faetal on 1/2/2012 at 01:34

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Demagogue, that's all well and good, but no one here is arguing that there are limits to knowledge and lots of dark crannies for gods to hide away in. It's just that it's (a) very convenient that every time knowledge advances a step further, religion rushes deeper into the cracks (or for the creationist types, the knowledge is fought against a la I.D.) and (b) quite telling that something as supposedly ancient and powerful as god's will on earth, as described in the various folk tales of the bible, seems to have been watered down in line of the advance of knowledge.

The idea has gone from there being a god who literally created the earth, meddled with humans, created floods, pestilence, sent down his only begotted son, who was actually himself, to die on the cross for human's sins, then be resurrected etc... to "oh yeah, god is the unseen force behind all of that stuff in science papers - if it weren't for the books that say god exists and the people who assimilate the belief, you'd never know he was there, also, anything in the bible which seems completely implausible is just allegorical, but everything else is an accurate historic account."

Science, despite being being a human construct and thus flawed by default, remains the most honest pursuit of what happens, without the presupposition of why. Again, I can't fail to notice how a lot of these arguments basically begin with "assuming god exists.." and then runs off to mine wikipedia for anything which bolsters it, rather than looking at the larger picture, and what the evidence points to, and THEN decides IF god exists. One of these is honest pursuit of answers, the others is re-writing the question to suit the right answer.
Seriously.

Azaran on 1/2/2012 at 01:44

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Just to add to this: this is one of the reasons that religion is dying in the West. Secular ethics and morality have rendered their religious counterparts obsolete, and so most people who apostatize either become atheists, or they go looking for a religion that can actually provide philosophical meaning, spiritual solace and mystical practices (e.g. Hinduism, Buddhism, New Age, &c).

Muzman on 1/2/2012 at 07:35

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There's a lot of debate about that at the moment and I expect to see some repeats soon enough. Penn are keen to defend one of their alumni. And Gould gets a great deal of posthumous kicking for being a bit soft and wooly when it comes to religion and other stuff. He's just not modernist enough for some people and I suspect he wanted people to be a bit reluctant to leap into grand conclusions about humanity. This may be a fatal flaw, but I'm down with it. (the weird thing is I distinctly remember Gould refilling those skulls himself in the book, not just doing statistical analysis. But everyone says otherwise. Oh well).
At any rate the temporal bias, while something people do a lot of ("oh they were crazy back then. but these days we've figured it out. Cross that question off" etc) is certainly not what Gould was doing there. The whole book is basically against that sort of thing, aiming to show that we were wrong then and we're probably wrong now. Or at least we should act as though our knowledge and conclusions are incomplete, particularly in areas where we've managed to do terrible things to one another on similar grounds in the past.
Yeah it's a bit activist and humanist and he cops a lot of stick as unscientific, like I said. But there it is.



Just diving in quickly without reading up on Topos and whatever (the discussion reminds me Godel's Incompleteness Theorem too) and perhaps insulting the whole conversation, there's often a terrible mistake in taking the weird theories and conclusions of quantum mechanics and running off into flights of logical and philosophical fancy.
Which isn't to say, rude as it sounded, that this is all useless or invalid. But those sub atomic investigations are much more procedural and granular than such methods generally allow for and being abstractly philosophical generally just muddies the waters.
I'm not being much use by saying this stuff, since I don't really know any examples off hand. But that's generally the way it has played out for me before: Be flummoxed by the looping paradoxes of some slice of logic and apparent conclusions of cosmology and quantum mechanics, but then actually see it hold together quite a lot better than I'd thought and be a lot more comprehensible when taken stepwise through the actual findings, experiments etc of the science (and discover much of this stuff is being terribly misused a lot of the time). And, above all, this is how it progresses. If the maths and logic don't seem to give us any help, we'll just have to come up with new ones as more information comes to hand. We seem to be running in to trouble with matching the abstract/theoretic/declarative in knowledge to the procedural in our understanding of things. We don't have the conceptual framework for comprehending the way one circumstance of "reality" will apply at one scale but not another. To me it seems like something we're going to just have to get, eventually.

Anyway, probably way off track there. What this has to do with Irreducible Complexity is the goal. IC seeks no knowledge, really. Investigating the limits of knowledge and reality is interesting I guess and people trying to break mathematics are probably genuine thinkers. But I'd wager none of them really posit irreducible complexity the way it is generally thought of. More likely their work is being misused by Discovery Institute flacks. Since the term was coined they've staked their marker just about anywhere, from the immune system to the bacterial flagellum, to proteins to atoms. There's guys now who say everything is irreducibly complex, as in "A table is not a table any more if you break it into pieces". ie. Concepts themselves are irreducibly complex. Which, given the religious origins of the argument, squares the circle nicely with trancendental apologetics (which posits, in a round about way, that the mere fact we have logic means god must exist). It's not even pretend science any more, it's linguistic deconstruction.
Irreducable complexity is not any sort of real investigation, is the thing, and the logic it often employs is trying to skip to the end based on a few axioms. It's true that it shouldn't be dismissed using similar errors, but it can be shown to be lacking in other ways quite clearly.

faetal on 1/2/2012 at 09:25

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I'm with Jay on this. I will never know for certain that there is no God, but likewise, I will never know for certain that there is no Hecate, Anubis, Vishnu etc...

I reject religion because it is a practice of condensing grand explanations out of the unknown, which to me is conceited. If something is mysterious to us, then it is just that and saying "yes, that's god" is, to me just attempting a more palatable explanation for what we don't yet know.

It is quit well characterised that morality and altruism are biological phenomena and are the inevitable result of species which thrive with social cohesion. The process works not just qualitatively from our perspective, but also mathematically. The prisoner's dilemma is a good example of how altruism works in population genetics to increase over time. So with the ever increasing frontiers of knowledge and realisation that morality is not dependent on religion (hence why the more brutal parts of the bible can be identified and ignored by the faithful's internal barometers), people are turning away from religion en masse. I think the reason why Buddhism etc fare better is because they rely less on supernatural elements - you don't have to believe in extraordinary spooky events in order to follow the philosophy. Still contains a fair amount of woo though, but that kind of thing will always have its followers - c.f. alternative therapies vs. evidence based medicine (if anyone wants to get started on that, please start another thread as it's a whole day-waster in itself).

So yes, an intellectually honest person will never say outright that God doesn't exist, but the religious will generally say they KNOW that he does and also dismiss outright as ridiculous that any other god does. It is hard to take religion seriously compared with something as through and practicable as science as a basis for what the possibilities are because religion tends to be blinkered in this fashion, or just keeps re-arranging the goal posts every time an answer comes along that blows part of their dogma out of the water.

jay pettitt on 1/2/2012 at 09:51

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semi seriously, to follow on from what Faetal just said -

Science has given us the ability to make energy dance to our precise whim. But we're still pretty confident that we're wrong about it.

Wrong is the new right.