Oh, so that's why you included the "if". I would think those who practice religion would consider any perceived communication meaningful. Maybe the focus of the communication is the person - subjective? Religion should be, after all, a personal venture.charles cure said:
Why are believers anti-science?
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Vindicator said:
right, but subjective communication isnt what i was talking about. i was talking about communication between two entities - one being god, the other being humanity as a whole. if god selectively communicates with some of us, but not others, yet is intelligent and full of love, what is gods reason for that? doesnt excluding some of us imply that god doesnt care as much about some of us? if god is not intelligent and full of love and is a selective communicator with no real bearing on the positive or negative aspects of our existence, why should we pay attention to god or any rules that god has made? if god is a non-communicative force of creative energy, then how can any of us say that we live by god's rules when talking about anything other than universal axioms of physics? in short, if god communicates selectively, without understanding that this is an impediment to humanity's knowledge of its existence, then that calls into question god's intelligence. if god understands and purposely wishes to confuse humanity and exclude some of us, then god's benevolence is brought into question. if god is neither of these, and exists not as a communicative entity, but as a creative force, why does it matter whether we believe or not, and how can you say that the existence of that kind of god would have any bearing on the nature of right and wrong or the correctness of human lifestyles and actions?
Hell yea! LOL.. it's happened here several times, and other forums that I visit. a fag for example is a ciggarette, while in America a fag, is a homosexual.
Anyhow, it even happens with my native language Spanish. I'm from South America, when I speak spanish to Mexicans they can right away tell I'm not Mexican because of the dialect, however there are some expressions & words, that would put people in controversy if it is not known that one is Latin and the other a Mexican. Weird No reason exists, the one making claim that "god" talks to them is merely delusional, such as if Vindicator were to claim that "god" talks to him, and he explains this to a psychotherapist, the conclusion would be he's delusional and hearing things.
Just Suppose
No pun intended Vindicator
Godless
Oddly enough, this conversation appears to be headed in a similar direction one of my first conversations here (with Q) went...charles cure said:
I'd rather not go over it again - waste of space and time - but maybe it'll diverge...
It boils down to what is objective and what is subjective. You refer to objective communication - i.e. when everyone agrees with your interpretation of some information.
Something like everyone seeing the Sun I assume... they know it's there... you have to leave the blind out of "everyone", of course, they just have to trust what the sighted say...
Looking at the above example, I wonder if there is any way in this Universe that something can be communicated to all humanity, without any ambiguity, i.e. a complete lack of several interpretations.
It seems, due to the limits of knowledge, that we just have to trust...
A lot of trust is in science you know? You trust your predecessors... cause you certainly cannot repeat every single experiment that every single scientist in your field performed... you can say that it has been repeated T times by S scientists... and the reported results concur to within reasonable limits... They don't violate our current "scientific construct."
Of course, then the points you raised come to the fore; if there's God, why wouldn't God construct a reality such that God can communicate without ambiguity to all humanity?
What I asked of Q is simply this: is it possible? If God can't do it then God is limited in ability? But why should God be able to do the impossible? Clearly, it makes no sense...
Maybe it just can't be done...
I would assume that our understanding of any communication that God might forward would be akin to our attempts to understand our existence.
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Vindicator said:
true, the blind may have to trust the sighted for a description of what the sun looks like, but the sun can be felt by the blind. the blind still get a suntan whether they can see it or not, can still get skin cancer, can still feel the cold in winter. the blind can agree it is there because its effects can still be measured in some way even without sight. not so with god.
the above example is fundamentally flawed because we are not talking about the same things. for your example of the sun to work with god, then people would have to disagree about whether the sun is there at all or not, which they dont. the sun would also have to not affect us in any significantly measurable or observable way, so that we could have an argument about whether it has unknown and magical powers.
what can be known is only limited by how much there is to know.
science doesnt operate on trust it operates on fact. that is where you have miunderstood it. a scientist doesnt trust that another scientist's previous foundational work is correct, it becomes evident through his own work. if the foundational work is flawed or incorrect, your results will be as well. scientists formulating a hypothesis understand what the result should be, and if the result does not correspond to what it is supposed to be, it is investigated to determine the source of the flaw until it is found, righted, and the experiment works or the hypothesis is revealed as fundamentally incorrect in the first place. this relationship does not involve trust, rather, it is based on factual correctness or incorrectness that can be tested.
but all of that is just speculation. there is no evidence of god. there is no evidence that a god-like entity has tried to communicate with anyone or with everyone in any known ways. if god created the universe, then it follows that god created reality, because it has evolved from the initial environment of the universe over time. if god created a reality that barred even itself from interference, then the inherent statement of such a design is that god does not wish to involve itself in our affairs. if god cant do the impossible, then why should we think that god created the universe out of nothing?
first, we would have to be able to agree that god is indeed communicating with anybody at all.
You know, insulting others so broadly isn't terribly useful. Mysticism is like a disease of the mind, but it cannot be cured with mere offense...
True, but it does make some atheist feel a bit better
LOL...Look at this way, at least we are not being burned at the stake like in the old days Mysticism is a mental desease, it is a remnant of the bicameral mind. Dr Julian Jaynes, discusses this in his book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"
Godless.
Godless said:True, but it does make some atheist feel a bit better
Mysticism is a mental desease, it is a remnant of the bicameral mind. Dr Julian Jaynes, discusses this in his book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"
Godless.
Yeah, and Milton discusses Lucifers ambitions to rein in hell in "Paradise Lost" ...
but thats not based in reality either.....though today many believe it.
They are both complete fiction.
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You're not empathising with a blind person... as far as a blind person is concerned they feel heat... how many sources of heat are there? How many causes of skin cancer?charles_cure said:
Sadly, I have never spoken to a blind person asking them what they understand the Sun, a Star, a Black Hole, a Galaxy of Stars(?),... to be... somehow I hold though, that if blind people were to have more of a say in this world, there might be some disagreement as to what the Sun exactly is... I am yet to see a blind astrophysicist. Try to put yourself in their shoes... ?
Known by whom? The quoted statement appears redundant. I think a more contextual statement would be: "What can be known by humanity is limited to what we can directly or indirectly perceive."
Science is as intellectual as it is empirical. Not every result of an experiment can be repeated by every scientist; some experiments are just too complex/difficult/expensive.
What one can do is review the results and method based on theory. Best part is when you apply a different methodology and come up with the same result. You may not have performed the other confirmation (but have an intellectual grasp of what was done), so you do conclude the method must have been sound to generate equivalent/supportive results.
You happily tout the concurrence in your references. That is what I consider to be trust.
The huge proportion of theistic humanity should, at least, allow some consideration. Maybe some can "see" some are "blind" and thus some need to just trust that the "heat" they feel is indeed due to what the "sighted" say? Certainly not easily done... but it could have benefits.
No pun intended.Godless said:True, but it does make some atheist feel a bit better
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Vindicator said:
from what i understand, theres not a lot of causes of skin cancer. in addition to that, the fact that a blind person cant see the sun doesnt eliminate its existence. it doesnt stop the sun from producing heat, exercising gravitational pull on earth, and being the center of our system of 9 planets, so trust has nothing to do with it. the sun is an immutable fact, and can still be measured by blind people in some way whether they can see it or not, because it is definitely there to be observed and measured by other means than sight.
youre wrong. science is empirical. i wasnt saying that the scientist has to go back and conduct every experiment of previous scientists in order to understand their own. what i was saying is that the relationship isnt based on trust its based on fact. if a previous experiment turns out to be wrong it will taint the results of an experiment that uses those incorrect findings as its foundation. in turn this leads to a re-examining of the original results and eventually a correction. you cant get correct results with incorrect data, and scientists dont just make wild stabs in the dark at answering questions, they develop highly complex hypotheses with potential outcomes in mind based on research prior to experimentation. you are grossly oversimplifying how it works.
my statement seems to be redundant because you dont grasp its meaning. i am saying that all that there is can be known. and if we cant know it, then it doesnt effect us or isnt there at all.
what you consider to be trust then, is not trust. scientists dont trust each other to be right, they consider the scientific method's ability to produce applicable results, and consider the probability of those results having been tainted by human errror. that is not trust. the scientific method is a fact based pursuit of confirmation for hypotheses with several subsets of strategic approaches that are applied under differing circumstances. if the facts do not exist, they cannot be manufactured over and over again to prove results. one hoax or mistake here and there slips through, but after thorough examination, or experimentation using a different methodology, the error or deliberate tampering is exposed. that does not imply trust in any fashion, because trust alone inevitably produces results that become obviously incorrect over time. so once again you are wrong. and you also assume that blind people could take no other approach toward the investigation of the existence of the sun other than to trust what sighted people can say,well, i think that even if the whole world were blind for the last 100,000 years, humanity still could have come up with a way to describe their environment accurately using science, and the only difference between their sun and ours would probably be a slight one in physical description (such as color for instance).
Still speaking for the sighted...
The rest...
I understand your position; I just see the same from a different angle.
I am involved in nothing I don't trust and the only way I'll accept something I perceive is if I trust my perception.
Perception starts from the known responses to stimuli of humans, through which we came to know and speak of them.
Humans must trust each other's perception or else there would be no objectivity - there would be no science.
I will delve no further into blind conversations.
So you believe science only involves observation and 0 intellect? Some might say the same of religion.
I disagree completely...
The rest...
I understand your position; I just see the same from a different angle.
I am involved in nothing I don't trust and the only way I'll accept something I perceive is if I trust my perception.
Perception starts from the known responses to stimuli of humans, through which we came to know and speak of them.
Humans must trust each other's perception or else there would be no objectivity - there would be no science.
I will delve no further into blind conversations.
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Vindicator said:Still speaking for the sighted...
So you believe science only involves observation and 0 intellect? Some might say the same of religion.
from Merriam-Webster.com
Main Entry: in·tel·lect
Pronunciation: 'in-t&l-"ekt
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French or Latin; Middle French, from Latin intellectus, from intellegere to understand -- more at INTELLIGENT
1 a : the power of knowing as distinguished from the power to feel and to will : the capacity for knowledge b : the capacity for rational or intelligent thought especially when highly developed
2 : a person with great intellectual powers
where does intellect have anything to do with trust? i believe science to be about observation, reasoning, logic, creativity, and intelligence. but intellect has nothing to do with trust, in fact it seemingly is the antithesis of trust, because trust is something you feel, not something you know. if you have knowledge of something, you dont need to trust someone elses description of it. so youre still wrong.
you dont trust your perception, you understand it. you know how to perceive things and do it. your personality and perceptions are not two seperate entities, one needing to trust the information from the other, they are an integrated system, so your whole premise here is foolish.
thats not true, objectivity is acheived through an agreement upon the shared similar attributes of a collective perception. if i see the color green and say hey thats green, and some people disagree with me and some people agree with me, then the color green needs to be defined and decided upon in a way that appears to have commonality by most peoples standards of perception. if one person perceives ear piercing as a pleasurable experience, and i trust their preception instead of my own, then i will feel the pain i should have known to expect and will have been a fool for trusting someone else's description of it. perceptions are subjective, but facts are not, facts are those things that can only be perceived in an extremely limited way by almost everyone, and they therefore constitute a foundation for the definition of other things that may be more subjective. so trust does not enter into it at all, yet again.
charles cure said:
A head knowledge of something is different than a true knowing.
That comes from the heart.....
There is a big difference, that includes experiance, balance, and wisdom.
Head knowledge can deceive you into a false confidence,
You see....."there's aways a bigger fish"
Faith is a substance of true knowledge....not blind faith.
The true meaning of faith is "Revelation"
Thanks Dino, it only seemed appropiate that our position be completely understood, however one can't help it if religious zealots are blind & ignorant.
The only thing that comes from the heart is blood. Everything about knowledge comes from the noodle you seem to be lacking on top of your head!
G! I qualify. I've got plenty of experience 44yold, I'm always balancing on top of beams 100's of feet in the air "work" and I've got plenty of wisdom, since I've got the internet
I've like to see you think without your brains! wait! what brains you've got none that would qualify as "head knowledge" if you did right? So I guess you have a sense of false confidence then!
Pleasssse
belief in the assertions of others without dispute!
Godless
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TheVisitor said:
i'm sorry, i was talking about reality. maybe i should have made that clear. were you aware that the brain thinks and that the heart pumps blood without the capacity to "know" anything?
class dismissed.
Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary said:
I do not think the lack of the word "trust" in a dictionary definition means trust is not involved in the process.charles cure said:
Understanding arises through intellect. Science, as an intellectual as much as it is empirical construct must be based on some amount of trust in the system itself else humanity would not pursue it, and individuals would not vehemently place it above all esle.
Here, I disagree again. While they are an integrated system, clearly, one can simply trust what he sees, hears, smells, tastes, feels: or not(?)... One has to analyse the information based on other inputs and conclude. Trust your intellect, trust your perception - trust yourself.
You may say; "...are perceived to have commonality..." I would presume defining these common perceptions would be a rather intellectual exercise.
I.E. facts are based on an agreed common perception, which is in turn based subjectively. You may say that each person's subjective perception is integrated into an objective construct.
I trust my perception and those of my fellows, else I'd be wondering if the Sun is really there.