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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jun 22, 2017 - 09:47pm PT
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How do you know you are you?
Expressed like a dyed in the wool post-modernist.
Why not stop wasting everybody's time with these vague post-modernist queries?
That go around and around... nowhere.
....
Meanwhile, there was another successful launch into space tonight, onboard 32 satellites to make the world a better, tighter, more unified place.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jun 22, 2017 - 09:47pm PT
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faith: strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof.
The duck is in left field with a catcher's mitt.
That's a very reductive even simplistic view or definition of faith. Try reading Viktor Emil Frankl's experiences in a Nazi concentration camp if you want to learn the real search for redemption through meaning.
i used to play left field with a catcher's mitt and it was very effective for high fly balls and line drives. I'll bet it was better than being a cheer leader anyway, you tell us.
So are you saying because you accept the wisdom you are religious?? A religious atheist?
Honestly this is just exhausting, if you are accepting religious wisdom you are accepting religious thought. I mean really how hard is that to comprehend? You don't have to believe in God to see the importance of theology or religion or to accept and understand the value of religion. I mean where did you people go to school? Amazing. Scientists? Really?
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rbord
Boulder climber
atlanta
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Jun 22, 2017 - 09:48pm PT
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the achievements in both science and religion are evidence of the remarkable singularity and significance of humanity in a universe where such achievements seem to be extremely rare.
The arrogance is not mine.
Again Paul, because I've said this before, you're taking your ignorance of reality and interpretting it as evidence to confirm your belief in humans' exceptionalism. Is that something that nonscience teaches?
The universe? Honestly, you believe that you've measured humans' achievements against the entire universe of achievements, and determined that all those other achievements in the universe pail in comparison? And you don't understand how someone might see that as arrogant?
Outside of the achievements that you know about on earth, what would you say is the second most impressive achievement in the universe? These "such achievements" - exactly how rare are they? How many such achievements are there in the universe? Please feel free to consult myths, religion, philosophy, if you believe that will bring you closer to the truth. But I expect their ignorance of the rest of the universe isn't much smaller than ours.
But you, you're not shallow and ill informed about all those other achievements in the universe. What are they?
it could be a more positive exchange
Paul I've responded substantively to like 8 things you've said, and the response I've gotten from you has been largely "I don't understand." Ok, if you don't understand then you don't understand. No shame there - we're humans - there's a lot of stuff we don't understand.
For me, the shame comes in when we pretend to understand things that we don't understand. But maybe that's the best we can do.
Science types, nonscience types, whatever. I think of them as humans.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jun 22, 2017 - 10:04pm PT
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Paul I've responded substantively to like 8 things you've said, and the response I've gotten from you has been largely "I don't understand." Ok, if you don't understand then you don't understand. No shame there - we're humans - there's a lot of stuff we don't understand.
Please, no offense, but you write in these strange non sequiturs that are difficult to comprehend full of assumptions that I really don't have the desire to straighten out.
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Bob D'A
Trad climber
Taos, NM
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Jun 22, 2017 - 10:36pm PT
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MikeL wrote: Some folks cannot deny their own experience. Look across the room. Is there a wall there? Do you doubt it? Should you?
If I did doubt it , I would get up and go touch it.
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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Jun 22, 2017 - 11:21pm PT
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But the problem s that religion simply makes things up. That is the escape hatch it offers. And demands blind faith in its creations.
I asked the question before. Twice. The one in a WoT might have been overlooked, but not the other.
I'll ask it again: What empirical evidence could possibly "prove" or even "strongly indicate" the existence of a creator God?
You guys bandy around such terms as "blind faith" like you've defined them. But you haven't. What is faith? What makes it blind as opposed to, well, some other sort of "faith" that isn't blind but presumably isn't "knowledge" either?
These questions impinge upon the pressing question, which is: What empirical evidence would it take, such that you would no longer claim that people with faith based upon "that" (whatever it would be) would not be "blind"?
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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Jun 22, 2017 - 11:22pm PT
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If I did doubt it , I would get up and go touch it.
That's called: naive realism, and it's pretty pathetic.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 22, 2017 - 11:51pm PT
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http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.php?topic_id=2978249&msg=2986915#msg2986915
Given the scientific method, what in principle could be adequate evidence for the existence of a creative God?
that would depend, of course, on what you mean by God. If it is a subjective experience, e.g. a "personal God", science would likely have something to say about behaviors that give rise to the experience. The validity of experience is traditionally not questioned, but certainly drug induced hallucinations result in experiences that the individual believes are real. Similarly, various diseases like schizophrenia can lead the individual to accept that subjective state as "real."
I thought John Forbes Nash's reply to the obvious question regarding his schizophrenia, "how could you have not known the difference between your mathematical thoughts and the schizophrenic thoughts?" provided insight:
"Those thoughts come from the same place."
So certainly this leaves plenty of room for a subjective experience of God, and as far as I know you could have all the "evidence" you need based on that subjective experience.
If you are asking about evidence for a physical God, not supernatural, then you have a lot of explaining to do. But let's say that God exists beyond the Planck scale. We cannot rule it out, and the physics of those scales is not yet known, it is possible it cannot be known.
The invocation of a supernatural God runs into the difficulty of explaining how the natural and the supernatural interact... as far as I know there is no construction that keeps them separate, at least in terms of measurement.
I am committed to seeking a natural explanation for the universe. Nothing that I know prevents such an explanation from existing.
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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Jun 23, 2017 - 12:04am PT
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I am committed to seeking a natural explanation for the universe. Nothing that I know prevents such an explanation from existing.
Lots of verbiage that really said very little.
You guys bag on anybody having "blind faith," as you like to call it. But then you have nothing to offer about what "evidence" would "contribute" toward "sighted faith."
Are you saying that atheism is by-definition true?
Oh, and btw, Ed, you sure slipped dangerously into philosophy there! Watch out; there be monsters.
My question is simpler than that. Granting your empirical perspective, what EMPIRICAL evidence could "indicate" the existence of God? I'm not asking about the existence of thoughts or impressions. Those are a given, and then only imply the question of whether or not they are veridical. And, after all, they doesn't distinguish, because, if empiricism is correct, that implies a "veil of perception doctrine," which is part of why Bob's naive realism IS so pathetic. You NEVER "touch the wall." You only "touch" your subjective perception of the wall.
So, since the "evidence" is ALL "back one level" behind the veil of perception, I don't care about "perceptions" or other such subjective stuff. That stuff fails to explicate. What I'm asking is: Pretend that empirical evidence is "direct" in the requisite way, so that there is genuine objectivity to it. Now, in THAT context, what sort of "touching the wall" sorts of evidence could in principle indicate that you're "touching God"?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 23, 2017 - 12:18am PT
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one can ask the question of the physical necessity for a God, create a hypothesis and test it...
let's say that God created the universe 6000 years ago in such a way that scientists would draw the conclusion that the universe is 13 some billion years old.
there's not much to argue with, the construction of such a "physical theory" can be made to explain the observations.
However, one might then try to use such a theory to look for new physical phenomena, unfortunately, theories built in such a manner do poorly. Certainly a major criticism of String Theory is that it describes the universe, but doesn't seem to be able to predict new things in the universe. So generally it isn't a very useful theory.
What is the role of a physical God?
I understand completely, the physical motivations of String Theory.
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Bob D'A
Trad climber
Taos, NM
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Jun 23, 2017 - 07:08am PT
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He's back...that didn't take long.
"If I did doubt it , I would get up and go touch it.
That's called: naive realism, and it's pretty pathetic."
Pathetic or not it would still prove to me the wall was there.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jun 23, 2017 - 07:24am PT
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sempervirens: Science is not concerned with emotion so it doesn't address tragic nature.
(BTW, you need to do a little reading. Start with Damasio.)
P.S. Go to Google Scholar and put in "cognition and emotion." There are 1.96 million hits.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jun 23, 2017 - 07:26am PT
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Bob: Pathetic or not it would still prove to me the wall was there.
To you.
If that's all that matters, Bob, then you've begun an argument for radical subjectivity and solipsism.
Welcome!
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Bob D'A
Trad climber
Taos, NM
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Jun 23, 2017 - 07:31am PT
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Good morning MikeL.
I just went over to touch the wall again, this time asked my wife to do it too.
Same result. :-)
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jun 23, 2017 - 07:46am PT
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Cited 424 times. Hardly a barn-burner, but it articulates the idea that perhaps Paul has been making.
Citation
Database: PsycARTICLES
[ Journal Article ]
Why fiction may be twice as true as fact: Fiction as cognitive and emotional simulation.
Oatley, Keith
Review of General Psychology, Vol 3(2), Jun 1999, 101-117. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.3.2.101
Abstract
. Although fiction treats themes of psychological importance, it has been excluded from psychology because it is seen as involving flawed empirical method. But fiction is not empirical truth. It is simulation that runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers. In any simulation, coherence truths have priority over correspondences. Moreover, in the simulations of fiction, personal truths can be explored that allow readers to experience emotions-their own emotions-and understand aspects of them that are obscure, in relation to contexts in which the emotions arise. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jun 23, 2017 - 07:48am PT
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Bob,
I take it that your experience of your wife is somehow qualitatively / categorically different than the experience you have of the wall? Did you touch her at the same time?
(No, please don't tell us.)
:-)
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sempervirens
climber
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Jun 23, 2017 - 08:01am PT
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Paul, you're not following your own arguments. But yeah, it's exhausting to argue with so many people. I don't have time to read all the comments.
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Bob D'A
Trad climber
Taos, NM
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Jun 23, 2017 - 08:01am PT
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No Mike, she just gave me a weird look when I asked her to touch the wall. After 48 years together (42 married) I have been getting weird looks for a long time now. :-)
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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Jun 23, 2017 - 08:39am PT
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Certainly a major criticism of String Theory is that it describes the universe, but doesn't seem to be able to predict new things in the universe. So generally it isn't a very useful theory.
Ah, yes, but the point is that (at least as Kaku describes it) string theory accomplishes something that doesn't seem to be able to be done in other ways, namely unify general relativity with quantum theory. So, there is at least that reason to believe that it may well be correct.
In other words, thinking strictly empirically, there is evidence in favor of string theory, even if it's not "known" to be correct or "testable" yet. Somebody fervently believing that string theory is correct would not be engaged in "blind faith" because there are strong, reasonable, and theoretically-satisfying reasons to have "faith" in it.
So, you talk about "testable" procedures regarding God, but then you proceed to suggest the narrowest (and ridiculous) subset of DOCTRINES (not possibly divine attributes) for testing. And, surprise, surprise, they come up short. Hmmm... perhaps a straw man here?
One might instead say something like, "Just as string theory 'explains' things that nothing else seems to, a creative God seems to be able to explain things that nothing else seems to, such as consciousness and objective values."
Now, some will deny the very existence of such "entities" as consciousness and objective values. But most people (including many atheist scientists) believe in these features of reality. And there are other features of reality that are "non-material" but seem real enough, such as propositions. In short, people believing in the real existence of, say, propositions are no more out on a "flyer" than people who believed/believe in the Higgs Boson.
So, even in the absence of "direct evidence," something like string theory could well be correct and does offer a theoretical "neatness" that is appealing as a "best explanation" even if it's presently not as "testable" as you'd wish.
With many of your theories, "True" is not the bar you're seeking to get over (nor can it be). The religionist need not get over the "True" bar either (despite the fact that FAR too many take a rabid perspective that theirs is TRUE and even the ONLY TRUTH). The point is that faith need not be "blind," even if it can in-principle never rise to the level of "known" to be "true."
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