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I am religious and believe in free will

70 (27.6%)

I am religious and do not believe in free will

10 (3.9%)

I am not religious and believe in free will

113 (44.5%)

I am not religious and do not believe in free will

61 (24%)

Total Members Voted: 249

[That Wolf]

Eh. We can make deductions about a hypothetical god from the observable universe, it's just not necessarily wholly accurate (limited human cognition, bias, and so on and so forth). Things like "if God's so good why do bad things happen", among other things.

+1
God, just like any other theory should be held as such.
When relativity was a theory people accepted it as matter of fact, and until proven, theorys should be treated as such.
Its a dark and terrible world full of pain and wants, but if you search for your own peice of peace you can find it.
Perhaps thats just annother test God has set out for us.

What does the bible say about stillborn souls and similar situations? When does one become 'alive' and gain a soul?
It was probably brought up in the earlier threads.

[TD1]

Eh. We can make deductions about a hypothetical god from the observable universe, it's just not necessarily wholly accurate (limited human cognition, bias, and so on and so forth). Things like "if God's so good why do bad things happen", among other things.

+1
God, just like any other theory should be held as such.
When relativity was a theory people accepted it as matter of fact, and until proven, theorys should be treated as such.
Its a dark and terrible world full of pain and wants, but if you search for your own peice of peace you can find it.
Perhaps thats just annother test God has set out for us.

What does the bible say about stillborn souls and similar situations? When does one become 'alive' and gain a soul?
It was probably brought up in the earlier threads.

At the centre of the world there is a giant death ray. A tribe of aliens are drilling down to find it as we speak. They happen to be fish like, though, and so their drill is at the deepest part of the ocean floor. I got this information from a book written thousands of years ago, so no, we can't talk to the author. This is my theory. I now expect you all to hold it as fact.

[scrdest]

Eh. We can make deductions about a hypothetical god from the observable universe, it's just not necessarily wholly accurate (limited human cognition, bias, and so on and so forth). Things like "if God's so good why do bad things happen", among other things.

+1
God, just like any other theory should be held as such.
When relativity was a theory people accepted it as matter of fact, and until proven, theorys should be treated as such.

What. Terminology pedantism aside, a theory is assumed *false* until proven. And a theory is proven by taking a prediction it makes that in a given condition X a result Y will occur and deemed plausible - not true, plausible - after various predictions are fulfilled over and over and over. And one single false prediction being found is the greatest thing that can happen to you as a scientist, because it means overturning an existing theory completely.

Meanwhile, religious claims are either unprovable at all or proven false before the followers claim the prediction really was something else all along - case in point, 'When Prophecy Fails'.

[Arx]

Edit: actually, I'm too tired and sick to try to defend anything right now.

[TD1]

It's my memory that a bit of editing was used to patch the odd prophetic hole. I think Dawkins used the prophecy of micah as his example. And besides, prophecies are rather open to interpretation. Just abour anything fulfills them.

[That Wolf]

Theory is theory, fact is fact.
As should be treated as such.
One accepts facts and builds on them.
Theorys should be tested until it breaks down or becomes a fact.

Yes the bible has obviously being proven false in the prophecies. But a deity itself should not be outright disproven due to lack of evidince.
Prophecy itself is a joke because human action is easy to predict so why rely on such?
Yes I agree you should never trust a religion that avoids to prove itself and asks you to have faith.
Blind faith is just that, blind.

[scrdest]

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it's not evidence of presence either. You don't need to actively disprove the existence of an invisible pink cow in my garage, you simply don't believe in it in the first place.

[TD1]

Indeed. If you can't see it how do you even get that it is pink? God's attributes are like the pinkness of an invisible cow.

[Mechatronic]

Logical positivism was an early 20th century branch of philosophy, so there's been about a century of philosophical musing on it. In simple terms, it assumes that the world, and our thoughts about it, consist of elementary facts and that we can apply logical rules to these facts to establish the truth. However, probably the most famous phrase is translated as something like: on that we cannot speak we must remain silent. This is sometimes interpreted as ambivalence in logical positivism towards nonsense, mysticism, gods and so on. It doesn't outright deny their existence but says that philosophers can't say anything about them because they're inherently outside of logical analysis.

[Descan]

To stretch a metaphor: a theory is as to a fact as a library is to a book.

I guess that makes a hypothesis a first-draft? And an experiment is... submission to the publisher?

[Helgoland]

And an experiment is... submission to the publisher?

That sounds almost religious, Descan~

[Descan]

* Descan shrugs.

I just follow the evidence. If a God pops up and says hi, I'll acknowledge it. Probably wouldn't worship it, that's an ethical factor and unless it has a very good explanation, it can't be a very ethical being.

So I'm not against religion, I'm just against falsehoods and unethical behavior. Just that I consider most religions to be one and the same to that.

[Helgoland]

Nonono, I meant that it sounded like the 'publisher' was God - you submit your thesis, and he decides - via your experiment failing or succeeding - whether he accepts it or not.

[Descan]

Heh. That's one interpretation.

[scrdest]

Nonono, I meant that it sounded like the 'publisher' was God - you submit your thesis, and he decides - via your experiment failing or succeeding - whether he accepts it or not.

Wow, that could be a basis of a very weird, very interesting fantasy cosmology concept.

Creator as a particularly uncreative being that pretty much crowdsources the rules for the universe, but once they're down, they're set in stone.