The talk itself is about 45 minutes (he actually starts around 9:00), then another 45 of Q&A. He's my professor at Portland State and this talk got ENORMOUS scrutiny. Somebody who ended up giving a rebuttal talk said this in the paper about him attacking faith: “I see that really as a form of abuse; I consider that just as serious or more serious as the abuse by Jerry Sandusky on the kids."
Anyway, it's really a great way to think about faith, give it a watch
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1) We are not all "knowers". Faith can bring happiness that truth can't. 2) There is still a leap of faith you must take when doing science (albeit of a different variety from religions). After all, who's to say tomorrow the universe does not act according to physical laws, and no amount of application of the scientific theory can discern a pattern?
a few theists will talk about how this talk doesn't convince them
sess will troll the atheists, doing it low key at first, then moving eventually to telling people they're done talking while maintaining an air of nonchalance with phrases like "it really isnt a big deal at all tho"
Ulti may come in with an "LOL Atheists, (an unrelated paragraph here about spanking or the fed or something)." that one's kind of 50/50.
SmartMuffin might reply but that's kind of unlikely, and he doesn't traditionally impact religion talks, only political talks. so that one shouldn't have too big an impact.
it's possible that meisnewbie will discuss things with large blocks of text, red sox is sometimes a good counterpart for these but not always.
and I will sit here gloating knowing that I predicted it all and congratulating myself for my substantial gift to this topic
(oh for serious though I'll probably watch this later)
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with that said, i see no problem with somebody wanting to have a discussion about why they do or dont believe in god and religion
The problem with most atheist 'evangelists' isn't that they're elitist-that they're too exclusionary, standoffish and secretive.
The problem is that they're too inclusionary. On some level, they assume that the other party would be able to agree with them on logical, evidential or epistemological grounds and so assume that theists could be convinced.
You never actually see atheist elitists talk to theists because asking "Is there a god?" is simply a sad, wrong mistaken question that never should have been asked in the first place to them.
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From: ToukaOone | #011 You never actually see atheist elitists talk to theists because asking "Is there a god?" is simply a sad, wrong mistaken question that never should have been asked in the first place to them.
I dig this.
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I may not have done it justice in the topic title, but for something so long I wanted an attention grabber.
His title on the other hand makes perfect sense if you listen to the talk. The amount of constructivism nut-hugging happening these days is baffling. Everything is not subjective.
Edit: the meat and potatoes of the whole thing is that faith doesn't function as a process of truth, and that to lawfully align your beliefs with reality it is illogical to use faith.
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How did he get homeopathy wrong? He didn't touch on "like heals like", but this isn't a homeopathy lecture. All you need to know is homeopathic remedies are pretty much just sugar pills.
OmarsComin posted... let me predict how this thread will go:
the atheists will talk about how god isn't real
a few theists will talk about how this talk doesn't convince them
sess will troll the atheists, doing it low key at first, then moving eventually to telling people they're done talking while maintaining an air of nonchalance with phrases like "it really isnt a big deal at all tho"
Ulti may come in with an "LOL Atheists, (an unrelated paragraph here about spanking or the fed or something)." that one's kind of 50/50.
SmartMuffin might reply but that's kind of unlikely, and he doesn't traditionally impact religion talks, only political talks. so that one shouldn't have too big an impact.
it's possible that meisnewbie will discuss things with large blocks of text, red sox is sometimes a good counterpart for these but not always.
and I will sit here gloating knowing that I predicted it all and congratulating myself for my substantial gift to this topic
(oh for serious though I'll probably watch this later)
you don't think anyone will talk about the big girl in the dog collar at the start of the video?
You never actually see atheist elitists talk to theists because asking "Is there a god?" is simply a sad, wrong mistaken question that never should have been asked in the first place to them.
agreed, and i also feel that is way more elitism overall on the pro-religion side of things.
But on the internet im not so sure. Same with my family. Im an atheist, so is my brother. My brother however thinks we should just about straight up ban religion in our country. I think that would be absolutely stupid.
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To have belief in something is NOT faith. You can believe something because of faith, faith is a means to belief, but faith is not belief. He doesn't have "faith" that sources he cited are right, he used logic, reasoning, and critical thinking to believe their claims.
You can not have faith in something. You can have beliefs that stem from faith.
Leebo86 posted... How did he get homeopathy wrong? He didn't touch on "like heals like", but this isn't a homeopathy lecture. All you need to know is homeopathic remedies are pretty much just sugar pills.
Also that ^
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Sure, you can come up with a single poorly designed test where homeopathic remedies slightly outperform placebos.
But the better the test is designed, the worse homeopathy does. There's no good evidence for it to work. And it makes zero sense anyway.
And this is unrelated to your complaint, which was that he didn't "comprehend" what homeopathy is. I asked how his explanation of what it is was wrong, and you didn't answer that.
Except there are sources (that I'm not going to go find, because I believe I've cited them before to you, and I'm not really going to call my house and find out what medical journal they're in) where homeopathic remedies preform better than placebos in side by side testing. There are also plenty of journals that say they preform worse than placebos.
To point out, if a treatment is completely useless then yeah, that is what we would expect to see! There will be some unknown number of people getting better from some unknown factor, and some unknown number of people getting worse from some unknown factor. We call this noise in in statistics, because it doesn't give us information about how good the treatment is.
If you want to pay money for a treatment, chances are you want to see some positive effect from the medicine, which means at the absolute lowest bound you want to see more people getting well than getting worse and having enough of the former that it swamps out the noise.
The results being inconclusive is a conclusive indicator that the treatment is ineffective.
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I would say so, if you don't believe something as a result of faith you have the belief that it is not true. I think that's what you're asking.
What if you have faith that would cause you to believe something, but other factors were more convincing to you, leading you ultimately to disbelieve it?
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red sox 777 posted... I would say so, if you don't believe something as a result of faith you have the belief that it is not true. I think that's what you're asking.
What if you have faith that would cause you to believe something, but other factors were more convincing to you, leading you ultimately to disbelieve it?
To move from a faith based belief to one of reason and logic means the rejection of the faith that led you to the original conclusion. If you do not believe the original conclusion, how can you be said to have faith in it?
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To move from a faith based belief to one of reason and logic means the rejection of the faith that led you to the original conclusion. If you do not believe the original conclusion, how can you be said to have faith in it?
But you said that faith was not the same as belief. If faith is not belief, but only evidence, surely I can have evidence supporting a position, other evidence supporting the other side, and choose one?
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From: SantaRPG | #030 I don't really have the facts to argue with your post at the moment so I'll just drop out of this debate. Again, I'm not trying to defend homeopathy here, just general open mindedness when it comes to things we don't or can't understand.
I think newbie is saying that the wide variance in results to some degree does indicate that we understand, because if homeopathy had any sort of an effect in either direction, the statistical noise in the results would be muffled by the effect of the treatment.
For instance, like, you can just take it as a number, where if you end on a positive number you recover, and on a negative you don't. So say a person getting a treatment starts at 0, and gets a random number added to it ranging from -10 to +10 which factors in the person's natural defenses, the environment, and other crap that we're not explicitly measuring. Then you add a number for the treatment you give to determine how effective it is. If the treatment's value is 0 (no effect) as would be for a placebo, you're still going to have a final value between -10 and +10 which is a bunch of people getting better and a bunch of people not. If the treatment's value is 8, then the range is -2 to +18 which means 90% of possible final values will get better, which is strong evidence that it works.
Actually I'm not sure that helped anything. The core thing there is that we'd see conclusive results if it was effective, not "sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't," which is in fact evidence that it's not doing anything notable rather than a lack of evidence.
I actually had this on in the background, expecting to have something to say. Then it turns out I didn't pay attention to it and the only thing I got out of it was a lot of agnostics were mislabeling themselves as atheists.
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red sox 777 posted... To move from a faith based belief to one of reason and logic means the rejection of the faith that led you to the original conclusion. If you do not believe the original conclusion, how can you be said to have faith in it?
But you said that faith was not the same as belief. If faith is not belief, but only evidence, surely I can have evidence supporting a position, other evidence supporting the other side, and choose one?
I use "to have faith in something" the way most people do, that was semantic on my part. When I say that, I mean "A belief that stems from faith, or a conclusion reached without evidence". Like when someone says "I have faith you" meaning "I have the belief that you'll come through. Why? I just do."
That out of the way, faith is the belief of something without evidence. Therefore you could not move from a faith based belief and be wooed to a different belief through evidence and still retain the faith. You can make the logical conclusion from the evidence presented to you and decide which one you want to go with. That would be based on critical thinking, as you are analyzing the premises and evidence, and thus removing faith from the equation.
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Again, I'm not trying to defend homeopathy here, just general open mindedness when it comes to things we don't or can't understand.
Trite but true saying: Keep your mind too open and your brain falls out.
Here's the thing though: Let's say that we really don't or can't understand homeopathy-a stance I obviously don't agree. That our map of homeopathy's efficacy is completely undrawn.
That does not give you or anyone else to just draw whatever on the map and call that an accurate depiction of the territory. It's an unknown answer, treat it as such instead of treating it as the opposite of whatever answer the other dude is giving.
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That out of the way, faith is the belief of something without evidence.
I'd agree with that.
Therefore you could not move from a faith based belief and be wooed to a different belief through evidence and still retain the faith. You can make the logical conclusion from the evidence presented to you and decide which one you want to go with. That would be based on critical thinking, as you are analyzing the premises and evidence, and thus removing faith from the equation.
That doesn't imply this though. Why can't I consider faith and evidence at the same time? I could then decide to favor either of them in determining my final belief.
Your conclusion might work if we defined faith as belief contrary to evidence. As in, contradicts evidence.
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In that case it would be a fallacy to incorporate faith into the line of reasoning. Yeah you can do it, it is illogical to do so. If you use faith as any of your premises in an argument, the conclusion cannot be held as true.
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In that case it would be a fallacy to incorporate faith into the line of reasoning. Yeah you can do it, it is illogical to do so. If you use faith as any of your premises in an argument, the conclusion cannot be held as true.
It may be an invalid argument, but it could be true anyway. It would not be a logically wrong argument, just an argument that does not prove anything.
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It's stupid to say faith is illogical... duh, that's the definition.
From: ViviffTheGreat | #041 If you use faith as any of your premises in an argument, the conclusion cannot be held as true.
Now THIS is a fallacy. Just because one of your premises is invalid, doesn't mean the rest of your premises, or the conclusion derived, is invalid, for example, in the case that you use faith as an extraneous premise that is not absolutely necessary to reach the conclusion.
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Youre right, I shouldn't have said "true", I should have said "sound". My brain is frazzled, excuse me. But getting lucky with an unsound argument with a true conclusion does not validate the argument or the premises. Basically basing any premise on faith adds absolutely nothing to the argument, therefore what would be the purpose?
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StealThisSheen posted... Trying to disprove faith and expecting people to agree is just as annoying as people pushing faith on others, as far as I'm concerned.
Just let people do their thing.
Ah, I was 20 minutes late.
Basically this. I consider myself vaguely Christian, but honestly, the only time I actually care about how religious and of what variation someone is is when they're actively trying to use it against other people, more than just a "Hey, have you heard the good news" kind of thing. If you're actively bashing religion (or the absence of it), you're really dumb.
StealThisSheen posted... Trying to disprove faith and expecting people to agree is just as annoying as people pushing faith on others, as far as I'm concerned.
Just let people do their thing.
Question, what is there to disprove?
Like,
What can ANYONE do, in theory to disprove "faith"?
And if there's nothing that can, what EXISTS to 'prove' faith? How do you know that faith exists in the first place then?
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From: StealThisSheen | #044 Trying to disprove faith and expecting people to agree is just as annoying as people pushing faith on others, as far as I'm concerned.
Just let people do their thing.
In a lot of cases people can do harm without trying to "push their faith on others". In the world of medicine, a lack of evidence is a dangerous thing, but people continue to believe in things that can't possibly help them (and usually the swindlers don't care).