Some Important Facts for the Religious (and Everybody Else)

[Unknown Soldier]

3. Not only is there no evidence that any consciousness can function without a living, physical brain, it is impossible to do so.

That one contains infinite volumes of discussion primarily because of the "consciousness" claim. Aside "consciousness" it certainly applies to humans based on all our observations. "Physical" brain? Is there some other kind?

Of course all brains are physical. I used the modifier "physical" to emphasize the material nature of the source of consciousness.

And you are right, there has been "volumes of discussion" about the nature of consciousness. Many insist that consciousness does exist without a physical support or that it is at least possible for consciousness to exist without a body. Note that the consciousness in question is human consciousness. Few people sit around wondering if that turkey they ate for Thanksgiving is living on without its body. They would think that considering turkey spirits is silly. How, then, is a human spirit any less silly? We humans privilege ourselves considering our own supposed afterlives while denying it to other species. In other words, our bias blinds us to the absurd nature of our beliefs.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

If you're going to evangelize for "sciencey-ness", you should at least learn the important habit of citing your sources.

You don't need to cite sources for information that is widely known and well established.

I explained that to Politesse, but I cited some sources anyway just to demonstrate how easy it is to find that information online. She got busy sniffing out some discrepancies between those sources and what I listed in the OP. I had to explain to her that those discrepancies were trivial and made no difference to the point I was making in the OP.

I've seen this tact before. If I post claims that any informed person already knows, and if some people don't like my claims, then they demand I post links to sources. If I post some links, then they either ignore them or get busy looking for some way to impugn those sources or impugn the way I used them. The last thing they want is evidence against their position. They just want me to waste time and effort.

 

[Politesse]

If you're going to evangelize for "sciencey-ness", you should at least learn the important habit of citing your sources.

You don't need to cite sources for information that is widely known and well established. For example, I would not include a citation to demonstrate that the unit weight of water is about 1 gm/cc at room temperature or that acceleration due to gravity at MSL is about 32.2 ft/sec^2 in a paper or research report that relied on this information. At least not in the engineering and physics communities - it may be different in the arts.

Sure. But I would make the same sardonic comment if someone was running around the forum shaming people for not knowing that the unit weight of water is about 10 gm/cc at room temperature. The offense is not that the poster was informal, but that they quite wrong about most of their claimed "facts". If any of the false statements in the OP are in fact "widely known", they are nevertheless wrong, and certainly not well-established. The arts have no relevance to this conversation, the age of the earth is not a question to pose to an artist unless you need a textbook illustration.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

If you're going to evangelize for "sciencey-ness", you should at least learn the important habit of citing your sources.

You don't need to cite sources for information that is widely known and well established. For example, I would not include a citation to demonstrate that the unit weight of water is about 1 gm/cc at room temperature or that acceleration due to gravity at MSL is about 32.2 ft/sec^2 in a paper or research report that relied on this information. At least not in the engineering and physics communities - it may be different in the arts.

Sure.

OK, good; you know that commonly known facts need not be accompanied by cited sources. I've been reading science and watching science videos for decades, and each item on the fact-list in the OP is based on many different sources (i.e. common knowledge). If I'm wrong about anything, it could be that I overestimated the knowledge of some of my readers.

But I would make the same sardonic comment if someone was running around the forum shaming people for not knowing that the unit weight of water is about 10 gm/cc at room temperature.

It was not my intention to shame anybody here for being unaware of the facts on my list. If anybody does feel ashamed for being ignorant of any of those facts, then the quick and easy remedy for that shame is to know those facts upon reading about them. As I see it, the only shame regarding knowledge isn't ignorance but willful ignorance, the kind of ignorance so often attending religious belief.

The offense is not that the poster was informal, but that they quite wrong about most of their claimed "facts".

Speaking of willful ignorance! I already explained to you that any differences between what I listed in the OP and what might be found on the internet are trivial. Broadly speaking, my facts are valid and are big trouble for religious faith.

And by the way, I just Googled "when did humans and chimps diverge," and as you can see the six-million-years figure I listed in the OP fits very snugly into the Google results of "between 5 million and 7 million years ago." I suppose you would insist that I'm "quite wrong" because my figure and the Google figure don't match exactly: I'm off by as much as a million years! LOL

If any of the false statements in the OP are in fact "widely known", they are nevertheless wrong, and certainly not well-established. The arts have no relevance to this conversation, the age of the earth is not a question to pose to an artist unless you need a textbook illustration.

LOL--many artists are well aware of the age of the cosmos. I'd recommend you join them in that knowledge if you can stomach a fact that runs counter to what religion gets wrong about the age of the cosmos.

 

[steve_bank]

Politesse let himself get drawn into an academic fight.

The quetion for him isi simple, does he agree that those with beliefs like religion and mythology need to know ehat history and scince say abiut the beliefs? Or shoud they stay in blissful ignorance.

I am wondering if something in the posts struck at his personal beliefs.

Personally I don't care either way on the issur. On another thread he argued Jesus was accepting of gays. There is nothing explict in the gospels. Jewish tradition had punishment fr gays. Paul spoke against it. In the end he said Jesus did not say anything against it.

Intellectual dishonesty?

 

[Unknown Soldier]

Politesse let himself get drawn into an academic fight.

I didn't see our exchange as a fight. I just explained how some criticisms of the OP are not valid.

The quetion for him isi simple, does he agree that those with beliefs like religion and mythology need to know ehat history and scince say abiut the beliefs? Or shoud they stay in blissful ignorance.

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I have this thing about the truth--I happen to like it, and I like to share it with others. I'm an educator, and I've spent much time tutoring people in subjects like math and science. If my students got something wrong, then I would correct them and explain why they erred. I would have betrayed their trust in me as an educator if I failed to let them know when they made a mistake. It appears that religion is different. Ignorance as you insinuate is bliss for the religious, and any correction is met with indignation if not fury. Denial, as we have seen, is also a popular response to correction.

I am wondering if something in the posts struck at his personal beliefs.

No specific belief was specified although belief in an afterlife and belief in religious healing seemed to me to encounter especially strong opposition.

Personally I don't care either way on the issur.

I do care. I don't want people to be ignorant or misinformed.

On another thread he argued Jesus was accepting of gays. There is nothing explict in the gospels.

I haven't failed to notice how Jesus seemed almost obsessed with preaching against adultery, and he even used the word "adulterous" as a synonym for evil. But as you say he never uttered a word about the sin of homosexuality. You might say Jesus indirectly opposed homosexuality when he supported the Jewish law.

Jewish tradition had punishment fr gays. Paul spoke against it. In the end he said Jesus did not say anything against it.

Yes. Moses and later Paul denounced homosexual acts while glorifying the genocidal Yahweh. I'd much rather encounter gay men than Yahweh.

Intellectual dishonesty?

Dishonesty, yes, but I'm not so sure about the intellectual part.

 

[Politesse]

Politesse let himself get drawn into an academic fight.

The quetion for him isi simple, does he agree that those with beliefs like religion and mythology need to know ehat history and scince say abiut the beliefs? Or shoud they stay in blissful ignorance.

I am wondering if something in the posts struck at his personal beliefs.

Personally I don't care either way on the issur. On another thread he argued Jesus was accepting of gays. There is nothing explict in the gospels. Jewish tradition had punishment fr gays. Paul spoke against it. In the end he said Jesus did not say anything against it.

Intellectual dishonesty?

The hell? The age of the earth, the age of the universe, the contents of Rising Star assemblage and their current date, are not a matters of belief. These are questions for scientists, not philosophers or theologians. If I'm wrong, show your work. The OP's own sources are the only one so far provided, and I agree with their contents. So what's your problem? Do you believe in your heart of hearts that the consensus of the scientific community is simply wrong about all this? If so, does it feel fluttery and nice in your heart to take a stand against human reason? Seems like small compensation to me.

And you're full of shit about the other thread, too, but take it up in that thread if you want to, it has no relevance here.

does he agree that those with beliefs like religion and mythology need to know ehat history and scince say abiut the beliefs? Or shoud they stay in blissful ignorance.

I fully and 100% percent endorse the findings of science and historical study, which is why it pisses me off that the OP started a thread about the importance of fact and proceeded to post a list of demonstrably incorrect facts. If you're going to get up on a high horse, make sure it's an actual horse. The hypocrisy of the OP positioning themselves as the unquestionable arbiter of facts, then getting a whole passel of them wrong because they were too lazy to actually look up them up first before spewing out another thread, is what irritates me here.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

No specific belief was specified although belief in an afterlife and belief in religious healing seemed to me to encounter especially strong opposition.

When you tell Wrestlmania fans that the matches are fixed you're disrespecting their magical beliefs. People really like their fantasy, especially when they think fantasy is reality. The OP is good enough for me.

 

[Politesse]

It appears that religion is different. Ignorance as you insinuate is bliss for the religious, and any correction is met with indignation if not fury. Denial, as we have seen, is also a popular response to correction.

How is our disagreement religious in any way? Do you belong to some religion that requires you to be wrong by a few million years on any question of cosmology or archaeology? Just admit that you are wrong, that you didn't bother to look any of this up until after your phony numbers were challenged, and we can all move on. Or don't. Sure, I guess a million years here or there doesn't matter. I mean, who cares about facts, right? This is the age of feelings, not reason.

 

[abaddon]

Wait till it's a religious poster who's inaccurate about some scientific facts. Considering it pedantry to want factual accuracy will disappear.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

No specific belief was specified although belief in an afterlife and belief in religious healing seemed to me to encounter especially strong opposition.

When you tell Wrestlmania fans that the matches are fixed you're disrespecting their magical beliefs.

They'll deny the fact that pro wrestling is fixed calling such exposures "quite wrong."

People really like their fantasy, especially when they think fantasy is reality.

I've often wondered why people don't like the truth. Yes, truth can be awful, but knowing it can lessen its impact by giving us a chance to take corrective action.

The OP is good enough for me.

You are welcome to factcheck all of it, but please don't split hairs.

 

[Politesse]

You are welcome to factcheck all of it, but please don't split hairs.

Split hairs like a 160 million years, or naming the wrong culture as the originator of an idea, apparently? If something sounds vaguely right, that should be "good enough" whether it reflects the best of our knowledge or not?

How I despise laziness and anti-intellectualism....

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

It also occurred to me, regarding 7, that Zoroastrianism is the oldest continuously practiced religion on Earth today. Not that the claim really means anything, other than stuff came before Christianity, Judiasm, and Islam.

If you want substantiation for death, then just dig up anybody's grave. You'll have no trouble literally seeing the substance of what happens to all of us post-death. Hint: Whatever may be left of the brain has ceased to function. The deceased no longer has consciousness.

Except, you are constraining the concept of consciousness to our own type of consciousness, which is rather short-sighted. Other versions could be possible. Just because we have a brain in a certain form doesn't mean consciousness can not propagate otherwise.

It seems reasonable to say that if our consciousness is to be said to have survived the destruction of our physical brains, it would have to be our own type of consciousness.

I'm not particularly interested in the hypothetical that our consciousness can survive death. I think the concept is baseless.

Other types of consciousness are, by definition, not us.

The original claim didn't hang on "us" for consciousness. "Not only is there no evidence that any consciousness can function without a living, physical brain, it is impossible to do so."

This claim is saying that consciousness requires a "physical brain". And ignoring that "physical brain" (as well as "consciousness") goes undefined, we have no reason to suggest that consciousness is impossible without a "physical brain". Our consciousness, certainly seems unlikely to survive without a brain, but the claim didn't specifically mention "us".

 

[steve_bank]

It is like saying a computer program can run after the computer is crushed by a truck.

Software never dies, it just keeps running forever.

A computer hardware-software duality. Software is not really connected to hardware, it operates interdependently from hardware in some other dimenion.

Metaphors change with the times.

 

[abaddon]

The belief that brains (and only brains) cause consciousness is an extrapolation from the facts but not itself an established fact. It's concluded from "this (sometimes) happens when that happens but we choose to call it causation instead of correlation".

Science has demonstrated there's a correlation between brain activity and subjective experience. Some evidence suggests it's not so... There are some occasions where less brain activity results in more replete, complex subjective experience, like during psychedelic experiences and NDE's. So the correlation isn't even 1:1. That brain activity IS the subjective experience is a metaphysical extrapolation from [some] observations and from choosing to believe that correlation means causation.

Also, while it's controversial (like all new ideas are... they were arguing about animal consciousness not all that long ago), there is talk about plant consciousness. So again it's not a settled fact that only brains cause, or are the sole location of, consciousness.

#3 in the OP's list is a metaphysical assertion. It's not a fact, it's a belief.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

You are welcome to factcheck all of it, but please don't split hairs.

Split hairs like a 160 million years...

I'm not sure what you're referring to here, but if you're referring to my posted estimate of the age of the cosmos, 160 million years is about 1.18 percent of 13.6 billion years. So if my estimated value is off, then it's only off by a little more than one percent.

So you're getting it wrong two different ways here. First, cosmologists can only estimate the age of the cosmos; they don't have an exact value. So there isn't really any wrong age of the universe in an absolute sense. People only get the age of the cosmos wrong when they're off by a large percentage. That's why religion is wrong regarding the universe's age: They're way off.

Your second error is to use numbers in an absolute sense rather than in a relative sense. As I just explained, 160 million years is a long time in an absolute sense, but compared to the age of the cosmos, 160 million years is but a brief moment. In the same way a length of one foot is a big error when measuring the height of a woman, but it's a trivial error when measuring the height of a redwood tree.

...or naming the wrong culture as the originator of an idea, apparently?

I just checked Blair's The Illustrated Bible Handbook, and on pages 108-109 he discusses the sources and historical value of Genesis. He explains that "the content of Genesis reflects traditions, customs, and conceptions of Mesopotamia." In particular, "both stories of creation in Genesis show marks of Mesopotamian thought, literary forms, and language. The Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish...offers an account of creation both strikingly similar to and different from that in Genesis 1:1 to 2:4."

So at least Genesis 1 is derived from Babylonian mythology just like I said in the OP.

If something sounds vaguely right, that should be "good enough" whether it reflects the best of our knowledge or not?

If something is right enough to support a point, then yes, it's sufficient.

How I despise laziness and anti-intellectualism....

I do too, but I think a comparison of the contents of my posts and yours will reveal the person who is intellectually lazy.

 

[Politesse]

So you're getting it wrong two different ways here. First, cosmologists can only estimate the age of the cosmos

Which you call a "fact", and get angry if anyone checks your numbers against the current consensus. I'm not questioning the credentials of the physics community; they're scientists, and more than capable of self-correction or model adjustment as needed. In the real world, that is how the sciences function. I'd be less annoyed by your preaching if it were backed by practice. Science isn't an arcane art, anyone can engage in it. But it requires humility and clear thinking.

So at least Genesis 1 is derived from Babylonian mythology just like I said in the OP.

You have a quote that doesn't match what you're saying, at all. Both the Tolkien mythos and the local legends of Barbarossa returning in the end times reflect the "king under the mountain" archetype widespread in Germanic cultures of Europe. Does this mean that Lord of the Rings must be "derived from" the story of Barbarossa? Blair does not in fact write that either document was the originator of the motifs in question, which almost certainly existed as oral literary genres for centuries before either manifested as an extant written document. The honest answer to the question is that the social origin of origin myths, in any culture, is usually preliterate and thus outside the realm of fact, for any historian working in any time period.

I wish to note in his defense that E.P. Blair himself is not wrong, he just didn't say what you are claiming he has said, and wouldn't have; he was a competent and assiduous scholar despite his conservative bias, one reason why the Abingdon Commentary was so well-received by a surprisingly broad range of Christian audiences. That said, if you want to move beyond coffee table books and simply look at the evidence with your own eyes I highly recommend the classic textbook Old Testament Parallels: Laws and Stories from the Ancient Near East, which offers a line by line comparison of the Enuma Elish and Genesis accounts on pages 11-21. The parallels are unquestionably there, but the EE is not the only document with clear parallels in Genesis, as the rest of the chapter also clearly demonstrates, and some of those influences are much older than either Jewish or Babylonian extant literature. You have if nothing else a serious Egypt problem if you've chosen your personal misinterpretation of a thirty-five year old popular audience Bible commentary as the hill to die on.

But the biggest problem here is that I know we aren't about to have an honest discussion of the issues at hand. Rather, you're going to double down and insist that either you're right or the ways you might be wrong are unimportant, and moreover I'm a stuck-up ivory tower prig or a clandestine evangelist or both for daring to question you. It doesn't so much bother me that you're wrong about all these things as that you don't seem to care rather you are or not. Science deserves better spokespersons.

 

[Politesse]

If something is right enough to support a point, then yes, it's sufficient.

No, it's not. You're doing a piss poor job of arguing a point, if you know there are flaws in your own argument but refuse to address or correct them. Doubly worse if you're trying to portray yourself as a brave defender of rationality, while engaging in the worst sort of lazy thinking and blind acceptance of authority. If you're not doing your homework enough to present the clearest and most accurate argument you can, why should anyone take you seriously?

 

[steve_bank]

The belief that brains (and only brains) cause consciousness is an extrapolation from the facts but not itself an established fact. It's concluded from "this (sometimes) happens when that happens but we choose to call it causation instead of correlation".

Science has demonstrated there's a correlation between brain activity and subjective experience. Some evidence suggests it's not so... There are some occasions where less brain activity results in more replete, complex subjective experience, like during psychedelic experiences and NDE's. So the correlation isn't even 1:1. That brain activity IS the subjective experience is a metaphysical extrapolation from [some] observations and from choosing to believe that correlation means causation.

Also, while it's controversial (like all new ideas are... they were arguing about animal consciousness not all that long ago), there is talk about plant consciousness. So again it's not a settled fact that only brains cause, or are the sole location of, consciousness.

#3 in the OP's list is a metaphysical assertion. It's not a fact, it's a belief.

What evidence to the contrary? In the70s, 80s and 90s a lot of work was done trying to demonstte the paranormal. In tghe 70s I took a psych class Aternate States Of Awareness, those were the days.

Both the KGB and CIA were said to have looked at it.

The teacher had a demo. He held up a series of sealed envelopes containing symbols. We were to deduce the sumbols as he held up each enebvelope.

The class was close to the statistical probabilities of chance.

It all depends on how you define consciousness. A human self awreness is not the same as sunflower turning towards the sun.

 

[bilby]

we have no reason to suggest that consciousness is impossible without a "physical brain"

Other than a total lack of any evidence, and the absence of any reason to even hypothesise that it might be.

We have no reason to suggest that there aren't plesiosaurs living under the Europan ice, but in the absence of any reason why we might suspect such a thing, or any evidence that it might be true, our experience and knowledge that strongly hints at the unlikelihood of such a thing should be sufficient for us to reject it.

"It's not impossible" is the most pathetic assertion ever. It's far from a sufficient claim as to make belief in something non-ridiculous.