If you are indeed a scientist, you know that typically science begins with many hypotheses on an open question of set of data, and, by a process of experimentation and testing, refines them down to one that explains all the facts. (And which may change if more facts appear.)
Religion started with many tribal gods, and still has many tribal gods. Not so many as before because we have bigger tribes, and because certain religions spread by the sword. Science doesn’t do this - except pseudo-science in Stalinist Russia.
Please give us one answer which religion has provided us to a degree of agreement we see for relativity and quantum physics. I don’t assume this - religion has failed miserably at providing answers.
Scientists who have faith in a hypothesis after it has been shown to be false are laughingstocks. Religious people who do this are saints.
“No, the universe needs to follow regular mathematical laws because otherwise it would dissolve into chaos and we wouldn’t be here to discuss the matter. Regardless of whether it came from nature, genies or a is a computer simulation. And as I said (and I note you left this out of the quote), the same would be true of some hypothetical god, so a god can’t qualify as the explanation for order because without pre-existing order it wouldn’t be able to exist.”
Quantum mechanics and particle accelerators have since proven the universe does not REQUIRE Newtonian mathematical law to exist, and examining these proven facts will not cause it to implode or cease to exist. Unless of course, the world is simply a projection based on your individualized perception. I think therefore I am until I think I am not at which point I will not be?
:smack:
The Newtonian system has been shown to be false, but it’s still very accurate unless taken under extreme circumstances. Nevertheless, relativity and quantum mechanics are still based on mathematics and AFAIK have not demolished the assumption that the laws of the universe are the same everywhere. So I don’t really understand what you’re saying here.
I think he just noted that he wasn’t aware of any good answers being provided by religion. You can fight his ignorance and prove that religious study is capable of providing answers by citing one good example.
In the same way that all you need to prove any god’s existence is one good example of that existence. Absence of evidence for any god is conclusive evidence for that god being absent.
(Restored the quote of mine inside the quote of his, to clarify the chain of conversation. I’m not sure if that’s kosher or not.)
So. You ask me “why are we here”, but then immediately refuse to turn around and define the very terms that make up the question you wished to ask? Doesn’t this strike you as a tad intellectually dishonest? I mean, you asked a question that was literally meaningless!
The evidence does not support the belief that there is a “why”, so I assume there isn’t, but I don’t actually completely rule it out. However, I do rule out any possible explanation that flies in the fact of the evidence. So, we are not created as the beloved children of an all-powerful god that cares for our well-being, because if we were the world would not be as it is. And in fact, having been apparently left to evolve, with no hint of direction, no evidence of humanity evincing consistent behaviors through history, no evidence that the world was created for us late arrivals - I’m hard pressed to even imagine any rational purpose for humanity’s creation that fits the actual sequence of events that has happened. Quite simply if humanity had any purpose, humanity and its history would be radically different - they’d consistently be serving some purpose. But as best we can tell, we’re not.
As for science explaining everything - in broad terms, science is nothing more than organized rational thought, with a few specific techniques added on to reduce the introduction of error through human psychological foibles. And if you take away rational thought, what’s left? Uncritically believing anything you hear? Guessing randomly? Listening to the voices in your head? Even if somebody stumbled on a true explanation through these means, they couldn’t actually know if they were right. Broadly, science and critical thinking is simply the only way to attain actual certainty of correctness.
And religious “study” is bullshit. It’s fairy tales. It’s fanfiction. Of course it can’t provide answers about actual reality, any more than the Lord of the Rings can provide those answers.
If a god actually existed, a scientific study of it could be made to get actual answers. That sort of thing has been tried many times. But despite centuries of looking, no gods have ever turned up.
I have been guilty of telling someone they are stupid. There are times I do regret being that harsh, there are times when it was the only answer left, to deal with some who was deliberately willfully ignorant (frustration). But in the end, it doesn’t matter to me if you follow Jesus, the Buddha, Mohammed, or any of the other saints, prophets, or wise men, or no one at all. As long as you accord the SAME to other people. I’ve said it before… There are freedom of religion, freedom from religion, and freedom from someone else’s religion. Each is a personal choice and needs to stay that way.
Some things are “truth” and can be scientifically proven and/or demonstrated. Those are facts and no hand waving can negate them. Some are scientific theory or hypothesis. Basically, “this explanation will work for us until a better one comes along”. And then some things are “matters of faith” - the individual should know the difference. Finally, there is nothing at all wrong with answering a question with an honest “I don’t know”.
Relatively intelligent people believe stupid things all the time, due to the magic of compartmentaliztion, so just because someone believes something completely moronic doesn’t mean they are a complete moron. (I’ll still call them one, though, but then I’m just uninhibited that way.)
On another subject, while we cannot be 100% sure there are no gods, we can be 100% sure that the specific god he’s imagining, and that she’s imagining, that that that group over there is imagining, doesn’t exist. That much we really do know.
I disagree. Science doesn’t give us “truth”. Science gives us models that make predictions. The degree to which those models correspond to reality is unknown. (And likely unknowable.)
Religion, of course, doesn’t even give us models that make predictions.
Then again, some folks disagree. That analogy is based on the assumption that whatever set of laws a universe comes up with, it’s somehow possible that some form of intelligent life would arise within it, hence there’s nothing special about the particular set of laws that we observe in our universe. Trouble is that we can logically infer that if certain laws, constants, or properties were different, no intelligent life (and usually not any life) would be possible. As Stephen Barr said: “In the final analysis one cannot escape from two very basic facts: the laws of nature did not have to be as they are; and the laws of nature had to be very special in form if life were to be possible.”
One example is the energy density of the universe and the apparent existence of a cosmological constant force that pushes matter apart. These determine the rate at which the universe expanded all throughout its history. If the universe expanded too quickly, matter would be too far apart to ever be pulled together by gravity. If it didn’t expand quickly enough, all matter would have been pulled together into a single clump. In either case there’d be no possiblity for life. Astronomical data suggest that galactic clusters moving away from each other at an expanding rate. For a cosmological constant that explains observed expansion: if it is present, it must be about 10^122 times smaller than the natural value to agree with this temperature measurement. How could L be set to such a small value with such precision? This is known as the cosmological constant problem.. Similar things arise in the particular composition of our universe. For example, it’s reasonable to suppose that life forms can only arise where there are stable, large molecules. Only carbon forms a large variety of those types of molecules, so carbon is necessary for life. Astrophysicist Fred Hoyle showed in a famous paper in 1953 that the formation of appreciable amounts of carbon in stars depends on an excited nuclear state of carbon which is turn depends on a precise balance of nuclear forces. Sascha Vongehr says there are “20 to 30” fine-tuned parameters necessary for life. Indeed even Dawkins acknowledges fine-tuning of multiple parameters on page 171: “The bottom line for each number is the same. The actual number sits in a Goldilocks band of values outside of which life would not have been possible.”
Well, I freely admit I did not know that, though the law, if Wikipedia is correct (a big if whenever Wikipedia is concerned) doesn’t criminalize blasphemy generally. Nevertheless, as I’ve already shown (in posts 46 and 60), there were a great many outspoken atheists in many countries for a long time before the arrival of the “new atheists”, and hence the claim that there’s something new about their aggressive promotion of atheism is false.
This, wherein you ask for a quote to show that Dawkins supports evolutionary psychology, really baffles me. Of course he does. It’s his schtick. It’s what much of his career is all about and what many key parts of his book rest on. From page 205: “Natural selections build child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival.” That’s one of a great many examples that could be given for Dawkins and there are plentiful others for Dennett and the rest.
I’ve started enough threads on the topic in the past. You can read my viewpoints. Suffice to say, I’ve never seen convincing evidence that any part of human preferences, behaviors, or thoughts is hard-wired by genes that arose due to evoluionary pressure in caveman times. Sure, I acknowledge that there are intelligent people who support the idea. Ben Goldacre says that 5 to 10 percent of the research in evolutionary psychology may be valid. V. S. Ramachandran says:
I try to be open minded, so I’m willing to consider that these guys may be correct when they say that a small portion of the claims from evolutionary psychology are true, but I’d first need to see experiments and answers to the most basic objections.
I’ll back up ITR here - the fine tuning argument is much more than Douglas Adams’ sentient puddle. There are several constants of physics that, if any one had been slightly different, it would result in a universe that could not possibly support any life. Scientific American had a major article about the constants a few months ago, and they had figured out that there were possibilities of varying those constants together (instead of one-at-a-time) which could conceivably still support some kind of strange life, but the number of possible life-supporting arrangements is still unimaginably tiny compared to the number that would be possible if each of those variables is independent.
The major ideas that I’m aware of for how to explain the apparent fine tuning:
[ul]
[li]There is some as-yet undiscovered physics that demands those constants be what they are.[/li][li]The constants are independent, and our universe is just a rarity, but there are a very large number of universes in existence, and those that can’t support life don’t have anyone asking these questions.[/li][li]It all could have been magicked into existence by some unknown party.[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]If you roll a 1000001-sided dice once, the odds are a million to one that any specific side will come up. Nonetheless, beating all the odds, one does. Supposing the number that comes up is “1”, or “123”, or “666”, does that mean it wasn’t rolled randomly?[/li][/ul]
And I’m not convinced that forms of life completely unimagined by us couldn’t happen in some very unusual environments. Of course we might not call them “life”, but to some degree that’s merely semantics.
Well this is the crux of the matter, I’d say. It all rests on the claim that there is no evidence for any theistic claim. I believe there’s plenty of evidence. I’ve got a shelf full of books providing the evidence at home and can find many more in a library and elsewhere. Whenever I say this, the majority of responses that I get from atheists will simply be insults aimed at me and/or the authors of the books in question. But for the minority of atheists who actually try to address the evidence, I find their answers more tenuous than almost anything else I hear. For instance, if I mention religious and spiritual experiences, I get told that it’s all explained away by obscure neurological disorders. Then when I look up the symptoms of those disorders I find they don’t match at all with they’re supposed to explain. I mention the fine-tuning of the universe, I get told about multiple universes. I mention miraculous healings, I get told something about the placebo effect, regardless of how well the medical facts are documented. etc… You say that you’ve looked at the evidence and found that it doesn’t hold together. Well, I say that I’ve looked at the evidence which atheists bring to counter my evidence and found that it doesn’t hold together.
In regards to that last paragraph, I’m tempted to ask what the metric for silliness is. It seems to me, generally speaking, that silly religious claims are a lot less silly than silly atheist claims. If somebody tells me that a certain monk living thousands of years ago could levitate, all that I can say in response is that it violates physical laws as we currently understand them. By contrast, the Dawkins crowd is offering to me laws of physics, biology, and psychology which they claim are present and in force at all times and places, then I can check the world around me and see if the laws they’re offering fit with what I observe. It seems to me plausible that the laws of the universe that I’d read in a high-school book may not have been as absolute throughout all time and space as we generally think. Ancient accounts of levitation of whatnot, I wouldn’t classify them as likely, but neither would I absolutely rule them out. On the other hand, when I presented with a notion such that all children have brains which incline them to believe and obey whatever adults say, I can say with certainty that it’s not true. I see children everyday and I once was a child and the claim flatly violates what I see, remember, and know.