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Post by LindavG on Jan 9, 2018 23:20:45 GMT
I understand what you're saying, I even subscribe to what SoCav is saying to an extent but I would go one further and say the existence of the universe and beyoned that. I also don't think science will eventually explain everything we don't understand. I believe as human's we're not and probably will never be evolved enough to know everything. Just to be clear here, I haven't accused anyone of being arrogant or narrow minded. I agree with you there, especially because the more we discover about the universe and beyond, the more questions are raised. I don't think we will ever get to the point where we know everything there is to know and that is a good thing. I also just watched the clip in the OP and am in full agreement with Brian Cox. What he is saying is essentially no different than what even the most outspoken atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have said, except he puts more emphasis on the fact that science cannot disprove the existence of a creator so he probably appears more open to the believers' point of view. But he is quite clear that he has no personal faith in God and is content in not knowing the answer to all of life's questions so he is no less an atheist than any of us I personally like Brian Cox's style of debating a lot better than Dawkins or Hitchens though because the latter can (could) be a bit too antagonistic sometimes for my taste. Sam Harris is good too in that respect. As for atheists being accused of arrogance or narrow-mindedness, I wasn't talking about you specifically but that's a stereotype of atheists that annoys me so much (you did like a post that repeats that same trope though, just sayin'). You hear it in that clip with Brand too, when he equates faith with humility and an inward belief in beauty (whatever that means), implying that non-faith means the opposite. It's just nonsense.
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Post by respect77 on Jan 10, 2018 5:12:03 GMT
That is my philosophy too. I think we have barely scratched the surface in terms of our knowledge of the natural world and more answers will come in due time. Rather than saying "there is no scientific explanation for X so therefore it must be supernatural" I tend to think "there is no explanation for X yet but let's wait and see what the future brings". After all, there are lots of things that used to be ascribed to the supernatural but for which we now have a perfectly natural explanation. I honestly have no idea how this can be construed as arrogant or narrow-minded. Exactly this. If nothing else history should teach us about the weakness of a "God of gaps" argument (that is the "if we can't explain something yet scientifically it means God did it"). Throughout history people attributed lots of phenomenons to gods that they could not explain with their current level of knowledge but that we perfectly understand now and it turned out it wasn't supernatural after all. What makes us think that the answers to the current gaps in our knowlede is God/supernatural then? It's just that we still do not have complete knowledge (and maybe never will). That's all. That doesn't prove God.
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Post by Snow White on Jan 20, 2018 3:34:55 GMT
I had forgotten about the program. In case you want to listen to it, here it is. I need to listen to it fully to have an opinion.
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Post by Liberian Girl on Jan 20, 2018 14:33:46 GMT
"Science is knowledge, it doesn't tell you what to make of that knowledge." - Prof Brian Cox
I listened to the podcast. Absolutely amazing. I have so much respect for Brian's knowledge, and obviously a lot of love for Russell Brand and his spiritual philosophy.
It was interesting. I absolutely LOVED the discussion as it became SO passionate around the 39 mins - 49 minutes mark. If you only watch a few minutes, watch THAT section because that was the heart of the matter: God, consciousness and science. Beautifully discussed.
Obviously for me, as someone who believes in God, I respect the fact that Brian Cox, even in his depth of knowledge, says that science cannot possibly rule out a creator, and that science is limited and not all-knowing.
I enjoyed Brian as he mentioned that life, as we know it, is a rarity and that even though due to the size of our universe we are insignificant - we are paradoxically still very VALUABLE because of having life at all in the way we experience it.
I loved Russell's argument to Brian, when Brian says that God/meaning/consciousness won't matter one day because the earth and all the energy will essentially die - Russell replies that it DOES still matter, because matter comes from consciousness, not the other way around. Life and consciousness is important and exists outside of the physical framework of science and its limited understanding etc.
I thought both sides put forward an amazing argument/discussion and I feel there is something here of value to sceptics AND believers.
I loved it. I plan to listen to it again soon.
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Post by respect77 on Jan 20, 2018 15:31:02 GMT
I respect the fact that Brian Cox, even in his depth of knowledge, says that science cannot possibly rule out a creator, and that science is limited and not all-knowing. vs. This is exactly the difference betewen science and religious beleif. Science doesn't have any qualms about admitting that we do not yet understand or can explain everything. Religious folks often represent that as a weakness of science but that's just being able to admit that our human knowledge is limited. Which BTW doesn't mean that the answer to those gaps in our current knowlede is "God did it" like religious people often try to use those gaps for. On the other hand, you have Russell Brand make absolutely unfounded claims like "matter comes from consciousness". There is absolutely no evidence that matter comes from consciousness or that "life and consciousness is important and exists outside of the physical framework of science". Atheists are often accused of arrogance, but I am sorry what can be more arrogant than a claim like that, for example? Like you state it as a fact that "matter comes from consciousness" when there is absolutely no evidence for any such thing, it is just something you believe. This juxtaposition shows well that it is actually theists who claim to know all the answers, not atheists. So I don't know why it is always atheists who get accused of arrogance.
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Post by Liberian Girl on Jan 20, 2018 15:58:48 GMT
I respect the fact that Brian Cox, even in his depth of knowledge, says that science cannot possibly rule out a creator, and that science is limited and not all-knowing. vs. This is exactly the difference betewen science and religious beleif. Science doesn't have any qualms about admitting that we do not yet understand or can explain everything. Religious folks often represent that as a weakness of science but that's just being able to admit that our human knowledge is limited. Which BTW doesn't mean that the answer to those gaps in our current knowlede is "God did it" like religious people often try to use those gaps for. On the other hand, you have Russell Brand make absolutely unfounded claims like "matter comes from consciousness". There is absolutely no evidence that matter comes from consciousness or that "life and consciousness is important and exists outside of the physical framework of science". Atheists are often accused of arrogance, but I am sorry what can be more arrogant than a claim like that, for example? Like you state it as a fact that "matter comes from consciousness" when there is absolutely no evidence for any such thing, it is just something you believe. This juxtaposition shows well that it is actually theists who claim to know all the answers, not atheists. So I don't know why it is always atheists who get accused of arrogance. Given that science cannot (at least yet) account for the emergence of life and the starting point for the existence of our planet etc, I think it's a fair theory to say that "consciousness" (or God/Intelligent Designer/higher power) existed FIRST and the world/matter can into being from that. That does sound logical to me. Outside of that, Russell does make the point several times that he is theorising, not trying to state as fact, which is fair enough.
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Post by respect77 on Jan 20, 2018 16:05:12 GMT
^ Once again that's the "God of gaps" argument: if we cannot explain something (yet) then the answer is God. It is not a theory, it is a fallacy. At the very best a hypothesis (but I would say rather just a belief) which isn't much. A theory in science requires much more than having a gut feeling or an unprovable, untestable idea.
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Post by Liberian Girl on Jan 20, 2018 16:13:54 GMT
^ But the fact that scientists would need to use the above criteria to understand/identify a God or a creator shows why science couldn't provide proof (or not) of God. Unfortunately God can't be placed under a microscope to be studied or be repeatedly tested. If anything IF there is a God, it'd be US under the microscope not him. Which makes us trying to fully grasp the nature of a creator as laughable, using our very limited means.
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Post by Liberian Girl on Jan 20, 2018 16:16:12 GMT
I still don't think it makes people like myself silly, who believe a complex world like ours didn't emerge from randomness or practically out of nothing (I know I'm over-simplify). Surely even atheists can at least understand why that theory is there.
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Post by respect77 on Jan 20, 2018 16:21:04 GMT
^ But the fact that scientists would need to use the above criteria to understand/identify a God or a creator shows why science couldn't provide proof (or not) of God. Unfortunately God can't be placed under a microscope to be studied or be repeatedly tested. If anything IF there is a God, it'd be US under the microscope not him. Which makes us trying to fully grasp the nature of a creator as laughable, using our very limited means. The problem with that, as we have discussed already, that by these standards anyone can make up any idea of anything that makes him or her personally comfortable or "makes sense" to him/her, and then place it outside of the testable world and say "you can't disprove it therefore it is equally valid as any scientific claim". No it is not. It's just an arbitrary belief. Someone else can have an equally valid belief to the contrary of yours. Beliefs are just that. It's alright as long as people are not trying to make them equally valid to scientific theories. They are not.
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Post by Liberian Girl on Jan 20, 2018 16:31:05 GMT
But I don't claim that I KNOW God exists or that any of the religions out there are true. My basis for having a belief in a "Creator/Intelligence" is because I think we are living proof of it, and the world we live in. It's not like I'm saying a Unicorn made a pixy house....I am merely saying that there is something (I.e life, the world) in existence and it makes sense that there is a force behind that, not random chaos.
I've said it before and I think it's a valid point: if something amazing appeared in your home one day, seemingly out of nowhere, if you asked your mother where it came from and she replied, "Oh, that? It just kinda appeared in your room and starting growing/changing." You'd be like, "no - something or someone put it there and that also doesn't explain why it is also changing/evolving."
If you wouldn't accept something random and intricate appearing in your house without some kind of force or reason,then I don't think it's hard to see why some people believe there is more to the emergence of life and the universe.
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Post by respect77 on Jan 20, 2018 16:58:54 GMT
But I don't claim that I KNOW God exists or that any of the religions out there are true. My basis for having a belief in a "Creator/Intelligence" is because I think we are living proof of it, and the world we live in. It's not like I'm saying a Unicorn made a pixy house....I am merely saying that there is something (I.e life, the world) in existence and it makes sense that there is a force behind that, not random chaos. I've said it before and I think it's a valid point: if something amazing appeared in your home one day, seemingly out of nowhere, if you asked your mother where it came from and she replied, "Oh, that? It just kinda appeared in your room and starting growing/changing." You'd be like, "no - something or someone put it there and that also doesn't explain why it is also changing/evolving." If you wouldn't accept something random and intricate appearing in your house without some kind of force or reason,then I don't think it's hard to see why some people believe there is more to the emergence of life and the universe. ^The bolded show exactly why it is subjective. You think it makes sense. But that doesn't make it more than your belief. People at a certain time in history thought it made sense that gods sat on the Olympus. Or it made sense to them that weather phenomenons were caused by gods. Or it made sense to them that illness was caused by evil spirits. All of those things made sense to many, many people during history. As long as we didn't understand these phenomenons as natural phenomenons it is easy to see why the god explanation made more sense to people at the time. It is the exact same thing with the origin of life or the universe. Just because we don't understand it yet, it does not follow that the answer is God. It is just many people are uncomfortable with not having an answer and certainty about everything yet, so they are quick to push God into those gaps of knowlede - which gives them more of a secure feeling than some sort of insecure, yet unexplained thing. By the way the scientific theory isn't that our complex world just randomly appeared out of nothing as "something amazing". That's a misrepresentation. But we have discussed that already too. There is much uncertainty about the origin of our universe or multiverse, but again, that doesn't mean the answer is some sort of God. It is just that our knowledge is not full, which is natural. But we have come a long way. Just think about it. Only about 150 years ago, people's natural instinct and gut feeling was that humans are so amazing, so complex that the only explanation for our existence can be a creator. Then Darwin came up with his theory. It is a theory because it is testable and it made predictions. If it was wrong it could have been disproven. But instead over time more and more evidence from all walks of science (paleontology, biology - think of DNA that people didn't even know about in Darwin's time, cosmology, astronomy, geography etc.) came to support Darwin's theory. It is a well established theory since then and it shows you don't actually need a creator of such a complex organization as a human being to emerge. Many people still find that idea offensive because it contradicts their holy books and because they think it somehow devalues them (I never understood that). At the time when those holy books were written it made perfect sense to people that God created humans fully formed. How else could we came to exist, right? Such complex, amazing beings. But that doesn't mean it was the truth. The same can be said about the origin of life and eventually the origin of the universe/multiverse. At this time I am content with saying we don't yet know everything and it is alright. But I don't feel the need to push the idea of God into our gaps of knowledge. That never turned out to be the correct answer.
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Post by respect77 on Jan 20, 2018 17:30:34 GMT
And BTW, our idea of gods/God also went through a lot of evolution over time. First you had polytheism with very much human-like gods who weren't perfect at all. They could be petty, they could be nasty, they could be fallible, they stole, they raped, they did nasty stuff, they could be very, very human (after all we made them after our own image, not the other way around, LOL).
Then monotheism appeared. The monotheistic God was claimed to be all powerful (unlike Greek gods, for example), but it was still a very human god when it came to his characteristics. In fact, if we take the the God of the Old Testament, for example, he is very petty, racist, homophobic, capricious etc. He may kill children on a whim, he may order his people to carry out genocide. Amazingly, he is exactly like people and society were at the time.
Then moving on to the New Testament and God becomes more of a mysterious being. He is also turned into being more merciful. There were actually a lot of different branches of Christianity in the first centuries A.D. - and if some other branch had won the battle for dominance then we would have a very different Christianity today, and perhaps also a very different world (since religion obviously influenced a lot of human history). Eg. there were the Gnostics who were more mysticists. There were the Marcionites who had a hard time reconciling the Old Testament God with the New Testament God so they had the idea that there were actually two Gods: the OT God was the creator but it was an evil God. And there was the good God of the NT that came to save us from the evil creator God. There were other types of Christianites as well.
Obviously this is a very short, simplicistic, Western/Judeo-Christian centric summary of the evolution of the god idea. We could talk about a lot of other gods, but the point is that it evolved and it always seemed to mirror human societies at a time - interestingly.
And then as science progresses so does our idea of God as well. Now theists who reject organized religions will talk about a "he/she/it" god. "It" being a possibility as well. "It", however, to me suggests something unconscious not a higher intelligence. So eventually it seems that even some theists are closing in on the possibility that there is nothing conscious out there. If it is an "It" - that can be anything then and it is just a matter of semantics that you call it "god" if you are so clingy on that term.
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Post by Liberian Girl on Jan 20, 2018 19:06:24 GMT
Socav -
I really do respect that. I think there's this general idea out there that theists hate science or reject it, and I don't. I know science has uncovered some absolutely mind-blowing stuff, beyond anything I could comprehend. My feelings on science are positive - I promise I'm not a "backward bible-better." BUT I also believe science is about studying the details of our world and the intricacies of it, understanding how something works or evolves. I don't yet believe science has the capacity to account for what "kicked off" non-life to life, what the spring board from geology to biology was.
You mention there is no more to a claim of God than to my example of a "Unicorn creating a pixie house." There is, though, based on the fact we are not living in or experiencing a pixie house - we are experiencing this world/life itself and my understanding that the "Big bang was caused by something (cause and effect etc). I guess we could call that "something" anything,like a Unicorn, but the title God generally works. It's only a label, I guess.
Respect77 - As I mentioned above, I do respect the advancement of knowledge through science. I know humanity has come far in being able to understand and analyse this world and life etc. I just think (and surely this is fair enough) that science does not have all the answers - but more than that, I'm not convinced science necessarily has a place to: IF there is a God he/it/she would be so, so beyond our comprehension that to think we can minimise, dissect, experiment and understand it is a little too faithful to the science field. Science has limits in what can be seen/measured/verified. I do think people can sometimes see Science as a God - placing a lot of faith as if it has, or will have, every answer to every question that arises in life.
Anyway I appreciate I am going off point here. In regards to your comment: "At this time I am content with saying we don't yet know everything...I don't feel the need to push the idea of God into our gaps of knowledge. That never turned out to be the correct answer."
I definitely agree we don't know the answer, I know that's true. But you saying "God never turned out to be the correct answer" when we don't know 100% either way also requires a faith of its own kind....that this complex world and life can evolve into being from a universe once inactive.
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Post by respect77 on Jan 20, 2018 21:02:36 GMT
Science has limits in what can be seen/measured/verified. I do think people can sometimes see Science as a God - placing a lot of faith as if it has, or will have, every answer to every question that arises in life. Science has its limits, but religion has more limits as it is basically nothing but fantasy that cannot be scrutinized. You just declare something is true to you because "it makes sense to me" and that it is outside of the realm of science and voila you have a pass to make any claim you want, to believe anything you want and to create any fantasy you want. To me that's an infinitely more limited way of thinking than the scientific approach. Fantasy and gut feelings do not make anything true even if they give you comfort. They don't make them equally valid as scientifically proven realities either. And I often see this accusation by theists that science is treated by atheists as some sort of religion. It is not. If you know how science actually works then you know its strength is exactly in it is openness to critique. That's why it has progressed to much. It's called the idea of falsifiabilty. What you see as a weakness of science is actually its strenght compared to religion and it is why it is so much more effective in making sense of the world than religion is. In science no one just makes ex cathedra statments but you have to prove things and you have to be open to scrutiny. You cannot hide behind the idea that "well, it is beyond science so it cannot be scrutinized". I prefer that to something that just makes statements based on belief and gut feelings. And I do think it is a superior way of understanding the world compared to beliefs and gut feelings. Science may not ever answer all of our questions (alone based on the fact that human history might be limited) but it came a longer way to make sense of the world than religion has ever done. It gave lot better and more sustainable answers as well. When in human history did God prove to be the correct answer? It doesn't require faith to say that "God did it" was never proven to be the correct answer. It is simply a historical fact.
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