Iggy

Rather than giving me a post or quote you changed your claim from "refuse that a god could exist" to "refusal that god exists". I assume this means you misspoke earlier and your new claim would be: In other words, you have to believe in god to see evidence of god. That sounds like religious logic, Have you ever considered that the reason religious logic is different from normal logic is because the baseball exists and god doesn't? Maybe you only see evidence of god if you believe because it has something to do with wishful thinking rather than objective reality.

Could you point out in the thread where someone "refused that god could exist". I've kept up with the thread throughout, but I don't recall that. Without a specific post or quote I'm afraid your last posting will appear entirely misleading.

+1 for Moontanman's sadistic cats Humans are the only ones protecting earth from the real evil... asteroids and comets that would exterminate most species. It's like the other animals don't even care. They refuse to shoulder their share of the responsibility. edit: I was a few seconds too late with that idea

Elaborate as you feel need be, sir. edit: I apologize if I seemed dismissive. I thought you were trying to disagree with me and I didn't want to drift off topic after recent complaints about the expanding scope ofthe thread.

I'm curious... A scientifically unanswerable question today can be scientifically answerable tomorrow... which is to say, two millennia ago "how old is the world?" was unanswerable in just the same way as "what accounts for the energy of the big bang?" is unanswerable today. Historically then, how good do you think theism is at filling in our shrinking margins of knowledge? Do you think "looking to God to provide a mechanism for unanswerable questions" has been an effective method? I think theistic methods like divine revelation have proven to be about as broken as methods get, but I'm curious how you would characterize them.

To elaborate where I was coming from, there are many perfectly rational beliefs that are not scientific claims and that are not falsifiable. (Tangential, but I'm not as enthusiastic about naive falsificationism as I was when first reading Popper. For elaboration I would mention that I think Susan Haack has some interesting things to say in this lecture: ) As an example, the consensus among scholars that Jesus of Nazareth actually existed is a reasonable view that is not "scientific." Similarly, believing that Mohammed actually existed is perfectly rational, while believing that he flew on a magic donkey is not, and the reasons for this distinction are not mere falsifiability. While it's an important aspect of scientific methodology, and knowledge in general, to insist that falsifiability is what makes beliefs rational or irrational may warrant the scientism epithet. I said *supernatural* religious claims to avoid the response you just gave. "Jesus existed" is not a supernatural claim. I did *not* say that falsifiability is the only distinction. I did *not* say that falsifiability is what makes beliefs rational or irrational. We are off topic.

That's right. My point is that religious claims are of the same general kind as those made by psychics, UFO abductees, astrologers, etc. Supernatural religious claims are similar to the claims of pseudoscience because they are both unfalsifiable. Not only is that an essential reason they are similar, it is the most important and the least refutable reason they are different from scientific claims.

Fascinating. I've got the first video -- Andy Thomson's lecture -- and the thread loaded and I'm genuinely excited to see what other people think about this http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/37248-how-religion-hijacks-neurocortical-mechanisms-and-why-so-many-believe-in-a-deity/ www.scienceforums.net/topic/37248-how-religion-hijacks-neurocortical-mechanisms-and-why-so-many-believe-in-a-deity/ putting http:// before the url seems to make the difference

If you're apologizing to me I can assure you there's no need. The problem with your reaction is that religious people don't agree that only one of the claims is empirical. People will say, "yes, I know God. I experienced God." That degrades instantly into your opinion versus the religious person's opinion regarding the reality of the religious person's vision of Jesus. That's an argument you can't win. Telling 80 or 90 percent of the population that you simply don't believe their experience of god because it is crazy doesn't illustrate why a belief in god is broken.

If I may, Tar's point appears to be that the only thing separating the claims of science and the claims of religion are that scientific claims have been observed and religious claims have not. If Muhammad actually saw the angel Gabriel then it was true for him in the same way that the density of the universe is true for a modern astronomer with a telescope. If that is the case then religious beliefs are no more broken then scientific beliefs -- it is just a matter of religious people having different experiences than people who have had no religious experiences. If that is the point then it overlooks the actual distinction between science and religion. The difference isn't observability, it is falsifiability. Observations can prove wrong current predictions saying how much matter is in the universe. Scientists can think of simple observations that Tar could do to prove the estimate wrong. Observations can't prove the existence of the archangel Gabriel wrong or the existence of Allah wrong. Dedicated, faithful, and smart religious people can't think of anything simple or otherwise I could do to prove religion wrong. ------------------- You can't prove the first one wrong. There are simple observations to prove the second one wrong. That is the litmus test your bullshit detector should be dialed into.

and religion would be more widely considered broken if we knew on what it was based. For example, birds collect straw for nests and squirrels bury nuts for winter. In a distant post-human future let's say birds and squirrels evolve an intelligence like ours. Birds may not make nests anymore. They build nice homes and drive sports cars. But, they might have a religious obligation to weave totems out of straw and leave them in trees for the straw god. Squirrels could also evolve past the need to hide nuts for winter, and maybe they end up with religious leaders telling them to bury 20% of the gold coins they earn every year to satiate and ward off an underground demon. The offerings to the straw god and the sacrifice to the underground demon would give the bird people and the squirrel people a positive instinctual emotional reaction. If they didn't know that their ancestors made nests and buried nuts they could easily think that the positive reaction they get from the tradition comes from religious truth. Knowing the basis of the tradition would make it all seem like hogwash. If the religious parts of our human world view come from a useful part of the world view of our ancestors I wonder, working backwards, if we could figure out what it was. A million years ago, or perhaps five, what was it about the way they lived that required an instinctual basis in thought and is expressed today as religion? That would be a fascinating discovery and it would answer the question of the thread. Belief in God could be the remnant of an instinct that is no longer functional... literally "broken".

So, is this basically a concession regarding the accuracy of my central proposition? It sure looks that way. If the thread title were "People who use circular reasoning, inconsistent logic -- who surrender critical thinking, and can't figure out if these are effective methods -- are broken" I suspect a few more people would affirm the notion.

Fair enough. I do see where you were coming from and it seems well enough reasoned to me not to want to bicker. You seem to think that we are born with moral values or that there are definite moral rights and wrongs. On what basis do you have the right to decide what is moral for the human species? Your point is irrelevant. Either morals are partly innate and partly learned (which, of course, they are) and a 2,500 year old story tricked you into thinking that it might be a good idea to murder and burn your child if you had a good day on the battlefield, or morals are divine and there is a god who capriciously decided that it might be moral for you to do this disgusting thing. Either way, it's quite sad. You can't denounce the most morally reprehensible thing imaginable. You somehow got yourself to the point, or someone led you weakly willed as you might have been to the point, where you keep making excuses for child murder. I fear you didn't get that. Let me put it a little differently, Either christianity is true and God created you a morally corrupt thing who thinks morally corrupt and scripturally reinforced thoughts about child murder -- or, christianity is false, and you've been poisoned into making excuses for child murder by a disgusting and ongoing tradition. Either way, the problem of being a morally corrupt thing is entirely yours. I'm not the one making excuses for child murder. I hope I am understood. Everything you keep saying only reinforces this problem you keep having and all I can think to do is to keep pointing it out.

Here is where we part company. You just read a story where someone killed and burned the body of their daughter because God granted them a victory in a field of battle. Any morally normal person reading such a story has to be sickened by it. It is amoral garbage and basic human decency demands that anyone discussing it denounces it as amoral garbage. But you read it and immediately start making excuses for it. Maybe it doesn't say what it says. Maybe God didn't ask for her to be sacrificed. Maybe God wanted a turtle dove to be slaughtered and burned that day for his pleasure, but by some freak accident poor Jephthah's daughter ended up on the slab instead. It is inexcusable. Today, you can bet, there is a Muslim father murdering his Muslim daughter in the name of honor. Where he lives there is no difference between secular law and religious law. It's all the same thing -- and there is no law against what he is doing. It is happening today, believe me, the life is being strangled out of her body -- she is being sent to Allah -- while you sit on the other side of the globe and make excuses for his immoral justification. I don't understand it at all. I don't understand how you can read that story, and not just be ok with it, but think that just maybe the creator of the universe also created that book special for our species. It is foreign to me that any intellectually and morally normal person can think that. Then read 1 Cr 7:22. If you're trying to prove to me that the bible has contradictions you can stop. I need no convincing.

If you mean my last post it was more of a comparison than a description, but I was hoping someone would argue that it is unfair. I'm not sure which things you say are meant to contradict which things I said. I was comparing religion to psychotic people and saying that we would all do well reacting to both in the same way. You say, for example, "Religion can be predictable, and there are buffers against its spontaneity." Yes, well... psychotic people can be predictable and there are buffers against their spontaneity. Both can be unpredictable because they are so irrational as well. Both can be dangerous. I'm sorry, I don't see a contradiction.

I would use the term disheartening, myself... Something to be minimized in a modern world, for sure. I agree, and I think 'scary' is the other thing it is. More than just trowing adjectives around, to honestly convey how the devoutly religious make me feel when they fervently recite nonsensical gibberish... I was in a downtown bar area near a university town when I was approached by someone who was clearly mentally challenged. Just to look at him from twenty paces off, he was first of all holding a screwdriver for no apparent purpose, and holding it with both hands in a way that looked extremely abnormal. His walk was labored and unnatural, and most of all his affect did nothing to hide the irrational mess beneath. He looked and walked directly at me at a full pace saying nothing with a screwdriver held tightly to his chest. I tried "hello, how are ya?" with no reply. He just kept walking right at me. Halfway through planning my escape he stopped and said something. I wish I could remember what it was, but it didn't make enough sense to remember. Whatever he said, it was enough for me to figure out that he wasn't mentally slow. He wasn't handicapped in that way. He was intelligent, but crazy. Psychotic and dissociated from reality without doubt. At this point I'm two steps from a psychotic person holding a screwdriver delivering a mess of nonsense words at me. I was scared and confused, and I think we should all have that same reaction to religion. It is dangerous to be near. It is so nonsensical that it can deliver irrational violence at any moment. My reaction, which may not have been the most compassionate (I was young), was to point down the street toward a larger group of people and say "right down there". He apparently took that to mean something because he walked off in that direction without any hesitation. When the christian right gets out their "god hates fags" signs and the muslim right make their suicide videos I'm reminded of that incident. These people make no sense to me. Their thoughts aren't like my thoughts, and I think we should be a little scared of something so dangerous.

I think providing references is a very good idea. It will force you to read the book you think is divine. By asking for references you do make absolutely clear that you have no clue where these things are in the bible. You've given divine warrant for a book you clearly haven't taken the trouble to read. Unimaginable in my mind. The daughter sacrificed by her father, a leader of Israel, to God is in Jud. 11:29-40. Paul introduces himself as a slave of Jesus in the first sentence in Romans. The comparison Jesus make between his followers and dutiful slaves is in Luke 12:35-48. Notice, also, the passage following that where peaceful Jesus promises to divide the word of people against each other in struggle -- the part where he says he doesn't come to the earth in the name of peace. Almost everything christians believe about christianity can be contradicted in the bible. God is clearly having a terrible time getting his message out, as Greg just pointed out. I bet there are one or two of the chosen people that are in publishing. I think we should get him in touch. Fantastic. Why are you granting me this apparent concession of my age?

I didn't use the word abandon. Slave must be the incorrect term because a slave has to act like a slave... otherwise they'll be whipped and beaten, and in Christianity you're just tortured eternally if you don't do it. It's entirely different. Jesus used the word slave so you are disagreeing with him. If you do his bidding then you are like a good slave who is rewarded, and if you don't follow his will then you are like a bad slave who is beaten for insolence -- Jesus makes that comparison in multiple gospels. Paul was also fond of the analogy -- he actually started his epistles, "Paul, a slave of Jesus..." I'm not sure you are familiar with the book you're supporting, or maybe you don't know the terminology. Slave is the right term for the greek "doulos" found all over the new testament. Brilliant argument. My child also wouldn't need to be saved from the torture I'm going to inflict on her if she hadn't rejected me. She said that I was a bad father so I'm going to torture her... unless she asks me to save her. Brilliant! I can excuse an illiterate person for making that kind of thing up 2,000 years ago in a tribal society where people were treated like property, but hearing someone repeat it today is just confusing. Again, I get the feeling you just haven't read the book. A child was sacrificed to God by a leader of the Israelites and God didn't stop it. Are you familiar with the story?

Follow me. Don't worry yourself about tomorrow. Don't concern yourself with food, money, your children, your job. Just drop everything and give yourself entirely to me. You are my slave and I am your master, and we can be sure to tell everyone that religion doesn't give man authority over other men because I'm so much more than a man. I'm a god you know. My father is a god and he gave me the power to save or condemn each and every one of you. If you don't believe me -- if you refuse to be my good and faithful slave -- I will torture you eternally. Coming from someone else who has read the good book, hose feathers is the nicest phrase that comes to mind.

I know some neo-nazis that aren't that bad. What does that say about Neo-Nazism? What does your point say about religion? I'm at a loss. What is wrong with standing up for beliefs? What do you think I'd find wrong with it? What, sir, are you talking about? This clearly begs the question: Is raping a child right or wrong. You would answer, apparently, that there is no such thing as right or wrong morals. Are we rocks? Are we indifferent to moral injustice? Good luck to you if that is your real position, but I am not. Again, on the slightest inspection your statement falls completely apart. Saying "do not do unto others what you would not want done to yourself" is not the same as saying "it's 3 o'clock in the universe" because a person is not a universe. Human morals describe right or wrong actions to humans. Your statement describes local human time to the universe. Actually, if your first axiom is that God doesn't exist then he really can't have logical correlations. For example, "just because God doesn't exist it doesn't mean that too much sunlight will give him a sunburn". I'm sorry, but God not existing does indeed mean the logical correlation (too much sunlight gives God a sunburn) is false. White noise. The consequences of imaginary numbers are verifiable and falsifiable. Not so with God. I might as well be asking you if God is an ingredient in sugar cookies as if that proved he didn't exist. I don't ask questions like that because I realize how frivolous they are. I never held that up as an assertion of yours.

I would guess either your points are belligerently nonsense, or people think standing up for religion is, in itself, worth throwing a negative vote behind. There are other possibilities. I will say, and I think I've heard this in the thread before, that religion is both morally and intellectually wrong. Many people who shoot heroin feel a calmness and deep sense of connection. This is *by no means* an indicator of the morality of the thing or the intellectual honesty of a proposition. Nobody said "just broken". People with psychologically-based reasons for doing things can be broken. Schizophrenics are broken and everyone is quite willing to accept "that psychological elements are involved". Every point you make seems to fall apart with even the mildest inspection. It is as if you expect people to answer the original post by saying "the psychological reasons for religion and believing in God are x,y,z"... as if that should answer the original post as far as whether or not they are broken. And, again, wanting your dead loved ones to enjoy an after life has nothing, at all, to do with the morality or truthfulness of religion or God. It also has nothing to do with just how broken religious people are. Wanting something does say anything about how broken you are for believing or wanting it.

Yes, I believe you are quite right. I had edited my post when the thought hit me that omega-lambda is certainly larger than omega-M in the concordance model and surely has been for some time. For added accuracy with higher redshifts you might like, http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/CosmoCalc.html

I agree. According to most sources I've seen we just recently entered the epoch of accelerated expansion. For example, this diagram has the onset of acceleration happening about 800 million years ago: http://www.astro.virginia.edu/class/whittle/astr553/Topic16/t16_three_distances_6.gif For the majority of the history of the universe the expansion has been decelerating. It wasn't until matter spread out enough that the mass density became less dominant than the vacuum energy density and the universe began expanding exponentially with time again EDIT I'm sorry, this was the diagram... I misread... and haven't kept informed. It looks like we entered the present accelerating epoch 6 - 8 billion years ago... from the diagram above and the couple sources I've just read. You would be absolutely correct then. At that point the second derivative of the scale factor would have turned positive, the first derivative would have reached a minimum value, and lambda's density would have overtaken the mass density. Very embarrassing slip.

It looks like you mixed up accelerating expansion with ordinary expansion. The observation that further away things have a greater radial velocity is what Hubble discovered in 1929. It is known as Hubble's law. The further away a galaxy is from us, the faster it recedes from us. That isn't the acceleration of expansion -- just expansion. The 1998 discovery of acceleration indicates that expansion will speed up over time, so that the rate of expansion at any and every distance will increase over time. Things that are relatively close to us today recede from us relatively slowly. In the far future things that are relatively close will recede quite a bit faster. Just like today things that are relatively far recede relatively fast and in the distant future things that are relatively far will recede even faster. Acceleration of expansion would mean that the rate of expansion of the whole universe increases over time... not that the rate of recession increases over distance.

Knowledge gives you the ability to chose between the truth and a falsity. It does not take away the ability of free choice. Knowing that the sun rises each day doesn't take away your free will. The information provides you with a basis for a reasoned, rational, and knowledgeable belief regarding when the sun will rise. Our lack of knowledge of a creator does not provide us with the freedom to chose to believe. The only choice lack of knowledge provides is uninformed belief. If God wanted to make himself known, as you assume, he could be open and honest. I'm having to think twice about my rejection of this thread's title. If God wanted to make himself known he could show up when people asked for him and be open and honest. That is how you make yourself known. God would hopefully be smart enough not to suffer an insurmountable failure of imagination on the question of how to meet someone. This is a new idea. Earlier you said "we must assume that said creator would make themselves known to us". Do I understand correctly now that he would only make himself known to us if he could prove to everyone that he is the creator. Don't get me wrong, I think miracles would be nice -- especially answering prayers of the innocent and helpless cried to God in desperation and torment. That would go a long way toward establishing credibility. But, just showing up and answering some straightforward questions would be a good move toward making yourself known. There are plenty of people that are perfectly willing to believe if there were any sort of verification. There isn't. The corollary question is what possible evidence -- anything conceivable -- might be uncovered tomorrow that would make you believe your god (god as you would define him) does not exist? Certainly there is none. Your definition of God is completely unfalsifiable.