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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (46179)	4/3/2002 4:34:23 PM
From: Neocon	Respond to of 82486

Interesting article. I do not want to address it cavalierly, so I think I will ponder awhile before responding........

To: Solon who wrote (46179)	4/3/2002 5:41:52 PM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

One thing that is wrong with the essay is that science is not the only way in which we know important things, either as individuals or as a society, and some of the things that have been incorporated under the rubric "science" more properly belong in a revived category of "natural history", for example, paleontology. We use philology, historiography, literary and art history, the system of law, journalism, and other things to find out things with greater or lesser confidence. But more than that, we use philosophy to consider the relations among these various modes of investigation, and to adjudicate their proper domains. In fact, the author was not properly speaking as a scientist, but as a philosopher, and his postulate of homogeneity was not properly derived from science, but philosophy. Now, philosophy may question whether science is capable of giving a complete account of all phenomena (in principle, of course). All science can do is claim that it can, but, in fact, that is a matter of faith. If science cannot give us a complete account of all phenomena, what are the sorts of questions which might be undecideable by science, given its protocols? Well, for example, science cannot address the issue of whether there is an implicit meaning or structure to the universe, since it assumes physical causation and randomness in the first place, and therefore would always beg the question. Now, the big question taken up by the essay is this: is contemporary science creating more or less confidence that it will be able to offer a comprehensive account for all phenomena, one that renders religion, or, more properly, theological speculation, superfluous? The author says yes, but it is a scrappy, defensive demonstration, and merely shows that science itself will not clearly support religion, which we already knew, because, after all, it is programmed not to. Actually, I have no confidence, reading his essay, that he even understands the point of contention, which is that science is beginning to push the limits of its assumptions as explanatory tools. Also, most religious people are not fundamentalist, and do not purely rely upon revelation for supposed truth, much less for a comprehensive morality, so I do not think he understands religion very well..........

To: Solon who wrote (46179)	4/4/2002 10:40:35 AM
From: cosmicforce	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 82486

My feeling was that the author can not be objective. He seems to 'hate' mysticism. I can understand not liking something organized and institutionalized but solitary mysticism allows us to bandage our understanding and proceed with incomplete knowledge (filling the cracks in God). It is only when our mysticism is in direct conflict with empirical data that I see any problem. Like any bureaucracy, institutionalized mysticism can end up being simply wrong in the face of the facts. We needn't look any further than the High Church's opinions on celestial mechanics for an example. Prior to the evidence provided by Galileo, the mystical meaning of having Earth at the center of God's creation was part of an overall edifice that promoted the coherence of the Church as the human embodiment of Gods will. Namely, the earth was the center of the universe and Rome was the center of God's will. Because of the institutional momentum, even when the mystic model is wrong, it is not changed. This produces a ridiculous output when viewed in the new framework. Personal mysticism, IMO, is essential for forming a coherent understanding of the whole. Unless you could possess all knowledge, one has to have a proxy to fill the gap in order to produce an output of some meaninful kind. In neural networks, unused inputs are tied to a logical '1'. The influence of the '1' is to provide a reference point. Since it doesn't change over time, it has little, if any effect, in calculations produced after initial 'training'. In human reality, there is no '1' to tie our logic to. Mysticism, IMO, fulfills this roll. This proxy is not sacrosanct and should be periodically 'process checked' to make sure that the assumptions are still valid against the new data. It should also be periodically changed to see if better forcasts come about.

To: Solon who wrote (46179)	4/4/2002 1:27:21 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

The author wants to show not only that science doesn't give us evidence for God (I think he does a good job of arguing this) but also that science shows us that God does not exist or at least that science has shown that the existence of God is highly unlikely. I think he fails in this attempt. It was a long article and with a much shorter response I might not address every point, but it seems to me that his main arguments that are used to show that science can and has demonstrated that the existence of God is highly unlikely are 1 - That science produces repeatable results which in the opinion of the author is not consistent with the idea of a God or at least not consistent with the idea of a God that involve himself in the universe because the involvement of God would skew the results. and 2 - That religious people can and have grabbed at different cosmological theories and said something like "see this is highly consistent with God because..." The rest of the article mostly seems to be an attempt to define science and religion, and an attempt to lay out the values of science as the author sees them. The second argument listed above isn't an effective argument for the idea that the existence of God is unlikely. It might be a good counter to the arguments that science shows how God is likely but countering the 2nd idea isn't the same thing as demonstrating that the first idea. is true. The 1st argument is at least more directly relevant to what the author said he wanted to prove, however it falls short. God could intervene in the lives of people without doing so routinely and I see no reason why God would focus these interventions of miracles on scientific experiments. It could be argued that the author effectively supports the idea that it is not unreasonable to believe that God does not exist, but he does not effectively support the idea that it is unreasonable to believe that God does exist, or that science demonstrates that it is unlikely that God exists. Tim