Thanks to wolfram alpha, stack overflow, and the internet in general, homework is as meaningful or as meaningless as the student chooses to make it. Most professors assigned 5-10% of the grade to homework, and that was usually just for completion, not for correctness.
Homework is an opportunity to practice and develop and understanding of the material being taught.
These statements go against what I have experienced in the real world. The internet and such is the primary source of information for me, even with my text books sitting next to me on my desk. The ability to look up stuff and self-teaching on-the-fly is much more useful than remembering every last thing that was taught to me in school. That's not to say there's no value - being able to do calculus and such by hand is necessary because you need to understand what's going on, but no one is going to pay me to just sit there and do calculus problems by hand all day. I use a calculator, even though I know how to do long division - it's faster and less error prone. I'm not saying do away with testing altogether, but rather use the real world as delimiter of where emphasis of knowledge and compency should really be put, rather than some professor's pie-in-the-sky notions.
Also, you usually don't get "redos" on an assignment from your boss - it's your responsibility to identify if you don't understand something and to ask for help right away, not after he's "graded your work". Once it's on paper (or checked into a repository), it's expected that you've done what you can to get it right the first time. And the professor can always hand out practice problems or in-class quizzes for the competency check, but the major evaluation should mirror what is desired in the real world.
"Projects" are also rife with problems; with much of the grade reducing to grading the student skills at project management itself. That's an important skill too, but not the one that should be getting tested. (Although to be fair, taking tests is also a skill unto itself, but "test taking" is easier to learn to do well than "project management")
And group projects have all kinds of other issues. In my experience the only people who like group projects are people who treat it like free marks some of their classmates will do for them.
They don't have to be group projects, they can be individual ones.
I guess my overall comment here is that because professors have a Ph.D. in their discipline they think that means they know what's best on how to teach. That's not true. My opinion is that everyone who wants to teach at a college or university should have some sort of education training (you know, from the Education Department) to dispel a lot of the silly, off-in-the-clouds notions that many professors think are good teaching practices that people in the Education Department would be quick to squash. They also think that because they are the "higher education pinnacle of society" that they automatically know what the real world needs and that the real world conforms to their ideas of what a person of that discipline should know to be useful and functional. Also not true. It's shocking how not true this is. There needs to be more of a vocational emphasis in higher education, and professors need to teach more of the things that they currently like to raise their noses at, but are the very things that industry constantly complains about with fresh graduates and ends up having to do the teaching themselves on the job.
I understand the difficulty, but in the case of advanced math courses, many of them don't have a lot of students in them, which deflates the argument those who would receive an F in a curve probably would have received and F anyway. IMO, the more advanced the course (especially in grad school), the less tests make sense at all for evaluation. It's better to have projects and homework be the primary evaluator since this is more in line with handling "real world" scenarios - which in theory is the point of giving out grades to begin with.
I see your reasoning on how it factors out the variability amongst professors (which is a good thing), but an even better solution is to change the professors themselves - either by forcing a review on their teaching/evaluation methods, or removing the professor altogether. The job market for academia has been hyper-saturated for quite some time now, so it should rather easy to cycle through them until you find good ones.
Bell curves "work" in academic settings because there's hardly any accountability imposed upon tenured professors for how they evaluate students. It's continually shown how grades (as of right now) are a poor predictor of success in the outside world, yet this continues to be ignored in the practical sense in academia.
You miss the point. You can make your case for how competent you are during your interview, but that still won't hold a candle to having X years experience at company Y. Again, I'm talking about getting your foot in the door, not about your performance once you're in.
One problem is that poaching encourages a dichotomous working class system. Poaching is good for employees who have experience, since their wage will go up because companies fight over them, but it's bad for potential employees fresh out of school. No employer wants to be the one to front the capital to train them. They would just rather poach someone that will be effective on day 1.
Granted, but that doesn't prevent him from suggesting "non-magical" solutions. My guess is that he has some solutions in mind, but he would rather someone else propose and defend them rather than being the unpopular voice.
Gartner fails to include any sort of actionable response to this phenomena, or even any argument that anything can be done about it. Article seems half-baked.
I would say the fact that your morality has been honed over millions of years by natural selection is a pretty good reason to listen to it. Just like how using your lungs to breath is a pretty good idea. And just like the conscious decision to use your biologically evolved lungs to breath, using your morality to make decisions is not even really much of a choice. The guilt of acting against your own moral code is a very compelling force.
Yes but the fact is that many people act according to opposing belief sets. Who's to say what's really right then, if it's based purely on subjective belief? Very compelling, yes, but that does not mean that it couldn't just be done away with, as some people do. And then who's to say that they are wrong for doing so?
I don't think morality needs to be immutable to be morality. Furthermore what could be less immutable than a morality controlled by an omnipotent dictator, that could change his
mind about what is moral any time he wants? It seems like new revelations change morality pretty frequently.
In fact I think the naturalistic evolutionary explanation of morality is far more objective than the the "it comes from God" view. For one thing it actually has reasons for being the way it is rather than the non-reason of "It's the way God wanted it".
How is that a non-reason? That either assumes that God doesn't really exist or that God really isn't God (ie. something else takes higher priority). I'm sorry, but changing morality is inherently self-contradictory. Otherwise, you have no business calling the worst crimes in humanity wrong as long as they say "well it's right according to me".
It does not follow the scientific method. It is the starting point of the scientific method. Denying the axiom is unscientific because it denies an axiom of science. There is no point in believing in scientific method if you don't believe what it is based on.
The fruit gained from the scientific method does not require atheism. It still provides insight and the same results within the context of natural phenomena with that assumption in place. I see no compelling reason to think otherwise barring just accepting an authoritarian stance that atheism must come along for the ride.
My gripe here is that the labeling is an authoritative attempt to avoid scrutiny. It's the flip side of what atheists often say against Christians when they inappropriately take for granted that everyone agrees upon the authority of the Bible in a debate (which obviously is not the case).
This is no different than any axiom. If you could scrutinize an axiom and prove it to be true or false, it would not be an axiom. Believing in the Bible is an axiom like believing in a universe governed by physical laws is an axiom. They are no different qualitatively, so I agree with you there. My point is not to show that science is right and religion is wrong. My point is to show that these are incompatible viewpoints.
Disagree. You don't buy into an axiom without scrutinizing it very thoroughly. You just don't scrutinize it deductively. Otherwise it really is FSM, or whatever you like.
Why is my definition of a spirit any different? What difference does it make if the spirit is made out of atoms if the results are functionally the same? Even if you believed in God, why is it so hard to imagine that the physical universe God created is incapable of housing a soul made out of atoms?
My point is the different in using the word "spirit" as a euphemism, or if it is a real entity apart from the physical body.
There are many different definitions and conceptions of what free will is. Some are completely incoherent in any reality. Some are perfectly consistent with a determinism (i.e. compatibalism).
You are right to say that if I assume a purely physical universe that
Imagine if you asked me why I didn't like the idea of morals from the Bible, and I said "This reduces my sacred sense of morality to just God. It makes the whole concept of morality meaningless so why should I listen to it? Just because I don't want to go to hell?
You would probably protest that my vision of what God is must be different than yours or I would not have said that. By the same token I think you're concept of "Just the physical world" is different than my view of the physical world which encompasses everything in the universe. I feel like morality being a product of an amazing process like natural selection is rather inspiring in it's elegance. Some people do not like this idea, but I find it to be very beautiful.
To assume that morality "evolves" is to go against the whole reason to listen to it. In short, it just becomes a candy-coated way of saying "I'm going to do whatever I want to do", or "We're going to do whatever we want to do", and try to inappropriately use objective language to try to avoid scrutinizing it. If it's not immutable and objective (and it doesn't depend on our state of evolution), then it's not what it makes itself out to be, which is a red flag that something's wrong with this definition.
Things may "Go back to normal", but now we can no longer look at the present state and back track to learn about the past. Imagine God changes the direction of a single photon. When we detect this photon we can in theory calculate where it must have been 1 million years ago (1 million light years away in some direction). But now all that is called into question.
But as I argued before, just because something can't be figured out through deductive reasoning is in no way grounds to assume that it can't exist.
No it doesn't. It is an assumption. It is an axiom. There is no proof for this. There *can* be no proof for this. This is why believing in miracles is such a problem. It assumes this axiom is false, and hence starts you from a position that is unscientific.
So it appears that this is just a war of semantics. You label it "unscientific", yet you also admit that it does not follow from the scientific method. My gripe here is that the labeling is an authoritative attempt to avoid scrutiny. It's the flip side of what atheists often say against Christians when they inappropriately take for granted that everyone agrees upon the authority of the Bible in a debate (which obviously is not the case).
I would rephrase it as... This argument assumes the human spirit is physical in nature and our consciousness is an emergent property of underlying physical laws. Isn't that amazing?
But that's negating the whole concept of a "spirit" to begin with, and is rather just a convenient way to summarize the human organism with a term that has a misleading connotation (if this definition were indeed the case).
This all boils down to what you assume about the existence of the supernatural a priori (in this case, a human spirit). If you assume not, then obviously there's no free will, and you don't need any neurological studies to conclude that, because that would logically follow from a purely physical existence and cause-and-effect. However, if you assume the supernatural exists, then you cannot hope to fully understand everything about how the human brain works, because other forces beside physical ones are acting upon it.
What if I said that this requirement for evidence to believe something is inherently scientific, and it falsely grants science authority over the supernatural. Science works for everything except the supernatural. When it comes to FSM you must just have faith.
That's to make a prior assumption about what should qualify for evidence, and what shouldn't. That begs the question of where did that prior assumption came from.
This is where I would disagree. But I would also ask why it is important that morality transcends humanity or the physical world?
Because that indicates that morality points to something more than just the physical world. When I try to reduce my sense of right and wrong and tell it "you're just a product of evolution", it doesn't fit. It makes the whole concept meaningless, so why should I listen to it?
Except that science treats claims of string theory (or as I like to call it "string hypothesis") to be testable in principle as a phenomenon of nature, even if tests have not yet been devised. I think most physicists will agree that string theory is the unfortunate name of a hypothesis that has certainly not risen to the level of confidence of a theory.
This is true, and especially since the discovery of Higgs, it make many exotic flavors of string theory less likely to be true.
No we haven't observed every particle in our science lab. But most of the atoms that existed at the time the events of the Bible took place, still exist. In fact, if Jesus was a real person, the odds that some of the atoms that comprised Jesus now comprise you are almost statistically inevitable. The time and place where all the miracles of the Bible supposedly took place are not so distant. The universe is 13 billion years old, and almost unfathomably large. If miracles were happening as of 2000 years ago on earth no less, we are basically living in miracle-land in basically the same time period in cosmological terms.
The matter involved with a supposed miracle would be constrained in time, not just space. Things would go back to normal once its done.
The inability to disprove the supernatural claims of the Bible is not good evidence for their truth.
That is true, but the reverse argument is also true.
But this is a fundamental assumption of science that the universe (including the one that God might inhabit) is governed by physical laws.
This "fundamental assumption" as far as it dictating God is what I disagree with, and I claim does not stem from any scientific result.
Humans according to Christianity are the causes of their own decision (i.e. free will), which is why we have moral responsibility. But science did not accept this assumption and has since gained a lot of ground in figuring out how the brain works. In a laboratory when can do experiments that analyze people's brains and determine when people are going to decide to do things before even they are consciously aware that they are going to do them.
Even some famous philosophers and scientists believed the human mind was immune to science (Descartes). This turned out to be a big mistake. I think the lesson to learn is never to take the "unmoved mover" argument for granted, whether for human minds or God.
But this argument already assumes non-existence of a human spirit and its interaction with our physical bodies, and our consciousness is only apart of our mental mind. Which study are you referring to?
There's a difference between questions whose answers are currently unknown, and questions whose answers are unknowable in principle.
If I said that the God of Abraham was real, but he too had a creator, and it was the flying spaghetti monster, would this argument persuade you? I could say that the reason God never mentioned FSM in the Bible was because God is still a stubborn atheist, and is unaware of his own creator. We will never discover FSM because he is outside of both physics and the supernatural reality of the Christian heavens (Which FSM created). Sure you can claim that it is Yahweh who is at the top, but it is actually FSM who is at the top. Also anyone else who claims that FSM has an even higher God is wrong, because I define FSM as the topmost creator, the prime mover.
You're right I though I was talking to the original poster this whole time. Sorry about that.
No problem. Honest mistake. It happens.
In that same vein I am describing the idea of assuming these same "axioms", plus the axiom that scientific evidence and the scientific method are the only valid ways of determining objective truth. Maybe this is not true, but such is the nature of axioms.
Ahh, so this is the heart of it. That last addition is what I take issue with. Please understand though that I do understand the desire to consider that as an axiom, because the wonderful thing about science is how it conveys truth in a very concrete, reliable fashion. Moreover, it naturally repels attempts by people or groups of people who would try to manipulate truth for their personal political purposes. And I'll be the first to admit that the history of religion (even Christianity) is not without its ugly, ugly blemishes - and I won't defend those things at all. They were/are wrong.
Nevertheless, my observation has been that there is more to the human condition than just scientific reasoning. "Reasoning" seems more general than that. In particular, you get the understanding of how the scientific method works, and how it reliably determines things that consistently lines up with observation. But you also get things like morality and intuitive awareness. These things are less quantitative, but nonetheless real. I've heard it argued that morality is just a product of human evolution's way of sustaining individuals and society as a whole, and I agree that it helps serve that function. But morality says there is more to itself than simply self-preservation. There's "meaning" to it, rather than just being a means-to-an-end, and its validity does not depend on the existence of myself or humanity.
This phenomenon is independent of what the scientific method says of the physical world.
I should point out that I don't think religion and science are incompatible in principle. There are forms of religion that do not require breaking the barrier between the natural and the super natural. These would be religions that are deist or pantheist in nature. But I do think science is mutually exclusive with any sort of religion which accepts miracles as reality.
So here it sounds like you could just treat the supernatural in the way that some hypothesize different dimensions or universes (i.e. string theory).
I agree with this statement and that's what the problem is. This is also why science assumes that they do no happen. Rejecting the premise that "miracles do not happen", is tantamount to rejecting science as a method determining objective truth.
So here is why calling this "science" is problematic. When people hear the world "science" they think of its reliability due the reproducible, verifiable results that time has shown squares up with observing how physical reality works, and thus has become a trustworthy source of information for that reason, and that reason alone. To put things that cannot be verified in this way under the same term is try to borrow from this trustworthiness in an inappropriate way. In other words, I put trust in science only because of its methodology, not for its title. If something does not or cannot follow the methodology, then I do not seem it worthy to be called "science", because it lacks the very thing that make science worthwhile to begin with.
In science the entire universe is a science lab.
But we have not somehow observed every single physical interaction on every scale, including those cases in which supposed miracles have occurred. What we have done is taken a tiny amount of data and extrapolated it to give a base understanding of how the universe works. We can't do any better than that as far as science is concerned.
The way you phrase it makes it seem that physics acknowledges the ex
Check who posted what there, friend. You are quoting someone else. I'll assume those comments referring to the other poster are just misdirected, unless you say otherwise. As far as other things you said, science and logic are not axioms - they are deductive and inductive methods (depending on the discipline) used upon your axioms. In short, there is no science experiment that can disprove anything miraculous. That's no fault on the part of the methodology of science - it is was it is. You asserted that miracles "destroys the ability of nature to be repeatable". Keep in mind that Christians don't just assert the supernatural, but intelligence behind the supernatural. It's not just some "noise" that randomly messes with nature - there's intent and a purpose behind it. So, you would not expect it to show up as some statistical anomaly in a lab. You will note that with physics experiments, they assume a "closed" model, where only the physical ("natural") phenomenon are assumed to operate (and usually they will make further assumptions on the simplicity of the interactions to make the math easier). And it makes sense to assume this for their intents and purposes because they are interested in how the physical (natural) world operates. But that should not be mistaken for "complete" or "open" knowledge of reality. And scientists admit as much each time something new is discovered any they update their models and theories, and we wouldn't say that there's anything incoherent about that. Another example is in theoretical computer science. We know from the Halting Problem that there is no way to logically deduce whether any given program will halt or not. However, it is still the case that every program will either halt or run forever, even though logical deduction cannot determine which. Perfectly coherent, yet admittedly incomplete logical knowledge (and logic, here, is the one saying that it's incomplete).
When did I call young earth creationists dumb? The supernatural can invade the natural without violating any premise of the scientific method - it can only say things about stuff that's measurable and repeatable - this is no secret, and certainly not a refutation. You really need to sit down and think this through. I believe in the authority of science because it's an extension of human observation and reason, but I'm also able to reason about that observation and reason, and realize what exactly it can and cannot do, and many people fail to do this.
The thing about what we're talking about is that foundations for any belief system, whether its called axioms in math, first principles in physics, or faith in Christianity, cannot be logically deduced into further basic things - otherwise you get infinite regression. I'm not calling anyone dumb. That's a completely wrong term to use anyway for someone you disagree with in this context anyway, because it's not pointing out a fault in any system of reasoning.
I'm sorry, but you're confusing scientific authority with a naturalistic worldview, which contains presuppositions that have absolutely nothing to do with the scientific method. To say that "science" (what we know of observable, repeatable events in nature) says something outside of this a fundamental logical fallacy. Try apply this sort of reasoning to, well, anything else, and see what you end up with. As far as the supernatural interacting with the natural, well you predictably repeat such supposed happening in a lab, because it doesn't behave that way. What you're presenting with what is call an Argument from Ignorance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
Now I'm not claiming that science supports my argument either - science says nothing about this either way.
1: "the things he is *most* known for almost certainly did not happen from a scientific point of view."
Your premise comes from a misconception of the authority of science. How can a system of logical reasoning that is entirely rooted in naturalistic observations and measurements say anything at all about something that is, by definition, "supernatural"?
2: "Because the Jesus form the Bible was supernatural"
This is circular reasoning. You cannot use this as proof to refute the nonexistence of the deity of Jesus, when you already presuppose its nonexistence.
3: "Why *shouldn't* you believe the earth is 6000 years old?"
Not all Christians hold to a literal interpretation of the creation story. Getting into the details of this topic is not something I can do justice to in this context. I would recommend looking up books on this subject - there are pretty easy to find.
Actually yes, Jesus was a common name in that time, but that I'm referring to the one referred to in the Bible. And your last two sentences is just stating your stance - you're not arguing anything as far as whether or not I should agree with it.
It's really not any more crazy to believe the earth is 6000 years old than it is to believe in the Bible and that Jesus was the son of God. In fact I would say it's orders of magnitude more likely that the Earth is 6000 years old than the idea that Jesus was anything more than a regular human being if he even existed at all.
Sorry, but you're gonna have to do a little better than pejorative rhetoric to be taken seriously by the opposing side. And please check your facts - almost all historians believe a man named Jesus from Nazareth existed. There isn't much debate about that.
Every time I saw tuition go up when I was in school it followed cuts in public education funding. Out here in California, the tuition at UC and CSU has gone up quickly because the state is trying to get its own budget under control after running deep into the red while that stupid actor was elected and re-elected by people who thought a tough talking actor with no experience at all in any government office should reside in Sacramento for 8 years.
That's a sign of government subsidy withdrawal. It sucks going through it, but that doesn't mean is shouldn't happen. To do nothing now will only make it hurt even more later.
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I disagree.
Thanks to wolfram alpha, stack overflow, and the internet in general, homework is as meaningful or as meaningless as the student chooses to make it. Most professors assigned 5-10% of the grade to homework, and that was usually just for completion, not for correctness.
Homework is an opportunity to practice and develop and understanding of the material being taught.
These statements go against what I have experienced in the real world. The internet and such is the primary source of information for me, even with my text books sitting next to me on my desk. The ability to look up stuff and self-teaching on-the-fly is much more useful than remembering every last thing that was taught to me in school. That's not to say there's no value - being able to do calculus and such by hand is necessary because you need to understand what's going on, but no one is going to pay me to just sit there and do calculus problems by hand all day. I use a calculator, even though I know how to do long division - it's faster and less error prone. I'm not saying do away with testing altogether, but rather use the real world as delimiter of where emphasis of knowledge and compency should really be put, rather than some professor's pie-in-the-sky notions.
Also, you usually don't get "redos" on an assignment from your boss - it's your responsibility to identify if you don't understand something and to ask for help right away, not after he's "graded your work". Once it's on paper (or checked into a repository), it's expected that you've done what you can to get it right the first time. And the professor can always hand out practice problems or in-class quizzes for the competency check, but the major evaluation should mirror what is desired in the real world.
"Projects" are also rife with problems; with much of the grade reducing to grading the student skills at project management itself. That's an important skill too, but not the one that should be getting tested. (Although to be fair, taking tests is also a skill unto itself, but "test taking" is easier to learn to do well than "project management")
And group projects have all kinds of other issues. In my experience the only people who like group projects are people who treat it like free marks some of their classmates will do for them.
They don't have to be group projects, they can be individual ones.
I guess my overall comment here is that because professors have a Ph.D. in their discipline they think that means they know what's best on how to teach. That's not true. My opinion is that everyone who wants to teach at a college or university should have some sort of education training (you know, from the Education Department) to dispel a lot of the silly, off-in-the-clouds notions that many professors think are good teaching practices that people in the Education Department would be quick to squash. They also think that because they are the "higher education pinnacle of society" that they automatically know what the real world needs and that the real world conforms to their ideas of what a person of that discipline should know to be useful and functional. Also not true. It's shocking how not true this is. There needs to be more of a vocational emphasis in higher education, and professors need to teach more of the things that they currently like to raise their noses at, but are the very things that industry constantly complains about with fresh graduates and ends up having to do the teaching themselves on the job.
I understand the difficulty, but in the case of advanced math courses, many of them don't have a lot of students in them, which deflates the argument those who would receive an F in a curve probably would have received and F anyway. IMO, the more advanced the course (especially in grad school), the less tests make sense at all for evaluation. It's better to have projects and homework be the primary evaluator since this is more in line with handling "real world" scenarios - which in theory is the point of giving out grades to begin with.
I see your reasoning on how it factors out the variability amongst professors (which is a good thing), but an even better solution is to change the professors themselves - either by forcing a review on their teaching/evaluation methods, or removing the professor altogether. The job market for academia has been hyper-saturated for quite some time now, so it should rather easy to cycle through them until you find good ones.
Bell curves "work" in academic settings because there's hardly any accountability imposed upon tenured professors for how they evaluate students. It's continually shown how grades (as of right now) are a poor predictor of success in the outside world, yet this continues to be ignored in the practical sense in academia.
You miss the point. You can make your case for how competent you are during your interview, but that still won't hold a candle to having X years experience at company Y. Again, I'm talking about getting your foot in the door, not about your performance once you're in.
For fresh graduates, it's not about the salary, it's about even getting your foot in the door.
One problem is that poaching encourages a dichotomous working class system. Poaching is good for employees who have experience, since their wage will go up because companies fight over them, but it's bad for potential employees fresh out of school. No employer wants to be the one to front the capital to train them. They would just rather poach someone that will be effective on day 1.
...that they do little to capitalize on with modern consoles.
Granted, but that doesn't prevent him from suggesting "non-magical" solutions. My guess is that he has some solutions in mind, but he would rather someone else propose and defend them rather than being the unpopular voice.
Gartner fails to include any sort of actionable response to this phenomena, or even any argument that anything can be done about it. Article seems half-baked.
I would say the fact that your morality has been honed over millions of years by natural selection is a pretty good reason to listen to it. Just like how using your lungs to breath is a pretty good idea. And just like the conscious decision to use your biologically evolved lungs to breath, using your morality to make decisions is not even really much of a choice. The guilt of acting against your own moral code is a very compelling force.
Yes but the fact is that many people act according to opposing belief sets. Who's to say what's really right then, if it's based purely on subjective belief? Very compelling, yes, but that does not mean that it couldn't just be done away with, as some people do. And then who's to say that they are wrong for doing so?
I don't think morality needs to be immutable to be morality. Furthermore what could be less immutable than a morality controlled by an omnipotent dictator, that could change his mind about what is moral any time he wants? It seems like new revelations change morality pretty frequently.
In fact I think the naturalistic evolutionary explanation of morality is far more objective than the the "it comes from God" view. For one thing it actually has reasons for being the way it is rather than the non-reason of "It's the way God wanted it".
How is that a non-reason? That either assumes that God doesn't really exist or that God really isn't God (ie. something else takes higher priority). I'm sorry, but changing morality is inherently self-contradictory. Otherwise, you have no business calling the worst crimes in humanity wrong as long as they say "well it's right according to me".
It does not follow the scientific method. It is the starting point of the scientific method. Denying the axiom is unscientific because it denies an axiom of science. There is no point in believing in scientific method if you don't believe what it is based on.
The fruit gained from the scientific method does not require atheism. It still provides insight and the same results within the context of natural phenomena with that assumption in place. I see no compelling reason to think otherwise barring just accepting an authoritarian stance that atheism must come along for the ride.
My gripe here is that the labeling is an authoritative attempt to avoid scrutiny. It's the flip side of what atheists often say against Christians when they inappropriately take for granted that everyone agrees upon the authority of the Bible in a debate (which obviously is not the case).
This is no different than any axiom. If you could scrutinize an axiom and prove it to be true or false, it would not be an axiom. Believing in the Bible is an axiom like believing in a universe governed by physical laws is an axiom. They are no different qualitatively, so I agree with you there. My point is not to show that science is right and religion is wrong. My point is to show that these are incompatible viewpoints.
Disagree. You don't buy into an axiom without scrutinizing it very thoroughly. You just don't scrutinize it deductively. Otherwise it really is FSM, or whatever you like.
Why is my definition of a spirit any different? What difference does it make if the spirit is made out of atoms if the results are functionally the same? Even if you believed in God, why is it so hard to imagine that the physical universe God created is incapable of housing a soul made out of atoms?
My point is the different in using the word "spirit" as a euphemism, or if it is a real entity apart from the physical body.
There are many different definitions and conceptions of what free will is. Some are completely incoherent in any reality. Some are perfectly consistent with a determinism (i.e. compatibalism).
You are right to say that if I assume a purely physical universe that
Imagine if you asked me why I didn't like the idea of morals from the Bible, and I said "This reduces my sacred sense of morality to just God. It makes the whole concept of morality meaningless so why should I listen to it? Just because I don't want to go to hell?
You would probably protest that my vision of what God is must be different than yours or I would not have said that. By the same token I think you're concept of "Just the physical world" is different than my view of the physical world which encompasses everything in the universe. I feel like morality being a product of an amazing process like natural selection is rather inspiring in it's elegance. Some people do not like this idea, but I find it to be very beautiful.
To assume that morality "evolves" is to go against the whole reason to listen to it. In short, it just becomes a candy-coated way of saying "I'm going to do whatever I want to do", or "We're going to do whatever we want to do", and try to inappropriately use objective language to try to avoid scrutinizing it. If it's not immutable and objective (and it doesn't depend on our state of evolution), then it's not what it makes itself out to be, which is a red flag that something's wrong with this definition.
Things may "Go back to normal", but now we can no longer look at the present state and back track to learn about the past. Imagine God changes the direction of a single photon. When we detect this photon we can in theory calculate where it must have been 1 million years ago (1 million light years away in some direction). But now all that is called into question.
But as I argued before, just because something can't be figured out through deductive reasoning is in no way grounds to assume that it can't exist.
No it doesn't. It is an assumption. It is an axiom. There is no proof for this. There *can* be no proof for this. This is why believing in miracles is such a problem. It assumes this axiom is false, and hence starts you from a position that is unscientific.
So it appears that this is just a war of semantics. You label it "unscientific", yet you also admit that it does not follow from the scientific method. My gripe here is that the labeling is an authoritative attempt to avoid scrutiny. It's the flip side of what atheists often say against Christians when they inappropriately take for granted that everyone agrees upon the authority of the Bible in a debate (which obviously is not the case).
I would rephrase it as... This argument assumes the human spirit is physical in nature and our consciousness is an emergent property of underlying physical laws. Isn't that amazing?
But that's negating the whole concept of a "spirit" to begin with, and is rather just a convenient way to summarize the human organism with a term that has a misleading connotation (if this definition were indeed the case).
Which study are you referring to?
There have been many.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will
This all boils down to what you assume about the existence of the supernatural a priori (in this case, a human spirit). If you assume not, then obviously there's no free will, and you don't need any neurological studies to conclude that, because that would logically follow from a purely physical existence and cause-and-effect. However, if you assume the supernatural exists, then you cannot hope to fully understand everything about how the human brain works, because other forces beside physical ones are acting upon it.
What if I said that this requirement for evidence to believe something is inherently scientific, and it falsely grants science authority over the supernatural. Science works for everything except the supernatural. When it comes to FSM you must just have faith.
That's to make a prior assumption about what should qualify for evidence, and what shouldn't. That begs the question of where did that prior assumption came from.
This is where I would disagree. But I would also ask why it is important that morality transcends humanity or the physical world?
Because that indicates that morality points to something more than just the physical world. When I try to reduce my sense of right and wrong and tell it "you're just a product of evolution", it doesn't fit. It makes the whole concept meaningless, so why should I listen to it?
Except that science treats claims of string theory (or as I like to call it "string hypothesis") to be testable in principle as a phenomenon of nature, even if tests have not yet been devised. I think most physicists will agree that string theory is the unfortunate name of a hypothesis that has certainly not risen to the level of confidence of a theory.
This is true, and especially since the discovery of Higgs, it make many exotic flavors of string theory less likely to be true.
No we haven't observed every particle in our science lab. But most of the atoms that existed at the time the events of the Bible took place, still exist. In fact, if Jesus was a real person, the odds that some of the atoms that comprised Jesus now comprise you are almost statistically inevitable. The time and place where all the miracles of the Bible supposedly took place are not so distant. The universe is 13 billion years old, and almost unfathomably large. If miracles were happening as of 2000 years ago on earth no less, we are basically living in miracle-land in basically the same time period in cosmological terms.
The matter involved with a supposed miracle would be constrained in time, not just space. Things would go back to normal once its done.
The inability to disprove the supernatural claims of the Bible is not good evidence for their truth.
That is true, but the reverse argument is also true.
But this is a fundamental assumption of science that the universe (including the one that God might inhabit) is governed by physical laws.
This "fundamental assumption" as far as it dictating God is what I disagree with, and I claim does not stem from any scientific result.
Humans according to Christianity are the causes of their own decision (i.e. free will), which is why we have moral responsibility. But science did not accept this assumption and has since gained a lot of ground in figuring out how the brain works. In a laboratory when can do experiments that analyze people's brains and determine when people are going to decide to do things before even they are consciously aware that they are going to do them.
Even some famous philosophers and scientists believed the human mind was immune to science (Descartes). This turned out to be a big mistake. I think the lesson to learn is never to take the "unmoved mover" argument for granted, whether for human minds or God.
But this argument already assumes non-existence of a human spirit and its interaction with our physical bodies, and our consciousness is only apart of our mental mind. Which study are you referring to?
There's a difference between questions whose answers are currently unknown, and questions whose answers are unknowable in principle.
If I said that the God of Abraham was real, but he too had a creator, and it was the flying spaghetti monster, would this argument persuade you? I could say that the reason God never mentioned FSM in the Bible was because God is still a stubborn atheist, and is unaware of his own creator. We will never discover FSM because he is outside of both physics and the supernatural reality of the Christian heavens (Which FSM created). Sure you can claim that it is Yahweh who is at the top, but it is actually FSM who is at the top. Also anyone else who claims that FSM has an even higher God is wrong, because I define FSM as the topmost creator, the prime mover.
This argum
You're right I though I was talking to the original poster this whole time. Sorry about that.
No problem. Honest mistake. It happens.
In that same vein I am describing the idea of assuming these same "axioms", plus the axiom that scientific evidence and the scientific method are the only valid ways of determining objective truth. Maybe this is not true, but such is the nature of axioms.
Ahh, so this is the heart of it. That last addition is what I take issue with. Please understand though that I do understand the desire to consider that as an axiom, because the wonderful thing about science is how it conveys truth in a very concrete, reliable fashion. Moreover, it naturally repels attempts by people or groups of people who would try to manipulate truth for their personal political purposes. And I'll be the first to admit that the history of religion (even Christianity) is not without its ugly, ugly blemishes - and I won't defend those things at all. They were/are wrong. Nevertheless, my observation has been that there is more to the human condition than just scientific reasoning. "Reasoning" seems more general than that. In particular, you get the understanding of how the scientific method works, and how it reliably determines things that consistently lines up with observation. But you also get things like morality and intuitive awareness. These things are less quantitative, but nonetheless real. I've heard it argued that morality is just a product of human evolution's way of sustaining individuals and society as a whole, and I agree that it helps serve that function. But morality says there is more to itself than simply self-preservation. There's "meaning" to it, rather than just being a means-to-an-end, and its validity does not depend on the existence of myself or humanity. This phenomenon is independent of what the scientific method says of the physical world.
I should point out that I don't think religion and science are incompatible in principle. There are forms of religion that do not require breaking the barrier between the natural and the super natural. These would be religions that are deist or pantheist in nature. But I do think science is mutually exclusive with any sort of religion which accepts miracles as reality.
So here it sounds like you could just treat the supernatural in the way that some hypothesize different dimensions or universes (i.e. string theory).
I agree with this statement and that's what the problem is. This is also why science assumes that they do no happen. Rejecting the premise that "miracles do not happen", is tantamount to rejecting science as a method determining objective truth.
So here is why calling this "science" is problematic. When people hear the world "science" they think of its reliability due the reproducible, verifiable results that time has shown squares up with observing how physical reality works, and thus has become a trustworthy source of information for that reason, and that reason alone. To put things that cannot be verified in this way under the same term is try to borrow from this trustworthiness in an inappropriate way. In other words, I put trust in science only because of its methodology, not for its title. If something does not or cannot follow the methodology, then I do not seem it worthy to be called "science", because it lacks the very thing that make science worthwhile to begin with.
In science the entire universe is a science lab.
But we have not somehow observed every single physical interaction on every scale, including those cases in which supposed miracles have occurred. What we have done is taken a tiny amount of data and extrapolated it to give a base understanding of how the universe works. We can't do any better than that as far as science is concerned.
The way you phrase it makes it seem that physics acknowledges the ex
Check who posted what there, friend. You are quoting someone else. I'll assume those comments referring to the other poster are just misdirected, unless you say otherwise. As far as other things you said, science and logic are not axioms - they are deductive and inductive methods (depending on the discipline) used upon your axioms. In short, there is no science experiment that can disprove anything miraculous. That's no fault on the part of the methodology of science - it is was it is. You asserted that miracles "destroys the ability of nature to be repeatable". Keep in mind that Christians don't just assert the supernatural, but intelligence behind the supernatural. It's not just some "noise" that randomly messes with nature - there's intent and a purpose behind it. So, you would not expect it to show up as some statistical anomaly in a lab. You will note that with physics experiments, they assume a "closed" model, where only the physical ("natural") phenomenon are assumed to operate (and usually they will make further assumptions on the simplicity of the interactions to make the math easier). And it makes sense to assume this for their intents and purposes because they are interested in how the physical (natural) world operates. But that should not be mistaken for "complete" or "open" knowledge of reality. And scientists admit as much each time something new is discovered any they update their models and theories, and we wouldn't say that there's anything incoherent about that. Another example is in theoretical computer science. We know from the Halting Problem that there is no way to logically deduce whether any given program will halt or not. However, it is still the case that every program will either halt or run forever, even though logical deduction cannot determine which. Perfectly coherent, yet admittedly incomplete logical knowledge (and logic, here, is the one saying that it's incomplete).
When did I call young earth creationists dumb? The supernatural can invade the natural without violating any premise of the scientific method - it can only say things about stuff that's measurable and repeatable - this is no secret, and certainly not a refutation. You really need to sit down and think this through. I believe in the authority of science because it's an extension of human observation and reason, but I'm also able to reason about that observation and reason, and realize what exactly it can and cannot do, and many people fail to do this. The thing about what we're talking about is that foundations for any belief system, whether its called axioms in math, first principles in physics, or faith in Christianity, cannot be logically deduced into further basic things - otherwise you get infinite regression. I'm not calling anyone dumb. That's a completely wrong term to use anyway for someone you disagree with in this context anyway, because it's not pointing out a fault in any system of reasoning.
I'm sorry, but you're confusing scientific authority with a naturalistic worldview, which contains presuppositions that have absolutely nothing to do with the scientific method. To say that "science" (what we know of observable, repeatable events in nature) says something outside of this a fundamental logical fallacy. Try apply this sort of reasoning to, well, anything else, and see what you end up with. As far as the supernatural interacting with the natural, well you predictably repeat such supposed happening in a lab, because it doesn't behave that way. What you're presenting with what is call an Argument from Ignorance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance Now I'm not claiming that science supports my argument either - science says nothing about this either way.
1: "the things he is *most* known for almost certainly did not happen from a scientific point of view." Your premise comes from a misconception of the authority of science. How can a system of logical reasoning that is entirely rooted in naturalistic observations and measurements say anything at all about something that is, by definition, "supernatural"? 2: "Because the Jesus form the Bible was supernatural" This is circular reasoning. You cannot use this as proof to refute the nonexistence of the deity of Jesus, when you already presuppose its nonexistence. 3: "Why *shouldn't* you believe the earth is 6000 years old?" Not all Christians hold to a literal interpretation of the creation story. Getting into the details of this topic is not something I can do justice to in this context. I would recommend looking up books on this subject - there are pretty easy to find.
Actually yes, Jesus was a common name in that time, but that I'm referring to the one referred to in the Bible. And your last two sentences is just stating your stance - you're not arguing anything as far as whether or not I should agree with it.
It's really not any more crazy to believe the earth is 6000 years old than it is to believe in the Bible and that Jesus was the son of God. In fact I would say it's orders of magnitude more likely that the Earth is 6000 years old than the idea that Jesus was anything more than a regular human being if he even existed at all.
Sorry, but you're gonna have to do a little better than pejorative rhetoric to be taken seriously by the opposing side. And please check your facts - almost all historians believe a man named Jesus from Nazareth existed. There isn't much debate about that.
You're forgetting to account the DeLorean surrounding surrounding the person. An orange vest should probably be thrown in there too.
Well without any pushing to a remote repo it's as mortal as any other source control.
Every time I saw tuition go up when I was in school it followed cuts in public education funding. Out here in California, the tuition at UC and CSU has gone up quickly because the state is trying to get its own budget under control after running deep into the red while that stupid actor was elected and re-elected by people who thought a tough talking actor with no experience at all in any government office should reside in Sacramento for 8 years.
That's a sign of government subsidy withdrawal. It sucks going through it, but that doesn't mean is shouldn't happen. To do nothing now will only make it hurt even more later.
Except for those who are are already making much more than that.
Many high-end scientific computing applications will already take and use as many cores as you give it. Definitely a niche market though.