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Originally Posted by filtherton
I think that anyone familiar with formal logic will find any logical system is doomed to incompleteness or inconsistency. One need not be religious to put too much faith in logic.
This isn't to say that logic isn't useful, just that it is what it is.
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It depends on what you mean by "too much faith." Are we placing too much faith into a hammer because we think we can use it to plant nails into wood?
You cannot use logic to construct answers to all your questions but you can certainly use it to weed out fallacious thinking. Can you clarify your point, here?
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Well, yes, but I would include the belief in logic in there as one of those religions, provided of course that one has deified logic.
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Oh, are we going the "it's a religion, too!" route? Really?
It should be noted that very few people, religious or otherwise, believe that they are being illogical. If theists said "yes, I know what I believe makes no sense but I want to believe it, anyway" then I would have little problem with that. It's that they believe their position is, somehow, reasonable and is worthy of being enforced upon me that's the problem...
Logic simply works. Calling logic a religion is like calling physics a religion...
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It's an interesting way of claiming that one need not understand the intricacies of that which one criticizes if one rejects its general conclusions. It's a way of rationalizing the apparently underwhelming scope of Dawkins' understandings of religious belief.
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Context would be important, here. For instance, if your conclusion is outrageous and I can find a false premise in your argument, I think I can safely disregard your argument without understanding the rest of it...
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Perhaps my response is more attributable to the fact that I infer much of my information about Dawkins from the things the people who are into him say. In retrospect, it isn't necessarily a very good way to get an accurate idea of the claims he's actually made.
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In my experience, people have their own opinions and use famous, credible people who somewhat share their opinion to bolster their own, even if those opinions differ subtley...
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It was pretty naive, and seemingly all too common. Science still satisfies my curiosity to a limited extent; it's just satisfaction that is immediately followed by apathy or more curiosity depending on whether I'm interested in getting further into whatever I happen to be studying. When I got into it, I wasn't expecting a neverending chain of whys. It required a slight mental adjustment.
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It's easy to make false generalizations of things we don't understand. It's obvious how much science affects our lives despite how little people understand what science is. Combine this with the simple fact that most people don't really need to know, exactly, how science works and you'll create a common misconception...
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I know what you're saying; it's difficult to reconcile young earth creationism with the fossil record without turning your god into a trickster. That being said, if one is inclined to go that route, to claim that god planted fossils to trick us is not falsifiable, despite how far-fetched.
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If your hypotheses are not falsifiable then, arguably, they are not statements of reality. Again, we are back to our use of terms...
If you're going to state that your religion somehow reflects reality then, by my terms, it is subject to scientific inquiry.
Regardless, creationists do not claim to worship a trickster god planting evidence so their religion remains scientifically disprovable...
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I think the logic of religion is interesting in that its axioms are frequently created and modified based on the conclusions one hopes to draw from them. It's a very cart before the horse kind of thing. It isn't always a bad way of doing things, though. It seems like there is a fair amount of philosophical musing that uses logic in the very same way. It isn't generally a good way to carry out science, but then again, I think it is only a confused and insecure theist who would claim otherwise.
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In other words, religion is the rationalization of what one wants. I don't find this interesting...
Incidentally, by your criteria, there are a awful lot of confused and insecure theists out there...
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Originally Posted by roachboy
my sentences are rarely malformed.
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Oh, this is going to be difficult to explain but I suppose that you deserve an explanation.
Let me give you a trivial example...
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if you want to say something about an argument that i made just do it.
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First of all, I don't have anything to say about your argument or I would simply have said so. I really only had something to say about how you state your arguments because I do want to know what the hell you're saying and you don't make it easy.
For instance, this paragraph would be more clearly written as "if you want to say something about an argument that i made
then just do it." While I was able to discern your meaning with little difficulty, it is still malformed.
More seriously, take this sentence for example:
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this doesn't mean that anything goes, that rigor doesn't matter in games that call for rigor--but it does mean that there are fundamental dimensions of being that you don't know about---but not knowing does not require that you therefore go running to a god to enable you to pretend that at some level or another the situation is otherwise any more than it should prompt you to make ludicrous claims about the comprehensiveness of logic's ability to account for the world.
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Ignoring your bizarre use of dashes, let me remove the qualifiers of the sentence after the last use of dashes to get to the central point.
Not knowing does not require that you go running to a god to enable you to pretend that the situation is
any more than it should prompt you to make claims about the comprehensiveness of logic's ability to account for the world.
The bold is what I think may be the source of confusion. I understand the part about claims of what logic can do. I understand that "not knowing" (ignorance) does not require God. What I fail to understand is how you're relating the two sentence fragments. Religion enables you to pretend that the situation is... what? That it is any more than... it should prompt you to do something? Does that make sense to you? What is "it" in "it should prompt you to?"
I cannot parse this sentence and I hope you can see why. This is a good example of how I view all your sentences. I simply don't understand what you're saying and this happens with astounding consistency...
I am complaining because, based on the few fragments I can discern, you actually understand some subtle points and I honestly wish I knew what the hell you're saying!