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Science as an atheists religion?

  
 
ajm
13:46 / 25.03.04
(Started this thread because I didn't want to argue in the 'Choosing a spiritual path' thread)

Although he was a devoutly religious man, Newton's physic left no room for free will or even a role for God in his deterministic model. With the advent of Quantum age his ideas were overthrown, in other words, the description of nature was refined. This quantum model speaks of probabilities and fuzziness and the limits to our very knowledge. This seems to have allowed free will and God back into the picture because we are no longer holding on to this deterministic ideology. Determinism was a dream. We can't know everything and there will always be that question mark, that sense of mystery. This doesn't just describe the very small but also everyday phenomena. We could, with the same accuracy, go to the moon with quantum physics as with Newton's physics, or say plot the fall of an apple. (no point to go
into relativity here)

Do atheist make the claim that science explains the world and God doesn't and that's why they're atheist. I don't think anyone here would say that science doesn't explain natural phenomena and having
a belief in God does. That's an idea as old as the hills and if we're rebelling against that line of thought then our basis for atheism is also based in the past. Science attempts to explain the 'What, When, Where and How'. It is our job to explain the 'Why'. (Why is there gravity, why is there space and time, why do the physical laws stay constant, why am I here...) I guess we can ignore the 'why' and just
concentrate on the others, but science is doing that for us and we don't have to even think about it, (just read up and parrot the findings like I do). The 'why' is the fun part to think about.

The idea that technology will bring about heaven on earth seems bizarre to me as it's more likely to destroy the earth (which it is doing very effectively). It might have the capability to help mankind,
but it will all depend on man and his mindset. Even if someone creates some great technology to help it seems there is someone always waiting to turn its purpose around for their own profit (criminal?). Can we as humans cast off the conflict and survival instincts in ourselves (can we even find it?)? Is it all up to the human race to rid itself of negative thoughts and emotions or are the scientists going to find a way to control the human mind and make us all peaceful through submission?

Will we evolve further?
 
 
diz
14:46 / 25.03.04
(Started this thread because I didn't want to argue in the 'Choosing a spiritual path' thread)

that may not be the best idea. this could easily be discussed in the original thread. i'm not a mod, mind you, but the Head Shop is getting flooded with redundant topics.
 
 
Lurid Archive
15:01 / 25.03.04
There are a lot of new threads of late, but I think a thread on atheism has a place in the HS.

Newton's physic left no room for free will or even a role for God in his deterministic model.

I think that is arguable. Although there was a feeling that determinism was the way forward, this thinking was as much to do with hubris as with anything concrete. Newton's physics works well predicting the paths for simple configurations of objects. It doesn't even pretend to address humanity, except in the crudest physical sense, so can have no consequences for free will as far as I can see. As for excluding God, I think this is overextending. It is a perfectly feasible religious position to imagine a god as non-interventionist. But that doesn't exclude god, only certain perceptions of god.

Also, one should note that Newtonian determinism (even in the limited context of applicability) is a slippery beast. It fails to provide a strictly predictive model for even moderately complicated physical situations. Our lack of knowledge is implicit in Newton's physics.

With the advent of Quantum age his ideas were overthrown

Yes, if by "overthrown" we mean that their domain of applicability was reduced. Newtonian physics is still used, however.

We can't know everything and there will always be that question mark, that sense of mystery.

Sure. No scientist or atheist would argue with you.

Do atheist make the claim that science explains the world and God doesn't and that's why they're atheist.

No. Most atheists adopt an epistemological framework with regards to the divine that would be widely considered unremarkable in any other situation. Having said that, there is an emotional weight to seeing mystical explanations overtaken by naturalistic ones. It certainly highlights the deficiency of arguments for god from the position of ignorance of the natural world. Didn't Dawkins say that he would have been a theist before Darwin?

The 'why' is the fun part to think about.

Maybe. But that is no argument for religion. Atheists aren't mindless automotons, you know. We can think about "why" questions and come up with different answers. And science is not, and does not claim to be, the entirety of human knowledge and experience. Reading what you are writing, you almost get the impression that an atheist would drop dead rather than appreciate poetry or engage in politics or take drugs. You realise this is a straw man, right?

The idea that technology will bring about heaven on earth

Again, while technology has benefits it also has drawbacks. That isn't controversial. I'm not sure I know anyone who believes that technology will bring "heaven on earth".
 
 
Tom Coates
15:09 / 25.03.04
To be honest this just looks like you're trying to avoid responding to people who have made comments or responded to you elsewhere. I wrote a long post explaining my position on things like this in a different thread and you haven't responded to it, so I don't really feel like I have any particular need to do so here.

Nonetheless, if you want to bring Quantum physics into it, then yes - if you want to believe that your god only has power to influence the probability of sub-atomic particles doing one thing or another, then you might be able to find a space for God in that. But you're not, are you? You want to be able to use that kind of ludicrously tiny sub-atomic weirdnesses in behaviour to suggest that something dropped might not fall to the ground or that someone might gain powers over life or death. But it just doesn't work! And even if God was in the specifics of the ways that a particle decayed, he wouldn't have much influence, because the mathematics of the probability are precise. He'd basically be forced on aggregate to obey those rules pretty precisely. That's not any conception of God that I understand.

Now with regard to the difference between the how and the why - I think the problem you're in is that there are lots of ways of conceiving of the why that don't involve God. That's using "There's some force in the world that gives things meaning" to patch up any old hole in any old argument. The truth is we don't know why the universe exists. It could be any number of reasons, or there could be no reason at all. In fact in terms of causality the big question normally is that given that nothing comes from nothing, things must have existed forever or there must have been some external cause of some kind - some kind of 'para' cause. If you want that to be God, then well ok - have fun with that for all the good it will do you. It doesn't explain where he came from, of course. And if you're going then to argue that he just appeared, then why's that different from the universe just appearing? Where's the 'why' of God? Can you answer that one?

As I said above, you're using "God" as a patch for a hole that as a species we find unpluggable. That's kind of fine, but it's also meaningless because the word could mean anything from divine farting to the person who is running the simulation of the universe on his desktop computer in the year 3012. You want me to stand up and say, "There are things that may very well be unknowable", then I'll do so. I'll do so on the condition that you accept that unknowable things aren't very useful to think about - by dint that if you can't know anything about them everything will be speculation, nothing will have application and there's no way of determining which of the infinity of lunatic theories that you could come up with would be any more 'true' than any others.

With regard to technology making a heaven on earth, well that's a completely different question and I think as a species we're all agreed that our ability to affect the the world with the technology that we've created has reached levels where more than ever we need to consider - as a species - how we should be using them. But again - I don't know what that has to do with God. There are lots of good evolutionary perspectives on Altruism, and lots of individuals of both religious and atheist backgrounds seem to be able to make judgements about what they considered to be right and/or wrong. The presence of some godhood in their lives doesn't really seem to make those judgements much easier for people, either. And I don't believe for a moment that religious people are better people than non-religious people. So where is there to go with that?

In a nutshell - (1) if God's only able to affect things at a quantum level then he's a pretty impotent god; (2) there are questions that are unanswered and some that we believe may be unanswerable but if they cannot be answered what value is there really in speculation? (3) I see no evidence to suggest that you have to believe in God to be a good person.
 
 
Tom Coates
15:13 / 25.03.04
BTW - here is my post in the other thread: Choosing a spiritual path - on Atheism. You might also want to consider whether or not threads about religion would be better placed in the Magick and Spirituality forum.
 
 
Char Aina
15:49 / 25.03.04
The idea that technology will bring about heaven on earth seems bizarre to me as it's more likely to destroy the earth (which it is doing very effectively). It might have the capability to help mankind,
but it will all depend on man and his mindset.


the idea that anything will bring heaven on earth seems bizare; mostly because human nature is involved.
in what way is 'technology' any different to other human endeavours?

its water.
it can drown you or save your from the desert.
like religion.

(i'm with tom... this seems like a magic/spirituality thread)
 
 
diz
15:59 / 25.03.04
With regard to technology making a heaven on earth, well that's a completely different question and I think as a species we're all agreed that our ability to affect the the world with the technology that we've created has reached levels where more than ever we need to consider - as a species - how we should be using them. But again - I don't know what that has to do with God. There are lots of good evolutionary perspectives on Altruism,

another point worth mentioning about evolutionary perspectives on this sort of issue is that maladaptive behaviors (including poorly-thought-out uses of technologies) carry their own "punishment," so to speak - that being that they're maladaptive. if we don't take corrective steps to avoid misusing technology, we'll be corrected out of the picture by our own misuse of the technology, and if we do take corrective measures, then there's no problem.
 
 
Thjatsi
07:07 / 27.03.04
the idea that anything will bring heaven on earth seems bizare; mostly because human nature is involved.

What if it involved changing human nature?
 
 
---
08:29 / 27.03.04
I have the view that even though science has given us some cool things it's been wrong from the outset and makes us spectators in the universal mind instead of having the freedom to do anything we want to do.

I don't blame science though, i just think that we've completely lost our ability to live in harmony with our environment and our version of science in many cases isn't needed.

I think that we are currently de-evolving however instead of evolving so that's why i see it like this. Maybe before we screwed our planet and each other we had the mind to percieve things on a quantum level anyway and if so, i'm guessing that a quanta wasn't just a particle or a wave to us, but anything that it wanted to be.

If anyone disagrees i'm ignoring your post. (joke)

I'm not expecting anyone to agree, but each to their own.

"we're all one being in a shamanic multiverse....."
 
 
---
08:51 / 27.03.04
Actually, to be honest, i think that some scientists do actually manage to grasp truth to a good extent, but the main question as far as i see it seems to be : are these people's views going to get accepted in time to bring about a major change in the scientific community in time to prevent the earth trashing that's well underway.
 
 
lekvar
22:15 / 31.03.04
As an atheist, I would say that yes, science is my religion, but perhaps not for the reason that you might think.

I have spent some time in college, I read National Geographic, I watch PBS, I've read (all right, skimmed) A brief History of Time.

Science facinates me but to be honest, my knowledge of it relies on faith.

Can I empirically prove the existance of gluons? Pluto? Fusion? Hell, I don't even know for a fact that Burma exists beyond the fact that I see it marked on a map.

I have faith that all these things exist because they make my world beautiful. I find joy knowing that quarks can be up, down, top, bottom, charm and strange.

Science is a way of viewing the universe. Technology is a byproduct of science. I don't think anyone realistically beleves that technology will create a "heaven on earth," but the rational midset is my nirvana, the scientific method is my Hail Mary, and Steven Hawking is my hierophant.

This is the same explanation I've given theists who ask me how I can live without faith. I have plenty! Just not in God(s).
 
 
Mirror
22:57 / 01.04.04
Well said, tekvar.

I would also posit that science is perhaps a more experimental religion than most apart from the various ones that practice magick, which is arguably simply science that's not well documented or widely understood.

Throughout history, people have made up stories to explain things. That's all that religion is. Science is just a method of testing the things that are claimed in these other stories, and making up new stories based on the results of the tests.

Religions, and scientific theories, live and die by how well they explain things to people.
 
 
Tom Coates
10:57 / 02.04.04
No - I'm afraid I disagree with that stuff on a few grounds. Firstly I think we have to distinguish between the grounds that we use to understand things. I can understand a principle of science (ie. that it is based on creating a hypothesis and then testing that hypothesis against reality), just as I can understand a principle of religious faith (ie. that it is purely experiential in origin, that people come to it and that belief without proof is of fundamental importance). All of us are qualified to make a distinction between those two, and moreover the very nature of that distinction casts scientific 'faith' and religious 'faith' to be utterly distinct from one another at the level of first principle.

After that point of course things get a little more complicated. Scientific orthodoxy is based upon principles of self-governing and self-testing free communities of individuals, who are able to replicate the experiments of other people, check their results and hold them to account if they are demonstrated to be wrong. The truth that emerges from Science isn't a truth that is absolute and external to humans, but then nothing is - it's an attempt to model the world in the most rigorous terms, in which individuals and groups of scientists pit propositions against one another and against the testable world in terms of certain basic principles (can they be tested, if they are tested do they pass, is it possible to determine if a theory is wrong or not). We as members of the public - on the whole - are supposed to understand and trust these mechanisms and allow the community to self-regulate in terms of whether something is true or not. At any given time, as well, the understanding is - if we could get enough money or time together, we could test the same things that they test and would get the same results.

There are similar communities in religion, but they're roles are very different. Rather than continually attempting to challenge their beliefs and get a better understanding of the world, religions (or at least holy-document based religions) are based upon first-person experiences of the world combined with the singular authority of a text or of a person who represents that text. It's completely different.

I think it's also important to remember that most scientific practice emerged from the same questions as religion did. But while one system was based upon basic logic and developing better models of the way the world worked, the other stuck with an inherited model passed down over generations. For these reasons the quality of 'faith' that we require is so radically different in each circumstance that it ceases to be useful even to have the same world. Maybe for science we use 'trust' (ie. we understand the mechanisms and trust the extrapolations) vs. faith (we don't understand the mechanisms and have faith in what we're told is true).
 
 
Mirror
14:58 / 02.04.04
There are similar communities in religion, but they're roles are very different. Rather than continually attempting to challenge their beliefs and get a better understanding of the world, religions (or at least holy-document based religions) are based upon first-person experiences of the world combined with the singular authority of a text or of a person who represents that text. It's completely different.

I should have qualified my former post to state that my perspective on religion is that of an outsider - I don't really have any religious experience, so perhaps I shouldn't be talking about faith. I have always sort of presumed that people accepted their religions in the same way that I accept science - because I understand the scope of its authority, and it answers, or at least attempts to answer the questions that I ask.

I think that the assertion that scientific faith and religious faith are fundamentally different concepts from first principles is an extremely useful idea. As separate entities, it seems that scientific faith and religious faith can coexist, but that this places something of a burden on religious faith not to make claims to scientific authority.
 
 
ajm
15:12 / 02.04.04
One of the most interesting subjects in life is life, how consciousness has come to evolve, and science hasn't come near to explaining it. They have actually tried to avoid it as they realize that they probably couldn't explain it and left it in the domain of metaphysics and religion. We once believed that the phenomenon we observed was completely independent of our perception. Only since the Quantum period where people have learned that the act of observing a phenomenon has a direct impact on the event (collapse of the probability wave). Some are now trying to interpret quantum physics in terms of the brain, but I have noticed that many of these people are ridiculed by modern science as quacks or pseudo-scientists.

I find it interesting that many of the eastern religions have come to the same conclusions as modern science has about the ontology of the cosmos. The difference is in how they describe it. The language of science is math. On an individual level math is irrelevant and it's the actual description we need. Through self-reflection (as in meditation) the very same ideas about relativity and quantum weirdness have been displayed. These people understand that to understand consciousness one must go deep into ones self, and not to look at the neural workings of some other individual. (Good book: 'The Tao of Science')

"We can think about "why" questions and come up with different answers. And science is not, and does not claim to be, the entirety of human knowledge and experience"
...So are all your ‘why’ answers based in science? If science and its methods aren't your only means of truth then where else do you get your answers?

"if you want to believe that your god only has power to influence the probability of sub-atomic particles doing one thing or another, then you might be able to find a space for God in that." - "That's not any conception of God that I understand." - "(1) if God's only able to affect things at a quantum level then he's a pretty impotent god;"
For an atheist it appears you have a very narrow view of god (or what it is or isn't, you even call it a he which goes to show your theistic conditioning). When you say 'your god', I laugh because I don't have a view of god. Like I said before, 'it' could be anything or everything. Maybe you're god Tom. I never said that he influences things although I wouldn't say the opposite either. God 'could' manifest as our very consciousness or as energy. Because God/spirit/reality/truth has been imagined as an omnipotent, a great being who created the universe, passing judgment on 'his' creation and desires to be worshiped, you rightly reject this and call yourself and atheist. By rejecting the popular versions of the God of Christians and all the others, you allow yourself to be molded by these religions just as much as the religions mould the 'believers', because your belief (and it is belief) is based on their beliefs. I can see you are trying, but you can't conceive what god is or isn't. The only thing that anyone can be certain of is their own existence, and their own experiences. I would only suggest that life is deeper than it appears, and deeper than science can probe into it. To see how deep it is, one must dive deep into ones self.

"I'll do so on the condition that you accept that unknowable things aren't very useful to think about"
There is an understanding beyond thought. I can see you only use your mind for useful things, good for you. I guess we shouldn't ponder love or beauty or any human emotions or works of art, because we will never deduce any logical 'why' of their existence. That's the whole point of art, to express and understand the unknowable. Is art useless? By trying to understand it we don't make any money or create any useful technologies so maybe it is. I hope you don't think this way.

"The truth is we don't know why the universe exists. It could be any number of reasons, or there could be no reason at all."
Just to piss you off whatever the reason is or isn't, I'll label it God If the universe really came from nothing then that would make the universe 'God'. That's what Plato believed, that the universe is an organism. There are organisms in us, is it so far fetched that we are inside an organism? I'm not saying one way or another, which doesn't make me an atheist or an agnostic. Where an atheist would say 'show me some proof' I say, 'that's a great idea that expresses something beautiful'. Maybe it's not useful to you, but to me it is because my purpose is to experience beauty and love and reality (god). All views are trying to express the same thing; people just express it differently and then go on to argue who expressed it the best. Arguing over the views, I agree, is pointless as arguing over the best language to use. It is the ego that argues such things.

"(2) there are questions that are unanswered and some that we believe may be unanswerable but if they cannot be answered what value is there really in speculation?"
I didn't say (or maybe I did) that the questions are unanswerable, just that scientific investigations won't be able to find the answer, answers to the questions of love, beauty, complex human emotion (which is anything but logical), reality or conscious. You know, the important stuff. Thought is limited.

"(3) I see no evidence to suggest that you have to believe in God to be a good person."
Maybe we're just arguing over semantics. Maybe my view of God is too broad. What's a 'good person'? I think to be a 'whole person' we have to understand that we are part of something larger than just the ego and our individual experience and that is what people are trying to show you through art, religion, philosophy and even science. Sometime science is trying to show that we are the masters of this reality, that we are Gods, which in a 'round about way, is the same thing, but from a somewhat egotistical standpoint. “My truth is derived from a scientific method, so I have more claim to the truth then you.” Then they call other truths ‘pseudo science’, which is a polite way to discredit everyone else’s views, thereby claiming to have the ‘way of truth’.

"I would have thought that their models were infinitely more complex, nuanced and intriguing than a purely religious one, and as such enhance our humanity"
Complex is better(?), now YOU lost ME.

"What in fact you seem to be saying is that the very act of explanation turns things into machines where the mystery about them made them something more than that."
The idea of loss of freedom has to do with determinism. The belief in determinism and the fact that we, as humans, are controlled by our genetics and the chemical processes in our brains and we are simple subject to that, that makes as machines. But if you understand that there is something outside of those processes that can affect us then we are raised above mere machines. The machine only does what it's programmed to do. If we are simply subject to the fate of these processes then can you see the moral implications? How can we condemn someone for doing what he is programmed to do?

"You say history is going to show and has shown that one paradigm replaces another paradigm, but you don't seem to have any sense that any of those paradigms are improvements on previous ones"
Improvements in what sense? Are people any better off? The only difference is the technological advances, which has created the bloodiest century ever.

"The word "God" referring to something physical without any sense of agency means pretty much nothing... "
How would you explain the beautiful music of Bach or Mozart, as variant wave pressures? That might be the most scientifically logical way to go about it, but it doesn't express any of the meaning. Everyone would explain it differently, but no one would be able to convey the meaning and beauty of it through words, people would actually have to listen for themselves. Life is the same. You can explain life through science, I'm not saying you can't, just that it doesn't get down to the deeper meaning. And we all know the 'physical' world is an illusion of the mind. You know that matter is energy right? Just another mystery science can't explain.

"The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties - this knowledge, this feeling ... that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men."
Albert Einstein
 
 
lekvar
20:16 / 02.04.04
Maybe for science we use 'trust' (ie. we understand the mechanisms and trust the extrapolations) vs. faith (we don't understand the mechanisms and have faith in what we're told is true).

OK, a further assertion of the faith of atheists:

I have faith that God(s) doesn't exist. This is faith, as it can't be proved either way. The second The Creator is revealed or shown to be a figment, I my faith implodes, just as it would for a Catholic. This is opposed to agnostics, who have no faith.

Of course, I'm also framing my arguement within my culture's theist background...
I'd like to know, do non-Judeo/Christians regard the issue of "faith"?
 
 
Mirror
22:39 / 02.04.04
Maybe we're just arguing over semantics. Maybe my view of God is too broad.

In the broadest sense of your view, would God be self-aware? And would this awareness be distinct from your own?

To get back to the original question of the thread, I think in the long run there is potential for science to bring about peace on earth. In general, discord arises out of need and competition for resources. If at some indeterminate point in the future, science is able to give us tools to eliminate need, then human beings will at least have the ability, if perhaps not the necessary drive, to create peace on earth.

Likewise, science will certainly not destroy the earth - although misguided, greedy, and short-sighted people stand a good chance of doing so.

As far as improving people's relationships with one another, I think that science and technology have already done so by facilitating communication. From the printing press onward, the ability of people to share ideas has been a great source of inspiration. The technology of writing has allowed us to have access to the wisdom of the ages. I know that I have a far larger number interesting conversations online than I do in person, mostly because written communication allows me to more fully formulate ideas before expressing them.

Fundamentally, you can't separate being human from tool-making, from technology, and you cannot separate technology from science. The scientific method is really indivisible from human interaction with the phenomenal world.
 
 
The Natural Way
15:32 / 03.04.04
You know, I get as far as this

One of the most interesting subjects in life is life, how consciousness has come to evolve, and science hasn't come near to explaining it. They have actually tried to avoid it as they realize that they probably couldn't explain it and left it in the domain of metaphysics and religion.

and I just stop reading. What the Cry-eye are you talking about, ajm? Yr constant use of the word "they" reeks of conspiracy theory and, well, there are loads and loads of philosophic and scientific models for consciousness. Sure, they're all works in progress, there's still a huge amount of mystery around the subject, but no-one's "given up". Aaaargh! How do you expect to discuss these incredibly weighty subjects if you can't be arsed to do even a little bit of research?
 
 
Tom Coates
22:33 / 03.04.04
One of the most interesting subjects in life is life, how consciousness has come to evolve, and science hasn't come near to explaining it. They have actually tried to avoid it as they realize that they probably couldn't explain it and left it in the domain of metaphysics and religion.

Well unfortunately that's just untrue. There are a large number of people working on this field at this point in time. An enormous number in fact. You only have to go to Amazon to see the enormous number of people who are working in psychology, neurology, neurolinguistics, AI etc etc and they're all concentrating on exactly these issues. Here's a list to get you started: Theories of Mind and Consciousness.

On an individual level math is irrelevant and it's the actual description we need. Through self-reflection (as in meditation) the very same ideas about relativity and quantum weirdness have been displayed.

You're really going to have to give up on the quantum physics thing. It doesn't say what you think it says. It doesn't leave any more space in the universe for thermodynamic miracles than anything before it - it just explains it in ways that are less familiar to us as human beings.

For an atheist it appears you have a very narrow view of god (or what it is or isn't, you even call it a he which goes to show your theistic conditioning). When you say 'your god', I laugh because I don't have a view of god. Like I said before, 'it' could be anything or everything. Maybe you're god Tom. I never said that he influences things although I wouldn't say the opposite either. God 'could' manifest as our very consciousness or as energy. Because God/spirit/reality/truth has been imagined as an omnipotent, a great being who created the universe, passing judgment on 'his' creation and desires to be worshiped, you rightly reject this and call yourself and atheist. By rejecting the popular versions of the God of Christians and all the others, you allow yourself to be molded by these religions just as much as the religions mould the 'believers', because your belief (and it is belief) is based on their beliefs. I can see you are trying, but you can't conceive what god is or isn't. The only thing that anyone can be certain of is their own existence, and their own experiences. I would only suggest that life is deeper than it appears, and deeper than science can probe into it. To see how deep it is, one must dive deep into ones self.

This is - I'm afraid - bunk. All you're doing is asserting! You've basically said in that thing that you have no idea what this thing called "God" is, just that exists! The entire paragraph doesn't mean anything! Just think about this for a minute - what is the function, the element of God that makes God God for you? Is it agency? Is it power? What is it?! If you can't tell me what you are trying to use this concept for, there's no way for me to respond. You might as well be saying that Nutbrabbletos exists and that - although you can't describe it and have no evidence for its existence - it clearly does exist and that scientists will never find it. I'm afraid it doesn't make any sense at all. It doesn't mean anything - it's just words in a line on a screen. If all you're suggesting is that life is deeper than it seems, well I can't respond to that. I don't know how "deeply" you experience "life" nor what it would mean to understand more deeply than you would by trying to uncover its patterns and logics and clarities.

There is an understanding beyond thought. I can see you only use your mind for useful things, good for you. I guess we shouldn't ponder love or beauty or any human emotions or works of art, because we will never deduce any logical 'why' of their existence. That's the whole point of art, to express and understand the unknowable. Is art useless? By trying to understand it we don't make any money or create any useful technologies so maybe it is. I hope you don't think this way.

Er. Well no. If by thought you mean the systematic conscious logical uncovering and following of arguments, then yes there is clearly more to human consciousness than that. If by thought you mean (on the other hand) 'human consciousness' then your distinctions stop making any sense. There isn't "human consciousness" on the one hand and the mystical parts that understand "love" and "art" on the other. Those bits that understand "love" and "art" (often in quite well-understood ways) are part of the same puzzle of human consciousness. Moreover, often we can trace the specific abilities or mechanisms of understanding down to particular parts of the brain. One part fails and a person can't recognise faces, anotehr part fails and they don't understand the concept of "left". Another fails and they recognise (and love) their wives only when they hear them talking, because the part of their brain that registers a warm glow when they see a face they recognise stops functioning. There's innumerable studies on this point - I suggest you start by looking up Ramachandran. He's pretty good.

Anyway - my point being - these things are not unknowable. These impulses are not unknowable. Love and responses to beauty are as much part of scientist's sphere of influence as anything else that the brain does. However, the brain cannot know those things which are in their essence unknowable. If you state that it's impossible for any human being to have any experience of something, evidence for its existence or reliable sense of its presence, then what on earth is the point of thinking about it? Oh and back to art, no - that's not it's 'whole point' - there are generation-upon-generation of artists who have different conceptualisations of what it's for and I think a large number of them would disagree with you on that one, so let's not just start asserting things again, eh?

Just to piss you off whatever the reason is or isn't, I'll label it God If the universe really came from nothing then that would make the universe 'God'. That's what Plato believed, that the universe is an organism. There are organisms in us, is it so far fetched that we are inside an organism? I'm not saying one way or another, which doesn't make me an atheist or an agnostic. Where an atheist would say 'show me some proof' I say, 'that's a great idea that expresses something beautiful'. Maybe it's not useful to you, but to me it is because my purpose is to experience beauty and love and reality (god).

Look - I can call it God too if I want. I could call the body of scientific knowledge God. I could call little fishes God. I could call neurons firing in my neocortex God. I could call electricity God. Calling something God doesn't change it into something new. At least we're finally getting somewhere - you say that God is an organism? That's something for us to argue with at least. W/r/t "a great idea that expresses something beautiful" - can't you understand that there are a lot of great ideas in the world, and that many of them express things that people experience as beautiful (Cocaine for example). You can enjoy these things all you want, but it DOESN'T HELP YOU EXPERIENCE REALITY. Pretty things aren't real because they're pretty!

I didn't say (or maybe I did) that the questions are unanswerable, just that scientific investigations won't be able to find the answer, answers to the questions of love, beauty, complex human emotion (which is anything but logical), reality or conscious. You know, the important stuff. Thought is limited.

This may be the case. There may be limits to scientific knowledge. Making some other stuff up to fill in the gap isn't going to help much though! Again - all those things ARE being examined by science (again - science being the application of bloody obvious principles - ie. is it provable / does this hypothesis fit and can I challenge it - that you use in every part of your everyday life) so I don't really know why you're droning on as if these things were the exclusive domain of your conception of God as Pretty Things That You Like To Hear About.

"I would have thought that their models were infinitely more complex, nuanced and intriguing than a purely religious one, and as such enhance our humanity"
Complex is better(?), now YOU lost ME.

Complex is better if it's trying to model a complex thing. I would argue that you need a model of something that actually has some relationship to the thing it models and that spurious statements based on aesthetics that reduce things down to meaningless and arbitrary concepts provide little or not value.

The idea of loss of freedom has to do with determinism. The belief in determinism and the fact that we, as humans, are controlled by our genetics and the chemical processes in our brains and we are simple subject to that, that makes as machines. But if you understand that there is something outside of those processes that can affect us then we are raised above mere machines. The machine only does what it's programmed to do. If we are simply subject to the fate of these processes then can you see the moral implications? How can we condemn someone for doing what he is programmed to do?

This DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE. All you're doing is moving the problem somewhere else. We either do things for no reason or we do them for a reason. If we do them for a reason then there are causes which will be external or internal. If they're internal then that just says there's something basic and fundamental to us that makes us do certain things and not others. What difference does it make if that thing is in our genes, hearts, heads or genitals?! You don't solve the question of whether we're robots or not by saying that it's not all biological, you just stick the problem in magic-land. If you believed in a 'soul', precisely how is that soul different from a machine either?

And anyway you're missing a really obvious point. Evolutionary biologists would say that human beings have developed the ability (a physical ability) to model different situations, weigh up the consequences of their actions and then to make decisions based upon the evidence. The person who kills another doesn't just decide to kill because they're a robot, they have been given the ability by their biology to think about the consequences of killing, the benefits and the disadvantages and the possible risks. They've also been equipped with some pretty basic pressures and resistances to killing people by evolution too. If they felt the advantages so dramatically outweighed the disadvantages and risks that they could get past their basic resistances, killed someone and then got caught then they would get punished and would directly deserve it. Humanity is complex and social and operates with a lot of feedback loops. They have to understand their physical and social environment. Human civilisation isn't the same now as it was fifty years ago, let alone 10,000 years ago - any theory of biology that said that people operated as automata wouldn't be able to deal with fact that people are able to cope with such different circumstances. Evolutionary pressure has made us able to make decisions and it is evolution's slow march that has taken us away from being automata towards being complex thinking creatures.

Improvements in what sense? Are people any better off? The only difference is the technological advances, which has created the bloodiest century ever

Go on then! Please! Feel free! Throw away your computer, abandon your television, get rid of electricity! Please! If you experience no advantage there, if there truly isn't any difference between the paradigms of the world that allowed you to type into this message board or immunise yourself against smallpox and the ones that would have you sticking dirty needles in your tongue or drilling holes in your head to relieve the press, then you shouldn't have any problem abandoning one set for the other! But you won't! You won't just decide not to breathe because I tell you that actually you don't need to at all. You WILL believe the former paradigm is better than the one I just said. Either admit it or asphyxiate yourself! It's up to you!

You can explain life through science, I'm not saying you can't, just that it doesn't get down to the deeper meaning. And we all know the 'physical' world is an illusion of the mind. You know that matter is energy right? Just another mystery science can't explain.

HANG ON! Those are 'mysteries' that (1) science has articulated better than any other system and (2) the science has explained better than any other system. What on earth do you want!? I didn't read E=MC2 in the bible... This is getting fucking ridiculous... Do you even want me to create a list of mysteries that religion couldn't explain!?
 
 
Tom Coates
22:45 / 03.04.04
To lekvar: "I have faith that God(s) doesn't exist. This is faith, as it can't be proved either way. The second The Creator is revealed or shown to be a figment, I my faith implodes, just as it would for a Catholic. This is opposed to agnostics, who have no faith."

I don't believe this is a reasonable argument. Basically think of it this way. The world is full of unprovable concepts. There will always be innumerably more unprovable theories in the world than provable ones. I could claim that there were invisible, immaterial badgers all around me. Or cats or fish. I could claim that outside the universe was nothing but jelly or cat wee or bird's eye potato waffles. I could claim pretty much anything if I made it a condition of my claim that no one could actually see or hear or experience in any way any of the things I'd claimed existed.

Now I don't know whether or not a God exists or not. Just like I don't know whether the world is surrounded by cat wee, but the burden of proof does not lie with me. It's not a rational position to say that - given that I can't prove that the universe is not surrounded by cat pee - that I have to state my default position as 'not knowing'. I do not consider myself cat-pee-surrounds-the-universe agnostic! No. Atheism isn't a matter of faith, it's a statement that says that God is a ludicrous proposition in defiance of everything else we know and understand about ourselves or our place in the universe. As such the 'is there / isn't there' question is ultimately a complete waste of time. Just as it would be for me to ask seriously "I wonder is 'love' really millions of totally invisible pixies and leprachauns that hover all around my body filling me with magic". I am not - by the way - an agnostic on that stuff either. Now I'm quite prepared to be wrong. If someone shows me evidence that destroys my world view, or even shakes it sizeably, then I will stop being an atheist. But I do not believe that will happen, hence I am an atheist.
 
  
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