"What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."

>reddit

No, it was a habit of Hitchens to simply look up the definition and parrot it as if it would be a huge truth bomb.

Evidence in what sense? Carbon dating, infrared photography or fingerprints? Or do we allow verbal argumentation and intellect/reason to enter the equation?

Is a creation not logically evidence of a creator? If there is a world, then there must be a world-maker, no?

[The project of new atheism is to create concise, easily repeatable pre-made arguments to advance a factory-produced ideology that pretty much already exists.]

Makes sense.
I have nothing against Hitchens despite the more recent anti-fedora train everyone hopped on, but when I tried watching some videos of him I couldn't get very far because his voice was just weirdly boring to me. Like it wasn't unpleasant, but his accent was enough to where I didn't understand everything he said immediately and his tone was kind of depressive and plodding so it wasn't even like I could just enjoy the aesthetics of his speaking in the absence of clear understanding for the meaning of his speaking.

He was a great man, but a tremendous bore on the topic of religion. It's a shame that that's what his legacy is mainly reduced to.

It's his own god damn fault that he got so lazy as a thinker. He deserves all the shit he gets.

He went from being a seething critic of US foreign policy to being a cheerleader for George W. Bush. I'm glad he's gone.

>Is a creation not logically evidence of a creator?
The trick is having evidence that the thing you're talking about is a creation in the first place, which in the case of life on Earth I don't think there's a scientific consensus that it is. Maybe it is in reality, but you certainly wouldn't be honest by trying to pretend everyone just accepts it as a creation to begin with.
>If there is a world, then there must be a world-maker, no?
Probably depends on what you mean by "maker." If there's a world and it had a beginning, then there would probably need to be some sort of circumstances / events which caused that beginning.
Now "maker" implies anthropomorphism / conscious intelligence, but there's no reason to assume these circumstances or events would have any traits like that. In fact, there's reason to assume the opposite because we're trying to explain more complicated / built up phenomena in terms of less complicated / less built up phenomena, and of course intelligence is something that emerged later in evolutionary history rather than sooner. Intelligence depends on a lot more prior physical scaffolding existing than photosynthesis or simple cellular locomotion does for example.

Prove this statement wrong soyboys

Hahahaahhaahhaah

What flawed logic soyboy

I'm glad I stopped drinking.

I don't think it's the sort of thing you prove or disprove, it's just an observation about what's fair. If you bring up some ridiculous claim and then start insisting I need to prove you wrong, something along the lines of that quote would be a good thing to mention in explaining why others shouldn't be bothered to assemble evidence against your claim when you haven't even begun to show any evidence for it.

ahhhh, honeypie, don't be so bootybothered you itsy little boompkin :)

>Now "maker" implies anthropomorphism / conscious intelligence

The idea that the God who created the universe we inhabit is shaped like a human being or possesses anything like physical form (or mass, location, velocity etc.) is outrageous enough to disregard immediately.

It is a sign of the times that nonbelievers actually think believers imagine God anthropomorphically. Nothing could be more vain or ridiculous.

>le empirics and reason xddddddddd

...

Anthropomorphism isn't limited to appearance. Note that I never once even mentioned anything about how this cause would appear. I think you know that already though and were just trying to score a lazy objection to a strawman argument.
If your idea of God involves intelligence, that's anthropomorphic too.

...

4/4

tldr hitchens is retarded

well, it's obvious, really

This is the actual answer.
"What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence." Says who?
Hitchens, and all atheists, have no basis for their moral and rational claims. They left with a totally circular worldview where they use reason to justify reason.
When deciding ones worldview one must pick and justify it without appealing to standards within that worldview. Atheists and rationalists cannot do this.
And yes, this is different from a Christian saying the Bible is true because the Bible says it's true because that is openly circular statement. That type of argument makes sense within a worldview in which the Bible is the truth. The atheist doing the same thing with reason does not make this sense.

Should all witness testimony be dismissed?

"What is asserted by euphoric men in trenchcoats can be dismissed without evidence."

Ad hominem

I'd rather argue about God than nitpick a context-tailored definition of "anthropomorphic." That's not my hope for that post or this one.

I picked this as a point of response because it indicates the difference of worldview more than others. It is very important to clarify that God is not a thing in the world, and that God is like man only in the sense that we have some morsel of God's intellect operating in our bodies.

We are not moving backwards, applying our self-understanding onto an imaginary being. We are using an intellect gifted to us by God via the cosmos to search for God outside the cosmos. Man is made in the image of God, not vice versa. This is the disagreement between the religions and the secular studies of religion (from sociology/anthropology/philosophy, exg. Comte, Marx, Freud or Bertrand Russell)

>It is very important to clarify that God is not a thing in the world, and that God is like man only in the sense that we have some morsel of God's intellect operating in our bodies.
>We are not moving backwards, applying our self-understanding onto an imaginary being. We are using an intellect gifted to us by God via the cosmos to search for God outside the cosmos. Man is made in the image of God, not vice versa. This is the disagreement between the religions and the secular studies of religion (from sociology/anthropology/philosophy, exg. Comte, Marx, Freud or Bertrand Russell)

All of this is sounds nice and deep, but is pure conjecture, equally good as any other conjecture.

>conjecture

What is conjecture and what is an example of an argument which is not conjecture?

Does science operate on the level of conjecture when it proposes theories based on observation?

Hard to believe you wrote so much and said so little.

>And yes, this is different from a Christian saying the Bible is true because the Bible says it's true because that is openly circular statement. That type of argument makes sense within a worldview in which the Bible is the truth. The atheist doing the same thing with reason does not make this sense.

Imagine being this dumb

>Is a creation not logically evidence of a creator? If there is a world, then there must be a world-maker, no?
No. It isn't.
You're making a non-sequitur (the world is created and so a Creator must follow even though there is no correlation).

>he accent was enough to where i didn’t understand everything he said immediately
are you a non-native speaker? if not you’re a really stupid, sheltered, fucking waste of stem cells and neurons

I'm the guy who said:

"If there is a world, then there must be a world-maker, no?"

I think a more serious critique of this would involve some of the following:

1. proposing a world that is cyclical or infinite (it has always existed and always will).

2. arguing that if a creator exists the creator must have a creator and so on

3. noting that ideas like "creation" and "beginning" (which indicate dynamisms) are impossible prior to the existence of time

The criticism you offered:

>"No. It isn't. You're making a non-sequitur (the world is created and so a Creator must follow even though there is no correlation)"

is complete trash. It's not a non-sequitur to say a creation has a creator. That's the definition of creation. A creator creates a creation. I think what you mean to say is, "How can you assume the world is a creation?"

Yeah but "The absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence."

is this Kantbot?

Those arguments would accept your bullshit premise as axiomatic which nobody will do. I'm not going to get that involved with a faulty intellectual substratum, but here:
First off, you're framing the earth as "a Creation", which is intellectual dishonesty in its pursest form and a linguistic trick. Earth isn't a creation, it is simply a heavenly body.
Secondly, a Creator implies a caricature of some sort—a second dishonesty. For whatever reason the universe came into existence, it did; but this doesn't imply an explicit act by a Creator.
You're begging the question by presuming something was ever created in the first place.

To say the statement of yours I quoted was non-sequitur was true, because it was a bunch of begging-the-question bullshit.

He didn't come up with it, its an old latin phrase. Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur

>I went to the store yesterday.
>DO YOU HAVE A SINGLE FACT TO BACK THAT UP?
>W-what do you mean? I go to the mall every oth--
>WHAT CAN BE ASSERTED WITHOUT EVIDENCE CAN BE REJECTED WITHOUT EVIDENCE.
>But why would I li--
>YOUR BELIEF THAT YOU WENT TO THE STORE YESTERDAY IS A DELUSION AND YOU ARE MENTALLY ILL.
>But I was there! Here I think I can find a--
>WHERE IS THE EVIDENCE? YOU HAVE NO EVIDENCE! THE BURDEN OF PROOF IS ON YOU!
>Here! Here's a receipt!
>THIS SAYS THAT IT WAS A TOYS R US! EXTRAORDINARY CLAIMS REQUIRE EXTRAORDINARY EVIDENCE!
*crumpled up receipts and throws it in face*
>YOU HAVE NO EVIDENCE!

Atheists are fucking retards.

fuck off brainlet, I ate your lunch

Not quite as old as you make out, only really popular in the 1800s.

same poster as in the other threads, are you a grad student yet?

neuroscience, CS or what exactly?

>universe is a Creation and thus needs a Creator
>universe needs to be cleaned and thus has a Cleaner
>universe is a tv show and needs a director

What's the difference between these statements? They're all vaguely defining the universe using human concepts and then assuming a deity-like figure must exist.

Math/religious studies double, no grad school no thank you

universities are in a state of severe decline

echoing the other user, oxford accent is not difficult. you must be a little-brain.

More like:

>universe is a creation and therefore has a creator
>universe has been cleaned and therefore has a cleaner
>universe has been produced for television and therefore has a director

The form of all three is the same without assuming any premise. It's just a simple grammar relationship.

A thing that's created has a creator. A thing that has been cleaned has a cleaner. A thing that has been Xed has an Xer.

how will you get hired/where will you be hired? i thought maths niggers need grad school or you’re basically just a hs teacher, no?

I work for a major package delivery company doing blue collar work and I like it that way for now.

woah

hmm

ok user bye for now

why tho

Well, I have this book that says a magic Pringles tin traveled bwck in time and created the universe. There is no evidence that anything in this book is true, but we should all believe it anyways!

*Supports mass immigration*

*Spends the end of his life telling you about how bad those Muslim immigrants are*

Wow what an amazing thinker.

>We have art in order to not die from the truth.
>If truth is a woman, what then?
>Can you conceive a god? Then be silent about all gods, but you could very well create the übermensch!

>replying seriously to that low effort bait

Take your meds

he spent his entire life worshiping people who were more talented than him, dead, and religious.

this is like a gay dude secretly jerking off to straight porn only to look at the girls face when she comes and whispering "i love you"

Did Christopher Hitchens ever comment on miraculous healings and apparitions?

A lot. God is Not Great covers it in a couple chapters, along with The Missionary Position.

>Of the global atheist and non-religious population, 76% reside in Asia and the Pacific, while the remainder reside in Europe (12%), North America (5%), Latin America and the Caribbean (4%), sub-Saharan Africa (2%) and the Middle East and North Africa (less than 1%).

Are Asians the ultimate fedoras, lads? Maybe we could've sent the Four Horsemen xD to PRC.

If this were the good old days we'd be aggressively evangelizing in Asia. Christianity's spreading pretty well in China even with persecution, but there needs to be an active war by the Church against all atheist regimes. Not a war of bullets and soldiers, of course; rather, a war of ideas.

Let me guess: he dismisses them without bothering to examine them closely? I don't know how you employ sophistry to get around someone miraculously being cured of their cancer.

>And yes, this is different from a Christian saying the Bible is true because the Bible says it's true because that is openly circular statement
hahahahahahahaah that made my day user thanks a lot

>as long as the worldview starts with magic it's fine
amazing

user is saying pick your poison
its cool to be a fedora or a christfag until your not a dick about it in my opinion
also these discussions never get from point A to B

le the free market and theocratic war of ideas *tips cardinal hat*

Is it not a flaw of human thought to assume a guiding hand where there is none? And what logic is there in applying the argument to the existence of a potential conscious creator or divine supernatural power to prove one specific faith on Earth? Through this reasoning, I could invent a religion right now and have an equal chance of being correct.

thats all nice
but when religion fags try to use this for their own gain pretending like they know wtf the creator is even up to by coming up with horseshit to manipulate the masses is not cool

The evidence required depends on the gravity of the claim, and how much I am asked to partake in the consequences of the claim.

If John says he saw a duck fly by this morning, I'll take him at his word.

If Muhammad says we should worship an all powerful divine being and slice off our foreskins and follow every specific rule he lays out or we'll burn forever...well...burden of proof and all that.

>I don't know how you employ sophistry to get around someone miraculously being cured of their cancer.
its not a miracle user because then why not cure everyone with cancer ?
that would be a miracle

All genuine Catholics dislike the free market. Capitalism is as much of a mistake as communism, if not more.

yet they will gladly take their money

Evidence depends on an axiom.

>demands evidence for atheism
>worships an invisible supernatural being without a shred of evidence besides the pure popular appeal of the idea
Cool. Cool cool cool.

Appeal to authority. Ad hominem. Red herring!

>Rumsfeld
Fucking kek. If only I could've been a fly on the wall in the weeks following the invasion, listening to live updates on the search for WMD's.

How about an argument based on the text in which your belief is founded and not making massive changes to it for the sake of self-consolidation.
>I'd rather argue about God than nitpick a context-tailored definition of "anthropomorphic."
He is anthropomorphic. We are in his image, he shares being with and is the father to something who lived a supposed human life and took a human form, and
>God is like man only in the sense that we have some morsel of God's intellect operating in our bodies.
is a complete fabrication made to survive in a world that passed beyond the acceptable nature of these beliefs.

no its not
your just fucking dumb

What authority did I invoke?

>basing a worldview on reason is bad
>basing a worldview on someone's magic system is good
We should implement Eru/Iluvatar worship worldwide. Or at least heavily amend the current texts if we're openly admitting the belief in magic/the supernatural as a purely logical validation point for a circular worldview.

fuck off kantbot

I'm not here to evaluate the claims of Christianity.

This conversation began in a very metaphysical domain and I don't see why we should depart it just yet.

The idea of "image of God" is, I admit, an unintentionally particular phrasing. I believe there are analogues to this idea in at least several of the "world religions."

There are many ways of approximating the idea, although none seem to quite capture it exactly. The Buddhists refer to the potential of all humans to reach enlightenment (tathagathagarba) although from what I gather this is emphasized in East Asian Buddhism. The Muslims describe the inherent moral dignity and moral potential of all persons. Similar ideas exist in Hinduism and elsewhere. My own understanding I would phrase as follows:

"Human life possesses and is essentially characterized by a relationship to god, inexpressible in language and approached by metaphor, but, so far as the world is concerned, constituting a distinction from material."

I suppose even terms like "soul" have overtones of this idea.

aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/arbitrary.html
aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/morality.html

Wtf I'm a Greek politheist now. By the way, Christians are politheistic too, they just don't want to admit it.

Don't worry I get you bc I'm not a brainlet.

Ok. but what is evidence, like, if I say the sun is hot, the evidence consists in it being palpably hot and able to be felt on the skin. ok. If I say that the input M_n simply-connected of a full braid group upon N elements is a n-tuple cover of a certain N-particle quantum configuration space Q_n, then this is no less true than the simpler fact that the sun is hot, but not everybody can understand this proof, yet it's still fucken true. If I say God exists (and I do), I can give you what in my mind constitutes proof, but all you can do it look back at me and say "that ain't proof."
The only difference between my mathematical proof and my proof of God is this: the former you are willing to take on authority, the latter you are not. This fact is at best a consequence of being raised under a secular capitalistic prison in which you are conditioned to believe in the eternal supremacy of STEM or the supremacy of philosophy which is closer to STEM over those that are farther from it. The only difference from me to you, Christians to atheists, is that the former are able to extend their intellects much farther because they are willing to take more on authority. It's symbolically the same as a person who enters buildings and a person who does not. The former walks through the door first, accepts everything presented to him for what it is, and then engages in discovering the nuances therein. The latter simply does not go in, he is a fussy person who believes that the only buildings he should go into are the ones that he is absolutely sure will not surprise him with an aesthetic that he does not already know the ins-and-outs of. Or, at the very least, the ones in which he need not accept anything before learning about it. Those however do not exist buy my mix tape.

The only difference from me to you, Christians to atheists, is that the former are able to extend their intellects much farther because they are willing to take more on authority

The more bullshit you believe, the smarter you are, sounds alright to me

>aynrandlexicon
fucking lol

Is there a reason you posted this? I regret having read all of that.

There's no such thing as "evidence".

Who here mad lmfao

Holy shit this is no good mate
It's a bad comparison because whatever your talking about wrt the brain is something if other people learned about they would invariably agree with you, since the world over we have a uniform conception of scientific method and proof. I don't accept on your authority, but on the authority of this method.
Your idea that the more you accept on authority the further you can extend your intellect is probably true, given the infinite domain of sophistry you could open up to yourself.
When you talk about the nuances of christian theology available only to people who 'fully' enter into the subject, you can't be talking about reason or logic or conclusive discourse because obviously these would be (and are) available to non-christians interested in the it - i suppose you're actually describing the play of christian ideology on your soul, your soul's response to it and communication with it. And this is where religious people, as far as i make out, are too naive, too childish, too credulous: they are unwilling really to auto-interrogate and get to know their souls properly; too willing to take themselves and their desires at face-value and not dig any deeper; i suppose being human, all too human

Sorry that was all a bit rushed but yeah your comparisons and analogies are bad, your argument about proof is specious at best.
if you wanna stop being religious you gotta work out why you don't want to stop being religious - which obviously is the difficulty and bind you find yourself in