Sciences vs. Religion

[AuntShecky]

Fair enough, but without our understanding of how nature works, provided by science, we could not make anything to our purpose from nature. Belief in God can not make a rocking chair, much less a rocket ship.

How about an ark? At least that's the story. Russell Crowe got the specs directly from the Boss upstairs.Oh, but I kid.

I take naturalism to be the thought that there is no such person as God, or anything like God. Naturalism is stronger than atheism: you can be an atheist without rising to the full heights (sinking to the lowest depth?) of naturalism; but you can't be a naturalist without being an atheist.

Admitting that this is the first I've heard of Plantinga, I think I'm gonna have to disagree with the notion that "you can't be a naturalist without being an atheist."

The aforementioned Teilhard was a naturalist as well as a paleonthologist, definitely not an atheist.

John J. Audobon was an ornithologist, author, artist, and non-atheist.Here are a couple of Audobon's statements:

There is but one kind of love; God is love, and all his creatures derive theirs from his; only it is modified by the different degrees of intelligence in different beings and creatures."

I pointed out to [a young artist] that nature is the great study for the artist, and assured him that the reason why my works pleased him was because they are all exact copies of the works of God, — who is the great Architect and perfect Artist; and impressed on his mind this fact, that '''nature indifferently copied is far superior to the best idealities.'''

And this one is sweet, as well as gently witty:

''Thank God it has rained all day.''' I say thank God, though rain is no rarity, because it is the duty of every man to be thankful for whatever happens by the will of the Omnipotent Creator; yet it was not so agreeable to any of my party as a fine day would have been.

The founder of the Sierra Club, John Muir(1838-1914) was perhaps one of our country's best-known naturalists. Having grown up in a strict Scottish-Protestant family, he dutifully memorized Bible verses, but by late in life, his beflief in a "conventional" Creator waned. According to one of the on-line biographies, He said "I never truly abandoned creeds. . .they went away on their own accord." Yet, he still retained enough belief to give credit where credit was due (to You-Know-Who) and blamed the blameworthy (us.):

“God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.”

If Muir was sincere with that statement--and there's no reason to believe that he wasn't-- then I would say that he was only half-way out of the atheist closet.

So you can't be a naturalist without being atheist? Well, maybe there are at least two and a half who contradict that notion.

[The Atheist]

[QUOTE=YesNo;1257037]Not all atheists are naturalists, but all naturalists are atheists as he defines the term on the first page of the Preface:[/qQUOTE]

Bingo.

Indeed, with respect to certain gods, or certain god-like substitutes, such as many worlds, I would be an atheist as well.

All believers of every kind are atheist in the case of most gods. Christians are entirely atheistic on Egyptian, Greek & Norse gods, among others.

It's always the last one that causes the trouble.

[Iain Sparrow]

Did Plantinga fail to address how a great many believers take Genesis literary and argue that God created man from dirt, woman from man's rib, and that the Earth was created 6000 years ago (discerned by tracing time from the point the Bible was written back through history)? Because science is very much in conflict with THAT particular religious belief. Obviously, I stated earlier that many Christians do believe in evolution and take Genesis only to be allegory; so there the conflict goes away. Really, I don't have much to say about Plantinga's discussion of guided VS unguided evolution except to point out that there's not a stitch of evidence that evolution is "guided" in any way. Mutations themselves are random, and 99% of all species every alive have gone extinct, and evolution has produced so many useless by-products that you'd have to ask why in the world any deity would "guide" it in those directions to begin with (ERVs, anyone? Bet Plantinga doesn't address those).

Finally, I run across somebody on a forum who understands the nature of Evolution.

You are correct, metaphorically speaking... evolution has no central nervous system; it does not think or calculate possibilities, it has no pity or conscience, it cares not whether a living thing survives or bites the dust. In fact evolution ends in extinction, every single time. Furthermore, on the surface of it, it appears that life on Earth is incredibly diverse, but in fact evolution operates within a narrow spectrum of options.

[MorpheusSandman]

I understand evolution much less than a few other posters on this forum who have written about it at length (OrphanPip is one), and even someone like an actual evolutionary biologist I know on another forum (IMDb) named RedRuth, but thanks for the compliment.

[Pendragon]

Further, what's the evidence that God provided these things as opposed to just the matter that was created by a random fluctuation in a quantum field?

Where is the evidence it was created by a random fluctuation in a quantum field? Using chance to explain the complexity of the universe to me sounds a little off. Whenever people claim things like ESP, clairvoyance, out of body, remote viewing (none of which I have the slightest use for and consider a waste of the resources devoted to research them!) chance is the first thing you rule out. If it is to be eliminated to prove a person naming cards he or she cannot see, why should it be accepted to explain how the universe began? The staggering number of factors that have to be positive for two brown eyed people to produce a blue eyed girl alone makes chance what my old Math Professor called "a hellacious number."

Pen, you really should stop taking this so personally. This is a thread about Science VS Religion, so you should expect there would be atheists who would challenge your beliefs and reasons for them.

Touche. However, you have talked about superstitions, irrationality, and ignorance in people who think God had anything to do with the creation process. I believe He did. You are aware that this is my standpoint. A generalized disparaging comment that hits a personal viewpoint then becomes personal. If I made a general remark that atheists were a blasphemous lot bound for hell on the fast track (I'm not saying that by the way, it isn't my place to judge any person) you being an atheist could consider that an attack on your belief system, and knowing that I know how you believe, might just feel like a personal attack.

And as I said, it is pointless to argue when neither accepts the possibility of the other actually being correct, or only one of the two in the discussion will grant the other the possibility of being correct.

You see with me, chance is a tricky thing. Given infinite time and infinite diversity there has to come a chance (even in one in a gazillion) that allows for a specific occurrence to take place. I submit that everything could have happened by chance. The ratio would for me be too large to type here.

Yet you will not give that same scenario to God, because bad things happen to good people.

Just listen a moment:

I started preaching when I was 19 and was fully ordained in my early twenties. I was a traveling Evangelist, which doesn't pay the bills, so I held down a full time job in a cabinet factory. I have a wife, and at one time we had three kid under the age of five at home. I worked very hard, I preached everywhere I could get a pulpit, and no distance was too much even though I had to drive at my own expense.

I was in a car crash in '92 which badly injured my neck and back. The high paying job I had at the factory was discontinued and I had a considerable cut in salary, which meant my wife had to work and we had three small kids. ] worked days and she worked nights which was bad for our relationship.

Then my genetic bomb went off and my bipolar put me in a mental hospital five times in one year. I became completely disabled due to the unreliability of when an attack could strike. It made me unemployable. I went back to school and studied computer programing which I hoped would allow me to work from home. No. It didn't. I was excommunicated from the churches where my support base was.

If anyone has a right to say there is no God I qualify. But I still believe, I will not quit. I write a blog for no pay, I hold services in my home or other people's homes, I make the best of what life gives me. But I couldn't make it without God.

Have I ever considered just quitting and saying something like: "I gave you all I had, God. I traveled and preached, I lead people to you, I prayed for people, and I promised to stand on your word. And how do I get repaid? You took everything from me, leaving me damaged goods. I'm done." Yes. But I cannot and will not.

Let me ask you. If you woke up tomorrow and your whole world had crashed, science cast you out as crazy, and everything you believed was turned upside down to the point that you began to doubt if science was correct about anything could you still hang on? With your support base destroyed, with people mocking your ideas when they used to pack places out to here you expound, could you continue to keep going?

Just think about it, mon ami.

God Bless

Pendragon

[MorpheusSandman]

Where is the evidence it was created by a random fluctuation in a quantum field? Using chance to explain the complexity of the universe to me sounds a little off. Whenever people claim things like ESP, clairvoyance, out of body, remote viewing... chance is the first thing you rule out.

A good laymen's introduction to the evidence for how quantum fields can create universe is in Lawrence Krauss's A Universe from Nothing. Given what we know of how quantum fields works, universes seem an inevitable product of them. Also, it's not just about chance but about chance combined with a number of trials. This should not be so alien/foreign since it's how evolution itself works: random mutations and natural selection. In the case of universe the randomness is what happens at the quantum level while the natural selection is what happens via whatever mathematical laws they bring about. The analogy with things like ESP et al. is a little off; firstly, life exists on a much higher level of organization than do quantum reality. To explain the difference, imagine the difference between rolling one die and rolling 1,000,000 dice simultaneously; in the former, while the "average" may be 3.5, the actual roll could just as likely be 3.5x smaller (a 1) or almost 60% larger (a 6). On the other hand, it would be extremely unlikely for the "average" of the 1,000,000 dice to come out at either extreme, and will be much closer to the 3.5 average. This is what life is like on OUR level, though even more extreme. We are the product of randomness tending towards a mean because of the huge aggregation/organization of particles.

That said, one doesn't really "rule out" chance when it comes to ESPs, but rather chance is the assumed null hypothesis and only if someone displays abilities that break significantly away from the average would someone consider that they had legitimate abilities. Not surprisingly, nobody has ever demonstrated this in any controlled experimental setting.

However, you have talked about superstitions, irrationality, and ignorance in people who think God had anything to do with the creation process.

Actually, I think all humans are irrational and ignorant to varying degrees, atheist or not. In fact, most atheists I know aren't really any more rational than theism because very often their rejection of religion has nothing to do with rationality. To me, rationality is something that one must really work at to refine because brains are innately irrational, and much of it involves fighting most every natural instinct/intuition we have. This goes far beyond the issue of belief or disbelief in Gods. Superstitions would merely be one form of irrationality and that certainly isn't limited to religion or Gods. Similarly, everyone is ignorant of something, it's only a question of how much our ignorance on any subject is affecting our beliefs about that subject. It just seems to me that God too frequently seems to be the God of the gaps for people, the thing we use to explain our ignorances away. I remember once watching a discussion between Richard Dawkins and some Cardinal; the Cardinal was a scientist himself and said that his conception of God was not of one we should use of explaining gaps in our knowledge, but a God of excess and gratuity, of going above and beyond what we needed to explain or know or even to live. You may try to find/watch the video yourself, as it was very civil and enlightening.

Just listen a moment:

...

Let me ask you. If you woke up tomorrow and your whole world had crashed, science cast you out a crazy, and everything you believed was turned upside down to the point that you began to doubt if science was correct about anything could you still hang on? With your support base destroyed, with people mocking your ideas when they used to pack places out to here you expound, could you continue to keep going?

Our stories our not terribly dissimilar, though our ultimate conclusions are. I was raised in a very devout Christian home and believed strongly until I came to my teens and found myself debilitated by chronic migraines, which slowly took everything in my away, from school to friends to sports to literature etc. and I found myself completely alone, isolated, and spending most of my days in excruciating pain. Simultaneously, I started having doubts about what I'd been told to believe all my life, which lead me to really start studying (if informally) philosophy, epistemology; I especially wanted to know what the RIGHT way was to reason and form beliefs, because surely there had to be something better than just strongly believing what you were told to believe.

My apostasy was a long and painful one, because my physical pain was very much echoed by the mental pain of what I felt to be my disillusionment, of, to use a phrase I quoted from Yeats in another thread, raving into the desolation of reality. The more I studied, the more I debated (with myself and others), the less I could find any substantial basis for my old faith, and while I continue to read the works of theologians periodically, to engage in the latest ideas and reasons put forth from admittedly very fine thinkers like Plantinga and Craig, I come back to the rationalism that I learned mostly through Lesswrong.com as being the only thing that has the consistency I think is necessary for truths.

As for your hypothetical, I have no idea how to imagine that scenario as I am not really "in" the world of science, I merely try to learn from the best of current scientific knowledge, so I'm already an outsider of sorts. I don't set my beliefs on any one scientific theory, thought, or explanations, and if the winds of evidence are blowing in another direction, I let myself be a leaf that is blown with it. This is one of the key virtues of rationalism, that one does not hang onto beliefs that seem to be unlikely in the face of new evidence, so as long as one has such a perspective it's hard to imagine a scenario where I'd be "cast out as crazy" or my whole world would be "turned upside down." When you make truth your God, and have a good understanding of rationalism that allows your mind to accept whatever at the time seems most likely the case, such upsettings can't happen. You can't turn to ruin a rationalist's mind any more than you can turn to ruin water. To quote Bruce Lee: "you put water into a cup it becomes the cup, you put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle; water can flow or it can crash; be water, my friend." I'll also add that, however strong and inflexible rocks seem, and however weak and flexible water may seem, water always wins in the end. Faith, to me, seems like rocks that can't help but we withered by change; while rationalism is like water that adapts to whatever changes come about.

[YesNo]

Did Plantinga fail to address how a great many believers take Genesis literary and argue that God created man from dirt, woman from man's rib, and that the Earth was created 6000 years ago (discerned by tracing time from the point the Bible was written back through history)? Because science is very much in conflict with THAT particular religious belief. Obviously, I stated earlier that many Christians do believe in evolution and take Genesis only to be allegory; so there the conflict goes away. Really, I don't have much to say about Plantinga's discussion of guided VS unguided evolution except to point out that there's not a stitch of evidence that evolution is "guided" in any way. Mutations themselves are random, and 99% of all species every alive have gone extinct, and evolution has produced so many useless by-products that you'd have to ask why in the world any deity would "guide" it in those directions to begin with (ERVs, anyone? Bet Plantinga doesn't address those).

There is not a "stitch of evidence" for the many worlds position you maintain, but that doesn't stop you from promoting it.

Regarding the distinction between guided and unguided evolution, Plantinga is simply doing what philosophers do. They make distinctions to help us see the issues better. What he is saying is something rather simple. A theistic position is not in opposition to evolution, but to unguided evolution.

He argues against Dawkins, Dennet and others who claim in their various ways that evolution is in opposition to theism. It isn't. What is in opposition is their individual version of unguided evolution.

[MorpheusSandman]

There is not a "stitch of evidence" for the many worlds position you maintain, but that doesn't stop you from promoting it.

Yes there is, but that doesn't stop you from repeating lies like this.

Regarding the distinction between guided and unguided evolution, Plantinga is simply doing what philosophers do.

Talking out his posterior? Yes, that's that most philosophers do, even the "great" ones.

He argues against Dawkins, Dennet and others who claim in their various ways that evolution is in opposition to theism. It isn't. What is in opposition is their individual version of unguided evolution.

It's worth pointing out the irony that you'll take a Christian apologist's views on evolution more seriously than an actual evolutionary biologist like Dawkins. Evolution is in direct opposition to a literal reading of Genesis, a view that many theists hold. I don't know why you keep trying to sweep this under the rug, or why in the world Plantinga would. At least you (or he) hasn't pulled a "No True Scotsman" fallacy yet. The random nature of evolutionary mutation is a key component in evolutionary theory; how in the world Plantinga gets from such randomness to "guided" you'll have to explain.

[YesNo]

Admitting that this is the first I've heard of Plantinga, I think I'm gonna have to disagree with the notion that "you can't be a naturalist without being an atheist."

The aforementioned Teilhard was a naturalist as well as a paleonthologist, definitely not an atheist.

I don't know much about Plantinga either. I did read the link you posted about Teilhard. He seemed to me to be a theist.

The word "naturalism" is used in a technical way by Plantinga. It is not the position of someone who studies nature, but someone who has a specific metaphysics which could be characterized as materialistic and atheistic where mind is a consequence of matter, but he does not include all atheists. For example, I suspect he does not include atheists who hold panpsychism as their philosophy of mind, but I'm not sure. It seems to me he needs to have all mental activity reduced to neurons firing.

Ultimately, he is setting that specific atheistic group ("naturalism") up for a fall by assuming their unguided evolution is true with their god of the gaps (Chance) to show that their own mental positions (reduced to neurons firing) cannot be trusted to be rational.

[MorpheusSandman]

Ultimately, he is setting that specific atheistic group ("naturalism") up for a fall by assuming their unguided evolution is true with their god of the gaps (Chance) to show that their own mental positions (reduced to neurons firing) cannot be trusted to be rational.

CS Lewis made this same arguments decades ago; I discussed it at length a long time ago on another forum (I'll try to find the link), but suffice it to say it's a position that was easily refutable then as it is now, though maybe Plantinga has some new spin on it. Lewis' formulations was founded on a misunderstanding of what "chance" means in a naturalistic philosophy as well as what rationality even is (namely, he assumed that rationalism was some absolute, a priori thing as opposed to a means of labeling the mental processes that exist based on the experiences they produce regardless of how they came to be).

[YesNo]

All believers of every kind are atheist in the case of most gods. Christians are entirely atheistic on Egyptian, Greek & Norse gods, among others.

It's always the last one that causes the trouble.

There are two problems with a general, anti-all-gods atheism.

The first is our ignorance. Naturalism (as Plantinga uses it) claims to know more than it does. Although the myths about Gods portray them as material objects of some sort, with the discovery of real fields in the 19th century, there is more to reality than material objects. With matter and energy being placed on two sides of an equal sign, matter itself is not intuitively obvious anymore.

It is best to hold one's fire and aim at specific Gods that one is culturally opposed to.

The second is when we reject one set of Gods we create others that we refuse to see as Gods. For example, anything that stimulates a feeling of self-righteousness is a God who grounds our ethics. I think Hitchens claimed that North Korea did not represent an atheistic state because it had converted itself into a sort of religion. To some extent I agree with him. What he misses is that it was atheism that generated that alternate religion once it became politically dominate. There will always be some God standing as long as there are self-righteous human beings.

The same thing would hold for the ideas such as many worlds. They are new Gods that come out of atheism. We are blinded from seeing these things as Gods because they lack the personal aspect of the old Gods. When these new Gods are no longer personal, they bring over all the bad features one objected to in the old religion (specifically, dogmatism and true believer self-righteous behavior) without any of the good features (specifically, grounding love relationships with others through worshiping the personal Gods).

Again, it is best to hold one's fire and aim at specific Gods that one is opposed to. The Gods I prefer taking aim at are those that can be described as de-personalized Gods. The others, out of humility, I leave alone.

[The Atheist]

There are two problems with a general, anti-all-gods atheism.

You're doing it again...

Atheism isn't anti-anything. Lack of belief is not anti, it isn't denial or rejection.

It is best to hold one's fire and aim at specific Gods that one is culturally opposed to.

Atheism isn't a cultural opposition either. Even if it were I can't for the life of me see why that would be anyway.

I don't believe in all gods equally. Makes no difference to me whether it's the Abrahamic god, Vishnu, Ganesha, Thor and Zeus. There is exactly the same amount and quality of evidence for all of them.

The same thing would hold for the ideas such as many worlds. They are new Gods that come out of atheism.

...and again....

Many worlds has nothing to do with atheism. Some atheists may believe it's true, but other atheists believe the world is run by lizards dressed as humans.

Neither proposition has any effect at all on the lack of belief in god/s.

As it happens, I'm agnostic on the multiverse.

[MorpheusSandman]

The same thing would hold for the ideas such as many worlds. They are new Gods that come out of atheism.

And I will continue to state, with every post in which you repeat lies like this, that you know nothing of quantum physics or MW and your ignorance on said subjects have been repeatedly pointed out by multiple posters and you've either ignored them or launched into non-sequitors. I don't know who you think you're fooling with this attempt. Either people already agree with you, in which their critical mind is turned off and you're preaching to the choir; or they don't agree with you, in which case you won't convince them; if they're in the middle and undecided, then I would truly love to hear from any that have been persuaded by your blatantly ignorant, lie-filled rhetoric.

[MorpheusSandman]

Many worlds has nothing to do with atheism....

As it happens, I'm agnostic on the multiverse.

However much MW has nothing to do with atheism it has far less to do with being a "God" or a "religion." MW is nothing more or less than the interpretation that the mathematical quantum physics models are real (meaning they're describing real objects) and complete (meaning that we don't add anything unprovable to the equations like the "collapse" of Copenhagen). How in the world YesNo turns THIS into an atheistic "God" or "religion" is beyond me. The fact that he's been repeatedly corrected on his mistakes and has either ignored them or replied with non-sequitors implies to me that he's now being intentionally dishonest. He's clearly made up his mind on such matters and is only concerned with reading people that agree with him rather than engaging with those that don't (hence him taking the word of a Christian apologist about evolution more seriously than actual evolutionary biologists).

[YesNo]

However much MW has nothing to do with atheism it has far less to do with being a "God" or a "religion." MW is nothing more or less than the interpretation that the mathematical quantum physics models are real (meaning they're describing real objects) and complete (meaning that we don't add anything unprovable to the equations like the "collapse" of Copenhagen). How in the world YesNo turns THIS into an atheistic "God" or "religion" is beyond me. The fact that he's been repeatedly corrected on his mistakes and has either ignored them or replied with non-sequitors implies to me that he's now being intentionally dishonest. He's clearly made up his mind on such matters and is only concerned with reading people that agree with him rather than engaging with those that don't (hence him taking the word of a Christian apologist about evolution more seriously than actual evolutionary biologists).

I was reading the chapter on miracles in Plantinga's Where the Conflict Really Lies that made me think that the structure of those "worlds" in the many worlds metaphysics is performing a function that a God would perform in other metaphysical systems: it is sustaining the many worlds reality. The reality that is being conserved, maintained, sustained is a deterministic universe.

Now I don't happen to believe in that metaphysics and quantum uncertainty confirms my disbelief in it. So I have no reason to believe in the existence of their God (those many worlds). Even the Schrodinger equation that many world proponents parade as "evidence" cannot be constructed within the many worlds metaphysics since they can't construct the coefficients for that equation. Because of that, they don't really have the Schrodinger equation to support their position. If they ever did get a functioning equation, they would have to copy the coefficients from other interpretations, such as Copenhagen, who can deal with the principle of uncertainty.

Without physical evidence and in light of the vacuous mathematics, I simply conclude the many worlds metaphysics is a delusion. That means I go beyond agnosticism with respect to those many worlds. I am an atheist with respect to them and I ground that atheism upon scientific theory and evidence.

Admittedly, these worlds are not a God in the sense that we normally view a God. The Gods that people normally follow in a traditional religious context are personal. That is, one can relate to those personal Gods and those Gods are free to relate back. If one could not, why bother worshiping them? That believers experience that their act of worship is effective is their evidence for the existence of those Gods. They don't need an equation to represent a de-personalized God, least of all an equation that they can't get to work.