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Originally Posted by Johnny Rotten
There's anecdotal ignorance on both sides of the fence. Those anecdotes do not address the underlying reasoning. While some people are secular because they follow a certain logical rigor, others simply reject God because they are bitter or angst-ridden. So? Does the presence of the latter group mean that atheism is a weak position? No. No more than the ridiculous claims of fundamentalist Christianity define theism. They merely occupy stations in a spectrum.
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I agree. This doesn't agree with your claim that atheism is a conclusion of logic. All atheism is is a rejection of belief in a deity. Logic need not have anything to do with it, and frequently it doesn't. It has nothing to do with atheism being a weak position; one would need to know more about the particular justifications one uses for being an atheist.
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As for your claim that a person can't say that the Universe behaves logically -- of course it does! People can tend towards the irrational, but the laws of physics are pretty well defined. When we get down to the subatomic level, we get paradoxes like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. But does that mean or even suggest that God or something mystical hides within this gap of understanding? That depends: How rational are you?
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I didn't say the universe doesn't behave logically. I said that it is very difficult to make a sound logical argument that the universe is absolutely logical, especially in light of certain phenomena that seem to be completely random (assuming my understanding of them is correct). It has nothing to do with god. What it does speak to is the inherent flaw, from a scientific perspective, in assuming that the universe is governed completely by logic.
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But when no testable data ever represents itself, over the course of thousands of years, you have to eventually move on to something that is in some way tangible.
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You have to? Why? I mean, I understand the thirst for actual, verifiable scientific knowledge, but I also understand that most people don't care, because it doesn't really matter to them. Most people only care about science to the extent that they enjoy watching dumbed down bits of it on the discovery channel. I think that there are a great many atheist who have merely replaced god with anyone with a PhD or a lab coat. It isn't logical at all, just a substitution. You seem to make the same mistake that many religious folk do, which is that you presume to have the correct perspective, instead of just a perspective. There is more to the world than that which can be independently verified in peer reviewed academic journals.
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I'm usually a diplomatic guy in these discussions, but... I just got through saying how it's a leap of faith. You're going much further than most religious folk, who acknowledge and accept and are sometimes even proud of the fact that their decision is not based on logic.
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What's you're point? I thought we were in agreement that the words of a subset of members of a group don't define that group.
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Second, separating logic and science this way is, frankly, ridiculous. Logic is used by science all the time. Math is logic, only defined with numbers instead of words. Science is observation, with logic (often math) used to determine what the observed phenomenon is.
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Logic is used by science all time, that is correct. Logic uses science never at all; people often reference science while using logic, but there is nothing about logic that requires science. Logic and science are separated every time someone writes coherent science fiction.
And as far as math goes, science needs math a lot more than math needs science. Mathematically speaking, one can rotate an infinitely large area around one of its boundaries and end up with a finitely large volume. Scientifically speaking, no. If all the natural laws of the universe changed overnight, there is no single purely mathematical proof that would need to be changed. Without math, science would be pretty much useless for a lot of things. Without science, math would be pretty much useless too. They are complementary, but they are still separate; there are a whole lot of "pure" mathematicians who frown upon the idea of wasting their time developing useful mathematics.