Slashdot Mirror

What is evil for a stone? A stone has no interests to concern itself with.

Evil" is that which is harmful to a living being, in other words that which threatens, harms, coerces, or destroys a living being.

Where has the evil gone? Poof! Maybe it never existed.

The continuum of good versus evil is broad and subjective

But it is clear that to provide resources for another is an act of good...

So, by this definition, are most of us "good" or "evil" or something in-between? Indeed, how does "God" fare in this test?

>>Ok. Name just one. In the end, everything comes down to either theism or atheism. You can't have it any other way.

Great taste!!! LESS FILLING!!! GREAT TASTE!!! LESS FILLING!!!

-- In the end this clearly comes down to atheism or theism. Way to go there Mr. Smarty Pants. How did elves make you that stupid?

>>How does this follow? "God did it" and "how did God do it?" are two different things.

They are two different questions, but I was addressing the former. I regard the latter as nonsense. How do elves shift plate techtonics? This is certainly different from the idea *that* elves cause plate techtonics to shift. If elves can do everything, then the answer "elves" is scientifically moot. Asking how elves do such a thing is just nonsense. We are simply looking for the naturalistic source and applying the motive to the process.

>>I find it really interesting that the former excludes the latter. Some historians of science have argued that it was because of the idea of a rational God that the idea arose that nature was ordered and could be fathomed,

Yes, and some people think that Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church. The existence of order in the universe would easily have been noted without the concept of God.

>>particularly through observation and testing. Wasn't it Kepler who studied the heavens in order to "think God's thoughts after Him"?

Kepler was a very good astrologer. Looking for order in the universe doesn't require an idea of God. We are really good at noticing order. 1 7 4 10 7 13 10 16 13 19 16 ___. What number would God make be next?

>>So the idea that God and science are incompatible is, to borrow a phrase, "not even wrong". It's simply a by product of the anti-intellectual, anti-historical, "don't offend me" nonsense that passes for thinking these days.

You think that since some people looked for order in the universe while believing in God that the idea of God is suddenly scientific? That's downright absurd. You might as well give leprechaun credit for our understanding of light diffusion.

>>Science flourished within a theistic worldview in Europe and elsewhere, so I don't see how you can support the idea that God is a disaster when it comes to science.

It flourished after the Dark Ages ended. Before that it could get you burnt or locked up. I am simply noting that there is a parallel between the article's idea of string theory having no real predictive power and the idea of God having nothing to add. Certainly, one could argue that Kepler's understanding of planetary rotation is based on his astrology and theism. He looked for patterns in things, but the idea of God doesn't add to the patterns or change the work. Just as one could say that since string theory explains QM it somehow changes the work. It doesn't. The ideas aren't scientific and don't add anything to the science itself. There's no reason to consider them, and doing so is just a waste of time.

>>But maybe by "modern" you mean "completely materialistic". And of course that's true. It's the age old dilemma: which came first? The naturalist says, "In the beginning were the particles...". The Christian says, "In the beginning was the Word..." And never the 'twain shall meet.

Actually, I know a number of materialistic naturalists and they would never say "In the beginning were the particles..." -- Such a thing is instantly flawed based on the existence of particles. Thus it can't be the beginning.

>>Oh, what the hell, let's go for troll moderation. I'll go so far as to argue that denying the existence of God is actually hindering science.

Well, I never argued what you think I argued. I argued that they are non-scientific and add nothing to the work itself. Thus, time should better be spend looking at other things.

>>Why? Because atheism a priori denies the existence of an intelligence far greater than man's and therefore denies the possibility of design in nature.

This is based off an incorrect understanding of atheism. Atheism isn't a denial of the existence of God it's a disbelief in the existence of God. It's not "There is no God." It's "I don't believe in God." -- There is a rather major difference there.

One must, in science, be open minded to ideas. But, all the noted instances of desi

The purpose of the universe is to try and get as close to passing the Turing test as possible...

... but mathematically, nothing in the universe ever can

you can't quantify intelligence because intelligence isn't and will never be measured in units.

Of course there are other choices

Still, just because something was useful in the past does not mean that it is still as useful today; it doesn't mean that there aren't better alternatives available now.

nothing is so holy as to be beyond question

Todays methods have their own problems and should be replaced in the future when we've discovered something better.

The problem is that all the strongly monotheistic religions place God not as "far greater than man" but as infinitely greater. Some people have a problem with an entity that is infinitely anything.

The whole idea of a search is to explore a possibility.

There is no such thing as an "atheist" worldview, except in an abstract sense. There is only a theist worldview, and then some people who do not share it, all of whom have their own worldviews which need not necessarily have any relation to each other.

It's not a strawman. I'm not saying that atheists believe such and such. It's just I described the logical conclusions if you are consistent with an atheistic worldview.

What I find more disturbing in general is that in spite of all the scientific progress humanity has made, the view that humans are practically irrelevant in the scope of the universe is challenged infinitely more than the view that we should all follow a martyred faith healer.

the power of anyone, be they man or god, is in the power of their ideas.

calling jesus a martyred faith healer doesn't really address his ideas.

how about calling him the one that loved others equal to himself. would the world be a better place if people loved others equal to themselves?

ultimately, that is the question and the martyred faith healer drew a line in the sand - humanity can never achieve long standing peace and harmony precisely because they break the law of relationships... if people value themselves more than others, all h*ll will break loose.

being a matyr and being a faith healer are *only* important once one realizes the relational equation that said person laid down.

do unto others as you would have them do unto you - OR SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR OWN MISGUIDED ACTIONS.

that equation is absolute. a donkey riding, faith healing, matyr taught that law 2,000 years ago and everyone since his time has proved him right.

the only reason to follow him is b/c he's right.

You're using a strawman fallacy... trying to troll perhaps?

It always strikes me as peculiar when people refer to "atheism" as though it were a unified philosophy. Dividing people into "theists" and "atheists" in itself is silly, since it is obvious that opinions vary greatly in the "theists" camp, even within the same sub-groups. What kind of uniformity or cohesiveness do you expect when you group people by entities they do not believe in?

What I find more disturbing in general is that in spite of all the scientific progress humanity has made, the view that humans are practically irrelevant in the scope of the universe is challenged infinitely more than the view that we should all follow a martyred faith healer.

> Under an atheist's worldview, all our thoughts are constrained by the laws of physics.
> An atheist cannot say that he believes something because it is true.
> You wouldn't believe anything because it is true.

Nobody believes anything "because it's true." By definition, believing a proposition means you accept it as true, regardless of its actual veracity.

You can't make something true by believing in it, and you don't have to believe in something that is, in fact, true. Atheists and theists are no different in this regard. Free will vs. determinism (whether you have a choice of believing) is a separate issue.

What is the difference between having free will and not having it? The ability to make choices not based on the state of your brain?

Those are some rather large leaps in deduction--I was unaware materialist atheists believed in a completely deterministic universe. Surely materialism doesn't leave out the possibility of the brain being extremely complex, no? Furthermore, human rationality has never been completely fool-proof. Humans employ many "unsafe" methods in their everday reasoning. I suggest a few introductory philosophy and maybe some logic classes--you haven't just yet defeated materialism (which you put as one in the same with atheism).

Atheists are not the only kind of non-religious folk. Some of us are simply not superstitious, and prefer to believe the evidence of our senses and the conclusions reached through reason over unsubstantiated claims of dubious origin.

More directly addressing your point, dismissing the idea of control by destiny or some supposed omniscient being does not leave one with only chemical reactions and Einsteinian physics to explain behaviour--some of us subscribe to the idea of free will. At any rate, enough is not understood about the universe to more than leave room for an explanation of consciousness to be made at some later date.

Torben

Our experience of consciousness may be atoms, molecules, and subatomic particles bouncing about semi-randomly, but the thoughts, ideas, and knowlege stemming from such allows for the consciousness to be changed.

Then again, not everything has to be pre-determined. Look at quantum mechanics. Not only are things not pre-determined, they're not determined at all till you actually look at it.

Under an atheist's worldview, all our thoughts are constrained by the laws of physics. An atheist cannot say that he believes something because it is true. You wouldn't believe anything because it is true. You would believe something because the atoms in your brain are bouncing around in a certain way. An atheist couldn't trust their own rational capabilities, if they are to be consistent in their atheism.

So if you are a strict materialist, you would have to say that not only do religious people have pre-determined conclusions, but that is the case for everyone.

I came into this IT world on the coat-tails of Carl Friden and his 1151 macro arithmetic printer which I programmed and sold to the Bank of New Zealand for mortgage tables. I then moved to the Canon 164P in which addition and subtraction operated virtually instantly. From the Canola museum, "99999999 x 99999999 completes in about 300 milliseconds". Its 1 kbits of delay line memory combined with a punch card reader made it the ideal machine with which to clean up sales to 90% of university and scientific establishments. The unwritten rule in 1971 was that the salesman's job was to create the program needed to make the sale. When I was made national programming supervisor that job fell to me, on top of my own quota. A couple of years later, I was the first HP field engineer selling my homework programs to the science community. Teaching professors to program was part of my sales pitch. That background became useful when I adapted space-frame analysis to my 15 year MRP-II development. Global was a world famous commercial Wang 4GL system. As a side business with my managing director's contacts, I created a crystal ball called the Ingrid Thought Processor. I bought and wrote my own copyright over Patrick Slater's Ingrid. Professor Slater was Charles Spearman's student and was compelled to make Ingrid non-assumptive and scalable, using his highly modified PCA algorithms. Unfortunately my non-profit AI goals conflicted with my commercial goals and I was thrown off the wild horse. In retaliation, I shot the horse with a triggerless gun. The recoil took the wife, and the kid. The harmonics are still being felt today. The case of Google vs China being but one. My opinions should be not taken seriously in this thread, not because I want to blow my own trupmet but to inform the workings of today's Ingrid KarmaGun(tm), and its similarities to the Google core algorithm. I want to say more but I'd rather get back to my two dimensional programming world. I'm finishing Ingrid's new Sony Acid beater and am looking for a Reason 3.0 plugin. I must say that the "Google vs China" story is right up there, along with Theism vs Atheism, and other such contradictions like Project Monarch, etc. This story-in-the-making can only make survival sense in a supercomputing grid where there are several ontological interactions. It must also tell a story that encompasses the beginings of all other so-called competing stories. Only by becoming the oldest story ever told, including the reasons why the other stories started as lies, can the Real Matrix exist. The one writing this type of story must trace his roots to the original survivors. As a Guarani-Brit I can, and tell such a story that includes the future determinations of medical marijuana and an undiluted group of Atlantean survivors who turned out to be my neighbors. The story is not so much programmed as it is disected and rebuilt as a cybernetic soul. For this story to be believed then all the characters depicted must be allowed to see it too. At such a junction a new form of world power is born with a new form of human expression. Chapter 1 http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~income/atlantis01.htm l If anyone wishes to ask me more, on the internet - away from Slashdot where my identity got pwned, I am known as Jimekus. Until then it pays not to be talked about too seriously. "Ingrid Beats Combing", so I'm off to code the speed of the tempo slider to ten seconds.

anyone who follows the recursive assumptions long enough winds up at a logical wall where they have no other option than to say "I belive X without any proof"

Well said yourself. And it's after we get to this point that things get interesting, since we're still talking about figuring out the truth. A given proposition may be unprovable but that certainly doesn't preclude it from being actually and objectively true -- thank Godel! It just means there's a bit more room for disagreement sometimes. ;-)

And this is faith; but it is not blind faith. For instance, we would probably agree that the axioms of logic work quite well and are highly likely to be True, provability notwithstanding. In contrast, I could disagree with your other statement...

to me "finding God" is the spiritual equivalent of a "get rich quick" scheme

...and suggest that your recursion has stopped slightly short. I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "get rich quick" scheme, but it's clear you're talking about the attractive upsides of theism -- elsewhere you mention the comfortable sense of having a benevolent God. Personally, I favor the existential upsides, such as having a simple, consistent, and objective framework that justifies things like equality, human dignity and human rights, compassion, meaning, etc. (rather than resorting to convoluted social explanations of these things).

But here's the other half of the recursion: atheism has its attractive upsides as well, primarily in terms of autonomy, self-creation, personal independence, moral subjectivism, and so on. And this is equally a "get rich quick" scenario. The atheist looks at theism and sees human desire behind it; the theist looks at atheism and sees human desire behind it also.

If we were blithering postmoderns we'd just stop here and prattle about the "equal validity of all viewpoints," but I'm not and I doubt you are. So I expect we agree that, at the end of the day, exactly one (or none) of those two options is True.

(I also think the question is decidable with adequate certainty, but I won't bet we agree on that. Thanks for an interesting discussion. =)

--
Dum de dum.

I'll come back to this point, but notice that you have no evidence for this broad and inflammatory claim. So far, I've argued that (a) existence of the supernatural cannot be proven by natural means; and (b) that you've made several factual errors in your posts. The first point is broadly agreed to by both atheist and theist scientists and philosophers. The second point is a matter of fact: either one of us is correct, or else neither of us. No blind zealotry. No misunderstanding of science; in fact, I've shown a very standard understanding of science consistent with the "two spheres" approach of Stephen J. Gould.

So at this point, faced with evidence that contradicts your hypothesis, you should retract your accusation according to your own dictum:

Good scientists start questioning their assumptions as soon as there is ANY evidence contradicting them.

I humbly await your apology.

By way of analogy, wouldn't you agree that I'm "anti-religious" if I claim that worship of any kind is a sin?

Yes, I would agree that your claim is anti-religious, because it is a broad rejection of all religion (with the possible exception of Buddhism, a sort of "non-religious religion").

But now, consider the actual beliefs of creationist Christians. Some accept the astronomical evidence for the age of the universe, some don't. Most accept the idea that species evolve, but reject the notion that all species evolved from a common ancestor; others reject both notions. None of them reject, wholesale, the results of chemistry and physics. In short, their beliefs aren't "anti-science", but anti-evolution. They don't reject all of science, but a specific claim of a specific branch of science. Some, but not all, are inconsistent in their understanding of science. I think that's a fair charge to lay at the feet of many creationists. But inconsistency is simply not the same as being "anti-".

If you want to make the broader point, that a good scientist can't be a theist, then you're simply wrong. Historically, many eminent scientists were theists, and that trend continues. Many of my friends and colleagues are Christian professors in various spots around the country: Princeton, USAF Academy, Redlands, Hopkins.

So what's the prize? Well, I hope to persuade you to turn your back on a certain flavor of atheism which holds that atheism is the only possible rational belief. We can call this the "smarter than thou" disease. Those who are afflicted by the disease belief, against the evidence, that all theists are foolish or deluded, and that the smart people are atheists because the evidence for atheism (which amounts to a lack of evidence for theism) is overwhelming.

The problem with this disease is that it is firmly based in unreality. Many bright people are theists; many stupid people are atheists. But those afflicted with the disease cannot handle this uncomfortable fact, so that when one of their own (such as Anthony Flew) becomes a theist, they turn on him and accuse him of senility -- which is, I suppose, the only accusation that makes sense if you believe that atheism is a matter of intelligence.

The most egregious example of the "smarter than thou" disease is the comment made by Dawkins, "religion is a virus of the mind." You might think, in light of the historic examples of very bright religious people, and in light of the foolishness of speaking o

This reply is as post-modern as they come. You want to argue about what they "could have meant" rather than what was actually said. It is clear through their writings and research that the men listed were devout Christians. While there was bound to be a degree of difference on non-essential beliefs, they were all Christians. You state that creationist arguments are "positioned against" science. This could not be further from the truth. The men listed above were Christian, and were Creationist. You are correct in one regard, though. Evolution does, indeed, cross over from the realm of Science into Philosophy. But to state that we "can't know what these men really believed" is as post-modern as it gets. If this were the case, I could say the same thing about Darwin himself! Yes, we know what he wrote, but no one can really know what was meant by his words! Your experience doesn't negate any absolutes. And to state that theism or Christianity is just about control over women and children is just provocative rhetoric.

"Even if it does or does not, just because something is true here and now does not mean it will be true elsewhere or tommorrow. Please keep some humility about your assertations of knowledge."

More post-modern drivel. Either something is true or it is not. Ultimate Truth does not change with the times. For instance, back in Darwin's day, though they didn't know about protons, electrons, neutrons, etc. These things always existed, but had just not yet been discovered. Not knowing something doesn't make it false. You tell me to keep some humility about (my assertions) of knowledge all the while making some pretty outrageous assertions yourself. Where is your humility? Why is simply stating a fact not showing humility? If this is the case then aren't we both guilty? LOL

"Science wouldn't be where it is today if it weren't for the work of Christian/Creationist Scientists such as Copernicus, Kepler, Boyle, Newton, Gauss, Faraday, Maxwell, Lord Kelvin"

You think maybe these intelligent folks might not have any other motivations to avoid confrontations with rabid theists? Like their careers, or in some cases their lives, maybe they placed the value of continuing their work above the self gratification of dissent.

Take for instance your first example, Copernicus. The Austrian mathematician Georg Rheticus wrote a book Narratio prima in 1542 outlining the essence of Copernicus' theory. The generally positive reception among peers and failing health convinced Copernicus to allow Rheticus to undertake the publication of a second more extensive book. It is said the first printed copy of De revolutionibus - orbium coelestium was placed in Copernicus' hands on the very day he died in 1543.

He did not have to be concerned about encountering the same fate as some others that embraced his theories. Fifty seven years later Giordano Bruno was tried before the Inquisition, condemned and burned at the stake for such blasphemy. Galileo was charged in 1633, under the threat of torture and death, forced to renounce all belief in Copernican theories, and was thereafter sentenced to imprisonment for the remainder of his life. Georg Rheticus himself may have avoided persecution because he was under the protection of Duke Albrecht, Albert of Prussia, who consented the publication, for whom he had developed a day length calculating instrument.

Maybe these folks just did not wish to suffer the fate of Galileo or Giordano Bruno. That is, to lose their positions of influence, to starve , be imprisoned or even be burned as heretics? Even in their public writings they may have well have been simply patronizing those that might cause them trouble. I have found that you see more of who someone is through their acts than their words anyway. The acts these men performed are the very foundation of the science that the creationist's argument is positioned against.There is also the issue of your implication of their support for the modern creationist argument. Even when they accepted the general therom, todays form of dogmatic faith might might be a bad fit. There is no way you know what these people actually thought about such matters.

Please note that while not a theist, I consider atheism to be even less of a valid belief system. I guess if you had to have a label for me it would be an agnostic honestly invested in the search of gnosis. Most of what I have read and seen in the theisms of yesterday and today is far less than honest and all to often devoid of knowledge, so I search on. BTW, I was raised once upon a time as a Baptist, so there is hope even for the well indoctrinated. From my experience and observations I suspect the root of the noise with the theists' communities has more to do with control of women and children than any true search for gnosis.

We are as a species very young, our individual live experiences rank close to the mayfly when compared to the age or agelessness of the universe. What we do not know in the span of the only mortal life we have evidence of far outweighs what we do know and will for a very long time. Just because something does not fit your world view does not mean it is not true. Even if it does or does not, just because something is true here and now does not mean it will be true elsewhere or tommorrow. Please keep some humility about your assertations of knowledge.

Evolution is a theory and is taught as a theory with mostly well supported evidence. It is a complex endeavor and that some parts of the theory may be invalid is more likely that not. I have reservations about a lot of it myself. However I see very little in the way of supporting evidence for the Creationist's argument. Never the less it should be taught, in an comparitave and equitable manner along side other religious and philosophical topics, but not as a science.

Wabi-sabi

Matthew