I'm not sure if you can buy this in bulk. But, at least it's a much quicker read than the Bible.
The Hard Evidence for God's Existence: A Comprehensive Guide
SPOILIER ALERT: It's 200 blank pages and isn't missing a single piece of hard evidence for the existence of any god.
That has already been written up as a great book ... of ... (spoiler alert) ... 200 blank pages.
That's only convincing about the Abrahamic god. There are other gods. I wouldn't want to recommend that anyone waste their time reading every single religious text ever written unless they happen to find the study of religion particularly interesting and get enjoyment from it.
There are literally thousands of other gods that are all as equally nonexistent as Yahweh/God/Jesus/Allah. Must we read about all of them to determine they don't exist either? Can't we just look at the hard evidence for the existence of god?
I haven't read this book, but can tell it's excellent just by the description:
The Hard Evidence for God's Existence: A Comprehensive Guide
Spoiler Alert: It's 200 blank pages.
I doubt this qualifies as irony. But, after doing all of the work required for a bat mitzvah, a nice quick, easy to read book like this might make a nice gift.
The Hard Evidence for God's Existence: A Comprehensive Guide
Spoiler alert: It's 200 blank pages.
Yikes!! I think they would have an easier time with The Hard Evidence for God's Existence: A Comprehensive Guide. (Spoiler Alert: 200 blank pages)
And, when they get through the hard evidence, they won't feel pressured into giving away money and spending time on their knees in front of a priest.
>> Which is exactly why a hypothesis does not become a theory until many other labs have repeated and verified the result.
> Sure. But it is, again, part of the process. Which is what I'm getting at.
Perhaps. But, it's the forming of testable and falsifiable predictions and then testing that sets the scientific method apart. It is also the reason for the rapid rise in our knowledge and our technology that happened after we started to use the scientific method.
Without the scientific method, it would literally have been impossible to come up with general relativity and quantum mechanics and neither would have been accepted without proof. In fact, we needed a pretty high level of technology just to get to the point of learning that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant for all observers. We would not have even arrived at that fact without the technology to perform such measurements.
> Whether they got significant results or not, we both recognize that ethics is a key part of modern science.
I would honestly say that this is a moral statement. Ethics and morality ought to be a part of the scientific method, especially when test subjects are sentient creatures.
The scientific method makes no such requirement.
Interestingly, this is a case where the morals of society have impacted science. China got a tremendous jump on the U.S. in stem cell research because China did not consider a blastocyst to be a human being. The U.S got behind because people's religion led them to believe that any cell with human DNA was a human life.
Anyway, I agree with your moral statement that ethics and morals should play a part in science. But, this is not a scientific statement.
>> If we're going to accept even the possibility of a supernatural being in light of the face that there has never been a single shred of hard scientific evidence of anything supernatural ever having taken place anywhere in the observable universe, don't you think it would pay to have at least the level of confidence that we use for something as simple as yet another particle in the standard model of particle physics?
> I don't really think "supernatural" makes sense as a term. If it exists, it's presumably part of the natural world.
Part of? Or, outside of? Most reasonable definitions of gods do posit supernatural beings with powers to affect our universe. Most definitions of God singular as a creator of the universe, posit that God is outside of spacetime, as would be required to create spacetime.
> And I'm not sure about what evidence there is still, which is why I ought to relabel myself agnostic. There's so much to look into.
Here's a really good book on the subject. It leaves out absolutely nothing.
The Hard Evidence for God's Existence: A Comprehensive Guide
Spoiler alert: Save yourself the money. It's 200 blank pages. It might make an amusing coffee table book. It's guaranteed to get people to look inside.
>> They find rationalizations for "eh but I don't really like that". But, when they still argue back and forth about the cosmological argument and those who do not accept it refuse to say, "you're batshit crazy; that bullshit was debunked by quantum mechanics a century ago", the field is saying "eh but I don't really like that" to the loss of cause and effect.
> They've incorporated it into arguments, so I don't think it's just "we don't like QM".
No. They've incorporated a caricature of QM that ignores actual experimental findings such as the Casimir effect that demonstrates quite conclusively that virtual particles pop into and out of existence all the time.
These are physical objects that demonstrably exist. They have a beginning. They have no cause.
>> I don't know whether Jesus existed or not. I find it a bit less than likely, maybe 30%. Parts of the story that are not even miracles are pretty seriously far fetched. And, we do have zero in the way of artifacts or first-hand accounts.
> Depending on the claim, I find it pretty plausible. Full-on Biblical Jesus, probably not. A historical one, sure. What we've got is pretty impressive for a wandering preacher in a Roman provincial backwater.
Please keep in mind, I'm not saying Jesus didn't exist. I have no idea how we could know that without a time machine. I'm just saying I'm not convinced.
Your description of Jesus doesn't match with even the non-miraculous stories in the New Testament such as that the San Hedrin met on the Eve of Passover, a high Jewish holiday to mete out an instantaneous death penalty ruling against their own 48 hour waiting period rule. This must have been one extremely important and infamous outlaw!
Such an event would be huge news!
Imagine the Supreme Court of the United States convening on Christmas Eve. Someone would have written about this!
This was the highest court in the land with judges who were religious Jews violating their own religion to convene on a high holiday. That didn't happen.
And, if that didn't happen, then Jesus' last supper wasn't a Passover Seder. And, if that wasn't the case then he didn't hand out the afikomen and tell the disciples to eat this for it is my body and then pass around the wine saying to drink it for it is his blood.
And, if none of that happened, a billion Catholics are all wrong about communion.
And, then there's the Easter Challenge.
And, then there's the obvious fact that not one single thing was written about Jesus by anyone who even claimed to know him while he was alive and nothing was written until decades after his death.
I'm not saying he didn't exist. I'm just saying I'm not convinced.
>> The purpose of ID is to pretend that it is science and not religion and thus weasel it both into science classes and into public schools despite the latter being a violation of the constitution. So, they're not going to want specifics of their religion in it.
> It requires theism, at least, but also they're not fooling anyone by pretending to not belong to any given religion.
Agreed. The courts also agreed.
>>>> That is not the right way to do it if you want to use empiricism. Formulate a testable hypothesis based on X kind of theism. Test the hypothesis.
>>> That won't always tell you what you want.
>> I claim it will.
> If you find the constants, then... what? Life is possible— certain, even, since we're here. Is that likely to be arranged by something intelligent? Is that just chance paying off? What's this more likely under?
I don't understand how you got to these questions.
I guess I should have replaced, "I claim it will" with "I claim nothing else possibly can".
We may not be able to answer your questions. But, we're not going to answer them with anything other than the scientific method.
I'll try to answer as best I can now.
> If you find the constants, then... what? Life is possible— certain, even, since we're here.
We know life is possible. That is not in question. If you want to know about how life formed, start with the same amino acids we found on 2 comets because we now know that these organic molecules predate the earth.
Then try to guess the conditions of the early earth and dump them into those conditions and see if you get a self-replicating molecule, perhaps a very simple strand of RNA.
Then you're done. The gap here (in God of the Gaps) is actually not so big. And, it keeps getting smaller as we learn more.
> Is that likely to be arranged by something intelligent?
How intelligent? We had life for more than 3 billion years on planet earth before multicellular life formed. It's possible that multicellular life is statistically fairly unlikely.
How are you defining intelligent? How intelligent? Is smart as a mouse good enough? Or, do you mean humans in particular? I think humans are even more unlikely, which is why so much evolution occurred without us and there is no convergent evolution for our brand of intelligence.
Flight has evolved at least 4 times (insects, pterosaurs, bats, birds). Add humans if you like. This is an obvious survival advantage, hence it's separate evolution so many times.
Our brand of intelligence? That may not be a survival advantage. Compared to the chambered nautilus or horseshoe crab at hundreds of millions of years virtually unchanged, humans are an extremely young species.
Already we're showing signs of killing ourselves off in the near future. Perhaps we're unlikely. Perhaps our traits are not even good for survival.
> Is that just chance paying off?
Yes. But, the payoff may be of negative value.
> What's this more likely under?
You mean nature or magic? I'm going with nature.
>>> Philosophy of religion, sorry.
>> Does that differ from theology in any meaningful way?
> Someone like Maimonides is a theological figure, and theology in general focuses on a lot of the inner workings of a religion— what is Christianity
Minor point. Maimonides was Jewish.
> Phil rel is related in that gods are a subject and it can go into philosophical examinations of particular aspects of themes, but it obviously makes philosophy its main focus, not literary studies, history, etc. It's not that those other things aren't important. It's just a different area. Phil rel isn't the same as Biblical studies in that the professor does not do metaphysics or ethics, they talk to you about how to interpret Matthew.
Do they talk to you about whether or not God exists? And, if so, which god?
These are the questions that cannot be answered in theology. The others certainly can be.
In fact, you didn't mention the Vedas or the Quran or the Book of Mormon. Why not?
Logical conclusion 1: You are not a troll.
Thanks for making me think through some of this.
>> I'm going to disagree with you on this one. I see no reason to believe logical thinking does not have a long history. Even people who think logically on most subjects can still come to illogical conclusions on others.
> History disagrees with you. It was Aristotle who first discovered logic and developed it to a high degree. Atheism comes after. The one cannot exist without the other. People also think logically and come to logical conclusions. All scientific knowledge is, after all, a product of trial and error.
Interesting. I was thinking of rational rather than logical, I guess. You're correct that logic is a formalized means of thinking. I hadn't realized that, actually. I thought it was just basic rationality. And, I presume that people long before so-called civilization sometimes thought rationally.
>> Actually, since evolution is a claim, it does bear the burden of proof. The bigger difference with theism is that unlike theism, evolution has an enormous body of hard scientific evidence to back it up.
> Yes, it does, but only for the competing theories that come after it. Because creationism exists as a positive claim before evolution, it is theists who always bear the burden of proof.
This is false. Any claim must be backed up. The reason you're thinking evolution does not need to do this is because it has already done so.
If someone wants to question evolution, they are welcome to read the rather lengthy books detailing the evidence.
By comparison, I'm only aware of one book that details all of the hard scientific evidence of God. Spoiler alert: It is 200 blank pages.
> Alternatively, theists always bear the burden of proof because our modern scientific epistemology has had remarkable success uncovering the laws of nature, allowing us to harness these forces through the development of technology, whereas religious epistemology has had no such success. Because faith has revealed itself to always be a failure a posteriori, it is always incumbent on the theist to establish justification for his positive claims, given prior probabilities.
I don't agree with your reasoning for why this is true. I think anyone making a positive claim has a duty to back up that claim.
I agree that all god(s) hypotheses have always failed spectacularly. But, this is not the reason that the claim must be backed up.
Some claims are less extraordinary and can be backed up to most people's satisfaction without a whole lot of evidence. If I told you I had eggs for breakfast this morning, you probably wouldn't even need to see a photo to believe me.
If I told you that time slowed down in the presence of a large gravity well or on accelerating bodies such as satellites, I hope you'd want some evidence. And, you'd get it! Because it is demonstrably true.
But, it is still a claim that needs to be backed up. People didn't just take Einstein's word for it.
>> P.S. The term atheism post-dates theism because it is the absence of theism. But, the lack of belief in any deities probably exists in all species that do not know of the concept of deities. So, almost by definition, this lack of belief in deities predates a belief in them. It's just that no term was necessary for this lack of belief prior to the belief.
> I'm going to disagree with this. The cognitive capacity to assent to atheism must be present, accompanied by the necessary logical and empirical tools, otherwise speaking of atheism and theism in this context, that of non-human species, is simply not meaningful.
> Again, atheism always comes after theism.
I don't agree. You're talking about the term and formal atheism. But, I think it is safe to say that rats do not believe in any gods. I could be wrong. But, I doubt it.
I do agree that the actual term atheism comes after theism because we would not need to define atheism or talk about it in the absence of theism. But, not believing in gods predates believing in gods. It is the act of rejecting claims for gods that requires others who make the claim, not the disbelief itself.
Don't confuse the existence of a word for atheism with the pre-existing condition of millions of years of no one even having thought of gods.
It wouldn't help to type your experience. The human brain is not a reliable source. Eyewitness testimony, for example, is among the least reliable types of evidence in the world. It disgusts me that we even allow it in a court of law. Here are some links.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-it/
https://agora.stanford.edu/sjls/Issue%20One/fisher&tversky.htm
https://www.simplypsychology.org/eyewitness-testimony.html
http://www.livescience.com/16194-crime-eyewitnesses-mistakes.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyewitness_testimony#Reliability
We sure as hell do not allow it in a science lab. When we ask questions about the nature of the universe in which we find ourselves, we only trust scientific evidence.
By all means, please do let me know if you come across a single shred of evidence that would meet those standards. Here's an excellent book containing all such evidence that we've found to date.
The Hard Evidence for God's Existence: A Comprehensive Guide
Spoiler alert! Your dysgraphia will not slow you down reading this one. It's 200 blank pages.
P.S. Edited to include links describing the problems of eyewitness testimony. If I shared your experiences that led you to belief, I would not trust my own brain without hard evidence confirming the experience. So, your testimony would not convince me. I would not even count it as evidence of any kind. I wouldn't count it from myself either, as I stated. So that is not a personal attack.
I just hope they place this book next to it at all stores that carry such material.