I don't believe in Atheism
Offline Greetings all.
While responding to one of Fonzie's posts, I realized that I don't believe in Atheism. Saying that somehow puts Atheism on the same level as religion, which I find unacceptable.
I'd rather say I state that there are no gods because science supports this statement.
What do you think?
Any comments and links welcome.
BTW, if my topic covers old ground, I apologize. I'm relatively new to Atheism and since joining the RSS forums, I realized I still had a lot to learn.
Thanks all.
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Offline Bob,
I'm unwilling to play "Bury her under a giant super-mega-post and declare Victory!" It's a stupid and dishonest tactic. Really.
I've been pretty clear -- utterly TRANSPARENT -- that G-d isn't a "person", doesn't have a "brain", doesn't "think", doesn't do anything you keep trying to ascribe to G-d.
Judaism is equally clear and utterly transparent that G-d isn't a "person" and that anthropomorphisms are just literary devices for explaining "really hard stuff" to goat and sheep herders in Bronze Age times. The "Hand of G-d" isn't a hand, flipper, paddle, pod, or whatever. The "Arm of G-d" doesn't have bones, joints, actuator devices, physicality of any sort, etc. And so on down the line. G-d isn't a bearded old white dude, or a beardless young woman of color, or anything in between, or any combination or permutation of any such attributes.
G-d does not exist WITHIN spacetime. G-d created spacetime, and this is abundantly clear from the very first verse of Genesis -- G-d created the Universe, and before there was a Universe, there was ... no Universe. This is so simple a child should be able to grasp it. Why you persist on trying to find G-d wandering around somewhere in spacetime is a mystery. Or a Mysterious Strawman.
There are some interesting theological arguments which state that if G-d is "unchanging", and various language is used to describe just how "unchanging" G-d is, that G-d can't be tinkering in the Universe since ... that would imply G-d changes. You don't seem to give a whit about "theological arguments", so I'll leave it with G-d isn't a puppeteer. I'd argue that we're created with Free Will, and being puppets on a string would violate that. That doesn't strike me as all that "theological", so perhaps you'll accept that.
You have a very flawed understanding of "thought". All thoughts are is decisions. That's it -- nothing particularly magical. Our brain is just a very complex neural network with massive parallelism. Different parts of the brain are specialized for different tasks and many of the decisions are made long before you're aware of them. Think of it as "background processing." Back in the 70's I messed around with self-hypnosis and a number of other tools for stuffing "thoughts" into the "background" for chewing on. In the 90's I started doing work in "creative thinking" and used to teach "thinking" as a process. That usually exposes, much more clearly, how decisions about valid, versus invalid, "thoughts" are made. The key, for anyone who wants to try this at home, is to turn off the filtering mechanisms inside your head.
I think I answered the question about G-d having to make sure all the subatomic particles in the Universe go to the correct places. The answer is "No".
You're 100,000 percent wrong that "matter" and "energy" aren't interchangeable. I'd suggest you get a better set of books. You might also read these --
http://www.worsleyschool.net/science/files/emc2/emc2.html
http://www.nobelprize.org/educational/physics/energy/intro.html
http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/voice1.htm
There are some interesting issues, but I don't think your Science skills are up to the challenge. Like, why does a gallon of hot water have more mass than the same number of moles of cold water. On this point the current cosmological theories are clear -- "matter" condensed from "energy".
If you can't understand and accept it, I'm sorry but I can't help you.
AFAYCS, you're right -- I'm not going to tell you what G-d "is". There is no-thing which you can name which =is= G-d. G-d is not a "thing". G-d is no-thing, which is different from nothing.
And finally, where does my particular god-concept fit into my world view?
I believe that G-d creates rules -- they can be Natural Laws or "Social Laws", but that's what G-d does. Here's the "Social Laws" G-d (supposedly, as we would insist) created for everyone after the Flood --
Idolatry is forbidden.
Incestuous and adulterous relations are forbidden.
Murder is forbidden.
Cursing the name of G-d is forbidden.
Theft is forbidden.
Eating the flesh of a living animal is forbidden.
Mankind is commanded to establish courts of justice
You might have issues with the first and fourth, but the others seems to be embodied by most "Secular Humanist" kinds of people, except for maybe the "adulterous" part of the second.
G-d also creates =distinctions= and I believe that the primary mode of "creation" is "creating distinctions". Consider Hawking Radiation. It was once believed that Black Holes were "eternal". Nothing can get out, and stuff can only go in. Hawking discovered that what actually happens is Black Holes "evaporate" because there is an uncertainty as to which side of the Event Horizon a particle, in a pair of particles (see something like virtual pair production for a better explanation), might actually be on. "Inside" or "Outside". If the "outside" particle is heading in the correct direction, with the correct energy, it goes buh-bye and the Black Hole loses a small about of mass and/or energy. More relevant to theology is language like Genesis 1:9 where the "waters" were "gathered" and the "land" and "water" were separated. Still as much "waters" as before, still as much "lands" as before, just some shuffling, all of which can be handled by the various Natural Laws which govern plate tectonics and the like.
Now. Why do I waste my time, as you might think, on all this "belief in G-d" stuff? I "waste my time" because it works for me. If you understood what it was like to grow up in the environment I grew up in, to be surrounded by Science, to attend college level Science courses as a regular affair from a very young age (my mother was earning her BS between the time I started Kindergarten until shortly before I started college myself), to see Apollo as something "personal", to engage Science in a very direct manner, once "G-d" and "Science" were fused in my mind, that fusion became impossible to undo.
Virtually everything I know about Science, which I think you'll have to admit is fairly substantial, is driven =directly= by my belief in G-d. This is not all that uncommon -- a great many people with a Science =and= Religion background derive much "meaning" from the study of Science as a way to perhaps comprehend the Mind of G-d, not that G-d has a "mind". Here are some quotes from Steven Hawking's "WikiQuotes" page. I agree with them for the most part. You can cut them out of any response. But I hope, very sincerely, that after you've read them that you'll understand I can no more cease to believe in G-d than I can cease to believe in Science.
I'm not religious in the normal sense. I believe the universe is governed by the laws of science. The laws may have been decreed by God, but God does not intervene to break the laws.
If we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we would know the mind of God.
(writing about Grand Unified Theories)
What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.
(I'd argue that the concept of Immitatio Dei means that G-d is also not needed to make sure the world works in a Just and Moral fashion.)
Some Einstein quotes, at least one of which will refute the assertion that he was an Atheist.
I believe in Spinoza's God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.
I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.
I said before, the most beautiful and most profound religious emotion that we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. And this mysticality is the power of all true science. If there is any such concept as a God, it is a subtle spirit, not an image of a man that so many have fixed in their minds. In essence, my religion consists of a humble admiration for this illimitable superior spirit that reveals itself in the slight details that we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds.
I'm not an atheist and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza's pantheism, but admire even more his contributions to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and the body as one, not two separate things.
Religion and science go together. As I've said before, science without religion is lame and religion without science is blind. They are interdependent and have a common goal—the search for truth. Hence it is absurd for religion to proscribe Galileo or Darwin or other scientists. And it is equally absurd when scientists say that there is no God. The real scientist has faith, which does not mean that he must subscribe to a creed. Without religion there is no charity. The soul given to each of us is moved by the same living spirit that moves the universe.
I'm travelling next week and need to start getting some tools and clothes gathered up. Several clients have conspired to make this trip more difficult (I don't extend credit, but that doesn't keep clients from failing to pay on time ...) and I need to do everything possible to make it actually happen.
"Obviously I'm convinced of the existence of G-d. I'm equally convinced that Atheists who've led good lives will be in Olam HaBa going "How the heck did I wind up in this place?!?" while Christians who've treated people like dirt will be in some other place asking the exact same question."
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Of course I do.
Genesis is clearly the uninformed speculation of a bunch of people who knew damn all about the origin of the "Life, the Universe, and Everything".
So why do you even try to hammer this myth into a crude fit to modern understanding of these things?
Thought is not a thing, it has no mass, of course. And I never said that. Although it definitely DOES require Time.
Those other things are measurable physical properties of manifestations of matter or energy or both. No problem.
Just as thought is a manifestation of a complex physical process requiring a complex stable substrate. Just as a computer program is not a collection of semiconductors connected in a very specific pattern and put into a specific state, but it needs such a physical structure to manifest.
The intimate dependence of our thoughts and emotions on a functioning material structure we call the 'brain' is overwhelmingly established. You damage part of the brain, and some aspect of our thinking, our feeling, of what makes up the person, is almost always affected.
Your 'argument' completely misses the point. A stable structure, which seems to be required to support the process which is cognition, requires something at least analogous to 'matter' particles.
No, I 'worship' the search for truth.
'Beyond' science, you only have ideas, speculation, guesses, maybe aesthetically and/or emotionally pleasing and comforting in themselves. But without something more, some form of empirical correlation with reality beyond our finite and fallible minds, you cannot derive truths about reality, beyond the emotional 'truths' about which of those ideas appeals to you.
Will you admit that your primitive book is not only incomplete - as in "it doesn't have all the answers" - but is explicitly wrong about many things?
That it is wrong about your history as well, not just science?
It does a lousy job. WTF has the language structure got to do with it? You keep banging on about that.
Sure it will limit their ability to nail down and pass on complex ideas. Which of course provides a further reason for not taking their ideas seriously. I win.
You so completely failed to understand that I said thought requires matter, not that it IS matter.
I object even to some scientists who have said "the mind is the brain", or similar. It is a manifestation of extremely complex processes going on in the brain, and to some extent, the rest of the body.
You remind me of those dumb Theists who come on here, assuming that Atheists must eschew any form of the 'immaterial'.
I, at least, just deny that the 'immaterial', ie those referents of our words that are not physical objects or measurable physical forces in themselves, can somehow support something which can have 'will' or 'intent' or the ability to directly, rather than metaphorically, influence the natural world.
Even pure energy, which we can measure and even weigh, cannot serve as the substrate of the processes of mind.
The "Second Law of Thermodynamics" can have none of those things. It is a formal description of consistent patterns and constraints we have observed and quantified in Reality. And so on with the other concepts you referred.
Concepts, ideas, abstractions, descriptions, G-d, are constructs of our mind. Thoughts cannot serve as the hardware to 'run' thoughts, anymore than a specification of, or a code listing of, or even a DVD of, MS Windows can run Office.
You show me how some sequence of events, some action, can occur 'before time'. All we need to broadly explain existence is n abstract principle, ie something even less 'material' than God, or even G-d. I have no problem with that.
It is your lame attempts to justify all your superfluous mythical baggage I object to.
That last sentence displays such shallowness of thought, I am sad for you. You make two fundamental fallacies.
1. As I have just been pointing out, thoughts and arguments and evidence are not matter, and I fully understand that - better than you do, it seems. My argument in no way assumes that. Straw man.
2. We are not required to disprove God. Give me one solid argument for IT. Once you posit an entity as existing, 'beyond' established scientific principles or detection, you are open to the 'logical possibilities' of an infinite variety of G-d's, Gods, Demons, and far more incomprehensible 'things', which in many cases could not co-exist. You are require to justify the conscious choice of one of these out of all the 'possibilities'.
Show me how you focussed on G-d, other than as an idea which simply appealed to you, and that you feel makes a good basis for herding your cats.
We now have examples around the world that more than hint at the fact that we do not need such primitive superstitions to develop a healthy society.
We don't need to pollute our principles with ancient taboos and imaginary authority figures.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
"Do you realize how =small= Hebrew is as a language? Do you have any (cultural) appreciation for the age of the text and the lack of sophistication of people 2,500 (if you buy the Documentary Hypothesis), 3,000 (age of the united Kingdom of Israel) or 3,500 (approximate date of the Exodus) years ago? The first chapter of Genesis has fewer =letters= than any reasonable cosmology text has words, and if it's a decent text, fewer letters than that text has paragraphs."
So I take it, you don't hold with the notion that the bible, specifically Genesis is in fact 'inspired' by god? Because obviously, if an all knowing creator had inspired (dictated) the facts vouchsafed to a few herdsmen in the Sinai, then we could in fact expect total scientific accuracy, couldn't we?
"Ah, this is where "I worship Science as a religion" comes screaming through.No,
G-d no more requires "matter" than "love" has weight, a rest mass,
magnetic field, spin, etc. "Thought" doesn't require mass or time. You
can't weigh or measure a thought, a feeling, an emotion, an intention, a
like or dislike, a belief or a slew of other things. There is no
weight, rest mass, eletromagnetic field, spin, or any other property
=to= the Laws of Nature. You can't give me a gram, meter, degree K,
Joule, Tesla, Weber or any other fundamental or derived unit of the
First, Second or Third Law of Thermodynamics. And yet, they all somehow
exist."
Ah, this is where the old 'let's conflate abstract emotional definitions with real things comes screaming through. Intellectually dishonest at best.
We define the biochemical response known as 'love' and all it's associated responses as emotions... call them 'real'... they are however just the label we use to describe the reality.
Similarly, 'thought' is the abstraction of cognitive action in the brain... thought is an abstraction of a real world process. If you are willing to ceed that your god is simply an abstraction, no more 'real' than 'thought' or 'emotion'... I'll go along with that.
Christianity: A disgusting middle eastern blood cult, based in human sacrifice, with sacraments of cannibalism and vampirism, whose highest icon is of a near naked man hanging in torment from a device of torture.
Technically, we don't know that for certain.
Too little is known about the brain, the mind, the processes, etc. There is the possibility that thought can be measured, we just don't know that it can.
Both of you can feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
You could argue that there will be an associated flow of energy with the process, and energy has mass according to m = e/c2 ( simple transposition of Einstein's equation).
Our thoughts will be connected with changes of state of some elements of our brain, and are a flow of 'information', which I think must have some minimum energy flow associated with it, according to Thermodynamic principles.
So yeah, thought does have some associated mass/energy, as well as necessarily requiring Time within which the sequence of thoughts we call 'thinking' must take place.
Quite separately, as fMRI and related technologies get better temporal and spatial resolution, I would expect we will be able to measure thought. I think we already can, in a crude way.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
OH PLEASE.
As per a recent thread on here, it was demonstrated that bacteria "think" without even having a brain. THEY HAVE NO BRAIN. They are single celled organisms and that one and only one cell is not a BRAIN CELL. And yet they make complex "decisions".
An ant has approximately 250,000 brain cells (we have around 10 billion ...) and yet ants are able to solve complex problems we find extremely difficult, or nearly impossible without massive amounts of computational power --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem
The rules by which the entire Universe operates HAVE NO MASS. They are not made of MATTER. Yet they control the complex interaction of virtually uncountable numbers of particles on an instant by instant basis, no BRAIN required.
You have made "Science" not into into a religion, but you bow down at the altar of your incomplete and grossly =flawed= understanding of Science.
"Obviously I'm convinced of the existence of G-d. I'm equally convinced that Atheists who've led good lives will be in Olam HaBa going "How the heck did I wind up in this place?!?" while Christians who've treated people like dirt will be in some other place asking the exact same question."
No, we couldn't.
In my previous career, I frequently had to explain previously unknown concepts to patent lawyers, who by virtue of being patent lawyers, could be expected to grasp new and novel concepts. And yet, I had to spend =hours= in many instances explaining how something completely new worked.
Based on that, I have no expectation, and see no reason to expect, that a revealed text would be totally and completely scientifically accurate, including the discussion of concepts that required maths and sciences as advanced as the creation of an entire universe.
"Obviously I'm convinced of the existence of G-d. I'm equally convinced that Atheists who've led good lives will be in Olam HaBa going "How the heck did I wind up in this place?!?" while Christians who've treated people like dirt will be in some other place asking the exact same question."
I'll grant my biology lessons were...shit...15 odd years ago. But isn't the nucleus of a cell the brain?
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
I figured you were avoiding this and now see you still are. You joke you need a check and you pass it off. OK. So you do believe in life after death because of this story regardless if it is a sin or not to contact them. The sinning part is not my concern. The fact you accept it as a literal story is my concern.
To correct your prior statement "There is clear mention of any "afterlife" in the non-literary parts of the Bible. "
I fully agree that hollow promises are bullshit especially when you can only collect after death.
Religion Kills !!!
Numbers 31:17-18 - Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.
http://jesus-needs-money.blogspot.com/
First, I think your comparison of bronze age savages and attorneys is grossly unfair, to the savages...
I know you need to pretend that it really happened that way, but honestly... don't you think it's more reasonable that this was a creation myth imagined by unsophisticated primitives, the errors and laughable mistakes being the natural consequence of their simple ignorance, rather than the convoluted and frankly weird apologetic hoops you expect us to follow you through? No... Genesis even with the best ad hoc apologetic, even with keeping ones eyes tightly shut bears no relation to reality... it is a portrayal of myth... nothing more.
By the way, cells do not think...they follow hard wired chemical instructions. Sliding down a slope isn't a decision, it's a factor of gravity. Similarly, the thought that ants 'solve' the complex problem ( Traveling Salesman ) ignores the methodology... not thought, but trial and error, with later generations following the chemical pheromone trails left by the former. It is in fact the LEAST efficient solution to the problem.
LC >;-}>
Christianity: A disgusting middle eastern blood cult, based in human sacrifice, with sacraments of cannibalism and vampirism, whose highest icon is of a near naked man hanging in torment from a device of torture.
You're an idiot.
No, I do not believe that people can speak with dead people. There's no =rational= reason it would be a sin if it was a viable method of having communication with dead relatives or whatever.
And seriously, if you demand responses, make payment arrangements. If I weren't shooting a bug right now, I'd have less free fingers-on-keyboard time and wouldn't be responding at all. Now that I've found a way to make the code work, I have to find out what the hell =had= to be changed. Then I go write customer invoices, ship stuff, update customer databases, in short -- make money.
But if you'd like, I could arrange for a wire transfer and you just send me some money and then you'll have my undivided attention.
"Obviously I'm convinced of the existence of G-d. I'm equally convinced that Atheists who've led good lives will be in Olam HaBa going "How the heck did I wind up in this place?!?" while Christians who've treated people like dirt will be in some other place asking the exact same question."
Oh, great -- I finally got the sensor configuration information I wanted and the sensor is configured properly. Which means there is likely a bug I can't fix remotely.
Which sucks.
"Obviously I'm convinced of the existence of G-d. I'm equally convinced that Atheists who've led good lives will be in Olam HaBa going "How the heck did I wind up in this place?!?" while Christians who've treated people like dirt will be in some other place asking the exact same question."
I worked for over 6 years as an autopsy technician... I spoke to the dead on a daily basis...
None ever answered back because, they are freeking DEAD...
LC >;-}>
Christianity: A disgusting middle eastern blood cult, based in human sacrifice, with sacraments of cannibalism and vampirism, whose highest icon is of a near naked man hanging in torment from a device of torture.
I never said the RULES or any abstractions have mass. You misread my response to Vastet, which was peripheral to my main post. I was conceding that arguably thoughts could have be said to have some energy associated with them, which, at a stretch, could be equated to an amount of mass. Thoughts are not in same category as rules and mathematical formula which can be used to describe regularities and relationships and patterns. Such things can be thecontent, the subject, of thoughts, not to be confused with the thoughts themselves.
Our thoughts are manifested almost entirely in the brain, but I did allow "to some extent in the rest of the body".
Complex decisions are not thoughts, they only require complex interactions. A silicon chip can do that. CPU's make far more complex decisions.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
Uh, you'd actually be wrong. Matter and energy are interrelated -- E = mc^2, m = E / c^2.
Discovered by ... A JEW!
Pick a particle, pick a rest mass, go find one of them bosons with the right energy and you just might wind up with a hadron. Photons produce electrons every day, and other goodies as well. A high enough energy state is what's believed to have created the entire Universe. Near infinite energy in a nearly infinitesimally small space.
How many guesses do I get, and does the first one count, Bob Spence?
"Obviously I'm convinced of the existence of G-d. I'm equally convinced that Atheists who've led good lives will be in Olam HaBa going "How the heck did I wind up in this place?!?" while Christians who've treated people like dirt will be in some other place asking the exact same question."
I fully agree that abstractions, rules, laws, principles, etc, are not material in any sense, have no mass.
D'uh.
That does not mean that the process that is thought, which can conceive of such things, reason about them, etc, does not require a persistent and stable substrate for it to 'run'. To make an atom, you need particles like electrons, protons, neutrons, IOW quarks and leptons, or particles composed of such. You can't use photons, gluons, bosons, etc, ie force particles. But you do need those particles, which convey energy, for the process to run.
You are conflating 'thoughts' with 'thinking', the process which generates 'thoughts'.
The 'rules' of the Universe are descriptions of the regularities in the interactions and behaviour of the matter and energy of which it is composed.
So the fact that complex structures, especially ones composed of vast numbers of interacting elements, are likely to display complex behaviour, without involving anything we would describe as a thought, and clearly require no separate control centre, such as a 'brain', or a Deity of any sort, is a good example, as is the bacteria, that complex behaviour, per se, does not require a sentient entity.
This reminds me of the fallacy of seeing the ability of a computer to play chess and beat a Grand Master as demonstrating that it is matching human thought in an interesting way. At least AI research has got way past that.
Thought requires complex structures, but complexity does not require or imply thought.
Guess who doesn't understand science... or maybe its just a reading comprehension problem on your part. Or failing to grasp the subtleties involved.
None of this justifies the Theological baggage of your favorite mystery cult.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
Photons do not turn into electrons 'every day'.
Sufficiently high-energy photons, around hard-gamma ray level, can turn into an electron-positron pair, but then are likely to recombine into a photon again, unless there is some special circumstance.
In the photo-electric effect, a photon transfers energy to an existing electron which can then escape from the atom to which it is bound. The photon does NOT turn into an electron.
The 'm' in Einstein's famous equation refers to mass, not matter. BTW he was a secular Jew. He did not believe in a personal God.
Matter is a collection of matter particles, normally in the form of atoms.
Mass is a property of energy and most particles.
The demonstration that the 'pure energy' of light, as photons, can be deflected by a gravitational filed, due to it having mass, is one of the most famous demonstrations of General Relativity.
NOTE: Apologies if my last few posts are a little scrambled. I think I might have hit the wrong button when responding to one - Mods can edit any post, I may have hit that while thinking I had hit the 'Quote' button. I attempted to sort it out, but some things seem to have disappeared.
In any case the possibility of conversion does not affect my argument. A stable substrate for the class of complex processes that manifest conscious thought requires matter, not energy particles.
Decision-making is not thought. Simple logic chips can do that.
Thought requires complex structures and processes. Complex structures and processes do not require thought.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
You are a fucking child. You stamp your feet when clear biblical text is shown to contradict your precious view and then you run the topic off the rails with your self-importance. The witch of Endor talking to the the dead Samuel is as believable to me as someone praying to your non-existent G-d. Both are made up, both are non-existent. It IS NOT a fucking sin because you are simply doing nothing connected to reality. The bible concept of sin is pure bullshit.
Religion Kills !!!
Numbers 31:17-18 - Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.
http://jesus-needs-money.blogspot.com/
Well, there is a number -- 511 kEV or so for an electron. Double that and all you need is a photon above 1.022 MEV and you've got electron / positron pair production. Go higher up and you get other things. Break CP-symmetry and you've got permanent stuff, like an entire Universe. Which is how we got the Universe we got, so the theory goes.
Matter and energy =are= interchangeable. Matter "condensed" out of the high energy / high temperature "soup" that was the early Universe post Big Bang -- "G-d said, 'Let there be Light, and there was Light'" -- and as that volume of energy expanded and cooled, different particles having different energies were able to "condense." The Universe cools as it expands, with different particles (quarks, bosons, hadrons, leptons, godons
) being able to form stably once the energy is low enough.
What is with you and "matter"? You do understand that matter came from energy, and matter can go back to energy, and that mass can vary all over the place -- for example, shorter wavelength light has more mass than longer wavelength light. A bucket containing water gains mass as it warms and loses mass as it cools?
And your points are? There is no "You must believe in G-d" commandment in Judaism. He was a Jew, like it or not. He was enough of a Jew that he was offered the presidency of Israel by David ben Gurion (I believe it was). I know you'd like to get rid of all Jews, and maybe steal away some Jews you like before you get rid of the rest of us, but he's ours. We got dibs on him first.
I'm not a pagan -- I don't believe in a "personal god" either. Any Jew who believes in a personal god (the notion that G-d can be related to in "people" terms" rather than universal and absolute terms ...) needs to be taken behind the woodshed and whacked. Have a quote from Imam Wiki --
Moses loves you. Really. He wants to give you a BIG HUG!
"Matter is a collection of matter particles ..."? Did you just make that up or something?
Have a link to Wikipedia --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter
Matter particles. I'll have to remember that one.
Yes, curved spacetime will cause things to not go in a "straight line" (whatever that means), and photons will cause spacetime to be curved as well.
Einstein was on really smart Jew!
Are you really sure about that? How much conscious thought does it require for an electron to change shells when it absorbs or emits a photon? "B'erev, b'boker" -- there was evening, and there was morning, Day One. Go find that 21cm neutral hydrogen spin line, then tell me how much thinking it took for that to happen.
How much "thought" does Gravity require? Electrostatic repulsion? All the Physical laws which lead to the formation of planetary nebula, planet and star formation, and so on? Does a rule require a thought? Do you have to think for "F = ma" to make your car move or not move?
Your only answer is "G-d must have a brain" because you think that G-d has the Universe on a string. G-d neither has a brain, nor thinks, nor has the Universe on a string.
Strawmen aren't arguments and you aren't a scientist.
That and you're wrong about "thought". At the bottom of everything inside our skull, it's just a neural network. No magical thoughtiton particles or whatever. Just a giant chemical soup keeping a highly parallel processor banging away.
"Obviously I'm convinced of the existence of G-d. I'm equally convinced that Atheists who've led good lives will be in Olam HaBa going "How the heck did I wind up in this place?!?" while Christians who've treated people like dirt will be in some other place asking the exact same question."
1). Is it ever possible to make a "mistake"? That's all a sin is in Judaism.
2). You can't talk to dead people because IT IS IMPOSSIBLE.
3). I don't believe the Witch of Endor spoke to the dead Samuel either.
"Obviously I'm convinced of the existence of G-d. I'm equally convinced that Atheists who've led good lives will be in Olam HaBa going "How the heck did I wind up in this place?!?" while Christians who've treated people like dirt will be in some other place asking the exact same question."
I did acknowledge that high energy photons do just that, why did you feel it necessary to say that as if I had denied it?
The circumstances of the Big Bang where we ended up with a net surplus of matter particles over anti-particles is
There is a direct equivalence between mass and energy. Mass and energy are NOT "interchangeable". Even less so "matter" and energy. Particles can and do convert from one to another, yes, but the two manifestations have different properties, they are still distinct types of particle, otherwise it would be meaningless to talk about one particle transforming or converting into one or more other particles.
The commonest use of the word "interchange" in Physics refers to matter particles swapping force particles. "Interchangeable"refers to objects that are sufficiently similar that one can be directly substituted for the other, like a car part. Photons do very different things from electrons.
You persist in conflating "matter" and "mass". Very sloppy.
Here is the more precise way to put it, at the top of that article:
Of course. None of that means that "matter" and "energy" are interchangeable. Conflating "mass" and "matter" is a category error. Mass is a property of both matter and energy.
Back at you, furry. Your points are?
Is that your God?
So why did he feel it he should make that distinction in specifically referring to a 'personal' God? Genuinely curious.
How does that mesh with your position?
Do you really think that Einstein was referring to a 'pagan' God?
Referring to a "personal" god does not necessarily refer to a God who is a "person", in the naive or literal sense.
I rather suspect that is what Einstein meant by the phrase "personal God".
the first sentence of that article expresses just what I said:
Interesting you haven't come across the term.
From the Wiki article on "matter" you just referred me to:
My underline.
Wow! You really demonstrated misunderstanding there.
The standard example of photons being affected by gravity (or curved space-time, if you wish) is by going past a very large mass, such as a star, big enough to actually significantly deflect a photon, or alternatively expressed as curving space-time enough to affect the path of a photon, measureably.
The curvature due to the mass-euivalent of the energy of a photon would be incredibly small.
"Straight", in this context, refers to the property of a line that "minimizes distances between its points". In a curved manifold, it refers to a "geodesic". Look it up.
For example, on a sphere, such as the Earth, a geodesic is a Great Circle, such as the lines of longitude, and the Equator. Which are indeed the shortest distance from one place to another.
"Thought" is an emergent property of a specific class of very complex processes.
That is like asking how much code must be executed for an individual electron, within an individual silicon atom within a particular silicon transistor, that is part of a computer, to change shells.
Those low-level processes are part of the substrate, the hardware, which allows Windows, or Mac OS, to run. The software does not drive those low-level processes, except in the sense that each operation will lead to different ON/OFF states on various points in the circuitry, which will imply many changes of energy state of many atoms. But of course if that atom is not part of the logic hardware of a computer, there will be no connection with software.
So a such a transition may be triggered by a change of state in a neurone which is part of a network which is contributing to our consciousness, but that same transition may be triggered by many entirely different events.
You question is also like asking how much pressure on the gas pedal of a car is needed to cause an atom of carbon to separate from a hydrocarbon molecule in the fuel and combine with oxygen to convert some chemical energy to heat.
So a conscious thought could trigger such a change, only if that electron is within an atom somewhere in the structure of the brain that ultimately generated that thought, but so could an unconscious thought, or an alcoholic drink, or an fMRI machine, or a blow to the head, etc. etc.
To paraphrase from an earlier post, thought is dependent on low-level physical events, but no such events are exclusively dependent on thoughts. Such events are associated with virtually every change of state of any physical system.
Rules and processes do not require thought. Why do keep raising this strawman? How do you read any of that into what I wrote?
My point was that IF there is a God which has will or intention, it must be capable of an analogue of thought, which requires some analogue of the sort of structures we see in all creatures which show more than strictly mechanical responses. Which requires matter, or a multidimensional analogue of matter particles, AND Time. Which implies such an entity is dependent on prior 'creation' of the principles and laws and material for such a thing to emerge.
So 'God' has no ultimate explanatory power as to Why Existence exists, and why things are as they are. It is a totally unnecessary concept, no matter how much you feel it helps you get your head around these ultimate questions.
If your God doesn't think, he has no will or intent in any meaningful sense, so WTF is it? If it is in some sense 'just' an abstract principle, why call it God, or G-d? You still, AFAICS, have not said what your G-d is, just what it is not.
And I attribute no 'magic' to thought or its origin. I broadly agree with your description of the underlying process.
I basically agree with your descriptions of what underlies thought. But 'thought' is not a chemical soup or neural network, any more than the results of a computer program, its output, be it a visual animated display, a formatted document, etc IS a collection of logic gates and registers and memory chips. One is the result, the output, of the other.
I am simply using different levels of description. Just as you refer to a chemical soup there, rather than describing it as billions of atoms changing state, different levels of description are used for discussing different aspects of reality. You wouldn't use the chemical soup level, or that of neural network (at least one level up), to talk about Einstein and his ideas, or the Torah, whatever. You would talk about "thoughts".
I may not be a scientist - I only did some science as part of my Engineering degree - although I have been reading science magazines for over 40 years, and now listen to many top Science podcasts.
A few clear errors on your part:
Genesis is not consistent with science.
Matter is NOT mass.
Matter is not "interchangeable" with energy.
I don't think anything much about about what God "must" be, or do. I am just trying to look at the implications of specific ideas of God, and trying to point out where I see logical or scientific problems or inconsistencies with those ideas. The problem I have with you, it is in trying to understand just what your conception of G-d is. In the absence of clarification, I am trying to get a handle on it, and just saying that IF ... THEN...
EDIT:
Are you saying that your idea of God doesn't need to think because the processes of the Universe, Gravity, etc, don't require conscious thought to make them happen?
Ok, so unlike most religious believers, you don't think the Universe requires a conscious designer or driver. Ok, fine.
So all that discussion is just us going around each other in circles.
Could I plead with you to be a little more explicit about just where your G-d concept fits into your world-view?
And why do you feel the need to hammer Genesis into some kind of crude fit to what we now understand about the origin of things, rather that just accepting it for what it clearly is, the imaginings of a scientifically uninformed ancient tribe?
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology