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Kimmio said:
What about uniting those realms for a more peaceful, cooperative existence in the physical universe - a more holistic view? Scientific orthodoxy doesn't seem to think too highly of that idea - nor does dogmatic religious orthodoxy.
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Actually, that's pretty much where I live and arguably where someone like Carl Sagan lived. Science, spirituality, poetry, philosophy all inform my worldview. Same with Sagan if you read his books. He may have found his spirituality in the stars rather than scripture but he was a very spiritual person nonetheless. Even Harris has a spiritual side, though it is informed more by a non-theistic Buddhism than belief in a God. Read his Waking Up someday. It's very good, if a bit dry.

I'm not sure what you mean by "scientific orthodoxy". Atheists like Harris and Dawkins are atheist orthodoxy, if anything, not scientific orthodoxy. Orthodoxy in science would mean strict adherence to the scientific method and, to be honest, I think most scientists are only like that in their work, not in their daily lives. They may not be religious (though many are) but they do draw their ideas and values from more than just their work. IOW, I'm not sure if scientists are as self-limiting as you think or if your view of science is too limited; rather like judging Christianity based purely on the behavior of evangelical TV preachers.

Also, a lot of science's rejection of religion is a reaction to religion's rejection of science. When you start off your relationship with heresy charges and censorship, that tends to colour the feelings of the people being charged and censored. And there are still religious groups fighting, in essence, to keep science under their thumb (e.g. the debates about allowing creationism in schools in the US) so there are still scientists seeing religion as the enemy.

That can be fixed and it is people like you and I, who are not dogmatic about either, who could fix it because we are prepared to embrace both in our understanding of reality. Hell, my grandfather, a UCCan minister educated in the early twentieth century saw no conflict between them and was reading Stephen Hawking the year before he died. If someone from his generation could see them as complementary, us younger folks certainly can.
 
Kimmio said:
I don't know Innana if we will ourselves achieve a world where none of those problems exist. But I do believe that such a world is conceivable, therefore possible, and exists in an elusive "somewhere/ sometime" and that is more important to me than calculations.
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I was just quoting you & you often don't think through the consequences of what you write -- you write Stream of Consciousness style

This is what you wrote: "or living a compassionate life, accepting that maybe we don't or can't find the answers to every problem."

So then that doesn't only apply to what you are afraid of (brr, SCIENCE! brr, RATIONALITY!! brr, HUMAN PROGRESS!, but also to things like stopping rape, stopping illness, stopping mistreatment of the disabled...I'm sure you are glad that there are people that aren't that fatalistic and do try, despite it all
 
Righto @Mendalla, it is up to us to decide what to do with facts, and there are many (subjective) ways of dealing with those facts

We are limited by the force of gravity, but we have learned how to harness it, through leaping & airplanes...
 
I am not equipped to wrap my head around the calculations. I marvel at the ideas. I guess I am referring to atheists. I realize scientist cannot all be absolute technical perfectionists in every aspect of life. I fear the control/ power that science/ the current field has the same way people at one time and in some places still fear the control and power of religion. They still operate so much as competing interests. And, science is 'winning'. Faith's objective is not to 'win' in the same sense, not through power. But for all of our advances in knowledge science has 'won' some pretty scary control. Including the ability to completely destroy human civilization. How can I trust it?
 
Inannawhimsey said:
I was just quoting you & you often don't think through the consequences of what you write -- you write Stream of Consciousness style

This is what you wrote: "or living a compassionate life, accepting that maybe we don't or can't find the answers to every problem."

So then that doesn't only apply to what you are afraid of (brr, SCIENCE! brr, RATIONALITY!! brr, HUMAN PROGRESS!, but also to things like stopping rape, stopping illness, stopping mistreatment of the disabled...I'm sure you are glad that there are people that aren't that fatalistic and do try, despite it all
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living this life is about trying our best to stop those things, from my POV - I don't necessarily believe that will happen in my lifetime but I do believe it will in some lifetime for somebody(s) somewhere. I am not fatalistic. It will happen through human compassion and compromise for the good of others, mostly. Not placing a high priority on discovering the origins of the universe through scientific means, does not make me at all fatalistic. In fact, sometimes I think those trying to get to close to the fire, so to speak are fatalistic. We've ended up with unspeakably destructive inventions as a result.
 
Kimmio said:
But for all of our advances in knowledge science has 'won' some pretty scary control. Including the ability to completely destroy human civilization. How can I trust it?
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By recognizing that science has also saved lives by the millions? Yes, it gave us nukes, but it also gave us antibiotics and vaccines, which have saved far more lives than any invention has killed. Without science, many of us wouldn't have made it to adulthood and those of us with various diseases and disabilities would likely have far shorter lifespans.

Take Alex Pangman. A damn fine jazz singer who is cursed with cystic fibrosis. Two lung transplants, drug therapies, O2 therapy when her lungs have been too weak during her "sick" periods, have all kept her alive and creative. All products of science. A hundred years ago, she wouldn't lived long enough to produce any music. That she is alive and singing is a testament to the positive influence of science. (Disclaimer: I know Alex's story because my employer supplied her oxygen and she sings regularly at company events now).

By recognizing the difference between science and technology? Einstein and others involved in discovering the modern quantum model of matter didn't build the atomic bomb, that was a technology derived from their work. Some of them even spoke out against it in the end. Remember that the first nuclear reactor was lit up a few years before the first A-bomb was dropped, showing that peaceful use of the technology was a possibility from the beginning.

By recognizing that science does not have the power to destroy civilization? Scientists don't start wars and don't have their fingers on the big red buttons. If you want to stop civilization from being destroyed, it's the politicians and generals you need to stop, not the scientists. Science has the power to save even more than to destroy (see above). It is politicians and generals who co-opt that power for destruction for the most part. Yes, some scientists play along but most of them are just dealing with the reality that once they publish, they have no control over how someone else uses their work.

In short, science is not about destruction, it is about creation. It is society that turns it into a destructive force.
 
In orthodox science we see a fixed vision ... and in the unorthodox some variation to what we know to be true ... because basically we don't know by loss or laws ...

Did science prove that light can be warped?
 
The old "ho-hum, yeah, sure, it gave us nukes" response. Completely ignoring the fact that that invention, and the enormous number of them that exist, have the power to destroy everything we've materially built and scientifically discovered, within hours. Less. Our entire civilization. That, to me, far outweighs the benefits that hard science has brought us - as long as that hangs over us. That's enormous control. And nobody in a position of power is really moving to do anything about it, other than token political chess moves. If humanity cared enough for humanity those monstrous things would not have been built - and a heck of a lot more effort, priority effort, would be put into safe disarmament before moving onto things like AI! - so let's not pretend, please, that science is so humanitarian.
 
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Inannawhimsey said:
Righto @Mendalla, it is up to us to decide what to do with facts, and there are many (subjective) ways of dealing with those facts

We are limited by the force of gravity, but we have learned how to harness it, through leaping & airplanes...
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How can we harness gravity? We don't even know what it is.
 
Science is employed in the service of building technology, @Mendalla. It is also used to understand the forces of nature. But, above all it is employed in the service of technology and that technology has given us an invention that holds our entire civilization hostage and I don't trust what it will serve next because of that. That is a very reasonable reason to not trust science entirely.
 
Waterfall said:
How can we harness gravity? We don't even know what it is.
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Building a plane requires us to know the behaviours of gravity (and other things, like wind resistance, wind flow, turbulence, etc)

Want to jump higher (which means you have to struggle against the force of gravity)? Wear springs of some sort. And so forth.

So, even though gravity isn't something that we can negate (as of this time)--kind of like a Law of Gawd, it is something that we can adapt to is what I was trying to get at. Often, we don't have to 'know' just what it is that we are dealing with (know everything aboot it, where it comes from, etc), but we know how it behaves and so on. Like Quantum Mechanics -- we don't really grok the why of it, but we know how it behaves and have built technologies around it that work.
 
We've even managed to do some pretty bizarre things like stop radioactive decay (one of the few processes in reality that is a causeless cause -- that is, truly random, as of this time) by observing it
(now if we can do that, what real power does g_d have, fmm? g_d, HERE WE COME!!! SET TEA FOR 8 BILLION!!!)

and we've even developed a very simple circuit that did a calculation WITHOUT DOING A CALCULATION...thank you, Quantum Mechanics!
 
Hinduism and Cosmology? ......hmmmm

Did you know that Carl Sagan once said "that Hinduism is the only religion in which the time scales correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology? It's cycles run from our ordinary day and night, to a day and night of Brahma, 8.46 Billions years long."

Bindu-Vipshot, means "point explosion" in Sanskrit. The word Brahman means grow big and the bindu-vipshot produced the sound waves of the syllable "om". The Upanishads, say that Brahman (god head) wanted to become many, which he did through an expression of will. Creation is depicted as "divine play" and no game is fun when Brahma knows exactly how it's going to go.
 
Waterfall said:
How can we harness gravity? We don't even know what it is.
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Yes, we do. That's the whole point of General Relativity. Gravity is the result of matter distorting space-time. It pulls things in because it creates a "well" in space-time that things "fall" into. That's gravity and it is very well understood and documented. That's the whole point of the gravitational wave post that started this: our theory of gravity has survived yet another test and will continue to prevail until some new observation breaks it (and that may yet happen).

Now, do we fully understand what "mass" is and why it is able to distort space-time? Somewhat. That's the Higgs field in action. However, because we still haven't found a successful way to tie General Relativity to the Standard Model of Particle Physics (which explains and explores the structure of matter and energy), we still don't fully understand it.

As for harnessing gravity, without that elusive link between General Relativity and the Standard Model, it ain't happening but if we ever find that "unified theory", then it moves into the "maybe" category.
 
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