Olav Kalgraf
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Olav Kalgraf commented on Are faith and reason incompatible? on April 24, 2008, 2:55 PM
'One cannot hold all knowledge in his or her brain at all times, so "reason" must depend upon ideas taken as "given" (that is, we take them on "faith" that they are correct).'You are confusing various completely different usages of the word faith. "To take something on faith" is an expression that can mean something as harmless as "accept for the sake of argument/convenience(and possibly corrected later)".In science(and really also in our daily lives) the underlying assumption is that if you take information "on faith" from a book, use it to solve a problem - you can test the solution against nature by way of experiement.The corrective power of empiricism makes a mockery of attempts to equate religious faith with making short term convenient assumptions from an epistemological point of view.The distinction you attempt to make between dogma and faith is a false one. The Dogma that Jesus will return and the faith in an invisible friend are clearly both the target of his question.
Olav Kalgraf commented on Are faith and reason incompatible? on April 24, 2008, 10:55 AM
'One cannot hold all knowledge in his or her brain at all times, so "reason" must depend upon ideas taken as "given" (that is, we take them on "faith" that they are correct).' You are confusing various completely different usages of the word faith. "To take something on faith" is an expression that can mean something as harmless as "accept for the sake of argument/convenience(and possibly corrected later)". In science(and really also in our daily lives) the underlying assumption is that if you take information "on faith" from a book, use it to solve a problem - you can test the solution against nature by way of experiement. The corrective power of empiricism makes a mockery of attempts to equate religious faith with making short term convenient assumptions from an epistemological point of view. The distinction you attempt to make between dogma and faith is a false one. The Dogma that Jesus will return and the faith in an invisible friend are clearly both the target of his question.
Olav Kalgraf commented on The Poverty of Atheism: The Argument From Hitler on April 23, 2008, 12:51 PM
While I agree with you that atheism is amoral, I see no reason at all to accept that "Theists got us" because of this.First, the morals of all the monotheistic religions are simply horrible. The only reason they *can* appear reasonable today is if they deliberately discard lots of their revelations. Of course, fundamentalists don't do this, and thus appear as embodiments of irrational evil and intolerance.This, in my opinion, is worse than atheism right off the bat, at least atheists aren't commanded by God to stone homosexuals or kill unbelievers - so we still have the option to behave in a civilized way. We also have the option of changing our moral code if we find out it isn't working well - another plus.It's clear that you're right when you talk about augmenting atheism with humanism etc to give it a framework for ethics and morals. However, this is something every atheist must do to be able to do anything in their daily lives, even if they decide that "God is dead and everything is permitted". In short, I don't really see the problem. You have a billion possible theistic morals on one side and a billion possible non-theistic morals on the other.Complaining that "atheism caused the holocaust"(which I think is a wrong statement historically btw) is about as meaningful as "theism caused human sacrifice of millions of people"(Many gods thirst for human blood after all). Theists qualify their faith with "Christianity", "Islam" etc, atheists are clearly allowed a multitude of mutually exclusive moral codes as well.
Olav Kalgraf commented on Are Atheists Just Spiritual Quitters? on April 23, 2008, 9:47 AM
Humanism is a practical approach to morality and ethics, it simply doesn't require anything more to unite humanity than that we are roughly the same kind of life. The main reason to regard humans as equal, in my opinion, is because it simplifies many kinds of conflict resolution. Not because there is any true equality across humanity.If you are a dualist and magic up things like "spirit" as the unifying factor in humanity you are well into religious territory and I'd argue that you can't classify yourself as an atheist anymore.And yeah, I think there are no "special" (supernatural) events in the universe. We may possibly not be able to find all the answers, but there is absolutely no evidence for reality being a huge game of pointless strategic morality as most religions want it to be.This lack of spirituality is a good thing. The very core property of the supernatural is that we have no knowledge about it.(If we did it would be natural) WHY would anyone insist on pretending to have inside information about things they also claim are unknowable? And also act on such lack of knowledge? It boggles the mind.The main reason to be an atheist is, in my opinion, the way science chips away at all religious beliefs. There is no question that fundamentalist christianity and islam are objectively wrong. Why would anyone believe they are 75% true divine revelations? And what would such a thing mean? How can you tell what's true?There's just one rational answer to this. All the partially falsified "revelations" are not credible sources of anything. This makes not accepting the theistic standpoints the only reasonable standpoint - in short atheism.This doesn't make atheism true, but it makes it such a solid platform that I'd stand tall while defending it to any of the theistic gods.
Olav Kalgraf commented on If the grand unified theory exists, what if it is untestable? on June 16, 2008, 6:34 AM
No. Science would not change and we would not be happy with only "mathematical evidence". The reason is that there is no such thing as "mathematical evidence".It would simply be a logical fallacy to attribute certain equations to nature without being able to test it.However, in practice this probably won't be an issue. Your statement basically boils down to the grand unified theory not having any measurable effects different from existing theories. The consequence of this is that it would be meaningless. Say for example that the unfalsifiable GUT lets us fully understand why the fundamental constants have the values they have, but is otherwise identical to current theories. If it is unfalsifiable, this means you are claiming they are fundamentally fixed and can never be modified by any experiment.Does this understanding have much practical value? Enough to throw the scientific method overboard? Not really.For there to be any point in adopting a new theory it must be able to let us predict nature with greater accuracy. This implies a changing phenomenon that we can predict and measure and thus it will be testable if we have any reason to want to adopt it.