Breaking the Science Barrier

[GDR]

I know this thread had kinda died, but I had this article in today's "The Mail" from the UK e-mailed to me. It was on topic so thought I'd post it.

Scientists and Faith

[handyman]

Unfortunately, it's like trying to talk to an NRA member about restricting his AR-15.

[Don Hudson]

Hi Greg;

We live our lives through millions of connected experiences from birth to "our present", all of which bring a deep familiarity of physical and emotional "reality" and habit, the sources of which are profoundly transparent and therefore invisible and uninspectable to us, but nevertheless equally, profoundly human. That is the nature of our lived (experienced) reality and is the only reality from which we may form responses and judgements about the world.

Because we, our brain and nervous system, are evolutionary in nature and have responded over 3 billion years to gradual changes in environment as life branched, and branched again millions of times, we are deeply "tailored to the earth", and of course, wholly unsuited to life elsewhere in the universe. To early life, oxygen was poisonous. To us, it is life - that is our reality which cannot be altered or denied.

There is no escaping that singular fact. We are "of earth" as much as we are "of star-stuff".

Despite what Deism may claim and though we may wish it, there is no external (beyond humans and life on earth) inevitability about a maker in any of this except perhaps an urgency towards belief in a maker.

Our lived "reality" is transparent to our senses. We interpret our reality through language, but poorly, so language is forever a prisoner of the hermeneutic gesture, which is what I wanted to open up a discussion upon in the other thread because it broaches, philosophically, the "ontology of being".

Philosophy is, by no means, using everyday language as we do here, to achieve a better understanding of reality - I believe it is why many may be religious and also scientific or philosophical. Though we may puzzle and, for some, marvel over such an "inconsistency", such inconsistency is only a comment about human capacity, it is not a comment or proof about the existence of a maker.

Science does not use language in the same way but plumbs and otherwise extends beyond such limitations as evolution has placed on our form and construction to theorize and accept as more than theory, some aspects of reality.

The laws of the universe are not human constructs. One does not have "faith" in gravity, nor does one need "faith" in scientific investigation and explanation. One only needs time for enough to repeat the experiment in many different labs.

These are all recognized facts by religious and non-religious people alike. The notion of god, on the other hand is purely a matter of personal, private faith which is, as the article states, cannot be communicated to another such that the experience is inevitable. One simply needs faith, no less of a reality for some but not inevitable for all.

No matter how powerful, one simply cannot, of necessity and undeniability, extend or attribute a sense of incredulity at the strangeness of a universe to the existence of a maker, deist or no. The article, in my view, fails utterly to convince, as does Professor Lennox in the debates with Dawkins which I listened to earlier this year.

I am not an "atheist", for to be so "de-scribed" by "The Other"-'s use of language, one must accept that "binary opposites" in language fully explain reality and they do not. Such thought has a name - that is, if only in a tiny way, a Structuralist way of thought, and part of what I contribute here might, in an equally tiny way perhaps, be seen as "post-Structuralist" or Continental Philosophy - but naming it doesn't tell us what it is. The name is not the thing named, (and the map is not the territory! Again, I do NOT mean to be obscure here - this kind of stuff is anything but obscure in philosophy - it's pretty ordinary, actually).

In much the same way that we seem to think that for a mountain to "exist", there must be valleys, (at least two!... ). That may explain material reality but binary opposition does not explain the human psyche very well.

"Atheist", like the term "agnostic" may be a convenient term used in these kinds of dialogues but it is such a limiting notion when confronted with the complexity of human existence and possibility.A-theism and theism are binary opposites. Although most will employ the term to de-scribe those who "do not believe in god", I "sub-scribe" to neither. Such terms just don't describe my "condition".

One cannot convey faith; one must come to faith by oneself. What convinces one, leaves another in abject puzzlement. Each of us travels that path alone; some come to faith early, some late, some never - it is what it is, as is life itself.

[Timothy]

Interesting article Greg. Thanks for posting it.

Don made an excellent point when he stated:

"One cannot convey faith; one must come to faith by oneself."

In my case faith came through my parents and has only been strengthened throughout my life - in good times as well as in bad. It's a fine topic for discussion, but not for argument. Perhaps the best we can do is to live our lives according to the principles of our faith and try to look after our neighbours, whoever or wherever they may be.

[Don Hudson]

Timothy;

It's a fine topic for discussion, but not for argument. Perhaps the best we can do is to live our lives according to the principles of our faith and try to look after our neighbours, whoever or wherever they may be.

I could not agree with you more heartily! - thank you for putting this so succinctly.

There are many reasons and ways to celebrate Christmas. By far, this is the most important way.

faith came through my parents

Notwithstanding the wonderful discussion on nature vs. nurture, it is our parent(s) from whom we learn "how to be".

From day one, (for me, "day one" begins at conception...), the messages "conveyed" by a parent first in the womb, then through touch, security (absent of fear), relieved discomforts (wet, hungry, tired), the timbre and vibrations of a familiar voice, familiar smells and later, a guiding, caring hand, OR the absence of some or all of this, teach us "being" - we feel, speak and act from millions of moments of earliest childhood experience. From earliest days we know "faith" from repeated experience of met needs which increase in complexity as we grow older. We come to that faith or absence of faith through our lived experiences sometimes as a response to life-altering experiences but, I might suggest, most times from earliest childhood experiences. One is "open" to all experience to the extent that one is secure and is happy stepping well outside one's quietly-constructed circle of "the familiar".

Timothy, I'm reading two books at the moment by Michael Ruse - the first one is, "Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? - The Relationship between Science and Religion, (2001), the second is "Darwinism and it's Discontents", (2006), a much stronger expression of the Darwinist view.

As you almost certainly have discerned there are two dialogues going on here; One concerns a personal faith in God, while the other is about religion itself and the formalized, insitutional expressions and constructs of same. My views on religion are abundantly clear and not in disagreement with Christopher Hitchens', Dawkins' and others' views.

It is time for "Religion" to come to terms with what is done in it's name - those speaking for Islam have been far too silent even to this day on this, and those who speak for Christianity have yet to even acknowledge that much that is inhumane and perhaps even evil has been perpetrated in it's name. Personal faith must address this as must the church. The increasing irrelevancy of religion in favour of a purely instrumental (as opposed to secular) "cause" where greed and violence is valued as solutions to difference is a valid discussion issue which has yet to be broached.

Another aspect of this which I think is worth discussing is Joseph Campbell's views as made in the "Power of Myth" series done at Skywalker Ranch with Bill Moyers.

Campbell described the Catholic service, (fyi, I was originally baptised Baptist) done as it was in Latin, with chants and in large cathedrals "launched the soul" in ways that guitar and drums with "folksy" services never could. Spirituality is about helping others on "the journey" certainly, but it is also about taking one to places one sees/feels/hears only rarely - the "rapture", as Campbell calls it, (this is not the religious, evangelical meaning of the term) where the ceremony touches those places in the psyche not normally ventured into.

Despite disagreement with the numbers, people are leaving the church and have been doing so for almost 50 years. As I described to Greg, the large church in which I practise the organ has a congregation of about 50 people, all over sixty. They are struggling where they were once, along with my childhood church down the street, (Olivet Baptist in New Westminster) a thriving community of deeply religious people who knew how to give thanks and make a community.

The possibility of a secular life has been growing since Hume. Nietszche has extremely important notions for Christians and non-Christians alike.

It seems to me that the question and discussion over the "existence" of god is immaterial to a life well-led as you have described. In a hundred years, we may recognize only historical vestiges of what we know today as "religion". I fervently, deeply, hope that is the case.

[GDR]

We live our lives through millions of connected experiences from birth to "our present", all of which bring a deep familiarity of physical and emotional "reality" and habit, the sources of which are profoundly transparent and therefore invisible and uninspectable to us, but nevertheless equally, profoundly human. That is the nature of our lived (experienced) reality and is the only reality from which we may form responses and judgements about the world.

Hi again Don

And both the physical and the emotional are real. If the physical world is all there is then show me a physical emotion? Do I weigh more when I'm angry than I do when I'm calm? What does an idea look like? You're not an Atheist so presumably you're not a materialist either. (I tend to think they're one and the same.) If there is more to our existence than the material doesn't that open up a whole new avenue that might lead to considering life outside of our 4 dimensional universe?

Because we, our brain and nervous system, are evolutionary in nature and have responded over 3 billion years to gradual changes in environment as life branched, and branched again millions of times, we are deeply "tailored to the earth", and of course, wholly unsuited to life elsewhere in the universe. To early life, oxygen was poisonous. To us, it is life - that is our reality which cannot be altered or denied.

It does seem that this place was tailor made for our arrival doesn't it?

Despite what Deism may claim and though we may wish it, there is no external (beyond humans and life on earth) inevitability about a maker in any of this except perhaps an urgency towards belief in a maker.

That's true, but there no inevitability about a purely materialistic history either. All we can do is look at the science, observe nature, consider our humaness and then draw our own conclusions. When I observe how finely tuned the universe has to be in order for us to exist; when I think about the range of human emotion; or consider our sense of mercy, justice and altruism, I come to the conclusion that the non-scientific evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of intelligent design. (Not to be confused with the "Intelligent Design" movement.) However once again, I agree that it isn't inevitable.

Our lived "reality" is transparent to our senses. We interpret our reality through language, but poorly, so language is forever a prisoner of the hermeneutic gesture, which is what I wanted to open up a discussion upon in the other thread because it broaches, philosophically, the "ontology of being".

Philosophy is, by no means, using everyday language as we do here, to achieve a better understanding of reality - I believe it is why many may be religious and also scientific or philosophical. Though we may puzzle and, for some, marvel over such an "inconsistency", such inconsistency is only a comment about human capacity, it is not a comment or proof about the existence of a maker.

I 'm not completely clear on your point. It does seem to me that philosophy can tell us more about our humaness and why we are the way we are, (which is what I understand you to mean by the “ontolgy of being”), than science can. Science tells us how things are, in a way, philosophy goes beyond that and tells us how things might have been. Also, I don't see the inconsistency. It seems logical to me that if I am correct with my philosophy or my theology, it will be consistent with solid science, and as far as I'm concerned it is.

No matter how powerful, one simply cannot, of necessity and undeniability, extend or attribute a sense of incredulity at the strangeness of a universe to the existence of a maker, deist or no. The article, in my view, fails utterly to convince, as does Professor Lennox in the debates with Dawkins which I listened to earlier this year.

There you go. I thought Lennox wiped the floor with him but then just possibly neither one of us is 100% objective.

These are all recognized facts by religious and non-religious people alike. The notion of god, on the other hand is purely a matter of personal, private faith which is, as the article states, cannot be communicated to another such that the experience is inevitable. One simply needs faith, no less of a reality for some but not inevitable for all.

Yes I have my faith. I am either right or wrong. Just because it isn't scientific does not mean that it can't be just as true as anything scientific. I love my wife and that is a fact but it isn't scientific. I can't test it in a lab and I can't prove it. People will have to judge whether it is true or not by what they observe. I judge the Christian message to be as true as anything scientific but I can't test it or prove it so I have come to my conclusions based on what I have experienced and observed.

"Atheist", like the term "agnostic" may be a convenient term used in these kinds of dialogues but it is such a limiting notion when confronted with the complexity of human existence and possibility.A-theism and theism are binary opposites. Although most will employ the term to de-scribe those who "do not believe in god", I "sub-scribe" to neither. Such terms just don't describe my "condition".

How would you describe your condition?

One cannot convey faith; one must come to faith by oneself. What convinces one, leaves another in abject puzzlement. Each of us travels that path alone; some come to faith early, some late, some never - it is what it is, as is life itself.

Essentially I agree but with one caveat. As a Christian I don't feel that I came to faith on my own. Christianity is about responding to that which created us and loved us in the first place. JMHO

Cheers

Greg

[GDR]

Don made an excellent point when he stated:

"One cannot convey faith; one must come to faith by oneself."

In my case faith came through my parents and has only been strengthened throughout my life - in good times as well as in bad. It's a fine topic for discussion, but not for argument. Perhaps the best we can do is to live our lives according to the principles of our faith and try to look after our neighbours, whoever or wherever they may be.

Nicely put Timothy.

The question though is "why" bother about our neighbour. Why should we build shelters for the homeless? Why should we build special facilities for the handicapped? The fact that we respond to something more than just the "survival of the fittest" indicates to me that although we may well be the product of evolutionary forces, we are much more than that.

There has to be a first cause for our emotions and our sense of right and wrong. If we decide that that first cause evolved through strictly natural processes then our faith is in ourselves. If we decide that it comes from God then our faith is in him. In the end, we are all people of faith.

Merry Christmas

Greg in snowy YYJ

[GDR]

I received a book that I mentioned previously, Quantum Enigma and found this in the first chapter. It describes what I was talking about in ways that I couldn't.

The worldview demanded by quantum theory is, to borrow the words of J.B.S. Haldane, not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. Most of us share commonsense intuitions. For example, is it not just common sense that one object cannot be in two far apart places at once?  And, surely what happens here is not affected by what happens at the same time some place very far away. And does it not go without saying that there is a real world "out there" whether we look at it or not? Quantum mechanics challenges each of these intuitions by having observation actually create the physical reality observed.

The writer of the book had a chance to spend an evening with Einstein in the 50's, when he was a graduate student. He writes this:

It would be many years before I understood Einstein's profound concern with the mysterious implications of quantum theory, implications that he called "spooky" and that he believed denied the obvious existence of the real world.

I'm looking forward to the rest of the book but thought I'd resurrect this old thread as this seemed germane and added to the discussion.

Greg

[Don Hudson]

Greg;

Interesting find - let me know how it goes. I also found something in my Christmas travels: "Atheism and Theism", J.J.C. Smart, & J. J. Haldane, (no relation, I believe). It's a 2nd edition so it's been around a while. Two philosophers, discussing God.

Hope you had a fine Christmas Season.

Don

[GDR]

Hi Don

I'm just through two chapters but it is fascinating stuff. Here the book that I read over Christmas. It was interesting because it put into context the evolution, (if I may be so bold as to borrow the term), of my own faith.

Great Emergence- How Christianity is Changing and Why

[GDR]

I discovered a web site that was put together in conjunction with the book I'm reading. Here is a short note on what the book is about. It is absolutely fascinating and once again it all points to the idea that nothing is intuitive or as it seems.

The Enigma in a Nutshell

[DEFCON]

Great link. Thanks GDR.