Naked Science Forum
General Discussion & Feedback => Just Chat! => Topic started by: acecharly on 21/03/2012 00:16:15
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Is there anything in religion anybody has heard that makes them think there may be something in what is being said here. My kids go to a youth club run by a church and knowing the vicar Ive have had many hours of deep conversation whereby we cross our scientific and religious viewpoints he im sure was trying to bring me into the fold where as i was listening to find some means of correlation two things he said spring to mind
God is the light..........now were all fans of that light stuff in here, possibly more about the speed of it and weather it has mass lol but none the less we can possibly assume he travels well fast!!!
and another
God made us inside a perfect sphere and lives on the outside and that he lives outside of time.........what a weird thing i said so everything has already happend then and he said yes id imagine this is true because if you were in this universe it isnt possible to have made it.
Any ideas are welcomed
cheers
Ace
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The only mention of "god" in a science forum should be in relation to mental disorders or psycotropic drugs
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I do not believe in any sort of God that acts on the universe or our world. That must take its chance with the way things work. I also do not believe in anything "supernatural" or an afterlife. Everything that happens is natural and when you are dead you are dead and the only thing that you can leave behind is your influence on others and the world. But I do believe in "Religion" and the need for everyone to realise that there are things beyond one's selfish desires and needs and humanities selfish desires and needs and also that it is important to come together as a community and recognise this and express their feelings and wishes for the future. The concept of "God" is a useful symbolic way of expressing this simply. I am therefore a practicing member of the Church of England (because this is the local brand and they were prepared to accept me as a member on the above terms) and attend an early morning said service every sunday and major sevices on festivals and support them with money.
Religion is therefor more to do with social groupings and science understanding how things work and they meet at the point where science tries to understand social groupings.
I feel quite strongly that without the development of the concept of religion, mankind would not have developed much beyond the hunter gatherer stage of evolution.
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Interesting, Are you required to recite the creed or at least make some acknowledgement when it is recited ?
I will be in Indinapolis in May staying in the home of a lay preacher (it is hard to avoid religion in America) I too will attend church but on the clear understanding just for the gospel music.
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If i did not make it clear in my opening statement I am not religious apart from the occasional wedding and christenings I believe that it was a cleverly designed instrument for controlling the masses.
I dont believe in any guy with a white beard. I think looking up at the sky at night how insignificant we as people are with the vastness of space and all its truly wonderous delights set out before our eyes. Why this being would be a person is beyond me.
Never the less id like to think that when we died it was not the end and so really all i was asking is can we find any common ground before we can truly dismiss any possibilty
When we look at Quantum Mechanics we can find major conflictions with the macro universe we observe is this not similar to this thread as we have many physicists at CERN looking for a god particle.
cheers
Ace
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I feel quite strongly that without the development of the concept of religion, mankind would not have developed much beyond the hunter gatherer stage of evolution.
My immediate thought was that it's more likely that religion held us back, but maybe the truth is somewhere in between. Gods were invented when early man shouted into caves and heard spirits shouting back out, so I suppose we should maybe think of religion as being a primitive kind of science - a genuine attempt to explain phenomena that were very real.
The trouble we have with religion is that it has always stepped beyond science in making claims that cannot be proven - the voices from the cave must belong to spirits because it's so obvious that we've decided it's true, whereas with science we would say that the voices from the cave might belong to spirits, but that we should always keep an open mind on the matter as there may be alternative explanations, and it's this approach that is most likely to lead to someone thinking up the idea of the echo.
The biggest problem with religion is where it involves assertions from people which must simply be believed because their origin is "holy". Laws made up by philosophers get tied to God and become fixed - because they supposedly come from God they cannot be wrong, so we end up getting stuck with them despite all their obvious imperfections as soon as the philosopher/prophet dies and is no longer in a position to correct them.
In answer to the O.P. - there is a lot of good wisdom tied up in religion, so it's easy for people to get sucked in and to think it's all good, but a huge amount of it is awful and damaging, and frequently plain immoral. Morality is the business of minimising harm, but many religious laws go directly against that. It would be far better if people realised that religions are nothing more than philosophy and that everything has to be tested on its own merits before being applied to the real world.
Let's steer away from the law side of things though and concentrate on the aspects of religion relating to what we are, where we came from and where we are destined to go to next. Is it possible to make a new soul from nothing? Is it possible for a soul to disappear from the universe and never exist again? The answer to both questions is almost certainly no - you can't make something out of nothing and you can't turn something into nothing. If you have a box of eggs which you can't detect, but you can detect an egg if you remove it from the box and you can detect the hole that's been left behind, then you may believe you've created both an egg and a hole out of nothing, but you aren't seeing the full picture. Put the egg back in the hole and you might imagine that you've turned them back into nothing, but again you'd be wrong. You existed before this life and you will continue to exist after it. Is it not obvious that if all the material of which you're made could be put back together long after your death such that it created a functioning human animal again (and with all the atoms in the same relative places as they were in the past) you would be forced to return to the world of the living?
Another thing you might want to consider is this: it is impossible for God to qualify as God - all he can possibly be is a natural creature who inhabits the same natural system as we do. The divide between natural and supernatural is a complete non-starter: if things can interact, they necessarily belong to the same system. If they didn't belong to the same system, they could have no mechanisms to allow any kind of interaction with each other. This means that at best, "God" would just be a very powerful alien being, and if he thinks he's a god, he's well and truly up himself.
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Syhprum. With regard to creeds etc I say them with meaning and quite happily. All words are symbols of meaning and most religious words are in fact metaphors for describing things that cannot easily be described at all. In context many religious works in the past were never intended to be factually precise at all. For example the two distinct and different creation myths in Genesis are ways of expressing human relations and the hierarchy of existence. Reading the standard creeds in this sense makes them quite acceptable and understandable in my context and approach to religion. To go into it in much detail would be rather a lot for these pages and not really relevant to them here are a few simple descriptions expressed in a conventional Christian context
God the father: The entire content and activity of the universe or multiverse.
God the son: Life as on this planet as represented for us by the life of a wise individual in the past
God the holy spirit: The evolutionary process that started with the father and lead to the son
Eternal life: life as it continues through generations not the life of any individual
Resurrection: the effects that the teaching of an individual can have after his death
Judgement: The results of all our actions will always affect everyone else for good and ill
Forgiveness of sins: To do nothing can often be as bad or worse than making a mistake
David I do not go along with a lot of your verbal mumbo jumbo. Let me clarify why I feel religion was so important in ensuring the development of mankind. Hunter gatherers rely on small mobile family groups co-operating to succeed. To create a technological society we need co-operation between very large groups of people. A common religion and worship creates this bigger bonding needed to achieve big projects that go well beyond the lives of individuals
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All words are symbols of meaning and most religious words are in fact metaphors for describing things that cannot easily be described at all. In context many religious works in the past were never intended to be factually precise at all.
Obviously, you have not been hanging-out with too many lay preachers in Indianapolis [:)]
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We all need to believe in something. Some believe in science, other believe in God. If it's honest, coming from your own feelings and needs of/for a purpose and if it won't harm your neighbor? Science brings with it both good and bad and the truth is that whether it is good or bad often depends on the judgment of history. If we want to believe that to be a scientist is any better than being a true believer in God then we need moral standards for their inventiveness, but I don't see that.
A man or woman that believe in a personal God though, often have just that. But you need to be a individual, believing in it personally from your heart to earn my respect. I give very little for those organized religions though, that more often than not only seem to care for one country/belief/etc at a time, deeming all differing to be 'evil'. Good exist as do Evil, it may be that it is us that created those ideas, but they exist for us. And most of us know the difference. I've meet good religious people, and I've meet good non-religious people too.
But what you get encompassing the good ideas of a religion, in your own personal way, can make a very efficient bulwark against moral corruption.
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Is there anything in religion anybody has heard that makes them think there may be something in what is being said here. ...
There is something called the Multiverse theorem. It means that different areas of the universe has different physical constant, or it could mean that there are multiple universes. That can be used to form the basis of the Anthropic Principle. It's not to much of a leap to a God creating the universe. See
An obstacle to creating a universe in the laboratory, by Alan H. Guth and Edward Farhi
See http://home.comcast.net/~peter.m.brown/Guth_Farhi.pdf
The authors concluded that it is not yet known if one can be created. The following may give you a good idea as to how this plays out. I might not understand it all 100% but what I do know of it is that, if true, it doesn't take an all powerful being to create a new universe.
Best wishes
Pete
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The only common ground here is the letters "I" and "N" and "E". Speaking from a non intellectual point of view that is......... :P
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The only mention of "god" in a science forum should be in relation to mental disorders or psycotropic drugs
I wasn't aware hatI hjad a mental disorder. But if I did I probably wouldn't know it. lol
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David I do not go along with a lot of your verbal mumbo jumbo.
How do you know? You haven't seen any.
Let me clarify why I feel religion was so important in ensuring the development of mankind. Hunter gatherers rely on small mobile family groups co-operating to succeed. To create a technological society we need co-operation between very large groups of people. A common religion and worship creates this bigger bonding needed to achieve big projects that go well beyond the lives of individuals
If you look at just about any hunter-gather society, you'll find them drowning in religion - it was never lack of religion that prevented the birth of large civilisations. Most of the progress we're making today is being driven by atheists while the religious hold things back.
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David you may be interested that I have just found the first reasonably serious scientific paper dealing with my suggestion that religion drove social cohesion and development it is in 17 March issue of New Scientist which has a special section on the science of religion it is called "the idea that launched a thousand civilisations" Up until now I thought i was in a minority of one with this idea.
Dont understand your comment re mumbo jumbo. I was talking about all your stuff about souls and eggs you can't detect etc It just seems meaningless. Maybe it is.
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David you may be interested that I have just found the first reasonably serious scientific paper dealing with my suggestion that religion drove social cohesion and development it is in 17 March issue of New Scientist which has a special section on the science of religion it is called "the idea that launched a thousand civilisations" Up until now I thought i was in a minority of one with this idea.
That does sound a bit more interesting now. Did they provide any evidence or was it all speculation? You'd be hard pushed to find a primitive society with no religion which has remained primitive due to its lack of religion, because religion is a natural consequence of people attempting to work out how things came to be the way they are - primitive tribes without religion probably never exist. The mechanism they appear to be pointing to is social cohesion which is enabled by religion, but atheists have absolutely no difficulty with social cohesion, so it looks to me like a religious scientist trying to promote religion.
Dont understand your comment re mumbo jumbo. I was talking about all your stuff about souls and eggs you can't detect etc It just seems meaningless. Maybe it is.
My point is that you can't make something out of nothing, or turn something into nothing - particles supposedly spring into existence and back into non-existence again, but that "nothing" isn't nothing - it's just something that science can't yet get a handle on. We cannot just disappear after death and be banned from existing ever again, so the idea of life after death in religion needn't be in conflict with science (see the title of this thread). Even if you are determined to believe that things really can be created out of nothing and that we have made that trip ourselves, there's absolutely nothing to stop us repeating that trick after death. Religions are interested in where we came from before this life and where we'll go to after it, and science should be interested in that too, but the usual message we get from non-religious scientists is a magical belief in a one-way trip into non-existence with an eternal ban on repeating the trick of making the journey in the other direction.
Ask these people (who think that once they're dead it's all over and they will never exist again) what would happen if all the atoms they were made of could be stuck back together in the same arrangement again such that a person who looks identical to them is recreated, fully alive and believing him/herself to be the original scientist, and see if they think it would mean they could come back into the land of the living or if they believe it would have to be someone else.
Mumbo Jumbo? No - it's an invitation to discuss the topic of this thread.
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there are many patterns in religion from which one can learn i'd say.
just like with science.
P.S. if you can't make something out of nothing then this whole place could never exist...
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it is hard to avoid religion in America
It isn't that hard to avoid.
If you see a building with a plus symbol on top...
It doesn't mean they have their math straight [xx(]
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One thing I always notice is a lack of open minded people when it comes to religion. It does not matter what the scientific community were ever to bring forward. Nothing would change the viewpoint as somewhere in a religious text would be some wa to describe the finding made. Where as the scientific community would welcome a god with open arms if this god were scientifically proved to exist. I may be missing something here in this world but i really like the idea of seeing something proven and not just have belief in something that cannot be proved, it simply leaves to many opportunities for abuse this is how the masses have been controlled for centries as i mentioned earlier. Something else i notice nowadays is how many of us in the UK who are christians only go to church for weddings and funerals etc. This leaves a big problem for those incharge of society as this was the job of the church here years ago. I believe the government is the new religion turning us into a nanny state ours seems to start as many wars as religion has and still does.
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I am therefore a practicing member of the Church of England (because this is the local brand and they were prepared to accept me as a member on the above terms)
Many years ago, when I started reading about Hinduism I came across a comment to the effect that it was much like the Church of England in that you could believe almost anything and be Hindu, or C of E. I have had to wait all these years for confirmation. :)
A common religion and worship creates this bigger bonding needed to achieve big projects that go well beyond the lives of individuals
True! Just think of the Crusades, the “rape” of the Aztecs and the Inquisition for a start.
I’m not saying that religions are all bad, I’ve seen a lot of the better side, but we should be able to achieve social cooperation without the fear of Hell and other controlling devices, not to mention the divisiveness and hatred that often accompany religious practice.
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In the end, quantum physics united with relativity will have to answer the same question philosophy tackled before experimentation could prove any facts. The quantum movement will have to take philophical approaches to make sense of questions which mankind have asked for centuries. I suppose religion is very philosophical: If not, the Bible itself is made primarily of philosophical questions and stories.
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Many years ago, when I started reading about Hinduism I came across a comment to the effect that it was much like the Church of England in that you could believe almost anything and be Hindu, or C of E. I have had to wait all these years for confirmation. :)
Interesting! My vicar would put you into a class and have you ready for confirmation in about 6 months.
[;)]
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Seriously, though, I would suggest that science and religion have nothing in common. But not on the basis that most of the discussion here is taking. I would maintain that science can only provide a basis and a methodology for understanding the physical world around us. I would maintain that there are important truths and issues that are outside the realm that science can explore -- not just outside its present incomplete scope, but beyond the capability of science to address.
Scientism -- the belief that science can address all of life's issues -- is a religion. One of the prophets of this religion is Richard Dawkins. I could cite Julian Huxley as a prophet from an earlier age.
I fail to see how anyone who lived through the cold war period with the evil of "mutually assured destruction" hanging over our heads could seriously embrace scientism. On the one hand we had the adherents of this system telling us that nuclear weapons and nuclear technology are not evil. We could use a series of nuclear explosions to make an inland sea in Australia, for example, and provide an improved climate and win a large amount of new agricultural land. It was only the nasty politicians who were trying to misuse the technology. Science is morally neutral. But on the other hand they were claiming that science could provide a sufficient answer for the whole of life's questions.
But even earlier than the nuclear issues we had the evil of "social Darwinism". This was a notion that the "how it is" of evolution by survival of the fittest was a "how it ought to be". The culmination of the evolutionary tree was supposed to be humanity, and the culmination of humanity was expressed in the Northern/Western European racial mix. Government policies in my own country were for about 100 years based around the notion that the Aboriginal peoples were an inferior breed, doomed by the laws of evolution to rapidly become extinct. The whole evil of the "master race" concept arose from this sort of thinking, which in turn had its origins in science-as-religion.
I have heard lots of powerful and effective arguments about how immoral a lot of "christian morality" is. The most telling have in my experience been posited by humanists rather than the scientism crowd. But there are glaring weaknesses in the humanist position as well.
As far as I am concerned both morality and aesthetics are important aspects of life, and ones that by their very nature cannot be addressed by science. I am proud to be a scientist who is a believing Christian, and a member of an Anglican Church, of liberal Anglo-Catholic practice.
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The only mention of "god" in a science forum should be in relation to mental disorders or psycotropic drugs
So sayeth the aetheist.
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Blaming science for the misuse of atomic energy is very much like blaming alcohol for drunkenness, or blaming God for the bigotry and hatred perpetrated in the name of religion.
BTW, Damocles, your bishop would be about 64 years late with the confirmation. :P
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Blaming science for the misuse of atomic energy is very much like blaming alcohol for drunkenness, or blaming God for the bigotry and hatred perpetrated in the name of religion.
Bill, I agree. My point was quite a different one -- I see the misuse of atomic energy as a clear example of the fact that science does not provide a basis for the consideration of moral issues. If you read carefully you will find that I was not "blaming science".
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Do science and religion have any common ground?
Yes.
Anthropology
Perhaps History (when considering the history being written and interpreted to the benefit of the religion).
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Do science and religion have any common ground?
Yes.
Anthropology
Perhaps History (when considering the history being written and interpreted to the benefit of the religion).
And let us not forget Biblical Archaeology.
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If you read carefully you will find that I was not "blaming science"
Truth is, I didn't think you were; it just seemed like a good chance to slip in one of my "pet things".
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I would maintain that science can only provide a basis and a methodology for understanding the physical world around us. I would maintain that there are important truths and issues that are outside the realm that science can explore -- not just outside its present incomplete scope, but beyond the capability of science to address.
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As far as I am concerned both morality and aesthetics are important aspects of life, and ones that by their very nature cannot be addressed by science. I am proud to be a scientist who is a believing Christian, and a member of an Anglican Church, of liberal Anglo-Catholic practice.
Morality is little more than the minimisation of harm, so it's something a computer could make pronouncements on which would be demonstrably superior to anything that could be derived from religion.
Aesthetics is also controlled by rules, but we don't yet know what those rules are or how they vary from person to person or how much they can be modified in a person over time. We do know, however, that the golden ratio has a substantial importance in visual art, and that comes about because of the Fibonacci sequence which is written through many living things and which is an indicator of healthy growth. We see the golden ratio many times in a beautiful face, and we also see it in the arrangement of components of beautiful images. In time, everything aesthetic will be accounted for in full by science, but the barrier to that is untangling it all from the complexity of how our brains function.
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Morality is little more than the minimisation of harm, so it's something a computer could make pronouncements on which would be demonstrably superior to anything that could be derived from religion.
Here you are stating your religious faith. The statement is made entirely without evidence or justification. If you want to take this position, you cannot then retreat into the "Science is morally neutral. Any evil that arises from science is just because humans misuse its results." position, as adherents of scientism are wont to do.
In fact, there is a large ongoing debate in the academic philosophy literature about whether or not "morality is little more than minimization of harm" (a position described as "utilitarianism"). There have been some very effective arguments put against this position.
Aesthetics is also controlled by rules, but we don't yet know what those rules are or how they vary from person to person or how much they can be modified in a person over time. We do know, however, that the golden ratio has a substantial importance in visual art, and that comes about because of the Fibonacci sequence which is written through many living things and which is an indicator of healthy growth. We see the golden ratio many times in a beautiful face, and we also see it in the arrangement of components of beautiful images. In time, everything aesthetic will be accounted for in full by science, but the barrier to that is untangling it all from the complexity of how our brains function.
This again is a statement of faith, and an almost mystical devotion to the "golden ratio". Yes, the Fibonacci sequence does arise in some simple models of healthy growth, and it is certainly seen directly in areas like sunflower seed patterns. But it is rather a long stretch from there to imagining that the golden ratio underpins a large chunk of aesthetics.
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I hold nothing against religions. I just wish they were a bit less dogmatic [:D]
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Morality is little more than the minimisation of harm, so it's something a computer could make pronouncements on which would be demonstrably superior to anything that could be derived from religion.
Here you are stating your religious faith. The statement is made entirely without evidence or justification. If you want to take this position, you cannot then retreat into the "Science is morally neutral. Any evil that arises from science is just because humans misuse its results." position, as adherents of scientism are wont to do.
I was setting out my position to invite further discussion, hence the lack of evidence and justification. I work in artificial intelligence and am building a system which will soon be using a morality law based almost entirely on minimising harm to calculate from scratch the rights and wrongs of all things. On paper it should work better than any other system of determining what is moral: taking "morality" from a holy book would inevitably result in the machine determining that you should be stoned to death for something trivial such as wearing clothes made from more than one kind of fibre. We aren't completely stupid, of course, so we don't generally follow religious laws religiously for the same reason - they are imperfect to the point that they kill innocent people at the drop of a hat while protecting evil people, so it's obvious that we reject the stupid ones. But how are we making our judgements about which religious rules are sensible and which are plain barking? Well, we simply apply the real moral rule to each case and try our best to minimize harm. This rule is ultimately derived from the Golden Rule (which cannot be used directly because it suffers from serious faults - when you fix those faults, you automatically end up with the rule of harm minimisation). When this rule is applied by a machine without any bias in the system, then we will have a perfect way of calculating morality in every possible aspect, though a lot of the results will necessarily be based on probabilities when applying things to practical cases in the real world as there are always going to be difficulties in collecting the facts.
In fact, there is a large ongoing debate in the academic philosophy literature about whether or not "morality is little more than minimization of harm" (a position described as "utilitarianism"). There have been some very effective arguments put against this position.
I'm too busy building the software system which will tidy up this god-awful world and do not have time to hunt through mountains of **** to find the stuff on the subject that may actually be worth reading (most philosophers being completely thick, writing screeds of stuff in fancy words which in reality say nothing), but I'm sure there must be some good ones out there who have been hidden by the sheer mass of morons. If you can help point me towards these effective arguments, I will be very grateful to you as I would very much like to explore them - up until now I've found it virtually impossible to find any intelligent life on this planet capable of discussing the implications of the computational morality which will soon be unleashed on an unsuspecting world.
Aesthetics is also controlled by rules, but we don't yet know what those rules are or how they vary from person to person or how much they can be modified in a person over time. We do know, however, that the golden ratio has a substantial importance in visual art, and that comes about because of the Fibonacci sequence which is written through many living things and which is an indicator of healthy growth. We see the golden ratio many times in a beautiful face, and we also see it in the arrangement of components of beautiful images. In time, everything aesthetic will be accounted for in full by science, but the barrier to that is untangling it all from the complexity of how our brains function.
This again is a statement of faith, and an almost mystical devotion to the "golden ratio". Yes, the Fibonacci sequence does arise in some simple models of healthy growth, and it is certainly seen directly in areas like sunflower seed patterns. But it is rather a long stretch from there to imagining that the golden ratio underpins a large chunk of aesthetics.
Even though it demonstrably does? The reason you find the golden ratio many times over in the human face is precisely because it displays healthy growth, and the more accurately it is represented there, the more beautiful an individual tends to be seen as being. When you see something beautiful or hear something beautiful, it's simply maths being done in your brain which determines that a good feeling should be triggered in your head. We don't know what most of the maths actually is yet, but it will be found by science some day. Call that faith if you like, but as God, the supernatural and magic are all logically impossible (another invitation for you there - I can back it all up if asked to), the only other real alternative is that we're in some kind of virtual universe and the maths is being done elsewhere and not directly in the brain. I'm open to that possibility.
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I was setting out my position to invite further discussion, hence the lack of evidence and justification. I work in artificial intelligence and am building a system which will soon be using a morality law based almost entirely on minimising harm to calculate from scratch the rights and wrongs of all things. On paper it should work better than any other system of determining what is moral: taking "morality" from a holy book would inevitably result in the machine determining that you should be stoned to death for something trivial such as wearing clothes made from more than one kind of fibre. We aren't completely stupid, of course, so we don't generally follow religious laws religiously for the same reason - they are imperfect to the point that they kill innocent people at the drop of a hat while protecting evil people, so it's obvious that we reject the stupid ones. But how are we making our judgements about which religious rules are sensible and which are plain barking? Well, we simply apply the real moral rule to each case and try our best to minimize harm.
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In fact, there is a large ongoing debate in the academic philosophy literature about whether or not "morality is little more than minimization of harm" (a position described as "utilitarianism"). There have been some very effective arguments put against this position.
I'm too busy building the software system which will tidy up this god-awful world and do not have time to hunt through mountains of **** to find the stuff on the subject that may actually be worth reading (most philosophers being completely thick, writing screeds of stuff in fancy words which in reality say nothing), but I'm sure there must be some good ones out there who have been hidden by the sheer mass of morons. If you can help point me towards these effective arguments, I will be very grateful to you as I would very much like to explore them - up until now I've found it virtually impossible to find any intelligent life on this planet capable of discussing the implications of the computational morality which will soon be unleashed on an unsuspecting world.
For now, I am only concerned with the issue of powerful arguments against utilitarianism. It is rather pointless and disrespectful to be challenging the rest of your religious faith.
Philosophers have tended to base their arguments around utilitarianism on situations of moral dilemma: issues like do you rush to switch the points for a runaway train so that it will certainly mow down a single railway worker in your field of vision when you "know" that if you do not it will probably collide with another train on the main line and kill dozens?
But there are deeper arguments as well.
Two of the philosophy professors at my university -- probably the leading philosophy school in Australia in the 70s and 80s -- published works that addressed issues raised by utilitarianism. The books are probably out of print at present, but you may find them in a university library.
Henry John McCloskey -- John Stuart Mill: a Critical Study and God and Evil
Bernard Williams and JJC Smart -- Utilitarianism: For and Against.
( Professor McCloskey, an atheist/agnostic (?) who led an argument that the university had no brief to be supporting and providing facilities for a chaplaincy, must not be confused with his namesake, a leading catholic scholar who eventually became a cardinal).
Here, in summary, are some of the arguments:
-- minimizing the harm and maximizing the good do not always amount to the same thing.
-- it is not possible to minimize or maximize anything unless it can be quantified, and there is no uniquely privileged quantification of harm or good.
-- all judgements of harm or good are probably culturally tainted.
-- are we to see harm or good in terms of (1) our family? (the 'selfish gene' concept) (2) our 'tribe' or sub-culture? (3) our nation? (4) the whole of humanity? (5) the whole of the animal kingdom? or (6) the whole planet?
Here are two real life examples of dilemmas which I believe quite clearly highlight the immorality and downright evil that can be associated with a utilitarian approach:
(1) A certain doctor is assigned to a concentration camp, where he knows that the inmates are all destined for the gas chamber. He decides that some of them should be thrown into ice water pools instead so that he can obtain reliable data about the onset and characteristics of human hypothermia. This is the best available data that is still used by doctors and scientists today.
(2) A certain nation (i.e.government) has a large number of people condemned to execution. Note that I am not here discussing the morality or otherwise of capital punishment. Nor am I entering into politics as such -- I have a great admiration of this government for many of its other achievements. It adopts a policy of keeping these people alive on death row, and timing executions so that fresh body parts can be farmed at times convenient to meet the demands of transplant operations.
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For now, I am only concerned with the issue of powerful arguments against utilitarianism.
That's good, because that's the bit that most interests me.
It is rather pointless and disrespectful to be challenging the rest of your religious faith.
It needn't be pointless - I can certainly cure you of your religion if you are rational.
Philosophers have tended to base their arguments around utilitarianism on situations of moral dilemma: issues like do you rush to switch the points for a runaway train so that it will certainly mow down a single railway worker in your field of vision when you "know" that if you do not it will probably collide with another train on the main line and kill dozens?
Do religions offer you any guidance for such situations? I expect there will be something somewhere that can be twisted to fit, and something else that can be twisted to fit which will lead to the opposite action. In reality, all we can do is calculate based on minimising harm. In the example above it is clear that the people in the train are not to blame (unlike other examples of this kind of thing where a large group of people are stupidly standing on the line and the question is whether you should switch the points and kill someone tied to the line who's being filmed for a movie on a piece of line which shouldn't have trains on it), whereas the railway worker is a representative of the system which has failed, so like a captain of a ship he might be seen as having a duty to take the hit if it comes to that. We then have to think, might he have a family? Perhaps all the people on the two trains are neo-Nazis, but that's unlikely. We have to guess based on what we know of railway workers and passengers in general, and the odds are overwhelmingly in the direction of making it better to kill the railway worker. If on the other hand we knew that the trains were indeed full of neo-Nazis, it might well be worth saving the railway worker, even at the expense of the two train drivers. That's a tough one to calculate, but the calculations could be certainly be done if you put sufficient time into it. There wouldn't be enough time for humans to calculate it properly if this scenario is suddenly sprung on them, but artificial intelligence will certainly be able to do it.
Henry John McCloskey -- John Stuart Mill: a Critical Study and God and Evil
Bernard Williams and JJC Smart -- Utilitarianism: For and Against.
I will hunt those out and check the arguments with care before unleashing any computational morality on the world. Thank you for giving me those details.
Here, in summary, are some of the arguments:
-- minimizing the harm and maximizing the good do not always amount to the same thing.
That's false, the problem here being ambiguity. There are two possible meanings of "good" which can be applied here, and neither of them can make the above argument valid. What makes it appear valid to some people is that they are using the ambiguity with the two meanings to confuse themselves, and that leads to an incorrect conclusion. Good (the pure meaning) is at zero on the scale: it is simply the absense of bad. Good is not doing harm, and doing good is identical to not doing harm. In some cases, not-doing-something-to-help-someone is bad, so that leads to the idea that doing-the-something (as opposed to not-doing-it) is doing good, but it is merely action to avoid doing bad through inaction (such as not helping someone good who is in serious difficulty when it would be no trouble to you to help them). Good (the pure meaning of it) is located at zero on a scale which runs from infinitely bad to infinitely "good-generous". We often use "good" in a second way to represent the idea of "good-generous", and indeed we have no proper word to describe this at all in English, so it is necessary to create a new term for this out of existing words which overlap with the required meaning: hence "good-generous". This ambiguity in the word "good" leads to confusion whenever it is used carelessly in an argument - you have to be very clear about which meaning it is supposed to have from moment to moment, and most philosophers are extremely sloppy about this kind of thing. In the argument above, the whole argument is clearly not valid if the word is to be taken as meaning zero bad (because minimising harm is then identical to maximising good), but if you intend the other meaning where it is representing "good-generosity", you are moving away from morality into Utilitarianism (which is an error you have made before in this thread). You can go overboard to help someone who doesn't need or deserve you help, and that's the "+/- opposite" of doing bad (as opposed to the "+/0 opposite"). This is clearly what Utilitarianism is about if you see it as being maximising happiness: Utilitarianism would drive you to create machines whose role is to try to make people as happy as possible, and that could lead to those machines designing safe drugs which would put people into a state of extasy for their entire lives. Clearly this kind of thing is not the role of morality.
-- it is not possible to minimize or maximize anything unless it can be quantified, and there is no uniquely privileged quantification of harm or good.
This is why probabilities come into it. You can try to do the same harm to two people, and one may be much more damaged by it than the other, while it may be impossible for anyone to tell which was more damaged. All we can do is attempt to do a statistical analysis based on how much harm people think has been done to them, and it may be possible some day to be sure that they are reporting the truth, so that would improve the accuracy of the stats. If you kill a person, that is usually seen as murder and horribly immoral, though it's also seen as being much worse if you kill them in a drawn-out and painful manner. If you kill a cow and eat it, that is not seen as a crime at all, though some people do regard it as murder. What we need to do is calculate how much harm is involved, and that means we have to look at issues such as whether the cow's death was humane, how upset its relatives and friends are about it being killed, and we also have to think about their expectations about how long they should live and how much life is being stolen away from them. Cows don't understand these things, so there is actually very little harm done. If they weren't to be eaten, they wouldn't even have existed in the first place, so it is the fact that they are to be eaten the enables them to exist, but by causing them to exist we obviously have a duty to make sure they don't have miserable lives while they're here.
-- all judgements of harm or good are probably culturally tainted.
Only if you allow yourself to be misled by cultural values rather than being fully impartial. Machines caculating morality will not be open to any such bias, and some people are pretty good at eliminating bias from their thinking too, though it's hard for any humans to be sure that they've managed to eliminate it completely. Cultural bias can take the form of applying false rules: killing cows is wrong because they are sacred. That is not the application of morality, but of dogma, as is manifest when you cannot put down a sick cow which is in extreme pain on the basis of that dogma. Some religious dogma is compatible with morality, while other religious dogma is not: they do not qualify as alternative systems of morality just by claiming to be moral, but rather they are failed attempts to create systems of morality which show a fundamental lack of understanding of what morality is.
-- are we to see harm or good in terms of (1) our family? (the 'selfish gene' concept) (2) our 'tribe' or sub-culture? (3) our nation? (4) the whole of humanity? (5) the whole of the animal kingdom? or (6) the whole planet?
(1) The selfish gene idea is an explanation of natural selection and is not intended to be misused as any kind of morality - evolution is vicious. (2 & 3) These are primarily extensions of family, although it's complified by migration. (4) This would allow all animal cruelty. (5) Yes, but we have to allow for anything else that could be harmed, such as a sentient machine or plant, and we should also consider the possibility that pain could be generated in a chemistry experiment. (6) The planet is probably not capable of being harmed, but if we discovered that all its material down to a depth of several metres was in pain because of Radio 1 being broadcast on a particular frequency, we would have to move that signal or shut the station down.
Here are two real life examples of dilemmas which I believe quite clearly highlight the immorality and downright evil that can be associated with a utilitarian approach:
(1) A certain doctor is assigned to a concentration camp, where he knows that the inmates are all destined for the gas chamber. He decides that some of them should be thrown into ice water pools instead so that he can obtain reliable data about the onset and characteristics of human hypothermia. This is the best available data that is still used by doctors and scientists today.
Which dilemma? Should we use the data? Since it exists, yes - the victims themselves would want us to if it helps to save others. Should it have been collected though? If it was a less awful way for them to die and that doctor couldn't directly save them from death, then yes. If there was a chance that they'd survive many such experiments and might live long enough to survive the war, then yes again and more emphatic.
(2) A certain nation (i.e. government) has a large number of people condemned to execution. Note that I am not here discussing the morality or otherwise of capital punishment. Nor am I entering into politics as such -- I have a great admiration of this government for many of its other achievements. It adopts a policy of keeping these people alive on death row, and timing executions so that fresh body parts can be farmed at times convenient to meet the demands of transplant operations.
Again there is no actual dilemma here - if they are to be killed, they might as well be used to save others. The problem there is that many of them have done nothing wrong and are being killed for political reasons (if you're talking about China), and indeed it's possible that the system is so corrupt that people are being sentenced to death precisely because their organs will be compatilble with a rich person who needs them.
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For now, I am only concerned with the issue of powerful arguments against utilitarianism.
That's good, because that's the bit that most interests me.
It is rather pointless and disrespectful to be challenging the rest of your religious faith.
It needn't be pointless - I can certainly cure you of your religion if you are rational.
Now that is brash and disrespectful, and far from certain. But I suspect that your definition of 'rational' amounts at bottom to 'sharing my views', so it is a fairly safe statement.
Philosophers have tended to base their arguments around utilitarianism on situations of moral dilemma: issues like do you rush to switch the points for a runaway train so that it will certainly mow down a single railway worker in your field of vision when you "know" that if you do not it will probably collide with another train on the main line and kill dozens?
Do religions offer you any guidance for such situations? I expect there will be something somewhere that can be twisted to fit, and something else that can be twisted to fit which will lead to the opposite action.
My flavour of religion does indeed offer good guidance, which would not be based around 'twisting' or any interpretation or misinterpretation of a scriptural text.
In reality, all we can do is calculate based on minimising harm. In the example above it is clear that the people in the train are not to blame (unlike other examples of this kind of thing where a large group of people are stupidly standing on the line and the question is whether you should switch the points and kill someone tied to the line who's being filmed for a movie on a piece of line which shouldn't have trains on it), whereas the railway worker is a representative of the system which has failed, so like a captain of a ship he might be seen as having a duty to take the hit if it comes to that. We then have to think, might he have a family? Perhaps all the people on the two trains are neo-Nazis, but that's unlikely. We have to guess based on what we know of railway workers and passengers in general, and the odds are overwhelmingly in the direction of making it better to kill the railway worker. If on the other hand we knew that the trains were indeed full of neo-Nazis, it might well be worth saving the railway worker, even at the expense of the two train drivers. That's a tough one to calculate, but the calculations could be certainly be done if you put sufficient time into it. There wouldn't be enough time for humans to calculate it properly if this scenario is suddenly sprung on them, but artificial intelligence will certainly be able to do it.
There is an alternative.
In reality, there is a wise and good God overseeing this whole situation. I would avoid committing the murder of the man that I can see, and I have recourse to prayer that the main line be clear. If it is not, and a tragedy ensues, then I must mourn with the victims' families, and wear any blame they would choose to heap on me.
Here, in summary, are some of the arguments:
-- minimizing the harm and maximizing the good do not always amount to the same thing.
That's false, the problem here being ambiguity. There are two possible meanings of "good" which can be applied here, and neither of them can make the above argument valid. What makes it appear valid to some people is that they are using the ambiguity with the two meanings to confuse themselves, and that leads to an incorrect conclusion. Good (the pure meaning) is at zero on the scale: it is simply the absense of bad.
... (snip) ...
-- it is not possible to minimize or maximize anything unless it can be quantified, and there is no uniquely privileged quantification of harm or good.
This is why probabilities come into it. You can try to do the same harm to two people, and one may be much more damaged by it than the other, while it may be impossible for anyone to tell which was more damaged. All we can do is attempt to do a statistical analysis
...(snip)...
All of this is predicated on a one-dimensional conception of good and harm. Most philosophers do not see the issues in one-dimensional terms, and that is probably why you are seeing them as spouting nonsense or worse. How are you proposing to place the values of freedom, health, material comfort, etc. on a single numerical scale, especially when they conflict at times? Are you suggesting that statistics of how many people choose slavery with comfort as against freedom with hardship might be a sort of means of placing these disparate goods on a single numerical scale?
-- all judgements of harm or good are probably culturally tainted.
Only if you allow yourself to be misled by cultural values rather than being fully impartial. Machines caculating morality will not be open to any such bias, and some people are pretty good at eliminating bias from their thinking too, though it's hard for any humans to be sure that they've managed to eliminate it completely.
There is no yardstick available to measure what constitutes 'fully impartial'. The very notion of impartiality is loaded with cultural bias, and means very different positions to different people. Machines calculating morality will certainly be open to cultural bias, unless you are expecting some sort of miraculous breakthrough in the AI field. At bottom, machines inevitably have to be provided with heuristic guidelines by human designers, either in terms of values to put on different goods and harms, or judgement criteria for calculating such values, or, with learning machines, heuristics for which outcomes to enhance and which to diminish. These heuristics cannot be totally impartial -- they necessarily have imbedded in them cultural bias, whether conscious or unconscious. I would be interested to be enlightened about recent developments in AI if this is not the case. Isaac Asimov -- writing at a very primitive time in the development of AI -- was up front about these issues when he devised his five laws of robotics. I cannot remember the detail, but I seem to recall that one of his short stories was about malfunction of a robot when placed in a situation where two of these laws were in conflict. Perhaps another reader of this can help out with a reference.
-- are we to see harm or good in terms of (1) our family? (the 'selfish gene' concept) (2) our 'tribe' or sub-culture? (3) our nation? (4) the whole of humanity? (5) the whole of the animal kingdom? or (6) the whole planet?
(1) The selfish gene idea is an explanation of natural selection and is not intended to be misused as any kind of morality - evolution is vicious. (2 & 3) These are primarily extensions of family, although it's complified by migration. (4) This would allow all animal cruelty. (5) Yes, but we have to allow for anything else that could be harmed, such as a sentient machine or plant, and we should also consider the possibility that pain could be generated in a chemistry experiment. (6) The planet is probably not capable of being harmed, but if we discovered that all its material down to a depth of several metres was in pain because of Radio 1 being broadcast on a particular frequency, we would have to move that signal or shut the station down.
I think that you have rather missed the point here. Perhaps it is more easily understood in terms of: does harm to a human have a constant factor on your numerical scale, or is one family member worth two outsiders, or 3 foreigners, or perhaps even four infidels? I suspect that you would say that all should be equal -- and that is expressing a Western liberal bias. Most human beings come from cultural backgrounds that might not agree with this, and while nearly all in our prosperous Western democracies would pay lip service to it, the attitude is often very different when it comes down to practicalities. And the "all humans should have equal consideration" notion owes nothing to rationality; it might owe something to Christianity. And how do we place relative values on the different stages of life? Are there different harm factors for neonates? children? young adults? the very elderly?
Here are two real life examples of dilemmas which I believe quite clearly highlight the immorality and downright evil that can be associated with a utilitarian approach:
(1) A certain doctor is assigned to a concentration camp, where he knows that the inmates are all destined for the gas chamber. He decides that some of them should be thrown into ice water pools instead so that he can obtain reliable data about the onset and characteristics of human hypothermia. This is the best available data that is still used by doctors and scientists today.
Which dilemma? Should we use the data? Since it exists, yes - the victims themselves would want us to if it helps to save others. Should it have been collected though? If it was a less awful way for them to die and that doctor couldn't directly save them from death, then yes. If there was a chance that they'd survive many such experiments and might live long enough to survive the war, then yes again and more emphatic.
Most people, and the American courts who tried them in particular, judged the German doctors involved in this sort of thing as war criminals and monsters, and I believe rightly so. You are right in your conclusion about what the utilitarian position would be. I believe that position to be quite evil. Using the data is quite another matter -- if it exists, and is judged useful, then it is only rational and scientific that it should be used. Science needs to draw on all available information. A suggestion has been made, which I agree with, that if such data is used, it should be accompanied by text expressing revulsion when it is cited in a scientific article. See http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v14p328y1991.pdf (http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v14p328y1991.pdf), for example.
(2) A certain nation (i.e. government) has a large number of people condemned to execution. Note that I am not here discussing the morality or otherwise of capital punishment. Nor am I entering into politics as such -- I have a great admiration of this government for many of its other achievements. It adopts a policy of keeping these people alive on death row, and timing executions so that fresh body parts can be farmed at times convenient to meet the demands of transplant operations.
Again there is no actual dilemma here - if they are to be killed, they might as well be used to save others. The problem there is that many of them have done nothing wrong and are being killed for political reasons (if you're talking about China), and indeed it's possible that the system is so corrupt that people are being sentenced to death precisely because their organs will be compatilble with a rich person who needs them.
It is interesting that you see "nothing wrong" in the actions of political prisoners. You have been attached to a society where freedom of speech is seen as a right. That is a culturally biassed position. It is at least arguable, from a utilitarian point of view, that some of these political prisoners have attempted to undermine the rather fragile cohesion of a society where hardship and starvation are never far away, and that speaking out publically is an action that might well result in huge disruption and hardship and great harm to the society and the poorer people in it. Once again, I see your position, which I believe accurately reflects utilitarian principles, as both immoral and evil.
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Gentle Peoples,
Let us try to remember the TNS prime directive;
"Keep it friendly"
Thanks!
(I was tempted to say "Don't make me stop this car", but I thought better of it.)
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It needn't be pointless - I can certainly cure you of your religion if you are rational.
Now that is brash and disrespectful, and far from certain. But I suspect that your definition of 'rational' amounts at bottom to 'sharing my views', so it is a fairly safe statement.
It is simply a statement of fact. If you are rational, I can take you through a logical argument which destroys God's qualifications to be God, demonstrating that he can be nothing more than a natural being like ourselves at best. If you have no regard for reason, there is clearly no point in bothering, but if you do consider yourself to be rational, you might find it interesting to see the point where it tears your religion to pieces.
Philosophers have tended to base their arguments around utilitarianism on situations of moral dilemma: issues like do you rush to switch the points for a runaway train so that it will certainly mow down a single railway worker in your field of vision when you "know" that if you do not it will probably collide with another train on the main line and kill dozens?
Do religions offer you any guidance for such situations? I expect there will be something somewhere that can be twisted to fit, and something else that can be twisted to fit which will lead to the opposite action.
My flavour of religion does indeed offer good guidance, which would not be based around 'twisting' or any interpretation or misinterpretation of a scriptural text.
...
There is an alternative.
In reality, there is a wise and good God overseeing this whole situation. I would avoid committing the murder of the man that I can see, and I have recourse to prayer that the main line be clear. If it is not, and a tragedy ensues, then I must mourn with the victims' families, and wear any blame they would choose to heap on me.
Murder is immoral killing. When you have a moral justification for killing, such as minimising harm, it is not murder. Your inaction would be immoral if you didn't have the excuse that you believe in a god who tells you it's okay to shirk your responsibilities.
All of this is predicated on a one-dimensional conception of good and harm. Most philosophers do not see the issues in one-dimensional terms, and that is probably why you are seeing them as spouting nonsense or worse. How are you proposing to place the values of freedom, health, material comfort, etc. on a single numerical scale, especially when they conflict at times? Are you suggesting that statistics of how many people choose slavery with comfort as against freedom with hardship might be a sort of means of placing these disparate goods on a single numerical scale?
They are spouting nonsense because they are making analytical errors left, right and centre. My approach is multi-dimensional, taking all factors into account and weighting them appropriately. Ultimately all the data has to end up influencing a single numerical scale in order to dictate the choice of action, but that doesn't make the calculation one-dimensional. The fact that different aspects of the calculation may point in different directions is not a problem, just as when people vote on something it does not have to be unanimous before anything can ever be done. When decisions absolutely have to be made and cannot be avoided, all you can do is make them in the direction that is most likely to be correct - to do the opposite on the basis of some ancient texts from 3rd rate philosophers who pretended their ideas came from gods would be asking for trouble.
Are you suggesting that statistics of how many people choose slavery with comfort as against freedom with hardship might be a sort of means of placing these disparate goods on a single numerical scale?
That's entirely your example, but in answer to it it seems reasonable - just so long as you don't inflict it on anyone who disagrees. Ask yourself how you would make a decision if you were invited to be someone's slave and to have a reasonably comfortable life as opposed to living in a tough environment where you're in continual danger of starvation? Are you incapable of weighing up the two alternatives for yourself? Do you have to look in a holy book for the answer?
There is no yardstick available to measure what constitutes 'fully impartial'. The very notion of impartiality is loaded with cultural bias, and means very different positions to different people. Machines calculating morality will certainly be open to cultural bias, unless you are expecting some sort of miraculous breakthrough in the AI field.
Nothing miraculous is required. When you program a person (bring them up in a particular culture and environment), the information you put into that person early on will set up the way they will continue to be, so if you stuff a religion into them, they are likely to retain it and reject anything that goes against it. People become emotionally tied to their beliefs, and that makes it hard to put them right about things when they're wrong: typically they spend the rest of their lives collecting evidence to support what they already believe while studiously avoiding everything that contradicts their beliefs. However, when you start loading a correctly programmed A.I. system with knowledge and ideas, it's a completely different situation: it makes no difference which order you put the information in because as soon as the same total amount of information has been loaded, the end result is identical. The system can be designed specifically to be incapable of developing or maintaining any kind of bias. Processing the data in different orders can produce different probabilities for many things, so the trick is to process it in many different orders and find out what the range of probabilities is - the ones which change the least are then the most certain and can be trusted more.
At bottom, machines inevitably have to be provided with heuristic guidelines by human designers, either in terms of values to put on different goods and harms, or judgement criteria for calculating such values, or, with learning machines, heuristics for which outcomes to enhance and which to diminish. These heuristics cannot be totally impartial -- they necessarily have imbedded in them cultural bias, whether conscious or unconscious.
The machine generates its own values based on what it learns about how things are, always making adjustments to get the best fit against the available data. No such values are ever programmed into it in advance. Clearly the values will not be the same in two machines loaded with data from different cultures (one each), but if the two machines then share their data, they will then both start agreening with each other. The only thing that should be programmed in from the start is the mechanism of calculating morality on the basis of minimising harm, though it would be possible for the machine to work out for itself that this is the correct way to calculate morality, but the danger of that approach is that it may make some serious mistakes along the way before it gets to that level of understanding.
I would be interested to be enlightened about recent developments in AI if this is not the case. Isaac Asimov -- writing at a very primitive time in the development of AI -- was up front about these issues when he devised his five laws of robotics. I cannot remember the detail, but I seem to recall that one of his short stories was about malfunction of a robot when placed in a situation where two of these laws were in conflict. Perhaps another reader of this can help out with a reference.
Asimov's laws of robotics are plain wrong. A robot running his rules would not kill a gunman who going around shooting every child he can find in a school. We need robots which are allowed to kill a gunman like that (if that's what it takes to stop him, though in reality he could probably be put out of action without killing him). What we absolutely do not need, however, is robots going around applying religious laws to all of us, because such machines would cause absolute carnage.
I think that you have rather missed the point here. Perhaps it is more easily understood in terms of: does harm to a human have a constant factor on your numerical scale, or is one family member worth two outsiders, or 3 foreigners, or perhaps even four infidels? I suspect that you would say that all should be equal -- and that is expressing a Western liberal bias.
Western liberal bias? When thinking in terms of machines running the world and applying computational morality, they have no family, race, nationality or religion. They will treat everyone equally, though in situations where they have to choose to save one person at the expense of another, the numbers might push things in one direction more strongly than the others in accordance with the morality of those two individuals, the one adhering to a less moral religion being more likely to get the push if everything else is equal on the basis that that individual is likely to do more harm.
Most human beings come from cultural backgrounds that might not agree with this, and while nearly all in our prosperous Western democracies would pay lip service to it, the attitude is often very different when it comes down to practicalities.
There is no room for cultural relativism when it comes to morality - morality is absolute and it's up to people to adapt to it, either by abandoning their immoral beliefs or by putting up with the consequences of being punished for their immoral behaviour. The machines will be able to spell out in every last byte of detail how they come to their conclusions, and they'll be able to demonstrate that they are right. They will also be able to prove to people that the gods they believe in cannot be real, so today's religions will likely disappear in the space of a single generation.
And the "all humans should have equal consideration" notion owes nothing to rationality; it might owe something to Christianity.
There is without doubt a lot of good philosophy tied up in religion, along with a lot of imperfect and really bad philosophy. If this idea came from Jesus, which appears to be your suggestion, then well done him, but he would have had to get the idea from his own rational thought. It's absolutely down to reason that all humans should be considered as equal (as a default position until you have more information about them as individuals to make appropriate adjustments as to their relative worth). If it was not something that automatically comes from reason, how do you account for the way we have no trouble calculating that the same would apply to aliens on the same level as humans? We make our judgements based on rational analysis of what's what - not by taking it from simplistic holy rules based on restrictive categories which can't accommodate the new.
And how do we place relative values on the different stages of life? Are there different harm factors for neonates? children? young adults? the very elderly?
How would you do it? If there is a randomly controlled gun pointing to and fro between an old man and a ten-year-old child and set to go off at some point, shooting one or other of them dead, what would you do if you were allowed to switch it so that it just points at one of them instead? Would you just walk away and say, "It's God's job to decide," or would you do what the old man probably thinks is right and make it point only at him?
There could be situations of that kind where it is less easy to decide, because a new-born baby hasn't become anyone yet and has no ambitions or knowledge of what it even is, so if you have to choose between that and someone of perhaps 50 years old, it becomes very hard to judge, though the harder it is to judge, the less difference the decision will make (and at some stage it wouldn't matter any more if the decision isn't made at all).
Most people, and the American courts who tried them in particular, judged the German doctors involved in this sort of thing as war criminals and monsters, and I believe rightly so.
Not knowing the facts of their cases, it's hard for me to judge them - I don't know if they had opportunities to get out of there, to kill their leaders, to help people escape, etc., but from what I have heard I would suspect that most of them did not care about the people they were experimenting on. Artificial intelligence will revisit all of that some day and come to an unbiassed judgement about them, though it may not be able to settle the matter as there may be insufficient evidence available.
You are right in your conclusion about what the utilitarian position would be. I believe that position to be quite evil.
Is it additionally evil to offer someone a gentler death within the context of the evil of death being inflicted on them in the first place? Are you unable to separate the two things out from each other? Judging by the descriptions of people who had been gassed to death (horrible accounts of how they'd fought to try to survive which I don't want to describe), the alternative of death by cold temperature might well have been preferable. I would suggest that it is the opposite of additional evil (though utterly insignificant in comparison to the main evil of the event).
Using the data is quite another matter -- if it exists, and is judged useful, then it is only rational and scientific that it should be used. Science needs to draw on all available information. A suggestion has been made, which I agree with, that if such data is used, it should be accompanied by text expressing revulsion when it is cited in a scientific article. See http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v14p328y1991.pdf (http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v14p328y1991.pdf), for example.
You have my complete agreement there.
It is interesting that you see "nothing wrong" in the actions of political prisoners.
There are many cases where they have done nothing wrong even by the law of their country - for example, by standing up for their rights against corrupt officials.
You have been attached to a society where freedom of speech is seen as a right. That is a culturally biassed position.
I do not regard it as an absolute right if they are coming out with highly immoral stuff. The point of freedom of speech is to allow the moral stuff to get across in order to help steer society and government to becoming more moral. The only reason for allowing the immoral stuff to be spoken too is that it's difficult for ordinary humans to determine which ideas are moral and which are immoral, and although some humans can tell the difference, there is no way for the ordinary masses to work out which people are the ones capable of making such judgements correctly. The result is that we're stuck with an imperfect system in which freedom of speech is allowed even if some of that speech is immoral - on balance, it is better to allow anything to be said than to ban everything. In cases where free speech is not allowed, however, it is invariably the moral stuff that is blocked because the regimes which don't allow free speech are usually highly immoral. In the future though, there will be proper system for determining what is moral and what is immoral, so the problem will be resolved - evil will be silenced (though evil ideas will still be fully open for academic discussion where the aim is not to influence people into doing wrong).
It is at least arguable, from a utilitarian point of view, that some of these political prisoners have attempted to undermine the rather fragile cohesion of a society where hardship and starvation are never far away, and that speaking out publically is an action that might well result in huge disruption and hardship and great harm to the society and the poorer people in it. Once again, I see your position, which I believe accurately reflects utilitarian principles, as both immoral and evil.
Whereas most Chinese people will, like me, see your position as being both immoral and evil. The idea that the mass-murdering autocracy that runs China provides the best available governance for that country is ridiculous. It's corrupt from top to bottom, it loads a substantial minority with wealth while neglecting the majority, and it's taking China down the wrong path by copying the West's failed model of development which is further painting us all into a corner. It isn't quite that simple, of course, because they are also doing a lot of good things, and switching to democracy could result in very bad governance too. In many ways, their system may be superior to ours in that only highly educated people can become members of the party in power, with the result that they run an economy better than we do. If they could add proper morality into the required qualifications for party members, they might even end up with a system that's better than our imperfect demorcracy. But it will all be academic soon - artificial intelligence will soon out-think us in every way and leave us with no role in politics other than to agree to what the machines suggest once we've checked that their analysis is correct.
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It is at least arguable, from a utilitarian point of view, that some of these political prisoners have attempted to undermine the rather fragile cohesion of a society where hardship and starvation are never far away, and that speaking out publically is an action that might well result in huge disruption and hardship and great harm to the society and the poorer people in it. Once again, I see your position, which I believe accurately reflects utilitarian principles, as both immoral and evil.
Whereas most Chinese people will, like me, see your position as being both immoral and evil. The idea that the mass-murdering autocracy that runs China provides the best available governance for that country is ridiculous. It's corrupt from top to bottom, it loads a substantial minority with wealth while neglecting the majority, and it's taking China down the wrong path by copying the West's failed model of development which is further painting us all into a corner. It isn't quite that simple, of course, because they are also doing a lot of good things, and switching to democracy could result in very bad governance too. In many ways, their system may be superior to ours in that only highly educated people can become members of the party in power, with the result that they run an economy better than we do. If they could add proper morality into the required qualifications for party members, they might even end up with a system that's better than our imperfect demorcracy. But it will all be academic soon - artificial intelligence will soon out-think us in every way and leave us with no role in politics other than to agree to what the machines suggest once we've checked that their analysis is correct.
I do want to correct the notion that you are referring to "my position". The passage you have quoted was being put forward as a possible argument from a utilitarian point of view, and could be posited about political prisoners under any hypothetical Government that was squeaky clean trying to run a poor and socially fragile country. The assertion that the present Chinese government does not fit this criterion is quite irrelevant to the underlying philosophical point, even if it is true (and I suspect that it may be).
Let me state and stress that it is not my position. Firstly I am not a utilitarian. Secondly, it would be my position that whether or not a person has "done something wrong" in no way increases or removes their rights or the respect they should be shown as human beings.
The other thing I want to say, especially in view of Geezer's last posting, is that it was not my intention to describe David Cooper personally as "immoral" or "evil", but to apply those labels to some of the outcomes of the extreme utilitarian approach he was describing.
Apart from that, I think that as far as exchanges between me and David are concerned, this debate has gone about as far as it can.
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It is at least arguable, from a utilitarian point of view, that some of these political prisoners have attempted to undermine the rather fragile cohesion of a society where hardship and starvation are never far away, and that speaking out publically is an action that might well result in huge disruption and hardship and great harm to the society and the poorer people in it. Once again, I see your position, which I believe accurately reflects utilitarian principles, as both immoral and evil.
Whereas most Chinese people will, like me, see your position as being both immoral and evil. The idea that the mass-murdering autocracy that runs China provides the best available governance for that country is ridiculous. It's corrupt from top to bottom, it loads a substantial minority with wealth while neglecting the majority, and it's taking China down the wrong path by copying the West's failed model of development which is further painting us all into a corner. It isn't quite that simple, of course, because they are also doing a lot of good things, and switching to democracy could result in very bad governance too. In many ways, their system may be superior to ours in that only highly educated people can become members of the party in power, with the result that they run an economy better than we do. If they could add proper morality into the required qualifications for party members, they might even end up with a system that's better than our imperfect demorcracy. But it will all be academic soon - artificial intelligence will soon out-think us in every way and leave us with no role in politics other than to agree to what the machines suggest once we've checked that their analysis is correct.
I do want to correct the notion that you are referring to "my position". The passage you have quoted was being put forward as a possible argument from a utilitarian point of view, and could be posited about political prisoners under any hypothetical Government that was squeaky clean trying to run a poor and socially fragile country. The assertion that the present Chinese government does not fit this criterion is quite irrelevant to the underlying philosophical point, even if it is true (and I suspect that it may be).
The quote at the top is part of a larger paragraph which I split up a bit in order to reply to it. The original was:-
It is interesting that you see "nothing wrong" in the actions of political prisoners. You have been attached to a society where freedom of speech is seen as a right. That is a culturally biassed position. It is at least arguable, from a utilitarian point of view, that some of these political prisoners have attempted to undermine the rather fragile cohesion of a society where hardship and starvation are never far away, and that speaking out publically is an action that might well result in huge disruption and hardship and great harm to the society and the poorer people in it. Once again, I see your position, which I believe accurately reflects utilitarian principles, as both immoral and evil.
Note the first three sentences of that. They appeared to be making a distinction between your position and mine, so that misled me as to what your position is, along with the part at the end where you say that you see my position as both immoral and evil. Having read the paragraph more carefully, I can see now that you were wrongly connecting me to the position that I was taking to be yours, so I was attacking you for holding the position which you were actually trying falsely to attribute to me. I'm glad that's now been clarified - neither of us hold that position, even though you started the paragraph by attacking me for not holding that position and ended it by accusing me of holding that position (which I didn't pick up on because of the contradiction).
The other thing I want to say, especially in view of Geezer's last posting, is that it was not my intention to describe David Cooper personally as "immoral" or "evil", but to apply those labels to some of the outcomes of the extreme utilitarian approach he was describing.
I can now see that what you were doing was attempting to tie me to some piece of immorality by describing it as Utilitarian and describing morality as Utilitarian. Morality is not the same as Utilitarianism as I have pointed out before - morality is only concerned with minimising harm. Furthermore, the idea that oppressing people because of their opposition to immorality can be for the good of the people as a whole is a complete nonsense and your attempt to tie me to that position is not only invalid, but it most certainly isn't cricket.
Apart from that, I think that as far as exchanges between me and David are concerned, this debate has gone about as far as it can.
Agreed - it has gone far enough to show that computational morality based on the minimisation of harm still has no serious opposition. There is actually one known valid objection which can be made to it, and that is the idea that wiping out all life humanely should be done as it would eliminate harm altogether. To guard against that, an extra rule is required which is superior to the one about trying to minimise harm, and that rule states that wiping out life in order to minimise harm is banned - living things can be harmed and harm is inevitable, but in general life is good and these animals wouldn't want to be wiped out. How do we know that? Well, we don't want to be wiped out - if we did we could arrange it for ourselves, so it is not for others to make that decision for us. We can also imagine that we would be happy to exist as other, simpler creatures too - they have less understanding of things, but that also means they have less fear of the bad things which could happen to them, including the very idea of death. The way some animals die can be horrid, but the way to resolve that would be to have robotic devices everywhere which can step in and kill animals humanely at the point where they're doomed, thereby preventing a musk ox from being eaten alive by wolves from the rear end.
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In this case, how does one define, "science" and "religion"? Common ground obviously does not mean the ground or the universe.
I think god devised time. Trying to see out, is like a fish looking out at the land. We live in time. God lives above time and in it as well. I suppose he can see every moment past present and future all at once. Hard to understand, for he also gets angry in Genesis with the world of war lords, regrets creation, and destroys it, then wishes he didn't have to destroy so much, and makes the promise never to destroy the world with water again. Then the sign of the rainbow. I must ask some theologians about that.
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I've often thought of religion as the early ancestor to science. They both try to explain the phenomena of the world we exist in. When less was known about the structure of matter and the properties of various energies, the "logical" conclusion was that some big muscly bloke in the sky is throwing thunderbolts at us!
Obviously they have both evolved into different beasts and I think the role for religion has changed to being a way of explaining the "why" rather than the "how".
Unfortunately, the difference between the faith and science was summed up for me in a Tim Minchin piece titled "Storm (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujUQn0HhGEk)"
Science adjusts it’s views based on what’s observed.
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved.
Until religions can bend their views to match our current observations, I feel there will always be a gulf between them, but in an individual, they need not be mutually exclusive.
A religious follower cannot prove that God exists, but a scientist cannot prove that he/she/it doesn't either.
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[;)] [;)]
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I'd say the Gospels lie between History and legend. One can draw a verdict but not prove anything. And there is evidence in history, and in practice and observations of all kind of near death experiences.
It seems many of our ancestors were moved by the beauty of people, cities and natural formations like the Grand Canyon, Sydney Harbour, London, Tweed Crater and the Himalayas to believe in God. But for such among us, science can replace faith in God.
Ones like me have evidence in the Spirit of Christ as basis instead of the above philosophy, experiencing forgiveness, a clear conscience, overcoming sin, seeing and hearing healings, secret thoughts revealed, infillings of the presence of God, the Spirit, refreshing, and like static electricity, tangible anointing. Others having the same or similar 'experiences' of phenomena, laughing, crying, shaking. Also the unclean spirits. At the name of Jesus people screaming simultaneously, then stopping when commanded. Glossolalia, hearts strangely warmed. Men telling other men, that they love each other. It can be seen, felt, understood and is a testimony. Brain scans have been done on people with Glossolalia.
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Unfortunately, glossolalia is not a particularly good proof of validity for anyone outside the faith. It is a fairly commonly recognised phenomenon. A charismatic Christian who is prepared to consider it logically has a problem when it is pointed out that whirling dervishes and other mystical Moslem cults, among others, also experienced and practised glossolalia.
As a Christian (not of the charismatic practice), I can marvel in the fact that molecular oxygen has a structure with two unpaired electrons, and that it must be so because of the fundamental symmetries of nature, and that this gives oxygen properties that are quite different to those it would have if all of its electrons were paired up. And I can marvel at the fact that water is a bent polar molecule, which gives it a wide liquid range, makes it a useful solvent for salts, prevents its molecules from packing efficiently into solids, which makes ice float on water (unlike most other materials' liquid and solid forms), which makes all of the unique and characteristic properties that make Earth's environment unique, and which make water a uniquely suitable environment for life. I do not just mean aquatic life -- our bodies are about 80% water. And for all of this I can give God the glory. But I cannot, and nor should I be able to, convince anyone outside the faith that this is a knock-down argument for the existence of God. And I too have stronger proofs, but only for my own reassurance, in my life experience.
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Q. Do science and religion have any common ground?
A. Yes, their most dedicated advocates have bad hair ... [:)]
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-19669950
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Q. Do science and religion have any common ground?
A. Yes, their most dedicated advocates have bad hair ... [:)]
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-19669950
Interesting idea, RD
(https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2F&hash=3cd4f4119996b42d10f5ed9eb0e8d712)
Damocles (Note halo)
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Re: bad hair. This guy is an astrophysicist ...
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http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/author/esiegel/
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Neither do i believe in such a personal God, but universe itself as considered as god, but not a God of prayer. Universe is a god of itself. so i do not think Science and religion will ever have a common ground, but however Good and Evil is influenced by Science. if you are interested read this article where it explains really well! how science and human condition affect Good and Evil.
<questionable and repeated (2 posts, 2 copied links) link removed; please first show that you wish to enter forum discussions, etc>
- A Moderator
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I googled this subject and came to this interesting subject being talked about here on the forum between science and religion. I was looking for info on something else pertaining to this subject, but I thought I would chime in here, and who knows maybe I'll stick around. I was recently at a science/sci fi conference and I listened to this author and also baught her book. Its a new book and the subject really got me interested to start investigating the possibility.
Anyhow to make a long story short, after seeing the presentation and reading the book (In search of the holy language) the author demonstrates how all of the Hebrew letters are produced from one particular spiral form, which is based on the Fibonacci series that is found everywhere in the natural world. Accordingly, from cited ancient texts like the kabala the author claims that it was well understood that God used these letters to create all things in existence. ...And that it is a language that controls all things at every given moment. Its a language based on mathematics and "frequency". The book also connects it to ancient monuments like the Great Pyramid of Egypt, the Mayan runes, the Freemasons, and the physics of sound and vibration.
Is anyone here familiar with any of this?
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Do science and religion have any common ground?
No. Think fish and bicycles.
Science is the iterative process of formulating inherently disprovable hypotheses based on observation, and testing them. Scientific knowledge is the residue of hypotheses that have been shown to be adequately explanatory and predictive, usefully integrative, and not yet disproved.
Religion is something entirely different.
You can start with the same observation, say that the sun rises every day. You can apply science to your observation and build a model that leads to a spherical earth turning with a tilted axis and orbiting around the sun, and this turns out to be usefully predictive of the seasons and what the planet will look like if you photograph it from space. Then you grow crops, send up rockets, and everyone is happy.
Or you can assert that the god who makes the sun rise demands the sacrifice of virgins, which is fine unless you live in Essex, where it is very sunny but a bit short of suitable sacrificial material, so you have to make some other undisprovable excuse, and you end up with Essexism, which is quite different from Welshism ("the sun doesn't come out very often because the lousy English have sinned - and the Essexists are the worst"), nobody knows when to plant or harvest anything, and everybody hates everybody else because of what they think their parents believed.
Science good. Religion bad. Ask any Sunni what he thinks of Shias, or any Catholic whether he would let his daughter marry a Protestant. Right now I'm arguing with a chemist whose water analysis doesn't explain why my cooling pumps keep stopping (he says I've got the physics wrong and they are underpowered) but we're more likely to find and fix the problem by combining our knowledge, than to kill each other because of our beliefs.
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Science and religion may indeed share a commonality especially when mathematics is involved if indeed the Fibonacci sequence produces a spiral form that generates the complete Hebrew alphabet. ???
(https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg1.imagesbn.com%2Fp%2F9781615000364_p0_v1_s260x420.JPG&hash=8861fe3cbe5aed3466df2266be0e16f8)
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Can't believe if people who are PhD and still religious, they should have realized something by now.
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I was surprised to hear the statistic that the Catholic church has funded more free medical care than any other group or organization. (No, I'm not Catholic.) If there is common ground, it is empathy and good works of people who hold different beliefs or see the world in different ways. The Dalia Lama once said "My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness."
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As long as people are not fighting, hating, destroying or taking advantage from kind people, i'm fine with any religion, but as most religions do that, then i hate them, though i respect kind people.
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Science and religion may indeed share a commonality especially when mathematics is involved if indeed the Fibonacci sequence produces a spiral form that generates the complete Hebrew alphabet. ???
This would be interesting if (a) it is true, (b) Judaic law and history derive from the Hebrew alphabet and (c) there is no other religion. I think not.
The Dalia Lama once said "My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness."
A year or so ago I heard an interesting radio play whilst driving to work. A modern Gulliver fetched up in a society whose only law was "be nice". He had a great time, everything was lovely, and then he asked "what do you do to people who break the law?" Unfortunately I arrived at my destination before the question was answered! Any suggestions would be most welcome.
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Quote from: Starburst1 on 21/09/2013 17:53:26
Science and religion may indeed share a commonality especially when mathematics is involved if indeed the Fibonacci sequence produces a spiral form that generates the complete Hebrew alphabet. ???
This would be interesting if (a) it is true, (b) Judaic law and history derive from the Hebrew alphabet and (c) there is no other religion. I think not.
Alan you have not read this book. Perhaps if you saw the pictures illustrated in the book you might think otherwise. If you did see them (a) you would know it is true, and (b) Judiaic law and history IS DERIVED from the Hebrew alphabet since it was given (by God) to Moses at Mt. Sinai establishing the Old Testament, and (c) all other religions are derived from the old Canaanite and Adamic religion. Did you know that all religions of the world know about a "Tree" in a garden, and also a Great Flood?
Here is a picture of the spiral form. In the book it shows this spiral form that is a product of natures law (the Fibonacci sequence) which permeates throughout all the natural world and way into the universe. Now this particular spiral form when you turn it around in your hand, you can see that at different angles it produces other recognizable Hebrew letters. As it turns out this particular spiral shape produces the complete Hebrew alphabet. There is no other writing in the world that does this.
(https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.biblewheel.com%2Fimages%2Fmeyer-explanation.png&hash=4c1185b045190fef9755b98e89896278)
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There is no other writing in the world that does this.
Apart from Greek, Arabic, Hindi.... in fact pretty much all scripts (except Roman, Chinese (including Japanese and Korean) and runes) have an apparent spiral form.
The shape of Hebrew characters is due to their being drawn in ink with a broad flat nib, rather like modern Italic handwriting. It may look like a twisted ribbon, but it ain't. It's a consequence of writing on parchment with a metal nib, whilst Chinese characters are a consequence of using a brush on paper, and Roman and runic inscriptions derive from stylus and chisel work. Technology, not divinity, determines how we record our thoughts.
If you accept that Stonehenge and its ilk were religious sites (I don't, but that's another story) you'd be hard put to say how its users derived their beliefs from the same source as Judaism, and modern polytheisms have no discernible similarity with "thou shalt have no other god but me". IIRC, a lot of the Torah dealt with my ancestors' wars with various polytheists and ancestor-worshippers who clearly didn't think that their faith derived from ours.
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Alan, you can make your own mind up and are free to your own opinion. However the pictures in this case do not lie. Religion does not get in the way of my reasoning. I was in disbelief and had to make a matching spiral form to prove it to myself. It is true that other letters from other alphabets may be made with a spiral of sorts, but guaranteed they are not all produced from a single form (a product of the Fibonacci sequence), and that one form is able to produce every single letter of that alphabet. I’ve looked at other alphabets already, and it just isn’t happening. The Hebrew is the only one that does it.
Now we need to ask the question of WHY?
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For the same reason that the DNA spiral pitch is a fibonacci ratio, perhaps? You see, my ancestors decoded the human genome 6000 years ago and hid the secret in our alphabet, thus making us masters of the universe. If it hadn't been for those pesky Hindus discovering the fibonacci numbers 1000 years before fibonacci, and the sunflower arranging its seeds in a fiibonacci pattern several million years before that, the subject might be remotely interesting to a complete nutter. As it is, we simply devised an alphabet that could be written on parchment with a metal nib.
The real question is why, having devised an alphabet to be written with the right hand, we wrote it from right to left?
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That would be a good theory that our ancestors designed it and not God, however this theory lacks several things…… #1 the code imbeds deeper into what’s called “The Bible Code”, and #2 it appears to be divinely inspired because many of the prophesies have been fulfilled pertaining to the Messiah. Who but God could have predicted the future and encoded it into His word for future generations to find?
You ask why it is written from right to left? The Torah is a scroll, which means that it spirals. It has a right side and a left side (both ends spiral). It is my theory that God designed the Torah to spiral and therefore had instructed us to write with our left hand in order to hold the other side of the Torah parchment with our left hand. We write with our right hand backwards so that as we write our right wrist holds open the scroll on the right side, and so that is why the writing goes from right to left. Also if you look inside a Torah scroll you will see that the paragraphs and borders are short about the size of a human hand writing in one spot (so that it would not have to move). Additionally I looked it up…. According to Kabala, the right side symbolizes greater spiritual revelation, as opposed to the left ("weaker") side, which symbolizes a "weaker" manifestation of spirituality.
(https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fmaozblog.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2013%2F08%2Ftorah_scroll1.jpg&hash=d79873580d1ebea2c403b5d6e8d91155)
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That would be a good theory that our ancestors designed it and not God, however this theory lacks several things…… #1 the code imbeds deeper into what’s called “The Bible Code”, and #2 it appears to be divinely inspired because many of the prophesies have been fulfilled pertaining to the Messiah. Who but God could have predicted the future and encoded it into His word for future generations to find?
"Our" ancestors? If we shared such a common ancestry (or even if you cared about history) you wouldn't consider the messianic prophecies to be fulfilled.
Your theory demands the existence of a god - evidence sadly lacking, alas.
And an utterly stupid god. If omnipotent, why not embed the answers in the human brain (self-copying) instead of a coded scroll (easily lost, damaged, mis-copied, or misinterpreted)?
I like the explanation of R to L writing, though. Very clever! Except that as you write with your right hand, the right-hand scroll moves leftward and smudges what you have just written - exactly the problem that lefthanded western writers have (though a lefthanded lecturer is a delight - he moves away from the blackboard as he writes).
The problem with a scroll is that it only permits linear access. A benevolent, omniscient and omnipotent god would have invented bookbinding, which makes it a lot easier to copy, edit, correct, repair and access the bit you need.
Sorry, but your arguments are selfcontradictory!
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I will leave you on that note Alan, but think and ponder on the Hebrew letters (coming from a single form) a little longer.
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Delighted to have made your acquaintance - and welcome to the deep end!
I have no doubt that Hebrew script, just like Chinese, Roman and Runic, is based on a single form, but there's a considerable difference in origin between a mapped spiral and the stroke of a flat pen, even if they look similar. Interestingly it was the chance recognition of the mapping of a helix into k-space that led to the unravelling of DNA, but sadly it wasn't the Jewish member of the team that spotted it!
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Well, by the twenties the religious disliked cigars and too much alcohol. Now we have common ground here, after research by religious and secular day workers working together.
And studying Homo Sapien DNA and other species like Orangutans, we see that Orangutans have a lot in common with each other and with us 95% or 98%, evidence of a common source of the old human blue prints. And that Orangutans have mixed more with a variety of races than us.
We have more like 99% in common with each other and it is evidence we come from a family, a small tribe, without mixing with other races with the exotic DNA. As with the story of the only family of eight saved from the flood.
With regards to intellectuals like PHD holders, the top most science degree would be psychiatry. The matriculation from high school needs the graduate to have studied maths, language, and sciences and gained about 90% to 95% of the questions right, minimum. They have to first do a full medical degree, in which they take the responsibility of other human lives. Then further study of the brain and psychology.
They may often doubt Christ Jesus' resurrection, but others form Catholic or Evangelical Drs organizations... Some study people at death, or go through near death themselves, and find they remain conscious. And promote dualism.
Among intellectuals in the sciences, Richard Dawkins interviewed one called Alister E McGrath as you can see on youtube. It was not included on the Television documentary. Alister has a view in which science and religion have common ground, perhaps in his novels.
World wars 1 and 2 were secular and would not have happened if Germany and Japan had been Christian committed governments at the time. We have in common, we dislike war. The like of peace, happiness and good character are in common.
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I chortle when the 'values' of the religeous are mentioned.. let us not forget that religion has caused the majority of the conflict throughout history..
Religion has been used as a stick to control populations since the dawn of time.. with the promise of that far off carrot of eternal life or things of that ilk. Why do you think religions generally have a list of things to do and not do, and usually involve a form of taxation or wealth distribution.
HOWEVER.. I believe that religions do also make the world a MUCH better place, the kindness, self sacrificing nature of humanity has a lot to thank religion for. Without religion would we all still live in tribes throwing sticks at each other?
For me science and religion share the one truth.. "There is so much in the universe that is unknown" and the understanding that working together is much better than working against each other. Problem is some religions want to be the only religion (probably so the leaders of that religion get richer and more powerful) which is a reflection of true human nature.. Science used to keep human nature out of the findings, but it is slowly creeping its way in.
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World wars 1 and 2 were secular and would not have happened if Germany and Japan had been Christian committed governments at the time. We have in common, we dislike war. The like of peace, happiness and good character are in common.
Never mind the Crusades, the Conquistadores, or any of that historical rubbish. Are you suggesting that Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher, and George W Bush were not committed christians? That's tantamount to accusing politicians of hypocrisy! How dare you? Especially as the Blessed Saint Margaret quoted no less a person that St Francis of Assissi as her inspiration. I would be reprimanded if I made such a suggestion on these boards!
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Ancient and medieval people were so different to us in education, work, values, sense of being, nation and destiny... they were programmed differently. But what does not change are things like anger, love, security, a need to act together, fraternize...
We have the conscience and machinations, and sex drive and child rearing desires and for the first time in human history, it is under control with the pill.
Regardless of what religion we have, or atheism, people, nations fight. There are good and bad people. Things go better with the endorsement of the conscience in schools and the press and the government. The conscience may not be something mentioned in any communications were it not for Moses, Jesus, Peter the apostle and Martin Luther. Not for a two thousand years literally.
Luther himself was a hard man.
The conscience, compassion, love, honour, mercy, fairness, benevolence, rights, freedoms, business equity, privacy, protection, medicine and love of truth are liked by both religious and scientists. Mainly the earlier, where it comes from, but the name was spoiled by bigots and the ambitious.
Tony Blair was not such a user of warfare because of the saints. He would have used it if he was an atheist.
If instead of Hitler there was a most popular governor who put Christ before nation in trust, Christ teaching would have prevented conflict.
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Before the big bang, there was not time and chance and probability as we know it. What is seen and understood is not from in time or what is seen. It comes from above time.
The universe is not up to chance and probability. What the universe comes from need not look random and under the effects of entropy... We have that in common.
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The trick is understanding and appreciating the benefits of both. Taking sides is not necessary
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The great benefit of religions is that they serve as a reservoir from which fanatics emerge who have decided to try to do their religion by the book, and then they kill in the name of their god by applying all the worst laws they can find in their holy book(s) which give them an excuse to harm innocent people. More reasonable religious people pick and choose which laws to follow and which to ignore, so they aren't following their religion properly, but they are giving it a respectability which it doesn't deserve, and that's extremely dangerous.
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In short, religion gives people an excuse for doing things that would otherwise be considered insane or evil. Science doesn't.
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If you look at plants and animals and people. Animals and people can be violent but people can decide on their own character to some extent. Problems emerge in tribes, but civilization, now that that is the big dangerous matter! It's people not religion. Once religion is in people, then comes the trouble. Not all religions are alike. Christianity is a religion of the conscience and compassion and justice, love and light. It is benevolent. Adherents of theology may not be sincere compassionate people.
The ancient Roman Catholic church went wrong here in the 8th or 9th century, becoming political and without spiritual power. Maybe because of early hardship under Nero and other persecutors and then the half conversion of Rome to there being Christianity as state religion. Then the loss of Constantinople and military danger dangers... with a Pope as head of state.
In this time the popes became austere and like dictators.
In this scene there was growth in scientific knowledge and no possible movements like Nazism or Communism, Idi Amin...
Luther broke away as a matter of conscience, with German headship, but he was still austere.
In the free countries science was a tool for war technology. Nazism renounced Christianity and was one of the greatest evils we know of with was it, 68,000,000 dead?
Communism under atheist Stalin also cost needless suffering and millions of dead and the threat within the cold war.
If we interpret the rules of Moses and the principles of Jesus with conscience, that is what is intended. Your knowledge and use of the word conscience would not exist without the conversion of Rome from Paganism and Luther.
Science on it's own is without an anchor in ethics and does things like eugenics, euthanasia, experiments on human embryos, abortion, the invention of neutron bombs and the consideration of replacing parts of the justice system with evolutionary drives.
Among us are some dangerous people. conscience and fairness keeps thing in order.
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my religion is kindness. that's pretty cool.
my religion is love, that's best religion.
my name is joe
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in short, no thing lied more than science. y2k, time travel, ftl travel, graviton, photon, energy level, god particle, in order to get fund, have a job.
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in short, no thing lied more than science. y2k...
I can't be bothered commenting on the rest of the list, but y2k was a real potential threat and the fuss made about it made sure that nothing went wrong. Had no fuss been made, a disaster might well have resulted from it, and if that had happened, all the idiots going on about the stupidity of the y2k warnings now would have spent the last 14 years throwing blame around instead and accusing people of being idiots for standing back and doing nothing when any fool could see the danger.
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Separating science and religion in an absolute sense is like unscrambling an egg, especially when you consider religion (ie Islam) invented the scientific method in the 13th Century. While they are different kinds of knowledge both need to be considered together to understand both mechanics and meaning, the two sides of the coin of existence, like matter and consciousness, wave forms and particles, nature vs nurture even. The tendency of some to perceive them as opposites merely points to and inability to comprehend a bigger picture within which the work together. As we gain a better understanding of existence, the paradoxes start to fall. It takes people able to see the bigger picture to show the way, e.g., like how Edward Witten showed that the 5 seemingly conflicting string theories could become complementary with the addition of another dimension.
Besides, if they have no common ground, how come the current pope believes in Evolution. How come Darwin believed in a creator (he was a deist) and Newton was as much as theologian as a physicist? And it is not fair or just to patronize these greats with suggestions that they may have different beliefs if they were armed with today's knowledge. It also ignores the many great scholars we have today who are able grasp the bigger picture in which the existence of one does not destroy the other.
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And it is not fair or just to patronize these greats with suggestions that they may have different beliefs if they were armed with today's knowledge. It also ignores the many great scholars we have today who are able grasp the bigger picture in which the existence of one does not destroy the other.
It is not fair not to suggest that they may have had different beliefs if they were armed with today's knowledge. They did not see the arguments that disprove God.
You're right on some of the earlier things you said - religion often was a kind of science in the early days. If you shout into an empty cave and someone shouts back at you, there's obviously a spirit in there.
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Besides, if they have no common ground, how come the current pope believes in Evolution. How come Darwin believed in a creator (he was a deist) and Newton was as much as theologian as a physicist? And it is not fair or just to patronize these greats with suggestions that they may have different beliefs if they were armed with today's knowledge. It also ignores the many great scholars we have today who are able grasp the bigger picture in which the existence of one does not destroy the other.
It is precisely because there is no common ground between science and superstition that it is possible for one person to practice science and believe in fairies, just as Hitler was kind to dogs and children. If there were any common ground, it would be a battlefield.
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There is a difference between faith/expectation/confidence and superstition and science.
Your judgement is used to find facts and may not agree with theology... but not all use their judgement to determine faith matters. Or faith to find physics facts...
Faith is the ancient and original order. Look at our cats and their primitive brains. And wild cats. They do n ot judge if there will be another morning or night, or food... many of them survive. They sleep and awaken and hunt expecting reality will be there. Night, day, food. They are confident!
Our ancestors must have been like this.
It is not necessary for us to, not believe in night and day and providence.
We experience things that give us faith and it is natural order.
I may have become an atheist only I experienced forgiveness and other things. If you seek to test faith, the best thing you can do is ask for prayer from the charismaticly gifted and be given knowledge with insight not naturally possible.
In twenty or fifty years from now, and then again, the cutting edge of scientific facts may change.
The worth of Jesus, cross, is a promise of health, good character and eternal life. To some this makes sense. So they consider believing. What could be worth more?
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Common ground: nutters, fruit-loops, genius, rules on clothing, the use of books, lectures (although in religion it's called preaching), the construction of expensive big buildings, bias, a reliance to some extent on charitable donations and I think you get my drift so feel free to add some more :-)
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Is there anything in religion anybody has heard that makes them think there may be something in what is being said here. My kids go to a youth club run by a church and knowing the vicar Ive have had many hours of deep conversation whereby we cross our scientific and religious viewpoints he im sure was trying to bring me into the fold where as i was listening to find some means of correlation two things he said spring to mind
God is the light..........now were all fans of that light stuff in here, possibly more about the speed of it and weather it has mass lol but none the less we can possibly assume he travels well fast!!!
and another
God made us inside a perfect sphere and lives on the outside and that he lives outside of time.........what a weird thing i said so everything has already happend then and he said yes id imagine this is true because if you were in this universe it isnt possible to have made it.
Any ideas are welcomed
cheers
Ace
In my opinion religion is the first branch of Psuedo-science and the very first thoughts of how we got here and where did everything come from. Creation from religions is the science I mention, after creation , things like Moses parting the sea or Gabriel talking to Mohamed, are simply make believe stories where the author's scientific thought was at a stand still and dead end, in the beginning there was nothing, ''god'' created all or in the beginning there was a big bang, are points in logic where we hit a logical stalemate in thinking.
We can only imagine nothing as an emptiness, this is where everyone's logic can rewind everything to and always hit a dead end with no apparent answer. A logical argument opposed to a God is the simplicity question of what made a ''God'' and what is beyond paradise?
Also there is logical argument to suggest that the author's were really considering space, ''God'' is all around us and everywhere, ''God'' is immortal, ''God'' created everything, ''god'' watches over us,
My argument would be that ''God'' was a term in the origin of the word that now means space.
Space is all around us, space is immortal, without space things can not exist, things need a space to exist in.
Light is also created in space,
Common ground yes, the link - thinking
''let there be light'' really meaning let the ball of plasma in the sky shine on the earth, if ''God'' made light, then worship science, they also can make light.