Science vs. Faith

[_beefcalf]

Note that I am not saying science is NOT "useful"- I am just denying it tells us much which is useful about anything outside of its utilitarian purview.

Because it is ultimately descriptive, it cannot get "beyond" language to some kind of "reality" beyond human experience.

I'm not absolutely sure I'm following you, but, for what it's worth, I think I agree with you: "Science is not useful for discussing, analyzing and understanding fantasy."

Is that about it?

[_mfbukowski]

when believers want to give their claims more weight, they dress these claims up in scientific terms. When believers want to belittle atheism or secular humanism, they call it a "religion". -Beastie

This is actually Tarski's siggy and it goes to the core of the issue, but it cuts two ways.

When non-believers want to belittle believers they call their beliefs "non-scientific".

Of course those beliefs are "non-scientific".

What the non-believer misses is the irony in all of that. They are SUPPOSED to be non-scientific!

Do all believers understand this point? No. Are believers who think their beliefs ARE scientific wrong?

Yes.

We who understand it can only do so much ;)

[_mfbukowski]

I'm not absolutely sure I'm following you, but, for what it's worth, I think I agree with you: "Science is not useful for discussing, analyzing and understanding fantasy."

Is that about it?

Nope.

Science is not useful for discussing analyzing and understanding anything which is not objectively observable.

If you want to call morals, history, literature, art, the questions of the meaning of life, what you should do with your life, who to vote for, or why you like to post here, "fantasy", be my guest.

Or for that matter, whether or not light is a wave or a particle, or something else, or if taxonomy is "objective truth"- be my guest.

I will gladly call it ALL "fantasy" if that floats your boat.

[Guest]

And no, I won't discuss Boghossian here because that will be an endless discussion.

There is at least one here who thinks he should be exalted to godhood because he was the chairman of the NYU philosophy department.

But he doesn't understand Rorty or any of the anti-realists really, and there are numerous articles which show that.

https://www.google.com/search?q=boghoss ... =firefox-a

[_Sethbag]

Many anti-realists hold to the view that all there is to talk about is talk itself, and that we cannot "get down" to any "reality" outside of descriptions of our experience, not what is "real" in any other sense.

Well, there is probably some point to that. Yet people have arguably useful conversations all the time about things. I can do some very useful things with math despite the fact that Russell and whats-his-name spent over 400 pages and didn't quite prove that 1+1=2.

I can't actually prove that anyone but myself exists, and some would say that I cannot even really prove that I exist, yet I still get by OK assuming, for the sake of argument, that I and others really do exist. And I doubt you'd choose to stop assuming you and others exist in your daily life activities either.

Yet it seems no one here can view religion also as a "useful fiction" as much as science or any other discipline is.

Why is that?

Because I can accept that science is a useful fiction, but most religious believers cannot accept that their religious worldview is one. To Mormons, Elohim, Jehova, Michael, Moroni, Nephi, etc. really did exist, in the literal sense. And once they stop really existing, as in the Gadianton Turn, Mormonism essentially stops existing, or at least commanding as much obedience from its members as it currently does.

Please don't criticize this for being overly simplistic- I know that already. That is the point of the post. You want a wall of text, I can give it to you complete with references.

I'm not sure what your point is. Are you arguing that the concept of Elohim, Jehova, Nephi, Moroni, etc. are a useful fiction? Are you arguing that priesthood authority and power is a useful fiction? If so, you'll have little argument from me.

[_keithb]

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.

That was a cool thread by the way, I forget if this was answered, but couldn't one define God's knowledge as the set of all sets?

I have so many thoughts on this that I just need a time to sit and write them down. I've just been so busy lately that it's hard to even post on interesting threads, let alone write the several pages of text that I would need to try and express some of the ideas that I've thought about lately.

My thoughts on this would be that you would be unable to really write down a set of all possible knowledge for a god, no matter how big the set is. Mathematicians realize this fact about the set of all supersets, which is why they define another mathematical object in its place called a "class". However, let's think about what this would imply a bit for a god in terms of being omniscient.

If we define a set of knowledge for god, no matter how large, we can construct a larger set of knowledge from the original set by constructing the superset of the original set (defined as the set of all possible subsets of the original and permissible as long as the axiom of choice holds in ZF set theory).

However, this would be unsettling in terms of a supposedly omniscient god. Why?

Well, because there is no largest set of knowledge. No matter how large we make the original set (even a very high cardinality of infinity), there will always exist a larger infinite set of knowledge. Period.

Now, I guess someone could argue that the knowledge of this god is progressing infinitely fast and has been doing so for an infinitely long time, so somehow this god has acquired all of the knowledge possible through this process, somewhat like the Mormon idea of eternal progression. But, if we relate knowledge to sets of statements about the real numbers (I guess taking a Platonist approach to numbers -- that true statements exist about numbers independent of the human mind) even this brings up a few questions:

1. How is this god expanding its knowledge base forever? First, as Turing showed in a paper (I don't have the reference handy but can look it up on request), there are infinitely many numbers that are not computable. He showed this by enumerating the possible computer programs as computing some set of numbers and then taking the diagonal numbers of this enumerated list. So, this would raise the question of how exactly this god is expanding its knowledge base if no computer programs exist (or can exist) to compute certain true statements.

2. Where is this god storing all the information? The only way that we humans know to store information is ultimately through energy, and there can't be an infinite density of energy, for obvious reasons (i.e. the Big Bang). Also, we have only seen particles that have a limited number of accessible quantum states (i.e. spin), so it doesn't seem reasonable to say that a god could store infinitely much information on a single particle, since this would presumably mean an infinite number of quantum states accessible by each particle to store each piece of information. So, does this god have a universe somewhere (or infinitely many of them) that it is using to store all of this ever increasing information that it is acquiring?

3. How is this god retrieving information? If a god knows everything that it is possible to ever know but can't retrieve the information, then can we really say that the god is omniscient? It's kind of like me saying, "I know what's going to happen a year from now today, but it will take me five years to retrieve the information." So, does the god have some sort of a super retrieval system to sort through the multiple universes that he is using as a hard disk in order to find pertinent information instantaneously?

There are other questions I have about the supposed idea of omniscience and omnipotence, but I guess this makes a good start. Just to give an example of the scope of the problem facing a being who claims to be (or thinks mistakenly) that it is god, here are a few of the situations a god should already know everything about:

1. What the universe will look like in 10 minutes.

2. What the universe would look like with one star less.

3. What the universe would look like with one star more.

4. The fastest possible draw in a chess game if both sides removed one pawn at random.

5. The first occurrence of a string of 1 million 2's in a row in the number Pi (or if such a string never occurs).

6. What the earth would look like if it were suddenly to turn into a giant cheese burger.

And so on ... for infinitely many possibilities.

Does this mean that there is no god? No. Possibly there are solutions to these problems that I am not smart enough to see. After all, there are infinitely many things that I don't know about the universe, as I just explained at the first of my post.

However, this does raise several serious questions in my mind as to how some being could be omniscient. It's an easy thing to say ... much harder to actually imagine or explain logically.

[_beefcalf]

I'm not absolutely sure I'm following you, but, for what it's worth, I think I agree with you: "Science is not useful for discussing, analyzing and understanding fantasy."

Is that about it?

Nope.

Science is not useful for discussing analyzing and understanding anything which is not objectively observable.

If you want to call morals, history, literature, art, the questions of the meaning of life, what you should do with your life, who to vote for, or why you like to post here, "fantasy", be my guest.

Or for that matter, whether or not light is a wave or a particle, or something else, or if taxonomy is "objective truth"- be my guest.

I will gladly call it ALL "fantasy" if that floats your boat.

History is not objectively observable? What did you do last Thursday? Did you get gas in your car? Might there be surveillance videos of you pumping your gas? Can you yet read the words on the Magne Carte in the cloister Old Testament the Salisbury Cathedral? Are the stones of the Western Wall still stacked one on top of the other? Can we dig the fossilized remains of ancient creatures out of the Burgess Shale?

And as for what we like, what we desire and how we feel, these things are not, in practice, measurable today. But they are simply a pattern of activity in neurons. While they are admittedly complex, there is nothing about these patterns which we should assume transcends the possibility of measurement and analysis.

Yes, such is my faith in science that I am confident that methods will be developed which not only can determine what you are thinking, but also which, given enough computational power, might create any desired pattern in your neurons. Making you happy, despondent, hopeful, nostalgic, remorseful. Whatever. It is absolutely a matter of inducing physical and physiological changes to the cells of your brain.

The concept of an immortal soul which acts as the seat of intelligence is clearly one of the easiest of the human myths to debunk.

Nothing you've mentioned here is beyond the purview of science.

[_Sethbag]

I cannot say I understand everything MFB writes in these threads. I'm certainly not well read in philosophy. However, my gut feeling based on my observations of a number of these threads over time is that MFB employs a sort of scorched-earth apologetics. That is, if he can destroy all basis for argument against his beliefs, then his beliefs become off-limits to criticism, and he can go on securely believing whatever he wants, which is apparently some personal form of Mormonism.

Am I far off?

[_Molok]

MFBukowski, science is perfectly capable of describing, understanding, and analyzing music. It's called music theory.

[_Tarski]

Science is not useful for discussing analyzing and understanding anything which is not objectively observable.

hmm. What would someone like you mean by "objectively observable"?