by sabastious 140 Replies latest jw friends
Tammy: But how was the spiritual conceived out of the physical?
Although I have not experienced a personal god that made man in his own image, that does not mean I have no interest in spirituality; the idea that what is manifest throughout the universe comes from an underlying cause that is not visible to humans.
Well the Atheist who baked me this cake was very imaginative creating this unknown creature... what do you say about that!
Although I have not experienced a personal god that made man in his own image, that does not mean I have no interest in spirituality; the idea that what is manifest throughout the universe comes from an underlying cause that is not visible to humans.
I know that, Trevor. I do understand that believing in or even just having interest in the spiritual (in any sense) does not necessarily lead a person to "God".
Peace to you,
Tammy
Spaghetti cupcakes, CJ? LOL.
Tammy, I still don't understand how the "spirit realm" presented by the Bible writers is anything more than a tweaking of things with which they were already familiar. Just take men, winged creatures, kings, thrones, chariots, animals, etc... throw in some mystery and invisibility, because they couldn't point to an observable source and, voila, you have the spirit realm. Base that realm on a hierarchy, which also was also not new to man.
That also gave them a comprehensive answer to the question: "Where did Thag's personality go when that wooly mammoth sat on him?"
"It must've floated out, invisible like breath, leaving his body behind... on to a better place that we cannot see."
SBC - Could be just a more extensive tweaking. I'm mulling it over. I usually think about a new idea for more than an hour or so ;)
"Where did Thag's personality go when that wooly mammoth sat on him?"
"It must've floated out, invisible like breath, leaving his body behind... on to a better place that we cannot see."
Cute. But that kind of connection couldn't be so simply made, imo. First, why would they even be concerned with Thag's personality, or think that it is not tied up with his physical body? Why would they even think that he had more than just his physical body, or that there was someplace else for it to go, even if he did believe in gods?
Tammy
"Atheists less imaginative about the unknown??"
Seriously???
I'm approaching this from the angle of scientific curiosity, which is constantly seeking out the answers to the "unknown"...
"What are black holes?"
"Does one exist at the heart of the Milky Way?'
"Does liquid water exist on Mars?"
"Does it support microbial life?"
"If we find evidence of microbial life on Mars, will it be similar to primitive bacteria on earth?"
And so on...
Mind you, we don't make up flying spirit creatures or pink unicorns to explain things...
But it takes a lot of unacknowledged imagination to test out the different ideas that can lead to forward leaps in scientific knowledge.
Zid
I realize you aren't a theist, Sab, and I'm not trying to make waves but the OP question, first, depends on a faulty generalization and, whether I answer yes or no, the title is misleading. It assigns too much weight to a single question: Does John Doe believe in a God or Gods in the standard sense of the term?
That some lack faith in a deity or deities does not preclude their ability to imagine "the unknown" outside of that single subject.
Does your lack of belief in unicorns mean that you have less overall imagination than someone who sincerely believes in them? No. That is just one of an infinite number of possible beliefs that you don't share.
Unimaginative atheists, no doubt, exist. But to me, a lack of imagination is NOT a symptom of atheism, nor is atheism a symptom of a lack of imagination. It is just as arbitrary to say that unimaginative people exist.
Hasty generalizations, while giving the appearance of "efficiency", often lead to wrong conclusions.
I guess I have found atheists to be generally welcoming, but they seem frightened by "left field thinking." But as long as you keep yourself grounded and within reality we can still dabble within the world of the unexplained without going overboard.
I can't help but feel like your question is directed toward those who value of the scientific method over clinging to unsubstantiated wishful thinking, and are atheists because of that fact. (At the risk of generalizing, I think it's safe to say many scientists who have made important discoveries were/are atheists. Not all but many.)
So that raises the question, does methodical, consistent scrutiny limit imagination? The article below asserts that science is imagination.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/04/06/science-is-imagination/
| "The mind that’s afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never create the brilliantly original…" | |
| –David Brin, Brightness Reef | |
People don’t understand science.
And I don’t mean that your average person doesn’t understand how relativity works, or quantum mechanics, or biochemistry. Like any advanced study, it’s hard to understand them, and it takes a lifetime of work to become familiar with them.
No, what I mean is that people don’t understand the process of science. How a scientist goes from a list of observations and perhaps a handful of equations to understanding. To knowing.
And that’s a shame, because it’s a beautiful thing. It’s not mechanical, not wholly logical, and not plodding down a narrow path of rules and laws.
But it appears to me that this is how Douglas Todd, author of an article in the Vancouver Sun called ‘Scientism’ infects Darwinian debates: An unflinching belief that science can explain everything about evolution becomes its own ideology, thinks of science. He likens it to religion, an unflinching belief that science can explain everything. He calls this — as many have before him — scientisim:
Scientism is the belief that the sciences have no boundaries and will, in the end, be able to explain everything in the universe. Scientism can, like religious literalism, become its own ideology.
[...]
Those who unknowingly fall into the trap of scientism act as if hard science is the only way of knowing reality. If something can’t be “proved” through the scientific method, through observable and measurable evidence, they say it’s irrelevant.
Scientism is terribly limiting of human understanding. It leaves little or no place for the insights of the arts, philosophy, psychology, literature, mythology, dreams, music, the emotions or spirituality.
Right from the gate he’s using a strawman argument. There are many things science can’t explain currently, and no real scientist brushes those fields off as "irrelevant". And he’s wrong in saying that science leaves no room for all those other studies; it’s our study of human evolution that bring fantastic insight into why we have art, dreams, and mythology in the first place. What a strange notion, that science plays no role in those fields or our understanding of them!
But it’s in his understanding of science where Todd goes completely off course. What he says about science is exactly backwards, and it seems to me that he doesn’t understand the process of science, of how it’s done by real scientists in real life.
First off, there is no such thing as scientism. What he is describing is simply science, because science by its very nature is an attempt to explain all things using natural processes. And he seems to think science has no imagination.
That’s insane. Without imagination, all we can do is categorize the world. Assigning names and numbers, statistics and categories. And while that sort of thing is important in the scientific process, it’s not science itself. Without imagination, science is a dictionary.
And in fact the opposite of what Todd is saying is true. It takes no imagination at all to insert a supernatural explanation in some spot where you don’t understand the process. It’s all too easy to say "the bacterium flagellum could not have evolved," or "The Big Bang theory doesn’t explain why the Universe is homogeneous everywhere," and therefore "God did it." But it takes imagination, soaring, incredible, wonderful imagination, to look beyond the limitations of what’s currently known, and see what could possibly be… and even more imagination to make sure this venturing beyond current understanding still stays within the bound of reason and known rules of science.
You can always insert magic or belief or some supernatural power, but in the end that is a trap. Because someone else who is more imaginative than you will see the actual steps, the process reality made, and then you are left with an ever-narrowing amount of supernatural room in which to wiggle. And once that gap starts to narrow, the squeeze is inevitable. Your explanation will be forced to fill zero volume, and you’re done. Your explanation will be shown to be wrong for everyone to see, and your only recourse will be to abandon it, far too late to save your credibility.
Or to run for the Texas State Board of Education. But that’s certainly not science.
It took a vast leap of imagination for Max Planck to think of gas molecules in the Sun to behave like little springs, oscillating away, able to eject only specific colors of light. It took a leap of imagination for Alan Guth to think that the Big Bang theory wasn’t wrong, but incomplete, and to add inflation to explain why the Universe looks so smooth. It took Darwin’s breadth of imagination to correlate the vast amount of data he collected, and see that it was the unthinking mind of nature that forced species to adapt or die.
It’s all too easy to poopoo science, and to say that scientists are black and white automatons who go through the motions of the scientific method, rejecting anything with sparkle or color or surprise. But that conclusion itself lacks imagination. Science is full of wonder, of surprise, of leaps of imagination. If it were anything else, we wouldn’t have probes orbiting other worlds, we wouldn’t have vaccinations capable of wiping out scourges like smallpox, we wouldn’t have digital cameras, the Internet, ever-faster computers, cars, planes, televisions. We wouldn’t be able to feed ourselves, support our population, or look ahead to see where our decisions are taking us… and to see if these decisions are the right ones, and what to do to make them better.
Without imagination, even after all these centuries, we’d have learned nothing.
Science is imagination.
Consider this: What would happen if you spoke to a bunch of geocentric astronomers in the middle ages, and told them that, instead of a teapotbetween earth and mars, there is a huge planet between mars and venus.
I would first point out that a teapot between earth and mars doesn't in any way correlate to a planet between mars and venus. There very well could be a teapot between earth and mars and that has nothing to do with earth being between mars and venus.
And, of course, by "between", I presume you actually mean the orbits of earth, mars and venus since, due to their orbits, they are very rarely all aligned along the planetary plane.
And then I would point out that telescopes didn't exist in the middle ages, having been invented around 1608, the middle ages ending around the mid 1400's. And then I would point that that when they did exist, they weren't powerful enough to do what you were asking.
Likewise, the atheist who says "I see no proof of God, he must not exist" does see proof of God's existence all around him. He just doesn't realize it, because his worldview prohibits him.
Likewise, a faulty conclusion drawn from a faulty premise, bad information and a lack of historical context is faulty. Of course there ARE atheist who say that, but, like most things about most people, they fall along a gradient rather than into a black or white position. Once you realize that, you will realize that, even if your premise is correct (and you really need to work on that), drawing conclusion based on faulty black/white logic when that doesn't really apply to people will lead to a faulty conclusion.
Tammy: yeap... that was my Birthday Cake
