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from the Fee-Fie-Fou-Fhum-Fideism-Falafel dept.
Commentary at Salon!
Should you believe in a God? Not according to most academic philosophers. A comprehensive survey revealed that only about 14 percent of English speaking professional philosophers are theists. As for what little religious belief remains among their colleagues, most professional philosophers regard it as a strange aberration among otherwise intelligent people. Among scientists the situation is much the same. Surveys of the members of the National Academy of Sciences, composed of the most prestigious scientists in the world, show that religious belief among them is practically nonexistent, about 7 percent.
[...] Now nothing definitely follows about the truth of a belief from what the majority of philosophers or scientists think. But such facts might cause believers discomfort. There has been a dramatic change in the last few centuries in the proportion of believers among the highly educated in the Western world. In the European Middle Ages belief in a God was ubiquitous, while today it is rare among the intelligentsia. This change occurred primarily because of the rise of modern science and a consensus among philosophers that arguments for the existence of gods, souls, afterlife and the like were unconvincing. Still, despite the view of professional philosophers and world-class scientists, religious beliefs have a universal appeal. What explains this?
[...] First, if you defend such beliefs by claiming that you have a right to your opinion, however unsupported by evidence it might be, you are referring to a political or legal right, not an epistemic one. You may have a legal right to say whatever you want, but you have epistemic justification only if there are good reasons and evidence to support your claim. If someone makes a claim without concern for reasons and evidence, we should conclude that they simply don't care about what's true. We shouldn't conclude that their beliefs are true because they are fervently held.
Another problem is that fideism—basing one's beliefs exclusively on faith—makes belief arbitrary, leaving no way to distinguish one religious belief from another. Fideism allows no reason to favor your preferred beliefs or superstitions over others. If I must accept your beliefs without evidence, then you must accept mine, no matter what absurdity I believe in. But is belief without reason and evidence worthy of rational beings? Doesn't it perpetuate the cycle of superstition and ignorance that has historically enslaved us? I agree with W.K. Clifford. "It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." Why? Because your beliefs affect other people, and your false beliefs may harm them.
I am checking to see what the Church of the Flying Spagetti Monster has to say about all this.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday January 21 2019, @02:19PM (7 children)
Come on, don't be obtuse. That's a possible explanation, however with a single miraculous occurrence, no scientist will ever be sure it's the only explanation or the correct one.
Science does not deal with one-off happenings, it can't - there must be a pattern of occurrences for science to be able to act.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by stormreaver on Monday January 21 2019, @09:54PM (6 children)
For one-off events that are significant, scientists will make note of what they can for future reference. Given the eternally diminishing domain of unexplained phenomena, connections will eventually be made until enough dots are connected to form a hypothesis, which will then lead to a theory.
The one thing I can say with absolute certainty is that those dots will have absolutely no supernatural, godly component to them. It's not being obtuse. It's paying attention to history, and extrapolating logically.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday January 21 2019, @10:31PM (5 children)
Rrrright. Have to admire your optimism in regards to 'the memory of science'.
The recall phase, then giving credence to what was recorded are two things I don't trust will happen at centuries scale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday January 22 2019, @12:44AM (4 children)
I think they're talking about about one-off events witnessed by multiple scientists. If it's really something that strange and only one scientist witnesses it, the most likely explanation is almost certainly that they were hallucinating or that their memory of the event deteriorated afterwards. If they took photos or recorded other data, in the case of the biggest miracles, it's likely more probable that they falsified the evidence themselves and then lost their memories of doing so (or did it during sleep, for example) than anything more exotic being the cause. The world population's big enough that one in a billion coincidences will happen quite a lot over the decades and centuries.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 22 2019, @12:59AM (1 child)
This is terribly un-charitable to the scientists who actually do witness bizarre one-off (aka very low odds) events.
In my life, I have experienced several things - coincidences and strange events - that would seem to require better-than-lottery-winning odds to occur. Unfortunately, none of them involved lottery winning levels of wealth acquisition - though more than one seems to have preserved my health and well-being.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday January 22 2019, @01:36AM
I was trying to give just one example of the sort of mundane, yet fairly improbable explanation that can explain something that otherwise seems to be a supernatural miracle. There could be many other explanations, so no offense to the scientists. ;) It's the whole "After eliminating the impossible, whatever is left, however improbable...". I've noticed it also seems to be human nature to dismiss explanations that are seen as dull, negative or distasteful as being less probable than they really are. Most people suck at estimating, let alone understanding, probabilities.
Genuinely glad to hear chance has been working out in your favor.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Tuesday January 22 2019, @01:49AM (1 child)
One in a billion probability is very high in terms of statistical mechanics/thermodynamics.
The probability of a shattered cup to recompose itself from pieces and jump back from the floor to the table, while is theoretically permitted by the laws of physics, has a probability many 10hundreds lower than the 1/1024.
- 1024 - estimation of the number of atoms in the cup.
- "10hundreds lower" - assume each isolated atom can take 100 values for position and 100 values for impulse , the "configuration space" of each of the atoms in isolation would be 104. However, the atoms aren't isolated, only considering interactions with 2-8 atoms in the neighborhood raises the dimension of the configuration space for all the atoms in the broken cup to a value no human mind is able to grasp.
To put the things in perspective - the age of universe is 4.317 seconds. The atoms in a solid vibrate at 1013 Hz range, so the age of Universe expressed is a paltry 4.330 periods of atom vibration in a solid.
I'm afraid that even if one available microstate would be "explored" at every vibration (see the ergodic hypothesis [wikipedia.org]) you'll need to wait zillions of Universe ages to have a non-negligible probability of seeing "the miracle of the shattered cup recomposing itself from pieces and jumping back on the table".
Even if the entire population of Earth would swear they saw that miracle, the probability of the entire population of Earth being delusional is still higher than the miracle above.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday January 22 2019, @02:10AM
Yes that was more or less my point. When you need an explanation for an apparently supernatural miracle (something that at face value is for, all practical purposes, pretty much impossible), you can start to consider some seriously wacky coincidences to explain it that are still mundane and still manage to be more probable than the suggested supernatural event itself.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?