Jews are religious believers too. At least the ones who are not atheists.
Rumor has it that there are more atheist Jews in Israel than religious Jews.
And thank G-d Jews in the US aren’t allowed to vote.
Sabbath for Skeptics
571
A=A
and always = A and only a TSZ “nihilist” .would deny it, says Barry Arrington.
A=A is infallibly, necessarily true
What does this claim even mean? That something denoted by A is identical to something else also denoted by A? Clearly not.
That if we devise a system of logic in which we declare that A always equals A , A must always equal A? Well, duh.
That the only possible logic system is one in which A is always equal to A? Well, no – fuzzy logic is a very useful logic system, and A is sometimes only approximately equal to A, or may equal A if it passes some threshold of probability of being A.
So what does he even mean? Is his claim even coherent?
Through a glass darkly?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-7zYBKgzfs
For discussion 🙂
Coyne hoodwinked and duped
Jerry Coyne represents himself as the epitome of science, reason and critical thinking. But “Dr. Reason” or shall we say “Dr. EvolutionIsTrue” often ends up as the butt of jokes and sarcasm in the ID community.
He got hoodwinked recently. He was pranked into believing a particular internet account was real and then started quoting from it to support his arguments. Turned out his evidence was from a faked source. Finally someone intervened to stop Coyne from making anymore a joke of himself. Coyne was forced to make a retraction:
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/09/06/more-twier-hilarity/
Continue reading
Monday School for Skeptics
If you want to present any real challenge to Jews and Christians, by which I mean a challenge that ought to be taken seriously, please consider that Jews and Christians just don’t accept your demands for a literal interpretation of every verse in the Bible.
Figures of speech used in the Bible, explained and illustrated
For 99 literal cents it can be yours.
Presuppositions of Science
Given recent posts here at TSZ challenging the validity of presuppositions and self-evident truths I thought the following list might be worthy of debate.
Presuppositions of Science
1. The existence of a theory-independent, external world
2. The orderly nature of the external world
3. The knowability of the external world
4. The existence of truth
5. The laws of logic
6. The reliability of our cognitive and sensory faculties to serve as truth gatherers and as a source of justified true beliefs in our intellectual environment
7. The adequacy of language to describe the world
8. The existence of values used in science
9. The uniformity of nature and induction
10. The existence of numbers
When critics object to the Logos as a presupposition and offer instead 10 other presuppositions, Ockham’s Razor flies out the window.
One if by Land, Woo if by Sea
This is the teaser for my crowdfunding campaign at http://www.gofundme.com/ss29jrfk. I’d very much appreciate your support, whether that means a donation, advice, or sharing the link. Any or all of those would be appreciated! And great big thanks to TSZ and its gracious host for letting me share it here.
Do you believe in acupuncture, alien abductions, ancient aliens, chi, crop circles, entity possession, “forbidden archaeology” or “forbidden religion,” homeopathy, near-death experiences, occult Nazi super-weapons, planet x, poisoned vaccines, spiritual channeling, the new world order, or illegal immigrants from Zeta Reticuli? Do you go to bed worrying about the New World Order, the Vatican, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, NASA, the WHO, the CDC, the UN, space aliens and/or demons conspiring against you and all right-thinking people? And are you convinced that the world is ruled from the Bohemian Grove, a secret bunker under the Denver airport, Bilderberg meetings, the Council on Foreign Relations, Buckingham Palace, alien worlds or other dimensions?
Probably not. But thousands of people do believe those things, and other things stranger than you can imagine. This January, dozens of experts these fields will gather together on a cruise ship called the Ruby Princess. It’s called, honestly and cleverly enough, the Conspira-Sea Cruise. They’ll spend seven days explaining, discussing, and even demonstrating their beliefs. Some of them are fairly famous, like Andy Wakefield and Sherri Tenpenny, who will be sharing their theories on vaccines. Others are relatively obscure, like Laura Magdalene Eisenhower, great-granddaughter of the former president, who claims to have been recruited for a secret Mars colonization effort and that stargates began opening around the Earth in 2012. For a full week, conspiracy theorists, dreamers, and snake-oil salesmen of every stripe will be preaching and peddling their wares.
I want to be there.
What is obvious to Granville Sewell
Granville Sewell, who needs no introduction here, is at it again. In a post at Uncommon Descent he imagines a case where a mathematician finds that looking at his problem from a different angle shows that his theorem must be wrong. Then he imagines talking to a biologist who thinks that an Intelligent Design argument is wrong. He then says to the biologist:
“So you believe that four fundamental, unintelligent forces of physics alone can rearrange the fundamental particles of physics into Apple iPhones and nuclear power plants?” I asked. “Well, I guess so, what’s your point?” he replied. “When you look at things from that point of view, it’s pretty obvious there must be an error somewhere in your theory, don’t you think?” I said.
As he usually does, Sewell seems to have forgotten to turn comments on for his post at UD. Is it “obvious” that life cannot originate? That it cannot evolve descendants, some of which are intelligent? That these descendants cannot then build Apple iPhones and nuclear power plants?
As long as we’re talking about whether some things are self-evident, we can also discuss whether this is “pretty obvious”. Discuss it here, if not at UD. Sewell is of course welcome to join in.
If God told you to kill a baby, would that be self-evidently immoral?
kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.
God,
1 Samuel 15:3If God told you to kill a baby, would that be self-evidently moral or immoral?
Moral of the story. Self-evident morality is not something IDists should be wasting print on. It doesn’t serve the Intelligent Design community.
Can one infallibly detect self-evident truths?
There’s been an interesting conversation at UD over self-evident truths lately. I think I’ve run up against the Uncommon Descent policy on dissent (don’t dissent), and the whole thing has devolved into “we are right” and “they are liars and also dumb.” But the underlying conversation was interesting, and I’d like to get some outside opinions on it. Especially KN, or anyone else with actual training in philosophy. I’m going to number positions for the sake of convenience, so that people with an opinion can react to any that interest them without feeling the need to engage them all. I’d love to hear where I’m wrong.
So as to my position:
- I make mistakes. I know this as certainly as I know anything—certainly enough not to doubt it in practice. This shows that I do not have the ability to perfectly perceive error in my own thinking.
- I cannot therefore be logically, absolutely certain of anything—not even that A=A. Because the faculties I would use to be perfectly, logically certain of that are the same ones that are not perfect.
- I think the trickiest question here is whether I can be certain that “I think, therefore I am.” But even there, is the fact that I cannot imagine any counter-example because it’s perfectly true, or because I have an imperfect and limited mind? I can’t know without a perfect, limitless mind, so I have to say even here, it’s not logically absolutely certain. (But obviously practically certain, and I don’t doubt it in practice.)
Does that make sense?
Now as to StephenB and Barry Arrington’s position.
- I think one major motivator of the “you’re a liar!” style of debate they’ve adopted is community identification. I’ve been thinking of this as building a wall. The point of the conversation is largely, not entirely, to show that “we think like this:” and “they think like that:”, or more pointedly, “look how stupid and ugly they are.” It makes it very easy to avoid questioning beliefs, because we cling particularly to those notions that separate us from them. It identifies and strengthens the community of us by redefining it in opposition to the ugliness and stupidity of them. And once that wall is built, it’s extremely hard to dismantle. Why on earth would you stop and seriously consider something a stupid and dishonest person says? And what would it say about you if you agreed with them? The wall exists to separate.
- This is not to say their positions are dishonest—I think they’re very upfront with their beliefs, and mean what they say.
- I think this is demonstrated particularly by BA’s habit of bailing out of a conversation and posting a new thread that very explicitly says look at how stupid and ugly those people are!
- I think I’m doing the same thing right now. I think that wall-building is wrong, but I don’t know how not to do it—especially as observing that someone else is building a wall is as good as laying a brick in your own.
- I can try to fight back against that by observing that walls exist to keep people in as well as out; the point is largely to have a bulwark against having to reconsider one’s beliefs and identity. So it’s important to ask, “Am I wrong?” Which I’m doing here, and attempting with some success to do in my own head.
Miracles are a Glaring Problem for Evolution, and Here’s Why
The movement against miracles was, not surprisingly, influential in the natural sciences. Simply put, if we’re not to appeal to miracles, then the world must have arisen naturalistically. This had a profound effect on the critical thinking, or lack thereof, of the time. Speculative hypotheses, with little basis in fact, enjoyed serious consideration and triumphant acceptance.
The bar was placed exceedingly low for such theories as pure conjecture became acceptable and celebrated science. Monumental scientific problems with the notion of spontaneous origins went ignored and evolutionary theories (from cosmological to biological) soon became “fact.”
Today strictly naturalistic, evolutionary, theories are a given. They simply are accepted as true, or as true as anything in science can be. And it also is a given that miracles are false. But what evolutionists prefer to overlook is that there is a causal relationship here. The latter made way for, and mandated, the former.
http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2015/06/miracles-are-glaring-problem-for.html?m=1
I don’t want to mischaracterize Intelligent Design, but…
The Varieties of Religious Language
Kantian Naturalist and I have been hopscotching from thread to thread, discussing the nature of religious language. The main point of contention is the assertoric/disclosive distinction: When is religious language assertoric — that is, when does it make claims about reality — and when is it merely disclosive, revealing attitude and affect without making actual claims?
I’ve created this thread as a permanent home for this otherwise nomadic discussion.
It may also be a good place for an ongoing discussion of another form of religious language — scripture. For believers who take scripture to be divinely inspired, the question is when it should be taken literally, when it should be taken figuratively or metaphorically, and whether there are consistent and justifiable criteria for drawing that distinction.
Non-Evolution of Stop Codons
Here is one reason I don’t think life as we know it is the result of ordinary processes.
Continue reading
The Grand Inquisitor
A thread for keiths where he can ask all the questions he likes and go on undisturbed in his soliloquy while the rest of us remain silent.
*kiss*
Munging Hell
I am one of those Christians who underwent a true “born again” experience. Surely the absolute worst kind of Christian. I had a life-changing experience that fundamentally changed the sort of person I was. You’re not going to de-convert me so please stop trying.
Are You Human?
You’ll need to watch the video to find out.
Or you could come up with a darwinian explanation for the squid/bacteria system if you feel up to it.
Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716
We conducted replications of 100 experimental and correlational studies published in three psychology journals using high-powered designs and original materials when available.
…
Ninety-seven percent of original studies had significant results (P < .05). Thirty-six percent of replications had significant results;
…
No single indicator sufficiently describes replication success, and the five indicators examined here are not the only ways to evaluate reproducibility. Nonetheless, collectively these results offer a clear conclusion: A large portion of replications produced weaker evidence for the original findings despite using materials provided by the original authors, review in advance for methodological fidelity, and high statistical power to detect the original effect sizes. Moreover, correlational evidence is consistent with the conclusion that variation in the strength of initial evidence (such as original P value) was more predictive of replication success than variation in the characteristics of the teams conducting the research (such as experience and expertise).
Consciousness isn’t all about you, you know
In an interesting article by Peter Halligan and David Oakley in NewScientist it is suggested that even if
consciousness occurs too late [in the process of a human action] to affect the outcomes of the mental processes apparently linked to it…it provides an evolutionary advantage that developed for the benefit of the social group, not the individual.
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/280979559_Consciousness_isnt_all_about_you_you_know
I’m curious to get the thoughts of those here on this suggestion.
Some things are not so simple
I have been distracted for months but I thought I would look in on UD to see if anything had changed. All is much the same but I was struck by this OP from Barry. The thrust of the post is that Barry is a plain-speaking chap stating obvious ethical truths and anyone denying it is using sophistry and is evil. The particular “obvious truth” that Barry is discussing is:
Anyone who cannot unambiguously condemn the practice of chopping little boys and girls up and selling the pieces like so much meat shares in the evil of those who do so.
I would argue that this gives the appearance of simplicity but hides considerable complexity and subtlety. It also illustrates how Barry, like everyone else, is actually a subjectivist in practice, whatever he might say in theory.
There is one obvious way in which this is statement is too simple. It leaves out whether the little boys and girls are alive or dead. Most people find it morally acceptable to reuse organs from people (including babies and infants) who have recently died.
But also the statement is packed with emotional use of language. (Throughout this I assume Barry is referring to the practice of using parts of aborted foetuses for research and/or treatment and charging for providing those parts).
1) “Meat” suggests flesh that is to be eaten. I don’t think anyone is selling foetuses to go into meat pies.
2) “Chopping up”. Body parts from foetuses presumably have to be extracted very carefully under controlled conditions to be useful. To describe this as chopping up is technically accurate but again has connotations of a butcher.
3) “Little boys and girls”. By describing a foetus as a little boy or girl, Barry appeals to our emotional response to little boys and girls that we meet, embrace and talk to.
4) “selling” suggests a product which is being produced, stocked and sold with the objective of creating a profit. It would indeed be shocking if organisations were deliberately getting mothers to abort so they could make a profit from selling the body parts. If you describe the same activity as covering the cost of extracting and preserving body parts of reuse it sounds quite different (the cost has to be recovered somehow or it would never happen).
What interests me is how Barry has chosen words for their emotional impact to make an ethical argument. If it had been described as:
Reusing parts of aborted foetuses for research and/or treatment and charging for providing those parts.
then it sounds a lot more morally acceptable than
chopping little boys and girls up and selling the pieces like so much meat
If morality were objective then it shouldn’t matter how you describe it. It is just a matter of observation and/or deduction – like working out the temperature on the surface of Mars. But ethics is actually a matter of our emotional responses so Barry has to use emotional language to make his point.
Questions for Christians and other theists, part 6: Hell
A question for those of you who believe in an omnibenevolent God but also in hell: How do you reconcile the two?
Some believers invoke the “free will defense”, but this makes no sense to me. It seems that God could easily save everyone, sending no one to hell, without violating anyone’s free will. Here’s how I described it recently:
It’s similar to a technique I’ve described in the past whereby God could have created a perfect world sans evil without violating anyone’s free will.
Here’s how it works:
1. Before creating each soul, God employs his omniscience to look forward in time and see whether that soul, if created, would freely accept him and go to heaven or freely reject him and go to hell.
2. If the former, God goes ahead and creates that soul. If the latter, then he doesn’t, choosing instead to create a different soul that will freely accept him and go to heaven.
Simple, isn’t it? Any omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent God could easily come up with something like this or better, rather than sending billions of souls to hell with no chance of a reprieve.
Theists, how do you respond?