God

Everyone get off the internet. Since there is no shared, objective reality, the internet is a lie.

Cannot? I bet you could.

Whoa. What a nice and arcane word. Can I has hug?

SuperCrunch, dude, I think she just pulled the car over.

Things like hugs and whatnot are impossible without a shared objective reality. In fact, you are just an projection of my chimerical wanderings.

Or am I yours? Whatever, none of this is real.

That is so deep. I need to write a poem using only words that I can prove exist in all possible ways because of this. But, ink is just a means to reaffirm my existence and is thus a burden to me realizing the one true meaning of life. le sigh.

Pstt. Words are the most non-existy things ever.

Gah, why am I talking into the non-existence?

Because we have bacon and cake awaiting within.

I regret to inform you that cake and bacon are lies too.

Obviously I made a rather wide generalization there. And clearly there are some differences. Namely that religion is steadfast in its core belief structure and that science is constantly changing.

Human logic is clearly imperfect. Sure we're "supersmart" and all, but the idea that we're capable of understanding the world around us on anything other than a base level seems highly improbable to me. We have logical paradoxes, can't grasp infinity, have imperfect numbers etc. We like to affirm that we know the truth and yet we consistently prove ourselves wrong 100 years later.
Science just seems an awful lot like the whole Sophocles questioning method, we keep asking questions and maybe we're getting closer to the answer, but we'll never get to the core truth.
And before you ask... yes thats better than living in a "truth" devised 1000's of years ago with no basis in fact.

However, I think that all three are flawed on the basis that they're human-derived and as I've stated ad nauseum, our abilities for logic and observation are fundamentally lacking. I just feel as though this obsessive over-reliance on science will lead us down a road where we begin to lose our humanity by obsessing over "truths" that we have no need to know and will never know.

Say it ain't so, joe!

The effect of drugs on the human mind has no bearing on the reliability of the mind or perceptions under normal conditions. Why can't we trust logic? You have not provided any reasons why logic is unreliable. All you have offered as evidence is that people on drugs might not utilize logic. Better yet, give me a compelling argument why logic is unreliable.

So far, I am convinced that your attempt at logic is indeed untrustworthy and your senses are unreliable. However, I think you were trying to be more ambitious than that...

Also, I don't believe you at all. Everyone truly believes in things other than their own existences. Your very actions prove that you believe in far more than you are admitting. You eat food, you take showers, you go to work, you don't slap your waitress, you buy drugs from people, you call up your friends, you use a computer, etc. Are you seriously trying to claim that you don't really believe that food, water, your job, money, your waitress, your drugs, your drug dealer, your friends, or your computer don't exist? If so, you're pretty foolish for attempting to use these things and interact with them. If you really want to prove that you don't believe that anything outside of you exists, then stop eating. The rest of us will disprove you by continuing to eat and showing that we, in fact, believe quite strongly in the external world and its inhabitants.

Note: If people can't believe in anything beyond themselves, then you couldn't have believed in the drugs you took to have this insight and we couldn't believe that you took those drugs either. Moreover, we couldn't believe that you even exist, so your example would be meaningless. See how that's kind of problematic for your stance?

You are misusing the word "fallacy." A fallacy is not a false belief. Please look up the word and try again. Please also correctly identify the fallacy they are committing. Finally, please explain how your use of logic here is not self-defeating.

For having faith in nothing, you sure are putting forth a lot of positive claims. This trend is particularly the case when you are denying the ability to know anything outside of yourself. If we can't rely on our senses or logic, aren't all of our beliefs founded on faith? You're contradicting yourself quite strongly here.

I think it's quite obvious that you are not all that exists. For one, your imagination is demonstrably quite limited. You could not have possibly made up all of the other stuff in the world. I am asking you to be honest here: do you regularly encounter things in the world that you couldn't have thought up in advance? For instance, have you ever watched a movie and said "Wow, I wish I could have written something like that" or tasted a new kind of food and said "Wow, I didn't expect this to taste like that"? If so, then those things likely aren't creations of your mind (because by your own admission they were beyond your imagination/comprehension). On another level, could you really have made up all of the stuff in the world like books, foreign languages, genocides, trees, pomegranates, etc.? Some of those things would be incredibly random to just think up. Likewise, if the world is solely a product of your solipsistic mind, then why is your waking "reality" different from your dream states?

I think you need to really sit down and apply Occam's Razor here: what is a better explanation? Is it more likely that other people and things exist or that drugs gave you some special insight into the world and showed how everything except you isn't real?

That's because you contradict yourself.

Oh, brother. You smoke a lot of dope, don't you?

I read all of what you wrote. Rehashing it doesn't change the metrics at all.

And why are you so defensive?

Come again. I've a what, now? Tell me that you didn't turn all super-sexist.

RedBstrd: Now there's a man with some real insight under his belt. That man is smart!

Edit: I don't know how you have the patience to say things I'm sure you've had to say too many times in your life.

Actually, he just smokes hookah over at my house. A bit of tobacco yes, but no to the dope.

Um, he's 20?

I have a lot of faith in humanity. People are pretty awesome so I am willing to work with them.

Everyday people have a lot of patience with my failures too.

Note: That should have been:

I am not sure how that second "don't" got in there...

You're a good man. But it must feel like Groundhog's Day.

Yeah, but I like Groundhog Day! Not only did it have Bill Murray, but it had a version of the Nietzschean eternal recurrence. It doesn't get much better than that...

...except, of course, movies with Bill Murray and Scarlet Johansson in see-through panties. That qualifies as better.

Wow... you really took that drug statement and ran with it. You made an awful lot of assumptions about who I am and what my ideas are based on from that singular statement and it appears as though you are trying to discredit me based on my admitted past drug use.

As far as the definition of fallacy is concerned. I was afraid that I was misusing it when I wrote that and so I checked the definition before hand.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fallacy
Perhaps its you who should be checking definitions.

My first post was brought on by another post and was meant as an expansion on his ideas that he could only believe in himself. Which I think is a core fear within everyone and not entirely unsubstantiated. Its ultimately a fear of being alone and is why we seek to reaffirm our existences and the existences of others through social interaction. Its why I'm on the internet right now. Because I don't like being alone and through conversing with other people via a forum, I am helping to extinguish that fear. As I stated when my post was initially challenged by Thistle. I do not believe in a solipistic philosophy, I was simply using it to make a point. Looking at my posts out of context I can see how it would be a contradiction. However, I see no contradiction in stating one thing as easily inferable and yet actually believing in something totally different.


Arguing against logic is not a simple task. Since I am human, all of my assumptions and beliefs are clearly based on logic. Thus my premise that human logic is flawed would seemingly negate any conclusions I might draw from a logical process. This and many other logical paradoxes seem to be support the flawed nature of logic.
The fact that we're constantly evolving creatures with a constantly growing base of knowledge and technology strikes me as enough reason to call our logic imperfect. Surely a lower primate doesn't think that its own mental processes are fallacious. Yet us "higher beings" can clearly see some of the crazy and illogical things that animals do based off of their logic. The only reason you believe so much in your logic being "perfect", is because as humans we have the highest level of consciousness of all the beings on this planet and there is no basis for comparison to prove other wise.
Logic is subjective, is something we have evolved and learned thus it is constantly changing, subject to paradoxes and leads to disparate conclusions. What part of that doesn't look like a flawed system for coming to conclusions to you. I'm not saying you shouldn't use logic, that would be impossible and likely dangerous. I just find the steadfast obsession with "logic and reason" to be arrogant and misguided, especially when used as justification for religious belief, i.e. atheism or otherwise.

While I'm on the subject I'll go ahead and take a crack at observations. However, that is far easier than taking a crack at logic.
For one: light, sound, energy and particulate matter all take time to reach our senses. Some more than others. All of our observations are outdated before they even reach us. Particularly when it comes to space. Some of the stars we see in the sky are likely not even in existence any more. Yet we are still receiving signals that would lead us to conclude that they are still there.
For two: Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The act of observing something changes the object you are observing. When a photon hits an object it changes the position of that object, thus deeming the information received once that same photon reaches the retina to be incorrect.
For three: We only have 5 senses. One of which is mostly an extension of touch and smell. As I said in the previous paragraph we are evolving creatures, our senses are imperfect and we only have the ones necessary to our survival. We know there are many wavelengths of light and frequencies of sound outside of our reach. And who knows what other types of things exist that we cannot see, hear, smell or touch and will never know or be capable of understanding.

Ultimately our logic and observational skills are flawed. They are adequate for survival on this planet, because we have evolved to survive on this planet. However the notion that we can use these tools in order to affirm the existence of a god or make massive generalizations about the nature of the universe.

As for my own beliefs, (not the solipistic paragraph I wrote to make a point) I'm human, I am subject to the same flaws as everyone else and as I previously stated am just as likely to be wrong about the nature of the universe as anyone else. However the idea of an infinitely interconnected infinite universe comforts me with the notion of death and helps me to lead a better life. Despite my disregard for the beliefs of the theist and atheist, I have no beef what they choose to believe in, as long as it does for them what my beliefs do for me.


With that: I'm done. There's no way I'm going to be able to explain myself in a way that is going to make you understand.


wildswan: Your post reeks of condescension... which is one of the few things that I find offensive or insulting. If you don't like being insulted for being a woman then don't insult me for being 20.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fallacy
Perhaps its you who should be checking definitions.


Ok, let's check definitions:
Brittanica
Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Oxford Dictionary

Dictionary.com, being a popular dictionary, clearly reflects the way that people (incorrectly) use the term sometimes. A fallacy is a flaw in reasoning, not a false belief. It comes from Old Latin "fallacia," which means to deceive (in this case to deceive people into accepting the soundness of an assertion).

If you compare your claim (that obsession with science and logic is a fallacy) to any of the definitions and/or examples on Oxford (the definitive English dictionary), you will find that you are misusing the word.

I was being rhetorical when I asked you to make an argument against logic. If you put forth an claim and then offer additional statements in support of that statement, then you are utilizing logic even if you wish to attack it.

The premise that the human mind is flawed would not (even if true) refute logical truths. Analytic truths (modus tollens, mathematics, etc.) are dependent on the reliability of the human mind. The analytic truth that 1 1=2 is true regardless of what we may think about it (and that is reflected in the geometry of the real world). Likewise, a statement founded on modus ponens or modus tollens is true or false regardless of the human mind.

In your example comparing animals and humans, you are mistakenly condensing two things: logic and thought processes. Not everyone uses logic (or "formal logic" if you prefer), especially animals who are not capable of introspection (or consciousness of their thought processes). I think you are making valid points about our everyday thought processes, which are subjective. Formal logic is something different, though. Logic more describes a way that we should think than a way that we do think.

Still, where does this leave us? Is it arrogant and misguided to rely on logic and reasoning? You relied on it when responding to my previous post. I used it when responding to you. We make logical deductions quite often and have a great deal of success with them. Well, we've both agreed that logic and reasoning is helpful in our everyday lives, but you have asked that we not apply it to religion. Why not? Why shouldn't the most reliable mechanism we have for inquiry into the world be excluded from that topic? Do we have some other faculty that gives us better insight into the world, ourselves, etc., that should replace it?

Take faith for instance. People often argue that faith is appropriate for discussions of religion, but I don't think it actually does anything. Having faith in one's girlfriend, for instance, doesn't actually mean that she is loyal, nor does one's faith in her loyalty make it easier to know if she is loyal. In fact, faith neither makes things true nor gives us insight into what is true or not. Faith is only a description of one's beliefs. "I have faith in God" means "I believe in God" (or if Kierkegaard is right it means you have specific beliefs about the capability of God).

If you would like to offer a more reliable mechanism for investigating religious claims, I would love to hear it. As it stands though, deferring to the best faculty we have is neither arrogant nor misguided.

Note how your initial critique of our sense hinges on scale: we have trouble with very large or very small objects. In both of these cases, we can prevent the problems by utilizing the proper tools. Likewise, neither of these seems to affect humans in normal viewing conditions (i.e. we are pretty good about things that fall within the normal range of perception).

You're confusing the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle with the "observer effect." Regardless, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle only applies to sub-atomic particles. Viewing one's cat, for instance, isn't going to change it. Regardless, you are pointing to a limitation on measurement, not on perception.

Despite the problems in measurement (or our need to rely on tools to perceive things outside of normal viewing conditions), we make really good general observations about the world. In fact, technology is a great indicator that we understand well how the universe works: we use math and geometry to construct skyscrapers, algorithms to create computer processes, split atoms, etc. We have demonstrated an astounding ability to understand the world around us.

More importantly, though, how is any of this relevant to the existence of a God? Our ability to measure the position and velocity of sub-atomic particles at the same time doesn't seem to have much bearing on the status of Thor, for instance.

A better question might be: Given all of the progress of logic, science, and our understanding of the world, why do people feel the desire to cling to explanations offered two thousand years ago and then try to defend unreliable belief-forming mechanism (faith, emotion, etc.) because they can be used to support these explanations?

wildswan: Your post reeks of condescension... which is one of the few things that I find offensive or insulting. If you don't like being insulted for being a woman then don't insult me for being 20.

Regardless of what she says or does, it would not be wise to insult someone for being a woman on this site.