waauw has actually covered most of your points here D1G in a similar way to the post I was slowly drafting did, but more concisely. If you want my super-long rambling version just say and I'll finish it up but it's a loooong read. I do however just want to dwell on this section briefly:
waauw wrote:daddy1gringo wrote:So we move on to the ideas of “Burden of proof” and Occam’s razor. Neither one is really a dictate of logic, but both are ways to deal with uncertainty. They are biases for one kind of assumption over the other based on what kind of results you want to get in the event of that uncertainty.
For example, in the U.S. Court system, supposedly at least, the burden of proof is on the prosecution because it is preferable for many guilty people to be acquitted than for one innocent one to be punished. It is a bias for one kind of assumption, innocence, over the other, because of the kind of results desired, not a way of determining which assumption is more likely.
Occam’s razor, similarly, makes no pretentions of saying that the assumption that satisfies its requirements better is actually more likely or more logical, simply that it is more productive to proceed on, or further examine such an assumption. My son-in-law, a skeptic, tells me that Occam doesn’t work well for physics. He rattled off a list of things, like “dark matter” and one-dimensional “strings” that are the either the prevailing theories or actually proven, but do not conform to the razor at all, being fraught with complications and unanswered questions.
All that is leaving aside the question of whether “It just happened” satisfies the razor better than what I believe does.
So what? I’ve said before that I am not so delusional that I think I’m going to post something and suddenly the atheists on the forum are going to declare, “Oh now I see the light! I now believe in Jesus!” The best I really hope for is that some will say, as at least one already has, “OK it’s not proven either way, so this is what I choose to believe, and not believe.” In a case of exceptional honesty, the person I’m thinking of actually said something like, “I guess the difference is that you want to believe it and I don’t.”
That’s what I’m getting at. I’ve said before that to a large degree the intellect is the whore of the will, telling it what it wants to hear and performing the tricks that it requires. To a large degree, what makes perfect sense to you depends on your preconceptions. Whichever way you choose to believe, the facts fall into place to support it.
In this aspect I entirely agree with you. The burden of proof is not on the believers only, but partially on the non-believers too. This is however only the case as long as you state that this is something you believe in. It changes completely when people start saying that it is a fact. For something to become a fact, it has to be proven. If it is not, it is but a theory.
There are two main issues here, one trivial and semantic and one fairly major.
Firstly, the trivial. Most people who have given serious thought to the matter and who do not believe in God don't say "it just happened" when talking of the creation of our universe. They say something more along the lines of "we don't know what happened or why before about 1 picosecond (about a millionth of a millionth of a second) after the big bang actually occured." Science doesn't say "everything came from nothing" or any of the other claptrap that some religious sources claim (much like you correctly say that the Bible doesn't say that God is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient and omnibenevolent). It's a misrepresentation. We claim as a fact that "it happened", the proof is everywhere (quite literally), but nobody with an ounce of common sense says that it was a random event that happened just because.
There are theories for sure, string theory and brane theory to name but two recent ones, but even these are backed up with a semblance of justification in the form of mathematical arguments. The reason these are given more credence than religious arguments is that we see very little in this universe that does not conform (at least in theory, if we could collect enough data) to mathematical laws. The universe appears to be rational in this regard. If you can prove something mathematically, then our experience is that the thing is more likely to be true than if you can tell a good story about it, and so we place these kinds of proofs on a higher level than we do narratives. That's not to say we're always right, but when we are not it's generally because someone has found an error in the calculations or the way we are reasoning than in the mathematical system itself.
Secondly, the non-trivial. Can you name any situation from our everyday lives when someone can make a truly substantive claim without providing evidence, and can say that everyone has to act as though that claim is the truth unless someone else can provide evidence that it isn't? The "we don't know" position makes no claims of knowledge, it simply states that there is insufficient information upon which to make any conclusions about a topic.
I'll quote a little section of your other post here:
Talking about the origin of all things, whatever you choose to believe, it is mind-boggling and outside of our common experience. Either there was a time before anything existed, which is mind boggling: what would it be like for nothing to exist, or some things have existed eternally, which is contrary to our experience, or before some point there was no time. The idea that there is a personality behind it, only he is eternal and everything else was created by him, is really no more of a stretch.
I do not make any claim that anything has existed forever. I have never said that time existed before anything else did. I have never said that time began at some point either. I would not make any of these claims as claims of fact. I might conduct thought experiments to say "what if X, Y or Z are true" and see where it takes me, but I know that none of them prove anything without me first proving that X, Y or Z did actually happen. As a thought experiment, an eternal personality that caused creation is valid. As a claim of some sort of truth, it's totally meaningless
unless you can also provide evidence of it, and evidence that it is linked in some way to your particular religious texts/principles. You're welcome to play around with it and amuse yourself with the fantasy, as is every other believer in every other faith, but to claim that anyone should structure even the smallest part of their lives according to this fairy tale is laughable, and worse, to teach it to children as "Truth" is child abuse, because once they learn that there is one thing that can be claimed as the truth without evidence or proper justification, then you have implanted a standard of knowledge into their heads that opens them up to all sorts of flim-flam, charlatanism and fraud.
They may be strong words, but just turn on any of the many TV evangelist channels. Think of people like Billy Graham, or Benny Hinn, raking in millions and millions every single year and not using it to help anyone but themselves and their own families and friends live ridiculously opulent lifestyles. Think of people like David Koresh, who killed himself and 81 of his followers that he gained by preaching a religious message. Think of the Pope, sitting on his golden throne with his stupid hat preaching about the virtues of charity while poor catholics all over the world donate whatever they can afford to his organisation. And before you respond please realise that I am making no claims about God here, merely the fact that once you teach a child that it's alright to believe in unsupported bullshit without being shown evidence as long as you stick the word God in there somewhere, then you leave them vulnerable to manipulation and victimisation from unscrupulous people and organisations for the rest of their lives. Why not simply teach them that they should think critically and be nice to others? Why do people insist that God has to be part of it?
(and the fact I've just turned
one of waauw's paragraphs into something this length should give you an idea why I was still trying to tidy up my response to you so many days after I started writing it)
