We HAVE to believe impossible things. Many things have been deemed impossible in the past, but the world changed and they became possible.
Flying used to be impossible, speaking to someone across the world used to be impossible, hell, facebook used to be impossible!
But there were people who thought it was possible, and it's because of them that we can have It's complicated relationships on facebook.
I always encourage people to believe in anything they want, so long they do not try to make others believe in too, and so long they do not insist that their way is the only way.
No other animal has the mental framework for understanding cause and effect, Wolpert says.
Yeah, um, okay. Dude has obviously never owned a pet. This article is junk science and not really up to the standards that should be required for this forum.
Regardless of his thesis, his evidence is woefully weak.
"Extraordinary claims, he said, demand extraordinary evidence."
The single worst statement to happen to epistemology. Extraordinary claims require the same type of evidence as ordinary claims.
Ignoring for now the category problem of delineating extraordinary claims from ordinary ones, we find a deeper issue: It seems to be the case that asserting a certain category of truth-value statements require a different level of verification than another category is itself an extraordinary claim. Yet there is no extraordinary evidence that this claim is true. Hence the argument is self-referrentially absurd.
I disagree, the whole point of the statement is that ordinary claims don't require verifiable evidence because they're ordinary and we expect them to happen.
If I say it rained yesterday, my word is evidence enough to satisfy most inquires about the weather. If I say it rained and God reached down and protected me with his hand, well, I better have some serious evidence if I expect anyone with a rational mind to believe a word I'm saying.
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence is a well known and well accepted self evident fact.
I disagree, the whole point of the statement is that ordinary claims don't require verifiable evidence because they're ordinary and we expect them to happen
Therefore, popular opinion belays fact?
I get what you are saying but your counter argument is not the best. The parent seems to have a good point about the nature of evidence, to suggest that ordinary claims though should be accepted at face value because they are ordinary is the reason heavier than air vehicles could never fly, for instance.
No, popular and ordinary are entirely different things. Ordinary claims are ordinary because they are well proven and well known and don't need re-evaluated every time.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence precisely because because they haven't been proven. Claiming the Earth was round was at one time extraordinary, it no longer is. Claiming you met God however, is still an extraordinary claim and as such still requires extraordinary evidence.
Stating that the same level of proof is required for each one ignores the reality of the history of the claim.
You're making two mistakes: a mistake between proof and belief and a mistake between types of claims.
I might believe you when you say it rained yesterday, but that certainly doesn't mean that you've done the work necessary to prove that it in fact did rain yesterday. To prove it, I'd need to see a video, examine the video for tampering, &c.
Similarly, if you said "someone protected me from the rain by keeping a big umbrella floating over my head the whole day", I'd need to see a video, examine the video for tampering, &c.
What do you know: the same evidentiary proof for two similar claims.
Notice how my second example uses a "smaller" thing than "god reached down" - the way you phrase it is entailing a whole bunch of metaphysical claims not entailed by the first claim. But two metaphysical claims can be examined using the tools available to us, and competing metaphysical claims would use similar evidentiary tools.
"People tend to look out for people of like faith, as in churches, and that support can make them stronger, thus improving the chances that they will live long enough to see their genes passed along."
Its kind of a stretch as an argument. Common identity is what brings people together, thus enabling social support structures. If people are brought together by ideas, true or not, its because those ideas are core to identity.
If I were to re-phrase the thesis, it would be something like this - 'Humans have the ability to infer cause/effect relationships based on the most relevant information available. Often, the perceived relevancy of ideas is heavily influenced by ideas that are held to be true in present cultural belief system. Over time, as more information is available to the culture, there may be a disparity between observed information (facts) and cultural ideas (beliefs). In this scenario, relevancy of ideas will still be influenced by cultural ideas, sometimes to the point of necessitating the dismissal of observed information.'
Wolpert is an atheist, but he says he isn't trying to convert anyone to atheism. If so, he may be the only person on the planet who is willing to share his deeply held beliefs without caring whether he can convince anyone to believe the same way.
Atheism is a "deeply held belief" now? Learn something new every day..
Additionally, claiming X doesn't exist and not being able to prove it doesn't make you religious. Common counterexamples being X = invisible pink unicorns or spaghetti monsters.
It's a surprisingly simple concept, considering how few people get it. I wonder whether there's a more effective way to communicate it.
The issue though is that because a notion of god as existed as long as we have, writing it off as pink unicorns or spaghetti monsters belittle's it to a meaningless degree; it's a weak counter.
There is clearly something very human in a god belief. To suggest that this type of belief is simply a meaningless may in fact be correct, but it leaves a big part of the equation blank.
It's like answering math questions without showing your work. I think that's what reasonable people have issues with.
To be precise, I wasn't suggesting anything. I was arguing that those reasons for labeling atheism a belief are wrong.
To answer your post, I think the lack of evidence for all religions is a perfectly good counter. I think it shouldn't matter how long some idea has been around, or whether it appeals to our innate human instincts. But clearly both matter to a lot of people. As I'm not one of those people, I have no idea how to address this need.
Flying used to be impossible, speaking to someone across the world used to be impossible, hell, facebook used to be impossible!
But there were people who thought it was possible, and it's because of them that we can have It's complicated relationships on facebook.
I always encourage people to believe in anything they want, so long they do not try to make others believe in too, and so long they do not insist that their way is the only way.