Why We Believe In GodsFollow

We came from outer space.

You're trying to craft a non existent dividing line.

You walked right into it, sucker.


When do a bunch of iron supports become a sky scraper?

When an indulgent entity assembles them. Good work, fuckstick, you just validated Intelligent Design as an arguable concept.

Get better at rhetoric.

You're not compelled to understand if you don't want to. It's a plenty simple and intelligible position though, if you do.

I don't really care if you disagree; I do care if you want to say that it's detrimental to the intellectual community. Understand now?



I'm sorry, were you implying that elinda duped allegory in some insidious scheme?

Unless you are actually one of the small percentage of people who actually understand the science, you're still just acting on faith.

I'm familiar with this phenomenon from when you post about social theory or economics.

There are hundreds of billions of galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars with a good chance of having planets. The universe is roughly 13 billions years old, and Earth took roughly one billion years before its first life forms, so 11 billion years maybe, before the first reasonable planets that could hold life? Hard to find anything useful on that.. but anyway.

Life was inevitable. Intelligent life was inevitable. Location doesn't matter. If we had appeared on any other planet in the universe, we would not know the difference, and there's a very good chance that that planet would be called "Earth" in whatever language we'd be speaking there.

I would be surprised if there wasn't at least one, and probably a few dozen, species in the universe right now pondering whether or not they and their planet are truly unique. I'd even be surprised if there wasn't, right now, something on another planet making a statement that he wouldn't be surprised at this same thing.

Alright gbaji, in the interests of congeniality, why don't you repeat my position back to me? It shouldn't be hard if you understand it.

I'm waiting.

I want a full argument, by the way. I don't want you to quote myself.

I figured I'd make that clear, since I haven't actually posted an argument.

Edited, May 7th 2009 6:41pm by Pensive

gbaji pretty summed up what I was thinking.

So how do you figure we created spacetime seeing as how it is the theater we exist in.

edit: spelling

Edited, May 7th 2009 6:32pm by Horsemouth

Have we not had this conversation often enough for people to get the basic terms down yet?

Agnostic = The position that the existence or non-existence of a god or gods can not be known. It doesn't mean "I just can't make up my mind."

One can be an agnostic theist "It's impossible to know for certain whether or not any gods exist, but I believe they do.", or an agnostic atheist "It's impossible to know for certain whether or not any gods exist but I don't believe the claims that they do."

Also, arguments from incredulity really are crap. Well it's so amazing and unbelievable God must have done it, it's the only thing that makes sense! It's lazy thinking.

You know what would be a really really handy step for humanity? Reach a f'ucking consensus on what "god" is. That would really help out a lot of people. Please don't interpret this as an invitation to share your personal opinion of the attributes of your god. It's not useful. 4 billion people, every one of them with their different opinion on what "god" is is not useful. That's not even touching on the question of what God wants. Follow the gourd or cast off the sandal? What does he/she want?

I know why people believe in gods. Because most human beings find "I/we don't know yet" to be an unbearable answer. Any answer is preferable.

I think it's very important if you care at all about making good claims when you're doing science later on. You don't agree?

I don't. I don't really care much about most things that don't matter at all. Free will vs determinism, existence as a predicate, etc.

While we do not have a particularly large sample pool yet, the evidence simply does not support this claim.

Space is big, planets are small, and living things are smaller still. We've only been able to detect planets outside our solar system for about a decade, and low-mass earth-like planets for only a few years. We have no way as yet to detect life remotely beyond the wishful thinking of SETI, so we must rely on samples (from probes or meteorites) to find it.

Because of this, right now we have of sample space of roughly two, fairly different, objects: Earth and Mars (the only thing they have in common is roughly similar composition). One we know for a fact has life on it; the other may have, based on current evidence, had life on it once. To say, in the light of this, that life "as far as we know doesn't, hasn't, and may never happen again on any other planet" strikes me as sheer folly.



And what, pray tell, is wrong with being an "accident"? What says our lives have to be given meaning, rather than creating it for ourselves?



And what are the odds that one specific sperm fertilized one specific egg to give you the specific genome you now possess? It doesn't matter. The odds of something happening don't matter much once it has happened.

And even the rarest events can become near certainties with enough attempts. The odds of rolling all sixes on 10 six-sided dice is roughly 1 in 60 million, but if I roll those dice one billion times, I'd get on average 16 or 17 all-sixes.

Our galaxy is 12.4 billion years old, it contains over 200 billion stars and has a total mass in excess of 500 billion solar masses, representing roughly 7x10^68 atoms; the number of potential molecular collisions that could result in a self-replicating molecule is so astronomically large that it dwarfs the low probability that such a collision actually results in said molecule. And that's just in our galaxy, which is itself just one of hundreds of billions.

On a universal scale, human intuitions about "rare" simply have no meaning.

Maybe all social scientists talk like this guy.

EASY now.

Or is it that you believe that there is a way to make justified claims without resorting to phenomenology?

No, you're missing the point. I just don't think it matters much. There are no "justified claims" to people who don't agree on a frame of reference, just as there is no "speed" without relativity. The entire Human experience is essentially arbitrary at it's base, that there's a consensus framework to describe it is nice; but meaningless. Without such, there would be nothing to describe, no claims to justify, etc. If the framework is arbitrary or objectively accurate is meaningless if it's been agreed upon.

Heuristics is as valid as the Scientific Method to most people, and always will be. Really though, the distinction is that you and I and whomever else agree on a set of rules that differentiates the two. It's only objectively more valid because we've set the standard for the frame of objectivity.

It's still largely believed today. If you believe that Einsteinian and Quantum physics concepts somehow support the more philosophical existential ideas that Pensive is alluding to, then you had really crappy physics teachers.

No, I'm just able to understand the math. You are not. This makes your opinion on the matter as meaningful as a blind man's review of a silent movie. Sorry, nothing personal, go take some classes if you want to have a meaningful discussion about this.



Pensive was arguing that since "time" and "space" are subjective qualities, that they therefore only exist as subjective things. We "create" them by imagining them to be. Which is only half the loaf. Yes. Our perception of time and space is created by us. Our means of interacting with time and space is created by us. But the actual reality of time and space is not.

Wrong. It's impossible to observe what the objective state of space and time is, which makes it impossible to determine what "actual reality" is. I understand your point, but you don't understand Pensive's.