scientist who believes in God

know1

Ahnimus wrote:

Is that because you believe in God?

The vast majority of scientists do not believe in the biblical God.

No - it's because scientists would be the ones most closely studying God's creation and works.

baraka

I dunno, I've said this many times in threads like this, but for me, there always remains that old problem about the end of the explanation chain. It seems to me, however successful our scientific explanations may be, they always have certain starting assumptions built in. Where do these laws come from in the first place? What is the origin of the logic for which all scientific reasoning is founded? I think we have to concede to the idea that the 'ultimate' questions will always lie outside the scope of empirical science as it is usually defined. However, I believe it is worth pursuing the path of rational inquiry to its limit, even if it is to 'prove' the chain of inference is incomplete.

Many scientists are religious, although most leave their religions 'at the door'. If any at all try to harmonize their spiritual side to their scientific side, it usually entails taking a very liberal view of religious doctrine and imbuing the world of science with a significance that some of their fellow scientists would find silly.

callen

Ahnimus wrote:

I believe in the universe and all it's wonder. I stand in awe at the light of the moon at night. I do not believe in God, I do not worship the almighty creator of all things, my universe is not beyond the laws of nature, it is nature.

as to the thread....if a scientist believes in god...they're pretty selective in choosing facts..and would very much scrutinize their scientific conclusions.

soulsinging

lucylespian wrote:

I dunno, that's pretty ineffable, totally ineffable actually, but it's existence causes me to wonder, nto to confine the answer to the paltry tale of Creation !!

im not confined to creation, and i do wonder. and i fully support any and all investigation into it. but at a certain point, you go back and the source seems to defy logical thought... big bang? what caused and where'd the matter come from before it exploded? etc etc. you get to a point where the scientific explanation is so mind-bendingly weird and abstract that it seems to defy the human capacity to properly grasp it... that is what i consider god, something beyond the reach of human understanding. yes, we constantly make progress and learn more and resolve things that previously seemed incomprehensible, but it seems every time we do, we end up with even more questions after. it's awe-inspiring.

soulsinging

MakingWaves wrote:

Those in the social sciences are more likely to believe in God and attend religious services than researchers in the natural sciences, the study found.

The opposite had been expected.

that's weird. why would they expect social scientists to believe less? because of the traditionally liberal politics of social scientists? cos the survey results are almost exactly what i would have expected... physical sciences provide far more challenges to religious doctrine than social sciences would. i dont know why anyone would have expected the opposite. i think this is evidence of the success of the propaganda about liberals (social scientists) being godless heathens and conservatives being pious men.

soulsinging

Ahnimus wrote:

Creation is a paradox. I've never understood the assumption of creation. The idea is that things exist, so they must have been created, but to presuppose a creator would be paradoxical, because it would be infinity thereafter. It's the old turtle problem.

The most widely known version today appears in Stephen Hawking's 1988 book A Brief History of Time, which begins with an anecdote about an encounter between a scientist and an old lady:

A well-known scientist (some say it was the philosopher Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.

At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise."

The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?"

"You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

It is possible that the lady's comment came after Russell's 1927 lecture Why I Am Not a Christian where, in discounting the "First Cause" argument intended to be a proof of God's existence, he comments:

If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

this is ridiculous because it attempts to apply science to creationism. science cannot tell us where all the matter in the universe came from or how it suddenly exploded or when time began either. not yet anyway. religion, rather than throwing up its hands and saying "we dont know," says well, this indescribable entity called god must have been behind things at that point, becos no other current explanation makes sense at this moment. the POINT of god is that god exists outside the human understanding of science and the universe and is not subject to things like physics or mathematics. SCIENCE is what says everything must have a cause, but it cannot supply the root cause. god is simply an attempt to explain the unexplainable. when we were young, it explained the moon and sun. now it explains the big bang. and so on. the problem with religion is when it ceases to become interprative and becomes prescriptive. instead of saying "i dont know how this works, so until i find a better explanation i will call it god," it begins to say "i believe in god and my god looks like this and therefore whatever i discover must adhere to this code or i will disregard it."

Ahnimus

soulsinging wrote:

this is ridiculous because it attempts to apply science to creationism. science cannot tell us where all the matter in the universe came from or how it suddenly exploded or when time began either. not yet anyway. religion, rather than throwing up its hands and saying "we dont know," says well, this indescribable entity called god must have been behind things at that point, becos no other current explanation makes sense at this moment. the POINT of god is that god exists outside the human understanding of science and the universe and is not subject to things like physics or mathematics. SCIENCE is what says everything must have a cause, but it cannot supply the root cause. god is simply an attempt to explain the unexplainable. when we were young, it explained the moon and sun. now it explains the big bang. and so on. the problem with religion is when it ceases to become interprative and becomes prescriptive. instead of saying "i dont know how this works, so until i find a better explanation i will call it god," it begins to say "i believe in god and my god looks like this and therefore whatever i discover must adhere to this code or i will disregard it."

I don't see the concept of God as explaining the unexplainable, it's unexplaining the unexplainable. It does nothing for explanation at all. God is not a root cause either, it's just a variable place-holder. It does nothing to explain anything. There is still a turtle problem with God.

By the way, Creationism set foot into the realm of science with Intelligent Design, or any other time it professes to be a science, then it is subject to scientific inquiry, it is not a valid scientific theory.

Abuskedti

THE LOOK wrote:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/03/collins.commentary/index.html

there are thousands of Christian Scientists silly.

angelica

soulsinging wrote:

that's weird. why would they expect social scientists to believe less? because of the traditionally liberal politics of social scientists? cos the survey results are almost exactly what i would have expected... physical sciences provide far more challenges to religious doctrine than social sciences would. i dont know why anyone would have expected the opposite. i think this is evidence of the success of the propaganda about liberals (social scientists) being godless heathens and conservatives being pious men.

I figured it was be because social science understands the common reasons for why people believe things, such as conditioning, culture, etc, and objectively looks at such issues. It demystifies the spiritual. Psychology at face value takes all the mystery out of things like spiritual experiences, etc. I was surprised, though, as well to hear that they thought social scientists would believe less.

Abuskedti

Scientists can test things.. and predict the future with relatively good results.

they can theorize about how the earth formed and how humans originated

buy they don't know why.. they don't know what came first - whether space was created intelligently or not.. they can only look at it and see what it does..

they can perhaps with relative certainty disprove some of the stories of the bible - but that does not disprove the existance of God or Jesus as his son...

Many Christians make claims that are scientifically unlikely.. but that is not what religion is about...

Science does not come close to eliminating intelligent design.. they only can show the unliklihood of many specific claims.

Ahnimus

Abuskedti wrote:

Scientists can test things.. and predict the future with relatively good results.

they can theorize about how the earth formed and how humans originated

buy they don't know why.. they don't know what came first - whether space was created intelligently or not.. they can only look at it and see what it does..

they can perhaps with relative certainty disprove some of the stories of the bible - but that does not disprove the existance of God or Jesus as his son...

Many Christians make claims that are scientifically unlikely.. but that is not what religion is about...

Science does not come close to eliminating intelligent design.. they only can show the unliklihood of many specific claims.

It doesn't matter if science can explain everything, nothing can explain everything, neither can Christianity or Islam. They don't do any better job of explaining anything.

soulsinging

Ahnimus wrote:

I don't see the concept of God as explaining the unexplainable, it's unexplaining the unexplainable. It does nothing for explanation at all. God is not a root cause either, it's just a variable place-holder. It does nothing to explain anything.

what is wrong with that? it does not impede science. what is wrong with a god that occupies the shadowy grey area outside the realm of science?

Ahnimus wrote:

By the way, Creationism set foot into the realm of science with Intelligent Design, or any other time it professes to be a science, then it is subject to scientific inquiry, it is not a valid scientific theory.

i know. i was just using it as a lazy example. intelligent design and creationism are pretty laughable in my humble opinion.

Ahnimus

soulsinging wrote:

what is wrong with that? it does not impede science. what is wrong with a god that occupies the shadowy grey area outside the realm of science?

I don't know, I just find it to be pointless. It's like 'I don't know how the earth does not fall, so there must be an elephant under it, who's standing on a tortoise.' It just doesn't really mean anything.

angelica

Abuskedti wrote:

Scientists can test things.. and predict the future with relatively good results.

they can theorize about how the earth formed and how humans originated

buy they don't know why.. they don't know what came first - whether space was created intelligently or not.. they can only look at it and see what it does..

they can perhaps with relative certainty disprove some of the stories of the bible - but that does not disprove the existance of God or Jesus as his son...

Many Christians make claims that are scientifically unlikely.. but that is not what religion is about...

Science does not come close to eliminating intelligent design.. they only can show the unliklihood of many specific claims.

Exactly Abu. I completely agree. They don't know why. They can see what it does.

Ahnimus

angelica wrote:

Exactly Abu. I completely agree. They don't know why. They can see what it does.

Nobody else knows why either. So it's pretty pointless to single out science.

PJammin'

Abuskedti wrote:

they can perhaps with relative certainty disprove some of the stories of the bible - but that does not disprove the existance of God or Jesus as his son...

Many Christians make claims that are scientifically unlikely.. but that is not what religion is about...

scientists that try to disprove the works of God are only fools in my opionion. who has the mind of God? certainly not some scientist who thinks they can disprove a miracle done by a creator who is perfect. i was watching CNN late last night and they were trying to come up with a scientific way of Jesus walking on water. face it, it was a miricle so stop trying to put some scientific spin on it. until some scientist creates a human being out of nothing then i'll start paying more attention.

soulsinging

Ahnimus wrote:

Nobody else knows why either. So it's pretty pointless to single out science.

yet you single out religion. how is that less pointless?

Ahnimus

soulsinging wrote:

yet you single out religion. how is that less pointless?

I've given props to religion for some of it's goals. But all in all, it's detrimental to society.

Remember the coin flip?

angelica

Ahnimus wrote:

Nobody else knows why either. So it's pretty pointless to single out science.

I'm saying that it leaves the questions of meaning and the "why" part up to us to individually discover and/or intuit, sense or feel for ourselves. This is in a level of human experience, where the only right or wrong is about what is right or wrong for each one of us.

The other day you and I said these comments:

Ahnimus wrote:

angelica wrote:

And your view of determinism is not as cut and dry as you make it out to be.

Actually it pretty much is, and if you asked Einstein, Bell or Bohr, they'd probably tell you the same thing I would.

After that I found a speech given by Niels Bohr, the founding father of quantum phsyics. He said this in 1957:

Niels Bohr, founding father of quantum physics wrote:

I would now like to say a few words about the old discussion of the freedom of the will. This, of course, is not related in any way to physics. Moreover, though attempts have been made through the ages, it is quite impossible to relate this problem to determinism; for a rigorous deterministic approach leaves no room for the concept of free will. On the other hand, it is clear that, like many other commonly used words, the word freedom is quite necessary to describe the richness of conscious life. Now, what do we use it for? In some situations we like to say that we have the feeling that it is possible for us, so to speak, to make the best of things. Speaking very loosely, it is simply a problem of cause; it is not possible to say whether we have the feeling that we are going to do something because we have the feeling that we can, or whether we can only because we will.


The problem is this, to see that we use the words "free will" to describe our situation in just as clear a manner as we use such words as "responsibility", "hope", and the like, all of which cannot be applied or defined unambiguously, except on the basis of the situations in which they are used.

He refers to free-will as being in the category of hope and responsibility. This is in a different aspect of life than science. This is in a realm where things ARE ambiguous, and have different meanings, depending on the person considering them, and depending on the context. For many people there is a complete assuredness of free-will as that richness of conscious life. That is between us and our philsophies and religions in a subjective place. As Niels Bohr says in the second paragraph, this is not objective--it can only be certain within the context used. This is the aspect of life that is subjective, within each individual.

Ahnimus

angelica wrote:

I'm saying that it leaves the questions of meaning and the "why" part up to us to individually discover and/or intuit, sense or feel for ourselves. This is in a level of human experience, where the only right or wrong is about what is right or wrong for each one of us.

The other day you and I said these comments:

After that I found a speech given by Niels Bohr, the founding father of quantum phsyics. He said this in 1957:

He refers to free-will as being in the category of hope and responsibility. This is in a different aspect of life than science. This is in a realm where things ARE ambiguous, and have different meanings, depending on the person considering them, and depending on the context. For many people there is a complete assuredness of free-will as that richness of conscious life. That is between us and our philsophies and religions in a subjective place. As Niels Bohr says in the second paragraph, this is not objective--it can only be certain within the context used. This is the aspect of life that is subjective, within each individual.

I get what Bohr is saying, but it doesn't sound like indeterminism to me. It sounds like he's speaking on context of subjectivity, which he should not be. The philosophical question of free-will, is not a question of wether we feel free-will, it's wether or not it actually exists. Anyone, including determinists as hard as Susan Blackmore or myself, will say "yes, I feel free-will, do I actually have it? no.".

It sounds like Bohr is saying the term "free-will" suits the experience of it, what he's not saying in that speech is what causes free-will. He actually says "Speaking very loosely, it is simply a problem of cause; it is not possible to say whether we have the feeling that we are going to do something because we have the feeling that we can, or whether we can only because we will."