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Author Topic:   Faith Science - Logically Indefensible
Percy
Member
Posts: 22393
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 151 of 166 (362352)
11-07-2006 6:20 AM
Reply to: Message 131 by foxjoe
11-06-2006 9:15 PM


Re: "Person of faith"
foxjoe writes:
subbie said:
Most scientists are in fact people of faith.
Please name 2?
It's often hard to know the religious beliefs of scientists because faith and religion is not a frequent topic in scientific circles, but here's a couple well known scientists who are "people of faith":
  • Ken Miller
  • Gerald Schroeder
But answering your question proves nothing. When someone states that most scientists believe in God they are usually referring to formal surveys that have been taken. I can't recall any precise figures, so I don't recall whether the figure for the number who believed in God was greater than 50%, but it was a hefty percentage.
People aren't drawn to science because they're atheistic religion haters. They're drawn to science because they love science, and they're people of all types, from the deeply religious to the deeply atheistic and everything in between.
Let me name a few that aren't of faith:
Einstein, Hawking, Dawkins, Gould,
Darwin, Huxley, Eldredge, Mayr, Simpson, Johanson, Leakey, Sagan, and Asimov
The survey I mentioned also revealed that the likelihood of belief in God decreases with increasing scientific accomplishment, and this list is consistent with that result since these are all very prominent scientists. But I'm not sure it could be accurately said that none of them are people of faith. For example, while Einstein could not be said to believe in God, and certainly not the Jewish God, he was an extremely spiritual person and a man of deep faith.
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
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Replies to this message:
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anglagard
Member (Idle past 837 days)
Posts: 2339
From: Socorro, New Mexico USA
Joined: 03-18-2006


Message 152 of 166 (362376)
11-07-2006 7:51 AM
Reply to: Message 151 by Percy
11-07-2006 6:20 AM


Re: "Person of faith"
Percy states:
For example, while Einstein could not be said to believe in God, and certainly not the Jewish God, he was an extremely spiritual person and a man of deep faith.
Einstein was a Spinoza Panthiest, which to some who can't tell the difference, is wrongly considered the same as athiest. Please allow someone else to elaborate:
quote:
Early in his life Einstein came to refer to God as "cosmic intelligence" which he did not think of in a personal but in a "super-personal" way, for, as he learned from Spinoza, the term "personal" when applied to human beings cannot as such be applied to God. 12 Nevertheless he resorted to the Jewish-Christian way of speaking of God who reveals himself in an ineffable way as truth which is its own certainty. Spinoza held that "truth is its own standard". "Truth is the criterion of itself and of the false, as light reveals itself and darkness," so that "he who has a true idea, simultaneously knows that he has a true idea, and cannot doubt concerning the truth of the thing perceived." 13 Hence once a thing is understood it goes on manifesting itself in the power of its own truth without having to provide for further proof. 14 Thus when God reveals himself to our minds, our understanding of him is carried forward by the intrinsic force of his truth as it continually impinges on our minds and presses for fuller realization within them.
In this way Einstein thought of God as revealing himself in the wonderful harmony and rational beauty of the universe, which calls for a mode of non-conceptual intuitive response in humility, wonder and awe which he associated with science and art. It was particularly in relation to science itself, however, that Einstein felt and cultivated that sense of wonder and awe. Once when Ernest Gordon, Dean of Princeton University Chapel, was asked by a fellow Scot, the photographer Alan Richards, how he could explain Einstein's combination of great intellect with apparent simplicity, he said, "I think it was his sense of reverence." 15 That was very true: Einstein's religious and scientific instinct were one and the same, for behind both it was his reverent intuition for God, his unabated awe at the thoughts of "the Old One", that was predominent.
Although Einstein was not himself a committed Jewish believer he would certainly have agreed with the call of Rabbi Shmuel Boteach today to restore God himself, rather than halacha, as the epicentre of Judaism. 16
Science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. 17
That statement comes from his 1939 address to Princeton Theological Seminary, but far from being unique, it is reflected in statement after statement he made about science, religion, and God.
Count Kessler once said to him, "Professor! I hear that you are deeply religious." Calmly and with great dignity, Einstein replied, "Yes, you can call it that. Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious." 18
Einstein was certainly no positivist. Here are some other statements Einstein made about this.
By way of the understanding he [the scientist] achieves a far-reaching emancipation from the shackles of personal hopes and desires, and thereby attains that humble attitude of mind towards the grandeur of reason incarnate in existence, and which, in its profoundest depths, is inaccessible to man. This attitude, however, appears to me to be religious, in the highest sense of the word. And so it seems to me that science not only purifies the religious impulse of the dross of its anthropomorphism but also contributes to a religious spiritualization of our understanding of life.19
My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior Spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. The deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning Power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God. 20
Yet again:
You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without a peculiar religious feeling of his own . . . .His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. 21
Still again, in another version of this statement, Einstein said:
Certain it is that a conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality and intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a higher order. The firm belief, which is bound up with deep feeling, in a superior mind revealing himself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God, which may, therefore be described in common parlance as `pantheistic' (Spinoza). 22
What did Einstein mean, then, when he referred to God as "cosmic intelligence", "the grandeur of reason incarnate in existence", to which he not infrequently referred in a Talmudic expression as "the Old One"? He was not always consistent so that it is not easy to grasp precisely what he meant. But it seems clear that he conceived of God as the ultimate spiritual ground of all rational order which transcends what the scientist works with as natural laws-a point to which we shall return later-but unlike the Jewish-Christian religion he did not think of that in what he called a "personal" or "anthropomorphic" way, that is, as a God conceived in man's image, but in a "superpersonal" (ausserpersnlichen) way freed from the fetters of the "only personal" (Nur-Persnlichen), or people's selfish desires.
What is important is the force of this superpersonal content and depth of the conviction concerning its overpowering meaningfulness, regardless of whether an attempt is made to unite this content with the divine Being for otherwise it would not be possible to count Buddha and Spinoza as religious personalities. Accordingly, a religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt of the significance and loftiness of these superpersonal objects and goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation. 23
Einstein was often asked, "Do you believe in God?", to which he sometimes replied "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all being". 24 "By God", Spinoza wrote at the very beginning of his Ethica, "I mean a being absolutely infinite-that is, a substance consisting in infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality". Proposition XV of the Ethica stated: "Whatever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived." 25
Einstein certainly held, as his constant appeal to God showed, that without God nothing can be known, but what did he really mean by his appeal to Spinoza? Once in answer to the question "Do you believe in the God of Spinoza?" Einstein replied as follows:
I can't answer with a simple yes or no. I'm not an atheist and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvellously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza's pantheism, but admire even more his contributions to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and the body as one, not two separate things. 26
In a letter to Henry Oldenburg, the secretary of the Royal Society, Spinoza declared, "I do not think it necessary for salvation to know Christ according to the flesh: but with the Eternal Son of God, that is the Eternal Wisdom of God, which had manifested itself in all things, and especially in the human mind, and above all in Christ Jesus, the case is far otherwise." 27 He himself, he claimed, "paid homage to the Books of the Bible, rather than to the Word of God." 28 Spinoza read the New Testament Scriptures as well as the Old Testament Scriptures, e.g. St John's Gospel and the Epistle to the Hebrews, in a Hebraic way. He complained to Henry Oldenburg: "You think that the texts in John's Gospel and in Hebrews are inconsistent with what I advance, because you measure oriental phrases by the standards of European speech; though John wrote his Gospel in Greek, he wrote it as a Hebrew." 29 That is what John Reuchlin used to call veritas Hebraica. 30 When another Jew, Martin Buber, whom Einstein had known for forty years, one day in Princeton pressed him hard to reveal his religious belief, Einstein said, "What we [physicists] strive for . . . is just to draw his lines after him." The deeper one penetrates into nature's secrets, he declared, the greater becomes one's respect for God.
Einstein held that the main source of the present-day conflicts between the spheres of religion and of science lay in "the concept of a personal God" for that was to think of God in an anthropomorphic way, and to project into him figurative images and human psychological notions of personality, which give rise, he held, to religious practices of worship and notions of providence shaped in accordance with human selfish desires. That did not mean that Einstein thought of God merely in some impersonal way, for, as we have noted, he thought of relation to God in a sublime superpersonal way which he confessed he was unable to grasp or express and before which he stood in unbounded awe and wonder. Hence he felt it deeply when Cardinal O'Connell of Boston charged him with being an atheist. 31 When a newspaperman once accosted him in California with the question, "Doctor is there a God?", Einstein turned away with tears in his eyes. 32
What, then, did Einstein mean by claiming to believe in Spinoza's Amor Dei Intellectualis, the intellectual love of God, the highest happiness that man can know? He was approving of Spinoza's idea that to be rational is to love God and to love God is to be rational, so that for one to engage in science is to think the thoughts of God after him. With Spinoza, however, that involved the outright identification of God with nature, a causally concatenated whole, whereas, as we have seen, with Einstein the Verstndlichkeit of God was so exalted that it could not be reduced to the logico-causal intelligibilities of nature. A transcendent relation had to be taken into account.
As a Jew himself Einstein naturally resonated with Spinoza, the greatest of all modern Jewish philosophers, for they shared in the traditional unitary concept of man as body of his soul and soul of his body. Although there was much in Spinoza's philosophy which Einstein could not accept, what did appeal to him was Spinoza's rejection of Cartesian and other forms of dualism, and his unitary conception of the universe with its inherent rational harmony. That was both a help and a problem for Einstein. It fuelled his great drive toward unified field-theory, and his rejection of a dualism between time and space, wave and particle, relativity theory and quantum theory, but Spinoza's logico-mathematical and hard causalist uniformity gave rise to an absolute rigid determinism which conflicted with Einstein's realist and dynamic understanding of the openness of the universe, in his rejection of the closed Euclidean system of the world.
Here let me refer to a very interesting letter, recorded by Helen Dukas, which Einstein wrote to a child who asked him whether scientists prayed.
I have tried to respond to your question as simply as I could. Here is my answer. Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the actions of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by prayer, i.e. by a wish addressed to a supernatural Being. However, it must be admitted that our actual knowledge of these laws is only imperfect and fragmentary, so that, actually the belief in the existence of basic all-embracing laws in nature also rests on a sort of faith. All the same this faith has been largely justified so far by the success of scientific research. But, on the other hand, everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe-a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive. 33
From: http://www.ctinquiry.org/...eflections_volume_1/torrance.htm
Sorry for the large cut n' paste but if it came from just me don't believe anyone would believe it was true.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 151 by Percy, posted 11-07-2006 6:20 AM Percy has not replied

Replies to this message:
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foxjoe 
Inactive Member


Message 153 of 166 (362484)
11-07-2006 6:09 PM
Reply to: Message 152 by anglagard
11-07-2006 7:51 AM


Re: "Person of faith"
That's nice. And this was found in a letter that Einstein wrote:
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it." - Albert Einstein in Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas (Einstein's secretary) and Banesh Hoffman, and published by Princeton University Press.

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foxjoe 
Inactive Member


Message 154 of 166 (362485)
11-07-2006 6:11 PM
Reply to: Message 151 by Percy
11-07-2006 6:20 AM


Re: "Person of faith"
And how do you know these two fellows weren't paid by the Templeton Foudation?
Ken Miller
Gerald Schroeder

This message is a reply to:
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Replies to this message:
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 Message 160 by Admin, posted 11-07-2006 9:01 PM foxjoe has not replied

  
Wounded King
Member
Posts: 4149
From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Joined: 04-09-2003


Message 155 of 166 (362494)
11-07-2006 7:03 PM
Reply to: Message 154 by foxjoe
11-07-2006 6:11 PM


Re: "Person of faith"
What about Francis Collins who headed the Human Genome Project?
I think you will find it hard to maintain the position that any scientist who professes to religious faith is in the pay of an organisation such as the Templeton Foundation.
How do you know that the entire discovery institute isn't a cunning ruse funded by George Soros to make the religious look like incompetent mendacious eejits?
TTFN,
WK
Edited by Wounded King, : No reason given.

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foxjoe 
Inactive Member


Message 156 of 166 (362497)
11-07-2006 7:31 PM
Reply to: Message 155 by Wounded King
11-07-2006 7:03 PM


Re: "Person of faith"
Templeton foundation recipient.

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foxjoe 
Inactive Member


Message 157 of 166 (362498)
11-07-2006 7:34 PM
Reply to: Message 156 by foxjoe
11-07-2006 7:31 PM


Re: "Person of faith"
I never said that religion makes you incompetent.
Scientists that work their whole life and still go to church, aren't necessarily religious. And even if they are, I said it was for personal entertainment. And for that use, it is a great thing.

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ringo
Member (Idle past 412 days)
Posts: 20940
From: frozen wasteland
Joined: 03-23-2005


Message 158 of 166 (362504)
11-07-2006 7:58 PM
Reply to: Message 157 by foxjoe
11-07-2006 7:34 PM


Re: "Person of faith"
foxjoe writes:
Scientists that work their whole life and still go to church, aren't necessarily religious.
That's starting to sound pretty silly: A scientist who goes to church is "no true Christian".
Maybe Answers In Genesis is paying you to come here and make evos look bad.

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC

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Percy
Member
Posts: 22393
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 159 of 166 (362509)
11-07-2006 8:57 PM
Reply to: Message 153 by foxjoe
11-07-2006 6:09 PM


Re: "Person of faith"
You appear to have found a letter which pretty much backs up exactly what Anglagard's excerpt said. Did you read Anglagard's message, the one you replied to? It doesn't appear so, because the tone of your reply indicates that you think you found a contradiction.
--Percy

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Admin
Director
Posts: 12998
From: EvC Forum
Joined: 06-14-2002
Member Rating: 2.3


Message 160 of 166 (362510)
11-07-2006 9:01 PM
Reply to: Message 154 by foxjoe
11-07-2006 6:11 PM


Re: "Person of faith"
Hi Foxjoe,
EvC Forum is a serious debate site, and serious debate doesn't seem to be your interest, so I'm permanently suspending you.

--Percy
EvC Forum Director

This message is a reply to:
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PaulK
Member
Posts: 17822
Joined: 01-10-2003
Member Rating: 2.2


Message 161 of 166 (362549)
11-08-2006 3:30 AM
Reply to: Message 151 by Percy
11-07-2006 6:20 AM


Re: "Person of faith"
Maybe Schroeder has done some good science in the past but I have seen some very serious criticisms of the "science" in his apologetic works. So maybe he isn't a good example to use. I'd rather use even Kurt Wise - but Francis Collins, Simon Conway-Morris or Howard Van Till might be better choices.

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Archer Opteryx
Member (Idle past 3598 days)
Posts: 1811
From: East Asia
Joined: 08-16-2006


Message 162 of 166 (362801)
11-09-2006 6:37 AM
Reply to: Message 149 by ReverendDG
11-07-2006 12:23 AM


off-topic: diagnostic term for psychological disorder
Pardon the digression, folks. I have no idea why this subject came up, but as long as it has and we have a lull...
RevDG:
by the way they call it MID, multiple identity disorder, rather than multiple personality disorder
I'd like to know your source for this, DG, so I'm up to date. The last time I saw an APA definition (DSM-IV) it was called Dissociative Personality Disorder. This would have been six or seven years ago.
That was a new designation with the fourth edition. The APA wanted to discourage the popular misconception that the disorder represents multiple personalities in a single body. It's a single personality, of course, that has fragmented itself into compartmentalized personas. None of the personas comes close to acting as a complete personality.
_____
Edited by Archer Opterix, : Detail.

Archer
All species are transitional.

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ramoss
Member (Idle past 612 days)
Posts: 3228
Joined: 08-11-2004


Message 163 of 166 (362963)
11-09-2006 7:44 PM
Reply to: Message 162 by Archer Opteryx
11-09-2006 6:37 AM


Re: off-topic: diagnostic term for psychological disorder
It is 'Dissociative Identity Disorder' , and was called that since 1994.
Some people think it is therapist induced.
Others disagree. I do know one person who suffers from it. I don't know if it is 'therapist induced' or not. I know that the symptoms are real to the person who is suffering through it.

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foxjoe 
Inactive Member


Message 164 of 166 (362972)
11-09-2006 8:42 PM
Reply to: Message 163 by ramoss
11-09-2006 7:44 PM


Re: off-topic: diagnostic term for psychological disorder
anglagard I did read the whole post concerning Einstein.
What I think of it is that it is simply an opinion.
I thought mentioning scientists and their distinction would help me win the debate purely on politics.
Sorry mr admin...
Joe

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AdminJar
Inactive Member


Message 165 of 166 (362976)
11-09-2006 8:59 PM
Reply to: Message 164 by foxjoe
11-09-2006 8:42 PM


sorry
but registering under a new name while suspended is against forum rules.
We are not dumb.

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