I actually thought to be quite amusing your way of saying that the reason you believed that 2+9=11 was different from the (you thought) lack of understanding of the person to whom you replied. But you are apparently incapable of even briefly explaining exactly why you do believe that arithmetical fact.

In the case of the physics you are simply dead wrong in claiming it is known to be quantum physics which breaks down where the severe problems of quantum gravity must be considered. That is not known, but far more of those who do seriously look at these things expect the replacement of general relativity is the more likely (though quite possibly both). Anyone interested in a popularization of some of these things which is up-to-date might like to consult Lawrence Krauss's recent book.

My question to see if you would be more specific in your 'mouthing off' was in order to determine which of the following seemed to be the case, and of course I couldn't use your vague, wooly philosophical/theological BS to do this:

Is it that you don't know what you are talking about and don't even know that fact, or don't know what you are talking about but are quite aware of that? Now we know.

@beef - "Atheists are not convinced by the arguments for the existence of God, and so do not believe in him/her, in the same way that non-unicorn-believers do not believe in unicorns."

No. This commonly proposed argument is little more than an exercise in philosophical illiteracy. We know unicorns do not exist because they are horned horses. We have studied the horse well enough, we know its biology, behaviour, and evolutionary history. We know that they do not fly or possess horns based upon empirical observation.

In other words, we know there are no unicorns due to applying the scientific method.

To cite this as the same reason you don't believe in god demonstrates that you don't really understand the concepts of theology, science, or both. You can not us the physical sciences to form hypothetical *objective* opinions on metaphysics. The two fields are logically incompatable.

To put it more simply...

I don't believe that 2+9 = 11 because yogurt tastes funny.

You absolutely can and should dismiss religious claims on about the physical world which can be tested (Scopes trial anyone?) and proven false. But to renounce the very basic idea of theism, deism, or atheism based on objectivity is wrong. This is a subjective preference we have - a belief. If it is not, then simply prove there isn't a deity out there somewhere.

Secondly, I actually think your etymology is wrong. The term atheist means "without god", not "without faith" nor "without belief". You are making the logical fallacy that because holding the idea that god exists requires belief, the idea that god doesn't exist requires no belief, even when there is an obvious logical disconnect. The argument you have formulated is that because there is no empirical proof of something, it can be rejected. So you aren't actually arguing against god, you are arguing that anything that can be doubted can be dismissed.

That is a reasonable assumption, but in order to be intellectually honest it does make you a nihilist. There are many many other things in life which require belief. Ethics, morality, sociology, even history and science itself all are full of belief. The laws of Quantum physics break down as we approach the singularity event and go past the big bang (hence Superstring and M theories). Every time science tries to create the ultimate origin theory, its proponents come up with something that seems to point to a “magical” solution. This is because science is inherently limited to the rules which define it (such things can't be tested or even reasonably established with "fossil" evidence).

The religion of the common man going to church every Sunday is nothing like as nuanced as the physics of Neil deGrasse Tyson, but I daresay the theology of Isaac Newton, Roger Bacon, Aristotle, or indeed William of Ockham (of Occams Razor) was just the same.

@peter

will be brief as there really is very little point...so in turn;

"I cannot tell.."
this is much better than the usual bizarre collective 'we' you normally resort to. but i digress, on to my "sloppy writing" Mr Pot Meets Kettle. whatever i could have possibly meant;

"If the second:"

bingo, my sloppy writing aims precisely at that. you have not a shred of experimental peer reviewed evidence, just hot air built upon the smoke billowing from your bottom.

"Sometimes an empirical claim can follow logically"

spoken like a theist, or even a Creationist. well done you! this is what's wrong with you peter, you just 'know' that it's all logical and empirical, and insist that experimental data is surplus to requirements. fine, be like that, but don't call it science, don't pretend you're engaging in methodological naturalism. your sophistry is of zero value to me.

"education is more important to me than entertainment"

yet you refuse to learn from genuine experts like Scott Atran who collect actual data about religious extremists and terrorists? you're a total joke mate. you ignore the people who use the scientific method in favour of those who merely sound plausible. more fool you.

You like that? Watch this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=MbbJe97CKVY#t=2...

Atran and Harris REALLY get into it. I all but expected someone to say "let's take this outside".

I can not believe Harris is taken seriously after that red-haired women comment. He is constantly begging the question and provides no actual evidence for anything he asserts. Then he goes and drags science into places it has no business being.

There are some great champions of atheism out there, he is not one of them.

McMac - You raise some good points but omit the main one; one tiny shred of evidence that such behaviour is "moral".

"Of course science doesn't have all the answers, only religonists demand that."

But some people claim this, particularly hardcore atheists such as Dawkins and Harris. Hitchens - "That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence." So provide evidence that me eating my neighbours baby is unethical.

Helping a cancer patient with treatment is kind. Witholding treatment is unkind. These are both facts. But kindness and unkindness are not values, not facts, and there is no way of ascertaining what those values might be.

What you are bringing to the discussion is the basis for the evolutionary development of the character traits we consider to be ethically good. That is an important thing to consider but doesn't help us very much, as we can't attach value to such behaviours, although it's not obvious unless one really gets into it. Let's see if I can demonstrate it though...

We evolve to aid each other in groups, because we are social animals and in helping others to survive, even at risk to ourselves sometimes, was the best method of insuring our genetic legacy. Even if we died fighting off a tiger attack, our kids would survive, and those others who survived would help our children survive. Thus even though it seems counter-productive, caring and sharing can be a good reproduction tactic (as explained in Dawkins excellent book "The Selfish Gene").

Now, we also have evolved this other trait. When a male sees other potential males looking at what nature has decreed is "his woman", he will ball up his fists and pound the crap out of that other male to prevent a possible mating, and eliminate a rival in the gene pool. If he see his womans eyes wandering to others in the group, he will also give her a painful punch in the face to ensure her loyalty to him, thus increasing his chances of passing on his genes to the next generation.

One of these examples is considered acceptable behaviour. The other is something we actually have laws against. Why is one (altruism and helping a cancer patient) considered "good" and the other (beating up your wife) considered "bad"?

Note: They are both evolved behaviours, so that can not be the answer.

@Andy - "Ok. Care to define what consitutes a hysterical atheist? To me the whole fundamentalist, arrogant, bigoted, yet another religion, and now hysterical, atheist line is no more than a ad hominem attack used by religious people to undermine otherwise very valid arguments against their religious beliefs."

The sort of person whos theological argument amounts to "Aren't religious people stupid? How can anyone be so gulliable to go around thinking they have an invisible sky fairy looking after them? They should bow to their superiors, us atheists, and understand that our beliefs aren't beliefs at all so are superior by default. Then every single problem in the world would evaporate in an instant"

You know the sort of thing, they give commentary such as "9/11 was a faith based initiative" (even though it had nothing to do with religion), or think that the word "science" is synonymous with "atheist based enlightenment".

This isn't to say that religion doesn't have the exact same sort of bigotry and smug self-supremacy rampant within it - it clearly does. All I am saying is that a fanatic is a fanatic whatever form their beliefs take.

@Peter - "If any actual examples have been provided (you of course do not say what they are), they will very likely either be a false way to view the world, or sometimes be rather accidentally containing a bit if truth not yet verified by 'science'."

Examples have been given aplenty, but I'll give you the obvious one and hope you finally get that banana - Morality. There is absolute zero scientific or empirical validity to it, yet it is an important cornerstone of our lives and our societies. No scientific basis at all for "right" or "wrong" is there? Yet how many atheists are also nihilists?

"And yet your wooly criticisms amount only to vague claims about it being wrong to stick with scientific truths in the sense previous. You have demonstrated woeful ignorance of real matters in logic, physics and mathematics. "

I've not demonstrated any ignorance in those, nor any knowledge of them. That wasn't the point. The point is that there are methods other than science to view the world, and those were examples.

Me not knowing about it or indeed knowing about it makes no difference.

If someone said "the only thing that lives in the sea are fish!", and I respond by saying "no, there are seals too", I really don't have to be a marine biologist to make this statement do I?

"Do you really think that the existence of such people is a criticism of his general views on atheism?" Absolutely not. His general views on atheism are absurd because they are based on a load of honk. He talks about 9/11, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, etc. Whenever someone points out that, according to studies done by experts in that particular field, such things are irreligious he puts his fingers in his ears and goes "lalalala".

I do think that such people are a valid criticism of the new atheist movement as a whole though. It is not comprised, as is often claimed, of "free-thinkers" if they are letting Dawkins do their thinking for them is it?

"But you have no leg to stand on if you really believe that you have a valid criticism of the recently invigorated atheist movement, other than the fact you can out-argue, in your opinion, some of its intellectually less sophisticated members."

Indeed. So this belief-based "movement" with its "members" who can't shut up about religion are the model for secularity?

" Now we know."

indeed "we" do peter; you are a petty WUM, thanks for confirming with that last post of yours.

Stephen W

YOU ARE AN INCREDIBLY STUPID, IGNORANT C-UNT. THESE THINGS WERE NOT RELIGIONS. THESE THINGS WERE NOT DONE TO PROMOTE ATHEISM. THESE THINGS WERE DONE TO INCREASE THE POWER OF THE RULING REGIMES YOU STUPID P-RICK. YOU ARE AN IDIOT OF EPIC PROPORTIONS.

Academic historian? HA. Who for? Scope UK.

There are no atheist religions you
p-rick. It's an oxymoron.

@peter

is there a reason you put things like this in posts not addressed to me? about your mealy mouthed ad-homs you say;

"I hope jankaas is among the few."

for what purpose should i take notice, your education or entertainment..?

@ Stephen W
I have to agree with some of the points raised by 'Rational Libertarian'.
If you are an "academic historian" then you will find that no religion of an kind played a part in Nazism, communism etc. Throughout history men have gone to war because of land. Religion became a good excuse for war because it divides ideologies and communities very quickly from differing groups of believers. Is Athiesm a religion? Well it's a line of belief to not believe if you know what I mean.

" I note that you didn't mention Communism, which has killed tens of millions of people and was obviously a secular, atheist religion."
Your above statement refuses to acknowledge opposing ideologies of any given time that have also killed tens of millions of people.
For whom the Gods wish to rule....they first makeath mad.

@andyg

A quicky, so time to answer:

"Peter has left me wondering, if there is such a thing as time"

Relativity says there isn't, or rather that the reality is a partial order on space-time, not a total order.

"....how come we can move it back and forward an hour when we so choose?"

Anyway, it is your measurement of time, not time, that is moved, if you speak of summer-time, etc.

@ Peter.
Earlier in the discussion you attempted to give a lecture which was so uuterly boring that I almost fell asleep. You yourself admitted that you was boring and that you'd veered off the subject of the original article.
I really do think that you need to go back to basics Peter because you are talking a language that is totally alien to everyday conversation. For some strange reason you then call what you are stating the language of "normal people". s for working out the complexities of an equation, you completely missed the target of theological symbolic numbering which is why I asked you the question. Go back to it and give it some thought. The 3 is simple but what of the rest? Get a life Pete.

@ Peter

Has anyone noticed that humans are not always rational. And more power to them for that. Oherwise we'd be called Apple or Microsoft.

Sir Michael

Very interesting. Was unaware such an organisation existed in Revolutionary France. I still don't believe that it is an atheist religion, just a belief system without deities, like secular humanism.

Still interesting, though.

@AndyPW

"Of course early Christians were accused of being atheists by the Romans, because they refused to believe in the existence of the Roman gods.
I think that sheds some light on why the behaviour of fundamentalist atheists is so similar to that of fundamentalist monotheists."

Can you explain this please? I just don't get the point and need help. Thanks.

The California christian seminary psychologist Barrett seems to me to write more like a 14 year old than a 40 year old, but perhaps Andy can provide some detail there as well, which changes my mind.

@Sir, jankaas, all Andys, others in MAS

It would be a shame for this to end in an orgy of backsidekissing by a Mutual Admiration Society, so here's a couple of remarks about Atran which are not quite so positive as they give, but have the virtue of being specific. I prefer logic to rhetoric; it seems to work better in science; so I prefer the written word to youtube, rather like preferring education to entertainment.

The earlier recommended debate (sorry jankaas for again not copying as usual, but NS rejects it written as a URL, so maybe it's the ghost of Steve Jobs, rather than me, to whom you should be whining):

edge dot org slash discourse slash bb dot html

must be read in reverse. In particular, Atran begins at the bottom very lengthily, Harris responds more briefly somewhere near the middle, and Atran comes back at great length again higher up. I hope anybody here not in the MAS will take the trouble to read this, before taking the remarks of that society on Atran too seriously. (Several others have interesting remarks in the debate as well.)

Two parts seem worth recording here:

First: Harris quoting Atran, then giving his response.

"religious beliefs are not false in the usual sense of failing to meet truth conditions"; they are, rather, like "poetic metaphors" which are "literally senseless. " How many devout Christians or Muslims would recognize their own faith in this neutered creed? What is "literally senseless" about the claim that human beings were created in their present forms by God (and that evolution is, therefore, a fiction)? What is "literally senseless" about the proposition that an eternity in a fiery hell awaits nonbelievers after death? Or the expectation that Jesus will one day return to earth and magically lift good Christians into the sky while hurling sinners into a lake of fire? More than half of the U.S. population apparently believes these things. And despite Atran's protestations on the subject, religious literalism is an utter commonplace in the Muslim world. In fact, openly doubting the perfect veracity and sublimity of the Koran can still get a Muslim killed almost anywhere on earth."
 
The further response by Atran to this in his second attempt higher up begins as this:

"…..religious beliefs are not false in the usual sense of failing to meet truth conditions'." In philosophy, since Aristotle, such beliefs have been described as "category violations," like a bodiless God with the ability to physically lift physical bodies. Modern philosophers, like A.J. Ayer and the logical positivists, routinely characterized religious utterances in this way."

But he carefully avoids all of Harris' examples (perhaps members of the MAS can show me how each is a category violation, a pretty simple concept about language, hardly involving sophisticated philosophy.) Atran instead continues at length about his excellent research, from which one must admire his persistence and courage, but hardly use it to dismiss the famous atheists of the 21st century.

Second: Here is Atran making a claim, and asserting empirical backing for this from Ginges:

"Of course, if it can be proven that religious beliefs are particularly dangerous to life and limb — at least any more dangerous than a belief in the cleansing power of "democracy" — attempts at (say) de-Islamicization might be as important as de-Nazification. Yet there is no such proof, and in the absence of any proof, or even compelling data of any sort. In fact, those of us doing actual empirical research in this area have uncovered evidence to the contrary of what was claimed. Jeremy Ginges, a psychologist at the New School, finds that belief in God does not promote violence, combative martyrdom or almost anything else the "God delusion" was blamed for at the conference."

But sometime earlier, the two of them had written an op-ed in NYTimes

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/opinion/25atran.html?pagewanted=all

in which they said the following concerning the conflict concerning Palestine:

"…there is a moral logic to seemingly intractable religious and cultural disputes. These conflicts cannot be reduced to secular calculations of interest but must be dealt with on their own terms, a logic very different from the marketplace or realpolitik."

In the purely logical sense, this is not quite a contradiction, but it comes close.

But I imagine members of the MAS can come to Atran's rescue, and explain some of this to me.

@Sir M

""There are no atheist religions. It's like saying not being a stamp collector is a hobby.""

ah, but being a stamp collector could be a profession, rather than just a hobby. what then of this analogy, the very one i have used in the past? i phrase it though a tiny bit different; it's like saying not collecting stamps is a hobby.

ttfn

@beef

you say; "No, I'm sorry, it is not an 'excellent post'. It is, forgive me, a load of meaningless guff."

that's you opinion, and i reckon you merely misunderstood what Sir M meant. has his later post at 13:13 cleared things up for you?

i found it another interesting post, filled with much to talk about.

@Des

"Has anyone noticed that humans are not always rational."

the crux of the matter i reckon, and one that is frequently ignored. the main issue i have with Dawkins/Harris et al, is their delusion that humans, despite all evidence showing they are deeply irrational animals, only need to be shown how irrational they are in order to become rational.

aint ever gonna happen imho.

@ Sir Michael.
As for your question (if it was fired in my direction)Here is my definition of "hysterical athiest". (This is in answer to your question and is not in any way aimed at you)
'Behaviour that exhibits an excessive or uncontrollable emotion, such as fear or panic because of the disbelief in or denial of the existance of a God or Gods'.

"Mathematics makes a definite statement about 2+9 in that it says it equals 11. Therefore mathematics is a religion."

No because you are discussing mathematics, not theology. By the exact same logic that you have just used when someone states that god exists they are talking about mathematics.

"I make a definite statement about god in that I say that word has 3 letters. Therefore I am a religion."

No because you are talking about the word, not the concept of a deity which can be called, among other things, god. If my position on the spelling of the word "buttercup" was that it be spelled "vagina", that doesn't make me a botanist or a gynacologist. It makes me a pervert with poor spelling skills (which, coincidentally, I am).

Intellectual dishonesty aside, if you have any actually salient points please share them. I love to learn.

Why do my posts not appear?

Ah, they do. The gist of them is that Science is ever-changing. What was scientifically true yesterday is untrue today. But since everybody intelligent knows this, perahps the posts were otiose.

Because people ask questions like that, for one reason.

What we really need is just some common sense. It's something that is amazingly lacking in society but is something which goes hand in hand with the idea of atheism.

I'd like to see more exposure of philosophical discussions to the public and less shying away from talking about the flaws of religion. If there is disagreement about something, it should be talked about just like anything else and not let off just because religion is a touchy subject. In the end, if you make people think, good things will follow.