Creationists think Evolutionists think like Creationists.

Oh please provide evidence for this. Do you realize who were the biggest supporters of separation of church and state in the formation of this country?
I thought not.The religious that is who. They had seen through the experience of europe what happens to minority churches when one belief becomes one with the government. Do you have any evidence that the prevailing view was that a church and the government should be one entity? Any?

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Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts

No, they point to something that isn't true. As he points out: Now he doesn't just say that the combination of QM and GR only yield infinity when applied to things that we can't observe and that you'd like to think are supernatural; he says that "they almost always yield one answer: infinity". Contrary to what we actually measure.

Tell me where we encounter an infinite dimension to anything in the natural world? If it ever was proven, (and I can't begin to imagine how it could be), that the final answer to the problem was infinity it seems to me that it we would have to consider it as something outside of what we consider natural. No, and I doubt they ever well. I have never said that I thought it would "pan out this time". I have no idea how or if it will pan out. I just found the statement interesting.

Where is the proof of that? Isn't that just your opinion?

No, it's the "opinion" of the dials and meters to which Greene referred. The calculations say one thing, the observations say another.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Hi GDR,Okay, I guess I give up prodding you for answers. If you can't support your contention that an answer of infinity indicates the possibility of the supernatural then could you at least stop repeating the claim?Since infinity as an answer seems to be driving your sense of something beyond the natural, consider something even more unnatural, imaginary numbers. If anything would point to the supernatural then imaginary numbers should be it, and yet the field where I began my education, electrical engineering, is filled with imaginary numbers, and infinities, too. For example, the analysis of AC circuits (that's the electricity that comes out of your walls) requires both imaginary numbers and infinities in spades.Infinity and imaginary numbers are helpful mathematical concepts that enable us to build accurate mathematical models of reality. They're not indicators of the supernatural.--Percy

Agreed. Science may not be able to find all natural solutions as well, though. It's quite possible (although the romantic in me doesn't like to think about it) that some aspect of the natural, physical world is simply beyond any and all human comprehension. Fair enough. However, this "given" is not the reason why a natural solution is expected. That would be a fallacy. The reason why the natural solution is expected is because of the pattern of finding natural solutions to problems that initially seem confusing. If you're looking for "scientific consensus" on the issue... I wish I could give you an answer, but you have asked a question that is above my head in such matters.
If you're looking for my own personal response, I would say yes. Something in an additional dimension would be "beyond our normal 4 dimensional world"... almost trivially true by definition. However, I would think that once knowledge is gained of such an extra dimension, it would then be a part of our "normal x dimensional world". Yes, a very objective pattern.
A very objective pattern that matches many other objective patterns which leads us to believe that some confusion exists between our current models of the physical world (GR and QM) and the reality of the physical world.It certainly does constitute a pattern.
It just doesn't constitute a pattern that points towards anything being "beyond our natural world" or "non-physical". Since such things have as-of-yet never been discovered, there exists no pattern to point towards them. This doesn't mean they can't exist, only that according to the information available to us... they are unlikely to exist and there is no rational or reasonable reason to pursue their existance.There still exists an infinite number of irrational and unreasonable reasons to pursue the existance of something that is "beyond our natural world".
Irrational and unreasonable pursuits do sometimes produce "real knowledge" of things that exist. It is just extremely rare, and almost always a waste of time and money.There are stories of "crazy old kooks" who irrationally and unreasonably believe certain species are alive and well when all evidence points towards their extinction. Sometimes (rarely) these kooks turn out to be right... and the knowledge is then re-assimilated into the scientific consensus.
But of the 1 or 2 success stories... the millions and millions of "crazy old kooks" who never do find what they're looking for are never heard about. It's not really news when no one expects a kook to find anything and the kook ends up... not finding anything As I said before, I am only discussing "where the evidence is pointing"... where the rational and reasonable patterns are objectively leading. But reality doesn't care what information we have at our disposal. Reality just is. "It is what it is". It's up to us to figure it all out.(I really do hope some people keep irrationally and unreasonably searching for things "beyond the natural"... that way they can (possibly) waste their lives and I'll still reap the benefits if they actually find anything... )

Hi StileI think that we have actually come together on this. There is no part of your post that I don't agree with.I know Percy keeps looking for me to support my argument but frankly the concept of infinity being something that doesn't exist in our natural world is all I got, at least from a scientific point of view and I don't see us going into a philosophical or theological discussion on the issue. (Been down that road on this forum just a few times before. )Thanks for the discussion.

I may be very late to this discussion but I just wanted to correct your use of cetain words. But Greene doesn't say that, the word "natural world" does not appear in the quote.Where we don't encounter infinite is in the macro world, not "the natural world." General Relativity explains the macro world, no infinite there. However, quantum mechanics (the micro world) does have infinite.What Greene means by the quote you gave is that, when merging the macro world with the micro world, equations yield infinite. It has nothing to do with natural or supernatural - it's micro -vs- macro that he's refering to.Hope this helped...- Oni

Only because you construe a Christianity that embraces science as weaker than one that denies it, but those Christians who embrace science say that your faith is the weaker one. And in my experience more atheists come from fundamentalism and creationism than from science-embracing theism; the incredible tension between the fundamentalist, Biblical literalist dogma and what can be plainly seen with ones own eyes is responsible for a lot of deconversions.But, frankly, you're right that clear-eyed observation of the natural world is substantial tension with adherence to religion, because religion is fundamentally an exercise in denying what is obviously true. Why? I'm not familiar with Jesus taking any position on the age of the Earth. And even if he did they wouldn't be the first or last Christians to disregard some piece of dogma you see as central. I don't see why, given that atheism is based neither on Christianity nor on US history. Those subjects would seem to be completely irrelevant to the practice and support for atheism.On the other hand, evolution is a scientific theory of biology, and to assess its degree of truth or falsity means inspecting and researching biological and chemical evidence, something you don't seem to possess the education to do.I'm sorry you've been made fun of by people who know less history than you - although it seems like you know a great deal of fictitious history, frankly - but I can't understand how that's an argument against learning biology. Can you elaborate? The books you listed aren't science books, they're not even about evolution. Did you think Daniel Dennett was a biologist? He's not. Sam Harris has a degree in neuroscience, which is close, but he's not an active researcher in that field.Dawkins is a biologist, but "The God Delusion" isn't his case for evolution, it's his case for atheism. I'm not angry, but if you find your posts anger others, maybe it's because you make ludicrous and unsupported imprecations against the characters of others. Maybe you could stop doing that? Just a thought. I don't. Are you claiming expertise in those fields? I've seen you make things up about both American history and Christianity, things everyone knows are false, so can you understand why I would be dubious about your claimed expertise in those subjects?

What about Newton's Laws of Gravity and the precession of Mercury's orbit? The orbit demonstrated that Newton's laws were wrong, but it didn't point towards Relativity. Mercury's orbit simply showed that Newton is wrong in the same way that current calculations demonstrate that QM and GR are wrong or incomplete on some level (which every physicist has known for quite some time).

When Newton was around the evidence indicated that this was a deterministic world. Later new evidence came to light which showed that Newton's views were wrong. The point is though that at the time of Newton the evidence pointed towards a deterministic existence.It is very possible that in the future there will be advances in science that will find naturalistic answers. I'm just saying that the current science seems to indicate an answer that lies outside our 4 dimensional world.

If memory serves, Einstein was firmly in the Deterministic school of thought. Remember the quip "God does not play dice"? Or rather, that our world is made up of more than the 4 dimensions that we are familiar with right now. The extra dimensions hinted at in String Theory do not lie outside of our world but are a part of it. A good analogy is Reimman's bookworm. In this analogy the 3D curvature of the crumpled page is detected as a force by the bookworm.

I agree although it seems to me that our world is made up of what we can pereceive and all we can perceive are 4 dimensions. I don't imagine that string theory advocates dimensions that we can perceive so wouldn't that make them metaphysical?

The extra dimensions are potentially detectable through instruments such as the LHC. They would be no more metaphysical than radio waves.