Instructions:Be sure to answer each question fully. I encourage you to usehyperlinks (that is, listing URL addresses of websites thatsubstantiate your position), multimedia (pictures, graphs), and keyquotes to enliven your essays. Place a copy of your test on yourwebsite and be sure to send a copy to your teacher when finished viaemail at neuralsurfer@yahoo.com Be sure to do your own work and citethe work of others when it is incorporated within your narrative.
1.NAME: Francisco Rodriguez
2. USERNAME: flatlineronduty
3. Web site (or blogger) address: http://hydroborator.blogspot.com/
4. Attendance: how many classes have you missed? How many have youbeen late to? Missed one; late to none.
5. LIST all of your posts (you can copy and paste them here, if youwish, or provide a link to all of them)
http://tv.groups.yahoo.com/group/sciencereligion/message/2790
http://tv.groups.yahoo.com/group/sciencereligion/message/2791
http://tv.groups.yahoo.com/group/sciencereligion/message/2793
http://tv.groups.yahoo.com/group/sciencereligion/message/2816
http://tv.groups.yahoo.com/group/sciencereligion/message/2866
http://tv.groups.yahoo.com/group/sciencereligion/message/2873
6. Have you watched all of the required films/lectures, etc., so far? Sure.
7. Did you do the required reading? Did you partially read them? Ifso, how much? I read most of the required books. I am in the process of reading Rational Mysticism and am yet to read Orthodoxy.
8. How would an atheist (in your chosen book) critique a theist's argument (in your chosen book) the existence of God? Be specific and be sure to reference your chosen reading.
Since Joan Roughgarden’s book Evolution and Christian Faith is not concerned "with ‘proving’ whether God exists, but with living a Christian life", I will base my answer on that.
Joan Roughgarden considers Christianity a good moral compass against the secular trend of unhindered individualism based on competition. She claims that "Jesus consistently tried to get people to think for themselves, to not rely on fixed rules or literal text". Conversely, Sam Harris in The End of Faith argues that at the root of religion is unreason, as a consequence of its foundational structure, faith. Faith exempts beliefs from having a basis in experience corroborated by evidence. Due to this, people end up believing things that a person outside their religion would consider insane. If these beliefs are of the extreme variety, people will in turn commit atrocities to assure their religion’s perseverance. He gives as example’s of this the Inquisition and the 9/11 terrorist attack.
9. How would a theist argue against the atheistic notion that a belief in God is delusional? Again, be sure to reference your chosen reading.
Joan Roughgarden would say that thinking that evolutionary biology shows a belief in God is delusional stems from adopting a "selfish-gene" view of evolution. That is to say, one that in emphasizing the gene as the unit of evolution, creates a philosophy based on selfishness and competition that does a sloppy job at explaining how "the contribution of individual genes to the whole […] can function in ways beyond the sum of its parts". Moreover, in many instances it is seen that organisms depend more on social interactions (be those intra or inter-species) than on competition for their survival.
Finally, one is better able to see the beauty of God in nature when one realizes that, while genetic mutations are random, natural selection, the main driving force behind evolution, is anything but. Natural breeding, as she refers to it, actually winds up improving a species’ adaptations to environmental constraints – mathematical algorithms have shown this, she says. From this she concludes that directionality can indeed be a characteristic of evolution, something very in line with theistic religious beliefs.
10. How does Littlewood's theory of large number help explainmiracles or supposed divine coincidences?
According to Littlewood’s theory, the probability of experiencing an event perceived as miraculous is approximately one in 35 days, since we are experiencing a gazillion of things just in one day. Littlewood's theory is based on mathematical calculations about the frequency with which disparate events can occur in synch. This is an application of the theory of very large numbers, which says that something otherwise uncommon appears often as the population N gets large enough, the number of events experienced being the N in this case.
http://en.wikipedia.org/Littlewood’s_Law
11. Discuss in this essay the pseudosciences: what are a couple ofreasons people turn to them and what are some key problems withthem? Take two or more pseudosciences and apply Ockham's razor(define the term first) to them.
According to the Skeptic’s Dictionary website, a pseudoscience can be defined as a group of ideas claiming to be scientific when they in fact are not. Some examples are astrology, the Bible code, telekinesis and parapsychology, etc. For a theory to be scientific, it must be grounded in methological naturalism, that is, it must not allude to or make any supernatural claims; it must be testable, empirically verifiable, able to be proven false, and predictions that broaden the understanding of the natural world must arise from it.
Why is it that in our modern, scientifically-minded world, people still turn to the pseudosciences? As one would expect, there is not one definite answer to this question and it all boils down to each individual’s case. However, a few common reasons will be discussed.
- Some people are simply ignorant about the falsehood of such doctrines, perhaps because they have been brought up in a milieu where current scientific understanding is not widespread or accessible, e.g. the
People may have been brought up with religious beliefs that either require or ease the adoption of a pseudoscientific explanation. For example, creationism is an attempt to fit scientific data with a literal understanding of Genesis, but to accomplish this, facts are forged and conflicting knowledge is discarded. Depending on how fervent their religiosity is and the extent to which the true scientific explanation contradicts their religion/worldview/beliefs/ideology (or worse, makes them untenable), people compartmentalize scientific knowledge and pseudoscience. Another example is the practice of trepanation which is more likely to be embraced by a person who believes in the immortality of the soul and the afterlife. In general, it can be argued that those who hold supernatural beliefs are more prone to believe in a pseudoscience.
Sometimes people simply believe in something for comfort, even if they are conscious that they believe in something that is false when it is too painful to accept reality.
Ockam’s Razor was a part of William of Ockam’s philosophy of nominalism. It is often stated as "do not multiply entities beyond necessity". Though his philosophy is considered valid by few nowadays, the razor became a necessary aspect of the scientific method. Basically, out of two competing explanations of a phenomenon, the one that postulates the least entities and makes the least assumptions is preferable.
Let us take the astrology as an example. Instead of thinking that mystical forces that determine our destiny emanate from astral bodies, it is more parsimonious to think that a chain of events comprising our actions and our interactions with others and our surroundings explains why things happen to us the way they do.
Now let’s consider intelligent design. One can assume there is a designer that acts by unknown (and perhaps unknowable) mechanisms in concert with the laws of nature to generate the different structures found in living organisms. However, one explains the same thing with fewer entities by postulating that natural selection and genetic variation, all by themselves can account for the existence of all life forms.
http://www.skepdic.com/pseudosc.html
12. Why does Darwinian evolution make atheism both respectable andtenable? Why was Charles Darwin agnostic about God and Christianity?
Prior to
It is in this regard that Charles Darwin became an agnostic.
13. Why does Richard Dawkins believe that religion is a virus of themind? Be specific in explaining meme theory and also explain whyDawkins' theory contradicts certain revelatory religions, likeJudaism, Christianity, and Islam?
A meme, or idea, according to memetics, is a pattern of information that has evolved to a form that induces its host organism to repeat the pattern. In this way, the organism is the meme’s vehicle for replicate itself in analogy to how a gene perpetuates itself according to a selfish-gene perspective. Religion man’s first attempt at explaining the world prior to the advancement of science, and those religions whose teachings encouraged their adherents to proselytize and conquer heathens, or to have more offspring to raise in the fold of their parent’s beliefs, had an advantage over those that did not. This explains evangelism and beliefs such as Catholicism’s prohibition of contraception, as well as religious intolerance seen in various faiths. Religions that claimed to be revealed from a deity and created sacred texts to compile in writing their core teachings would be more successful at perpetuating their existence over time, and beliefs such as the afterlife and the doctrine of hell gave people reason to fear not converting to them. Thus, according to Dawkins’ theory, the truth claims a religion makes are not references to reality, but merely catchy nonsense.
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MEMIN.html
14. How would a religious believer respond to Richard Dawkins'notion that religion is more akin to a mind parasite than anaccurate description or approach to reality? Clue: think of OwenGingerich or Freeman Dyson, etc
By pointing out that atheism would also be a meme according to Dawkins’ theory. If so, who is to say that religion is deleterious without impugning their own views? Why can’t one say that skepticism evolved to give people unwarranted confidence in the power of their own reason and intellectual abilities in an otherwise chaotic world? Scientific facts are neither right nor wrong, so how could Dawkins qualify one meme as a virus if atheism would also be an idea "infecting" hosts to replicate itself.
Furthermore, one could point out a distinction between memetics and other new biological approaches to behavior. Evolutionary psychology and affective neuroscience provide room for epigenetic shaping of behavior since they take the brain’s modularity for granted. Memetics, on the other hand, postulated a horizontal transfer of memes from host to host. This is more than anything a new version of the outdated theory of Lamarckism. If memes really are the psychological analogue of genes, one would expect that they proceed by the same mechanism of vertical transfer of information. When memetics tries to incorporate brain modularity into its theory, it shoots itself in the foot, for if the memes originate from modules, it is the module, not the meme that provided a trait that was selected for. Thus, it would not be the meme itself that is infecting new hosts, but the specificity of the module that has made it thrive and produce behavior most favorable to the particular environment.
15. Here is the topic: How did the world come into being? In otherwords, how was the universe created? Present two different set ofanswers to that question based on a creationist who believes inintelligent design (even if partially evolutionary) and one based onprobability theory (think Wolfram, for instance) and evolution. Besure to be accurate to each perspective and be sure to document yoursummaries. Finally, who do you think would present the mostpersuasiveanswer/argument?
- The creationist would argue that God created the physical laws that govern our universe:
From the complexity of a galaxy to the precise cosmological constants needed for life as we know it to exist, one can see that the universe has been fine-tuned by a Supreme Being. Existence is an ontological primary, and since evidence supports that time and space themselves began to exist from a singularity at the Big Bang expansion, one cannot think that they came from nothingness, since nothingness is a non-concept. Rather, God set the Big Bang in motion, and the universe’s evolution has proceeded in accordance with the Deity’s governance. Biological evolution via natural selection is a valid way of explaining the diversity and relatedness of life forms on the planet, but it cannot account for all structures because some of them are irreducibly complex, whether at the molecular or macro level. That is to say, if one removes one of the structure’s parts, the whole structure becomes useless. It was then the Intelligent Designer (i.e. God) who "tweaked" the evolutionary process to surmount these obstacles. Furthermore, some characteristics of the human experience, such as consciousness or morality, can only be explained by invoking a supernatural creator.
The physicalist/skeptic would argue that natural laws are all that is needed to explain every phenomenon known to humans:
First off, there may be an infinite number of universes created from endlessly bifurcating vacuum fluctuations, rendering ours nothing but trivial. The question of what preceded the Big Bang is meaningless, given that space-time must exist for some thing to precede another, yet time was created at the Big Bang. If there really were something before the Big Bang, the laws of physics that operate on our universe would be different from those prior to the cosmic expansion. Thus, one could think of existence as being eternal, as the process of being would never have a start or an end; it would merely be an indefinite, perhaps cyclic, course of one universe expanding and then collapsing into another universe. Energy would neither be created nor destroyed, and the underlying processes, being quantum mechanical in nature, would indeed be possible to get something out of nothing.
The existence of life can be explained sufficiently well by abiogenesis. This planet had all the materials necessary for life to exist. Its early conditions allowed for the synthesis of organic molecules from inorganic matter; some of these molecules were self-replicating, and from then on they were subject to the mechanism of natural selection. But going beyond evolution, applying Wolfram’s postulate one can discern that this universe’s complexity is inherent in the set of parameters (the sub-atomic level) that it can be reduced to in its most minimal form. Therefore, no god is necessary to describe why this universe is the way it is.
I consider the scientific argument the only persuasive choice.
16. According to Stephen Jay Gould, religion and science can indeedget along. Dawkins suggest the opposite. Elaborate on theGould/Dawkins debate and who do you think wins the discussion?
According to Dawkins, the popular idea that religion and science are converging is a complete farce. In his view, this misconception has become so widespread in part because of scientists who use religious language to describe their worldviews while not being anything other than atheists or agnostics in reality. People sometimes confuse awe and amazement towards science and nature with religion, he contends, and such sloppy definition of religion does nothing but blur the true meaning of the word. It is frequently argued that religion and science are complementary because they touch on different aspects of life. More specifically, religion addresses existential questions whereas science is concerned with explaining the physical laws the universe operates on. Dawkins says that this is an inexistent division, that there is no reason to think there are any "why" questions as opposed to "how" questions, and that even if there exist matters beyond the scope of science to answer, there has never been any indication whatsoever that religion could answer them effectively. It is just as reasonable to believe in a teapot orbiting the earth as it is in any religious doctrine. Just because a doctrine does not contradict what is known about the world, it is not a rational alternative. The lack of evidence for it makes believing in it irrational. Moreover, in so far as religion makes claims about the material world, such as what was before the Big Bang, the Flood story, etc. it is vulnerable to scientific criticism, and one finds out that indeed. It is this type of claims that are at the very root of religion and conflict is unavoidable.
According to Gould, religion and science are "non-overlapping magisteria", that is to say, they pertain to different domains of knowledge. Religion’s turf is questions regarding "meaning, purpose, value". Science concerns itself with the study of the properties that make up the natural world. Both domains are just as relevant, he contends. To counter Dawkins, Gould says that those religious beliefs that step on science’s ground are not truly religious, but pseudoscientific. For a belief to be religious it must consign itself with explaining the supra-natural world, not the physical one. Likewise, while science can provide acumen into matters of meaning or ethics, it cannot answer this type of questions, as they are within the scope of religion.
In my opinion, Dawkins is right in saying that people, especially scientists, should not be sloppy when describing their beliefs or lack thereof by twisting the meanings of religious words to the point that they sound ambiguous and mislead others about what they think. However, I agree with Gould that, in principle, his thesis allows for the accommodation of religiosity and scientific coherence without contradiction. The problem is, though, that the issue is not so clear cut. A religious belief may not appear to be making any factual assertions, and may not be in contradiction with the body of scientific knowledge of the present time, but might end up doing so once new scientific discoveries have been made. So, Gould’s thesis is more persuasive in my view, but it is in serious need of enhancement as well.
http://www.forbes.com/asap/1999/1004/235.html
http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Catalano/the_g_files.shtml
17. Why does your teacher repeatedly argue that it is naive (and most often wrong) to "confuse neurology for ontology." Explain andgive a specific example to back up your essay.
We can only sense the world the way our brains are wired to perceive things, yet we often confuse our sensory experience for reality as it is in itself. For example, we can only see a very tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum, yet that does not mean the rest is not there. Religion exploits this fact to come up with metaphysical extravagancies that purport to explain the world and provide comfort to people. An example would be rage being attributed as demon possession.
18. Quantum theorists have discovered that the only accurate way todescribe the subatomic world is by probabilities, particularly asoutlined by Werner Heisenberg and his principle of uncertaintyrelations. How can a physical understanding of the world based onchance/randomness/chaos be RECONCILED with a theological view thatthe universe was designed and displays purpose? Or, is such areconciliation impossible? Substantiate your argument.
Two approaches:
The Bohm interpretation of quantum mechanics takes the uncertainty relation to be an epistemological, not an ontological question. Since an electron is very small compared to objects we are accustomed to, the energy required to measure its momentum is enough to create an infinitely narrow stake in the position wave packet, and viceversa. This does not mean that there is a fundamental impossibility in measuring both with complete certainty, but only a practical one. Further, according to Bohmian mechanics, the wave-particle duality and wavefunction collapse problems are resolved by considering a subatomic particle as a point mass that is guided by its wave. Thus, instead of being in a limbo state before being measured, the particle has a definite position and momentum all throughout. Hence, determinism is saved in the quantum world, and nature at its very core need not be ruled by chance.
Granting the standard
19. In what specific ways does Faqir Chand help to explain WHYcertain people have religious experiences and others do not. Howdoes Faqir Chand's view of religion underline or support a purelysociological view of religion as meaning function?
Many people have attributed their fortunes to the guru Faqir Chand’s strong spirituality. Some even have claimed that they have had visions of him talking to them and guiding them to the right path. Meanwhile, Faqir Chand vehemently denies having caused or even being aware of any of their occurrences. Instead, he thinks it is people’s own piety and faith that makes them prone to find relief, either from categorical anxieties, or mere temporary issues, in the form of revelations and other religious experiences. In actuality, it is the mind that creates the religious experience, and due to the believer’s own neurology, he has experiences that confirm his belief. Since the non-believer does not have such bias, he is not prone to have that kind of experiences.
http://www.geocities.com/eckcult/cultexpose/visions.html
20. What is Nietzsche's notion of the myth of the eternal return andhow could such an idea potentially transform one's day to day life?In what ways is it completely contrary to religious notions of anafterlife? The myth of eternal recurrence runs like this: Suppose that after death, you would re-live this life exactly the same as the original time. That is to say, having identical experiences, with the same people, the same places, same everything, and after you died that time, you would re-live the same life again and again eternally. This would be horrific, for every experience would be cheapened to the point of possessing absolutely no value at all. Nietzsche is trying to point out that in hoping for an afterlife, we end up devaluing the only life we are certain of. If we live like there is no life after death, we cherish to the maximum every happening in our life, since we will not get to experience anything like it after we are gone. This can also be extended to mean that in some cases people commit atrocities and follies exclusively as an extension of their religious/spiritual beliefs, whereas those who do not hold those ideas prudently caliber their actions, since their current existence is their sole preoccupation.
http://www.meskot.com/recurrence.htm
21. Why is Edward O. Wilson arguing for a consilience between thehumanities and the sciences? The boundaries between different sciences are rapidly vanishing. Since we live in a physical universe, there is no reason to believe that the social sciences and humanities cannot be reduced to natural science. Thus, there is no alternative to consilience. More importantly, there is no reason to believe the social sciences would not profit from this amalgamation. On the contrary, literacy in science is needed to elucidate and solve the majority of problems that affect the public sphere – war, environmental pollution, sexual ethics, poverty, etc… Abandoning an entrenched view of the disciplines is required to arrive at an accurate description of reality, one that is not perverted by ideologies and/or superstitions. It is scientists’ duty to educate the world and reclaim objectivity as their forte, in juxtaposition with post-modernist philosophies which claim that such knowledge cannot be reached. For these reasons, it is imperative for individuals who want to be competitive in our modern world of widespread instantaneous information to be able to interpret the information concisely and apply that knowledge in ways that would be most useful and productive. The same holds true for political leaders, who are regrettably for the most part not very informed in these areas nowadays. They ought to accept consilience in order make wise decisions for the people.
22. How would Freeman Dyson and Owen Gingerich respond to skepticsin the Beyond Belief Conference?
- Neil Degrasse Tyson says that religious feeling arises when man reaches the boundaries of his knowledge. This is a ubiquitous tendency, displayed by the common person and the intellectual alike. He mentions Ptolemy, Galileo and
What is needed is for faith to be disfavored and investigation adopted. It is discovery that drives economies. There is absolutely no indication of purpose or design in the universe, unless one includes bad design. Examples of this are: the universe cools as it expands until it will be unsuitable for life, natural disasters, disease, birth defects, etc.
- Freeman Dyson would start by pointing out that there is a great emotional aspect to religions, given that they are long traditions that have lasted for centuries. Moreover, there is too much weirdness at the subatomic level for scientists to state with certainty that the material world is a self-containing machine. At the quantum level, the world seems to make choices of its own, which could point in the direction of an underlying elementary form of consciousness. Further, since mind exists at our level, one could think of God as a consciousness that is found throughout the cosmos at a higher level. It is perplexing that, contrary to what Degrasse alludes to, the universe possesses this great diversity, something truly interesting. In addition, one can wonder why it is so hospitable to life. Mechanisms like natural selection need to already have something to work on, and God could be the explanation to why things in this universe are built so that these mechanisms can operate on them. Ultimately, however, religion is about providing the ultimate meaning to life, and as such, is separate from the scientific realm. Likewise, one should be careful not to stretch the explicative scope of science. If being religious makes more sense to a person, there is nothing wrong about that since religion and science need not necessarily be at odds with each other.
- Owen Gingerich would add that the fact that this universe can be understood is also intriguing. What seems like a screw-up, that there is no element of 5 amu, in fact allows for this abundance of oxygen and carbon, which are the main components of life as we know it. According to Gingerich, the only way to get around the anthropic principle is to say that there is something intrinsic to the nature of this universe that necessarily makes it the way it is (Wolfram, anyone?). This position is pretty much approaching the issue from a different angle, but at this point the skeptic’s position is, like the theist’s, one of faith, since neither explanation can be proven.
Source: Videos on neuralsurfer website.
23. If biological life can be understood reductively, as Watson andCrick have suggested, what necessity is there to posit a belief is aSupreme Creator? Be sure to back up your argument with pertinentreferences and/or quotes.
There is no necessity; however, the two issues are not contradictory. Most people will continue to believe in God because they are not satisfied with the answers naturalism gives to matters usually regarded as belonging to metaphysics and logic. For example, questions such as those of meaning, existence, or the nature of causation, to a name a few, are not answered, in their eyes, by postulating that there exist properties of our (material) world that are brute facts requiring no further explanation.
More importantly, though, is that one should turn to physics and cosmology, not biology, to see whether atheism can properly account for this universe’s existence. Here the theist might provide the following line of reasoning:
Cosmological arguments are sometimes presented as evidence that theism/deism has become obsolete. It is stated that the Big Bang was nothing but the result of a vacuum fluctuation from a greater whole, a bubble of space-time emerging from a pan-universe. While this hasn’t been ruled out per se, it poses more questions than it solves. For instance, a corollary of the Big Bang is the grand-scale smoothness of the cosmos, yet it is difficult to envision how amplification of virtual particles via fluctuations would bring about the overall homogeneous density and temperature of the universe, as evinced by the uniformity of the blackbody radiation. Further, given that cyclic and infinite views of the universe have fallen out of favor, the question of what was the uncaused cause at the start of causality still remains. Since it has not been shown that the universe could be the first cause, one can resort to God for an answer.
References: - The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg
- Ancient Light by Alan Lightman
Again, this by no means shows that God-belief is a logical necessity – it isn’t regardless of whether life can be explained reductively or not. The point is that not all arguments for believing in God would be rendered useless.
24. So far, what is your favorite reading and why? I like Nietzsche’s prose, but I disagree with the way he interprets Christianity, as well as his take on morality. In my opinion, if Nietzsche’s idea of the ubermensch is taken to its logical conclusion, he simply cannot provide a good reason why one shouldn’t step on other people to achieve one’s own goals. Overall though, I would say The End of Faith is my favorite book because it does not get into deriding and insulting people’s beliefs, and presents clear argumentation. It is hard to disagree with his central thesis, that depending on how illogical one’s foundation is, the more probable it becomes that one will end up committing an atrocity. However, I would say he deals with the issue too superficially, to discern the factors that led a person to engage in an act of terrorism, one also has to study the milieu from which they come as well as their personal experience, instead of making broad generalizations.
25. Is there anything that science cannot explain?
So far, science cannot adequately explain the process of concept formation. Even if in the future the neurophysiology underlying most cerebral processes is understood in excruciating detail, the concept in our minds and the brain state that caused it are not one and the same. The age-old problem of universals is still not resolved, at least not by science. However, almost anything one can think of that used to be a mystery seemed to be unexplainable by science at some point, until scientific advancements were able to explain the phenomenon. So, even though the current approach does not seem to resolve the question I cannot say that one day it won’t, but then again, what do I know?
26. What is the favorite thing you learned so far? That our professor came up with a hypothesis to explain away glossolalia after overhearing a couple in the heat of passion.
Be STOKED! Extra Credit questions will be added later
No comments:
Post a Comment