Can science continue without a belief in God?

plugh

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An interesting insight into how people can get drawn into wanting to believe in near-death experiences, heaven, angels and the things that they are already primed to associate with their religious beliefs, is that of Alex Malarkey, (real name) - aka the Boy Who Came Back from Heaven.

I can't pretend to do justice to this complicated story, but the essence is that as a child Alex was in a horrific car accident, subsequently spending some months in a coma. When he emerged, he then told his story of having been to heaven and met Jesus.

Additionally, Alex also told that he saw his father fly through the window to be caught and saved by an angel.

The book and the film were heavily promoted in the "heaven tourism" category by religious publishers and many had the proof that they needed of how heaven is real, and so on.

Except that it was all a lie.

To his credit, some five years after the accident, Alex recanted his story and admitted that he made it all up. Subsequently, Alex described the book as "one of the most deceptive books ever".

When you read on and around this story, it gets quite distasteful. There are suggestions of financial impropriety from the father, and the mother has indicated that she was getting fed up from people coming to the door in search of Alex.

That Alex and his mother have had to resort to the courts and public statements in order to get the book removed from sale, is a sad commentary on how easy it is to manipulate people's desires and how little effect reality has in tempering those desires.

Another interesting insight is to read the book reviews on Amazon.

Alex has disavowed this story for many years now, and it's a simple task to look around to see if the story has been revealed to be a fake. Yet, just as we see in this thread, there are still people gushing over an acknowledged forgery and using it to prop up their beliefs. Some Christians have attempted to alert others that it's indisputably untrue, but that doesn't seem to turn off anyone who wants - or needs - to believe otherwise.

Perhaps some of the saddest comments are the ones where people still maintain - even though they acknowledge that the story was made up - the tale as proof that their god exists, on the account that it was a "miracle" that Alex survived the accident.

That "miracle" people refer to is that the child survived the accident. The not-so-miracle being that he emerged from his coma as a quadriplegic.

Another interesting aside is that we often see an apologetic defence of "well, science has been wrong before so it can't be trusted". How strange that those sentiments are never applied in reverse.

As for science needing god beliefs - it functions very well in the presence of reality alone.
 
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DennisTate

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Near death experience accounts have several possible explanations and one of them is that they may well be glimpses of higher invisible dimensions of space and time.

That is the conclusion that I arrived at but I must admit that I was somewhat skeptical as I first began to study them.

www.CarbonBias.blogspot.ca/
 
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DennisTate

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An interesting insight into how people can get drawn into wanting to believe in near-death experiences, heaven, angels and the things that they are already primed to associate with their religious beliefs, is that of Alex Malarkey, (real name) - aka the Boy Who Came Back from Heaven.

I can't pretend to do justice to this complicated story, but the essence is that as a child Alex was in a horrific car accident, subsequently spending some months in a coma. When he emerged, he then told his story of having been to heaven and met Jesus.

Additionally, Alex also told that he saw his father fly through the window to be caught and saved by an angel.

The book and the film were heavily promoted in the "heaven tourism" category by religious publishers and many had the proof that they needed of how heaven is real, and so on.

Except that it was all a lie.

To his credit, some five years after the accident, Alex recanted his story and admitted that he made it all up. Subsequently, Alex described the book as "one of the most deceptive books ever".

When you read on and around this story, it gets quite distasteful. There are suggestions of financial impropriety from the father, and the mother has indicated that she was getting fed up from people coming to the door in search of Alex.

That Alex and his mother have had to resort to the courts and public statements in order to get the book removed from sale, is a sad commentary on how easy it is to manipulate people's desires and how little effect reality has in tempering those desires.

Another interesting insight is to read the book reviews on Amazon.

Alex has disavowed this story for many years now, and it's a simple task to look around to see if the story has been revealed to be a fake. Yet, just as we see in this thread, there are still people gushing over an acknowledged forgery and using it to prop up their beliefs. Some Christians have attempted to alert others that it's indisputably untrue, but that doesn't seem to turn off anyone who wants - or needs - to believe otherwise.

Perhaps some of the saddest comments are the ones where people still maintain - even though they acknowledge that the story was made up - the tale as proof that their god exists, on the account that it was a "miracle" that Alex survived the accident.

That "miracle" people refer to is that the child survived the accident. The not-so-miracle being that he emerged from his coma as a quadriplegic.

Another interesting aside is that we often see an apologetic defence of "well, science has been wrong before so it can't be trusted". How strange that those sentiments are never applied in reverse.

As for science needing god beliefs - it functions very well in the presence of reality alone.


Or..... the original story could have been very much what the child remembered at first but.......

because his dad was getting all the money and all the attention from the book and proposed movie......

did mom get religious leaders who believe NDE accounts disagree with their understanding of scripture to convince the boy that he must have made it up because if his story was true.... then the Bible must be wrong??????

My old church the Worldwide Church of God taught Soul Sleep so I do have an idea why the boy could be convinced that what he saw...... was contradictory to the Bible..... so therefore he must have imagined it or been shown it by Satan?????

Dr. George Ritchie's Near-Death Experience
c. His Experience of the "Receiving Station"

Jesus then takes Ritchie to another realm and is shown a kind of "receiving station" where spirits would arrive in a deep hypnotic sleep because of a particular religious belief they held to be true. Here there were "angels" trying to arouse them and help them realize, "God is truly a God of the living and that they did not have to lie around sleeping until Gabriel or someone came along blowing on a horn." These are the spirits of people who believe they must sleep in their grave until the second coming of Christ (i.e., soul sleep.)
 
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DennisTate

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Does 'settling matters quickly with an adversary' refer to worldview issues? I thought it was about someone who is suing you or taking you to court?

I was thinking that the basic principle would apply to both of these types of situations.
 
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DennisTate

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Not really. The Gish-gallop text you quoted is gibberish.

Saying "God is light" means that God is the visible spectrum of the electromagnetic force. That doesn't help anyone.

Einstein's equation is nothing to do with God or what 'holds all things together'. What holds all things together are the strong nuclear force, the electromagnetic force, and gravity, in order of scale. This has nothing to do with consciousness.

I'd like to see a citation and context for the quote attributed to Hawking, because to a physicist, 'pure' is a meaningless qualifier for light, and he would be well aware that fundamental particles are not made of light.

The Higgs boson was called the 'God Particle' in the title of Leon Lederman's book on the Higgs, by the publisher, and in the face of Lederman's and Peter Higg's objections. It was a provocative title designed to court publicity and sell the book.


I think that it is more than a little intriguing that Strings..... and Waves...... or something that sure sounds similar to Strings and Waves....... get reported from so many different types of unusual spiritual experience.

A VISION of HELL Gehenna - HADES - SHEOL. It is Eternal Torment!

Dr. Michael Yeager, on the verge of suicide and with a knife to his wrist a fear hit him which he now recognizes as the fear of God. He dropped his knife and went to his knees and asked the Lord to forgive him of his sins and he gave his life to the Lord.

He was immediately freed from all addictions and was given a desire to tell others about Jesus. What stuck out to me the most is that he said that selfishness is the beginning of being on the pathway to hell. He mentions things like being obsessed with TV watching, sports and anything else we love more than God, as very dangerous and can place us on the wrong path.

One night when in prayer he received a vision of hell and the floor of his room opened up he kept falling down and down in a deep dark hole for miles and miles. It was very real and he could see, touch, smell, feel everything. Fear was filling his whole being.

A wind was blowing from this hole that seemed to be bottomless and the odor was so strong it was sickening. By looking between his feet he could see a distant orange glow. As he approached this orange glow it became bigger and bigger and he then entered a cavern and he was over a huge area of what looked like lava sending flames hundreds of feet into the air. Earth shattering explosions could also be heard. He knew he was still about 10,000 feet above this burning sea and even at that distance the heat was almost too much to bear and it felt like his skin was actually burning off.




The smell was so nauseating that it made him cough and gasp for air but there was none. His ears than began to be filled with a very eerie sound that sounded like humming. This sound was constant and got louder and louder as he approached the lava. God opened his understanding as to what the sound was. The sound was actually human beings screaming in unbelievable agony. He realized that God was showing him a vision of hell.

At about 200 feet above this lake of lava, fire and brimstone, the pain got almost too much to bear. He then saw some objects bobbing up and down in this burning sea of what looked like lava. There were tens of thousands of these objects. These objects were actually human beings bobbing up and down and back and forth. These people were weeping and wailing in extreme agony.

No relief from pain was available to them. Their bodies were burned black in this sea of fire and brimstone. Suddenly he plunged into the lava and it covered him and filled his eyes, nose throat, lungs etc. His eyes felt like they were being consumed out of their sockets and could barely breathe. He finds it difficult to explain the amount of pain he was experiencing. He also knew hell was eternal and no chance of getting out.

He was shown that selfishness is the gateway to hell. Excruciating pain overtook him fully as he was submerged in this sea of fire and brimstone that looked like lava. As he was sucked down into this sea he was in total darkness with no light at all. He was suffocating and could not take a breath but yet he was not dying. When he returned to the surface he realized that he was till intact and his five senses were very much alive.

There were other creatures in the sea of fire that looked like huge worms. They would come to the surface and then disappear and then return to the surface. About 20 feet from him he saw them coming to the surface and they were coming towards him. When they reached him they began boring into him and went inside his body and brain and were coming out of his eyes. They were driving him insane. (where the worm dieth not) There is no end to these things in hell. They are eternal. There is no place to go for any relief. There is no love there. It is totally void of love. An emptiness beyond comprehension enveloped him.

Although there were many, many others there, there were no communications whatsoever. Your memory is also there still with you and you can remember everything that went on in your life, including each time the Gospel was presented to you and you refused.

He then was gripped with an intense thirst. There was no way to quench this thirst. (rich man and Lazarus) If the message of the Gospel is rejected you will be forever tormented in hell like the Bible so clearly says. The voice of God then echoed across the sea of fire and brimstone and lava telling hell to release him and he was returned back to his room. " (Dr. Michael Yeager)

If Selfishness is the gateway to the scarier places in higher invisible dimensions...... then perhaps the ultimate in scary situation.... is being alone with the two forms of fundamental energy.
 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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Near death experience accounts have several possible explanations and one of them is that they may well be glimpses of higher invisible dimensions of space and time.
There are no known invisible 'higher' dimensions of space and time, and - as previously explained - the hypothetical compactified spatial dimensions of String Theory are too tiny to contain anything even if they were configured as analogues of the meta-scale 4D spacetime we experience. The hypothetical extra large spatial dimensions of Brane cosmology are a bulk or hyperspace in which our 3+1 D universe 'floats', the way a 2D sheet exists in 3D space; however, results from the LHC and LIGO are not supportive of these hypotheses.

That is the conclusion that I arrived at but I must admit that I was somewhat skeptical as I first began to study them.
You were right to be sceptical; there's nothing in physics or neuroscience that provides any support for such stories, and the neuroscience strongly suggests they're reports of vivid hallucinatory states.

You may find an NDE story more interesting than the vivid hallucination explanation, but I would recommend you enjoy it as fantasy fiction.
 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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I think that it is more than a little intriguing that Strings..... and Waves...... or something that sure sounds similar to Strings and Waves....... get reported from so many different types of unusual spiritual experience.
Confirmation bias is an intriguing phenomenon.

If Selfishness is the gateway to the scarier places in higher invisible dimensions...... then perhaps the ultimate in scary situation.... is being alone with the two forms of fundamental energy.
That's a sentence of truly Chopra-esque vacuuity. There are plenty more: Wisdom of Chopra.
 
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Kylie

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Near death experience accounts have several possible explanations and one of them is that they may well be glimpses of higher invisible dimensions of space and time.

That is the conclusion that I arrived at but I must admit that I was somewhat skeptical as I first began to study them.

www.CarbonBias.blogspot.ca/

Higher dimensions?

A dimension is something like height or width. It is not like some secret universe hidden away somewhere. Stop getting your science knowledge from Doctor Who and start getting it from scientists.
 
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DennisTate

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Higher dimensions?

A dimension is something like height or width. It is not like some secret universe hidden away somewhere. Stop getting your science knowledge from Doctor Who and start getting it from scientists.
Are you sure?

"It was not until 1920 that the idea of linking electromagnetism and
gravity resurfaced. At that time a new theory of gravitation had been proposed by Albert Einstein (1879-1955), called the general theory of relativity. It was a replacement of Newton's theory, which had stood unchallenged since 1687. Inspired by Einstein's work, a young German mathematician named Theodore Kaluza was seized by a curious idea. The theory of relativity links space an time together to form a four-dimensional space-time continuum. What would happen, mused Kaluza, if general relativity were formulated in five rather than four dimensions? This is what Kaluza did, and to everyone's astonishment it was discovered that five-dimensional gravity obeys the same laws as
four-dimensional gravity as well as Maxwell's laws for the electromagnetic field. In other words, gravitation and electromagnetism are automatically unified in five dimensions, where electromagnetism is merely a component of gravity!"


The only drawback of the theory concerns the extra dimension. Why
don't we see it?
An ingenious answer was provided by Oskar Klein. A
hosepipe viewed from afar looks like a wiggly line, i.e. one- dimensional.
However, on closer inspection it can be seen as a narrow tube. It is, in fact,
two-dimensional, and what was taken to be a point on the line is actually a
little circle going around the tube. In the same way, reasoned Klein, what we normally regard as a point in three dimensional space could in reality be a little circle going around a fourth space dimension. Thus Kaluza's extra
dimension might well exist, but be impossible to detect because it is closed
(circular) and rolled up to a very small circumference. In spite of
these bizarre overtones, it seems probable that in future a "theory of everything" will make use of the idea of unseen higher dimensions."
.
...

"Although nature manifests four distinct forces, physicists believe that
each may be part of a smaller number of more primitive forces. At high energy, the electromagnetic and weak forces appear to merge into a single "electroweak" force. Some "grand unified theories" suggest that a further amalgamation takes place between the electroweak and strong forces at as yet unattained energies. The most ambitious unification schemes envisage an amalgamation of all four forces into a single "superforce" at ultra-high levels of energy."...

"The real burden in the next three centuries will not be the development of fancy mathematics, but the experimental testing of these ambitious theories. All current thinking about total unification assumes that the effects of linking all the forces and particles together will only become manifest at energies that are some trillion times greater than those currently attainable in particle accelerators. Probably we shall never reach such energies directly" ( A Theory of Everything" Volume 21 of "The World of Science)
 
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There are no known invisible 'higher' dimensions of space and time, and - as previously explained - the hypothetical compactified spatial dimensions of String Theory are too tiny to contain anything even if they were configured as analogues of the meta-scale 4D spacetime we experience. The hypothetical extra large spatial dimensions of Brane cosmology are a bulk or hyperspace in which our 3+1 D universe 'floats', the way a 2D sheet exists in 3D space; however, results from the LHC and LIGO are not supportive of these hypotheses.

You were right to be sceptical; there's nothing in physics or neuroscience that provides any support for such stories, and the neuroscience strongly suggests they're reports of vivid hallucinatory states.

You may find an NDE story more interesting than the vivid hallucination explanation, but I would recommend you enjoy it as fantasy fiction.


String Theory and the reality of Energy from Quantum Vacuum are ideas accepted by the majority of modern scientists.
 
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Kylie

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Are you sure?

Yes.

To claim that Near Death Experiences are really just experiencing a higher dimension is like saying that a two dimensional creature experiences height when it has a near death experience.

It would not look like some other world, or other part of the universe, or a different universe. No bright shiny lights or feeling of peace. It's just a new dimension that gives a different look at what is already there. It's not religious in any way.
 
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Kylie

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I actually rather like Chopra...... (but you probably guessed that already didn't you)?

His stuff always seemed like just meaningless buzzwords to me. "Intelligence is merely an indication that the soul is becoming actualized within consciousness." I just made that up, it means absolutely nothing, and it sounds like something he'd say.
 
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Kylie

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String Theory and the reality of Energy from Quantum Vacuum are ideas accepted by the majority of modern scientists.

I'm curious, what evidence is there that has convinced the majority of modern scientists (in relevant fields) that string theory is correct.
 
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Yes.

To claim that Near Death Experiences are really just experiencing a higher dimension is like saying that a two dimensional creature experiences height when it has a near death experience.

It would not look like some other world, or other part of the universe, or a different universe. No bright shiny lights or feeling of peace. It's just a new dimension that gives a different look at what is already there. It's not religious in any way.
Oh I think it would be religious to the max.

Almost everything in our world has meaning in 3 dimensions that would be utterly lacking in 2. Extrapolate that out to the meaning we might find in 4 or more dimensions.
 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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String Theory and the reality of Energy from Quantum Vacuum are ideas accepted by the majority of modern scientists.
Last I heard, physicists are fairly evenly split over whether String Theory is likely to produce anything more than interesting mathematical tools; and the LHC has ruled out the simplest, most elegant SUSY models. That the quantum vacuum has a great deal of energy is not in dispute (although it's not clear how to best calculate it), but I'm not aware of any competent physicist who thinks that energy can somehow be used or extracted; the Casimir effect may interfere with MEMS (MicroElectroMechanical Systems), but it's thought to be a conservative force, and that means that for any system using it you can't get more energy out than you put in. Practical free energy from the quantum vacuum would be lovely and would make the discoverer rich and famous beyond reckoning, but there's a reason the big bucks are going into other projects.
 
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