Topic: Health and Religion - page 17. (Read 210823 times)

You are correct that my arguments do highlight the difficulty humans indeed any consciousness must face when determining whether something is true. Indeed there are only two possibilities. You can become a epistemological nihilist and decide you can never know anything at all ever or you can assume some basic foundation to ground yourself upon and build your knowledge upon it.

Once you really understand this you understand that faith is unavoidable. Ultimately we choose to have a faith in our core beliefs and build everything we are upon that faith. Even the nihilist have faith in their nihilism they certainly cannot prove nihilism is true. Most people don't understand their own assumptions. They adopt a whole host of them but don't actually ever analyze them to any degree or even know what they are.
 
The scientific method is an extremely useful tool for answering questions but it is just a tool. It is an error to elevate that tool to a stature that it does not warrant and pretend it will answer questions it never can. One of the assumptions you must make if you believe scientific facts exist is that the universe is rational (results from today will predict reality tomorrow) and that knowledge exists. Science ultimately is just disciplined observation, testing, and recording of results very useful but limited in what it can answer.

What I have endeavored to show in this thread is that faith in God is superior then faith in alternatives like nihilism and definitely superior to lying to oneself and pretend denying you have faith. To some degree I have succeeded and to some degree I have failed. That depends on the reader.  

Now all you are saying is that the people who put the scientific method together, did it without using logic.  So, they got the scientific method some other way than through logic, right? It must have been told to them by God through the Bible. Why else would they believe that science theory, which can be changed at any moment by the whims of scientists making a directional change in what they observe (based on their desires), is the truth? It's all about religion. The whole scientific method is a religious thing... and we know that religion was around long before modern science.

So, using the scientific method, I have just proven that science is an illogical branch of religion. And you helped me do it through your post that I quoted.



EDIT: Btw, ever heard of the expanding universe? There isn't any gravity. It's the inertia of the expansion that gives the impression of gravity.

I'm not assuming anything, you are. Your arguments show humans cannot determine whether something is true or not. It's also really easy to prove that using the scientific method works far better than simply using your reasoning and logic. For example:

Let's say you don't know much about anything. An apple falls on your head, you start to think about it, why does that happen? Will you ever be able to determine it's gravity only using your logic without performing any experiment or gathering evidence? Of course not. In fact logically, the earth could simply be accelerating upwards, that would make sense logically and would explain the apple falling.

Translation: His arguments lead to conclusions that falsify what I have arbitrarily and subjectively defined as "truth" so I am going to assume he is wrong about everything and stop thinking about his arguments.

His epistemological tools do not lead him even close to the truth, so you can assume he is wrong about everything.

Like I said before, the scientific method is the best tool we have, anything else can easily lead you to mental masturbation or worse, delusion or schizophrenic episodes. You know the “I am the prophet”, “I have found the light” type of conditions.

But you dont know how wrong you are if you dont know the real truth, therefore you could be 99% wrong about god and you wouldnt know it.

Humans cannot be “ideal” anything. We can’t be ideal parents or ideal employees. We cannot be ideal athletes or ideal mathematicians.

We may not be able to achieve perfection but we can approximate it to the best of our ability. Yes we are guaranteed to fall short but to the degree we succeed everyone benefits.

from what i observed religion always have a long discussion, i think this is a never ending discussion.

You're wrong! The gain is finding out who the joker is who asks a bunch of hypothetical questions because he doesn't have anything substantial to say.

Well, if you agree humans cannot be ideal rational thinkers, then whats the point of bringing it up? We gain nothing with it.

It is known via logical deduction. If ideal rational thinkers are faced with a symmetrical situation and reasoning alone is the ultimate justification they will reach identical conclusions.

This must be true if reasoning is objective as arithmetic is.


I agree we cannot be ideal rational thinkers. Our biological limitations alone guarantee that. But that does not mean we should not try. Indeed it would be idiotic not to try.

C.S. Lewis wrote a nice discussion on this point.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MtTeCyrgjIQ&t=160s


Not sure I am following you here. My arguments are simple logic that anyone is capable of following. What evidence are you looking for?


Ha ha I doubt the subtlety was intentional but that was funny.

What a subtle way to tell him he's not human.     

There are many holes in your argument. First:

''Any number of ideal rational thinkers faced with the same situation and undergoing similar throes of reasoning agony will necessarily come up with the identical answer eventually'' How is this known?

Let's say for a moment that it's true, what does it matter for us? Humans cannot be ideal rational thinkers and even if somehow someone could, how would we ever know?

Your arguments fail to really prove anything as they offer 0 evidence of anything that it's claimed there.

So what are you embracing? Something that you cannot define? I like to know how you can embrace something that cannot be defined.  

Like I said, you might as well embrace my Goo Goo. LOL.

I will tell you what you are embracing.  A cultural relic that has been ingrained into your memory since childhood.  You know, the smell of an old church, old paintings, songs, prayers, the main stories from the religion you we brought up in.  That is what you are embracing.

If you were born in Saudi Arabia you will be here trying to convince everyone that ALLAH is the only way, and that he will punish you in the lakes of fires if you don’t follow him.

Your position is as idiotic as that of any Muslim, Hindu or a Jew; solely based on culturally driven NONSENSE.

You seem to have forgotten our earlier conversations. We have previously discussed in some depth how one can define God to the best of our ability given our limited perspectives. I would refer you back to those prior conversations. Or if you wish you can review the conversation I had with Astargath on the same topic here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.24470502

I have laid out a logical argument and you apparently are either unable to comprehend it or you understand it and cannot refute and are thus prevaricating. I am a busy man and have no interest in forum games. My time is limited so if you lack the ability to understand you lack the ability to understand and if you are simply playing dumb for the fun of it then we are also both wasting our time. Regardless I have shared what I wanted to share on the topic and the time has come for me return to work so I will give you the final word to inspire us all with your wisdom.

Edit: I find it sad that you entirely ignored the actual argument I was making in my post on Multiverse Wide Cooperation no engagement on the concept of superrationality no argument at all really just utter blindness and repeated attempts to change the subject. You will never see past your preconceived notions if you refuse to think.

First define God. Then go from there.

Embrace God? What are you talking about?  You make no sense.

It is like me saying embrace Goo Goo.

 
Yes we should stay objective. Objectively demands embracing a worldview that will make maximum universal cooperation possible.

That in turns requires embracing God and the principle of love your neighbor as yourself.

This belief honestly followed allows for unconditional love and solves the Platonia Dilemma as well as any other similar cooperation and coordination problems. It will in the long run make everyone all superrationally cooperating life better off.

We have discussed the rationality of God in depth in our discussion here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.36246134

We did not agree then and won’t now.

You should take great care and fully think through the logic and it’s implications. You are a new consciousness in a very old universe. These brief moments of learning our biological time on this earth is our moment to signal to the universe what we truly are.

This decision may have much more importance then you think. Indeed if the religious are correct it is the most important choice you will ever make.

Rational thinking is objective. Problem is that very few people can stay objective.

For example, faced with no evidence in the existence of the supernatural, some people “deduce” that it might exist, yourself included.

Logical, objective conclusion should have been “we cannot say that the supernatural does exist in lieu of any evidence”. PERIOD.

To help us stay objective we have developed the scientific method.  It is the best epistemic tool we have.

You should use it to stay objective.

Here is what the AI researcher Douglas Hofstadter wrote on the topic. The answer to your question is in the realization that reasoning is not subjective.

“You might feel that each person is completely unique and therefore that no one can be relied on as a predictor of how other people will act, especially in an intensely dilemmatic situation. There is more to the story, however.

Any number of ideal rational thinkers faced with the same situation and undergoing similar throes of reasoning agony will necessarily come up with the identical answer eventually, so long as reasoning alone is the ultimate justification for their conclusion. Otherwise reasoning would be subjective, not objective as arithmetic is. A conclusion reached by reasoning would be a matter of preference, not of necessity. Now some people may believe this of reasoning, but rational thinkers understand that a valid argument must be universally compelling, otherwise it is simply not a valid argument.

If you’ll grant this, then you are 90% of the way. All you need ask now is which world is better for the individual rational thinker: (one with thinkers all cooperating or all defecting)
...
Since I am typical, cooperating must be preferred by all rational thinkers. So I’ll cooperate.” Another way of stating it, making it sound weirder, is this: “If I choose cooperation, then everyone will choose cooperation.”
...
“We live in a world filled with opposing belief systems so similar as to be nearly interchangeable, yet whose adherents are blind to that symmetry. This description applies not only to myriad small, conflicts in the world but also to the colossal... Yet the recognition of symmetry - in short, the sanity - has not yet come. In fact, the insanity seems only to grow, rather than be supplanted by sanity. What has an intelligent species like our own done to get itself into this horrible dilemma? What can it do to get itself out? Are we all helpless as we watch this spectacle unfold, or does the answer lie, for each one of us, in recognition of our own typicality, and in small steps taken on an individual level toward sanity?”
...
“To many people, this sounds like a belief in voodoo or sympathetic magic, a vision of a universe permeated by tenuous threads of synchronicity, conveying thoughts from mind to mind like pneumatic tubes carrying messages across Paris, and making people resonate to a secret harmony. Nothing could be further from the truth. This solution depends in no way on telepathy or bizarre forms of causality. It’s just that the statement “I’ll choose C and then everyone will”, though entirely correct, is somewhat misleadingly phrased. It involves the word “choice”, which is incompatible with the compelling quality of logic. Schoolchildren do not choose what 507 divided by 13 is; they figure it out. Analogously, my letter really did not allow choice; it demanded reasoning. Thus, a better way to phrase the “voodoo” statement would be this: “If reasoning guides me to say C, then, as I am no different from anyone else as far as rational thinking is concerned, it will guide everyone to say C.””

As a philosophical matter it seems nice but not as science. A logical truth is 100% true in all situations, right? That can exist, the problem is, how can you know that? Have you been in all of those possible situations and if you haven't, how can you claim it's a logical truth?