601. Taking Science on Faith

Comment #90944 by Quine on November 26, 2007 at 6:47 pm

Yes, Steve, it is more interesting than I should spend time on. As far as answering the points that Davies was groping around, comment #90596 by BMMcArdle brought in Lee Smolin's comments by ref:

The link to rebuttal of Davies' article:
http://www.edge.org./discourse/science_faith.html

602. Taking Science on Faith

Comment #90929 by Quine on November 26, 2007 at 5:21 pm

From gr8hands:

That is the media's fault, not the fault of those in the sciences.

603. Taking Science on Faith

Comment #90919 by Quine on November 26, 2007 at 4:51 pm

... but fortunately in physics even a very elegant theory would eventually have to face empirical tests.

604. Taking Science on Faith

Comment #90905 by Quine on November 26, 2007 at 4:16 pm

Bonzai,

Please be careful with terminology. If you go look up the math definition of "isomorphic" you will see that requires the property of being both one to one, and onto. Physical maps and models are not isomorphic, they bridge meta levels as in Russell's Theory of Types, making them essentially metaphoric. I realize you said "somewhat isomorphic" but actually the best you can get is "somewhat homomorphic." A map would be judged successful for my walks through the forest if it shows me the trails I could use even though it lacked the designators as to where I could drill for oil. Also, you can't expect to cut out the drawing of the apple tree and have it taste like apples when you eat it.

It is true that we want our models of physics to be so complete that we can use them to find things in the world that we have not seen before. I am all for this, and it shows one of the great powers of the scientific method over reliance on scripture. What I am against is the creeping tendency to "voodoo modelism" where the idea that you can make a model of someone (voodoo doll), empowers you to hurt that person by sticking a pin in the doll. Changing the value in a parameter of the model may correspond to some other condition in reality, but not necessarily. Conclusions drawn about some "conceivable" other space you can't get to from here (untestable) should not be given credence beyond speculation, no matter how pretty the math looks. A false premise implies any conclusion.

605. 2006 Charles Simonyi Lecture: 'Can the Internet Save The Enlightenment?'

Comment #90889 by Quine on November 26, 2007 at 3:23 pm

Beautifully expressed.

606. Taking Science on Faith

Comment #90644 by Quine on November 26, 2007 at 1:46 am

Any day, I expect to read that some former Theology-Physics double major has opened the First Church of the Holy Fine Tuning, and is gleefully fleecing the flock at the collection plate. This piece by Paul Davies is going to make more of this kind of trouble because it is placed as op ed where a big audience of people will be mislead. Others have gone after its deficiencies here and at edge.org, so I will not bother to go further, but I do wish to say a few things about what happens when scientists and other technical workers neglect the impact of language.

Fortunately, no one has tried to start the "Temple of Einstein's God" or the "Theological Institute of 'It Is Just a Theory'" or "Pascal's Mathematical Magisterium" but we have had to wait out popular misunderstandings. In politics, expert consultants run words and phrases past focus groups long before any candidate is allowed to use them in any speech or handout. Look ahead is essential to try to find how what you are about to say can be "spun" to make you look like you are advocating sticking pitchforks into babies. This is not the practice in science. No one came to Einstein before he wrote his personal letters and suggested to him that mentioning "God" would be a big help to religion in later years (should be worth a posthumous Templeton), nor did anyone suggest what would become of Pascal's unpublished musings after his death. And certainly, no one at the time of Darwin thought there should be a conference to come up with an alternate word for "theory" so that future generations would know this did not mean "wild ass guess."

This brings us to the word "law" as used by Davies. Not a simple subject. Over the last 500 years science has developed into a profession and in the process terminology has been adapted from ordinary language. However, as often happens with jargon of trade, "law" in science is nothing like "law" in common language, but gives the opportunity for some to "spin" it to imply the existence of a "Law Giver." (I was heartened to see Lee Smolin quote Charles Sanders Pierce, and I also recommend his 1878 writing: How to Make Our Ideas Clear.)

In fact, there is no existence proof for laws in Nature. These so called "laws" are actually just rules or heuristics that we have found useful in our models of Nature (the map is not the territory). We get very excited about them because they allow us to make predictions about what will happen in Nature under specific conditions, such as when we fire a rocket to take a probe to Jupiter, or when we build a bridge that is supposed to withstand the weight of a train. However, Nature does not care what we put in our models, it just does what it does.

As time has gone on, and we have made more measurements of what happens in Nature, we have come to depend on a few constants in our models that are now known to very high precision. This has come about by a process that looks at the difference between the predictions of the model and the observed results of measurement, and adjusts the values of the constants to minimize this difference. At any time someone may come up with a better model that reduces the number of constants, or replaces them with totally different concepts. The idea that the constants represent "knobs" somewhere that can be "fine tuned" is completely backwards. It can be entertained as science fiction, but is not a falsifiable proposition we can test. Riding this into a religious philosophy is just speculation. As for me, "Show me the knobs."

The piece by Davies muddies the water for the general public. That water will become clearer with time, only to be muddied by someone else, from time to time. I take some hope that the reaction to Davies in the scientific world will be to take more care to state what we know in more clear and unambiguous terms.

607. Man-sized sea scorpion claw found

Comment #89728 by Quine on November 21, 2007 at 3:43 pm

I wonder if they will now have to do a big animatronic claw coming out of the pond at the Creation Museum.

608. URGENT APPEAL: Please Help Protect Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Comment #89415 by Quine on November 20, 2007 at 4:01 pm

Bruce Bawer's book, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within, opens on page one with the death of Theo van Gogh. In order to convey the scope of the danger, the author quotes from the note that was pinned by butcher knife to Theo's chest:

I know definitely that you, O America, will go down. I know definitely that you, O Europe, will go down. I know definitely that you, O Netherlands, will go down. I know definitely that you, O Hirsi Ali, will go down.

609. URGENT APPEAL: Please Help Protect Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Comment #89057 by Quine on November 19, 2007 at 3:49 pm

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is critical to the resistance of the mindless tyranny of Islam. A great deal of this is because she is a woman who has suffered through it and has the intellectual capability to look back and understand the fine details of how it works. Please go back and review both parts of her presentation to the AAI. Dan Dennett picked up on the fact that Ayaan recognized that the women in Islam are tasked with policing each other to continue what is a defacto form of slavery. She is so important exactly because if the women of Islam came to understand what she understands, the system of oppression would collapse. The men know this, and that is why they need to kill her as soon as possible.

610. URGENT APPEAL: Please Help Protect Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Comment #88682 by Quine on November 18, 2007 at 1:51 pm

I read her book, Infidel, last week; it was riveting. I am buying copies and handing them out to people I know who need their world views expanded. This both supports her and makes the world more enlightened. It irritates me that the threats against her have successfully isolated her from the public.

I would like her to do a series of lectures that can be put up on the web with some kind of micropayment system for download. I know RDF is going into video production; perhaps there can be some link up. The point would be to counteract the imposed isolation, and let her voice be heard.

EDIT: My money is in.

611. Allan Gregg interviews Richard Dawkins

Comment #87856 by Quine on November 13, 2007 at 11:52 am

After Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod, some theists objected to lighting rods because they seemed to be a human attempt to circumvent God's judgment. How's that for logic? Before humans could defend against lightning, they rationalized it as a tool of God's judgment. Then when Benjamin Franklin used rational inquiry to change the game rules, theists tended to cling to their rationalization after it became outmoded.

612. Allan Gregg interviews Richard Dawkins

Comment #87707 by Quine on November 12, 2007 at 11:19 pm

The recent earthquake in Peru gave a morbid example: hundreds of worshippers were in a church when the quake struck; the building collapsed, killing many of them.

613. Malaysia firm's 'Muslim car' plan

Comment #87604 by Quine on November 12, 2007 at 3:10 pm

Notice that they still have a woman in the picture with the car, even though she is well covered?

614. Georgia plans service to pray for rain

Comment #86572 by Quine on November 9, 2007 at 4:20 pm

Let's ask them to drop the CO2 levels while they are at it.

615. Arguments Against Evolution

Comment #86299 by Quine on November 9, 2007 at 12:30 am

Shuggy,

Relax, information is not conserved. It takes energy to make information, and in some cases you can get part of the energy back before you destroy the information. The creatioists are mixing up the units of measure (information bits) with what is being measured (entropy).

616. Suffering, Evil and the Existence of God

Comment #86193 by Quine on November 8, 2007 at 4:15 pm

Yes, that is why I rarely use physicalism in public. Then, if you use naturalism they think you are a nudist. Non-supernaturalism is too big a mouthful. It goes on and on, so I stick with "materialism" in the presence of those who know what it means, and "philosophical materialism" for those who need to go look it up.

617. Suffering, Evil and the Existence of God

Comment #86189 by Quine on November 8, 2007 at 3:46 pm

Arcturus,

That matter is patterned energy makes no difference to the philosophy of materialism. However, I do agree that the term has become less useful because of the pop use (thanks, Madonna) of materialistic, which leads many people to think philosophic materialism is economic materialism (he who dies with the most toys, wins).

618. Suffering, Evil and the Existence of God

Comment #86176 by Quine on November 8, 2007 at 2:33 pm

An excellent question, CT, and well phrased.

Some have noticed that the characteristics of imagination seem ideal for religion. However, I suspect that the memeplex of religion has evolved over time to fit the characteristics of human imagination like a glove fits a hand.

At some point in the evolution of life it became valuable for an organism to be able to tell if some other was living versus inanimate; living might eat you, whereas inanimate was mostly harmless. When dealing with other living things it became progressively more valuable to predict what those other living things were going to do, thus originated a theory of other minds. An imagination capability for how chemical reactions could give rise to an other self, was not particularly valuable when compared to a relatively cartoonlike ability to impune intent to other operators. We see universally across cultures that children with as yet undeveloped brains relate so quickly and easily to cartoons, ideas, and stories of talking animals and even animated houses, trees or other objects. Is there any wonder that religion can ride upon these imaginations to produce ghosts, angels, and other talking beings out of nothing?

619. Suffering, Evil and the Existence of God

Comment #85701 by Quine on November 6, 2007 at 10:27 pm

Amazing timing, I was just talking about Ehrman on another thread. It looks like religion is decomposing into philosophy, and these days, in philosophy all roads lead to consciousness. (And yet, Dennett has taken a break from his great work on consciousness to talk about religion.) We had a good time on the materialism thread over in the RD Forum earlier this year.

620. The truth in religion

Comment #85427 by Quine on November 5, 2007 at 8:53 pm

Hi Chris,

Yes, it is a fairly short road for informed logical people to get at least as far as Deism. If you know science, you know Genesis and Exodus are just mythology. That means no chosen people so, Judaism is mythology. If there was no original sin, then a person needs a redeemer like a fish needs a bicycle so, Christianity is mythology. Islam needs the same creation story so, Islam is mythology. Need I go on to the Mormons, JWs, Xsci, etc.?

When you get to Deism, there are still many things to think about. Do watch out for the
Sherlock Holmes Fallacy and know there are more possibilities than we know now, or will perhaps ever know. I will get back to this part of the discussion.

Early humans saw an intelligent mover in all things in nature. After a while, we pushed that back past thunder, lightning, sun, moon, stars, species, and almost life itself (abiogenesis). After the ID fight, I thought they would slide the main battle lines back to abiogenesis, however, the smart money (Templeton Foundation) seems to be gathering around the position pushed all the way back to fine-tuning. John Polkinghorne, a Templeton Foundation prize winner, is giving that indication and I just saw this book announcement:

Fitness of the Cosmos for Life: Biochemistry and Fine-Tuning edited by Charles L. Harper, Jr., who is an astrophysicist and planetary scientist and serves as Senior Vice President of the John Templeton Foundation.

Steve99 and I have discussed some of the things re fine-tuning on another thread, and there are more threads about it over in the Forum, and I am sure we will keep thinking about it. I look at it as another form of trying to find a "gap" so the "God of the Gaps" has a place to live. Physics will make progress on this, but we have no guarantee that the "gap" won't then be movable to higher energy levels than we can test, or higher dimensionality than we can access.

Please keep in mind that the map is not the territory. The constants we put in our model of the physical behavior we observe from our instruments are in the map, not the physics. There is no evidence that they are settings, or changeable parameters. Some may turn out to be sums over histories as in some quantum cases. My new slogan for this is, "Show me the knobs." (Note: if you sum over the history of all reciprocals of the squares of the integers, you would get 1/6 of the square of pi, which if you wrote out in digits would go on forever, now that, is fine-tuned!)

So, what if the Universe turns out to be stranger than we are capable of imagining? A couple of days ago, I asked a friend who is an astrophysicist for a rough estimate of the ratio of the mass of the earth to the mass of the known Universe. He thought about it for a few seconds and came up with 0.000000000000000000000001 (if I typed the right number of zeros that is 10^-23). That is the whole earth, which in the old days was most of creation, and we are just a tiny part of that. Now, even if it may psychologically look like physics is fine-tuned for this Universe, it certainly does not look like this Universe is fine-tuned for us.

Back to Deism, suppose you spend the rest of your life believing there is something out there somewhere that caused this Universe to exist. I will just skip the infinite regress issue and go on to what difference does it make? First off, just because something caused our Universe to exist, we don't know if that thing knows it caused our Universe to exist, or that it knows our Universe does exist at all. This would be the case for something that went out of existence in the process of giving rise to our Universe. Also, just because something caused our Universe, there is no necessity that it can interact with our Universe. Or if it can, what if it just did it to watch the exploding stars and black holes and doesn't know life is here. What if it did it for the benefit of some other kind of life somewhere far away, and we are just the consequence of the laws of chemistry being the same over here? These metaphysical questions just keep going on and on. The only hope to have something rational is to stick to falsifiable propositions no matter how much emotional appeal you feel from the metaphysical.

I hold that Deism is a difference that doesn't make a difference. The continuous development of both the species and the individual indicate that we are our bodies, and when we are dead, we are dead. If a deity does not interact with the world, and we are our bodies, then there is no afterlife, and believing in that unknown deity makes no difference.

For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. --Ecclesiastes 9:5

------
EDIT: I looked around for a better mass of Universe number and found 3e52 kg, so with a mass of Earth at 6e24 kg that gives a ratio of 2e-28, which is 5 more zeros than I wrote above.

621. The truth in religion

Comment #85355 by Quine on November 5, 2007 at 2:40 pm

Bonzai,

Thanks for that link to the review by Simon Blackburn; it was great. I also liked the paragraph just before the one you posted:

In other words, and thank heavens, we can mix 'n' match. If we do not like bits of Deuteronomy or Leviticus, we may thankfully junk them. If Jesus's view of fig trees and pigs and witchcraft and possession by devils, or his view of Canaanites (or perhaps it was just Canaanite women) as "dogs," no longer appeals to us, then we may tiptoe past. And if Paul's evident belief that the world was about to come to an end impugns his status as recipient of the divine word, we may airbrush it out. In this way we may arrive at "a consonant combination" and a good night's sleep. Meanwhile our cousinly fellow-readers in Rome or Riyadh can enthusiastically help the God of love to persecute those who use contraceptives or like their sex upside down or back to front, before marriage or in a mirror. According to Polkinghorne, this is just the price of complexity and plurality. Whereas the truth is that when you mix 'n' match you only bring back what you already wanted to bring back. Appeals to biblical authority are pure reader responses, hermeneutics run riot, postmodernism in action.

622. The truth in religion

Comment #85302 by Quine on November 5, 2007 at 1:06 pm

Re: Comment #85072 by CHeard

Thank you, Chris, that was much more than a quick run-down, and I will be awhile digging into the areas you chalk marked. Special thanks for the pointer to Papias, whom I did not know. That I could have read up on Polycarp and missed Papias was disappointing.

I did understand that there were four Gospels recognized in the proto-orthodox group after about 120 C.E. They were probably close to what we have from post 300, but I do not have a good idea of how close. I would expect there to have been some number of copies, of each, at different times, made for circulation among the groups, and there to have been differences among the copies. For example, someone's copy of Mark got copied into Codex Sinaiticus, and everyone else's didn't. I am less concerned with the canonization of the number of the Gospels, than with what was in them.

I very much liked that comment from Papias about getting it from the preacher. It tends to explain the question of why Saul of Tarsus (Paul) did not sit down and write a Gospel back before any of the four. He was busy using his rhetorical powers for preaching, and the idea that written documents had any standing did not exist (also, what do you need texts for if the world is about to end next generation, anyway?). It is only after the original preachers had died, and those who had known them directly started to fade away (and the world had, somehow, not come to an end) that the written word started to take on the power it has been given by successive generations (especially orthodox then reformers then literalist nutjobs of today). This also matches the movement of those preaching in Aramaic through the changing demographic of the faithful to Greek, and into texts.

Later it gets into the whole heretical battles of Origen. It would be wonderful if we ever dug up texts on the other side, instead of just having to take the winner's word for what the losers had. It is a bit like trying to understand what Dawkins is saying using only the writings of Alister McGrath. However, we are stuck now with what we have now, and I don't worry too much about which of the mythologies won out compared to the more interesting history of how the preaching turned to writing.

Thanks again for the time you put into your answer.

P.S. How are your students doing?

623. The truth in religion

Comment #85022 by Quine on November 4, 2007 at 2:29 pm

BAEOZ

I accept your argument about the rewriting completey. If you're going to have a propaganda book about a guy who rises from dead, who was forseen. You'd write it that way from the beggining.

624. The Turning of an Atheist

Comment #84994 by Quine on November 4, 2007 at 12:51 pm

I knew what you meant, just being emphatic. My condolence for your grandfather.

EDIT: It would be good to know just how common it is. It struck me as elder abuse at the time. Perhaps it is just a pattern in which you are forced into religion at the start of your life, and then, even if you get loose, forced back in at the end.

P.S. I also wonder how many dying people are cornered into trading lip service of religion for hospice care?

625. The Turning of an Atheist

Comment #84991 by Quine on November 4, 2007 at 12:39 pm

Diacanu

Quine-
No shit?

626. The Turning of an Atheist

Comment #84987 by Quine on November 4, 2007 at 12:30 pm

It is painful for me to tell this, but when I look at the photograph of Flew, it takes me back to the death of my father. He was a lifelong Atheist who detested religion primarily out of his humanitarian loathing of hypocrisy. We would sit and discuss philosophy when I was a child; an experience dear to me, but so rare as to be almost unexplainable to most others. Sadly, when he was dying in his 90'th year, he lost his higher brain functions over a period of several days in the hospital, during which, my mother managed to get him to agree (she says) to be baptized into the Catholic Church. Subsequently, I see how so many of these "deathbed conversion" may have come about, and now look at them with, not only the deserved devaluation, but also with my father's characteristic attitude.

627. I didn't know the FLEA CIRCUS was back in town!

Comment #84956 by Quine on November 4, 2007 at 10:40 am

A Godsend to publishing. (Psst: Follow the Money)

628. The truth in religion

Comment #84864 by Quine on November 4, 2007 at 1:41 am

Comment #84856 by CHeard

The four canonical gospels had achieved that status well before Constantine.

629. The truth in religion

Comment #84593 by Quine on November 2, 2007 at 5:03 pm

Like Sam Harris says (or something like) Science requires a small epistemological puddle-hop, Religion, a trans-atlantic flight.

630. What the New Atheists Don't See

Comment #84308 by Quine on November 1, 2007 at 5:38 pm

I am happy to say that the transcendent purpose of the lives of the folks during the days of Homo erectus was so you could exist to read these words. If we do the right things, future generations will look back on the transcendent purpose of our lives the same way.

631. The truth in religion

Comment #84233 by Quine on November 1, 2007 at 1:15 pm

cowalker:

I'm sure Cornwell would agree that it would be quite irresponsible to indoctrinate children with simplistic religious beliefs before they are capable of understanding academic arguments and theological subtleties.

632. The truth in religion

Comment #84180 by Quine on November 1, 2007 at 11:35 am

Darwin's angel pertinently asks, "Would you really trade child sexual abuse for being brought up in the religion of your parents?".

633. Believe it or not, courtesy counts

Comment #83966 by Quine on October 31, 2007 at 11:28 pm

If you write/say "sacred text" you have given them the point before you get started. I use "scripture" without "sacred" or "holy." It is common to all religions (among peoples who have writing). Try rereading the article with "scripture" swapped for "sacred text" and you will get the change of feeling.

634. Tests of faith over 'The Golden Compass'

Comment #83358 by Quine on October 29, 2007 at 7:29 pm

Original sin is the knowledge of good and evil. Is that right? It was wrong for us to disobey god and because of that we know what is good and what is bad. So knowledge is bad - sinful. Ignorance is bliss.

635. Tests of faith over 'The Golden Compass'

Comment #83293 by Quine on October 29, 2007 at 2:26 pm

Take a look at the previews.

EDIT: As time goes on and people see that folks like Tolkien, Rowling, and Pullman can just make up entire worlds, it becomes easier to see how other folks in times long ago could just make up religions. P.S. I am going to hand out copies of the books at Xmas to all the kids I know.

636. Debate between Christopher Hitchens and Alister McGrath

Comment #83045 by Quine on October 28, 2007 at 5:26 pm

Dr Benway, best wishes on a speedy recovery.

637. Science and Religion BOTH make faith claims

Comment #83030 by Quine on October 28, 2007 at 3:55 pm

I posted a comment on the belief thread that could have gone here, as it continues with the equivocation observation of BAEOZ.

638. Atheists don't believe in anything

Comment #82815 by Quine on October 27, 2007 at 8:36 pm

I just (tonight) had a Christian missionary try to work me over on "belief." Their standard tactic is to get you to talk about some basic things you "believe," and then shift the context so that the meaning of the word comes more from the definition of "faith," and that allows them to make some example of "faith" seem, not only believable, but also "reasonable."

I did not bite on the "belief" bait. The cost is that you are going to have to use more words to keep each word in an definitional context that is not so easy for them to shift. So I said, "No, I have a mental model of future situations that leads me to reasonable expectations." I went on to describe how evidence is fed back to adjust the model. I could see in his eyes that he really wanted to get to his usual conclusions, but was stopped trying to find a way to turn "reasonable expectations" into "faith."

EDIT: Also, when they hit me with things like, "Well, you believe in gravity, don't you?" I answer, "No, I don't have to believe in gravity, I can test it!"

639. A new website addition: Debate Points

Comment #82813 by Quine on October 27, 2007 at 7:50 pm

Real Life: I just got back from a long walk, that started as a medium length walk, except I met one of my neighbors on the road who turned out to be a Christian missionary. Yes, I would have rather met the Buddha in the road, but this was interesting because of the time following the debates, and reading these threads. He just started going through the list topics, and I had my thoughts organized and ready. It was the first time anyone bothered to actually explain to him why evolution did not violate the second law of thermodynamics.

If you want the world to be more educated, start with yourself.

640. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #82800 by Quine on October 27, 2007 at 4:45 pm

Chris,

Thanks for checking in, and I am glad to hear you are okay. I have been thinking of you as I have watched the Malibu fire. I live in a forest in Northern California, so fire is not a remote idea. Also, I have firefighter relatives and friends who are down there (now, mostly mopping up). Part of my college education was in Hollywood, and as a young guy my friends and I would ride bicycles through the canyons around Topanga and down to the ocean, so watching the live video feed was riveting. Again, thanks for letting us know.

641. Pascal's Wager

Comment #82542 by Quine on October 26, 2007 at 4:32 pm

Comment #82380 by TheDigitalRuler

Likewise, I could choose to go to church on Sundays, to pray every night, and to tell everyone I believe that God exists, that Jesus is His Son, etc. But none of that would change the fact that I don't really believe any of that is true.

642. Sam Harris at AAI 07

Comment #82500 by Quine on October 26, 2007 at 1:22 pm

Comment #82488 by m76

I think we non-believers should proudly claim to stand shoulder-to-atheistic-shoulder with believers when it comes to all but one God.

643. The New Atheists on Organized Freethought

Comment #82240 by Quine on October 25, 2007 at 11:17 pm

Thanks Brian,

I do not expect to get much support from my friends, here, but I think without you the religious would ignore us even more than they do.

644. Sam Harris at AAI 07

Comment #82193 by Quine on October 25, 2007 at 8:39 pm

I think Sam is great, and applaud that he is willing to stand up and say things some might not like. I do not think "we" should all do the same thing, whatever that is. I am sure it is fine for some to go under the radar until things change in the world, but I also think that some need to be out there as the "in your face" "sharp edge of the spear" calling themselves "Atheists" (thank you Brian Sapient).

What I call myself depends on what I think it is going to mean in the mind of the listener. Folks here know perfectly well what "Atheist" actually means, so I will use it here. When asked by strangers, I usually tell them that I am "not a person of faith" (with language control) and then a bit later in the discussion I let on that I think that no case of the supernatural has been properly established, and that the unconscious mind is much more powerful than people realize (covers Sam's spirituality). By the time they get around to stuffing me in a preexisting category, I have wrapped myself with enough extra information to have some wiggle room.

EDIT: I also go as a Pastafarian from time to time, especially when discussing the Supreme Being.

645. Arguments From Design, First Cause, Something Rather Than Nothing, Fundamental Constants

Comment #82130 by Quine on October 25, 2007 at 6:02 pm

I will try to narrow it down. I am not taking a position that science should not pursue the physics of this. I am trying to get to the perception (which is what the Theist argument is based on) that these fundamental parts of our models somehow support them. Perhaps as more is known, it will eat into that perception. I do not think it will be anything as important as was Darwin, because the biology more directly makes us what we are, personally, and impacts our behavior. I also worry that if we do not work on the flaws in the logic of the perception, that they will just keep sliding that along even in the face of past failures.

Always, we need to keep asking believers: "Show me the step by step argument that starts with something science does not know (yet) and ends up with me on my knees praying to your deity."

646. Arguments From Design, First Cause, Something Rather Than Nothing, Fundamental Constants

Comment #82112 by Quine on October 25, 2007 at 5:19 pm

No, steve99, I have not confused you for a believer. I know very well from your past writings that you are both a non-believer and an excellent thinker. What I am trying to get to, here, is a response to the rhetoric from a believer on this issue. (That was the question in my last post.) There are several places to hit that bogus chain of 'reasoning' and I am trying to get you to see that it is not necessary that physics have an explanation for the nature of the constants we use in our models to do so. If I am wrong about that, then the believers will always be able to point to the difference between what we do know and what we want to know as their justification.

But to deny there is a problem at all in terms of fine tuning is equivalent to some pre-Darwin biologist denying that some mechanism is needed to explain the complexity of life by declaring life 'not complex'.

647. Arguments From Design, First Cause, Something Rather Than Nothing, Fundamental Constants

Comment #82072 by Quine on October 25, 2007 at 4:13 pm

steve99 would you please step us through the argument that starts with the constants of Physics, and ends up with an afterlife based on our current free will choices of belief?

648. Arguments From Design, First Cause, Something Rather Than Nothing, Fundamental Constants

Comment #82041 by Quine on October 25, 2007 at 3:25 pm

It is not about the physics. It is about a fallback position from Paley's Watch. In the past (and still for ID), life was so complex people thought it had to be designed by an intelligent force. Now, thanks to the fossil record, we can see how life builds complexity without intervention. So, they have fallen back to where we do not have a fossil record, and never will: parameters of this Universe. Yes, we have the background IR (EDIT: more specifically, microwave) as a fossil of the Big Bang, but from inside the Universe we cannot go farther except by inference. We cannot know the Universe of Universes.

So back to "fine tuning" as a red herring: what about your personal "fine tuning"? Let us look at your last 1000 male ancestors (could as well be 1 million etc.) and number each sperm cell ejaculated for each conception. At a low number of 10,000,000 choices for each sperm cell that makes 7 decimal digits per ancestor giving a "fine tuned" number for you that is 7000 digits long. Suppose you could not look around and see other people, and know how this came about? Yes, you might think your spectacular "fine tuning" meant something very special.

Get over it.

649. Science owes its origins to Christianity or Religion

Comment #81984 by Quine on October 25, 2007 at 1:37 pm

Remember, if the Christians can find out that a scientist was baptized as a baby, they can claim credit, even if they suppressed him/her during life.

650. Arguments From Design, First Cause, Something Rather Than Nothing, Fundamental Constants

Comment #81948 by Quine on October 25, 2007 at 12:42 pm

steve99,

The religious side has hijacked the phrase "fine tuning" from the world of Physics. Yes, there is real, and very interesting, work going on to understand the basic parameters of the Universe. However, the religious use the phrase as shorthand for "this Universe must have been designed by a Creator because these parameters could not be here by chance." It is a flavor of the "God of Gaps" and it is for that we need a quick snappy retort.


EDIT: Yes, the retort should not be about a multiverse or anything else they are not going to get. (Or we will have to eat later.)