Do atheists believe in magnetism?

[firedragon]

It is a tad simple of an example.

People love evidence fair enough so do I. I often hear people dismissing the evidence of others. Denying that its worth the time to conduct the experiment. Prove it first mentality. But nothing works that way.

We did not prove the Higgs is a thing and then build CERN.

Belief precedes the action. Action leads to the situation where the evidence can be seen.

What you said is not relevant to me Truth in love.

 

[ppp]

We

It is a tad simple of an example.

People love evidence fair enough so do I. I often hear people dismissing the evidence of others. Denying that its worth the time to conduct the experiment. Prove it first mentality. But nothing works that way.

We did not prove the Higgs is a thing and then build CERN.

Belief precedes the action. Action leads to the situation where the evidence can be seen.

We don't prove real world things mentally. We model things mentally, then demonstrate the accuracies and inaccuracies of that model with practical controlled tests.

 

[Truth in love]

I'm not an atheist, but I have questions.

Do you think that electromagnetic phenomena are not demonstrable?

What do you think electromagnetic means?

What do you mean by believe?

What is not always there in electromagnetic devices?

Is a lightbulb an electromagnetic device?

Electromagnetic fields are generated typically by running current through a cooper wire coil. It is only observable when powered. It can be observed, but if the set conditions of operation are not met it will not have the desired results.

Belief is a trust in something. This typically leads to action.
I would typically not list a light bulb that way though I suppose there likely is small em field around it.

 

[Truth in love]

What does "it does when the conditions are the same" mean? Having different results is a demonstrable effect isn't it?

Depends. If I tell you I found great game to play called a snow ball fight. You arrange to come over to my house to play and its 80 degrees the day you get here I would be very hard pressed to show you how a snowball fight works.

 

[Truth in love]

I am not quite clear on what this post was supposed to convey, but it seems you are lumping disparate concepts under the heading of belief when they are not belief in the sense of believing by faith without objective evidence.

Believe is a choice. People choose to believe the news or not. To believe in the moon landing or not. Sure some things have more evidence, but it is still a choice people make. Wither its to believe that your spouse loves you or in God or in the risk of licking a 9V battery. It is the same core action.

 

[SkepticThinker]

Yes, but your electromagnetic does not work without power. Set conditions must be met in order for it to function. The same can be said of faith. Yet one is embraced and the other ridiculed. Why?

Electromagnetism is testable. Faith is the excuse people give for believing something when they don't have good evidence.
I don't see how the two are related.

 

[SkepticThinker]

So if I set up an experiment with an electromagnetic, but a cable is bad and you don't see the evidence is the theory wrong?

It means your methodology is flawed.

 

[Truth in love]

What is the mediation approach in a belief system?

Medication is a common practice in many belief systems. I see it like mental exercise. A person can try it out. If they find they have more peace of mind, focus etc. Then they have evidence that the practice is helpful to them.

Now this would not mean that they have evidence of every aspect of every belief, but they would have something.

 

[Truth in love]

No God is helping man. People die from predictable mortality rates. So if someone has an illness that has a 75% mortality rate in 1 year then they may live even only having a 25% chance to survive 1 year. They may call it help from their deity, Allah, Krishna, Yahweh, or others.
But when 10,000 of the cases are looked at we see 75% of the cases died within 1 year. These probabilities are always followed. So ~7,500 people didn't survive. Meanwhile out of ~2,500 people, the religious will say they were helped.
They were not. If a deity was helping the statistics would be all over the place, impossible to map. What is happening is probabilities play out exactly as they should.

Sadly this is also true for children. There are many in cancer wards and many will not make it. Despite entire families begging for help in prayer. There is NO evidence of outside intervention.
Yes sometimes you lose a job and find a better one by coincidence and so on. That happens likely because you are suddenly speaking out about your situation. But it feels like divine intervention. Meanwhile there are families in shelters and vans because no job was found.
Revelations are not believed, ever, except in your own religion. If Christian you are fine with Abraham and Paul but you know Gabrielle didn't speak to Muhammad, Moroni didn't speak to Joe Smith, John From didn't speak with the Cargo Cults and so on.


And then prayer studies have been done. Controlled experiments with several types of test subjects and a control. Didn't help.
The people who survive something and are religious will say they were helped. Atheists who survive somehow survive without help and the people who didn't survive don't get to tell the story. so you only hear from the survivors.
So there is no evidence for theism.

Also billions of people claim help from Yahweh, billions claim Allah, billions say Krishna.....

To demonstrate God communicated with a person you would also need a scientific test. One person reading the thoughts of the examiner, getting long strings of numbers and the ability to repeat the test anytime.
That would be a start.

God tends to not want to spend time jumping hoops.

However God does often communicate and send help. Our history is filled with events that defy logical explanations. This does not answer al the questions, but it does warrant further investigation.

 

[PearlSeeker]

However God does often communicate and send help.

A simple "Hello, I am here" would be enough.

 

[Qwin]

Why would you imagine someone who lacks belief in a deity, does not hold any beliefs about the real world they inhabit? A human being couldn't function without forming beliefs about the world they occupy.
You now that beliefs don't all have the same objective merit right? A belief is just an acceptance that something exists or is true, especially one without proof. It need not be without proof of course.
Atheism is simply the lack or absence of belief in any deity or deities, why anyone would imagine this means an atheist would hold no beliefs, or that this was even possible, is baffling?

'Beliefs don't all have the same objective merit,' you say. Well no. However, I meant that the commonality of beliefs is that they're all beliefs, and, as you say, beliefs are an acceptance of something without proof. There is a difference, and the difference is in names, and the names embody the concepts. Each has merit, certainly, because each name has merit applied. All-up, names, usually in merit order, float in human heads, which is the first truth of Gods and Deities, and also the first truth of your own beliefs. If you don't believe you have belief, unbelief or disbelief regarding the known names of Deities and God, then it's denial, which is also floating around, bolstering the reality of you, that you call you.

And here we are, all debating using little internal voltages that magically (well no one professes to know the complexity) have categories and merit. Essentially you have beliefs but with different names. To me you are indeed religious, and appropriately you espouse your philosophies on these "Religious Forums." How so, 'religious?' I'll reiterate: you as a person have beliefs, and denials, as does every other person here. The only difference is the names.

 

[Truth in love]

Atheists "can" believe in magnetism based on its effects.

Atheists don't feel that there are affects that can only be attributed to God.

Once could argue that a man named Atlas is holding up the world. But that begs the question, what is holding up Atlas. The answer is that he is standing on a giant turtle. But what is the turtle standing on (etc).

It is much like a Superman movie in which Superman caught Lois as she was falling from a tall building and he said "Don't worry, Lois, I've got you." Then Lois said "you've got me, but who has you?"

There are an infinite number of things to speculate about, but they likely are not all true (we could speculate that Santa exists).

But, if we take careful measurements of magnetism, and see how it interacts with other variables, we can write formulas about them.

If you had three equations, and they all had three variables, you could solve for one variable at a time. So, you could determine, for example, x, y, and z.

James Clerk Maxwell was teaching a high school class when he wrote the four known laws of electromagnetics, and noticed that there were four variables. This, he thought, might mean that two of the equations might be linearly dependent. For example, x + 2y = 3z, and 2x + 4y = 6z are really the same equation (one is twice the other).

When Maxwell tried to find out which of the two electromagnetic laws are duplicates, he ended up showing that any three will derive the fourth. Thus, there are no unnecessary laws, but they all are interdependent.

The science of electromagnetism started with careful measurements, from which we derived formulae, and we found that 4 of the formulae are co-dependent on each other.

Our discovery's in electromagnetism like many other things began with an observation. "that's odd" is an oft felt it not said thing early in the process. This leads to working to discover what is there. careful measurements are great and often workable in physics and math. Much less so with social sciences.


You seem to be equating the end results of a discovery in one area with the early phases in another. Do I believe in Atlas,? no, but the question might lead to more questions. Answer can sometimes be found. Turns out the Demetor was very effective at helping crops grow. Just slap an image out in the field and your crops did better. We now call it a scarecrow, but there was an effect. Now we see a different reason for this working, but it worked. I can't find a logical explanation for the events in Cokevile, The events are documented. People may choose to believe or not believe that they laws of physics just happened to work a little different that day, but science has yet explain it.

 

[Qwin]

No, she meant "falsifiable." Unfalsifiable means it's not able to be falsified.

"Falsifiability is the capacity for some proposition, statement, theory or hypothesis to be proven wrong. That capacity is an essential component of the scientific method and hypothesis testing. In a scientific context, falsifiability is sometimes considered synonymous with testability."
What is falsifiability? - Definition from WhatIs.com

Hey, it's not other peoples' fault that you can't justify your claims with evidence. We are on a debate forum, after all. That's what goes on here.

Actually you confirmed my point.

 

[SkepticThinker]

Actually you confirmed my point.

How's that? You misinterpreted what unfalsifiable means.

 

[Qwin]

How's that? You misinterpreted what unfalsifiable means.

Un-falsifiable means it can't be falsified, but falsifiable means it can be falsified. The person claimed to want, "falsifiable evidence," which means: evidence that can be falsified. In other words, make up something - anything you like - and present it. I must remember though, this is 2022, lol.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

"Nobody here has been hostile to you. They've been like me - unemotional." Gunna call that one out. Frequent condescending comments, insults to my knowledge and integrity have been a norm on here.

I'd have to see the specific words that you are calling hostility. I've not seen everything written to you, but I haven't seen anything I would call hostile in what I have read. The reason I ask is because my experience with theists in these discussions is that they're quick to emotional responses and tend to think in terms of their persecution. I don't say that this is you, but I also don't know what you are calling hostile, and can't say that I would agree with your illustrative examples until I see them.

I used to refer to the three stages of apologist decompensation. First, the apologist is friendly and has a message to share. Critical thinkers will identify errors of fact and logical fallacies. The apologist begins by fielding these, but eventually goes into the "that's just your opinion" and "you didn't see it happen" and "you can't prove that God doesn't exist" kind of defensive mode. His demeanor and words change. These comments are subjected to the same critical analysis, and the apologist becomes emotional. He's frustrated and somewhere between angry and offended.

Why does this happen with the apologists, but not those posting to him? I think it's because the theist believes the atheist is immoral and doing things he shouldn't be doing. He's militant. He hates God. Decent people don't behave like this. He knows, because decent people are in church, and this never happens there. He's not used to seeing what he perceives as impudence. He's not used to seeing what he considers holy disrespected, which is how he perceives dissent in this arena, and eventually, the frustration and emotional content appears. He takes it personally, and he dislikes and disapproves of the skeptic. The reverse doesn't happen. If the critical thinker injects a little editorializing, it will be to condemn certain posting etiquette, like repeating points already rebutted and not counter-rebutted, or the folly of criticizing science the believer doesn't understand, or citing Christian scripture as authoritative to a non-Christian. But this never becomes more emotional or angry than that, and certainly doesn't rise to the level of hostility. Dismissive perhaps, but it's not angry, and in my estimation, not hostile, although you might disagree.

"Truth does not demand belief." Actually it does. All action requires some level of belief. if I did not believe that drink water would help my thrust I would not take that action.

Belief is one of those words with different meanings that lead to equivocation errors. I use the word belief to mean anything one considers true whether because of good evidence or faith, but some people use the word only to mean the latter, as when they say, "I don't believe. I know." What Barker is saying is that truth doesn't require faith to be believed, where for him, like me, true means demonstrably correct.

I just read these words: "and, as you say, beliefs are an acceptance of something without proof." That's a different definition for truth than mine, and the two should not be conflated as equivalent.

many on the non believing side will not accept the reality that they need to believe in order to try to learn science and also religion.

This illustrates the equivocation problem - equating empiric belief with faith-based belief. We learn science empirically, and for the experienced critical thinker, there is no choice in what to believe. Something is believable because is evidently correct according to his epistemology, and nothing else is, including insufficiently evidenced religious claims. For the faith-based thinker, there is a choice what to believe, because his beliefs aren't tethered to evidence. They don't need empiric support to be believable to him. Pick a god and believe it exists. Pick whatever doctrine you like and believe it but no other.

 

[SkepticThinker]

Un-falsifiable means it can't be falsified, but falsifiable means it can be falsified. The person claimed to want, "falsifiable evidence," which means: evidence that can be falsified. In other words, make up something - anything you like - and present it. I must remember though, this is 2022, lol.

My post did not confirm your point.
And you still don't seem to know what falsifiable means. Hint: It doesn't mean making up anything you like.
If you make an unfalsifiable claim, then you are making a claim that cannot be demonstrated to be false/wrong. It's something of a useless claim that doesn't get us anywhere.
If you make a falsifiable claim, you are making a claim that can be demonstrated to be false\wrong. These claims are actually useful ones that can get us somewhere.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Electromagnetic fields are generated typically by running current through a cooper wire coil. It is only observable when powered. It can be observed, but if the set conditions of operation are not met it will not have the desired results.

Belief is a trust in something. This typically leads to action.
I would typically not list a light bulb that way though I suppose there likely is small em field around it.

Same question for you: do sincerely believe that this is a valid argument that ought to convince an atheist?

 

[Subduction Zone]

Un-falsifiable means it can't be falsified, but falsifiable means it can be falsified. The person claimed to want, "falsifiable evidence," which means: evidence that can be falsified. In other words, make up something - anything you like - and present it. I must remember though, this is 2022, lol.

Falsifiable means that if it is wrong it can be shown to be wrong. Unfalsifiable means that even if the concept is wrong there is no way to show that it is wrong. In other words it is irrational.

Invisible green fairies tied my shoes this morning. Prove me wrong.

 

[Sheldon]

Its a question about how people look at things.

Many people insist that they trust science, but not anything requiring any belief, yet much of science requires a level of trust, belief faith etc.

This is pretty muddled thinking. Firstly science is a method or methods for studying and understanding the natural world and physical universe. So when you say "trust" science it's hard to understand what you mean, since it's efficacy in doing just that is manifest?

Secondly a belief is an acceptance that something exists or is true, a belief can be held without any objective evidence whatsoever, but can also be held in an objective fact, so the word is too vague here to offer any real meaning. Also atheists are not an homogenous group, they can all be said to lack one specific belief, but beyond that they might have little to nothing in common.

Faith is defined as complete trust or confidence in someone or something, in this context since the efficacy of science is manifest, and my trust in science to study and understand the natural world and physical universe would match how successful it could be shown to be to achieve this, I'm not sure what your objection is? Don't you go to a doctor when you're ill? If so then you trust medical science, but that doesn't require purely subjective beliefs, or faith in the doctrines of any religion?

However this is not of course remotely comparable to religious faith, and it is disingenuous to compare them in this way, since religious faith is defined as strong belief in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual conviction rather than proof, so applying that to atheists seems odd, and pretending it is remotely the same as someone trusting science to study and understand the natural world or physical universe is extremely disingenuous, as the two things are not even remotely similar.