Searching for GOD...

[Sassy]

Without doubt, many hundreds, if not thousands, of women would have lived instead of dying from the dangers of back street abortions.


I heard part of a World Service programme this morning when a woman from Uganda (I think) was pointing out that women were still being denied safe abortions.I bet she'd like to have
shaken the interviewer (male)  who, it seemed, would prefer the status quo to remain. this is not right.

Why are women still becoming pregnant or people catching HIV when we have birth control in the form of condoms.
In this age there is no excuse for unwanted pregnancies or people catching HIV from consensual sex.

[Sassy]

There is nothing 'wise' about endorsing suffering.

So why did you have children when child birth caused you suffering... Pain? Pain is only one form of suffering.
So suffering is a fact of life for many reasons. Should we use euthanasia to kill off those starving to death and
being mistreated or abused in other countries?


I think the truth is that the wise know, suffering has no endorsing.
But sometimes the answers are too difficult to find when it is serious conditions.

[Sassy]

This is garbage. A neighbour of mine had suffered so much with MND that he drove his electric wheelchair into his garden pond and drowned himself whilst his wife was out shopping. Your preference for allowing such situations to continue is disturbing.

Was it his state of MIND or was it a mental illness?

[Sassy]

Well Shaker and Rhiannon,
After reading the content of your last few posts I thank God that I am a Christian.

Alan,

It was their nature of when all else fails blame somebody else.
Not exactly doing anything to help their neighbours or make the world a place where suffering is lessening.
Most Christians give and aid to stop the suffering whereas most atheists stay at home and moan about it, whilst doing absolutely nothing to alleviate it. The past week I have been helping a woman who is disabled and in a wheelchair to get her electricity and water back on.  The woman does not feel sorry for herself and she is happy go lucky even in such a dire situation.

Ignore the atheist/pagan who complain and do absolutely nothing to help anyone in the situations they complain about, but blame other people or God for it....

Truth is... if humans got of their fat complaining backsides and actually did something then half the suffering in the world would be gone and the other half would not exist.

[Shaker]

Sarcasm alive and well, I see.

If people against suffering then why abortion or the need for euthanasia?

It isn't all crystal clear is it?

Bloody hell. If you were any dafter than you already are you'd have to be put in a sunny spot and watered twice a week.

[Alan Burns]

Msg 9504 AB  So best make up answers then and stop asking any questions?

I just wanted to point out that current science can't be used to disprove what Christians believe to be divine revelations, not made up answers.

[Gordon]

I just wanted to point out that current science can't be used to disprove what Christians believe to be divine revelations, not made up answers.

Yet another fallacy Alan, since science isn't trying to 'disprove what Christians believe to be divine revelations' since that isn't what science does, and also since there is nothing for it to investigate until such times as you guys define your terms within an appropriate methodology that is appropriate to science.

Until you can all you have is a bunch of anecdotes that are indistinguishable from fiction and claims involving ancient religious superstitions that can simply be dismissed as things stand. 

[bluehillside Retd.]

AB,

By dismantling, I assume you refer to the alternative arguments…

Then you assume wrongly. By “dismantling” I mean the invalidating of your arguments whenever they are logically fallacious. A bad argument is a bad argument, no matter how sincerely you happen to believe in its conclusion.

… that we came into existence by the product of random forces acting within a big cloud of gas…

Depends what you mean by “random”, but if you mean something like “purposeless” then yes.

And “we” came into existence a long, long, long time after the “cloud of gas” – all that was necessary was the starter conditions that eventually led to organic chemistry, that eventually led to single-cell life, that eventually led etc etc 

assisted by a crude filtering system based on survival.

What “crude filtering system based on survival” are you thinking of? If you mean evolution, then it’s actually a remarkably elegant and powerful mechanism for speciation.

And the assumption that science will eventually define how awareness works…

Straw man. What we know is that “science” is the only method we have that reliably and verifiably models reality, and it seems reasonable therefore to think that it’s our best bet eventually to “define how awareness works”. Whether it will ever do that however is at this time unknowable.

…and that free will must be an illusion because it can never be explained in physical terms.

No, free will as you define it is almost certainly illusory because that’s what the evidence indicates, and moreover you have no definition, no method, no anything to test your alternative conjecture.

[bluehillside Retd.]

AB,

I just wanted to point out that current science can't be used to disprove what Christians believe to be divine revelations, not made up answers.

Why? “Science” can’t disprove my conjecture that there are invisible pixies dancing on my keyboard either.

What science can do though is to find your conjectures to be “not even wrong” because of the absence of coherent definitions, the absence of evidence, and the absence of a method to validate them.

This burden of proof issue really has got you foxed still hasn’t it. 

[Shaker]

I just wanted to point out that current science can't be used to disprove what Christians believe to be divine revelations, not made up answers.

That's known as the negative proof fallacy, Alan, and of all the ways that reasoning can go wrong, that one seems to be hammered into the ground more often than any other on this forum.

[Alan Burns]

No, free will as you define it is almost certainly illusory because that’s what the evidence indicates, and moreover you have no definition, no method, no anything to test your alternative conjecture.

Apart from my most basic perception of reality.

[bluehillside Retd.]

AB,

Apart from my most basic perception of reality.

Lots of people have had “most basic perceptions of reality” that have been shown to be flat wrong. What’s makes your personal feeling on the matter so special that it’s more reliable than the evidence that undoes it? 

[Gordon]

Apart from my most basic perception of reality.

Tell me, Alan, when did you come to realise you were infallible?

[Alan Burns]

AB,

Lots of people have had “most basic perceptions of reality” that have been shown to be flat wrong. What’s makes your personal feeling on the matter so special that it’s more reliable than the evidence that undoes it?

It is not a feeling, it is the reality that I am using my consciously driven free will to type this reply.

[Shaker]

It is not a feeling, it is the reality that I am using my consciously driven free will to type this reply.

How would you know if it were otherwise?

[Alan Burns]

How would you know if it were otherwise?

In other words, how do you know what you know 

[bluehillside Retd.]

AB,

It is not a feeling, it is the reality that I am using my consciously driven free will to type this reply.

When the arguments you use to validate your conjectures are demonstrably wrong, then all you have left is precisely a feeling.

Now that’s fine provided you recognise it as such – we all have feelings about all sorts of matters – but it provides you with no basis whatever to assert your feelings as facts for others, as you are wont to do here. 

And that’s your problem. By all means post, “I have this feeling that god, devils, Jack Frost etc are real” to your heart’s content if you really want to, but the moment you assert your feelings about these things to be facts then you have to argue for them.

And that’s when it all goes wrong for you.

Sorry, but there it is.

[torridon]

No, free will as you define it is almost certainly illusory because that’s what the evidence indicates, and moreover you have no definition, no method, no anything to test your alternative conjecture.

Apart from my most basic perception of reality.

Noone disputes that that is how is seems to us.

According to my most basic perception of reality the chair underneath my bum is solid.  But we know it isn't, really.

It feels like we experience of reality in real time, but we don't, actually.

We think of time as proceeding along at a uniform absolute steady pace, but Einstein showed us that it doesn't, actually.

Free will is a bit like that, it feels free, and that is good enough for most people for most of the time. Those of us who say otherwise, we are those who are curious and interested in how things actually are, rather than just how they seem.

[Rhiannon]

Bloody hell. If you were any dafter than you already are you'd have to be put in a sunny spot and watered twice a week.

 

[Shaker]

In other words, how do you know what you know 

More or less - you claim the reality of free will based on nothing more that I can see than that's subjectively how it feels to you; that entirely subjective feeling of apparently being able to choose and act freely is what to you constitutes proof.

My question was trying to get at how you would know if your subjective feeling was in fact an at best unreliable and at worst downright deceptive guide to what's actually the case. I don't have a horse in this race; the free will v. determinism debate is one of those areas of philosophy which has never interested me hugely (I've always been more of an ethics man meself) but I have read around the subject enough to know that recent findings in neuroscience cast doubt, to put it mildly, on the existence of the sort of libertarian free will that you continually push, since how things subjectively feel to us can be unreliable guides to reality since human minds are incredibly intricate and complex things pushed and pulled by all sorts of instincts, drives and forces of which we're only dimly aware or are even wholly unaware at the time.

That doesn't mean that free will doesn't exist, but what we know so far is more than enough to cast strong doubt on it, as you've been told time and time and time again by umpteen different posters here over a long period of time - and to absolutely no avail, clearly.

[Shaker]

Why are women still becoming pregnant or people catching HIV when we have birth control in the form of condoms.
In this age there is no excuse for unwanted pregnancies or people catching HIV from consensual sex.

Of course there is. Condoms, used properly, are a highly effective form of contraception but (a) there are forces at work - predominantly religious ones - which forbid people making use of them based on religious dogma; (b) they're not always used properly even where they are available; and (c) highly effective does not equal absolutely 100% foolproof in each, all and every situation.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

More likely, dismantling refers more to the demolition of theist beliefs than the promotion of any alternatives. The scientific approach to knowledge acquisition is harder, requires work, and is often, I agree, counter intuitive in many ways. But maybe we should, to paraphrase John Kennedy, do the hard things, because we can.  Theist beliefs are ultimately not about truth, but that they masquerade as truth claims is what irritates many people who have learned to see through their spell.

A round about way of defending scientism Torridon.
The term truth claims is obviously at least being used as a naturalistic construct. The truth of that is therefore dependent on the truth of naturalism.
Nobody is therefore obliged to accept THAT claim on the nod.

[floo]

Of course there is. Condoms, used properly, are a highly effective form of contraception but (a) there are forces at work - predominantly religious ones - which forbid people making use of them based on religious dogma; (b) they're not always used properly even where they are available; and (c) highly effective does not equal absolutely 100% foolproof in each, all and every situation.

Condoms fail from time to time as I know for a fact!

[Alan Burns]

Apart from my most basic perception of reality.


Noone disputes that that is how is seems to us.

According to my most basic perception of reality the chair underneath my bum is solid.  But we know it isn't, really.

The bum on the seat is not a very good example.

We are really talking of cause and effect, so the chair is simply causing your bum not to hit the floor.  How it does it is irrelevent to the fact that is is the cause of this behaviour.  Take the chair away, and we can be certain that the bum will hit the floor.

So there are some things my body can only do if initiated by an act of conscious will, for example speech.  Without the act of conscious will, these things will not be enacted.  How this occurs is irrelevent to the fact that the speech can only occur by an act of conscious will.  If deterministic science can't explain how it works, we must look beyond this for the true explanation.

[Shaker]

If deterministic science can't explain how it works, we must look beyond this for the true explanation.

Few things convey how utterly ignorant you are of science and the way science proceeds than that ridiculous comment.

Not currently having an answer does not give you carte blanche to cast around for any old twaddle that suits you.

Added to which you stand in need of a methodology capable of demonstrating an explanation to be the true one - "I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my toes" does not count; that's pins and needles, or possibly cramp - and we all know how that's going to pan out when you're asked for one.

Always time to post this again. The section starting around 1:50 is the important bit:

https://youtu.be/uDYba0m6ztE