Mod Idea: Simulating surfaces -> Borg Technology -> Twinkie Physics -> Worldviews

[dogscoff]

I don't want religion taught in public schools. I also don't

I take it that's in response to my Last post. Sorry, I was being facetious...

[Krsqk]

Maybe we should take the morning/afternoon to settle down a little. I think we're all getting a little antsy. I'll check back around 7 or 8 EST.

[E. Albright]

Originally posted by Krsqk:

quote:

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[...] Where did God come from?

God, by definition, is uncreated. I'm not saying that's scientific (i.e., proveable).

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Ahem. If it's possible to posit an uncreated God, it's possible to posit other uncreated things. Thus, I can (and will) posit that the universe is uncreated/undesigned, thus eliminating the need for a uncreated/undesigned creator/designer. St. Tom's causal chains can't stand up to Occam's razor. I'm not saying that's scientific, but I don't have to, 'cause I'm agnostic in terms of universal creation (i.e., I hold that certain truth in this regard is ultimately unknowable). And I know that in this sort of debate a declaration of any form of agnosticism is generally viewed right up there with declarations that "I'm rubber and you're glue...", but there you go.

Originally posted by Krsqk:
If I said, "Such and such happened at such a time, and it happened thus and so," I'd expect you to take what I said at face value. If I said, "Let me tell you a story with a moral; here it is," I'd expect you to understand what I meant. That's the literal interpretation of the Bible.

If you don't take the Bible literally, you get to decide what you want to take or not take. It puts man as the determining factor for what's supposed to be God's Word. What did God mean if He doesn't mean what He says?

Problem: you make it sound as though language has one, unambiguous meaning. Heh. Speaking as a student of computer science whose interests run towards natural language processing, I find your suggestion amusing. Speaking as a student of philosophy whose interests run towards phenomenology and philosophy of language, I find your suggestion troubling. But most forcefully, speaking as a student of literary criticism who never quite got over his fondness for deconstruction (tho' I probably shouldn't admit that in polite company), I find your suggestion unsupportable.

Comprehension of language (written or otherwise) is interpretation. It is not "comprehension" in the pure sense in which the word is commonly used. I will admit that there is a strong tendency, particularly in the US, to view language as precise, but hélas, it just is not so. Language is an approximation based on current socially accepted norms. Which are neither universal nor static. If I order a hot dog, I expect to get a hot dog. But there's no reason I couldn't recieve a kraut dog, if in this community everyone knows that when you ask for a hot dog, you mean a hot dog with kraut. 500 years ago (or so), "meat" in English meant "foodstuff", not "the flesh of an animal".

So tell me, how can you avoid interpreting language? The answer is, you can't; you can at best strive for consistent interpretation. This sort of reasoning is the basis for W. V. O. Quine's "On the Reasons for Indeterminacy of Translation" (Journal of Philosophy 1970; unfortunately, I couldn't find an Online Version of it). Extracting meaning from language is approximation and assumption; it is not and cannot be viewed as a matter of certainty or precision. Thus, anyone who speaks of "literally" interpreting a book is doomed to speak wrongly.

What the above is to say is that your above statement, "What did God mean if He doesn't mean what He says?", is in fact a misleading rhetorical question, because it implys that one can't possibly ask "What did God mean if He does mean what He says?", and one unfortunately can (and must). As reading any book, even the Bible, is ultimately an act of interpretive guesswork, man is necessarily the determining factor for what's supposed to be God's Word...

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
2. Do your answers show more or less faith than the person who says, "God must have designed it"?

They show no faith. They show scientific understanding and learning.

I.F., you're absolutely right. Your answers show no faith. They show scientific understanding and learning.

I.F., you're absolutely wrong. Your answers show as much or more faith than the person who says, "God must have designed it".

I.F., you're either right or wrong depending on how I choose to interpret "faith".

(Okay, that Last bit was really more addressed to Krsqk, but still...)

E. Albright

[Edit: Yow. Sorry about the length on this...]

[ December 12, 2002, 17:51: Message edited by: E. Albright ]

[Suicide Junkie]

[Edit: Yow. Sorry about the length on this...]

Don't worry, there are much larger Posts around here

[Puke]

Originally posted by dogscoff:
When my kids go to school I want them to learn all about how the Frost Giant Ymir was formed in the great void Ginnugagap...

I was going to bring that up myself, but i have been trying not to get involved in this. A far better creation story if I ever heard one, and since most Norse myth is designed to teach morality and philosophy rather than to explain nature and enslave the minds of the feeble to a dictatorial institution, I would be much happier having it taught in schools. Especially the bit about insubstantial things being stronger than substantial things, and it is the insubstantial things that are able to chain back Fenris. Good stuff, thanks 'Scoff.

[Wanderer]

I picked these points as they're space-related

"Why do many moons in our solar system still have magnetic fields? They should have cooled off inside after several billion years, and the molten core is necessary for a magnetic field?"

The major moons of Jupiter are very hot at their cores because they are constantly being squeezed and expanded as they go round the planet (imperfect orbits and the huge mass of Jupiter cause these effects). This is why Io is more volcanic than Earth. I don't have a list of all the moons of the solar system and how strong their magnetic fields are (and for some reason I can't access Google!) so that's my suggestion for now.

"How accurate can interstellar measurements be? The base of our triangle used for parallax is 16 light-minutes, and we're somehow accurate out to millions or billions of light-years? The angle at the tip of the triangle for a star 1 light-year away is .017. For 100 light-years away, it's .00017, and so on. 100 light-years is like two people 16 inches apart trying to measure ~800 miles away--the room for error is immense."

Actually, a lot of distance measuring is done by classifying stars. If a star is a certain shade of blue that tells you roughly how hot its surface is and by comparing how intense the light from it is to the amount of light we'd expect to be radiated off the surface (look up black body radiation) an estimate of the distance is possible. For huge distances (i.e. to other galaxies), astronomers look for supergiants, variable stars etc. to use as a yardstick. Parallax is only used for very close stars.

Don't forget we're not using our eyesight to judge distances, but augmenting our vision with powerful telescopes, many of which are automated and don't even bother looking in the tiny visual part of the EM spectrum.

Oh, and if several people tried measuring the 800 mile distance standing 16" apart every night for a month and the average of the sensible (you'll always get the odd freak result, which is why you take measurements more than once) results came out as pretty close to 800 miles, would you credit it or simply assume they'd cheated?

[Solar]

Good stuff, E. Albright. Language is so ambiguous and dependant on interpretation, it's a wonder we humans manage to communicate at all.

Originally posted by E. Albright:
I'm agnostic in terms of universal creation (i.e., I hold that certain truth in this regard is ultimately unknowable). And I know that in this sort of debate a declaration of any form of agnosticism is generally viewed right up there with declarations that "I'm rubber and you're glue...", but there you go.

Agnosticism seems perfectly reasonable to me, and I don't understand why so many scoff at the mention of it.
Our "facts" about the universe are based more on assumption than most people like to admit.
As human beings, what does our "reality" consist of? The input received by our senses, our brain's interpretation of that input, and memories of past input and interpretation (experience). Based on observation, we make assumptions about the nature of the universe. We have to, otherwise we couldn't function.
Every morning I step out of bed without looking, because I believe there will be a floor there. This belief is based on my experience (my senses told me there was a floor there Last night), my faith in the reliability of my senses, and my understanding of the laws of the universe, based on a lifetime of sensory input (floors don't just move during the night). Do I KNOW the floor is still going to be there? No, but I have a pretty good idea. So until I jump out of bed and fall into the downstairs bathroom, I believe in the static-ness of my bedroom floor. This example may seem silly, but I think the same goes for belief in creationism, evolution, Norse myth, or anything else.

Originally posted by Krsqk:
No, belief isn't a switch, but it is a choice. Either you choose to believe in God, or you choose to believe in evolution.

How is belief based on choice? Try as hard as you want to believe that the earth is flat, but you won't be able to truly believe if it contradicts your understanding of the universe. We believe what we believe because it makes the most sense to us based on our input, experience, and interpretation (or because we have an emotional need to believe, which is another can of worms entirely), but do we really KNOW? My input, experience, and interpretation tell me that certain things are unknowable.

Science is great, but it's based on the assumption that what we perceive is real and unmovable. If we are really brains in vats hooked up to the matrix (and how can we prove that we aren't), then everything we “know” is invalid. Science and religion both boil down to somebody‘s "best guess".

And now you can see how a steady diet of philosophy and science fiction over the course of 25 years can really mess with your mind.

Solar

[ December 12, 2002, 19:53: Message edited by: Solar ]