A theist is someone who believes on faith, and faith alone (because there is no scientific evidence), that god exists.

An atheist is someone who believes on faith, and faith alone (because there is no scientific evidence), that god does not exist.

An agnostic can see strengths and weaknesses in each of the true believers’ arguments, and chooses not to care.

Now I have better things to do.

Desmond Tutu quotes his father’s advice: Don’t shout louder; improve your argument.

Ponder what it means to say of someone that he believes something which you do not. If a belief, operationally defined, is an expectation for the outcome of an experiment, what can “I believe in Heaven and life after death” or “I believe in God” mean? What experiment could these statements imply? Belioevers have an answer. To a materialist “God” must be an undefined term. When asked why “God” did not appear in __Mechanique Celeste__, Laplace replied: “I have no need of that hypothesis.” That’s the most a devout materialist can say.

It is easy to suppose that loved ones who appear in our dreams after their death continue to live, somewhere. Sometimes they appear so vividly in waking dreams that they seem as real as the rocks and trees of this world. Given this, religion is natural and hardly surprising.

Sometimes I think strident atheists must have been molested by priests or something. Why else are they so angry?

As to the second question, people make stuff up to control other people. Just like the movie Marjoe we see over and over again that the heads of the religions have little belief and mostly use their religion to control people.

Religion is child abuse.

On La Shawn Barber’s blog, there’s quite a discussion going about how one lives as an atheist or agnostic. It has gotten a little OT, so I decided to post here on a side discussion, the issue of whether the Bible is myth or fact, authentic or a bunch…

Unfortunately, in actual practice in many academic circles and in not a few scientific circles (which, btw, seem to be typically embedded within academia), evidence exists that one is not free to believe what the empirical data suggests, but is politically compelled to “maintain the party line”. This seems to be especially evident in the hypothesis of evolution, which is called a theory (though never empirically established with the strength of evidence which the scientific community normally requires for theory status), and is taught in schools and cited as an basic assumption as if it were a scientific law. Further, scientists, academics, and some others have appealed to the legal system to block the serious presentation of the alternative of intelligent design.

As to your implicit assertion (or more correctly, the assertion I infer), that in religion there is no room for provisionality, I disagree, based on 42 years of personal experience and observation. For those whose religion is a form handed down, it may in fact be dogmatic. However, in what I hold to be true Christian faith, faith and beliefs are 1. subject to examination and 2. capable of standing up under the scrutiny. I can tell you that from the time I was first shown in the black and white of the Bible the message that one can personally experience a relationship with God (an assertion which conflicted with my prior religious teaching), I have consistently questioned everything. (In one church experience in which I was challenged by the tweens to help them examine “what we believe”, the pastor said to me, “You’ll lead them to the right answers [what the church believes] won’t you?”, and I replied, “I can’t promise that. We’ll see what the Bible says.”) I have always abhorred the phrase, “Well, our church believes…”, and have relied on the Bible as the final authority.

Now having said that, I acknowledge that there are, in fact and myth, “gray areas”, or more correctly, unclear areas in the Bible, and also that there is controversy about the authenticity of the Bible. I will only say here that there is plenty of empirical proof of the Bible’s authenticity (there are whole books–indeed, whole libraries–dealing with that subject). And as to the gray areas, I’ll quote a preacher I once heard about being asked if he wasn’t bothered by the parts of the Bible he didn’t understand, who replied, “I’m a whole lot more bothered by the parts I DO understand.”

But I digress. I accept/believe in the authority and authenticity of the Bible, but my belief, while it started as a step of faith, has been firmly established by my “empirical research”, that is, my continual reassessment of the Bible’s content as evidenced in my personal experience and my direct observations of events and lives around me, and of the Bible’s authenticity by my frequent revisits to the evidences of history and archeology as to the origins of and preservation of the Bible. For 42 years, my stream of incoming data has consistently reinforced my provisionally-held beliefs. I don’t consider that dogmatism.

Please reread. I cited the rantings of those men as evidence of the bible’s positive value, and I do believe it has positive value, whatever its provenance.

Religion is not called “Faith” for no reason. It obviously requires more faith than non-belief now that modern science, especially geology and astronomy, is providing verifiable answers to many of the questions ancient texts attempted to explain, but were equally obviouly way off.

For those who have had a ‘personal’ experience with their creator, I can fully understand your reason to believe, and I am very jealous. I have not and it is lonely living with the cold hard scientific evidence, coupled with the cold hard observational evidence good and bad things happen to bad and good people randomly, that actual evidence of any deity with ‘good’ power to intervene is totally missing.

“Two things, however, are clear about any religion that might derive from cybernetics and systems theory, ecology, and natural history. First, that in the asking of questions, there will be no limit to our hubris; and second, that there shall always be humility in our acceptance of answers. In these two characteristics we shall be in sharp contrast with most of the religions of the world. They show little humility in their espousal of answers but great fear about what questions they will ask.”

“Miracles are dreams and imaginings whereby
materialists hope to escape from their materialism.”

Bateson called evolution “the pattern that connects”, which is what I was getting at by calling it “the underlying mechanism of all self-organizing information systems”.

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Fred: “Kman, every person, religious or non-religious, has faith in some ‘authority’”.

Here’s the thing: in science, that faith is provisional. It’s based one’s own observations, and on building up a coherent view of reality. I know Newton is right (at least in the classical domain) because in physics class I did the experiments, not because I memorized catechisms. That coherence, or consilience, then helps us to judge how reliable an authority is. That’s necessary because it is simply not possible to do all the experiments yourself.

However, we are always ready to throw over even our most cherished authority when we are faced with new observations his theories cannot explain.
The fastest path to scientific fame is to prove your teachers dead wrong.

Or as someone once put it, the most important moment in science is not when we say, “Ha! I thought so!” It’s when we say, “Hm. That’s strange….”

There are some excellent books available which document this far better than I can, e.g. Evidence That Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell, and which process with critical logic the suppositions on both sides of our present discussion, e.g. Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.

Second point I’ll address: It’s interesting to me that you declaim the Bible and then offer as proof of the Bible’s lack of authority the rantings of three men who didn’t believe the Bible. I maintain that their “madness” was the direct result of their rejection of the Bible or possibly that their rejection of the Bible was the direct result of their madness. I’d welcome further discussion of these 2 issues, but it gets us pretty OT here.

Are those “normal, common sense techniques” you use to supposedly determine God’s existence material or immaterial? If they are immaterial, as a materialist, what “techniques” did you use to determine their value and why?

Fred

Malcom Kirkpatrick explicitly, EricZ, Kman and djmoore implicitly, and possibly RedBeard fall into this category, as do I.

I wouldn’t say I’m certain God doesn’t exist, but I would say that, using the same normal common sense techniques I use in daily life to decide whether a particular proposition is true, false, or currently unable to be determined, the existence of God is “pretty unlikely, and there’s no particular reason to believe it.”

As for whether if, God does exist, is the Bible his word? I would say on similar grounds that the Bible is almost certainly a collection of folklore with moral lessons, comparable to classical Greek mythology, the Baghavad Gita or the Norse sagas. Furthermore, my reading of history says that such evolved, time tested systems tend to be superior from a social impact point of view to the rantings of single identifiable madmen, such as Mohammed, Joseph Smith, or L. Ron Hubbard.

1) The Earth is very old (Lyell).

No, Lyell did not prove this. He assumed uniformitarianism is true with out question (the working presupposition of most current materialists) and interpreted his observations regarding his geology accordingly.

Some will argue that modern dating techniques vindicate Lyell’s notions, but the general public is more often left in the dark about the fact that dating methods are not always conclusive, but yield multiple ages and the one age recorded for the journal article is chosen from the particular bias of the scientist.

And

4) Differences in parents’ hereditary bequests influence differences in survival rates, and so differences in the representation of characteristics in the next generation (Darwin).

Darwin’s ideas were not unique to him. Others before him suggested similar understandings of natural selection and survival rates, but they understood those hereditary characteristics to be nature’s way of preserving the health of the group. No one suggested a descent with modification from lesser life forms to greater. Darwin thought the building blocks of life, like living cells, were simplistic blobs. Our discovery of DNA and our ability to see that so-called simplistic life through microscopes is really more complex than we could ever had imagined totally debunked his working theory.

Fred