'Xian' - what's all that about then?

[flamingjimmy]

My point is that our conception of reality fundamentally can not be derived purely from a rational logical organisation of our sensory experiences.

For babies, perhaps, but I'm an adult, and mine can.

 

However I have also shown that a large number of those concepts are not derived from there.

No you haven't, you just keep repeating that they are and seem to expect me to just take it on faith from you.

 

It is in the formulation of those concepts that there is room for the spiritual for the religious, for the aesthetic , for the emotive language we understand and can meaningfully use to communicate.

I've got nothing against using words like 'I' and 'mind' and 'self' to communicate ideas to other people. What I'm arguing against is the idea any of these things are literally more than the sum of their parts, the idea that your mind is literally seperate from your body, the idea that the self is literally more than just your physical form. You appear to to be trying to change the subject.

 

You are welcome like I do to say God does not exist, but it is something we will never be able to prove. We also cannot say that religious language is meaningless to religious people that use it, they communicate and understand things on that level and it makes sense to them. It is arrogance to deny them the meaning it is apparent they derive from such language. We simply can't do so with any superiority because there is space with in our shared conceptualisation of reality for the religious.

?? What does any of this have to do with anything? I'm not trying to disprove god here, I'm not saying the religious language is meaningless to the people that use it. Two completely irrelevant strawmen. All I am saying, and all I have been saying is that nothing is literally more than the sum of its parts. This is a physical world, claiming that there is more to it than just the physical is an extraordinary claim, and I will require extraordinary evidence to believe it.

 

I am not seeking to prove the religious, such an argument would be self defeating, it would remove faith. What I am arguing is that whilst a religious interpretation of the world can be seen as optional it is not meaningless and cannot simply be dismissed as inconsistent, or illogical (at its most fundamental mystical level) and cannot be disproved.

All completely irrelevant (also wrong, but thats not important right now). All that I'm saying is just because something is too complicated for us to understand does not mean it is not just a physical process. That's all that I've been saying throughout our exchange on this thread.

[Wildcat]

For babies, perhaps, but I'm an adult, and mine can.

 

You can't possibly have derived those conceptions as a toddler with faculties you admit you only have as an adult.

 

No you haven't, you just keep repeating that they are and seem to expect me to just take it on faith from you.

 

Not at all, the key to my point is the one I keep repeating. See above. I am not asking you to take my word on faith, I am pointing out your argument is incompatible with the chronology, a premiss you almost concede in your first sentence and have conceded previously (if I recall correctly).

 

I've got nothing against using words like 'I' and 'mind' and 'self' to communicate ideas to other people. What I'm arguing against is the idea any of these things are literally more than the sum of their parts, the idea that your mind is literally seperate from your body, the idea that the self is literally more than just your physical form. You appear to to be trying to change the subject.

 

?? What does any of this have to do with anything? I'm not trying to disprove god here, I'm not saying the religious language is meaningless to the people that use it. Two completely irrelevant strawmen. All I am saying, and all I have been saying is that nothing is literally more than the sum of its parts. This is a physical world, claiming that there is more to it than just the physical is an extraordinary claim, and I will require extraordinary evidence to believe it.

 

All completely irrelevant (also wrong, but thats not important right now).

 

Not a Strawmen at all, I am simply trying to keep my responses to the context in which I have been making them. This section of the debate started around page 13 when Six45ive posted Dawkin's version of the epicurean paradox (presumably to further demonstrate his unwillingness to be restricted by social conventions and concerns he might be considered rude). Since his post took up a substantial part of the page, I thought it important to respond by pointing out that the flaw in the epicurean paradox is that it makes a category mistake with criticisms of non-scientific language not being scientific and hence being meaningless. His viewpoint, whether he knows it or not, is that associated with AJ Ayer in his Logical Positivist book Language, Truth and Logic. A position that was initially well received but that since the seventies has been considered to be fundamentally flawed by most if not all academics, including AJ Ayer himself. My points about language are what we are discussing.

 

It is rather like criticising an impressionist painting for not looking like a photograph.

 

It is only later that we moved on to things being more than a sum of their parts. A position I am taking not least because our conception of such ideas are not derived from a consideration of those parts and therefore the meaning we give to those words clearly is more and in fact different from talking about sums of parts.

 

All that I'm saying is just because something is too complicated for us to understand does not mean it is not just a physical process. That's all that I've been saying throughout our exchange on this thread.

 

I don't disagree with that statement. By talking about emergence, ie the counter-intuitive order from the chaos derived from iterative mathematical functions, I have even described the process by which that may well occur.

[pininsho]

This thread seems to be going all over the place but a point I'd like to make to the posters who seem to be saying that it's OK to believe in something without evidence, the acceptance of a metaphysical god, is do you care if your beliefs are most likely true? That is, when you apply correspondence theory, what happens? Can you demonstrate your beliefs correspond to objective demonstrable reality?

 

Basically if you appear to be unconcerned whether or not your beliefs are true just because you have a warm fuzzy feeling when you sing a hymn in church then how can you be trusted to make honest, well adjusted decisions in life in general?

[purdyamos]

This thread seems to be going all over the place but a point I'd like to make to the posters who seem to be saying that it's OK to believe in something without evidence, the acceptance of a metaphysical god, is do you care if your beliefs are most likely true? That is, when you apply correspondence theory, what happens? Can you demonstrate your beliefs correspond to objective demonstrable reality?

 

Basically if you appear to be unconcerned whether or not your beliefs are true just because you have a warm fuzzy feeling when you sing a hymn in church then how can you be trusted to make honest, well adjusted decisions in life in general?

 

 

 

I don't know if you're referring to my posts on right & left brain functions and the others who joined that discussion, but certain posters seemed to want to twist that into a science v anti-science style argument, which proved (as I said) that they missed the point. It's entirely possible to know that everything is a result of physical processes, but that includes ways of understanding and types of mental processing that cannot be codified in ways other than by direct experience and do not respond to logical delineations. Even if you could it would not supercede the value of the experience itself.

 

I have sensed from some posts on this thread and elsewhere that those who respect and embrace the right side of their brain as much as their left are somehow irrational and try to make out that they're foolish religious types, or somehow inferior or just don't know enough - of their favoured type of knowledge. What others can clearly see is that they in turn have their own limitations of other kinds of knowledge, the kind that is not easily translated into words and logic.

 

It's entirely possible to appreciate the transcendent and indescribable kinds of perception without believing in an external God, and to benefit from them without any of it being superstitious. I have always believed that what are termed religious feelings and a sense of God exist only within the mind, but humans evolved that and related perceptions for good reasons. The Chilean Miners are an example of it helping people get through extreme crisis. But it's possible to gain benefit from the same regions of experience without it being related to a supernatural being. That doesn't diminish their potential impact on a person's sense of humanity.

 

I said in my first post that the right and left brain thinking styles related to fundamentalist and mystical variations of religious belief. But they can also represent the varying approaches of the atheist posters too, some of whom have a rather literalist, supremacist attitude, who want to nail everything to measurable and tangible proofs, and who tend to be contemptuous of anyone who invokes right brain concepts or experiences. That's why they tend to get called fundamentalist too, on these kinds of threads, though they claim it's a pointless adjective. I can see the point of their argument against that accusation (in terms of dictionary definitions) but I can also see where it comes from (in terms of their limited understanding of others' perspectives and at times a cold and aggressive manner). Those two sides, again, correspond to left and right brain assessments of something. I can see both sides.

 

This thread has gone all over the place but it's one of the more interesting religious threads I've seen I think. But one thing I do know is that there are some things that you can only try and explain a couple of times, and if someone doesn't get it then they're just not going to get it. We all inhabit different points on the logic-to-feeling spectrum (as has been categorised in the Myers Briggs personality typologies) and even if people have totally different combinations of dominant perceptual functioning, they each have their relevant role to play in the human community. One of my artist friends might be useless as at pure analytical work, but then a pure analyst would might in turn be crud at bereavement counselling. Horses for courses, but not necessarily an equation of believing in god or not.

[Grahame]

This thread seems to be going all over the place but a point I'd like to make to the posters who seem to be saying that it's OK to believe in something without evidence, the acceptance of a metaphysical god, is do you care if your beliefs are most likely true? That is, when you apply correspondence theory, what happens? Can you demonstrate your beliefs correspond to objective demonstrable reality?

 

Basically if you appear to be unconcerned whether or not your beliefs are true just because you have a warm fuzzy feeling when you sing a hymn in church then how can you be trusted to make honest, well adjusted decisions in life in general?

 

You are welcome to compare my lifestyle with the average Joe if that is what you wish.

 

Apart from taking out a loan when I bought my first car and a mortgage I have never been in debt, never lived beyond my means, never been in trouble with wine, women, drugs, never had a week without a pay packet, never been in trouble with the police, my CRB check has nothing on it at all, I am still working age 66, I ran and cycled for fitness and fun, brought up a small child, am honest and reliable and my life has never been the mess of some.

 

That sort of record (I think) is testimony to a person who "can be trusted to make honest, well adjusted decisions in life in general."

 

 

[Wildcat]

This thread seems to be going all over the place but a point I'd like to make to the posters who seem to be saying that it's OK to believe in something without evidence, the acceptance of a metaphysical god, is do you care if your beliefs are most likely true? That is, when you apply correspondence theory, what happens? Can you demonstrate your beliefs correspond to objective demonstrable reality?

 

Basically if you appear to be unconcerned whether or not your beliefs are true just because you have a warm fuzzy feeling when you sing a hymn in church then how can you be trusted to make honest, well adjusted decisions in life in general?

 

Both religious and non-religious viewpoints can and do argue their views correspond with objective reality. And that in so far as it is possible to, they would say they are demonstrable.

 

This is taking us well off topic and without an obvious relevance to the arguments under discussion, but I would ask you whether truth in the context of someone who says they are living a lie corresponds with an external reality and whether a correspondence theory of truth restricts truth beyond the way we properly use the word? Is there not such a thing as subjective truth? *

 

Aquinas says “A judgment is said to be true when it conforms to the external reality” whilst Kierkegaard and Existentialists would say "Subjectivity is Truth" (not the only truth but still an important conception of truth).

 

* And following on from that, that a Correspondence Theory of Truth turns out to be false, by its own standard, because its conception of Truth does not correspond with the way the word is used in objective reality, when it is used subjectively.

[pininsho]

Purdyamos.

All this is very well and easily understood but it doesn't really address my post.

I don't want to get too deep into this thread as I don't have the time and if it keeps going off into the rest of the metaphysical realm to do with art and music and so forth then I'm not really interested.

This thread is supposed to be about religion and the understanding that people's decisions based on their metaphysical state have an effect on the world around them.

Is it possible for you to respond to the effect of religion on society and where you see that in your right verses left brain understanding?

Thanks.

[Halibut]

This thread seems to be going all over the place but a point I'd like to make to the posters who seem to be saying that it's OK to believe in something without evidence, the acceptance of a metaphysical god, is do you care if your beliefs are most likely true? That is, when you apply correspondence theory, what happens? Can you demonstrate your beliefs correspond to objective demonstrable reality?

 

Basically if you appear to be unconcerned whether or not your beliefs are true just because you have a warm fuzzy feeling when you sing a hymn in church then how can you be trusted to make honest, well adjusted decisions in life in general?

 

Utterly flawed thinking; you're making the entirely false assumption that believing or experiencing a 'false' belief/emotion i.e. 'God' precludes one from making valid, scientific, moral or practical judgements in other areas of ones life.

[Mr Prime]

Utterly flawed thinking; you're making the entirely false assumption that believing or experiencing a 'false' belief/emotion i.e. 'God' precludes one from making valid, scientific, moral or practical judgements in other areas of ones life.

 

It doesn't preclude it no but if you can't get the meaning of life right then it casts a shadow over other thinking.

 

Considering how many have been slaughtered in the name of non existent God's it shows how that flawed sky wishing ends up turning into ultra flawed murder over nothingness.

[pininsho]

You are welcome to compare my lifestyle with the average Joe if that is what you wish.

 

Apart from taking out a loan when I bought my first car and a mortgage I have never been in debt, never lived beyond my means, never been in trouble with wine, women, drugs, never had a week without a pay packet, never been in trouble with the police, my CRB check has nothing on it at all, I am still working age 66, I ran and cycled for fitness and fun, brought up a small child, am honest and reliable and my life has never been the mess of some.

 

That sort of record (I think) is testimony to a person who "can be trusted to make honest, well adjusted decisions in life in general."

 

Thank you for your open response.

Unfortunately all of the above is about you and the vast majority of both religious and non religious people would probably testify to something similar. Unfortunately for you I've read a lot of your posts and it's your attitude towards other people who have a different lifestyle to you that reinforces the idea that having a clear inabilty to think logically and then applying what you feel about somebody or something in it's place causes great harm which results in a lot of posters responding to you in an aggressive manner.