"Up the slope" was a term I used to express the progression to "extraordinairy" of course borrowing from Carl Sagan's brilliant observation that "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" It's worthy of note that a looser version of that is likely where he got it. He substituted "evidence" for "proof" since proof is primarily a MathematicalConcept since all Math can be traced back to it's foundation in axioms - self-evident truths like 1 = 1. So I don't deny that vision of any sort is a wonderful thing and color, or any improvement on differential perception, is even more wonderful. I'm truly sorry that you have missed out on color, but if all humans were dichromate there wouldn't even be a word "green" until and unless some means of demonstrating to us all the difference in wavelength and perhaps thermal characteristics, a translation of what is outside normal perception, and that qualifies as "up the slope" to me. Such translation is not quite extraordinary by today's standards but at one time it was... and that's how Science works - a step by step progression of separating "wheat from chaff", inexorably refining, improving.

Having been an Engineering major in college, I did study advanced mathematics and in some fields, painstakingly increased my grasp since college and if I understand you correctly, we agree that predictive math has a very good record for bearing out over time. That said, I truly don't understand your seeming dismissive view on Big Bang, nor sundialsvcs's on Quantum Mechanics. Big Bang Theory is extremely solid after so many years and so much effort to poke holes in it. Every discipline agrees and it becomes more solid over time, not less, and considering the advancements made since the kernel of thought that was The Cosmic Egg, if it ":didn't hold water" it would have sunk a long time ago. Will it continue to be refined, even with some rather large chunks discarded? I'd say that is highly likely but will it evaporate into nothingness? Those are odds I'd bet against "All In!". Quantum Mechanics? A bit further removed from our normal experience than Big Bang, and with some very ill-defined areas something like the maps our ancient ancestors used to circumnavigate the Earth, and just as safe a bet "close to the shore".

I'm not saying you must have the same confidence I have in these things, I'm only saying there is a great deal of evidence that one won't get reading Popular Science or watching the various pop science shows/channels on TV (or worse, nothing at all) and if you'd like your opinion(s) to be well-founded in reality instead of diluted by entertainment, one needs to study those, or unknowingly drift into speculation.

The point is, we all decide what is important for us to know well and nobody can argue with what another individual finds important. We can, however, argue effectively about conclusions and one of the major advantages of civilization is "division of labor". There are experts in almost every conceivable field who spend their lives, and often also large sums of money for high tech instruments to see more, test ever deeper and more accurately. We ignore these things at our own intellectual peril. We do indeed stand on the shoulders of giants, but only if we take our heads out of the sand and climb up.

I first met quantum mechanics in my 6th year at school, when a visitor gave us science students a talk on it. He showed us the orbitals which had replaced electron orbits, shaped pieces of space around an atomic nucleus where there is a chance of finding an electron. Outside these areas, no electrons! Orbitals come in different shapes: s-orbitals are spherical, but p- and d-orbitals have separate lobes. I put up my hand and asked how the electron could get from one lobe of a p-orbital into the other if it couldn't exist in the space between. He frowned and said that that is the kind of question you don't ask. I was flabbergasted. It was the kind of answer I would have expected from a fundamentalist if you challenged his theology. I was already a Christian at that time, and I found myself examining my own beliefs to see if they contained anything as irrational as this. As far as I could see, they didn't.

Later, in my university chemistry course, I learned a lot more, including the Schroedinger equation (which is actually rather pretty). But I still couldn't believe that all this corresponded to anything real. So I did a round robin on the class, asking the others if they believed all this. There were around 25 of us in that class. And do you know what? None of us believed any of it. Yet we were all prepared to regurgitate these claims obediently in our exams, because that's the only way to get your degree.

Ever since then, I have quietly smiled to myself whenever I hear atheist scientists saying how religion depends on faith and obedience but science on reason alone.

If it is unexplanabel make something up, scientology* is absolutely no different from christianity* maybe less killing

fairy tails and stupidity deserve what earth will get

I am a bit surprised, Hazel, at your ultimate reaction since I've witnessed critical thinking on your part here. Of course, the visitor probably thought he was being funny and clever with such an answer since "you don't ask" is more glib than, "We don't know yet. We observe and can plot (the presence of) the lobes but have nothing on which to base travel." Heisenberg is a bitch and this stuff is really tiny.

Knowledge, especially current knowledge regarding new and/or difficult to observe areas, is of low confidence but we only have to accept that aspect and recount those odds when we relate it as "best information". If you planned an hour drive to London and asked a friend in London what was the weather like today and they responded "It's 30 C and raining", despite the fact that it might not be raining everywhere in London or could stop within an hour, you'd be wise to bring an umbrella, There would be almost zero need to bring water wings, a parka, a jet pack or an anti-earthquake stasis field ;) . You certainly wouldn't be wise to bring prospecting gear since the streets are not really paved in gold.

In the above example you have a lifelong frame of reference to assist you but what if you'd inquired about the weather on Jupiter? Beyond being a safe bet that "windy" would be a good answer, at what temperature and just how windy is beyond your (or anyone's) ken, at least at a specific moment like in an hour or in a specific location which also has little meaning to us since we live on a small, solid planet rather than a gas giant. Progress in the body of knowledge on the macro scale comes faster and more reliably than on the micro scale, but the progression is the same - refinement.

Ultimately, regarding Science vs/ Faith, we are dealing with the difference of limited evidence and weak understanding (low confidence and expectation for change) compared to zero evidence and zero hope of ever gathering any AND on a macro scale (outside our Universe) we also have no way of gathering any data about. Why insist on 100% certainty when surely in our daily lives any one of us would likely bet on 10 to 1 odds and (stupidly, IMHO) people bet on lottery odds orders of magnitude lower?... yet you expect certainty from Science?

As for theoretical mathematicians exploring the possibility of things existing outside our Universe - as in the MultiVerse - that is much like the speculation that Westward Route to India might exist. It only gives focus to what would be needed to attempt to discover if that even could be true, let alone actually true.

It's useful to some degree and promotes learning more but how much one is willing to bet on it depends entirely on risk assessment and your willingness to bet on low odds. Gamble a penny? Hmmm probably. Gamble $10K? I'm gonna have to research that. IMHO only the naive and those in need of grasping at straws of hope bet their lives on zero odds of winning.

Incidentally I admit to you and myself that I may well fall into that category momentarily when I sense death is imminent. I hope not but it is possible. Fear is a powerful motivator and very often destructive of Reason and while possibly unavoidable at the moment of death, not IMHO a way to conduct one's entire life.

I truly can't see any overlap in Science and Faith, beyond the concern with the nature of things we actually can observe, although I do see some people who manage. Whatever twirls ur beanie.

How do you decide whether a thing corresponds to something "real" or not? (and what does that mean exactly?)

Science does depend on reason, especially when it cannot observe any facts – as is the case with quantum mechanics. It is not (yet) possible for us to observe anything at this level. Instead, we try to construct mathematical equations and so-forth which match what we think we are observing, then we make inferences from those. Undetected (and, undetectable) error could occur at any and every point. So, there is a lot of "faith" in the world of science ... not to mention "pure guesswork."

It's not ideal, but, at the moment at least, it's the best that we have.

Evolution is another example. We can observe evolution taking place on the species level – hence the title of Darwin's book. But it is n-o-t "proof," nor is it even particularly "scientific," to conjecture(!) that this explains all of the diversity of life on this planet. And, actually, neither did Darwin assert that it actually was! :eek: Darwin was exploring the philosophical realm of, "where might this chain of reasoning take us, without any known-to-us-today contradiction?" And his readership, having received formal schooling in the subject of "the philosophy of science," understood this implicitly. Darwin's philosophical observation was that what is observed in species might explain a whole lot more.

"But does it?" We don't know. We can't know. ("However, we know this ...")

I always winced when Dr. Carl Sagan (RIP) used his catch-phrase, "billions and billions." This is hand-waving of the highest order, and scientists do it a lot. Just give a poorly-understood process "plenty of time to work it out," and you come up with the works of Shakespeare . . . ?

The whole thing is simply not that exact, nor deterministic. But a great many people, especially those who cling to Science "religiously," don't seem to understand nor to accept this. Like it or not, we are "blind men," faced with an elephant. We're just doing the best we can.

And, I think, if you simply decline to hold science (and religion) to an un-achievable standard of performance ... "able to answer the Great Kahuna Questions with certainty" ... things get a whole lot easier. And, I'd say, a whole lot more realistic and manageable.

I seem to be stuck in a Sisyphus Loop on this matter but "once more into the breach". I actually like both substance and tone of the above quoted post (some snipped) but I stumble on "there is a lot of faith in the world of science". If we are not talking about "scientists", who vary widely and wildly as humans are want to do, but rather the body of knowledge or the method to amass that body, what is it that you don't get about the dividing line between Faith and Science?

Obviously since Faith by definition and by practice is a sense of knowledge, often blind certainty, with zero, none, nada, zilch, goose egg. 0 evidence of any kind, excepting the many times translated words of ridiculously ancient and wildly superstitious cultures with a terrible track record of accuracy, that by it's very nature amounts to the worst kind of hearsay, not good evidence by anyone's standards except in areas of religion.

Science requires evidence and accepts falsifying as a right and necessary part of arriving at strong conclusions. Without Science we would be fortunate to even live in caves as a few hunter/gatherers rather than the (possibly overpopulated) dominant species at the top of the food chain actually beginning to physically explore other worlds and not just wonder about them. Look around you. Almost everything good in your life (and yes, a number of bad problems not yet solved as well) is a result of science and that in the face of "If God wanted Man to fly, he'd be born with wings" and "How many angels can stand on the head of a pin?".

It is extremely important to define "observe" and "inference" in the above quote. It is also important to recognize thresholds of power at key points in the evolution of the scientific method. While, at it's core, the legacy of "observe" being limited to one or more of our five senses will always likely remain ultimately valid (largely because if repeatable, events can be "viewed" by something of a quorum) over time Mathematics has grown from merely abstract and mostly applied in measuring to being able to make very trustworthy predictions. This is because so many previous relationships have been catalogued and tested so many times with the same or extremely similar results that the refinement has reached a point of being sophisticated at progression and projection. These are then followed up by observation and much like observing air, are necessarily indirect but obviously still valid, especially over time with numerous iterations.

Please pay close attention to the fact that I didn't embolden " a lot of "faith" in the world of science" but instead chose "...it cannot observe any facts – as is the case with quantum mechanics". This is because this reveals an all too common misconception based on ignorance of scientific study.


For the TLDR
Quantum Theory was originated by a man born in 1858, Max Planck and that is not a typo... we're talking ~160 years ago with HUGE advancement since then. At the time of his discoveries and predictions the entire world of sub-atomic particles other than Proton, Electron, and Neutron was essentially unknown and radiation was only marginally understood. Now we know of a whole panoply of particles and though they were first predicted mathematically they have all been observed and recently even the elusive Higgs Boson can be added to the "Observed" list.

If that isn't enough then I invite you to do a search on ESA's Integral project which, among numerous other groundbreaking discoveries, observed and measured a photon "drag race" in which the "course" was estimated at over 300,000,000 (3 x 10^8) ! Light Years ! away. Since One Light Year = 5.9 x 10^12 miles you are forgiven if you don't do the calculation and simply recognize that this is a truly immense distance. The importance of this great distance is only eclipsed by the luck of discovering the Gamma Ray Burst GRB 041219A, unusually early (because of it's size, brightness and duration and that Integral was deployed in time) which allowed ESA's satellite/telescope to catalogue both High Energy particles and lower energy visible light (photons) 10,000 times more accurately than ever before.

End of TLDR section - skip to PS

The importance of this discovery and "race" is absolutely astounding and revolutionary. It is known that for example photons leaving the center of our Sun take amazing lengths of time to reach the surface, often measured in millions of years, due to the deflection from many collisions from the extreme density inside stars. So measuring the time that photons took to cover almost 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles was a breathtaking race because if, as many theorists speculated, the Universe is "grainy" (an extremely important concept and threshold in Quantum Gravity as well as QM in general) and at what level the smallest grains exist has profound implications to QM. Since a grainy universe would have a slowing effect (actually a bouncing greater distance effect) on photons, they should arrive at the telescope at different times.

The arrival times (repeated with millions of measurements) were essentially simultaneous and that observation can only exist if the Universe is not grainy down to one trillionth of Planck Scale, which effectively trounced almost all existing Quantum Gravity theories which expected graininess down to Planck Scale. This has huge implications for Quantum Theory but while it denied so many avenues and assumptions, it also defined BY OBSERVATION the nature of our Quantum Universe.

I apologize if this is overly long or technical but anyone can search any aspect of the above to discover for themselves that Quantum Theory is only "voodoo" in SciFi movies and religious sites. In Science, it is coming along very nicely, thank you very much.

Oh yes, and if it all possible, in light of this (OK, you got me, pun intended ;) ) and many other observations, please refrain from equating any number greater than One with Zero, OK?

PS - Also I should mention that a whole new era of discovery has begun with --- Gravity Wave Astronomy --- which incidentally observed and verified one of Albert Einstein's mathematical predictions.

Thank you for the most enlightening and erudite post, enorbet. You did my comments good service. :)

As you know, I did not intend the word, "faith," to mean, "faith in __." Thus perhaps it was not the correct word for me to have chosen.

For instance, my intended use of the word was certainly not (and I love this quote ...): "Yup ... wrong word!" :)

My real point is that science, too, is a human(!) process. It is "another mode of human thought that is intended to precisely bound, then quantify and explain make hypotheses and then theories about, "what we [think we] 'know.'" It is very strict as to what sort of data is admitted and how it is to be interpreted.

It should always be accompanied (IMHO) by "the philosophy of science," which steps back and studies the scientific process itself. ("Philosophy is 'thinking about thinking.'") This, too, provides insight. For instance, although we were not "there when the foundations of the world were laid," both the theory (hypothesis?) of "evolution" and the theory of "geologic time" provide valuable knowledge to those who are not ... afraid of it unwilling, for whatever valid-to-them reason, to openly consider it.

- - -
And, as I continue to quietly aver, "there is no true conflict here." science, philosophy, and religion(!), all have their respected and respectable place. All three are valid – and important(!) – forms of human thought. Religion, in particular, is an apparently-unique and precious part of "who we are." I think that we err, and err very seriously, if we discount or dismiss any of these things -- and especially if we speak disparagingly about any person for these reasons.

But, likewise(!), IMHO, I think that we should not accept such tomfoolery (IMHO™) as "Creation Science." The three modes of thought have bounds which each one should not cross. None should pretend to be the other. None should grasp the baton of "absolute truth" and use it to beat the other over the head, no matter how earnestly one may believe that the other party deserves it is entitled to it. ;) To do so is to delve into the world (IMHO) of fallacy and nonsense – and human disrespect.

if one does not truly understand themselves then how can they understand another?

The hate (Strong Dislike even, or even dislike) for someones beliefs distorts ones own way of thinking, perceiving, and even understanding of not only themselves but others as well.

Just in case I am included in there I'd like to go on record saying outright and with utmost sincerity "I don't hate you, nor even dislike you, BW-userx, but I do most definitely fear a part of what you represent" What you represent to me was summed up in the noting of a trend that has taken place before in History, much like that during times of economic downturn populations invariably drift to the aggressive Right, despite misnomers. If there ever was a Wolf in Sheep's clothing misnomer, the name National Socialist Party is but one example of such a common trend that rose to power because of devastating WWI reparations. However the trend I am referring to here was noted by Carl Sagan in his book Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Obviously there are many forces at play that lead to this distinctly possible future (some is true already) but reliance on unquestioning Faith, denial of easily proven facts particularly if they seem to conflict with "sacred text", is one of the keystones of this process and it is growing as once again Islam and Christianity polarize to square off "in the ring", and it is absolutely frightening. I can only hope we regain our senses before we drift too far into self-righteous chest-beating and sabre-rattling and we get a real life view ringside of Hell On Earth.

While I think that Dr. Sagan and his wife correctly foresaw the shape of the future including the present perverse trend called "globalization," I don't share their dystopian view of what it might become. (Although I know that this conclusion would be consistent with the thesis of their text.)

I don't think that any text – secular nor religious – is meant to be an oracle nor should be taken as one. Likewise, I would observe that "Christianity and Islam have been 'facing off'" for thousands of years. (Let us not forget that Christianity used religious promises to mount an invasion known as "the Crusades.") They're going to keep doing so forever. Chest-beating and saber-rattling is much to be preferred over all-out war.

Many of the disturbances that now exist in the Middle East region are, I think, mostly the ongoing consequences of the breakup of the Ottoman Empire following World War 1. The region was carved-up by the British conquerors without regard to ... the Persian Empire. Governments were created and imposed, meant to be "friendly" to European powers and to do their will, and of course to haul-away the usual treasures: opium and oil. (Now also, lithium.) Those governments mostly still exist today, but they are but a very-artificial "blip" in the actual, much-different, history of the region. The "former Allies" will never allow those lines to be erased.

But, at one time, these kings and kingdoms were the wealthiest and most-powerful on Earth. In rugged and inhospitable country, they thrived and ruled, fought and conquered.

0 = ∞ (indeterminate form) okay... :p

again fails to proved evidence of what he is talking about. just says things and expects others to know and or believe everything that is coming out of his mount. The God effect.

you dislike what I believe in so much you deny basic truths about the human mind that throw off your logic and reasoning. The ability to even use your mind properly so it faults your ability to use your mind to its fullest potential to even come to a proper conclusion on anything, especially what you hate, dislike, distrust due to improperly using your mind.

that statement above is proof of it, and it is you now showing your blatant (closet) bigotry about me. Judging me as a wolf in sheep clothing belonging to some National Socialist Party. again making accusations against me without proof whatsoever. that is the mind of a bigot.

Bigots are closed minded people that harbor hatred in there hearts and souls. They are the real deceivers of themselves and others. Looks to me that the books you are reading are polluting your mind about me personally and others.

And it is the minds that think like you talk about how the Bible itself is polluting the minds of many.

when it is in fact the ones that abuse it and not what the bible itself in what it teaches and proves to us.

Dear Mr Atheist allow me to destroy evolution in 3 minutes!

source
http://creationtoday.org/creationist-challenge/

I'm not dismissive: I accept the theory. The point I was making is that even in the natural sciences, there are degrees of certainty and that none approach that of pure mathematics. Thus the Big Bang theory depends on the axiom of Spatial Uniformity: that we can assume that phenomena observed in other galaxies will have the same causes that they would have in the solar system. That is an axiom or assumption, which you cannot prove, as you cannot go to another galaxy and check. It also depends on the axiom of Temporal Uniformity: the rules of physics do not change purely with with the passing of time. That too cannot be tested, although some physicists actually questioned it in the last century. Both assumptions could be wrong. Because it makes heavy use of such assumptions, cosmology has a lower level of certainty than chemistry, let alone pure maths.

As I said, I suspect that the Big Bang theory is true, but I know that it might not be. What I find amusing is that the scientific atheists will jib at accepting gods whom they have not experienced, while accepting assumptions about things that nobody has experienced.