Do you think the Bible takes precedence over evidence?

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To me, the bible is a work of fiction, created by man to try to explain the universe around them with no other options. Yes there may have been a man called jesus, who preached he was the son of god etc, but he may have been a crazy and his miracles may have just been extra fiction added to the bible to further prove his divinty. (I know it's a little bit da vinci code here but bear with me)
I do not take my views from just a book. I make my own using my own 'experiments' and some provable facts that relate to my hypothesis (be it positive or negative).

This is the moral equivalent of asserting that the universe was created a second ago and we came into being from nothing complete with our memories. It is what the (real) George Orwell referred to in -1984- as collective solopsism.

The entire premise of -1984- was that the past is what the Party said it was.

ruveyn

Or to (the other) Orwell.

The debate about history is a debate about how good the evidence is. That doesn't matter one little bit unless you are committed to choose your beliefs based on whether they are probably true, independent of how much you like them. If you discard any evidence that contradicts what you want to believe (as the two guys on the CMI web site are proud to do) it no longer matters how good the evidence is. If you discard all contradictory evidence, what remains will always be all in favour of what you want to believe and you don't have to care about how good the evidence is.

Are you being ironic?

Perhaps I should clarify. History is fictional, because it's a story we make up about how we got to the present. It might be based on truth, but it isn't truth in itself. Any historian knows about bias. Ask three witnesses to a crime what exactly happened, and you'll get three different stories (you'll probably get two more even more different stories from the victim and the perpetrator!).

The past does not exist - but this doesn't mean it never did. I apologise for being tricksy with my words here! Thursday last week does not exist any more, and it is impossible to prove any claims about what happened that day because all we have are the echoes of that day still sounding today.

Not being able to prove something doesnt mean it doesnt exist. Proving it doesnt exist proves it doesnt exist

In much the same way that a past doesn't exist as a present, a spoon does not exist as a car.

Stupid poll. All i read was.

If you don't know something, then let your fingers do the walking, as nobody is your personal search engine.

Acronyms should be explained unless they are well known. Leaving it as an "exercise for the reader" is a really lazy way of doing things. Period.

I am neither.


The topic is whether to believe what is probably true or to believe what is comforting. Lots of people discard any evidence that contradicts what they want to believe, and often the beliefs they prop up through extreme confirmation bias have nothing to do with religion. But most of these people pretend to have good reason to discard inconvenient evidence. The young Earth creationists I quoted are the first I have seen who are proud to be irrational. They refer to their interpretation of the Bible as the Ultimate Truth. That is not relevant to atheists or Buddhists. It would have made no sense to include them. I could have included Muslims, but I have never noticed a Muslim creationist on WP, so why bother?

I should say that beliefs not tested against inconvenient evidence can still be right, it's just less probable.


I thought the quote in my opening post made that clear enough. I'm sorry it wasn't. Can you tell me why it wasn't clear from the quote that YEC had to stand for young Earth creationist?

Not "proud to be irrational" in the least. The members of CMI, those who I have had communications with at the least, are hardly "irrational" and if you notice what they actually say there about "starting assumption[s]" is quite valid. You alter the axioms of a system of thought, and the entire system is skewed from what it formerly was. The postulates and theorems of the older system may be slightly analogous, but no longer valid.

What they say about starting assumptions is their justification. What needs justifying is this:

I do not think what follows comes anywhere near to being sufficient justification for ignoring all inconvenient evidence because they have decided they already have The Truth.

Here is again the definition of one necessary aspect of rationality:

That puts the authors of that book into an interesting position. If they will not commit themselves to choosing beliefs based on which are probably true independent of how much they like them, what is their basis for believing the Bible is the word of God? If they believe that just because they feel like it, they have no basis for this:

They have to assume that God's Word is to be found in the bible instead of in the scripture of some other faith and they have to assume that their literal interpretation is true or they don't have the relevance to cosmology and other sciences that they want. What is the basis of these assumptions? If the choice of these assumptions is not epistemically rational, why trust anything that follows from them?

It's not a matter of ignoring evidence. At worst it is a matter of interpreting or placing relevance upon evidence, but I think that it more is a matter of some form of perception bias mainly on the evolutionist side which disables you people from seeing any evidence against atheistic origins. You can and already have said the same for creationists, and not just you but practically all in your camp as well. It's not a one sided bias where only creationists are subjective and only evolutionists are objective, but rather the constant perception of each other as subjective. However, evolutionists have the additional psychological reinforcement of feeling as if they were in the "in-crowd", which tends to decrease critical thinking via argumentum ad populum.

I quote them again:

The relevant word is "never". Why is this not a matter of ignoring evidence?


Are you equating evolution with atheism? It's no more atheist than continental drift or thermodynamics or relativity. None of the these theories contain a variable that stands for "here is where God intervenes". If that makes them atheist, it has escaped the notice of the many people of many religious faiths who accept and use these theories.


From my post earlier in this thread:

Just over three weeks ago I asked you a question you may have missed:

I haven't seen an answer yet. Of the creationists here you are the one most open to honest debate, but one plausible reason for your lack of reply is that you don't agree. If that is the reason (it is not the only possibility), you don't even aspire to rationality.

I do agree with the general principle that beliefs should be adopted on the basis of which are most probably true, independent of whether they are comforting. If you want to see how consistent I am, search for my contribution to AG's thread on Hume's argument against miracles.

It just looks like a loaded question as there are many components to the question, though I suppose you don't intend it to be so. Let's see though,

The general principle is that "beliefs should be adopted on the basis of which are most probably true, independent of whether they are comforting". To answer shortly, I think it was C.S. Lewis who said, "My heart cannot accept what my mind rejects." (Or upon searching, it was actually a Clark Pinnock who said that, meh.) But if you want a detailed reply, then lets go into the facets of the question.

Firstly, is it actually possible for beliefs to be adopted? Are beliefs merely some sort of dogma which one memorizes in order to regurgitate? Or are beliefs something which one actually views as truth rather than mere rigmarole? Imagine telling somebody about you being accused of a violent crime and that you didn't actually commit it, and they say, "I believe you." Which definition of "believe" would you hope that they mean? That they "believe" you in the sense that they trust your word or that they "believe" you in the sense that they memorized it in order to gossip and spread rumors?

Probabilistic truth, there is something where I'm certain there must be an entire chapter of a textbook devoted to it somewhere. However, my usage of "I'm certain" would probably be an example of this, as well as the use of the word probably probably would be too. As would the use of the word pro... I don't know, the notion of "what is probably true" seems rather subjective in terms of debate where people argue tooth and nail arguing passed each other. In terms of physics, the amount of radiation exposed to per year is based on probability, such as the surface area at a certain distance from a source of radiation would get a fraction of the radiation emitted depending upon the dispersal pattern (spherical, conical, etc) and of the surface area exposed the fraction of surface area which genomic material composes and of that the fraction of which radiation damage would lead to cancer, et cetera. In terms of what one person actually believes though, I think that is determined by what they perceive to be most probably true already. It depends upon the presuppositions they accept as true as to what they perceive as having a greater or lesser probability.

Independence of comfort? Cicero and the other stoics were probably fairly cool... to quote more perfectly what Pinnock said, "The heart cannot delight in what the mind rejects as false".