The End of Faith

[Lestat]

Great book by Sam Harris, a must read in my opinion.

Basic premise is that in order for us to survive as a civilizaton, we need to start subjecting religious/spiritual belief to the same rules that we subject everything to.

We've been making advances in all areas of life except religion, and its harming the world. Look at the major conflicts we have going on now, India/Pakistan, Palastinians/Israel, Cheneya/Russia... all faith based wars where fundamentalists are out of control.

Why is it that we subject EVERY belief about the world to logic, reason, and evidence, except religion?

The books that most people follow, the Bible and Koran... are extremely violent books, they were written in days where there were no weapons of mass destruction, you stoned people or stabbed them.. now take those same writing and introduce nuclear weapons, you have a recipie for disaster!

A couple good analogies.... if you were to dig up someone from the 14th century and give them a quiz on geography, science, math, and religion.. they would have a CHILD's understanding of everything except religion, of which they would likely be dead on even today. We've made very little progress in terms of religion, and it will ultimately be our downfall.

Also, imagine this, you have a neighbor, and he tells you he has FAITH that there is a refridgerator size diamond buried in his backyard. He has no evidence of it, but he just knows. You would think he was an idiot right? What if his family spent every Sunday digging for it, they loved this time together as a family, even if the diamond wasn't there, who would want to take that away from them?

Sam Harris also makes the controversial claim that its the MODERATES not the fundamentalists that are the worst offenders. Why? because of moderate religion, we are unable to criticize fundamentalist beliefs! Its taboo to tell someone they are utterly insane for a religious belief. What if your doctor, who was operating on you, said forget the surgery today, we're going to pray for you and your appendix will heal itself. The guy would be sued and lose his license! What if someone today claimed the earth was flat, do we have to respect that person's belief? Would we allow this person to hold any position of power? Why then do we frequently put people in office that openly subscribe to beliefs that have no basis in reality?

 

[Lestat]

A goo except:

A few minutes spent wandering the graveyard of bad ideas suggests that such conceptual revolutions are possible. Consider the case of alchemy: it fascinated human beings for over a thousand years, and yet anyone who seriously claims to be a practicing alchemist today will have disqualified himself for most positions of responsibility in our society. Faith-based religion must suffer the same slide into obsolescence. What is the alternative to religion as we know it? As it turns out, this is the wrong question to ask. Chemistry was not an “alternative” to alchemy; it was a wholesale exchange of ignorance at its most rococo for genuine knowledge.3 We will find that, as with alchemy, to speak of “alternatives” to religious faith is to miss the point.

 

[Lestat]

how many of you christians really follow the Bible? If you think so, please read this passage and tell me if you REALLY follow the Bible:


If your brother, the son of your father or of your mother, or your son or daughter, or the spouse whom you embrace, or your most intimate friend, tries to secretly seduce you, saying, “Let us go and serve other gods,” unknown to you or your ancestors before you, gods of the peoples surrounding you, whether near you or far away, anywhere throughout the world, you must not consent, you must not listen to him; you must show him no pity, you must not spare him or conceal his guilt. No, you must kill him, your hand must strike the first blow in putting him to death and the hands of the rest of the people following. You must stone him to death, since he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God. . . .(Deuteronomy 13:7–11)

 

[samoth]

There an absurdly large amount of opinions, writings, books, et cetera covering this topic. This forces me to conclude that you are likely trying to win Spellman's "Thread of the Week" contest, lol.

Swaying from traditional arguments that will undoubtedly be reiterated here ad nauseum, I'll contribute a more recent annoyance relating to this subject: Popular science books on quantum mechanics wherein the authors attempt to relate the subject to the whole free will argument. The pathetic part is that the public eats this crap up without even having a clue -- or, I should say, actual knowledge and understanding -- as to the inner workings of this rather esoteric subject.

 

[Lestat]

There an absurdly large amount of opinions, writings, books, et cetera covering this topic. This forces me to conclude that you are likely trying to win Spellman's "Thread of the Week" contest, lol.

Swaying from traditional arguments that will undoubtedly be reiterated here ad nauseum, I'll contribute a more recent annoyance relating to this subject: Popular science books on quantum mechanics wherein the authors attempt to relate the subject to the whole free will argument. The pathetic part is that the public eats this crap up without even having a clue -- or, I should say, actual knowledge and understanding -- as to the inner workings of this rather esoteric subject.

explain a bit more man... I don't see the connection between quantum mechanics.. free will AND faith.

 

[Lestat]

"Faith" is false conviction in unjustified propositions (a certain book was written by God; we will be reunited with our loved ones after death; the Creator of the universe can hear our thoughts, etc.). "Spirituality" or "mysticism" (both words are pretty terrible, but there are no good alternatives in English) refers to any process of introspection by which a person can come to realize that the feeling he calls "I" is a cognitive illusion. The core truth of mysticism is this: It is possible to experience the world without feeling like a separate "self" in the usual sense. Such a change in the character of one's experience need not become the basis for making unsupportable claims about the nature of the universe, however.

 

[samoth]

Why is it that we subject EVERY belief about the world to logic, reason, and evidence, except religion?

Here's something for the christians to argue, presented in a propositional logic form:

Premise: Only material causality may be used to explain human choices.
Premise: Human choices appear to be non-determined.
Conclusion: Hence, there must be a material cause for the apparent non-determinacy of human choice.

Does the conclusion logically follow the premises? Are the premises logically sound?

 

[Lestat]

Here's something for the christians to argue, presented in a propositional logic form:

Premise: Only material causality may be used to explain human choices.
Premise: Human choices appear to be non-determined.
Conclusion: Hence, there must be a material cause for the apparent non-determinacy of human choice.

Does the conclusion logically follow the premises? Are the premises logically sound?

The conclusion does not logically follow the premises.

I do not see any causation between Premise 1 and Premise 2.

Regarding premise #1, not all of what happens in life is a human choice though, plenty of our experience and existance in life is not in our control, or anyone's control for that matter (think about the residents of New Orleans for a minute). Many religious types are quick to explain this away with faith, that its the doing of a higher power. Logic however would dictate that were are not in control of every aspect of our lives, the weather being a perfect example, so some choices (weather or not to drown) are not in our control.

 

[samoth]

explain a bit more man... I don't see the connection between quantum mechanics.. free will AND faith.

It has to do with the whole uncertainty principle thing and thought processes and similarsuch. Let me find a link...

Here, I'll just post the pertinant stuff:



Determinism, quantum mechanics and classical physics

Since the beginning of the 20th Century, quantum mechanics has revealed previously concealed aspects of events. Newtonian physics, taken in isolation rather than as an approximation to quantum mechanics, depicts a universe in which objects move in perfectly determinative ways. At human scale levels of interaction, Newtonian mechanics gives predictions that in all respects check out as completely perfectible, if not perfect in practice. The dependability of predictions turns out to be reliably improved by refinement in our knowledge of initial conditions. Poorly designed and fabricated guns and ammunition scatter their shots rather widely around the center of a target, and better guns produce tighter patterns. Absolute knowledge of the forces accelerating a bullet should produce absolutely reliable predictions of its path, or so we thought.

Contrary to what Newtonian mechanics would predict, at atomic scales the Newtonian paths of objects can only be predicted in a probabilistic way. In double-slit experiments, electrons fired singly through a double-slit apparatus at a distant screen do not arrive at a single point, nor do they arrive in a scattered pattern analogous to bullets fired by a fixed gun at a distant target. Instead, they arrive in varying concentrations at widely separated points, and the distribution of their hits can be calculated reliably. In that sense the behavior of the electrons in this apparatus is deterministic, but there is no way to predict where in the resulting interference pattern an individual electron will make its contribution.

On the macro scale it can matter very much whether a bullet arrives at a certain point at a certain time, as snipers and their victims are well aware; there are analogous quantum events that have macro- as well as quantum-level consequences. It is easy to contrive situations in which the arrival of an electron at a screen at a certain point and time would trigger one event and its arrival at another point would trigger an entirely different event. Whether such events are significant in nature may be open to question and empirical investigation. What is clear, however, is that proof of the occurrence of such random events would not address the broader claim determinists make regarding moral responsibility. If the difference in human choices is not due to predetermined occurrences, as determinists argue, but rather to the random movements of an electron, as some free will advocates argue, this would not seem to address the question of individual moral responsibility. Rather than an internally determined force leading the criminal to his crime, an entirely random, almost external, force determines his course. This would be akin to a stranger's hand moving one's hand to perform an action, or injecting one with a truth serum to provide accurate testimony. In neither case would traditional morality find the acted upon individual to be responsible for his actions.

If probabilistically determined events do have an impact on the macro events such as whether a person who could be historically important dies in youth of a cancer caused by a random mutation, then the course of history is not determined from the dawn of time. But some authorities argue against the reality of such probabilistically determined events and/or argue that events on the atomic scale cannot influence the course of events on the macro scale.

Some people have argued that in addition to the conditions humans can observe and the rules they can deduce there are hidden factors or hidden variables that determine absolutely in which order electrons reach the screen. They argue that the course of the universe is absolutely determined, but that humans are screened from knowledge of the determinative factors. So, they say, it only appears that things proceed in a merely probabilistically determinative way. Actually, they proceed in an absolutely determinative way. Although matters are still subject to some measure of dispute, quantum mechanics makes statistical predictions that would be violated if some local hidden variables existed. There have been a number of experiments to verify those predictions, and so far they do not appear to be violated although many physicists believe better experiments are needed to conclusively settle the question. See Bell test experiments. It is, however, possible to augment quantum mechanics with non-local hidden variables to achieve a deterministic theory that is in agreement with experiment. An example is the Bohm interpretation of quantum mechanics.

The well known experimental physicist Dr. Herbert P. Broida [1] (1920-1978) taught his statistical mechanics class at The University of California at Santa Barbara that the probabilities arise in the transition from quantum to classical descriptions, rather than within quantum mechanics, as sometimes supposed. The time dependent Schrödinger equation gives the first time derivative of the quantum mechanical state. That is, it explicitly and uniquely predicts the development of the wave function with time.


So quantum mechanics is deterministic, provided that one accepts the wave function itself as reality (rather than as probability of classical coordinates). This is true also in more advanced cases. Since we have no practical way of knowing the exact magnitudes, and especially the phases, in a full quantum mechanical description of the causes of an observable event, this turns out to be philosophically similar to the "hidden variable" doctrine.

According to some, quantum mechanics is more strongly ordered than Classical Mechanics, because while Classical Mechanics is chaotic, quantum mechanics is not. For example, the classical problem of three bodies under a force such as gravity is not integrable, while the quantum mechanical three body problem is tractable and integrable, using the Faddeev Equations. That is the quantum mechanical problem can always be solved to a given accuracy with a computer of predetermined precision, while the classical problem may require arbitrarily high precision, depending on the details of the motion. This does not mean that quantum mechanics describes the world as more deterministic, unless one already considers the wave function to be the true reality. Even so, this does not get rid of the probabilities, because we can't do anything without using classical descriptions, but it assigns the probabilities to the classical approximation, rather than to the quantum reality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism#Determinism.2C_quantum_mechanics_and_classical_physics

 

[Lestat]

Just imagine how different it would be if every time a person in a position of power used the word "God," the press responded as though he had just used a word like "Poseidon." Our conversation with ourselves would change very quickly and very dramatically. Imagine someone opposing stem-cell research on the floor of the Senate with a statement like, "life is a gift from Zeus himself. No man should meddle with it."