On 11 Jan 2013, at 23:42, meekerdb wrote:
On 1/11/2013 2:17 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 11:25 AM, <[email protected]> wrote:
In a message dated 1/11/2013 2:27:33 AM Eastern Standard Time, [email protected]
writes:
1) Choose some religion, it doesn't matter which
2) Find an idea some adherents of that religion put forward but
almost no one seriously believes in or is easily shown to be
inconsistent
3) Assume that because you have disproved one idea of one religion
that all ideas found in all religions are false and/or unscientific
4) Bask in the feeling of superiority over those who are not so
enlightened
Jason
Ok, so in Darwinian fashion you sort through hundreds of faiths, so
what happens when you cannot dissprove a religion? You sort them
down till you hit a toughie, does that make it automatically
correct, or is it the intellectual limitation of the sorter? Your
Basking, is angering many non-believers, even. Witness Higg's
criticism of Dawkins. Believers, Jason, I suppose will merely, pray
for your soul (poor lad!).
Perhaps if you decided to create your own religion, that couldn't
be disproved, based on physics, or math, you would be coming up
with the best faith? Then we could all be converted to being
Jasonites. Or Reschers-whichever you prefer?
I'm nor sure I understand your point. My point was only that
John's adherence to atheism, which he defines as belief in no Gods,
is less rational than someone following his 4-step program to
become a liberal theologian.
In particular, it is the above step 3, rejecting all religious
ideas as false without giving the idea a fair scientific
evaluation, which is especially problematic. John is perhaps being
prescient in turning a blind eye to these other ideas, as otherwise
we might have the specter of a self-proclaimed atheist who finds
scientific justification for after lives, reincarnation, karma,
beings who exercise complete control over worlds of their design
and creation, as well as a self-existent changeless infinite object
responsible for the existence of all reality.
He would rather avoid those topics altogether and take solace in
denying specific instances of inconsistent or silly definitions of
God.
But your parody fails as a serious argument because the ideas put
forward by *almost all theists* include a very powerful, beneficent,
all knowing superbeing who will judge and reward and punish souls in
an after life and who answers prayers. Now some, far from powerful,
humans with far from complete information, eliminated smallpox from
the world. God therefore must have had that power and simply chose
not to do it. So if any very powerful, very knowledgeable
superbeing exists, it is not beneficent and not an acceptable judge
of good and evil. These are not just a peripheral idea of theisms
and it's falsehood is not a minor point because all theism insist
that these ideas are definitive of their religion.
John didn't say that all religions are false or unscientific. His
point was that you can avoid those attributes by becoming a *liberal
theologian* - and incidentally that nothing follows from liberal
theology.
Science follows from it. Unless you define science by instrumentalism,
but even this used "unconscious" religion. Without *some* religion,
there is no science at all.
Scientist who pretend not having religion, are either technician
uninterested in knowledge, or people taking for granted the religion
of their parents.
Bruno
Brent
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