The woman who discovered what the universe is made of doesn't even get as much as a plaque, much less a statue. When she died in 1979 her obituary didn't even mention her greatest discovery.
Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.
Even to this day, women doing astrophysics seem to be doing at a disadvantage because they have to spend a lot of time monitoring professional relationships for sexual harassment.
This video from Dr. Angela Collier went viral a few years ago on the topic [1]
I'm not subject to much sexual or physical harassment as I'm a somewhat physically imposing guy.
But what she meant is that a lot of your mental bandwidth is taken in thinking about how you can and can't interact with certain people if there's a culture of tolerating abuse.
You can see this in non sexual abuse cases, like nonproductive crunch leads people to watch what they say to PMs, etc.
The same can be said of plate tectonics, vaccines, the transistor, the cosmic microwave background radiation, the big bang, and the laws of thermodynamics.
TIL in 1925 it was thought that the Sun had no elemental difference from the Earth, and women were barred from becoming professors at Harvard. Basically dark ages.
Not just that - also "She completed her studies, but was not awarded a degree because of her sex; Cambridge did not grant degrees to women until 1948."
I was equally shocked to read that. But in context, the 20th century was still in large parts dark ages for women regarding their rights. For instance, I just read they were only permitted to vote in parts of Switzerland from 1990!
> The first federal vote in which women were able to participate was the 31 October 1971 election of the Federal Assembly. However it was not until a 1990 decision by the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland that women gained full voting rights in the final Swiss canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden.
It's a kind of depressingly common stage in institutions becoming coeducational: many of them allowed women to take classes for years (townies, daughters of faculty, etc.) but didn't fully integrate them into the academic experience; they generally didn't formally matriculate and were often either granted no degrees or given a "lady's degree" without a graduation ceremony.
The famous story is Philippa Fawcett, who took the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos exams at a time when women weren't officially placed on the ranked list of successful candidates. Her official exam result was listed as "above the Senior Wrangler"- in other words, above the top male candidate.
15 years later Fawcett became one of the "steamboat ladies"- women who took advantage of a long-standing agreement (that still exists in a limited form today) between Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin that graduates of one university can receive the same degree from another one without further examination. When Dublin began to award degrees to women in 1904, they briefly opened this arrangement to women who had passed exams at Oxford or Cambridge that would have entitled them to degrees had they been men. Several hundred British Oxbridge alumnae travelled to Dublin to graduate, and the fees they paid financed the construction of a hall of residence for Dublin's female students.
Women couldn't even be Harvard students, never mind professors! Her diploma would have said "Radcliffe College" - they didn't start putting the name Harvard alongside Radcliffe for another few decades.
Wow! There is a whole roster of woman scientists that were denied a Nobel Prize and this one seems to be the most appalling one! And I had never heard about her before. I knew about one other though:
The discoverer of the pulsar, for which the Nobel Prize was awarded to two others - her PhD supervisor and an astronomer.
–
I want to admit: when I clicked the link to the Wikipedia article of Cecilia Payne I expected some really minor quirky historical figure – not the literal discoverer of the sun’s composition.
Hard to say its the most appalling. Two more appalling omissions are Lisa Meitner for nuclear fission, and Chien-Shiung Wu for parity violation, since effectively others were given the prize for the work and their contributions overlooked.
If you want to be constantly irritated, read about Rosalind Franklin. (And yes, I know she died before the Nobels were announced, that's not the point.)
// she created an experiment on the efficacy of prayer by dividing her exams in two groups, praying for success only on one, the other one being a control group. She achieved the higher marks in the latter group
In at least Judaism - and I would expect in other religions, prayer is necessarily partnered with intention[1] - ie what is in your heart matters, not just the words you're repeating. Presumably someone creating such an experiment does not engage in the prayer with sincere faith and thus can conclude nothing from the outcome.
On the simplest level, because the very idea of faith requires going beyond the point where you are able to operate on pure reason. For topics that can be understood using experimentation, faith is not required.
"I believe in prayer" and "I am going to determine my religiosity based on the outcome of this experiment" are incompatible beliefs. Since we know the later is true, we can assume the former isn't.
Faith is the (a) recognition that we're limited beings whose perception and thinking are ultimately inadequate to understand objective reality and (b) a set of beliefs you take on for dealing with that unknowable space.
(a) is obviously true even if you're a complete atheist. EG, there's no reason to assume that evolution endowed us with ability to understand the objective reality anymore than it has endowed some deaf and blind deepwater creature that ability.
Since we all engage in life despite the limitations of (a), we are all making assumptions about the nature of reality whether we call it faith or not. EG, in the absence of us being able to know for certain why/how/by whom the universe was created, religious people make one assumption (purposeful creation and the meaning of life that it implies) while atheists make another one (random accident and the meaninglessness it implies.) You can't "see" that accident anymore than you can "see" G-d, so the amount of faith required to believe one or the other (or any other variation) is the same.
So yes, there's room for faith and we all operate on it. Back to the topic at hand, prayer is in the domain of religious faith, so it's meaningless for a non-religious person to test it out.
I absolutely do not agree that (a) is obviously true, for several reasons, so you are going to need to clarify and then provide some evidence to back that claim.
1) What does "understand objective reality" mean, specifically?
2) Please provide evidence that we currently do not "understand objective reality."
3) Please provide evidence that we do not possess the ability to _ever_ "understand objective reality."
> we all operate on it
[citation needed]
> prayer is in the domain of religious faith, so it's meaningless for a non-religious person to test it out
This is extremely presumptuous. What is your rationale that Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was "non-religious" at the time she conducted the experiment? (Hint: you'll need to show that she had a complete lack of religious belief, not only a lack of belief in the religion(s) you're familiar with.)
EDIT: there's also a whole load of other fallacious crap in your comment that I haven't even addressed. We cannot assume the universe was created at all for any purpose; atheism has nothing to do with "random accidents" or any supposed meaning attached to them; having no reason to assume something does not imply its negation, etc etc.
Sorry, did you mean to quote something different in my post? Questions are not evidence. It’d be extremely helpful if you gave a specific definition of “understand objective reality” as I asked in #1 before moving on to 2 and 3.
If you’re saying that “understand objective reality” means “knowing the true process of the universe’s creation” I’d counter that baked into that is the assumption that the universe was created, which is not necessarily the case, so you’d additionally need to provide evidence for that.
That question is implicitly suggesting that the universe was created. If that turns out not to be the case, then not even an omniscient being could answer it correctly. It would be equivalent to asking “describe the true process by which the Earth came to be flat.”
Of course, humanity does not understand everything about the universe. For instance, there is still the huge open problem of unifying general relativity with quantum mechanics, which is essential to understanding the very early universe (the standard model starts to lose accuracy prior to 10^(-32) seconds after the Big Bang [0]).
But that does not mean humanity will never understand such things.
And in case you are thinking “we’ll never know for sure; we’ll only have theories”:
I contend that all knowledge is inherently probabilistic. To claim to know something with absolute, 100% certainty is a fallacy [1]. After studying math my whole life, I am pretty confident that multiplication of integers is commutative. Is it possible that I have misunderstood numbers for my whole life, or that I am hallucinating right now, or that all of humanity has made the same mistake throughout all of history without realizing it? Yes. Just very, very improbable.
But that does not take away from the notion of understanding. One can understand an idea, while simultaneously recognizing that there is a small chance their understanding is flawed.
[1] The notions of “probability 1” and “certain” are actually distinct; for instance, if you flipped a coin for every integer, the probability that at least one would turn up heads is 1, even though it is possible for them to all land tails. That being said, the existence of real-life phenomena (cosmic rays, parasites, etc.) that could affect our minds at any given time ensures that no claims of knowledge can ever have probability exactly 1.
> You can't "see" that accident anymore than you can "see" G-d, so the amount of faith required to believe one or the other (or any other variation) is the same.
This is atrociously false. The amount of assumptions you need for intelligent design FAR outweigh the theory of evolution by natural selection plus standard cosmogony (big bang theory). For the former you need everything to ALREADY exist in the "mind" of the creator, but for the latter all you need is a big bang and a RNG. It's completely silly to put these two hypotheses on equal footing.
Also, God knows what you meant, no need to hide it.
> Faith is the (a) recognition that we're limited beings whose perception and thinking are ultimately inadequate to understand objective reality and (b) a set of beliefs you take on for dealing with that unknowable space.
This is fine, until you use those beliefs to rationalize made-up explanations for things where there otherwise exist rational explanations! Mostly this happens when those rational explanations cause trouble for other deeply-rooted "beliefs." (I would call it zealotry at the dinner table, but I'm being nice!)
For example, the people in the US who deny much of science because of young-earth creationist beliefs.
Very much agree. The space of ideas and percepts is just too big to be grasped in one broad "objective" view of the whole scene. This is a matter of computational limitation.
Faith is what setups the context for post-diction[1]. You can think of it as the prompt/messages you feed to a LLM. In fact, in order to help me write my previous comment (in another thread [2]), I fed some pdfs to claude-100k on poe.com in order to compare Italino Calvino's "Cybernetics and Ghosts" with the esoteric ideas of Voevodsky. Since this is relevant to the discussion, I will quote it in full.
> Claude: Unfortunately Italo Calvino's lecture "Cybernetics and Ghosts" does not discuss the paranormal. The lecture focuses on exploring the relationship between literature, language, and emerging ideas in fields like cybernetics, information theory, and structural linguistics. The uppercase emphasis is mine.
> Me: I do think there are parallels between Voevodsky's interview and Calivno's text:
> Calvino says,
> "Now, some of you may wonder why I so gaily announce prospects that in most men of letters arouse tearful laments punctuated by cries of execration. The reason is that I have always known, more or less obscurely, that things stood this way, not the way they were commonly said to stand. Various aesthetic theories maintained that poetry was a matter of inspiration descending from I know not what lofty place, or welling up from I know not what great depths, or else pure intuition, or an otherwise not identified moment in the life of the spirit, or the Voice of the Times with which the Spirit of the World chooses to speak to the poet, or a reflection of social structures that by means of some unknown optical phenomenon is projected on the page, or a direct grasp on the psychology of the depths that enables us to ladle out images of the unconscious, both individual and collective; or at any rate SOMETHING INTUITIVE, IMMEDIATE, AUTHENTIC, AND ALL-EMBRACING THAT SPRINGS UP WHO KNOWS HOW, SOMETHING EQUIVALENT AND HOMOLOGOUS TO SOMETHING ELSE, and symbolic of it. But in these theories there always remained a void that no one knew how to fill, a zone of darkness between cause and effect: how does one arrive at the written page? By what route is the soul or history or society or the subconscious transformed into a series of black lines on a white page?"
> Claude:
> > You make an interesting parallel between Calvino and Voevodsky here. While Calvino is focused more on literature and ideas of inspiration/creativity, there are similarities to Voevodsky's perspective:
> Both question prevailing notions or "aesthetic theories" about where artistic/literary works come from (inspiration from some mystical source for Calvino, materialist paradigms for Voevodsky).
> They see a "void" or "zone of darkness" in these theories around how abstract ideas/processes are concretely manifested in a work.
> Calvino wonders how the soul/history is transformed into written lines - paralleling Voevodsky's exploration of realms like the paranormal/supernatural that influence human consciousness/behavior but are not scientifically understood.
> Their stances acknowledge gaps in conventional understandings and an openness to alternative explanations outside dominant frameworks.
> So while focused on different domains, they both exhibit a skepticism of dominant ideologies and a willingness to consider non-traditional influences. There is a parallel curiosity about gaps or unknown processes connecting the abstract/internal to the concrete expression. This relates to Voevodsky's open-minded investigations into areas like the paranormal that lie outside standard paradigms. NICE OBSERVATION OF A PHILOSOPHICAL SIMILARITY IN THEIR PERSPECTIVES.
To make this comment homologuous to my previous one ([2]), I'll punctuate it with an excerpt from Grothendieck's "The key...
Why am I being downvoted ? Or worse, absolutely ignored ? Not just here, but whenever I mention those topics ? This is an honest question. Consider these thoughts have lead me to extreme isolation.
That is the definition of faith used by the irreligious -- as hostile a definition as if you asked one political party to explain the beliefs of the other! An insider, and particularly a Christian, would never define faith that way.
Speaking as a Christian myself, I would say faith is belief in motion. And I would say that faith doesn't oppose rationality and evidence, but is rather sort of orthogonal to it.
Let us suppose you believe there is a horrible and dangerous pandemic going on outside your house. You rationally are afraid to go outside. And then as days pass, you gather evidence that the pandemic has subsided and things are safe now. At first you don't trust it. And then you think it might be true. And then probably true. And then virtually certain. That process of gathering evidence and becoming more certain is rationality. Faith... is when you go outside. Belief in motion.
Now, that step out the door can happen at any point. It can happen when you first hear a hint that things are better, and in a reckless rush of hope, you run outside. It can happen long after you are certain certain certain and fear keeps you inside too long. These are both examples of bad faith, unhealthy faith, faith misused. A Christian speaking of faith really means healthy faith - you go out when you should.
Sound faith doesn't imply a lack of evidence, or complete evidence either. It's about deciding the evidence is sufficient and moving forward from there. And it's not only that - it's faith in something. If you step outside because a certain analyst convinced you it was safe, and you later take that same analyst's advice on diet, and on this, and on that, and it keeps working out - you are growing in faith in that analyst. Eventually, you may trust them quite a lot.
This is what I would say faith is: belief in motion, working towards building trust.
I simply rephrased the parent post’s definition of faith, nothing more.
There is a lot of nonsense, bad analogies, and fallacious reasoning here that I don’t care to respond to individually, so I’ll just ask a question that should be easy for you to answer given your explanation, and will also let you pick up a Nobel Prize or similar award if you answer successfully:
What is your evidence for god existing? In other words, framed in terms of your (bad) pandemic analogy, what is your equivalent to the verifiable evidence gathered showing that the pandemic is subsiding?
> I simply rephrased the parent post’s definition of faith, nothing more.
Oh, I know, I know, and both of you are only rehearsing what is common knowledge in the culture. It's just, that culture consists of people who don't have faith, and among people who do, it's something quite different. Ask a Catholic, a Jew, a Muslim, heck even a Buddhist - it won't be exactly what I said, but it'll be a lot more like what I said than what you said. I'm not trying to be hostile - just executing a cultural exchange.
What is the evidence for God existing?
This will no doubt annoy you, but I'll frame the answer to that by talking about faith a little more. See, the way I've described things, faith is a very rational process, something an intellectually healthy person does all the time. You have some notion of "sufficient" evidence that lets you believe something, trust something, act on something. I presume you have a lot of faith in the scientific process, such that when it tells you something you believe it! That is an example of healthy faith. You did have a rational basis for belief at some point, long ago, but really by now you've been trusting it for a long time, and it's been working out, and it makes sense of everything. That's strong, healthy faith. It isn't weird at all. It's rational and normal.
I have that sort of rational and normal faith - in God. Which makes it weird if you ask me for evidence that God exists, sort of like asking how you know science works. It kind of takes a minute to even get your head around a perspective that could ask a question like that. You are coming from an alien perspective to me, a position of zero faith, of distrust, you want evidence of a distant and theoretical God, God as an abstract and safe idea, like you might ask for evidence of the existence of electrons. My first inclination is to laugh, and point at the nearest power cable! That must seem nonsensical, but the truth is that to me God is as concrete and real and close and dangerous as an electrical socket. I don't believe in God the way I believe in electrons, but more like the way I believe in my car. I drive it to work every day. Of course it exists. I interact with it, in an undeniable way, on the average Tuesday. But of course, my evidence wouldn't be yours, much the same as a science skeptic wondering about electrons is unimpressed by an electric tea kettle. He doesn't know how it works, but who says it has anything to do with electrons? Okay, you might ask yourself, why do I believe in electrons? And - after moment sputtering and hardly knowing where to begin - you say well, all right, there's this paper, and they guffaw at the scientific establishment. And you say, well okay, there's this one experiment that's actually accessible enough I did it myself, personally, in college, it was really neat... And they poke holes in that. And on and on.
The science skeptic in that story is coming from a position of zero faith, of hostility to faith, and is committing a very similar intellectual sin to the the pandemic fearer who won't come out in my previous example. This individual won't have faith when he really ought to, when he really should, and it's clear something else is going on.
Of course, it's always possible to doubt any evidence, reality is never certain certain, but something about this guy is clearly messed up. You start to wonder if what's actually going on is that an electron kicked his dog at some point. And generally speaking, that's usually exactly what it is.
I've heard it said that the opposite of faith is fear, and I think it can be. I would say it's emotional dysregulation towards belief. Sometimes you refuse a conclusion out of fear. Sometimes shame. Sometimes pride. I have found with atheists it's often anger.
It's a phenomenon we're all familiar with in politics, r...
You wrote a lot of words and provided zero evidence.
> Which makes it weird if you ask me for evidence that God exists, sort of like asking how you know science works.
This is not at all weird to me! If you ask me how I know science works, I can point to countless thousands of studies and experiments, which result in data, which can be reproduced (if they're good experiments), and which clearly comport with the reality around us. I can also point to older scientific experiments that were incomplete or otherwise flawed, and the newer experiments which showed that the explanations offered in those prior studies were not sufficient to explain what we see in reality. This is how I know science works.
> Whoever wrote that [the bible] is someone I want to follow.
The bible is full of savage and senseless violence, slavery and proclamations for how to own people as property (and instructions to slaves for how to behave), and other moral horrors. What is wrong with you? The fact that you mentioned this as the first bit of "evidence" (it isn't evidence, by the way, it's a book) is sad.
edit: a few responses to other nonsense in your post:
> is committing a very similar intellectual sin to the the pandemic fearer
What is an "intellectual sin"?
> evidence is not why people believe or resist belief - the evidence is good, faith is the default, skepticism means something is going on and it's almost never about evidence
[citation needed]
> Lee Strobel's Case For Christ is excellent, and is even available in movie format. There's another one about C.S Lewis
lol
> Zero faith is a wall that can't be gotten over with evidence
[citation needed]
Speaking only for myself, if you presented to me objective, verifiable facts consistent with the existence of the chrsitian god, I would absolutely change my belief regarding the existence of that god!
> But there is a test to look for the real issue. You can pray - something along the lines of, "God, if you're there, I'd like to know - show me." I think people from a zero faith perspective generally react to that proposition, not with the rational "lol what's the point?" but with more of a "No way, no how, absolutely not!"
My reaction to this is actually neither of those, it's "okay, great, let's test prayer to see if it works!" Fortunately, many people have already done that, and it results in outcomes no better than random chance.
In general there are a bunch of attempts in your post to tie faith to emotion, which is weird to me. I believe things when there is sufficient evidence to warrant them, and emotion does not factor into my decision to believe or not believe some claim.
It is a book that shouldn't exist, powerful enough to found a civilization and turn the world upside down, and to turn individual people upside down and inside out in an astonishing range of contexts.
The same tome is the battle cry of warriors and the song of martyrs and salve for paupers and satisfying to high powered intellectuals. How?? It is the best thing ever written by a wide margin, which was the first and strongest evidence to me. Is anything else like it? 1500 years in the making, dozens of authors, three continents, multiple languages, one story that hangs together and still changes the world. If God didn't write it, it must have been aliens.
Violence, slavery, moral horrors? Aye, absolutely - and sex, too, shocking sex. Even a little swearing. ;) It is a book about sin and evil, after all. But if you pay attention, all the evil things are defeated in the end.
Would you like to know why there are instructions for how to keep slaves in the old testament? Because humanity was an absolute bunch of moral toddlers in 1200 BC, and regulating the practice and giving slaves rights was a massive step forwards. The ideas that eventually flowered into abolition come from the Bible. The idea that all men are equal is an astonishingly counterintuitive one, given how obvious it is (and always has been) that they are not.
Would you like to know why there are instructions on how to be a slave in the new testament? Because the truly righteous man can thrive and live rightly in anycircumstance - even that one - and it is glorious to prove it, and that is how. Don't mistake those instructions for an endorsement of injustice. Rather, and astonishingly, it is possible to be righteous in am abjectly broken, monstrous, unjust world. You don't have to fix the world. You can do brilliant good right where you are. In a way, the ultimate middle finger to injustice is to notevencare when it affects you.
But I expect none of that makes any sense to you. :D
It is notable to me that you say I provided zero evidence. I actually sketched quite a lot, and I linked to more. I expect what you mean is that I provided zero evidence that you think counts. No evidence "counts" for my electron-denier, or for my pandemic-phobic either. Biblically speaking, Jesus' opponents asked for a sign that he came from God and then wrote it off when he rose from the dead. Which really makes you wonder what he was supposed to do.
It sounds like you are expecting to detect God in a lab. But that sort of comes full circle to what started the discussion. The experiments that are supposed to detect him would hardly be expected to work on your dad, let alone the almighty king of kings creator of the universe. I mean, he sees you. He knows what you're doing. He's very capable of doing what he wants.
Or, let me put this another way. If someone were to propose to me that fairies existed, but were hiding, and I said, well I don't see them in my lab experiment, I sound pretty idiotic. I mean, duh. They're fairies. They don't want you to see them. If I were to propose the same experiment to disprove the existence of space aliens, I sound like a loon. But for some reason, the idea that The Almighty doesn't exist if he won't get in a cage with the lab rats and rabbits doesn't seem crazy to you. I mean, true or false, doesn't that entirely fly in the face of the concept?
You are making excuses for the being who I assume you claim is the literal moral arbiter of the entire universe. If the all-powerful god couldn't be bothered to say "don't own people as property," that alone is reason enough for me to treat him with disdain, especially when he _does_ make proclamations about mundane things such as which foods I should eat and which clothes I should wear.
I have faith (see what I did there?) that deep down you are better than this. Your morality has been corrupted by years of religious brainwashing. I'm going to stop engaging with you further. I seriously hope you are able to recover from whatever mental harms have been done to you in the name of religion.
That's the pride and anger I was expecting to find. Your commentary towards God and his works is hostile, quick to judge, to the point (I would say) of even being unfair and hasty. Any excuse for an insult! Any reason to reject!
That's really common among atheists. I knew a young lady, an atheist, who - after you peeled all the layers off the onion - was fundamentally angry at God that her mother had died. Lee Strobel's atheism was founded in a broken relationship with his father. C.S. Lewis', for all its intellectual styling, was based on a lot of personal tragedy and a broken world. I know it's patronizing to psychoanalyze, and I apologize for that. But it really does astonish me - you can almost set your clock by it. Uncertainty can make an agnostic or an unaffiliated, but atheism seems to call for something special. If you want a citation that belief is about emotion and not evidence... I mean, you're kind of providing one.
No insult intended, impossible as that might be to believe. It is a condition common to all humanity. The type I see a lot of among Atheists is just one flavor.
For what it's worth, I have benefitted a lot from conversations with atheists over the years, and I bear you all a great deal of affection.
In the case of slavery, my disdain for god is exactly equal to the disdain that I would have for any thinking, sentient being that condones owning other thinking, sentient beings as property. Please don't misrepresent what I'm saying as being generally hostile to god. It's also dishonest of you to call me hasty or unfair -- I've spent decades researching and debating this topic and my views are the result of that work.
Perhaps I misread you. If you are serious about this
-
Speaking only for myself, if you presented to me objective, verifiable facts consistent with the existence of the chrsitian god, I would absolutely change my belief regarding the existence of that god!
-
Then let me go from there. You laugh at Lee Strobel's work - too popular? Why? I can suggest Craig Keener's Miracles if you want to cover similar ground at an extremely rigorous academic level. Is that what you're looking for?
Is a link not good enough? A conversation can hardly do justice to a large topic, but I can sketch what you'll find if you follow the link.
But I am curious why you laugh at Stobel. I think he's pretty impressive. You don't?
Every piece of "evidence" that you reference is just a collection of stories. This is akin to testimonial evidence which is the weakest form of evidence. In order to believe in a claim as extraordinary as that of an all-powerful deity who created the universe, I'm going to need some better evidence than that.
Stobel and Lewis's works/stories are laughably bad and can't hold up to even the lightest scientific scrutiny.
I'm familiar with Craig Keener as well, and to call the work "rigorous" in any sense of the word is also laughable. Just about every one of his supposed "miracles" is either mundane ("so-and-so recovered from their illness slowly over a period of 18 months, after surgery") or unsubstantiated, and thus I am convinced by literally zero of them.
As I mentioned in my other post, I'm going to stop here, and I sincerely hope you are able get help to recover from the harm that religion has done to you.
Well - I myself think historical methods are perfectly reasonable for establishing historical facts - and the credibility of Christianity is primarily a question of historical fact. And Keener's books were what convinced me that miracles definitely still happen, a case I don't remember specifically because it's been a minute, but which I do remember being both meticulous and overwhelming.
But I am curious, if you are willing to condescend a little further - if historical evidence is out as an entire category (which seems already unreasonable to me, but let's go with it), what sort of "better" evidence are you looking for? I mean, it sounds like this is not a new argument to you, so I expect you'll know what I mean when I say, "I think the astrophysics stuff is really good." I mean, it's so insanely good that it makes people who want to reject God say insane-sounding things about unbelievable numbers of unverifiable parallel universes. At which point I think just believing in God is way simpler. Or, I think the origin of life stuff is really good - good enough to convert Anthony Flew and make Nobel Laureates start talking about panspermia. I have some personal stories that have historically been good enough to require telepathic space aliens as an alternative explanation, in discussions like this.
Not good enough for you? I imagine you're familiar and I should skip it?
That really does beg the question - what evidence would be good enough for you?
> I mean, it sounds like this is not a new argument to you, so I expect you'll know what I mean when I say, "I think the astrophysics stuff is really good."
You are correct, and my response is the same one I give whenever a theist brings up astrophysics as an argument for god: you probably don't understand "the astrophysics stuff" as well as you think you do. Depending on what, specifically, you mean by "the astrophysics stuff", it's likely that you have misconceptions about a) what the big bang theory is, the period of time covered by it, and related implications, or b) the second law of thermodynamics, or c) quantum mechanics, or some combination of the above.
> That really does beg the question - what evidence would be good enough for you?
I don't know, but if a god exists, she certainly does, and the fact that she hasn't shown it to me is evidence that either she does not exist or that she does not want me to know she exists. Either way, the only rational position for me to take is that I do not accept the claim that the christian god exists, until warranted by evidence.
I have a more questions to ask you based on your responses, which I've yet to receive clear, succinct answers to from any theist, but I think I'll stop here since it's clear I won't get them. Bye.
I understand what you mean but I don't think I agree. Scientists are human and frequently experiment on things that they have strong beliefs or faith in. Francis Collins is famously a devout Christian, but still conducted experiments on the origins of human life. Personally, I have faith in gravity (an absolute belief that it will work despite never having studied it myself), but I would still be very interested in doing an experiment to test it, probably partly because like everyone else I enjoy confirming my own beliefs. On the other hand, I have no faith in prayer and have never considered running an experiment, and would not really be interested in doing so.
We can't know for sure, but my own intuition tells me that someone who conceived of and carried out that prayer experiment probably believed it was going to work.
I think you're calling out a subtle difference between "faith" and perhaps "belief" or "knowledge." Gravity is something you believe deeply because of the science and experience you have with it.
Faith would be something like "gravity and other laws of physics exist because the universe is inherently meaningful" while another faith would be "... they exist despite the universe being being random and inherently meaningless"
The inherent meaning of the universe is not something we can test out, but it's something we have a faith-like belief (one way or another.)
I’m not sure I understand the question. If you’re asking about the purpose of my life, at a biological level it’s to procreate, and on top of that I additionally make it a goal for myself to 1) try my hardest to leave the world
a better place than it was when I arrived, and 2) try my hardest to raise children that are decent people and set similar goals for themselves.
> Do you see any reason to be a good person instead of being an egoistic one, where the latter would benefit you?
Of course, I try to take actions that contribute to the well being of others or humanity as a whole whenever I can. I think we can all have well being as a goal without resorting to any unsubstantiated religious dogma.
I’m curious to know what you think any of this has to do with “the meaning of the universe” (whatever that means).
> 1) try my hardest to leave the world a better place than it was when I arrived
Why? What is the reason for that? You will not care about it when you're dead and right now you might spend a lot of resources for that, decreasing your quality of life, which is everything that you have.
> I try to take actions that contribute to the well being of others or humanity as a whole whenever I can.
Same as above. It's probably very hard, without any benefits to you on Earth.
> I think we can all have well being as a goal without resorting to any unsubstantiated religious dogma.
We probably can indeed, but I do not understand the logic of pursuing long-term benefits for everyone while sacrificing immediate benefits for yourself. Is this just an instinctive decision?
> I’m curious to know what you think any of this has to do with “the meaning of the universe” (whatever that means).
The Universe looks extremely complicated and unlikely to me. It's laws are fine tuned to make it as complicated as possible. The more we learn about how it works, the more questions appear. Whenever we think that we understand most of it, new discoveries turn everything upside down. The Universe is almost designed in such a way to create humans, if not on Earth then somewhere else. Could this be the meaning of the Universe? Then, there might also be the meaning of humanity, too.
Another angle to this. Imagine there is a possibility to create a simulation of the Universe. If someone could do it, then they likely run many simulations simultaneously, just like people do. Then, the probability for you to be born in a simulation is much larger than in reality.
Offtopic:
>purpose of my life, at a biological level it’s to procreate
I aim for well-being because I think that whatever is beneficial to others is likely to be beneficial to me as well, for example if I help my neighbors out when they are in trouble, they’re in turn more likely to help me.
There are a few common theist and theist-adjacent arguments in your post including the fine-tuning argument and the simulation hypothesis, all of which I reject due to lack of evidence in their favor.
I still don’t understand what you mean when you’re trying to identify “the meaning of the universe” or of humanity. The universe is all that we can see, nothing more. To try to assign meaning to it is, to me, exactly like trying to assign meaning to the Sun, or a rock, or the Andromeda galaxy, just at a larger scale.
> I aim for well-being because I think that whatever is beneficial to others is likely to be beneficial to me as well
My question was explicitly about cases when you have no benefit whatsoever in this life.
> theist-adjacent arguments in your post
Yes, how else can you argue about "the meaning of the universe" otherwise? Science simply does not try to answer such questions, it asks other questions. Of course there is no evidence for any of that and you have a good reason to reject it. But by rejecting it you are also, in my understanding, rejecting the reason to help the humanity whenever that is against your own goals (like with having children!).
> My question was explicitly about cases when you have no benefit whatsoever in this life.
I’m sorry, I didn’t get that from your post. Can you give an example case where I’d have no benefit whatsoever?
> Yes, how else can you argue about "the meaning of the universe" otherwise?
Can you please define “the meaning of the universe” for me? I stated previously that I hold no beliefs about that, and that is primarily because I don’t understand what you and others mean by that phrase. Other than stating I hold no beliefs about it I have not been arguing for/against it, again, because I don’t know what it means for the universe to have a meaning.
If you believe the universe has meaning, can you please first define what that means, and then cite evidence in support of it?
> Can you give an example case where I’d have no benefit whatsoever?
Let's say you donate money to African children or survivors of an earthquake, or partiipate in a project that will not have any results in your lifetime (like Voyager maybe?). Or you go to a climate demonstration while being old, without any chance to see any consequence of it.
> Can you please define “the meaning of the universe” for me?
I guess there can be no scientific definition here. But imagine there was someone who created the Universe and tuned it for humanity to appear and develop, in a hope of having a good companion. In such case, the meaning of the Universe would be to eventually give a companion. Or maybe, there was nobody, but the Universe still appeared in such a way that more and more complicated structures are created infinitely. What is a purpose of a living cell? It is to collect, process, and transfer further information about the environment (to survive). Same for human DNA, and maybe for humans, too. We can process information much more efficiently with our tools already and enter the informational age - maybe for a reason? To me knowledge is the meaning of the Universe/humanity, and only knowledge will reveal if there is something more here.
> Let's say you donate money to African children or survivors of an earthquake, or partiipate in a project that will not have any results in your lifetime (like Voyager maybe?). Or you go to a climate demonstration while being old, without any chance to see any consequence of it.
For a lot of these types of things I could argue that my children might still benefit even if I wouldn't (e.g. the climate change thing). For others, I'd argue that I maybe I have an innate desire to want to see the human race continue. Call it a biological instinct, maybe.
> But imagine there was someone who created the Universe and tuned it for humanity to appear and develop
This is a huge leap so I'm not really that interested in considering it unless there is evidence.
> Or maybe, there was nobody, but the Universe still appeared in such a way that more and more complicated structures are created infinitely. What is a purpose of a living cell? It is to collect, process, and transfer further information about the environment (to survive). Same for human DNA, and maybe for humans, too.
Yes, maybe. But this seems to be veering off-topic from my original question about what does it mean to ascribe meaning to the universe. Are you equating the purpose of life (human or otherwise) with the meaning of the universe? Sorry if I'm not understanding but this still seems very hand-wavy to me and I'd like to understand exactly what it is you're talking about before trying to argue for or against it.
> For a lot of these types of things I could argue that my children might still benefit even if I wouldn't
But why would you care if you won't be here? It won't change your life, will it? I see no logical reason for such sacrifices (apart from a belief in something higher than us: life after death / higher purpose or similar).
> Call it a biological instinct, maybe.
This is the key. I guess, it's also the answer to my above question. It effectively means that this is a random choice, based on a gut feeling, and that most people (who do not have such instinct) will choose a different, more logical and beneficial, behavior.
> Are you equating the purpose of life (human or otherwise) with the meaning of the universe?
I tend to believe that yes, they are connected (not necessarily for humans: possibly aliens, too). I make such conclusion from the complexity considerations, as I explained above. Of course, there is no rigor to such conclusion, otherwise it would be ordinary science and our discussion would be unnecessary: this all would be just a fact.
However, it shouldn't even matter if purpose of life (human or otherwise) and the meaning of the universe are the same or not. My line of thought is that if you believe that there is a meaning of the Universe, then you have a logical reason to behave with a long-term view. And otherwise you don't, do you?
Because I would like for my children and their peers to not live in a world ravaged by climate change, disease, and war.
> It effectively means that this is a random choice
No, not random, a choice honed by thousands of years of natural selection.
> that most people (who do not have such instinct) will choose a different, more logical and beneficial, behavior.
Do you have evidence for any part of this statement?
> My line of thought is that if you believe that there is a meaning of the Universe, then you have a logical reason to behave with a long-term view. And otherwise you don't, do you?
I don't see how this follows at all. For one, all of the reasons I've previously stated are, in my opinion, solid reasons for behaving with a long-term view. Secondly, I still don't understand what you mean by "meaning of the universe," and your possibly-maybe equivalence of it with "the purpose of life" has left me at least as confused as was before.
Edit: this might have been obvious from my prior posts, but it might be worth stating explicitly that when it comes to all of this stuff, I'm a naturalist, and more specifically I tend to agree with the methodological naturalist way of thinking. So statements like:
> Of course, there is no rigor to such conclusion, otherwise it would be ordinary science and our discussion would be unnecessary: this all would be just a fact
are tough for me to wrap my brain around. To me, "ordinary science" is *all there is*, and I would expect that if there were some higher being that created the universe, we would see evidence of that being and it would be described in studies that would use data to assign good candidate explanations (not "facts") to what we observe. But in the thousands upon thousands of years that humans have believed in deities, no one has yet done this to my knowledge.
> No, not random, a choice honed by thousands of years of natural selection.
OK, you have just stated that you do not use logic when making decisions about your life long-term but instincts. I was searching for logical reasons to behave empathically. With a strict, mathematical logic, if you will. And I don't see it.
> Do you have evidence for any part of this statement?
Do you have evidence that most people on Earth are involved in a volunteer activity that has no benefit for them in this life? AFAIK it's the opposite: true volunteering is a rarity. (Although following instincts is of course popular.)
> For one, all of the reasons I've previously stated are, in my opinion, solid reasons for behaving with a long-term view.
I disagree. From the natural selection's point of view, it's true. From the point of view of one person, it isn't.
> To me, "ordinary science" is all there is
I fully agree with you here. However, our current knowldege is not all there is.
> and I would expect that if there were some higher being that created the universe, we would see evidence of that being
This is a naive view of such entity. The world might be more complicated than this. For instance, some religions explain that it would not want you to know this, because you should have a free will and your own path to grow and not a path of a follower of a god.
> Do you have evidence that most people on Earth are involved in a volunteer activity that has no benefit for them in this life?
I never claimed that, and since you responded to my request for evidence with a question implying that I hold a position I do not hold, I'll assume you have no evidence and dismiss your claim.
> From the natural selection's point of view, it's true. From the point of view of one person, it isn't.
Why? Natural selection is not a conscious entity and therefore cannot possibly have a point of view. And I feel that the benefits provided to me and my life, as I've previously described, make it rational for me to behave this way on an individual level.
> This is a naive view of such entity. The world might be more complicated than this. For instance, some religions explain that it would not want you to know this, because you should have a free will and your own path to grow and not a path of a follower of a god.
OK, let's break this down: the fact that there has never been any established scientific evidence for a creator means that those deities that are not described as remaining hidden are likely not to exist.
For the others, if the claim is that the deity is well and truly hidden and there can never be evidence for their existence, then I feel it's rational to dismiss those claims, in kind, without evidence.
>> that most people (who do not have such instinct) will choose a different, more logical and beneficial, behavior.
> Do you have evidence for any part of this statement?
I do not understand which evidence you need. You yourself explained that your choice is the result of an instinct. I said that people who have no such instinct will behave differently. It's true by definition. Ok, the "most" part of my sentence is controversial. Maybe I'm wrong, but I definitely can't see a lot of volunteers in the world that behave counter to their own egoistic, logical goals.
> And I feel that the benefits provided to me and my life, as I've previously described, make it rational for me to behave this way on an individual level.
There are no benefits to you and your life. Prove otherwise.
> there can never be evidence for their existence
I never said this.
You do not understand what all of this has to do with the meaning of Universe, because you fail to understand that, without it, there are no reasons to think long-term for each logical individual. You should explain where you find such reasons and I don't see that you could.
I never claimed that you did, instead I was trying to categorize all god claims into one of two groups, and for each group give the reason why I don’t believe any claims that the deities in that group exist.
> You do not understand what all of this has to do with the meaning of Universe, because you fail to understand that, without it, there are no reasons to think long-term for each logical individual.
This is a claim and you should provide evidence for it rather than shifting the burden of proof to me.
I upvoted your response to me though I have no response on that particular topic as I don’t have depth on Christianity.
I do think religion encourages engagement and wrestling with faith as a matter of process so I agree with you there. But I don’t think the story of Thomas is taken to mean you don’t have faith in anything besides tangible proof.
The notion that religion must be taken on faith only, and that testing is antithetical to "the true belief" is fairly new. It was likely a reaction to rapidly shrinking gaps in our knowledge of the world, that mostly pushed religion out of the "material" world.
I'd say "complementary" rather than "antithetical".
Questions of faith are "interoperable" (to use geek language) or consistent with reason (what you call the material world), meaning that if there is a seeming contradiction, you may have misunderstood one or the other.
The world of knowledge is logical-axiomatical when deduction is applied and empirical-scientific when induction is applied. Importantly, neither of the two methods can answer fundamental questions like "Why are we here?", "What are we supposed to do?", "What can we expect?" etc. which fall in the realm of faith.
There are "interface" situations between the realm of faith and the realm of science such as events seen as miracles, which scientifically are just low likelihood events and that is all that can be said about them regarding science, whereas a subject may not be content with such an non-explanation e.g. "Why did I alone survive the plane crash? Why me?"
Or take the historical Jesus: it is evident that a person by that name existed, because the Romans reported so (considering him their enemy makes them reliable sources): the Roman historian and senator Tacitus referred to Jesus, his execution by Pontius Pilate, and the existence of early Christians in Rome in his final work, Annals (written c. AD 116), book 15, chapter 44. Now Tacitus did not confirm that Jesus was a "saviour", ascribing a religious role to a historic figure is an act of faith, perhaps based on his message of love of neighbor and forgiveness, which at the time was seen as contradicting Jewish commandments (and therefore, predictably, heresy, which calls for death) but was actually a clarification of these, spoken by someone who practiced what he preached.
I think many of the paradoxes of prayer are most easily comprehended if we remember that God is called our Father, and we are called his children. How would the situation in question work out, between a father and a child?
Suppose there are three brothers - Peter, James, and John. Suppose Peter is wondering if it ever matters whether he asks his dad for anything. Perhaps he thinks his dad is so powerful and so wise that he will always do the right thing and doesn't need Peter's advice. Or perhaps he thinks his father is so distant and uncaring that asking him for help is useless. So Peter decides, as an experiment, every day to ask his dad to do something nice for James, and never asks him to do anything for John. What will happen?
It entirely depends on the relationship between Peter and his dad! But at a minimum, it seems likely that Peter's dad would resist his son's attempt to control him, and would take a dim view of Peter's insincere requests and desire to play with his brother's fates.
Is there any point in children asking their parents for things? There is - if Peter is genuinely worried about a problem James is having and brings it to his father's attention, action is all but guaranteed - especially if they are close. There's a world of difference between requests based on the pre-existing relationship and the feeling behind the request.
God is a person. He knows when you're running a study. He knows when you're genuinely concerned. He knows you far more thoroughly than you know yourself, and responds - not the way a force under your control would, but the way a person would.
As a bonus thought, I have a young son who likes to take trips outside. It is his favorite thing. I know this. At any moment of the day, I know he would probably like me to take him outside just then. Sometimes I do, sometimes I am doing other things. I am infinitely wiser than my (in this case, two year old) son when it comes to prioritizing going outside vs. doing other things, and I really do try to get him as much outside time as I can, in general. And yet! In spite of all of that! It is perfectly true that he frequently causes me to take him outside by asking. Despite all logic to the contrary, prayer can work - the same way, for the same reason. There is something in the asking itself that changes the context and the priorities.
Incredibly counterintuitive things can happen when people are involved.
There seems to be an underlying assumption that when your god knows you're running a prayer experiment, they'll selectively ignore the prayers in order to make the experiment fail and make themselves appear nonexistent. Why? I understand that god is unknowable, but what I mean is, why do you believe that? Is there some theological reason? Or do you just assume it must be true because otherwise the experiments would work?
I appreciated your analogy, but I don't believe it answers this question. No father would ignore their child's requests specifically to make them believe they don't have a father.
This is a great question and I am going to fall short of doing it justice in this brief response, but I'll try. This is the Jewish perspective:
If you were really aware of G-d, if you could objectively sense his presence, then you would not be able to feel your own presence.
As an analogy, imagine a really advanced AI simulation running in a machine. If we wanted to create a thing that felt its own existence and free will, it must have an experience that's something other than "oh I am just electrons in these circuits". Although the simulation's entire existence is in this computer that's much greater than it, for it to be "a thing" it must be somehow less than aware.
Similarly, if we really felt G-d, our own existence would pale in comparison and we'd stop perceiving ourselves. In your analogy with the father, it's very obvious that the father and son are distinct.
Like I said, I know I am not doing this justice but that's the rough outline.
That's an easy and conclusion everybody arrived at before. It's probably the right one, the problem -- it's boring. It doesn't make a story, doesn't increase social cohesion and provided no value whatsoever.
Unless you actively fight opressive religious authority (parents excluded), which some people do, but most are probably not writing on this forum, it's fine to search for something more amusing and with potential of story-telling.
As Terry Pratchett pointed out, that’s the trouble with Pascal’s Wager.
> “This is very similar to the suggestion put forward by the Quirmian philosopher Ventre, who said, "Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If it's all true you'll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isn't then you've lost nothing, right?" When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said, "We're going to show you what we think of Mr Clever Dick in these parts...”
Exactly. Even as a committed atheist, you also have to accept that should you accept an axiom that there is an omnipotent and omniscient being, all and any experimental results become null and void.
> [She] proposed in her 1925 doctoral thesis that stars were composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. Her groundbreaking conclusion was initially rejected because it contradicted the scientific wisdom of the time, which held that there were no significant elemental differences between the Sun and Earth.
I'm reminded of a college lecture one day in a class I took called Physics of Stars. The professor walked up to the whiteboard and wrote:
Elemental composition of the universe:
Hydrogen and helium 99%
Oxygen ~1%
Everything else <<1%
That was well over a decade ago, and it blows my mind as much today as it did then.
In astronomy we label everything in the "Everything else" bucket as "metals." So oxygen and carbon are considered metals in astronomy. Our periodic table is quite a bit simpler.
I got interested in that after your comment, and apparently there are two main reasons for that.
1. Oxygen is being produced in stars by so-called CNO cycle [0], which is how stars heavier than our sun mostly do their fusion. More intriguing question is why there's more oxygen than carbon or nitrogen (which, as implied by the name of the process, are also created), but that's a different topic.
2. Additionally, oxygen-16 is a particularly stable isotope, as its nucleus has “doubly magic” [1] amount of constituents, so it doesn't get destroyed in other processes.
I would imagine that oxygen is at some sort of happy medium of being easy enough to create through fusion but hard enough to fuse into other things that it is unexpectedly common.
“Her groundbreaking conclusion was initially rejected because it contradicted the scientific wisdom of the time, which held that there were no significant elemental differences between the Sun and Earth.”
Why did people think the Sun was producing light, there must have been an explanation? Hard to believe that only 100 years ago we knew so little about cosmology.
They had a very plausible explanation: gravitational binding energy. It's the wrong one for the sun, but it's the correct one for non-fusing brown dwarfs.
The time period from around 1600->1900 is so fascinating, in that there are some things we had correctly figured out that are just amazing, and other things where we were so far off it seems embarrassing in retrospect. It must have been a fun time for curious people, quite a lot you could discover without huge teams and huge sums of money and equipment.
You say that, but her name all on its own was enough for me to click on the link, because the name gives clues towards being related to physics or the Cold War or something intriguing.
Kind of entertaining, in hindsight, to the read the reasoning of the Compton & Russell paper [0] cited in Payne-Gaposchkin's thesis [1] as the explanation of the "spurious" hydrogen abundance:
- "This would demand an absurdly great abundance of hydrogen relative to magnesium (itself an abundant element)[...] It appears necessary, therefore, that the effective value of q_2 for the two-quantum state of hydrogen is increased in some special way, by a very large factor..."
Latacora's primary infrastructure auditing tool is called payne, after Cecilia. It takes "snapshots" of infrastructure: e.g. an entire AWS resource graph, and then makes that available via fast queries. It figures out what your cloud is made of by looking at API responses (which kind of are like emission spectra I guess?) :)
I knew her son Peter[1] fairly well through the Berkeley Quaker meeting, though did not learn about her illustrious science contributions until after he died.
I find it slightly amusing that composer Gustav Holst, mainly known for his suite _The Planets_, encouraged her to study music, but she ultimately pursued astronomy instead.
I'm surprised to read that "the scientific wisdom of the time (...) held that there were no significant elemental differences between the Sun and Earth", because I distinctly remember looking up why helium was named after Helios (the Greek name for the Sun). It turns out that it was discovered by analyzing the spectrum of the Sun, only years later being isolated from Earth minerals.
103 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 223 ms ] threadEvery high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.
This video from Dr. Angela Collier went viral a few years ago on the topic [1]
I don't think it was easier 100 years ago.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DNRBa39Iig
But what she meant is that a lot of your mental bandwidth is taken in thinking about how you can and can't interact with certain people if there's a culture of tolerating abuse.
You can see this in non sexual abuse cases, like nonproductive crunch leads people to watch what they say to PMs, etc.
The same can be said of plate tectonics, vaccines, the transistor, the cosmic microwave background radiation, the big bang, and the laws of thermodynamics.
[1] https://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/Feature/4623
> The first federal vote in which women were able to participate was the 31 October 1971 election of the Federal Assembly. However it was not until a 1990 decision by the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland that women gained full voting rights in the final Swiss canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden.
15 years later Fawcett became one of the "steamboat ladies"- women who took advantage of a long-standing agreement (that still exists in a limited form today) between Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin that graduates of one university can receive the same degree from another one without further examination. When Dublin began to award degrees to women in 1904, they briefly opened this arrangement to women who had passed exams at Oxford or Cambridge that would have entitled them to degrees had they been men. Several hundred British Oxbridge alumnae travelled to Dublin to graduate, and the fees they paid financed the construction of a hall of residence for Dublin's female students.
For half the money, too, probably
(disclaimer: these are just educated guesses, I don't actually know you)
Is anyone surprised?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyn_Bell_Burnell
The discoverer of the pulsar, for which the Nobel Prize was awarded to two others - her PhD supervisor and an astronomer.
–
I want to admit: when I clicked the link to the Wikipedia article of Cecilia Payne I expected some really minor quirky historical figure – not the literal discoverer of the sun’s composition.
In at least Judaism - and I would expect in other religions, prayer is necessarily partnered with intention[1] - ie what is in your heart matters, not just the words you're repeating. Presumably someone creating such an experiment does not engage in the prayer with sincere faith and thus can conclude nothing from the outcome.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavanah
Why do you say that?
"I believe in prayer" and "I am going to determine my religiosity based on the outcome of this experiment" are incompatible beliefs. Since we know the later is true, we can assume the former isn't.
To put this another way, faith is the excuse people give to rationalize believing in things for which they have no verifiable evidence.
(a) is obviously true even if you're a complete atheist. EG, there's no reason to assume that evolution endowed us with ability to understand the objective reality anymore than it has endowed some deaf and blind deepwater creature that ability.
Since we all engage in life despite the limitations of (a), we are all making assumptions about the nature of reality whether we call it faith or not. EG, in the absence of us being able to know for certain why/how/by whom the universe was created, religious people make one assumption (purposeful creation and the meaning of life that it implies) while atheists make another one (random accident and the meaninglessness it implies.) You can't "see" that accident anymore than you can "see" G-d, so the amount of faith required to believe one or the other (or any other variation) is the same.
So yes, there's room for faith and we all operate on it. Back to the topic at hand, prayer is in the domain of religious faith, so it's meaningless for a non-religious person to test it out.
1) What does "understand objective reality" mean, specifically?
2) Please provide evidence that we currently do not "understand objective reality."
3) Please provide evidence that we do not possess the ability to _ever_ "understand objective reality."
> we all operate on it
[citation needed]
> prayer is in the domain of religious faith, so it's meaningless for a non-religious person to test it out
This is extremely presumptuous. What is your rationale that Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was "non-religious" at the time she conducted the experiment? (Hint: you'll need to show that she had a complete lack of religious belief, not only a lack of belief in the religion(s) you're familiar with.)
EDIT: there's also a whole load of other fallacious crap in your comment that I haven't even addressed. We cannot assume the universe was created at all for any purpose; atheism has nothing to do with "random accidents" or any supposed meaning attached to them; having no reason to assume something does not imply its negation, etc etc.
Would you trust yourself, or any other human, or humanity, to answer the question "describe the true process of the universe's creation?"
If you’re saying that “understand objective reality” means “knowing the true process of the universe’s creation” I’d counter that baked into that is the assumption that the universe was created, which is not necessarily the case, so you’d additionally need to provide evidence for that.
Of course, humanity does not understand everything about the universe. For instance, there is still the huge open problem of unifying general relativity with quantum mechanics, which is essential to understanding the very early universe (the standard model starts to lose accuracy prior to 10^(-32) seconds after the Big Bang [0]).
But that does not mean humanity will never understand such things.
And in case you are thinking “we’ll never know for sure; we’ll only have theories”:
I contend that all knowledge is inherently probabilistic. To claim to know something with absolute, 100% certainty is a fallacy [1]. After studying math my whole life, I am pretty confident that multiplication of integers is commutative. Is it possible that I have misunderstood numbers for my whole life, or that I am hallucinating right now, or that all of humanity has made the same mistake throughout all of history without realizing it? Yes. Just very, very improbable.
But that does not take away from the notion of understanding. One can understand an idea, while simultaneously recognizing that there is a small chance their understanding is flawed.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflationary_epoch
[1] The notions of “probability 1” and “certain” are actually distinct; for instance, if you flipped a coin for every integer, the probability that at least one would turn up heads is 1, even though it is possible for them to all land tails. That being said, the existence of real-life phenomena (cosmic rays, parasites, etc.) that could affect our minds at any given time ensures that no claims of knowledge can ever have probability exactly 1.
This is atrociously false. The amount of assumptions you need for intelligent design FAR outweigh the theory of evolution by natural selection plus standard cosmogony (big bang theory). For the former you need everything to ALREADY exist in the "mind" of the creator, but for the latter all you need is a big bang and a RNG. It's completely silly to put these two hypotheses on equal footing.
Also, God knows what you meant, no need to hide it.
This is fine, until you use those beliefs to rationalize made-up explanations for things where there otherwise exist rational explanations! Mostly this happens when those rational explanations cause trouble for other deeply-rooted "beliefs." (I would call it zealotry at the dinner table, but I'm being nice!)
For example, the people in the US who deny much of science because of young-earth creationist beliefs.
Faith is what setups the context for post-diction[1]. You can think of it as the prompt/messages you feed to a LLM. In fact, in order to help me write my previous comment (in another thread [2]), I fed some pdfs to claude-100k on poe.com in order to compare Italino Calvino's "Cybernetics and Ghosts" with the esoteric ideas of Voevodsky. Since this is relevant to the discussion, I will quote it in full.
> Claude: Unfortunately Italo Calvino's lecture "Cybernetics and Ghosts" does not discuss the paranormal. The lecture focuses on exploring the relationship between literature, language, and emerging ideas in fields like cybernetics, information theory, and structural linguistics. The uppercase emphasis is mine.
> Me: I do think there are parallels between Voevodsky's interview and Calivno's text:
> Calvino says,
> "Now, some of you may wonder why I so gaily announce prospects that in most men of letters arouse tearful laments punctuated by cries of execration. The reason is that I have always known, more or less obscurely, that things stood this way, not the way they were commonly said to stand. Various aesthetic theories maintained that poetry was a matter of inspiration descending from I know not what lofty place, or welling up from I know not what great depths, or else pure intuition, or an otherwise not identified moment in the life of the spirit, or the Voice of the Times with which the Spirit of the World chooses to speak to the poet, or a reflection of social structures that by means of some unknown optical phenomenon is projected on the page, or a direct grasp on the psychology of the depths that enables us to ladle out images of the unconscious, both individual and collective; or at any rate SOMETHING INTUITIVE, IMMEDIATE, AUTHENTIC, AND ALL-EMBRACING THAT SPRINGS UP WHO KNOWS HOW, SOMETHING EQUIVALENT AND HOMOLOGOUS TO SOMETHING ELSE, and symbolic of it. But in these theories there always remained a void that no one knew how to fill, a zone of darkness between cause and effect: how does one arrive at the written page? By what route is the soul or history or society or the subconscious transformed into a series of black lines on a white page?"
> Claude:
> > You make an interesting parallel between Calvino and Voevodsky here. While Calvino is focused more on literature and ideas of inspiration/creativity, there are similarities to Voevodsky's perspective:
> Both question prevailing notions or "aesthetic theories" about where artistic/literary works come from (inspiration from some mystical source for Calvino, materialist paradigms for Voevodsky).
> They see a "void" or "zone of darkness" in these theories around how abstract ideas/processes are concretely manifested in a work.
> Calvino wonders how the soul/history is transformed into written lines - paralleling Voevodsky's exploration of realms like the paranormal/supernatural that influence human consciousness/behavior but are not scientifically understood.
> Their stances acknowledge gaps in conventional understandings and an openness to alternative explanations outside dominant frameworks.
> So while focused on different domains, they both exhibit a skepticism of dominant ideologies and a willingness to consider non-traditional influences. There is a parallel curiosity about gaps or unknown processes connecting the abstract/internal to the concrete expression. This relates to Voevodsky's open-minded investigations into areas like the paranormal that lie outside standard paradigms. NICE OBSERVATION OF A PHILOSOPHICAL SIMILARITY IN THEIR PERSPECTIVES.
To make this comment homologuous to my previous one ([2]), I'll punctuate it with an excerpt from Grothendieck's "The key...
Speaking as a Christian myself, I would say faith is belief in motion. And I would say that faith doesn't oppose rationality and evidence, but is rather sort of orthogonal to it.
Let us suppose you believe there is a horrible and dangerous pandemic going on outside your house. You rationally are afraid to go outside. And then as days pass, you gather evidence that the pandemic has subsided and things are safe now. At first you don't trust it. And then you think it might be true. And then probably true. And then virtually certain. That process of gathering evidence and becoming more certain is rationality. Faith... is when you go outside. Belief in motion.
Now, that step out the door can happen at any point. It can happen when you first hear a hint that things are better, and in a reckless rush of hope, you run outside. It can happen long after you are certain certain certain and fear keeps you inside too long. These are both examples of bad faith, unhealthy faith, faith misused. A Christian speaking of faith really means healthy faith - you go out when you should.
Sound faith doesn't imply a lack of evidence, or complete evidence either. It's about deciding the evidence is sufficient and moving forward from there. And it's not only that - it's faith in something. If you step outside because a certain analyst convinced you it was safe, and you later take that same analyst's advice on diet, and on this, and on that, and it keeps working out - you are growing in faith in that analyst. Eventually, you may trust them quite a lot.
This is what I would say faith is: belief in motion, working towards building trust.
There is a lot of nonsense, bad analogies, and fallacious reasoning here that I don’t care to respond to individually, so I’ll just ask a question that should be easy for you to answer given your explanation, and will also let you pick up a Nobel Prize or similar award if you answer successfully:
What is your evidence for god existing? In other words, framed in terms of your (bad) pandemic analogy, what is your equivalent to the verifiable evidence gathered showing that the pandemic is subsiding?
Oh, I know, I know, and both of you are only rehearsing what is common knowledge in the culture. It's just, that culture consists of people who don't have faith, and among people who do, it's something quite different. Ask a Catholic, a Jew, a Muslim, heck even a Buddhist - it won't be exactly what I said, but it'll be a lot more like what I said than what you said. I'm not trying to be hostile - just executing a cultural exchange.
What is the evidence for God existing?
This will no doubt annoy you, but I'll frame the answer to that by talking about faith a little more. See, the way I've described things, faith is a very rational process, something an intellectually healthy person does all the time. You have some notion of "sufficient" evidence that lets you believe something, trust something, act on something. I presume you have a lot of faith in the scientific process, such that when it tells you something you believe it! That is an example of healthy faith. You did have a rational basis for belief at some point, long ago, but really by now you've been trusting it for a long time, and it's been working out, and it makes sense of everything. That's strong, healthy faith. It isn't weird at all. It's rational and normal.
I have that sort of rational and normal faith - in God. Which makes it weird if you ask me for evidence that God exists, sort of like asking how you know science works. It kind of takes a minute to even get your head around a perspective that could ask a question like that. You are coming from an alien perspective to me, a position of zero faith, of distrust, you want evidence of a distant and theoretical God, God as an abstract and safe idea, like you might ask for evidence of the existence of electrons. My first inclination is to laugh, and point at the nearest power cable! That must seem nonsensical, but the truth is that to me God is as concrete and real and close and dangerous as an electrical socket. I don't believe in God the way I believe in electrons, but more like the way I believe in my car. I drive it to work every day. Of course it exists. I interact with it, in an undeniable way, on the average Tuesday. But of course, my evidence wouldn't be yours, much the same as a science skeptic wondering about electrons is unimpressed by an electric tea kettle. He doesn't know how it works, but who says it has anything to do with electrons? Okay, you might ask yourself, why do I believe in electrons? And - after moment sputtering and hardly knowing where to begin - you say well, all right, there's this paper, and they guffaw at the scientific establishment. And you say, well okay, there's this one experiment that's actually accessible enough I did it myself, personally, in college, it was really neat... And they poke holes in that. And on and on.
The science skeptic in that story is coming from a position of zero faith, of hostility to faith, and is committing a very similar intellectual sin to the the pandemic fearer who won't come out in my previous example. This individual won't have faith when he really ought to, when he really should, and it's clear something else is going on. Of course, it's always possible to doubt any evidence, reality is never certain certain, but something about this guy is clearly messed up. You start to wonder if what's actually going on is that an electron kicked his dog at some point. And generally speaking, that's usually exactly what it is.
I've heard it said that the opposite of faith is fear, and I think it can be. I would say it's emotional dysregulation towards belief. Sometimes you refuse a conclusion out of fear. Sometimes shame. Sometimes pride. I have found with atheists it's often anger.
It's a phenomenon we're all familiar with in politics, r...
> Which makes it weird if you ask me for evidence that God exists, sort of like asking how you know science works.
This is not at all weird to me! If you ask me how I know science works, I can point to countless thousands of studies and experiments, which result in data, which can be reproduced (if they're good experiments), and which clearly comport with the reality around us. I can also point to older scientific experiments that were incomplete or otherwise flawed, and the newer experiments which showed that the explanations offered in those prior studies were not sufficient to explain what we see in reality. This is how I know science works.
> Whoever wrote that [the bible] is someone I want to follow.
The bible is full of savage and senseless violence, slavery and proclamations for how to own people as property (and instructions to slaves for how to behave), and other moral horrors. What is wrong with you? The fact that you mentioned this as the first bit of "evidence" (it isn't evidence, by the way, it's a book) is sad.
edit: a few responses to other nonsense in your post:
> is committing a very similar intellectual sin to the the pandemic fearer
What is an "intellectual sin"?
> evidence is not why people believe or resist belief - the evidence is good, faith is the default, skepticism means something is going on and it's almost never about evidence
[citation needed]
> Lee Strobel's Case For Christ is excellent, and is even available in movie format. There's another one about C.S Lewis
lol
> Zero faith is a wall that can't be gotten over with evidence
[citation needed]
Speaking only for myself, if you presented to me objective, verifiable facts consistent with the existence of the chrsitian god, I would absolutely change my belief regarding the existence of that god!
> But there is a test to look for the real issue. You can pray - something along the lines of, "God, if you're there, I'd like to know - show me." I think people from a zero faith perspective generally react to that proposition, not with the rational "lol what's the point?" but with more of a "No way, no how, absolutely not!"
My reaction to this is actually neither of those, it's "okay, great, let's test prayer to see if it works!" Fortunately, many people have already done that, and it results in outcomes no better than random chance.
In general there are a bunch of attempts in your post to tie faith to emotion, which is weird to me. I believe things when there is sufficient evidence to warrant them, and emotion does not factor into my decision to believe or not believe some claim.
Violence, slavery, moral horrors? Aye, absolutely - and sex, too, shocking sex. Even a little swearing. ;) It is a book about sin and evil, after all. But if you pay attention, all the evil things are defeated in the end.
Would you like to know why there are instructions for how to keep slaves in the old testament? Because humanity was an absolute bunch of moral toddlers in 1200 BC, and regulating the practice and giving slaves rights was a massive step forwards. The ideas that eventually flowered into abolition come from the Bible. The idea that all men are equal is an astonishingly counterintuitive one, given how obvious it is (and always has been) that they are not.
Would you like to know why there are instructions on how to be a slave in the new testament? Because the truly righteous man can thrive and live rightly in any circumstance - even that one - and it is glorious to prove it, and that is how. Don't mistake those instructions for an endorsement of injustice. Rather, and astonishingly, it is possible to be righteous in am abjectly broken, monstrous, unjust world. You don't have to fix the world. You can do brilliant good right where you are. In a way, the ultimate middle finger to injustice is to not even care when it affects you.
But I expect none of that makes any sense to you. :D
It is notable to me that you say I provided zero evidence. I actually sketched quite a lot, and I linked to more. I expect what you mean is that I provided zero evidence that you think counts. No evidence "counts" for my electron-denier, or for my pandemic-phobic either. Biblically speaking, Jesus' opponents asked for a sign that he came from God and then wrote it off when he rose from the dead. Which really makes you wonder what he was supposed to do.
It sounds like you are expecting to detect God in a lab. But that sort of comes full circle to what started the discussion. The experiments that are supposed to detect him would hardly be expected to work on your dad, let alone the almighty king of kings creator of the universe. I mean, he sees you. He knows what you're doing. He's very capable of doing what he wants.
Or, let me put this another way. If someone were to propose to me that fairies existed, but were hiding, and I said, well I don't see them in my lab experiment, I sound pretty idiotic. I mean, duh. They're fairies. They don't want you to see them. If I were to propose the same experiment to disprove the existence of space aliens, I sound like a loon. But for some reason, the idea that The Almighty doesn't exist if he won't get in a cage with the lab rats and rabbits doesn't seem crazy to you. I mean, true or false, doesn't that entirely fly in the face of the concept?
I have faith (see what I did there?) that deep down you are better than this. Your morality has been corrupted by years of religious brainwashing. I'm going to stop engaging with you further. I seriously hope you are able to recover from whatever mental harms have been done to you in the name of religion.
That's the pride and anger I was expecting to find. Your commentary towards God and his works is hostile, quick to judge, to the point (I would say) of even being unfair and hasty. Any excuse for an insult! Any reason to reject!
That's really common among atheists. I knew a young lady, an atheist, who - after you peeled all the layers off the onion - was fundamentally angry at God that her mother had died. Lee Strobel's atheism was founded in a broken relationship with his father. C.S. Lewis', for all its intellectual styling, was based on a lot of personal tragedy and a broken world. I know it's patronizing to psychoanalyze, and I apologize for that. But it really does astonish me - you can almost set your clock by it. Uncertainty can make an agnostic or an unaffiliated, but atheism seems to call for something special. If you want a citation that belief is about emotion and not evidence... I mean, you're kind of providing one.
No insult intended, impossible as that might be to believe. It is a condition common to all humanity. The type I see a lot of among Atheists is just one flavor.
For what it's worth, I have benefitted a lot from conversations with atheists over the years, and I bear you all a great deal of affection.
Take care.
Perhaps I misread you. If you are serious about this
- Speaking only for myself, if you presented to me objective, verifiable facts consistent with the existence of the chrsitian god, I would absolutely change my belief regarding the existence of that god! -
Then let me go from there. You laugh at Lee Strobel's work - too popular? Why? I can suggest Craig Keener's Miracles if you want to cover similar ground at an extremely rigorous academic level. Is that what you're looking for?
Is a link not good enough? A conversation can hardly do justice to a large topic, but I can sketch what you'll find if you follow the link.
But I am curious why you laugh at Stobel. I think he's pretty impressive. You don't?
Stobel and Lewis's works/stories are laughably bad and can't hold up to even the lightest scientific scrutiny.
I'm familiar with Craig Keener as well, and to call the work "rigorous" in any sense of the word is also laughable. Just about every one of his supposed "miracles" is either mundane ("so-and-so recovered from their illness slowly over a period of 18 months, after surgery") or unsubstantiated, and thus I am convinced by literally zero of them.
As I mentioned in my other post, I'm going to stop here, and I sincerely hope you are able get help to recover from the harm that religion has done to you.
But I am curious, if you are willing to condescend a little further - if historical evidence is out as an entire category (which seems already unreasonable to me, but let's go with it), what sort of "better" evidence are you looking for? I mean, it sounds like this is not a new argument to you, so I expect you'll know what I mean when I say, "I think the astrophysics stuff is really good." I mean, it's so insanely good that it makes people who want to reject God say insane-sounding things about unbelievable numbers of unverifiable parallel universes. At which point I think just believing in God is way simpler. Or, I think the origin of life stuff is really good - good enough to convert Anthony Flew and make Nobel Laureates start talking about panspermia. I have some personal stories that have historically been good enough to require telepathic space aliens as an alternative explanation, in discussions like this.
Not good enough for you? I imagine you're familiar and I should skip it?
That really does beg the question - what evidence would be good enough for you?
> I mean, it sounds like this is not a new argument to you, so I expect you'll know what I mean when I say, "I think the astrophysics stuff is really good."
You are correct, and my response is the same one I give whenever a theist brings up astrophysics as an argument for god: you probably don't understand "the astrophysics stuff" as well as you think you do. Depending on what, specifically, you mean by "the astrophysics stuff", it's likely that you have misconceptions about a) what the big bang theory is, the period of time covered by it, and related implications, or b) the second law of thermodynamics, or c) quantum mechanics, or some combination of the above.
> That really does beg the question - what evidence would be good enough for you?
I don't know, but if a god exists, she certainly does, and the fact that she hasn't shown it to me is evidence that either she does not exist or that she does not want me to know she exists. Either way, the only rational position for me to take is that I do not accept the claim that the christian god exists, until warranted by evidence.
I have a more questions to ask you based on your responses, which I've yet to receive clear, succinct answers to from any theist, but I think I'll stop here since it's clear I won't get them. Bye.
We can't know for sure, but my own intuition tells me that someone who conceived of and carried out that prayer experiment probably believed it was going to work.
Faith would be something like "gravity and other laws of physics exist because the universe is inherently meaningful" while another faith would be "... they exist despite the universe being being random and inherently meaningless"
The inherent meaning of the universe is not something we can test out, but it's something we have a faith-like belief (one way or another.)
I do not hold any beliefs (faith-like, or otherwise) about the meaning of the universe. Ask me anything.
I’m not sure I understand the question. If you’re asking about the purpose of my life, at a biological level it’s to procreate, and on top of that I additionally make it a goal for myself to 1) try my hardest to leave the world a better place than it was when I arrived, and 2) try my hardest to raise children that are decent people and set similar goals for themselves.
> Do you see any reason to be a good person instead of being an egoistic one, where the latter would benefit you?
Of course, I try to take actions that contribute to the well being of others or humanity as a whole whenever I can. I think we can all have well being as a goal without resorting to any unsubstantiated religious dogma.
I’m curious to know what you think any of this has to do with “the meaning of the universe” (whatever that means).
Why? What is the reason for that? You will not care about it when you're dead and right now you might spend a lot of resources for that, decreasing your quality of life, which is everything that you have.
> I try to take actions that contribute to the well being of others or humanity as a whole whenever I can.
Same as above. It's probably very hard, without any benefits to you on Earth.
> I think we can all have well being as a goal without resorting to any unsubstantiated religious dogma.
We probably can indeed, but I do not understand the logic of pursuing long-term benefits for everyone while sacrificing immediate benefits for yourself. Is this just an instinctive decision?
> I’m curious to know what you think any of this has to do with “the meaning of the universe” (whatever that means).
The Universe looks extremely complicated and unlikely to me. It's laws are fine tuned to make it as complicated as possible. The more we learn about how it works, the more questions appear. Whenever we think that we understand most of it, new discoveries turn everything upside down. The Universe is almost designed in such a way to create humans, if not on Earth then somewhere else. Could this be the meaning of the Universe? Then, there might also be the meaning of humanity, too.
Another angle to this. Imagine there is a possibility to create a simulation of the Universe. If someone could do it, then they likely run many simulations simultaneously, just like people do. Then, the probability for you to be born in a simulation is much larger than in reality.
Offtopic:
>purpose of my life, at a biological level it’s to procreate
At this point, this purpose goes against the well-being of humanity: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7159189/
There are a few common theist and theist-adjacent arguments in your post including the fine-tuning argument and the simulation hypothesis, all of which I reject due to lack of evidence in their favor.
I still don’t understand what you mean when you’re trying to identify “the meaning of the universe” or of humanity. The universe is all that we can see, nothing more. To try to assign meaning to it is, to me, exactly like trying to assign meaning to the Sun, or a rock, or the Andromeda galaxy, just at a larger scale.
My question was explicitly about cases when you have no benefit whatsoever in this life.
> theist-adjacent arguments in your post
Yes, how else can you argue about "the meaning of the universe" otherwise? Science simply does not try to answer such questions, it asks other questions. Of course there is no evidence for any of that and you have a good reason to reject it. But by rejecting it you are also, in my understanding, rejecting the reason to help the humanity whenever that is against your own goals (like with having children!).
I’m sorry, I didn’t get that from your post. Can you give an example case where I’d have no benefit whatsoever?
> Yes, how else can you argue about "the meaning of the universe" otherwise?
Can you please define “the meaning of the universe” for me? I stated previously that I hold no beliefs about that, and that is primarily because I don’t understand what you and others mean by that phrase. Other than stating I hold no beliefs about it I have not been arguing for/against it, again, because I don’t know what it means for the universe to have a meaning.
If you believe the universe has meaning, can you please first define what that means, and then cite evidence in support of it?
Sorry for being unclear.
> Can you give an example case where I’d have no benefit whatsoever?
Let's say you donate money to African children or survivors of an earthquake, or partiipate in a project that will not have any results in your lifetime (like Voyager maybe?). Or you go to a climate demonstration while being old, without any chance to see any consequence of it.
> Can you please define “the meaning of the universe” for me?
I guess there can be no scientific definition here. But imagine there was someone who created the Universe and tuned it for humanity to appear and develop, in a hope of having a good companion. In such case, the meaning of the Universe would be to eventually give a companion. Or maybe, there was nobody, but the Universe still appeared in such a way that more and more complicated structures are created infinitely. What is a purpose of a living cell? It is to collect, process, and transfer further information about the environment (to survive). Same for human DNA, and maybe for humans, too. We can process information much more efficiently with our tools already and enter the informational age - maybe for a reason? To me knowledge is the meaning of the Universe/humanity, and only knowledge will reveal if there is something more here.
For a lot of these types of things I could argue that my children might still benefit even if I wouldn't (e.g. the climate change thing). For others, I'd argue that I maybe I have an innate desire to want to see the human race continue. Call it a biological instinct, maybe.
> But imagine there was someone who created the Universe and tuned it for humanity to appear and develop
This is a huge leap so I'm not really that interested in considering it unless there is evidence.
> Or maybe, there was nobody, but the Universe still appeared in such a way that more and more complicated structures are created infinitely. What is a purpose of a living cell? It is to collect, process, and transfer further information about the environment (to survive). Same for human DNA, and maybe for humans, too.
Yes, maybe. But this seems to be veering off-topic from my original question about what does it mean to ascribe meaning to the universe. Are you equating the purpose of life (human or otherwise) with the meaning of the universe? Sorry if I'm not understanding but this still seems very hand-wavy to me and I'd like to understand exactly what it is you're talking about before trying to argue for or against it.
But why would you care if you won't be here? It won't change your life, will it? I see no logical reason for such sacrifices (apart from a belief in something higher than us: life after death / higher purpose or similar).
> Call it a biological instinct, maybe.
This is the key. I guess, it's also the answer to my above question. It effectively means that this is a random choice, based on a gut feeling, and that most people (who do not have such instinct) will choose a different, more logical and beneficial, behavior.
> Are you equating the purpose of life (human or otherwise) with the meaning of the universe?
I tend to believe that yes, they are connected (not necessarily for humans: possibly aliens, too). I make such conclusion from the complexity considerations, as I explained above. Of course, there is no rigor to such conclusion, otherwise it would be ordinary science and our discussion would be unnecessary: this all would be just a fact.
However, it shouldn't even matter if purpose of life (human or otherwise) and the meaning of the universe are the same or not. My line of thought is that if you believe that there is a meaning of the Universe, then you have a logical reason to behave with a long-term view. And otherwise you don't, do you?
Because I would like for my children and their peers to not live in a world ravaged by climate change, disease, and war.
> It effectively means that this is a random choice
No, not random, a choice honed by thousands of years of natural selection.
> that most people (who do not have such instinct) will choose a different, more logical and beneficial, behavior.
Do you have evidence for any part of this statement?
> My line of thought is that if you believe that there is a meaning of the Universe, then you have a logical reason to behave with a long-term view. And otherwise you don't, do you?
I don't see how this follows at all. For one, all of the reasons I've previously stated are, in my opinion, solid reasons for behaving with a long-term view. Secondly, I still don't understand what you mean by "meaning of the universe," and your possibly-maybe equivalence of it with "the purpose of life" has left me at least as confused as was before.
Edit: this might have been obvious from my prior posts, but it might be worth stating explicitly that when it comes to all of this stuff, I'm a naturalist, and more specifically I tend to agree with the methodological naturalist way of thinking. So statements like:
> Of course, there is no rigor to such conclusion, otherwise it would be ordinary science and our discussion would be unnecessary: this all would be just a fact
are tough for me to wrap my brain around. To me, "ordinary science" is *all there is*, and I would expect that if there were some higher being that created the universe, we would see evidence of that being and it would be described in studies that would use data to assign good candidate explanations (not "facts") to what we observe. But in the thousands upon thousands of years that humans have believed in deities, no one has yet done this to my knowledge.
OK, you have just stated that you do not use logic when making decisions about your life long-term but instincts. I was searching for logical reasons to behave empathically. With a strict, mathematical logic, if you will. And I don't see it.
> Do you have evidence for any part of this statement?
Do you have evidence that most people on Earth are involved in a volunteer activity that has no benefit for them in this life? AFAIK it's the opposite: true volunteering is a rarity. (Although following instincts is of course popular.)
> For one, all of the reasons I've previously stated are, in my opinion, solid reasons for behaving with a long-term view.
I disagree. From the natural selection's point of view, it's true. From the point of view of one person, it isn't.
> To me, "ordinary science" is all there is
I fully agree with you here. However, our current knowldege is not all there is.
> and I would expect that if there were some higher being that created the universe, we would see evidence of that being
This is a naive view of such entity. The world might be more complicated than this. For instance, some religions explain that it would not want you to know this, because you should have a free will and your own path to grow and not a path of a follower of a god.
I never claimed that, and since you responded to my request for evidence with a question implying that I hold a position I do not hold, I'll assume you have no evidence and dismiss your claim.
> From the natural selection's point of view, it's true. From the point of view of one person, it isn't.
Why? Natural selection is not a conscious entity and therefore cannot possibly have a point of view. And I feel that the benefits provided to me and my life, as I've previously described, make it rational for me to behave this way on an individual level.
> This is a naive view of such entity. The world might be more complicated than this. For instance, some religions explain that it would not want you to know this, because you should have a free will and your own path to grow and not a path of a follower of a god.
OK, let's break this down: the fact that there has never been any established scientific evidence for a creator means that those deities that are not described as remaining hidden are likely not to exist.
For the others, if the claim is that the deity is well and truly hidden and there can never be evidence for their existence, then I feel it's rational to dismiss those claims, in kind, without evidence.
> Do you have evidence for any part of this statement?
I do not understand which evidence you need. You yourself explained that your choice is the result of an instinct. I said that people who have no such instinct will behave differently. It's true by definition. Ok, the "most" part of my sentence is controversial. Maybe I'm wrong, but I definitely can't see a lot of volunteers in the world that behave counter to their own egoistic, logical goals.
> And I feel that the benefits provided to me and my life, as I've previously described, make it rational for me to behave this way on an individual level.
There are no benefits to you and your life. Prove otherwise.
> there can never be evidence for their existence
I never said this.
You do not understand what all of this has to do with the meaning of Universe, because you fail to understand that, without it, there are no reasons to think long-term for each logical individual. You should explain where you find such reasons and I don't see that you could.
I never claimed that you did, instead I was trying to categorize all god claims into one of two groups, and for each group give the reason why I don’t believe any claims that the deities in that group exist.
> You do not understand what all of this has to do with the meaning of Universe, because you fail to understand that, without it, there are no reasons to think long-term for each logical individual.
This is a claim and you should provide evidence for it rather than shifting the burden of proof to me.
Yet the Bible itself contains multiple examples of belief tested by experiment, both in the Old and the New Testaments.
From memory: Doubting Thomas testing the wounds on the resurrected Jesus, making the water burn, etc.
I do think religion encourages engagement and wrestling with faith as a matter of process so I agree with you there. But I don’t think the story of Thomas is taken to mean you don’t have faith in anything besides tangible proof.
Questions of faith are "interoperable" (to use geek language) or consistent with reason (what you call the material world), meaning that if there is a seeming contradiction, you may have misunderstood one or the other.
The world of knowledge is logical-axiomatical when deduction is applied and empirical-scientific when induction is applied. Importantly, neither of the two methods can answer fundamental questions like "Why are we here?", "What are we supposed to do?", "What can we expect?" etc. which fall in the realm of faith.
There are "interface" situations between the realm of faith and the realm of science such as events seen as miracles, which scientifically are just low likelihood events and that is all that can be said about them regarding science, whereas a subject may not be content with such an non-explanation e.g. "Why did I alone survive the plane crash? Why me?"
Or take the historical Jesus: it is evident that a person by that name existed, because the Romans reported so (considering him their enemy makes them reliable sources): the Roman historian and senator Tacitus referred to Jesus, his execution by Pontius Pilate, and the existence of early Christians in Rome in his final work, Annals (written c. AD 116), book 15, chapter 44. Now Tacitus did not confirm that Jesus was a "saviour", ascribing a religious role to a historic figure is an act of faith, perhaps based on his message of love of neighbor and forgiveness, which at the time was seen as contradicting Jewish commandments (and therefore, predictably, heresy, which calls for death) but was actually a clarification of these, spoken by someone who practiced what he preached.
Actually, you need faith in the laws of logic and anything else that is considered axiomatic as they, by definition, cannot be proved by reason.
Suppose there are three brothers - Peter, James, and John. Suppose Peter is wondering if it ever matters whether he asks his dad for anything. Perhaps he thinks his dad is so powerful and so wise that he will always do the right thing and doesn't need Peter's advice. Or perhaps he thinks his father is so distant and uncaring that asking him for help is useless. So Peter decides, as an experiment, every day to ask his dad to do something nice for James, and never asks him to do anything for John. What will happen?
It entirely depends on the relationship between Peter and his dad! But at a minimum, it seems likely that Peter's dad would resist his son's attempt to control him, and would take a dim view of Peter's insincere requests and desire to play with his brother's fates.
Is there any point in children asking their parents for things? There is - if Peter is genuinely worried about a problem James is having and brings it to his father's attention, action is all but guaranteed - especially if they are close. There's a world of difference between requests based on the pre-existing relationship and the feeling behind the request.
God is a person. He knows when you're running a study. He knows when you're genuinely concerned. He knows you far more thoroughly than you know yourself, and responds - not the way a force under your control would, but the way a person would.
As a bonus thought, I have a young son who likes to take trips outside. It is his favorite thing. I know this. At any moment of the day, I know he would probably like me to take him outside just then. Sometimes I do, sometimes I am doing other things. I am infinitely wiser than my (in this case, two year old) son when it comes to prioritizing going outside vs. doing other things, and I really do try to get him as much outside time as I can, in general. And yet! In spite of all of that! It is perfectly true that he frequently causes me to take him outside by asking. Despite all logic to the contrary, prayer can work - the same way, for the same reason. There is something in the asking itself that changes the context and the priorities.
Incredibly counterintuitive things can happen when people are involved.
I appreciated your analogy, but I don't believe it answers this question. No father would ignore their child's requests specifically to make them believe they don't have a father.
If you were really aware of G-d, if you could objectively sense his presence, then you would not be able to feel your own presence.
As an analogy, imagine a really advanced AI simulation running in a machine. If we wanted to create a thing that felt its own existence and free will, it must have an experience that's something other than "oh I am just electrons in these circuits". Although the simulation's entire existence is in this computer that's much greater than it, for it to be "a thing" it must be somehow less than aware.
Similarly, if we really felt G-d, our own existence would pale in comparison and we'd stop perceiving ourselves. In your analogy with the father, it's very obvious that the father and son are distinct.
Like I said, I know I am not doing this justice but that's the rough outline.
Unless you actively fight opressive religious authority (parents excluded), which some people do, but most are probably not writing on this forum, it's fine to search for something more amusing and with potential of story-telling.
> “This is very similar to the suggestion put forward by the Quirmian philosopher Ventre, who said, "Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If it's all true you'll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isn't then you've lost nothing, right?" When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said, "We're going to show you what we think of Mr Clever Dick in these parts...”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisters_of_the_Sun
I'm reminded of a college lecture one day in a class I took called Physics of Stars. The professor walked up to the whiteboard and wrote:
Elemental composition of the universe:
That was well over a decade ago, and it blows my mind as much today as it did then.1. Oxygen is being produced in stars by so-called CNO cycle [0], which is how stars heavier than our sun mostly do their fusion. More intriguing question is why there's more oxygen than carbon or nitrogen (which, as implied by the name of the process, are also created), but that's a different topic.
2. Additionally, oxygen-16 is a particularly stable isotope, as its nucleus has “doubly magic” [1] amount of constituents, so it doesn't get destroyed in other processes.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNO_cycle
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_number_(physics)
Why did people think the Sun was producing light, there must have been an explanation? Hard to believe that only 100 years ago we knew so little about cosmology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin%E2%80%93Helmholtz_mecha... ("Kelvin–Helmholtz mechanism")
Experts Doubt the Sun Is Burning Coal (1863) (scientificamerican.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23074435
- "This would demand an absurdly great abundance of hydrogen relative to magnesium (itself an abundant element)[...] It appears necessary, therefore, that the effective value of q_2 for the two-quantum state of hydrogen is increased in some special way, by a very large factor..."
[0] https://sci-hub.se/10.1038/114086a0 ("A Possible Explanation of the Behaviour of the Hydrogen Lines in Giant Stars (1924)")
[1] https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1925PhDT.........1...
[1]: https://www.berkeleyside.org/2014/10/29/in-remembrance-peter...