Trance on 31/1/2012 at 20:00

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(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W96AJ0ChboU) Yup

Independent Thief on 31/1/2012 at 21:12

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I think people have bought into the idea that science and the concept of God are somehow at odds, coming from my perspective as a Calvinist, I believe God in His sovereignty lays out the groundwork for everything in the universe-all science is doing is simply finding out the mechanics of how it works. God has no need to hide in 'gaps', His handiwork is there for everyone to see. The Creator has no need to do something fantastic every five minutes to keep it all going, the natural laws He's laid out work very well. I really don't see the need for creationist arguments in science at all-God can do something instantly via a miracle if He chooses, or He can let the laws of physics, chemistry, biology-etc run their natural course to obtain results He wants via predestination. I think the whole conflict in that area has been egged on by Dawkins and others who act like science=atheism when that's far from the truth.



As I've mentioned before, there is a lot of allegory in the prophetic works-Jesus Himself spoke often in parables. However as for the miraculous, once you accept the existence of God then you understand that as the author of reality-He can step in and alter things anytime He chooses.

faetal on 31/1/2012 at 21:47

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The problem with all of that is that a god is not necessary to explain it. What that does is reduce god to being a redundancy. "Science describes the natural world exactly as god made it" - then why bother with god? God is only on the table as an option because it was put there a few millennia ago when there were no other explanations. Seem odd that in his own book, the bible, god makes no mention of anything beyond the macroscopic scale, no details of anything which was not apparent to humans at the time. If god created all of this in the same complexity as we know it now, then why was the bible written in a technologically ancient context?

Also, as regards sometimes scientists lose their neutrality - of course they do - they're humans. Humans are deeply flawed. This is another prime example of clutching at straws and picking out exceptions to try to weaken the rule. The fact remains that science is a discipline which has its strength in peer review. If anything can be validly debunked, then over time, it will. It's not a perfect process, but it definitely beats "well, we'd best just keep re-interpreting what's in this here bible then".

Lastly, talking about the science at the frontiers of knowledge throwing up some very strange and as yet mysterious questions, as allowing for the supernatural is, I believe a classic god of the gaps argument. Just going on basic probability alone, it's pretty coincidental that god happens to live just over the hill of the bits we've managed to figure out thus far. Stands to reason that a god just isn't there to find. I'm of the opinion that lacking any evidence *for* god, it is pointless to wonder whether there is one or not, just like it is pointless to wonder if unicorns or trolls exist. The only difference is some traditions which precede. But on that basis, we can also wonder if Zeus or Poseidon exist. Or Ra.

jay pettitt on 31/1/2012 at 21:58

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I've tried reading that (demagogue's post) 3 times and I'm still struggling to make sense of it.

Science (and scientists) are fallible. Check. It ain't called the ultraviolet catastrophe for nothing.

I'm not sure that's positive evidence for anything else though.

--edit--
Okay, I think I get it.

Science is an attempt to let reality speak for itself - but translated so beings that are yay high and with two ears, a couple of eyes, a rudimentary nose and a handful of appendages (hint: us) can understand it.

It's kinda like how I imagine interpreting ye olde Hebrew might be. However hard the interpreter tries, the translation is going to end up being coloured one way or another along the way.

I'm not sure 'rationalists' tend think that scientific knowledge is perfect though. It's certainly not advertised as such. I don't know if I qualify, but I lean toward science because I think (on balance) it's pretty good, not because I think it's like, the word of god or something.

But in an effort to interpret reality as best one can, I'm not sure (http://ncse.com/webfm_send/747) this kind of thing helps.

demagogue on 1/2/2012 at 00:49

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Well something like (http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/topos.html) topos theory, as formal logic, can be stated very precisely without ambiguity (although granted it's obscure & abstract stuff).

The quick way to get across the gist of it is that, while it keeps the "law of non-contradiction" (A and not-A can't both be true at the same time), it's possible in some cases to reject the "law of excluded middle" (either A is true or not-A is true, even if we don't know which one), where A is some low-level structure on which or out of which everything else is built. Under topos theory, with the right conditions, there'd be nothing in the structure of reality that would be able to "talk to" that level, so calling it "A" or "not-A" is impermissible. If you say it, you're not talking about reality anymore (since it can't reach A to know what it is) but just some kind of transcendental statement...

This is not a mere complaint that scientists are limited creatures and can't know if A holds or not, but it says something about the structure of reality itself, that the reality we live in stops at a level above A and it doesn't "exist" as something knowable, even if (the weird part about it) our reality is built out of that level. (Some people use topos logic to talk about QM & Heisenberg Uncertainty, some of have used it for M-Theory, some for consciousness; but there's a growing appreciation it may hold at some level down there...)

A classic metaphor (and old one now) is like if a toy reality was confined to only t.v. signals, and then these t.v. signals talked to each other inside the t.v. They wouldn't know just by looking around them if the signal was carried in by EM waves through the air or through a closed-circuit cable, because the "platform" is transparent to the "signal". Their t.v. reality is identical either way. If they were very clever scientists, they might do experiments and notice that if their "reality" were carried by closed-circuit cables it'd be a little more fluid than if it were signals carried in by EM airwaves, but a clever designer might ensure that there was no physical difference in the signal between the two kinds of waves, and the t.v. people would never be able to tell. Of course in actual reality, they could just jump out & look at the t.v. and see that it's receiving airwaves or a CC cable signal. But we may not have that luxury with super strings or some low level of our reality.

The punchline, in being so pepped up to combat creationists, some people may have the attitude "pffah, silly Christians. You can't say God is at the bottom of it all. It's turtles (physical processes) all the way down." But if topos theory is a better description of reality, then this conclusion is wrong, or invalid. The theory wouldn't allow you to say it's turtles all the way down, it may only allow you to say it's turtles to this base topography on which everything is built, but below that it's invalid to make claims about the structure (e.g., like "Whatever it is, it's not God". This could be an impermissible claim under topos theory, as a matter of the structure of reality itself. Although since you don't have the law of excluded middle, that doesn't imply that it is God either like it would under classic logic, where God either is there or isn't; it can't be both.) Since that may make some scientifically-minded people flip out on ideological grounds, they may end up doing bad science rejecting a topos style of logic when it might be the better logic, in the same way that Gould was doing bad science by saying "Science isn't racist" and interpreting data that way trying to be "neutral"... Well what happens when the data is racist? Now you're doctoring the data and replacing science with ideology and not being "neutral" in just the way you were complaining about. Or the better example is Hoyle's opposition to the Big Bang Theory on ideological grounds as being too much like creationism. Neutrality in science ideally means you let reality tell you itself what it is, and claim no more and no less than that.

Is that a better explanation?

Edit: BTW, this argument probably has more punch when you're talking about something some people really want to believe is down there, like whatever super-string stuff is made of, or the geometry of spacetime it moves on, or some lower theory -- what do you mean I can't say X is or isn't really there?! -- rather than God, which scientists at least are already used to leaving out of their physical models and not worrying about. But it's not worth re-tailoring a good argument just so it fits better in a religion thread. This is the kind of issue we should be talking about IMO when talking about the foundation of reality, and if it's not a good fit for a religious debate than so much the worse for the religion debate. It's a good debate for reality.