Are you an atheist? (14 Viewers)

[Galaxiom]

For example, any reasonable person would accept that there are is no T Rex living today. The size of the animal is such that it is highly likely it would have been observed. Secondly, there would be more than one as if there was only one then its presence on earth would be for a limited time. Even if these T Rex were not directly observed then such things as the remains of their prey would be an indicator.

Yet you still have no absolute proof because none is possible. Under your terms you accept, by faith, that the continued existence of T Rex is implausible.

Similarly the atheist accepts that the notion of a god is implausible. Reproducible scientific evidence, as is technically able to be achieved to date, for the current pinnacles of scientific theory hold that every aspect of the observed universe can be derived from the single pixel of amorphous energy that we know as The Big Bang.

There is no place and no need within this Universe for such gods to exist. Yes they could exist beyond but by invoking them we reach a conundrum. From where did these beings arise? Surely if we presume complexity can only be created by the even more complex, then we are pursuing a blind alley in trying to explain our existence.

The theory of self driven development from amorphous pure energy through clear, concise and well understood interactions carries a lot more credibility. Personally I find it inspiring that life very probably grew from the interactions between minerals where alkaline and acid environments met

We are indeed "of this Earth". Please hold that thought as you contemplate our future.

 

[Mike375]

We are indeed "of this Earth". Please hold that thought as you contemplate our future.

We are of this universe. As you appear to be a scientist why restrict yourself. Are you saying we live in this room and so will only seek answers that can be supplied from this room?

I will reply on my "other gods etc." tomorrow as getting ready for bed

 

[Galaxiom]

We are of this universe. As you appear to be a scientist why restrict yourself.

Because there is no need to look beyond the planet to discover where we came from. It is a long way from anywhere else and introducing concepts such as panspermia only moves the challenge of abiogenesis to a new location.

My money is on abiogenesis developing from the reaction that occurs where alkaline ocean floor hydrothermal vents discharge through Olivine. The reaction that forms the mineral Serpentine is the same as the most basic energy reaction in all life forms on the planet.

 

[Frothingslosh]

You know, by Mike375's logic, purple dancing unicorns who fart glitter and piss Budweiser must exist because no one has ever proven that they don't.

The knots True Believers (tm) tie themselves into in order to convince themselves that atheists are just like them never fail to amuse the hell out of me.

 

[Alc]

You know, by Mike375's logic, purple dancing unicorns who fart glitter and piss Budweiser must exist because no one has ever proven that they don't.

The knots True Believers (tm) tie themselves into in order to convince themselves that atheists are just like them never fail to amuse the hell out of me.

If the only way you feel you can win an argument is by changing the definition of the words you're arguing about, surely you must know you're not doing well? Atheism is a religion like not playing football is a sport.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Mike:

As I said both positions require faith, that is, taking a position that is not backed by facts.

There is a difference. Atheists have these little mind-tools called logic and extrapolation. They have the scientific method that allows us to build AND TEST models of reality. The problem is that religion is inherently NOT testable.

Surely you are not suggesting that in the whole universe there are not other life forms that are above us and from a technology point of view. Of course accepting that opens a new road or direction

The new direction continues with this question: If such beings exist (and I'm not going to deny that possibility), would they be aghast at our primitive viewpoint if we called them "gods" ??? Or would they be more like Capt. Picard in the ST:TNG episode where the primitive Vulcan-like people thought he was the "Overseer" ?

Galaxiom's comment:

The theory of self driven development from amorphous pure energy through clear, concise and well understood interactions carries a lot more credibility. Personally I find it inspiring that life very probably grew from the interactions between minerals where alkaline and acid environments met

Look into the work of the late Alan Turing, who did more than just design computer algorithms. It maybe counts as a lesser-known work but Turing came up with a theorem that explains a natural reason WHY things progress from simple to complex based solely on natural considerations (no deity involved.)

We are of this universe. As you appear to be a scientist why restrict yourself. Are you saying we live in this room and so will only seek answers that can be supplied from this room?

Quite the contrary. The space exploration program, though very slow these days, is an example of finding ways to see out of the room called Earth. Once we have other technology, we might step outside the Solar system. After that, who knows. But the point is that we don't start from being bound to the ground 200 years ago and immediately jump out to the Universe. We have to go through the work of Montgolfier (balloon travel), the Wright Brothers (airplanes), Robert Goddard and Werner Von Braun (rocketry) to make those steps along the way. Yes, we will get out of the room someday. Just not today.

Frothy: Where can I get one of those unicorns? I can put up with the glitter if I can only get a renewable source of Budweiser.

 

[Mike375]

You know, by Mike375's logic, purple dancing unicorns who fart glitter and piss Budweiser must exist because no one has ever proven that they don't.

The knots True Believers (tm) tie themselves into in order to convince themselves that atheists are just like them never fail to amuse the hell out of me.

Using your logic then God or gods must exist because no one has ever proved they don't exist.

For me the leap of faith to believe superior beings exist is a smaller leap of faith than believing we are alone and are the superior beings.

 

[Frothingslosh]

Who ever said I believed we're alone, Fermi Paradox notwithstanding? I simply pointed out that lack of negative proof of God doesn't prove his existence any more than lack of negative proof of my magical unicorn proves IT exists, which is EXACTLY the line of logic that you used earlier.

Most scientists would agree that since we know the chance of life evolving in the universe is non-zero, we know that the number of stars in the universe is insanely, unbelievably high, and we know that planets are common features of star systems, that there for the LIKELIHOOD of there being no other intelligent life anywhere else in the universe approaches zero.

Most scientists also agree that assuming aliens are God is ludicrous.

About time this board had a Scientologist joining this thread, though.

 

[Mike375]

Most scientists also agree that assuming aliens are God is ludicrous.

Consider for a moment it's a nice hot sunny day. The little lizards and insects are out and about. Millions of years of instinct tell them it will be like this for a week or so.

Then you decide to mow the lawn and water the garden. From their point of view you are super natural. Such a thing would fit deism in the sense that you stuffing up their day was not your intention. Of course there are many times whereby we deliberately demonstrate our super natural power to animals such as farming, going shooting etc. and etc.

 

[Mike375]

Most scientists also agree that assuming aliens are God is ludicrous.

In the early 1800s all the explosive scientists would have agreed that it would have taken 100s of tons of black powder to shift a small mountain or a cliff.

Imagine trying to explain to them about the hydrogen bomb.

The expression "Most scientists also agree" and similar statements all have one thing in common and that is with the passage of time the error rate proves to be close enough to 100%

 

[AccessBlaster]

The creator(s) will turn out to be 3 feet tall with almond shaped eyes. The earth? nothing more then a petri dish on the ass end of the universe. Everything you think you know, will be spun 180 degrees. So relax and enjoy the show peeps.

 

[Galaxiom]

Consider for a moment it's a nice hot sunny day. The little lizards and insects are out and about. Millions of years of instinct tell them it will be like this for a week or so.

Then you decide to mow the lawn and water the garden. From their point of view you are super natural..

Yes, perhaps from their point of view being ignorant of the bigger picture of nature. If they could communicate they might even create and pass on a myth to explain what they don't understand like humans did when we didn't fully comprehend our environment..

But as we came to understand nature, we cast out myth after myth until there was nothing left that needed an explanation beyond the known natural laws. We now have a scientific grasp of development of the Universe from the moment when the first pixel of amorphous energy appeared right through to what we observe today.

Even the fuzzy bits regarding the axis of the observed Universe and the apparent attraction of matter in a particular direction don't inspire us to suggest it is due to a god. Instead scientists propose natural causes, albeit beyond the limits of what we can observe. These hypotheses are followed by observations that determine which ones can be ruled out.

Your alien god hypothesis is a solution in need of a problem that doesn't exist.

 

[Galaxiom]

The expression "Most scientists also agree" and similar statements all have one thing in common and that is with the passage of time the error rate proves to be close enough to 100%

Utter rubbish. You are again demonstrating your complete ignorance of science as you did in the debates about evolution.

Science is a matter of refinement and has been incredibly successful as sorting out the truth from the fiction ever since the implementation of the modern scientific method of testing hypotheses rather than just contemplating what may have been the will of God.

For example, Newton was correct about Gravitation and his Laws of Motion are still applied today. Einstein simply refined them by adding in a factor that is only significant when the body is moving at speed that is a significant fraction of the speed of light.

I challenge you to name even one scientifically accepted principle that has turned out to be completely wrong.

 

[Libre]

I challenge you to name even one scientifically accepted principle that has turned out to be completely wrong.

An enticing challenge. It should be easy, one would think, to come up with just one, but there are two clauses of the challenge that make it unassailable, no matter what anyone suggests.

Galaxiom's hypothesis, basically, is that not one scientifically accepted principle has turned out to be completely wrong. The challenge is to disprove that hypothesis by coming up with a valid example of one, but that turns out to be impossible. This makes the hypothesis poorly worded or implausible because it can't be disproved.

The two clauses that I refer to are variants of the "True Scotsman" fallacy and/or the "moving the goalpost" fallacy.

Not that I disagree with Galaxiom, I hasten to add!!!!
Mike is clearly out in left field with his "atheism takes more faith than religion" and "alien god" metaphors. I TOTALLY agree with Galaxiom, but in the spirit of honest debate and keeping the gaming tables clean, it should be pointed out that no matter what anyone says, Galaxiom could respond that the example:
-was not a scientifically accepted principle;
or that
-it was not proved completely wrong.

and it would be very hard to dispute either objection.

Not that it's stopped me from trying.
Let me see - well, a lot of Aristotle's ideas have been shown to be hogwash - the geocentric model of the solar system and the impossibility of the number zero, being two such examples.
Oh wait, maybe those weren't scientifically accepted.

Ah, I got it!
Lemarck's Theory of Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics
Hmmm. Not completely wrong. (and probably not fully accepted either)

I'll keep working on it.

 

[Frothingslosh]

Honestly, the closest I can come to coming up with one later proved wrong was the concept of 'ether' in interplanetary space. That was proven wrong when it was shown that light does NOT need a medium through which to travel. Even there, though, that was a widespread assumption that was proven wrong, not an empirically tested, scientifically proven and accepted 'fact'.

Overall, empirical testing has proven many, many ASSUMPTIONS wrong, but no scientifically tested and accepted principles that I can think of.

The EM Drive *MAY* do this if it turns out to be a real effect, but it's far, far more likely that it will simply result in modifications and corrections to existing theories. At worst, it may open up a whole new branch of Physics the way Einstein's papers did.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

The expression "Most scientists also agree" and similar statements all have one thing in common and that is with the passage of time the error rate proves to be close enough to 100%

We could play around with "No True Scotsman" fallacies and "Moving the Goalpost" ploys, as previously mentioned, but I will approach this in a different way.

With the passage of time we have learned things that allow us to reject scientifically inaccurate principles - e.g. phlogiston (as the "element" of fire) and ether (as a light transmission medium). Therefore, we COULD say that science is self-correcting such that we do, indeed, revisit ideas and disprove them even though they were "gospel" at the time. We are the ones who move our own goalposts. We who are the scientists of the world are the driving force to modernize and update scientific knowledge. We are the ones who keep science from stagnating.

But let's ask the parallel question for religion: Since the old Council of Nicea that did what it did to "tie down and confirm" the contents of the Bible, what (if anything) have we learned about God that wasn't knowable back then? Explain to me why the religious people of the world have allowed the teachings of the Bible to stagnate? At MOST, we have a couple of new translations, but what new things have we learned about God that could not have been determined at the time of the Council of Nicea simply by reading and studying the Bible?

We have some new philosophical interpretations of what this or that passage really means, but that could have happened at any time once we had a well-defined Bible. We have some weasel-word evasions to cover for the fact that science has unequivocally disproved some things that the Bible says are so, and proved things that the Bible says aren't so.

The scientific side of the house can grow. The religious side of the house is still stuck in the same mud of the last couple of millennia. The biggest problem is that since you cannot test the mystical parts of the Bible, you can't even tell just how close we are to your 100% error rate. But on the non-mystical parts, the error rate is high and growing higher as we study our world.

 

[Galaxiom]

Let me see - well, a lot of Aristotle's ideas have been shown to be hogwash - the geocentric model of the solar system and the impossibility of the number zero, being two such examples.

You will note I said:

Science is a matter of refinement and has been incredibly successful as sorting out the truth from the fiction ever since the implementation of the modern scientific method of testing hypotheses rather than just contemplating what may have been the will of God. (Emphasis added)

Lemarck's Theory of Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics.

Lemark only had a hypothesis without any theory of a mechanism of how the acquired characteristics were inherited. Until there is a theory to test there really is no science as such, just observation and speculation.

The Theories of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics cover the entirety of the fundamental mechanisms of the Universe. Thousands of experiments have been conducted to test the theories and without exception they have confirmed them. The Higgs Boson turning up on cue exactly as predicted by theory was one of the spectacular example of how modern science is led by theoretical knowledge confirmed by the scientific method.

Anything radically new won't overturn these theories but will describe their underlying mechanisms in the same way Einstein's Relativity showed what was behind Newtonian Gravity.

 

[speakers_86]

There is nothing wrong with proving a theory wrong, that is what makes the science so great, is that it is self-correcting. Over time, it becomes closer and closer to being correct.

I believe that we cannot know everything there is to know. I once read that there is a theory that we cannot know all of the math there is to know, I think this applies to science as well. Here is an article that says something of the sort. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but it looks interesting.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/limits-on-human-comprehension/

 

[Libre]

I challenge you to name even one scientifically accepted principle that has turned out to be completely wrong.

Okay Galax - I'm up for the challenge.
Is Googling in the spirit of this thing?
Or do I have to come up with it on my own. Because I probably can't. But I'm pretty sure there are plenty of examples - Scotsmen and goalposts notwithstanding.

 

[Rabbie]

Even if there are examples where science got it completely wrong then science has corrected those errors. Many of the errors were due to the inability to get accurate observations due to the limitations of instrumentation etc.

I once read in a sci-fi magazine that if you could send a 1960s transistor radio back to the 1920s it would work but it would have been impossible to reproduce it except by chance because with those days technology it would have been impossible to measure the small amount of impurities in the silicon required to make a functioning transistor