Science is a metaphysical party pooper.

Post Reply New Topic

You really got smoked in this exchange and I think you know it.


"Religion is a fantasy dreamed up by people who would prefer not to think and thereby provides no answers at all."

Substantiate this please. You don't have the authority to call people sane or not. I'm going to call into work religious. Moron.

I see your religion does nothing to discourage its members from gloating and insults.

Have you met Slowmutant yet?

You have amply demonstrated a total adherence to a system that has produced no tangible useful results for helping people fight disease, poverty, and many problems that have assailed humanity for centuries and has proposed, through the centuries, concepts of the mechanisms of nature that have proved total nonsense when they were properly investigated. When the advances that science has created are so obvious and ubiquitous and you simply deny them the status of your mental condition becomes so clearly pitiful that it is not worthwhile any further to try to talk obvious sense to you.

What system have I demonstrated a total adherence to? Religion brings tangible results to the world every day. It brings meaning and joy to the lives of billions. There are countless great scientists, thinkers, and humanitarians who are religious. Keep parroting that false dichotomy that somehow science and religion are at odds and incompatible. There has been extensive work on the conflict thesis that says otherwise.

I havent seen science put an end to war, poverty, etc.. Science does not debunk religion in any way.



http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/ET_ ... 129257.cms

These are obviously people who don't like to think. Maybe if you lived in a country with more than a few million people and any diversity, you wouldn't have such a narrow mindset.

In fact most of the time science does progress in a generally linear logical way - at the moment there are two main methods - either hypothesis driven which is more classical - designing testable hypotheses which fit the current data in the simplest way and can be modified, strengthened or disregarded after further experimental evidence. Some imagination can be useful here, and certainly geniuses such as Einstein clearly don't come to the same hypotheses as most people do, so in general science only moves forwards slowly. But there are always logical next steps to take, which are being taken all the time by most scientists. The other method of moving science forward (at least in my field), is via accumulation of huge amounts of data (such as the human genome for example), in the logical hope that it will be useful one day.

Its true that great discoveries can seem to come from nowhere, but I am fairly sure that most of these laws and theories would have arrived through the natural progression of science in a more logical way, a few years later. Scientists don't work in isolation. Work is always based upon the work of others. The steps build up and one day someone who is a bit more talented than the rest can put it all together in a new way.

Heal my insanity o great Sand! In other words, prove that nothing of us or our lives can possibly survive death. {But you've already pointed out that 'all the answers' cannot be provided }

P.s. I don't remember BlackElk denying the advances science has made_

I cannot refute your prejudices. There are many things I have no proof of non-existence but also no evidence of existence. If you want eagerly to belief in things with no evidence of existence and no evidence of non-existence, feel free. You fall into a category.

so the energy presents as heat-- i am talking about organisation.

you say "the body's metabolism" as if this were a simple process. those words actually encompass an incredibly complex system of biochemical reactions. i don't know the numbers off the top of my head, but i know we're easily talking millions/billions/trillions of individual interactions between molecules every second, all operating within a larger system with the specific purpose of maintaining homeostasis (another single word describing an incredibly complex concept at the molecular level) of the entire macroscopic organism.....perhaps there are over-arching patterns in these chemical reactions that dictate some kind of organisation to the heat patterns we release, in ways we are incapable of measuring/computing with our current technology?

i mentioned earlier in this thread how we have only relatively recently learned, or at least begun to have a truly empirical explanation for, how birds navigate for migration. before that, the explanation we had was that they possessed some sort of "inborn knowledge" of how to migrate. we called this phenomena "instinct"--a concept that almost sounds like superstition, b/c we had no good explanation for it....only theories. now we know that in this case it is simply a matter of the birds possessing a high concentration of certain magnetic elements in a particular area of their brains that allows them to respond to and navigate by the differences in the EM fields geographically overlaying the earth. we discovered the inherent pattern through scientific observation. so imagine what we may find about other behaviors we call "instinctive"--there may be external, observable explanations there too, and we just have to find them.

we are still infants in what we have to understand about our own planet, let alone the universe at large. just because you cannot empirically demonstrate a concept/phenomena now does not mean it is not at least remotely possible. science is always, and only, what we know so far--our collective wisdom to date. it is fluid, ever adapting with the addition of knew information. you cannot argue from a position of the perfect objectivity of science, b/c if such a thing exists we don't understand it yet. our science (including how we apply it) isn't perfect b/c we aren't perfect, and we have much to learn.


sorry for the rambling it's something i do .

No scientists will deny that there are unknowns. But no scientist will act as if a mere speculation with no evidence represents useful knowledge. Any speculation requires some perceptual evidence to even consider it has possible validity and that evidence must be validated through several accredited sources.

what is wrong with trying to imagine what may be contained in that vast void that represents all we don't understand yet? dreaming in this way strengthens human creativity and imaginative thinking. you can't tell me that creativity and imaginative thinking are not or have never been useful to science? there have to be those willing to extend their interest beyond what is understood to keep that knowledge base growing. if your imagination is limited to only include things you know to be possible because you consider everything else useless and irrelevant, then i pity you. there must be willingness to intellectually embrace and explore the impossible, the absurd, the unknown, for real learning to happen.

Remember who you're talking to, StarvingArtist.

I feel that the existence of the divine or an afterlife are unlikely, but lack of evidence for or against the existence of a phenomenon merely means that we don't know whether it is real or not, and would be unwise to pre-judge it as either real and actual or as impossible or false. Estimating the probablility of something being real has no bearing on whether it is real or not, therefore it seems reasonable for people to take into account possibilities for which no evidence either way exists, where those possibilities are relevant to their core concerns.

A word about consciousness - Although it seems to appear from and vanish into pure matter given our current knowledge, this is unusual for such a fundamental phenomenon. For example, a stable celestial body cannot create or destroy its own gravity, as far as I'm aware.

There is no workable theory on the relationship to consciouness and matter. We can't view or measure the world without changing it. Materialism is flawed.

Nuh-uh.

Yuh-huh.

And if anyone even hints at the "consciousness causes collapse" interpretation of quantum theory I am going to reach through the interwebz and slap you with a salmon.