I’ll quote Tim Minchin here
"If you wanna watch telly, you should watch Scooby Doo That show was so cool Because every time there was a church with a ghoul Or a ghost in a school They looked beneath the mask and what was inside? The fucking janitor or the dude who ran the waterslide Because throughout history Every mystery Ever solved has turned out to be Not magic"Like one of my faves of his
Do you know what they call alternative medicine that’s been proved to work? Medicine.
Germ Theory
Diseases used to be associated with paranormal powers or the wrath of gods in most cultures. The discovery of microorganisms and advancement of medicine may be our civilization’s greatest achievement.
Science deals with the natural, gods are by definition supernatural.
Science can not either prove or disprove existence of supernatural. It may only erode the reasoning why supernatural should exist.
That reasoning is subjective, and as such, there are no definite answers to your question unless we add additional constraints.
Didn’t some quantum nondeterminism prove the existence of effects without a natural cause? (being divil’s advocate a bit here for the craic)
No
Slapping “quantum” in front of something does not make it magic.
Take ‘natural’ to mean ‘being fully explicable by states in the observable world’.
‘Supernatural’ means everything not natural by that definition.
You have results (like Aspect’s experiment) that prove that the world is not naturalist: the world is not fully explainable by observable states causing other states.
That is not the definition that natural sciences use for natural. Going down that rabbit hole is completely meaningless, since we are no longer talking about science at that point.
In addition, if using your definition, nothing is natural according to our current understanding.
If I say something this person burst into flames for supernatural reasons, I mean without a measurable cause in the observable universe.
That has very little to do with anything related to the arguments you’ve made before, and I am not interested in participating in a Gish Gallop.
That is not the definition that natural sciences use for natural.
Go on then: what definition do they use?
Slapping “quantum” in front of something does not make it magic.
Slapping “quantum” in front of something generally makes it involve indeterminism (excepting the many-worlds interpretation)
Go on then: what definition do they use?
Natural means pretty much “element of the physical universe, identified by observation”.
You’re claiming in another comment to this thread that you have M.Sc., you should be aware of this, please stop wasting everyone’s time.
Slapping “quantum” in front of something generally makes it involve indeterminism (excepting the many-worlds interpretation)
Indeterminism is by no means non-natural, and it does not make things any less observable. We can observe quantum states just fine.
And as for
Yeah all the Bell stuff
“All the Bell stuff” doesn’t have anything to do with “Didn’t some quantum nondeterminism prove the existence of effects without a natural cause?”
And no, it didn’t. AFAIK there are exactly zero physicists who argue that.
You made a ludicrous claim, and are unable or unwilling to back it up even a bit, yet somehow you feel continuing this without anything to show is a good use of anyone’s time. If you are not going to make an actual argument, I do not see value in continuing this conversation, as all it does is make this thread more difficult to read for others who most likely are not very interested watching yet another internet argument sidethread.
Natural means pretty much “element of the physical universe, identified by observation”.
Right. We are in agreement. And indeterminism says that those natural things are not sufficient explanations of experimental results. There is something going on in Aspect’s experiment
Determinism: things are fully explained by natural phenomena, i.e. by observable elements of the physical universe
Indeterminism: observable elements of the physical universe are insufficient to explain experimental results; there is something else, like randomness
AFAIK there are exactly zero physicists who argue that.
We must be misunderstanding each other somewhere. Surely you’re not saying that zero physicists argue indeterminism? Obviously many/most physicists believe in indeterminism.
- A Snapshot of Foundational Attitudes Toward Quantum Mechanics (2013) by Schlosshauer, Kofler, and Zeilinger found that 64% of physicists believe that “Randomness is a fundamental concept in nature” and 48% believe “The randomness is irreducible”. For the question “What is your favorite interpretation of quantum mechanics?”, the most popular answer by some way was the Copenhagn interpretation (which as you know is anti-deterministic)
Lev Vaidman: “Historically, appearance of the quantum theory led to a prevailing view that Nature is indeterministic… Quantum theory and determinism usually do not go together.” (Vaidman, L. (2014). Quantum theory and determinism. Quantum Studies: Mathematics and Foundations, 1(1-2), 5–38. doi:10.1007/s40509-014-0008-4)
You made a ludicrous claim
Yes. And these ludicrous claims are standard in physics for decades now. Specifically, the ludicrous claim that most physicists believe is that there are things going on without natural causes (Natural means pretty much “element of the physical universe, identified by observation”). That’s an extremely standard ludicrous claim about our ludicrous universe.
and are unable or unwilling to back it up even a bit
That’s false.
yet somehow you feel continuing this without anything to show is a good use of anyone’s time. If you are not going to make an actual argument, I do not see value in continuing this conversation, as all it does is make this thread more difficult to read for others who most likely are not very interested watching yet another internet argument sidethread.
Please calm down.
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Science will never be able to prove a negative
Oh dear. There are already two lemmings in this thread spreading this one.
Would you and @[email protected] and @[email protected] please just look up “can you prove a negative or not” using your research method of choice. Make this the day you learn.
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Can you prove a positive where the supernatural is involved?
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You should read the meta-analyses of the ganzfeld experiments.
Whatever we observe empirically is “natural” by definition. Causality is an assumption, not a law of nature.
Good comment
The traditional notion of cause and effect is not something all philosophers even agree upon, I mean many materialist philosophers largely rejected the notion of simple cause-and-effect chains that go back to the “first cause” since the 1800s, and that idea is still pretty popular in some eastern countries.
For example, in China they teach “dialectical materialist” philosophy part of required “common core” in universities for any degree, and that philosophical school sees cause and effect as in a sense dependent upon point of view, that an effect being described as a particular cause is just a way of looking at things, and the same relationship under a different point of view may in fact reverse what is considered the cause and the effect, viewing the effect as the cause and vice-versa. Other points of view may even ascribe entirely different things as the cause.
It has a very holistic view of the material world so there really is no single cause to any effect, so what you choose to identify as the cause is more of a label placed by an individual based on causes that are relevant to them and not necessarily because those are truly the only causes. In a more holistic view of nature, Laplacian-style determinism doesn’t even make sense because it implies nature is reducible down to separable causes which can all be isolated from the rest and their properties can then be fully accounted for, allowing one to predict the future with certainty.
However, in a more holistic view of nature, it makes no sense to speak of the universe being reducible to separable causes as, again, what we label as causes are human constructs and the universe is not actually separable. In fact, the physicists Dmitry Blokhintsev had written a paper in response to a paper Albert Einstein wrote criticizing Einstein’s distaste for quantum mechanics as based on his adherence to the notion of separability which stems from Newtonian and Kantian philosophy, something which dialectical materialists, which Blokhintsev self-identified as, had rejected on philosophical grounds.
He wrote this paper many many years prior to the publication of Bell’s theorem which showed that giving up on separability (and by extension absolute determinism) really is a necessity in quantum mechanics. Blokhintsev would then go on to write a whole book called The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics where in it he argues that separability in nature is an illusion and under a more holistic picture absolute determinism makes no sense, again, purely from materialistic grounds.
The point I’m making is ultimately just that a lot of the properties people try to ascribe to “materialists” or “naturalists” which then later try to show quantum mechanics is in contradiction with, they seem to forget that these are large umbrella philosophies with many different sects and there have been materialist philosophers criticizing absolute determinism as even being a meaningful concept since at least the 1800s.
1700s but yeah
If they were, it has nothing to do with nature being supernatural. It just means that nature’s state is not locally real. That does not tie into religion in any objective way.
In addition, both of those articles are (slightly) wrong. There was a lenghty discussion about how in r/physics when they came out. The tl;dr is that it boils down to:
- locality
- realism
- independence of measurement
Pick two.
But that has no relevance to religion other than you can make either philosophical or religious argument out of anything.
Yeah all the Bell stuff
Evolutionary biology was the main one
Which is a bit silly to me, in that any religious person could simply explain evolution away as the mechanism by which a god or gods created humanity (to iterate on form until creating their supposed “perfect image”).
God being a human who was also his own father is fine, but the suggestion that evolution could be part of god’s plan is where we draw the line?
They had to reject it because any religion with a creation myth specifically says how the god created people. To accept an alternative story would reject the notion of the book as truth.
The religious are not looking for answers, they already have all the answers by definition of their holy book or whatever. They’re looking for confirmation bias and reject anything that goes against that.
If you’re talking specifically about the Abrahamic God, sure. But if it’s about the existence of any higher being, then there’s no contradiction here.
You even used the incredibly nebulous term “higher beings”. Define it.
Anything that you would call a “god”.
If I give an ostensive definition, I would say it includes the beings like the Abrahamic god, or Olympian gods, and exclude humans, animals, bacteria, the planet we live on, and objects we handle in our day to day lives. I’ll tentatively draw the line at any being that is not bound to the laws of physics as we understand them today.
Why exclude humans, animals and bacteria? How about Sun? Jesus Christ? God-King Jayavarman II? A cat? Very small spirit of tiny stream? A holy stone (stone is not a human, nor animal or bacteria, a lot of stones were worshipped in various forms and meanings in history)? A tree chewed by pilgrims? Invisible Hand of the Market?
Incredibly arbitrary definition again constructed to wriggle your way from any concrete statement.
If we had the technological power, would humans run simulations of universes with Planck length precision? Obviously yes. So extrapolating from our one and only example of intelligent life (us), it seems like intelligent life enjoys stimulating universes. If our reality were the result of that kind of project, and the engineers lived outside the laws of physics, I would call them higher beings. And they could be as hands-off or as interventionist as they pleased.
I don’t think OP is asking about the existence of humans, or animals, or any other physical entity. If they were, you can trivially say that you exist, and therefore god exists. That’s unless you want to go into ontology and question what it means to “exist”, which I’m pretty sure also isn’t what OP intended.
Nope. In Islam, God commands His servants to seek knowledge in all things. Muslims are obligated to seek knowledge because it will only continue to prove the existence of God.
any religious person could simply explain evolution away as the mechanism by which a god or gods created humanity
Many did, and this position is called Deism. In most versions, god(s) started the universe with initial conditions that would lead to the formation of intelligent life, and then withdrew.
Could be, but evolution makes God redundant, and then it is the whole simplest explanation thing that kicks in, right?
Occam’s razor doesn’t mean that the simplest explanation is always true, but rather that it’s usually the most likely to be true.
Using simplicity as a measure of how likely something is to be true always felt a little anthropocentric. How do we determine that something is simple if not via the systems and abstractions that are easy for human minds to comprehend?
No… not necessarily. Why can’t God command the creation of something and then allow the natural process to create said thing? Evolution doesn’t disprove the existence of God.
At some point you’re advocating for Deism. Which is fine enough, but doesn’t really provide any satisfactory answers. You need to define exactly what you mean by “God” before any further useful conversation can be had.
The scientific process, including evolution, has dispelled the myths found in any religious textbook ever written, including their particular definitions of “God”. I’d suggest you just drop the word and the associated baggage, and start from scratch. Come up with a new word, and define properties for it that make a coherent argument.
Well for one, I would recommend you drop the idea of what is God from the Christian perspective, they’re clueless. That much is true. Islam is far superior in terms of intellect and sophistication, after all the Quran is the literal Word of God. Unlike the Bible, authored by pagan and anti-Christ men who had a liking to Egyptian mythologies.
(Quran 21:30) Have not those who disbelieve known that the heavens and the Earth were of one connected entity, then We separated them and We made every living thing out of water? Will they not then believe?
(Quran 24:45) And Allah has created from water every living creature. Some of them crawl on their bellies, some walk on two legs, and some walk on four. Allah creates whatever He wills. Surely Allah is Most Capable of everything.
(Quran 64:3) He designed you then made your design better.
(Quran 40:64) He formed you then made your forms better.
(Quran 71:17) And Allah has caused you to grow from the earth a [progressive] growth.
(Quran 76:28) We created them and strengthened their forms.
(Quran 82:6-9) O mankind, what has deceived you concerning your Lord, the Generous, Who created you, then proportioned you, and then balanced you; in whatever form He willed has He assembled you.
Going to be blunt, if you read these verses (and there’s more verses) and don’t believe that this aligns with a creation of something, which in turn evolves (strengthens in its form) then it was meant to be. There’s nothing under the sun I could tell you that will pique your interest.
God has Willed it. This is the way.
He designed you then made your design better. He formed you then made your forms better. We created them and strengthened their forms.
That’s not how any of this works. None of these require the process of biological evolution, they’re clearly written as the islamic equivalent of intelligent design. Those describe some wizard creating something and then working to make it better, which is the opposite of how biological evolution works. Relying on “evolves” having several different meanings (
evolves (strengthens in its form)) is not an argument that is made in good faith. The process of biological evolution is not described in any religious literature, including yours.And Allah has created from water every living creature
I assume you bolded this because it’s important somehow. It’s not, though. It’s a vague allegory that has no predictive power, is not science, and has nothing to do with the process of biological evolution.
Religions don’t teach science. However, in Islam, we are obligated to learn science amongst other subjects. The verses you and I quoted do NOT conflict with evolution.
Many scientists believe that life on Earth originated in the ocean, and that all life was aquatic for the first 90% of Earth’s history. Some scientists think that life may have begun near deep sea hydrothermal vents, which are chimney-like vents that form when seawater mixes with magma on the ocean floor, creating superheated plumes. The chemicals and energy from these vents could have fueled chemical reactions that led to the evolution of life. For example, a 2017 study found tube-like fossils in rocks that are at least 3.77 billion years old that resemble microorganisms that live near hydrothermal vents today.
Furthermore, using the DNA sequences of modern organisms, biologists have tentatively traced the most recent common ancestor of all life to an aquatic microorganism that lived in extremely high temperatures — a likely candidate for a hydrothermal vent inhabitant!
But like I said before, there’s nothing under the sun that I can tell you that will sway you.
The “god” part becomes an unnecessarily complex explanation. I prefer simpler explanations when they fit the data just as well as the complex ones. It also reduces te risk when trying to broaden out to other lines of enquiry.
As johsny said It makes the god explanation redundant for the large topic of species of life. There’s no need to waste time or energy “disproving” god. The whole concept of god is simply useless to understanding - and so is a waste of time or mental energy.
But the so called explanations referncing god are typically such bullshit anyway nothing testable, no evidence, just “god did some shit”, “isn’t god cool/powerful”. So they never were actually useful to scientific reasoning. However much they may pretend otherwise religions are so much more aligned with laws and social structures and norms of behaviour than they are about advancing science.
If you squint real hard, the first creation myth in Genisis is pretty close to evolution.
Religion is deliberately non-falsifiable. No matter what scientific proof you can come up with, at the end of the day they just say God is fucking with us burying skeletons of creatures that never existed and such.
The fact that it needs to be constructed that way is frankly all the proof I need to toss religion in the garbage, but everyone isn’t so cavalier about the disposition of their “immortal soul.”
Honestly immortality and the very nature of God are both abhorrent to me. If religion were true, the best I could hope for is to be cast into a lake of fire and be destroyed, so I kinda win either way. Worst case is all religion is wrong but so is atheism and I have to spend eternity with an entity who is less of a malicious cunt than the Abrahamic god.
Religion is deliberately non-falsifiable.
I think it would be more accurate to say that the non-falsifiablity of religion has evolved as a result of a sort of natural selection. Essentially all the falsifiable religious beliefs have been falsified, and thus have trouble propagating.
Hah! Fair enough.
Heliocentric model.
Cosmic distance and time. Light speed as a limit.
The geological age of the Earth.
Dinosaurs.
Evolutionary theory.
Continental drift.
The periodic table of the elements.
Quantum theory, including wave-particle duality.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
Black holes.
It’s interesting, some theists would just say “that’s how God built the universe” and be satisfied with that.
The halfway sensible ones would. But the ones that thing religious texts are magic books would burn the former as heretics if they were allowed to do so.
Well sure. There are religious people who want to know how the world works. After all, if there is a creator/God then one of the ways that being communicated with us for certain is the universe we live in.
Thats me over 15 years ago. Now I’m staunch atheist.
You should read the Quran. Or not.
What does the Quran say about black holes?
Never read the Quran, but had a coworker who claimed the quran explains a ton of science, including recent science. She also believed in creationism and therefore also thought evolution was bs, so I didn’t put much basis into her words.
Letter from Charles Darwin to Asa Gray (22nd May 1860)
With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.— I am bewildered.— I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.
On that note, what’s up with the obligate coprophagy of the koala? And their famously smooth brains? I’d make the koala, were it I in the high seat, but a kind and caring creator wouldn’t.
Some herbivores can’t digest their food all the way, cows get around it by having more than one stomach and also chewing their cud (vomiting up from first stomach and rechewing). Rabbits do the same thing as koalas, partially digest their food and eat their poop.
The scientific method itself considers any as yet unsubstantiated theory as hypothesis. Applying this to the idea of God would leave one agnostic on the issue.
A couple of prominent examples of religious dogmas disproved by scientific discoveries are the Copernican Revolution and evolution by means of natural selection.
God’s an unfalsifiable claim, so there really isn’t anything that could test that hypothesis.
Pretty much any scientific test/discovery that counters anything in a religious text whose adherents view the text as completely truthful and literal. But sciencey stuff might not have much of an effect on religious folks who view their texts less literally.
But anyways… heliocentrism, germ theory, gravity, evolution through natural selection, probably a huge chunk of the field of archeology, plate tectonics, radiometric dating, probably the written language at various points in human history (but that’s not really a discovery), trans species organ transplants, decoding DNA, direct genetic engineering, CRISPR, radio telescopy.
Translative spoken word by the time a second hand account of the word of god becomes the word of the person speaking. Weird god never came back once we had verbatim recording techniques to address these inaccuracies.
But he works in mysterious ways
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There have been plenty of discoveries opposed by religion X. Those historically do not have significant impact on prevalence of such a religion.
I do think answers explaining why any answer to the original question suffers from logical fallacies are equally good to those that do try to get to the OP’s intent, and I think it is good to have both. I do think the literal answers are more “straight” (and I tend to go to the literate mode when talking about science), so that’s what I went up with.
Religion exists for a number of reasons, but the primary purpose it serves an individual is as a foundation for their overall worldview.
“Faith” as many call it, serves to answer questions we don’t have answers to.
Where did we come from? Why are we here? What happens after we die?
Religion gives us comforting answers to these questions, and as these questions are ultimately unanswerable, can do so in perpetuity.
Religion has also tried to answer questions that we didn’t yet have answers for.
What are the sun, moon, and stars? Why are there tides? Why does it rain?
God was long accepted as the source of these things, and prayer was thought to be the best way have any influence.
But today we have answered basically all the major questions. We have a working model of the entire solar system, down to the weather on other planets. We figured out how to turn rocks into computers. All that’s left is the unanswerable.
As for where we come from, we’ve filled in a lot of gaps. Evolution is now the accepted answer for where Humans came from, now the question is where life itself came from, and if there’s life outside of Earth (and how much).
Philosophy has given us plenty of options for what our purpose is. There are plenty of ways to wrap your mind around your own identity without turning to the supernatural.
And our study of anatomy and neurology suggests that our conscious self ceases to exist after death, the only thing standing in the way of that belief is the very human tendency to be in denial of our own mortality.
It wasn’t any particular scientific discovery that weakened religion. It was the popularity of science fiction that did it. As Arthur C. Clarke put it, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” People can now imagine how miracles are done without invoking anything supernatural. We might not have the tech to do it yet, but we have a pretty good idea of potential methods. That has placed a lot of “creator god” religions under pressure. Create life? Tech will eventually do it. Create a world? Sure, tech again. Given enough tech, a solar system can be spawned. Water into wine? We’re halfway there with Kool-Aid. We already have vimanas (those ancient Hindu flying vehicles). We call them airplanes or helicopters. We can destroy a whole city with a single weapon. So why should we worship a supreme being who supposedly did those things?
Assuming we can conquer poverty, religions that survive will be centered around improving the human condition. Worshipping dieties will eventually fall by the wayside. It will still be a long process. You can’t dispel faith with reason and facts. And people in poverty tend to embrace religion because it gives them comfort and hope that things will be better in the afterlife.
You need to define God first.
We should definitely start with this.
If it’s biblical sky daddy that influences our everyday lives, pretty much everything.
If it’s just more or less self-conscious entity behind the curtain of reality that sparked the universe, it’s pretty much unprovable and so undisprovable.
Printing presses, industrialized education, and the industrial revolution.
Giving people en mass the time study and educate themselves.
