Tocky on 22/10/2022 at 22:13
Yeah. I don't believe in any religion. I sure as hell don't believe in forcing anyones beliefs on anyone else. Also all the concoctions of God by man make him a dick. I'm not worshipping a dick. I'm not worshipping anyone for that matter. What sort of dick would want that? Now a buddy with some good advice and who wants the best for you is cool. A buddy that will burn you in hell forever if you don't take that advice? A dick. It's okay if that buddy laughs about what an idiot I am for not taking it though.
I like to think there is a sort of big buddy spiritual essence in the universe, though it makes no sense, and I'm sure I do it because it is comforting. I understand all my motivations. It helps me to feel there is something somewhere in the universe completely good but that would still bitch slap a true ass like Charles Manson into nothingness . But oops you didn't dot all your i's and cross all your t's so it's off to never ending searing pain? Remember that time you doubted because anyone with a brain would? Sorry, searing pain forever. Bible, Quran, and Torah dudes didn't think that shit through. Or maybe they did. That makes them dicks.
Qooper on 23/10/2022 at 13:46
Quote Posted by Nicker
Big Bang is not supernatural.
The existence of existence may be mysterious but that doesn't make it unlawful.
I think what heywood's response to your comment meant was that some things that were previously considered supernatural have been credibly substantiated as natural since. Please correct me heywood if I misunderstood your post.
Quote Posted by Nicker
As a baseline - it should be noted that not a single supernatural claim has ever been credibly substantiated in human history.
This angle of approach is problematic, because it seems to make these assumptions (once again, please correct me if I'm wrong Nicker):
- Physical science is the only reliable method of extracting knowledge from the world
- Anything that happens in the physical world can be explained with the laws of physics eventually
These foundations, by definition, exclude anything supernatural from existence. If something supernatural were to happen, it would get the label "This too is natural, just not yet understood." This label itself is a belief and a worldview. <EDIT>I kind of missed my own point, so I'll add this. I don't think merely anything supernatural is important. If I see a random car floating high up in the air without explanation, sure it's bizarre, but if it's just that, a floating car, then it doesn't really make any difference. So to clarify, when it comes to examples like this, even I would think that there's a physical explanation, but I also wouldn't give it that much importance. It wouldn't change my life to see a floating car. I'd perhaps take some video-footage and call the police if I saw others doing the same. Okay, now the other part of the label I mentioned earlier, is that certain eyewitness accounts would be labelled made up. Claims of events breaking known laws of physics would be rejected as fabrications, for example the empty tomb of Christ. What I was trying to get at is that if we define supernatural events to be physics-breaking, and we define the entire world to be solely physics-based, then we have defined that supernatural events don't exist. For every event there must be a physical explanation, or else they didn't happen. This perspective is very close to my heart for reasons I won't talk about here, but I'll also mention that I don't use only physics when I try to understand daily life or the stock market or relationships or art. I still kind of feel that I'm not getting at the bullseye of my point, but this is getting pretty wordy already, so I'll end my edit here.</EDIT>
However, there are many approaches to investigation, and the suitability of a certain type of approach depends on what is being investigated. For example, a crime scene is investigated using several different methods, and physics is just one. Eyewitnesses are crucial.
Nicker on 23/10/2022 at 20:44
Thanks for your reply, Qooper.
You are right that if something thought to be supernatural was observed by credible witnesses or measured in some reliable way, it would no longer be presumed supernatural. Rather it would be some natural phenomenon we had yet to understand.
The problem is that religions base their authority on unprovable claims about impossible events. There are several big issues here, the most obvious being, why should anyone believe a word of it? A second problem is that, having insisted that they don't need to prove their claims, they proceed to assert motives to the invisible creature they have invented. Glaring non sequitur.
From here they can generate justifications for crimes and atrocities. Of course this is a bit of a simplification and some people do justify benevolent actions from these beliefs, but historically, the misery and suffering created by superstitious beliefs far outweighs the benefits.
Quote:
However, there are many approaches to investigation, and the suitability of a certain type of approach depends on what is being investigated.
True but all genuine methods of investigation require some sort of validation. Superstitious and supernatural claims never provide this validation and cannot do so because they cannot be tested (falsified). Beyond that, many assert that trying to test their claims is blasphemous. A sin against their invisible creature.
heywood on 26/10/2022 at 21:23
Thanks Qooper. That was one of the two aspects of the big bang theory I was thinking about. The other aspect is that the current theory remains partly supernatural. It requires an action to cause the singularity that kicks it all off, and per the theory that action must be supernatural. Then very shortly after the singularity, we theorize that an inflationary period took place, which explains why the universe evolved to have large scale structure while remaining isotropic. But the cause of this inflationary period is unknown, the mechanism is outside of known physics, and why did it start and stop in a tiny instant and then never be seen again? Also, why did it take billions of years after the big bang for dark energy to appear? We're likely to find answers to some of these questions over time, perhaps most of them, but for now we don't have natural explanations for everything. Cosmology likes to fill the gaps with supernatural placeholders for things to be explained someday.
Pyrian on 26/10/2022 at 22:17
There's a closed door, with a light shining from underneath it.
"What's causing that light?"
"I don't know, the door's closed and I can't observe any details."
"So, it's sUpErNaTuRaL!1!"
"That's not how anything works."
Jason Moyer on 27/10/2022 at 02:22
Quote:
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that something so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: 'I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, 'for proof denies faith, and without faith, I am nothing.' 'But, says Man, the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.' 'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and vanishes in a puff of logic. 'Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid from making a small fortune when he used it as the theme of his best-selling book, Well That About Wraps It Up For God
.
Briareos H on 27/10/2022 at 08:58
Agree with Pyrian, let's not confuse the unknown with the supernatural. We have some models of what happens before the big bang but, sure, very few that mesh deeply with our other models of the world, and even fewer that make predictions that could be observed, but that doesn't mean that any of that isn't natural.
The supernatural is what cannot and will never be probed from within our reality.
demagogue on 27/10/2022 at 10:05
If you've been watching cosmology videos lately, they don't talk about the Big Bang per se. All the talk is about inflation, and an inflaton field decaying into the particles we know and love (with a Higgs mechanism in the mix). If you apply vanilla effective quantum field theory to it, then like any field it's gonna have a decay half life, except by its nature it's self-generating, which means there always gonna be a part that keeps inflating even if parts are decaying over time, and it's just our little pocket that decayed. We don't have any indication otherwise. But of course we can't observe the part that doesn't decay because it's already inflated far beyond the observable horizon of our universe.
But if that's right, it's going to start pushing what people mean by science. This is actually something I wanted to talk about in the Many Worlds Interpretation thread. What is science? Is it driven by the most straightforward model we create based on our observations? Or does it require "observation"? In the case of quantum chromodynamics, it's impossible we will ever be able to observe an isolated quark. But the consensus position is that the quark model is true because the math perfectly works out that way based on what we do observe, and we have no observable indication otherwise. But when it comes to an inflation multiverse or the many worlds interpretation, that's the direction the math based on observation straightforwardly points to, but now because the multiple worlds are "unobservable", now that's not science but pseudoscience or supernatural voodoo.
But anyway I just want to think about eternal inflation & the multiverse for now. I didn't mention it before, but the model is popular because it answers a lot of otherwise really hard problems like the universe's flatness, the homogeny in the cosmic microwave background, a lot of very different phenomena that are all answered by this one feature. So the justification for it is observation. And when we have any new field in quantum physics, they always start with the vanilla template and change it based on observation from there. That's what gave us the Standard Model & now this infinite inflation model. (That's not to say they're perfect or complete. We already know the SM is incomplete and infinite inflation still has open questions to answer. But as Susskind says in the video below, we're approaching the limits of our ability to have observations which allow us to fill in the details further. We may reach the best models we can have with the data we have, and anything beyond that may be real but inaccessible.)
Anyway the major punchline of the infinite inflation model, whether you think it's credible or even think it's still science or not, is that it offers an explanation on the most cosmic scale of why we're here, and that's eternal rolls of dices and the anthropic principle. We're here because the eternal decay of inflaton fields creates background geometries to manifest every conceivable symmetry pattern and thus parameters for different laws of quantum physics (different particles & coupling strengths, etc). In string theory, they say there are 10^500 possible Calabi-Yau geometries, each one manifesting a different set of parameters. And early quantum fluctuation will determine the shape of the universe from there. The suggestion is that all of these possible physics & initial conditions are manifested somewhere, eventually, and not once, but each one an infinity of times. (Yes that would mean that this reality exactly as we see it has been manifested before and will be again. See you suckas the next loop around. And not just this one, but an infinity of other universes like but not exactly like this one, e.g., with a one particle difference at one point in time, two particles differences at two points in time, etc. See y'all in those loops as well.) We're in the universe we're in because our laws of physics are the ones that allow the generation of stars, planets, and life. The anthropic principle. That's a truth that one credible model of physics points to that a lot of cosmologists take seriously. But we'll never be able to observe before the pre-inflation state, nor the continuation of the inflation beyond our universe, and still less the other universes that decays of the inflaton field seed and create. So would you consider that explanation a natural or supernatural one?
Incidentally, if one's definition of God is an omnipotent being, and if their definition of omnipotence is the power to manifest any and every possibility, then the fact that every conceivable possibility of every conceivable physics is actually manifested somewhere, then that kind of looks like even the most traditional definition of God. What could a God do other than what's actually manifested by nature as we have it now; and what is manifest omnipotence except God? Every possibility actually is manifested, and this reality is just our branch of it.
Anyway food for thought. Here's a nice video on it.
[video=youtube;AuWDzQ-tiZ8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuWDzQ-tiZ8[/video]
Briareos H on 27/10/2022 at 10:36
Quote Posted by demagogue
But we'll never be able to observe before the pre-inflation state, nor the continuation of the inflation beyond our universe,
Unless the model allows the passing of information from one universe into another, e.g. non-uniformities in the CMB predicted by Penrose's conformal cyclic model.
Edit: poorly read the message and didn't notice you only meant this remark in the context of eternal inflation. In any case none of these require or benefit from the concept of god or from a dichotomy of nature vs. something else.
Regarding extending predictions of the maths towards the unobservable, pseudo-science as it may be, if it creates the seed in a scientist's mind to look at things differently and perhaps bring something new, then it shouldn't be discarded. In this way, the supernatural may be beneficial, as well as it may ultimately lower the signal-to-noise ratio.
heywood on 27/10/2022 at 16:31
Here's the definition of supernatural from Oxford:
"(of a manifestation or event) attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature."
We're quick to criticize religion for not explaining its miracles. So I thought it fair to point out that science's best explanation for creation still requires a couple of miracles of its own.
In describing some event, you might say "It happened because of hypothesized force X that we have yet to encounter or understand." And a Christian might say "God made it happen." But both of those statements are saying exactly the same thing to me, which is "I don't know why it happened, it's a hole in my theory."
