I believe it was Karl Popper (a famous philosopher of science) who wrote that he believed that Christianity was instrumental in the formation of science in the West. The Christian God creates a rational world that can be understood through reason. However, the world is not contingent, so we must observe it to know it. Even math started out as religion - the Pythagorians had a religion based on rational numbers. So I completely disagree with you that science and religion are incompatible.
I am male. So for me to spend hours a day sitting at my computer desk, clicking away on a mouse and keyboard, making-believe that I am a hulking, heroic barbarian that battles dragons and saves worlds is all perfectly OK, but making-believe that I am a FEMALE hulking, heroir barbarian that battles dragons and saves worlds is silly, degenerate, etc? This doesn't make any sense to me.
I think a really interesting point that you don't mention is that historically the many worlds theory was introduced after the traditional copenhagen interpretation. My understanding of the many worlds theory (I don't know any more about it than you mention, frankly) is that the formalism is identical to standard qm. In the sense that it doesn't give any new predictions relative to the copenhagen interpretation, then, its contribution was philosophical, not scientific. The question is if it had come first (with all the math of QM of course), would quantum mechanics make us think of a deterministic multiverse rather than an indeterminstic single universe.
Sorry, but to me, you are the one who doesn't write like someone from science. I am a physicist with something of a hobby level interest in philosophy of science, and first of all most scientists (or physicists in my case) I have met couldn't give a flying crap about all of this anyway because they are too concerned about publishing their next paper to get the very limited money that is available. Also, despite stereotypes, most of them seem to have a hell of a lot more humility than you show in any of your posts here, which I think comes from struggling for so long with ideas that nobody can completely understand. You grow to appreciate that the world is far more amazing and beautiful than you can ever completely imagine yourself; it seems hard to believe that you have all the answers. (Of course, there are exceptions.) epistemiclife writes that way. I think that you write, frankly, like someone who is more concerned about making himself feel good that he is smart and educated enough to be convinced by a particular scientific theory that, incidentally, flies in the face of millennia of human intuition, and which evidently no uneducated person in his right mind would believe anyway (evidenced by the fact that for the first 5000+years of human existence, we did have theistic creation myths.) Giving a kidney to someone is something to be proud of; being convinced of evolution is not. (And yes, I do think that any smart, educated person in his right mind should be convinced by evolution.)
I don't quite understand why right now there seems to be a movement to take one of the most unconvincing iterations of "Christianity" (the conservative, Biblical literalist strain that is so popular in the US) and write reams and reams about how it means atheists are so smart, because I find it incredibly masturbatory, and even more boring. Terry Eagleton is a far better critic of it than I am.
I remember a number of years ago when "for" and "against" intelligence-design columns were published in Physics Today. The "for" column advocated trying to educate all the IDers; the "against" column said it was all a waste of time since they were too unwilling or unable to believe evolution anyway, and the physics community should focus on doing physics. You seem to be in the third position- call it the "try to make other people who don't agree with me know I think they are idiots" camp. It isn't helping.
What you can do under the law, and what you should do, are not necessarily the same thing. Certainly the movie industry has every right under the law to demand prosecution of this kid. Tabloids also have the right under the law to publish private pictures of celebrities; that doesn't mean doing so isn't soulless and wrong. Of course, the movie industry should remember that the day may be coming when a movie become like a song is now- something people pay to get not because they have to, but mostly because they think they should. Irrespective of rights, people prefer not to pay companies that send 19 year old kids to jail for 20 seconds of film footage.
A big criticism of quantum mechanics (still) is that nobody is exactly sure the minimum you have to do to one entangled particle to "measure" it, which determines what the person with the other entangled particle will he when he "measures" his particle. Schrodinger's cat paradox has never beeon completely satisfactorily answered. The existance of quantum entanglement is well established, though.
Nobody has ever found a way to use entangled particles to send FTL messages. In principle it is impossible. I have never even heard anybody else but this guy musing about ways it might be possible.
Except that I've never had the probable state of my keys being in the kitchen destructively interfere with the probable state of my keys being left in my bedroom to make my keys more likely to be on the key ring...:-)
I didn't say that determinism implied the subjectivity of time. I did say that it does make the flow of time seem subjective. If God knew everything that would ever happen, I'm sure a philosopher could still point out that time might still flow, but I can't imagine why I would care. (It could easily be a failure of my imagination though.) I also didn't say that an indeterminant universe would mean an objective flow of time. However, if quantum mechanical measurement changes the universe in an irreversible way, I have trouble seeing how this wouldn't impose a causality that everybody has to agree on, and hence an objective "flow" of time in some sense. It could be these are the wrong questions, though, like wondering about the Earth's drag in the aether.
Scientific cosmology is about relating the origin of the universe to, eg, the shape of the galaxies, or the amount of hydrogen in the universe. Religion tries to relate it to, eg, whether the US should have invaded Iraq. The latter is quite a bit more amibitious undertaking. However, science itself seems to have been partly inspired by Western religion and philosophy (I think it is Popper who has a famous quote on this, but I am too lazy to look it up.) Presumably, Eastern religion can also contribute (maybe it already has?) However, I find prefer to see religion and philsoophy as providing imagination and creativity to scientific though. I think that saying they provide insight isn't accurate to the history of how religion has actually influenced science. I wish I knew more about eastern religion actually- but there is only so much time in the day!
As to your link about quantum theory and the mind- I think it is important to note that this is not the orthodox view. The counterargument I have heard to this is: how much mind does it take "make the measurement" (cause the wavefunction to collapes, cause the electron to pick a slit, etc.) Does it take (Schrodinger's!) cat? A human brain? A PhD? Just my 2 cents.
I don't think physicists understand time all that well. General relativity implies a world that is deterministic (which Einstein liked very much) and so the flow of time seems to become a subjective aspect of our consciousness (and we don't understand consciousness, of course.) In quantum mechanics, we can't come to terms with time without coming to terms with the process of measurement, which we still haven't done, but I think most physicists would claim that the quantum universe seems genuinely undetermined so that time must pass in some kind of objective way. So part of reconciling general relativity and quantum mechanics will probably involve a better understanding of time.
Scientists have assumptions and prejudices that make up paradigms. They have faith that the world is comprehensible. For example, Einstein couldn't accept quantum mechanics because for him, for the universe to be comprehensible it had to be predictable, and this was something quantum mechanics did not allow. (Kuhn would consider the move to quantum mechanics a "paradigm shift".) He spent the rest of his life trying to show that he was right (there was good reason then to think he might be.) This was an act of faith. However, Einstein did not argue that quantum mechanics didn't fit the available data. Any competent scientist could see that it did fit the data, and Einstein was certainly competent. Had he argued that quantum mechanics did not fit the data, this would have been an act analogous to ID. Personally, I wouldn't have called this an act of faith either- I would have called it an act of denial.
Also, the idea isn't to teach kids to make up their own minds regardless of what other people say. It is to teach them make up their own minds regardless of what people who are wrong say, and also to have the humility to know when to admit that they might be wrong themselves.
Of course, the interesting part of the big bang theory is not what came "before" the big bang (which many not even be a meaningful statement.) What came after the big bang is the "answer"; it helps to provide a nexus between, for example, our understanding of galaxies and of protons. It is true, though, that the big bang doesn't provide an answer to the metaphysical question of first cause (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_cause), although it can probably motivate answers. However, science is not directly concerned with metaphysics.
The original post (before yours) talked about colonizing in the context of whether as an "investment" for history it costs more than jamestown did. If a handful of people going to mars is to be seen as a society's investment in the future, then it makes sense to me to rate it in terms of the wealth of the entire society, not a particular individual. If the claim is that space exploration should be privately funded- well then you make what I consider to be a pretty good argument that it seems to have been easier for individuals to fund the founding of Jamestown than it would be for mars exploration to be privately funded now. (Although, to be fair, while a lot of people complain nowadays that corporations and wealthy individuals own the government, back then they pretty literally, officially did own it, so its not clear to me that this sort of approach really makes sense.) I didn't realize that colonization was so accessible back then, actually, although I suppose it make sense.
Except that I claim the test must systematically rate the type of intelligence some people have higher than others. For example, if you are Shakespeare, and I am Einstein (why not be modest?:-)) and the imaginary IQ test you and I take is very flawed in that it has only math problems on it, I will do much better than you will; if the test focuses on language skills, then you will do much better than I. A real IQ test will presumably be a balance between these two types of questions, so that our scores will be much close to each other. However, imagine that you are not so good at math and logic since you have been writing plays, not playing logical puzzle games, for the last 30 years of your life, while I have been keeping up my verbal skills by writing papers for the last 30 years I have been doing physics. Then I will presumably do better on the IQ test (perhaps more than 2 points better) but this is pretty irrelevant to what most people mean by "intelligence", and is certainly irrelevant to how well you and I will do at our jobs. Now, this might still say something interesting- it might say that scientists have to keep up verbal skills while playwrights don't have to keep up math skills. Similarly, this study says that eldest children are treated differently in a systematic way, which is interesting. But this doesn't mean that having an IQ of 102 vs 100 is really all that different. This problem gets worse when talking about individuals (the paper talks about large groups of individuals) since you also have to worry about statistical error on a particular test, and also since the systematic effects should tend to be larger for an individual, and tend to average out over very many individuals.
I don't completely disagree with your conclusions. But I think it makes more sense to put the cost of colonizing Jamestown in units of GDP- how much of Britain's GDP did it cost to colonize Jamestown vs the percent of the US GDP (or the US + other countries if it is to be a collaboration.) A quick search claimed the GDP of Britain in 1900 was 125billion in 1995 dollars, which is smaller than a good-sized US state's GDP is of today. I don't know what it was when Jamestown was settled, but I suspect that the costs you cite compare much more favorably as a percent of GDP.
There is an article about this same thing in new scientist http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn12089-do-b lack-holes-really-exist.html
It quotes 't Hooft as claiming that "The process he describes can in no way produce enough radiation to make a black hole disappear as quickly as he is suggesting." So I am skeptical.
Hundreds of billions of dollars is the GDP of a good-sized US state. It is also roughly the size of the loss due to hurricane Katrina ( http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2005 /09/04/59145.htm ). Cotton seems to be suggesting that domestic piracy has the equivalent effect on the US economy as losing an entire state, or having to rebuild a major city.
Falling back on cynicism when the great majority of experts declare Nature isn't doing what you want Her to just causes democracy to devolve into demagogy. The government's job is to insure that you are able to say and think what you want to, not to make you feel better when you are wrong. This article comes across as very whiny to me.
Does this imply that while certain characteristics depend very strongly on individual groups of molecules in a particular chromosome, in general our genetic information might be better thought of as somehow a property of the entire chromosome, analogously to thinking of the same chromosome's (relativistic) mass being a property of the entire chromosome rather than the algebraic sum of the parts?
No. Technology from the future will allow us to live forever. How will we get this technology in the future you ask? Simple! We will already have had it.
I didn't say that genesis and the big bang are in conflict in the sense that one must prove the other completely wrong. In fact, I personally disagree with that claim. However, I think the claim the two descriptions have nothing to do with each other is equally wrong. There is a middle ground. They both provide incomplete descriptions that are not unrelated to each other.
I think that you focus on the predictive role of science, and forget that it must also motivate why these predictions are important. Natural selection and the big bang are so profound precisely because they do force (some of us) to re-evaluate the very simple questions that Genesis frames and to some degree answers: who and where are we? I don't claim this new answer has to be characterized as part of an atheistic or theistic world-view, but certainly it must be different from the one our ancestors had 2000+ years ago! To say otherwise is an injustice to the immense leaps of imagination that have been needed to develop important scientific ideas. It also leaves religion so transcendent as to be irrelevant. To borrow some of your words, if religion is our relationship with the universe, and that relationship doesn't depend on how the universe behaves when we actually physically relate to it, then that leaves us and the universe a little too estranged from each other. (I guess I would claim we need a little chemistry together...:-))
>>So, if someone believes every word of the Bible is absolute truth and nothing is metaphorical, simplified in terms that the people of the time would understand, and was completely accurate in its translation from language to language, then that would qualify them as a fundamentalist in my mind. In general, there is nothing wrong with that.
Fundamentalism that doesn't have the inclination to worry whether evolution occurred any more than it worries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin because it is too focused on, for example, the family dealing with an abusive father- I agree with you that there is nothing wrong with this fundamentalism. However, the fundamentalism that offers biblical literalism as a seductively easy answer to life's ambiguities, to be ordered and slurped down like the proverbial happy meal so that its customer can go back to focusing on his American Idol episode- this I do have a problem with. When coming to terms with the big religious questions that we all struggle with, there is nothing wrong with being simple, but fundamentalism seems to me to often be used as an excuse to be lazy.
If your position is that it is OK to intentionally bomb civilians to win a war, and if you believe that wars are waged to achieve political goals, then it would seem to me you are claiming it is OK to intentionally kill mass numbers of civilians to achieve political goals. I think, then, that the only way you can consistently claim that, eg, the 9/11 bombings were immoral is to claim that no moral political ends can come of it. This is not a position I want to be in. In any case, as I understand it, the way that we justified bombing the japanese (or the germans) to ourselves during WWII was to "intend" to bomb the factories that were necessary to the Japanese war machine (which we could never hit accurately enough to avoid civilians.) Of course, the terror this inspired must have helped the war effort as well.
In any case, even if what you are saying is true- that bombing civilians as a result of an intent to bomb them is sometimes morally necessary- I still claim that is disturbing as hell.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe it was Karl Popper (a famous philosopher of science) who wrote that he believed that Christianity was instrumental in the formation of science in the West. The Christian God creates a rational world that can be understood through reason. However, the world is not contingent, so we must observe it to know it. Even math started out as religion - the Pythagorians had a religion based on rational numbers. So I completely disagree with you that science and religion are incompatible.
I am male. So for me to spend hours a day sitting at my computer desk, clicking away on a mouse and keyboard, making-believe that I am a hulking, heroic barbarian that battles dragons and saves worlds is all perfectly OK, but making-believe that I am a FEMALE hulking, heroir barbarian that battles dragons and saves worlds is silly, degenerate, etc? This doesn't make any sense to me.
I think a really interesting point that you don't mention is that historically the many worlds theory was introduced after the traditional copenhagen interpretation. My understanding of the many worlds theory (I don't know any more about it than you mention, frankly) is that the formalism is identical to standard qm. In the sense that it doesn't give any new predictions relative to the copenhagen interpretation, then, its contribution was philosophical, not scientific. The question is if it had come first (with all the math of QM of course), would quantum mechanics make us think of a deterministic multiverse rather than an indeterminstic single universe.
>> You don't write like someone in science.
.
Sorry, but to me, you are the one who doesn't write like someone from science. I am a physicist with something of a hobby level interest in philosophy of science, and first of all most scientists (or physicists in my case) I have met couldn't give a flying crap about all of this anyway because they are too concerned about publishing their next paper to get the very limited money that is available. Also, despite stereotypes, most of them seem to have a hell of a lot more humility than you show in any of your posts here, which I think comes from struggling for so long with ideas that nobody can completely understand. You grow to appreciate that the world is far more amazing and beautiful than you can ever completely imagine yourself; it seems hard to believe that you have all the answers. (Of course, there are exceptions.) epistemiclife writes that way. I think that you write, frankly, like someone who is more concerned about making himself feel good that he is smart and educated enough to be convinced by a particular scientific theory that, incidentally, flies in the face of millennia of human intuition, and which evidently no uneducated person in his right mind would believe anyway (evidenced by the fact that for the first 5000+years of human existence, we did have theistic creation myths.) Giving a kidney to someone is something to be proud of; being convinced of evolution is not. (And yes, I do think that any smart, educated person in his right mind should be convinced by evolution.)
I don't quite understand why right now there seems to be a movement to take one of the most unconvincing iterations of "Christianity" (the conservative, Biblical literalist strain that is so popular in the US) and write reams and reams about how it means atheists are so smart, because I find it incredibly masturbatory, and even more boring. Terry Eagleton is a far better critic of it than I am
I remember a number of years ago when "for" and "against" intelligence-design columns were published in Physics Today. The "for" column advocated trying to educate all the IDers; the "against" column said it was all a waste of time since they were too unwilling or unable to believe evolution anyway, and the physics community should focus on doing physics. You seem to be in the third position- call it the "try to make other people who don't agree with me know I think they are idiots" camp. It isn't helping.
Just my two cents.
What you can do under the law, and what you should do, are not necessarily the same thing. Certainly the movie industry has every right under the law to demand prosecution of this kid. Tabloids also have the right under the law to publish private pictures of celebrities; that doesn't mean doing so isn't soulless and wrong. Of course, the movie industry should remember that the day may be coming when a movie become like a song is now- something people pay to get not because they have to, but mostly because they think they should. Irrespective of rights, people prefer not to pay companies that send 19 year old kids to jail for 20 seconds of film footage.
A big criticism of quantum mechanics (still) is that nobody is exactly sure the minimum you have to do to one entangled particle to "measure" it, which determines what the person with the other entangled particle will he when he "measures" his particle. Schrodinger's cat paradox has never beeon completely satisfactorily answered. The existance of quantum entanglement is well established, though.
Nobody has ever found a way to use entangled particles to send FTL messages. In principle it is impossible. I have never even heard anybody else but this guy musing about ways it might be possible.
Of course, we can't perfectly clone a person even in principle, since quantum states can't be perfectly cloned. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_cloning_theorem
Except that I've never had the probable state of my keys being in the kitchen destructively interfere with the probable state of my keys being left in my bedroom to make my keys more likely to be on the key ring... :-)
I didn't say that determinism implied the subjectivity of time. I did say that it does make the flow of time seem subjective. If God knew everything that would ever happen, I'm sure a philosopher could still point out that time might still flow, but I can't imagine why I would care. (It could easily be a failure of my imagination though.) I also didn't say that an indeterminant universe would mean an objective flow of time. However, if quantum mechanical measurement changes the universe in an irreversible way, I have trouble seeing how this wouldn't impose a causality that everybody has to agree on, and hence an objective "flow" of time in some sense. It could be these are the wrong questions, though, like wondering about the Earth's drag in the aether.
Scientific cosmology is about relating the origin of the universe to, eg, the shape of the galaxies, or the amount of hydrogen in the universe. Religion tries to relate it to, eg, whether the US should have invaded Iraq. The latter is quite a bit more amibitious undertaking. However, science itself seems to have been partly inspired by Western religion and philosophy (I think it is Popper who has a famous quote on this, but I am too lazy to look it up.) Presumably, Eastern religion can also contribute (maybe it already has?) However, I find prefer to see religion and philsoophy as providing imagination and creativity to scientific though. I think that saying they provide insight isn't accurate to the history of how religion has actually influenced science. I wish I knew more about eastern religion actually- but there is only so much time in the day!
As to your link about quantum theory and the mind- I think it is important to note that this is not the orthodox view. The counterargument I have heard to this is: how much mind does it take "make the measurement" (cause the wavefunction to collapes, cause the electron to pick a slit, etc.) Does it take (Schrodinger's!) cat? A human brain? A PhD? Just my 2 cents.
I don't think physicists understand time all that well. General relativity implies a world that is deterministic (which Einstein liked very much) and so the flow of time seems to become a subjective aspect of our consciousness (and we don't understand consciousness, of course.) In quantum mechanics, we can't come to terms with time without coming to terms with the process of measurement, which we still haven't done, but I think most physicists would claim that the quantum universe seems genuinely undetermined so that time must pass in some kind of objective way. So part of reconciling general relativity and quantum mechanics will probably involve a better understanding of time.
Scientists have assumptions and prejudices that make up paradigms. They have faith that the world is comprehensible. For example, Einstein couldn't accept quantum mechanics because for him, for the universe to be comprehensible it had to be predictable, and this was something quantum mechanics did not allow. (Kuhn would consider the move to quantum mechanics a "paradigm shift".) He spent the rest of his life trying to show that he was right (there was good reason then to think he might be.) This was an act of faith. However, Einstein did not argue that quantum mechanics didn't fit the available data. Any competent scientist could see that it did fit the data, and Einstein was certainly competent. Had he argued that quantum mechanics did not fit the data, this would have been an act analogous to ID. Personally, I wouldn't have called this an act of faith either- I would have called it an act of denial.
Also, the idea isn't to teach kids to make up their own minds regardless of what other people say. It is to teach them make up their own minds regardless of what people who are wrong say, and also to have the humility to know when to admit that they might be wrong themselves.
Of course, the interesting part of the big bang theory is not what came "before" the big bang (which many not even be a meaningful statement.) What came after the big bang is the "answer"; it helps to provide a nexus between, for example, our understanding of galaxies and of protons. It is true, though, that the big bang doesn't provide an answer to the metaphysical question of first cause (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_cause), although it can probably motivate answers. However, science is not directly concerned with metaphysics.
The original post (before yours) talked about colonizing in the context of whether as an "investment" for history it costs more than jamestown did. If a handful of people going to mars is to be seen as a society's investment in the future, then it makes sense to me to rate it in terms of the wealth of the entire society, not a particular individual. If the claim is that space exploration should be privately funded- well then you make what I consider to be a pretty good argument that it seems to have been easier for individuals to fund the founding of Jamestown than it would be for mars exploration to be privately funded now. (Although, to be fair, while a lot of people complain nowadays that corporations and wealthy individuals own the government, back then they pretty literally, officially did own it, so its not clear to me that this sort of approach really makes sense.) I didn't realize that colonization was so accessible back then, actually, although I suppose it make sense.
Except that I claim the test must systematically rate the type of intelligence some people have higher than others. For example, if you are Shakespeare, and I am Einstein (why not be modest? :-)) and the imaginary IQ test you and I take is very flawed in that it has only math problems on it, I will do much better than you will; if the test focuses on language skills, then you will do much better than I. A real IQ test will presumably be a balance between these two types of questions, so that our scores will be much close to each other. However, imagine that you are not so good at math and logic since you have been writing plays, not playing logical puzzle games, for the last 30 years of your life, while I have been keeping up my verbal skills by writing papers for the last 30 years I have been doing physics. Then I will presumably do better on the IQ test (perhaps more than 2 points better) but this is pretty irrelevant to what most people mean by "intelligence", and is certainly irrelevant to how well you and I will do at our jobs. Now, this might still say something interesting- it might say that scientists have to keep up verbal skills while playwrights don't have to keep up math skills. Similarly, this study says that eldest children are treated differently in a systematic way, which is interesting. But this doesn't mean that having an IQ of 102 vs 100 is really all that different. This problem gets worse when talking about individuals (the paper talks about large groups of individuals) since you also have to worry about statistical error on a particular test, and also since the systematic effects should tend to be larger for an individual, and tend to average out over very many individuals.
I don't completely disagree with your conclusions. But I think it makes more sense to put the cost of colonizing Jamestown in units of GDP- how much of Britain's GDP did it cost to colonize Jamestown vs the percent of the US GDP (or the US + other countries if it is to be a collaboration.) A quick search claimed the GDP of Britain in 1900 was 125billion in 1995 dollars, which is smaller than a good-sized US state's GDP is of today. I don't know what it was when Jamestown was settled, but I suspect that the costs you cite compare much more favorably as a percent of GDP.
There is an article about this same thing in new scientistb lack-holes-really-exist.html
http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn12089-do-
It quotes 't Hooft as claiming that "The process he describes can in no way produce enough radiation to make a black hole disappear as quickly as he is suggesting." So I am skeptical.
Hundreds of billions of dollars is the GDP of a good-sized US state. It is also roughly the size of the loss due to hurricane Katrina ( http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2005 /09/04/59145.htm ). Cotton seems to be suggesting that domestic piracy has the equivalent effect on the US economy as losing an entire state, or having to rebuild a major city.
Falling back on cynicism when the great majority of experts declare Nature isn't doing what you want Her to just causes democracy to devolve into demagogy. The government's job is to insure that you are able to say and think what you want to, not to make you feel better when you are wrong. This article comes across as very whiny to me.
Does this imply that while certain characteristics depend very strongly on individual groups of molecules in a particular chromosome, in general our genetic information might be better thought of as somehow a property of the entire chromosome, analogously to thinking of the same chromosome's (relativistic) mass being a property of the entire chromosome rather than the algebraic sum of the parts?
No. Technology from the future will allow us to live forever. How will we get this technology in the future you ask? Simple! We will already have had it.
I didn't say that genesis and the big bang are in conflict in the sense that one must prove the other completely wrong. In fact, I personally disagree with that claim. However, I think the claim the two descriptions have nothing to do with each other is equally wrong. There is a middle ground. They both provide incomplete descriptions that are not unrelated to each other.
I think that you focus on the predictive role of science, and forget that it must also motivate why these predictions are important. Natural selection and the big bang are so profound precisely because they do force (some of us) to re-evaluate the very simple questions that Genesis frames and to some degree answers: who and where are we? I don't claim this new answer has to be characterized as part of an atheistic or theistic world-view, but certainly it must be different from the one our ancestors had 2000+ years ago! To say otherwise is an injustice to the immense leaps of imagination that have been needed to develop important scientific ideas. It also leaves religion so transcendent as to be irrelevant. To borrow some of your words, if religion is our relationship with the universe, and that relationship doesn't depend on how the universe behaves when we actually physically relate to it, then that leaves us and the universe a little too estranged from each other. (I guess I would claim we need a little chemistry together...:-))
>>So, if someone believes every word of the Bible is absolute truth and nothing is metaphorical, simplified in terms that the people of the time would understand, and was completely accurate in its translation from language to language, then that would qualify them as a fundamentalist in my mind. In general, there is nothing wrong with that.
Fundamentalism that doesn't have the inclination to worry whether evolution occurred any more than it worries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin because it is too focused on, for example, the family dealing with an abusive father- I agree with you that there is nothing wrong with this fundamentalism. However, the fundamentalism that offers biblical literalism as a seductively easy answer to life's ambiguities, to be ordered and slurped down like the proverbial happy meal so that its customer can go back to focusing on his American Idol episode- this I do have a problem with. When coming to terms with the big religious questions that we all struggle with, there is nothing wrong with being simple, but fundamentalism seems to me to often be used as an excuse to be lazy.
If your position is that it is OK to intentionally bomb civilians to win a war, and if you believe that wars are waged to achieve political goals, then it would seem to me you are claiming it is OK to intentionally kill mass numbers of civilians to achieve political goals. I think, then, that the only way you can consistently claim that, eg, the 9/11 bombings were immoral is to claim that no moral political ends can come of it. This is not a position I want to be in. In any case, as I understand it, the way that we justified bombing the japanese (or the germans) to ourselves during WWII was to "intend" to bomb the factories that were necessary to the Japanese war machine (which we could never hit accurately enough to avoid civilians.) Of course, the terror this inspired must have helped the war effort as well.
In any case, even if what you are saying is true- that bombing civilians as a result of an intent to bomb them is sometimes morally necessary- I still claim that is disturbing as hell.