Kevin's Watch

Isn't it always the case when talking about issues like this, that we're quick to bring up religious oppression and dangers, and then praise "rational" people who have moved us past such eras.

Of course, the 20th century being the worst, and the worst examples being those who tried to stamp out religion.

People took offense that the earth wasn't the center of the universe. Of course, who discovered it wasn't? Some religious dude. I mean, the vast majority of humans throughout history have believed in something outside the natural, yet, somehow, we got here? Wouldn't we be stuck as the proverbial caveman? No, such thinking, that religion prevents advance, is the nonsense of Nye and Dawkins, but a rational person can see through it.

Can't they?

Zarathustra wrote: Music might not be rational thought, but neither is it chaotic, much less magical. I don't have to point out the mathematical nature of music. Order and spontaneity aren't mutually exclusive.

Z, I have been a musician since my freshman year in High School (which would total out to well over 30 years and in all of that time, writing all of those songs, playing all of those gigs and exploring all of those melodies not once did I consider that the music I play or played was mathematical in nature. Don't get me wrong I am aware that the relationships and interactions between rhythm, melody and structure all have numeric components and tend to follow recognizable patterns but I never would have bothered to learn to play drums, then guitar, then bass and then keys if I knew before hand I'd have to have a more intimate relationship with math.

Atomic, just because you use mathematical structures without explicitly intending to do so doesn't alter my point. You don't have to know what time signature you're in to play (though it helps), but that doesn't mean your music doesn't have a time signature. Professional musicians are certainly aware of these things. The greatest music is usually produced with these relationships explicitly in mind.

Cyberweez, I've pointed out the irrational beliefs of atheists and admitted we can all be vulnerable to them. I'm not saying at that atheists are automatically virtuous. I don't think anyone would claim that 20th century atrocities were rational, just because some atheists had a hand in them. I mentioned ISIS beheading people in the other thread, but I'm not really focusing on physical violence here. That's almost too obvious to point out. I'm primarily talking about the "violence" that faith and irrationality does to our world views, which is more subtle (though, as you can see in my final paragraph below, the physical implications are much larger than mere war).

Yes, some religious guys have made contributions to science. Obviously, mankind has stumbled upon a scientific tradition in the last 4 centuries despite the millennia of (mostly) irrationality prior to that. But it's extremely fragile. We could plunge back into a Dark Age. It's happened before. Similarly, we've almost created sustained scientific revolutions in the past, only to have them fizzle out and die before they could achieve a lasting stability.

If some of those fledgling scientific revolutions had not died out, we would have already populated all the visible stars and be immortal by now. The "Kingdom of Heaven" would have been achieved. These are the literal stakes. Extinction or our celestial destiny.

Cybrweez wrote: Of course, the 20th century being the worst, and the worst examples being those who tried to stamp out religion.

And people always say things like that despite the evidence showing people are far less likely to die by violence today than ever before.
The world...even in some of the most violent parts of it...has never been so free of violent death.

aTOMiC wrote:Thanks to the aforementioned free will factor said God is unable to physically act on your behalf. Theoretically of course. I'm not an expert on the subject.

I'll stand corrected if you can quote chapter and verse, but isn't the free will thing something from the Thomas Covenant universe rather than from the tenets of christianity?

aTOMiC wrote:God hears all prayers.

If he does, why does he choose to ingore the prayers of good natured and devotional people and allow them or their families to die or suffer in horrible ways?

It's not as if he hasn't offered to help someone who prays:

Mark 11:24 wrote:Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.

1 John 3:22 wrote:And whatever we ask we receive from him, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him.

John 15:7 wrote:If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.

John 14:13-14 wrote:Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it.

Matthew 21:21-22 wrote:And Jesus answered them, “Truly, I say to you, if you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what has been done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ it will happen. And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith.”

Zarathustra wrote:Atomic, just because you use mathematical structures without explicitly intending to do so doesn't alter my point. You don't have to know what time signature you're in to play (though it helps), but that doesn't mean your music doesn't have a time signature. Professional musicians are certainly aware of these things. The greatest music is usually produced with these relationships explicitly in mind.

Just a bit of a running joke on my part. I've gotten plenty of ribbing over the years for being uninterested in the formal intricacies of music theory and application whilst still producing music.

BTW I'm sure you didn't mean to imply that my music is not counted amongst the greatest given that I've paid no attention to mathematical relationships while composing.

Again, just a joke.

Cybrweez wrote:Isn't it always the case when talking about issues like this, that we're quick to bring up religious oppression and dangers, and then praise "rational" people who have moved us past such eras.

No, it's not always the case. You just need to check my post from earlier - I made no mention of rational people, just the murderous nature of the christian crusaders. I doubt that rational people had any part in the more peaceful crusades and later excursions into the Holy Land.

Zarathustra wrote:

Fist and Faith wrote:Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, Werner Heisenberg, and Francis Collins were as inquisitive, scientifically rigorous, and brilliant as pretty much anyone else you'd care to name. The devoted themselves to understanding what they believed to be the properties and characteristics that God created. And they did more than most people to advance our understanding of the universe's properties and characteristics. More than most atheists.

Niels Bohr, Peter Higgs, and Stephen Hawking did more than most people to advance our understanding of the universe's properties and characteristics. More than most theists.

Point being, it's not religious beliefs, whether extreme or none, that determine how much someone will want to understand how things work. Making a theist doubt his faith will not advance our understanding of the universe if he is not the scientific type. Making an atheist believe in God will not stop her from wanting to understand how the universe works.

You make some good points. However, Newton wasted vast amounts of time looking for codes in the Bible (not to mention writing nearly a million words on the subject of alchemy), when he could have been doing something just as revolutionary as his more famous discovery (Principia). So his spiritualism misled him. While it didn't completely hinder his production of perhaps the most important advance in the history of science, it was a mistake and monumental waste of time for one of earth's rarest geniuses.

Hawking, while not a theist, is still prone to irrational fears about robots and AI. He thinks we need to fear technology ... the man who would be dead right now or unable to communicate without it. Perhaps his total dependency upon computers makes him irrationally afraid of them, but it's still a problem. He is terrorizing less informed people with his paranoid fantasies.

The point is that it's not just belief in God, but irrational thought in general, that's the problem (as I've stressed before). The fact that even the most brilliant minds can be prone to it should be a warning for us to guard against it all the more. It's not an elitist attitude to sound this warning. We're not just talking to the "dumbasses" as HLT's hilarious post suggests. We're talking to everyone, including ourselves.

Irrationality doesn't stop progress altogether, but it is certainly an opposing force, the friction which slows progress down. It's what every positive advance must fight against.

I think you're wrong. I think people's minds work in their own ways. Newton's mind worked the way it did, in both of the directions that we're talking about. We can speculate all we want, but the one thing we know for sure is that he did delve into irrationality, and he did accomplish what he did with math and science. I suspect you can't shut off part of a person's mind without affecting the rest of it. His spiritualism might not have wasted his time. It might have allowed him to be more productive with the time he dedicated to math and science than he would have been if he had tried to force himself to do what you think he should have done all the time. Kind of like dreams. What purpose do they serve? I can't think of anything other than letting the mind run crazy. What happens when people are not allowed to dream? From the Star Trek TOS episode Shore Leave: "The more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play." This seems like a similar idea.

michaelm wrote:

aTOMiC wrote:God hears all prayers.

If he does, why does he choose to ingore the prayers of good natured and devotional people and allow them or their families to die or suffer in horrible ways?

I like George Burns' God. "I can't help hearing. I don't always listen."