Topic: Why do Atheists Hate Religion? - page 411. (Read 901367 times)

Possibly. BADecker is on some thing about how all you have to do is challenge the jurisdiction of the court by telling them to define certain magic words and then you COMMON LAW VICTORY WIN or something wholly ridiculous. (While I am intentionally making it sound dumb, ask him for the official logic of it, and then you'll see my intentional misrepresentation isn't actually more absurd, and has the added benefit of humor, whereas the people who believe they have discovered a magic 'get out of jail free card' are entirely serious.)

The margin-of-error can only be calculated based upon the number of trials.  If I've been alive for 3,000 days and the sun hasn't exploded yet, then based upon 3,000 "trials" I can predict with very high statistical confidence that the sun will not explode tomorrow due to a very small margin-of-error.  Of course, that confidence does no good if the sun goes nova tomorrow.  The margin-of-error exists specifically because you always have access to a limited data set.  The margin-of-error could be eliminated completely if you somehow had knowledge of all trials that ever were, are, and ever will be, but obviously we don't have this ability.

And correct, mathematical proofs are fully abstract, internally consistent, and (at least) to that extent, sound.  Whether or not (and how) they actually apply to physical reality is another issue.  But regardless, they constitute 'a priori' knowledge and are knowable at a 100% level of confidence, without any margin-of-error.


Yes, your understanding is basically correct, and also correct about the "perfect machine."  Sensory technology seems to function as a 2nd-order observer.  In the double-slit experiment of quantum mechanics, the suggestive collapse of the wave function occurred in the presence of both human and technological observers.

Your question about whether Intelligent Design is the "necessary" mechanism by which reality is created/defined is fantastic.  You are correct to imply that conclusion didn't necessarily follow.

The best model one can theoretically come up with to explain something must meet a few criteria:  It must 1) Be internally consistent, 2) Comprehensively and soundly explain all information it attempts to do so, and 3) Introduce the fewest number of assumptions, ideally zero.  Falsification of the model can happen on two levels.  At a lower level, the model can be rendered internally invalid if new information is introduced which should be explained by it, but isn't.  At a higher level, the model can be rendered externally invalid if another model, which is broader in its scope, not only explains all information in the original model, but synthesizes this knowledge with other information unexplained by the original model (the result being a deeper understanding which predicates any topological understanding).

That being said, could reality have "always existed," independent of metrics?  From an empirical perspective, maybe, but there's no possible way to know without introducing some unnecessary assumptions.  This actually gets right back to the Positivistic Universe assumption, as your question yields to the same impossible means of empirical falsification, i.e. you would need to somehow collect metric data via observation in a Universe totally void of observers and metrics.  What we do know, however, is that the data suggest that in 100% of cases where reality has been affirmed to exist, perception and metrics were present, and in exactly 0 cases has reality been affirmed to exist in the absence of perception and metrics.  That's why the Positivistic Universe assumption exists in the first place; it's as practical to adhere to this assumption as it is to assume the sun won't go nova tomorrow.

From a philosophical perspective, no lol, reality could not have existed independent of metrics.  One reason is we have the sameness-in-difference tautology of logic to turn to, which states that all relational entities must necessarily reduce to a common medium.  Because what is real and unreal are relational entities, it follows they, too, reduce to a common medium.  Metrics axiomatically create the distinction between real and unreal according to a simple difference metric (i.e. 1 vs. 0).  No metric --> no distinction between what's real and unreal.

Your link leads nowhere
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I guess you pretty much don't know. And by your arrogance it is easy to guess that you don't know much overall

" The manipulation by scientists is all cause and effect by scientists, and it might appear to create effect before cause. Things in nature don't work that way."[/i], Go look into quantum physics.

Okay, point taken. I won't speak to him on this thread anymore.

Your link leads nowhere
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I guess you pretty much don't know. And by your arrogance it is easy to guess that you don't know much overall

Your explanations have little behind them. The things that are true regarding your explanations, have a whole lot of scientific manipulation regarding them. The manipulation by scientists is all cause and effect by scientists, and it might appear to create effect before cause. Things in nature don't work that way.

The thread went completely the wrong path once you've started answering to BADecker.

Except that on a subatomic level, cause and effect works differently, there might not even be a cause. And all of that is irreleavnt, that's your view that because things are organized, then an "intelligent designer" must have designed it. That makes no sense as you can look at it in a multitude of ways(There being no "intelligent designer", everything happening by "chance"/coincidence, the math behind it, etc). That's why you can't use science to prove or disprove god.

So everything you've said there is irrelevant and proves nothing, to make it simple.

The dedicated scientist looks for two things. First he looks for something that happened. Then he looks for why/how.

Just to be a scientist, a scientist looks for cause and effect, even though he does it in reverse order, effect first. Once he finds the cause (he had already found the effect), then he turns the cause into another effect in his mind, and looks for the thing that caused it. This is the basic way scientific investigation operates.

The greater a scientist is, the more he looks for cause and effect.

The dreamer looks for what he wishes would exist. The dreamer dives into his science fiction.

Real science has even predicted and found organization in the pandemonium of an atomic blast. This organization involves the way matter and energy act upon each other inside the blast. There is no disorder. There is only extreme complexity. Everything operates by cause and effect in an atomic blast, even though there are countless trillions of causes that turn into reactions, reactions that themselves become causes that act on other "things" and turn them into reactions, that only become further causes, etc.

There is intelligent design in it all. This indicates Intelligent Designer, and when you have an Intelligent Designer that can design something this great, It falls into the classification of God.

Religion trails after science. So if science knows very little about the basics, then those religions know absolutely nothing at all.

Some of this is correct.

We don't know as fact where the universe came from.
We don't know as fact regarding how it came into being.
We also know that we are also tied to cause and effect in everything so that true random essentially doesn't exist.
We know that people's minds and thoughts are products of the causation of cause and effect.
We know by observation of how everything operates that everything is intelligently designed.
We know that stuff doesn't appear out of nowhere without a cause.

In other words, science knows very little about the basics. But what it DOES know suggests that there is an Intelligent Designer.

Scientific evidence is to Religious beliefs what Magellan's then theory that the Earth isn't flat to the Church's previous belief that it was.
(Point is that common beliefs in religions tend to change slowly throughout time simply with the gain of knowledge thanks to science, partly showing the falseness of such religions)

Yes!

The whole realm of scientific evidence includes a whole lot of theory (fiction) right along with the things that are literally fact.

We need to see the actual proof in all directions, so we can sift out what the real and true fact is.

I guess, you should at first prove that "scientists" (and not some brain-dead journalists) actually claimed something to the effect that "more than 2 billion [DNA entries] are junk" (rather than showing "superiority", wtf)...

What credentials do you have so that you can disprove the claims of other scientists? Rather than showing "superiority" how about actually posting references? Thank you.

I guess, you should at first prove that "scientists" (and not some brain-dead journalists) actually claimed something to the effect that "more than 2 billion [DNA entries] are junk"

So many people are doing the same logical fallacy (so called round-trip fallacy) again and again. If you don't understand something, it doesn't mean it is meaningless (still less junk). In short, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence...

This pertains to the original post as well (that about Mycoplasma)

No problem, and good clarification. I think the problem that bugs me the most, is that this "margin-of-error" attached to conclusions derived from the Scientific Method is inherently impossible to calculate (as far as I can tell).

I agree that certain things can be proven absolutely, I suppose certain mathematical proofs would be examples of a priori knowledge, and could be proven logically with no need for inductive reasoning? When I said "nothing can ever be proven" I meant things based on inductive reasoning (lazy writing from me).

This is interesting stuff. I'd be lying if I said I understood it all, but I would like to question your final point.

I think I agree on everything up to that. If I'm understanding correctly, metrics are inherently abstract because they rely on perception to exist. Even if you had a perfect machine which used the binary metric to ask whether something existed or not, the result must be perceived by a "mind", so even this binary metric is abstract.

On to your last paragraph. Now, I agree that "metrics are self-descriptively invoked by an intelligent mind, and that all real definition is a product of these metrics", but why should that mean that "Intelligent Design is the necessary mechanism by which reality is created/defined."?

Why is it not possible that, for example, reality always existed, and the metrics that we use to define it are of our own making? Or in other words, why should our logical definition of reality have anything to do with how it was created? Just because we need metrics to understand reality, why does that mean that said reality has to have an Intelligent Designer using the same metrics?

(sorry, finding it hard to explain myself...  )