[mycroft]

And to think I thought I was going to get flamed.
Now I know why The Water Cooler is my level.
Thank you all.

Mike: Did you never play in the gutter of a street after a snowmelt/rainstorm, and build dams to try to stop the water from getting into the drain, or otherwise retrain gravity? Did you not try something, see it sort of worked, but could work better if..., tried that, saw what happened, continued? And is that not the nature of the Scientist/Tinkerer/Engineer? Is not the primary question of the Scientist "What if?"

Also, I was going to keep vagueish my actual affiliation, but in order to answer your "how do I reconcile" issues, the Moderator I was talking about (who makes my "heresies" seem well within bounds) is The Very Rev. Bill Phipps. You can see...

As for obviating thought - where did I ever say that? I said what I believe, what I have believed for years, what I have thought about, and tinkered with, and discussed with others, and argued with others, and reinterpreted, and... Unthinking allegiance to *anything* is abhorrent to me, and when I catch myself doing it, I think. When I catch someone else doing it, I scream (inside). Sometimes I tilt at windmills, and say something. But the number of people who have such unthinking allegiances (carefully fostered, no doubt) who are even willing to question that allegiance is small.

There are simply some things that Science can not truly, completely, 100% accurately and without possible contradiction say. Do they affect my life? No. Is it an interesting exercise in theorizing? Sure. Is investigation to get that fourth or fifth 9 on the probability a waste of time? Of course not.

You are blunt in your arguments, and they could have been smoothed a bit - one expects that is the rigour of your own training coming out. But no, I read in them no malice or attack. Thank you for making sure I knew, however.

Helene: There are many for whom Science is the New Religion; those who say that evolution is "right" because it's the current theory of Science and ID is "wrong" because Science says so - as opposed to saying that ID is not Science, and not scientifically useful, and evolutionary theory answers the current questions, and predicts successfully in future, and therefore is scientifically useful - are inductees in the New Religion. Also those who say "Science says this, so it must be true" without being willing to do the research to make up their own mind if, in the instant case, "Science" is right and valid.

Case in point: Science said Vioxx was safe. Evidence has shown that it is not. That's okay, new evidence that invalidates theories comes up all the time. It turned out that investigation has shown that the science used to make that Science was bad science, however, and should not be Science. But either way, Science was wrong. Science is wrong - at least in some things. Anyone who does not accept that - that does not continually look upon the teachings of Science with doubt, and check the formulation to ensure that it is Good Science, and eternally check theories with the new evidence as it emerges - is not a scientist, he is a believer (or a charlatan).

There are also those (as has been since the year dot) for whom Money is the New Religion; and there seems to be a many who are trying to re-establish the personality cults of the past, or for whom their country is the new God.

Humans make gods; if they don't have one, they look for one. Truly it is the exceptional who can honestly live without religion of some sort. In modern times, where what can be learned in one lifetime by any one person is only a tiny fraction of what is known, it becomes yet more difficult to avoid ascribing religious "truth" to *something*.

Ed: Good way to needle me, picking That Writer for your quotes. I'm sure not on purpose - but let's just say that in my opinion his juveniles make good reading :-), and every once in a while I pull out his sermon with a plot attached, and see if I still think it rests on sand (which doesn't mean that I don't respect his intellectual integrity - that movie, augh, that movie!). All I can say is that equating "rational" with "true" is equally a statement of faith, and see where that gets me.

Oh, of course, if I truly wished to live my life simply on what was rational for me, it would be long, boring, and bear a lot more resemblance to Adam Wildavsky than it currently does. And even that is a faith.

Michael.
P.S. (now that you've got me thinking of Silver Age SF writers) I would have approved more of the Struldbrug Club method of raising the age of WBF Senior rather than the current "you guys were in one year at a time, you guys will be in one year at a time, you guys are stuck at 'almost senior' for 5 years while we fix things." But who listens to me? mdf

[mycroft]

Oh, Mike, one more thing:

"moderate" religious p.o.v.? You must be Canadian. Even I admit that I am on the nutty, liberal (but not Liberal), way out on the moonbat (great word - for whoever brought that one up vs. wingnut, thanks!) fringe, lucky-not-to-be-lynched-in-Alberta end of the spectrum. Imagine what traditional "conservative Christians" think of me.

Of course, I happen to think that I'm right, as well. I also happen to think that, espousing my views as I do, I don't do enough to practise what I believe.

I'm working on that.

Michael.

[mikeh]

mycroft, on Nov 22 2007, 06:28 PM, said:

And to think I thought I was going to get flamed.
Now I know why The Water Cooler is my level.
Thank you all.

Mike: Did you never play in the gutter of a street after a snowmelt/rainstorm, and build dams to try to stop the water from getting into the drain, or otherwise retrain gravity?  Did you not try something, see it sort of worked, but could work better if..., tried that, saw what happened, continued?  And is that not the nature of the Scientist/Tinkerer/Engineer?  Is not the primary question of the Scientist "What if?"

Michael:

I love this topic, perhaps too much

It just seems to me that to believe in a god (of the ilk required by all organized religions of which I am aware) requires wilful blindness to so many factors.

These include, if we confine our concerns to your experimenter type god:

1. Is he 'our' god or are there other beings out there who also worship him?

2. If we have souls, how do we reconcile that with evolution? When and why did he confer a soul on the first being to have one? Did he await homo sapiens? What about the neanderthals? Homo Erectus? And so on, not to mention my two dogs, who definitely have personalities, so why not souls? I have never read of any rationalization (let alone plausible explanation) of when souls appeared in the evolutionary scheme.

3. Since we are contingent and remarkably improbable consequences of evolution (random chance winnowed by natural selection) it seems that god got really lucky that we developed as we did. We cannot even rationally argue (I mean, beyond the confidence level of speculation) that self-aware intelligence was inevitable, let alone that it would resemble us.

4. Given the size and age of the universe, what prompted him to meddle when and where he did 2000 years ago?

There are many many other problems with the god hypothesis.

Personally, I find the concept of the universe as I imagine it to be to be breathtakingly beautiful, with no need of a god. I regret that we live for such a short time, and that we lack the ability to know and experience more of the universe, but the glimpses we are afforded fill me with awe that needs no god as an explanation or justification.

Personally, I find the very concept of a god who expects any form of worship or explicit acknowledgement to diminish my sense of wonder, not to enhance it.

I stress that, despite the bluntness of my language, I have respect for those who are comfortable (or uncomfortable but persist) with faith so long as they acknowledge that there is a real difference between faith and knowledge, and that they are prepared to narrow the scope of the former when the field of the latter expands.

If all goes well for homo sapiens or our successor species then maybe the field of knowledge will finally squeeze out the areas of unknowledge in which faith exists. I realize that for some that would be threatening, and I feel sorry for such. In the meantime, the limits of our (ever-expanding) realms or knowledge leave open areas in which faith can rationally dwell, and I enjoy debating with those who feel that such areas will always persist. I may be convinced that they are mistaken, but I would be as opposed to eradicating the concept of religion from our schools as I am to allowing it to be taught as science. I only add the caveat that I would want to see atheism taught as a logical and sensible alternative to belief.

As a bit of a digression, your argument that 'science' knew that Vioxx was safe is erroneous. What 'science' knew was that any drug will have an impact on the body. What 'science' led to was testing. That testing, as I understand it, initially resulted in data suggesting that the risks of serious side effects was acceptably low... not zero. Further experience with the drug resulted in additional data, which 'science' interpreted as requiring a reassessment. The manufacturer is now alleged, as I understand the allegations, to have known about some of this new data for quite some time. Science didn't fail in the vioxx case: humans did.

[Winstonm]

Mike and Mycroft,

I am enjoying eavesdropping on your discussion and hope it is not too bold to add another perspective?

I appears to me the difficulty with evolutionary theory for Christian beliefs is due to the concept of original sin. The conflicts stem from this need for atonement. The continuity of life strikes at the heart of those beliefs but does not similarly effect a broad spiritutal belief.

In purely spiritual thinking, there is no need for this conflict as a higher power - or superior intelligence if you rather - is simply there to be accessed if one so wishes.
Someone else wrote that "From nothing comes nothing." In this sense, everything that is could be considered to be part of an original something, and hence there is no need to atone for being a part of this whole - it is only when an organism evolves to the point of complexity where a need arises that the organism turns to the greater part of itself for guidance. It could be compared to walking mindlessly on a stairmaster - the legs need little input from the brain to repeat this mindless task - but when it comes time to stop excercising and interact with others, the brain is then fully engaged.

So in this sense you might say that everything has a soul - or is a part of - but it is irrelevant to lower life forms. Thus, it could be argued that there was no point in time that soul was injected, rather soul was and has always been.

[barmar]

No scientist would say "If it's not testable, it's wrong." What thay say is "If it's not testable, it's not SCIENCE."

I just started reading The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin. In the introduction he gives a good description of scientific theories:

Quote

In science, for a theory to be believed, it must make a new prediction -- different from those made by previous theories -- for an experiment not yet done.  For the experiment to be meaningful, we must be able to get an answer that disagrees with that prediction.  When this is the case, we say that a theory is falsifiable -- vulnerable to being shown false.  The theory also has to be confirmable; it must be possible to verify a new prediction that only this theory makes.  Only when a theory has been tested and the results agree with the theory do we advance the theory to the ranks of true theories.

So when considering ID or Creationism as possible theories, how do they fit this definition? What predictions do they make that differ from those of evolution by natural selection? What experiments could be done to determine whether evolution or ID is the truth? AFAIK, ID proponents don't have an answer to this; they simply say "Evolution doesn't seem adequate to explain {the eye, the flagellum, AMP synthesis}, so it must be ID." When real scientists encounter something that's hard to explain through evolution, they just admit "we don't know yet, but we're not giving up and assuming it's supernatural." And often by looking and thinking harder they figure it out -- intermediate eyes and precursors to the flagellum have been found.

The reason ID proponents are so willing to give up is because their religious beliefs make them WANT there to be a supernatural explanation. They've assumed that God has created everything, and then use any little missing piece in the evolution theory as an excuse to put forth ID as the alternative. ID works as a solution because it doesn't really explain anything.

Believing in ID is like believing that a stage magician really has magical powers, simply because you can't figure out how he pulled off the trick.

[Codo]

mikeh, on Nov 23 2007, 10:03 AM, said:

It just seems to me that to believe in a god (of the ilk required by all organized religions of which I am aware) requires wilful blindness to so many factors.

Hi Mike et al,

I enjoyed this thread too, espcially the part between you and Michael.
As I hopefully "acknowledge that there is a real difference between faith and knowledge, and that ( I am) prepared to narrow the scope of the former when the field of the latter expands. " I try to answer some of your great questions.

Quote

1. Is he 'our' god or are there other beings out there who also worship him?

How should we know?
I think sometimes that we are a little bid like intelligent fishs who swim in their own aquarium. From time to time they see "the hand" comming into the bowl. "The hand" let it rain food from heaven- every day. Sometimes "the hand" catches one of us for reasons we do not understand. Sometimes these fellow fishs return, sometimes not. There stories about what they had seen outside our fish bowl are scary and unbelievable.

Now if you and me are fishs in a fish bowl. How can we judge about the hand? How can we know that this hand is just part of a person and that there are millions of them outside?
We simply don´t know, we just have our faith that "the hand" is our allmighty god. He can do anything. But he not always does.

Maybe our fish science will help us to develop lenses to look clearer outside of our bowl. So now we see that "the hand" is part of "a person". We develop a new picture of our god. He is not any more "the hand" he is now "Paul". And we can see that our science helps us to have a better picture of our god then before.
We still know nothing about the planet, about anything in his world. But it still helped us for a better understanding of "our small world" andf gave us even a little insight in his "outside" world.

Quote

2. If we have souls, how do we reconcile that with evolution? When and why did he confer a soul on the first being to have one? Did he await homo sapiens? What about the neanderthals? Homo Erectus? And so on, not to mention my two dogs, who definitely have personalities, so why not souls? I have never read of any rationalization (let alone plausible explanation) of when souls appeared in the evolutionary scheme.

Maybe there is even a scientific evidence for a soul: In physics we have the law that nothing- no mass and no energy- will ever get lost. They may change to something different, but it cannot disapear. So, when you are dying, your life seems to disappear. But this is impossible, nothing can disappear. So maybe every living plant or animal has a soul?
Or maybe god in his endless wisdom decided that we are now grown up enough to have a soul on the 12. of November on a rainy day some 4.456 years ago?

Quote

3. Since we are contingent and remarkably improbable consequences of evolution (random chance winnowed by natural selection) it seems that god got really lucky that we developed as we did. We cannot even rationally argue (I mean, beyond the confidence level of speculation) that self-aware intelligence was inevitable, let alone that it would resemble us.

Maybe you get lucky when you find the singleton king behind the ace because you havd been able to play better and count the hand out? Or because you looked into the cards? Or dealt the deck yourself? It is the same thing with god: His abilities are much higher then the abilities of us mortals. So maybe it was not just luck, but skill. And maybe we are just fish in the fish bowl and he left us alone for a period and was realy lucky that we developed. Or maybe he was really unlucky because he expected an intelligent nice, beautyful and warm species?

Quote

4. Given the size and age of the universe, what prompted him to meddle when and where he did 2000 years ago?

Maybe he was scheduled to look after the fish bowl? Or he was just curious to see what had happened sinces he creates the aquarium? Maybe he knew it was time to look after us?


I really enjoy to talk to atheists like you or Gerben who give "the other side" some room to life.
I see the possibility that god was just an invention to explain the world and that science may "narrow the range" of the faith.

But I prefer to believe in god. It is just nicer then to believe that we are alone and that my life will be finished in some mintues/years/decades...

And besides that I am quite sure that even the exploding science we have, will never be able to explain everything. There will be grey areas even besides Heisenberg.

[helene_t]

Hi Michael, Mike and Roland, what a nice civilized discussion, how silly of me to think that the only thing that could come out of this topic would be flame wars

I was brought up with Marxism, which I see as the ultimate way of turning science (well, "science") into a religion. While I struggled, during my late teens, to get rid of the remains of Marxism in my self, I felt quite sympathetic towards Christianity, which seemed (at that place, at that time) to provide a belief system able to separate moral and spirituality from science. Now I have grown older and the Berlin Wall has fallen so that aspect does not apply for me personally anymore, at least it does not feel as strongly now. Yet when I read what Michael and Roland write it reminds me of a way of thinking that allows one not to search for answers to scientific questions in religion, and not to search for answers to religious questions in science.

(Of course, science can often provide insight that is relevant to moral discussions, and some scientists (Niels Bohr) attribute the intuition that helps them as scientists to spirituality. But neither provide ultimate answers for the other).

[Gerben42]

Quote

And besides that I am quite sure that even the exploding science we have, will never be able to explain everything. There will be grey areas even besides Heisenberg.

I think so too, simply because of the complexity of problems. If you want to explain why bananas are yellow, it won't help you too much if you start out with quantum physics even if you did have the "theory of everything".

I'd like to quote Douglas Adams here:

Quote

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

[han]

Indeed, very enjoyable read so far, how unusual for a discussion on this topic. Michael, would you mind saying what kind of scientist you are?

[mycroft]

Was a chemistry intern for a few years (long enough to know I needed a degree that would give me a real job, rather than lab tech, and didn't feel like going full PhD to get one), am an Electrical Engineer, work as a sysadmin/crypto tech.

[nige1]

This is fun.

At school we were taught that explanations go through historical phases

• Religious, based on superstition and magic.
  
• Philosphical: based on logic and "common sense"
  
• Scientific: theories based on as few hypotheses as possible (Occam's razor) --
  refined by observation and experiment (the Scientific method)-- assymptotically approaching a valid model of reality.

Examples...
Thunder - Anger of the Gods - Clouds bangiing together - After-effect of lightning.
Burning - Acceptance by Gods - Giving up phlogiston - Exothermic oxidation
Creationism - Lamarkism - Darwinism.

Arguably, String theory is not Physics because so far it is unverifiable. It is merely Natural Philosophy - the old name for that discipline.

Fanatical Religion and Patriotism, between them, are responsible for most of the ills of the world. Conversely, a frozen view of "Science" can become a religion for some people.

Nevertheless, Religion and Science are compatible. Mendel was a Catholic priest and Experimental scientist "The father of modern Genetics" - no less

I'm a Roman Catholic because if a Christian God exists, then it behooves us to act accordingly; if not, then what does one more delusion matter, in a world of illusion? As a Pascal Pensée puts it "If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing." Occam would not approve And The Spaghetti Monster may claim discrimination

[PassedOut]

nige1, on Dec 5 2007, 06:42 AM, said:

I'm a Roman Catholic because if a Christian God exists, then it behooves us to act accordingly;

People say this, I know, but can one actually believe a particular religion on this basis?

[helene_t]

PassedOut, on Dec 5 2007, 02:21 PM, said:

nige1, on Dec 5 2007, 06:42 AM, said:

I'm a Roman Catholic because if a Christian God exists, then it behooves us to act accordingly;

People say this, I know, but can one actually believe a particular religion on this basis?

That's what I find strange, too. In retrospect, I sometimes find myself believing in certain things on the basis of convenience, but at the moment I realize that my belief is based on convenience, I stop believing.

[nige1]

PassedOut, on Dec 5 2007, 07:21 AM, said:

nige1, on Dec 5 2007, 06:42 AM, said:

I'm a Roman Catholic because if a Christian God exists, then it behooves us to act accordingly;

People say this, I know, but can one actually believe a particular religion on this basis?

Thomas Aquinas would disagree but I don't think you can prove that God exists. Some religions have a verifiable history but if God's existence were verifiable, then belief in Him would be based on Science rather than an act of Faith. The blood of many martyrs, however, attests the strength of Religious belief.

[nige1]

helene_t, on Dec 5 2007, 07:29 AM, said:

That's what I find strange, too. In retrospect, I sometimes find myself believing in certain things on the basis of convenience, but at the moment I realize that my belief is based on convenience, I stop believing.

It's wishful thinking. It's like making assumptions at Bridge If, to make your contract, you need a player to hold certain cards, then you must place the other cards so that your reconstruction is consistent with the bidding and earlier play.

Similarly, if you hope that life has meaning and death is not the end of existence (especially if you are old and many of your relatives and friends are dead) then you may rationalize religious belief.

This conficts with Occam's (scientific) razor ...

William of Ockham, on 1285–1349, Attrib, said:

"entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem", or
"entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity".

but accords with popular superstition...

William Shakespeare, on Hamlet, Act I Scene v, said:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy

[PassedOut]

nige1, on Dec 5 2007, 08:15 AM, said:

It's wishful thinking. It's like making assumptions at Bridge If, to make your contract, you need a player to hold certain cards, then you must place the other cards so that your reconstruction is consistent with the bidding and earlier play.

Similarly, if you hope that life has meaning and death is not the end of existence (especially if you are old and many of your relatives and friends are dead) then you may rationalize religious belief.

True, we play our cards based on assumptions about the unseen cards in order to maximize our chances of achieving the goal at hand. But that differs from saying that we actually believe that the unseen cards lie as assumed.

Similarly, one can participate in all the rituals and ceremonies of a particular religion in hopes of gaining a promised after-life. But ceremonial participation is not quite the same as a firm belief in the specific claims of a religion.

nige1, on Dec 5 2007, 07:49 AM, said:

The blood of many martyrs, however, attests the strength of Religious belief.

Acts of martyrdom do indeed provide strong evidence of the beliefs of the martyrs. They don't, however, establish that the beliefs themselves were well-founded. Indeed, conflicting religions and philosophies put forward their respective martyrs.

[kenberg]

nige1, on Dec 5 2007, 06:42 AM, said:

Nevertheless, Religion and Science are compatible. Mendel was a Catholic priest and Experimental scientist "The father of modern Genetics" - no less

I'm a Roman Catholic because if a Christian God exists, then it behooves us to act accordingly; if not, then what does one more delusion matter, in a world of illusion? As a Pascal Pensée puts it "If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing." Occam would not approve And The Spaghetti Monster may claim discrimination

Folks have been focusing on the second of these two paragraphs, I would like to speak up for the first.

I am not religious but I have close friends who are. They are often at least as bright as I am and at least as sensible as I am.

I don't care much for the hedge your bets argument in the second paragraph and (I realize I don't know) I suspect it is not the real basis of your faith. That is, I can well imagine a person giving up on that argument but comfortably keeping his faith.


There are real conflicts: availability of abortion, stem cell research, things like that. Even there, a person's religious beliefs are not a completely reliable guide to his views on these matters. It's not crazy, or rare, for a non-religious person to have some doubts about the wisdom of some modern uses of technology.



However these other issues of intelligent design and such seem to me to stir up trouble where none need exist. There is no reason in the world why a scientist cannot believe that God is behind it all, nor does one have to have scientific training to develop skepticism, and it is a simple fact that many scientists have strong religious beliefs. A religious view of the world, as long as it does not require a six day creation period around 3000 or so BCE (I still prefer BC but I bow to modernity), absolutely need not be in conflict with science.

But of course the original post was about Pat Robertson. I see his outburst as doing us all a favor. The Intelligent Design folks were very good at presenting their case as " This is not about religion. Heavens no. We are just interested in seeing that science is taught right. How could anyone say we are advocating the teaching of religion in science class." It was all a scam, and Robertson's outburst made it crystal clear that it was a scam.

[luke warm]

PassedOut, on Dec 5 2007, 07:21 AM, said:

nige1, on Dec 5 2007, 06:42 AM, said:

I'm a Roman Catholic because if a Christian God exists, then it behooves us to act accordingly;

People say this, I know, but can one actually believe a particular religion on this basis?

no

[nige1]

luke warm, on Dec 5 2007, 06:14 PM, said:

PassedOut, on Dec 5 2007, 07:21 AM, said:

People say this, I know, but can one actually believe  a particular religion on this basis?

no

This life rarely affords a sound basis for belief. The towering edifice of Science rests on unproven foundations. For example,

• Occam's razor, at the heart of science.
  
• Most scientific models are Mathematical. Hence based on Set theory and Arithmetic (Gödel has shown that the latter is incomplete or its axioms are inconsistent)

Thus, although some seem to have complete faith in Science, IMO, (like Religion) current Scientific models are best treated as working hypotheses. Manifestly, Science has advantages: It is not only predictive but also evolutionary When an experiment fails, the Scientist can try to modify his theory to account for the anomaly

Similarly, IMO you should distrust blind Faith. When shown to be wrong, you should be able to change your views.

[Winstonm]

luke warm, on Dec 5 2007, 06:14 PM, said:

PassedOut, on Dec 5 2007, 07:21 AM, said:

nige1, on Dec 5 2007, 06:42 AM, said:

I'm a Roman Catholic because if a Christian God exists, then it behooves us to act accordingly;

People say this, I know, but can one actually believe a particular religion on this basis?

no

Yes. This action shows even more faith than that of a mustard seed - a seed cannot even say "if".