I have just spoken to Dr. Scumacher over the phone and he has agreed to an interview. Please post any questions here and I'll try to get them in. Anything regarding Christian faith and quantum physics, this is the time and place to post them.

Ask him if he has an empirical model that is testable and falsifiable and can be independently peer reviewed that shows that it is possible for a thought to arise from a non-material process?

My point is that ALL god concepts throughout history require willful ignorance to swallow the claim of a non-material thinking entity.

Of course the answer is no, and to this date you will not find any theist of any label that can do such.

But since he claims to be a "scientist", I'm always interested how believers try to stick their myth into science.

I am in no way taking him seriously. But it is entertaining to see them try to fit a square peg into a round hole.

 

How about:

1. Define God.

2. Why do you believe this being exists.

3. What's his take on empiricism, as a scientist.

4. How does he compartmentalize faith and critical thinking.

5. How can anyone with half a brain believe an extraordinary claim with no proof.

Go from there, the empirical question should give you a lot of material to work with, you can go down that road and hand him a nice big shovel to dig a nice big hole for himself.

 

In case you're still taking questions:

1) Considering that humans are one species out of millions that has been around for a couple hundred thousand years in a universe 13 billion years old; does he believe we are the end goal of his god's creation?  

2) Did god create the physical laws, or are they independent of him?

 

OK Marty, here are a few from me:

 

If god made the universe, from what did he make it?

 

This would be interesting because of the creationists who posit the watch maker argument. Well, a watch implies not only a make but also materials. If the argument can have any value at all, then it also requires that the universe maker had material to work with.

 

Where was god before he made everything?

 

Again, as a watch maker has a work shop, so too must a universe maker.

 

Who made all the stuff that god used to make the universe and how would your scientist friend deal with the infinite regress?

 

Hey Marty, me again.

 

I took a look at your first post and the wikipedia link was broken. I fixed that for you. If you notice a flag that the thread was “updated”, that is because that happens any time the first post in a thread is edited.

 

Anyway, now that I know who we will be talking to, I would ask you to see if he would also be willing to field a few questions regarding his scientific work?

 

In order for them to be of much use to anyone outside the few of us who are willing to sort out the arcana, I would have to start in English (as poor a tool as it may be) and see if the questions actually go anywhere useful. Let me give you a sample and see what he thinks:

 

For today's nanometer scale electronics, quantum effects are not yet a problem. However, as electronics continue to shrink in size, is it likely that at some point quantum coherence would result in a loss of resolution? Basically, if transistors ever made it down to the scale of moving a handful of electrons, would tunneling become an issue such that the state of a transistor would become uncertain?

Good questions. I emailed some of the preliminaries to Dr. Scumacher and I he has been very receptive. Non religious questions are welcome. My plan is to shoot enough soundbites to use in several projects, religious or not.

 Could you ask him to describe the process by which he hypothesizes God created the universe?

Hello,

I personally know at least a dozen Christian scientists in all sorts of fields. Most of them are evidential in nature. Mean that proof, in which Brian speaks of, must be empirical.

Thus, via their starting point in science, they allow the probable data to speak for the Bible, verses the Bible to interpret the data, thus making science a reality.

Thus, what is his mode operandum in his philosphy of science. Does he feel that archeology prooves the Bible. Also, if he is an evidentialist, ask him how he can support the inerrance of Scripture via Sola Scriptura, if the probable data dictates the interpretation of the Bible itself.

This happened in the early 20th century, and led to the gap theory, Literary Hermenutics, Progressive Creationism, among other things.

Thus, his philosphy of science would be a place to start Since I have never heard of him.

Respectfully,

Jean Chauvin (Jude 3).

Hello Gay Friend,

Of course that is an ad hominem abusive. And you didn't understand my post. I said most are evidential, meaning that allow the data to speak for the Bible, verses the Bible speaking for the Data.

Since interpretation is not in the area of proof, this is a dillema for faggots and atheists. Thus, only in Christianity can such a dillema be solved in the inerrant Word of God.

The only means to know.

Respectfully,

Jean Chauvin (Jude 3).

Dr. Schumacher responds:

I have more answers and will be posting more soon. Thakns for your input Jean, I will be adding your questions in the next installment.

Really? Big Bang has been around for quite a while.

Why are you so desperate to insert a "who" in as a cause when a "what" is much more simple with no magical baggage?

The origins of our universe are not the cause of a who, but CONDITIONS, much like the hot African coast during the summer has a tendency to produce hurricanes in the Atlantic. I hope you don't think Posiden causes or allows hurricanes.

"Invisible friends" are inventions of human's wishful thinking. It is a placebo, a projection of our own narcissism as a species. It is a strong emotional appeal and nothing more. It is a side affect of human evolution and a comic book reflection of our real evolutionary drive to continue.

 

In the interest of brevity, I emailed Dr. Schumacher a link to this thread. This was his response:

 

He isn't being serious, he used the word "fagot" to provoke a response. He is nothing but a childish troll looking for attention.

 

I had surmised that. My response was thinly disguised sarcasm with a point in semantics. When my niece was around 6, one of her friends called her and her cousin "dykes" and it hurt her feelings so she went to her dad and asked him to define the word. Being a skilled technician, he held up a pair of boltcutters and said, "This is a pair of dykes, honey." She asked why someone would call her and her cousin a pair of boltcutters, he replied, "Because he doesn't know any better."

I was not positing the Big Bang as the ground of existence, I was positing the existence of a basic and intrinsically simple regularity of the fundamental 'elements' of being, which are currently somewhere at or below the level of quarks and leptons. This regularity and self-similarity is all that is needed to give to orderly patterns and structures, along with the formation of the essential 'matter' particles, which are the basis of persistent complex patterns and processes, which seem to be essential for emergent complexity, such as life and self-awareness.

An immaterial realm, beyond space and time, or some higher dimensional equivalent of such, seems to me to be incapable of sustaining anything of consequence.

Science sees complex forms arising from simpler every day, as as crystalline structures form from formless liquid solutions, and as living organisms reproduce and grow, so there is simply no logical necessity for something already well beyond a basic sea of particles or 'quantum foam', or some such, to pre-exist.

And if you are going to include the conventional 'omni' attributes, you are definitely positing something extraordinary, by any definition, any beyond any logical necessity for a creator being.

Which makes the idea of a God unnecessary, and indeed only a complicating factor to be explained, rather than an explanation in itself.

The contradiction is that God cannot be the origin of himself.

I was not verging on proposing 'irrationality' as signs of a consciousness, but rather non-rationality, such as preferences, emotions, drives, etc, IOW all signs of the subjective. I hope you recognize the important distinction.

Science and philosophy were once obsessed with 'rationality' as the ultimate attribute of an ideal mind, but we have come to recognize, with the arrival of complex computer systems, that that is something that can be derived from complex logical structures. We once thought mental skills such as playing chess at a high level was a test for a 'mind', but now we know better, or should.

Rather, it is things like self-awareness which are more important, and a sense of ethics, and altruism which are the goals of the latest AI research. There are currently at least four groups of life-forms which show unmistakable signs of self-awareness: the higher primates, including ourselves, elephants, cetaceans, especially dolphins, and some bird species, such as parrots and corvids.

If find 'transcendent' an unnecessary qualification for anything.

We have a pretty good idea where our moral intuitions come from, from evolution, as being highly important for the success of a social, mutually cooperating species, and have identified key parts of the brain, the 'mirror neurones', as fundamental to developing feelings of empathy, the basis of love and compassion, and other positive drives. I agree that 'social consensus' does not really capture what I was referring to, but rather I mean a minimum degree of shared instincts and urges, not a consciously arrived at 'consensus'.

'Moral' rules based on the edicts of an authority figure are not the basis of a morality, but rather a form of legal system, but one inferior to that in modern advanced democracies, as lacking adequate appeal mechanisms.

AN important aspect of our nature is some diversity of dispositions and desires, which is vital to our ability to adapt, as a society or civilization, to new circumstances, and to evolve socially and intellectually. So there will always be some individuals who stand out against the masses, at all margins of the 'moral' and intellectual landscape: Darwin, Galileo, Einstein, Pasteur, Giordano Bruno, Wilberforce, some strongly criticised or even persecuted by the intellectual or 'moral' authorities of the times, as against the likes of Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, at a darker boundary.

 

And you could be a total douche who is convinced his shit don't smell.

What's that got to do with the price of tea in China?

 

That knife cuts both ways, Einstein.

 

That's not a point in the theists favor, whatsoever.

 

False.

There are mountains of factual data derived from experiments, on the fallibility of human perception.

 

It leaves you not knowing what you're talking about.

 

No amount of posturing is going to help you overcome the same problems that theism suffers from, which is that it's perched precariously on nothing but legend, folklore, personal intuition and 'experiences', to posit that they know the 'truth'.

Theism (and theists) would be best to start be more intellectually honest, and learn to make the distinction between 'opinion' and 'facts', when they communicate.

I will concede that due to common grammar and syntax, that it would be difficult and tedious to always preface dialogue with 'supposed' god 'entity', and 'supposed' 'person' Jesus, but, it is what it is. Both are 'supposed' to be real, yet all there is that is examinable, is legend, folklore, and 'personal' experience, which is to say, "Not much"...

 

Grow a pair, FFS.

 

So?

You've not lived billions of years to see how this universe formed, or how life emerged in it, so your posturing has little to do with the price of tea in China, or whether Bigfoot is actually fact, or fiction.

Some of us are actually quite 'gifted' in intellect, and work in science and technologies, as well, and put our pants on one leg at a time, just like you do. 

So, just get over yourself.

And the price of tea in China was never effected.

Nor will that effect on what you will succeed, or fail, in proving...

 

Then you're not well suited to debating...

 

 

More comments from the peanut gallery...

Maybe it's time to grow up a little...

It seems like a simple concept. The 'maker' of all things. 

No.

That's a non sequitur.

There's an unbroken stream by which events occur.

Unless you want to posit that if you could have a conversation with god, he would say 'I dunno, I'm not quite sure how I made that happen', which is absurd, if you want to posit that he is 'all knowing'.

How do you know that's possible?

Ad hoc reasoning. 

Ad hoc reasoning.

The question is more in line with "Why is it useful to you to conclude that this being exists?"

That's where many skeptics differ, from theists.

In a universe with universal constants, things could only occur 1 way. And they did.

Like a round peg fitting in a round hole. 

Extending that to pontificating about how 'rational' that is, is merely navel gazing...

Here, let me help you fix that.

"It is, what it is"

Bullshit.

This is where the equivocations begin.

The theories of 'gods' are based on imaginations of the natural world experienced 'empirically'.

Pure bullshit.

There is a huge distinction between a bunch of apples, and 100 apples, or 49 apples to your left, and 51 apples to your right.

Logical fallacy.

The individual.

That's why it's subjective, and not any means to posit that any gods exist.

Argumentum ad populum

Ignorance is nothing new.

Many people today believe in Astrology, and pattern their lives after it, despite the fact that it has been proven to be pure bunk.

Rhetorical question.

At the very best, you have no better than 50/50 odds of being correct/incorrect on a speculation.

Proof that a god exists would be evidence that without one, the universe (reality) could not possibly have occurred, or (reality) could not have always existed, in another 'form', without a deity.

Theism has got miles to go before it has anymore veracity than any other 'god' theory, from antiquity.

This is why most atheists consider thiests to be irrational. They have lower standards of what they'll adopt as 'evidence', and are willing to be 'elastic' in their imaginations when it confirms their bias, and dismissive when an antithesis does not confirm their bias.

Pure and simple.

Speak for yourself.

Whether there's a god or not, has never concerned me one bit.

I simply don't care.

Sometimes we're apathetic to a question.

Sure.

But how could you conclude, and live your entire life based on legend and folklore?

 

 

Coming in late to this thread, there's a lot to scroll through and I'm too dyslexic to read it all.  I did have a question for Dr. Schumacher, if he's still reading -- forgive me if it's already been touched upon.  I've been curious about how Christians defend their belief in a 6K year-old universe.  Some Christians don't believe this, of course.  But for the ones that do, I'm wondering if they then believe that none of the celestial bodies we can observe from Earth are further away from our planet than 6,000 light years?

 

 

Wow! What is this thread?!  A transcendental connection session with a "theist scientist"? 

After reading his replies, it seems to me that his skin is indeed too thin to debate anything (religious).  Perhaps his most telling comment was on credentials.  He is totally missing the number of people with degrees and university appointments on this forum in case he is serious about credentials. 

 

Faith and God can serve as a mental lift that helps to achieve breakthroughs in science.  But as a scientist, I can't imagine how can a scientist proudly parade a belief in a deity. 

 

No questions, just this comment.

 

I've signed onto this forum to save my old friend Marty some time and trouble, but I do so with some trepidation. As I put it to him, I've no interest in playing the starring role in a bear-baiting. This may be amusing for the spectators, but it is a waste of the bear's precious time. With all due respect, I really have many better things to do, including actual science.

 

But some of the most recent comments really do require a response.

 

My initial responses to some of the questions Marty sent me -- before I had ever looked at this forum -- contained intemperate language. I regret this not at all. I was properly irritated, still am, at the use of scare quotes by the fellow calling me a "scientist". My answer was designed to establish that I am a no-quotes scientist, full stop, by any reasonable definition of the word. This is not credential-waving, though I do understand how it could be taken that way. Let me therefore be clear: My credentials as a quantum physicist do not automatically make my statements about theology more reliable. (The same might apply to Stephen Hawking.) My intention was to counter a textbook example of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. Surely no "real" scientist could believe such stuff! Well, I am a real scientist, respected by my peers; I am a real Christian, of a fairly traditional sort; the two sets have a non-null intersection. Fact. Deal with it.

 

Some commenters have said things that are well worth engaging. BobSpence1, for instance, seems to be a smart guy with interesting stuff to say and the ability to say it clearly. He makes an excellent point about the way in which complexity emerges in the natural world. Anybody who has spent a lot of time on, say, cellular automaton theory will know that this is itself a remarkable feature of the "rule-set" by which the system is governed. Our universe is a remarkably friendly place for the emergence and persistence of extremely deep complex systems. (You might regard this as a recycling of the well-discussed anthropic "fine-tuning" of cosmic parameters. I view it as a larger point about the form of the laws also, not just the numerical value of a handful of constants.)

 

Similarly, BobSpence1 expands his view on the source and meaning of human morality. His remark about the species survival value of diversity is excellent. But the fact that some existing moral systems can be judged to be "adequate" or "inadequate" suggests an ideal standard for that judgment -- a standard that does not actually exist in real moral systems. Could a never-instantiated standard be the result of evolution? No; nothing which does not exist in the phenotype can be subject to natural selection. So this standard is something else. I could propose several theories, some of them consistent with BobSpence1's beliefs and some not. I am honestly interested in which ones he would endorse.

 

He may go a bit too far to say that "We have a pretty good idea" of where morality comes from in the evolutionary scheme of things. We have some clues and intuitions, but evolutionary psychology is far less well-founded than either evolution or psychology. It is not altogether honest to treat the most recent speculations as sound, well-tested theory; but perhaps he only meant to argue that evolutionary psychology has the potential to really explain all this stuff. Maybe it does. We'll see.

 

He does a little less well with more specifically theological matters. For instance, he says that the idea that God is the ground of his own being is contradictory because "God cannot be the origin of himself." First, the "origin" language is a bit misleading if God does not exist "within" spacetime. Our experience does suggest that nothing in spacetime can be its own cause. This is one of the reasons that theologians long ago concluded that God's existence is not confined to spacetime. Frankly, this is elementary stuff, metaphysicswise-speaking. It might not be correct, but it is a well-developed logical system with lots of serious thinking behind it. Simply asserting that it does not make sense is like those people who say that relativity is nonsense because observers in relative motion could not possibly both see each other's clocks running slowly. I talk to people like that all the time, and they are quite convinced that they have noticed the fatal flaw in Einstein. But you have to do the math.

 

Participant harleysportster seems to regard the conversation as over, as I have nothing new to offer. OK then. Bye.

 

RedneF sees me as "posturing" and perhaps too timid to engage in a real debate. ("Grow a pair.&quot OK. I freely admit that the debates and discussions I usually engage in have a different flavor from discussions here. For one thing, they generally involve more equations. They also involve much less personal animosity -- or rather, impersonal animosity, since RedneF would not know me from Adam. Yes, I've led a pretty sheltered life. I haven't spent many hours engaging in flame wars on the web. (Have you seen that great XKCD cartoon?) But seriously, when you think about how brief and precious the hours of this life are -- and I regard them so, even if I also believe in Heaven -- and about how little we accomplish of the great things that are possible for us, why get caught up in such things?

 

Have I answered and refuted RedneF? Not really. Did he answer and refute me? Not really. So we're even.

 

Brian37 calls me "Doctor" and says that I am attempting a covert argument from authority, based on my own authority as a scientist. As I explained above, I am not, but let me follow his response. He makes the reasonable point that scientists of other religions should have the same claim to authority for their religious views, which differ from mine. Some of us, maybe all of us, have to be wrong. Ergo, the argument from authority fails. Well, despite the sarcasm and ill-feeling that pervade his remarks, his argument is exactly right. It also applies to atheist scientists.

 

Brian37 goes on to make some further -- not arguments, exactly, but some strong images. Neal Stephenson once said that very few people do actual thinking, not in the sense of following a line of thought or developing an idea. Instead, they put pictures together in their heads. I think Stephenson was a bit too cynical here, but the distinction is worth pondering. Or perhaps the discussion around here has such a deep history that Brian37 is only calling to mind by icons some very careful and battle-tested arguments that I missed somewhere. (I often feel the same about Dawkins's writing.)

 

By the way, has everyone here read Stephenson's book Anathem? This has as thoughtful and humane a discussion of the relation between science and religion as I have ever read -- and is also (among other things) a rousing and imaginative science fiction adventure. Great stuff -- 800 pages, true, and a little slow at first, but well worth the time. I can't quite tell whether I agree with Stephenson's philosophical positions. I very much admire his human outlook.

 

I hope my endorsement here has not cost him any readers.

 

Anyway, Brian37 also goes on to attempt to dismantle some other explanations I gave. For example, he objects to my definition of God because I haven't established that such a being is possible. But without a prior definition, the question of God's possibility is meaningless. Similarly, he rejects some parts of my definition as "ad hoc reasoning". For the life of me, I can't figure out what this means. No, really. Something is "ad hoc" if it is chosen or done for a particular instance. This can be a criticism if the choice or deed is wrongly inconsistent with other things. How does this apply to the "reasoning" in my (very tentative) definition?

 

Later on he calls "bullshit" on a number of things I say. The accusation of an "argumentum ad populum" is plausible, and it would be a fair cop if I had pushed the argument any further. The point I was trying to make, of course, was to question the unexamined term "extraordinary". That point is a weak one, though, so I happily concede it. The claim of God's existence and nature is extraordinary. I would not expect someone to accept it on trivial grounds. Then Brian37 calls something I say a "rhetorical question", which it is. So what? (Another rhetorical question!) Finally, at the end of his heated and passionate rejoinder to all I have said, he answers my last point (that all conclusions are tentative and fallible) by saying that he is "apathetic" to the question of God. Ummm. I don't think that word means what you think it means.

 

OK, I do not wish to make him angry, and I do think I understand him. What he probably means is that, because he does not believe God exists, he has never regarded the question as an important one. The reason he is here is not to bat around the question, or even to persuade anyone, but to take shots at idiots like me. Fair enough.

 

He comes back for another go, bringing up the 72 virgins of Muslim paradise and Vishnu and all the rest. He also likes the phrase "pet deity", which he has used before and uses again, twice, presumably because it expresses the right air of contempt. "Fairy tales" and "myths", too. If he is trying to upset me with his word-choice, well, it all just sort of beads up and rolls off. But digging a little, I recognize an familiar point. I have a good friend and long-time collaborator, an eminent physicist (NAS member, etc.), whose principal objection to any particular religion is the fact that there are so many of them. It seems unjust to him to believe one set of scriptures and reject all the others. Since they can't all be equally right, the simplest hypothesis is that they are all equally wrong. This is not exactly logic, but it is based on a sense of fairness -- a sense that those people in ancient India or Africa or China were just as smart, and just as ignorant, as our own forebears. I do respect that. But doesn't this amount to a kind of inverse argumentum ad populum? Since so many people have thought otherwise, in many different ways, the idea is clearly wrong . . . .

 

To respond to commenter roseweed, I have to say that Christians who believe the world is 6000 years old are wrong and misguided -- bad science, bad thinking, even bad theology. Many of them have been told that to accept the antiquity of the earth and the evolution of life would mean that they had to reject God, about whom they think they have personal knowledge and to whom they feel strong loyalty and gratitude. Some of the people who have told them these things are so-called "teachers" of Christian doctrine. Others are atheist foes of religion. What strange allies! (It reminds me of what my Dad used to say about "Baptists and bootleggers" opposing the end of Prohibition.) I am saddened that many of my co-religionists have been taken in by this stuff. I am not much interested in recounting their (atrocious) arguments in its favor.

 

BobSpence1 returns with good points about intuition. He is a little hard on our "native reasoning", though, since historically it did give rise to all the good and sound forms of reasoning (like mathematics and natural science). It has enabled us to recognize sound arguments when we learned to make them. And in practical matters, including pretty much all of our human relationships, we rely on heuristics, analogies, and intuition a great deal. I do not believe that we are wrong to do so, partly because we are not only reasoning beings. We have passions and relationships and individuality and obligation. And even in the realms of math and science, a trained and informed intuition invariably "leads the way" toward new discoveries. We can only prove what we have first guessed. Even if most intuition is just flat wrong -- a thing I am far from conceding -- it is an indispensable tool in the practical application of reason to the world.

 

OK, that is about all I have time for. Actually, it is a good deal more than I have time for. By the time I post this, there will perhaps be more comments and responses; I'll have to leave them unanswered for the present.  And it may be some time before I can engage this fully again.  If that makes me a coward in your eyes, so be it.  You all must understand that my intention is not to provide an ironclad argument that completely establishes belief in the Christian God as an inescapable deduction from our common objective experience. I do not know that such an argument exists. I am even less sure that I could construct it. And even if I could and did, would anyone read it? My goal is much more modest: to persuade you that it is possible for a single person to hold both the Christian faith and a passionate attachment to (and some expertise in) contemporary science, without doing violence to either. The two can coexist with integrity and harmony, and without serious psychological pathology, in a single mind and heart. This by no means establishes that Christianity is true or that atheism is false. Indeed no. But it does suggest that some arguments (and a great deal of rhetoric) presented in favor of atheism are both unjust and unsound. If you're the smart guys, you should do better.

This thread seems to have started with good intentions, but some of the questions were definitely hostile. So I'm going to ask a 3 questions I don't think have been asked yet:

 

How, if at all, does your faith inform your work? This is only relevant primarily because he's a theoretical physicist.

 

How do you feel about the fact that most of your fellow scientists reject religion?

 

Related to #1, what do you think of Michio Kaku's thoughts that we don't need to separate science and god? Link

 

Welcome Dr. Schumacher. It is good to see that you decided to post directly. One thing is that you are not fully registered yet and you will have to reenter your details every time that you post. If you are interested in keeping up the dialogue, you might want to consider finishing off the process so that your account is actually saved on the server.

 

In any case, having read your lengthy post, yes, it is true that you will get some level of hostility here. I think that that should b pretty much expect though. This is, after all, an atheist forum and some people are going to pull out their “pet god” and similar terms. Nature of the beast and all that.

 

One bit that stands out for me is that you mentioned that part of your motivation was to demonstrate that it is possible to b both a scientist and a christian at the same time. Well, since you would stand in the same company as Max Planck, Georges Lematrie and Arthur Compton, I assure you that I am not really either surprised or concerned on that point.

 

I do see that you seem to have passed over my earlier questions. I don't really know the motivation for that. I can tell you that when I posted them, we had yet to meet you and thus part of where I was going was to try and determine what perspective you would take on the matters which would likely come up.

 

Now that you have posted and specifically on the nature of god being outside of spacetime, that would actually bring me back to the watchmaker questions. In all honesty, I have never seen anyone try to follow the watchmaker analogy up before. It is as if it is in some manner valid to throw it out there with the expectation that it just be accepted.

 

Related to that would be Hoyle's tornado in a junk yard analogy. Well, if the junkyard simply lacks the parts needed to build a machine of some specified complexity, then I don't think that anyone could make a valid probabilistic argument in the first place.

 

Anyway, are you specifically asserting that god must be outside of space time because he could not cause himself to exist inside of space time? If so, that would lead me to other questions.

 

First, what does “outside of space time” even mean?

 

Don't misunderstand me. At first glance, that question might make as much sense as asking what is north of the north pole. However, if theologians wish to assert that there is a meaningful concept which obtains to understanding the nature of god, then that concept should be one which, at least in principal could be understood.

 

If you wanted to advance that god hangs out in the Calabai Yau manifold, that would be fine (those are of course my words, not yours but it provides some structure for such a discussion). Now as it happens, that would fill the requirement of being beyond space time. We do not even know if the idea is valid or, if it is valid, what it may actually be like. Even so, if it is real, then it is, in some meaningful sense, a place and it will have a structure. That structure is, in principal possible to understand even if we never actually get the details down pat.

 

Second, granting that god does inhabit some in principal definable location with definable rules, then that location would seem to allow for the spontaneous generation of at least on conscious entity. However, why stop there?

 

If god can come into existence once, then why not a dozen or a million gods? The rules of that game either allow it or not. Under fairly standard christian theology, god seems to want to populate his realm with his favorite people. Yet, if he is really that lonely, who better to populate it with than more gods? Unless there is something basic about that realm that only allows for the one being to come into existence ever. However, if that is the case, then there is clearly at least one thing which god simply cannot do.

Marty,

 

Frankly, this is the first time I see an interview format for a debate on a forum.  I don't think many on this forum will share the view that religion is bad for EVERYONE.  For instance, when religious people question atheism as a "worldview" that lacks morals, I wonder if they are going start murdering people if they stop believing the Bible.  For such "moral" theists, I think religion is a good think, always was and will be.  I think we are on the same side on this. But it would be interesting to know your opinion on why you think religion isn't a bad thing for everyone.  

 

Following a very specific religion doctrine (Christianity, Scientology, Islam, etc.) is a dangerous path for a scientist in my opinion.  What if some of scientific finding are in odds with religious teachings?  Which one will win?  Would such a scientist-theist be willing to change his religious view or commit an academic fraud?  And how do you think this scientist-theist can justify for him self that in one part of his life he used to applying scientific method to every hypothesis and theory, and in another part of his life he needs to reject setting up the same standards for falsifiability of the claim.  For me, I guess, this dilemma would lead to a bipolar disorder of some sort. 

 

Of course he seems to be credible in his field, but I was surprised he brought this as an argument in his reply, as if the religious beliefs of the NIH director make his God anymore real.  I feel that many people here on the RRS have not seen a Christian scientist on this forum for quite a while and the very idea that such scientists exist attracts enough interest to start reading and posting. 

 

If you are a journalist, I think one good question for a religious scientist will be if he feels any pressure or discrimination from his peers because of his beliefs.  In respect to his professional environment, he is swimming similar waters as an atheist would swim in the Bible belt.  Atheists are known to be treated and accepted really bad in many american communities.  Would the opposite (the treatment of a theist by an atheist community) be true or false?  

 

Awww, how could you guys have a thread like this when I wasn't here?

I don't have any question or comments at this time, but welcome to the forum, Dr. Schumacher.