Yes indeed... didn't someone say something to the effect that it's our "delusion about the goodness, beauty and intelligence of our children is all that keeps us from strangling them at birth..."

LC >;-}>

It is impossible for any human to be 100% rational at every second of their lives. From birth to death, if one reaches old age, there are billions and billions of thoughts and split second decisions that we make and there will never be a perfect human being that will be 100% rational all the time.

However, we can seek when there are disputes on the nature of the human condition, better ways to collectively filter out bias so that irrationality has less of a chance of creeping in.

Evolution isn't about perfection, it is merely about getting to the point of reproduction. Evolution is biology based, not label based. And no matter what label we hold, no matter who ends up on top, in the long term our species and even this planet will die.

So while seeking to filter out bad claims and bias, we must always understand as a species that there will never be a utopia.

 This doesn't sound so much like an attack on the "invisible, intangible magic man in the sky" as it is on idealism or anything not hardcore materialism. While materialism is the view most consistent to what we see, I think it's best to concede ignorance and remain agnostic in regards to "intangibles."

On the other hand, wouldn't it be irrational to hold the (strong) belief that only material exists given our a)inability to perceive anything beyond matter and b) our inability to know if there IS anything beyond matter?

Basically, empiricism is the best we have so far, but even that has it's short comings.

Bob had it right on the button...

I'm an unrepentant materialist, I dwell in the natural world. And in this place I call reality, we are allowed to dream, to imagine and to speculate all we wish. We can not, however lay claims of reality to our speculations, nor call our imaginings and dreams fact.

The mind, intelligence, consciousness... that which defines sentience is an emergent phenomena of the physical brain. We know of no mechanism, real or even hypothetical wherein sentience can reside outside of a material form. Yet, the superstitious make just that claim without a bit of evidence.

LC >;-}>

We have looked in the mirror and fallen in love--with ourselves. Narcissists go to the same graveyards. Now what? Where will we be in 100 years? Are we certain? Keep looking in the mirror. Peace. Conundrum

Was that an argument, or an attempted subtle attack, or something else?

Welcome, by the way.

Someday I'd like to have a serious conversation about (sometimes) invisible (to most of people) intangible beings generating kinetic vector field that resembles magical powers. It is an interesting topic and it is not entirely theoretical, I must say. 

I suspect that most of skeptics don't really care. They did not choose to fight for rationality, they just want to stand against the bullshit and live in peace. So once they see that some extraordinary claim is harmless or actually possible, they lose interest. Going in deeper and examining the science behind that is too much of a work for something they did not choose.

Probably  all of the above.  Any attack is purely intellectual, and not really intentional.  Everyone has the right to believe or not believe anything they so desire, within the bounds of human rights of course.  The battlegrounds are the finite and the infinite--the natural and supernatural--theos and atheos.  The participants are usually biased by various forms of egomania--mostly inherited from one called Narcissus.

The human kind still has a serious problem with origin and purpose.

Albert from Einstein believed in an intelligence greater than his.  What did he see at the atomic level?  A sub-atomic intelligence.  Al never admitted a personal relationship with this intelligence.

I Ramble.

Peace,

Conundrum

"Behold; Man is become as one of us, to know good and evil".  Man cannot deal with Truth, being unable to recognize  nor define it.  So he morphs through life, contemplating his navel on Mars Hill nobbling on triticale bars and bemoaning the insufficiencies of Aristotle and the lastest cosmology.

There is Truth out there which sets one free from the bondage of the Ego mania.  Search for:  The Unknown God.

Peace.

Conundrum

LC: have you considered Prozac? Most of us who suffer from abberations of the cerebral cortex need a little help.

Obviously, our indubitable basic beliefs are from different galaxies. Whatever happened to the concept of the open mind?

Peace,
Conundrum

Another person taking a scientist words out of context. In Einstein's last letter he said while he liked the Jewish tradition he found the writings as "although noble, childish"(Regarding the ignorance of the writers of their holy books in their clearly superstitious claims written in an unscientific age)

Einstein's "god" was not a god, nor a personal god. It was the concept of nature and our seeking to understand nature.

Belief does not mean that.

Belief is still belief, whatever degree of certainty or confidence one attaches to it. Any level of belief in things for which there is not only no evidence, but can be no evidence, such as omnipotent/infinite gods, is not rationally justifiable.

If the strength of the belief is reasonably consistent with the plausibility and/or amount of evidence pointing to the possible truth of what is believed in, there is no problem.

We don't require 100% certainty to justify accepting any proposition. All empirical, ie, objective knowledge has a degree of uncertainty associated with it.

We are justified in assuming, a term I prefer to the word 'believe', that something is the case, as long as it seems to match reality adequately, as in allowing us to predict to a useful degree the result of some action.

Assuming a world of matter and energy, as described by Physics, certainly works extremely well. That is all I need to know. It has guided the development of the technology that is allowing us to communicate.

Unquestionably. But theism is a blanket statement for all beliefs in god, not just the commonly accepted ones.

Denial of atheism:

“I’m not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what that is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the most intelligent human toward God.”

And then:

"In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views."

Quotes he made in support of theism are too numerous to list.

I received your letter of June 10th. I have never talked to a Jesuit 
priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies 
about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and 
have always been an atheist. 

Albert Einstein, letter to Guy H. Raner Jr, July 2, 1945

The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of 
human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still 
primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No 
interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. 

 Letter to philosopher Eric Gutkind, January 3, 1954 

I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of
 what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and 
actions of human beings. 


 - Albert Einstein, responding to Rabbi Herbert Goldstein's question "Do you believe in God?"

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a
 lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a 
personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly.
 If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the 
unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our 
science can reveal it. 


 - Albert Einstein, letter to an atheist (1954), quoted in Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas & Banesh Hoffman 

LC >;-}>

There is massive evidence that we live in a 'material' world. In common usage, 'matter' is that which is not mind or 'spirit'. Do you deny that there is 'something', that is not 'us' or the people we deal with, that we observe and interact with? That is all it means to say 'we live in a material world". That we perceive something beyond ourselves that is still there when we come back to it IS the evidence.

Remember, evidence doesn't have to be 100% proof - that is what is not possible.

We have massive evidence that we live in a world that corresponds fairly closely to our sense experience. 'Matter' is that which gives 'things' some persistent structure. Anything which retains its shape is evidence. Matter is simply anything which occupies space and has volume.

Physics IS evidence. It works.

As described in your statement, our 'belief' in a material world does not differ from a belief in God, but that is because your statement is patently in error, in denying that we have evidence.

We have no evidence for God. We have evidence of order. Order does not require an intelligence, merely matter, ie persistent entities. Intelligence is dependent on the pre-existence of an ordered reality, not the other way round.

We have no evidence that we were 'lucky'. That would involve assuming there is only one possible precise state of the laws of Physics, etc, that would lead to a structure that would support the emergence of life of some kind. It didn't have to be a solar system. That sounds like the 'fine-tuning' argument, which has been shown to be not valid.

A 'solar system' only requires a star and gravity and smaller chunks of matter. Actually only matter and gravity, chunks of matter of all sizes up to stars and beyond are formed by gravity pulling mater together. Hardy remarkable luck. It seems now that maybe most stars have planets. And given the size of the universe, it would be remarkable if there wasn't at least one planet suitable for some form of life.

It is only remarkable to the naive and uninformed, so in that case it is arguably rational, as it was to our ancestors. But in the context of current understanding, it is no longer rational. IOW it is no longer possible to make a rational argument for those old ideas when you include current science in your propositions.

I have always held that the word 'knowledge' is very slippery, and should probably be avoided in serious discussion of our beliefs and assumptions. The common philosophical definition of 'knowledge' as "justified true belief" is f**king idiotic, precisely because it includes the word 'true' in it, which makes it a useless circularity. Epistemology is pretty useless, riddled as it is with crap like that. I don't give a rat's arse about "strict epistemological criteria", I simply don't use or refer to 'epistemology'.

Of course all we have is belief, assumptions, instincts, intuitions, which can be held with varying degrees of confidence. The only assumption which can be reasonably held with virtually perfect certainty, IMHO,  is 'cogito ergo sum', ie 'I think, therefore I am'. The 'Laws of Logic' would be pretty much up there, namely that there are separate 'things' we can identify in our 'world' (Law of Identity), and that contradictions are not valid, ie anything which seems to show that A = not A must be wrong.

From there, we can only have beliefs and assumptions.

I distinguish 'assumptions' as those ideas we consciously choose and recognize as such, as not clearly and unambiguously demonstrated by the evidence, from 'beliefs', which I don't see as something we choose, but are driven to by our perceptions, experience and reasoning, as being what everything at least seems to point to.

My suggestion would be that you, and many others here, only know the Christian god-concept, which is primarily that of a Bearded Old White Guy who controls the entire Universe on the end of a string.

I didn't have a clue what panentheism was before I found a definition of it, but it most closely matched the concept I had of G-d at the time I found it.  If you say that Einstein's conceptualization of "god" was "the concept of nature", and from everything I've read in all my readings of Einstein (which go back over 4 decades) that is correct, Einstein could most accurately be described as a panentheist.

The problem many people have with god-concepts is that most of them are so heavily influenced by Bearded Old White Guy In Robe or Well-Hung Naked Guy Holding Hammer / Lightning Bolt / Pitchfork (okay, so many of them weren't really all that well-hung ...) that conceptualizing ANYTHING which lacks body parts as a deity is just about as impossible as can be.

I can't begin to count the number of arguments against the existence of god and/or gods that somehow involve non-physical "brains" or some other inside-space-time-manifestation.  The answer to me was that G-d is not a thing in the space-time-occupying sense of a thing.  G-d created space-time (and I don't mean in a Higgs sense, I mean in the sense that G-d created the Higgs boson and the rest of the GUT), G-d does not exist =within= space-time.

Then why call it God, or G-d and not the awesome turtle outside space-time that created the thing which created the Higgs field?  With your definition of god, I see absolutely no point of even considering such a thing.  It may very well be a trans-dimensional chicken of doom... it's complete gibberish.

I think the distinction here was between the material (meaning particles, energy and their interactions) and the supernatural implied in the previous posts (meaning spiritual, transcendent, not of material).  I'm sure Bob and many others here are aware of the stuff to non stuff ratio, the point was, however, that such ratio, low though it may be, is still a NATURAL explanation for our world.  

I'm not sure what you refer to as proof.  You can prove a large set of things exists outside of a solipsistic paradigm.  You cannot prove with 100% certainty, but relative to any given criteria you may prove anything.  If you preset the parameters for any proof, you may arrive at 100% satisfaction of set parameters.  If you then turn around and change set parameters to let's say, a smaller scale, then the parameters change and the previous proof is no longer satisfactory.  What you mean to say is that there will always be a set of parameters that you can think of, that the proof I provide is not 100% satisfactory.  Which is not the same as saying that you cannot prove anything.  That's just silly solipsistic philosophy.   

@ War Pig... I really liked your avatar dude, please don't go all irrational on us.  

The problem is that you've arbitrarily defined what is "material" and what is "silly solipsistic philosophy".

Or put another way, you believe with 100% confidence something that cannot, by your own admission, be proven with 100% certainty.

The "stuff" that makes up the ratio "low though it may be" is made up of "stuff" that occupies no space at all -- a proton is made up of three quarks (uud) and quarks are, themselves, far smaller than the proton they produce.  So far as I've been able to determine, the further "into" matter we "look", the less there is to matter.  Based on that trend, there really is "nothing", which is far from "silly solipsistic philosophy".

hehe, I've touched a nerve.  The solipsism remark was towards your "you can't prove ANYTHING" remark.  

I agree with your statement fundamentally but the way you have worded it leaves so much room for interpretation that I felt it needed to be clarified.  Left to "you can't prove anything" allows room for so much woo and neo-spiritual BS that a distinction needs to be made.  

I personally say that you cannot prove anything other then "Cogito ergo sum".  Everything else is expressed in degrees of certainty.  This, however, doesn't give equal footing to spiritual half talk BS, versus peer reviewed, repeatable experimental data.  The degree of certainty I attribute to scientifically obtained data, while not proven 100%, is so so high in the 99.999% that for all pragmatic purposes we may as well call it certain.  It just saves on words.  I could say I believe this to a degree of 99.9999% certainity, except for in the case that... blah blah.  Instead I will just claim it as practical truth.  

Once we have established that we have a subjectively flawed epistemic frame of reference, it is impractical to continually bring it up.  It is also impractical, bordering on incorrect to claim that the tautological definition of knowledge is one hundred percent certainty.

Metaphysical solipsism is likely the most fruitless and self defeating personal philosophy one can adopt.  I it as the ultimate laziness of exploring alternative options.  In my line of work, I often find a weak analogy of this mindset.  Not so much solipsistic in itself, but more of an inability to think outside the box ( if I'm permitted the cliche and pun).

One of the aspects of my job is to identify inefficiencies in a given process and suggest, design and test alternative solutions.  Unfortunately, this puts me head to head with people's egos that have been doing said process for years on end.  The most often remark I get is "there's no need to reinvent the wheel", or "this works fine the way it is, why fix it if it ain't broken".  To me, it sounds like intellectual laziness.  Enter solipsism... I can almost see the attraction, but you MUST establish a starting point, otherwise you have a rational equivalent of infinite regress. You are a dream inside a dream.... ad infinitum.  For me, there seems no more logical starting point then "Cogito ergo sum".

It has the nice ring of solipsism, but it has the added benefit of having the balls to make a firm statement.  Now that I am sure I exist, I have to set parameters of what I consider existence.  Once you start defining a frame of reference, you can measure knowledge relative to that basic currency.  

So, back to your friend's challenge, the answer is quite simple.  You have to ask him to define the frame of reference.  Once he has decided that "real" existence ( as opposed to figments of imagination ) has the property of X, Y, Z, then you can find the set of elements with said properties.  The parties involved need to intellectual consistency/honesty to not move the goal posts.  Again, if you tautologically define non existence as everything other then ONESELF, then likely you are everything, and by definition everything you think exists.  The distinction then becomes "figments of your imagination" are just things that exist, but are not what YOU incorrectly consider ONESELF.  I can run circles around intellectually lazy people, it's my job (I'm actually quite new to this position but learning fast)

I meant metaphysical-solipsism as opposed to methodological-solipsism, not all of Metaphysical is intellectually lazy.  Though some here may argue that is exactly the case.  I think we're at the point where we are talking past ourselves.  It's likely my fault, I most always assume too much and tend to skip over things that I consider obvious.  I didn't imply science is "real", I simply implied that it has a much higher probability then non tangible concepts.  Also, in the context of the above quote, I consider science as the pursuit of a higher probability of reality, hence not intellectually lazy, as opposed to metaphysical-solipsism that has a big tattoo on it's forehead stating "you can't prove that".  To me that just reeks of laziness.  I hope that cleared things up a little. 

I don't want to get into epistemic nuances in this conversation, suffice it to say that by stating"I think, therefore I am" must ultimately have an "I" to originate the thought.  I was referring to this fundamental conclusion from "Cogito ergo sum" versus any distinction relative to any specific branches of epistemology.

Did you ever consider how much more dogmatic society was back then? It amazes me that he even got away with the quotes posted here without some nut popping him off. I bet if alive today, especially with all the new things we have uncovered since, he'd no doubt call himself an atheist. I find it highly likely he avoided the word because of the stupid stigma people like you falsely attach to it.

Even Jefferson, if he ran today could not get elected with what he said about religion and the absurd fantastic claims it makes.

So at the very least, even if he had a generic god, he would STILL despise the childish myths and violent tribalism it causes.

You want to lead us to the god of Abraham which is your ultimate goal. Using Einstein to do it is intellectually dishonest. regardless if he was an atheist or not. He rejected that particular god.

Outside this bad argument, you fail to consider that the "cause" of evolution and even that of the universe is the cause of a "what" and not a "who". Just like the ocean god Neptune does not cause hurricanes because it is merely a myth.

Einstein would not value the OT as literal fact , much less consider it a science textbook. At best he found some nice stories in it, at the most. But he considered the whole thing myth regardless.

Everything that is is the cause of a process and conditions of natural science, not a magic man with a magic wand. Much less that of the bloodthirsty mafia boss of the OT and bible.

 "The Christian's axioms are self-consistent and make good sense of the evidence"

And you can't name one.

"The atheist's axioms are ultimately self-refuting"

The only axioms atheists have are the ones you've made up?

 "The greatest form of irrationality is to believe in rationality when that rationality was supposedly ultimately produced by non-rational random combinations of chemicals."

Good thing that science doesn't work the way you're strawmanning it.

1. Everything which has a beginning has a cause.

2. The universe has a beginning.

3. Therefore the universe has a cause. 

4. Complex specified information always requires an intelligent message sender.

5. All living organisms have complex specified information.

6. Therefore the complex specified information in living organisms requires an intelligent message sender. 

Refute any one of these criteria logically.

Where's your proof I've made this up? This is just your assertion.

What does science have to do with you being irrational?