What are your beliefs on religion, god?

as previously noted i was addressing the traditional religious (christian in this case) narrative - as you said something vague about the hypothetical creator judging humans i went ahead and filled in the blanks. i was not addressing a deistic designer too vague to be accessible to testing.

science certainly has and will continue to have a say in the matter of whether humans have souls or not, the probability that a deity intervenes in the natural world, the probability that the universe was created specifically as a testing ground for humans etc. if you dispute that there's not much to discuss.

i did not disagree with that. i was simply arguing the benefits of using certain semantics, so as not to lend credibility to the idea that religion can answer questions about objective reality that science is currently unable to. i feel like one of your eariler posts in this thread was likely to be taken just that way by the christians here.

in some cases ridiculing is not, in some it can be quite useful. but in my view pandering by advocating the notion of domains or referring to currently untestable questions as 'unscientific' never is.

seems like there's a bit of pigeonholing going on here. you're reading things into my posts that aren't there, and i don't think it's entirely the fault of my communication skills.

 

Once again: show me the journals. Show me the science. If you can't point me to the peer-reviewed papers that specifically address these questions, then indeed we don't have anything to discuss, scientifically speaking.

This may be another semantics issue. When I say that religion "answers questions", I don't necessarily mean that it "answers questions correctly". Religion DOES answer many of the questions that science can't touch -- it just happens to do so through oral tradition and mythology. The fact that I recognize the appeal of seeking religious answers to unscientific questions in no way implies that I consider those answers valid or valuable.

I'm not a proponent of "domains" in the sense of "this is a question for science, and this is a question for religion", because I don't consider the two at all comparable. It's more accurate to say "this is an empirical question, which science can answer (or attempt to answer), and this is not". If folks want to make up stories to fill in the blanks, that's their prerogative -- and they've been happily doing so for thousands of years. I think it's a little silly, but then I also think Pokemon is silly, and look how popular that is.

As long as religious individuals are willing to adapt their worldviews in the face of actual empirical discoveries, I don't have a problem with those who find comfort in using stories to fill in the gaps. You can call it pandering if you wish -- I just call it respect. As long as there remains the faintest shred of possibility that a belief could be true, I'm not going to try too hard to overwrite it with my uninspiring "I don't knows". Sure, there are plenty of die-hards who will go down in a sinking ship of belief, no matter what the evidence shows (e.g. young earthers), but there are also many (including some religious leaders) who have expressed more flexibility. Take the Dalai Lama, for example: "If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims."

 

Great quote from a truly great man.

This also gets back to my earlier question for Mags, which I believe got missed: if time itself began with the Big Bang, was there ever a time at which the universe did not exist?

 

He says "it's my view that the simplest explanation is: there is no god." And I wholeheartedly agree. He doesn't claim empirical proof, and he doesn't claim that there are no other plausible explanations -- merely that this is the simplest. Occam's Razor, while useful, is not iron-clad and is not to be confused with scientific evidence. His comment that "there is no time for god to make the universe" is easily countered by the good ol' "god is timeless!" classic. What he really does here is summarize why god is not necessary for the Big Bang.

Peer-review is not a prerequisite, but if a given topic simply doesn't show up in the scientific literature at all, I think it's a strong indication that the question is not considered scientific in the first place. As far as I know, Hawking never published any of these ideas in a formal physics paper -- why wouldn't he, if it is a question to be answered by science?

 

i don't get the significance of this demand. i'm sure there are other reasons topics pertaining specifically to disproving religious tenets aren't commonly published other than that they aren't testable. scientists presumably consider most of them trivial/unimportant, or already thoroughly if indirectly refuted by other published evidence, and a waste of their time. there may also be funding issues if one sets out specifically to disprove a religious tenet.

just because nobody has published a paper with the title 'evidence humans do not have eternal souls' (if noone has) does not mean there is not a mountain of evidence that all of human cognizance, personality, and behavior is the purely physical result of evolution.

 

thanks to QM there is no shortage of working physicists who think GR is just an approximation of a deeper reality.

 

It's significant because publications are important indicators of the scope of any particular discipline. If a question is at all significant and within the scope of physics, a paper related to it has probably appeared at some point in Physical Review Letters or something similar. I'm not asking for a paper explicitly titled "Humans Do Not Have Souls", but I don't think it's too much to ask for a direct statement to that effect somewhere in the conclusions.

And yes, of course it is considered a waste of time for researchers to consider disproving the existence of an immortal, intangible soul -- it's unscientific.

 

Yes, time came into existence when matter came into existence when the universe was created since matter/time/space are all interconnected, but we're not arguing about whether time exists or not, we're debating why it came into existence. How can something from eternities past come into being without the deliberate will of something greater than itself that existed priorly? How can something that has been the way it has for eternity (no beginning/no end) suddenly pop into existence at a distinct point where it breaks the eternal constant and creates a point in time without the driving force of a personal, intelligent being behind it [IE, 13.7 billion years ago if you believe that)? It makes sense that an intelligence and a force exists outside of the universe that has always existed and created matter/time/space from nothing, and I think we can all agree that from nothing, nothing comes. So something always existed in one form or another.

Yes, it's hard to grasp since the universe is all we can see and know, but consider the universe from the perspective of a being with the attributes of God. If you are eternal and are not bound by time or spacial restrictions, a grain of sand and a galaxy will look the same to you, since there is nothing dividing the two. God exists in a greater dimension (as in more than 3 dimensions, matter/time/space) so us conceiving what matter may look like outside the context of time and space is impossible for us even conceive. That's why God knows the beginning from the end. It's like God is a cosmic author who brought His story to reality.

 

i have no idea if any such conclusions have been published and i don't think it's relevant. someone publishing within the scope a particular discipline is doing just that, and presumably wouldn't feel the need to or would think it would be unprofessional to extend their conclusions to encompass ramifications for religious tenets. that doesn't mean there aren't ramifications.

would you deny that science has shown that the christian concept of a soul, retaining aspects of personality and memory after death, is improbable?

 

This is a fun little article about trying to scientifically detect the soul.


How much does your soul weigh?

 

Yes I've heard of this man and his book, I think it's desperation tactics honestly. If something came from nothing then I think you could form a powerful argument that there was never really "nothing" in the first place. Either way, it's an endless totem pole with no answer or explanation in sight.

 

I'm going to stop you right there for a moment. If time didn't exist before the universe came into being, then it's meaningless to ask how something could come from nothing -- there literally never was "nothing". Your common-sense refrain of "from nothing, nothing comes" relies on a flow of time: at some moment (in time) there was nothing, and then, a certain span of time later, there was something. But that's not what we're talking about here. If time began WITH the Big Bang, the universe is essentially eternal. There never was nothing. That is but one example of how this particular "proof" for the existence of god comes unraveled -- it applies time-dependent conservation laws to a potentially timeless context.

 

The universe (matter/time/space) began to exist according to modern scientific theories, correct? No more static, steady-state theory since it has been proven that the universe had a finite beginning. So what could bring that into existence without the deliberate action of a personal, eternal and intelligent being? Dead, brainless eternal constants do not change forms and create independent realms on their own. I mean, why didn't the Big Bang happen infinitely ago, not a finite point in time (IE, 13.7 billion years)? I mean, give me one example in the known universe where chaos brings forth order, complexity, information and interworking systems? You can't, because it doesn't happen. And that doesn't even answer the question of how it came into being!

 

Right. And just because you can't see, touch, or hear God with your physical senses doesn't mean he isn't there, right?

Science is not in the business of addressing nonempirical questions. Period. I honestly don't understand how someone can disagree with this.

Science tells us quite consistently that there is no objectively measurable evidence for such a thing. I don't know how one would go about generating an actual probability for that which is unmeasurable, though. Again: unscientific.