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Technical Difficulties With Automated Blog Posts

[20100131] The blog is still refusing mail from gmail. I've stopped the forwarders. When the mail server stops trying to deliver mail (probably by the 5th). I'll try another strategy.
I'm trying to find the equilibrium between Google News Alerts, Gmail and Blogger to permit automated posting of Google News Alerts to the blog so I can have them for reference and work on other things. My goal is not to focus on one news topic, but to have the varied topics in the news feeds automatically posted in the blog daily or weekly because I can capture more unique data that way.

Suicide Bomb News Feed

The Jihad News Feed

Witch News Feed

Ritual Abuse and Killing News Feed

Faith Heal News Feed

Female Genital Mutilation News

Exorcism News Feed

Child Bride or Marriage News Feed

Church Abuse News Feed

Animal Sacrifice News Feed

Religious Exemption News Feed

Sunday, October 25, 2009

How Can Anyone Know Anything About A Mysterious God?

Recently in a rejoinder over at Debunking Christianity one of the participants made the following comment challenging a non-believer to
"Account for the information design that every atheist scholar admits that exists but lives in denial explaining away."

If I can reliably predict the outcome of an event 80% of the time because I know how most of it works, is what I think I know "explaining away" the truth that it must be that "god did it"?

To call scientific explanations, which are by their methodology designed to be reliable or repeatable, "explaining away" is to dismiss the accumulation of knowledge as irrelevant in favor of keeping a worldview that favors remaining anchored to reacting to chance.

A course in probability and economics will give a TASTE of how new properties and characteristics "emerge" from the interaction of "elements". They will demonstrate that "cooperation" or even "coopetition" is rationally, logically, and mathematically the best outcome for all participants. A rudimentary type of morality emerges from the self-interested behavior of actors in an iterative series of events.

Its the "golden rule" and it comes from self-interested behavior of participants, not god.

Dismissing knowledge accumulated through the scientific method, or even scientific theories as "explaining away" negates the natural processes of deviation and mistakes in the system being observed. There can be no unintended errors. Its all got to be god or nothing. And in a more liberal viewpoint that will admit that "God set it in motion and then nature took it from there", then there still exists the problem of explaining why information about any particular god (scripture, personal "experience" what have you) is more valid than any other religion.

All these arguments boil down to ancient information and circumstantial evidence.

If it is said that "god did it", its not enough. It must be shown why the other hypothesis fails, and it must be ensured that its repeatable. The hypothesis that produces the more reliable information should be the one that gets the commitment from the observer. For any given religion there are at least two competing hypotheses that must be eliminated, Science and some other religion. It must be shown why a religions hypothesis produces more reliable outcomes than any other, otherwise, it should be admitted that they are all eligible to be probable.

If someone is not willing to do that, then they are at least obligated to say that either hypothesis might be true, and then they become an agnostic. Logically a religious person should be agnostic anyway, especially with what they think about they know about their god. Just when they think they've got a characteristic identified, something happens that is not consistent, and they struggle to account for it somehow.

"gods ways are mysterious" is just another way of saying
"I don't know anything about this".
 
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7 comments:

Lavishmorticia said...

I really enjoyed reading this post. I think its great to question things in life especially religion. Look forward to reading more of your posts.

Anonymous said...

Hi Lafishmorticia,
thanks!
I have imported this blog from DC, and I am almost finished with relabeling and cleaning up meaningless tags, but I will be posting something very soon. I have lots of material that wasn't really appropriate for DC sitting unused in my Googledocs, so it will take little effort to polish them up and publish them.

Rich said...

So the good thing is, I can still do a little dialogue gaming, it's just that now you admit that you really are a clown! :) I still liek to read your writtings and they always make me think. I'll turn my BS detector back on now. I look forward to continuing discussions with you.

Gandolf said...

Lee my opinion in atleast this particular instance is,im sure some overbearing reasons are its always been a job and a chosen career at stake too.And while claiming other people must supposedly have a bias in simply trying to explain away matters etc,the claimant simply forgets all posibilities of their own bias for simply accepting what seems easier and suits them better.

Rich said...

Hi Gandolf,
That's actually a good point. What about those who have a different career but still are involved in a religion on a voluntary basis?

Anonymous said...

Hi RichD,
Glad you could make it. Make yourself at home, there's beer in the fridge and chips in the cabinet.
;-)

Gandolf said...

Hi RichD yes thats actually a jolly good point too.Could be lots of others reasons i agree.Could be Custom, wife believes too, faith, family, habit, means well, hope, wish, confused, madness, insanity, hates atheist, ardi stinks, scientists suck, etc etc.

Yeah for sure guess there really is likely a very big number of reasons why it could be :(.

 

served since Nov. 13, 2009