Science... it's just a religion

Are we in the presence of a sage?

Proverb was the wrong term; I couldn't edit it in time.

No, it's a simple quote with complex meaning for those who wish to find it. Just know that faith is not limited to spirituality nor religion; what we do not know for certain, we must take on faith. In the absence of knowledge, you don't simply decide that there is nothing -- do you?

More like parsley . . .

science is not religion , religion is part of science .

Can you expand on that a bit?

You didn't answer my question. I asked where you are getting these ideas.

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I believe, as someone stated earlier, he's implying that religion is a form of science that predates modern, methodical science.

While I can see the connection, I actually feel religion is rooted more deeply in philosophy, and that philosophy is in fact the true precedent for the scientific method that would establish science as we know it.

In other words, philosophy was the father of both religion and science -- two different schools of thought that would evolve over time.

The corollary, of course, is that philosophy and religion were born of separate schools of thought themselves; whichever, I believe philosophy covers a broad spectrum of thought and is therefore difficult to classify absolutely. I think we can all agree that religion, science, and philosophy in general are not disparate in their ultimate goals.

Looking back on this topic, it's very clear to both myself and the community at large that my ideas and supporting evidence came from my ass.

The discussion itself, however, turned out to be relatively valid; for that, I can't complain.

At least you agree that I'm useful. Even parsley has a purpose and many recipes would suffer without it.

We already know that.

Science is based on the philosophy of naturalism, specifically, methodological naturalism.

Here, READ THIS. Have fun

What makes a discussion valid? More importantly, valid for you. Do you believe that this discussion was equally valid for others? Since a discussion is an activity of two or more people, if only one person finds it "valid" isn't that a contradiction of sorts?

I don't really think you offered much here to be considered, and pulling something out your ass and then following it with grandiloquent prose is hardly anything to brag about.

If you want to flush out your thoughts on a topic, that's great. I think it's an admirable desire. Many here have a pretty good knowledge and experience base to offer you excellent feedback on many topics.

You should however, refrain from presenting your ideas as if they hold some unique proverbial merit. We rarely if ever get to give the verdict on if anything we say or write is actually profound or meaningful to anyone else.

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TL;DR VERSION: I have issues, I'm working on them, and I hope to become a more productive and likable member of this community.



I appreciate that you asked and made me aware of my logical error, but in this specific case I think you read too far into my words; I said that the discussion turned out to be valid, and that I said it makes it my opinion -- thus, the discussion was valid to me. You gathered as much, as any reasonable person would.



I daresay I'm not bragging -- how did you establish that idea? I admitted to the idiocy of this topic and have since attempted to improve my ability to remain neutral and "Socratic", if you will.

This topic began with an idea and premise that could be developed, but died quickly and with great justice as my mouth rambled on ahead of my brain. The grandiloquent prose is a side effect of my love for words and the beauty of mellifluous language; my first problem is that it doesn't always translate well into the scientific realm, and secondly, my writing ability is in desperate need of development.



I agree wholeheartedly and I've been in the process of this since I began posting here. I'm iron-willed and strong-headed, wholly committed to what is and what is right -- or so I grew up thinking and wishing. In truth, my obsession with "right" vs. "wrong" led me to believe everything could be classified as such, and I spent many years attempting to find the key to being "correct" -- which was, I thought, to saturate oneself with facts.

I've grown up a lot since then, but there were plenty of bumps; without getting overly personal, you could certainly make an argument that I should be in an asylum, or at the very least on prescription medication.

You don't need my life story, nor do you want it I'm certain, but know this: I hate being wrong and sounding ignorant, and when you're left to yourself over many years, you begin to believe there is no resistance to your own ideas. Over the past few years, it's been made terribly obvious that I was fundamentally wrong on many issues, and in light of that I put up a barrier to protect myself; I'm trying to emerge from that shell.

In a quote: "Flawless logic cannot exempt me from my imperfect condition."

That's another of my own quotes, but this particular one concerns me and only me. It is personal and therefore opinionated; I make no claims of its profundity.

Sorry for the wall of text.

I bookmarked that site and glanced over the article; I find it interesting.

Most interesting, however, is this:

"To avoid these traps scientists assume that all causes are empirical and naturalistic; which means they can be measured, quantified and studied methodically."

My view of God, if He should exist, is as empirical and naturalistic as the ground below our feet; in fact, if I'm correct, nothing God did, does, or will ever do is beyond measurement, quantification, and methodical study.

The biggest component of my view is this: everything must make logical sense. Nothing that I've ever witnessed in nature defies logic; it merely defies current understanding. Humans, in my opinion, are one of the only known entities in existence capable of defying logic -- like a self-aware computer program with a complex set of instructions to define behavior, but the free will to choose otherwise.

Anyway, that's hardly here nor there -- I just consider you one of the few people here so far who will actually take a moment to consider my words and decide for yourself whether there is merit to them beyond my own poor communication.

You are a true scientist, and the exact opposite of the kind I described in this topic. (That is my opinion whether you consider yourself one or not.)

You are honest about your mistakes. That alone will make you a fine member of A2K.

Some of your philosophical ideas remind me of myself when I was much younger.

well Lieunacy you have missed something very simple. Science doesn't just jump to some conclusion and call it a fact. It looks at reality and tries to see if that reality is testable or varifyable. However religion does absolutely none of that. It jumps to a conclusion and doesn't even bother to see if the claim being made is testable according to reality. Therefore science is only a religion when someone just blindly accepts a claim without there being any good reason to do so. However the people who typically behave that way have weaknesses within their logic and reasoning skills and that is why they fall into such a trap.

Your view of "God" may be closer to Deism or Pantheism, than the traditional Christian view. You also might want to Google "Spinoza" who believed this:

"Spinoza asserted that for a concept of god to make any sense at all, it must simply be nature. That is, god cannot be something outside nature that controls it, but must necessarily be part of it. According to Spinoza, God IS nature. While Spinoza was excommunicated from his Jewish community in Amsterdam and condemned by Christians as well for being an atheist, he was very devoutly religious. He saw the traditional anthropomorphic (man-like) god as an abomination, completely rejecting the wonder of nature, from which life comes. To Spinoza, nature is the true expression of God. And each of us is part of it. Unfortunately, his highly technical, mathematical style of writing limited widespread appreciation of his work."

Your speculations seem sincere, so I try. While many of your conjectures are off the mark and unfounded, a few are interesting.

You seem to have deduced the philosophical underpinnings of Science and Religion without having been taught it. No small task. You seem to have limited exposure to otherwise available knowledge. Why is that?

Therein lies my problem with Christianity as an organized religion: they deny the fundamental principles of the Holy Bible in order to further their own convictions. What they refuse to acknowledge is that the Bible is not a literal work; it is a symbolic work that foreshadows the end of times and even the nature of man and the universe around them.

Furthermore, it is a book that was written by men and has been translated and redistributed by men for 2,000 years. It has passed hands through some of the most dishonest, power-hungry theists the world has ever seen; kings and priests, popes and bishops -- you name it, it's conceivable that someone left their own, tarnished mark upon the book's original copy.

My views are, of course, beyond the scope of a single reply here, but allow me to provide an introduction that (hopefully) makes sense.

I believe that God is the universe. Not the entity as an "individual", but the cumulative whole of the energy that permits it to exist. Without energy, subatomic/quantum reactions would cease to occur and hypothetically, the very construct of reality would collapse upon itself. Nothing could exist because nothing could be observed nor measured.

My belief states, furthermore, that God is the original creator and artist: the penultimate scientist and artisan. If we take dark matter (or the space beyond our universe) to be inordinate matter lacking energy to react, then anything that does not have energy -- therefore mass -- simply does not exist. Even if it did, we could not prove it, as we could not measure anything within that volume of space -- if indeed you could call it a volume. It may very well be a point. But that's the idea: it's formless, devoid of function, like Batman's cape without an electrical charge running through it ().

God, then, is the energy that provides matter its ability to react: to repel and attract, to mate and destroy, and to produce products from multiplication or decay. I believe we can look no further than the photon for evidence (however limited) of this: the photon may react differently depending on whether or not it is observed. This lends credence to the idea that energy, and potentially therefore the universe, is conscious -- and is in fact a part of the whole that is God.

Consider this: virtually any particle, composite particle, molecule, atom, etc, I've ever heard of, has always reacted in predictable ways Once those initial relationships were established, the only thing that changed were the conditions and environment -- and the energy constant that permitted them to "live." The specific interaction between any two entities, once established, did not change... except the photon, which seemingly chose a different path -- by choice.

That leads me to the fundamental idea behind my view: God is the universal conscience that binds all things into a single system. Think of a brain -- it sends and receives millions upon billions of communications by means of electrical signals transmitted through a neural network. Now consider the nucleus of a cell; it is essentially a limited brain that stores DNA and produces essential proteins for cell function.

Now consider the universe: it is essentially a cell, complete with organelles (stars and massive bodies), a membrane (the edge of the known universe), and a "fluid" to transport material ("space", which includes CMBR). The nucleus or brain, then, is God; however, He does not exist within the universe, nor separately from it, for He is the universe -- or more specifically, He is the energy whole spread throughout the entire volume of known space.

Going back to my idea of Batman's cape (in the new movies), you could then consider the universe like so: inordinate matter (fermions -- the quarks and leptons) are charged by energy (bosons) to assemble into increasingly complex structures.

What force holds all things together? It's simple. If you ask me, virtually all bonds are electromagnetic in nature, carried by the photon -- the quantum of light... and as a fundamental constituent of my belief: God.

*breath*

Oh boy; as I said, this was beyond the scope of a single post and I feel I've left as much out as I was able to explain. In either case, I believe it's a solid introduction.

If you want a more specific discussion about electromagnetism as the bond between nearly all things, check out my theory on gravity: http://able2know.org/topic/166885-1

Nobody's yet to refute it and thus far, and I've gathered that A2K members typically do only one of two things: 1) refute something and prove it wrong, or 2) not respond for lack of anything to refute. But maybe that's just me.



Largely by choice, I'm sure; I grew up writing fiction, creating worlds and people. As I get older, my desire for consistency and logical cohesion grows with my creativity; therefore, it was only natural I began to study what man already knows so that I can paint convincing, beautiful, and authentic fiction over the top of it.

As the years went by, I decided that my greatest calling was thus: to study everything real so that I might create the greatest fictional universe ever imagined -- perhaps the goal of science fictions writers since Asimov and Orwell. They loved to delve into the hypothetical, but they did so with respect to what is known; in light of that, their works have lived on and endured not only to be enjoyed, but marveled at: they predicted many things accurately.

But as an artist and creative personality lacking direction over the years, you can imagine I struggled -- and continue to -- with researching "reality." It's always easier to delve into the abstract. I discovered the underpinnings of science and religion by working those abstractions into clay -- what begins as a "hunch" or merely an "idea" forms itself into something real over time.

Therefore, you could say I'm a little bit of everything, conflicted to the core. It's hard for me to choose one course because nearly everything interests me; in fact, my greatest interest is relationships; relationships between matter and energy, between atoms, between molecules, between cells, between animals, between humans, between the planets and stars -- everything. No one field of science or study could sate my appetite for knowledge and creativity.

That is why I believe I've discovered the "truth "of God; in trying to create my own universe, I learned what makes creation so beautiful and desirable, and I applied that to my study of the universe. Once you see that God is possible, it's hard to consider otherwise -- and yet every morning I wake up questioning whether He's there. It's a strange duality.

In any case, it leads me to one interesting point: characters. When creating a book or film, characters are often thought the most important element. Characters and their relationships with one another. If God created the universe, you might consider existence as being a live action book, and human beings are both its protagonists and antagonists.

This is where I draw my greatest strength: I believe God created man in an attempt to create sentient, intelligent beings other than Himself. He wanted to see original creativity, beyond his own; he wanted other viewpoints; he wanted engaging conversation; and most importantly, he wanted good company -- as anyone does. You could imagine it would be lonely being God.

We are an abstraction of God -- God is not an abstraction of us; we are a part of Him. And one day, when the universe collapses (as I believe it will), all the information of our existence will be returned to the "source" and we may be reformed not in the physical realm, but in God's "mind:" a perfect place not subject to natural laws and relationships, but a place of equilibrium where everything that exists does so exactly as God wills. There would be no entropy nor death because technically, we will be but figments of His imagination.

It makes more sense than perhaps any man wants to believe. If that is the reality, then Jesus Christ truly is the way and the light -- the only means through which we may enter the kingdom of Heaven... God's "mind."

Of course, that's still my belief, and over the course of my life I wish to revise and refine it into something that makes sense not only to me, but to everyone; I don't want to prove that God exists, I only want to suggest that His existence is more plausible and scientific than we've been able to understand or comprehend so far.

Beyond that, I've refined my argument on this subject: science studies what is, religion studies would could be, and philosophy bridges the gap between the two.

Why are you taking a concept like energy and lumping god onto it? That is hijacking something we already have a description for and adding on something completely vague to it. Why are you doing that? Why are you so insistent to put god in there somewhere or to define it a certain way? I can honestly tell you that you really don't believe god is energy. The reason I can say this, is because you go on to add in additional stuff. Which means you are calling god energy and then that energy has other properties, but in reality energy does not have those other properties. So which is it? You can't just hijack a term and call it god because YOU want there to be a god and this is your clever way to slip it into the picture and then follow that up with more unsupportable baggage.

Energy is energy and testable in reality.
God is a made up concept without any basis in reality.

You can't have both because they contradict each other.

Energy does not decide to do what it does. Energy does not play favorites or pick or choose what it wants to do and when. Energy does not create something for a purpose or dispel itself for any motivation. More than likely energy is not the cause of the universe but instead it is more likely a byproduct of the universe coming into being. Therefore if god were energy then it would be an after thought of the formation of the universe and not a preformed static energy. However god is actually a post concept anyways so that part is already in line with reality. Humans create god and gods because they simply can not cope with their reality.

Be wary your convictions; they will dull you.

The only thing I have to say is this: about energy "choosing" against its nature, I'm likely mistaken. That is something beyond measure and therefore untestable; the idea was derived from a video I'd watched about the double-slit experiment.

Other than that, I've not changed the properties nor function of energy in the slightest. You speculate that it's "more than likely" energy is a byproduct of the universe, whereas I agree wholeheartedly that it is.

You misinterpret the true implications of my views. I'm too tired to try and explain further at this point, but I'm quite sure you're uninterested either way.

On that, good night and thanks for responding.

PS: I maintain that I know nothing -- everything is speculation, including many radical scientific theories... and due to lack of concrete evidence, the truth of it all is not as-of-yet discernible. We can make but educated guesses. I'm not going to argue that with you. My ideas are radical and that's the point, but everything I learn about the way things work and how everything formed only serves to strengthen my arguments.

If you think I'm crazy and only get angered by what I have to say, please don't respond.