That was just an “even if” that were true. I’m sure nobody knows for sure, but the finding that we plan to move our arm subconsciously before we consciously decide to move it is interesting.
Religion has evolved into what it is today. If religion did not stress conversion or ‘spreading the word’ it would cease to exist. It would die out with its members.
I feel like I get a lot of goodness and strength out of my relationship with God, but my faith has been tested repeatedly through my life and there have been many times where I’ve had a lot of doubt. I still have doubt today, though I have come to terms with it. A lot of people who believe in God don’t have the total blind faith that many atheists assume they do. They have doubts, and are afraid those doubts will separate them from something they feel like they need to get through life. I can understand how some people, especially those who have been sheltered from doubters, can become very defensive when people question their beliefs.
I’ve been reading T. H. Huxley, and he says that he is quite unable to disprove supernatural things like demons. However he has never seen any evidence for them much evidence against, and is pretty certain there are no such things. If that is the definition of agnosticism, I’m an agnostic about the supernatural - but I also disbelieve in it. I fail to see why so many people define the supernatural away - isn’t it stronger to be willing to accept it given adequate evidence, which has never been submitted?
Now for Liberal. When people talking about science examining the supernatural, we’re not talking a direct examination. We are examining the shadows the supernatural casts on the natural world, assuming there are any such. (Reference to Plato’s cave intentional.) If there are no such shadows, then anything you say about the supernatural is clearly said without a shred of support. If there are shadows, then they can be examined. Subjective experiences count as shadows - psychology studies those all the time. So it would be cool if you stopped using “science can’t directly examine the supernatural” as a response, since it is not one, even though it is true.
Oh, okay. I don’t have a cite, but I recall something similar or related to that was actually established; something about triggering the mental and kinesthetic process of moving move a muscle before awareness of that kicks in.
I’m really glad someone brought up psychology which is, in my view, all too readily dismissed by those that have no problem expounding on elaborate philosophical views. I brought something up in another thread that would basically be a psychological study and found an apparent total ignorance of the methods of studying subjective experiences that’s done all the time to control for contamination of an experiment, what people really believe about something as opposed to what they claim, how and why people lie, etc. Glad it was mentioned.
I, at least, am not defining it away; There might be things that exist outside our universe and don’t interact with it. However, we have no way to know about such entities. Entities which reside outside our universe but occasionally interact with it can be known about; they can also be studied to the extent that they interact with our reality.
See, the basic mistake (or deliberate special pleading) is to forget that science is grounded in observations, ordinary observations of events and experiences. If it can be observed, then it can be studied - be it an apple or an atom or an angel.
Actually, we can’t directly observe anything. Atomic properties are inferred from other behaviors. Stellar properties are percieved only through telescopes. Radio waves are only examined by picking them up in electrical pulses which are then converted into something we can interpret, like sound or light. Heck, we don’t even see things directly, if you want to get technical: our brains interpret electrical pulses indirectly sent from receptors in our eyes that collect millions of photons that were redirected by the lens of our eye after bouncing off thing we’re seeing. Nothing in life is examined directly except our own personal thoughts and emotions.
So, not only can’t science directly examine the supernatural, it can’t directly examine anything else either. Which is to say, science can examine the supernatural as directly as anything else; there is nothing about the supernatural that distinguishes it as far as science is concerned. If you can experience it, then you can study it.
I recall the same thing. People’s actions appear to be initiated in the unconscious areas of the brain, the conscious part only becoming aware of them afterwards.
Yeah, which I think argued for some behavior as instinct, lower lever, reptilian, whatever. I’d bring up my suspicion about religious belief in that regard, but I think I’ll save myself the trauma. LOL
Too much influence from the “reptile complex” is one theory I’ve heard. It helps explain the obsession with ritual/tradition and the stunting of the higher emotions typical of religion. I recall reading years ago that there is or was a treatment for a birth defect that prevents full maturation of the brain as a side effect; one result of this is a strong tendency toward religious fundamentalism and an inability to “pair bond”, science-speak for love.
And I read that long before I even had a computer, so no cite, sorry.
Both my kids are psychology majors, and I wrote a paper with the oldest on the psychology of computer design, especially in the area of decision making. Most people think that all you have to do to get a project approved or a technique adapted is to show positive ROI - we’re trying to show that a lot more is involved. It’s similar to the relationship of behavioral economics and regular economics - we have a paper on that also.
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You should watch the HBO documentary “Hard As Nails”. It’s about a youth ministry and it’s 28 year old leader who is batshit insane about his love for God. He literally screams at people while preaching. The reason I bring this up is because about halfway through the movie they bump into a guy on the street and they are trying to recruit him to see their sermon that night.
The guy starts out by saying no thanks, because he was Catholic, grew up Catholic and now he has no belief in god. They (the batshit crazy minister guy) start to ask him why and the dude starts to go CRAZY himself about how people who believe in God are sick in the head, they’re brainwashed, they’re nuts. I mean, he was SCREAMING IT ! The nonbeliever was the opposite of the believer. They both screamed their beliefs like crazy people. Watch it, it’s very entertaining.
Well, and if people are asking you to take their fantasies seriously to the extent of making aircraft design a faith-based discipline, you’ll have a case - and I’ll cheer you to the echo, because on other boards I’ve given people quite a wigging for saying things like “if it’s not in the Bible, we don’t need to know it”.
To date though I believe every scientifically-designed aircraft has proved superior to every divinely-revealed aircraft; which is not difficult given that I believe the latter set to be empty.
Meanwhile, I think anyone dripping dilute hydrochloric acid into a dilute solution of sodium carbonate and praying over it has mistaken the purpose of both prayer and the test tube. But I also feel free to doubt that science is able to establish the truth of the proposition: “Science is a valid tool for pronouncing on the existence of God”.
And people are taking their fantasies that seriously, on a wide variety of subjects. People make real world, often disastrous decisions on their baseless faith in such things as prosperity theology, faith healing, astrology, the evil of condoms, the sinfulness of homosexuality, the environment ( no need to worry about it; the world’s going to end ), antibiotic resistance ( can’t admit it exits ! That’s evil-lution ! ), international politics, stem cell research, abortion, brain death, homeopathy, and on and on.
If science isn’t, than nothing is. Science is reliable. Science has accomplished so much for the simple reason that it’s the one method of understanding the world that we have that actually works. And God is exactly the sort of thing that science is supposed to be good at dealing with; an objective entity, something to be proven or disproven. God either exists, or he doesn’t. Science is not incapable of studying God because he is beyond science, but because there’s nothing to study beyond the empty and contradictory claims of believers.
Yes, there are real questions that science can’t answer, but those are subjective questions. Science can’t tell you the answer to such questions because there isn’t an objective answer for it to give. God is not subjective. Religion in general is not subjective; it makes pronouncements about objective reality. Nearly all of which turn out to be wrong if they can be checked.
Well, that’s not Christians, that’s Americans. You might find ours less whacked-out. 
A fair few items on your list offend me no less than you - which might suggest that religion alone isn’t the defining characteristic, and it’s not like I represent some lunatic fringe that barely counts as Christian.
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Science has not established your last proposition to be true, though no doubt you greatly wish that it could. I see no reason why science should be able to examine God, any more than a Sim should be able to examine the programmer; at most, any experiment performed inside the computer would reveal only as much of the programmer as the programmer chose to permit, and that only on a case-by-case basis. What’s outside the computer is not even of a nature comprehensible to the Sims.
As an IT professional myself I not only respect science but I depend on it for my day-to-day living, and I know that hoping and praying doesn’t cut it next to efficient database design and disciplined coding. But I also know that no SQL manual can teach me a darn thing about whether I ought to sneak off for a cinq-à-sept with the hottie from the third floor and make my excuses to my wife when I roll in late and smelling of perfume. However good a tool may be, it’s fit for the purpose it was made for, and not for every purpose under the sun.
Even that can help us know some things, though. You yourself are a Christian; surely you believe that we on the inside can understand the outside, at least to an extent? It isn’t your belief that we can’t understand the outside; only that we cannot understand the outside using the tool of science (I would assume).
The argument to make shouldn’t be that it is hard for us inside to understand the out; it should be one of why something on the outside may be examined one way and not another. As in your last paragraph; I would argue that there are aspects of religion that do fall within science’s ability to look at.
It doesn’t need to. That’s the job of the people who claim that God exists.
And as I said, that alternative isn’t whether use science or religion to prove and understand God. It’s science or nothing. Religion doesn’t work. Faith, spirituality, revelation, and all the other “alternate routes to knowledge” are utterly empty, utterly barren. Mental masturbation.
If you are right that God is so utterly beyond us, then people should shut up about God because we can say nothing useful about it ( including calling it a “him” ), not even that it exists. We can’t say that it’s good either, since your version of God doesn’t actually do anything we can judge as good. You’ve essentially created a place for God beyond science by doing so the only way that could be done; by making God utterly irrelevant and detached from us. I don’t really think that a God of Pointlessness is what most of the religious mean when they talk about God.
I think I understand part of the basic problem. If an entity interacts with the physical world, that interaction can be studied scientifically, without exception (so far), so I don’t think the problem lies in that direction. The problem is that a large proportion of those who are religious are taught from an early age that it is wrong to look for evidence of their god’s existence, and over the years this gets mistranslated from “It is a sin to use science to look for God” to “Science can’t be used to look for God.” Then they get upset when those who use scientific principles don’t follow they same religious teachings, even though the afore-mentioned investigators are under no obligation to do so.
I agree, and I believe it gets related to the “don’t test god” thing. I believe there was a guy who said the sun didn’t revolve around the earth that had trouble with something similar…
Seriously, though, where is Liberal? His last activity was yesterday (Friday) at 8:20 AM. I hope nothing happened to him. It’s not like him to be away from the Board for so long.