Science vs. Faith

[_Sethbag]

Beef, the obvious reply to you on that is that all of those thousands of gods were really just the one true God that Nightlion believes in, merely explained differently due to error creeping in to the original true doctrine. Of course, that merely hoists the problem you refer to up one level and rephrases it, to congratulate Nightlion on identifying the correct interpretation of the one true God out of all the thousands of misinterpretations promulgated throughout human history.

[_beefcalf]

Beef, the obvious reply to you on that is that all of those thousands of gods were really just the one true God that Nightlion believes in, merely explained differently due to error creeping in to the original true doctrine. Of course, that merely hoists the problem you refer to up one level and rephrases it, to congratulate Nightlion on identifying the correct interpretation of the one true God out of all the thousands of misinterpretations promulgated throughout human history.

What I think is cool is how the God of Abraham sends down prophets who teach us that Jesus was the Christ (Abinidi, for example) and he also sends us prophets who teach that Jesus was not the Christ (Mohammed). He is such a kidder! I love that old trick he did... the one where he flooded the Earth and lovingly and mercifully drowned nearly everything, then came down and painstakingly erased any and all evidence of this flood from the earth. Wow! He really got me with that one. I just laughed and laughed! From his messing around with the pseudogenes and LINES and SINES in our DNA to make it look like... get this! ...to make it look like we are related to chimpanzees through a recent ancestor! Man-o-man, he never lets up! It's just one non-stop practical joke after another. No wonder Nightlion likes him.

[_Darth J]

Beef, the obvious reply to you on that is that all of those thousands of gods were really just the one true God that Nightlion believes in, merely explained differently due to error creeping in to the original true doctrine. Of course, that merely hoists the problem you refer to up one level and rephrases it, to congratulate Nightlion on identifying the correct interpretation of the one true God out of all the thousands of misinterpretations promulgated throughout human history.

What I think is cool is how the God of Abraham sends down prophets who teach us that Jesus was the Christ (Abinidi, for example) and he also sends us prophets who teach that Jesus was not the Christ (Mohammed). He is such a kidder! I love that old trick he did... the one where he flooded the Earth and lovingly and mercifully drowned nearly everything, then came down and painstakingly erased any and all evidence of this flood from the earth. Wow! He really got me with that one. I just laughed and laughed! From his messing around with the pseudogenes and LINES and SINES in our DNA to make it look like... get this! ...to make it look like we are related to chimpanzees through a recent ancestor! Man-o-man, he never lets up! It's just one non-stop practical joke after another. No wonder Nightlion likes him.

Thus sayeth the Lord: Riddle me this.......

[_beefcalf]

Thus sayeth the Lord: Riddle me this.......

Hey! What is that symbol over his right breast? Are these the new millennial garments we will all be wearing when Christ returns?

[_Nightlion]

Exactly which God are we talking about here, Nightlion? Is is safe to suppose that, of the ten-thousand gods variously attested to by the prophets and shaman of the ages, you only consider one of them to be real? And that the other nine-thousand, nine-hundred and ninety-nine of them are completely fictional?

I think it speaks well of you that you were able to sift through all the thousands of shams and fakes and frauds concocted by man and carefully select that one divine needle in the celestial haystack, the only real God. The fact that you were born amongst Mormons in the twentieth century certainly played no part in influencing your selection, I should be careful to add...

I never had to sift though anything. God drew me unto himself and manifested his power in my being wrought upon by his Almighty power and made a new creature, raise up to a higher state of existence, where the knowledge of God is a certainty. That is the promise of the gospel. Mormons do NOT do it. What happened to me is officially repudiated by LDS tradition and doctrine. In forty years of searching I have not found a single Mormon who said....."Cool, tell me how I can come to know God and be wrought upon and cleansed. I will give away all that I possess to obtain such a blessing."

Now I can explain it with great plainness to anyone who cares. Nobody cares. The pride of humanity floats way higher than the troll lines God has set out to snag the meek and contrite and the broken-hearted. It is epic fail. God is not pleased.

[_Tarski]

The sciences tell me what is, metaphysics tells me what must be..

But as Feynman points out, metaphysics has a very poor track record telling us what must be and what couldn't be. He gives several examples of philosophers claiming that science must work in a certain way only to be slammed down by science itself.

How many times have you heard that the same experiment under the same conditions must lead to the same result for science to make sense?
Quantum mechanics forced us to retract that notion.

Also, what happened to all the concepts and necessary truths of Artistitolean or medieval metaphysics? Things look quite different to the modern mind and this is largely due to what experience with nature has forced on us.

Kant thought that the laws of Euclidean geometry were synthetic a priori truths and he seems to have had everyone convinced for a while.
Then came non-Euclidean geometry, general relativity and now the bizarre world of noncommutative geometry.


Finally, if nature forces us to even rethink the already murky foundations of mathematics and logic (which is sort of happening already ) then we will live with it. Will we need topos theory instead of standard set theory or something as yet unthought of?

I mean, it is not as if we are all that sure of ourselves as far as the foundations and limitations of logic and mathematics. Even there, it is in some sense "wait and see' and therefore broadly empirical.

[_mfbukowski]

Keep in mind that human compassion and empathy must be taken into consideration.

So judging things for emotional reasons is "scientific"?

How about a burning in the bosom?

[_beefcalf]

Keep in mind that human compassion and empathy must be taken into consideration.

So judging things for emotional reasons is "scientific"?

How about a burning in the bosom?

Is it your opinion that human compassion and empathic feelings cannot produce/be produced by physiologically measurable changes in brain state? Because I believe there may be research which might lead me to conclude that these 'emotions' are indeed correlated with physiological events in the brain. If this is the case, perhaps emotions can be moved from the subjective to the objective.

[_Samantabhadra]

The problem with atheism--well, one of the main problems with atheism--and in general with the whole "science vs. faith" false dichotomy is that it presupposes a kind of naïve metaphysical realism about (sub)atomic particles.

To be sure, there have at various points existed paradigms other than that of the Copenhagen School, but generally speaking one disagrees with Niels Bohr at one's own peril. More specifically, every experimental test of local realism has failed, and James Bell's famed experiment put more or less the final nail in the coffin of the idea that the universe is ultimately or fundamentally objective in terms of what does or does not exist. The point being, if the most basic building blocks of the "objective" "material" universe are not ultimately self-identical, even at a particular location in spacetime, then what possible rationale could there be for positing that the universe as such is "objective" or "material"? There is none.

[_MrStakhanovite]

Is it so straightforward?

Yes.

Problems in the Philosophy of Science may grind Philosophy of Science to a halt, but as you point out they don't grind science to a halt, and I am not certain that it is enough to say that that is because "there is work to be done and science has utility", as if scientists were somehow at fault in not being sophisticated or observant enough to realize that We Have A Problem Here, Houston

Has nothing to do with sophistication, but people can only know so much. Your typical field Biologist won’t be able to speak much outside their field, much less in another discipline. There is only so much a person can take on. You don’t need to know just what exactly is going on inside a computer to get a lot of use out of it.

Maybe what worries philosophers of science has less relation to science than they like to think?

Today, if Philosophy of Science is going to be your Area of Specialty, you need some kind of graduate degree in the field you work on, in addition to your philosophy degree. This is to ensure that one doesn’t get divorced from the current trends and ideas.