Science discovers God

Gisteron - Do you accept personal experience as justification to believe something?

rugadd wrote: Gisteron - Do you accept personal experience as justification to believe something?

ooo...

Im on pins and needles at this moment...

(quick wink at Gisteron, lol)

Wescli Wardest wrote: "...but, as it stands there is no proof one way or the other and it is purely a matter of faith. You either believe there is something out there that we may one day may be able to explain (the Force), or you don’t."

The problem with this position is that it seems to say that ignorance = faith....

Faith is not ignorance, it is arriving at a position informed by data which is unacceptable to the Scientific method...

Whether or not we one day can explain it should be irrelevant to one's faith position.

I try to adhere to the philosophy of science in most aspects of my thought-processes, however, I acknowledge that my "faith" in the Force is not compatible with the scientific method.

I accept that it will not be justified by scientific data and I'm fine with that. I just don't feel the need to prove my "faith" scientifically....

The absence of evidence is just that, nothing. To argue from any position based on the strength of the "lack of evidence" is to build a sandcastle below the tide-line....

Each individual has to decide for hirself the shape of their faith. To me, one of the most important aspects of my faith is that it's mine, informed by my investigations of the world, which I do not seek to impose upon anyone else...

Not necessarily. Many people have faith via indoctrination, or in spite of evidence to the contrary. Like stockholm syndrome for an idea.

The problem with this position is that it seems to say that ignorance = faith....

I wouldn’t say so. And I would hope that is not what happens or what people interpret.

Whether or not we one day can explain it should be irrelevant to one's faith position.

I agree.

I try to adhere to the philosophy of science in most aspects of my thought-processes, however, I acknowledge that my "faith" in the Force is not compatible with the scientific method.

I would not say that it is opposition or conflict with science either. Just a few hundred years ago we had no idea what bacteria were. Yet they existed even though we couldn’t describe them, identify them or even know what to look for. That is the absence of evidence does not constitute evidence of absence. If I told any of you to go and fetch my “machine” none of you would be able to do it. You wouldn’t even know what to look for. But I know for a fact that it exists. I built it, you can see it’s effect (if you knew what to look for), I have pictures of it and I have used it successfully many times and plan to continue using it. But, but the logic that is continually thrown at me, several on this thread would suggest that me asking someone to go and fetch my machine would be wrong in some manner because you can’t find it or even prove it exists. But, I would tell you that you have to trust me and then I could show you how to find it.

Now, if one decided that they wanted to believe in “God”, the Force, whatever; I cannot tell you how to do that or where to find it. I can tell you how I did but that may have little effect for you.

rugadd wrote: Gisteron - Do you accept personal experience as justification to believe something?

Well, that's not what the video was arguing for or from...
To answer your question though: Technically, I shouldn't. However, for practical reasons, I recognize varying degrees of believability and justification. If you tell me that you now own a pet cat when a week ago you didn't, I might just take you by your word. It's an inconsequential claim and I know people come to own new pet cats every day. Notice that this inference is not based on my faith in your honesty, but rather on how believable the claim is absent further information. If I know you are allergic to feline hair, for example, I might want to see it before I'd be quite so convinced. If I know you as a person who has always hated cats in the past, I may wish to see some sort of certificate or at least know how this came to be. The more extraordinary the claim (feel free to ask what I mean by that, since I promised I'd try and keep things brief), the more critical I am of it, and if I do come to believe it eventually, I try and proport my confidence in it to the justification available to me.

Gisteron wrote:

rugadd wrote: Gisteron - Do you accept personal experience as justification to believe something?

Well, that's not what the video was arguing for or from...
To answer your question though: Technically, I shouldn't. However, for practical reasons, I recognize varying degrees of believability and justification. If you tell me that you now own a pet cat when a week ago you didn't, I might just take you by your word. It's an inconsequential claim and I know people come to own new pet cats every day. Notice that this inference is not based on my faith in your honesty, but rather on how believable the claim is absent further information. If I know you are allergic to feline hair, for example, I might want to see it before I'd be quite so convinced. If I know you as a person who has always hated cats in the past, I may wish to see some sort of certificate or at least know how this came to be. The more extraordinary the claim (feel free to ask what I mean by that, since I promised I'd try and keep things brief), the more critical I am of it, and if I do come to believe it eventually, I try and proport my confidence in it to the justification available to me.

A very good and pragmatic answer.

And by that, would the idea of there being something out there that is greater than us, something that binds us and the universe together and gives us the basis for a moral existence. Something that could crate from seemingly nothing. Not anything we have definition for now (other than the Force) and I am pretty sure that there is some kind of cosmic balance that this thing keeps or regulates back to center as much as possible. Would that be plausible or too spectacular to believe without question or proof?

Also, would you say that the soul is something you would believe exists?

[hr]

Nothing wrong with being pragmatic.

I would say to dismiss it out of hand would be personal incredulity in action, but likewise admitting one simply does not know would not be the same as admission of possibility. If anything it is merely an arguement for an individuals right to believe whatever they want....which we respect to some degree here already.

Wescli Wardest wrote: Just a few hundred years ago we had no idea what bacteria were. Yet they existed even though we couldn’t describe them, identify them or even know what to look for.

I don't think the debate here is about whether there are bacteria (or gods, for that matter) or not, but whether or not it is reasonable to believe in them. At a time when we had no idea that microorganisms were even possible, it would have been just as irrational to believe in them anyway. To say that just because our knowledge progresses, therefore every idea is equally plausible or believable is simply false. Everyone is happy to remember Democritus' atoms and how right he was that all matter consists of tiny particles, yet we forget that he also insisted that the atoms were blocks of the four alchemical elements and how completely wrong he was about that. The fact that we don't have reasons to believe a thing now doesn't make the belief reasonable; it makes it unreasonable. And this has nothing to do with whether the proposition in question is correct or not. Schroeder's argument is nonsensical even if his 'The Biblical God' exists, and is indeed the master of our universe.

Wescli Wardest wrote: And by that, would the idea of there being something out there that is greater than us, something that binds us and the universe together and gives us the basis for a moral existence.

i posted a video in the J. Peterson thread where he basically says that proper morality is not some puritanical authority demanding us to conform to its arbitrary preferences, but rather the recognition that there are ways of acting which have shown themselves to work best, generally speaking and with all things considered, over long periods of time

the idea is that we call them "moral truths" not because we stand up on a high chair and demand perfection from everyone else, but because we sit back and watch who does what and see who prospers as a result of what they do, and then seek to adopt the positions that lead to the best personal life experiences for ourselves and our loved ones

you might find that consistent with your view, or not, but i personally think it makes sense and is interesting

a link to the video, for those interested
Jordan Peterson Q&A: Disney Propaganda and Why Bashing Religion Doesn't Make You Smart

I would disagree with the idea that the debate is about whether it is reasonable to believe in something greater than oneself, I’ll call it “the Force” for simplicity of communication. That may be your side of the debate granted.

I am a practicing Jedi. I am a Knight of Jediism. I believe in the Force. And I am willing to have reasoned conversations with anyone discussing this and exploring their belief system. I am even willing to listen to reason why they believe I may not have the best reasoning behind my beliefs. But as a Knight of Jediism it is one of my duties to defend the faith. What that means is keeping a safe place for people to freely explore what it is they believe and be able to come to terms with those beliefs without being bullied, harassed or told they are wrong during that process. It is not for me to tell them what to believe.

And when I find things that I feel some people might be amused by I will share it with them.

Being one that does believe, I know that there are things I cannot explain or have the answers to. Yet. But this does not mean that the absence of those particular pieces of knowledge is proof that it doesn’t exist or reason to believe that the belief is unreasonable.

Right now, you and I are at an impasse. Because, it would appear that you want me to believe that without empirical supporting data or some kind of pragmatic reasoning by your standard, my belief is invalid. Where I know that given our understanding of the universe and all in it, there are some things I am just going to have to take on faith at this time.

So, would you say that the soul exists?

the recognition that there are ways of acting which have shown themselves to work best, generally speaking and with all things considered, over long periods of time

And why would we want what is best for all of us if there were not something binding us together and giving us that desire over long periods of time? That is how I believe these things have shaped our morality. Not something coming down and saying, do this, don’t do that.

Wescli Wardest wrote:

the recognition that there are ways of acting which have shown themselves to work best, generally speaking and with all things considered, over long periods of time

And why would we want what is best for all of us if there were not something binding us together and giving us that desire over long periods of time? That is how I believe these things have shaped our morality. Not something coming down and saying, do this, don’t do that.

i think its easy to say that we are bound together at least by the similarities of the fact that we are all human, primates, mammals, alive

science certainly has established that all life on earth exists within something of a spiderweb of relationships, and that each individual life form has a place within and derives its own sustenance from that web

from that view we could definitely consider ourselves being "bound together", and maybe in a way that bridges (or begins to bridge) the gap between "blind faith" on the one hand, and "strict scientific criteria" on the other (not that i believe faith to be entirely blind)

one could possibly argue that even the celestial bodies are connected, through gravity or dark matter or some such, but that is beyond my education at this point

Side note on something you said… I read a paper a while back where scientist were working on the explanation of how dark matter binds the universe together and that there was more dark matter than regular matter. It was interesting.

Many things are bound together by physical similarities. And we all share common background, the Earth. But, there are species that will eat their own, cannibalism. Many humans did the same in several different cultures and many of them share a very different moral system than we do. So why don’t we eat each other? Especially if there were benefit to eliminating the individual. It may be wrong to kill another but if there is no evidence, IE you ate them, and then it would be very difficult to prove wrong doing.

Have you ever felt like someone was watching you? Or that someone was near? Or helped someone look for something and for some reason you felt like you knew where it was? I think this is part of something that connects us on a deeper level. And that connection helps to preserve us as a species and create morals that will help us to flourish as a group.

[hr]

second paragraph meant to be amusing... ha ha funny!

Wescli Wardest wrote: ... Would the idea of there being something out there that is greater than us, something that binds us and the universe together and gives us the basis for a moral existence. Something that could crate from seemingly nothing. Not anything we have definition for now (other than the Force) and I am pretty sure that there is some kind of cosmic balance that this thing keeps or regulates back to center as much as possible. Would that be plausible or too spectacular to believe without question or proof?

Well, I don't know what "out there" or "binds together" or "basis for a moral existence" means, so... hard to tell. Given that the expansion of our universe accelerates it would on the face of it appear as though the net forces on that front do more to drive things apart than back together, but then I'm not cosmologist, so my confidence in specifics on that is rather slim. I wouldn't say that the emergence of morality is such a fundamentally unnatural or inexplicable thing that it requires something beyond selective pressures. If however there was such a thing, I would expect moral developments that are less dependent on the lifestyle of the animal taxon that develops them. Now I wouldn't call that definitive or sufficient reason to say that no such Force exists, but it would take more than a mere assertion or an argument from ignorance before I could say that it does.

Before I get to the soul thing, a few short remarks about the paragraphs prior to your reiterated inquiry:
I would say that the rules do demand respectful conduct, but I don't think anyone here is or should be safe from being told they are wrong about something, regardless of what it is and how it relates to the doctrine. This is off topic, so I only respond to it because you bring up the safe place to express oneself thing a second time as if this was threatened by anything anybody said in this thread.

This started with a video presenting what is an argument for Schroeder's "the Biblical God". I only questioned that he means the same thing you do when you speak of the Force. Whether your belief in the Force has reasons was not addressed. You do keep implying that it is not a matter of reason, and that I would call unreasonable (by definition), but I wouldn't call the Force proposition false (or in valid) for that reason alone. To call it so and to explain what I mean when I do is all I can, too. If you are fine holding a belief that is unreasonable in this sense of the word, that's where the debate stops. I probably still have a belief or two from days before the formation of my current skepticism that I would abandon for being likewise, should I consciously reconsider them today.

As for whether I believe the soul exists, that depends on what we mean by the soul and by existing, respectively.
If by the soul you mean some kind of life essence or a spirit of the person that survives the body's death and is no product of the body's neurochemistry, and if by exist you mean that it interacts with either the body or any other part of the natural world in some detectable way, then I do believe such a soul does not exists in such a way. If existence does not include detectable interaction, then I still have crushing questions about the coming together of the body and the soul, but cannot fundamentally assert or reject its existence so technically I'd say I do not believe it exists, though I do not believe that it doesn't either. If by soul you mean something else, we can discuss that, too, though I'd welcome it if it were in a different thread or in private, seeing how pending a tie to this thread's topic it seems peripheral or even irrelevant to it.

I wouldn't say that the emergence of morality is such a fundamentally unnatural or inexplicable thing that it requires something beyond selective pressures. If however there was such a thing, I would expect moral developments that are less dependent on the lifestyle of the animal taxon that develops them.

On this point I would offer that pure morality, yes I am making that up to explain a concept, the core of what we find as being right and wrong, acceptable and not, is basically universal. The moral systems we adopt then add to the pure morality, or maybe core morality would be a better descriptor, and is completely able to be influenced by lifestyle and the animal basis.

I was having a discussion the other night where my point was that no policy should be made based on emotional content or “feelings.” Because, this is where the personal bias and subjective interpretations of past events come into play and often, and quite easily, bring prejudice and uneven measures to be adopted. And I believe that the exact same can occur when deciding what to deem as moral and not moral. And if a culture continues to value the secondary morals as priority then it can change the universal core morals till a society begins to erode.

And that is why fundamental principles based off the core morals must be protected. And we must uphold and cherish those morals.

I really don’t have anything to add to the rest of what you wrote. Seems reasonable, thought out and like a perfectly good belief.

This same argument could be used to cite the existence of many different Gods. The forces of nature of which he speaks could very well be represented by my Gods. It doesn't have to refer to the Biblical God. This doesn't prove to me the existence of any one God but speaks to the existence of many. My Gods are forces of nature. They act upon the universe. They (in some cases) predate the universe.

It's an interesting thought but I don't think he really succeeded in proving the existence of the Biblical God. I would need much more proof than this to get me to believe in that particular God.