EPTBy your argument, multiple universes or aliens or anything fantastical like that MUST not exist because there is currently no empirical evidence saying we have detected anything of the sort. Does this mean it plainly does not exist? No, that's taking a leap of faith, actually.
Philosophy of Knowledge - Page 9
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j0k3r
United States577 Posts
By your argument, multiple universes or aliens or anything fantastical like that MUST not exist because there is currently no empirical evidence saying we have detected anything of the sort. Does this mean it plainly does not exist? No, that's taking a leap of faith, actually. | ||
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Sotamursu
Finland612 Posts
On July 01 2011 05:21 j0k3r wrote: Sotamursu you're mistakenly taking the view that the default position is NO -DOES NOT EXIST. There are three positions. YES - DON'T KNOW - NO. The lack of empirical evidence only proves the middle position. Let us reverse your argument because we can. You claim: this "thing" does not exist. I ask for you to provide empirical evidence to back up your claim. You want to use non-evidence AS your evidence. This cannot work because effectively I have been provided with nothing. By your argument, multiple universes or aliens or anything fantastical like that MUST not exist because there is currently no empirical evidence saying we have detected anything of the sort. Does this mean it plainly does not exist? No, that's taking a leap of faith, actually. You didn't read any of my earlier post did you? When I say god does not exist, I do not mean it some weird ultimate objective truth. Lack of evidence can be used as evidence in this case. I reject the existance of god or anything else that hasn't been proven on the basis that they haven't been proven. That is my position. I don't understand how you can say that not a single scientific discovery in the history of mankind pointing to the existance of a deity as nothing. You might as well say you don't know anything because you can never be truly sure that the knowledge you have at the moment is true. How do you determine the non-existance of something? | ||
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Kukaracha
France1954 Posts
On July 01 2011 03:07 Sotamursu wrote: I find it incredible that you didn't understand anything you read. Did you skip the part where it shows how you "disprove" anything that isn't supported with evidence? Do you even know how the scientific method works? You are the one claiming there is a deist god, yet you don't give evidence for it's existance and just prance around somehow trying to avoid the burden of proof. I can't and you should not believe in such a big claim without anything to back it up. 1) I'm an atheist. 2) So, Induction, Deduction, Abduction, Hypothetical-deductive method, Observation, Experimentation, Reproducibility, Difference method, Methods of Mill, Accordance and concordance, Etc. Wich seems to be not, one, but many different kinds of methods, and this is why the term of "epistemological anarchy" was created. On July 01 2011 03:07 Sotamursu wrote: No one has faith in the scientific method, because no one has to have it. It works and it's the best possible method for finding out the truth humanity has ever had. The thing that is disputed in the scientific community are the specific claims, tests and results, not the way the whole thing works and it's not like the scientific community has never reached a consensus. Oh, ok, so what is this unique and universal "scientific method" you could apply in physics, mathematics and neurology? Positivist, much, my friend? On July 01 2011 03:07 Sotamursu wrote: Do you really think that the deist god is somehow above the scientific method? If you know a better method for determining true claims from false claims go ahead and inform the world. I'm sure the scientific community will shower you with money as you've pretty much made one of the most important discoveries for man kind. You're proceeding by inductions. Karl Popper made a strong critic of such an outdated logic by pointing out that any hypothesis can never be certain since one single observation going against it will invalidate everything. He stated that not everything was a legitimate ground for scientific research; anything that can be empirically verified belongs to the scientific sphere, but theories that can not be invalidated should not be studied. A deist God can not be invalidated since the concept implies that the only element suggesting its existence is our own. A deist God does not intervene on the world, nor is he defined as a known entity. On July 01 2011 03:07 Sotamursu wrote: This is how any serious claim is tested, of course claims like "I had toast for breakfast" doesn't need such serious testing, because it is quite plausible. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Saying that the universe has a creator that is outside time and space is a pretty serious claim and requires very solid evidence. Oho! This doesn't look very rigorous to me! Is that your "scientific method"? When does something become and extraordinary claim? How do you define them from normal claims? There seems to be a misunderstanding (or ignorance) regarding the term "deist". A deist God does not necessarily manifest itself; it is only there because deists assume that there must be a beginning. Something emerging from nothing (big bang) or something that is everlasting (eternal space) can not be imagined by the human brain, much like the alleged shape of the universe. Deism consists in believing that this terra icognita can only be explained through a superior power that lies beyond our understanding. No cult or precise definition is involved. As for me, I believe that this is just beyond our reach, but the idea that some sort of power or entity could "explain" all this seems unlikely. This is why I'm an atheist. But thinking that science can one day explain what we can't even imagine in our craziest dreams is FAITH since no one knows the future. Unless you do know that the human brain will solve this problem and discover all there is to discover. But this requires some sort of magical powers, and I seem to understand that you don't think magical powers exist (even though you think you can disprove and idea that can not be proven in the first place. | ||
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deathly rat
United Kingdom911 Posts
Do you realise that he was a philosopher in the 18th Century? Do you realise the kind of scientific knowledge they had back then? His view of the world and his philosophies are a clearly a product of his time and are so out dated as to be only interesting in an historical sense. Do you ever wonder why all of the famous philosophers are from before the scientific revolution? We have the tools now to find the real answer to questions philosophers could only hypothesize about back in the 18th century. Essentially many branches of philosophy have been made redundant by advances in science. The way the mind works and why people behave the way they do is one obvious example from the work of Kant. Much of it is complete conjecture that any modern neuroscientist/behavioural psychologist would be able to answer in a flash with certainty. Philosophy still has many practical uses, for example in the areas of ethics and politics. However when thinking about the matter of fact, way things are, then philosophy has completely lost it's place in society. So by all means argue philosophy about whether you can have a positive outlook on life if you percieve it as a godless universe, but don't actually try and use 18th century philosophy to talk about the existance of god. We have definately gone beyond that. | ||
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koreasilver
9109 Posts
On July 01 2011 05:53 deathly rat wrote: Do you ever wonder why all of the famous philosophers are from before the scientific revolution? Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jaspers, Arendt, Nietzsche, Tillich, Levinas, Derrida, Foucalt, Deleuze, A.J. Ayers, Russel, Wittgenstein, Popper, Marx, Marion, Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on Have you never heard of philosophy of science? Or the fact that the very methods of scientific inquiry are philosophical? The traditions of the modern natural sciences have been heavily influenced by some rather specific philosophical traditions. Basically, you have no idea what philosophy is. | ||
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Kukaracha
France1954 Posts
On July 01 2011 05:53 deathly rat wrote: I just read a whole bunch of stuff about Kant and his ideas. Do you realise that he was a philosopher in the 18th Century? Do you realise the kind of scientific knowledge they had back then? His view of the world and his philosophies are a clearly a product of his time and are so out dated as to be only interesting in an historical sense. [...] Blablabla [...] Karl Popper, epistemology, Bachelard, Poincaré, etc. It's not because you haven't opened a philosophy book from the 19th century that there were no philosophers since then. All those I mentioned are pretty famous. Not as much as Kant but Kant was an incredible revolution of rigor in his time. Ah, wait, burden of proof... what about a death certificate? I could tell you to read a book, but I remember a recent scandal in which a french "intellectual" quoted and imaginary philosopher, not realizing that it had been made up by another writer. Probably fooled by the normal proof (web pages, books, articles), as it was a normal claim, and didn't need extraordinary proof (see the universal scientific method of our friend). Edit: wait... I just realized... is a death certificate an extraordinary proof? Is it overkill? Please tell me. | ||
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deathly rat
United Kingdom911 Posts
On July 01 2011 06:00 koreasilver wrote: Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jaspers, Arendt, Nietzsche, Tillich, Levinas, Derrida, Foucalt, Deleuze, A.J. Ayers, Russel, Wittgenstein, Popper, Marx, Marion, Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on Have you never heard of philosophy of science? Or the fact that the very methods of scientific inquiry are philosophical? The traditions of the modern natural sciences have been heavily influenced by some rather specific philosophical traditions. Basically, you have no idea what philosophy is. “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds,” according to physicist Richard Feynman. I've read some Bertrand Russel. I like it, but he was atheist sadly for you. | ||
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koreasilver
9109 Posts
And why would Russel being an atheist be a "sad" thing for me? I dislike Russel, but my dislike of him has nothing to do with his atheism and is about how he was an arrogant aristocrat who was a champion of a school of thought that was flawed from the core. That's as stupid as saying that I have to like Aquinas because I'm religious, which is retarded. | ||
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Kukaracha
France1954 Posts
On July 01 2011 06:08 deathly rat wrote: “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds,” according to physicist Richard Feynman. I've read some Bertrand Russel. I like it, but he was atheist sadly for you. Well Richard Feynman should stick to physics then. : ) Philosophy is a very vague term, and I think you'll be more than happy to know that many scientists ARE philosophers! Hurray! And they don't even have a white beard. That's right. Bachelard was a physics and chemistry teacher, Poincaré was one of the last all-around scientists with a high expertise in various domains. And yet, they sat down to think, hum, is what we're doing right? Or am I doing it wrong? How should I do it? Amazing, right? Thinking about stuff. Well that's philosophy, among other things... | ||
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koreasilver
9109 Posts
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Kukaracha
France1954 Posts
On July 01 2011 06:19 koreasilver wrote: Too many people have this misconception that philosophy is just about throwing around truisms and speculative metaphysics. You still need to start the explanation in a simple way... The core of philosophy is a rigorous thought process, any deeper definition is not a good introduction, and is a complex task. | ||
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Sotamursu
Finland612 Posts
Oh, ok, so what is this unique and universal "scientific method" you could apply in physics, mathematics and neurology? Positivist, much, my friend? Uh, I'm kind of confused. The scientific method refers to the stuff you mentioned above and we apply all those in different branches of science. I'm not saying that at any point in time there will never be a better method for science, there just isn't a better one at the moment or in the near future. You're proceeding by inductions. Karl Popper made a strong critic of such an outdated logic by pointing out that any hypothesis can never be certain since one single observation going against it will invalidate everything. He stated that not everything was a legitimate ground for scientific research; anything that can be empirically verified belongs to the scientific sphere, but theories that can not be invalidated should not be studied. That seems reasonable. Studying something that is not falsifiable would be a waste of time. A deist God can not be invalidated since the concept implies that the only element suggesting its existence is our own. A deist God does not intervene on the world, nor is he defined as a known entity. Which makes claiming that such a god exist pointless, since you can never know if he did anything or existed. You could replace that with any other imaginary being that can not be detected through any means. Oho! This doesn't look very rigorous to me! Is that your "scientific method"? When does something become and extraordinary claim? How do you define them from normal claims? No it's not rigorous, maybe I should've put that better. My point was that a massive possibly world view altering claim should not be taken without giving it a second thought. There seems to be a misunderstanding (or ignorance) regarding the term "deist". A deist God does not necessarily manifest itself; it is only there because deists assume that there must be a beginning. Something emerging from nothing (big bang) or something that is everlasting (eternal space) can not be imagined by the human brain, much like the alleged shape of the universe. Deism consists in believing that this terra icognita can only be explained through a superior power that lies beyond our understanding. No cult or precise definition is involved. I never quite understood reasoning like that. How can you say the universe can't be eternal, because it's hard or impossible to comprehend and then replace that with an even more harder to comprehend creature that is eternal and omnipotent. And just to clear something up, big bang isn't an event where something comes from nothing. As for me, I believe that this is just beyond our reach, but the idea that some sort of power or entity could "explain" all this seems unlikely. This is why I'm an atheist. But thinking that science can one day explain what we can't even imagine in our craziest dreams is FAITH since no one knows the future. If it affects us, or the world around us in any way or we can perceive it, it can be studied. Other than that I don't know what your point is in that paragraph, because it has explained a lot of stuff that people 5000 years ago wouldn't have thought up in their craziest dreams. I think it's way more likely that science will offer answers in the future, rather than believing gods. Unless you do know that the human brain will solve this problem and discover all there is to discover. But this requires some sort of magical powers, and I seem to understand that you don't think magical powers exist (even though you think you can disprove and idea that can not be proven in the first place. I don't think magic goes into the deist deity category. It's sort of an exception since it by definition can not be detected by any means. If people could summon fireballs from their hands and destroy buildings, it would be pretty hard to disprove that happened. You would notice that affecting the world around you. I'm not even sure what we're debating about at the moment. | ||
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deathly rat
United Kingdom911 Posts
"And yet, they sat down to think, hum, is what we're doing right? Or am I doing it wrong? How should I do it?" Yes, ethics in science is a topic for philosophy. The outcomes of ethical decisions can never be labelled as "true" in any definative sense or objective sense. I already stated this. | ||
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koreasilver
9109 Posts
On July 01 2011 06:38 deathly rat wrote: My dad's uncle was Russel's GP, cool story bro, i know. "And yet, they sat down to think, hum, is what we're doing right? Or am I doing it wrong? How should I do it?" Yes, ethics in science is a topic for philosophy. The outcomes of ethical decisions can never be labelled as "true" in any definative sense or objective sense. I already stated this. That isn't ethics. | ||
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deathly rat
United Kingdom911 Posts
I can see how all that reading of philosophy has made you into a really eloquent individual /sarcasm In fact none of your recent posts have done anything but rubbish the previous post. Why don't you contribute something worthwhile to the discussion mr 5000 posts. | ||
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Kukaracha
France1954 Posts
I believe that deism can not be disproved, and even though I too think that it is pointless, I just wanted to stress that an atheist should not aggressively argue with a deist person, and never claim they hold evidence for God's non-existance. Furthermore, people like deists do not have cults or anything that has been or could be harmful in the history of religion. In short, they're not hurting anybody. As a conclusion, I just think that everyone's ignorance should be kept in mind regarding this subject. All the methods I listed differ from one another. I wanted to point out that for different domains, people use different methods, that are sometimes somewhat contradictory. And my reasoning about the big bang being unimaginable is that our mind can not conceive infinity nor nothingness. We can talk about it, we can use it as a zero or an infinity sign, but we can not begin to comprehend it. The supposed shape of the universe (I don't know how to express it in english, but something along the lines of delimted but folded on itself on its center, you do not "get out" of it but never encounter any limit") or the concept of God strike our minds as illogical. If I were to describe an item that has his inside on the outside but is closed from the outer world... it's just illogical. Of course, one can believe that science will go further and that such great mysteries will be inveiled. But my second point was that this is having faith in science. We do not know what the future will hold, and we do not know if people in the past would've had a basic logical problem with our world like we have with such odd concepts like infinity. | ||
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Kukaracha
France1954 Posts
On July 01 2011 08:18 deathly rat wrote: I can see how all that reading of philosophy has made you into a really eloquent individual /sarcasm In fact none of your recent posts have done anything but rubbish the previous post. Why don't you contribute something worthwhile to the discussion mr 5000 posts. I was referring to methods as the tools of the scientist, and philosophy as the reflexion the scientist has over his tools. Believe it or not, philosophy has done a great deal for science, as they are very similar in some aspects. The trend to seperate "abstract" and "logical" thinking is quite recent, and quite sad, I have to say. Before this, we would have brilliant geniuses who were not only specialists in their domain, but also strong and dynamic thinkers. Descartes is a great example. We could argue that this is an answer to a growing common knowledge and more difficult questions, but many people still manage to pull off such combinations. At the beginning of the century, an engineer needed an extensive knowledge of history, litterature, geography and philosophy; nowadays, if you're good in your speciality, you can get away with barely knowing how to write. This also goes the other way round. Many contemporary philoso^phers lack the insight and rigorous down-to-earth thinking that the scientific crowd usually shares. Mainly because the two sides tend to reject each other a little. Well, at least among the crowd. Edit: grammar. | ||
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koreasilver
9109 Posts
On July 01 2011 08:18 deathly rat wrote: I can see how all that reading of philosophy has made you into a really eloquent individual /sarcasm In fact none of your recent posts have done anything but rubbish the previous post. Why don't you contribute something worthwhile to the discussion mr 5000 posts. You're missing the entire point. The very center of modern natural philosophy, the adherence to empirical studies, is based around a philosophical ideology. Because of the deep influence of positivism on the natural sciences, the very structure of the natural sciences is always open to philosophical inquiry. The very position and structure of the natural sciences is a philosophical exercise. This isn't a question of ethics, it's a question of the very roots of scientific inquiry and the methods that are employed in it. | ||
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deathly rat
United Kingdom911 Posts
It is possible that you could call the whole of science a branch of philosophy, in that the formation of it's principles were rooted in philosophy, however it is clearly now a distictly different animal with not only differences in methodology and ideas, but also in society, conventions and institutions. To call philosophy and science the same thing, is to say that people are the same as fish. This is also the reason scientists are no longer commonly philosophers and vica versa. | ||
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Sotamursu
Finland612 Posts
On July 01 2011 08:40 Kukaracha wrote: + Show Spoiler + Sotamursu, to sum up my position: I believe that deism can not be disproved, and even though I too think that it is pointless, I just wanted to stress that an atheist should not aggressively argue with a deist person, and never claim they hold evidence for God's non-existance. Furthermore, people like deists do not have cults or anything that has been or could be harmful in the history of religion. In short, they're not hurting anybody. As a conclusion, I just think that everyone's ignorance should be kept in mind regarding this subject. The problem is that if you can not disprove something by default, you can not prove it either and when you think scientifically, something you can not prove does not exist. All the methods I listed differ from one another. I wanted to point out that for different domains, people use different methods, that are sometimes somewhat contradictory. They do use different methods, but the observation, testing, peer review etc. are used in all fields. I think you're mixing up methods a bit. You would use an EEG in neurology, that does not mean EEG is a philosophical method, it's just a way to observe things in your brain. + Show Spoiler + And my reasoning about the big bang being unimaginable is that our mind can not conceive infinity nor nothingness. We can talk about it, we can use it as a zero or an infinity sign, but we can not begin to comprehend it. The supposed shape of the universe (I don't know how to express it in english, but something along the lines of delimted but folded on itself on its center, you do not "get out" of it but never encounter any limit") or the concept of God strike our minds as illogical. If I were to describe an item that has his inside on the outside but is closed from the outer world... it's just illogical. You're talking about a singularity and there's nothing illogical in one. Hell there are countless black holes in the universe and they're all singularities. It's not even hard to understand, if you read about it for 5 minutes. Of course, one can believe that science will go further and that such great mysteries will be inveiled. But my second point was that this is having faith in science. We do not know what the future will hold, and we do not know if people in the past would've had a basic logical problem with our world like we have with such odd concepts like infinity. My point is that it's not blind faith. It's a prediction based on past success. You can't compare it to something like belief in god. I'm not really into philosophy, but I'm pretty sure someone has written something about infinity. | ||
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