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> Faith by definition isn't something which can be backed by evidence There is evidence backed belief in the unseen, and there is blind faith. So your claim th

> Faith by definition isn't something which can be backed by evidence There is evidence backed belief in the unseen, and there is blind faith. So your claim that by definition faith is without evidence is not correct. Secondly, even science needs to accept certain axioms as a given so that we can build upon them. Scientism is believing that the only way to arrive at truth is through experimentation, which is a false view. There are many things we accept, even though we cannot prove them through experimentation. Watch the lecture I posted to broaden your horizons.

michaelmrose 4y ago
Science chooses minimal axioms and builds the flesh of the world based on the existing bones ready to revise when new bones are discovered. Religion chooses a substantial set of axioms derived from a mixture of philosophy and fantasy dreamt up by our pre scientific ancestors who thought bad smells caused disease then makes many forms of revision sinful. A set of beliefs without ability to revise everything from the ground up will forever be limited.
- al_mandi 4y ago
  Just because the sets are of different size does not mean one is incorrect. You're also straw manning by talking about pre ancestors and bad smells.
  - michaelmrose 4y ago
    You can't win arguments by playing logical fallacies like they are uno cards. I was pointing out that the same ancestors who dreamt up the axioms you aren't allowed by religious law to fully revise or toss out had understandings limited by the information available in that antique period. Only hundreds of years ago medical professionals believed in the miasma theory of disease and before that both of our ancestors believed that sickness had paranormal causes. The problem with your set of axioms isn't MERELY the size. It's that you are asked to buy them in a box sealed millennia ago by people who if they were transported to our time frame would be regarded as lunatics because they believe crazy shit. Worse you are offered imaginary immortality and the threat of imaginary perdition in order to obtain actual service in exchange for wholly fictional benefits.
michaelmrose 4y ago
It took him 8 minutes to actually set himself up to actually start talking and the first thing that came out of Dr Ali's mouth is a lie. He said of 4 prominent authors promoting atheism that he described as the four horsemen of atheism that their primary argument is that god isn't good ergo god isn't real. This...just isn't true. It's a gross reduction. I'm 8 minutes in and your speaker's only substantial point is a lie. Now we go on to a false rant about Islam being inherently peaceful when it didn't arise in a peaceful time nor promote what we would today think of as peace, atheists being bigots, random comparison of atheism to antisemitism. Some hate for the Beatles. Comparison of Beatles fandom to satanism. I have to admit that this is entertaining. Having someone smart enough to read books and speak well while being absolutely committed to falsehood is like watching someone dress up their dog as a human being. The forms are there but not the substance. People have been declaring society was going to hell in a hand basket for at least the last several thousand years and were we really going to hell we should have long since arrived in perdition. It is common to mistake change in social norms as decay instead of progression because one who is anchored in a particular set of mores and forms is unable to see the value in change. They perceive only the losses and never the gains. Your speaker declares that a fiction is the root of all morality and I find myself unimpressed with his insight because people hold all sorts of beliefs including none at all and this seems positively uncorrelated with their observed degree of morality and decency. He has it in fact entirely backwards and the necessary fictions we create to explain our world our rooted in our essential nature as sympathetic and empathetic creatures. We look at our fellow man and see the need to care about them as we do ourselves and thus we elevate that concern to a natural law and produce something better than ourselves to defend it. If we were inherently so lawless the need for law and justice as each society understands it wouldn't flow so effortlessly from our pens or spring so readily to our minds. The reasoning is simple we developed a mind too complex for direct meta analysis of all its internal workings and a need to work beside others of our own species as complex as ourselves and the tools to understand and predict their behavior works well turned inward. We perceive the difference between a desired state and a present state even if its not actually physically painful as suffering and produce a society where at least an in group minimizes suffering because its adaptive surely but also because we live not in the world but in our own heads in a model of the world constantly rewritten full of individuals we imagine with the same tools we use to imagine ourselves. If we destroy them or diminish them we must necessarily live in an internal world wrought in part of the blight we have brought about which we must perceive again with the same internal tools we use to experience ourselves. All evil and harm is self mutilation. For a being capable of sympathy and meta-cognition morality would seem to come naturally even if the end results differ wildly in thoughts, results, and methods. Assigning it ex post facto to the god you created to enforce it is the tail wagging the dog. It's illogical because empathy came millions of years before your particular species of god. 13 minutes in and his argument seems to be that it would be really bad if God weren't real ergo God then some people who promoted atheism were bad dudes ergo we must reject atheism. This mirrors the exact argument he first falsely put in the mouths of his opponents and then helpfully debunked. Now we are suggesting that atheism suggests that survival of the fittest be applied as a moral principal rather than a description of the evolution of life on Earth. This is a tired trope. If rabbits are different degrees of brown and the browner guys blend in better and the coyotes each more of the other fellows then more browner rabbits will on average breed over time leading to browner rabbits. Trying to apply this moralistically towards human beings is both a misunderstanding of humanity, ethics, and science. We don't need Jesus or Allah to tell us this is a bad idea. At 16 we segway into shitty parts of American history with a sideline into why Muslims are better because they don't kill women and children. Notably given the religious make up of American leaders these actions were largely perpetrated by people who also believe in God. This is neither here nor there but keeping score on that point seems pretty important to him. At this point it looks like its important to him to establish a hierarchy of morality Islam > Christianity > Godless. Since I don't have all day I'm going to skip from minute 18 to 45. Ok now we are proving the existence of gods we have the same tired arguments about a watch implying a watch maker and various aspects of our solar system being particularly amenable to life. One would expect such a discussion to happen on worlds,solar systems, and universes that themselves are amenable to our kind of life while silence is likely to reign in environments were life is impossible or unlikely. If he had read more of the books he degrades by the "four horsemen" of atheism he might already have good answers to these arguments. Likely he has but he hopes you will click a youtube video and sit back and passively absorb re-enforcement of your existing beliefs than actually reading a book yourself. I watched at least half the lecture you posted and I found it deceptive, manipulative, and ill founded. It did a reasonable job of lobbing critiques at America's geopolitical actions which one might say are fairly easy targets but a poor job of addressing any big questions. May I suggest you read something written by one of the "four horsemen" of atheism?

michaelmrose 4y ago

Science chooses minimal axioms and builds the flesh of the world based on the existing bones ready to revise when new bones are discovered. Religion chooses a substantial set of axioms derived from a mixture of philosophy and fantasy dreamt up by our pre scientific ancestors who thought bad smells caused disease then makes many forms of revision sinful. A set of beliefs without ability to revise everything from the ground up will forever be limited.

al_mandi 4y ago
Just because the sets are of different size does not mean one is incorrect. You're also straw manning by talking about pre ancestors and bad smells.
- michaelmrose 4y ago
  You can't win arguments by playing logical fallacies like they are uno cards. I was pointing out that the same ancestors who dreamt up the axioms you aren't allowed by religious law to fully revise or toss out had understandings limited by the information available in that antique period. Only hundreds of years ago medical professionals believed in the miasma theory of disease and before that both of our ancestors believed that sickness had paranormal causes. The problem with your set of axioms isn't MERELY the size. It's that you are asked to buy them in a box sealed millennia ago by people who if they were transported to our time frame would be regarded as lunatics because they believe crazy shit. Worse you are offered imaginary immortality and the threat of imaginary perdition in order to obtain actual service in exchange for wholly fictional benefits.

michaelmrose 4y ago

It took him 8 minutes to actually set himself up to actually start talking and the first thing that came out of Dr Ali's mouth is a lie. He said of 4 prominent authors promoting atheism that he described as the four horsemen of atheism that their primary argument is that god isn't good ergo god isn't real. This...just isn't true. It's a gross reduction. I'm 8 minutes in and your speaker's only substantial point is a lie. Now we go on to a false rant about Islam being inherently peaceful when it didn't arise in a peaceful time nor promote what we would today think of as peace, atheists being bigots, random comparison of atheism to antisemitism. Some hate for the Beatles. Comparison of Beatles fandom to satanism. I have to admit that this is entertaining. Having someone smart enough to read books and speak well while being absolutely committed to falsehood is like watching someone dress up their dog as a human being. The forms are there but not the substance. People have been declaring society was going to hell in a hand basket for at least the last several thousand years and were we really going to hell we should have long since arrived in perdition. It is common to mistake change in social norms as decay instead of progression because one who is anchored in a particular set of mores and forms is unable to see the value in change. They perceive only the losses and never the gains. Your speaker declares that a fiction is the root of all morality and I find myself unimpressed with his insight because people hold all sorts of beliefs including none at all and this seems positively uncorrelated with their observed degree of morality and decency. He has it in fact entirely backwards and the necessary fictions we create to explain our world our rooted in our essential nature as sympathetic and empathetic creatures. We look at our fellow man and see the need to care about them as we do ourselves and thus we elevate that concern to a natural law and produce something better than ourselves to defend it. If we were inherently so lawless the need for law and justice as each society understands it wouldn't flow so effortlessly from our pens or spring so readily to our minds. The reasoning is simple we developed a mind too complex for direct meta analysis of all its internal workings and a need to work beside others of our own species as complex as ourselves and the tools to understand and predict their behavior works well turned inward. We perceive the difference between a desired state and a present state even if its not actually physically painful as suffering and produce a society where at least an in group minimizes suffering because its adaptive surely but also because we live not in the world but in our own heads in a model of the world constantly rewritten full of individuals we imagine with the same tools we use to imagine ourselves. If we destroy them or diminish them we must necessarily live in an internal world wrought in part of the blight we have brought about which we must perceive again with the same internal tools we use to experience ourselves. All evil and harm is self mutilation. For a being capable of sympathy and meta-cognition morality would seem to come naturally even if the end results differ wildly in thoughts, results, and methods. Assigning it ex post facto to the god you created to enforce it is the tail wagging the dog. It's illogical because empathy came millions of years before your particular species of god. 13 minutes in and his argument seems to be that it would be really bad if God weren't real ergo God then some people who promoted atheism were bad dudes ergo we must reject atheism. This mirrors the exact argument he first falsely put in the mouths of his opponents and then helpfully debunked. Now we are suggesting that atheism suggests that survival of the fittest be applied as a moral principal rather than a description of the evolution of life on Earth. This is a tired trope. If rabbits are different degrees of brown and the browner guys blend in better and the coyotes each more of the other fellows then more browner rabbits will on average breed over time leading to browner rabbits. Trying to apply this moralistically towards human beings is both a misunderstanding of humanity, ethics, and science. We don't need Jesus or Allah to tell us this is a bad idea. At 16 we segway into shitty parts of American history with a sideline into why Muslims are better because they don't kill women and children. Notably given the religious make up of American leaders these actions were largely perpetrated by people who also believe in God. This is neither here nor there but keeping score on that point seems pretty important to him. At this point it looks like its important to him to establish a hierarchy of morality Islam > Christianity > Godless. Since I don't have all day I'm going to skip from minute 18 to 45. Ok now we are proving the existence of gods we have the same tired arguments about a watch implying a watch maker and various aspects of our solar system being particularly amenable to life. One would expect such a discussion to happen on worlds,solar systems, and universes that themselves are amenable to our kind of life while silence is likely to reign in environments were life is impossible or unlikely. If he had read more of the books he degrades by the "four horsemen" of atheism he might already have good answers to these arguments. Likely he has but he hopes you will click a youtube video and sit back and passively absorb re-enforcement of your existing beliefs than actually reading a book yourself. I watched at least half the lecture you posted and I found it deceptive, manipulative, and ill founded. It did a reasonable job of lobbing critiques at America's geopolitical actions which one might say are fairly easy targets but a poor job of addressing any big questions. May I suggest you read something written by one of the "four horsemen" of atheism?