Moral conundrum

[Overdog]

Originally Posted by CJSTora

Here's the hypothetical situation: You know the whereabouts of a family of Jews hiding from the Nazis. A Nazi patrol comes up to you and asks where they are; you, a good God-fearing Christian, can either lie and say you don't know (which would be bad, because, like, lying is a sin), or you could tell the truth, and the Nazis would zip off and search for and presumably execute the family. What do you do?

Going by your hypothetical I could do either and justify it under christianity.

The problem is there's close to forty thousand different christian denominations due to inumerable interpretations of the bible.

[Dion]

Originally Posted by Overdog

The problem is there's close to forty thousand different christian denominations due to inumerable interpretations of the bible.

And the very best part of that is they ALL think their interpretation is the only correct one.

[Tiger Belle]

Originally Posted by rewboss

I think that where we differ most is your insistance that everything can be described and explained through logic and reason alone, and my belief that logic and reason can only take you so far.

This pretty much sums up why I now avoid having "existence of God" discussions with those who disbelieve...if you believe in God, you believe in miracles, the possibility of the seemingly impossible and the belief that some things aren't explainable based on human logic and other human concepts like science--in short, the belief that "with God, all things are possible"...you will never convince a person who believes that everything has a basis in science and human reality that there is a God, because God defies that very premise

[rewboss]

Originally Posted by Dion

And the very best part of that is they ALL think their interpretation is the only correct one.

Many. Probably most. But not all.

[Overdog]

Originally Posted by Tiger Belle

This pretty much sums up why I now avoid having "existence of God" discussions with those who disbelieve...if you believe in God, you believe in miracles, the possibility of the seemingly impossible and the belief that some things aren't explainable based on human logic and other human concepts like science--in short, the belief that "with God, all things are possible"...you will never convince a person who believes that everything has a basis in science and human reality that there is a God, because God defies that very premise

For a rationalist god defies that premise in the same way leprechauns, fairies, and unicorns defy it. A complete lack of credible evidence excludes the rational conclusion that they do exist. Theists have no problem applying this analytical criteria to those entities but stop short when it comes to their beliefs. You compartmentalize and protect your faith form analytical thinking due to personal desires. This is simply what faith is all about. It's an unwilingness to apply logic and reason where logic and reason conclude contrary to one's personal desires.

[rewboss]

Originally Posted by Overdog

For a rationalist god defies that premise in the same way leprechauns, fairies, and unicorns defy it. A complete lack of credible evidence excludes the rational conclusion that they do exist.

Unfortunately, you could say the same about cold dark matter -- by definition, it cannot be detected or observed. It's the most popular explanation for the rotation of galaxies and other phenomena, but other than the fact that the universe doesn't seem to quite behave the way Einstein described it, there's precisely zero evidence for its existence. There are other explanations which do not assume the existence of an undetectable substance, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It does mean I personally wouldn't be surprised if it turned out it didn't exist, but that's a different matter entirely.

Science isn't even bothered by leprechauns, fairies and unicorns. Leprechauns and fairies would, if they did exist, belong to the realm of the supernatural and thus out of the remit of our science entirely. Unicorns would become the concern of scientists if a unicorn fossil was ever discovered, and who can say that that will never happen? After all, of all the creatures that have ever existed, only a tiny fraction become fossilised and only a tiny fraction of those have ever been discovered. The huge majority of species that have ever existed have probably been entirely erased from the fossil records and no credible evidence of their existence remains -- that doesn't mean they never existed.

The supernatural, as I said, exists -- by definition -- beyond the grasp of science, if, indeed, it does exist (I'm not saying it does). If there is a deity that created the universe, then clearly that deity cannot, in any meaningful sense of the term, exist in either space or time, since both are products of the universe. The creator of the Mona Lisa does not exist inside his own painting.

This isn't, by the way, intended to be a scientific argument: this is strictly philosophical. That said, I think we have to bear in mind that our scientific principles which we today consider the very pinnacle of human achievement will probably, 500 years from now, appear ludicruously primitive and wholly inadequate.

[CJSTora]

Ah, the great "non-overlapping magisteria" argument. An argument which has been soundly trounced in various debates and even by philosophers.

The argument is, of course, built on a variation of a "God of the Gaps" argument, which you even hint at here. There are some things that can never be explained by science, but that's alright, because that's not science's "magisteria". ...And that's where we'll hide our God concept for safe-keeping.

This is just another flavour of the "God of the Gaps" thinking. You probably don't like that label, but that's what it is. God exists in the places we don't understand. Of course, your "twist" on this is that these places we cannot possibly understand. This God has been spending the last few centuries retreating into smaller and even smaller gaps. When will we get to the gap he cannot be explained away from? I maintain that we will never find that one last impregnable gap of understanding. This God is the one most frequently abandoned when a student gets their understanding expanded at university. This God is the one finding less and less of a foothold in our superstitious minds as our understanding increases. This God is the one that's the easiest for scientific thinkers, and those that are beholden to evidence, to dismiss as irrelevant and identify as the making of a profoundly ignorant civilization.

The problem with the public perception of a lot of science is that the leading edge of scientific discovery and understanding is advancing so fast, the public education system can hardly keep up. Where scientific understanding is now, compared to what I was taught in high school just 2 decades ago is mindbogglingly different. I was taught that the smallest elements of matter were protons, neutrons and electrons, with protons and neutrons forming a nucleus around which electrons orbit in shells, forming an atom, which can join together in various ways to form molecules, and so on. If you were to survey the population of educated countries on what the smallest parts of an atom are, you would probably get the answer of protons, neutrons and electrons.

There was no talk of quarks, the different kinds of quarks, or the role they play in the construction of atomic nuclei. This is not a new idea, either. Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) were first posited in the 1940s - 4 full decades before I found myself sitting in a physics classroom. What I was being taught was already woefully out of date, by a measure of two generations.

Your treatment of "dark matter" betrays an ignorance of our most current understanding of it. You speak as if it's all just theoretical fluff with all the substantive evidence of a big question mark. It's more than a "popular explanation", and there is PLENTY of evidence for its existence.

Scientists now understand it reasonably well. Well enough to create predictive experiments to test newer theories. For starters, the term "dark matter" is a bit of a misnomer. It's not actually "dark", as near as we can tell. The terms "dark matter" and "dark energy" are only placeholder labels, until scientific minds can understand them better to give them a more accurate name.

To our eyes, dark matter and dark energy are invisible. Particles of dark matter, various types of quarks, are so small that our naked eyes can never see them. They blink in and out of existence so fast that even if our eyes were sharp enough to see them, our relatively slow brains would never even get the chance to register its existence. Even if we could speed up our brain so that we could recognize one of these particles popping into existence, it will have vanished before the electrical impulse could complete the travel from our eye to our brain.

What we once conceptualized as a perfect vacuum in empty space is actually a soup of these particles popping into and out of existence. The matter we can see only accounts for about 1/50th of the mass of the entire universe, in order for the universe to behave the way it does. We are like the croutons in a soup, except unlike those croutons, we never get soggy, in the sense that dark matter and dark energy does not normally interact with what we call matter.

Do we actually see atoms binding together to form molecules? Have we observed electrons exchanging from one atomic shell to another in chemical reactions? No, but we theorize these things to be true, we make predictions based on these theories, and we experiment to test the predictions for accuracy of the theory.

At some point, after repeatedly consistent experiments, further testing of the theory becomes unnecessary. If you drop a rubber ball repeatedly and record the results, do you have any reason to suspect that the ball will behave any differently on the 2,537,619th time you drop it as it did on the 2,537,618th drop? At some point, hopefully long before you reach 2 million repetitions, you realize that the theory is statistically reliable and sound enough to make predictions.

You can then take the proven theory and build off of that theory with further advancement, such as the steps taken from Gravity to General Relativity to Special Relativity.

Do we see gravity? No, but we observe its effect, and we can make predictions on outcomes of applications of the theory that are astoundingly accurate (in most circumstances - we have to apply corrections to the theory such as the Theory of Special Relativity as we approach the speed of light, but luckily, we humans don't often travel at such velocities in our everyday lives), and we do not have to invoke God, or resort to theories of "Intelligent Falling" to explain the outcomes of gravitational theory.

"Dark matter" is not some theoretical goop that scientists use to fill their own gaps in understanding. The scientific community has made very specific predictions on what we should expect to observe from an experiment if this dark matter and dark energy does exist and behaves in certain ways. Largely speaking, we've seen that the experiments produce the predicted results. When the results are not as expected, it has resulted in a fine-tuning of the theories and more accurate results from new experiments.

This is what the Large Hadron Collider was built for. The LHC will help us solidify or further refine these theories in conducting experiments the likes of which we could never do before. Atomic particles will be smashing into each other at a combined speed of practically double the speed of light (each particle travelling 99.99999% the speed of light in opposite directions). If a correctly conducted experiment fails to produce a predicted result, the outcome of the exeriment often points us in a new direction and the theory is revisited. Sometimes, if the outcome is something completely outside the expected range of results, the theory may be completely scrapped and new theories pursued.

The experiments to be conducted at LHC are not to test the existence of dark matter/energy. It's widely accepted that it exists. They are to test the properties of it and increase our understanding of it even further. Beyond that, one of the crowning achievements and most anticipated of experiments done with the LHC will be a test in which scientists hope to observe for the first time the effects of the Higgs boson.

If the Higgs boson experiments do not produce predicted results, then the theory will be revised and re-tested, or scrapped altogether. If they do produce the predicted results, we will have confirmed the current theory on what was behind what was once taught as (and still referred to by creationists as) the "Big Bang". Modern scientists do not understand it as an enormous explosion, the popular concept, but instead as a rapid conversion of energy to matter - triggered by some of these particles under the right circumstances - that resulted in a rapid "inflation" of matter.

This is the beauty of science. The very nature of the scientific process makes it self-correcting and truth-seeking, advancing and expanding our knowledge and understanding of the universe. For those who pursue the scientific ideal, nothing can be more awe-inspiring than the revealing by our own understanding of a great truth of our universe. Some of us find this greater understanding to be beauty itself.

There is no such beauty in a God of the Gaps, as it can never, has never, and will never, come up with an explanation for these things, nor will it ever contribute to the furtherance of our knowledge or understanding, or advancement as a species or civilization. This kind of God only acts as a pacifier, making us content with wallowing in our own ignorance of our universe. You just choose to wrap it up in a romantic concept of some ultimately unknowable grandeur. With the destruction of a God concept we lose our place as creatures of a Divine creation. Maybe that's what unsettles you. If you prefer the pacifier of ignorance, then that's great. Do not assert that it's anything close to the truth, and do not stand in the way of those who seek a greater, more honest and truthful understanding.

That said, I think we have to bear in mind that our scientific principles which we today consider the very pinnacle of human achievement will probably, 500 years from now, appear ludicruously primitive and wholly inadequate.

You're absolutely right. 500 years in the future, quantum electrodynamics (QED) may be fully understood, and taught in grade school science classes. On this hope, philosophers and scientists agree, but for opposite rationale. Scientists will express that hope as the expected product of the continuing advancement of science itself. Philosophers will express that hope as if to illustrate some great futility of scientific advancement, and thus earn some reflected validity for philosophical circle-jerks.

500 years from now, our first awkward steps into theorizing QED may be seen as primitive or simplistic, almost as we now view the then gargantuan leaps made by Newton, Galileo, Copernicus and so on. Feynman may be as revered a name in the annals of science as Einstein or Darwin. The fact that our current scientific knowledge may be later perceived as infantile in grasp is not a reason to stop scientific pursuit, nor does it devalue the process. It is, instead, probably the best reason I can think of to continue the advancement.

Scientists make no claim that modern science is the be-all-end-all. The only claim of science is that it is the best means we have by which to explain and understand the truths of the universe, and it improves itself all the time. The scientific method may well continue ad infinitum, but I believe (as do many others) there will come a point where science will explain enough that ancient relics such as concepts of a God will be as inconsequential as pixies and unicorns are today.

Religions, however, do present themselves as the be-all-end-all. They each claim to be the exclusive curators of "true knowledge". Religions shun scientific discovery and advancement. Religions and God concepts, however, as time marches further away from their point of creation, only reveal themselves in greater and greater magnitude to be little more than the archaic remnants of ignorance and superstition.

[Overdog]

Originally Posted by rewboss

Unfortunately, you could say the same about cold dark matter -- by definition, it cannot be detected or observed. It's the most popular explanation for the rotation of galaxies and other phenomena, but other than the fact that the universe doesn't seem to quite behave the way Einstein described it, there's precisely zero evidence for its existence. There are other explanations which do not assume the existence of an undetectable substance, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It does mean I personally wouldn't be surprised if it turned out it didn't exist, but that's a different matter entirely.

Science isn't even bothered by leprechauns, fairies and unicorns. Leprechauns and fairies would, if they did exist, belong to the realm of the supernatural and thus out of the remit of our science entirely. Unicorns would become the concern of scientists if a unicorn fossil was ever discovered, and who can say that that will never happen? After all, of all the creatures that have ever existed, only a tiny fraction become fossilised and only a tiny fraction of those have ever been discovered. The huge majority of species that have ever existed have probably been entirely erased from the fossil records and no credible evidence of their existence remains -- that doesn't mean they never existed.

The supernatural, as I said, exists -- by definition -- beyond the grasp of science, if, indeed, it does exist (I'm not saying it does). If there is a deity that created the universe, then clearly that deity cannot, in any meaningful sense of the term, exist in either space or time, since both are products of the universe. The creator of the Mona Lisa does not exist inside his own painting.

This isn't, by the way, intended to be a scientific argument: this is strictly philosophical. That said, I think we have to bear in mind that our scientific principles which we today consider the very pinnacle of human achievement will probably, 500 years from now, appear ludicruously primitive and wholly inadequate.

No offense, but I don't see your point or if you were attempting to refute anything I said.
If I simply missed it, please enlighten me.

I will say athough there's countless things science doesn't know, this doesn't mean any unevidenced concept the human mind can dream up is plausible or reasonable to assume.

[rewboss]

Originally Posted by CJSTora

The argument is, of course, built on a variation of a "God of the Gaps" argument, which you even hint at here. There are some things that can never be explained by science, but that's alright, because that's not science's "magisteria". ...And that's where we'll hide our God concept for safe-keeping.

Yes... and no.

But actually, such august bodies as the US National Academy of Sciences don't seem to have a problem with NOMA. Richard Dawkins does, but that's because he's Richard Dawkins and, as Marcus Brigstocke -- a very prominent British atheist -- says, Richard Dawkins would argue with his own reflection.

This is where the problem lies, though: non-believers and believers alike drawing the notion of God into science, where such notions simply don't belong. On Darwin's 200th anniversary, a group of scientists got together -- believers and non-believers alike -- and pleaded with atheists to please, please, please stop using evolution and science in general as a stick to beat religion with: it's actually hampering efforts to get things done and is generally recognised as one of the major contributory factors towards the increased polarization of the whole debate. Christianity never really had much of a problem with evolution -- never really paid it much attention, by and large -- until recently. Yes, yes, some church leaders said it was rubbish, many early scientists had trouble with the Church, but generally speaking it wasn't the problem it is now.

Trying to debate God in terms of science, or science in terms of religion, is a travesty. These things don't belong in the same debate.

It's kind of hard to explain to somebody who wants to reduce every single thing to something rational, but philosophy and religion are not -- or at least should not be -- concerned with how the universe works or how it came into being. They're concerned with why -- a question meaningless to science, because scientifically, there is no "why", other than in a strict cause-and-effect sense.

This God has been spending the last few centuries retreating into smaller and even smaller gaps.

The main reason I think that if God does exist, he doesn't exist in any conventional sense. Obviously not.

When will we get to the gap he cannot be explained away from? I maintain that we will never find that one last impregnable gap of understanding. This God is the one most frequently abandoned when a student gets their understanding expanded at university. This God is the one finding less and less of a foothold in our superstitious minds as our understanding increases. This God is the one that's the easiest for scientific thinkers, and those that are beholden to evidence, to dismiss as irrelevant and identify as the making of a profoundly ignorant civilization.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, which is why you labelled "my" God as such, I presume. Nice line of argument: "Aha, so you believe in a God that science can't touch? Well, that sounds suspiciously like a God that science can touch, so you lose." You criticize me for conveniently placing God in a space we can never understand -- outside of space and time itself -- then argue that it's the same as putting God into a space we can and will understand.

To our eyes, dark matter and dark energy are invisible. Particles of dark matter, various types of quarks, are so small that our naked eyes can never see them. (followed by long description of dark matter)

Yes, well, that's what dark matter ought to be if it exists. All of that doesn't mean it does exist, only that if it does exist, that's what it would be like. But observational evidence remains elusive, and currently, dark matter remains hypothetical -- and slightly controversial. Some scientists wonder if it's just that our understanding of gravity is incomplete, which is very possible. Another theory is that the cosmological constant which Einstein originally included in his General Theory of Relativity but then left out as his "greatest mistake" might have been spot on after all. Still another is that it's not matter, but a side effect of dark energy.

Dark matter may very probably exist. But the only evidence for it is indirect, and that evidence also admits of other explanations. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist, though... which is more or less the point you made by describing the properties it should have if it does exist. I'm not accusing the scientists of bad science, I'm saying scientists occasionally believe things without credible evidence -- they have to, whether they like it or not, in order for science to make any progress at all. It was, for example, an attempt to measure the "ether drift" -- a concept we now know is ridiculous -- that led eventually to Einstein's theories.

Do we actually see atoms binding together to form molecules? Have we observed electrons exchanging from one atomic shell to another in chemical reactions? No, but we theorize these things to be true, we make predictions based on these theories, and we experiment to test the predictions for accuracy of the theory.

You're missing the point somewhat, but if you're still thinking in terms of electron shells, you're behind the times. Current thinking is that electrons exist as clouds, or the probability of there being a certain electrical charge at a certain point. However, scientists have actually succeeded in taking images of a carbon atom's electron cloud.

At some point, after repeatedly consistent experiments, further testing of the theory becomes unnecessary. If you drop a rubber ball repeatedly and record the results, do you have any reason to suspect that the ball will behave any differently on the 2,537,619th time you drop it as it did on the 2,537,618th drop? At some point, hopefully long before you reach 2 million repetitions, you realize that the theory is statistically reliable and sound enough to make predictions.

But that has nothing to do with whether or not dark matter exists. What your experiment suggests is that a rubber ball dropped from a certain height will always hit the ground at the same speed: it doesn't tell you what's causing it. Newton conceptualized it as a "force", while Einstein conceptualized it as deformations in spacetime, but those are just conceptualizations that enable us humans to formulate our theories and make predictions. What observing galaxies proves is that galaxies behave in a certain manner, but doesn't explain what's causing it.

You can then take the proven theory and build off of that theory with further advancement, such as the steps taken from Gravity to General Relativity to Special Relativity.

Special Relativity came first. It's "special" because it doesn't describe everything -- specifically, gravity. It took Einstein a little more effort to generalise his theories to include gravity.

"Dark matter" is not some theoretical goop that scientists use to fill their own gaps in understanding.

I never suggested that. I said it's the most common hypothesis to explain part of our universe.

Largely speaking, we've seen that the experiments produce the predicted results. When the results are not as expected, it has resulted in a fine-tuning of the theories and more accurate results from new experiments.

This was true of phlogiston, which explained how things burned. It was an excellent theory which explained observed phenomena very well. When you burn a piece of wood, phlogiston escapes as flames, and the wood ends up lighter. Until, that is, one scientist thought to collect all the gases, smoke and ash, let it all cool down, and then weigh it, and found that all the materials together weighed more than the original piece of wood. This meant that the phlogiston theory either had to be abandoned altogether, or tweaked. Many thinkers chose to tweak the theory, and endowed phlogiston with negative weight. That theory worked very well indeed -- in fact, it was admirable and even made correct predictions -- and had the added benefit of explaining why flames always strove upwards. It was some time before oxygen was discovered to be the agent involved, at which point the phlogiston theory had to be abandoned after all.

That's not to say phlogiston was bad science, or that science is necessarily suspect. But phlogiston turned out to be a stepping stone, perhaps a necessary stage in the development of chemistry. Dark matter may well end up going the same way. Many chemists of the day were as certain of phlogiston's negative weight as you are now of the existence of dark matter.

All of which misses the point I was making, which is not that dark matter does not exist, but that scientists are pretty sure it does without any actual evidence -- just a collection of phenomena for which dark matter is the most popular explanation.

This is the beauty of science. The very nature of the scientific process makes it self-correcting and truth-seeking, advancing and expanding our knowledge and understanding of the universe.

A fact that I don't dispute.

Some of us find this greater understanding to be beauty itself.

"It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings." (Proverbs 25:2)

There is no such beauty in a God of the Gaps, as it can never, has never, and will never, come up with an explanation for these things

I never said God was the explanation for these things. And from accusing me of using an argument related to God of the Gaps, you now accuse me of using that actual argument. Or have you stopped talking to me and are now ranting against religion in general?

You just choose to wrap it up in a romantic concept of some ultimately unknowable grandeur.

"Grandeur"? Maybe. Probably not. Certainly not a man in white and a golden crown sitting on a throne in the clouds seranaded by cherubs playing harps. Just what kind of a God do you think I believe in?

With the destruction of a God concept we lose our place as creatures of a Divine creation. Maybe that's what unsettles you.

No. I've already said what unsettles me (although I find it nearly impossible to put into words). I'm perfectly well aware that, in the grand scheme of things, we're just a bunch of apes stumbling around on a nondescript planet on the outskirts of a humdrum galaxy, and that the human race will be gone in the blink of an eye.

If you prefer the pacifier of ignorance, then that's great. Do not assert that it's anything close to the truth, and do not stand in the way of those who seek a greater, more honest and truthful understanding.

I'm not standing in anyone's way, and I do not claim to have the monopoly on truth, or even to have understood anything with any accuracy. I'm sorry I don't think and feel the way you think a believer should think and feel, but I can't help that. If you want to argue with somebody who thinks God is an explanation for everything science can't yet explain, or who thinks science is wrong or blasphemous, or who thinks they have all the answers and anyone who disagrees is wrong, I'm not the right man for the job.

I do not claim to know the mind of nature of any deity that may, or may not, exist. I do know that any attempt to conceptualize any deity, to try to imagine what he must be like, is bound to fail. I lean towards a more abstract notion of God -- and I've said this before, so I don't know why you're still arguing with me on this particular point.

I said before that the main difference between us is that you're not prepared, or able, to adopt a philosophical attitude. And your response, more or less, is a scientific argument. Which is ridiculous, as I have said. The fact that God is often used as an excuse to put the brakes on science is the single most important reason I believe religion and science do not, ever, belong in the same debate.

Religions, however, do present themselves as the be-all-end-all. They each claim to be the exclusive curators of "true knowledge". Religions shun scientific discovery and advancement.

No, this is not always, or even generally, true. It's true of the loud-mouthed Christian fundamentalists, and being encouraged by the polarisation of the whole debate, but generally speaking, science and religion usually manage to get along, if a little uneasily sometimes.

And no, not all religions claim to be the exclusive curators of "true knowledge".

[JWSahara]

I'll pray for us all.

[Overdog]

Rew you didn't detract from a single point CJ made.