Science and religion

[Fido]

Originally Posted by dpmartin

Fido,

your ok, I don’t care what they say about you.

Hope every one rejoices in the Holidays...

I never quit rejoicing, or joicing for that matter. Best.

[de Silentio]

Sorry Scattered, I forgot to add the smiley face after saying that your comment was insulting. I was not insulted, it takes quite a lot to insult me.

Scattered - Really my whole point is that when I look at the progression of thought, science and technology, there is refinement and things retain their meaning and purpose, but become simpler

Would you agree that the understanding of things typically start out complicated, then as we learn more and understand them further they become simpler? For example, understanding why an apple falls to the Earth rather than falling up to the sky began with Newton's [FONT='Verdana','sans-serif']Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, [/font]which is a complicated publication. Now, however, understanding why an apple falls to the ground is quite simple.

It seems to me that our understanding of things is simple because those things are generally excepted and understood. You say that you can understand where the space shuttle came from and what it is about, but this is only because you rest your simple understanding on the complicated understanding of others.

To use your example of software code, you can only make someone else’s code simpler to a point, and even at this point, that code is most likely complicated. Yes, it may have started out more complicated than it is now, but believe me, it is still complicated. Personally, I have a hard time with code because of my limited mathematical experience. You, I am assuming, find code to be much simpler, since you have the knowledge and general understanding. Likewise, I am a Network Admin, and like you, when I am designing a system, I must go through complicated reasonings to get to an end product for myself or my customer. My end product is usually straight forward, and laid out pretty simple, but it rests on hours upon hours of complicated work and reasonings.

I think this can be applied to religion, at least the Christian religion, also. A lot of what Christian believe is rested on the complicated works of Augustine. For example, explaining how Jesus could have been God. Most Christians will say: "How is Jesus God? Oh, the Trinity. What is the Trinity, it is one God in his three forms, they are separate, but the same." Augustine, on the other hand, worked over many pages.

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On a personal note, I think it is the simple aspects of God that are the most important, all of the other stuff is simply exercise. Personally, I enjoy the complicated reasoning, and spend a lot of time trying to reconcile God, my experience, and logic. I find these things have brought me closer to God, and understanding him. However, I do recognize they are everybody.

[Fido]

Originally Posted by de Silentio

Sorry Scattered, I forgot to add the smiley face after saying that your comment was insulting. I was not insulted, it takes quite a lot to insult me.



Would you agree that the understanding of things typically start out complicated, then as we learn more and understand them further they become simpler? For example, understanding why an apple falls to the Earth rather than falling up to the sky began with Newton's [FONT='Verdana','sans-serif']Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, [/font]which is a complicated publication. Now, however, understanding why an apple falls to the ground is quite simple.

It seems to me that our understanding of things is simple because those things are generally excepted and understood. You say that you can understand where the space shuttle came from and what it is about, but this is only because you rest your simple understanding on the complicated understanding of others.

To use your example of software code, you can only make someone else’s code simpler to a point, and even at this point, that code is most likely complicated. Yes, it may have started out more complicated than it is now, but believe me, it is still complicated. Personally, I have a hard time with code because of my limited mathematical experience. You, I am assuming, find code to be much simpler, since you have the knowledge and general understanding. Likewise, I am a Network Admin, and like you, when I am designing a system, I must go through complicated reasonings to get to an end product for myself or my customer. My end product is usually straight forward, and laid out pretty simple, but it rests on hours upon hours of complicated work and reasonings.

I think this can be applied to religion, at least the Christian religion, also. A lot of what Christian believe is rested on the complicated works of Augustine. For example, explaining how Jesus could have been God. Most Christians will say: "How is Jesus God? Oh, the Trinity. What is the Trinity, it is one God in his three forms, they are separate, but the same." Augustine, on the other hand, worked over many pages.

------

On a personal note, I think it is the simple aspects of God that are the most important, all of the other stuff is simply exercise. Personally, I enjoy the complicated reasoning, and spend a lot of time trying to reconcile God, my experience, and logic. I find these things have brought me closer to God, and understanding him. However, I do recognize they are everybody.

one of the facts that led to the trashing of the ptolemaic conception of the universe was the constant corrections that had to be applied to it. It is amazing how long people hang onto an outmoded explanations of human behavior like capitalism, which really produces no good, but justifies a lot of misery- long after it has done all the good it can. Not to side track anything. The truth is always more simple than what it replaces.

[Aedes]

Originally Posted by Fido

The truth is always more simple than what it replaces.

Except when it's not.

Human pathophysiology is a bit more complicated than Galen's four humors would have us believe, for example.

Science, by its nature, is reductionist. There are always new details being added. It's pretty seldom that some law or some paradigm shift comes along. At face value evolution is nice and simple, the germ theory of disease is nice and simple, DNA as the genetic element is nice and simple. But the thing is these concepts don't exist in a vacuum and they only have meaning in the context of overwhelming detail.

[Fido]

Originally Posted by Aedes

Except when it's not.

Human pathophysiology is a bit more complicated than Galen's four humors would have us believe, for example.

Science, by its nature, is reductionist. There are always new details being added. It's pretty seldom that some law or some paradigm shift comes along. At face value evolution is nice and simple, the germ theory of disease is nice and simple, DNA as the genetic element is nice and simple. But the thing is these concepts don't exist in a vacuum and they only have meaning in the context of overwhelming detail.

A difficult as they may seem on their face they are much more simple than any simple thing that does not address the problem. If you are looking for simple and non functional go back to the the four humors, and byob.

[Aedes]

I think it's a rationalization to say that a complex thing is simple because it better addresses the problem. That's a redefinition of the word simple.

It was simple and non-functional to say that stress caused heart attacks, and that you could prevent heart attacks by preventing stress.

It's now complex and extremely functional to say that circulating cholesterol in the form of oxidized LDL and VLDL, endothelial dysfunction due to diabetes, smoking, and hypertension lead to inflammatory endovascular plaques that cause heart attacks when they rupture, leading to occlusive platelet aggregation.

The latter is simple only in that it's more easily demonstrable; but it's mechanistically far more complex.

[Fido]

Originally Posted by Aedes

I think it's a rationalization to say that a complex thing is simple because it better addresses the problem. That's a redefinition of the word simple.

It was simple and non-functional to say that stress caused heart attacks, and that you could prevent heart attacks by preventing stress.

It's now complex and extremely functional to say that circulating cholesterol in the form of oxidized LDL and VLDL, endothelial dysfunction due to diabetes, smoking, and hypertension lead to inflammatory endovascular plaques that cause heart attacks when they rupture, leading to occlusive platelet aggregation.

The latter is simple only in that it's more easily demonstrable; but it's mechanistically far more complex.

You are absolutely right that it is a rationalization. It is the most rational conclusion I have come to today. It can never get more simple than what it is. All explainations which do not explain obfuscate. I am sorry if it seems complex. You are on the cutting edge of reality, and that has got to be scary. But you know it first. And that complex terminology is the price you pay for a simple understanding. People get sick and die. There; simple, true, and hardly to the point. We do not have to propitiate any Gods. We don't have to hunt up a kid to throw on the alter. I would say the rational explaination is the best and simplest we can do; always.

[Aedes]

I guess you can look at it as if it's a "best fit line" on a graph, in which we just have data points and we're trying to guess the actual line. In those terms then it is simpler to get closer to the truth, because the variation about that line is minimized.

That said, the "rational explanation" isn't necessarily right or wrong -- it's just the best we can do based on what we know empirically. It's just all the details upon details upon details that allows us to refine the rational explanation.

[Scattered]

It seems that this post has sort of digressed, which is OK as I have found that it didn't fit here. This is a philosophy board. Reflections here come from philosophy. What I am best at is biology and what I have discovered about God and religion is from biology, though it is unprecedented enough to qualify more as philosophy than any science. It is pretty amazing stuff and it is more than one point that I have discovered. It is rather revolutionary ideas, but it also something whose time has come. So I will finish up my posts here with a thought.
May I first give some background so that if I claim something rather outrageous, but don't back it up, you will at least know where I am coming from. I am going to write what I concluded, but not how or why. I hope you will excuse me, because I am still writing on it and I have reasons not to tip my hand so to speak. ... or you can skip to the last paragraph.
I started out as this big pasty looking nerd at age 15 in LA. Something happened, but I still don't for sure know what. I asked the question, "why is that person different from me".
Shortly after that, I started studying biology and in my last year of high school, had a very inspiring biology teacher. It is clear that by then I was on the path I have followed since and that I already had calculated in the factors of disease and recombination. My question had become a theoretical question of "how could humans again achieve a stable ecology". This was a nice form as it allowed me to bring to the problem the tools of science that I had been learning. Immediately, the science of biology makes it clear how dangerous it is for a specie to exist without a stable ecology, something we had not had since the time of the "hunter/gatherer" ecology. We have gone through transitional ecologies, but even agriculture seems to have a limited projected time limit due to natural soil depletion. Of course it is all dependant on population size, which doesn't look likely to stabilize either.
I thought about it some. It turns out that it is widely believed that disease is again going to become the primary natural selective effect it has historically been for humans. I saw another more esoteric problem, genetic load from recombination.
I thought about it long enough to get a degree in biology from the University of California at Santa Cruz. There I found The Evolution of Man and Society written by the British geneticist C. D. Darlington. It is brilliant, but not currently politically correct for a reason he calls the Third Forbidden Question in Science, heredity. That is so because currently studies of heredity leads to Social Darwinism which leads to racist arguments and conflicts such as WWII. If you study heredity, you will be labeled a racist and rejected from both academia and polite society. I didn't know any better and I came up with a new idea that has the opposite result. Call this my primary idea. I studied it for 25 years. I wrote about it before PCs existed. I then typed about it when they did. It would make racism meaningless and counter survival, but that was a secondary effect. My purpose and result was to come up with much of how humans could again achieve a stable ecology. Since I concluded that the solution would take behavioral adaptation as well as the genetic adaptation I had studied, I started looking at learned survival strategies, called moralities, that are an essential part of human survival. Historically, most moralities have been based on authority and precedence, but in the future will have to be based on reason and understanding or they will not adequately serve.
Then, a buddy of mine got me to look at religion. He didn't like religion. Well, I hadn't thought about it much. I was raised in a family that mostly gracefully balanced religion and science, but it had never been that important to me. Religion sounds great, but if you like the tools of science, it is hard to study. My friend got me to think about it. A bit surprisingly, based on reason and background data, for various reasons I concluded that God(s) probably existed as did at least heaven. Considering the ancient stories, perhaps angels and the rest of the supernatural genera existed as well. What was far more surprising to me though was that the reasoning was based on the genetic principles that I had been studying so long that I referred to above as my primary idea. The point is that I am a biologist, first and last.
OK, that's all I have to say for now. I'm study genetics and found some interesting stuff, but based on that I found a rather easily supportable (fact and reason based) argument that God(s) exist, heaven exists and God's purpose (something most religions don't claim to have). It is not a complicated argument, but it is not something that has been put together before. It was not my goal, but it is where my studies led.
That is where I am coming from and where I am trying to figure out where to proceed from. If heredity is the Third Forbidden in Science, I suspect that the Fourth is God.
Enjoy, Scattered
PS. This wasn't reductionism, as I just followed facts and reasons to a larger idea

[Fido]

How does one reason from the finite to the infinite? Does it not always involve a leap of faith?

Personally I don't care. If you want to believe, then believe. If you want to; then avoid belief as much as possible. We neither need God to be good, nor, for our science to be correct. God, if there is such a thing, or nothing, does not need us -to be God. We are mutualy independent. And I look at the good book, and from Genesis on not one human being has offered to regurgitate adam's apple. According to our myth, God put us into the way of knowledge. I am not keeping my portion of that original sin by accident or ignorence. If it had been me I would have turned that tree into so many apple pies. And for a simple reason. With knowledge it is possible to endure any suffering up to death and even death. The great advantage of knowledge is not that it lets us deal death, but to surmount it, and percieve a meaning beyond death.

What if it matters that our larger existence is a shadow of God? Only there then does it matter, for all around us, in our reality, is order and regularity. We have often shown that no matter what crime we are behind that God leaves us to our own justice. We can draw no conclusions from this like: If God does not do justice we must act as God in doing justice. -We cannot say we are Gods for acting as God would if he could. I think we should conclude that we are on our own, and that we have to find our own reasons for treating our own as we should, and if we cannot do that -then, to at least make all our crimes as audacious as our first.