h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

'Could life'?! *called* life!

I just have a quick question to Warner. If God is not within his creation but outside it, why did he have a problem with people building that Tower of Babel?

Updates to some Gif-o-pedia pages:

A42437478
A42437603
A42437658

Gif

you could a link to
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/heaven.html
for the pascal's wager one

A42437829

Gif

I'm not particularly convinced by his second point though...

Gif

Oh there's several logical sleight-of-hands in it. But it's no worse than the original and slightly cleverer I think.

sleights-of-hand

Pascal's Wager is a complete fallacy, it makes no logical sense at all and proves how circular and skewed any religious belief system is if they are using it as an argument FOR religion and the existance of god instead of against.

Just thought i'd share

Oh wait, i forgot that almost everyone knew that already. Sorry.

Another attempt to derail the conversation.

Most religions have a visible symbol - a cross, crescent, star, etc. Atheism - despite the efforts of PZ Myers et al - lacks that. So I was wondering whether we atheists should pick ourselves a colour. Something distinctive and recognisable that gives us a 'branding'. So my question is:

a) Is this a good idea?; and

b) Which colour?

Gif

On my gravestone, instead of a cross or david´s star, I´ll just put a text that reads "This space intentionally left blank".

I think branding and cohesion for atheists is not a good idea.
The thing is that atheists only really have their nontheism in common (generally that is, there's also a pretty strong science bent but not for everyone).

Already we have gone from the old days of simply having the term 'atheist' to now where we have different types of atheist, non theists, rationalists (even romantic ones! ) and so on and so on.

Once you have a structure there will always be those who disagree with it and thus you exclude potential members. We are already seeing the split of atheist/antitheist.

There is a significant third voice in the debates which says "Im an atheist but i don't agree with Dawkins/ABC/Whatever because it isn't my sort of atheism". Not all of them can be theists/deists trying to troll.

The more there is a structure purely for atheists the more there will be infighting and splits and all the other problems that come with social organisations.

For me, if you are a nontheist and wish to be part of something with the same aims I'd say join the Secularists or the Humanists and use their branding.

In my normal life, apart from some work wear have anything that loinks me to a University, society etc.

I certainly have no need to advertise the fact that I am a human being who believes that supernatural beings don't exist.

We should be showing everyone that, as Brian said, *we are all individuals*.

Atheist organisations seem to me obviously a bad idea. The whole problem with religion is that they have these organisations which are supposed to define the faith and norms of behaviour, with a priesthood, etc.

On the other hand, I have nothing against loosely organised atheist campaign groups (although myself I'd certainly never be part of one that Dawkins and co. were prominent in). I think the bus, for example, is great (despite being part financed by Dawkins)!

Another attempt to derail the conversation...

During the 1930s in Germany, previously respectable academic journals started publishing junk science purporting to show that there was something inherently inferior and/or evil about Jews. The outward appearance of this work was very similar to that of actual science - use of language, tables of data, graphs, self-styled peer reviewed journals, etc. Now we know that it was nothing like what we would like to call science, but how were people at the time supposed to know that if they weren't experts themselves?

Or more recently, we have a lot of junk science being put about by evolutionary psychologists for example. How are people today supposed to distinguish between junk science and genuine science? I'm not sure I can even: is climate science genuine or junk? It seems to be based on enormously complex computer models that make it difficult to evaluate any of their claims. But I'm inclined to think it is genuine. Why? I'm not exactly sure.

So I gave the post the title "an exercise in empathy" because I think it might be worth thinking about what it is like to be a religious person who doesn't have much knowledge or training in science, confronted by people like us on this thread, or Dawkins, telling them that science has shown their worldview is completely wrong. What are they supposed to make of that? Why shouldn't they be dubious about it? bearing in mind the examples above.

> During the 1930s in Germany, previously respectable academic journals started publishing junk science purporting to show that there was something inherently inferior and/or evil about Jews. The outward appearance of this work was very similar to that of actual science - use of language, tables of data, graphs, self-styled peer reviewed journals, etc. Now we know that it was nothing like what we would like to call science, but how were people at the time supposed to know that if they weren't experts themselves?
<

Well they could have realised that it was merely being portrayed as 'science' within the context of their own society. For example were such journals open to peer review from scientists all over the world? The whole international community? Presumably not.

Science as we accept it today is a worldwide structure. Scientists from a variety of cultures and traditions will peer review it as 'science'. This provides safeguards against any one ideology hyjacking. Yes of course there maybe temporary biases due to political pressures eg something being in the interests or not, of western oil interests...but these things will emerge over time I think if science is open to the worldwide community.

And in the long term scientific ideas ultimately rely on *evidence* And this evidence is used to produce results in real life. If it starts failing to do that, people will quickly realise something is wrong, because it makes no pretensions of producing intermittant and unpredicatble results such as 'miracles'.

Yes I think it is open to potential manipulation, but if it retains its international open access, I think this is less of a danger.

But it's still young as a discipline so we may have some stuff to learn about safe guarding its integrity.

Hey Effers,

"For example were such journals open to peer review from scientists all over the world?"

That's a good point and you're right they weren't, and unsurprisingly Germany's academic reputation worldwide went downhill very fast. Would people in 30s Germany have known that though? Or would they have just read things which cited highly intellectual sounding journals etc. and taken them as truth? I don't know if they had science journalists back then, but if they were as passive and uncritical as the ones we have today they probably wouldn't even have been able to evaluate the claims made in these pseudo-scientific papers.

I'm not trying to criticise science (not that I wouldn't do that, but it's not what I'm aiming at here), but just thinking about how people perceive it, and whether or not *from their point of view* they ought to respect it.

OK so we can say they ought to learn about it and see it from our point of view, but that's asking a lot. I got involved in a discussion here on h2g2 about the concept of "chi" which ended with kea and others saying that in order to evaluate claims about chi I would have to do some studying and experience it myself. Now I can see the force of that argument, but I don't see that I'm ever going to be sufficiently at my leisure that I could justify spending my time trying to experience chi.

I don't have a conclusion here btw, I'm not trying to say we shouldn't argue with religious people and that we shouldn't promote the scientific view as superior to that of the religious view. Just thinking out loud about how it all appears to the people we're arguing with.

Gif

Thanks for your response.

You obviously have your side of the argument...fair play to you. Fair play to you for creating your 'Gifopedia'. Its probably sensible for me not to continue adding to it!

Bless you anyway.

Mikey2

Yes Dogster my liking for science as a system is as much because it is founded upon 'probability'. This means it operates within time; ie at any moment some new evidence may come to light which turns the previously accepted view upside down. Maybe one could think about how it was when Einstein's thinking and the subsequent experiments had to make physcists re-assess Newtonian physics and how to re-contextualise that. I think this time based probability conception is also a safe guard against corruption within science, because any theory of reality is only ever provisional

I dislike absolutism of any kind. Amongst many problems I have with the faith system, especially the Abrahmic type is its pretensions to absolutism. Not only is the existance of God insisted upon without evidence, this insistance is held with 'certainty'. The certainty is fundamental to the idea of 'faith' itself. And it gives the illusion of safety to people. Because of this, unless a faith adherent is willing to accept the primacy of probability and be prepared to change their world view at any moment, I don't see really how we have much to say to one another really if I'm honest. The different psychology required mitigates against this.

I think the slogan, 'There is probably no God', says as much about the system of scientific thought as it does about the statement itself.

Have you ever read, 'The Search' by CP Snow? It tells the story of a phycisist who cheats and makes up results. He's tempted by the lure of fame and 'power', but over time of course it comes to light because other experiments contradict the results.

I think the time element in evaluating probability is fundamental and is why theories evolve. Without the time element and accepting any scientific idea as merely provisional, science would very quickly become corrupt. I doubt the Nazis made it clear to people that their results were only provisional. It does seem as if ideologies of all sorts that are based on absolute truth of any kind will eventually fade away, much as all the many theologies and belief in many different types of 'gods' evolve into belief in other gods over the millenia.