thebends

for the record, i'm an atheist. well, two-timing atheist. meaning i don't believe..not even a little. i just really, really hope i'm wrong. that would be awesome. :P.
BUT!
well, after reading a good amount on cosmology. all the science that went into the creation of the universe (i'm too tired to go into the quantum jargon)
well, even when they map out the big bang right down to the smallest amount of time they still don't know how the hell that happened.
("wrinkles in time" -wicked read)

Coolyo

sorry, I meant to explain the part of my opening post, where I said that God would always be impeding the path of science... and what do you know, the LHC breaks a few months after it is built.

Who knows, what if we end up not answering ANYTHING with the LHC?


And although the law of gravity is "proven", "reliable", and "measurable", we still don't know WHY it exists! Why do larger masses attract smaller masses? We don't know!

If we ever do find out the answer to that question, there's just going to be another follow-up question that will require more time and money to build to answer, and so on.

Nimetic

God deliberately impeding science... Why didn't I think of that before.

That explains the shuttle failures too.

Heck, maybe it's also the reason why my modem dropped out this morning. It was to prevent me from accessing wikipedia.

tisonlyi

I think rb is headed in the direction i've been thinking toward the.

A lot of the time, trying to describe ourselves, the universe, our feelings and experiences, we forget that we're very much limited by the bounds of our own language. Nouns as discrete elements of the universe exist in our language, as a good shorthand on what surrounds us, but does "glass" really represent and describe what we think it does, what is really out there?(whichever definition of the noun you care to take)

There is no such thing, even when viewed from a human standpoint, as a fixed object. Everything is in flux, changing, interacting with everything else, constantly:

I think there's a tendency to mistake reality for our senses and capacity to describe what we sense. Reality is reality, our senses are information about reality, not reality itself and language is an abstraction of that information.

Meta-meta-reality?

What does this have to do with science and religion?

I think science are manners in which we try to apply our languages and linguistic systems of thought (yes, even mathematics is a language of sorts) to the events we see (sense) around us, so that they 'make sense' within our own sphere of language.

Nouns and verbs, matter and energy.

Religions are the predecessors of science in that they are narrative creating mechanisms. Narratives that help us understand where we are. With religion you need look only to the authority and culture as proof, with science, measurements and predictions..

Religion is absolute truth, science is absolute truth until the next bit of evidence refines the narrative/understanding or blows it away. Both are, for most people and to a significant degree, limited to the senses and the language of that person, people or culture. Even our imagination and visualisations are based on our sense experiences to a degree...

English and German are very picky (in a sense) modern languages filled with prepositions, which I think naturally lends them to technical pursuits, precision and absolutism. I don't see it as any surprise that both science and protestantism found significant homes in the western, Christian world in countries dominated by those languages.

I think much of the problems in the world as we find it now has a lot to do with the contradiction between the emergent universe, species and societies we find ourselves in, and our capacity to tie those concepts down in our clumpy languages.

So the way I see it goes like this:

Religion (relic of the ancient narrative device):

God, man, creation, good, bad. Nice and clumpy.

19th Century Science:

Mechanical universe, indivisible atoms, neatly divided species, societies classified and consistent, etc

21st Century Science:

Relativistic universe, quantum particles and effects, blurry divisions of genetics, societies without well-defined rules or groups, etc...

Understanding might be stretching the limits of our capacity to describe the understood, or at least grasped/pointed at...

I've really no idea where i was going with this, but now i've wrote it, i'm pressing submit, dammit.

__________________
"I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place." - Winston Churchill, 1937 --{ORLY?}--

Coolyo

LHC fix date got postponed again, until this september...

tedo201

I think the presence of a prime mover is a strong possibility but that human kind might accidentally stubmle upon the acute understanding of anything resembling a deity is unlikely. We should really postpone this discussion for another hundred million years or so and see if any new information pans out.

jrwheel

I recently read an article in Discover magazine about the quantum mechanics of photosynthesis. they have stumbled onto something that just may take us somewhere. as strange as quantum physics is.... it is real. it may explain gravity itself as a bi-product of entanglement. I also am starting to believe that the answer to all of our energy / power needs can be solved by harnessing the power of quantum potential. apparently plants have been using it for zillions of years which has allowed for oxygen on earth which in turn aloowes for humans and every other living being.
I am not a scientist, just interested and amazed at what is out there and in here.

florida0214

These posts rarely ever go anywhere. It is no surprise that this one has achieved exactly that. It was not in grand fashion but it made it, nonetheless.

I am intrigued by the comment about hoping that you are wrong about there being no God. Does this mean that if Christians (very broad and almost inapplicable term) are correct, you are happy to live for eternity in Hell? By that I mean your spirit and not you physically.

Oh and to comment on the original Idea. I feel that God exists and since he created science in the first place the two are complimentary. Now we did not evolve from Apes (I really hope not), but we are evolving on a micro level. This would explain things like skin color. To steal, loosely, from a book: to prove that God exists would undermine his very existence since God exists only through faith and proof of existence would not require faith, God would henceforth cease to exist because there is a lack of faith.
Sorry to be brief but I think my point, though it will be poorly taken, was made.

__________________
"Two men: one thinks he can. One thinks he cannot. They are Both Right."

Lasereth

EDIT

__________________
"A Darwinian attacks his theory, seeking to find flaws. An ID believer defends his theory, seeking to conceal flaws." -Roger Ebert

telekinetic

I just want to make sure no one else misses your statement here implying that you believe that God broke the LHC.

__________________
twisted no more

r-o-smith

I think this is an important point, but that it also contains its own presuppositions. There are ideological purposes for establishing constructs that do pit these two categories against one another. Seeking their reconciliation, as Baraka seeks to do, disrupts those ideological purposes on both 'sides' of the divide.

Coolyo

Yes, that is what I meant.

Of course, that is based on the theory that God actually exists, and is probably hard to grasp for someone who's an atheist.

Cynosure

What bothers me is, some atheists are compelled to pop their head into a discussion about the aspects of God (or any other discussion that must assume God exists in order for that discussion to take place), and chime in to remind everyone there that he/she doesn't believe in God – that God does not, in fact, exist, and thus the discussion is absolutely pointless.

For example: Let's say there's a thread titled, "Will there be lovemaking in the afterlife?" This could be quite an interesting discussion. But if you're an atheist and you don't believe in an afterlife, and if you cannot imagine there's an afterlife even for the sake of participating in this discussion, then you should be considerate and stay out. There is no call for you to pop your head into the discussion and tell everyone there you don't believe any afterlife exists and therefor their discussion is pointless.