.>>

The reason “hijacked” doesn’t fit is because there are no ultimate standards of religious ethics or religious morality. Religion isn’t intrinsically moral in and of itself, and nor is there any objective way to determine that the evil religion is not a real religion and the good religion is. Certainly there is enough wriggle room in the ambiguity of the holy books of the Abrahamic religions to justify near anything with a bit of cherry-picking.

<<Mengele is the classic example of one who did [kill in the name of religion].>>

Okay, so you’ve found an example, but what about the rest of what I said - which was the fundamental point I was making; that being that there is nothing within science to support what such a person would do?

Similarly, communists might have killed in the name of atheism (as theists will often claim they did) but that doesn’t mean much given that there is nothing within atheism to support what the communists did. There is, on the other hand, aspects inherent to religion that are attributable to the harm that can come from it. Again, it can convince someone who doesn’t have all the answers to think that they do.

<<Which is precisely what I have been arguing.>>

I know. What I’m concerned with, however, is when you take the comparison beyond that. That’s where your comparisons are no longer valid.

An interesting summary, George.

I read with interest your view that

>>[Christianity] is neither just a philosophical orientation that can inspire arts, science and morality (as well as act against them), nor a fairy tale (mythology) to be taken verbatim by the philosophically unsophisticated, nor a “mystical experience” comparable to the more developed Oriental versions, nor a pain killer (“opium for the masses”). Christianity is all of these things taken TOGETHER, and more.<<

I was so intrigued, given that last bit, I thought I'd take out the "neither just" parts, and turn them into positives. This what I discovered:

"[Christianity] is a philosophical orientation that can inspire arts, science and morality (as well as act against them), a fairy tale (mythology) to be taken verbatim by the philosophically unsophisticated, a 'mystical experience' comparable to the more developed Oriental versions, and a pain killer ('opium for the masses'). Christianity is all of these things, and more."

Oddly, I agree with practically all of that. Especially the fairy tale bit.

But which of these, in your view, is a justification for Christianity's existence in the twentyfirst century?

AJP, science simply doesn't address issues of morality/ethics. The quintessential scientific model thinker is Robert Hooke. As well as formulating Hooke's Law

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooke%27s_law

he was held in some awe by his contemporaries within the early Royal Society for his ability to suppress his human responses to the pain of other creatures. For example, his surgical experiments on live dogs, where he excised different organs to see what would happen were regarded as exemplary. So great was his fame in this regard that Samuel Pepys, in a paroxysm of agony with kidney stones that would have soon killed him, allowed Hooke to operate (ex anaethesia) to remove them, trusting in his steadiness of hand and lack of empathy to do the job despite the agony and likely prognosis of his patient. Pepys survived.

Pericles, let's turn your question around: what is a justification for Christianity's non-existence in the 21st century? Let's examine a corollary to that: if it is justified that Christianity should not exist, what should be done to bring about that outcome? What grounds are there for such action?

Now you’ve got me confused, Craig Minns.

<<… science simply doesn't address issues of morality/ethics.>>

I know, and that actually goes to what I was saying.

The fact that science doesn’t address issues of morality and ethics, while religion does, only strengthens my point. It’s partly the reason why there’s "nothing within science to support what such a person would do," and why science is not able to "convince someone who doesn’t have all the answers to think that they do."

You've actually helped support my argument that it's not true that “[t]he same may be said of the natural sciences.”

The fact that science doesn’t address issues of morality and ethics when religion does, does not therefore mean that the two cannot be compared on that level at all. It doesn't mean that any differences or similarities there cannot be counted towards how similar or different they are overall. On the contrary, they help define why the two are either similar or different.

Zero is still a number.

AJ,cience and religion derive from the same epistemological (search for causation) roots, it is the ontology (means of approaching the problem) which is different. In both cases, if there is a lack of ethical/moral grounding the pragmatic effect may be somewhat dysfunctional from an external POV.

The moral grounding in the Abrahamic religions is provided by an externalised omnipresent power called God embodied in a religiopolitical hierarchy, while in the modern scientific endeavour it is provided by an externalised omnipresent power called Law embodied in a sociopolitical hierarchy.

Completely equivalent.

Craig

What do you think of thinkers such as Pythagoras or Euclid?

Do you call that science, and if so, why; and if not, why not?

These things have been called proto-physics, because although most people say they are not 'science' per se, yet if we take out of science, the possibility of measurement, then what would be left of Hooke's and Newton's contributions?

I would be interested in your comments on this.

"The moral grounding in the Abrahamic religions is provided by an externalised omnipresent power called God embodied in a religiopolitical hierarchy, while in the modern scientific endeavour it is provided by an externalised omnipresent power called Law embodied in a sociopolitical hierarchy."

And what if someone doesn't agree with the latter clause? What is the moral status of that moral grounding?

Craig Minns,

I think I'm going to have to drag you back a bit because - as had happened in our other discussion - you seem to be drifting a bit from your claims that I was initially responding to.

I’m happy to run with all you said in your last post, for now, because I don’t think it detracts from my two points.

The first one being that it is wrong to say that some “hijack” religion (unless you want to specify a particular religion, and even then…). Religion is purely subjective and personal, and there is no wrong way to go about it so long as you maintain a supernatural component to it. One’s conclusions are just as likely to be right or wrong regardless of what religious beliefs one holds, for so long as they are guided by those religious beliefs.

The second point being that it is at the very least misleading to say or imply that science is just as prone to “lead[ing] to profoundly flawed social outcomes” and “be[ing] hijacked by horrid people to justify abhorrent actions” and “stultifying” as religion is, when only religion has (or seems to consistently develop) tenets that enable one to think that they have all the answers when they don’t. Probably because religions always comprise this idea that they are ultimately concerned with a higher level or plane that transcends the observable world.

"... while in the modern scientific endeavour it [moral grounding] is provided by an externalised omnipresent power called Law embodied in a sociopolitical hierarchy."

Isn't that just deifying the State?

If the law allowed, for example, cruel vivisections, according to your theory, that would provide moral grounding for cruel vivisections. Yes? No? There is in other words, no substantive content to moral grounding, it depends entirely on what the State has arbitrarily legislated?

Pericles,

>>But which of these, in your view, is a justification for Christianity's existence in the twentyfirst century? <<

What is the justification for, e.g. my existence in the 21st century? Or did you mean to say, as Craig Minns hinted, that I should rather not exist (be killed) if no such justification can be found ? You see, I did not understand your question.

However, I understand your preference for one feature of Christianity, or religion in general, just one (of the six) “blind men’s views of the elephant”.

Craig Minns,

>>Science and religion derive from the same epistemological (search for causation) roots, it is the ontology (means of approaching the problem) which is different.<<

I think ontologically scientism - as one possible interpretation of science (not science itself since it is not directly concerned with the nature of reality, only the various philosophical interpretations of scientific findings are) - and most religious, certainly Christian, world views differ in what they assume about ultimate reality.

So one can indeed say that the ontologies of science and (most) religions are different in the sense that the latter are mostly concerned with an extension of reality the former is concerned with.

On the other hand, epistemologically, how to acquire knowledge about this reality, though still different, their methods can be compared because the human seeker of this knowledge is the same in both cases, as already in 1974 Ian Barbour observed (c.f. his Myths, Models and Paradigms: The Nature of Scientific and Religious Language) by pointing to some parallels in forming our respective representations of reality.

Dear AJ Philips,

The definition of number has differed with society. The ancient Greeks regarded number as the natural numbers – 1, 2, 3, 4 ….. and fractions with numerator and denominator natural numbers. They were aware that there were quantities such as the square root of which could not be expressed by what they defined as number. They called those quantities irrational meaning they were not numbers. Zero was also not a number since it was neither a natural number nor a quotient of natural numbers.

Number is a word with several meanings. Once the notion of a continuum developed number meant quantities on that continuum. Those could be expressed as distances on a line or real numbers. Quantities expressed considered off the line were not real so they were called imaginary. Imaginary numbers which can be represented as points on a plane are represented as combination of two numbers eg a + bi – on a three dimension space as a + bi + cj - on a four dimension space as a + bi + cj + dk - etc.

Number may also mean that which makes one numb.

Craig Minns wrote:

"The moral grounding in the Abrahamic religions is provided by an externalised omnipresent power called God embodied in a religiopolitical hierarchy, while in the modern scientific endeavour it is provided by an externalised omnipresent power called Law embodied in a sociopolitical hierarchy."

Dear Craig,

The only moral grounding in science is that:

1.You must supply evidence for your assertions by reason and experiment.

2. The experiments must be reproducible.

3. Data must not be fudged.

There is no other moral grounding.

String theory may become science. It is not science as yet since no experiments have been devised and no evidence supplied to validate the theory. Experiments devised to validate the theory must be reproducible.

Laws devised by mechanisms of coercion such as the state have nothing to do with science.

Theories conforming to a political ideology such as the racial theories of the Nazis and communist Lysenkoism also have nothing to do with science

correction:

1.You must supply evidence for your assertions by observation and experiment.

Don't be silly, George.

>>What is the justification for, e.g. my existence in the 21st century? Or did you mean to say, as Craig Minns hinted, that I should rather not exist (be killed) if no such justification can be found ? You see, I did not understand your question.<<

Of course you understood the question. You just didn't want to answer it, that's all. But I'll break it down into simple segments for you, if you insist on being obtuse.

You stated that:

1. [Christianity] is a philosophical orientation that can inspire arts, science and morality (as well as act against them)

2. [Christianity is] a fairy tale (mythology) to be taken verbatim by the philosophically unsophisticated

3. [Christianity is] a 'mystical experience' comparable to the more developed Oriental versions

4. [Christianity is] a pain killer ('opium for the masses')

None of these appears to me to add any unique value to our humanity. All can be found elsewhere, in various forms and guises.

You, on the other hand, are unique, in that there is only one of you. Which fact alone justifies your separate existence in the 21st Century.

And Craig Minns, you should know by now that asking someone to prove a negative is impolite:

>>...what is a justification for Christianity's non-existence in the 21st century? <<

There is none, of course, in the same way that there is no justification for the non-existence of Weet-bix, despite the fact that there are many dozens of alternative foodstuffs that have the same ingredients. But I would happily bet that if I asked the marketing department of Sanitarium to justify Weet-bix's existence in the twentyfirst century, they make a better fist of explaining its virtues than George has done with Christianity.

All

I would like to know, do you call geometry, mathematics and logic "science", or not?

If not, then what you have got if you take these out of science?

Dear david f,

>> a + bi – on a three dimension space as a + bi + cj - on a four dimension space as a + bi + cj + dk - etc. <<

You have complex numbers a+bi, they form a field (i.e. you can add and multiply them satisfying the standard rules), you have quaternions - a+bi+cj+dk - and octonions (eight of such terms). They all form what is called a (noncommutative) normed division algebra (you can add and multiply them but the multiplication might depend on which order you do it). However, there is no such algebra structure possible on the space of a+bi+cj, neither on the other “etc”, hence one does not refer to them as numbers.

>> while in the modern scientific endeavour it is provided by an externalised omnipresent power called Law embodied in a sociopolitical hierarchy.”<<

I agree here with you. The quote seems to confuse moral with legal. “Law embodied in a sociopolitical hierarchy” is one thing, imposed on (and mostly respected by) all members - religious or not - of the state. On the other hand, morality is an evolutionally product embedded individually (conscience) as well as socially. Catholic ethics refers to this product as natural law. For Christians, and probably the other Abrahamic religions, morality has also another dimension, namely that seen as imposed by God. I am aware that not all religions have an ethics dimension.

Pericles,

>>None of these appears to me to add any unique value to our humanity. All can be found elsewhere, in various forms and guises. <<

That obviously must appear to you, otherwise you would be a Christian. As for uniqueness, I stressed (by capitalisation) that one ought to see Christianity as being all these (and other) things TOGETHER, admitting that taken separately each such feature can be “found elsewhere, in various forms and guises”.

Jardine K. Jardine,

>>do you call geometry, mathematics and logic "science", or not?<<

Geometry is part of mathematics and neither mathematics nor logic (or philosophy in general) are parts of science if by science you understand natural science (but are, if by science you understand the German Wissenschaft, i.e. a systematically organised body of knowledge).

>>what you have got if you take these out of science<<

Mathematics is the language of science. There is pure mathematics, i.e. independent of physics, but there is no pure physics, independent of mathematics. In other branches of science it is not that obvious. If English is the only language Joe Smith speaks then he cannot get very far without using it: Joe Smith is dependent on English but not vice versa.

When you learned to count apples and oranges you soon learned that there was an abstract, or pure, mathematics, in this case arithmetics that was independent of what you were counting and could be further developed on its own to become useful in other, e.g. accounting or science applications, while still remaining independent of what it was applied to.

AJP, as I have tried to explain, science derives from religion. Any science-based argument against religion is essentially a sectarian dispute and therefore fundamentally uninteresting.

The argument against scientism is that it is derived from the belief of some who don't know any better that science "has all the answers" and it doesn't, nor can it.

JKJ, no, it's not deifying the state, simply recognising the pragmatics of the situation. A scientist may wish to perform all sorts of experiments but laws constrain her ambitions within some bounds (defined as ethics) acceptable to the group (nation), which is exactly the function of religious authority (defined as morality in that case). A proper discussion of ethics/morality would be interesting, but not on this thread.

Pythagorus is an interesting case. He was a member of a mystical sect interested in the underlying patterns of reality and it is arguable that he was not a mathematician as such at all. Euclid was more interested in establishing immutable precepts for his musings on pure mathematics. In some ways he set the study of science back for a long time. There's an interesting discussion from Feynmann on youtube about "Babylonian vs Greek mathematics" which is worth watching.

Pericles, I'm sorry, I wasn't asking anybody to do anything other than to consider the implications of what may have been unintentionally loose language. If I grasp your point, you think that a religious person has an obligation to convince you (or perhaps some ineffably Solomonic Judge who shares your view) of the validity of his belief in order for that belief to be a reasonable one to hold.

At the risk of offending, that's poppycock that has some rather unpleasant ethical implications.

That's ok Craig Minns.

>>If I grasp your point, you think that a religious person has an obligation to convince you (or perhaps some ineffably Solomonic Judge who shares your view) of the validity of his belief in order for that belief to be a reasonable one to hold. At the risk of offending, that's poppycock that has some rather unpleasant ethical implications.<<

Since you did in fact fail to grasp the point I was making, then there is no possibility that you would offend.

It has never occurred to me - not once - that a religious person has an obligation to convince me of the validity of their belief.

I have on occasions wondered, however, why some of them seem to spend so much of their valuable time attempting to do so.

Present company excluded, naturally.

Dear George,

I was representing vectors as numbers. Of course there are quaternions, octonions etc. There are rules for operating with vectors, but I did not want to go into them.

We do not believe or not accept the beliefs in a religion by reason. We can neither prove nor disprove the existence of a deity. Morality in the Abrahamic religions is filtered through the religion, but it is a convenient fiction to say it is the word of God. In general I don’t think Christians or Jews currently accept slavery as moral although I think some Muslims do. At one time adherents of the Abrahamic religions accepted slavery as moral. Southern Baptists in the United States broke off the other Baptists in the nineteenth century because SB accepted slavery.

Morality even in the Abrahamic faiths in general conforms to the usages of the society in which they find themselves. Most living in a democratic society accept the values of the society. The recent killings by some Muslims in France, Australia and other places are due to the Muslims not accepting the values of the society in which they are living. However, they are still acting morally. In Saudi Arabia it is legal to execute people for the offenses of blasphemy and apostasy. In that they are acting contrary to the words of the prophet who supposedly said that one should not exercise compulsion in religion. The problem is that the word of God as found in scripture or in interpretation of scripture is not coherent internally and can conflict with the laws of the polity.

The Bible accepts slavery and enjoins killing of witches. In Africa Christians are still killing witches although it is not considered the thing to do in the Americas and Europe by Christians or Jews.

Your belief in God and my atheism are not products of reason and cannot be defended by reason. However, the fact is humans have believed in many gods. I believe in one less than you believe in

Dear George,

My last sentence in my previous post should be: I believe in one fewer God than you do.

Dear Craig Minns,

You have stated that science derives from religion. When did this happen? I don’t think it did.

About 22 centuries ago Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the earth to better than 99% accuracy. He did this by finding the difference in time from noon at 2 points on the earth. This was a scientific experiment. Do you know of any connection that it had with religion?

I think it more reasonable to state that science and religion derive from the same impulse – the desire to explain what we find around us. However, science relies on observation and experiment. Religion relies on unprovable assertions.

You have stated, “AJP, as I have tried to explain, science derives from religion.”

You have not tried to explain. You have made an assertion and given no evidence for its validity.

Craig Minns,

It sounds like you’re changing tack. You’ve been saying (and I agreed) that science and religion are derived from the same humanistic needs, but I don’t think you’ve said this yet…

<<…as I have tried to explain, science derives from religion.>>

Are you appealing to the “orderly creator” nonsense that we hear from Christian apologists over and over again regarding the founding of modern science?

Either way, this sounds like a non sequitur to me. If science were derived from religion (granting for a moment that it was), how does it then follow that there is something objective about religion that can be "hijacked"; how does does it justify your implication that religion is no more to blame for those who use it to justify evil actions than science is when people hijack science for similar purposes?

<<Any science-based argument against religion is essentially a sectarian dispute and therefore fundamentally uninteresting.>>

Whether or not a question is uninteresting is subjective. Personally, I find it fascinating.

<<The argument against scientism is that it is derived from the belief of some who don't know any better that science "has all the answers" and it doesn't, nor can it.>>

Well scientism didn’t factor into either of the points I was making. It didn’t need to. But since you mention it, I will point out that it is just a caricature invented by those who feel threatened by the idea that science may one day explain an aspect of reality that needs to remain mysterious in order to justify a belief that is important to them. Usually a belief in the total free will of humans and a fear of determinism, or a religious belief.

That aside, I don’t think we can say this for sure. We have no way of knowing that. This argument is based on the assumption (and for many, the hope) that science will never, and could never, explain everything. It relies on the Argument from Ignorance fallacy in that it is fundamentally based on the fact that we cannot yet explain consciousness.

David f, you're quite right, I should have said that science and religion derive from a common human impulse which was my intent: mea culpa.

It is only very recently that science and religion have diverged sufficiently to be identified as separate pursuits (post-European enlightenment) and therefore, my original comment is not entirely invalid. I think you are completely wrong to say that religion has no basis in observation. To the contrary, it is all about observations of the world and an attempt to explain how humans fit into that observed reality. In that it is no different to science, albeit less reductionist and with greater emphasis on qualia than phenomena, perhaps.

As QM is further developed it is becoming increasingly obvious that the classically deterministic view of reality (that I suggest underlies a great deal of the support for scientism) is simply a crude approximation to reality; a step along the path to a proper understanding just as religion is.

I have previously provided my reasoning as to the common nature of religious and scientific epistemology, so I don't think your last sentence is reasonable.

Pericles, if I have misunderstood you, perhaps you might elucidate?

I think Craig is correct. Scripture is a compendium of human experience, especially historical experience. As such it represents a kind of empiricism. No other nation learnt from its history to the exert that Israel did. It also learnt from poetry and song and legend. It is not as if Scripture was dropped fully formed from the sky as in the Koran, it was mulled over and selected and edited over hundreds of years. What was conserved was an image of what it is like to be alive and human, to deal with death, war, exile and peace. As such, it is an invaluable source apart from any religious construction. Of course many of its expressions have to be read as analogy or at times as just plain balmy, but that is the mix of it, a very human and sometimes fallible document. It was also conditioned to a time before natural science.

Sells, Craig
That assumes that religion is a kind of attempt to understand reality. If it is, it's not doing a very good job of it: fabulous magical superbeings don't really have much explaining power. All its explaining power is only this: Get all the things we don't understand. Now. Call the explanation of them God".

Also, how do we know that the writers of scripture weren't doing it in their own time for their own advantages, rather than as some kind of expression of divinity? We know Mohammed did. What makes you think Moses and the rest of them weren't doing the same. The patriarchs had lots of wives and concubines. Well? Doesn't that have explaining power? It does for me.

What if religion is an evolved adaptation for a sexually-selected tendency to false beliefs that just happen to increase sexual and reproductive advantage? This would have explaining power, and more than is supplied by the content of their fabulous god-stories.

Craig
"JKJ, no, it's not deifying the state, simply recognising the pragmatics of the situation."

Well is it ethics or pragmatics? The fact that the state imposes limits doesn't establish that it's providing moral grounding, rather than, for example, providing 'might is right'. There is not necessarily any moral grounding in it.

Blimey Craig Minns, surely you can't be serious?

>>Pericles, if I have misunderstood you, perhaps you might elucidate?<<

You asked:

>>...what is a justification for Christianity's non-existence in the 21st century?<<

I answered:

"There is none, of course, in the same way that there is no justification for the non-existence of Weet-bix".

Perhaps if you can tell me which part of "there is no justification for Christianity's non-existence in the 21st century" you did not understand, I might be able to assist.

Pericles, I'm not interested in silly schoolyard games. You made a confused statement in an attempt to troll, I tried to answer in good faith, including asking you to explain so as I might understand and now you're trying to be "clever".

I won't make the same mistake again: clever is as clever does.

JKJ, ethics and pragmatics go hand in hand, as is made clear by the usage in my original comment.

"Grounding" in the context refers to the process of checking on one's reasoning process. It is a feedback pragmatic, that allows one to derive a contextual basis for one's decision-making, in this case, ethical/moral decisions.

In the case of the church, if a religious person has a moral dilemma they may seek advice from the parish priest or equivalent, who may draw on various authorities, both religious and secular to advise them.

In the case of a scientist reference may be made to ethics committees and legal advice to the same end.

In either case the final decision rests with the one making the decision, and they may choose to do other than as advised, guided by their own sense of propriety, but in the knowledge that it is counter to the "received wisdom".

I'm afraid that I don't see the point of the rest of your post, it's going over ground already covered.

JKJ, my apologies, I didn't properly read your last comment. Does religion , or at least spirituality have some form of adaptive function? I would say that it must, given that it persists in every cultural milieu that I'm aware of.

One obvious such adaptive function is as a display of the practitioner's group-centric behaviour, which in a group species like humans is highly selectively advantageous: more children survive when a family group has the support of a community than otherwise.

This function is recognised and promoted by the churches, who often have specific programs to recruit those from the least socio-economically advantaged communities who are most likely to see an advantage in being part of a supportive community.

On the other hand, within wealthier, more economically secure communities the social support function is less compellling, so the prosperity doctrines of churches like Hillsong are perhaps more attractive.

Similar sectarian gradations exist within other faith traditions and are sometimes formalised, as in the Vedic traditions.

Dawkins's formulation of the extended phenotype including the memetic information of culture is relevant, it seems to me.

Good comment, thanks.

Dear Craig Minns,

An adaptive function in one environment may be deleterious in another. I believe that is the case with religion. Religion is a tremendous binding force. A group sharing a belief is unified, and the family bond is extended to every believer of the same faith.

However, we no longer live in tribal conditions. Belief groups rub up against other belief groups. Missionaries are recruitment agents who try to tear people away from their belief group to join the belief group of the missionary. I think that is the impetus behind the many articles that Sellick has written. He would spread his particular belief system. What was a binding force becomes a source of conflict when those who subscribe to a set of dogmas are committed to pushing it on others. They even feel they are doing something worthwhile.

The invented supernatural entity promulgating one set of rules conflicts with another form of supernatural belief with another set of rules. Athanasian conflicts with Arian. Christian tries to extirpate paganism, and so it goes on and on. The binding force has become a force that seeks to sever the bonds which hold another group together. Sometimes those subscribing to one mumbojumbo massacre those who subscribe to another mumbojumbo.

I have felt threatened by the missionaries who have approached me. They leave me with the insulting, "I'll pray for you." It wouldn't be so bad if people who had a belief system would just leave others who didn't share it alone, but many are not content with that. They must harass others. They don't reflect that their success means breaking another individuals bonds with family, neighbours and community.

As the late, great Jimmy Durante said, "Why doesn't everybody leave everybody else the hell alone?"

I'm very short of time these days, but I try my best to follow this fascinating thread and sadly I cannot find the time to contribute more.

One point that strikes me is the view expressed by several members here as if:

"science and religion derive from a common human impulse... It is only very recently that science and religion have diverged sufficiently to be identified as separate pursuits"

I totally disagree.

Religion and science are near opposites - religion takes one away from this world, towards God, while science is curiosity-driven in relation to this world, thus Genesis refers to it as the forbidden "tree of knowledge", the major sin of being interested in the world instead.

It is true that the medieval Christian church for example was interested in science, but that is not BECAUSE of its religion but DESPITE it, it is because curiosity has overcome the clergy just like any other human weakness, hence to the extant that this science is presented as a religious feature, it represents the deterioration and corruption of the church rather than its religion (whatever was left of it).

Dear david f,

>> I was representing vectors as numbers<<

That is an unusual terminology; one distinguishes between numbers (scalars) and vectors, but never mind.

As I understand your post, most of it does not contradict what I wrote here about Christianity/religion, except for - as you know - my objection to the “kidnapping” of terms likle rational, reasonable (or moral) to support a theist or atheist basic worldview assumption: I believe there are reasonable and unreasonable, rational and irrational theists as well as atheists and the same for moral and immoral.

>>Your belief in God and my atheism are not products of reason and cannot be defended by reason.<<

I agree. In the same sense that one cannot use reason to derive an axiom from something else. That is, except for the word “defend” if that means providing arguments that are convincing for some, not convincing for others.

For instance, in philosophy of science one speaks of scientific realism and constructive empiricism (both having nothing to do with theism or atheism) and philosophers argue - defend their view, if you like - which one is more insightful, (“truthful” in common, everyday language). I personally like both the approaches, that give me a “stereo vision” of philosophy of science (having implications also for my vision of the philosophy of religion), and I think our insights into reality would be impoverished if one ignored one of these perspectives.

>>humans have believed in many gods. I believe in one less than you believe in<<

This is a standard misunderstanding (confusing representation with what is being represented), that I can try to explain only through a metaphor:

I have many photos of my father, some taken by a professional, some of poor quality, etc. But I am still aware I had only one father, and cherish one photo of him that is my favourite. Somebody else who never knew my father, especially if he has no information about him except some technically very poor photos, might conclude that they are not of the same person, or that such a person never existed.

(ctd)

(ctd)

>>They leave me with the insulting, "I'll pray for you.”<<

I know the experience (Jehovah’s Witnesses?) but I fail to understand what is insulting in somebody wishing for me something he/she finds good, even if I do not find it good and do not wish for it. This is different from wishing something that the wisher would not want to happen to himself/herself.

Yuyutsu,

>>It is true that the medieval Christian church for example was interested in science, but that is not BECAUSE of its religion but DESPITE it, it is because curiosity has overcome the clergy just like any other human weakness,<<

Do you mean to say that the pursuit of science, with the ensuing technological achievements, is - or resulted from - a human weakness that we should rather not succumb to?

Davidf, I don't read Peter's articles the same way, although I must admit to having been a little taken aback at times. I'm sure he can speak for himself, but it seems to me that he, like the rest of us, is struggling honestly to make sense of his world and his articles are to some extent a part of that.

On the other hand, there are several atheists who post here and elsewhere who quite explicitly state that their intent is to "change minds", which they seek to do by trying to show that religion is foolish. This is proselytising of the least commendable sort, based not on seeking mutuality, but on sneering faux-superiority designed to destroy a working belief structure, but offering nothing workable at the personal level to replace it.

Might I suggest that if you feel threatened by missionaries then you have a simple solution available to you? Post a polite sign at your gate stating they are not welcome.

I don't bother, since it seems to me that they are mostly sincere people who get little reward for their efforts so if I take the time to wish them well, accept their literature even if I just bin it when they leave, offer them a cool drink and thank them for their interest it is a decent thing to do that costs me little. I've always found that if I tell them up front that I have incompatible views we can have a friendly chat and part amicably.

If a person is well linked within a community then they will hardly be susceptible to "breaking bonds" by the appearance of a missionary. On the other hand, if a person lacks such links, then perhaps they may be more open to the possibility and still no bonds are broken.

How many people around the world do you think might be estranged in the way you suggest? Even if it is as high as 1 million, which seems extremely unlikely, that is about 7/1000 of 1%.

Davidf, Steelie and co have to be all part of the ploy to destroy Western Civilisation. I do know that David Fisher's most favourite religion he hates is Christianity. He is all for the NEW WORLD ORDER.

http://politicalvelcraft.org/2012/09/14/illuminati-origins-of-secret-government-the-mental-fatal-disease-of-militant-narcissists-stop-them-cold-protect-the-constitution/

The Zionists using their control of Freemasonary thus creating the PROTESTant reformations and so called Enlightenment in order to divide the Church.

http://politicalvelcraft.org/2015/02/09/another-jpmorgan-banker-murder-suicide-added-to-the-list-of-71-dead-nwo-bankers-by-un-natural-causes/

Illuminati: Origins of Secret Government
http://youtu.be/LHi3xeTTHP4

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Weishaupt

SCIENCE FLOURISHED UNDER CHRISTIANITY. FACT! There were so many clergy who were also scientists, inventors etc.

There has been nothing but Communist propaganda since the Reformation against the Catholic Church. Incredible devious LIES.

The Jew: Commissary to the Gentiles
The First to See the Possibilities of War by Propaganda
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Eli_Ravage
http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http://www.geocities.com/alabasters_archive/commissary.html&date=2009-10-25+12:14:32

http://www.darkmoon.me/2014/key-quotations-from-you-gentiles-by-maurice-samuel/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Levy
http://www.sweetliberty.org/issues/israel/levy.htm
Dr. LEVY, A JEW, ADMITS HIS PEOPLE'S ERROR

“As a learned Jew, Moses Mendelssohn, said: "Judaism is not a religion, but a Law religionised".

So there you have it. Think Communism, think Jew. Think Marxism, think Jew. Think Trotskyism, think Jew.

And how many people have they killed throughout history, all the wars and revolutions. 60 million DEAD in Russia, all the intelligentsia and elites and Christians in the Katyn Massacre in Poland - both Christian nations. Killing off the monarchies. COLD BLOODEDNESS. Unbelievable.

Yet why are we only constantly reminded of the Holocaust? Tell me?

Because the media and Hollywood is controlled by Jews. And so are the banks. Think Rothchilds who have caused just about all the wars in our history.

Think NEW WORLD ORDER. We have to stop this Commie nightmare becoming a reality.

Dear George,

<<Do you mean to say that the pursuit of science, with the ensuing technological achievements, is - or resulted from - a human weakness that we should rather not succumb to?>>

In the ultimate sense this is so, in the ultimate sense the world is an illusion and one should not waste their time on it, directing their attention away from God.

But in practice, it is too much to ask: renouncing all interest in the world and focusing on God alone is a life-time pursuit if not longer - perhaps just one in a billion is able to simply forsake it all at once, just upon hearing this advice - the rest of us require long-term practices, morals and techniques that eventually and gradually lead one there, which is what religion provides.

So I cannot expect the clergy to abstain from being interested in the world and curious about it as they aren't perfect saints yet - but I would expect them to present this as their private human pursuit rather than associate it with their religious teachings.

Dear George,

Please forgive me for representing a vector as an imaginary number.

I find “I’ll pray for you.” insulting because I feel I am being treated as an object rather than as a person. They, presumably sincerely, are going to address the deity they believe in to change me in a way that they were unsuccessful in doing. They could do so without telling me about it.

Telling me about it shows a lack of consideration for my feelings. I don’t tell them that I hope they will abandon their delusions and adopt reason. Maybe I will if it happens again.

Dear Craig Minns,

The missionaries that go door to door have little effect although they occasionally get a live one. The numbers of Jehovah’s Witnesses remains relatively constant since the numbers of those leaving approximates the number of new converts. Sincerity is no excuse for anything. If it were we could excuse those who commit atrocities if they are sincere.

I was thinking of the way missionaries have taken Aboriginal children and put them in missions where they were forbidden to practice the religion of their parents. In the 1920s my mother was a teacher on the St. Regis Indian Reservation on the shores of the St. Lawrence River. The children were forbidden to converse in their native language and were punished if caught doing so. Missionaries have alienated people from their culture, and forcing another religion on them is part of it.

There were missionaries to the various Pacific island who plied a chief with presents to induce him to convert. He would then force the members of his tribe to convert. I am thinking of the way Christianity spread through Europe. It was generally accompanied by violence and compulsion. Richard Fletcher wrote “The Conversion of Europe from Paganism to Christianity: 371-1386” which tells of the process by which Europe was converted to Christianity. Charlemagne gave the pagan Gauls the choice of Christianity or beheading. It was most effective.

Continued

David, pulling up historical references is pointless, I'm afraid. The whole point of my argument, such as it is, is that what we need to be fostering is a great deal more "good faith" rather than carrying on such historical disputes and resentments and assumptions of ill-intent.

You're an old man, what do you need of such bitterness?

Continued

Compulsion in religion still happens. I worked with a Korean technician in setting up an MRI installation. He told me that when he was in the Korean army the soldiers were asked to attend Christian services and attend indoctrination sessions. Soldiers could refuse, but those who did were assigned to tasks like cleaning latrines.

In the modern world where countries have some degree of separation of religion and state missionaries are no longer as free to exert violence to bring in converts. They will work on people who are vulnerable through poverty, emotional upset or other causes. Medical missionaries may use their healing as a device to bring people into their church. In Asia ‘rice Christians’ were brought in the fold through food.

There was a convenience store near us run by a family with two sons. One son became a Jehovah’s Witness due to the appeal of a pretty JW who appeared at his door.

In my large family it has happened twice. One cousin was a drug addict. A fundamentalist Christian sect took him in. They were effective at curing him, and he even acquired a wife in the sect. Converting people by getting to them when they are at a low ebb is not unique to Christians. Another cousin was deeply troubled by the death of his father while he was a student at Cornell University. A Jewish fundamentalist sect gave him emotional support and helped him through the grieving process. Both cousins are still attached to their sects and alienated from their families.

I don’t know the statistics of converts to different religions, but people get alienated from family and/or culture by religious conversion.

Dear Craig,

I don’t think it is bitterness to bring in the past. It remains with us. Remembering it might make it less likely to repeat.

I prefer not to call other people bitter, ascribe other unpleasant qualities to them, assail their motives or make judgments about their person. I would appreciate it if you would do the same.

David, I had no intent to offend and I'm sorry if I did.

The thing about the past is that it contains good and bad; we can choose to focus on one or the other at our own whim.

Another person looking at the same events you have related might see the support offered to your cousin after his father's death as a good thing. They may see the provision of rice to the hungry as a good reason to think well of Christians. They may see a mission of doctors as an admirable endeavour and so on.

The fact that religion may be used to justify political power doesn't make religion a bad thing any more than the fact that science has been used to produce enormously destructive technologies makes it a bad thing. Some shonky salespeople don't make the business of buying and selling contemptible. A dodgy politician doesn't condemn the idea of politics and so on.

We should certainly do what we can to minimise the likely negative outcomes of misuse of any ideas, but absolutism can ONLY lead to bad outcomes, which is well shown by any number of historical examples and is a very strong result in game theory that has earnt two Nobel prizes of the 19 that have been awarded for work in that field.

You're a very smart man, David, with the benefit of age to allow you time to become wise. It surprises me that you are so determinedly absolutist in this.

Dear Craig,

You can't resist calling names. Now I'm absolutist. That's a way of saying you don't agree, but there are other, more polite ways of saying it. I will post no more to you.

Sheesh David, get over yourself.

david f,

You are a fundamentalist, absolutist and extreme in your thoughts. You have such hatred for Christianity without reason.

Tell me what you think about Communism and Marxism, and its effects on the world?

Please read what I posted yesterday. Why have you ignored them? Every other time I have posted, you have always responded. Why are you not responding to me now?

"david f,

You are a fundamentalist, absolutist and extreme in your thoughts. You have such hatred for Christianity without reason."

Lol!..talk about the pot calling the kettle black!

Constance accuses someone else of "being extreme in their thoughts".

"Please read what I posted yesterday. Why have you ignored them? Every other time I have posted, you have always responded. Why are you not responding to me now?"

Perhaps it's because you like to insult the people you're debating - as in - "david f, You are a fundamentalist, absolutist and extreme in your thoughts..."

Charmed, I'm sure.

Dear Yuyutsu,

This is not what I had a problem with. It was the implication that curiosity in this context (clery or not) - being behind any scientific (or pre-scientfic) attempts to understand how the physical world works, and use this understanding to make life easier - should be seen as a human weekness.

Dear david f,

I agree with the part “They could do so without telling me about it”. This is the problem, I suppose, nurses face, when they have to determine which terminal patient is comforted and which one is offended by being told that the nurse will pray for him/her.

I think it is one thing to simply state that a medieval thinker was wrong (e.g. when he claimed that the Earth was the centre of the universe), and another thing to draw conclusions from this about the intelligence of that thinker. The same when not “truth” about the world but "morality" is concerned.

There is physical as well as psychological coercion into a worldview, religious or not. I am immune to the arguments of e.g. Richard Dawkins, also because I have had (most of) them force fed at school. Others are not. Similarly religion - Christianity or Judaism as you mention - can also be “force fed”, although today mostly only on the psychological level, as blurry as that distinction is (when the recipient is a child there is no difference between physical and psychological coercion).

http://politicalvelcraft.org/catholic/

“Father Of The Big Bang, Catholic Priest Georges Lemaitre Pictured With Albert Einstein. “Georges Lemaitre a Belgian astrophysicist/Mathematician developed the theory of the Big Bang. In January 1933, Georges Lemaitre traveled with Albert Einstein to California for a series of seminars. After Georges Lemaitre detailed his Big Bang theory, Einstein stood up applauded, and said, “This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.”

Virgin Mary appears to +500,000 people in Egypt!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKHaNMTRF1o
Virgin Mary Appears Above The Coptic Church In 1968 In Zeitoun, Egypt. Something to consider, Egypt’s leadership was under Nasser who was a staunch atheist, socialist, and dependent on Soviet aid & advisers. They tried to block access to Church and when that failed something else unexpectedly happened ~ the apparitions stopped when the authorities started to charge admittance to get near the church. LOL!
FACTOID:
It wasn’t until 1972 that Lloyd Cross developed the integral hologram by combining white-light transmission holography with conventional cinematography to produce MOVING 3-dimensional images. Sequential frames of 2-D motion-picture footage of a rotating subject are recorded on holographic film. When viewed, the composite images are synthesized by the human brain as a 3-D image.
So when measuring this barometer to Zeitun one must also account for the HUGE spatial landscape where The MOVING Marian Apparitions took place in the Sky and near The Coptic Church in 1968. Apparitions took place 4 years before holograms were invented in their primacy form."

Cont.....

Thanks for the gratuitous insults, Craig Minns.

>>Pericles, I'm not interested in silly schoolyard games. You made a confused statement in an attempt to troll, I tried to answer in good faith, including asking you to explain so as I might understand and now you're trying to be "clever".<<

Just because you asked a silly question, doesn't give you permission to cover it up with bluster. You initially missed the point completely, and jumped into the middle of a conversation with what you firmly believed was a zinger:

>>Pericles, let's turn your question around: what is a justification for Christianity's non-existence in the 21st century?<<

The response was straightforward:

>>...there is no justification for Christianity's non-existence in the 21st century<<

To pretend that you didn't understand the answer you received reflects badly on your motives. It is a form of verballing, allowing yourself the opportunity to ascribe to me opinions that I do not share, and then condemn them. As you do here:

>>At the risk of offending, that's poppycock that has some rather unpleasant ethical implications.<<

I notice that you quite enjoy insulting people. If that's how you get your jollies, I feel very sad for you.

Have a great day.

Dear Constance,

I don’t feel like discussing anything with someone who starts off a post by calling me names. I also don’t consider your previous posts worth discussing.

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=12693 contains an article I wrote on the Communist Manifesto.

Dear George,

It is not the same problem nurses face. A nurse may not know the religious views of the patient. Missionaries who have been discussing religion with me know my views and know that I would not appreciate being told they will pray for me.

I agree that it is wrong to draw conclusions about the intelligence of a thinker from the contents of his or her views. One can depend overmuch on reason. Those who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope on the grounds that reason told them he was wrong may have been more intelligent than he was.

I doubt that you were force fed Dawkins’ arguments when you went to school. You were force fed arguments against religion, but that was before Dawkins. Not all religions are the same, and not all arguments against religions are the same.

To want to know more about the world whether it is in a scientific, religious or other context is in my opinion a virtue. I would have been bothered if none of my children ever questioned what they were told. I also think doubt is a virtue, and faith is not.

Hi Craig,

Pericles' response:

>>...there is no justification for Christianity's non-existence in the 21st century<<

is simply saying that if there is no way of proving or disproving something, then we can't say that something doesn't exist. It's not saying that something does exist, merely that one can't say that something doesn't exist, so we go on believing as we like, one way or the other.

One cannot disprove a negative, after all.

Joe

Pericles, I asked you to explain your original question to George, which you claimed I misunderstood.

Apparently you can't and to be honest, I'm no longer interested.

Far from "getting my jollies" from "insulting people", I would quite like to be able to hold intelligent discussions, but unfortunately that becomes very difficult when people like yourself choose to try to deliberately derail such discussions with the sort of schoolboy sophistry you've demonstrated to date on this one.

You may be quite a clever person, but I've no way of knowing that from your contributions to this discussion.

Hi Joe,
I understand that and it seems that Pericles and I agree on that point. However, his original question was to George, asking him to "justify" Christianity's existence. As I suggested above, that may have been simply loose language, but his response since then has been a rather childish attempt to play games.

I'd suggest that "believing what we want to believe" is fair enough, but if all of us believe something, as it seems to be true that we do, then there are interesting questions that arise from the differences and commonalities across the various belief structures.

Atheism as a form of active belief, rather than a reactionary response to theism, is quite a new branch in the tree of beliefs and I think it needs time to sort itself out. Scientism is one twig on the branch and I think it's not a very strong one.

Dear david f,

I agree that the missionary should have known how you felt about these things. Unfortunately, some of them act like an importunate salesperson.

>>I doubt that you were force fed Dawkins’ arguments when you went to school. You were force fed arguments against religion, but that was before Dawkins.<<

Note that I put “most of” in brackets when referring to his arguments. Anyhow, it is people philosophically more savvy than I who say there is nothing original in Dawkins’ arguments from a philosophical (in distinction to psychological) point of view (unlike some other atheist arguments from our post-Enlightenment history, that are of value irrespective of whether or not one agrees with their initial, e.g. metaphysical, assumptions).

>>I also think doubt is a virtue, and faith is not.<<

I would put here “being certain” instead of faith, since faith in my understanding is more complicated than simply something one can doubt or be certain about. It is a state of mind, including preference for a metaphysical model of reality plus something else (depending on what religion faith refers to), but not reducible to them. I can doubt or be certain only about a statement that I fully understand, which is seldom a clear distinction where abstract concepts are involved.

Doubt in the sense of being open to other than rigid interpretations of the beliefs of one’s faith, belongs to an educated e.g. Christian’s faith, as expressed in the classical Anselm’s “faith seeking understanding”.

FATIMA APPARITIONS

Miracle of Fatima
https://www.ewtn.com/fatima/apparitions/October.htm

This is how thousands of indigenous Mexicans were converted to Catholicism
http://www.catholiceducation.org/en/culture/catholic-contributions/science-sees-what-mary-saw-from-juan-diegos-tilma.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Guadalupe

Breaking News: The Virgin Mary Apparition in Vietnam
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6UYe4v0-po

(from 7:42 on pseudo science against clear evidence of apparitions incl Fatima)
Jewish Harvard Professor Roy Schoeman Becomes Convinced Catholic (Talk 1 Prescott Mission))
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeDzSfquYcs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malachi_Martin
He spoke and wrote often about the Three Secrets of Fátima and was an ardent supporter of Fr. Nicholas Gruner: "Father Gruner is fulfilling a desperately needed function in the ongoing perception of Mary's role in the salvation of our imperilled world. Father Gruner is absolutely correct that the consecration of Russia as—Our Lady desired, has not been executed".

Martin said concerning the three secrets of the Virgin Mary as Queen of Heaven in Fátima in 1917, she mandated the Pope of 1960 to consecrate Russia to her Immaculate Heart. The Russian Orthodox Church would then convert to Roman Catholicism. If the mandate were not followed, devastating war in the world and destruction inside the church (The Great Apostasy) would follow. He said that he stood outside the papal living quarters in 1960 whilst Pope John XXIII and Cardinal Bea and others were reading the document containing the third secret, and that, in order to assure Russian cooperation at the approaching Second Vatican Council, the Pope decided against the mandate. Later Paul VI and John Paul II decided against it for various reasons.”

LOOK WHAT HAPPENED TO RUSSIA IN 1917! Up to 60 million people murdered by Stalin.

Cont.....

Dear George,

Mea culpa. I was implicitly defining faith as credulous belief. Some believers have that sort of faith. Others have the faith of Anselm.

Of course Dawkins’ arguments against religious faith are nothing new. However, I think his motivation is quite new. From my reading of him he is most concerned with the fundamentalist’s reading of the Bible and the Koran as scientific texts whose literal interpretation conflicts with scientific findings. That is not your religion nor the religion of most educated Christians. However, there is a similarity between that type of religion, and the Marxist ideology of Stalin resulting in Lysenkoism which rejected genetic science as incompatible with the Stalinist ideology.

To Dawkins nothing can trump scientific findings except their falsification by other scientific findings which contradict the former. Where Dawkins goes wrong in my opinion is to condemn all believers, even those who do not support biblical literalism, because they are part of a religion which contains those who support biblical literalism.

I am of the impression (you will correct me if I am wrong) that the main Marxist critique of religion is that it is a tool of unenlightened bourgeois society to control the masses.

I object to faith (defined as credulous belief) whether in religion, ideology, new age or science. Those ignorant of science may either have inordinate faith in it, fear of it or rejection of its findings.

I do wonder at the dynamics of internet discussions. It is quite different to talking about edgy subjects face to face or even on the telephone. Internet conversations lack the feedback that facial expressions and voice intonation that modify what we say to each other. Hence we get this awfully fraught conversation in which name calling is the game, misunderstandings are rife and little real conversation occurs. Without affective feedback we feel free to endlessly regurgitate our prejudices. I think Craig Minns and George have been very patient and have given their best shot only to be rewarded by the usually trolling. I have read threads from other religious blogs that do not have the same fraught quality as this one has. It would be great to have a real discussion in which the contributors have actually read the article. I am sure that trolling has prevented many interesting contributions.

....Cont

Many Non Catholics wouldn't be aware of the apparitions of Mother Mary. They have never been disproven. And the evidence is there. But never newsworthy, hey? As the insults to Christianity persist.

“The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them.”
-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/profecias/esp_profecia01d2.htm
"Pope John Paul II was nearly assassinated on May 13, 1981 (the anniversary of Mary’s first apparitional appearance at Fatima). The gun was aimed at the Pope’s head, but Agca had to aim for his abdomen instead when the pontiff turned to a young girl who was wearing a picture of Our Lady of Fatima. While he was in the hospital, Pope John Paul reviewed the Church’s documentation of Fatima, and he read the secret Third Secret of Fatima. In 1984 the Pope consecrated Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Communism collapsed soon afterward."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Secrets_of_F%C3%A1tima

http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20000626_message-fatima_en.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Pius_XI
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_John_Paul_I_conspiracy_theories

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consecration_of_Russia

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/sitemap/free/2013/3/article/why-did-the-virgin-mary-choose-russia-earth-shaking-promises-from-heaven-about-

“In addition, Russians still believe in objective truth, unlike the intellectual elites of the West, who have "deconstructed" reality to the point of nihilism. This should not surprise us, because unlike the West, Russia never succumbed to the so-called Enlightenment, despite the Czars' periodic imbibing of Western influence.”

Cont....

......Cont

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_regimes
SECULAR VALUES:
Some proponents of traditional ethical standards and religious faith argue that the killings were at least partly the result of a weakening of faith and the unleashing of the radical values of theEuropean Enlightenment upon the modern world.

Observing this kind of trend in critical scholarship, the University of Oklahoma political scientist Allen D. Hertzke zooms in on the ideas of British Catholic writer and historian Paul Johnson and writes that:

“ [A] shift in intellectual mood has come from the critique of the perceived failures and blinders of the secular project. To be sure, this critique is not universally shared, but a vast scholarship, along with a proliferating array of opinion journals and think tank symposia, catalog the fallout from the abandonment of transcendent societal anchors. Epitomizing this thought is Paul Johnson's magisterial book Modern Times, which attacks the common Enlightenment assumption that less religious faith necessarily equals more human freedom or democracy. The collapse of the religious impulse among the educated classes in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, he argues, left a vacuum that was filled by politicians wielding power under the banner of totalitarian ideologies – whether 'blood and soil' Fascism or atheistic Communism. Thus the attempt to live without God made idols of politics and produced the century's 'gangster statesmen' – Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot – whose 'unappeasable appetite for controlling mankind' unleashed unimaginable horrors. Or as T.S. Eliot puts it, 'If you will not have God (and he is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.'

>>>>

Jacob Schiff was head of the New York
investment firm Kuhn, Loeb and Co. He
was one of the principal backers of the
Bolshevik revolution and personally
financed Trotsky's trip from New York
to Russia. He was a major contributor
to Woodrow Wilson's presidential
campaign and an advocate for passage
of the Federal Reserve Act. (p. 210)

http://www.wildboar.net/multilingual/easterneuropean/russian/literature/articles/whofinanced/whofinancedleninandtrotsky.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Schiff

Cont......

Constance,
I take a dim view of people who use this thread, not to discuss the article but to push their own agenda. Would you please desist.

David f is right. Dawkins’ attitude is different too.

After Darwin, it was, “What a pity it’s not true”; then it became, “They may be wrong, but there’s no harm in them believing”, now it’s, “This can be really harmful and no idea should be immune from criticism”. Those like Dawkins have helped popularise this more enlightened attitude. The age of his arguments are a red herring given they apparently can’t be engaged without ad hominems, misunderstandings, or misrepresentations.

Craig Minns,

What do you mean when you say that religion “works”? Because, from my observations and experience, it’s Christians who struggle much more to make sense of the world precisely because it doesn’t work. Trying to reconcile the real world with Christian theology can be stressful and is a constant effort.

This is just one of the reasons why I see the desire to “change minds” as a very commendable thing. I use arguments against religious belief that I think may have helped me to see reason earlier. In retrospect, my life could have turned out very differently had I dropped the bigotry inherent to my religious belief earlier.

You only need to read some of the comments from those who thank people like Dawkins and (someone far more effective with much better arguments) Matt dillahunty to understand the stress that can be lifted and the clarity that can be achieved when religious belief is ditched. The world makes so much more sense when you’re not trying to see purpose in every bad thing that happens.

<<The fact that religion may be used to justify political power doesn't make religion a bad thing any more than the fact that science has been used to produce enormously destructive technologies makes it a bad thing.>>

No so. Unlike science, dogma is inherent to religious belief, making it at least partly to blame for the bad that comes from it. I’m not sure why you’re going to such great lengths to not understand this very important distinction.

Sells,

As far as I can tell, no-one here has trolled yet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_%28Internet%29.

AJ, I say religion works because it is patently obvious that a very large number of people in the world subscribe to some form of religious belief or other, including atheists like yourself who have transferred their faith from one sectarian model to another.

Bigotry is a personal choice, not intrinsic at all to any form of religion or any philosophical tradition. It emerges from the "in-group/out-group" psychological response and I suspect those who are most prone to be "joiners" of all kinds are also most prone to bigotry, although I haven't checked to see if there's evidence for that. Some leaders are especially skilled at triggering that in-group/out-group response, whether in religious groups or secular. It's a standard part of politics, after all.

The "stress" that is lifted by dropping religion may arise from several causes, but I am extremely doubtful much of it comes from the sheer intellectual joy of discovering a better way to think. I'd wager quite a lot that most of it is down to joining the "cool kids" and some of it due to feeling less restricted in personal behaviour.

Dogma is also inherent to the philosophy of science. Furthermore, dogma is not always bad, even if it on the surface incomprehensible. However, if one does not understand it, or it is used to substitute for properly reasoned views, which is, I'm sad to say the big problem with scientism and no doubt for many other religions, then it leads to lousy inferences.

We don't need less religion, as such, we do need more people able to think for themselves. Dawkins and Dillahunty are able to do so, perhaps, but I'm afraid that most of their followers are just looking for the next guru.

Craig Minns,

But you haven’t been talking about beliefs in general.

<<I say religion works because it is patently obvious that a very large number of people in the world subscribe to some form of religious belief or other, including atheists like yourself who have transferred their faith from one sectarian model to another.>>

So I don’t know why you have introduced the “or other”.

I already dealt with “faith” on the other thread. I did not choose a different faith. Scientists don’t have a faith. I lost a faith and replaced it with a more healthy scepticism. The suggestion from certain atheists that those like myself have just found another faith is a pretentious show of elitism and intellectual snobbery from those who think they've managed to rise above it all.

<<Bigotry is a personal choice, not intrinsic at all to any form of religion or any philosophical tradition.>>

This couldn’t possibly be more wrong. You have provided no justification for this claim.

Firstly, our personal choices are always limited to some extent by external factors. Religion can be one of those. Secondly, any system of belief that teaches that is holds the ultimate and incontrovertible truth will almost always breed bigotry. We can even see this in how those who

<<The "stress" that is lifted by dropping religion may arise from several causes…>>

Probably. I’d doubt your wager, though. Where is your evidence for it? There is nothing “cool” about losing a religious belief in many parts of the US. I felt pretty damn cool myself, as a Christian.

<<Dogma is also inherent to the philosophy of science.>>

Not it’s not. There are no principles or sets of principles laid down by an authority in science as being incontrovertibly true.

<<Furthermore, dogma is not always bad…>>

A principle or a set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true is always going to end badly eventually.

<<We don't need less religion, as such, we do need more people able to think for themselves.>>

The two go hand in hand.

AJ, to quote Michael Palin (a well-known atheist)

"Contradiction is not an argument. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says."

I'm not interested in playing the game of apologetics, which means I'm not going to spend 20 minutes showing you why your contradictions are wrong.

Work it out for yourself - or don't, it's entirely up to you. After all, you're the one who wants to proselytise.

That incomplete sentence was supposed to read:

"We can even see this in how those who's levels of bigotry tend to lower with increasing wishy-washiness of their religious beliefs."

Craig Minns,

A contradiction is an argument if your point is that the idea that you're contradicting is wrong.

I’m not playing “apologetics” either. This is just another attempt to put myself and others like me in the same box as theists, as is your use of the word “proselytising”. It’s an ad hominem, essentially.

<<...I'm not going to spend 20 minutes showing you why your contradictions are wrong.>>

I think I’ve demonstrated well and truly that they’re not. Which is why it comes as no surprise to me that you are not interested in continuing. What has me intrigued, however, is how can be so important for an atheist to cling to a flawed defence of religion that they would sign off with snippy and unfair insinuations when it was shown to be wrong.

Dear david f,

>>To Dawkins nothing can trump scientific findings except their falsification by other scientific findings which contradict the former.<<

I agree, but let me again add a metaphor: To somebody restricting his/her attention to real numbers only, the square root of minus one does not exist (this was all mathematicians just a few centuries ago). That is fair enough, as long as he/she does not try to derive from facts known about real numbers arguments against those who see the real line extended into the complex plane.

>>Where Dawkins goes wrong in my opinion is to condemn all believers, even those who do not support biblical literalism, because they are part of a religion which contains those who support biblical literalism.<<

Of course, I agree. It is like condemning all blacks, Germans, Jews or what you have just because some among them are silly (and worse).

Biblical literalism is one of those silly things. On the other hand, people read popular accounts of cosmology, even think they understand why scientists think this is how things are/were, without understanding - maybe even being aware of the relevance of - Einstein's gravitation theory. Perhaps something similar could be said about popular understanding of matters concerning religious beliefs, the Bible etc.

There is nothing wrong with having a limited (naive?) understanding of physics, philosophy, biblical exegesis, or what, as long as one is aware of one’s own limitations. And is able to tolerate that other people have their own, perhaps different, limitations in understanding this or that. (Of course, provided this limited understanding of what their world view is about does not lead to acts harmful to the society or other individuals.)

AJP, a contradiction is just a contradiction. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

I realise you feel somewhat offended by my comments, but I watched a very good friend spend years doing "counter-apologetics" engaged with apologeticists completely fruitlessly. With the greatest of respect, your arguments are neither new to me or correct and the form of the discussion is not likely to be productive. You are taking a faith-based approach, which you are entirely sincere about, but is not going to ever allow you to accept that a view different to your own faith is acceptable. You will go on trying to "change my mind", as every good evangelist is driven to do.

So I commend you for your zeal and wish you well

George,

I’m afraid, through either loose wording or a misunderstanding of Dawkins’ position, david f has not communicated Dawkins’ position well. Which has lead to this false analogy from you...

<<It is like condemning all blacks, Germans, Jews or what you have just because some among them are silly...>>

Dawkins does not condemn all believers just because they are a part of a religion consisting of others who support biblical literalism. He does, however, point out that non-literalists (as with the moderates versus fundamentalists) enable, or open the door to, literalists.

It is not like condemning all blacks, Germans or Jews because some among them are silly; because being black, German or Jewish is not enabling the silly among them. We don’t have a choice about our heritage either.

Your analogy is invalid.

.

Craig Minns,

The point about ‘broken clocks’ is that if someone voices enough opinions often enough, then they’re bound to be right about something eventually through sheer dumb luck. It has nothing to do with contradictions. What on earth were you getting at?

<<...a contradiction is just a contradiction.>>

Not if the person doing the contradicting demonstrates that their contradiction is sound by following it up with evidence and/or reasoning. The contradictions Michael Palin was talking about were just short, sharp responses like “No it’s not”.

Again though, this has nothing to do with ‘broken clocks’.

<<You are taking a faith-based approach, which you are entirely sincere about, but is not going to ever allow you to accept that a view different to your own faith is acceptable.>>

This is just an ad hominem. If you had heard my arguments before, then you could simply counter them without resorting to lowbrow tactics like this. As it stands, every parallel you’ve tried to draw between science and religion has fallen flat.

You have not demonstrated that I have a faith-based position either. Nor could you know that I am not willing to be convinced by opposing opinions. I am not the one here ducking, weaving, and continuously having to be reminded of the initial bone of contention.

AJ Philips,

>>Your analogy is invalid.<<

OK, so I assume a “valid” analogy would be condemning teachers of English for “enabling or opening the door to” some people who say rude or stupid things in English.

No sorry, George.

That wouldn’t be accurate either because non-literalists generally aren’t considered teachers of literalists, nor do they necessarily exist to teach anything. On the contrary, I see what I suspect to be a lot of convenient overlooking from non-literalists of what literalists believe, in what appears to be a wish to not contradict someone who at least shares the same fundamental belief in a god.

More importantly, however, is the fact that the literalism, dangerous fundamentalism and everything in between - elements for which we see all sorts of undesirable real world manifestations result from, thus rendering the continued membership of a club that contains such absurd and/or dangerous elements makes one an enabler of, or akin to a mafia wife to, those literalists/fundamentalists who draw their legitimacy from the billions of their fellow travellers - do not exist with language or its study.

Religion allows people in the millions to believe what only a crazy person could believe alone. I don’t think we could say the same for English.

Dear Sells;

You wrote;

“Constance, I take a dim view of people who use this thread, not to discuss the article but to push their own agenda. Would you please desist.”

May I say sir what a miserable and totally inadequate response.

You appear to take some ownership of the thread, which is fine as it was your article that was being discussed, but when a member of your own faith comes on and spews vitriol and anti-Semitic hatred of the kind that ultimately saw fruition in the horror of the extermination camps, the greatest admonishment you seem capable of mustering is a charge of not addressing your article.

There seems to be a constant refrain in this country that the Muslim community has to take greater responsibility for the transgressions of their lunatic fringe, well that has to cut both ways. I invite you to do the right thing and repudiate the heinous rantings of this hateful and deluded poster.

SR, I thought Peter's response was well calculated and it seems to have been effective. Requiring him to explicitly disavow the rantings of a loon of a different sectarian background is hardly reasonable.

I'm at a bit of a loss as to why GY doesn't take some form of action though. Not just against Constance, but the equally hateful, although slightly more contained (in the sense that he limits himself to his own articles and their threads, so at least he's easy to avoid) David Singer, who spouts precisely the same sort of guff on a somewhat reciprocal vector.

I read a paper recently on paralinguistics, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paralanguage, which touched on the issue of communication on the internet, prompted by Peter's comment on this thread. The upshot is that people tend to become more extremist over time in their comments because they are trying to make a written form of communication conform to more "natural" modes, but without the immediate extrinsic feedback that is a feature of modes like speech (or signing for the deaf), it can lead to a kind of runaway auto-feedback. Writing is a medium that is suited to precision of argument much more than speech is. It is time-delayed and any errors in construction are readily caught by either the writer or the careful reader. Someone who feels passionately about a subject, especially if they feel their views are not shared by their audience, may not even notice how extreme or absolute their views as written have become as they hone their writing to have what they think will be maximum impact. This has been a problem for pamphleteers and polemicists since writing was invented, I suspect.

On the internet, it is much harder because selection bias and confirmation bias come into play and some people only seek sources of information which reinforce their views, so writing with balance becomes impossible for them.

I'm by no means immune, in that I rarely bother to write unless I have some bone of contention to chew on. I'm sure you could say the same.

Constance writes; "LOOK WHAT HAPPENED TO RUSSIA IN 1917! Up to 60 million people murdered by Stalin."

I hope the management will forgive the sidestep into the barely-relevant, but drivel like the above quote should not be allowed to appear without challenge.

In 1917, Stalin was chairman of the Petrograd Soviet trying desperately at Lenin's behest to reconcile with the Mensheviks and other splinter groups. It was a power struggle not susceptible of reasoned settlement. Lenin's life was in danger and Stalin assisted his Bolshevik colleague first to hide in the Alliluyeva household for several weeks and then shepherded him to greater safety over the Finnish border. As an editor of Pravda and an upper-level party functionary in those revolutionary turbulent times, Stalin had precious little time to organize such industrial-sized massacres. In fact no centralized authority existed in 1917 that could have instigated such action.

Trying to ally Stalin's antipathy toward religion into a pathological hatred fails every time when some zealot with a dim smattering of Russian history raises Stalin's supposed atheism. It was a powerfull tool of political and social influence. He used religion, he neither hated it nor favoured it. He destroyed the Russian church because it opposed him politically to protect its royal and aristocratic privilege. One could assert with no less authority that Stalin's penchant for philately drove him to commit the massacres he was later responsible for.

As for atheism being a driving force behind the dreadful sacrifice of life as communism arose in Russia and China......this rather twisted reasoning is tantamount to claiming that not playing golf is a sport.

My apologies to management for the diversion but I confess that historical ignorance, when so blatantly exhibited by Constance, should be revealed as worthless.

Craig Minns,

"I'm at a bit of a loss as to why GY doesn't take some form of action though. Not just against Constance, but the equally hateful, although slightly more contained (in the sense that he limits himself to his own articles and their threads, so at least he's easy to avoid) David Singer, who spouts precisely the same sort of guff on a somewhat reciprocal vector."

If you're unhappy with a post and have a complaint, then you should hit the red cross and report it - Graham isn't psychic and hasn't time to trawl through every thread.

Regarding David Singer, it would appear that his articles are published on OLO by choice - why would Graham "take action" against them?

Your point to AJPhilips:

"....You are taking a faith-based approach, which you are entirely sincere about, but is not going to ever allow you to accept that a view different to your own faith is acceptable. You will go on trying to "change my mind", as every good evangelist is driven to do."

I think you're off the mark there. If you want to an example of someone giving atheism the "faith-based" approach, you could do no better than peruse David Nicholl's 2012 article on the Atheist Convention, which resembles old-style revivalist rhetoric.

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=13634

"Most attendees came away from the three days and three nights of being voluntarily entombed in the magnificent Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre from 13 to 15 April with feelings varying from elation to euphoria..."

"Now the event is over the afterglow still burns brightly in the thoughts of attendees from being enthralled by an intellectual stimulus noteworthy for its call to celebrate reason...."

"...the atmosphere was filled by a powerfully exquisite joy..."

Etc...

AJ Philips,

>>Religion allows people in the millions to believe what only a crazy person could believe alone.<<

I thought we had already agreed on this, namely that one of the differences between us two is that I would not say that only a crazy person could believe what you do or have an understanding for.

We have been also through the following: If you don’t see the message supposed to be conveyed through a metaphor you just don’t get it, full stop - no need to explain why.

Craig Minns, Sells,

I’d like to endorse your recent reactions to some contributors here (though I agree with Poirot re authors of whole articles like David Singer). Indeed, the purpose of this kind of discussions ought to be to better understand (the others but also oneself) rather than convert.

Hi Poirot,
I rarely report others' comments. On the other hand, GY has applied some rules to our discussions here and it seems to me that some commenters routinely honour those rules more in the breach. Constance is the obvious benchmark, of course, but Singer is not a long way behind. His articles are relatively simple polemics drawing on a particular political view, but his comments are frankly loony rants that detract both from the articles and the quality of the forum. Criticising Israel's policies or his articles does not make one a "Jew hater" for example. I'm not completely sure why GY publishes his work, since in my own experience he's quite a tough editor.

I realise GY is not a mind reader, but I'm sure a simple script could be written to alert him to the posts of some contributors for direct vetting.

Thanks for that great link to Nicholls' piece, it shows precisely what I've been trying to get at. AJP's stuff is slightly more subtle, but is every bit the apologetic that one might see on a site like Theology Web or Answers in Genesis, replete with the favoured preachers to offer "authoritative" quotes.

The shame is that I agree with you that AJP is obviously an intelligent person, but he is a convert with all the fervour of a new faith to evangelise.

George, thanks for the endorsement. I think we manage OK to achieve a better understanding on the whole. It may even be that it is helpful to have the more outrageous comments as a measure of when we are straying too far from the middle ground for understanding to be reasonably possible.

Yes George, I remember that agreement.

<<...namely that one of the differences between us two is that I would not say that only a crazy person could believe what you do or have an understanding for.>>

But I have not asked you to say that, and nor is that what I said. For you to suggest that I did, only goes to show that either you missed the point entirely, or you’re throwing a red herring out there.

<<If you don’t see the message supposed to be conveyed through a metaphor you just don’t get it...>>

Well, you’ve never said what this message was, but I understand that you believe it’s “supposed to be conveyed through a metaphor” (often in Scripture). So I don’t think you are in a position to yet to claim that I’ll never get it.

I know what I thought it was, but it was more of a literalist one and you refuse to explain what your non-literalist one is (and yet you claim to believe that discussions on OLO are about understanding each other).

<<Indeed, the purpose of this kind of discussions ought to be to better understand (the others but also oneself) rather than convert.>>

I don’t think there is any particular purpose to these discussions other than to (as the website suggests) debate. Any purpose beyond that is entirely personal and subjective.

I have simply pointed to the problems in Craig Minns’ arguments. The fact that this comes across to some as an attempt to convert is rather telling indeed.

Craig Minns,

"I rarely report others' comments. On the other hand, GY has applied some rules to our discussions here and it seems to me that some commenters routinely honour those rules more in the breach...."

Most of us "rarely" report comments - some posters here never do - however, what is the point of rabbiting on about posts we find offensive, if we're not prepared to alert Graham?

"I realise GY is not a mind reader, but I'm sure a simple script could be written to alert him to the posts of some contributors for direct vetting."

How would that work? We're dealing with humans here - and it's often a fine line between acceptable and unacceptable. I think Graham prides himself on not interfering too much.

The onus is on each of us to report if we believe a post is out of order. There's no badge of honour available to those who decide the red cross is only to be used in dire circumstances.

"The shame is that I agree with you that AJP is obviously an intelligent person, but he is a convert with all the fervour of a new faith to evangelise.'

I disagree - AJPhilips is merely employing reason and rational argument. Yes, he's particularly driven to articulate his point - but so is everyone else.

Just point out, that I, on numerous occasions have sought to imbibe theology, to provide myself an opportunity to "believe"...I used to have an inherent attraction to metaphysical explanations (part of the human psyche/condition?). They appealed to me. I "love" cathedrals and churches, their architecture (my favourite thing to draw), the feeling of "sacred space" when one enters their confines...and yet my rational mind will not allow me to "believe".

I've tried often - the "Holy Spirit" still awaits without.

Poirot, we'll have to agree to disagree about AJP, I think. As I said, I watched a friend spend hours every day doing just as AJP does, with the same reason for starting (disaffection with a church upbringing). I've heard all of the arguments, made quite a few of them myself and in my view it's a wrong-headed approach.

I don't feel strongly enough to take action against Constance or Singer and as a fellow poster I don't think it's even my role, to be honest. It's GY's site and if he's happy to allow that sort of thing it's up to him. If I were him I'd likely try to reduce the noise a bit though. I'm sure it drives some away.

I'm not a "believer", by the way. I've said so on many occasions. My interest is in trying to understand the things that make us all tick, which includes for many of us, religion or spirituality. I've certainly had experiences I can't satisfactorily explain, which is one reason I'm perhaps more willing than you to explore the ways that others who may have had similar experiences explain them. I see no virtue in the kind of "muscular atheism" that some here seem to want to promote.

Craig Minns,

"I don't feel strongly enough to take action against Constance or Singer and as a fellow poster I don't think it's even my role, to be honest. It's GY's site and if he's happy to allow that sort of thing it's up to him. If I were him I'd likely try to reduce the noise a bit though. I'm sure it drives some away."

In the case of posters (not article authors - unless they breach when replying to comments)...yes, it's Graham's site, but if you "don't feel strongly enough" to report then (as I've already pointed out) how do you expect Graham to know?

He's the sole moderator - and presumably "has a life". Believe it or not, I'm thinking he tends to rely on us to moderate ourselves to great extent - coz we're supposedly grown-ups...and that seems to be something that's occurred to some extent latterly on this thread.

I like your term ""muscular atheism" ...that would be a slightly watered-down version of "militant atheism", a term batted around by "muscular theists"?

Thanks a lot for the words of support, Poirot. Whether or not that’s what they were meant for.

Craig Minns,

This would depend on what it is that you’re trying to achieve…

<<I've heard all of the arguments, made quite a few of them myself and in my view it's a wrong-headed approach.>>

Is it to raise consciousnesses among fence-sitters? Is it to mobilise fence-sitters? Is it to help nudge those who are starting to doubt the beliefs they had shoved down their throats as kids? Is it to de-convert believers in general? Or is it just because you might value having bad ideas countered whenever possible?

For me it’s mostly the last one. My main goal is to correct problems that I see in the arguments of others so as to not leave them there unaddressed and uncorrected. My urge to do this is more akin to seeing a pimple that needs to be popped than it is to an evangelist’s need to convert and save souls (I'd know, I've been on both sides). I guess the main difference is that I hope to prevent others picking up bad ideas rather than removing those already held. If I manage to achieve the latter, then that’s just icing on the cake.

Different people respond to different approaches in different ways. I don’t think we can say that a particular approach is wrong in all instances. Given the fact that churches in Australia lose 200 members per week, I think something is going right somewhere.

All we need is love. Can we hug Constance, Sells and David Singer? Would they want to be hugged? Maybe that's what they need. I just had a loving hug and feel benevolent to you all even though there doesn't seem to be a point in much of our argy-bargy.

The sun is shining. Outside my window the ixora flowers and the poinciana sway in the wind, and my breath is sweet with chocolate. In billions of years space will be filled with lifeless rocks in meaningless motion. Now it's filled with rocks occupied by life in meaningless motion. The universe doesn't care. Hotchacha!

AJP, the point is that the "bad ideas" are not driven by religious experience, they (mis)use it to promote some power agenda. The real problem, as Peter pointed out earlier, is that the various holy books are often readily misused in that way because they were, without exception, written by people who were embedded in a particular cultural matrix, often not the people who are their subjects (the NT is not written by Jesus, the OT wasn't written by any of the prophets, the Bhagavad Gita not written by Shiva and so on) and rewritten over the years to suit new agendas.

They are often quite muddled, but the religious experience is by its nature not a clear one for most people, even the great prophets, any more than maths sprang fully formed to the minds of Leibnitz, Euler, et al. Their insights developed over time and they tried to pass them on, often imperfectly. The great advance of mathematics was that it created a clear, concrete language to express ideas which had not existed before.

I recommend highly the work of von Neumann on subjective probability, but be careful, it sent a Nobel laureate (John Nash) mad for 35 years. You should be safe though, since you have a very strongly grounded view of the world that limits your ability to observe anomalies.

David, hug accepted and returned. Chocolate-scented breath notwithstanding, I'm going to draw the line at a kiss though.

Sheesh, serves me right for editing on the fly. First sentence should have read:

"AJP, the point is that the "bad ideas" are not driven by religious experience, [but that some] (mis)use it to promote some power agenda."

AJ Philips,

“But I have not asked you to say that”.

Neither did I claim you asked me to say anything. So again, please let us leave it at that. I am sure you will find others who can understand (and accept) your “corrections of arguments” by those whose way of expressing their views you do not see as being up to your standards.

Craig Minns,

It looks like we’re about to come full circle now. I’ve already addressed everything you said in that last post of yours.

This is what I mean by you ducking and weaving…

<<...the point is that the "bad ideas" are not driven by religious experience, [but that some] (mis)use it to promote some power agenda.">>

Okay, so now you're talking about "religious experience", not religion. I asked you to explain what you mean by “religious experience” on the other thread, but I don’t think I got a response. You would need to define it before I could respond to this.

You’ve also switched from religion to “holy books” regarding the “misuse” of religion. Okay, but this (and the above) does not negate my point about religion being able to influence undesirable behaviour in a way that science cannot.

By the way, nothing I have said suggests that I “have a very strongly grounded view of the world that limits [my] ability to observe anomalies.” This is another ad hominem and a red herring.

.

George,

That had nothing to do with the thrust of my post.

<<Neither did I claim you asked me to say anything.>>

But let’s have a look at what you said again anyway:

“I thought we had already agreed on this, namely that one of the differences between us two is that I would not say that only a crazy person could believe what you do or have an understanding for.” (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=17075#301759)

So I mentioned that I didn’t ask you to “say that only a crazy person could believe what [I] do”, before proceeding to the actual crux of my response. Namely, that I did not say that your views were crazy. In fact, quite the opposite, given the context of our current reality.

<<I am sure you will find others who can understand (and accept) your “corrections of arguments” by those whose way of expressing their views you do not see as being up to your standards.>>

How people express their views is irrelevant. It’s the content I’m concerned with.

AJ, we've come full circle because you don't want to go anywhere.

I don't know how to explain the religious experience, or I would do so and this discussion wouldn't exist. I've always been talking about the human experience, I've never, ever claimed otherwise. You, on the other hand, have a particular beef with a particular form of organised religion and a particular church, which you have coupled to your faith is scientism to draw a particular conclusion that you want to convince everyone is the only possible one to draw. All of your efforts are directed not at understanding another point of view, but at trying to prove, using your own assumptions, that it cannot be of any value.

That is not scientific, my friend and if you think it is, you are wrong.

Holy books are what is used by those who wish to claim some form of divine sanction for their choice of actions, or if you prefer the modern terminology, use a selection bias in service of their confirmation bias. In the case of adherents to scientism that might include such things as "A Brief History of Time" or "On the Origin of Species" or "The God Delusion". It's extremely doubtful that many of those who might speak glowingly of such works have any genuine understanding of the ideas, any more than those who sit dutifully in church every Sunday understand what was in the mind of someone like Jesus. Instead, what is relied on is the interpretation of a go-betweeen, such as Dillahunty or Ken Ham.

Calling you well-grounded isn't an ad hom any more than calling you intelligent is. You have a very strong belief in and a matrix of justifications for a particular world view which makes you largely immune to anything that doesn't fit. As I said, have a read of von Neumann on subjective probability, which is strongly related to game theory although most work on it is done using Bayesian techniques and an assumption of rationality to avoid the difficult subjectivity aspects and have a good look into Nash's story.

Craig Minns,

I’m happy to go other places, but not because you want to duck and weave and slink away from a failed point.

<<I don't know how to explain the religious experience...>>

I didn’t ask you to explain the religious experience, I just need you to tell me what you’re referring to when you mention it.

<<I've always been talking about the human experience, I've never, ever claimed otherwise.>>

While making comparisons between religion and science that were demonstrably false. Again, I need to drag you back!

<<You, on the other hand, have a particular beef with a particular form of organised religion and a particular church...>>

Nope. I’m talking about all religion to some extent, and the concept of religion itself. A “particular church” though? Where did you get that?!

<<All of your efforts are directed not at understanding another point of view, but at trying to prove, using your own assumptions, that it cannot be of any value.>>

I have never said that certain beliefs “cannot be of any value”. You’re making this up. Either way, try providing one example of where I continue to argue in vain due to my inability to hear what the other is saying.

Or make things up as you have here, for that matter.

Your comparison between holy books and the works of scientists/atheist writers only demonstrates my point about scientism being nothing more than a caricature. You might get some naive teenager on the internet like that, but that’s about it.

<<You have a very strong belief in and a matrix of justifications for a particular world view which makes you largely immune to anything that doesn't fit.>>

I have altered and refined my beliefs many times. It is the constant refining of my beliefs that is my strength in debate. It never stops. I am, for example, extremely embarrassed about some of my posts from years ago on OLO.

You will never see me argue a flawed point that has been demonstrated to be false, only to then slink off to a different thread and then repeat it.

Sheesh mate, this is why I keep telling your we're at cross purposes

I'm not trying to "get" anyone, nor am I trying to convince anyone of anything other than the value of discussion.

I don't care whether you agree with me. I don't care whether you understand me, because unless you want to do so there's not a thing I can do to make it happen. I already understand you; I was once very much like you in my own views.

No matter what I say, you will seek to show that my argument is flawed unless I completely agree with you, at which point you will tell me I don't, not really, not like a TRUE believer. If I give you a recipe for a different way of looking at things, you will argue that I have not properly explained it. If I take the trouble to explain it you will argue that it doesn't and couldn't possibly work and you will be right, because your own cognitive biases mean that for you it cannot.

This is standard apologetics, mate and it's pointless at best, destructive at worst.

Science requires a genuinely open mind, but you are locked into a dogmatic model which says that having an open mind is a flaw. You think of yourself as a "skeptic", but you have no real understanding of what the term means.

As I said earlier, I wish you well. I think you're a smart guy, but you lack confidence in your judgement and so you rely on a rigid framework of rules. I hope you get past that. Be prepared to be wrong occasionally. Experiment with ideas. Learn how to think, my friend. At the moment you've just learnt one model of how to reason.

Craig Minns,

We are not at cross purposes and here’s why:

You claim(ed) that scientists have a faith. I showed (in the other thread) that they didn’t.
You claim(ed) that science has a dogma. I explained that it didn’t and why.
You claim that religion is no more to blame for the actions of those who utilise it for bad deeds (or do bad things in its name) than science. I demonstrated that it was by pointing out that your first two claims were false.

Whether or not one of us is trying to “get”, or convince, the other is a side issue. Here you are again implying that this is my motivation. You need to make this personal now because there is nowhere left for you to go. Take your understanding of faith, for example. Before, it was just an innocent and necessary tool used to make sense of the world, now it’s a dogmatic burden that you’ve managed to rise above, and brand me with. Christians do the same thing: one minute faith is a virtue, then next it’s an unavoidable burden that atheists must necessarily have too.

If your mission is to learn about human experience, then great. But doing so does not necessitate clinging to the idea that religion and science are more alike than what they really are. If you're going to cling to this notion to the extent where any proof that it is bogus provokes from you offensive claims regarding the supposed motives and goals of others, then I can guarantee you that any answers you find in your search for a greater understanding of human experience will almost certainly be false. As you said earlier...

“That is not scientific, my friend..."

I'll ignore the rest of what you said because it is still just attacking the strawman you have created regarding my mindset and motives; both of which you couldn't possibly know until you demonstrate that I am wrong on something and witness me duck and weave and make assumptions about your motivations to avoid facing the fact.

Just as you have.

AJ, you'll always ignore whatever doesn't fit your preconceptions, as I said a couple of posts up.

Let's call it quits, mate. Good luck in your righteous crusade to destroy all religion with your invincible circular reasoning.

Craig Minns,

I’m afraid I can’t just leave it there. I still reserve the right to defend my claims and ideas (even at the risk of that being mistaken for an evangelism or trying to convince you of something), so I have to at least ask for an example of myself not accepting something that doesn’t fit my preconceptions, despite it being shown to have (successfully) contradicted a preconception of mine.

I don't think you can.

I suspect you’re mistaking my expectation for evidence (proportionate to the extraordinariness of the claim, of course) as "always ignor[ing] whatever doesn't fit [my] preconceptions," but I don’t see why that’s unreasonable given that evidence-based reasoning is the only reliable pathway to truth given what we currently know. That being said, I’d doubt these other models of reasoning that you refer to (whatever they are) are reliable. The “heart” is a common alternative to evidence and reason suggested by theists and dreamers, but we all know how unreliable that is. Personal revelation is proffered by theists, but as I said on the other thread, how could you know that was reliable without evidence?

What are you talking about when you suggest that my reasoning is circular? I think I know what you’re referring to, but it’s easily responded to by simply pointing out that it is an unavoidable circularity (that is not overcome by “the heart” or personal revelation) and is not much of a problem given that we live in a world in which we understand things on probabilistic terms, and in ways that still appear to be reliable. Any suggestion that that is not good enough is an appeal to an unnecessary need for absolute certainty and a red herring.

"It's unavoidable circularity"

Yes, because your view is dogmatic, not skeptical. It assumes the axioms you choose as premises for your reasoning are unassailable.

I'll simply suggest, for the last time, that you have a good read of von Neumann's and Nash's work. Follow that up with Aumann's extension of Nash's great ideas. Take the time to read some of Hameroff and Penrose's, Tegmark's, Susskind's work. Check out Deutsch's work, both on information theory and on constructor theory. Sit down for a few weeks or months and think about the implications of Popper's work. Look at the incredible work being done in artificial intelligence research on resolving the NP hard problem of abductive inference. Learn a little about Markov and the problem of induction with incomplete information. Make an effort to keep up with the work in cognitive neuroscience, psychology, economics.

Read Adam Smith, John Locke, Descartes, Leibnitz. Make a special effort to read Wittgenstein, Maturana (really read Maturana), Shaw. Learn all you can from Feynmann and Einstein about the nature of problems and the way to approach them. Do some serious meditation or at least, spend a lot of time alone.

The list goes on and on.

In other words, do some work. I've spent the past 15 years doing just that, mate and more. The first 13 or so were preparation for actually learning how to overcome the idea that I already knew how to think. I wish I'd started sooner.

Have a go. Assume all you know is wrong and start from there. Or keep going round in circles. It's up to you.

I'm not claiming to be especially smart, mate. You're probably able to do it much faster than I could.

Craig Minns,

My view certainly is sceptical rather than dogmatic.

If it were dogmatic, then it would assert certain principles as incontrovertibly true. It doesn’t, and this is where you keep misunderstanding me. I even went to the length earlier of adding the caveat: “...given what we currently know.”

All I’m saying is that evidence-based reasoning is the only pathway to truth, given what we currently know. But the fact that we can’t know everything with ‘absolute certainty’ (that red herring I mentioned before) doesn’t mean that we just entertain any old absurd notion without evidence for its reliability (and this is where I think you go wrong). It also doesn’t necessitate, however, that we reject it out of hand either, and this is what you are assuming that I’m doing. Believe it or not, it is actually possible to reserve judgement.

And if my tone suggests that I’ve taken it beyond ‘reserving judgement’, then that’s just because the “heart” and personal revelation (I can’t imagine what else you could be talking about) have had thousands of years to demonstrate their reliability and have failed hopelessly thus far. That doesn’t mean that I cannot be convinced otherwise of their reliability though. It just means that I think the possibility of that happening is (at this point) infinitesimally small; so much so that I’m happy to be laughed at in the event that I’m proven wrong because I think I have a pretty good defence.

We need to keep an open mind, but not so much so that our brains fall out.

Hi AJ,
This is going to be my last post on the topic.

Evidence-based (deductive) reasoning is not even close to being the only pathway to the truth. At best it is a means of verifying a guess, at worst it is a stultifying wet blanket on advancing knowledge.

In order for knowledge to advance, it requires the willingness to consider that previous models may be wrong and to consider "what if...?".

I've suggested some reading, which is by no means exhaustive. Enjoy.

Sorry, Craig Minns. I should have said (as I have said many times before in previous discussions) that evidence based reasoning is the *most reliable* pathway to truth. I don’t know why I said *the only* last night. I’ve even acknowledged many times in the past that following one’s “heart” can be a pathway to truth. It’s just not a very reliable one. The same can be said about flipping a coin. Inductive reasoning too can be useful by is only supposed to be probable and is less certain than deductive.

I'm all for considering the "What ifs" and entertaining the fact that current models may be wrong. At the same time though, we need to avoid falling into the trap of thinking that we mustn't know know anything just because we can't know everything,

I'm going to contradict myself: this is my last comment on the topic :).

It has nothing to do with "following [one's] heart", although it is certainly true that following a tricky line of reasoning can be emotionally stimulating.

There are three forms of logical reasoning and each has their place. Deduction is the most useful for solving problems in which all of the information is known and the conclusions must follow from the known information.

a+b=c
c+d=e
ergo a+b+d=e

Induction is useful for solving problems which may not be readily reduced to fundamental components, but for which the probability of certain things being so can be estimated. Bayes' concept of probability is inductive.

a is usually bigger than b
b is usually bigger than c
therefore, a is probably bigger than c (but it might be smaller)

Abduction is the realm of the "quantum leap" and is reliable to the extent that one is able to apply some intuition to the likeliness of some of the inputs, without necessarily being able to prove with any rigour that the intuition is correct. It is also the realm of metaphor.

a seems to be somewhat like z
z+x=b
perhaps c, which is somewhat like b, might result from a and x?

The thing is that it is only with abduction that science or any other branch of knowledge can open new horizons.

Relativity, the Big Bang, Hawking radiation, QM, Maxwell's demon, evolution, Kepler's discovery of the elliptical nature of planetary orbits ("I tried it because I'd tried everything else")...

Each of these great ideas was opposed by people, sometimes very eminent people, who insisted that they were just speculations and therefore not worth the trouble to think about.

I'm not sure of the relevance of your last sentence to the topic. I've certainly never suggested anything of the kind - quite the opposite.

You're obviously interested in the nature of knowledge. The Theory of Knowledge is a vast topic in Philosophy and fascinating.

Hi Craig,

Your last post ? I didn't think so. Then you suggest that

"Evidence-based (deductive) reasoning is not even close to being the only pathway to the truth."

You could be onto something. Evidence ? Feh ! Passion ? Yes, getting warmer. Top of the head, light-bulb moments ? Yes, sounds good. Evidence-free pontifications ? Yes - beauty !

Perhaps you're right that the wisest people are those young bucks with a skinful at the local's front bar, ideally just before they go outside and spew over somebody's car. They're so full of simple conviction, surely that must stand for something.

Evidence is so hard, after all. So much tedious effort, maybe years and phucking years of it, with the added risk that, in the search, one may come across counter-evidence that stuffs up all of one's Nobel-Prize-winning hypotheses.

I recall an acquaintance, at the conclusion of her four-year stint at a Ph.D., when I asked her, had she stumbled across anything which in any way conflicted with her research topic: "Nope," she replied confidently. I thought, "Sister, you've learnt nothing in four years".

So no wonder that any researchers, such as yourself, confidently learn nothing but confirming what they started out with, except a flurry of name-dropping.

Evidence is all there is.

Joe

Joe, with the greatest of respect, you're talking through the bit you should be sitting on.

Or at least, that's my hypothesis based on the limited evidence available.

Still, if I were you I'd stop it, just in case.

Hi Craig,

I asked the bit I'm sitting on and it told me nothing new, but suggested I might ask you for deep wisdom, conjured out of your own pure wind and solid substances. I demurred, since I'm stuck on the out-dated notion that one need some evidence, some substance, some solid foundation, before one puts forward anything like a new idea.

For instance, it struck me today, after years of gestation, that in Australia, with its frequent and long droughts, that in pre-European times, populations must have been decimated, with children under four or five dying through lack of any mother's milk, and old people, especially women, dying pretty quickly too, maybe the old men as well. The current drought in Queensland covers around a million square kilometres: how would that have affected Aboriginal groups in pre-European times ? They would have been nearly wiped out: neighbouring groups, once the drought broke, might have moved into their country, devised new stories and, within a generation of less, seen themselves as the 50,000-year-old inheritors of that country.

How would I demonstrate this crack-pot idea, even to myself ? Reading over old records, journals, diaries, maybe. But how to understand pre-European situations ?

The major, confounding, problem is that, at least here in SA, the Protector set up a system of ration depots very quickly (devilishly cunning !) so that old people, mothers with young children, the infirm , orphans, etc. across the Province, had an assured supply of food. Even in droughts, when the able-bodied were supplied as well. What impact might that have had on Aboriginal demography ? I hesitate to suggest. With that assured food supply, what impact might a ten-year drought have had on cultural continuity, compared to pre-European drought times ? Too horrifying to think of, as oneof the Left.

Genuine research is very difficult, especially in dealing with the problem of screening out confounding factors. But how can I flap my lips with confidence unless I have some evidence ? Stance, yes; passion, yes; but I have this nagging suspicion that I need

evidence.

Joe

I'm glad you and your sitting bits are on talking terms, Joe.

Evidence is unquestionably essential for disproving an hypothesis, but that is all it can do.

Popper was a metaphysicist: he was interested in the nature of reality and he was always acutely aware that the theory of knowledge acquisition he proposed was incomplete.

The missing link is abduction: what Feynmann called a "guess".

1. Notice something that can't be explained
2. Guess an explanation
3. Propose a mechanism that might fit the explanation
4. Test it for contradictions against what is already known
5. If it passes, test it for its predictive ability
6. If it passes, you have a theory, congratulations
7. If it doesn't, you still have a guess that may be useful in thinking about the problem.

Abduction is currently a seriously tough problem that sets people apart from machines. Some really interesting approaches are being taken to solve it, but until we have machines capable of making that guess with little information to guide them, we won't have AI.

I mentioned that it is also involved in metaphor. Do a search on General Semantics if you'd like to know some more (and of course, if your sitting bits don't object).

Hi Craig,

Yes, my sitting bits are my best friend, sometimes they allow me to talk for them.

Yes, Popper showed that it is difficult, if not impossible, to prove that any hypothesis may be valid, because it is always open to falsification, BUT we have to go with something, and that, in part, is whatever hypotheses have not yet been falsified.

After all, there is something 'out there', an objective reality that we are always striving to, but never will, grasp totally. That's life. But we can get close to it: not all crackpot notions are equal, one could say. And one major component towards that distant understanding has to involve 'evidence', something which can be pulled apart and held up to the light, something which might 'answer' until it is conclusively demolished and replaced with a better explanation. But that also requires 'evidence', if you like, 'better' evidence.

The bottom line is that SOME evidence is better than none, and that relatively (I hate that word) thorough evidence is better than mere stance, or hearsay, or rumour, or sheer bigotry.

For example, the 'Stolen Generation': how many confirmed cases ? One. And that was pretty iffy, if you look at the details. If I had been Marj Angus, the social worker in that case in 1958, I would probably have whipped that dying baby off to Adelaide Hospital and fabricated a story so that he could be fostered out once he recovered.

One case, yet we have had Apologies and buckets of tears over them. I didn't know the bloke involved, Bruce Trevorrow, but I knew his brothers and his mum, and his mum's boyfriend. In fact, it was through the actions of the boyfriend that I met my wife.

But that's another story.

Joe