Duh?


Duh?


I don't "believe" in a theory, I merely take it to be a likely explanation of what happened. That's...kind of the whole idea...

God is quite the miraculous accident, you know...

In fact, he's far more complex than this rock we're on.

The beautiful thing about the scientific theory is if evidence comes to light that a hypothesis is incorrect, the scientific community would re-evaluate its beliefs, and would reform a new/modified hypothesis as to what happened. Right now, we have more evidence to support the idea that life began in an extremely privative form and slowly adjusted itself into more complex organisms than we do that life was simply created as the complex multi-function organisms we see currently.

Really? Please, explain this to me without borrowing from the scientific theories.
As of right now, we have geological evidence and computer simulations to back the idea that Theia collided with the Earth and flung matter into orbit around the Eath. This model has more support than any other theory, including the Earth catching a foreign body, or the moon simply being a custom-creation for the Earth.

What's the difference between scientists theorizing that things in the universe happen due to observable circumstances and systems based on observation, and having faith in the accuracy of these circumstances/systems, and someone who has faith that everything in the universe sparked with a supernatural finger-snap? Oh, I guess that little bit about how the scientists rely on ideas and theories they can recreate and observe/measure multiple times is enough to separate them from the individuals who go purely on faith that "well...I bet this happened...even though we've/we'll never see anything remotely similar to what I'm describing." But, you know, I'm one of those weirdos who blindly follows science. Baaaaah </sheep noise>, what do I know?

Let me just say: you don't understand faith. Unfortunately, neither do many, many people. Faith isn't static.

Let's say sometime you have a small spiritual experience. It affects you enough that you think "maybe there's something to this". Now you have a little bit of faith. Then you decide that the experience was powerful enough that you will pray. Then say you exercise your small amount of faith in your prayer and receive an answer (in any of many ways). This increases your faith even more.

I'm sure some churches don't teach this. Just don't generalize.

(The wikiquote entry on faith is appallingly biased)

From a very good article about George Bush

One evening circa 1910, Marsden and Geiger sat down to perform an incredibly tedious experiment sending alpha particles through a thin sheet of gold foil, to test the 'plum pudding' model of the atom. They found the remarkable result that, while most the particles went straight through, a tiny proportion of the particles were deflected back towards them.

If these two scientists had had faith in the 'plum pudding' model, they would have held their unshakable belief in its truth (the sort of quality that religions of all sorts value so highly). If they had had faith, they wouldn't even be doing the experiment in the first place.

But they didn't, they had no faith. And their work resulted in the nuclear model of the atom. Marsden got a knighthood, and Geiger had a tube named after him.

Now, indeed, certain concepts are more presumptuous than others. Current work in Theoretical Physics involves many various 'Grand Unified Theories' trying to link the strong nuclear force with the electroweak force, most of them involving the concept of magnetic monopoles.
Again, scientists do not have 'faith' in any one of these theories. A single theoretical physicist may produce several conflicting theories. Their purpose is causal; 'If this is found to be true, then this must be true because of the calculations shown below'. The theoretical physicist certainly does not have 'faith' in the theory because if the premise is not shown to be true, then he must work on a different model.

The very concept of 'faith' is diametrically opposed to the philosophy of science. It crushes skepticism and curiosity in favour of relentless and violent conviction.



I'd be more likely to think "woah, acid flashback".

The human mind is an beautifully powerful machine, and it will often delude you in order to preserve itself. This is largely the result of what people see as 'spiritual experiences'; under moments of extreme stress or extreme emotion the brain will make you hallicunate so that you calm down and don't have a heart-attack. The 'light at the end of a tunnel' hallucination is particularly common.

Moreover, like the 'appallingly biased' wikiquote entry on faith says, I don't want to believe in a God that wants to be praised all the time.

There's a very big leap from 'hmm! that was weird, I wonder what that was' to 'I will pray to it several times a day!', the sort of leap that can only be induced by years of indoctrination from childhood.

I am a strong supporter in science because it gave me internets.

INTERNETS

One: It doesn't have to be that huge a leap. We're not talking isolated incidents here. Is it a huge leap from "every single time I pray (with some small amount of faith and a desire to really know the answer) asking if such and such is true I get a strong feeling that it is true" to "I'll live as if this is true"?

Two: You're just wrong about it being a matter of indoctrination. I have seen too many converts from too different backgrounds to believe that it's only indoctrination.

Three: It's pretty obvious you've never had a real spiritual experience. It's not a hallucination. Rather, it can be most simply described as a strong input of emotion. You can say that it's just a fluke, but why does the fluke happen in the same sort of situation?

actually, I rather think that it's atheism that takes many years of indoctrination; the prevalence of religion throughout human history suggests to me that it's a rather natural outgrowth of the way the human mind works.

mort i agree with you on a lot of things, but your astounding generalizations on faith are laughable at best. to say that faith is the antithesis and even the "enemy" of reason is pure tripe.

if i have faith that my theory is going to proven to be true, then that faith is completely revisable and even discardable, but for the here and now i hold said faith. it is true that faith does not REQUIRE reason (as in logic), but the enemy of reason? no.

now, there are some PEOPLE who have faith and are so closed minded about it that you could probably call THEM an enemy of reason, but even then their faith is more of a symptom than a cause. and this makes an exceedingly poor excuse for calling faith the antithesis of reason.

I think you'll find them not from such different backgrounds at all.
Why is a child brought up in a Muslim community so statistically overwhemingly more likely to 'find' Mohammed, while a child brought up in a Christian community is statistically more likely to 'find' Jesus?





Who are you to say what a 'real' spiritual experience is?

When I was first taught Euler's identity, , I had what would tick all the boxes for a 'spiritual experience'. Before then I had thought of mathematics as a tool I use to do things or a useful language I spoke to communicate things, but Euler's identity is a tantalising hint at the absolute mathematical beauty of reality. It was like going from thinking you were using a spanner to realising the spanner was actually using you all along.
I have a very powerful emotional response to mathematics, in its elegance and beauty. I'm sure any computer programmers here with a natural aversion to 'ugly' code will appreciate this. It isn't about what is efficient or useful, it is about what is beautiful.

And on a more theological level, how do you know that your faith is in God? Let's take for granted that Moses had a 'spiritual experience' from some powerful supernatural entity that gave him the commandments, and that Jesus was sent to Earth by some powerful supernatural entity to influence humans and performed supernatural miracles.
How do you know that this powerful supernatural entity was actually God?
Surely the Devil, also a powerful supernatural entity, is just as capable of such miracles? When Moses recieved his supernatural messages, how could he tell the difference between a message sent by God and a message sent by Satan? How could we mere humans tell the difference whether Jesus was the son of God, or the son of Satan? When you recieve your spiritual experience, how do you know that it doesn't come from the Devil?
Both supernatural entities are powerful far beyond our comprehension, and both capable of performing miracles on Earth to influence us, and giving us spiritiual experiences within us - so how do we tell the difference between them? If God has created us to instinctively 'know' what is Him and what isn't, why would he require to send us 'spiritual experiences' to nudge us into faith?

It is possible that all that follow the Ten Commandments are following the instructions of the Devil, and all that worship Jesus Christ are worshipping the son of Satan. How would they know otherwise? And if they persist in this worship by faith, how will they ever see otherwise?

I'd say the reason you can point to this as your equivalent of a spiritual experience is that it's rooted in exactly the same functions of the mind that religion is: namely, the drive to find and construct patterns out of our experiences. This leads some people to magical thinking and seeing connections that the rest of us would call superstition; others are impressed by the elegence of a proof or a physical theory. So on what grounds can you criticize a person for enjoying one version or another of abstraction from reality?

Personally I believe that most major religions are actually inspired by the same supernatural source. I believe Mohammed was inspired by the same god that inspired Paul and the ancient Hindu writers. I think sometimes certain groups weren't given the same truths as other groups (I don't know why) and that - combined with corruption by humans - has caused the great separation in sects we see. Of course I can't prove this, but it does answer many questions. It would also explain why people "find" the religion they grow up with.

Consider a man with a lamp. He's had his lamp for years and he likes it a lot. It lights his room at night very well. One day a lamp salesman comes by his house. He asks to see the man's lamp. The man proudly shows the salesman the power of his lamp and the salesman is impressed. The man really does have a very fine lamp and the salesman tells him so. Then the salesman takes out his lamp and turns it on. The man has never seen his room so brightly lit. He can suddenly see perfectly clearly every corner of his room. He knows he had a fine lamp before but he buys the new lamp on the spot.

(That's not my allegory. It was written by some religious figure) There are several lessons that can be drawn from the story, and unfortunately I can't really remember what the one I had in mind first was. First of all, what would have happened had the man refused to see the salesman's lamp? He would have had naive faith in his lamp and would have suffered unknowingly because of it. Had he had real faith in his lamp he would have known that it was the light from the lamp that was good and that there might be stronger sources of the same light.

Basically, the existence of multiple religions doesn't negate them all. I actually like that you've had a mathematical spiritual experience. I think there is truth and beauty in almost any area of the universe you wish to look. For me, who believes in God - it hints at the beauty of God's creation - and for you it doesn't because you don't believe in God. It can go either way.

Let me try and deal with the theological point. Pick some supernatural being, let's call ours Fred. We have some initial experience with Fred, decide to start following Her. Now we can't know much about Fred. Fred might actually be some supernatural cabal of separate beings, so we rely on consistency in Fred's messages. If suddenly you get a message with content that doesn't seem consistent with Fred's other messages you should start to question if that message is actually from Fred. Scripture is usually there to provide a base for analysis. Typically we can trust scripture is from Fred and not some other supernatural is because the scripture is what brought us to Fred in the first place.

Sorry that this post is not very well put together. These are some interesting questions that I haven't really thought about before.

For one thing, whatever abstraction he has is based on actual observations of reality, not a fairy tale. But more importantly, these abstractions of reality that people have which are based off religious teachings tend to lead people towards things like persecution, war and violence. It's a pretty common theme throughout human history.

And we come back to the arguments that one, for the time that non-religious political leaders have been around they've caused a good number of awful conflicts, and two, that wars caused by religion can often be considered caused by a corruption of the religion's teachings.

I haven't really read all of this thread, so if the whole 'religion causes war' bit has been done then I'm sorry for bringing it up again.

Isn't that a bit of a logical loop? You can't be sure about Fred so you turn to scriptures written by "Fred" to be sure about Fred?
That's more or less the whole God-exists-because-the-Bible-says-so-and-was-written-by-God-therefore-God-exists-beca.....

Why doesn't t his threae dmake sense

I didn't explain it very well. I was trying to answer Mort's question about not knowing one supernatural message source from another. Let me try again.

One set of scriptures - when read - leads to a certain set and type of "spiritual signal". Then we have another unknown source of signals. If the scriptures describe some supernatural being Fred that generates signals of some type. If the signals from the unknown source match the type of signal described by scripture then they can be treated as from Fred as long as the content of the signals is consistent with what is found in the scriptures. We can say that the source is Fred - even if Fred is actually five different beings - because the only descriptions we have created or can comprehend for supernatural beings is the type of signal (the spirit of the being) and the content of the signal (the gospel, message, teaching, goal, etc.)

Keep in mind this isn't a method to prove any supernatural being exists. It is only using consistency checks to keep track of different supernatural beings. The reliability of spiritual signals as proof for existence of gods (an unfortunate term that I would rather not use) is another issue entirely; one that has to do with faith in Occam's Razor and science as religion.\


This has taken a turn for the weird.

But what if Fred is Satan? What if all of your experience with the supernatural and spiritual has been only from evil? How would you know? And as your faith is entirely vested in this Fred (who may possibly be Satan), you will never be open to God if He indeed does communicate with us.
Does this not worry you?

In Soviet Russia, God hates Bill Nye.

This is where I have to get religion specific. In my experience there are two sources, one Good, one Bad. The Good one has a very definite "good feeling" while the Bad one tends to be tempting for a short time and then be gone shortly. The impermanence of the Bad source suggests that maybe the Good one is more powerful. Even if we can't determine who's who in heaven from here, we can just pick whatever one is more powerful in the long one.

Still assuming Christian mythology, why would God pretend to be evil? It sounds plausible that Satan would send out supposedly-Godly messages to confuse people on earth (I think he has in scripture), but it makes no sense for God to pretend to be the Bad Guy.

Again, if Satan were to disseminate messages that were in line completely with the teachings of God, he would be God as far as we're concerned. People who followed those messages would be followers of God because it all comes down to what they teach and what we do.

None of this is very persuading, I'm just trying to show that just because you can think of questions about a religion doesn't mean it isn't true, and that it's possible to think in depth about religion without being a heretic.

One source, pretending to be two. One good and one bad but in reality both bad. I don't think that one would ever get boring. In fact, I think I just solved religion.

edit: oops ha.

page one my dear...