Ah, there’s the rub. For a believer a miracle is not necessary, for a skeptic a miracle is not enough.
You can’t prove the existence of God with science*, anything you can measure isn’t going to be God. It’s like trying to explain the blueness of caramel, it’s not even wrong. You have to have faith in the existence or non-existence of God, anything else is rational agnosticism.
*Science doesn’t prove anything to be true, it’s just in a constant state of failing to disprove it
Wouldn’t that depend on the properties of God? If God can be observed then couldn’t it be proven to exist the same as any other observable thing?
Then you get into the whole “what is god (like)?” discussions.
I’m in the “the gods are reality” camp, which can trip up some atheists, especially the dogmatic ones you mentioned, because they’re used to arguing against anthropomorphic gods – and only one of them at that.
Aside: you know what’s cool about this discussion?It’s a hot-button topic and everyone’s being so relaxed. I really appreciate it. Just wanted to say.
Back on topic: I think people can get hung up on details, instead of the important things, and that can lead to dogmatism. Swift illustrated that nicely in the war between the Little- and Big-Endians in Gulliver’s Travels. The major points of morality are pretty consistent – otherwise we couldn’t have pluralistic societies at all.
I had caramel ice cream just last night, and it was a very vivid blue…
Little washed out in this picture.
I would question eating blue caramel in China, and I eat those very questionable pineapple spears on sticks sold off street carts.
I guess I’ve decided that I’d rather be killed by dodgy chemicals than dodgy sterilization.
I think that makes you agnostic rather than atheist, right?
No. There are things that are observable that aren’t real (dreams, hallucinations). Also, gods have supernatural powers, what natural ruler can you possibly use to measure them?
There are experiences to be had which are enough for many to be convinced there’s something there. While tripping balls on DMT I’ve seen some pretty freaky shit which seemed to have a different quality to normal tripping hallucinations; at one point it was as if I could see people’s auras or whatever, and it was like their psyches were on display.
Now, I’m the first to take this sort of thing with a grain of salt, but it occurs to me that if it’s possible to attain that state with any sort of reliability, what seemed like a paranormal ability should be testable somehow.
If reading auras is actually a thing, that still falls a long way short of proving the existence of God, but it would be some pretty damn tantalising stuff, and would perhaps add credence to some of the other stuff experienced on DMT, most of which has a decidedly spiritual flavour.
Which may lead to discovering it’s not paranormal at all, but some hitherto-unexplained natural phenomenon.
There’s a Neil Degrasse Tyson quote I love, where he says most scientific discoveries don’t start with “Eureka!”, but with someone saying, “Huh. That’s weird.”
That aura thing could lead to insights about sight, about brain function, about a lot of things. I hope someone’s looking into it.
Well, if it’s a thing, it’s definitely paranormal, but we could make it not paranormal by making it more normal. And if you ask me, supernatural is an obvious oxymoron; everything obeys its nature.
But yeah, the trick is to get to the bottom (and top) of nature. Science most definitely informs and extends spirituality, and the reverse should also apply. I’m peeved pretty damn hard about some of the most interesting lines of enquiry being so very arbitrarily deemed verboten.
Fuck you, Nixon.
I make no assumption other than whatever is written down is highly unlikely to be accurate. Consider the myths that spring up and persist about flesh and blood humans that lived during recorded history. We can’t even get that accurate. So now a bunch of people had visions, and those were written down, and copied, and translated and edited to meet ever changing social norms. Assuming the original visions were 100% accurate, humans down the pipeline will invariably change the original message intentionally or not.
I love disusing things like this. I have an open mind and imagination. I’d like for there to be some magical or spiritual realm. But I can’t just believe in random things for no good reason. I don’t care for formal religion. But don’t have a problem with a spiritual life. But yes, normally discussions on the existence and nature of God(s) online does not go well.
I’m sort of in between. My internal rules are very agnostic. But my gut feeling when I ignore those rules is atheist.
The objects in a dream are not but the dream itself can be measured in the brain.
If God(s) do(es) exist. They are either measurable or not measurable or both. I make no claims one way or another either about the abilities of us to measure or the nature of such entities to be measured. Maybe the two intersect, maybe they don’t.
I was kind of obsessed with Terence McKenna and the world of DMT in the early 90’s. I think spiritual experiences can occur regardless to if there are Gods or spiritual stuff (auras, souls, realm, etc…). There are many ways to put the brain into a different state. Maybe they are connecting to some spiritual something or maybe its all in their head. As long as it is therapeutic I don’t see the problem personally.
I love that quote.
Paranormal is really just the bucket of stuff that we either haven’t figured out yet or that doesn’t really exist/occur. I grew up watching In Search of in the 70’s. Started me early wondering what exists that we just can’t see yet.
That was me exactly until I smoked a cone of changa laced with crystal DMT after doing a couple of lines of speed. Now I’m pretty much on the fence.
BTW, if anybody’s inspired to try tripping while speeding, all the usual tripping caveats apply, but squared - you’ve been warned.
Literally? hahaha
I’ve never been a fan of speed. Coke on the other hand I really enjoyed. Never had a problem with it and it’s been 12 plus years since I have been around people with access.
I will repeat your warning that drugs can have multiplicative affects. Read up before combining things unless you like unexpected ambulance rides.
Oh yeah, it’s dirty, nasty stuff. But a shitload of fun, so I’m not averse to the odd bit once in a blue moon.
If you can measure it, it’s not a god. Gods require faith, science requires evidence. You can’t apply one to the other.
In the current states of both science and theology, yes that’s true. Hypothetically though, that may not always be the case.
Just because we didn’t have the tools to measure it for millenia of human existence doesn’t mean that radiation wasn’t always there…
A purely invented God requires faith and imagination to exist just like anything made up. If we and our various recordings cease to exist then they cease.
But I don’t have the spec sheet on a real God that exists independently of humanity. Maybe it is truly impossible to measure such a being even if it wanted to be seen and was right in front of you. Maybe such a being could change form to be detectable? I’m not saying it’s possible. I’m just saying without knowing anything about such a being it’s impossible to know that we can’t measure it given the right circumstances.
I just noticed this.
Engineering is about how things work, to my mind. Science is about how the world fits together, which is a bit more encompassing. But religion is not about what it means to be good. That’s a branch of philosophy [ethics and morality]. You don’t need a religion for that.
Religion seems to me to be a way of justifying the shared realm of ideas that bind a society together. And that’s distinct from theology, which seeks to answer the questions “Why is there anything rather than nothing?” and “Why is there intelligence?”
I know that Stephen Gould (whom I admire greatly) argued for your view, but I believe that is because his Jewish background made him unwilling to tread on the realms of belief (and not only Jewish ones. His sensitivity to Catholicism is also well documented). My own feeling is that orthogonality or disjoint sets is a cop-out. Sociology, psychology, neurology and evolutionary biology will eventually fully explain religion. At that point any supernatural aspects are dead, but religion as a subject of study will still exist. Personally I think we are a long way along on that process, but in most societies outside Europe religious groups are still able to suppress the truth to varying degrees.
Ultimately science may be able to describe the properties of our universe which have made it possible for intelligence to emerge from an expanding sphere of hot radiation. But the fundamental question - where did the hot ball of radiation originate - could well be unanswerable since we can’t see outside our universe. Hence turtles all the way down.
When I read people like Gould, or Teilhard de Chardin for that matter, I’m aware that between me and them is a great gulf of intellect. But being very intelligent doesn’t make you always right, even though you deserve a respectful hearing.
Well said, I couldn’t agree with the view of religion and science as disjoint either, but didn’t know why that didn’t set right with me.