the mechanism of memetics is natural selection. whatever information is beneficial to a culture gets passed on. some information changes and most of those changes don't help much but some are vast improvements. it is a model of the human brain that is has pretty well accepted premises (information is passed on, it changes occasionally, and the best form of information tends to "succeed"). and uses the same logical continuity as evolution does.

i agree completely, and the mechanistic explanation of the universe has been profoundly successful. the mechanistic theory as you seem to call it does a great job, so to quote Laplace when asked about where god fit in his theory of the cosmos, "I have no need for that hypothesis."

The logical continuity of evolution is the physical evidence left by DNA. For these sorts of models, there is no evidence. This is much like the thinking of evolutionary psychology. You never verify that the mechanism is the actually in play -- it's merely assumed to be the right mechanism.

Successful at doing what?

Great job at what?

There is no need for that hypothesis to accomplish what?

it follows evolution in the broader sense that there is replication, mutation and variable success. this exists outside of biology and has been modeled in robotics, where code goes through "generations" in order to accomplish a task and becomes better at its task, whatever that may be. there is a great video that is in the SMP video thread i can find if you want showing evolution occurring in a computer simulation where simple geometric shapes are given a task and evolve to perform them.

i thought it was implied but does a great job of explaining the interactions of the universe.

I read that memetics is much more accepted on the Internet and by computer techie types than in mainstream science. It has to do with memetics being similar to programming somehow.

But now how do these models have any "predictive power"? (I've seen the videos. They're very clunky shapes doing things somewhat awkwardly.)

I disagree.

I think this is a critical distinction. Whether you call it "God" or "gravity" what you get with the mechanistic view of the universe is a series of descriptions, not explanations.

they are explanations, they aren't completely reduced yet but they are explanations. it is an explanation in the sense that you can ask "why do massive bodies attract each other" and i can say because of the law of gravity, it explains it and lets you make predictions. gravity is a hard case because it is so weak that our current technology just isn't powerful enough to detect a graviton should it exist. with the other forces though we have gotten much better explanations because he have found elementary particles which make or explanation that much more complete than they used to be. our mechanistic view has done really well at predicting particles and bringing about new, more exact laws of the universe. God has never contributed to finding new laws of the universe to my knowledge.

edit: and as for the predictive power, the prediction would be that this code based on evolutionary algorithm would produce increasingly fit designs over enough time. this could be falsified had the designs simply randomly flopped around and never came any closer to accomplishing the task they had been given.

Let's rephrase that:

This has just as much "power" as your explanation. You've just applied a different label. This can go on with any model. I don't think your case for "explaining" instead of "describing" is very strong.

Again: You're using a construct which is insufficiently robust to even encounter God, so of course you're not going to see any contributions from God.

yes, but the laws of gravity combined with other laws we've found have lead to us knowing deeper laws. the current laws give us a means of finding new laws where saying "bodies attract because god wants them to" in all likelihood would never lead to a deeper understanding.

and if you want to say that god is whatever determines the laws of physics i am totally okay with that, but that is a far far cry from any religion and is a god of the gaps.

edit: and before you ask about it, by deeper understanding i mean underlying laws that lead to the simpler ones we observe in the sense of Einstein's relativity compared to newtonian mechanics.

You seem to have missed the point. It doesn't matter *what* label you ascribe to the phenomenon. If you call it "gravity" and I call it "God" but yet we both agree that the description of the phenomenon is the same (ie, the same underlying mathematical model), neither model is less sufficient than the other in terms of leading to "deeper understanding" (even in your definition). You talk about it as if *because* you've labeled it "gravity" you have a better chance of making sense of it. I find this line of reasoning to be empty.

I've never found the whole "god of the gaps" argument more or less compelling that "science of the gaps." That you ascribe all phenomena to "natural laws/physical laws" and I ascribe them to "God" gives neither one of us an advantage over the other.

You're still failing to distinguish "describing" from "explaining."

yes, it doesn't matter the label, as long as the label doesn't cause you to stop further questioning. when you label something god it has a tendency to make you stop asking questions. you are just getting in to arbitrary semantics.

we all know that when the vast majority of people have said "god did it" they meant some active being controlled the outcome of the event. if you want to dispute this feel free but this seems like what has clearly been meant historically. here is the time line i laid out in my FAQ

150AD-Ptolemy
The geocentric universe is the leading philosophy and to Ptolemy the motion of the planets were tremendously perplexing. in the geocentric model the planets have erratic orbits where they are looping back and forth due to our perspective on earth. he explained that the gods must be controlling these and that he sees Zeus' hand at work.

1615-Galileo
Galileo pioneered the heliocentric universe, the sun at the center of everything. he has a famous quote, "the bible tells us how to go to heaven and not how the heavens go".

1687-Newton
Newton effectively invented physics as we know it, with mathematical models and well defined laws. Newton, now with the tools of gravitation and such, can now explain the motions of objects with no reference to god. it is all physical law and he knew how it works. God no longer was needed to explain the motions of the planets. This goes until he realizes that once you talk about his physical model of reality that if he applies his law of gravitation to the entire solar system he can't explain how the solar system is stable. his model just becomes to complicated explain how the solar system is stable. He says that mere mechanical causes cannot account for such complexity, the hand of god must stabilize the solar system

1696-Huygens
He was the first to really explore the idea of life in places other than earth. gravity is well known at this point and the orbits and all that is old hat. nowhere in his writings on physics is there reference to god, but once he gets to biology he invokes god, for that is the only way he can see how life is different than non-life.

1799-Laplace
Writes the most comprehensive work on celestial mechanics that uses all the available math at the time which is now more fully developed than what newton had and can calculate all those things that baffled Newton. Newton had access to all the math necessary, he just never proceeded far enough with it but was convinced that God was the answer and never went further. a 100 year gap in knowledge because it took someone who could ignore Newton's hypothesis that god manages the solar system.

1859-Darwin
This is the year Charles Darwin published the origin of species, a comprehensive text on the nature of how life evolves. he did not have the stumbling block Huygens had and managed to examine life in a new way and see how it clearly evolved. Darwin didn't really have any special technology or anything, he just mostly made observations anyone could make. he had the advantage of a trip to the Galapagos which was a great demonstration of evolution but still anyone could have come to the conclusions he did if they had the right idea. Darwin was the first to look past the idea that all of life was designed as is and saw it for what it was, something Huygens couldn't do.

this is what happens when you say "god did it", you stop asking questions further because you think you have it figured out. when you use laws as description then it is easier to say "this might be right but it could change".

the god of the gaps thing comes from the fact that things once explained as gods doing keep getting explained conclusively by science but not the other way around. "science of the gaps" is really dumb because science has a great track record of accurately describing and making predictions about the universe whereas the god of the gaps never does.

edit: and you are the one making the distinction between explanation and description, why don't you distinguish the two. you can't say the two are different then ask me to distinguish between the two...

I think you misrepresent history with that statement. It's not as if the exploration of ideas came to a screeching halt anywhere in history because of attributing something to God. In fact, the modern university system is FOUNDED UPON a worldview that is the exploration of God's world. All of the major academic institutions leading into the enlightenment were theistically-minded people doing exactly the opposite of what you claim that they were doing.

The semantics here are not arbitrary. It represents something an a priori attitude you bring to the table, not a conclusion based on what is discovered at the table.

Once again, the bolded claim is false.

Furthermore, there are many areas in science where the laws are the description and the scientists think they've "figured it out." Look at how much trouble it was when I suggested that the sciences don't all reduce to physics. Even when I got the scientists to admit it hasn't been proven (minus Tom), the scientists continued to assert the position anyway. It's merely an assumption that has been put on the system (and a non-necessary assumption at that). This is why I see the equivalence between "God did it" and "science did it."

Science as we know it today isn't robust enough to consider God, so of course it's going to be this way! I've made this statement a bunch of times, but you don't seem to be understanding it. You admit that "the mechanistic understanding of the universe is robust enough to even consider 'God'" yet you the fact that this worldview is somehow making headway in proving something "against" God. Once you've got yourself in a worldview where you've assumed away God, then OF COURSE you're not going to find God doing anything.

See the previous paragraph. You're working within a specific framework that has already rejected God's ability to take any role, so of course you're not going to find anything pertaining to God. The structure of this argument is incredibly weak and unconvincing.

Here are the original statements:

Describing means giving an answer to "What's going on?" Explaining means giving an answer to "Why is it happening?"

Let's take gravity as an example. Everyone has known gravity has existed throughout history. They didn't necessarily use that word to describe it, but they understood phenomenologically that things fell. It wasn't until Newton came along and quantitatively DESCRIBED gravity that people started to make progress in understanding the mechanism of gravity. However, the inverse square law took no steps towards EXPLAINING gravity, it simply gave a more precise DESCRIPTION of it.

We still don't really have an EXPLANATION of gravity. It simply is, and we're trying our best to DESCRIBE it as accurately as possible. Even if you take Einstein's model of gravity as curvature in spacetime, you don't get an EXPLANATION. Why does spacetime curve in the presence of massive objects? It just does. Once you accept that it does, then we can go on to DESCRIBE the consequences.

In general, the mechanistic worldview DESCRIBES things, not EXPLAINS them. Once you've defined a mechanism, you can go on to DESCRIBE it in further and further detail, or discover that it doesn't work, or whatever, but you are never in a position to EXPLAIN it. It simply is.

I wanted to approach this point separately:

I find it intellectual disingenuous that you assert under Laplace that uses math that was "now more fully developed than what newton had" but at the same time you argue that "Newton had access to all the math necessary." You try to make it sound as if the 100 years of intellectual maturation in the mathematical community had nothing at all to do with Laplace's ability to describe the solar system mathemtically, and that the primary obstacle was Newton's hypothesis that God manages the solar system. It reeks of revisionist history, and I challenge you to produce evidence that your description of these events are as you claim them to be.

i'll try to answer everything in one post but if i miss some things forgive me.

first, the god did it has historically been a stopping point. no it doesn't bring a halt to science, but it does stop the person on the track from going further. that is what the timeline is about, that scientists who had the tools at their hands didn't proceed to the conclusions they had the knowledge to make because they assumed god did it. once a scientist comes to the limits of his knowledge and decides god did it, they tend to stop investigating. it takes someone else who isn't burdened by this assumption to take it further.

my view doesn't take into account god not because i assume it doesn't exist but because i haven't need had cause to incorporate that assumption. it is ockham's razor, if i can get a full explanation without an assumption why should i have that assumption? again i am okay with the possibility of a god that set the laws as they are and let it all go, it is as good an explanation as any as to why the laws are how we are. while i don't believe it is true i am open to it, though it leads to a very vague description of what god as. as of now i haven't seen need to invoke god with regard to any mechanism in the universe, i'd rather say i don't know because historically the limits of our knowledge always get broken down.

i think we have a definitional disagreement with definitions with regard to explain/describe. i believe you can explain something with something you haven't yet explained. i do believe Einstein's relativity explains gravity in the sense that it explains how curvature of space-time is influenced by massive bodies. i don't believe it is a full explanation but i believe it is more complete than prior explanations. though Einstein's explanation leaves another question it does explain an unanswered one. the idea is to get closer and closer to whatever the fundamental laws are.

regardless of all this, even if i do allow god, then i need to explain that, so it has exactly the same explaining power of any other theory. now that i think about it i realize that your premise is flawed because you assume that if god exists, it explains something. by your definition it doesn't, because in the examples i gave where one unexplained questions was answered with another you called that describing, which means god is in exactly the same situation, you need to explain that or else it is just a description.

with regard to the Laplace stuff as i don't know a ton about the history of math i'll have to refer you to the talk where i got that info. in the FAQ thread i cited it but i guess i forgot it here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vrpPPV_yPY

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/t...1eef86868908||
lecture 2 i think of this series is very related to this discussion if you want to watch it.

I watched the first part of the video, but I didn't have time to watch the whole thing. I get a strong sense of revisionist history given how he has framed the discussion. An atheist astrophysicist trying to build an historical meta-narrative to argue that people used God as an excuse not to pursue questions harder? I'm pretty sure that he's injecting a lot of his own speculation into the picture.

What you're really seeing is the gradual development of intellectual theories. Were all the scientists previous to Einstein hindered because everyone kept ascribing things to God? Surely, Einstein's special relativity requires no complicated mathematics, so that people should have been able to understand this from about the time of Descartes. What Einstein brought was a new insight about the nature of light and considering the consequences of light having a finite speed, and considering those things relative to what Newton's mechanics would imply (I don't believe Einstein would have had his insights if Newton had not come first). Nobody else thought about it that way. It's nothing having to do with God or anything, just that people didn't ask that particular question (or maybe they asked but lacked the insight to understand it).

When people reach intractable problems today, you get different explanations why those problems are intractable. In the "Are there any questions science cannot answer" thread you got "efficiency" as reasons that people don't look at those problems. You also get people assuming that their answer is already entirely correct and sufficient, so that there's not even a need or desire to investigate those things more fully. The major hinderances to scientific development are more about what you already assume to be true about the world (ie, Newton's circular aesthetics and Einstein's desire for a fully deterministic universe).

Reread your own posts. You *CANNOT* invoke God in your mechanistic view of the world.

Yes, we disagree.

1) I don't believe it EXPLAINS how massive bodies influence spacetime, it just DESCRIBES the influence. It comes out as an assertion: Massive objects cause a curvature in spacetime.
2) I don't believe that defining the universe to *BE* 4-dimensional spacetime is entirely sensible. I believe it makes more sense to say that 4-dimensional spacetime is a model of reality. If the M-theorists are right, then there's a more robust model that requires the universe to be 11-dimensional, so by declaring that the universe *IS* 4-dimensional spacetime you've closed the door on future intellectual developments. (This is the "model of the thing is not the thing" argument.)

Again, I take issue with the words: The description is more precise (ie, yields a higher degree of accuracy).

God is not a mechanism. I used "God mechanism" previously to try to demonstrate God within your mechanistic framework. The theistic understanding is that God is the primary cause of all things, and there is no appeal to a higher/precedent cause because otherwise that thing would be God. Things are because God is. This doesn't describe anything in particular, but it explains everything (you can accept or reject the statement, I'm just saying that this what the understanding brings). God also does what a mechanistic worldview cannot do, which is ascribe meaning and value to things.

my "mechanistic" universe has room for god where everyone tends to place it, in the gaps. we can say god did anything we don't know yet and it fits in the theory, i just don't see why that is helpful.

do you realize how different your posts when you are taking issue with others than when you are writing about god? you are the most meticulous person i've seen with regard to wording (not saying that is a bad thing) but once you start throwing around phrases like

for someone who constantly questions people's assumption you seem to have made a boatload based on nothing in particular. how does God explain everything better than this:

this is what people are talking about with the god of the gaps. it just fills in the hole of what we can't explain right now. i'm not sure why you can't see how that is, it is just the idea that the God you describe fills in the gaps that secular scientists tend to just fill in by saying "i don't know". it doesn't explain anything, it just puts a lot of vague language there. the difference is that in religion the vague language is the end of the discussion but in science it is the beginning.

A deistic viewpoint would agree with you. However, once the thing that we don't/can't know on our own makes itself known, then you can know something about it. You also have to check your epistemology in terms of what you "know" in this setting (to avoid defining "knowledge" as "scientific knowledge" -- ie, reproducibly testable information).

Under the mechanistic worldview, this is false. Meaning and value is ascribed by us based on sociology and psychology, which are mechanisms based in biology, which is established by chemistry, which is described by physics. People don't like to think about meaning being given by physics, so they introduce ideas like 'proximate meaning' to avoid the utter meaninglessness of it all.

what i'm saying in the first part of your post is that we don't know it yet, but given our track record with finding out things we once didn't know i feel there is a good chance that we will know.

if god makes things meaningful, then what is god's meaning? And i believe meaning can exist and is a relative value. i don't think there is objective meaning and i think you'd be hard pressed to prove there is, but it seems very reasonable that what we call meaning is a relative value humans take and what is meaningful to me may not be meaningful to someone else. even then, why do you assume life has meaning?

At a certain point, words and definitions will fail you and you can make no higher appeals to explain them. These are the worldview assumptions. I believe (based on absolutely nothing at all) that there is actually meaning and value to life. I use things such as the existence of reason and logic, and notions of "love," "hate," "good," "evil," "right," and "wrong" to support this claim, but they do not stand as proof of it. If I reject that God is, then I find myself with a position where meaning is meaningless -- that "meaning" is all in my head. The experience of my life indicates that "meaning" is something beyond me, and outside of my head, so I reject the mechanistic worldview, which leads me back to God.

Life is all about making sense of the worldview assumptions that we have, and spend our lives justifying to ourselves that it's actually sensible. I believe that this is what people mean when they say that they "discover" that they hold a certain belief. Worldview assumptions can be changed, but it's very difficult (because it requires almost a complete "reprogramming" of our understanding of ourselves and the world around us) and very rare (because they sit so deeply in our minds).

so then why do you continually question people's assumptions in arguments. i wouldn't be so adamant about this if it weren't for the fact that in just about every argument you continually question assumptions yet don't seem to explain your own as well as you'd like others to explain theirs.

and what is bad about having the meaning all be in your head? why is that any less real to you than anything else?

and even then, assuming life is meaningful, why does that imply your life is meaningful? how do you know your meaning in life is not to provide carbon dioxide for plants?

If you have to undergo suffering in this world is meaningless suffering better than suffering with a purpose?

And should God have the right to make moral judgment/choices about us? Why is this different from a woman who has the moral right to choose to have an abortion or not?

I explain mine to the fullest extent that I can. This doesn't mean that I don't desire to explain them further, or that my explanations are "complete" in any sense of the word.

What bothers me (intellectually) is that many people don't spend much time looking at their own thoughts, but simply go out of their way to criticize others' thoughts. I've found that most people, when pressed, find themselves sounding just as silly as they believe others sound.

Some are too arrogant to get the point, which is to their own detriment. Others take a more humble look at themselves, and after some inspection decide that they really do believe what they believe. That's fine. I don't expect to be able to change that (and if it does change, then I don't think I can take credit for it). Some will find that their own understanding isn't adequate or sufficient, and then they go on to explore more. This is also fine.

This is why my argumentation revolves so much around worldview assumptions. I believe that this is where all of the action is.

It's "less real" because I don't believe that I'm the God of my own universe. To paraphrase Bill Cosby (from "Bill Cosby: Himself"):

If I were solely responsible for this world inside my head (of my own construction), I would be very disappointed with myself that I have not made more of it, or done a better job with it. If I'm responsible for creating meaning, and then attempting to understand the world according to the meaning I've ascribed to it, then I should be fired for gross incompetence. Even when I'm "at my best" I don't think there's all that much to be proud of.

The statement "life is meaningful" does not imply "my life is meaningful." I'm not sure where I implied that.

"Meaning" isn't proven, nor is it demonstrated. It is ascribed, and then it is sometimes affirmed. If you are asking me to "prove" meaning, I'll simply tell you that I can't. I can't prove to you that I'm something more than a slave to the plant world, eating and breathing on some set program simply to create more CO2. (I can't prove to you that I'm nothing more than that, either.) I can tell you that this is not the meaning that I seem to have, based on my experience of life. I can tell you about ways that I think it has been affirmed that I have meaning and value other than simply breathing. But it's not a proof, and it won't convince anyone that doesn't want to believe otherwise.

i don't think most people on this forum are as narrow minded as you seem to imply. most atheists on the forum are totally willing to say they don't know what is at the start. i think you can call it god but i don't think that really adds anything to the description we already have that "there is some reason the universe started and is the way it is". the main reason i am against the label of god because it is such a loaded term.

i don't think the universe's meaning needs to be up to you for the meaning to be internal. it seems each individual ascribes meaning as they think it should be, i think it is arrogant to think that the meaning a given person describes is correct for the entire universe. i can't imagine how human life could have objective meaning in the universe, we are so tiny and insignificant both spatially and temporally.

regardless, i am yet to see a reasonable explanation as to how that idea of god, the one that put the universe in motion, gets us to any incarnation of a personal deity. from your previous post:

how does God make any more sense than saying for instance "meaning is a fundamental property of the universe"? In saying God just is you could say the universe is and everything exists because of it. i really don't see how god aids in this at all

You're missing the point. The claim that they don't know is not what is being put under scrutiny here, nor is knowledge about the beginning of the universe.

Much of the atheist position revolves around this. They take the safe route by not making any claims, and simply go on to try to poke holes in other people's perspectives. I suppose if the ultimate meaning in life is to find flaws in others, then they're doing a great job. But at the end of the day, "I don't know" doesn't really make progress towards anything. The impression that they often leave in a discussion is not just "I don't know" but it's also "whatever it is you believe must be wrong." Whether this is a fair characterization of how they view their own arguments is irrelevant -- this is the impression that is left.

Whatever you choose to label it is fine.

To me, this is an odd paragraph. You start off by asserting that we can ascribe meaning to things, but then you conclude that that meaning is actually pretty meaningless anyway. This is what I was saying when I said

Framing the idea of global/universal meaning in terms of arrogance is missing the point. I don't believe that humans are the ones with the authority to ascribe meaning to anything (unless meaning is all in our heads, in which case it's really meaningless). But the first cause has the opportunity to ascribe global meaning. Therefore, if God is then aligning our sense of meaning to the meaning that has already been ascribed should be an important goal.

On its own, it doesn't.

This is why revelation matters. The only way that the God who created matter could possibly be understood by matter is for God to become matter. The otherliness of God is such that human cannot even begin to comprehend without having a model to help bridge the intellectual gap. This is why Jesus is central to Christianity, and is viewed as the ultimate revelation in Christianity. It made what was totally inaccessible into something that is now accessible.

Aids in what?

You're putting God as a subordinate to some higher scheme. This understanding of God is not the same as my understanding of God, which is probably why it's not making any sense. This is the same problem of trying to put God into a mechanistic worldview.

I strongly and fundamentally disagree with this. "I don't know" is the starting point for understanding or learning absolutely anything. If you start by assuming you know something based on faith then you've surrendered to ignorance and can never learn anything at all.

If Newton knew on faith that angels are what governed the motion of the planets, he would never have discovered gravity. If Darwin knew on faith that God had placed all life in its present form on Earth 6000 years ago, he would never have discovered evolution. If you can't admit that you don't know something, you have no chance of ever truly explaining it. The same goes for the origins of the universe.

alright


but it isn't like atheists categorically assume everything anyone else believes is wrong (though that seems to be what you think and i don't blame you because it can sound like that), it is saying that it doesn't make any sense to believe something without evidence just because it is a nicer solution than saying i don't know. if you want to get to the truth then you need to scrutinize every theory until you come out with something that is on solid ground.

it isn't so much about what i choose to label it so much as the fallout of what other people seem to label it, but whatever this is a minor and tangential point


my point is that if we just talk about some universal meaning then humans are hopeless, i just can't imagine any way you could convince me that my actions contribute to some universal meaning. what i could believe is that meaning only exists on a case by case basis.


first of all it seems nonsensical to say that meaning is meaningless. if we are talking about on an individual level then the statement obviously contradicts itself and of course that meaning doesn't have meaning on a universal level because if we assume the internal meaning exists then we are saying we don't care about some universal meaning. you are big on questioning fundamental assumptions, so think about why you think that internal meaningless is some how less valuable than some sort of universal meaning.

k


this is where you make the big leap. why is Christ any better a vessel for god's word than Muhammad?


Aids in explaining the things you said that god explains but secular science doesn't.

well my point is that if god is the top of the ladder why does everything else need an explanation but not it? it doesn't make much sense to say "well that can't be then end of the chain but this can, it explains everything". i don't see how god actually explains things any more than laws do, if you want to say god is the laws of the universe then we are just at an issue of nomenclature, but i'd rather put off on that until we know a lot more about physics, but we seem to then get in to meaning which doesn't fit in that definition of god.

I'd like to say that you have probably the most agreeable and well thought out religious beliefs of anyone i've ever talked to, the only belief you've said that i couldn't see myself holding under different circumstances is the jump you make from meaning to Christianity specifically though you have the most logical jump TO a religion i've seen, i just don't see why christianity is any more special than judaism or islam or whatever religion that gets you to the same place.

P.S. we should try to cut these posts down as they are growing quickly and getting cumbersome to respond to in an organized way