Why Do the Religious Reject Science While Embracing the Impossible?

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Alexis Jacobi
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Re: Why Do the Religious Reject Science While Embracing the Impossible?

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Gary Childress wrote: Thu Jan 16, 2025 6:36 am It's possible that BigMike is using some kind of AI program to assist in his writing. In some sense, though, his writing still presents an argument so focusing on the method he's using could amount to a fallacy of relevance with regard to the argument he's presenting. Just FYI.
If we accept — you may not — that BigMike’s position is in truth grounded in fallacy, one is left to define the fallacy as accurately as possible. The fallacious belief, as all fallacies, all intellectual errors, will result in consequences, and generally negative consequences. My reference here is to Weaver’s statement that “ideas have consequences”. We have to sort through erroneous ideas and if possible discover the root of the fallacy, and then reestablish the foundation of “proper ideation”.

BigMike has had important relevance for me because “he” (it, them) has focused the idea-set into an intense concentration. A consequential, determining idea-set that involves establishing as a truth-claim a new, scientistic anthropology. Man, a biological robot, determined, unfree, in a cosmos without a relationship to an order of ideas, metaphysical and supernatural in nature, and of that order defined as intellectual (c.f. the definition offered of intellect).

With strong adamancy BM’s object is to weaken and destroy this conceptual link, and then to exclaim that those who live in accord with it, who “believe” in it “are intrinsically evil”. Mere hyperbole? I do not think so. The idea of the existence of a supernatural potency (the divine, God, a realm of metaphysical truth, etc.) and the relationship to it, is being portrayed as sickness, deviancy and — quoting Mike — as “intrinsically evil”.

You, Flash, the Philosophical Master Wilbur Boneman, and 49/50ths of the philosophers who contribute here and are proponents of modern philosophy, share BM’s basic position. And you (for the sake of example) suffer under the weight of the conflict which is the distorting declared understanding that is “atheism”. Your position is complicated by obvious factors but you are “emblematic” of an intellectual impasse.

In this sense BG expresses the essence of the modern position. It is radical postmodernist in my view.

I recognize that the Master Intellects who share their marvelous ideas here fundamentally disagree with the thrust of my assertions, but I am merely trying to clarify the nature of the conflict. It has a precise root.

And to show real wonderfulness as I go humbly along …

Now, it will come to pass that AI will become 1,000 times more adept at “argument”, and AI will be employed in social, cultural and idea manipulation as an extension and a tool of war. Fourth degree warfare, fifth degree, it has various names. And who will not be able to stand up against a powerful adversary? Those without sufficient grounding in sound argumentation; a background in ideas; a relationship with our cultural and civilizational history.

Like the majority who write here: illiterates in demonstrable ways. This is not mere insult, it is a vital fact.

BigMike represents a danger. He emblemizes a man, an intellect, organized “mathematically” but skewed in one tendentious, determined direction: to destroy the intellectual/conceptual pathway to a “core” reality. To follow his argument one must de-intellectualize oneself (again “intellectual” in my sense of the definition I offered).

In my view? Mike says he battles what is “evil” and is awaiting the day “it” dies out so that a new man, and a new anthropology, is established by what is implied as a state apparatus with control over the education system. The implications are real and they are consequential.

I really suggest that some intellectually narcissistic fools begin a somewhat closer and more serious analysis of what is taking shape in our world today.
Gary Childress
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Re: Why Do the Religious Reject Science While Embracing the Impossible?

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Alexis Jacobi wrote: Thu Jan 16, 2025 1:22 pm
Gary Childress wrote: Thu Jan 16, 2025 6:36 am It's possible that BigMike is using some kind of AI program to assist in his writing. In some sense, though, his writing still presents an argument so focusing on the method he's using could amount to a fallacy of relevance with regard to the argument he's presenting. Just FYI.
If we accept — you may not — that BigMike’s position is in truth grounded in fallacy.
I guess we can skip some of the rest and narrow it down to whether BigMike's position is fallacious or not. What fallacy do you find that BigMike is making?
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Alexis Jacobi
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Re: Why Do the Religious Reject Science While Embracing the Impossible?

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If you’ve read anything I have written in the past month you would not have to ask such a dimwitted question!

I really believe that you, despite obstacles, can do much better.

What is it that hangs you up, Gary?
Gary Childress
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Re: Why Do the Religious Reject Science While Embracing the Impossible?

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Alexis Jacobi wrote: Thu Jan 16, 2025 1:36 pm If you’ve read anything I have written in the past month you would not have to ask such a dimwitted question!

I really believe that you, despite obstacles, can do much better.

What is it that hangs you up, Gary?
I have indeed not been reading much of your writing this past month. I apologize. However, if you don't wish to repeat your findings to me, then I suppose that's fair.
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Alexis Jacobi
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Re: Why Do the Religious Reject Science While Embracing the Impossible?

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Even though they don't have a choice, people who believe they have free will are intrinsically evil.
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Re: Why Do the Religious Reject Science While Embracing the Impossible?

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Alexis Jacobi wrote: Thu Jan 16, 2025 1:39 pm
Even though they don't have a choice, people who believe they have free will are intrinsically evil.
OK. I saw that. However, perhaps BigMike doesn't believe that anymore. Isn't that a post of his from 2022 or something? I thought you meant that BigMike's claim that we behave according to deterministic rules was a fallacious argument.

I find it difficult to believe that believing in a free will is evil. I'm more interested in his claim that we live in a deterministic universe.
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Alexis Jacobi
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Re: Why Do the Religious Reject Science While Embracing the Impossible?

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In contradiction to IC’s view, I don’t think we can separate our ideas from our psychology. If psyche is taken as the root of psychology.

So this odd creature “BigMike” empowered or bolstered by an artificial information gathering and focussing robotics, operating in language models, gives a strange push (“bolster”) to unique intellectual ailments that can be examined psychologically. As manifestation of the “psyche”.

[My view of course. But I am sort of responding to the Kiwi lunatic’s view that religious nuttery is at the root of opposition to BM’s notion of determinism (as “truth”).]
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Alexis Jacobi
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Re: Why Do the Religious Reject Science While Embracing the Impossible?

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Gary, have you been reading carefully or merely superficially over the last month?
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Re: Why Do the Religious Reject Science While Embracing the Impossible?

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Alexis Jacobi wrote: Thu Jan 16, 2025 1:39 pm
Even though they don't have a choice, people who believe they have free will are intrinsically evil.
More broadly: Mike insists that we meat machines can be better, learn, reform society, etc. while simultaneously insisting not a one of us has any say-so on our thoughts, choices, desires, actions, etc.

Also: despite all of us, accordin' to Mike, bein' meat machines, all of us act as free wills. If he were right, you'd think at least some of us would act like meat machines. None of us do, though.
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Re: Why Do the Religious Reject Science While Embracing the Impossible?

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Alexis Jacobi wrote: Thu Jan 16, 2025 1:52 pm Gary, have you been reading carefully or merely superficially over the last month?
I haven't been paying much attention to much of the back and forth banter. I'd just like to find out if BIgMike's argument (that we behave deterministically) is fallacious or not. However, if you're not in a mood to share your findings, then fair enough.
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Alexis Jacobi
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Re: Why Do the Religious Reject Science While Embracing the Impossible?

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I already have, in dozens of posts. Just examine the last 10 or so. The real value offered for free is incalculable.

Would you please, you stingy lout, make a $100.00 donation for your own good?!?
Gary Childress
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Re: Why Do the Religious Reject Science While Embracing the Impossible?

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Alexis Jacobi wrote: Thu Jan 16, 2025 2:04 pm I already have, in dozens of posts. Just examine the last 10 or so. The real value offered for free is incalculable.

Would you please, you stingy lout, make a $100.00 donation for your own good?!?
Well, I've been skimming some of your posts. And most of your counterarguments seem rhetorical. However, I would be interested in seeing Mike's argument fleshed out in a logical format. I'll see if I can solicit Mike for one.
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Alexis Jacobi
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Re: Why Do the Religious Reject Science While Embracing the Impossible?

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“Dark Lord! Oh Agent of Cruel Chaos! Appear! Explain!
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henry quirk
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Re: Why Do the Religious Reject Science While Embracing the Impossible?

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Gary Childress wrote: Thu Jan 16, 2025 2:10 pmI would be interested in seeing Mike's argument fleshed out in a logical format.
This...
BigMike wrote: Fri Nov 29, 2024 6:06 pmHere’s the brutal truth: your brain is a deterministic machine, operating under the same unyielding physical laws as a rock rolling downhill. You don’t control your thoughts, your desires, or your decisions. You are driven by a cascade of external inputs, biological processes, and environmental stimuli—all of which you neither initiated nor directed.
...is Mike's argument.
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Alexis Jacobi
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Re: Why Do the Religious Reject Science While Embracing the Impossible?

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Last edited by Alexis Jacobi on Thu Jan 16, 2025 2:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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