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This argument is only as compelling as "There are over 5,000 explanations for what the sun is. But don't worry, only yours is correct." Or "There are over 5,000 ideologies believed in by humanity. But don't worry, only yours is correct."
The difference is, with the sun, you can actually look up and see it. You can use a telescope to see it in detail. You can determine which of the 5000 statements is true. You can study and understand it. With religion, they all have an equal basis in reality
What if my god is the sun? Check and mate.
Before you try and blaspheme, just know the power of my deity can and will give you cancer if you don't anoint yourself with the proper sacrificial ointments.
What Solar Piety Factor ointment do you recommend?
It depends on the types of sin happening in your local environment. Some places are exposed to more levels of gods wrath than others.
My environment is apparently steeped in sin based on current wrath levels, and only shows signs of increasing. Additionally, I am one of God's cursed races, I bear the Nuclear Overlord's most spited complexion.
The sun is a cruel, but righteous god. May your melanomas be painless and swift.
Understandable
Uh, my god is a giant space lobster that eats planets. I'll have to ask if they can eat stars, but I'm guessing the answer is yes.
They also spit acid and fire, have laser eyes, and have a saddle so the faithful can ride them when they come to eat the planet.
The proof of my gods' power is that lobsters are delicious
But do you agree that the argument is bad? If there was an actually legit religion then it would be logical that one is real and the 5000 are not. Doesn't matter if religions are bogus, this logic is bogus too.
The logic is, unless your religion has an actual basis in reality, you don't have any more claim to being more well reasoned than any other. Without this, any (and none) are on equal footing. If you believe just because you believe in something but you don't have any particular reason to believe in your one, odds are you're wrong.
It confronts people who claim they believe the true god(s) to say why they're correct over the infinitely many others that could exist.
This is largely the thing that led me on my path towards atheism. I had a Buddhist friend in middle/high school, which led to me having an interest in other religions. Once you recognize all of them have equal reasons for their belief, it makes it hard to believe you happened to just be born into the one that's real.
Not all religions have an equal basis in reality. If you have a religion that claims the sun is literally a divine, disembodied head that's so mad it's glowing, we can empirically disprove that. That's just not what stars are. If you have one that correctly states what the sun is, that means the second religion has a better basis in reality than the first.
We can also know things logically or philosophically, but can't debate them scientifically. That's often how we come to moral conclusions - we can't strictly base how we should behave off of evolutionary advantages, for example.
I mean, that's a pretty human-chauvinistic view. You can prove that the sun is a gigantic nuclear furnace, but you can't really prove that gigantic nuclear furnaces aren't what disembodied godheads look like.
We know what a head is. It's a part of a biological creature. In the absence of some convincing evidence or argumentation otherwise, it doesn't make sense to assume it's a head.
Robots are not biological, yet many have heads that fulfill the same sensory function as biological heads. It is very possible that non-biological sentient entities exist, and in absence of some convincing evidence or argumentation otherwise, it doesn't make sense to definitively assume nuclear sentiences can't exist.
You're piling on assumptions like crazy, which makes for a logically weak position. All other things being equal, the claim that relies on the fewest assumptions is more likely to be true. Given the increasingly outlandish assumptions at play, it makes more sense to believe that the sun is not a sentient head glowing with rage.
Not really, no. My position is objectively based on fewer assumptions than yours. Occam's razor is certainly useful, but it is not a tool for determining truth. It's only a tool for determining the simplest explanation.
Your assumption that sentient beings, and their heads, must be biological places your claim in a much more precarious position relative to the razor than mine.
You're making the argument that it is, or could be, a sentient, angry head. No evidence or arguments for that position, other than "well we can't say it isn't" have been presented. A head is a defined object, and there's no reason to modify the definition of "head" to include the sun. Your argument doesn't make much more sense than "a hydrogen atom may be a carbon atom, your assumption that it isn't is precarious."
Occam's razor is indeed for simpler arguments rather than article strictly for truth. But from my experience as an engineer, generally the fewer assumptions you make when coming to a conclusion, the closer to the truth you'll actually be.
Correct. So assumptions like "life must be biological, and alternative claims are outlandish" places you objectively further from the truth.
"Life" is a defined term, a biological function. Non-biological objects are, by definition, not living. This isn't an assumption, it's a definition. Again, you're essentially arguing that hydrogen atoms are also carbon atoms.
Only if you define it that way, which means that you need an alternative term for non-biological entities which, otherwise, fulfill all the actually functional landmarks of life: sensing, processing, and subsequently interacting with the environment. There's no proof that these phenomena are implicitly bound to biological systems.
Call it what you want, but there's absolutely no evidence (besides the circumstantial evidence of observed phenomenon in an implicitly biased environment) that biology is the only way to achieve sentience. Our knowledge of the mechanisms of sentience is woefully limited. Biological-chauvinism only cements your own myopic biases, skepticism taken to the extreme of prejudice.
I'm claiming that carbon and hydrogen are both atomic elements composed of protons, neutrons, and electrons. You're claiming that hydrogen is the only legitimate substance and carbon, by definition, isn't a real substance.
A definition is not an assumption, it's a description of something which has certain known properties. If something else fulfills similar functions to a living being, but it isn't a biological entity, then, by the biological definition, it isn't alive. I'm not sure what your issue is here. It's not like we're ever going to run out of definitions. Are you arguing in favor of animism?
My claim is that carbon and hydrogen are distinct substances with particular properties and definitions. There is no "one true substance."
Why is the definition of biological life relevant to a conversation about nuclear sentience? You're the only one throwing the word "life" around. Arguing against its misuse when I haven't actually used it is classic straw manning.
You're the one who started arguing that a head may not necessarily be part of a biological being, which was irrelevant to my point. I'm not sure why you're so concerned about nuclear sentience to begin with, quite frankly. I was just enjoying the conversation. I raised the conjectural angry solar head to demonstrate a claim that can be disproved scientifically to show that some religions have a stronger basis in reality. The sun doesn't have the properties of a sentient head, so such a claim is false. What is your point, and how does it relate to mine?
When your point is that the sun can't be a disembodied godhead because heads are biological, then yes refuting the biological limitation is of central relevance. Claims can't really be disproven scientifically, that's not science. Claims can be evaluated and judged scientifically that the sun doesn't have the properties of a biological head, there is no scientific test to judge that the sun cannot be the head of some unknown non-biological sentient being.
Science only determines whether data is consistent with a given model. Nothing more, nothing less.
This isn't a meaningful distinction. A claim that the sun is an angry head would assert that it fits the model of a head. This is something we can test scientifically. If the data regarding the sun isn't consistent with the model of a head, then the claim that it's a head has been disproved. At minimum, we can prove that the data is inconsistent with the model and give significant evidence against the claim.
So far, the only counterargument to this is "we can't know for sure that it isn't the head of an unknown non-biological sentient being." If this was a substantial argument in favor of the claim, then it would stand to reason that the sun could be considered anything, like a planet from another universe, the eye of a mortal human named Bob, a USB-C cable for a bottle of hand sanitizer, and more.
I'm not sure what your point is, or why you're so adamant that the sun may, in fact, be the head of a non-biological sentient being. This has nothing to do with my point that OP's argument isn't convincing because it holds equal relevance to other fields.
Incorrect. Robots have electrical heads, organizations have conceptual heads. You're not making a scientific argument, you're making semantic strawmen contrived to confirm your biases. Nothing could be further from science.
First, what is your point?
Second, does the sun fit any of the following definitions:
headcommandThird, if it doesn't fit any of the above definitions, can you explain which definition of head that it does, what that definition is, and why it's relevant?
My point is you're torturing a non-scientific argument to try to pass it off as scientific. No one benefits my pretending achieve is something it isn't. You're trying to use it to determine reality, when it's just a tool to develop consistent models. It does not work when considering a phenomenon outside of testable hypotheses.
Again, the sun could be the head, the sensory and processing unit, of an unknown nuclear being. We have no way to test this, so it cannot be scientifically "disproved". That does not dictate reality. You're trying to apply scientific reasoning to phenomena outside its preview.
Your claim doesn't have anything to do with my original point other than semantic sports over whether the sun is a head. Philosophy and theology also don't determine reality. We can only discover it through these means, the same way we can discover reality through science. The simple fact is that some philosophical, theological, and scientific hypotheses are closer to reality than others. The only way to dispute that would be to argue there is no objective truth, which is a self-defeating claim.
Again, OP is making a meaningless argument.
There is no objective truth. You wanting to project objective truth does not make it more real. Reality is a mystery, and using tools incorrectly to fool yourself into objective truth is a miscarriage of science.
You're trying to apply materialism to allegory. Evaluating religion this way is a meaningless argument.
Is the statement that there is no objective truth objectively true? If so, there is some objective truth, and the statement is false. Like I said, it's a self-defeating claim.
We solved this a century ago with set theory.
What does set theory have to do with absolute truth? And if there is no absolute truth, how can any aspect of set theory be valid?
Might wanna brush up on your epistemology. These are middle school tier arguments.
It's a simple question. Can you explain? I'm not gonna go and substantiate your argument for you.
I can, but I won't. This is no longer an entertaining use of my time. I'm not going to explain the implications of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem to someone with such a shaky grasp of epistemology. Pearls before swine.
It's odd that you won't explain your epistemology to someone, but you will claim moral/intellectual superiority in not explaining an actually important point after debating them on the hypothetical sentience of the sun for over a day. You can throw all the names of theorems you want at a conversation. but the simple fact is that "there is no absolute truth" is a self-contradictory statement. Any philosophy you build on such a fragile foundation is a non-starter.
Which is precisely why I'm not going to explain epistemology to someone who has repeatedly demonstrated poor logical methodology.
I can't control what you believe at the end of the day, but I will encourage you not to believe in claims that are fundamental logical contradictions. You deserve better than that from yourself. In any case, have a good rest of the week.