Strawman. Largly, the part about science and religon being in conflict is not the fault of atheists.
[QUOTE I met Neal Stephenson once and he said that he thought that Snow Crash didn’t really predict the fate of the world very well, a[/QUOTE]
What did you think about the part about religions as viri?
Then you have no arguement. Remember the thread about ghosts and science? No one held the view (People seem to think that god can not be proven.) that you seemed to think they did.
I completely agree with Stephenson that religions are virii or I should say viral memes, as ALL ideas are.
We have moved on from proving disproving god to mysticism, you might have missed the subtle shift in the wind.
I can’t wait to see what you said in the religions are eviiiiil thread!
Erek
Mods, I don’t seem to have receivded the new memo, the one about how it is no longer permisable to ask a side question of a poster, whether it has to do with the current topic, or not.
Oh, and in the other thread, I asked you to write an OP, so you could stop hijacking threads to point out the “fact” that atheism is a religion.
That’s not the thread I was referring to. I was talking about the one where you completely messed up the definition of religion. I mean the one besides this one.
Erek
Oh, and I didn’t ask you a side question, I made a statement.
Before we build any machines, it would be good to see if there is anything to measure, right? One way of doing that is to see if someone with the power can consistently affect the physical world, such as pushing away bees. If this is demonstrated, the next step would be to figure out how it works. You say Chi, but maybe it is something else - for instance you could emit phermones that annoy the bees. I could think of several types of experiments to do. You’d want to eliminate the purely physical causes before going to a non-physical one. If that is where the evidence led, though, there would be a lot of people interested in figuring it out.
There seems to be a lack of impact on the rest of the world. Why don’t you give one example of a scientific truth from this book, one that is precise and not fuzzy.
Some types of science are experiential. Much of psychology rests on reports of internal states. Science is not equivalent to what can be measured by a meter. However if there is a claim that something is repeatable, there are ways of checking. Otherwise, things are anecdotal, and of only literary value.
I’m not disputing your claim at all. I’m withholding judgement. If you want to demonstrate, even to yourself, that it was not a coincidence, then I outlined some steps that you could take. If I thought I were influencing bees with my mind I would do it. My psychic power is that I can predict the next elevator to come - at least that’s the fairy tale I tell myself. If I really thought I had this power I could do a simple experiment. I bet it would come out negative, but even if it came out positive, it would probably be me hearing the sound of the cars. If I could predict it, the next step would be to plug my ears to not hear the cars, and see if the “power” went away. If it didn’t, I’d put myself on a vibrationless platform. Then I’d see if I could still predict it when far away.
This is a way of thinking. Is it better? Well, while mysticism certainly has made people feel better, science has saved countless lives, increased our comfort, made our life better in every way. It all comes from applying this methodology, and finding real answers.
Planck’s constant has been verified over and over. If you find the interpretation that some people have of QM specious, I’m probably with you 100%. But most of this stuff is not a matter of opinion.
It is not a matter of respect or intelligence. Don’t you think 2,000 or more years of development of methodology and results count for something? Even smart people are prisoners of their culture. Aristotle, brilliant as he was, did not think experiments were useful, so he “proved” stuff that Gallileo had to disprove experimentally.
The ancients never invented the scientific method. If tney had, we’ d probably be spreading among the stars already.
I’d say influence, not determine. People also try to avoid some futures. Plenty of people, including me, got into science through science fiction.
If you think I, or any scientist, thinks we can now explain everything you’re way off base. I’m in fact saying that anything you have that affects the natural world can be demonstrated and confirmed. So far we’ve been able to explain most things, but it is always possible we’ll run into something that can’t be. But that’s not the way I’m betting.
Voyager See the problem here is you are going tangental to everything I am saying, and so the work to get you on the same page as I am is as great as it is to even talk about these incredibly difficult to describe subjects.
First off, mysticism and science are in no way in conflict. This is a prejudice, it is simply incorrect. There is no conflict, there is no competition, the two things are methods of discerning the truth, they are not mutually exclusive. One is intuitive the other is intellectual. It is very nice that science is intellectual and can “prove” things. That doesn’t mean they were not ‘discovered’ aeons ago. It would require someone who is well versed in both qabbalah and quantum mechanics in order to really explain these things.
The Sefer Yetzirah talks about the formation of consciousness, how our perception of the physical world is defined by the words we use to describe it. It uses Hebrew as a sort of machine code for consciousness. However, it does go into some concepts such as how duality springs from singularity, something that is INCREDIBLY hard to articulate. If I attempted to articulate it, I’d only be doing the subject matter an injustice. You’d have to check the book for yourself. A lot of it involves meditation methods to prepare oneself for receiving this information intuitively. The truth is still the truth, and if something is incorrect it is still incorrect. If something is true, it is scientifically provable, it’s that simple. However, when dealing with the primal levels of consciuosness words begin to fail us. We go into the amygdala and that’s where consciousness is in the form of impressions and feelings, rather than words, and on down the amygdala to the spine and the rest of the nervous system which the brain is only parts of.
Now the method I tend to verify things with is experiential. My methodology is different, but it’s not competing with a verification methodology, and I am capable of understanding what science is, I understand critical thinking skills. If you want to teach me new tools, that’s fine, but stop trying to teach me what I already know if you would.
Your fundamental misunderstanding of these ideas is what is holding back this dialogue. You think that somehow by explaining something that you deny it. For instance, if I push the bee away with phermones, that doesn’t mean it has nothing to do with Chi. Chi is life energy, so the chi could have caused me to secrete the phermones, something that would be a subconscious act triggered within the amygdala and the lower parts of the nervous system that are sublingual.
That’s the fallacy that I am attempting to fight, the one that requires scientific explanations to subsume the mystical interpretations. It’s false, there is no conflict between the two. I am describing an effect, and how I came to that effect, and you are attempting to explain it using your language. That doesn’t make what I said incorrect.
The Sefer Yetzirah helps one get in touch with their consciousness that is outside of the standard lingual consciousness that we use. Quantum Mechanics, Genomics and many scientific fields of today are delving into the areas where the informational meets the physical. These books have long described them, and in the case of Qabbalah, new understanding of Qabbalah often parallels new scientific discoveries. I think making statements about Madonna’s interest in Qabbalah and dismissing the work of jews throughout history is kind of ignorant personally.
I’d argue that Qabbalah informs upon everything that you now believe, that the evolution of science takes it’s roots in these ancient studies. I of course have no way to prove such a belief except to point you to people like Pythagoras and Newton.
As far as I am concerned the atheist vs deist debate is purely semantic, the fundamental difference being how one defines consciousness.
Erek
Oh, and I specifically think that no scientist can explain everything, which is why I find this debate USUALLY to be one of merely fighting ignorance of pretentious atheists, and not really delving terribly deeply into the true nature of the universe. Though, I’ll admit this debate with you has been fairly fruitful.
Erek
Wrong. Science is an attempt to discern objective reality ; mysticism is all about subjectivity. The two are quite in opposition to one another. The things science has found were not discovered “aeons” ago; saying so is ridiculous; a denial of reality.
Why believe in something like Chi, when there is no evidence for it ? It explains nothing, and without evidence it can’t be rationally talked about.
Science is not trying to “subsume” mystical interpetations, as there is nothing useful to subsume. Some mystical types try to subsume science into mysticism, but they alway fail. Science is too heavily grounded in reality to merge with mysticism.
Impossible. Consciousness, by definition, is something we are aware of. We are by definition already in touch with our own consciousness.
Whose mystical studies accomplished less than nothing. They discovered nothing from mysticism, and it distracted them from more useful things.
You can believe that; you can also believe there is no difference between maple syrup and crude oil. It still won’t make your pancakes taste better.
No one is saying that science can explain everything; science is simply the one method we have that works. If science can’t explain something, there is no other method that can.
Now that is hubris. Homer, Shakespeare, Balzac, Thoreau, and Chekhov are calling. Answer the phone.
Der Trihs: Your arguments are henceforth not worth responding to. You are being willfully ignorant about what mysticism is. Subjective =/= Wrong.
Erek
I’m trying to understand what you see as the role of mysticism in understanding the universe. Is it a hypothesis generator? That someone a long time ago mentioned something is different from their having discovered it, since they probably used the same technique to describe something that is totally untrue. Was the true discovery linked to other true discoveries, or did it stand on its own? I’m sure you’ve read some creationists claim that since the Bible says “let there be light” it successfully described the Big Bang.
I’m not saying that the mystics had to use the same techniques as scientists. If they could make true discoveries consistently with some totally different technique, such as meditation, that would be fascinating. I usually however see claims that some chance hit validates all sorts of other stuff.
I apologize if I have been explaining things you know, but you coulda fooled me. I’m not sure what you mean by experiential verification. We experience lots of things, some of them misleading. I can experience the sight of a bear in my closet, but its just old clothes. How do you falsify something experientially?
Interesting. Where I was going with this example was to show that if you couldn’t find a physical cause, then maybe Chi would be a reasonable explanation. But now you’re using it as a possible cause because you like the idea, best as I can figure. I was once able to change my heart rate through feedback from a heart monitor I was hooked up to. It scared the crap out of the nurse, but I never though an explanation besides that by brain is hooked up to the controls of my body was necessary - certainly not Chi or any other non-material explanation.
Maybe this is the difference between science and mysticism. Science does not introduce concepts unless they are needed. It sounds like, from your example, that mysticism uses concepts for whatever reason and keeps them even if they serve no real purpose. If you started with a blank slate, and found that you could control bees, and found you did it chemically, and that this was controlled by a certain part of your brain, and was evolutionarily justified in a certain way, and was turned on by a certain strand of dna, why would you introduce Chi?
This is exactly why I don’t believe in any god. A long time ago god was the best explanation for things, and it has carried over until today. But today, starting with a blank slate, do I see a need for god to explain anything? I don’t. I don’t claim that I can falsify god, or disprove god (just like I can’t disprove that Chi let me control my heart) but he is not needed. Once I figured this out I cleaned out my mental closet and gave him the boot. Chi has never been in my closet, so I don’t have to boot it. (Not to be confused with my dog Ki, named by his former owners, who were Jewish Buddhists. He doesn’t get the boot.)
The history of science is filled with those who were wrong, but which influenced the later discovery of what was correct. So, I’m not sure if the Qabbalah did influence science (I’d have to see a causal thread) but even if it did doesn’t imply it is correct about the universe. It is interesting to know why they thought the way they did, and to appreciate their insights, and how they did the best they did with what they knew. We’re certainly wrong about tons of things also. But people who are right by guessing deserve less credit than those wrong through a logical chain. In the sf book I am writing I provide a way of traveling faster than light which I think I could even justify as an expansion on Einstein - and might even be able to develop the math for, assuming some stuff about other branes. If in 100 years it turns out that I predicted or was close to something that actually works, I deserve no credit except as a lucky guesser.
Fiction is not explanation.
Voyager Qabbalah influenced Jewish thought, anything influenced by Jewish thought is influenced by Qabbalah. You’d have to actually be willing to open the source material that you are dismissing.
If I were as closed minded about all the ‘scientists’ who were incorrect and used them to dismiss those that were correct, you’d laugh at me, yet somehow I am sitting here trying to explain it to you with varying degrees of patience. You are saying it’s a “Chance discovery” because a lot of people were incorrect, but that doesn’t mean that people like Moses, Jesus, Buddha etc… were incorrect because Angel Dust the Crystal Gazing hippy and her ilk throughout history were wrong. You are judging the wise mystics by the lowest common denominator. I am not judging science by the lowest common denomenator. Obviously many people have found truths through meditation, unless of course you think that the masses have been thoroughly ignorant, and we suddenly discovered knowledge in the past three hundred years.
If it weren’t for the Temple Priests in ancient Europe and Greece, that which you call “science” wouldn’t even exist. I keep using Pythagoras as an example, his cult , the Mathematekoi, put forth things like the Pythagorean theorem, and are the predecessors of modern day mathematicians. They were mystics in their time. Newton was a mystic, yet for some reason I keep using these examples of mystics that touch on truth that even you consider to be truth, and it is roundly ignored.
Until you are willing to accept that Newton and Pythagoras were mystics and helped define what you call “science”, then there isn’t much point in continuing, because you have a self-serving definition of both mysticism and science.
Chi is accepted by many people as existing. If you go to your local martial arts extravaganza, and see the guys jumping high up in the air and breaking boards with a butterfly kick, they are “Focusing their chi”, and would tell you that this is what enables them to perform such feats. You very well might deny that Chi exists, even when the expert practitioner who has just verified his ability to perform amazing feats right before your very eyes, but that’s something you will have to personally decide for yourself.
This thread has exhausted all fruit, and there is nothing more to say. I am merely repeating myself at this point. So at this point you can assume that I am wrong about all these things, and then we’ll remain where we are, but if I am correct, then as long as you keep your cognitive dissonance in place, then you will be laboring under a glass ceiling whereas all I need to do is take one calculus class, and read a book about quantum physics to surpass the level of this conversation. It would be no more difficult for you, but you’d have to be willing to open a book on the subject you are dismissing beforehand.
This is why I believe that atheists labor under a glass ceiling that cannot be surpassed as long as they cling to the false presumptions they labor under, about what exists and what does not. The attitude however, is no different from any religious extremist who believes the bible is the only true word of God.
Erek
I don’t doubt that. I don’t even doubt that Jewish thought influenced science. I’m saying that lots of things that turned out to be incorrect influenced science, and that their being incorrect does not mean the people doing them were stupid. Science thrives on the realization that most of what we do will be wrong, and tries to find and correct our inevitable errors.
Incorrect about what? If you are talking morals and ethics, that is something not covered by science, so, while we could have a nice discussion on moral correctness, it has nothing to do with what we are discussing. Taking Moses to stand for the people who actually wrote the Torah, then he was incorrect about the earth and the heavens and how we began. That falls into science, and they flubbed it. Science had not been invented yet, so I don’t fault them for being wrong, but wrong they were.
I don’t think you are comprehending my responses. I said that the “chance discoveries” don’t count even if they are correct. A stopped clock is right twice a day - at those times it gets the right answer for the wrong reasons.
What lowest common denominator? And what scientific truths have been discovered through meditation? Not that this matters - as I said hypotheses can come from anywhere, the important part is in the experimental verification. If someone came up with a new medicine through meditation, and tried to publish, it would get rejected. If they came up with a medicine the same way, then went into the lab and showed it would work, it would get accepted. (He might be embarrassed to describe where the idea came from, but maybe not.)
Math is very different from science. The Greeks prediliction for proving things worked fine in math, but failed miserably in science. But mysticism had nothing to do with why we use this today - that even the hardest headed skeptic can repeat the proofs is the reason. Same with Newton. His mystical work is abandoned and is junk. His math and science is not. You’ve got to separate the work from the person. Tesla became a total loony, but his work is still good.
Here is what the Perfect Master has to say about that.
Nope, that is not going to help. You’d have to start understanding how science works. so, why do you think chi is involved in everything - besides reference to ancient books and wishful thinking?
But it has nothing to do with atheism. I’d wager most or all scientists who believe in God would be just as dubious about mysticism as I am, and for the same reasons. Since it is evident from the other GD thread that you still don’t even know what atheism is (it is NOT saying that there is no god) I conclude that you are somehow incapable of understanding science and logic.
Pity.
No, we’ve advanced past them. A “wise mystic” is at best a good guesser; we can do better these days.
That’s a small exaggeration, but not much. Most of humanities’ knowledge has been discovered in the last few hundred years.
Because the mystical parts of their work are not the useful and correct parts.
A magician can claim to read minds, and use it in his act. That doesn’t make him a telepath.
Voyager I do understand how science works. You just have this prejudgement that you’re not willing to get past. It’s simply not me who doesn’t understand. There is nothing you’ve said about science that in any way implies that mysticism is incorrect.
Go back and read Maeglin’s post. I’ve known him for years, and he’s one of the few people who actually IS a skeptic, and even he disagreed with the painting of mysticism in this thread.
The simple fact is you know NOTHING about mysticism. I’ve had science classes, I’ve read books on different scientific topics, I have zero problem with the concept of evolution, none at all, I believe it’s true. You on the other hand have a book by Arthur Conan Doyle, you don’t even know what the Sefer Yetzirah contains, or what it talks about, yet you say it’s been proven wrong. How can you possibly know that?
I think it is you that is confused about how science works sir.
Erek
Oh, yes it is.
You are quite right. Nor did I intend to. What I did say was that science is an effective way of finding out how the world works. You haven’t given me one reason to suppose that mysticism, of any flavor, can do the same. I asked you for something that mysticism got right, and the answer I got was basically to read the book. (Which I will do when I get to the library - if they have it. ) All I’ve seen in this thread is assertion by ancient book.
The bee example was particularly telling. You wouldn’t give up the mystic explanation even when a physical explanation was posited to exist. I’d be happy to accept a mystic explanation if that were the most likely alternative. (Well, maybe not happy 
). But it hasn’t.
You mean the one where he said mysticism addresses fundamental human issues? I have no problem with that, I’m only talking about facts about the world. If you are talking why, that is a perfectly acceptable domain of religion and mysticism. I don’t know how you’d know you got the right answer, but perhaps any answer that satisfies is the right one. My objection to religion (and not mysticism as I understand it) is that religion claims there is one right answer, enforced by a deity they won’t bring on-stage. You’ve never said anything like this, so this is not an issue I have with you.
I’ve read a lot more than that one book. Not as much as you, I’m sure, since I get little out of it. I’ve never even said that the Sefer Yetzirah has been proven wrong, not knowing its claims. I doubt very much it has a full and complete scientific description of anything. I even said it might well be right about something, but that is different from being right by a valid process. Do you perhaps have a link to a web page or article giving the true statements made by the Sefer Yetzirah? That would be a good start.
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I think it is you that is confused about how science works sir.
Erek
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36 years working in it makes me think I know how it works fairly well. Actually I’m a computer whatever, but my wife is a “real” scientist.
Taking classes and reading popular books does not make you understand how science really works. If I remember correctly, you think that a hypothesis should be considered true until disproven. Am I correct? The way science works is that a hypothesis is false until there is evidence to verify (not prove) it.
Again, your bee example is splendid. If you are right about your ability, you’d be either rich or famous or both. If it were chemical, you could distill your phermones and make a bee repellent. Think of the people who are allergic, and the lives you’d save. If it were chi, and non-physical, you could pass Randi’s test, make a million, but more importantly demonstrate to all us skeptics that mysticism is true.
The null hypothesis is that you remembered only the times the bee happened to go away, and not the other times. But I’d be delighted if you showed that your perception was true. It would be an advancement in our understanding of the world, and that is what I like best.
But mysticism does not appear to advance our understanding at all (rocks are not conscious by an reasonable definition of the term) which is why I reject it. Philosophy I do like, since it works by logic, not assertion. If there is something to mysticism, you haven’t been a good advocate.
To make some observations relative to some of the propositions advanced in the OP, let me make the following comments:
First, there is absolutely no doubt that superstition did play an element in the evolution of the various belief systems of humanity. Just as children learn that the wrath of a parent or other adult is fearsome, but that said parent/adult can be propitiated by behavior in accordance with parental commands, gifts, and gestures of love and affection, so, no doubt, people, conditioned by their childhood experiences, attributed to the volcano or the thunderhead the characteristics of those fearsome adults which they had learned to deal with as children. And, of course, they did have practical grounds for thinking so: they experimented, and it worked. If, every year, they sacrificed a virgin* to the great god Ghu who lived in the volcano, He would not cause it to erupt … except sometimes, when it was clear that Ug, the outcast who was known not to live by the Rules of the Tribe, must have sinned so badly that Ghu was wrathful nonetheless. Or perhaps the sacrificial maiden was not virgo intacta; no God wants some man’s leftovers, after all!
However, to attribute all religious experience to this sort of superstition is a false generalization. Many people, from Akhnaten and Moses down to many living people, have experienced some sort of theophany in their lives. Some of this can be attributed to hallucination and desire to believe, but not all. I subjected my own personal conversion experience to skeptical analysis, and infer that without a remarkable degree of subconscious precognitive ability, along with a perverse subconscious desire to rid myself of rationalism, the only reasonable explanation of what happened to me was that I had an experience of God. And typically, conversion experiences tend to have a number of characteristics in common which are not even so easily explained as Lekatt’s NDEs, except on the presumption that an actual theophanic experience in fact happened to those who undergo them.
Does this necessarily prove out anyone’s theology, validate any particular religious system? Perhaps not. If there is a God worthy of our belief (as I believe there is), one assertion that can be made of Him is that He is greater than, impossible to encapsule by, human descriptions and categories. The Sh’ma, the Hijma, and the “negative assertion” of the Tao are all true of Him. As J.B. Phillips entitled one of his books, “Your God is too small.”
But, raised in a Christian culture and with a quasi-Christian parentage and upbringing, one of the things I discovered about the God Who had revealed Himself to Me is that He corresponded quite clearly to the character of the God Whom Jesus taught and Whom He called Father. This is not, be it noted clearly, the divine megalomaniac with a prejudice against sex and human happiness preached by some brands of Christianity who seem to have jumped directly from Leviticus and Obadiah to Romans, with more interest in learning the rules to propitiate Him than in finding out what behavior He actually wants, as taught by the Person they agree is His Son.
By the way, the idea that Jesus was not a man like other men is itself a Christian heresy, Docetism. Traditional Trinitarian theology claims Him to be the Second Person of the Trinity, the Word of God, incarnate as a human being, the sole real case of what Hindu thought calls avatars, truly God and truly Man. There are a lot of supposed Trinitarian Christians around who have placed Him on so high a pedestal that they fail to recognize their own Docetism, but sound theology agrees with the strongest of agnostics in saying that whatever else He may or may not have been, Jesus was a man.
A particularly petty point that is sufficiently irksome to me to be worth making is the misspellings in the argument. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was perhaps the foremost teacher of satyagraha, the nonviolent protest which Martin Luther King Jr. Also taught. If there was a famous religious leader named Ghandi, I am not aware of one. Likewise, the title of the Tim Allen movie was a pun based on the homonymy of the term for a single item in a contract with the second half of the name given the legendary figure created by the assimilation of St. Nicholas of Myra into the Father Winter mythos of northern and eastern Europe. There is no E in Santa Claus.
Finally, the scholarship of Charles Darwin has no impact, except to strengthen it, on the faith of the majority of Christians. He is seen as a threat to their beliefs only by a minority who practice a naive literalism with regard to the myth, in the Campbellian sense, used to describe Creation, and who, in consequence, cannot accept the idea of an intricacy of creation that might bring forth humanity, not by an anthropomorphic deity gathering together dust, but through the implementation of a system that is profligate in calling forth eurypterids, arthrodires, dromaeosaurs, uintatheres, mastodons, and australopithecenes. A Someone who is capable of seeing not only every sparrow fall, but also every pterosaur, who not only garbs in glory the lilies of the field but the tree ferns and giant horsetails, is larger and more complex than their conception of a wrathful tyrant, a Daddy who will cast down and out to eternal torture if one does not convince Him that one is sorry for one’s misbehavior.
Hence my assertion is that the OP works only by grouping into superstition not merely some but all religious experience, throwing Julian of Norwich and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin into the same pot with cargo cultism, and argues against a brand of Christianity which is advocated only by a noisy minority of that religion’s adherents.