I’ve been to the main conference in my area for 28 years in a row, have been and spoken at many others, founded a few and have been program chair for more. I regret to say that your perception of conferences is correct. The only thing I’m surprised at is that Sagan would say otherwise. Could you quote it exactly? I don’t remember throwing my copy of that book across the room.
At the major conference I’m involved with we have program committee members check all slides (for which there are strict guidelines) and make sure they are readable. However we can’t do anything about boring speakers, and there are lots of them. Speakers with flair are rare and sought after. And we spend a lot of thought on the food also.
None of this has anything to do with science, though. The most boring speaker may be saying something brilliant, and the best speaker may be full of hot air. I’ve never read it, but my understanding is that Lord Keynes couldn’t write worth a damn, and Paul Samuelson became famous producing readable versions of Keynes’ work. That doesn’t devalue the work at all.
Seminars, a lot of which are practice for students, are even worse. But you are judging the book of science by its presentation cover.
[quote]
You base your view of science on a question posed by a confessed amateur? If I based my view of Christianity on Jack Chick, I’m sure you’d tell me to move my magnifying glass.
But you haven’t yet told me what to talk about. Please, read my previous posts again – I have asked you many reasonable questions which you have not yet engaged.
Put yourself in my position. Here I am hearing someone tell me that the reason they disagree with my OP’s bullet points is, in part, because one famous scientist exaggerated the excitement of conferences. Could you understand if I felt that you were avoiding the real meat of the philosophies of science and/or materialism and concentrating only on trivia and thought that this constituted a strong selection bias which led you to ignore arguments which threatened to undermine your theistic worldview?
You are simply refusing to debate. Please quote a ludicrous statement and we can explore it. Again, it sounds like you’re scared I might actually justify it reasonably.
In fact, Dawkins repeatedly explores behaviours which might well not be “useful” in any sense. (Ironically, he considers aspects of religion to be destructive memes similar to biological pathogens.) When I feel you are misrepresenting him I simply must call you on it.
I’m saying that this “universal theory” is a strawman of your own making, and attempting to help you dismantle it in favour of what Dawkins, and probably myeslf*, really say.
OK, that’s a good start: Let us explore whether religion as a phenomenon might be explained scientifically.
The universe is roughly 13.7 billion years old. Earth is around 5 billion. Life on Earth, in the form of simple bacteria, is around 4 billion. Complex multicellular life is less than a billion years old, mammals a couple of hundred million, primates a few tens of millions. The Last Common Ancestor between humans and apes lived around 8 million years ago, Australopithecus a few million, and other hominids appeared since then culminating in Homo sapiens a few hundred thousand years ago. If you question this, we’ll have to start a separate thread. I would hope that we can agree that modern humans required no divine
interference to evolve from similar, earlier hominids.
Somewhere in that sequence, the first individual hypothesised gods and/or afterlives. If we agree that humans evolved naturally, we can explore whether a particular human hypothesis - namely, that there is a “person” who causes phenomena that cannot be explained - could, repeat could (not did, just could) have arisen naturally.
How’s that for a start? I’m not seeking to provide a perfectly convincing answer in one post (or indeed at all, since the perfect is the enemy of the good), I’m just seeking to establish the kind of exploration you’d be willing to undertake. mswas, you appear to be talking about the history of science rather than science itself. The reason why many elements of ancient philosophy is rejected by science is because it either cannot be tested even in principle or, more commonly, it did have testable consequences and those tests were utterly failed. One can understand why people thought the Earth stayed fixed (and thus why it says so explicitly in the Bible numerous times), while still dismissing it as a hypothesis like every educated person does today.
[quote]
You base your view of science on a question posed by a confessed amateur? If I based my view of Christianity on Jack Chick, I’m sure you’d tell me to move my magnifying glass.
But you haven’t yet told me what to talk about. Please, read my previous posts again – I have asked you many reasonable questions which you have not yet engaged.
Put yourself in my position. Here I am hearing someone tell me that the reason they disagree with my OP’s bullet points is, in part, because one famous scientist exaggerated the excitement of conferences. Could you understand if I felt that you were avoiding the real meat of the philosophies of science and/or materialism and concentrating only on trivia and thought that this constituted a strong selection bias which led you to ignore arguments which threatened to undermine your theistic worldview?
You are simply refusing to debate. Please quote a ludicrous statement and we can explore it. Again, it sounds like you’re scared I might actually justify it reasonably.
In fact, Dawkins repeatedly explores behaviours which might well not be “useful” in any sense. (Ironically, he considers aspects of religion to be destructive memes similar to biological pathogens.) When I feel you are misrepresenting him I simply must call you on it.
I’m saying that this “universal theory” is a strawman of your own making, and attempting to help you dismantle it in favour of what Dawkins, and probably myself*, really say.
OK, that’s a good start: Let us explore whether religion as a phenomenon might be explained scientifically.
The universe is roughly 13.7 billion years old. Earth is around 5 billion. Life on Earth, in the form of simple bacteria, is around 4 billion. Complex multicellular life is less than a billion years old, mammals a couple of hundred million, primates a few tens of millions. The Last Common Ancestor between humans and apes lived around 8 million years ago, Australopithecus a few million, and other hominids appeared since then culminating in Homo sapiens a few hundred thousand years ago. If you question this, we’ll have to start a separate thread. I would hope that we can agree that modern humans required no divine interference to evolve from similar, earlier hominids, which in turn required nothing but small genetic mutations over millions of years to evolve from mammals, tetrapods, fish and so on.
Somewhere in that sequence, the first individual hypothesised gods and/or afterlives. If we agree that humans evolved naturally, we can explore whether two particular human hypotheses - namely, that there is a “person” who causes phenomena that cannot be explained, and that one somehow lives on after death - could, repeat could (not did, just could) have arisen naturally. We could then explore whether such hypotheses could fare well in the Darwinian battle of hypotheses (and the behaviours such beliefs might cause) such that “religion” eventually emerged naturally.
How’s that for a start? I’m not seeking to provide a perfectly convincing answer in one post (or indeed at all, since the perfect is the enemy of the good), I’m just seeking to establish the kind of exploration you’d be willing to undertake. mswas, you appear to be talking about the history of science rather than science itself. The reason why many elements of ancient philosophy is rejected by science is because it either cannot be tested even in principle or, more commonly, it did have testable consequences and those tests were utterly failed. One can understand why people thought the Earth stayed fixed (and thus why it says so explicitly in the Bible numerous times), while still dismissing it as a hypothesis like every educated person does today.
Sentient Meat, you left a backslash off a /quote; that’s why your post didn’t show up. This is your post reposted outside of the quote function, so the italics work :
You base your view of science on a question posed by a confessed amateur? If I based my view of Christianity on Jack Chick, I’m sure you’d tell me to move my magnifying glass.
But you haven’t yet told me what to talk about. Please, read my previous posts again – I have asked you many reasonable questions which you have not yet engaged.
Put yourself in my position. Here I am hearing someone tell me that the reason they disagree with my OP’s bullet points is, in part, because one famous scientist exaggerated the excitement of conferences. Could you understand if I felt that you were avoiding the real meat of the philosophies of science and/or materialism and concentrating only on trivia and thought that this constituted a strong selection bias which led you to ignore arguments which threatened to undermine your theistic worldview?
You are simply refusing to debate. Please quote a ludicrous statement and we can explore it. Again, it sounds like you’re scared I might actually justify it reasonably.
In fact, Dawkins repeatedly explores behaviours which might well not be “useful” in any sense. (Ironically, he considers aspects of religion to be destructive memes similar to biological pathogens.) When I feel you are misrepresenting him I simply must call you on it.
I’m saying that this “universal theory” is a strawman of your own making, and attempting to help you dismantle it in favour of what Dawkins, and probably myself*, really say.
OK, that’s a good start: Let us explore whether religion as a phenomenon might be explained scientifically.
The universe is roughly 13.7 billion years old. Earth is around 5 billion. Life on Earth, in the form of simple bacteria, is around 4 billion. Complex multicellular life is less than a billion years old, mammals a couple of hundred million, primates a few tens of millions. The Last Common Ancestor between humans and apes lived around 8 million years ago, Australopithecus a few million, and other hominids appeared since then culminating in Homo sapiens a few hundred thousand years ago. If you question this, we’ll have to start a separate thread. I would hope that we can agree that modern humans required no divine interference to evolve from similar, earlier hominids, which in turn required nothing but small genetic mutations over millions of years to evolve from mammals, tetrapods, fish and so on.
Somewhere in that sequence, the first individual hypothesised gods and/or afterlives. If we agree that humans evolved naturally, we can explore whether two particular human hypotheses - namely, that there is a “person” who causes phenomena that cannot be explained, and that one somehow lives on after death - could, repeat could (not did, just could) have arisen naturally. We could then explore whether such hypotheses could fare well in the Darwinian battle of hypotheses (and the behaviours such beliefs might cause) such that “religion” eventually emerged naturally.
How’s that for a start? I’m not seeking to provide a perfectly convincing answer in one post (or indeed at all, since the perfect is the enemy of the good), I’m just seeking to establish the kind of exploration you’d be willing to undertake. mswas, you appear to be talking about the history of science rather than science itself. The reason why many elements of ancient philosophy is rejected by science is because it either cannot be tested even in principle or, more commonly, it did have testable consequences and those tests were utterly failed. One can understand why people thought the Earth stayed fixed (and thus why it says so explicitly in the Bible numerous times), while still dismissing it as a hypothesis like every educated person does today.
You base your view of science on a question posed by a confessed amateur? If I based my view of Christianity on someone like Jack Chick, I’m sure you’d tell me to move my magnifying glass.
But you haven’t yet told me what to talk about. Please, read my previous posts again – I have asked you many reasonable questions which you have not yet engaged.
Put yourself in my position. Here I am hearing someone tell me that the reason they disagree with my OP’s bullet points is, in part, because one famous scientist exaggerated the excitement of conferences. Could you understand if I felt that you were avoiding the real meat of the philosophies of science and/or materialism and concentrating only on trivia and thought that this constituted a strong selection bias which led you to ignore arguments which threatened to undermine your theistic worldview?
You are simply refusing to debate. Please quote a ludicrous statement and we can explore it. Again, it sounds like you’re scared I might actually justify it reasonably.
In fact, Dawkins repeatedly explores behaviours which might well not be “useful” in any sense. (Ironically, he considers aspects of religion to be destructive memes similar to biological pathogens.) When I feel you are misrepresenting him I simply must call you on it.
I’m saying that this “universal theory” is a strawman of your own making, and attempting to help you dismantle it in favour of what Dawkins, and probably myself, really say.
OK, that’s a good start: Let us explore whether religion as a phenomenon might be explained scientifically.
The universe is roughly 13.7 billion years old. Earth is around 5 billion. Life on Earth, in the form of simple bacteria, is around 4 billion. Complex multicellular life is less than a billion years old, mammals a couple of hundred million, primates a few tens of millions. The Last Common Ancestor between humans and apes lived around 8 million years ago, Australopithecus a few million, and other hominids appeared since then culminating in Homo sapiens a few hundred thousand years ago. If you question this, we’ll have to start a separate thread. I would hope that we can agree that modern humans required no divine interference to evolve from similar, earlier hominids, which in turn required nothing but small genetic mutations over millions of years to evolve from mammals, tetrapods, fish and so on.
Somewhere in that sequence, the first individual hypothesised gods and/or afterlives. If we agree that humans evolved naturally, we can explore whether two particular human hypotheses - namely, that there is a “person” who causes phenomena that cannot be explained, and that one somehow lives on after death - could, repeat could (not did, just could) have arisen naturally. We could then explore whether such hypotheses could fare well in the Darwinian battle of hypotheses (and the behaviours such beliefs might cause) such that “religion” eventually emerged naturally.
How’s that for a start? I’m not seeking to provide a perfectly convincing answer in one post (or indeed at all, since the perfect is the enemy of the good), I’m just seeking to establish the kind of exploration you’d be willing to undertake. mswas, you appear to be talking about the history of science rather than science itself. The reason why many elements of ancient philosophy is rejected by science is because it either cannot be tested even in principle or, more commonly, it did have testable consequences and those tests were utterly failed. One can understand why people thought the Earth stayed fixed (and thus why it says so explicitly in the Bible numerous times), while still dismissing it as a hypothesis like every educated person does today.
I am not talking about the Geocentric theory. I am talking about other things that are a bit deeper. The issue here is you want to study religion through a scientific lens, so at a certain point you’re going to have to validate an idea long enough to test it.
I still don’t understand your use of the word “validate”, since I’ve already expressed numerous times that many theistic philosophies are not logically inconsistent, merely that I do not accept their initial axioms (since if I did, I would be a theist!). I repeat, I and science generally is open to any testable claims. The trouble with much of what you’re talking about is that it is untestable or has already failed key tests. And don’t downplay geocentrism as not being “deep” - that’s only how it seems to you in the 21st century. It is probably the single most divisive issue of religion’s conflict with science in history.
I think he wants you to accept it into your heart and develop absolute blind faith in it. And then, you know, once you’re entirely hooked, then put it to the “test”.
I’ve seen several people use the strawman argument that modern scientists think the ancients were stupid because they were wrong. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many argued very effectively, but their arguments were based on faulty information. We are no doubt making similar mistakes today.
BTW, I don’t think the evolutionary basis of religion is a good example. Even if that were proven in some way, couldn’t god have inserted this into our genes to make us more willing to worship?
Yeah, but it’s gone back and forth. Heliocentrism smacked of Sun Worship. I think that’s more of what it was about than anything. The earliest monotheistic faiths were forms of Sun Worship. Science in a way is Sun Worship, all of our power comes from the Sun. We use metaphors for ‘light’, our cars are powered on bottled solar energy in the form of gasoline. The holy grail of energy is efficient solar.
What I am getting at is that we need to identify what is being described in order to test it. Most people dismiss certain concepts without actually knowing the precepts of the system, as I gave with the example of Acupuncture earlier.
As begbert’s post illustrates, there is a generalized hostility toward religious concepts. It is not accepting the premises as true in an absolute sense, but in accepting the system as internally valid in order to test it’s ideas on their own terms. Without accepting the overall cosmology, you can’t even know what is being described. Often you’ll think you know, but you don’t really. This is one of the biggest problems with studying religion. There are many religions, and they all have their own complex internal cosmologies, and yet they borrow from each other throughout history and have areas where they dovetail. Also, the method by which the traditions are passed on is through a system of concealed knowledge. Priesthoods hold the keys to the religions, there being higher levels of knowledge that change the way a prior set of knowledge was understood. The notion of ‘transcendence’, is about superseding earlier levels of knowledge. A Priest’s knowledge of theology supersedes that of the peasant, and that of the Pope or the Monk supersedes the knowledge of the low level clergy. Generally when people are speaking out against religion, they are speaking against low church beliefs, the beliefs that high church feels are vulgar.
That, and religion is more concerned with morality than it is with empirical physical integration.
The ancients weren’t ‘wrong’. That’s a meaningless statement. Sometimes they were wrong, as sometimes you are wrong. Sometimes they were right as sometimes you are right.
As to the evolutionary basis, I agree, God could have done it that way.
Amazing how you can call science “sun worship” right before claiming that we “dismiss certain concepts without actually knowing the precepts of the system”. Have you no shame at all?
And I have met precisely the attitude I described in real life several times; presented pretty much exactly, conceptually speaking, as I’ve presented it here. It was not an invention of hostility; it was real religion I’d been presented with, which I (incorretly, it seems) thought sounded like what you meant.
But instead…you’re really claiming that we can’t understand religion because it’s kept a secret? In this day and age? That’s…interesting. Which religion are you talking about again?
I will concede that religion is more about morality than being accurate in the things in real life that it chooses to expound upon.
Wrong in the context of a specific proposition, such as whether the sun rotates around the earth. And I’m sure some were stupid - but that writing hasn’t survived.
mswas, I still can’t see clearly where we disagree, if anywhere. Sometimes (indeed, usually) the ancients were wrong in what testable claims they made. Sometimes todays religions and philosophies are wrong when they make testable claims. If a religion or philosophy makes a testable claim (such as “the Earth remains fixed”, “twisting embedded needles is more effective than placebo” or whatever), one does not need to accept associated claims in order to test it.
And wrong in a sense because the didn’t really have the concept of testable claim. But no one calls Aristotle stupid because he was too lazy to invent the entire modern scientific methodology in his copious free time.
Yes, well that’s the knee-jerk reaction. That kind of reaction cannot study religion in a scientific manner. One has to accept the internal logic of the system in order to study it.
All religions. People spend their whole lives deciphering religious codes whether it’s Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism or a Mystical sect like Sufism. Do you think that the average Jew can illustrate the finer points of Qabbalism or that the average Buddhist can meditate for three days straight?
Great, now there is a point where we can establish a common understanding. We can know that we are talking about the same thing. The point of what I am trying to say is to ensure that we aren’t talking past each other, because the same words mean different things in their relative contexts. There is an illusion of speaking the same language because we are both using English, but in fact, it’s not the same language. The Neurolinguistic assumptions that underlie the various cosmologies are not the same. So to study a religion, you have to treat it like learning a language, you have to learn it’s internal rules if you want to study it and transpose what you glean into your own cosmology.