Satanists in Florida offer to fill school counselor roles after DeSantis law

To file the lawsuits they do, they have to have standing. Thus they need a "religion." If you want to call that trolling I guess. I think Christians doing things like putting the ten commandments in schools is much more in line with "trolling." They're know it's a violation and theyre fishing for the reaction.

 

Both sides are effectively trolling, but that doesn't mean they don't believe in the value of what they are doing. Things like the Satanic Temple wouldn't exist in the capacity that it does if it weren't for forceful moves to insert symbolism into the government sphere by people who identify as Christian. But while the number of people that genuinely believe that the Satanic Temple did not intentionally pick "Satan" as a troll effort is a potentially a nonzero number, I don't think anybody in this thread actually believes that.

The Bible doesn't call on us to force others towards Christianity; for Christians, it is fair to contemplate whether these things add to or detract from the potential of bringing others to Christ.

The Satanic Temple's "tenets" are sufficiently vague when it comes to moral views. Their utility boils down to "be nice" and "follow science," but as people vet these ideas and put them into practice, you will inevitably come up with different interpretations on how these would play out in the real world. Even things like the "Beliefs should conform to our best scientific understanding of the world. We should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit our beliefs." There are no such things as "scientific facts" because science doesn't "prove" things to be true. Science is used to disprove things that are not true. Math has proofs, science does not. Religious views are typically not falsifiable and therefore not in violation of any "scientific facts."

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,WESGATORS

 

I get your connection to Trump here, but the freedom to offend is a critical freedom. Without it, there can be no freedom of speech.

 

I actually agree. I think Christians who push for these things are opening this exact Pandora's box. The 10c should be allowed in a classroom in certain cases, uit not required or forced. (A Jewish person may choose to have the 10c on her desk for instance.

I 100% agree that this is often pandering (trolling even) by the right.

 

/Tread.

Nailed it WES, way more eloquently than I could have.

 

People are free to believe whatever nonsense they choose to. When people try to infiltrate schools with their beliefs that is where the problems start. You defend the infiltration?

 

Next to your 6 pack of Billy beer?

 

Indeed there is never going to be a logically ironclad definition of truth or goodness. I do think you are being a bit hard on scientific facts though. While I think Hume was right that there is no way to prove that the sun will come up tomorrow, it is an extreme position to deny that the sun came up today. At that point, we are not denying “scientific facts”; we are denying all facts and reality, which I don’t think we want.

BTW, Karl Popper’s model of science, which seems to be the origin of your view, did come close to an extreme position like this about scientific theories, but he later realized that this was a troubling perspective. To remedy this, he came up with the concept of “corroboration”, where theories can be corroborated by failed attempts at falsification. This of course rather gutted the power of falsification. At this point, philosophers of science mostly think in terms of evidence and probability.

 

Off topic, but too interesting to pass up...

What is this position being compared to? I suppose you are seeking to establish something that is considered universally true due to shared observation (is this what a "fact" is? what "reality" is?). But what if the observation is not shared? If I experience something that you have not, and I have no way of conveying that information to you does that mean it wasn't real? Does that mean our realities are different from one another? Or does it mean that our unique experiences may not always neatly fold into such perfect terms as "facts" and "reality?" Even if I do have a way of conveying said information to you, am I lying? Was I hallucinating? Was I misinterpreting something that you may have identified to be something else? Or maybe more simply: can "facts" exist without "trust?"

Was Earth being considered at the center of the universe a product of corroboration? How do we distinguish between failed attempts at falsification due to: (a) our own limits vs. (b) a more credible idea? Often times we can lean on predictive value, but that's not always applicable or easy to ascertain.

We live our lives based on beliefs in ideas that are not fully corroborated or at least not known to us to be even reasonably corroborated. Sometimes these beliefs are justified. Sometimes they are not. Is this food safe to eat? Is my car going to start? Is somebody going to break into my house tonight? Is some driver going to collide with me on my commute to/from work? Am I sufficiently providing for my children or am I spoiling them? What's an appropriate work/life balance? Am I giving enough to my community? Am I participating enough in local politics? When I give something away to a panhandler am I helping the poor or am I enabling drug use? Am I ok to drive? How much do I know about the kids and families of those kids who hang out with my kids? How much should I know about them?

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,WESGATORS

 

Someone needs to keep reading.

 

I read on later and you are in favor of keeping schools to teaching facts and not faith. There is an old saying as long as students are unprepared for tests there will always be prayer in school.

 

So much good stuff here, Wes. You’ve clearly thought about the problem a lot. I’ll start with your biggest question: how can we tell if a failed falsification is due to the truth of the theory or poor attempts at falsification? Strictly speaking, we cannot. This is what I meant when I wrote that we will never have a logical test for truth. But using Popper’s first idea that theories can only be falsified is problematic too, as it would see cell theory as equally true as any theory that was just invented and not yet tested.

So can we evaluate claims at all? I think we can and that your first paragraph offers a part of a solution: look for shared visions. As Charles Sanders Peirce wrote just before Popper’s time: “Especially one man’s experience is nothing. If he sees what others cannot, we call it hallucination. It is not ‘my’ experience but ‘our’ experience that needs to be thought of; and this ‘us’ has indefinite possibilities.” A special observation by one person that no one else can see cannot be entered as scientific knowledge, as most believe it is a requisite of science that ideas can be checked by others. Newton’s calculations, Darwin’s arguments, and Pasteur’s experiments are all available for anyone else to examine, replicate, and/or criticize.

Still, debates can persist, as critical tests aren’t available for complex theories. What about a church that disputes that organisms evolve? Should we this view as in our cannon of knowledge? I think we should not. Again, we will not have a strictly logical test for which views to take seriously, but almost certainly do we need a critical attitude in the community and usually some other aspects in the theories, such as falsifiability, explanatory power, and internal logical consistency. Churches usually do not invite criticism of their beliefs, and the current alternative of intelligent design doesn’t actually make any predictions or offer explanations. There is a somewhat new theory that seeks to (sort of) supplant our current model of evolution. It is called the extended evolutionary synthesis, which likely does likely meet our criteria from above. It is currently being given a hearing by the scientific community.

So I do take it as a fact that humans and cats are genetically related to one another. This is based on evidence and probability, so I also hold that all theories are open to being revised or refuted in the future. No theory should be protected from criticism, and if one day a theory comes along which claims to better explain the similarities among all animals, we will have to give it honest consideration. If it succeeds, we can accept it as knowledge. If it fails, we maintain our current model.

 

I can accept that "scientific knowledge" has a high standard to receive such a label; my point was more along the lines of the idea that we rely so much more in our general lives on "knowledge" that doesn't rise to the level of "scientific knowledge." The idea of having our world view conform to scientific knowledge is anywhere between impossible to irrelevant. Would you say that buying into that which can be corroborated requires that we do not buy into that which cannot be corroborated? If yes, then we would be rejecting actual experiences that are personal to us that cannot be adequately proven to others. If no, then what is the utility in claiming that our world view should conform to scientific knowledge other than to express we should reject that which can be adequately proven to be false?

It's worth noting that a belief in ID does not require a disbelief in evolution. In the most broad sense, every aspect of evolution is "designed" to those who don't impose constraints on a Creator. For what could exist that couldn't have been designed by an all-powerful Creator? Personally, I don't believe that anything should be taught in school as fact that is not falsifiable. As children get older, there's certainly room for "this is what some people believe" but those ideas shouldn't be presented in any sort of coercive fashion in public schools.

This sounds reasonable, and at this point it's probably only a matter of semantics. But if it were to be proven that humans and cats are not related, would you say that the "fact" is no longer a fact or that it was never a fact to begin with?

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,WESGATORS

 

Admittedly have not read the bill. But it should also be allowing Rabbis, Imams, and Sangha to serve as well.
If not, it's a totally unconstitutional waste of time and gross political showboating.
We taxpayers deserve better from Tallahassee.

 

More thoughtful and challenging stuff, Wes.

I meant to address your first point in the last post but got so caught in scientific knowledge. There are those who don’t believe anything we see are real, and I can’t prove this is false. In fact, some of their arguments can be frighteningly compelling. But no, I don’t walk around telling people they didn’t have yogurt for lunch because no one else saw it. Once we do this, we might as well say that we aren’t having this conversation. I would also note that it doesn’t much matter if they had yogurt. Now if it did - say the eating of this yogurt was the key testimony in a murder trial - then I think it’s absolutely right to be skeptical of the claim. No one can directly corroborate the eating of the yogurt, but the 12 person jury can corroborate the evidence for the claim, including testimony, grocery receipts, discarded packaging, etc. Again, evidence and probability. If we don’t have this evidence, then I would have to remain agnostic on the question of whether they ate the yogurt.

Next, while ID doesn’t contradict the broad idea of evolution, it certainly contradicts the theory of natural selection. Explaining the appearance of design without appealing to a conscious designer was the great success of that theory. I agree that it would be fine to teach that some people believe in ID at some point, because that is a fact that can be corroborated or falsified with evidence.

Lastly, I don’t think it matters whether we revoke a fact’s status after it has been falsified. As long as we accept that all knowledge is provisional, the use of the specific word fact becomes semantic.

 

What aspect of "natural selection" logically exists outside of or in exclusion of any potentially designed plan? Perhaps it is more specific ID arguments that you are thinking of (those that are not necessarily accepted by all who adhere to ID)? Or is this a matter of getting into the fundamental aspects of determinism vs. indeterminism?

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,WESGATORS

 

Typically, intelligent design posits that the structure of organisms has been designed by an intelligent entity. This is the opposite of the argument of natural selection, which suggests that complex structures can evolve out of simpler ones via a simple natural process. If you were to adopt a form of ID that does not conflict with natural selection, it would have to be robbed of its most characteristic points, turning ID into something more like deism.

Intelligent design - Wikipedia

 

Interesting; I didn't realize that capitalized "I" had taken over such a specific concept of design. I suppose I should have used lower case "i" and "d." I think it's worth recognizing that there are many potential ways for an intelligent designer to exist; these ways include those that do and those that do not conflict with scientific discovery. I suspect that is a biased effort (those behind the wiki article), but it is irrelevant, ultimately, as what you have referenced here is not what I was referring to.

Regardless, one can believe in an intelligent designer as a Christian God and still see scientific discovery as attempting to unravel the details of how God's world was created. No Christian has the exclusive rights to the general concept of intelligent design in exclusion of other Christian views. No doubt my views on this will differ from the views of others on here.

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,WESGATORS

 

I totally agree. While our theories of gravity or natural selection might conflict with the specific beliefs of a religion, in no way should they falsify the existence of god.