mardi 31 mai 2011

Why out-of-body and near-death experiences don’t prove God « Why Evolution Is True

Serious question to those who believe the unsaved will be annihilated rather than eternally tormented ? - Yahoo! Answers

Nut-jobs just made u p Hell No God has rights over us per Lamberth's argument from autonomy that our level of consciousness gives us the right to be frree beings, in line with Morgan's Caon and the UN Declaration of the Rigts of Man.
We need no threat of Hell to be moral, and no God has the right to send us there and no right to demand worship or have a relationship with us. That putative relationship can never be an excuse for the horrors that theists prattle that free will and soul-making justify!
And outside those wacky scriptures, where does the evidence reveal Heaven and Hell and the future state and contral-causa [ causeless]l free will? As usual, John HIck and Alvin Plantinga err!
Ww gnu atheists mean business!

dimanche 29 mai 2011

Strato of Ga's Blog | Defense of Naturalism

Walter Kaufmann & the ‘Old Atheism’

Scoutle.com

Also read Kaufmann's other book " Faith of a Heretic." He appreciates religion more than we gnu atheists do and was magnificent stylist.

A Better Reason ‘Why People Do Not Believe in God’

“God”: Function Before Truth

Check out this website I found at anatheist.net

“God” Doesn’t Pull Its Own Weight

Blogger: rationalist - Post a Comment

Check out this website I found at blogger.com

Google ythe ignostic-Ockham and the presumption of naturalism for even more in favour of naturalism.

rationalist

Check out this website I found at lamberthcom.blogspot.com

Outline Of My Case Against God

Outline Of My Case Against God

Outline Of My Case Against God

Outline Of My Case Against God

“God” Is A Nonsensical Concept (1D)

Check out this website I found at anatheist.net

This is why supernaturalism whilst semantically understable is logically and factually incoherent. God wills whaat He wills, that tautology, means nothing more than God did it, explaining nothing either scienfically as the god of the gaps or philosophically as the explanatory god of the gaps. Therefore He cannot be Arustitke's Primary Cause nor Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason,

Leucippus of Ga.

What can the supernatural add to the natural? Does it clarify it? Does it bring forth knowledge? Is it in accord with our conservation -background- of knowledge? Does it simplify matters or does it add useless mysteries? Do people actually have supernatural experiences and can they have a relationship with any supernatural subject?
Are the saints, including the Virgin Mary, affect the natural world?
Leucippus inquires in order to examine the supernatural world.
He sees no addition to the natural or any simplification but rather the obfuscation of matters with a sleight of hand- theological double talk. The supernatural explanation redounds to God did it, which is so uninformative! It ranks with demons and gremlins as explanations. We have Nature, but how can the supernatural comport with it when as Lamberth's atelic or teleonomic arguments explains that as the weight of evidence presents only teleonomy- no planned outcomes, so that to add the supernatural as the intent behind natural causes, that cannot perforce add to knowledge but rather contradict it with the new Omphalos argument which bases itself on Hick's epistemic distance one that He has to hide Himself ambiguously from us in order to not override our free will. Do public announcements then try to override our free will unjustly and do parents try erroneously to override their children's free wills with punishment.Why then would He prefer then to allow all the evils when He could have caused our free wills to be free but with a guarantee not to do wrong as David Steele Ramsay observes in " Atheism Explained: from Folly to Philosophy?"
John l.Schellenberg, a fellow skeptic, notes with his hiddenness argument that that redounds to in effect no God at all!
We skeptics find that all religious experience merely add a needless explanation -the supernatural- to our own mental states. In "God, Freedom and Immortality," fellow naturalist Jonathon Harrison maintains that to deny the power of say Mary as to her apparitions begs the question but no, the inverse is true. How could Mary effectuate any natural phenomenon to render her present in that form? By magic? No, the supernaturalist begs the question by denying the presumption of naturalism that all natural causes and explanations themselves not only are necessary and efficient but also primary and sufficient. And that begs no questions but is our starting point, which the supernaturalists with evidence must override. That presumption is the key to our conservation of knowledge.
How can the supernatural with all its convoluted,ad hoc assumptions be more simple than just the natural as Richard Swinburne, advanced theologian alleges? It is no,t as he fathom, how many parts to a theory that matters but for what can it account without itself be more complicated as the supernatural then is.
Naturals causes and explanations don't themselves require the mysteries of the supernatural to validate them! Those convoluted, ad hoc assumptions of His referents as the Grand Miracle Monger and so forth and His incoherent, contradictory attributes are those convoluted, ad hoc assumptions!
The supernatural, as cause and explanation violates Ockham's razor, then plus also contradicting them! That's a double whammy!
Do supernatural entities communicate telepathically to us so that we can have a two-way relationship with it? This relationship then again is our mental states at work.It is our ignoring that we can rely on our inner resources without this placebo as our motivator!That morality requires no supernatural foundation but religion requires it to effect people's lives goes back to Plato's Euthyphro that morality is indeed independent of religion,albeit Plato himself was a theist. The supernatural adds no explanation then to morality but a needless series of convoluted, ad hoc assumptions.
How then could the supernatural be any more an explanation than demons and gremlins as the underlying cause? No psychiatrist or mechanic or scientist needs any of these three for the primary and sufficient causes and explanations!
Answered prayer is merely post hoc- coincidental, and miracles,including faith healing, merely follow natural causes and explanations. Alister Earl McGrath, Dawkins's nemesis, this needless redundancy adds then nothing to explaining matters but is no more that the vacuous rantings of Richard Swinburne and William Lame Craig's obscurantism of the personal explanation as adding not natural ones. We require no such personal explanation as teleonomic evolution explains the patterns of life that people see as designs, the quantum fields explain how the Metaverse exists eternally and none for miracles. This obscurantism with with its mysteries adds only solecistic, sophisticated sophistry- ignorant, complicated nonsense!
It scope and predictive value exists only as parasitic on the natural causes and explanations then!In itself it has no scope as it goes nowhere and can predict nothing.
Therefore, it has no simplicity,lacks coherence with our conservation of knowledge and lacks scope and predicts nothing that it can be no theory and part of knowledge
We ignostics go further that the atelic-itself alone- and other arguments show that lack of referents and that His attributes are indeed incoherent and contradictory that He cannot exist so that we naturalist need no traversing averse to find that or be omniscient but merely be analytically.
Leucippus and the other ancient philosophers are ahead still most of humankind!
As Sydney Hook observes science is acquired knowledge whilst faith begs the question of being knowledge. As Fr. Griggs notes," Logic is the bane of theists."
And as an Englishman notes, " Religion is mythinformation.'
http:// Ignostic Morgan's blog.wordpress.com
http:// Socrates of the South.posterous.com

Argument from religious experience - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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It has been suggested that Witness argument be merged into this article or section. (Discuss)

The Argument from religious experience is an argument for the existence of God, as against materialism.

Contents

[edit] Outline logical structure

Its logical structure is essentially as follows:

  1. There are compelling reasons for considering at least some religious experiences to point to and validate spiritual realities that exist in a way that transcends any material manifestations.
  2. According to Materialism, nothing exists in a way that transcends its material manifestations.
  3. According to Classical Theism in general, and to many theistic faiths, God endows Humans with the ability to have spiritual experiences and to perceive, albeit imperfectly, such spiritual realities. There are innumerable references in both the Old testament, from Adam talking with God in Genesis onwards, and in the New Testament of which the Transfiguration and St Paul's comments in 1 Corinthians about spiritual gifts and "seeing through a glass darkly" (i.e. through a poor mirror, imperfectly) may stand as two examples</ref> and these spiritual realities exist in a way that transcends any material manifestations.
  4. Therefore, to the extent that premise (1) is accepted, Theism is more plausible than Materialism.

Points 2, 3 and 4 are relatively un-controversial, and the argument is formally valid, so discussion focuses on the premise (1).

[edit] Suggested reasons for accepting the premise

The principal arguments for the premise are: Very substantial numbers of "ordinary" people report having had such experiences, though this isn't to say that religious believers aren't ordinary.[1] Such experiences are reported in almost all known cultures.

These experiences often have very significant effects on people's lives, frequently inducing in them acts of extreme self-sacrifice well beyond what could be expected from evolutionary arguments.

These experiences often seem very real to the people involved, and are quite often reported as being shared by a number of people.[2] Although mass delusions are not inconceivable, one needs compelling reasons for invoking this as an explanation.

Swinburne suggests that, as two basic principles of rationality, we ought to believe that things are as they seem unless and until we have evidence that they are mistaken (principle of credulity), and that those who do not have an experience of a certain type ought to believe others who say that they do in the absence of evidence of deceit or delusion (principle of testimony) and thus, although if you have a strong reason to disbelieve in the existence of God you will discount these experiences, in other cases such evidence should count towards the existence of God.[3]

[edit] Suggested reasons for disputing the premise

  1. There is little doubt that some reports of religious experience have naturalistic and/or psychological explanations and are thus mistaken. If some reports are mistaken, perhaps all such reports may be.
  2. These might be mis-firings of evolved mechanisms selected for very different reasons.[4]
  3. Religious texts such as the bible that speak of revelations are of disputable historical accuracy.[5]
  4. It is conceivable that some claimed religious experiences are lies, possibly done for attention or acceptance.[5]
  5. Argument from Inconsistent Revelations : Different people have had, or believed to have had, religious experiences pointing to the existence of different religions. Not all of these can be correct.
  6. It has been argued that religious experiences are little more than hallucinations aimed at fulfilling basic psychological desires of immortality, purpose, etc. Sigmund Freud, for example, considered God to be simply a psychological "illusion"[6] created by the mind, instead of an actual existing entity.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes and references

  1. ^ Polkinghorne Belief in God in an Age of Science' "the surveys conducted by the distinguished biologist Alister Hardy"Swinburne references David Hay Religious Experience Today (1990) chapters 5, 6 and Appendix
  2. ^ For example the New Testament speaks of Jesus, after his resurrection, appearing to 10 or more people at once (see eg 1 Corinthians 15:6, Luke 24, Mt 28, Jn 16, Acts 1).
  3. ^ Swinburne, Is there a God? p 133–136
  4. ^ This is broadly Dawkins' line in The God Delusion
  5. ^ a b Walker, Cliff. "Is The Bible Historically Accurate?". Positive Atheism. http://www.positiveatheism.org/mail/eml9823.htm. Retrieved 11 May 2010. 
  6. ^ Freud, Sigmund, The Future of an Illusion, W. W. Norton & Company, ISBN 0393008312

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By averring that the supernatural makes for relgiious experiences, one begs the question. All religious experiences result from ones own mental states at work.