Is Atheism a religion?

Sarky

Jernal wrote: »

Last time I checked Sarky was a priest of the dogma some choose to call microbiology.

I'm a bioinformatician now. I have people to do the microbiology for me. Most of them are Ph.D.s and doctors and professors way more qualified than me, but I ask them to do some PCR or gene expression study, and hey, off they go. Don't tell DuPLo, it'd ruin the fantasy of a scientific hierarchy he's created to reinforce his ignorance as something to be proud of.

Turtwig

Sarky wrote: »

Jernal wrote: »

Last time I checked Sarky was a priest of the dogma some choose to call microbiology.

I'm a bioinformatician now. I have people to do the microbiology for me. Most of them are Ph.D.s and doctors and professors way more qualified than me, but I ask them to do some PCR or gene expression study, and hey, off they go. Don't tell DuPLo, it'd ruin the fantasy of a scientific hierarchy he's created to reinforce his ignorance as something to be proud of.

So you're like a bishop now?

Sarky

Well everyone I've had sex with has been legal and consenting, but apart from that I suppose, yeah. Certainly most of you lot can kiss my ring :pac:

CerebralCortex

DuPLeX wrote: »

Ok I'm gonna be clear here . for you.. Science didn't Build computers any more than God built the Cistene chapel , People did ! ...An if you are suggesting that because we have Computers of Iphones that we should believe unquestioningly every line of dogma handed down by Science or some Guy in a lab coat . Then Congratulations! You are Religious..

Science isn't a thing that builds though, it's a process that allows us humans to get an accurate description of reality without which we'd be still wouldn't have invented the wheel.
Are you seriously that computers materialised independent of computer science and electronic engineering?

Zombrex

DuPLeX wrote: »

I believe I drew the analogy of a group of Clergy all reading and agreeing a particular Doctrine.They are all well read Intelligent men who have a firm grasp of the subject matter in hand .They may not all have the same view point but they will work to come to a consensus which will work for them and their paymasters (the church) and then they pass this dogma on to the unquestioning public,who will accept it (more or less) the Peer review process works in the same way producing the similar Scientific dogma for similar reasons..

That isn't even remotely what peer review is.

To be clear, I'm not saying that you have a different view point as to the value of peer review, I'm saying what you have described isn't peer review, it isn't remotely peer review, any more than saying peer review is Getting into an auto-mobile, turning the key, pressing acceleration is describing peer review either.

DuPLeX wrote: »

If the peer review process has any more validity than this then please point out how and don't resort to more childish nonsense.

What you described isn't peer review. So the first thing that has to be done is someone explaining to you what peer review is.

Personally I don't think there is much point attempted that until we establish you are open to having this explained to you.

sponsoredwalk

Mark Hamill wrote: »

You would do well to read entire sentences, rather than the selective reading you are employing:

In the context of you responding to what I actually posted then I located the only relevant part of your response. I asked how we are justified in assuming it isn't happening. I even bolded the word justified to emphasize it's importance. Your response admitted that we aren't justified in assuming that it isn't happening:

Mark Hamill wrote: »

(but not infallible) method

If the peer review process was infallible then we'd be justified in assuming it isn't happening, but it's not infallible ergo we simply can't be justified in assuming it isn't. This is the important point - you can tell yourself some narrative to feel psychologically secure about this uncertainty (which is what the rest of your response is), indeed you'd have to to not go insane (I'm not saying it's a bad thing that we tell ourselves such stories), but you simply can't deny that the uncertainty is there which is ineradicable as a basic consequence of reality. None of this is even questionable frankly. The important point that was being made, one nobody has answered for yet, is that this fundamental uncertainty requires people to indulge in faith (, Git 'em ). Scientists must have faith ( ):

People have a right to believe whatever they like, including irrational beliefs. In fact, we all have irrational beliefs, in a certain sense. We have to. If I walk out the door, I have an irrational belief that the floor is there. Can I prove it? You know if I’m paying attention to it I see that it’s there, but I can’t prove it. In fact, if you’re a scientist, you don’t prove anything. The sciences don’t have proofs, what they have is surmises.
http://www.chomsky.info/debates/20060301.htm

For some reason saying this seems to be like saying a curse word but that's the point public enemy number one was trying to make if you actually read his/her posts. Unless the word faith is a curse word to you as well I don't see why you're not defending him/her as a basic matter of honesty & integrity.

So to sum up, by analogy we can use the words of my favourite lecturer:

"Due to effects of quantum mechanics, if I run at this wall, there is a non-zero probability that I will go straight through it.
This probability however, is not high enough to justify me actually trying it."

In other words, though we'd be lunatics to seriously mistrust peer review, there is a non-zero probability that it may be incorrect and as such there is an element of faith involved & if you are actually reading public enemy number one's posts you'll see he/she was trying to get people to even answer this point (they still haven't). When the frequency of posts on a certain forum try to claim group X doesn't have any faith, that they "don't do faith" as was claimed, then what I've said above is literally a "got'cha" & there are tons of other ones we could go into. When people have problems with elementary reality such as this then I think ideology & dogma are words that become relevant to the discussion.

sponsoredwalk

Sarky wrote: »

e was assumed to be a certain value until it was discovered the data were cooked. Then it was changed to something else, after more accurate research. This is not a conspiracy. It is the total opposite. And every single time a mistake or lie has been found in someone's science, it is corrected.

I bolded the word justifiably to emphasize it's importance. Your response makes sense if I hadn't included that word. You've explained to me what it means to assume it isn't happening & why we can feel psychologically secure in doing so, but this is not justification for doing so (read the post above me if you have a problem with this statement). Quite frankly I am emphasizing this issue because people in here seem to either completely ignore it or just want to deny it, there really is no other answer than that we have to indulge in faithfully assuming () that there is not some massive conspiracy against us at every step. I mean even Descartes recognized this when developing the early stages of the contemporary scientific method & such awareness is ingrained in scientific practice & philosophy, just read Russell to find people similarly admitting such possibilities as fundamental uncertainties of reality we're forced to deal with. It might be too matrixey & not be interesting to you (or anyone else it seems) but that doesn't mean it's not relevant & quite frankly it's an undeniable point of logic. We just can't be sure we aren't in the matrix & you'd think any level of honest skepticism would recognize that. We can't be sure that one of the atoms on a leaf in your garden isn't responsible for absolutely everything there ever is & was. This atom may be ensuring that every scientific experiment lies to us & ensuring we'll never find any evidence of it's power. Just because no evidence points that way doesn't mean it isn't the case & as such we must have faith that we are on the right track given the evidence as it stands & have faith that we are not being deceived from the all-merciful & all-powerful wisdom of the leaf-atom.

sponsoredwalk

Bannasidhe wrote: »

That is exactly what I was doing.
If a poster wishes to discuss the existence of a possible conspiracy then the CT forum is the perfect place.

S/he never claimed it was occurring they said it might be occurring & if you're following the conversation it sprang from asking people in here whether trusting scientific claims without actually verifying them for yourself is an act of faith (something currently unanswered) & whether people in here can acknowledge agenda, corruption & manipulation in science & square that with the fact that they take claims on faith. In the context of this actual conversation, responding with CT is analogous to screaming OMFGRACIST!!! at someone talking about The Nigger of Narcissus & functioned as nothing more than a way to dodge the question being posed.

Bannasidhe wrote: »

Also - I fail to see what the possible existence of dodgy doings among scientists has to do with whether Atheism is a religion - which is what this thread is about.

It sprang up from a discussion about faith, whether people are willing to acknowledge that they are indulging in the horrendous sin of faith when they take the word of scientists & don't actually verify X for themselves & then, if you read the thread, we shifted onto agenda, corruption & manipulation in science & how faithfully accepting claims of scientists plays out with that.

doctoremma

Sarky wrote: »

I'm a bioinformatician now. I have people to do the microbiology for me. Most of them are Ph.D.s and doctors and professors way more qualified than me, but I ask them to do some PCR or gene expression study, and hey, off they go.

Exactly opposite to me - I do the experiments (or rather, my students/RAs do), then I get the bioinformatics monkeys to sift the data for me.

At least, that's what I thought I was doing. But you know, humans think they have trained dolphins to jump for fish when, in reality, it's the opposite. Maybe I'm the monkey?

Turtwig

sponsoredwalk wrote: »

We just can't be sure we aren't in the matrix & you'd think any level of honest skepticism would recognize that. We can't be sure that one of the atoms on a leaf in your garden isn't responsible for absolutely everything there ever is & was..

Another example of where burning at the stake becomes rational. We could just burn all the leaves and if the universe ends we know you were right if it doesn't then we'll have to assume the leaf transferred its atom to something else. We'll just have to burn that something else until the universe ends or there's none left to burn. In which case we move onto something else entirely different again and repeat the process ad infinitum until the universe ends.

sponsoredwalk

Jernal wrote: »

Another example of where burning at the stake becomes rational. We could just burn all the leaves and if the universe ends we know you were right if it doesn't then we'll have to assume the leaf transferred its atom to something else. We'll just have to burn that something else until the universe ends or there's none left to burn. In which case we move onto something else entirely different again and repeat the process ad infinitum until the universe ends.

And?

Mark Hamill

sponsoredwalk wrote: »

In the context of you responding to what I actually posted then I located the only relevant part of your response. I asked how we are justified in assuming it isn't happening. I even bolded the word justified to emphasize it's importance. Your response admitted that we aren't justified in assuming that it isn't happening:

(but not infallible) method

If the peer review process was infallible then we'd be justified in assuming it isn't happening, but it's not infallible ergo we simply can't be justified in assuming it isn't. This is the important point - you can tell yourself some narrative to feel psychologically secure about this uncertainty (which is what the rest of your response is), indeed you'd have to to not go insane (I'm not saying it's a bad thing that we tell ourselves such stories), but you simply can't deny that the uncertainty is there which is ineradicable as a basic consequence of reality.

Since when does peer review have to be infallible in order for it to be justifiable to hold it as reliable? Peer review as a system is designed so as to minimize the instances of scientist publishing fraudulent or incorrect papers. Its not an infallible test, but that means we merely have to be open to the possibility of it failing, not that we have to de facto assume that any given paper is fraudulent. I already explained this before with the justice system analogy, if someone is already proven innocent, you need new evidence in order for the possibility of them being guilty to be considered again. Simple saying it is possible that juries or judges get it wrong is not new evidence.

You are justified in saying that its possible for papers to get through peer review even if they are flawed. But you are not justified in saying that we have to assume any given paper is flawed without giving evidence for the given case. It is possible that you are a murderer (you are a human, humans have committed murder in the past) but without any specific evidence, I would not be justified in assuming that you are a murderer.

sponsoredwalk wrote: »

None of this is even questionable frankly. The important point that was being made, one nobody has answered for yet, is that this fundamental uncertainty requires people to indulge in faith (, Git 'em ). Scientists must have faith ( ):

For some reason saying this seems to be like saying a curse word but that's the point public enemy number one was trying to make if you actually read his/her posts. Unless the word faith is a curse word to you as well I don't see why you're not defending him/her as a basic matter of honesty & integrity.

Faith as the OP is describing it (ie religious faith) is believing in something despite the lack of evidence. However, there is no lack of evidence that peer review works and is extremely reliable. So the "faith" involved is not the same. If I jump up, I expect to fall down. You can call this "faith" in gravity if you like, buts it not even remotely the same kind of faith involved in believing that gays are evil, or that heaven is only for 144,000 people etc.

sponsoredwalk wrote: »

So to sum up, by analogy we can use the words of my favourite lecturer:

"Due to effects of quantum mechanics, if I run at this wall, there is a non-zero probability that I will go straight through it.
This probability however, is not high enough to justify me actually trying it."

In other words, though we'd be lunatics to seriously mistrust peer review, there is a non-zero probability that it may be incorrect and as such there is an element of faith involved & if you are actually reading public enemy number one's posts you'll see he/she was trying to get people to even answer this point (they still haven't). When the frequency of posts on a certain forum try to claim group X doesn't have any faith, that they "don't do faith" as was claimed, then what I've said above is literally a "got'cha" & there are tons of other ones we could go into. When people have problems with elementary reality such as this then I think ideology & dogma are words that become relevant to the discussion.

No-one has denied there is a possibility that peer reviewed papers could be flawed or fraudulent. The problem is in assuming there are. The most honest and critical thing you can do, recognizing the possibility of flaw or fraud in peer reviewed papers, is to be open to someone suggesting a reason why a specific peer reviewed paper may be flawed or fraudulent. It is not to assume that any peer reviewed paper is flawed or fraudulent until evidence is provided. Peer review is evidence that a paper isn't flawed or fraudulent. Without further contradictory evidence, assuming that a peer reviewed paper is flawed or fraudulent is a position of blind, religious-like, faith.

Mark Hamill

sponsoredwalk wrote: »

We just can't be sure we aren't in the matrix & you'd think any level of honest skepticism would recognize that.

And do what with it exactly?

sponsoredwalk wrote: »

We can't be sure that one of the atoms on a leaf in your garden isn't responsible for absolutely everything there ever is & was. This atom may be ensuring that every scientific experiment lies to us & ensuring we'll never find any evidence of it's power. Just because no evidence points that way doesn't mean it isn't the case & as such we must have faith that we are on the right track given the evidence as it stands & have faith that we are not being deceived from the all-merciful & all-powerful wisdom of the leaf-atom.

Its not a case of "we must have faith", its a case that its irrelevant until someone can produce evidence and explanation for it, as, so far, everything we do contradicts that notion. Its all well and good saying that "X" is possible, but if your entire justification for "X" is "well you can't prove it isn't" then why should we care? I'm god, and you can't prove I'm not.

Turtwig

sponsoredwalk wrote: »

And?

I just realised the burning at the stake was referred to in a different thread.

Sarky

doctoremma wrote: »

Exactly opposite to me - I do the experiments (or rather, my students/RAs do), then I get the bioinformatics monkeys to sift the data for me.

At least, that's what I thought I was doing. But you know, humans think they have trained dolphins to jump for fish when, in reality, it's the opposite. Maybe I'm the monkey?

All I know is I'd better be damn sure my work is good, cos none of them will hesitate to point out a flaw. It's almost like I'm being... reviewed. By my peers... Madness!

Turtwig

Sarky wrote: »

All I know is I'd better be damn sure my work is good, cos none of them will hesitate to point out a flaw. It's almost like I'm being... reviewed. By my peers... Madness!

:cool:

sponsoredwalk

Mark Hamill wrote: »

Since when does peer review have to be infallible in order for it to be justifiable to hold it as reliable?

So in other words you concede that we have to have faith that the peer-review process has not screwed up, whether intentional or otherwise. If you go back to the person everybody ganged up on & read the quotes I think you'll see this was the question being posed & despite the back-slapping the point remains correct. At most you can justify it as being reliable but that it can be wrong, we must take it on faith that it's not wrong, no matter how psychologically comfortable we feel in knowing people did their best. That's the point. The only way to eradicate the element of faith is for an infallible peer-review, how else do you remove the inherent uncertainty? The only way out of this is I can see for you to deny that the inherent uncertainty implies an element of faith, or if you want to concede that there is an element of faith to make sure we don't employ the same interpretation of the word as the philistine religious do (we'll get to that below). Please don't post another explanation of the process or logic of peer review, if I didn't understand it before I understand it after reading your explanations.

Mark Hamill wrote: »

Faith as the OP is describing it (ie religious faith) is believing in something despite the lack of evidence. However, there is no lack of evidence that peer review works and is extremely reliable. So the "faith" involved is not the same. If I jump up, I expect to fall down. You can call this "faith" in gravity if you like, buts it not even remotely the same kind of faith involved in believing that gays are evil, or that heaven is only for 144,000 people etc.

As good as it must feel to put others down in trying to justify the fact that you also indulge in such sins as the philistine out-group indulge in, the central fact remains that you indulge in faith in assuming that the people in the peer-review caught or spotted errors/flaws in the work they reviewed. Furthermore you have faith that they are not all lying to you constantly as a means to deceive you. Furthermore you have faith that when you jump up you'll land, why? You assume that the laws of physics will continue to hold in the future as they have done in the past & there is literally no way to show that they will, that is an assumption - a faith-based assumption every person is forced to make out of sheer necessity, the past has no way to tell us whether the atom on the fifth leaf will change it's mood & switch off gravity or straighten the curvature of space time or whatever really happens... How many other need we mention? I apologize for the presence of such foul & dirty words but sometimes a gentleman must breach societal norms, offend politeness & come out of the closet with such curse words when the time comes... Note that this was the point trying to be expressed over the torrent of scorn at the critical one... As to the differentiation between interpretations of the word faith, more than five (synonymous) definitions have been posted:

Penn wrote: »

But you're using multiple definitions of the word 'faith'.

faith
noun
1.confidence or trust in a person or thing: faith in another's ability.
2.belief that is not based on proof: He had faith that the hypothesis would be substantiated by fact.
3.belief in God or in the doctrines or teachings of religion: the firm faith of the Pilgrims.
4.belief in anything, as a code of ethics, standards of merit, etc.: to be of the same faith with someone concerning honesty.
5.a system of religious belief: the Christian faith; the Jewish faith.

Take your pick, lets find out, if you don't see it already, how the definition applies to our circumstances.

Galvasean

Everything in this thread should be deleted bar the thread title and the 1st reply.
Then it should be made a sticky.

ShooterSF

So in sponsoredwalk's way of thinking even believing we exist is a religion as it relies on an assumption, I mean "faith". Ok then can we have a new word for people who claim knowledge (not assumptions, not even best guesses) of things they can't know, can't test and can't show us? Just so we can go back to distinguishing the clear difference.

Jesus Nut

Yes.

Athiests say believing in god is dogmatic but the same is true for the opposite. Believing not in god is just as dogmatic as the other!

Galvasean

Jesus Nut wrote: »

Yes.

Athiests say believing in god is dogmatic but the same is true for the opposite. Believing not in god is just as dogmatic as the other!

Oh look another person who doesn't quite grasp what religion is.
One born every minute...

Jesus Nut

Galvasean wrote: »

Oh look another person who doesn't quite grasp what religion is.
One born every minute...

You havent a clue what your talking about

ShooterSF

Jesus Nut wrote: »

You havent a clue what your talking about

You haven't a clue what you're talking about.

Gbear

Galvasean wrote: »

Oh look another person who doesn't quite grasp what religion is.
One born every minute...

You wouldn't mind if before they posted they actually read and understood the bloody thread.

You'd swear that "atheism is just another religion" is some sort of novel argument that hasn't been regurgitated and demolished a million billion times already on this thread alone, never mind this forum and never mind the entire internet.

Turtwig

Jesus Nut wrote: »

You havent a clue what your talking about

So answer me this then, what exactly is he talking about?

Jesus Nut

What am I talking about?

endacl

Jesus Nut wrote: »

Yes.

Athiests say believing in god is dogmatic but the same is true for the opposite. Believing not in god is just as dogmatic as the other!

What do automatic dogs have to do with anything?

ShooterSF

Jesus Nut wrote: »

What am I talking about?

Are those my feet?

Turtwig

Jesus Nut wrote: »

What am I talking about?

How the frack are we supposed to know? I may be telekinetic, but I'm not psychic. Sorry.

Sonics2k

Jesus Nut wrote: »

What am I talking about?

Some gibberish that made no sense, backed up purely by a lack of effort to read the thread and possibly a lack of education and/or common sense.

People should really think before they try claiming that Atheism is a religion. Because it's bloody well not.

There is no arguing this, no debate, and no discussion. It quite simply cannot be a religion.