Saint Teresa

[ProfessorDavey]

Sorry but any natural law demands repeatability and observability.

Nope you are confusing natural laws with science, the latter being a method commonly used to predict what those natural laws are.

So on your latter view of observability - that requires there to be something that can observe, i.e. some living thing with sufficient higher level intelligence to be able to observe, or some measurement device able to 'observe'. Now that means that, by your definition events that occurred prior to the ability to observe must therefore fall foul of your definition. This is of course ludicrous.

[Alan Burns]

......  That is the person we are talking about.

You seem well versed with Hitchens' attempts to deride the work of this saint.

But I wonder how many fortunate souls she helped to discover God's love.

And how many poor souls have been deprived of knowing God's love through Hitchens using his God given gifts to deliberately ridicule the Christian faith.

[jeremyp]

jeremy,

Only according to the findings of your cultural framework. There could be a culture somewhere that thinks that water is unicorn tears and for them that would be "true" too - just as for some cultures here it was true that not making the right sacrifices to the volcano god caused him to be angry.

But that wouldn't mean either of those things are actually true, because they are not and if they applied the methods of science they would find that out.

You still seem to be locked in to the notion that water being made of oxygen and hydrogen must be an accurate model of a base reality. Why?

Because numerous observations have told us that it is the correct model.

Consider this exchange. We're doing it using the only tool we have - language. Language is precisely a cultural construct, and it delineates and bounds the ideas we're able to have and to share. The ancient Greeks had no word for "blue" for example so, for them, there was no such colour. We see colours in three base primaries - certain shrimps see colour in 26. What aspects of the universe can they access that we cannot?

Colour perception is an artifact of the way the receptors in the eye react to different wavelengths of light.

The scientific model of light is not based on colours. There's nothing cultural about it.

Just because the Greeks had no word for blue doesn't mean they couldn't perceive light emitted in the range 500 nm to 400 nm.

[Sebastian Toe]

You seem well versed with Hitchens' attempts to deride the work of this saint.

But I wonder how many fortunate souls she helped to discover God's love.

And how many poor souls have been deprived of knowing God's love through Hitchens using his God given gifts to deliberately ridicule the Christian faith.

I wonder how many unfortunate poor souls she duped into believing in her God's love?

And how many lucky people were rescued from a life of delusion by Hitchens using his own powers of persuasion?

[ProfessorDavey]

You seem well versed with Hitchens' attempts to deride the work of this saint.

But I wonder how many fortunate souls she helped to discover God's love.

And how many poor souls have been deprived of knowing God's love through Hitchens using his God given gifts to deliberately ridicule the Christian faith.

I don't think Hitchens has ever with-held proper pain relief from people in appalling pain, nor allowed people to die who could have live had they received easily accessible medical help.

But you've sort of raised another point here, which hasn't really been addressed yet on this thread.

Lets not forget that most of the people in her homes won't have been Christian. Her organisation routinely engaged in non consensual baptism - I think that is counter to basic human rights. I suspect you'd be pretty miffed if someone inducted you without your permission into another religion.

[bluehillside Retd.]

Vlad,

Sorry but any natural law demands repeatability and observability. All of what I have raised are by definition unrepeatable and/or unobservable by anything evolved.

Well that's novel. Before there were people around to investigate them there was no gravity, no weak magnetic force, no...etc eh?

Okaaaay - so all was "supernatural" until an obscure species in a remote backwater of the Universe figured out how to some of it worked, at which point the previously supernatural bits magicked into natural phenomena eh?

How would that work would you say? Did the supernatural gravity for example become natural gravity some time around when Newton had his breakfast, when he wrote down his findings, when they were published? What if we think we have discovered something so it magics into the natural, but it turns out that we were wrong - do phenomena have a sort of return ticket back to the superrnatural just in case?

I think we should be told!     

I'm afraid I don't give prizes for just writing verbose grandiose sounding repetitions of previous error.

As you said yourself in your quote from Wikipedia the supernatural is that which cannot explained by science or subject to laws of nature.

You are of course talking about multiverse here. That doesn't help.
as for unknown unknowns...

When your premise is a car crash (see above) then anything you try to rest on it fails a priori. The definition doesn't mean "phenomena that science can't explain" you banana - it means phenomena that in their inherent character can never be investigated by science because they sit outside of if its remit.

Good grief!     

[bluehillside Retd.]

jeremy,

But that wouldn't mean either of those things are actually true, because they are not and if they applied the methods of science they would find that out.

Depends what you mean by "actually" true. They're true enough for the purposes to which they're put. Newtonian physics was true enough for the purposes to which it was put before Einstein showed up, when new truth models became available. You're still locked in to the idea of a base, "actual" truth that we have found but other cultures haven't. You can't do that though - the phenomenon of unknown unknowns alone tells you that. What if we are for example just algorithms programmed to think that water is what we think it is?

That's the thing about truth - there can be no "actual" because it's probabilistic. "X is probably true according the data available and the tools and processes we have to investigate them" is fine; "X is absolutely, categorically, irrefutably true" is not because that's something we cannot know to be the case.     

Because numerous observations have told us that it is the correct model.

Yes, but only "correct" so far as our observations are accurate, and our interpretation of them maps precisely to an "out there" reality. I'm not saying that the conclusion we have is wrong, but you cannot just assume that it reflects a base reality either.   

Colour perception is an artifact of the way the receptors in the eye react to different wavelengths of light.

And of the processing the brain does to interpret that data. How would you know that what you perceive as "red" is also what I perceive as "red"? (The "other minds" problem.)

The scientific model of light is not based on colours. There's nothing cultural about it.

Just because the Greeks had no word for blue doesn't mean they couldn't perceive light emitted in the range 500 nm to 400 nm.

But they saw no difference between that and the frequency for dark red ("the wine-dark sea") - it was all one colour to them. I forget the details, but there's a toad that recognises a snake orientated in one direction but not in another (one being "about to bite me" mode, the other being "not about to bite me"). Photons are reaching the eyes of the toad in each case, but for one the snake simply doesn't exist - it's invisible. That's the toad's reality, and that's a kind of culture too. 

Incidentally, none of this implies that "true enough" isn't powerful and important - it's what gives us MRI scanners and space craft visiting comets, and it's what allows us to disqualify the claims of the religious when they crash through the tools we have to model reality. I'm just saying that it's dangerous territory to overreach into claims for it of certainty and absolutism.       

[Walt Zingmatilder]

Vlad,

Well that's novel. Before there were people around to investigate them there was no gravity, no weak magnetic force, no...etc eh?

Okaaaay - so all was "supernatural" until an obscure species in a remote backwater of the Universe figured out how to some of it worked, at which point the previously supernatural bits magicked into natural phenomena eh?

How would that work would you say? Did the supernatural gravity for example become natural gravity some time around when Newton had his breakfast, when he wrote down his findings, when they were published? What if we think we have discovered something so it magics into the natural, but it turns out that we were wrong - do phenomena have a sort of return ticket back to the superrnatural just in case?

I think we should be told!     

When your premise is a car crash (see above) then anything you try to rest on it fails a priori. The definition doesn't mean "phenomena that science can't explain" you banana - it means phenomena that in their inherent character can never be investigated by science because they sit outside of if its remit.

Good grief!   

Hillside

As you know it is my belief that not only do you hate me, but I suspect you despise everybody on this forum.

I am not talking about the repeatable and yet here you are talking about gravity and the weak magnetic force.

I am talking about the existing of the universe as is which is either due
to a creator or it popped out of nothing or it is eternal and had a helping hand or it is eternal and perturbs itself.

There are no other alternatives there are no clues from the inside except for a big bang.

They are beyond observation unless you postulate the eternal being and I don't think you of all people would go down that route.

You are as they say trying to describe the whole of a ping pong ball from the inside.

[bluehillside Retd.]

Vlad,

As you know it is my belief that not only do you hate me…

Don’t be silly. Why on earth would I hate you? I do hate (if that’s the right word) your behaviour – the dishonesty, the endless evasions, the obtuseness etc – but so far as I’m concerned there is no “you” to hate even if I was so inclined. "You" are just a four-letter moniker.

…but I suspect you despise everybody on this forum.

Then, as so often, your suspect wrongly

I am not talking about the repeatable and yet here you are talking about gravity and the weak magnetic force.

Makes no difference – you’re still confusing “phenomena which the naturalistic tools and methods we have do not explain” with, “phenomena that in their very nature inherently can never be investigated by naturalistic means”. That’s your big mistake just there.   

I am talking about the existing of the universe as is which is either due
to a creator or it popped out of nothing or it is eternal and had a helping hand or it is eternal and perturbs itself.

There are no other alternatives there are no clues from the inside except for a big bang.

Why, as it has nothing whatever to say to the notion of “supernatural”? "Inexplicable" and "supernatural" are not the same thing, whether or not the event is unique.

They are beyond observation unless you postulate the eternal being and I don't think you of all people would go down that route.

You are as they say trying to describe the whole of a ping pong ball from the inside.

No, you are trying to dupe people into thinking that “not amenable to the naturalistic means of investigation we have” is a synonym for, “inherently necessarily beyond the scope of any naturalistic enquiry”.

Bad idea. Very bad. If you really want to assert the supernatural, you’ll need an awful lot more that “we don’t have a big enough telescope to find out whether or not it’s natural” to do the job.

So where are my Liquorice Allsorts then?

[BashfulAnthony]

Vlad,

Don’t be silly. Why on earth would I hate you? I do hate (if that’s the right word) your behaviour – the dishonesty, the endless evasions, the obtuseness etc – but so far as I’m concerned there is no “you” to hate even if I was so inclined. "You" are just a four-letter moniker.

Then, as so often, your suspect wrongly

Makes no difference – you’re still confusing “phenomena which the naturalistic tools and methods we have do not explain” with, “phenomena that in their very nature inherently can never be investigated by naturalistic means”. That’s your big mistake just there.   

Why, as it has nothing whatever to say to the notion of “supernatural”? "Inexplicable" and "supernatural" are not the same thing, whether or not the event is unique.

No, you are trying to dupe people into thinking that “not amenable to the naturalistic means of investigation we have” is a synonym for, “inherently necessarily beyond the scope of any naturalistic enquiry”.

Bad idea. Very bad. If you really want to assert the supernatural, you’ll need an awful lot more that “we don’t have a big enough telescope to find out whether or not it’s natural” to do the job.

So where are my Liquorice Allsorts then?

Vlad.  Nobody hates you. You can't hate a name on a screen. It's not hatred: its trolling.

[Alan Burns]

Lets not forget that most of the people in her homes won't have been Christian. Her organisation routinely engaged in non consensual baptism - I think that is counter to basic human rights.

If you had the opportunity to save someone's life, would you need their consent first?

So does the same apply to saving someone's soul?

[bluehillside Retd.]

AB,

If you had the opportunity to save someone's life, would you need their consent first?

Depends on the circumstances but, on balance, no.

So does the same apply to saving someone's soul?

No, because "soul" is just something you've made up without benefit of argument or evidence to validate your personal religious beliefs.

[ProfessorDavey]

If you had the opportunity to save someone's life, would you need their consent first?

Depends on circumstances of course, but in principle yes. We all have the right to refuse medical treatment, including life saving treatment. So if it is possible to try to obtain consent, then that is what you must do, to allow that person to either give consent (and therefore authorise the life saving treatment) or refuse that consent in which case providing treatment against the wishes of the patient would be unlawful.

There are, of course, emergency situations, where it is impossible to obtain consent - in these cases the course of action should be that deemed to be in the patient's best interests, ideally throughout understanding what they would want. So in many cases treatment would be provided - but of course there needs to be an evidence base to support that treatment. You can't just do anything in an emergency situation.

So does the same apply to saving someone's soul?

First of course there is no evidence base to support the notion that baptism 'saves a soul' - indeed there is no evidence that there is a 'soul'.

Taking that caveat into account and applying the same principles as above there should be no baptism except with the consent of the person being baptised, as there is no credible 'best interests' justification in an emergency situation (whatever that might be) and if not emergency then consent must always be given.

[Nearly Sane]

Surely the point about non consensual baptism is that even for someone who believes in a soul it's a nonsense. If it's not consensual then the individual soul has not expressed belief. You could just as well go into the garden and throw some holy water on the ground and declare that all of the earth are now baptised. It makes a farce of claiming faith is worth anything.

[Brownie]

If you had the opportunity to save someone's life, would you need their consent first?

So does the same apply to saving someone's soul?

Alan, the Church no longer teaches that physical baptism is necessary for salvation.

[ProfessorDavey]

Surely the point about non consensual baptism is that even for someone who believes in a soul it's a nonsense. If it's not consensual then the individual soul has not expressed belief. You could just as well go into the garden and throw some holy water on the ground and declare that all of the earth are now baptised. It makes a farce of claiming faith is worth anything.

But wouldn't that be a problem for any infant baptism, where by definition the baby does not, and indeed cannot, give consent.

I know that some christian denominations have a problem with infant baptism, but the biggies (CofE and RCC) don't - so presumably they don't consider consent to be important in baptism.

[Nearly Sane]

But wouldn't that be a problem for any infant baptism, where by definition the baby does not, and indeed cannot, give consent.

I know that some christian denominations have a problem with infant baptism, but the biggies (CofE and RCC) don't - so presumably they don't consider consent to be important in baptism.

I think they see parents/godparents consent a essentially working here. That it's illogical surely is not removed simply because of a consistency in the illogic by certain denominations. Anyway on this basis we will all be Mormon soon.

[Sebastian Toe]

If you had the opportunity to save someone's life, would you need their consent first?

So does the same apply to saving someone's soul?

So you wont mind then if in order to save your true dark soul that it is requested that call is made upon the High Spirit of the Great and Most Holy Beelzebub to baptise you spiritually into His church for now and evermore?

And that it is done in such a manner that although you will dismiss this holy calling as false and continue to deny it for as long as you live but nevertheless you will be a true Disciple of the Great Dark One for the rest of your days on this earth and you will never be able to prove that you are not.

Lo, it was always your destiny for this to occur. Do you think that you are named 'Burns' for nothing?