quote:As was just discussed in this thread, science is limited in what it can study. If God exists, science could still not study God.
If God exists in any way that is meaningful, science can study God. It is only the non-meaningful things that science cannot study.
Ah, but this raises the question: "If God is meaningful, would science know how to study God?"
As for the statement earlier, about not having any scientists specifically working to disprove the existence of God, I agree with that. I don't think they do.
I also do not think that the majority of religious people go out of their way to prove God's existence. Religion and belief in God is based on faith, not proof that He exists. I disagree with any religous group or person that tries to prove God's existence.
In fact, I would go so far as to say it is contrary to any religious faith that believes that God has given us free will to try and prove God's existence.
Now I will put another spin on the argument. Science is based on human knowledge. There are things Science has not discovered yet. Much of the technology we enjoy has been around for less than 200 years. We have mapped a vast majority of the human genome, cloning has been possible with animals, etc. In another 200 years, where will we be?
Let us think about where our level of technology and understanding will be another 200 years from now. Perhaps it would be possible to create a human "in our own image." Let us also say for example, we found a planet on which life could be supported, and placed these artificial humans on that planet.
Would the people on this planet not consider their creator a deity?
I am someone that believes God is not some formless being or cloud like presence. I believe we were literally created in His image. How He performed this we simply do not know, but would it be so far fetched to think that God actually used technology and a knowledge of the many scientific disciplines to create a planet, animals, and man?
Who is to say man on earth is the most technologically advanced race in the universe?
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quote:Let us think about where our level of technology and understanding will be another 200 years from now. Perhaps it would be possible to create a human "in our own image." Let us also say for example, we found a planet on which life could be supported, and placed these artificial humans on that planet.
Would the people on this planet not consider their creator a deity?
whether they would or would not consider us, their creators, a deity says nothing about whether this deity can be studied by science. And in your particular example "god" would most certainly be able to be studied by science.
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Science can only study things that are repeatable and transferrable and it cannot study most aspects of non-deterministic systems.
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Would you like to give an example of a non-deterministic system?
quote:I also do not think that the majority of religious people go out of their way to prove God's existence. Religion and belief in God is based on faith, not proof that He exists.
Why this double standard? Why should religion get this escape clause, "I don't have to show evidence, I have faith"? This is not the behaviour of adults; children can believe in Santa Claus because it's convenient for them to do so - and most of them have rather better evidence than adult theists do, at that. But when an adult asserts that he believes because he believes, he makes himself much less than human. If we are anything more than squalid animals breeding in the muck, it's because we can think. When you refuse to do so, you denigrate the whole human race, and you dishonour your ancestors who brought you to the state where you can spew your filth across the internets. Grow up.
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As I understand it, quantum mechanics has yields several instances of non-deterministic systems, such as the position of electrons the nucleus of an atom.
Any free willed entity, such as God or human beings, would also be a non-deterministic system.
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quote:As I understand it, quantum mechanics yields several instances of non-deterministic systems, such as the position of electrons the nucleus of an atom.
You are mistaken; the wave function is perfectly deterministic. But even if you were correct, would you like to say in what sense science is unable to study this?
quote:Any free willed entity, such as God or human beings, would also be a non-deterministic system.
That does not follow. What you probably mean is that a free-willed soul which steers the body does so by rules other than those of known physics. Apart from this, I don't believe humans have free will and I don't believe gods exist, so they're rather bad examples for purposes of convincing me. But even granting humans free will, their actions are not random; you would not consider a robot whose actions were determined by cosmic-ray impacts to be free-willed, and the same applies if the source of randomness is outside ordinary physics. Any system that makes decisions, as opposed to flipping coins, does so by some set of rules; just because the rules aren't the ones governing electrons doesn't mean they don't exist. Show a free-willed soul the same inputs, and it performs the same actions, or it is nothing more than a random number generator. And even if it were a random number generator, you could study the distribution of the numbers.
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quote:Originally posted by MrSquicky: No. I mean that a free willed soul would be a non-deterministic system.
I also don't think you understand quantum mechanics very well.
Squicky, I think it's a huge leap from the fact that the positions of electrons can be non-deterministic to the conclusion that human beings are non-deterministic. I would think that the burden of proof would be on you to explain how this quantum indeterminacy could affect large scale actions by organisms such as ourselves.
It's also my understanding that science is actually quite capable of studying quantum mechanics.
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quote:No. I mean that a free willed soul would be a non-deterministic system.
I just gave an argument for why this is not true. Merely re-asserting what you originally said is not a very effective argument; would you like to show how my reasoning fails?
As for my understanding of quantum mechanics, I hate to argue from authority, but you do remember what subject I have two degrees in, no? Hint: It's the same one I'm working towards a PhD in. I do not say that this makes my understanding superior to yours; quantum mechanics is tricky business and an ability to do the math is not everything there is to it. But I do feel that it entitles me not to have my view quite so cavalierly dismissed. Again: I assert that the wave function's development is deterministic. Starting with the Schrödinger equation - we'll stick to the nonrelativistic version for now - can you show that this assertion is mistaken? And if you do so, will you further go on to answer my other question, and demonstrate how science was unable to study electrons?
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I didn't say anything about quantum indeterminacy explaining free willed humans. They were just two examples of non-deterministic systems.
I'm also not asserting that humans are in any way provably free willed. My points are about the (pretty well known) epistemological limitations of science. There are a lot of questions it can't answer and phenomena that it can't study. This is not a controversial statement and yet it seems largely to not affect the rather grandiose claims of some of the materialists here.
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Oh, and since the thread is about doctoral theses (thesises? thesii?), would you like to read mine? It's not quite finished yet, the final numbers are yet to go in, but the first five chapters or so are pretty well done. I urge you to pay particular attention to the second chapter, which lays out the formal math - quantum mechanics - of what I'm doing. Go on, have a go. I welcome feedback on both the actual math, and grammar or spelling errors, it's hard to catch them all.
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Your second sentence of chapter one seems off, unless that's a scientific term I don't get:
quote:Since only the mass eigenstates only the mass eigenstates appear in the equations of motion, a meson that initially has an unambiguous flavour will at later times be in a superposition of that flavour and its anti-flavour.
quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Would you like to give an example of a non-deterministic system?
quote:I also do not think that the majority of religious people go out of their way to prove God's existence. Religion and belief in God is based on faith, not proof that He exists.
Why this double standard? Why should religion get this escape clause, "I don't have to show evidence, I have faith"? This is not the behaviour of adults; children can believe in Santa Claus because it's convenient for them to do so - and most of them have rather better evidence than adult theists do, at that. But when an adult asserts that he believes because he believes, he makes himself much less than human. If we are anything more than squalid animals breeding in the muck, it's because we can think. When you refuse to do so, you denigrate the whole human race, and you dishonour your ancestors who brought you to the state where you can spew your filth across the internets. Grow up.
Great job KoM. Insult someone, then go ahead and tell THEM to grow up. I am trying to have a discussion, and you resort to insults.
Believing in something you cannot see does not make you less human. For example, I have never seen your brain, but I believe it exists. You may be able to show it to me if you chose to, but YOU hold that power. If an entity such as God existed, and does not choose to appear to me, it does not mean he is non-existant. He would hold the power to make himself known or not.
Science also has a belief system. It is called a Hypothesis or theory. If a scientist has a theory, he tests that theory and researches the data to determine if it is true or not.
Likewise a religious person may have a theory of God. The person tests that theory and researches the data to determine if it is true or not.
Whether is the theory is scientific or religious, there is faith involved.
The argument that man evolved from apes is a theory based on faith. Many believe humans evolved from the ape, however science has yet to produce definitive evidence. They still have not found the "Missing Link" connecting the two species.
Does that mean that man did NOT evolve from apes? Not necessarily. They very well could have! But right now, without sufficient and definitive evidence, it is only a theory that some have FAITH is true.
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Um. Apart from the repetition of the phrase 'only the mass eigenstates', which apparently has passed the glazed eyes of three successive reviewers, what is the offness?
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That was what I was referring to. You mentioned grammar errors.
My knowledge of quantum mechanics is only casual, though I do try to study it from time to time, with varying degrees of success. (I am missing many maths.)
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quote:The argument that man evolved from apes is a theory based on faith.
No, it isn't. It is based on evidence from genetics, fossils, geology, animal breeding, bacterial experiments, and likely a dozen or so other subjects I've momentarily forgotten.
quote:They still have not found the "Missing Link" connecting the two species.
Your understanding of the science is roughly 75 years out of date. The 'Missing Link' is a Victorian coinage which is not needed; and anyway, what do you call the likes of Lucy? You are now in classic creationist denial-mode; there are large numbers of 'intermediate' fossils, but every time a fossil B bridges a gap between A and C, creationists scream "But now there are gaps AB and BC! Where are the missing links?!"
quote:Believing in something you cannot see does not make you less human.
No, but then that's not what I said. I said that believing without evidence makes you less human.
quote:Likewise a religious person may have a theory of God. The person tests that theory and researches the data to determine if it is true or not.
Well then, now we're getting somewhere. This directly contradicts what you said earlier, about god-beliefs being based in faith. Could you please clarify which it is? Faith, or experiment? I would request that you please not jump from one to the other; it's very confusing to argue with someone who doesn't know what he believes, he just knows that he believes it.
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Oh, and since the thread is about doctoral theses (thesises? thesii?), would you like to read mine? It's not quite finished yet, the final numbers are yet to go in, but the first five chapters or so are pretty well done. I urge you to pay particular attention to the second chapter, which lays out the formal math - quantum mechanics - of what I'm doing. Go on, have a go. I welcome feedback on both the actual math, and grammar or spelling errors, it's hard to catch them all.
I don't understand 3/4 of it, but I will tell you that it looks very nice.
I wish you luck with it!
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Science also has a belief system. It is called a Hypothesis or theory. If a scientist has a theory, he tests that theory and researches the data to determine if it is true or not.
Likewise a religious person may have a theory of God. The person tests that theory and researches the data to determine if it is true or not.
Can you give examples of specific beliefs (e.g. do you believe Him omnipotent?) you have about God, and observations that you would regard as falsifying these beliefs? For example, if I believed that God had a long, white beard and then I saw him and he was clean-shaven this would falsify my belief.
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quote:Originally posted by IanO: That was what I was referring to. You mentioned grammar errors.
Ah yes. Thanks. Corrected in what's up now. It's kind of weird how that managed to slip pass me, two advisors, a postdoc, a wife, a father-in-law, and two parents!
[ December 16, 2009, 04:46 PM: Message edited by: King of Men ]
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Again, evidence that is not transferable is not equivalent to no evidence.
Geraine, however, explicitly appealed to faith, which is not evidence of any kind, transferable or not; it's just a fancy word for stamping your foot on the ground and saying "Well, I believe anyway, so there!" The argument against the particular kinds of non-transferable evidence that theists sometimes appeal to is a separate topic.
I notice that you suddenly went very quiet about quantum mechanics.
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quote:Likewise a religious person may have a theory of God. The person tests that theory and researches the data to determine if it is true or not.
Hee. Before I "hee" again, please clarify: are you suggesting that the existence of God is a reliably testable hypothesis?
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quote:The argument that man evolved from apes is a theory based on faith.
No, it isn't. It is based on evidence from genetics, fossils, geology, animal breeding, bacterial experiments, and likely a dozen or so other subjects I've momentarily forgotten.
Except when you look at the fossils as well as the time lines of evolution, humans simply do not fit in. Hell, Thomas Huxley even stated:
"Large changes [in species] occur over tens of millions of years, while really major ones (macro changes) take a hundred million years or so."
Yet man would have had to benefit from several macro-mutations in the course of only six million yaers. As far as Lucy is concerned, she apparently lived 3.6-3.2 million years ago, her skeleton was only 40 percent complete, and now it is unsure if she was even a biped.
If this were also true, why have humans evolved but apes have remained in a state of stagnation?
quote:Believing in something you cannot see does not make you less human.
No, but then that's not what I said. I said that believing without evidence makes you less human.
And yet scientists believe in things as well that have no concrete evidence for.
quote:Likewise a religious person may have a theory of God. The person tests that theory and researches the data to determine if it is true or not.
Well then, now we're getting somewhere. This directly contradicts what you said earlier, about god-beliefs being based in faith. Could you please clarify which it is? Faith, or experiment? I would request that you please not jump from one to the other; it's very confusing to argue with someone who doesn't know what he believes, he just knows that he believes it.
I would contend that faith IS an experiment. Just as a scientist attempts to prove a theory, so to does the religious individual. They read, learn, and ponder the data. They come to their own conclusion whether it is true or not. It does not mean that another person will come to the same conclusion, but for that person it is true.
KoM, I am interested in your field of work. You are studying quantum physics, am I correct?
Edit: I really suck at quoting, just read the quote because I responded Posts: 1937 | Registered: Nov 2006
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KOM, I don't respect you or your intelligence enough to waste time getting you to admit that you are wrong about quantum indeterminacy. It's enough for me to know that people who know what they're talking about will know.
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Because it's inherent in the definition of "true." I submit to you that anything which is a "personal truth" is, at best, a misworded proposition.
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quote:I don't respect you or your intelligence enough to waste time getting you to admit that you are wrong about quantum indeterminacy...
Says the psych major to the physicist who just linked to his dissertation on eigenstates. Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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quote:Except when you look at the fossils as well as the time lines of evolution, humans simply do not fit in. Hell, Thomas Huxley even stated:
"Large changes [in species] occur over tens of millions of years, while really major ones (macro changes) take a hundred million years or so."
And Thomas Huxley died in 1895!Eighteen-ninety-bloody-five! You might as well quote Newton on quantum optics!
quote:If this were also true, why have humans evolved but apes have remained in a state of stagnation?
They haven't. They just evolved in a different direction; the apes of today are as different from the apes of Lucy's time as humans are, it's just that the differences are less obvious to the naked eye.
quote:And yet scientists believe in things as well that have no concrete evidence.
Sez you.
quote:I would contend that faith IS an experiment. (...) for that person it is true.
There is exactly one truth; no more, and no less. There is no "truth for me" that's different from the "truth for you"; there is a single fact of the matter, and if we disagree on it then at least one of us is wrong. Either your god exists or it doesn't; to assert otherwise is madness. When you die, you will find out which is true, although you'll only know it very briefly.
Faith is not an experiment; it is a belief held without evidence. Beliefs are not experiments, beliefs are beliefs. Words have meanings; please stick to them.
quote:You are studying quantum physics, am I correct?
Particle physics; quantum physics is a tool I use. Your interest would benefit very strongly from some actual education; you have shamefully neglected your brain and filled it up with nonsense. You may have been "reading and pondering", but you're doing it wrong; from the arguments you make, you have been looking only at creationist literature, and those people lie. You have been lied to. Thomas Huxley! Absent gods, you quote people a hundred years dead and think you've made a serious contribution to the discussion! You cannot form an opionion that people are obliged to take seriously until you've read something not written as explicit propaganda. Get thee to TalkOrigins and flush the poisonous lies out of your brain; it may not yet be too late.
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quote:Originally posted by MrSquicky: KOM, I don't respect you or your intelligence enough to waste time getting you to admit that you are wrong about quantum indeterminacy. It's enough for me to know that people who know what they're talking about will know.
That certainly ends this discussion very effectively, yes. You are a coward, afraid of being shown wrong and unable to argue your point of view. Good day to you.
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quote:Because it's inherent in the definition of "true." I submit to you that anything which is a "personal truth" is, at best, a misworded proposition.
Ahh...begging the question.
Subjective perception is objectively true. That I perceive something is true. And thus, personal truth.
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Or, to put it somewhat less pompously: Geraine, you are using arguments that lead to what I call a "mushy God," which is quite possibly the most comforting but intellectually laziest sort of God out there. (Mushy Gods infuriate KoM more than almost anything else on Earth, so that's why he's being so insulting to you -- which is not an attempt to excuse his behavior, mind.)
The reason "mushy Gods" don't work is the same reason that there isn't "personal truth." The contextual reality in which a "personal truth" might be said to be "true" is exclusively internal; it is a product of one's own internal context, and while it might have some value within that context, it has no truth value -- and, in fact, cannot have any -- outside of that context. I can say "it is true that the Beatles are a good band," and that would be a "personal truth" -- but in order to move that to a communal context as a true statement (without establishing some universal criteria for "goodness" as might be applied to bands) it is necessary to frame that proposition as "it is true that Tom believes the Beatles to be a good band." In the same way, saying "God exists" as a personal truth makes no sense in any other context; it's like asserting "a tree exists over there, but just for me." What it really means is "I believe that God exists," which is pretty much tautological for the purposes of this conversation.
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So, I figured I'd check my assertion on indeterminacy because it has been a bit. Here's what I pulled from wikipedia as the first google result for "non deterministic phenomena in physics":
quote:However, in the natural world the electrons normally remain in an uncertain, non-deterministic "smeared" (wave-particle wave function) orbital path around or "through" the nucleus, defying classical electromagnetism.[7]
"If humans evolved from monkeys, why do we still have monkeys?" (a form of your "why have apes stagnated?" question) is so ridiculous that it's become a bit of a running joke amongst those familiar with evolutionary theory.
It is a great example of the sort of dishonest/ignorant argument produced by creationist propagandists. They take a simple, informal factual statement, like "humans are descended from apes" and then point at a modern ape and say "See? We still have apes. If we evolved, why didn't they?" while ignoring (willfully?) the fact that the apes we evolved from were not the same species that we colloquially refer to as apes now. Heck, technically speaking humans are apes. It's a classification that refers to all hominoids.
Do you see why this argument isn't just wrong, it's meaningless?
A valid argument against the statement that humans are descended from apes would start by noting that the use of "apes" in this context is ambiguous. It would then follow this by noting that evolutionary theory actually says - that all modern hominoids share a common ancestor. Finally, it would show how available evidence is insufficient to support a conclusion of common ancestry. To do this, of course, one would have to be familiar with the rather broad evidence that is currently cited in support of that conclusion. This is obviously a bit more work than just repeating a talking point from a creationist web site, but as I recall your way isn't the easy way.
quote:Originally posted by Geraine: Does that mean that man did NOT evolve from apes? Not necessarily. They very well could have! But right now, without sufficient and definitive evidence, it is only a theory that some have FAITH is true.
1. We didn't evolve from apes. Apes and humans share a close common ancestor.
2. In terms of what constitutes 'sufficient and definitive evidence,' evolution is right up there with, say, germ theory and plate tectonics and heliocentrism. We actually have more direct evidence of evolutionary theory than we have of most astronomical science, which infers most of its data and findings and makes its discoveries (like 'what is a neutron star?' or 'what is a magnetaur?') successfully through correlation.
Saying that evolution lacks definitive evidence is kind of an argumentative dead-end. I mean that as advice, really. The amount of evidence that exists is staggering. To claim that evidence is paltry enough to make it a matter of faith is an argumentative mistake that can, at best, lead to a drubbing in counterpoint.
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quote:it's like asserting "a tree exists over there, but just for me."
But that can be true.
Certainly, subjective perception of the environment leads to unique conceptions, some of which even have objectively observable effects. Learned helplessness is probably the most classic example of this.
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quote:Originally posted by MrSquicky: So, I figured I'd check my assertion on indeterminacy because it has been a bit. Here's what I pulled from wikipedia as the first google result for "non deterministic phenomena in physics":
quote:However, in the natural world the electrons normally remain in an uncertain, non-deterministic "smeared" (wave-particle wave function) orbital path around or "through" the nucleus, defying classical electromagnetism.[7]
Urk. That's what happens when people try to explain physics without using math. Sorry, this is just wrong. There is no orbit, deterministic or otherwise. There is a wave function specifying the electron density at each point; the wave function develops according to the deterministic Schrödinger (or Dirac if you want relativistic effects) equation, which is a nice ordinary differential equation, no randomness. (Well, not necessarily nice in the sense of 'easily soluble', of course.)
You are now using Wiki hand-waving popular explanations to argue with math. I suggest that you're in a bit of a hole and the correct action is to stop digging.
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No, it can't. A tree exists or it does not. You may, in your own internal context, not be aware of the actual state of this hypothetical tree, but that does not affect the actual state of the tree in communal reality.
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You'd think so, but sometimes I need to use it to distinguish what's really "real" from what people insist is personally "real."
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quote:Either your god exists or it doesn't; to assert otherwise is madness.
For personal perceptual contexts this is obviously the case.
It is also entirely possible that it is ultimately the truth.
It's not madness. It's just not logical. That doesn't mean it isn't so. There are mature, meaningful philosophical systems that support A and !A both being true.
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Nu, but aren't you then allowing them to frame the discussion by apparently admitting the existence of two separate realities? When your argument is that there is only one, you ought not to undermine it by your language.
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quote:I would contend that faith IS an experiment. Just as a scientist attempts to prove a theory, so to does the religious individual. They read, learn, and ponder the data. They come to their own conclusion whether it is true or not. It does not mean that another person will come to the same conclusion, but for that person it is true.
There's different types of experiments. What you are talking about can be said to be an experiment for some definitions of the world, but it is qualitatively different from proper scientific experiments.
There's a big word, epistemology, which pretty much means, what we can know we know. I think one of the big problems that people get into with pushing their philosophy, whether it be religious or strict materialism, is that they don't understand and very often far overstep the bounds of the relevant epistemologies. It sounds like you would likely benefit from learning more about science not as a series of statements that people in lab coats say, but as a system of thought, as a way of knowing what we can know.
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quote:Either your god exists or it doesn't; to assert otherwise is madness.
It's not madness. It's just not logical. That doesn't mean it isn't so. There are mature, meaningful philosophical systems that support A and !A both being true.
Ok, I can see your brain has rotted to the point where only Darwin can help. I challenge you to a duel. I'll give you an advantage: You can use a gun, while I'll use a sword. My sword, however, will be made using the axioms of physics; your gun should be made so that it both is and is not loaded.
This has the additional advantage of being an experimental life-after-death test for you; two experiments for the price of one, great in these times when the NSF is rather strapped. I'm sure we can get a grant.
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quote:I disagree that this is necessarily true. It's an axiom.
Tell you what. You spend some time in the reality where it's not true, then come back and tell me what it was like. Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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