Well, I am one of the few, but I have got to say that I have become more sympathetic towards religion (especially Christianity). — Emptyheady

How did you arrive at your social conservatism?

Christopher Hitchens is the only commie I respect. — Emptyheady

But CH wasn't a social conservative for sure :P

The youth of the 3 Abrahamic faiths were not especially conservative as I remember--more like associated with social upheaval. — Bitter Crank

You *may* (but I would dispute even this) be correct about Christianity, but Judaism and Islam were conservative from the very beginning. Although both passed through times when the conservatism advocated by the religion was actually neglected. Baghdad during the Golden Age of Islam was similar to New York today :P

It isn't very common that that people do this--launch "revolutions" within the church, yet preserve their conservative faith. — Bitter Crank

What do you think of Reinhold Niebuhr?

I don't follow why social conservatives are restricted and progressive liberals aren't. In fact, it makes no sense at all to me. Both are equally restricted.

Social conservatives are foundational, tied to certain basic beliefs which they cannot change and still remain socially conservative — Cavacava

But so it is with everyone. This holds for progressive liberals too - they can't suddenly be anti-gay marriage and still be progressive liberals...

Joe believes in God. Joe doesn't believe that God has communicated with him. Joe says that God has communicated with him. Joe is lying about this. Well, Joe believes in God. It's not true that Joe is an atheist. — Terrapin Station

Okay, how does Joe form a belief in God? He tells others that he believes in God because God has spoken to him. If that isn't so, why doesn't he give the real reason for his belief? I'm not saying that these that you list aren't possibilities - they are logical possibilties, but I don't care about that, because they're very unlikely.

So that something is highly unlikely/dubious doesn't imply that the alternative is a logical implication. Logical implications only obtain when the alternative is (logically) impossible. — Terrapin Station

I'm talking pragmatically here not logically. I don't care about having an air-tight logical argument for this.

Via attempting to explain natural phenomena, various regular occurrences, various disasters, etc. — Terrapin Station

If you look at religious texts, these are very rarely cited as reasons, and most of the religious texts don't deal with explaining science or the reason for the occurrence of natural events at all. They mostly deal with history and morality.

If it gets right. If the belief coheres with what's the case in the world. — Terrapin Station

Sorry but such expressions are totally foreign to me. It gets right? How can something get right? Something may BE right, but GET right?

it's not at all impossible to claim that x communicated with you without really having an experience (or consecutive experiences if you like) of x communicating with you. How is that possible? By lying. — Terrapin Station

Yes I agree. Therefore if they lie about it, they are atheists.

Of course, it's also possible to claim that x communicated with you where you really did have an experience (or consecutive experiences) of x communicating with you but where no x communicated with you. In other words, your mental phenomena could be illusory, or you could be mistaken about how your mental phenomena correlate with the world. — Terrapin Station

Yes but it would require this to happen consecutively, over almost an entire life-span. That's highly unlikely and dubious. Apart from this, I would need to suffer of no sort of mental illness which impedes me from influencing my fellow men in order to be able to start a religion.

It's not at all the case that the people who created religions had to be atheists just in case there are no gods. — Terrapin Station

No but they certainly probably were, and surely I have no reason to assume otherwise.

The people who created religions could have been (and surely were) religious believers. — Terrapin Station

How would they come to religious belief if there is no God? Moses for example, claimed to come to religious belief and came down the mountain with tablets written by God. He surely must know if God really communicated with him or not. And if God didn't, and he is lying, then he knows he is lying.

"The atheistic belief has right what the world is like." — Terrapin Station

First of all I struggle to understand this sentence - the atheistic belief HAS right?? What the hell does that mean?

And it does follow - because it implies that folks who created religions must have been atheists. It's impossible to claim God communicated with me, unless I really did have consecutive experiences of God communicating. But if atheism is true, then God didn't communicate with me, and I darn well know he didn't.

Okay, so if the atheistic belief has right what the world is like, then that implies that atheists created religions because _____? (And then what's the argument there?) — Terrapin Station

That implies atheists created religions because the folks who have created religions were the educated - those who could, first of all, write, and write very well. If you look at some of the Books from the Bible for example, they are very well written, and they illustrate quite complex points. Clearly they weren't written by idiots, or uncultured men and women. If there is no God, and if no God actually communicated with them, it is obvious that they would be aware of this when writing the religious texts. As for why they created religion - simple - to have an easy way to teach and enforce morality on their fellow men.

Okay, so how would "A lack of belief in God" being true (do you mean it's true that the person has a lack of belief in God? Or are you more saying if the belief has right what the world is like?)--anyway, how would the lack of belief in God have any sort of implication for the creation of religions? — Terrapin Station

Atheism being true obviously doesn't mean a lack of belief in God is true. It means there is no God.

What do you take atheism to be, first off? — Terrapin Station

Lack of belief in God.

What are you talking about? Are you positing something like the idea that "atheists created religions"??? — Terrapin Station

I am saying that if atheism is true, then atheists created religions. Head over to a website like Quora, or Reddit, and so forth, and you'll see most atheists there always associating social conservatism with religion, to the point they think that folks cannot be socially conservative unless they are religious. And yet this seems strange.

(And what would that have to do with the topic you presented in this thread?) — Terrapin Station

Because if atheism is true, then atheists themselves (those who created religions) had independent reasons to hold to social conservative positions - so it seems strange to see today so many atheists who would find social conservatism as anathema to their position, and equivalent to basically being religious.

No one is saying they're identical. You asked why they're associated with each other. That's why. — Terrapin Station

Okay, but then why are there so few atheist social conservatives? Because remember, the few back in the day religions were founded, who were in power and had brain compared to the uneducated majority, if atheism is true, it would mean they founded religions and allowed them to flourish in order to justify their actions to the people. They could justify much more easily by "God said it" to the uneducated majority, than by explanation - the uneducated majority couldn't understand explanation, but they could understand "God said it". But this means that these people with the brains had been atheists themselves, and used religion merely as a tool. If so, they must have had independent reason - reason apart from religion - to issue the social conservative decrees they did. So this proves that there are independent reasons for holding to social conservative positions, and raises the question as to why there are so few atheist social conservatives today?

Religions have content that's socially conservative. Gods, prophets, etc.(whatever it might be depending on the religion at hand) supposedly issue decrees against certain sorts of behaviors, clothing options, diets, etc., and that content doesn't change. — Terrapin Station

Okay, but if they did issue such decrees, and religion itself is a myth as atheists claim, then it follows that they never issued such decrees for religious reasons. So why did they issue them? Just like today we issue laws in order to prevent wrong-doings and harm, so too, they must have perceived harm in those behaviours that they issued religious injunctions against. And therefore it seems quite clear that the position of social conservatism, given that take, would be separate from the position of religion - given atheism. Why are there so few atheist social conservatives?

Okay, if so, why is there a statistical correlation?

What does a "like" button have to do with philosophy? Is philosophy a popularity contest?

Well most people think I'm right-leaning too, but that's because I'm a social conservative, but I support left-leaning economic policies (anti-corporatism). People associate religious views with the right.

>:O sorry man but you're quite a funny one!

No i don't appeal to a "field". Have you studied quantum field theory? What we call particles are really the fields moving to a higher energy level at a certain location. This is actually science bruv - you should read up on it.

Evidently ALL of its responses, are in part due to its nature. It's simply what being a boson is - behaving that way.

Nope, the response of the particle - more precisely the Reality in the proximity of the particle - is not a function of the past. The particle is free - nothing causes, or can possibly cause its response. All loopholes are closed. — tom

Yeah the particle behaves spontaneously. So what? That doesn't mean that it's uncaused. It is caused, because something, namely a field, produces that particle, for once, and secondly because that particle has a certain nature, a nature which causes it to be spontaneous. In other words, doesn't its nature cause its free response? Its nature is such that it has a free response. Nothing uncaused about that. So no - sorry to burst your bubble. There's nothing uncaused about indeterminism :D

Nope, the response of the particle is un-caused — tom

You don't understand what uncaused means. Uncaused means that there is no particle there even. If there is a particle there, then that particle has a certain nature, a certain way of behaving. That way of behaving may be indeterministic in nature. It may be random, it may be spontaneous. All that doesn't mean there isn't a cause. It means there is a cause - that cause is the nature of the particle. It's in the nature of the particle to move, for example, spontaneously. It's in its nature - it's what it means to be that kind of particle.

And a metaphysical principle cannot be falsified by a physical theory.

I think the first one is quite useful since it separates the economic aspects (right vs left) and the social attitudes (authoritarian vs libertarian). Economically it seems most people here are on the left, and socially it seems they are very libertarian.

Second law of thermodynamics is partly metaphysical. The arrow of time isn't just a distinction of one state of existence from another, but a identification of a logical difference between the past and future. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Maybe... I'm reluctant to say it is metaphysical.

The perpetual motion machine — TheWillowOfDarkness

Practically it seems impossible.

Nothing about this relationship is necessarily to the world though. At any point, gas might behave differently or cease to exist at all. The gas laws are not a constraint on the world, but rather than expression of the world as we've found it. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Yeeeees >:O just like at any point I may become Bishop of Rome!

The gas laws are not a constraint on the world, but rather than expression of the world as we've found it. — TheWillowOfDarkness

No, they are necessary. The world couldn't be otherwise. This world couldn't. Maybe some other world could.

As such, there is no "final cause." Gas that behaves to the gas model laws is not necessary at all. It's only so when gas behaves in that way. No doubt gas that is modelled by the gas laws necessarily behaves in that way, but that is an expression, an instance of being, rather than a cause. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Look to what mumbo-jumbo crazy assumptions you have to resort to just because you're worried about the consequences of final causality with regards to God. You have to accept that the laws governing this universe could entirely change tomorrow, and be completely different! Gravity could start repelling us from the Earth rather than attracting us! So crazy...

Okay :)

Any spin-1 boson will suffice. For details, consult the Free Will Theorem. — tom

Well, all that the free-will theorem proves, if anything, is that quantum mechanics is indeterministic. That isn't to say that it is acausal. Science views indeterminism with something being uncaused, but this isn't true at all. With regard to the spin-1 boson. Taking QFT as true, the material cause is the field, the formal cause is the boson, the efficient cause is whatever gave energy to the field to move into the higher state and produce the boson, and the final cause is whatever interaction the boson has (which may indeed be an indeterminate interaction - because it is in the nature of the boson to interact, even randomly if you want, with other particles).

their time-symmetry indicates that causation is not a part of Reality. — tom

What about the second law of thermodynamics, the only theory in physics that has never been questioned - the so called arrow of time? :)

Obviously they cannot. But the behavior of the gas is understood to be the result of the interactions of the particles that constitute it. — John

On a theoretical level sure. But on the practical level no. We don't calculate as if the behaviour of individual particles mattered. We deal with global level variables - pressure, temperature, etc. which we claim/assume to arise from the behaviour of the particles. That's why my initial answer was yes and no. I didn't say I disagree with what you're saying. What you're saying isn't wrong, just not the full story.

This is irrelevant because I never said it was. It is obviously modeled as the energetic interactions of all the particles, including the interactions of the gas particles with the particles that make up the container. — John

The gas laws model the behaviour of the gas as a whole. To model it as composed of particles is to be able to take into account what each particle does and what effect those actions have. But this is precisely what isn't done. Furthermore, interaction with the walls of the container is assumed to be equivalent to interaction with other particles (except that the wall is given infinite mass - so effectively the particle that hits the wall is deflected at the opposite angle it hits at, at the same velocity it hit - this wouldn't be the case with a particle hitting another particle, because then there would be transfer of velocities across the line of impact, taking into account the masses of the two particles). Same assumptions as I said in my previous comment.

However, it is difficult to go from individual particles to pressure for example. Pressure is something that arises out of the behaviour of all the particles together, not of one single particle. Technically and theoretically this is equivalent to adding effects from each individual particle, but this has never been tested :P Furthermore, the ideal gas law applies to all gases (or so they say), regardless of the particles which make up the gas. So theoretically, two gases which have different particles which compose them, but have the same number of particles, will behave the same. Practically obviously they don't, because some of the gases have more massive particles for example, and thus behave differently in the same conditions. (but the differences are slight)

Certainly coherency of whole theories can be eroded by reduction to mechanistic explanations of action on micro-physical levels, but I think it's fair to say that it is generally presumed to be the case by modern scientists that macro processes are ultimately and exhaustively constituted by energetic, efficient microphysical processes, even if observable macrolevel interactions, for example fluctuations of animal populations in some ecosystem, cannot be coherently modeled in those terms — John

True, but what I mean to say is that this "detailed analysis" is never actually done. It's always presupposed that it is possible to do it though. It's presupposed that it's possible to go from physics and develop out of it the whole of chemistry/biology and everything else. And there are reasons for holding onto such presuppositions, but they're never actually tested.

But then how is the pressure of a gas in a container and the force it exerts on the container generally modeled? In terms of movements of particles, no? — John

Yes and no. The theory behind it is modelled as particles, but the behaviour of each individual particle isn't used to determine the behaviour of the whole gas. So the behaviour of the whole gas isn't mathematically modelled in terms of the behaviour of each individual particle. Rather the behaviour of the whole gas is determined with reference to temperature, volume, pressure, number of molecules and universal gas constant. So the behaviour of the gas in terms of particles isn't actually tractable. It's only the statistic behaviour of gas, as all the particles combined, that is tractable and modelled.

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

All these particle models assume conservation of kinetic energy (elastic collisions), conservation of momentum and transfer of forces along the line of impact. So the behaviour of gas that we know statistically is taken for granted to emerge out of the behaviour of the particles assuming those assumptions I listed. Recently in fact I've been playing around with some programming to model Brownian motion, and the assumptions used in that particle model are basically the same (so my program can model gas, just as well as Brownian motion - all that one has to do is keep the particles the same size/mass).

But, as far as I know, (and I don't know that much about quantum physics) the "particles" themselves are today considered to be energetic configurations (i.e. forms) of a field. — John

Yes but in reference to different things. For example, in reference to radioactive decay, since the atom is the main actor, we take the constituents of the atom as material cause, and their structure as the formal cause. If we take the proton as main actor, instead of the atom, and talk about the proton and its behaviour, then we take the material cause as the up up down quarks and the formal cause as their structure/relationship with each other. It's all with regard to how deep the explanation needs to go. To explain radioactive decay for example, the fact that protons are made up of quarks is irrelevant. So protons can be treated as fundamentals for the purposes of such an explanation. Of course if one wants to be really exact and detailed, they would treat quarks, bosons and so forth as fundamentals and go with everything up from there. But such an analysis isn't required for an explanation, the same way that the genetic mechanism isn't required to explain evolution. The idea of evolution can be explained merely through the idea of inheritance, and natural selection.

At bottom there does not seem to be any coherent and unequivocal distinction between form and matter. — John

I think there is. In Plato/Aristotle, matter is the raw underlying material, and form is its structure, whether this structure is given by its shape, etc. So for an atom, the constituent parts - the protons, neutrons and electrons are its material cause (and each of these particles have certain properties which influence the behaviour of the atom, such as charge). Then there is the formal cause - the form of the atom - which are all the properties given by the specific association and number of protons/electrons/neutrons - which are the properties of the different substances, etc.

Yeah that is a significant difference I think.

Yeah - and I never scored heavily on the Right either in the past when I took it. And never heavily authoritarian or heavily libertarian. I did sometimes score even heavier on the left though in the past.

My preferred economic system would be distributism - lots of independent, small producers - and no large multinational corporations. With focus on family and culture, rather than economics. Nowadays, a large part of our identity is an economical one - what job do you have and how much you earn. That's wrong. So I'm economically liberal towards the small guy, economically authoritarian towards the big guy, and socially authoritarian towards everyone on key issues with regards to the family. Oh, and I'm environmentally friendly too.

John, I always knew you're a communist at heart! >:O

How do you post image links?

Where do people think I stand? :P I will post the result soon... My result will shock and surprise! :D

Atomic structure is probably better thought of as a material cause because it is understood to determine the different kinds of material or elements. — John

If atomic structure is the material cause, then what is the formal cause? Material cause is the raw element something is made of. Formal cause is the structure of the raw element, its form.

In other words you're misinterpreting what was intended by what I wrote and insisting upon your own interpretation as if you think you know better than I do what I meant; which is annoying to say the least. I'm not interested in discussing issues that you have fabricated and then insist on attributing to me; why would I? It seems just a waste of time. — John

Maybe you intended something different than you wrote, or maybe I don't know how to understand English expressions - doesn't really matter to be honest. Stop complaining so much :P

But spin 1 bosons, with no internal structure, exhibit uncaused interactions. — tom

Give a specific example.

But there is no notion of causality in fundamental physics. — tom

That's because you, like other physicists, are using muddled up notions of causality. I've explained for example, how radioactive decay, a phenomenon widely taken to be uncaused in physics is actually caused, and can be explained and understood perfectly by Aristotle's fourfold causality metaphysics.

So how do you reduce a theory of abstract replicators undergoing variation and selection to a physical theory? — tom

Ask a scientist.

According to the "scientific world-view" (neo-)Darwinism is a fundamental theory with applications to Life, Culture and Quantum Mechanics. — tom

Not according to Lawrence Krauss - for example.