elprotoolio wrote:No, it's arriving at that conclusion after numerous experiments and observations offer no evidence that a supernatural world exists.

No, it's arriving at that conclusion after numerous experiments and observations offer no evidence that a supernatural world exists.

ok i get that... but...

I see no dead body, nor any other evidence that a murder has been committed here. I would be foolish to assume there has been a murder and spend my energy trying to figure out why the murder is undetectable. It is more reasonable to avoid presuming the occurrence of a murder if there is no evidence for one.

i'm not trying to be hard-headed but... i think the murder analogy drives a point home but it may be to the wrong address. so, all conclusions must be made from evidence that you just happen upon accidentally, or after you receive a phone call from someone who did. thus, there is no such thing as the worthwhile hunch... exhausting a mere idea is lame and unscientific. nothing could come of it, unless it does, and then nevermind.

this is a monster of a thing we've all ended up in, and with itty bitty brains that only allow us to understand what is necessary about our living world. kinda like dogs. what do they know about computers. one thing we do have is wonder, and for good or bad, it has rendered some pretty powerful results on this planet.

kenoki wrote: thus, there is no such thing as the worthwhile hunch... exhausting a mere idea is lame and unscientific. nothing could come of it, unless it does, and then nevermind.

If your hunch leads you to discover something substantial, then great. It was a worthwhile hunch. You're clearly not talking about that sort of hunch. You're talking about a pure hunch that has led you to nothing but an unsubstantiated confidence in the hunch itself. In other words, wishful thinking. I don't think one ought to rely on that kind of hunch (or give it credit in a greater culture) for anything at all.

If I may be so bold as to bold the parts I wanna twist and turn and throw back at your black ass...

steve wrote:I see no dead body, nor any other evidence that a murder has been committed here. I would be foolish to assume there has been a murder and spend my energy trying to figure out why the murder is undetectable. It is more reasonable to avoid presuming the occurrence of a murder if there is no evidence for one.

Ya see Steve, I put the body through a grinder, took the ground remains and put them in a vat full of molten lead, poured the molten-lead-plus-remain-grindings into a kiddie pool made of steel, waited for it to cool, had my body painted in fake-silver body paint and took a photo of me standing on top of it in a pose like on The Oscar... then I took the huge metal disc and dropped it out the door of a TH-57 into the heart of an active volcano.

But I guess since there's no evidence of it to be found (like, ever) then there was no murder then, huh? And when I show you a picture of me in the statue pose and tell you "that's me right there, with the remains from the murder" you'll say "yeah, sure, whatevs yo".

Quote:
(A little fascinating factoid: Readers may already know this from the movie with the title that relates to the fact that when a person dies, they weigh 21 grams less than they did when they were alive. Some would say that this is the soul leaving the body. I'm not sure what the scientific explanation for this is. I would like to know.)

The weight of a lungful of air.

Is that a fact or just a guess? You would think that would have been taken into consideration before such an idea were expressed. And don't people have different size lungs? So wouldn't the weight in grams vary according to the size of the person?

If you want to convince me there is something I cannot encounter in the natural world I inhabit, you are welcome to try, and I am open to learning about it. So far everything I have heard about a world beyond the natural one has been pure bullshit, and I don't expect your arguments to be significantly different.

I have never seen China, but I know that it exists because evidence in the form of pictures, tv, books, and people who have told me it exists. I believe God exists for that exact same reason. The only idea that separates my kind of belief in China and my belief in God is the reality presented to us by science, which we all know is not infallible. If you want to base your belief and stake your existence on something that is as subject to change as science, that is of course your decision. Although to say it is complete bullshit is a bit arrogant and perhaps verging on close-minded. I feel the same way about evolution, so I guess I'm close-minded and arrogant too, except that I have at one time learned and considered evolution as a possiblity, its just that evolution seems so much more unlikely and implausible than there being an intelligent designer from my point of view.

I forget how long ago, but a long time ago, science believed the earth was flat, even as the Bible, which predated this notion, said otherwise. At this same time, there were many science-based European thinkers who would tell you the world was flat would also tell you that there was no such place as China or the New World. It was only through exploration and searching that the New World was found as well that the earth was found to be round much to the dismay of scientists and some theolosophers alike, I imagine.
From what I understand, the more a person reads and studies something the more likely they are to subscribe to it. This, I suppose, is akin if not in itself a form of indoctrination, but does not science and religion both suffer from this characteristic?

I believe in God, not necessarily because I was told to, but because of personal evidence that I have gathered with my own perception and experiences, just as science has with its own perception and experiences, both of our perceptions flawed and imperfect, but I no longer see how there couldn't be a higher power given the complexity of something as simple as an eyeball.

The difference between my faith and science is that there is no way for me to show you physical evidence of my faith no more than I can show you my feelings or thoughts except as to express them through the format of writing, singing, dancing, art, sex, talking, and everything else. Can I prove happiness? Can I prove sadness? Yet, these are accepted as real.

Just because something can't be proven scientifically doesn't mean it can't be real. I guess thats the main thing I am getting at. I apologize if I seem as though I am coming across as self-righteous or "in the know", I'm just as much a fool as the next fool which is you too. In a totally non-gay way, love ya'.

disco suicide wrote: Just as the human body only has five senses available to it, the science community as a whole and throughout time constitutes a body of knowledge, information, and evidence that can only be detected with this scientific bodies' "five senses" so to speak. As I'm sure you are aware there are many things that the human bodies five senses cannot detect as well as many things in which our senses do detect giving us evidence of our surrounding.

The reason you know this is that science has been able to transcend the five senses, and to enhance them, to the point that they are no longer a limitation on our experience of the world.

Do you see how rational thought, research and the testable, expansive nature of inquiry has ruined your analogy? You say we are limited to the five senses, so surely rational inquiry must be limited in some way. I say, science has removed this limitation, allowing you to make the statement, "I'm sure you are aware there are many things that the human bodies five senses cannot detect..." knowing it to be true. Science is essentally the removal, piecemeal, of such limitations to understanding. It owes its existence to the fact that there are things we don't know yet.

Just because we don't know something yet, it doesn't mean that magic is behind it. By rights, since magic has never been shown to be behind any of the things it has serially been given credit for, we should begin to doubt that it is responsible for anything at all. I mean you should. I already do.

disco suicide wrote:The difference between my faith and science is that there is no way for me to show you physical evidence of my faith no more than I can show you my feelings or thoughts except as to express them through the format of writing, singing, dancing, art, sex, talking, and everything else. Can I prove happiness? Can I prove sadness? Yet, these are accepted as real.

Happiness is a state of mind. If you experience happiness, you know it to be real. That says nothing about the existence of happiness outside your frame of mind, but as a state of mind, of course it is real. You are experiencing it, and you have that experience as evidence.

I believe that you have convinced yourself there is a god. That is your state of mind. When you suggest to me that this God truly exists in a manner that he can interact with me and the rest of the world, then I mush ask you to convince me. Your state of mind is not enough.

scott wrote:Let's give out examples of cases in which modern science has come to conclusions that seemed crazy at the time, or even still do.

A long time ago, people* built really big monuments at certain mystical places because these sites seemed to have supernatural powers. Healing, resurrecting the dead, seeing UFOs, that kind of stuff. Science eventually identified these sites to be on ley lines. Rampant mysticism continues, as do some cool art projects. It seems safe to say that mysticism steps up when experimentation or technical ability hasn't been developed yet; therefore to bask in the ignorance of mysticism is to embrace dumbassed egotism (like, we're as smart as we'll ever be, so why try to find out why this shit's happening?). Not that science came up with crazed-assed conclusions here, but the shark bit made me think about this thread.

*and, it turns out, sharks.

edit for the sharks.

Gary L. Peterson once wrote:"The chief discovery which satisfied me thoroughly as to the practicability of my plan was made in 1899 in Colorado Springs, where I carried on tests with a generator of 1500 KW capacity and ascertained that under certain conditions the current was capable of passing across the entire globe and returning from the antipodes to its origin undiminished in strength. It was a result so unbelievable that the revelation at first almost stunned me."

Remember that whole Tesla thread?. I still think Tesla predicted the whole WiFi thing.

El Protoolio wrote:

disco suicide wrote:

Anyway, as much as I feel that the Abrahamic religions have fucked things up in our world,

Hasn't science fucked up the world as well?

Example: Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Greenhouse effect. Et cetera. All in the name of rational progress, right?

Not science but the misapplication of that science. You can't blame "science" for what people do with it. You need to blame those people. Just like you can't blame "religion" but instead the people who twist that religion to pursue their own bigoted and often violent agenda.

I think both the question and response here are too pat or simply stated.

Throughout its history western science has been intractably bound to forms of instrumental reason and rationality that posit "nature" as an object of knowledge and thus control. A lot of bad shit has come of this. It simply isn't responsible or historically accurate to suggest that enlightenment rationality and science aren't implicated in some crappy stuff.

What is the deal with giving science full credit for leading to advancements and triumphs of human reasoning but insisting that all its negative outcomes and implications rest only in the actions and imperfectons of individuals? This is retarded.

It's the same argument Christians give about God (which I see El Protoolio is happy to back up). Ie, "Big Ernie" is a just, honorable and superior being and if evil exists and bad shit happens it's unrelated to religion and instead the result of "human evil" or "people who twist religion around."

Just insert "science" for "God" and "religion," and "method" for "being" above.

I call bullshit. The destruction of our planet is not simply the "misapplication" of science, because science isn't some homogenous, uniform thing. It's a battle ground. Scientists hash it out until someone emerges victorious. And bodies of research get financial backing and funding to be pursued within the context of the corporate university system, capitalist medical paradigm, etc, etc. The most ethical research--research that may challenge current doxa--is often underfunded, while people fucking around in asshole theories like evolutionary psychology are signing book deals.

Marx urged people to do the impossible--to think the development of world capitalism positively and negatively all at once; to achieve, in Fredric Jameson's words,

a type of thinking that would be capable of grasping the demonstrably baleful features of capitalism along with its extraordinary and liberating dynamism simultaneously within a single thought, and without attenuating any of the force of either judgment. We are somehow to lift our minds to a point at which it is possible to understand that capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst.

Given the current state of the planet and the history and concept of "health" handed to us by enlightenment rationality, I think it's appropriate to think about science in a similar way, to consider both its potentialities and its destructive will-to-power. Although I must say I don't mean that as an equivocation: I'd like to see the end of capitalism, NOT science.

It shouldn't be about passing moral judgement on systems of thought ("science is evil," "capitalism is evil"); it should be about deploying and transforming human inquiry in ethical ways.

disco suicide wrote:Hasn't science fucked up the world as well?

Example: Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Greenhouse effect. Et cetera.

Don't forget about the time that robot fucked your mom.

That was harsh.