This has a new significance with the Pope scandal

[jaycee]

Originally Posted by Ghost_Tracker

Well, it seems valid for people to believe only in concrete things that they have in front of them. Where I run into trouble, personally, is when people start talking about "concrete" because it's made of "hard matter." "Matter," of course, being . . . well - an energy wave and a mathematical construct. One which can have its momentum measured - *or* its location - but not both at the same . . . uhm . . . "time." Time, of course, being something concr- uhm, a mathematical construct that doesn't actually exist physically. But of course you can trust your eyes with - welllll, you can form theories based on photons hitting your retin- uhm, light waves - well, they're both waves and particles at the same TIME, see, and . . . well then they cause electrical IMPULES in the BRAIN which lead to "consciousness," and . . . well no, I can't explain what consciousness is, science has NO idea what that is and probably never will but . . .


You have your faith, and I have mine...

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE science - but it's a faith too.
Have you ever personally done any of the experiments which led to these beliefs?
It's a faith.

By the way, "science" practically doesn't exist any more, as such. In "Science," work is supposed to be independently reproduced before it's accepted as "true." That's almost never done these days, and yet findings are taken as valid and used to form further theories which are again rarely reproduced independently.

It's a faith-based perspective based on partial, unsubstantiated evidence. Some of which is overwhelming.
For example, the fact that you can't move more than 186,282 miles in one second's worth of . . . uhm . . time.
By "move" of course, I mean through "space," which is uhm . . . uhm . . . well, it's a mathematical CONSTRUCT, see, and . . .

"

Yes.


By the way, another fun little thing to think about - and of course, don't take this the wrong way, I'm not pointing my finger at you and you and saying "YOU'RE DAMNED! YOU'RE GOING TO BURN IN HELL!" I'm just shooting the you-know-what here and trying to explain my way of viewing things. - - One place where I run into difficulty is when so-called "logical" people start telling me "logic doesn't prove there's a God." For me, the logic is actually very simple - Suppose there were as high as a one in ten chance that if you don't do something as easy as saying the word, "Yes," you would burn in hell for all eternity. I don't mean for a paltry trillion years. I don't mean for a short period of time like ten to the hundredth power years. We're talkin' for eva. Versus just simply believing that there may have been a conscious impetus behind the Big Bang - the cause of which remains completely 100% unexplained - and that that being might care about us. Considering the fact that MANY physicists who have all the available data believe that there HAS to be a God, that's enough for me. Considering that if I'm right, good things could happen and I'll avoid possibly horrific consequences, and considering that if I'm wrong, I'll never know, there's everything to gain and nothing to lose.
It's the path of least resistance...
(And for me, the "simplist possible explanation, all else being equal," is that there's a God.)

Those are my thoughts on it all, anyway.

(I feel shattered! I did the most elaborate reply to this at lunch time today, but I must've pressed preview, not send! Well, let's see if I can write a shorter reply anyway - the last attempt was convoluted.)
The current cornerstones of physics, Quantum Field Theory and General Relativity, are both mathematically rigorous and outstandingly accurate in their predictions (one part in 10^12 for Quantum Electrodynamics, e.g. the Helium nucleus has a mass of 4.001506179127 with an error of +62 for the last two digits, and one part in 10^14 for GR seems familiar in this experiment - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSR_J0737-3039). Of course what QFT and GR say about reality is so far removed from our everyday experience of "middle world" (medium distances, times, speeds etc.) that we're lucky we can understand either of the theories at all! Although I'm perplexed when you speak of science currently not understanding consciousness, and it therefore probably never will - if scientists knew everything they'd be out of a job! Fortunately for us though, the universe becomes ever more incredible and elaborate as we probe further, so scientific investigation is unlikely to end any time soon!
Now, to conclude that science is a faith because, as Newton described it, we're seeing further by "standing on the shoulders of giants", is ridiculous. Although I've performed but a mere handful of the experiments past scientists would've done, the fact that I'm using a computer to type this response is evidence enough that science is progressing. If you still consider that faith, then you might as well have faith in surviving a jump off a ten-story building and landing on the pavement below!
Are you really sure independent verification/falsification isn't much performed anymore? One of the more interesting (at least to me) displays of refutation and subsequently revealed fabrication is the "discovery" of element 118 http://www.webelements.com/ununoctium/). Can you give me any good examples of unsubstantiated/lazy/bad science?
Ah, yes, Pascal's wager - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager. Feel free to read it, as nothing I can say here will add to that informative repository.
(As a side, sometimes I'm questioned as to how I can trust Wikipedia, my favourite initial source of information. Well, basically, I've often enjoyed looking up articles about which I know quite a bit, and the information contained within has been incredibly accurate, especially considering it's so easily edited. So knowing that, I can infer (to a point - I check some other references depending on how critical the information is), that Wikipedia pages from which I learn new information are accurate.)
You say many physicists believe in a god/s. I expect most of them are pantheists like Einstein, but in the cases that their not, their god is still so far removed from the gods of most religious people that, should they describe precisely what their god is like to a church (mosque, etc.) congregation, they'd be branded atheists. And perhaps rightly so!
Your god, simple? Really, any entity powerful and intelligent enough to create a universe like this one couldn't be described as anything other than complex! You've posited complexity to explain complexity! Your god's existence demands explanation! Who created God? (Oh, wait, eternal, never created... got it... although it still does nothing to remove the issue of complexity...)
I think that covers everything, although I'll leave one last comment to ponder over. (It relates to Pascal's Wager.) You say you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by believing in God (although not Allah, Yahwe, Vishnu, or Zeus). I disagree. Consider that the number of possible combinations of DNA that would lead to what we'd call a sentient human ranges in at least billions of billions, and yet only billions of people are lucky enough to be born at all! If we're so lucky, wouldn't you want to learn as much as possible about the place in which we make our brief visit through the best methods of inquiry? Basically, I see it this way - devote your life to religion, and you spend your time obsessing over sin, death, and the afterlife; devote your life to science, maths, and philosophy, and you discover unexpected wonders and beauty in the universe well beyond anything any human-made fairytale could ever offer!
(Phew! That was long... and arguably better than my first effort, fortunately! )