Isaac Posted June 11, 2015 Share Posted June 11, 2015 Too busy. Later. Busy, but still lurking on Manx Forums. lol Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Isaac Posted June 11, 2015 Share Posted June 11, 2015 Science should be neutral and devoid of belief bias. Naturalism, materialism and atheism are all examples of belief bias. No they're not, retard. I know you think atheism is a belief, TJ, but it's not. It's the absence of belief in the absence of evidence. Yes, they are. Atheism IS a belief - it's the belief that there is no god(s) Corrected you. I don't believe in unicorms or He-Man, doesn't mean my understanding of electricity will be biased by that fact. I am not aware of any major religious system that believes in multiple deities. All the world's great religions, past and present, have believed in a singular deity - even if that deity chooses to manifest in multiple ways. What do unicorns or He-Man have to do with God or gods? These are completely different categories. You're basically just introducing an irrelevancy into the argument. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gerrydandridge Posted June 12, 2015 Author Share Posted June 12, 2015 Some more impressive NASA CGI, and they admit it at 25 seconds in. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/02/09/nasa-gives-us-an-amazing-look-at-the-dark-side-of-the-moon/ What is stopping them from showing us real footage I wonder? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mojomonkey Posted June 12, 2015 Share Posted June 12, 2015 Some more impressive NASA CGI, and they admit it at 25 seconds in. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/02/09/nasa-gives-us-an-amazing-look-at-the-dark-side-of-the-moon/ What is stopping them from showing us real footage I wonder? What, they admit it is CGI? They are hardly pretending it isn't, it is even in stated in the 2nd sentence of the article. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
manxy Posted June 12, 2015 Share Posted June 12, 2015 Nuts! I was hoping that the moon was flat Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gerrydandridge Posted June 12, 2015 Author Share Posted June 12, 2015 It could well be as they are only offering us CGI and studio artwork Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mojomonkey Posted June 12, 2015 Share Posted June 12, 2015 Hi Gerry, are you ever going to answer my question and tell me who "they" are? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gerrydandridge Posted June 12, 2015 Author Share Posted June 12, 2015 Yes if you like....Jesuits and their Freemason foot solders... Simple as that.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bobbie Bobster Posted June 12, 2015 Share Posted June 12, 2015 Yes if you like....Jesuits and their Freemason foot solders... Simple as that.. Oh come on gerry, you're not even trying with that feeble attempt. I expected a better quallity of troll from you by now! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Isaac Posted June 12, 2015 Share Posted June 12, 2015 Yes if you like....Jesuits and their Freemason foot solders... Simple as that.. Freemasonry is anti-Catholic. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
guzzi Posted June 13, 2015 Share Posted June 13, 2015 Yes if you like....Jesuits and their Freemason foot solders... Simple as that.. That's wonderful, love it. Brightened up my morning. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Isaac Posted June 13, 2015 Share Posted June 13, 2015 Bump for Chinahand. Why does he always disappear when I debunk him? Too busy. Later. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chinahand Posted June 13, 2015 Share Posted June 13, 2015 If there is evidence for the supernatural - science will have to deal with that and add it to its corpus of knowledge. It is not dogmatic and does not automatically reject the idea of the supernatural - it just asks for evidence and asks how is this belief useful. But will it really? Not when science has a naturalistic bias. I'm sorry but materialism is dogmatic. You're saying nothing exists but the physical and therefore any evidence or theory which might go beyond that will be marginalised and ridiculed. Will it really ... well we don't know do we ... we have no evidence for the supernatural. But we do have quite a lot of instances where science has looked at prayer, or pre-cognition. I'll repeat myself, science doesn't preclude the supernatural, nor does it preclude things it doesn't have evidence for, we have no evidence for what is going on inside black holes. But what it does require is for the results it produces to have some explanatory power which can be useful. The supernatural provides very little explanatory power - God did it, isn't a useful answer, while mundane, evidence based explanations without supernatural leaps have been perfectly effective in providing all the advances science has given us. A Pope literally told Stephen Hawking to his face that you should not do research into the events prior to the Big Bang without considering God. Well there is huge amounts of work doing exactly this. Newton explicitly thought you needed God to keep planetary orbits stable - but Laplace comes along and shows that isn't the case. Will at some time in the future a scientist make a claim about needing God, as Newton did, and will he found to be right ... who knows. It would be a huge, brilliant discovery. But this is the slightly odd issue - an awful lot of theology claims you cannot find God with a microscope, but another huge body of work criticizes science for ignoring God. That is the trouble with Theology: it is self inflated. While science does all it can to root itself on evidence and refutable principles. I'm sure you've read Karl Popper and know science can't be divorced from social and ideological context. To claim intellectual purity is bordering on claims of holiness. Scientists are almost being held on a pedestal as not mere mortals like the rest of us and have become like a priestly caste. Sorry but wherever human beings are involved, there is going to be bias. That is a fact. Where have I ever said science is divorced from social and ideological context. What science is done, how it is done and what interests people, is totally socially dependent. Science isn't anything holy - it is done by grad-students and eccentric professors and they are flawed humans full of the arrogances and foibles all humanity contains. Science is quite definitely not ideologically pure - that is the point - the very real intellectual combat of science comes from the idea people are wrong and need to show their working and their evidence to justify their claims and then in addition show how these claims can be useful to predict new behaviour, or explain anomalies in existing data or whatever. Science is messy, full of error bars and real disagreements where one research group rips to bits the evidence of another group - the recent debunking of the claimed discovery of gravitation waves is a typical example of this. Get off your high horse. Science is a very human, very flawed endeavour full of rivalries, and containing, more often than you'd expect, outright egotistical frauds. But it works because those frauds are followed up - where's the beef, show us your working, you've fooled yourself, but not us. Those are the very human principles, rooting in flawed humanity, which actually allow science to build knowledge that has had enough of our flawed stink washed off it to be useful. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
woolley Posted June 13, 2015 Share Posted June 13, 2015 The supernatural provides very little explanatory power - God did it, isn't a useful answer, "It just happened in a big bang" isn't that useful either and not too much different to "God did it" really. Conveniently, when we ask what happened before the big bang, we are told that it is not a pertinent question because time and space came into being in that instant, so there is no "before". That is just semantics because there must surely have been some pre-existing trigger to the event. Science and religion are not mutually exclusive and a scientist can adhere to a religion. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chinahand Posted June 13, 2015 Share Posted June 13, 2015 Woolley, why do scientists believe in the Big Bang? Do you think this belief is similar to a belief in Heaven or the supernatural? I think scientific belief is very different from a theological belief. Just a few pages back you were praising Einstein - and quite definitely he was a truly brilliant man. I presume if you have followed his science you will know about what he called his greatest mistake. Einstein developed an entirely new way of looking at reality - and the challenge of science is to follow a theory to see what it predicts and where it breaks down from reality. In this instance, though, Einstein didn't do this. When he made his greatest mistake - he had basically a theological belief - an unevidenced belief that the universe was static. His discoveries in General Relativity over-turned this belief - providing a vision of reality of huge predictive power, but Einstein didn't follow his vision, but deliberately distorted it - by adding an extra term to force the equations to fit in his inaccurate belief that the universe was static. As a result the scientific leap that General Relativity provided to our understand the origins of the universe was stalled ... but not forever. Theology has no ability to find errors - some people, by religious faith, firmly believe, say, that Jesus was a holy man, guided by Allah to help prepare the world for his greatest and final prophet, Muhammed, while others just as firmly believe he was a divine being who had existed as one manifestation of the triune God eternally. These ideas are contradictory, but religious faith demands the faithful accept one or other of these beliefs no matter what, rejecting opposing beliefs and holding firm even in the face of evidence the beliefs are wrong - those who do not doubt religious beliefs even in the face of contrary evidence are praised and encouraged as true believers. Science doesn't work like this. Science looks how a theory actually fits with reality using evidence to distinguish ideas - unless a theory can differentiate different possibilities it has no predictive power and hence is limited in its scientific reach. In the case of Einstein's greatest mistake evidence clearly answered which of his two theoretical visions was correct - his original vision, or the one with a cosmological constant deliberately set to keep the universe static. And it was Edwin Hubble who found that evidence by finding a way to measure the movements of distant galaxies. Hubble provided convincing evidence that the universe wasn't static - just as Einstein's amazing vision had correctly predicted: space time is expanding pulling the Galaxies further and further apart. Now, if the Galaxy is expanding what was it like in the past? Could different conditions have changed this expansion - stopped it contracting into an ever smaller denser state the further back in time you go. Did the expansion indicate a origin of the universe in a dense hot past? Again this wasn't a matter for religious belief. Scientists deliberately go and examine their theories to see what predictions they make about the universe and then go out and look. Fred Hoyle found the evidence for a big bang unconvincing and was certain that matter was being continually created. The expansion didn't lead back to a big bang. Rather an eternal and infinite universe maintained a constant density as it expanded as matter was continually created anew. It was Hoyle who coined the term Big Bang - attempting to trivialize the concept. But evidence proved him wrong. I'm not going to go into great detail (this post is overlong even for one by Chinahand!), but I presume you know about the discovery of the cosmic background radiation. This radiation is direct evidence that the universe was once hugely dense and hot, with that heat now muted and expanded throughout the vastness of space. It totally refutes Fred Hoyle's theories about an eternal constant density universe where matter is continually created, but is entirely consistent with the Big Bang. Scientists didn't just come up with the ideas of the Big Bang, or inflation, or multiverses etc for fun, or in a unevidence religious fashion. These ideas come from following evidence, by generating theories to explain that evidence and seeing how these theories create new predictions about the universe which can then be observed, strengthening the theory, or found to be inaccurate, refuting the theory. Science doesn't go "it just happened in a big bang". They've come to understand this incredible idea through patiently following evidence and attempting to understand what it means. Many of the scientists involved categorically rejected the idea - like Fred Hoyle, but the evidence refuted his alternative explanations. This is very very different from religious dogma and who knows where the science will lead in the future. A lot of work is going on wondering if the Big Bang wasn't the beginning and whether there are any marks upon the universe from any possible past existence. This is a hugely complex area, and I've criticized Stephen Hawking in the past for over-reaching what science can say about the origins of the Universe, but even so having knowledge of the reasons why the Big Bang is a coherent explanation of the evidence and our understanding of the universe is hugely different from a religious faith in Heaven or creation. Unevidenced religious beliefs, held solely on faith are not the same as scientific understandings - their philosophical underpinnings are pretty much contradictory. That doesn't mean religious people can't be scientists but when they do science a religious person has to look at evidence in a way wholly different from when they practice their religion. I know which way of looking at the world is better for understanding the world, and ensuring you do not fool yourself. There are loads of questions science cannot answer, but religions can only dogmatically assert and do not provide any tools for examining whether these assertions are right or wrong. I honestly do not see what theology brings to the debate that secular philosophy cannot bring. Secular philosophy may be flawed, but at least it knows that. Theology makes much grander claims - that confidence is in my view very dangerous. I'm very wary of it, and much prefer to admit to doubt and ignorance. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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