Why do atheists think that religious people are delusional?

No. Fundamentalism is not recent. To say that the Pilgrims were not Bible believing Christians....is mighty ridiculous. Perhaps you don't know what fundamentalism is? It simply means Bible based. It means understanding that the Bible is true, is God inspired and that the Bible does not change to adjust to the whims of society.

 

I agree we need more tolerance. Its not something that can be mandated though because as soon as we do we become intolerant ourselves. A humorous catch 22 that the most intolerant bozos in the world love pointing out.

I think the best thing is to try to understand what is really going on without judging it. At least initially. Once a clear picture starts to emerge conclusions and judgements become inevitable.

 

Not all Atheists promote and condone wide open sexual immorality as do the Gays, who come out in public talking about their sex lives , or the Feminists who dress almost naked, use No Fault Divorce, have half the babies out of wedlock, etc.
But neither do they criticize it either.

 

It only took a few Gays to Act Out, and the right to corrupt the children prevailed.
Christians are the least of the Gay worry now, because they merely sit in their churches, and watch the sexual immorality without ction.

The people we need gather together are those who went to Chic fil A.
They sent the message that there s no desire to hurt Gays, but they see what Gay power wants to do, and they oppose it.
These are the regular people, ready to protect everyone from abuse.
But they are beginning to see the "agenda."

 

Fundamentalism is a movement which wants to insist that medieval Bible interpretations are even more important the the truth.

They resist seeing the Bible as compatible with Science when read correctly.
In this, they make up lies which oppose exactly what Christ preached, which was that "The truth will make you free."

 

LOL

Truth is defined as Facts.

We discover things we call Facts.
Experiments show those Facts to anyone who repeats the experiment.

 

You aren't describing science.

So, what ARE you describing?

 

Seriously it depends on the claim if your claim is simple: The is a Creative Power of the Universe and it has a plan for me, and I believe this. Its not much of an issue its a personal belief that doesn't make claims or foists itself on society at large in either a negative or positive way.

But when you make serious claims lets pick one there should be ample evidence for, the Exodus, and it happened as it said in the Torah then we want proof and can demand proof as Atheists from relevant sciences like Archeology such as historical records from the region that it happened, physical evidence of such plagues, patterns of power to dictate the crippling of one of the major empires, consistent folk stories from the cultures, tomb art well anything like that. Its not asking too much.

And if you want to use the Bible for society policy you should be able to prove the facts that the Bible is the will of some divine god and prove this being is the only god and further what its will is. Atheists use Humanism largely for beliefs which tend to be simple and elegant with rational thought used for policies and morality, some will agree with the Bible murder is wrong but also we differ on things like gay marriage on simple grounds it hurts no one and is therefore neutral and one can say good it stabilizes a couple which can be a positive thing and if they adopt unwanted children then they get parents which is good.

I think its simple really we can't understand how you consider the Bible as evidence and untestable claims as justification for it while you can't understand us and our world view that we see the world in purely mechanical terms and the things we can't answer we are okay not knowing. Until science finds out the answers but such questions usually don't matter such as how it all started. We are here shouldn't that be enough proof it started somehow not necessarily needing a deity or deities being involved?

 

I was describing Truth.
The Scientific Method is used to establish truths.

Science, on the other hand, uses the Truths established by the Scientific Method to propose their own ideas.
They call their ideas theories.
Theories try explaining how Reality works, and by what means these concrete established truths are produced.

 

One word summed up the Bible, according to Jesus.
He said "Truth" is that word.

"Truth saves."
Truth tells us about Reality.
We need to live in Reality to be sane.

Pretty simple.

The problem is when we find truth, it makes people who have been living in lies very angry.
Its like the Emperor's Clothes.
The truth was that the emperor was naked.
But no one but a child was allowed to tell him so.

 

Scientific method has no way of establishing "truth" by any rational definition of truth.

And, your "science" that is outside of scientific method is ... what? Where are the rules for that, or do you make them up as you go along?

 

Yes it does, Biological Evolution using many disciplines is largely verified as a solid theory just as good as our theory of gravity explains gravity a force also that is there regardless of ones beliefs or opinion. An alien civilization might call then different things but in the end these are universal principles here or on some distant galaxies alien world with another species of advance being like us. Science discovers what is there and what it can't demonstrate isn't there yet, but a divine force fairy-being would demand we first have scientific evidence of the supernatural then later evidence of divine beings called deities.

For an example most of you deists must have watched Touched by an Angel now lets say one lite up all pretty and said I'm an angel sent by god to me. First I would think okay is this fake then okay your a real being so what are you an advanced alien and can you prove there's a god who sent you and go on. If I showed up in stone age society with a modern suit of body armor, guns, a Humvee that say was solar powered and other cool things I would bet the primitives would say I was a god since I had a lighting throwing that unleashes metal shards to kill and moves faster than any man in his metal chariot. You Diests would say yep angel, give me the message and cry and grovel and it could be an alien doing it on a bar bet from their space ship.

 

Strangely, the scientific community has not yet demonstrated how the elements necessary for the occurrence of a Big Bang came into being. Therefore, according to your statement above, the occurrence of the Big Bang could not have happened yet because science has not demonstrated how those necessary elements came into being.

 

Well, first off I'm an atheist. But seriously, no worries...

I agree evolution is one of our premier theories of science, so solid that all modern biological science has that theory as a founding principle.

So, I'm more making the point that there was no time at which that theory was proven and there was no methodology that was carried out where when that process ended, we had a proven theory. Also, we're learning all the time about how the many processes involved actually work. So, there are tons of new specifics that we keep finding out, giving greater clarity. So far, these have only added to the confidence in the central theory.


But, it is important to keep the actual process of scientific progress in mind, as there are theories in which we have not gained that level of confidence. So, knowing the process is important. Knowing that there is no proof mechanism is important.

For example, climate change. We have theories there where we are gaining confidence. And, we have an audience that says, "Come back when you have proof." That is a horrible disconnect that blocks any kind of rational approach to allowing science to affect public policy. We need people to better understand how science works, so science can be allowed to affect public policy.

We need people to know there will NEVER be proof (since that's the truth). In fact, science won't even have proof after the fact for important public policy decisions. For example, over the last decade we had the economic theory that TARP would help. So we did it twice. Yet, not even now do we know what TARP actually accomplished.

We have to accept science presenting some level of confidence in a range of possibility, because we will never get proof that would make public policy decisions so much easier.

We do this a little bit. We have some environmental standards for example. And, we did TARP, which probably helped, but who knows how much?

Newt Gingrich stated that the probability of an event multiplied by the cost of the event should be a guide to whether public policy is required. Basically, it's like an 80% chance of an event that would cost a $1B should spur us to think about mitigation of a certain size. Or whatever. His idea comes from the FACT that scientific method will NEVER have proof, but it will have very important info. about how things will likely work, and we can't afford to ignore that info.

Sorry - WAY too long!

 

I like you post because you openly admit that science will never have PROOF. "
We need people to know there will NEVER be proof (since that's the truth). In fact, science won't even have proof after the fact for important public policy decisions." Unfortunately,, you did not go into an explanation of why "science won't even have proof after the fact for public policy decisions": or even decisions made on the private common citizen level of decision making. I do hope that you will, at your convenience, attempt to make such an explanation. Otherwise... a good posting on your part... IMHO.

 

Well, the simple answer is that scientific method has proof of falsehood, but not proof that a theory is true or correct. Every theory in science is available to some budding your Einstein to correct as more is learned.

There are sound reasons for there being no way to prove an hypothesis to be true. The problem of proving an hypothesis true is entirely different from proving it false.

Think about Newton. His contribution was significant, but could not be proven true in any complete sense. How could we? At that time we knew nothing of the dimensions that Einstein would add, which identified Newton's work as serious progress, but limited. We needed Einstein even for stuff like GPS. Before Einstein we could say, "Newton is true as far as we know." But, what the heck is THAT? Physics could again undergo a significant change, as we still don't have a unified theory in physics. We like Einstein's work because it is highly useful.

What IS possible is working on ways to include the best we know today when making public policy decisions. Obviously, we do that to some extent already. We just need to get a lot better at it.

 

At the highlighted text. It would seem that if the scientific method cannot find a falsehood within a theory, then the assumption regarding that theory would be taken as 'true'. Thus proving the 'true' nature of that theory. Thus eliminating any gray areas between true and false. Or does the logic used in science demand a gray area,,,, wiggle room... thus showing an uncertainty regarding the nature of that theory?

 

True science can only do two things reveal when used what forces are at work in the Universe, accepting some things we don't know, and also disprove by the Scientific Method claims as well as prove them.

If you claim an event ,The Exodus, happened as in the Torah its very sensible that related sciences (Archeology for one) can disprove that claim or prove it.

 

So you are suggesting that the scientific community will accept things which they have no knowledge about? If the members of the scientific community are in a condition that you describe as "don't know", then how can they also 'know' that the something even exists if they "don't know"? The use of the very method you praise (the scientific method), is based on assumptions. So how can the use of the scientific method lead to results that are 'true' when such usage of the scientific method itself is based on something that has not been proven to be true. It seems that the scientific method has established an illusion to make it appear to those less informed that the scientific method is supposed to be the ultimate in processes, when in fact it is only the soup de jure at *best guess*.

 

One problem (not the only one) is that for all the testing against a theory, those doing the work may simply not have found where the weakness is.

In the Newton example, those between Newton and Einstein simply didn't know where to look for the weakness in Newton's work. Actually, for some time prior to Einstein they knew something was missing somewhere, but it took Einstein to identify what it was.

Another trivial example is the theory that all crows are black. You can find crow after crow and notice that they are black. But, it doesn't prove that there is no place or future or past time with a family of white crows.

With systems as large and complex as climate change the problem is very difficult. For one thing, it adds in the fact that you can't repeat the last 20 years with a different value for the amount of CO2 in the air, or some other factor being different. In fact, you can't develop a new measurement instrument (such as a satellite) and send it back in time, so you can get some concrete history to compare - we're stuck being limited to whatever was recorded back then. In fact, the major factors climatologists are concerned about can't be changed by them in order to verify a theory about the effect of a chemical in the atmosphere, for example.

So, climatologists can learn a whole lot about how our system works and can grow confidence, but they will not be providing us with anything that we should accept as proof. What they provide will be in the "highly likely" range or will be expressed as a change that is within some range - like "2 to 5 degrees over 50 years", or whatever.

Of course, we did TARP (twice!) without a lot of certainty. There was disagreement on the theory that TARP would spur the economy, and by how much. There certainly were "deniers". We still determined that action was warranted. We didn't become paralyzed because of lack of "proof".

We can't refuse to take action purely on the grounds that we don't have certainty/proof. We already know that is true (as seen by our action on TARP, environmental improvements, etc.) . But, we need to get better at incorporating the best science we have in the public policy decisions we make.

 

One could also look under every rock and pebble on the planet Earth and not find God, but that does not rule out the matter of His positive existence. As for the PROOF.... www.tfd.com/proof evidence or argument that compels the mind to accept an assertion as true. If you read that definition honestly and with an open mind, it is easily seen that the proof is determined by the individual who is making the assessment... not some group who collaborate and attempt to appease one another with their pretense of knowing when they admit that they don't know and cannot prove a theory.

 

Sure, but you aren't reading about scientific method, which is how the world has been doing science for a long time now.

One of the disconnects between science and the public is the fact that science has specific meanings for some words like theory and proof that aren't exactly like some of the other uses of these words. In science, there is "prove false" (which means that the hypothesis as written must be discarded) and there is no "prove true". In math, there is "prove true", but the gigantic difference is that in math one is talking about systems that are not so open. Natural science is open - Newton just had no way to know how the speed of light was related to objects dropping, how space/time warps, etc. Euler could make proofs about numbers, because everything that can impact numbers is fairly well defined. So, he could show that he had taken care of every possibility in a way that would never, ever need to change - proof.

Plus, your definition of "compels the mind" can't possibly work for science, since no scientist is going to have any idea what might "compel" your mind or mine, nor a way to detect whether that was accomplished. Plus, it wouldn't be interesting to science itself, as compelling the minds of the public is a separate task usually having more to do with communication and less to do with the rigor that science demands. And, science depends on scientists doubting each other at all times. That's central to progress. Hypotheses grow strong by defeating attempts to prove falsehood.

We have numerous US citizens who see evolution as not just unproven, but false. That can't be seen by scientists as a reason to demote evolution from its firmly held position as a fundamental of all modern biology. Instead, the problem has to do with education and communication - and, religion in some cases.

 

At the highlighted text above. If something (an hypothesis) is proven to be 'false', then there is the inference that the opposite of the hypothesis is applicable.. thus proving it (the opposite) to be 'true'. Some argue that there is no gray area between 'true' and 'false' .... yet the scientific community brags about their 'best guess' condition. 'best guess' is a gray and ambiguous area.... an area of uncertainty... therefore throwing onto the 'proven false' notion the same degree of uncertainty. The hypothesis is based upon an "if/then" set of statements. However in the logic used in computer sciences, the 'if/then' statement goes one step further. In electronics the 'if/then' is followed up by an 'else' statement as options available after the conclusion of the if/then. In the scientific method, what is followed up after the if/then is a locked in position of 'false' and no other condition is acceptable. This is an error on the part of the scientific method, as has been shown with Newton and Einstein. See here for what I consider to be a very well summarized layout of how the scientific method is supposed to work. Also it shows (probably contrary to popular belief) that even the common man/woman out on the streets uses the scientific method many times each day. http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~pyo22/students/hypothesis.html

"best guess" is not a proof of anything. In your closing statement you have mentioned 'religion' as one of the things that needs to be addressed in causing the "US citizens" who oppose evolution as a fundamental of all modern biology to come to an outright acceptance of that alleged fundamental of all modern biology. Well, the same could be said of science in accepting the teachings of 'religion'. There are enough publications on the subject of 'religion' and its component parts to amply supply the scientific community with an extremely long list of variables that would allow the community to establish an hypothesis on the existence of God. Yet they refuse to even consider such a task. At the same time, the impact of the findings of such an hypothesis and the followup experimentation could have a much desired impact on the global community; conversely, said results could also create an upheaval in the global community that makes the scientific community fearful of what they might find.

'guess work' or 'best guess' simply falls into that gray area of uncertainty. I like that Star Trek motto; 'dare to go where no man has gone before'.

"compel the mind" is not my definition. It belongs to the dictionary who published it. It presents the pathway to exploration. Something compelled (past tense) your mind to have the mindset that you have. Until that something happened or presented itself to you, you had no idea of what would cause your mind to be compelled to have the mindset that you have.

 

And such a shame that it takes an Agnostic to see the utter craziness of all of these religions based upon ideas,, ideas created not by some god, but by the human brain itself. And then once these various ideas are created, and qualities are then assigned to the numerous gods, an inevitable animosity arises between the different belief systems.. It would be one thing if these belief systems were based upon verifiable facts, instead of just assumptions that breeds imagination.

The die hard Christian who somehow believes in Christian indoctrination, goes to the grave holding onto those beliefs, as does the Muslim, the Jew, the Mormon and the Hindu. Each one will claim that only his particular belief is true, and it is very rare that one belief system is replaced by a different and contrary belief system.

From the bird's eye view, and as much objectivity that can be mustered, we understand that religious beliefs divide man, and cause conflict between man. Instead of religion bringing humanity together, it divides. And division is inevitably followed by conflict and even violence and killing. So the fruits of religious beliefs create the evil that they are supposed to avoid, and transcend. As Christ said, if your eye offends you, pluck it out. So whatever divides man, which leads to violent conflict and killing, should be plucked out and thrown away. And so religion, as we know it, should be plucked out and tossed into the fires.

 

No. If an hypothesis is false it most definitely does not imply that the opposite is useful in any way. The hypothesis could easily just be nonsense.

Your procedural computer language analogy isn't formed properly. In the example in your link the predicate was a hypothesis - the battery is dead. So, the <false> branch action is to throw away the predicate. But, more importantly, evaluating a natural sciences hypothesis isn't like the engineering problem of verifying that there is sufficient electrical characteristics in the battery. You can't evaluate <humans evolved from microorganisms> or <human activity is changing the rate of warming of this planet> like that.

Yes, people use sort of a simplified scientific method. But, we're not great at applying that to problems that are actually hard to solve - like climate change. We're not good at determining when we need experts.

Yes, I'm saying that "our best understanding" is not a proof of anything. But, being the best understanding of people who dedicate their lives trying to be right about a subject, spending more than a decade on study and training on the subject as individuals, people who as a group have been studying the problem for decades - that needs to carry weight. Sorry for the repetition.

No, a scientific hypothesis can not mention god in any way. The reason is simple. To be a valid hypothesis, it has to be possible for scientific methods to prove the hypothesis false (if it is indeed false). So, for example, "string theory" isn't science, because there is no way that mankind can test whether some theory coming from that arena is false. Likewise, no hypothesis concerning god can be tested to determine if it is false. You can say pretty much anything you want about god, and it can not be proven false. Therefore, it is outside the realm of science. You could say that "gravity" is really an all-powerful, omnipresent god who moves things in the way we see them move. Science has no answer for that! I doubt anyone actually thinks that but it doesn't matter - science can not disprove even THAT statement.

So, all I meant about religion in my last post is that religion can be an issue, but scientists are NOT going to change that by doing more or better science. Religion can only change by processes of religion.