Why would a reasonable person believe in God?

[Marvin Edwards]

With that thought in mind could you tell me what would constitute a claim that is not "testable." Recently in the thread you used "reason" and "rational justification" to defend your position. I would use the same words to defend mine. According to wiki anyway, scientism is the opinion that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality. I am guessing you disagree with that opinion and am curious about how you relate it to "testability." I'm also curious, is it possible that you have a negative opinion of scientism and if so could you tell me why?

I have often wondered whether scientism can answer or test a certain class of question.
For example science can tell me that if I hit the little old lady over the head with a cricket bat a certain way it will kill her.
But can science tell me "is it the correct/proper/right/kind to hit her on the head and kill her"?
We can always find people who will say no and others who will say yes.
Can science tell us should we kill her?

Note there is no dispute about the consequence of hitting the old lady. She will die. Science is clear on that.

Science can tell us how to do things, but not whether or not to do things. Morality, which we hope to pass on from generation to generation, is the desire to do good things and avoid creating unnecessary harm.

Religion provides a community of people seeking to do what is right and good, and provides mutual support, in the face of those who often profit at the expense of others.

 

[atrib]

I've yet to meet a theist who claims they have or know all the answers. You are indeed fortunate to have met at least one.

I have met several theists, Christian and Muslim, who claim that the answer to all questions can be found in their preferred holy book. You must not go out very much, or perhaps the theists in your circles don't believe that, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. Argument from ignorance.

I have often wondered whether scientism can answer or test a certain class of question.
For example science can tell me that if I hit the little old lady over the head with a cricket bat a certain way it will kill her.
But can science tell me "is it the correct/proper/right/kind to hit her on the head and kill her"?
We can always find people who will say no and others who will say yes.
Can science tell us should we kill her?

I don't think we have sufficient understanding of how the universe works for science to accurately model the complex phenomena that have to be studied in order to address such questions. But we can still objectively ask the following question: Does killing the old lady provide a net increase to the well being of the community in which she resides, and the human species as a whole? And even if it did provide a net benefit, would the members of her community allow such an action, based on their own standards of acceptable behavior? I suspect the answer to that question will almost always be no. If the old lady is a serial killer who is caught in the act of taking another life, and killing her is the only way to stop her from doing so, the answer might be yes. Context is important. However, since you have provided zero context as to why we are considering ending the life of this old lady, the question cannot be answered. Sorry your "gotcha" didn't work.

Note there is no dispute about the consequence of hitting the old lady. She will die. Science is clear on that.

Really? If you hit a million ladies over the head with a bat, the blow is guaranteed to kill them each and every time? How did you come to this conclusion?

I don't know if you think about killing old ladies on a regular basis (perhaps you have a really annoying mother in law), but most humans don't. I find it bizarre that you would even come up with something so extreme and grotesque. What was the point you were trying to make?

 

[abaddon]

... Argument from ignorance.

Tigers! didn't say nobody else has met them.

I haven't met them either. If you've met a few then I guess there are some. The claim being addressed was that "atheists don't usually claim to have the answers" implying that theists usually do. That looks like an "extrapolation" from 1) [some] theists think they have knowledge of biology and cosmology from ancient books to 2) [many] theists think they "know it all". It's an exaggeration.

I have often wondered whether scientism can answer or test a certain class of question.
....
Can science tell us should we kill her?

I don't think we have sufficient understanding of how the universe works for science to accurately model the complex phenomena that have to be studied in order to address such questions...

You have to unscientifically decide what you think "well being" is and then figure out how to scientifically achieve it. No matter how you define "well being" it'll have subjective evaluation in it. There's no escaping it, and it's not clear how "good" it would be to be so totally objectified as that.

Note there is no dispute about the consequence of hitting the old lady. She will die. Science is clear on that.

... What was the point you were trying to make?

I understood the gist of the point is to contrast what science can't do (make a judgment about the goodness/badness of the old lady's murder) and what science can actually do (tell us the technicalities of how she died).

Ultimately science is technicalities. We get some knowledge about the more objective aspects of reality from it, and this knowledge allows making gizmos and medicines. Which, for the most part, is nice.

Scientism on the other hand is people taking a big gigantic crap on science. They want it to be a kind of quasi-religion that gives all the answers (at least the ones judged to be important) because having all those answers gives lots of control. Which is the same basic screwed-up impulse as that among some theists who think their revelation-based knowledge let's them determine what's best for everyone. It's a kind of totalitarian impulse either way.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

For purposes of further discussion, does anyone object to using the following definition of science?

Science is the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the universe following a systematic methodology based on evidence.

If we can't agree on a definition I'll toss in the towel.

 

[Copernicus]

For purposes of further discussion, does anyone object to using the following definition of science?

Science is the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the universe following a systematic methodology based on evidence.

If we can't agree on a definition I'll toss in the towel.

Like any definition, this statement is not designed to fully explain the meaning of the word, just to isolate and identify one of the ways in which people use it. So it is vague about the nature of the "systematic methodology", but that usually entails observation, experimentation, and testing. If you refined it along those lines, you would have a tighter definition. Science also assumes causal materialism, although spiritualists might reject that assumption and propose that science could, in principle, discover the laws governing magic and the occult through a systematic methodology. Authors of science fiction and fantasies sometimes imagine such possibilities. (I am thinking specifically of the famous Strugatsky brothers' Monday begins on Saturday, a satirical sendup of Soviet materialist dogma.)

 

[Marvin Edwards]

For purposes of further discussion, does anyone object to using the following definition of science?

Science is the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the universe following a systematic methodology based on evidence.

If we can't agree on a definition I'll toss in the towel.

Like any definition, this statement is not designed to fully explain the meaning of the word, just to isolate and identify one of the ways in which people use it. So it is vague about the nature of the "systematic methodology", but that usually entails observation, experimentation, and testing. If you refined it along those lines, you would have a tighter definition. Science also assumes causal materialism, although spiritualists might reject that assumption and propose that science could, in principle, discover the laws governing magic and the occult through a systematic methodology. Authors of science fiction and fantasies sometimes imagine such possibilities. (I am thinking specifically of the famous Strugatsky brothers' Monday begins on Saturday, a satirical sendup of Soviet materialist dogma.)

Not everything that "exists" is material. For example, processes and events are not material objects, but are real nonetheless. We exist as a process running upon the neural infrastructure of our brains. Stop the process, and the brain reverts to an inanimate lump of matter. So, the process is more than just the brain. Rather than a material object, a process represents a series of rapid changes in the material.

 

[Copernicus]

For purposes of further discussion, does anyone object to using the following definition of science?

Science is the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the universe following a systematic methodology based on evidence.

If we can't agree on a definition I'll toss in the towel.

Like any definition, this statement is not designed to fully explain the meaning of the word, just to isolate and identify one of the ways in which people use it. So it is vague about the nature of the "systematic methodology", but that usually entails observation, experimentation, and testing. If you refined it along those lines, you would have a tighter definition. Science also assumes causal materialism, although spiritualists might reject that assumption and propose that science could, in principle, discover the laws governing magic and the occult through a systematic methodology. Authors of science fiction and fantasies sometimes imagine such possibilities. (I am thinking specifically of the famous Strugatsky brothers' Monday begins on Saturday, a satirical sendup of Soviet materialist dogma.)

Not everything that "exists" is material. For example, processes and events are not material objects, but are real nonetheless. We exist as a process running upon the neural infrastructure of our brains. Stop the process, and the brain reverts to an inanimate lump of matter. So, the process is more than just the brain. Rather than a material object, a process represents a series of rapid changes in the material.

It sounds like you are saying that the systemic behavior of physical interactions is not itself something physical. I think that you might be equivocating on different senses of what it means to say that something "exists", but I don't really want to get into a discussion of model theoretic semantics, which might be useful in explaining those differences.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

For purposes of further discussion, does anyone object to using the following definition of science?

Science is the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the universe following a systematic methodology based on evidence.

If we can't agree on a definition I'll toss in the towel.

Like any definition, this statement is not designed to fully explain the meaning of the word, just to isolate and identify one of the ways in which people use it. So it is vague about the nature of the "systematic methodology", but that usually entails observation, experimentation, and testing. If you refined it along those lines, you would have a tighter definition. Science also assumes causal materialism, although spiritualists might reject that assumption and propose that science could, in principle, discover the laws governing magic and the occult through a systematic methodology. Authors of science fiction and fantasies sometimes imagine such possibilities. (I am thinking specifically of the famous Strugatsky brothers' Monday begins on Saturday, a satirical sendup of Soviet materialist dogma.)

Not everything that "exists" is material. For example, processes and events are not material objects, but are real nonetheless. We exist as a process running upon the neural infrastructure of our brains. Stop the process, and the brain reverts to an inanimate lump of matter. So, the process is more than just the brain. Rather than a material object, a process represents a series of rapid changes in the material.

It sounds like you are saying that the systemic behavior of physical interactions is not itself something physical. I think that you might be equivocating on different senses of what it means to say that something "exists", but I don't really want to get into a discussion of model theoretic semantics, which might be useful in explaining those differences.

Nothing that complicated. It is a material process, but it is not a lump of inanimate matter. It is matter organized in such a way that it operates as a running mechanism. Matter behaves differently when organized differently:
1. Inanimate matter behaves passively in response to physical forces. A bowling ball placed on a slope will always roll downhill. It's behavior is governed by gravity.
2. A living organism, on the other hand, behaves purposefully. It is governed by biological drives to survive, thrive, and reproduce. Place a squirrel on that same slope and he may go uphill, down, or any other direction where he expects to find his next acorn. While still affected by gravity, he is no longer governed by it. His behavior is instead governed by biological drives.
3. An intelligent species, such as us (actually, I would include the squirrel here as well), has a brain sufficiently evolved to imagine, evaluate, and choose. It can behave deliberately. While still affected by gravity and biological drives, its behavior is governed by its own choices. Rather than governed entirely by instinct, it is able to choose when, where, and how to go about satisfying its biological needs.

 

[Copernicus]

Nothing that complicated. It is a material process, but it is not a lump of inanimate matter. It is matter organized in such a way that it operates as a running mechanism. Matter behaves differently when organized differently:
1. Inanimate matter behaves passively in response to physical forces. A bowling ball placed on a slope will always roll downhill. It's behavior is governed by gravity.
2. A living organism, on the other hand, behaves purposefully. It is governed by biological drives to survive, thrive, and reproduce. Place a squirrel on that same slope and he may go uphill, down, or any other direction where he expects to find his next acorn. While still affected by gravity, he is no longer governed by it. His behavior is instead governed by biological drives.
3. An intelligent species, such as us (actually, I would include the squirrel here as well), has a brain sufficiently evolved to imagine, evaluate, and choose. It can behave deliberately. While still affected by gravity and biological drives, its behavior is governed by its own choices. Rather than governed entirely by instinct, it is able to choose when, where, and how to go about satisfying its biological needs.

I might quibble with some of the things you say here (e.g. your first claim), but I don't see the relevance of any this to my response concerning TGG Moogly's definition of science. Perhaps it would have been clearer if I had written that science assumes methodological physicalism rather than materialism. Were you disagreeing with that claim? I am certainly not an advocate of radical reductionism.

 

[Elixir]

Not everything that "exists" is material. For example, processes and events are not material objects, but are real nonetheless.

They are “real” only as descriptions of the behavior of that which exists materially. They have no objective existence.

 

[Wiploc]

For purposes of further discussion, does anyone object to using the following definition of science?

Science is the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the universe following a systematic methodology based on evidence.

If we can't agree on a definition I'll toss in the towel.

You won't get people to agree on definitions of god, objective, moral, good, or religion either.

All you can do is say what you mean by a word, and then be consistent.

The fact that people don't all use words the same way is no reason to throw in the towel.
You'd have similar problems in other fields. You don't throw in the towel when talking
about cooking or teaching or literature or math or pseudo-science, so why would you
throw in the towel on this subject.

A favorite quote from The Fiction Editor, by Thomas McCormack:

Ever since Aristotle first groped in its occulting gloom, commentators have failed to agree on a consistent lexicon: Philosophers, teachers, critics, and writers of how-to-write books have reinlessly use words like 'plot', 'story', 'structure', 'situation', 'theme', 'premise', 'proposition', 'conflict', 'opposition', 'jeopardy', 'point-of-attack', 'crisis', 'catharsis', 'resolution'--and on through an attic of jumbled and overlapping terminology.

Underlying this verbal pandemonium is, predictably, conceptual chaos: The words arise from ideas that are blurred and rimless.

This comes perilously close to saying that something essential to discuss is essentially undiscussable, but I have to bear-dance into it anyway because it's a crucial area that editors often mention, rarely think through, and never adequately understand, and my assignment is to make the case that something can be done about this.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

Nothing that complicated. It is a material process, but it is not a lump of inanimate matter. It is matter organized in such a way that it operates as a running mechanism. Matter behaves differently when organized differently:
1. Inanimate matter behaves passively in response to physical forces. A bowling ball placed on a slope will always roll downhill. It's behavior is governed by gravity.
2. A living organism, on the other hand, behaves purposefully. It is governed by biological drives to survive, thrive, and reproduce. Place a squirrel on that same slope and he may go uphill, down, or any other direction where he expects to find his next acorn. While still affected by gravity, he is no longer governed by it. His behavior is instead governed by biological drives.
3. An intelligent species, such as us (actually, I would include the squirrel here as well), has a brain sufficiently evolved to imagine, evaluate, and choose. It can behave deliberately. While still affected by gravity and biological drives, its behavior is governed by its own choices. Rather than governed entirely by instinct, it is able to choose when, where, and how to go about satisfying its biological needs.

I might quibble with some of the things you say here (e.g. your first claim), but I don't see the relevance of any this to my response concerning TGG Moogly's definition of science. Perhaps it would have been clearer if I had written that science assumes methodological physicalism rather than materialism. Were you disagreeing with that claim? I am certainly not an advocate of radical reductionism.

I'm not worried about the definition of science. Actually, I'm not worried about radical reductionism either. No one is going to attempt to explain any human behavior at the atomic level. That's why we have the Life sciences and the Social sciences in addition to the Physical sciences.

Each science derives their "laws of nature" by observing reliable patterns of behavior in their own set of objects: whether inanimate, living, or intelligent. Physics cannot explain human behavior because it does not observe these objects. While physics is quite competent at explaining why a cup of water flows downhill, it is clueless as to why a similar cup of water, heated, and mixed with a little coffee, will hop into the car and go grocery shopping. We need the other sciences to explain that.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

Not everything that "exists" is material. For example, processes and events are not material objects, but are real nonetheless.

They are “real” only as descriptions of the behavior of that which exists materially. They have no objective existence.

Doesn't an event really happen? When the apple hit newton on the head, that was an event. The event explains how the apple, once attached to the tree, is now on the ground, and Isaac now has a lump on his head. If the event was not real, then how do we explain the change in the state of things.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Not everything that "exists" is material. For example, processes and events are not material objects, but are real nonetheless.

They are “real” only as descriptions of the behavior of that which exists materially. They have no objective existence.

Doesn't an event really happen? When the apple hit newton on the head, that was an event. The event explains how the apple, once attached to the tree, is now on the ground, and Isaac now has a lump on his head. If the event was not real, then how do we explain the change in the state of things.

What does your event weigh? What color is it? What does it sound like? What is its behavior if I subject it to heat? How is it affected by gravity and electromagnetic radiation? How many can fit into a cubic inch at 70 degrees F?

Or are you saying that "happening" has a measurable, quantifiable quality as far as your event is concerned. How much "happen" is in your event?

The word "event" is just language, as Elixir stated, used to communicate information. So is the word "happen." There are lots of words like that. Not every word has an objective existence as a material object. I understand your confusion, it's quite common and is why it's difficult to get lots of folks to understand science and how it works.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

Not everything that "exists" is material. For example, processes and events are not material objects, but are real nonetheless.

They are “real” only as descriptions of the behavior of that which exists materially. They have no objective existence.

Doesn't an event really happen? When the apple hit newton on the head, that was an event. The event explains how the apple, once attached to the tree, is now on the ground, and Isaac now has a lump on his head. If the event was not real, then how do we explain the change in the state of things.

What does your event weigh? What color is it? What does it sound like? What is its behavior if I subject it to heat? How is it affected by gravity and electromagnetic radiation? How many can fit into a cubic inch at 70 degrees F?

The word "event" is just language, as Elixir stated, used to communicate information. There are lots of words like that. Not every word has an objective existence as a material object. I understand your confusion, it's quite common and is why it's difficult to get lots of folks to understand science and how it works.

The sound was a thud. The weight of the event would be the accelerating fall of the apple until it reached Newton's head. If you subject Newton to heat, he will begin to sweat. Sweating is another process, another event. Newton's life, from birth to death, is an event. And it contains millions of smaller events, such as his encounter with the apple. Events are real. But events are not real objects, but rather real events.

According to Wikipedia, ontologically speaking, events exist: "Ontologists often try to determine what the categories or highest kinds are and how they form a system of categories that encompasses classification of all entities. Commonly proposed categories include substances, properties, relations, states of affairs and events."

The word "event" refers to something that is considered to actually happen in the real world. Events are real.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

The word "event" refers to something that is considered to actually happen in the real world. Events are real.

And of course existence exists! The word "event" is like the word motion, events happen and motion moves. Right? Pretty simple but not scientific.

 

[Copernicus]

Nothing that complicated. It is a material process, but it is not a lump of inanimate matter. It is matter organized in such a way that it operates as a running mechanism. Matter behaves differently when organized differently:
1. Inanimate matter behaves passively in response to physical forces. A bowling ball placed on a slope will always roll downhill. It's behavior is governed by gravity.
2. A living organism, on the other hand, behaves purposefully. It is governed by biological drives to survive, thrive, and reproduce. Place a squirrel on that same slope and he may go uphill, down, or any other direction where he expects to find his next acorn. While still affected by gravity, he is no longer governed by it. His behavior is instead governed by biological drives.
3. An intelligent species, such as us (actually, I would include the squirrel here as well), has a brain sufficiently evolved to imagine, evaluate, and choose. It can behave deliberately. While still affected by gravity and biological drives, its behavior is governed by its own choices. Rather than governed entirely by instinct, it is able to choose when, where, and how to go about satisfying its biological needs.

I might quibble with some of the things you say here (e.g. your first claim), but I don't see the relevance of any this to my response concerning TGG Moogly's definition of science. Perhaps it would have been clearer if I had written that science assumes methodological physicalism rather than materialism. Were you disagreeing with that claim? I am certainly not an advocate of radical reductionism.

I'm not worried about the definition of science. Actually, I'm not worried about radical reductionism either. No one is going to attempt to explain any human behavior at the atomic level. That's why we have the Life sciences and the Social sciences in addition to the Physical sciences.

Each science derives their "laws of nature" by observing reliable patterns of behavior in their own set of objects: whether inanimate, living, or intelligent. Physics cannot explain human behavior because it does not observe these objects. While physics is quite competent at explaining why a cup of water flows downhill, it is clueless as to why a similar cup of water, heated, and mixed with a little coffee, will hop into the car and go grocery shopping. We need the other sciences to explain that.

I don't disagree with many of the things you said, but you responded to a post where there was a concern with the definition of science. So I'm still not seeing any relevance to what I posted. Others may wish to pursue some of the points addressed in your comments.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

The sound was a thud. The weight of the event would be the accelerating fall of the apple until it reached Newton's head. If you subject Newton to heat, he will begin to sweat. Sweating is another process, another event. Newton's life, from birth to death, is an event. And it contains millions of smaller events, such as his encounter with the apple. Events are real. But events are not real objects, but rather real events.

Scientifically speaking that would amount to gibberish.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Science per se merely assumes materialism from a methodological perspective rather than a philosophical perspective.

Is it an assumption? I see it as a conclusion, perhaps even subconscious, based on overwhelming amounts of observation and experience.

 

[bilby]

Physicalists aren't constrained to consider Newtonian mechanics in three dimensional space.

Events, intelligence, changes, dynamic patterns, choices, chaotic systems, thoughts, emotions and a whole plethora of other stuff you can't kick exists in Einsteinian spacetime with four or more dimensions, at least one of which has "imaginary" or "timelike" behaviour - that is, the distance between two points in spacetime is the square root of the sum of the squares of the space dimensions minus the squares of the time dimension(s).

Asking whether a thought has a physical existence, or worse, suggesting that it cannot, because you can't isolate a particle of thought, or heat it, or weigh it, is just an admission that your understanding of physics is more than a century out of date.

Everything that is real has a real physical existence. The physics of all everyday phenomena (ie things happening at scales larger than a hadron and smaller than a solar system) is completely understood.

Thoughts aren't special or different; They're just very complex and rapidly changing cyclical or meta-cyclical physics.

Dualism is nonsense. There are no unknown substances or unknown forces that can possibly act on anything in the range of scales outlined above. We built a huge facility underneath Switzerland and France to test this, and demonstrated it to be the case.

Well, of course it still might not be the case (as all we actually did was fail to prove it to be false despite massive efforts to do so), but if it isn't true then literally everything we predicted using modern physics that turned out to be correct was correct by pure coincidence, and we don't understand anything at all, we just got super-astronomically lucky. It would require a serious commitment to contrarianism to genuinely suggest that our understanding of physics remains incomplete at moderate scales and energies.

Of course, it would be stupidly difficult to try to describe thoughts in purely physical terms, which is why we have a series of approximations such as chemistry, biology, endocrinology, neurology, psychology, etc., etc., which allow us to talk about these phenomena without spending thousands of billions of years on calculating the exact way they will play out.

Fortunately, high level rules can be derived from a system without any understanding of lower level rules (although an understanding of these can be helpful). You don't need to know any physics at all in order to understand the cyclical flooding in the Nile valley, or the seasonal migration of prey animals. We would be in a serious pickle if such things required a prior understanding of quantum field theory.