Omniscience and quantum mechanics

[lucaspa]

According to some, God is omniscient: he knows everything.

But, according to quantum mechanics, there are inherent limitations to just how much can be known about a given system. ... This uncertainty principle isn't the result of practical limitations to measurements, but is an inherent property of the quantum mechanical nature of the system.

Exactly. It cannot be known. What we have from scripture is that God is very powerful, very knowing, and very present. This got changed into the "omnis": omipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. But the omni's are actually a human hypothesis about God.

So, God's Creation says that God is not omniscient nor omnipresent (you missed that one, Wiccan_Child, it comes from recent experiments in superposition). So, does an entity have to be omniscient and omnipotent to be God? Put another way, how powerful, knowing, and present does an entity have to be to qualify as God?

The conservatives will tell you that God must be the omni's in order to be God. But many Christians well versed in science will tell you that this isn't the case. I strongly recommend you read the last 3 chapters of Kenneth Miller's Finding Darwin's God. There are very powerful and exciting theological conclusions to be drawn from the fact that the future cannot be known in its entirety.

Now, God can be, and is, very knowing. But you don't have to be omnipotent for that. For instance, I'm not omnipotent but, because I know my daughters very well, I can predict what they will do in certain situations. God has that type of knowledge.

 

[Chesterton]

Exactly. It cannot be known. What we have from scripture is that God is very powerful, very knowing, and very present. This got changed into the "omnis": omipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. But the omni's are actually a human hypothesis about God.

I made this point early on in this thread. I don't know Greek or Hebrew, but as best as I can tell, "omnipotent" appears only once late in the Bible (New Testament), the other two words don't appear at all. The language of scripture is not scientific language.

 

[lucaspa]

we can build models based on adjustments in those equations that show that even the smallest of changes create a universe of solar radiation, completely uninhabitable to life as we know it.

This is called the Strong Anthropic Principle (SAP for short). The problem is that it is a mistake in logic. I'll let Daniel Dennett explain since he did it very well:

"According to the Anthropic Principle, we are entitled to infer facts about the universe and its laws from the undisputed fact that we (we anthropoi, human beings) are here to do the inferring and observing. The Anthropic Principle comes in several flavors.
In the "weak form" it is a sound, harmless, and on occasion useful application of elementary logic: if x is a necessary condition for the existence of y, and y exists, then x exists. If consciousness depends on complex physical structures, and complex physical structures depend on large molecules composed of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, then, since we are conscious, the world must contain such elements.
"But notice that there is a loose cannon on the deck in the previous sentence: the wandering "must". I have followed the common practice in English of couching a claim of necessity in a technically incorrect way. As any student in logic class soon learns, what I really should have written is: *It must be the case that*: if consciousness depends ... then, since we are conscious, the world *contains* such elements.
The conclusion that can be validly drawn is only that the world *does* contain such elements, not that it *had* to contain such elements. It *has* to contain such elements *for us to exist*, we may grant, but it might not have contained such elements, and if that had been the case, we wouldn't be here to be dismayed. It's as simple as that.
Take a simpler example. Suppose John is a bachelor. Then he *must* be single, right? (That's a truth of logic.) Poor John -- he can never get married! The fallacy is obvious in this example, and it is worth keeping it in the back of your mind as a template to compare other arguments with."
Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Ideas, pp. 165-166.

Bottom line, the universe could have that massive solar radiation and life would not exist. That does not show the universe to be manufactured, because the universe does not have to have the parameters for life. If the universe didn't have those parameters, we simply wouldn't be here to make logical mistakes.

First up, whether evolution is or isn't an argument to design is irrelevant as I believe God could very likely have setup the initial conditions and let things run a course he predetermined. So I see no conflict there.

It's true that evolution does not deny a Creator. Evolution, for Christians, is simply how God created the diversity of life on the planet. And evolution does not have to be "predetermined" to have God created. The "predetermined" applies only if you think God wanted a modified ape to communicate with. But I see no reason why God would prefer any particular bodily form, since God does not have a body. Natural selection, running by itself, will eventually produce a being that is sentient and capable of communicating with God. Why would God "want" anything more? God could let evolution run on thousands of worlds and have thousands of sentient species to communicate with.

Secondly whether life is easy to make or not is also irrelevant and doesn't speak as to whether a being designed it or not.

Yeah, it does. "Designed" doesn't refer to some drawing or blueprint. "Designed" means "manufactured". That is, when people say "God designed human beings" they mean God manufactured humans directly. That life arises easily from chemistry doesn't speak to whether God created. But it does negate whether God designed. God simply created the first life by chemistry instead of speaking it into existence.

Lastly no one is saying that God magicked everything into existence.

That's exactly what creationists say.

I am saying that the mechanics and precisely 'how' everything has been created and came to be, is at this point unknown. However, there are trademarks of design all over the place, and as such it makes sense to believe that it was created by a designer 'somehow'.

And this is where you go to "magicked". You are saying that God manufactured things in their present form. You don't know the manufacturing process, so that process is "magic".

Address the argument -> If something looks designed, we should attribute that to a designer.

OK, there are two ways to address this problem. One is that "looks designed" isn't sufficient to say something was manufactured. Michael Behe, one of the most prominent of Intelligent Designers and author of Darwin's Black Box (you may have heard of it), acknowledges this toward the end of the book. Behe says:
"For a simple artificial object such as a steel rod, the context is often important in concluding design. If you saw the rod outside a steel plant, you would infer design. Suppose however, that you traveled in a rocket ship to a barren alien planet that had never been explored. If you saw dozens of cylindrical steel rods lying on the side of a volcano, you would need more information before you could be sure that alien geological processes -- natural for the planet -- had not produced the rods." Michael Behe, Darwin's Black Box, pp 195-196

What this means is that we must also look at the environment around the object before we can say "design". It's not enough to look at a watch, but the watch must be on a heath. The take away lesson here is that there must be no process in the environment that can produce the object before we can say "design" as in an intelligent being manufactured the object.

So, are there processes in the environment that will produce the designs we see? YES. Chemistry and physics will produce some of them. But the biggie is that natural selection is an unintelligent process that produces design. It's an alogorithm for producing design. Not "appearance of design", but design.

You see, up until 1859 people did not know any method other than manufacture by an intelligent entity to get design. So there was always a hidden prepositional phrase to "design". "Design by an intelligent being". People were the standard intelligent beings.

But with the discovery of natural selection, we can't assume that prepositional phrase anymore. We have things designed by chemistry, and things designed by natural selection.

We are simply finding incredible information about how things are:

A) Suited perfectly to allow us to live here.
B) Balanced within tiny margins where a variance of any measure would result in not only no life, but a universe unable to support life whatsoever.

it still remains to see how you respond to the original claim I made, which is that the most simple and obvious answer is to posit the universe was made with intent to support complex life

Remember I'm a theist. Check my faith icon. I believe that the universe was created by God. But, that the universe does support life is not proof that it was created by God. There are other ways it could have gotten those parameters. What to you is "the most simple and obvious answer" is not the only answer. It's only one of the possible answers. You and I believe it is correct, but all we can really say is that the universe is consistent with it being created by God.

What you are doing is saying that those "variations" are arbitrary things. However, that may not be the case. One of the attractions of String Theory is that those variations which allow life are inevitable consequences of the basic properties of strings and 'branes.

I'm not sure you got my point, it's not that it changes you, it's that it is seen as an unwanted change - people know that by being Christian there are absolute standards they are held to.

This is the argument that atheists are atheists because they don't want to adhere to a moral code. That's nonsense.

Oh! Right. So, God is only responsible for the bad things in our universe, not for any of the wonders of our universe, or our planet, of life, the human body, of our minds, personalities and character, the elements, atmosphere, environment and such. Oddly, it's only since man came along that the planet has gotten so messed up.

One, the planet got 'messed up' many times in the past. Ecologies are not stable. For instance, there was a thriving anerobic ecology 3.5 billion years ago. When photosynthesis evolved, that planetary ecology died. The earth was really messed up for a time. Dimetrodons and buffalo are only 2 examples of "cockroach" species that take over and ruin the biodiversity of an ecology. So there have been examples in the past of species that could be removed without having negative effects. And humans aren't the only species today. What negative effects are you going to see if you remove SIV or mosquitoes, to name just 2 examples? Someone misled you about the pyramid.

What you are ducking is the problem of evil. Why bad things happen to good people. There are good answers to it, but you aren't using one of them.

Mankind does bad things, as well as the good - God only does good. It's easy to sit on the outside and think, well, that earthquake killed 50k people but I would simply ask why do people keep going and rebuilding homes over giant fault-lines?[/quote]

What you are missing is: why does God allow the fault lines to move? Or rather, why doesn't God have the fault lines move in several very small increments that do not kill people instead of large ones that kill people? You see, in your status of God controlling everything, God has alternatives that would avoid the bad.

So yes,failing to act to prevent a tragedy when you could also counts as "bad". Your assertion that "God only does good" in your context that God is responsible for everything that happens simply doesn't work.

Again, there are good answers to why God allows bad things happpen. Those answers even preserve and enhance God as loving. But your argument isn't one of them.

We don't punish people when their inaction causes evil.

We don't? Yes, we have. Look at the war crimes trials after WWII. Officials were punished because they went along with the Nazis and didn't try to stop them.

Umm... ok, well, why do you feel the need to champion their method of interpretation? Also the geocentrism issue is another example of the scripture not saying what you think it does.

Oh no! Here scripture does say in plain Hebrew that the earth does not move. The only way for that to be literally true is for the earth to be the center of the solar system and for the sun and planets to go around it.

No. It doesn't, this is another thing that atheists continually do. You don't assume that what is written is true. You test it.

Exactly. 1 Thessalonians 5:21: "Test everything. Hold on to the good." Digit, here we are paying for Fundamentalism. Fundamentalism assumes the Bible is true in a literal interpretations.

Now, militant atheists like to also hold to Biblical literalism and inerrancy. The reason is obvious: it's the only way to falsify Christianity. So they do often adopt that strawman.

You take what is written, you see what the words mean, what the language says, what historical and cultural context it is in and then you gather all the facts you can about it, and form a conclusion.

Yes. It's called the Rules of Interpretation. It's used for all documents, not just scripture:
http://www.digistat.com/gcf/8rules.htm
Apologetics research resources on religious cults and sects - The Eight Rules of Bible Interpretation

This is a huge point now: Yes we can. Actually it's the only way to do it. This is really important, it doesn't matter what is said, whether they are talking about an ancient race of fluffy pink elephants or Ghengis Khan - if it's written and presented as historical narrative, that is how you interpret it - just because something is positioned in that context, ie as historical narrative, doesn't mean it's true. It just means they thought it was when they wrote it.

Not necessarily. Sometimes we mistake something as being a historical narrative and it was never intended as such. Examples include Genesis 1-3 and Genesis 6-8.

 

[lucaspa]

I made this point early on in this thread. I don't know Greek or Hebrew, but as best as I can tell, "omnipotent" appears only once late in the Bible (New Testament), the other two words don't appear at all. The language of scripture is not scientific language.

I didn't even attempt to read the entire thread, so I apologize for not giving you credit where it is due.

No, the language of scripture, as noted by many prominent theologians (such as John Calvin) is not "scientific language". And, in this case, people came up with an extrapolation to the hypothesis of "omni". Wiccan_Child's "problem" disappears as soon as we go back to very powerful, knowing, and present instead of "omni".

 

[lucaspa]

True, but neither evolution nor abiogenesis are specifically arguments against design, in that sense. Rather, they explain how things could naturally form. That an omnipotent being could have poofed them into being is neither here nor there: no one disputes that.

No, both are arguments against "design". Again, "design" means "direct manufacture in present form". It's not that God could have poofed things into existence in their present form, it's that the evidence shows God did not poof things into existence in their present form. And the Argument from Design states that God did poof.

Most Christians I have talked to argue that nature is the ultimate expression of God's word, and how we interpret the Bible should reflect this: if an interpretation is at odds with God's created reality, that interpretation is demonstrably wrong (e.g., geocentrism).

I wish you would have phrased this a bit differently. It's not "nature is the ultimate expressoin of God's word", but rather that God has two books. "God's created reality" -- nature -- is just as much God's book as scripture. Therefore, we can use the book of God's Creation to test interpretations of scripture. Since God is consistent, an interpretation of scripture that contradicts God's Creation cannot be a correct interpretation.

This assumes that the Bible is indeed God's word, and that the author's intent reflects this.

It's "God's word" in the sense that God inspired the author, not that God dictated scripture. What's more, the intent of scripture is to tell theological truths. Scripture doesn't need to tell us truths about God's Creation; we have God's Creation to tell us those truths.

Thus, deducing the author's intent must involve the natural world: we cannot say the author intended such-and-such a verse to be interpreted as a literal, historical account, if such an interpretation is at odds with reality.

It's not fair to talk about the human author's intent. For instance, I think it was indeed the human author's intent to say that camels do not have cloven hooves and that rabbits do not chew cud. That intent is embedded within the intent to define clean and unclean foods. However, those statements are clearly mistaken. So what God's Creation does is not necessarily tell us about the author's intent, but about our interpretation.

As an atheist, I don't really care how people interpret the Bible, but it's an interesting psychology nonetheless.

How so? How is that any different from interpreting On the Origin of Species? We can clearly see Darwin's intent, but we can also clearly compare what Darwin wrote with reality and see that he was sometimes in error.

If you recall, my original point was that an inerrant, infallible, scientifically and medically accurate religious text supported by all archaeological fields would be good evidence of a divine author (with some added caveats). That the Bible isn't an example of such a text is of no concern to me.

No, it wouldn't. First, you cannot convey concepts to people without the language to do so. So there is no way you can have an infallible scientific and medical text written by people 2500 years ago. They simply don't have the language to be accurate.

Second, when people are exposed to extraordinary and emotionally wrenching events, no two of them ever report every detail identically or as completely accurate. It doesn't happen with car accidents or battles. Why should we think it happens with encounters with God? To have a completely consistent, inerrant, scientific, medical, archeological, etc. accurate text would tell me that it was not genuine. It would mean that someone tinkered with it to make it all fit.

The difference between dark matter and God is that dark matter is not nearly as mysterious as popular culture makes out, and it is very much in the bounds of science. Dark matter is a prime example of scientists doing what scientists do best: positing testable hypotheses for natural phenomena, and then going out and actually testing them. If the cosmological model is true, then dark matter exists. If it doesn't, then it's not. That's a testable fact, entirely within the realm of scientific inquiry.

Yes, dark matter is. If you want a comparison with something in science to God, try tachyons. Both God and tachyons are allowed by theory, but both are untestable and indetectable by science, and both, for science, are a pain in the _ss if they exist.

Even God and miracles can be scientifically studied. Science isn't antithetical to the supernatural; it's indifferent to it.

Miracles can be studied by science if and only if they leave evidence that persists to the present. So the miracle of the loaves and fishes, for instance, cannot be studied by science.

God cannot directly be studied by science. Science is limited by methodological materialism. As the wag put it "you can't put God in a test tube, and you can't keep him out of one."

If God looks at science, God must be sneaked into the back door. What you must do is propose a material method by which God works. Then you test the material method. Flood Geology is an example. It was proposed that God caused a world-wide Flood and the Flood caused all geological features. The Flood got falsified, but all that means is that God caused geological features some other way.

Another example is intercessory prayer. It is proposed that God answers prayers so that intercessory prayer will have an effect. It turns out that several studies (yes, including the Benson study) showed that intercessory prayer does have an effect. But that doesn't show God, only IP.

I'm sorry, Wiccan_Child, but science is a limited form of knowing. Within its bounds, science is very reliable. But those bounds are much tighter than you state. Most of our lives are lived outside of what science can study.

 

[Wiccan_Child]

When survival is threatened, we experience fear and aversion, for ourselves and even for others. That's understandable, but I don't see how that could lead to the evolution of abstract concept of "right". If we stand too near a cliff, or if a tiger approaches, we will experience fear. That's understandable. We are averse to the thought of eating dirt or tree bark; the taste is not appealling, because there are few or no nutrients in them. That's also understandable. But the concepts of "right" and "useful" are distinct. To mesh them as you do is like meshing the abstract idea of justice with the physical feeling of a hunger pang.

If I'm standing too near the edge of a cliff, I may experience feelings of fear and aversion to falling over. Other people observing me, through empathy, may even feel similar feelings for me; a stranger may feel an emotional urge to say "Hey mister, be careful there!" If I were to fall over the cliff and be killed, other humans will pass judgment on the action; they will say I was foolish, but they will not say I was immoral.

But they will feel it is moral to assist you. If a child were wandering near a cliff edge, we'd feel it is 'right' to coax them away, and 'wrong' to leave them in peril. And that's the core of it: the child is in danger, and those who help endangered children are more likely to have their own children survive to adulthood. Thus, this abstract sense of 'we should help children' provides a benefit, and can be built upon by natural selection. Fear and aversion are other, more primal instincts.

Now imagine I'm on the edge of a cliff, and someone pushes me over. The result would be the same - some injury or death to one person, and the non-survival of one person's genes. But humans would not say the pusher was foolish, they'd say he was bad or evil.

Our sense of morality is shaped by culture. Would they say the same if the person pushed was Hitler, or Hussein? 100 years ago, gay rights were unheard of and it was obvious that gay people were depraved; women were obviously inferior to men and any sexual pleasure on their part led to 'hysteria'; black people, while entitled to the same freedoms as white people, were obviously intellectually inferior. What is deemed 'right' is a product of our culture, as well as our ancestry.

I say we would never have come to perceive a difference between "right" and "useful". The outcome is the same: if a man goes over a cliff, his genes will not survive, whether he falls due to his own negligence, or due to the intent of another person. I can understand how we might naturally come to feel fear and aversion for such an event, but I cannot understand how we could come to feel injustice and evil regarding such an event. If our moral ideas were wholly programmed by mindless nature, we would speak of "utility"; we would never have come to invent the idea of "morality", of justice and ethics.

I disagree. The man on the cliff may die, but his kin are still alive. They are the ones who determine whether the action was moral, immoral, or amoral. There is no evolutionary benefit in berating a dead man for his foolishness, but there is an evolutionary benefit in condemning a murderer for his actions: by condemning murder, you discourage it. A society that condemns murder will, therefore, have less instances of murder than a society that doesn't. Therefore, the former society will be more successful than the latter society.

That's why we call it murder: we feel that actively pushing someone off a cliff is 'wrong', because our evolved instincts compel us to, in general, condemn homicide.

But you would say my consciousness is just a collection of molecules like serotonin, right? So do molecules start "wanting" when there's some certain amount of them, or some certain configuration of them?

I'd tentatively say yes. There's a great deal we don't know about the concious mind. As far as we can tell, it's an emergent feature of a very complex pattern-recognising machine, 3.5 billion years of trial-and-error. It's like how the atoms of a computer don't automatically become a computer when in the same room; they have to be constructed and working in concert before the machine will 'turn on'. The same could be true for the mind.

I agree it's a testament to how ingrained such feelings are, but that doesn't go to the origin of the feelings. I specifically mentioned a "selfish, back-stabbing man". A man who risked his life to kill Hitler for the good of others would not be doing so merely for his own self-interest.

Depends. What if he succeeded Hitler, and took the reigns of the Third Reich? That's certainly a motive for the selfish backstabber. We can admire that man for helping humanity, even though his motivations were wholly selfish.

An entrepreneur, who uses his policies to stab the back of his peers and acquire his position of power and wealth, can nonetheless be admired for using green policies - he advocates moral policies, but for personal gain.
A politician who helps minority groups can be rightly applauded for his actions, even though he may be doing so for purely selfish, political reasons. We applaud him more if he had selfless reasons, but selfish reasons don't stop applause altogether.

In other words, such oxymoronic phrases as the 'selfless backstabber' are either simply unusual (selfless backstabbers can exist, but they're rare), or semantically impossible. They're not proof of a spontaneous origin of morality.

The act of murder determines when you go, not where you go.

Of course it does: if I am murdered before a miraculous conversion, I'm going to Hell. If I am murdered after my miraculous conversion, I'm going to Heaven. So the timing is quite important, since Christianity traditionally preaches that one must do X, Y, and Z before you die, otherwise you go to Hell. Some modern, liberal Christians say a good god would reward good people for being good, rather than faithful people for having faith, but I don't think you're talking about that.

I agree with your "perhaps", but either way, evolution may in turn be governed by God, as gravity and everything else may be governed by God.

Which brings up God's level of interference. Does he actually manipulate atoms, molecules, rocks, planets? Or does he 'influence' in a deistic fashion, setting everything up precisely at the dawn of time, knowing full well the result?

Well as I've said, your naturalistic view of it creates a puzzle, I think my spiritual view of things solves the puzzle.

So do a lot of spiritual views, virtually all of which disagree with your view. I'm not subscribing to any unless someone can provide some substantiation.

I don't know, but I imagine England might have an equivalent to this: In America, every prospectus for certain types of financial investments must by law include language to the following effect - "Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results." It's a wise admonition, and if you think science is on a trajectory to figure everything out, based on the fact that in the past it's figured some things out, you could be right or wrong, but you're just speculating.

Indeed, and I never say that science will figure everything out. But I do believe that, based on past performances, science will figure more things out. We will, for instance, create commercial fusion energy - something the US is tantalisingly close to with its NIF, putting it back on track to being a technological powerhouse.

Anyway. Science may not figure everything out, but that's not my point. My point was to attack the 'God of the Gaps' argument: just as we have discovered things in the past, we will discover things in the future. Maybe not everything, but certainly more than we know today. So, to say that 'God did' whatever we currently don't know is just daft - not knowing why X happens is no reason to conclude that God exists. Conciousness is one such X. That we currently don't know a great deal about the concious mind is no reason to infer God.

I think we do it all the time; in everyday conversation, and across time and place through literature, music, art, etc. I think the idea of p-zombies proves it in a negative way - we wouldn't have to speculate on what it's like to be other-than-human if it weren't for the fact that we all do know what it's like to be human. I've read philosophers who've wondered what a human ultimately is, but I've never read a philosopher who wondered what it was like to be human. And whatever any philosopher says about the human condition, he assumes other humans will know what he's talking about. Otherwise, he would be similar to a man trying to describe a color to a blind man, which would be futile and no one would even attempt it.

I think it's the same as playing a piece of music that evokes a particular emotion. While we can't communicate what that emotion feels like in complete and consistent terms, we can play a sombre piece to evoke a sombre emotion in anyone who listens.

So I can give someone salt and say "There, that's what salt tastes like", but there really isn't any guarantee that what they taste is actually why I taste. We both associate it with saltiness, but the quale may be entirely different.

You're not precluding an absolute authority, you're just claiming the authority is serotonin. The difference between the Platonic Form of Good, and the "serotonic" form of good, is that the former would be true if it exists, and the latter cannot be true in any sense, because the latter is matter, and matter cannot be true or false.

Depends what we're calling 'true' or not. Statements are true or false, not extant beings.

This view of being under the control of chemicals places us in the same position as if we were brains in vats. You say bad is not really bad, it just feels that way. Red is not really red, it just looks that way. All is illusion, and you turn meaning into non-meaning. Again, the "cardinal difficulty" buried within that view is that it must apply equally to the reasoning capacity which you use to arrive at that view. If you say "2 + 2 must equal 4", you have to stick to your guns and remind yourself that "that's just the chemicals talking." You can't attribute everything to the evolution of your brain except the one thing (reason) which happens to "seem" most real to you.

Sure I can. My reasoning is entirely valid if we have evolved to be reasonable. "It's just chemicals" doesn't preclude deductive reasoning, it just provides an explanation as to what is actually doing the reasoning.

I often see religious people accused of believing what they want to believe, of seeking comfort in arbitrary beliefs. The materialist lays himself open to the same charge, with an important difference being that the religious could be right, and the materialist cannot be right. There could exist a truth which provides comfort; there could not be a brain chemistry which dictates that truth is not really truth, and still call it truth.

Of course the materialist can be right. At the end of the day, it may all still simply be matter and nature, unintelligent and unguided. The fact that conglomerations of matter have evolved to think and reason doesn't preclude the materialist's worldview.

I don't understand. How do you determine that the things which atoms comprise aren't real, but the things which comprise atoms are real?

Because a computer is only real inasmuch as it's a conglomerate of atoms. Our brains see the computer as a distinct object, but it's not. Human society isn't 'real', since it's not an actual thing, it's a collection of things.

 

[Wiccan_Child]

No, both are arguments against "design". Again, "design" means "direct manufacture in present form". It's not that God could have poofed things into existence in their present form, it's that the evidence shows God did not poof things into existence in their present form. And the Argument from Design states that God did poof.

Not always. God need not poof to 'directly manufacture in present form'. He could wheel them off a construction line, or manipulate genetics over 3.5 billion years, or kick-start a universe with precise initial conditions. All these routes end up with design.

I wish you would have phrased this a bit differently. It's not "nature is the ultimate expressoin of God's word", but rather that God has two books. "God's created reality" -- nature -- is just as much God's book as scripture. Therefore, we can use the book of God's Creation to test interpretations of scripture. Since God is consistent, an interpretation of scripture that contradicts God's Creation cannot be a correct interpretation.

Which is what I said . If one's interpretation of the Bible contradicts reality, then reality takes precedent.

How so? How is that any different from interpreting On the Origin of Species? We can clearly see Darwin's intent, but we can also clearly compare what Darwin wrote with reality and see that he was sometimes in error.

I'm not sure what you're getting at; I'm talking about how a Christian should go about interpreting parts of the Bible with an eye on Creation, since the Bible is held to be true in whole or in part by virtually all Christianity. Darwin's books are not.

No, it wouldn't. First, you cannot convey concepts to people without the language to do so. So there is no way you can have an infallible scientific and medical text written by people 2500 years ago. They simply don't have the language to be accurate.

So? God is all-powerful, he could easily have poofed into being a book written in early 20[sup]th[/sup] century French, and be able to convey ideas in precise terminology.

Second, when people are exposed to extraordinary and emotionally wrenching events, no two of them ever report every detail identically or as completely accurate. It doesn't happen with car accidents or battles. Why should we think it happens with encounters with God? To have a completely consistent, inerrant, scientific, medical, archeological, etc. accurate text would tell me that it was not genuine. It would mean that someone tinkered with it to make it all fit.

Exactly! And that person can only be God! Or, at the very least, not human. The whole point is that this knowledge cannot have come from humans. If we unearthed a 6000 year-old book that had detailed knowledge of a hitherto unknown method of cold fusion, and it actually worked, who do you think could have authored it? No human knows a method of cold fusion even today, let alone 6000 years ago.

I maintain that, if God so chose, he could make his existence plain. None of this whiff about the majesty of nature of the courage of the human spirit, I mean as plain as the ocean. If God can make an ocean's existence known, he can make his own existence known. If I can think of ways that he could prove his existence by, then so can he. After all, he wasn't too shy about shaking his sabre in Biblical times, was he?

Yes, dark matter is. If you want a comparison with something in science to God, try tachyons. Both God and tachyons are allowed by theory, but both are untestable and indetectable by science, and both, for science, are a pain in the _ss if they exist.

Tachyons would be a headache, sure, but that doesn't mean they're fundamentally untestable. A 'tachyon' is just a name for a particle with a specific exotic property, and it's only 'exotic' because we haven't found such a particle yet.
The same is true for God. Just because we haven't found a way to directly test for his existence, doesn't mean we can't. Just because we don't have any evidence for his existence, doesn't mean we won't. I'm pleased that you acknowledge that he is within the bounds of theoretical science, but I still maintain that there's no reason to preclude his appearance in experimental science.

Miracles can be studied by science if and only if they leave evidence that persists to the present. So the miracle of the loaves and fishes, for instance, cannot be studied by science.

God cannot directly be studied by science. Science is limited by methodological materialism. As the wag put it "you can't put God in a test tube, and you can't keep him out of one."

If God looks at science, God must be sneaked into the back door. What you must do is propose a material method by which God works. Then you test the material method. Flood Geology is an example. It was proposed that God caused a world-wide Flood and the Flood caused all geological features. The Flood got falsified, but all that means is that God caused geological features some other way.

I agree. God remains obstinantely hidden, as far as we can tell, so any investigation at present must be done by proxy. That's what IDists do: they say God exists because that's the only explanation for X. A fallacious argument, sure, but it's on the right lines.

However, there's nothing to say that, in a million years time, we won't encounter the centre of the universe and find God sitting majestically on clouds of Hydrogen. Who knows. Who's to say he doesn't have a physical presence that is completely at ease with being tested to our satisfaction?

Another example is intercessory prayer. It is proposed that God answers prayers so that intercessory prayer will have an effect. It turns out that several studies (yes, including the Benson study) showed that intercessory prayer does have an effect. But that doesn't show God, only IP.

Which is why remote prayer is what's interesting: patients who don't even know they're being prayed for. If the people prayed for by the Pope and the Pope alone were cured 100% of any and all ailments without fail, that's pretty damn good evidence of God. It's certainly make me think twice.

I'm sorry, Wiccan_Child, but science is a limited form of knowing. Within its bounds, science is very reliable. But those bounds are much tighter than you state. Most of our lives are lived outside of what science can study.

I disagree.

I didn't even attempt to read the entire thread, so I apologize for not giving you credit where it is due.

No, the language of scripture, as noted by many prominent theologians (such as John Calvin) is not "scientific language". And, in this case, people came up with an extrapolation to the hypothesis of "omni". Wiccan_Child's "problem" disappears as soon as we go back to very powerful, knowing, and present instead of "omni".

Which is something I addressed right at the start of this thread earlier this year.

 

[Chesterton]

But they will feel it is moral to assist you. If a child were wandering near a cliff edge, we'd feel it is 'right' to coax them away, and 'wrong' to leave them in peril. And that's the core of it: the child is in danger, and those who help endangered children are more likely to have their own children survive to adulthood. Thus, this abstract sense of 'we should help children' provides a benefit, and can be built upon by natural selection. Fear and aversion are other, more primal instincts.

Where did you come up with "those who help endangered children are more likely to have their own children survive"? Clearly, those who help their own children are more likely to have their own children survive, but those who do not expend energy or take risks for others are wisely conserving energy for, and minimizing risk to, themselves, which would seem to be a "golden rule" of natural biological processes.

I can agree that the concept of "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" could come to be perceived as useful, but that is not what we humans mean by "right" or morally good. Moral good is when I scratch your back when I don't expect to get mine scratched in return, or even when scratching your back may mean I suffer for doing so.

Also, a little reductio ad absudum: It's useful that I have five fingers, but I don't feel it's morally right. It would be useful if I had wings and could fly, but I don't feel it's morally wrong that I don't. You still have to show how something could come to be perceived as right in the abstract. If I feel that it's right to try and save another person from danger because it's useful, then I should also feel that it's morally right to have five fingers, or to be a biped, or to have blond hair if I'm Scandinavian.

Our sense of morality is shaped by culture. Would they say the same if the person pushed was Hitler, or Hussein? 100 years ago, gay rights were unheard of and it was obvious that gay people were depraved; women were obviously inferior to men and any sexual pleasure on their part led to 'hysteria'; black people, while entitled to the same freedoms as white people, were obviously intellectually inferior. What is deemed 'right' is a product of our culture, as well as our ancestry.

Your point has little to do with moral judgment, but a lot to do with poor information. It might be our duty to kill witches if there were such a thing. There remains a class of people whom we consider depraved and inferior - we call them criminals - and we treat them differently.

I disagree. The man on the cliff may die, but his kin are still alive. They are the ones who determine whether the action was moral, immoral, or amoral. There is no evolutionary benefit in berating a dead man for his foolishness, but there is an evolutionary benefit in condemning a murderer for his actions: by condemning murder, you discourage it. A society that condemns murder will, therefore, have less instances of murder than a society that doesn't. Therefore, the former society will be more successful than the latter society.

That's why we call it murder: we feel that actively pushing someone off a cliff is 'wrong', because our evolved instincts compel us to, in general, condemn homicide.

Of course there is benefit in pointing out foolishness. There is no benefit in condemning immorality unless morality is a real thing. If I want to rob someone and you tell me I shouldn't, I'll ask why, and you know you can't give me an answer. I don't want to rob society, just this one man. You might say but if everyone did that society would fall apart. Two obvious responses: 1) The animal world does that, and it does not fall apart because of it. 2) If every human did that, I'd still be a fool not to do it myself.* So from the naturalistic view, either way the fool is the honest, moral man.

* From the novel Catch-22, and from game theory, specifically the prisoner's dilemma. "The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on..."

I'd tentatively say yes. There's a great deal we don't know about the concious mind. As far as we can tell, it's an emergent feature of a very complex pattern-recognising machine, 3.5 billion years of trial-and-error. It's like how the atoms of a computer don't automatically become a computer when in the same room; they have to be constructed and working in concert before the machine will 'turn on'. The same could be true for the mind.

Well that's a decent start for an Intelligent Design argument, anyway.

Depends. What if he succeeded Hitler, and took the reigns of the Third Reich? That's certainly a motive for the selfish backstabber. We can admire that man for helping humanity, even though his motivations were wholly selfish.

An entrepreneur, who uses his policies to stab the back of his peers and acquire his position of power and wealth, can nonetheless be admired for using green policies - he advocates moral policies, but for personal gain.
A politician who helps minority groups can be rightly applauded for his actions, even though he may be doing so for purely selfish, political reasons. We applaud him more if he had selfless reasons, but selfish reasons don't stop applause altogether.

In other words, such oxymoronic phrases as the 'selfless backstabber' are either simply unusual (selfless backstabbers can exist, but they're rare), or semantically impossible. They're not proof of a spontaneous origin of morality.

I don't admire anyone for seeking personal gain, even though I recognize it can be the impetus for good results. I don't admire good results, because results can even be forced, as in the story of Robin Hood.

Of course it does: if I am murdered before a miraculous conversion, I'm going to Hell. If I am murdered after my miraculous conversion, I'm going to Heaven. So the timing is quite important, since Christianity traditionally preaches that one must do X, Y, and Z before you die, otherwise you go to Hell. Some modern, liberal Christians say a good god would reward good people for being good, rather than faithful people for having faith, but I don't think you're talking about that.

God may not allow you to be murdered unless He knows you'll be going to the place where you are already going. And if He knows where you are ultimately going, it doesn't matter much when you go.

Which brings up God's level of interference. Does he actually manipulate atoms, molecules, rocks, planets? Or does he 'influence' in a deistic fashion, setting everything up precisely at the dawn of time, knowing full well the result?

I don't know. Maybe some of both. But time is different for us. We're all King Lears, and God is Shakespeare. God could have decided some things before He wrote the play, during the writing of the play, or after He's written the play (He could go back and edit, and who would be the wiser?).

So do a lot of spiritual views, virtually all of which disagree with your view. I'm not subscribing to any unless someone can provide some substantiation.

Other spiritual views don't much disagree with me on this point, and at least not to the extent that your view disagrees with almost all spiritual views.

Indeed, and I never say that science will figure everything out. But I do believe that, based on past performances, science will figure more things out. We will, for instance, create commercial fusion energy - something the US is tantalisingly close to with its NIF, putting it back on track to being a technological powerhouse.

Anyway. Science may not figure everything out, but that's not my point. My point was to attack the 'God of the Gaps' argument: just as we have discovered things in the past, we will discover things in the future. Maybe not everything, but certainly more than we know today. So, to say that 'God did' whatever we currently don't know is just daft - not knowing why X happens is no reason to conclude that God exists. Conciousness is one such X. That we currently don't know a great deal about the concious mind is no reason to infer God.

All right, but by the same token, the fact that we've learned a lot is no reason to exclude God. And anyway, you haven't really explained lightning until you've fully explained all that is necessary for lightning, which ultimately would involve explaining the four fundamental forces (or at least two or three of them, I think).

I think it's the same as playing a piece of music that evokes a particular emotion. While we can't communicate what that emotion feels like in complete and consistent terms, we can play a sombre piece to evoke a sombre emotion in anyone who listens.

So I can give someone salt and say "There, that's what salt tastes like", but there really isn't any guarantee that what they taste is actually why I taste. We both associate it with saltiness, but the quale may be entirely different.

But you're the physicalist. You're the one who should be insisting that physical human brains must interpret the same physical things the same way. Anyway, give someone a lot of salt in their tea or on their sweet dessert. Their reaction will tell you it tastes the same to them as it does to you.

Depends what we're calling 'true' or not. Statements are true or false, not extant beings.

I have at least a vague idea of what I mean by "true"; I honestly have no idea what you mean by "true". Your definition seems to be arbitrary. I gather you feel that human reason and indivisible particles are true. But humanity has traditionally meant by true something different, that something is actually true, not merely that we feel that way about it, as I suspect you feel about reason and particles.

Recommended reading: The Abolition of Man. Short read. Online here if you want - Men Without Chests

Sure I can. My reasoning is entirely valid if we have evolved to be reasonable. "It's just chemicals" doesn't preclude deductive reasoning, it just provides an explanation as to what is actually doing the reasoning.

Of course the materialist can be right. At the end of the day, it may all still simply be matter and nature, unintelligent and unguided. The fact that conglomerations of matter have evolved to think and reason doesn't preclude the materialist's worldview.

Because a computer is only real inasmuch as it's a conglomerate of atoms. Our brains see the computer as a distinct object, but it's not. Human society isn't 'real', since it's not an actual thing, it's a collection of things.

As above, I'm confused as to how you determine what's fundamentally real and what's an arbitrary construct. You say reason is real, but conscience is not. Particles are real, but things comprised of particles are not. It sort of seems you pick and choose what things are real to suit your worldview. To my thinking, if quarks or strings or whatever are real, then so is the chair which they form.

 

[Chesterton]

Never mind.

 

[lucaspa]

But they will feel it is moral to assist you. If a child were wandering near a cliff edge, we'd feel it is 'right' to coax them away, and 'wrong' to leave them in peril. And that's the core of it: the child is in danger, and those who help endangered children are more likely to have their own children survive to adulthood. Thus, this abstract sense of 'we should help children' provides a benefit, and can be built upon by natural selection. Fear and aversion are other, more primal instincts.

Actually, people who help children in danger -- children not their own -- are not more likely to have their own children survive to adulthood. Why would they? Are you hoping for reciprocity from others if your children are in danger? Why would you get it? Sorry, but this example has no natural selection advantage. That's not to say that some morals don't have an evolutionary advantage, but you just demonstrated that not all of them do.

Our sense of morality is shaped by culture. Would they say the same if the person pushed was Hitler, or Hussein? 100 years ago, gay rights were unheard of and it was obvious that gay people were depraved; women were obviously inferior to men and any sexual pleasure on their part led to 'hysteria'; black people, while entitled to the same freedoms as white people, were obviously intellectually inferior. What is deemed 'right' is a product of our culture, as well as our ancestry.

Not necessarily. The roots of the morality of equality to gays, blacks, and women are inherent in the Declaration of Independence. And how was that couched, in terms of culture and ancestry? NO! It was a universal declaration based on belief in God. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

There is the basic statement that eventually nullified all those other beliefs about freedoms, intellectual inferiority, hysteria, etc. And that statement is based in religion, not culture or ancestry.

There is no evolutionary benefit in berating a dead man for his foolishness,

Sure there is! Think about it. By berating a dead man for doing something stupid, then it lessens the chance that any of the listeners are going to do the same stupid thing. Wiccan_Child, we need to have a talk about evolution and natural selection. Because so far, on 2 tries, you have gotten evolution exactly opposite of how it works.

but there is an evolutionary benefit in condemning a murderer for his actions: by condemning murder, you discourage it. A society that condemns murder will, therefore, have less instances of murder than a society that doesn't. Therefore, the former society will be more successful than the latter society.

Evolution does not work by societies. The level of selection is the individual, not the group. The problem with murder, from an evolutionary standpoint, is that it removes possibly good alleles from the gene pool. The murdered have no chance to have further offspring. However, the society that goes in for retribution has a problem: the relatives of the victim kill the murderer, then the relatives of the murderer kill his killers, then the relatives of the newly killed kill their killers, and so on. You have a Hatfield-McCoy type feud in which alleles are wiped out right and left.

That's why we call it murder: we feel that actively pushing someone off a cliff is 'wrong', because our evolved instincts compel us to, in general, condemn homicide.

Sorry, but it's not natural selection in the way you state it. The problem is that humans evolved in small social groups where individuals are interdependent. Social cooperation depends on trust. A murder is, by definition, a selfish act for the murderer. The murderer gains at the expense of someone else in the group. The basic trust and cooperation necessary for individual survival is sundered. Dislike of murder is a manifestation of our evolved module for detecting cheating.

There's a great deal we don't know about the concious mind. As far as we can tell, it's an emergent feature of a very complex pattern-recognising machine, 3.5 billion years of trial-and-error.

Actually 3.5 billion years of design by natural selection. So? That does not negate that the conscious mind is also capable of communicating with God.

An entrepreneur, who uses his policies to stab the back of his peers and acquire his position of power and wealth, can nonetheless be admired for using green policies - he advocates moral policies, but for personal gain.

But the policies are not moral for the small group. Wiccan_Child, when you look at our behaviors and decide whether they are moral with regard to evolution, you have to set them in the time and environment we evolved in. The entrepreneur in the example is not moral.

Of course it does: if I am murdered before a miraculous conversion, I'm going to Hell. If I am murdered after my miraculous conversion, I'm going to Heaven. So the timing is quite important, since Christianity traditionally preaches that one must do X, Y, and Z before you die, otherwise you go to Hell.

Here you are using sampling bias. What's more, you are violating the Second Commandment. You are saying absolutey what God will do. But you don't know what God will do. "Judgement is mine, says the Lord." But you are saying what that judgement is, so you are taking the Lord's name in vain.

Which brings up God's level of interference. Does he actually manipulate atoms, molecules, rocks, planets? Or does he 'influence' in a deistic fashion, setting everything up precisely at the dawn of time, knowing full well the result?

We've already established that, due to what we know of quantum mechanics, God can't do the latter. The future is open and cannot be known with certainty by anyone, including God.

So, yes, God can manipulate atoms, molecules, rocks, planets. But you are missing a third alternative: God sustains the universe. Christians believe that every physical and chemical process does absolutely depend on the will of God. God stops willing it, and gravity stops working. God stops willing it each and every time, and hydrogen does not burn in oxygen.

Indeed, and I never say that science will figure everything out. But I do believe that, based on past performances, science will figure more things out.

That's fine. But that threatens Christianity if and only if Christianity used god-of-the-gaps. Discard god-of-the-gaps, and it doesn't matter how much science figures out. All science is doing is telling us the physical/material processes God uses.

We will, for instance, create commercial fusion energy - something the US is tantalisingly close to with its NIF,

LOL! We've been "tantalizingly close" for 50 years. Better not hold your breath.

My point was to attack the 'God of the Gaps' argument:

god-of-the-gaps is not Biblical and not Christian. So forget attacking it by "science". Instead the death blow is given by scripture and theology: God created a complete universe. Making God fill the "gap" between 2 members of the universe reduces God to a creature of the universe. And that is just not acceptable.

I think it's the same as playing a piece of music that evokes a particular emotion. While we can't communicate what that emotion feels like in complete and consistent terms, we can play a sombre piece to evoke a sombre emotion in anyone who listens.

And that is a good description of experience of God. We can't communicate what God is like in complete and consistsent terms, because we simply can't understand the totality of God. But God can be experienced by anyone who listens.

Depends what we're calling 'true' or not. Statements are true or false, not extant beings.

"extant beings" are simply statements about the existence and "jobs" of those beings. As such, the extant beings are true or not: that is, they exist or not.

Of course the materialist can be right. At the end of the day, it may all still simply be matter and nature, unintelligent and unguided. The fact that conglomerations of matter have evolved to think and reason doesn't preclude the materialist's worldview.

True. But it equally does not prove a materialist worldview.

 

[lucaspa]

Not always. God need not poof to 'directly manufacture in present form'. He could wheel them off a construction line, or manipulate genetics over 3.5 billion years, or kick-start a universe with precise initial conditions. All these routes end up with design.

"Wheeling off a construction line" is "manufacturing in their present form". "manipulate genetics over 3.5 billion years" is not sufficient for "design" as the term is used. Genetics alone won't give you design; you need a selection process as well.

And we've shown that the universe we live in has an open future, so that "precise initial conditions" will not end up with one design or any particular living organism.

Which is what I said . If one's interpretation of the Bible contradicts reality, then reality takes precedent.

Sorry, but to the Christian "reality" is God's Creation. Reality is not separate from God, because God created "reality". Right? So it's not "reality vs interpretation of the Bible" but "God vs human interpretation of the Bible.

I'm not sure what you're getting at; I'm talking about how a Christian should go about interpreting parts of the Bible with an eye on Creation, since the Bible is held to be true in whole or in part by virtually all Christianity. Darwin's books are not.

Your original claim was: "As an atheist, I don't really care how people interpret the Bible, but it's an interesting psychology nonetheless." as tho interpreting the Bible were somehow different from interpreting any other book and was based only on psychology.

My point is that you are using Special Pleading. The Bible is interpreted as we interpret any other set of books. I simply used the example of Darwin's Origin of Species to demonstrate this.

So? God is all-powerful, he could easily have poofed into being a book written in early 20[sup]th[/sup] century French, and be able to convey ideas in precise terminology.

And if He had poofed such a book to the Hebrews around 1500 BC, would they have kept the book? NO! It would have been meaningless to them. They would have thrown it away. Remember, communicating with people means using concepts and language they understand. Try explaining television to a 5 year old. Or even answering the question "why is the sky blue?"

If we unearthed a 6000 year-old book that had detailed knowledge of a hitherto unknown method of cold fusion, and it actually worked, who do you think could have authored it? No human knows a method of cold fusion even today, let alone 6000 years ago.

And no human would have saved the book to be "unearthed" because it was gibberish. They would have used the pages for tinder to help light their cookfires. For people to save a book, it has to be understandable to them. What you are doing is setting up a strawman argument.

I maintain that, if God so chose, he could make his existence plain.

Hmm. Didn't He in the Exodus? Didn't He in the Resurrection? He continues to do so in personal experience with individuals. How many more times do you want Him to make it "plain"? Look, just because you don't have personal experience and you don't believe the times He did make it "plain" in history, don't go blaming God. Look in the mirror first.

Tachyons would be a headache, sure, but that doesn't mean they're fundamentally untestable. A 'tachyon' is just a name for a particle with a specific exotic property, and it's only 'exotic' because we haven't found such a particle yet.

What's the property? The property is that tachyons can only travel at speeds faster than light. So how do we detect such a particle? Sight? Yeah, right. You should have looked up tachyons before you made these statements. BTW, the particle is also "exotic" because it violates cause and effect. It would literally come from the future and go to the past. See that pain in the buttocks they pose? Undetecable by science, allowed by science, and a pain in the behind if they exist. Sound familiar? A lot like God for science, right?

The same is true for God. Just because we haven't found a way to directly test for his existence, doesn't mean we can't.

Really? You know a way to get around Methodological Materialism? Please, publish and get ready to accept your Nobel. You are saying this out of ignorance of how science works. J

Just because we don't have any evidence for his existence, doesn't mean we won't.

We do have evidence for God's existence. It's just that the evidence is also explained by other hypotheses, too.

I'm pleased that you acknowledge that he is within the bounds of theoretical science, but I still maintain that there's no reason to preclude his appearance in experimental science.

Yes, there is a reason to preclude God's appearance in experimental science. Think of how we do experiments and remember the importance of "controls". Now figure out how we can control for God. It's called Methodological Materialism and it's a limitation of science that no one has a clue how to get around.

I agree. God remains obstinantely hidden, as far as we can tell, so any investigation at present must be done by proxy. That's what IDists do: they say God exists because that's the only explanation for X. A fallacious argument, sure, but it's on the right lines.

No, it's not "on the right lines". IDers are testing a mechanism by which God works: direct manufacture. It's sneaking God in by the back door.

However, I'd like to see why you think the argument is fallacious. After all, you are proposing evidence for God because "that's the only explanation for X". Look at your hypothetical book on fusion. So why do you think the general argument is "fallacious"?

However, there's nothing to say that, in a million years time, we won't encounter the centre of the universe

We are at the "centre of the universe". Read about Big Bang.

Which is why remote prayer is what's interesting: patients who don't even know they're being prayed for. If the people prayed for by the Pope and the Pope alone were cured 100% of any and all ailments without fail, that's pretty damn good evidence of God. It's certainly make me think twice.

Strawman about the Pope. Remember, God still has a choice whether to cure or not. You are making the Pope into God.

But, considering the overwhelming evidence that intercessory prayer has an effect, why aren't you already "thinking twice"? Why don't you consider it "damn good evidence of God"? I know why the researchers don't -- because they understand science a lot better than you do.

I disagree.

Denial without reason or evidence. Very convincing.

Which is something I addressed right at the start of this thread earlier this year.

Commented on but the "address" failed for a number of reasons. I'll go into them if you wish.

 

[Wiccan_Child]

Woops, completely forgot! I'll do replies tomorrow

EDIT: By 'tomorrow' I clearly meant 'two weeks from now'...

 

[Wiccan_Child]

Right, now where was I...

Where did you come up with "those who help endangered children are more likely to have their own children survive"? Clearly, those who help their own children are more likely to have their own children survive, but those who do not expend energy or take risks for others are wisely conserving energy for, and minimizing risk to, themselves, which would seem to be a "golden rule" of natural biological processes.

If every individual helps every child, then my children will also benefit from this pooled resource. When we talk about how instincts evolved, you have to remember they evolve in the entire species: when this desire grows, everyone experiences it. There's no evolutionary benefit in helping other children unless my children receive the same benefit.

I can agree that the concept of "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" could come to be perceived as useful, but that is not what we humans mean by "right" or morally good. Moral good is when I scratch your back when I don't expect to get mine scratched in return, or even when scratching your back may mean I suffer for doing so.

Also, a little reductio ad absudum: It's useful that I have five fingers, but I don't feel it's morally right. It would be useful if I had wings and could fly, but I don't feel it's morally wrong that I don't. You still have to show how something could come to be perceived as right in the abstract. If I feel that it's right to try and save another person from danger because it's useful, then I should also feel that it's morally right to have five fingers, or to be a biped, or to have blond hair if I'm Scandinavian.

The difference is that an evolved desire is far more likely to compel us into action than philosophising. There's no benefit in feeling that blonde hair is superior, which is why it's not an instinctive response - but there is a benefit in feeling that altruism is superior, hence why it evolved. An abstract feeling that altruism is good bolsters the society in which it occurs, so there's a selection pressure for it. But an abstract feeling that six fingers is good doesn't confer any benefit - it's not a behaviour that can be changed by our desires.

Of course there is benefit in pointing out foolishness. There is no benefit in condemning immorality unless morality is a real thing. If I want to rob someone and you tell me I shouldn't, I'll ask why, and you know you can't give me an answer. I don't want to rob society, just this one man. You might say but if everyone did that society would fall apart. Two obvious responses: 1) The animal world does that, and it does not fall apart because of it. 2) If every human did that, I'd still be a fool not to do it myself.* So from the naturalistic view, either way the fool is the honest, moral man.

* From the novel Catch-22, and from game theory, specifically the prisoner's dilemma. "The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on..."

I'm attempting to explain the evolutionary origins of morality, not justify it. If you truly feel that robbing someone is not immoral, do you really think any philosophy on the nature of morality is going to change that? Indeed, do your beliefs and actions have any bearing on the nature of morality? Even if you rob someone without qualm, that's not going automatically prove me wrong - I could still be completely correct.

Well that's a decent start for an Intelligent Design argument, anyway.

*shudder* Don't let the DI find out!

God may not allow you to be murdered unless He knows you'll be going to the place where you are already going. And if He knows where you are ultimately going, it doesn't matter much when you go.

Then kill yourself. Your destination is already set in stone - and if it's not, you won't succeed - so why not skip the wait and meet your maker?

Other spiritual views don't much disagree with me on this point, and at least not to the extent that your view disagrees with almost all spiritual views.

Which isn't my problem: the natural view is, as far as I can tell, the only view that has any meat to it. Even if the spiritual view has greater explanatory power, it's still utterly baseless. That's why I pointed out the existence of other spiritual views - it's all well and good extolling the virtues of your beliefs based on their spiritual nature, but logically those virtues apply to other spiritual views too. The Buddhist view of the Cosmos, for instance, is no more or less valid than your own, as far as I can tell.

In other words, flinging the word 'spiritual' is a more generalised form of the God of the Gaps: it's a catch-all word to 'explain' what we don't yet understand. What's the nature of the mind? Spiritual. What's the origin of the universe? Spiritual. What causes lightening? Spirits. It's the natural view that is dispelling this, which is why I believe it - it works.

All right, but by the same token, the fact that we've learned a lot is no reason to exclude God. And anyway, you haven't really explained lightning until you've fully explained all that is necessary for lightning, which ultimately would involve explaining the four fundamental forces (or at least two or three of them, I think).

We can explain how electricity works without having to know the fundaments of reality: a knowledge of electrons is sufficient. Since the exact details of electrons (whether they're point or composite particles, say) doesn't change how they operate, such details are irrelevant to the explanation of electricity. Thus, we don't need to know everything about electrons in order to use them in a complete explanation of lightening. In fact, the only reason you'd need them is if you were doing extremely high energy physics, by which point a bit of static charge is the least of your worries

But you're the physicalist. You're the one who should be insisting that physical human brains must interpret the same physical things the same way. Anyway, give someone a lot of salt in their tea or on their sweet dessert. Their reaction will tell you it tastes the same to them as it does to you.

Sure, but their subjective experiences may be completely different; it's the old "Is your green my green?" question. And no, I don't have to insist we interpret things the same, quite the opposite in fact: since I'm asserting that all subjective experience is ultimately based in the brain and its extremities, it stands to reason that variations in between two brains will lead to variations in experiences. What I experience when I taste salt may be entirely different to what you experience, since our brains are ultimately different. The end result is the same, but the exact sensation is (probably) not.

I have at least a vague idea of what I mean by "true"; I honestly have no idea what you mean by "true". Your definition seems to be arbitrary. I gather you feel that human reason and indivisible particles are true. But humanity has traditionally meant by true something different, that something is actually true, not merely that we feel that way about it, as I suspect you feel about reason and particles.

As we discussed in another thread, it's somewhat futile to wonder what other peoples understood by the word 'true': it's a singularly English word. Our understanding of the word 'truth' is inextricably linked to our culture and background. There is no 'traditional' understanding, beyond vague analogies.

As above, I'm confused as to how you determine what's fundamentally real and what's an arbitrary construct. You say reason is real, but conscience is not. Particles are real, but things comprised of particles are not. It sort of seems you pick and choose what things are real to suit your worldview. To my thinking, if quarks or strings or whatever are real, then so is the chair which they form.

Society isn't a human just because it's made up of humans, nor is it 'real' because it's made up of real things. It's a handy human idealism, a simplification of a more complex reality. The same is true of the chair. The atoms that make it are what's 'really' real (or whatever the base unit of reality is), not the second order structures.

 

[Wiccan_Child]

Actually, people who help children in danger -- children not their own -- are not more likely to have their own children survive to adulthood. Why would they? Are you hoping for reciprocity from others if your children are in danger? Why would you get it? Sorry, but this example has no natural selection advantage. That's not to say that some morals don't have an evolutionary advantage, but you just demonstrated that not all of them do.

It would occur in everyone, hence, reciprocity.

Not necessarily. The roots of the morality of equality to gays, blacks, and women are inherent in the Declaration of Independence. And how was that couched, in terms of culture and ancestry? NO! It was a universal declaration based on belief in God. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

There is the basic statement that eventually nullified all those other beliefs about freedoms, intellectual inferiority, hysteria, etc. And that statement is based in religion, not culture or ancestry.

You're mistaken if you think all civil rights movements exist solely because of the Declaration of Independence.

Sure there is! Think about it. By berating a dead man for doing something stupid, then it lessens the chance that any of the listeners are going to do the same stupid thing. Wiccan_Child, we need to have a talk about evolution and natural selection. Because so far, on 2 tries, you have gotten evolution exactly opposite of how it works.

Allegedly. Your accusations would have more weight if you actually read my post: I was saying exactly what you accused me of ignoring, namely, that berating a dead man only benefits the living.

Evolution does not work by societies. The level of selection is the individual, not the group. The problem with murder, from an evolutionary standpoint, is that it removes possibly good alleles from the gene pool. The murdered have no chance to have further offspring. However, the society that goes in for retribution has a problem: the relatives of the victim kill the murderer, then the relatives of the murderer kill his killers, then the relatives of the newly killed kill their killers, and so on. You have a Hatfield-McCoy type feud in which alleles are wiped out right and left.

Which is why we evolved to abhor murder, nipping the problem in the bud. The level of selection is not restricted to the individual - the basic unit of evolution is the gene, which can confer benefits to structures of a higher order than the individual (the family, the party, the society, etc)

Sorry, but it's not natural selection in the way you state it. The problem is that humans evolved in small social groups where individuals are interdependent. Social cooperation depends on trust. A murder is, by definition, a selfish act for the murderer. The murderer gains at the expense of someone else in the group. The basic trust and cooperation necessary for individual survival is sundered. Dislike of murder is a manifestation of our evolved module for detecting cheating.

In other words, a trait selected for above the level of the individual.

Actually 3.5 billion years of design by natural selection. So? That does not negate that the conscious mind is also capable of communicating with God.

Irrelevant - we were discussing the origin of conciousness, not whether the mind can communicate with God.

But the policies are not moral for the small group. Wiccan_Child, when you look at our behaviors and decide whether they are moral with regard to evolution, you have to set them in the time and environment we evolved in. The entrepreneur in the example is not moral.

Irrelevant - we were discussing whether one can admire a backstabber, not trying to deduce moral truths using evolutionary theory.

Here you are using sampling bias. What's more, you are violating the Second Commandment. You are saying absolutey what God will do. But you don't know what God will do. "Judgement is mine, says the Lord." But you are saying what that judgement is, so you are taking the Lord's name in vain.

Irrelevant - we were discussing Chesterton's beliefs on the afterlife, not yours. I am not espousing these beliefs, he is.

We've already established that, due to what we know of quantum mechanics, God can't do the latter. The future is open and cannot be known with certainty by anyone, including God.

So, yes, God can manipulate atoms, molecules, rocks, planets. But you are missing a third alternative: God sustains the universe. Christians believe that every physical and chemical process does absolutely depend on the will of God. God stops willing it, and gravity stops working. God stops willing it each and every time, and hydrogen does not burn in oxygen.

That's not a third option, that's a specification of the first: God interacts at the atomic level. That his interaction is 'willing things to work' is just a detail.

That's fine. But that threatens Christianity if and only if Christianity used god-of-the-gaps. Discard god-of-the-gaps, and it doesn't matter how much science figures out. All science is doing is telling us the physical/material processes God uses.

Irrelevant - we were discussing the nature of the march of science, not how the God of the Gaps argument pertains to Christianity.

LOL! We've been "tantalizingly close" for 50 years. Better not hold your breath.

Quite.

god-of-the-gaps is not Biblical and not Christian. So forget attacking it by "science". Instead the death blow is given by scripture and theology: God created a complete universe. Making God fill the "gap" between 2 members of the universe reduces God to a creature of the universe. And that is just not acceptable.

To you. There are other Christians (and Muslims, etc) in this world who profess the 'God of the Gaps' argument, and it is to those our discussion pertained.

"extant beings" are simply statements about the existence and "jobs" of those beings. As such, the extant beings are true or not: that is, they exist or not.

Yes, we've covered all that.

True. But it equally does not prove a materialist worldview.

I never said it did.

 

[Wiccan_Child]

Your original claim was: "As an atheist, I don't really care how people interpret the Bible, but it's an interesting psychology nonetheless." as tho interpreting the Bible were somehow different from interpreting any other book and was based only on psychology.

Then you misunderstood what I was trying to get across.

And if He had poofed such a book to the Hebrews around 1500 BC, would they have kept the book? NO! It would have been meaningless to them. They would have thrown it away. Remember, communicating with people means using concepts and language they understand. Try explaining television to a 5 year old. Or even answering the question "why is the sky blue?" And no human would have saved the book to be "unearthed" because it was gibberish. They would have used the pages for tinder to help light their cookfires. For people to save a book, it has to be understandable to them.

Unless God himself intervened, preventing it being set on fire. Or charged them with preserving it throughout the ages. The point is God could have used his omnipotence to ensure such a book lasted the ages.

Hmm. Didn't He in the Exodus? Didn't He in the Resurrection? He continues to do so in personal experience with individuals. How many more times do you want Him to make it "plain"? Look, just because you don't have personal experience and you don't believe the times He did make it "plain" in history, don't go blaming God.

Why not? He's the one remaining obstinately hidden. If he wants me to believe, he knows how to get my attention.

What's the property? The property is that tachyons can only travel at speeds faster than light. So how do we detect such a particle? Sight? Yeah, right. You should have looked up tachyons before you made these statements.

Why? I'm a particle physicist myself, I'm well aware what a tachyon is. That a tachyon travels faster than the speed of light doesn't mean we can't see it, any more than a supersonic jet can't be heard. Relativity notwithstanding, of course.

Really? You know a way to get around Methodological Materialism? Please, publish and get ready to accept your Nobel. You are saying this out of ignorance of how science works.

My point is that not detecting something yet is no proof that we will never detect it. For all we know, the Mormons could be right and God could have a physical body somewhere - thus rendering him susceptible to the scientific method.

No, it's not "on the right lines". IDers are testing a mechanism by which God works: direct manufacture. It's sneaking God in by the back door.

However, I'd like to see why you think the argument is fallacious. After all, you are proposing evidence for God because "that's the only explanation for X". Look at your hypothetical book on fusion. So why do you think the general argument is "fallacious"?

Because evolution is capable of creating an irreducibly complex system. Thus, ID is fallacious for inferring the falsehood of evolution with such systems.

Strawman about the Pope. Remember, God still has a choice whether to cure or not. You are making the Pope into God.

But, considering the overwhelming evidence that intercessory prayer has an effect, why aren't you already "thinking twice"? Why don't you consider it "damn good evidence of God"? I know why the researchers don't -- because they understand science a lot better than you do.

It would help if you actually read my posts.
First, I wasn't attempting to refute an argument, so just what was I building a strawman of?
Second, there's a key word you miss: if. I was positing a hypothetical, a possible scenario which would constitute "damn good evidence for God". Did you really think I thought such a thing was actually going on?
Third, you're missing the whole point of the hypothetical: evidence for God, not evidence for your understanding of the Christian God. Big difference. Obviously miracles and healing in your mythology work different than in this hypothetical mythology, that's the whole point.
Fourth, it should be obvious why I'm not "thinking twice": I do not agree that there is evidence that intercessory prayer works, neither by supernatural (God directly healing) nor natural means (the Placebo/Hawthorne effect).

Denial without reason or evidence. Very convincing.

What can I say, your brisk and patronising posts don't exactly engender a thorough response.

Commented on but the "address" failed for a number of reasons. I'll go into them if you wish.

Pass.

 

[Chesterton]

If every individual helps every child, then my children will also benefit from this pooled resource. When we talk about how instincts evolved, you have to remember they evolve in the entire species: when this desire grows, everyone experiences it. There's no evolutionary benefit in helping other children unless my children receive the same benefit.

Unless many organisms acquire this altruistic instinct at once, the instinct cannot survive because the individual organism acting upon this instinct will not survive to pass it on, right? So how can a trait evolve in an entire species at once?

The difference is that an evolved desire is far more likely to compel us into action than philosophising. There's no benefit in feeling that blonde hair is superior, which is why it's not an instinctive response - but there is a benefit in feeling that altruism is superior, hence why it evolved. An abstract feeling that altruism is good bolsters the society in which it occurs, so there's a selection pressure for it. But an abstract feeling that six fingers is good doesn't confer any benefit - it's not a behaviour that can be changed by our desires.

But then neither is any feeling a behavior. Either mental feelings themselves are behaviors, or else we separately mentally feel things about behaviors. I believe the latter. If you look up "behavior" at Wiki, you'll see it defined as response to stimuli. But feelings about behavior clearly cannot be purely responses to stimuli, because they are actually moral value judgments about the appropriateness of responses to stimuli. Behavior can be response to stimuli, but feelings about behavior are, obviously, about behavior itself. So they must be something other than mere behavior.

I disagree that the moral "instinct" can be called a "desire". Morality is famous for conflicting with desires. Desires are the players, morality is the referee. If you say the moral instinct is just one of many desires, then that precludes the idea that morality could have come to be a dominant desire through evolution.

Morality is a feeling about feelings. Like reason, it is "about" something else. It's removed from nature. Nothing natural is "about" anything.

I'm attempting to explain the evolutionary origins of morality, not justify it. If you truly feel that robbing someone is not immoral, do you really think any philosophy on the nature of morality is going to change that? Indeed, do your beliefs and actions have any bearing on the nature of morality? Even if you rob someone without qualm, that's not going automatically prove me wrong - I could still be completely correct.

Your point seems to be that morality is useful, therefore it would be naturally selected for. My point was that morality is not useful; it doesn't work. At least not until we can philosophize about it, but philosophy comes much later than morality, at least according to those who think morality has its roots in altruistic bacteria.

Then kill yourself. Your destination is already set in stone - and if it's not, you won't succeed - so why not skip the wait and meet your maker?

I'd sometimes like to commit suicide, if nothing else out of curiousity, but skipping the wait is against the rules. Besides it's bad style, like an actor storming off the stage before his parts done due to a tantrum or something. It's immature. (Double entendre intended by the word "immature": childish, and not fully developed to the extent of possible or intended development. )

Which isn't my problem: the natural view is, as far as I can tell, the only view that has any meat to it. Even if the spiritual view has greater explanatory power, it's still utterly baseless. That's why I pointed out the existence of other spiritual views - it's all well and good extolling the virtues of your beliefs based on their spiritual nature, but logically those virtues apply to other spiritual views too. The Buddhist view of the Cosmos, for instance, is no more or less valid than your own, as far as I can tell.

In other words, flinging the word 'spiritual' is a more generalised form of the God of the Gaps: it's a catch-all word to 'explain' what we don't yet understand. What's the nature of the mind? Spiritual. What's the origin of the universe? Spiritual. What causes lightening? Spirits. It's the natural view that is dispelling this, which is why I believe it - it works.

You say the spiritual view is baseless, and the natural view "works", but you can't even tell me what the natural view says, can you? It doesn't say anything. Science can't even tell me whether a chair exists. We've had this cutting-edge thing called quantum mechanics for about 100 years and the best and brightest still don't have a clue how to interpret it. It's a great irony that no materialist knows what material is, and no naturalist knows what nature is or what it means. I see no meat in the natural view.

We can explain how electricity works without having to know the fundaments of reality: a knowledge of electrons is sufficient. Since the exact details of electrons (whether they're point or composite particles, say) doesn't change how they operate, such details are irrelevant to the explanation of electricity. Thus, we don't need to know everything about electrons in order to use them in a complete explanation of lightening. In fact, the only reason you'd need them is if you were doing extremely high energy physics, by which point a bit of static charge is the least of your worries

That seems an unscientific thing to say. Like a man saying "I relaxed my grip on a ball in my hand, and the ball moved to the ground. Why did it move to the ground? Because I relaxed my grip. Nothing more to it, case closed."

Sure, but their subjective experiences may be completely different; it's the old "Is your green my green?" question. And no, I don't have to insist we interpret things the same, quite the opposite in fact: since I'm asserting that all subjective experience is ultimately based in the brain and its extremities, it stands to reason that variations in between two brains will lead to variations in experiences. What I experience when I taste salt may be entirely different to what you experience, since our brains are ultimately different. The end result is the same, but the exact sensation is (probably) not.

But you think the brain is a purely physical machine, don't you? How could you run one kind of physical input into two versions of the same physical machine and get two different outputs?

As we discussed in another thread, it's somewhat futile to wonder what other peoples understood by the word 'true': it's a singularly English word. Our understanding of the word 'truth' is inextricably linked to our culture and background. There is no 'traditional' understanding, beyond vague analogies.

You sound like Pilate. Check the appendix to the Lewis book I referenced.

Society isn't a human just because it's made up of humans, nor is it 'real' because it's made up of real things. It's a handy human idealism, a simplification of a more complex reality. The same is true of the chair. The atoms that make it are what's 'really' real (or whatever the base unit of reality is), not the second order structures.

I didn't say a chair is an atom because it's made of atoms. What if string theory turned out to be true? Will you then say the strings are real but the atoms aren't, since atoms are arrangements of strings? If I build a universe with [real base units, whatever they are] then the universe is real. An arrangement of real things is not in any sense unreal simply because it's an arrangement.

 

[snackster29]

if your going to bring up a subject at least understand what your talking about. the uncertainty principle is not because of our limitations to accurately measure particles,it is a fundamental law of nature which is portrayed beautifully when anyone brings up absolute zero. its impossible for atoms to ever completely stop vibrating or else we would be aware of its velocity and location

 

[Wiccan_Child]

if your going to bring up a subject at least understand what your talking about.

Duely noted.

the uncertainty principle is not because of our limitations to accurately measure particles,

I never said it was, and I've corrected many people here who think it is.

it is a fundamental law of nature which is portrayed beautifully when anyone brings up absolute zero. its impossible for atoms to ever completely stop vibrating or else we would be aware of its velocity and location

Eh, not exactly. Absolute zero is forbidden because there is a fundamental quantum of energy you cannot extract, the so-called 'zero-point energy'. An atom doesn't vibrate, so much as it experiences a spacial 'blur' of its wavefunction.

 

[snackster29]

Well that is one view on it. But an atom definitely vibrates which why there is thermal energy or heat. The uncertainty principle was an unanticipated equation which solved absolute zero and why it is virtually impossible

 

[Wiccan_Child]

Well that is one view on it. But an atom definitely vibrates which why there is thermal energy or heat. The uncertainty principle was an unanticipated equation which solved absolute zero and why it is virtually impossible

I have literally no idea what you're talking about. The uncertainty principle is a consequence of the premises of quantum mechanics. Absolute zero isn't something to be 'solved', it's a thermodynamic concept.