Post: #26

Do we?

For now I guess we could say that we know people have strong opinions.

Post: #27

Right, Dr. Jones has gone out the window to avoid marking his papers, let's chat.

(01-24-2016 10:02 AM)avantgarde Wrote:  For something to be a fact, it has to be established to be true or be a piece of Info about circumstances that occured. You can't prove cells evolved out inorganic materials over billion of years. S***, you can't prove dinosaurs are 65 million years old, there are tons of archaeological evidences for dragons/dinosaurs, they are covering and misconstruing facts. Why would Herodotus talk winged serpents in the near east if they don't exist?( true he was controversial by some but he sounded he saw it in person) Why wouldn't so many cultures talking about dragons and Knights slaying them? They already found blood cells in dino bones but they are so in denial..

Firstly, let's talk about facts. Facts are a piece of information, but that's all. On their own, facts are simply pieces of data: the temperature outside this morning, the amount of rainfall last night, the number of bottles Uncle George got through in the previous evening: these are facts. Data. Fact do not require proof; they simply are. They are the fundamental atoms of knowledge, data that we all have the same assumptions about. (How do we know 20mm of rainfall, as opposed to six litres, fell last night? Because we have a cup with little marks on it that says so.)

Theories are explanations of facts. That science generally refers to them as theories and not laws (absent some more archaic usages or mathematical principles, which are another matter entirely) should clue you in: there is no such thing as a proven theory. There is only a hypothesis, or strong hypothesis in the case of a theory, that the world works the way science believes it does. I am a big fan of Karl Popper for that reason: if the proposition you seek to test is not falsifiable -- i.e. if it's fundamentally untestable in such a way as to signal whether it's correct or not -- then the proposition is not scientific. This sets a hard limit on science as it rightly should, because the last thing any scientist (as opposed to a scientheist, a term of my own) wanted was that science should be more than a tool for adjudging how the physical universe works. Gravitation, evolution, you name it: they are forever theories, working ideas for how to explain sets of data. Nothing more.

Once you put science back in that box, life gets much simpler. Once religion leaves science entirely alone or shrugs that science is but a subset of the greater book of knowledge and is not the index to that book, conflict between religion and science more or less ceases. And once religion begins to understand that interpretation of religious texts is itself necessary and transformative of both the text and the reader, fundamentalism dies out and the whole effort at literal creationism just turns into a weird sort of LARPing with Christianity. Once one begins to realise that a being necessarily omnipotent and omniscient is under no obligation whatsoever to conform to ascended-ape brain farts like logic, rationality, or physics, the desire to smoosh religion into the box of science just looks plain silly.

Related exhibit: Herodotus. Herodotus wrote in a very different epoch. The discipline of history itself was only just forming. Herodotus's spiritual successor, Thucydides, is seen as the father of modern history in that he was the first historical chronicler we know of who began to record events that transpired with some idea of objectivity to the account, i.e. getting competing accounts of events and trying to arrive at an objective idea of what took place from synthesis of them. His History of the Peloppenisan War involved him travelling to various parts of the Mediterranean to get accounts from the Spartan side as well as his own eyewitness accounts. And even then, taking baby steps into objectivity as he did, he is still understood to have gotten large doses of it wrong, and most of the speeches in the History are very likely to have been made up or massaged by him to suit his viewpoint. To his discredit, he uses Homer's Iliad as a historical source, but to his credit, he notes the likely exaggeration and cuts the military numbers down.

Herodotus was not as objective. We know he could not have travelled to or seen all of the things he wrote about, and therefore had to be working from hearsay accounts in many respects, from the accounts of travellers. I need not re-explain Chinese Whispers, but Herodotus was not as aware of exaggeration; he was from a very different period in history where little science was practiced and little objectivity embraced. He took for granted what he was being told was the truth where his own experience did not clash with it. The main reason he's used or referred to so much is because he's one of the best detailed sources on the Greek/Persian war; most of the accounts of Leonidas and the 300 we hear originate out of his account. I'm not disputing Herodotus's contribution, incidentally, but it has to be seen in context.

(01-24-2016 01:37 PM)AlwaysBeClosing Wrote:  I don't mean to come across as nihilistic, but seriously one new fossil is uncovered and now the theories get moved around to try to explain it. It is so flimsy, why the hell should I believe something that is based on such limited known evidence? And it sure as hell is not going to define my reality or existence.

Theories can be modified to incorporate new data that comes in. The question is whether the data contradicts the foundations of the theory so completely that it invalidates the entire theory. But as you say -- and I'll get to it in a second -- some people become used to a paradigm, so contradictory information will often be incorporated into that paradigm. You can see plenty of examples of that with the slightly-smarted feminists out there: women have better mental health! Why do they try to kill themselves at four times the rate of men, then? Because patriarchy!

(01-24-2016 03:59 PM)RatInTheWoods Wrote:  Imagine you were an intelligent, rational, logical computer. You observed the universe and came up with the most rational, logical, truthful explanation you could based on the facts, evidence and knowledge you had at that time, and then adjust that based on every change in data and evidence that turned up.

Imagine there were millions of you over time, all checking on each other, looking for errors, actively looking for new evidence, facts and carrying out experiments to test old knowledge and find new facts out.

This is science.

...as practiced by an intelligent computer or by a god. Not by a human being. Try the short book "Betrayers of the Truth" and see how science, particularly in medicine, actually works when it encounters egotistical human beings. Fraud in scientific papers is rampant, as is muddling with numbers, going back to Gregor Mendel himself. Outsiders to scientific communities will be ostracised for decades: look into what happened to Chandrasekhar and see how that "objective" field of physics and astronomy treated him for challenging the status quo. Look into any number of scientific 'debates' over time. The bitchery, politicking, nepotism, and outright fraud that takes place makes the Catholic Church under the Borgias look like amateurs by comparison. Shit, look at social "science" in our own period, so often deployed against men: ADHD, Freudian psychology, and on, and on. Science as conceptualised versus science as practiced, like religion, are rather different things.

Science in the grand scheme of things is still a human institution. And it's still vulnerable to that age-old mother of all bloodshed: the belief that you have found a single, universal truth. Scientheists constantly resort back to "Science may not know what happened before the Big Bang, but one day it will."

To which my answer is: "Ever heard of the God of the Gaps fallacy?" Leaving aside that quantum physics implies there are, indeed, hard limits on what we can ever know about the physical universe, and they're pathetically restricted: we can't even know the velocity and position of a subatomic particle at once, can't even exceed the speed of a photon.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #28

edit - wrong thread

Post: #29

There does seem like there is an increase in consciousness. As if there is a purpose behind creation.

Post: #30

Science is important obviously but we should examine evolution more carefully.

After meeting a convincing guy with evidence, I started to wonder are some of the early hominoid fossils even real or are there better explanations?
There are people finding various artifacts showing detailed depictions of dinosaurs as(triceratops, stegosaurus...) apparently. It could be fake, but who knows unless u carbon date and prove its authenticity?
Even radiometric dating is not that accurate. They keep trying to measure the age of Grand Canyon, they get vastly different ages.
Believing in God doesn't mean you have to throw away logic and science or other things as we are limited beings and need observation and Methods to solve things. Plus if creationism is more likely and more evidence, why not believe it til better proof?

If influential people and education are indoctrinating feminism and liberalism, what other crap could be promoting ?

Damn, Einstein once rejected ether in special relativity but later on with general relativity he went Back to new ether as the physical space. People are finding out about dark energy and matter. Even energy of vaccum space is calculated to be massive but observed much smaller, but where is the rest of energy then ? Why the discrepancy, Rest not measurable now and can you extract it?
Maybe tesla did extract energy from the air, perhaps he found a way to harness dark energy or residual energy (whether it be solar or etc) in the air, but all his stuff was confiscated!

Post: #31

(01-25-2016 12:31 AM)Pride male Wrote:  There does seem like there is an increase in consciousness. As if there is a purpose behind creation.

You may well like the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and in particular his concept of the Omega Point. For a somewhat dark take on the Omega Point, try William Peter Blatty's book Legion and pay attention to Kinderman's musings, especially towards the end of the book.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #32

I don't know about more /consciousness , most people get on with consumeristic lives and seem to not introspect that much.
But on Rvf that is different

Post: #33

Calleman writes about the 9 levels of consciousness.

Material matter
Cellular
Mammals
Family
Tribal
National
Planetary
Galactic
Universal

Post: #34

(01-24-2016 11:01 AM)scorpion Wrote:  avantgarde, you aren't going to find any good answers to your questions. As much as people like to claim that evolution is a scientific process, it is ultimately a faith-based belief. It is unscientific because it is inherently unfalsifiable. Also, as you correctly noted, evolution completely fails to answer the most important question: the origin of the universe and of life in particular.

Seems to be a blatant strawman: who would posit that the purpose of the theory of evolution is to provide an answer as to the origins of life itself?

It seems (to me at least) to be more of a descriptive theory that describes how random mutations in the genome of a population, combined with selection due to environmental pressure can lead to changes and divergences in the overall genetic code of a population.

Additionally I would argue that there is more than enough evidence for it that one who is not dogmatic in their initial worldviews would have to accept it (or at the very least as a very likely cause for what we CAN observe). Let me freely state that you (Scorpion) are one of my favorite RVF posters, but I get the feeling that you let your religion bias you when it comes to matters such as these.

Why do Northern Europeans, who have a long history of raising the domestic animals native to our region (for example, let's say cows) have a gene that allows their bodies to produce the enzyme (lactase) necessary to properly digest milk, whereas people from regions that historically never raised cows (such as the Japanese) lack this very specific enzyme.

We could even go back to the original Darwinian examples of the finches of the Galapagos, where due to a lack of competition, similar finches on these isolated islands diverged over time with different adaptive evolutions in the beaks of the finches to suit different sources of food: thus nuts, insects, certain kinds of cacti, etc..

One last example: what would you call the process in which bacterial or viral populations develop resistances to certain antibiotics? This IS something that can be carried out in lab experiments, under timelines easily observable by humans.

Maybe it is my lack of a religious upbringing, but I struggle to see how one can view evolution as such a flimsy theory when we can see examples of it right in front of our eyes.

Quote: It's one thing to argue that a man could evolve from a monkey. It's another thing entirely to argue that a monkey could evolve from a rock.

If this is truly what you believe that the theory of evolution entails, then I'm not entirely sure where to begin. Actually I would be interested to see what you personally perceive the significance and general interpretation of the theory of evolution to be.

Quote:Most evolutionists (that is, people who "believe" in evolution) are scientifically illiterate, and take the theory literally on faith. Many others, even with science backgrounds, mostly accept it based on peer pressure or simply take it for granted as being true without ever really diving into the details or asking the most serious and difficult questions

Is not part of the role of science to admit just how little we know about the universe? That we cannot answer all fundamental questions?

The most commonly accepted theory is that the universe as we know it originated from the infamous 'big bang', the event whose echo is still being felt across the universe as background microwave radiation, but more than that we do not know: this is simply what the best of our research indicates as to the existence of our current physical universe, and does not try to give any explanation for how it happened, and more importantly, what preceded it (neglecting all considerations as to how one would define time when time as we know it did not exist), as these are questions which are fundamentally unanswerable.

Post: #35

When I was younger I thought too, society could become a macroconsciousness as people become more controlled and more like automatons and then society consumes planets then galaxies etc ...

Post: #36

(01-25-2016 06:19 AM)thebassist Wrote:  

Quote:Most evolutionists (that is, people who "believe" in evolution) are scientifically illiterate, and take the theory literally on faith. Many others, even with science backgrounds, mostly accept it based on peer pressure or simply take it for granted as being true without ever really diving into the details or asking the most serious and difficult questions

Is not part of the role of science to admit just how little we know about the universe? That we cannot answer all fundamental questions?

If that were all that science proposes to do, it would actually have much in common with religion, particularly the more mystical Eastern ones. See for example any discussions about apophatic theology and indeed the concept of the ineffable God.

The problem is that atheism grabs onto science as an alternative belief system that can replace religion outright. This mix of atheism and science is just a resurgence of an Classical-era vein of human thought that keeps rearing its head: epicureanism, being a somewhat related school to stoicism. The difference was that while stoicism advocated the stolid ordering of one's life in belief that there was an order to existence not yet revealed, epicureanism's driving philosophy centred around the phrase "Matter and void and nothing more" as an explanation for all things, excused death as something you wouldn't feel and therefore should not fear, and whose moral precepts more or less came down to being polite to other people while retaining a sense of superiority that you didn't have to run around afraid of things like the other vermin.

Stephen Greenblatt's overly-triumphant book The Swerve tells us about how Epicureanism emerged out of the Middle Ages darkness and was adopted as a sort of Illuminati-ish philosophy in diverse forms. The Catholic Church well understood the threat the thought system represented: James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man contains references to it as a heretical way of thought as well.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #37

I personally seem to find myself in between two camps: the atheists and the dogmatic believers of the book (whichever book that may be).

For the case of the very religious, I find their situational myopia to be very confusing: one of my best friends is very Christian, and we have some great discussions about developments in science and technology where it is clear that he has an appreciation for the scientific method, and yet at the same time he believes that the Earth is 5,000 years old, despite the glaring evidence to the contrary.

I find it absurd that we have to merely accept things being a certain way because it said it somewhere in a religious book. I personally believe that religion has no place in that which can be explained by the scientific method.

In the case of evolution (or geology, for that matter), it is predicated on the concept of ergodicity: that the current observable mechanisms for change are the same as those in the past. Thus in geology, the slow, incremental rates of sedimentary deposition that we observe currently are responsible for the many layers of different rocks underneath our feet, with each layer being representative of the surface sedimentary conditions of the time (combined with the effects of burial at higher pressures and temperatures at depth, but you get the point).

And thus for evolution, the same selective processes that we can observe in bacterial and viral populations that we put under certain environmental pressures are responsible for the long term shifts in populations that we can observe and date (thanks to the geologic timelines which we can construct (based on ergodicity, once again) as well as radiocarbon dating, to some extent).

On the other hand, I find the worldview of atheists to be too far gone on the rational side- discounting anything that could shock their worldview, and choosing to ignore it completely. As examples I would refer to the universal phenomena of near-death experiences, or that of young children remembering past lives, even in societies where such notions are contrary to the local beliefs. Atheists would refer to such things as being some kinds of hallucinatory 'tricks of the mind', which I think is the same kind of myopia that overly religious people display when presented with information contradictory to that which they have strongly identified with.

As for what I personally believe (isn't this what this whole thread comes down to?), I think that the notion of a higher power is not irreconciliable with our scientific method.

I see God (let's call it that, for simplicity) in the way that completely random processes lead to the generation of increasingly complex systems that are governed by our fundamental forces of nature. I see God in the way the way that these systems, composed of atoms, slowly, inexorably, over scales of time incomprehensible to the human mind show a striving towards higher levels of consciousness: starting from the most basic of prokaryotic anaerobic single-celled bacteria, to the evolution of the nucleus in eukaryotic bacteria, to the first multicellular organisms (all over hundreds of millions years of slow, inexorable development!!), all the way to the first organism which has the levels of consciousness necessary to contemplate its own existence!

What is that fundamental 'thing' in the universe that drives processes concerning the random interactions between atoms towards systems of increasing complexity, of higher consciousness, over incalculable periods of time?

That to me is God.

Post: #38

(01-25-2016 06:57 AM)Paracelsus Wrote:  

(01-25-2016 06:19 AM)thebassist Wrote:  Is not part of the role of science to admit just how little we know about the universe? That we cannot answer all fundamental questions?

If that were all that science proposes to do, it would actually have much in common with religion, particularly the more mystical Eastern ones. See for example any discussions about apophatic theology and indeed the concept of the ineffable God.

The problem is that atheism grabs onto science as an alternative belief system that can replace religion outright. This mix of atheism and science is just a resurgence of an Classical-era vein of human thought that keeps rearing its head: epicureanism, being a somewhat related school to stoicism. The difference was that while stoicism advocated the stolid ordering of one's life in belief that there was an order to existence not yet revealed, epicureanism's driving philosophy centred around the phrase "Matter and void and nothing more" as an explanation for all things, excused death as something you wouldn't feel and therefore should not fear, and whose moral precepts more or less came down to being polite to other people while retaining a sense of superiority that you didn't have to run around afraid of things like the other vermin.

Thanks for making some good points, I hadn't really thought about it in this way before.

In this sense, strict people of the book and atheists are just different branches of the same tree: both camps base themselves on foundations which are inherently reasonable- thus for the religious it is the spiritual nature of our existence (which I find undeniable), and for the atheists, the power of the scientific method (which I find equally undeniable).

Post: #39

[The bassist ]
Even in the bible depending on sect , 6 days doesn't mean literal days but periods. The earth by many ntelligent /theist design believers ain't 5000 years old.

Post: #40

(01-24-2016 10:08 PM)Paracelsus Wrote:  Science in the grand scheme of things is still a human institution. And it's still vulnerable to that age-old mother of all bloodshed: the belief that you have found a single, universal truth. Scientheists constantly resort back to "Science may not know what happened before the Big Bang, but one day it will."

That goes without saying, as we are just apes down from the trees a few hundred thou years ago.

But my post is trying to highlight to you the polar opposite ideology of science Vs religion. I'm sure you got that.

Science has inbuilt "human proof" features like peer review, experimentation and the fundamental premise is that EVERYTHING is open to challenge, if you bring evidence and supporting experimentation. Thats the beautiful thing about the scientific method.

Its the best us apes can do, and we have landed robots on Mars and worked out the age of the universe with it, among other breathtaking feats....

Post: #41

(01-25-2016 06:57 AM)Paracelsus Wrote:  The problem is that atheism grabs onto science as an alternative belief system that can replace religion outright.

True atheism isn't a "belief system" at all, it's the polar opposite.

Its as far from a "belief system" as you can get, since it's not based on "beliefs" at all, it's just based on the scientific method, and acceptance that not all facts are known, or can be known. They don't make them up in this situation.

Proper Atheists don't see the need to "replace religion" with anything, in the same way you don't replace the tooth fairy with anything... You just intellectually develop past the point of "need" to a greater place.

Remember, most religious people don't believe in many, many gods... They are atheists as well, its just true atheists go one god more....

Post: #42

(01-25-2016 08:06 PM)RatInTheWoods Wrote:  

(01-25-2016 06:57 AM)Paracelsus Wrote:  The problem is that atheism grabs onto science as an alternative belief system that can replace religion outright.

True atheism isn't a "belief system" at all, it's the polar opposite.

Its as far from a "belief system" as you can get, since it's not based on "beliefs" at all, it's just based on the scientific method, and acceptance that not all facts are known, or can be known. They don't make them up in this situation.

Proper Atheists don't see the need to "replace religion" with anything, in the same way you don't replace the tooth fairy with anything... You just intellectually develop past the point of "need" to a greater place.

Remember, most religious people don't believe in many, many gods... They are atheists as well, its just true atheists go one god more....

I agree churches are only for those who believe in a god other than themselves.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #43

there's too much evidence that is in favor of evolution. the experiments testing the legitimacy of "primordial soup" may be less than satisfying, but they ultimately prove that organic molecules can be created from inorganic molecules. similarly, mitochondria prove that our lineage traces back to early prokaryotes, and advanced genome sequencing proves selection is present even on a genetic level.

Post: #44

Evolutionary theory is well supported by the available evidence. Abiogenesis is something entirely separate, despite creationists trying to make shit up about it.

Unlike creation, evolution is falsifiable. Therefore, evolution is science.

Post: #45

Certain Religions go through too, they go through refinement.

Post: #46

Also forgot this bit:

(01-25-2016 07:03 AM)thebassist Wrote:  I find it absurd that we have to merely accept things being a certain way because it said it somewhere in a religious book. I personally believe that religion has no place in that which can be explained by the scientific method.

You are not the only one.

Quote:Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion. [1 Timothy 1.7]

That's St. Augustine of Hippo in the year 415, writing the book De Genesi Ad Litteram ("The Literal Meaning of Genesis"). Augustine is one of the fathers of Christian theology (he's the one who most famously propagated the doctrine of Original Sin, though it had been mentioned before) and his autobiography makes it pretty clear he fucked his way across Europe before taking on Christian asceticism.

Implicit in this statement is in effect that religion requires reinterpretation or a person to intellectually engage with it to be credible.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm