Posts by Damian White
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I would think things would be just as bad for the first few tokers too, having to draw through a 1.5m long doobie . . . you'd need lungs like hot-water bottles, and need to suck for a few minutes before any perseverant wafts made it to your end . . .
. . . and should that be hippocampii ?
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The invocation of bronze age theology, the death of Galileo, or teapots in orbit does not advance this debate.
. . . but it does. Any debate on atheism vs. agnosticism vs. faith will always come down to the burden of proof; as each side demands that the other provide some sort of back up for their stance. But as Agnosticism inherently doesn't make a claim that needs refuting, and as faith can always rest on it's laurels of being belief-based and thus fundamentally not requiring proof, thus that burden of proof tends to fall on the atheist.
However, as atheism is inherently the lack of a belief, then theoretically the evidence it would need to provide is evidence that something doesn't exist. By empirical science this is essentially an infinite null-hypothesis . . . and as most people can't actually conceptualize that, thus the metaphorical representation of the sheer foolishness of doing such has come about, firstly by Betrand Russell's teapot, then followed by the Pink Unicorn (I think?) and of course His High And Mighty Noodly-Appendaged One.
By establishing this infeasibility, the burden of proof is placed squarely back on the shoulders of those that claim a god exists in the first place . . .
. . which sorta makes sense, as both atheism and agnosticism are essentially relative concepts -- i.e. each referring to a given 'belief', and how one choses to accept it, or not.
So surely any such call for 'proof' should begin with the initial assumption/claim -- i.e. that such a god exists -- that atheists then disbelieve . . .
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I love the discussions about the universe being perfectly suited for us and why that is so. I come from a mathematics background and so we often look at pi to answer this.
Hell yeah . . . it's for this reason alone that I can't fathom why some people turn to religion: why do you need to believe in some toga-wearing old dude with a big white beard for a sense of wonder, when you have the near-perfect harmony of evolution to gaze on in awe?
Even in simply a terrestrial sense, where we are as a species is an amazing example of the beauty of the evolutionary process in and of itself. That feeling of 'the universe being perfectly suited for us' is purely based on 'us' being the continued 'optimal' choice for countless decisions/selections made over the past squazillion years . . .
. . . so rather than the universe being perfectly suited to us, from a socio-evolutionary background it's more a case of 'us' being the perfect 'product' of a series of selections for the optimal competitor relative to that universe.
In this sense, we can't not be perfectly suited to it . . . and I personally find that understanding much more satisfying than any thought of being the 'miracle' (sic) of some divine creator, who conveniently exists outside of space, time, and any other parameters that could/would lead to a tangible reference to its existence.
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Something that is 'unprovable' is not false - there is very little that is 'provable'.
Hear hear . . .
. . . from the afore-referenced Douglas Adams interview, when asked about 'proof' with respect to his atheism:
I don’t accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me “Well, you haven’t been there, have you? You haven’t seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid” - then I can’t even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we’d got, and we’ve now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don’t think that being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is. I don’t think the matter calls for even-handedness at all.
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It seems to me that agnosticism is the only strictly rational position on spirituality. Unfortunately, many athiests prefer not to accept that their own religious belief (the unprovable assertion that there is no god) is open to serious critique.
True, but surely this is solely due to the infinite space/time paradox that all such debates are limited to - atheism, as a belief, lacks the quantifiable parameters that empirical, scientific rigour needs to work with . . . thus, no atheistic stance can ever be scientifically proven. In comparision Agnosticism, the great sitting-on-the-fence, doesn't make a claim that requires any burden of proof, neatly side-stepping this whole issue.
And it is that burden of proof that the various Flying Spaghetti Monster-esque metaphors address, by demonstrating the folly of applying such to what is essentially an 'infinite' null-hypothesis.
Douglas Adams adds a lot of ammunition to this whole debate in this interview on his own stringent atheism.
And amen to that.
:)
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All praise the Flying Spaghetti Monster . . .
. . and may we all one day be touched by His Noodly Appendage.
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But a couple of years ago the son of a friend of my mother blew his hand off trying to make a super bomb using gunpowder from fireworks (stupid).
. . . yeah. I don't mean to agree with havoc here (sic.), but I'm in the science trade too -- the biological sciences, fortunately -- and have *already* been asked by a few tellurian urbanites if I have access to home-brew manufacturing reagents.
Hmmmn . . .
. . . and was it just me, or did the majority of 'free gifts' oft found in one's packet of Weetbix -- usually fighter jets/rocket ships and the likes -- usually contain an 'empty space' underneath them *perfectly* shaped for a double happy . . ?