Whatever. What was the scientist’s name, and what did he say?
It’s all in the Wikipedia articles. Look for Edward Condon and J.Allen Hynek.
“Believe those who seek the truth; Doubt those who find it.” ~~Andre Gide
I can’t help but think Einstein purposely used plenty of metaphor, and sometimes ambiguous language to please the general population, and to get the clergy off of his ass; especially when they were demanding to know if he was an atheist or not.
Not if it there isn’t anything to it.
razncain
The whole point of this debate is this: Any claims about a non-physical reality or non-ordinary aspect to existence of any kind is immediately poo hood, and ridiculed and attacked by what Marcell Truzzi, co-founder of CIOPS, calls pseudoskeptics, who are obstinately or intolerantly devoted to their own opinions and prejudices about anything other than what they believe to be true. Susan Blackmore, a former woo woo person who became a CSICOP member describes it like this “The worst kind of pseudoskepticism”: “There are some members of the skeptics’ groups who clearly believe they know the right answer prior to inquiry. They appear not to be interested in weighing alternatives, investigating strange claims, or trying out psychic experiences or altered states for themselves (heaven forbid!), but only in promoting their own particular belief structure and cohesion . . . I have to say it—most of these people are men. Indeed, I have not met a single woman of this type.”
Watch this: http://www.moviesfoundonline.com/trouble_with_atheism.php and read some of this: Albert Einstein Quotes on Spirituality.
The philosoical differences here are that one side says the know absolutely, completely and totally that there are no metaphysical or non-ordinary aspects to existence. Why? Because no one’s proven it yet, therefore, it doesn’t exist.
The other side of the Einstein/Marcello Truzzi, Susan Balckmore side says, “I know a lot, but I don’t know it all, therefore, I will keep myself open to other possibilities.” The first mindset stunts and retards growth and the second mindset helps advance it with an agnostic approach by the method of suspended judgment accompanied by systematic doubt, or criticism. I see no suspended doubt, systematic or not. I see no doubt from the first side, all I see is adamant, intellectual certitude and a fair amount of Ad hominem attacks; fools, garbage etc. Even Einstein has been partially lumped into the category of “fools” for daring to percieve in a “mysterious” aspect of the universe. This is not agnostic skepticism in the grand tradition of Marcello Truzzi, co-founder of CIOPS.
If scientists a hundred years ago had been shown the concept of quantum mechanics and all its paradoxes, it would be considered by most to be woo woo, if not outright heresy or the ravings of a madman. Fortunately, there would still be a few healthy, agnostic skeptics that would no doubt consider it highly improbable, if not outright impossible, because their instruments couldn’t measure it, but they wouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water, much less the whole bathtub and then nail the bathroom door shut.
Perhaps you are unaware that the best way to shut up naysayers is to present unambiguous evidence of your claims. That is what scientists have been doing for centuries when they were laughed at. None have advanced their theories by demanding that their critics “prove them wrong”.
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Good point on the bating.
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Religion, like Atheism, are world views which are
A comprehensive conception or apprehension of the world, especially from a specific standpoint that address the most basic of questions of our sentient species has, an innate psychological need to have answered; who am I, what am I and why am I?
What is existence/reality?
Any world view of any kind gives “cognitive closure” - the human desire to eliminate ambiguity and arrive at definite conclusions. In this sense Atheism and Religion have a lot in common:
“The Word” – bible/on the origin of species
“God” – holy trinity/scientific method
“demons” – devil/primitive, superstitious thought
“sages&saints” – jesus/Dawkins, Randi, Shermer, etc. so on and so forth.
3. no one has said I didn’t have one. They have pretty much said that it was nothing more than a biochemical model, nothing more, So you have to prove it, but I don’t have to prove it. Which is fair enough. it just means you don’t give it very much credence at that point. But to call it utterly wrong, garbage, the folly of fools and slam, lock and nail shut the door on it for all time is the height of bigoted thought processes. To try to say, “you have to prove it, but I don’t have to attempt to disprove it is bastion of what Marcell Truzzi, co-founder of CIOPS calls a pseudoskeptic.
Until someone actually provides scientific evidence for the cause of NDEs, I, too, find these discussions tedious in their “is too/is not” repetition, but there is no reason to start making these threads into personal feuds. If the best they can say is “not proven” and the best you can say is “not disproven,” then there really is no serious
debate. When you begin getting personal, however, you create the serious possibility that the thread will be closed.
- You are right that is has become tedious, however, if you’ll remember, this started out as a simple, straight forward question in the “general questions” section.
It very quickly got turned into a tedious, back-and-forth, “Yes, you did!/no, I didn’t!” type of digital masturbation.
As far as getting personal, I only started firing back afte words lik, “garbge/fool” started coming up. There is been a dearth of civil discourse on this thread. Do what you feel you need to do as far as closing the thread, I respect that. I will do my best to avoid any posts that I think are trying to “bait”.
Wrong. Atheism doesn’t answer those questions because it’s just a single assertion; there are no gods. That’s all. It says nothing about the meaning of life, personal identity or anything like that.
Religion DOES provide answers, but they’re wrong. Simply pulled out of thin air.
Oh, please. Origin of Species is hardly the atheist version of the Bible; it’s a scientific treatise on evolution. God is a mythological character that is taken on faith; the scientific method is a technique of studying reality that is trusted due to the fact that it works. Devils are yet more mythological characters, while superstitious thought is simply factually incorrect and irrational thought.
Religion and science are not even remotely alike, no matter how often you and your fellow believers try to drag science down to religion’s level. They are opposites; science is based on facts and reason; religion on delusions and irrationality. Science has a long history of discovering the truth; religion has a longer one of being consistently wrong. Scientists all study the real, objective world; the religious all study their own separate delusions. Science is always improving; religion stagnates.
And atheists don’t have “atheist saints”; that’s a flaw of the believers. That’s why attempts to denigrate people like Dawkins or co-opt people like Einstein don’t impress us. Dawkins is just a scientist who feels it necessary to talk about religion and atheism; not some atheist guru or leader. And Einstein was just a scientific genius who was right about some things, wrong about others, and whom the believers have a habit of lying about to try to co-opt him ( something he complained about while alive as I recall ). There are no such people as “atheist saints”, or an “atheist Pope”.
No, we are saying that it’s ALREADY been proved that there’s nothing going on but biology, as far as is possible to prove anything.
This song and dance has been going on since time immemorial. New, strange, exotic ideas are first ridiculed, then as they start gaining ground the are attacked and then if they are valid they are accepted as fact and a new paradigm is created.
RIDICULED DISCOVERERS,
VINDICATED MAVERICKS
2002 William Beaty
THE LIST: scroll down
Weird science versus revolutionary science
While it's true that at least 99% of revolutionary announcements from the fringes of science are just as bogus as they seem, we cannot dismiss every one of them without investigation. If we do, then we'll certainly take our place among the ranks of scoffers who dismissed (or even accidentally helped suppress) a large number of major scientific discoveries throughout history. Beware, for many discoveries such as powered flight and drifting continents today only appear sane and acceptable because we have such powerful hindsight. These same advancements were seen as obviously a bunch of disgusting lunatic garbage during the years they were first discovered.
In science, pursuing revolutionary advancements can be like searching for diamonds hidden in sewage. It's a shame that the realms of questionable ideas contain "diamonds" of great value. This makes the judging crazy theories far more difficult. If crazy discoveries were *always* bogus, then we'd have good reason to reject them without thought. However, since the diamonds exist, we must distrust our first impressions. Sometimes the "obvious craziness" turns out to be a genuine cutting-edge discovery. As with the little child questioning the emperor's clothing, sometimes the entire scientific community is misguided and incompetent, and only the lone voice of the "fringe" scientist is telling the truth.
Below is a list of scientists who were reviled for their crackpottery, only to be later proven correct. Todays science texts are dishonest to the extent that they hide the huge mistakes made by the scientific community. They rarely discuss the acts of intellectual suppression directed at the following researchers by colleague. And... after wide reading, I've never encountered any similar list.[1] This is very telling.
"When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." - Jonathan Swift
THE LIST: scroll down
To add: Gilbert Ling, John C. Lilly
http://amasci.com/supress1.html
From Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Three types of Skepticism:
"Academic" or "Cartesian" Skeptics: followers of Plato's Academy.
Reason is paramount. We cannot know anything about the future, or anything about the contents of someone else's mind, or anything about the past, or anything at all about the "external world."
"Epistemist" Skeptics
We CAN know about the future, we can know about the contents of someone else's mind, or about the past, or about the "external world."
"Pyrrhonian" Skeptics
Inquiry is paramount, and a skeptic is an inquirer. Our position is not doubt or denial or disbelief, but continual inquiry. For example, We do not believe in the reality of a god, but neither do we deny it. Nor do we say that nobody could ever know for certain one way or the other, as agnostics do. Instead we say of god, "I personally do not know at the moment but I am trying to find out."
And like Science in general, Pyrrhonian Skepticism is based on bend-over-backwards honesty, and on tenativeness, neither of which figures largely in other forms of skepticism.
Marcell Truzzi’s (co-founder of CIOPS) word “Zetectic” is the same as “Pyrrhonian Skeptic.”
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED:
More about Pyrrhonian Skepticism: Dr. P. Suber
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/skept.htm
More about Academic Skepticism: Stanford Encyc. of Philos
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism/
I think we should add a fourth type: Kurtzian Skepticism.
Old school CSICOP skepticism doesn’t seem to fall under any of the above three classifications. Kurtzian Skepticism is more based on a battle between light and darkness, where Skeptics know the truth about religion, about the paranormal, cryptozoology, etc., and they must fight against hoards of credulous people who ‘worship’ ignorance, and who threaten to bring down civilization and trigger a new dark age.
* Arrhenius (ion chemistry)
* Alfven, Hans (galaxy-scale plasma dynamics)
* Baird, John L. (television camera)
* Bakker, Robert (fast, warm-blooded dinosaurs)
* Bardeen & Brattain (transistor)
* Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan (black holes in 1930)
* Chladni, Ernst (meteorites in 1800)
* Crick & Watson (DNA)
* Doppler (optical Doppler effect)
* Folk, Robert L. (existence and importance of nanobacteria)
* Galvani (bioelectricity)
* Harvey, William (circulation of blood, 1628)
* Krebs (ATP energy, Krebs cycle)
* Galileo (supported the Copernican viewpoint)
* Gauss, Karl F. (nonEuclidean geometery)
* Binning/Roher/Gimzewski (scanning-tunneling microscope)
* Goddard, Robert (rocket-powered space ships)
* Goethe (Land color theory)
* Gold, Thomas (deep non-biological petroleum deposits)
* Gold, Thomas (deep mine bacteria)
* Lister, J (sterilizing)
* T Maiman (Laser)
"Concepts which have proved useful for ordering things easily assume so great an authority over us, that we forget their terrestrial origin and accept them as unalterable facts. They then become labeled as 'conceptual necessities,' etc. The road of scientific progress is frequently blocked for long periods by such errors." - ***Einstein***
* Margulis, Lynn (endosymbiotic organelles)
* Mayer, Julius R. (The Law of Conservation of Energy)
* Marshall, B (ulcers caused by bacteria, helicobacter pylori)
* McClintlock, Barbara (mobile genetic elements, "jumping genes", transposons)
* Newlands, J. (pre-Mendeleev periodic table)
* Nottebohm, F. (neurogenesis: brains can grow neurons)
* Ohm, George S. (Ohm's Law)
* Ovshinsky, Stanford R. (amorphous semiconductor devices)
* Pasteur, Louis (germ theory of disease)
* Prusiner, Stanley (existence of prions, 1982)
* Rous, Peyton (viruses cause cancer)
* Semmelweis, I. (surgeons wash hands, puerperal fever )
* Tesla, Nikola (Earth electrical resonance, "Schumann" resonance)
* Tesla, Nikola (brushless AC motor)
* J H van't Hoff (molecules are 3D)
* Warren, Warren S (flaw in MRI theory)
* Wegener, Alfred (continental drift)
* Wright, Wilbur & Orville (flying machines)
* Zwicky, Fritz (existence of dark matter, 1933)
* Zweig, George (quark theory)
"Men show their character in nothing more clearly than by what they think laughable." -J. W. Goethe
"The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science. If we watch ourselves honestly we shall often find that we have begun to argue against a new idea even before it has been completely stated." - Wilfred Trotter, 1941
If you are going to insist on presenting this tedious and off-topic song and dance instead of the evidence asked for repeatedly, perhaps you should stick to posting in Cafe Society.
Bolding mine.
What does this mean, “if they are valid”? What standard do you apply to determine validity? Do you have any standard at all? Or do you have to believe whatever claptrap anyone proposes, or else be guilty of having the “closed mind” you have accused your detractors of having?
I have a very open mind. I would love to believe in NDE’s, Bigfoot, UFO’s, a loving god and all sorts of fascinating supernatural stuff. But I know that not every thing that I read on the internets is true, so I need some means to separate the wheat from the chaff. I use the scientific method of unambiguous evidence, repeatable testing and falsifiability to determine what I will believe, and what I will not. You may find my standards too rigorous, and a threat to your beliefs. But I will not surrender my search for wisdom to someone who has no standards for validity at all.
An open mind is only as good as the filter that keeps crap from falling in.
Then let’s see the investigation. lekatt, who is a True Believer of the most credulous sort, has at least provided links to people who talked to people who eperienced NDEs. None of that rises to the level of science, any more than asking the survivor of a plane crash the scientific explanation for his or her survival, but it is at least something. You have priovided not one shred of evidence that your experience was other than a state of oxygen deprivation.
Where’s the beef?
This statement regarding that list is utter nonsense, probably invented by some anti-science crackpot to rationalize why their own weird beliefs should be given greater acceptance.
The people on the lists you provided were often challenged by other scientists to provide evidence for their claims. However, only three of the people on that list suffered anything resembling ridicule by “scientists” for their claims. Barry Marshall was, indeed, mocked and denied funding to pursue his idea regarding bacterial ulcers. Barbara McClintock was given a bit of a rough time, (although she also had supporters). And Alfred Wegener was correctly challenged to provide evidence of his notions–notions that he got as wrong as he got right. (He posited that the continents plowed through the crust rather than that they floated on a more malleable crust than had been understood existed.) There was no ridicule by scientists of the Wright brothers for their efforts. “Scientists” (such as there were at the beginning of the seventeenth century) actually supported Galileo when he was not attacking them for not bowing down to his “superior” wisdom.
The fact that one can find an occasional nasty remark from one scientist or another, (often taken out of context regarding an intradisciplinary feud), hardly makes a case that science is unnecessarily skeptical of all things new.
Now, since, (as Czarcasm notes), this red herring really has nothing to do with your thread, let’s see where we stand.
You had an experience that you associate with a life threatening event, a Near Death Experience. I think we can accept that.
So, what do you think happened?
Why do you not accept the ideas put forth, (as documented by researchers), that simple oxygen deprivation accounts for the perceptions you experienced?
If you have no alternative theory and you refuse to accept the current medical hypothesis, why are you continuing to keep this thread alive?
This is exasperating.
Look - the way new ideas get accepted in science is by providing evidence. The evidence is challenged if it stands in opposition to the accepted truths of science. The challenges (call them “attacks” or “ridicule” if you must) are part of the process. The ideas have to prove their merit. It’s a battlefield of ideas, and outsiders want to play the “waaah, science is biased against my pet theory” card when in actuality science is a brutal battleground for every idea. Heck, just look at the viciousness over homo floresiensis, and that is in no way metaphysical or supernatural.
Yes, science has occasionally been turned on its head. But there are a few points which people fail to consider.
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The instances of this are a strength of science (and of skepticism), not a weakness. They show that the process works. You come up with some insane idea, all you have to do is prove it and science will follow. They will fight you at first, but once you offer some meat on the bones they’ll jump all over it. Most of the scientists I’ve ever met or heard lecture absolutely love new discoveries. They just hate wasting their time on false starts or people bringing in dead horses for more beatings.
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As science has progressed and matured and accepted new data, it’s all flowed in one direction - toward the materialistic paradigm. The big picture of the progression of science shows that the more we know, the less we need to point to the ghost in the machine.
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Yes, great discoveries have sometimes taken a while to be accepted. But that doesn’t mean that every crazy idea people have is just a discovery waiting to be categorized by science. Sometimes crazy ideas are just crazy ideas. It doesn’t matter how many people believe them, and it doesn’t matter how smart the people are who believe them. If the evidence doesn’t bear it out, you can’t just cross your arms and stamp your feet and call the opposition closed-minded. (Well, I suppose you can, but you’re just inviting more of that ridicule you don’t seem to appreciate.)
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In either case, the proper time to believe something is when there’s evidence to believe it. Jake, you repeatedly bring up that in the past times scientists wouldn’t have believed current science. Of course they wouldn’t, and they would be right in disbelieving it until presented with evidence. This is, again, how science works. The truth is what the truth is, and that’s as true as it truly gets. Yet if you don’t have some method of sussing out what’s reasonable to believe and what’s not, you’re never going to stand a chance of getting at what that truth is.
Der Trihs may speak in more absolute terms than I would, but we’re basically in agreement. I can say I “know” that these experiences are just a trick of the brain. But I’m saying I know, with a lowercase “k.” I don’t believe I can “Know” anything with an uppercase “k.” How do I Know I’m not a head in a jar somewhere, being poked and prodded and filled with hallucinations? How do I Know I’m not God, and this whole world is my simulation just to amuse myself? How do I Know that the world wasn’t created five seconds ago and all these memories are implanted in me? How do I Know my wife isn’t really a reptilian male from planet Kromulent, sent here just to torment me by fattening me up with baked goods? I don’t really Know any of that is untrue. But I do know it’s untrue, as much as I know my bed is in my bedroom and my cat’s name is Punky and I had an appendectomy a few years ago. I know these things because I have evidence for them that is reasonable from the perspective of a human being living everyday life. I know them to be facts. However, even what I “know” as facts, I’m willing to change my mind on given superior evidence. I’m a human and I accept my fallibility as a human. However, that doesn’t mean that every single idea thrown my way gets a pass as being reasonable.
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While I’m not personally aware of any in-depth NDE studies that show exactly where in the brain it’s happening, the mechanism, etc… I do think we can draw a conclusion from other brain-related research. The dualistic notion that the mind/self is different from the brain has been pretty well relegated to the rubbish bin. Just looking at a history of traumatic brain injuries should bear this out to a reasonable person. Change the brain, you change the personality. Simple. (For a more in-depth look at this, I recommend the debates between Steven Novella and Michael Egnor.)
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Appeals to authority are logical fallacies no matter how many times they’re repeated. It’s worse when they’re out-of-context misrepresentations of position. Such appeals suggest either ignorance or disingenuousness on the part of the presenter.
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If Atheism is a religion, bald is a hair color.
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The reason we have science in the first place is that humans are not that good at figuring out the world on their own. Our perception is limited and easily misguided. Our memories are malleable and often change after events. Our intuition is barely a candle in the dark and our intellect has to compete with myriad influences within our own heads. If we’re really interested in reality rather than our own human perception, science is the best tool we have so far. The metaphysical stuff has not been borne out by science in all the years people have tried, so right now it’s reasonable to think it’s all just in people’s heads. But if you provide evidence, science will eventually come around. That’s what it always does.
The point seems to be being missed - whether wilfully, or not - that if “real scientists” refuse to even entertain the idea of any credibility to this topic, then the subject has not been researched adequately enough to be dismissed entirely.
Your spirit cite should at least include these letters from Einstein which will explain his personal view on religion, but I realize that might be rain on their parade, so they mustn’t be bothered.
Truzzi was a professor of sociology. Blackmore studied psychology. They tend to be more open to testing paranormal claims as do physicists which often think it’s a huge waste of time and resources, but I’m sure many don’t object for the others spending their time doing such things. A good healthy dose of skepticism is apart of any of the sciences. There are things, such as gravity, that don’t need people out everyday dropping balls or whatever, and everyone reporting back to see if any of them may have shot up towards the sky. Scientists have more important things to do.
Women tend to believe more in astrology than males too. You’ll also find more women and children in churches than males. I do think physicists, whether they are male or female, probably won’t take these paranormal claims as seriously, but are willing to be shown the credible evidence if it ever came in. I can understand their skepticism.
Although CSICOP I find credible, and will test individual claims, I think the empirical data speaks for itself. Why hasn’t one claim of anything paranormal to date been validated and/or replicated? Besides, many of these people being tested are best suited for magicians to be doing the testing anyhow, since deceit is often involved. Some however, are just honestly mistaken, and are taken in by the ideomotor effect.
I remember a great deal of Blackmore’s work, and think she is honest enough to do such research. She wrote a good article for CSICOP which dealt with NDE’s and OBO’s many years back in the nineties. I still have some of my CSICOP journals including her article. See the Skeptical Inquirer Fall 1991 issue. If you accept her research; you realize her empirical data hasn’t given the next lifers anything important to write home about.
You state that Blackmore is a former woo woo person. Are you suggesting she now believes in life after death? You’re aware she’s an atheist, aren’t you?
While you seem awfully harsh on skeptics, I have a quote for you. The late Milton Rothman, who was the professor of physics at Trenton State college, also has this to say about a certain kind of skeptic. I don’t know you well enough to know if he had you in mind or not, but we all have met this kind of skeptic.
He goes on to talk about the proper skeptic is pragmatist, a person whose knowledge is based on experience and observation, who knows the difference between belief and knowledge and remembers where beliefs come from and how knowledge enters the mind. Judicious skepticism requires us not only to look at unsubstantiated claims with a jaundiced eye, but also to change our opinions about the world when sufficient evidence has been presented.
We await such evidence on NDE. If you’re particularly interested of exactly what many of these pseudoscientific claims are up against, read Milton Rothman’s A Physicist’s Guide to Skepticism. It is excellent.
razncain
I didn’t miss that point, I found unpersuasive. There have been hundreds of scientific inquiries into supernatural topics, and none of them produced unambiguous evidence supporting such claims. It is erroneous to conclude that absence of support from the scientific community means there just hasn’t been enough research. There has been tons; it just doesn’t support supernatural claims.
Here is the best answer I can come up with: After centuries of looking for something that wasn’t there, they decided to quit wasting their valuable time, and decided to switch to looking for that which has at least a possibility of existing.
I wanted to follow-up more on Susan Blackmore to see what’s she been up to since my membership in CSICOP was in the nineties when I subscribed to their journal, the Skeptical Inquirer.
I’m also curious about something. You seem to denigrate “atheists” and “skeptics” alike, if they don’t agree with your opinion, but yet you use Susan Blackmore to come to your defense when she identifies with both. See the wiki article. Richard Dawkins, the Devil incarnate himself, also wrote the foreword to one of her books.
Also I have learned after brushing up a bit more on Susan Blackmore that after 25 years of research into the paranormal, she has finally given up.
It’s interesting as to why, and I’m curious as to what you thought about it. I’d also appreciate what you were getting at by stating she was “a former woo woo person” herself.
ranzcain
3*An open mind is only as good as the filter that doesn’t dogmatically keep potentially from falling out.
Find a person who refuses to examine evidence as it comes in due to a *pro-*science bias, and we’ll talk. Unless you were criticizing the religious and mystical-minded for their intolerance of scientific theories? (They are after all the group with the greater association with the term ‘dogma’, after all.)