Are you religious?

[Higgs_bosun]

Higgs Bosun - do you exist? As your particle obviously doesn't. If you read what I wrote carefully I'm saying that there is an evidential ground for transcendent belief, reincarnation for example. I'm not concerned about Matt Slick's logic chopping. Russell was, of course, the author of the teapot analogy which was taken up by Dawkins.

Near Death Experiences are well documented. You just refuse to examine the evidence all of these negative arguments amount to is 'I find it impossible to believe so it can't be true.'Peter Fenwick who has made a life study of NDE phenomena said,

"So we are left with a real scientific problem. It looks as if what the NDE experiencers are saying is probably correct. Now, if that's true then you have to say some very fundamental things about brain and mind. That carries a huge cost and consequence for science. So research in this area has to be done properly. But it looks as if mind and brain - if the data is correct - are separate."

Naturally, you hard case materialists will not even listen to opposing arguments and I won't even go to a Kuhnian revolution in our ideas about mind-brain. To you lot it's a slab of dead meat to us it's the house of the immortal soul. As has been said so often on here you either believe or you don't - but I do think I know who the losers are.

Gunga….please don’t confuse Higgs_bosun with the Higgs boson… I can ascribe mass to anything I like and have already been discovered. Giving you a free ride see… Yes I probably exist…but transendental knowledge is pure fiction…. You can’t know anything about stuff outside of existence…sorry.

Near death experiences are just that… I have had two. They are not messages from beyond life…trust me. They are explained by a range of conditions understood by neuroscientists. Russell, I remind you won his Nobel prize for literature on his work regarding Our Knowledge of the External World…check it out.

We can’t know the unknowable…

[StickyEnd]

... I'm saying that there is an evidential ground for transcendent belief...

What evidence? Can you name any?

[Higgs_bosun]

When a devout believer in god is affected by Alzheimer’s what is happening to the so called spirituality and soul? There is a visible physical change taking place in the brain that has an impact upon mental faculties but the person lives on. Do christians need to reinvent some kind of ‘limbo’ for brain damaged victims? They recently scrapped the notion of a ‘limbo’ for the unborn foetus… It appears that religion cannot offer a satisfactory explanation for the status of being just a little bit alive…or being slightly dead. Hey Ho… god works in mysterious ways…Apparently the way gods work are precisely in the same way as one would expect in a physical world without extant gods.

From a confident person able to experience the wonderful warmth of gods love, to expound with absolute certainty a vision of how this works…to a bumbling incoherent shell…The disease by simply destroying a few brain cells removes all of this wonderful insight. This is also similar for head accident victims but what is important with Alzheimer’s is the slow and gradual progress of the disease. At what point can one say that the ‘person’ is still there?

This is just one of countless enquiries that atheists make upon the claims of religion. There exists no reason to accept any of the supernatural waffle to cover harsh realities. I propose that the entire religious world is fatuous….

My wife and I are busy preparing for Santa’s visit, decorations and everything… My letter has been written to him and just as soon as the roads are clear of snow we will be driving into town to hand the list for our presents to him. He is going to be in Tescos today providing they can fix the collapsed roof…gods snow was a bit too heavy for it.

YouTube - Monty Python Crackpot Religions LTD

[Higgs_bosun]

Im not having the "without choice or free will" bit. Clearly the body, mind, and the genes are interrelated, but studies have shown than environment has a greater impact than shared genes. Genetic determinism is clearly not the arbiter of all our behaviour, although, interestingly it could explain risky sex.

Sorry about the paste in.... I just can't be bothered to type it all in my own words.

Given that human beings have evolved by natural selection (with genetic drift and some other factors perhaps assisting), and are ethical creatures, it follows ab esse ad posse that ethics can be derived from evolution by natural selection.
That, though, might not be to answer the purport of the question, which asks: would natural selection be sufficient to produce creatures with a consciousness of ethical principles and a tendency to wish to observe them and see them observed?
The idea might be that whereas other social animals have evolved behaviours that subserve the interests of their sociality—dominance orderings, co-operation in hunting and watching for predators—this does not amount to ethics, the idea of which at least premises an awareness of the demands and responsibilities ethics involves, and the possibility of their non-observance, not least deliberately. Among other animals the evolved social behaviours are largely invariant and automatic; a putative “ethics” that is choicelessly a result of hard-wiring could not be ethics.
Immediately one says this, one has begged what is possibly the hardest question known to metaphysics and moral philosophy: that of free will. Almost every indication from sociobiology, evolutionary psychology and neurophilosophy supports the deterministic side of the argument, entailing that our sense of being choice-makers, deliberators, option-possessors, who could have done otherwise in most of our actions, is an illusion. On the evidence flooding in from these sources, we are as other social animals, only worse off in that we operate under an enormous error theory about our own nature, falsely thinking that we have free will and that we are therefore genuinely ethical creatures. It was from this error—if it is one—that Spinoza sought to free us by arguing in his Ethics that once we recognise that we live by necessity, we cease to repine, and thus are liberated from unhappiness.
For of course the very idea of ethics premises freedom of the will. There is no logic in praising or blaming individuals for what they do unless they could have done otherwise, any more than one would praise a pebble for rolling downhill upon being dislodged by rain. So this month’s question becomes, by these selective pressures: could natural selection, resulting in the adaptations otherwise distinctive of human descent, have produced free will?
To answer that requires a clearer conception of “free will.” Its formal identifier is the “genuinely could have done otherwise” requirement: but not only does that itself require unpacking, we also need to look for the fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) traces that suggest which structures in the brain import novelty into the world’s causal chains, making their possessor a true agent, and not merely a patient—a sufferer—of the universe’s history. So the question evolves yet again: could finding such a thing even be a possibility?

AC Grayling

[StickyEnd]

Sorry about the paste in.... I just can't be bothered to type it all in my own words.

...

I am not convinced. That we have less free-will than is intuitive has some evidence, it will take some serious evidence to persuade me that I or anyone else have never made a choice.

[BoomShackerLacker]

Disagree...The hammer strike inflicted on one or more persons is indeed a unified experience....ask you pal after you give him a whack!

It's unlikely that you will find a person who will find a hammer blow to the thumb any less unifying...The physical pain is common to all with a nervous system in good working order and not anesthetised by a religion or some other form of drug.

The experience is expressed similarly; I agree with that.

[BoomShackerLacker]

Yes...we must trust our senses but you have screwed up by suggesting that rationalism has anything to do with blind faith. Blind faith is the exclusive territory of religion. Probability requires exacting amounts of questioning... faith is not involved. Astute judgement perhaps but not faith...

Science requires faith.

[BoomShackerLacker]

Nope, and certainly not for an eternity.



Debatable.



That's it? Love is your criteria for examining the blind, pitiless indifference of empiricism? How exactly does that work?

Not sure I grasp that last line.

This thread is to do with our existence but instead there is a lot of debate on the physical world and 'knowing it'. This is partly useful but limited as our 'lived experience' is not purely a physical act.

[BoomShackerLacker]

I don't recall making that point.

I take it then that you are unable to "...show that the principles of the "theory" or "philosophy" that we are told to study and apply lead by valid argument to conclusions that we and others had not already reached on other (and better) grounds; these "others" include people lacking formal education, who typically seem to have no problem reaching these conclusions through mutual interactions that avoid the "theoretical" obscurities entirely, or often on their own?"

The only thing obscure around here is you.

You're rooting your search for understanding I feel by pursuing knowledge. Knowledge will only contain abstract reflections from the 'whole of reality'. We won't know truth.

That's why I'm trying to steer us away from debates on knowledge systems, such as physical sciences.

"We" are obscure.

[BoomShackerLacker]

This is an example of why people are frustrated with you.

Soldier_Why was talking about Christ's attitude, "Love me or burn forever". This is not Soldier_Why's misinterpretation or strawman; here is John 14:6:

"Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me."

Instead, instead of addressing the point - that Jesus centres morality on himself and arbitrary worship of him, rather than intrinsically good behaviour, and condemns otherwise good people as not worthy of 'the way, the truth and the life' simply because they don't worship him - you twist SW's words by either:

a) ignoring the specification of the love as aimed at Christ, therefore reading the sentence as 'Love, or burn forever'
or b) assuming that true love only exists in relation to Christ.

a) is either dishonest, lazy or indicative of illiteracy; I've bolded and reddened the operative words in this post accordingly, so no excuses. b) is retarded and sad beyond words, not only for its lack of justification but for your characterisation of love as religious, ritualistic etc, rather than as an emotional bond between real human beings. The end effect, intended or otherwise, to paint SW and by extension non-believers as loveless, hateful, soulless, etc.

I know not whether your attitude stems from illiteracy, dishonesty, douchebaggery or a combination thereof, but if it don't understand why people are reacting to you as they do, you never will. Doubtless you will selectively read this post because of some minor niggle of form rather than overall content, and dismiss it... but you'll only prove my point.

Are you really an English student at a University?