Advertisement
If you have a new account but are having problems posting or verifying your account, please email us on hello@boards.ie for help. Thanks :)
Hello all! Please ensure that you are posting a new thread or question in the appropriate forum. The Feedback forum is overwhelmed with questions that are having to be moved elsewhere. If you need help to verify your account contact hello@boards.ie
Hi there,
There is an issue with role permissions that is being worked on at the moment.
If you are having trouble with access or permissions on regional forums please post here to get access: https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058365403/you-do-not-have-permission-for-that#latest
There is an issue with role permissions that is being worked on at the moment.
If you are having trouble with access or permissions on regional forums please post here to get access: https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058365403/you-do-not-have-permission-for-that#latest
Vincent Browne's Challenging God
Comments
-
-
-
-
Hmmm.... some (but not all) of the early commentary here is, ironically, at the level of discourse that some of the commenters are attributing to the show.
Maybe the style of the show masked some of the substance. I thought Vincent Browne asked important and coherent questions. I agree that James Mackey was condescending, but both he and Fainche Ryan are intelligent educated people who for whatever reasons genuinely believe what they are saying, despite the internal contradictions and lack of evidence to support it. I think we should be prepared to engage them rather than merely insult them.
We can easily forget here how important and unusual it is to have these discussions on national Irish television. The arguments may seem boring to us because we engage in them every day, but most viewers of national Irish television are not regularly exposed to many of the basic arguments supporting atheism, reason and science. In that context, I felt it was useful to be able to put these basic arguments on record for the viewers.
Here is a summary of the points that I raised on the show.
I said that I think that where gods came from, in evolutionary terms, is that it was useful for people to identify patterns in the environment around them, as it would save them from being eaten by a wild beast. I said that people who were able to recognise more patterns rather than less patterns were more likely to survive, and as a side-effect of our ability to recognise patterns, we noticed patterns that didn’t exist, and we misidentified patterns, and we thought that if we do this, the gods are angry, and if we do this, the gods are pleased. And then some people added in the notion that if you do what I tell you, then the gods will be pleased, and that is how things went from purely just believing in gods, to religions, which are effectively social control.
I said that James Mackey and Fainche Ryan were assuming that God exists. I said that, broadly speaking, every generation, we understand more about how the universe operates, and every generation, we move more and more explanations from the ‘it must have been a god’ category, to the ‘we now understand how it happens naturally’ category. And in every generation, religious people call the bits that we don’t yet understand things that are caused by gods. I said that there is a relentless flow of what were previously religious explanations for natural phenomena being replaced by natural explanations, and there is nothing going in the opposite direction. There are no phenomena where we once thought that science gave us the best answer, and that now we realise that it was a god that did it.
When Fainche Ryan asked me can science explain the beginning, I said no, but neither can religion. I said that what science can do is that it can take us currently back as far as the Big Bang, and we can say that we don’t yet know what happened before that, but that we can be reasonably confident, based on the relentless flow of scientific explanations overtaking religious explanations, that when we do find out, the answer will be a natural one, and the field in which we are most likely to discover it is the field of quantum mechanics. I said that the current work, in particular by Steven Hawking, which is explaining how our universe, not the universe, can have come about without needing to invent a god to explain it.
I said that time and space are essentially dimensions of our universe, and that before time and space, in fact before is probably the wrong word because you can’t go before time, but beyond time or whatever phrase you want to use, that what appears to be nothing, even in terms of vacuums, contains energy fluctuations from which particles can and do come into and go out of existence with no apparent reason, and that the latest speculation from quantum physicists is that, from that, one can conceive - consistent with the evidence, rather than just making something up - one can conceive a universe coming into existence.
I asked James Mackey what did he believe consciousness to be, and I added that consciousness is a property of our brains, and that it is not an independently existing entity. I said that when our brains cease to function, our consciousness ceases to function. I said that he was purely speculating that the idea of consciousness is not only existing independently of human brains, or indeed the brains of other sentient beings, but that it was there at the beginning and that it caused matter to come about.
When James Mackey said that I had assumed that science had proven that consciousness is an emergence from our brain, I said that science does not prove anything. I said that science, unlike religion, knows that we can never know the truth. What science says is that we can gradually approach the truth by removing ideas that are shown to be not consistent with the evidence.
I said that the difficulty with some of the language of spirituality is that, if you allow yourself to stray beyond applying reason to the apparent evidence of our senses, and if you allow yourself go into that area not just in imagination, but in terms of asserting that you are representing reality, then you are allowing yourself to make up anything. I said that to be honest, I find at times that discussing theology is almost like discussing the rules of quiditch with people who believe that Harry Potter is a documentary. I said that there are things that are real, and that there are things that we make up, and that making things up as stories is fine in terms of passing on morals and so on, but when one allows oneself to assert that these imagined explanations are actually real, then you can come up with anything.
I said that science is quite comfortable with the idea that there are things that we do not understand, and that there are things that we do not yet know, but that the difference between science and religion is the way that we approach trying to understand it. I said that in science, you try to prove your theory is wrong, while in religion you recite things to try to reinforce the beliefs that you already have. I said that James Mackey was making things up about consciousness preceding the Big Bang, and that he understands how the scientific method operates, and that he understands how making things up operates, and that there is a distinction between the two.
When James Mackey said that religion addresses the whole of reality, I said that the scale of the universe is that there are over 100 billion galaxies, each of which is over 100 billion stars like our sun, and the idea that a God, that might have created something of that scale, would have a concern for beings of one species on one planet revolving around one of those suns. I said that if he was addressing the whole of reality, then in that context the idea that anything that might have been responsible for that would have any concern about what human beings on the planet Earth are doing is preposterous.
I said that what the idea of God as designer comes back to, which was the first thing that I said on the show, is the propensity of human beings to misidentify patterns that aren’t there. I said that there are things in nature that can create the illusion of design, but that does not mean that there is a conscious design or a conscious designer there. I said that if James Mackey wants to throw book titles around, if he reads the Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins he would understand how the illusion of design comes about.
When Fainche Ryan said that evolution fits in perfectly with the Christian story, I said that it does not. I said that the Christian story depends on there being an Adam and Eve who had original sin, whether you read metaphorically or literally. I said that if you bring in evolution, you take out Adam and Eve, you take out original sin, you therefore take out the reason for Jesus being crucified, and the whole thing collapses.
When Vincent Browne raised the Holocaust, I said that he had made a very important point, because it takes us beyond just theological speculation, and takes us into the area of real suffering and real people being killed. I said that the Holocaust came about for two reasons: because of the dogma of Nazism and the dogma of Christianity. I said that both of those combined enabled Hitler, who believed and who wrote that he was doing the work of the Lord in exterminating the Jews, to allow a country of otherwise good people, but who had been brought up to believe that the Jews had killed their Saviour, to justify to themselves things that, in the absence of religion and fascism, they would have intuitively known were wrong.
I think it is useful to have had an opportunity to highlight these arguments on national Irish television, to an audience many of whom may not have heard them before. I think it is useful to have had these arguments contrasted with some of the unsubstantiated and contradictory arguments made on behalf of theism and religion on the same show.
I am always open to constructive criticism of my performance in anything that I do. On this show, I didn’t think it was necessary for me to go into attack mode in order to convey these points, particularly as Vincent Browne was already being quite assertive in his questions.
That said, I do sometimes wonder about the relative merits of playing by the broadcasting equivalent of Queensbury Rules when debating with people who are not doing so. The downside is that you get to say less than you would like to, while the upside is that neutral viewers may be better disposed to hearing what you do get to say.
I’ve published a more complete summary of what was discussed on the show here.0 -
-
Advertisement
-
-
Slightly off topic but on the idea of a universe fine tuned for life - new developements (newish anyway) point that the line between life and non life is not all that clear cut. The universe if you ask me is not fine tuned for life (for a start 99.999999999% of it will kill any life we know of immediately!) the parts that do appear fine tuned, like earth, are either A - just lucky, or B - only fine tuned through chance for 1 particular type of life, therefore others could quite possible exist in places that would kill earth type life,
This video is well worth a look - proto cells that behave in certain ways as though they are alive -perhaps a stepping stone on the way to actually being alive as we know it.
0 -
-
-
-
Advertisement
-
Science did it?
Science of the gaps = we don't know now but are sure science will answer all the questions. It's as bad as god of the gaps where we attribute everything we don't know to 'god takes care of that'.
Exchanging one form of faith for another is never a good idea. Science will explain everything isn't even a claim that science makes.0 -
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Advertisement
-
-
-
-
Mt point is when someone says 'science will answer x' that's a belief, no more or less than believing that God did it.
A point that some people seem to miss completely.
Just because both are forms of belief doesn't make the beliefs equal in any way. You are completely ignoring why people might have either belief.
This is a rock:
This is also a rock:
Is one no more or less than the other??0 -
Mark Hamill wrote: »Just because both are forms of belief doesn't make the beliefs equal in any way. You are completely ignoring why people might have either belief.
This is a rock:
This is also a rock:
Is one no more or less than the other??
Categorical error. Rock isn't binary, belief is. You either believe or you don't, theirs no such thing as a small belief or big belief.
I know we use terms like strongly believe or inclined to believe but in fact you believe or you don't. In that sense all belief is the same.
I hate when people use belief as a term for knowing. Once you say 'I believe' your in the realm of hypothesis or theory yet to be proven.
We are sloppy with language, useful when in conversation or negotiations but completely useless when discussing facts.0 -
-
-
Michael Nugent wrote: »Hmmm.... some (but not all) of the early commentary here is, ironically, at the level of discourse that some of the commenters are attributing to the show.
Don't mind me, I'm a condescending twit.:pac:0 -
Brian Shanahan wrote: »The average atheist is more intelligent than the average human, and much more likely to be engaged or trained in a subject of methodoligical investigation of reality
Eh? What now? I presume you have something to support this astounding claim. 0 -
Advertisement
-
Eh? What now? I presume you have something to support this astounding claim.
His own superior intellect no doubt:D
..in other words a sample of one, quite scientific
By the same logic, as the majority of East Asians are atheist or non-religious, does that mean East Asians are more intelligent than other demographic groups?0 -
-
-
-
-
-
Advertisement
-
Michael Nugent wrote: »
We can easily forget here how important and unusual it is to have these discussions on national Irish television. The arguments may seem boring to us because we engage in them every day, but most viewers of national Irish television are not regularly exposed to many of the basic arguments supporting atheism, reason and science. In that context, I felt it was useful to be able to put these basic arguments on record for the viewers.
I’ve published a more complete summary of what was discussed on the show here.
This.
Watched the show Monday night on TV3's 3 Player. I, like most of the regular posters here, have already heard Nugent's points many times. But we're not the target audience. The hope is that viewers at home who dare not question the infallibility of the church/ religion, and thus haven't read any atheist articles nor watched any debates, might see that atheists don't look like Marilyn Manson*. There are atheists among us, and they have been known to blend in. Some of them have a family, maybe even a job.
The debate would have been better with one minor alteration. Instead of Michael Nugent flying solo, he should have had a dark-haired, atheist vixen by his side.
*My mother finds it hard to bring herself to even say the word 'atheist'. She thinks they are horrible, miserable people, and I suspect she visualises Manson when she does.0 -
-
-
-
-
Advertisement
-
Well if Richard Lynn said it, it must be true :rolleyes:
There is scientific evidence that people who call themselves liberal are more intelligent than those who identify as conservative. Those who identify as extremely liberal being the most intelligent. Does this cross into atheist -theist? Its hard to say although I would say that the majority of atheists identify as liberal.
0 -
-
-
-
-
Studies like this are a can of worms to the ideologues who may choose to parrot them. However, it's not really reason to suggest we shouldn't conduct these types of studies. The more contentious studies, for example, Men vs Women may never be accepted. The thing is though, by doing them scientists actually gain insights into about how humans works. The core claim "women are more/less smart/empathetic than men" may never be resolved. But if you ever read the "debates" had on the issue you'll gain a plethora of insight into the overall abilities and workings of humans and how they may can manifest differently. Just because we may not like the results or ever accept them doesn't mean the studies themselves won't provide use to us in other non contentious ways.
0 -
Not at all.
So, why do we care whether particular groups of intelligent people are more atheist than average?Though I would be reminded of the old comment about Russia -- that you could be a member of the Communist Party, you could be honest, or you could be smart. But only two at any one time.
That is a pretty good quoteWhile the topic is highly contested for a variety of methodological, evidence-based and faith-based reasons, there does appear to be reasonably consistent evidence of a negative correlation between high IQ and religiosity:
So what if theres a correlation, though? There are so many possible confounding reasons, its not very causally suggestive.
Even if you could establish a causal link, what would be the value?0 -
-
-
-
Advertisement
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dySwrhMQdX4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jo7_RtCI5dg
Advertisement