Thoughts on The God Delusion

[MaverickMenzies]

Quoting Haunted from 13:57, 24th Jul 2008
My money is heavily on general relativity being wrong.

Sorry if this is too much of a detour from the actual topic, but why? Do you mean that you think that GR is just a low energy effective theory to something completely different?

[Haunted]

GR has thrown up alot problems that seem to generate bizarre explanations. Dark Matter for example is just a consequence of GR not being able to explain gravity on the largest of scales i.e. it predicts there should be much more matter than we are seeing ergo that matter must be dark. WIMPs and MACHOS may account for some of this remainder but 96%?

That and the fundamental difference between GR and QM is that (in a nutshell) QM translates forces and energies via particle interactions (gauge bosons transmit force) and since gravity is a force it should have a corresponding force carrier (the graviton, yet to be observed). However GR has no need of particles and specifically works on the lack of them to transmit gravity. Instead of gravity being a force per se it is merely a warping of spacetime. The Earth isn't really accelerating circularly around the sun, we are following a straight path, just that path happens to be bent.

What GR does have really going for it is gravitational lensing. Light bends around this warped space as well and since light has no mass there shouldn't be any graviton interactions transmitting the force of gravity, so spacetime is indeed bent.

Fair enough this is personal incredulity and I'm certainly no expert on GR.

EDIT: Yes, I do think GR is merely an approximation of something else, exactly as Newtons' Laws were previously.

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[MaverickMenzies]

Quoting Haunted from 15:46, 24th Jul 2008
GR has thrown up alot problems that seem to generate bizarre explanations. Dark Matter for example is just a consequence of GR not being able to explain gravity on the largest of scales i.e. it predicts there should be much more matter than we are seeing ergo that matter must be dark. WIMPs and MACHOS may account for some of this remainder but 96%?

That and the fundamental difference between GR and QM is that (in a nutshell) QM translates forces and energies via particle interactions (gauge bosons transmit force) and since gravity is a force it should have a corresponding force carrier (the graviton, yet to be observed). However GR has no need of particles and specifically works on the lack of them to transmit gravity. Instead of gravity being a force per se it is merely a warping of spacetime. The Earth isn't really accelerating circularly around the sun, we are following a straight path, just that path happens to be bent.

What GR does have really going for it is gravitational lensing. Light bends around this warped space as well and since light has no mass there shouldn't be any graviton interactions transmitting the force of gravity, so spacetime is indeed bent.

Fair enough this is personal incredulity and I'm certainly no expert on GR.

EDIT: Yes, I do think GR is merely an approximation of something else, exactly as Newtons' Laws were previously.

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You might find this interesting:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/3366486/SelfO ... AM-June-08

its a popular article on the CTD approach to quantum gravity - it seems fairly conservative in its assumptions and I can predict the emergence of a semi-classical 4D spacetime.

[Haunted]

Can't get that to open and it needs me to register to get it as a pdf

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[Humphrey]

Quoting Haunted from 14:06, 24th Jul 2008

Quoting out_stanley_fishing from 20:26, 23rd Jul 2008
The only way to have a lack of belief is to not take sides on any issue. It is only the person who says "I don't know," who has a lack of belief. All who say "I know," believe in what they say.

But I am saying 'I don't know'. I never claimed to know whether there is a god or not (and even then which one?), I simply claimed not to believe in any. It is a belief to claim "there is no god", but it is not a belief to say "I do not believe in one".

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I was doing some random browsing on Youtube and I came across a knock down theistic argument against atheism.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9iiZv0Sq2I

I don't see how you could possibly refute this one.

Argument over we can all go home.

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[groovy]

Were you being sarcastic?

Actually most of the scientific fallacies (Like the world being flat) are misconceptions. Even the Greeks knew that the world was Round, this man has not done his research. We knew a lot more earlier than most people think we did.

Quoting Humphrey from 17:23, 24th Jul 2008

Quoting Haunted from 14:06, 24th Jul 2008

Quoting out_stanley_fishing from 20:26, 23rd Jul 2008
The only way to have a lack of belief is to not take sides on any issue. It is only the person who says "I don't know," who has a lack of belief. All who say "I know," believe in what they say.

But I am saying 'I don't know'. I never claimed to know whether there is a god or not (and even then which one?), I simply claimed not to believe in any. It is a belief to claim "there is no god", but it is not a belief to say "I do not believe in one".

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Now with 100% more corn

I was doing some random browsing on Youtube and I came across a knock down theistic argument against atheism.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9iiZv0Sq2I

I don't see how you could possibly refute this one.

Argument over we can all go home.

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http://humphreyclarke.blogspot.com/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/humphrey_clarke/

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Remember now, there's a big difference between kneeling down and BENDING OVER!

[Frank]

Quoting groovy from 17:38, 24th Jul 2008
We knew a lot more earlier than most people think we did.

Scientists are saying the future is going to be far more futuristic than they originally predicted.

Sillyness aside, I find this debate rather intriguing. I find it better to orient the arguments as follows:
- Reason vs Religion (i.e. the core claim is not anything really to do with science, but that it is unreasonable to have faith, this rests on reasonability being a desirable 'good')
- Quantum Mechanics vs General Relativity, the ineptitude of science (it's all in the foundations of the subject, as others have said. Is it a particle explanation, or is it a curvature of some relative structure. Money of mine is on to say both)
- You crucial difference between "I do not believe in god" and "I believe in 'no God'"/"I believe there is no god".

There are some very intricate and rather endearing arguments in all of these. I'm not a skilled enough logician to get into the nitty-gritty of religion vs reason, so I'd step slightly aside.

With the QMvGR discussion, I find it an immensely compelling example of where our understanding of everything is falling at many turns. We hope it'll get back up, but it illustrates quite highly how easily we 'reasonable people' can be attacked for having faith in some very disturbing, very contradictory things.

But then, the devil is in the details. As I mentioned above, QM & GR are incommensurate wherein their foundations disagree. I half expect there to be a revelation some time in the future where we end up with another 'duality'. That is: our explanation and interpretation of QM isn't always what it seems. That where QM says "particles!" and GR says "relative fields!" there'll be an interchangeable description which yields both and neither of these (in a similar manner to WPD).

But that's a hope and certainly not based in reason!

Crucial Differences

With any sort of discussion like this the semantics are important to get right, but once they're agreed upon they lose significance as they, by themselves, cause few to no problems.

Understanding what we mean when we say "Atheists believe in not-god" or "Atheists not-believe in god" and the differing scales of agnosticism, theism and so on is really important when discussing it. Generalising or, worse, making mistakes and pinning the wrong ideas to the wrong category can really undo the progress of any argument.

Also we can get cynical comments too!



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"There is only ever one truth. Things are always black or white, there's no such thing as a shade of grey. If you think that something is a shade of grey it simply means that you don't fully understand the situation. The truth is narrow and the path of the pursuit of truth is similarly narrow."
Also, some years later:
"here we are arguing about a few uppity troublemakers with a bee in their bonnet and a conspiracy theory."

[Ragamuffin_artist]

[s]

Cause and effect is more of a philosophical idea than it is a scientific one.

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My gut response is that cause and effect are actually indispensable to science, as science necessarily relies on the predictability of cause and effect...does it not?

Also, an intriguing comment by Humphrey:

“It’s also worth pointing out that this doesn’t entirely solve the ‘something from nothing conundrum as the Quantum Vacuum is not “nothing” but an incredibly rich structure, teeming with possibilities and energy. It is also hard to see how we can use the laws of physics to describe something happening before the laws of physics existed. Unless we are proposing that the laws of physics have always existed. It is important to emphasise in these discussions that the universe is not simply a bunch of rocks hanging hopelessly in a void, its a highly complex structure which needs to be ‘fine tuned’ in certain ways to give rise to anything interesting at all. This is why the multiverse explanation is so much in vogue at the moment. “

The multiverse notion is mentioned in passing by Dawkins, actually. If i remember correctly, it is used as a response to arguments that suggest that the laws of physics are too “fine tuned” for life to form by accident/chance (not the best words, but I trust you know what I mean). Some stock examples of such deistic arguments are:

1)That if the difference in mass between a proton and a neutron were not exactly as it is [twice the mass of an electron] all neutrons would have become protons or vice versa. Life would not exist.
2)Gravity is 10 to the 39th power weaker than electromagnetism. I it had been 10 to the 33rd power weaker, stars would be a billion times less massive and burn out a million times faster
3)A stronger nuclear strong force (by as little as 2 percent) would have prevented the formation of protons—yielding a universe without atoms. Decreasing it by 5 percent would yield a universe without stars.

Dawkins admitted that it was in such arguments such that deists/creationists have their strongest point: the way the universe physically works seems almost too perfect. Once you find yourself opening up to the faith-based idea of a multiverse as a way to explain this phenomena, how is that any better than simply accepting the faith-based notion of god? Especially if we strip all self-imposed romanticized notions of god and view god, for now, as simply an infinite (or nearly infinite) source of energy that got things rolling?

My apologies if I have misunderstood what either of you were trying to say.

[Humphrey]

Quoting ragamuffin_artist from20:36, 24th Jul 2008
Dawkins admitted that it was in such arguments such that deists/creationists have their strongest point: the way the universe physically works seems almost too perfect. Once you find yourself opening up to the faith-based idea of a multiverse as a way to explain this phenomena, how is that any better than simply accepting the faith-based notion of god? Especially if we strip all self-imposed romanticized notions of god and view god, for now, as simply an infinite (or nearly infinite) source of energy that got things rolling?

I think its a bit strong to say that people's belief in the multiverse is faith based. For some people it is but in Science all knowledge is provisional and stands or falls on its own merits, as opposed to faith based religious beliefs which are presented as knock down facts. Most multiverse proponents would agree that what they are putting forward is pure metaphysical speculation.

The obvious point is that we shouldn’t necessarily be surprised to see the values of the constants that we do because if they were a little different then we wouldn’t be here to see them in the first place. For example if the vacuum energy had been just a hair greater at the end of inflation, it would be so enormous today that space would be highly curved and the stars and planets could not exist. Therefore no five fingered homo sapiens to observe that value in the first place. In other words, what we see is basically an anthropic selection effect.

Of course, for that to work you need to have something to select from, usually an infinite ensemble of universes. The ‘fine tuning’ problem makes it implausible that this universe could have just popped into existence, unless of course what we call the universe is just part of a vast cosmic landscape in which universes are popping into existence the whole time, in which case there is no problem with probability. The vast majority of these will be dead universes in which nothing interesting can emerge. We just happen to be in one that can give rise to life. For discussions of this see Martin Rees ‘Just Six Numbers’, Susskind’s ‘The Cosmic Landscape’, Stenger’s ‘Timeless Reality’ and Paul Davies ‘The Goldilocks Enigma’.

This is both the best idea and the worst idea anyone has come up with. It is the best idea because it explains absolutely anything, it is the worst idea because it makes what we call reality fundamentally stupid and poses some serious problem for human identity.

See:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/ma ... vis116.xml

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/24/opini ... ted=1&_r=3

For example in a Tegmark multiverse anything that can exist does exist. Right now, somewhere in the cosmic landscape there is another version of Dawkins who is a member of the Discovery institute and is lecturing people on the dangers of ‘Evil-ution’ as part of his tour to promote ‘The Atheist Delusion’. Meanwhile another version of myself is attending furry conventions dressed as Tweetie Bird. If we accept the principle that sentient beings could one day evolve through technology into a god like entity (see the Omega Point for example) and begin creating its own universes, then the cosmic landscape is going to be Polytheistic. You might even end up with a string of ‘Gods’ each dependent on the one above it for its existence.

The problem is, when you get into the metaphysics of ultimate causation there really isn’t such a thing as a satisfactory explanation. For a start, to avoid an infinite regress, you need to accept something as a brute fact, be it laws of physics, a quantum vacuum, a multiverse or a creator god. Which one you plump for is largely a matter of personal preference. For myself I love the idea that the universe is a really poorly programmed simulation. This would explain why two items I meant to order from Sainsbury's arrived with my shop last week, despite the fact I didn't actually buy them on the website; although perhaps this would fall foul of Occum's razor.


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[Humphrey]

Quoting groovy from 17:38, 24th Jul 2008
Were you being sarcastic?

Actually most of the scientific fallacies (Like the world being flat) are misconceptions. Even the Greeks knew that the world was Round, this man has not done his research. We knew a lot more earlier than most people think we did.

I have to admit, I nearly wet myself laughing when he said that we didn't know the earth was a sphere until Sir Francis Drake sailed around it (!?!). If we had just looked in the Koran we would have figured it out ages ago.

Take that infidels!.

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[Haunted]

Another thing to consider with fine tuning arguements is that our solution of the constants is not necessarily the only one that results in self-assembled sentient structures.

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[Humphrey]

Quoting ragamuffin_artist from 20:36, 24th Jul 2008
Once you find yourself opening up to the faith-based idea of a multiverse as a way to explain this phenomena, how is that any better than simply accepting the faith-based notion of god? Especially if we strip all self-imposed romanticized notions of god and view god, for now, as simply an infinite (or nearly infinite) source of energy that got things rolling?

Random bit of trivia. Apparently David Icke uses the multiverse to argue for the plausibility of his theory that the world is controlled by a bunch of shape shifting lizards who conduct blood rituals and human sacrifices. After all, as he says, given an infinity of worlds, it would be 'staggering' if sentience had not evolved down the reptilian line.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj8GWcwf ... re=related

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[Raindog]

I believe the children are our future