1robin
Christian/Baptist
I have read books, watched debates, read debate transcripts, and had hundreds of debates about morality. Watch the Harris Craig debate on moral ontology. Morality isn't a property of any atom or of a biological anomalies.
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Atheistic Double Standard?
- Thread starter Jeremiahcp
- Start date
Did a Muslim tell you that?
Your world is small.
The media doesn't have much respect for the church or clergy any more. I haven't seen a movie in years with a religious aspect that didn't include hypocrisy or some other moral failing until recently - Hacksaw Ridge.
The last one before that was Deliver Us From Evil.
My wife is watching The Young Pope. I look up from time to time. The pope, who is rarely seen without a cigarette, and cardinals are mostly corrupt.
That's how your culture at large perceives the church. Why do you suppose that is?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deliver_Us_from_Evil_(2014_film)
Milton Platt
Well-Known Member
In a way.....but i can only evaluate a god claim by listening to the one making the claim. I cannot evaluate every one of the tens of thousands of different claims. I can with a good deal of confidence reject an incoherent god, though. It is the job of the person making the assertion to demonstrate that his god is not only coherent, but has a chance of actually existing. However, I never say "you're wrong"....I say that I do not believe you because you have not satisfied the burden of proof. The person could be right, but I can't assume that every unproven claim is right. A god may exist, but i do not believe it exists until that has been demonstrated.
I don't know how you are using the word :"know" in your post. Are you using that to indicate absolute knowledge? It is possible to "know" that a god does not exist with about the same degree of certainty that one can "know" that a unicorn does not exist, or that a teapot is not orbiting a planet somewhere in the universe. Yet both are possible.
igno remos
New Member
It will be double standard if I claim to worship an invisible pink unicorn inside my closet and can not produce evidence that it is indeed true. When I make such claims then the burden of proof rest entirely on me not on someone that rejects my claims. So there is no double standard. When no demonstrable or substantial evidence to an alleged claim is presented then it can be rejected just as well without proof. You can reject my claims of the invisible unicorn if I can not present demonstrable proof or substantial evidence to such alleged claims. You can equally reject my claims without proof just as easily. The burden of proof rest entirely on the claimant. I must present proof of the invisible unicorn to satisfy your skepticism and if I an unable to satisfy your objections you are perfectly correct to reject my claims or beliefs just as equally without proof. Same difference no proof presented dismiss it just as equally without proof. Do you agree with my position? Shalom.
gnomon
Well-Known Member
Where is the double standard?
A non-believer asking proof of a claim is not a double standard.
You present a claim to me, as was in my childhood, that a particular human is the Son of God as well as being God..........
Asking proof is not a double standard.
You do not understand the term.
JustWondering
Jerk
No, I base my beliefs and claims on reason and evidence. If called to demonstrate why I don't believe something I will provide an explanation based on reason and logic. I have asked theists on occasion to defend their position without evidence, just rational arguments. Why do you think it's wrong for someone to ask for evidence if someone is making extraordinary claims? Did you make this thread just to rile people up?
I don't make broad claims like god does not exist. I make claims about specific god concepts.
I have made the claim that the Abrahamic religions are made up by men and their god does not exist. I have demonstrated multiple times in this forum and in RL that there are verses in the Bible and Koran that make claims that do not conform to reality. That's a deal breaker for me.
Secondly, all religions making claims about supernatural beings/forces have the same amount of empirical evidence to support them, none. An intellectually honest person would recognize that FACT and would not give more credence to one religion that invokes the supernatural over another.
Did some intelligence/s create the universe and/or life? I don't know. If some intelligence had a hand in our creation I have not seen it interfere in our affairs for good or ill. Why worry about something that is absent from our lives due to it's non-existence or apathy?
Jeremiahcp
Well-Known Jerk
You clearly did not read the thread.
gnomon
Well-Known Member
I clearly did.
Stating that non-believers demand hard evidence while assuming, en masse, that non-believers do not provide hard evidence.......
Never making an initial assumption by shifting the goal posts.........you set up a false assumption to assume a double standard.....
I'm surprised this thread went on for so long given the initial post.
I should have just liked Jayhawkers post on this thread and yawned.
I'll do just that.........."yawn".
Since you mention William Lane Craig here is what RationalWiki has to say about him and his arguments. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/William_Lane_Craig
The burden of proof is on the person making the existence claim. In this case, that means the theists.
If a scientist makes a claim that there is a new particle, it isn't the job of others to prove that particle does NOT exist. It is the job of the scientist to prove it *does*.
If someone claims that BigFoot exists, it is their role to prove such a creature exists, not the role of every one else to show it doesn't.
Jeremiahcp
Well-Known Jerk
If you read the thread then you ability to grasp it is lacking. Which is why I am incline to believe you did not read the thread. So either you are very dim or you didn't read the entire thread.
Jeremiahcp
Well-Known Jerk
"Why do you think it's wrong for someone to ask for evidence if someone is making extraordinary claims?"
I certainly never said anything like that. Where is your evidence that I "think it's wrong for someone to ask for evidence if someone is making extraordinary claims"?
It is amazing how many "non-believers" posting in this thread read things in the OP which are simply not there. I mean it seems to validate my point.
Jeremiahcp
Well-Known Jerk
Not surprisingly, Craig asserts that both reason and evidence should be subordinate to faith. Why would a reason and evidence based thinker be interested in anything else that followed?
[1] Reason should be subordinate to faith:
“I think Martin Luther correctly distinguished between what he called the magisterial and ministerial uses of reason. The magisterial use of reason occurs when reason stands over and above the gospel like a magistrate and judges it on the basis of argument and evidence. The ministerial use of reason occurs when reason submits to and serves the gospel.... Should a conflict arise between the witness of the Holy Spirit to the fundamental truth of the Christian faith and beliefs based on argument and evidence, then it is the former which must take precedence over the latter.” -William Lane Craig
[2] Evidence should be subordinate to faith:
"The way in which I know Christianity is true is first and foremost on the basis of the witness of the Holy Spirit in my heart. And this gives me a self-authenticating means of knowing Christianity is true wholly apart from the evidence. And therefore, even if in some historically contingent circumstances the evidence that I have available to me should turn against Christianity, I do not think that this controverts the witness of the Holy Spirit. In such a situation, I should regard that as simply a result of the contingent circumstances that I'm in, and that if I were to pursue this with due diligence and with time, I would discover that the evidence, if in fact I could get the correct picture, would support exactly what the witness of the Holy Spirit tells me." - William Lane Craig
This man is announcing to the world that his mind is closed for business. He's telling us that even if he's wrong, there is no way for him to discover that fact because he refuses to consider any evidence that contradicts what he has chosen to believe by faith. If open-mindedness is the ability and willingness to consider an argument and its evidence impartially and to be convinced by a compelling argument, then this is its opposite.
And finally, Craig makes one of the two worst arguments I have ever seen, the Kalam cosmological argument, which depends on the universe having a first moment, a fact which he says points conclusively to a god with a long list of features. Look at the gigantic leap of faith he makes:
Kalam cosmological argument
- Like everything that comes into being, the universe has a cause.
- If the universe has a cause, then an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and enormously powerful.
- Therefore, an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and enormously powerful.
This argument is also refuted two other ways.
[1] Things which do not yet exist cannot be causally influenced, therefore, nothing which exists can cause anything which does not exist to begin existing. Creation ex nihilo is unreasonable.
[2] Existing outside of time excludes all acts including creation, thinking, or even existing. They all require that something pass through a series of continuous moments, before which it didn't exist, during which it does, and after which it no longer exists. Thoughts and deeds require before and after moments.
Sam Harris, of course, is the opposite. Their debate was pretty one-sided. Here's Harris lambasting Craig over Craig's double standard and moral self-compromise. From the transcript from Sam Harris' rebuttal to William Lane Craig from their debate at Notre Dame entitled “Is the Foundation of Morality Natural or Supernatural? / Is Good from God?"
“Please notice the double standard that people like Dr. Craig use to exonerate God from all this evil. We’re told that God is loving, and kind, and just, and intrinsically good; but when someone like myself points out the rather obvious and compelling evidence that God is cruel and unjust, because he visits suffering on innocent people, of a scope and scale that would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath, we’re told that God is mysterious. “Who can understand God’s will?”
“And yet, this is precisely - this “merely human” understanding of God’s will - is precisely what believers use to establish his goodness in the first place. Something good happens to a Christian - he feels some bliss while praying, say, or he sees some positive change in his life - and we’re told that God is good. But when children by the tens of thousands are torn from their parents’ arms and drowned, we’re told that God is mysterious. This is how you play tennis without the net. And I want to suggest to you, that it is not only tiresome when otherwise-intelligent people speak this way, it is morally reprehensible.
“Given all the good, all that this God of yours does not accomplish in the lives of others, given - given the misery that’s being imposed on some helpless child at this instant - this kind of faith is obscene. To think in this way is to fail to reason honestly, or to care sufficiently about the suffering of other human beings."
Ouch!
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And how should I show such credentials?
Once again, Vilenkin was working with a description that is primarily based on general relativity. He showed, for example, that inflation cannot be eternal. But few were expecting that to be the case.
His basic issue, and a common one with *all* models for the very early universe, is that we do not have a verified quantum theory of gravity. Vilenkin is mostly working in a classical GR model with a few quantum additions, not a fully quantum theory of gravity.
Those theories that we *do* have for quantum gravity ALL have time going past the BB into the past, either as a 'bounce' or as a multiverse. The 'bounce' version is NOT the oscillating universe that you were talking about.
Next, I am not saying that a finite universe is completely ruled out. It just isn't the best fit to the data we currently have. At present, the spatial curvature is zero to our levels of accuracy. This allows for either a finite or an infinite universe depending on whether the curvature is actually positive or not.
But, like I said, ALL versions of quantum gravity that we have so far have time going past the BB into the past.
Again, is time goes infinitely into the past, there need not be a 'prime mover'. But I will agree, we do not *know* at this point. But silly philosophical arguments about infinite time aren't going to resolve the issue. The only thing that *could* is finding a verifiable quantum theory of gravity.
No, science is NOT based on the universality of cause and effect. For example, the timing of a nuclear decay is random. There is nothing different about a nucleus that decays now versus a nucleus of the same type that decays in ten years. The timing of that decay is not caused.
Most quantum level phenomena are uncaused in the classical sense of the term where the cause uniquely determines the effect. In fact, for most quantum systems (and this has been verified), there are multiple possible outcomes with NO cause for one over the others. This is verified and 'hidden causes' have been excluded.
I am quite familiar with Platinga's argument. he failed because he did a double quantification that was not allowed.
Sorry, but the fact that quantum mechanics is how the universe works and that it is a non-causal theory shows your logic is flawed.
How do you want me to show competence? Passing PhD level quals in it? Being able to explain what is going on in Arrow's experiment? Or being able to do a perturbation analysis of how a hydrogen atom reacts to a passing photon?[/QUOTE]
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All internally logically consistent systems.
I'm drawing a distinction between "an incoherent god" and "a god that may or may not be coherent in the believer's head but has been explained in a way I can't understand."
Often, I can't tell whether the explanation accurately reflects the god the person believes in. Sometimes, the person argues that the explanation isn't accurate ("I can't put my experience of God into words..." etc.).
I try to keep in mind that I'm evaluating what's presented to me, which mighy be different from what the person I'm talking to actually believes. If someone's just bad at communicating their position, I won't take this to mean that their position is necessarily wrong; but I will take it to mean that I have no reason to accept their position as right.
OK, I have run across this stuff before. I am always amazed at the contortions philosophers get themselves into. I would say I am closest to the B description of time, but it fails to encompass the full description. The best way to approach this issue isn't to focus on time, but to focus on spacetime. Neither time alone nor space alone has any set meaning. So, for example, different observers will disagree about what events are simultaneous(bit at different locations). They will also disagree about which events happen at the same location (but at different times). But, nevertheless, there is a geometry of spacetime that they *will* agree about.
This is basic special relativity. And it becomes even more fundamental as you proceed to general relativity.