Literal HELL more likely than evolution (for 'muricans)
- Thread starter SuAside
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TwinkieGorilla
This ghoul has seen it all
Kahgan said:
you know, what we need are schools that don't teach children that creationism is just as viable as evolution. what we need are better education systems. that, and the total annihilation of every trailer park in existence.
PlanHex said:
Congratulations. You just prove that we can't be sure that the world is consistent and that we therefore can't prove the law of cause and effect.
The point is moot, except for armchair philosophy, though.
If the world is inconsistent and causality is wrong, that means that we absolutely do not know anything. It means we can't expect anything to be consistent, which means sanity is wrong, which means we have to adopt the viewpoint of a lunatic.
Relativism is not a hypothesis, relativism is a logical fallacy. Relativism cannot be correct, because it disproves its own correctness. If relativism were correct, relativism cannot be correct for the same reasons causality cannot be correct.
Adhering to relativism means abandoning sanity, which means you're pretty much incapable of living a normal life and might get hit by a train because you refuse to accept its existence.
Relativism is a favourite of religious "Creation Scientists" to prove that they are just as right as anybody else. Even if relativism were not contradictory, it could only successfully ALL knowledge and assumptions, thus disproving creationism and all other crackpot ideas as well.
Sorry, but science isn't democratic. Scientific truth is factual truth, not consensual truth. If you do away with the few principles science is based on, your brain cannot function because comprehension is made impossible.
Natural selection is a fact. Core Darwinism holds true. Why? Because we have tons and tons of evidence, not merely anecdotal, but tangible and fully reproducible.
Creationism is false. It has no factual evidence whatsoever and it is incredibly unlikely for exactly the same reasons it tries to disprove Darwinism with.
Darwinism proposes that all life started with one very simple event (likely enough to have occurred on ONE planet in a vast universe full of billions of billions of planets) and went on from there through RANDOM mutation and NON-RANDOM natural selection. Not in major jumps, but on a slow, gradual slope.
Creationism is NOT on the same grounds with Darwinism. Armchair relativism and "all things are equal" is a fun exercise to practice in American Philosophy 101, but it's completely false and non-productive outside the classroom.
PS:
Mods: split/merge with Spiritism thread?
Your points about relativism are idiotic and overbroad at best.
For all you know the earth is NOT consistent.
non-productive != false
Just because you don't like the answers don't mean they aren't the answers.
Also, there are many MANY schools of relativism, and also many styles of application within each school of thought. You talk about philosophy 101 logic, yet at the same time you give a philosophy 101 explanation of relativism. I suggest you do a bit of reading, even wiki is competent at philosophy, although I'd suggest going to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online.
Biased oversimplification that qualifies the validity of answers by agreement with the results will get you nowhere, that is terribly sophomoric.
For all you know the earth is NOT consistent.
non-productive != false
Just because you don't like the answers don't mean they aren't the answers.
Also, there are many MANY schools of relativism, and also many styles of application within each school of thought. You talk about philosophy 101 logic, yet at the same time you give a philosophy 101 explanation of relativism. I suggest you do a bit of reading, even wiki is competent at philosophy, although I'd suggest going to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online.
Biased oversimplification that qualifies the validity of answers by agreement with the results will get you nowhere, that is terribly sophomoric.
In advance to answering your rebuke, I'd like to point out that your conclusions regarding my competence are irrelevant and also very much wrong. I'm not going to fling around references to establish my qualification, but I can assure you that I DO know what I am talking about and that I will happily consider any specific counterpoint you wish to make -- please leave the ad-hominem tone of your preceding post out of this, though.
Relativism is a broad field, that is correct. But it is obvious that not all forms of relativism aren't relevant to the topic at hand, so I expect that you don't take any of my arguments as arguments against irrelevant forms of relativism.
Non-productive equals false when it comes to practical reality. That something is logically possible or thinkable doesn't make it real.
Scientific Truth is not Truth in all senses of that word, yes. It's merely a very large set of logical arguments about the world at large based on a very small set of premises (e.g., consistency, causality, etc). The rest is based on empirical observations (empiricism being based on the premises).
Religion on the other hand is based on anecdotal evidence and subjective interpretation. Religious statements, however, do not even try to be distinct from Scientific Truth. They use scientific techniques to assert their validity, but they do so based on premises that simply would not hold when they are subject of scientific critique.
I am oversimplifying Relativism because I am not addressing any particular school of relativism, but the (oversimplified) notion of Relativism as it is being used in popular media and religious "scientific" debate.
That very notion of Relativism is based on a rather simple proposition, namely, that the basis of scientific knowledge cannot be verified by non-scientific means (including empirical evidence, as the principles of empiricism, causality and consistency would have to go) and thus, science equals religion.
The difference lies in pragmatism: evidently (this is, again, empirical evidence), scientific truth WORKS -- if you get hit by a train, you get injured and will quite likely die.
Religious truth is either pragmatically irrelevant -- there's no way of knowing whether you really wake up in heaven after dying after having lived a life considered "good" by your religion -- or, at best, inconclusive -- if you commit a "sin" and something bad happens to you, it tends to be hard to prove because the link between the two events (=causality) cannot be proven through empirical research.
Religion makes claims about causal relations between events, but disregards the falsifiability of these claims by claiming that it is inherently exempt from falsifiability.
This is more about Occam's Razor, really: religion makes claims about rational truth that cannot be proven or disproven through empirical observation (i.e. there is no reproducible evidence), science makes claims that can be and ARE proven on a daily basis. Religions is out, science is in.
Popular relativism is (ab)used as a toy by religious people to make seemingly scientific and rational points about the validity of their claims. My point is that relativism does not add anything productive to the debate at hand.
As far as we know, the world is consistent. There's really no reason to assume the contrary. There's certainly no practical use in assuming anything else.
Cultural relativism or moral relativism are subjects of their own, but they don't add anything useful to the debate either.
Religion fails the instant it tries to establish any scientific relevance. Most religious hypothesis don't even survive Occam's Razor before the validity of their premises is even considered. The rest doesn't get much further either.
I'm sorry if my previous post seemed like a direct attack against Relativism itself. That was not my intention.
Relativism is, however, irrelevant to most considerations such as this debate. Relativism is a dead-beat argument. If you bring relativism to a debate about the truth content of religion, you might as well not participate at all.
Relativism is a broad field, that is correct. But it is obvious that not all forms of relativism aren't relevant to the topic at hand, so I expect that you don't take any of my arguments as arguments against irrelevant forms of relativism.
Non-productive equals false when it comes to practical reality. That something is logically possible or thinkable doesn't make it real.
Scientific Truth is not Truth in all senses of that word, yes. It's merely a very large set of logical arguments about the world at large based on a very small set of premises (e.g., consistency, causality, etc). The rest is based on empirical observations (empiricism being based on the premises).
Religion on the other hand is based on anecdotal evidence and subjective interpretation. Religious statements, however, do not even try to be distinct from Scientific Truth. They use scientific techniques to assert their validity, but they do so based on premises that simply would not hold when they are subject of scientific critique.
I am oversimplifying Relativism because I am not addressing any particular school of relativism, but the (oversimplified) notion of Relativism as it is being used in popular media and religious "scientific" debate.
That very notion of Relativism is based on a rather simple proposition, namely, that the basis of scientific knowledge cannot be verified by non-scientific means (including empirical evidence, as the principles of empiricism, causality and consistency would have to go) and thus, science equals religion.
The difference lies in pragmatism: evidently (this is, again, empirical evidence), scientific truth WORKS -- if you get hit by a train, you get injured and will quite likely die.
Religious truth is either pragmatically irrelevant -- there's no way of knowing whether you really wake up in heaven after dying after having lived a life considered "good" by your religion -- or, at best, inconclusive -- if you commit a "sin" and something bad happens to you, it tends to be hard to prove because the link between the two events (=causality) cannot be proven through empirical research.
Religion makes claims about causal relations between events, but disregards the falsifiability of these claims by claiming that it is inherently exempt from falsifiability.
This is more about Occam's Razor, really: religion makes claims about rational truth that cannot be proven or disproven through empirical observation (i.e. there is no reproducible evidence), science makes claims that can be and ARE proven on a daily basis. Religions is out, science is in.
Popular relativism is (ab)used as a toy by religious people to make seemingly scientific and rational points about the validity of their claims. My point is that relativism does not add anything productive to the debate at hand.
As far as we know, the world is consistent. There's really no reason to assume the contrary. There's certainly no practical use in assuming anything else.
Cultural relativism or moral relativism are subjects of their own, but they don't add anything useful to the debate either.
Religion fails the instant it tries to establish any scientific relevance. Most religious hypothesis don't even survive Occam's Razor before the validity of their premises is even considered. The rest doesn't get much further either.
I'm sorry if my previous post seemed like a direct attack against Relativism itself. That was not my intention.
Relativism is, however, irrelevant to most considerations such as this debate. Relativism is a dead-beat argument. If you bring relativism to a debate about the truth content of religion, you might as well not participate at all.
Heh, I agree that religion is not science, but I will not agree that science is not religion.
And for that matter, I loathe Occam's Razor and the pragmatic biases in philosophy (outside of the field of scientific philosophy, that is)
There have been endless amounts of mathematical algorithms published in our time that have found no purpose or function, and I would hardly consider making a pointless math problem to be very pragmatic. Sometimes things are conceived and/or discovered long before a use for them is decided upon. To say that one thing should be ruled out as a possible answer simply because it is not pragmatic or currently useable seems to be the height of folly (philosophicsally speaking, not scientifically speaking).
While I don't agree with disregarding science if one is trying to be astute, I do feel strongly that there is not such a thing as a more or less qualifying philosophy, due to the (im)practical nature of all attempts to grasp at the motives behind existence or the consistencies of reality.
Relativism might be mildly self defeating, but that is, like I said, an oversimplified view. If one could take even a universal relativism and encapsulate it around other ideas as a sort of logical net of support, it begins to make perfect sense.
Oh and pardon the acid tongue, occasional bad habit when I'm feeling impatient :/
And for that matter, I loathe Occam's Razor and the pragmatic biases in philosophy (outside of the field of scientific philosophy, that is)
There have been endless amounts of mathematical algorithms published in our time that have found no purpose or function, and I would hardly consider making a pointless math problem to be very pragmatic. Sometimes things are conceived and/or discovered long before a use for them is decided upon. To say that one thing should be ruled out as a possible answer simply because it is not pragmatic or currently useable seems to be the height of folly (philosophicsally speaking, not scientifically speaking).
While I don't agree with disregarding science if one is trying to be astute, I do feel strongly that there is not such a thing as a more or less qualifying philosophy, due to the (im)practical nature of all attempts to grasp at the motives behind existence or the consistencies of reality.
Relativism might be mildly self defeating, but that is, like I said, an oversimplified view. If one could take even a universal relativism and encapsulate it around other ideas as a sort of logical net of support, it begins to make perfect sense.
Oh and pardon the acid tongue, occasional bad habit when I'm feeling impatient :/
I share the habit, no worries.
I'm not saying (temporarily) impractical theories are not worth considering, but I'd still advise against taking them off the shelf until an actual use can be found.
Armchair philosophy is not inherently bad. It's just not particularly helpful as long as it remains non-productive.
Religion remains incapable of defeating itself once it steps into the realm of science. That is what many-a religious person fails to realise when trying to combine the two and justify religious dogma with scientific claims.
I'm not saying (temporarily) impractical theories are not worth considering, but I'd still advise against taking them off the shelf until an actual use can be found.
Armchair philosophy is not inherently bad. It's just not particularly helpful as long as it remains non-productive.
Religion remains incapable of defeating itself once it steps into the realm of science. That is what many-a religious person fails to realise when trying to combine the two and justify religious dogma with scientific claims.
Makenshi
Ahoy, ye salty dogs!
Ashmo said:
I'm not a mod but I think I say I can disagree on this.
This thread is about literal Hell x Evolutionism; people are mostly discussing what is more likely to be truth, effectively debating Religion x Science.
The Spiritism thread was created just to present a philosophy relatively unkown - outside of Brazil and France - and see what the people here at NMA (very intelligent people I might add
) think about the claims made by this philosophy (not to preach that it holds "teh holy truth"), effectively debating Spiritualism x Materialism.@xdarkyrex: you were right, I've read more and the Spiritism has, in fact, religious characteristics (actually they say it's a philosophycal doctrine that deals with religious and scientific themes, but it may just be the same thing in the end). Interesting... but let's not talk it here, unless the thread is merged.
So, I think by now we've established that I suck huge amounts of ass at analogies.Ashmo said:
My point with my little story was in fact that my teacher used his superior debating skills to make us all look dumber than Homer Simpson on a good day, like BN did with Makenshi.
Makenshi
Ahoy, ye salty dogs!
By the way, thank you for that. BN is way better with words than me, I even stopped replying - I know stuff, but elaborating answers in a way that he can't throw back easily is the problem :/