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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
"Robert A. Heinlein once wrote (approximately), "There is no compelling evidence supporting the theory of life after death. Neither is there any evidence against it. Soon enough you will know, so why worry about it?"
Just how does anyone "know" that we'll "know"?
Is there proof of this?
NO.
Thank you for making that distinction between materialism and physicalism; I agree that's important. Thank you also for your detailed summary of T. Padmanabhan. That is all fascinating, and "true" (verifiable) as far as it goes. I don't dispute any of that.
The trouble is it doesn't explain why or how the "early (photon-radiation) era cosmos" exists in the first place. I find the theory elegant, powerful and beautiful, but it doesn't speak to Ultimate Cause in any way.
As for Lynx, I would suggest that by calling me unintelligent in his first post he did indeed call me "an idiot". Perhaps, Lynx should model his discourse more along the lines of droogoy and hotspur if he's truly interested in dialogue (of course, I doubt he is).
Thanks again, droogoy. Best wishes
King -
The character was Hal Sleet, not Al. Otherwise a fitting tribute.
As for the rest of these intellect vs. faith constructions -
very interesting, I'm sure. You all carry the mark of faith in your arguments, though none of you invented them. Maybe I'll write a monograph on the phenomenon and call it "Origin of the Specious".
All I know is that if you laid all the people that attend church in this country end to end, they'd be more comfortable.
Yes, I stole that.
Two last points: I do not equate the philosophy of atheism with religion directly. I DO equate the tactics and the language of the militant atheist with that of the fundamentalist religious devotee. Zealotry is zealotry under any guise, and while the philosophy of atheism is obviously more evolved than that of traditional religions (of any stripe), it is no less subject to codification and dogmatization.
I made a distinction also between surpassing and dismissing. Obviously, valid observation is valid by definition. Newton's laws were originally thought to govern all matter--and at the time they did; all KNOWN matter worked within Newtonian physics. Newton was surpassed in the quantum age when it became evident that those laws ceased to function at the quantum level. Quantum mechanics did not negate Newton's laws in the manifest world in which he elaborated them, but the discovery of relativity and the quantum field required dismissing those laws in the very macro and micro manifest world. The broader the viewpoint (i.e. the more experience we have relative to what we're observing, the more we can observe and the more we experience, ad infinitum) the more accurate we can be in our explanation.
You seem to me to speak of atheism as an absolute, and I am merely suggesting that it is more rightly open-ended and evolving in the same way that the whole of the Cosmos is open-ended and evolving. To state "this is fact for all time" denies all the historical examples of a statement like that later being proven false and closes the door on further, current examination.
That's a problem to me.
jazztao wrote:
The trouble is it doesn't explain why or how the "early (photon-radiation) era cosmos" exists in the first place. I find the theory elegant, powerful and beautiful, but it doesn't speak to Ultimate Cause in any way.
No, it doesn't, because it provides a positivist solution not a causal one. As Mario Bunge (Causality and Modern Science, Dover) has observed:
"Giving reasons is no longer regarded as assigning causes. In Science, it means to combine particular propositions about facts with hypotheses, laws, axioms and definitions. In general, there is no correspondence between sufficient reason and causation."
Bunge and others recommend instead the elucidation of necessary and sufficient conditions. A necessary condition is one without which the event cannot occur. A sufficient condition is one which - if present- the event must occur.
For example, consider a hydrogen emission nebula. A necessary condition is a hydrogen gas cloud. If there is no hydrogen cloud there can be no emission nebula. A sufficient condition is a proximate source of radiation, e.g. star, which can excite the electrons in many of the clouds hydrogen atoms to higher energy levels. On returning to lower energy levels there will then be the emission of photons and voila! The H-emission nebula.
What is essential for the non-positivists to do, is not to pursue the hollow "ultimate cause" but rather try to specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for what THEY believe is essential to the origin of the cosmos.
Again, this is not a problem for the modern Materialist-positivist. Asking for the "ultimate cause" of the original quantum fluctuation is for us tantamount to asking "What is north of the north pole?"
Again, that is a beautiful explanation, and of course the focus on necessary and sufficient conditions is succinct and reliable.
However, I doubt very much that the questions "why are we here?" and "what was there before there was something?" will ever be vanquished from the human experience. That mystery, though it shall remain a mystery, is not unworthy of exploration or discourse. You choose not to entertain these questions and that's fine, but to suggest that they are not valid questions I think is incorrect.
Read it in his own words:
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat/331953
jazztao wrote:
However, I doubt very much that the questions "why are we here?" and "what was there before there was something?" will ever be vanquished from the human experience.
I don't either. I simply don't think they can ever be answered, which is why science didn't prosper and move from strength to strength until it began to ignore all 'why' questions. E.g. we never ask 'Why do stars shine?' we ask HOW they shine. The latter let to more productive and fruitful approaches of research and discovery of nuclear fusion in stellar cores.
Also people may not like the feasible answer, such as there may not be any "purpose" to why we are here. We may just "be here" with no point or purpose. It may then ultimately be up to us as sentient beings and orphans in a purposeless cosmos to craft our own purpose as opposed to looking for it on high.
That mystery, though it shall remain a mystery, is not unworthy of exploration or discourse.
I know and can appreciate that, as I initially began taking courses in theology and philosophy at a Catholic university, before I switched to pure science (astronomy-astrophysics) at a public one, working with some of the best stellar astrophysicists and astrometists, dynamicists.
You choose not to entertain these questions and that's fine, but to suggest that they are not valid questions I think is incorrect
I simply think the questions are a waste of time. I pursued them - while doing philosophy- at great length. It never got anywhere and one merely returned to the same point in and endless loop. Then, my attention shifted to science and I began to appreciate the positivist approach, as in quantum mechanics, wherein we do not ask 'why' electrons behave as probability waves in atoms, or how the exp (iEt/h) factor figures in the Schrodinger equation - we simply accept these in terms of the theory's predictions as a prescriptive template.
And no - again, I do not say the "higher questions" are "invaid". I simply say they were (and remain) unproductive for me. As for others, as I said, I suspect the questions, on account of the entry of the Godel Incompletenes theorems at various levels, lead to excess self-reference, and that is why one gets endless loops and no clear progress.
If one questioner could just provide the n-s conditions for his claim, or the underpinning of his quest, then much of this could be rendered more legitimate as a useful pursuit. As opposed to mere speculations that never produce results.
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