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Author Topic: Atheists  (Read 404432 times)

G-Flex

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Re: Atheists
« Reply #2460 on: March 19, 2010, 02:21:53 am »

Well, the thing is that it's kind of silly to say that you either believe something is true or you don't.

If a friend of mine tells me something is true, I'll consider it, and consider how likely it is that they're wrong (to the best of my ability), and that sort of thing will determine my confidence in it being factual. If I read about something that's had all sorts of scientific studies done on it that all agree, my confidence will be substantially greater, approaching but not reaching 100%.
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MrWiggles

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Re: Atheists
« Reply #2461 on: March 19, 2010, 02:27:43 am »

Well, the thing is that it's kind of silly to say that you either believe something is true or you don't.

If a friend of mine tells me something is true, I'll consider it, and consider how likely it is that they're wrong (to the best of my ability), and that sort of thing will determine my confidence in it being factual. If I read about something that's had all sorts of scientific studies done on it that all agree, my confidence will be substantially greater, approaching but not reaching 100%.

Right, but that depends on what the item is at hand. If its objective value, like 'My paper clips weighs three gram.' Then it can be confirm repeatedly and independently. If its a value judgement like 'Shelia is a good lay.' then it can boil down to other misc. factors as it truthness is subjective.
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G-Flex

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Re: Atheists
« Reply #2462 on: March 19, 2010, 02:31:13 am »

Yeah, but only because the meaning of "good" is subjective; if you define what a given person thinks is "good" in that situation, you remove the subjectivity.

... Not that it would be an easy thing to test in a very scientific manner.
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MrWiggles

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Re: Atheists
« Reply #2463 on: March 19, 2010, 02:46:08 am »

Yeah, but only because the meaning of "good" is subjective; if you define what a given person thinks is "good" in that situation, you remove the subjectivity.

... Not that it would be an easy thing to test in a very scientific manner.

I dont know.

If we had a large sample pool, and prevented them know who they were fucking, with a selection sample of woman, then we asked them to rate on a 1-10 scale. We can then have the statitican review the resulrts without knowing who the data point collected.

We can then see if Shelia stands out as a good lay. We have a control and its doubled blinded.
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G-Flex

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Re: Atheists
« Reply #2464 on: March 19, 2010, 02:58:06 am »

Rating from a 1-10 only tests the statistical variation on people thinking she's a good lay, though; it doesn't help you predict whether or not a given person would. Well, unless you poll them like crazy on what they consider "good" to mean, or something like that. It would be pretty sketchy.
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MrWiggles

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Re: Atheists
« Reply #2465 on: March 19, 2010, 03:01:13 am »

Rating from a 1-10 only tests the statistical variation on people thinking she's a good lay, though; it doesn't help you predict whether or not a given person would. Well, unless you poll them like crazy on what they consider "good" to mean, or something like that. It would be pretty sketchy.
This is why social sciences will always be a soft science.
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G-Flex

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Re: Atheists
« Reply #2466 on: March 19, 2010, 03:04:32 am »

... Because there are methodological problems with studies that were conceived as a complete joke due to how infeasible they are?
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MrWiggles

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Re: Atheists
« Reply #2467 on: March 19, 2010, 03:08:20 am »

... Because there are methodological problems with studies that were conceived as a complete joke due to how infeasible they are?
Exactly.
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Neruz

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Re: Atheists
« Reply #2468 on: March 19, 2010, 04:25:18 am »

Also because social sciences rarely give a cause, only an effect. Social Scientists can say that group X of people is Y% more likely to engage in violent crime, but they can't say why this is the case, only that it is.

Flaede

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Re: Atheists
« Reply #2469 on: March 19, 2010, 04:57:18 am »

Also because social sciences rarely give a cause, only an effect. Social Scientists can say that group X of people is Y% more likely to engage in violent crime, but they can't say why this is the case, only that it is.

it's not even effect. it's correlation.


dude! made it through the whole thread safely, and then this get me to post! agh.

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Siquo

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Re: Atheists
« Reply #2470 on: March 19, 2010, 05:16:24 am »

I (someone who actually reads the whole thread) wholeheartedly agree with several posts made by Fooj, and with at least the last 4 posts by G-Flex.

Dreiche, I'm sorry if it sounded like I viewed our discussion as empty. You've made me review my beliefs and the way I act out on them, something I usually do in my head. Typing those things and putting them in order made me review them and think about them differently, which has been educating and fun for me.

Smitehappy: Fact without meaning is exactly that: meaningless. Which is what makes Science tick, but it's meaningless to us humans, who need to have meaning. All meaning you give to facts are coloured by your paradigm, belief or faith. Scientific results are also meaningless. They gain meaning through interpretation. One of the pitfalls of a scientist is interpreting results before they are duly processed, for instance. Faith without fact does not exist, since all we see and experience is fact, as you say, and faith/belief is an interpretation of those things (using faith as "religion" or shared belief here and belief as a personal belief or paradigm).


And when I refer to Science, I refer to the natural Sciences. IMNSHO social sciences (Yes, I had those in university as well) have no right to call themselves Science...
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G-Flex

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Re: Atheists
« Reply #2471 on: March 19, 2010, 06:05:51 am »

Also because social sciences rarely give a cause, only an effect. Social Scientists can say that group X of people is Y% more likely to engage in violent crime, but they can't say why this is the case, only that it is.

it's not even effect. it's correlation.


dude! made it through the whole thread safely, and then this get me to post! agh.



Causation can still be established if the mechanism for the relationship is discovered to a degree of reliability, as with anything else. The problem is mostly that it's hard to isolate variables.


And when I refer to Science, I refer to the natural Sciences. IMNSHO social sciences (Yes, I had those in university as well) have no right to call themselves Science...

Principles of science being more difficult to apply to something does not mean those principles are not being followed. It just means that things are harder to figure out. Of course, that makes it easier to pass off pseudoscience as science in those fields, if you aren't paying hard enough attention, and means that various concurrent yet sometimes mutually exclusive theories about things are likely to exist at a given time, but that doesn't make it "not science".
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Andir

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Re: Atheists
« Reply #2472 on: March 19, 2010, 06:11:18 am »

Smitehappy: Fact without meaning is exactly that: meaningless. Which is what makes Science tick, but it's meaningless to us humans, who need to have meaning. All meaning you give to facts are coloured by your paradigm, belief or faith. Scientific results are also meaningless. They gain meaning through interpretation. One of the pitfalls of a scientist is interpreting results before they are duly processed, for instance. Faith without fact does not exist, since all we see and experience is fact, as you say, and faith/belief is an interpretation of those things (using faith as "religion" or shared belief here and belief as a personal belief or paradigm).
Ugh, you're clouding issues here.  In one paragraph you make a blanket issue that is refutable, then you change the meaning of Science in your last sentence to only mean an "arguable" definition of science.  But in that regard... I wouldn't call information meaningless.  The more truth that we find on how the world ticks is not meaningless.

What I find disappointing though (and this was touched on before) is the absolute faith most physicists place on Einstein's every word.  It's almost a religion on it's own, and it's as if the man couldn't be wrong in anything (even though his theories only seem to apply in the astronomical plane and fall flat in quantum physics... ie: he failed to actually create a universal theory.)  Most people still believe that time is related to speed because of GPS sync.  I'm sure it has nothing to do with quantum mechanics or due to the fact that those very satellites are far away from all the electrical and molecular interference here on Earth and the clocks they have on then that rely on vibrations of molecules wouldn't be affected by that at all...
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Siquo

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Re: Atheists
« Reply #2473 on: March 19, 2010, 06:31:45 am »

I wouldn't call information meaningless.  The more truth that we find on how the world ticks is not meaningless.
Truth wouldn't be meaningless, but regarding certain information as truth is the meaning you give to that information. Any information, in itself, the essence of it, is meaningless. These letters are meaningless without someone reading them. Scientific results are meaningless without someone interpreting them. Applying the word "truth" or "nonsense" or "fact" to any information does not change the information itself, it is you personally who attaches meaning to information, based on your belief.

G-Flex: Yes, sorry, I didn't distinguish between "science - The Method" and "Science - The study of Nature". Science-The Study and man in general are just not ready yet to study complex things such as sociology, economy, et cetera.
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dreiche2

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Re: Atheists
« Reply #2474 on: March 19, 2010, 07:10:15 am »

I was hoping I would get a response from Siquo before I got responses from multiple people who missed the reference and/or warned that a mod might intervene for my rampant flaming, but such is the internet.

I got the reference, I was merely questioning your style of beginning your sentence with "fuck you". Silly internet people, always ranting about politeness!

I was, in a sense, backing up Siquo's statement that science is not settled in a concrete foundation, and that what we know about it can change at any time, by referencing the popular Aristotelian theory of everything in the universe being held together by a series of crystal spheres that revolve around the Earth, which was disproved by Galileo and is a perfect example of the fallacies of being too arrogant in what we think we've nailed down as fact.

That is an exceptionally bad example to base critique of science on (also, the spheres sound more like Ptolemaeus than Aristotle to me, but it doesn't matter).

a perfect example of the fallacies of being too arrogant in what we think we've nailed down as fact.

1. At that time, the world view of Aristotle/Ptolemaeus was put forward and defended aggressively by the catholic church. The Inquisition forced Galileo to recant his views. This is a perfect example of people ignoring evidence because it doesn't fit with their religious beliefs, demonstrating the problems with dogma based religions, not with science!

2. You're not going to be able to criticize science with examples from that time anyway, because science as we now know it was only in its infancy back then. In particularly, Aristotle wasn't a scientist in the modern sense:

Quote from: wikipedia
His writings provide an account of many scientific observations, a mixture of precocious accuracy and curious errors. For example, in his History of Animals he claimed that human males have more teeth than females and in the Generation of Animals he said the female is as it were a deformed male.

[...]

In places, Aristotle goes too far in deriving 'laws of the universe' from simple observation and over-stretched reason. Today's scientific method assumes that such thinking without sufficient facts is ineffective, and that discerning the validity of one's hypothesis requires far more rigorous experimentation than that which Aristotle used to support his laws.

3.

science is not settled in a concrete foundation, and that what we know about it can change at any time

Current scientific theories being replaced with new ones in the light of new evidence is in the very spirit of science. That's a good thing.



This thread is taking an interesting turn. This is not to say a productive one. It seems as though most of us aren't actually reading any of the pages that come before where we decide to post, judging by how new definitions of religion keep popping up whenever a new person joins into the discussion (which would be okay, except that the definitions we were originally debating over aren't being addressed).

I'm sorry that people weren't discussing what you want them to discuss in you absence. As for that topic, I think everything has been said in that regard. I for my part am simply of the opinion is that the definition is wrong/incomplete. I'm perfectly fine with the full definition of religion as given by the dictionary, but you guys insisted on using only the first quarter of the sentence. Which is an issue you have not further addressed after I put it forward.

However, even if we go by that definition (religion is "a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe"), I still think everyone has stated their opinion by now.

To summarize my own position: The question is whether that definition implies that all three things need to be addressed (I would say it's unclear, but probably no given examples of religions that might not address all three things), or otherwise the question becomes what purpose exactly means or whether saying there is no purpose counts or not and the endless semantic arguments that follow. But yes, in my opinion, given that definition and certain assumptions, certain realizations of atheism and scientific theories are a set of beliefs concerning the nature and potentially cause of the universe, and can thus, by that definition, be regarded as religions.

Happy now? But again, the definition is incomplete, so it doesn't matter.

Anything else there is to discuss about this?


What I find disappointing though (and this was touched on before) is the absolute faith most physicists place on Einstein's every word.  It's almost a religion on it's own, and it's as if the man couldn't be wrong in anything.

Who does that. I'm a physicist. I'm not aware of that happening.
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