Information imbalance.

Originally posted by RJHinds
You could argue that the Holy Bible predicted the internet and Al Gore invented both the internet and global warming. 😏

Or you could argue that the world is 6000 years old and that humans co-existed with dinosaurs.


Saying the sky is green doesn't make it so. Ill-informed people will argue anything. That doesn't make them right.

Originally posted by Suzianne
Or you could argue that the world is 6000 years old and that humans co-existed with dinosaurs.


Saying the sky is green doesn't make it so. Ill-informed people will argue anything. That doesn't make them right.

Yes I do argue that the world is 6000 years old and that humans co-existed with dinosaurs.
😏

Originally posted by OdBod
Read the opening post again. To state that you have proved something beyond doubt is not only arrogant but brings into question your logic process.

I have read it again, and I stand by my claim. Arrogant or not, I am right. Merely pointing to my arrogance doesn't prove me wrong, it only proves your total lack of a rational counter argument. If you think my logic process has been brought into question then feel free to explain what is wrong with my argument.

Originally posted by Suzianne
Or you could argue that the world is 6000 years old and that humans co-existed with dinosaurs.


Saying the sky is green doesn't make it so. Ill-informed people will argue anything. That doesn't make them right.

The Chinese call the sky green

Originally posted by AThousandYoung
The Chinese call the sky green

No, they don't. They just don't distinguish green and blue as separate primary colors like we do.

Originally posted by DeepThought
I find it more likely that what would drive religion to become irrelevant to people is the increasing gulf between the moral codes and how people actually live their lives.

I think you are exactly right. While science and philosophy may generate ever increasing vacillations of thought and theory, the truth lies where the rubber meets the road.

'Religion' will disappear in direct relation to the disappearance of the thought of a God given moral code in human experience.

Originally posted by twhitehead
What I am querying is how you measure its importance.

[b]It is perfectly obvious that people use the internet for information and many other things.
And its also perfectly obvious that religion has been the cause of multiple wars, and causes vast numbers of people to attend religious gatherings on a regular basis, should I go on?
For you to que ...[text shortened]... rder to prove that information is not proportional to importance. I have proved it beyond doubt.[/b]

The following is a rule, every rule has an exception.

I think as an exercise in logic your point is correct. A single counter-example destroys the argument. However, it really depends on whether Od Bod's statement is intended to have universal and rigorous applicability or is intended to indicate a tendency.

The "Every rule has an exception." statement taken pedantically is self-contradictory, but as a heuristic to prevent people from overly pedantically applying legal or moral imperatives it's fine. In general "Thou shalt not kill" is clearly right, but it's easy to think of cases where it's the only thing to do. "Thou shalt not kill except under exceptional cases listed in clauses 13 a, c, d and clause 15." lacks a certain amount of force.

I think the problem with Od Bod's statement is one of relevance. People don't base their lives and beliefs on science. No one decides who they want to marry based on genetic analysis. If I want to know the rate of precession of Mercury then I'll turn to science, that's what science is for. If I want answers to the kinds of metaphysical questions posed in this forum then science really isn't any use as there's no empirical evidence and no sound justification for extrapolating from nomological certainties.

Originally posted by DeepThought
The following is a rule, every rule has an exception.

I think as an exercise in logic your point is correct. A single counter-example destroys the argument. However, it really depends on whether Od Bod's statement is intended to have universal and rigorous applicability or is intended to indicate a tendency.

The "Every rule has an exception." sta ...[text shortened]... no empirical evidence and no sound justification for extrapolating from nomological certainties.

If I want answers to the kinds of metaphysical questions posed in this forum then science really isn't any use as there's no empirical evidence and no sound justification for extrapolating from nomological certainties.

People keep saying things like this, but when pressed cannot actually provide
questions that actually have answers that cannot be tackled via the scientific
method.

Can you actually back this statement up and actually demonstrate that there are questions
[on this forum or otherwise] that have any cogent meaning that cannot be addressed via
the scientific method.

Originally posted by DeepThought
Probably not successfully, what verse in the Bible predicts the internet?

Many people over the years have proposed that there would be an increase in technology as the end times approach. Among those espousing this view were renowned scientists Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon. On the frontispiece of Bacon's Instauratio Magna, ships of learning were depicted passing by the limits of human knowledge, with a quote in Latin from Daniel 12:4.

Originally posted by DeepThought
I think as an exercise in logic your point is correct. A single counter-example destroys the argument. However, it really depends on whether Od Bod's statement is intended to have universal and rigorous applicability or is intended to indicate a tendency.

I agree, but I think it is fairly obvious that many more examples could be found with ease demonstrating that it isn't even a tendency.
Once could for example point out that the most important religions are not the ones with the biggest books, or at least there isn't a clear correlation between religion importance and book size.

I think the problem with Od Bod's statement is one of relevance. People don't base their lives and beliefs on science.
You might not, but many of us do to a significant degree.

No one decides who they want to marry based on genetic analysis.
OK, that's a good exception to the rule. It might explain why my marriage didn't last.

If I want answers to the kinds of metaphysical questions posed in this forum then science really isn't any use as there's no empirical evidence and no sound justification for extrapolating from nomological certainties.
Well nothing else is of any use either. That's what happens when you have beliefs that have no empirical evidence. Science - or rather a scientific way of thinking - would tell us not to hold such beliefs and that the questions cannot be answered.
Although there are quite a lot of questions asked in this forum that do actually have scientific answers.

Originally posted by twhitehead
I agree, but I think it is fairly obvious that many more examples could be found with ease demonstrating that it isn't even a tendency.
Once could for example point out that the most important religions are not the ones with the biggest books, or at least there isn't a clear correlation between religion importance and book size.

[b]I think the problem ...[text shortened]... there are quite a lot of questions asked in this forum that do actually have scientific answers.

Science is only as good as those doing the analyzing of the data. 😏

Originally posted by googlefudge

If I want answers to the kinds of metaphysical questions posed in this forum then science really isn't any use as there's no empirical evidence and no sound justification for extrapolating from nomological certainties.

People keep saying things like this, but when pressed cannot actually provide
questions that actually have answers th ...[text shortened]... or otherwise] that have any cogent meaning that cannot be addressed via
the scientific method.

When you say "Questions that actually have answers" do you mean questions where the answer is known - where justified and true are taken to be within normal levels of certainty. Or do you mean questions which are answerable, an answer is believed to exist, but no such answer is known.

If there is no empirical evidence for some question then it's difficult to see what science can say. Empirical science doesn't help much with proving something like the internal consistency of elementary geometry [1], it's an exercise in logic. Now we come to a problem, if you define logic as part of Science then any answer I give can end up being part of science. If one does not then I've provided an example.

I think you're conflating science and rationalism. I'm under the impression that you're a rationalist, which may or may not be true, but for the rest of the post I'm going to assume it is. The two have things in common, but they aren't the same thing. So rationalism may well be able to provide answers to things that science can't as science is bound by empiricism, which rationalism isn't automatically, as I understand it.

So if your argument is that these things do not require one to turn to religion to find answers then sure. But that is a different statement to the one I made which is that science cannot answer some questions, even in principle.

[1] Where by elementary geometry I mean the Tarski axiomatization in first order logic. It's carefully designed to avoid Gödel's incompleteness theorem and so is both consistent, complete, but only semi-decidable. Meaning that a statement made within that system is provably true. It counts as infallible knowledge. The answer is unarguably exists.

I think the Wikipedia page could have a mistake. One of the writers seemed to think one could define distances by simply defining a distance to be 1. Since Tarski didn't include this I'm guessing that it could do some damage to the provability of the system. But I don't understand Gödel's theorem well enough to tell.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski's_axioms

Originally posted by RJHinds
Many people over the years have proposed that there would be an increase in technology as the end times approach. Among those espousing this view were renowned scientists Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon. On the frontispiece of Bacon's Instauratio Magna, ships of learning were depicted passing by the limits of human knowledge, with a quote in Latin from Daniel 12:4.

I looked up Daniel 12:4:

But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.

I think claiming that this is a prediction of the internet is not really sustainable. You might be able to claim it predicted the modern phenomenon of running marathons though.

Originally posted by twhitehead
I agree, but I think it is fairly obvious that many more examples could be found with ease demonstrating that it isn't even a tendency.
Once could for example point out that the most important religions are not the ones with the biggest books, or at least there isn't a clear correlation between religion importance and book size.

[b]I think the problem ...[text shortened]... there are quite a lot of questions asked in this forum that do actually have scientific answers.

Yeah, I needed a qualifier "people don't base everything in their lives..." or some such.

Originally posted by DeepThought
I think you're conflating science and rationalism.

I am probably often guilty of that.
A few things I do use science for:
I try to take scientific findings into account with regards to my decisions on what I choose to eat.
I wear glasses. Now one could argue that I wear them because I couldn't see otherwise and that's a purely rational decision and not a scientific one. But science helped develop them. So I am using a scientifically developed product.
The same goes for my computer and many other products.
I get my medical advice from scientifically trained people.
Do I carry out scientific experiments day to day and base my decisions on the results? No, generally not. But when relevant, and there is a scientific finding on an issue, it will give significant weight to my decisions.