Is this the same dude that did a whole episode of a tv show about how second hand smoke isn’t bad for you?
Almost, they did half an episode of Bullshit about second hand smoke.
On the topic, Bullshit was weird show, using Penn and Teller to make a show about disproving pseudo science and outright bullshit, and then also trying to disprove perfectly resonable stuff.
It did make me trust public restrooms more though, but I wasn’t a fan of their endangered species episode. Turns out they were right about recycling but that’s just kind of sad.
To be fair, they wanted to do a Bullshit Bullshit show to correct the record, but were told no.
It’s a pretty smooth brain take because the core ideas of religion are just about universal. Those core ideas would be re-derived. It’s the details and names that vary. You could describe religion as a connectedness to, and humbleness before the mystery of, the universe
What I’m saying is that nobody knows how any of this works. Maybe we are in a simulation and there is a literal being overseeing us. Logical positivism & reductionist materialism have long been disproven by Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem & quantum uncertainty. We do not know what’s going on. Athiest people who claim they definitely know how the universe works are just as bad as fundamentalists. It’s the same mistake of overconfidence
Athiest people who claim they definitely know how the universe works
The thing is that atheists don’t do that. They are aware how science works and that what we consider to be true is only the current best approximation.
disproven by Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem
I don’t know much about most of the fancy words you’re throwing around. But I do know that the Incompleteness Theorem only states that statements can exist that you can neither prove nor deny. We could assume that a deity exists that chooses to hide its existence. This assumption would be such an independent axiom. If we take it to be true, however, then it is subject to reasoning, and we can quickly derive that this deity does not have the properties we usually associate with it. So while a deity may exist, it certainly isn’t the one we’re picturing, from which “God doesn‘t exist” follows necessarily.
It’s also worth noting that Gödel was talking about an axiomatization of mathematics, not the ‘real world.’
There is no god, that’s the simple truth
I think this is what the poster was referring to with the overconfidence part
“There are no unicorns, that’s the simple truth.”
Is this also over confidence?
There are a lot of children who believe in unicorns.
A lot of pictures too. The pictures are more consistent than that of the gods.
As I understand it, a statement like that is unscientific. You can say that the likelihood of unicorns existing is extremely small, trace possible mythological origins to show the stories are fabricated, but you can’t categorically prove that something doesn’t exist.
Are you saying that a proof that God doesn’t exist, can’t itself exist?
…Yes?
So therefore you can categorically prove that something doesn’t exist?
I think the point is that humanity 2.0 might believe the sea gods will reward your undying bloodlust and through many murders, you may be rewarded with eternal battle in the under halls.
But humanity 2.0 will always discover that the earth revolves around the sun the same way we did, and that whatever math they derive will provide the same answers as ours.
“a connectedness to, and humbleness before the mystery of, the universe”
This is the same rationale Stephen Colbert used when debating Ricky Gervais making the same point above. Yes, similar ideas may come back and people may invent new deities to direct this emotional response towards as humans have done in the past, but it is not observable and/or measurable fact. There is no evidence that any of these created deities are real, but the science of human behaviours in such a experiment may show that humans will always create religions to deal with the overwhelming response of appreciating the improbable notion that your conscious self exists.
What core ideas are there in the big religions?
Besides the oppression of subserviente women and the hatred of homosexuals?
I’m partial to “The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine”
Do the people asking that question just conveniently ignore the fact that religious leaders rape children like it’s going out of style?
Immunity to cognitive dissonance is a requirement to believe in religion.
I do want to commit some crimes but I also have morals, crazy concept
Last year I jaywalked directly in front of a police. While waving. Oh the thrill.
As some day it may happen that a victim must be found
I’ve got a little list — I’ve got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground
And who never would be missed — who never would be missed!
– Gilbert and Sullivan, The MikadoThere’s absolutely a handful of figures – all well known, all active in politics or business, all gladly engaging in behaviors that cause mass harm and sometimes death – that I might be inclined to try to
murderassassinate. (Once you’re that famous, its assumed you have enemies who want to kill you, even if you’re just famous for being a Beatle and writing pop songs.)I’m not sure I could pull the trigger, having ever killed anyone, but I and many many others have motive good enough for the courts, regardless of who actually kills them.
But yeah, even if I had a really, really good rifle and training to use it (or a hit-man glad to do it for me) it would be an act of desperation. I would not fault a starving man for stealing food, and would applaud a mother swiping medicine for her kids.
My mores drive me, instead, to remove these people from their positions of power without causing them harm, or even better, to reform them ( by way of Inception maybe) so that they conduct themselves with empathy and awareness of all the harm they might cause by their actions. But when we don’t have the capacity to do that, and they continue to cause harm, the knife in the night whispers.
I would be worried by those people and distance myself from them asap tbh.
People would still think about their relationship with the universe.
This is only really an argument against taking religious texts literally which most people don’t actually do.
This is only really an argument against taking religious texts literally which most people don’t actually do.
Tell that to the people who think I should be killed (or, at best, jailed and/or sent through re-education) for being a man lying with a man… because they definitely take that part literally (whilst otherwise getting tattoos, eating shrimp cocktail, and sacrificing their children to Molech).
I’m cool with people having a relationship with the universe. Call it “God” if you must. But, that relationship is definitely personal.
It’s actually happened with science in different ways. There have been several instances of concurrent discoveries, and some, like the Pythagorean Theorem, that has been repeatedly discovered (Pythagoras wasn’t the first to figure it out)
climate denying shit bag.
Choose better.
Folks like you who readily attack those that admit they were wrong are part of the problem.
Fuck off
.
Wowowowowow
According to his Wikipedia article he changed his view on climate change a decade ago.
In 2008, Jillette stated that there is not enough information to make an informed decision on global warming, that his gut told him it was not real, but his mind said that he cannot prove it.[46] As of 2014, he has changed his position and now believes that climate change is occurring
Both his past and present takes are perfectly reasonable. If you don’t know enough about something, then you don’t know. Simple as that. Much better than being confidently incorrect (or even confidently correct) about it when you don’t actually know the topic.
Makes me wonder how that even came up.
Who had the clever idea of asking: “Is climate change real? Let’s ask a magician/actor”.
I think it’s perfectly reasonable for people to have an opinion on various topics. They may be well informed or horribly misinformed.
The main issue is whether they can learn enough to either strengthen or weaken their view. And it sounds like Penn has.
While the quote presents a correct conclusion, it’s also problematic in that it makes a slip of logic and paints a target for fallacious rebuttal.
- The slip of logic: one cannot conclude that no gods exist because all religions are clearly wrong – all that tells us is that none of the specific gods depicted by these religions exist. The path to disprove the existence of ALL gods must go through philosophy instead;
- Painted target: by juxtaposing science and religion, he invites the religious nuts to perceive and treat both things as belonging to the same class of intellectual activity, i.e. the “you have your opinion and I have mine” crowd.
Scientifically, we’d have to carry out the scenario of erasing the religions to see if the hypothesis is true. But how would we compare if they were erased?
The trick is that you don’t actually need to do it, as we already have the functional equivalent analogue – the development of countless different religions in the past, in different regions of the globe – as evidence. If at least one of these religions were right, you would’ve expected it to show up in at least more than one region in the past, but we can clearly trace all similar religions to patterns of human migration, which strongly suggests humans created all of them out of their cultural beliefs at the time
