Yeah, that’s always been my problem with the whole ‘cant measure god’ argument.
If something can affect the ‘measurable world’, then it can be measured.
If something can’t affect it, then it may as well not exist.
If god answers prayers, even it’s just by changing a human mind, then it can be measured.
If god causes natural disasters, then it can be measured.
If god heals people, then it can be measured.
But if god can’t affect this reality in any way, then why bother thinking it’s there at all?
Different things work for different people. Certainly we know that our attitude and perspective helps steer our decisions and affects our lives and how we interact with the world.
How are we to measure that? If a person through reading the New Testament and the words of Jesus decides to change their life for the better how are we to measure that? How do we “know” if God did it or if that person through their own emotions just used religion and the concept of a higher power to move themselves?
I’d say that there’s nothing preventing god from being scientifically tested. AFAIK, science presumes methodological natural; ie, that everything is testable. Of course I realize that doesn’t mean everything is testable.
So I don’t think it’s an automatic conclusion to say that the existence of god can or cannot be proven.
It just appears that, scientifically speaking, we can’t disprove god’s existence yet. Philosophically speaking that’s a whole other kettle of fish, with people on both sides claiming to have proven/disproven god.
The same way we would measure it happening from a non-religious book.
If god did it, there should be some indication that something besides the person was involved, shouldn’t there? If there is, it can be measured. If there isn’t, there’s no reason to think anything else is involved.
I think this is where you’re going to run in to problems. Your analogy is particularly weak: How is the math problem (described materially by pencil and paper, or pixels) immaterial? At that, “math” is measurable, and materially justifiable, say by counting a number of objects, or calculating the speed of a vehicle. The same simply cannot be said of our actions as they relate to something wholly immaterial like “God” and the “Spirit” and you really can’t draw a valid comparison. So in order to make this a defensible position, you’ll have to either A) get a better analogy or B) accept that there are ways to “measure” God and the Spirit, and point to materially justifiable evidence. (And yes, I already know that you think you have a personally valid justification along these lines, but as has been discussed ad nauseam that doesn’t qualify for the rest of us as a point of debate, since you can do nothing to prove it’s empirical worth.
No, how is a universe that, at the quantum level, fluctuates not real? I know, I know you are using a Rational (or some such) definition of Real.
I think the problem I had with your post had to do with this sentence, “I disagree that nature is reality.” You are using a different definition of reality than the vernacular. You are, maybe intentionally, making the same type of assumption that atheists are when they make claims against a particular definition of god, assuming that the definition is implicitly accepted by their opponents.
Meaning that nature may not be reality as defined by Liberal.
The math problem is nonmaterial because it isn’t made of physical stuff. The pencil and paper may describe the problem, but the same tools can also describe God, music, and unicorns. There’s a difference between a “number” (an abstract cardinality or ordinality) and a “numeral” (a squiggly line on paper).
Math isn’t measurable; math measures. The speed of the vehicle is measured by math. I can’t speak to “materially justifiable” because I don’t know what it means.
Yes, I think I can. And I think I did. A numeral may be material, but a number is not.
Neither can the Easter Bunny. But I’m pretty darn certain that it’s a fabrication nonetheless.
This verges closely to the No True Scotsman argument. You’re defining the “quantum world” not to be real because our model of it is probabilistic. The latter part of the statement is true, but that doesn’t make it nonreal; it exists in the same sense that any physical object or action exists, that is to say, we can test it and observe that the results are consistant with the predictions of the theory (though, again, only in a statistical sense). That it can’t be explained in terms of everyday objects without apparent paradox, or that the behavior can’t be predicted deterministically, doesn’t mean that it is “decidedly not real”; instead, it means that it is beyond the limits of us to observe directly, perhaps fundamentally so, but whatever is actually going on at that level can be predicted and tested via repeatable experiments. This is reality, insofar as we can perceive it, and I don’t know that there is any utility in trying to define “real reality” any other way. (This does open up the possibility that nature is all a simulacrum with the appearance of reality–few popular movies and most of the work of Philip K. Dick is predicated on the concept–but that just begs the question of what reality is, if not the self-consistant physical principles and resultant actions you experience.)
God, on the other hand, is this moving target of causal claim; “God did this thing, but He won’t do it again; you just have to believe that it happened and He caused it.” This isn’t an inherently false rationale–if an event occurs but you can’t repeat it or test it, it doesn’t mean that it didn’t occur but just that you have no useful data–but it does strike me as a very arbitrary justification for claims of existance, and certainly not one testable by science. This doesn’t, in my opinion, give faith and science equal standing–I personally prefer explanations that are repeatable, don’t depend upon authoritarian justification, and are nonarbitrary–but if you’re going to claim by definition that there are things outside of nature (supernatural) then there’s really nothing rationality and observation can say about it.
I do realize that my definition is nonstandard by common usage, but I’ve never concealed it, and in fact subjected it to open scrutiny with this thread, Is the universe real? more than two years ago. It’s fine by me if we’re going to discuss reality in an off-the-cuff two-guys-in-a-bar kind of way to use the vernacular meaning. But this thread is specifically tagged as a discussion of philosophy, and so I think a philosophical definition, as spelled out in the linked thread, is appropriate.
Plus, I think the definition is especially critical when people demand evidence of what is real. Defining reality as basically that which one can sense presumes the reality of the senses themselves. Surely you would not allow me to presume the reality of God to show that God is real, would you? Why then can you presume the reality of the senses?
Sure the method is called ‘looking at the evidence’.
If someone reads a non-religious book, and performs an action related to the contents of the book, what reason do we assign to the performing of that action? Without any complicating evidence, we assign the contents of the book and the attributes of the person to the reason.
If someone reads a religious book, and performs an action related to the contents of the book, what reason do we assign to the performing of the action? Without any complicating evidence, we assign the contents of the book and the attributes of the person to the reason.
See, unless we have any evidence that god did it, we have no reason to claim that god did it.
But your description of reality is one side of the tautology confirming the other. A man is a bachelor because he is unmarried, and things made of atoms are real because things made of atoms are accessible to them. The eyes and ears and nerve endings with which you observe the universe are themselves a part of the universe. If that’s all reality is, it is very uninteresting.
You can observe either the location or the momentum or a particle, but not both. I don’t mean to be demanding, but that seems like an awfully puny examination of “whatever is actually going on at that level”.
What is useful depends on what you’re trying to do. If you’re content with atoms observing atoms, then there is indeed no utility for you in any other definition of reality.
Well now, hold on. Setting aside how flippantly you’ve described God, you buy into lots of things as being real that won’t ever happen again. Like the Big Bang, for instance. Or the collapse of an electron’s orbit. Or the blessedly final election of George W. Bush as president of the US.
But that’s what I said at the outset. Science is not the appropriate tool for examining God.
Rationality and observation are not synonyms. People rationally discuss analytical (non-physical) things all the time. In fact, that’s what we’re doing in this thread. Meanwhile, as you laud science for its ability to falsify, keep in mind that falsification is itself a philosophical principle and is not falsifiable.
No, I wouldn’t, but I would allow you to presume the reality of your mind. As I would presume the reality of my own, which is fed via the senses and communicates via speaking and complex finger-motions.
What I mean is, they are the only type of “reality” which science can address. This is, I’ll fully acknowledge, defining reality in pragmatic, mechanical terms, but it’s the only workable definition for experimental or observational science. All else is in the realm of metaphysics.
Not true; you can observe both, but (at least as provided by QM) only to a theoretical limit of precision. The problem with observations on the quantum level is that the observer is an inherent part of the system merely by the act of trying to inspect it.
But “real” events–even those that are unique–can be observed in multiple ways, and each of those observations used to correlate to or falsify a hypothesis. Claims of divine miracles or intervention, however, defy–by definition–any standard framework of causal behavior. If God wants to make cows fly through the air, His will be done, and nothing one says about the improbability of this in Newtonian mechanics, aerodynamic theory, or basic zoology has any standing against it.
On this we agree firmly, I think. My point–and I apologize for not making it more explicit–it that a comparison to quantum mechanics as somehow also being supernatural or not real in like manner is not a very apt analogy. Systems on the quantum level aren’t literally a Schrödinger equation flying through Hilbert space; this is merely the model we use which happens to fit, and satisfy repeated experiments. Why it fits is, despite nearly a century of pondering and dozens of competing interpretations, none of which have any strong claim as being more correct than any other, is an unknown, and possibly (though I hope this not to be the case) fundamentally impercievable. This doesn’t make the resulting behavior any less real (again, in a pragmatic sense that can be tested) but merely that we can’t see beyond the veil of all of the mathematics that work so senselessly well. If you don’t ever open the hood of your car, it doesn’t mean that a bunch of tiny ponies are running on a treadmill to drive the transmission; we can be certain–by the rumbling of the engine, the consumption of gasoline, and the blue cloud that is exhausted 'cause we haven’t changed the oil in 50k miles and the rings are worn–that there is, in fact, an internal combustion engine, or something very much like it (and not at all like a horse) powering the vehicle. There is something “real” going on at the quantum level, and our crude, straining analogies and cleverly accurate but ultimately unrevealing models don’t protray it in any way that gives credence to one interpretation over another.
With God (or any belief in supernatural entities) we essentially have to take someone’s word for it or experience some kind of inner revelation which is not objectively testable. This personally strikes me as being very arbitrary and suspect precisely because it can’t be tested scientifically.
So we should toss archaeology, paleontology, cosmology, and the bulk of geology and astronomy out the window? (Not to mention plain old history.) Scientists routinely tests hypotheses about events that happened as far back as 13 billion years ago.
Of course it’s true that there is a dearth of real evidence that Jesus walked on water, turned water into wine, or was resurrected from the dead. This is why we have rules about the “burden of proof”.
Ever hear of market research? The impact of all sorts of things can be measured, and the statistical validity of the conclusions measured and described. You can call this scientific or not, depending on whether you consider sociology or psychology scientific.
The scientific question is whether we can distinguish between the case where there is no god, but a Bible and religion, and that there is a God. Results that would indicate a God might be measurable miracles, information in the Bible not explainable by knowledge available at the time it was written, or even reaction to reading the Bible totally unlike that of reading other books. Since I don’t think anyone has shown any of these things, we have to go with the null hypothesis (no god, everything explainable by known real causes) for the moment. At least if you’re making any pretense of using science.
Another way of looking at it is that in the stories in the Bible, where God is a real presence, no one had to conduct experiments looking for subtle statistical variations to demonstrate him. That offers up an excellent model of the world with god present, one we don’t see in reality.
Only after you call. Before that, Schrödinger is simultaneously holding two pair, a full house, four of a kind, and a royal straight flush, plus a big gin and Uno. Wigner has a friend who knows what he’s really showing, but he’s not telling anyone.
