Atheist Discussion

Full Version: Can love prove God? What's wrong with this argument?
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(10-10-2024, 10:09 PM)Paleophyte Wrote: [ -> ]If only Huggy had the wits to Google his bullshit first.

Smuggy is not such a one as to challenge his own brand of bullshit.
Also more nonesense responses from Huggy  Tongue
(10-10-2024, 08:46 PM)SYZ Wrote: [ -> ]One only has to look at the birth rate in the central
African region to confirm that blind instinct has a
lot to play...

•  Niger: 6.9 children per woman
•  Somalia: 6.1
•  Chad: 5.9

•  USA: 1.66 children per woman.
•  Canada: 1.43
•  Australia: 1.63   [ABS, 5 July 2024]



Well, in fairness the infant mortality rate is pretty steep in Africa, too.  
Worst, overall is Afghanistan...where a different set of religitard morons are in charge....
but then the next 9 are in africa.

The deaths are understandable given the conditions and so are the births given those same conditions and the warring and the rapes.......

I don't know how much "love" is involved in any of that.  Little, I suspect.
I think Huggy wants to fight against the claim that some animals don’t love because it’s different than human love.

How in the hell would we know one way or the other since there’s zero communication with animals. All we can do is look at behaviors and…guess what, some animals appear to love their mate.

And no…love isn’t always kind or all the other bullshit in your Bible quote. Love has a tremendous amount of jealousy, controlling behavior, and other pitfalls. It can be fleeting or long lasting and it also changes over time. If god is love, he’s as incapable of being consistent or kind as humans…just like he was dreamed up by humans…oh, wait!
(10-11-2024, 12:30 AM)Huggy Bear Wrote: [ -> ]
(10-10-2024, 10:09 PM)Paleophyte Wrote: [ -> ]Animal Emotions: Exploring Passionate Natures

"...current research provides compelling evidence that at least some animals likely feel a full range of emotions..."

If only Huggy had the wits to Google his bullshit first.

*emphasis mine*

Did I say that animals don't feel emotion or did I specify love? Also, are you at all familiar with the word "likely" and it's place regarding scientific data?

Either you're dishonest or stoopid, not sure which, but the phrase "full range of emotions" leaves little ambiguity. In case there was the author went on to list them immediately after that and love was right there. Seriously, you didn't have to read past the first paragraph.

Quote:Pure conjecture... indeed, the whole section of the article discussing love is 100% opinion.

And if I'm going to be choosing between your baseless opinion and that of a qualified professional in a peer-reviewed journal, well, not much of a contest is there? You asked for peer-reviewed and you got it. You aren't qualified to refute it, so kindly piss off back to your troll cave.
(10-11-2024, 12:46 AM)Huggy Bear Wrote: [ -> ]
(10-10-2024, 10:34 PM)Paleophyte Wrote: [ -> ]You know how this goes, burden of proof rests upon the claimant. Kindly provide peer-reviewed research demonstrating the existence of your god, that it is the exclusive source of love, that love is necessary to morality, and so forth.

He who makes the batshit insane claims gets to back up the batshit insane claims.

Actually I made no claims buddy, let me paraphrase how we ended here.

"There is a giant leap here between "Love", something that we know ultimately is chemicals in our brain making us feel a certain way about others that forms long lasting attachments between people"

THAT is the actual claim being made, my repose to that was:

"What is the chemical composition of love?"

The response to that was:

"Dopamine
Neural Pathways
A Brain"

My reply to that was:

"So Love requires a ‘brain’, ‘dopamine’ and ‘neural pathways’, all of which are present in animals, yet animals don’t have the ability to love."

The claim that animals can love comes from your fellow athiests...

Nice try, but 0 out of 10 for failing the reading comprehension on your own posts. The emphasised portion is your claim that "animals don't have the ability to love." Burden of proof to you. Additionally, you followed with:

(10-10-2024, 05:31 PM)Huggy Bear Wrote: [ -> ]An animal mating for life doesn't imply that they love each other, it's simply their instinctual nature to do so, or else you'd see cases where love ends and they separate, same as humans. 

Have fun demonstrating those. They are, as you say, "Pure conjecture... indeed, the whole section of the article discussing love is 100% opinion." And baseless opinion at that.

Quote:Do you agree with the following statement?

"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres."

Nope. Sounds like poetic platitudes. Please, continue on to the bits about prophesy and speaking in tongues. Hilarity will ensue.
(10-11-2024, 01:21 AM)pattylt Wrote: [ -> ]How in the hell would we know one way or the other since there’s zero communication with animals.  All we can do is look at behaviors and…guess what, some animals appear to love their mate.

Well, there are a few ways that we might be able to tackle that. First we probably need to admit that we aren't The Pinnacle Of Creation and reframe the question. Emotions aren't simple on/off conditions that only us hoomans were gifted. A little more accurately it'd be "Which emotions do other animals feel? And to what degree? And do some of them feel emotions that we don't?!?"

Next we might want to check and see which animals have the neural hardware for emotions like ours. Without the hardware it gets tricky to justify a similar emotional response. You need to be careful with that though and check for similar structures in animals that might have gone down a different branch of the evolutionary tree. That little mistake got people thinking that lobsters didn't feel pain and that boiling them alive was fine. It turns out that a lot of the emotional hardware is located in very primitive sections of the brain, when it's in the brain at all. Your adrenal glands are on your kidneys and it doesn't take much research beyond a few CCs of epinephrine to understand where those emotions are coming from.

After that we might pause to wonder how certain organisms would even work without emotion. Pure instinct is all well and good for very simple situations, but complex interactions in herd, pack, and social animals are probably going to need more than that. The reductionist that insists that all other animals can work on instinct alone is then left to explain how they know that human emotion is anything different. I'm honestly left wondering how a troop(?) of bonobos would even work without emotions.

One of the niftier approaches has been to let the animals do the detective work. After all, an emotion isn't much use if others of your species can't perceive it. Watching how one animal reacts to the emotional states of another of the same species can help screen out some of our anthropomorphic biases. Here's a study on non-human emotional response that you might find interesting. They found a variety of different responses by various mammals down to rats, mice, and sheep. And sheep are pretty damned thick!

At the end of the day it's a thorny question and must be a really interesting field to work in, but it's pretty clear that anything sparkier than a jellyfish or a barnacle needs some level of emotion to function. After that it's largely a matter shades of grey and where the True Scotsmen draw the line on love and such.
(10-11-2024, 03:32 AM)Paleophyte Wrote: [ -> ]
(10-11-2024, 12:30 AM)Huggy Bear Wrote: [ -> ]*emphasis mine*

Did I say that animals don't feel emotion or did I specify love? Also, are you at all familiar with the word "likely" and it's place regarding scientific data?

Either you're dishonest or stoopid, not sure which, but the phrase "full range of emotions" leaves little ambiguity. In case there was the author went on to list them immediately after that and love was right there. Seriously, you didn't have to read past the first paragraph.

Quote:Pure conjecture... indeed, the whole section of the article discussing love is 100% opinion.

And if I'm going to be choosing between your baseless opinion and that of a qualified professional in a peer-reviewed journal, well, not much of a contest is there? You asked for peer-reviewed and you got it. You aren't qualified to refute it, so kindly piss off back to your troll cave.
*emphasis mine *

Oh really?  So peer-reviewed research is all of a sudden your end all be all authority? Remind me for a second, is this you?

(08-04-2024, 03:10 AM)Paleophyte Wrote: [ -> ]@Huggy Bear I posted one just a page or two back. It's in my post on why your peer-reviewed articles weren't worth the paper they were written on.

You realize this makes you  a big ass hypocrite,  right?
(10-11-2024, 08:52 AM)Huggy Bear Wrote: [ -> ]
(10-11-2024, 03:32 AM)Paleophyte Wrote: [ -> ]Either you're dishonest or stoopid, not sure which, but the phrase "full range of emotions" leaves little ambiguity. In case there was the author went on to list them immediately after that and love was right there. Seriously, you didn't have to read past the first paragraph.


And if I'm going to be choosing between your baseless opinion and that of a qualified professional in a peer-reviewed journal, well, not much of a contest is there? You asked for peer-reviewed and you got it. You aren't qualified to refute it, so kindly piss off back to your troll cave.
*emphasis mine *

Oh really?  So peer-reviewed research is all of a sudden your end all be all authority? Remind me for a second, is this you?

(08-04-2024, 03:10 AM)Paleophyte Wrote: [ -> ]@Huggy Bear I posted one just a page or two back. It's in my post on why your peer-reviewed articles weren't worth the paper they were written on.

You realize this makes you  a big ass hypocrite,  right?

Nope. I took the seminar courses where we learn to dissect academic papers. That's why I can and did tell you the reasons why the articles you cited weren't worth the paper they were written on. And since you haven't taken those courses, that's why your opinion is baseless. TBH, the paper that I cited to you wasn't the best quality. The one that I mentioned to Patty two posts back is significantly better but doesn't address love specifically.

Regardless, Burden of Proof to you. Have fun with that.

ETA: Isn't it a mortal sin to combine cross-posting and necroposting?
(10-11-2024, 04:47 AM)Paleophyte Wrote: [ -> ]After that we might pause to wonder how certain organisms would even work without emotion. Pure instinct is all well and good for very simple situations, but complex interactions in herd, pack, and social animals are probably going to need more than that. The reductionist that insists that all other animals can work on instinct alone is then left to explain how they know that human emotion is anything different. I'm honestly left wondering how a troop(?) of bonobos would even work without emotions.
"Pure instinct" would still be an "emotional experience".  Compulsion, specifically.  Plants, for example, don't feel compulsion or anything at all, and so they operate without "pure instinct" - but still produce outcomes associated with intelligence.  Which would have seemed odd to us even recently, before we understood machine intelligence.  Things which do not employ emotions or instinct (if there's a difference) to their interactions with the world.  Some living creatures may be closer to a machine intelligence than an emotional one.  Some aspects of emotionally intelligent creatures may, themselves, be instances of machine intelligence.  

Quote:At the end of the day it's a thorny question and must be a really interesting field to work in, but it's pretty clear that anything sparkier than a jellyfish or a barnacle needs some level of emotion to function. After that it's largely a matter shades of grey and where the True Scotsmen draw the line on love and such.
They need some level of some kind of intelligence - but I don't think either example is a good example of an emotional intelligence. I do think it's useful to remember that emotional intelligence would still be effected by a machine, and be based on the products of machine intelligence. So, the idea between quality and kind probably doesn't represent any fundamental difference in production..just different performance benchmarks.
Quote:*emphasis mine *

Oh really?  So peer-reviewed research is all of a sudden your end all be all authority? Remind me for a second, is this you?

Apparently your to dumb comprehend there are different levels of peer review and one can appropriate peer review well not holding it as an ultimate authority that can never be questioned if peer review wasn't questioned it would be useless.


Quote:You realize this makes you  a big ass hypocrite,  right?

Your inability to understand nuisance doesn't make him a hypocrite
(10-11-2024, 09:56 AM)Paleophyte Wrote: [ -> ]
(10-11-2024, 08:52 AM)Huggy Bear Wrote: [ -> ]*emphasis mine *

Oh really?  So peer-reviewed research is all of a sudden your end all be all authority? Remind me for a second, is this you?


You realize this makes you  a big ass hypocrite,  right?

Nope. I took the seminar courses where we learn to dissect academic papers. That's why I can and did tell you the reasons why the articles you cited weren't worth the paper they were written on. And since you haven't taken those courses, that's why your opinion is baseless. TBH, the paper that I cited to you wasn't the best quality. The one that I mentioned to Patty two posts back is significantly better but doesn't address love specifically.

Regardless, Burden of Proof to you. Have fun with that.

ETA: Isn't it a mortal sin to combine cross-posting and necroposting?
Not only that he doesn't get the papers he sights most of the time and leaps to absurd conclusion using it
(10-11-2024, 03:52 AM)Paleophyte Wrote: [ -> ]
(10-11-2024, 12:46 AM)Huggy Bear Wrote: [ -> ]Actually I made no claims buddy, let me paraphrase how we ended here.

"There is a giant leap here between "Love", something that we know ultimately is chemicals in our brain making us feel a certain way about others that forms long lasting attachments between people"

THAT is the actual claim being made, my repose to that was:

"What is the chemical composition of love?"

The response to that was:

"Dopamine
Neural Pathways
A Brain"

My reply to that was:

"So Love requires a ‘brain’, ‘dopamine’ and ‘neural pathways’, all of which are present in animals, yet animals don’t have the ability to love."

The claim that animals can love comes from your fellow athiests...

Nice try, but 0 out of 10 for failing the reading comprehension on your own posts. The emphasised portion is your claim that "animals don't have the ability to love." Burden of proof to you. Additionally, you followed with:

(10-10-2024, 05:31 PM)Huggy Bear Wrote: [ -> ]An animal mating for life doesn't imply that they love each other, it's simply their instinctual nature to do so, or else you'd see cases where love ends and they separate, same as humans. 

Have fun demonstrating those. They are, as you say, "Pure conjecture... indeed, the whole section of the article discussing love is 100% opinion." And baseless opinion at that.

What you emphasised is the default position, your article, if you bothered reading it says as much.

"I also posit that those who claim that few if any animals have deep, rich, and complex emotional lives—that they cannot feel such emotions as joy, love, or grief—should share the burden of proof with those who argue otherwise."
One it says no such thing and no the burden of proof is 100% on you as Paleophyte points out . Try again
Fire the writers. Animals breaking up is an indication that they are better at love than animals which stay together.

Love isn't patient or kind or any of that bullshit. Real Love...is breaking up.
(10-11-2024, 09:56 AM)Paleophyte Wrote: [ -> ]
(10-11-2024, 08:52 AM)Huggy Bear Wrote: [ -> ]*emphasis mine *

Oh really?  So peer-reviewed research is all of a sudden your end all be all authority? Remind me for a second, is this you?


You realize this makes you  a big ass hypocrite,  right?

Nope. I took the seminar courses where we learn to dissect academic papers. That's why I can and did tell you the reasons why the articles you cited weren't worth the paper they were written on. And since you haven't taken those courses, that's why your opinion is baseless. TBH, the paper that I cited to you wasn't the best quality. The one that I mentioned to Patty two posts back is significantly better but doesn't address love specifically.

Regardless, Burden of Proof to you. Have fun with that.

ETA: Isn't it a mortal sin to combine cross-posting and necroposting?
*emphasis mine*


Yet you overlook the part of your article that cites an admitted OPINION as evidence, seems like you need a refund. Btw, I don't believe for a second that you attended any such seminar, now go ahead and hold this L.

[Image: giphy.gif?cid=ecf05e47rnuhn2669y91fct9cm...y.gif&ct=g]
I always love it when huggy pretends he owned someone when he has in fact owned himself and lacks the awareness to see it  Big Grin
(10-11-2024, 04:23 PM)Huggy Bear Wrote: [ -> ][Image: giphy.gif?cid=ecf05e47rnuhn2669y91fct9cm...y.gif&ct=g]

Hey @Huggy Bear

Will you ever answer the question as to what happens to the soul of an aborted festus/clump of cells?
(10-11-2024, 12:46 AM)Huggy Bear Wrote: [ -> ]...The claim that animals can love comes from your fellow athiests

As an aside I know you repeatedly misspell atheists as "athiests".
I'm not sure whether you do this simply as an attempt to stir the
pot, or maybe you're dyslexic?

Anyway...

Earlier you said "So Love requires a ‘brain’, ‘dopamine’ and ‘neural
pathways’, all of which are present in animals, yet animals don’t
have the ability to love
."

(my bold)

Link necessary.  Please.
Romance, and Hollywood horseshit, aside...

When did this "love" nonsense enter the equation?  For most of human history marriage was little more than a contract between families with the "bride" being the property transferred to the groom and having to bring along a dowry to boot!

Children were offspring who were mainly counted upon to serve as extra farm hands and a lot of them had to be born because child mortality was very high.  "Love" did not matter for shit.
(10-11-2024, 04:23 PM)Huggy Bear Wrote: [ -> ]Yet you overlook the part of your article that cites an admitted OPINION as evidence, seems like you need a refund.

I didn't overlook it. Most scientific papers cite a variety of sources. I've already said that this isn't the best paper that I could find, but I can't be arsed to spend more than 5 minutes on Google for your foolishness. You asked for peer-reviewed and you got it. 

Quote:Btw, I don't believe for a second that you attended any such seminar

Your beliefs are irrelevant, as always. You get basic training on how to evaluate scientific literature in any decent BSc and you typically get a more thorough series of courses in your masters and PhD work. You pretty much have to if your job is going to be picking apart other scientists work and writing your own. The Prof works the course material into it, so you're reading current scientific lit and learning how to evaluate it. You get together with a few classmates and the Prof to pop the hood and see how good or bad this week's papers were. And it's seminar courses (note the plural), not seminar. This isn't something you get in a couple of hours with a sales pitch for a timeshare in Florida. Seriously, how is your reading comprehension this rubbish?

Regardless, burden of proof is still yours. But don't worry, I'm sure that nobody has noticed your continuing attempts at dodging that.
(10-11-2024, 04:38 PM)SaxonX Wrote: [ -> ]I always love it when huggy pretends he owned someone when he has in fact owned himself and lacks the awareness to see it  Big Grin

Aww, poor little tink tink…

A self own would be attempting to argue that animals have all these human feelings, all the while kidnapping their children whom they apparently love, and selling them off or giving them away.

If that’s what you believe, doesn’t that make anyone with pets no different than a slave trader?
Anyone notice Huggs is stuck in the 'pet' box? Evidence of a closed mind.

Edit: Litter box might be an appropriate analogy.
(10-12-2024, 03:46 PM)Huggy Bear Wrote: [ -> ]A self own would be attempting to argue that animals have all these human feelings, all the while kidnapping their children whom they apparently love, and selling them off or giving them away.

That's just admitting that humans don't treat animals as well as we do other humans. No big shock there seeing how poorly we treat other humans with different skin colour/belief/culture/sexual orientation/etc... And they aren't human feelings, they're feelings that a lot of animals have, including humans. I'd say that I was surprised that you could be this dense, but I'm not.
(10-12-2024, 03:46 PM)Huggy Bear Wrote: [ -> ]
(10-11-2024, 04:38 PM)SaxonX Wrote: [ -> ]I always love it when huggy pretends he owned someone when he has in fact owned himself and lacks the awareness to see it  Big Grin

Aww, poor little tink tink…

A self own would be attempting to argue that animals have all these human feelings, all the while kidnapping their children whom they apparently love, and selling them off or giving them away.

If that’s what you believe, doesn’t that make anyone with pets no different than a slave trader?

You do realize humans push their litter out of the nest, too.  It just takes humans longer to become independent.  When we lived in more primitive circumstances, children were expected to leave the nest in their early teen.  Dogs just mature earlier.  In fact, having our children still living in mom’s basement is only a recent phenomenon.  When our children leave, do we stop loving them?  Does a dog or cat?  Again, we don’t know…they can’t tell us their feelings.  Like most mothers, they’re thrilled they don’t have to watch them all the time.  They get a deserved rest.
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