Describing Christianity - Page 21

On October 18 2013 12:19 packrat386 wrote:
If you have a logical proof that my conception of God cannot exist I would love to hear it. I really enjoy discussing philosophical proofs and so far nobody has offered any.

As for the square circle, of course this requires us to accept some basic tenets of math and logic as axiomatic. If you want to deny those then go ahead, but the world stops making sense fast.

As for purple caterpillars, if you specify that they are undetectable then yeah, they fall into the same category as god. They are equally likely and equally difficult to reject as a hypothesis.

On October 18 2013 13:55 koreasilver wrote:
I'm going to have to strenuously disagree that Derrida was doing negative theology. Regardless of all my disagreements with Marion, at least Marion understood this and went at lengths to defend negative theology against Derrida. I think all the theologians that have tried to appropriate Derrida to set up their supposedly-nonmetaphysical-but-still-negative-anyway theologies just misread Derrida horribly. I'm gonna have to be a stickler about this because I really think this is where people go haywire over Derrida. Hagglund does a great deal in elucidating this in his Radical Atheism book.

On October 18 2013 15:45 Tobberoth wrote:

No one is debating whether or not your conception of God CAN exist. People are trying to make you understand that it's more logical to assume that something DOESN'T exist than assume that something exists when you can't know either way. Everyone agrees with this, even you, which is why we talked about the teapot example for 30 pages.

Let's say a christian is of your belief. There is no evidence or reason to believe in God, yet they believe in him because they haven't seen PROOF that he doesn't exist. That means they also have to believe in invisible teapots in space, because they haven't seen proof that they don't exist. They also have to believe I've met aliens, because they haven't seen proof that I haven't. They also have to believe that the internet is actually made out of milk, because they haven't seen proof that this is not the case.

See? The world stops making sense VERY fast when you go from claimant needs proof to non-claimant needs proof. The purple caterpillars and god are not hard to reject as hypotheses, because they are AUTOMATICALLY rejected when there's no way to test them.

On October 18 2013 16:36 packrat386 wrote:

You keep saying this as if everyone agrees to it. I have laid out my objection to this idea several times. There is no reason to believe that the negative hypothesis is true simply because it describes less things.



Also your examples are mostly silly. Its relatively easy to test whether you have met aliens or whether the internet is made of milk. My argument only applies to those things that cannot be tested by definition and are not illogical. Lastly, I'm not arguing that you should believe the positive hypothesis either, but merely that they are equally valid as beliefs.

On October 18 2013 16:41 Tobberoth wrote:

They are not equally valid as beliefs. One way leads to progress, the other leads to ignorance. Open-minded ignorance? Maybe, but also pure stupidity.

My examples aren't silly. Of course you can test these things, that's because they are REAL THINGS and not made up with the specific intention of it being untestable so you can fool the masses, like the concept of God. That makes it even worse as a hypothesis, not better. When an hypothesis is untestable, it's completely useless and therefor discarded.

On October 18 2013 16:56 packrat386 wrote:
Arguments about why religion is bad don't have much of a bearing here. We're discussing just the existence of god, not the goodness of the church.

Also, the fact that your examples are testable means that they aren't relevant to the discussion at hand. Russels teapot relies on presenting something that the audience will think is ridiculous ("If you believe in God you might as well believe that the Internet is made of milk!"), however one of these things can be rejected after a pretty cursory test, the other is much harder.

Basically, I'm calling into question the principle that we should always err on the side of negative hypotheses in the absence of proof or evidence. In the case that there is proof or evidence, you should clearly favor the hypothesis that it supports.

On October 18 2013 17:00 Tobberoth wrote:

The absence of proof or evidence is in itself proof of non-existance for all intents and purposes. It's really that simple. If there's no way to test something, there's also no reason to believe in it or worry about it. It's simply useless unproductive thoughts about something which doesn't matter. Something that can't be tested can't affect you, so why even bother?

On October 18 2013 17:06 packrat386 wrote:

Lol, you take the part that I object to and just proclaim it as axiomatic truth. Thats a convenient way of arguing. Lets say I apply your theory to itself hmm?

I'm going to re-write your statement a bit. Take premise A to be "The absence of evidence for any given hypothesis is evidence to reject that hypothesis". Now let me consider A as my hypothesis. There is an absence of evidence for hypothesis A, therefore I ought to reject it. Contradiction? We must reject our original premise A.

If you want to give me some reason why I should believe that "The absence of proof or evidence is in itself proof of non-existance for all intents and purposes" then you're going to need to work for it.

On October 18 2013 17:12 Tobberoth wrote:

Um. Did you read my post? It clearly stated after that phrase why this is so: If something is not testable, it can't affect us. THIS is the premise. It follows that if you have no evidence for something, and can't procure said evidence, the hypothesis is useless, because even if it were to be true, we can't even know that, it brings us nowhere.

I'm going to simplify this for you: Please let me know why it makes more sense to believe in the existance of something which is untestable and has no evidence or basis supporting it, than to not believe in it. Don't worry, way ahead of you, I know you're going to answer "I'm not saying it makes more sense, I'm saying it makes equal sense". However, I can give several arguments (I already have in this topic, over and over) why it makes more sense to not believe it. It leads to progress, it's more practical, it leads to knowledge which has actual impact. If I can say why it's better to go with non-belief will you can't argue for belief, I believe that makes your argument quite weak indeed.

On October 18 2013 17:20 packrat386 wrote:

Things that are not testable can still effect you. Convenient example is the existence of God (what a motherfucking surprise). If God exists, whether or not he directly fiddles with the universe, most people would act differently than if he didn't exist because of things like final judgement.

Arguing that a particular truth is impractical doesn't really get you anywhere. Perhaps it is less practical to believe in God (although I see no reason why it should be, and neither do the large contingent of religious scientists and engineers in the modern world), but that's like saying I should ignore the Heisenberg uncertainty principle because its frustrating.

Also, I can argue equally, that belief in God tends to make people happy, and that the leap of faith that you take in being religious is valuable in and of itself.

On October 18 2013 17:27 Tobberoth wrote:

Now you're talking specifics. You're not saying anymore that we should believe in things which are untestable and has no basis, you're saying we should believe in God. You're saying religion can make people happy. The idea that the claimaint needs proof is a general idea, the teapot argument is general. You're taking an idea which is just as useless, but since it has been fashioned to have an effect, you're forced to view it differently.

"There's invisible teapots in space."
"Who cares."
"If you don't believe they exist, you'll go to teapot hell when you die where they torture you with teapot lasers."
"Oh shit, suddenly I have a reason to believe in it."

The general idea that you need proof to make claims is just as true for the concept of God, even if there's added bullshit behind the baseless initial concept. If you don't believe in the initial concept, the extra stuff is meaningless, and the teapot argument and all this stuff about needing evidence or falsifiability for an hypothesis to be considered is already throwing that concept out the airlock. There's no reason to believe god exists, so obviously there's no reason to believe in final judgement. You already have to believe in God to factor in Final Judgement.

On October 18 2013 17:34 packrat386 wrote:
My argument was that we shouldn't privilege a negative hypothesis simply because it is the negative hypothesis. You then proceeded to offer other reasons not to believe in God, so I answered those, and provided some reasons to believe in it in order to even out the scales.

Your original argument was that we shouldn't believe in God simply because we should always prefer the negative hypothesis. When I answered this argument you wanted to move on to another one (we shouldn't believe in God because the harms outweigh the benefits).

These are 2 fundamentally different arguments, so before we go forward I'd like to know which one we're talking about.

Should I not believe in God because

A: Belief in God causes material harms that are worse than the benefits (lack of progress etc.)
B: Belief in things that are not able to be tested is unjustified.

On October 18 2013 17:42 IgnE wrote:
How about Occam's Razor?

On October 18 2013 17:43 packrat386 wrote:

All of my arguments for why we should reject tobberoths method are equally arguments to reject occams razor.

On October 18 2013 17:41 Tobberoth wrote:

B is definitely the discussion at hand. You've sort of misunderstood me, belief in god was just an example for me. Lack of progress is true in all situations where you prefer positive hypothesis. The scientific method is founded on the idea that hypotheses are useless until you can test them to make sure they have any value and actually represent the world in a meaningful way. Whether you believe in god or invisible teapots is not relevant, the fact that you believe in them without basis is the problem. When you can test something, you can learn more about it, which is the progress I'm talking about. When an hypothesis is untestable, you can just change the hypothesis randomly and nothing will change, so it's not really progress. God is just the most pressing example because of the topic at hand.

On October 18 2013 17:43 packrat386 wrote:

All of my arguments for why we should reject tobberoths method are equally arguments to reject occams razor.

On October 18 2013 17:44 Tobberoth wrote:

My method? You mean the scientific method?

On October 18 2013 17:46 packrat386 wrote:

Since the things that we are allowed to believe in will probably remain untestable, I fail to see how it prevents progress. Whether or not I believe in undetectable teapots on pluto is going to have no effect on my ability to test other hypotheses. Your argument is basically that science is good, but how I choose to interact with those things that we can't use do experiments on has no bearing on how I interact with the testable material world.