Audie
Veteran Member
um, what does that mean?
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Empirical Evidence for God
- Thread starter Ostronomos
- Start date
um, what does that mean?
Ostronomos
Well-Known Member
Do elaborate.
Truthseeker
Non-debating member when I can help myself
Show me the scientific study that says that the chances of life are quite high.
Ostronomos
Well-Known Member
I'm afraid anthropic fine-tuning is an argument that has been debunked for quite some time. If you're going to use science to support God, why not go with consciousness as a universal phenomenon?
sealchan
Well-Known Member
It means that there are psychological experiences that can be identified from a person's testimony that contain typical features that are shared across cultures and prevailing belief systems and time. Historical accounts match modern day accounts.
The experience of God may have initially been based on a cultural recognition of these experiences. God was an interpretation of an underlying, psychological experience of profound personal meaning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.08448
2014 - https://www.nasa.gov/ames/kepler/na...-planet-in-the-habitable-zone-of-another-star
2017 - https://edition-m.cnn.com/2017/06/19/us/exoplanets-nasa-kepler-announcement/index.html
https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.06714
https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.06288
https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0205014
Now can you show me a scientific study that says god did it
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Subduction Zone
Veteran Member
It sounds like a fancy way of saying that people dream up God in their heads.
Ostronomos
Well-Known Member
Forgive my intrusion, but my equation could have only come from a mind that is 100% certain of God's existence.
Subduction Zone
Veteran Member
What "equation"? I am sure that I can come up with one just as valid or more so that 100% refutes God's existence.
Meaningless equations are worthless in a discussion.
Audie
Veteran Member
That is "psychology" for you. A whole book can be
boiled down to a pamphlet, if it id double spaced.
Audie
Veteran Member
Sounds like the low art of self deception to me.
TurkeyOnRye
Well-Known Member
I think that's a very silly question to ask. By "meta-reality" I mean to describe the design underlying the content of reality, akin to describing the physics by which a ball exists and interacts in its environment, as opposed to describing a ball and what you think the ball is doing. That seems like a far more useful and pragmatic view than chocking up one's experience to say a visitation by Christ or Mohomed, for instance. In any case, one must formulate the experience into something conceptual if we are to package it up for communication to others. What's the alternative? Just shutting up about it and forgetting it ever happened?
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No, evidence to be useful must have objective existence, and so be examinable by anyone, at least in principle. That's why the right video will always beat witness testimony in court, for example.
And whether or not item-of-evidence A is confirmation of claim-about-reality X will be a matter of further impartial assessment and argument.
Check out >scientific method<.
We don't have enough understanding of how constants are determined to say whether that's right or wrong. For example, what if they're not independent, what if only one of them has to be right for all of them to be right?
Meanwhile, self-evidently we can only be here talking about it if they're right for our kind of self-aware life. What kinds of self-aware life could arise under a different set of constants, we have no idea ─ saying it couldn't be like ours is merely stating the obvious.
What is a god? How can you tell?
And how do gods exist? What kinds of constants are necessary before that's possible?
Subduction Zone
Veteran Member
One example of a "fine tuning" that was explained are the orbital relationships from Kepler's Laws. For example orbits were finely tuned to sweep out equal areas of the orbital disc in equal times. That fine tuning disappeared with the development of Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation. Later discoveries unexplained relationships. It will probably happen again and again. In fact I am willing to bet that someone that understands physics better than I do can name some such relationships in the current list of "finely tuned" constants.
sealchan
Well-Known Member
Well it might seem silly if you think of a dogmatic belief as not rational or not subject to rationality and a metaphysical belief as something resulting from a rational insight and open to all the influence that evidence can provide.
But I think that a metaphysics only remains such to the extent that it treats of matters outside of direct evidence. A metaphysics is a sort of logical invention of what the universe is just outside the reach of science.
Dogmatic beliefs are simply old metaphysical propositions which have become required thought due to tradition and corruption due to the political power behind that tradition. But they both share an extra-scientific quality. But metaphysics has a more pleasant reputation.
IMO
sealchan
Well-Known Member
Well you have to first accept the idea that on the whole any knowledge a human being has doesn't pop magically into consciousness but is a result of brain activity. That brain activity re-presents the world to the knower in the form of neural activity. That representation is, at best, a model or analogy to reality and not, strictly speaking, reality itself. From this I make the assumption that anything the human brain knows is as much a product of the brain itself as it is the reality that that brain is knowing.
If so, then what part is the brain inventing and what part is the real reality? I don't think we can know the universe accept with our "brain-colored glasses". For an example, when one gets inspired by the notion of the Tao one realizes how much balance and opposites interact and switch their places. But if you study how the brain works you also see this. So our minds are very Tao-y and everything is Tao-unified because of that.
So if we have a conscious experience of an ultimate nature we can never be sure to what extent our own minds are shaping that experience and to what extent that reality reflects a truth external to our mind.
At best we might say that a certain type of experience which people claim to have may share certain qualities such that we can recognize that type of experience. These experiences sincerely reported represent an objective reality about what the mind can experience. These experiences happen to people without their being subject to the control of that person although a person can foster that experience perhaps by certain preparatory actions.
I have spent many years studying dreams and the power of their reality and meaning. I take such things seriously and to the extent that they provide meaning to the individual they should be valued and cherished. They need not have any demonstrable reality in their specific form to fulfill this meaning, but to the extent that they fall into a class of experiences that are similar to the experiences of others, that experience is both made valuable by the objectivity implied by its commonality (even if rare) but it is also diminished in personal meaning because by that very same fact it becomes something that might happen to anyone given the right peculiar conditions.
In all of this there no implied need to posit another reality outside that which is created by any fiction. Any dream might be understood as merely the outcome of universal brain processes but the particular content is always unique due to the unique experience of the dreamer. Admitting to the subjectivity of the experience should not be seen as making that truth any less important. A personal experience with deep impact is worth more than any merely taught truth which is supposedly true for anyone simply because of the fact that that which makes us common typically doesn't speak to us of our personal value. For that we require uniqueness for uniqueness signals our special value and the implied need for our presence in the world.
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Ostronomos
Well-Known Member
I bet you're proud of your ignorant and objectively stupid comments.
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