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So to be clear, you've made a claim regarding Charles Darwin, with no evidence to support it what so ever.
Furthermore, you've never read his actual autobiography? Nor works like Descent of Man.
Utter, utter, utter bollocks.
A nice argument from ignorance.
Please don't mind me. Carry on.
Attachments
Attach Image/Video?:
"Please don't mind me. Carry on."
No one ever has, nor will they I suspect, as long as this vapid point scoring is all you have.
Run along now, adults are trying to talk.
well if adults are trying to talk, that might leavve you out too. By the way, contrary to some recent baloney of yours here is some links to the Method of Doubt.
https://www.google.ca/search?client=opera&q=method+of+doubt&sourceid=ope...
You certainly have confidence, so you have potential, but little substance to your ramblings so far. Are you going to realize your potential or just love your own bombast and blather?
" here is some links to the Method of Doubt."
Are some links, links being plural you see.
"Are you going to realize your potential or just love your own bombast and blather?"
Wow, I stand corrected, you may be capable of introspection after all. Sadly it seems basic punctuation is always going to be beyond your grasp.
Again if you have read, let alone understood, anything by Descartes I will turn my laptop into a sandwich.
Says the guy who doesn't correctly describe what delusion is, how Dawkins presents it and what the actual crux of his claim is...
Again, utter bollocks!
Summing up some items:
1. Darwin an atheist? As noted above, Darwin never said he was an atheist, so you can't concluded he was. Plenty of evidence he matured and changed his views about the Bible, a comforting development, but that doesn't make him an atheist.
2. Definition of delusion: atheists seem to prefer the definition where a false belief could be true. Of course I don't accept that as it is irrational, so I guess we won't agree on that. Your preferred definition seems to make the "god Delusion" and exercise in futility.
3. Dawkins' "God hypothesis" isn't falsifiable, so doesn't seem to fall inside Popper's boundaries for science. Popper's falsifiability principle puts Dawkins "God Hypothesis" in the realm of pseudoscience. It doesn't make sense to formulate a hypothesis for something that is not falsifiable.
1. Why are you obsessed with Darwin's religious views? Hitler was a christian, I never see theists trying to champion this fact? unlike Hitler who remained a believer to the end, Darwin certainly stopped believing before died, and on at least one occasion said so, in a letter which recently came up for auction, and I posted a link to an article explaining this, so you're a liar as well.
2. Delusion
noun
an idiosyncratic belief or impression maintained despite being contradicted by reality or rational argument, typically as a symptom of mental disorder.
No one is interested in your puerile semantics, the dictionary definition will do just fine.
3."It doesn't make sense to formulate a hypothesis for something that is not falsifiable."
How fucking hilarious is that, from someone who believes a deity exists. but can demonstrate no evidence for it. You still haven't cited the chapter and page from TGD where you claim RD stated science could examine unfalsifiable claims, I think you lied.
What "god hypothesis" are you claiming RD has formulated? I think this is another dishonest claim you have made up. In TGD RD stated that where religions made claims their deity interfered in the physical world, then these were falsifiable, and could be tested by science, as of course they have for things such as intercessory prayer, and of course the research showed that intercessory prayer had no discernible effect. So a perfect example of what RD claimed in action.
What objective evidence can you demonstrate that any deity exists? Your BS about RD is entertaining, but it is too obvious a smokescreen to avoid answering my question.
Summing up your lack of rational thinking:
1.Darwin openly described himself as agnostic and that as he was progressing in age he would fluctuate between that and atheism.
Either way, he was not convinced by the god hypothesis.
You could at the very least read his literature and his personal biography and letters, but your appear to be too lazy to do so.
Regardless, His worldview does not make any difference to the work of Richard Dawkins in this particular instance.
2. In the God Delusion, Dawkins offers a very concise pair of competing hypotheses:
a) The hypothesis that requires a creator, that does not account for natural phenomena and is extremely complex.
b) The naturalistic hypothesis, which is supported by vast amounts of evidence, has testable theories supporting them, as well as being far more elegant and simple (this plays in to Occam's razor).
Again, it is plainly evident that you have not truly read the material.
Furthermore, I doubt any atheistic literature has truly 'converted' any atheist, and that there decisions were based on a multitude of rational reasons.
3. The actual definition of delusion is, "An idiosyncratic belief or impression maintained despite being contradicted by reality or rational argument, typically as a symptom of mental disorder. That is according to the Oxford dictionary.
So where is Dawkins wrong? The god hypothesis does not account for any natural phenomena in the entire cosmos.
Theists hold a belief that has no evidence to support it, requires the laws of nature to be suspended in order for it to make sense,
and we could go on and on with all the irrational garbage that surrounds the myth.
But still, you will all believe, and that appears to be quite delusional.
3,
According to physics, the universe began with the Big Bang. That leaves three possiblites on the origin of material, namely
1. Material created itself.
2. Material always existed
3. God created it.
Naturalism implies it has to be either 1, or 2. Those who believe in Naturalism also imply, at least on this forum, 'We know for sure it was either 1 or 2 due to .....? due to what? You can't know what happend prior to the Big Bang. None knows what precititated it. Naturalism assumes it it was 1, or 2. "Assume" means its unproven, ergo, Naturalism is a faith.
Belief in a creator God comports well with the Big Bang. Belief in the Big Bang, and Belief in a creator God are rationally coherent beliefs. Beilef in a creator God is a faith that is rationally coherent with the current theories of physics.
What I am not claiming:
I'm not against atheism. I don't care if you are an atheist. I'm a pluralist. You don't seem to be aware that the USA, and other democraatic nations were founded partly on principles of pluraism. And interestingly, all of the founding fathers of the USA were theists of some sort or other, yet they promoted freedom of religion. That means, in part, atheists are free to have Faith in Naturalism if they want.
What I am arguing against:
Atheists are science based and so couldn't possibly be mistaken about anything. After all, science is emperical and objective. Case closed. When questioned Atheists invariably but vaguely talk about "evidence", and in doing so reveal themsleves as believeing in a defunct, kaput epistomology relating to thse guys: -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism
Evidence-cum-linear reasoning from the base failed a long time ago. Its over. Abandoned. It doesn't work. Its a relic in the history of epistomology. The empericist foundationalist tried to eliminate belief from fact and failed. One result is, people can believe what they want, including atheists.
Given the demise of "evidence" based foundationaist theories, epistomology turned to the coherence theory of knowledge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherence_theory_of_truth
Apparently, Dawkins has some of you convinced that research into prayer showed it didn't work, therefore we know there is no creator God. Its flawed. He is trying to extrapolate from that to what did or didn't happen prior to the creation of the universe. But all he is really showing is that their beliefs about what prayer can achieve is dubious. he is challenging their beliefs about prayer, not the existance of God.
"According to physics, the universe began with the Big Bang. "
Wrong, and I'd bet a years salary you don't have a clue why, because I'd bet another years salary you're simply parroting another cliche of apologetics, that you don't remotely understand.
You're funny.
Confident however, so you show potential.
I'll join in that bet from Sheldon.
Reference Link
Except I shall raise that bet to two years salary.
Now please explain why you are WRONG.
rmfr
"Dawkins has some of you convinced that research into prayer showed it didn't work, "
You really are obsessed with RD? The research had nothing to do with RD.
"Prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery, a large and long-awaited study has found."
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/health/31pray.html
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Three years ago, a multi-million-dollar, controlled, double-blind study was conducted to test intercessory prayer.
The Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) found two major results:
1) “Intercessory prayer had no effect on recovery from surgery without complications.”
2) “Patients who knew they were receiving intercessory prayer fared worse.”"
http://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2009/05/15/study-concludes-intercesso...
-----------------------------------------------------------------
"Seeking to assess the effect of third-party prayer on patient outcomes, investigators found no evidence for divine intervention. They did, however, detect a possible proof for the power of negative thinking.
The three-year Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP), published in the April 4 American Heart Journal, was the largest-ever attempt to apply scientific methods to measure the influence of prayer on the well-being of another. It examined 1,800 patients "
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/no-prayer-prescription/
Of course just like you, theists and apologists deny the facts, sadly evidence will never dent the delusional faith of the gullible.
****NB PROFESSOR DAWKINS WAS NOT REMOTELY INVOLVED IN ANY OF THESE STUDIES - SO APOLLO LIED, AGAIN.*****
1. Thats bollocks, The universe did not start with the big bang, it is the point at which the universe expanded from a hot, dense state... with low entropy.
2. You've literally played the god of the gaps card, you could say: a) the universe was a steady state before hand or b) it came from almost nothingness, but at no point does it logically lead to "oh well it must have been my invisible cosmic mage!!!!"
That is essentially you in court after being presented with the options:
A) Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK
B) something else killed JFK
You jump up and say, "It was The Predator!"
Bollocks again, you're on a role sunshine!
Naturalism simply offers the premise that everything functions within the laws and forces operate in the world.
As a model, it is superb and has the weight of everything we've experienced as a species to support it.
Everything can be traced via naturalistic phenomena.
You're right about this!
Haha I'm kidding.... this too is bollocks.
Naturalism literally would just tell you that whatever the route to the answer, it will have a natural explanation and not need some beardy magic prick who can't find his own kids, to be a part of the process.
Atheists don't need to have faith in naturalism, as it is not a belief structure.
It is a model that explains everything perfectly fine within the natural world.
The fact it has so much evidence to support, makes it acceptable to a rational and logical mind.
Perhaps, because every claim a theist makes has been utterly refuted and crushed by science?!
These days the only weapons that are available in a theists arsenal are, Logical arguments (which tend to be shit, like Matt Slick who got destroyed in about 5 mins by an actual expert in logic called Alex Malpass), Arguement from ignorance and/or incredulity and essentially making shit up in order to deny science (Ken Ham for instance).
Theism is so poorly defined, even you lot can't definitively decide on what the bible is (just a story? A document in accordance to science?, a historical document? Literal truth? It goes on and on...) you can't get an accurate definition from any group of religious people on what God is? Or The Bible or Jesus for that matter.
It's total and utter bollocks.
Boooooooolllloooooockssss! Dear oh dear...
This is hysterical! PMSL!
It's called, just being a good Bayesian! The preponderance of evidence supports the claim that praying does fuck all.
Hope has a better shot! We are all hoping you'll post something relatively cogent, but no... Just more bollocks.
Your ignorance and lack of knowledge is shocking.
1. Possibly
2. Possibly
3. Prove it
No it does not, it simply demonstrates how everything in the cosmos since spacetime begun has a natural rationale, reasoning, logical explanation, and to the best of anyone's knowledge, this appears to be the case.
Naturalism is by no means a faith, your lack of knowledge again is staggering!
It is a model that is supported by the preponderance of evidence, something your faith is devoid of.
For example, let me ask you, what is more important to all life on earth.
God or Oxygen?
Strange that you God is necessary and powerful, but it so unimportant it beggars belief.
Please, please, please, evidence this! or just explain how?
Just against reason, logic, rationality, critical thinking and basic facts.
I am done, I should have stopped earlier considering how massively wrong your opening salvo was.
Sheldon,
1. Hitler. Reportedly, the Nazi's murdered 30 Catholic priests early in the war. After that the Pope supported and was engaged in plots to assassinate Hitler. Similarily, Bonhoffer a Lutheren was invovled in attempts to assassinate him. Reportedly, he has some association with catholics as a child, but I have no evidence he was a Christian as an adult. Anyway, What does Hitler got to do with it?
Many of the greats in the history of science were theists Kepler, Copernicus, Newton, Darwin. Atheists often talk to me as if only athiests can be scientists, and atheism is science based.
2. Delusional: You thought doubt wasn't a method. Were you delusional because you had that false belief? There is more than one dictionary definition, but you pick the convoluted one. Delusional is much worse than a mistaken belief, and I don't thing the definion really captures it.
3. God hypothesis: "The proposed existence of this interventionist God, which Dawkins calls the "God Hypothesis", becomes an important theme in the book.[15] He maintains that the existence or non-existence of God is a scientific fact about the universe, which is discoverable in principle if not in practice.[16]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_Delusion#"God_hypothesis"
yes, in the example you gave of intercessory prayer, I believe you and he have a point. No arguement there. I know some people who are big into "faith healing" and insist they have cured eveything from cancer to gays. so I said why don't you go to the local hospital on Sunday, pray ion the behalf of the sick, heal every one, and on Monday all the doctors will come to work and be amazed while dischargeing every one. They got very very angry at me. I am now certified demon posessed. (They are funny). God didn't invent prayer, it was invented by falible humans. So when research into it shows no difference, it proves that the humans who used it were mistaken about its meaning or import. It doesn't prove God didn't create the universe, which is, I think, but I'm not sure, Dawkins' point. I believe God created all the natural processes, so God is always at work in the universe. When Dawkins studies some natural process, he is studying Gods work. Dawkins is welcome to his personal belief in the metaphysics of Naturalism. That's his faith. I hope he doen't get the right to impose his faith on others.
So I got Fundy's claiming they are infalable because they read the Bible,and pray to get infalible messages from God on the one hand, and I got atheists claiming infalible objective science proves what happened or didn't happen before the big bang.
"The Reichskonkordat ("Concordat between the Holy See and the German Reich"[1]) is a treaty negotiated between the Vatican and the emergent Nazi Germany. It was signed on 20 July 1933 by Cardinal Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli, who later became Pope Pius XII, on behalf of Pope Pius XI and Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen on behalf of President Paul von Hindenburg and the German government. It was ratified September 10, 1933 and it has been in force from that date onward. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichskonkordat
You're talking through your arse, again. The real hilarity is the way you manage to work Professor Dawkins's name into every post, talk about an obsessed chippy theist, hilarious.
" I got atheists claiming infalible objective science proves what happened or didn't happen before the big bang."
I'm not sure which is funnier, the fact you can't spell infallible, or the pathetic lies in your piss poor trolling.
Hitler had a treaty with the Vatican, so he's a christian according to sheldon.
Hitler hasd a treaty with Stalin, so he is a atheist communist according to Sheldon's reasoning.
@ Apollo
Talk about delusional...
rmfr
@ Apollo
You do talk a lot of bollocks don't you?
I'm with Sheldon here, you must be a troll or remarkably dense.
You avoid questions (like all theists) when you realise that to answer exposes your arrogance or otherwise complete wrong headed idea.
You resort to ad hominem fallacy when facts are published that deny your assertions.
Straw men abound in almost every post.
Sheesh.
"Hitler had a treaty with the Vatican, so he's a christian according to sheldon."
I can't tell whether this is outright mendacity, or rank stupidity, or both of course. However I never remotely claimed nor even implied the shameful and blood drenched concordat that the Vatican formed with Nazism proved Hitler was a christian.
"Hitler hasd a treaty with Stalin, so he is a atheist communist according to Sheldon's reasoning."
Well I'm happy for others to decide for themselves if I said any such thing, but this display of idiotic duplicity from you tells us a great deal about the depths a theists will sink to when their superstitious guff is challenged.
I mentioned the concordat for two reason:
1. It was a disgraceful attempt by the RCC to preserve itself by surrendering to the appalling and barbaric Nazis regime, and again shows that the RCC has no sense of morality at all. the fact a few priests broke rank and fought against Nazism is a credit to them, but doesn't change the repulsive self interest of the RCC, the same RCC we now see have been protecting paedophile priests from justice for centuries without giving their child victims a second thought.
2. To expose your lie that Nazism and Hitler were atheistic. The SS had gott mit uns - god with us, inscribed on their belt buckles and all SS recruits had to be christian, no one else was allowed into their ranks in Germany, and they had to take their oath to Hitler "before god" which would be a bizarre thing for an atheist to do, but an even more bizarre thing for an atheist to demand.
As for Hitler, he claimed himself, throughout his entire life to be both a christian and a catholic, even right at the end when all political mileage he might have derived from it was long gone. Hitler claimed to be "doing god's work" in Mein Kampf, and of course it would take an astonishing level of ignorance and or stupidity to not know that his antisemitism was derived from centuries of European Christian antisemitism, and most of it approved by the Vatican. The fact that a few priests broke rank and showed some moral courage doesn't change the facts, or make the RCC's shameless concordat any less repulsive.
Throughout his life in christian churches throughout Germany, Hitler's birthday was celebrated in a special mass. This only stopped when he died and the war over. In a meticulous census conducted in 1939, over 94% of Germans identified as christian, and we all know how badly other religious demographics fared in the years that followed.
Over all I must say you seem to be one of the most ignorant ill-informed theists who has posted on here. There seems to be no topic on which you can't make a fool of yourself.
I still don't appreciate your lies through, so do deist, or else my patience might be tested too far.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_persecution_of_the_Catholic_Church_in...
Nazi persecution of Catholics.
So what, christians have been persecuting each other for centuries. This doesn't make them atheists, only a moron would think it would.
I don't believe theists are delusional. I take care of mentally ill people who suffer from delusions. I will not eqjate their psychological distress with the kinds of bullshit that religious people perpetuate. Antipsychotic medications can help mentally ill people quell these troubling and disabling thoughts but have no effect on religious beliefs.
Similarily, medications don't help atheists who believe they know what happened or didn't happen prior the the Big Bang. There is no evidence for that atheist claim, and medication won't help. Some greatly exagerated view of science, based on an epistomology abandoned some 70 years ago, is the faith of many atheists. I'm not drinking that kool aid.
And there you go. Not only shifting burden of proof, but switching the subject. The two most common tactics of Religious Absolutists when they have realized they have spanked.
rmfr
The atheist view leaves them two possibilites:
1. the material of the universe created itself atheist hypothesis,
2. material always existed atheist hypothesis.
Prove which hypothesis is true.
For me, its obvious. A creator God, or the material of the universe created itself, or it always existed, are not scientifically knowable. Hence, none of them can be a hypothesis. To use Popper's criteria, none of them are falsifiable, so they don't belong in science.
Sheldon thinks that he has all the answers by virtue of emperical objectivity. He overlooks many things. One is when you observe an object, you are not observing everything else. Hence, one has to select what one observes. The selection process is guided by your beliefs about what is valuable to observe. Since beliefs are involved in choices about what to observe, objectivity isn't possible. Moreover, if one has rigid beliefs guiding what to observe, one is prone to confirmation bias. I think you guys only look at what tells you what you already believe so you are tied into confirmation bias.
I'd encourage you and Sheldon to put your brains to work on proving your origin of material hypothesis.
@Apollo
All this from the man who has yet to answer my question regarding his criteria for reading the bible?
Irony much.
Old man, check the thread. I answered it some time ago. In fact I answered it before you asked it.
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