God

I work with the scientific method every day in my job and it is useful for measuring quantities and modeling experimental data with theoretical fits. But, when we talk about good and evil, or right and wrong, or what defines a prick from a charitable person, then we are moving from the confines of science to moral law. That's why I bring up those questions about your basis.

Hi,

Are you a statistician of some sort?

While my determinism affects my views (under some philosophical definitions I would be considered a compatibilist), I have a sense of of morality based on the assumption that the world would be a better place if it had the least amount of suffering and the most well-being, and anything else that I think follows from it, and we should strive to make the world a kinder, fairer, and better place. It has to do with the kind of world that I would want to live in and what I think others would benefit from.

I wouldn't use science as a basis for "moral law" either, but I think that the scientific method can be a useful in describing cultural norms, and science can be utilised to better discern that which is beneficial to well-being and human and nature's flourishing. Of course it can be used for good and evil, so can religion, but unlike science, religions are considered by a great many to be moral authorities. Well, many of them claim that the moral authority is God and they are just acting like the messengers....

I grew up in the Anglican Church, have socialist leanings, and am somewhat affiliated with Humanism: https://americanhumanist.org/what-is-humanism/definition-of-humanism/ . I consider myself to be a liberal in the sense of being a free-thinker and open minded even if I don't believe in truly free will. I am ultimately agnostic on all matters in some sense, but I don't need to be absolutely convinced to believe many things. I'd rather live in a secular democracy than a theocracy. I would like everyone to have opportunities to achieve their potential, I value creativity and principles of equality, compassion and rational thinking, I value volunteerism, and I care deeply about environmental issues.

Anyway, sorry, I do go on. Brevity is the soul of wit and all that.

Not that I want this to become like an interview with question/ answer as I prefer more casual dialectic, and swapping jokes, but what about you? Do you have any relevant affiliations? Do you believe in God, and if so, why?

Edited by Logan - June 19 2019 at 21:10

Jaketejas wrote: I believe that science can be used for good or evil, and therefore, I can't use science as a basis for moral law.

I haven't talked about religion, DE, and I won't. I am only discussing personal philosophy on moral law and the fact that I use science as a tool on a daily basis in my work. But, if you want to share your views on religion, feel free.

I'm not sure if you saw my comment "I'm not on a soapbox here. Maybe someone else has a different viewpoint." I welcome other perspectives on philosophy. I find the discussion interesting, and I thank folks for sharing their views, as well as how they came about them. Isn't that what a forum is for?

That's interesting. It seems there was some confusion as I never intended to imply that Occam's Razor is the apparent reasoning behind the quote. Jaketejas was responding to a post I made to Yesesis about his revelation where I brought up Occam'r razor, and earlier in the thread I had responded to his revelation by starting my post with "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof". I feel that both concepts apply to the claim/ revelation. They both relate to what I have said in this thread on a particular matter, and I would argue that one can find relations between the concepts themselves. Methinks that it was a more mundane comment than you inferred.

I'm not convinced that Occam's razor always, or does indeed at all, favour divine intervention because that requires the assumption that God exists, the assumption that God is omnipotent, the assumption that God created the universe and other assumptions about the nature of God.   And then one gets into the whole if a God was required to create the universe, was another needed to create God? And so on. It's not as simple as we only require one assumption, God, we then have to make assumptions about God.

Are you familiar with the Solomonoff prediction and Occam's razor?

I'm going to lazily quote from an article on this instead of trying to explain it in my own words (it's late): https://unherd.com/2018/09/can-occams-razor-prove-god-doesnt-exist/

Tom Chivers wrote: ...the Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne, in a 2010 paper, deployed Occam’s razor when he suggested that God is the simplest explanation for the universe, because God is a single thing. “God did it” is certainly simpler to say than “the universe emerged from quantum fluctuations in space-time”. But I would say that Occam’s razor is an argument against the existence of God. Who’s right? Conveniently, in the 1960s, the mathematicians Ray Solomonoff and Andrey Kolmogorov developed a mathematically formalised version of Occam’s razor. One version of it is known as ‘minimum message length‘, and it asks: what is the shortest computer program that could produce what we’re seeing? Let’s start with a simpler example than the creation of the universe: producing a string of numbers. I’ve taken this example from a Czech mathematician/computer scientist called Michal Koucký. He gives three strings of numbers: 33333333333, 31415926535, and 84354279521. If you wanted to write a program that carried on those strings for a million digits, what’s the shortest it could be? The first you could do very easily: a simple bit of code saying “print the number 3 a million times”. You could do it in four lines of the beginners’ programming language BASIC. The other two look random. But, in fact, the second string is simply the first 11 digits of pi, and you could print it out to a million digits by using one of the many quite simple algorithms which determine the digits of pi. The third, however, is truly random. To write it out to a million digits you would need the program to specify all one million of them. According to the ‘minimum message-length’ version of Occam’s razor, the first string is the simplest; the second is nearly as simple; and the third is the most complex. So what does this mean for Swinburne? Well, the equations needed to describe the Big Bang are certainly complex. But they are sufficiently simple for humans to have written them. The algorithms needed to describe God – an all-powerful, all-knowing being – are not. We haven’t even managed to write software that’s as powerful as a human brain yet. From a minimum message-length perspective, God is much more complex – and therefore unlikely – than physics. The same is true of evolution – you can quite easily write a program that approximates evolution by natural selection. But an intelligence sufficient to design all the creatures that evolution has made would be amazingly hard to program. It also has implications for arguments within science. The “many worlds” interpretation of quantum theory, which says that every fraction of a second the universe splits into billions of parallel universes, sounds complex. The alternative, the “Copenhagen” interpretation, which says that quantum events aren’t resolved until they are observed, needs only one universe, and so sounds simpler. But the program you’d need to create millions of universes would be pretty much the same as a program needed to create one universe – just have an extra line in it which says “do that again”, essentially – while a program that had to keep track of what every human in the world was looking at would be much more complex. According to minimum message-length Occam’s razor, a cosmos consisting of infinite universes can be ‘simpler’ than one that contains just one. None of this means that these arguments are correct. The Copenhagen interpretation might be right despite being more complex. God might still exist; if the evidence shows that intelligent creation is more likely than the Big Bang, then it doesn’t matter how simple the theories are. But it means that you need more evidence for them. William of Ockham was by all accounts one of the finest philosophical minds of his time, but he was also a friar and a Christian. I don’t know if he would be pleased to see me using his razor as an argument against the existence of God. But I think he would appreciate the simplicity of Solomonoff and Kolmogorov’s update of his argument for simplicity.

What exactly does "basis" mean in this context? Is the question about epistemological justification?

YESESIS wrote: Wow, this thread has kind of exploded since I posted that last night. Anyway, I might have asked before for some sign but it certainly wasn't with as much outpouring of emotion as that day, of that I'm sure. And again no other night of my life have I turned on the TV and right there is a program trying to prove the existence God(I don't remember it that well now, only saw it the one time). But that night it felt very strongly like God was answering me. That's what I believe happened, and great point by BaldJean that it maybe can't truly be understood by someone who didn't experience the same thing.

It's been quite an interesting discussion and I'm rather glad you bumped this thread (except that I lost time on other things that I should have been doing what with all the responding, but I visit the forum for discussion, so no real complaints). Thanks for sharing.   

Lewian wrote: I believe that god is created by belief.