That's one enormous conceptual space you are asking "faith" to cover, Heteromeles. It seems to me if we follow your definition, then every human endeavour s based on "faith". Including love, throwing yourself onto a grenade, planning genocide and going to the toilet.
In which case you are certainly right that under your definition science and religion are both based on "faith". But since so is everything else, the statement has become so wide as to lose all meaning.
]]>I don't know what you mean by faith here. Note also that the faith that there's an invisible sky father is just a leetle different from 'faith' in QM or GR, since those models actually make testable (and accurate) predictions.
Finally - and this isn't really germane to the central point - but those statements about current theory aren't really accurate. String theory is untestable, yes . . . which is why most people don't think of it as a scientific theory and have moved on to something else. In fact, most departments won't even consider a string theorist as a possible hire. Contrast this with ten or twenty years ago when they were the bright young men of their day.
Moving on, dark matter (I think that's what your talking about here) is to the first approximation just a straightforward observation - we detect this stuff's gravitational effect, but we don't see it interacting with anything. Well there's also all those MOND theories - Relativity is Wrong, doncha know ;-) Ummm . . . here's a nice little (non-mathematical) post about MOND vs dark matter. Again, the main takeaway here is that hinky the gravitational effects are observations that look as if there's an extra something that obey the usual laws of gravity but is otherwise undetectable. More on that in a bit.
Finally, GR and QM don't conflict. That tired old canard may have powered a lot of Analog stories back in the day, but it really is well past it's sell-by date. Because what they really are is incomplete. And there's nothing wrong with that, contrary to popular folklore; we don't demand that the theory of evolution explain stellar formation after all. So it is with these two heavyweights - both work well in their own domains and they most definitely do not 'conflict'. What's really going on is that both theories are models. Gravity behaves as if it were the effect of curved space-time, but there's no compelling reason (other than perhaps aesthetics) to say that's what gravity 'really' is. As one guy said:
Why are we forced to take the drastic step of making spacetime itself into a pseudo-Riemannian manifold?
The answer seems to be that we’re not! It’s possible to treat general relativity as just a complicated field theory on flat spacetime, involving a tensor at every point — and indeed, this is a perspective that both Feynman and Weinberg famously adopted at various times. It’s just that most people see it as simpler, more parsimonious, to interpret the tensors geometrically.
So both GM and QR can be regarded as field theories, with the same mathematical machinery underneath and operating more or less in the same background. That's the first part. The second part is that there is a 'natural' way to extend both theories (think of the reals as being the 'natural' way to extend the rationals), but a) making predictions based on those extensions is computationally very, very hard, and b) the usual fudges for cutting off those computations past a certain point while still getting a reasonable answer (stuff like 'renormalization') just don't work. To say that QM and GR are in conflict because they get different answers is just a bit misleading when in fact both answers are wrong!
Now, some people have thought it would be very, very nice to unify them in some sort of super-theory, but in fact, it could just be that some answers are very hard to calculate. That may be unsatisfying and messy, but hey, protein-folding calculations are notoriously difficult, and you don't hear about anyone in the bio-sciences complaining about that, do you, or suggesting that there must be a 'better' theory where the computations become mysteriously easier ;-)
Anyway, my point is that 'faith' with regards to observations and models that are explicitly known from the get-go to be incomplete is just a little bit different than 'faith' in something that can't be shown to exist, let alone observed.
]]>I’m surprised that nobody has mentioned it yet, but have you taken a look at Kaluza-Klein theory?
Right. If you take the Cartesian product of 4-dimensional spacetime with a small circle to get a 5-dimensional spacetime, then there is an extra gravitational force between two particles that have velocity in the circle direction. The behavior of this new gravitational effect is equivalent to electromagnetism; the velocity of a particle in the circle direction manifests itself as electric charge. Moreover, if the particles are quantum mechanical, then this manifested charge is quantized, because the velocity in the circle direction is an integer. You might think that the resulting force is weak at the usual experimental scales, as gravity is; however, by making the circle small, you can make the unit of charge as large as you like.
This beautiful geometric idea works so well that you might suppose that it has the ring of truth. It is not a complete idea of course, because it supposes without explanation the stability of the small circle direction. Even so, it is the best idea that people have for making short-range forces a manifestation of gravity. (Maybe even the only viable idea at present; I’m not sure.)
But, be warned: The Kaluza-Klein construction doesn’t yet predict anything new; it only at best explains things that we can already see. It is therefore the stifling dogma of the oppressor class of high-energy theory.
See, that's what the modern conception of what theories are all about: building models. It's all well and good for a model to be 'elegant'. But if it doesn't actually help any, doesn't really do anything new for you, why keep it? Iow, we care a lot less about the nature of 'ultimate reality' (whatever that is) or what something 'really' is than we do in making predictions. The former concern is what explanations incorporating the Great Sky Father are all about. The latter is really the kickoff of modern science.[1] I think this bit is what really confuses people and what gets them all tangled up in that faith thing. Models are really just tightly compressed descriptions of behaviour. They don't (or at any rate, shouldn't) make any pretensions about what's behind that behaviour. You want that sort of thing, you're really talking about metaphysics. Philosophy, not science.
I suspect as well that this sort of operationalism is distasteful to a lot of folks: They are emotionally unsatisfied, for example, with any explanation of how people behave if it doesn't reference the little guy inside. What they really want instead (and often don't realize that's what they want) is an explanation of how people 'really' think. That's why the Freud stuff remained popular for so long (imho), despite it being demonstrably wrong. How satisfying it is to know that people act the way they do because of Mommy issues, or Daddy issues, or sibling rivalry or somesuch!
Oops. Another overly long post. I'll stop now :-)
[1]Some give Newton credit for this one; no, Newton did not come up with a theory of gravity in the sense of what gravity 'really' was. Instead, he came up with a model, the inverse square law thing, that made testable and useful predictions. Iow, he didn't say what gravity 'really' was, he explained how gravity behaved. That may seem like an unnecessary bit of hair-splitting, but it makes all the difference in the world.
]]>As for QM and GR not conflicting, I'm still confused about whether you can describe the curvature of space-time through QM, or the collapse of a wave function through GR. I'm saying that the statement of faith here is that it's possible to come up with a single model that describes both sets of phenomena in a predictive way, which I understand to be the Theory of Everything.
]]>That's like asking whether you can make chocolate brownies from bacon. It may, in fact, be possible to do so with sufficiently advanced tools, but you're better off starting out with the tools that were designed for the job. QM and GR don't "conflict" any more than bacon and chocolate "conflict"; they're two different things that serve different purposes. They may well be subsets of a larger category ("Theory of Everything" and "Nommables", respectively), but that's an entirely separate question.
]]>heteromeles @ 105 No You've fallen for the bait-&-switch bullshit the religious put up. And I think you are (very mildly) trolling .... Except that my proposition: "No god is detectable" can be tested, can't it? Oops. As for a "ToE" well, it is an ongoing project, & has been since "The New Atlantis" was published.
We (The Merchants of Light) make up the noblest foundation that ever was upon the Earth. For the end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes and the secret nature of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.
SoV @ 107 Well there is "something" out there causing gravitational effects. The current label for "it" ( &, of course, there may be more than one "it" causing the observed effects ) is Dark Matter. Work is proceeding on finding greater details. The exact opposite of religius mysticism, in fact.
Oh, & thanks for the "Dark Matter" link - most informative.
]]>Anyway, totally different subject. Since there's not a crib sheet for Charlie's A Colder War (sorry, I don't know if the online copies are pirated or approved, so no link here), I thought it worth posting here.
Anyway, great news: There's lots of life in Lake Vostok. For those who don't know, that's the frozen lake under a glacier in Antarctica. They claim over 3,000 separate taxa, including multicellular life and fungi. The bad news is, it's all Terran life, at least the ones they've talking about so far.
]]>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_of_humanity
For me, it's more of a working hypothesis.
As for TOE, I guess "Nova Atlantis" is not the best book to argue there that TOE has no religious roots; BTW, I always like it when "progressive" thinkers have their reactionary moments, or reactionaries, in their quest for ancient privileges, inadvertantly defend human freedom...
The Tirsan cometh forth with all his generation or linage, the males before him, and the females following him; and if there be a mother from whose body the whole linage is descended, there is a traverse placed in a loft above on the right hand of the chair, with a privy door, and a carved window of glass, leaded with gold and blue; where she sitteth, but is not seen.]]>
"belief in appliciability of the scientific method doesn't have to mean it's appliciable to everything in this universe"
"As for calling the belief in the appliciability of the scientific method "faith", I guess it depends somewhat on the practitioner, it might be in some people, and there are quite some secular religions that depend on "science" explaining everything, with debatable justification, DIAMAT is one example, but it seems Comte was subject to the braineater, too:"
]]>There; fixed that for you! ;-) Seriously, the only times I care about anyone else's views on the existence or otherwise of their imaginary friend, and the forms of "worship" of same is when they try and force their view down my throat.
]]>The central paradox I like tackling is whether one believes what's in a book, or whether one believes the evidence of one's own senses, trained or not. This leads to some tricky issues.
For instance, an atheist would say that someone who believes in the literal truth of the Bible is deluded, because they're believing a falsehood they've read.
But what do atheists do about the people who claim to have seen God? Worse, what do they do when those people teach others to use their methods, and the students also have mystical experiences? That's the essence of repeatability. In his latest book (Hallucinations) Oliver Sacks reports on precisely this kind of study, undertaken by an anthropologist who studied with a group of fundamentalist Christians in the best tradition of experiential anthropology, and who had some of their mystical experiences
This is where it gets tricky. Do you trust your experience, or do you trust a book that tells you such experiences are false? If you trust the book over your own experience, aren't you as doctrinaire as those you think are deluded for believing different books? What happens if you have no experience, but you choose to believe a book over what other people say they are experiencing?
Personally, I believe in the subjective existence of God. That seems strongly supportable by a mass of evidence, and it seems to be trainable and at least partially repeatable. To my knowledge, no one has produced objective, repeatable evidence for the existence of God, and there's no obvious place (other than in the dark matter) for such a being or beings to exist. This is for the great sky fairy version of God, and ignores those who believe that the biosphere or the sun qualify as life-giving, superhuman deities in a very concrete sense. Worshipping anything physical is, of course, not religion, just pagan nonsense.
]]>I really don't care what anyone's views are, as long as they lead by "being nice to other people because they can be", and if they "go to service" it's because they actually want to do so rather than because they "want to be seen to do so" if you see the distinction?
It was put that way because I find "evangelical atheism" every bit as annoying as "evangelical $religion". If you think your belief system is so great then show me by living it rather than by talking it at me!
]]>And I believe in the existence of hallucinations brought on by recreational drugs. To go from the existence of the hallucinations to the existence of the stuff the hallucinations are about isn't performing a repeatable experiment. It is misunderstanding the nature of reality and our interactions with same. Sorry, but I am starting to see why you think science and religion are both based on faith. And "not having a clue about science" is a big part of it.
"Worshipping anything physical is, of course, not religion, just pagan nonsense."
Aaaand we're done.
]]>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bond_(ornithologist)
Come to think about it, names of famous ornithologists might be good as aliases for RPGs and like. Though you easily get into, err, strange territory, as with this German guy, author of the standard guide around WW2:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Günther_Niethammer
For those not fluent in German, Niethammer joined the NSDAP and the SS in 1937, which might indicate he was more into it for the connections and not for the ideology. In 1940, he joined the Waffen-SS which used him for guard duty. In one place called Auschwitz, 1940.
Now the extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau only opened in 1941, so it seems likely this was Auschwitz I, which was not so much about gassing Jews, but about starving Poles and Russians, still, err, not a nice thing to have in your CV...
Actually, he didn't like it there, either, so he got the special job of looking after the birds in the neighbourhood. And a paper called "Observations on the birds of Auschwitz"...
http://www.landesmuseum.at/pdf_frei_remote/ANNA_52_0164-0199.pdf
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