May 21, 2011. The date of the Rapture.

A little clarification here. "Thought experiments" as performed by Einstein and countered by Bohr were of concepts, not outcomes. There is a very famous "Clock Timer" thought experiment conceived by Einstein that "disproved" QM. Bohr could not find the fault with Einstein's thought for quite some time, until he realized that the overlooked logic was Einstein had left out the relativity effects in his thought experiment!!!

He found the bug.

 

Well there you go... QM can not be used to explain everything just like the video explained. Therefore QM can not definitively explain away God.

 

Rational people are occasionally irrational.

Irrational people are occasionally rational.

I like pie.

 

There's no need to 'explain away' any gods, because they've never been 'explained' in the first place. The burden of proof is on those making the claims.

"What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof."
Christopher Hitchens

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
Marcello Truzzi (popularised by Carl Sagan)

 

Sounds to me like you're discribing evolution. After all, it's a much newer "theory" than creation from God. But then perhaps you have some proof of the big bang. I know I'm not old enough to give an eye witness account of either.

As for Daniels statement "There is no evidence for god or the Bible", it is indeed a free country to believe or disbelieve what you want. So there was no biblical Abraham? Tell that to the Arabs/Muslims or the Jews. Both can trace their lineage to him, and with a name like Daniel, perhaps you could to...

 

Religion is not based on the scientific method, and therefore does not have to be proven in that manner.

I assert that God wouldn't be God if His existence could be proven. So, the inability to prove His existence proves the existence of God.

 

The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with the nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen it 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 therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."

"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly 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 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 making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best-selling book Well That About Wraps It Up For God.

Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

 

I've more or less given up on theological debates, but I know what I believe.

 

First off all, the fact that QM shows that thought experiments have no real results, does not mean it "cannnot explain everything." And second QM does not need to "explain away god." But what QM does do is provide am understanding of the world which leaves no need to invoke the idea of a god. The CONCEPT of god is unnecessary. This does not "prove" that there is no god. But it does render all arguments for the existence of god invalid.

Take a basic cosmology course. The evidence for the big bang is overwhelming. There is no "proof" that we are not living in some Matrix-style virtual world created by a janitor working at Cray Research. And god-believers can certainly claim that a god set off the big bang. But nobody who has actually studied the matter denies that the big bang happened.

The Bible is a work of fiction that includes some historical personages as well as some fictional characters, some historical place names, and some historical events as well as some fictional events. It also has a lot of poetry, some jokes (which fundamentalists usually refuse to see), some pornography, and some life advice, some of it quite insightful.

I will clarify my earlier statement: There is no evidence that the Bible is the revealed or dictated work of a creator/god.

More properly, religion is not falsifiable, and therefore cannot be proven or disproven. But when you consider that it comes to us from cave men who probably thought that stars were holes poked into the blanket of the night sky, it has very little credibility.

Of course you are making a silly joke. But you've come awfully close to a line of thought popular in some circles of the Catholic Church, which says that faith would be meaningless if there were any evidence for it. Some other lines often associated with that one say "Thank god for original sin, for otherwise there'd have been no savior." (But of course there'd have been no need for one!) And a third is the notion that Judas Iscariot did us all a big favor, because without him there'd have been no crucifixion and we'd all still be damned to hell.

However, the basic argument that "the lack of evidence proves the existence of god" is flawed. In fact, the lack of evidence suggests that most probably there is not a god. As I said earlier, believing in a god is no different than believing that there are kamikaze stealth Edsels on the planet Uranus.

 

Shh! They are on an important mission flying around Uranus knocking off Klingons.

 

Since you addressed this to me, I'll offer you a challenge. I'll spend 90 minutes of my valuable time studying basic cosmology with the lecture of your choice if you'll spend 90 minutes of your valuable time watching a video lecture from a multiple Ph D'ed scientist, university professor and lecturer on just this subject.
Come on, you're the one that claimed they don't exist. I dare you to click and just peek at the possibility that there is another side to the story.
Just click here. You might even find it interesting, even if you disagree with it.
Be sure to give me a link to my 90 minutes of basic cosmology.

On another note, I'm happy to see that there is at least one thing we can agree on in this thread.

 

What? ALL religion is not only falsifiable, but none of them would be here if it wasn't for various falsifications.

 

Just like the QM video, he won't do that. He might fall under some mind control thingy...

 

Back a long time ago, Quantum Mechanics was based entirely on mathematics. It was pretty straightforward conceptually. Wave equations were needed to explain particle propagation. Particle equations were needed to explain particle interactions. The real fun enigma was nature's sudden shift from one math to the other. This of course caused lots of interesting (and still continuing) discussions among physicists.

Since then, the math has been abandoned, and the QM mystery of this wave/particle duality has become a new age explanation for many things. These new explanations invoking QM have nothing to do with particle propagation or interaction. Love, caring, and spiritual aspects of life have lots of mysteries concerning the source of such things. A mystery not solved by QM matrix calculations.

 

Hmmm, we haven't heard from Daniel since early this morning in this thread. I can only surmise he is engrossed in that video I challenged him to watch. Now I'm really wondering which video/lecture he's going to have me study. Post you're link for me, a deal is a deal.

 

I have some thoughts on Harold Camping, but as the thread has moved on to other matters I'll spare you.

Meanwhile the Pope has something to say about physics. Astrophysics anyway:

NewsDaily: God was behind Big Bang, universe no accident: Pope

The news piece also indicates that the Catholic Church has updated its position on biological evolution. I did not know that - perhaps others here did?

 

Maybe he read Richard Dawkins' new book "The Greatest Show on Earth". I rather enjoyed it.

 

Sorry. QM is still mathematics. In fact, it is not possible for existing natural human languages to express some of the stuff that goes on at the quantum level, and ONLY math can do so.

And nature never shifted from one math to another. We used to use simpler math, which was a very good approximation. "Good enough for government work" as they say. We then discovered newer math which gets closer to the truth. And we're not done. Pretty much everyone in physics believes there are some equations waiting to be discovered which will unite the four fundamental forces of nature into one.

Love, caring, and spirituality are not addressed by QM. They are addressed by biology and psychology. And even physiology: It turns out that "visions" and "spiritual experiences arise from real brain wave activity. It's not yet clear how that activity originates but it's an active field of study, and some folks feel that once we solve that question, religion's last hand-hold will be broken and we can finally toss it into the trash heap of history where it belongs.

The Catholic Church has accepted evolution for a long time. Like many other mainstream churches (i.e. churches that do not insist on a literal reading of the Bible -- and most Christian churches do not take the Bible literally) the Catholic Church has long taken the position that evolution happens, but that god is behind it, directing it, and they accept scientific estimates of the age of the Earth.

Oh, and I don't care to watch a long video in which someone tells lies about science and then assert that there is validity to religion, based on those lies. And I don't think that 90 minutes is enough for an introductory course on cosmology. If anyone is interested, I recommend The Teaching Company (teach12.com on the web) for a wide variety of academic courses. But those are not free. (All their courses go on sale at least once a year, so you have to wait until the ones you are interested are, or else pay exorbitant prices.) And I am not interested in "deals" where I watch bogus science in order to get someone else to watch real science. Learning is fun. Listening to preachers is not, with very rare exceptions. I can remember two preachers whose sermons I enjoyed. One was a UU minister whose sermons were more like lectures, and the other was a Congregational United Church of Christ minister whose sermon was a strong exhortations to respect human rights. I'm not counting a lay preacher I encountered, whose "sermons" were really essays on topics not directly connected to religion.