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What Do You Believe Even If You Can't Prove It?
An anonymous reader writes "That's what online magazine The Edge - the World Question Center asked over 120 scientists, futurists, and other interesting minds. Their answers are sometimes short and to the point (Bruce Sterling: 'We're in for climatic mayhem'), often long and involved; they cover everything from the existence of God to the nature of black holes. What do you believe, even though you can't prove it?"
Hey, speak for yourself! Just because you aren't man enough to produce it...
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What I don't understand is that pedophilia is just as natural and yet there are no lobby groups creating a nice, warm fuzzy feeling and forcing pedophile mariages on society.
Except for:
And any combination of the above.
Personally I believe we need a Privacy Amendment much more than something to "protect" us from gays trying to destroy families or hippies trying to desecrate our flags.
> that time and space have always been and will always be continuous
Problem: gravity.
Einstein worked for many years (20 iirc) trying to introduce the cosmological constant to show the universe wouldn't just collapse, and later claimed it to be the biggest mistake of his life.
One other way to get round the problem of the universe just collapsing is to have an infinitely big universe that is uniform. But this has it's own problems such as that means for any given point in the night sky, if you trace it out it will land on the surface of a sun. That means the night sky should look like a blaze of white.
But *sigh* of course such logic will be totally lost on people with beliefs, and no doubt you are shaking your head saying 'well that's what i believe, and I don't care what you say'.
Agreed. Jesus existed, most likely anyway, but he was not any god's son, just Somebody's son. He was smart though -- he rode into town on an ass, just like the proficy fortold. He had a nice blueprint to follow to convince people that he was god. Wish I'd have thought of it first.
Speak for yourself.
"Yes, I am an athiest. No, I'm not hostile to Christianity or Christians: I just stopped accepting that there was a need for God and lost interest (except as a hobby of studying myth in literature and culture)."
Did you ever consider that saying you stopped accepting that the core of everything they believe in and the basis of everything they do had any value might be inherently hostile?
Ask yourself if this is at all hostile: "It's not that I'm hostile to you, I just don't think that the reasons behind anything you have to say matter in the slightest, except possibly as a hobby."
What was the title of this article....dumbass. So you want me to provide evidence to prove something in an article called "What do you Believe Even If you can't prove it". You are a real genius.
My contention is that white holes are obscured by the dust and high density of stars that would surround them so you can't observe them.
@de_machina
> The odds of that happening by chance are estimated at 1 to 10^50.
And that isn't all. If one of any number of physical constants were different by one part in ten to the umpteenth power (where "umpteenth" can range from about 10 to about 100), life could not have existed in any form at any time nor place in the universe.
Stuff to think about. As for me, I think it's strong evidence that God was behind the Big Bang.
Yes, there are some three dozen physical constants that are perfectly tuned to allow life.
;) that the god of the Bible is actually an amalgamation of two (or more) advanced extraterrestrial figures, known in Sumerian legends as Enki and Enlil. Indeed, with a bit of research one finds that the Book of Genesis is a sort of 'executive summary' of the Sumerian Epic of Creation, word for word in some places. The Hebrews likely copied it during Nebuchadnezzar's Babylonian captivity.
What about that makes you believe that the god described in the Bible is responsible, though?
Personally, my readings have lead me to believe that if there is some universal "god" that has guided the forming of the cosmos, it is a collective and pervasive consciousness that we are all conected to at the quantum level, which has a tendency to move towards greater coherence... not some schizophrenic authority figure in a 2000 year old book. I believe (but cannot prove
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
I'm not going to get into a long debate here, not worth it. Will just try to briefly answer your question.
:)
> What about that makes you believe that the god described in the Bible is responsible, though?
For starters, I think it's reasonable (but cannot prove) that for such longshot odds of the Big Bang producing a universe that can support intelligent life, Something intelligent must have been behind it. I apologize to atheists who will find this concept difficult to grasp, but undirected explosions (which the BB would be if they were right) do not tend to result in systems that are fine-tuned by hundreds of orders of magnitude more accurately than the best possible human engineering.
Given that such a Being was behind the Big Bang, we can start to speculate about His character. Obviously, He has wisdom beyond measure. He has infinite power beyond anything we could comprehend -- He can create time/space dimensions at will! Finally, we can see that He also designed humans. The heart, for example, is one of the most efficient possible pumps, and the brain is amazing.
Now, would Someone like this want to simply allow for humans' existence, then un-involve Himself, as deists suggest? I don't think so; why would He have bothered? I think (but cannot prove) that it's reasonable that this Person would want humans to know something about Himself.
So we can begin to look at ways God may have revealed Himself. Are they consistent? Are they reasonable? Do they truly satisfy?
1) Yes, I've seen long lists of "Bible contradictions." As someone who has reasonable knowledge of the Bible myself, though, I am amazed at how consistent its entire message is, given the fact that it was written by dozens of humans over thousands of years -- humans from all walks of life and in three continents. Most of these "contradictions" were conjured up by folks who, frankly, don't understand the message of the Bible and/or are deliberately trying to make it look bad. Yes, there are a few things that appear to be real contradictions; these may well be a result of ancient memorization practices and/or the fact that some of the Bible is based on eyewitness accounts (which God may have inspired them to write but could be off in minor details).
2) The Bible has some pretty outrageous claims by the modern world's standards. But are they reasonable? Just because it claims that Jesus did miracles and claimed to be the only way to God the Father does not in itself mean that it isn't true. "The Case for Christ" by Lee Strobel does a reasonable job of showing that the Gospel accounts of the life of Jesus Christ are reasonable, even if not proven.
3) What is the fruit of a given belief? Does it satisfy your inmost being? I think it was Blaise Pascal who said there's a "God-shaped hole in everyone's heart." What fills it? Does going to church or doing good works fill it? No. I and many Christians could easily testify that only a personal relationship with Jesus Christ fits the bill. Beyond simply "filling the hole," we can testify that Jesus Christ lives in us and has been faithful through the ages. Can I prove this scientifically? No. But His presense in us is just as good. In fact, it has a way of making gigabytes of intellectual arguments against His existence look rather shallow.
'There is no way I am going to read a book with "Akashic Field" in the title, leastways not without laughing.'
;)
;)
Then I'm afraid I must accuse you of judging a book by its cover.
The fact is, there is no formal name yet for the so called "zero-point field", the sea of quantum energy fluctuations that exists even at near 0K. This particular author chose to call it Akashic (or the A-field, like the EM-field, the G-field, etc), based on an Indian philosophy about an information field that encodes all of existence. So what?
This book can be found in the "Science" section at your bookstore, not the "New Age" section, if that's what you're gettings at.
But I'd recommend Lynne McTaggart's "The Field" first anyway. It's essentially a catalog of recent experiments, whereas "Akashic" is far more speculative.
PS I liked the rest of your post.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson