3 things you did today

haha lol, thats a great pun..

i just made it out to no particular church. I really cant be bothered - after doing it for about 45 minutes just to realise im doing the wrong thing... typical.


EDIT: my RE teacher sent a boy out once for joking around saying he was a satanist. He never went back to RE with the same teacher. He also goes on and on about how great christianity is, how much they work to make the world a better place... blah... blah... blah.... how we should all love christianity. how the bible was written by the genius people of the time...

i walked by whn they were having an assembly. He was actually standing on the table shouting... strange stuff..

 

Miracles are happening all the time

 

That would depend how you define a miracle, but in the religious sense of Christian miracles, we'd be talking about weeping statues, rising from the dead, transubstantiation etc which are held to be the mysterious works of the big beardy magic man in the sky...

 

Do I detect the sound of a drum being banged?

 

I think it's sometimes important to annoy people

 

In the case of "rising from the dead" or life after death i dont find that a ridiculous notion at all
You know my feelings on the beardy magic man though
But to me a miracle does have a totally different meaning. Why magic tricks and fantasy have to be involved im not quite sure

 

I'm an atheist, but a baby being born is a miracle, and so is a rainbow. And human life. My favourite Dawkins quote says that it's extremely unlikely for all factors to come together to create human life, but the fact that they did makes human life extremly precious.

 

We are talking about two distinctly different things which both confusingly can be referred to with the same word ('miracle' is a homonym:tongue: ). Firstly miracles as "events which excite admiring awe", which happen all the time, and secondly as "events of supernatural origin, works of god", which almost certainly never do...

 

I know, I did take philosophy and ethics....

 

In philosophy we would say (assuming your premise) the term 'miracle' is disjunctive.

I am agnostic myself, I go with the thinking that atheism is a belief system in the same way that religious faith is. I am taken with the 'miracle' of consciousness - how can the mental coexist with the physical? Science has yet to answer that question. There is much that is unknown, so I try to keep an open mind.

 

That would depend how you define atheism; etymologically it means "without belief"; it has frequently been misunderstood to mean positive belief in the absence of deities, which would indeed be a 'belief system', but an irrational one since negative proof is logically impossible. Strictly, then, atheism is a form of agnosticism with only subtle epistemic differences (atheism = without theism; agnosticism = without knowledge). Thus defined, atheism is not a belief system, but precisely the lack of one...

 

Well, for a start a belief does not have to be logical. In practical terms, I'd imagine that an atheist usually has the belief that there is no God, or that God does not exist. This belief would be rationalised with associated beliefs, such as the belief that there is no evidence for the existence of God, and that scientific evidence is necessary to support the belief in God. Someone who has no idea what religion is and has never encountered the notion of God could feasibly have merely the absence of belief, but I think it's fair to say that many if not most people in the world have some understanding of what religious belief entails, and have therefore made a conscious decision one way or the other.

 

In my mind, the two are the same
Im not saying i believe in weeping statues or turning water into wine, but then God isnt the cloud guy for me and im not Christian or infact any recognied religion. But an awe-inspiring creation is a "work of God" (God being more a force, an everything etc than something as unimaginative and silly as a man) and IS of "supernatural origin"
I do think it is important that God and miracles...and religion, are kept separate, unless that is obviously the context

If that makes sense

 

I just realised that WAS obviously the context Im very tired!
Still, you know my view now!
:leaving:

 

Of course not, people believe all sorts of nonsense But personally I would not adhere to a belief I knew to be illogical. A belief that "god does not exist" is an illogical one because of the fallacy of negative proof; there is simply no requirement for invoking supernaturalism as an explanation so the question of god's existence simply doesn't arise - hence "without theism". If somebody presents a positive claim for belief my response is "prove it".

Of course calling yourself an atheist is self-identifying with a whole range of philosophical debate and making the point that you in some way define your outlook in naturalistic terms, in opposition to the norm, which is supernatural theism. I use the word atheist rather than agnostic because the latter implies that you refuse to make a judgement given a lack of absolute proof, which in my view is a less interesting epistemological point than the one that the issue of theism is irrelevant, even though I regard the two as near synonyms.

 

Are you by any chance a linguist lithium?

I go with your assertion that the belief that "God does not exist" is illogical, but there's a problem with mixing logic with belief. As I understand it, the only things that can be proved are mathematical theorems. In the real world nothing can be proved. Science works on the basis of theories, not proofs. A theory is judged as to whether it is both necessary and sufficient to explain the evidence, along with Occam's Razor which states that ceteris paribus the less complex of two competing theories should be adopted. A theory can be disproved if contradictary evidence is found, but it cannot be proved to be true. If we suppose that the existence of God is a theory, then one could demand evidence to support the theory as you say, but in the scientific sense (since that seems to be the ground you're arguing from) the theory of God cannot be proved under any circumstances, simply because theories about the real world do not have truth values [*edit* that we can ascertain].

Also, to say that the issue of theism is irrelevant implies that you have made a judgement upon the issue, which would in turn involve a thought process based upon a system of beliefs. If you've never heard of religion fair enough, but otherwise beliefs are involved.

 

1) Went to the shops for a smoothie, got a bit wet.
2) Ended up buying more than I should have, and missed my appointment
3) Thought about things and decided to change.

 

Comforted my mum
Worried that it may be bad luck she was buying so many things so early on, got told to pull myself together
Had hardly any sleep again

 

While strictly this is true (irony intended), it does not mean that all truth claims have equal validity. An hypothesis becomes a theory when it is supported by observational data, is non-contradictory, falsifiable, necessary, sufficient, parsimonious etc. While this can not constitute 100% proof it functions as a kind of conditional proof, as close to truth as it is logically possible to get. For instance it is impossible to absolutely prove 100% that the earth always orbits the sun or apples always fall downwards so we must remain sceptical and be open to the unlikely event that the earth begins to orbit Jupiter or apples start to fall up into the sky, at which point we must revise our theory of gravity. But for all practical purposes, Newtonian gravity is conditionally 'true' (on a non-quantum scale), as true as anything can possibly be, even though we do not fully understand what gravity is.

The god hypothesis can theoretically be proved in precisely the same way that gravity can be proved, with observational data, and to the same degree of conditional "truthiness". I can think of experiments which would establish the existence of god in this way, for instance if praying to a god were shown to be more effective than praying to a teapot, or if miracles which could only have supernatural origin were shown to occur. No such evidence (and there have been plenty of tests) has ever been found, so the hypothesis does not meet the above criteria (parsimonious, non-contradictory, supported by observation, etc) and does not even begin to approach the level of a theory comparable to say evolution. For this reason it's a good idea to treat it as a failed hypothesis in the absence of data - if data were found this may of course change, but I do not hold my breath.

This is true of the traditional "sky daddy" interventionist god - it would be very easy to demonstrate his existence if such a thing were real. It would be less easy to prove the non-interventionist god of Deism, but again since this would be a hypothesis which violates the conditions for a good theory, in the absence of evidence, with no requirement for invoking such an explanation, the sensible way to proceed is to treat the hypothesis as one of many unlikely possibilities: just as possible and just as likely as giant space turtles, flying spaghetti monsters, etc.

 

hehe