In the previous lounge, during one of the long and vigorous discussions that evolved into faith versus science (I think it was a thread that started out talking about nature), someone mentioned two basic scientific principles that scientists are still unable to explain and which are accepted as "that's just the way it is".

Does anyone recall what they might have been or, barring recollection, just know what they are?

ryck

"Non-troubleshooting technical issues belong in the Lounge" was probably one of them.

I don't remember that specific thread but I can take a guess about one of those principles. Physics is based upon mathematical representations of reality. Obviously, the math is successful at predicting the behavior of physical objects. We couldn't get to the Moon, for example, if the opposite were true. AFAIK, nobody understands why physical objects follow mathematical rules. Math is a human invention, not an object.

"Actually", math/physics/etc is an deduction based on observable phenomena and then becomes inductive when used to predict phenomena.
And don't forget abduction ... and all things which pull stuff apart and then put it back together again.

You omitted seduction, which brings things together.

Mea culpa, although methinks that would fall into my last category.

Jon, it could be the other way around: It is not that objects follow our math rules, it is that the rules are tailored to the objects. We definitely are quite advanced in that domain, I guess. But coming back to the original post, we see that a lot in biology. The same molecule has different effects on different cell types having the same signaling machinery. The cell type-dependent effects are unexplained in general - this is just the way it is...

I'm not quite sure about this. Pure math is abstract and its own world. Yet, arithmetic, algebra, trigonometry, calculus, etc. seem to be involved in the "real" world. I don't think that mathematicians necessarily tailored their theorems to physical objects. (Of course, one could make that claim about geometry and trigonometry.)

Quantum mechanics is just plain weird by the standards of our everyday experience but it seems to predict sub-atomic behavior quite well. My violin student has a Ph.D. in physics and actually understands quantum theory. I made the remark that that theory is somewhat more comprehensible than the US Tax Code but he said that they were equal. Quantum Theory allows for parallel universes and the IRS seems to exist in one. I don't know where politicians fit into all this but that's for future generations to explain.

Macnerd10 has it right Jon. You have the cart before the horse. Physics is not based on mathematics it is based on observed physical phenomena which in turn can be modeled mathematically. Albert Einstein created his theories, and he was always careful to call them theories, by observing specific physical phenomena, working them out as a "story problem" describing why the phenomena might occur, and only then developing a mathematical formula to model his story. Of course if he could not model it mathematically he might have to rethink his story.

Virtually every physical, and even human activity, can be modeled mathematically. In some cases the model can be devolved into a single specific equation such as E=MC², others require a complex set of related equations, and still others require modeling using a mathematical heuristic. As the mathematics and the phenomena are better understood the more complex formulations tend to become simpler and less complex. I once took a course where we spent an entire semester understanding the implications of a 47 step equation modeling a single process. Two days before the final exam another researcher published a paper that reduced the 47 step equation into a single equation with 4 variables. (My professor humanely elected to hand out a copy of the new formula instead of the final exam and gave everyone in the class a Pass.)

The beauty of this is once the math has been worked out, it is possible to infer from that math phenomena that have not yet been observed and in fact may never be directly observable. The current very exciting theoretical physics work in string theory being a prime example of the latter.

Mathematical modeling is not limited to physics and the {i]hard[/i] sciences, but as macnerd10 has indicated can easily extended into the biological sciences or in fact virtually any field of study. How about modeling the behavior of customers in the line(s) at a MacDonalds -- been there, done that. the ultimate modeling is summed up in General Systems Theory.

Bingo. The math that is used in physics represents a model of the observed facts. We observe the way the physical world behaves, we construct models that match the observed reality, then we use those models to predict the behavior of the physical world and see how closely the world matches the models.

Some of these models are mathematical in nature. That doesn't mean the physical world is mathematical; it means that certain types of math can be used to construct models that match the behavior we see in the physical world. Not all of these models are mathematical, and not all math models the physical world.

Many thanks to macnerd10, joemikeb and Tacit for their clear, concise explanations. If only economists could come up with accurate equations...

but that has nothing to do with math. it's all voodoo!

Isn't that what I said, far more economically?

Actually Jon the class I mentioned was a graduate economics course. The primary economic models over the last 50 years been based on two critical assumptions first propounded by Keynes:

1. The markets are at their core rational and
2. the major players in the market would always act out of informed self-interest

Unfortunately as Alan Greenspan said, he never dreamed the big players greed would overwhelm their informed self-interest, but it did. Once that happened the markets were no longer acting in a rational manner or viewed another way, the collapse was a rational, albeit disastrous, reaction to an irrational system.

It is possible to anticipate irrational behavior in a system and there were many who were predicting the eventual crash but they were uniformly ignored because their rational arguments carried little or no weight in a system that had become almost totally irrational.

You mean that IRS takes our money in this universe and spends it on something in the parallel one?

Ah, that's a horse of a different color. Economics bears no resemblance to science of any kind. Your arguments vis-a-vis mathematics may be correct but your example is not a good one.

Perhaps someone can answer the original question in this thread.

Thanks Jon:

This thread is a good example of what has always made the Lounge shine, IMHO. You can ask about one thing and then get a great education in something related.

I may have phrased my question poorly. As I recall, the previous thread had got to a point where there was back-and-forth about the wisdom of believing in things that can't be proven. Someone made the point that such reliance on accepting the unproven existed in science.

I seems to be me that they mentioned two particular principles or theories - may even have been The Theory of ______ and The Theory of ______, - on which a lot of ensuing science didn't work unless you first accepted these two unknowns as true.

ryck

That was me; I argued then, and continue to argue now, that accepting things on faith, without evidence, is a mistake.

The argument that science accepts things that aren't proven is often made by those who favor believing in things on faith, but it isn't a good argument. There are axioms in mathematics that can't be proven formally (such as a thing is always equal to itself), but the body of human scientific knowledge does not rest on these axioms; it rests on observation. Any theory is only as good as the next bit of evidence that refutes it.

A scientist does not accept "the earth's gravity imparts an acceleration on an object equivalent to 9.8 meters per second squared" as an axiom; he goes out and measures it. Again and again and again and again. And then he refines his tools and increases the precision of his measurements, and measures it again.

The force of gravity is not math; the math describes the behavior of gravity. There's a difference. The animal that lives in my house is not a big black dog; "big" and "black" and "dog" are simply arbitrary sounds used to describe it, but it is an animal that exists without those words, so arguments about semantics do not change the reality of its existence any more than arguments about axioms in mathematics change the way that gravity behaves. Even in a different language, the pet in my house would be the same; even in a different mathematical system, gravity would act the same way. It's important not to confuse a thing with the model or language that we use to describe the thing. Attacks on axioms of a mathematical language do not mean that the universe's properties are based on things that can't be proved.

Faith is believing in something without evidence to support that belief. We have evidence to support the belief that gravity behaves in thus-and-such a way; we do not have evidence to believe that there is an invisible man who lives in the sky and spends a great deal of time thinking about what kind of clothes people should wear and how people should have sex.

One of the problems with accepting any belief without evidence is that you have no referent to decide whether or not that belief has any bearing on reality or not, as the world's thousands of religious faiths can demonstrate--they can not possibly all be right.

And to use your own philosophical principles against that: such things as "an invisible man who lives in the sky" could exist... whether or not any proof can be demonstrated. If there is a 'Creator' out there somewhere, he/she/it doesn't need **your** belief in order to exist. The real problems arise when mankind tries to politicize the debate with dogma (and dictatorship, and war, etc).

Though it got bad reviews from the critics, i do remember enjoying the book "The Tao of Physics"  a few decades back.

I cannot recall the quote precisely but the great mathematician and physicist, Albert Einstein, was quoted as saying something to the effect that no amount of experimentation could prove any of his work to be true and it would take but a single experiment to prove it false.

We accept scientific evidence and the mathematical models as true until a better explanation comes along, we learn more about the observed phenomena, or it is proven to be wrong. In that sense I contend we do take scientific theory on faith based on what we know and can explain at any given point in our understanding. I was taught atoms were the smallest elements of matter, then there were protons, neutrons, and electrons, that lasted until quarks came along, and today the theoretical physicists are working on string theory as the one in the same largest and smallest elements of matter and energy.

It strikes me that all scientific knowledge is genuinely a working hypothesis that we accept on faith as true until more or better understanding comes along.

Not responding to Hal, just contributing to the thread . . .

Mathematical modelling of the physical world is bound to have a "faith" component. I'm not talking about an Old Man With A Beard, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Suppose there is an isomorphism between a complete mathematical model, and the physical laws of the universe. Then by Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, our mathematical model must have unproveable truths, and this would, by our isomorphism, mean that the real world must also have unproveable truths - i.e. things that must be taken on "faith".

I generally agree but the word "faith" makes me uneasy. When we say in papers "we believe" it does not imply that it is our faith, rather our understanding. This is why a lot of science people like the expression "working hypothesis, which implies that it mimics the real-life situation reasonably well but has room to be changed if new evidence is obtained. The original post was about "it is just as it is", which again is not about faith but about our total lack of understanding the phenomenon, whether we can describe it, measure, or create a model of it using math. Bottom line, I guess, we are all fairly correct and on the same ground.
Just one word of defense for John. When physicists describe some, say, new particle, as a prediction using a mathematical apparatus, and then discover it by experimentation, it is very easy to believe that the object obeys our reasoning and calculations. Most would say that the prediction was correct because we knew enough to make it, and the object is just still on its own, but we were able to model it correctly. This is one of the definitions of scientific discipline - whether it can make testable predictions. But it is so tempting to believe that if our model is advanced and accurate enough, the world may follow it by some higher law. Who knows?

Indeed, such an entity could exist. And it is unquestionably true that if such an entity exists, it will continue to exist regardless of whether or not I or anyone else believes in it.

One of the fundamental axioms of science, though, is that one does not benefit from believing that something exists when one has absolutely, positively no evidence to support that belief. There are literally billions of things that could possibly exist--a secret alien base on the far side of the moon, a gigantic omnipotent sky-dragon that called existence into being with a flap of its mighty wings, a caterpillar with an infinite number of legs wrapped in a ball around space-time outside the bounds of the physical universe, a cloned reproduction of Elvis Presley sealed in a ball of lucite in orbit around Alpha Centauri...I could, if I wanted to, spend months coming up with lists of things that could exist.

Hell, I could posit that the entire universe was created just exactly as it was about three hundred milliseconds before you read this post by being sneezed out of the nose of a supernatural, all-powerful being with a bad head cold. That could be the case; all of our memories could have been created along with us just a scant instant ago.

But the point is, without any evidence, there is no reason that you should believe any of these things. And in fact, you don't. Even the most faithful person does not accept 99.99999% of all the things which have been accepted on faith throughout human history. When we're talking about beliefs which are not supported by evidence and for which no proof can ever exist, what tool do you use to decide which ones to believe and which ones to reject? How can you tell?



Not as long as you don't confuse the model with reality, nor believe that the model is a perfectly complete, perfectly accurate reflection of reality.

Models are useful precisely because they model only a portion of reality. As human beings, we can not understand the whole of the physical world all at once, so we create models that help us to understand specific bits of it at a time. The model E=mC^2 is useful in helping us to understand the relationship between matter and energy; the model Fg=g(m1 m2)/r^2 is a model that helps us understand the gravitational attraction between two bodies; the proton-proton chain is a model that helps us understand how hydrogen fuses into helium in a star.

None of these things is an attempt to completely model the physical world. Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem states that a formal mathematical system must be incomplete in terms of provable theses and internal consistency, but mathematical systems are not the same thing as models; models of the physical world are specific subsets of mathematics, and not all models are mathematical in nature.

No benefit? Who says so? AFAIK, scientists haven't derived any equations for love either... so what do they know? Put all the geniuses on the planet into a [sterile] building and supply them with barrels containing every element in the universe, plus an unlimited amount of every type of energy. With all that, they couldn't even create a cockroach. Life and love are supposed to remain mysterious wonders. Believe anything you want. Your guess is as good as mine (maybe).



"Reality" in terms of anything meaningful is what we perceive through our five senses. Take those away and not much matters. And i suspect our senses are far from perfect anyway (and are thus probably inadequate to truly define something as subjective as "reality").

Horatio:
O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!

Hamlet:
And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

   --Hamlet; Act 1, scene 5

I also disagree. Many physics and chemistry predictions of the last century were based upon some theoretical calculations and conclusions but not on any evidence. When the new particles are discovered in physics, chances are that they have been predicted but no real evidence existed. We are not talking about star or planet discoveries because in many cases the orbits of the neighboring bodies were not as they should have been should no star/planet be present there. You may be right about benefits because they are hard to define, but this is definitely not a fundamental axiom of science. Suspicions and abstract mathematical predictions cannot generally be classified as evidence.

They do, however, have evidence to suggest that love exists.

Not all models are mathematical. There are many things that no equations exist for, yet we still have evidence of.



Not yet, anyway. They can put together individual living cells from scratch, but not a cockroach.

Yet.

That's just an engineering challenge, though. We know that it is possible to make living things from non-living things, and at this point even someone in a reasonably well-equipped college molecular biology lab can do it as his thesis project. The rest is just tailoring the cells and assembling them in the right order. It'll happen.



"Supposed" to? Why? I for one find the universe wondrous enough as it is without believing in Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. I've never met a working scientist who is not filled, every day, with joy and wonder and awe at the physical universe.



True. And without the evidence, these hypothesis may be considered interesting, but they are not believed.

Einstein's general theory of relativity was published decades before any evidence existed to support it--and it was considered a curiosity, an interesting idea, until the evidence came along. It wasn't until that evidence came along that it was believed, and moved into being one of the cornerstones of our understanding of nature.

Today, string theory is considered an interesting idea, but people don't believe it, except insofar as there are people who find it plausible. Nobody will really believe it until and unless evidence presents itself.



Yep, and without that evidence, things are considered possibilities, nothing more.

But I'm actually talking about something a little different. When i talk about faith, I'm talking about things that are not supported by evidence and for which no evidence can ever exist. If you talk to ten people who give you ten completely different, utterly incompatible faith-based beliefs (there is a single invisible man in the sky who created everything; no, there are hundreds of invisible entities who created the universe; no, there are three all-powerful invisible entities who made the world happen; no, the world was created by an animistic, self-aware force that exists in everything; and so on, and so on), which do you believe?

All of them? That's not possible; they contradict each other. The one you were told to believe when you were a child? If so, what separates them from belief in Santa Claus? What benefit do you get from believing any of them?

Evidence is in the eye of the beholder. Some folks can look at a tree or a puppy and see that as sufficient evidence of a Supreme Being. For me, the fact that i (or you) can *think* about and intelligently discuss (speculate on?) these existential matters is "evidence" enough that there's a lot more going on here than just random atoms and subatomic particles converging after some Big Bang.



Actually , that's news to me. Gotta link?



Seems to me if they're starting with a cell, then "someone" ELSE has already done the magical part. Heck, give me a mustard seed and i'll turn it into a tree in a few years. MAGIC! [that's why i sterilized the building and only furnished raw elements and energy.]



As i said one post back: believe whatever you want... after all, this is the land of the free here. If you enjoy living a faithless life then enjoy. [so long as it doesn't harm the other visitors on this planet.]



Who knows? There may be roughly 12 billion *different* answers to that question too. None of which will (necessarily) do you (or me) any good. The real answer to that is whatever you (or i) decide for ourselves.

Look: if there is a Supreme Being, and you were him... would you go around to everyone announcing yourself and answering all their questions? No way. Folks would be scared $#!+less. Free will would fall prey to (involuntary) subservience. We'd all be robots. Mysteries are far more interesting (in this case), and a better test of one's true character.

God wins.

I guess, not yet. Too many components in there...

They see validation of that notion, but not evidence. "Evidence" has a very specific meaning.

Indeed, the more you examine the natural world closely, and see things like the human retina (which is inside-out), the fact that living organisms share traits and even DNA with other organisms, and so on, the more you see evidence that there is not a master plan or architect.

There are several problems that get in the way of our ability to understand the physical world--problems which a person must carefully guard against if he or she is to be able to understand what 'evidence' really is.

The first and by far the biggest is confirmation bias--the natural tendency of human beings to see only what confirms their own ideas and conceptions, and not see things which tend not to confirm those ideas.

The second is hyperactive pattern matching. Human brains are extraordinarily good at finding patterns; it's what they're optimized for. We are so good at finding patterns that we tend to see patterns even where none exist at all.

The third is in misunderstanding correlation. Correlation does not demonstrate a cause and effect relationship, but our brains are extremely well optimized for believing that it does, because it has kept our ancestors alive. If I eat a food and then I get sick, that is NOT evidence that the food made me sick; but my ancestors who believed that it was tended not to eat food after they felt sick, so they were more likely to survive--and pass on genes for brains that see correlation as proof of causation.

The fourth is promiscuous teleology]--the tendency of human beings to look for "purpose" in things. Small children will believe things like "rocks have sharp edges so that animals can scratch their backs on them;" as adults, we make the same error in more subtle ways.

The fifth is the human tendency to propose an idea, and then search for evidence to support the idea. We are storytelling animals; we tell ourselves little stories all the time, all day long, to help explain the world to us. Those stories can become like Rulyard Kipling's 'just so' stories--"the dog brought fire to man by stealing it from the gods in his mouth, and that's why dogs can't talk. Their mouths were burned by the fire." So the observation that dogs can't talk becomes seen as 'evidence' that man got fire when our faithful companion the dog stole it from the gods and brought it to us. Creationists, particularly Young Earth Creationists, are especially prone to seeing this sort of 'evidence'.



Of course, there is a lot of front-loading on that statement. There idea that there must be more going on is promiscuous teleology; the idea that it's random is a misunderstanding of selective adaptation (the initial processes of the first and most primitive forms of life may have been random, but natural selection is an inherently nonrandom process).



Many. There's an entire field associated with it; it's called synthetic biology. The most interesting part of synthetic biology, to me, is engineering synthetic biology, which is the process of creating living organisms from scratch. MIT has an entire synthetic biology program, and there are [url= http://syntheticbiology.org/]trade organizations[/url] dedicated to it. Dr. Craig Ventnor, the biologist responsible for spearheading the sequencing of the human genome, was the first person to use synthetic biology to create a complete bacterium from scratch starting with only the component chemicals; other synthetic biologists start with living cells, or parts of living cells, and then reprogram them by hand-coding pieces of DNA that instruct the cells (or parts of the cells) to act as counters or other circuits.




Dr. Ventnor started with a handful of chemicals--simple amino acids, a collection of proteins, and hand-coded DNA. Does that count?



The problem with subscribing to faith-based cosmological systems without evidence is that they lead, when they come into competition, to all sorts of reprehensible acts of atrocity.

There is no way for them not to, in fact. If you propagate a belief system which says "this belief system is inspired directly by the creator of the universe; the creator of the universe writes books; and the creator of the universe has specified one right way to live," then it is absolutely inevitable that some people who accept that belief system will commit acts of atrocity against people who do not.



I say the "real" answer is the one that most closely matches the physical world. I also say that the physical world is not subject to belief; if you believe that there is a leprechaun in the garden, but there is not, your belief won't cause one to be there.



If I were a supreme being, and I wanted people to believe in me, and I planned to torture people who did not believe in me for all eternity, then I'd be a pretty crappy divine being if I didn't announce myself! Only a reprehensible being of appalling evil would do such a thing.

You mutter such objects of equine delight that the mind's ability to sew slices of mordant ivory becomes tamed with visions of Tamils in Constantinople.



No... and I think you sense the difference.
From "I am creating artificial life, declares US gene pioneer":


A new life form perhaps... but it required an already existing life form to come into "being".
Sorry but... that just sounds like Dr. Frankenstein, working at a molecular level.
[edit: and perhaps a little H. P. Lovecraft for good measure. ]

--

Most of your post there is very clever indeed (intricately so), but less honest (imho) than purported. I might (again) turn your own arguments on themselves and accuse you of practicing a highly skilled (yet transparently cloaked) form of "promiscuous teleology". Of course you'll disagree... so, on that part we should simply agree that our *opinions* probably differ. [not much more to say about that... as we seem to have reached the point of diminishing returns.]


But then there's the remaining political/religious arguments (delivered in the form of sarcastic slurs)... which i have no idea why those are being directed in a reply to me. I am *not* in favor of "organized" religion(s) and/or persecution of non-believers, etc. Re-read my first post to see that we already agree about that aspect of this topic.

Faithfully yours,

-HI-

Sorry, Tacit, this Venter story does not cut it. He only made a "synthetic chromosome"; Khorana got the Nobel prize for a synthetic gene many years ago. He just wanted to put it into a bacterial cell and "create a new species" in the sensationalist journalist lingo. This is not the same as making a synthetic cell. Venter has been notorious for ambitious announcements. Contrary to popular belief, and his and Clinton's assertions, the human genome has not been fully sequenced yet.

Ironically we have religious fanatics on one hand... and now "scientists" trying to play god on the other.

Extremists either way you slice it.

Religious people have been accusing others of "playing god" for thousands of years. As near as I can tell, the definition of "playing god" means "trying to understand parts of the physical world that I personally do not understand but think should be blocked off from human comprehension and marked with a sign reading 'god is here'."

One of the most interesting things we see from history is the way god retreats as our understanding of the physical world advances. Religions have always tried to fill in gaps in our understanding by saying "if there's something we don't understand, god did it," but the more we learn, the less space is left for god.

There is nothing particularly magical about life; we're closing in on the ability to create a living organism entirely from scratch, and if you don't accept that Dr. Ventnor has done that yet, the question will become academic soon. The more our knowledge of the physical world advances, the more we realize that things we used to think of as magic are simply the operation of natural law.

And that's a good thing, just for the record.

If you start with the premise that we are fallen from grace, created perfect by a perfect divinity and then corrupted, then we are doomed to being nothing more than we are right now. If you accept the premise that we are the wonderful, amazing, awe-inspiring result of the natural workings of the physical world, then there is no limit, save for those imposed by the laws of physics themselves, to the altitude we can soar.

Some people find that frightening, and want to put limits on how high we can fly. Those limits are almost invariably called 'god'. I don't buy it history shows us too many examples of how these cries of 'playing god' have been false.

I agree that it will become academic one day but Venter has NOT done it yet. Your reference is from 2007 and in 2009 people are still only TALKING about it. It will take way longer, especially for cells that are more advanced than the bacterial ones. The caveat not that visible for the general public is that we can recreate a lot of biochemical reactions in a test tube but the cell is an autoregulatory and self-procreating machine, which is for now way beyond our abilities. I am also looking forward to seeing something like this happening in my lifetime, but suspect it would take a long time.
P.S. My old mentor always cautioned me about following scientific advances in the mass media. He is a cancer researcher and used to say "If we believe everything that is written in the newspapers about cancer treatment, I fail to understand why this disease is still around".

Yeah but i haven't been around for a thousand years... so i didn't use that phrase in those cases. [and i don't subscribe to the definition you gave either.] We're strictly talking about 'creating' life in this sub-thread/tangent.


What happened to all that "awe" then?


You have more faith than you realize.


I seriously doubt that creating "life" from scratch [i.e., in my sterilized building, with nothing but elements and energy] is possible. They will always need to tinker with something that's already alive (or parts of something that was). No more magical than breeding a dog with a pig. Hey look... it's a new life form!!! Eureka, etc.

The scientist in me wants to see the proof.

I think I owned that dog when I was a kid growing up on the prairies. Of course, you could substitute "pig" with "any being that stands still long enough".

ryck

On what do you base that belief? Do you believe that life is magical--that there is something in a living organism beyond the molecules that make it up?

Organism? Animal or vegetable?
Can it think... sense fear, or joy?
Any grey matter in the anatomy?
Define all the parameters here.

Anyway, perhaps the boarding school i attended in the early 70's was too close to that hippie commune. It was called 'Spirit In The Flesh' (the commune, not the school. ). Um, yeah... i suppose you could call it a belief. Not that i'm willing to fight to the death over it... and, not that i have any proofs worked out or anything.

So okay... maybe an apple has life (without a "soul") -- and maybe your doctor Mengele Spock can (eventually) synthesize apples... allowing future astronauts to travel light years into the cosmos, and not go hungry. That's fine. (beam me up already, Scotty)

But i still have doubts (unless they borrow a little bacteria... or caviar... or something with an inner "life" force) that scientists will be able to develop any 'creatures'. I.e., using only jars of elements and energy transference, etc.

Interesting thread. I am a long-time MacFixIt reader who has always enjoyed the 'adult' demeanor and intelligent responses proffered, and am very glad FineTunedMac has 'arisen from the ashes' so to speak.

Perhaps that's not a good analogy for this thread, but whatever. I was following this thread's discussion with interest, as I have always had the tendency (much to my mother's chagrin) of questioning 'faith-based' convictions, especially when they conflicted with the beliefs of other, 'faithful' people. I find myself, now pushing retirement age, more attuned to Tacit's view of the 'universe'. However, I appreciate a respectful exchange of ideas, which this thread seemed to be, until now. Hal Itosis' reference to 'Mengle' was unwarranted and disrespectful, IMHO, and represents and all-to-common slide into the emotional morass we seem to find in discourse today involving controversial issues. I'm saddened and disappointed.

Frank

I suppose it is a fact of human nature that faith is inevitably highly individualistic. James Fowler proposed his Stages of Faith derived at least in part on Jean Piaget's Theory of cognitive development and perhaps more directly on Kohlberg's stages of moral development. While Fowler's work focused on Christian faith development a careful reading reveals his work is equally valid not only for spiritual faith development, but any faith development. Whether that faith is lodged in political viewpoints, scientific theory or in spirituality there is little, if any, significant difference.

There is reason to believe an examination of the distribution of the population would find the mean somewhere in the third stage which is characterized by conformity. Conformity implies rejection of any other faith that differs from your own. Therefore we arrive at what you describe as I share your sadness and disappointment but as a person of faith (Calvinist) and a person of scientific bent, I can only view it as an artifact of the human condition.

Now, a little defense for Tacit! His term "from scratch" should not be taken at face value. We cannot make proteins by a synthetic process because of their complexity. But we can make them in a test tube using isolated cell's protein synthesis machinery. This should be legitimate within "from scratch". If we knew what and how to mix in order to create a living cell, we could possibly make one that would be really "alive". It does not mean that we have to make all the molecules from basic bricks - this would be counterproductive and extremely expensive. Further, I do not believe that life entails some magic "ether" that has to be added to the cell components in order to bring cell into full gear with autoregulation and ability to divide. I was just saying that we are rather far from this goal despite assurances of sensationalist biologists-entrepreneurs. And let us not mix awful and rather stupid experiments by Mengele, especially the twin "studies" with a noble cause of creating "new forms of life" for the betterment of mankind and for agricultural and industrial purposes. But the major caveat would be a global regulation of such activities. We would not like to see some new form of life eating up the rest of the planet

Then there's where we disagree. Disassembling a living 'organism' and borrowing its parts is *not* starting from scratch.


Re: "Mengele"

Okay, well, over the top maybe... but so was some of the reactions. Let's assume then that Venter has good intentions. Why his big rush to glory then? Didn't you [macnerd10] point out that the claim was a bit overstated? Anyway, power of that kind can easily end up running amok. Perhaps one of his less successful experiments winds up in a landfill, and then morphs into some new kind of moss or algae which turns out to be fatal to fish or something. [and unlike an ordinary chemical spill... this living mess keeps on growing.]

You know, even good old Einstein wasn't exactly "thrilled" about the A-Bomb.
And -- unless i'm mistaken -- Einstein made many a reference to God as well.

Hey, sorry you slid into emotional sadness and disappointment... but the name "Mengle" [sp.?] wasn't directed at anyone here... least of all you (unless you're the doctor conducting these creepy experiments).

And the reason is quite simple...

   "I'm the one that's gonna die when it's time for me to die." -- James Marshall Hendrix

   "In the end there is one dance you'll do alone." -- Clyde Jackson Browne

"It's not that I'm afraid of dying. I just don't want to be there when it happens." Woody Allen

"Die, my dear? Why that's the last thing I'll do." Groucho Marx

I apologize for the misspelling of 'Mengele'- the fingers sometimes outrun the brain these days. And no, I haven't been conducting any 'creepy' experiments lately - unless trying to get my printer to work with Snow Leopard counts. And while Einstein made many references to 'God', I'm not sure to whose God, of all those in play today, he was referring.

Frank

I think i might know which one.  But -- for purposes of this thread -- it doesn't really matter "whose God". It was just an example of a great scientific mind who had some sort of faith in a higher power. [Perhaps he may have asked himself: 'what actually *caused* the Big Bang?' -- idunno.]

Also, he didn't seek to cook up artificial 'organisms' (synthetic bacteria?) with the [alleged] attitude that "there's nothing magical about life." [Or so has been the astute representation in this thread thus far.] Let's just hope that Venter et. al. have slightly more enlightened viewpoints than that. (Hmm, born in Salt Lake City? What are the odds he's an atheist then? ).

Finally, i want to thank you for not holding me accountable for the Crusades.

Death is the only frontier that pretty near all of us will ever cross; I look forward to discovering what's really on the other side (as opposed to what I envision) but not too soon, mind you.

Einstein was a professional and would never have ventured into "seeking to cook up artificial organisms", which is the realm of molecular and cell biology, quite far from his theoretical physics. Besides, his faith story may be complicated, as much as Darwin's. It is amazing for me that nowadays there are quite a few prominent biologists who are true believers. Since religion occupies an important place in many people's minds, an element of faith is definitely present even in the scientific community. And it is so hard to completely brush off the Aristotle's principle of teleology...

Don't rush it please; none of these discoveries was ever published...

Perhaps you are aware of someone who won't die? Isn't it odd that "true believers" also don't want to die too soon and fight it as much as possible? Logic would suggest that they would eagerly embrace meeting their deity.

Here ya go:

http://www.fantastic-voyage.net/

Now that someone is offering a key to immortality, I think that I'll run the other way while holding tightly onto my wallet.

I sure hope that won't be literally true in my universe, which is not to say there isn't any room for romantic obfuscation of reality.

Likewise, and despite all arguments to the contrary, beliefs are inherently irrational coping and comforting mechanisms (there's your 'benefit') generated by a brain lacking in understanding or means to deal with issues in a more active and fundamental way, but that doesn't mean there isn't room for that either. That is, as long as you remember what and where you are, and won't let beliefs dictate your options to the exclusion of everything else. But that's my 2¢...

Nicely put! Scientists call it the working hypothesis and it is always tied to a certain area or problem (maybe except physics). Common folks tend to explain it by God's will. This makes us comfortable with the world, like a wall to keep our sanity behind it.

+10!

Of course, the difference between the two is that scientific working hypotheses (including those in physics) are continuously tested and rejected when the experimental data makes their continuation untenable, while God's will is usually neither tested nor rejected by the faithful who more often than not tend to frown upon such investigative activities.

Agree!

...meaning what? It currently is true? (guess i missed something).



Again, "reality" (and i suppose you mean *physical* reality?) is phenomena perceived by our 5 senses. Explain (if you will) dreams. [i.e., the dimensions therein are *not* limited by the physical world we live in day-to-day. For example, even the atoms and molecules everyone is all excited about here are somewhat illusory. Theoretically, there is more space in these solids (such as our Macs) than we are capable of seeing with our eyes. I don't know about the rest of you... but i fly and time-travel in my dreams all the time. Not that i have full control or anything. (still trying to get through Victor Sanchez's book on Castaneda).] Anyway, Einstein blew away many conceptions of (Newtonian) reality when he proved that {the passage of} time is *not* a constant. The maximum speed of light.... that's the constant.




Yes, there is some 'comfort mechanism' involved perhaps. But... "a brain lacking in understanding or means to deal with issues" is a trait all humans share, so that cancels out. [unless you have all the answers to life... or even the right questions? -- if so, Dr. Venter could probably use your help.  ]




None of which truly answers such questions as: 'where did we come from?' and 'where are we going?'. Are you saying that you believe before we were born we came from nowhere... and when we die we will go nowhere. [?] If so... that's none too comforting.




Common folks are more interested in watching Survivor or Sopranos (besides getting food and sex of course), than thinking about such deep subjects.

Which reminds me of some burning questions:
Is there TV in heaven?
Cable or dish?
How many channels?

Obviously, I cannot answer many of the questions you ask, but that doesn't mean I have to resort to [deluding myself by] inventing irrational answers. I can wait and am perfectly happy in the expectation that the scientific method used so far to elucidate reality is quite capable of continuing to do so, whether this happens in my lifetime or not. But it's equally clear that 'virtual' realities as experienced in dreams don't need to meet the strictures of reality as perceived by (y)our waking senses.

You can easily imagine assembling both real and unreal items into immaterial model constructs, and it is a small step to do so whether one is aware of the imaginary or unreal aspects of certain components or not. And while that hard to pinpoint awareness might be qualified as illusory (not that this train of thought requires such a thing), the more readily described matter is arguably a different case*. What is illusory there is the notion that one should be able to perceive all dimensions of matter within the limits of one's unaided senses. If you have no problem transporting yourself beyond your own limitations with the aid of machines, why wouldn't that apply to your perceptions as well?

I must also disagree with your notion that "a brain lacking in understanding or means to deal with issues is a trait all humans share, so that [it] cancels out". I'm sure you can see more than one flaw in that interpretation, and this even applies to (and despite) those missing answers or questions you're referring to, just as I'm sure Dr. Venter is already sufficiently aware of this not to require my help. This is no zero sum game, to the contrary.

Likewise, I don't need to believe anything beyond what I can already encompass about my life: my 'self' reached critical mass and emerged during my physical development, just as it will cease to exist upon my death or perhaps even before that. It doesn't bother me one bit if you'd call that 'coming from nowhere and returning to nowhere', because that's how it appears to me; I have no problem whatsoever with that view and don't require a comforting illusion purporting something else. Besides, my personal fate is separate from that of humanity as a whole, and speculation about the details is as 'real' to all of us as it is immaterial to the actual course of events of such things.

*) We both can easily observe the differences between the effect of such mental exercises on reality, as opposed to that of direct interventions based on previous experimentation and associated expectation. But once again, these are only a few more coins from my opinion purse. Meanwhile, I'll let your final questions stew for a bit longer...

Ï€ is an irrational number... yet you (we) have no problem accepting that in order to compute its full value, one must go towards infinity for eternity? Is that rational?



Seems you share that faith with tacit. That must be a source of comfort [as opposed to "irrational" self-delusion] i suppose?


[Your second paragraph blew me away... so (despite my not understanding it fully) i think i'll agree with you there.]



But... you (we) can't just take out those questions (or any others of that nature), because therein lies the very reason we all share that trait: none of us *knows* the answers to these [before and after type] questions. We may speculate in different ways... or choose to ignore the matter entirely. But basically, we're all just babes in the woods here. [edit: and i guess one other big question is "why?" -- isn't there some famous quote concerning the 'unexamined life'?]



All good, no problem whatsoever. So... we're right back to my "believe what you want" then -- aren't we? [you keep using words like "view" and "expectation", but that's pretty much the same as a belief system... whether you approve of that term or not.]

As i hope i made clear... i don't claim to be right (about anything here), or say that you're wrong. Just exchanging ideas.

[and i enjoy it when folks like Jon and Artie make jokes... this topic needs comic relief. ]

No good links for TV in heaven but some claims that Internet is not needed in heaven:
http://www.raptureready.com/faq/faq361.html

> Quoting artie: "Death is the only frontier that pretty near all of us will ever cross; [....]"

Quoting Jon: "Perhaps you are aware of someone who won't die?"

I haven't run across any of those, but I'm aware of many people who will cross frontiers before before they die.

> Isn't it odd that "true believers" also don't want to die too soon and fight it as much as possible? Logic would suggest that they would eagerly embrace meeting their deity.

Did people always fight death as they do today, or is today's (American, anyhow) attitude that nobody should ever die a new thing?

My feeling is that death was pretty much universally accepted until the "Medical Industrial Complex" decided that inventing new medications and appliances to keep people inhaling and exhaling longer was preferable.

French toast?

Fear of death, like fear of anything else, is mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.

I think that people always fought death. Having a strong survival instinct is definitely a Darwinian trait. In other words, organisms (I'm not limiting this to humans) that don't go out of their way to survive tend not to contribute to the gene pool. Male black widow spiders are (nominally) exceptions, of course, but the point is that they manage to reproduce before they go to The Great Web In The Sky.

I agree that Americans somehow think that death is an abnormality and can be avoided if one takes the right vitamins, exercises, and otherwise lives via the health fad du jour. There seems to be an attitude that, if a patient dies, the doctor must be incompetent. We don't even see people die; that's relegated to hospitals and nursing homes.

There's a great line in Woody Allen's Sleeper. His character awakens 200 years in the future and is informed that all his friends are dead. He is incredulous and exclaims, "But the all ate organic rice!"

My wife's father died at home at age 90, with his loved ones surrounding him. To my mind, that beats the hell out of passing on while tubes of various diameters are inserted in every available orifice. Dying is inevitable but some methods are better than others.

No, it's not odd. That's because it has nothing to do with logic. Most people I have discussed death with say if not for those left behind, they would gladly "retire". Since most of us know how much it hurts us to lose a loved one, we don't want our loved ones to suffer that pain from our unexpected or early demise. And then there's the "don't want to miss out" angle; not seeing your grandkids grow up, etc.

Artificial flowers cannot die for life within them is illusion.

If you have complete faith, there should be no pain involved in the death of a loved one because you "know" that that person is in Heaven. In fact, I would think that you would be overjoyed because of the deceased's complete bliss and the "knowledge" that you will see that person again.

I disagree. The loved ones left behind are still, uh, living. For however long that lasts, they will miss the departed. It's similar to someone going on a trip. I'm reminded of a newlywed couple I know. Before they got married, one of them went overseas. They missed each other terribly, even though they knew they would soon be reunited, and could still talk to one another. You got two of the emotions involved in your last sentence. You missed one.

And if it is complete faith you're discussing, the quote marks around knowledge are unnecessary.

I should have remembered that.

So, you've had feelings/emotions in the past? Where have they gone?

You cannot apply logic exclusively in a discussion of death. The use of sarcasm detracts from the heretofore presumed seriousness of your dialog. Should it continue, I will bow out.

Gregg,

You misunderstand me. I was not being sarcastic and I don't understand why you thought so (and also am very surprised at your reaction). I was trying to state some inconsistencies, nothing more.

I assure you that my feelings and emotions are as deep as anyone else's and they haven't gone anyplace. It might be better to state that emotions and logic seem to occupy different areas of the brain and are not easy (or even possible) to reconcile. Without going into detail, I have had experience dealing with profound, clinical depression that I knew was illogical but that illogicality made no difference to the emotional state; you can't argue with emotions. So, it's no surprise that faith and logic are not necessarily compatible.

Alright, sorry if I jumped to a conclusion based on your cryptic post. Either I missed something, or you have not clearly pointed out the inconsistencies to which you refer.

So basically, you ARE saying that there is a magical, mystical essence to life, something that goes beyond the physical laws of the universe.

Why do you believe that?



Indeed he did. But Einstein did not believe in any personally involved god the way most religious people do; he did not believe in a god who involves himself in the lives of humans, nor one who suspends the physical laws of the universe for the convenience of humans.

And even Einstein's limited view of god still blinded him from some physical truths of the physical world; he refused to accept quantum physics on religious grounds--and those principles and models he refused to believe have been tested and found to be accurate.

Einstein spent the last fifteen years of his life as a living monument to himself, contributing nothing to physics, because his religion caused him to refuse to accept the reality of how the universe works.

This is one of the greatest problems of faith-based belief systems.



One of the things I find most fascinating about religious faith is the notion that there is no awe and majesty in the universe without magic.

There is nothing magical about life; life exists by, and follows, physical law. But that does not mean that it is not awe-inspiring. You do not need leprechauns, fairy dust, or invisible men with magic powers who live in the sky in order to be awestruck by the magnificence and incredible wonder of the physical world.

In fact, I think that relying on magic detracts from the awe and wonder of the world, because it says "all this is here because someone waved a magic wand and made it be here"--far less awe-inspiring, in my book, than "of the trillions and trillions of ways this universe could have turned out, the way it did turn out is with such beauty and majesty as to beggar human comprehension, and we are here to witness it."

We are the universe's way of understanding itself. That, to me, is far more awe-inspiring than we are the corrupt creations of a magical man in the sky.



They're not dimensions; they're the result of activity in your brain, nothing more. If I stop the activity in your brain--for example, with an anaesthetic drug--I stop those dreams.

This is not true, actually:
http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSCOL06020420070220

> and i enjoy it when folks like Jon and Artie make jokes [....]

I posted a joke?

Roger,

I do not think your post will be helpful to FineTunedMac members who are anxious to either die or live forever.

But since this is the Lounge, I will not click "Notify."

> I think that people always fought death.

Not like they do today, I think; fighting death used to go hand and hand with respect for a more realistic view of life than many, if not most, Americans have today.

> There seems to be an attitude that, if a patient dies, the doctor must be incompetent.

That's not an attitude... It's a legal doctrine!

I can't speak for anyone else, but I intend to live forever or die trying.

> > There seems to be an attitude that, if a patient dies, the doctor must be incompetent.<<

If a patient dies in the hand of an incompetent and or negligent caregiver, then yes, it should be challenged. Keep in mind that doctors operate conveyor belts and the deadly issues most often were overlooked. Courts challenge "Unreasonable Expectations" but they frown on neglect. An attorney can only do so much defending incompetence or victimization, in the end the law prevails.
.

Arguing feelings as a justification for irrational reasoning is a no-starter. Emotion is a chemical reaction stimulated by the senses.

http://www.face-and-emotion.com/dataface/emotion/theories.jsp

History demonstrates that if our species needs a God to blame or justify its actions they will create one. Needs Fulfilled.

Artificial flowers cannot die for life within them is illusion.

You used Einstein's surname, and the way you used God in that sentence is as if it is a name, therefore God should also be capitalized. Had you said "a god" it would be correct to make it lower case. But then I suppose you will claim it is used as a concept, not a name.

You are equating what most religious people I know consider to be divine power with magic. The concepts might be close, but there is a distinction. Because that divine power is manifested in ways humans cannot explain or comprehend doesn't reduce it to some sort of "hocus-pocus" trick.

Putting faith in its place

Does God exist?

Perhaps because i don't lack imagination. [it's far more interesting than using "logic" to "argue" about metaphysical matters.]

Even music has both mathematical and artistic (creative) properties.

Focusing on just one side of the brain is not as pleasurable.

Oh I see... you want to blame his mistakes on religion (and/or God) too. That's a bit of a stretch (but not surprising).

Edit: i (obviously) already know about the "God does not play dice with the universe" quote. Have you got something else?


Leprechauns? Fairy dust? Invisible men who live in the sky? Wands? I think we're losing some sophistication here over semantical interpretations of the word magic. [We can/should drop the word magic/magical, if those are the types of visuals it gives you.]

I'm sorry, you were about to explain what caused the Big Bang... right? So okay, there was all this 'matter' (which came from where again?) floating around in space... and then one day it all exploded (because why?).

Thanks.

--

Edit #2: Interesting (seems the jury hasn't rendered a final verdict):

Anyway... I assume you can prove that all the scientists mentioned on that page (and also those in the "main articles" which are linked by that page) are all athesists, except Einstein? Naturally.

The Brights

Interesting... politically motivated agnosticism. [or ?]

--

These quotes are for tacit...

ALBERT EINSTEIN:
I don't try to imagine a personal god; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.


ALBERT EINSTEIN:
I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his [sic] creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious ourselves.

seems to me that as long as there's a God, we'll never take responsibility.

...responsibility for what?

On another note:
Do people who don't believe God exists still have clauses in their insurance policies excluding Acts of God?

everything. being good to each other, and all that sort of stuff. you know, making a rum go off this whole thing called life.

Or Vogon constructor fleets?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2BfobqkUY8

Now, what's that got to do with the war in Bosnia?

Nothing that i know of   (wasn't that man-made?).

Or... which of those [noncontiguous] quotes of mine were you referencing?

[i get the feeling my humor detector has missed some association amidst this multi-threaded meshugganah. Connect the dots for me, if worthwhile.]

--

To all: that last wiki page i linked to cuts to the heart of the matter (and spirit) of what the OP was (seemed to be?) shooting for. That page lists several schools of thought which don't quite jive (much like the myriad of religious factions which disturb certain members), and -- for each school of thought -- that page links to a main article. For all the witty repartee we enjoy here, quantum mechanics is about as high-falutin' as it gets. If you all want to get seriously deep... let's go for it. [i'll do my share of studying.]

I would guess tacit that you subscribe to the "Copenhagen interpretation"? [i haven't picked any yet, but] i've ruled that one out after reading this quote:


idunno... it just doesn't sound "unified".

There was a very funny English TV comedy series in the 60s and 70s called "Misleading Cases" about a guy who brought private cases to court, usually to explore moral or ethical issues. In one episode about insurance, the legal definition of an act of God (for the purposes of insurance claims) was deemed to be something that no reasonable man would expect.

An Act Of God defined

So you're saying people would be more responsible if no one thought God exists? You'll have to explain the logic. I can't wrap my head around that until I can stop shaking it.

How many hospitals were founded by Atheist organizations? ...many are run by Christian organizations. (Alert! unPC! ...but I know of only one other religion involved in running hospitals, on a much smaller scale, and you must know which one I'm speaking of.) Outside of my biological family, the people I've turned to for help have been caring, good people I knew from church. You must have a very different life experience!

Well, I don't think they got it right. The definition in Harv's link is much better.

A reasonable man might expect a tornado or hurricane, but as a policyholder, he is not responsible for the consequences. On the other hand, many scientific experiments lead to conclusions that were not expected at the outset. In fact, frequently the result is the opposite of the expectations.

Really? Consider this definition from Harv's link:

Act Of God
An event which is caused solely by the effect of nature or natural causes and without any interference by humans whatsoever.

On this particular planet there's arguably little if anything left that fits that bill. Even those phenomena that once upon a time might have easily qualified have now been 'contaminated' by human activity on a global scale. I suppose you could maintain that the exact location of the effects of those 'acts of God' has not been determined, but the counter argument would use the lack of sufficiently detailed models to explain that. The point of all this being that this line of reasoning won't get you anywhere while discussing the pro or cons of religion or God (two entirely different things, btw).

Anyway, against this background, the use of some sort of 'expectation' in the legal description of 'Acts of God' gains applicability and has the added advantage of being sufficiently vague to allow for wiggle room. That has never hurt when money was involved...

with a God, ultimately the responsibility for everything rests there, and not on us. until we say, "we need to do that which helps us all, not because someone tells us to, but because it is beneficial to life," we won't ever get there.



are you saying that only through religion will people do good things? hardly. certainly churches do good things, so do lots of people who don't go to church. they just don't have a bunch of people tithing to them...

and how about those Crusades? there's some good works...

No, not only through religion. I'm just saying that lots of good things are done in the name of religion. Sadly, it's also true that many use religion in a destructive way. I don't suppose pointing to those Crusades that happened yesterday, er, centuries ago gets us any closer to your utopia, does it? And pooling resources (tithing) somehow makes the good deeds less noble than if an individual is acting alone? I don't get your point.

I still don't follow your logic. (get rid of God = increased responsibility) How would you apply it in other situations? Let's see, if there was no SEC, then Wall Street would operate on principles of altruism. Yeah, now I get it.

There is one example I can think of that almost fits into your concept. Some places have eliminated traffic controls in congested areas. There are no rules separating pedestrians from vehicles, or giving one car the right of way over another. The result has been that people drive slower and are generally more careful. However, this behavior can be explained adequately as self-preservation!

That part seems to have wandered off the path somewhat, since i don't see where roger said anything about "get rid of God". [i think his slant was more like: folks tend to pass the buck, and make the "man upstairs" their scapegoat.]

Similarly, i don't quite get the SEC comparison. Due to free will, any 'regulation' of behavior down here is self-imposed. [Meaning: mankind controls mankind, by whichever "book/word" they choose.]

The great tragedy of Science, the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

T. H. Huxley

Imagine that atheist hold a "God Didn't Make Little Green Apples" convention in Miami on Sunday, an Adam atheist enthusiastically attends. Adam's not really devote, he just likes a pretty girl there and the Spaghetti dinner she serves, so he sits in the back alone while everyone at that convention sits close to the podium. Along comes a hurricane and everyone dies but Adam. Adam stands in the aftermath of a hurricane with death and carnage all around him and says, "boy, I'm lucky to be alive"

He tries to make sense of the reason he survived and comes up with a few possibilities. It could be the obvious difference in location or the fact that he jumped up the grab the balcony, or that he was wearing inflatable underwear. He concludes that it was all those reasons because after the storm had surged he fell out of the balcony into the standing water and his underwear kept him afloat. He swears that he will always wear inflatable underwear whenever he visits Miami and will recommend them in any emergency plan, so that they may save lives in the future.

Just down the street in another gathering of Church going Creationist, and Creato the creationist is attending, as he does every week, not because he's devote, but because he likes their brand of pasta and the smiling people who can sing in harmony.

Along comes the hurricane and kills everyone but Creato, and as he stands in the aftermath of death and carnage says, "thank god, god was looking out for me"
He doesn't try to figure out why he survived, it was gods will that everyone of those devote Creationist die and that he live. There is no lesson to learn, there is no action one could take, there are no preventive measures, just flow with it and fill your mind with the spirit of gods will.

Keep filling those spaces between thought until there is no room for reason, deduction or curiosity. Then fill the airwaves, and knock on doors selling god like the Fuller Brush Man so you can build a Glass Cathedral, a Vatican City or a Pyramid Tomb. Build Hospitals on tax-free prime property with donation money, fill them with Nuns working for free. Use your enormous financial wealth to leverage the bank notes and give tax loopholes to doctors who gather captive audiences of creation followers who donate time. There were and are large financial reasons for nonprofits to build medical facilities or schools subsidized by the government and donors. Capturing the creationist in their final hours also has it's benefits, the transfer of wealth to these facilities was and is enormous.

I understand that creationist get all warm and fuzzy when they think of Good, but if they studies the Good that inspires them they may begin to have doubts. Doubt at one time was called heresy and got you burnt at a stake, today you are just shunned and allotted no political power.

Noone know why there was a Big Bang, some are looking for a logical explanation, others want to feed their need with conclusions of father figures in the sky. Thinking members of our species choose to look for answers while dependent members settle for good feelings and a false sense of security.

It's an argument as old as our history and like all historical gods, this one will pass eventually.

Wow, you sure "know" a lot. Or, are those perhaps just beliefs you hold... which similarly provide good feelings and some type of security (true/false/whatever)?

See, from a third POV (or alternate universe)... we're not all that different.

It looks like you could use some faith cake.

I observe, suspect or conclude... I don't believe. The word has been captured and therefore useless in general conversation. If you have any evidence to refute my claim that "No One knows why there was a big bang", step up and present it. Instead of stating that I "know" a lot, show me what I don't know, please.

ELL OH ELL

No, that part (those 8 words) wasn't the problem . . . it was everything you said *after* the comma.

Thanks, well done!

"all knowledge is the hypothesis for what is examined next"

Looks like you misunderstood (as sandbox apparently did) which *part* of his quote i was referring to. In fact, if you got the 'equal' versus 'superior' point at the end of your vid, you'll see i have *consistently* been plugging the 'equal' portion. (So, perhaps you need to check your interpretation and reasoning in this case? -- i feel my communication has been pretty clear).

BACK TO THE ORIGINAL POST...



Was this the old Lounge thread you meant? "Inner Life of a Cell" (Nov/23/07)

If my observation is unacceptable then please explain to me why anyone would jump to a conclusion that a supernatural being created the big bang, built the universe, built the earth in 7 days, and is responsible for every aspect of our lives, in thought and deed. What purpose does it serve?

Just observing the language alone describes a father figure, this terminology demonstrate an authority figure watching over us from above, as it would be viewed from a child's perspective. I'm open to your suggestions.

Wasn't all this stuff covered in The Religion Thread at MFIF? I have been lurking around this thread for awhile and it seems to me that people with different viewpoints are talking at each other (not to each other) and in the same way. I can only conclude that it is not possible to have a meeting of the minds between believers and non-believers. The mindset of each is totally incomprehensible to those of the opposite persuasion.

Just for the record, I'm a non-believer and I have decided that I don't care of someone is a believer provided that he/she leaves others alone and remains content to practice religion in private. If believing in a deity gets you through life, that's OK with me. Life is difficult enough as it is.

Well, I'm not at all sure I get what you're after and my attempts to figure that out increasingly feel like (pardon the comparison) a struggle with an eel in a bucket of snot.

The Faith Cake clip was a response to a specific quote of yours (not Sandbox) and what I perceived you tried to say: i.e., that 'a belief in science requires the same amount of faith as a belief in god (it doesn't and the position is in fact self-evidently untrue), but if you intended something else with that quote I'd like to hear about it.

Yup. My dog is better than your dog.

I'm using "magic" here to mean any supernatural force or power outside of or beyond the physical laws the govern the universe. Miracles, direct divine intervention by a personally involved god, supernatural events, and so on all qualify as 'magic' as I'm using the word.

You can substitute "supernatural divine power" for "magic" in what I wrote, if you prefer, and it still stands. One of the things I find most fascinating about religious faith is the notion that there is no awe and majesty in the universe without supernatural divine power.



The distinction between beliefs based on faith and beliefs that are not faith-based is that beliefs that are not based on faith are not taken with no evidence to support them.

The fact that we do not yet know everything there is to know does not justify faith-based beliefs; this is merely the 'god of the gaps.' A stone-age society might have two people arguing about what the sun is; Ogg might argue that the sun is a god, and Gronk might argue that even though he doesn't know what the sun is or what the sun is made out of, it's a natural phenomenon and not a god.

Ogg could say that he and Gronk have beliefs that are based on faith...but Ogg would be wrong. And, as knowledge progesses, Ogg's sun-god shrinks away, until finally Ogg's far descendents realize that Ogg was absolutely, totally wrong.

The problem with the god of the gaps is that that god gets smaller and smaller every day. Every day, we learn more; every day, there becomes less room to say "We don't know what caused X, so it must be some sort of god."



Many.

The "How many hospitals were founded by atheists?" trope pops up on Fundamentalist Web sites all the time, with the implied answer of "none," but the people who ask the question don't really know the answer.

The first hospital in the US, founded before the country was even a country back in 1658, was established in New Amsterdam (now called New York) by Jacob Hendrickszen Varrevanger. He was not a religious person; it was not a religious hospital.

The oldest hospital still in use in the US, Bellevue Hospital in New York, was founded as a secular institution by the New York government in 1736.

Benjamin Franklin, known for his non-theist religious beliefs, founded several hospitals in the US and in France.

Today, only about 13% of all US hospitals are religious or connected to religious organizations, primarily the Catholic Church. There were as of 1999 a total of 604 hospitals in the US founded by ir on affiliation with religious organizations, out of a total of 4,573 hospitals.

How many hospitals were founded by atheist organizations? Seven and a half times more than were founded by religious organizations!



That would be fine, if that's all there were.

The problem is that there is no major organized faith that does not tell its adherents that it is the only "true" faith. We see from history and from modern politics that, even despite resource competition and political power grabs and land wars and all the other stressors that can lead to violence, people fracture along religious lines more readily than along any other.

Faith--believing things with no proof for no reason other than that the believer wants them to be true--leads inevitably to atrocity. Science flies us to the moon; faith flies us into buildings.

We live in a society whose politics, public policy, foreign relations, and laws are all shaped and distorted by faith. George Bush invoked religion as a supporting reason to invade Iraq. Beliefs about the soul led to the ban on stem cell research. The Reagans consulted astrologers before making policy decisions; the Bushs consulted ultra-fundamentalist Christian pastors.

There is no "practice your faith by yourself in your own home." Never has been.

While I can't disagree with your point in general, I don't think that "inevitably" is quite accurate. I have yet to see the Quakers or the Unitarians commit violence. My impression of Buddhism is that it is quite peaceable. Still, you are right in too many instances. I know of no instances in which atheists killed for their (non) beliefs.

Um... Stalin? Mao?

I stand corrected.

I'm not buying that. You are trying to imply that all hospitals not founded or operated by a religious organization are "Atheist Hospitals". No way! Oh, but I'm sure you can demonstrate that's true for each of the nearly 4,000 institutions.

You're also equating secular with atheistic. Not valid. Just because religion is not highlighted in an organization does not mean it's run by people who are not religious, must less anti-religious.

Ben Franklin also was not an atheistic organization.

Organizations name things after themselves. My son was born at Lutheran Hospital. Others are named Saint this or that. Others are called Community Hospital, or Memorial Hospital. I've yet to run across one named for an atheistic organization.

I don't intend this small side issue as a proof of something. I'm just pointing out that many religious organizations are on the forefront of altruism. It was just a counterpoint.

But i have no wish to take up *that* argument either way. As i've said (this makes the 3rd? time): believe what you want (about the Big Bang or whatever)... but at least admit it's a belief/opinion, no better than any other.

Step by step then...

• >> Noone know why there was a Big Bang, <<
  
  Right. (or, at least i agree)
   
   
• >> some are looking for a logical explanation, others want to feed their need with conclusions of father figures in the sky. <<
  
  "Feed their need"? Sounds condescending.
  
  Any interest in the subject (whether logical or mystical) could be considered 'feeding a need'. Only those who don't give a hoot can (possibly) claim to not be feeding a need. [but perhaps they too are feeding a need by being ignorant/indifferent.]
   
   
• >> Thinking members of our species choose to look for answers while dependent members settle for good feelings and a false sense of security. <<
  
  Oh yeah? ["settle"? - "false"?] How do you know it's false? Is that a fact you can prove... or is that just your belief/opinion? Religious fanatics and scientific snobs are no different in my book (belief/opinion), because they sometimes attack each other's views (beliefs/opinions) without adequate reasoning. The existence of a God/Creator has neither been proved *or* disproved, AFAIK.
   
   
• >> It's an argument as old as our history and like all historical gods, this one will pass eventually. <<
  
  Will pass? Again... you "know" this how? [sounds more like faith (to feed a dependency and provide false security perhaps?).]

See now... all i was doing was pointing a mirror at you. Nothing heavy.

--

Before you get too riled up, know that i have an engineering degree and only go to church twice a year (Catholic on probation). I also play guitar and much of the music i like might sound to some like it was written by the devil (monster cut there). If you want to blast Pope what's-his-face for locking up Galileo, i'll join you in that chorus in a nanosecond. Likewise the Spanish Inquisition -- major sicko stuff.


--


But this thread seems to be degenerating into a battle of base/extremist viewpoints, which is an endless (unprovable) dispute. What's the matter? Were the many [scientific] schools *interpreting* quantum mechanics too challenging mentally? Because that was the most fascinating discovery (for me anyway) so far. There we have some of the most brilliant minds on the planet, all looking at the same data and -- when trying to answer: what does it say about "reality" -- they have at least seven varying conclusions.

Wow.

Another Einstein quote is in order perhaps:
    “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain;
      and as far as they are certain... they do not refer to reality.”

Fine. Please see to it that your comments don't wander too far afield of that premise.
[i've already pointed out at least one example of *your* faith... so don't knock it.]



Hmm, I wasn't aware that 'faith-based' beliefs required any justification.
And justify to whom? Who will be the judge of metaphysical unknowns?

Just for one instance, try to imagine the brainpower wasted on prayer throughout history. Let's say 20 billion people throughout the life of our species believed in one form of Flying Spaghetti Monster or another. Their individual lives averaged 40 years of which they spent 30 years following the strands of pasta to nowhere.

30 years, 365 days, 8760 hours/5840 waking hours

20 billion people from age 10 have wasted 11,680,000,000,000 hours creating or following tangled strands of spaghetti that lead nowhere. That's the mistake that I suspect should be addressed. Imagine what the world would be if all that brainpower was used on fact based reasoning.

I'm not trying to be condescending, needs are what we all fulfill.

False, would be determined by outcome. Have we as a species found more or less evidence to validate the claims that are taught by faith based endeavors? From my perspective there is a constant flow of data to refute most Abrahamic theory for example. That in itself would demonstrate to a review board, board of directors, council, whatever, that to expend resources on the pursuit of this theory was a waste.

In the logical world this line of study would be discounted for lack of evidence and common sense. There is plenty of documentation of failed mystical theory going back to the Titans, Caves, or Pagans when the Gods were feminine.

If I were to invest in a project today that promised to cure the common cold, it would have to be fact based. A prayer, incantation or a round at the Stations of the Cross with Sister Mary St. Jude would not attract my time or capital.

If a potential client discovered that my solution to their problem was to join a faith based organization rather than pursuing a reasoned strategy I doubt that 99% of the population would find my service useful.

The issue needs to be addressed because science is causing the edges to fray, and we need to have a logical plan to deal with it as it unravels.

The theory builds armies and discounts women, while trying to capture the moral high ground. New initiatives to correct the course educates woman, and in turn reduces population growth. It doesn't feed people on unsustainable lands to a point where they are just healthy enough to produce more offspring, and turn them into fertilizers 6 months later when the milk dries up. With all due respect to Mother Theresa.

The issue, as I see it, was that faith base reasoning and "Belief" is a mistake. And in demonstrating why it is and then showing what can be done to reverse the mistake would make this thread useful. In spite of what people want to believe, the belief is nothing more than active gray matter. The affect of the out of control gray matter upon life is what really needs to be addressed.

Yes, and thanks. Turns out that the information I sought wasn't in a specific post but at a posted link to a New York Times article by Paul Davies.

Taking Science On Faith

The references weren't quite as specific as I recalled (i.e. The Theory of ______ and The Theory of ______) but maybe that just means I should start taking B12.

ryck

No... thank YOU! [and what a stimulating article too, which no doubt will be shredded to pieces in some posts to follow.]

The final sentence reads:
Ouch! (please don't shoot me folks, i'm just a messenger. )

BTW ryck... did you know that Paul Davies also inspired a (much) earlier Lounge thread?

• the multiverse: parallel universes are real (Apr/15/03)

Neither did i.

The quote of the article is manifestly trivial. This is what differentiates a scientific theory from a "manifestly bogus" one: testability. Some people say that science is only what produces testable theories or predictions. By this reasoning many serious minds still consider medicine an art rather than science. Concerning faith in science, one should distinguish between faith in the results one gets (we believe that they are true) and faith of the scientist in general that borders on or is directly related to God's will. The latter could be creationism from the Big Bang to life. Once we can explain the data or a theory by experiments, there is less and less God involved in science. The famous Laplace as you all know answered to Napoleon in this way:

The "outcome" of mortal life is mortal death. Perhaps it's not entirely wasteful to ponder whether or not humans potentially embody some eternal spiritual component as well. Because if we don't, then hell... let's just party like it's 1999.



But isn't it obvious that: once claims are validated -- they are no longer "based on faith"? Anyway, which claim(s) are you seeking to validate?



Too vague. Pick something specific that was refuted and then a suitable response can be formulated.



Uh huh... but science OTOH has been pristine and error-free, lo these many centuries. Remember blood-letting? How would you like to be sick back in the good old days and hear the physician say: "Aha, you have fever? We drain 5 quarts blood... that oughta cool you down."



Science is causing the edges to fray? There are several schools of thought on that as well. (I mentioned "The Tao of Physics" on an earlier page. So, there is at least one physicist who sees that matter from a different perspective).



Oh i see, so all non-atheistic individuals are accountable for the political aspirations of a bunch of chauvinist whackos? Sweeping generalization or what?



Well, what can i say? "Sorry my previous reply demonstrated you were guilty of virtually the same presuppositions and prejudices as you claim the opposite camp to be." ?

"Testable" was contained in the quote. So, you're merely repeating what the quote already said? [i don't get it.]



Laplace was a genius... unfortunately i am not.
[i don't follow what either of you have proved.]

I just wanted to say that what you quoted is common knowledge and the article's author did not need to repeat it again. Because of this, I did not understand (in turn) why a person like you would quote something really cliche.
The rest is just "reasoning" around the quote. The way I see the idea of Laplace is that (I guess, you share this point of view) in real science there is little place for believing in God. He just formulated it very much in-your-face, as a "hypothesis". If only believers would deal with science, its progress may have stalled (look at the Middle Ages) because they might not be interested in digging deeper, since every oddity or Nature's puzzle could be explained by God's will. But it is exactly the unexplainable that drives human quest for scientific truth. What I am saying is not a universal truth, of course, but a good example of this point of view is creationism. If we endorse it, there is no point looking into the complexity of the animal and plant kingdoms, finding relationship among species and studying their natural history - everything was created by God and left as is. Belief in this particular case is really counterproductive because it removes the time dimension from biological studies, IMHO.

["common knowledge"? "cliche"?] That's rich. Almost as profound as pooh-poohing dreams with talk of some pill... as if that somehow covers the mysteries of the human mind. Are you sure you read (and understood) what Davies said (and meant)?

Else... what then has been the big squawk here throughout the past 5 pages? Haven't the proponents of strict scientific methods been debasing faith as nothing but a security blanket for mindless morons? [And doesn't Davies assert that much of the basic laws of physics are themselves taken with a certain amount of faith? Because (although proven "accurate" so far) they aren't truly understood -- at least that's my interpretation.]

You [or someone] got some 'xplainin' to do.

>> hal said:
The "outcome" of mortal life is mortal death. Perhaps it's not entirely wasteful to ponder whether or not humans potentially embody some eternal spiritual component as well. Because if we don't, then hell... let's just party like it's 1999.<<

You live, you die, and the worms, beetles and flies party like it's 1969. You go on in your progeny.

Give me a minute to ponder….OK if there is a spirit no one has produced any actual evidence.

I look at life in any form and see it end, turned into a pile of decay and be recycled into another life form. I can live with that, life and death are a cycle. If something else is going on I'm open to it, but I'm not going to build a monument, kneel in a pew, bang my head on the floor or wall to the notion. I'd rather be the fly.

>> hal said:
Too vague. Pick something specific that was refuted and then a suitable response can be formulated.<<

Archeology unearths many examples that refute the 6000-year-old earth for example. Simple observation refuted the flat world.

Bloodletting was hardly a proven method; anymore then snake oil was a cure for everything that ailed you. Your reaching. lets light a candle and sing a psalm for the bloodless, shall we, how about a guitar mass?

The Tao of Physics?
I prefer Consilience http://www.2think.org/hii/wilson.shtml

>> hal said:
Oh i see, so all non-atheistic individuals are accountable for the political aspirations of a bunch of chauvinist whackos? Sweeping generalization or what?<<

The theory rings the division bell. My god is better than yours, my god told me to build a boat, split a sea, and displace 140,000 Palestinians so we can live in the chosen land…. Prove it, you can't,….. but that doesn't stop anyone from building an army to do gods bidding.

Find a group of scientist that claim the unbelievable and then build armies to defend the non-proven scientific claim. Good Luck!

If you are in fact an engineer then you should be able to understand what social engineering is all about. Of course victims of manipulation will find it hard to concede to being duped by men in dresses who are called father. People that have been programmed to fear death and look forward to life with god are conflicted. They know it's dumb, but they go back to church twice a year just in case.

If you got a worm you need to feed it.

Why is the sky blue?

Why is blue "blue" ?
[something in the brain... idunno]

It seems like you're semi-serious and semi-kidding to get through this discussion. However, lately i can't tell which mode you're in (even within a sentence). So, i will cherry pick a small item and try to communicate in a normal fashion.


I believe you also mentioned earlier that the Earth was created in 7 days. Look, i'm no defender of *everything* in the Bible, and i'm no expert either... but it's certainly not a calculus book or a physics book, and sometimes it's not even a history book. I recall learning (and i'm not even sure it was from the Bible... that's how lame my "faith" is) this one equation: one day for God is a thousand years for man.

Do the math if you want, but my point is: lighten up. [you're directing a lot of anti-religious rhetoric at the wrong guy... i'm just open-minded.]


--


Okay, one more thing.

>>> The Tao of Physics?
> I prefer Consilience

Apples and artichokes.

One (mine) fits this thread to a tee. I did that googley thing (on Sociobiology) and it seems a little too "Brave New World. . . on steroids" for me. If i have missed its merit, then perhaps it deserves a thread of its own [?].

This is what I said before. "Scientific" faith is a feeling that things are as your experiments or theories show. This is a legitimate belief not requiring supernatural power. Nothing to do with religious faith. Every scientist should believe in certain laws of nature or his/her results as a working hypothesis. And this is not religion, IMHO. Most people here debated about religious faith that may or may not come into play when we truly don't understand anything. This is why I quoted Laplace because his scientific method did not need a supernatural power to explain laws of astronomy. But again, it is very tempting to invoke such power when one cannot understand things especially when one cannot "feel and touch" them and a lot of proofs are indirect and abstract.
So, IMHO, there is faith in the veracity of certain things and religious faith in a supernatural power that can explain everything but does not necessarily lead to the forward movement of scientific quest.

You don't actually know much science, do you?

Hal, I was just playing as I suspect you were. Not being a hardcore follower but you were vaguely defending the concept.

I'm holding this idea to the same standard that we need to hold science too, and it doesn't hold up.

So, one tries to be fair, to put it in context. Consider the time line and the educational level of people thousands of years ago and try to understand what the need was that would create the concept and enforce it so rigorously. Understand the influence of nurture, environment, family traditions and if there is a genetic or biological component here and now.

Uniting a population under a supernatural being who can watch you or watch over you in 4000 BC must have been appealing. I have no argument with that. It is understandable into the Middle Ages to a degree, but if one looks carefully they will begin to see the books rewritten, the wealth concentrated and atrocious acts mount. A student of the belief theory could see the unrest, the fractured groups splitting off to carry-on or reinvent the theory to suit their new reality or need to maintain control.

What E.O. Wilson addresses is the unification of the Sciences. He brings the hard calculative science together with the soft social sciences in an attempt to demonstrate that both can work together…..IF.

It is one thing to calculate the distance to the moon and quite another to calculate how the mind was able to accomplish the calculation.

I'm not opposed to the premise of a theory that unites Minds and (for the purpose of this argument) Hearts but when the theory takes it's own course, or a life of it's own and interferes with the progress of man, then it needs to be examined. Under the microscope the theory of a Prime Mover doesn't do well, but that's not to say it did not have a practical application 6000 years ago.

I can understand that people have needs that I don't share, but if those needs interfere with my progress or our progress, they need to be isolated, defined and controlled. Not to put too fine a point on it, but we are at a time in our development when we need to put a limit on this dependency.

Knowing that the great powers of this society come from great wealth or large groups, limiting god is not going to be easy. Understanding the power of dependency will help our species curb the appetite of the portion of our population that depends on this concept for their security and purpose.

Every religion that I can find throughout history was replaced by another, I suspect that by combining the sciences that we can concoct a highbred theory that will inaccurately address some issues while exposing the needy population to fact based theory.

Let's put it this way: any engineering/technical class we could possibly attend together, i would probably do as well or better than you (if i wanted to). Perhaps circuit analysis and analog/digital design was more interesting to me than rates of reaction or Maxwell's equations. I assume you are fluent with Maxwell's equations then? Or convolution? Please join the conversation and contribute some information. I've probably forgotten more science than i can remember, so i'm here to learn something interesting (if you have anything to contribute besides sarcasm that is).


Your question was highly irrelevant [especially in the context of the quote you chose, and the exchange Alex and i were having at the time] and itself was open to different interpretations. Scattered blue light is only blue because we (humans) with our retinal receptors and brain processors **perceive** that electromagnetic frequency band in that manner. We have invented the word "blue" to describe it. Perhaps a Gorp from the Ueulon galaxy (say the planet Diflaxus) might **perceive** that particular sub-spectrum as being fuchsia with yellow polka dots. [whereas red might look like grey lines to him.] In other words: the sky isn't truly blue... we just "think" it's blue. And i don't believe you've actually given the matter much thought, have you?

[if you were looking for the traditional answer dealing with molecular resonance or something, try google. Electrical engineers don't have to take more than 2 levels of chemistry (thank GOD).]

So... what was your major?

Yes... gravity is quite an interesting animal, isn't it?

I remember one physics teacher i had put
up on the board and called it "mother". Not just because of the 'ma' pun... but because it was one of physics' fundamental laws.

So for Newton, gravity was a force (like a string perhaps) pulling on the apple. When the stem became weak, that force "pulled" the apple to the ground. Sure seems that way, doesn't it? But -- in Newton's universe -- time was always a constant (and unalterable) entity. And since the velocity of the apple was so slow (compared to "light"), everything appeared precisely right (mathematically).

Then along comes Einstein. What was gravity doing to the apple? Merely (mysteriously) pulling like some invisible string on its mass? No, more than that. Gravity was warping the **time** component of the space-time field between Earth and the apple, and thus directing the apple's future in space. That's some heavy $#!+.

We have all the equations, and we can synthesize and manipulate electromagnetic waves until we're blue in the face. But not so with gravitational forces (other than taking some mass and accelerating it). Why can't *we* build a UFO saucer?

--

[i guess the upshot of all that is: formulas are one thing... while actual knowledge, understanding, reasons and "explanations" are another.]

A saucer has been built in the last decade by a Russian firm but they could not afford production and sold it to Boeing that conveniently tabled it because it does not resemble at all the conventional aircraft. It looks like a saucer, has jet engines and, according to the designer team, cannot crash fatally if the engines are cut off. In a free fall, it assumes some strange trajectory, leaning to the right and left and this way cutting speed like a mountain skier. These are general things as I recall them and may not be 100% accurate. The only problem - it does not have a speed of light (sigh).
Something like this: http://www.boingboing.net/2005/04/13/russias-flying-sauce.html
or this: http://www.xuux.info/html/UFO-News/200906/19-8.html

The Case for Antigravity

[narrator has the same Brit accent as the "faith cake" video.  ]

Mathematics. Followed by graduate study in Operations Research, and History and Philosophy of Science.

Here:
http://www.mcps.umn.edu/

Worked as a systems engineer here:
http://www.atk.com/
a software engineer here (although it was 2 name changes ago):
http://www.bostonscientific.com/
and an SQA engineer here:
http://solutions.3m.com/en_US/

Any other questions of pedigree?

And yeah, I know what Maxwell's equations are. I trust they are not part of a faith-based science movement now. That would be more this part of physics:

http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/vvc/theory/model.html

which is still the most successful theory (where success is measured by making correct predictions) ever. It is by no means complete, so there are still plenty of those gaps for the gods to party down in.

Excellent.

I elected (i.e., not required for BSEE) to take "Functions of a Complex Variable" -- Chaos theory, Koshi-Riemann? non-linear second-order differential stuff. Managed to score a B+ (the class size was minus 10 faces after 2 weeks). Can't remember a single thing about it. One would need to use that skill almost weekly to retain it.


Well i don't know... but is that sort of polarization really what this was all about?
Actually, i had a rather cool T-shirt long ago which read:

I always thought that was funny. (sadly, that t-shirt is too small for me now).



Not really... but i think you omitted this one:
- repair permissions before and after applying a system update

Putting all that experience together nicely.

I am reminded by this thread of a quote of Alan Turing: "Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition."

By the way, for a good and fun introduction to modern Complex variable theory, take a peek at Visual Complex Analysis. I actually bought my copy off the shelf at Border's.

[/quote]

Why is the sky blue?
[/quote]

...and why is the grass, or plant leaves green? not what it does, but why green?

On the religion thing, it seems to me that mankind (in general) has had religion from the year dot. There have always been gods, demons, majic etc, no matter what the society or race. Even the oldest and most genetically unique, the Australian Aborigine, had a system of illogical beliefs.

My conclusion has been, maybe humankind in general needs to believe there is some greater power than us, for some reason I can not fathom.

However another's beliefs, no matter how illogical I find them, are not of a particular worry to me, until they start impacting to the detriment of my life.

BTW, most hospitals in NZ are named after the area or city they are in, one exception is Starship Childrens Hospital in Auckland. Those with religious names are usually private, ie you pay, and run by some religious organisation. So, I can't agree that hospitals were started by religionists, well at least not here, but by humanitarians, some of whom may have had conventional religious beliefs.

Both Stalin and Mao killed millions of people on the basis of a faith.

Remember my earlier definition of the word "faith"--a belief that is accepted without evidence to support it. All religions are faith, but not all faiths are religion. For example, astrology is taken on faith, despite mountains of evidence against it, but it isn't a religion.

Stalin accepted many beliefs on faith, without evidence to support them: he believed that wheat and other organisms could be "trained" to inherit new traits they acquired from the environment, a belief that killed millions of Soviet citizens through starvation. He believed that all knowledge that came from "bourgeois" West was inherently corrupted, which caused him to reject outright things like genetic biology and molecular biology. He believed that Jews were inherently inferior in intelligence to non-Jews, and so ignored the reports of a Jewish doctor, Dr. Karpai, who had reported an anomaly in the cardiogram of one of his top Politburo officers, Andrei Zhdanov (who shortly thereafter died of a heart attack).

Chairman Mao is a textbook case of irrational and anti-rational thinking. Mao believed, for example, that industrialization could be accomplished quickly by forcing farmers to stop producing food and instead making them work on collective industrialization projects; the result of this belief that he held without supporting evidence was the Great Chinese Famine, which killed tens of millions of people.

Mao believed that formal education and schooling were inherently corrupting influences, and that all the knowledge a person needed could be gained informally through experience; as a result, most of the industrial projects developed during the Great Leap Forward, from roadways to dams to industrial infrastructure, failed or turned out to be useless, because they were not designed by skilled engineers.

Mao and Stalin are great examples of what happens when anti-intellectualism wins the day--when people reject the fruits of formal, rigorous scientific inquiry in favor of superstition and beliefs held without evidence. Stalin killed geneticists; Mao executed engineers; as a direct result, millions died.

These are not examples of what happens when atheists take power; they are examples of what happens when superstition triumphs over reason, when leaders turn their back on studious inquiry into the physical laws of the universe in favor of ideology and irrationality. There has never been a case in which millions of people have been murdered because of an excess of reasonableness.



I'm not saying any such thing; what is an 'atheist organization,' anyway? I'm saying that hospitals are most commonly built for reasons which are not religious.

How many hospitals have been built by the Assemblies of God, or the Fundamentalist Mormons? How about the Christian Scientists, who hold as a matter of faith that all of medicine is a sin, and that only the power of the Holy Spirit can cure disease?



Sorry, no. It's supported by considerable evidence; the COBE satellite was designed and built to test the predictions made by the Big Bang model, and it's one of the most stunning success stories in all of science. The data gathered by the satellite about the universal microwave background radiation match perfectly to within the limits of ...e by the theory.

As Randall Munroe, author of XKCD, famously observed, "We finally figured out that you could separate fact from superstition by a completely radical method: observation. You can try things, measure them, and see how they work! Bitches. The graph [of] data from the COBE mission, which looked at the background microwave glow of the universe and found that it fit perfectly with the idea that the universe used to be really hot everywhere. This strongly reinforced the Big Bang theory and was one of the most dramatic examples of an experiment agreeing with a theory in history -- the data points fit perfectly, with error bars too small to draw on the graph. It's one of the most triumphant scientific results in history."

How much evidence do you have to support the notion that some divine cosmic being made the world in six days and created woman out of the rib of man?

Or is that even the creation myth you prefer? There are lots of creation stories: the Chinese tradition that says the universe began with an egg, out of which hatched a giant whose arms became the world? How about the Egyptian myth in which the god Re masturbates, and from his masturbation is produced the father and mother of an entire race of gods, who go out and build the world? How about the Mesopotamian myth, which says that the descendants of the goddess Tiamat revolt against her and destroy her, then split her body in half, and create the heavens from one half and the earth from the other half?

Are each of these ideas "no better than any other"?

That is one of the main problems with the nature of faith, and one you still haven't answered, even though I have asked you twice. I will now ask you a third time.

There are hundreds of thousands of beliefs that have no evidence and can have no evidence. The three-part Christian god made the world, the giant god P'an Ku created the heavens and the earth from the halves of a gigantic eggshell, the Greek gods Gaia and Uranus create all the heavens and the earth but Uranus shuts up the flawed creations within the bowels of the earth to make way for man, the notion that the universe began when eight gods sprung from the back of an enormous jellyfish and filled the firmament with other gods, who come together to form the world; the universe began as an empty hollow that slowly filled with water and then froze into the shape of a giant, Ymir, whose armpits produced a second generation of giants who rose up and slew him, then made the world from his flesh and bones...it goes on and on and on.

Given all that, and given that there can be no evidence, not one shred, to support any of this, how do you choose a faith? Do you just believe what you're told to believe? What your parents believe? What your society believe? Were all the people who believe in Ymir and Odin and Loki and Set fools and simpletons, but you are wise and enlightened because your god is somehow better?



And cannot be. Yet I am betting that you don't believe in Apollo, Amaterasu, Geong Si, Freyr, Iris, Kagutsuchi, Maia, Marduk, Bast, Yarikh, Tiamat, Rama, Ninazu, Lugh, Hathor, Juturna, Fenrir, Ceres, Dagon, Ohkuninushi, Shapsu, Vishnu, Yum Kimil, Xochiquetzal, Tonatiuh, Selene, Shiva, Rhea, Orgelmir, Mot, Hermes, Ixtab, Davlin, Ceridwen, Athirat, Balder, or Horus, yet they can be neither proved nor disproved either. So how do you choose a god to believe in?



It's not even hard to shred. The author doesn't know what science is. The author asserts that " All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order." And that's exactly what we see; science doesn't believe that on faith, but rather that's where the evidence has led.

We don't believe that a hammer, when dropped will fall because of some kind of prophet who revealed it as an issue of faith; we believe it because every time we drop a hammer, it falls. Non-falling hammers are thin on the ground indeed.

The article's prime absurdity can be found in this ridiculous passage: "Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too." This is a re-couching of the same old tired yarn that science is just like religion because science doesn't know everything yet. It's a weak argument, which tends to be persuasive only to those who do not know what science actually is.

Think about the two cave men I talked about before. Ogg says that the sun is a god. Gronk says that it isn't; he doesn't know what it is, but it's not a god. Ogg's sun-god dies as science advances; people in prehistoric times could not explain what the sun was, but that does not mean that the sun was a god, nor that belief in a physical, non-supernatural explanation for the sun was "faith". They didn't know what that explanation was, that's all.

Now we do. Now we know that the sun is not a god. Ogg's belief in a sun-god shrinks as science advances.

I believe this is why the vast majority of the world's religious traditions, including all forms of fundamentalist Christianity, are anti-intellectual. Their gods are the gods of the gaps. Their faith only survives as long as they can say "there are things we don't know and there are things science doesn't know so that means science is just another faith." As knowledge progresses, their gods must retreat. As science learns more, their gods become less. They HAVE to be anti-intellectual, for the same reason that the caveman Ogg HAS to oppose learning about the nature of the sun. Once we do learn these things, there is no room left for god.

So as our knowledge grows, our gods become more feeble and more abstract. What was once believed to be an entire bestiary of fearsome gods whose actions shaped everything from the rising of the sun to the falling of the rain has become a distant, invisible, amorphous man in the sky who contents himself with drawing vague doodles on bits of toast.

Interesting point of view. My only problem is your free and very superficial interpretation of both Mao and Stalin. As much as I hate the monsters, especially, Stalin, you must give it to them that they built powerful states that, no matter how stupid the subsequent rulers, were could not be driven into oblivion. Stalin's ruthless rule was a good example, including space travel, WMD, and general industrialization. He relied on many very talented and highly educated people. This is all known stuff. The means to achieve his goals - that is a totally different horror story.
Hitler may be a better example because, of all his entourage, only Speer had a higher education (as an architect!). Still, Germany was a very advanced state under him until it went to war and all rational things became irrational.

Perhaps some stories are more believable than others.

I will say this: if someone [conclusively] *proves* something, it's a little late for you to 'stand up' and say you believe it. You merely learn what someone else studied. (and we all do that... so, no big deal). Myth has its place, where no proof exists.



Just choose whatever pleases you. [it's your life friend... not mine.]

I'm more agnostic than theistic, because i don't claim to know one way or the other (let alone have knowledge of any details). It's more of a "feeling" really, that something *beyond* congealed matter is behind all this (life, you, me, etc). And i suspect we haven't yet invented the instruments to detect it, or developed the lexicon to describe it.



Sorry, I'm busy enough defending my own words. Perhaps if you get in touch with Davies, the two of you can discuss each other's viewpoints and reach some understanding.

Sure you did. ...and, you tell me. I guess atheists don't organize for the purpose of helping the sick. That was kind of the point. Health care is big business of course, so the profit motive is a big one.



I guess you "misspoke". The "I'm not buying that" remark was in reference to that quote. I'll accept your revision.



I don't see a point here. This does not negate the fact that hospitals are supported by Baptists, Catholics, Lutherans, Mennonites, Methodists, Presbyterians, and those of the Jewish faith. (Webster's definition)

Anyway, enough of this tangent I interjected. The other stuff is far more interesting.

Ah... so that's what the 'A' in A.I.G. stands for.
[jest kidding folks]

> It's more of a "feeling" really, that something *beyond* congealed matter is behind all this (life, you, me, etc). And i suspect we haven't yet invented the instruments to detect it, or developed the lexicon to describe it.

That, I think, is the most expressive comment so-far posted in this thread (the parts I've read, anyhow).

(My own take on the matter is "Reality is a dream; god is the dreamer.")

Throughout history, many people have had many feelings about the way the universe has operated, all unsupported by evidence and often in sharp contrast with one another.

It is a natural human urge to want to believe in something "more." I don't understand why this is necessary; the universe is filled beyond measure with elegant truths, many of which far surpass our feeble imaginations of gods and demons. Faith describes tiny, limited worlds; the reality is majestic and beautiful beyond imagining.

The gift of science, as unappreciated as it is, is that it lets us learn that the physical universe is awe-inspiring beyond the wildest dreams of prophets and seers.

If you wish to understand the majesty of reality, feel with your heart, but check your facts.

Huh? IYHO.

Einstein and Newton both had faith (in some sort of Creator/Being). So have many great scientists. [sadly, you're just swatting at flies here.]

There's no shortage of opinions out there... plenty of which disagree with your assessment. I.e., faith doesn't have to exclude "reality" (and/or all the awesomeness and/or all the majesty you wax so poetically about). Why do you continuously polarize the two? They're only mutually exclusive in one's mind, if one chooses to *believe* that. You do have a "religion" apparently: it's called Scientology perhaps? No? So, what do you call this agenda/mission then?

And please don't throw the Bible at me... i'm not even talking about that. (if that's the source of this hang-up, find someone else to pummel). Check out "The Tao of Physics" maybe... Capra is better able than me to express the [inevitable] union from both perspectives.

An argument can be made that if Newton approached his craft as an atheist he would have been more vigorously opposed than he was. The same can be said about Einstein.

One would need to consider the time line and the power of organized religion when these great thinkers were promoting their ideas. My question would be, how many people were never heard from as a result of their anti religious positions?

How much further would we have advanced if the opponents of the Prime Mover weren't reprimanded, jailed, tortured or killed?

IMHO, since late 19th century this is no longer an issue, at least, not a major one. On the contrary, some atheists, like Lysenko and Lepeshinskaya in Russia stalled great and reputed genetics research shunning and imprisoning competitors using some slogan-like stupidities, political accusations and data falsifying. To a certain extent, the same happened in China under Mao but this is less known. After the end of Mao's rule this negative influence of religion of belligerent atheism on science has gone, hopefully, forever.
P.S. I am not sure Einstein's (or Mileva's, as some claim) theory suffered that much from religious zealots, although you may be quite right about Newton. Concerning the latter's beliefs, nothing is really clear; there are steady claims that he was a prominent free mason.

Even intelligent people can have their limits.
Einstein was pounded by zealots on both side and chose to take the middle ground. He was a Jew, influenced by Catholicism as a child. A reader of Immanuel Kant and Spinoza. Spinoza's work was classic but it took a century before it was recognized, because of his religious position he was dashed by the Jews and Christians.

One cannot possibly be brought up in a environment of religion and not be influenced by it. So Einstein was open to the idea, rejected by both sides which was a good place to be in his time. It was unreasonable to defend a religion while you were dissecting theories held by believers and to discount believers while trying to convince them that his ideas should be considered.

Agree!

So?



Because I come from a reality-based approach to understanding the physical universe; I do not believe that comforting myths have value over truth.

When you look at the world of faith, you see the same things repeated over and over again. People invent all sorts of stories, with not a tiny shred of evidence to support them, which other people accept as truth on faith. These stories inevitably describe a physical universe wich is smaller and simpler than the reality. How many times has a faith-based system said "Oh, my God, we were wrong! The universe is even older, even larger, even grander than we thought!"?

When you look to inventing belief systems without any physical evidence to support them, you find that human imagination is rather feeble. If all these faiths are true, how come they all describe such small worlds? How come no prophet or seer has ever received a vision from god that tells him that the universe is incomprehensibly huge and incomprehensibly fine-grained and billions of years old?

No, prophets and seers tell us of tiny worlds, with the stars mere pinpricks in the sky rather than entire suns in their own right. Prophets and seers tell us that the world (75% of which is covered with water) was invented specifically for man (who has no gills).

It's sad, really, to be so insecure as to have to believe all these nonsense stories in order to feel good about ourselves. It's sad, it blinds us to the truth, and it makes us petty and evil. People are altogether too eager to kill one another over who has the best imaginary friend; what, in all that, is the value of believing stories without any reason to suppose they are true?



Um...reality?



BWAH ha ha ha!

*gasp* *gasp*

Hee hee hee! Stop, you're killing me! The Tao of Physics, that completely discredited old rag that is the laughingstock of real physicists, that feeble and desperate attempt to do some incredibly creative metaphoric interpretation of Hindu superstition in order to try to convince people that, no, it really really looks like a layperson's flawed understanding of quantum mechanics? That book that has become the foundation of a whole truckload of New Age superstitious twaddle that tries to convince us that "quantum physics" is responsible for everything from Tantric sex "energy manipulations" to ESP? Are you KIDDING me? I'm surprised you haven't mentioned "What the Bleep do We Know" (which tells us, among other things, that water has the magical ability to absorb "energy vibrations" from human emotions and even read written Japanese).

Still, I do think there's a valuable point lurking in there.

I think it's interesting that people will, on the one hand, try to claim that we can know truth through faith without looking at evidence, and on the other hand, somewhere deep inside will still try to act like rationalists. That's why we see the faithful clutching desperately for science to justify their faith.

It's not just books like The Tao of Physics or twaddle like What The Bleep Do We Know. Look in any religious book store and you will find entire sections filled with so-called "scientific proofs" that this or that faith is "real." You'll see books that try to "prove" that Jesus is the Messiah or that Mohammad talked to some god or other.

Even faiths in things like young-earth creationism try to wrap themselves up in the language and dressing of science. They long for the legitimacy of science, because on some level they seem aware that science is a tool that has had, and continues to have, success at exploring and understanding the nature of the physical world that faith has never matched.

How many times have we had a faith-based, supernatural explanation for some part of the physical world, and then replaced it with a natural explanation? Many, which is why faith has to be anti-intellectual.

How many times have we had a natural explanation for some part of the physical world, and then replaced it with a faith-based, supernatural explanation? Um...exactly never.

So... science and scientists don't have to exclude -- or include -- that possibility. It's a personal matter. Can't your scientific mind even grasp the concept? [you don't have to agree... but your understanding seems somewhat impoverished.]



I quoted all of that (this time) simply because it has absolutely nothing to do with me or my particular flavor of "faith", and it illustrates (epitomizes/proves) how obsessed you are with the topic in general... but blissfully ignorant as to the personal nature of faith. All that noise has nothing to do with me... and therefore has no purpose [in a reply to me] but obfuscation.



Really?... you mean "perception" or what?
[Your turn now]: why is the sky blue?



Really?... layperson?... let's see now.

[Your turn now]: your scientific credentials are what?



You're supernatural -- write a book why don't you?
Perhaps others will get off on (or feel comforted by) all the negative energy.

we need this guy back...

Yes, although we still have:



http://www.randi.org/site/

Speaking of dogs, I don't have a horse in this race, but it seems to me that there's an obvious point that has yet to be made in this thread: the full-blown symphony of existence is inherently ungraspable by rational thought.

That is, the brain is fundamentally a filter between reality and the individual ego, a mechanism for reducing the cacophony of sensory input to manageable proportions by muting or squelching some information, classifying some information according to constantly-evolving taxonomic schemes, grouping similar data relationships together on the basis of apparently shared underlying patterns, etc.

Our capacity to understand, in other words, is limited by the very logic we employ to elaborate that which we do understand. We can no more describe all of reality using science than we can describe all possible feelings or states using language. And just as the very act of composing sentences represents a reduction of the fullness of expression in the interest of communicating a specific idea, the act of describing the universe scientifically represents a reduction of the fullness of description in order to grasp a specific relationship among observed phenomena.

* * * * *

I was in the cathedral at Chartres on a family vacation when I was a teenager. It was the middle of a weekday, and with parts of the ceiling undergoing repair, the organist was practicing amidst the informality of drop cloths and scaffolding.

Hearing that music (which some would hold to be sacred) reverberating through that ancient Gothic edifice (held by many to be sacred) by the dusky light of eight-hundred-year-old stained glass windows (a particularly renowned example of what numerous folks believe to be a sacred art form) certainly evoked a sense of connectedness to something greater than myself (or my family, or the other folks in the cathedral, or the other folks in France, or the U.S., or any other subdivision of reality). I don't consider myself religious, but I do consider myself to have, for want of a better word, a spiritual life...and that was a spiritual experience.

What constitues spirituality? Is it a vestigial remnant of the days when we sought to explain the unknown by creating divine or magical figures because we hadn't developed the tools to explain things rationally?

I think not, or at least not for me. I think spirituality is simply a different medium of perception, one in which understanding occurs emotionally rather than rationally. Otherwise, whence comes art? music? poetry?

* * * * *

If I did have a horse in this race, it would be that science explains everything that is explainable scientifically—a continually expanding body of phenomena—but that only a portion of everything that is explainable is explainable scientifically, and that portion of experience which lies outside of the descriptive abilities of science is, like that portion of expression which lies outside of the ability of language to communicate, infinite.

Consider how we experience what we call "reality":

We don't actually see. Light enters the eye and stimulates specialized light receptors (rods for black&white, cones for color). When stimulated, that receptor sends a nerve impulse to a specialized area of the brain that interprets those impulses as seeing.

We don't actually hear. Oscillating air cause the eardrum to vibrate. Those vibrations are passed via three small bones (hammer, anvil, stirrup) to the cochlea and sets up vibrations in the cochlear fluid. The fluid, in turn, causes specialized "hairs" to vibrate and those hairs send a nerve impulse to a specialized part of the brain which interprets the nerve impulses as sound.

All senses (and there are many more than five) work this way. The big point is that the nerve impulses from those receptors are IDENTICAL in nature. It is the part of the brain that receives the impulse that interprets it. If you could switch the nerves from the ear to the optical part of the brain, you would "see" sound.

What is color? It isn't real. Yes, different wavelengths of light are detected by the cones but our perception of red, green, blue, etc. results from a section of the brain that receives an impulse from a particular receptor. Again, the impulses are IDENTICAL. In fact, we only see three "colors", namely red, green and blue because those are the three types of cones that we have. Other colors result from the stimulation of more than one type of cone and, again, are interpretations of the brain.

How much of the external world do we actually know? In truth, none of it because our sensations are all filtered by our brains. It is impossible to imagine a color that you have never seen. Many birds and insects have receptors that respond to ultraviolet. What does it look like? If their perceptions are at all like ours, it looks like a color that we have never seen. We can use film that is sensitive to ultraviolet but we don't actually see it. Instead, the film converts UV to a color that we can see.

Astronomers deal with this all the time. They realized, long ago, that most of the light in the universe falls outside our limited perceptions of wavelengths. So, they scan the skies for radio waves, UV, X-rays, and gamma rays. We can devise methods of converting those things to visual media that are visible to us, but we don't really experience them.

Patients undergoing brain surgery are generally conscious (the brain has no pain receptors so only local anesthetics are needed). When a visual area of the brain is stimulated with a mild electric current, the patient sees things. To the patient, this is just as real as "actual" sight.

In conclusion, our senses give us the illusion that we can know our surroundings. This is only an illusion.

"A poet once said "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imaginations adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the Earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secret of the universe's age, and the evolution of the stars. What strange array of chemicals are there in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts — physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on — remember that Nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!"

R.P. Feynman

I'm not sure who you think believes that, but it does fit conveniently into your conclusion. Which came first?

Rather, I, and many people I know, find confirmation of faith (specifically, belief in a Creator) in scientific knowledge. I don't have a habit of studying and debating these things, so I will reference a web site (again) where many such points are made. I have had the pleasure of listening to a few lectures given by the author.

http://www.doesgodexist.com/Pamphlets/Go...dInHisWord.html

It's long, and I don't imagine many who are following this discussion will read it, nor do I expect (or want) a point-by-point rebuttal. I just offer it as another perspective that I haven't seen expressed here as yet.

I'm confident that you like the sound of your violin, most of the time that is. I wonder if you realize that your explanation allows for the possibility, perhaps even the inevitability, that the favorite piece you like to play on it sounds to others like anything from a punk band to a Caterpillar planer in full swing, and that its appearance resembles a blue whale as much as a hapless army vehicle launched by an IED? And then I'm not even talking about its smells.

Against the background of this potential confusion it's good to hear your reassurance that all creation is an illusion...

Speaking about my violin playing, I have been told that the strings sounded better when they were in the cat.

NOTE: Violin strings are not made from catgut and never were. AFAIK, the origin of that term is not known with certainty.

Uncertainty abounds///

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catgut>

The Psychology of Grand was well understood in the early development of our species, like shock & awe. Show a sheep herder a huge building with colored glass and art they could have never imagined, fill the room with endless sounds of choirs or organs, let them touch the fine finished wood and stonework. have them smell the candles and oils and the senses will be overwhelmed causing and emotional response that some relate to spiritualism.

Follow me and this can be yours in paradise. The problem is that we are sensory creatures and when dead have no operating sensors. Why would a spirit need sensors? Why would a spiritual being need sensors? Could someone have a spiritual experience if they had no sensors?

Chemistry, or chemical energy creates the Felling of emotion that overwhelms our understanding of what our sensors are telling us and if your properly programmed the explanation will be a spiritual experience.

Without the program in place the experience would not be explained as spiritual, spirituality is learned through a nurturing process.

And sometimes, near-death experiences.

--

Speaking of which... since dogs have such acute hearing, i wonder what they hear when Jon fiddles with his catguts.

Their howls tend to drown out my playing so they probably don't hear too much.

It's just "too many notes".

near death sparks a primal fear response of run, hide, escape, the person is not running to spiritualism, they are trying to avoid it, if their programming has taught them that a spiritual life is on the other side of death. It's been said, many want to go to heaven but nobody wants to die....i wonder why?
Most believers who want to meet their maker should not fear death, but embrace it, shouldn't they?

Ops, I'm thinking logically.

Not intended to make any one feel sorry for me, but a response from my own experience.

I have a terminal incurable disease, my mental and physical feeling of well being fluctuates madly and there are times when I would certainly be happy to die.

However, the inbuilt instinctive survival mode kicks in, the body's own will to survive seems to be stronger than my personal wish that I be allowed to die, (comfortably).

In my case it is a physical thing, nothing to do with faith or wishing to meet my maker. I guess that applies to others as well, the body itself says, run, hide, do what is needed to survive, and fact shuts down systems in order to let others carry on, I have had this explained to me medically and experienced it myself. Sometimes I am struggling so hard to breathe, I almost lose control of my bowels and bladder. Nothing to do with fear, just the body redirecting energies for survival.

I would say the ultimate wish to survive in most has little to do with faith, and a lot to do with the body fighting for life in its own, involuntary way.

Don't confuse "science" with "scientists". There are individual scientists who believe in some sort of supernatural god, but that's beside the point, really.

The point still stands: Why should we believe in something that is not supported by a shred of evidence? What is the value in accepting something when we have no reason whatsoever to believe that it is true, other than the fact that we really, really want it to be true?

Seers and prophets and gurus and preachers say all sorts of things, some of which are inherently contradictory and some of which are extraordinary indeed. Why should we believe any of it? What is it that makes us, as a species, so willing to accept things without the slightest hint of any sort of proof that they might have any truth at all?

History certainly shows us that whenever some religious faith disagrees with science on some matter of empirical fact, the religion is wrong and the science is right. Why, since faith can't get provable things right, should anyone believe that it gets unprovable things right?



Re-read what I said. I didn't say the author of The Tao of Physics was a layperson; I said the book attempts to merge Hindu religion with a layperson's understanding of physics.

Fritjof Capra isn't a layperson; he's a fraud. The target audience for his book is laypeople.

To quote physicist Dr. Heinz R. Pagels, author of The Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics as the Language of Nature: "No qualified physicist that I know would claim to find such a connection [between Hindu mysticism and physics] without knowingly committing fraud. The claim that the fields of modern physics have anything to do with the "field of consciousness" is false. The notion that what physicists call "the vacuum state" has anything to do with consciousness is nonsense. The claim that large numbers of people meditating helps reduce crime and war by creating a unified field of consciousness is foolishness of a high order. The presentation of the ideas of modern physics side by side, and apparently supportive of, the ideas of the Maharishi about pure consciousness can only be intended to deceive those who might not know any better."



Sadly, possibly not for much longer. James Randi, who is a personal hero of mine (I met him in person for the first time last year), is currently in poor health.

Here's a picture taken when I met him:
http://www.obsidianfields.com/lj/tacit_randi.jpg

He is, I think, one of the few people who has made a big difference acting as a voice of reason and sanity in a world awash with irrationality, and I feel privileged to have met him. I believe that if more people thought the way he did, we'd have fewer people willing to blow themselves up or fly airplanes into buildings in hopes of eternal life in some sort of magical hereafter.



Just so. An internal feeling is not actually proof. Muslims have spiritual feelings of Allah; Christians have spiritual feelings of Jesus; Hindus have spiritual feelings of Vishnu; yet not all these things can be true, for they are each mutually contradictory. The presence of an internal feeling, even an overwhelming one, does not necessarily imply an external supernatural force.

Say one rainy night John Doe is driving a little too fast. While negotiating one particular hilly curve, he overestimates the coefficient of friction and the vehicle skids off the road and starts tumbling down the hillside. After 20 seconds (which feels more like several minutes) the car eventually stops rolling about. The shattered windshield is caved in, with tree branches looming just inches from his face... yet he manages to crawl out of the car (trembling) and (shakily) stands up. Dumbfounded, he realizes he's lucky to still be alive.

Now... where does the 'running and hiding' part come in? I don't follow. [isn't the next stage a little more reflective than that?]



Well, i qualified what i said with "sometimes"... but perhaps i was wrong. [I didn't realize there existed some neat little piece of psychoanalysis which wraps each aspect of human behavior into such a tidy package, such that every person's reactions and reasoning under various near-death experiences could always be so easily predicted and explained. That sounds quite convenient.]

Hey tacit!

Good questions. Problem is (and has been all along): i never claimed to know any of those answers (or cared one way or the other in "providing" them, if i did).



Good questions. Problem is (and has been all along): i never claimed to know any of those answers (or cared one way or the other in "providing" them, if i did).



Good questions. [why the hell do you keep asking me this stuff?  ]
Believe what you want... whatever pleases you. [sound familiar yet?]



Whoa. Several problems there. First, you are quoting what Pagels said in response to what *two* different people said (Capra and the Maharishi). By blending those two, the sample is polluted. Second, we'd also need to see the *exact* quote from Capra's book.. just in case it may have been misinterpreted/misunderstood somehow. [i.e., Pagels words in your quote: "such a connection" -- which connection? did he disagree with every word in the book... or only 5 particular sentences? was there anything (not mentioned by Pagels) that he felt was worthwhile... or did he (like you) simply skip over any [interesting or unusual] points of agreement?]

You like science right? Then present a more convincing case of your allegation (fraud). If you're a big fan of Randi, then don't settle for these murky references. What exactly did Capra say?... what did you understand it to mean?... and what proof can you show us that it's "fraudulent"?

BTW, apparently Pagels sold books too [e.g., "The Cosmic Code" ]. And -- in true karmic nature -- someone found a way to dissect it and discover 'a load of erroneous presuppositions'. And on, and on, and yawn. Perhaps Pagels was blending the Maharishi's words with Capra's in order to hype his own product... who knows?

I gotta side with dkmarsh here: i really *don't* have a dog in this race. I mentioned Capra because i enjoyed reading his thoughts 30 years ago. If you want to tear him up, go for it. [but i haven't seen anything conclusive or scientific as yet.] So far you've said Paul Davies "doesn't know what science is", and Fritjof Capra "is a fraud". [and you were none too kind to Einstein either.] I would pay some serious money to be in the same room, if you guys ever got together.

I read a fine quote sometime back about strong beliefs. I don't remember the exact quote nor the author but it goes something like this: "There is no correlation between how strongly one believes that a hypothesis is true and whether or not it is actually true." BTW, the author was a scientist and was referring not to religious faith but to scientists who have strong convictions about their unproved hypotheses.

For example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory



Disclaimer: I find 10-dimensional string theory to be aesthetically pleasing from a mathematical perspective, but the experimental confirmation is nada at this point, because of the energy requirements. This is, at least in part, the reason for the Large Hadron Collider .

I certainly wouldn't want to be heard claiming that there exist aspects of experience which only can be understood outside of science, when extended objects that are charged sources for differential form generalizations of the vector potential electromagnetic field offer such a compelling argument to the contrary.

String theory?
String theory my BIG TOE.

--

Been trying to read up on your baby there. Gotta admit, the full 26-dimension prototype (and all the theory to get there) is practically incomprehensible to be. The word 'abstract' doesn't do it justice. But i tried to follow along. When the article got down to describing Compaction... a visual of the concept slowly formed in my brane [sic]:

Expressed that way, i can begin to see how the 10 dimensional model is more comfortable (sincerely, no sarcasm intended there). Interesting that time is always one-dimensional. Or perhaps that was God's plan? OOOOPS... i meant Nature's Way.

I think I have only one final plea to make; and I will leave it to one who is far more qualified than I shall ever be to make it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mIfatdNqBA

and

http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2008/01/bronowskis-principle-of-tolerance.html

Hard to argue with that.

For example, even if LHC experiments confirm some x-dimensional string theory to be 100% accurate beyond reproach -- that still only proves that it's a good representation of reality... not "reality" itself.

Thus -- much like the several schools currently interpreting quantum mechanical phenomena -- there will (most probably) evolve a variety of viewpoints "defining" what that x-dimensional string model means [i.e., seems to indicate about reality].

It seems to me that that, in a nutshell, is the core of this entire discussion and the most fundamental difference between you and I.

I believe that there exists beyond ourselves a physical world, and that this physical world exists independently of us. I believe that insofar as some model, idea, postulate hypothesis, or model conforms in its properties to the real world, it is true, and insofar as it does not, it is false. I believe that the more we understand about the physical world, the better our understanding of ourselves.

And--perhaps most key--I do not believe there is any advantage to holding onto an idea simply because we find it pleasing or comforting. I do not believe that the comforting lie is superior to the comfortable truth.

In fact, I believe that holding on to comforting ideas that are false, just because they are comforting, is an incredibly harmful, destructive impulse that throughout history has been responsible, and continues to be responsible, for the vast majority of human atrocity.

So, to your "Believe what you want... whatever pleases you," I say this:

1. That is not a good tool for understanding the physical world. All the prophets, rabbis, fakirs, priests, seers, shamans, mystics, mediums, spiritualists, sages, medicine men, witch doctors, gurus, and occultists who have ever lived, with all their visions, prophesies, revelations, and divine inspiration combined, have shed less light on the workings of the physical world than Isaac Newton alone. Without the essential ingredient of "going out and seeing if your ideas actually work," no dream, vision, or revelation can be counted on to explain the workings of the world.

2. "What you want" and "what pleases you" most often means what supports your prevailing prejudices, insecurities, and fears." This is why we see, over and over, some kind of faith used as the foundation of morality, yet we also see that the moral values given to us by preachers and prophets are evil, twisted, corrupted versions of the very prejudices held by those preachers and prophets. From the Christian Bible, which endorses slavery and teaches that women are inferior to men, to the rural parts of India where religious faith teaches that it is acceptable to burn a woman alive if she is suspected of infidelity, we see over and over again that taking things on faith is the easy way to justifying atrocity, and that the beliefs which are most pleasing are those which most legitimize the evil impulses of the believer.

For those who care passionately about the truth, "believe what you want, whatever pleases you" is moral and intellectual bankruptcy.

Physical world... that's it? So, human consciousness is nothing but swirling particles of matter? Over eons, they became intelligent and self-aware [somehow] and found themselves posting at the Fine Tuned Mac forums chatting about quantum electrodynamics and string theory? Them's some miraculous particles. How do suppose they do that?

FWIW (not much perhaps), I more-or-less subscribe to this sort of (unproven) thinking:

You may remember reading that in Matherne's review of Pagels' "The Cosmic Code" which i linked to a few posts back (i'd never seen it before then). Interestingly, that's not so different from Capra's take on things... but not identical either. Do i find it comforting? Not particularly, but my brain cells tend to drift in that direction... until someone proves otherwise i suppose. AFAIK, it's *not* a religion -- more of a concept rather (with "pantheistic" qualities perhaps, as i've also recently learned). I'm pretty sure that sort of thinking has never erected cathedrals or waged war... nonetheless, i won't be offended if it makes you uncomfortable. [time to pull out that "promiscuous teleology" pill.]





Not sure if you're speaking generally here, about any-and-all ideas?... or were you referring to one idea in particular? [edit: BTW, if you wish to hold on to ideas that *don't* please you... i think an exception can be made.]



But realistically that isn't even the choice, is it? Not as far as i'm concerned anyway. Again, i don't know to what specifically you might be referring... but, if you're suggesting that i'm "holding on" to some "comforting lie" despite being aware of an alternative [corresponding] "comfortable truth"... i'd say that in all probability you are mistaken.



Did i ever say it was? No... thus: no argument.



I said believe whatever you want... not do whatever you want. [i've shortened my credo during the last few exchanges... but you may recall back on page 2 i specified: "so long as it doesn't harm the other visitors on this planet." That part seems fairly self-evident, so i haven't been repeating it.]



Not really. The problems usually arise when "believe what i tell you to believe" comes into play. If everyone practiced "believe whatever you want" no one would be bothering each other about their respective beliefs. Is that not logical? [again, within the framework of not harming one's neighbor. One of them might wish to paint their house pink or maybe burn a pentagram on the lawn... but local laws prohibit that sort of thing, etc. YMMV.]

edit: BTW, is repealing the First Amendment high up there on your To-Do list then?



Okay. Well then -- aside from "posting" me into oblivion and repealing the First Ammedment -- how do you presume to overcome this (perceived) predicament? Whether consciously or not, you appear to be tippy-toeing right into "believe what i tell you to believe" territory... much like the zealots you purport to despise (ironically enough).

Was there some verbal misunderstanding, or are you having delusions? [i hear the banks charge as much as $20 now for bouncing "intellectual" checks.]

--

At this juncture i would like to point out that -- back on page *4* -- i tried to redirect the angular momentum of this thread into a slightly more elevated orbit. I linked to that 'Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics' page and tried to solicit views on the various schools of thought listed there. In essence, you declined that invitation (and my 2nd appeal as well), with not so much as a relevant response... let alone any direct reply to my specific "Copenhagen" query. Indeed it can be said you have been totally 'tacit' in that respect.

Somehow, the focus always strays back into one of these anti-religion sermons and/or questionnaires; going to the extent of researching the names of every god in the wiki (or did you recall all those from memory?) Your point has been well made for over (at least) 6 of the past 8 pages, repetitiously so. Parts i agree with and parts don't seem to pertain to me. In those places where we both disagree (and it does apply to me), i don't wish to dwell... but, i have placed some responses earlier in this post. I have absolutely no interest in "converting" anyone (do you?). Or is the purpose of this anti-religion smokescreen to *avoid* actually engaging in discussion wherein ideas about various (as yet) unexplained scientific principles could be shared? Remember... "unexplained scientific principles"...the original title of this thread?

Live long and prosper.

Go right to the source and ask the horse
He'll give you the answer that you'll endorse.
He's always on a steady course.
Talk to Mister God

...or one can imagine that.. what give light must endure burning...

That's no on the first, and, uh, no on the second. But those misconceptions are common.

http://nobeliefs.com/DarkBible/darkbible7.htm

The references to slavery and women's submissiveness in the new testament are both from the Pauline epistles. In each case, Paul is writing to a particular church in a particular culture which bore little or no resemblance to any modern culture. As an aside both of these appear in epistles (letters) that are generally thought to have actually been written by the Apostle Paul while modern computer supported scholarship has placed the true authorship of many of the so called Pauline epistles in doubt, but that is a whole other topic.

Christians in some communities were freeing their slaves, but those freedmen and women were forbidden to earn money, to own property, or even to beg for food or shelter. So freeing a slave was tantamount to a sentence of slow death by starvation and exposure to the elements. Paul is urging the masters and their slaves to maintain the relationship as a more caring option in that particular cultural situation. Because Christians were freeing slaves, some jurisdictions passed laws forbidding freeing slaves because of the problems created by the starving former slaves.

Paul's recommendations for spousal relations are in a similar vein. At that time in that part of the world the status of women was little, if any, better than that of slaves. Women's business transactions had to be performed by their husband, father or brother except in very rare circumstances. Likewise women could own no property and if they angered their husband all the husband had to do was say, "I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you" and the divorce was final. When that happened the woman had essentially two options. If her family permitted, return home in shame, which caused the family to lose face and status in the community. The other alternative was prostitution and the life expectancy of a prostitute was less than six months. Paul is calling on the women to do what they had to do to survive and more importantly he is urging the husbands to treat their wives, and polygamy was common, with respect and not casually or in a pique cast them aside.

Any effort to understand either the Hebrew (old) or the Greek (new) testament without a consideration of the culture in which they were written, the audience to which they were addressed, the viewpoint of the authors, the preconceptions of the translators, and the translators convictions is doomed to misinterpretation and misunderstanding. I will also add that the letter of Paul's writings such as these can easily lead to the wrong conclusion, but the underlying principle these exemplify are as valid today as they were on the day they were written.

As joemikeb eloquently explains, that link describing the social conditions of an ancient time is not the equivalent to the statement I quoted from Tacit's post.

Joemikeb, your explanation is kinda silly. Your defending Paul and telling the world that Christians not only had slaves but also were condemning them to death with their own laws and rituals that didn't allow women to survive on their own.

I must have missed the part where God stepped in and stopped this tragedy.

Is there any written statements on gender equality in the bible, in practice or in the Abrahamic tradition for that matter? I produced the written evidence in the bible that confirm what Gregg had discounted. Tacit's comment was accurate.

I don't think I need to read Greek or Hebrew to understand the epistles. If I need clarification I'll have to resort to my many years of parochial education and scrape by on rusty Latin.

You've misunderstood that post in a few places, and/or you're mixing in some ideas that are not a response to the post. It's hard to tell. I guess the "part you missed" was the New Law. And you weren't being invited to learn Greek or Hebrew.

There's more to your link than I realized. The first time, I didn't scroll down, and just read the introductory paragraph. There are some things, on a quick read, that the author just has wrong. I suspect that lack of understanding is in play on many of the others, but some appear to present a formidable challenge on first reading.

Gregg, I could with certainty easily find more evidence to make my point.

We could start with the story in the Garden of Eden.

Just look on-line and see for yourself how many gender equality organizations there are for the rights of Christian women, and then by contrast find somewhere men are seeking equality and justice.

One of Joe's points was that one would need to understand the culture of the time. He makes a valid point, but I do understand the era, and I have a background in Christian theology and still I arrive at the same conclusion.

Slavery of women in the US in the past 500 years was a product of Christian in America. It was Christian Europeans that brought most of the slaves here. It was Christian men who raped and exploited the slaves. It was Christians that inflicted genocide on 12 million Native Americans.

And I've not even touched upon the genocide of central and South American or Eastern Europe. Coming from a Christian background and many years of parochial schools, I know the history and the contradictions very well, and from my perspective one of the most destructive forces that ever plagued this planet, was and is, the Abrahamic religions. Through the eons Jews, Christian and Muslims have been butchering indigenous people around the globe using justifications of Gods will or Manifest Destiny to steal land, resources, labor, power, or money while trying to convince the world that they hold the moral high ground, the hypocrisy is enough the gag a maggot, and even today defenders turn a blind eye to history so they can feel secure in their destiny in the clouds.

If the US and Western Nations want to succeed in the 21st century they will have to shed this addiction and move on to reason and accountability.

Mark, I appreciate the tone of the above post. I respectfully submit that it concentrates on the actions of people, and reflects poorly on the religion those people followed (or followed to some degree). It does not prove that the religion is morally bankrupt, just that the individuals are. During the same periods of time, there were other adherents of the same religions who acted nobly. I am quite sure that there are documented cases of the evil actions of people who claim (or claimed) no religious faith. That does not mean that all people with no religious faith are evil.

Similarly, think about political scandals. We certainly have many to ponder. Don't you suppose that within the administrations tainted by scandal (and try to name one in the U.S. that wasn't!) there were people who did not violate any legal or ethical standard in the performance of their duties? Of course there were! Some even resigned rather than compromise their integrity. But, which stories do we hear more about?

A side note:
I read a article excerpted from The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution in the Oct. 5 edition of Newsweek the other day. I found it very thought-provoking, in spite of author Richard Dawkins' obvious arrogance and condescending attitude towards those taking an opposite position. I would love to witness a debate between Dawkins and Francis Collins (geneticist and newly appointed head of the National Institutes of Health) who believes that evolution can be compatible with faith in God. I know that such a debate would not settle anything, but it would certainly be entertaining!

Gregg, excuse my exuberance please, it wasn't meant to offend.

The point I'm attempting to make is that if there is some divine guidance in following the prime mover that history clearly demonstrates that one could not perceive the difference between a person that is guided and a person that is not.

Certainly you'll find non-believers committing the same atrocities, but they're not claiming that it is for a divine purpose. They don't lure in the innocent, dependent, and seeker of support with promises of life after death, honey & virgins to do their bidding, nor do they claim moral authority. They're not using physiological manipulation through sensory overload to convince someone that this is truth. They don't require the person to face to the east many times per day and capture thought energy through repetitive injury.

This is the product of a theory without evidence.

The idea has been fruitful in that it has been able to accumulate great wealth and power through manipulation throughout the eons, but I would argue that it has been a destructive force in our development as a species. The idea…has pitted men against men, villages against villages, nations against nations and east against west. There and millions in the US that would kill a Commie at first sight, not because they might be from Russia, but because they don't have a god. The funny part is that the Believer doesn't have a god either; they have an idea and an organization to support the notion without evidence.

If a corporation employs people who do not represent the mission statement, they have an obligation to discipline or remove them; Manifest Destiny was never addressed because it served the organization. One could argue that because the organization is so large and diverse that it wouldn't be possible to oversee everyone, but I would recount by arguing that this is supposed to be divine providence and no human discipline should be needed. Certainly one would have to agree that discipline has been used against followers that did not follow closely. A visit to Salem Mass would certainly set the record straight.

If one looks at the world today, and sees the conflicts around the world they would notice a similar thread running though most of them. Genocide by Muslims in Africa in the name of Allah to capture oil and riches. The power is in the organized religion, not in the national identity. The Israelis relocating to the Promise land, displacing a hundred thousand Palestinians in their wake and justifying their actions under the command of their god, this is not Nation building it's Kingdom building. A logical man would conclude that a voice from the clouds is ridicules and have no reason to commit atrocities to fulfill the voices wishes, but those who are susceptible to supernatural influence or for those who use this theory for their own gain, the only idea that is ridicules is the one they do not accept.

This is not a path to a fact or a truth, it is a method of population manipulation using accumulated followers and their wealth to confuse the facts for their own benefit.

It is one thing to have an active hypothesis and to work on it until it finds facts, and quite another to act on a hypothesis and make up the rules as you go along.

After thousands of years and billions of people contemplating for trillions of hours on the same notion and not being able to produce one shred of evidence, one might think that the theory has run its course. With all due respect.

Mark, no offense taken. But I wonder if you misread my first sentence. It is clear that you and I cannot think alike on this matter. There wouldn’t be much use in itemizing all the points in your post above that I differ with you on or take issue with. Whatever I write is not going to change your mind, and I don’t see an indication that you’re even interested in trying to understand the opposing point of view. You didn’t acknowledge the primary point I made in my previous post, and instead you continued in the same vein.

It is a sad fact that, in my view, many (purposely not quantified) adherents of religious faiths (and I’m carefully being all-inclusive here) have perverted that faith’s tenets in various ways. You’ve complained bitterly about some of them. This sad fact gives religion a bad name. There are still many good people who disagree with you without being disagreeable. (And no, I’m not suggesting that you were being disagreeable in that post.)

I have been following the exchanges between Gregg and Sandbox for some time and the posts reinforce what I said earlier, namely that people with opposite viewpoints cannot understand why anyone would disagree with them. I compliment both of you for your ability to post rationally and avoid emotionally negative responses. That's far too easy to do.

Hats off to you both! If only all discourse about controversial issues were so civil...

There are passages in the Bible, in both the old and the new testaments, which condone slavery and explicitly say that women are inferior to men.

You can argue that these passages reflect the societies of Biblical times or that they are the responsibility of specific individuals, but that does not change the fact that they are there. The Bible contains passages endorsing both of these views, as well as other, equally reprehensible views.

Which is exactly my point--faith-based moral systems always reflect, never set, the morality of their adherents. A religion which condemns something that the people in the society where that religion believe is good, or which claims as good that which those people condemn, is unlikely to gain traction. Religious systems flourish when they cater to rather than seek to change the various prejudices and bigotries of the target audience.

Author Sam Harris argues that a religious person can function in a modern, industrial society only if he does not take the sacred texts of his religion seriously, and that the more seriously a person takes the religious texts of his faith, the less able that person is to function.

The Bible commands many reprehensible things and condones many more--it teaches, among other things, that a man may sell his daughter as a sex slave provided that he does not sell her to foreigners; that if a person in a town turns from god that everyone in that town, including infants and animals, must be killed; that if a family raises a son who turns from god, it is the responsibility of that family to put their son to death; that a woman who is not a virgin on her wedding night must be stoned to death; that if a betrothed woman is raped, she and the rapist are both to be executed; and so on.

Modern Christians find ways to rationalize not doing these things and do not obey these Biblical commands because as members of an industrial, pluralistic society, we believe these things are wrong and our society does not condone them. On a practical level, our society could not continue to function if we still obeyed these imperatives.

There are modern-day Christians who believe that all the commandments in the Bible, including those about executing women who are not virgins and putting to death both the rapist and his victim, should be obeyed. The Christian Reconstructionist movement, for example, wants to see the United States governed by an absolute theocracy which enforces all 613 commandments in the Bible which have not expressly and explicitly been revoked by the New Testament. Needless to say, these are the folks who approve of planting bombs in clinics and gay bars, and they don't make very nice neighbors.

(Interestingly, the one area which is a significant source of contention within the Reconstructionist movement is the issue of slavery. Most Christian Reconstructionists favor bringing back slavery, on the grounds that the Bible explicitly endorses it; a minority of Reconstructionists oppose this view.)

The point here is that there is an inverse correlation between being a good citizen of a modern, pluralistic society and believing in the Bible, the Koran, or other sacred religious texts; being a good citizen of a modern industrial society just about requires finding some way, if you are religious, of rationalizing the idea that the majority of the scriptures of your faith do not apply to you.

I wasn't avoiding your first point Gregg; I thought I had addressed it.



Your argument is that although there are statements in the bible(s) that are not acceptable in today's society that as a book of guidance it still has value. And that, although some people do nasty thing in the name of religion or belief, that there are some that do not. If my explanation is not correct please set me straight.

.

I'm absolutely certain that there are well meaning, dedicated and honest people who believe in a prime mover(god). My sister is a nun example=(a sister of the sacred heart) and through her I have met many well meaning people. So I do understand that what one person does in an organization or religion is not a reflection on the whole. I do know that my sister would have been a good person in the eyes of our culture if she was born into a Muslim family or agnostic family or a Nazi family, she gets her kicks from giving to others. She enjoys sacrifice.

She's very intelligent, double master degrees, and teaches in places like Hell's Kitchen in special educational programs that no one else dare address. I know the depth of her convictions, so if your wandering if I can understand the dichotomy between her life and her representation of a conventional religion, I do.
Simply put, she has a worm and needs to feed it. Living in sacrifice turns her on. And she readily admits it.

I've had long conversations with her, her friends, and her monsignors a bishop or two and they understand the contradictions very well, but there is no other place to live as they do, if it wasn't for the convent, rectory, monastery or church there would be no place to satisfy their hunger.

Before I go on….let me make sure that I've addressed the point that you made in your first sentence. With all due respect.

(Thank you, Jon.)
(Yes, Mark, that's clear. I didn't think it was before.)


No, there aren't. However, there are things in the Old Testament that I cannot rationalize. But of course, being centuries removed, we cannot even analyze them in their context. Just like centuries from now, our descendants will not be able to figure us out.


And what's the point? There are descriptions of evil things that people did. There are descriptions of the failings of people who were, and still are, looked up to in Judeo-Christian circles. And then there are countless modern examples of people who violated cultural mores and tried to hide it, only to have it exposed. On the other hand, Letterman "came clean" when he was afraid of being exposed. How many come clean when there is no danger? If someone says "I messed up" on his/her own, is that not admirable? So when individual screw-ups are revealed in the Bible, that invalidates everything?


I submit that the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament are an example of an exception to your rule. "A new commandment I give to you...." His teachings went against the tide of the society, and 2,000+ years later, some still attempt to follow them. It ain't easy! Never say always, and only say never when you say never say always.


No surprise here; I disagree.


And what's the point? There are descriptions of evil things that people did. There are descriptions of the failings of people who were, and still are, looked up to in Judeo-Christian circles. And then there are countless modern examples of people who violated cultural mores and tried to hide it, only to have it exposed. On the other hand, Letterman "came clean" when he was afraid of being exposed. How many come clean when there is no danger? If someone says "I messed up" on his/her own, is that not admirable? So when individual screw-ups are revealed in the Bible, that invalidates everything?


I submit that the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament are an example of an exception to your rule. "A new commandment I give to you...." His teachings went against the tide of the society, and 2,000+ years later, some still attempt to follow them. It ain't easy! Never say always, and only say never when you say never say always.


All are part of the set of things I cannot rationalize, as stated above. We must not pretend to be smart enough to understand that society based on modern society. The OT texts need to be understood from the perspective of the children of Isreal, leaving Egypt (400 yrs of slavery/brutality) and entering into another very violent culture (Canaan). Many of the old covenant laws were in place to limit brutality & violence. Unfortunately, women were often oppressed and treated as 2nd class citizens by that society. I suppose rules were made that would be effective in that environment, but I don't really know why those rules were made for sure.


Modern Christians, and those 2,000 years ago do not because they are Christians. I suppose you can say that about modern Jews, who do not accept the New Testament.


One should not underestimate the ability of human beings to screw up anything; say, government, for instance. Do you suppose there are things about our government that the Founding Fathers would find abhorrent? (career politicians taking graft, for instance)


That's nonsense.

We could argue over the meaning of scripture, the perceived abuse through the ages written by followers of religious traditions and never come to the point. Paul of the New Testament could have been a drunken sailor and the editors and translators through the years could have been mad men or politically motivated. We don't know what the Nazarene said, it wasn't written in his own hand, and wasn't written for years after his non-death. The writers did not hear the statements so it's all hearsay.

What we do know is what we can observe in today's culture.

Marriage vows in the Abrahamic traditions places women in a subservient position to men. In most if not all religions the daughter is the property of the father until marriage. When married, the wife is subordinate to the authority of the husband.

The fact that women were subordinate made marital rape a property crime rather than a crime of violence. Since religious marriage vows were considered contract law and a sacrament the courts had no jurisdiction over the sanctity of a marriage contract so there was no crime at all. This was and is condoned by religions today and only national laws can supercede these traditions. It was not followers that change the laws it was secular reasoning that put a stop to it in western societies.

Women were to be Subservient in authoritarian relationships between couples.

When a person has no control over their lives the act becomes an issue of bondage, slavery in marriage, and by marriage. Women working for nothing or for less in the work place were considered natural. It was never challenged by a religion, it was challenged by secular authority. These acceptable traditions and laws were brought to North America on ships carrying Christians who quickly established their rules in the colonies upon which state and national laws were written. Written by men, there are no women writers in any constitutional paperwork that I can find.

21st century….you have primarily Christian influence still trying to control the choices of women. Today birth control is not an acceptable nor is abortion. Women trying to control their own destinies are challenged by what religious observers find unacceptable to gods laws.

One cannot prove there is a god but we can observe the result of belief and judge the theory accordingly using critical thinking, the basis of scientific exploration. An assertion, without evidence, is not accepted as true in modern life. What a person or group thought to be true 6000 or 2000 years ago is not necessarily fact. It may comfort the observer in knowing they are following an ancient tradition, but that only serves the comfort zone it does not prove the assertion to be factual.

If one enjoys the feeling that is stimulated by believing the unreasonable then of course there is no way to find common ground with reasonable people. If one feels entitled to their beliefs because they are solipsists then of course there is no argument.

IMO.

All that we perceive or do not perceive is subject to our sensory perception. Much of what we believe is a product of nurture and environment. What we need to agree on is that we do not have an answer but that the scientific course of study is by far and unequivocally the best way to resolve our differences. Evidence is required to satisfy everyone universally and that is the best avenue to our coexistence.

The days of unity in belief of a father figure are over, we're on our own, on a spinning rock in a vast universe that we now all need to understand. We need to stop wasting time on who said what, and who's god is bigger or better, and get about admitting that the idea of god is small and insignificant in comparison to what we will discover in the future. Understanding our universe will help us understand ourselves. Being a part of the universe rather than the masters of the universe in the image of god will go a long way in releasing us from the bondage to spiritualism and unite us in a common cause.

Oh, now I see. Thanks for making it so clear.

One cannot prove there isn't one either. And so what?



The result? Oh you mean pick and choose the worst examples, and pretend that's the norm? Sorta like those "physicians" who laughed at Lister and Pasteur, when told they were infecting [i.e., killing] their patients with invisible germs? Yeah, eventually doctors learned to wash their hands [and sterilize their instruments]... but it didn't happen overnight. [Same deal with that blood-letting example a few pages back... as you stated: it was never a "proven" cure... right. but still, it sure was *practiced* (under the guise of 'science') for a long time though, wasn't it?]

Shall we just pick out the worst examples of each other's viewpoints, and play 'gotcha' till the other guy cries uncle? Is that what your "worm" hungers for? [so far, that 'social-engineering' field you promoted a ways back has all the trappings of a cult.]



Therefore -- scientifically -- you aren't making any such assertions either (as to the definite non-existence of a creator). So where do we go from there then? [i doubt the phrase "Thou shalt not kill" appears in any physics book -- shall i now proclaim that therefore science books condone murder?]



Oh I see. So, you're saying that your sister is trying to master the universe[?].

Here's a fun read (except the math part): "Many-worlds interpretation".  [can't say whether i agree or disagree... but it's a lot lighter reading than the quantum/religious entanglement going on here.]

What color is your god? Is it large or small, can it fit in your pocket, who made this god, does it have a brand? How much does it cost? Do I get a choice of god, can I get the god of Abraham?



Will god talk to me on mountain tops, give me a staff to split the red sea, grow trees in the desert so I can build a boat and float a pair of every critter on the planet.
Instead of Loaves and fishes can I get steaks and fries? I'll take two gods to go.

At a time when men would live to 50 years old the bible claimed they lived to be 137 I could go on for days and as I write there are scientist out there refuting Gods Word in these books every day.

These stories are simple absurd, but are the basis of these religions.

"Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six."
Leo Tolstoy



I have no idea if there is or isn't some sort of creator, I'd like to meet his maker. When the evidence is presented I'll make my own determination. We as a species do not kill our own naturally, there were natural laws of preservation long before our species manufactured the supernatural. The books of Abraham are represented as the word of god. Anything I write is a product of my own deductions.



She belongs to a society that teaches the superiority of our species and that we were created in the image of god. So yes master of the universe is her belief. The universe revolves around her god, and she's a part of his master plan. If you are a follower of the Abrahamic traditions that is the directive.



There is much that I don't understand but I don't see anything on that page that goes beyond hypothesis. I doesn't say believe this or go to hell. Those folks are not interested in whether I tuned to the east when I think about them or ask me to bang my head on the floor. They're not recounting the words of Yahweh, God, Jesus, Mohammed or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

.

I would like to see our species unite.

I do not suspect that the religions of the world will ever concede to anyone's interpretation of god, other than their own. I suspect that the theory of a prime mover has exhausted itself and devolved into tit for tat and grasping at straws. On the other hand our species has moved on without religion in the most productive corners of our world. Some may need to fly a religious flag in theocracies, but if they're in pursuit of uncovering the mysteries of the universe they're most likely only role playing their piety for family reasons while dismantling the yarn.

As humans experience the productive methods required by scientific study, and grow to understand that reasoned outcomes, common purpose, with less competition, they will move further away from the mystic and closer to rational thought.

This thread

I've thought more about your use of "condone" only to come back and find that you originally used "endorse" instead. That's the way I took it, but there are other possibilities. The nuances of our language make it flexible, but that sometimes hinders communication.

Dictionary(OSX) gives two meanings. Condone in one sense can be accept/allow. Certainly, scripture encourages slaves in that time to accept their circumstances*, for they were powerless to change them. I don't want to get deeply into the power thing here... free will, etc. But "allow" implies the ability to put a stop to something that is within one's control. Perhaps that applies, but I'd be more inclined to use "tolerate" instead, in that no punishment was meted out for slave ownership. Free will again...

Condone in another sense can be approve/sanction which gets closer to the concept of endorsement. To that I say emphatically, scripture does no such thing, certainly not in the New Testament, which is what my Christian faith is based on. I'm not as certain about the Old Testament, but I don't recall ever running across such a statement.

For your contention to be correct, the value judgment must be in the text, not a conclusion drawn from your own moral standards, or those of modern society.

Interestingly, dictionary.com gives this meaning to condone:
to give tacit approval to

*Elsewhere, scripture encourages everyone to be "content in all circumstances". Pretty good advice, perhaps dependent on one's definition of "content".

quite possible an exercise in futility, no doubt, but exercise me must.



whereas:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilience:_The_Unity_of_Knowledge

Evidence is the common denominator if we are to agree. There is no other medium that I can think of that serve unity's purpose.

But...

When beliefs stop being negotiable, bad things happen, and there is a history of bad things as a result of unsubstantiated belief.

You won't even try to engage in a friendly, imaginative (non-mathematical) discussion of quantum mechanical interpretations... yet you claim to be pro-science? [hey... i'm very pro-science, and i'm not pleased with the pretense of some who claim that **they** alone represent the pro-science viewpoint around here.]

What you (and almost everyone else) seem unable to appreciate [recognize/discern] is that the whole 'interpretations of quantum mechanics' subject is exactly what science is struggling with at the moment... because the paradoxes our (current) knowledge seems to present entail some truly bizarre implications. THAT's what this thread ("Unexplained Scientific Principles") should be about, because those [differing] schools/interpretations/theories is where the real "reality" beef exists.

How does religion-bashing even begin to answer those (quantum) types of questions? Why bother with inane, small-minded crap like "what color is ['my'] god?" ?  You're supposedly pro-science... then let's talk about how perplexing its various viewpoints are at this point in time, and why that might be the case.

Instead, i detect a deep desire to avoid such scientific topics. Apparently a commandment has been issued...

• Thou shalt only believeth in what hath been proved.

...so therefore, there's not much else to discuss (other than asserting that any notion of a possible creator leads to burning women. Brilliant [not]).

I don't know what Thomas Edison's spiritual inclinations were... but certainly he had a faith to persevere through failure after failure. At times i'm sure it seemed that all he was "proving" was that light-bulbs were impossible to make. But he continued to try anyway. [i suspect he enjoyed some extra time by not spending any of it bashing the religious beliefs of his fellow man.]



Whisky Tango Foxtrot said that page was about anything like that? [is that what you expected... or wanted?]

It seems you're exclusively looking to argue about religious stuff in order to *hide* from speculation (or even wonderment) about scientific mysteries.

Nice approach. Good luck with that. [if Edison had had that type of "scientific" attitude, we'd be reading our posts in the dark. ]

The only thing missing in that picture is how the horse keeps getting pulled back into the frame, despite any (of my) attempts to bury it.

Perhaps the horse is supernatural?

When ryck refined his point:



and tacit answered:


Then the conversation that was requested proceeded to where we are:

The you rang in:



then joemikeb:



oldMACman said:



Macnerd10 said:



then tact said:



and you responded:



and again:



and again:



above is where YOU caught my eye.

And again:



And again at the end of the third page and still I haven't posted.



Then I did:


I guess one could say that "I'm the one who is bashing" something, or avoiding something else, if it serves their need to believe anything… even if it's crud under their fingernails accumulated by scratching their imaginary blackboard to hear an echo.

There are reasons why humans have created beliefs in the supernatural, and there are consequences to that approach as well as a history of results. If pointing that out to a defender of the notion makes them defensive… there is probably an explanation from a scientific perspective.

Far out man.



Groovedelic.

as I expected

Perhaps it's time for a more simple-minded view.

Some of the people on the "science side" of this thread assume that having a spiritual side can only be within an established religion. That rationale is beyond me.

I do not belong to any church. In fact, except for weddings and funerals, haven't been in a church in fifty years. However, I do believe absolutely that there is something beyond life on earth and that there is a superior being. What it is or what awaits beyond life on earth, I don't know. I just believe it exists and I'll find out when I die. My belief has never caused me to consider killing, raping, maiming or any other dreadful act.

Neither does having that belief prevent me from accepting the evidence on things like evolution and other theories. I just think that there are things that are beyond science - something else, unexplainable and unprovable, that existed before the Big Bang or whatever starting point anyone wants to use.

However, the science side cannot seem to accept anything that is not conclusively proved scientifically and therefore asserts that, if it isn't provable, it can't be.

I think that is incredible arrogance. It's like saying "we are the most superior beings and unless it's proven to us, it doesn't exist". As we have seen through the thread, there's no use arguing the point because neither side can prove the other wrong. Some of the arguments remind me of the Blood, Sweat and Tears lyric, "I know there ain't no Heaven, but I'll pray there ain't no Hell".

But the arrogance doesn't stop there. There is a contention that If I believe in a superior being I must be incapable of rational thought (What utter nonsense) or I must need a crutch to get me through life (Equally nonsensical). Indeed, I would argue that it's the science side who are most in need of a crutch (proof) before they can believe in something.

To get back to my original question, I wanted information that showed that it wasn't only religion that asks people to blindly accept things on faith. The MFIF thread had examples of Science asking people to do exactly the same thing (accept things on faith) on some basic principles.

I had a good reason for seeking the "science taken on faith" information, and it is simple. I have a longtime friend who is terminally ill (small cell cancer has returned) and my friend's beliefs are the same as mine. We haven't talked much yet about the journey ahead of him but we will.

I want to be sure that when he takes that final step that he is not carrying the extra burden of doubt, that what he believes is true and his belief doesn't require proof - no different than Science having concepts that don't seem to require proof.

I had thought that the originally sought article Taking Science On Faith would be sufficient to show that Science doesn't have quite as many answers as it thinks it has. However, this thread has given me far more than I could possibly have hoped for. For that, I thank the participants.

ryck

Are there some on this thread?



Why do you believe absolutely, would be my question. My guess is that you think a spirit was inserted into you and when the body dies the spirit will leave. The fact as we know them, demonstrates that we consume nourishment and manufacture energy to operate our bodies until the machinery breaks down. The body is then decomposed and consumed by other organisms on earth. Even the carbon from cremation.



I suspect that there are thing that are beyond my comprehension too, but I do not make the leap into saying that after I die my life is going there, I'm content with being worm food, which completes the circle of life.



from my perspective the science side says.. there is nothing beyond question. The non-science side says… don't question me.



because you will not present the rational for your absolute belief the questions remain and haunt you. Being haunted you strike out at the questioner, attempting to put the onus on them. The arrogance, I would suggest, is found in the refusal to answer the question and continue to claim, that there is something when there is nothing to present.



I can understand your motive and sympathize with your position but the journey is at its end as far as we can prove, no matter what we choose to believe.



Science has questions, belief has doubt.

The MFIF thread started as a video of Cellular Biology, which then became a long discussion (largely between Tacit and me) about Mother Nature and, eventually with some other input, morphed into the same argument as this thread.

At that point in the MFIF thread I dropped out because I find these arguments circular and not very useful. So, I will not be taking your bait, particularly since you continue to miss the point entirely. My original FTM post was, in part:

" In the previous lounge…… someone mentioned two basic scientific principles that scientists are still unable to explain and which are accepted as "that's just the way it is".

The science side berates people who accept things on faith but disregards the fact that it does the same thing with some of its own principles.

It also asks others to accept its scientific conclusions “on faith”. Yes, it can be argued that their conclusions “can be proved” but that’s meaningless unless everyone had the same level of education and can understand the explanation. Clearly that is not so and therefore it becomes "just take our word for it" or, dare I say it, take it on faith.

That is what most people do. They accept the scientific opinions on faith.

The science side argues that acceptance of religious ideas on faith has been the cause of great woes. I don't think anyone has disagreed. However, taking science's "word for it" has also caused extraordinary pain and suffering. Frontal lobotomies and thalidomide come immediately to mind.

The science group likes to use words like shamans and fakirs. I don't think anyone disagrees that there are untruthful religious leaders. However, the science group can be tarred with the same brush. Let us not forget all those scientists whose "scientific opinions" are paid for by large industries. The tobacco industry and the energy industry have both been able to to trot out their industry-friendly scientists to assure us that smoking does not cause cancer or that global warming is a myth.

In my opinion, that makes science no different than the religions you are so quick to condemn.

ryck

Does that perspective have room for anything which might exist in between those two "sides"... or is it too narrow to visualize anything but polar opposites?



Pretty stupid question, don't you think? - Evidence?!?!
Else um... what is your scientific definition of "faith"?



Oooh, "haunted". Brrrr. Spooky.

Continue to claim???  Sorry sandbox... Ryck isn't the one "continuing" around here.
[Methinks thou doth protest too much.]



Yawn. I doubt you know much *actual* science.
At least... your posts don't show any evidence.

Not only does the Old Testament explicitly condone slavery, it even sets out laws and rules by which slavery is permissible, specifies who may own slaves and under what circumstances, and even goes so far as to specify, in detail, when a man is permitted to sell his daughter as a sex slave, who he is and is not permitted to sell her to, and what the terms of the contract of the sale are to be.

See, for example, Leviticus 25:44-46, Exodus 21:2-6, Exodus 21:7-11 (the verses which explicitly allow a man to sell his daughter as a sex slave as long as he does not sell her to foreigners).

Jesus not only condones slavery, and specifically instructs slaves not to try to gain their freedom (Ephesians 6:5, 1 Timothy 6:1-2), he even specifically condones beating a slave for wrongdoing even if that slave does not know he has done something wrong (Luke 12:47-48).



With respect, I think you just proved the point. You yourself say that you don't know what the Old Testament has to say on the subject of slavery and you believe that the New Testament supersedes the old. You have to believe these things in order to be a functioning member of a pluralistic, post-industrial society; these are the things that you have accepted as reasons not to obey the 613 commandments in the Bible, many of which (like executing any family member who turns away from god) would put you at odds with the values of the society in which you live.

If you read the Old Testament, you will see that it endorses slavery, and many other reprehensible things. It also describes people doing these things, but that's not what I'm talking about--I'm talking about the rules and commandments specifically instructing people to do these things.

If you read Matthew 5:18, you will see that the Old Testament rules and commandments are not undone by Jesus; they are still in force.

However, you cannot believe these things and also still be a functioning member of society, so you have constructed rationalizations--or perhaps accepted rationalizations constructed by others--about why you are exempt from Old Testament law, even while still accepting the divine providence of the Bible.

Which is exactly what Sam Harris is talking about.

Nonetheless, the statement is almost correct, except that scientists have A LOT of doubts.

True, and they question their doubt. Belief has doubt without question.

The finality of belief without empirical evidence leaves doubt unquestioned.

In this thread you will see that expressed as faith, and having faith is somehow a license to be unquestioned. "I have a Right to believe what I want" can be heard from their self-proclaimed moral authority. But do they have a right to believe anything without question and proclaim that it holds a truth unknown to those who do not have faith?

I have faith that the next breath of air will be there, but I don't believe that a man in a long white beard who lives upstairs delivered it.

Granted, 6000 years ago it was reasonable to assume that a superman made everything. But today we can understand the atmosphere and break in down to it's elements. If we're interested and not lazy we don't need to say god made air as a matter of faith.

Our natural differences are beyond our control, male or female, tall or short, different colors, languages on so on. By adding a new dimension we create a false dichotomy and new divisions within the faith orientation. You have wars between religions when there shouldn't even be a division of religion or religion at all.
Then there are those who say they don't belong to a religion and so I question if they created their own god? If he was create by you, you should be able to produce him for inspection. Not usually the case I find, and most of the time they borrow a preconceived god but follow their own rules.

Franklin, to state the obvious, you and I are poles apart in our thinking regarding the things we’ve been discussing. I must say that there are several instances in your posts where I dislike the tone of your statements, but I am not going to dwell on them. I have taken your most recent post and rearranged it in almost the reverse order of how you presented it. I may have omitted some things, but the words in italics are yours.

I’m not trying to persuade you to adopt my point of view. That’s clearly not going to happen. But, you have made several assertions regarding passages from the Bible that are simply incorrect. Should you choose to do that in subsequent posts, I may not respond if it’s clear to me that there is no point in doing so. We shall see. I suspect that you’re not really interested in explanations of Christianity from Christians, but I’m offering some below. If I’m correct about that, just say so, and we can agree to move on to other topics.

If you read Matthew 5:18, you will see that the Old Testament rules and commandments are not undone by Jesus; they are still in force.

I have read Mt. 5:18 as well as v.17 and 19... and ch. 4 and 6... ok, I’ve read the whole New Testament. It’s more than a list of rules and regulations. It’s also a story. I suppose you know that, but I’m stating it here because there is no sense of that in your posts. Anyway, Mt. 5:18 does not say what you assert. You could quote part of it to make it seem to say that, as long as you stop before you get to “until...”. The concept of the New replacing the Old is not fully explained in this passage. That’s not the subject. However, the Book of Hebrews addresses that subject throughout. If you just want the Cliff’s Notes version, take a look at 7:18,19 and 8:7-13 and 9:9,10. Also, one of your previous posts indicated your belief that people of faith do not know their own “scriptures”. You’re wrong about that too.

However, you cannot believe these things and also still be a functioning member of society, so you have constructed rationalizations--or perhaps accepted rationalizations constructed by others--about why you are exempt from Old Testament law, even while still accepting the divine providence of the Bible.

Which is exactly what Sam Harris is talking about.

(By the way, that’s not a sentence, or a paragraph.)
Sorry, both you and Mr. Harris are wrong. I hold that position because of the concepts in the passages I cited above, and in many others. I don’t want to open “Pandora’s box” on the subject of why I believe the Scriptures to be the inspired Word of God, but of course, that comes into play.

Jesus not only condones slavery, and specifically instructs slaves not to try to gain their freedom (Ephesians 6:5, 1 Timothy 6:1-2), he even specifically condones beating a slave for wrongdoing even if that slave does not know he has done something wrong (Luke 12:47-48).

Nothing that you assert is stated in those passages. Those are your conclusions, and they are incorrect. (As an aside, Jesus is not being quoted in Eph. or 1 Ti.) You didn’t heed my prescription for rendering what is in the text, rather than what is in your mind. I thought you might be correct about the instruction to slaves not to seek their freedom, but, it’s not there.

Not only does the Old Testament explicitly condone slavery, it even sets out laws and rules by which slavery is permissible, specifies who may own slaves and under what circumstances, and even goes so far as to specify, in detail, when a man is permitted to sell his daughter as a sex slave, who he is and is not permitted to sell her to, and what the terms of the contract of the sale are to be.

I’ve already dealt with that. I know that some of that is true. I can’t explain it to you (or to myself!) without really getting into the Old Testament again, which I haven’t done for a long time. But I will say this: The OT also describes God providing for the Israelites in the wilderness, delivering them from Pharaoh, and doing many other things that are kind, caring, etc. There seems to be a disconnect there. I suspect Bible scholars have sought to understand that apparent disconnect. I also suspect that you might not be interested in what those studies have concluded.

You yourself say that you don't know what the Old Testament has to say on the subject of slavery...

That’s not what I said. You didn’t even read and repeat what I wrote correctly in its context.

...and you believe that the New Testament supersedes the old. You have to believe these things in order to be a functioning member of a pluralistic, post-industrial society; these are the things that you have accepted as reasons not to obey the 613 commandments in the Bible, many of which (like executing any family member who turns away from god) would put you at odds with the values of the society in which you live.

No, that’s not why. But, I’ve already addressed that.

If you read the Old Testament, you will see that it endorses slavery, and many other reprehensible things. It also describes people doing these things, but that's not what I'm talking about--I'm talking about the rules and commandments specifically instructing people to do these things.

Again, I’ve read it. I’ve also given my response to this before. It’s still up there.

It sho'nuff seems that some here are merely “interested” in science to the limited extent that certain concepts it contains can be used as a weapon against spiritual/religious thought (or other *sociopolitical* concerns), and nothing more.  When it comes to choosing a 'side' amongst the various schools which currently exist within science itself (i.e., the internal quantum division), or offering a considerate opinion... or even just a simple relevant comment on such matters [like: "Wow, that theory is mind-blowing!" or "How could science regard such things as possible?"] -- we hear only the silence of the lambs.

Perhaps we should title our posts with more accurate subjects from here on.

It doesn't take 11 dimensions to predict that outcome.

I agree that the topics discussed by the various scientific schools are interesting enough to pursue, but that's not likely to happen in the contentious tone this thread has developed. I doubt that merely adapting post titles will fix this. That's hardly surprising after this discussion was distracted from its core issues by (to mention just a few ways) ignoring or belittling relevant remarks, by confusing individual practitioners with their art, and by pointing to essentially meaningless side issues.

Now it seems it's the different schools existing within science. Such schools don't matter at all in that greater scheme of things, as they are only exponents of the theses they propose, which await verification or falsification and nothing more. Choosing sides here is quite irrelevant to the eventual outcome (which is what it is), unless perhaps (and rather unscientifically) one happens to have invested in one theory over another and would feel a loss when one's favorite doesn't come out the 'winner'.

The bottom line is that 'science' doesn't have an agenda beyond doing what it purports to do: explaining the physical world. It can be argued that religion does, to the extent that it (imprudently) chose to appropriate the exegesis of reality to further its influence. Sure, the current state of affairs in science would allow one to question many religious positions regarding the physical world, but that is not the purpose of the endeavor. Still, the inevitability of this process increasingly causes dogmatic religion grief in maintaining its stance on the topic, a situation it cannot help but perceive as threatening.

I consider it largely a waste of breath to throw specific scientific findings against religion, because both use different frames of mind and reference. This is manifested by the claim of 'science denying the basis of religion' with its systematic deconstruction of religious dogma, which is countered by 'religion denying the basis of reality' with the selective wishful thinking it likes to equate to the rigorous scientific approach. This is the home turf of that slippery eel I referred to above and I suspect the main reason for the silence of the lambs. So be it. Unless, of course, you want to pick up those topics in a more agreeable dimension.

The civilization of modern Europe has been able to survive largely because Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science.
-Winston Churchill

Just ran across this today, and forgot to interject it here earlier. Just posting it because it "fits", not to rouse more debate. I'm quite sure many participants do not see this the way Sir Winston did. This is not an accurate, word for word quote. Newsweek broke it up into two pieces, and I've incorporated their "fill" line to make it make sense.

That's one opinion. I realize that 'the greater scheme of things' for some people (who only want to wait around for science to tell them what to believe) might be all that matters. But we could all be dead before those answers come. Look at that many-worlds interpretation for example. That -- and many other theories like it -- have sat around since the late 1950s. (That's over 50 years folks).

Pluswhich, I contend that: without some sort of faith (in something), some sense of adventure and/or an actual *interest* in what these theories (seem to) imply about "reality" -- there would be no further progress (or theories even). People would just sit around and wait for research data, rather than stepping out on a limb with scientific speculation. It is *ideas* (theories, guesses, interpretations, conjecture, etc.) which provide impetus and direction (i.e., what intelligent questions to ask next). Also, these theories give other scientists ideas... stuff to ponder, expand, and/or debate [i.e., what does it mean?].



Another dull perspective. I never said choosing a side was in any way relevant to the eventual outcome. Quantum theory isn't about some horse race. It's some deeply, deeply fascinating (and strange) stuff about this world's appearance. Just read some of those interpretations (the summaries and/or explanations in "English" i mean, which discuss philosophical and other more comprehensible facets... the math is strictly for geniuses). While no doubt the eventual outcome is important... the theories -- as they exist now -- are still highly worthy in their own right (inasmuch as they indicate where we need to go and what sorts of stuff to look for). And no matter which one "wins" -- our current choices are chock full of rich, weird conversational substance.

Need i restate this thread's title again? [if you want to start a thread called "Explained Scientific Principles" for discussing the "greater scheme"... then enjoy.   ]



Yeah... but those aspects were never really disputed here (not by me). That anti-religion angle has been repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated ... but i never took any position ["believe what you want" isn't a single position]. There have been a lot of posts here, seemingly aimed at some invisible foe. I would suggest if folks want to attack religion with any effectiveness, go register at some religious website and party down. [or perhaps the mods here wish to start a special 'Religion' forum?]



That hasn't been my goal... so i guess we agree. In fact, if i were to have some goal along those lines... it would actually be more attuned to the thinking of Capra, et. al., who see the two eventually merging. Not a specific "religion" mind you... just that: if there is a Creator... and if science is so &*$#ing smart... the two may yet meet someday.

I personally don't think it will happen... since science will get closer and closer to the fact [realization] that the forces we are trying to obtain full knowledge of will get harder and harder for our [collective human] consciousness to capture.

And... isn't that almost what every theory in those quantum schools seems to be saying? I may be wrong. What do you think they prophesy?

[if you just want to wait around for the right answer to come along... i understand.]

From here I need to examine the language.

.
know v
1. vti to have information firmly in the mind or committed to memory
2. vti to believe firmly in the truth or certainty of something
3. vti to be or become aware of something
4. vt to have a thorough understanding of something through experience or study
5. vt to be acquainted, associated, or familiar with somebody or something
6. vt to be able to perceive the differences or distinctions between things or people
7. vt to recognize somebody or something by a distinguishing characteristic or attribute
8. vt to engage in sexual intercourse with somebody (archaic)

.
be·lief n
1. acceptance by the mind that something is true or real, often underpinned by an emotional or spiritual sense of certainty
2. confidence that somebody or something is good or will be effective
3. a statement, principle, or doctrine that a person or group accepts as true
4. an opinion, especially a firm and considered one
5. religious faith

.
sus·pect v
1. vt to believe that somebody may have committed a crime or wrongdoing without having any proof
2. vt to doubt the truth or validity of something
3. vt to think that something is probable or likely
4. vti to be suspicious about something

n
somebody who is thought to be possibly guilty of wrongdoing or doing something illegal

adj
1. thought or likely to be false or untrustworthy
2. looking likely to contain something dangerous or illegal

.
de·duce vt
1. to come to a conclusion, often without all the necessary or relevant information, but using what is known in a logical way
2. to come to a conclusion by inference from a general principle

.
faith n
1. belief in, devotion to, or trust in somebody or something, especially without logical proof
2. a system of religious belief, or the group of people who adhere to it
3. belief in and devotion to God
4. a strongly held set of beliefs or principles
5. allegiance or loyalty to somebody or something

.
con·fi·dence n
1. a belief or self-assurance in your ability to succeed
2. belief or assurance in somebody or something or the ability of somebody or something to act in a proper, trustworthy, or reliable manner
3. something told to somebody that is to be kept private
4. a relationship based on trust and intimacy

.
ac·cep·tance n
1. a written or verbal indication that somebody agrees to an invitation
2. the willing receipt of a gift or payment
3. willingness to believe that something is true
4. the realization of a fact or truth resulting in somebody’s coming to terms with it
5. the tolerating of something without protesting
6. willingness to treat somebody as a member of a group or social circle
7. an offer to allow somebody to join an organization or attend an institution
8. formal agreement, in writing or verbally, showing that somebody assents to the terms and conditions in a contract
9. a formal agreement by a debtor to pay a draft or bill of exchange when it becomes payable

.
rec·og·nize vt
1. to identify a thing or person because of having perceived him, her, or it before
2. to show appreciation of or give credit to another’s achievement
3. to allow a person to speak to a meeting
4. to accept formally the independent and legal status of a country or regime
5. to give or award something to a person as a token of acknowledgment of or gratitude
6. to show in some way that somebody is personally known
7. to accept the validity or truth of something
8. to bind another molecule that has a complementary structure

.
ac·knowl·edge v
1. vti to admit or accept that something exists, is true, or is real
2. vti to respond to something such as a greeting or message to show it has been noticed or received
3. vti to show appreciation or express thanks for something such as a letter or gift
4. vt to recognize or admit the existence, rights, or authority of somebody or something, especially in a legal context
5. vt to give official or public recognition of the help somebody has given or the work somebody has done

Encarta® World English Dictionary

Belief, is an acceptance

Faith, is a simple word that has meaning beyond simple "confidence".

Confidence in ones self, environment, associates, process, study, direction, scope…and so on. Confidence comes with a trust element and trust can be earned. There is an element of risk in Confidence so there needs to be a value assessment.

Is the ["known"] maximum speed of light the absolute highest rate at which matter (photons) or energy (information) can be transmitted?

Heck no, the Enterprise travelled at Warp nine if I remember correctly!

What is [known] is that light travels.
An axiom is used in mathematics as a starting point, in this case the speed of light in a defined medium, say…a vacuum. There is no argument that I'm aware of that light does not travel, not even from my dog. My garden responds to the movement of light, leaning to or away from the light when shadows effect the flora's position.

Ideally, that's true. It is often claimed that science and religion are entirely separate from one another, in that science tries to answer the 'how' of things and religion tries to answer the 'why.' Religion, some people tell us, isn't about the physical world at all, but only about the supernatural or the divine.

However, I don't believe that this is actually true in practice. Every religious tradition I am aware of without exception, from Hinduism to Islam to Shintoism to Christianity, makes empirical claims about the physical world.

All empirical claims about the physical world are matters best evaluated by evidence, not faith. If a seer or a prophet or a guru or a shaman makes claims about the age of the world, or the size of the world, or the nature of physical law, or states that thus-and-such an activity will persuade a supernatural deity to cure a disease (as long as it's not a missing limb or a lost eye, anyway--god has always had severe limits when it comes to miracle cures) or strike one's adversaries dead with lightning, those are empirical claims that can be tested.

The faithful often play a game in which they make empirical claims about the physical world, then retreat into "you can't test religion with the tools of science, empiricism isn't appropriate for matters of faith" when those claims are put to the test.

And like I said before, every time a religious faith has made an empirical claim about the physical world which has disagreed with science, the science has been right and the faith has been wrong. If we can not trust faith to give us the right answers on issues where we can check the answers, how can we trust faith to get the right answers on issues where we can't check the answers?



Photons aren't matter. They have no mass.

Is that "no mass" (whatsoever, period)... no rest mass... or no relativistic mass?
[i've never measured either of those... which one(s) have you recorded? ]

Some theories may construct the model differently: What is the mass of a photon?

Anyway, we're getting into wave/particle duality now (as well as mass/energy equivalence), and so, okay... perhaps 'matter' wasn't the most perfect word [which is why i generally favor the less technical term "stuff".] But thank goodness we got you back on a science track here.

So that still leaves my original question completely unanswered however
(except for the Star Trek sci-fi "warp 9" response by ...JER. Good one!).

The Faster Than Light FAQ

Tachyons

The jury is still out, but it's not looking very favorable at the moment. Note that a similar situation existed while trying to understand blackbody radiation at the end of the 19th century. This eventually led to quantum mechanics and the current Standard Model. So not looking favorable could be considered a positive sign.

Black Body

Language getting in the way?

Known speed of light was a math product. A bit less than 300,000kps
Faster than the speed of light challenges relativity.
Imagination is at work:
http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw43.html

Stuff can travel at the maximum speed of light [if> stuff doesn't get in its way

Hard science will not answer the question that some want it to.
They cannot use science to justify their faith.

Much work has been done to find "stuff" that can be associated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_radiation

Speed of light in different mediums.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/hotsciencelight/ligh-flash.html



I recognized that the objective to the question asked, was to make a connection between hard science and faith. Some thought using mysticism was an answer; others use the soft sciences to make their point. I did not notice that Tacit had not applied soft science in any of his analysis. His Linguistics tried to explain how the issues was being confused. Using the science of Cultural Anthropology he demonstrated how and why the connection couldn't be made. Others also made the same distinctions, examples of how Giants in the field of both disciplines were trying to find a Consilience to move the argument forward were posted, all within the bounds of science. The only time that the argument left the realm of science is when mysticism was introduced and attempts were made to validate it.

So is theoretical physics something you have a 'hard' time rationalizing?
Or have you got a cute little cult-like slogan to explain that away too?
P.S. - who is this "they" you refer to, and why not try brainwashing them?



Term: "math product"? -- meaning multiply what?
Also: "kps" -- not familiar with those units.

Tricky language did you say?

Re: Unexplained Lounge-Behavior Principles


tacit I just have to ask: if you truly believe science is superior, why do you feel so compelled to repeat the same stuff over and over? It smacks of insecurity. Who exactly are you preaching to? We are on page 10 now... and since page 2 it seems you've been battling an invisible God or something. We are Mac users here... not retards. Give it a rest. No one here really needs these repetitious sermons. Do you need them, for some reason? [i would enjoy hearing something *new* from you.]


I have no clue what you're babbling about either. Are you feeling like someone is forcing faith down your throat? Someone here? You have a problem with people living their own lives the way they choose? You want to dictate what they should do? Or just reaffirm that your way is superior to some imaginary poster here?

There's something unnatural artificial about all this.

> Also: "kps" -- not familiar with those units.

kilometers/second

No... really?
Please show me a page that uses "kps".

I repeat them for the same reason that if we were in a discussion about Santa Claus, I would repeat that reindeer do not fly, there is no toy factory at the North Pole, and a reindeer-driven sleigh can not visit every house in the world in the space of 24 hours--because they are relevant facts and becuse so far nobody has offered any convincing counter to them (or indeed any counter at all).

So what about it? If you think faith is superior, why have you not yet offered up an example of a revelation based on faith that has been demonstrated to accurately describe the physical world in a way that observation can not? If you think that faith has some other function than to describe the physical world, then how would you answer questions like what its function is and why when it does describe the physical world it gets the facts wrong, and why the faithful nevertheless use that faith as a basis for describing the world?

I keep putting the questions out there and you keep dodging them.

I do not recall, so far, any particularly compelling statements from you (or from anyone else) about what exactly the value of faith is, or why it's a good idea to believe something on faith without any supporting evidence.

Hal_itosis, you claim you're unable to understand my babbling and yet you've responded to my posted for many pages. As far as Science being superior to religion, they're not even in the same universe, though you're trying to marry them with ignorance and insult. A theory is just that, and in a logical framework the theory is questioned and the evidence inspected.

Whereas:

In the fabricated world of the gods, there is no question as to gods validity, nor is there any evidence to present. If you have a theory of a prime mover and have evidence to substantiate the assertion present it for examination and the science community will do its due diligence in examining your claim. Until you can come forward with a reasonable concept it will remain outside of the scientific community and classified as myth, magic, and make believe. Cartoon Characters with addictive qualities to pacify the desperate or lazy among us. The tools are available to draw a logical conclusion; all you have to do is use them. If you want to be a scientist when you grow up, these tools will help you get there. If you want to believe in Santa Clause, fine, but don't try to sell us Santa the Scientist and expect that we will just "Believe" it.

Speed of light =kilometres per second 299,792,458 (exact) which can be found and understood by a 4th grader. Usually 300 thousand kilometres per second is used, rounded off the closest common denominator. In America 186 thousand miles per second (mps) is used. There could be variations, short cuts or new ways to express the mathematical outcome, but I haven't been in the 4th grade in 45 years so I'm using the means of expressing the fundamentals that I was taught, in the language that I was taught. If it's wrong it's gods fault, his priest taught it to me in grammar school. Shall we continue on with the primary school tit for tat so you can get your jollies or would you like to move on to something else that you found on the internet(s) on a scientific comic book site where a rocket-ship finds heaven?

Who?, what?, when? Check the transcript: "Parts i agree with and parts don't seem to pertain to me.", etc. [i.e., in reference to your attacks on faith.]



Hmm, i guess you missed this reply (which i repeated twice): "i never claimed to know any of those answers (or cared one way or the other in providing them, if i did)."

Basically, you've been trying to put others into some mold where we need to account for all kinds of stuff that we don't have anything to do with... let alone agree with. Seems to be some sort of perception problem on your end, IMHO.

--

Oh well...apparently, any earnest discussion of 'unexplained scientific principles' will *not* be taking place after all. Unfortunately, you [and señor sandbag] have tanked an otherwise perfectly good thread (by means of peripheral preconceptions and assorted time-wasting platitudes). It's gone beyond boring now, and -- as indicated earlier -- that sectarian style of discourse provides a rather poor representation of the scientific viewpoint which you supposedly support. Unproductive, uninspiring prevarication. "Blinded by science" (or something) sounds more like it. Mondo fail.

Y'all may as well continue following thalo's lead, and establish a dedicated website... perhaps called "halo.net" (if that domain is available). Clearly there's little benefit in lounging around here any longer. Just let gravity put this thread out of its misery.

Vaya con Dios, dudes.

Sure you are trying to connect science and faith based religion without evidence, and your not finding any support, would be my take on the perception issue. Because I can't see the invisible link you claim.. then I'm what? A science snob?

Science isn't the end game, logic is, a reasonable use of our brains and senses through a structured, systematic process that assures a dependable outcome.

Vaya con Dios (go with god) and your not a salesman for the holy ghost? Right

Oh well...apparently, any earnest discussion of 'unexplained scientific principles' will *not* be taking place after all.

>> Vaya con Dios (go with god) and your not a salesman for the holy ghost? Right

Actually, that bit of humor was added just to watch you jump. Good boy.

"In traditional logic, an axiom or postulate is a proposition that is not proved or demonstrated but considered to be either self-evident, or subject to necessary decision. Therefore, its truth is taken for granted, and serves as a starting point for deducing and inferring other (theory dependent) truths.

In mathematics, the term axiom is used in two related but distinguishable senses: "logical axioms" and "non-logical axioms". In both senses, an axiom is any mathematical statement that serves as a starting point from which other statements are logically derived. Unlike theorems, axioms (unless redundant) cannot be derived by principles of deduction, nor are they demonstrable by mathematical proofs, simply because they are starting points; there is nothing else from which they logically follow (otherwise they would be classified as theorems).

Logical axioms are usually statements that are taken to be universally true (e.g., A and B implies A), while non-logical axioms (e.g., a + b = b + a) are actually defining properties for the domain of a specific mathematical theory (such as arithmetic). When used in that sense, "axiom," "postulate", and "assumption" may be used interchangeably. In general, a non-logical axiom is not a self-evident truth, but rather a formal logical expression used in deduction to build a mathematical theory. To axiomatize a system of knowledge is to show that its claims can be derived from a small, well-understood set of sentences (the axioms). There are typically multiple ways to axiomatize a given mathematical domain.

Outside logic and mathematics, the term "axiom" is used loosely for any established principle of some field."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom

I don't understand why you require it or why you might think that anyone should have to provide it.

In an earlier post you said, in part, "...I argued then, and continue to argue now, that accepting things on faith, without evidence, is a mistake." That's what you believe and it's quite acceptable because, like the rest of us, you have a right to your beliefs. Further, neither you nor anyone else is obliged to explain why particular beliefs are held.

Perhaps it's time for everyone to agree to disagree.

ryck

It seems to me that the issue isn't so much that you have to provide anything, but that you won't or can't.
Apart from that, I'm sure you can understand why such statements would be of interest.

IOW: What may be compelling to some is not necessarily so to others.

Since a moderator has stepped in to confront the OP, i will re-enter to clarify my position.

This shouldn't come as news, but believe it or not -- while tacit was so engrossed in expounding the virtues of atheism -- others here were far more interested in discussing unexplained scientific principles. How other people's faith came to be such a thorn of fixation in tacit's mind (that it totally tanked this entire thread) is still the only *meaningful* unanswered question. Could it be simply because he intensely desired to circumvent any exploration into unexplained scientific principles? (At least that pretext is more palatable than some of the other possibilities implied by his unbounded preoccupation).


Easily falsified... and how/when did such aspects ever become "the issue" anyway -- and who cares?

To question one about their personal faith was not inherent in the initial issue -- but rather, part of the straw man established to derail this thread. One's personal faith is personal. [i.e., the answer ryck might give isn't necessarily the same answer i would give, or the same anyone else (such as Azimov, Edison, Einstein, Faraday, Franklin, Newton, Nimoy, Sagan, Shatner, Zappa, etc., etc., etc.) would give.]


Not really. Just as such "statements" of personal faith would differ from person to person, so would the "interest" level. [i.e., what you might find interesting about ryck's faith isn't necessarily the same as what tacit (or L. Ron Hubbard, or anyone else, etc.) might find of interest. Take for example the infantile inquiries in this thread: "what color is your god?" -- and -- "does it fit in your pocket?" -- etc. One would assume the members here were more sophisticated than that... but such assumptions can easily be disproved (apparently).

Besides, *none* of the above matters. Personal religious beliefs are not (were never) the issue here, but unexplained scientific principles are (or were supposed to be).

E.g., quantum theory...


And even assuming the mathematical foundations are rock solid (i'd like to have Craig on my side here ), other issues embedded in quantum theory entail aspects such as 'the measurement problem' -- somewhat related to (but not the same as) the probabilistic nature involved in Heisenburg's uncertainty principle...


One example of this is Bell's theorem (John Stewart Bell) which seemed to resolve the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox... [is that right?] but i can't quite seem to piece together all the events in the evolution of quantum theory, or fathom what the various implications are in terms that i (and other laypeople here) can understand and discuss...


I.e., just as Einstein expanded on (or "blew the doors off") Newtonian physics, so now science is searching for something new in which to place its faith. Albert's dream was to find the 'Unified Field Equation' -- but he died before achieving success. A similar quest continues today however (under the ambitious title 'The Theory of Everything'). There is a ton of cool stuff we could be getting into (e.g., Schrödinger's cat thought experiment, the many-minds interpretation, and dozens of other items) with an amicable inquisitive spirit... instead of confrontational [know-it-all] religious debate.

This all connects back to something tacit said earlier about Einstein. Except -- instead of being petty by blaming Einstein's "religion" -- we should be talking about what that outcome meant scientifically. You know... trying to help each other understand these results and their interpretations (both in terms of science and philosophy). Instead, we get childish comments by people who think they even understand one iota of what patterns Capra might be capable of perceiving. Until someone here can get into explaining (or at least engage in adult conversation about) stuff like the "quantum mind" and the "quantum mind/body problem" -- i don't think their other judgements about any members' personal religious feelings could ever be qualified... or realistically relevant in *any* event.

The viewpoint that this thread was ever about religion (or should continue in that vein) is pure dogma.


--


edit: Here is an example of what Einstein's "religion" (hidden variables) was not ready for... The Problem of Conscious Observation

Why is it an issue if I choose to keep the reasons for my beliefs to myself? To be blunt - it's nobody else's business.

It's only the atheists who seem to care why someone has a belief other than theirs. I think about the various church people who show up at my door wanting talk about their views. I simply say "Thanks anyway but I have my own beliefs" and they just go away.

They don't demand that I answer why. They don't suggest that, if I believe in something other than what they believe, there must be something wrong with me or that I'm incapable of rational thought. My guess is that if one of the zealous atheists showed up I'd be having the police remove them from my property and I'd be considering charges.

And, no, I don't understand why anyone else would care what I believe or why.

The only thing I wonder about in all of this is: What other freedoms do the atheists think should not exist?

ryck

I think, your sources may be outdated
Anyway, count me out of this crowd.

I too have little interest in choosing sides, and so will continue down the path of autodidacticism.

You're right - I painted with too wide a brush and should have been more specific within this thread. Apology extended.

ryck

And to you, the same apology extended above.

ryck

No need to, really! We all can get excited...

never mind

about kps: http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/trying-to-measure-the-speed-of-light.html
Comment: What is happening in US about the units of measure is really deplorable. The whole country lives in medieval times because of pounds, acres, inches and miles, and nobody wants to get modern. The politicians do not even say that it is costly but say that the country is not prepared for the transition. What a disrespect for the fellow citizens! We are the only country in the world that uses outdated unit system. At the same time, American science, as any other, formally prohibits using these archaic units; try to put any of these in a paper and it will get rejected immediately. Moreover,

from: http://www.factmonster.com/ipka/A0001658.html

The metric system is not only universally used (except for the US and maybe Myanmar) but it is much easier than the English system. The metric system is based on decimals and so there is no need to deal with fractions or ridiculous things like 16 oz. in a pound or 5280 feet in a mile. Most of the resistance to it, I believe, lies in the erroneous idea that one would have to constantly convert between the two systems. Once you get into metrics, you simply stay there and never convert again.

We do have some metrics in the US, however. Beverages come in liter bottles (or parts thereof) and every drug addict knows what a kilogram is.

We have really no idea what you are talking about

Thats the seed of how this conversation got side-tracked into issues of faith; science doesn't place its 'faith' in anything, and understanding the difference between science and faith is key to even being able to talk about things like unexplained scientific principles.

As someone on my Twitter feed recently said: If you believe in science, you're doing it wrong.

There are, as has already been explained, axioms in any area of formal inquiry, but even these axioms are not statements of faith. You can not use formal arithmetic to derive a formal proof of "a + b = b + a"; in formal arithmetic, this is axiomatic.

You can, however, demonstrate that it is true. You can take a bag of three apples and add two apples to it, and then take a bag of two apples and add three apples to it, and show that in both cases the total number of apples is the same.

Similarly, while you can not derive a formal proof of "a / b != b / a", you can still show that it is true.

Science has no faith. People did not believe Albert Einstein because he was smart; people believed him because the ideas he had (well, some of them, anyway), turned out to be demonstrably true.

Likewise, there are many hypotheses which we do not currently know the truth of: string theory, the existence of the Higgs boson, the existence and properties of dark matter, and so on. But scientists do not "believe in" these things, nor take them on faith.

Rather, they derive experiments to test them. The value of these ideas depends only on what the experiments say, and not on anything else--not on the intelligence or the fame of the people who propose the ideas, not on how well the ideas sound, but only on whether or not they can be observed to be true.

Many non-scientists do not understand the way theories are formulated, and so say things like "Einstein proved that Newton's laws are false."

Einstein did not prove that Newton's laws are false. In fact, Newton's laws can not be false; if you use Newton's laws to calculate the path of a baseball or a satellite, and then you throw the baseball or launch the satellite, you'll see that Newton's laws are spot-on.

What Einstein did was show that Newton's laws apply only in certain circumstances; and created new, more complex laws that apply to more circumstances. But if you use relativity to calculate the path of a baseball--a silly thing to do, because it would be beastly complicated and difficult--but if you do it, you'll see that it arrives at the same answer Newton does.

Which it has to, because you can go out and throw the baseball and see that it's the correct answer.

Hell, if you were to have all the supercomputers the world has yet constructed at your disposal and you could duplicate all those computers a billion times over, you might have enough computing horsepower, maybe, to use quantum mechanics to calculate the path of a baseball. And if you did that, you'd find that that answer also matched Newton.

What laypeople see as one theory "proving wrong" another theory, scientists recognize as one theory being more general and applying to a larger set of circumstances as another theory. But any theory that disagrees with reality about the path the baseball takes is wrong on the face of it, no matter how elegant, because we *know* the path of that baseball. And any idea that we can't yet test against the reality isn't accepted on faith at all.

It takes a generation to smooth out. My daughters grew up in the metric system so it's easy for them. Those of us who were raised in the old system spent a lot of time mentally converting.

"Man, it's hot today...it's 35."

"No, really how hot is it? (Mentally...let's see roughly double and add 30) Holy crap, it's 100 degrees. You're right...it is hot!"

It's tough being an old fart.

ryck

Perhaps, but it should be noted that powers of 2 are actually more compatible with the digital world than are powers of 10. (Heck, if we'd evolved with 4 digits on each hand, we'd find the decimal-based metric system absurd, since in base eight a meter would be 144 centimeters...)

The closer and closer to lightspeed that baseball approaches, the more and more Newton (and you) get wronger and wronger results. That's one thing Einstein solved, and Newton would never have expected his equations to err (simply due to the object's high velocity).

The missing factor is something like (1 - v^2/c^2)^1/2 [causing weirdness like mass and time to change.]

Plus... Newton believed that time was a fixed, never-varying quantity. If anyone ever told Newton that on the event horizon of a black hole time actually stops... he probably would have passed out (or passed something). 3-dimensional space is actually a curved 4-dimensional continuum? Forget it. Newton's concept of "time" was that it behaved like a perfectly constantly accurate clock, always ticking at the same "rate", for all observers... everywhere in the universe, regardless of motion or gravity. [some readers may recall i already mentioned words to that effect back on page 6.]

I seem to recall some example where we start with 2 twins and send one off in a spacecraft traveling at near lightspeed for 20 years. When he returns to Earth his twin there has aged 20 years, but the astronaut twin is much less older... something like that? Of course that's unproven as yet... but (assuming it's possible), Newton would never have expected that.

Newton got a few key things wrong... yet science had faith in his version of the truth.  Accept it.

[i'm not saying he wasn't a genius -- he was. He did more great things than millions combined. Fine.]

You'll forgive me if I haven't read all 11 pages of this thread, I'm sure, but assuming no one has gotten around to answering the original question yet, it's my understanding, so to speak, that we don't actually know what gravity is. We basically know how it works, but not what it is, although we're pretty sure it's something. I don't think we've figured out exactly what dust is either. Despite my spiritual views, or lack of them, or perhaps because of them or not, I'm open to correction.

The other big mystery, although I suppose it's more sociology than science, is why religious people have more sex than atheists.

> "every drug addict knows what a kilogram is"

Naaah... We addicts know what "dime bags" are; kilos are for dealers!

I think it's related to the same thing Pinky and The Brain try to do every night.

Why, JM! Almost seems as if you're...trolling.

Just remember, the Lounge is a catch-and-release forum (or, in the poetic words of the State of New York, a Special No Kill Area).

May I should have said drug dealers. The international drug trade (not that I know from personal experience, of course) works with kilos, otherwise known as kilograms.

Code:

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  __.._,-" .-"'"")  /' ,' _          \ |  /"-.`j""``---.._
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   ;.'         /-'---"".--"'       /,_,^-._ .)
   `:=.__.,itz `---._.;'           ""      ""

Not so sure it's a matter of 'more sex' but rather less contraception/abortion.

But we digress...

It's the ultimate twofer, crarko! Did I hear that global warming has come your way early this year?

dk: Are you telling me to leave my crossbow at home, or that I won't be needing my kevlar vest?

Hal: It's sex, fer sher. No doubt. Settled social science. Anyone who says otherwise needs to check into rational rehab.

As long as your open to correction...

That should be "as long as you're open to correction."

Or...
As long as your open-to-correction mother-in-law says...

The non-scientific phrase I used was "blew the doors off Newtonian physics".

It can be [and often is] viewed that the 2nd law still holds. From that perspective however, the very nature [interpretation] of the variables and the formulation of the equation needs to be tweaked... to line up with the full facts. So there is still a 'disconnect' from reality (when viewed as Newton saw it).



An ordinary calculator with a 'square root' key (such as Calculator.app in scientific mode) will do.
As mentioned in my other post, the beastly factor comes down to...

E.g., for momentum (p = mv), the true value is: p = mv / SQRT( 1 - (v^2/c^2) )




I cranked out 3 select [high velocity] samples using the above factor (as a divisor), and compared Newtonian predictions to their relativistic equivalents.

My (possibly imperfect) reckoning was:

• for objects moving at 200 million m/s (almost 67% lightspeed),
  Newton's results are low by a factor of 1.34 -- i.e., 33% error.
  
   
• for objects moving at 224 million m/s (almost 75% lightspeed),
  Newton's results are low by a factor of 1.5 -- i.e., 50% error.
  
   
• for objects moving at 260 million m/s (almost 87% lightspeed),
  Newton's results are low by a factor of 2 -- i.e., 100% error.

Beyond 90% lightspeed ("warp 9"?) -- the increase in error is exponential.
[Frankly speaking, it explodes (the magnitude of error that is).]


I understand your point about a "larger set of circumstances"... but that doesn't automatically absolve all previous (historical) scientific assumptions. I doubt anyone even questioned, "Hey... does this stuff still work when mass moves faster than 100 million meters per second?". Most likely, Newton (and the entire global scientific community for almost the next 200 years) essentially took it for granted that p = mv would accurately determine the linear momentum of any object (be it particle or planet), moving at any velocity, traveling anywhere in 'De Mundi Systemate'. For all practical purposes, the feeling was that Newton had mastered physical motion in the universe.

Knowing what we know now... was that not simply faith in unfalsified theory?

If not... how would you prefer to characterize it?

Note: i'm not *faulting* science in any respect, since i don't always associate negative connotations with the word "faith" (as seems to be the current wisdom).

I just want that pitcher in my bullpen.


P.S. The word 'verisimilitude' comes to mind here...

http://philosophy.wisc.edu/forster/220/notes_10.html

Your correction is noted.

Crossbow? Kevlar vest?

Hmm, okay... read that, and i think i follow what you mean (then again -- by being so concise -- you frequently leave wiggle room for individual interpretation of what *all* you may have meant).

So in this thread then, it may not be totally clear what "the set of questions" are. But words such as reality have been put to use frequently throughout these past 12 pages. So yes... if divining the position of a baseball [tossed by a human] was the extent of 'reality' around here... then indeed Newton is as far as we need take this discussion. But apparently planet Mercury turned out a little too fleet-footed for his laws? That reminds me of an extinct band 'Made In Sweden' who had a song (instrumental actually) called "43 Seconds of Arc per Century" (wicked 4/4 beat, almost uncountable despite being common-time).

Anyway... as far as looking at (and explaining) items such as the Big Bang or quantum phenomena? -- We need better guns!

Verisimilitude, schmerisimilitude.

--

What i found interesting was that 'conscious observer' paper by Zeh. He seems to be saying that the Schrödinger wave function equation may not merely represent some separate (independent) objective "reality" concept (such as 2+2=4 or distance=rate*time), but rather it expresses a function which also constitutes a 'coupling' between the observer and the observed. [i.e., more of a subjective reality.] Did you see anything like that in there, or was i hallucinating (and how can you tell)?

Sociology is scientific analysis of societies.
Sociology is not more or less than science, it is science.

Wouldn't s/he be more useful on your mound? (pragmatically speaking)

Hal-lelujah said:



Define science?
Define faith?

It's highly unlikely that your selection of words describes what science HAD. Science as a working body would be more likely to have assurance than faith in Newton's work.

Aha... more likely. So, some may have had faith in Newton's work. Interesting.
But if 'assurance' works better for you, great. It is a good word too, i must say.

So -- when errors started cropping up -- they didn't experience "doubt" but... . . . what?
What's the right word for their feelings then?

Thanks.

• Maxwell's Influence On The Evolution Of The Idea Of Physical Reality
  [on the one hundredth anniversary of Maxwell's birth. Published, 1931, in
  James Clerk Maxwell: A Commemoration Volume, Cambridge University Press.]

I'll see your Einstein, and raise you a Higgs boson.

Read 'em and weep. I did.

BTW, the LHC is coming back online in the next month or so.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8309875.stm

It is more than likely that there were some with faith, but if asked about their faith, in Newton's work, they would probably explain their uncertainties grounded in logic and not in faith. The problem with the use of the word in a discussion about science is that it confuses the issues and does not accurately describe the scientist's position.

If the word does not have religious overtones, explain what Faith Based programs are? Explain what it is that a person needs to have when they are told that faith is needed to believe this or that, semantically speaking.

In our culture the word has been captured by a segment of the population to define them, forfeiting the broader connotation.
Notice that I didn't write sacrificing the broader connotation.
Sacrifice has been long used as a faith based word, so it would not be accurate in a scientific discussion if my intentions were to not distract the reader...leading them into subtopics.

I had read the times article and concluded that:



Nielson hates Higgs particles and so he's looking to blame someone for the failures of the machine. God's always a handy Whipping Boy. Egocentric one might say. If we can't do it there must be a supernatural force in our super brainiac way? It's a machine, not a contest with Zeus.

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Try telling that to Richard Feynman.

Is the Hadron Collider the most beautiful machine ever invented, or what?

The New York Times article on Nielson and Ninomiya has more detail, including the note that:
The quote from Niels Bohr reminds me of a seminar on "creative problem solving I once attended:
At the heart of the process was, oddly enough, the suspension of judgment, not the exercise of it. Creativity requires the willingness to entertain ideas which one might ordinarily reject out of hand for a whole litany of reasons (crazy, ill-informed, off topic, illogical, counter factual etc.). The theory, so to speak, of brainstorming suggests that it is often the risible idea from one whch can actually stimulate the out -of-the-box thinking of another who comes up with a workable solution to the problem being addressed. I've often found that to be the case on an individual level, where reminding myself not to pass judgment on my own ideas too quickly has proven useful when attacking a difficult problem.

I rather think that attacking the concept of faith and God may ultimately be less, rather than more useful in that regard. After all, the ability to conceive of things that do not exist, or do not yet exist, or that theoretically do not or "cannot" exist, is a unique function of human cognition which serves many purposes. Imagination is very interesting word when you stop to think about at it. It's what we use to write drama, or a poem, or science "fiction" on the one hand, or to search for a theory of everything on the other.

Thomas Kuhn and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions spring immediately to mind on the question of anomalies and shifting paradigms. Kuhn seems especially relevant to this conversation generally, as well: I was in Peru when the first man walked on the moon, and I remember my amusement when the cook at my host's house dismissed the whole thing as a hoax. There's no small measure of condescension in our current view of the recalcitrant who rejected scientific evidence that the earth was not flat and that the sun does not revolve around us for so long.

In reality, that concept conflicts with the working knowledge we derive experientially in our ordinary lives, and which we are essentially asked to reject as false. The sun, and the shadows it casts, certainly appear to move across the ground. Even now, you'd have to have put away a lot of beers before you'd put your bottle down on a beach ball. We flatten out road maps to register them on paper and frankly, as an ordinary civilian, I take the edicts of the scientific priesthood more on faith than understanding. I certainly can't see most of what they tell me, and almost any educated person can tick off a liar of contemporary examples where they've proved themselves wrong. Back to Kuhn:

There are more things in heaven and earth.....

I think "liar" instead of "list" is an editorial artifact of condensation, not a Freudian slip, but I could be wrong!

Since I appear to have this thread to myself now, I might as well just carry on.

IMO, you seem to suffer from a substantial case of confirmation bias yourself, with a series of definitions which expand and contract, as needed, and a liberal dose of "some" and "most" as strategic disclaimers.


It seems equally obvious that some will not. So too, while it may be true that "hospitals are most commonly built for reasons which are not religious," hospitals built and sponsored by religious institutions are legion. The Catholic Church, for example, currently cares for 25% of the worlds population of AIDs victims -- and I may have that percentage too low.

By the time your anti-rational snow ball gets through rolling downhill, you've defined faith as virtually any erroneous belief whatsoever, conflated the religious with the evangelical, and included virtually anyone and everyone who ever done someone else wrong -- along with a lot of folks who haven't -- in your own cosmology. With apologies for the mixed metaphor, I think the broader the brush in this instance, the less useful it becomes.



Oddly enough, what has really struck me reading through this thread is that you are the one who seems the most determined to pose scientific and religious cosmologies as inalterably opposed competitors, the most inclined to take your own joyful experience of the physical world as the universal end state to which all ought to aspire, and the least tolerant of those who defend spirituality as both a natural and legitimate dimension of human perception.

You get there with all sorts of unsupported assertions:



One could just as easily substitute science for faith in that formulation. I'm sure Dawkins is working on it, but the imagination seems perversely resistant to scientific inquiry.



I'm not sure how you get from your premise to your conclusion. It looks like the only place to go from there is up. Both science and religion suggest that we can make improvements in our natural state as we go. Indeed, that concept may actually be more central to religion than science, where simply understanding is often an end in itself, and where the fruits of exploration can also be perverted in the service of atrocity. I doubt you would stipulate to the inevitability of the latter though, would you?



It would take conjuring up a logical pretzel to support this assertion, but what interests me is that you almost seem to be saying that the world is more miraculous if you take a divine creator out of the equation.



Or "reason."

I don't think your own arguments here are free from hyperactive pattern matching, misunderstood correlations, and teleological promiscuity, but this post is long enough already, so I'll just leave it at one last comment.

Your example of "misunderstanding correlation" seems peculiar, when in fact there is a cause and effect relationship between toxins in food and sickness, whether sufficient evidence yet existed to prove it scientifically or not. While your numbers 2 through 5 can be part and parcel of confirmation bias and other potentially dangerous errors, they are also part and parcel of the impulse toward scientific exploration. While I do understand your premise here, I think you have a lot more evidence gathering to do before it satisfies your own parameters for ostensibly settled science or falsifiable conclusions.

For myself, I don't really give a rat's p'tootie if Sociology is considered a science or not. Parts of it are, and parts are not. Parts of Geology are, and parts are not. Geologists still drink lots of beer and remain happy.

The sociological question that I would like to pose is: how do you go about disseminating science and creating interest for it within a culture where the universe of discourse seems to be pre-occupied with pirates and vampires?

You mean the electrons in your own body orbiting their nuclei at some 1 million m/s aren't self-evident?

The kicker for me is 'time'. The scientific description (as per relativity theory) is one of least intuitive concepts i've ever encountered... insomuch as 'time' is supposedly such a simple abstraction... one we *all* live with constantly and somehow think (feel, believe, assume) we understand.

Well, for starters, I'd think you'd at least want a TV series in which top scientists humiliate each other in a manic quest for some kind of sophomoric award, wouldn't you?

While we were quoting Feynman, here are a few others...

“We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.”

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts”

“If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part.”

and my favorite

“If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.”