hinduwoman

Look, this is nothing more than the old ignorance theory. This is so majestic and as yet unexplained, and so it must be God.
So what? All cultures had myths about the rainbow, but have you recently heard anyone start a new one or explain it in terms of the old myths?

High Ideologue

I never said this 'must be God'.

joedad

Agnosticism can be more broadly applied, at least as I see it, as all agnosticism requires some knowledge.

Are you agnostic, for example, about the possibility that if you jumped from a two thousand foot precipice or out of an airplane, and landed on rocks, that you would survive uninjured?

To be more dramatic, are you agnostic about the possibility that if you fired a loaded gun into your temple, that the bullet would pass through without causing injury or death? Pretty graphic, but I'm trying to make a point.

If you are not agnostic about these things, and I presume you are not, why be agnostic about the god concept? Gods make rainbows and thunderbolts depending upon one's level of knowledge, so why couldn't a god cause you to forego injury just as well?

Where do you draw the line? Why do you draw the line where you do?

(Rhetorical questions, no reply necessary)

joe

Philosoft

You cannot be serious. You do not even live by this maxim, I assure you.

Why kid oneself? Why not seek truth instead?

Opera Nut

There are lots of things we cannot observe yet, and we therefore don't know about. There are limits to our perception and telescopes, but our technology gets better all the time.
Einstein turned Newtonian physics on its head.
Newtonian physics is what we see in the everyday world. We don't see Relativity happening at the level of our normal existence, but that doesn't mean relativity is not true near the speed of light. Relativity has been proven by the bending of gravity waves in space.

The Hubble telescope is letting us see lots of stuff that physicists cannot explain yet. But someday it will be understood.
THings we cannot see are still there. Which has nothing to do with the existence of a god or gods.

I live with a former nuclear physicist who reconciled gravity with Einstein's unified field theory. Einstein never solved this problem but my friend did, and worked out all the math to fit gravity in it. He never pubished it because of the fear of criticism & his fundie physics dept faculty advisors who thought black holes did not exist in1969.

He thought he was supposed to be the successor to Einstein, and he has done it.
Nobody knows about it but me.
I shit you not.

But anyway, why are you trying to connnect perception or scientific theory with god? No connection I can see.
Dark matter? Just another piece of the puzzle. No implications there of God, or conclusions there is a god due to the structure of the natural world. I don't bite the watchmaker theory, and I don't think anybody else here will bite either.
Just because we have DNA and many forms of organization does not imply a creator.

Stephen T-B

Have to say, High Ideologue, I don’t want to read a book to find out what “a divine eternal essence to self and world,” is, and primarily because an essence is the product of something, not to something. And if it were possible for Essence of World to be obtained I imagine it would be a thick chemical soup.
You, of course, are talking about something without physical constituents whose existence does not impinge upon us in any measurable way or we’d know about it. Like we know about dark matter and dark energy. We might not know what they are, but our scientists deduce their existence because they have a measurable effect.
The essence you speak of might or might not exist, and if it does, so what?
You propose a hypothesis whose only function is to provide you with something to write about.

Asha'man

Technically, science cannot directly detect anything. Everything is detected by its influence on the universe. If you take a picture of a wall, you are really measuring the indirect effect of bouncing photons on a light sensitive material. When you walk into a wall, you are measuring the electromagnetic repulsion effect of hoards of electron clouds.

Now, I admit that dark matter and dark energy seem to have fewer interactions with the universe than we are used to. And that having fewer interactions might lead us to miss those interactions for a time. But those interactions exist, and we see them now, so that is why dark matter and dark energy are considered to exist, even if we haven’t fully characterized them yet.

I have an invisible fire-breathing dragon in my garage, but it does not interact with the universe in any way that is detectable by science. Therefore, almost by definition, I do not have an invisible fire-breathing dragon in my garage.

Perchance

Hello High Idealogue,

Can I ask you a few questions?

1) If you feel that metaphysical naturalism (the belief in a totally natural universe, without any supernature involved) cannot possibly be all there is, why not? Is it because of a need for emotional satisfaction, or do you truly think there's evidence pointing to the supernatural?

2) Why are myth and fantasy necessary to survival? I love fantasy, it's all I read, but that doesn't mean I need to believe in fantasy outside fantasy novels. If I hadn't found fantasy, or if it didn't exist, I don't think I would commit suicide. I would be reading some other genre of novels instead. I can divide emotional satisfaction I get from something I know isn't real from what exists around me in the natural world, satisfying or not. Why does what exists in entertainment need to be applied to the real world?

-Perchance.

Asha'man

(I had another thought while in the shower….)

The real difference between the claims of dark matter and the soul is simple: evidence.

Do you know how the idea of dark matter arose? Some astronomers were measuring the orbital velocity of individual stars within a galaxy. They ran the math for orbital motion, and it wasn’t what they expected. Some bright guy spoke up: “Hey, it’s almost like there is more mass in this galaxy than we thought, and it looks like it is orbiting out here, in the dark area surrounding the galaxy.” So, they came up with the idea of dark matter.

Dark matter is an explanation for an observation. Since the observation is real, and the explanation plausible, I accept it.

The “divine eternal essence to self” is an explanation that has no supporting evidence. None, zilch, nada. Some guy came up with a wild story, but nobody has been able to come up with a single reliable observation that supports it. This is not an explanation for an observation, it explains nothing and has no supporting observations. Therefore, I reject it.

Now, if someone had come along and said they love cupcakes, and the dark matter surrounding galaxies must be (chocolate) cupcakes, I would probably reject that too. It may provide an explanation, it may make people happy, and may even be vaguely possible, but there just isn’t any supporting evidence that would make that conclusion rational.

Secular Pinoy

I think HI's argument boils down to a divine presence-of-the-gaps. He hides this "thing" to the crevasses of human knowledge, thereby evading current attempts to disprove it. But everyday the gaps are shrinking. So what was put inside the gap turns out to be merely a human construct, created to temporarily fill in the gaps. We will not fill up the crevasses entirely, but the trend does allow us to provisionally conclude that the gap-filler is man-made and does not refer to an independent entity.