We're just cells.

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You must have had quite interesting experiences with "religious people" to make such a sweeping statement. I say this because religious people have been, in my experience, among the most determined and intelligent people I know personally.

Perhaps the point is that there is no solution in that an "intelligent" person can be only atheistic/agnostic or theistic, that is, either position is a viable one. (To say nothing of other positions.) Again, it's not extremely intellectually satisfying conclusion, but it's one I've come to accept.

 

@Oaz: from the top of Aik's latest post...

(Ooh, triple quote. )

@Aik:
You might want to edit that post to prevent this happening again. Though how Oaz missed that I don't know.

 

Ah, mustn't have been as clever as you.

 

Sotrry to go , but funny thing about CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien: when CS lewis began writing the Chronicles of Narnia, he was an atheist, but by the time he had finished, he was a Christian. With Tolkien, this worked in reverse. He started his writing as a Christian, but finished as an atheist.

The existence of God is a very, very tricky subject., and although I personally believe humanity is a statistical inevitability in an infinite universe ( that is, in an infinite universe, all possibilities will occur, such as a planet capable of supporting intelligent life), abandoning the concept of God could only lead to nihilism.

 

*Blinks*

I am pretty damn sure that Tolkien was never an atheist...

May I ask - why? I and many others have abandoned the concept of God and aren't nihilists. That's as baseless a statement as 'you need to have faith' - clearly, you don't...

 

Man, this is hard to explain.
Okay, so the concept of God is not just as a metaphysical deity who watches and judges, but also something inside us: our social conscience and sense of ethics. If we were to completely ignore this part of us, we would see no point in obeying the "rules" of ethics. I'm not just talking about the Judeo-Christian bearded man in the sky.

And on the Tolkien note, I think it might have actually been the other way around...

 

You're redefining 'god' to the point that it's no longer recognisable as what everyone else calls 'god' - by what you've written it sounds (to me) like you're just talking about cultural values, which is hardly divine.

And to stick with the Tolkien note, the story goes like this AFAIK: Tolkien = Catholic. CS Lewis = atheist. Many religious discussions later and CS Lewis = Protestant (and quite anti-atheist...). That's pretty much all there is to it...

 

Ah, wikipedia. FOnt of all knowledge. The Ontological arguement actually makes perfect sense when carefully considered, but I dislike it, so I shalln't bother doing so here. If anyone goes out and finds it, I shall have done my daily good deed.

And what exactly is that? If you're going to define God, good luck. Wake me up when you're done.

 

Who says cultural values can't be religious? I can think of several cultures which have religion at their core. For example, isn't the core of the Ireland problem that N.Ireland and S.Ireland have different religious values Leading to clashing cultural values?

 

Stronger support? Better scientific angle? Not really, unless you concider an inherrantly, and admittedly, flawed explanation derived through the vaguest posibilities of M-Theory (debatably scientific to begin with) a scientific angle. M-Theory's colliding super-strings is the only 'scientific' explanation for the creation of the universe I've ever heard, and no one that I know of believes it as is, not to say that there aren't any that believe it may lead to one someday, but...
Anyway, if I haven't confused everyone yet, the Judaeo-Christian deity's creation of the universe is just as plausible and has just as much direct evidence, and more circumstantial, really, than any scientific theory I've ever heard. From this we can reason that belief in God and an afterlife, though not necessary, is rational and far from rediculous.

Thank you.

 

ok, my first post in this topic. to address mediocre man's original statement:

I think that you shouldn't rely purely on science to explain your existance. Obviously, science doesn't know everything, it is a constantly evolving field. Science itself it is limited by our own capacity to understand. I personally think that science is just one way to try to comprehend reality that humans have created. it certainly isn't the only way.

not that i don't like science or anything. I think science is great. But i think it is a misuse of science to try to use it as a means to understand ourselves and our our real nature.
ok, theres my $0.02!

 

OK, Phone_Tools, you are surely free to feel this way, but really: what else is there apart from science? I take it you talk about the "scientific method" in general rather than about an arbitrary field of science like biology or physics. So: what other means do you have to understand anything? And why is trying to understand something - even if you deem it transcendental - a misuse of science?

(Theodore Schick Jr. http://www.csicop.org/si/9703/end.html)

 

On the matter of wikipedia: So are you telling me that the information in that article is false? Because if not, there's no real need to slag it off just because it's wikipedia.

Well, let's just start with (one of...) the dictionary definitions:
'A being of supernatural powers or attributes, believed in and worshiped by a people, especially a male deity thought to control some part of nature or reality.'

Key words: Being and Supernatural. Yeah, this is just a dictionary definition, but I think it gets the point across - I'm thinking that there aren't many people who will classify 'god' as your personal beliefs...

Religion is the core of their beliefs - but that doesn't make their beliefs and morals 'god'. It just means that their culture - being the religious one that it is - has rubbed off the religious values and beliefs onto them.

NOG: Is there something wrong with the conventional big-bang theory as an explanation? Sure, you can argue that something must have started the big bang, so why not God - but then you're just god-of-the-gapsing. As science progresses the gaps which god fills in our knowledge grow smaller and smaller - it's already pretty clear that it's not the same God as presented in the Bible (who loves directly intervening and throwing around power - evolution for one kind of shoots that idea).

It is essentially impossible to disprove the existence of a God, sure. But the common ideas of who this God is and what he stands for look very ... unscientific in the face of science. I will always say that some blather about strings and massive explosions backed up by evidence (and yes, there's plenty of evidence for the big bang, and at least *something* that makes the quantum physicists waffle about the M-Theory, though it's far far beyond my understanding...) makes a better explanation than 'There's a guy in this place called Heaven, and he created everything - not sure why...' - there isn't *any* evidence for that whatsoever, nor can there be.

If you can't buy the current scientific stuff - I don't see why the religious alternative makes any more sense at all.

 

Aikanaro -- not that I would seriously suggest this, but perhaps it's possible that there actually is an omnipotent (let us leave out omnibenevolent for now) Christian God, and he, in his omnipotence, has created a bunch of evidence that would seem to invalidate his existence, for certain reasons. In other words, it is possible -- unlikely, perhaps -- that we are living in a sort of Matrix universe in which reality (which includes the dinosaur bones and massive explosions that discredit some accounts of religion) might not actually be real?

This isn't a very scientific or even readily acceptable theory, but where as science rests on theories and testing and disproving these theories, religion and faith do not really rest on "I have a theory that there is a certain God/gods/savior -- let's test this out."

(Incidentally, I was most forced to question the existence of the Christian God not because of scientific proof contrary to Christian teachings, but apparent problems in Christian teachings, namely the problem of evil.)

I agree that it is very difficult for many of us today to imagine a man sitting on a cloud. After all, God does not visit me (even in my dreams) or write me a letter. Nonetheless, I am still inclined to believe in a God that doesn't necessarily fit in with the Biblical God. Einstein said he believed in Spinoza's God, that is, all the universe is a sort of unfolding of God's will. I actually don't subscribe to that belief, but the God I am inclined toward is that the entirety of things in the universe are connected and contain meaning.

All this said -- my, how we have deviated from the original topic.

 

Diverted from topic? The question was that are we JUST cells. Religion tends to answer this question by conjuring other explanations, such as we're God's creations or that each of us have a soul. And then it becomes important what kind of God do we have and what part God had in our and the universe's creation.

Science tends to have a negative answer to the question 'Are we just cells?' as well. There is more to us than our physical properties, although the current consensus might be that most or all of these things that go beyond physics can be explained as products of physical, chemical and biological activities.

My view is that there's no need to go beyond scientific explanations in what is in the realm of human experience and life. Situations and phenomenons that go beyond this realm should be researched, and if no other possible explanation than a religious one, then one can accept the religious explanation.

Either scientific or religious way of explaining the world don't necessarily nullify the other, in many cases they overlap, but personally I prefer the scientific one, since it corrects itself and evolves much faster than the religious one.

 

@Darkthorne:

What? No. The superiority of science comes from testing, not just making a better explanation. A simpler, more concise, better understood explanation is squat if you can't test it and find out if its right. Remember, spontanious generation fit all those criteria until it was tested.

@Aikanaro:
Wikipedia has been known to be wrong more often than I feel comfortable with. I don't know about the quote in question, but I'll bet there's more to it than Wikipedia presents.

As for big bang, actually, yes. First off, it isn't a theory of creation, it isa theory of organization. Secondly, recent experiments into the background EM field of the universe as well as all attempts to accurately date the 'big bang' have cast a lot of doubt on the conventional view of it. M-Theory has taken the position that, at the point of the Big Bang, the laws of physics were drastically different, even to the point of combining several of the basic forces. I don't know how other scientific fields have taken it, but the conventional view of the Big Bang is under serious review.

As for science filling in for God, the gaps aren't getting smaller, they're getting bigger. How it works is this, the field of science is an ever expanding disc. The perimiter of this disc is what we know of, but don't understand. This is what is usually 'filled in' with God. On top of that, there are 'holes' in this disc, areas that we thought we understood, but occasionally something just blasts all our theories out of the water. Again, God may be used to 'fill in' these parts. The real point, however, is that this is God's intrusion into the scientific realm, and that He has His own realm called philosophy/theology which remains untouched by science.

As for your comment that God is unscientific, of course He is. No one ever said that God was a testable, repeatable event. Or at least, if someone did, they need to be shot. And quantum physicists waffle about M-Theory because it is untestable. They don't like it and call it unscientific because it is WELL beyond the current bounds of technology and, as such, is unscientific.

@Phone_Tools:

The reality that we created? I hope there's an explanation behind that one.


All in all, this is a very interesting topic. Psychology is split, some saying its all chemistry and genetics, others saying we are more than the sum of our parts. As far as I know, no other fields of science weigh in on the matter. Scientists have in the past tried to prove the existance of the soul by measuring the change in body mass at death (yes, they really did this). They came up with squat, big suprise. If there is a soul, and I believe that there is, I'll bet everything I have that it doesn't have mass.

EDIT: Sorry about that, didn't notice.

[ May 31, 2006, 15:52: Message edited by: NOG (No Other Gods) ]

 

The same way planes crash so often, I'll bet.

Theories are about as scientific as you can get. What scientists don't like is when it's treated as truth, when they can't even test it.

Acutally, you do lose about an ounce or two at death. Though they probably found where that came from and went. *shrug*

P.S. Could you change the second thing in your post from

Code:

 to [quote]?  It's seriously messing up the margins.

 

NOG, it is without question that "testing" (or rather "making falsifiable statements instead of pushing explanations into the realm of transcendence") is central to the scientific method. And yet... it is a common misconception, that you start with testing (i.e. gathering data) and then look through your results and shout "heureka!".

You start with an educated guess, with a small, wobbly explanation of how things might work. And only then you're able to start the testing, to seperate the necessary data from the useless. And then you fortify or falsify your explanation. You never really reach a state where you have proven your starting hypothesis. You may only reach a point where you find it very unreasonable to prefer the explanation "the fairies did it" when you have something like "that's electro-magnetism for you!" in your repertoire.

But this is philosphy. I favoured "explanation" over "testing" in reply to Phone_Tools, because a) I had a handy quote (ha!), and b) because the usual reply of a believer in higher powers to a scientist who states that he can explain things (e.g. creation of the universe) is "well, if you dig deep enough, you will find that all your knowledge rests on a system of beliefs as well - so how should your beliefs be superior to mine?"

To anticipate this argument I tried to show how scientific beliefs are superior to, say, esoteric beliefs.

In addition, I don't share your view concerning the "god of gaps". I feel that whether the field of science is an expanding cube or a mad locust is beside the point. People have always used god (among other functions, granted) as an explanation of the unexplainable. Not only of the things that can't be explained in principle, but of things that could not be explained at that former point of time as well. History shows us that every explanation of that kind evaporated under the scientfic stare. There is no reason to assume that todays explanations of the unexplainable (i.e. "God did it, basta") will not be changed as well.

In this sense, science has indeed pushed back God. Now we can argue at length whether each explanation yields a new question or whether the house that science built will be finished some day. This, again, is philosophically interesting - but a bit pointless as well. Since the explanations that involve God yield no understanding (cf. the above) I prefer to keep him out. Explanationwise.

Of course, there's still the comforting thing about God. Well, another topic...

 

Oaz: Well yeah, sure, that *could* happen ... but why would anyone believe it? It makes no sense, it doesn't tie in with any experience anyone has ever had - it's dismissable (in much the same way that my ninja space monkeys theory is dismissable - there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to think that there might be ninja monkeys in space, no matter how I justify it...)

NOG:

Actually, I have read of a study that said that Wikipedia has less errors per page on average than the Encyclopedia Britannica and Encarta. Sure, it can be wrong, but I would say that it's less likely to be wrong than most because both critics and supporters want to get their view in, and the only way to do that is to keep it neutral or no-one does...

But anyway, we should probably move on from Wiki, another topic, mayhap

Um, I think I'll skip your stuff on the big bang because what you say afterwards kinda makes it irrelevant.

Hmm, I did an assignment not so long ago on this kind of stuff - so you're taking the position that science and religion are seperate things which shouldn't overlap?

Well, I like that position, but I think it has some problems (well, I don't personally view them as problems, but it might be a problem for someone else...) - by putting God soley into the realm of philosophy and theology, you're giving up your religion's claim to being objectively true. Thus God himself becomes something that doesn't objectively exist - maybe starts looking like a symbol or metaphor...

While I think that God-as-metaphor is an excellent idea, I suspect that you and most other religious people don't actually hold to that...

Well, both God and M-Theory are hypothesises - the difference that makes one more plausible than the other is that one is based on modern up-to-date theories and information, while the other is based on dogma.

As to the cries of off-topicness - this is one of the few religious discussions on this forum recently that I'm able to enjoy, so don't tell the mods that we're talking physics rather than biology now...

 

Sorry about that code thing, didn't realize I had done that, thanks.

@Darkthorne:
Ah, but the beginning theories of science are, in reality, no better than any other theory. The difference between modern scientific theories and the 'theory' of spontaneous generation is the tested/testable nature. The truth is that scientific beliefs aren't better than others unless they have been tested, refined, re-tested, refined, etc to the point where we can't find anything wrong any more.

Which kind? Those that cannot be explaned in principle still can't. Those that could not be explained at the time and can now still aren't neccessarily out of the woods on the God issue. The topic here becomes probability. If the earth shakes and people blame God, well, maybe it was just an earthquake. If a 'prophet' says the earth will shake and destroy city X in 3 days time, and it does, in 3 days time, science still has some explaining to do.

The thing to remember, however, is that explanations around God are less 'how' oriented and more 'why' oriented. I won't argue that, in the above situation, an earthquake destroyed the city, but God being behind the earthquake lends a whole new set of posibilities as to 'why'.

@Aikanaro:
I didn't know that about Wikipedia. I'll have to keep that in mind. In my own experience, however, I have come across a number of entries I found substantially less than adequate.

No, not that science and religion shouldn't overlap, but that they are inherantly different things. What I'm trying to say is that God-type answers are much more about 'why', which is a philisophical/theological problem, than about 'how'. I have no doubt that God is behind all things, but He's not telling me how He did it, He's leaving that for me to find out.

If treated like scientific theories, both God and M-Theory fail at one, and only one, point: they can't be tested. Neither one is in contradiction with currently understood facts, neither one is in contradiction with itself, both offer reasonable explanations to a number of questions that science has so far failed to answer. The only problem is that they can't be tested.