Richard Dawkins

I'm not trying to convert anyone to anything. I could care less. It's just that it disturbs me when I see an intelligent human being ask me to prove the non-existence of something rather than the normal scientific route of him proving the existence of his god - with facts and verifable data etc, not hearsay and fairytales.

If an atheist asserts that there is no god the onus is on them to do the proving. If a believer asserts that there is a god then the onus is on them. If either is content to simply state their beliefs then thats fine. If someone wants to accept a belief on faith without needing proof of everything then that fine to.

The only people (apart from the Hare Krishna lad who used to be at the GPO on a Saturday afternoon! oh and one satanist in Fibbers a couple of years ago!) who have tried to convert me to something in recent years have been atheists! Mostly they have the cheek to tell me that I must accept their point of view unless I can prove my belief system! (btw I don't count anyone on this discussion in the above!)

At which point there are a few options.
1. go with the St. Augustine line of believe science over scripture (see the full encyclical quote earlier in the topic). ie what you can prove to me as being true I will accept.
2. go with being Buddhist. Smile, tell them the existence or not of god is unimportant, smile again.
3. make them prove their assertions. Telling them that if they fail to then they are just accepting them on faith usually induces a high blood pressure response.
4. tell them to zip it about religion, finish their drink and watch the match! (sometimes this works!)

Cheers,
~Al

Albert,

Fair enough - live and let live.
P.S. points 2 and 4 are appealing.

Ive read through this discussion and have a few observations to make.

I am religious in the fact that I believe in some supreme being. this does not have to contradict logic. I dont believe in creationism and am not one of these people who thinks that if you dont believe, you go to hell, and I think of myself as a man of science. I say each to their own. Im not going into my own personal beliefs , but one thing I can say full heartedly is that I cannot stand Richard Dawkins. Just like there are preachers and radicals who scream at you that you go to hell if you don’t believe in God, Dawkins is like the opposite side of the coin. I get the impression that it really really annoys him that anyone can believe in something without any proof. He is completely entitled to this opinion, but like the religious freaks, he also tries to force his opinions onto others, and thats what gets on my goat.

A few of my friends know I go to church regularly. And they always try to start the same old conversation with me:

"why do you believe in god?" followed quickly by "what proof is there".

Once, i tried to explain its about faith, not proof, but I ended the conversation as they only wanted to debunk my beliefs rather than listen to what I had to say.

I know this is an impartial and "nice" debate here, but I just wanted to show that its not always religious nuts forcing their beliefs on people, often, as I find its people just trying to debunk my beliefs just for the hell of it, or because they think that believing in a big "invisible man who can do magic"(as one friend put it) im childish and I should be set straight.

All this may be neither here nor there in regards to this thread, but I think it fits in here also.

I 100 % believe in the live and let live idea, unfortunately there are both religious and scientific nuts that wont accept that.

But to finish off, it is 100% possible to be scientific and logical, and still have religious belifs.

That is supposed to be proof of God?

where did I calim it proves God? It is however evidence of something beyond science. if it is not then care to please scientifically explain how and why the woman acted as she did?

Looks a lot like proof of the great potentail of human beings to me.

and this is all "hardwired" into all human beings? What physical rules or laws govern "human potential"?

I don't see any reason to evoke a mythical being in the sky to explain an act of kindness, I have more faith in humanity than that.

You have it the wrong way around. how does science explain kindness?

What are atoms, photons, quarks, dark energy, hyperspace? All are concepts with varying degrees of actual evidence.

NONE of science is faith based.

If that is a scientific statement based on known facts and data then prove it! If you can't prove it then do you admit you believe it?

Where is the evidence for wormholes?
There are no known facts about them or no data since they have never been shown to exist. But what about atoms. do they really exist or are they convienient models to explain something which is there but we can't or don't really understand.

what if the "laws of nature" are only approximations of how something behaves and there are in fact no ultimate physical laws.


Parallell universes? ones with infinite possibilities (one of which is you totally agree with me that some science is faith based.

Models are made based on known facts and data. If the model doesn't work it gets thrown out or refined to suit newly discovered facts. No faith is asked for or received.

Burbridge would disagree. may scientists are pressurised into towing the line.

Quantum theory is probably the most tested theory ever, it deals with all the above and has never failed. The standard model in particle physics (while it is not complete) demonstrates almost everything else we need to know, and has predicted previously unknown particles that have since been discovered. I would like to see your definition of Fact, if you think this is faith based. However you would argue that belief in God is based on fact??

Somewhat. Belief is ultimately faith based. But religion is also rational.

‘We are machines for propagating DNA, and the propagation of DNA is a self sustaining process. It is every living objects’ sole reason for living’

- this is a dawkings comment. It is scientism! Methodological reductionism
does not imply ontological reductionism i.e. that things are only the descriptions of them as examined by a scientific process.

Scientifically speaking people are worth about a fiver in minerals and water etc.

I'm sorry but your not making sense.
Anyway your welcome to your beliefs, I'll not spend any more time arguing over the merits of a non-entity, enjoy your superstitions and juju. (with all due respect etc. no offence intended).

I am quote offended by that comment whether you intended it or not! I dodnt claim that any of my oersonal beliefs cam into this nor did push those beliefs on others. In fact I argued rationally and in a scientific way as far as I can see. I rescent that being describes ad superstition and juju!
[quote=Steve Jones, professor of Genetics at University College, London, Reith lectures
Science cannot answer the question that philosophers - or children - ask; why are we here, what is the point of being alive, how ought we to behave? Genetics has almost nothing to say about what makes us more than just machines driven by biology, about what makes us human. These questions may be interesting, but scientists are no more qualified to comment on them than is anyone else.

So that is juju and ONLY science should be accepted as the opinion by which we live?
Science - friend or foe?Dr Denis Alexander

Popper's falsifyability moves the focus away from the ‘facts in the external world’ which force the theory upon us, onto the scientific community. Logic and skills generate better theories and methods for testing them. Data thus become ‘theory-laden’.

That is basically you position

Kuhn pointed out that the history of science does not support Popper’s -science advances by the systematic refutation of theories but by ‘paradigm-shifts’
the final scientific authority now lies in the hands of the scientific community , which decides between competing paradigms on grounds that go beyond application of rules.

such a view leads tosociological reductionism - scientific knowledge as determined more by the prejudices of a scientific community than properties of the physical world.

Critical realists believe that their data reflect the properties of the real world ‘out there’, but also acknowledge the important role of the scientific community in selecting and interpreting data.

The ‘critical realism’ espoused by most scientists sits very comfortably with a closely analogous form of critical realism adopted by most Christians.
There are strong grounds for believing that science and Christianity are mutual allies, particularly in their shared commitment to a critical realist view of knowledge and their mutual hostility to relativistic modes of thought.

end excerpts.

[
Albert,
I'm not trying to convert anyone to anything. I could care less. It's just that it disturbs me when I see an intelligent human being ask me to prove the non-existence of something rather than the normal scientific route of him proving the existence of his god - with facts and verifable data etc, not hearsay and fairytales.

Dr Alexander wrote: The ‘standard view’ of science comprises a commonsense inductivist picture of scientific progress that started with Bacon, was continued by the empirical approach of the mechanical philosophers, and was expressed in its most extreme form by the logical positivists. According to this view, the natural world is regarded as real and objective, and the preferences or intentions of its observers make no difference to its characteristics. The task of the scientist is to make a large number of accurate experimental observations, and then induce from such facts a general theory which, providing it is supported by a large body of consistent data, is viewed as an ‘immutable law of nature’. Discovering a law, in this view, is like discovering a new continent.
This ‘naive realist’ view places the authority of science firmly in the techniques involved in the method of enquiry itself. Subjective value-judgments are consigned to a realm outside of science, making science itself the realm of facts. The positivists took this approach a step further by defining meaning and rationality using criteria of empirical verifiability. However, this century has witnessed a gradual loss of confidence in the naive realist view. First, Karl Popper launched a frontal attack on one of its key tenets in his Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934) by claiming that, far from gaining more credibility as they are buttressed by increasing quantities of empirical evidence, scientific theories are really only useful to science insofar as they can be disproved.The difference between scientific knowledge and other kinds of human intellectual and artistic endeavour, according to this view, is that the former is potentially falsifiable. It should be noted that Popper's influential perspective on the nature of scientific knowledge shifts the focus of attention away from the ‘facts in the external world’ which force the theory upon us, onto the scientific community, whose logic and expertise generate better theories and methods for testing them. Data thus become ‘theory-laden’ since they are collected in the context of this attempt to falsify particular theories.

Anyway your welcome to your beliefs, I'll not spend any more time arguing over the merits of a non-entity, enjoy your superstitions and juju. (with all due respect etc. no offence intended).

Neither superstition nor juju. In fact standard fare in the History and Philosophy of Science as a academic pursuit.