This Ricky Gervais piece was a good read, discuss that or anything else you’d like in this open thread.
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”
Black Jesus loves a paper trail.
President Musk and Trump are both poorly raised, coddled 8 year old boys.
Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!
We still have time to mess this up!
Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.
Dumb motherfuckers cannot understand a consequence that most 4 year olds have fully sorted out.
rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius
Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.
A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals
If a good thing happens for a bad reason, it’s still a good thing.
I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.
If you voted for Trump, you don’t get to speak about ethics, morals, or rule of law.
Innocent people don’t delay justice.
The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.
There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.
Everybody saw this coming.
“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”
If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.
The words do not have to be perfect.
There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.
And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.
The lights are all blinking red.
The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.
Ross Hershberger
I love Ricky Gervais a whole lot more now. This is fantastic.
jeffreyw
I like pie.
Linda Featheringill
Nice essay. I always did admire Seekers-after-the-Truth.
There are Mysteries, of course, and my agnostic heart just cannot define them. Fortunately, I like mysteries and I often enjoy confusion.
RedKitten
SiubhanDuinne responded to me on the other open thread, but I’ll reply to her on this one, as it’s more likely that she’ll see it:
It’s the former — I’ve been awful at posting here lately. Between work, and Sam being busy, and the fact that I haz a new blog on the go, my brain has just not been in the political sphere. I’ve been lurking, but often didn’t comment because I didn’t really feel like i had anything to say.
The young Sam is very well. He runs around like mad, is very charming and sweet (when he’s not having a toddler meltdown about the inherent unfairness of life), and is just a great kid. His current favourite trick is, when I’m printing something off, he’ll run over and put his hand on the printer while it warms up, and as soon as the paper comes out, he grabs it and hands it to me, saying, “Thaaaa!” (i.e. “There!”)
I’m NOWHERE near ready for Christmas, though. I’ve been sick off and on for the last month — first a regular flu, then bronchitis, and most recently, a stomach flu. So I’ve made my Christmas tree extra-festive, hoping it will distract from the fact that my windows need washing and that I couldn’t be arsed to move my furniture the last time I mopped.
Captain Haddock
Sorry, but I find smug non-believers just as annoying as smug believers.
Southern Beale
One of our local Teanutties got her panties in a twist over a Christmas card the trashman left on her bin. I put her in her place.
That’s all I’ve got ….
Linda Featheringill
@RedKitten:
Lovely picture! I can see that he might keep you busy for several years!
I have also missed you. Glad you’re hanging in there. Hope you get to feeling better.
Nevermind the dust under the furniture. In the end, the dust wins anyway.
Have a glorious Christmas!
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@Captain Haddock:
What was smug about Gervais’ piece? Is it that atheists aren’t allowed to state their beliefs out of fear that they will make a believer feel inadequate?
gnomedad
@RedKitten:
You haz? Where?
Linda Featheringill
Speaking of young ones . . .
Have we heard from Suzanne recently? She should be about due.
CA Doc
My kids, in 3rd and 5th grade, are just now starting to grapple with these ideas and realizing that we, their parents, don’t believe in god etc and that makes us “weird” or even dangerous in their social circles. We do believe in morality and expect them to act accordingly, without threats or rewards. It will be interesting to see how they respond to the pressure to have religion. I remember going to vacation bible school as a kid just because it looked like fun to be “in the club” but realizing at the same time I could never buy what they were selling.
Legalize
@Captain Haddock:
What does that even mean? What’s “smug” about saying 1 + 1 =/= 3 no matter how strongly you “believe” it?
JGabriel
Ricky Gervais:
I’m an agnostic. I’m not religious, and I strongly doubt the existence of God. That said, Gervais’s reasoning here is misguided; you can’t use scienctific evidence to disprove God, because science is firmly grounded in the principle of explaining the material universe in natural terms, i.e. the philosophy of Natural Materialism — without resorting to the supernatural explanations like “It’s that way because God made it that way.”
The scientific method is a hugely productive and often beneficial way to examine the universe, but it can’t say jack shit about, of, for, or against God, because God is excluded from the domain of scientific inquiry by being both immaterial and supernatural.
I think it’s perfectly valid for someone to say that they don’t believe in God because they adhere strictly to the philosophy, or belief system, of Natural Materialism — but it’s a tautology to argue that there’s no scientific evidence for God because, at its core, the philosophical underpinnings of science already exclude God from the domain of its explanatory power.
So the problem with Gervais’s justification for atheism isn’t that it’s impolite, patronizing, or smug. It’s just that it’s tautological, wrong, and irrelevant. And I say this as someone who shares his conclusions, just not his reasoning.
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Alwhite
WOW, just wow! Not half bad for a dumb comic! Thanks for linking to that.
RedKitten
@gnomedad: At my URL. I’ve realized that blogging is much tougher than it looks — I have a whole new respect for John et al, particularly where their topic of choice is a hell of a lot more complex and in-depth than mine.
some other guy
New food safety legislation passed through the lame duck Senate last night.
(via Washington Monthly)
The Moar You Know
Wake up.
Something to get the juices flowing on the last pre-Christmas Monday.
cleek
@JGabriel:
true.
science endeavors to explain all of existence. nothing that exists is outside its purview. and if people want to define “God” as something outside science’s reach – which by by definition means God does not exist – well, science has no problem with that.
timb
@Captain Haddock: Apology not accepted.
You seem pretty self-satisfied in your denunciation of the self-satisfied. It’s almost like one cannot express an opinion (an opinion no one is even asking you to share) without being smug.
In other words, I often find I am annoyed at the opinions of smug haters of the smug than I am the rantings of believers or non-believers
Fargus
@JGabriel:
Not the case. Non-overlapping magisteria is really the last defense from a religious apologist cowering in the corner. At its core, religion is making claims about how the world is. As is science. You can’t say that religion is in a realm where science not only doesn’t but CAN’T say anything about it. Religions claim miracles, which are suspensions of the natural order that would, in theory, be empirically testable, right? How is that something where science and religion are not allowed to conflict?
Fargus
@timb:
Just like the opinions of smug people who say, “I don’t vote for either party because there’s no difference between the two,” right?
timb
@JGabriel: How can one say something exists if that “thing” does not manifest itself in a material sense? If God created things, if He provides guidance about the material world, then some part of Him must manifest in the physical world….
Edit: What Fargus said….especially since Fargus said it better, although more combative, than I did
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@JGabriel:
And I think you missed Ricky’s point. He’s stated that it’s up to the religious people to prove God exists, rather than the current practice of religious people to force atheists to prove God doesn’t exist. Just because enough people believe in God is not “proof.”
The only way science excludes God is because it requires proof rather of existence rather than the impossible “prove to me God is not real.”
Sharl
As a science dood and a non- believer, Iris Dement speaks for me.
JGabriel
cleek:
Again, I add, all material existence. The question of whether a spiritual world, a world of the non-material and immeasurable, exists, can’t be commented upon by science. By definition, the spiritual world, and whether or not it exists, is outside the purview of science. What lies beyond, or within, the singularity of a black hole, being at present immeasurable, also exists outside the purview of science. Would you also claim that, therefore, black hole singularities do not exist?
Saying “Nothing is outside the purview of science, therefore God, being outside the purview of science, doesn’t exist,” repeats, in different form, the same tautology that Gervais argues.
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cyd
Spotted an amusing line in the NYT’s article on Sadrists in Iraq
The lack of self-awareness here just boggles the mind.
The Real American Democrat
It’s perfectly acceptable to believe in God. Silly brit.
Chicago dyke
@Linda Featheringill:
as an atheist, i’ve come to view those mysteries (and not capitalize them any more) as another way of saying “science just hasn’t figured it out yet, but with time and research and advances in scientific fields, someday it will.” i used to be agnostic, but after a while, it started to feel too hypocritical. the universe is a wild and wacky place and there’s plenty of it that makes me feel awe. but i just couldn’t sustain the belief that something “higher” or supernatural has to be in the picture. i used to spend a great deal of time in Divinity school making liberal non-Bible literalist Christians uncomfortable with arguments like “well, if you’re going to ignore the parts about ‘women shut up in church’ and ‘stone queers,’ why believe any of the rest of it? where’s the logic in that?” so i finally applied the same standard to myself and just embraced complete atheism. ymmv and i don’t have contempt or anything like that for agnostics.
cleek
@JGabriel:
nope. there is no way around the simple meaning of “exist”; either something exists or it doesn’t.
people don’t get to carve special meanings out of fundamental words and the concepts they embody just to avoid uncomfortable logical consequences.
call it a tautology if you want, but a tautology beats hand-waving any day.
Paul in KY
@RedKitten: Great Sam picture. Thanks for posting it :-)
Svensker
@Linda Featheringill:
She’s being induced tomorrow.
JGabriel
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
No. The reason science excludes God is because its aim is to explain all that it can without resorting to God or the supernatural in general.
Is this it really that hard to grasp the distinction between Natural Materialism as a philosophy, and Science as a method based in that philosophy?
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Chicago dyke
that’s your definition of the spiritual world. plenty of religious traditions posit not only that it is in this universe, but that believers have “been there” and come back, or that they communicate with the beings who supposedly live there, or that they can channel its energies, etc. because no scientist has ever been able to test those claims and achieve a positive result, science rejects its existence, quite correctly.
JGabriel
@cleek:
Bullshit. Exist doesn’t have a simple meaning. If it did, all the world’s philosophers and mathematician would never have had anything to write about. Reams of mathematics are devoted to the perfect circle and the calculation of pi to the nth decimal, neither of which exists in nature.
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JGabriel
@Chicago dyke:
Certainly, some scientists reject the existence of a spiritual world (and I haven’t any faith in it myself), but science does not, because it cannot. Science rejects the supernatural as an explanatory method for natural phenomena, because it can’t be measured or tested. Quite correctly, as you say.
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Sharl
Yes, scientific principles can only be applied to testable assertions/hypotheses – any “faith” on the part of practitioners of science is limited to the “belief” that their human senses and (by extension) equipment are functional, and their observations are repeatable (at least by themselves) and reproducible (by independent others).
Being an invention of (many) humans, “God” is defined in all sorts of ways, including some ways that are not testable. CD is the expert on such questions – she has a degree in this kind of shit and everything – but IIRC, the Deists (e.g., some of this nations founders) believed in such an “untestable God” who, like a watchmaker, built us and our universe, wound up the stem to get things moving, and wandered away.
Fargus
What of miracles, JGabriel? Suspensions of the natural order. How is that not testable?
If God, or other denizens of this non-material spiritual realm are said to have created or otherwise influenced the material universe, then it’s ridiculous to say that there’s absolutely no way to measure the spiritual. By the believers’ own definition, the spiritual realm has measurable impact on physical reality.
It’s only apologists looking to find a new dark corner for religion to hide in and prepare its latest nonsense who claim otherwise.
JGabriel
@JGabriel:
Sorry, ambiguous pronoun there. The meaning is probably clear anyway, but for the sake of clarity, that should read:
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Linda Featheringill
@Svensker:
Thanks for the update on Suzanne.
SiubhanDuinne
@jeffreyw:
You are a GREAT MAN!! Thank you :-) Mmmmmmm…..
JGabriel
@Fargus:
In two ways.
1) Miracles, by definition, aren’t repeatable under controlled circumstances. When “miracles” are repeatable, they’re rarely called miracles; they’re usually called “naturally recurring phenomena”.
2) There are scientifically postulated, naturally occurring, phenomena that go beyond the bounds of testable and measurable methods — the interior of a black hole singularity being the best known example. When science reaches such a boundary, it simply says, “We don’t what happens beyond that point.” God also falls into a category beyond the domain of science; in the case of God, it falls into the category of super natural belief, rather than a naturally occurring material phenomena, but the principal that science can’t prove or disprove anything about it remains the same. In both cases, the singularity and God, the phenomena are beyond the parameters science has set itself to work within.
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SiubhanDuinne
@RedKitten: Thanks for the update, and the photo. OMG he is a cutie! Hope you feel better and have at least the occasional opportunity to swing by these parts. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s missed your trenchant and witty observations (and SamKitten, of course). Hope the entire Kitten family has a great Christmas.
JGabriel
Fargus:
That’s irrelevant, because Natural Materialism excludes God as an explanation. Science doesn’t say you can’t measure the physical impact, it says that you can’t attribute the impact to a spiritual world. Once you attribute a physical phenomena to God, you’ve left the domain of science; not because the spiritual world doesn’t exist — that question is irrelevant to science — but because the spiritual world is outside the defined parameters of scientific explanation.
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WyldPirate
@JGabriel:
It seems to me that you and Fargus are talking past each other.
I am of your mindset to a large degree and you are perfectly describing Natural Materialism (or Methodological Naturalism) and how science deals with the supernatural.
I think what Fargus is saying is that when the religious make ridiculous claims of the “reality” of their religion, then one can “disprove” their claims based upon methodological naturalism.
For instance, it has always bugged the shit out of me when religious folks say that “God” speaks directly to them and answers their “prayers” or that they “know” what “God’s will” is as if they have a direct line. We have scientifically based evidence for these sorts of “claims”–they are called hallucinations or delusions and they will earn you a trip to a psych ward if you go muttering about delusions outside the realm of religion.
The same is true for the claims of “miracles”–both past and present–attributed to “God”. Many of these claims can be falsified via the scientific method and demonstrated to be the utter horseshit that they are.
Brachiator
@JGabriel:
So is Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, or elves, ghosts and goblins, by this definition. The idea that there is a supernatural realm is an effusion of philosophy or faith, but is otherwise meaningless. It is a “just so” story.
There are absolutely no rules, guidelines or “objective” or generally agreed upon ways to plumb the so-called supernatural.
So, while you might feel it, believe it, even know it, unless there is some discernible manifestation in this world, it is a personal reaction and so, subject to all kinds of interpretations.
Shorter: people used to believe that spirits were in trees. Were people wrong or did the spirits move away? How can you tell for sure?
This begs the question of how you get to the so-called spiritual world. To say that the answer is religion is of course a tautology. An unprovable force meets an invisible object.
Sentient Puddle
@JGabriel:
If science had some way of finding some reasonable axiom for said spiritual world, I’m sure scientists would love to explore the hell out of it. I know that this is impossible by definition, but I think this contradiction demonstrates the overall problem. Religious fundamentalists want to “prove” (for lack of a better term) the existence of God by relying on these things that, by definition, suspend all the rules of science and logic that we know. Shouldn’t that raise a red flag in the mind of a reasonable person?
This is also sort of colored by reading some of the comments on that article. Some people thinking they can prove the existence of God by…I don’t know, the fact that he had a 1% chance of survival and did so? I think these people are bring this whole suspension of logic thing into the realm where it shouldn’t be.
cleek
@JGabriel:
philosophy deals with many other things besides existence. and mathematics is pretty much unconcerned with existence.
“abstract” is not the same as “does not exist”. they don’t exist as physical objects, but they exist as concepts which can be used in mathematical calculations. “God” can not be used for any kind of calculation or prediction. it’s not even abstract. it is a logically empty concept. there is no way to evaluate any kind of truth about it. and any definition of “exist” must include the ability to evaluate some kind of truth about the object in question. if it’s impossible to state any kind of truth about something, how can it be said to exist at all?
if “God” exists in reality, it’s only to satisfy a craving for comfort. and it’s a satisfaction that requires you to believe that logic and proof are provisional and can be cast aside when it feels good. if you’re willing to take that step, you can believe literally anything you can imagine. and, yes, people do believe in all kinds of things without proof. but that says nothing about God, and everything about the human mind’s ability to ignore logic, evidence, proof, causality and existence , when it feels good.
Mnemosyne
@Sentient Puddle:
That’s really what the problem is: religious fundamentalists keep insisting that there must be scientific proof for their philosophical beliefs, and if the scientific proof doesn’t uphold their philosophy, they have to discard science.
“Love one another as I have loved you” is not something that can be proven or disproven by science, because it has nothing to do with science. It’s a philosophy and a suggested mode of behavior. It’s when people start insisting that they have physical proof that there is a material God who affects the physical world that religion runs into trouble.
(Here’s part two of that Al Mohler takedown.)
knocienz
@Fargus:
Rather than discussing something so titanic as a universal creator, I tend to prefer the question of whether someone believes in free will vs everyone basically being just a machine responding in a deterministic way to stimuli.
Free will is certainly a belief lacking any scientific backing, but almost everyone will admit to its belief and even those that don’t admit to it act in a fashion indiscernible from someone who does.
Sko Hayes
Wow, did you see the comment section (I did not wade in to that)- there were over 2000 comments to Ricky’s column.
I can imagine what’s being said.
I remember being skeptical in Sunday School, but being raised Catholic, one could never question a nun or a priest, or you got the ruler across the knuckles. I stopped going to church at 16, because I simply thought there were too many hypocrites in church (my own father got divorced and remarried and continued to attend, though he never took communion).
I finally accepted being an atheist in rehab, when looking for a “Higher Power” resulted in my figuring out there was no higher power than myself when it came to defeating addiction.
Skepticat
Although I was brought up as an Episcopalian, I’ve had no religious beliefs since my teens. The concept of religion makes plenty of sense–people desperate for answers to the inexplicable found them, and the church incidentally found a wonderful way to accumulate power and subjugate women. My opinion, which I try not to foist onto others as I’d have others not foist theirs onto me, is that humans created god rather than god created humans–or anything else.
In general I have no problem with people who believe in god; there are times at which I wish I had the comfort their faith provides them. I don’t require that they give up their beliefs simply because I don’t share them; I ask only the same respect in return. Once it reaches the political and social policy fronts, however, I take violent exception to being bludgeoned with an intangible that I find nonsensical and antithetical to my equally valid beliefs–or lack thereof.
JGabriel
@Chicago dyke:
Neither can I. I’m not arguing for the existence of God or a spiritual world, neither of which I have any faith in.
I’m merely arguing that we can’t use science to prove or disprove the existence of God or a spiritual world, because both are defined, whether they exist or not, as supernatural — existing above or outside the natural world and able to override natural laws — while science restricts itself to explanations that are based in the interactions of the material world without resorting to the supernatural.
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Brachiator
@Captain Haddock:
I’m pretty much a smug “don’t give a shitter.”
I’m a furious agnostic. It seems to me that questions about God and the supernatural are unknowable. And if something is by definition unknowable, then I don’t see that I should care about it at all, or pay any attention to it.
What people believe is pretty much their business, unless they start insisting that I should live my life or mold my own beliefs to be in conformity with their received insights.
On the other hand, I have no patience for a near subset of related stuff, hazy spirituality, mediums and the happy chatty dead, ghosts, ESP, psychics and other charlatans. So far, every claim about this nonsense has either failed when challenged or has been shown to be fraudulent.
jrg
@JGabriel:
Then formulates testable hypotheses, and seeks to prove or disprove them.
Shorter JGabriel: “The spirit world cannot be tested in the physical world, because it does not interact with the physical world. Except when it does, then it still cannot be tested because shut up, that’s why”.
Primitive man could this logic to explain anything, and be wrong 100% of the time.
What slays me the most about this god-of-the-gaps nonsense is that if you really follow it to it’s conclusion, you’d see that Jehovah presents a solution no more or less logical than voodoo or praying to the moon.
In other words, you’re throwing out every metric available for determining what’s bullshit and what’s not, then clinging to an arbitrary belief system, and asserting it’s “truth” over all others, entirely because of ethnocentrism… Yeah, and it’s atheists that are smug and arrogant.
cleek
@knocienz:
put me down as a determinist, but one who is happy to go along with the illusion of free will because i know i will never be able to identify and understand all the things that go into “having a thought”.
maybe someone, someday, will be able to do it (more likely, a computer, since a human could never think fast enough to keep up with all the data about what’s happening inside another person’s brain, in real time). but it won’t happen in my lifetime.
Mnemosyne
@jrg:
Here’s a thought experiment for you. Take a look at the painting that Tom included in his post above, then come back and show us empirical proof that it’s a good painting.
That’s what JGabriel seems to be saying: things like religious belief are literally immaterial, the same way that perceiving art is immaterial. You can look at the science of how one’s eyes work and how the image is processed in the brain, but you can’t use science to determine what’s a great painting and what isn’t. That kind of question is beyond the realm of science because you will never be able to prove that one painting is better than another using physical, empirical evidence.
JGabriel
@Sentient Puddle:
At which point, it would be redefined as natural. The definition of “supernatural” is that which is not constrained by natural law. The word “axiom” itself implies a natural law, subject to repetition under identical circumstances.
A god constrained by natural law isn’t a god at all – it’s just an alien being. A god that will always act predictably, that will always, under circumstance A, produce outcome B, isn’t a god — it’s a force that can be harnessed for technological purposes.
A god that can be predicted, a god without whimsy, is no god.
And a science that can’t accurately predict is no science; it would be divination. That’s why science rests on on a philosophy that excludes gods and spirits from its explanations.
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draftmama
All the atheists I know, including me and my honey, having been brought up in the “church” of whatever, seem to have had that apocryphal moment. For me it was sitting in confirmation class and thinking I know they want me to be devout but I’m not and I don’t believe in this malarkey, and I’d rather be out playing tennis (it was June and sunny). My honey’s last week in Lutheran school was his “oh really??”- he realized he no longer had to believe it was all so terribly important.
Just because we don’t believe in “God” doesn’t mean we don’t espouse moral values. My mum who despite dragging us to church because we lived opposite the Vicarage was an avowed atheist, died in 1986 but her spirit is with me every day, as I’m sure mine will be for my kids.
The hypocrisy of religion is the sad. All those pols blowing off about god and gays while they f**k everything they can get hold of, with or without diapers. And they get to “govern”…..
Get your own little piece of land, grow food, keep chickens, learn to drive the horses, feed the pigs, live zero energy and feed the birds because THAT is really good for your soul – you can actually tune the garbage out pretty effectively.
cleek
@JGabriel:
that’s completely backwards. science does not exclude anything. religion does the excluding because it knows it needs to put its assertions out of the realm of testability. religion says “this is a wonderful thing which you can know nothing about except what i tell you.”
and when religions do make testable claims – the 6,000 year-old Earth, for example – those claims eventually end up getting tested and religion retreats. we’re left with metaphysical hand-waving because that’s all that science hasn’t been able to knock down.
jrg
@Mnemosyne:
He said: “Miracles, by definition, aren’t repeatable under controlled circumstances”. This implies that the supernatural can affect the natural world. That’s entirely objective, not subjective. Either it did, or it didn’t.
Of course, he and cleek already went over this above, but it’s still an absurd discussion of semantics masquerading as a meaningful theological discussion. I can believe all day long that unicorns exist. I could even glue a horn to a horse’s head.
Even if you use an abused animal or a mental image of a unicorn to say that unicorns exist in the abstract sense, neither action will conjure up a magical creature.
JGabriel
@jrg:
Wrong. I’m saying that it can’t be called science, because science excludes supernatural explanations from its purview.
I don’t believe there is a spiritual world, or that it interacts with the physical world, but even if there was and it did, it would still fall outside the domain of science, because it is supernatural. Science restricts itself to discovering, analyzing, and commenting on repeatable, natural, laws.
A spiritual world that can override the laws of physics is, ipso facto, supernatural and not predictable, and therefore the scientific method — which bases its laws and predictions on repeatable phenomena — cannot be used to analyse it or state the laws which govern it, because, again by definition, the supernatural is unpredictable and ungovernable by natural law. If it were, it would no longer be supernatural.
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JGabriel
@cleek:
Jeepers, Cleek, there’s a whole branch of literature on this issue. Science excludes the supernatural; it’s part of science’s philosophical underpinnings. Saying over and over again that it’s not, doesn’t make it true.
If you want to read more about it, Stephen Jay Gould’s Rock of Ages, on Non-Overlapping Magisteria, is a decent starting point.
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knocienz
@cleek:
I would think that denial of the illusion would actually substantially lower one’s survival rate. Which of course implies that a certain level of faith-in-denial-of-reason is both healthy and necessary.
The question is what level of denial is optimal? A subject that I’ve found makes both religious and athiests somewhat uncomfortable.
Sentient Puddle
@JGabriel: Right, but the underlying point there is that if a hard truth is out there, science would love to take a stab at finding it. If there’s another realm out there that plays by different rules, science would be trying to figure out those rules.
In that sense, the existence and nature of God strikes me as being one such hard truth, not something that can be considered more subjective, like what @Mnemosyne alluded to. There’s clearly a lot of philosophical ground in there that science would be ill-equipped to deal with (and that stuff I’m trying to stay away from because I’ve soured a fair bit on philosophy as a whole), but it really seems like there’s at least a fair bit of stuff that you could venture at with science. Or rather, you could if anyone had any clue where to begin.
Mnemosyne
@jrg:
But he’s not saying that he believes that miracles actually occur. He’s actually saying that he doesn’t believe it, but if a miracle occurred, it would by definition be a supernatural occurrence, not a natural (scientific) one.
Frankly, I think that people who try to find “proof” of their religious and/or philosophical beliefs are morons because by definition they will never find that proof. As I said, it’s like trying to prove scientifically that a certain painting or a particular piece of music is great because of how the artist mixed his pigments or the particular arrangement of the notes of the composer. It misses the point by a mile.
JGabriel
jrg:
I don’t think this is a meaningful discussion about theology at all.
Wikipedia:
So, yes, a semantic discussion about the meaning of science is exactly what this is. I don’t think that’s an absurd discussion to have, but you’re free to have that opinion.
I do get tired of the use of the word semantics as a cheap insult, though.
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cleek
@JGabriel:
there is no such thing as “the supernatural”. it is a fantasy. that science excludes such things is an indictment of the person who asserts his fantasy is reality.
logician, heal thyself.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
This removes it even from the realm of philosophy and makes religion, what, a matter of aesthetics, like high fashion.
@knocienz:
Not at all. We’re wired to believe weird things. Sometimes this makes us wary of the moving shape in the night, which might be a danger. And it might be stupid to check it out in the absence of any tangible evidence of what it might be. And if it turns out to be the wind shifting a branch instead of a lion, then we fooled ourselves, but are still alive. We may even tell others, or ourselves, that we were braver than we actually were. Because you gotta have faith.
2liberal
my sports hate list:
1. New York Yankees (the MFYs)
2. Pittsburgh Steelers
3. New York Jets
4. Bill Parcells (blowhard traitor who was on the phone wth the Jets during SB week 1996 season)
Favorite sports teams and people:
1. Arizona Cardinals (have season tix)
2. NE Patriots (longtime fan since ~1970, not a front runner)
3. Phoenix Suns
4. Bellichick
5. Alvin Gentry
25. Ken Whisenhunt
JGabriel
@Mnemosyne: Thank you, Mnemosyne. I like your parallel examples from the art world.
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Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
Interesting that you feel compelled to discount the very idea of art by sneering that it’s all about “high fashion” and “aesthetics.”
Aesthetics can be an aspect of art, but it absolutely is not the definition of art. In fact, I would argue that aesthetics are often used as a “scientific” way to claim that there’s an objective way to judge art that everyone should agree with.
Apathy
I work in an environmental chem lab and I for one would love to be certified to detect evil spirits. Not sure how you run a calibration curve on that.
Science doesn’t ignore the supernatural or miracles, it just does the best it can. They are currently handled as random error and outliers.
It basically comes down to “Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science.”
http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20081205
JGabriel
cleek:
A belief with which I wholeheartedly agree. But science can’t be used to prove or disprove it, because science axiomatically excludes the supernatural from consideration.
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Mnemosyne
@Sentient Puddle:
I admit, I have a somewhat idiosyncratic view of spirituality/religion/whatever, but I do think it’s primarily subjective and that people organize themselves into groups but retain at least some of that subjectivity.
For example, you can ask a group of, say, devout Roman Catholics who all went to the same Catholic school and had the same teachers about some of the various dogma and beliefs of that particular sect (like transubstantiation, Purgatory, or Limbo) and I guarantee you that not one of the interviews will match perfectly with any of the others. That’s because even when people are presented with a rigid belief system, they’ll often pick and choose which parts they believe and which parts they can ignore.
As a society, we don’t act like religion is subjective, but I think we’d probably be better off if we did.
jrg
@JGabriel:
You and cleek were arguing over the meaning of “to exist” upthread. I think I’ll file that one under semantics.
…and if your argument consists of playing word games with “to exist” in order to prove your point, perhaps you should be a little less sensitive when someone calls you on it.
@Mnemosyne:
If my aunt had a scrotum, she’d be my uncle.
knocienz
@Brachiator:
I think the analogy is a bit off, very few folks have an issue with faith in the absence of information, but faith in denial of information is usually viewed differently.
(being worried that the sound in the dark was not a lion or a prowler, but a manticore for instance)
But I do agree on the overall point that we are wired to believe in wierd things. The issue I’ve found when I discuss free will as an example is that most everyone (including strong athiests) will agree that it is a useful belief for them even if most evidence is to the contrary. (And in many ways, I’m agreeing with the originally cited author as belief in free will typically doesn’t lead to the burning of witches so doesn’t have as strong of a downside)
cleek
@JGabriel:
again, science hasn’t done the exclusion.
if you deliberately define something as being untouchable by science, you can’t use science to describe it. true. but it’s not a matter of “science is incapable…”, it’s a matter of “you have made a nonsensical statement.”
z5 + green = gravy TIE fighter tantrum.
your inability to disprove that doesn’t mean i have made a “supernatural” statement. it means i’m speaking gibberish.
JGabriel
Apathy:
Heh. I’d go a step further and drop the “indistinguishable from”. Magic/alchemy is technology without the exclusion of the supernatural — an attempt to produce predictable technological results on an explanatory basis of “spirits” rather than explanations based on physical laws derived from repeatable, natural, explanations.
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Mnemosyne
@jrg:
Well, if you take intersexed people into account, not necessarily. But it does seem to me that JGabriel is approaching this mostly as a philosophical question — which by definition doesn’t have a single or right answer — and not a scientific question.
JGabriel
@cleek:
Yes. Yes, it does.
(C’mon, dude, you set yourself up for that one. I couldn’t leave a low-hanging pitch like that just sit there.)
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Mnemosyne
@cleek:
Is saying that DaVinci was a better artist than Caravaggio automatically a nonsensical statement? It would be nonsensical if you were standing in a lab trying to prove it through chemically analyzing their paints, but not if you’re standing in front of each of their paintings.
It’s a nonsensical statement to present your aesthetic opinion as something that can be scientifically proven, but it’s a perfectly rational statement outside of science. That’s why it’s nonsensical for fundamentalists to try and prove that their religion is “real” in a material sense — it exists outside of science because it’s subjective by nature.
JGabriel
@jrg:
The meaning of “to exist” is a semantical question; i.e., a question of definition. So I have no argument with your filing system.
We’re not engaging in a word game, we’re discussing the meaning of science. Relegating it to a word game is a nice way to dismiss the discussion without thinking about it, though.
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Brachiator
@Mnemosyne: RE: This removes it even from the realm of philosophy and makes religion, what, a matter of aesthetics, like high fashion.
You have got me entirely wrong. I am not discounting the idea of art. I am discounting the idea of religion.
In fact, if anything, I value art much more than I do religion.
The greatest critics, from Aristotle to Northrop Frye, have been systematic in their approaches to art, but this is not quite the same thing as being “scientific,” which is almost always reductive. And then you have something like Freud’s Jokes and their Relation to the Unconcious, which is not even funny. He’s always stepping on the punch lines.
On the other hand, Joyce’s jibe in Finnegan’s Wake about girls who are “jung and easily freudened” is pure gold.
Sadly, most Americans furiously rebel against anything remotely resembling critical judgment with respect to art, and the only meaningful criticism becomes “I liked it. It was entertaining.” Not much of a universal or “objective standard” here.
Mnemosyne
If it sounds like I’m saying there’s no such thing as the One True Religion and all religious belief is entirely subjective … you’re right.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
My argument is that discounting the idea of religion is like discounting the idea that motion pictures can be art because they’re a collective endeavor and not the single vision of a single person (and, yes, I’ve had that argument with people). It’s still a subjective decision.
You can objectively say that people who insist that there is material proof of their religious beliefs are total fucking morons, because that material proof doesn’t exist. That’s not the same as judging someone’s personal beliefs in things like love or charity as “true” or “not true.” You can judge those beliefs as stupid or assholish, but you can do that with art, too.
Some people value art more. Some people value religion more. Some people mix the two and use their religion to inform their art or their art to inform their religion. We can do this because religion is much more similar to art than it is to science. Which is why, as I keep emphasizing, people who look for scientific proof of their religious beliefs are total fucking morons.
jrg
Yeah, but what he appears to be saying is: “If something were to happen for absolutely no physical reason, no reasoning exists that would be able to predict future occurrences of a similar event”.
Aside from the fact that his assertion describes nothing but itself (“If something is supernatural, then it’s supernatural”), how is this applicable to anything, in any way? How can you know that something is supernatural without searching for a reason first? Furthermore, if you’re unable to determine a reason for an occurrence, does it follow that no reason exists, so it’s open season for boogeyman speculation?
There is no way to know for sure if something happened for no reason. “the supernatural” in the context of this discussion means nothing more than “anything I cannot explain”.
Brachiator
@knocienz:
The free will question is somewhat interesting philosophically, but I’m not certain how significant it is as a practical matter. It’s not that anyone who denies the existence of free will can predict what any individual will do next or given any particular environment or stimuli.
You don’t learn anything about consciousness (which may be a delusional byproduct of biochemical processes, but it’s still cool) or personality.
I take your point, though. I have a bit more interest in how so many components have to come together to create an integrated, functional human being, and how something like an absence of fear can paradoxically be harmful to an individual.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
Speaking as someone with two film degrees, it seems to be because anyone can watch a movie, so everyone thinks they’re automatically an expert. Not everyone can read Joyce or Pynchon, so they’re (somewhat) more willing to defer to critics to judge those, but it’s easy to sit and watch a movie, so everyone imagines themselves to be an expert.
cleek
@Mnemosyne:
if only religion was a simple matter of taste!
aesthetics can at least be defended and discussed. you can describe the things that please/displease you about a work, and other people can weigh your observations against whatever it is that they like/dislike about it. and, you both agree that you’re talking about something that actually exists. but there’s nothing to even discuss about “God” – there’s not even a fourth-generation Xerox of a 2000-year-old sketch to look at. there’s only gibberish.
aesthetics may be subjective, but the objects under consideration are objectively real. religion is subjective opinions about logical nullities.
(i will grant that the allegorical stories that religions bring with them are useful, as all allegories are.)
Fargus
jrg: Exactly. The supernatural, abstracted to such a level that it can’t interact with the natural, is not just unknown but unknowable. If it can’t have any impact on our natural world, then it can’t be known, it can’t be claimed to be known, and the most logical default position is a hard agnosticism.
It seems to me that JGabriel is trying to have it both ways re: miracles. If something happens in our world, the natural world, then it is testable via objective means. It may not be repeatable, at least not at first, but there’s no reason to call it miraculous if your definition of the miraculous has to be supernatural, you know what I’m saying? If someone claims an honest-to-goodness miracle, it seems to me that JGabriel’s response, if he’s being honest and consistent, would have to be that they’re full of shit because anything happening in the natural world cannot by definition have a supernatural explanation because the supernatural is by definition divorced from science by definition. By definition.
JGabriel
@jrg:
Dude, you seem to be operating under the delusion that I believe in religion or the supernatural, despite my repeated assertions that I do not.
Also, you’re making my argument for me: I’m not saying the supernatural exists, I’m saying that science exludes it from consideration — for precisely the reasons you’ve stated above. You can’t determine that anything has a supernatural explanation, because the supernatural is definitionally unpredictable and therefore undeterminable.
The scientific method is based on the premise that all natural phenomena has a natural explanation, and that if we don’t know the explanation yet, we will find it, eventually, when we have more knowledge. I’m a big fan of it.
Saying a phenomena has a supernatural cause is outside the realm of scientific explanation; i.e., it is not an acceptable explanation in science. In church, yes; in science, not. Therefore science can’t be used to prove or disprove the existence of God. God is a priori excluded as a scientific explanation. Once you bring God into it, you’re no longer in a scientific conversation — you can call it religion or metaphysics (outside science), but it’s no longer science.
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Chicago dyke
@Sharl:
so in which ways, to use your own words, is god testable?
and i’ll have to remember this is blog where having advanced training on the topic at hand isn’t worth anything. i’m sure that will be interesting to John and Doug. thanks for reminding me!
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
I don’t take this line of attack because I understand that some people deeply need to believe in religion or something, whether or not it is real. It’s like people who go to psychics or fortune tellers. Their need for comfort, reassurance, whatever is paramount. It is sad sometimes, but this doesn’t make these people morons.
Hmm. I see what you are saying here in part, but with art it is more about it’s beauty than about it’s truth.
Still, there is a huge difference between saying “that’s good art” and “that’s God.” Anything we say about art is a matter of valuation and evaluation. A statement about God is supposedly a statement about the world, the universe.
And oddly enough, a lot of God talk is very much like UFO talk. I am always amused when people on late night talk radio go on and on about what the space aliens want even though they have never spoken with one directly.
Science, religion and art are all ways of trying to understand the world or in the case of art, responding or reacting to being in the world. Art and science are more interesting to me.
Religion hangs on, just barely, but has been replaced for some people by psychology. Oddly enough, psychologists and all manner of “experts” are treated like priests or shaman. Go figure.
Fargus
@JGabriel:
You’re confusing things. Sure, “Goddidit” isn’t a satisfactory explanation for a natural phenomenon. But to say that you can’t evaluate claims of natural phenomenon with supernatural causes is just false. If all you’re saying is that science can’t tell us what kind of shoes God is wearing, then you’re saying basically less than nothing at all. What I and others seem to be saying here is that when religion makes empirical claims about how the world is, those are testable claims, and can be shown to be false, or unlikely, or what have you.
In terms of heaven and hell and God and his nature, etc., as I said above, sure, all that stuff is unprovable and therefore useless in any explanatory context. It’s just a nice story people like to tell each other about how they’re better than everyone else.
But to say that since God isn’t an acceptable cause in science, science can’t say anything about God, that’s just false.
JGabriel
Fargus:
Yep, that’s pretty much what I’d think, with exceptions for obvious rhetorical exclamations of awe at the “miracle of life” or the “miracle of the universe”. Colloquially, we often use the word “miracle” for particularly unique (there’s only one universe that we know of) or awe-inspiring.
But in the more everyday sense of “Ooh, something special happened to me, it must be a miracle ordained by God!”, yeah, I think that’s bullshit used to justify one’s good fortune as meaning one is superior to the rest of us everyday rabble.
Edited to add:
Fargus:
Also largely true, but not because it’s divorced from science, but because I don’t believe in the supernatural. Science is divorced from the supernatural by the philosophical underpinnings of its method, not by belief.
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Chicago dyke
and you know it’s “unpredictable” how, again?
in order to know something is irregular, one must first have a regular standard by which it can be measured. which supernatural events do you know of which demonstrate its irregularity, and against what are you comparing it to, that is supernaturally “regular?” or are you measuring it against reality, which is testable and knowable to all? unlike the supernatural, which only some of you can perceive?
and i’m sorry, but there just isn’t one definition of “supernatural.” every faith, every sect, every con artist, define it differently. that’s the fun part. science is in no way afraid of testing supernatural claims, in the West that’s been true for hundreds of years (not counting ancient skeptics who were even more willing to poke fun of Zeus and Pazuzu). when people make claims about the existence of something, they are inherently presuming to have knowledge of it.
share that knowledge with us. not via fun snark and semantics and pithy blog posts, but by example. how did you believers come to the conclusion that the supernatural is “real?” because you were raised to believe so by other people who told you it was, or because you experienced it? if you experienced it, can everyone else, or just special people like you? if not, why not? and if not, why should i worship something that denies me the experience of directly knowing it?
Mnemosyne
@cleek:
It really ought to be, but unfortunately fundamentalists decided to battle on the grounds of whether or not the things they said were objectively real, not whether or not they were useful. So you end up with things like the friend of Fred Clark’s who nearly had a nervous breakdown when he was presented with an 8,000 year old wall because he’d been told not only that the Earth was only 6,000 years old, but that if he didn’t believe the world was only 6,000 years old, then absolutely nothing else he believed was true, either. Useful for creating atheists, but not really the best way to go for everyone’s mental health.
Except that there are things to look at: the Bible, the Koran, the Vedas. The authorship may be in dispute ;-) but those are still real things that can be examined and debated. You can read them and discuss the things you liked and the things you didn’t and whether or not you found any of the stories useful or enlightening.
Which, again, is where the fundie insistence on “truth” screws everything up, because if you think that, say, the Bible is literally true and every event listed in there actually happened, then you can’t have a debate or discussion about it any more than you can debate or discuss whether or not DNA exists. By presenting it as fact, they ruin it as philosophy because they don’t allow for the kind of dissection that’s necessary to objectively examine what’s there.
If you haven’t heard Julia Sweeney’s “Letting Go of God,” I highly recommend it, because the thing that leads her to atheism is a Bible study class where all of the questions she has about what she just read and answered with, “Well, some of it didn’t actually happen, but some of it did, and we’ll tell you which parts are which.”
cleek
@Mnemosyne:
well, those are statements about the supernatural critters. they aren’t the supernatural critters themselves. they’re the Great Anthology Of Art Criticism (vol 1,2,3), which go on for great length about the merits of works of art that could never have existed.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
I would disagree — I think it’s impossible for something to be beautiful without it containing some kind of truth, even if that truth is, “Wouldn’t it be cool if other planets existed and they had beautiful cities on them?” We can tell when art is false (Thomas Kincaide, anyone?), and it pisses us off.
This is my prejudice as a writer/screenwriter, but art is a statement about the universe, at least if it’s good art. Art that doesn’t make any kind of statement about the world or the universe or, at its most prosaic level, about being human, is hollow.
That’s why you can take two huge blockbuster fantasy films like Transformers and Inception and explain why one is art and the other is not art. It’s because one of them shows us an interesting universe that has morals and consequences that we can think about and debate, and the other one has lots of awesome car crashes and explosions.
Mnemosyne
@cleek:
Ulysses is not Joyce himself, either — it’s a statement about himself. If you go in that direction, you have to say that Islam or Mormonism are really true because we know who the authors of their holy books were. But, of course, just because someone existed doesn’t mean that their claims about religion were empirically true, too. It just means that we know who the author was.
Since there’s no possible way that a faster than light speed drive could exist given what we know about physics, should everyone stop watching Star Trek? Or do we accept it as storytelling that creates an alternate universe where impossible things happen?
Fargus
@Mnemosyne:
If that’s how everybody understood religion, I for one wouldn’t be participating in this conversation.
Sharl
@Chicago dyke:
__
OK, first I need the definition of God. Here it is: A corporeal being, visible to all humans in its presence, with bright green hair who floats* in air (*approximately 2.958 meters from the ground), and is always in front of the building where I work from 1:18pm through 1:25pm on Tuesdays. It will supply a beverage of my choice immediately upon request, and also upon request, it will sing all the songs from Monty Python’s “Holy Grail” without missing a note.
I’ll check tomorrow (the “testable” part), and let you know how this all pans out. I’m very excited; I hope you are too.
Chicago dyke
so in other words, Sharl, ya got nuthin. or were you just saying things you don’t really mean, just to be nasty to me?
i think i know which it is. and remember, i’m the atheist. i don’t try to define what doesn’t exist. if you don’t even know what you really mean when you say “god” maybe you should talk about it less.
JGabriel
Reposted due to moderation.
JGabriel
WyldPirate:
Ah. Well, if Fargus thinks I’m denying that, then either he’s wrong, or I’m explaining myself poorly.
Fargus:
I’m not saying that. I’m saying that science can’t use Goddidit or any other supernatural explanation. The only scientific options for describing a cause are natural laws or saying we don’t know the cause (yet).
Euclidean Geometry is based on five axioms, none of which are provable. The fifth axiom states (from Wikipedia): If a line segment intersects two straight lines forming two interior angles on the same side that sum to less than two right angles, then the two lines, if extended indefinitely, meet on that side on which the angles sum to less than two right angles.
Again, like all five axioms, it’s not provable or disprovable, and, in fact, valid Non-euclidean geomtries exist that change that axiom.
Excluding supernatural causes in science is axiomatic, like the five axioms in geometry, neither provable nor disprovable. That means it can’t be used to prove or disprove the existence of supernatural causes, all it can do is show that there are natural explanations that are more fruitful and useful than supernatural explanations for a given phenomena.
We exclude religion/gods/the supernatural from science because it provides a solid foundation for discovering repeatable phenomena (which we call laws) in the natural material universe that have held up over time and proven useful as a basis for technology, exploration, and knowledge.
You can draw the inference that such usefulness and success means that God doesn’t exist, but that’s not proof. It’s just an inference based on the success of ignoring God/the supernatural as a basis for the causes of natural phenomena.
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JGabriel
@Chicago dyke:
I thought I answered this already. The supernatural is that which can overrides the laws of nature. That ability to “override” is what makes it “super”. I’m not using any kind of specialized or esoteric definition here:
Wikipedia — The supernatural or supranatural (Latin: super, supra “above” + natura “nature”) is anything above or beyond what one holds to be natural or exists outside natural law and the observable universe.
If something isn’t governed by natural law, which is to say it can’t be predicted by natural law or observation, then that’s pretty much fits the definition of “unpredictable”, doesn’t it?
Eh, I don’t agree that it’s real. I merely agree that it has a definition.
I think we’re using the word supernatural slightly differently. I’m using it as a label for things which are postulated to supersede natural laws, including but not limited to gods and spirits.
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sharl
@Chicago dyke: My point is that god has so many definitions (AFAICT – you are the expert, not me), that I don’t even engage in such questions of “testability”. I simply invented a “testable God” (theological Calvinball, if you will – I win!).
Seems to much like that “# of angels on the head of a pin” BS to me. For folks who want to discuss that, knock yerselves out; I tend to get bored with the subject early in the discussion.
BTW, I’d love to read your thesis, if it includes (as I’m sure it must) HOW a faith system (or faith systems in general) evolved in a given culture, taking into account prehistoric oral traditions (to the extent they were known), tribal power relationships, local environmental conditions (weather, seasons, yaddayadda) that would affect the mythology, etc. That stuff is fascinating to me, but as someone who had to eat, sleep and breathe my scientific specialty to get my degree, I never found time to check out your turf. Got any good book recs or decent online references?
I’ve seen your intellect at its best, and you seem to have a damn fine mind. But don’t expect much respect for your knowledge in these parts, especially on an unsupported appeal-to-authority basis (no matter how valid that may be; I know more about you from longtime lurking at Eschaton, but most folks here don’t). This is mostly a place for barstool bitchin’ and BSing; I judge this joint accordingly, and I like it here.
Fargus
@JGabriel:
I have been careful not to say anywhere in here that science disproves the existence of God. I said hard agnosticism (not just unknown but unknowable) is the stance that makes the most sense to me, and when I say I’m an atheist, it’s shorthand for “I haven’t seen anything that leads me to believe God exists, and as such I conduct my life as though he doesn’t.”
What I’m saying is that you’re claiming that if supernatural claims can’t be posited as proof of natural phenomena, then natural means can’t be used to evaluate supernatural claims. This is simply not true. That’s like saying that because “Goddidit” isn’t acceptable as proof that the gaps in the fossil record vindicate claims of God’s existence, then science can’t be used to evaluate empirical claims made about the supernatural. They’re two different things that you’re conflating.
I agree with you that perhaps we can’t measure things that take place inside this supernatural realm internally, but to the extent that claims are made that the supernatural realm impacts our reality, it can be measured, albeit indirectly. Hence studies about the efficacy of prayer, etc.
JGabriel
Sentient Puddle: Agreed.
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Origuy
This is one of the best Open Threads I’ve seen in this or any blog in a long time. Off topic; I’m in the San Jose airport waiting for a flight to Chicago which has been delayed. Despite all the fuss about the new security, no one touched my junk and as far as I can tell, I’ve not been microwaved; just the usual metal detectors. The new scanners are there but not operating at least in terminal A. I’ve been at the bar at Gordon Biersch for an hour already; it looks like I’ll be there a while longer. The bartender is pushing the $4 shots pretty hard. I hope I’ll get to Chicago in time to get some Genos East pan pizza with the solid layer of sausage under the cheese. I’ll be really bummed if I don’t!
+3 and counting……
JGabriel
@Fargus:
That’s my belief as well. Earlier in the thread you derided non-overlapping magisteria, and that’s where I think we disagree. To me, the “harder”, i.e. more rigorous, stance is to accept that science has nothing to say with respect to the existence of God/the supernatural, and to recognize that’s the domain of faith and religion rather than try to shoehorn science into commenting on it.
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Mnemosyne
@JGabriel:
That’s pretty much where I stand, too — to me, you can neither prove nor disprove something that relies as heavily on subjective experience as religion does, so the people who insist that they can prove there is no god/s don’t seem that different that people who insist that they can prove that there are.
The only way to find out without a shadow of a doubt whether or not there is an afterlife is to actually die, and I’m not that eager to find out.
JGabriel
@Fargus:
By the way, I think you’ve misread me on this point. I do make a distinction between the existence of a supernatural order, which is outside the domain of scientific investigation, and alleged supernatural occurrences in the natural world, which, being in the natural world, are decidedly within its domain.
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JGabriel
Mnemosyne:
Heh. Depends on what kind of day I’m having.
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JGabriel
@Mnemosyne:
More in the way of a footnote, but Mnemosyne is right. I was using “immaterial” in the strictly literal sense, not in its colloquially dismissive “irrelevant” sense.
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Chicago dyke
sorry, mang. i got 3.5 jobs and i can’t really keep up on this thread like i’d like to. it reminds me of the old days in school. but with less boring theology of the xtian fathers in latin and greek, and more snark and sex.
The supernatural is that which can overrides the laws of nature.
again: an example of that happening would be? if you can’t come up with one, then it’s just a “metaphysical” philosopher’s exercise, akin to “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin,” something that never really happened but that some people use as an “example” of a fishy-wishy definition of “something” except in the sense that it’s not in any way like some thing that is real and observable by all people. if you can’t point to it having happened, to someone, somewhere, ever, you’re basically talking about the pink hippos in tutus i saw last weekend when i was smoking some really fine junk. this is and always will be my crux with the theologists and apologists who make claims about the supposed reality of the supernatural. you can’t all agree on a definition, let alone point to an example of it showing itself in a meaningful way to human beings, or even one research scientist. but i’m supposed to believe it’s “real” in some sense?
BTW, I’d love to read your thesis, if it includes (as I’m sure it must) HOW a faith system (or faith systems in general) evolved in a given culture, taking into account prehistoric oral traditions
clarification: there are many different kinds of divinity schools, not all of them teach xtian or even monotheistic theology and religious history and nothing else. some of them, like mine, also teach political history, ethics (including non-religious ethics), archaeology, philology, philosophy including non-theist philosophy, sociology, ev-bio and anthropology. the term “divinity school” in the modern american academic setting is actually a bit archaic, and implies something from a past, different age. my work was in comparative Semitic philology and pre-monotheistic religious traditions and archaeology of the eastern Semitic in a period that completely predates Biblical “history” (the cultures of Sumer, Akkad, Assyria and Babylonian but with plenty of Ugaritic, Hittite, and Hebrew because it’s a well rounded program). if you read Emesal, i’ll send you some of my better chapters. i took a buttload of xtian, jewish, islamic and hindu theology classes while getting the master’s degree, and fell asleep in most of them. well, not quite, but you get the drift. writing a diss on something like “how a faith system evolved in a given culture” was never on my radar. i was always much more interested in the political and economic motivations of those who cloaked themselves in religion to enrich themselves, and how those people created the “history” and “religions” of their dominant societal narratives. i guess that might be what you’re asking me to describe, come to think of it.
my bottom line at this point: heh, and it’s no different today than it was 5,000 years ago. “all bow to Enlil and Inanna! give us all you cattle and sheep-goats! (the $ of the day) and don’t question what the Priest-King-Godling says about higher taxes, or you’ll be sold into slavery! now have a heaping cup of su9-ba2-du-du (also known as “shut the fuck up!”)”
but if you believe anything i ever write, anywhere, believe this: i really don’t ever give a fuck what anyone, on any comment box, thinks about what i blog. i blog because of my current working reality, which is one filled with bouts of busy, annoying work followed by long stretches of “hurry up and wait” as we used to say in the Corps. blogging keeps my mind busy enough so i don’t feel like putting a bullet thru my nose, while my life is on hold. i care about impressing people in meatspace; the virtual world is like TV for people like me (who doesn’t watch TV) and if everyone here hates me, it just makes it more amusing. you seem like a good egg and i appreciate your engagement, fwiw. BJ has always been the place i go to feel like “an outsider;” i’m very aware of how i don’t fit in here.
rootless, care to ‘splain? heh. ;-)
Mnemosyne
@Chicago dyke:
I find it fascinating that people can take an idea that has no god in it whatsoever (like, oh, libertarianism/Objectivism) and still treat the central belief (like, oh, the magical “free market”) as something godlike that cannot be questioned or changed. I’m not sure if that says something about our deep need as a species to have a belief system, or the power of elites to use any tools at hand to keep the proles down, or some combination of both and a few other things besides.
Sharl
@Chicago dyke:
Thanks for the response.
I don’t know if the last line was aimed at me, but in case it was, I am not rootless, who shows up here from time-to-time under that same nym (e.g., here, and here – style look familiar?). And on the rare occasions I delurked over at Eschaton, it was generally using this nym (at least for the past several years).
Rootless and I do tend to comment in some of the same places, and I used to watch the battles s/he would wage over at Atrios’ joint – talk about being an ‘outsider’! – but I never swiped the rootless_e nym, nor style.
JGabriel
Chicago dyke:
I guess the first such example that comes to mind is the parting of the Red Sea in the biblical story — and since I’m not religious, you’re right, it’s really no different to me than the question of how many angels can dance on the head of pin.
So, yes, this has been a metaphysical, and semantic, conversation all along. I’ve said as much several times.
I’ve said repeatedly that I don’t believe in the supernatural. In fact, I said it in the same post you quoted:
.
Jack Bauer
@The Real American Democrat:
That’s actually what he said. Faith is faith, in and of itself, that’s fine.
gordonsowner
Good grief, I haven’t seen such philosophical wankery on religion and art from Mnemosyne and JGabriel since college. Not a Woody Allen fan in general, but whenever I hear wanking like this, I think of this clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCb2Le3wtIk .
Growing up rural, people believe in god (and I no longer do), and not in the way that they believe some art is better than others. It isn’t a subjective thing. And this has practical implications on their lives and our society. But no one gives a shit (other than philosophical masturbators like these here) if it is or isn’t subjective like art, or can be defined as outside the domain of science. The religious don’t care about this perspective. Atheists don’t care. People practicing science don’t care. Mnemosyne and JGabriel argue this point to and end that at first I couldn’t decipher and quickly gave up caring about.
Socrates was executed not because he brought a freeing truth damaging to the government, but because he was a pain in the ass who flaunted laws for no damn good reason. I am much more sympathetic to the Athenians than Socrates now with some distance from college, and it’s mostly because of meeting people like the philosophers in forums like this.
JGabriel
gordonsowner:
This makes me so grateful for the rest of your response. I couldn’t be more pleased that someone who shares their sympathies with the Athenians over Socrates would have your reaction.
If it’s pseudo-trolling, it’s brilliant, but I’ll be even more delighted if it’s not.
Thank you, gordonsowner, thank you for your gift of mirth.
.
Mnemosyne
@gordonsowner:
Really? They didn’t think that “their” god was the only right and true god, and everyone else had false gods?
You must have grown up around some awfully open-minded believers.
gordonsowner
@JGabriel:
I was inspired by the passage from here, starting pg. 73 (by the page numbers, not absolute pages). While we’re at it, I feel the same lack of love about Robert M. Pirsig, after a friend recently made me read _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_. The insights about Quality with a capital ‘Q’? Yeah, he could have kept that light under a bushel… same caliber of bullshit as here, but, you know, more royalties for him. If you take that as a compliment, more’s the pity.
gordonsowner
@Mnemosyne: Err… go back and reread… You don’t seem to be understanding that correctly…. they believe in god, and NOT in the way that some art is better than others. That is, not in, “well, yes, we all have our opinion about god, but we all know these opinions are subjective, like art,” but in the way of “ours is the one true god.”
Correcting the interpretation of my post is about as far as I’ll go… I’ll thank you not to ask me to unzip my fly and stay for a spell… :-)
Mnemosyne
@gordonsowner:
Clearly you’ve never majored in any art field if you think that believing that your own opinion about art is the One True Way and everyone who doesn’t think exactly like you do is
going to hella stupid poseur is in any way uncommon. Trust me, among artists, the attitude is not one of “live and let live,” which is one of the reasons why it strikes me as being so close to religion. I have come close to actual fistfights over an interpretation of a scene in a film that the other person insists is “wrong.”Ewww, dude, put that thing away! What do you think this is, the New York subway?
JGabriel
gordonsowner:
Pirsig? Okay, now I’m insulted. And I mean wounded. Wounded to my very core of my being.
Because there’s nothing, NOTHING, more devastating than being accused of philosophical wankery by a random Internet commenter arguing from the authority of his/her common-sense rural upbringing (which is clearly superior to my urban-aping effetery) and the not-giving-a-shit-ness wisdom of their Athenian-philosopher-killing advocacy.
I mean, if I can’t make someone like that care, then what’s the point of living?
Sigh.
.
gordonsowner
@JGabriel:
In the inestimable words of Dr. Horrible: Wow, sarcasm! That’s original!
And you lay it on pretty thick — a sign that you aren’t confident enough in your communication skills to craft a lighter application. It makes me imagine a person who, in a foreign restaurant, makes loud animal noises and flaps their arms when ordering an entree.
And as far as my background experience goes, this sums up my attitude towards it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHJbSvidohg . How you construed it to be “arguing from authority” is beyond me. But then again you seem to care deeply about getting unimportant things right and glossing over the details of realities-on-the-ground.
The point of my o.p. is that the discussion of things like god existing and things unknowable to science is academic in the worst sense of the word. People who believe in the literal truth of religion don’t care for the discussion. Any interesting atheist doesn’t either, nor any scientist I can think of. People who want to believe, will believe. People who grew up in a faith and are too lazy or scared or comfortable to question their beleifs will also believe. People who question assumptions, especially their own deep-seated ones, likely reject god as being real. Lastly, like you guys are doing, people construct some language-cage in which god can exist but not admit falsification tests for the sake of some Grand Unified Theory that can accomodate people who want to have their cake and eat it too (and shows off how clever you are with abstractions and logic to boot!). But the last category really doesn’t have any practical importance, and so is an utter waste of time.
Arrogant pronouncement on my part? Sure. But no less so than the crap you two put up that tries to carve out a realm of your own in which you can wank away on whose art has more quality or whether that tree that fell by itself made a sound and all sorts of logical gymnastics where you don’t have to worry about hearing “Who the fuck cares?”
Fargus
JGabriel, here’s what bothers me most about your position. Your definition of supernatural is tautological. As has been pointed out above, re: miracles, you said at first that they’re not within science’s purview because they’re supernatural and thus by definition not within science’s ability to examine. But if you can somehow examine them, then they must somehow be supernatural! Such a shifting and nebulous definition, no? Your declaration that science automatically rules the supernatural out of bounds is only good up to your definition of supernatural, which seems to be something like, “Will I be able to get this done before I lose interest? If not, SUPERNATURAL!”
Mnemosyne
@gordonsowner:
If there’s one thing I hate, it’s people who insist that every fucking thing has to be “practical.” We can’t teach kids about art or music at school, because it’s not “practical.” We need to teach them to take tests by rote, because that’s “practical.”
There is room in life for frivolity. If you want your life to be nothing but work work work with no time to lay on your back in the grass and make up stories about the cloud formations, that’s your privilege, but don’t go around sneering that it’s pointless to do it because it’s not “practical.” Of course it’s not fucking practical. That’s why it’s fun, you fucking idiot.
gordonsowner
@Mnemosyne:
Ah, I see. Just so I understand correctly, your part in this thread is just pure frivolous fun, just a whole bunch of sound and fury — daydreaming out loud for an audience, with no real meaning. Which is why you calling me a fucking idiot doesn’t make me sad for myself. But, having to call people “fucking idiots” in things that are fun for you seems stressful. I suggest you relax with some art. Do you know about art? I could suggest a few Kinkade paintings to get you started…
To me, shutting out one thing (like putting up a sign, “NOM! No science allowed!”) actually takes the fun out of stuff. In this case, I think it leads to dead-end conclusions that could have been more fun. To say that science can’t say anything about god-in-the-gaps, or why certain people like certain art and not others kind of kills the scene (that’s an artsy term from comedy improv — not that i’d know personally, hating art and frivolity and all). Claiming “NOM” is an attempt to separate two unruly cousins to separate corners of the Thanksgiving table and asking them to play nicely for the rest of the day while Grandma enjoys her Valium. I say, fuck ’em, let ’em fight and see what happens.
The solution you seem to provide is not practical in the sense that you say above, in that it doesn’t survey a tract of land or get my dishes cleaner on the power-saver cycle. But it’s also not practical in a way that you seem to enjoy. It shuts down debate. “No, no,” you say, “science stops at the threshold, and now we get to make things up by some completely arbitrary and fantastic rules.” Which I find boring on its face usually, because when people do that, what they really mean is that they have some predetermined set of rules for something and they want you to be a sparring partner with them in an area they feel competent. First, that’s just narcissism, and second, I don’t like any area where I’m told something is off-limits conversationally. Usually, things unfold with all of the suspense of a game of Candyland.
But then again, what do I know of fun?