Yeah, portraying themselves as "persecuted" by some secular humanist position or other is a continually repeated rhetorical ploy among American evange...
@"Wayfarer" The number of outspoken "New Atheists" can be counted on one hand. Meanwhils, literally thousands of sermons, Sunday school lessons, Bible...
What I dispute is your charge that Dawkins and company allege to "prove" that God doesn't exist. Stating that there probably is no God is not alleging...
I dispute your charge that Dawkins and company allege to "prove" that God doesn't exist. Any citations? And your charge that the decline in Americans'...
The "Watchmaker" argument, a Christian apologetics argument, is widely rehearsed by contemporary apologists defending ID. It's this argument that Dawk...
You're right. In the Blind Watchmaker, he does not specify that the designer would have to be more complex than his design, but rather would be "vastl...
A pertinent distinction can be made between current popular "ID" and the more academic and centuries-old "argument from design." In current popular ID...
Dawkins expressed the argument in The Blind Watchmaker. His primary argument is the positive one that natural selection can explain the complex adapta...
Yes, ID transparently is repackaged Creationism. When several court decisions about the teaching of "Creation Science" in U.S. public schools came dow...
@"Arkady", @"Wayfarer", @"John" Just want to note that Dawkins' argument that an intelligence capable of designing and implementing something as compl...
Indeed, beliefs have consequences--both positive and negative. But it is a logical fallacy to accept or reject a proposition because we like or don't ...
Culture is not "founded" on religion any more than it's founded on social relationships and power structures and food production and law and economics...
Right, if what we want, as in science, etc. are reliability and predictiveness, we have come to understand that independent intersubjective corroborat...
I think people use "know" for beliefs they're convinced of., and they're convinced because the belief has satisfied whatever intuitive or explicit epi...
I have repeatedly acknowledged the fact that such experiences are compelling, and intractably convincing to the person who's had one. As far as they a...
I haven't said that "we have sufficient reason to reject the claim that an experience could cause one to know that God exists." Clearly there have bee...
It's a speculative metaphysical hypothesis, John--a way of explaining our experiences. Just as alternative ways of explaining our experiences include ...
??? I specifically said that the noumenon is a realist hypothesis. It is proposed as the reality on which our phenomenal experiences are grounded. But...
Emotions are intuitive, automatic, non-reflective value judgments that something is good or bad for us. Because they are non-conscious heuristics, tho...
The way I think of it is this: "our particular kind of processing system" is phemomemal--a conceptualization, a mental construct--based on certain phe...
Well, I think we cannot say much if anything meaningful about what the noumenon "is" in any sense other than that it is what we interact with via our ...
Little, if anything is more compelling than first-hand personal experience. Tenacious conviction of the truth of our own experiences (and memories) is...
I think of the noumenon as the raw input that our particular human kind of processing system interacts with. We are entirely oblivious to the great ma...
ss You've said both (1) that unless there's internal inconsistency or blatant contradiction in what a person claims, the experience can be assumed to ...
But remember way back a post or two, when you said; And you surely realize that Granny was talking about a risen-from-the-dead supernauiral visiting-f...
As I said to Colin, no one is challenging his claim to have had a powerful experience. What we are able to address in such instances, though, is the p...
The widely preached fundamentalist Chridstian ID reasoning is that the complexity we observe in the world cannot possibly exist unless if was intended...
Dawkins is responding to the widespread fundamentalist christian notions of "Intelligent Design" and couching his critique consistent with their widel...
Complexity can indeed excede the complexity of the causal agent, as, for example, when a vast and intricate ecosystem is caused by a beaver damming a ...
Dawkins' inference is simply that surely an intelligence that could in every infinite detail and interrelationship intend, design, comprehend, know ho...
Nobody disputes that you've had some kind of powerful experience. What is debatable, though, is your assertion that your experience involved a superna...
Pretty soapboxy. And mistaken. All I meant by "not equal" was, as I said, that different explanations have, for example, different purposes, different...
Yeah, didn't mean to ignore what you've said, MU, just trying to see how it fits into my understanding. I surely agree that there's much convention in...
Your point? Do you assume that I haven't studied the same subjects, and read the books you mentioned? What I claim is that there are various ways of l...
No jurisdiction? If there are observable phenomena (the assertions people make about their experiences), and empirical data (the content of their expl...
First, note that the terms in which the reports are presented differ substantively from person to person, and demonstrably are terms from their own pa...
If it's legitimate to propose that people's reports of their alleged religious experiences are not really about the particular supernatural beings and...
It is entirely legitimate to explain anything in whatever way such explanation provides insight. The OP assertion can be expressed as "I experienced G...
@John It is uncontroversially true that the content of the vast majority of reported religious experiences from people throughout history and across t...
It is not controversial that evangelicals report their experiences as encounters with Jesus, God, angels, demons; Catholics as encounters with God, Je...
If we consider the many, many testimonies of those across the world presently and throughout history who've had what the understand to be a religious ...
Sure, our judgment about whether there is or is not sufficient reason to subscribe to a proposition depends on what is being proposed. I wasn't the on...
There are tens of millions of fundamentalist religious believers in the world whose behavior is informed by their beliefs. Simple, straightforward rea...
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