Choosing a faith

Whatever are you talking about? In particular, what is "science of the gaps" supposed to be and supposed to claim/state?.I did a search on that phrase and traced back through NosyNed's quoting your apparently first use of it in 2013 -- Message 171, 22-May-2013 11:31 AM, in My Beliefs- GDR: At no point could I find you ever defining what that was supposed to mean, nor what its significance is supposed to be. Frankly, it looks like it was (and still is) a knee-jerk attempt at diversion like Trump's out-of-order "response" to Clinton exposing him in debate as Putin's puppet: "You're the puppet! You're the puppet!"Please define that term and present some kind of support for it or at least some discussion of it:

One thing I've learned on this forum was a new word, Ignosticism:

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Ignosticism or igtheism is the idea that the question of the existence of God is meaningless because the word "God" has no coherent and unambiguous definition.

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Terminology

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The term ignosticism was coined in 1964 by Sherwin Wine, a rabbi and a founding figure of Humanistic Judaism.

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Distinction from theological noncognitivism

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Ignosticism and theological noncognitivism are similar although whereas the ignostic says "every theological position assumes too much about the concept of God", the theological noncognitivist claims to have no concept whatever to label as "a concept of God", but the relationship of ignosticism to other nontheistic views is less clear. While Paul Kurtz finds the view to be compatible with both weak atheism and agnosticism, other philosophers[who?] consider ignosticism to be distinct.

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Indeed, until we can establish a clear definition for "God", everybody will just use it to mean whatever they choose to mean without ever having to reveal just what they are talking about.In my very first semester in college I took the class in Formal Logic. The instructor was an infamous local politician (ultra-conservative former state senator), but he kept true to his promise to keep politics out of the lectures (except for occasional non-partisan examples) -- I say that to establish his training and practical experience with debating.He taught us that in a debate the first order of business is to clearly establish the definitions of the terminology that will be used in the debate. Without that essential first step, the debate is meaningless as both sides use the same words sans meaning to talk past each other about entirely different things.Of course, debates and attempted discussions with creationists (primarily) and theists in general almost invariably avoid (or even refuse) to present their definitions. Especially creationists rely on the ensuing confusion such that the most terrifying question you can ask them is "What are you saying? What does that mean?"When creationists do that, it is certainly through malfeasance. When theists in general do it, then the fault is more likely to lie in ethnocentrism and just plain not having thought it through. Though when theists do it for the purpose of proselytizing (ie, trying to deceive one into converting), then that edges towards malfeasance.

Just sharing techniques for pros and cons. When I went online in the late 80's it was on CompServe -- no BBSes ¹, no Internet until approaching mid-90's, just CompuServe. I had to connect through a modem after warning everybody to stay off the phone -- I was married at the time with young kids. Plus they charged for every minute of connect time. All that motivated me to find ways to minimize my time online tying up the phone and accruing connect-time charges.My solution was to use a terminal emulator (TE) that came with Carbon Copy which I used at work. It had two very important features: text capture file and text file insertion (it's been more than a few decades, so I forget the exact terminology). The capture file feature would save all text received, basically like redirecting output to a file in MS-DOS and in UNIX shells (eg, dir C:\ /s > c_dir.txt). "Text file insertion" would transmit the contents of a text file as if I had entered them from the keyboard, basically like redirecting input from a file in MS-DOS and in UNIX (eg, sort < names.txt -- more commonly combine redirecting both input and output; eg, sort < names.txt > sorted.txt).So my CompuServe sessions would go something like:

1. Offline, write what I wanted to post in a text editor, saving each message or library text in a separate text file.
2. In the terminal emulator, open the capture file.
3. Connect to CompuServe and navigate to the forums I want to visit. As the text is received from CompuServe it is saved to the capture file, including the echoing back of my own keyboard entries.
4. As I return to a message thread I wanted to reply to, enter the command to reply, then use the control key to call up the text insertion dialog box and enter the name of the text file that contains the reply I wrote offline. Since that "keyboard input" gets echoed back, it also goes into the capture file.
5. At the end of my session, I disconnect and close the capture file.
6. Now offline, I use the capture file to find and copy out the messages I want to reply to, which I do in a separate text file.
7. My replies now written, I copy them out of my working file into the separate text files needed for text insertion in my next session.

This method worked very well for me for a number of reasons, only a couple of which were:

• I had time to compose more thoughtful replies. That included the time to do research for my replies; eg, I could refer to a book for the information I needed, all without having to worry about the connection meter running up my bill or the fraying of my wife's already nearly non-existent patience.
• I could take my offline reading and writing with me to work where I could work on it during lunch.
• An unplanned benefit was that I now had an archive of all discussions I had visited or all library files I had read. Decades later, I can still go back and review what had transpired.

That last ability became very important in my dealings with creationists via email. AOL's original application included the same capture file and text insertion features as Carbon Copy's TE had. Therefore, every time I connected to AOL I would open a capture file which would save all my emails to a text file. As a result, I have an archive of all my emails with creationists received through that software.I had a rather lengthy and yet very fruitless correspondence with a local YEC activist who's a legend in his own mind. He turned out to be such a pathological liar that I would frequently have to go back into my archive to quote him directly. Without that capture file feature, I could not have defended myself as well.Unfortunately, tech has since "improved" to the point of near uselessness. In my own experience:

• CompuServe came up with its own special software to manage our online experience, TapCIS, which I did try and which proved to be absolutely useless for my purposes. Basically, given a directory of captured text files you can take them anywhere on any computer and do a global search, a grep. Not only were you required to have TapCIS installed in the computer, but it also provided no such global search capability that I could find.
• Furthermore, TapCIS did not support ASCII, which was essential for the Carbon Copy TE and for my use of text files. As a result, CompuServe (CIS, AKA "CI$") started disabling ASCII access to its forums in order to force us all to using TapCIS, which was available for free, as I recall, so that was not the reason to force it onto us. As far as I can figure, their motivation was technological, that the direction they wanted their tech to go did not support ASCII.
• As a result, CompuServe forced me out as a customer by having made their product unusable -- there was a very hard-bitten Mel Gibson crime movie (Payback (1999), I'm pretty sure) where he has one of the guys who had wronged him captive, so he has the guy light his cigarette but the lighter doesn't work, so his line before killing the guy in cold blood is, "Then what good are you?" CompuServe could no longer do anything purposeful, so what good was it? None.
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  The last that I looked at CompuServe was in the late 1990's after they had switched over to the World Wide Web. No capture file? No support for ASCII? So what good are they?
• Then the new version of AOL stripped off all the email header data from the capture file (saving only the text itself, which by stripping away the context is useless, especially when doing a search), so I had to revert to an earlier version of AOL and refuse all future upgrades.
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  Finally, AOL stopped supporting that old software. I have tried their new software application with all its bells and whistles, but without that absolutely vital file capture feature for emails, what good are they (followed by a cold-blooded bullet to the brain à la Mel Gibson)?
• For AOL, I'm left with their webmail site, so I'm reduced to other less efficient methods. Basically, I'm reduced to having to save each and every email individually into text files. As a result, I have a number of pending_*.txt files to work from.

You say that you use Word to manage your offline editing. How does that not mess you up at times?I used to be active as a mentor on a C Programming Forum which is no longer. One beginning C programmer posted his very simple program (maybe a dozen lines of code) and couldn't understand why it wouldn't compile. The problem was that the compiler couldn't recognize his quotation marks -- I verified that by copy and pasting his code to a text file and then viewing it through a hex dump jproduced through the xxd command line utility. The quotation marks were not the 0x22 (34 decimal) that the ASCII-based complier expected, but rather whatever non-ASCII open/close-quote marks character codes that a word processor had generated. My advice to him was to stop using a word processor, but rather to use a text editor when writing source code. And to stick to 7-bit ASCII at that.  

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¹ FOOTNOTE: 

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Nu? If it works it works, don't futz with it!In the meantime, what is this nonsense about "science of the gaps"?

Sorry, but what the fuck are you talking about?

Really? This kind of bullshit on your part is all that your god demands of you?Well, that tells us everything we could ever need to know about your worthless piece-of-sh*t god we could ever need to know.

Sorry about those last two. But even now in the cold light of day I still don't understand what you're saying: What program are you talking about? And how would one "resolve a program"?Copying from the web site (EvC Forum, I assume you mean) is how I sometimes get our messages here into my text editor (NoteTab Pro) for editing. Emails? How would emails get involved here, but there again I will copy-and-paste from an email to a text file in my text editor, both to establish some kind of archive for key emails and to write my reply which I then copy-and-paste from my text editor to the email in the email website.What would worry me is the continued use of a word processor instead of a text editor. My main concern is that the word processor will inject erroneous characters that would confuse an application that excepts ASCII; eg, the compiler expecting the ASCII code for double quotes (0x22) and instead getting the word processor's open and close double quotes (I forget those character codes).Word processors are fine for working on documents with formatting, though I wouldn't expect their formatting to port to this forum. Frankly, I do most of my writing in my text editor and then, if I need the formatting capability, I will copy that over from the text editor to Word where I can add the formatting. I rarely use Word, but rather do almost everything in my text editor, NoteTab Pro: emails, web pages, source code, notes, etc. Well, if I'm working in another alphabet (eg, my Russian study notes), then I'm pretty much forced into using Word for that as well as selecting the Russian keyboard.BTW, when I need to use special characters, I'll switch my keyboard over to ENG INTL (US-International) which handles most. Though on this forum I favor using HTML entity codes.

Possible, albeit intractable. As long as questions remain and the unknown has yet to be explored and understood, we must continue to explore, discover, and learn. We will never be able to learn everything, but we must still try.That would be the difference between "God of the Gaps" (GotG) and your "Science of the Gaps" (SotG). Unfortunately, you had not explored the ideas and their consequences during the nine years since you first posted mention (without explanation) of your SotG.The GotG approach and attitude is "we don't know this and we never will, so therefore goddidit." Not only does that put a stop to any further research into those questions because of that empty goddidit "answer", but that goddidit becomes proof of God. So not only does it create the illusion of that question having been answered, but it also creates the situation in which any attempts at further research would be questioning God, something that believers would never allow.

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Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.

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("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32)

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As I recall Wakefield stating in another article, also concerning Gentry's polonium halos claim: The "fault" that you attribute to your SotG, that our built-in assumption that we should be able to find answers to the gaps in our knowledge, is actually its strength and is what makes it better than GotG with its defeatism. If we think that we can find the answer, then we will try to find it and, even if we cannot answer that particular question, we will learn so much more in the process.And, yes, scientific methodology has proven to be the best approach we have ever created for learning about the physical universe and how it works.

Except there would be evidence of someone having pushed that rock, or at least of someone having been in the immediate vicinity of the rock's original location in the fairly immediate past: footprints!. No trace of anybody having been present would weigh against the "someone pushed it" hypothesis. By analogy, consider the small child explaining to his mother that he hadn't broken the lamp, but rather it was an elephant that had entered the room (and somehow hadn't upset anything else, just the lamp).Was it erosion? Examination would uncover signs of erosion, which does leave evidence. If physical support for that rock had eroded away or subsided, then there would be evidence of that.In the end, you are free to believe all you want to in your elephant who magically leaves behind no evidence of its passage. Just don't expect any agreement from those who actually examine the evidence.

I would quibble that should be: "except base 3 or 4". Not base 2 because the "2" does not exist, but rather that equation would be 10 + 10 = 100. And "4" would not exist in base 4, but rather it would be 2 + 2 = 10.But you did recover in your examples and discussion, so I will not quibble. Not sure about math, but in some programming languages the + is the concatenation operator (joins two strings to form a longer string), so there it would be 2 + 2 = 22 (ie, concatenate the string 2 with the string 2 to form the string 22) -- though the notation for the strings will vary.

Revisiting this because of ringo's Message 272. Quick question: What kind of counselor is he? A normal counselor (ie, for normals) or a Christian counselor (ie, for ... you know who)? Because it would make a difference.You remember about Dan Barker. I've mentioned him a few times. Raised a fundamentalist Christian and served as a fundamentalist minister for two decades after having been called to the pulpit personally by God (that was his story). But then he committed the unpardonable sin of daring to think and start to ask questions and now he has been given the title (by his opponents, I'm pretty sure) of "America's Leading Atheist" and co-President of the (FFRF).I bring him up again because of a statement he made from his own decades-long personal religious experience (quoting from memory): "Fundamentalism is what happens when your theology becomes your psychology."As a result of their having different psychologies, they do not find useful counselors trained to help normals, but rather they need to have their own special Christian counselors. Rather than try to help them with their problems for the purpose of resolving those problems, Christian counselors also seek to keep their patients within the Fold.I saw them in action during my divorce. I got recruited to help balance a 50's singles dance class at a nationally known Baptist megachurch (class attendance: 100 women to 50 men, so after a couple weeks many of the women drop out) and that brought me into the social circle of those middle-age single Christians.One of their activities was to attend another local megachurch's "Singles Seminars" led by a pair of Christian counselors who took turns giving that week's presentation. They would use some of the same tools as normal counselors (eg, setting boundaries, associating with people who lead you to positive attitudes) and would even start to offer some actual good advice, but then they would inevitably blow it completely as they veered off the road into the weeds with religion; eg:

• "Why should you want to be happy? Because that's what Jesus wants for you!"
  (And not because being happy is better than the alternative? So if the only reason for wanting to be happy is because of what Jesus wants, then if you're not a Christian you would have no reason to want to be happy? That is so messed up!)
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• "You need to stay away from bad people who will steer you wrong and instead associate with good people. How will you know the good people? They will be the ones leading you to God."
  (And that's supposed to be a good thing? Not in my experience! I have seen far too many examples of horrible people doing horrible things because they had been led to God. Why would anybody with even a single thread of moral fiber in them ever want to become one of those monsters, a [voice=revulsion]Christian[/voice]?)
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• "You will never be able to recover from your divorce by your own efforts. Only with Jesus' help can you ever recover!"
  (So unless you are a Christian, you are just plain humped. [voice=sarcasm]Well thank you very much, sir. May I have another one please?[/voice] Here they're are being far worse than useless as they try to impress upon non-Christians a sense of hopelessness. Same to you, buddy!)

As we see in those examples, for a normal a Christian counselor would be worse than useless. One of the several reasons would be that a Christian counselor would never offer any practical or real reasons for making any positive changes, but rather everything is because of God and what God wants.And for one whose theology has become his psychology (ie, one whose psychology is centered on God, who interprets everything through God and bases all his motivation on God, etc) a normal counselor would be of little use since that counselor would give real and practical reasons and goals, whereas the patient can only relate to what God wants.But there's also the point that when seeing a Christian counselor, it's not about you. Rather it's about keeping you from straying from God, even when that would be the way to cure you. They will try to keep you from asking too many questions and from thinking too much.Or from talking to outsiders who are telling you things that your religion does not want you to hear. Hence your counselor's advice to leave from here.

For which there would be evidence which must be examined in order to determine what had actually happened.I'm thinking particularly of Locard's exchange principle:

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In forensic science, Locard's principle holds that the perpetrator of a crime will bring something into the crime scene and leave with something from it, and that both can be used as forensic evidence. Dr. Edmond Locard (1877–1966) was a pioneer in forensic science who became known as the Sherlock Holmes of Lyon, France. He formulated the basic principle of forensic science as: "Every contact leaves a trace". It is generally understood as "with contact between two items, there will be an exchange." Paul L. Kirk expressed the principle as follows:

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Wherever he steps, whatever he touches, whatever he leaves, even unconsciously, will serve as a silent witness against him. Not only his fingerprints or his footprints, but his hair, the fibres from his clothes, the glass he breaks, the tool mark he leaves, the paint he scratches, the blood or semen he deposits or collects. All of these and more, bear mute witness against him. This is evidence that does not forget. It is not confused by the excitement of the moment. It is not absent because human witnesses are. It is factual evidence. Physical evidence cannot be wrong, it cannot perjure itself, it cannot be wholly absent. Only human failure to find it, study and understand it, can diminish its value.

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To get a better time-fix on Dr. Locard, he set up the first police forensic lab in 1910. No, the point is that there is always evidence (which includes the absence of certain evidence that would be expected by a given hypothesis), so one must be ready to test one's hypotheses against the evidence. Ignoring evidence just so one can hold on to one's unfounded preconceived notion would be a sin.A full investigation requires taking all the evidence into account. Engaging in wishful thinking is doing the opposite. 
OBTW, it could be both! Not necessarily either-or. For example, erosion had weakened the soil under the rock to the point where a passerby stepping a little too close to the rock would have been enough to cause the soil to give way and the rock to go tumbling down. And the evidence should show that! Or show something different. Every hypothesis is subject to testing and rejecting or refining.Don't fool yourself with simplistic either-or thinking, but rather follow the evidence. 
ABE:Just to make sure that last point was clear. No, that is not the point. Not by a long shot!If it's both, then it is both! Not either-or, but both!You are claiming the opposite, that if it is both, then you can pick either one and ignore the other. Wrong! If it is both then you must accept both. Not pick and choose what you want to believe and ignore the rest (like the cafeteria theology which we observe far too many Christians employing).Both means both.

Edited by dwise1, : ABE

Which you have not presented yet. I'm not trying to pry, but rather my question is whether yours is a Christian counselor or a normal one.If a Christian counselor, do you find him expressing concern for keeping your faith intact, to protect you from any doubts or niggling questions? Or does he keep it on a lower key by using your faith to try to motivate you to do what you need to for your own sake?If a counselor for normals, do you have difficulty understanding what he's trying to do or difficulty getting motivated?And OBTW, what I wrote was based on my observations, though I had gotten talked into their "DivorceCare" program (I was looking at another program, but it was on the same night as our dance class which my friend wanted to keep me in for sake of the ever lopsided male/female imbalance). Actually, I was seeing a counselor for normals at the time, but I couldn't follow her instructions.She wanted to get me out dating again while at the same time she'd be advising me on danger signs -- and on the side she'd regale me with tales of "borderline cases", the dangerous ones to avoid. In order to do that, she wanted me to go onto dating sites and start dating three women at the same time (never on the same date, of course, but rather have me juggling three at one time). Then I would come in and report on them and she would point out issues and advise me. Why three? If I only dated one, then I become fixated on her and leave therapy prematurely with her ending up with a Land Shark (see below), the type she was trying to teach me to identify and avoid. With three, no risk of becoming fixated on any one.I have to admit that is a practical plan, but it wouldn't work for me. The dating sites just left me cold such that none of them appealed to me at all -- it's kind of like when you're in a restaurant and you don't see anything you like on the menu but you have to order something, so you go through a process of elimination rejecting dishes because you don't like something in them until you finally end up with one dish that is the least undesirable. Only in the case of the dating sites there was no "one dish" left at the end of the process.The other issue is that I already had a therapeutic plan in place. My divorce with the accompanying issues (infidelity, malice, abuse, etc on her part) was only about a third of what I was going through. For that other major part (see http://dwise1.net/ ) I had turned to dance classes to take off some time and recharge my batteries, basically to give me the strength to keep going. I expanded that with the divorce such that I had classes seven days a week. I would have to cut some of that out to do the three-woman-juggle she wanted me to do. I just couldn't do that.Plus what she was asking me to do is not in my nature.Though I did get out of it an awareness of the existence and dangers of borderline cases (actually, my son got bitten by one, his first wife, who turned out to be an opioid addict (before it was fashionable) who would have ended his police career much sooner). Wikipedia's former page on Land Shark (that one is no longer there) which described that as the term sailors traditionally had for the shifty merchants, women, and cutthroats in the port towns ready to prey on the sailors -- "This port is a predator-rich environment." That image has stuck with me.

It was a slight slip-up which was corrected almost immediately.If you had not corrected it yourself (which you did), then a correction on my part would have been called for.But to use your slip-up for nothing more than a ¡ gotcha! would be ill-mannered and not conducive towards the good of the order.

What?First, that is a direct lie! I am very strongly inclined to also called it deliberate! I should mention at this point that I have been studying "creation science" since 1981 and discussing it since 1985. In all those nearly four decades I have seen so much lying by creationists (and also "true Christians"), some of it demonstrably deliberate, that I am absolutely and thoroughly disgusted by that practice.I was once a Christian, you should know. I was raised on generic Protestantism (family was only implicitly Christian, not overtly), my mother sent me to Released Time Christian Education (there was a church across the street, so no trailer on the curbside for us), I put in my pew time at our neighbors' church, and was baptized there. So I know what Christians are taught.Though, about a year after my baptism I decided I should get serious with all this religion stuff so I started reading the Bible, from the beginning (of course), to see just what it was that I was supposed to believe. I didn't even make it out of Genesis before I realized that I just simply couldn't be any of this stuff, so I left, quite peacefully. BTW, many atheists I've met all have the same basic deconversion story: "I started reading the Bible." About 80% of the children raised on fundamentalism leave the faith and even religion altogether in early adulthood. My personal advice to parents who do not want their children to deconvert: Do not leave your child alone with a Bible!The error I committed in my initial deconversion was that I was reading the Bible literally. In the intervening years (that particular church is long gone physically) I have not been able to determine the particular denomination nor theology of that particular church, but I have little doubt that it was consumed by biblical literalism, which ironically was how I had set out to interpret the Bible as I was reading it, so, according to my own church, I was reading it wrong. Yet the literalistic manner in which I was reading it was what made me an atheist more than a half-century ago.Half a decade later, like circa 1970, the "Jesus Freak Movement" had started. I had made a huge mistake trying to interpret the Bible literally. Now there was an entire movement that was insisting in precisely that!By that time, I had acquired some linguistical expertise, enough to have a basic understanding of how language works. About how translation works (quick study: it's not word-for-word substitution, but rather an act of interpretation -- you interpret what the original text says and you translate it into English).You've been arguing against that point and now you suddenly pull a bait-and-switch? Why does this smell to me like a dishonest creationist BS move? (admittedly, "dishonest creationist" is a redundant term)Who the frak was talking about morality in a culture? We were talking about rocks rolling down a hill as an example of the use (and abuse on your part) of evidence.Gods have no use for morality; only humans do (well, of human morality, since morality also appears in other species). Without humans, morality has no meaning. Also, morality has nothing to do with religion, except that religion always tries to take all the credit. Basically, societies evolve their morality and then use religion and its myths to justify and perpetuate their morality through the generations.As I worked out in my topic, Probability of It Being Their Own Particular God, there have about 288,000 gods in human existence, each one with its own moral code. Your own god, who is supposed to be the source of all human morality (apparently), does not speak for all those other gods' cultures. So with only about 1/288,000-th of the overall input (3.4722×10^(-6)), your own personal god-thingee is the actual source of all human morality? Really?O