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I think that some folks are just naturally talented at spotting incongruities - parts of a story that don't make any sense. For instance, I was called by a scammer that seemed legitimate until he wanted remote access to my computer. I realized at that point that I was being played - why would anyone need remote access when he could just tell me what to do? And an employee of Microsoft wouldn't ask that I download a third party program that would give him remote access.
Point being here is that what made a lot of atheists actually become atheists is that talent for skepticism and effortlessly spotting things that just don't make sense. A scammer might be able to string along people like me for a time, but unless their deception is completely foolproof and 100% logical, we're going to see through it. We don't have "faith" that the scammer is actually a legitimate person conducting business above board and honestly.
Atheism is just a "side effect," if you will, of a very critical mind - and when I say "critical," I don't mean suspicious, paranoid, pessimistic, or obstinate. What I mean is that many atheists have that talent for spotting holes and inconsistencies in any story - and that makes us atheists. We see religion for the scam that it is.
Thus, while a person with a critical mind can be taken for a ride by religion for a certain amount of time, sooner or later, that critical mind will begin asking, "Why do I beleive in this stuff?"
True beleivers, though, seem to lack this talent and can be fooled indefinately - even in the face of things that do not make sense.
Ha, I had forgotten about this thread. Yes, stereotyping is fun, but stereotypes are largely anecdotes, not facts. An atheist friend of mine likes to say that stereotypes exist for a reason - because they are true. In my view, this is a very simplistic view, and does not tell the whole story. It could very well be that atheists are more inclined to be critical thinkers, but is it because critical thinkers become atheists or do critical thinkers more readily switch religions? ie. maybe atheists who become religious are also just a critical in their thinking. It could also be that critical thinking skills have no correlation with religious beliefs.
Everyone is pretty sure that those sharing their way of viewing the world are the most objective and rational, but without empirical evidence, these are opinions that can only be taken on faith. There’s nothing wrong with that; everyone has opinions.
Everyone is pretty sure that those sharing their way of viewing the world are the most objective and rational, but without empirical evidence, these are opinions that can only be taken on faith. There’s nothing wrong with that; everyone has opinions.
Faith is belief without requiring evidence. Unbelief is the rejection of faith on insufficient evidence. Unbelief therefore does not involve faith in the slightest, it is relentlessly "objective and rational" and in fact that is the very basis on which theists usually object to it -- it is, to them, "vain worldly wisdom" and antithetical to faith, which they regard as virtuous.
It's true that the faithful often have this gambit that tries to turn atheism into a mere "false religion" where they claim that atheism requires faith, in order to deny this fundamental and obvious difference between the two. That doesn't make it so. Usually it is based on a fallacy, that atheism is a knowledge claim and therefore by turns arrogant and simply a sort of "negative faith".
Atheism is simply an absence of belief in gods due to insufficient evidence, based on decent evidentiary standards that do not admit personal subjective experiences and ancient scrolls and bald assertions as evidence.
Does this make atheism "objective and rational"? Not perfectly. Atheists are people, and people have lots of subjective ideas and feelings and biases. People often initially become unbelievers, for example, because of painful cognitive dissonance within their particular religion -- often, broken promises.
Does this mean atheism has "empirical evidence" to back it up? Not in the sense that it disproves god(s). God(s) are an inherently unfalsifiable and therefore unprovable assertion. However, there is a great deal of empirical evidence that the reality we experience comports itself precisely with what we would expect to see if god(s) were non-existent, absent or indifferent -- and that it does not at all agree with what one should reasonably expect of, e.g., a tri-omni deity.
Shirina, there have been plenty of very very smart and critical thinkers from Christ's day to ours who were/are much more intelligent than you and I combined. They were great theologians and thinkers and didn't think they were "taken for a ride." So it seems to me your idea does not fit every shoe.
Eusebius, nobody denies that some of these people were brilliant. What they were not was provided with the information that we now have that raises questions about whether the revealed information about gods and creations were factual or just myth.
As an obvious example, Newton was one of the most brilliant scientists ever, but he believed in God, because geology and palaeontology and evolution-theory had hardly been hinted at. He believed in Astrology and Alchemy too. His brilliance did not immediately reveal to him that they were bunk. There was no real reason for him to assume that they were. It required a better understanding of the the world and its history and of the universe and its formation for such ideas to be supplanted with better ones.
It is not being brilliant that makes one right, but being better informed.
In short, trying to buy the debate by appealing to old God-believers who were more brilliant is just one of the false arguments that Theists specialize in.
Ha, I had forgotten about this thread. Yes, stereotyping is fun, but stereotypes are largely anecdotes, not facts. An atheist friend of mine likes to say that stereotypes exist for a reason - because they are true. In my view, this is a very simplistic view, and does not tell the whole story. It could very well be that atheists are more inclined to be critical thinkers, but is it because critical thinkers become atheists or do critical thinkers more readily switch religions? ie. maybe atheists who become religious are also just a critical in their thinking. It could also be that critical thinking skills have no correlation with religious beliefs.
Everyone is pretty sure that those sharing their way of viewing the world are the most objective and rational, but without empirical evidence, these are opinions that can only be taken on faith. There’s nothing wrong with that; everyone has opinions.
I can say that it is a questioning mind that leads to doubts. It is puzzling over those doubts that leads one to look for methods of correct reasoning.
Becoming atheist - mainly because of the challenges to defend my disbelief - position by a Theist colleague - and the sea-change of the Internet - led me to find and use critical and logical methods of thinking.
I can't speak for everyone, but I would say that critical and logical thinking is one of the knock -on or fall-out effects of doubting the God -claims. Where the supposed revelations and plonked-down truths of religion do not stand up anymore, we are thrown back onto trying to decide for ourselves what is true and right.
And thus we atheists will have to settle on critical and logical thinking as the only viable way of doing it, if we no longer trust in divine revelations.
It is not being brilliant that makes one right, but being better informed.
In short, trying to buy the debate by appealing to old God-believers who were more brilliant is just one of the false arguments that Theists specialize in.
Yes. Intelligence is also highly subject to compartmentalization. There is no reason in principle that, say, a brilliant and accomplished nuclear physicist could not be a creationist. It's not going to happen often, because he'd be a pretty tortured nuclear physicist at some level. But people certainly can and do choose NOT to apply the scientific method and/or rational thought processes to certain parts of their thinking, while applying it rigorously to others. Humans are nothing, if not inconsistent.
I have to admit that the 'Living fossil' argument is the best one they have. If King crabs or sharks or crocodiles or Coelacanths or Salmanders with triangular heads are millions of years old-how come they are still around? why haven't they gone extinct?
The answer is that the species,if it is content in its environment and doesn't have any evolutionary pressure to adapt to changed conditions will continue unchanged (apart from micro-evolutionary changes - because the modern Coelacanth has changed from the prehistoric one) for millions of years.
In fact it seems to me that extinctions are father uncommon and apply mainly to large creatures.
The triassic extinction saw the end to the large reptiles and enabled the bird-hipped dinosaurs (small,like Coelaphysis (1), at the time) to expand in a 'Triassic explosion' into the ecological void, just as in their turn the Cretaceous extinction allowed small mammals and birds to expand in a miocene explosion into the large mammals and carnivorous birds of the Oligocene.
Now it seems that it was large mammals that seemed to go exinct, but small ones like insects, birds and small mammals did not. Indeed the sea-creatures carried on regardless,though it is a puzzle to me why sea dinosaurs-all of them - went extinct. I just state what the evidence says, not provide explanations for everything.
The point is that living fossils is not really a problem for evolution -theory or evidence - and bill Nye is not contradicting himself. Though this Living Fossil argument - refribbed into 'Animals all jumbled together' has been used (falsely) before. There is no real fossil evidence of all kinds of animals 'jumbled together'. The evidence of stratified fossils is that they evolved from simpler to more complex (or just larger) species, where they did evolve, that is.
I'm not arguing that aspect, what the video was asking is if the coelacanth was around all this time, should we have expected fossils of them around later than 65 million years? (In comparison to Bill Nye's expectation of kangaroo fossils being found between the Middle East and Australia if creationism is true)
I'm not arguing that aspect, what the video was asking is if the coelacanth was around all this time, should we have expected fossils of them around later than 65 million years? (In comparison to Bill Nye's expectation of kangaroo fossils being found between the Middle East and Australia if creationism is true)
Yes, we should have Coelacanth fossils in all geologicall ayers if it continued to exist fromthe Devonian to today.
Of course in a YE or Flood deposit scenario, the same should apply.
It would be interesting to see whether there are any other coelacanth fossils.
Of course, in the global shallow seas of the Devonian rather than the deep oceans of other geological ages the sheer number of coelacanths and the frequency of fossilization opportunities can affect how many fossils we could expect to find.
.....
Apparently there are several species of sub-species of Coelacanth, fromthe silurian - devonian to the cenozoic - over 50 m yrs
I'm not arguing that aspect, what the video was asking is if the coelacanth was around all this time, should we have expected fossils of them around later than 65 million years? (In comparison to Bill Nye's expectation of kangaroo fossils being found between the Middle East and Australia if creationism is true)
I thought Nye talked about not finding kangaroo bones - not fossils. Fossils wouldn't form in the few thousands of years since the (supposed) Flood.
As I recall (I may be mistaken) this came out of the idea of how kangaroos from the ark got to Australia, no fossils having beenleft.
It is a remark that we may smile at, because we know a shartage of fossil remains may be explained by them being rather rare and we also know that the 'Pangaea' theory gets around howKangaroos got to Australia. Though the idea that the animals browsing in the part of the island continent suddenly found that their bit had broken away and was driftng off to the south has its own problems.
As I observed before the debate, Nye may know a lot about science, but might not be familiar with some of the Bible-literalist YE Creationist theories.
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