Before I start, I'd like to issue a blanket apology for creating yet another religion thread. You guys have probably gone through countless iterations of these in the past, and are probably either rolling your eyes or slitting your wrists by now.
However, the reason I wanted to have a discussion is a very interesting debate that I came across the other day. The debate itself was held about a week ago in Notre-Dame University, so it is pretty unlikely that it was covered in previous threads.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9V85OykSDT8
It is 1 hour 48 minutes long. At first I figured I'd just watch the parts where Hitchens talks, because frankly I wasn't very interested in what the other side had to say (mainly I was looking for something specific that Hitchens has reportedly say, but I digress).
But a very interesting thing happened: I ended up watching the whole thing, because D'Souza's arguments were actually very well-made and eloquently delivered.
The main point he made was that science is actually "guilty" of a lot of things that atheists accuse religion of. He gave the example of dark matter. Scientists did calculations and found out discrepancies in their measurements of the mass of galaxies, clusters of galaxies and the entire universe made through dynamical and general relativistic means. They then said, "hey, there must be something else that is responsible for these discrepancies, something we can't see or hear or feel, but can account for the effects of. So let's call this thing dark matter." D'Souza says this is the exact same reasoning that religious people use when they say God exists. They say the existence of God, while not proven by sight and smell and sound etc., is the
current best explanation for the things that we cannot explain.
There are many other interesting points made by both sides of the debate. The thing I liked the most out of everything Hitchens said was that there are many religions in the world, and by their definitions and claims, only one of them can be correct. He says that this is a very strong evidence that religion is man-made. He also says that many subspecies of humans (such as the Neanderthals) had religions of their own (as seen by their cave paintings), but they went extinct. Which would mean that their gods left them behind. So how do we know that our God, if it exists, will not do the same to us? He supposes that the species that looks upon our Sun as it is dying, millions of years from now, will be a very different species, probably with its own god(s).
Request: Please watch at least some of the debate before responding. I probably haven't done justice to their arguments. Thank you.
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Plus there's quite a bit of difference in presuming the existence of matter because we can measure its effects and presuming the existence of an omnipotent being because we can't explain some things.
Watching/listening to it now. As someone with a B.A. in Religious Studies - and an atheist - I, of course, have a particular interest in this sort of thing. Be back in an hour and a half, then!
There is also the fact that he is arguing for a god of the gaps.
Carl Sagan says it best:
"In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time someting like that happened in politics or religion."
-Carl Sagan
Still, it's a good debate and at the very least it's entertaining.
God on the other hand has a million and one extraneous properties that have nothing to do with what he's used as an explanation for.
To be fair, the "First there was nothing, and then nothing exploded, and then there were planets and people and stuff" does sound kind of ridiculous, but compared to "A Wizard did it" it gets considerably more plausible.
Carl Sagan has it all wrong though:
Religious views and ideas change all the time, usually when some new King or Church decide that they want to retranslate/edit the Bible.
Scientist also rarely worship dark matter and believe it's responsible for anything except gravitational effects on the universy, nor do they give it any personality or claim it has affected their lives personally. I suppose if you go to ultra-abstract theism you might find some parallers, but when you got that deep the only difference between "God" and "Dark matter" is the name.
I'll try to listen to the debate though, although I can't stand Hitchens.
Would you like him more if he got his old beard back?
Religious guy analogy fail.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
See, aether.
But I mean... no scientist anywhere at any time thinks Dark Matter is a good theory. It's literally here until we figure out something less dumb.
You can't really compare that to "and we take on faith the immutable truth of the creator".
Because thats how science works? Test for the hypothesis?
Science is all about having truths that exist only until someone comes along to knock them down.
And the aether theory was discarded because it no longer fit the data not because the power of Christ compelled us
you can point out bad science all you want but the only thing that beats bad science is good science.
Right. And hopefully in all that testing, you find some more data that can help you formulate a new hypothesis. It's not like scientists are sitting around smoking weed and someone says, "Hey, hey guys, what if there was, like, this matter, but it was all dark?" and BAM! a new hypothesis is born. Dudes look at data and try to come up with the least-crazy idea that explains everything. Except sometimes the least-crazy idea is still pretty wacko because the universe is a weird-ass place.
Anyone (read: D'Souza) suggesting that a major religion has just floated the God idea until they can come up with a better way to explain things is full of shit.
And antimatter destroys matter when they touch!
That sounds ridiculous to me too, but its (sort of) true. You can certainly make dark matter sound ridiculous (and maybe it is) but that doesn't mean it might not end up as scientific theory. Its not yet, but its possible.
Particularly since people are still following counterproductive religious teachings long after science has come up with the "better way to explain things."
Yeah I don't get your problem Mad Scientist, Dark Matter is weird and sounds dumb, but it's the best stopgap explanation we have at the moment. The second there's something that's more parsimonious, we'll hop to that.
I mean you may as well be all 'Yeah but Darwin can't even explain how traits get passed along'!
Yep, pretty much (though I think it's 10%, not 30%.)
Assorted calculations behave as if there was a vast amount of extra matter in the universe, but we can't see it. Dark Matter is the idea we currently go with because it explains what we see, and doesn't really contradict anything outside of the fact that we can't directly measure it. I wouldn't say it's dumb, just inelegant.
"There are x propositions. They are all mutually exclusive; only one proposition can be true at most. Therefore, all the propositions are wrong."
Of course, battling to see who can make the most terrible argument isn't really a great idea.
I.E. Life is complex, therefore it couldn't have come together randomly and there is a God.
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
Stop it.
Even if we observed 100% of the universe, understood everything, knew for a fact the big bang happened, and knew for a fact the Universe was still expanding etc etc all that jazz, religion isn't discounted.
As my sixth grade teacher explained it, maybe God just said "bang!"
Also, the whole "All religions say that they're right and others are wrong, thus none can be right" (aside from being incorrect) is a silly, silly argument. Like, a brain meltingly stupid argument and why does this guy get to give lectures again?
Still, they are exclusive in the sense that a scientifically minded person cannot argue that God itself is plausible without fudging his or her logic a bit. And of course, anyone who does that can just as easily replace God with FSM or some other nonsense to achieve the same results. Basically, any imaginary thing with qualities that prevent its existence from being directly disproved cannot be directly disproved.
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
Actually you would prove the existence of god if you understood exactly how everything happened, for you would be god in a sense.
But one can only know what they know, and learn some things that they don't from their perspective. Knowing everything would also entail being everything.
It sounds like you're quoting a JRPG.
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
Knowing everything exactly as it happened without flaw is basically impossible as is being perfect at anything. God like as it were.
Sounds like someone really liked "The Last Question"
Yeah, the argument is not "all these religions are obviously false" but more "what makes your religion different?"
It's like the observation that we haven't found God yet, it is not proof of non-existence but it is certainly evidence pointing towards him not being there.
http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
Short story by Asimov. Considering your theory, you might find it very interesting, it's one of my favorite stories.
It's not a dumb theory. But, it is an incomplete one. It's being used as a "plug number" to make mathematics align with our observations. It could be dark matter. It could be an incomplete understanding of "standard" matter. It could be cosmic strings. No one knows. They just know to look for something because we obviously don't have it "down" yet when there's a big gap in our theories. Hence my "science of the gaps" comment.
How so?