/lit/ - Literature

Natural science is based on metaphysical assumptions that cannot be proven by its own methods.

>If you propose the non-existence of something, you must follow the scientific method in your defense of its non-existence

lol

>>1939439
Yeah, that's completely retarded.

empiricism =/= scientific method

I thought it was well-established that the scientific method only applies to phenomena? Since God is considered the underlying ground / cause of ALL phenomena and forces, without exception, how is it possible for the scientific method to either prove or disprove his existence?

>>1939445
This. God is not a phenomenal being, therefore the scientific method cannot be applied.

This seems oddly appropriate.

>"The Babel Fish" said The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quietly, "is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.

>Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this:
>"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
>"But," says Man, "The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
>"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.

>"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

Iis it just me or is there a real backlash against these aggresssive atheists? I like to think so anyway. It's nice to watch the ebb and flow.

>>1939451
"aggressive atheists" piss me off as well, and I'm an atheist myself.

but there's always been a huge backlash against atheism, pic related.

>>1939438
Do I have to be an Atheist or a Theist?
Can I just plain as day not give a shit, is that an option?

>>1939455
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apatheism

>>1939455
Would that be an "Apathist"?

>>1939450

I find it funny when people try to use that quote to support their arguments and leave out the little part at the end.

>>1939454
That's why if you plan on being a politician you don't let anyone know you're an atheist until after you win.

>lying=politics 101

good argument.
Now if only all athiests wearn't sad sappy depressive pizza faced teenage boys. Who are only Athiest because their dad rapes them, and their dad wears a cross around his neck.
We wouldn't have a problem

>>1939474
>That's why if you plan on being a politician you don't let anyone know you're an atheist until after you win.

trollface_at_his_inauguration_speech.jpg

>>1939472
adams was himself an atheist, but thinking that quote was actually intended as an argument against the existence of god is so loving retarded

honestly, stupid atheists piss me off more than stupid religious people do, even though stupid religious people are historically thousands of times worse in the consequences of their actions

>>1939477
Unlike being black, I can hide my personal beliefs. Lots of the American founders did a fine job of obscuring their convictions from the public.

>>1939454
I really hate it when this graph is used to justify the whining atheists do about how they're a persecuted minority.

>>1939455
Good question. My MO has always been similar, but I definitely do not believe god exists. My take is that believing requires faith=de facto giving a shit. I don't care that I'm atheist or that the next man is theist, there's nothing for me to give a shit about. This does not clash with atheism to me. These attentionwhore atheists are mostly doing it wrong, but somebody's gotta say something if--for instance--my school district wants to teach my kid that intelligent design is legit science, for example.

Otherwise, there's really nothing to argue about, i.e. god=nothing.

>>1939470
>>1939469
Well this settles it, I am an Apathist, And never Again will I read one of these threads where all that happens is trolls trolling trolls trolling trolls....

>>1939470
>>1939469
>Apathism is a thing
Debate settled, I am officially changing my facebook ''religion'' status

I'm an atheist and I find it amazing how whiny some people from this "minority" can be. They claim to be atheist but still judge themselves according to a framework of religion. Weird.

>>1939485
there was a family guy episode about this.

>>1939497
Just go out on a limb here and say the episode revolved around Brian.

>>1939469
Igtheism is superior.

An atheist with an axe to grind. What a novelty.

>>1939529
I'll see your igtheism and raise one ichthyism.

Obsessive atheism is anti-dialectic and thus counter-revolutionary. To cry about the wrongdoings of atheism and ignore the 1billion+ death toll of capitalism is hilarious and I can't wait to see dawkinean teens impaled.

>benjamin braddock

Why do people entertain this guy? He might as well change his name into "I'm trolling you motherfuckers"

>>1939589
all tripfags/namefags should change their name to that

The problem isn't religion, it's fanaticism. I don't mean this in the sense that "only fundamentalists cause problems" bullshit that "moderate" Christians try pulling. I mean that a fanatical obsession with any system, be it communism, Nazism, Christianity, Islam, etc.

remember, children: sage and report.

>>1939600
Or atheism.

>>1939575
>>Obsessive atheism is anti-dialectic and thus counter-revolutionary.

"Counter-revolutionary" to what? The Roman Empire? If that, then that was already on its decline by the time Constantine enforced Christianity on the empire. If you're talking about typical thinking about religion...fuck off, "atheism" in the definitive context of the Christian interpretation, is about as naturalistic as you can (short of science, which you can't expect pothead liberals to comprehend).

>>1939575
>anti-dialectic and thus counter-revolutionary

a vulgar marxist walks into a bar

>>1939440
Why has no one addressed this compelling point? Because you can't?

>>1939615
I am vehemently fanatic about stuff not existing.

>>1939622
Nobody likes to guess about the mountain of bullshit you have behind your oneliner. Write the damn arguments in the first post and don't wait for someone to ask for them. We don't care so much about one post in the piss-sea of hundreds.

>>1939622

ooh, burn them faggots. good one, come up with your own original counterpoint ya fucking moron.

>>1939625
Don't worry, I know you are.

These threads contain nothing but trolls, whiny atheists, meta whiny atheists and probably the occasional religious person who gets lost in the shitstorm.

Any genuine Christians here? Or just trolls who throw up cliched arguments that have been discussed to death?

Enjoy eternal damnation in hell OP.

>>1939660
i'm a Christian

>>1939575
no no no, you are wrong, actually capitalism is so bad that it caused more than 100 trillion deaths, seriously!

>>1939660
More of an anti-rationalist, so I disagree with OP...people blindly following socially constructed concepts and systems of knowledge/power really irritate me, as they are guilty of the same leap of faith that they mock on a regular basis.

>>1939660
And newly-converted Apathists, see
>>1939492
>>1939489

>>1939667
An anti-rationalist? I've never heard anyone admit that before.

The thing about true rationality is that it's about making as few assumptions as is practicably possible, not making none at all. If you are opposed to unnecessary leaps of faith, I can't see why you'd be an anti-rationalist.

>>1939660
I am a Catholic with a degree in Systematic Theology who teaches logic. I occasionally get involved in these threads, but usually realize that the OP who brings them up is merely a troll. This thread, for example, starts with scientism and leads onto the Adam's definition of faith.

Until the Hitchhiker's Guide no one defined faith as 'belief without evidence'; very few dictionaries held that definition, no one used 'faith' in such a manner in common speech. Then adams wrote the passage quoted here;
>>1939450
an obvious satire of atheists, of all things, and suddenly people start thinking 'faith means belief without evidence' and that meaning entered dictionaries within 20 years of the book's publication
Anyway, the statement that "you must use the scientific method" is one a silly thin to be uttered by someone who claims to be rational. And I hear or read some variant of it every week.

>>1939683
I'm not against leaps of faith, I was just pointing out that by accepting the narrative of Rationalism, such atheists are taking a leap of faith which contradicts their stated outlook on knowledge. Anti-Rationalism is really the basis for ideas such as Deconstruction and it does not mean one is never ''rational'' in the lower-case ''r'' sense of the word, but that one questions the basis of Rationalism, the proper known describing ideas which took hold of popular discourse in the late nineteenth century and which are fundamental to arguments such as ''The burden of proof is on Religion." for instance.

>>1939683
>The thing about true rationality is that it's about making as few assumptions as is practicably possible, not making none at all. If you are opposed to unnecessary leaps of faith, I can't see why you'd be an anti-rationalist.
The thing about being rational is is that it's irrational. There's no ratioal basis for rationality.

>>1939696
The sophistication of this argument is on the level of nihilists not existing because they believe in nihilism

>>1939696
Yes, that's what I meant. You can't "prove" that rationality works using rationality, because eventually you end up repeating yourself.

Let's say that
1) X is true
2) If X is true, Y is true.
If someone accepts those statements, but does not accept that Y is true, then the rationalist must include
3) If 1 and 2 are true, Y is true.
And if that someone keeps denying it, the rationalist ends up stuck in a loop. This is why formal systems have axioms, and cannot be used to prove those axioms.

>>1939714
syllogisms do not equal the entirety of 'Rationality'

>>1939714
Circular arguments aren't rational. What we mean by rational is arbitrary, and usually boils down to "what one believes to be reasonable". More or less a "you either agree or you're crazy" kind of statement.

>>1939730
That was pretty much the point I was trying to make. We can't prove our axioms using a formal system, since that formal system has to base everything it does on those axioms.

I take it very few of you have read Godel, Escher, Bach.

>>1939750
>Godel Escher Bach
I take it you haven't read something like Either/Or by Soren Kierkergaard.

>>1939757
Perhaps not, but Godel, Escher, Bach is relevant to the issue at hand. Unless we happen to be discussing different issues here.

>>1939696
So if the choice is between irrationality and irrationality, why not choose the irrationality that has a track record on making shit work?

>>1939779
You mean atheism?

>>1939779
I think he meant Ichthyism, bra.

>ichthyism, ichthyismus:

A toxic condition caused by toxic fish roe.

LOL.

>>1939750
I take it you've never read the Postmodern Condition by Jean-Francois Lyotard

The scientific method is an unproven theory.

i mean how stupid and redundant are these 'hurr durr axioms' arguments you're using the very thing you're calling into question in order to call it into question, like trying to make a stairs by using one step and pulling it out from under you to put higher up every time you need to climb upwards

>>1939714
So what you are saying is that even rationality demands that we take a leap of faith in its assumptions. How very very interesting.

>2011
>Caring about theism of any sort

This discussion is about the most moot thing around...

When well regarded analytical philosophers resort to cosmological arguments to justify Christianity out of course, it shows that this issue that it is futile to resolve through logic.

Pic related, if you posted in this thread, you were done

>>1939454

Living in a country that shows the most indifference towards religion, atheism means absolutely nothing, it's simply the default. Anything else is a strange deviation from it.

>>1940088
Which country would that be, Anon?

>>1940092
Estonia. I've genuinely never met a religious person in real life. The closest there's been was a girl who said she was christian, but when asked about it she said she believed there might be some supernatural power out there, but definitely not a god, which is actually so very far from christianity.

I suspect a lot of the "religious" people in the statistics are similar, (thought we're still in first place) since it's so uncommon here it takes less for people to consider themselves religious.

>>1940108
Interesting. I wonder why that is. Do you think it might be because of the legacy of the Communist governments? The fact that Christianity came relatively late to the Baltic region? Maybe people have looked askance at the orthodox Church since it is quite unabashedly an instrument of the state. A combination of many elements, perhaps.

>>1940253
Not that person, but that doesn't make sense. Catholicism was an instrument of the state for thousands of years, Lutheranism became an instrument of many of the German states, Islam was an instrument of the Arab states, and so on. All of which were as unabashed manipulations of religion as the Eastern Orthodox Church.

>>1940253
Probably a combination of several elements, yes. Religion was brought here in a rather half-assed manner in the first place and never became much other than another tedious chore forced upon us by the people who enslaved us.

So when communism presented an opportunity to cast it aside it was quite readily accepted. Their propaganda worked so well that until the late 50's a large amount of people actually believed religion was a mental illness of sorts.

Sure is christian in here.

Sure is Quentin in here.

>>1939454
I think that part of the backlash against militant atheists is that they are in some ways even less tolerant than the religious people whom they despise, because even the most hardcore religious person has to begrudgingly acknowledge that there are valid non-theistic ways of looking at the world. They understand that professing a religion or rejecting the belief in a religion is a choice we all must make in this secular age. Yet, these militant anti-theists believe that scientific materialism is the only way to understand and approach the world. It's a position far less tolerant than what most theists will countenance.

>that feel when you stop giving a fuck about society and its religiosity becomes a non-issue

We don't need science or proof, we only need to look at history.
Entire civilizations believed in different religions.
95% of these were wrong since they're not compatible one another.
Whether the remaining 5% is right or not is irrelevant.
If you see billions of people believed in non-existing gods without proofs and were wrong, you should take a step back and wonder what the fuck you're doing, and at the very least adopt an agnostic position.
Either that or you don't care about being right or not, and then don't try and argue with us.

Why the fuck do people keep bumping this thread?

>>1941189
>We don't need science or proof, we only need to look at a bunch of statistical proofs

I want to take a luxurious piss into the mouth of whoever keeps starting religion threads on /lit/.