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Dean

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Posted: April 08 2013 at 02:18

rogerthat wrote:

There is a third way...what Einstein subscribed to, called pantheism. I am not interested in the minute details of it, whether or not I agree with everything that it is supposed to entail. It is broadly similar to my views. Rather than writing long paras to justify my beliefs, let me put it this way. I believe God gave us Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Darwin and many other great scientists to open our eyes to the world we live in and get rid of our ignorance and blind faith in fables. I get it, everything, including the Big Bang, is a phenomenon that is a victim of random chance. But on balance, I'd like to reflect and say that this game of chance could have gone so horribly wrong, so much worse. So maybe an invisible hand rolled out the magic numbers on the dice to keep the ship steady. I much prefer this notion to that of a monkey God carrying a mountain on his shoulders. Science hasn't yet advanced to the point where we can predict an earthquake to the minute, to the second. I am not going to say it is impossible because what may not be possible today might be tomorrow. But that may not happen in my lifetime and I can't wait to find out. Rather than thanking 'random chance', I'd like to thank God for allowing me to wake up to another day of life.

There is a fourth way... post-theism. Simply that we have outgrown the concept of gods and have no further use for them. In post-theism gods can exist or have existed or simply never existed, they can have existed and never revealed themselves or they can have been an invention of man.

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stonebeard View Drop Down

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Posted: April 08 2013 at 02:39

dr wu23 wrote:

Lot of words there but when you distill it down we are back at square one that says no one knows...that's still called agnosticism last time I looked...and still imo the only tenable position.

And no...not hedging any bets...just being honest.

Sure it's tenable. I self-identify as an atheist, but when you press me on the issue of what we actually know, you might get me to eventually admit that I should properly be called an agnostic, since being absolutely certain there is no God isn't very defensible giving the limits of human knowledge. But there is something to be said of self-identifying as an atheist rather than an agnostic. It is taking that step, and choosing a side. I understand wanting to be true to ones own convictions, or lack thereof in the case of agnostics, but there's only so much hand-wringing that a person can do before saying, "All right, I admit it. I act like there's no God in my day to day life, so I might as well just admit it. Yes technically I don't know, but for all practical purposes I live my life like an atheist. So call me what you will."

It's not about hedging bets, nor about Pascal's Wager. Go where your heart tells you to go, but as far as I know, no one's heart tells them to muddle about in existential confusion forever.

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Gerinski

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Posted: April 08 2013 at 03:22

Dean wrote:

On the face of it what proof have we that a god may or may not exist? One-tenth of bugger-all really. We have some stories. Written in books. By men.

This is certainly true of all the fictional gods (all of those in your long list, from Thor to Yaweh and all in between).

But proof is not the only rational justification for guessing, or even believing, that a 'god' (understood simply as some higher entity involved in the existence (and perhaps workings) of the universe which we can not at present comprehend) is likely to exist.

Logic alone, without proof or even empirical suggestion, has been a very useful guidance for many scientific advances, many conjectures have been regarded as reasonably accepted scientific truth for years and proof / empirical confirmation came only later.

Einstein deduced special relativity and all of its counterintuitive consequences (the invariability of the speed of light, length contraction, time dilation etc) purely from applying logical reasoning around 1904. Proofs of all these phenomena came only much later.

The fact that electromagnetic energy must be quantized was deduced by Max Plank and Einstein also from applying logical reasoning to the black body radiation problem, with proof coming only later.

Schwarzschild had no proof or even observational or experimental suggestion of the existence of black holes, he deduced their likely existence purely from working out solutions to Einstein's general relativity equations in 1916, reasonable proof of their existence was not obtained until the 70's.

The existence of the Higgs boson was predicted by logic and mathematical consistency and has remained a reasonably accepted scientific truth without proof for decades.

Alan Turing deduced that it should be possible to build a universal computer applying logic, before there was any physical evidence suggesting that it could indeed be done.

Similarly, even if the existence of a god is at least at present beyond any reasonable possibility for empirical inquiry (and very possibly forever), some people may, from their logic system of (non religious!) beliefs, forge the opinion that the existence of a god is more likely than, for example, the likelihood that our universe started by pure chance out of nothing, that it's all what there is and that there is no deeper explanation for its existence.

This would not mean adhering to any of the existing religions nor thinking that such a god should deserve worship or demand any particular code of action during our human life. Practically it would not make any difference with living as an atheist.

In a certain sense, being agnostic is more compatible with the scientific spirit than being atheist, since science is based on always questioning the existing body of knowledge, always aiming at searching for deeper explanations even if the hypothesis suggested by logical reasoning seem at present crazy and untestable, while atheists simply take the current status of knowledge (that all evidence suggests that there is no god) as sufficient truth and give up to question further.

I do not personally favour much this position, at present my logic does not lead me to believe that a god likely exists, but I just want to insist that such a position may be legitimate and that such a god would not be based on ancient tales and books but on individual opinion forged in the present.

Dean

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Posted: April 08 2013 at 03:42

dr wu23 wrote:

Lot of words there but when you distill it down we are back at square one that says no one knows...that's still called agnosticism last time I looked...and still imo the only tenable position.

And no...not hedging any bets...just being honest.

Alas, I lack the skill of being succinct, then I happen to think there is more to using lots of words than just padding, such as using the word "attempting" to change the meaning of a phrase, or simply by adding clarification or broader/narrower explanation. There are lots of things that "no one knows" that many people are happy to say do not exist by merely looking at the complete lack of evidence and complete lack of explanation like sasquatch, ghosts, telekinesis, the elixir of life, unicorns, and sure enough, a several pantheons of gods. The "ah, you can't prove they don't exist" tactic carries no weight. Agnosticism is no more or less tenable than atheism or theism, it is no more or less honest either; and sorry, but "no one knows" is not agnosticism, you can say "no one knows" and still be a theist, you can say "no one knows" and still be an atheist. You can even say "no one will ever know" and still be any one of those three because they were never about "knowing" in the first place.

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Argonaught View Drop Down

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Posted: April 08 2013 at 05:31

dr wu23 wrote:

Lot of words there but when you distill it down we are back at square one that says no one knows...that's still called agnosticism last time I looked...and still imo the only tenable position.

And no...not hedging any bets...just being honest.

yes (sorry, Mr. Dean, gossipin' about you right now), the voluminous thesis above came across like an energetic, albeit futile attempt to waltz away from the fact that, well, we just don't have a way of knowing anything for sure. "I only know that I know nothing, but some don't even know that".

By the way, if you look with your mind open, the Biblical cosmogony may not be all that irreconcilable with what our scientific knowledge postulates today (which will continue to change as our concepts evolve and develop). If you said to someone mere 2 generations ago that all his/her books, music and photos could be carried around in a chip the size of the pinky nail, it would sound as ridiculous as squeezing all the worlds animals, in pairs, into a boat. You see, pix/dox/music can be digitized; and the ark could have been carrying the DNA code. Still sounds like complete obscurantist nonsense?

Dean

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Posted: April 08 2013 at 05:46

Gerinski wrote:

Dean wrote:

On the face of it what proof have we that a god may or may not exist? One-tenth of bugger-all really. We have some stories. Written in books. By men.

This is certainly true of all the fictional gods (all of those in your long list, from Thor to Yaweh and all in between).

One word: Testability.

Gerinski wrote:

The fact that electromagnetic energy must be quantized was deduced by Max Plank and Einstein also from applying logical reasoning to the black body radiation problem, with proof coming only later.

The existence of the Higgs boson was predicted by logic and mathematical consistency and has remained a reasonably accepted scientific truth without proof for decades.

Alan Turing deduced that it should be possible to build a universal computer applying logic, before there was any physical evidence suggesting that it could indeed be done.

One word: Testability.

Gerinski wrote:

One word: Untestability.

Gerinski wrote:

Then what use is it, what practical value would it have... what is it for? It would not be a religion that's for sure.

Gerinski wrote:

Science is not religion. Science does not deal in absolutes. Agnosticism is not application of the scientifc method or spirit, it's resignation to the fact that they don't know something, that is the opposite of science.

Gerinski wrote:

No one ever said it was not legitimate, my previous reply on this remains: "For them"

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Gerinski

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Posted: April 08 2013 at 06:05

My science examples were misleading, I never meant that such a position would be scientific, by definition any hypotesis which is not falsifiable is not scientific (although incidentally we need to start getting to grips with the fact that much serious modern science deals with hypotesis which are not falsifiable, at least in the foreseeable future (string theory, parallel universes, brane-worlds, parent-baby universes etc etc). Mathematical consistency alone is possibly becoming what empirical falsification was in the times of Popper (to clarify, this was a digression, mathematical consistency surely does not apply either to the subject in question).

I only meant that the argument that every god is the product of ancient tales and books is not necessarily true, some people may believe in the existence of a god without resorting to any of those tales and books.

And regarding testability, to say that logical consistency has been enough for theories to be respected even before it was conceivable that they might be ever testable in practice.

Indeed, that would not be a religion, never said it would, it would just be a personal belief with little if any practical utility.

I fully accept the for them statement.

Edited by Gerinski - April 08 2013 at 06:12

Dean

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Posted: April 08 2013 at 06:44

Argonaught wrote:

dr wu23 wrote:

Lot of words there but when you distill it down we are back at square one that says no one knows...that's still called agnosticism last time I looked...and still imo the only tenable position.

And no...not hedging any bets...just being honest.

Did it? Oh. Silly me. If you are being that pedantic, we don't know anything for sure. Not one thing. Nada. This is changes nothing - I'll still buy a kilo of potatoes even though I cannot be sure that the shop keeper will weigh an exact kilo of potatoes, or that the kilo of potatoes isn't really a tonne of carrots, or a pink balloon.

Argonaught wrote:

Back in 1995-97 I wrote a silly little ezine on the young version internet (before it grew-up to be a corporate shopping mall) where I converted the biblical ark dimensions from archaic cubits to nice modern metric units and then computed the total enclosed volume created by those measurements and calculated that it would allow 1.3µm³ for a pair of every species of creature that ever existed on Earth in its history (this point is important if you also hold with the Young Earth idea), from that I speculated that this would only be possible as DNA. Not withstanding of course that extracting DNA in the Bronze Age Middle East was an unknown science, that microscopes had not been invented yet and they would not have the technology to reconstitute a creature from a single DNA sample, or that collecting those creatures from around the World in less than seven days would also be unachievable with the technology they had at their disposal (it is highly questionable they could achieve this feat even if we limit the number of animals to those extant species from their local area ... "Hey Shem, how many creeping things have you caught today?" ... "Two score and six" ... "Oh dear, the manifest says there are several thousand..."). In that ezine I also commented upon the similarities between the biblical creation myth and scientific cosmogony, except of course that science would prefer that suns (composed of simplest element: hydrogen) came into existence before a watery formless lump of rock floating in the void (as both water and rock are more complex molecules of more complex elements), and we'd prefer it if the Earth was spinning while it was being formed and not set into motion after the event, which would mean that technically night-and-day existed as the Earth was forming and not later-on during the first day. Still, I never said it sounded like complete obscurantist nonsense.. I have enough to deal with concerning the words I do say and write without worrying about words you want to put into my mouth, but hey, it's only a playful mind-game, a lighthearted excursion that no one should take seriously (I certainly don't) and nothing to get het up about.

Edited by Dean - April 08 2013 at 06:47

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dr wu23

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Posted: April 08 2013 at 11:51

Dean wrote:

dr wu23 wrote:

Lot of words there but when you distill it down we are back at square one that says no one knows...that's still called agnosticism last time I looked...and still imo the only tenable position.

And no...not hedging any bets...just being honest.

You can say whatever you want but the bottom line is no one knows....period.

And for me that's as good as it gets. All the rest is just mental masturbation.

One does nothing yet nothing is left undone.
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Dean

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Posted: April 08 2013 at 12:02

dr wu23 wrote:

Dean wrote:

dr wu23 wrote:

Lot of words there but when you distill it down we are back at square one that says no one knows...that's still called agnosticism last time I looked...and still imo the only tenable position.

And no...not hedging any bets...just being honest.

You can say whatever you want but the bottom line is no one knows....period.

And for me that's as good as it gets. All the rest is just mental masturbation.

How unpleasantly rude of you to say so, and with a cute little smiley face too. Why did you even bother posting?

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dr wu23

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Posted: April 08 2013 at 12:50

Dean wrote:

dr wu23 wrote:

Dean wrote:

dr wu23 wrote:

Lot of words there but when you distill it down we are back at square one that says no one knows...that's still called agnosticism last time I looked...and still imo the only tenable position.

And no...not hedging any bets...just being honest.

You can say whatever you want but the bottom line is no one knows....period.

And for me that's as good as it gets. All the rest is just mental masturbation.

How unpleasantly rude of you to say so, and with a cute little smiley face too. Why did you even bother posting?

Rude...? Are you serious or just overly sensitive....? Lighten up a bit.

geesh........

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Dean

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Posted: April 08 2013 at 13:07

dr wu23 wrote:

Rude...? Are you serious or just overly sensitive....? Lighten up a bit.

geesh........

Rude enough for me to giggle about it, not rude enough for me to ball my tiny fists and have an aneurysm. I would have thought my tone in this thread (and others) is sufficiently light-hearted for it to be obvious that I take very little seriously and am far from over sensitive. Sure everything I write on this subject (and many others) is mental masturbation, and that is indeed a guilty pleasure, do you honestly think I sit calculating the volume of a mythical (and somewhat implausible) boat for any reason other than personal amusement and possbly to raise a smile in one or two others who may perhaps also find it amusing to indulge in a little menial mental distraction? Yet to have someone disregard what I had posted in honest reply to something they said and have them merely repeat their view I find to be a little disrespectful of the time I took in writting that reply. I guess that does make me sensitive, but I don't think that is overly so.

peace out.

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dr wu23

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Posted: April 08 2013 at 13:48

Dean wrote:

dr wu23 wrote:

Rude...? Are you serious or just overly sensitive....? Lighten up a bit.

geesh........

peace out.

Fair enough.......,

I wasn't being 'dismissive' or ignoring your words btw. For me the bottom line is it's an unknown so why beat a dead horse?

One of my all time favorite writers once said:

"If you think you know what's going on you are probably full of sh*te."

Robert Anton Wilson

One does nothing yet nothing is left undone.
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Posted: April 10 2013 at 20:27

Dean wrote:

Ambient Hurricanes wrote:

Here we go...

Dean and I were having a debate in the gay marriage thread that veered quite off the topic at hand; he requested that I move the debate to this thread, a request with which I will happily comply. I'm not going to bother summarizing the whole thing; it's all over there in the other thread.

Dean wrote:

My statement was not without prior qualification, I specifically stated "religious belief" and "secular opinion" and from that point on the qualification was implied and maintained in subsequent posts. Of course my secular belief that the Earth is a sphere of rock orbiting the sun is not an opinion, secular or religious, just as my opinion that the Earth is 4.5billion years old is not so much an opinion but a belief supported by scientific evidence (as opposed to the religious belief that the Earth is 6,500 years old supported by a biblical chronology that most theologians find dubious - I would find it difficult to accept the Young Earth idea as merely an opinion). No, I delineated my point several times by stating categorically I was referring to "religious belief" vs "secular opinion" ... rather than say, "religious belief" vs "secular belief"; "religious opinion" vs "secular opinion" or "religious opinion" vs "secular belief".

A "Religious belief" can only be held by religious people, non club members cannot share that belief, however, a religious person can have a secular opinion that non club members can share, for example you and Alex (and I come to that) share the opinion that In Absentia is a 5-star album - while some may elevate everything that SWilson creates to god-like proportions, that is not a religious belief.

The statement that homosexuality is a sin is purely a religious belief, it is not an opinion because it is not based upon subjective reasoning, it is written in the Bible (Cor 6:9 etc,etc) and is therefore part of the belief-system. For a religious person to hold an opinion that is counter to that is in itself a sin; the religious person did not arrive at the conclusion that homosexuality is a sin by any subjective perspective - they were told and they believed.

You're whole argument is based upon the premise that religious belief is simply a blind acceptance of authority, which it is not. You're trying to draw a distinction between "belief" founded on some authority and "opinion" founded on subjective reasoning; if there's any difference it is one of degree and not of kind, and each is inclusive of the other because every truth claim anyone makes, either in their own mind or in public, is founded upon both faith and reason. The balance between the two might be different in any given case, but that's dependent not only upon the truth claim but upon the person holding the truth claim. I am rationally convinced that Jesus rose from the dead, for example; I believe this to be objectively true. I do not found this upon mere blind faith; from my knowledge of history and the texts that talk about Jesus and human nature and everything else that relates to the subject I have become convinced that Jesus' resurrection is the truth. This truth claim of mine requires both faith and subjective reasoning; it is belief and it is opinion.

And if you think that Christians merely blindly believe the stuff in the Bible without thinking about it for themselves, you are sorely mistaken. I read the Bible rationally. I don't blindly accept everything I read in it. Study of Scripture and of the history surrounding it has confirmed my belief (and my opinion) that it speaks the truth.

If you did not believe in the resurrection you would (by definition) not be a christian. Your "truth" is not an empirical truth or an objective truth nor is it a relative truth, it is a subjective truth and a revealed truth and an absolute truth. You are permitted to regard it as an absolute truth within the framework of your religion because that is fundamental to your faith, it is not appicable outside that framework. You cannot claim an objective truth if the reasoning you used was based upon subjective evidence and other subjective and/or revealed truths. We must allow the distinction between these different kinds of truth to be different and separate and not mix them willy-nilly in the hope that one will form a counter argument for the other. You believe the revealed truth that Jesus is the son of god, that cannot be an objective truth because the existence of god is not an objective truth, it is an absolute truth [in your religion]. You believe it to be a truth because it is the foundation of your religion, judaism and islam recognise the revealed truth of the same god but do not recognise Jesus as the son of god, muslims do however accept him as a prophet. Atheists accept that Jesus existed as a man based upon the empirical evidence, but do not regard his resurrection or claim to be the son of a god to be a rational, empirical or objective truth.

The words "belief", "truth", "faith", "absolute" (and "theory") have different meanings in different contexts and [those meanings] are not commutable. I do not believe that your belief in the bible is blind belief, quite the contrary, it is just not the same belief; there is a difference between objective belief and subjective belief and there is a diffference between religious belief and secular belief. The words are the same but the meanings and usage are different.

I will post the same thing here I posted in the other thread:

Dictionary wrote:

ob·jec·tive: 2. Having actual existence or reality.

The claim that Jesus rose from the dead is an objective truth claim because it is a claim about objective reality. Christians do not claim that Jesus rose from the dead in their heads, or only in the context of their religion, or that it only matters to Christians whether He rose or not. The resurrection does not exist within the framework of my religion. Whether or not it happened matters to all people. Everywhere. Because if Jesus really rose from the dead, then the implication is that you had better do something about it because He is God and is coming to judge the world.

I do not believe that Jesus rose from the dead merely because it is the foundation of my religion. I am a Christian because I believe that He rose from the dead, and I believe that He rose because I am convinced that all the historical evidence supports the veracity of the resurrection. Your different kinds of truth don't make any sense. Truth is correspondence with reality. When someone makes a truth claim, he is making a claim about correspondence with reality. Thus, it is an objective claim because it is a claim about actual reality. You don't have to believe in Jesus. You can argue against the veracity of the claims Christians make about Him, provide historical and philosophical evidence, and have a good robust debate about it. I welcome this. But it makes no sense to dismiss it as subjective, or only valid in the context of a religion. This doesn't do the truth claim justice. It's marginalizing your debate opponent instead of meeting him head on.

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CPicard

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Posted: April 10 2013 at 20:49

Some people call it "resurrection". Other people say: "he waked up after a three day coma".

Snow Dog

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Posted: April 11 2013 at 07:35

CPicard wrote:

Some people call it "resurrection". Other people say: "he waked up after a three day coma".

Some may say "the body was taken"

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Posted: April 11 2013 at 07:41

CPicard wrote:

Some people call it "resurrection". Other people say: "he waked up after a three day coma".

I don't listen to those people because they don't know the past tense of wake is woke, not waked. Tongue

Some people dismiss the whole resurrection thing as silliness too. Wink

I can understand your anger at me, but what did the horse I rode in on ever do to you?

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Posted: April 11 2013 at 07:52

Some deeply religious people may say " He was merely a prophet"

CPicard

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Posted: April 11 2013 at 10:37

The Doctor wrote:

CPicard wrote:

Some people call it "resurrection". Other people say: "he waked up after a three day coma".

I don't listen to those people because they don't know the past tense of wake is woke, not waked. Tongue

Some people dismiss the whole resurrection thing as silliness too. Wink

Well, I skipped the lesson about irregular verbs and went straight to the cursing lesson. Would you like a sample? Stern Smile

I think I wrote this message around 3:00 a.m. (French time), so I'm not surprised there are some grammar errors.

Dean

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Posted: April 11 2013 at 17:11

Ambient Hurricanes wrote:

Dean wrote:

If you did not believe in the resurrection you would (by definition) not be a christian. Your "truth" is not an empirical truth or an objective truth nor is it a relative truth, it is a subjective truth and a revealed truth and an absolute truth. You are permitted to regard it as an absolute truth within the framework of your religion because that is fundamental to your faith, it is not appicable outside that framework. You cannot claim an objective truth if the reasoning you used was based upon subjective evidence and other subjective and/or revealed truths. We must allow the distinction between these different kinds of truth to be different and separate and not mix them willy-nilly in the hope that one will form a counter argument for the other. You believe the revealed truth that Jesus is the son of god, that cannot be an objective truth because the existence of god is not an objective truth, it is an absolute truth [in your religion]. You believe it to be a truth because it is the foundation of your religion, judaism and islam recognise the revealed truth of the same god but do not recognise Jesus as the son of god, muslims do however accept him as a prophet. Atheists accept that Jesus existed as a man based upon the empirical evidence, but do not regard his resurrection or claim to be the son of a god to be a rational, empirical or objective truth.

The words "belief", "truth", "faith", "absolute" (and "theory") have different meanings in different contexts and [those meanings] are not commutable. I do not believe that your belief in the bible is blind belief, quite the contrary, it is just not the same belief; there is a difference between objective belief and subjective belief and there is a diffference between religious belief and secular belief. The words are the same but the meanings and usage are different.

I will post the same thing here I posted in the other thread:

Dictionary wrote:

ob·jec·tive: 2. Having actual existence or reality.

The same dictionary wrote:

adj.

1. Of or having to do with a material object.

2. Having actual existence or reality.

3.
a. Uninfluenced by emotions or personal prejudices: an objective critic. See Synonyms at fair1.
b. Based on observable phenomena; presented factually: an objective appraisal.

4. Medicine Indicating a symptom or condition perceived as a sign of disease by someone other than the person affected.

5. Grammar
a. Of, relating to, or being the case of a noun or pronoun that serves as the object of a verb.
b. Of or relating to a noun or pronoun used in this case.

n.
1. Something that actually exists.
2. Something worked toward or striven for; a goal. See Synonyms at intention.

3. Grammar
a. The objective case.
b. A noun or pronoun in the objective case.

4. The lens or lens system in a microscope or other optical instrument that first receives light rays from the object and forms the image. Also called object glass, objective lens, object lens.

We are conversing in english - this was the first language to have developed in a purely christian country in the total thrall of that religion where the was no separation of church and state. The english we speak has little in common with the anglo-saxon old english or any of the pre-christian brythonic and celtic languages, it was not developed as a language prior to the arrival of christianity, unlike hebrew or greek or latin or spanish or any of the germanic or scandinavian languages - and I would posit that because of that english is not only the first christian language, it is the only christian language. Therefore all of the words we have like "belief" and "absolute" that we use in a secular form are originally of theological origin and only had theological meanings and usage to begin with, but when we took those words out of that religious context their meanings altered which gives them ambiguity - French was preferred as the language of diplomacy because it did not have such ambiguity, perfidious albion exists because we can say one thing that can be interpreted in too many ways.

For example "absolute" did not mean "total" or "unequivocal" or "without limit", it meant "unattached" - i.e not connected to anything else - it was a theological word that meant essentially - "from god". When we use it in a secular sense we no longer mean "from god" - absolute despot or absolute power or absolute zero or absolute hot all use a different meaning of the word than it does in the context of say "Jesus is god is an absolute truth" - In presuming that the secular meaning of the word is valid in that context is an error, the phrase does not mean "Jesus is god is an unequivocal truth", it means "Jesus is god is a truth from god". If proof was needed of this then just consider the word "absolution", which is an ecclesiastical word derived from the theological meaning of "absolute", not the secular meaning(s). When early christians used the phrase "absolute truth" they meant "truth from god" not "unequivocal truth"

Of course you may believe that "Jesus is god is an unequivocal truth", and once again I will state categorically that you have to believe that to be a christian, but you cannot claim that for all or claim that the whole phrase is an objective truth of non-christians. (more of this later, unless I get bored). Since for christans "absolute truth" is the same as "unequivocal truth" so "absolute" became synonymous with "unequivocal", that does not make it objective, it is still "truth from god" and that's not objective truth.

You cannot pick and chose which meaning of a word you want to have applied in any given context, the context in which it is used determines the meaning, not the other way around.

1+1=10 is an absolute truth in the Binary Numeral System (Base-2), it is false in every other base, in every other numerical base 1+1=2 is an absolute truth, Two different contexts, two different truths.

Ambient Hurricanes wrote:

The claim that Jesus rose from the dead is an objective truth claim because it is a claim about objective reality. Christians do not claim that Jesus rose from the dead in their heads, or only in the context of their religion, or that it only matters to Christians whether He rose or not. The resurrection does not exist within the framework of my religion. Whether or not it happened matters to all people. Everywhere. Because if Jesus really rose from the dead, then the implication is that you had better do something about it because He is God and is coming to judge the world.

That is a serious misuse of the word "objective". It would be objective if the reality was categorically and unequivocally and universally true, and it is not - it fails to meet any of the definitions of "objective" no matter how you argue that. The claim is a truthful claim, but what it is claiming is not a truth. It is not a reality so can not be objective, it can only be objective if you can demonstrate that it actually exists in reality. It can be an objective truth or it can be an objective falsehood and that can only be determined through testability, which it does not have.

Your statement that "The resurrection does not exist within the framework of my religion." does not make sense, I suspect you typed something different to what was in your head - because of course the resurrection exist within the framework of your religion- without it you don't have a religion.

However, I am pleased you use the words "if" and "implication" in the last sentence. The implication if Jesus really did not rise from the dead is that he's not god and he's not coming. Any judging to be done then would be self-judgement, and the weight of that will be considerable.

Ambient Hurricanes wrote:

I do not believe that Jesus rose from the dead merely because it is the foundation of my religion. I am a Christian because I believe that He rose from the dead, and I believe that He rose because I am convinced that all the historical evidence supports the veracity of the resurrection. Your different kinds of truth don't make any sense. Truth is correspondence with reality. When someone makes a truth claim, he is making a claim about correspondence with reality. Thus, it is an objective claim because it is a claim about actual reality. You don't have to believe in Jesus. You can argue against the veracity of the claims Christians make about Him, provide historical and philosophical evidence, and have a good robust debate about it. I welcome this. But it makes no sense to dismiss it as subjective, or only valid in the context of a religion. This doesn't do the truth claim justice. It's marginalizing your debate opponent instead of meeting him head on.

I never said that you believed in the resurrection merely because it is the foundation of your religion. I would never use that implication nor would I use the word "merely" in that context. I do not write between the lines because people have enough problems reading what I write on the line. Here is what I wrote:

If you did not believe in the resurrection you would (by definition) not be a christian
Your "truth" is [...] an absolute truth within the framework of your religion because that is fundamental to your faith.
You believe the revealed truth that Jesus is the son of god, [...] You believe it to be a truth because it is the foundation of your religion.

Now, unless the concept of christianity has changed since I was a christian, that's pretty much the definition of what it is to be a christian, and wikipedia seems to back me up here:

wiki wrote:

The central tenet of Christianity is the belief in Jesus as the Son of God and the Messiah (Christ). [...] The core Christian belief is that through belief in and acceptance of the death and resurrection of Jesus, sinful humans can be reconciled to God and thereby are offered salvation and the promise of eternal life.

In other words, the christian religion was built on the foundation that Jesus is the son of god and he rose from the dead. So if you do not believe either of those then you are not a christian. Of course you can believe both those things and not be a christian, but that's getting too semantic even for the Atheist/Agnostoc thread.

Truth is not just about correspondence with reality - for a truth to be valid in that (theory) there must exist something in reality that affirms it - once you apply correspondence to something that exists outside reality or cannot be proven to exist in reality there is no correspondence so it cannot be regarded as a truth. What you are suggesting is the truth affirms the reality by correspondence, which is not only backwards, it is practically circular. If my different kinds of truth (namely: empirical, revealed, objective, subjective, relative and absolute) don't make any sense to you then we are at an impasse because life is too short for me to explain them here (sorry for the cop-out - read a book, they're more informative than I will ever be). Nor is it dismissive to state that a truth is subjective - as if that infers some second-class citizenship upon it making it lesser of a truth than objective truth, a subjective truth is a valid truth, it just has no defence against an objective truth. You can believe that unicorns do not exist as a subjective truth or you can believe they do exist as a subjective truth - both are valid because the belief is true whether the unicorn exists or not - once someone produces a unicorn then their existence becomes an objective truth and the subjective truths are no longer relevant.

By claiming that I am marginalising you as a debate opponent because I will not accept your claim of Jesus is the son of god as an objective truth you have attempted to stack the deck in your favour. This would be the same as me stating that god does not exist is an objective truth and if you reject that you have marginalised me. No matter how much I believe the statement that god does not exist, no matter how much that is grounded in reality, no matter how important that is to everyone on Earth if we could prove that was actually the case, I would never insist that someone who does not believe that accepts it is an objective truth unless we could prove that was actually the case. To claim that is it is an objective truth is to claim it as an objective truth. This is why your claims regarding Jesus, god and the resurrection cannot be objective truth.

Now, before I make a huge error in mis-reading what you have written, can you confirm/clarify the factuality of this statement and my following interpretation of it:

"I am a Christian because I believe that He rose from the dead, and I believe that He rose because I am convinced that all the historical evidence supports the veracity of the resurrection."

There you have described a chronological sequence of events working backwards - you looked at the historical evidence of the resurrection, found it to be accuarate and truthful and from that you believe that Jesus rose from the dead and because you believe that you became a christian. Is this a correct interpretation of what you wrote? Because if this is correct then you are one in a billion who converted to christianity in this way. If however, you were a christian before you looked at all the historical evidence then I question the logic of your statement.

We could look at the historical evidence for the resurrection if there was any that would stand up to investigative scrutiny. The only accounts we have are contained within the bible and that tends to be a somewhat circular as a proof of the veracity of itself and there is contradiction within those accounts and questions over who actually wrote what, and when it was written to question its reliability as a factual historical document. (If you can explain the four different and sometimes contradictory accounts of the life and death of Jesus then please, be my guest). As to physical evidence this is not only scant and without provenance, it is also obfuscated by a lot of dubious claims and proven and/or suspected forgeries (the Shroud of Turin - real, a medivel fake, the work of Leonardo da Vinci or the burial shroud of a Cathar heretic flayed alive by the Inquisition?). We cannot even be sure of any of the geographical locations mentioned in the gospels, so if we cannot locate physical landscape features with any degree of certainty based upon scripture what chance is there for any of the the less fixed physical objects or any of the "eye-witness" testimonies? We have four locations for the Garden of Gethsemane - none of them incontrovertable, which is odd to say the least (given its significance so soon after the events that occured there someone must have known where it was in the first century of the Common Era) ... why do John and Luke not mention it by name even? The same is true of Golgotha, location uncertain, and the Tomb of Joseph of Arimathea... we don't even know where Arimathea is or whether it ever existed - we've managed to not only lose a whole town but any mention of it outside the gospels. So I'm not sure how robust such debate would be, the historical would be entertaining but unconvincing to either of us and the philosophical has no interest for me at all since philosophical evidence is as tangible as a fairy-fart and just as useful.

Edited by Dean - April 11 2013 at 17:27

What?