Is atheism responsible for conspiracy theories?

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 john arran 04 Dec 2020

For the most part, conspiracy theories can never be proven. Neither can they be disproved, at least not to the satisfaction of their adherents, who resort to ever less plausible defences - such as that large proportions of the population are 'in on it'. No amount of reasoning seems enough to overcome unshakable belief once it's taken hold.

It seems that such an attitude is very closely related, if not identical, to that shown by many followers of religion, but that most people in the UK and other western countries are no longer brought up to actively follow religious doctrine. Could the rise in conspiracies be in part fuelled by a common human weakness that's no longer being satisfied by religion?

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 elliot.baker 04 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

Conspiracy theories are a bit like anti-religion though because they are all about "they're out to get me" and we are all doomed because of a higher power (Illuminati / Bill Gates / Boris / vaccine manufacturers), conversely doesn't religion suggest that if you lead a good life and show faith good things will come?

I wonder if in some way it's a way for some people to explain away a sadness or hopelessness in their lives, because it's attributed to a higher power. I am just musing.

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 Offwidth 04 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

The need to believe in something was the origin of Bokononism. I guess people who don't  read much need to invent an alternative belief system

https://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/personal/bokonon.html

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 a crap climber 04 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

I've wondered the same thing myself before. 

I think they both offer some kind of order to the chaos in the world. As if people need to believe there's some kind of high power controlling things, be it a deity or the illuminati or whatever. I guess the reality that bad things happen for no particular reason is harder to deal with 

 Timmd 04 Dec 2020
In reply to elliot.baker:

> I wonder if in some way it's a way for some people to explain away a sadness or hopelessness in their lives, because it's attributed to a higher power. I am just musing.

I think you may have a possibility - I put it down to people being daft, but that doesn't get us anywhere hopeful. 

A facebook friend and somebody to say hello to unfriended me after I commented along the lines of taking a covid vaccine being a socially responsible thing to do if it helps to protect vulnerable people who can't have one (She'd shared something which said that not taking a vaccine isn't selflsh, but 'taking responsibility', which makes no sense in my eyes), and then questioned her share along the lines of 'Now you know what you'd do in Hitler's German' - ie follow the rules like you're told to, and then shared as a reply to her comment an article explaining that data exists to show that there actually has been a rise in respiratory cases this year (there not having been being a key stone of her narrative that 'there is something going on'. 

To my eyes, she seems to lack the capacity to critically asses what she finds online and on facebook, she has also talked about not watching the news ( because it's too depressing), which I think means that something will strike an emotional chord with her and she goes with it rather than pondering (like we all have the potential to do).

In not being a teacher, and not having been in school as a pupil since the 90's, I wouldn't know what school is like now, but I find myself thinking that teaching children how to critically assess and question what they come across online could be a good start towards popping conspiracy theories. 

Edit: There is a book called 'Men Who Hate Women' or something along those lines, recently written by a lady who did internet research after finding that teenage boys in different schools around the country were quoting the same untrue things, regarding societal injustices or disparities to do with the genders and other things, she looked into it by logging into specialist forums as a man and watching youtube videos and what have you, and found that they were likely to be all getting their untruths from the same places, so she wrote a book about it in response, to illustrate what is happening. There seems to be real need for people to go beyond 'I saw on the internet' when forming their worldviews. 

Edit: 2 Here is the book, for anybody who has any sons or male relatives who might seem less than agreeable in their views on women. https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/Men-Who-Hate-Women/Laura-Bates/978...

Edit 3: There was something on Radio 4 about how fake news spreads faster than the truth does on social media (to do with how it's designed to emotionally trigger people IIRC, in people feeling anger and outrage and sharing things),which isn't so cheery when put next to teenage boys believing the same untrue things in different parts of the country. 

Post edited at 15:14
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cb294 04 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

No, 95% * of people being thick as shit is.

I blame first private TV stations and daytime TV (last century) and more recently social media for the dropping of intellectual standards across society.

Loss of religion, less so. In contrast I would think that organized religion is the most successful fake news and conspiracy theory of all times. Loss of religious authority since the Age of Enlightmenent and the acceptance of scientific theories over unfounded fairy tales is what made progress possible in the first place.

I am of course aware of the importance of rituals for social cohesion and the emergence of a unified culture that was, and in part still is, provided by organized religion. However, I see no evidence that this role is now being taken over by by a wild mixture of conspiracy theories.

However, it may underlie the worrying trend towards authoritarianism, the mystical "will of the people" replacing the "will of god".

CB

*trust me on that statistic, I just made that up.

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Removed User 04 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

Are conspiracy theories any more popular now than they were in the past?

 RobAJones 04 Dec 2020
In reply to cb294:

and Timmd

> No, 95% * of people being thick as shit is.

> I blame first private TV stations and daytime TV (last century) and more recently social media for the dropping of intellectual standards across society.

It might be more than 95%. I had a conversation with a group of A level students last week, at least half of them will get A/A*'s in Maths. They were adamant that they were far better informed than me, basically on the principle that they had more sources of information. They didn't seem able or willing to question these "sources"

 mondite 04 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

Is there a rise in conspiracy theory believers?

Is the number of believers disproportionally higher for atheists vs religious believers?

Personally I doubt there is much connection outside maybe for some feeling part of a community which was once done by the local church. A key feature of many conspiracy believers is just how many different theories they can support (often including some contradictory ones eg covid 19 doesnt exist and yet 5G causes it) so someone who is prone to it could keep the religion on the side.

The biggest difference that I see is how much easier it is to get one spread now. In the past, say for 911, to get someone to one of the truther sites needed them to be actively looking. Now though you are far more likely to be exposed to it just when browsing the social media provider of your choice.

mick taylor 04 Dec 2020
In reply to Removed User:

I heard someone on the radio saying that the lack of trust in the government (because massive numbers of people feel the government has not listened to them) has led to a big increase in anti government conspiracies (and hence anti vaccine conspiracies).  So I reckon ‘yes’, they are more popular now. Chuck in the self gratification aspect of social media and how it helps reinforce bull shit, we have a killer combo. 

 jkarran 04 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

Are they really new? I assume they just exploit the same brain behaviours religions do and thy always have, it's just the stories that change. Think witches and well poisonings and all the antisemitic guff.

jk

 Timmd 04 Dec 2020
In reply to RobAJones:

> and Timmd

> It might be more than 95%. I had a conversation with a group of A level students last week, at least half of them will get A/A*'s in Maths. They were adamant that they were far better informed than me, basically on the principle that they had more sources of information. They didn't seem able or willing to question these "sources"

That's rather worrying. I only did a GCSE in History, but I think that taught me how to look to different sources, and to question them, and to get them from 'different kinds of places'.  Anything which neatly explains everything seems too handy in our chaotic world, I'm generally under the impression that I'm likely to not entirely know what's going on.

Edit: It's weird to realise you have enough forgotten things in the back of your mind to make you feel kinda depressed about the world if you join them up. Hey ho, I guess.

Post edited at 15:33
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 RobAJones 04 Dec 2020
In reply to Timmd:

It a generalisation, but unfortunately teachers(in order to meet targets) are expected to spoon feed students, so that they can pass exams, by regurgitating what they have been told. 

Old Skooled 04 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

A lack of religiosity is far from the same as atheism, so no. 

 Timmd 04 Dec 2020
In reply to RobAJones: I guess it comes down to education being broader than school, and being down to what one reads and listens too, and watches, and being taught how to think as a skill to keep addressing while alive. 

I'm offski, to get things done so I can enjoy Xmas, it mightn't be as bleak as one imagines I guess, or as bleak as I can imagine...

Post edited at 15:46
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 redjerry 04 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

hmmm. Well let's think, the US is jam-packed with religion and jam-packed with conspiracy theories, so you might be looking at correlation rather than causation.

OP john arran 04 Dec 2020
In reply to Old Skooled:

> A lack of religiosity is far from the same as atheism, so no. 

I think what I was trying to get at wasn't so much a deliberate and considered atheism so much as a passive absence of theism resulting from a lack of religious schooling and social conditioning. The kind of people who might answer the question 'Do you believe in God?' with 'I guess not,' thereby potentially still being open for something similar to take root.

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 summo 04 Dec 2020
In reply to cb294:

> No, 95% * of people being thick as shit is.

> I blame first private TV stations and daytime TV (last century) and more recently social media for the dropping of intellectual standards across society.

People aren't thicker, but I'd argue volume of actual hard facts or knowledge is diminishing. The why do I need to know that, I can just Google it, and that's where the decline accelerates. 

Exams, working in teams, discussing, etc.. has become more prevalent and simply learning in depth knowledge less so. 

Tv the same; countryfile was once a programme for folk working in the country, farmers etc and had in depth features, now it's just a fluffy show for townies. Even go on a weather website you have to hunt for a synoptic chart, everything is just dummed down more and more. 

On the R4 Today programme this morning there was an A level student in England taking about the exam situation for Wales people, I think she meant the Welsh. 

Post edited at 15:50
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 timjones 04 Dec 2020
In reply to elliot.baker:

> I wonder if in some way it's a way for some people to explain away a sadness or hopelessness in their lives, because it's attributed to a higher power. I am just musing.

I think that religion is probably better at providing the means to cope with adversity than our modern "reasoned and rational"  science based approach to life.

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 summo 04 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

I think conspiracy theorists are insecure about their own lack of knowledge, or are unwilling to trust others. So they latch onto obscure bizarre theories that some how explain or reassure them. You rarely get a person who only believes in just the one conspiracy theory, they'll take the full package of them! It's psychological. 

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Old Skooled 04 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

All atheism is deliberate and considered. I think you'd find many adherents to conspiracy theorists do profess some kind of religious/spiritual belief.

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 Phil Lyon 04 Dec 2020
In reply to summo:

The desire to hold hidden knowledge is as old as the hills.

To find out some hidden knowledge that, even in a small way, matches what you may already believe gives you a boost.

There is now so much information at our fingertips that it is relatively easy to find more about anything, then fall down a wormhole of confirmation bias and over time, a more and more intriguing/mysterious version of your initial thoughts.

Start at the idea of not trusting the government. An easy starting point, since we know that governments are full of fallible human beings that are tempted to look after themselves/their own. It doesn't take many social media interactions from there to end up at 5g/covid stuff if you're not prepared to be a critical thinker.

mick taylor 04 Dec 2020
In reply to summo:

What worries me isn’t the very small number of foil hat wearing nutters who believe them all, its the massive number of ‘normal’ people who appear to latch onto one or two (just a sense I have, no evidence whatsoever).

 elsewhere 04 Dec 2020
In reply to Old Skooled:

> All atheism is deliberate and considered.

Really? There's a belief system immune to human foibles?

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 elsewhere 04 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

> For the most part, conspiracy theories can never be proven. Neither can they be disproved, at least not to the satisfaction of their adherents, who resort to ever less plausible defences - such as that large proportions of the population are 'in on it'. No amount of reasoning seems enough to overcome unshakable belief once it's taken hold.

The same applies to belief systems about god (religions and atheism) and politics. None of them can be proven or disproven* and yet some people can't cope with complexity, uncertainty or the idea that a single preferred belief system might not have all the right answers that are simple and understandable.

*maybe you can disprove the crackpot ones to the satisfaction of most people but not to their adherents.

Post edited at 17:18
 Martin W 04 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

Your thread title read to me like one of those Daily Mail headline generators: "Do single mothers cause cancer?" and that sort of thing.  In such circumstances I feel that Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines

 Shani 04 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

I'd say so. We understand the world in terms of agency, whereas most of what happens is emergence.

In a complex world it's easy to see how an angry volcano god has now been replaced by New World Order.

People now understand the mechanisms behind vocanic eruptions but much of science & economics is magic to them.

 Webster 04 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

Interesting suggestion, and seems entirely plausible. The counter would be that allot of conspiracy theorists (especially in the states) are also die hard religious nutters i expect. maybe not the UFO chasers, but certainly the anti-vax brigade etc.

 Cobra_Head 04 Dec 2020
In reply to Removed User:

> Are conspiracy theories any more popular now than they were in the past?


some people say so, but I think they're being brainwashed by 5G

 gravy 04 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

Are you trying to imply that the various religions have been doing us a service up to now by hoovering up the irrational into various harmless time consuming rituals, and now the old style religions can't compete with the f*ckwittery on facebook etc and we're somehow in danger from irrational idiots running amock?

'Tis as it ever was just with new frocks.

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 Ianto Bach 04 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

That's what they want you to think

I

 marsbar 04 Dec 2020
In reply to elsewhere:

I consider atheism to be disbelief, not a belief system.  

 elsewhere 04 Dec 2020
In reply to marsbar:

> I consider atheism to be disbelief, not a belief system.  

To me it as an unprovable belief system like any other. Despite that some exponents have great faith in their unprovable belief and try to proselytise with religious fervour. If it weren't for them I'd say I was an atheist.

Post edited at 20:43
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 Si dH 04 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

Isn't the popularity of religion something that has been dropping for a lot longer in the UK than the recent rise of conspiracy theories? The two phenomena don't seem to be similar in timescale to me. My generation (mid-late 30s) is much less religious than my parents' (late 60s) who are/were much less religious than their parents (90s+). This has surely been happening for 50 years and more. In the late 80s and early 90s, at the absolute most, no more than 10% of people I knew growing up went to church. And that was at a CofE school.

Like others I think the rise of conspiracy theories is much more about social media; the ease of sharing, the problem of confirmation bias the way we all follow people who we like and agree with.

Post edited at 21:11
 marsbar 04 Dec 2020
In reply to elsewhere:

I don't believe the stuff I was taught as a child was actually true. All seeing 3 part God, heaven, hell, angels, virgin birth, ark with 2 of each animal, resurrection, feeding 5000 people with 3 loaves of bread and a few fish, all that stuff.  

I don't think that constitutes a belief system.  I don't really care what anyone else believes as long as they leave other people out of it.  

I believe I will have a cup of tea.  That's probably my nearest thing.  

 Timmd 04 Dec 2020
In reply to elsewhere:

> To me it as an unprovable belief system like any other. Despite that some exponents have great faith in their unprovable belief and try to proselytise with religious fervour. If it weren't for them I'd say I was an atheist.

I think that's more of a personality trait in some who say they're atheists, the technical definition is somebody doesn't follow a theology from finding no reason to be convinced by one, or too many unanswered questions (which is myself). I'd happily live in a society of mutual tolerance ('You can think differently to me, and that's fine') and one where religious people don't have more influence than those who don't follow a theology (which seems 'fair' to me, since they're founded on faith-a decision to believe rather than evidence). 

Anyway, back to conspiracy theories and what to do about them... 

Edit: For context I'm an ex Catholic, my teenage self decided it didn't all hold together, and too much reliance on 1 book and faith in the guy at the front being the one who knows. I'm dumbfounded at a friend 'becoming'  a Catholic in her 30's, but there you go.

Post edited at 22:41
cb294 04 Dec 2020
In reply to summo:

I agree, people were always thick.

I would love to see more hard facts taught at school and uni level. However, having that background I use google and wikipedia productively every day. Wikipedia is my no1 source for preparing lectures that are not on my specialist subject.

There is so much knowledge out there, and you can look up stuff easily, but you do need a well calibrated BS detector to make it work!

CB

cb294 04 Dec 2020
In reply to Timmd:

Tell me the qualitative difference between lizard people and virgin birth, resurrection, and angels.

Both are the same steaming pile of shit.

CB

 balmybaldwin 04 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

I think it's more that Religion is a gateway drug into hardcore batshit craziness tbh.  At least that appears to be the case with my neighbour.

 elsewhere 04 Dec 2020
In reply to Timmd:

Ex Catholic - me too - forever lapsed but never anything else, it's in the blood.

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 Andy Clarke 04 Dec 2020
In reply to cb294:

> I agree, people were always thick.

> I would love to see more hard facts taught at school and uni level. However, having that background I use google and wikipedia productively every day. Wikipedia is my no1 source for preparing lectures that are not on my specialist subject.

> There is so much knowledge out there, and you can look up stuff easily, but you do need a well calibrated BS detector to make it work!

> CB

As an ex-teacher, I would say be careful what you wish for. There has been a sustained effort over many years to drag education back to a learning content model, on the ideological grounds that too much focus on skills is associated with progressives and therefore suspect. Hence we get rote-learning and regurgitation. Media studies is often ridiculed - on here as much as anywhere - and yet what better way of calibrating students' bullshit detectors could there be? Good luck with finding much time for that in a secondary English curriculum nowadays. Anyone who doesn't know who to blame for this impoverishment of the curriculum needs to work on their critical thinking skills.

Post edited at 23:50
 redjerry 04 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

Of course, on the flip side, there are plenty of conspiracy theories that, when the truth finally made it out to the cold light of day, turned out to be a lot closer to the actual truth than the "official truth".

Post edited at 00:00
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Alyson30 05 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

> It seems that such an attitude is very closely related, if not identical, to that shown by many followers of religion.

Seems to me, not much.

It depends what you mean by religion as, as far I can tell, the term encapsulates a large variety of vastly different modes of beliefs and behaviours most of them not resembling whatsoever conspiracy theories.

Post edited at 00:21
 alibrightman 05 Dec 2020
In reply to Andy Clarke:

> ... Media studies is often ridiculed - on here as much as anywhere - and yet what better way of calibrating students' bullshit detectors could there be?

I don't know anything about Media Studies other than what I've read in the Sun / Star / Metro.  If Media Studies "calibrates students' bullshit detectors", I'm all in favour.

 sg 05 Dec 2020
In reply to Andy Clarke:

Agreed.

But also, be careful out there all. We may feel like the enlightened daughters and sons of Hume, Darwin, Woolf and Foucault but our nihilistic worldview may not be the future or even the righteous present. People believe different things for lots of reasons, not just stupidity, and hubris stalks the certain. History tells us that humankind will know many more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies, before we're ushered away. And I'm a science teacher (though maybe not a very good one, granted).

Alyson30 05 Dec 2020
In reply to sg:

^ what he said

Post edited at 00:33
 summo 05 Dec 2020
In reply to cb294:

but you do need a well calibrated BS detector to make it work!

> CB

Common sense is surprisingly rare. 

 Andy Clarke 05 Dec 2020
In reply to summo:

> Common sense is surprisingly rare. 

And its author believed it was the will of the Almighty that "there should be diversity of religious opinions among us."

Post edited at 07:32
 Bob Kemp 05 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

I was wondering about the direction of causality here.  Conspiracy theories are often quasi- religious in nature. I had a look and found this academic study that suggests religious world-views lead to a propensity to believe conspiracy theories:

https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12314

(I haven’t read the whole paper as I can’t get access.)

cb294 05 Dec 2020
In reply to Andy Clarke:

I teach biology at uni level, and the students rock up here lacking the most basic skills in maths, physics, and chemnistry.

I am not paid for remedial teaching of derivatives and differential equations, or the concept of equilibrium conditions in chemistry. This is stuff students should be equipped with when they show up here claiming to be interested in natural sciences.

I have no idea why you think media studies help with bullshit detection. A solid grounding in factual knowledge that allows you to cross check any claims for consistency, and a good sense of numbers, again to be able to make quick mental estimates to check claims for plausibility are much more crucial.

If people had that basic numeracy, claims that we are anywhere close to SARS-CoV2 herd immunity would have had much  less traction.

What has become much better are the presentation skills of my students, and their grasp of English as a second language. Assigning English language papers for journal club has become a total non issue.

CB

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cb294 05 Dec 2020
In reply to elsewhere:

Ex -Lutheran here, but I get exactly what you are talking about.

Christmas without hymns and attending a recital of the Christmas Oratory is just wrong.

A motto I have stolen and adopted is that I don't believe in Jesus, but I do believe in Bach!

CB

cb294 05 Dec 2020
In reply to Bob Kemp:

In all such cases, sci hub is your friend:

https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12314

Essentially all research is paid by the public to being with, paying again for the results is morally wrong.

CB

 RobAJones 05 Dec 2020
In reply to cb294:

> I am not paid for remedial teaching of derivatives and differential equations,

If someone (not you?) has allowed them on the course, isn't that what you are paid for. If someone was doing A level maths and couldn't  factorise a quadratic (I would agree they shouldn't be on the course)  if someone had allowed it, my job was to teach them?

In reply to elsewhere:

> To me it as an unprovable belief system like any other. Despite that some exponents have great faith in their unprovable belief and try to proselytise with religious fervour. If it weren't for them I'd say I was an atheist.


No it's a lack of belief, an unwillingness to accept anprovable position,not a system of anti-belief

 Bob Kemp 05 Dec 2020
In reply to cb294:

Thanks- I’d forgotten about them. Absolutely agree about paying for papers. 

In reply to DubyaJamesDubya:

That's agnosticism. 

Atheism is a non-belief in deities and there are only two alternatives to the question. If atheists consider it overwhelmingly unlikely that god exists then it is a belief like any other.

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 Duncan Bourne 05 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

I think that is not far off the mark.

I don’t know as I would necessarily describe it as a weakness as such but a natural dispensation towards applying underlying causes to random or even not so random events.

Neither is it especially human as pigeons have been observed exhibiting superstitious behaviour. Tapping things to be fed, because it happened a few random times.

Firm conviction in something is a strong trait and a natural inclination to cherry pick data to support that is in all of us. The scientific method is good at side stepping this for the most part, except that most scientists being human are still subject to bias. With religion and by extension conspiracy theory advocates and alien anal probers self affirming and cherry picking are de rigour. I think they give an illusion of control. I also have found with the current COVID pandemic that such conspiracies are generally rolled out as an excuse to criticise perceived constraints on freedom. Ie. Big money is trying to control us, masks are bad, vaccines don’t work and the virus is all fake. In this it is no different to religion which has a long history of making shit up in order to get its own way.

 Andy Clarke 05 Dec 2020
In reply to cb294:

> I have no idea why you think media studies help with bullshit detection. A solid grounding in factual knowledge that allows you to cross check any claims for consistency, and a good sense of numbers, again to be able to make quick mental estimates to check claims for plausibility are much more crucial.

Because most bullshit is perpetrated by various forms of media and a good grasp of text and image analysis skills will enable one to detect bias and manipulation. The most pernicious forms of mass indoctrination by demagogues have rarely been number driven, so while good numeracy skills are of course essential, they are merely one component of a good bullshit detector, and hardly the prime one. Witness Trump's ludicrous number exaggerations: no more than primary school  numeracy is needed to see through them, but believers simply don't care. It's the emotive arguments and appeals that students most need equipping to resist. 

Of course every student needs some sort of "solid grounding in factual knowledge" because one teaches and develops skills by engaging with knowledge. However, the ideological arguments over what facts should be squeezed into the tiny amount of time available will rage for as long as we have schools. What shouldn't be up for debate is the need to teach the skills of finding the factual knowledge required to "cross-check"  whatever one is faced with. It makes no sense to expect all such knowledge to be carried around in the head. (Though obviously everyone should be able to recite the names and dates of the British monarchs!)

1
 elsewhere 05 Dec 2020
In reply to DubyaJamesDubya:

> No it's a lack of belief, an unwillingness to accept anprovable position,not a system of anti-belief

Believing provability is significant is a belief and can be part of a belief system. 

It's a belief I share along with the importance of evidence, science and skepticism about unprovables like god and politics. A belief system like any other.

Post edited at 10:16
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In reply to Andy Clarke:

>There has been a sustained effort over many years to drag education back to a learning content model, on the ideological grounds that too much focus on skills is associated with progressives and therefore suspect. Hence we get rote-learning and regurgitation...

Rote learning has its place. I've worked in a broadly engineering related context all my life and I still find I need to recall things I learnt rote in O and A level maths more than three decades ago. Even the multiplication tables we had to memorise and repeat in front of the class at an even younger age are handy. Outside of that, the irregular verb conjugations for French, that were so boring at the time, have proved useful, too. When you're young that is the time to fill your head with that kind of thing, it's much easier to learn then and stays with you for life. Critical thinking skills are important, but that's something to develop more fully later when you have the basics in place. Having said that, for a significant percentage of the population you're wasting your time, as my old grandmother used to say, "thee casn't make a purse out a sow's ear".

 Rog Wilko 05 Dec 2020
In reply to Andy Clarke:

> Anyone who doesn't know who to blame for this impoverishment of the curriculum needs to work on their critical thinking skills.

I wouldn't classify my dear old mum as a critical thinker. She had a tendency to agree with the last person she'd spoken with, especially if they were good looking and nicely dressed. But oddly enough she often recalled her own mother, who was a natural sceptic, telling her "Don't believe anything you hear and only half what you see". I try to keep to this advice.

 Timmd 05 Dec 2020
In reply to cb294:

> I have no idea why you think media studies help with bullshit detection. A solid grounding in factual knowledge that allows you to cross check any claims for consistency, and a good sense of numbers, again to be able to make quick mental estimates to check claims for plausibility are much more crucial.

> If people had that basic numeracy, claims that we are anywhere close to SARS-CoV2 herd immunity would have had much  less traction.

I think deep down it just needs a questioning mind (and ability to gauge sources), I'm only average in maths, but if coming across that claim about herd immunity, I'd google it to see what scientific sources or people like the Economist are saying, sources with a reputation for a focus on detail (rather than somebody on youtube talking about 'the truth' if you like).

Post edited at 10:37
 Andy Clarke 05 Dec 2020
In reply to wurzelinzummerset:

> Rote learning has its place. I've worked in a broadly engineering related context all my life and I still find I need to recall things I learnt rote in O and A level maths more than three decades ago. Even the multiplication tables we had to memorise and repeat in front of the class at an even younger age are handy. Outside of that, the irregular verb conjugations for French, that were so boring at the time, have proved useful, too.

I certainly don't disagree: rote-learning of such basics as tables and the rules/exceptions for navigating the irregularities of the English language undoubtedly has its place. However, I think this should only account for a small part of the curriculum. After 30 years of dabbling in MFL teaching, I still shudder somewhat at the memory of teaching irregular verb conjugations - and I still hold to the view that it's far more important to get students communicating without being hung up about making mistakes. My own school was a specialist Language College and alongside compulsory French and German and optional Spanish we also taught introductory Mandarin to all. That caused a bit of a stir in the local North Warwickshire community at first!

 Timmd 05 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

> That's agnosticism. 

> Atheism is a non-belief in deities and there are only two alternatives to the question. If atheists consider it overwhelmingly unlikely that god exists then it is a belief like any other.

It's about it being 'unlikely given the available evidence'.  Things like talking snakes, or an all knowing being which is kind creating people who are sinful - but hold on, a kind and all knowing being would know that people would turn out to be sinful, and create something different which is kind all the time. Or the need for a perfect person to die for us to be forgiven, if an other worldly being is powerful enough to create the world and a perfect person, it's powerful enough (and kind enough, the theory goes) to forgive mankind anyway, for the sins it's all knowing enough to have predicted in the first place. WTF? I had Catholic guilt instilled in me to such a degree, that I took almost 20 years to unpick it and realise how flawed the narrative is, or shake off the guilt that is. It's like a guilt trip a damaged parent would employ. 

Which is before one gets onto voices from the sky and burning bushes only ever happening 2000+ years ago to nobody around to verify it. 

There's so many inconsistencies, and things taken as a given. 

Post edited at 11:11
 Duncan Bourne 05 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

> Atheism is a non-belief in deities and there are only two alternatives to the question. If atheists consider it overwhelmingly unlikely that god exists then it is a belief like any other.

Not saying that this is what you are saying but it is an old argument from religious people that Atheism is "just another belief" which skirts over the fact that not all beliefs (or lack of them) are equal. As examples the belief that one can handle deadly snakes safely because "God will protect you" as opposed to "Leave dangerous snakes well alone". The belief that world leaders are lizard men (as opposed to just men) or the belief that we are all in a simulation and if you walk out across a busy motorway the cars won't hit you because the programming won't let them. Some beliefs adhere closer to observable phenomenon than others.

Post edited at 11:12
 mbh 05 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

> Atheism is a non-belief in deities and there are only two alternatives to the question. If atheists consider it overwhelmingly unlikely that god exists then it is a belief like any other.

Well, there are provisional beliefs and there are faiths.

 Timmd 05 Dec 2020
In reply to elsewhere:

> Ex Catholic - me too - forever lapsed but never anything else, it's in the blood.

I always switch radio stations when they start murmuring through mass, I'm a humanist with Buddhist leanings now, it's much more agreeable. 

Post edited at 11:26
 elsewhere 05 Dec 2020
In reply to Duncan Bourne:

> Not saying that this is what you are saying but it is an old argument from religious people that Atheism is "just another belief" which skirts over the fact that not all beliefs (or lack of them) are equal.

That's worth a giggle. The belief system is of most value is generally the one held by that individual. It's entirely subjective.

Would I be wrong in assuming you hold the beliefs that you place most value in or do you think there is a better set of beliefs?

Post edited at 11:22
 alan.rodger 05 Dec 2020
In reply to timjones:

Inclined to agree. Faith in Science needs to retain scepticism at its core given the threats to our very existence now recognised from the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, the jet engine, the H bomb, scientific farming, plastics etc. Medicine might be its saving grace.

1
 Rob Exile Ward 05 Dec 2020
In reply to mbh:

I have a theory that a lot more people throughout history have been atheist, but gone along with organised religion for social reasons.

It's very hard to read Shakespeare and think he was a believer. Although he's buried in a church, his epitaph -which he wrote before he died - is not religious at all.

 Timmd 05 Dec 2020
In reply to timjones:

> I think that religion is probably better at providing the means to cope with adversity than our modern "reasoned and rational"  science based approach to life.

I don't think it comes down to a binary choice between those, I think there is space for children being taught emotional resilience and emotional literacy (towards being in tune with themselves), which is the foundation people ultimately need, and something which modern Britain isn't set up to instil in children, with schooling being more 'by rote', and children tending to be more depressed and anxious when surveys are done.

As a most definitely ex Catholic, I don't now look towards rationality and science to get me through life, but a sense of hopefulness and inner strength.  

nb Interestingly enough, having childhood accidents is meant to be helpful towards emotional resilience, from enduring a set back and then becoming okay again, on a child scale of bumps and grazes and cuts that is, rather than something serious. The emotional pattern is created of feeling set back before things turning out okay, it's quite interesting the ways in how children naturally play are helpful towards developing. 

Post edited at 11:42
 Andy Clarke 05 Dec 2020
In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

> I have a theory that a lot more people throughout history have been atheist, but gone along with organised religion for social reasons.

> It's very hard to read Shakespeare and think he was a believer. Although he's buried in a church, his epitaph -which he wrote before he died - is not religious at all.

But if I remember right, his epitaph refers to Jesus and his will certainly employs standard religious phrasing, commending his  soul into the hands of God etc etc. Given the lack of conclusive evidence, I guess you'll just have to have faith in your intuition!

Post edited at 11:37
In reply to Andy Clarke:

>and I still hold to the view that it's far more important to get students communicating without being hung up about making mistakes...

That reminds me of my own experience at school. Having to stand up in a French or German lesson and answer questions, for which you'd get a really hard time for a poor answer. It made me hate foreign languages as I can express things clearly in writing, but not so well orally -- that applies to English, too, not just foreign languages. That was a shame, because I think I could have been really good at the written/ reading side of things rather than just doing the minimum to pass the exams. Anyway, despite that, I took up learning French later in life, and now really enjoy reading in that language. So, from my own experience, I like the idea of not getting too hung up on mistakes in this context. 

 Duncan Bourne 05 Dec 2020
In reply to elsewhere:

I think people do hold the beliefs they place most value in. I mean there is an actual church in america where they handle serpents (with a corresponding high number of deaths from those who didn't belief strongly enough). And in one sense our entire reality is subjective, being the interpretation our brain places on the information it receives via the senses and that was brought home to me when I tried psychadelics in the 70's. But we don't live in little bubbles (except during lockdown) and someones subjective belief that God is telling them to go out and murder has an impact upon the wider community, as does a belief that wives should follow their dead husbands on to funeral pyres. Within that there are varying shades of belief some strange but harmless, some helpful, some positively dangerous. Societies of humans have to find ways of navigating through all these beliefs and arriving at what most approximates the truth

 Jon Stewart 05 Dec 2020
In reply to timjones:

> I think that religion is probably better at providing the means to cope with adversity than our modern "reasoned and rational"  science based approach to life.

Depends very much on the nature of the adversity. It's pretty good for fear of death. Not so good if the adversity is feeling rejected by society because you don't conform (e.g. Lgbt). There's definitely positive aspects of religion in social cohesion (presumably why we evolved the behaviour) but only if your face fits. 

 AllanMac 05 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

Interesting question. I've often wondered if there might be a still existing evolved mechanism in the brain to transmit and receive belief-system based thought, craving attention and stimulus. In small groups, it looks like weakness and/or gullibility - but in larger 'tribal' groups a single belief can gain in strength and plausibility, and at that point it becomes more and more immune to rationality - whether or not that comes from an internal or external source.

If logic and rationality are going to make any inroads into what looks on the outside like madness, it has to be in tandem with some kind of empathy and understanding. With conspiracy theories and religion, that is very difficult to do especially for those who are atheistic towards belief systems generally.

I don't think the core psychological mechanism that embraces conspiracy and religion is a weakness as such, it is more to do with what it gets fed with. If it is fed only from one source or belief, it then goes unquestioned. The more sources there are, the more rational, empathic and ethical the beholder becomes - which additionally gives more courage to break away from tribal allegiance.

 Rob Exile Ward 05 Dec 2020
In reply to Andy Clarke:

Ha! I'll half concede, I'd forgotten the reference to Jesus. But he doesn't talk about heavenly hosts, sitting at the right hand of God, at peace in heaven etc etc:

'Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare, To dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones, And cursed be he that moves my bones.'

Post edited at 15:26
cb294 05 Dec 2020
In reply to RobAJones:

No, my job is to teach them biology. If some students do not understand sufficient maths or chemistry to follow the topic, it unfortunately becomes my job to fail them during exams. To prevent that happening it is their job to catch up on what is listed as prerequisite knowledge in the module description.

In reality I will waste time to revise school level maths and chemistry even though it is certainly not my job to accommodate schools continuously dropping standards.

Really, what is demanded is not too esoteric, just some basic calculus and basic physical chemistry. I am not even asking them to perform calculations, just to follow the argument.

However, schools let people graduate with levels of maths skills that would be considered functional analphabetism over in the languages department....

CB

 RobAJones 05 Dec 2020
In reply to cb294:

> No, my job is to teach them biology. If some students do not understand sufficient maths or chemistry to follow the topic, it unfortunately becomes my job to fail them during exams. To prevent that happening it is their job to catch up on what is listed as prerequisite knowledge in the module description.

If they want to keep their jobs/ progress up the pay scale A level biology, chemistry, psychology etc. teachers don't have that luxury

> In reality I will waste time to revise school level maths and chemistry even though it is certainly not my job to accommodate schools continuously dropping standards.

As has been said up thread children are not getting thicker, equally I would say they are not getting more intelligent. I not going to claim that standards have improved in schools but I don't think they have got worse during the last 25 years. However getting on for four times as many students are now going to Uni. The issue you face is now due to Unis accepting money to teach, not particularly clever or hardworking middle class students. 

> Really, what is demanded is not too esoteric, just some basic calculus and basic physical chemistry. I am not even asking them to perform calculations, just to follow the argument.

Going back to the previous point, to be able to do the maths part of this, they will have need to get at least a 7 at GCSE, normally around 20% of student achieve this, but 40+% are accepted by Unis,  and then done A level maths. 

> However, schools let people graduate with levels of maths skills that would be considered functional analphabetism over in the languages department....

Schools can't let anyone graduate? (OK this year could be classed as an exception) We try to get them the best possible grades. You decide whether or not to accept them based on these grades and the subjects they have got them in?

> CB

 Jon Stewart 05 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

> Atheism is a non-belief in deities and there are only two alternatives to the question. If atheists consider it overwhelmingly unlikely that god exists then it is a belief like any other.

Justified beliefs are still beliefs, but they are categorically different to unjustified beliefs. Do not pretend they are the same.

 Jon Stewart 05 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

I don't think conspiracy theories fill a "god shaped hole" - I think they're appealing to people whose identity is of alienation from the mainstream, that they're hard done by by "the system" and they're stupid enough to believe nonsense. I see no reason you'd see less of this in a more religious society, provided there was the same freedom of exchange of ideas as we have here today.

I think the same psychological traits that support religious belief are similar in belief in Brexit and anti-lockdown on the libertarian right. Otherwise intelligent people cling on to a false belief about the world just because they want it to be true. If it's true, their worldview and identity is valid, but if it's false (i.e. Brexit will make our country worse on every sensible measure and letting covid out of control would be a total disaster for the economy) then that undermines their whole philosophy. So, just like the religious, these views can be compartmentalised as too important and vulnerable to be subject to the rational scrutiny they might apply when, say, deciding where to invest money.

In fact, I think there might be an overlap of religious posters and the libertarian right on UKC.

 Timmd 05 Dec 2020
In reply to Jon Stewart: Hmmn, it's worth remembering that there's going to be left wing types who are religious, too, just in case you're putting different beliefs into an 'illogical &/or irrational box'

 Jon Stewart 05 Dec 2020
In reply to Timmd:

For sure. The equivalent false belief on the left is that Corbyn could feasibly have been PM. People believed it because they wanted it to be true, when any rational analysis showed it to be false.

In reply to Timmd and other replies:

Atheism is opposed to theism. Fundamentally the question is whether there is a creator or not? There's no scientific evidence either way, you either take a strong position on the matter which is a belief, or you are agnostic.

If you set atheism against each of the particular versions of theism (e.g. having a literal belief in the Christian bible is only a minor viewpoint within Christianity which is one of the leading versions of religious belief but only one of many) then fair enough, layers have been added by people so that each of the versions is more complex than the fundamental question and is going to be less likely.

1
In reply to Jon Stewart:

> For sure. The equivalent false belief on the left is that Corbyn could feasibly have been PM. People believed it because they wanted it to be true, when any rational analysis showed it to be false.

FFS this is a bit out of context but I'm taking the bait. Corbyn delivered 13m votes in 2017, he narrowly missed becoming PM. There's no false belief there, any rational analysis of UK politics shows that 13m votes can feasibly (in fact usually would) make you PM.

In reply to cumbria mammoth:

> There's no scientific evidence either way, you either take a strong position on the matter which is a belief, or you are agnostic.

Theres no scientific evidence that unicorns, leprechauns, elves, dragons, or any of the legion of imaginary beings don't actually exist. That doesn't mean I'm agnostic about their existence.

In reply to captain paranoia:

You've got strong faith in your own belief system there to put the possibility of a creator into the same category as unicorns, leprechauns, elves, dragons, etc.

5
 Jon Stewart 05 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

> FFS this is a bit out of context but I'm taking the bait. Corbyn delivered 13m votes in 2017, he narrowly missed becoming PM. There's no false belief there, any rational analysis of UK politics shows that 13m votes can feasibly (in fact usually would) make you PM.

He lost an election against Theresa May. Her electoral strategy involved coming up with the "dementia tax". If you can lose an election against that, you're in the wrong job.

In reply to cumbria mammoth:

How do you know that unicorns didn't create the universe?

 Jon Stewart 05 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

> You've got strong faith in your own belief system there to put the possibility of a creator into the same category as unicorns, leprechauns, elves, dragons, etc.

If someone comes up with a description of "a creator", then it falls into exactly the same category as unicorns etc: things which have certain properties, but for whose existence there is no evidence.

If there is no description - "there is something beyond what we can see by science that explains the creation of the universe" then fine, that's reasonable. Spinoza's God, "nature", whatever, I'm on board with all that. But that is not the Abrahamic god, do not pretend that it is.

It seems like you want to have a description of this creator - and that makes it a postulate for which evidence is needed (omnipotent, omniscient, interested in human affairs, etc) - but you also want keep the ambiguity that it's simply something beyond what we cannot see by science that explains the creation of the universe. You want to have your cake and eat it. Philosophically, it ain't gonna fly.

Post edited at 22:31
In reply to Jon Stewart:

Well, a God can have created the world we inhabit, be omnipotent, omniscient, interested in human affairs, etc, but also not intervene in the affairs of this world. Many religions see the physical world we can observe as part of a universe that includes a more important spiritual dimension.

My own view is that God is the universe (or maybe includes the universe, something I haven't managed to pin down which is along those lines anyway) and that he limits his intervention in this life to allowing us to choose to accept or reject the thoughts that he makes occur to us. 

In reply to captain paranoia:

> How do you know that unicorns didn't create the universe?

Ha, well if we're using "unicorn" as an alternative to "God" as a label for the creator then ok, accepted.

I gave you a flippant reply before but I think you are making a category error here. Your conception of God would seem to be of a being that exists within the universe whereas I would think that any considered religious viewpoint sees God more in terms of the conscious force which created and sustains the entire universe.

 Jon Stewart 05 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

> Well, a God can have created the world we inhabit, be omnipotent, omniscient, interested in human affairs, etc, but also not intervene in the affairs of this world

Yes, it could, but that's very much like hypothesising an invisible unicorn. Sure you can make it up, but please don't ask us to believe in it, because you're telling us up front that we'll never see it (or have any evidence of it). If you start describing this entity with words like "omnipotent, omniscient, interested in human affairs" then you bring on yourself a burden of evidence. Saying it's invisible "also not intervene in the affairs of this world" is exactly equivalent to claiming unicorns are invisible.

What you're saying is : I want to make a hypothesis, but one which is exempt from the requirement of evidence. You want to have your cake and eat it. No can do.

> Many religions see the physical world we can observe as part of a universe that includes a more important spiritual dimension.

Fine. Believe in a spiritual dimension that has no effect on the physical world if you want to. It's an invisible unicorn. So long as nothing that exists in the physical realm is negatively effected by this invisible unicorn, I have no problem with it. If the belief in the invisible unicorn (and note that the belief is part of the physical world, it exists in the brains of humans) starts negatively effecting the physical world, then I want rid of it. As soon as possible.

> My own view is that God is the universe (or maybe includes the universe, something I haven't managed to pin down which is along those lines anyway)

Spinoza's god - like it.

> and that he limits his intervention in this life to allowing us to choose to accept or reject the thoughts that he makes occur to us. 

Making choices like a person ("allowing us to choose") - anthropomorphic nonsense, coupled with some weird free will of humans to veto god's design of human thoughts. No. Really not keen.

I'm not sold, because it's philosophically incoherent.

Post edited at 23:59
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

> he limits his intervention in this life to allowing us to choose to accept or reject the thoughts that he makes occur to us. 

Why would he do any of that?

In reply to captain paranoia:

I find it quite amusing that many people who have already rejected the nebulous notion of a god, nevertheless find themselves referring to it, almost unconsciously, as 'he'. As if they already know or accept something rather specific about it.

4
In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

> nevertheless find themselves referring to it, almost unconsciously, as 'he'.

Being deferential to the Abrahamic tradition, of course, which is by far the dominant concept of God in the West. Used completely consciously when discussing the concept with those who are obviously presenting a God of the Abrahamic tradition.

Post edited at 00:42
In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

Anyway, as a veteran of the UKC Holy Wars, I really ought to know better than to be bothered getting into this sort of discussion, so I'll bow out here.

OP john arran 06 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

> My own view is that God is the universe (or maybe includes the universe, something I haven't managed to pin down which is along those lines anyway) and that he limits his intervention in this life to allowing us to choose to accept or reject the thoughts that he makes occur to us. 

My view is that the only way that such a view sensibly could have been arrived at is by having considered the existence of a god as axiomatic, this being the reductive outcome of the inability to establish any more specific attributes to such a deity.

 dr evil 06 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

No scientific evidence?

It’s science that shows how the world works without the need for prehistoric delusions about organised sympathetic magic that is religion. The branch of science called anthropology demonstrates that the thousands of religions that have been invented have similar characteristics and are obviously inventions of man. Humans are a superstitious bunch.

 Offwidth 06 Dec 2020
In reply to RobAJones:

You're making the mistake of thinking the brightest and best went to University when numbers were a quarter of where they are now. Its likely many average intelligence male  upper middle class kids went to University back then. So you thesis is simply not true except for subsets of exceptional working class kids who made it through the grammar lottery. The main thing that has changed is a more equitable entry (in which nearly half that change from a quarter is due to women, who back then were very much in a minority, and the rest from better opportunity below upper middle classes).

 GrahamD 06 Dec 2020

In reply to geode:

What on earth has that speculation got to do with 5g ?

 wintertree 06 Dec 2020
In reply to GrahamD:

> What on earth has that speculation got to do with 5g ?

Pushing 5G nonsense is on their shitposting todo list for this account?  I'm trying to keep an open mind on brand new accounts but then when they go and blatantly misrepresent something in relation to a common nonsense conspiracy?

I find the explanation given through the Guardian article rather hard to believe - or at least incomplete.  If I ran a facility like the ones at the centre of this, I would have continuous broadband spectrum analysis running with anything above the baseline noise and anything exceeding normal signal levels in the commercial/aviation/maritime band immediately flagged up for human examination.  Not in anticipation of a directed energy weapon but to sweep for bugs and other security holes.  But it would sure as shitcakes detect the kind of intensity pulse needed for the described effects.

Shucks, I've run period of logging a scanning narrowband spectrum analyser (scripting a cheap bit of RTL-SDR kit to slowly scan its full range) at home just out of general curiosity.  It's amazing what flies through the airwaves.

My suspicion (stated before) is that the common factor in these different incidents is the US state department presence and that this is likely side-effects of an RF jamming system perhaps used for meetings above some security level.  So, technically, this could indeed be directed RF, they're just not disclosing whose RF it was...

Got bugger all to do with 5g though.

In reply to Offwidth:

)> You're making the mistake of thinking the brightest and best went to University when numbers were a quarter of where they are now. Its likely many average intelligence male  upper middle class kids went to University back then. So you thesis is simply not true except for subsets of exceptional working class kids who made it through the grammar lottery. The main thing that has changed is a more equitable entry (in which nearly half that change from a quarter is due to women, who back then were very much in a minority, and the rest from better opportunity below upper middle classes).

In 1969, when I went to University, the opportunities were fantastic because there was an amazing system of grants. I went to the University of Wales Cardiff, and in my final year of Honours Philosophy I think I was the only one who'd been to an English public school. They were from all backgrounds, English and Welsh. My closest friend in that final year was the son of a (still working) miner. His family lived in an extremely modest terraced miner's cottage in the Aberdare valley iirc – I was very honoured when he asked me to be his Best Man at his wedding. They were really, really lovely people. The weird thing was, particularly at that university, there was just zero class consciousness. No snobbery of any kind. It just wasn't an issue. We all just seemed to get on with each other. Perhaps I was very lucky.

Post edited at 14:28
 RobAJones 06 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

There is some merit in what you have said, but I think you are going back further than I was. Both my wife and I went to local comps. in the 70's/80's. None of our parents (our their siblings) went to Uni. We effective spent the last 8 years of our careers at the school she went to as a child, children in the same position now don't really have that opportunity. (I accept there are now more kids who have parents that went to Uni.) I certainly didn't feel that I was more intelligent than my peers at Uni (quite the opposite, but that was due to overseas students) I agree with cb that they are being expected to teach "weak" students. Do you agree that this is due to a drop in standards in schools?  I could argue that based on the PISA results, (especially in science) over the last 20+ years, there is some evidence that the attainment of 15 year olds has improved (even allowing for Gove/Cumming trying to manipulate the latest results) Most of my A level maths teaching was between 1995 and 2008, do I think my peers and I were better than the current cohort, no. They might not be as academic, after talking to a few ex-colleagues about cb's remarks, one pointed out half the staff teaching maths in his school wouldn't be able to do the "basic" maths cb. wanted as a prerequisite for a biology course. If we are going to allow students with "average" mathematical ability to go to Uni. you need to accept what that is at the moment and in my experience it was the same 30 years ago. I think there are studies based on people who went to school in the 50's and 60's that back this up.

Edit. 4 others went to Uni. from my school that year, my wife recons it was about 8, we both think they were probably the most intelligent students at the time. This year I would bet that the number of students going to Uni. from those two schools will be close to 120, and it won't be the most able. 

Post edited at 14:32
 wintertree 06 Dec 2020
In reply to RobAJones & cb294:

I think different universities give very different perspectives in the UK.  One I am familiar with is where a significant fraction of the cohort has come through independent schools with a high staff:student ratio and a lot of extra support.  Private 1:1 tuition at GCSE and A-level is also common and it seems like some of the teaching very much revolves around the examinations and grading as a means to high grades, rather than a proper teaching of the subject.

This really shows as the support is paired back significantly from that at university level, and often levels things up between students from state schools where there was perhaps much less individual support.

The way I see it, particularly in the first group there it's not uncommon to find kids with A*A* in maths/further maths who are very good at doing maths but don't really understand maths.  So the "remedial" work I do is more about getting them to understand what's really going on in the stuff they can do almost automatically.  Generally this isn't hard but I take it as a damning indictment of the systems that brought us to this point.  Knowing how to do something in the modern world full of automation and computers is far less important than knowing why you should do it and understanding how it works.  

Actually understanding maths has wide reaching implications in terms of logical thinking and deduction as well as being able to spitball an order of magnitude estimate to check information as cb294 noted above.

I've ranted on this before - https://www.ukhillwalking.com/forums/off_belay/bodmas_made_a_kid_swear_at_me_t...

 RobAJones 06 Dec 2020
In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

> In 1969, when I went to University, the opportunities were fantastic because there was an amazing system of grants.

The grant system was still in place in 1988, without that and sponsorship from BT, I wouldn't have gone, Manchester . My experience was similar to you. I remember meeting people from all over and not being aware of any elitism.

 RobAJones 06 Dec 2020
In reply to wintertree:

> I think different universities give very different perspectives in the UK.  One I am familiar with is where a significant fraction of the cohort has come through independent schools with a high staff:student ratio and a lot of extra support.  Private 1:1 tuition at GCSE and A-level is also common and it seems like some of the teaching very much revolves around the examinations and grading as a means to high grades, rather than a proper teaching of the subject.

I agree that schools have effectively become exams factories but in my experience i (maths)t is only Oxbridge  (Warwick and Durham a little) that attempt to identify those that have a "proper" understanding. You might be surprised how many state school students have private tutors. The circumstances are odd, but I know a London Academy where 70% of the pupils are disadvantaged and 76% have private tutors. The "new" GCSE maths was supposed to test problem solving skills, but I haven't been convinced by anyone who thinks they can teach problem solving, the result was students getting those questions wrong and a corresponding drop in the grade boundaries. Cb was probably correct with 5%. I would estimate that 5% of 16 are capable of what I think of as problem solving.  

> The way I see it, particularly in the first group there it's not uncommon to find kids with A*A* in maths/further maths who are very good at doing maths but don't really understand maths.  So the "remedial" work I do is more about getting them to understand what's really going on in the stuff they can do almost automatically.  Generally this isn't hard but I take it as a damning indictment of the systems that brought us to this point.  Knowing how to do something in the modern world full of automation and computers is far less important than knowing why you should do it and understanding how it works.  

Guilty. But you can't blame the teachers, their jobs and pay depend on "playing the system" Those A*/A* students will be in class with students getting C/D/E's. Improving the lower grades is measured an A* students having a better understanding isn't. Again A* Oxbridge candidates would have some  input before their entrance exams.

Post edited at 15:23
 mbh 06 Dec 2020
In reply to RobAJones:

For a brief period 20+ years ago I taught some A level maths and electronics. I was quite shocked at how simple it was and at how I could get even very dense kids to do well by teaching them to recognise patterns: If the question looks like this, you do this...

Later, I was asked by a couple of local A level centres to coach their (presumably) star kids for Oxbridge interviews. A number of them came with A*s across the board. I took a problem solving approach, challenging them with stuff they would not likely have come across but that I thought they should be able to tackle with the knowledge they supposedly had. Despite that, many of them, all those *s notwithstanding, just got nowhere. Brainy but not cerebral, I thought.

 RobAJones 06 Dec 2020
In reply to mbh:

That sounds familiar. I was teaching a lot of A level at that time. I remember a few times unsuccessful Oxbridge applicants complaining, that I hadn't taught them something, when we looked at the question it would be a simple (GCSE level) concept but asked in an unfamiliar context.

 Offwidth 06 Dec 2020
In reply to mbh:

The drop in maths standards at University entry occured when exam Board for A levels became competitive and when EDEXCEL took over BTEC qualifications. I taught maths heavy engineering subjects from the mid 80s and noticed no obvious difference in intelligence over time but a massive difference in being prepared for us in the subject...so most students caught up (with help) but a few were let down as they didn't have the capacity for change.  I later discovered Coventry Poly/Uni did normalised entry tests and showed this trend vs A level grades in their research data. Its still available on the web if you search.

I just tried to find data on demographics since the 60's with some searching..I need to look harder as I got nothing easily accessible.. I did find 14% participation in HE in 1970 so to get to 1/4 of where we are now we are looking at the end of the fast expansion in the late 60s. I couldn't find any data for the proportion of women in HE but I know such graphs exist (and changed fast from the late 60s).Oh and for Gordon a snippet that Wales had more women than England or Scotland in the early 70s.

Post edited at 17:51
 RobAJones 06 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

Your earlier post got me interested. I'll post again when I've collated all the info but number of students getting their first degree

1970  51,000

1990 77,000

2010  333,000

The gender imbalance you mention was evident in 1970 but less so in 1990. In the late 80's only 8% of students got 3 A levels.

 Offwidth 06 Dec 2020
In reply to RobAJones:

Just found a table

Table 8
Students obtaining university degrees, UK
First degrees Higher degrees
Men Women Total Men Women Total
1920 3,145 1,212 4,357 529 174 703
1930 6,494 2,635 9,129 1,123 200 1,323
1938 7,071 2,240 9,311 1,316 164 1,480
1950 13,398 3,939 17,337 2,149 261 2,410
1960 16,851 5,575 22,426 2,994 279 3,273
1970 35,571 15,618 51,189 11,186 1,715 12,901
1980 42,831 25,319 68,150 14,414 4,511 18,925
1990 43,297 33,866 77,163 20,905 10,419 31,324
2000 109,930 133,316 243,246 46,015 40,520 86,535
2005 122,155 156,225 278,380 63,035 62,050 125,085
2010 144,980 185,740 330,720 93,375 89,235 182,610
2011 153,235 197,565 350,800 96,280 97,990 194,270

 RobAJones 06 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

Yep, I got it from this document which has other interesting stuff

https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/22771/1/SN04252.pdf

Looks like around 25% of undergrad. students were female from 1920 to 1960 and then it changed gradually over time to even out in early nineties. I suspect individual memories of M/F ratios will be very course dependant. I did Engineering 55/3 

Post edited at 18:14
 RobAJones 06 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

> You're making the mistake of thinking the brightest and best went to University when numbers were a quarter of where they are now. Its likely many average intelligence male  upper middle class kids went to University back then. So you thesis is simply not true except for subsets of exceptional working class kids who made it through the grammar lottery. The main thing that has changed is a more equitable entry (in which nearly half that change from a quarter is due to women, who back then were very much in a minority, and the rest from better opportunity below upper middle classes).

Looking at the data, my (biased) opinion is that this gives me the grounds to claim my cohort (1990) is as intelligent as Gordon's (1970)  based on the changes you have outlined. It doesn't explain the 4x increase since then? If cb is failing students who are not capable of completing the course that is the correct thing to do. I would suggest that as now nearly twice as many students are getting a first class degree compared to any degree in 1990 not many of their colleagues are. It just passes the problem further up the chain.

"A record number of students, 28.4 per cent, were given a top degree last year – double the 14 per cent who gained a first a decade ago, Higher Education Statistics Agency data revealed.

The figures come after ministers warned that grade inflation could make degrees worth less to businesses and students and endanger the world-class reputation of British universities.

Employers now say they are increasingly having to look at graduates’ extra-curricular achievements, rather than just their degree results, to differentiate between candidates amid concerns about the trend."

 RobAJones 06 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

Seems like the further up the scale you go, the more grade inflation you get, looks like we are only 20 years away from every child getting a 1st class degree

1990 5000

2000 20000

2010 40000

2019 100000

 RobAJones 06 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

I've digressed a bit from the OP, but perhaps it is as simple as, we now have a significant proportion of the population who think they are clever and have a piece of paper to back it up but compared to previous generations they are not.

In reply to Offwidth:

Hope you don't think this is a too much of a cheek but I've just converted that useful table of yours to a real table to make it a bit easier to read:

https://www.gordonstainforthbelper.co.uk/StudentObtainingDegreesUK

 Dave Garnett 06 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

> Could the rise in conspiracies be in part fuelled by a common human weakness that's no longer being satisfied by religion?

GK Chesterton said that the problem with atheists was not that they believe nothing, but that they would believe anything.

Then again, GK Chesterton liked an empty aphorism.

 wintertree 06 Dec 2020
In reply to RobAJones:

> Guilty. But you can't blame the teachers, their jobs and pay depend on "playing the system" Those A*/A* students will be in class with students getting C/D/E's. Improving the lower grades is measured an A* students having a better understanding isn't

I agree.  I worry that the system now is so drawn out that it quenches a lot of the raw talent that powered advances in science in past centuries.  That reminds me, I’ve misplaced my Oliver Heaviside biography and really do need to finish it...

In reply to Jon Stewart:

> Yes, it could, but that's very much like hypothesising an invisible unicorn. Sure you can make it up, but please don't ask us to believe in it, because you're telling us up front that we'll never see it (or have any evidence of it). If you start describing this entity with words like "omnipotent, omniscient, interested in human affairs" then you bring on yourself a burden of evidence. Saying it's invisible "also not intervene in the affairs of this world" is exactly equivalent to claiming unicorns are invisible.

> What you're saying is : I want to make a hypothesis, but one which is exempt from the requirement of evidence. You want to have your cake and eat it. No can do.

I just wanted to make the case that on the question of whether there is a creator there's no way to test the superiority of a yes or no answer. Those describing words were introduced to the thread by you. 

I did go with the description though because it's what I believe. If you allow the existence of a creator and then speculate about the attributes of that creator then I think you are going to come to omnipotent and omniscient, which is arguable. This is a power with the ability and inclination to consciously chose to create all that there is and with such power and knowledge then why wouldn't he be interested in human affairs?

Speculation and intuition is one way to add a description of the attributes of the creator. There are also many who have had direct spiritual experience of the divine, I think the most credible of which are the ones that have come through meditation.

> Fine. Believe in a spiritual dimension that has no effect on the physical world if you want to. It's an invisible unicorn. So long as nothing that exists in the physical realm is negatively effected by this invisible unicorn, I have no problem with it. If the belief in the invisible unicorn (and note that the belief is part of the physical world, it exists in the brains of humans) starts negatively effecting the physical world, then I want rid of it. As soon as possible.

It's humans that negatively affect the physical world, including by adding false teachings to spiritual knowledge.

> Spinoza's god - like it.

> Making choices like a person ("allowing us to choose") - anthropomorphic nonsense, coupled with some weird free will of humans to veto god's design of human thoughts. No. Really not keen.

Not sure if you've misunderstood me here? It's people I'm saying are making choices in this world so people are of course anthropomorphic.

> I'm not sold, because it's philosophically incoherent.

 Sir Chasm 06 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

> I just wanted to make the case that on the question of whether there is a creator there's no way to test the superiority of a yes or no answer. Those describing words were introduced to the thread by you. 

A yes or no answer is all we have. 

> I did go with the description though because it's what I believe. If you allow the existence of a creator and then speculate about the attributes of that creator then I think you are going to come to omnipotent and omniscient, which is arguable. This is a power with the ability and inclination to consciously chose to create all that there is and with such power and knowledge then why wouldn't he be interested in human affairs?

Was your god interested in the holocaust? The gulags? Rwanda? 

> Speculation and intuition is one way to add a description of the attributes of the creator. There are also many who have had direct spiritual experience of the divine, I think the most credible of which are the ones that have come through meditation.

But what if there is no divine? Do you accept that's a possibility? 

> It's humans that negatively affect the physical world, including by adding false teachings to spiritual knowledge.

What "spiritual knowledge" would there be without humans? 

> Not sure if you've misunderstood me here? It's people I'm saying are making choices in this world so people are of course anthropomorphic.

Well, durr. 

1
In reply to john arran:

> My view is that the only way that such a view sensibly could have been arrived at is by having considered the existence of a god as axiomatic, this being the reductive outcome of the inability to establish any more specific attributes to such a deity.

Yes I do consider the existence of a creator to be self evident. I think a lot of people (most people?) intuitively know that there is a spiritual aspect to existence. I think this is more common than it would seem at first appearance. In our society, religious belief is often looked down on a lot of people won't admit to a belief in God, but many will say that they believe in some sort of a higher power.

4
In reply to dr evil:

> No scientific evidence?

> It’s science that shows how the world works without the need for prehistoric delusions about organised sympathetic magic that is religion. The branch of science called anthropology demonstrates that the thousands of religions that have been invented have similar characteristics and are obviously inventions of man. Humans are a superstitious bunch.

Yes, the thousands of religions have very similar characteristics which is what you would expect if people who devote their lives to investigating the divine are discovering true knowledge about the creator.

6
In reply to Sir Chasm:

> A yes or no answer is all we have. 

There's also a 'Don't know' answer. Which is perhaps the most 'scientific'. Einstein took this position, though he wavered between agnosticism and Spinozism.

 Sir Chasm 07 Dec 2020
In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

> There's also a 'Don't know' answer. Which is perhaps the most 'scientific'. Einstein took this position, though he wavered between agnosticism and Spinozism.

No. You either believe or you don't. If you "don't know" whether you believe then clearly you don't believe. 

4
In reply to Sir Chasm:

Knowledge and belief are very distinctly different things. I'm separating myself completely from belief and putting myself on the side of knowledge (or lack of it).

 Sir Chasm 07 Dec 2020
In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

> Knowledge and belief are very distinctly different things. I'm separating myself completely from belief and putting myself on the side of knowledge (or lack of it).

You don't know whether you believe in gods? Still comes back to you not believing. Or do you not believe you don't know?

2
In reply to Sir Chasm:

I've just told you that: that I don't 'believe' in god or any kind of god. There remains the scientific question whether there is or is not (factually) a higher or supreme intelligence that has something to do with the creation of the universe. It's not impossible, in fact, quite probable, but we have nothing to go on apart from 'faith' and wishful thinking. I'm not interested in wasting time on it, actually. In fact, it's not any kind of preoccupation for me. I can live my life perfectly well without it, and certainly without getting in a tizz about it. But I do have a kind of private joke: that it would be bloody funny if we do one day, in the far future, discover scientifically that there is some kind of higher intelligence (though I'm sure it would have to be 'immanent' rather than 'transcendent' - to use those ghastly old theological terms - because the latter seems very far-fetched indeed.)

Forgive me if I don't discuss this further now, because during these brief moments while I've been talking to you I've been completely preoccupied with the RAF's great war effort in August-September 1942 (pre-Alamein) in the Delta and Suez Canal area of Egypt ... in connection with a biography I'm writing ... and it's now after midnight, and Operations are starting again ...

Post edited at 00:53
3
OP john arran 07 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

> Yes I do consider the existence of a creator to be self evident. I think a lot of people (most people?) intuitively know that there is a spiritual aspect to existence. I think this is more common than it would seem at first appearance. In our society, religious belief is often looked down on a lot of people won't admit to a belief in God, but many will say that they believe in some sort of a higher power.

So now we go from the axiomatic god straight to harnessing any vague feelings of 'spirituality' in support of supporting your axiomatic thesis. Unfounded would be a suitable term for it.

 Jon Stewart 07 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

> Yes, the thousands of religions have very similar characteristics which is what you would expect if people who devote their lives to investigating the divine are discovering true knowledge about the creator.

I'm afraid that other regions and traditions worldwide look absolutely nothing like the abrahamic monotheistic religions. Go have a look! 

1
 Offwidth 07 Dec 2020
In reply to RobAJones:

I'm not defending grade inflation with the huge modern numbers of firsts. I was lucky in never being involved in that (nor being pressured to pass substandard students). That's mainly the fault of marketisation of the Universities and having 1sts as a KPI in league tables. It's both funny and sad watching the intellectual contortionism used to justify the mess.

There were some genuine improvements in output standards during my 35 years as an academic ... the uniformity of good University teaching and student support did improve .... Matlab, coding and application packages, saved huge amounts of time wasted on donkey work and really stretched the limits of what good STEM undergraduates and postgraduates could achieve.

My main point is if you look at so called distributions of intelligence. Someone at 66% on that curve isn't a gulf from 50% in IQ test performance terms and it's amazing how people seem to get 'brighter' in a subject if they pay attention and work hard under good tuition.  Post WW2 we always took very well tutored but average intelligence kids to University from public schools. Even the odd one at Cambridge (prince Andrew) in my time there. Currently well over half middle class kids go to University at 18 but nothing like that for the poorest families, so we've had plenty of average kids in University for decades yet many intelligent kids are being left behind.

Post edited at 08:47
 Offwidth 07 Dec 2020
In reply to Sir Chasm:

One might say there is a serious intellectual recognition gulf in your knowledge if you really think the philosophical choice is binary. Agnosticism is not so easily written off, nor are the limits of the religious found in philosophy like Christian non realism (read Don Cuppit).

 GrahamD 07 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

> This is a power with the ability and inclination to consciously chose to create all that there is and with such power and knowledge then why wouldn't he be interested in human affairs?

Create everything except themselves, of course.  Now you are left with the thorny question of what created the creator - something even more 'wonderful' than the universe we can see and measure.  Is it a pyramid of ever more capable creators all the way down ?

1
 Sir Chasm 07 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

> One might say there is a serious intellectual recognition gulf in your knowledge if you really think the philosophical choice is binary. Agnosticism is not so easily written off, nor are the limits of the religious found in philosophy like Christian non realism (read Don Cuppit).

One might say that. One would be wrong.

And if one is going to cite an author one might try and get his name right, and at least suggest one title.

 Sir Chasm 07 Dec 2020
In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

Well, when you've got the time to discuss your claim that a higher intelligence created the universe I'll be all ears.

 DancingOnRock 07 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

It’s a complete lack of trust in our political leaders that leads to conspiracy theories. 
 

The more populist governments become and the less they are willing to make hard unpopular decisions, the more they’ll come unstuck with their policies and the less they will be trusted to be able to do their jobs properly. 
 

Throw in a good smattering of ‘experts’ who also have a political agenda and are often giving contradictory advice.

Some media who will create division to engage more people. 
 

A huge amount of science has to be taken on trust. I can pretty much show the world is a globe, but it would take me years. Years, I don’t have time to spare, and has been done countless times before. There’s so much evidence that it’s a globe, including everyday objects depending on it being one in order for them to work. BUT I still have to trust that it is. Therein lies a big problem for people who have lost trust in all the above. 
 

Peope don’t want to listen to people who are giving them scary messages. “We are hurtling through space on a massive rock”, verses someone who tells them, “It’s ok, it’s flat, stationary and there’s a big dome protecting us”. Which one would you like to be true? 
 

People also have a tendency to only believe what they actually see. Lots of evidence of that here in the political discussions we have. 
 

Experts tell us our health service is going to be swamped and overwhelmed, it doesn’t get overwhelmed, therefore the experts were apparently wrong (again!) People lose more trust in the experts and want to believe it’s all a hoax. That’s a nice warm feeling and means they can get on with life as normal. 

1
 mondite 07 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

> Agnosticism is not so easily written off

I think Bertrand Russell covered this sufficiently.

“As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.”

cb294 07 Dec 2020
In reply to RobAJones:

Finally going to reply as I am back in the office with a proper keyboard. On the weekend I gave up after my new laptop ate my posts three times. I assume I was hitting some function on the touch pad with my palms.....

I am teaching in the German university system, so not all of what you posted translates 1:1.

For example, passing the higher school exams ("Abitur", officially called Allgemeine Hochschulreife, or "certificate of academic suitability") after 12 or 13 years depending on state entitles you to attend university, and this is pretty much free of charge up to your first masters' level degree (usually there is some admin fee and a compulsory semester ticket for the local public transport systems. I pay something like €150 per semester for each of my children at uni).

Thus, while UK and US students can to some extent rightfully expect to be treated as customers, German students should be duty bound not to waste that rather generous offer.

Access is limited for only a handful of degrees (mainly psychology and medicine), otherwise it is your choice what you enrol for, even though some universities now do some form of entry exam for some, in particular maths heavy courses.

Nevertheless, also here the fraction of each cohort that passes the Abitur exams and goes off to uni afterwards increases annually. If teenagers are not getting any cleverer, that must mean that standards are dropping.

This is clearly not happening across the board. Foreign language in particular have improved significantly since my time. Asking even first year students to present English language papers in English has become a total non issue. The last time I was asked by a student for a paper in German must have been more than ten years ago.

Presumably, though, this is because teenagers today are much more exposed to films and videos in the original versions over the internet. Nevertheless, schools, to their credit, seem to have run with it and gradually changed to a much more conversational style of teaching.

Also, the presentation skills of students have increased massively, but if my children are representative for better or worse that was quite a large fraction of what they did at school.

Maths and sciences are a disaster, though. With every reform of the syllabus more and more topics are cut from the curriculum to avoid having the little lambs overwhelmed by the nasty complicated stuff.

As a consequence, my daughter had to attend a 10 week, full time course in remedial maths over the summer holidays that was offered/ demanded by her university before starting to study physics.

Topics of that course included complex numbers, integration, and the basics of matrix calculations / linear algebra, all stuff that was part of my own Abitur exams back in the 1980s.

My suspicion is that this dumbing down of the sciences in particular happens because departments of education are stuffed with civil servants who are lawyers or humanities graduates and who are actually proud of their innumeracy*.

In any case, what am I to do? How am I to explain reaction diffusion models of biological pattern formation if my students have no idea of differential equations? What about receptor ligand interactions and subcellular concentration effects, if they do not have an at least intuitive understanding of the law of mass action and are baffled by the term "dissociation constant"?

I do not need them to understand that stuff at the level of university lectures on analysis or statistical mechanics, basic 1990s school level would do, thank you very much.

I normally would not blame individual teachers, after all my wife and most of my family are teachers and I appreciate how much effort they put in, but was rather shocked by your claim somewhere above that some of the topics I mentioned would be above the understanding of some of your colleagues.

As it is, I am paid to teach biological topics, but spend too much of my time compensating for the failure of the school system to provide these basics.

I wish that we would also have a ten week boot camp before the first semester, with tons of maths and organic, inorganic and physical chemistry to weed out some students who may "love animals" but are unsuitable for studying biology as a science, and allow the others to catch up.

Given the job prospects for biologists we are not doing them any favour dragging them to their degrees anyway.

CB
 

* edit: and by an ideology that seriously believes that talent is spread evenly, and any failure of a student to grasp a topic is a consequence of either bad teaching or a lack of support by society. The president of my university even claimed in a staff email that obtaining a university degree is essentially a human right. Of course, she is an art historian....

Post edited at 10:07
cb294 07 Dec 2020
In reply to GrahamD:

No it is turtles all the way down...

Seriously, how can anyone believe some external entity created the universe, which by definition encompasses all there is? The entire proposition is self contradictory.

CB

edit: just to note that this is a great example of thread bifurcation, two totally unrelated conversations going on in parallel!

Post edited at 10:01
1
 Offwidth 07 Dec 2020
In reply to Sir Chasm:

I apologise for my clumsy use of a tablet keyboard alongside bad eyesight. However I'd prefer that sort of mistake to making statements, seemingly backed by nothing more than belief, in writing-off the views of many great minds in a subject where logical proof seems impossible. It all looks a bit similar to those with a blind faith in god. Why don't you at least try to explain to us lesser mortals why anything other than the binary view is not possible.

1
 Sir Chasm 07 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

> I apologise for my clumsy use of a tablet keyboard alongside bad eyesight. However I'd prefer that sort of mistake to making statements, seemingly backed by nothing more than belief, in writing-off the views of many great minds in a subject where logical proof seems impossible. It all looks a bit similar to those with a blind faith in god. Why don't you at least try to explain to us lesser mortals why anything other than the binary view is not possible.

Your argument from authority is pretty tedious, but as you apparently can't be bothered to do any thinking for yourself here goes. You either believe in gods (whichever one takes your fancy) or you don't. If you say you don't know whether you believe in gods then you can't claim to have a belief in gods. If you like you can subdivide those people who don't believe in gods, but they're all atheists because they lack a belief in gods. 

1
 Rob Exile Ward 07 Dec 2020
In reply to cb294:

I  think it is a really interesting way to wile away an hour or two, contemplating the origin of the universe. Ultimately is is such a counter-intuitive phenomenon it would be easier to pretend it never happened - but obviously it did. You can talk up all the esoteric physics you want, ultimately we are faced with the issue that 'something' - even if it was only a miniscule spec of energy - arose out of , literally, unimaginable nothing. That is not a phenomenon that appears to have happened ever again, anywhere; but it did once.

It's a bit like considering our more immediate existence: the irrefutable truth is that we came in to being by - ahem - our parents 'doing it'; then their parents, then their parents and so on. Might be distasteful to contemplate but it did happen, right back to when the first amoeba got it on with another good looking one that was slightly different. 

Re conspiracy theories - and other illogical belief systems, like religions. Actually they can be refuted: very quickly:  you have to start creating additional, and increasingly improbable additional phenomena to sustain them, a bit like the reverse of Occam's razor. You can't believe the Twin Towers were blown up without positing all sorts of shadowy organisations, phenomenal organisational skills, convoluted and unclear political aims and a cast of 1,000s. It's a bit easier to accept the simpler explanation - that a small bunch of inadequate, no-hope Saudis with access to more money than sense, motivated by the quiet rantings of father-figure promising them all sorts of goodies in the hereafter, did just enough planning - and not too much - to 'get lucky.' 

 Alfrede 07 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

But John, the States is technically the most religiously fundamental community in the world and it is rife with conspiracy theories. I reckon you would find that most conspiracy theorists would also claim to be fundamental Christians. I doubt you will find many atheists voting for Trump! This supports the thesis put forward by a number of your correspondents that the two things appeal to the same elements of human nature. Sadly though they would seem to be complementary rather than conflicting giving human beings twice as much chance of being irrationally stupid. (With a careful apology here to my Christian fellow citizens most of whom do not come into the same category as the Trump voting fundamentalists I mean to target and are every bit as rational and civilized as I could wish them to be.) I also agree with those pointing out that conspiracy theories are nothing new. Believing the vaccine for COVID is a manipulative implant by Bill Gates is no different from believing the old woman next door has put a spell on your sick pig or that the Jewish family up the road sacrifice Christian children. It is possible however that the new social media spread this kind of nonsense quicker than in the past. I often think how much Goebbels or the Inquisition would have loved Twitter!

 dr evil 07 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

So these guys are onto something then?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Philip_Movement

 Alfrede 07 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

Atheism and Agnosticism are rational beliefs based on observation of how the world around us actually operates. This differentiates them from superstitions or religions which persist in making claims about reality which rational observation suggest are probably untrue. If I observe Anne Frank dying in a concentation camp while Doctor Mengel lives to a comfortable old age in Argentina (to give one of countless possible examples) it seems perfectly rational to me to decline to believe in a benevolent interventionist 'God' who runs the world ethically and responds to prayer. That the world operates on a scientific material basis which from a human point of view is ethically meaningless seems a far more probable explanation. They are therefore a different kind of belief system since they leave open the possibility of change. If the world around me at any point seemed to demonstrate the existence of a particular deity I would change my mind and believe. No such evidence seems remotely forthcoming so I shall remain for the moment an atheist.

 Offwidth 07 Dec 2020
In reply to Sir Chasm:

At least we know your logic now. So by playing along with that almost no-one believes in god as those with uncertainty are really atheists in disguise. How do you deal with the occasional doubt of the religious, say in the face of horror, btw?

1
 Sir Chasm 07 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

> At least we know your logic now. So by playing along with that almost no-one believes in god as those with uncertainty are really atheists in disguise. How do you deal with the occasional doubt of the religious, say in the face of horror, btw?

You'll should really ask someone who believes in gods. But if the horrors they saw stopped them believing in gods then they've become an atheist - because they'd stopped believing in gods, do you get it yet?

2
 Alfrede 07 Dec 2020
In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

Absolutely. I reckon throughout history a third of the population have been atheist and another third pay lip service without any strong belief. However until very recently (late 18th Century in Europe?) it was impossible to admit this publically as religious people would immediately murder you. Even now in societies which supposedly have freedom of thought, there is enormous social pressure exerted on people to pay at least lip service to the dominant religion of the specific community.  Mark Twain wrote very profound and funny atheist texts but only let them be published after his death and even now in the States it would be unthinkeable for any major public figure to admit to non-belief. I think a Muslim-transgender-woman-opposed-to-gun-sales-and-pro-abortion would have more chance of the Presidency than an avowed agnostic. Do you know the wonderful deathbed words of gnarly old Emperor Vespasian to his bodyguard? They were on the lines of 'hey guys, I think I am turning into a God!' Indeed. I suspect a lot of sophisticated classical-world thinkers had a high level of scepticism about reading the future in the entrails of chickens but didn't want to end up like Socrates.

 Offwidth 07 Dec 2020
In reply to Sir Chasm:

I think I'm getting close. The Christian bible is telling us Jesus became an atheist briefly to save us all.

 Sir Chasm 07 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

> I think I'm getting close. The Christian bible is telling us Jesus became an atheist briefly to save us all.

Where does the Bible say Jesus stopped believing in god? If you're thinking about the "o lord why hast thou forsaken me" bit then your thinking is faulty.

1
cb294 07 Dec 2020
In reply to Alfrede:

This.

It is, however, interesting that religions popped up essentially everywhere once societies became large enough to benefit from this. Certainly, we are genetically predisposed to believe in agency: It was always adaptive to assume that a branch on the forest floor did not just crack by itself, and you better grab your spear in case the bear comes. This really precedes the human stage of our evolution. It was therefore reasonable to expect that other phenomena such as thunder, rain, springs, seasons, etc. were also caused by agents. Since these agents for some reason always were hidden, it was also rational to consider them supernatural entities of some kind.

The key question is why almost always a religious class able to control the rest of the population became established once societies became productive enough to support such a class. Two actually, as normally they came as a buy one get one free with a political ruling class, and possibly a bit later a military class / standing army.

The evolutionary benefits for individual members of these classes are obvious enough. The interesting bit is that the exploitation of normal members of society did not destabilize these societies, but instead appears to have given them some advantage, else organized religions and rituals would not be so universally prevalent. For me as a biologist the interesting bit is whether this can count as an example of selection happening at group rather than individual level. Sacrificing yourself is certainly nonadaptive for the young men (mainly) asked to fight in a war of succession within the ruling class or caste  (as here even the altruism argument of kin selection fails).

What is not reasonable is to stick with such myths once better explanations are available. We know why clouds form and sometimes build up sufficient electrical potential that it will eventually be released as lightning. No need to invoke a thunder god, etc..

It is also reasonable to extrapolate from our explanatory powers so far to expect that we will eventually find answers within the framework of the scientific method (or should at least be able to do so in principle) for as yet unsolved problems.

Believing in a god of the gaps or a prime mover is just an intellectually embarrassing stance.

CB

edit: it is also interesting to consider the emergence of monotheistic religions (from animistic nature gods via gods of places or tribes) in the context of consolidation of power within a society. In the old testament you can still find clear references that the most powerful god (of a whole bunch whose existence is not really doubted) is with the tribes of Judah.

Post edited at 12:40
In reply to Sir Chasm:

> Well, when you've got the time to discuss your claim that a higher intelligence created the universe I'll be all ears.

Completely pointless discussing it with you, if you change what I said. I said it was an open question, that it was a remote possibility, that we don't know. I did NOT claim that it was the case. Bye.

1
 Sir Chasm 07 Dec 2020
In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

> Completely pointless discussing it with you, if you change what I said. I said it was an open question, that it was a remote possibility, that we don't know. I did NOT claim that it was the case. Bye.

What you said was "There remains the scientific question whether there is or is not (factually) a higher or supreme intelligence that has something to do with the creation of the universe. It's not impossible, in fact, quite probable, but we have nothing to go on apart from 'faith' and wishful thinking.".

So you said it's "quite probable".

3
 wintertree 07 Dec 2020
In reply to cb294:

> The key question is why almost always a religious class able to control the rest of the population became established once societies became productive enough to support such a class

Positive feedback.  

 Andy Clarke 07 Dec 2020
In reply to cb294:

> Believing in a god of the gaps or a prime mover is just an intellectually embarrassing stance.

I wish you science bods would maintain a united front. When we have the creator of the uncertainty principle consoling himself with the thought that at least the Creator of the universe knows where the particles are it gets very confusing for the rest of us.

cb294 07 Dec 2020
In reply to wintertree:

Yes, but unless all societies develop in parallel (which is demonstrably false at later stages of history) these societies seem to have effectively outcompeted their neighbours still lacking organized religion. At the same time, for the majority of members this in nonadaptive, so at which level did selection happen, and what exactly was the benefit? Were rituals really that beneficial for social cohesion and productivity?

The earlier stage of selecting for belief in agency (essentially fixing it as a pan-human trait) must have been long gone by that time.

CB

cb294 07 Dec 2020
In reply to Andy Clarke:

Figure of speech, not an actual belief.

CB

edit: Which is not to say that people are not able of true double think, some more than others, else you could not have religious scientists at all.

Post edited at 13:09
In reply to Sir Chasm:

Nor would I discuss with you 'my claim that it will rain tomorrow', because I haven't said that either. I don't know. It may or may not. It's quite probable.

3
Roadrunner6 07 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

I'm not sure there's any relationship.

I know many christians who jump on any conspiracy theory. It does tend to be more of a right wing issue over here but again I'm not sure there is a cause and effect there.

 Sir Chasm 07 Dec 2020
In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

> Nor would I discuss with you 'my claim that it will rain tomorrow', because I haven't said that either. I don't know. It may or may not. It's quite probable.

The met office suggests that Belper has an 80% chance of rain tomorrow, so I'd agree that's quite probable. If you say something is quite probable would you not be suggesting it was more probable than not? Or are you claiming that any chance whatsoever of something happening means it's quite probable?

 Andy Clarke 07 Dec 2020
In reply to cb294:

> Figure of speech, not an actual belief.

> CB

> edit: Which is not to say that people are not able of true double think, some more than others, else you could not have religious scientists at all.

In Heisenberg's case, I'm sure the belief was very actual. If I recall he in fact refers to the "Lord God." The good old qualitative (quantum?) leap (of faith).

cb294 07 Dec 2020
In reply to Andy Clarke:

Not as far as I understand. He did believe that Western values and culture were derived from and still grounded in Christianity, but when asked about the existence of a personal god (in his book "Der Teil und das Ganze"), he declined to answer, referring instead to a "central order of things and events" („zentrale Ordnung der Dinge und des Geschehens“).

CB

In reply to Sir Chasm:

> The met office suggests that Belper has an 80% chance of rain tomorrow, so I'd agree that's quite probable. If you say something is quite probable would you not be suggesting it was more probable than not? Or are you claiming that any chance whatsoever of something happening means it's quite probable?

No, again you twist it. I had not seen any figures for the rainfall tomorrow when I said that. I said simply that it might or might not rain tomorrow (meaning 50/50, based on no empirical data whatever). I never said 80% chance. Nor that it was more probable than not. Nor 'any chance whatsoever', i.e. above 1%. 'Quite probable' was simply meant to be synonymous with 50/50. Meaning, I hadn't a clue.

2
 Andy Clarke 07 Dec 2020
In reply to cb294:

> Not as far as I understand. He did believe that Western values and culture were derived from and still grounded in Christianity, but when asked about the existence of a personal god (in his book "Der Teil und das Ganze"), he declined to answer, referring instead to a "central order of things and events" („zentrale Ordnung der Dinge und des Geschehens“).

You may well be right, but my "research" (ie a quick look in Wiki) threw up this:

Heisenberg, a devout Christian, wrote: "We can console ourselves that the good Lord God would know the position of the [subatomic] particles, thus He would let the causality principle continue to have validity," in his last letter to Albert Einstein. Einstein continued to maintain that quantum physics must be incomplete because it implies that the universe is indeterminate at a fundamental level.

I appreciate Einstein made it clear he didn't believe in a personal God, particularly one who enjoyed shooting craps.

Anyway, I shall be at my most lapsedly self-indulgent in a couple of days when I sidle into Birmingham Cathedral, play Handel's "I know that my Redeemer liveth" on my headphones, and get a bit misty-eyed. 

cb294 07 Dec 2020
In reply to Andy Clarke:

I play the Christmas Oratory at work over my speakers as no one can stop me (imagine evil mad scientist laugh here)!

Advent just feels wrong without the prospect of attending one concert live, and then stepping outside church to the bustle of a Christmas market for some mulled wine and roast almonds...

CB

 marsbar 07 Dec 2020
In reply to Andy Clarke:

Einstein 

>It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

I think "God does not play dice with the universe" was not meant to be taken as literally as some people thought.  

 Andy Clarke 07 Dec 2020
In reply to marsbar:

> Einstein 

> >It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

> I think "God does not play dice with the universe" was not meant to be taken as literally as some people thought.  

Yes, hence my smartarse remark about shooting craps. Still, "inspirational" poster printers have made a few bob out of it.

 RobAJones 07 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

> My main point is if you look at so called distributions of intelligence. Someone at 66% on that curve isn't a gulf from 50% in IQ test performance terms and it's amazing how people seem to get 'brighter' in a subject if they pay attention and work hard under good tuition. 

But in 1990 only 10% of students went to Uni less than 1% to Oxbridge I find it difficult to accept the selection system at time resulted in too many "average" students getting the exam grades necessary. Pupils might get better exam grades with a "good" teacher and they certainly  will if they work harder. As cb and wintertree have outlined previously, this doesn't make them more able to cope with what our view of an academic university course.

 Post WW2 we always took very well tutored but average intelligence kids to University from public schools. Even the odd one at Cambridge (prince Andrew) in my time there. Currently well over half middle class kids go to University at 18 but nothing like that for the poorest families, so we've had plenty of average kids in University for decades yet many intelligent kids are being left behind.

I'm not disputing that intelligent kids are left behind, I made the point that due to fees/loans it is now more difficult for those kids than it was for me in '88 when there were no fees/grants. As you say that now means lots of middle class can go, but it costs. I was talking about Universities in general, until the  Oxbridge has always been an outlier. I thought at the time was actively discouraging me to apply. The "promotional" video involved following 4 candidates. Two lads, I related to got A's and were rejected, there was an exceptional girl who did get in and a boy who had his acceptance letter delivered on a silver tray by the butler after getting CCD. My views on how the education system should be changed are considerable more radical than Jeremy Corbyn, so you don't need to convince me of the bias towards the private sector. Although at least the pressure being applied to Oxbridge over the last 4/5 years is having some effect.

 RobAJones 07 Dec 2020

.  reply to cb294:

When thinking about your post, today, I thought you might have been working in a different county. Basically I agree with you, but in order to have students of the desired quality there (in UK) will be far fewer. Many students are currently pushed towards University on the principle academic is good/respected, practical not so. I get the impression that is slightly better in Germany.

 RobAJones 07 Dec 2020
In reply to wintertree:

> I agree.  I worry that the system now is so drawn out that it quenches a lot of the raw talent that powered advances in science in past centuries.  

I wondered about this for a long time. If there is another pandemic, in say, 30 years time. Who will be leading the scientific response? What is their education like at the moment? 

Post edited at 19:56
 Sir Chasm 07 Dec 2020
In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

> No, again you twist it. I had not seen any figures for the rainfall tomorrow when I said that. I said simply that it might or might not rain tomorrow (meaning 50/50, based on no empirical data whatever). I never said 80% chance. Nor that it was more probable than not. Nor 'any chance whatsoever', i.e. above 1%. 'Quite probable' was simply meant to be synonymous with 50/50. Meaning, I hadn't a clue.

Now you're claiming that "quite probable" means 50/50, so you're saying you think there's a 50/50 chance that an intelligent entity created the universe and that it's going to rain tomorrow? 

3
In reply to Sir Chasm:

Yes, very roughly - because how can one measure these things? (I haven't bothered to look at the forecast yet so the probability of rain/or sleet .. feels cold ...  for me remains 50/50 also.) Just one detail: at a philosophical level I'm wary of the idea of a separate 'entity' but that's a separate subject. BTW, I'm not 'claiming' anything, just trying to tell you what I meant. I should perhaps have just said 50/50 from the outset, because those adjectives are a bit like climbing grades. 'probable' (probably ) meaning a lot more than 50/50; 'quite probable', about 50/50; 'rather improbable', less than 50/50. As the French would say, the whole subject is 'assez difficile'. But I wouldn't take it too seriously. I'm just on to my second whisky mac and have no intention of getting serious now. And the subject of whether 'god' exists or not is particularly boring.

In reply to john arran:

> So now we go from the axiomatic god straight to harnessing any vague feelings of 'spirituality' in support of supporting your axiomatic thesis. Unfounded would be a suitable term for it.

They remain vague feelings of spirituality because spirituality is discouraged in our society. In a society where describing religious views as a weakness in someone barely raises a challenge and is agreed with by most, most will go with the flow and suppress any intuition towards spirituality that they may have. In days gone by or in other societies people may be encouraged to explore and develop this spiritual intuition.

I am also very interested in the similarities between religions. I was dumbfounded when I first realised that the message of Jesus and the Bhudda is essentially the same. The lack of a deity in Bhuddism may seem like a big difference but when you understand God as the conscious force that sustains and is present throughout the whole universe this is not really a difference at all. Hinduism on the face of it looks polytheistic but when you look into it the multiple deities are not independent but manifestations of one supreme God.

All religions have at their heart a teaching that the way to salvation is through suppression of ones own ego. As Christ puts it "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ and ‘Love your neighbour as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these."

People all over the world have always had direct spiritual experiences which they characterise as an enlightenment. Through meditation, through near death experiences, and sometimes through drugs, they experience a universal consciousness and a complete dissolution of the sense of self and a complete sense of unity with everything in the universe. They see this as a divine encounter and I believe this is the basis for all true religion everywhere.

2
 Sir Chasm 07 Dec 2020
In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

No problem, I assumed you must have been fairly sozzled last night to come out with it. 

In reply to Sir Chasm:

I was not sozzled last night, just careless with my English. Metaphorically, in French climbing terms, I used D when I meant AD. So sorry.

In reply to Alfrede:

> Atheism and Agnosticism are rational beliefs based on observation of how the world around us actually operates. This differentiates them from superstitions or religions which persist in making claims about reality which rational observation suggest are probably untrue. If I observe Anne Frank dying in a concentation camp while Doctor Mengel lives to a comfortable old age in Argentina (to give one of countless possible examples) it seems perfectly rational to me to decline to believe in a benevolent interventionist 'God' who runs the world ethically and responds to prayer. That the world operates on a scientific material basis which from a human point of view is ethically meaningless seems a far more probable explanation. They are therefore a different kind of belief system since they leave open the possibility of change. If the world around me at any point seemed to demonstrate the existence of a particular deity I would change my mind and believe. No such evidence seems remotely forthcoming so I shall remain for the moment an atheist.

You've added a few requirements of God there before you would be willing to believe. That's up to you but atheism is opposed to belief in any sort of God, not just an interventionist one. The only belief that can be supported by science is agnosticism.

Post edited at 23:07
1
 Sir Chasm 07 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

> You've added a few requirements of God there before you would be willing to believe. That's up to you but atheism is opposed to belief in any sort of God, not just an interventionist one. The only rational belief is agnosticism.

Atheism isn't "opposed to belief in any sort of God", it's merely the lack of belief in gods. 

1
In reply to : cumbria mammoth 

> > No it's a lack of belief, an unwillingness to accept anprovable position,not a system of anti-belief

> That's agnosticism. 

> Atheism is a non-belief in deities and there are only two alternatives to the question. If atheists consider it overwhelmingly unlikely that god exists then it is a belief like any other.

Ffs Sir Chasm, try to at least have a skim through the thread and follow the argument. This is where I came in, you're just churning out a line and not adding anything. 

5
 Sir Chasm 07 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

You appear to be talking to yourself, merely wrongly stating something again doesn't make you any more coherent. 

1
OP john arran 08 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

> They remain vague feelings of spirituality because spirituality is discouraged in our society.

That's not the way I see it. The amount of 'woo' taken semi-seriously in our society, without any justification for it, seems ridiculous to me.

> I am also very interested in the similarities between religions. I was dumbfounded when I first realised that the message of Jesus and the Bhudda is essentially the same. The lack of a deity in Bhuddism may seem like a big difference but when you understand God as the conscious force that sustains and is present throughout the whole universe this is not really a difference at all. Hinduism on the face of it looks polytheistic but when you look into it the multiple deities are not independent but manifestations of one supreme God.

> All religions have at their heart a teaching that the way to salvation is through suppression of ones own ego. As Christ puts it "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ and ‘Love your neighbour as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these."

If you cherry pick similarities and quietly ignore the obvious differences, of course you're going to be able to satisfy yourself that you're right. But even if you focus on your love and lack of ego points, what it appears to boil down to is that people have created deity systems in their own image, or rather in their idealised image, to personify (a curiously appropriate term somehow) all they see as good in humans. The qualities people respect (or used to - vengeance isn't quite the attractive trait it may once have been) are assigned to good/god and those they don't are either assigned to a devil or dismissed as human frailty. It's hardly a surprise that the qualities people respect in others are broadly similar across cultures and through the ages, so the general qualities assigned to their supposed supernatural beings are similar as a result.

In reply to Sir Chasm:

That's a laugh considering I've been developing my point over 9 posts in discussion with posters who are prepared to consider what has already been said whereas you can't even be bothered to read the last post properly and just seem to want to chuck one liners out. 

Removed User 08 Dec 2020
In reply to Sir Chasm:

> Atheism isn't "opposed to belief in any sort of God", it's merely the lack of belief in gods. 

This. Opposition to god as described by religion is anti-theism, an established idea.

1
cb294 08 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

 

> People all over the world have always had direct spiritual experiences which they characterise as an enlightenment. .... They see this as a divine encounter ....

... and they are wrong.

They get crosstalk from within their brains, hearing or seeing stuff that is not actually coming in via the normal sensory routes.

That crap is always happening in the background a normal part of processing, but our consciousness is usually able to differentiate and prevent that noise pushing up.

If that filtering process fails we alternatively call it paranoid schizophrenia or communication with god. Mental illness or religious experience is simply a question how widely shared a given delusion is.

All proper evidence (e.g. using fMRI during prayer or meditation) shows that feelings of spiritual input are exclusively generated in our brains and can even be triggered experimentally.

CB

 Sir Chasm 08 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

> That's a laugh considering I've been developing my point over 9 posts in discussion with posters who are prepared to consider what has already been said whereas you can't even be bothered to read the last post properly and just seem to want to chuck one liners out. 

Yes, but your point is false. Not believing in gods doesn't equate to believing there are no gods. You believe in god, you are a theist. I have no such belief so I am an atheist (I'm also apixie, afairy, aunicorn). 

1
 Duncan Bourne 08 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

>I just wanted to make the case that on the question of whether there is a creator there's no way to test the superiority of a yes or no answer.

Well there is in that if you postulate the existence or non-existence of a something then you can ask questions that pertain to each scenario and use them to predict on the future. Ie do unicorns exist? If so we should be able to find evidence of unicorns. It only takes one unicorn to prove the existence of unicorns but if you continually fail to find unicorns then although you can speculate that there may be some out of the way place where unicorns exist for all practical purposes they don’t and putting out food for unicorns is a waste of time.

>If you allow the existence of a creator and then speculate about the attributes of that creator then I think you are going to come to omnipotent and omniscient, which is arguable. This is a power with the ability and inclination to consciously chose to create all that there is and with such power and knowledge then why wouldn't he be interested in human affairs?

I come to the opposite conclusion. If there is an omnipotent omniscient being then it follows that due to the existence of deeply unpleasant things that happen in the world either deliberately or at random with come back on them being random then either God is not either of those things, is but doesn’t get involved, is but deliberately causes them for reasons unknown. Either way it is impossible to make predictions on what influences God as all the multiple religions attribute different lines of morality which go unpunished unless it is by the people who hold them. In short the world seems to carry on perfectly fine without God and all you are doing is adding a random element that you can’t prove. Pray/don’t pray it makes no difference.

>There are also many who have had direct spiritual experience of the divine, I think the most credible of which are the ones that have come through meditation.

I have been through this. At one time I would have said I had definite experience of the divine. However when analysed there was nothing that could not have come from my own imagination. Which is not to say it wasn’t useful but you don’t need God to meditate.

> It's humans that negatively affect the physical world, including by adding false teachings to spiritual knowledge.

So where do earthquakes, diseases, droughts, meteorite collisions, plagues of locusts etc fit in? Also define false teachings. It strikes me that the advocates of one belief say that automatically about opposing beliefs.

 Duncan Bourne 08 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

>I am also very interested in the similarities between religions. I was dumbfounded when I first realised that the message of Jesus and the Bhudda is essentially the same. The lack of a deity in Bhuddism may seem like a big difference but when you understand God as the conscious force that sustains and is present throughout the whole universe this is not really a difference at all. Hinduism on the face of it looks polytheistic but when you look into it the multiple deities are not independent but manifestations of one supreme God.

I understand where you are coming from here and certainly agree that practically all religions have at their heart a supreme Demiurge. But I see this as a fundamental feature of human thinking rather than proof of a divine being. The Buddhism you mention is (like Christianity) a multifaceted thing ranging from the near Shamanistic beliefs of Tibetan Buddhist practice to the atheistic personal discovery of Japanese Zen.

>All religions have at their heart a teaching that the way to salvation is through suppression of ones own ego. As Christ puts it "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ and ‘Love your neighbour as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these."

I disagree with suppression of the ego. The message of Buddhism is not one of suppression but of transcendence. Suffering is caused by desire, transcend desire and become free. This is sometimes interpreted as having no desire but such a thing is impossible, we desire to eat, we desire to breath and so on and so forth. Rather it is about not being a slave to desire. Summed up in the phrase “We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world”. Meaning it is our perceptions that shape how we see what is around us. When we let go of that which binds us we act with a pure heart.

Also love thy neighbour only really extends to your tribe. In fact Buddhism is one of the few major religions/philosophies that doesn’t advocate smiting the unbeliever.(which isn't to say that they don't from time to time in the pursuit of political aims)

>People all over the world have always had direct spiritual experiences which they characterise as an enlightenment. Through meditation, through near death experiences, and sometimes through drugs, they experience a universal consciousness and a complete dissolution of the sense of self and a complete sense of unity with everything in the universe. They see this as a divine encounter and I believe this is the basis for all true religion everywhere.

I had this but I don’t see it as a divine encounter. Rather I regard it as a finding of peace without the need for a deity

Post edited at 09:25
 Duncan Bourne 08 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

I suppose in brief I take the view that believing in the existence of an all powerful deity makes no significant difference to my life. It cannot be wholely disproven but is reduced to Spinoza's "God of the gaps" with no practical influence that I would consider. Also that theism offers no merit beyond social control and a sense of culture.

 Offwidth 08 Dec 2020
In reply to RobAJones:

The numbers you gave for 1990 actually apply to the late 60s. Participation was slow rising in the 70s and 80's but took off from 1990 (when it was around 16%) to more than double that by the late 90s.

I taught in a north midlands Poly and subsequent new University. The numbers of middle class kids (quite a few from public school) actually became a majority post 92. This was mainly as we dumped all our BTEC courses as we didn't trust EDEXCEL standards and struggled to fit their rigid syllabus for direct entry routes to our degrees. Most local working class kids had come to us via non A level routes from local colleges and part-time from companies.

Knowing what was taught before my time, City and Guilds engineering courses would be classified as foundation degree standard these days let alone the ONC, OND, HNC and HND qualifications. Qualifications below the honours degree level distort comparative participation rates (say 90s compared to now) in the UK making the difference look higher than it is. Some other professional qualifications, notably Nursing, are also HE these days.

I've never experienced average intelligence kids (the least intelligent in my class) struggle to pass on my maths heavy modules unless they didn't pay attention or didn't turn up. Most of the developed world has HE participation over 50%, some a good bit over that. I just don't buy this English exceptionalism.

Post edited at 11:18
 Jon Stewart 08 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

> You've added a few requirements of God there before you would be willing to believe. That's up to you but atheism is opposed to belief in any sort of God, not just an interventionist one. The only belief that can be supported by science is agnosticism.

The "only belief" that is supported by science is a vast network of beliefs that are self-consistent, which explain our experiences with the world, which allow us to predict and manipulate the world, and which are testable against the world out there. That vast network of beliefs does not include a belief in god.

So, 1.,  atheism, no belief in god, is perfectly consistent with this network of beliefs.

Or, 2., you can simultaneously hold a belief in god that isn't part of that network of beliefs about how the world works (you have to take an extremely loose interpretation of what is referred to as "god" in any kind of religious text though, otherwise it starts to become inconsistent with the network of beliefs about the world).

Where a belief in god is presented as integrated into the network of beliefs about the world supported by science, when you examine them closely they either fail to be consistent in the network (e.g. they pose additional, contradictory causes for things that already have explanations), or they turn out to be completely separable from it (non-interventionist "god of the gaps").

I think in your use of the word "agnostic" you're implying that there are equally good reasons to take either of the positions 1. and 2. above - but this is not right. If you want to hold on to the vast network of beliefs that make up our scientific understanding of the world, then you have already tacitly accepted some philosophical methods like Occam's razor, abductive reasoning (inference to the best explanation), some sort of correspondence theory of truth and JTB knowledge. You can't have your scientific understanding without also accepting these philosophical foundations. And once you accept these foundations, you have every reason to take position 1, and to reject position 2.

This is why "spirituality" has become "unfashionable". It's not for no reason. It's because "spiritual" beliefs are inconsistent with the either the actual network of beliefs we have about the world; or they're independent but they are inconsistent with the philosophical foundations of our scientific beliefs. It's not just fashion or culture, that leads to a rejection of religion and spirituality, that rejection follows from the firm foundations of rationality and building up a self-consistent network of beliefs. "Spirituality" is a violation of that consistency, and that's why it's routinely rejected in our scientific society as a way of understanding our experience in the world.

John Searle speaks well (he always does) on the meaning of "agnosticism" here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT2O81SIVbY&ab_channel=CloserToTruth

Post edited at 10:56
 Offwidth 08 Dec 2020
In reply to Jon Stewart:

I think part of the current situation arises because very few scientists are taught the relevant philosophy of science. Their stated religious belief would seem to create congnitive dissonance for a significant proportion of such scientists but most don't know and the science they do doesn't require they know. A prominent minority are aware and retain faith anyhow within some philosophical structure. It's funny as I can't remember a single group discussion on this subject amongst scientists in all my decades of academia but have had quite a few one to one conversations.

 Jon Stewart 08 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

When I was a physics student I *hated* philosophy - I thought the whole thing was a load of pointless crap, people sitting on their arses trying to work out how the world worked without bothering to get up and look at it. It's only in the last few years I've become interested, and now part of me wishes I'd studied philosophy rather than physics - or I suppose I'd have liked to have done a course in the most interesting bits of both.

cb294 08 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

I am sure you know the relevant Feynman quote about birds...

Most philosophy of science fails to describe science as it is done in the real world.

CB

cb294 08 Dec 2020
In reply to Jon Stewart:

Exactly, the proof is in the pudding.

The scientific world view as an integrated whole has given us continuously increasing insight in the world, resulting in technology (irrespective of whether that is for better or worse, but it proves that the whole scheme works).

I still await spiritual technology. Yogic flyers, OK, but what else?

CB

In reply to cb294:

> Most philosophy of science fails to describe science as it is done in the real world.

I thought 'Philosophy of Chemistry' by J. van Brakel (Leuven University Press, 2000) was pretty good. Rather awkward English, but I suppose that's because he's Belgian I bought it 10 years ago, so can't remember much about it; but I've written in the front 'An enormously important book'! and it's absolutely covered with marginal notes.

In reply to cb294:

I think he also said something to the effect that any benefits of subjects like philosophy are countered by the idiots who tend to study it.

To Jon Stewart: I think that many of the notable scientists over the years were also very proficient philosophers but like you I held the subject in disdain until my later years.  I studied electrical engineering so felt much more at home with the practical side of things.

Al

 RobAJones 08 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

> The numbers you gave for 1990 actually apply to the late 60s. Participation was slow rising in the 70s and 80's but took off from 1990 (when it was around 16%) to more than double that by the late 90s.

I thought that had been covered?

You

"You're making the mistake of thinking the brightest and best went to University when numbers were a quarter of where they are now. Its likely many average intelligence male  upper middle class kids went to University back then. So you thesis is simply not true except for subsets of exceptional working class kids who made it through the grammar lottery. The main thing that has changed is a more equitable entry (in which nearly half that change from a quarter is due to women, who back then were very much in a minority, and the rest from better opportunity below upper middle classes)"

Me

"Looking at the data, my (biased) opinion is that this gives me the grounds to claim my cohort (1990) is as intelligent as Gordon's (1970)  based on the changes you have outlined. It doesn't explain the 4x increase since then? If cb is failing students who are not capable of completing the course that is the correct thing to do. I would suggest that as now nearly twice as many students are getting a first class degree compared to any degree in 1990 not many of their colleagues are. It just passes the problem further up the chain."

Virtually all that increase (70-90) was due to female graduates. At secondary level there was a move away from selective schools to comprehensive. IMO this supports my view that the system became "fairer" (not fair) during this time with no drop in "academic" standards

> I taught in a north midlands Poly and subsequent new University. The numbers of middle class kids (quite a few from public school) actually became a majority post 92. This was mainly as we dumped all our BTEC courses as we didn't trust EDEXCEL standards and struggled to fit their rigid syllabus for direct entry routes to our degrees. Most local working class kids had come to us via non A level routes from local colleges and part-time from companies.

The public school effect has piqued my interest. The numbers attending have been very consistent (6-8%) for over a century. Since 2000 the number of those students going onto HE has also been very consistent (80-82%) Not sure what that means, other than to reinforce a belief it is more to to with inherited wealth than acquired wealth. Might have been different in other areas but I was able to do A levels at my local college.  

> Knowing what was taught before my time, City and Guilds engineering courses would be classified as foundation degree standard these days let alone the ONC, OND, HNC and HND qualifications. Qualifications below the honours degree level distort comparative participation rates (say 90s compared to now) in the UK making the difference look higher than it is. Some other professional qualifications, notably Nursing, are also HE these days.

Agreed a lot of careers now require an honours degree, and the course probably hasn't changed much, so more a case of re-branding than anything else?

> I've never experienced average intelligence kids (the least intelligent in my class) struggle to pass on my maths heavy modules unless they didn't pay attention or didn't turn up. Most of the developed world has HE participation over 50%, some a good bit over that. I just don't buy this English exceptionalism.

As well as paying attention and turning up they probably attempted to do the work set as well? If all secondary school students did this for 5 years the "average" grade would be a 7 not 4/5. in Singapore, South Korea, Shanghai  they do achieve this. I remember having 4 girls in a year 7 class. They all arrived with a 4c from KS2  (just below average). Five years later two got a 7 (top 20%) one a 4 and the other a 2 (bottom 10%) that difference had little to do with my teaching and everything with how hard (or not) they worked. This is "mainstream" education? The bottom 10% normally have cognitive issues that hard work doesn't help much, they need specialist teaching. The wintertree and cb want to be teaching some of the top 10%. Our education at the moment doesn't produce the type of student they want at 18 and our exam system certainly does allow them to identify who they are.

Post edited at 15:45
 Offwidth 08 Dec 2020
In reply to RobAJones:

Numbers are 3x (not 4x) up since 1990 (with notably additional more women...yes I'd agree the change from 1970 to 1990 was mostly improved gender balance. My point was the proportion of upper middle class kids will have changed little (yes, which is expected by those who think intelligence is mostly genetic.... I don't)

Lol...yes by paying attention I mean doing the work set.  We seem to be in agreement on proper engagement being more important than other factors so why do you think having kids with average intelligence in University is such an issue (when its not in any other westernised nation)?

It was nice to get to teach some super-bright students ('top 1%' types who were as good as Cambridge NatSci peers of mine) but most of the few who ended up with us did so for a variety of 'life issues' (sometimes in the 90s this was really shit personal support from local Russell group institutions during problems/illness which led to an unfair fail in the first year) or from company day release (I had 10 students from Rolls one year in a late 80's Mech Eng electronics class who all got firsts. I've also had 'top 10%' type students not engage at all and get through my modules on luck with lowish marks.

I've said already we agree about grade inflation in terms of the ludicrous numbers of firsts given. I was never part of that. On technical undergrad modules I gave around 15% first class marks and failed around 15% fairly consistently over decades (I got few resits as I tried to ensure students did engage and anyone who failed my module tended to fail enough others to need a repeat year).

I contend that the fact that 18year olds are not as well prepared as they were from A levels is grade inflation and easier exams you can rote learn to good results and too much coursework in some subjects. From memory I think Coventry found on their entry tests that an A level Maths grade D when they started these tests was equivalent to top end B when they published the work. If intelligence was the issue the remedial classes we used to ensure they were OK by the end of the first term of year 1, in subjects like maths, wouldn't have worked (yes, some failed to meet this standard).

I'm pretty sure cb doesn't work in the UK.

In reply to Duncan Bourne:

> >I just wanted to make the case that on the question of whether there is a creator there's no way to test the superiority of a yes or no answer.

> Well there is in that if you postulate the existence or non-existence of a something then you can ask questions that pertain to each scenario and use them to predict on the future. Ie do unicorns exist? If so we should be able to find evidence of unicorns. It only takes one unicorn to prove the existence of unicorns but if you continually fail to find unicorns then although you can speculate that there may be some out of the way place where unicorns exist for all practical purposes they don’t and putting out food for unicorns is a waste of time.

Come on, I've given an answer to this already. This is a category error because a unicorn would be a creature that exists within the universe whereas I would think that any considered religious viewpoint sees God more in terms of the conscious force which created and sustains the entire universe. If our creator is also non interventionist in the physical world then what prediction would you make? My prediction is that we will come face to face with him when we pass into the spiritual world and then we will find out what it was all about.

> >If you allow the existence of a creator and then speculate about the attributes of that creator then I think you are going to come to omnipotent and omniscient, which is arguable. This is a power with the ability and inclination to consciously chose to create all that there is and with such power and knowledge then why wouldn't he be interested in human affairs?

> I come to the opposite conclusion. If there is an omnipotent omniscient being then it follows that due to the existence of deeply unpleasant things that happen in the world either deliberately or at random with come back on them being random then either God is not either of those things, is but doesn’t get involved, is but deliberately causes them for reasons unknown. Either way it is impossible to make predictions on what influences God as all the multiple religions attribute different lines of morality which go unpunished unless it is by the people who hold them. In short the world seems to carry on perfectly fine without God and all you are doing is adding a random element that you can’t prove. Pray/don’t pray it makes no difference.

> So where do earthquakes, diseases, droughts, meteorite collisions, plagues of locusts etc fit in?

Makes no difference in this world but maybe in the next? The existence of evil and suffering in this world shows us that whatever God's purpose for creation is, it is not created as a playground in which we may be free from trials in this life. Taking his omnipotence and omniscience as a given then I would probably have to go as far as saying that the choices we make in the face of the trials that life presents us may well be the purpose of creation.

> >There are also many who have had direct spiritual experience of the divine, I think the most credible of which are the ones that have come through meditation.

> I have been through this. At one time I would have said I had definite experience of the divine. However when analysed there was nothing that could not have come from my own imagination. Which is not to say it wasn’t useful but you don’t need God to meditate.

You're ahead of me. I'd like to get there through meditation but haven't really got much chance with the distractions going on in my house. I'll confess to being a bit worried about it as well.

Back to the question of the superiority or not of atheism though. Here you have had a direct experience which you definitely attributed to having been a divine encounter. There are many accounts that corroborate this experience and it is very commonly described as a revelation, an ultimate truth, something that is more real than our everyday experience. It could have come from your own imagination but what rational reason is there to dismiss your lived experience? Now it is you that is adding an less probable explanation in order to sustain your belief.

> Also define false teachings. It strikes me that the advocates of one belief say that automatically about opposing beliefs.

Well, each person will have to make their own judgement here but there is no doubt that millennia of imperfect people leading organised religion means that corrupted messages are ubiquitous so there is a need to look for the truth. My approach is that the teachings of Jesus Christ are supreme and I am interested in to looking for the agreements between religions as likely to have originated from a common thread and checking any ideas I come across against Christ's message.

> >I am also very interested in the similarities between religions. I was dumbfounded when I first realised that the message of Jesus and the Bhudda is essentially the same. The lack of a deity in Bhuddism may seem like a big difference but when you understand God as the conscious force that sustains and is present throughout the whole universe this is not really a difference at all. Hinduism on the face of it looks polytheistic but when you look into it the multiple deities are not independent but manifestations of one supreme God.

> I understand where you are coming from here and certainly agree that practically all religions have at their heart a supreme Demiurge. But I see this as a fundamental feature of human thinking rather than proof of a divine being. The Buddhism you mention is (like Christianity) a multifaceted thing ranging from the near Shamanistic beliefs of Tibetan Buddhist practice to the atheistic personal discovery of Japanese Zen.

Well we won't get proof either way, there will always be another possibility.

> >All religions have at their heart a teaching that the way to salvation is through suppression of ones own ego. As Christ puts it "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ and ‘Love your neighbour as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these."

> I disagree with suppression of the ego. The message of Buddhism is not one of suppression but of transcendence. Suffering is caused by desire, transcend desire and become free. This is sometimes interpreted as having no desire but such a thing is impossible, we desire to eat, we desire to breath and so on and so forth. Rather it is about not being a slave to desire. Summed up in the phrase “We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world”. Meaning it is our perceptions that shape how we see what is around us. When we let go of that which binds us we act with a pure heart.

> Also love thy neighbour only really extends to your tribe. In fact Buddhism is one of the few major religions/philosophies that doesn’t advocate smiting the unbeliever.(which isn't to say that they don't from time to time in the pursuit of political aims)

The choice of the word neighbour means those who you can affect and if everyone loves those who they can affect then it will soon extend to the whole world. More earth shattering in its implications though is the follow up "...as you love yourself". How much time and effort does each of us put in to looking after ourselves? Our health, our comfort, our family, our social status, accumulating possessions, experiences and learning, our safety, etc. To comply you would need to expend all that time and effort into others. It is not a matter of following some laws and rituals, Jesus is telling us that the way to God is that we need to completely disregard the self and live entirely for others and the rest of creation.

> >People all over the world have always had direct spiritual experiences which they characterise as an enlightenment. Through meditation, through near death experiences, and sometimes through drugs, they experience a universal consciousness and a complete dissolution of the sense of self and a complete sense of unity with everything in the universe. They see this as a divine encounter and I believe this is the basis for all true religion everywhere.

> I had this but I don’t see it as a divine encounter. Rather I regard it as a finding of peace without the need for a deity

You did see it as a divine encounter though and it sounds as though it has had a lasting effect on you. I wonder how much difference your expectation of what a deity is makes?

> I suppose in brief I take the view that believing in the existence of an all powerful deity makes no significant difference to my life. It cannot be wholely disproven but is reduced to Spinoza's "God of the gaps" with no practical influence that I would consider. Also that theism offers no merit beyond social control and a sense of culture.

No, but you look at God the wrong way around, he is not there to explain gaps in our knowledge and to fulfil our every desire, we are here to serve his purpose and our reward awaits in the next world.

2
 Timmd 09 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth: How can you presume to tell somebody that they saw something as a divine encounter, when they've said 'I didn't see it as a divine encounter'?

Post edited at 00:47
1
 summo 09 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

If your god and jesus did exist he needs sacking. Consider how old the universe is, our planet, he waits how long then turns up especially for us, but very unconvincingly gets his message across before disappearing back up into the clouds. Even failing Grayling could do better. Religion is just something for the insecure and illeducated to hang off, who then go on to condition the next generation. 

 Andy Clarke 09 Dec 2020
In reply to summo:

> Religion is just something for the insecure and illeducated to hang off, who then go on to condition the next generation. 

Whatever needs it is meeting certainly aren't confined to the ill-educated, as a cursory Google of religious scientists will show. It would perhaps be convenient if it were. It's quite possible to be a person of faith, who is also charismatically confident, cultured and articulate. This was brought home forcefully to me when I met John Sentamu a few times when he was Bishop of Birmingham. If religion is ministering to insecurities, they aren't peculiar to the thick.

 summo 09 Dec 2020
In reply to Andy Clarke:

Then why believe in something void of any evidence? 

Granted in his case it pays the bills. 

Post edited at 07:50
In reply to Timmd:

> How can you presume to tell somebody that they saw something as a divine encounter, when they've said 'I didn't see it as a divine encounter'?

I wish people would at least read the post they are replying to properly. Firstly you have misquoted Duncan, he says "don't" not "didn't" i.e. he doesn't see it as a divine encounter anymore. Earlier in the post Duncan told us that "At one time I would have said I had definite experience of the divine". 

Apologies to Duncan for discussing you like this, I would rather depersonalise it but I felt I needed to respond to this one. You make some interesting points and obviously have good knowledge about religion. 

 Andy Clarke 09 Dec 2020
In reply to summo:

> Then why believe in something void of any evidence? 

> Granted in his case it pays the bills. 

Since Sentamu was prepared to risk everything by speaking out against Amin in his native Uganda - and was in fact imprisoned for doing so - I hardly think he's the sort of man who's in it for the big bucks and posh frocks. But no doubt the annals of atheism are full of such stories of courageous opposition to oppression. As to why he believes - and whether or not his belief may be linked to his courage - you'd have to ask him.

 Sir Chasm 09 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

The problem you always run up against when you claim god's omnipotence and omniscience is that god must therefore have known about all the bad things (child abuse, the Holocaust etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum) that were going to happen in his creation. He must also have been able to prevent the bad things happening. In most cases I suspect you would say that someone being a willing accomplice to child abuse was a bad thing, but when it's god we get a hand wavy "it'll all make sense when we're dead".

Post edited at 08:56
 wintertree 09 Dec 2020
In reply to Sir Chasm:

Yes, a god with the three Os leaves no room for human free will.  If such a god were to judge humans for following the track of their lives fixed by the three Os, well, that’s a bit pointless.

 mondite 09 Dec 2020
In reply to summo:

> Then why believe in something void of any evidence? 

Because he has the "god gene" of course.

Whilst I doubt it is as simple as that one gene I do think there is something in peoples make up (either genetic or upbringing) which will make someone more likely to believe in the supernatural/assign actions to external agency.

Same way as you get the varying need to belong to groups for example how some become fanatical football fans dedicated to "their" club and others dont.

Combine those together and you get full on religion.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

> The "only belief" that is supported by science is a vast network of beliefs that are self-consistent, which explain our experiences with the world, which allow us to predict and manipulate the world, and which are testable against the world out there. That vast network of beliefs does not include a belief in god.

> So, 1.,  atheism, no belief in god, is perfectly consistent with this network of beliefs.

> Or, 2., you can simultaneously hold a belief in god that isn't part of that network of beliefs about how the world works (you have to take an extremely loose interpretation of what is referred to as "god" in any kind of religious text though, otherwise it starts to become inconsistent with the network of beliefs about the world).

> Where a belief in god is presented as integrated into the network of beliefs about the world supported by science, when you examine them closely they either fail to be consistent in the network (e.g. they pose additional, contradictory causes for things that already have explanations), or they turn out to be completely separable from it (non-interventionist "god of the gaps").

> I think in your use of the word "agnostic" you're implying that there are equally good reasons to take either of the positions 1. and 2. above - but this is not right. If you want to hold on to the vast network of beliefs that make up our scientific understanding of the world, then you have already tacitly accepted some philosophical methods like Occam's razor, abductive reasoning (inference to the best explanation), some sort of correspondence theory of truth and JTB knowledge. You can't have your scientific understanding without also accepting these philosophical foundations. And once you accept these foundations, you have every reason to take position 1, and to reject position 2.

> This is why "spirituality" has become "unfashionable". It's not for no reason. It's because "spiritual" beliefs are inconsistent with the either the actual network of beliefs we have about the world; or they're independent but they are inconsistent with the philosophical foundations of our scientific beliefs. It's not just fashion or culture, that leads to a rejection of religion and spirituality, that rejection follows from the firm foundations of rationality and building up a self-consistent network of beliefs. "Spirituality" is a violation of that consistency, and that's why it's routinely rejected in our scientific society as a way of understanding our experience in the world.

> John Searle speaks well (he always does) on the meaning of "agnosticism" here:

The foundation of all knowledge is intuition. Everyone intuitively knows that other people and things exist outside of their own mind. This is not secure knowledge but it is a starting point that allows ideas about the world to be tested. Many (possibly most, possibly all) people have an intuition that there is a spiritual aspect to existence. 

The next tier of knowledge is experiential. If you have an experience you can know for sure what you are experiencing. You can then ask why it happened, maybe reproduce the experience in a scientific manner.

Scientific knowledge is experiential knowledge that can be reproduced and has been confirmed by others. This is the most secure and trustworthy tier of knowledge. 

If people have had direct experience of God then they have a Justified True Belief in God. If their account is credible then others can have a Justified True Belief in God. I'm sure you will dispute whether their account is credible but a God who doesn't intervene in the physical world is consistent with the accounts of those who have had spiritual experiences, consistent with scientific observations and consistent with religious teachings when you separate allegory from the literal.

2
 Duncan Bourne 09 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

> If our creator is also non interventionist in the physical world then what prediction would you make? My prediction is that we will come face to face with him when we pass into the spiritual world and then we will find out what it was all about.

If the creator is non-interventionist then my prediction is that such a creator is an unnecessary addition to the physical world. You are postulating a world beyond the physical for which we have no evidence. If you have a non-interventionist God who only becomes relevant after you die in an existence for which you can know nothing about then how can you know what is true or just fabrication?

>Taking his omnipotence and omniscience as a given then I would probably have to go as far as saying that the choices we make in the face of the trials that life presents us may well be the purpose of creation.

It is an interesting thought experiment. But one that sits ill with the concept of an omnipotent and omniscient god. In my novel a Dark Heart I postulate a God that allows apparently evil things to happen but in order to arrive at specific future point in order to defeat a greater enemy. The theme being that the great good is the motivating factor. However it makes the assumption that there is a force that said God has no control over and that there is only a limited sequence of events that lead to the desired result for which God has no control over in how the time sequences play out save re-run them with endless tweaks.

It brings us to the question as to whether creation even has a purpose? If we can never unveil that purpose then it is next to irrelevant. Do you ascribe a purpose to God allowing the abuse of children by Catholic priests, or the early death of children in accidents or even the mass extinction of species? If there is a purpose to that then it is not one that is directed to the individuals concerned, unless perhaps we go down the road of re-incarnation and even then such purpose is still obscure.

.>Back to the question of the superiority or not of atheism though. Here you have had a direct experience which you definitely attributed to having been a divine encounter. There are many accounts that corroborate this experience and it is very commonly described as a revelation, an ultimate truth, something that is more real than our everyday experience. It could have come from your own imagination but what rational reason is there to dismiss your lived experience? Now it is you that is adding an less probable explanation in order to sustain your belief.

I had a variety of “spiritual” experiences, which convinced me at the time in the existence of a spiritual world. However when I challenged these experiences by demanding of them objective truth then I found none. They had absolutely no influence in the physical world. A revelation yes but one that exists in the confines of my head. Which is not a bad thing but I realised that attributing anything more to it was unnecessary. It certainly did not demonstrate the existence of any supernatural intelligence. In short you cannot explain the unexplainable by postulating something more unexplainable to explain it.

>Well, each person will have to make their own judgement here but there is no doubt that millennia of imperfect people leading organised religion means that corrupted messages are ubiquitous so there is a need to look for the truth. My approach is that the teachings of Jesus Christ are supreme and I am interested in to looking for the agreements between religions as likely to have originated from a common thread and checking any ideas I come across against Christ's message.

So why chose Jesus Christ over say Krishna, Mithras, Shiva, Buddha, Mohammed? I would say it is personal choice rather than any knowledge of an absolute truth. A Muslim would argue that Mohammed is the last final prophet of God. Also which aspect of Jesus do you follow? The one outlined by the catholic church, the church of England, the protestant church, the church of the latter day saints, the Jesus of the Koran. The name of Jesus is evoked by many who add their own slant to “Christianity”. One persons corrupted message is another’s divine truth it seems to me arbitrary which one choses to follow.

>Well we won't get proof either way, there will always be another possibility.

Possibilities without proof are conjecture but some have a greater likely hood than others. If I say that by carrying a rucksack full of bricks it is protecting me from being run over by a car and I don’t get run over by a car is that likely proof that it works? If I cannot prove it either way then I might as well not carry around a heavy rucksack on the vague off chance it acts as a talisman. That is how religion seems to me.

>The choice of the word neighbour means those who you can affect and if everyone loves those who they can affect then it will soon extend to the whole world.

Except many who stand as religious leaders do not follow this philosophy

>More earth shattering in its implications though is the follow up "...as you love yourself". How much time and effort does each of us put in to looking after ourselves? Our health, our comfort, our family, our social status, accumulating possessions, experiences and learning, our safety, etc. To comply you would need to expend all that time and effort into others. It is not a matter of following some laws and rituals, Jesus is telling us that the way to God is that we need to completely disregard the self and live entirely for others and the rest of creation.

Interesting though for me more me I would lean towards the middleway proposed by Buddha. Who from being a prince undertook the life of an aesthetic, which is extreme denial of the self. From this he discovered the middle way of balance and harmony (I paraphrase here). The Jains of India live a life based entirely on not causing harm they disregard clothes and brush the ground before them so that they do not inadvertently step on some small creature. In many ways it is the ultimate expression of what you say.

>You did see it as a divine encounter though and it sounds as though it has had a lasting effect on you. I wonder how much difference your expectation of what a deity is makes?

I didn’t see it as a divine encounter. It came long after I had abandoned any belief in the spiritual. I see it as coming to an understanding of my own nature and realising that perception it everything. In this regard if you believe in a deity then you will find evidence for a deity but if you don’t such evidence fades to nothing and is no more relevant than believing.

>No, but you look at God the wrong way around, he is not there to explain gaps in our knowledge and to fulfil our every desire, we are here to serve his purpose and our reward awaits in the next world.

Here is the nub. “We are here to serve his purpose”. But it presupposes such a purpose exists, that such a deity exists and that there is a life beyond this one. If you say how do we know what this purpose is? Then it comes down to personal choice of which “truth” one follows according to ones own inclinations and culture and appears to make like difference. No deity has ever intervened to stop a religious practice except in the literature of a particular religion. The proof of said deity rests on personal claim, there is no objective evidence for such a being as with an after life, who’s borne from which no traveller returns.

You say God is not there to explain our gaps in knowledge and I would agree, but I see such a deity as an unnecessary fabrication.

 Duncan Bourne 09 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

> Apologies to Duncan for discussing you like this, I would rather depersonalise it but I felt I needed to respond to this one. You make some interesting points and obviously have good knowledge about religion. 

Hey no worries. I think you have misunderstood me though (see my reply to other post)

 Duncan Bourne 09 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

To clarify my position:

I grew up believing in a Christian god until such time as the inconsistencies in such a belief became to great to ignore.

I then became interested in Eastern beliefs and philosophy with its concept of Karma and reincarnation as being more consistent with a divine plan than a simple heaven or hell with no comebacks.

I then became interested in gaining knowledge of God until I came to realise that such was the diversity of opinion and lack of clear evidence that I was just sustaining a fantasy of my own devising. If all religions claim to be true and there is no way to prove one better than another then maybe there is no truth to discover?

So I abandoned God and explored what I did know and what I do know is what I think. The world happens around me but I can chose how to react to that and how I interpret it. The purity of that is I am and I am not. I am the interface between the physical and story, which is thought. Ergo the God we see is the god we want and if we chose no God then there is no God. Therefore the truth is that God is a construct of our imagination.

 Jon Stewart 09 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

Thanks for engaging with these points.

> The foundation of all knowledge is intuition. Everyone intuitively knows that other people and things exist outside of their own mind.

No it isn't, and no they don't. There may be nothing outside my own mind, I don't know that solipsism is false (it isn't JTB knowledge because if "true" is by correspondence to the external world, it cannot meet that criterion); but the best explanation for my experience is me being a human existing in an external world. It's not intuition, it's abductive reasoning. And I don't spend any time worrying about it, since nothing would be different whether solipsism is true or false. Same with the problem of other minds - I don't know for sure anyone else is conscious, but the best explanation for my experience is that they are. No intuition required, just the same reasoning all of my other knowledge is based on: abduction and consistency.

> This is not secure knowledge but it is a starting point that allows ideas about the world to be tested.

Agree, but it's not intuition.

> Many (possibly most, possibly all) people have an intuition that there is a spiritual aspect to existence. 

Shall we make that some people? It clearly isn't all, because I'm telling you, and so are others here, that they don't have that intuition. And we as a society have rejected religion and spirituality as having any connection to knowledge and truth, i.e. stuff we can agree on. This rejection of spirituality in public life allows us to live with governance and policies that are acceptable to most of us, not just believers of one particular faith.

> The next tier of knowledge is experiential. If you have an experience you can know for sure what you are experiencing. You can then ask why it happened, maybe reproduce the experience in a scientific manner.

This is the first tier of knowledge. I think you've incorrectly inserted intuition as a foundation in order to "beef up" its value, when it has none.

> Scientific knowledge is experiential knowledge that can be reproduced and has been confirmed by others. This is the most secure and trustworthy tier of knowledge. 

Yes. Trustworthy knowledge is experiential knowledge that is consistent with all other experiential knowledge. It's the consistency which gives us our justification, because the consistency is best explained by correspondence to the world (truth).

> If people have had direct experience of God then they have a Justified True Belief in God.

No. They have justification for their belief. You just assumed "true" without giving any reasons and that's not the kind of move you get away with! (You're going to rely on intuition, but I've discounted any value or meaning in intuition, because it's simply not connected to knowledge - it's an emotion, an experience generated by the human brain which by definition isn't justified). Their belief in god is not JTB knowledge because, if you accept something like a correspondence theory of truth, then there's no T. If you could repeat the experience and investigate it, so lots of independent observers could agree that the experience corresponded to the external world, then it would go from being a justified belief to a justified true belief. You want your T for free.

> If their account is credible then others can have a Justified True Belief in God. I'm sure you will dispute whether their account is credible but a God who doesn't intervene in the physical world is consistent with the accounts of those who have had spiritual experiences, consistent with scientific observations and consistent with religious teachings when you separate allegory from the literal.

That's just a contradiction. Either god doesn't intervene and no one has direct experience of him, or he does intervene and people have direct experience. People have brains that you can put in scanners and see which bits are using the most oxygen at any moment. While someone was having a religious experience, you could put them in a scanner and see the pattern of neural activity causing it. So god would be intervening in the physical world - with the human brain, and so with the scanner, and the people watching the scanner...

You're butting up against the interaction problem of dualism. Princess Elizabeth had Descartes on the ropes with this, and dualism never recovered. You can have your non-intervening spiritual realm if you want, but it's got to be non-intervening, otherwise you've got to explain how the two realms interact. Do you believe in Descartes' "animal spirits"? Princess Elizabeth was not impressed back in 1600 and something, and things have not improved for dualism since.

Post edited at 10:56
 RobAJones 09 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

> Numbers are 3x (not 4x) up since 1990 (with notably additional more women...yes I'd agree the change from 1970 to 1990 was mostly improved gender balance. My point was the proportion of upper middle class kids will have changed little (yes, which is expected by those who think intelligence is mostly genetic.... I don't)

77x3=350?? your figures not mine, but I do accept that a significant part of that will be courses that were not Uni. degrees now being so. I'm interested in your point  about upper middle class changing little. I accept I was just speaking from personal experience that me and some of my peers were able to go to uni. because we got exam grades that enabled us to go, with no perceived financial down side. Similar students I have taught over that last 10 or so years are not going (Accountancy/Sellafield tend to be the  usual route for them) the main reason for them not going is the perceived financial implication

> Lol...yes by paying attention I mean doing the work set.  We seem to be in agreement on proper engagement being more important than other factors so why do you think having kids with average intelligence in University is such an issue (when its not in any other westernised nation)?

The issue I have is mainly, with the cost. This started with cb/wintertree expressing their concern that students were no longer being prepared for their degree courses. I assume the courses they were/are trying to deliver are similar to those in 1990. It might be snobby of me, but I think there is an argument that some of the expansion has been "training" rather than "academic education" and as I've said before we should value practical/vocational skills more, not charging students to be "trained" would be a start, this would reduce the need to pretend they are academic. I my limited experience other counties do seem to value this more. We are well above EU averages from 1990-2019?

UK 48% EU35% Germany31%

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Educational_at...

My main issue is the lack of funding for education. It is often said that our spending on education is in line with western European countries (if you include tuition fees it is actually more) but this includes private school fees? So we spend 3x as much(per pupil) on education the most privileged?

> I contend that the fact that 18year olds are not as well prepared as they were from A levels is grade inflation and easier exams you can rote learn to good results and too much coursework in some subjects. 

I completely agree with you on this, for some degrees. For other degree courses now it is good preparation, as to complete the degree they just need to carry on  learning by rote. But this just moves the problem onto employers. See my previous post

> I'm pretty sure cb doesn't work in the UK.

Yep, Germany, I've acknowledged this previously

 Timmd 09 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

> If people have had direct experience of God then they have a Justified True Belief in God. If their account is credible then others can have a Justified True Belief in God. I'm sure you will dispute whether their account is credible but a God who doesn't intervene in the physical world is consistent with the accounts of those who have had spiritual experiences, consistent with scientific observations and consistent with religious teachings when you separate allegory from the literal.

 A God which doesn't intervene is also consistent with one which doesn't exist, in a spirit of 'logical leaps' that is.

Going back to you saying that atheism is as much as a belief as religion is further up, I've gone from being a theist, to an agnostic, to an atheist, and - speaking only for myself - it comes down to not having any reason to think about whether a god may exist, because there's nothing I come across which suggests to me that one does. It's not a belief system which I adopt, I just haven't come across anything to make me decide 'Aha, there is a god', or 'This suggests that there might be', so I think about/focus on other things, towards deriving meaning and goodness from life. To wonder if there might be, I'd need to come across something to set me wondering, I'm full of questions about how the universe occurred, in what lurks beyond our knowledge, but for one of those questions to be god related, there'd need to be something relating to our current concepts of religion to trigger one, a voice from the heavens or a miraculous something or other - rather than a gap in life's answers being a good fit for a god, atheism might more accurately be described as a mind full of unanswered questions without proposed answers on which to lean.

There's lots I don't know, and I'm fine with not knowing, fine with the unanswered questions potentially not being answered in my own lifetime.

Post edited at 11:35
1
 RobAJones 09 Dec 2020
In reply to cb294:

After rereading you post I thought I should reply to this.

> I normally would not blame individual teachers, after all my wife and most of my family are teachers and I appreciate how much effort they put in, but was rather shocked by your claim somewhere above that some of the topics I mentioned would be above the understanding of some of your colleagues.

I think they are assuming subjects will be taught by someone with a related  degree. It will be true in most schools, but some schools (in deprived areas in particular), have acute staffing issues. In the last school I worked in both the Headteacher and Deputy taught maths, they had GCSE maths but didn't study it at A level. About 20% of the lesson were taught by teachers from other departments, two members of the maths department qualified as primary school teachers  (they both had A level maths but an unrelated degree)

Post edited at 11:15
 Offwidth 09 Dec 2020
In reply to RobAJones:

Not sure where you got 77 from? With my eyesight and rubbish tablet typing maybe it's a typo somewhere. I did state about 16% participation in 1990 and x3 gives 48% (roughly where we are now).

Just as the data is not comparing like with like, when looking at the UK change from 1990 to now, the same applies to those EU figures. HE in the UK now includes vocational degree level training below honours level (often called tertiary type B). There is plenty of vocational training in academic degrees (called tertiary type A): medicine and most engineering honours degrees being good examples.

This is from a 2014 OECD report on Germany.

"Based on current patterns, in 2012 an estimated 53% of young people in Germany are expected to enter academically oriented tertiary programmes (tertiary-type A) in their lifetime, up from 30% in 2000 and closer to the OECD average of 58% (compared with 48% in 2000). In addition, some 22% of young people are expected to enter shorter, more vocationally-oriented tertiary programmes (tertiary-type B) during their lifetime, up from 15% in 2000 and exceeding the OECD average of 18% (up from 16% in 2000). Despite these increases in entry rates, tertiary graduation rates are still below the OECD average. An estimated 31% of young people in Germany are expected to graduate from academically oriented tertiary programmes in their lifetime, up from 18% in 2000 (a 13 percentage-point increase compared to the 10 percentage-point increase of the OECD average, from 28% in 2000 to 38% in 2012). Meanwhile, 15% of young people are expected to graduate from vocationally oriented tertiary programmes, up from 11% in 2000 and above both of the OECD averages of 10% in 2012 and 9% in 2000 ".

So well over 50% of Germans are involved in HE and a total (assuming no overlap) of 46% lifetime graduation in HE were expected from 2012 school cohorts... better than the UK but below the OECD average.

One of the horrors of the UK £9k fee system is how it has massively reduced part time mature student numbers in the UK (and kneecapped what was a world class exemplar: The Open University).

Several economic analyses have estimated the cost to the taxpayer of the £9k system will be roughly the same as the old £3k fees, mainly due to additional write- offs. So what was the point of it? Fees across the EU are much lower and often free. University accomodation is usually much cheaper. Grants are often available (proper grants not UK style loan grants).

Post edited at 11:56
cb294 09 Dec 2020
In reply to RobAJones:

That is what I assumed. In Germany, above elementary school, you will normally have studied maths at university not quite to masters level as part of your teaching degree. The same goes for your mandatory second subject.

Staff shortages mean that some states now also hire teachers who do not have that formal teaching degree, but for teaching maths you normally are asked to demonstrate corresponding maths skills from your professional career (typically engineering or natural sciences).

 Duncan Bourne 09 Dec 2020
In reply to Timmd:

Kind of what I think

Q. Does God exist?

A. Yes but only within the realms of human imagination (Dolphins may have a God but so far they have not told us). There is no objective reality that can be ascribed to God. If there were we could point to it.

Imagination is the interpretation we apply to the physical world. Ie abstract concepts of good or bad. The truth of such concepts is determined by a) how closely they match physical reality b) our cultural background and c) our own individual judgement.

A) is a process of matching expectation – Every thing dies, we don’t float off the earth, night follows day. A belief that gravity doesn’t exist is inconsistent with observation. There is no physical phenomenon of God to observe therefore we cannot clearly state that God does not exist (absence of evidence not being evidence of absence) but we can infer that it is most probably a product of imagination by comparing…

B) Cultural backgrounds – There is broad acceptance of the idea of a God in many cultures and many societies are based on such. However there is also great division over interpretation evidenced by the divisions between Catholic and Protestant, Shia and Sunni, within specific religious groups and then also larger religious groups Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Judaic, Shinto, Buddhist, Voodoo, Pagan, etc etc. This maybe interpreted that God has many different and conflicting concepts of truth that are all valid or has no interesting in point out those in error. Or we could interpret it as being consistent with an imaginary concept conceived to unite a society of group.

C) Individual interpretation – Every aspect of God comes down to this. Even within the same group of believers. Religious texts are not read literally they are interpreted, even if that is a literal interpretation. Now in a sense this is true of the physical world. Remember how a few years ago there was a great debate over whether a dress was blue or gold? The people who saw blue, saw blue, that is how their brains interpreted the information received through the senses. But nobody denied the physicality of the dress. Could it be that God is similar? But then that still leaves us in the realm of interpretation and imagination. We can not point to a physical manifestation of God no matter what its colour. Whether God is a man, a woman or a coyote (In a Miwok myth, Coyote creates all animals, then calls them to a council to discuss the creation of human beings. Each animal wants people to be imbued with its own best qualities, causing an argument. Coyote mocks them all, vowing that human beings should have his own wit and cunning. Each animal makes a human model in its own likeness; but overnight Coyote destroys the other models, so that only his own model comes to life. Source Wikipedia) it is consistent with the workings of human imagination.

In conclusion it is logical to attribute God to a creation of imagination rather than an external force of nature.

 RobAJones 09 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

Possibly we have been talking at cross purposes? Gordon "tidied up" your table, but that was about students who completed degrees rather than those who took part?

In reply to Offwidth:

Hope you don't think this is a too much of a cheek but I've just converted that useful table of yours to a real table to make it a bit easier to read:

https://www.gordonstainforthbelper.co.uk/StudentObtainingDegreesUK 11

 Report

 Timmd 09 Dec 2020
In reply to Duncan Bourne: That's much better articulated than I could put it.

You're right about the absence of evidence not being the same as evidence of absence, I think the only thing I'd add, as a now atheist, that the absence of evidence means that it doesn't come to mind as a possible answer - some kind of deity that is - due to the absence of evidence, the questions without answers and the lack of evidence are interlinked (the lack of evidence making it an unknowable to 'leave where it is' or forget about until the topic comes up), making 'I don't know what's behind it all' and not thinking about a god, the natural mind space in which I end up, and contentedly so, as far as having a peaceful mind goes in that corner of my thinking...not having related answers is only a bad thing if one perceives it to be.

I didn't sleep till 3, and woke up at 8, and then dozed, so the above is as good as I can put it, but you've kind of said it all well already.

nb: This isn't me writing along the lines of 'defining what is true', it's about describing what being an atheist is like - as far as I experience it. If people find solace in religion that's fine by me.

Post edited at 14:42
 Offwidth 09 Dec 2020
In reply to RobAJones:

That explains it.  Those are actual numbers, not population norm referenced percentages.

I do think grade inflation and passing substandard students is a national scandal but we accept University leadership in England without proper modern governance and too much political interference from the government. Scotland following a review changed the law to improve governance:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2016/15/contents/enacted

OP john arran 09 Dec 2020
In reply to Timmd:

With each religion that I'm familiar with, to varying extents, I've arrived at a considered opinion that there's no justification I can see for belief. I'm not agnostic as I have reached a considered opinion, and that is that the Christian God does not exist, and neither does any other Gods with which I have some familiarity. It doesn't need a leap of faith to declare an opinion that the Christian God doesn't exist, it's a considered response.

I'm sure there are religions in the world that I've never even heard about. Obviously I can have no belief in whatever deity or deities they may entail. Does that mean I believe such deities don't exist? Given that belief is a considered state, how could I possibly have a belief concerning something I've never even encountered as an idea? The absence of belief is not equivalent to the presence of belief in any way.

If I were to declare a belief that there never will nor ever could be any conceivable circumstance in which I would consider the existence of any deity as being even a remote possibility, then that would be getting closer to the kind of belief that religious adherents possess, as it would be requiring a decision based on factors that are simply unknown and perhaps unknowable. But that's not what atheism is; atheism just speaks of a current opinion based on available and considered knowledge. It requires no belief, simply a rational consideration of available information and resultant conclusion.

 RobAJones 09 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

> That explains it.  Those are actual numbers, not population norm referenced percentages.

norm referenced to what? There were more children in secondary school in 1985 (4.2m) compared to 2012 (3.8m). There were more people born in 1970 (800,000) than 2000 (600,000) I'd be surprised if immigration/infant mortality account for  the difference.

From you other post, perhaps this explains cb's comments

"estimated 53% of young people in Germany are expected to enter academically oriented tertiary programmes"

"estimated 31% of young people in Germany are expected to graduate from academically oriented tertiary programmes"

I'm not sure what the drop out rate is here but pretty sure it is a lot less than that

I completely agree with this

I do think grade inflation and passing substandard students is a national scandal but we accept University leadership in England without proper modern governance and too much political interference from the government

 Offwidth 09 Dec 2020
In reply to RobAJones:

Participation was officially about 16% in 1990 and is just below 50% now. Look up the government information if you want details, I've already explained some of the differences influencing the numbers and changes in how the numbers were derived.

Around 60% graduation levels for Germany in the middle period of my academic career  wouldn't surprise me as they kept sending failing students back round the loop and I'm sure some might eventually have needed a job with what they already had. The UK wasn't always great. Graduation percentages from some courses I taught on were too often below 70% of those who enrolled (but quite a few students transferred using passed credit and graduated on another course).  I once taught on a dysfunctional course with a graduation rate from enrollment that once went as low as 20% (due to a bad year with some idiot module leaders, on a course badly formed from the hardest modules from two hard courses from two different departments with no real thematic integration) but again with many transfers. I was glad when that course ended.

My experience of German exchange students was pretty positive in ability tems but I often felt their country let them down in progress terms. Quite a few graduated with a PhD at over 30 ...too many wasted years of high performance stuck in an over-rigorous education system when they should have been doing more useful postdoc work. A few German exchange students climbed with our Uni club regularly including one onsighting upto E7, whom I regularly belayed (and tried to second). Happy days.

Post edited at 15:42
 Sayon 09 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

Quite a few years ago on Thought for today, Rabbi Lionel Blue told the story of a boy who said to a religious elder:

"I'm an atheist"

The reply:

"No son, you need to know a lot to be an atheist. What you are is an ignoramus."

3
 Jon Stewart 09 Dec 2020
In reply to Sayon:

> "No son, you need to know a lot to be an atheist. What you are is an ignoramus."

How glib. Philosophical rigour is hardly what's needed to make it to the top of a religious organisation though, is it?

1
cb294 09 Dec 2020
In reply to Sayon:

That, in a nutshell, is what is wrong about religious indoctrination of children.

CB

 Andy Clarke 09 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

Worshippers at the shrine of Phillip K Dick may remember that in Our Friends from Frolix 8, the carcass of a hugely advanced organism capable of creating habitable worlds and populating it with creatures derived from itself, was found floating in space near Alpha, in 2019. Some claimed this was conclusive proof of the death of God.

 Timmd 09 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran: I think a certain kind of personality is needed perhaps as well, since religions keep continuing. It's something which is meant to add to wellbeing and lifespan, so in some ways it isn't to be knocked, if that's what helps people keep happy.

To jump sideways onto the thread topic again, I'm thinking that it's the amount of variable quality information available and the expertise with which it's disseminated which might be behind the rise in conspiracy theory beliefs, because they play on people's need to make sense of a complex and contradictory world. There's an easy way for them to spread about the death of Bob Marley and Jimi Hendrix for example, and 'documentaries' about them on youtube. 

Post edited at 19:24
 RobAJones 09 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

> Participation was officially about 16% in 1990 and is just below 50% now. Look up the government information if you want details, I've already explained some of the differences influencing the numbers and changes in how the numbers were derived.

After working on the data side of a MAT for a few years, I'm pretty sceptical of any  statistics released by the government and the DFE in particular. They are regularly pull up by both the UK Statistics Authority and the Office for Statistics Regulation. Officially the participation of disadvantaged students has increased in the last decade? Disadvantaged students in London are actually more likely to go to Uni. then non disadvantaged from the NW?? If you make up the rules you can say pretty much what you like. 

> My experience of German exchange students was pretty positive in ability tems but I often felt their country let them down in progress terms. Quite a few graduated with a PhD at over 30 ...too many wasted years of high performance stuck in an over-rigorous education system when they should have been doing more useful postdoc work. A few German exchange students climbed with our Uni club regularly including one onsighting upto E7, whom I regularly belayed (and tried to second). Happy days.

Yup, Mrs J worked in Koblenz for three years.Most of her friends seemed to finish their courses in their thirties. We used to have A level exchange students for a term, I think they are a self selecting group. One actually stopped with us for two years and then went to Durham, probably for the reasons you outlined above. 

 Rob Exile Ward 09 Dec 2020
In reply to Sayon:

What a nasty little story.

 Sir Chasm 09 Dec 2020
In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

I wouldn't pay too much attention to made up stories. 

In reply to Jon Stewart:

> Thanks for engaging with these points.

I enjoy getting stuck into this stuff so thanks for the opportunity.

There's quite a few interesting replies to me today and a couple I didn't manage to get to yesterday that I'd like to have responded to if I had time but I'd better go with this one to acknowledge my error.

> No it isn't, and no they don't. There may be nothing outside my own mind, I don't know that solipsism is false (it isn't JTB knowledge because if "true" is by correspondence to the external world, it cannot meet that criterion); but the best explanation for my experience is me being a human existing in an external world. It's not intuition, it's abductive reasoning. And I don't spend any time worrying about it, since nothing would be different whether solipsism is true or false. Same with the problem of other minds - I don't know for sure anyone else is conscious, but the best explanation for my experience is that they are. No intuition required, just the same reasoning all of my other knowledge is based on: abduction and consistency.

> Agree, but it's not intuition.

> Shall we make that some people? It clearly isn't all, because I'm telling you, and so are others here, that they don't have that intuition. And we as a society have rejected religion and spirituality as having any connection to knowledge and truth, i.e. stuff we can agree on. This rejection of spirituality in public life allows us to live with governance and policies that are acceptable to most of us, not just believers of one particular faith.

> This is the first tier of knowledge. I think you've incorrectly inserted intuition as a foundation in order to "beef up" its value, when it has none.

What I am trying to get to is the starting point. I'm hearing arguments that claim atheism (by which I don't mean an absence of belief but I mean having a strong enough conviction that God doesn't exist to lead to labelling people that do believe in God as weak minded) is the exclusive completely rational belief system. The arguments put forward to claim this superiority tend to rely on theists having invented God as an unjustified extra layer to fill in gaps in knowledge. I reject this, what I'm saying is that for the many people who have an intuition that God exists that is the starting point. From this foundation there is no compelling reason that I'm aware of why belief in a creator has to be abandoned.

> Yes. Trustworthy knowledge is experiential knowledge that is consistent with all other experiential knowledge. It's the consistency which gives us our justification, because the consistency is best explained by correspondence to the world (truth).

> > If people have had direct experience of God then they have a Justified True Belief in God.

> No. They have justification for their belief. You just assumed "true" without giving any reasons and that's not the kind of move you get away with! (You're going to rely on intuition, but I've discounted any value or meaning in intuition, because it's simply not connected to knowledge - it's an emotion, an experience generated by the human brain which by definition isn't justified). Their belief in god is not JTB knowledge because, if you accept something like a correspondence theory of truth, then there's no T. If you could repeat the experience and investigate it, so lots of independent observers could agree that the experience corresponded to the external world, then it would go from being a justified belief to a justified true belief. You want your T for free.

I've been schooled in the theory of knowledge here and accept all you say in this paragraph. I'll drop the phrase intuitive knowledge, intuition is belief. I would still say though that knowledge becomes knowledge through a process that often starts with intuition. You introduced the phrase JTB knowledge to me earlier which I had to google and I misunderstood that it meant a justified belief about the truth rather than a justified belief that is also true. I stand corrected.

So, people who have had direct experience of God have a Justified Belief in God then and if their account is credible then others can have a Justified Belief in God. This justified belief may or may not also be true. If you've had a direct experience then you ought to have a very strong reason to abandon belief in that experience. 

> That's just a contradiction. Either god doesn't intervene and no one has direct experience of him, or he does intervene and people have direct experience. People have brains that you can put in scanners and see which bits are using the most oxygen at any moment. While someone was having a religious experience, you could put them in a scanner and see the pattern of neural activity causing it. So god would be intervening in the physical world - with the human brain, and so with the scanner, and the people watching the scanner...

> You're butting up against the interaction problem of dualism. Princess Elizabeth had Descartes on the ropes with this, and dualism never recovered. You can have your non-intervening spiritual realm if you want, but it's got to be non-intervening, otherwise you've got to explain how the two realms interact. Do you believe in Descartes' "animal spirits"? Princess Elizabeth was not impressed back in 1600 and something, and things have not improved for dualism since.

Better minds than me have got stuck into the mind-body problem but the theory that I am most interested in is that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe and that our brains/minds "tune" into it, resolving it into an individual ego which is an adaption that helps our physical bodies to survive in our environment. I think that when people have these spiritual experiences they are bypassing the filter of our brain and having an experience of the universal consciousness. Pure speculation I admit.

Post edited at 00:01
1
 Sir Chasm 10 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

> I enjoy getting stuck into this stuff so thanks for the opportunity.

> There's quite a few interesting replies to me today and a couple I didn't manage to get to yesterday that I'd like to have responded to if I had time but I'd better go with this one to acknowledge my error.

> What I am trying to get to is the starting point. I'm hearing arguments that claim atheism (by which I don't mean an absence of belief but I mean having a strong enough conviction that God doesn't exist to lead to labelling people that do believe in God as weak minded) is the exclusive completely rational belief system. The arguments put forward to claim this superiority tend to rely on theists having invented God as an unjustified extra layer to fill in gaps in knowledge. I reject this, what I'm saying is that for the many people who have an intuition that God exists that is the starting point. From this foundation there is no compelling reason that I'm aware of why belief in a creator has to be abandoned.

I think you're on to something here (putting aside your repeated disingenuous interpretation of atheism). People who believe in gods do seem to start early, before they've given it any thought at all really, mum and dad believed so the child believes. I suppose you can call that intuition (in your special dictionary). Once that foundation is laid there is a lack of desire to go looking for any compelling reason to "abandon belief" (see, you do know that atheism is a lack of belief really).

> I've been schooled in the theory of knowledge here and accept all you say in this paragraph. I'll drop the phrase intuitive knowledge, intuition is belief. I would still say though that knowledge becomes knowledge through a process that often starts with intuition. You introduced the phrase JTB knowledge to me earlier which I had to google and I misunderstood that it meant a justified belief about the truth rather than a justified belief that is also true. I stand corrected.

> So, people who have had direct experience of God have a Justified Belief in God then and if their account is credible then others can have a Justified Belief in God. This justified belief may or may not also be true. If you've had a direct experience then you ought to have a very strong reason to abandon belief in that experience. 

How have these people directly experienced gods?

> Better minds than me have got stuck into the mind-body problem but the theory that I am most interested in is that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe and that our brains/minds "tune" into it, resolving it into an individual ego which is an adaption that helps our physical bodies to survive in our environment. I think that when people have these spiritual experiences they are bypassing the filter of our brain and having an experience of the universal consciousness. Pure speculation I admit.

Presumably god created the consciousness that floats around in the aether?

OP john arran 10 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

> what I'm saying is that for the many people who have an intuition that God exists that is the starting point. From this foundation there is no compelling reason that I'm aware of why belief in a creator has to be abandoned.

A starting point, according to conventional reasoning, is an axiom. If you start from the axiom X=true is it really any wonder you can find a way to conclude that X=true?

cb294 10 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

 

> .... I reject this, what I'm saying is that for the many people who have an intuition that God exists that is the starting point. From this foundation there is no compelling reason that I'm aware of why belief in a creator has to be abandoned.

Wrong starting point. Humanity has arrived at a coherent framework (call it scientific materialism, rationalism,  or whatever you like) that is proven by its predictive power, which is reflected by the innovation it has driven for better or worse over the last 500 years. It has led to atom bombs and antibiotics, so the argument has to be entirely non-ethical.

This rationalist framework is able to explain both why and how people arrive at that intuition: It originates entirely from within our brains (detecable by fMRI) and has been shaped by evolution predating the human stage.

Occam's razor, which is a core part of the same successful framework, asks us to reject any entities not necessary for the explanantion of a given phenomenon.

You can therefore of course still invoke a creator to make sense of the world, but you then cannot anymore describe any arguments flowing from that start point as rational.

If you claim that it were, I would challenge you to name one scientific or technological insight that requires the assumption of the existence of supernatural entities to explain an observation.

The converse list, starting in antiquity, is, as you well know, endless.

CB

 Offwidth 10 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

I think its even more dumb to try and disprove a 'god of the gaps' using such logic. Sure you  can show some things in religion are wrong in scientific terms, like many creationists views.

I don't believe in a god of the gaps so I have nothing in this game other than respect for different philosophically consistent viewpoints defended by people a lot more expert in the subject than me. If disproving religion was so straightforward only ignorant fools would believe. Even the rabbi tale has a point there, true or not... most assertions I've heard that god definitely doesn't exist are childish. It's often the same reason we ignored the idiot churchmen who said god created the universe as if evolution happened.

1
 Sir Chasm 10 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

Who's trying to disprove religion!? I think we all accept that religion exists.

P.s. Have you managed to find the bit in the Bible that says Jesus stopped believing in god yet?

1
OP john arran 10 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

> I think its even more dumb to try and disprove a 'god of the gaps' using such logic. Sure you  can show some things in religion are wrong in scientific terms, like many creationists views.

I wasn't for a moment trying to disprove any gods, or anything else for that matter. I was simply pointing out a rather obvious flaw in the reasoning presented in support for one.

 Offwidth 10 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

I just don't think such reasoning applies to all faith (none of which has any proven scientific basis).

 Offwidth 10 Dec 2020
In reply to Sir Chasm:

I'm sure he would appreciate the irony of your defence of the level of his doubts in the veracity of dad and his ghost's plans.

In reply to Offwidth:

[As a complete aside, Offwidth, I must say that as a writer I'm boggling at your grammatically exotic last sentence, and trying to unravel it. ... ]

1
 Sir Chasm 10 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

> I'm sure he would appreciate the irony of your defence of the level of his doubts in the veracity of dad and his ghost's plans.

I'm sure he would. Didn't doubt in the existence of his dad/himself/ghost though did he? Unlike your claim.

OP john arran 10 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

> I just don't think such reasoning applies to all faith (none of which has any proven scientific basis).

As none of that relates to the post in question, you appear to be debating yourself, so I'll leave you to it.

 Offwidth 10 Dec 2020
In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

It's a clunky attempted joke. You have to admit an atheist arguing on biblical text about an earlier joke is a bit surreal. Maybe I should have tried a line about reading the scriptures in their original language, as these multiple translations can be tricky (why the greek 'middleman' is still so important in Christian theology).

2
 Offwidth 10 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

I think it applies directly to what Cumbria Mammoth said. I could be wrong as I'm not an expert but I've seen similar arguments as yours (on similar statements) demolished before by philosophers.

On a more general subject, given Humanism bases moral principles on reason (rejecting the idea of supernatural agency), on shared human values and respect for others;. it's hard for pragmatic action to occur with people working together to improve quality of life, at the same time as being forcibly disrespectful to all the religious.

Post edited at 11:30
OP john arran 10 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

What you appear to have missed, bafflingly, is that I wasn't arguing that religion needs to be able to justify itself using rational tools, but that in this case one such rational tool was indeed being used to justify a religious stance and it contained a fundamental reasoning flaw.

 Offwidth 10 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

I'm not missing that. I think that what I think Cumbria Mammoth was trying to say is right, that there is a rational position that can start from faith. I don't have to share that faith to think that. Effectively you are saying faith can't prove gods existence, which although true doesn't help us work alongside or understand what can be a faith based self-consistent philosophy of a religious person. 

Post edited at 12:11
OP john arran 10 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

All of which I would agree with, except the slight problem that starting from faith cannot be in any way a rational decision. It may be justified in a variety of ways but rationality isn't one of them. Once that decision's been made, of course, my whole point was that you can use genuine rational reasoning to show whatever you like as long as you've axiomatically started out with something equivalent to what you're trying to show.

cb294 10 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

Religions NEED to be disrepected as  long as there are religious people happy to act on their  convictions in a way that affects others.

Rationally unjustified, baseless belief in supernatural beings and other obsolete explanations for why the world is how it is have long enough hampered progress, and served as justification for discrimination and human rights abuses.

If you want to do anything that impacts others you better have a solid, rationally justifyable reason. Feelings some waffly spiritual connection with the universe, hearing concrete voices of god in your head, or finding instructions in the words of some long dead prophet are not sufficient, and the way our governments still pander to such irrationality is deeply embrarassing.

CB

cb294 10 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

> .... I think that what I think Cumbria Mammoth was trying to say is right, that there is a rational position that can start from faith. .....

That seems to be his standpoint, but it is a wrong standpoint. Starting from an unjustified axiomatic startpoint contaminates the entire rest of the argument. At the very least, everything that follows has to be qualified ("Assuming my startpoint be true, i.e. there is a creator, then follows XYZ"). So to apply your ideas more generally, or even derive concrete policy from them, you should have to justify your choice of start point.

CB

 Andy Clarke 10 Dec 2020
In reply to cb294:

> Religions NEED to be disrepected as  long as there are religious people happy to act on their  convictions in a way that affects others.

> Rationally unjustified, baseless belief in supernatural beings and other obsolete explanations for why the world is how it is have long enough hampered progress, and served as justification for discrimination and human rights abuses.

Personally, I don't feel this is sufficient reason to disrespect religion on principle. After all, two of the last century's most significant campaigners for human rights - King and Gandhi - were men of profound religious faith and I don't doubt that there were times when this faith was of great help to them in continuing a struggle that must often have looked hopeless.

 Duncan Bourne 10 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

>What I am trying to get to is the starting point. I'm hearing arguments that claim atheism (by which I don't mean an absence of belief but I mean having a strong enough conviction that God doesn't exist to lead to labelling people that do believe in God as weak minded) is the exclusive completely rational belief system. The arguments put forward to claim this superiority tend to rely on theists having invented God as an unjustified extra layer to fill in gaps in knowledge. I reject this, what I'm saying is that for the many people who have an intuition that God exists that is the starting point. From this foundation there is no compelling reason that I'm aware of why belief in a creator has to be abandoned.

First of all I wanted to clear up the notion that theists are weak minded. Most of our science is here because of early investigations by Muslim scholars before the crusades buggered everything up and Gregor Mendel the father of genetics was a monk, to name but one.

I still hold that a creator concept emerges from the human imagination rather than a physical entity. This is a slightly different take on the concept of “invention” in that I don’t think anyone ever sat down and said let’s invent God, although plenty have done that about how such a God operates ever since.

I don’t think that God was invented to fill in gaps in knowledge but has retreated as our knowledge has expanded (ie changes in how the earth developed and species arose. No one claiming the world is 60,000 years old is taken seriously any more even though it was once regarded as such.) Or should that be the interpretation of God has changed to include things God has no control over or chooses not to have control over.

Atheists may claim a logical superiority but Theists have commanded a superior position for centuries and still do so it is a bit rich to complain that atheists act superior. I think anyone holding a particular position automatically believes it to be superior. Why argue a belief you thought was false? Really it is seeking to understand which position has the greater validity and that is a tricky thing to establish as we are talking about something which by its very nature is hard to validate.

To return to this; “what I'm saying is that for the many people who have an intuition that God exists that is the starting point.” (which I understand as a leap of imagination, a Eureka moment if you like)

“From this foundation there is no compelling reason that I'm aware of why belief in a creator has to be abandoned.” (I see no reason why it should be abandoned but I don’t see it as a compelling reason for an outsider to take it as prove of existence.)

>the theory that I am most interested in is that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe and that our brains/minds "tune" into it, resolving it into an individual ego which is an adaption that helps our physical bodies to survive in our environment. I think that when people have these spiritual experiences they are bypassing the filter of our brain and having an experience of the universal consciousness. Pure speculation I admit.

An interesting theory and one that has many different adherents (The Gaia hypothesis being one). But again is a leap of imagination that doesn’t necessarily translate into a universal consciousness as espoused by any particular religion.

In fairness this is also how science works “what if?” followed by “Then what?” and “What should we get if we do this/look here?”

Good debate by the way

Post edited at 13:23
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 Offwidth 10 Dec 2020
In reply to cb294:

I'm aware those are your views but I think you are very wrong. If you don't give space for religious people in society, especially given their massive prevalence, you risk spreading your views to someone less morally constrained who might commit crimes based on those views. Disrespect too easily leads to hate. Those committing violence against the religious, because they hate their viewpont, is not limited to other religious people.

In opposing the damage done by religious irrationality, I would fully support you and we have laws to deal with egregious examples.

Post edited at 13:35
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 Jon Stewart 10 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

Interesting reply, thanks. Although I presented my position as being perfectly rational and unproblematic, I was actually skating over some interesting problems. For me, these problems are less problematic than theism, but it's a matter of degree.

> The arguments put forward to claim this superiority tend to rely on theists having invented God as an unjustified extra layer to fill in gaps in knowledge. I reject this, what I'm saying is that for the many people who have an intuition that God exists that is the starting point.

I think I can see what you're saying - the disagreement, I think is about what we mean by "rational". I maintain that basing belief on a foundation of intuition isn't "rational" - or at least it doesn't fit my definition of "rational" which brings a requirement of objectivity. I can quite understand that if you have a really strong intuition about something big like the existence of a realm beyond the physical into which religion provides a window, then that becomes foundational. But that intuition is a purely subjective feature of your consciousness and when I say "rational" I'm saying that it's something anyone can come to the same answer about, something objective. So my foundations are stuff like Occam's razor which we use to find out about what's out there in the world outside our subjective experience. I think you're arguing that a foundation of intuition is of equal firmness or shakiness to foundations like Occam's razor, abductive reasoning, etc. 

It's pretty hard to show that, say, Occam's razor really is right (you can actually argue that it's self-defeating in fact). Whereas if you have a very strong intuition, while that's even harder to show that it's right (impossible in fact, that's what makes it an intuition), it probably feels much harder to give up than Occam's razor.

This is why I would say that atheism, a near-certainty that god does not exist exactly like a lack of belief in fairies or whatever is more "rational". It's the conclusion you reach when you try to reduce the reliance on purely subjective experience (it's impossible to eliminate of course since all we know is our experience). If your foundations are intuition then you're giving enormous weight to certain purely subjective experiences and that doesn't fit the definition of what many of us call "rational" which is striving for objectivity.

> You introduced the phrase JTB knowledge to me earlier which I had to google and I misunderstood that it meant a justified belief about the truth rather than a justified belief that is also true.

That makes sense now. I've learnt quite a lot about philosophy through this process, going away to find out what terms mean or who said what in the past. I think it's a really interesting process, seeing how your own position fits into the wider landscape of what people who've spent their lives thinking about these things have come up with. I made it sound like JTB knowledge was uncontroversial, but it's got problems as a theory of knowledge. Same with the correspondence theory of truth. But for me, they're pretty solid theories which I consider "good enough to make progress" even if there are ways to (maybe) undermine them.

> So, people who have had direct experience of God have a Justified Belief in God then and if their account is credible then others can have a Justified Belief in God. This justified belief may or may not also be true. If you've had a direct experience then you ought to have a very strong reason to abandon belief in that experience. 

That's right. Atheists/rationalists would say that basically, Occam's razor is a very strong reason, but I get that that probably isn't convincing to someone who has very strong intuitions about very profound and salient experiences. The question is whether that meets a definition of "rational" or not, and I maintain it doesn't, because when I say "rational" I mean something like "objective".

> Better minds than me have got stuck into the mind-body problem but the theory that I am most interested in is that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe and that our brains/minds "tune" into it, resolving it into an individual ego which is an adaption that helps our physical bodies to survive in our environment. I think that when people have these spiritual experiences they are bypassing the filter of our brain and having an experience of the universal consciousness. Pure speculation I admit.

Yes. The mind-body problem always ends up somewhere completely mad, which is why it's great. Many people who consider themselves hardcore rationalists end up saying that consciousness doesn't exist, which is totally ridiculous and obviously wrong. My rationalist scheme ends up with "epiphenomenalism" - consciousness existing but seemingly playing no causal role (hard to reconcile with me thinking of this and making my fingers type it - quite mad). Your approach is a bit mad as well - I would argue rather more mad than mine. So you see what I mean, taking the atheist/materialist/rationalist worldview doesn't give me a problem free, sensible understanding of the world, and I don't have to get to what happened before the big bang to run into difficulties. "How am I conscious" causes plenty of problems for the atheist/materialist/rationalist, which we rather like to skate over.

Post edited at 19:40
cb294 10 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

Eat more shit, billions of flies cannot be wrong....

Whether an idea, philosophy, delusion, or worldview is worthy of respect is certainly not a question of how widely its is held.

Instead, it depends on the validity of the argument brought forth. In that, holding on to one of several internally inconsistent bronze age superstitions is plainly a ridiculous philosophical or intellectual stance and not worthy of respect, just to be laughed at.

Respecting the value of religious ritual for society, enjoying Bach's Christmas Oratory etc., celebrating Chritsmas as a time of rest, family, and calm is an entirely different issue:

I would always wear long sleeves and take off my hat when entering a church, would not taunt my muslim colleague with food during Ramadan, am in favour of shops being closed on Sunday or religious holidays, etc.....

Just don't claim that the notions of a creator making the universe, his son popping up here 2ky ago by virgin birth, that you are absolved from responsibilty for your actions because the son of god died for them and founded a club that actually has power to absolve us from that accountability, etc., are a true account of what happened and how the world functions, rather than man made, useful myths.

Base your world view on these myths being factual (or at least that they contain an ever shrinking kernel of truth, as the god of the gaps faithful would argue), which by definition includes the claim that all their associated rules also apply to everyone else including me, and I reserve my right to laugh at your naivité.

CB

cb294 10 Dec 2020
In reply to Andy Clarke:

No, the only reason to disrespect religion as a world view is its intellectually laughable inconsistency, both internally (why does have Christianity two accounts of creation and four of the life and teachings of its main guru?), between competing versions (they cannot ALL be correct, if I would have to pick one the Norse ones seem fun, with the promise of complete game over by Ragnarök and a lying squirrel running up and down some tree...), and of course incompatibly with the entire body of knowledge, insight, and progress brought by materialist science.

Respecting what Gandhi and King did, and acknowledging that they were inspired by entirely man made myths? No problem, except so were the folk burning witches or those tearing down the mosque at Ayodijah...

 mondite 10 Dec 2020
In reply to cb294:

>  if I would have to pick one the Norse ones seem fun, with the promise of complete game over by Ragnarök

Being picky it wasnt complete game over but more a reboot. Whilst pretty much everyone, including most of the gods, would be dead the earth would be renewed and life, including humans, would return.

cb294 10 Dec 2020
In reply to mondite:

True, but what can beat Ratatöskr*? A f*cking ginormous megasquirrel running up and down the world tree, exchanging messages between the eagle on top and the dragon at the roots, lying to both?

They must have been smoking POWERFUL stuff.

CB

 *Great name, too. Drill-Tooth. Anyway, I am always amazed by how essentially all mythologies are rather vague on mechanistic detail but highly precise on the names of every demon or hero involved.

Reminds me of making up bed time stories for my children: "Yes daddy, you have said there was a pig standing in the field, but was was the NAME of that pig..."

edit: ... and my cynical mind says, "...so the priest makes one up".

Post edited at 22:36
In reply to cb294:

> > .... I think that what I think Cumbria Mammoth was trying to say is right, that there is a rational position that can start from faith. .....

> That seems to be his standpoint, but it is a wrong standpoint. Starting from an unjustified axiomatic startpoint contaminates the entire rest of the argument. At the very least, everything that follows has to be qualified ("Assuming my startpoint be true, i.e. there is a creator, then follows XYZ"). So to apply your ideas more generally, or even derive concrete policy from them, you should have to justify your choice of start point.

> CB

Thanks to all who have replied. I've tied myself in knots tonight over how to put things and still not come up with anything satisfactory so here is a bit of a rushed response before I pack it in for the night. I might not get a chance to reply again in the next couple of days.

I came into the thread wanting to make the point that atheism and theism are as irrational as each other and I still think that holds even though the thread has developed in some surprising ways.

All knowledge comes down to an unjustified axiom, there is always one more layer to peel back and in the end there is an unproven fundamental. I think an individual who begins as a theist or who begins as an atheist can rationally justify maintaining that position. None of us start out as a blank slate after all.

God isn't an invention to fill in gaps in knowledge. A predisposition towards the idea of God may be an innate part of our genetic programming, and there are credible reports from people who have had what they report as divine encounters through meditation, near death experiences, and through drugs.

I don't agree with this lack of belief in gods definition of atheism. Just because it is easier to word your belief in the negative doesn't make it not a belief. The question of whether there is a creator is one of the big questions, (there are good reasons to ask such as the experiences described above or because of the apparent fine tuning of the universe) and the options are yes, no, or I don't know. If someone is not interested in the question then they could maybe be described as falling within this no belief definition (but they wouldn't describe themselves as atheist), but anybody who is engaged enough to get involved in this thread and is coming down on the side of no has a belief. If anyone was really able to come to the question without a view, without proof either way it could not be rational for them to say anything other than I don't know.

In reply to john arran:

I absolutely agree with you. very deep thoughts that respond within me.

 Offwidth 11 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

You say starting from faith is an irrational base (I'd agree), but where is our rational base? What is the practical difference to humanism if people with faith attempt to build scientific and philosophical rationality on top of that faith?

In reply to john arran:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/episteme/article/abs/god-as-the-ult...

"Traditional secular conspiracy theories and explanations of worldly events in terms of supernatural agency share interesting epistemic features. This paper explores what can be called “supernatural conspiracy theories”, by considering such supernatural explanations through the lens of recent work on the epistemology of secular conspiracy theories. After considering the similarities and the differences between the two types of theories, the prospects for agnosticism both with respect to secular conspiracy theories and the existence of God are then considered. Arguments regarding secular conspiracy theories suggest ways to defend agnosticism with respect to God from arguments that agnosticism is not a logically stable position and that it ultimately collapses into atheism, as has been argued by N. Russell Hanson and others. I conclude that such attacks on religious agnosticism fail to appreciate the conspiratorial features of God's alleged role in the universe."

This looks like an interesting read , although they want money for the article.

I just thought I'd throw the link and idea's in it your way.

cb294 11 Dec 2020
In reply to cumbria mammoth:

> All knowledge comes down to an unjustified axiom, there is always one more layer to peel back and in the end there is an unproven fundamental.

I don't buy that. Even if I accepted that materialst scientism / atheism, like theism, had an axiomatic start point I would disagree with the idea that the choice of start point is arbitrary.

I would demand that the start point for developing an overarching theory / world view is chosen so that it is consistent with the huge, still increasing and importantly, internally consistent body of scientific explanations for what is happening in this world and how.

By choosing a start point that is either contradicting that knowledge (there clearly is no thunder god) or are superfluos and are simply tacked on (why invoke a creator...) you lose the right to have your world view called rational: "Rational" demands culling any superfluous assumptions.

> .... and there are credible reports from people who have had what they report as divine encounters through meditation, near death experiences, and through drugs.

The EXPERIENCES of divine encounters are certainly credible, and fMRI studies have documented activation of language processing parts of the brain of praying nuns, without corresponding signals in the upstream auditory system. That this constitutes external input, and not merely an induced malfunctioning of the brain (as with drugs and near death) is much less credible.

Such reports/intuitions are therefore not a rational choice of starting point.

CB

 Offwidth 11 Dec 2020
In reply to cb294:

You completely bypass the social and legal context of the religious in the western world. They have freedom of religious conscience but they don't have a right to do anything they like and can't bypass law. You rant away as if all the religious have literal belief in their holy books and are running amok over law. You're embarrassing.

I wasnt 'feeling the width' of the religious numbers I was more concerned with constitutional protections and  the legal rights of the religious and how we can all live together constructively in peace. I see your style of atheism as a risk to that as it 'others' the religious. Humanism in contrast works well alongside the religious when dealing with rational views and asks us to call out abuse in the name of religion. It's fully consistent with what makes a good citizen. 

4
cb294 11 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

Not at all. They have exceptions no other groups enjoy. Just a few minutes ago I heard that the Cardinal of Cologne just referred himself to the Pope for checking whether in 2005 he covered up a child abuse by not referring a paedophile priest who had abused a choir boy to a "canonical" examination, as the priest allegedly was too ill.

WTF? I know how those exceptions came about historically, but there is zero excuse for having them still in the year 2020. That should be question for regular criminal courts to examine.

If it were up to me, the catholic church should be disbanded and their assets sold to pay for their centuries long, active collaboration in such crimes and their coverup. Add having discrimination of women as a core tenet to the charge sheet.

Again, if the principles of a group are incompatible with human rights it should be banned, without any excuses for superstition.

Any individual should be free to stick to whatever sad and embarrassing superstition they like, but everbody else should be free to ridicule them, and draw cartoons of a phrophet with a bomb turban, etc.

However, religious organizations should have no exemption from antidiscrimination or employment rules.

Let's force the pope to appoint 30% of female cardinals, or close down his club!

CB

 Offwidth 11 Dec 2020
In reply to cb294:

The crimes of the religious don't make it right to hate in return. The catholic church is a vital part of the lives of many millions of good law abiding EU citizens. The church is not above the law nor are those in power who illegally assist in covering up any criminal action. The corruption and crime attached to the catholic church are horrific in my view and the inaction of our governments is a stain on our democracy, yet ordinary catholics are not to blame.

The rhetoric you use and its universality is getting too close in my view to that of the religious or ideological extremists (whose views and actions are not compatible with the laws they live under). You have a right to say it but I'd rather you didn't and I certainly don't think it helps us all live together in peace, or allow crime commited in the name of religion, or under it's protection, to be properly dealt with.

Freedom to ridicule depends on the circumstances. Our laws and structures allow that fully in a satirical magazine, less so on post watershed satirical TV, less again in news media, and can be illegal face to face in the street (where it amounts to incitement). I appreciate the European state interventions on these limits of freedom of speech as the evidence from the US is extremism (in particular religious extremism) and hate is more prevalent there and enabled by their additional freedoms.

Post edited at 09:46
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OP john arran 11 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

I very much doubt that cb294 thinks it would be a good idea to have a sudden revolution whereby all of his ideas are enacted overnight, though I'd certainly agree with the majority of them being medium term goals. Society simply isn't distancing itself from public interference in the name of religion, or if it is the change could be quicker.

 Offwidth 11 Dec 2020
In reply to john arran:

I'd be happy with those 'medium term goals' if they arose naturally in democratic civil society. I've been clear I think our governments and legal systems have failed us in the Catholic and C of E child abuse scandals (amongst other crimes committed under the name of religion that have not been fairly prosecuted). 

Key reasons I abandoned the religions of my family at a very young age (I was exposed to 3 competing versions of Christianity) was awareness of historical hate and modern hypocrisy.  It's really worrying to me to see western atheists who claim to be of the political centre become militant towards law abiding citzens with faith. I thought that the territory of politically extreme atheist dictators. Hate never leads anywhere good.

Post edited at 10:10
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cb294 11 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

I would argue that being a member of the Catholic church, or more precisely, to remain a member once these crimes became public knowledge, amounts to being an accessory to the crimes of the institution:

Even if you yourself do not abuse children (which is obviously the case for the vast majority of catholics) or discriminate against women (quite the reverse, as a catholic woman the church will almost by definition have discriminated against you, even if you have been brought up to accept that), your membership gives the institution the excuse to continue these abuses or discriminatory practises. These need to be called out for what they are.

The starting point, however, was whether a self delusion can become accepted truth if it is shared by enough people. I would argue that this is wrong in principle.

I have no issue with following religious ritual as long as it is crystal clear that these are not derived from a divine truth, but are inventions of man. The problem with accepting the former is that it absolves people from the responsibility of the effects of their religion on others, which is innacceptable in principle.

CB

1
 Offwidth 11 Dec 2020
In reply to cb294:

An opinion you are entitled to but its not the legal or constitutional situation you live under. I share all your concerns about crimes and discrimination but please stick to attacking the church and crackpot religious individuals and their actions and stop collectively bundling in law abiding citizens with faith. Modern history shows real change needs religious moderates on board.

Post edited at 11:43
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cb294 11 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

True, what I do amounts to political campaigning to get these privileges revoked!

However, I do also hold moderate catholics responsible for the actions of the catholic church as a whole (obviously not for specific cases of abuse by individual priests directly).

After all, they keep that institution alive and pass their deferential attitudes towards the church and their tolerance of discrimination on to their children.

CB

 Timmd 11 Dec 2020
In reply to cb294:

> If it were up to me, the catholic church should be disbanded and their assets sold to pay for their centuries long, active collaboration in such crimes and their coverup. Add having discrimination of women as a core tenet to the charge sheet.

> Again, if the principles of a group are incompatible with human rights it should be banned, without any excuses for superstition.

> Any individual should be free to stick to whatever sad and embarrassing superstition they like, but everbody else should be free to ridicule them, and draw cartoons of a phrophet with a bomb turban, etc.

> However, religious organizations should have no exemption from antidiscrimination or employment rules.

> Let's force the pope to appoint 30% of female cardinals, or close down his club!

> CB

There's been attempts to 'ban' religions before, and it's never worked, and it doesn't work in Tibet, though the CCP are doing their best to wipe out any Tibetan Buddhist beliefs ( they might get as far as reducing the numbers who follow it so it's less culturally significant, but it'll still exist). I agree with Offwidth, that the religious people need to be involved in any changes for the better, people can tend to hunker down in a defensive manner if feeling opposed or under threat. How we got to a stage where in the UK we won't draw pictures of a long dead person under threat of a backlash is something which concerns me too, though. It's like being in the middle ages in that aspect, 'whargh, you drew a picture of him', any holy people in heaven (which are thought to exist) are fine and unaffected because they're in heaven - which surely makes everything fine?

Post edited at 16:27
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 Offwidth 11 Dec 2020
In reply to Timmd:

That depends on the branch of Islam and any threats of violence are of course illegal. Lots of pictures here (mainly from Iran):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depictions_of_Muhammad

cb294 11 Dec 2020
In reply to Timmd:

/Checks time - spots that this is the 21st century./

The superstitionists have been pandered to long enough, they can believe whatever crap they want but their permanent holding back of progress must be stopped. It is simply not on anymore to run a club of any kind that blocks women from leading positions, or prevents information about child abuse being passed on to the criminal justice system because of confidentiality of some made up psycho power mechanisms supposedly absolving people from the responsibility of their actions.

This breaks fundamental rules that must trump whatever is written by some bronze age goat herds.

By all means keep the beneficial rules and rituals that have permeated into wider society (as I said above, I am much in favour of e.g. keeping Sundays free, will always follow a respectful dress code when sightseeing in churches or monasteries....), but let's not tolerate arguing from any other position than that these rules are man made.

At a personal level, believe whatever you want, but any unfounded idea that such rules really are of divine origin must not be ebterteined by society.

Taking recourse to divine inspiration, i.e. claiming that certain rules must be adhered to because someone supernatural told as so, rather than because they work and for a long time they were beneficial for society, will always be abused as a justification to deviate from the rules that apply to everyone else (human rights, antidiscrimination, labour, child protection, animal welfare, etc. ...).

CB

 RobAJones 11 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

Hi, Some of your thoughts made me want to do a bit of research into Educational Inequality over time. This document challenges my opinion( and I think yours) that things improved from 1970-2000. Given the increase in female graduates and introduction of comprehensive schools. It was written in 2004, hopefully I can find something more recent that can convince me things have improved over the last 20 years.

"The central conclusion from this survey of work is that the links between parental income, parental social class and eventual higher education achievement have strengthened over time.Family background, rather than a person’s early ability, played a more important role in determining how well someone does for those born in 1970 than for those born in 1958"

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1475-5890.2004.tb00099.x

 Timmd 11 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

> That depends on the branch of Islam and any threats of violence are of course illegal. Lots of pictures here (mainly from Iran):

Thank you for adding that, something worth remembering. Perhaps that could be a spark of change. I wonder if one could use that 'to argue the point with'?

Post edited at 18:13
 Timmd 11 Dec 2020
In reply to cb294:

It's not about the validity of your arguments to do with more of society 'sticking to reality' one might call it (as an atheist ex Catholic I'm not going to disagree), but more about how human nature can be, which (imho) is why the religious need to be part of the process.

Tangentially related, a sociologist and psychologist who did a study of the Roma people in mainland Europe, found that where they feel more under pressure from the rest of society, they can tend to hold onto different elements of their culture even where they can be harmful to them, from perceiving their own sense of identity to be under threat.

Humans are humans, and reality is reality, I think there's often only a passing relationship between the 2, if the Roma people can dig their heals in (for understandable if not 'logical' reasons), I think religious people can probably be expected to as well. I think I've a certain empathy for religious people too, in seeing them as needing to believe, but that's not at the root of why I think an 'agreeable approach' might work better.

Edit: At least Germany is doing something right in not recognising Scientology as a religion, they're recognised as one in the UK.

Post edited at 18:31
 Offwidth 11 Dec 2020
In reply to RobAJones:

That's interesting as the Freakanomics pair did some research in US education and found similar sounding results. In particular the background, family and other educational support was more important than the quality reputation of the school (as long as the school was OK). Hence the effort and obsession some parents had in getting kids into the right school would be better placed in providing better support at home.

Please don't think I regard everything as improved. A level maths standards have dropped several grades. Grade inflation has happened in many Universities. Governance in new Universities has got worse. I really don't think the students I taught changed that much in general ability over my time but those with serious problems (especially mental health) were better treated with time (with the exception of dyslexia where support funding was stupidly cut fairly recently). Students always approximately deserved the pass grades I gave them (or not!). I think this was partly luck on my part as other academics I've met had significant pressure to increase pass rates and grades

 RobAJones 11 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

> That's interesting as the Freakanomics pair did some research in US education and found similar sounding results. In particular the background, family and other educational support was more important than the quality reputation of the school (as long as the school was OK). Hence the effort and obsession some parents had in getting kids into the right school would be better placed in providing better support at home.

 IMO OFSTED have exacerbated the problem. I've worked in Outstanding and Inadequate schools, this had little to do with the teaching  or management quality. There have been really good and a few poor teachers, in every school I've worked in. It does understandably result in parents who care about their kids education sending them to certain schools. I think your "not OK" schools are ones that contain students whose parents don't know how to care about their education. Sleep and diet have more effect on progress than teaching? I no with parents paying for tutors to try to improve understanding than I do with parents paying for better contacts at a private school. I think that is a British thing?  Certainly when compared to high performing education systems. 

> Please don't think I regard everything as improved. A level maths standards have dropped several grades. Grade inflation has happened in many Universities. Governance in new Universities has got worse. I really don't think the students I taught changed that much in general ability over my time but those with serious problems (especially mental health) were better treated with time (with the exception of dyslexia where support funding was stupidly cut fairly recently). Students always approximately deserved the pass grades I gave them (or not!). I think this was partly luck on my part as other academics I've met had significant pressure to increase pass rates and grades

I wonder if there will be a change in priorities?A friend of mine works in the Chem. Eng. industry he  says some skilled operators are now paid considerably more than the people managing them. Computers are very good at calculating, robots less so at performing tasks in an uncontrolled environment. I agree students haven't changed much, although I think parental attitude has. MRs J is musical, she is worried students in her old school don't have the same opportunity she had, free instruments, free lessons, school orchestra, county youth orchestra etc.. I looked up the ABRSM stats. the number of grade 8's has been pretty constant for 40 years, pass,merit ,distinction rates have also been constant. Are people giving music teachers a hard time, for pass rates not improving? If driving test pass rates went from 40% to 80%, would the reaction be driving instructors are getting much better or sh*t there are lots of dangerous drivers on the road? There seems to be an acceptance that the music teacher/driving instructor know what they are doing and enter the student for the exam at the correct time. Yep, both Mrs J's cousin, my brother and his partner are all looking for a way out due to pressure to improve grades against their better judgement.

 freeflyer 11 Dec 2020
In reply to Timmd:

> It's not about the validity of your arguments to do with more of society 'sticking to reality' one might call it (as an atheist ex Catholic I'm not going to disagree), but more about how human nature can be, which (imho) is why the religious need to be part of the process.

Religion is indeed a process, not a theory or a bandwagon.

This film exemplifies what religion is about - bringing people together, giving them a voice and responding to their needs:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-55133081
 

1
 Sir Chasm 11 Dec 2020
In reply to freeflyer:

Those are noce people doing some great work. Do you not think it's a bit shitty that they're clearing up after god created a mess? He made covid. And poverty. He knew all this was going to happen. 

1
 freeflyer 12 Dec 2020
In reply to Sir Chasm:

I agree with your comment, and I would indeed think it was more than shitty if I had the beliefs that you describe.

I'm guessing that if you spoke to the people in the film, you'd get a good variety of responses, but mostly they'd be getting on with the job of living in very difficult circumstances, and that they are doing for others what in the past they've found difficult to do for themselves. The result is, hopefully, positive all round.

Religion that matters is a personal spiritual path of some kind - any kind. How you describe it is up to you. If you want to describe it as a mess with covid and poverty, then that is what your path looks like at the moment. Looking at that film makes me feel that way as well.

 Sir Chasm 12 Dec 2020
In reply to freeflyer:

> I agree with your comment, and I would indeed think it was more than shitty if I had the beliefs that you describe.

> I'm guessing that if you spoke to the people in the film, you'd get a good variety of responses, but mostly they'd be getting on with the job of living in very difficult circumstances, and that they are doing for others what in the past they've found difficult to do for themselves. The result is, hopefully, positive all round.

> Religion that matters is a personal spiritual path of some kind - any kind. How you describe it is up to you. If you want to describe it as a mess with covid and poverty, then that is what your path looks like at the moment. Looking at that film makes me feel that way as well.

I have no idea what you are trying to say. 

 Offwidth 12 Dec 2020
In reply to RobAJones:

It's very rare that high skilled industrial workers get paid more than managers. Job evaluation methodologies focus on rank responsibility and money. The japanese were famous for their more enlightened position when I was young, based on niche US business theory that no one would implement at home.

My dads last job was as a non-standard sport peripatetic across many schools. Alongside these sport specialists there were music and language and other niche specialists. Most became victims of budget cuts. Then to add insult to injury contract fall outs led to most unpaid out of hours sport support being lost. State school curriculum lack flexibility richness and depth....another reason many parents pay for something else.

Post edited at 09:56
 Andy Clarke 12 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

> State school curriculum lack flexibility richness and depth....another reason many parents pay for something else.

These are certainly aspects which have shrunk over the years - primarily because of government diktat, driven by foolishly backward-looking ideology. In the great days of curriculum development - say 70's to mid 80's - state secondary schools were often driving innovation in such areas as modularisation, continuous assessment, whole-school language policies, active learning, mixed-ability, individual project work  etc etc. I look back on the things I was able to do as a Head of English/Head of Communications Faculty with a mixture of amazement and sadness at how much has been lost. And those paying for private schooling for their own children are very often exactly those who voted in the anti-progressive ideologues who have wreaked the destruction!

 Offwidth 12 Dec 2020
In reply to Andy Clarke:

Agreed.

In the meantime on a completely different subject we don't need conspiracy theories to explain why F1 are reluctant to stop sportswashing repressive regimes, including the Saudis who resist allowing half the population being allowed to drive and treated campaigners as terrorists.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/12/lewis-hamilton-human-...

These regimes are the same ones where money funds the catastrophe in Yemen, leaks worldwide to islamic terrorism and explicitly funds islamic extremist views in mosques across the world.  Hiow much more damage is OK before the west put law, human rights and social liberalism before money and oil.

 RobAJones 12 Dec 2020
In reply to Offwidth:

> It's very rare that high skilled industrial workers get paid more than managers.

That has certainly been true, up to now. I'm just not sure it won't become more common in the future. Until the last few years I hadn't heard of it at all, but I can see that earning more than your boss could cause problems in many circumstances. With a higher percentage of people now getting a degree, I think the  "value"  of some have already been reduced. A ex-teacher friend says he is taking home more as a delivery driver than he was as a HOD, for fewer hours (I'm not convinced he is really better off,as I don't think he has factored in pension, sick pay etc.). If this is a trend it  might help improve income mobility, which is possibly more important than social mobility.

 RobAJones 12 Dec 2020
In reply to Andy Clarke:

Agreed. League Tables have exacerbated to problem. I decided I'd had enough when it was openly admitted at SLT meetings, that we were making decisions regarding the courses followed by students, based on how it would affect the schools "results" rather than what would be in the child's best interests.


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