Don,
Thanks for your reply and taking the time to address my post. I've started spending a lot of time looking at the forums with more practical information regarding biology, nootropics, etc., and I can say I'm glad to be back. There's a lot of useful stuff I've been missing.
I've always enjoyed reading your posts because you've got a head on your shoulders and represent the conflicted theistic scientists so well. It is highly ironic that, while you are questioning the methodological consistency of secular scientific inquiry, it is in actuality your own position which is logically inconsistent.
Conflicted theistic scientists? lol... thanks. I really don't feel conflicted at all. Sure, confusion is possible, and I've struggled at times with it, and in the end came to pretty clear conclusions. Anyway, I'm not questioning the methodological consistency of secular scientific inquiry. I'm just saying that there are a lot of people who are unwilling to apply that same methodology to religion, and then they come away saying there's no evidence. There's a great scripture in the Book of Mormon: "Behold, I would exhort you that when you shall read these things... I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true." (Moroni 10:3-4) Translation into geekspeak: when you find this stuff, test it for yourself. Any encouragement of belief based on a blind faith or unknowables is rather pointless.
Which is exactly doing what you were saying, minus the last sentence here:
However, rather than taking the doctor at his word you could, if you wanted to, confirm his advice by breaking out the lab equipment and independly verifying that penicillian combats infection. I know this sounds silly, but it is within the realm of the physical possible that you could do this. You CAN NOT do this when some one is making a claim about the existence or causal powers of Gods.
You CAN do this, and that's exactly what you should do. So I pray and ask if I should give my mission president a call when I've been waiting a while to hear back regarding whether or not I'd be sent home to get medical treatment (weird, but I was feeling uncertain) and the conversation goes like this:
"Should I call him?"
"No."
"Will he call me?"
"Yes."
"When?"
"Tomorrow."
And he called the next day. Okay, maybe you can discount it as coincidence. But when it happens on a regular basis and the answers I receive are always right, I would call this testable and observable by any standard. Could you give it another explanation? Probably. It's psychosomatic and tapping into parts of our thoughts that we normally ignore, or maybe there's a basis for psychic phenomenon after all, or none of it's real and I'm just finding a way to reinforce my delusions. But then you hear about "experiments" all over the place where clear voices told people exactly where to go, what to do, what to grab, and how to do things in situations to save people's lives. Or clear confirmation about the reality of God or the testimony of others.
That's what makes me so certain.
See, I can try for myself, get results for myself, results that are reproduceable for others as they've reported the same results. So, in time, just as with conventional science, I learn to trust the methodology, because I've tested it. I've observed for myself. I've tried different things. I've tested doctrines to see if they have the efficacy they promise.
To take a quote from the Gipper, TRUST BUT VERIFY.
Hooah.
As I've said before, your religious persuasion is almost completely predicated on your geographic/cultural heritage.
Then why do so many people convert to other faiths? Sure, there are many people who say, "Well, I've just always been a Catholic and always will be." But there are many who feel that what they've been given isn't the truth. They're searching, they're looking hard, and they're experimenting. You shouldn't be so quick to discount their reason, as they tend to be intelligent people. Interestingly, the same thing happens in science.
There's an ingrained physics community that will only consider the zero-point field as virtual particles and consequently ignorable for all intents and purposes. They say that this is a consequence of quantum mechanics. Okay, but what if quantum mechanics really is the consequence of particles interacting with the ZPF? What if you could add a stochastic element to classical electrodynamics and use that to obtain the ground state of a hydrogen atom? (You can, by the way.) Well, most of these people won't hear it. It's heresy to them. These are your supposed rational people, right? Intellectual elitism is death to an open and creative mind, and I'm saying the far lot of atheist scientists (i.e. the majority of scientists) have refused to accept the evidence or test it for themselves. They've become so entirely sure that no logic can confirm or deny the existence of a God that they won't bother to sincerely ask God if he's telling the truth, nor do the research about the experiments and results that others have had, even if it goes by a different name.
Rational people do base their beliefs on testimonials, actually. They're just healthily skeptical. If certain testimony doesn't sound plausible, they won't take it at face value until they've learned more for themselves. But if somebody's testimony goes like this: "The most important result so far is the observation of the suppression of high p$_T$ hadrons in central Au-Au collisions followed by the subsequent null experiment where the same suppression was not seen in deuteron-Au collisions. The observed suppression is a final state effect in which a large amount of energy is lost by the fast parton as it penetrates the medium. This observation, together with measurements of the elliptic flow, leads to the conclusion that the energy density reached is at least 10 times that of a normal nucleon. The simplest and most economical explanation of these phenomenon is that the system is a dense, locally thermalized system of unscreened color charges," (
Richard Seto) you're likely to believe them. You've grown up learning to trust the methodology of conventional scientists, because far more often than not, it turns out to be true. So you trust and base your beliefs on Richard Seto's testimony.
So for a natural skeptic and scientist like myself, questions are asked, doctrines are tested, and in time it comes to be that it's trustworthy, like science is trustworthy. And once you're past that first part in either science or religion, you don't have to go testing every little thing for yourself. You understand the underlying principles and trust that if somebody has conducted things right, his results should be believable. On the other hand, if a particular methodology seems to not jive with what you can observe yourself, like chiropractors using acupressure to diagnose bacterial infections of various organs and you have no way of verifying that, you might do well to distrust their guidance.
You are asking us (us nonbelievers) to believe in some magical invisible man in the sky, instead of simply believing in the infinite existence of the universe.
That is where I was coming from in saying that you assume God should be unknowable or mysterious. [tung] I am not asking you to believe in some magical invisible man in the sky. I don't believe there is one. And I don't think that anything of revelation received from God has ever contradicted this belief in an infinite universe. I'm saying there is a knowable God, and I believe all things are knowable. You just have to allow yourself to learn about other evidence that doesn't quite fit with your meme.
Again Gewis, I mean no disresect, but there is zero physical evidence for the Christian/Mormon faith. Just because you keep saying that there is doesn't make it true.
I actually wrote something about that a long while ago that I never really finished, for these forums no less.
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I feel it would be beneficial to the discussion if I put in my two cents advocating entirely a different opinion than those shared by perhaps the majority of those perusing these forums.
I'm going to be taking this from a Christian perspective, more specifically, as a believer and member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons). Peter makes an excellent point, that if God doesn't want to be found, he won't be found. From the idea that he's a master creator, many of the observed laws governing our universe may be contradictory with mainstream theological ideas, but don't necessarily have to be. As I said in my introductory post in the Introduce Yourself forums, wherein entered a bit of religious discussion, there are particular questions that likely never would have been questions at all had the original text been understood better. For instance, the Greek rendition of the Old Testament, instead of being read 'create,' is more accurately read 'organize.' Certainly an organization of already existent matter into the form we see it now agrees with conservation of mass-energy. There's no reason, from a theological perspective, to believe that God, being the Creator of the universe and the Institutor of the laws governing the same, would operate within this universe in a manner inconsistent with the laws He established. That the Earth is 6,000 years old is hard to support, but that 6,000 years have elapsed since the time Adam left the Garden of Eden may be better supported, or even more loosely, that 1,000 years had numerical significance in Judaic culture, but wasn't intended to be interpereted literally, although this part is unknown to me.
The debate of creation vs. evolution tends to turn some rational thinkers off to the entire belief structure of mainstream Christian religion, as fundamentalists on the religious side refuse to see what's plainly evident for everybody to see, that evolution is a principle of nature. While the particulars of theory of evolution are still being debated among paleontologists, the idea is beyond denial, unless one chooses to throw out observational evidence. That a fossil record would be some sort of trick of God with the intention of leading mankind astray is absurd, nor can the existence of such be ascribed to the devil without contradiction of important scripturally supported doctrines. So, while still maintaining a belief in God, one has to come to the conclusion that the language of the biblical record of organizational creation includes evolution. Indeed, "God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day," speaks nothing of the length of what he called day or night. Any in-depth study of Judaism, from which we get this account, will reveal that it's filled with symbolic teachings of all sorts, and even the constant washings were not points of sanitation, but of symbolic teaching. Any expectation of pure literalism in accounts from a symbolic culture are unrealistic.
For behold, Isaiah spake many things which were hard for many of my people to understand; for they know not concerning the manner of prophecying among the Jews. For I, Nephi, have not taught them concerning the manner of the Jews... Yea, and my soul delighteth in the words of Isaiah, for I came out from Jerusalem, and mine eyes hath beheld the things of the Jews, and I know that the Jews do understand the things of the prophets, and there is none other people that understand the things which were spoken unto the Jews like unto them, save it be that they are taught after the manner of the things of the Jews. - 2 Nephi 25: 1-2, 5
This is text from the Book of Mormon shortly after the Babylonians invaded ca. 600 B.C. Interestingly, this brings me to another point: God does not choose to remain unknown, and this has been demonstrated in modern times as well as ancient. For instance, the aforementioned Babylonian Captivity. Jeremiah prophecied concerning this event many years before it happened, according as he had been directed through revelation. The Book of Mormon prophet Lehi left with his family into the wilderness after being nearly killed in Jerusalem for preaching repentance, this immediately prior to the captivity. They traced a path recorded in scripture that follows very nearly along identifiable landmarks in the Arabian Peninsula, in sequential order as if they had been headed right out of Jerusalem. For those unaware of the origins of the Book of Mormon, it was translated and subsequently published by 1830... by a man with a 2nd or 3rd grade education, Joseph Smith. The history of that I'll get to, as already it seems a ridiculous notion by the way I've introduced it, but the point merely suffices that there's very little means by which a farmboy could have known so much of the geography and history of the region,
particularly considering that historians and geographers in the United States were largely unaware of these details themselves at the time, which have since been discovered by archaeologists. The record details a subsequent journey to the American continent. Particular instances verifying the Book of Mormon include tribal currencies in Honduras with striking similarities to currency outlined in Alma (one of those in the Book of Mormon), and apparent Hebrew and Egpyptian linguistic roots in pre-Columbian languages, as well as the striking similarity between the pyramids of the Old and New worlds.
The Book of Mormon, unlikely a fabrication as the plausibility of a New York farmboy making up a geographically, archaeologically, and stylistically accurate text is very small, can be assumed to be a historical record. In linguistic structure, the pattern of mirroring concepts progressively forward and digressively back with a central peak, also known as a chiasmus, is strong in ancient Judaic texts. Interestingly, the Book of Mormon follows this structure through its entirety. Probability now leans heavily in favor of the authenticity of the Book of Mormon at this point.
Taking, then, the Book of Mormon as an authentic record, we can then begin to look at its contents. With the exception of large amounts of quotations from Isaiah and other Israelite prophets, the Book of Mormon departs from the symbolism traditional to Jewish prophetic styles. Nephi, quoted earlier, states that “my soul delighteth in plainness,” and seeks to explain the visions he received and their interpretations in plain language. This precedent sets the tone for the historians/prophets who follow after him. While still following a chiasmus, events are related in plain language, prophecies and warnings given clearly for any to understand. Yet, with the confusing symbolism abandoned, visions, revelation, prophecy, and miracles are recorded just as sure as political and military conflicts, including body counts and tactical maneuvers.
The God of both the New and Old Testaments was a God of miracles, angels, and revelation. Symbolism in accounts provide an instrument for teaching, but central is the idea of God communicating with His children. With so many various and independent experiences confirming this idea, one has to wonder whether every prophet from Adam to Malachi was simply making it up in recording their communications with God. Telling about this is the record of Daniel:
All the presidents of the kingdom, the governors, and the princes, the counsellors, and the captains, have consulted together to establish a royal statute, and to make a firm decree, that whosoever shall ask a petition of any God or man for thirty days, save of thee, O king, he shall be cast into the den of lions. - Daniel 5: 7
That the burning bush of Moses may have been written to symbolize something else (whatever that something else was, it was still there in the record) is conceivable, but that Daniel, a powerful and wise leader for his time, was clearly petitioning a higher power and
getting results is not left vague or open to interpretation by the text. This is only one example, but a scriptural search will find multiple examples of the same thing: Communication from God to believers, who are rewarded for their faith by blessings.
Immediately consistent with Old Testament records of prophets communicating with God is the record of Jesus Christ communicating with His Father, and teaching people the manner in which they should pray. "Our Father, which art in heaven..." (Matthew 6: 9) The veracity of the independent records of the 4 Gospels (90 percent of Mark is in both Matthew and Luke, and Mark is generally regarded as first, but the agreement of the record of events separately in Matthew and Luke beyond that contained in Mark is impressive)
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That's as far as I got. There are more things I'd like to add. In mosaics in at least one ancient cathedral (in Italy or Greece, I don't remember which, but I've seen the photographs), you have depictions of an ordinance that still has some vestigial elements in Catholic society (the Pope is the only one who does it). Except that his ordinance looks nothing like the mosaics, and those mosaics look exactly like what was revealed to Joseph Smith regarding temple ordinances, and that we still conduct today. (I won't describe them here) Do you really think that's just coincidence, though? Of course not. And if you're not going to believe it came from the source Joseph Smith said it did, then don't you have to assume he was a fraud (a fraud who healed broken bones and serious illness as so many have done since)? But fraud doesn't jive with it either. See, he got too many things right. South Carolina was the the opening shots of the civil war were, as he prophesied. Mass migration of Jews and the literal gathering of Israel in Palestine started circa 1850, shortly after the land was dedicated for their return. Nations are now increasingly gathering against Israel as prophesied by Ezekiel, anti-semitism is rampant. Since seismology and weather tracking have begun with conventional science, there has been a steady increase in significant events worldwide. Even accounting for increases in technological sensitivity, frequency and severity of earthquakes have increased. "Wars and rumors of wars" are accelerating in frequency.
No observables, eh? You can believe what you like, and in the end your foundation is just as arbitrary as those you consider "irrational." People throughout time have managed to deny what was right in front of them.
And remember, if there is no objective evidence to support your beliefs then you must ask yourself: ARE MY EXPERIENCES REAL, OR ARE THEY JUST A VESTIGIAL SIDE EFFECT OF EVOLUTIONARY FORCES ACTING UPON MY REPRESENTATIONAL SYSTEMS WITHIN MY COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE?
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I've already asked that question. In the end, it was far inadequate.