I know what the Lagrangian point is in astronomy, though I've always known them as the Lagrange Points. But why would I need the math knowledge you refer to to know that science is successful? It's not just that the scientific process gives us the closest representation of the Universe, it's that the scientific process allows us to make predictions that work. Science got us an 85%+ 5 year survival rate for the most common form of childhood leukemia, ALL. You can't get that with prayer and rituals. Science got us rovers on Mars, prayer and rituals did not. Science is successful. Is it perfect? Of course not. Science has allowed humans slaughter each other in unbelievable numbers. But so has religion. It's not blind faith and I'm not clinging to anything. It's repeatable successes that lead me to trust science over god beliefs.
I was referring to Lagrangian mechanics, but that doesn't matter. I think that part of my post was unnecessary and potentially snobby so forget it and apaologies. Of course you're right, science does give us things (though I can only imagine back in the days when the RCC reigned religion gave you things as well) and it does work where religion does not. What's dangerous is presuming that because it works where religion does not, that it alos works where religions claims to. Listen, if you believe in the doppler effect, because you believe in the work that was done on it, on the evidence you've seen, and the people who have done work on it, by all means, great. But when people trying to use "science" as some all encompassing thing to debunk, and therefore replace religion, they are using it as a religion, and I can't help but feel a beautiful tool is being misused. And even if you're not misusing science as a religion, I would argue that many are.
I will need time to digest your comments, 12345, I'm not sure I follow them. You seem to be arguing that my references to the scientific process don't represent the scientific community's. I don't understand that comment. Who are these scientists you think are worshiping at the alter of process? Sorry, more offensive to theists comments. I respect people's beliefs, but I also have my own and don't want to censor them in order to be polite. So I ask people who don't want their beliefs challenged to simply pass my comments over. Spoiler I'm not a fan of NOMa. I think it suggests we should apply a double standard to some conclusions, give them a pass as if evidence matters not only when it comes to god beliefs. Without a double standard NOMa has no meaning.
The scientific community, as a whole, is not worrying about God. That's for philosophers or drunken nights. These men and women are spending their lives worrying about the physical world, either deriving equations, running simulations, or doing experiments, on small, realizable problems that can be feasibly studied. On the whole, you don't get papers in physics (at least legitimate ones), chemistry, mathematics, astronomy, biology, etc, for looking for answers that could credit or discredit God.You might mention cosmology, but then we'd be leaving the tried and true sciences that brought you cell phones and a cure for Leukemia, and entering the realm of theory. A unified theory would be nice, but that's neither here nor there. The "community" is a bunch of competing people in various fields. It's not one big team, like a religion.
I think it's very restrictive to say that philosophers worry about god. It's also grossly inaccurate for the major part. The lack of god (more accurately the lack of a direction) is at the heart of the Existentialist movement, which is still one of the main fields of contemporary philosophy. I feel a lot of people tend to confuse philosophy and theology, especally the Richard Dawkins 'Strong Atheist' types. The truth is that most of the major philosophers of the past 150 years have been doing pretty much anything else, with their lack of belief in a god as just a starting point. In fact philosophers like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Sartre pretty much just assumed that god didn't exist. They barely bothered to come up with any good anti-god arguments.
The problem with arguing about God is that no matter what science comes up with, it is perfectly consistent with the existence of God. If God was a Taurus, like me, he/she would be too lazy to keep working on it constantly. Instead, he/she would do exactly what was done - automatise the Universe using basic principles and let it play out.
You are describing the Deist god. Gods do less and less until they do absolutely nothing, ergo you can't prove there is no god. You also can't prove I don't have an invisible dragon in my garage. I think a lot of archeologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists would beg to differ with your perception of science. And there's a fairly well established movement of Christians trying to prove intelligent design with scientific methods, and disprove the evidence that refutes their god beliefs such as evolution and that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. They look for scientific evidence of a worldwide flood and irreducible complexity in life forms. While they aren't my idea of good scientists, a few of them are scientists.
The best thing I've heard from the creationist movement is that the water from what they called the 'Noachian flood' seeped into the earth, and then somehow enough energy was found by the planet itself to shoot all the excess water out of the earth's atmosphere and into space. Part of it hit the moon and that's why it has craters.
[MENTION=53143]GingerCoffee[/MENTION]: I think you misunderstood my comment. Or I misunderstood yours Never mind. [MENTION=2124]Lemex[/MENTION]: wow, it's so surreal that people can believe such nonsense. I am open to the idea of God but I'm not stupid and uneducated. Geez...
First I would like to apologize for the fantastic typos in my last that I just didn't see. I've had nothing but one cup of coffee and have been at work all day. [MENTION=35110]jazzabel[/MENTION]: yeah, one more in depth theory has that apparently pressure was so built up and all this Noachian flood water was concentrated in to so small a place (again, somehow) and so it resulted in enough force to launch all that water from the earth and into deep space. Creationists on YouTube have talked about it, and I never know if I should laugh or cry reading that stuff.
[MENTION=2124]Lemex[/MENTION]: You must have a lot of patience, I can't bear to listen to crap like that anymore. All I know is that it's mind boggling what some people are prepared to say to buy a fast ticket to heaven (or so they think). And you can't argue with them. If a geothermal physicist (or whatever field is relevant here) went to explain science they'd dismiss it. If he confronted them with facts that prove their theories are impossible, they say 'nothing is impossible for God". It's brainwashing at its finest.
...........what? (I'm not actually looking for a reply from anyone. Just wanted to express my incredulity. Ta.)
Yeah, they're just as bad. Show me the research of theirs that gets into nature and il concede them well established
While it has since been refuted because the genetic precursor was found, Michael Behe's hypothesis that the bacterial flagellum was irreducibly complex is the most famous example. He won't let go of his quest to disprove evolution, but aside from that he's a legitimate scientist and has a long list of published research. As for discounting all the scientific fields I listed, I'm not sure why you would do that. A lot of people try to dismiss what is sometimes called 'soft science'. I believe it is because they have a poor understanding of how one does research when there are such complex variables as one finds in the study of human culture and psychology. Since I don't know your objections, I can't address them. I'll give one example. The anthropological study of culture and migration had a pretty detailed account of human migration out of Africa. One can also map that migration by looking at the evolution of languages and the accounts linguistic studies correlated well with the anthropological data. And when genetic science was used to study human migration out of Africa the results very closely matched both the data from language evolution and anthropological research. To say anthropology is not a science would be wrong.
It might surprise you to find out how much of that science you dismiss contributed to the discovery of the germ theory (Dr Snow's work on the epidemiology of cholera in London) and the discovery of the first vaccine for small pox (because it was noticed that milk maids weren't getting small pox), both critical steps that preceded development of an effective vaccine for polio. Edited to add: I almost forgot, when Snow discovered the source of the cholera was the Broad St pump, because he failed to convince enough people to quit getting water there, he and a couple public health officials removed the pump handle. I think that falls under the category of psychology. And now there is a resurgence of polio in parts of the world where socio-cultural factors are resulting in people refusing to get the polio vaccine. It's going to take psychosocial science to address what the 'physical' science cannot if we ever hope to rid the world of polio. Want to try another? This is fun.
Actually, that's a good point. Soft sciences are definitely important. Give me some time to try and formulate what it is that distinguishes soft from hard and see if there's not something we can apply to the argument of disproving God.
Ok, my definition of hard and soft varies slightly from the established. Soft to hard is a spectrum, not always rigid, where we go from exploring, massive and complex, harder to define bodies, with seemingly unlimited variables, like cultures, societies, etc, to slightly more well defined systems, like ones personality, then the brain, a cell, proteins, molecules, atoms, subatomic particles, and finally abstract models like a rigid rotor, for example. My definition fits in with the accepted definition because my spectrum suggests that the more complex the system to be studied, the more harder it is do a controlled experiment. It doesn't surprise me that you would list the "softer' sciences when finding examples that try to argue the existence or non existence of a super natural being. The more confined I am to just one thing, the harder it is for me to extend it to other arguments. To me, the beauty of science has always been this. "I have this particular result in this isolated experiment, and therefore, it suggests this one particular thing." We can put these things, let's call them models, formulas, and laws, together to form a bigger picture, but in the end, that's just the human mind applying tools to understand the world around him. " When you enforce the "bigger picture" instead of admiring the smaller bits individually, in my mind, you can lose sight of what it was you were doing in the first place. The more reach a claim has, the less safe it is. Denying a theory of existence, using science, a bag of individual tools, is an enormous endeavor. And, having thought about it, I suppose this doesn't really exclude fields like anthropology. After all, if those are sciences, they too deal with plethora of specific models.
You are using a fallacious argument with a dab of salt. Let's break it down to the elements. There's no essential difference between observing humans and observing the stars. While we use more tools to observe the very far and very small, and, those things which are out of the range of our senses, if you watch the liquid in a test tube turn pink while counting the drops to determine pH, it's not very different from observing that only the people who ate the salad are throwing up. An observation is an observation. The scientific process is the scientific process and the principles don't change because you are applying the process to different things. There may be a lot of variables to consider when you try to draw a conclusion about human behavior, there are a lot of variables when you try to draw a conclusion about the weather, or the economy. You can still apply the scientific process to all three of those things. Does the quality of research differ by field of study? Are some scientific fields of research better developed than others? Yes. Astronomy is by far older and more developed than medical science. But science is still science and the evidence I base my premise on is sound, easily verified, falsifiable, and overwhelming. Spoiler When you look to the origin of gods beliefs, you find overwhelming evidence of fiction. You find a complete lack of evidence of any actual gods ever having interacted with people. At some point it's reasonable to draw a conclusion based on that overwhelming evidence that fiction explains all god beliefs. It's not complicated. The science isn't soft. The evidence is overwhelming. As I said, it's takes a paradigm shift. You have to shift from asking for evidence to disprove something for which there is not evidence for in the first place, and look instead at what one can say about the evidence one does have. The dab of salt I refer to is that bit of pondering all the 'can't dos' with science. My premise is very simple, it's not complex. Human god beliefs are a very complex phenomena, but it's not hard to show that the nature of those beliefs is still based in fiction.
I disagree. I could argue that the larger the system you try to study, the harder it is to remove hidden variables, but I have a feeling we'd just go back and forth on this point. Let me try another angle. If I hit a substance with light, and I measure the exact frequency it absorbs at most, that's exactly what I know. If I give ten people food A and ten people food B (and switch them on opposite days), and all the people who ate food A get sick, whereas none of the people in B get sick, that's exactly what I know. We can consider all hidden variables removed for both cases. The first case is much more specific than the second case (due to smaller scale), enough so that I can characterize something fundamental about the substance's electronic state. More work will be needed to fully define those energy levels, but its something. In the latter case, all I know is food A makes people sick. It doesn't tell me what it is precisely in food A that makes people sick, nor does it characterize that substance in any way. It's a result, but it's much less specific than the first. It's not nearly as fundamental. Even if you remove outside variables from outside a system, there are inside variables instead. Macroscopic things are inherently more complex. I believe in understanding things from reductionist stand point, simply because its easier for the human mind to understand small isolated bits as opposed to complex wholes. Therefore, I would argue that in most cases, hard sciences treat more definable, more fundamental topics than the so called "soft" ones. This goes back to my initial argument, that science can't treat with topics like supernatural beings, because it is beyond its scope, and that, it doesn't surprise me when you mention softer sciences treating with this topic, considering its scope is much less rigorous.
