yguy

Yes.

eh

Well in that case, I must answer no, I do not suppose the world is like that. That is the only honest answer I can give, since I haven't seen the slightest evidence for such an idea.

But hey, we wouldn't need a theory of quantum gravity with God as an explanation. Hell, we can even explain the 4 fundemental forces in one neat package. The strong nuclear force is caused by the Easter Bunny, the weak nuclear is caused by the Tooth Fairy, electromagnetism by Santa Claus, and gravity is the work of God. Take that, string theorists!

Corona688

What's so trivializing about science? The fact that reality doesn't seem to care if anyone believes in your deity or not? Like many including me have said, science does NOT discount god. It merely shows him to be unnecessary for many things.

yguy

Not what I said, of course. Just on the off chance you have any desire to understand what I meant, you can take a look at that sophmoric strawman by eh in the post preceeding yours.

But it does no such thing. In many cases, it has destroyed the prejudices of religious zealots, no doubt; but that isn't what we're discussing.

Peter Soderqvist

Soderqvist1: This is not truth!
Amit Goswami is a professor of Physics at the Universe of Oregon, and his specialty is the measurement problem in Quantum physics, I don't say that Goswami 's way of reasoning is absolute truth, but I am definitely saying that, that he has enough evidence in order to put materialism in doubt!

Scientific Proof of the Existence of God An Interview with Amit Goswami
http://www.twm.co.nz/goswintro.htm

Consciousness and Quantum Measurement by Amit Goswami
The interpretational difficulties of quantum mechanics can be solved with the hypothesis (von Neumann, 1955; Wigner, 1962) that consciousness collapses the quantum wave function. The paradoxes raised against this hypothesis have now all been satisfactorily solved (Bass, 1971; Blood, 1993; Goswami, 1989, 1993; Stapp, 1993). There is, however, one question that continues to be raised: Is consciousness absolutely necessary for interpreting quantum mechanics? Can we find other alternatives to collapse and consciousness as the collapser?

Some of these alternatives propose to modify quantum mechanics in a major way (for example, nonlinear theories); others are not philosophically satisfactory (for example, decoherence theories); still others invoke other questionable physical theories in order to make sense of quantum mechanics (Cramers, 19; Penrose, 1994). But there are two theories, one due to David Bohm (19), and the other called the many worlds theory (Everett, 1957), that still attract a lot of adherents.

In this short paper, we will argue that Bohm’s theory is better interpreted with collapse of the wave function (and therefore, consciousness brought into the arena). As for the many worlds theory, even the latest versions of this theory requires special treatment of the conscious observer in order to make sense, and is thus a dualist theory (readers can verify this following the same general argument as Squires (1987)). Some final comments are also made about the implication of this reinterpretation for Bohm’s philosophy of implicate and explicate order.
http://www.swcp.com/~hswift/swc/Summ...oswami9901.htm

echidna

Although at the same time you'd have to admit that Science has certainly shrunken God's realm over the past few centuries.

With the exception of fundie nutters, mainstream rationalism is now aware that God does not dictate the weather on a daily whim, that He does not interventionally dictate who is healed and who dies from illness or who wins a war. For each of these, anyone with an ounce of common sense would rather carry an umbrella, take their medicine and buy bigger tanks, than to ever bother investing in prayer.

Yes I'm agnostic, but Science has certainy pushed any possibility of a God further and further back into the aetherial.

VonEvilstein

What, exactly, was I ridiculing there? I was merely pointing out that, if divine beings are actually doing all this stuff, they're doing it in such a way as to not be observable at all - the prime characteristic of the IPU (apart from its pinkness). I did not intend to ridicule anything here, and I do not think that I did.

yguy

I didn't say you did; I merely pointed out the potential for it based on your mention of IPU. eh was kind enough to prove me correct on that point with that pathetic strawman of his.

eh

What strawman? Using Santa to explain EM is no more silly than invoking magical Gods to explain other forces.

yguy

No, it has merely shrunken the degree to which God is perceived as the ultimate cause of everything, by way of discrediting many religionists' misconceptions.

Rationalism is not aware of any such thing, because no such thing has ever been demonstrated. Ever.

I'm not into prayer myself, but it's a red herring anyway. The human proclivity to misuse prayer hardly mitigates against God's influence in natural phenomena.

Only in the minds of worshippers at the altar of empiricism.