Science vs. Faith

[_MrStakhanovite]

How is speciation a metaphysical issue? The categorizing of living things into discrete species is merely a useful fiction. What is the tie to metaphysics?

Because it deals with categories, and for categories to make any taxonomy coherent, you need to know when a category begins and when it ends. How many parts do you have to remove from a house till it ceases to be a house and something else?

[_MrStakhanovite]

But as Feynman points out, metaphysics has a very poor track record telling us what must be and what couldn't be.

I don’t know what Feynman said, I typically don’t go to him with the kind of questions I have.

He gives several examples of philosophers claiming that science must work in a certain way only to be slammed down by science itself.

And? Newton was an Alchemist and Godel thought Leibnitz encoded secret formulas into his personal notes. Brilliant people are wrong all the time.

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?

Typically, I only hear that from people who lecture believers on why science makes faith irrelevant.

Also, what happened to all the concepts and necessary truths of Artistitolean or medieval metaphysics?

They didn’t go anywhere?

Things look quite different to the modern mind and this is largely due to what experience with nature has forced on us.

So necessary and contingent truths are some how different? There is no more talk of universals or just particulars? No more talk of Abstracta and Concreta? No more possible worlds?

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.

You’ll have to unpack that, I don’t know how “wait and see” becomes “broadly empirical” in any meaningful sense.

[_Sethbag]

How is speciation a metaphysical issue? The categorizing of living things into discrete species is merely a useful fiction. What is the tie to metaphysics?

Because it deals with categories, and for categories to make any taxonomy coherent, you need to know when a category begins and when it ends. How many parts do you have to remove from a house till it ceases to be a house and something else?

That's just it though, there is no point where you no one species begins and one ends. The taxonomers have to argue and fight about it, and then make a decision. This follows from the fact that every single living thing is of the same species as its parents, yet multiple species may emerge out of that lineage.

[_keithb]

It is the oft quoted maxim you call Occam's (Ockham's) razor, no? We observe that intelligence naturally exist one greater than another. Therefore the existence of God is predicted by the data. And hence God is the most simple solution to creation.
And besides all that, he has told us as much, so come on now, get real, stop the lies.

In order to prove your point, you need this propositions to be true:

"If we observe N entities (1,2,3 .. N) with some property X, and X1<X2< ... <XN, then there will always exist an entity (N+1), such that X(N+1)>XN".

That is not Occam's Razor, but is instead a creation of Joseph Smith in the Book of Abraham. What is more, it is easy to show that the proposition on which you rely is false.

For suppose that the entities (1, 2, 3 ...) are the novels of Jane Austen, which can be arranged in order of length if we want to (instead of order of date of writing). Then leaving aside juvenilia, there are just six novels in the sequence, with the second longer than the first ... and eventually the sixth longer than the fifth.

But (alas) there is no seventh novel longer than the sixth. She just didn't write one. So your principle is not generally true, and there is no reason to think that it applies to 'intelligences' any more than it does to novels.

[/quote]


Not only this, but I think that the whole idea of the hierarchy of infinite sets with different cardinalities also seems to pose problems to this notion, as I noted in one of my earliest posts on this forum.

Suppose that a god exists with some sort of knowledge set that is infinite in scope. What I argued in my post (and what I believe can be easily shown) is that there exists a super set that can be constructed from this original set (assuming the axiom of choice) that has a higher cardinality than the original set (and thus can not be mapped onto the original set with a one-to-one correspondence).

I am sure that Tarski could probably talk in more depth about these types of theoretical mathematical topics than I could, but the very idea of an omniscient god existing is for me problematic on a philosophical and mathematical level.

[_keithb]

I would also point out that the types of discussions that go on between people on the board about God in the broadest sense of the concept aren't really the ones that would matter to most people in real life. The god that most people believe in, and the god that I used to believe in quite literally when I was a believing member of the Mormon church, is not some abstract possibility that might exist in an abstract logical framework but one that helps you find your car keys when you lose them.

When I believed in god, I literally thought there was some old guy with a white beard, living on a planet/star named Kolob, and watching me use the bathroom and reading my thoughts as I fantasized about Mila Kunis. I think that this is the definition of god that actually means something in the world, that gets people into the churches on Sunday, etc.

[_Samantabhadra]

Suppose that a god exists with some sort of knowledge set that is infinite in scope. What I argued in my post (and what I believe can be easily shown) is that there exists a super set that can be constructed from this original set (assuming the axiom of choice) that has a higher cardinality than the original set (and thus can not be mapped onto the original set with a one-to-one correspondence).

This only holds if "knowledge" means something like "believing [proposition P] is true, while [proposition P] corresponds to an actual state of affairs" or, (almost) equivalently, knowing the exact position and momentum of each and every point-mass in the universe. The problem is that "the exact position and momentum of each and every point-mass in the universe" is not physically defined or physically definable. The issue here is that you are making a category error about what is "knowable" or what "knowledge" means.

When I believed in god, I literally thought there was some old guy with a white beard, living on a planet/star named Kolob, and watching me use the bathroom and reading my thoughts as I fantasized about Mila Kunis. I think that this is the definition of god that actually means something in the world, that gets people into the churches on Sunday, etc.

While this is sadly true of a great many believers, if that was your idea of God then your idea of God was false and more or less idolatrous. Leaving aside for a moment the fact that nearly every aspect of Mormonism (except for what was stolen from the Masons) is fraudulent, the bottom line is that this conception of God does no justice to the teachings of Apostolic Christianity. You don't have to accept those teachings, any more than you have to be Christian, but it is very important not to confuse the fraudulent tradition of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young with actual real-life Christianity.

[_Drifting]

I have faith in science.

I demonstrate this faith every time I follow a medical practitioners advice.
My faith is reinforced by the rewards I receive as a result of my obedience to the advice.

In fact faith in science produces a demonstrably higher success rate of reward than faith in religion. One can see, for the most part, scientific theories becoming more and more accurate and more consistent with other evidences over time. On the other hand - one can see, for the most part, religious theories becoming less and less accurate and less consistent with other evidences over time.

When it comes down to a choice science wins everytime.

[_Chap]

...

When it comes down to a choice science wins everytime.

I think that is it.

When we have a decision to make that involves at least in part the kind of question that science is good at answering - ranging from "How was the Grand Canyon formed" to "What stages does a fertilized human ovum pass through?", then anyone who chooses to ignore the science and answer on some other basis is making a very poor choice.

Even the most religious people (except for a tiny minority in western societies) confess this through their actions. They don't pray to find out whether the anti-lock brakes on their car are OK - they ask a qualified technician to check the system using the right equipment They don't pray to find out what medicine is best for their heart condition - they ask a physician trained in medical science. They don't pray to know where and when in its launch sequence a satellite should be put into orbit - they do the math using Newton's laws.

When the contest is one that science can enter, it wins every time. Even when it gives the wrong answer, science has a self-correcting mechanism that enables us to find out how that answer was wrong, and find a better one. Religion doesn't work that way: even when it does change its answers, it usually pretends that it always said that all along ...

[_MrStakhanovite]

That's just it though, there is no point where you no one species begins and one ends. The taxonomers have to argue and fight about it, and then make a decision. This follows from the fact that every single living thing is of the same species as its parents, yet multiple species may emerge out of that lineage.

Whoa Seth, did you intend to say that species are something that neither begins nor ends, and that, that there can be no specie changes from parent to child? Right or wrong, that is some serious metaphysical assumptions.

[_Tarski]

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.

Is what you say objectively true?
If not, shouldn't I ignore it?