JillSwift

"Atheist" is about belief. Do I believe god exists? No. "Gnosis" is about knowledge. Do I know god does not exist, no. Thus I am an agnostic atheist. "Agnostic" is not some middle position between theist and atheist. You can and do have agnostic theists and agnostic atheists, the are in fact the majority of both belief and non-belief. The other possibilities are mere extensions of the primary two. I t boils down to: If it affects us, we can test it, if it does not it's irrelevant. Why it does or does not have effect isn't important. Save for "We don't recognize it as X", which is an odd one. If we can explain the effect with a natural cause... then it must not be X. If we can not explain the effect with a natural cause, then perhaps we need to postulate X. How can we otherwise not recognize X? I'm hoping you now understand that It's not a black-n-white thing. Atheists generally don't hold that "God does not exist", rather they hold the null hypothesis. As in: "I don't believe in fairies, since there is no evidence they exist." as opposed to "Fairies do not exist, because that would contradict <some other demonstrable fact>." I can criticize a belief in god because I see there's no reason to believe. I can not criticize a belief in god because I "know it's wrong" as I don't know that it is, I just know it's not evidenced. ___________________________________________________________________________________ <ot type="spottedafreind">Hi Mooeypoo! == *hugs*</ot>

Did you mean, then, you were just going to stop arguing this with me? A method to shut me out? The only way to take the "indirect evidence" as evidence for god is to make as a priori the decision that there is a god. That's to make a conclusion then find evidence to support it. This necessarily means to exclude evidence that isn't supportive. It's not logical in the least. Also, you keep framing the atheistic argument as being gnostic, where the fact is the vast majority of atheist positions are agnostic. The actual answer to "Does god exist?" is "I don't actually know, given the nature of 'god', but there is no evidence to be found and no way to test so I stay with the null hypothesis". As for the supernatural - here's the thing with that: 1. Assume there is a supernatural X, there are then two possibilities: -- a. X can affect our world in some way -- b. X can not effect our world in any way 2. If (a) is true, science can be brought to bear to test if X exists indirectly through its effects. 3. If (b) is true, then even if X does exist it is utterly irrelevant. So long as it's claimed that god is not testable, then even if got exists it is irrelevant.

Okies. Just a final thought or so: I don't think theists have flawed thinking, but the thinking leading to theism is flawed. Probably just a quibble, but I don't want to seem like I'd call the theist people themselves unreasonable, 'cuz they ain't.

I was unaware there was a culture around transhumanism. (Seems early to me ==) You may also be interested in posts in the Medical Science/Psychiatry & Psychology forum, there's a few threads discussing the Difficult Problem of Consciousness.

This does not then jibe with: What does personal confidence have to do with it? Aren't the results of a given epistemology a better metric?

Yup. See: What Can Be Done To Protect Us From the Dangers of the Technological Singularity and The Technological Singularity: all but inevitable? What aspect(s) of the concept interest you? ==

AS you demonstrate here. It would have been silly rhetoric, neither fair nor unfair. At best a plea to vanity, at worst a appeal to authority. Was your intent is to say different methods of deciding what is real and what is not are all perfectly equal? If that were true, we'd have garnered as much useful technology from the study of theology as from empirical science. Whether there is contrary evidence depends entirely on which god you're talking about. It is as perfectly reasonable to deny a theist's belief in god as it is reasonable to deny belief in fairies, gnomes and flumphartigans. No evidence of their existence means no reason in believing in them.

You do realize there is more than one definition for "faith", right? Per your analogy, I'd have "faith" DNA exists where faith means "confidence or trust in a person or thing". This is in contrast to "belief that is without evidence, or in spite of contrary evidence", which would be religious faith.

He can't be. 100% certainty can't be attained - strictly speaking. Though a functional certainty can be. Intellectual honesty requires the recognition of the fact that we are nothing near omniscient, and there is always the chance - even if so remote as to be not worth consideration in daily life - that what we are certain about is in fact untrue. Zarnaxus isn't only admitting that trickery or misinterpretation may well mean there is no Australia in objective reality. I doubt very much though that this doubt is more than the admission of a tremendously remote possibility in regard to what I said before. It's not even close to being the opposite of "belief without evidence". Making up for a lack of evidence with faith sounds like pure fiction, though. Isn't there a huge difference between admitting that perfect certainty isn't achievable (without discarding functional certainty) and fabricating a belief?

I don't see it like that. Zarnaxus isn't claiming not to know Australia is there, rather that even though we can have a high certainty about Australia (as my previous post) we can't be supremely certain without a final test of the "Australia hypothesis" - a test we can manage to do. As contrast, there is a dearth of evidence for "god", and no way to test the god hypothesis. I've been debating the whole god idea for over two decades, and I've yet to come across any argument in favor that has consistent logic. So, I can't see them being two sides to one coin, but wildly different approaches to trying to understand reality. One is reasonable (faith as in a high degree of certainty), the other is just bizarre (faith as in belief without evidence or despite contrary evidence).

If trying to test the claim that there is a continent and country called "Australia", no one will ever claim that the reason one can not find it is because: You must first have faith - and if you can't see it, you've not enough faith. Australia is inherently beyond human understanding, and thus can not be detected by human means. Australia exists outside our universe - it has no energy, mater, or dimension. It is supernatural/metaphysical. Thus, you can not detect it. Where folks commonly say similar things about "god". Secondly, "Australia" is very clearly defined. On seeing any continent, we could test it against the definition and know clearly if we're looking at Australia or not. Whereas "god" is very vaguely defined, and many definitions are in direct contradiction with other definitions. Many of the definitions for god are internally inconsistent, meaning they can't describe anything real. So, it seems rather easy to say "Australia exists" with faith that one is correct (as in the sort of faith that lets you say the sun will rise tomorrow, i.e. very likely right, with a nonzero chance of being wrong), while it seems rather unreasonable to have the same certainty about god.

Argument from authority. Unsupported assertion. Fallacies. Irrelevant. Evidence is what was asked for. Unsupported assertion. Fallacy. Unsupported assertion. Fallacy. Appeal to good intentions. Fallacy. You've been asked for evidence many times and have yet to do anything other than make bald assertions. Because you can not or will not provide evidence, your argument does not hold water.

Yep, spot on.

The keyboard, most of the time. The CPU instructions themselves exist as bits during execution, stored like any other data in memory. The source of those instructions came from a programmer tapping away at a keyboard - and that process is simply monitoring the opening and closing of switches (the keys) and interpret them as which key was pressed, and store the associated character in memory. Those character codes are then converted into CPU instructions via a previous set of CPU instructions (the compiler). The original CPU instructions to make all this come to pass were probably also entered via a keyboard, with the interpretation of those keystrokes handled by a hardware interpreter of a sort no longer in use. HTH

The Internet Archive may be what you're looking for.

You just never know. I've owned HP and Acer laptops and they just go and go and go. A friend's Acer likewise was a stalwart little machine. Someone else I know had an Acer that was essentially a $1500 paper weight. A co-worker had an HP that only seemed to work if you pressed down on the screen hinges before you started it up - and even after several trips to HP's repair center, no one was the wiser as to why. What it boils down to is, buy from somewhere they have a liberal return policy, and consider extra warranties. 'cause you just never know.

Look here: http://www.openprinting.org/printer_list.cgi

Y'all really should have gone with "Idea Fight Club"

Heh. That's an apt description.

Some ideas: "Speculations, Burgeoning Ideas, and the Occasional Crackpot Notion" "Speculation, Early Postulates, and the Odd bit of Flotsam" "Wherein we Speculate, Examine, and Eviscerate Ideas" "A place to discover the brutality of peer review." "Examinations of Arguments Not Mainstream" "Idea Fight Club" (First rule: We don't talk about this forum.)

Well, initially. Pseudoscience becomes obvious when it refuses to change upon introduction of evidence. Never the less, the point is good. It's unreasonable to expect our dear moderators to sift through all the chaff.

Mmmm. Evidence. Good stuff. I can get behind this argument.

And this suggests word order... how?