10 Questions for Atheists / Angry Agnostics

[XenoFish]

10 hours ago, Hammerclaw said:

What percentage of male atheists either zip and button, or button and zip?

Jogging pants. Easier solution. Why button or zip? Feel the breeze.

What percentage either put both shoes on and tie, or put each on and tie, one at time? It's important.

Crocs. Because every paranoid atheist needs to make a quick escape from the spiritual police.

 

[rodentraiser]

17 hours ago, Carlos Allende said:

Fascinating answers, m8. In terms of question 7, I just worry that the atheist-theist debate is so impassioned that everyone (atheists in particular) don't realize they're falling into a default-contrarian mindset, maybe via some kind of persecution complex. 

I understand what you're saying. In fact, there's a test online that tests people for this very thing. This is the test I took. For who knows what reason, I saved my score and you can judge me by that. It doesn't really prove anything, but it is an interesting test.

"Battleground God

Can your beliefs about religion make it across our intellectual battleground?

In this activity, you’ll be asked a series of questions about God and religion. In each case (apart from Question 1, where "Don't Know" is a possible answer), you need to answer either True or False. The aim of the activity is not to judge whether your answers are correct. Rather, our battleground is that of rational consistency. This means to get across without taking any hits, you are required to answer in a way that is rationally consistent. In other words, you have to avoid choosing answers that contradict each other. Also, if you answer in a way that is rationally consistent, but which has strange or unpalatable implications, you’ll be forced to bite a bullet - accept something many find unpalatable and would view as being a major problem."

https://www.philosophyexperiments.com/god/Default.aspx

My score:

 

 

Edited to add: those seven tenets I mentioned are the seven fundamental tenets of the Satanic Temple.

Edited October 15, 2018 by rodentraiser

[GoodReality]

I'm agnostic but, 

1) General immorality has lead to a lot of what was mentioned in this list. 

2) Call 911

3) Just have a box of random books and put them in the hotel rooms. Maybe someone will find a new favorite book. 

4) Scientific proof

5) Nope

6) I can let them determine it for themselves. 

7) I don't claim things just to be different. 

8)  Nope

9)  Humans don't know much 

10)  Wouldn't even think about that in the moment.

[+Hammerclaw]

21 hours ago, eight bits said:

Atheists use Velcro.

Infidels.

[eight bits]

9 hours ago, rodentraiser said:

https://www.philosophyexperiments.com/god/Default.aspx

I thought that was an interesting exercise over a second cup of coffee. I took one claimed contradiction, which I saw coming, so I kept track. Bear in mind that except for the Question of God itself (which is Q. 1), where "don't know" is allowed, all other scored questions are true or else false.

This is the question 8, verbatim:

Quote

It is justified to base one's beliefs the external world - i.e. the world outside one's head -. on a firm inner conviction, even in the absence of independent evidence for the truth of the conviction.

In one interpretation, the question reduces to: Is it ever rational to form a priori beliefs, when no evidence (or argument) is available to the person forming the belief? Are Bayesian belief management principles, which prescribe that a priori beliefs be formed and attended to, ever rational?

Well, of course the answer to the interpreted question is yes. Bayesian belief modeling is normative according to some. Even Bayes' critics usually don't deny that Bayes is rational (but do assert that it is not the only rational approach to uncertainty). So, the answer to the interpreted question is yes, for any Bayesian and even for the usual critic of Bayesian methods. That's almost everybody who thinks seriously about uncertain reasoning. I answered "true."

Assent to the interpreted question does not entail agreement with other possible interpretations of the question (e.g. that all a priori beliefs are to be treated as equally "justified," that once a fact claim is "justified," confidence in its accuracy should be the same whether or not there is evidence for the claim, that all "justified" beliefs are equally good warrants for taking action, ...).

Nevertheless, a contradiction was alleged, based on my answer to Q. 16, that a named individual described as a serial killer was not justified in his inner conviction that he was "carrying out God's will" to kill sex workers.

Good luck with that. I haven't committed about how, in general, behavioral resolutions (which I assert occur inside one's head) are to be "justified" in light of personal beliefs about the external world (assuming that's where the serial killer's "God" is). In this particular case, I haven't committed that there is any relationship between this individual's beliefs and his behavioral choices. I don't know the person, but based on the facts alleged in the question, I cannot exclude mental illness as the cause of his behavior.

Still, an interesting exercise.

Edited October 15, 2018 by eight bits

[eight bits]

So, just for chuckles, I retook the quiz, answering questions 1-15 the same way as I did the first time, and answered question 16 the only other way allowed (True, the serial killer is justified in the belief described in my preceding post).

In that case, you get a "bite the bullet" fault, complaining only about the answer to questions 8 ("...it is justified to base...") and 16:

Quote

You've just bitten a bullet!

You are consistent in applying the principle that that even in the absence of independent evidence, it is justified to base one's beliefs about the external world on a firm, inner-conviction. The problem is that it seems you have to accept that people might be justified in their belief that God could demand something terrible.

This is something many religious people are willing to accept. For example, Kierkegaard believed that it is precisely because Abraham had to contravene established morality to follow God's will and attempt to sacrifice his son which made his act the supreme act of faith. But as Kierkegaard also stressed, this makes the act incomprehensible from a rational point of view. The rational alternative - that people should require more than such an inner conviction to justify such a belief - is more attractive to most people, but you reject this alternative and bite the bullet.

So, there is no way that a Bayesian or the usual kind of Bayesian critic can avoid some objection when they hit Q 16, regardless of their beliefs about God, the ostensible subject matter of the quiz.

The only way to get a correct answer is to deny a prominent approach to normative belief management, and to do so in way that other critics generally don't. I suppose it would be unsporting  also to point out that the reliability of ordinary logic is, finally, a matter of conviction (Godel having proven that there is no proof of the proofworthiness of proofs independent of proofs' proofworthiness - hell, say it that way, and it's obvious!).

This is a problem with the usefulness of the quiz :). Or, if you prefer,

Quote

The rational alternative - that people should require more than such an inner conviction to justify such a belief -

- isn't what was asked in question 8.

[Carlos Allende]

18 hours ago, rodentraiser said:

I saved my score and you can judge me by that. It doesn't really prove anything, but it is an interesting test.

Good call, RR, it _is_ an interesting test, but slightly infuriating. For all I know, it _is_ logically sound (I fancy I have a low IQ, compensated by gob*****ry), but I think it needs to come with a proviso or disclaimer that it's _purely_ based on logic, and has nothing to do with basic human nuance. I dispute the Nessy analogy, big time: certainly it's rational to believe the LNM doesn't exist because there's 'no strong evidence or argument that it does' --but in that scenario you've got to weigh in the balance the eye-witness accounts that have come in over the centuries: you can see all the possibilities about why someone might have lied or hallucinated, but the simplest, most satisfying is probably, "Yeah? So what, m8? I lied because _it's just GOOD FOR THE SOUL,_ to pretend there's an ancient, scaly monster lurking right under the noses of complacent mankind". I don't think a logic-bound atheist would never accept a similar statement about God. They have a weird kind of hatred of emotional awe, in my experience. The biggest row I ever had with a girlfriend was whether Clooney was just being a dick in Solaris (I said, it was all fine). 

I also thought the Peter Sutcliffe reference was in poor taste. I don't think the author of this test has heard of schizophrenia. To honour a fellow conscious human being, you should assume that at least _their subconscious mechanisms_ are still capable of accepting a logical argument. If someone is suggesting that schizophrenia is similar to belief in God, then it's not far from the idea that religious people should be mass-medicated, and so mass-indoctrinated by some kind of humanist philosophy, which are always notoriously ill-defined and sanctimonious. I don't want to believe in God any more, but I still want to be 'good' --what should I do? Get a life-size tattoo on my chest of Lilly Allen holding a flag that says 'Immigrants Welcome'? 

But most condescending (not that there's anything wrong with being condescending, you give as good as you get), is the idea that 'To reject rational constraints on religious discourse in this fashion requires accepting that religious convictions, including your own religious convictions, are beyond any debate or rational discussion'. There _can_ be cycles of irrationality within a rational framework, and vice-versa, up to and including ultimate reality. It's semantics, that's all. Last year, I caught a really aggressive virus and it almost saw me off. I remember laying in my bed in the middle of the night, more a ball of fever germs than a man, thinking, 'Right, that's it, I'm going insane'. But I didn't, not quite. As the fever got worse, my mind became exactly what this test is talking about in Question 17: a God trying to create square circles. I was conscious, but I was also trying to solve logically-impossible maths problems, like getting '5' from 2 + 2, without the advantage of being able to infinitely recur. Looking back, it's obvious this was my mind representing the fight against the virus in abstract terms, and I get the impression that if I didn't have the _drive_ to believe I could understand these sums (impossible though they were), I probably would have died. 

So yeah. Now I'm going back to something easy now like a 1000-page Slavoj Zizek book.

 

[+Liquid Gardens]

12 hours ago, eight bits said:

Still, an interesting exercise.

It is interesting, but all of the bullets I've received so far through a couple tries I think are bull-something alright.

Quote

You've taken a direct hit!

You say that God does not have the freedom and power to do impossible things such as create square circles, but in earlier answers you indicated that any entity that it is right to call God must be free and have the power to do anything. So, on your view, God is not free and does not have the power to do what is impossible. This requires that you accept - in common with most, but not all, philosophers and theologians, and contrary to your earlier answer - that God's freedom and power are not unbounded. He does not have the freedom and power to do literally anything.

Quote

You've just bitten a bullet!

In saying that God has the freedom and power to do that which is logically impossible (such as creating square circles), you are saying that any discussion of God and ultimate reality cannot be constrained by basic principles of rationality. This would seem to make rational discourse about God impossible. If rational discourse about God is impossible, there is nothing rational we can say about God and nothing rational we can say to support our belief or disbelief in God. To reject rational constraints on religious discourse in this fashion requires accepting that religious convictions, including your own religious convictions, are beyond any debate or rational discussion. This is to bite a bullet.

It seems that no matter what I answer on this square circle question it seems to think there's a contradiction, although the problem for me might be that I don't think 'can god make square circles?' is a true/false question. Only when 'square circles' is defined as something that I or anyone can actually comprehend, then we can move on to say whether it even counts as a 'literal anything', with reference to the first direct hit.  

For the second supposedly bitten bullet, I don't think the rational conclusion to the idea that God can do something logically impossible is, 'therefore rational discourse about God is impossible'.  That doesn't follow, it in itself seems to make the same mistake it's accusing me of; if I'm being inconsistent by applying rationality to something that can be illogical, then why apply the entirely logical reasoning 'cannot be constrained by basic principles of rationality' in its justification?  Does irrationality spread out and corrupt all rational conclusions, including their argument, or not?  Besides, it seems I can still have rational discourse about the things that God does and is that are not logically impossible or when he's being rational.  'For He so loved the world', 'because the world had become wicked (except for Noah)', 'verily I say to you they have their reward', etc, are all offered up as reasons for various things in the Bible and they aren't incomprehensible.

[eight bits]

@Liquid Gardens

1 hour ago, Liquid Gardens said:

It seems that no matter what I answer on this square circle question it seems to think there's a contradiction,

I got a break there, because the early "do 'anything'" question had some verbiage about whether it was right to call an entity "God" unless they could do anything. I thought about Zeus, who isn't omnipotent, but I think he's reasonably referred to as a god. Even the omnipotent Abrahamic God apparently can't lie (at least in some tellings), so I answered that question false, and got a pass on the "do the impossible" question, which I also answered false.

However, although I didn't think of it, I can see that there probably is another coherent interpretation of the "do impossible things" question where "square circle" is treated like any other oxymoron - since it has no inherent meaning, you define it to give it some meaning ((like jumbo shrimp and colossal olives). Then

Quote

Only when 'square circles' is defined as something that I or anyone can actually comprehend, then we can move on to say whether it even counts as a 'literal anything', with reference to the first direct hit. 

Something like that should be OK.

On the other way through,

Quote

Does irrationality spread out and corrupt all rational conclusions, including their argument, or not?

If you're an AI buff, then you know there are formal systems that "compartmentalize" their contradictions (or, less elegantly, any program that contains a bug, but functions OK most of the time, crashing only once in a while, has somehow contained the implications of its containing a contradiction). So, there are things you can do.

As far as I know, that's where the religious term mystery comes in; as a way to comparmentalize contradiction. Example No set of real things can simultaneously have 3 members and only 1 member simultaneously, but the Christian Godhead supposedly does. So, the whole system collapses? No, the Trinity is designated as a mystery, and then there's no problem. (I wonder whether "just kidding" wouldn't work equally well as mystery.)

-

There's also a thread about the quiz on the S vs. S board:

It seems like there are a lot of questionable "contradictions" and "bitten bullets."

Edited October 16, 2018 by eight bits

[SHaYap]

I think the Chinese equivalent of the predicament lays in distinguishing when a needle needs be through eye or tongue ...

~

Edited October 16, 2018 by third_eye
something sumpthang

[rodentraiser]

One of the reasons I answered a lot of questions the way I did on that test was because I tend to really, really overthink a lot of things. I remember a question on a psyche test once that stated: "True or False. I have problems falling asleep at night because I worry about money."

That question threw me into a dither. Yes, I worry about money and yes, I have problems falling asleep sometimes, but although once or twice I've worried about money at night while trying to go to sleep, I don't generally have problems falling asleep because I worry about money. So how do I answer this question?

Because of stuff like that, I've just learned to take test questions totally at face value and answer as quick as I can, right off the bat. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But I have to say, when I saw my score on that test, I really, really was surprised and that's when I thought there was something fishy about the whole thing. There's too much ambiguity about the questions and I don't think there's a completely right answer to some of them.

[docyabut2]

 Questions for Atheists  I know you don't believe in a God, but there was a creator of all this. But do you believe these billions and billions humans only have one life? 

[docyabut2]

To add we know we are from the star dust and the Earth  ( the Mother the egg )is hit by orgasms( the  Father )the elements mix of the earth started with life. The only way life is destroy by blowing up the earth, is why we are trying to find another planet our specie can survived

[psyche101]

4 hours ago, docyabut2 said:

 Questions for Atheists  I know you don't believe in a God, but there was a creator of all this. 

No there wasn't doccy. There were natural processes. There is nothing whatsoever in nature that actually suggests a creator ever existed, the only reason we consider one is the writings of man. Nothing else at all supports the creator idea. 

4 hours ago, docyabut2 said:

But do you believe these billions and billions humans only have one life? 

Of course. Everything does. Again, nothing in nature suggests otherwise, only man made concepts consider the option. We know how our bodies work. Nothing at all suggests any part of us survives death. Only our imaginations. 

[psyche101]

3 hours ago, docyabut2 said:

To add we know we are from the star dust and the Earth  ( the Mother the egg )is hit by orgasms( the  Father )the elements mix of the earth started with life. The only way life is destroy by blowing up the earth, is why we are trying to find another planet our specie can survived

Nothing like that doccy. The elements that our bodies are made of were crated in supernova yes, evolution took care of the rest over great time lines. 

A pathogen could wipe us out, we aren't expecting to have to leave the earth over natural demise for a coupe billion years that leaves us quite some wiggle room. 

[Podo]

17 hours ago, docyabut2 said:

 Questions for Atheists  I know you don't believe in a God, but there was a creator of all this. But do you believe these billions and billions humans only have one life? 

It's not so much that I believe that we only have one life, it's more accurate to say that i have no reason to believe anything other than that. There is no substantial evidence that we exist for more than one stretch. 

[Robotic Jew]

On 9/17/2018 at 2:06 PM, danydandan said:

The Truth, the one and only truth.

Weather its.

Why are we/you/I really here? Is or isn't there a God?  How can one win the lottery etcetera. Whatever truth you want to know.

There is no "why?"

[danydandan]

12 minutes ago, Robotic Jew said:

There is no "why?"

How do you know that? With certainty.

[SHaYap]

Good ol' George knew it when good things are at the end ...

~

[00.05:29]

~

[XenoFish]

22 hours ago, docyabut2 said:

 Questions for Atheists  I know you don't believe in a God, but there was a creator of all this. But do you believe these billions and billions humans only have one life? 

If there is a creator it should be easy to prove. If it can't be. Then it either doesn't care or doesn't exist. As for us having billions of lives. No. Not at all. That's just wishful thinking from people afraid of death and finality.

[XenoFish]

Even the universe is going to die.

[SHaYap]

Sounds to me that only planets die. sun/stars die ... galaxies dissipates but the Universe just keeps on banging ...

~

[XenoFish]

3 minutes ago, third_eye said:

Sounds to me that only planets die. sun/stars die ... galaxies dissipates but the Universe just keeps on banging ...

~

What's it going to matter when the universe is a cold no-thingness.

[SHaYap]

3 minutes ago, XenoFish said:

What's it going to matter when the universe is a cold no-thingness.

Well ... as much as if everything is a hot-everything I guess ...

~

[rodentraiser]

On 10/17/2018 at 2:17 PM, docyabut2 said:

 Questions for Atheists  I know you don't believe in a God, but there was a creator of all this. But do you believe these billions and billions humans only have one life? 

I used to think reincarnation was pretty much hogwash. Then one day I got on one of those sites where they posted 'the creepiest things your kids have ever said to you'. It wasn't the article so much that got my attention. It was the comments to the article, hundreds and hundreds of them giving examples of "creepy" things their kids said. Over and over and over kids would tell their parents about their 'other mom' or where they lived 'before coming here'. I was pretty much blown away and so now I'm beginning to wonder if we really are reincarnated when we die.

As to the billions of people who have already lived or are living now, I read something interesting about that, too. One mother overheard her daughter say something about deciding to come to Earth this time and she thought having hands was the greatest thing ever.

It may be we are one of a number of universes and the souls of us all are scattered all through the stars.

By the way, if you want to read some of the things kids have said, don't look up reincarnation. Just google "creepy things kids say" and start reading.