Briefly: Is it still a miracle if it only happened in someone's drug-addled brain?
Well, drugs have been a part of South American religion for a very long time. They take hallucinogenic drugs in part of their rituals, when they contact that spiritual world for the purpose of healing people, contacting ancestors, or even finding lost objects. I think the experience of taking acid, mushrooms, or cacti, for an intentional spiritual journey is a lot different than that of taking them just to see weird colors and experience something different. But many different cultures have believed that these drugs can take down the wall between the mind and the spiritual realm. Whether that is true or whether it is all illusion, there is no obvious test for.
Someone says they have been visited by an angel, and some people believe them, and then others believe them in turn... We had the brains to observe things, but not explain them. Newton and Bernoulli weren't around.
When giving suggestions for a guy who could have gone back in time to find a "better" course than belief in God, maybe you shouldn't have picked a exceptionally pious theist and Christian like Newton.
Agreed. I personally find it far-fetched to suppose that schizophrenics, for example, have brains that just invent different voices that tell them to kill themselves, or otherwise mess with them. I, for one, believe the voices are real. The fact that the brain can be manipulated to either hear them or not hear them, doesn't shed light on the controversy one way or the other.
Omnipotence, for example, is logically inconsistent.
Only poorly defined omnipotence is logically inconsistent. God is omnipotent in that all power that exists is from him, and there are no finite limits to his power.
Unfortunately that is not correct. I certainly accept that Genesis is an early attempt at writing down some properties of the putative concept God, but because of the inconsistencies involved, the attempt is a failure. That means literally that the book Genesis does not resolve the question of attaching a logical conception to the word God.
But all major definitions of God by mainstream religions are logically inconsistent, and therefore they do not represent "something" for which a proof of existence or nonexistence makes sense.
Not so. The God of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, even Taoism, and the God of the Greek Philosophers and the original God of ancient Egypt, are all described in the same way, with the same properties. There is far more evidence of a common conception of God across those traditions than a divergent one. Obviously, it's not an identical conception, but they all believe in one God who is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, who transcends both time and space, who is Essence Itself and Existence Itself, who is Love Itself, and Wisdom Itself, and who is therefore the source of all life, the creator.
Interesting spin, but you're stretching it. And I think this is interesting, because every time science learns something about the universe or the mind like this the rhetorical effort required to work God back into the model gets more tortured. And that trend, I would say, constitutes a hint as to where to look for philosophical insight, were one inclined to glean some.
I think the opposite of everything you say here is true. First, what becomes ever more tortured is the atheistic explanations of why we would have a brain structure whose only purpose seems to be allowing us to perceive the presence of God. Second, the more we learn about the universe, the more it jibes with theology, and the more atheistic scientists grudgingly follow the evidence, usually after decades of ignoring it because it sounds too religious. The best modern examples of these are the big bang theory, the theories of mile-deep floods after the ice age. Both theories came about during the peak of atheism in the scientific community, and as a result the evidence for these things was ignored for decades. Atheistic scientists today are forced to take refuge in a belief in an infinite number of unknowable universes, a theory which is neither scientific nor rational.
You OTOH pretend there might be another explanation for the feeling of divine than random brain function, you pretend that a real god come into play. The burden of evidence to demonstrate it is on your side.
Given that there is apparently an organ in the brain for sensing God, I would say that the burden of proof is on those who say it is for something other than sensing God.
Do you really think belief in fairy big beard or whatever makes people less likely to kill each other?
Given that the first two officially atheist countries in history (AFAIK), the USSR and the People's Republic of China, perpetrated the two largest mass genocides in history, I'm going to go with "yes."
The first and most major result of such experiments is to show that no "religious experiences" can be trusted as personal proof of an almighty being. Just because you have had a few instances in your life when you truly felt God's presense, that alone should mean virtually nothing without some other verification. If this sensation can be created without God's presense, then it is no longer valid "proof" of his existance.
Just because it is triggered by poking the brain doesn't mean it's being experienced "without God's presence." You may recall that one of the basic properties of any conception of God is that he is omnipresent. This is nothing new. In South America especially, the awareness presence of God and/or spirits has been triggered by drugs since time immemorial. The reliance upon drugs to experience these things may make it more plausible to explain away as hallucination, but it also shows that there is no contradiction between the belief of actual awareness of God and/or spirits, and a natural mechanism of transcending the natural to experience the spiritual. After all, all who believe in the afterlife believe that a natural mechanism, i.e. death, leads to the direct experience of spirits and/or God thereafter.
I'd have to say yes. Maybe one day it will be necessary for celebrities to patent their genomes so people don't make unauthorized clones of them for fun and profit.
Everybody gets hung up on "life" as if it's something so fundamental, but really it's by definition nothing more than a set of characteristics (ability to reproduce, etc, etc). That's because life IS a fundamental, real thing -- not merely a set of characteristics.
Do you consider a virus to be alive? It's a borderline case, but some people at least would say yes.
There is no sensible definition of life that would include viruses.
No. Evolution would have gotten rid of it if it caused a net increase in the risk of death between menarche and menopause (males simply don't matter here).
No, as an appendix is a complex structure, and its presence in an organism lowers the organism's informational entropy, evolution would remove it without positive pressure to keep it.
as we currently chop it out at the first sign of inflammation, we may also overstate the actual risk of death from appendicitis in the absence of treatment.
As a parent of a child whose appendix burst within a couple days of the first abdominal pain, I am naturally inclined to doubt that.
You can believe what you want about a deity, and what mechanisms it put into place to run the universe. But beware of animism by ascribing "intent" to abstract statistical descriptions of phenomena.
Or you could be wary of attempts to ascribe to physical causes things which have spiritual causes. Or the best solution is probably to be wary of attempts to ascribe to anything any apparent causes which aren't the actual causes.
I think that depends. If bacterial resistance to antibiotics amounted simply to some one-time mutation of a protein into a new form, I don't see any reason to suspect that that is going to mutate back. OTOH, if the resistance required a configuration with lower entropy than the non-resistance, like say a NEW protein that must be manufactured, then that would be expected to reverse itself if no longer needed.
Yeah, well NOW the onslaught is coming... troll! ANTI-religious, ANTI-theist, or ANTI-creationist posts are ALWAYS the first posts to breach these subjects on slashdot. I love the study of both natural and spiritual phenomenon, but I would much rather discuss the findings concerning the functions of the appendix than get goaded into defending my beliefs, or if not goaded myself, have to wade through the bickering of others who have been.
Why do you theists crave the "scientific" label so much? Why do you want to shoehorn the adjective "scientific" to the religious texts? Is it because all the theistic power bases like the church, and the political parties have lost their credibility completely? Is it because only science has some credibility and a track record of delivering progress? And you need to somehow get part of that credibility rub off on you?
I've never known a theist to crave the "scientific" label. However, most people who are interested in spiritual truth, are also interested in natural truth. People like Newton, who spent more time pursuing spiritual truth than natural truth, still deserve to be called scientists for their work involving natural truth.
It is noteworthy that all attempts so far to link attained spiritual knowledge as leverage for attaining natural knowledge have proven deeply flawed, and those who were successful scientists as well as spiritual seekers, such as Newton, Lemaître, etc., pursued natural truth independently from any spiritual findings.
Suggesting that the religious seek the credibility of the track record of science is silly. The track record of the progress of religion includes the virtual abolishment of the once-ubiquitous practices of infanticide and slavery. The track record of science includes providing intellectual credibility and the color of rationality to the holocaust and communism.
In other words, "someone said appendix is useless because of evolution, this mean ID is correct" is nonsense.
Sure. However, when a theory gives rise to predictions that turn out to be false, that certainly undermines that theory. One of the most heard predictions of neodarwinism, at least as understood by the masses, is that the appendix is vestigal. This study, along with the other studies it references, to my mind constitutes adequate proof that the appendix is NOT vestigal. Therefore neodariwnism, at least as understood by the masses, is a highly flawed theory.
All this obviously says nothing whatsoever about ID or creationism.
Standing up and lecturing is a useless method that no teacher should be using, I don't care what level we're talking about. Let me paint you a picture;
You set a goal. Say, this class will raise $XX.XX by December. From there, you brainstorm with your class: How do we do it? Now the class comes up with ideas, and the teacher picks the best of the bunch ( or best several ). Then they set to work making that happen, with the teacher mixing in social studies, history, math, and science into the mix ( which is the criteria they used to select the 'best' ideas ). Over the course of the next several months, your class works towards this goal using skills you teach them along the way.
Now, not only are they learning their subjects, they are using them in a real world environment to accomplish a real world goal. The lessons they learn here will stay with them for life. They are exercising their imaginations to come up with solutions to real problems. Through this, they gain the confidence to go on to bigger and better things.
Anybody who simply lectures is not a teacher; They are a highly paid monkey with a larger vocabulary.
That sounds amazingly useless to me. How do the students improve their writing skills by doing this? What do they learn about science? What new math skills do they learn? Practice adding and subtracting? If this is a remedial school for kids who are going to go out into the world and scrounge for money, then maybe it's useful. For kids who might be interested in studying advance subjects in college, and will need to improve their writing and math skills, it seems like an incredible waste of time.
Furthermore, if kids don't develop the ability to learn from lectures, they will not only fail in college, but they will fail in the business world.
Actually I think it would be better to have an emphasis on expressive art with science and technology complimenting it. S&T is great for the mind, but it doesn't feed the soul.
Americans have obese and lethargic souls. School is for education. It's not for feeding the bloody soul. If we do not MAKE it be about education (by which I'm referring to reading, writing and math), then sooner or later American workers will become completely economically useless, and our extreme economic poverty will FORCE us to make it about education.
Using the Berkeley lectures on youtube as examples, most teachers like to conduct interactive lectures with their students, where they can prompt the students for answers and get responses, so they have a sense of how well the students are keeping pace with them, and so they can clarify anything that needs clarifying. I think these teachers would tell you that a recording wouldn't work. In fact one of the teachers made the point to the class... staying home and watching the webcast is not an option, barring exceptional circumstances, as the lecture is intended to be interactive. For classes that are too large for questions (like Physics 10, which looks awesome), and with many remote learners, they do questions by email listserve after the lecture, which I think is a GOOD use of technology. And he also uses a lot of technology, like computer-based slides and movies, in the lecture, but the basic structure is talking in front of the blackboard.
I have a deep interest in astrophysics, math, electrical engineering, computer science, and organic chemistry just to name a few.
Kids aren't interested these days because no one is showing them why they should be interested.
I don't think that's the reason. I think a lot of kids would be interested in engineering, astrophysics, and the like, just based on the subject matter. But once they get to college, where they can actually study those things, they look in the syllabus, and see all the advanced calculus prerequisites, and forget it. They never get the chance to learn interesting things, because nobody MADE them advance their math skills in high school instead of taking BS courses.
In the old days, parents(at least the mother) were expected to TOTALLY sacrifice themselves.
You mean the Aztec days? Most of the sacrificial victims were men.
Why do people STILL characterize running a home and raising children as "totally sacrificing" one's self, as opposed to, say, driving a bus all day to pay the rent and put food on the table? The latter is what, then? Self-fulfillment? Put out that bra. It's a fire hazard. More power to anyone who truly loves their job. But by far the majority of people I know who actually and truly fit the description of loving their job, are women who are raising their children and keeping a home.
If you think about it, where do you still find chalkboards outside school ? We are in the powerpoint era. It may have its drawbacks, but chalkboard is so limited and time-consuming to use...
I disagree. Where ever in the business world groups of people are thinking together, you will find whiteboards. Blackboards are the same. For math, these are far superior to powerpoint. For reading and writing, you don't really need either. That should be 90% of high school right there.
The thing SE Asian countries do well is to get average people to learn maths, mostly by old fashioned blackboard lessons a punishing curriculum and exams you can actually fail. America and Britain have dumbed things down to increase the pass rate and because telling people they're failures is a bit fascist, and Pakistan education is patchy and dominated by a poisonous religion.
I think you're absolutely right. I don't think that Orientals (I'm still holding out on this non-PC word, as "Asians" would obviously include such places as Pakistan and Russia, and there's no way I'm saying "South-East Asia" when there's a perfectly good word for that) or their culture are more inherently math-inclined. As you may be implying, the advantage of Oriental cultures is that they value discipline. The West hasn't valued discipline in a very long time. If we actually wanted our high school kids to excel, it would be simple. We would tell them, "you are going to spend half this year writing, and the other half advancing your math skills. It may or may not be enjoyable, but you will emerge with the most important skills you can have." Instead we tell them, "High school is for having fun. Take Drawing and Painting, Football, and TV Production. And here's a list of clinics for when you get an STD on prom night." A country that has become as petty as we have become deserves to fail, and we will. Then, when we have to struggle to survive again, like our ancestors did, we'll remember the reasons for discipline and seriousness.
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Well, drugs have been a part of South American religion for a very long time. They take hallucinogenic drugs in part of their rituals, when they contact that spiritual world for the purpose of healing people, contacting ancestors, or even finding lost objects. I think the experience of taking acid, mushrooms, or cacti, for an intentional spiritual journey is a lot different than that of taking them just to see weird colors and experience something different. But many different cultures have believed that these drugs can take down the wall between the mind and the spiritual realm. Whether that is true or whether it is all illusion, there is no obvious test for.
Sure. Now how do you determine if it's there or not?
When giving suggestions for a guy who could have gone back in time to find a "better" course than belief in God, maybe you shouldn't have picked a exceptionally pious theist and Christian like Newton.
Agreed. I personally find it far-fetched to suppose that schizophrenics, for example, have brains that just invent different voices that tell them to kill themselves, or otherwise mess with them. I, for one, believe the voices are real. The fact that the brain can be manipulated to either hear them or not hear them, doesn't shed light on the controversy one way or the other.
Only poorly defined omnipotence is logically inconsistent. God is omnipotent in that all power that exists is from him, and there are no finite limits to his power.
Have I got a book for you. The first half of this book is essentially a 172-page definition of exactly what God is:
http://www.theisticscience.org/books/dlw/dlw.html
Not so. The God of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, even Taoism, and the God of the Greek Philosophers and the original God of ancient Egypt, are all described in the same way, with the same properties. There is far more evidence of a common conception of God across those traditions than a divergent one. Obviously, it's not an identical conception, but they all believe in one God who is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, who transcends both time and space, who is Essence Itself and Existence Itself, who is Love Itself, and Wisdom Itself, and who is therefore the source of all life, the creator.
I think the opposite of everything you say here is true. First, what becomes ever more tortured is the atheistic explanations of why we would have a brain structure whose only purpose seems to be allowing us to perceive the presence of God. Second, the more we learn about the universe, the more it jibes with theology, and the more atheistic scientists grudgingly follow the evidence, usually after decades of ignoring it because it sounds too religious. The best modern examples of these are the big bang theory, the theories of mile-deep floods after the ice age. Both theories came about during the peak of atheism in the scientific community, and as a result the evidence for these things was ignored for decades. Atheistic scientists today are forced to take refuge in a belief in an infinite number of unknowable universes, a theory which is neither scientific nor rational.
Given that there is apparently an organ in the brain for sensing God, I would say that the burden of proof is on those who say it is for something other than sensing God.
Given that the first two officially atheist countries in history (AFAIK), the USSR and the People's Republic of China, perpetrated the two largest mass genocides in history, I'm going to go with "yes."
Just because it is triggered by poking the brain doesn't mean it's being experienced "without God's presence." You may recall that one of the basic properties of any conception of God is that he is omnipresent. This is nothing new. In South America especially, the awareness presence of God and/or spirits has been triggered by drugs since time immemorial. The reliance upon drugs to experience these things may make it more plausible to explain away as hallucination, but it also shows that there is no contradiction between the belief of actual awareness of God and/or spirits, and a natural mechanism of transcending the natural to experience the spiritual. After all, all who believe in the afterlife believe that a natural mechanism, i.e. death, leads to the direct experience of spirits and/or God thereafter.
I concur. Who would spend that kind of time and money, without doing the math to figure the stress loads on those connection points?
I'd have to say yes. Maybe one day it will be necessary for celebrities to patent their genomes so people don't make unauthorized clones of them for fun and profit.
That's because life IS a fundamental, real thing -- not merely a set of characteristics.
There is no sensible definition of life that would include viruses.
No, as an appendix is a complex structure, and its presence in an organism lowers the organism's informational entropy, evolution would remove it without positive pressure to keep it.
As a parent of a child whose appendix burst within a couple days of the first abdominal pain, I am naturally inclined to doubt that.
Or you could be wary of attempts to ascribe to physical causes things which have spiritual causes. Or the best solution is probably to be wary of attempts to ascribe to anything any apparent causes which aren't the actual causes.
I think that depends. If bacterial resistance to antibiotics amounted simply to some one-time mutation of a protein into a new form, I don't see any reason to suspect that that is going to mutate back. OTOH, if the resistance required a configuration with lower entropy than the non-resistance, like say a NEW protein that must be manufactured, then that would be expected to reverse itself if no longer needed.
Yeah, well NOW the onslaught is coming... troll! ANTI-religious, ANTI-theist, or ANTI-creationist posts are ALWAYS the first posts to breach these subjects on slashdot. I love the study of both natural and spiritual phenomenon, but I would much rather discuss the findings concerning the functions of the appendix than get goaded into defending my beliefs, or if not goaded myself, have to wade through the bickering of others who have been.
I've never known a theist to crave the "scientific" label. However, most people who are interested in spiritual truth, are also interested in natural truth. People like Newton, who spent more time pursuing spiritual truth than natural truth, still deserve to be called scientists for their work involving natural truth.
It is noteworthy that all attempts so far to link attained spiritual knowledge as leverage for attaining natural knowledge have proven deeply flawed, and those who were successful scientists as well as spiritual seekers, such as Newton, Lemaître, etc., pursued natural truth independently from any spiritual findings.
Suggesting that the religious seek the credibility of the track record of science is silly. The track record of the progress of religion includes the virtual abolishment of the once-ubiquitous practices of infanticide and slavery. The track record of science includes providing intellectual credibility and the color of rationality to the holocaust and communism.
Sure. However, when a theory gives rise to predictions that turn out to be false, that certainly undermines that theory. One of the most heard predictions of neodarwinism, at least as understood by the masses, is that the appendix is vestigal. This study, along with the other studies it references, to my mind constitutes adequate proof that the appendix is NOT vestigal. Therefore neodariwnism, at least as understood by the masses, is a highly flawed theory.
All this obviously says nothing whatsoever about ID or creationism.
That sounds amazingly useless to me. How do the students improve their writing skills by doing this? What do they learn about science? What new math skills do they learn? Practice adding and subtracting? If this is a remedial school for kids who are going to go out into the world and scrounge for money, then maybe it's useful. For kids who might be interested in studying advance subjects in college, and will need to improve their writing and math skills, it seems like an incredible waste of time.
Furthermore, if kids don't develop the ability to learn from lectures, they will not only fail in college, but they will fail in the business world.
Americans have obese and lethargic souls. School is for education. It's not for feeding the bloody soul. If we do not MAKE it be about education (by which I'm referring to reading, writing and math), then sooner or later American workers will become completely economically useless, and our extreme economic poverty will FORCE us to make it about education.
Using the Berkeley lectures on youtube as examples, most teachers like to conduct interactive lectures with their students, where they can prompt the students for answers and get responses, so they have a sense of how well the students are keeping pace with them, and so they can clarify anything that needs clarifying. I think these teachers would tell you that a recording wouldn't work. In fact one of the teachers made the point to the class... staying home and watching the webcast is not an option, barring exceptional circumstances, as the lecture is intended to be interactive. For classes that are too large for questions (like Physics 10, which looks awesome), and with many remote learners, they do questions by email listserve after the lecture, which I think is a GOOD use of technology. And he also uses a lot of technology, like computer-based slides and movies, in the lecture, but the basic structure is talking in front of the blackboard.
I don't think that's the reason. I think a lot of kids would be interested in engineering, astrophysics, and the like, just based on the subject matter. But once they get to college, where they can actually study those things, they look in the syllabus, and see all the advanced calculus prerequisites, and forget it. They never get the chance to learn interesting things, because nobody MADE them advance their math skills in high school instead of taking BS courses.
You mean the Aztec days? Most of the sacrificial victims were men.
Why do people STILL characterize running a home and raising children as "totally sacrificing" one's self, as opposed to, say, driving a bus all day to pay the rent and put food on the table? The latter is what, then? Self-fulfillment? Put out that bra. It's a fire hazard. More power to anyone who truly loves their job. But by far the majority of people I know who actually and truly fit the description of loving their job, are women who are raising their children and keeping a home.
I disagree. Where ever in the business world groups of people are thinking together, you will find whiteboards. Blackboards are the same. For math, these are far superior to powerpoint. For reading and writing, you don't really need either. That should be 90% of high school right there.
I think you're absolutely right. I don't think that Orientals (I'm still holding out on this non-PC word, as "Asians" would obviously include such places as Pakistan and Russia, and there's no way I'm saying "South-East Asia" when there's a perfectly good word for that) or their culture are more inherently math-inclined. As you may be implying, the advantage of Oriental cultures is that they value discipline. The West hasn't valued discipline in a very long time. If we actually wanted our high school kids to excel, it would be simple. We would tell them, "you are going to spend half this year writing, and the other half advancing your math skills. It may or may not be enjoyable, but you will emerge with the most important skills you can have." Instead we tell them, "High school is for having fun. Take Drawing and Painting, Football, and TV Production. And here's a list of clinics for when you get an STD on prom night." A country that has become as petty as we have become deserves to fail, and we will. Then, when we have to struggle to survive again, like our ancestors did, we'll remember the reasons for discipline and seriousness.