I'm starting to doubt my lack of belief

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Kiley wrote

There's the true damage the fundamentalists have done, is to make it seem that is the only way of understanding spirituality.

Yes, and that's equally true for all religions plagued with them.

I'm wondering what the fundamentalist variety of nihilist would look like? Empty space?

Neither does science (and with it belief and logic) have to be contrary to the Bible.

I've a friend, well, an online one, but I've known him for years. The nature of the online community was such that hundreds of the members had met several others, so his character is of no question.

He was a special forces guy and was parachuting as a training exercise. His drogue tangled and slammed him against the wall of a building, and then he hit the ground. He said that he remembers being dead, but he could still hear them treating him. He didnt want to be revived. I think he died a second time on the operating table. And they brought him back again.

Hes the nicest man you could meet, and hes convinced hes going to hell for the things he did in the military. Needless to say hes retired and pretty mangled after that.

Anyway. Other than hearing them, he said there is no sensory information at all. He didnt feel any pain until they revived him.

Yeah, I was just being flip, more than anything.


A braindead body, maybe?

@Surnames: Modern surnames didn't become popular in Sweden until the eighteenth century, I think I remember. Linné's father made one up. I think it was an imported concept, so it should have been a bit earlier in other regions, but I don't know the foreign history of it.

He he he

To the best of my knowlege Nihilism has been saved from the plague of fundamentalism, but I'm enjoying the idea!

Yes, this works very well if one can accept that one's knowlege of both the Bible and Science is incomplete and imperfect. That's my stance, as it happens. I know there are apparent misunderstandings. Medieval europeans believed that the Bible taught the earth was flat but later scholarship in both science and biblical studies showed this to be wrong. That didn't get Galileo out of his jam, but it's a good example of how the things we fight over now may turn out to be quite ridiculous in time. Humility and uncertainty are good things.

Personally, I do not agree with those who state that it is a matter of going with the heart over the head. Rather, I think it is a question of whether we are willing to extrapolate to an asymptotic "line" of sorts that by nature we cannot touch. That is how I see my faith...not a shutting-down of the mind, but a willingness to name and accept the value at the asymptote of what I see in this world. To me, anyway, it is a logical process up to the point where I hit the inherent limit of the finite mind. At that point there is a leap. That doesn't mean I don't keep pushing and pushing myself closer and closer to the asymptote; I don't believe that being a Christian, in my case, means that I need or am even asked to abandon my logical faculties.

As to logical leaps, where I find an improper one is when anyone follows a chain like this...

a) All that we can detect by the material senses (or by machines that provide input to the senses) is subject to the scientific method (i.e. falsifiable).

b) Spiritual matters cannot be detected by the senses / are nonfalsifiable.

Therefore

c) Spiritual matters do not exist.

I do not see the logic in that whatsoever. To leap from the nonfalsifiability of the spiritual to its nonexistence makes no sense. All we have is a statement that our senses and therefore the scientific method as we know it cannot be applied...and nothing more than that.

All of what I term experiential evidence (that is, your internal experience of the world) is by nature unmeasurable by science. We can measure the neurons that fire while we are having an experience, but there is no such thing as (for instance) a "love-meter," nor can science assign an ethical value. Science can assign probabilities of a worldly outcome, but not tell us what that outcome should mean to us. Experiential evidence is also non-transferable by nature. I can "transfer" a description of a dream or an emotion, for instance, but you must infer what I mean through the filter of your own experiences and you cannot experience my thoughts and feelings as I do (nor can I do the same for you). However, I can say from my own experience that my emotions and internal experiences are real, and I accept that they are meaningful.

If there is experiential evidence that is causing you to change your outlook on things, I think that it should be taken into consideration rather than suppressed automatically simply because it is experiential. Obviously we must always be aware of the ways in which we can perceive wrongly...we should be educated and aware of logical fallacies and psychological tendencies, but I see no reason why I cannot couple that knowledge with my experiences. The existence of the spiritual and my engagement does not automatically follow to the conclusion that I am ignoring my mind or my logic or that I become an unstable person or diseased as some have alleged. What I have done is simply extrapolated off of the available material and experiential evidence.

I'm with you on this one. Personally, I think spiritual sensibility ranks with the 5 classical senses. It's something we are all aware of in some way or another--though it's difficult if not impossible to explain or put into words. I think it's unfair to say that such things do NOT exist because they do not exist in some kind of material way. You might as well go ahead and say that emotions do not exist either. If anyone says emotions don't exist, slam a baseball bat against their head and ask how that makes them feel.

Same things for someone who argues against the existence of morality.

Ok, but the problem is that the other 5 senses have a clear mechanism, but spiritual sensibility doesn't. Even further, from what I've heard, research on the matter suggests that the human spiritual sense tends to be primitive and make little logical sense. (but I can't find an article) However, really, how can there be a spiritual sense when they all come to different conclusions? If you asked two men about whether there is a car 15 feet in front of you, you shouldn't get extremely different answers, but with this spiritual sense we do. If you have ever read the Bhagavad Gita, you will see that the experience of transcendence in Krishna is a central part of the religion, and that an intense mysticism is a part of this belief system. In fact, it seems to me that mystics are a part of most religions, but even further, that most of these religions and therefore mysticisms must disagree.

Heck, why do so many people's Christianities disagree?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLBDFe3mDtk[/youtube]

For instance, there is evidence suggesting that a person's personal beliefs and their beliefs on what God thinks will tend to be the same, even using the same mechanisms for both processes:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 151321.htm

Not only that, but if the sense is improved by removing parts of the brain, I have to doubt it is really a sense. http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... -spiritual
Perhaps a glitch instead.

Let's put it this way: we do not suppose that schizophrenics have a special sense, and we do not suppose so because they diverge so strongly from what we sense, or even what the others sense, so, by what should we assume that this special sense exists in others.


Emotions have been studied by scientists for over 100 years. Gods and spirits have not been. I think that a difference really does seem to exist in the materiality of such things.

Now, to say that gods and spirits do not exist because they are not material is to assume something away, and that is wrong. However, in the same breath, I want to say that given all of the pointless speculations over gods and spirits, and the utter lack of solid evidence for non-material things, I think dismissing the category of non-material beings is rational. After all, I pretty much dismiss perpetual motion machines as a category.
http://atheismblog.blogspot.com/2009/12 ... ument.html

The neurological mechanisms of emotions, and the effects of emotions on health and in social settings have been studied. By contrast, how we should feel about those phenomena and what sort of value we should assign to them cannot be determined by science other than a basic distinction between what is physically healthy and what is physically unhealthy. That does not make them valueless, however. The same is true of all experiential phenomena, to my mind...non-falsifiability does not mean nonexistence.

A perpetual motion machine is not a value or a feeling, however, and does not belong in the same category. That is a material item that violates laws we can demonstrate by science (i.e. the laws of thermodynamics). It has no sentience, no ability to feel or to make choices--it is wholly governed by material law and to the best of our knowledge (unless one believes in animism or pantheism) it does not have that self-understanding which appears to be unique to human beings. You can assess a claim of that nature and invalidate it without having to even consider the possibility of anything else.

With something non-falsifiable, however, we have to couple our experiential evidence with what we see by our other senses. This is not required with the perpetual motion machine. We cannot simply dismiss it because it is impossible to measure externally...that does not automatically mean nonexistence.

You mean what is conducive to fulfilling a certain set of criterion decided upon for proper functioning. I mean, there is no reason that longevity must reflect maximal happiness, or that longevity must reflect productivity, or anything else.


Ok.


Non-falsifiability might as well mean non-existence though. If an entity's existence is equally compatible with all possible states of affairs, such that nothing can disprove it, then it does not add to our explanatory power and could reasonably be removed from any explanation we give of reality. (I'm probably being sloppy somewhere, but whatever)


And God or the spirits are supposed to be entities, not "values".


No, we don't demonstrate laws by science, period. Verificationism is dead, and the reason for this is because we can never actually verify anything. We can only falsify things, and organize existing data to find patterns. Just because we have patterns about the laws of thermodynamics does not mean that we can disprove ALL perpetual motion machines.


Nature is pretty complex, and the idea "there is exactly one possible perpetual motion machine that will only work under specific circumstances" is effectually unfalsifiable simply because we can't test all possible organizations of matter and physical circumstances.


It is unlikely we have other senses, as in ESP or whatever, as I've already tried to argue. They don't seem to arrive at facts, but rather work by processes that are non-fact-bearing, and even that disagree greatly. Even further, claiming that we do have extra-senses is questionable given other things we know about reality.

I mean, I'll make it clear. If we can rest assured by our laws of thermodynamics, then we should be equally comfortable with a law of ontology. That law of ontology is this: "All things that exist have physical existence". We've never come across a credible claim of a non-physical being, and vague special senses sound more like mental defects than ways to find the truth. If you disagree, then it seems that you should be able to outline reasons why we can or should trust these senses to find a unified truth. Heck, define how we can trust these senses to find the truth, but we can't systemize this effort?

That is not a law; that is an axiom. Its truth or falsity cannot be demonstrated, not without an exhaustive knowledge of every single phenomenon in the Universe, so if it is to be used, its value must be assumed.

A better phrasing might be, "So far in our explorations of objective reality, we have yet to discover a thing which exists but does not have physical existence." It is possible, for instance, that consciousness is not merely a matter of colloidal chemistry in the brain, but actually has some sort of non-physical component - a "spirit" or "soul", if you will. As such a thing would not be measurable or detectable by any instruments we have yet created, we cannot demonstrate either its existence or its nonexistence, and making a positive statement either way requires assumptions.

The laws of thermodynamics, which you have selected for a comparison, are derived from prolonged observation and measurements of physical phenomena, rather than simply being axiomatically assumed to be true, and thus are hardly directly comparable to the philosophical studies of ontology and epistomology. (Further, there may be selected instances in which they can be violated, for short periods - there are, for instance, some interesting implications in the theory of vacuum fluctuation...)

Now you just have to choose which God/Gods to believe in. Quite a big list to choose from. Remember, if you're wrong the the real one will not be pleased when you die.

+1

Another thing is, you say you don't know if God isn't real, but then how do you know which religion is right? How do you know Hinduism isn't the true religion, not Christianity? There's no proof either way.

From the OP, it sounds as if you're just giving in to surrounding pressure to be a Christian.