Examining the evidence there is of God

[Pete in Panama]

Are you open to explanations in science about why humans believe in religious concepts? Would you resist learning if you found out that humans believe subconsciously due to social influence and conformity, not the emotional reasons they think is true?....

If you have a particular scientific publication in mind I'd be interested in whether the experiments were ever duplicated by independent researchers. It's my understanding that the majority of papers from soft sciences like psychology and sociology have never been successfully reproduced independently (from here). However, let's focus on science and not religion. We realize that science w/o morals is worthless, so we'll consider scientific ethics (not situational ethics but morally based ethics) and part of science itself.

Accuracy in science journals would be an issue of ethics, not morals. Ethics in science has become a crucial part of it. My education is in psychology, and the history of psychology is disturbing. Many experimenters in the late 1800's and early 1900's did many cruel and inhumane things to humans and other animals. Much of this was due to the influence of Christianity and the assumption that humans are special, and animals do not have feelings. The mentalli ill were treated like animals since they lacked the cognitive ability that was thought to be the seat of the soul. Of course science learns, and advances, and by the late 60's ethics in all the sciences were changed to reflect more progressive understanding.

One part of ethics has been transparency and accuracy. There have been stories in recent years of bad ethics by labs, mostly in medicine trials, but the pressure for this behavior has been greed by pharma and other industries that rely on certain results in science. The US government has cut funding for many universities that conduct research and the result is cuts to research and raising costs to students. The lost funding has meant many universities need to show results to get funding, so it becomes an ethical dilemma. The USA as a nation has a conservative movement that has more contempt for science and exvertise, and many republicans want to cut funding to higher education. This will only cause more problems, and force any research into the private sector where a profit motive will tank ethics.


It seems the word you mean is objectivity. Scientists don't claim that their work is absolute, quite the opposite. But the work has to be objective, and that means realy on facts and data, and avoid any unwarranted assumptions, like religious assumptions.

There's a reason why results in science do not indicate any supernatural. The results don't support the assumptions and beliefs of theists. It's not personal, it's objective.

My program included a year of philosophy courses where the understanding was that if an idea was objectively verifiable independently (w/ no connecting input), then the subject of study was considered absolute. The opposite of absolute being relative. Your year of philosophy may have been different than mine, my degree was from a state university in California..

 

[rational experiences]

Absolute.

Go back in time from now as man of science.

His machine history a colder universe would instantly disappear.

Absolute.

As metal is a cold pressure law in a seam of pressures.

It's own history before back in time hotter was melt.

Man ignored the visiting sun stars burn explode increased space law heat as a scattered O cold God origin.

As earth would act the same if it blew apart. Would wander reacting exploding.

Origin law had been removed as a science thesis.

 

[rational experiences]

Absolute.

Go back in time from now as man of science.

His machine history a colder universe would instantly disappear.

Absolute.

As metal is a cold pressure law in a seam of pressures.

It's own history before back in time hotter was melt.

Man ignored the visiting sun stars burn explode increased space law heat as a scattered O cold God origin.

As earth would act the same if it blew apart. Would wander reacting exploding.

Origin law had been removed as a science thesis.

Take that advice as a man who said I'd make it relative.

Infinity removed gave me metals.

Once only is absolute one.

Advice...just live as a human in natural garden laws. No extreme bad behaviours only practiced by man in artificial civilisation control.

Artificial said greedy men what I built.

 

[F1fan]

If you have a particular scientific publication in mind I'd be interested in whether the experiments were ever duplicated by independent researchers. It's my understanding that the majority of papers from soft sciences like psychology and sociology have never been successfully reproduced independently (from here). However, let's focus on science and not religion. We realize that science w/o morals is worthless, so we'll consider scientific ethics (not situational ethics but morally based ethics) and part of science itself.

Several things, studies in psychology have to meet a 95% statistical accuracy rate. How well do religious claims stack up to that? That is exceptionally high as conclusions go. If a study gets 92% accuracy it fails. That is still higher than any religious claim, right? You're calling out the failure rate for many experiments. The requirement to convict a person for murder is less than the minimum for experiments in psychology.

Another thing is that controlling variables is very difficult in tests in psychology and that is often devending on the pools of subjects. If you select a group os subjects from a poorly educated area the results of a study could be vcastly different than if you select people from a highly educated area. We are studying human beings and there is a vast set of differences culturally and educationally. As I have noted psychology is a field of science that has had to adjust over time due to the subjects being tested and ethics considerations.

As for so material for you to read I would suggest Emotional Intelligence by Dan Goleman. The book is a great source to learn about the biology of the brain and how it evolved the way it did. It explains how our primitive fight-or-flight fear response mechanism is still intact from our early hominid ancestors, and how this causes problems for our neocortex and ability to form abstract ideas.

I also siggest a more detailed book called The Biology of Belief by Joseph Giovannoli.

https://www.amazon.com/Biology-Belief-Biases-Beliefs-Perceptions/dp/0970813716

Also Michael Shermer is good, and has written many books, and has academic presentations on YouTube. He's an entertaining guy, actually.

https://www.amazon.com/People-Believe-Weird-Things-Pseudoscience/dp/0805070893

My program included a year of philosophy courses where the understanding was that if an idea was objectively verifiable independently (w/ no connecting input), then the subject of study was considered absolute. The opposite of absolute being relative. Your year of philosophy may have been different than mine, my degree was from a state university in California..

Well philosophy has the advantage of making its own rules.

 

[Pete in Panama]

Several things, studies in psychology have to meet a 95% statistical accuracy rate. How well do religious claims stack up to that? That is exceptionally high as conclusions go. If a study gets 92% accuracy it fails. That is still higher than any religious claim, right? You're calling out the failure rate for many experiments. The requirement to convict a person for murder is less than the minimum for experiments in psychology.

Another thing is that controlling variables is very difficult in tests in psychology and that is often devending on the pools of subjects. If you select a group os subjects from a poorly educated area the results of a study could be vcastly different than if you select people from a highly educated area. We are studying human beings and there is a vast set of differences culturally and educationally. As I have noted psychology is a field of science that has had to adjust over time due to the subjects being tested and ethics considerations.

As for so material for you to read I would suggest Emotional Intelligence by Dan Goleman. The book is a great source to learn about the biology of the brain and how it evolved the way it did. It explains how our primitive fight-or-flight fear response mechanism is still intact from our early hominid ancestors, and how this causes problems for our neocortex and ability to form abstract ideas.

I also siggest a more detailed book called The Biology of Belief by Joseph Giovannoli.

https://www.amazon.com/Biology-Belief-Biases-Beliefs-Perceptions/dp/0970813716

Also Michael Shermer is good, and has written many books, and has academic presentations on YouTube. He's an entertaining guy, actually.

https://www.amazon.com/People-Believe-Weird-Things-Pseudoscience/dp/0805070893...

Ah so many memories of my psych classes so many years ago. It'd be fun to get back into all that but I was asking u about absolute vs. relative truth and those are concepts from philosophy, and when u said...

...Well philosophy has the advantage of making its own rules.

--it told me how very little interest you had in the subject and how very unwilling you are to ever get into it.

--but I do thank u for ur time.

 

[joelr]

What is "a being"?
..still sounds much like you refer to a person, to me.

Yes like a person who is really angry at those who don't follow the new religion, who insists on yelling about how scary the punishments will be, a person who hates things they don't understand like gay people. Like an angry king from the Middle Ages. That sounds a lot like a "being" to me.

God does not hate religions. He hates insincerity and undue oppression of others.

And people who don't follow the rules and don't believe in the correct religion. And gays.

..and all this happened, just because it could.
That belief is not for me, thankyou.

It doesn't matter what is "for you". You can also reject the Earth goes around the sun and sickness isn't a punishment from a deity. That doesn't change what is true.
Quantum mechanics has already demonstrated that the universe is probabilistic, if something can happen it eventually will. It may be unlikely for self replicating chemicals to evolve on any one planet but when you have billions of galaxies and trillions of planets the odds are very good.
In this universe it can happen. There may be many other universes where it cannot, we would not find ourself in any of those. We do find ourself in a universe where probabilities had enough time and locations to actually play out. Giving good evidence to the fact that we arose from unconscious natural forces.
Now to add the God theory on top of that is redundant. So God wanted it to look like it may have been by probability just to fool people who understand such things. Sounds a bit warped.
Ancient outdated ideas generally are. They no longer make sense out of the world as they once were intended to do.

You can choose any belief. If you want to believe what is true then you would need different standards. Everyone is free to believe false things.

 

[wellwisher]

Science can show that the invention of written language and the rise of civilization correlate much better to the 6000 year ago time scale of Genesis, than it does to the billion/million year time scale of geology and biological evolution leading to humans.

How does evolution explain the invention of written language and the rise of civilization using natural selection? The conceptual problem is neither of these inventions; writing and civilization, were already natural to the earth, to provide natural selective pressures, for their own sudden appearance? How does evolution and natural selection explain the iPhone which appeared without nature.

The rise of civilization is when humans, in bulk, began to control and alter their environment, thereby partially transforming nature, thereby partially escaping natural selection, in favor of manmade selection. Evolution cannot explain this change away from natural selection, in favor of artificial selection. Doesn't that disconnect from natural selection falsify evolution and natural selection, in terms of it being the only driving force, for human selection, after 6000 years ago?

For example, if you compare the health of all the natural animals, to that of humans, why do humans, as a species, fall short in average basic health, yet some also live longer, on a relative scale? How does natural selection explain this one species, being so deviant from the norm? What natural environment created these selective pressures for this deviance? It is called will and choice and manmade selections, which Genesis first describes.

This does not prove God, but it shows something else; wildcard, was added to natural evolution, about 6000 years ago, that was no longer conceptually consistent, with only natural selection; fall from paradise. It was connected to a new creative principle, like the bible claims, that would make humans Lords over the animals. Human would go on to either domesticate them, eat them, or hunt them to extinction. This indicates a major change in the human brain's natural operating system, which would come about 6000 or so years ago.

As a modern example of how such manmade change makes possible, the internet is only about 25 years old in terms of mass usage; Windows 98. In this small amount of time, this innovation has caused humans to become more self absorbed, using their fives senses, much less time in physical reality. Staring at a cell phone is not the same as looking at the natural birds or clouds. Emoji's are not natural.

Virtual reality is being pushed forward, ahead of natural reality, due to manmade pressures. The former is more imaginary than natural sensory. How will this change humans in a 100 or even 1000 years, if this new behavior continues to persist, since this is not natural or even based on natural selection? This is manmade selection. The future humans may forget how to react within natural reality, and start reacting based on man made fads and herd stampedes that are programed into virtual reality. How many believed the Russian Collusion Coup was based on hard reality and not just imaginary virtual reality? How many could not tell the difference any longer? How can evolution work for you, if natural real is not known?

How many who beloved in the alternate reality of the Russian Collusion virtual reality now believe gender ambiguity is natural? What is your belief based on? The faddish gender ambiguity did not come from natural selection, or else all animals who now live in natural physical reality, would also be under the same natural selective pressure. Herds of all types of animals would be lining up at Veterinarians offices to get sex change operations. This is not observed, since this virtual fad is based on human selective pressures; virtual reality.

If we compared the percent of claimed alternate gender cases in places that it is taught and embraced; Left wing schools, to places where it is not taught or ignored, there should be the same number of cases, if it was innate human and driven by natural selection. If it is a type of man made virtual conditioning there will be no correlation. It would also demonstrate how natural selection is being ignored, by those who teach such manmade ideas, thereby voiding classic evolution for the very young people, who then defend evolution. They do not see the irony. This alternate reality, which began about 6000 years ago is based on will and choice and an active imagination; operating system upgrade that departed from natural selection.

 

[TransmutingSoul]

This OP now moves over to the following OP

Obligation as Faith leaders

It is about our own responsibilities in pursuing evidence.

Regards Tony