John Wheeler popularized the term "it from bit" and the idea of a participatory universe. The limits of human observation aside, it could be that the universe itself doesn't really know how it began. If a superheated plasma is indifferent to being in a 5 dimensional black hole as opposed to a state where only space exists, then, in a sense, there isn't any difference between the two explanations (given that the plasma is the entire universe).
There's this phenomenon in science where you think something is arbitrary, it could've happened in any number of ways. Then you do some digging and find out there is actually only one possible way for it to happen, none of the other ways make logical sense. And it's not a matter of initial state or anything, but of geometry or something.
Sometimes, after I put down the crack pipe, I wonder if there is only one possible way for the universe to exist, and knowing it isn't a matter of observation, but of abstraction, that irreal logical constructions are actually not abstract enough to explain the universe, etc.
Maybe a variable initial state doesn't make logical sense at the end of the day. Maybe the numbers we have to plug into the models to make them work are like pi or the zeros of the zeta function, maybe they just fall out of some result in group theory or sth idk
I guess God has to be not like everything else. He has to have access to a larger set of axioms or something. Transcendence allows him to go beyond what makes sense. I mean, I’ve no idea what I’m talking about, but I have to acknowledge that the universe exists even if its existence makes no sense. I feel like I have to resign in the end, and I’m not even a religious person.
If you look at the circle on a piece of paper, yeah, it doesn't make sense _after_ it's been drawn.
But it does have a beginning, you had to pickup a pencil, placed the carbon tip on the surface of the paper and then finally you were able to draw a circle.
So yes, it makes sense _before_ the circle even existed. Something created the circle, it didn't materializa itself out of nothing.
>No, because God is, like us, the descendant of something else, or else has infinite history.
God could have no beginning. This makes sense because God exists outside of our conception of spacetime. We have to have a beginning, because in the universe we live in the laws of time and nature say everything has to have a beginning.
Maybe we’ll eventually figure out that when something passes through a singularities event horizon, that is the superheated ‘all energy’ state the universe was/is/has always been born from.
It wouldn’t be the weirdest thing that’s happened!
I think mathematical statements don't have causes but constraints. Could be that the universe is somehow constrained to exist because of some incredibly abstract truth.
Can't it be some kind of self-explaining recursive thing - Doesn't it have to be? I think this is what Christopher Langan is on about with his CTMU theory.
After I pick up the crack pipe from my HN brother, I come to the same conclusion. Most questions aren't even answerable in a cosmic context because they become ill formed at that level.
Putting down my bong and loading another, I remark to the travelers that the human brain is the only set of atoms in the universe which wonders why they are there. All the other atoms seem perfectly happy to exist at all.
Being a passerby on the street after hearing someone say that while they grind their next dose, I stop and comment that that was an incredible narcissistic observation for someone from a species who hasn't even colonised another solar system yet.
While wondering around the market, I come and hear and will notice that ironically the fact that this universe have “narcissism” in itself in it just proves, also maybe not that happily, that we exist regardless of being able to colonise systems or not. Because we are and we think. We exists.
The universe is only made of matter so it is true in the sense that it exists but it is not the definition nor the root of creation of Existence itself. That’s where the “I AM” from the Bible echo even more what you say and add so much meaning to it. God Is.
I’m a big fan of the blog, but disagree with this entry. Her argument could be applied to the idea of the Big Bang itself: we can never receive light from any further back than the “surface of last scattering”, so the notion of a hotter prior epoch is an extrapolation. The extrapolation is a good one as it uses independently-tested laws of evolution, at least to the point these laws presumably break down, as she points out.
Similarly, it’s entirely conceivable that we may find independent ways to test which of the proposed modifications of the evolution laws is correct, for instance by using data collected from binary mergers. Then, these modified laws would lead to a modified story of what happened near the Big Bang. Alternatively, it may happen that all but one or a few of the proposed modifications do not play nicely with the other forces of nature at a theoretical level.
Or maybe not, but we certainly can’t rule out this possibility a priori.
Moreover, her point about not having a multi-universe data set would dismiss all of cosmology as mere “ascience” — again, including the notion of the Big Bang itself.
Instead, I think it likely that the present multiplicity of early universe proposals will be pruned as more data becomes available.
> Her argument could be applied to the idea of the Big Bang itself
What's wrong with that?
The thing about science is that it cannot pretend that it knows. It needs to prove. To which end, I don't think we should be supposing that we're going to know. Otherwise we're doing religion.
Science is, effectively, religion/faith in a particular set of base presumptions (axioms of set theory or logic theory guide all "logical" reasoning). Basically, limits of human mind understanding things come with just having to trust some things are simply so.
The biggest difference from things more commonly referred to as "religions" is that science invites you to challenge all these assumptions and look for a better (and smaller, simpler) working set that still explains all the phenomena we observe at least as well as the sets of axioms we currently use. And it knows that all the knowledge we gain is simply the approximation of the real stuff, and that we can only work to improve those approximations.
No. Faith is belief without evidence or belief in the presence of contrary evidence. If we were to suppose the "base presumptions" of science were on the same level as religious claims, then they could be arbitrarily ignored without real-world consequences.
I guess you are unacquainted with formal axiomatic basis for the most formal of all sciences (mathematics).
Eg. natural numbers are defined by assuming that there exists one, and that there is a successor to one: everything else flows from that (this is an older system, but more approachable than the set theory one).
Basically, we never, ever prove that one indeed exists, or that it has a successor: these are assumptions that have so far proven to work well, but we can never tell for sure.
In the past, axiomatic systems have been found to be "wrong" when matched against reality (most notably the axiom of parallelism and hyperbolic geometry), so there's nothing to say that any of the other ones are "correct".
So we have faith that one exists and that it has a successor. Without evidence, just like you say.
Again, none of this makes science useless: it is an approximation of reality that we always work to improve. But some things we can't prove, so we have just assume they are so (otherwise known as faith).
Numbers are a human construct, just like words in a language. They don't "exist" in the same sense as anything physically real. Nobody has "faith" in the number one, it's just a concept that's proven to be universally useful. If it weren't useful, people wouldn't (and couldn't) conceptualize it. Again, faith is believing in something despite lack of evidence or despite evidence to the contrary.
For the sake of the argument: Have you seen evidence of scientific fact-x? (For example x=“water is made of H2 + O”)
Since set of “x” is so wast, no matter who you are, for most of “x” the answer will be “NO”. Time, accessible equipment and brain-capability constraints force us to outsource the evidence check to others. (even smartest scientists read papers instead of reproducing all experiments)
Part2:
I would like to distinguish two meanings/aspects of word “Science” used by in various contexts:
- scientific method - hypothesis, experiment, …
- “institution of society” -distinct group in society, view/expectation by the rest of society, education, trusted sources and similar
Methods of science and religion are very different.
But as “institutions”, they do have some parallels.
- Both offer basic explanation of reality.
- In both cases people trust stuff written by others.
- Both have consistency if you accept some basic truths.
To sum it up:
I (and most) believe that “carbon has 6 protons“ without evidence. The basis of this belief is trust in science (the institution of society) based on its authority, stated principles&process. But in the end laypeople don’t have evidence for that.
You can e.g. electrolyze water at home and see bubbles. Of course this proves nothing but the fact that water has something in it that makes bubbles at plus or minus, and regularly so. You can add salt/soda and see that it goes faster. All this is not a direct evidence of H or O or what electricity is, but at least some indirect one that can be progressed further, even if you won’t.
You can buy a complex device like a microwave oven or a chemistry lab and experiment with them, checking how they map to scientific knowledge, and asking on physics/chemistry SE about your findings and getting answers from people completely uninterested of fooling you, who are not knowledgeable of what you’re doing besides what you described.
It’s harder with C=6, but by messing with chemicals you can at least make some natural sense of what 6 means in that theory.
Religion at its face value cannot be experimented on at all. Any coincidences (if you find what to experiment on) are so irregular that can only be explained by statistics, even if you won’t. The only way to “study” religious knowledge is to fall for an interpretation of the day, which is always based on some experimental knowledge which others extracted from nature, because these people are interested in converting more adepts from a general population.
You’re correct that there is no direct way to learn and proof to yourself due to materialistic limitations. But when you take plausible interests and statistical phenomena into account, you can easily see yourself what has much more evidential depth and innocence of presupposition.
I trust scientific facts proportional to the evidence I have that these facts are true. This is not the case for faith, wherein disproportionately large amounts of trust are demanded without any evidence.
Our model of the atom allows us to accurately predict chemical reactions. Religion has no predictive power whatsoever, and none of its unique "truth" claims are provable or falsifiable.
People who uncritically trust "science" as regurgitated by pop-culture media are more akin to theists.
This isn’t a good comparison. Science can do something religion can’t: it can predict what will happen ahead of time based on prior knowledge. Religion works backwards to explain why a thing that happened was the will of some god (in the example of Christianity).
This then has practical, real-world implications. Praying harder never seemed to stop a bridge collapsing but a better understanding of physics allowed humanity to build bigger and stronger bridges.
It’s treated that way by the masses but it most certainly isn’t. You aren’t going to find the origin of reality via science but science is used to describe reality.
Otherwise I agree. It will always be our approximation and until we meet aliens and do science with them we can’t be sure all of reality isn’t a construct of the human mind.
Going back to the simplicity statement from the video: you can model the universe as the product of your imagination but it seems surprisingly consistent if it is. It’s clear that the universe continues existing even when you’re not paying attention to it. For this to be true either:
* Your brain is storing and processing the entire universe all the time
* Your brain is constantly rewriting its own memory on a mass scale to pretend the universe is consistent
Both of these seem way more complicated than just “the universe exists and you’re a part of it.”
(Yes, I know our brains rewrite history but not on the scale required to make all of reality seem consistent in this way)
Science is a process. The result of that process is explanations for phenomena. And the reason this matters is that the particular explanations produced by the scientific process turn out to give you the power to make extraordinarily accurate predictions about (certain aspects of) the future, and thus give you a tremendous amount of leverage in becoming the master of your own fate.
It is absolutely not a religion, except insofar as it is the only thing mankind has ever come up with that truly gives us the gift of prophecy.
You may see the above as a critique of science: I actually consider it a positive aspect that puts it way above traditional religions.
The fact that I recognize there are both faith and religious elements to science only makes it easier to explain how and why science is better than religion.
Note that science similarly includes a lot of areas where our predictions are not "extraordinarily accurate" (all the statistics-based science, like medicine, social sciences...) in any particular case, yet it's still science because we recognize the limits (eg. "with a large number of samples, this will mostly happen").
The scientific method lacks two features that distinguish religions from other human activities:
1. A doctrine whose source is authority (usually but not always a deity) rather than observation and
2. Rituals based on that doctrine
One might argue that the actual human practice of science sometimes involves the acceptance of authoritative doctrine (e.g. peer-reviewed papers) and associated rituals (e.g. conferences), but that is not quite true because the rituals are not based on the doctrine. Scientific conferences are not held because there is a peer-reviewed paper that says that they should be, they are held because empirically they help to advance the scientific process (or at least did in the past). Religious rituals exist entirely because of authoritative doctrine. There is no reason for (say) communion or baptism other than what is written in the Bible or proclaimed by the church.
> science similarly includes a lot of areas where our predictions are not "extraordinarily accurate"
Sure. Science isn't perfect. The view it provides us into the future isn't flawless, it's just vastly better than anything else humans have ever tried.
Not to lend any credence to the antiscience above, but nothing about science being a process or even the falsifiability and other safeguards of that process preclude it from religious adherence. Even if they’re extraordinarily accurate processes, “it” absolutely can be and sometimes is treated as religious. Elevating science as a process of knowledge acquisition does it a disservice too. Scientists make mistakes, have attachments to their areas of study, and have a lot of complicated incentives that nominally would be anathema to the “process” even if they’re following the process … faithfully.
> Similarly, it’s entirely conceivable that we may find independent ways to test which of the proposed modifications of the evolution laws is correct, for instance by using data collected from binary mergers. Then, these modified laws would lead to a modified story of what happened near the Big Bang.
Sure, but you have to start from observations of the binary merger, not from what you'd like the Big Bang to be like, like most of these theories do. Starting from predictions about the origin of the universe is unlikely to produce good testable theories, since there is nothing to test there. You have to look at phenomena that are actually still happening in the universe to guide your research, and only then extrapolate.
Einstein's equations are time reservable and deterministic, so the evolution has only one path and ultimately it doesn't matter which end you start at, you'll get to the other unique end point regardless.
The problem is to get the correct start conditions that makes the other end of the path end up somewhere plausible.
It is largely a matter of training and temperament if you think it's more rewarding to start from the observations of current phenomena that all have some uncertainty and laboriously work backwards to predict an early universe that doesn't match the observations and then have to start over, or if you think it's better to start from the distant past and work toward the now only to find a problem and having to start over.
Sure, the equations themselves lead to the same place.
But this is only true if they are the right equations.
If you look at an existing phenomenon that maybe relativity doesn't describe well enough, and find some modification to these equations that explains it better; and then you go and check that indeed this new model explains all known observations better - you have a pretty solid new theory. You can then expand this theory into the early universe and see what consequences it would have for the inflation model.
However, if you start from the big bang and want to modify Einstein's equations, what will guide you to a better model? Most likely you will use your intuition on how the universe must have begun - but then, chances are, your modified laws will predict entirely the wrong thing about the current universe; or, you can add terms to the existing equations that have no influence in the current universe, but then, by Occam's razor, your theory should just be discarded since it explains all observable phenomena equally well, but is more complex.
Look, the entire problem is that wherever people start, their modifications lead to entirely wrong predictions.
To be very clear this also happens when you start with a theory that describes the local universe well, indeed the fact that when general relativity extrapolated backwards gives blatantly unphysical results is the entire issue we are trying to solve!
As I read the post, she takes the fact of a Hot Big Bang (narrowly construed in the modern sense of a homogenous, hot initial state prior to which vanilla GR breaks down, not as a literal singularity) to be a fact knowable by the normal process of science. Whereas the question of what came before that — I.e. what modified description takes over at higher temperatures yet — is placed in a different epistemic category of forever unknowability.
Of course, for any theory that applies within a certain domain, there’s always the question of what happens beyond that domain (“what came before that… and before that… and before that…?”). But this infinite regress isn’t particularly noteworthy. If I understand her correctly, she is claiming to be able to draw a particular line and to say that we can know things on one side of this line but— even in principle — can never know anything past this particular line.
She certainly understands her stuff. But I respectfully disagree with her conclusions — I see no reason to think that we might not make progress on the question through the normal process of science.
I don’t think people are understanding the subtlety of what she’s saying here. She’s saying that since there are no predictions to be made, there’s nothing falsifiable in any of the many theories. Worse, if the theories _do_ make falsifiable predictions that still will only reduce the imaginative space, not reduce it down to one theory, and that instead we choose between theories on the basis of how many “constants” they require.
This argument isn’t invalidated by possible future discoveries. It’ll still be possible to generate competing elegant mathematical models that only differ in ways that are unobserved.
Yes, but this is a generic rubric to apply to all frontiers of science: falsifiable theories are good; unfalsifiable theories are bad; even when you falsify a theory, there will always be room to fudge and rescue it by making it more baroque; the principle of parsimony should be applied to give less credence to baroque theories.
I see no reason to place the frontier of "what happened right at / before the Big Bang where vanilla GR breaks down" in a different epistemic category than all other frontiers of science, as the blog post seems to do. i.e., I see no reason that we should not build models and collect data in order to expand into this frontier, as we profitably do in other areas of science.
There’s a couple of easy explanations for this 1) It’s her field of expertise 2) There aren’t any other frontiers of science where so much publicity and money is being spent on stuff that doesn’t look like it will ever advance science.
Dinosaur Train doesn't get everything right. An untestable hypothesis is still a hypothesis. Even an unfalsifiable hypothesis is a hypothesis. But testable hypotheses are better then untestable (and unfalsifiable) ones because, well, you can test them to see if they are false.
But, after all, who knows, and who can say
Whence it all came, and how creation happened?
the gods themselves are later than creation,
so who knows truly whence it has arisen?
Whence all creation had its origin,
the creator, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not,
the creator, who surveys it all from highest heaven,
he knows — or maybe even he does not know.
Okay, this is truly bizarre. I came here to share this exact quote (after reading a prior comment about how the universe itself may never know), only to find that someone already posted it... whose handle is the same one I use on other sites, because I share the same initials.
Genuinely thought I'd gone crazy for a moment and posted this with an alternate account.
I would say it's an unlikely coincidence, but not truly bizarre.
- It's common for desi names to start with A or K
- It's common for desis to use initials when referring to themselves
- Some desi surnames are over-represented in the population
- People with desi names are likely to come in contact with South Asian culture irrespective of their environment or if they speak the relevant languages. Or rather, they are more likely to have these avenues to begin with if they ended up with such a naming scheme.
- There are only so many foundational or well-known texts in any culture, so if there is a relevant passage, it has a high likelihood of being cited
It's not that different from a Jay Smith and a John Smith quoting a relevant C.S. Lewis or Biblical passage and having a jsmith handle.
If we will never know, then there should be some kind of proof that the beginning of the universe is un-knowledgeable, sort of like Godel's theory of incompleteness. But there is none, so the affirmation is incorrect:
What is the name of the person that created this pot, What day did they create it? Were they in a relationship at that time? Did they have children? How many siblings did they have?
There's no way to know. You can theorise time travel to find out or you can weasle into believing we'll somehow make machines in the future that can measure every facet of every atom related to the creation of the pot in such a way as to be able to trace their trajectories through time backward but both of those are grasping at straws, things that are unlikely to ever actually come to pass.
The reality is we'll never know the answers to those questions.
The same is true of how the universe began.
The best we can do is follow our theories of how the universe works backward and see where they lead and then try to create those initial conditions and see if we get the results we expect. It may be impossible to create those initial conditions though and even so, we'd be guessing at what those initial conditions actually were as we'd be assuming that running our calculations in reverse is true describe the actual initial conditions whereas they really only describe assumed initial conditions.
Human history stretches back 200,000 years according to some estimates. The agricultural revolution started about 12,000 year ago in multiple locations around the world. The first civilization was Sumer, started some 8,500 years ago. The first known writings are from Mesoamerica around 5,300 years ago. Socrates was put to death 2421 years ago. Cesar was killed 2066 years ago. Christianity began 2000 years ago, and Islam began 1412 years ago.
Most of human history we will know nothing about. At most we'll find a few hints of complex cultures and technology spread out across time. These people were just as intelligent as you and I, yet their lives will forever be shrouded in a mysterious past.
You got the direction backwards. Increase in entropy means that the farther back you go in time, the less information the universe has in it in some sense. The initial state of the universe would therefore be very simple, having low entropy. If the state were simple enough, then in principle, we could figure it out in exact detail. The thing that thermodynamics says is unknowable is the distant future of the universe. We can predict that it will be dark and cold and empty and sparsely filled with ever-more red-shifted radiation, but it's impossible, even in principle, to know the details of exactly where each individual particle in going to end up.
>then there should be some kind of proof that the beginning of the universe is un-knowledgeable
Sabine literally addresses this in the piece:
>"As I said earlier, you can always do this, because for any evolution law there will be some initial state that will give you the right prediction for today. The problem is that this makes a simple explanation more complicated, so these theories are not scientifically justifiable. They don’t improve the explanatory power of the standard cosmological model. Another way to put it is that all those complicated ideas for how the universe began are unnecessary to explain what we observe. It’s actually worse. Because you might think we just have to wait for better observations and then maybe we’ll see that the current cosmological model is no longer the simplest explanation. But if there was an earlier phase of the universe that was indeed more complicated than the simple initial state that we use today, we couldn’t use the scientific method to decide whether it’s correct or not. The scientific method as we know it just doesn’t cover this case. Science fails!"
There are countless of competing models you can invent that explain the beginning of the universe and everything you see, provided you make them sufficiently complex. The problem is, that's not science.
It's like saying: the standard model explains everything but the beginning. Let's say God caused the universe and then he went away. Technically that's an explanation, it doesn't violate physics as we know it, but it's not scientific. And given that we can't run repeated experiments on the early universe because we only got one, assuming the standard model explains everything but the early universe implies it is out of the reach of science.
We may not know the answer to how the universe began, but a time loop at the beginning of the universe is my favorite explanation. Gott and Li proposed this model and you can see Gott explain it elegantly here: https://youtu.be/raTqAyLikLU
The thing about time loop is that, how and when did it began? I just can't wrap my head around something being here, there and everywhere at all times.
You're right. In fact a time loop has the same something from nothing problem any other theory has.
Imagine a flatlander universe. Package up time in another dimension and you can represent their entire existence as a static 3d cube. Timeloops would just be a static torus in the cube.
The same is true of a 3 spatial dimension + 1 time dimension universe. You can view it as a static 4d tesseract. Timeloops are just a 4-taurus. Where did that 4 Taurus come from? It's the same something from nothing problem.
It's something we learn very early in the philosophy of science, is that our vision of the world will always be inherently limited by the capabilities of our perception and the way we process it
Interstellar is pretty much nonsense even given the premise. Even if you are talking about time travel you can easily make something more plasuible than that.
Also Interstellar had information passing from the future to the past which isn't really what's typically sufficent to consider it a time loop.
It's a metaphysical assumption, meaning beyond the realm of experimental science. Science has inherent limitations, and cannot be used to explain everything. This is a good starting point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If3cNUixEBM
Interesting how you just said science "cannot be used to explain everything" and yet now you're claiming "proof" and "evidence" (i.e. science) for your particular religion. Make up your mind.
Why is there even such a gigantic universe? Like what is the purpose of it - why was there a Big Bang? If I really think hard about these questions it makes me uncomfortable and anxious.
The universe is as big as it is because of the word size used by the machine which runs the simulation. Most of it seems to be 'wasted space' but that is just a consequence of the large word size needed to have an accurate enough simulation.
I used to ponder this too much as a child. Why is there something instead of nothing.
The most satisfying answer for me was that you must first define nothingness. But the moment it's been defined nothingness ceases to be. It seems to me at least that somethingness (suchness) [1] and nothingness are cross-reference negation of the other. So it can't be one or the other but must be both.
This probably is not making an sense. Later I stumbled into Buddhism [2] which seems to have this undefinableness as a core of experienced reality.
Why anxious? the answers to those questions, while interesting and entertaining, aren't relevant to you today. Just be glad you get to experience this tiny little part of the universe for the brief time you're here.
Uncountably many will that differ from you by random degree on uncountably many dimensions. How much like you do they have to be, to actually be you?
Everybody reading this differs from you by only small degree. You differ from yourself-of-yesterday by a typically smaller amount, and -of-last-year by a less-small amount.
There is no evidence to believe that's true, so you shouldn't believe it and assume that your current life is all you have. Enjoy it to the fullest while it lasts.
I read this somewhere else so it would be nice someone can quote the origin, but think of it this way - you were dead for billions of years before you were born, you weren't anxious then. once you are dead you won't feel the anxiety again, so why bother worrying about it now when there are a whole lot of other things you can do.
Looking at a static stone and deducing where it fell from may work based on the current rules you know today but no one tells you these are the only rules. We have to look at science as best guess for the moment and not as absolute truth.
Maybe it stops being science and starts being math, but I don’t think that means we should discourage people from doing it. That said, I am sympathetic to an argument that we may not need to fund such inquiries.
“We will never know” sounds overly pessimistic to me; I could imagine someone from the 10th century claiming we will never know the trillionth prime number.
I think that the evolution of physics has actually been a series of discoveries of new things that are impossible. We used to think that many things were possible if only we knew the right spell, or invoked the right god, or just worked hard enough.
Then as people studied nature more thoroughly and systematically, they started observing laws that simply can't be crossed - conservation of energy, conservation of momentum, the increase of entropy , the limited speed of causality, the uncertainty principle - to name some of the bigger ones. All of these have put limits on something we used to think of as unlimited.
There are many more non-existence proofs in math as well - so even in pure math, you can't escape this accumulation (probably the most famous such problem, one long attempted that ultimately proved impossible, is "squaring the circle", or in modern terms, the fact that pi^n is irrational for any rational n).
> “We will never know” sounds overly pessimistic to me; I could imagine someone from the 10th century claiming we will never know the trillionth prime number.
There are tons of stuff we as human beings we'll discover and be pretty confident about it. There are other things we'll never know. I think that's part of being human, to know our limits.
Reminds me of something Karl Popper philosophized about. I'm completely butchering it ofcourse, but it goes along something like this - Every scientific theory is waiting to be falsified by future generations. He concludes that everything in Empirical sciences cannot be proven, but instead they're only falsifiable.
The fact that things we have accepted as scientific fact have, in the past been proven to be utterly false points to the fact that any of the scientific facts we believe in may be false. And then there's always the possibility that you're a brain in a jar and this is just a dream so everything you believe is actually false. (wake up)
Things like the big bang seem to be things after the beginning of the universe. In the same way, the issue with a god is "who created god, and who created that who created god...". If he's eternal, who/what made him eternal? We have the same problem in science, and I think any explanation/theory would have the same problem. Also, I dislike that when some physicists explain this they say, "sure, you can get something from nothing" and then change the definition of 'nothing' for their explanation to work. I feel like it's a disservice to not just admit mayyybe we don't know some things. Disclaimer: not a physicist and maybe missing something.
Indeed. We'll never know the beginning of everything; science cannot accomplish that, religion cannot provide satisfactory answers, and philosophy will always leave you half empty half full.
That being said, discovering things is fun, so as human beings we should not stop doing science/religion/philosophy/etc ever.
the issue with a god is "who created god, and who created that who created god..."
It is if you assume God is bound to the chain of causation, but obviously any creator is likely unbound by the system of laws in which his creation exists, the same as when we create a video game we stand apart from it. I always liked the Dr. Quantum Flatland as an example of god-like capabilities wrt dimensionality:
By the same logic the universe itself (as opposed to its contents including the laws of nature) then the universe isn't necessarily bound to the internal system of laws, and all the same arguments can apply there with no need for a creator!
Time, and causuality, is a construct inside of our universe. Asking who created the creator is like asking which way is down when you are in outer space..
If you can’t use the concept of causality outside of the universe, then the idea that there’s a creator outside of the universe who caused the universe is already out of bounds.
> who caused the universe is already out of bounds.
"caused" can mean a different thing. Imagine causualty in a 3d FPS video game, and the creation of the game itself. Though they are similar in semantics, one is different from the other.
Ah, well in that case, the parent poster can just say that asking about the cause of the creator is a valid thing to talk about, because they mean a subtly different kind of ‘cause’ than the kind of cause you told them wasn’t valid to talk about outside of the universe.
They can, but that wouldn't be too interesting to anyone in this universe. Or that it how I read it. Just like a being in a game wondering what caused the game company/programmer to write the game..
The reason will have no consequence to the beings in the game, and thus they will only be interested in the causuality mechanism within the game..
I infer then that you think the concept of a creator outside of our universe who caused it is a concept of no consequence. If so, then on that we agree.
In the case of the Bible, it makes it explicitly clear that God is uncreated. Asking the question, "Who created an uncreated God?" doesn't make much sense in that case.
To be clear, it makes a ton of sense to ask such a question.
The underlying assumption to the question is why only one thing is allowed to be uncreated .. ? Are there others like them, much like here on Earth where we have many authors writing many books? The Bible doesn't answer those at all, it starts in media res (despite its first three words!)
The Bible very explicitly teaches that there are no other gods. Here is one passage among many.
Isaiah 44:6-8 ESV
Thus says the LORD, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, the LORD of hosts: "I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god. [7] Who is like me? Let him proclaim it. Let him declare and set it before me, since I appointed an ancient people. Let them declare what is to come, and what will happen. [8] Fear not, nor be afraid; have I not told you from of old and declared it? And you are my witnesses! Is there a God besides me? There is no Rock; I know not any."
In other places, it says pretty explicitly that there are other gods:
Pslams 95:3 ESV
For the LORD is a great God, and a great King above all gods.
Psalms 97:7 ESV
All worshipers of images are put to shame, who make their boast in worthless idols; worship him, all you gods!
Deuteronomy 32:8 NRSV (less henotheistic in other translatins)
When the Most High apportioned the nations, when he divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the gods;
And there are others. We know pretty clearly from historical sources that the early Jews were henotheistic (recognized the existence of other gods, but only worshipped YHWH), and that is preserved in the oldest parts of the Old Testament. Even Genesis often uses a plural when God talks about his works - today that is often explained as talking about himself and the angels or even the holy trinity, but it is very likely it originally referred to the god of Israel and the other (lesser) gods in the heavens.
It would be more accurate to say that science corrects itself. At any given time there are ideas which appear to have been verified as much as possible, others which are near speculation, and others which are quite uncertain with evidence for and against.
What I think the parent means by contradicting science is rather different: the Bible says things which go against ideas which we believe have been verified by evidence, but the Bible won’t be changed to reflect that understanding. On the other hand, science will change its idea of what it thinks to be true as more evidence becomes available. Nobody changes things in the Bible.
If God exists outside of time, it's not possible that he had a beginning. A common trap I see people fall into when thinking about God is that they struggle to think in any other terms but the ones they're familiar with.
Because how can we even apprehend anything existing outside of time?
Of course, but then immediately leads to the question: if we admit that it is possible for God itself to be un-created, why can't the universe itself be uncreated as well?
The attributes between the universe and The Creator would need to be differentiated.
In other words, the properties of that which is uncreated would need to be defined so they can be distinguished from something that is created. These properties have to be understood and accepted as an exclusive set that cannot be "distributed" or "shared" among other beings; in order to dispel the notion that there can be multiple uncreated beings or beings that are created that share attributes with The Creator.
Note that I wasn't arguing against the big bang, or even cosmology itself. I was only pointing out that the concept of God doesn't add anything to the conversation.
It's also important to note that the big bang theory completely leaves open the question of what there was in the tiny tiny universe before inflation. Basically, the current BBT describes how the universe evolved starting from some time t=t0 + 10^-36 seconds. But that leaves a gap after t0 but before this time.
Finally, the question of existence from nothing is traditionally extended to the supposed singularity that existed at t0 as well, though that is on shaker ground.
Sure, but this thread wasn't referring to the solid state theory - it is referring to the philosophical problem of creation from nothing.
That is, in our usual life, everything that exists comes from something else that exists. But we can't easily apply this rule to the very beginning of the universe (be it the big bang or whatever other model).
So, the question is - how do we handle this? Thomas Aquinas said that this is itself proof of God's existence: the universe did not exist at some point, then God created the first thing. Of course, the next logical question is - ok, then how does the rule apply to God? And the religious say - well, the rule doesn't apply to God, only to creation.
But, if we accept that the rule isn't universal, then we can also choose not to apply it to the beginning of the universe. Instead, we can tweak the rule to say that everything except the singularity at the beginning of the Universe is created by another existing thing; the singularity itself was always there and requires no explanation. This is perfectly consistent with the Big Bang theory, and is in fact how most scientists conceptualize it (or, they say that questions about the origin of that singularity make no sense, since time itself began once the singularity started inflating, but this is philosophically similar).
Of course, we can posit anything we want about that singularity and its past (if any), and we will never contradict another theory, since there is no remnant in the existing universe of what came before inflation, so whatever theory we want will be consistent with the current universe.
Did a different universe collapse into that singularity, perhaps one with slightly different constants of nature? Sure, why not. Was it a regular black hole in another, larger, universe that still exists, but which is too far away from us to be detectable in any way now that space-time has expanded so much? Possibly, why not. Did gods and demons fight until they a powerful sorceror cast a spell to imprison them into single point, where they and there magic were ground to dust and exploded in the inflation? Perfectly coherent with all known physical theories.
The reason for easiness in regard to the complete otherness of His Essence and His unrestrictedness is this: most certainly, the Maker of the universe is not of the same kind as the universe. His Essence resembles no other essence at all. Since this is so, the obstacles and restraints within the sphere of the universe cannot hinder Him, they cannot restrict His actions. He has complete disposal over the whole universe and is able to transform all of it at the same time. If the disposal and actions that are apparent in the universe were to be attributed to it, it would cause so many difficulties and so much confusion that neither would any order remain nor would anything continue to exist; indeed, nothing would be able to come into existence.
For example, if the masterly art in vaulted domes is attributed to the stones of the domes, and if the command of a battalion, which properly belongs to its officer, is left to the soldiers, either neither of them would ever come into existence, or with great difficulty and confusion they would achieve a state completely lacking in order. Whereas, if in order for the situation of the stones in the dome to be achieved, it is accorded to a master who is not a stone himself, and if the command of the soldiers in the regiment is referred to an officer who possesses the essential quality of officership, both the art is easy and command and organization are easy. This is because, while the stones and the soldiers are obstacles to each other, the master and the officer can look from every angle, they command without obstacle.
"... if the universe expands today, this means if we look back in time the matter must have been squeezed together, so the density was higher.
If the universe expands today, how does it follow that it was also expanding yesterday, or a million years ago? Maybe universe expands, then contracts again cyclically?
The reason expansion yesterday is plausible if we see expansion is simply that's it's far more plausible nothing so special happened yesterday as to change the motion of the entire universe.
The universe is not a little trickle of water down the wall in the bathroom you can easily redirect with your little finger, the universe it really big, so you need something equally big to make it change behaviour.
The oceans used to seem really big to us too, but each rising tide wasn’t destined to continue rising—the tides turned out to be cyclical, even though we couldn’t imagine anything but gods or magic to be powerful enough to cause the change. Perhaps we’re in a similar trough of understanding here?
My point is that you could replace a couple words in your comment to get the following, and it would've been conceivable for a person to say a thousand years ago on their first day at the ocean. And yet it wouldn't have been accurate.
> The reason tides always rising is plausible if we see tides rising now is simply that's it's far more plausible nothing so special ever happened as to change the motion of the entire ocean.
> The ocean is not a little trickle of water down the wall in the bathroom you can easily redirect with your little finger, the ocean is really big, so you need something equally big to make it change behaviour.
Are you aware that the tides rise and recede twice a day? Nobody has ever tough a tide would go on for ever, simply by the definition of what a tide is.
But even beside that, the reasons why the ocean has tides are very big indeed. You could try making the argument with a Tsunami, but those also require huge motions of the Earth to happen at any impressive scale.
Finally, the ocean remain big even now!
Honestly I don't get what you were going for, it like an argument version of when sideshow bob is trapped in a field of rakes, every step brings pain.
> Maybe universe expands, then contracts again cyclically?
It's possible, but you're going to have to come up with a theory for why whatever 'force' is driving the expansion goes from negative, to positive, and back.
Is there a good theory as to why Universe is expanding and acceleration its expansion? Dark Matter? Dark Energy? Cosmological Constant? Those are more like "We can not really explain it so we assume there is something like "Dark Energy" which causes it all.
Maybe a better analogy would be a spring that goes from contraction to expansion and back again? A lot of things behave like waves so could it be some space field swinging in a wave-like pattern? Is there some evidence for the expansion to have also happened say 10B years ago in the CMBR?
> If the universe expands today, how does it follow that it was also expanding yesterday
The universe is not only expanding, it's expanding faster and faster... it's very hard to see how anything could explain the rate of expansion could have started off negative, then instead of just collapsing into itself, it reverted somehow and then started accelerating. The simple explanation is that it has always expanded, though at a slower rate, just like in the future it seems it will continue to expand at a faster rate.
I agree it is a simple plausible explanation and Occam's Razor argues that simple explanations are the most likely. So yes maybe it is the most likely explanation. But that is not the same as saying we know it is the explanation.
Big Bang itself is a counter-intuitive explanation: Something came out of nothing.
> But that is not the same as saying we know it is the explanation.
No scientist says that. If evidence ever comes up against any scientific theory (and that's why we call it a theory) it's readily replaced with the most seemingly correct theory.
> Big Bang itself is a counter-intuitive explanation: Something came out of nothing.
Can a theory of creation exist that does not involve something coming out of nothing?
Perhaps not. I'm just pointing out we should not dismiss theories simply because they are counter-intuitive.
There is another theory, which says universe expands then contracts, then expands and so on and it has always, always been like that. I understand many scientists today don't vote for that theory but I think it is less counter-intuitive than something coming out of nothing.
IMHO it is equally hard to wrap our head around the concept of inifity (has always been there) versus there being a start or end to time and space.
It's a bit weird because if we try to think about the end of space our brain immediately asks "well what is beyond the end?" and so implicitly expects there to be more and more - ad infinitum.
But on the other hand if we think about something being infinite then our brain immediately tells us "hold on! that seems fishy, I've never experienced something infinite, it has to start somehow" and so implicitly expects there to be a limit to everything.
To me infinity is the (more) natural circumstance.
We are used to just going forward, if there is an obstacle it can be removed somehow. And even if we go around Earth and arrive back to where we started we can then realize: Hey I should be going up instead, not in 3D circles.
If then space itself turns out to be curved and round, based on what we have learned so far, we can reason hey there must be some extra dimension (something like "up") which I am missing so far. I must go there to truly experience infinity.
One can argue though that dimensions themselves are a limit. Going around in a circle is infinite in 2D but limited in the third dimension. So one would ask what about the N+1th dimension? Are there infinite dimensions?
Maybe infinity is indeed more natural to us since our brain accepts and indeed expects that there is something unknown just to be discovered.
But I guess we are coming back to the point of the video/article. There does not seem to be a way to know for sure and we can think and argue about it till the end of time :P
* God is not a good hypothesis for any secondary cause. The creation of space-time as we currently understand it must have had a secondary cause. Let's patiently keep looking for a scientific hypothesis (theoretical or empirical) that is an incremental improvement on what we already know.
* Religious people who conceive of God as the creator, believing that the word 'creator' refers to the creation of the universe at some point in the past, are completely misunderstanding the use of the word and need to do some more homework.
* Non-Religious people should stop conflating 'metaphysical' statements with religion. Can we agree that we need to make metaphysical statements from time to time if we are having a conversation to understand something 'about physics'?
> Religious people who conceive of God as the creator, believing that the word 'creator' refers to the creation of the universe at some point in the past, are completely misunderstanding the use of the word and need to do some more homework.
Can you explain what you mean here - I couldn’t follow
There are two senses to understand the word creator. I'll illustrate both by analogies to the way 'we' create as people:
(1) A violinist is creating the music that you are currently hearing. Here and now in the present.
(2) A painter created a painting in the 19th century, and you can see the artifact on the wall in a museum.
In the case of (1) the creator brings the song into being out of nothing. More or less, don't squabble over sound waves. :^). When the violinist stops playing, the music stops. Here and now in the present.
In the case of (2) the painter finished the work 'at some point in time' and we can have all sorts of interesting conversations about when exactly the artifact was created. Did the painter really paint it in the way some book said that he did? Does the painter maintain any connection to the painting after it's finished? etc.
You see, if the proper sense of the word creator is actually (1). Then all discussions about (2) are distractions.
So, it's important to remember that, for example, knowledgeable Christians refer to God as the creator in the sense of (1). There may or may not be some interesting discussions to be had about whether God is a creator in the sense of (2) but they are conversations about secondary causes, and very much irrelevant to God's existence and the role as the primary cause.
> So, it's important to remember that, for example, knowledgeable Christians refer to God as the creator in the sense of (1)
I am very curious why you think that - given that the Bible and all common teachings of it that I've ever seen very explicitly define God as the creator in the second sense (Genesis very clearly describes past events - not just Let there be light and so on, which could be taken as metaphors for every day dawning, but also Adam and even and all of their descendants, which are described and were understood throughout history as ancestors, not metaphors). The Jewish calendar is even numbered since the year of creation.
Also, while I'm now atheistic, I received at least basic Eastern Orthodox education in school, and the very explicit notion there was that God was the creator of the universe; I also know modern Catholic teaching explicitly names God as the cause of the Big Bang itself, or whatever else science finds to be the mechanism by which the observable universe formed.
Also, while many do accept the possibility of miracles, even some commonly recurring miracles (like the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ during Holy Communion during every Sunday Mass), the working of the natural world is accepted as ordained by God, but not personally directed by Him - this is quite explicit at least in Catholicism and Orthodoxy, where any direct intervention of God on Earth is seen as a miracle, usually related to a Saint.
Note: I am not saying that there are no Christians that believe what you are saying, or that it somehow runs counter to Christianity. I am only saying that I don't think it is a common understanding of Christianity, even one limited to more literate/knowledgeable Christians; e.g. I don't think the Pope believes what you are saying.
What the GP is talking about, is the traditional distinction made in philosophy between in fieri and in esse causation. A causes B in fieri if A was necessary for B to begin to exist–but once B exists, it can continue to exist even if A ceases to exist. A causes B in esse if B can only exist as long as A continues to exist (and do whatever is needful to sustain B in existence.)
You will not find this idea directly stated in the Bible anywhere – these terms were developed in mediaeval scholastic philosophy (although the concept arguably goes back further). Among Roman Catholics, it is certainly the standard view–indeed, I think it is actually an official dogma that God continuously sustains the universe in existence (creates it in esse), as opposed to the deist view that God created it in fieri but its continued existence no longer depends on him.
Many Protestant philosophers invoke the same distinction. Philosophy of this kind is less popular in Eastern Orthodoxy (especially in recent times) – but when Orthodox thinkers have taken an interest in these kinds of philosophical topics, their views on them tend to be broadly similar to Catholic views, so I'd expect them to endorse the distinction as well.
> I don't think the Pope believes what you are saying.
This stuff is standard in seminary training for Catholic priests – so I'm pretty sure Pope Francis knows it – and although we can't know what's going on in his head, why would he disagree with it?
It gives a nice quick and better overview of the point I was trying to bring out. The video here is produced by the Dominican House of Studies in Washington DC.
> I don't think the Pope believes what you are saying.
I can't speak for the Pope, but you can quite confident that the definition of creation expressed in the video is the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church and very likely identical or essentially identical to the teaching of the Eastern Orthodox church.
> I am only saying that I don't think it is a common understanding of Christianity
You're Right! And I stand by my statement. :^) Common Christians need to do more homework.
> knowledgeable Christians refer to God as the creator in the sense of (1)
How does this relate to the idea of creation in 7 days? Doesn't it imply that creation is something that happened in a particular point in time (ie the first 7 days in time), like (2)?
Yes. The Bible does include a creation of the world story which if taken literally would lead to an interpretation of God as the creator in sense (2).
But the point is that there is this other sense, (1) above, in which God is the creator. This is the dominant sense and is present throughout the Bible as well as the classical tradition that unifies the teachings of the bible with basic philosophy. 'For in him we live and move and have our being.'
Aka, I've used someone else's redefinition of the word away from the vernacular understanding, to redefine it to support my view of the world. See also "recession."
Not quite. Although I fully understand the feedback. There are 2 equally valid senses in which the word creator can be used. Both conform to standard definitions but each used in a different sense.
I tried to add clarity in the response above. Thanks!
On this note, did you know that the official age of the universe is 432 × 10^15 seconds and the diameter of the universe 7 × 432 × 10^15 light-seconds? An amazing coincidence.
Nah. Reason is just the best model we have at the time, given the evidence that we have.
For example, Newtonian physics is a pretty darn good way of looking at the universe and it works well. It was thought of as "known". But of course, I'm sure everyone here knows that Einsteinian physics replaced Newtonian physics with a more accurate model of the universe.
Faith is different in that it is based on no evidence. For example, in christendom, they say there's a heaven, with no testable evidence, or that there's a god, let alone the one that they think exists as opposed to Kali or Uhuru-Mazda, or the other hundredss of thousands of gods that have been professed to be real.
>Belief is Necessary to fill in the gaps between creation cycles (Or its rejection entirely).
eh....despite what the author says, it is conceivable that a scientific solution could be found for the creation. But with faith, just saying "God done it" is something that requires no work, no new knowledge, and not even an attempt at new knowledge. Belief is something necessary when one is just too lazy to try to figure out the actual solution, or to disprove one's belief and accept that it is wrong.
In his famous talk "A Universe from Nothing", Lawrence Krauss makes the same point, if slightly less definitively. ("We may never know", and that's okay - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo)
By analogy he describes how, due to the expansion of the universe, Milky Way residents 100 billion years from now will be unable to observe the cosmic background radiation or any galaxy but our own. Civilizations wil evolve, invent science, use the best tools possible, and incorrectly conclude that the universe consists of one single galaxy alone in a vast sea of empty space.
When we triply rewrite hard drives, we understand that information can be destroyed. Sometimes the universe does the samething. Sometimes information is irretrievably lost.
In Hindu scriptures there are many many universes that are bubbles perspiring from a particular form of Vishnu as he lies down. With each breath the universes are formed and destroyed, for us the time is very very slow but at his level he is literally breathing in and out and the bubbles come and go.
Alright finally an explanation on why all the other explanations work. To me the most convincing theory how the universe began is this one: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l4Wbb1cqubo
What if it never began and has simply always existed? That is the likely scenario, as the moment you think about it beginning, you again face beginning from what? What was that called before the universe other than the universe?
If the universe is infinitely old - well, what’s the probability that, untold (yet finite) aeons ago, a planet existed just like this one, in which history unfolded in exactly the same way, even the pettiest details of our lives being precisely the same? I think the probability is arbitrarily close to 1 - not just that our lives have happened exactly the same before once, but an arbitrary - even infinite - number of times - and we should expect will again in the future. Would it follow that Nietzsche was correct in his doctrine of eternal recurrence?
But if there exist an infinite number of copies of myself, all exactly the same - why should I consider myself to be any one of them individually, as opposed to all of them equally? If they are all the same, are they not identical? In which case - the past isn’t infinite after all - rather time is finite and circular.
Another way to put it - any finite spatial volume must contain finite information (see the Bekenstein bound) - hence can only exist in a finite number of distinguishable states. Given infinite time but only a finite number of possible states to visit in them, it has to visit the self-same states again and again - an infinite number of times
Well, there's also the possibility that the universe occupied some single state (say, the singularity posited by the big bang theory) since t=-inf to some t0 when it exploded, and that the dynamical laws are of such a nature that it can never return to that state.
Right now, the prevailing model of cosmology (lambda-CDM) basically says that the universe can never return to an earlier state, as it is constantly expanding (and that expansion is accelerating). In this model, the universe has an infinite number of possible states, and is in fact guaranteed to never visit a previous state, even though it has an infinite future ahead of it.
> Well, there's also the possibility that the universe occupied some single state (say, the singularity posited by the big bang theory) since t=-inf to some t0 when it exploded
What's the actual difference between these two positions:
(A) the universe was in state X for an infinite amount of time, then suddenly transitioned to some other state Y
(B) time began at t=0 with the universe in state X, and it immediately transitioned to some other state Y
They seem effectively identical, with seemingly no way for us to tell them apart. (B) seems simpler than (A), so by Occam's razor we ought to prefer it to (A), unless we have some specific reason not to. What could such a reason be? Well, I suppose (A) might lead to simpler mathematics. However, in actual fact, I don't believe that's true; and even if it were, it still might be reasonable to conclude that the "infinite static before-life of the universe" was just a mathematical artefact, without any physical reality.
Other problems with this view: (i) time is usually understood as a succession of instants which are somehow distinct – could an infinite succession of instants, all exactly the same as each other, actually count as "time"? (ii) why, if the universe had existed forever in a single state, did it suddenly transition to a new one? That seems harder to explain than the universe just existing with a finite past.
So, I think an infinite past only really makes sense if the infinite past involved an infinity of distinct universe-states – which I think might lead to the consequences I was suggesting.
> In this model, the universe has an infinite number of possible states, and is in fact guaranteed to never visit a previous state, even though it has an infinite future ahead of it.
Let me present a variation on the Boltzmann brain argument: the universe is vast, yet the volume of it which is actually relevant to humans is quite small. Humans cannot ever know or care about the state of the universe as a whole, only that subsection of it we can somehow observe–which is at most the observable universe; but, if we accept the possibility (even only as exceedingly unlikely) that nature is deceiving us (other galaxies don't really exist, it is just randomly arranged photons which by amazing fluke are exactly the same as what we'd observe if other galaxies did), the knowable subsection could be a lot smaller. No matter how stupendously unlikely such as scenario may be – so long as its probability is not strictly zero, in an infinite future, any constant non-zero probability is going to converge to unity.
Consider the current state of this galaxy – does Lambda-CDM guarantee that the universe will never visit a future state, which contains a Milky Way-sized volume, whose state is exactly the same as the state of this galaxy right now? You can repeat the question for "solar system-sized volume with exact same state as our solar system has right now" or "Earth-sized volume with exact same state as Earth has right now". Or a volume with the same size as the current observable universe, and the same state as it?
Our human brains cannot grasp the idea of "it simply always existed".
Imagine a non-human being (e.g., "god", "beings from another dimension", "beings from an advanced civilization", etc.) telling us the theory of everything (with maths and all, if you want), and the end saying: "btw, there is no origin, and no end. Realiy has always existed". Do you think our scientists (or any other kind of curious human being) will say "Alright, got it. Won't keep investigating then. Thanks!". That won't happen, our human brains cannot understand that concept, and there will always be the "but how does it work?!"
Just because everything within this universe has some preceding cause doesn’t mean that the universe itself can’t have a beginning without anything preceding it.
This is an interesting and important point. I'll attempt to rephrase your point slightly differently:
Everything we observe in the universe has a sequence of linear causes stretching backward in time. However we can't be sure from these observations that Universe (or multiverse or something similar) itself has been caused in a similar way. -- I hope I got that right.
But is the physical universe (or multiverse or something similar) that we experience a good candidate for the uncaused base reality that just exists?
A good reason to think not is that universe is composed of stuff and parts that change relative to each other. If something changes, ie goes from potential to actual, then there is something that is more actual, or more real, from which we should be able to explain the change.
Another way to say it is that we may not know what base reality is, but in order for it to be a good candidate for 'the' base reality, it should be completely simple. And the universe as whole, by all appearances, is quite complex.
Impossibility: the limits of science and the science of limits by John D Barrow — rest in peace — is an excellent book about the aspects of the Universe we can never know. For example, the visible Universe and whether constants are constant.
When this blogger starts by pushing back on philosophers, I think they may mean scientists like Barrow, which is a shame because he makes for very compelling reading. In fact, have I not seen warnings here, from reputable posters, about this Backreaction blog?
In any case, I recommend the ahem “philosophy” book heartily.
To add to your point, why should there be nothingness? Who is to say that 0 is before 1? There's 1/2 somewhere right? And 1/4 before that, etc.
It's not obvious that there "should" be nothing, rather than perpetual something. It's not obvious we should work with integers and not the reals. Or the rationals. Or the rationals without zero, which cannot exist as a denominator (in the common definition of the rationals). It's not obvious that we've ever detected zero. And why a line? Why not a circle? And even if a line, couldn't it be the limit of a circle whose radius tends to infinity? Etc.
I am sure all pot smokers know the answer. The observable universe is in a much larger universe with many like itself. Sometimes universes collide and form a new universe. There is an infinite stack of these much larger and much smaller universes (more like a fractal tree actually); some are hot and some are cold but even cold universes can collide make a hot universe.
Soma drinkers, lotus eaters, born-again mushroom enthusiasts.. We know how the universe began, trillions of different ways. Creativity and imagination are as much part of fundamental physics as quarks and entropy.
> So if you read yet another headline about some physicist who thinks our universe could have begun this way or that way, you should really read this as a creation myth written in the language of mathematics.
I thought that was very insightful. Today people try to pawn of all sorts of opinions as “science” by covering them with the language of science.
First, we would need to solve time.
I am not sure if we are able to grasp it.
Then we must figure out what happened at T-1 or T-2,
which I think will be simple once we understand time.
The theory creates a start and then explains the progress from there.
but not what caused it.
In theory of the cylinder than the universe travels to that is good
but it does not explain how everything came to be.
We have a simple to state problem.
There was nothing, then there was something.
Much like in Genesis
""And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.""
Instead:
Science says there was a big bang and from that everything was created.
and we have figured out a model to explain (most) of the evolution since
the big bang. Which means we can say no god did it.
But the way the story begins is in my opinion quite similar.
In one version god is used to explain what created us.
Which then leads to the question of who created god
and to answer that we need to figure out time.
(I am aware that there are equations that explain what was at t-1
or explain that there was nothing and even asking the question
of what was at t-1 is crazy. I do not have the background that
could allow me to understand the equations, but every which way you do
it you end up with a question of what started it, or what was before
what was the trigger to get it going.
Perhaps you can say that the universe has always been there, forever,
sometimes it shrinks sometimes it expands, and we have a nice perpetuum mobile.
> We have a simple to state problem. There was nothing, then there was something.
Natural language is woefully inadequate to express these issues, but believe it is a mistake to state the problem like this. There can be no concept of “before” if there is a T0. Perhaps the “why is there something rather than nothing?” version comes closer to what we are asking.
Hawking’s history of time actually anwsers this question with „we don’t know and don’t have any information from before big bang we can access to use in research”.
Not quite. There is still the possibility that at some point in the future we will be able to figure it out unless it can be proven that it is impossible.
The only observation is that currently we don't know. Could it be the spaghetti god monster? Maybe. Maybe not. We simply can't tell at the moment.
There are things we don't know the answer to. We just have to keep looking.
The story's title isn't explicit about the means by which the knowledge is gained, nor exactly which details are being sought.
I think it's a mistake to treat the scientific method as the only plausible source of knowledge. My opinion is obviously based on a particular worldview, but so is a claim that the only useful source of knowledge is the scientific method.
Watching tons of PBS Spacetime the only theories oI see is that Universes are constantly being created with different properties, with an externally rare one having the right conditions for life to be possible.
Still leaves the same questions as to why a bunch of universes are being created or where the energy comes from.
End of day there isn’t anything I’ve seen other then a true all powerful God or equivalent being responsible.
I sense you just expressing your view on the matter, but I think that this is a very weak argument for God's existence. It's completely plausible that we will at some point in the future have good materialist explanations for the existence of energy or the size of the multiverse etc.
> However, you play around with words the same question always remains what was before.
> Where did this super dense black hole come from? What caused it to be? What was it before it was a black hole?
These theories are just that - thought experiments to try to come up with possible explanations. They are not claimed as proven or facts.
There are a lot of open equestions. It is work in progress.
> Our current theories for the origin of black holes as far as I know does not include the spontaneous appearance of a black hole for no reaosn.
There are actually theories that black holes can form spontaneously. This is because particles are theorized to be able to spontaneously form and under the right circumstances they'd form a black hole. They would most likely though evaporate nearly instantly. But again that is not proven.
"We don't know how fire comes to life, and we will never know."
"We don't know how to defend ourselves against beasts, and we'll never know."
"We don't know how disease spreads, let's just hug it out, we'll never know."
"We don't know how to fly like a bird, we'll never know."
"We don't know how to land the booster of a rocket, we'll never know."
"We don't know how to cure that form of cancer, and we'll never know."
What a ridiculous defeatist attitude. History has proven that, so far, we've been very reliable at figuring out things that were deemed impossible.
I'd say we already know. It would be infinitely arrogant of us to think we're the originals. We're likely inside an inescapable but observable simulation, inside a simulation, repeat for any unknown number of times. That's probably how "the universe" (our universe) began.
Our parent universes probably have far more complexities to them that have been stripped from ours, for the sake of computational simplicity. Perhaps the actual originals, or any of our parent simulators, know exactly how the universe came to be. We might figure it out, too.
None of those things are impossible based on known physics. Traveling backwards in time to observe the beginning of the universe, and/or somehow existing outside the universe in order to do the observation, is impossible. Could we learn new physics that make it possible? Yes, but it is still a totally different class of problems than the ones you listed. Those were ONLY a question of knowledge. The problem at hand is a question of both knowledge AND the laws of physics actually allowing for that knowledge to be had. There was never any reason to assume that we would be unable to cure a certain type of cancer with the right knowledge alone.
> We're likely inside an inescapable but observable simulation, inside a simulation, repeat for any unknown number of times. That's probably how "the universe" (our universe) began.
That's just deferring the question. If we're a simulation inside a larger universe, then how did that universe begin? Although I'd argue if we're in a simulation then we're still a part of the host universe, even if kept in isolation, and it's that host universe we should ultimately care about when asking the big questions.
I agree that the title is kind of defeatist and I'm not against scientific research on finding the source of universe, heck I optimistically hope humans find it within my lifetime. That said, all your examples are really miniscule and dare I say, easy, as compared to the scale of understanding the universe.
You present an interesting semi-fictional point on simulation.
This universe became just in universes bubbles explosion. One day, we will be able to determine which of the marbles of universes in the universes bag of marbles collide to create this one new marbles.
Sciences is here to go further, not to stop thinking at the edge of one way of think.
I really love when science goes so deep, it loops back around into philosophy. When I took intro philosophy in college, I really was pleased how deeply it is ingrained in everything else. There’s a reason people like Descartes are well known in both math and philosophy.
We may have a better understanding someday though.
Roger Penrose's Cyclic Universe theory is quite intriguing to me, but unfortunately still doesn't answer the question if there was an initial created universe or an infinite amount of prior universes (aeons).
the radius of the visible universe is about 14.0 billion parsecs (about 45.7 billion light-years), while the age of the universe is 13.787 ± 0.020 billion years. I must have missed out on some caveats to the speed of light.
You did - space-time can expand with unbounded speed, and that is what happened in the early universe. Remember that the big bang is not some point in space-time which we are moving away from, it is a point in space-time that has expanded to the size of the current universe (and keeps expanding).
The speed of light is only a limit on how fast matter/energy can move through space-time.
The speed of causation is also so unintuitive imo, but also a must to make anything make sense logically. After watching many hours of youtube i still cant wrap my head around it.
Say you're accellerating 1g forever you never reach the speed of light for other observers..
Whats cool about gravity is that the spacetime 'train tracks' are tilted slightly into the earth so youre pulled down, but the earth is resisting tou going into it. Just waving your hands around is the same feel as playing with magnets
I think the most intuitive explanation I've seen for c is that in fact everything always moves at a fixed speed, c, in space-time - either through space or through time (from past to future). You can neither increase nor decrease your total speed, you can only change its direction - the larger the space-only component is, the smaller the time component is.
Additionally, mass deforms space-time such that a little bit of your motion towards the future is directed to the center of mass instead.
Yes we are limited by our genetics but what does that mean when you consider that we are starting to learn how to manipulate our genes?
Evolution doesn't seem to stop. Science is advancing at an increasing pace and the boundary is pushed forward each and every day. What might become of humans in a million years?
All it takes is one person with a mutant super-intelligence gene to bring forth a new step for human kind or one scientific discovery on how to hyper evolve a new babies intelligence.
And we have several billion more years before the sun shuts down, so hopefully that will emerge.
"The issue is that physicists can’t accept the scientifically honest answer: We don’t know, and leave it at that."
This sentence jumped out for me. Is there some kind of crusade going on that I have missed the beginning of? This feels like a strange sentence in this piece and feels like a (misguided) attack.
Suggests that the universe may be older than the Big Bang theory predicts. There are a lot of qualifiers on both sides of this, so I would suggest sitting back with some popcorn and enjoying the spectacle of a lot of primate descended life forms earnestly debating something that in many cases they couldn't even be bothered to read up on.
Haven't read the article but I remember some mentioning these analysis are quite useless without spectra. Maybe someone more knowledgeable can explain this.
I think she justifies the "attack" towards the end of the piece, where she talks about the many theories that purport to explain how the universe began. Her point is that you can always create a coherent mathematical model that "explains" this, but since it is logically impossible to check it, you're not proposing a scientific theory.
I don’t often go looking in Astronomy or cosmology journals, but I’d be surprised if either scientists were trying to publish articles like that — or if they were, that they could pass peer review.
On the other hand, if you are working on theories that can extend into the early universe, it’s not unimportant to try and figure out where the model breaks down. Maybe t=0 isn’t possible, but t=1s? 1ns? 1ps? How much can we feasibly describe?
I’d argue that not exploring the limits of models is also bad science. Knowing the limits is a fundamental part of communicating a model.
> I’d be surprised if either scientists were trying to publish articles like that — or if they were, that they could pass peer review.
The article we're discussing itself even links to one such paper [0]. All of the others she mentions are also published works - Penrose's CCC [1], the ekpyrotic universe [2], Hawking's no-boundary state [3] etc.
> On the other hand, if you are working on theories that can extend into the early universe, it’s not unimportant to try and figure out where the model breaks down. Maybe t=0 isn’t possible, but t=1s? 1ns? 1ps? How much can we feasibly describe?
Sure, but this is a different thing. Many of these are adding elements to the existing theories, and then predict a new initial state given the modified evolution laws.
The point of publishing those articles is...to publish them though. Like, you have an idea, you write it up, submit it and note that it can fit known data but isn't currently testable. Done, and important. Maybe it goes nowhere, maybe it inspires someone, but the point of journals is in the name: they're journals of work in the field, shared so the community can explore and benefit from them.
They're not publications of "what is definitely true", they are fundamentally explorations of what could be, or the more important "this is kind of interesting where could it lead?".
> note that it can fit known data but isn't currently testable.
But the thing is, theories about the beginning of the universe will never be testable, they aren't just not currently testable.
So, if your theory has no novel predictions about the future, but it adds extra parameters to obtain a different prediction about a past which exists beyond what can be measured, then you're wasting your time creating this theory, and wasting reviewers' and readers' time publishing it; and you're wasting money researching it.
This is what Sabine usually writes and complains about - research money being spent on research that is at best unlikely to bear any fruit, and at worst navel-gazing, especially when there are very real problems in physics that are not receiving significant research.
This is why she complains about people researching the beginning of the universe, or black hole entropy, or grand unified theories, or the hierarchy "problem", or looking for supersimmetry or for WIMPs in ever larger particle accelerators.
Instead, she wishes more people were researching the measurement problem, non-linearity in quantum mechanics, high-energy physics through radio-telescopes instead of particle accelerators, to name a few things.
Now, I don't know anywhere near enough to say that she is right, but I do believe she is not trivially wrong, like you seem to be suggesting.
She's fantastic. She doesn't hesitate to call out the physics community on its idiosyncrasies. She is a necessary check and balance on the mainstream body of researchers.
So you're right - Research Fellow at Frankfurt Institute of Advanced Science [1]
However her broad ranging commentary which tends to take the tone of "this field should listen to me but doesn't" as is the case with this article (and a few others she's done such as about the LHC[2] or black-hole information loss[3]) leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
Our best cosmological theory applied backwards results in singularity. That's bad. See her droplet example.
According to maximally projected Penrose diagrams in singularity time and space evert into the multiverse. You move in time and space flows around you.
https://youtu.be/4v9A9hQUcBQ
And according to our other most successful theory, space-time is divided into chunks. And boiling. Opposite of infinitely divisible, smooth relativistic space-time.
Not to mention if we go with current astronomy theory, we end up with unexplained dark matter and dark energy, that give different answers depending on the methodology.
I think that this is the TL;DR of the whole piece:
> So if you read yet another headline about some physicist who thinks our universe could have begun this way or that way, you should really read this as a creation myth written in the language of mathematics.
We sometimes also rule out other ways it "could" have happened, because they're further from our current paradigm, or just harder (or maybe impossible) to verify. In this sense, it may not be a "religion", but there is an element of "faith"
The most relevant definition (i.e. the only one that states anything about evidence) from your link seems to agree:
> 2.b. firm belief in something for which there is no proof
With respect to the Christian Bible reference, I don't read it as saying there's no evidence for what they believe; I think you'd have a hard time finding a Christian who does.
My pet theory: Something has always existed. There was no beginning. No origin. No first cause. No t=0. No start. It's always been there. What was before that? That. And that. And that. Always that.
And the Second Law of Thermodynamics is not absolute and can be broken.
Understanding what time is and what time isn't can deeply affect ones view of the universe. Being stuck down here in a gravity well we think of time as a fundamental thing that ticks along the same for everyone. But when we start looking at things at cosmological scales even the idea of a t=0 starts to bend and break.
For example look at particle interactions. The vast majority of them you can play them forward and backwards and they look exactly the same. You wouldn't be able to tell which way the video is running. The only way we can tell there is an arrow of time is because at some point a field asymmetry occurred. In a universe where all fields are symmetrical the idea of time simply breaks down and has no meaning.
The history of the Universe channel touches on this in their latest video.
> My pet theory: Something has always existed. There was no beginning. No origin. No first cause. No t=0. No start. It's always been there. What was before that? That. And that. And that. Always that.
Your pet theory is the view of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and the Roman Catholic Church. The mistake that people make (you can even see it in this thread), is that they start with some preconceived conception of God, with all it's baggage, and then they attempt argue for, or against, this concept.
The more productive approach is to recognize and acknowledge the necessary existence of a base reality. Then you simply assign the English word 'God' as a reference pointer to this base reality.
const God = (the one base reality that exists necessarily)
> The more productive approach is to recognize and acknowledge the necessary existence of a base reality. Then you simply assign the English word 'God' as a reference pointer to this base reality.
You can, but I'm not sure how "then" onwards is going to help — the people I've seen conflating these things before will still conflate them after doing this.
Yup. I see what you mean and I do think in practice conversations may proceed this way. And I think you are illustrating well the point I made above.
The key idea though is that if you make a dispassionate analysis of what this base reality must be, you find that it has certain 'attributes'. So for example, anything that has horns would not be good candidate for base reality since the contingent concept of 'horn' would need to be explained by, and derive its very existence from something much more simple. So that simpler thing would be the less bad candidate. Etc.
If time exists then there's always a before. Unless at some point time didn't exist. But if time didn't exist and then suddenly something started to tick, that's still a transition from "no time" to "time" and this "no time" was before "time".
These thoughts are driving me crazy. There must be a piece of the puzzle we're missing.
There must be something about time that isn't or wasn't always linear. Otherwise there's no end to the "who created it" question.
It's similar to asking what contains the universe. And what contains the thing that contains the universe.
It feels as if there's a force (?) that we're not yet recognizing. Else, it's a crazy infinite loop.
Not that I'm saying this is true (just an example), but is the Big Bang simply (?) the introduction of time into the then time-less universe? It just doesn't make sense to say "The universe started with the Big Bang" when what that was prior was the universe but in a different form (or so we guess).
So it seems that something else had to be introduced to change the nature of the old universe into the new universe. Else the "start" is more like a "transformation" and even that opens a ton of questions.
The YouTube link I provided is to a professional astronomer and science communicator and she is explicitly saying JWST data does no such thing and that reports claiming it does are wrong.
I'm happy for physics that finally someone from their ranks is trying, at least trying, to say that cosmology is a hoax. I've been writing this for ages. Here's one article I dug: https://notlar3.blogspot.com/search/label/Big%20Bang
It's somewhat ironic to see this statement from Sabine Hossenfelder, who as a quantum super-determinist holds quite specific beliefs about the beginning of the universe.
“We will never know” is such a contradictory statement. On the surface, it implies the limits of our knowledge while simultaneously indicating that the author possesses the omnipotence required to know what humans will learn throughout the entirety of our future. Add it to your list of things to never write.
I don’t know if the statement is correct in this case but in general saying “we will never know” about a subject which we have incomplete knowledge isn’t a contradiction.
I can say, we will never know what the first human that got to North America had for lunch on their 20th birthday, and I think that’s as true as it could reasonably be. Sure maybe we’ll invent a time machine or some other technology in the future that invalidates it, but if you apply that logic then nothing can ever be stated as a fact.
> I can say, we will never know what the first human that got to North America had for lunch on their 20th birthday, and I think that’s as true as it could reasonably be.
if there is a large mirror a few hundred light years away we might be able to see his lunch in the reflection ;)
Very few things about the origins of the universe can be stated as fact at this point so “we will never know” isn't a "fact" either. Implied certainty on either side seems pre-emptive.
I'm not questioning that part. I don't know if stating that we'll never know about the origins of the universe is correct. I tend to agree personally that it seems premature.
All I'm saying is that making (nearly) absolute claims with incomplete knowledge is not a contradiction.
Furthermore there is the complication caused by ambiguous problem statements. In your example, how we define the first human that got to North America? Which immigration wave? What if there were immigration waves that were completely wiped out without leaving any effects of the subsequent populations?
What is the 20th birthday? According to which calendar? (Leap days etc)?
What is lunch? Not every people subdivide their meals in a predictable way that you can pinpoint to what "lunch" is
Etc etc
EDIT: forgot the most obvious: define what counts for human. It's not clear cut to distinguish boundaries between species
Furthermore if a human time travels back to the past and then sets up shop and lives amongst the first humans, maybe they are the first human? Semantics and ambiguity have a way of making unspecific questions paradoxical
That's a very narrow reading of it. There's always an implicit "to the best of our current knowledge" caveat with every sound scientific statement. And it's true, to the best of our current knowledge, we can never know what it's like inside a black hole or very close to the time our universe began because the physics that we know tells us no person or probe can ever go there and come back to tell. If you're no so generous as to accept the implicit caveat you just end up being fun at parties because you go around and tell people to "never say never and always avoid always".
This just falls completely apart when you look at the history of physics. Einstein for example is usually considered to be one of the smarter people, and even he thought it would be impossible to ever measure gravitational waves directly. He simply could not foresee the future developments of quantum mechanics, like lasers or squeezed light states. And yet here we are. Even if the author was the best physicist in the world (and if you look at her papers she certainly isn't by a long shot), you should never trust any statement like that. This is not just detrimental to science outreach (these things capture young people's imagination after all), it's also pointless to argue about them when we know that we almost certainly just lack imagination ourselves. Noone alive today can tell what will be possible in 100 years, period.
I hate this way of thinking. Einstein never thought that it's impossible to measure gravitational waves, he just couldn't imagine any way we could ever make instruments precise enough to do so.
However, measuring the state of the singularity that probably existed before inflation, or even more so, measuring anything about how that in itself came to be, is explicitly impossible given our current theories. As impossible as building a space ship that travels faster than light, or measuring the precise position and velocity of a particle.
These are not technological issues: finding a way to do them would mean a completely new paradigm in science. So any paper that attempts to prove these things without presenting a new paradigm is doomed to the "we will never know" bag.
You're falling into the exact argument trap you laid out yourself. Einstein had no clue what would be possible just 100 years later and just because we have no clue how to ever measure a singularity (which is actually not completely true, but let's not get into that) it would be very presumptuous of us to say that it will remain impossible another 100 years into the future. Just imagine if people kept listening to the guys who kept saying all the stuff we do today is impossible. Science is incremental steps - and we have to follow them disregarding of how worthwhile they might seem right now. Very rarely will someone come along and enable something directly that was thought impossible just recently. But over the long run, things work differently. Sure, we'll reach a lot of dead ends along the way while pursuing great things, but on the other hand we don't get anywhere at all by only listening to people who can't imagine anything.
Sure, but that's an example of measuring something that's happening now. It's not quite in the same category as measuring something that happened 13.7 billion years ago.
Well, first of all these gravitational wave-creating events happened billions of light years away and thus are already a way to view the universe billions of years ago. Going back and looking even further into the past is just an example of what seems impossible to us right now. But in the grand scheme of things, we have no clue what's possible as evidenced by the history of physics. On top of that, there are actually pathways towards understanding things like string theory or the big bang. Einstein by comparison was not disingenuous when he made that statement, since the theoretical and experimental work didn't even show a possible path to imagine the future. Of course that doesn't mean that these other things will pan out in the future (e.g. stuff like astronomically-sized colliders or mathematical bottom-up/top-down proof approaches), but saying that anything we do today definitely won't ever work out, no matter what, is either incredibly naive, misinformed or outright slanderous towards these areas of research.
I watched the video, and the sense I got was you don’t need to bother to read anything where scientists talk about having figured out what happened at the beginning of the universe because we can never know. This seems to explicitly exclude the possibility that there could ever be a discovery you might read about that would change that.
Well to quote user mensetmanusman: "Per thermodynamic axioms, incompleteness is implied by the arrow of time and information atrophy. This would imply an unknowable beginning."
I think 'never' should be understood in this way—either there's something wrong or fundamentally incomplete about our theories, or we can not know certain things. Barring groundbreaking advancements in understanding akin to quantum physics and relativity theory, physics tells us so. Since the papers discussed do not establish such a new and testable theory but still go and discuss things current science cannot access, they cannot taken to be science. Doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong or uninteresting. I don't think she excludes the possibility that a groundbreaking discovery could be made that changes that. But the papers were not written in a time that knows of such a discovery.
Ok, yeah maybe I could see that. But it’s kind of a confusing message - don’t read or take this research on this topic seriously, except in case some research on this topic comes that you should read and take seriously.
Per PBS SpaceTime, humanity has been able to recreate conditions 0.000001 seconds after Big Bang (arbitrary number), in particle accelerators. But to add an extra 0 would require the energy output of our universe.
The implication is that we simply don’t have enough energies to recreate similar circumstance in a particle accelerator and we cannot “see” past microwave background radiation. As such, as of now, there isn’t a straight path to understand the Big Bang further in any context.
A more charitable reading would be "appreciate that all such theories are necessarily humble and limited; unless the entire context of science and human understanding becomes fundamentally and dramatically transformed"
She explicitly says that the scientific method is insufficient to give an answer to this question. So reading anything written by scientists won't give a conclusive answer. I think it's implicitly hinted that you might as well read something by a religious person, or a philosopher, or anyone with a random theory, as none of the theories can be proven or disproven by the scientific method, and so all of their answers will be equally (un)satisfying.
It's theoretically possible that we'll one day find some other method of finding out the truth (perhaps a god will descend from the heavens and tell us? or perhaps we manage to find a bug / exploit in the simulation?) but personally I find it unlikely.
She did make an appeal to simplicity, claiming that simpler is better, and she stated that religious origins are way more complicated so while they can't be proven wrong, if you accept the idea that simpler is better then religious explanations are unlikely to be true.
Yes, in the context of an example where the scientific method does / did work, and provides a simple explanation, namely evolution. Her argument is that in the case of the origin of the universe, the scientific method doesn't work, instead. That doesn't make the religious "method" better, but also not worse.
Honestly I find “it’s unknowable” to be a pretty satisfactory answer. Mostly because to me it points at something that seems almost obvious the more I’ve thought about it. Even if it were possible to see past the “Big Bang”, what possible reason is there to think that would be the end of the rabbit hole? As mind bending as it is to think that the trail is infinite, it’s even more mind bending to imagine that it’s not.
That reminds me of her article, very narrow. She seems to imply scientists, or at least scientific theories, implicate certain universal origins when really they're implying "to the best of our current knowledge". I think most everyone that's scientifically literate, and you'd think it'd be common knowledge among most of HN crowd, knows that scientific theories of universal origins aren't certain but here we have a whole article of the 'well awkshually' party-pooping you're talking about. She does seem pretty certain about uncertainty though which tells the tale that she's not beyond the paradox either.
Hossenfelder is a polarizing figure. “Lost In Math” was a thought-provoking book in the tradition of the other string iconoclasts (Smolin, Woit, Rovelli, roughly “the Perimeter crowd”). “Three Roads to Quantum Gravity” was the last general audience book that Smolin did before he’d fucking had it and did “The Trouble with Physics”. Woit went straight for the jugular with “Not Even Wrong”.
These people have (for better or worse) burnt the ships with the people of their generation who write grants and sit on tenure committees.
Hossenfelder’s pivot to “wildly over-credentialed pop-sci YouTuber” is interesting. My gut flinch reaction is like, “you’re better than this”, but… I have not walked a mile in her shoes, and if this is an end-run around a corrupt job market for particle/high-energy people who won’t won’t get on board with The Landscape? Maybe more power to her.
I give that context so that people will know (my opinion on) the backstory for why she’s in an adversarial relationship with The Academy.
The “will never know” phrasing might be unfortunate. But the epistemological principle goes back to Hawking at least: “asking what happened before the Big Bang or where it came from is like asking what is north of the North Pole”.
It’s a fun thing to theorize about, but the Big Bang is almost definitionally “the bound on observable causality”. It’s not a statement about what we won’t ever know, it’s a statement about what’s knowable.
The trouble with Hossenfelder isn't so much that she rejects string theory, lots of people do that. No the problem is that she's pivoted into declaring the entire enterprise of cosmology and particle physics pointless, when she says
"""How about you wait, and we talk again in 10 billion years."""
this is not so much a joke as a thinly disguised a deeply held conviction. There's no need for a secret cabal to explain why someone who clearly thinks the job should not even be done has trouble finding further employment in an extremely harsh job market.
You sound very knowledgable about this, so I guess I'm mostly addressing any readers of this thread when I recommend Lost in Math as a prerequisite for making that judgement. Of the four I mentioned, it's the most personal / autobiographical / reflective.
She's obvious pissed off, and that should be taken into account when evaluating her assertions. Woit is way more pissed off, and probably the better mathematician. Smolin seems like, sad and resigned more than angry, but he also got a great gig wither Perimeter (which he might still hold?), which has to soften the blow.
Frankly my layman's knowledge of all this is badly dated, because after decades of avid interest going back to childhood I got so dispirited about it I've kind of stopped paying attention outside of a few bright spots (Deutsch/Marletto have my rapt attention).
So I don't doubt you that lots of people reject Stringworld now maybe even to the point of that being a fairly mainstream view, but 10 or 20 years ago that was a CLM at best and usually tenure-track suicide, and there's a whole generation of people who did in fact operate under the dictates of something that could, with a little poetic license, be called a "cabal". Dismantling the scientific method to admit the Landscape was, at least to an avid outsider, dogma not long ago.
I'm enheartened to hear that people are starting to try new stuff again, but it's not difficult for me to have sympathy for people who just kinda gave up.
If there was a time were doubting string theory was career suicide, its wasn't in 2000 and certainly not 2010, those where the years when Woit was riding high on his book and "crisis in physics" was a popular phrase.
Honestly I think the biggest problem is that you have the timeline wrong, string theory reached its zenith in the 90's, but already by 2002 Woit could give it a good public kicking and mostly get praise for it (if you trust his own account here: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/arxiv-trackbacks.html I find it deeply funny that of the two of the people he reports as being angry with his beat down, one is the infamous Lubos Motl! ).
As an aside, from the tone with which Woit recounts how people wrote possibly mean things about him in the comments of a blog, I suspect he might simply not be a very nice person to interact with which explains why he might have had trouble in his career.
For example, when reporting that he complained to the arxiv admins, he's careful to note he was polite, which I think sounds like someone who unprompted confirms they were wearing pants to an interview...
I think you're correct that I slipped at least a decade, maybe two in the way I painted that, and I appreciate you keeping the dialog level-set on important mile markers. I hate when I spread the worst kind of misinformation which is the almost right kinda but off by a big, important term sort.
It seems to be a product of not realizing (or wanting to realize) how old I am! I just checked and Witten won his Fields in 1990, I would have sworn it was like 5-8 years later than that, to pick one key milestone. Getting old is an experience!
In full disclosure I haven’t read the article yet, I will do so after this comment. But reading, I just wanted to mention something that sprang to mind.
Gödels incompleteness theorem.
In that case, we know for sure that we will never find a list of complete and consistent axioms for all mathematics. We do not need omniscience for this, it’s something we know for sure we will never learn.
I think there are more examples, I remember one of my professors mentioning off the cuff he believes P vs NP will never be proven one way or another because it’s most likely one of those problems that simply don’t have a solution. Or, maybe the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is another example. We know for sure there are limitations on the knowledge we can have.
I don’t think it’s unfair to imply a limit to our knowledge. I’m not saying the universe’s beginning necessarily falls into this category, I honestly don’t know. But there are for sure classes of problems that by their very nature cannot be known, or cannot be known with certainty.
There's unknowable material real facts that nobody will ever know though.
I read into one a few years ago when I was trying to find when the last American slave died.
The problem is they were considered property so no documentation or birth records were produced. The lack of record keeping made this an impossible question.
The last documented one was in the 1930s but the last civil war veteran died in the 1950s, surely there was some baby of the 1860s that was born into the system that probably survived until at least the Montgomery bus boycott or Brown v. Board.
But this is something I discovered is a factual statement that's impossible to verify and will never be resolved.
>On the surface, it implies the limits of our knowledge while simultaneously indicating that the author possesses the omnipotence required to know what humans will learn throughout the entirety of our future
That's no contradiction though.
A contradiction would be "I know everything about X" and at the same time "There's a limit to our knowledge of X".
It's no contradiction to claim that there are limits to our knowledge but still claim to absolutely know Y about Z.
In other words, the idea that "there are limits to our knowledge" is not incompatible with the idea that we fully know this or that. You just mean that those limits only apply to other things.
(Heck, in math we can even prove that some things can never be proven, thus both implying limits to our knowledge and that we know something with 100% certainty).
> in math we can even prove that some things can never be proven
No we can't. We can only prove that certain formal systems cannot resolve certain statements. We might still invent other formal systems that are acceptable to us and that can resolve those statements.
>We might still invent other formal systems that are acceptable to us and that can resolve those statements.
That's irrelevant, though, because a mathematical proof or a statement X is considered in the context of a specific formal system (and any isomorphic system).
Proving that S can't be proven under formal system F will always be true regardless if you are able to prove the same statement in the formal system Z.
For example, you can't say "I just disproved that triangle angles add to 180 degrees" just because you've proved they add to more than 180 degrees under a non-flat surface or non-Euclidean geometry.
People saying "triangle angles add to 180 degrees" implicitly already mean "under Euclidean geometry and in a flat plane". It's just left implied, because it's goes without saying that they mean it within the system they expressed the problem and did the proof in.
And for those other systems, iF they embed arithmetic, we can effectively produce a statement that is visibly true and which that other system cannot prove.
“Finite picture whose dimensions are a certain amount of space and a certain amount of time; the protons and electrons are the streaks of paint which define the picture against its space-time background. Traveling as far back in time as we can, brings us not to the creation of the picture, but to its edge; the creation of the picture lies as much outside the picture as the artist is outside his canvas. On this view, discussing the creation of the universe in terms of time and space is like trying to discover the artist and the action of painting, by going to the edge of the canvas. This brings us very near to those philosophical systems which regard the universe as a thought in the mind of its Creator, thereby reducing all discussion of material creation to futility.” — James Leans
Well there are some who claim to know, and will argue that “it happened this way” when in reality it’s a guess, based on some assumptions, and measurements, fit to a model. We don’t know everything, and it’s worth the contradiction to point out the fallacy of those who postulate
Is it something you have personally verified and found to have been the case as you established the principles in play, or is it (at the other end of the spectrum) that a science paper says such-and-such and you read a summary on HN?
I think "fatalistic" is a better word than "contradictory". I otherwise agree.
There are a lot of misconceptions about the Big Bang. The Universe is a metric space. The "metric" part here is deliberate, specific and technical. It really means that given two points the metric can tell us what we call the "distance" between them. Abstract maths deals with spaces that do and don't have metrics.
The best explanation I've heard of the Big Bang is not that the Universe originated from a single point but rather the metric between all points in the Universe at the time of the Big Bang was 0.
There's an open question about whether the Universe is finite or infinite. I mean the actual Universe not the observable Universe. This is almost a metaphysical question since we'll probably never know.
We don't really know how gravity and space acts in such extreme environments but with black holes (that we also don't understand at the quantum level) we have plenty of examples of admittedly less extreme but still exxtreme corollaries. It is kind of mind-bending though. One description I read says that time acts like space and space acts like time within the event horizon. As in, you can see light entering the black holes behind you but that's the past and we can view the past all around us (eg distant galaxies are us viewing the past). Towards the singularity is the "future" and we can no more see that than we can see any future.
We, as sentient beings, have a difficult time comprehending things beyond our existence. What I mean is that before we were born, we didn't exist. After we die, we don't exist. We can't really comprehend that intuitively because our perception of the world is predicated on our cognizance. The past is easier. Stuff happened before we were born. But now we do exist. So at some point in the future we won't exist. How can you comprehend your own lack of existence?
I feel in some ways similar about the Universe. Our observations are predicated on concepts like "time" and "space" that at some point didn't exist. How do you reason about the lack of existence of space let alone time when everything we know is predicated on that?
Still, I too feel like the author is too pessimistic about how much more we can learn here. Assuming we aren't extinguished in the next few centuries (which is actually more difficult than it sounds at this point) we are going to be here for an inconceivably long time. Given our understanding of the Universe, that's likely to be >10^100 years. That's a long time to figure stuff out.
Perhaps, if there is a God, he does not desire us to learn about him by knowledge or by science, but by love for him and seeking him out.
For who is man to say, that man must only learn about God through objectively verifiable facts, because man said so? Perhaps this God wants seeking. If we were born without eyes, color would still exist, but we would never perceive it, and how would we believe it if someone said it did exist?
Our knowledge of the cosmos, in just a few hundreds of years, expanded from the Earth, Moon, planets and stars of the firmament, a kind of cozy neighborhood, to that of unfathomable numbers of galaxies stretching out to unimaginable distances of space and time.
Strange that gods who were so occupied with matters on this planet, who live in a nearby heaven up by the firmament of stars, are also still credible candidates for "creator" of the universe.
The real universe is so much more vast and so much more strange than any scriptures had ever imagined. One could be forgiven for excusing that underestimation of the universe as a limitation of the imagination of man.
In other words, "the god of the gaps" has to keep finding new gaps to fill, and the gaps are ever less tenable.
Are they really less tenable? Because, if there be a God, on the judgement day present in many of the religions we know, he might point out that the sheer complexity of the universe should be a sign of his existence. What are the odds? Are the odds actually in favor of man's theory, or is man desperately clinging to a theory to avoid him? Is it actually good science as designed, or rather any excuse no matter how implausible will suffice? Good science looks at the odds and makes a conclusion. Bad science looks at the conclusion and ignores the odds to bias towards a result.
Edit: Furthermore, this said God might point out on said day the lack of any aliens, or other life, as another sign that the universe was made for man, and nothing else, and the sheer enormity of it should be yet another sign. For if the universe was not large, would it be more easy to deny?
Edit 2: You might dismiss the above, and these aren't the best arguments that could be formulated, but it is more to show that your presupposition that a larger universe disproves his existence is untenable.
Theism is man's "theory". Either way, we enter a paradox, if you believe in gods then the theories of man ultimately came from gods, ie, a perfectly logical system only produces logical output.
This whole thread pretty much wound up like I predicted while reading the article. Author implies with certainty that science is uncertain in a specific field and it's invaded by people certain of their beliefs in other fields, ie, if science has a kink in it then gods exist for certain.
For god of the gaps argument never fails to amuse me.
You’re taking an unbelievably literal interpretation of a faith you don’t believe in and literally projecting it on to the parent comment as a form of criticism. Safe to say that I don’t think you can expect a response from them.
My view of gods as being too small for the universe is grounded in the history of religions. If the OP is making up a new god for the newly discovered gaps, he faces no such limitations.
Right. You’re grounding your statement in the view that theology cannot evolve with the times, and that any claim that it does is actually, in fact, a falsehood. That itself is a major assumption on your part.
I honestly never cared for Hossenfelder's science communication. She's far too dismissive and dishonest in representing theoretical views she disagrees with. And I don't necessarily have the physics understanding to pick these biases out too easily.
I think Sean Carroll for instance does a much better job at this when he interviews people whose views he disagrees with in his podcasts, which happens quite frequently.
I enjoy it. There are a lot of communicators who shy away from giving their own opinion about anything that isn't the overwhelming consensus. They might be wrong after all. It is refreshing to have somebody actually disagree with something and then back it up.
It depends on what you mean by "back it up", especially regarding rigor. The more "surprising"/disagreeable an idea is, the more rigor we (or at least I) expect of the arguments.
agree but be aware carroll swings way way way way to the other extreme especially about the pet theories he happens to like: multiverses ; the everett interpretation of qm ;boltzmann's brains and so on
Yes, he's opinionated. But he regularly interviews people who disagree with him and does a good job at both asking them hard questions and helping them explain their own view. And when he does agree with them, I think he does a decent job at playing devil's advocate and challenging their position.
Taking HN threads into religious flamewar (or any flamewar), as you did here and in dozens of other comments in this thread, is seriously not ok on HN and will get you banned here.
The one you started with this throwaway swipe turned truly hellish. That's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. No more of this please!
Yea I think this thread wasn't necessary. Cheers for bringing it up, it wasn't my intention but I agree I shouldn't have opened it like that and a lot of the followup discussion could have been avoided. I think I'll stay clear of anything touching religion as we see where that gets us. Point taken!
May I ask you though why you downvoted a bunch of my comments which I think had nothing to do with a flamewar, for example the ones in the discussion with origin_path? It must have been you because due to the age of the comments normal users are not able to downvote them anymore. I'm not saying I shouldn't be downvoted for the stuff that played into the flamewar but why the other stuff? My guess is that those also are not welcome on HN I'm just not 100% sure why or which rule these comments broke. Clarification on that would be welcome. I've duly reviewed the guidelines.
Thanks for the kind replies, I know it's not pleasant to get a moderation scolding like that.
There's sort of a fuzzy line between outright flamewar and generic ideological tangents (which religious topics certainly are covered by), both of which are against the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). I agree that not all those exchanges were equally flamey, but I just don't think generic religious argumentation is on topic here. If you want to argue that I was a bit too indiscriminate, I'd say you may have a point :)
On the other hand, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32619634 was on topic and a really nice historical contribution to the specific topic of the thread—the point at which the discussion went generic-religious (flamewar or not) was the point at which the quality of the discussion plummeted.
I found it interesting as an early example of a similar line of reasoning with a similar conclusion.
The Wikipedia link mentions that: “Astronomer Carl Sagan quoted it in discussing India's "tradition of skeptical questioning and unselfconscious humility before the great cosmic mysteries."”
I don't think the line of reasoning is similar at all.
The quoted text just says "We don't know. Hypothetical beings higher than us don't know because they came after the initial origin. A hypothetical creator might or might not know."
I agree with the first sentence but it doesn't give any insight really. The reasoning regarding Gods coming after creation so they wouldn't know doesn't check out. Maybe they are great scientists and found a way to get the answer? By implying even Gods don't know you get defeatism - how could we mere mortals know? Let's not try.
The truth is, that's all you can say with certainty. That we don't know. Anything else is conjecture. Sometimes it's more wise to know that you don't know
Because the whole premise and foundation of religion is that you ought to believe things absent evidence and without good reasons (that’s what faith is). If you have good reasons to believe something you give the reason; religion does not and should not, especially with its centuries-long history of malice and suppression towards free and scientific thought, deserve any credibility when it comes to matters of facts.
Not really. Non-Abrahamic religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. have nothing to do with faith or beliefs.
Both Hinduism and Buddhism explicitly allows for atheistic sects within the religion.
The religions are mostly concerned with philosophies of life and the nature of reality than worship of Gods based on belief and faith.
Religion equals faith, is very much a Christian idea. There are other religions that are based on ritual and tradition which don't expect such an epistemology from their adherents.
I don't know why people do this so often on the (english)internet. People will write off all religion, while obviously speaking from the perspective of Christianity only. People have bad experiences with Christianity, and then decide that Buddhism, Jainism, Daoism, and Shinto are all a scam. It's a strange fallacy that people should know better by now, it's just straight up a sweeping generalization.
It’s not writing it off (whatever that means here) but if you’re asserting Buddhism, Daosim, and Shinto do not have many foundational faith-based/supernatural elements you may want to review their sacred texts. Jainism I am less familiar with, but the other three are entirely founded in faith-based tenants that have no supporting evidence.
Background: degree in philosophy, focussing on philosophy of religion. I have read all the books. They are all fantasies, many very well written and fun to read, but no more fact-based than The Silmarillion.
>religion does not and should not, especially with its centuries-long history of malice and suppression towards free and scientific thought
That I was referring to. Show me where Zoroastrianism, Sikhism, and Bahaism are against scientific thought.
Being familiar with a smattering of religious texts you learned in University is hardly enough to make such large claims about every single religion in the entire world.
This argument always depends on what kinds of evidence you accept and trust as valid for faith. One big test for that is trusting any of the holy books as evidence for something faithful.
It's really weird to watch science and science-like ideas grow out of faith and religion, then the faith be blamed for 'persecuting' science after a certain philosophy took over in the late 19th century.
> It's really weird to watch science and science-like ideas grow out of faith and religion
While there are certain events that can be filed under this category, more often than not its the other way around. That is, the ideas come outside the religion, run contradictory until proven unquestionably, and then the religious texts are found to be retroactively always been proving the science that was found later.
That's not really fair. For example, Galileo is often given as an example of someone who was persecuted by the Church for his ideas - without often mentioning that his ideas were championed by the Pope and the Jesuit order before some misunderstandings.
Also, a lot of the basis of science comes from members of the Church, occultists, or others living in deeply fundamentalist environments (Newton being a famous father of science who was deeply occult in his thinking; or Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, the father of algebra and whose name is the basis of the word algorithm, being a court astronomer and the head of an Abbasid Caliph's library).
Where and when, throughout all human history, have there been significant populations not subject to a religion? It seems strange to suggest that demonstrably unscientific belief systems with incompatible differences tied mainly to geographic location somehow have a unifying impact on scientific progress.
It's kind of like saying a person contributed to science because of their hair color while simultaneously conceding that people of all hair colors contribute to science.
One would hope your religion has more impact on it's followers than a box of hair dye.
The heirarchal ordering of some faiths, the commitment to truth, the belief in the veracity of the written word, the ability to support monastic orders are all functions of a society that believes. The belief that the individual speaks the truth and should be listened to, are the mechanisms that allow science to flourish.
Some scientists act as if you can have that without the faith. They focus only on the parts of history which support the contemporary scientist view that if we could just free ourselves from the whacky religionists we could get on with the /real/ science, which is nearly always an idea that reflects a minor variation on what has already come before.
If only the scientist knew the history ideas (including faith), could we have new things and not retreads of some millenia-dead philosopher.
Faith is not commitment to "truth," but rather commitment to a belief regardless of its veracity. Science has nothing to do with "believing" something - its a process for determining what actually is true based on evidence. Historically, science has only been allowed to flourish as long as it tiptoed around the religious powers-that-be.
If you really think science boils down to a "minor variation on what has come before," I'm curious to know what millenia-dead philosophers managed to launch a JWST equivalent.
Faith is commitment to truth in Christianity and science has a lot to do with believing. People choose which of their hunches and theories at the edge of their individual knowledge with a leap of faith.
I said the Scientist operates on a minor variation on old ideas, not all of science. Quite frequently even the top echelon scientists are pushing science forwards based on ideas that started well before them.
These conversations aren't really possible anymore, people aren't interested in the meaning of words or meaning at all. They just want to relate to whatever goofball idea their tribe agrees with.
>I'm curious to know what millenia-dead philosophers managed to launch a JWST equivalent.
Oh so you want me to summarize the history of ideas after all -.-
Uhm what? You can believe something is true but it does not make it objectively true.
Science is not believing in the sense of religion. Science is about curiousity and exploring ideas that one thinks might be true. The next step is to try to experimentaly verify the idea or to for example mathematicaly prove it. It's not about believing something is true and then stopping there.
> Quite frequently even the top echelon scientists are pushing science forwards based on ideas that started well before them.
What's wrong with that? Not every idea can be completely fresh. I am not sure what your point is.
> These conversations aren't really possible anymore, people aren't interested in the meaning of words or meaning at all. They just want to relate to whatever goofball idea their tribe agrees with.
Sounds a lot like religion?
> Oh so you want me to summarize the history of ideas after all -.-
I don't see the connection between your answer and his question.
You constantly talk in the terms of faithful ideas and yet reject they exist.
There is a reason you 'think this curious idea might be true' and the chain of ideas that got you to this point goes back a long way. And your thinking is usually influenced by unspoken ideas you take as prima facie true and acceptable, even though you never admit it.
These ideas come from faith and if you understand their starting point, you can understand their likely ending point and become a better scientist for it.
You don't see the connection because I haven't summarized centuries of ideas in three sentences of logical chains so you don't have to think about the history of ideas, and can just accept the answer prima facie like you do every other idea science runs on.
You don't know, what you don't know.
This really feels like pearls before swine. Have a nice day.
I agree the religious flamewar was bad. Appologies for that.
Some of the other comments in this thread that contribute to the number you quoted were not contributing to a flamewar though so I don't think the number of comments is bad per se. It's just a topic I have interest in and commenting a lot can be also a sign of a lively discussion and not a flamewar - though a lot of it was! I've seen a preference on HN for 'post and drop' style which imho contributes to a more shallow discussion. Sometimes it might be hard to find the balance I guess. If one is passionate about a topic one can quickly get too engaged in it. Anyways, wont happen again. Cheers!
This is a totally western-centric view of history. Islam had a golden age during which algebra was created in addition to many other great scientific achievments. And it came it hand in hand with religion. In fact algebra was created to help do the complex math involved in Islamic inheritance laws.
And honestly it isn't even very accurate there. The dark ages were called so not because Christianity persecuted science, it was called that because we have few records from that time. The few records we do have, are from the religious clergy.
I think the ratio of babble to sound reasoning is much better in science than in religion. That being said, there is also a lot of science babble and we should call it out and try to keep it at a as low amount as possible.
The core tenets of science are pretty sound. Religions are based on a lot of completely made up stuff. They are not 100% bad of course. But we seriously can do much much better than that.
I think there is a reason why the concept of religions evolved. They might have been an important tool in early societies. But they are very very old tools and I don't think we need them anymore. They come with too many dangerous problems.
Science is not a replacement for religion because science is not a moral code. It can tell you how something can be done, but not what is right or wrong to do. Attempts to develop such moral codes by reasoning from first principles turns out to be incredibly difficult and can easily lead to degenerate conclusions.
In another comment you ask what scientism is. We can define it as an attempt to turn science into religion. It retains the surface look and feel of science, but isn't science. HN has a lot of people who follow scientism - you can find them getting frustrated on any story about science asking why other people can't just Believe The Scientists like they do.
> Science is not a replacement for religion because science is not a moral code. It can tell you how something can be done, but not what is right or wrong to do. Attempts to develop such moral codes by reasoning from first principles turns out to be incredibly difficult and can easily lead to degenerate conclusions.
I have not seen any proof of that. Neither did I see proof that only religion can give you the correct moral code. As I mentioned a few times: given that there a several disagreeing religions they can't be all right. So it's not the fact that something is a religion that gives a correct moral code.
Even if something is difficult, it does not mean that I instead resort to making up some stories and declare that's the right moral code.
> In another comment you ask what scientism is. We can define it as an attempt to turn science into religion. It retains the surface look and feel of science, but isn't science. HN has a lot of people who follow scientism - you can find them getting frustrated on any story about science asking why other people can't just Believe The Scientists like they do.
Well if that were the definition of scientism then I wouldn't subscribe to scientism. That would sound pretty much like the opposite of science and an attempt to subvert and abuse it.
Ah, I didn't argue that religion gives you a correct moral code, or that there is only one possible moral code. Religions are the result of memetic evolution so it's natural that there's some variety. All I argue is that science doesn't give you one at all.
Proving this would take at least a whole book, maybe more, but such books have been written many times in the past when science vs religion was more topical. Most people don't demand such a book because "science can tell you how to do it but not whether you should" is a pretty uncontroversial position that's been taken by scientists themselves many times, it's pretty much the starting point of the debate over whether Nagasaki should have been nuked for example.
Still, consider a sample moral problem: revenge. Christianity (to take a familiar example) has a very evolved take on revenge. It teaches that you shouldn't avenge wrongdoing (eye for an eye), instead you should "turn the other cheek". If everyone did this it has obvious advantages for stopping conflicts escalating into long term violence, but it denies people a sense of justice. So Christianity also has a whole lot of evolved stories about how that's OK because sinners will be judged in heaven by God and maybe sent to Hell if they've been bad, so you can turn the other cheek yet rest assured that justice will be done ... in the afterlife. Obviously all this is totally unfalsifiable, it doesn't attempt to be rational in any way but it's a really useful set of beliefs and stories for creating a more peaceful society.
If you take only science as a starting point, how do you derive this sort of moral code and - just as importantly - make it stick? How would you teach it to children? In fact you'd struggle even with the far more basic task of deriving a moral code that bans murder. You can't start with evolution because animals kill each other all the time; there's nothing unnatural about murder. It's the prohibition against it that's unnatural, but science is just the study of the natural world, so that's no help. See for yourself, try it. Come up with a rational first-principles explanation of why murder is bad without invoking religion, and which doesn't simply boil down to tautologies, circular reasoning, appeal to authority or other logical fallacies. I've tried - it's hard!
"if that were the definition of scientism then I wouldn't subscribe to scientism."
Right, but nobody explicitly subscribes to scientism. We don't even have such a word as "scientismist" because it's pretty much the defacto default religion of the modern population.
Scientism is perhaps the nastiest of all religions because it denies its own nature. Other religions accept what they are, but this one presents itself as pure rationalism even though it's not. It's very, very easy to accidentally become a follower of scientism which is why so many people are. All you have to do is use reasoning like this:
1. Science is a good way to determine what is true.
2. But I am busy and don't have time to do science. Therefore I will delegate it to professional scientists.
3. I don't have time to figure out who is applying the scientific method on a person-by-person basis, so I'll delegate that to scientific institutions (universities, governments, corporations etc).
3. I don't have time to verify that these institutions are actually using the scientific method. Actually I'm not even sure what the scientific method is, beyond the very basics. So I'll assume that if people are being referred to as scientists by other people who are also being called scientists, and the places they work have money, then they are scientific institutions.
4. I don't have time to actually read what these institutions write down in their holy books/journals, because a lot of it is written in Latin, but I am sure that it is Science and that The Word of Science is Truth, so whatever these institutions claim must be true.
5. I don't have time to actually find out what these institutions claim, but there's this noisy town crier in the middle of our village who says that the institutions claim X, and nobody seems to be objecting, so I have Faith that this must be The Word and therefore Truth.
5. I don't understand why these oddball heretics keep popping up who lack Faith in The Word as transcribed by the priests at the Institutions, because why would anyone doubt what is obviously and clearly True? Yes, scientists are merely men and may sometimes be unclear about the universal underlying Truth, which may even be unknowable to us mere mortals, but nonetheless it is important for community cohesion to have Faith and therefore we should banish these heretics as far outside the village as possible.
In other words, although people like to think they're rational, being rational is time consuming and difficult so most people delegate it. But - and this is where it becomes scientism - they don't recognize that this is what they've done. They conflate belief in a hierarchical Church-like system with rationality, and end up believing anything that people working at these institutions say even if it's obviously pseudo-scientific. And, they treat doubt in the sciencey-ness of the priestly class as terrible heresy; such heretics deserve to get their printing presses smashed up (cancelled).
> All I argue is that science doesn't give you one at all.
But I have given you examples of arriving at moral rules through arguments that are not based on religious thought.
> Proving this would take at least a whole book, maybe more, but such books have been written many times in the past when science vs religion was more topical. Most people don't demand such a book because "science can tell you how to do it but not whether you should" is a pretty uncontroversial position that's been taken by scientists themselves many times, it's pretty much the starting point of the debate over whether Nagasaki should have been nuked for example.
Why would it take a book? I just gave counter examples and have disproven your claim already. That you can find examples where science can not explain something does not mean it cannot explain anything in terms of "why". The whole point of science is to explain the "why". Why it happened, why it is that way and why it will happen.
You can use science to debate if Nagasaki should have been nuked. That though would probably be a complex discussion but I can see a possibility that someone scientifically shows that there would have been better ways to solve the conflict.
> Obviously all this is totally unfalsifiable, it doesn't attempt to be rational in any way but it's a really useful set of beliefs and stories for creating a more peaceful society.
Only under the assumption that everyone in the society strictly follows the rule. As soon as one guy just turns into a tyrrant or if another group comes in order to suppress them the framework collapses and so it is unworkable in the real world where there are real threats.
> If you take only science as a starting point, how do you derive this sort of moral code and - just as importantly - make it stick?
We have laws that prohibit harming others and they don't need religious justification. Harming a member of society is against everyones interest because we are part of society and we optimize for a good quality of life of society as that optimizes our own. Take Sweden as an example. Very secular country. Are you claiming their society has weak morals? Are they full of revenge killings?
> In fact you'd struggle even with the far more basic task of deriving a moral code that bans murder. You can't start with evolution because animals kill each other all the time; there's nothing unnatural about murder. It's the prohibition against it that's unnatural, but science is just the study of the natural world, so that's no help. See for yourself, try it. Come up with a rational first-principles explanation of why murder is bad without invoking religion, and which doesn't simply boil down to tautologies, circular reasoning, appeal to authority or other logical fallacies. I've tried - it's hard!
I did it in other comments but here we go again: it's easy to argue that since we optimize the survival of our society we should not kill each other. A species that is happy to just randomly kill each other has real disadvantages that should be obvious. Your claim that animals kill each other all the time: killing within their own group is rare. Take two random animals from the same species and put them together in a room and see if they will kill each other. Do this with enough animals and different species. The vast majority will not kill each other. How come?
> Right, but nobody explicitly subscribes to scientism. We don't even have such a word as "scientismist" because it's pretty much the defacto default religion of the modern population.
I don't agree with that. You seriously claim that the majority just blindly believes in science but wouldn't admit it? Or is it maybe because people started to trust a system which they can at least partially verify and that can explain a lot of the real world?
> Scientism is perhaps the nastiest of all religions because it denies its own nature. Other religions accept what they are, but this one presents itself as pure rationalism even though it's not. It's very, very easy to accidentally become a follower of scientism which is why so many people are. All you have to do is use reasoning like this:
Blind belief is always bad. Which one is the worst is not a particularly interesting conversation to me.
We alreay agree that scientism (meaning religious corruption of science as you've shown) isn't good. Don't think we need to expand on that further.
I don't quite see where you provided examples before this comment, sorry, could you repeat them? I looked through the thread and see you asserting we don't need religions anymore, but not where you give concrete worked examples of moral questions and how to resolve them with science.
"You can use science to debate if Nagasaki should have been nuked"
I'm not really sure how. It would be interesting to see an attempt. Note that doing this without relying on ambient moral principles like "killing people is bad" is probably impossible but those moral principles don't come from science, as I point out, hence why I don't see how to do it.
"We have laws that prohibit harming others and they don't need religious justification."
Yes I thought you might go there. It doesn't work. Those laws are derived from religious codes originally. Also, the law is not a moral code, the law is supposed to implement moral codes. If you believe morality flows from law as the original source, you have to believe that lawmakers are inherently more morally capable than the people they rule. Moreover you cannot have such a thing as a tyrant because the moment they achieve power and change the law, whatever they do becomes axiomatically moral and therefore they are not a tyrant. Are you really going to argue that? No way are most people going to go anywhere near a claim like that, quite the opposite, it is often argued that lawmakers are less moral than regular people!
"Harming a member of society is against everyones interest because we are part of society and we optimize for a good quality of life of society as that optimizes our own"
This isn't a logical argument from first principles. Harming someone else can very much be in your interest in all sorts of situations. For it to be considered immoral, there must be some higher justification that states that your clear self-interest in harming an enemy is subservient to some other principle.
Claims like "we optimize for a good quality of life of society" don't mean anything concrete. It's just restating a belief that the original position is morally correct in different words. Every tyrant in history has always claimed to be acting for the betterment of society and how can you argue otherwise without some system deeper than "this is morally good because we say it's best for everyone therefore it is"?
That's what I mean by it being difficult. All the obvious answers just lead you in circles.
"Your claim that animals kill each other all the time: killing within their own group is rare. Take two random animals from the same species and put them together in a room and see if they will kill each other."
So by analogy it's OK to kill other races but not your own? That's certainly a moral code that has existed in the past, but it's not one that is accepted today.
But it's an odd argument because it's really common that animals will fight and injure each other within the same species, sometimes fatally. Usually fights over territory or mating dominance. Even in pack animals there are fights over who gets the mates. By coincidence I was at a zoo just two days ago and they had a few cages where there was only a single animal, with an explanation that they had to do this because if they put more than one animal of the same type in the same cage they would fight for dominance. It's normal e.g. the antlers on a deer are for fighting. One of them was a type of crane, and the explanation was that cranes pick a single mate for life and this one had picked "Man", so would fight with any other crane. Animal jealousy!
"You serious claim that the majority just blindly believes in science but wouldn't admit it?"
After what we saw in the last two years! Wow yes, absolutely I seriously claim that. The amount of pseudo-scientific garbage that the population swallowed about COVID is just incredible. Claims that fell apart the moment you read the papers or even just thought about them were routinely passed off and accepted by the population because they came from "experts". It is one of the major themes of our age.
> I don't quite see where you provided examples before this comment, sorry, could you repeat them? I looked through the thread and see you asserting we don't need religions anymore, but not where you give concrete worked examples of moral questions and how to resolve them with science.
I gave an example right in my comment to which you replied. Further explanation below. Another example was when al_mandi asked me to give an example how rape can be argued against.
> This isn't a logical argument from first principles. Harming someone else can very much be in your interest in all sorts of situations. For it to be considered immoral, there must be some higher justification that states that your clear self-interest in harming an enemy is subservient to some other principle.
I think I see where your misunderstanding is. That you can find a specific situation where harming someone else can be in your interest does not invalidate the argument that says so in the grand scheme of things and in most situations. Nearly nothing is absolute.
The same logical fallacy has been shown in this HN discussion about a dozen times.
A general rule can be true even if in a specific case it does not apply. Killing someone in the general case is bad but in specific cases it can be good. Take for example a suicide bomber running into a crowd. That killing is bad in general can be argued for with logic and without resulting to religion. It should be obvious that killing in general will harm your own chances of survival in general. I can deduce that with my own brain and don't need a prophet to tell me. You can ask me to go the full chain of logic back to first principles but you know full well that's a lot to do. Can we see the desire to not get killed as something given not by religion?
For example: if you show that science can not explain a certain thing then that does not mean science can not explain anything at all.
If B follows A then NOT B does not follow NOT A.
A triangle is a geometric shape. It does not follow that if something is not a triangle then it's not a geometric shape.
> I'm not really sure how. It would be interesting to see an attempt. Note that doing this without relying on ambient moral principles like "killing people is bad" is probably impossible but those moral principles don't come from science, as I point out, hence why I don't see how to do it.
The claim is that morals can only come from religion but I argued and showed that this is not the case.
Your claim is that something ALWAYS applies (e.g. ONLY religion can bring morals). If I can show a single counter example then I invalidate your claim.
If I claim that something is true ON AVERAGE and you show one counter example then that does NOT invalidate my claim.
If you say that ONLY a 6 sided dice can throw a 4 and I have an 8 sided dice and throw a 4 then you lose.
If I say on average you will roll at least a 2 with your dice then rolling a 1 does not prove me wrong.
> Claims like "we optimize for a good quality of life of society" don't mean anything concrete. It's just restating a belief that the original position is morally correct in different words. Every tyrant in history has always claimed to be acting for the betterment of society and how can you argue otherwise without some system deeper than "this is morally good because we say it's best for everyone therefore it is"?
This is simple evolution. If we don't optimize for life in our society then we have a clear disadvantage compared to other societies that do so. Animals follow the same and they don't need religion for that.
> So by analogy it's OK to kill other races but not your own?
No, you again fell into the same logical fallacy. You can see two races as individual members of a larger society. Put random animals from different species into a room and most of them will also not kill each other. That does not mean some of them will not kill the other. And the fact that some will kill the other does not mean they all will do so.
> But it's an odd argument because it's really common that animals will fight and injure each other within the same species, sometimes fatally. Usually fights over territory or mating dominance. Even in pack animals there are fights over who gets the mates. By coincidence I was at a zoo just two days ago and they had a few cages where there was only a single animal, with an explanation that they had to do this because if they put more than one animal of the same type in the same cage they would fight for dominance. It's normal e.g. the antlers on a deer are for fighting. One of them was a type of crane, and the explanation was that cranes pick a single mate for life and this one had picked "Man", so would fight with any other crane. Animal jealousy!
Some and sometimes. As explained, that does not invalidate the argument. You can't claim that the majority of animals constantly fight within their species.
> After what we saw in the last two years! Wow yes, absolutely I seriously claim that. The amount of pseudo-scientific garbage that the population swallowed about COVID is just incredible. Claims that fell apart the moment you read the papers or even just thought about them were routinely passed off and accepted by the population because they came from "experts". It is one of the major themes of our age.
Yea the past two years have been... difficult in many respects. But again, same logical issue. It does not mean that they always blindly believe in all of science.
Thanks. I wasn't reading all your other posts in this thread. I have now read your proposal for a non-religious opposition to rape.
I'd like to clarify what I'm arguing here. I'm not arguing that only religion can provide a moral code. I don't think I've stated that anywhere. To try and clarify, what I'm claiming is:
- Science is not in and of itself a moral code. NB: science is not the same thing as rationality!
- Creating a moral code as comprehensive and useful as those that religions provide, based on nothing more than logic applied to a handful of axioms (first principles), is really hard. Maybe not impossible! But it's definitely harder than it looks, and this can easily lead to bizarre and destructive conclusions, or arguments that sound logical on the surface but which actually contain fallacies.
You are arguing (I think) that the codes provided by religions are totally irrational and should be discarded. I'm not actually religious but find myself in the Nietzschian camp, thinking that is risky and has to be refined a bit. If you accept the axioms (e.g. that the word of God/Jesus is axiomatically moral, that the Bible records the word of God/Jesus), then the reasoning from that point on is pretty straightforward. And in particular it's fairly complete because the Bible covers how to treat a lot of common situations. We know this moral code sorta mostly works, because it's been around a long time and we have a lot of experience with it. We also know what happened to communist societies that deliberately erased religion and replaced it with Marxist morality - hundreds of millions of deaths, which is why a common American insult to the Soviets in the 20th century was to call them "godless". This is what Nietzsche predicted in "The Will To Power".
"It should be obvious that killing in general will harm your own chances of survival in general ... This is simple evolution. If we don't optimize for life in our society then we have a clear disadvantage compared to other societies that do so."
OK, now we're getting somewhere. This is a Darwinian argument: that which leads to successful reproduction is moral.
The problem is that this justification fails in the case where one side is overwhelmingly strong. If my side knows about guns and has them, and all you have is spears, then realistically I can kill as many of you as I want without any real risk. Moreover I can then move in and take all your land and women, so at that point it's an evolutionary fit strategy to do so. Yet this shouldn't be considered morally OK merely because the risk of dying in return is very low. Indeed, it's critical to have a moral code that doesn't involve relative risks here to stop exactly that genocidal situation from occurring.
"Put random animals from different species into a room and most of them will also not kill each other. That does not mean some of them will not kill the other"
Correct but I've never claimed 100% consistent or even majority behaviour; it'd be irrelevant to my argument to do so. My point is that if you build a Darwinian moral code then there's nothing really wrong with me fighting and killing you. After all, animals do it sometimes. Sure not all the time, and I wouldn't go around killing people all the time anyway for the risk related reasons you previously highlighted. But so what? If evolution is all there is to it then how could anyone tell me not to kill you for moral reasons? The fact that most of the time, animals don't do it? Not convincing.
> I'd like to clarify what I'm arguing here. I'm not arguing that only religion can provide a moral code.
I am sorry if I misunderstoo your position or possibly mixed it up with what al_mandi said. He was the one who stated it is only religion that can give us morals and without it we'd be a barbaric society and living like animals.
> - Science is not in and of itself a moral code. NB: science is not the same thing as rationality!
I would agree with this. Science uses rational thought to build knowledge about reality.
> - Creating a moral code as comprehensive and useful as those that religions provide, based on nothing more than logic applied to a handful of axioms (first principles), is really hard. Maybe not impossible! But it's definitely harder than it looks, and this can easily lead to bizarre and destructive conclusions, or arguments that sound logical on the surface but which actually contain fallacies.
I would also agree here that building a moral code from axioms is a lot of work and hard. And it has to be because there is a huge amount of situations in life for which the moral code would need to be queried for guidance. But wouldn't it provide an immense value if we did all that work and it turned out to be workable? The problems you listed exist just as well in moral code derived from religious axioms.
> You are arguing (I think) that the codes provided by religions are totally irrational and should be discarded
No, I would not say that all of the moral code provided by the various religions are completely irrational and should be discarded. There is a lot of guidelines that I would probably agree with. I just reject some of the axioms like the existance of god. I can agree with a conclusion even if I disagree with how they arrived at said conclusion. Note that I do not claim there is no god. I am not an atheist. But I see no proof for it and we just don't know if there is one or not. It is not proven and it seems not falsifiable.
> If you accept the axioms (e.g. that the word of God/Jesus is axiomatically moral, that the Bible records the word of God/Jesus), then the reasoning from that point on is pretty straightforward.
I don't accept these axioms.
> And in particular it's fairly complete because the Bible covers how to treat a lot of common situations. We know this moral code sorta mostly works, because it's been around a long time and we have a lot of experience with it.
Sure, it might sorta mostly work but at that point we could also have just come up with random moral rules and tried them all over a long time and stuck with the set that sorta mostly works. We would not need to justify them with religious axioms. I think you will agree with me here because you also said religion is not the only way that can provide a moral code.
> We also know what happened to communist societies that deliberately erased religion and replaced it with Marxist morality - hundreds of millions of deaths,
I don't think the soviet era was following the core spirit of science though. It had a lot more in common with religious doctrine. That they pushed to erase religion was rather a play in order to remove any competing power systems that could endanger them.
> The problem is that this justification fails in the case where one side is overwhelmingly strong. If my side knows about guns and has them, and all you have is spears, then realistically I can kill as many of you as I want without any real risk. Moreover I can then move in and take all your land and women, so at that point it's an evolutionary fit strategy to do so. Yet this shouldn't be considered morally OK merely because the risk of dying in return is very low. Indeed, it's critical to have a moral code that doesn't involve relative risks here to stop exactly that genocidal situation from occurring.
I have actually already addressed this. Your argument overlooks that the two groups belong to a bigger group which again needs to optimize for survival. If one part of a species kills another part of the same species then the species has weakend itself. This goes all the way up to all living things. It is an often held misconception that survival of the fittest means it has to be a contest where the winner is the last man standing. If we killed every living being that might be a threat to us no matter how remote then that would actually harm ourselves because it destroys large parts of a working ecosystem and would create all kinds of unforseeable, possibly fatal problems. Religion might arrive at a similar view by proclaiming god has declared life sacred because it was his creation. To me, this while being a useful thought can create a lot more issues because it is intellectually lazier and when people don't understand or are even allowed to question "why" then they have a higher chance of applying the rule in a destructive way. One has to be concious that no rule in a moral code must be assumed 100% correct in all situations.
> Correct but I've never claimed 100% consistent or even majority behaviour; it'd be irrelevant to my argument to do so. My point is that if you build a Darwinian moral code then there's nothing really wrong with me fighting and killing you. After all, animals do it sometimes. Sure not all the time, and I wouldn't go around killing people all the time anyway for the risk related reasons you previously highlighted. But so what? If evolution is all there is to it then how could anyone tell me not to kill you for moral reasons? The fact that most of the time, animals don't do it? Not convincing.
My previous paragraph gave some more explanation on my point of view. To specifically address your example: you killing me for arbitrary reasons poses a risk to you. Society will see your behaviour as destructive to itself and will try to prevent it or punish you for it. This does not mean that killing is always bad. Killing someone that is about to kill other people for no reason would be justified.
Animals don't have the same cognitive capabilities that we have. Nonetheless nature has baked into them traits that are common and result in a lot of behavior that one could reasonably argue that they must have some kind of moral code as well. Human morals are more sophisticated but there are similarities. Now, we are surely not the be-all end-all of evolution which means our cognitive capabilities are also limited. Maybe in a million years our ancestors will look back and pity us for our limited understanding and poor morals :)
At this point I'd like to thank you for a much more intellectually interesting conversation. I was a bit exhausted after the one with al_mandi.
I thank you too for your deeply considered and respectful debate.
I'm not religious and I also don't accept the axioms that the Bible is the word of God, that anything God says is true, etc. We share the goal / ideal of a moral code that is based on simpler, tighter axioms and sound reasoning. Some years ago I thought it would be easy to develop such a code. Nowadays I fear that it's very difficult, perhaps too difficult right now, and we are perhaps to evolved religion what Da Vinci was when he tried to build a mechanical bird i.e. far further away from being able to match the evolved system than he realized, and for many reasons he couldn't have understood.
"I don't think the soviet era was following the core spirit of science though. It had a lot more in common with religious doctrine."
I think this was one of the core criticisms of communism, made both by philosophers in the 19th century and more everyday folk in the 20th. Marx liked to claim that his ideas were scientific, but actually nothing about Marxism is scientific. His critics contended that to be religious, to want to believe in or even to worship something, is a core part of human nature, and that if you simply abolish evolved religions then new pseudo-religions would immediately emerge (but they'd be worse).
We can see that this happened repeatedly in all communist countries: the population was quickly "converted" to new religions which involved worshipping and deifying both the abstract concepts of man, progress and communist ideology, along with also the less abstract leaders. Hence all the "cults of personality" i.e. religions that viewed Lenin, Stalin, Mao etc as quasi-prophets of the coming utopia.
If this claim of a deep need for religion/belief is true, and as I get older I see more and more evidence that maybe it is, then trying to create a moral code based purely on logic derived from a set of sound core axioms might be naive or backfire - sort of like trying to convert the world to speaking Esperanto would. But of course it's very difficult to disentangle cause and effect. Perhaps the apparent "need" for religion is in reality mostly a need for a comprehensive moral code, and as communism didn't provide one, it instead turned into a stunted and disfigured substitute for one.
One obvious way in which an artificial moral code might be lacking is in the story telling aspects. Religions have the advantage (?) that they're easy to teach to children because children ask "why" a lot but can't understand complicated answers. If you had to explain every rule via reference to a long chain of cause/effect logic, it might be difficult to impart the urgency of morality to children and this could lead to problems later. But arguably we have this issue already.
"If we killed every living being that might be a threat to us no matter how remote then that would actually harm ourselves because it destroys large parts of a working ecosystem and would create all kinds of unforseeable, possibly fatal problems"
Yes, so the code we're patching together here is a kind of mix of Darwinian evolution combined with a kind of Gaia style planet/social ecology philosophy. It can work for some things. A concern that arises is that this would appear to be ultimately a form of New Age collectivism - everyone is linked to everyone else. In such a code, do individual rights have any meaning or is everything subservient to the greater whole and if so, how does that not lead in a great circle back to communism?
I find the COVID vaccine mandates to be a good test case for some of these issues. Putting aside for a moment the widely accepted yet pseudo-scientific justification for them (without stopping transmission there is no possible argument in favor), this is ultimately a question of individual rights and risks vs collective outcomes. A "for the betterment of the species" moral code requires some ability to make collective vs individual moral tradeoffs, but in practice such decisions must always be mediated by the state. As we've seen, modern states seem unable to maintain even the most basic levels of rationality about some topics.
> I'm not religious and I also don't accept the axioms that the Bible is the word of God, that anything God says is true, etc. We share the goal / ideal of a moral code that is based on simpler, tighter axioms and sound reasoning. Some years ago I thought it would be easy to develop such a code. Nowadays I fear that it's very difficult, perhaps too difficult right now, and we are perhaps to evolved religion what Da Vinci was when he tried to build a mechanical bird i.e. far further away from being able to match the evolved system than he realized, and for many reasons he couldn't have understood.
This is an interesting point. Maybe using computer simulations could be a valuable tool to attempt it? Oh boy, now I fear someone will develop a Moral AI :) (I think it would be a bad idea)
> I think this was one of the core criticisms of communism, made both by philosophers in the 19th century and more everyday folk in the 20th. Marx liked to claim that his ideas were scientific, but actually nothing about Marxism is scientific. His critics contended that to be religious, to want to believe in or even to worship something, is a core part of human nature, and that if you simply abolish evolved religions then new pseudo-religions would immediately emerge (but they'd be worse).
> We can see that this happened repeatedly in all communist countries: the population was quickly "converted" to new religions which involved worshipping and deifying both the abstract concepts of man, progress and communist ideology, along with also the less abstract leaders. Hence all the "cults of personality" i.e. religions that viewed Lenin, Stalin, Mao etc as quasi-prophets of the coming utopia.
I would agree with this although I am not sure if the rise of replacement belief systems is a given. These absolutist belief systems (be it based on god or on more earthy core) are the ultimate issue as far as I can see. So a society has to come up with a way to prevent these extreme ideologies. The problem is that a society which is not absolute also has to be tolerant to people having other belief systems or otherwise it itself would be an absolute and extreme system. I'm not 100% sure of this.
> If this claim of a deep need for religion/belief is true, and as I get older I see more and more evidence that maybe it is, then trying to create a moral code based purely on logic derived from a set of sound core axioms might be naive or backfire - sort of like trying to convert the world to speaking Esperanto would. But of course it's very difficult to disentangle cause and effect. Perhaps the apparent "need" for religion is in reality mostly a need for a comprehensive moral code, and as communism didn't provide one, it instead turned into a stunted and disfigured substitute for one.
I am convinced that we humans require a moral code - something that can guide us when making our decisions but I don't see a reason why it has to be from religion. Also humans are lazy. So religious moral code is a very convenient tool in our lives. It is accepted in your group of peers if they share the religion so no need to argue too mcuh, it doesn't need too much thinking because a lot is declared via doctrine and like you said it sorta kinda works. I think this is one of the reasons why religions spread. Accepting it makes life easier in a way.
Religions are undergoing also an evolutionary process in my opinion. They often base themselves upon the previous one and alter it trying to improve it.
> One obvious way in which an artificial moral code might be lacking is in the story telling aspects. Religions have the advantage (?) that they're easy to teach to children because children ask "why" a lot but can't understand complicated answers. If you had to explain every rule via reference to a long chain of cause/effect logic, it might be difficult to impart the urgency of morality to children and this could lead to problems later. But arguably we have this issue already.
Very good point that I had not thought of. We teach children with story books. We tell them stories. Trying to teach them with dry rational arguments might not work. And children have less capacity to distrust. When they ask "why" it is usually because they are naturally curious and just don't understand something. As they grow older they are more likely to question the teachings if they don't think these make sense. Only when growing older did I come to the realization that I can't take the religious teachings of my childhood as true. I do remember my mother reading me kids stories which had moral insights but had nothing to do with religion so it seems stories are the key but they do not need to be religion based. There could be a simple version of the moral code for kids which can piece by piece be replaced with a more complex one as they grow up.
> Yes, so the code we're patching together here is a kind of mix of Darwinian evolution combined with a kind of Gaia style planet/social ecology philosophy. It can work for some things. A concern that arises is that this would appear to be ultimately a form of New Age collectivism - everyone is linked to everyone else. In such a code, do individual rights have any meaning or is everything subservient to the greater whole and if so, how does that not lead in a great circle back to communism?
Again good point and question. I think what the core issue here is, is the question of the group or the individuum is more important. Arguably chosing either one can lead to pretty serious issues. If we choose the group then we run danger of looping back to communism indeed. If we choose the individuum then we go in the "the strongest can take it all" direction. This means a balance between the two has to be found. That is what we have in our societies right now in many regards. In law systems we have rights of the public and rights of of private individuals. I'm not sure if this can be derived from Darwinian thinking. Maybe evolution also tries to optimize for an individual to be the best it can as long as the downside for the species is not bigger than the upside of the individual?
Many times a right or freedom for some part of society is a removal of a right or freedom of another part. It always boils down to a balancing act. And yes, a justice system is required to mediate that. Though we should not assume that it will be perfect, as long as it is based on humans which are imperfect it will be imperfect as well but it should be possible to build a really good one. We have a few that I would describe as "not too bad" but there is a lot of room for improvement.
> Religions are based on a lot of completely made up stuff
Did you survey all religions to make such claim? And it's not like you don't need axiomatic bases that need to be accepted as is to base science on. There's a lot of "I think" and assumptions in your post that are not backed up by evidence, and some even contrary to reality.
> Did you survey all religions to make such claim?
That is the definition of religion. They are believes that relate to supernatural beings and sprituality. They cannot be proven or disproven.
> And it's not like you don't need axiomatic bases that need to be accepted as is to base science on.
Correct, there are axioms - assumptions - which the rest of the logical system is based upon. Same as for example in Mathematics. The assumptions are much more reasonable than for example assuming there is a God because they result in expirically testable predictions.
I have started to watch the video you linked to, I have not finished it yet but the beginning was pretty good and the presenter seems well spoken. But by about minute 10 I already noticed a lot of logical fallacies. He is (rightfully maybe) accusing certain famous people in history of wrong logical arguments but then he quickly makes the same plus a lot of ad hominems thrown in for good measure. For example the claim that the "four horsemen" of science think that replacing mosques and synagogues into starbucks would make society all peaceful is frankly just ridicolous. Then he immediately follows it up by claiming if there is no religion then there is no morality. This is completely baseless. I am not a religious person but I do have morals. I'm not running around trying to torture people just because I don't believe in a supernatural being. I'm going to watch it in full because listening to the other side of an argument is the best but I have to say this talk is going south very fast IMHO :(
I finished it now. It did not get any better. Most of his arguments can be boiled down to "science can't explain that so it must be god". No.
Towards the end he shows a lack of understanding of statistics. He claims if any infinitesmally small change to the laws of nature would have caused an uninhabitable universe then it must have been specifically designed the way it is. He brings several examples that actually are all the exact same argument.
The mistake here is that he assumes that there was only one random try at creating this universe and that we cannot have been sooo extremely lucky. There is no reason to believe that there was only one try. What if there were a large number of tries? If all the other tries resulted in uninhabitable universes then of course us being in the lucky version must make us think this was not random chance.
Example: ask a large number of people to flip a coin ten times. Eventually you will reach someone that actually flipped ten times heads in succession. What would that guy think? Clearly that's not a normal coin and you designed the whole thing to be like that because what are the odds of him flipping ten times heads? He does not know about the other thousand people you had play this game that didn't get ten times heads.
> There is no reason to believe that there was only one try.
Exactly what he mentions in his talk, on what are you basing this belief? It's a metaphysical claim that is outside the realm of science. You just proved his point.
Erm, what? I disproved his point. He claims because us being in this unlikely universe is proof for a design. No, it's a logical fallacy as I outlined in the example of flipping coins. The video presenter is the guy who flipped 10 times heads and claims "See! God made this happen!" Can you please point to the exact time in the video where he mentions multiple tries? That would contradict his own point about the low chance and hence design.
He assumes there was only one "flip of the coin". There is zero reason to assume this and so his whole argument falls because when his assumption does not apply then mathematics tells us there is absolutely nothing special about finding ourselves in that "unlikely" universe because actually when taking a step back it isn't unlikely, it is pretty much guaranteed - completely without anyone designing it that way.
> Can you please point to the exact time in the video where he mentions multiple tries?
I was referring to what you wrote. You said that there's no reason that there weren't multiple tries to get the universe just right to support life. I'm saying that's a metaphysical claim you just made, which is outside the realm of science, which is the point the presenter was making.
I can actually use his own logic to prove the opposite point of his claim. Since his reasoning only works if there was one (or very few) tries wouldn't it be very unlikely to have had few tries compared to a much high number of possibly inifite tries? That means his case is in fact the unlikely case (few tries and hence likely design).
What I am saying is that we have no reason to assume and certainly no proof for ANY number of tries so we can't deduce what he claims. But if you follow his reasoning then he actually would need to come to the opposite conclusion that he came to.
I am not making the metaphysical claim, he is making it. I am only showing that his own logic works against him. Anyone who claims god exists is in the realm of metaphysical.
It seems like he's wanting to borrow science or at least some logic when it supports his argument but when it comes to the gods, he wants to say they exist outside of science and logic. This is a common argument and it's not ultimately falsifiable, ie, 'I say it's true because you can't prove otherwise'. And so too do invisible flying fairies exist who render themselves outside the realms of science due to magic pixie dust.
And so is any other argument to attempt to explain what was before the universe. Those are outside the realms of science. And furthermore, just because something is not falsifiable does not make it untrue. We exist in this world after all, so something had to have happened at the start.
I posted that lecture as an intro to broaden people's perspectives. It is then a proof by induction to reach the correct religion that explains our world. Some signs are summarized on www.provingislam.com. There are lots of great scholars who have presented many proofs on the matter.
> And so is any other argument to attempt to explain what was before the universe. Those are outside the realms of science.
That's the point of the submitted article. That any theory that cannot be proven should not be paid much attention to. They are nice thought experiments but that's it.
> And furthermore, just because something is not falsifiable does not make it untrue.
Neither does it make it true. The point is if there can't be proof then it's pointless to think too much about it.
> I posted that lecture as an intro to broaden people's perspectives.
Unfortunately the video failed miserably at that. It was full of wrong claims and conclusions, logic errors and on top used the same attacks on certain groups that it in the beginning complained about.
> It is then a proof by induction to reach the correct religion that explains our world. Some signs are summarized on www.provingislam.com. There are lots of great scholars who have presented many proofs on the matter.
You said there were proofs in the video. There were none whatsoever. You can't follow a proof of induction based on wrong premises. Religion does not explain our world, science does (to some extend). Religion is a tool that has been used for good and bad throughout history.
Please don't refer to more outside sources that supposedly contain proof but bring one solid proof here yourself. So far everything has been debunked.
> That any theory that cannot be proven should not be paid much attention to
So we continue to live our life as animals?
As I mentioned elsewhere, in Islam, we have logic, observational evidence, and the honest news to get to truth. Disregarding any one of them is nonsensical.
> Neither does it make it true. The point is if there can't be proof then it's pointless to think too much about it.
Honest news is a source of truth.
> You said there were proofs in the video
There were several arguments made, e.g. fine tuning argument and the fact that something cannot come out of nothing. Those are established, and denying them is basically denying logic.
>> That any theory that cannot be proven should not be paid much attention to
> So we continue to live our life as animals?
What? How does yours follow from mine? I absolutely can't follow your way of thinking. Please explain. We seperated from animals long before religions were a thing. I am not living life as an animal just because I am not a theist (nor atheist).
> As I mentioned elsewhere, in Islam, we have logic, observational evidence, and the honest news to get to truth. Disregarding any one of them is nonsensical.
> Honest news is a source of truth.
"Honest news" is hearsay. I can't go and verify any of it. I cannot logically explain any of it even. You are asking me to just believe it is true what someone a millenia ago said, something (miracles) that goes against any real life obvervation I can do. Sorry, not happening.
> There were several arguments made, e.g. fine tuning argument and the fact that something cannot come out of nothing. Those are established, and denying them is basically denying logic.
You said there is proof and yet whenever I ask you to present it you don't. I refused a whole bunch of the arguments made in the video, I think it was extremely misleading and some might call it dishonest.
I specifically refuted his fine tuning argument. I did so using basic logic and understanding of statistics. Can you tell me where exactly I was wrong? Quick recap: he assumes (unjustified) that there was only one try at making the universe and so the chance to get our universe would be excedingly low. There is no reason to make such an assumption and if you remove that assumption then the most likely scenario is actually that you arrive at our universe because with enough tries you will hit the jackpot a hundred times in a row, guaranteed. From our limited point of view that would look like a rigged system, something designed to be that way. This might be unintuitive at first to many people but is a simple mathematical fact.
That is just one of the possible explanation without resulting to intelligent design. Stephen Hawking's top-down cosmology is another. There are a few more.
> "Honest news" is hearsay. I can't go and verify any of it. I cannot logically explain any of it even. You are asking me to just believe it is true what someone a millenia ago said, something (miracles) that goes against any real life obvervation I can do. Sorry, not happening.
Look up the Islamic Isnad system.
Furthermore, if that's how you're going to view the world, then you can't accept any news about history. Obviously that is not wise or rational.
> I did so using basic logic and understanding of statistics. Can you tell me where exactly I was wrong?
By assuming there were many "tries" before the current universe came into existence. Who was behind those tries? When was the first try? Those are all metaphysical claims.
I did but I didn't see anything that convinced me. It really is hearsay.
> Furthermore, if that's how you're going to view the world, then you can't accept any news about history. Obviously that is not wise or rational.
No, you keep on making wrong conclusions. I accept there are historical texts and I can with rational thought come up with rough estimates how likely those events happened as written. Historians are usually honest that they can't be 100% sure that those events happened exactly as written because there is a long history of our understanding of events being incomplete, inaccurate or completely wrong. We can't take historical texts as gospel to build all our system of society and be so brazen to claim it's 100% true. And if some historical text talks about miracles, something which cannot be explained with rational thought and to the best of our current knowledge should be impossible then I have to be extra sceptical.
> By assuming there were many "tries" before the current universe came into existence. Who was behind those tries? When was the first try? Those are all metaphysical claims.
I showed that when I use his base of reasoning then his conclusion is wrong. Applying statistics leads to the opposite conclusion than what he presented.
His hole argument rests on an assumption he picked out of thin air. So if he can do it then I can with equal right assume there were many tries, no? Him and me would both have no justification to pick either.
Now if I give you my own opinion then I would say there is zero reason to make such assumptions and therefor we cannot deduce anything about how many tries there have been, when the first try was, if there even exists time outside our universe or what other rules apply or don't apply. It's all thought experiments. Thinking that the idea of god was there and just willed the universe into existance is a thought experiment just as valid as me claiming a pink machine prints universes. I cannot prove that and you can't disprove it. It's a stalemate. I admit that fact while you are 100% sure of your point of view. And since you are so keen on relying on history: history tells us people that had your point of view eventually were proven wrong.
Like you said, all those things including your claims are metaphysical theories. They are not facts.
No it's not. Even non Muslims admitted that we Muslims have the right to be proud of it. There's nothing else anywhere like it, secular or non secular texts.
> Historians are usually honest
Our Muslim historians even more so.
> And if some historical text talks about miracles, something which cannot be explained with rational thought and to the best of our current knowledge
Or that God bent the laws of our reality to make a point. Not everything is explainable by logic, especially when we see such events take place thousands of years later in our lifetimes today.
> So if he can do it then I can with equal right assume there were many tries, no?
No, because his claim is that there is a creator, whereas you're just making a claim that has no basis in your secular materialistic world view.
> Now if I give you my own opinion then I would say there is zero reason to make such assumptions
We exist, so there had to be a starting point. We have evidence that people came and claimed to be sent from God, and we proved their claims based on many things (their character, miracles, etc). The Quran to this day stands as a living miracle, and its challenge is up for anyone to take (many centuries after everyone tried and failed).
> They are believes that relate to supernatural beings and sprituality. They cannot be proven or disproven.
That's not 100% true. There can (and is) proof and evidence for validating religious claims. You're conflating belief in the unseen (with evidence) with blind faith without evidence, those are two different things.
> I am not a religious person but I do have morals.
He mentions that non-religious people can have morals later in the lecture.
> That's not 100% true. There can (and is) proof and evidence for validating religious claims. You're conflating belief in the unseen (with evidence) with blind faith without evidence, those are two different things.
Any religion who claims there is a God does not have proof of such. If there was real experimentally testable and unambigous proof than scientists would need to accept that.
What does belief in the unseen with evidence mean?
> He mentions that non-religious people can have morals later in the lecture.
So he is contradicting himself then. I'm now at minute 30 but there are so many logical fallacies it's really hard to watch.
The example with the kid asking why the mother is boiling water and apparently science not being able to explain the "why" ("because I love you") or the reason of why the universe exists: he then turns around and just claims religion can give you the correct answer which clearly it can't because there are different religions that would give you possibly different answers and they can't all be right at the same time.
He claims science cannot "prove" emotions or other workings of our brain. Well I think we're getting closer and closer to understand how the brain works. We already know that emotions are in part controlled by substances like hormones. We don't know 100% of it but we're working on it.
He further goes on to claim that science cannot provide morality. He again gives no evidence of this. Why can't we derive morals from logical scientific arguments?
Another claim is that science could not explain why someone would go and help a drowning kid. Once more no evidence. How about us being evolutionary programmed to keep our offspring alive to increase chance of the survival of our species? Just earlier to that he claimed animals have no morals. But that is the exact same behaviour that animals are showing...
I can't also follow the argument about science needing to find all possible combinations of DNA mutations that show the transition from apes to humans. Why does it need to show every minute step? How does that show religion is correct instead?
The constant flood of strawmans is impressive at least. I'm at minute 30 and not sure if I will comment more on it, it is very tedious because there is just such an enormous amount of illogical argumentation.
Correct. We can't prove the existance and we can't disprove the existance. Either side would be wrong.
Religion claims there is a god.
Science says just we don't know.
It is pointless to be on the side of religion because as we agreed one cannot prove or disprove it and therefor it becomes indestinguishable from any other claim that can't be falsified. Christianity says there is a god. I say there's a funny pink machine spitting out universes. You can't prove me wrong so you can't say who is right.
> he then turns around and just claims religion can give you the correct answer which clearly it can't because there are different religions
His point is that experimental science is not in the domain of answering "why" in that sense. It's a metaphysical problem outside the realm of science. The question of finding which religion is true is a separate issue. You don't want to fall in the genetic fallacy when making such an argument.
> Well I think we're getting closer and closer to understand how the brain works.
No one is saying we shouldn't work on it. But this sounds like the "science of the gaps" argument that atheists make fun of theists for using when the former claim "God of the gaps" fallacy.
> Why can't we derive morals from logical scientific arguments?
Show me how. He talks about how different cultures agree that certain things are acceptable and others aren't. And he gave the example of harming or sacrificing children. If we agreed tomorrow that such practice is ok, in a secular society there is nothing prohibiting such action.
In Islam, we have something called the Fitrah, a natural disposition to certain things, such as acting "good" (we need a benchmark for that obviously, but in a Judeo-Christian Western world, it's quite obvious), or the innate belief in a Creator. This falls under that, and animals also have instincts.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees. He states the argument at the beginning, and then gives examples. You don't have to agree with each and every example, but the point stands.
Experimental science cannot answer things beyond what it is designed to do.
> His point is that experimental science is not in the domain of answering "why" in that sense. It's a metaphysical problem outside the realm of science. The question of finding which religion is true is a separate issue. You don't want to fall in the genetic fallacy when making such an argument.
That is a wild claim. Science is very much in the domain of answering "why". Science is selfcontious enough to know it can't answer everything. Religion claims the answer "why" but there is tons of claims without proof and often impossible to disprove and so a very sneaky tool. I don't know what genetic fallacy you are refering to.
> No one is saying we shouldn't work on it. But this sounds like the "science of the gaps" argument that atheists make fun of theists for using when the former claim "God of the gaps" fallacy.
As I said, he claims science cannot explain emotions without providing any evidence whatsoever and anyone who is following science even a bit should clearly see that it seems entirely possible that we will be able to understand it all. He wrongfully accuses science and uses this accusation to make us seek the answer in religion instead. Terrible.
> Show me how. He talks about how different cultures agree that certain things are acceptable and others aren't. And he gave the example of harming or sacrificing children.
I gave you an example. Protecting children serves an evolutionary goal. We can find more logic scientific reasons for this behavior. The presenter then brings an example of standing up for an old lady in the bus. Equally here we can make arguments like "if people behave this way then it will increase their own quality of life when they are older". A young person giving up their seat is a minor inconvenience to them but the gain for the old person is much bigger because they might experience a lot more relief when sitting down. This behavior could be explained as an optimization of quality of life of the society.
If different cultures agree on certain acceptable behaviors then that hints at other reasons than religion because different societies have different religions. Which one is the right one?
> If we agreed tomorrow that such practice is ok, in a secular society there is nothing prohibiting such action.
Again logical fallacy. There is nothing inherintly preventing a religious society from commiting atrocious acts as evidenced by religious sacrifices. What if we agreed tomorrow to form a religion which required that red haired kids be sacrificed by the age of 10? How is it being decided by a religious group any different from a secular group? Your claim that a secular group can't have morals is absurd and baffling.
> In Islam, we have something called the Fitrah, a natural disposition to certain things, such as acting "good" (we need a benchmark for that obviously, but in a Judeo-Christian Western world, it's quite obvious), or the innate belief in a Creator. This falls under that, and animals also have instincts.
If we behave similar to animals in some regards is it that we do that because of our instincts or do animals have religious believes? If Islam has some rules that make you behave well then that's great. But it does not mean that you need Islam to behave well.
> I think you're missing the forest for the trees. He states the argument at the beginning, and then gives examples. You don't have to agree with each and every example, but the point stands.
I don't think so. I bring arguments and explanations why his claims don't hold water and his examples are not evidence for his claims. If you want then we can go more into some specific examples.
> Experimental science cannot answer things beyond what it is designed to do.
Once more: that science cannot explain something is NOT evidence for any other random unprovable explanation like the existance of a god.
I would btw like to ask you: would you agree that some parts of Islam might be wrong or do you believe it is 100% correct?
> Once more: that science cannot explain something is NOT evidence for any other random unprovable explanation like the existance of a god.
Which is why in Islam we have three sources of truth: observations, logic, and the honest news. We have established that Muhammad, Prayers of God be upon him, existed, and the Quran is preserved, and the authentic Hadiths are preserved. He performed miracles, and foretold events, some of which only came true in the past couple of decades (more at www.provingislam.com). As such, we trust what he brought forth to us.
> I would btw like to ask you: would you agree that some parts of Islam might be wrong or do you believe it is 100% correct?
I believe Islam is 100% correct. If I don't, then by definition I am not a Muslim. We don't get to pick and choose what we like and don't like. Of course, you're going to have to mention exactly what you mean by "some parts of Islam", that's quite a vague term.
> Which is why in Islam we have three sources of truth: observations, logic, and the honest news. We have established that Muhammad, Prayers of God be upon him, existed, and the Quran is preserved, and the authentic Hadiths are preserved. He performed miracles, and foretold events, some of which only came true in the past couple of decades (more at www.provingislam.com). As such, we trust what he brought forth to us.
Again I can't follow your reasoning. You say that Islam is based on three sources of truth, one being logic but you at the same time claim that god does not follow logic and that we should not try to apply our logic to understand him and his rules. This makes no sense.
> I believe Islam is 100% correct. If I don't, then by definition I am not a Muslim. We don't get to pick and choose what we like and don't like. Of course, you're going to have to mention exactly what you mean by "some parts of Islam", that's quite a vague term.
But there is more than one version of Islam, isn't there? That means you also believe that only your version is the one true version. It also means you believe there cannot have been any mistakes in any of the writings. In any passed on stories. If there is no room for errors then there is no room for improvement. These prophets and scholars were 100% perfect. New knowledge can not supersede old knowledge. This is the definition of blind belief. You don't accept the possibility of errors. You leave no room for another view.
"Some parts of Islam" is intentionally vague because I asked if you believed if it is 100% true. It does not matter what parts of Islam I was refering to because 100% by definition covers it all.
There have been a great number of religions throughout thousands of years. Or iterations and versions of the certain religions. I find it arrogant and shortsighted to believe that your version is the final one and no other that comes after it will be better.
> same time claim that god does not follow logic and that we should not try to apply our logic to understand him and his rules. This makes no sense.
It does make sense. Those three sources of evidence can have some overlap. We cannot for example retest that an ancient battle took place even though we know it did. Not everything is testable over and over again. Same applies here.
> But there is more than one version of Islam, isn't there?
What do you mean by version? Sunni vs Shia I presume? Yes, but we apply the same standards to arrive at truth. Furthermore, all "versions" have the same core: God is one, we all have the same Quran, we all have to pray, fast, etc. We all submit to God. Any other differences we can discuss to arrive at the truth.
> It also means you believe there cannot have been any mistakes in any of the writings.
We have an Isnad system in Islam, something that does not exist anywhere else in either faith systems or even secular systems. It gives us absolute confidence in being able to know if texts are valid or not. If we apply those standards to the Bible for example, it would immediately be rendered as weak (we don't know who the bible authors are).
The Quran is 100% preserved. The authentic Hadiths are 100% preserved. It depends on what you mean by "stories". This is a deep topic that I would not be able to do justice over a post, you'll have to watch an introductory lecture that talks about these things. Furthermore, there is a very specific process in how we go about deducing rules from Quran and Hadith. These are the major schools of thoughts (Hanafi, Shaf'ii, Maliki, and Hanbali).
> If there is no room for errors then there is no room for improvement.
Not true. There are many nascent topics that we have been able to derive rules for based on the approaches I mentioned.
> You don't accept the possibility of errors.
Not true. We know and classified Hadiths according to their authenticity, we have Hadiths that are Mutawater for example, all the way to falsely attributed Hadiths which are fabricated. We've done the work a long long time ago.
> There have been a great number of religions throughout thousands of years. Or iterations and versions of the certain religions. I find it arrogant and shortsighted to believe that your version is the final one and no other that comes after it will be better.
The Islamic view is as follows: God sent prophets and messengers to people throughout history. We accept Moses, Jesus, Noah, Abraham, Lot, Saleh, etc. Prayers of God be upon them all as prophets and messengers. There were many whom we don't have the names of, we're talking hundreds of thousands if I recall correctly. They all came with the same core message of the Oneness of the Creator, and to worship him and submit to him. As such, the followers of those prophets and messengers were called Submitters (Muslims in Arabic). Over time, those messages got corrupted. For example, Jesus Prayers of God be upon him, never claimed to be God or son of God, however, over time some people attributed this false idea to him, and we have the present day incarnation of Christianity.
Islam is the final revelation from God, and is preserved. It supersedes everything before it. Muhammad Prayers of God be upon him was sent to all of mankind until the end of time. He brought with him many miracles, and foretold many events in the future, some of which are happening today before our very eyes.
We have to accept all of those prophets that God sent, otherwise we're not Muslim.
On the other side, there are definitely man made religions (e.g. satanism) and many self proclaimed prophets that were not sent from God. Obviously, we don't give those people any credence, and we were warned about them in our texts.
Also, I've heard the fallacious argument before. Just because there are many religions does not mean that one of them isn't true. This is the genetic fallacy. Something that Dawkins and his ilk do all the time without realizing it.
> It does make sense. Those three sources of evidence can have some overlap. We cannot for example retest that an ancient battle took place even though we know it did. Not everything is testable over and over again. Same applies here.
If something is not testable then I need to be sceptical. Maybe the ancient battle happened. Maybe it didn't. Maybe it happened but the written texts are full of inaccuracies. I can't tell. The more evidence the better. Historical records from a thousand years ago are many times highly inaccurate.
> What do you mean by version? Sunni vs Shia I presume? Yes, but we apply the same standards to arrive at truth. Furthermore, all "versions" have the same core: God is one, we all have the same Quran, we all have to pray, fast, etc. We all submit to God. Any other differences we can discuss to arrive at the truth.
And why is there still no final resolution which one is the true one?
> We have an Isnad system in Islam, something that does not exist anywhere else in either faith systems or even secular systems. It gives us absolute confidence in being able to know if texts are valid or not. If we apply those standards to the Bible for example, it would immediately be rendered as weak (we don't know who the bible authors are).
This literally is appeal to authority. "These fine men said so and so it must be true". I don't believe in the stories in the bible either.
> Not true. There are many nascent topics that we have been able to derive rules for based on the approaches I mentioned.
I am talking about existing rulings. It assumes they have all been, without any shred of doubt 100% perfect. It does not leave room for future knowledge to improve our understanding of the past and adjust accordingly.
It is one of the core concepts of science. Always be open to challenge our understanding of reality and refine our models when new evidence emerges. Since we honestly admit that we don't know everything yet, we need to be open to change and improve.
> Not true. We know and classified Hadiths according to their authenticity, we have Hadiths that are Mutawater for example, all the way to falsely attributed Hadiths which are fabricated. We've done the work a long long time ago.
But you said in another place that you believe everything that Islam teaches you is 100% correct. So all these checks and work has been done yes? Or are you open that there might be a (even if very small) possibility that some mistakes sneaked in somewhere somehow?
> The Islamic view is as follows: God sent prophets and messengers to people throughout history. We accept Moses, Jesus, Noah, Abraham, Lot, Saleh, etc. Prayers of God be upon them all as prophets and messengers. There were many whom we don't have the names of, we're talking hundreds of thousands if I recall correctly. They all came with the same core message of the Oneness of the Creator, and to worship him and submit to him. As such, the followers of those prophets and messengers were called Submitters (Muslims in Arabic). Over time, those messages got corrupted. For example, Jesus Prayers of God be upon him, never claimed to be God or son of God, however, over time some people attributed this false idea to him, and we have the present day incarnation of Christianity.
But it's hearsay. And why does god need you to worship him? Is it bad for god if you don't worship him? If I don't pray, am I somehow hurting him?
> Islam is the final revelation from God, and is preserved. It supersedes everything before it. Muhammad Prayers of God be upon him was sent to all of mankind until the end of time. He brought with him many miracles, and foretold many events in the future, some of which are happening today before our very eyes.
How can you claim it is the final version and nothing will come after it? Do you know the future? Can god change his mind?
You do realize that there have been tons and tons of religions before Islam and many of their followers shared the exact same view as you do? "Our version is the real truth! This time for sure!".
> We have to accept all of those prophets that God sent, otherwise we're not Muslim.
Ok, if you want to be a Submitter than you have to be a... Submitter. Just please don't try to force others to be Submitters too.
> On the other side, there are definitely man made religions (e.g. satanism) and many self proclaimed prophets that were not sent from God. Obviously, we don't give those people any credence, and we were warned about them in our texts.
All religions are man made. They are a theoretical concept to work with certain ideas about the supernatural.
> Also, I've heard the fallacious argument before. Just because there are many religions does not mean that one of them isn't true. This is the genetic fallacy. Something that Dawkins and his ilk do all the time without realizing it.
I cannot disprove your version of god. But as long as I don't see definite proof then I can't submit to this ideology.
> The more evidence the better. Historical records from a thousand years ago are many times highly inaccurate
The Islamic Isanad system addresses this issue.
> And why is there still no final resolution which one is the true one?
The differences are mostly political. There is a resolution, it's just that people stick to their desires in the face of evidence.
> It does not leave room for future knowledge to improve our understanding of the past and adjust accordingly.
Islam does leave things open to adjust as we further our knowledge. The foundations do not change. This does not have anything to do with whether it is true.
> Is it bad for god if you don't worship him? If I don't pray, am I somehow hurting him?
Of course not. He doesn't need us.
> Do you know the future?
God told us the future (it's in the Quran).
I'm quite curious, we Muslims believe that Jesus Prayer of God be upon him will return. If you are alive at that time, is that sufficient evidence for you to accept?
> All religions are man made.
Yet you present no evidence. I presented proof (e.g. provingislam.com) about very detailed prophecies made thousands of years ago and came true. Just because you want something doesn't make it so.
>But they are very very old tools and I don't think we need them anymore.
The societial problems that once solved by religion is worse than ever. It is true that current religions cannot solve it, because they have been "fact checked" out by the new religion of "science" with scientists as the new holymen, but that is a separate discussion.
The point is, we need a solution to those problems more than ever, but we truly cannot hope to find one.
Science is not a religion. Scientists are not holymen as evidence by the constant questioning of their theories by other scientists. That's the whole thing science is about! Relentless checking of hypothesis through experiments that match reality.
I agree strongly with you that we need a solution to these problems as currently we don't have one. I disagree though that we cannot hope to find one. Hope dies last :)
Science is not a religion. If scientism means thinking that science is the best tool we have right now to explain reality then I guess yea I'm pro science. But it's very far from a religion.
BTW science does not claim to know it all or even be able to know it all. In fact it is an important part of science to find the limits of science.
The “war” between religion and science as you are attempting to draw here, is in fact a fantasy, an illusion, the fruit of a tragic misunderstanding.
First, in a very real sense, the modern physical sciences came from religion. The great founders of science—Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Descartes, etc.—were, without exception, trained in ecclesially sponsored schools and universities. It was under the aegis of the church that they took in their physics, their astronomy, and their mathematics. More specifically, they learned in those institutions two essentially theological truths necessary for the emergence of the experimental sciences—namely, that the universe is not God and that the universe, in every nook and cranny, is marked by intelligibility. If nature were divine—as indeed it is considered to be in many religions, philosophies, and mysticisms—then it could never be an apt subject for observation, analysis, and experimentation. And if nature were simply chaotic, void of form, it would never yield up the harmonies and patterned intelligibilities that scientists readily seek. When these two truths, which are both a function of the doctrine of creation, obtain, the sciences can get underway.
Second, when science and theology are properly understood, they are not in conflict, since they are not competing for primacy on the same playing field, like opposing football teams. Utilizing the scientific method, the physical sciences deal with events, objects, dynamics, and relationships within the empirically verifiable order. Theology, employing an entirely different method, deals with God and the things of God—and God is not an object in the world, not a reality circumscribed within the context of nature. As Thomas Aquinas put it, God is not ens summum (highest being), but rather ipsum esse (the act of being as such)—which is to say, God is not a being among beings, but instead the reason why there is an empirically observable universe at all. In this way, he is like the author of a richly complex novel. Charles Dickens never appears as a character in any of his sprawling narratives, yet he is the reason why any of those characters exist at all. Accordingly, the sciences, as such, can never adjudicate the question of God’s existence nor speak of his activity or attributes. Another type of rationality—not in competition with scientific rationality—is required for the determination of those matters.
And this brings me to my third point: as parent said, _scientism_ is not science. Sadly rampant today, especially among the young, scientism is the reduction of all knowledge to the scientific form of knowledge. The undeniable success of the physical sciences and the extraordinary usefulness of the technologies to which they have given rise have produced in the minds of many this conviction, but it represents a tragic impoverishment. A chemist might be able to tell us the chemical makeup of the paints that Michelangelo used on the Sistine Ceiling, but he couldn’t, qua scientist, tell us a thing about what makes that work of art so beautiful. A geologist might be able to tell us the stratification of the earth below the city of Chicago, but he could never, again qua scientist, tell us whether that city is being justly or unjustly governed. There isn’t a trace of the scientific method in Romeo and Juliet, but who would be so stupid as to assert that that play tells us nothing true about the nature of love. In a similar way, the great texts of the Bible and the theological tradition are not “scientific,” but they nevertheless speak the profoundest truths about God, creation, sin, redemption, grace, etc. Both the cause and effect of scientism, sadly, is the attenuation of the liberal arts in our institutions of higher education. Rather than appreciating literature, history, philosophy, and religion as conduits of objective truth, many today relegate these to the arena of subjective feeling or subject them to withering ideological criticism.
My fourth and final point is this: Galileo is one paragraph in one chapter of a very long book. The great astronomer is often invoked as the patron saint of heroic scientists struggling to free themselves from the obscurantism and irrationality of religion. The censorship of his books by the Church, and the great scientist’s virtual imprisonment at the behest of the pope, is taken as the dark paradigm of the Church/science relationship. Obviously, the Galileo episode was hardly the Church’s finest moment, and in point of fact, John Paul II, expressing real contrition, explicitly apologized for it. But to use it as the lens for viewing the play between faith and science is crucially inadequate. There have been, from the earliest days of the modern sciences, thousands of deeply religious people involved in scientific research and investigation. To name just a handful: Copernicus, revolutionary cosmologist and a third order Dominican; Nicholas Steno, the father of geology and a bishop of the Church; Louis Pasteur, one of the founders of microbiology and a devout Catholic layman; Gregor Mendel, the father of modern genetics and an Augustinian friar; Georges Lemaître, formulator of the Big Bang theory of cosmic origins and a Catholic priest; Mary Kenneth Keller, the first woman in the United States to receive a doctorate in computer science and a Catholic religious sister. I believe it is fair to say that all of these figures understood the fundamental points that I have laid out in this article and therefore saw that they could be utterly devoted to both their science and their faith.
> The “war” between religion and science as you are attempting to draw here, is in fact a fantasy, an illusion, the fruit of a tragic misunderstanding.
The fact of the matter is that persecution of scientists based on religious grounds is a bitter reality. Denial of that is the fantasy.
> First, in a very real sense, the modern physical sciences came from religion. The great founders of science—Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Descartes, etc.—were, without exception, trained in ecclesially sponsored schools and universities. It was under the aegis of the church that they took in their physics, their astronomy, and their mathematics. More specifically, they learned in those institutions two essentially theological truths necessary for the emergence of the experimental sciences—namely, that the universe is not God and that the universe, in every nook and cranny, is marked by intelligibility. If nature were divine—as indeed it is considered to be in many religions, philosophies, and mysticisms—then it could never be an apt subject for observation, analysis, and experimentation. And if nature were simply chaotic, void of form, it would never yield up the harmonies and patterned intelligibilities that scientists readily seek. When these two truths, which are both a function of the doctrine of creation, obtain, the sciences can get underway.
This is also full of logical fallacies. Just because some scientists had been also religious to varying degrees does not mean that science can only emerge from religion. Even more so if they had little choice because being religious was the norm and they would have in many cases had little access to universities had they openly spoken against religion.
Science does not need the doctrine of creation which is a fairly recent concept. Do you think that nobody performed science before these religions existed? The first people who figured out how to make a fire were scientists and not preachers. Do you think people who are not theists are not able to do science? These claims are mindboggling.
From Bell to Zuse, they seem to have done just fine without believing in creationism or religion at all.
> Second, when science and theology are properly understood, they are not in conflict, since they are not competing for primacy on the same playing field, like opposing football teams. Utilizing the scientific method, the physical sciences deal with events, objects, dynamics, and relationships within the empirically verifiable order. Theology, employing an entirely different method, deals with God and the things of God—and God is not an object in the world, not a reality circumscribed within the context of nature. As Thomas Aquinas put it, God is not ens summum (highest being), but rather ipsum esse (the act of being as such)—which is to say, God is not a being among beings, but instead the reason why there is an empirically observable universe at all. In this way, he is like the author of a richly complex novel. Charles Dickens never appears as a character in any of his sprawling narratives, yet he is the reason why any of those characters exist at all. Accordingly, the sciences, as such, can never adjudicate the question of God’s existence nor speak of his activity or attributes. Another type of rationality—not in competition with scientific rationality—is required for the determination of those matters.
If religion was all about the things outside our physical realm then I'd be fine with it. Everyone is free to believe in a god if that somehow helps them in life. But the problem is that religion does not keep itself to the realm outside physics but touches many aspects of real life and tries to dictate even the life of other people who do not agree to the arbitrary rules of some religion. And this is why religion clashes with science. If religion was playing on a totally different football field than science all would be good. But religion plays on a field that overlaps with the field of science.
> And this brings me to my third point: as parent said, _scientism_ is not science. Sadly rampant today, especially among the young, scientism is the reduction of all knowledge to the scientific form of knowledge. The undeniable success of the physical sciences and the extraordinary usefulness of the technologies to which they have given rise have produced in the minds of many this conviction, but it represents a tragic impoverishment. A chemist might be able to tell us the chemical makeup of the paints that Michelangelo used on the Sistine Ceiling, but he couldn’t, qua scientist, tell us a thing about what makes that work of art so beautiful. A geologist might be able to tell us the stratification of the earth below the city of Chicago, but he could never, again qua scientist, tell us whether that city is being justly or unjustly governed. There isn’t a trace of the scientific method in Romeo and Juliet, but who would be so stupid as to assert that that play tells us nothing true about the nature of love. In a similar way, the great texts of the Bible and the theological tradition are not “scientific,” but they nevertheless speak the profoundest truths about God, creation, sin, redemption, grace, etc. Both the cause and effect of scientism, sadly, is the attenuation of the liberal arts in our institutions of higher education. Rather than appreciating literature, history, philosophy, and religion as conduits of objective truth, many today relegate these to the arena of subjective feeling or subject them to withering ideological criticism.
We have very different understandings of the word truth. Truth is something that has been proven and can be verified beyond doubt. Stories about gods are not truths. Tales are not to be taken for truths - they are merely that, tales.
> My fourth and final point is this: Galileo is one paragraph in one chapter of a very long book. The great astronomer is often invoked as the patron saint of heroic scientists struggling to free themselves from the obscurantism and irrationality of religion. The censorship of his books by the Church, and the great scientist’s virtual imprisonment at the behest of the pope, is taken as the dark paradigm of the Church/science relationship. Obviously, the Galileo episode was hardly the Church’s finest moment, and in point of fact, John Paul II, expressing real contrition, explicitly apologized for it. But to use it as the lens for viewing the play between faith and science is crucially inadequate. There have been, from the earliest days of the modern sciences, thousands of deeply religious people involved in scientific research and investigation. To name just a handful: Copernicus, revolutionary cosmologist and a third order Dominican; Nicholas Steno, the father of geology and a bishop of the Church; Louis Pasteur, one of the founders of microbiology and a devout Catholic layman; Gregor Mendel, the father of modern genetics and an Augustinian friar; Georges Lemaître, formulator of the Big Bang theory of cosmic origins and a Catholic priest; Mary Kenneth Keller, the first woman in the United States to receive a doctorate in computer science and a Catholic religious sister. I believe it is fair to say that all of these figures understood the fundamental points that I have laid out in this article and therefore saw that they could be utterly devoted to both their science and their faith.
None of these examples though shows that we need religion for science. The fact that some famous scientists made religion and science work for themselves is fine but what does this show us? That all religions work for all scientists? Clearly not.
Proper religion and science do not disagree. I am a person of faith (which is backed by evidence), and my faith pushed us to seek knowledge. The Islamic Golden age is a testament to that fact.
Scientism is not what you defined. From wikipedia (which I take with a big grain of salt)
> Scientism is the opinion that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality.
I’m only 10:33 into this video and already facepalming so much. The guy starts with explaining logic basics, which is cool, then goes to blaming some people “leading the atheist movement” (whom I never really listened to and agree that they devote too many of their attention to fight religion, but hey everyone chooses their own way) and then summarizes “if you don’t have any moral authority then what’s your moral anchor” backing it by some citation of classics lacking any context. Right after talking about logic and how these atheist leaders manipulate it. Then goes to repeat some worship nonsense.
Don’t expect many people to watch this hour long blah blah blah.
Edit: beared with it to 19:18 and stopped, sorry, this guy is full of populistic bullshit he tries to refute. Does god exist or not, we will not know ftom this. But you are literally following a fanatic.
Faith by definition isn't something which can be backed by evidence otherwise it would by definition just be a type of science. It would be the study of God via experimentation, accumulation of evidence, and logical extrapolation. There are religious folks that are big on logical deduction and extrapolation but they all start with terribly unlikely axioms pulled straight out of their ass or equally made up fictions rendered sacred somehow by the passage of time.
> Faith by definition isn't something which can be backed by evidence
There is evidence backed belief in the unseen, and there is blind faith. So your claim that by definition faith is without evidence is not correct.
Secondly, even science needs to accept certain axioms as a given so that we can build upon them.
Scientism is believing that the only way to arrive at truth is through experimentation, which is a false view. There are many things we accept, even though we cannot prove them through experimentation.
Watch the lecture I posted to broaden your horizons.
Science chooses minimal axioms and builds the flesh of the world based on the existing bones ready to revise when new bones are discovered.
Religion chooses a substantial set of axioms derived from a mixture of philosophy and fantasy dreamt up by our pre scientific ancestors who thought bad smells caused disease then makes many forms of revision sinful. A set of beliefs without ability to revise everything from the ground up will forever be limited.
You can't win arguments by playing logical fallacies like they are uno cards. I was pointing out that the same ancestors who dreamt up the axioms you aren't allowed by religious law to fully revise or toss out had understandings limited by the information available in that antique period. Only hundreds of years ago medical professionals believed in the miasma theory of disease and before that both of our ancestors believed that sickness had paranormal causes.
The problem with your set of axioms isn't MERELY the size. It's that you are asked to buy them in a box sealed millennia ago by people who if they were transported to our time frame would be regarded as lunatics because they believe crazy shit. Worse you are offered imaginary immortality and the threat of imaginary perdition in order to obtain actual service in exchange for wholly fictional benefits.
It took him 8 minutes to actually set himself up to actually start talking and the first thing that came out of Dr Ali's mouth is a lie. He said of 4 prominent authors promoting atheism that he described as the four horsemen of atheism that their primary argument is that god isn't good ergo god isn't real. This...just isn't true. It's a gross reduction. I'm 8 minutes in and your speaker's only substantial point is a lie.
Now we go on to a false rant about Islam being inherently peaceful when it didn't arise in a peaceful time nor promote what we would today think of as peace, atheists being bigots, random comparison of atheism to antisemitism. Some hate for the Beatles. Comparison of Beatles fandom to satanism. I have to admit that this is entertaining. Having someone smart enough to read books and speak well while being absolutely committed to falsehood is like watching someone dress up their dog as a human being. The forms are there but not the substance.
People have been declaring society was going to hell in a hand basket for at least the last several thousand years and were we really going to hell we should have long since arrived in perdition. It is common to mistake change in social norms as decay instead of progression because one who is anchored in a particular set of mores and forms is unable to see the value in change. They perceive only the losses and never the gains.
Your speaker declares that a fiction is the root of all morality and I find myself unimpressed with his insight because people hold all sorts of beliefs including none at all and this seems positively uncorrelated with their observed degree of morality and decency. He has it in fact entirely backwards and the necessary fictions we create to explain our world our rooted in our essential nature as sympathetic and empathetic creatures. We look at our fellow man and see the need to care about them as we do ourselves and thus we elevate that concern to a natural law and produce something better than ourselves to defend it.
If we were inherently so lawless the need for law and justice as each society understands it wouldn't flow so effortlessly from our pens or spring so readily to our minds.
The reasoning is simple we developed a mind too complex for direct meta analysis of all its internal workings and a need to work beside others of our own species as complex as ourselves and the tools to understand and predict their behavior works well turned inward.
We perceive the difference between a desired state and a present state even if its not actually physically painful as suffering and produce a society where at least an in group minimizes suffering because its adaptive surely but also because we live not in the world but in our own heads in a model of the world constantly rewritten full of individuals we imagine with the same tools we use to imagine ourselves. If we destroy them or diminish them we must necessarily live in an internal world wrought in part of the blight we have brought about which we must perceive again with the same internal tools we use to experience ourselves. All evil and harm is self mutilation.
For a being capable of sympathy and meta-cognition morality would seem to come naturally even if the end results differ wildly in thoughts, results, and methods. Assigning it ex post facto to the god you created to enforce it is the tail wagging the dog. It's illogical because empathy came millions of years before your particular species of god.
13 minutes in and his argument seems to be that it would be really bad if God weren't real ergo God then some people who promoted atheism were bad dudes ergo we must reject atheism. This mirrors the exact argument he first falsely put in the mouths of his opponents and then helpfully debunked.
Now we are suggesting that atheism suggests that survival of the fittest be applied as a moral principal rather than a description of the evolution of life on Earth. This is a tired trope. If rabbits are different degrees of brown and the browner guys blend in better and the coyotes each more of the other fellows then more browner rabbits will on average breed over time leading to browner rabbits. Trying to apply this moralistically towards human beings is both a misunderstanding of humanity, ethics, and science. We don't need Jesus or Allah to tell us this is a bad idea.
At 16 we segway into shitty parts of American history with a sideline into why Muslims are better because they don't kill women and children. Notably given the religious make up of American leaders these actions were largely perpetrated by people who also believe in God. This is neither here nor there but keeping score on that point seems pretty important to him.
At this point it looks like its important to him to establish a hierarchy of morality Islam > Christianity > Godless.
Since I don't have all day I'm going to skip from minute 18 to 45. Ok now we are proving the existence of gods we have the same tired arguments about a watch implying a watch maker and various aspects of our solar system being particularly amenable to life. One would expect such a discussion to happen on worlds,solar systems, and universes that themselves are amenable to our kind of life while silence is likely to reign in environments were life is impossible or unlikely.
If he had read more of the books he degrades by the "four horsemen" of atheism he might already have good answers to these arguments. Likely he has but he hopes you will click a youtube video and sit back and passively absorb re-enforcement of your existing beliefs than actually reading a book yourself.
I watched at least half the lecture you posted and I found it deceptive, manipulative, and ill founded. It did a reasonable job of lobbing critiques at America's geopolitical actions which one might say are fairly easy targets but a poor job of addressing any big questions.
May I suggest you read something written by one of the "four horsemen" of atheism?
> He said of 4 prominent authors promoting atheism that he described as the four horsemen of atheism that their primary argument is that god isn't good ergo god isn't real. This...just isn't true.
How is it a lie? It's a summary, sure, he can only go into so much given the time. He shows a book by one of them and the title is a giveaway of that summary.
> false rant about Islam being inherently peaceful
Based on what are you claiming that it is false? If you confusing peaceful with pacifist, then Islam is not pacifist.
> nor promote what we would today think of as peace
Then inform us what we would today think of as peace.
> It is common to mistake change in social norms as decay instead of progression
It's easy to see the social decay over time. Of course each generation is experiencing such a decay when they compare it to the previous generations, but we clearly see how things are speeding up. Just look at the ills that we see in so called "developed first world nations", the mental illnesses, the decline of morals, the normalization and over sexualization of behaviors, all the way to children, the destruction of the extended family, then the nuclear family. It's quite obvious where things are heading. This is not fear mongering. When you have someone like Kraus saying that he cannot find a moral argument against incest, then someone with half a brain should think about what this means.
> Your speaker declares that a fiction is the root of all morality
I'm not sure where he said that.
> Trying to apply this moralistically towards human beings is both a misunderstanding of humanity, ethics, and science.
No it isn't. From a purely secular and atheistic world view, there was nothing wrong or bad about horrific historic events like the Holocaust, the nuclear bombs, rape, Epstein, etc. I think it was one of those "four horsemen" who said that rape is not good or bad, but it's just a phenomenon like the spots on a cheetah. Even this atheist biology professor claims that there is no ultimate foundation for ethics from an atheistic world view: https://youtu.be/EqK_JPts26k?t=182
That is the only logical conclusion to arrive at from an atheistic world view, at least he's being honest with himself. More atheists should be honest with themselves as well and we'll see how things end up.
> We don't need Jesus or Allah to tell us this is a bad idea.
Based on the above, we sure do.
> while silence is likely to reign in environments were life is impossible or unlikely.
Yet, we exist. So our world is clearly viable for hosting life. I'm not sure what you're getting at here.
> Likely he has but he hopes you will click a youtube video and sit back and passively absorb re-enforcement of your existing beliefs than actually reading a book yourself.
He's a professor and a scholar of biblical hermeneutics with field specialties in Sacred Languages, Comparative Theology, and Comparative Literature. He doesn't "hope" anything. It seems you're straw manning because you think we in Islam shy away from debates or discussion. That couldn't be further from the truth.
> May I suggest you read something written by one of the "four horsemen" of atheism?
Like the time where Dawkins falsely and cringely claims that Islam teaches that salt water and sweet water don't mix? I've watched lectures for those people, and their arguments are straw men, or just outright lies that shows their ignorance and malice especially when it comes to Islam.
Bear in mind that this lecture was just to have people expand their horizons, especially those that think that science is going to answer everything. It won't. There is so much material out there by good people who have torn down these atheistic arguments. People like Youtube these days, so I recommend Mohammad Hijab and Sami Ameri. I have lots more who speak Arabic, but I think this is not the right audience for them.
That is the only logical conclusion to arrive at from an atheistic world view, at least he's being honest with himself. More atheists should be honest with themselves as well and we'll see how things end up.
People may speak fantasies, but act - they mostly act as they honestly think. “Things” will end up just as they are now. You are dehumanizing atheists and, as I suspect, anyone who doesn’t follow your “ethical” god.
We all have a right to disagree, but thinking that all ethical people who do not agree with you are just not honest with themselves is delusional. You’re basically saying that if your god doesn’t prohibit something that other people may find highly unethical in their culture, you will still do that. That’s the essence of how most people see your religion.
> You are dehumanizing atheists and, as I suspect, anyone who doesn’t follow your “ethical” god.
I'm not. We see the evidence of the direction of where the world is heading right before our eyes. The wise people already see it coming.
> thinking that all ethical people who do not agree with you are just not honest with themselves is delusional.
I said that the conclusion that those atheists had reached is the ultimate and only conclusion to reach when one is honest with themselves. I saw many atheists, and they don't think about the implication of their world view. They just live day to day as things around us get worse, then people cry and complain about how bad things are, while being blind to the true causes.
Look at the big mess of the modern day economic system. People are crying about high interest rates, student loans, etc. Islam, Judaism, and Christianity all prohibit usury (interest) for a good reason. Today people are trying to address the symptoms but not the cause, and they're failing at it. All these things have repercussions, but few people see it.
These generalizations that you make about atheists basing on how messed up the world is are false. Any complex system will have issues, and you cannot compare it to an imaginary one. People may cry about many things but fact is they still do not express any interest in living in existing religious states. So maybe what you're seeing as a cultural myopia is an otherwise excellent tradeoff. It's easy to criticize any system while taking it for granted and not living in systems you're advocating for.
You don't need to post the video numerous times. I have commented on it on one of your other replies.
> Proper religion and science do not disagree.
What makes a proper religion? And can you tell me how it agrees with science?
> I am a person of faith (which is backed by evidence), and my faith pushed us to seek knowledge. The Islamic Golden age is a testament to that fact.
Well for me personally, curiousity pushed me to seek knowledge but each to their own.
My problem is that any religion who believes in an all powerful God quickly runs into logical problems. Here is one quick example and I'd love for you to explain to me where my reasoning went wrong:
1. Assume there is an omnipotent being called God
2. If God is omnipotent then he can create two other omnipotent beings that have the following two goals: 1. destroy the other being 2. protect itself from being destroyed.
3. Clearly both of these created beings cannot both achieve their goals because they cannot both destroy the other and at the same time protect themselves.
4. If these beings cannot do what they were created for then clearly they cannot be omnipotent.
5. If God cannot create such beings then clearly he himself is not omnipotent
> What makes a proper religion? And can you tell me how it agrees with science?
One that is backed by proofs and evidence. Islam does not disagree with science.
Your argument is not very different from can God create a rock so heavy that He cannot cary it? The answer is simple, it's a logical absurdity to even go there. God told us about his Attributes, and we are not to hold Him or His Attributes to our worldly logic.
I have seen zero proofs for the existance of god. Not in your video or anywhere else. If such proof existed then that would be the biggest scientific breakthrough in history and it would be the absolute focus for science to understand more.
> Your argument is not very different from can God create a rock so heavy that He cannot cary it? The answer is simple, it's a logical absurdity to even go there. God told us about his Attributes, and we are not to hold Him or His Attributes to our worldly logic.
Yes it's the same argument. I can't follow your logic though. You just claim that we cannot comprehend the concept of god. You say that logic cannot be applied. If we cannot comprehend god and have to give up logic then why would we follow the word of certain people who claimed that god spoke to them? How can we tell apart a true prophet who really was contacted by god from a random imposter? To tell those apart would mean we already know what god would or would not say. But if god does not have to follow logic then how can we deduce what is correct or not?
As you see once you leave the realm of logic the whole house of cards falls.
Another thing you could deduce from your argument btw is that god created humans intentionally in a way that they cannot comprehend. Isn't that painting god in a pretty bad light?
> If such proof existed then that would be the biggest scientific breakthrough i
You still continue to conflate science with God who exists outside the realms and is not bound by the laws of our world. He created logic, it does not apply to him. When He revealed to us his attributes, we are not ones to question whether they make sense to us or not.
So your argument stems from illogic? Surely you don't admit such do you? When I was religious, religion captured me by thinking 'that makes sense'. It used a minor amount of logic to convert me but ultimately it failed because it didn't stand up against my rigors in the end. Religion wants to ultimately refrain from the rigors of logic but when confronted, how does it defend itself? That's right, it tries to use "logical" arguments just like in the video you linked.
If you want to deny logic then the guy you're arguing with is just as right as you think you are because he has justification to be illogical. That is the problem with making unfalsifiable claims like the gods exist outside of logic, you basically admit to a tie, at the very least.
No. I as mentioned in another post, God exists outside the realms of this reality, and is not bound by our laws. He created our laws, and he created logic, and they do not apply to him.
We don't deny logic. If you study Islam, logic is one of the 3 methods to arrive at truth. The other two are observations (not dissimilar from experimental science) and the final is truthfully relayed news (الخبر الصادق). We take all of those into consideration when studying our reality.
> When I was religious
Were you Muslim though? Not all religions have these rigors.
> No. I as mentioned in another post, God exists outside the realms of this reality, and is not bound by our laws. He created our laws, and he created logic, and they do not apply to him.
Yea and once you leave our realm of logic nothing can be proven or argued about apart from stating that we don't know anything about it. To claim otherwise is futile.
> We don't deny logic. If you study Islam, logic is one of the 3 methods to arrive at truth. The other two are observations (not dissimilar from experimental science) and the final is truthfully relayed news (الخبر الصادق). We take all of those into consideration when studying our reality.
But you denied logic. You said when talking about god and his rules we can't apply our logic because he operates outside of it. This is a very dangerous method in order to make some people be the bearers of truth and any other individual must not assume he can independently verify any of it. It is a method to create a power structure.
We apply logic where it applies, and we use other sources of evidence for where it doesn't apply. This is the same as we were talking about regarding science. Science and logic have their limitations, they are good at what they do within their realm of operation, but outside of it, we have to use other tools.
> We apply logic where it applies, and we use other sources of evidence for where it doesn't apply
If you leave the realm of logic then really anything can be claimed. I claim there is a pink machine outside our universe which is printing universes. How do you know this not to be the case?
> If you leave the realm of logic then really anything can be claimed
God is outside the realm of logic. Think about it, if you create a game or simulation, are you bound by its laws? You can make a simulation where 1 + 1 = 5
You seem to have a view that the world consists only of (a) people who claim things, and (b) people who believe them, and that there’s no difference between types of claims.
The claim of someone who says they have the word of god is hearsay and there’s no way to figure out whether they do or not. The claims of someone who says they’ve followed the scientific method are verifiable by others. If they claim that their experiments show tiny blue tetrahedrons make up all matter, other people can check. Nobody can check if god talks to the first person.
The difference is not only in whether they are verifiable, whether they are verified, but also whether things which are produced from them actually seem to work. Religious claims fail at all three: they are not verifiable, they have not been verified, and they don’t seem to work.
The fact that things seem to work does not mean that they actually do work. We all are subject to cognitive biases which can trip us up. Most people aren’t very good at recognizing when that happens. That’s why these things survive so long.
Correct. And over time we--both as individuals and collectively as a civilization--gradually cull those things which seemed to work at one time but have become clear that they do not, and gradually adopt those things which seem to work better than those. In the end, over long periods of time, what matters is what does work, not what seems to. A society which believes than matter is made of small blue regular polyhedra will fail to develop as well as a society which continually culls and refines its beliefs based on experimental evidence.
Except when we test them, they don’t seem to work after all. Would you fly on an airplane engineered by someone trained in engineering, or a plane engineered by someone who relied only on inspiration from a deity? Would you go to the hospital with doctors who practice typical Western medicine, or a hospital in which the doctors only pray over you? Etc.
Yes, I have. The next step beyond thinking "Aha! Replication crisis!" is that the replication crisis is directing you towards its correction: the goal is replication, correct? And in many instances we fall short of that goal. The corrective action is to refine standards to which we hold scientific research. It is not correct to say, "Darnitall, we have a replication crisis, science is no better able to get us closer to things which are true than religion, divination, palm reading, astrology, and coin flipping." And that is exactly the sense in which the replication crisis is improving our ability to figure out which things are more likely to be true than others.
There is no "western" science. It's just science and it works the same wherever you are. Same as there is no "western mathematics".
Why are you and a few other people on the side of religion argueing so much against the west? Science vs religion does not care what the longitude you find yourself in. Or is "eastern science" somehow different?
Science is not perfect, how could it as it is made up of humans and we clearly are not perfect. It's still waaaaaay better than religious doctrines.
It is, because you can verify the claims of a holy man if you go meditate in a cave for a couple of decades.
Since no one is willing to do that, people used to accept their word for a fact. The same is the case with science claim that cannot be verified by common men who depend on them.
That they are also "believing", might be hard to get through the thick skull of these modern "science" gushers. They fail to see that "science" can be just a label, strapped to anything businesses wants to sell.
The missing ingredient is that if the common men--who you think have no better option than to depend blindly on someone they choose to believe--build a civilization based exclusively on the meditations of these holy men who they have accepted as the repositories of truth, they will find that their society will fall to those societies which have a, shall we say, more empirical basis for their view of the world.
> It is, because you can verify the claims of a holy man if you go meditate in a cave for a couple of decades.
This is the most ridicolous thing I've read in a decade on HN. Congrats I guess?
You can readily go and verify a lot of claims of science and I gave you an example in another comment. What claims about god can I go and verify? I'm eager to try.
I can’t reply to the question I was asked, so I reply here:
How many have I verified? I’m not sure of the #, but I’ve verified much of classical physics, chemistry, astronomical observations, and lots of things in electronics (some of which rely on quantum mechanics) and electromagnetism.
But as I said, they question is not whether you or I have personally verified everything, but whether they are verifiable in principle, by anyone. The claims of chemistry, physics, astronomy, etc, are verifiable. The claims of a holy man are not.
Man is imperfect. The scientific method is a process that verifies, humans implement and observe the output. With religion, humans "observe" more than they can verify. Religion admits as much that it lacks verification, that's why it has faith.
Religion wants the best of both worlds, saying it is endowed with logic and verification yet when pushed you get the same tired argument about faith and 'gods exist outside logic'. At the same time it wants to say that it doesn't have to participate. Why should your side be special? Why can't I ultimately resort to illogic? Who knows, maybe my atheistic views are derived from a system so abstracted from my intellectual senses that I can validly resort to claiming they may ultimately stem from a time/place far removed from logic also, I just don't claim that it's an anthropomorphic entity like a god.
And yet, this mythical common man--who you say has to just choose who to trust--will find that if he chooses to build civilization by trusting the imperfect holy men, it will pale in significance to the civilization built by other common men who choose to trust the imperfect scientists.
Except you can find another group of holy men who disagree with that group. And a third group that disagrees with those two groups. The number of groups ends up quite large, and nobody can quite seem to figure out a way to test whether one group has it a bit more right than the others.
Why do you think that matters?
You might as well ask "what makes you trust your own perception when you verify scientific claims"?
As it happens, literally every time you switch on a light you are, in fact, verifying multiple scientific theories. Not to mention interacting with your phone or computer to type your HN comments.
>what makes you trust your own perception when you verify scientific claims"
Because it is with my own perception that I sense the rest of the world with it. So that is all that one should care. Let me know if you don't get this. I ll elaborate..
One of main reasons the scientific method has been so successful is because it forces us to challenge our assumptions that our perceptions of the world are correct.
My second reply is that it’s important whether things derived from two different claims actually work.
Make two hospitals: one which follows standard Western medical practice, and the other which does not and instead performs prayers over its patients. I can predict which hospital will have better patient outcomes.
> I can predict which hospital will have better patient outcomes.
That is quite besided the point. The point being every patient who goes there believes the hospital us doing western blah blah blah...
Let me simplyfy it even more. The common mans dependence of "science" is based on beliefs. Just as it was on religion at an older time.
That scientific method is more trust worthy, does not make that dependence not based on belief. That is the weakest link in the chain, and that link is common to both science and religion.
You seem to be focused on the so-called common man and his inability to do anything more than just believe things. I think you do this common man an injustice.
Let’s say this common man is religious (pick one) and is going about his day and is injured in some accident. He is taken to a hospital, and one which he knows is aligned with his religious beliefs. Upon arriving the doctors triage him and tell him he’s bleeding internally. But then they tell him that they have assembled a team of highly respected members of the religion to which he adheres and these persons are revered among its followers. They are about to lay hands on him and pray for his internal bleeding to stop. He asks if they will also be performing surgery, to which they reply that no, their god is loving, caring, and will hear the prayers of the faithful and heal him.
Now if you really are talking about the truly common man, this common man will, with whatever strength that remains, object quite strenuously! He will insist that a doctor perform surgery on him immediately and stop the bleeding.
And why does this common man do this? Because what he really believes is that while his religious beliefs may provide some type of assurance and comfort, when the rubber meets the road, he’d like some science, please.
The difference being what those beliefs are based upon.
I'd recommend a read through Plato's Socratic dialog Theaetetus. Then think through whether the progression of sensation, true belief, and justified true belief does or does not form a sequence of increasingly better ways to think about the world.
As for your last sentence, although I could say the same, I think you will agree that it would serve no purpose.
Ultimately everything that you can't verify comes down to beliefs which is many things for the common person. But all disciplines aren't equal in this domain. Science began being formalized with the scientific process, it was founded upon principles of rigorous verification. Religion was founded, generally, by a human or humans trying to "verify" the gods' wishes by very abstract and obtuse senses such as 'feelings'. Science may start with feelings or certain intuitions about what should be but then it has to be ran through a proper process that is repeatable and proven no matter how the scientist feels.
> Tell me, how many scientific "claims" that you rely on a day to day basis, have you verified personally?
Many. Science claims when I push the brakes in my car I will slow down due to the friction. Seems to be working pretty well so far. How does religion explain it?
You fell into the trap of thinking that each person needs to verify each claim in order to put general trust in science. That's not how it works. If I can pick a random claim and given enough time and effort can verify it with a high chance then I can reasonably be sure the other claims are most likely correct. Not all of them! There are scientific claims that are incorrect. We know because they have been shown to be incorrect. But that doesn't invalidate the rest of the claims. And yes there will be claims that I personally can't verify so I'll have to use my own judgement to trust them or not. Over time someone will emerge to prove them wrong if they are indeed wrong. Unless of course they impossible to falsify like the existance of god. But then I just can ignore that claim if it can't be proven either way - no matter if it's a claim in science or religion.
With religion I can't verify much at all. Can I verify the existance of god? Nope. Can I verify earth was created X thousand years ago? Nope. Can I prove that my prayer will get some result? Nope. So logically my trust in the other religous claims is very low.
We had science classes in school. Physics and Chemistry for example. I remember doing experiments all the time to check if something was really working the way it was claimed. It checked out every single time. We also had Religion classes. I don't remember a single time that we tried to verify a claim. Not even an attempt! How do you build faith in a system full of claims with no evidence? As we kids grew older and developed a stronger independent way of thinking instead of blindly believing what the teacher told us, more and more of us started questioning those claims and were left utterly unsatisfied and ultimately left the religion class and switched to ethics instead.
>You fell into the trap of thinking that each person needs to verify each claim in order to put general trust in science.
I am not falling into any trap. Science and religion has its legit original purpose (religion was never meant to explain nature, though it does it as part of its own way of accomplishing its goals). But both are prone to exploitation by selfish entities, because of the need or requirement of laymans belief in the ir claims.
So ultimately, a religious claim and a scientific claim that cannot be realistically verified by 99.9 % of people are both similar, and both can end up casuing similar evils.
As I mentioned elsewhere, you cannot prove everything only by science. In Islam, we have logic and the honest news as two other sources we rely on to study and deduce facts about our reality.
No you didn't. The specific thread here of the conversation is not about scientism anymore. But if you want to go back, the original discussion was about science vs religion and not scientism. Nobody in here claimed they adhere to blind faith in science and that science can explain everything. The opposite was stated.
Some people have blind faith in scientific claims. That's not science though and it does not invalidate science. A big principle of science is to do exactly the opposite and not blindly trust in something. Every system gets corrupted by some people but it does not mean the system is bad. We're talking about the same thing over and over.
You're straw manning when you say things like "cares about the sexual life of humans". I highly recommend you watch this to broaden your horizons: https://youtu.be/If3cNUixEBM
There is a great deal of evidence, philosophically and rationally, for the existence of God.
The Big Bang, first theorized by theoretical physicist and Catholic priest Georges Lamaitre, states the universe sprang into existence 13.7b years ago; it was not eternal as previously thought.
And we know from observation that everything that begins to exist has a cause for its existence.
This suggests that the universe was caused. Since the universe can't cause itself, its cause must be outside of the universe. It must be immaterial; not made up of the stuff of the universe. It must be timeless and not governed by the laws of the universe. And it must be exceedingly powerful to create all the energy that kicked off the expanding universe with its billions of spinning galaxies, stars, and planets.
A powerful, immaterial, timeless force outside of the universet that caused the universe to exist. This points to God.
This reasoning does not hold up. Science does not claim the universe needs a cause to come into existance. Your premise is already wrong. Science tries to come up with explanations for the observed reality in our universe. It does not claim to know what is outside the observable universe or what laws of physics exist or don't exist there.
You follow the extremely common logical fallacy that because you want there to be a reason for the universe and you wanting there to be something before the universe then that means there has to be a god?
A big leap based on unproven assumptions.
Who says time does not extend outside the universe? Where's the proof that a universe can't cause itself? Why can't it be governed by the same laws?
Science does not claim to have all the answers but just then jumping to the conclusion that there has to be a god? Nah.
What if there indeed was a God but is now gone? What makes you assume that he cares about us and our morals? What would he think of people that claim he has spoken to them? Why would he create all the sickness and pain in the world? Would it mean there's some extremely sick and perverted being out there that just likes to watch innocent women being raped? Clearly he could prevent that. But then again why do religions assume that their god is good willing? Clearly he can't be that with all the shit going on because if he willed it into existance then all that is on him.
> "Where's the proof that a universe can't cause itself"
What we observe in nature. Everything in nature that begins to exist was caused by something else. (Some have suggested quantum exceptions to this rule, but even those claims are tenuous at best.)
The best observable evidence we have is that everything that begins to exist must be caused.
While atheist philosophers like Bertrand Russel once believed the universe was eternal -- and therefore didn't need to be caused -- it was the Big Bang theory that proved otherwise. The universe had a beginning, therefore it has a cause. My conviction, then, is that God really does exist, and the he caused the universe to exist.
> "Clearly he could prevent that...clearly he can't be [good] with all the shit going on"
You're entering territory that philosophers and theologians have been discussing for millenia. I won't pretend to have the real answer for you, but one answer I've found reasonable is that if God prevents evil, He also prevents free choice; free will. It is better to exist in a world with free will -- even if it means some people abuse that for evil -- than to exist in a world where free will doesn't exist.
On the same theme of evil and suffering, what is more problematic is if God doesn't exist, then evil is subjective. Only if God exists and right from wrong are legislated by God do we have a grounded morality, one where we can definitely say what is good and what is evil.
> What we observe in nature. Everything in nature that begins to exist was caused by something else. (Some have suggested quantum exceptions to this rule, but even those claims are tenuous at best.)
> The best observable evidence we have is that everything that begins to exist must be caused.
Inside our observable universe? Yea most likely. We can't deduce that the same hold true outside the universe.
Einstein explained that nothing can move faster than light but the universe seems to be expanding faster than light so clearly the universe itself can follow different rules and of course anything theoretically outside of it could do pretty much anything for all we know (since we don't know anything about it).
> While atheist philosophers like Bertrand Russel once believed the universe was eternal -- and therefore didn't need to be caused -- it was the Big Bang theory that proved otherwise. The universe had a beginning, therefore it has a cause. My conviction, then, is that God really does exist, and the he caused the universe to exist.
The big bang theory is not proven. That's what the video of the article talks about. It's a hypothesis amongst many about the origin of our universe. If you base your conviction of the existance of god on the big bang theory... I dunno what to say. Why does god follow from big bang? Just because there was a cause? Imagine you are an ant living inside a box. You never see anything outside the box. I've put the ants inside the box. You as an ant might believe something must have created the box. Even if that were true (which you can't prove from inside the box) then clearly that does not mean I am god, right? I couldn't care less about the beliefs of the ants and I have no idea if they worship me or not. But maybe they built a whole faith in me and a system of rules because one ant claims I spoke to it in its dreams. Reality though is that they are simply wrong and just made a whole lot of wrong assumptions.
> You're entering territory that philosophers and theologians have been discussing for millenia.
And they still didn't come up with an answer. Likely never will.
> I won't pretend to have the real answer for you, but one answer I've found reasonable is that if God prevents evil, He also prevents free choice; free will. It is better to exist in a world with free will -- even if it means some people abuse that for evil -- than to exist in a world where free will doesn't exist.
You can make some interesting thought experiments regarding that. If god created beings with free will then that means he can't be omnipotent because the beings are not bound by his will. If it is not his will but free will and as you said everything must have a cause... then what is the cause for our free decisions? Does that mean it is arbitrary? Random? If so then there is something outside of god and all he created. What is it? Or does free will mean there is no ultimate cause?
You called people doing evil an abuse of free will. But why is it abuse if god wanted it to be like that? Doesn't it mean that god wanted evil to exist? Otherwise he'd create a system with free will but with evil excluded. We would never know about evil being missing since he completely removed it from our reality. In the same line of thinking how would we know if we have true free will? What if there was a third thing next to good and evil? How can we know we have free will? And how can we say it is better to have free will than not? If I gave you the choice of living a life in which 100% of days you are happy or a life in which on random days you will be unhappy, which life would you choose?
> On the same theme of evil and suffering, what is more problematic is if God doesn't exist, then evil is subjective. Only if God exists and right from wrong are legislated by God do we have a grounded morality, one where we can definitely say what is good and what is evil.
Nope that is not true. We can have morals and ethics without god. You are accusing me of not having a grounded morality because I am not a theist which I find really offensive. Morals can emerge from simple logical arguments that will strive for the survival of our species and a well working society.
Good and bad are actually subjective. Muslims will find me eating pork as bad. For christians it wouldn't be bad. For christians it would be really bad if I had multiple wifes while muslims would be OK with it. Who is right and who is wrong? If you pick either one then you claim that some religions are correct and others wrong. How did you decide which ones are the correct ones? It also means there can only be one final true religion because if there are two religions then they must differ in something and both can't be right at the same time.
You say god legislates what is good and bad. Ignoring that different religions as outlined above disagree about what is good or bad, how exactly do we know for sure that the claimed laws have been handed by god? That someone pronounces so is not good enough.
Do animals who seem to also have a system of good and bad have religous believes? My dog feels really guilty when he makes a mess. Who told him about god and that he shall not make a mess?
> Inside our observable universe? Yea most likely. We can't deduce that the same hold true outside the universe.
Which is why we rely on the honest news. Prophets like Muhammad, Jesus, and Moses Prayers of God be upon them all proved that they came with a message. They performed miracles, and their character is well known. It's basically an inductive proof.
The claims that they performed miracles and various testaments to their good character are hearsay, not evidence.
If one man claims that god said to him “such and such”, he may think that god has spoken to him, but I’m not obliged to. All I can say with certainty is that he is a person who thinks god spoke to him and subsequently told me about it.
Of course it's evidence. We have prophecies made thousands of years ago and they're coming true in our very lifetimes. E.g. http://www.provingislam.com
No, it's just complete bullshit. Zero reasoning, just wild claims. Your argument with me started out not that bad and I tried to use sound logic to see who might be right. But as the argument went on you drifted more into babble, left the realm of logic and gave up addressing my arguments. Now we're in full tilt nonsense territory it seems.
>A powerful, immaterial, timeless force outside of the universet that caused the universe to exist. This points to God.
Holy leap of faith, batman, such a non-sequitur. The former I'd agree is plausible but then you just go headlong into a big assumption or in your case, ironically and paradoxically, you state it as a certainty in a thread about our uncertain universal beginnings. I could run with the former in that perhaps some kind of force outside it caused it but what caused that force? Also there is nothing pointing to this force being some intelligent anthropomorphic entity aware of our existence (as generally believed) other than a few religious texts that, some argue, spawned from other polytheistic religious texts that had entirely different views of the gods.
>There is a great deal of evidence, philosophically and rationally, for the existence of God.
And evidence against if you really want to learn about philosophy in a more well-rounded way. And "rationally"? Many views can be rational which can be pretty subjective, just not logical or true.
And we know from observation that everything that begins to exist has a cause for its existence.
We actually never observed everything, cause there is a great shadow far in the past. We just launched yet another space telescope to look a little farther, btw.
This suggests that the universe was caused. ... A powerful, immaterial, timeless force outside of the universet that caused the universe to exist. This points to God.
Or to a multi-dimensional coffee machine which farts universes as a side product every multi-morning and its owner doesn't even know that. It doesn't point to anything and even less so to a conscious creator who decides where "you" go after your brain runs low on oxygen for a while.
This is just a big bag of bad logic. It's going from their may be other factors beyond our present understanding of physics to their must be a being with volition. It's like seeing the massive complexity of a hurricane and from that deducing that Zeus must exist and demands a goat on a certain Thursday every year to avoid him blowing your crops away.
There is every reason to believe our present theories are presently insufficient because this is a very hard topic and no reason to believe that the universe is caused by something immaterial or timeless much less something with volition and purpose. There are multiple theories that you could read about if you wish that require neither cause nor volition.
why you think this should be your god or gods?
I don't want to attack you， just I have my religion, too. so when every time, I found same argument, I just confused at how this can connect to some specific object.
You love to use the strawman argument yet you use other logical fallacies like argument from authority in presenting the guy in your video, claiming he has this degree or this certification. I almost never bother to point this out but if you're going to call others out for logical fallacies, be aware of your own.
You're simply trying to diverge from the discussion when evidence is presented to you, by outright ignoring it. The video I posted presents rational and philosophical evidence (among others) for the existence of God.
I'm not. And it's not someone else thinking for me. I went through a phase of agnosticism myself before coming back to my senses. I did my own research, standing on the mountains of knowledge of scholars that came before and dedicated their lives to the religion. There are good summaries like provingislam.com (which did not exist when I did my research) for people who want it. And also elaborate explanations like https://youtu.be/nTsEZXx8kRg
Another video with wrong conclusions. It boils down to claiming "there is something written in the book which could not have been known at that time and place" which is just a claim with zero proof. We have no way of telling that. The rest of the video he goes on a tangent about how the bible and egyptian beliefs were wrong. That does not prove that what is written in Qran is correct nor does it show it came from god. The fact that he chose to spend so much time on that (he was challenged to make a very concise video to prove prophethood) makes me wonder why he did that. I'd expect any talk that does not help the argument to be not in there.
We have proof. We know about the state of the world back then. We have history, archeology, the knowledge of that era, and much much more. Even English author and historian Tom Holland had to admit that the Quran had too much nuanced knowledge about Jewish and Christian texts that, instead of submitting, he had to come up with a completely illogical and provably wrong story that Makkah was not in present day Saudi Arabia, but on the outskirts of Jerusalem.
Even the non Muslims admit and are in awe of what happened.
> We know about the state of the world back then. We have history, archeology, the knowledge of that era, and much much more.
You don't know everything about that time. Do you have a recording of everything that was communicated between any party? Historical texts and archeology give us snippets from that time. We can get some general idea but we can't make absolute claims about every detail with 100% certainty.
> Even the non Muslims admit and are in awe of what happened.
Some.
> He proved that what's written in the Quran correct, discoveries made just a couple of hundred years ago.
You can claim that a million more times. I saw no proof.
Basically because whereas some science will ultimately turn out to be useless malarkey ALL of religion is useless malarkey that we have been dealing with for thousands of years. Worse than not adding value such "babble" has been at various times a bulwark for all sorts of evil men and backwards looking philosophies. Some of us are tired of society being held back for the sake of old men's words given unearned weight by being backed by the weight of lies.
Here's how I understood it: "The Gods themselves are part of creation. Even if there were a Creator, he may not know for certain whether it was indeed him who created"
But that doesn't get us any further than "We don't know yet." It doesn't prove or disprove anything. By the same line of reasoning one could say there is no time at all and all our memory of the past is an illusion generated by a simulation. The linked video talks about this: there are an infinite amount of theories that one can come up with to explain the current state and it might not be possible with our current understanding to prove them wrong.
The problem I have with religious texts is they are very vague and evidently open to a lot of interpretation. And by talking about things like God and building a logical system out of wrong axioms that is then applied to daily life choices they actually can create real issues - we've had enough of them in history.
> Which religious texts? Each and every one of the texts available for each religion in the world?
I should have been clearer: religious texts on average. Maybe there is some religion out there that is not vague, very clear and not open to interpretation. I'd be happy to hear about an example and explore it further. But the major world religions all have varying interpretations.
> I think Mao, Lenin, Stalin, etc. disagree with you there.
The existance of these monsters does not prove religions don't create issues. Or what's your claim?
> What does having texts with some degree of interpretation have to do with whether those texts are true or not? Sounds like a genetic fallacy.
You are putting words in my mouth. I said texts that are vague and open to a lot of interpretation can cause a lot of issues. Especially when those interpretations are used to make life choices and doubly so when making choices about others.
> My claim is that without religion, we'd be in a far off worse place.
Please provide evidence for this. Clearly one can have ethics and morals without religion. Note: showing that some atheists did something wrong is not evidence of that. Oh and btw there is more than theism and atheism. I wouldn't describe myself as an atheist. Do I know that there is no such thing as a god? Nope. All I know is that I really can't subscribe to that believe personally but who am I to claim either way. I can still strive to be a good member of society.
Not all texts are vague and open to interpretation. A proper religion with strong scholarly underpinnings like Islam has this issue figured out. The Quran itself calls out the issue, and Muslim scholars from the very beginning have a foundation on which to base rulings.
> so when making choices about others
By living in society, someone is making choices on the behalf of another regardless of whether that society is religious or secular.
> Please provide evidence for this
We're seeing it today. Look at the rates of depression, suicide, etc. in so called "developed first world" countries and compare them to war torn "third world" countries that are generally religious. Society is in moral and ethical decline, and it worries me how much longer this can go on before some chaotic event will take place.
Without an authority, the very question of what "good" and "bad" mean becomes meaningless. I recall one atheistic head (might have been Dawkins) who claimed that rape is not good or bad, it just is a phenomenon like the spots on a cheetah. Or Kraus (and others) who said that he could not find a moral justification against incest if there is consent from both sides.
>A proper religion with strong scholarly underpinnings like Islam has this issue figured out.
Wow, I'm surprised you went there. To this day many denominations of Islam are still killing each other over the "correct" interpretation.
You call out developed worlds as if they're immoral yet the most religious countries [0] also have a big overlap in having the most militant conflict [1]. Oh but they're happy, right? I wouldn't think so. Many of the least religious countries, such as the Scandinavian countries, often rank higher on happiness as well. Also in the developed world we can criticize our own countries more, generally, and so we have lots of free press that loves to prop up the negatives. Are Islamic countries generally free to criticize themselves so easily? Sorry to speak negatively of those countries but you invite such generalizations when you make such generalizations.
> To this day many denominations of Islam are still killing each other over the "correct" interpretation.
Yet, those denominations you speak of are minorities, and some are even supported by factions like the CIA to continue civil unrest, because it's in the interest of the West.
> also have a big overlap in having the most militant conflict
I'm who's surprised you went there. It's as if the last 100 years of history didn't mean much? The vast majority of those countries have been occupied and colonized by the West, and I'd argue that they continue to be to this day.
> Are Islamic countries generally free to criticize themselves so easily?
You can look up Islamic history to see to what high degree of responsibility those in charge were held. Read up on Omar ibn AlKhattab for example.
> Not all texts are vague and open to interpretation. A proper religion with strong scholarly underpinnings like Islam has this issue figured out. The Quran itself calls out the issue, and Muslim scholars from the very beginning have a foundation on which to base rulings.
I don't want to claim all are vague. Many are. If the foundation though is based upon an arbitrary claim of a god and unprovable claims that such god spoke to someone and gave us some rules then I cannot subscribe to that concept because any other concept with arbitrary rules is equaly valid and I wouldn't know which one to choose. And if I can't know which one to choose then that means there is no right or wrong choice, it is arbitrary.
> By living in society, someone is making choices on the behalf of another regardless of whether that society is religious or secular.
Correct. Some choices are sound and some not. A society needs to make a decision about each rule they impose in isolation and not based upon for example what a single person said was right or wrong. A good set of core rules for a society will naturally emerge after some time completely without religion. You can see this because completely seperated societies come up with same or similar rules but can have completely different religious believes or can be completely secular.
> We're seeing it today. Look at the rates of depression, suicide, etc. in so called "developed first world" countries and compare them to war torn "third world" countries that are generally religious. Society is in moral and ethical decline, and it worries me how much longer this can go on before some chaotic event will take place.
Life expectancy and quality of life has improved drastically in (not only) western countries over time while at the same time turning more secular. Thanks science! You do not need religion in order to have a well functioning society. The western countries are not perfect - there's a lot wrong with them. Like the racism in the US for example. But there is also a lot wrong with for example middle eastern countries. What's up with all the fighting between religious groups there? I neither live in the west nor the middle east btw and don't think I have a bias because I don't count myself as part of either.
> Without an authority, the very question of what "good" and "bad" mean becomes meaningless. I recall one atheistic head (might have been Dawkins) who claimed that rape is not good or bad, it just is a phenomenon like the spots on a cheetah. Or Kraus (and others) who said that he could not find a moral justification against incest if there is consent from both sides.
The concept of good and bad is the concept of morals. Morals can be deduced from logic and does not require religion. "We should do X because Y". The better we can explain Y, the higher the chance of someone subscribing to the logic and doing X. If Y is "because it is written in some book that some dude was told this by god" then many people might rightfully claim that they don't see the reasoning. I really really don't want to live under a religious authority that can impose arbitrary rules on me like that I have to pray five times a day and must not eat pork because I see zero logic behind that. Just to be clear: I don't want to single out Islam here but I am taking it as the example because I am argueing with you and you believe in Islam.
The fact that some atheists said or did something that most people will agree is wrong does not mean all of atheists are wrong in the same way. That's the same mistake the presenter in that video made. There are good atheists and bad atheists. There are good theists and bad theists. You cannot claim from any of these that either secularism or theism is good or bad.
> If the foundation though is based upon an arbitrary claim of a god and unprovable claims that such god spoke to someone and gave us some rules then I cannot subscribe to that concept because any other concept with arbitrary rules is equaly valid and I wouldn't know which one to choose. And if I can't know which one to choose then that means there is no right or wrong choice, it is arbitrary.
Which is why you evaluate those claims and see what evidence they bring forth. We have a lot of proof and evidence in Islam. Some are listed on www.provingislam.com
> Life expectancy and quality of life has improved drastically in (not only) western countries over time while at the same time turning more secular.
Correlation vs causation.
> Thanks science
False dichotomy. No one is saying science isn't useful. As a matter of fact, many of today's foundational sciences and discoveries go back to the Islamic Golden Age. Great Muslim scholars like Al-Khararizmy (the word "algorithm" is a direct derivative of his name), Algebra (the science of Al-Jabr, an Arabic word), and many many more were because Islam pushed those people to seek knowledge and learn about the world around them. Many of those scholars saw studying and exploring the world around them as signs of God. This is something established in the Quran and Hadith.
> What's up with all the fighting between religious groups there?
Maybe the colonizing West that engaged in dirty divide and conquer tactics has something to do with it? Or maybe the fact that the US lied about WMD's to invade Iraq and they got away with it with no consequences, while leaving millions of Iraqis between dead and maimed and homeless. Same with Afghanistan. The amount of destruction caused to Muslim lands by the West is orders of magnitude more than any internal conflicts. And it's not like the West is some bastion of peace either, today Russia and Ukraine are fighting aren't they?
> The fact that some atheists said or did something that most people will agree is wrong does not mean all of atheists are wrong in the same way.
So tell me why are they wrong to say that rape is just a phenomenon or that incest is ok. On what basis, from a strictly atheistic materialistic world view are you going to make an opposite claim?
> Which is why you evaluate those claims and see what evidence they bring forth. We have a lot of proof and evidence in Islam. Some are listed on www.provingislam.com
Please bring a single proof of god here in your own words. I have already wasted one hour on that video which didn't lead anywhere.
> Correlation vs causation.
You might want to try apply that to your original claim that the western civilizations are declining because they are so secular.
> False dichotomy. No one is saying science isn't useful. As a matter of fact, many of today's foundational sciences and discoveries go back to the Islamic Golden Age. Great Muslim scholars like Al-Khararizmy (the word "algorithm" is a direct derivative of his name), Algebra (the science of Al-Jabr, an Arabic word), and many many more were because Islam pushed those people to seek knowledge and learn about the world around them. Many of those scholars saw studying and exploring the world around them as signs of God. This is something established in the Quran and Hadith.
Any many go back to christians, jews or even predate our mainstream religions. During many times throughout history not claiming to be part of a belief system would net you severe repercussions. Maybe Islam encouraged seeking knowledge. Pretty sure it also persecuted people who seeked knowledge that Islam didn't like.
> Maybe the colonizing West that engaged in dirty divide and conquer tactics has something to do with it?
Or maybe that happened already before all the western influence? I am also not claiming the west being good. I'm saying both sides are doing shit. I'm no fan of the wars that the US waged in Iraq, Afghanistan etc. That one side is doing something bad does not make the bad things that the other side is doing OK. The point is any fighting is bad.
> So tell me why are they wrong to say that rape is just a phenomenon or that incest is ok. On what basis, from a strictly atheistic materialistic world view are you going to make an opposite claim?
That's super trivial. I'd argue rape being just a phenomenon is wrong because accepting it as such has bad repercussions on our society. Rape leaves the victim traumatized and less productive in society. Society has to expend resources to help the victim. As for incest: anyone with a bit of knowledge how reproduction and genetics work can see that inbreeding increases the chance of genetic defects. The whole point why evolution came up with the concept of sexes is to mix genes from different pools to avoid this problem. Genetic defects again hurt a society.
> Please bring a single proof of god here in your own words. I have already wasted one hour on that video which didn't lead anywhere.
That video was a good start, the fine tuning argument, the fact that something cannot come out of nothing, etc.
The next step is that when someone claims to have been sent by God, we look at the evidence he brings forth. Prophet Muhammad Prayers of God be upon brought with him signs and performed miracles. The Quran itself is a living miracle, no one had been able to bring anything like it, and the Arabs at the time tried. Some even admitted but would not believe due to pride, this is quite well documented. Furthermore, the Quran and Hadiths talk about events that happen tens or even thousands of years later. The website I linked mentions over 100 of them. Some like the desolate bedouins competing to build tall towers or the fact that the deserts of Arabia were not only green, but would return to be rivers and meadows have only been discovered very recently.
> You might want to try apply that to your original claim that the western civilizations are declining because they are so secular.
The behavior of secular people is quite obvious as to what is causing these issues. Many of them get rich, have everything at their disposal and think, this is it? This has happened time and time again. I'd be interested to hear your explanation. The Quran already alluded to this over 1400 years ago, even when atheism was not common (another miracle):
> But whoever turns away from My Reminder will certainly have a miserable life
> Any many go back to christians, jews or even predate our mainstream religions
The difference is that with Islam, those scholars admit that it was Islam is what played a role in pushing them to pursue knowledge. It's in our religion.
> Pretty sure it also persecuted people who seeked knowledge that Islam didn't like.
Bold and false claim. Show me your proof. Islam is not Europe in the dark ages that you are talking about.
> Or maybe that happened already before all the western influence?
The Islamic world had the Caliphate established until WWI. Not saying that we did not make mistakes (one of the biggest was getting involved in WWI to begin with), but since then, it's been quite clear what's going on.
> I'd argue rape being just a phenomenon is wrong
But it's not wrong according to those atheist figures, who are heavily pushing atheism. You cannot force your view on him. Once such practices get adopted and popular, you have no retort.
> Rape leaves the victim traumatized and less productive in society
Maybe, maybe not. Rape used to be common back in the day, and people were not as traumatized. Secondly, who cares about society, we're all "chemical scum" anyway. Why does it matter?
> anyone with a bit of knowledge how reproduction and genetics work can see that inbreeding increases the chance of genetic defects.
So? Also, there's birth control and abortion to solve that problem.
> That video was a good start, the fine tuning argument, the fact that something cannot come out of nothing, etc.
No it was terrible. In another comment I explained why the fine tuning argument has been refuted because there are plenty other explanations.
> The next step is that when someone claims to have been sent by God, we look at the evidence he brings forth. Prophet Muhammad Prayers of God be upon brought with him signs and performed miracles. The Quran itself is a living miracle, no one had been able to bring anything like it, and the Arabs at the time tried. Some even admitted but would not believe due to pride, this is quite well documented. Furthermore, the Quran and Hadiths talk about events that happen tens or even thousands of years later. The website I linked mentions over 100 of them. Some like the desolate bedouins competing to build tall towers or the fact that the deserts of Arabia were not only green, but would return to be rivers and meadows have only been discovered very recently.
You are calling writing a book a miracle? Sometimes I am a bit speachless. Horoscopes also "predict" the future. If I make many predictions without specific times into the future and some of them turn out to be true then is that evidence that I can predict the future? No. They were just realistic enough predictions and others have not come to fruition. Next I would claim they just have not happened yet...
> The behavior of secular people is quite obvious as to what is causing these issues. Many of them get rich, have everything at their disposal and think, this is it? This has happened time and time again. I'd be interested to hear your explanation. The Quran already alluded to this over 1400 years ago, even when atheism was not common (another miracle):
You are confusing secular people with materialistic people. And btw. materialism is not just for secular people, religious people can be like that as well. There have been plenty of skandals in the country I currently live in with monks accumulating vasts amounts of wealth. The catholic church is one of the richest institutions in the world. You are claiming all secular people behave some way but that's just your bad point of view regarding them. Various times have you talked about western countries as if they are somehow suffering from a lot of issues in their societies. How come for example skandinavian countries again and again rank at the top of the quality of life index? Or the happiness index? I have lived in Europe and it really was not bad at all. When I watch news I also could get the impression that life really is terrible. Issue after issue. But when I stop consuming the news and just spend time with people then turns out life's pretty darn good.
> Bold and false claim. Show me your proof. Islam is not Europe in the dark ages that you are talking about.
Rhazes (865-925)
Muhammad ibn Zakariyā Rāzī or Rhazes was a medical pioneer from Baghdad who lived between 860 and 932 AD. He was responsible for introducing western teachings, rational thought and the works of Hippocrates and Galen to the Arabic world. One of his books, Continens Liber, was a compendium of everything known about medicine. The book made him famous, but offended a Muslim priest who ordered the doctor to be beaten over the head with his own manuscript, which caused him to go blind, preventing him from future practice.
> The Islamic world had the Caliphate established until WWI. Not saying that we did not make mistakes (one of the biggest was getting involved in WWI to begin with), but since then, it's been quite clear what's going on.
I live a few hundred meters from a mosque. Non-muslims are afraid to say anything against them because there was a history of violence. Even police does not dare to confront when there is open illegal behavior unless it is really serious. Insurance companies refuse to provide coverage for factories in the muslim controlled areas of the country because of numerous attacks. This is in Asia btw and the US is not meddling here. I'm sure not all Muslim are like that. And I guess the muslim community you are in is peaceful. I have met some absolutely fantastic human beings which were muslims. But there are groups in Islam which are not like that. Islam itself does not guarantee a peaceful society. The same problems exist in other religions and also secular societies.
> But it's not wrong according to those atheist figures, who are heavily pushing atheism. You cannot force your view on him. Once such practices get adopted and popular, you have no retort.
That some atheist makes some claims does not mean it's a fact or that other people will listen to them. Atheism does not mean science. There's tons of batshit crazy atheists. I pay no attention to them. I am not forcing my view on them. There are also plenty batshit crazy theists. Same thing. Are you really suggesting that rape has a chance of getting adopted as a popular practice? You have a way too grim understanding of humanity.
> Maybe, maybe not. Rape used to be common back in the day, and people were not as traumatized. Secondly, who cares about society, we're all "chemical scum" anyway. Why does it matter?
Of course most were traumatized. Why weren't they? They were just too scared to speak up. This can still happen today btw.
Not sure where the "chemical scum" comes from? I presented rational argument that can justify morals. Of course we care about society because we are part of society and when optimizing life in society we optimize also our own. That's why we don't eat our children and why we care for the elderly. One day we will be old and hopefully our children will care for us when we can't anymore.
The Quran challenges anyone to bring something like it. The challenge is open. Seeminly easy right? It's gone unchallenged all these millenia.
> Horoscopes also "predict" the future
No they don't. The prophecies of Muhammad Prayers of God be upon him are extremely nuanced, from things like the emergence of a green Arabia, to the desolate bedouins competing to build tall towers, to naming individuals and their exact spot where they will die on the battle field, to the intricate and nuanced knowledge he had about other traditions while living in Makkah (https://youtu.be/nTsEZXx8kRg). More at provingislam.com
> You are confusing secular people with materialistic people
Materialism as in explaining reality with only a purely materalistic tangible point of view, not monetary materialism.
> The book made him famous, but offended a Muslim priest who ordered the doctor to be beaten over the head with his own manuscript,
Who was that "Muslim priest"? (we don't have priests in Islam by the way). According to wikipedia (to be taken with a grain of salt):
> He spent the last years of his life in his native Rey suffering from glaucoma. His eye affliction started with cataracts and ended in total blindness.[19] The cause of his blindness is uncertain. One account mentioned by Ibn Juljul attributed the cause to a blow to his head by his patron, Mansur ibn Ishaq, for failing to provide proof for his alchemy theories;[20] while Abulfaraj and Casiri claimed that the cause was a diet of beans only
If this indeed happened, he would have had the right to seek retribution from a judge. You failed to show that this is a systemic problem as Europe was in the darsk ages.
> Even police does not dare to confront when there is open illegal behavior unless it is really serious.
What you're describing is not different from what happens in poor ghettos in America. Nothing to do with religion. I'm willing to bet that neighborhood is poor and uneducated.
> This is in Asia btw and the US is not meddling here.
The West has been meddling for a long long time, if not directly, then indirectly.
> That some atheist makes some claims
That's not any atheist. Those are the people claiming "enlightenement" and spearheading the atheist movement like Dawkins and his ilk. The difference is that with atheists, there is no moral compass or ultimate reference or authority to confirm or debate their thoughts. Whereas with a religion, we can go back to their scriptures.
> The Quran challenges anyone to bring something like it. The challenge is open. Seeminly easy right? It's gone unchallenged all these millenia.
What's that supposed to prove? I know I cannot perform miracles. WTF?
> No they don't. The prophecies of Muhammad Prayers of God be upon him are extremely nuanced, from things like the emergence of a green Arabia, to the desolate bedouins competing to build tall towers, to naming individuals and their exact spot where they will die on the battle field, to the intricate and nuanced knowledge he had about other traditions while living in Makkah (https://youtu.be/nTsEZXx8kRg). More at provingislam.com
That's why I put the word into quotes. They don't. Same for your prophet. Please show me one prediction with condition, time and place that is in the relative near future. We both will see if it will happen as claimed or not. Not something from the past written in historical stories. Something that you and me can see with our own eyes.
> Materialism as in explaining reality with only a purely materalistic tangible point of view, not monetary materialism.
I have not said I am a follower of Materialism. Why do you ask me to prove something with it?
> Who was that "Muslim priest"? (we don't have priests in Islam by the way). According to wikipedia (to be taken with a grain of salt):
It's not my words. Maybe he was a monk. Maybe he was a "scholar". Maybe you call him something else. In the end he'd be some religious person with some kind of authority.
> What you're describing is not different from what happens in poor ghettos in America. Nothing to do with religion. I'm willing to bet that neighborhood is poor and uneducated.
The neighbourhood while not rich is also not poor compared to the rest of the country. Middle class is where I'd put it. I'm certainly not living in a ghetto. And strangly enough it only applies to the muslim community, not the rest in the area. I agree this happens also in ghettos.
> The West has been meddling for a long long time, if not directly, then indirectly.
I live here. I am pretty sure the west has zero influence over the local muslims. Who are you to tell me otherwise? I didn't even tell you the country and you claim the west is excerting influence and that this is why the fighting happens. It just shows your blind hate towards the west.
> That's not any atheist. Those are the people claiming "enlightenement" and spearheading the atheist movement like Dawkins and his ilk. The difference is that with atheists, there is no moral compass or ultimate reference or authority to confirm or debate their thoughts. Whereas with a religion, we can go back to their scriptures.
Why do you need to resort to derogatory words when speaking about people like Dawkins and have to inject praises when talking about your prophet? This is a pattern amongst extremists. I told you numerous times I'm not atheist so why are you trying to argue all the time against atheists?
> Stephen Hawking
I think you misunderstood his quote. Don't take that description is literal. All he wanted to say is we are in the grand scheme of the universe not the most important thing. Not everything a famous scientist says is to be taken literally and especially not if it's not part of a scientific claim in a paper. He was human and not a robot. Guess what? He can even be wrong! Scientists don't take all his words as gospel. My point stands. That someone said something that is wrong does not invalidate the whole concept of reasoning. Unless there was a claim that all he said was true and "honest news" like a prophet. Nobody claims that.
or when it will end, despite university profs trying to justify their high salaries by confidently predicting exactly what will happen to the universe...no one knows, despite lying university blowhards telling us that they know everything
"So if you read yet another headline about some physicist who thinks our universe could have begun this way or that way, you should really read this as a creation myth written in the language of mathematics. It’s not wrong, but it isn’t scientific either. The Big Bang is the simplest explanation we know, and that is probably wrong, and that’s it. That’s all that science can tell us."
Which one? The Hindu / Buddhist / Sufi Islamist philosophy of everyone being connected and being reborn / recycled comes pretty close to the scientific postulation that "energy is constant and can neither be created nor destroyed but only converted from one form to another". So when we die, our energy conserved in our body becomes something else. The caveat of the first law of thermodynamic is that all this happens only "in a closed system". So is God within this system, a part of the system and part of the energy in this system (which would mean that when we attain Moksha / Nirvana and escape the cycle of rebirth / reconversion, we become a part of God)?. Or is God outside this system?
I don't have a prevailing interest is how the universe was formed. The subject matter doesn't interest me. What does interest me is that the generally accepted position of all scientists who worked in this field said "Big Bang" was the de facto position. Until is suddenly isn't.
That just throws the whole reputation of all those scientists into doubt with the average Joe.
The Big Bang theory is still very much the de facto theory. The JWST findings while interesting are just one data point and they'll be further investigated. But it's way too early to say that BBT is dead.
Scientists are constantly finding better theories for explaining things and I think the population in general understands and accepts that.
Everyone should be willing to change their position often and without shame. Scientists in particular should not be elevated for holding unmovable conclusions about anything. They must be open to evidence proving their theories wrong.
Those who prefer blind trust in unchanging authorities will be disappointed.
Sabine likes to swing an axe into a tree. Her preaching gets tiresome fast though.
She redefines science to require simplicity, when it simply doesn't require it. Many solved or solveable problems in science are ghastly complex and computers improved or solved them. The LHC is a most-obvious example for that category. Do I even need to point out the counter-arguments or are we just taking Sabine at her word..
This thinking mirrors a cultural-faith shift and has little to do with the premise of the article, that we dont know and cant know the universe before the Big Bang.
A scientist who doesn't preach is worth their weight in gold, usually because they're too busy doing science to preach.
She is the red dressed woman on the Tiber River telling us how she won't let this stand anymore. Meanwhile the rest of us just get on with it. Accordingly saying this comment was a waste of time.
> She redefines science to require simplicity, when it simply doesn't require it.
God wills the Universe into Being. I have explained everything completely. What qualities of a selection function do you have that would choose a different explanation?
One that doesn't require something more complex than the Universe to explain the Universe?
Well it's not so hard to break apart all the presuppositions in that sentence, but I know you're not looking for this.
Arguing tiber-river style divine simplicity is best left up to the dominican monk gregory pine and his debate partners.
You might be disappointed to discover I was making a practical point, not using the ideal-metaphorical language of sabine and her culture.
Practically speaking no matter where sabine and the concept of simplicity, teamwork and the coming relational tribalism goes, one can work on the ghost of the tree she is trying to chop down or drag an incomplete, complex part of science through the bubble of 'simplicity' out to disrupt the other side.
Put more briefly, no matter how simple we all agree 'it' is, you can disrupt that bubble with infinite complexity, just as easily as she cuts down trees.
Sabine, wearing her science communicator hat, necessarily has to simplify a lot. Everything of hers that I watch or read is simplified science (including her branded Brilliant course), and it has to be simplified for me to follow it because I'm a software engineer not a scientist and I can't yet do the tensor differential calculus of relativity nor the complex-valued calculus of quantum mechanics.
But even without that caveat, science has to be as simple as possible (and no simpler), because every extra equation or variable beyond the minimum is necessarily a worthless decoration adorning the core idea. Computers don't always let you brute force your way past that extra complexity, but even when they do, it never really helps to have it.
I mean gene unfolding, meterology, lhc, fusion, space research, ect have all been served tremendously by computing. Granted one could say they are temporarily less useful due to a local peak of optimization, buut that's a long way from throwing out all the sine waves and commiting to perfect metaphysics.
Describe a metaphysical house that could never exist. One with mc esher stairs and melted clocks everywhere.
Who would do that? What would it prove to do that?
Yes computers can be a waste of time.. what's your point? You want me to tell you how to improve science with computing to save you from simplicity, or should I just instead do it...
> She redefines science to require simplicity, when it simply doesn't require it.
The point of my example is to show that you don't add unnecessary complexity if you don't need to. But if you think that weather and plasma physics are examples of "ghastly complex" things, you're not talking about the same category of complexity as the one every scientist will argue against.
It's the difference between saying "go is hard" because it took until AlphaGo to make an AI to play it well vs. "go is easy" because the rules fit on a matchbox in a normal font.
You're not adding the complexity, it's out there. One would hope we're aiming at modelling nature.
The human body is incredibly complex and making simple theories about it doesn't help so much. As you said, Go is incredibly complex and it took ML to tackle it.
ML is a good case, is it simple or is it complex? The ideas we use to communicate the program are simple enough. It's polynomial regression or it's a neural network. Understandable ideal simple terms, but what the program practically executes is much more complex.
Why ditch understanding what's going on under the hood so that we can live in the land of ideal simplicities? Those usually come last after you get what's going on and have refined your practicalities down.
We need better tools for everything and we're not going to get there by ignoring the practical and complex parts.
Sabine is happy to kill off looking at complexity because Penrose is hypothesizing about the nature of life under the guise of pre-big bang physics.
Okay I get her relationship to Penrose.. why do I have to stop exploring complexity again? Cause it's not divinely simple.. and/or because she said so?
But again I admit I waste my own time and maybe yours, we wont merge our views. The eagle never lost as much time as he did, talking to the raven.
What we do know is that the universe didn’t begin from nothing. It’s impossible for something to arise out of nothing, so there has always been something.
Nothingness is the space that holds everything.
From there it can be argued that the universe began with the adjacent possible of nothing.
Please, how can any human being be so absolute about anything? Modern humans emerged ~300K years ago (or at least that's what we know so far), so how on earth can we be sure about anything? Our science is nice and all, and can help us built amazing devices that save lives and allow us to explore... but all we have are models. Theories. Zero certainty.
If anything, science is all about: "I have no idea what this is, but I have a model that seems to explain certain scenarios. Let's stick with it until someone more intelligent than us provides a better model". We may be "sure" about certain "laws" (e.g,, thermodynamics, speed of light, etc.)... but I think it's a mistake to be so absolute about them.
It is not obvious to me whether one could determine if the phrase "the adjacent possible of nothing" refers to something, as opposed to merely resembling phrases that do. Regardless, there is an evocative ring to it.
It's not impossible for something to arise out of nothing. Well, what I really should say is, it's not impossible for two somethings to arise out of nothing, as long as they have opposite charge and annihilate when they come into contact.
I like to imagine there's an anti-universe moving backwards in time from the start of the universe, and that's where all the unexplained missing baryonic antimatter ended up.
Put in other words, something is a subset of nothing! This idea fits in well with the unprovable MWI as well. If every possibile configuration of spacetime exists, and in a symmetry where everything has an opposite, doesn't it all kind of "add up" to 0? This idea has been in my head since high school physics many years ago.
>What we do know is that the universe didn’t begin from nothing. It’s impossible for something to arise out of nothing, so there has always been something.
Got proof?
...and isn't that the whole point of the discussion?
I think most statements like this have an underlying conceptual problem in that they assume the existence of causality.
Since the Big Bang is the beginning of space and time, it doesn’t make sense to say it “came from” anything - not nothing, anything. Nothing could have “caused” it because causality depends on there being a before in which the cause could take place. Causality breaks down with the beginning of time and that causes us a lot of conceptual confusion.
I think one thing that humans have not come to terms with is the possibility that some fundamental fields are essentially dead in terms of possible new discoveries that most people will care about. That doesn't mean that there's nothing left to do. There are minor details in some fields but they are more like engineering problems. Physics may be one of those fields and I certainly think math is as well. However, it's sometimes hard to recognize because there is a core group of people that keep it going because it's their nest egg.
I quite disagree with this. Visionaries come along to unseat centuries of limitations, raising the ceiling forever. Those visionaries are rare, but there will be more.
Maybe, but if you look at the list of famous unsolved problems in math, it has been dwindling for a long time. The list used to contain problems that undergrads could understand. Biology is still like this -- you can take quite a few interesting unsolved problems in biology and explain it to most people.
Math has a few left like the Riemann hypothesis, but the vast majority of new work that has been coming out is more like refinements (I say this as a PhD in math who as actually read them). We look at history and expect it to repeat itself, but if you closely examine math history you can actually see a decline. Take the time to truly examine "visionary" things that have happened in math and those events are actually getting fewer and fewer. I seriously doubt there is much left to do that is of interest to more than 5-10 people in each subfield.
Well, due to the nature of math there are technically hundreds of questions you can ask (specific behaviour of the infinite number of diophantine equations, improving constants in estimation, whether there exists a prime number that satisfies XYZ, etc), but those problems are becoming so hyperspecialized that very few people if any will care about them. There may be one more paradigm shift that is related to stuff that Sholze is doing and there is certainly some work to do in proof theory ala Voevodky's univalent foundations so we could see a couple more things but the vast majority of basic foundational work in math is done.
So while we have a few more fundamental problems that most people have heard of like the Riemann hypothesis and the twin primes conjecture, don't expect to have any more of those. (Certainly the more recent ones are already so specialized that few people outside the immediate area would ever understand or even care about them).
I'm also not sure why there's such a negative view towards the end of progress on this site---a lot of people seem to take it as an axiom that currently "useless" things will eventually become useful but I simply do not believe that is the case (and this is coming from someone who has published quite a few papers in pure math).
Physics still has major gaps right in the middle - our two main theories of how the world works are mathematically incompatible. This leaves room for some significant new discoveries that could upend everyone's understanding of the world.
Not to mention that both QM and GR in themselves have inconsistencies or infinities. GR famously has a singularity in the center of a black hole, which means the math doesn't actually apply there. QM has the measurement problem, and the (probably related) problem of making the laws of motion linear, when we can clearly see highly non-linear behavior in reality.
Depends what you mean by care about, because the majority of praised discoveries are an extra foot on the millipede. Precisely because we designed our universities and technologies that way.
You can nurture in systems and cultures that break open the fundamentals again if you so wish. Most people don't wish it, they are happy living out incremental improvement in the city and surrounds.
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There's this phenomenon in science where you think something is arbitrary, it could've happened in any number of ways. Then you do some digging and find out there is actually only one possible way for it to happen, none of the other ways make logical sense. And it's not a matter of initial state or anything, but of geometry or something.
Sometimes, after I put down the crack pipe, I wonder if there is only one possible way for the universe to exist, and knowing it isn't a matter of observation, but of abstraction, that irreal logical constructions are actually not abstract enough to explain the universe, etc.
Maybe a variable initial state doesn't make logical sense at the end of the day. Maybe the numbers we have to plug into the models to make them work are like pi or the zeros of the zeta function, maybe they just fall out of some result in group theory or sth idk