|
And then the other side says -- "This is all really cool. The spontaneous nature of things, the different laws of the universe, isn't nature great -- and God wasn't involved at all, nature just happened."
The scientists I've been rubbing shoulders with don't try to go back past when everything was set in motion, and happily admit they have nothing other than an array of plausible theories to even go back that far. Maybe you could direct me toward such sources, where people say nature just happened.
And to turn the tables: what made God, Mr. Rimmer?
I was actually going to post saying that it was good to see you still around as well.
1st part -- I don't really know if that's really what scientists say. It just seems to me a lot of "random" things that seem to just "happen". Maybe they don't say that nature just happened, but then it seems like if nature didn't "just happen" then something must have directed it. But as you say, maybe they just don't go back that far in their thinking.
The subject is interesting to me. ZombieNeighbors said something like that he wouldn't want to be in my shoes with my line of thinking. Here's my line of thinking. We have boiled this whole "origin" thing (at least in theory) to RNA/DNA strands that self-replicate and that this is what many people feel could have been the start of life as we know it. There are a number of things that I find fascinating. First, it doesn't appear that we can find evidence that RNA is naturally forming outside a "creature" -- kind of a "which came first? The chicken or the egg?" thought. Not that it really matters in the long run. The other thing that is really interesting is that we have some kind of "soup" from which it is entirely possible that "life" came from. But see, that's not good enough. So what if it's "life"? That wouldn't have meant anything on its own. No, this "life" immediately had the ability to self-replicate. For absolutely no reason. There are no natural predators. There is no Darwinian situation going on. Yet this strand is genetically designed, right from the beginning to duplicate itself. That is amazing. But it doesn't stop there. Because I was thinking, "what about the vast amount of variation with RNA/DNA with all the species that we even know about today -- something has to account for this." ZombieNeighbors said that the RNA strands are basically designed to duplicate with mutations and modifications in mind. They were made to evolve. That is fascinating.
And there are people who still don't see a grand designer. I think that it's neat being in my shoes. ;-)
2nd part -- this seems to be coming up more recently. At least two other people have asked this the past month. Which seems interesting to me. I'm sure that many people would say that "people" created God if for no other reason than to explain things. I think that the majority of Christians believe that God always was -- that he had no "start" and therefore nothing created him. At least that's how I understand things.
The reason the question of who created God comes up so often is that it's the straightforward refutation to three (or four depending on how you want to count) of Aquinas's proofs. And most nonbelievers have heard those proofs roughly the same number of times we've told a believer that we're nonbelievers. :)
The most common one is the argument from first cause. Every cause has an effect. So what caused everything to be? Well, God!
The problem, of course, being that if everything requires a cause, then so does God. So who caused God to be?
The believer responds no, no, no, God has always been and is without cause.
To which the nonbeliever then replies that the believer has just rejected the central premise of his own argument. If God does not require a cause, then everything does not in fact require a cause. So the argument fails. (Sometimes this also includes a discussion about parsimony and whether or not its meaningful to consider the Big Bang as having a cause.)
Then the believer sometimes (many give up at this point) claims that God is a special exception because, well, he's God. Which is a special pleading and we're back up to the past few paragraphs again.
Aquinas made structurally identical claims based upon motion, necessity and contingency, and one other that I'm forgetting because it's been a decade since I last heard it. The fifth is the argument from design, which is similar but not quite identical.
|
Moff,
I think the question keeps getting asked as the common claim of Intelligent Design proponents boils down to "This is too complex to have evolved, it must have had a Designer". The counter question becomes, "So what designed the Designer?" As you have never advocated that sort of reasoning, I think you'd be better off ignoring that question. It's a response to pseudoscience rather than a serious inquiry.
EDIT: As to the RNA thing, two things to remember: In the current environment, there isn't a lot of spare organic molecules out there. All the organisms have already used it up. And just because I can't remember hearing about it, really shouldn't be taken as any sort of evidence that it didn't happen. I haven't been involved in microbiology for over a decade.
There are a number of things that I find fascinating. First, it doesn't appear that we can find evidence that RNA is naturally forming outside a "creature".
This is partially true. There is, in fact, evidence [which was just bolstered by that article I originally posted] that RNA can be formed in the absence of any biological machinery. However, as you correctly pointed out, there is no evidence that, nowadays, any such process is happening (at least that I know of). There are two good reasons for this:
a) Conditions on earth nowadays are vastly different from earth on its beggining. There is some evidence, for instance, that our atmosphere had much less oxygen before life emerged, which would be crucial to the long-term stability of RNA chains before they had a "protective coating" (i.e. membrane). Note that this is only of one of the differences, but I would not want to bore people to death.
b) There were no self-replicating biological entities to compete for the molecules needed for RNA formation. Hence RNA only competed with itself. It would be reasonable to assume that these precursor molecules would be more abundant in that time (at least in a free, available state), than nowadays, thus allowing RNA to form. Today, to obtain these molecules, we have to eat :)
So what if it's "life"? That wouldn't have meant anything on its own. No, this "life" immediately had the ability to self-replicate. For absolutely no reason.
Well, not for no reason. The molecular mechanism for RNA self-replication occurs by the same laws all other chemical processes follow, and can be understood by the same tools (chemical theory). Different chemical structures confer different abilities for substances. For instance, acids "burn", RNAs "self-replicate", and glue, well, "glues". There is no reason to single out self-replication as having no reason.
There are no natural predators. There is no Darwinian situation going on.
It is true that in ths hypothesized RNA world of ours there are no natural predators, unless, of course, a given replicative RNA strand also has the "ability" to disassemble otherstrands for its tasty ribonucleotides. Even if we discard this possibility, the quantity of ribonucleotides was not infinite, implying that, at some point, strands which, for instance, replicated faster, would have an advantage. At that point, Darwinian selection kicks in.
Yet this strand is genetically designed, right from the beginning to duplicate itself
This is an interesting point that becomes clear with a thoguth experiment. Let us assume that the ribonucleotides are already there (our soup). The four kinds of RNA ribonucleotides will, slowly, start to assemble (we already know that this process happens), forming chains with approximately aleatory ordering. If only one of the gazzilion possible ribonucleotide sequences that were formed has the chemical capability to self-replicate, it will start to do just that. In the end it will surpass in quantity all the non-self-replicating ones, since its production is not aleatory anymore, but guided by an advantage. There is no design in it.
I hope that it didn't read like gibberish, Moff. I can be somewhat obscure sometimes :)
This is an interesting point that becomes clear with a thoguth experiment.
Good explanations, but your typo really caught my eye.
The Thoguth Experiment.
I'm gonna use that.
This is an interesting point that becomes clear with a thoguth experiment.Good explanations, but your typo really caught my eye.
The Thoguth Experiment.
I'm gonna use that.
lol, I was going to correct it, but I'd better leave it this way as reference. It resembles a mad wizard's dabbling with the occult. And a "Big Bang Theory" episode title.
I was actually going to post saying that it was good to see you still around as well.
This is a truly awesome thread.
And how.
And throughout its history everybody has kept their cool.
|
For the most part yeah everyone has. I know I said way way way back in the thread that I didn't think people could remain civil in a religious discussion, I am very happy to be have proven wrong.
(time and again about certian issues ;p)
Although I retain my beliefs in God, I may have modified them somewhat concerning evolution and other things, I have Kirth, Paul, and the other scientific minded folks who have taken the time to explain their feilds to me. I hope that the other side of the feild has learned a little from guys like Moff and Digitalelf as well. I will probably still lurk now and then but I'm afraid the conversation has risen "above my pay grade" so to speak so I wont be posting much for fear of looking a bigger fool than I did in the begining.
Kirk M Moore
This is an interesting point that becomes clear with a thoguth experiment.
Sounds like an experiment that Cthulhu would do. Maybe he's the intelligent designer.
Sounds like an experiment that Cthulhu would do. Maybe he's the intelligent designer.
Which would make HP Lovecraft the Dembski or Johnson of Intelligent Design. That's a pretty good fit except for Lovecraft having talent.
I was actually going to post saying that it was good to see you still around as well.
1st part -- I don't really know if that's really what scientists say. It just seems to me a lot of "random" things that seem to just "happen". Maybe they don't say that nature just happened, but then it seems like if nature didn't "just happen" then something must have directed it. But as you say, maybe they just don't go back that far in their thinking.
Physics really only have models to describe the universe up until planck epoch 1. We cant even begin to understand what happened between planck time 0 and planck time 1, let alone before that.
Now, some people might have idea's but frankly trying to understand what happened at that point is currently little more than guess work in which our brains arn't even able to really conceive of the concepts involved.But we do know some things about the universe which and events after planck time 1 that shed some light on why things didn't 'just happen.'
Many worlds hypothesis which by my understanding came out of string theory, is not proven, but it is consistent with known facts and models about quantum physics.
Many worlds hypothesis posits that their are a near infinite number of universes which exist as a sort of churning broth of possibilities, and that this universe is just one of those universes. Within this contexts, physical constants are not the way they are to support us, but rather we are the way we are, because of the physical constants of the universe we live in. Part of the problem is that Anthropocentrism makes it very tempting to believe that the universe is the way it is because of use, when logically it is much more likely that we are the way we are because of the universe.
The subject is interesting to me. ZombieNeighbors said something like that he wouldn't want to be in my shoes with my line of thinking. Here's my line of thinking. We have boiled this whole "origin" thing (at least in theory) to RNA/DNA strands that self-replicate and that this is what many people feel could have been the start of life as we know it. There are a number of things that I find fascinating. First, it doesn't appear that we can find evidence that RNA is naturally forming outside a "creature" -- kind of a "which came first? The chicken or the egg?" thought.
We don't find it 'naturally occuring now for one very reason. Conditions in which it can form have not existed in perhapes a billion years on this planet. The advent of oxygen producing life radically altered the make up of earth atmosphere, 'destroying' (by changing them into other things) many of the monocles that are required for its formation. What this experiement demonstrated is a chemical route that could have occured in the conditions evidence suggests must have existed pre-oxygen producing life. This research answers the chicken and egg question, or perhapes more accurately, starts to answer it.
Not that it really matters in the long run. The other thing that is really interesting is that we have some kind of "soup" from which it is entirely possible that "life" came from. But see, that's not good enough. So what if it's "life"? That wouldn't have meant anything on its own. No, this "life" immediately had the ability to self-replicate.
Self replication is an intrinsic property of life. It is just about the only property of life that ALL biologists agree is required for something to be alive.
However, in the case of proto life such as Ribozyme, they are nothing more than folded (they are folded by the interaction of the chemicals that make them up) strands of RNA that are able to make copies of themselves. The only thing that is 'random' about the formation of a Ribozyme, is the order in which Nucliotides polymerise.But even with some element of randomness involved, it was hardly supprising that Ribozyme's would form.
Imagain a language, which has only four letters. Now set up a thosand type writers which choose one of five options ever second. Those options are A, C, G, U and stop writing and start new word. Allow these type writers to run for a thosand years. Imagain how many possible words and non-words would be created. Now imagain that there were hundreds of thosands, maybe millions of type writers and you had two or three billion years in which to work with. would you really be suprised if that languages most beautiful and refined word turned up on occasion?
That analogy is effectively what could have happened with the formation of Ribozymes.
For absolutely no reason. There are no natural predators. There is no Darwinian situation going on. Yet this strand is genetically designed, right from the beginning to duplicate itself. That is amazing. But it doesn't stop there. Because I was thinking, "what about the vast amount of variation with RNA/DNA with all the species that we even know about today -- something has to account for this." ZombieNeighbors said that the RNA strands are basically designed to duplicate with mutations and modifications in mind. They were made to evolve. That is fascinating.
Well actually, It is entirely 'possible' that the Proto life of the RNA world may have formed complex proto ecosystems. Types of Ribozyme which have an active site that brake down other Ribozymes to act as a sources of Nucliotides for reproduction could well of existed. It is also in accurate to think of predation as the only or even primary form of selective pressure that drives evolution. Anything from local radiation levels to PH can drive natural selection. There are a huge number of ' Darwinian situations' occurring.
Mutation and natural selection account for the variationRNA isn't about 'designed', its just a property of the make up of RNA. Your commiting an anthropocentric fallicy again. Not your fault, it is easy to do.
And there are people who still don't see a grand designer. I think that it's neat being in my shoes. ;-)
I don't see the world of a designer. I see a series of explainable natural processes in a multiverse that boogles the mind. The reason i wouldn't want to believe in a god is that i think the idea of a celectial clock maker is less interesting than the beautiful vista of the multiverse.
2nd part -- this seems to be coming up more recently. At least two other people have asked this the past month. Which seems interesting to me. I'm sure that many people would say that "people" created God if for no other reason than to explain things. I think that the majority of Christians believe that God always was -- that he had no "start" and therefore nothing created him. At least that's how I understand things.
'Gods' are, regardless of our belief in the existence of deities, a fact of human life. Most humans thought out most of history have believed in gods. That does not mean that deities actually exist. However, it does mean that any atheist has to produce a hypothesis for why people believe in gods. All those people are doing here is discussing the origins of belief in gods. Some of use, my self and at least one other here work from a neurological/psychological perspective and consider belief in gods to be a by-product of certain elements of the mind. Others i believe take an anthropological perspective, seeing 'gods' as a thought tool created by early humans as a way to explain the events of the world.
Theists of cause hold a third view which is that their god or gods are real and people believe in them because of that fact. I hope that clears it up for you.
a) Conditions on earth nowadays are vastly different from earth on its beggining. There is some evidence, for instance, that our atmosphere had much less oxygen before life emerged, which would be crucial to the long-term stability of RNA chains before they had a "protective coating" (i.e. membrane)...
We are pretty much certain that there was not much free oxygen before life arose. Free oxygen in an atmosphere is not stable. It is very reactive and combines with other stuff to form water, rust, etc. etc. and therefore doesn't stick around very long. The only reason we have it in our atmosphere is because plants are constantly generating it as a waste product when they break down carbon dioxide.
As a matter of fact, one way that astronomers plan to try to detect life on planets orbiting other stars is by getting the spectra of their atmospheres (they have actually done this with some of the gas giants they've found so far, if the planets pass in front of their star they can get spectral lines from light shining through the planet's atmosphere, even though the planets are far too small to see at those distances). If oxygen is present you can pretty much guarantee that life is present.
All hail lord Thoguth!
Anyway. I won't touch the "what came before God/what came before nature" questions because it's the one question that doesn't go anywhere.
...
So what created the many worlds and the broth of possibility? Huh? Huh?
j/k
...So what created the many worlds and the broth of possibility? Huh? Huh?
j/k
The broth of possibility comes from the soup of possibility. It's turtle soup of course.
Fools! The broth of Thoguth was a calculation error!
And so a new alias is born. Ain't creation beautiful.
...I will probably still lurk now and then but I'm afraid the conversation has risen "above my pay grade" so to speak so I wont be posting much for fear of looking a bigger fool than I did in the begining.
Kirk M Moore
Please don't go just yet, Moorluck. As you can see the conversation is rapidly dropping through everyone's pay grade and soon no one will have any trouble at all keeping up.
....the broth of Thoguth....
Try saying that ten times, really fast.
|
|
Please don't go just yet, Moorluck. As you can see the conversation is rapidly dropping through everyone's pay grade and soon no one will have any trouble at all keeping up....I will probably still lurk now and then but I'm afraid the conversation has risen "above my pay grade" so to speak so I wont be posting much for fear of looking a bigger fool than I did in the begining.
Kirk M Moore
So I see. Hell at this rate it's gonna be beneath our pay grades.
Yup... I just asked my 4 yr old and she understands it so I ~should~ be OK.
Conditions in which it can form have not existed in perhapes a billion years on this planet.
Slight correction: hydrothermal vents ("black smokers") on the ocean floor still seem to simulate those conditions quite closely (very low pH, chemically reducing conditions, and no free oxygen).
Also, the chemical signatures in very old rocks indicate we've had a high-oxygen atmosphere for ca. 2.8 Ga (billion yrs before present), and there is evidence of cyanobacteria (a perfect terraforming organism -- not only photosynthetic, but reef-building -- anyone seen the stromatolites at Shark Bay, Australia?) as of ~3.2 Ga. Good thing; there's enough CO2 locked in limestone reefs to turn Earth into Venus, if it weren't locked up that way. Early cyanobacteria development and proliferation altered the fundamental nature of the early Earth, from unlivable (by our standards) to ideal (again, by our standards). Of course, all the free oxygen they produced killed off most of the other existing life at the time, but c'est la vie -- organisms adapted or died. Interestingly, fast metabolic processes work better in the presence of free oxygen, implying that more complex life would never have evolved in a low-oxygen-atmosphere Earth. As an added bonus, free oxygen also made an ozone layer possible, which in turn makes life on land possible. And as yet another "plus," an atmosphere with as much CO2 as now exists in the limestones and reefs, over enough time, leads to runaway greenhouse conditions that ultimately boil off the oceans. In other words, without the early advent of cyanobacteria (and later, other similar organisms), there would likely be no life on Earth now -- or at least none that we'd recognize as such. How perfect is all that? The hand of God directly at work? Or just a set of really cool occurrances? Who can say?
Conditions in which it can form have not existed in perhapes a billion years on this planet.Slight correction: hydrothermal vents ("black smokers") on the ocean floor still seem to simulate those conditions quite closely (very low pH, chemically reducing conditions, and no free oxygen).
Also, the chemical signatures in very old rocks indicate we've had a high-oxygen atmosphere for ca. 2.8 Ga (billion yrs before present), and there is evidence of cyanobacteria (a perfect terraforming organism -- not only photosynthetic, but reef-building -- anyone seen the stromatolites at Shark Bay, Australia?) as of ~3.2 Ga. Good thing; there's enough CO2 locked in limestone reefs to turn Earth into Venus, if it weren't locked up that way. Early cyanobacteria development and proliferation altered the fundamental nature of the early Earth, from unlivable (by our standards) to ideal (again, by our standards). Of course, all the free oxygen they produced killed off most of the other existing life at the time, but c'est la vie -- organisms adapted or died. Interestingly, fast metabolic processes work better in the presence of free oxygen, implying that more complex life would never have evolved in a low-oxygen-atmosphere Earth. As an added bonus, free oxygen also made an ozone layer possible, which in turn makes life on land possible. And as yet another "plus," an atmosphere with as much CO2 as now exists in the limestones and reefs, over enough time, leads to runaway greenhouse conditions that ultimately boil off the oceans. In other words, without the early advent of cyanobacteria (and later, other similar organisms), there would likely be no life on Earth now -- or at least none that we'd recognize as such. How perfect is all that? The hand of God directly at work? Or just a set of really cool occurrances? Who can say?
Yeah yeah, and there are super-concentrated salt lakes on the oceans bottom and a few other truely extreme enviroments. But our total knowledge about all of these things can be written on a sheet of paper when compaired to the volumes of knowledge we don't know about them. So for the perposes for a discussion like this bringing them only muddies an already fairly confusingly detailed puddle.
|
|
This question is off the current topic but still falls under the relgious discussion theme.
Can someone explain how the Pope's infalibility (sp?) works?
Is he born with it, gain it when elected to Pope, or some other method?
Are the Cardinals that elect him also infallible in their selection?
In this case, what does infallible refer to? Only matters of religious significance or does the Pope always win at poker and never buys rotten fruit at the supermarket, etc?
Thank you.
Darned if I know how it works but it also means he can find the easy girls in any club he goes to as well. (j/k any Catholics just j/k)
|
|
This question is off the current topic but still falls under the relgious discussion theme.
Can someone explain how the Pope's infalibility (sp?) works?
Is he born with it, gain it when elected to Pope, or some other method?
Are the Cardinals that elect him also infallible in their selection?
In this case, what does infallible refer to? Only matters of religious significance or does the Pope always win at poker and never buys rotten fruit at the supermarket, etc?
Thank you.
I am not a catholic and don't believe a good bit of their dogma. But though certianly not an expert on catholic doctrine, I know enough to answer this question.
Firstly, the doctrine is the doctrine of Ex Cathedra. It is a fairly new doctrine and is defined thus:
Literally "from the chair", a theological term which signifies authoritative teaching and is more particularly applied to the definitions given by the Roman pontiff. Originally the name of the seat occupied by a professor or a bishop, cathedra was used later on to denote the magisterium, or teaching authority. The phrase ex cathedra occurs in the writings of the medieval theologians, and more frequently in the discussions which arose after the Reformation in regard to the papal prerogatives. But its present meaning was formally determined by the Vatican Council, Sess. IV, Const. de Ecclesiâ Christi, c. iv: "We teach and define that it is a dogma Divinely revealed that the Roman pontiff when he speaks ex cathedra, that is when in discharge of the office of pastor and doctor of all Christians, by virtue of his supreme Apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the universal Church, by the Divine assistance promised to him in Blessed Peter, is possessed of that infallibility with which the Divine Redeemer willed that his Church should be endowed in defining doctrine regarding faith or morals, and that therefore such definitions of the Roman pontiff are of themselves and not from the consent of the Church irreformable."
Basically it means that the pope is only considered infallible when he is speaking as an apostle of Christ on matters of church doctrine. I personally think it might be observed that it is a doctrine more in word than in deed, more discussed than observed.
And catholics do teach that God helps guide the cardinals in choosing the pope.
Can someone explain how the Pope's infalibility (sp?) works?
Is he born with it, gain it when elected to Pope, or some other method?
You already have your answer, but I'll add one further fact. Papal infallibility has only been invoked once since its modern definition was established. In 1950 Pius XII proclaimed that at the time of her death, Mary was physically taken up into heaven. This is a dogma of the faith now and thus theoretically compulsory belief for Catholics.
How perfect is all that? The hand of God directly at work? Or just a set of really cool occurrances? Who can say?
On this topic, I offer an essay I have just discovered.
On this topic, I offer an essay I have just discovered.
As I understand it, his point begins similarly to mine: you can equate God with a "myth," others with a "gospel," and the consequences are indeed indistinguishable. However, he then follows up with the statement "in case of a tie, the myth hypothesis wins," without any reason it should, except that he seems to want it to. And that's the difference in world views again. A believer can just as easily state, "in case of a tie, the gospel hypothesis wins," and provide equally little evidence that this "must" be the case. So we're back to each person having equal right to pick whichever view they prefer, so long as the conclusions regarding the physical evidence are not compromised. (i.e., as long as there is actually a "tie").
On this topic, I offer an essay I have just discovered.As I understand it, his point begins similarly to mine: you can equate God with a "myth," others with a "gospel," and the consequences are indeed indistinguishable.
Except when they're not. If one does have an interest in determining the truth value of a hypothesis, the relevant data are in the differences. That's all laid out in the first paragraph:
The honest inquirer’s goal will be to zero in on the areas where the consequences are clearly and significantly different between the two hypotheses, maximizing the assurance with which we can draw conclusions about which hypothesis is more consistent with real-world truth. The rationalizer, by contrast, does not want the truth revealed, and so will have a contrary goal: to deprive us of the means of distinguishing the consequences of a true hypothesis from a false one, either by denying us access to the evidence or by obscuring the differences between the consequences each hypothesis would produce.
He goes on to argue for essentially taking both hypotheses as ordinary subjects of intellectual inquiry. If X is true, then Y would be the case. We can observe whether or not Y is the case and our observations inform us about the truth value of X.
None of this speaks to a person's rights. One has the right to believe anything one wishes, regardless of its truth value. It's strictly a question of which hypothesis most fits the data. The religious can always appeal to Schroedinger's God. That's their right, but doing so suggests rationalization, not inquiry.
Doesn't some scientific inquiry involve both rationalising (forming a hypothesis) and investigation (setting out to try to prove or disprove it)?
Not as I understand it. One examines the data available and forms a hypothesis from it. One then sets out to test it. If the test comes back to falsify the hypothesis, it's discarded (at least to the degree falsified) and with the new data, one creates a new hypothesis to subject to tests.
Rationalization would be the act of declaring that the falsification did not actually happen because the hypothesis was not what it was said to be all along and it "really" meant something consistent with the data.
For example, say I told you that I had a real-life fire-breathing dragon in my garage. You'd probably doubt me, so we'd go out to see it. Fair enough, right? Either there's a dragon there, or there's not. We can investigate by going and seeing. So we go out to my garage and you don't see any dragon. There goes the dragon hypothesis, right?
Well, it's invisible. It's an invisible dragon.
Hm. Ok, we can spread some flour out on the floor and see its footprints.
No no, can't do that. It's flying.
We'll cast flour in the air then and watch it cling to the scales.
Did I mention that the dragon is incorporeal before? I'm sure I did.
One can argue that you can't disprove my incorporeal, invisible, floating dragon. But there's no reason to believe in it either. In fact, that I'm coming up with all these traits after you've conducted the investigation suggests that I made the whole thing up. I'm not cooperating with your investigation at all and I'm in fact not interested in determining the truth. I'm interested in obscuring it by trying to make it look as though my dragon theory is as good as your no dragon theory. That's rationalization.
One can argue that you can't disprove my incorporeal, invisible, floating dragon. But there's no reason to believe in it either.
You're still missing my ultimate point, I think. As long as our investigation involves, say, whether a ball will fall to the ground if dropped, whether I say "gravity pulls it" and you say "an incorporeal dragon uses the power of gravity to pull it" is irrelevant, so long as we both agree that it falls, and what the falling rate is, etc. In other words, as long as the invisible, incorporeal dragon remains in the background of various hypotheses, and does not itself become a hypothesis, then what's the harm in it?
My feeling is that it is the absolute dogma 'there is a dragon' in the example you cite which is what may be at fault
That's my opinion too. I'm telling you that I have a dragon, but then simply ignoring all evidence that I do not through some semantic maneuvering. I'm arguing in bad faith, more or less. Rationalizing rather than engaging in honest inquiry.
But now that I've said all that, I shall be the subtlest beast in all the field and offer the proverbial fruit. Want an apple? :)
One can argue that you can't disprove my incorporeal, invisible, floating dragon. But there's no reason to believe in it either.You're still missing my ultimate point, I think. As long as our investigation involves, say, whether a ball will fall to the ground if dropped, whether I say "gravity pulls it" and you say "an incorporeal dragon pulls it" is irrelevant, so long as we both agree that it falls, and what the falling rate is, and my gravitons are proportional to the size of your dragons, etc. In other words, as long as the invisible, incorporeal dragon remains in the background of various hypotheses, and does not itself become a hypothesis, then what's the harm in it?
The invisible, incorporeal dragon is a hypothesis. The difference between a dragon and no dragon is all the difference in the world. The fact that I can disguise my dragon however I like when I claim that it exists, that I can play Schroedinger's Dragon with it, doesn't make it somehow equally true. It only makes me less honest and less interested in developing an increasingly accurate understanding of the universe. In fact, it renders me more interested in preventing you from doing the same since every fact I have to contort around is another obstacle I'd rather be without. Eventually, I'm going to have to invent an entire alternate epistemology that proclaims making stuff up the highest form of truth, but only if it's made up stuff that I personally approve of.
I say the dragon is unneeded. The balls will fall with or without the dragon, and no mechanism by which an incorporeal dragon could effect corporeal balls has yet been advanced. Thus there is no reason to suspect that one exists and the dragonists have a positive obligation if they wish to be taken seriously to demonstrate that the dragon is real. As they have failed to do so, there is every reason to presume that the dragon is not only unneeded, but actually fictional.
You and I might not need that dragon, but many, many, many more people do believe in a dragon than don't. Many of those people control much of the funding that goes into the research. They will NOT stop believing in that dragon no matter what arguments you put forth, but they do become increasingly hostile as you argue against it, and eventually they pull that funding, or try to replace your ball research with nonsense "magic dragon gravity," because you refuse to allow them to think that real gravity is a tool of the dragon. You can let them hold onto that belief, or you can force them to view you as a direct threat to them, and cause them to lock us down into the dark ages. Is that what you're after? Let them keep the dragon, I say, but show them how your discoveries can ALWAYS be fit around it, because an incorporeal dragon takes up no space and can be fit into anything.
...I say the dragon is unneeded. The balls will fall with or without the dragon, and no mechanism by which an incorporeal dragon could effect corporeal balls has yet been advanced...
The dragon makes all the difference, since we know the argument is changed by observation--the ball of fire may not fall if there's no-one there to observe it! String Theory invalidates the dragon!
As a matter of interest do you think you have a dragon or not in the example cited? Irrespective of whether or not the dragon exists, if you genuinely think you have a dragon and are trying to reason with me so that I will believe you have a dragon, too, I think that that's a very different case in what it says about you from if you don't think you actually have a dragon but are trying to con me into thinking that you do.
I left it unstated for a reason, to be honest. It's not obvious to me that it makes any real difference if I believe I really do have a dragon or if I am feeding you a line. The goal and methods are the same, to convince you that I have a dragon despite the fact that I have no evidence to support this thesis. It's just as intellectually respectable (which is to say not at all) for me to use these methods if I believe in the dragon or if I do not. It's certainly not morally identical, but that's a separate issue. Being simply mistaken isn't on the same moral plane as perpetrating a fraud.
You and I might not need that dragon, but many, many, many more people do believe in a dragon than don't.
Which does not make the dragon any more real.
Many of those people control much of the funding that goes into the research.
A sad state of affairs, but it also does not make the dragon any more real.
They will NOT stop believing in that dragon no matter what arguments you put forth, but they do become increasingly hostile as you argue against it, and eventually they pull that funding, or try to replace your ball research with nonsense "magic dragon gravity," because you refuse to allow them to think that real gravity is a tool of the dragon. You can let them hold onto that belief, or you can force them to view you as a direct threat to them, and cause them to lock us down into the dark ages. Is that what you're after? Let them keep the dragon, I say, but show them how your discoveries can ALWAYS be fit around it, because an incorporeal dragon takes up no space and can be fit into anything.
I see no difference between losing the funding and being locked down in the dark ages and having the funding but being forced to act as though locked down in the dark ages. The dragonists are adults and reasonable, rational adults can agree to live together in a society and pursue joint projects even if they disagree about other things. I do not think them so incurably childish, or so wildly insane, or so monumentally petty, that they are utterly beyond help or will refuse all cooperation until adragonists fall to their knees and repent before the torturer's arts. That way is tyranny. That also strikes me as an exceptionally mean view to take of the dragonists. They may not be perfect, but they're not demons either.
Furthermore, it is neither my responsibility nor my interest to provide them with dragonist apologetics. The difficulties of the dragonist philosophy in assimilating new information are failings in its intellectual structure. Why should an adragonist be interested in those? Seems like a strictly internal matter, like the color of the dragon's scales or what kind of hats the dragon prefers one to wear.
The dragon makes all the difference, since we know the argument is changed by observation--the ball of fire may not fall if there's no-one there to observe it! String Theory invalidates the dragon!
That's quantum mechanics, not string theory. And the "observer" can be anything the ball interacts with, like the atoms in the floor for instance. It does not have to be a conscious "observer." IMHO using the word "observer" to describe that type of situation was one of the dumbest choices of words ever made by physicists. It leads to a lot of misunderstanding.
That's quantum mechanics, not string theory. And the "observer" can be anything the ball interacts with, like the atoms in the floor for instance. It does not have to be a conscious "observer." IMHO using the word "observer" to describe that type of situation was one of the dumbest choices of words ever made by physicists. It leads to a lot of misunderstanding.
That.
They may not be perfect, but they're not demons either.
On that we fully agree, and that's exactly why I advocate not trying to take anyone's beliefs away from him or her. OK, I'm unable to communicate clearly through metaphor; let me speak plainly. Believers are reasonable people for the most part. They really don't like to be told what not to believe by some well-meaning outsider. If you start pushing hard down this road of telling them that science "disproves" God, that just makes them more angry they get at your presumption, and therefore the worse the anti-science backlash is. There is no point to antagonizing anyone in that manner, and indeed it is counterproductive for everyone. Cooperation and co-existence work fine for me; I see no need for an engineered conflict.
I pretty often hear things like, "Why are you scientists always trying to tell people there's no God?" So, yes, I go out of my way to explain that no, I'm not telling anyone that, and that none of my research leads in that direction. Scientists in general are in the science business, not the religious refutation business -- which is one I wouldn't be in even if I wanted to. The more that well-meaning people present science as a refutation to religion, the harder it is for me to convince people that I'm not part of some atheist Communist brainwashing anti-Christian cult.
|
|
I'm not part of some atheist Communist brainwashing anti-Christian cult.
Damn. I needed target practice...
Seriously, though, I wonder how the people that DO seem to be part of that cult reconcile the fact that now a few scientists are comfortable being Christian. Science and religion can live together, as long as they don't keep stepping on each others' toes.