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Atheism and Faith

It Aint Necessarily So

Veteran Member
Premium Member
If you haven't determined in your mind that X is true, then by definition you don't believe x is true. Which means by definition you are a non-believer in x. You are in a state of unbelief. Again, I can't explain this any more simply to you.

You will never get cooperation here. He will continue to ignore your (and my) comments and definitions in order to perpetuate his agenda of confusion and calumny. We're all liars, you know.

That's bad faith disputation, in contrast to good faith disputation, where writers and speakers go to lengths to be clear and to understand one another in a cooperative effort, also called dialectic, which is what you, I, and many others here are doing. It's not what PureX is doing. He has simply assumed that atheists who say that they are also agnostic are liars, and he's hell-bent on making that case using whatever semantic technique he thinks will accomplish that.

our criteria for truthfulness. For we humans, that all too often equates to functional predictability, which is a relative bias by it's own definition

Yes, I have a bias for ideas that work - that function to help me predict outcomes. Bias is not necessarily a bad thing - just irrational biases. We all have many rational biases, such as a bias against pedophiles or drunk drivers. These are rational biases, and are the basis of all knowledge. We learn how to get along with others because we have a bias for social harmony over conflict. That's knowledge, and it's all biases - a preference for one of two or more options over any others.

and so is not that likely to lead to the "whole truth" (whatever that is).

I mentioned earlier that this is a dead end and intellectual pitfall. Whole truth, absolute truth, ultimate truth, objective truth - all illusory goals. The most we can settle for is that an idea serves us. If it does, don't worry about its metaphysical status - just use it too one's profit.

The faithful seem to think that they benefit by muddying the concept of truth. What is truth, they ask rhetorically? Whose truth - yours or mine, they ask as if they have stumbled onto something profound and helpful.

Truth must relate to the concept of what you call functional predictability, or the concept has no value. Detaching it from empirical observation renders it meaningless, which as I said, seems to be the purpose of many faith-based thinkers, who want their truth to be held in the same esteem as the truths that got men to the moon and back, for example.

So for me, truth is that quality that facts possess, facts being linguistic strings (sentences, paragraphs) that accurately maps some aspect of reality as determined by its ability to predict outcomes. If one wants to call anything else truth, then he is on his own, since his ideas that he is calling truth can't be put to practical use if they are determined by any other process than observing reality and inducing useful generalizations about it.

But once again, I recommend focusing not on the abstract and unobtainable, but turning more to pragmatism - what works?

insisting that you are both undetermined and dis-(un)believing is inherently self-contradictory.

For you, because you are confused. I recommended to you that you untangle the concepts of not believing and believing not by assigning them different words, defining them to readers unfamiliar with your usage, and sticking to this formulation. Here, you're making disbelief and unbelief synonyms, and throwing in the word undetermined.

By this other reckoning, where disbelief is the positive assertion that one considers a proposition untrue, and unbelief is simply the lack of believing whether also accompanied by disbelief or not, and where undetermined is generally called agnostic, we have three categories of thinker - believer, agnostic, and disbeliever, where unbeliever encompasses both agnostic and disbeliever.

I think that you understand that and have an agenda to call atheists liars, which is served by keeping this matter vague and ambiguous so that you can tell them they don't mean what they say according to your confused lexicon. I say that because you steadfastly refuse to cooperate with others here. You're not trying to come to consensus or mutual understanding. You're trying to make atheists liars.
 

It Aint Necessarily So

Veteran Member
Premium Member
why do you INSIST on interjecting the word "belief" into the label you apply to your supposedly undetermined state of mind, when what is supposedly still undetermined is whether to believe or disbelieve?

That's how English (and other languages) works. It's why you (and every other English speaker) INSIST on injecting the word theist into atheist. Privatives are prefixes that mean not, as in asymmetric, illogical, immature, inedible, and unnecessary. We INSIST on including what something is not after the privative prefix. Unbelief is the absence of belief, which includes what you call the undetermined, but which also includes what I call disbelief.

It's also not an "undetermined" position. Which is the source of the dishonesty and confusion in all of this.

The dishonesty here is all yours. You feign interest in a cooperative discussion of mutual discovery, but that's not your purpose at all. You are here to try to establish that atheists are lying when they tell you what they believe, and to impose a defective nomenclature on others who have rejected it. If you were being honest, you would make an effort to understand how others use language. Two speakers do not need to use language the same way if each defines his terms and uses them consistently. Each will be understood if there is a good faith effort to understand the other and to explain oneself clearly.

But that's not you.

God is not an evidential proposition, so it requires no evidential verification

Disagree. The rational skeptic believes nothing without sufficient evidence to support that belief. If there is no evidence for gods, there is no reason to believe that they exist.

you will (probably) demand "objective evidence" which by definition cannot exist. So your demands are logically incoherent and absurdly biased.

That is also true concerning the nonexistent - objective evidence does not exist.

There is no reason why the presence of a god causally connected to our world, which it would have to be to be able to manipulate that world, couldn't be measured or detected in some way at least in principle, perhaps in the future when new instruments are developed - assuming that there is something to detect. The reason that believers claim that their god can't be detected is because it isn't detected, and so a rationale has to be contrived to explain why this powerful and ubiquitous entity is indistinguishable from the non-existent, which is what you just dd. You want to cast those requiring evidence of a god before believing it as "logically incoherent," and delegitimize their insistence that you give them a reason to believe before they will.

I find believing by faith to be "logically incoherent."

That's because you've bought into your own lie. Sorry, but that's just what I'm seeing, here.

That's because you see atheists as liars. You've already made that clear.

So, in the face of this lack of evidence, you either choose to remain undetermined, or you choose to either believe, or disbelieve that God/gods exists.

Yep. Or more simply, you either believe or you don't (unbelief). If you don't believe in gods, you might say that they don't exist (disbelief, or strong atheism, or gnostic atheism), or that you don't know.

By this reckoning, belief and unbelief form a MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive) couple, meaning that everybody fits into one category or the other, and nobody into both. But this is not true with belief and disbelief, because one need not be in either category, as with the agnostic atheist, who neither believes nor disbelieves.

Look how much easier this becomes when we are clear and careful with our nomenclature, avoiding the equivocation fallacies that emerge from less clear definitions and use of language.
 

Terry Sampson

Well-Known Member
I had not prepared a diagram of Frame A and B with the events ordered from the POV of an intermediate frame, but have just finished doing so.

Finally, in the intermediate frame (Loedel frame), the sequence of events is

1
2 and 4 simultaneous
3, 5, and 7 simultaneous
6 and 8 simultaneous
9

As you can see in the following diagram, my order of events is:
1
2 and 4 simultaneous
3, 5, and 7 simultaneous
6 and 8 simultaneous
9

Ergo, we are in agreement.

Double Triplet - Revised-3.jpg
 

Polymath257

Think & Care
Staff member
Premium Member
I had not prepared a diagram of Frame A and B with the events ordered from the POV of an intermediate frame, but have just finished doing so.



As you can see in the following diagram, my order of events is:
1
2 and 4 simultaneous
3, 5, and 7 simultaneous
6 and 8 simultaneous
9

Ergo, we are in agreement.

View attachment 34461

BTW, I like your diagrams. And your acknowledgement of your error and correction of it increased my respect towards you.

Any other issues here?
 

Terry Sampson

Well-Known Member
BTW, I like your diagrams.

Thanks. I generally stick to v = 0.866c, but I can draw them for other speeds when I figure out the correct angles.

And your acknowledgement of your error and correction of it ...

That was embarrassing to say the least. To quote myself from a similar type of error many years ago, "I wasn't wrong, I just made a mistake." I mixed up my frames, colors, and lines of simultaneity.

Any other issues here?

Troublesome issues? No, none that I can think of.

Only thing to add, I suppose, are overlapping light cones to show the Paradox of the Light Sphere. I could do that, but it would take me a couple of minutes, and I figure that you already know where to put them.

Obviously, my affirmation of Absolute Space and Absolute Time are primary grounds for my bias against relativity. There are at least two or three other issues beyond that. Those are the ones that I previously wondered if you might be able to clear up.
 

Polymath257

Think & Care
Staff member
Premium Member
Thanks. I generally stick to v = 0.866c, but I can draw them for other speeds when I figure out the correct angles.

I was actually going to mention that. For v/c=.866, it appears you are using the sine of the angle is v/c. It should be the cotangent. So, in this case, the angle should be 49.1 degrees with the angle up being 40.1 degrees. This gives a broader picture, but the results we have been discussing stay the same.

One way to see this is that is v/c is very close to 1, we want the angle to be very close to 45 degrees.

The angle of 60 degrees on this diagram corresponds to a v/c=.577.

Easy mistake to make, by the way.
 

Terry Sampson

Well-Known Member
For v/c=.866, it appears you are using the sine of the angle is v/c. It should be the cotangent. S

I plead innocence on the grounds of ignorance and my reliance on Joel Gwinn's Module 603 "The Spacetime World: Loedel's Spacetime Diagram", relevant portioned presented below.

99603-8.jpg
 

Polymath257

Think & Care
Staff member
Premium Member
I plead innocence on the grounds of ignorance and my reliance on Joel Gwinn's Module 603 "The Spacetime World: Loedel's Spacetime Diagram", relevant portioned presented below.

View attachment 34463

Yep, it's your source that messed up. For the angle in the figure, you should have

tan(alpha)=beta.

not

sin(alpha)=beta.

Like I said, an easy mistake to make.

If you need help getting the angles, I can do any you want quickly.

Or I can cook up a table if that's helpful.

/E: I was thinking about this. There *is* a variable called the rapidity which is related to beta=v/c by the *hyperbolic sine* as opposed to the ordinary sine.

Maybe your reference got these confused.
 
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Polymath257

Think & Care
Staff member
Premium Member
Whew!

Just to confirm: so v/c (i.e. beta) = tangent of angle between ct and ct'?

I was going to say yes, but wait.

The angle in the figure is *twice* the angle from the vertical to either. My bad. I was using the angle from the vertical.

But the math still doesn't work out to give sin(alpha)=beta. The actual is

sin(alpha)=2(beta)/(1+beta^2)


@Terry Sampson : I changed this post. Please see my changes.
 
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halbhh

The wonder and awe of "all things".
Disbelief is Sigma 5, i.e., 99% possibility. Not the slightest evidence of God and soul anywhere.
Since it would take total information -- omniscience -- to know all 'evidence' perfectly (seeing what's real and what is not) "anywhere" on Earth (and throughout decades, centuries...), then the best position lacking confirmed evidence yourself (just with naturally limited information) is to say, accurately, "I don't know for sure."
 

PureX

Veteran Member
That is not true. A belief is a position which is held to be true. Disbelief is to not hold that a particular position is true.

belief
noun
  1. an acceptance that something exists or is true, especially one without proof.
  2. trust, faith, or confidence in (someone or something).

disbelief

noun
  1. inability or refusal to accept that something is true or real.

So "disbelief" is not a belief. It is the withholding of belief.


False. It does not assume that proposition is false or invalid, it simply doesn't accept it as true.
When you have to rely on dictionary definitions you have already lost the debate. Because dictionaries only record how words are being used, regardless of whether they are being used logically or illogically, honestly or dishonestly. The dictionary also says that being "gay" means being homosexual, even though we all know that being gay has nothing to do with being homosexual.
 

Polymath257

Think & Care
Staff member
Premium Member
@Terry Sampson

Just to be clear. If theta is the angle *from the vertical*, then

tan(theta)=beta=v/c.

The opening angle in your source is twice this angle and the formula is completely wrong.
 

Terry Sampson

Well-Known Member
Maybe your reference got these confused.

Maybe. Do you know somebody who knows Spanish? I've attached Enrique Paloma Loedel's 1948 paper, "Aberracion y Relatividad", which according Henri Amar's letter to the America Journal of Physics is Loedel's paper publicizing the mathematical basis for his diagram. I've also attached Amar's published letter affirming Loedel's priority.
 

Attachments

  • American Journal of Physics Volume 25 issue 5 1957.pdf
    522 KB · Views: 0
  • Loedel-1948-Aberracion-y-Relatividad.pdf
    3.6 MB · Views: 0

Aupmanyav

Be your own guru
Since it would take total information -- omniscience -- to know all 'evidence' perfectly (seeing what's real and what is not) "anywhere" on Earth (and throughout decades, centuries...), then the best position lacking confirmed evidence yourself (just with naturally limited information) is to say, accurately, "I don't know for sure."
We do not know for sure if the sun would rise tomorrow but 'Sigma 6', 99.999% possibility is that it would and would not explode in the next 24 hours, that is why we say the sun would rise tomorrow.

"Six Sigma (6σ) is a set of techniques and tools for process improvement. It was introduced by American engineer Bill Smith while working at Motorola in 1980. Jack Welch made it central to his business strategy at General Electric in 1995. A six sigma process is one in which 99.99966% of all opportunities to produce some feature of a part are statistically expected to be free of defects."
Six Sigma - Wikipedia
 
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ImmortalFlame

Woke gremlin
When you have to rely on dictionary definitions you have already lost the debate.
But you're the one contesting the use of words and asserting a specific definition of "disbelief" that hasn't been mutually agreed upon. I'm simply pointing out that those words have broader meanings.

Because dictionaries only record how words are being used, regardless of whether they are being used logically or illogically, honestly or dishonestly.
So what is dishonest about using a word according to its definition and clearly explaining so?
 
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