Problem with miracles is that they're not necessarily evidence for any particular god, or even a god. Also, they're usually anecdotal evidence that is hard to verify.

I love how you just keep equating incorporeal theories with corporeal theories.

Must be the materialist in you.

Well, there's no evidence for the incorporeal in the first place; so one assumes that, in order to exist, something must be corporeal.

Yes, that is the hard part about having a system which requires repeatability when testing something which is inherently not to be repeated. If you could repeat the miracle, you would no longer call it a miracle.

But when the miracle happens, it makes it no less empirical.

You still seem to be making the same mistake. You basically are saying "Our way is empirical, because our evidence is better. They make up evidence which doesn't really exist, so their way isn't empirical." The fact is that both follow the exact same model:

1. Gather empirical (observational) evidence
2. Interpret that evidence in light of our own beliefs, moral and social structure, and the severity of its implications
3. Reach a conclusion based on both #1 and #2

Pure empiricists are not immune to #2, though for some reason there seems to be a tendency to pretend they are. The goal, for any productive conversation, is to examine both the evidence (#1) and the context (#2) that leads people to a certain belief structure, then examine the evidence and context thta leads to your current belief structure. You then have to determine where exactly your aversion lies.

In most cases, people on every side reject the evidence (#1) because of their current beliefs and lifestyles (#2). They then try to attribute the problems to the evidence by ignoring it or presupposing that it is false or misleading. In these cases (which make up the vast majority of debates over religious issues) the problem is not with #1, but #2. The way to make the most progress is to examine each piece of evidence for each side, and work step by step through why it should be considered valid, how it contributes to the conclusion, and why it should be considered superior to the conflicting evidence (which nearly always exists).

You could say all day that Theists invent nonexistent evidence to support their position (i.e. God in the gaps), and I could say the same of Atheists (We don't know, but we will someday!) - in both cases we're being misleading. There is evidence for each side, it's just a matter of examining it and deciding which is superior.

I was reading some article which say that Evolutionists have a new deity, which is described as "Evolution provided for..." without giving any evidence or stating any research for that idea.

That's actually becoming a pretty common answer. I like hearing people imply that "God in the gaps" is a fallacy. They are basically saying "That's horrible evidence for God! Obviously natural processes fill that gap!"

In most cases, I don't think they even recognize they are just substituting a new name for "god".

Sounds like an interesting article!

I suppose that we're supposed to believe public teaching is a priesthood, then?

I partially agree, but I think it goes deeper (as I've already stated in some previous post) - nothing we experience/observe is purely objective. Therefore we can't get to know the universal truth through our methods of gaining knowledge at all, unless maybe by coincidence. And even that is assuming there is such a thing as the fundamental truth about the world. Ultimately, everything can be questioned, and if we were to linger over it, we'd never reach any conclusions. It's a philosophical matter I suppose, though it also came to be a science issue along with quantum theory.

Still, does it really matter? We are limited, so we might as well take what our perception tells us as truth and build our knowledge from there. String theory is neat but most likely unprovable - we live in 3D world and nothing seems to be able to change it (who knows though).

Looking at all the three questions, my answer depends on your definition of truth (boundaries for what you consider true). If by truth you mean 'the universal thruth' I tried to define above, my answer to all three of them is 'no'.

@Demetrios
I looked up imaginary numbers. I didn't dig into it considering what I found right away.


Edited

Completely ignoring the purpose of your post in favor of more fun, I decided to do some research.
I started by searching Wikipedia for "public teaching" - look at the #1 result.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...public+teaching

From dictionary.com:
Priest: a person whose office it is to perform religious rites, and esp. to make sacrificial offerings.
Religious Rite: an established ceremony prescribed by a religion

It all comes down to how you define "religion," but the teaching could be considered an established ceremony, so it could be construed as a priesthood of sorts...that would be a fun case to argue.

In more seriousness, now, @Kashim...



This is where the conversation circles back to faith. In all actuality, you are right - we will never be able to logically, absolutely prove anything. Most of us can admit that. The logical question, then, is why we are not all agnostic...and the answer is that we don't have to be able to absolutely prove it. There is an important aspect of human nature that goes beyond logic and reasoning, filling in where empiricism lacks. We let faith take us the extra step, even though we don't know for sure.

When people get married, how do they really know that they are in love with the person they're marrying? How do they know they won't get a divorce, or that the person they're marrying isn't an axe murderer (good movie, by the way)? In reality, they don't. There is no way they can absolutely prove any of those things. They gather what evidence they can (spending time, learning about their soon-to-be-spouse, etc), then they take the next step on faith. If we were truly pure empiricists, none of us could ever get married or trust anyone else, since there is no empirical proof that any person is trustworthy. Luckily, we are not pure empiricists - in fact, even though I've talked to hundreds of "religious agnotsics," I have never yet met one that practiced that same concept in all areas of their lives.

I've seen lately lots of people stating as fact that religious people have to deal with cognitive dissonance. I'm starting to wonder if that is perhaps a projection of the type you are describing here.

If reducing the debt is not a gain for you, I don't think I can follow your way of thinking anymore, sorry. It contradicts with my basic common sense. Would you also say that electronic money, since it doesn't actually exist, has no value?

Similarly, if you reject the empirical source of basic mathematics because they involve abstract, imaginary constructs, show me an example of a true empirical evidence that doesn't. Also, tell me where the assumption is and why do you think it's untrue.

You're saying one might consider division by zero being an impossible operation breaking mathematics. I say otherwise - it only strenghtens its validity and serves as an evidence.
Based on what? Empiricism.
When I have 4 apples, and I want to divide them into two even groups, I make two groups of 2 apples. Math says the same.
When I have 4 apples and I want to divide them into one group, I do nothing, because I already have that one group. Math says the same.
When I have 4 apples and I want to divide them into zero groups, I... actually don't know how to do that. Math says it doesn't know how to do that either. No contradiction.


Funny thing - 'evidence' and 'proof' are also the same one word in Polish. I'll have to look up those two in the dictionary to find out what's the meaning of the distinction you're making...

That's an idiotic notion propagated by theists who just try to make science look like another "religion" and thus on the same level as their beliefs... when it's obviously not true.

The "god of the gaps" argument is idiotic because, of course, you point at the gap and say it's evidence for god. Scientists don't point at a gap and say it's evidence for anything; rather, having seen how everything else works through natural processes, they inductively reason that natural processes must also be responsible for unknown things, but they don't try to fill that "gap" with a theory until there is enough data to falsify theories that could fit in the gap - at which point it stops being a gap in the first place.

There is a fundamental difference between "goddidit" and "it happened through a natural process" - we understand the natural process, while saying god did it is just a cop-out from having to provide an explanation. The question "How do you explain X without god" is just a sneaky way of saying, "How do you explain X at all," which implies "X, therefore God because you can't explain X." It's pure intellectual laziness, and in many cases downright arrogance. There's a fundamental difference between saying "We don't know" and saying "God did it". The latter implies that you have evidence for God (As opposed to natural processes or space aliens or fairies) doing it.

Take for example creationism and evolution; those are two explanations which are not equivalent. The former just says, "God did it, because it says so on the Bible;" the latter says "From examining the fossil record, the morphology of current life-forms, genetics, biochemistry, developmental biology, populational dynamics and a series of other pieces of evidence, we have surmised that the most likely explanation for the arising of complex life on Earth after the first self-replicating life-forms is through natural selection of random variation in populations of similar beings." Saying they're equivalent and the latter just substitutes "evolution" for "god" is hopeless ignorance and apologetics.

Evidence is information presented in support of an idea. With sufficient evidence, we usually behave as though something is true, even though it's not really proven.

A proof is a way of demonstrating that an idea is true and could not be any other way.

We should be agnostic if the hypotheses "There is a god" and "There is no god" were equivalent. In that sense, I am agnostic about any deities which do not at all influence the tangible world. Unfortunately, all meaningful deities do in some way or another (Otherwise, how and why would you worship them?) thus making them less likely than not to exist given our perceptions.

Again, you don't understand how empirical inquiry works. "Proof" is for mathematics and alcohol; in real life, we rely on likelihood. At a certain point, given the evidence we have, we understand that it is more likely that someone is really trustworthy than that they have been deceiving us all this time (Although, given how this is definitely not an exact science, the actual point varies from person to person). Empiricism is made to acknowledge that we work with limited information; it relies on comparing evidence for both hypotheses and deciding which is more likely to be true. Ultimately it works by producing a hypothesis that explains all evidence and requires no leaps of faith (That is, it requires no belief in entities whose existence has not been demonstrated, and when that is necessary, in not ascribing any more properties to said entities than what is strictly necessary to explain the evidence.)

For example, when we see someone dead with a knife on his back, we have a number of possible hypotheses - Let's call them the "murder," "suicide," and "natural processes" hypotheses.

Superficially, Occam's Razor would discount the possibility of murder; but induction (Similar events tended to be murders) and deduction (Knives have not been observed to move towards backs on their own, and it is difficult to stab oneself on the back) lead us to believe that the "murder" hypothesis is true, even though we can't really know (Our sense may be unreliable; maybe it was a suicide; maybe there really is a hidden force that attracts knives to people's backs.)

I see, that makes our equivalents 'proof' and 'absolute proof'. Some confusion.

Thanks!

"That's an idiotic notion propagated by theists who just try to make science look like another "religion" and thus on the same level as their beliefs... when it's obviously not true."

Yes, those damn Theists... except in this case, it was an Atheist who was tired of seeing scientific papers giving no explanation other than "evolution provides for"

It was an atheist getting upset that some scientists/evolutionists are writing research papers as if they were theists.

Source please? "I was reading some article" does not suffice to establish veracity of claims.

At any rate, I'm not obligated to agree with everything all other theists say - after all, Hitler was a Christian, but I don't pin that on Christians because, you know, groups of people aren't sessile colonies.

The article that Daganev makes reference to does not appear on Google. Two attempts to find it only produced 22 and 8 results, respectively, none of which made that claim. Only possibility is that the phrase "evolution provides for" does not appear in it.

Careful which bandwagons you jump on.

Bandwagon?

What bandwagon?

I mentioned one guy who wrote something, and I was reminded of it because of what was said in that post.

If the phrase "evolution provides for" only get 22 hits, then I'm pretty certain that isn't the exact phrase. Perhaps its Evolution provided for, or evolution allowed for, or evolution made x happen. Even if I were to spend the time to remember if I read it in a magazine, or a book, or a website, (or its even possible it was said in one of the many conversations I have at work, though I doubt that because I distinctly remember the phrase in italics and quotes) and even if I was able to show to you that this one person did in fact make that statement of frustration, how would that even "verify the claim."

Its an opinion/observation, made by an Atheist who dislikes the religion vs evolution conversation.