Every serious student of cause and effect, i.e. the material sciences, knows that correlation is not to be endowed with the designation, "causation".
Correlation identifies two sets of facts, Set [A] and Set [B], then looks at similarities between the two sets in trends or other features. After finding similarities, correlation cannot produce any causation without additional facts, facts which identify the cause of the similarity as being due to the actual cause of the target set of facts. It is always false to say that if Set [A] and Set [B] appear to have similarities, then one set caused the other.
This issue is even more severe for evolution, because one set is a loose amalgam of individual static facts which do not provide any objective proof of evolution, and the other set is a “mountain” of extrapolations, interpolations, opinions, and inferences: definitely not actual objective, falsifiable facts. So any correlation which is made is between actual isolated facts on the one hand, and no facts at all on the other hand. For evolution, not only is the correlation falsely endowed with causation as the isolated individual facts are compared (with science fiction stories supplied specifically for the purpose of correlation), but also the entire premise is fatally flawed by the lack of a factual set against which to “correlate” with the isolated facts of the original set. So even the attempt to correlate fact with fiction is a logic fallacy.
Set [A (facts)] cannot be logically correlated with Set [B(non-facts)].
Each of the two flaws, 1) use of correlation as causation and 2) correlating facts with non-facts, are individually fatal to the “necessary intellectual process” demanded by Evolution. So Evolution is doubly false when making such claims, and such claims are all that evolutionists are capable of providing.
There is every reason, if one is devoted to actual logic first and foremost, not to accept any pursuit which attempts to make such a correlation. And when the pursuit requires such fallacious faux correlation to be accepted as “Truth” and “the only Truth”, it is obvious that that pursuit has no dedication to either logic or rational thought.
Further, the attack on those who DO accept logical requirements before any acceptance of this sort of claims of Truth is purely an act in blatant support of irrationality. The motivation for that is clear, because the cultish quality of such demands leads straight back through the false hypothesis of Philosophical Materialism to the necessary irrationality of Atheism (Neither Philosophical Materialism nor Atheism can prove the foundational claims underlying their propositions or worldviews; but both require a physical, material creation story, and evolution, they claim, is the only story available – ignoring all the falsifiers of course).
So not only is such a pursuit demonstrably fallacious, it is also demonstrably ideologically motivated similar to cultism.
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3 things I've recently realized while debating with an Atheist:
1) Most Atheists claim that "to avoid harm" is their ultimate moral principle.
Problem with this is that keeping in line with Atheism, harm must be strictly defined as "intentionally causing physical injury". Mental and emotional harm cannot be objectively confirmed as they leave no physical scar and is purely based on personal experience. For example: calling someone derogatory names may harm one person but the same derogatory remarks could have no affect on another person. There is no objective standard to measure personal experience and must be dismissed as invalid evidence, at least in accordance with Atheism. Then there is of course fraud, lying, cheating ,stealing, racketeering, money laundering, cheating on your lover, etc. leaves no physical injury therefore they are acceptable per Atheist moral standards.
2) Atheists have a major issue with the construction of the universe and life as we know it. They can't understand why natural disasters exist, they can't accept the fact that there is so much cruelty in nature, why we are not perfect beings, why evil/hate exist, etc. In short, they can't understand nor accept the fact that the universe is not constructed according to their expectations. Narcissistic? I'd say most likely yes. Also, a complete denial and rejection of reality, not to mention the insanity of trying to alter something we have no control over. But the worst part is that Atheism offers no solution to natural disasters and no preventive measures to these issues, except rants at a deity they don't believe exist.
3) Atheists commonly define good as "avoiding harm/intentionally causing physical injury". Yet, how can they be good if there is no harm to avoid. Without evil, good is only an intellectual concept. Therefore evil must exist if good is to be realized. Much like health is defined by the medical dictionary as the lack of abnormality or illness. Without these polar opposites such concepts have no actual meaning except as hypotheticals.
That's my little rant, hope it can help others who face similar discussions with Atheists.
Interesting.
Do atheists actually limit harm to "intentionally causing physical injury"? The SJW flavor of new atheism doesn't seem to, the Atheism Plus guys (PZ Myers, R.Carrier) seem to subscribe to feminist definitions of harm; women and minorities can be hurt socially and economically by cis/white/hetero/whatever males even without threat of violence. A+ founder and practicing polyamorist Richard Carrier is presently defending himself from accusations of sexual harassment and has even promised to sue his accuser(s) in court. More than a few atheist groups have had lawsuits and legal action regarding fraud/theft, Madeline O'hare's American Atheists was an early example, but Richard Dawkins and the Secular Coalition for America have had embezzlement problems also. I don't think atheists have any principled definition of harm, like the rest of an athiest's moral outlook, it's as flexible as the individual atheist needs it to be when the situation arises.
More info: https://shadowtolight.wordpress.com/2015/06/17/atheist-organizations-and-embezzlement/
https://shadowtolight.wordpress.com/2016/07/31/woman-who-accused-richard-carrier-of-sexual-harassment-seeking-help-to-defend-herself-against-his-lawyers/
Talon,
Yes, I believe Hitchen's offered a similar challenge to theists, to provide one moral duty that Atheists alike cannot perform. It's a straw man and misses the target completely.
The main contention is this: If Philosophical Materialism is applied consistently then phenomenon such as subjective beliefs and personal experiences are irrelevant, invalid as evidence and causally inert. Of course taking Materialism to its logical conclusion is impractical and inhumane per theist standards. It's not that there are no examples of Atheists being humane in the public eye but rather are they being consistent with their beliefs?
1) God chose to create a world containing evil people and natural disasters (when he didn’t have to). 2) God knew that they would commit crimes and countless millions would suffer. 3) Therefore God is criminally responsible, – just like if a prison releases a dangerous criminal onto the streets knowing he will kill people they are criminally responsible. 4) God is a consequentialist who allows violations of his own “objective moral laws” to achieve a greater good.
Atheists can account for suffering and evil. We live in a universe that doesn’t care about us and we are an animal species where our temporal lobes are too small and our adrenaline glands are too big. This is why suffering and evil people exist.
CommonSense,
You have not addressed the refutations to your prior statements below. You merely ignore them and march forward with similar complaints, most of which have already been addressed and refuted. I will go ahead and address this re-hashing of refuted concepts this time. But you will need to address the refutations if you wish to have a conversation here.
”1) God chose to create a world containing evil people and natural disasters (when he didn’t have to). 2) God knew that they would commit crimes and countless millions would suffer. 3) Therefore God is criminally responsible, – just like if a prison releases a dangerous criminal onto the streets knowing he will kill people they are criminally responsible. 4) God is a consequentialist who allows violations of his own “objective moral laws” to achieve a greater good.”
1) A universe containing both life and agency requires the concept of choice. What you refer to as a criminal creation is in fact not a utopia and is not amenable to Atheist desires and dictates that it should be a utopia because of Atheist morality. No intelligent being can exercise choice if choices are restricted as Atheists demand that they should be. In fact the universe which Atheists demand is one of automatons, restricted in their behaviors to algorithmically defined zones of available actions. This requires no intelligence whatsoever, since there are no actual choices to be made; all possible choices would have possibilities for failure due to unforeseeable consequences, at a minimum, and ever present entropic failure at every turn.
So the Atheist conception of utopia is actually one of mechanistic organisms and static material existence which precludes any natural deviations which might hurt the mechanistic organisms. Not to have that situation is considered “criminal”, as if the deity should be punished by the superior moral cluster of Atheists – who have no common morality themselves.
Atheist morality is always merely a personal opinion which mirrors the desires and proclivities of the individual Atheist. So the individual Atheist cannot ever be immoral by his own morality. This superior morality leads to moral preening and elitism, to the point that the Atheist actually feels superior to any being which has the power and intellect to have created the entire universe, including the Atheist.
All claims of morality by any Atheist, then, are seen to be irrational first and foremost, and self-serving as well as completely elitist to the point of self-deification, in order to condemn a deity which he either denies or considers inferior to himself (due to his obviously superior self-morality, albeit tautological and logically false).
2) Atheist morality for God (or anyone) is completely non-coherent for three reasons: A) Atheists have no moral authority to which any other human need listen, nor do Atheists have a common ethic, much less a common, objective, self-evident moral code; b) a deity does not report to anyone, certainly not any Atheist; c) Atheism demands the animalism which you describe and use as a premise, which therefore logically relieves the Atheist of any possible moral conception other than hormonal desires and emotional disturbances, i.e., chaos. This is evident in Atheist societies, including China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, and the EU which is destroying itself and its populace.
” Atheists can account for suffering and evil. We live in a universe that doesn’t care about us and we are an animal species where our temporal lobes are too small and our adrenaline glands are too big. This is why suffering and evil people exist.”
3) Accounting for suffering does not even address the necessity for having consequences for actions in a universe designed for cause and effect, material entropy, intellect, and choice. And this “account” is lacking any possibility of proof of concept; it is a Just So Story in the same intellectual path as the Just So Stories of Evolution: unfalsifiable and therefore non-empirical and with no hope of becoming objective, falsifiable knowledge. Stories are not evidence, and are not knowledge.
Further, Dawkins has shown conclusively that an Atheist cannot have a conception of “evil”, and you have concurred with your adoption of animalism. So you have no grounding even possible for your complaint of “evil people”, “evil deity”, evil natural catastrophe, or evil anything. Your moral opinion is totally without a shred of moral authority, and is solely a volatile opinion specific only to yourself, and changeable at a moment’s notice.
"Mental and emotional harm cannot be objectively confirmed as they leave no physical scar and is purely based on personal experience. For example: calling someone derogatory names may harm one person but the same derogatory remarks could have no affect on another person. There is no objective standard to measure personal experience and must be dismissed as invalid evidence, at least in accordance with Atheism."
But they are physically visible – we can observe that somebody is in psychological pain. (If we couldn’t we wouldn’t be able to talk about it)The mind is based in the physical world. The brain is the physical substrate of the mind. Therefore this is a false dichotomy. Sam Vaknin correctly says “When we are born, we are not much more than the sum of our genes and their manifestations. Our brain – a physical object – is the residence of mental health and its disorders. Mental illness cannot be explained without resorting to the body and, especially, to the brain. And our brain cannot be contemplated without considering our genes. Thus, any explanation of our mental life that leaves out our hereditary makeup and our neurophysiology is lacking. Such lacking theories are nothing but literary narratives. Psychoanalysis, for instance, is often accused of being divorced from corporeal reality”
Thoughts and beliefs from the physicalist view are based in physical reality – electro chemicals in the brain. So this doesn’t contradict materialism. Dualism on the other hand has the massive problem of explaining how (what it holds to be) two fundamental different substances- mind and body – interact.
"Accounting for suffering does not even address the necessity for having consequences for actions in a universe designed for cause and effect, material entropy, intellect, and choice."
The necessity is simple because if you don’t the species will become extinct. This is an actual basis for holding people responsible- invoking a mysterious being who himself would (to say the least) have questionable morals is not a basis and has nothing to do with moral responsibility.
"Further, Dawkins has shown conclusively that an Atheist cannot have a conception of “evil”, and you have concurred with your adoption of animalism.
Only conscious beings can be described as evil – the entire universe is not.
"So you have no grounding even possible for your complaint of “evil people”, “evil deity”, evil natural catastrophe, or evil anything. Your moral opinion is totally without a shred of moral authority, and is solely a volatile opinion specific only to yourself, and changeable at a moment’s notice.
Nonsense your God (if he existed) is either evil, incompetent or indifferent in any case such a being is not the yardstick for human morality.
1) A universe containing both life and agency requires the concept of choice. What you refer to as a criminal creation is in fact not a utopia and is not amenable to Atheist desires and dictates that it should be a utopia because of Atheist morality. No intelligent being can exercise choice if choices are restricted as Atheists demand that they should be. In fact the universe which Atheists demand is one of automatons, restricted in their behaviors to algorithmically defined zones of available actions. This requires no intelligence whatsoever, since there are no actual choices to be made; all possible choices would have possibilities for failure due to unforeseeable consequences, at a minimum, and ever present entropic failure at every turn.
1) I don’t think anybody would agree those countries could be called “Utopias”. 2) Would it be a bad idea (if we had the power) to elimate genes that either directly cause or predispose us to things like developmental disorders, mental illness and retardation, drug/alcohol addiction and psychopathy/anti social behaviour just so we can keep the “free will and choice”?.3)Tell that to WLC a professional theologian and philosopher who says there is no contradiction between free will and omniscience (and who says he studied the subject in depth for years) says that God is like a perfect infallible barometer. It’s your free choice that determines Gods foreknowledge not Gods foreknowledge determining your free choice. You are free to do what you want – your just not free to fool the barometer. So by analogy if a parent offers two bowls to their child one of green vegetables and the other a bowl of ice cream the parent knows before hand what the child will freely choose. But that knowledge is not causing or determining the child’s choice – and certainly not the parents will being enforced on the child.
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