[split] a discussion on origins sparked by "The Order of Things"

[Torkelburger]

Newton believing anything doesn’t make it true.
Again, go back to my post and read what I said, which was that the causal relationship you assumed between Newton’s lack of our present day knowledge and his belief in god, was bogus.

It isn’t bogus.  Many people today, many of them scientists, do not have a belief in a god or anything supernatural (and may be described as metaphysical naturalists) specifically because of their acceptance of scientific facts, by their own admission.  Some people do not.  The fact there are religious people today (including scientists) doesn’t matter.  We do not know which camp Newton would belong in would he have lived today.  Whether you agree with people doing that or not is a separate issue.  But many people do that.  We know that people believed in much more superstitious and silly things long ago, many of them unscientific and proven wrong in recent times.  Such as alchemy, and magic/woo-woo stuff such as how-to instructions of “curing” leprosy by incantations and using the blood of birds (as in the Bible), etc., etc.  We also know that a person's environment greatly influences religious belief.

“Evidence”? Any evidence we have for the “Big Bang” theory is incomplete and hugely circumstantial.

There are at least 100 data points to support the Big Bang.  The BBT is the most robust current model supported by the evidence (no scare quotes).  Prior to Hubble, hardly anyone even thought about an expanding universe.  It was expected that the galaxies would be blue-shifted or at least varying colors, but when it was seen they were all red-shifted, the models adjust to where the EVIDENCE leads.  This is the opposite of religion and faith.  In religion, you don’t change any model or belief at all.  In religion, the conclusions are always assumed from the start and are unchangeable.  You assert you know the truth ALREADY.  Faith is when you don’t even ask.  You just assert that you already know the answer without even searching for it.  You are told it by someone or some thing with some supernatural source or feeling, etc.  And the answer is equivalent to magic.

It would be like scientists asserting the Big Bang just out of nowhere without even looking through a spectrometer or telescopes or detecting the cosmic radiation, etc.  You would have just made it up out of thin air.  That would have been faith.  But that’s not what happened at all.  Scientists went with what the evidence showed.

Which is why Narlikar even to this day thinks that the steady state theory has legs. Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose in 1964 “proved” that running the film of time backwards does lead to a singularity, but any number of new observations tomorrow may lead to an adjustment in that conclusion.

Exactly.  Which is what I said in my previous post earlier.  Science is always revealing new things, usually in the direction of becoming more precise.  Again, that’s a huge difference with religion, which assumes the conclusion from the very start.  And religious claims never have any evidence at all.  None.  Zero.  Zilch.  Nothing even to “adjust”.

The presence of a universal background radiation doesn’t necessarily mean that there was a Big Bang. The universe may have been oscillating for all time.

We have to go where the evidence leads.  And if we do not currently know any answers, then we say we do not currently know, not make up answers from anyone’s “faith”.

In the inevitable absence of certainty, most people choose to have a model to explain the world.  Not choosing to have a model is no great act of scientific bravery.

This is hilarious.  You equivocate scientific terminology with a religious worldview/woo-woo as if those things mean the same thing.  Very sneaky of you.
In any case, you’re arguing in favor for the God of the Gaps, aka the Argument from Incredulity.  Mega-logical fallacy.

If anything, it shows the subject to be lacking in creativity.

Give me a break.  I am only concerned with whether or not something is true, not with whether or not something is creative.  Whether or not something is creative has nothing to do with whether or not it is true.

What is the distinction between faith and belief? Faith is the assumption that a belief is true at a given level of evidence (which may vary from 0 to 99.99999%). That’s how I see it.

Wrong.  Faith is believing in something when there is no evidence at all.  None.  Zero.  But yet you still hold a belief despite the lack of evidence.  Further, faith is also used to hold a belief in OPPOSITION to empirical evidence.  Such as chain-smoking Frank Zappa repeatedly denying throughout his life the evidence that supports the fact that regular cigarette smoking has an increased causal risk to cancer (and then died of cancer at 52).

When there is 99% empirical evidence for something, it requires acceptance.  When you have a good reason to accept something, or have evidence for a fact, etc., you GIVE THE REASON.  When you do NOT have a good reason, you assert the “fact” on faith alone and just state that you have faith that it is true.  Because that is ALL you have.

That is the very definition put forth by the bible itself in Hebrews 11:1—"the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”  IOW, just believing in something you hope is true without any empirical evidence that it is.

Just to be clear, if you’re coming after me with some hocus pocus faith in Jesus argument aired on Alabama TV, don’t. I’m not American.

I don't care if you're from Timbuktu.  There is no need to be paranoid.  No one is coming after you.

[CRNDLSM]

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Wrong.  Faith is believing in something when there is no evidence at all.  None.  Zero.  But yet you still hold a belief despite the lack of evidence.  Further, faith is also used to hold a belief in OPPOSITION to empirical evidence.  Such as chain-smoking Frank Zappa repeatedly denying throughout his life the evidence that supports the fact that regular cigarette smoking has an increased causal risk to cancer (and then died of cancer at 52).

When there is 99% empirical evidence for something, it requires acceptance.  When you have a good reason to accept something, or have evidence for a fact, etc., you GIVE THE REASON.  When you do NOT have a good reason, you assert the “fact” on faith alone and just state that you have faith that it is true.  Because that is ALL you have.

That is the very definition put forth by the bible itself in Hebrews 11:1—"the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”  IOW, just believing in something you hope is true without any empirical evidence that it is.

Someone who knows God exists cannot have faith in It?  That doesn't make sense.  Faith can have evidence for sure.

[Mark A Becker]

Hey all-

The link below, from a Pew survey done in 2009, adds some interesting details to the discussion. I'd like to see what an updated survey would reveal. (I think this may be the one you had referenced much earlier, Torkelburger).

Though I always take surveys with a rather large grain of salt, here it is:
https://www.pewforum.org/2009/11/05/scie...nd-belief/

I find it interesting that older scientists express lesser belief in God or a "universal spirit" (bewildering term).  Physicists seem to express the least belief.

Though the non-believers are always reflected as a minority %, I would hazard a guess that the "don't know/refused" group just flat out disregarded the survey, and would probably have increased the "don't believe" %.

I personally know scientists who are strong believers and those who are staunch atheists.  All of them are good people, and that's what matters to me.

[busker]

@Torkelburger - Hubble only found out that the universe was expanding. An expanding universe doesn’t point to a singularity back in time. The Universal Background Radiation is a more convincing argument for a “Big Bang”, but not really. As I mentioned, if Narlikar, who was senior wrangler at Cambridge and is one of the world’s best known astrophysicists, thinks that the steady theory still has legs, there’s something to it.
Newtonian mechanics had 1000’s of points of evidence in its favour until the Michelson Morley experiment and, the strange orbit of Mercury.
It was Einstein’s faith in Galilean relativity, that the laws of nature should hold in all frames of reference, that led to the intellectual leap that was first special, and then general, relativity.
So was Einstein a fool to move away from classical mechanics on a leap of faith?
There were alternative explanations for Michelson Morley
Or take the simpler example of the heliocentric theory.
Why did Copernicus choose it over the geocentric model, “proof” of which was that we couldn’t feel the earth to be moving?
The geocentric theory, with a sufficient number of epicycles, is sufficient to explain retrograde motion.
But Copernicus went for the more elegant solution. The simpler model that explained the movement of the planets. Despite the known “evidence” at the time.

Believing in something with negative evidence is silly
Believing in something with zero evidence is akin to Einstein’s faith in elegance - a most excellent choice
Believing in something with positive evidence is complicated - more than one explanation exists for observed phenomena. Our faith in Occam’s razor tells us what the provisionally “right” model is.

Believing in nothing because there is no evidence either way is being a tax advisor - an utterly boring choice of personality.

[Mark A Becker]

All-

"In a 1930 essay, Einstein expressed this another way: "To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man."
from The Atlantic, 10/7/2012

In that sense, I hold with Einstein.

Where I live, in the United States, whether you're a scientist or first grader, the US Constitution states:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."

Many people incorrectly think that this only means "freedom of religion", when, in fact, it also means "freedom from religion"; it has two parts, two clauses.  Essentially that means that we can believe, or not believe, whatever we want, but cannot require others to believe as we do, or don't.

Even though most Americans (see link below) subscribe to some type of belief in God, the US government may not establish any religion, nor may it prohibit the free excercise.  This has led to numerous court battles over the years. Sometimes the tension between the two clauses is palpable.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/20...ef-in-god/

Of course, in a forum like this, we can argue faith and/or belief all we want, because no one is forcing anybody to believe or not believe anything.

[rowens]

To say there's a difference between supernatural and paranormal, I say paranormal is what's outside of what's considered normal. Anything that happens is natural, whether it be a giraffe or a vampire or a Teddy Ruxpin or whatever God you people keep talking about.
Where does nature begin and end? Human psychology cancels itself out, as human consciousness is an aberrant mental disorder within and without of its own standards.
Most people who point to a God as a centering focus in their experience are pointing to something within reason of their experiential framework. Among the hebrew names for God, at least one of them represents Expansion. As with the Bible being a culturally appropriating satire of surrounding civilizations, it includes the evolution of God and Gods in synch with the expansion of territorial influence and power. God is a changing image and a centering foci. God is as much real as an entity as my personality or yours.
God is a point of energy at/in/from which a system of reasoning and activity is carried out. The Bible is actually a weakness of God, in as much as it limits interpretations to those canonical stories and reckonings, and is a strength in being a point of focus itself for diverse interpretations, heresies and burnings.

If this doesn't fit this discussion, put it somewhere else. I don't mind. I simply wanted to say something about the word supernatural, and, like that Holy Name, began to expand on nature and god and gods.

---

God can't lose within his own reality-framework, and the idea of other and false gods is considered such a threat, for God can and can't be threatened or fail. This is the Mystery of the Circle encompassing this all-encompassing Universe. This all-inclusive Holiness.

[Mark A Becker]

The following article appeared in Psychology Today, July 3, 2021 :
"Is the “God Spot” Rooted Far Below Our Brain’s Thinking Cap? Spirituality and religiosity may be tied to circuits rooted in the brainstem.

Here is the link to the article:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...inking-cap

The lead on this is Dr. Michael Ferguson, PhD, a Harvard and Cornell-trained neuroscientist working on neurospirituality.  Below are his citations:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?use...675&oi=sra

The BIG QUESTION is, how will the findings of Dr. Ferguson's research stand up to peer review. He even teaches a course on neurospirituality at Harvard.  What I find interesting is this kind of research is actually going on.

We may call it legit, or we may call it bogus. Regardless what we call it, it is happening.

[Xlateralus]

Not really. Having an open mind is the key to learning.

Missing the point again.
An open mind is compatible with a default hypothesis.

Not really   

Your insistence that someone must pick a side without complete information has been made throughout mankind’s existence. It rarely works out well.

[rowens]

How do you get from neurolinguistics to spirituality? It was already there, stuck in the concept box before you considered neurolinguistics, and remains stuck. Once you run through all the meanings and connotations of spirit, you look at whether you need a separate distinction. Does neurolinguistics patterning necessitate God? What about a brainstem? There seems to be a consensus that we have brains. Where do we get the idea of what the word consensus means? Where is the split between what the mind perceives and what the mind is perceiving? What is mind?
If I am a part of a pattern-perceiving continuum, human race, and taught to arrange thoughts and objects into word-concepts, then this programming of what I call me has been going on long before what is called birth. And where this idea of before, and where this idea of came from, and this idea of where? This idea of idea?

From that reasoning you fabricate, if fabricate can be used without anything to distinguish otherwise, the notion of a transcendence that transcends rational limitations. Transcendence is a concept within the so-called limitations. Once you've posited a transcendent God, you've set him right here where you are, within your own qualifications.
There is no difference between this God and you. There's no rationale for the necessity for mind. A difference of opinion and hallucination is a mild distinction. 

This is pragmatic. If there's a God that works better for you in a transcendent context, that God has that feature. What is necessary?

Are you making arrangements with your god? Are you using the theories of physics to make a practical invention? Or is it the exercise of thinking and discussing or arguing that furthers your cause? 
 
Maybe gods and physics and practical things work better the less you think about them. Maybe thinking about them is what obscures them.

That's all there is to it.

---

Everything you think about is created and given context as you think. Each time you think something it is created anew and the context may or may not be slightly or/and largely different. Everyone else is doing the same. And the consensus reality consists of thoughts and contexts coming in and out of existence in various largely and slightly modified ways, often simultaneously within one so-called individual mind.

This is why the concept of Understanding is depicted above the Abyss of Knowledge on the Tree of Life. And Wisdom even higher. And Wisdom is very slight in importance at that.

[busker]

The following article appeared in Psychology Today, July 3, 2021 :
"Is the “God Spot” Rooted Far Below Our Brain’s Thinking Cap? Spirituality and religiosity may be tied to circuits rooted in the brainstem.

Here is the link to the article:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...inking-cap

The lead on this is Dr. Michael Ferguson, PhD, a Harvard and Cornell-trained neuroscientist working on neurospirituality.  Below are his citations:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?use...675&oi=sra

The BIG QUESTION is, how will the findings of Dr. Ferguson's research stand up to peer review. He even teaches a course on neurospirituality at Harvard.  What I find interesting is this kind of research is actually going on.

We may call it legit, or we may call it bogus. Regardless what we call it, it is happening.

I bought Francis Collin's book 'The Language of God'. It arrived in the mail today. 
My first thought: it looks slim for a book that cost me ~20 US dollars!!!
Obviously, 

the more the pages, the greater the book.
The longer the poem, the better the look,
the wetter the phloem, the woodier the xylem, 
the woodier the xylem, the fewer to pile 'em,
compile 'em, file 'em...
so Staunton could turn 'em to bishops and rooks

[Tiger the Lion]

My question for everyone is how does all of this relate to poetry? Does a poet's worldview have an impact on the profundity of their writing? Is there such a thing as inspired work? Are all our silly love songs just ridiculous now that we know they're built on nothing more than electricity and pheromones? Why write at all if we are not experiencing something extraordinary? (or paranormal, as Rowens put it.)

[rowens]

Love and poetry are the same drive. So are dreams. The drive or flow is a river, your life conditions are the rocks that carve out the passage-direction of the flow. What you dream, what you write, who you love. The rocks carve the river, the river carves the rocks.

---

Now I have to go watch the rest of this Peacemaker episode.

[Mark A Becker]

Hey Paul- thanks for the questions, to re-center this discussion within a poetry forum.

My question for everyone is how does all of this relate to poetry?
Having written the poem that led to this extensive thread I must say that it led to an interesting dog leg. I did not expect the poem to have that effect, but that's what happens. Had I not added the spoiler, I doubt that the poem would've generated the reaction that it did. Note to self: lay off the spoilers and let the poem speak for itself. So, "all of this" was not really even related to the actual poem. If you knew me in "real life" you would quickly find that I'm easily drawn into protracted discussions. And I definitely got sucked in.

Does a poet's worldview have an impact on the profundity of their writing?
Since my worldview is always a part of my thinking it can't help but influence my writing. I don't strive for profundity, and find that going for a "BIG IDEA" is usually counter-productive. 

Is there such a thing as inspired work?
I definitely sense times when thoughts/observations come to mind, and words begin to form around them.  Many, if not most, times, those words collapse in a heap. The simplest thoughts, the ones based on actual events or observations, seem to hold up the best.  So, yes, inspiration is a very real thing for me. 

Are all our silly love songs just ridiculous now that we know they're built on nothing more than electricity and pheromones?
I never consider the neurolological basis for songs or poems that I write. So, no, "silly" love songs or poems are not ridiculous.  Some are better than others, though.  I can usually tell when I'm on to a good idea.  Many times, the best songs, or poems I write just seem to pop out of nowhere. (See "inspired work").

Why write at all if we are not experiencing something extraordinary? (or paranormal, as Rowens put it.)
Fortunately, I am "lucky" enough to sense the extraordinary in the most ordinary of things. I know many, many people who are also as "lucky".  It is within these ordinary events and observations that we share common ground. That we relate with each other. Or, sometimes, not.

Still, I write poems and songs simply because it feels necessary for me. Sometimes I need it more than other times. I never know when a regular ole ordinary thing will bubble to the surface, but I latch onto it when it does. Most of the time, I may only write down a single thought, a stick picture, a post-it-note.  Sometimes I even call myself a post-it-note poet. Other times I'll spend way too much time to whittle on an entire piece. It's during those times that time itself falls away, and I do find those times to be extraordinary. Even when "nothing" comes of them. Maybe, especially when "nothing" comes of them.

[busker]

@Mark - having flipped through Collins's book, I find a contradiction that I have seen with many Christian apologists. It is all right to talk about a God on the basis of how complex life is, how unlikely the universe is, etc. The deep truth is imageless.
But from there, to make the jump and believe that a Levantine tribe 5,000 years ago was selected by a particular tribal deity as his chosen race, and who were enjoined not to worship that deity's rivals, is a bridge too far. Or the whole drama about Yehoshua being resurrected, not to mention the drama of the Trinity.
It's this moving from the plausible and intelligent questions about the nature of existence, to the superstitions of a particular group of people to the exclusion of the superstitions of other groups of people, is what I don't understand.
This is the weakness even with Islam, unless you allow for a radical re-interpretation of its doctrines such as the infallibility of the Quran. But in comparison, Islam is a less theologically conflicted faith amongst the Abrahamic religions.

---

I am only concerned with whether or not something is true, not with whether or not something is creative.  Whether or not something is creative has nothing to do with whether or not it is true.

What is truth?

[Mark A Becker]

The rocks carve the river, the river carves the rocks.

A simple, elegant, and accurate one line poem. 

I borrowed the idea and made it a 4 line poem.  In other words, I stole your poem.  Your version looks more like the river, mine looks more like the rocks.  Hmmm... I like yours better, but it was a fun experiment.  Thanks, rowens

The rocks carve
the river,
           
          the river
carves the rocks.

---

Hey busker-

I’m not gonna read Collins’ book for some of the reasons you point out, though I purposely expose myself to ideas I don’t agree with, because I’m curious.

I would be very interested in your answer(s) to the questions posed by Paul aka Tiger. How ‘bout it?

[busker]

Hey busker-

I’m not gonna read Collins’ book for some of the reasons you point out, though I purposely expose myself to ideas I don’t agree with, because I’m curious.

I would be very interested in your answer(s) to the questions posed by Paul aka Tiger. How ‘bout it?

Oh, he's not that bad, not a William Jennings Bryant or that Craig Lane chap. He's open to the possibility of different people taking different approaches. I was more disappointed in the light coverage of molecular biology - I was hoping for deeper meditations, having some familiarity with the technical side of things myself.
But most of all, 20 USD is wayyyyyy too much for that book!!!

will get back to Tiger's point shortly