Dan Peterson Takes on the "No Evidence At All for The Book of Mormon" Argument

[Analytics]

10 hours ago, OGHoosier said:

I want to follow up on this further. Believe it or not, I actually do read from Carroll's blog every now and then, though I haven't bought any books of his. Thus I'd say that, though I'm perhaps not an expert on Carroll's thought on the same level as yourself, I'm not entirely an unwashed barbarian either. 

If Carroll's blog posts are any indication, a central theme of his thought is captured by the excerpt above that I snipped from your quote. It's similar to Graham Oppy's "Best Argument Against God" in that it is based entirely on the perceived simplicity and parsimony of a naturalistic theory compared to a theistic one. Several critiques of this mode of thought are available but I'd focus on the obvious: this mode of argument can be disarmed if certain observations which complicate the theory are viewed as resistant to whatever the counter-explanations would be. Cue @Kevin Christensen and his discussion about paradigms. You have depicted his arguments as merely ways to dismiss whatever evidence is inconvenient, but frankly, he's right that evaluation of a paradigm depends on which problems are more important to solve. Take for an example the universal intuition about free will. Both Carroll and Gazzaniga (for those that don't want to buy Who's In Charge, you can look up his 2009 Gifford Lectures which are the basis for the book) go to lengths to try and make space for our intuitive understanding of free will as a representation, the "poetry" in poetic naturalism, if not a true depiction of reality. Why? Because we can't get on without it. That's Christof Koch's argument for the existence of free will: science recognizes the reality  (or at least approximate reality) of things which are necessary to explain the world, and free will is a necessity in every social science.  Furthermore, per phenomenal conservatism I have an exceptionally good prima facie reason to believe that free will is real, pace Carroll. If I observe things which are contrary to his extrapolations of the consequences of Core Theory, can his interpretation of Core Theory really be said to underlie everything I witness? Which is more important? Maintaining free will, which accords with my direct observations and every form of explaining life with my fellow beings? Or do I prioritize having a theory that is consistent with certain prominent interpretations of physics, damn the torpedoes? Does it make a difference that there are other interpretations of the data which do not require so extreme a conclusion? Weighty questions, and they aren't ones that can just be determined by a magisterial handwave towards the data. 

Free will might not be the best example to make your point because according to Carroll, "free will" and the core theory are not mutually exclusive. But it does depend upon what you mean by "free will." Carroll would say there is no such thing as free will if "free will" means you can bend the laws of physics from doing what they were going to do on their own to doing what you want them to do. But if "free will" simply means making choices in the "poetic naturalist" way that is in harmony with the laws of physics, that is fine. He does criticize "free-will skeptics" for making a variety of errors in his thinking, but in the end he says, "There’s a sense in which you do have free will. There’s also a sense in which you don’t. Which sense is the “right” one is an issue you’re welcome to decide for yourself (if you think you have the ability to make decisions)."

Clearly, he is a lot more comfortable with people believing in free will than he is with believing in dualism. 

Edited March 17, 2021 by Analytics
Changed “free” to “free will”

[Analytics]

Here is a good-faith effort to apply the reasoning from the large quote at the bottom of the last page to Mormonism’s truth claims regarding spirits.

Let’s hypothesize that spirits exist in the Mormon sense. When our physical senses see, hear, touch, feel or smell something, some of that data is transferred from our physical nervous system to our spirits. Likewise, the components of our thoughts, feelings, and decision-making ability that is spiritual in nature is also transferred from our spirits back to our nervous system.

The obvious way for this transfer between spirits and nervous systems would be through electromagnetic impulses. Of course if that is the way spirits actually worked they would be quite easy to detect—spirits would be made of normal matter that we should actually be able to touch and see. So let’s hypothesize that there is a 5th force (the other four being gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear strong, and nuclear weak). Since the nervous system runs on electrical impulses this fifth force needs to be able to push electrons around, but is not electromagnetic itself. Using a force other than electromagnetism, this fifth “spiritual force” nudges and is nudged by the electrons in our brain—that is how the spirit interfaces with the body.

We know from quantum field theory that if this fifth spiritual force exists and can nudge and be nudged by electrons, then its corresponding spirit particle can be created by banging electrons and positrons together. That is how quantum field theory works.

In the 1980’s, our friends in Europe spent untold billions to create the Large Electron-Positron Collider that is the perfect device to test this very hypothesis. The collider is a loop 27 kilometers long that can spin electrons and positrons to within a tiny percentage of the speed of light. When banged together, it should reveal even the smallest particles that can flash in and out of existence for the tiniest periods of time that can nudge electrons in even the most subtle ways. (Of course there could be (and presumably are) smaller, weaker, and more ephemeral particles that are beyond the capacity of the Large Electron-Positron Collider to detect. But anything in that realm would be much too feeble to push an electron in our brain hard enough to make any difference in anything).

Earlier in this thread, smac97 asked me when, precisely, science proved that spirits don’t exist. The answer to that question is that this knowledge started to emerge in 1989 when the Large Electron-Positron Collider was first fired up, and became crystal clear by the time it was retired in 2000. According to Carroll:

From 1989 to 2000, a particle accelerator called the Large Electron-Positron Collider (predecessor of today’s Large Hadron Collider) operated underground outside Geneva. Within its experiments, electrons and positrons collided at enormous energies, and physicists kept extremely careful track of everything that came out. They were hoping with all their hearts to find new particles; discovering new particles, especially unexpected ones, is what keeps particle physics exciting. But they didn’t see any. Just the known particles of the Core Theory, produced in great numbers.

The same has been done for protons smashing into antiprotons, and various other combinations. The verdict is unambiguous: we’ve found all of the particles that our best current technology enables us to find. Crossing symmetry assures us that, if there were any particles lurking around us that interact with ordinary matter strongly enough to make a difference to the behavior of everyday stuff, those particles should have easily been produced in experiments. But there’s nothing there.

Carroll, Sean. The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (pp. 182-183). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

So what is a Mormon to make of this evidence?

1. Quantum Field Theory is simply wrong (e.g. spirit matter does interface with the human nervous system, but crashing electrons and positrons together does not create spirit matter. If that is true, the whole theory of Quantum Mechanics--the most thoroughly tested and robust theory in all of science--unravels).
2. Through divine intervention, God was meddling with the results of the Large Electron-Positron Collider in order to keep spirit matter and spirit energy hidden.
3. Some other ad hoc rationalization?
4. Concede there really aren’t spirits.

Those are our options. None of them is desirable, so the whole issue is swept under the rug.

 

[Ryan Dahle]

12 hours ago, Analytics said:

14 hours ago, Ryan Dahle said:

But I thought we were discussing the model's ability to disprove that God (or other spiritual entities) are somehow influencing our consciousness--the only everyday miracle assumed by Latter-day Saints. How can the model begin to disprove that phenomenon if it is inherently outside of its "domain of applicability"?

Just because we don't know how consciousness emerges from the atoms of our brain doesn't mean there are tenable alternatives to that being what's going on.

I never said that the absence of a scientific theory to explain consciousness automatically yields "tenable alternatives to that being what's going on." The point is that if science itself doesn't have a tenable theory to explain a phenomenon (consciousness in this case), one can hardly fault theists for not having a tenable scientific theory to explain how spiritual phenomena interact, scientifically speaking, with the thing that science doesn't understand to begin with. 

It seems that at this point, your whole argument fell apart and the backpedaling began. You resorted to the tactic of comparing religious belief to an absurd example of illogical thinking to make religious belief look as silly as possible:

16 hours ago, Analytics said:

By the same reasoning, just because the idea of floating gold has never been observed and contradicts everything we know about gravity doesn't mean that gold isn't floating all of the place except where we are looking.

The problem with this example--the reason I called it a false analogy and an an irrelevant diversion--is that it bears little resemblance to the types religious claims that Latter-day Saints actually believe. I have many lines of evidence which I use to support my belief in spiritual phenomena that I could never marshal to support the floating gold hypothesis. And I haven't yet found strong naturalistic explanations to account for those lines of evidence.

Critics don't have a good theory to explain the collective statements from the formal and informal witnesses of the Book of Mormon. 

Critics don't have a good theory to explain the collective statements from the witnesses of the translation of the Book of Mormon. 

Critics don't have a good theory to explain the Book of Mormon's complexity, consistency, and sophistication.

Critics don't have a good theory to collectively explain the Book of Mormon's ancient literary features.

Critics don't have a good theory to collectively explain the Book of Mormon's ancient cultural features.

Critics don't have a good theory to explain the Book of Moses's connections to extant Enoch texts that were only published after Joseph Smith's lifetime.

Critics don't have a good theory to explain the Book of Abraham's ancient features. 

I find that in these cases, the tables are turned, and it is the critics who must repeatedly rely upon absences of evidence, leaps of logic, and theories that would never be logically coherent under any other circumstances. But since such theories are all that the critics have, in the face of believing in angels and spiritual influences, they are tenaciously held to. With a wave of the hand all the positive evidence is dismissed by general appeals to Occam's Razor (apparently believing in anything, no matter how absurd, is better than believing in angels and gold plates), which only illustrates that it is philosophical and religious assumptions, rather than actual countervailing evidence, which fuels the drive for disbelief. 

I'm not saying the above lines of evidence should logically compel people to accept the Restoration. They aren't that strong, especially when looked at piecemeal. What I am saying is that we have many more valid reasons to believe in the Restoration than to believe in floating gold--the most important of which are direct spiritual experiences that are well beyond science's ability to disprove. And I'm saying it is silly to try to disprove spiritual phenomena by an appeal to our allegedly near-omniscient understanding of the quantum realm when that knowledge is basically irrelevant to the only type of regularly-occurring "supernatural" phenomena that Latter-day Saints actually believe in (spiritual influence at the level of consciousness). 

[Analytics]

In the off-chance that anybody is paying attention to what I’ve said in the last few posts, you should now better understand why I’ve been calling spirits not existing a positive result of science. It isn’t just that scientists haven’t happened to notice spiritual stuff yet and have prematurely and foolishly declared that since they haven’t been noticed they probably don’t exist. Rather, Quantum Field Theory—the most restrictive, robust, tested, and powerful theory in all of science—the theory that is as powerful as the offspring of the Hulk and Godzilla—tells us where and how to look for spirit stuff. Huge teams of the worlds best scientists have spent billions of dollars in the specific laboratory work that would reveal spirit matter. If it existed.

Understanding that should help you better understand Carroll’s point when he said:

Whether you are a physicalist who believes that there is nothing to us other than the particles of the Core Theory, or someone who thinks that there is some crucial nonphysical component to a human being, everyone admits that the particles are part of who we are. If you want to say there is something else, you have to explain how that something else interacts with the particles. How, in other words, the Core Theory is incomplete, and has to change.

To address this issue seriously, we wouldn’t necessarily need to have a “Soul Theory” that is as rigorous and well developed as the Core Theory of physics. We would, however, need to be specific and quantitative about how the Core Theory could possibly be changed. There needs to be a way that “soul stuff” interacts with the fields of which we are made—with electrons, or photons, or something. Do those interactions satisfy conservation of energy, momentum, and electric charge? Does matter interact back on the soul, or is the principle of action and reaction violated? Is there “virtual soul stuff” as well as “real soul stuff,” and do quantum fluctuations of soul stuff affect the measurable properties of ordinary particles? Or does the soul stuff not interact directly with particles, and merely affect the quantum probabilities associated with measurement outcomes? Is the soul a kind of “hidden variable” playing an important role in quantum ontology?

If you want to be a dualist and believe in an immaterial soul that plays any role whatsoever in who we are as human beings, these questions are not optional. We’re not rigging the game by demanding a full-blown mathematical theory of the soul itself; we’re simply asking how the soul is supposed to affect the mathematical theory of the quantum fields that we already have.

Carroll, Sean. The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (pp. 215-216). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

 

[Analytics]

4 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

I never said that the absence of a scientific theory to explain consciousness automatically yields "tenable alternatives to that being what's going on." The point is that if science itself doesn't have a tenable theory to explain a phenomenon (consciousness in this case), one can hardly fault theists for not having a tenable scientific theory to explain how spiritual phenomena interact, scientifically speaking, with the thing that science doesn't understand to begin with. 

It seems that at this point, your whole argument fell apart and the backpedaling began. You resorted to the tactic of comparing religious belief to an absurd example of illogical thinking to make religious belief look as silly as possible:

The problem with this example--the reason I called it a false analogy and an an irrelevant diversion--is that it bears little resemblance to the types religious claims that Latter-day Saints actually believe. I have many lines of evidence which I use to support my belief in spiritual phenomena that I could never marshal to support the floating gold hypothesis.

According to my understanding of Quantum Mechanics, which I have now exerted some time and effort to relay to this board, the existence of spirits contradicts Quantum Mechanics as much as floating gold contradicts gravity. Likewise, there is as much evidence for the law of Quantum Mechanics as there is for gravity.

4 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

Critics don't have a good theory to explain the collective statements from the formal and informal witnesses of the Book of Mormon. 

People lie, mislead, are fooled, or are mistaken all the time. You make like the "God did it" theory better than Dan Vogel's theory on this, but that doesn't mean Vogel's theory isn't plausible.

4 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

Critics don't have a good theory to explain the collective statements from the witnesses of the translation of the Book of Mormon. 

People lie, mislead, are fooled, or are mistaken all the time.

4 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

Critics don't have a good theory to explain the Book of Mormon's complexity, consistency, and sophistication.

Lots of books are complex, consistent, and sophisticated.

4 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

Critics don't have a good theory to collectively explain the Book of Mormon's ancient literary features.

Lots of book have "ancient library features." Apologists don't have a good theory to explain why it is so obviously the product of 19th Century America. 

4 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

Critics don't have a good theory to collectively explain the Book of Mormon's ancient cultural features.

Critics don't have a good theory to explain the Book of Moses's connections to extant Enoch texts that were only published after Joseph Smith's lifetime.

Critics don't have a good theory to explain the Book of Abraham's ancient features. 

LOL.

4 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

I find that in these cases, the tables are turned, and it is the critics who must repeatedly rely upon absences of evidence, leaps of logic, and theories that would never be logically coherent under any other circumstances. But since such theories are all that the critics have, in the face of believing in angels and spiritual influences, they are tenaciously held to. With a wave of the hand all the positive evidence is dismissed by general appeals to Occam's Razor (apparently believing in anything, no matter how absurd, is better than believing in angels and gold plates), which only illustrates that it is philosophical and religious assumptions, rather than actual countervailing evidence, which fuels the drive for disbelief. 

I'm not saying the above lines of evidence should logically compel people to accept the Restoration. They aren't that strong, especially when looked at piecemeal. What I am saying is that we have many more valid reasons to believe in the Restoration than to believe in floating gold--the most important of which are direct spiritual experiences that are well beyond science's ability to disprove. And I'm saying it is silly to try to disprove spiritual phenomena by an appeal to our allegedly near-omniscient understanding of the quantum realm when that knowledge is basically irrelevant to the only type of regularly-occurring "supernatural" phenomena that Latter-day Saints actually believe in (spiritual influence at the level of consciousness). 

Well, I've explained my point on how Quantum Field Theory proves that consciousness and spiritual influences must arise from within the brain, not without. But as we've already discussed, we all get to weigh the evidence as we see it and choose our own paradigms. 

I apologize if I've come across as mocking. That wasn't my intent. And I thank you for listening to what I have to say and for sharing your thoughts with me.

[Analytics]

29 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

The point is that if science itself doesn't have a tenable theory to explain a phenomenon (consciousness in this case), one can hardly fault theists for not having a tenable scientific theory to explain how spiritual phenomena interact, scientifically speaking, with the thing that science doesn't understand to begin with. 

This is a fair point that deserves to be addressed. The huge advantage that the mind-emerges-from-the-brain theory has over dualism is that it is consistent with the evidence and with the known laws of physics.

That said, I readily admit that it is neither intuitive or satisfying. I don’t like it as a theory. I simply see no plausible alternative.

In contrast, dualism is extremely intuitive. Anybody can watch “Freaky Friday” and immediately understand what is going on. But it seems to me that something being intuitive isn’t the same as it being plausible.

[Ryan Dahle]

7 minutes ago, Analytics said:

This is a fair point that deserves to be addressed. The huge advantage that the mind-emerges-from-the-brain theory has over dualism is that it is consistent with the evidence and with the known laws of physics.

I think a huge disconnect in this discussion is that you and Carroll seem to be arguing against a brand of dualism that I think is unnecessary.

26 minutes ago, Analytics said:

Well, I've explained my point on how Quantum Field Theory proves that consciousness and spiritual influences must arise from within the brain, not without. But as we've already discussed, we all get to weigh the evidence as we see it and choose our own paradigms. 

I apologize if I've come across as mocking. That wasn't my intent. And I thank you for listening to what I have to say and for sharing your thoughts with me.

I don't think you have anything to apologize for. You haven't been rude or disparaging, at least not to me. Your views are no less condescending than mine, I suppose. That is just the nature of our opposing opinions and world views when spoken frankly. And I suspected that you would feel differently about the categories of evidence that I alluded to. No need to rehash them all. 

It has been a worthwhile discussion for me, despite the obvious disconnects and lack of shared assumptions about many things. 

[rongo]

@Analytics:

You are making many scientific assumptions that are unwarranted and unscientific (e.g., that quantum field theory has scientifically disproved the existence of spirit, for instance). When the Standard Model and quantum field theory postulate and predict current and yet-to-be-discovered "weakly interacting (WIMPS, neutrinos, etc.) and non-interacting particles, to say that CERN in the late 1980s proved once and for all that there is no spirit matter, because they didn't come out in the wash in particle accelerators and collisions, is to make scientific predictions that physicists themselves wouldn't make. We're not even close to approaching the Planck energy, and as we are able to make more and more energetic collisions, hundreds more "fundamental particles" will be added to the Standard Model. And even that won't address spirit matter, or even predicted non-interacting forms of matter. As an aside, as Michio Kaku said, when there are hundreds of "fundamental" particles, just how "fundamental" can they be?

Have you read anything from Richard Muller (Cal-Berkely astrophysicist, father of the dark energy theory)? He forcefully argues in favor of the soul, and there are others like him. And, Michio Kaku points out that the anthropic principle (our existence statistically cannot be random chance) is particularly strong among string theorists (something has to make the observations to collapse the wave function into our universe).

Muller makes many interesting points in his "Now: The Physics of Time." Here are some of them (from notes I took to send to my son on his mission):

---Tachyons (supposed particles that travel much faster than the speed of light) do not exist, because they would violate free-will (in his view). 

---Entropy is a real problem in physics, if scientists will admit it. According to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, everything should move towards chaos and disorganization, but the universe itself, and galaxies, on down to the subatomic level, are all highly organized. Something is holding it together and working against this [this reminds me of Nibley’s discussion about how the proton should have decayed by now, but hasn’t. They actually can’t detect any proton decay, and there shouldn’t be any protons by now.  But here we still are]. The universe is highly organized throughout, like a gas in a container that is located only in a corner of it. Entropy and the 2nd Law dictate that it should be or be in the process of spreading throughout the container, but that isn’t what we find; it’s highly organized (low entropy).

---"Occam's Razor is often a poor guide to the truth."

---The universe’s expansion is accelerating, much faster than the speed of light at the outer edge. There has to be some sort of “dark energy” (energy we can’t detect) driving this, because our current laws of physics don’t allow this. “It’s aether all over again."

---One of the light speed conundrums is that light reaches us from 28 billion light years away (the edge of the expanded universe). Since the universe is thought to only be 14 billion years old, this is a big problem under current physics. It’s also a mystery how equilibrium has been reached in places that far apart, without contact between them (like two containers, one with high-density gas, and one with a small amount, connected by a valve. It’s like finding both of them with equal densities, which would happen if the valve were open (equilibrium), except the valve is closed).

---(Einstein): : “Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the ‘old one.’ I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.” Richard Feynman, one of the giants, “stayed away from the interpretation of quantum physics. In his colorful Brooklyn colloquial manner, Feynman warned, ‘Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‘But how can it be like that?’ because you will go down the drain into a blind alley from which nobody has escaped.’ ”

---Paul Dirac’s vacuum: chock full of negative energy electrons, which makes it so that the electron is stable (a mystery otherwise). We can’t detect it, but it’s there (like a fish in water can’t “detect” the water).

---Positrons (anti-electrons) might be negative energy electrons coming into being and disappearing and leaving a “bubble” in space-time, which seems to us to be positrons (anti-matter). The mysterious Casimir effect spooks scientists, because it is demonstrable that subatomic particles arise out of seeming nothing all the time. The "vacuum," once we really understand it, will probably be shown to be anything but --- even though its contents are undetectable to us.

---

[Here’s where it gets good: Muller’s religious physics explanation. He poses a similar question I’ve wondered before: what if what we see as colors would look like another color if others could see what we see? How could we even know if this is the case or not?]  "It’s a proven fact that each of our two eyes sees slightly different colors when looking at the same thing (ask any optometrist), so it’s no stretch to wonder if others see something else entirely. What if there were a girl, Mary, who was purposely brought up only seeing black and white (possible. The San Francisco Exploratorium museum has a room lit with a monochromatic light – single frequency, yellow only, low pressure sodium lamps. It’s full of colorful items that only look black and white once the eyes adjust to the slight yellowish tint). And then shining a flashlight on the colorful items (a jar of jelly beans, for example), dazzles the eye with a burst of color.

Mary grows up normally in her black and white world – only the absence of color is different. She reads about color in her science books, and wonders what living in a world of color would be like. She finds physics and optics explanations of rainbows to be interesting, but wonders what a rainbow would actually look like. She eventually becomes a brilliant neuroscientist, and knows everything about how the eye works. She knows all of this, but has never experienced it herself. Then one day, Mary walks out the door into a full color world. What will her reaction be when she finally sees a rainbow? Will she say, “Oh, this is exactly what I expected from the science I studied?” Or, will her reaction be, “I had no idea!?”

There is knowing, and there is knowing. When I tell you what I know, you may conclude that I really don’t, but what I know is what I know. It’s not my opinion, it’s not my belief. I know what I mean, and it’s true. Mary learns for herself what colors look like. Many scientists say, nonsense, she has learned nothing she didn’t already know.

“What is it that does the seeing? If free will exists, what exercises it? What experiences now and differentiates it from then? [Muller defines this as the soul, and says that if the technology existed, he would never allow himself to be beamed up like in Star Trek, because of the quantum equations that only allow this if the old copy of yourself is destroyed, and then a new exact copy with quantum particles reconstituted. Even if it could be guaranteed that all memories and feelings could be transferred in this way, Muller is suspicious that his soul would not be].

---

"Atheism becomes a religion when it makes positive assertions, and the science flavor of this I call 'physicalism.' Physicalism is a better term for scientific atheism."

---

"Feeling empathy (putting ourselves in other people’s shoes, and trying to see things from their perspective) is remarkable, and completely unexplainable with physics. This is strong evidence for me that I have a soul. The soul is much, much more than consciousness (the physicalist view, that consciousness is just brain chemistry and electrical signals in nerve cells)."

---

“I recall in fifth grade my teacher said she was going to teach us how we see. I was excited. This was something I had always wondered about and wanted to understand. That afternoon, she pulled down the diagram of the eye on the blackboard. I had seen this in science books. Nothing new yet. She traced the rays. Yes, I knew that, too. Light went through the lenses, was focused on the retina, and turned into electricity. I had read about that. Pulses went to the brain. The brain knew where each signal came from so it could reconstruct the image. The retina image was upside down, but my brain inverted it. OK, here we go! This was the moment when my questions would be answered! My concentration doubled (true story. I really was on the edge of my seat). But instead of giving the explanation, she said, “Now, let’s talk about the ear and how we hear.” I sat back terribly disappointed. I had read the science books, but they always stopped at the brain. I wanted to know how I saw, how the signal went beyond my brain, to that place where I could see what the color blue looked like. What does all of this have to do with the mystery of now? As long as we think we are nothing but machines run by a fancy multitasking computer, these issues are irrelevant. They have no meaning, unless perceived by that same thing (the soul?) that looks at the signal in the brain and sees what blue looks like. The body processes signals, but the thing that looks is what I refer to as the soul. I know I have a soul. You can’t talk me out of that. It’s the thing that goes beyond physics, that is beyond the body and past the brain and sees what things and colors look like. I don’t understand the soul . . . but having children and grandchildren . . . Do they have souls, too? Yes, that is obvious to me, yet I can’t explain how I know . . . If you tell me I don’t have a soul, that it is an illusion, that you can teach a computer program to act as if it, too, has a soul, I conclude that you don’t know what I am talking about, just like my fifth-grade teacher.”

---

In short, there is a lot we still don't know, and what has been discovered and theorized does not disprove the existence of spirit matter. We're nowhere near being able to even approach trying to prove or disprove that, and there is a lot in what we already have that demonstrates that science does not yet fully explain reality. We're still groping along in the cave. 

 

[rodheadlee]

On 3/15/2021 at 7:09 AM, Analytics said:

I would postulate a couple of things. First, there are a set of natural laws that are in fact correct. Second, science is in fact figuring things out--it is progressing. Given those two things, it follows that sooner or later science will postulate laws of physics that will in fact be true.

The question for us lay observers then is what will it look like when physicists figure out the true nature of physics in the realm that affects our day-to-day lives (including the physics that underlie the workings of the brain).

I presume that when you say you died what you really mean is that you nearly died, right? You aren't claiming that you are a ghost right now. That is why experiences such as yours are called "near-death experiences" rather than "death experiences."

Neuroscientists almost universally believe that your experience was actually driven by your own imagination--that you don't have a spirit and it didn't leave your body. As one example among many I could draw from to illustrate the point, you said that while your spirit was floating above your body and looking outside the window, you read the writing on the side of the police vans. Let's talk about what that means.

When somebody claims they read the letters on a police van, what it means is that the van is in a lit environment. Light reflects off the letters on the side of the van and make it to your eyeball. The lens of your eye changes the direction of the light beams and focuses them onto the retina. When the focused light hits the retina it stimulates nerve cells that change the light energy into electrical impulses. The electrical impulses travel through the optic nerve where a giant section of your brain takes those signals, processes them, does a whole bunch of interpolation and interpretation to make sense of it and fill in the gaps, and then sends those processed images to your consciousness.

Given that's what it means from the perspective of physics and neuroscience to "see" words written on a van, how do you see words on a van without an eye with a lens and a retina, without optic nerves, and without a brain? If your spirit doesn't have a lens to focus the light, how can it see clearly enough to read? If it doesn't have a retina that transforms the light into electrical impulses, how does it sense there is even light there?

If your spirit was focusing light and intercepting it in order to see, then manifestations of spirits messing with the lights should be detectible wherever such spirits are present. Yet there is no evidence that spirits meddle with light in a way that would permit sight. The evidence for this is lacking to the extent that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. 

The one point that you are missing is you cannot see out the window from the gurney that I was strapped onto.

[Analytics]

57 minutes ago, rongo said:

@Analytics:

You are making many scientific assumptions that are unwarranted and unscientific (e.g., that quantum field theory has scientifically disproved the existence of spirit, for instance). When the Standard Model and quantum field theory postulate and predict current and yet-to-be-discovered "weakly interacting (WIMPS, neutrinos, etc.) and non-interacting particles, to say that CERN in the late 1980s proved once and for all that there is no spirit matter, because they didn't come out in the wash in particle accelerators and collisions, is to make scientific predictions that physicists themselves wouldn't make.

Sigh. I wasn't making any "assumptions", much less unscientific ones. Nor was I claiming things that "physicists themselves" wouldn't claim. Rather, I was quoting extensively from and referring to the arguments of one of the world's top theoretical physicists, Dr. Sean Carroll of Caltech.

57 minutes ago, rongo said:

We're not even close to approaching the Planck energy, and as we are able to make more and more energetic collisions, hundreds more "fundamental particles" will be added to the Standard Model. And even that won't address spirit matter, or even predicted non-interacting forms of matter. As an aside, as Michio Kaku said, when there are hundreds of "fundamental" particles, just how "fundamental" can they be?

That is completely irrelevant to Dr. Carroll's point, and chapters 23 and 24 of Big Picture deal with it directly. If I haven't mentioned this yet, if you are really interested in understanding Dr. Carroll's arguments on this topic, you need to read chapters 19-27 of his book. 

One of the misunderstandings you have is that Dr. Carroll isn't talking about hundreds of "fundamental particles" or things that are on the bleeding edge of the unknown such as WIMPS, neutrinos, etc. Rather, he is talking about Effective Quantum Field Theory. Here are a few brief quotes to help you understand the nature of his arguments (but you really need to read the whole book in context to fully understand the arguments):

The search for new forces is greatly abetted by the fact that ordinary objects are made only of three kinds of particles: protons, neutrons, and electrons. Another feature of quantum field theory is that you can’t turn the forces from individual particles on and off; the associated fields are always there. You can create macroscopic forces by arranging positive and negative charges in the right way, as in an electromagnet, but particle by particle the fields are always present. So we just have to look for forces between those three kinds of particles. Physicists have done precisely that: constructing impeccably precise experiments that bring objects of different compositions close together and then apart again, searching for any hint of an influence outside the known forces of nature.

The results, as of 2015, are shown schematically in the figure. Any possible force between two given kinds of particles is parameterized by two numbers: how strong it is, and the distance over which it reaches. (Gravity and electromagnetism are “long-range” forces, stretching essentially infinitely far; the strong and weak nuclear forces have very short ranges, smaller than individual atoms.) It’s easiest to measure forces that are strong, and that reach over long distances. Those are the possible forces that we’ve already ruled out...

The constraints provided by quantum mechanics and relativity make quantum field theory an extremely restrictive and unforgiving framework. We can use that rigidity to map out how well we’ve tested the Core Theory, the specific set of fields and interactions that governs our local environment. The answer is: really well. Enough to be convinced that we know what the relevant particles and fields are in this regime, and any new discoveries will involve phenomena that only manifest themselves elsewhere—at higher energies, shorter distances, more extreme conditions.

But how do we know, even if we can’t directly see new particles or fields, that they can’t exert some subtle but important influence on the particles that we do see? The answer can be traced to another feature of quantum fields: an idea called effective field theory. In quantum field theory, the modifier “effective” doesn’t mean something like “does a good job fitting the data.” Rather, an effective theory is an emergent approximation to a deeper theory. A kind of approximation that is specific, reliable, and well controlled—all due to the power of quantum field theory.

Given some physical system, there are some things you care about, and some you don’t. An effective theory is one that models only those features of the system that you care about. The features you don’t care about are too small to be noticed, or moving back and forth in ways that everything just averages out. An effective theory describes the macroscopic features that emerge out of a more comprehensive microscopic description.

Effective theories are extremely useful in a wide variety of situations. When we talked about describing the air as a gas rather than as a collection of molecules, we were really using an effective theory, since the motions of the individual molecules didn’t concern us. Think about the Earth moving around the sun. The Earth contains approximately 1050 different atoms. It should be nearly impossible to describe how something so enormously complex moves through space—how could we conceivably keep track of all of those atoms? The answer is that we don’t have to: we have to keep track of only the single quantity we are interested in, the location of the Earth’s center of mass. Whenever we talk about the motion of big macroscopic objects, we’re almost always implicitly using an effective theory of their center-of-mass motion. The idea of an effective theory is ubiquitous, but really comes into its glory when we’re dealing with quantum fields. That’s because of an insight due to Nobel laureate Kenneth Wilson, who thought deeply about the “field” nature of quantum field theory.

Wilson focused on a fact well-known to physicists: if you have a vibrating field, you can always break those vibrations up into a certain contribution at each different wavelength. That’s what we’re doing when we pass a beam of light through a prism and decompose it into different colors; red light is a long-wavelength vibration in the electromagnetic field, blue light is a short-wavelength vibration, and so on for all the colors in between. In quantum mechanics, short-wavelength vibrations are oscillating faster, and therefore have more energy, than long-wavelength ones. The things we care about are the low-energy, long-wavelength vibrations; those are the ones that are easy to make and observe in our everyday lives (unless your everyday life exposes you to particle accelerators or high-energy cosmic rays).

So, Wilson says, quantum field theory comes automatically equipped with a very natural way to create effective theories: keep track of only the long-wavelength/low-energy vibrations in the fields. The short-wavelength/high-energy vibrations are still there, but as far as the effective theory is concerned, all they do is affect how the long-wavelength vibrations behave. Effective field theories capture the low-energy behavior of the world, and by particle-physics standards, everything we see in our daily lives is happening at low energies.

For example, we know that protons and neutrons are made out of up quarks and down quarks, held together by gluons. The quarks and gluons, zipping around at high energies inside the protons and neutrons, are short-wavelength field vibrations. We don’t need to know anything about them to talk about protons and neutrons and how they interact with each other. There is an effective field theory of protons and neutrons that works perfectly well, as long as we don’t zoom in so closely that we can see the individual quarks and gluons.

This simple example highlights important aspects of how effective theories work. For one thing, notice that the actual entities we’re talking about—the ontology of the theory—can be completely different in the effective theory from that of a more comprehensive microscopic theory. The microscopic theory has quarks; the effective theory has protons and neutrons. It’s an example of emergence: the vocabulary we use to talk about fluids is completely different from that of molecules, even though they can both refer to the same physical system.

Two features characterize how wonderfully simple and powerful effective field theories are. First, for any one effective theory, there could be many different microscopic theories that give rise to it. That’s multiple realizability in the context of quantum physics. Consequently, we don’t need to know all the microscopic details to make confident statements about macroscopic behavior. Second, given any effective theory, the kinds of dynamics it can have are generally extremely limited...

Another way of conveying the same idea is to think about which phenomena depend on which other phenomena—what supervenes on what, as the philosophers would say. This is shown in the next figure. Astrophysical phenomena depend on the Core Theory, but also on new physics. And everything, of course, depends on the same underlying reality. But crucially, the emergent phenomena we see in our everyday lives do not depend on dark matter or other new physics. Moreover, they only depend on underlying reality through their dependence on the Core Theory particles and interactions. That’s the power of effective field theory. All sorts of microscopic quantum-gravitational craziness could be breaking out deep within the underlying reality, but none of that matters for the behavior of chairs and cars and central nervous systems; it’s all subsumed in the effective field theory of the Core Theory.

The strength of effective field theory is what allows us to assert “This time is different” when we make our audacious claim that the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely known. When Newton and Laplace contemplated the glory of classical mechanics, they may very well have considered the possibility that it would someday have to be superseded by more comprehensive theories.

And eventually it was—by special relativity, general relativity, and quantum mechanics. Newtonian theory is a good approximation in a certain domain of applicability, but ultimately it breaks down and we need a better description of reality.

What’s new is that Newton and Laplace, even if they had thought of their ideas as only accurate in a certain regime, had no way of knowing how far that regime extended. Newtonian gravity works very well for the Earth or Venus; it eventually starts breaking down when we consider the orbit of Mercury, whose tiny precession became some of the strongest evidence in favor of Einstein’s general relativity. But Newton would have had no idea how far his theory might be accurate.

With effective field theory, however, that’s exactly what we have. An effective field theory describes everything that happens to a certain set of fields, as long as the energies are lower than a certain cutoff, and distances are larger than a certain lower limit (as set by experiment). Once we have the parameters of the effective theory pinned down, we know what will happen to our fields in any experiment we can imagine within its domain of applicability, even if we haven’t done that experiment yet. It’s this special feature of quantum field theory that gives us the confidence to make such audacious claims about the scope of our knowledge.

Carroll, Sean. The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (p. 184-191). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

 

57 minutes ago, rongo said:

Have you read anything from Richard Muller (Cal-Berkely astrophysicist, father of the dark energy theory)? He forcefully argues in favor of the soul, and there are others like him. And, Michio Kaku points out that the anthropic principle (our existence statistically cannot be random chance) is particularly strong among string theorists (something has to make the observations to collapse the wave function into our universe).

Muller makes many interesting points in his "Now: The Physics of Time." Here are some of them (from notes I took to send to my son on his mission):

---Tachyons (supposed particles that travel much faster than the speed of light) do not exist, because they would violate free-will (in his view). 

---Entropy is a real problem in physics, if scientists will admit it. According to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, everything should move towards chaos and disorganization, but the universe itself, and galaxies, on down to the subatomic level, are all highly organized. Something is holding it together and working against this [this reminds me of Nibley’s discussion about how the proton should have decayed by now, but hasn’t. They actually can’t detect any proton decay, and there shouldn’t be any protons by now.  But here we still are]. The universe is highly organized throughout, like a gas in a container that is located only in a corner of it. Entropy and the 2nd Law dictate that it should be or be in the process of spreading throughout the container, but that isn’t what we find; it’s highly organized (low entropy).

---"Occam's Razor is often a poor guide to the truth."

---The universe’s expansion is accelerating, much faster than the speed of light at the outer edge. There has to be some sort of “dark energy” (energy we can’t detect) driving this, because our current laws of physics don’t allow this. “It’s aether all over again."

---One of the light speed conundrums is that light reaches us from 28 billion light years away (the edge of the expanded universe). Since the universe is thought to only be 14 billion years old, this is a big problem under current physics. It’s also a mystery how equilibrium has been reached in places that far apart, without contact between them (like two containers, one with high-density gas, and one with a small amount, connected by a valve. It’s like finding both of them with equal densities, which would happen if the valve were open (equilibrium), except the valve is closed).

---(Einstein): : “Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the ‘old one.’ I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.” Richard Feynman, one of the giants, “stayed away from the interpretation of quantum physics. In his colorful Brooklyn colloquial manner, Feynman warned, ‘Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‘But how can it be like that?’ because you will go down the drain into a blind alley from which nobody has escaped.’ ”

---Paul Dirac’s vacuum: chock full of negative energy electrons, which makes it so that the electron is stable (a mystery otherwise). We can’t detect it, but it’s there (like a fish in water can’t “detect” the water).

---Positrons (anti-electrons) might be negative energy electrons coming into being and disappearing and leaving a “bubble” in space-time, which seems to us to be positrons (anti-matter). The mysterious Casimir effect spooks scientists, because it is demonstrable that subatomic particles arise out of seeming nothing all the time. The "vacuum," once we really understand it, will probably be shown to be anything but --- even though its contents are undetectable to us.

Good stuff. Thank you for sharing.

 

57 minutes ago, rongo said:

[Here’s where it gets good: Muller’s religious physics explanation. He poses a similar question I’ve wondered before: what if what we see as colors would look like another color if others could see what we see? How could we even know if this is the case or not?]  "It’s a proven fact that each of our two eyes sees slightly different colors when looking at the same thing (ask any optometrist), so it’s no stretch to wonder if others see something else entirely. What if there were a girl, Mary, who was purposely brought up only seeing black and white (possible. The San Francisco Exploratorium museum has a room lit with a monochromatic light – single frequency, yellow only, low pressure sodium lamps. It’s full of colorful items that only look black and white once the eyes adjust to the slight yellowish tint). And then shining a flashlight on the colorful items (a jar of jelly beans, for example), dazzles the eye with a burst of color.

Mary grows up normally in her black and white world – only the absence of color is different. She reads about color in her science books, and wonders what living in a world of color would be like. She finds physics and optics explanations of rainbows to be interesting, but wonders what a rainbow would actually look like. She eventually becomes a brilliant neuroscientist, and knows everything about how the eye works. She knows all of this, but has never experienced it herself. Then one day, Mary walks out the door into a full color world. What will her reaction be when she finally sees a rainbow? Will she say, “Oh, this is exactly what I expected from the science I studied?” Or, will her reaction be, “I had no idea!?”

There is knowing, and there is knowing. When I tell you what I know, you may conclude that I really don’t, but what I know is what I know. It’s not my opinion, it’s not my belief. I know what I mean, and it’s true. Mary learns for herself what colors look like. Many scientists say, nonsense, she has learned nothing she didn’t already know.

“What is it that does the seeing? If free will exists, what exercises it? What experiences now and differentiates it from then? [Muller defines this as the soul, and says that if the technology existed, he would never allow himself to be beamed up like in Star Trek, because of the quantum equations that only allow this if the old copy of yourself is destroyed, and then a new exact copy with quantum particles reconstituted. Even if it could be guaranteed that all memories and feelings could be transferred in this way, Muller is suspicious that his soul would not be].

---

"Atheism becomes a religion when it makes positive assertions, and the science flavor of this I call 'physicalism.' Physicalism is a better term for scientific atheism."

---

"Feeling empathy (putting ourselves in other people’s shoes, and trying to see things from their perspective) is remarkable, and completely unexplainable with physics. This is strong evidence for me that I have a soul. The soul is much, much more than consciousness (the physicalist view, that consciousness is just brain chemistry and electrical signals in nerve cells)."

---

“I recall in fifth grade my teacher said she was going to teach us how we see. I was excited. This was something I had always wondered about and wanted to understand. That afternoon, she pulled down the diagram of the eye on the blackboard. I had seen this in science books. Nothing new yet. She traced the rays. Yes, I knew that, too. Light went through the lenses, was focused on the retina, and turned into electricity. I had read about that. Pulses went to the brain. The brain knew where each signal came from so it could reconstruct the image. The retina image was upside down, but my brain inverted it. OK, here we go! This was the moment when my questions would be answered! My concentration doubled (true story. I really was on the edge of my seat). But instead of giving the explanation, she said, “Now, let’s talk about the ear and how we hear.” I sat back terribly disappointed. I had read the science books, but they always stopped at the brain. I wanted to know how I saw, how the signal went beyond my brain, to that place where I could see what the color blue looked like. What does all of this have to do with the mystery of now? As long as we think we are nothing but machines run by a fancy multitasking computer, these issues are irrelevant. They have no meaning, unless perceived by that same thing (the soul?) that looks at the signal in the brain and sees what blue looks like. The body processes signals, but the thing that looks is what I refer to as the soul. I know I have a soul. You can’t talk me out of that. It’s the thing that goes beyond physics, that is beyond the body and past the brain and sees what things and colors look like. I don’t understand the soul . . . but having children and grandchildren . . . Do they have souls, too? Yes, that is obvious to me, yet I can’t explain how I know . . . If you tell me I don’t have a soul, that it is an illusion, that you can teach a computer program to act as if it, too, has a soul, I conclude that you don’t know what I am talking about, just like my fifth-grade teacher.”

Ironically, Ashutosh S. Jogalekar, the writer for Scientific American, says that is where the book gets bad. In his Amazon review, he says, "the last third of the book then sort of unravels as Muller flits from one philosophical topic to another. Many of these seem dimly connected to the book's main proposal, and I also found some of the sentence constructions rather clumsy. These include free will, souls and empathy, and Muller mostly recycles stuff that other people have said (the one interesting thing that he says is that faster-than-light travel would violate free will because effects could then precede causes); his treatment of these topics is rather superficial in my opinion and the style is quite rambling."

I don't see how any of this contravenes Carroll's arguments. It doesn't mean that the fact that subjective impressions that are indescribably multichromatic and palpable disprove Effective Quantum Field Theory.

57 minutes ago, rongo said:

In short, there is a lot we still don't know, and what has been discovered and theorized does not disprove the existence of spirit matter. We're nowhere near being able to even approach trying to prove or disprove that, and there is a lot in what we already have that demonstrates that science does not yet fully explain reality. We're still groping along in the cave. 

There are something things we know, and there are some things we don't. When a top physicist looks in excruciating detail at what Effective Quantum Field Theory implies about the nature of reality, we should consider the possibility that he is the one that is outside the cave and that we are the ones groping at the shadows.

[Analytics]

1 hour ago, rodheadlee said:

The one point that you are missing is you cannot see out the window from the gurney that I was strapped onto.

I understand that, but by the same token, you can't see out the window if you don't have eyes. In principle it is conceivable that a spirit could leave your body and be floating in another realm. It is inconceivable that a spirit can read what's written on the side of a van in this realm--doing so requires a mechanism to gather, focus, and intercept light. 

It's more likely that your experience is the result of imagination and misremembering.

Edited March 17, 2021 by Analytics

[ttribe]

Fascinating how many unqualified, un-credentialed, and untrained "scientists" in this thread think they understand scientific analysis and theory better than those who actually study and work in these areas professionally.  [sarcasm] Clearly, being an autodidact on quantum theory is superior than anything else. [/sarcasm]

[CA Steve]

1 hour ago, rodheadlee said:

The one point that you are missing is you cannot see out the window from the gurney that I was strapped onto.

I am not doubting your experience but it seems to me that this is a great example of what Analytics is trying to illustrate, that is; how scientific laws as we understand them can contradict our religious beliefs. In this case you believe that your spirit was hovering above your body enabling you to see out a window that your physical body could not. If the spirit is comprised of matter as LDS doctrine doctrine states, why isn't it subject to the laws of gravity?

[OGHoosier]

29 minutes ago, ttribe said:

Fascinating how many unqualified, un-credentialed, and untrained "scientists" in this thread think they understand scientific analysis and theory better than those who actually study and work in these areas professionally.  [sarcasm] Clearly, being an autodidact on quantum theory is superior than anything else. [/sarcasm]

Fascinating how you seem to dismiss the necessity of reasoning for ourselves and evaluating contrary viewpoints when Almighty Science enters the picture. 

[smac97]

1 hour ago, Analytics said:

I understand that, but by the same token, you can't see out the window if you don't have eyes.

"If."

Quote

In principle it is conceivable that a spirit could leave your body and be floating in another realm. It is inconceivable that a spirit can read what's written on the side of a van in this realm--doing so requires a mechanism to gather, focus, and intercept light. 

A spirit lacks this mechanism?  And you know this . . . how?

Quote

It's more likely that your experience is the result of imagination and misremembering.

You sure seem to enjoy the phrase "more likely."  Your use of it became suspect and unreliable when you trotted out the Appeal to Ridicule, several times over, and the double down on it again and again.

Thanks,

-Smac

Edited March 17, 2021 by smac97

[ttribe]

23 minutes ago, OGHoosier said:

Fascinating how you seem to dismiss the necessity of reasoning for ourselves and evaluating contrary viewpoints when Almighty Science enters the picture. 

I'm doing no such thing.  I've not criticized your engaging in a reasoning exercise; simply your wholesale dismissal of scientific findings based on your preconceived notions requiring you to reconcile testable observations and evidence with intangibles that you insist must exist to support your faith.

[smac97]

19 minutes ago, ttribe said:

I'm doing no such thing.  I've not criticized your engaging in a reasoning exercise; simply your wholesale dismissal of scientific findings based on your preconceived notions requiring you to reconcile testable observations and evidence with intangibles that you insist must exist to support your faith.

There are "scientific findings" based on "testable observations and evidence" that empirically and objectively disprove the existence of God, spirits, etc.?

Are you sure?

Thanks,

-Smac

[ttribe]

7 minutes ago, smac97 said:

There are "scientific findings" based on "testable observations and evidence" that empirically and objectively disprove the existence of God, spirits, etc.?

Are you sure?

Thanks,

-Smac

Did I say that?  If you are following the discussion (which I'm sure you are), you'll agree with me there is a lot of criticism of the various sources offered by @Analytics in his posts.  My observation is that: 1) those criticisms of the actual scientists in those fields is being done from a position of relative ignorance; and 2) those criticisms are motivated by a reaction based primarily (solely?) on a need to maintain faith.

[smac97]

12 minutes ago, ttribe said:

Quote

There are "scientific findings" based on "testable observations and evidence" that empirically and objectively disprove the existence of God, spirits, etc.?

Did I say that? 

Kinda sorta seemed to be the inference.

Quote

If you are following the discussion (which I'm sure you are),

Perhaps not as much as I should (if I am going to comment, anyway).

Quote

you'll agree with me there is a lot of criticism of the various sources offered by @Analytics in his posts. 

Yes.  

Quote

My observation is that: 1) those criticisms of the actual scientists in those fields is being done from a position of relative ignorance;

I think academic credentialing is not required to see when "actual scientists" have made statements that go beyond the scientific evidence and/or the scope of their expertise.

Example: I am a lawyer with 17 years of litigation experience.  If I were to tell you "I, as a lawyer with 17 years of litigation experience, hereby declare that the Book of Mormon is the revealed word of God," would you go along with that?  Accept my say-so as definitive or meaningful because of my legal training and experience? 

Or would you perhaps be comfortable in disagreeing with that statement, notwithstaning you being in "a position of relative ignorance" (I'm assuming here that you are not a lawyer)?

I am happy to listen to scientists pontificate about things that are within their sphere of knowledge.  I'm even willing to give Carroll's postulations a whirl, even though they go beyond the parameters of what science can empirically prove or disprove.  But I'm not about to bend a knee to his say-so about the existence of spirits, God, etc. just because of his academic/scentific credentials.

If he can present "scientific findings" based on "testable observations and evidence" that empirically and objectively disprove the existence of God, spirits, etc., then I'm all ears.  But I don't think he's done that.  At all.  Instead, what I am seeing from him, from Analytics (and, it seems, from you also to an extent) is scientism.  

Quote

2) those criticisms are motivated by a reaction based primarily (solely?) on a need to maintain faith.

The same could be said, I suppose, of your comments.  And Analytics'.  And Carroll's (an avowed atheist who has publicly denounced religion in toto).

Thanks,

-Smac

Edited March 17, 2021 by smac97

[smac97]

On 3/16/2021 at 10:28 AM, Analytics said:

As a refresher, I brought up an example of a top-tier scientist who claims there is "no evidence" that effective quantum field theory fails to describe reality within its domain of applicability to the degree of accuracy that the theory posits.

Okay.

Quote

His arguments are detailed, subtle, and qualified. He talks about the nature of the theories, the experimental evidence supporting them, and how the theories themselves have limits of what they can and cannot predict.

Okay.

Quote

He also goes into great length to talk about how these arguments are different than claims in the past that were made about science being near to having figured everything out. If he is right about this, then there is "no evidence" that it is the least bit plausible for the "supernatural" elements of religion to be real.

I reject the label "supernatural."

I think his claim of "no evidence" exceeds the scope of what scientific inquiry can prove or disprove.

I think there is no present way to prove or disprove the existence of God, spirits, etc.

Quote

I brought this up because it is an important example of the vast library of evidence against the Church that apologists ignore.  

I don't think Carroll's postulations are "evidence against the Church."

I don't think you have demonstrated that apologists have ignored Carroll.

Quote

I have also referenced scholars who point out that extremely intelligent people often use their intelligence to rationalize false beliefs rather than to overcome their cognitive biases and work towards the best understanding of reality that is suggested by the data.

First, you really stack the deck when you speak of "false beliefs."  You presume that which is yet to be demonstrated.

Second, this rationalization thing could include . . . Carroll, right?  He can be using his intelligence to rationalize his atheism?  His hostility towards religion?

Or is using "intelligence to rationalize false beliefs" only a thing done by people who disagree with Analytics (and, ipso facto, are carrying around "false beliefs")?

Quote

References to Kuhn and accusations of positivism and scientism don't deal with Carroll's arguments,

I really think they do.  Paul Nelson's critique (which I cited/quoted here) sure seems to "deal with Carroll's arguments," as indicated by your massively re-arranging his "gold" analogy so as to once again stack the deck.

Quote

much less give any indication that those arguments are understood.  Quite the opposite, in fact. It certainly doesn't refute my point that this evidence is ignored by apologists.

Latter-day Saint apologists critique evidence and arguments presented all the time.  FARMS did it.  FAIR does it.  Interpreter does it.  Jeff Lindsay does it.  Book of Mormon Central does it.  And on and on and on.  

So it's a bit absurd for you to pluck a book out of the millions available on Amazon, quote it, and then say "There.  Mormon apologists have not responded to this book.  I rest my case.  The Mormons are not addressing the evidence against their beliefs."  That is patently and wildly inaccurate and misleading.

Quote

Each of us need to decide if we are using philosophy to best understand reality 

I agree with this.

Quote

or using it as an excuse to ignore scientific arguments that we don't like

I don't ignore scientific principles when they are relevant and within their proper sphere.  To the contrary, I think scientific advancements are a wonderful thing.  But there are all sorts of things that "scientific argument" can neither prove nor disprove.  Among these are the things you "don't like," namely, the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, such as the existence of God, spirits, and so on.  

"Scientific arguments" about the existence of God, spirits, etc. is not a thing.  You are preaching scientism, not science.

Quote

because the arguments holding water would require us to make our own mental revolutions about what paradigms are most consistent with reality.

Oh, nonsense.  Nobody is "ignor{ing} scientific arguments."  We are all fine with science within its sphere and element.  But science, in its present form, can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God, or the existence of spirits.

And I utterly refute the imputation that Latter-day Saint apologists are somehow afraid or reluctant to engage and and evaluate and respond to arguments and evidences as to what we believe.  Apologists have been doing just that for a very long time.

Thanks,

-Smac

Edited August 5, 2021 by smac97

[Analytics]

1 hour ago, smac97 said:

"If."

A spirit lacks this mechanism?  And you know this . . . how?

If a spirit left your body, could hover in the air, and could read words painted on a police van, that would mean that there would be one or two spiritual "eyes" that could block out light except that which went into some sort of spiritual aperture. And then there would be a spiritual lens to focus the light onto a spiritual retina. All of these mechanisms that meddle with the light would necessarily be quite visible. This is what it means to "see".

If you think there is some other mechanism by which spirits can see, don't you find it odd that it doesn't work until after you are dead?

 

1 hour ago, smac97 said:

You sure seem to enjoy the phrase "more likely."  Your use of it became suspect and unreliable when you trotted out the Appeal to Ridicule, several times over, and the double down on it again and again.

Pointing out the ridiculousness of ridiculous beliefs in a friendly conversation that somebody chose to engage in is not the same thing as ridiculing. 

 

[mfbukowski]

On 3/16/2021 at 12:17 PM, Analytics said:

Consider three competing theories. One says that the motion of planets and moons in the solar system is governed, at least to a pretty good approximation, by Isaac Newton’s theories of gravity and motion. Another says that Newtonian physics doesn’t apply at all, and that instead every celestial body has an angel assigned to it, and these angels guide the planets and moons in their motions through space, along paths that just coincidentally match those that Newton would have predicted. Most of us would probably think that the first theory is simpler than the second—you get the same predictions out, without needing to invoke vaguely defined angelic entities. But the third theory is that Newtonian gravity is responsible for the motions of everything in the solar system except for the moon, which is guided by an angel, and that angel simply chooses to follow the trajectory that would have been predicted by Newton.

The above is actually a quote from Carroll.

Which theory accounts for WHY the planets exist at all??

That is deliberately excluded because each individual CREATES their own paradigm to answer that.

THAT is religion, and why all this talk of science and history is irrelevant to the real issue which is what we discuss here.

This is a theology forum, for physics, and history, inquire elsewhere 

Or we could discuss grandma's apple pie recipe, which is equally relevant to theology as physics.

 Does anyone understand the difference in meaning between the word "HOW" and the word "WHY"?

Why= Grandma makes the pies because she loves her grandchildren

How = her favorite recipe.

Recipes, like this discussion, are the "science" of piemaking, but do not explain  "why" the recipe exists in the first place.

 

[smac97]

22 minutes ago, Analytics said:

Quote

"If."

A spirit lacks this mechanism?  And you know this . . . how?

If a spirit left your body, could hover in the air, and could read words painted on a police van, that would mean that there would be one or two spiritual "eyes" that could block out light except that which went into some sort of spiritual aperture.

And you know this . . . how?  How do you know the particulars of how a spirit body functions?  

22 minutes ago, Analytics said:

And then there would be a spiritual lens to focus the light onto a spiritual retina.

Okay.  I'll go along with this.

22 minutes ago, Analytics said:

All of these mechanisms that meddle with the light would necessarily be quite visible.

Ah.  "Would necessarily."  How do you know that?  

22 minutes ago, Analytics said:

This is what it means to "see".

I'm not persuaded that we can definitively prove or disprove that a spirit body would "meddle with the light" in a way that would "necessarily be quite visible" or detectable.

22 minutes ago, Analytics said:

If you think there is some other mechanism by which spirits can see, don't you find it odd that it doesn't work until after you are dead?

Now this is the part that I can get on board with.  Discussion of the individual's personal expectations ("don't you find it odd...").  I think that is a threshold issue.

I don't know the particulars of spiritual matter.  I don't know how the Lord changed water to wine, or multiplied the loaves and fishes, or walked on water, or resurrected from the dead, or ascended into heaven.  Similarly, I don't fully understand the affection I have for my wife, the concept of malum in se, and all sorts of social/ethical/moral issues.

Science can't prove or disprove these things, and in most respects can't even meaningfully address them.  

22 minutes ago, Analytics said:

Pointing out the ridiculousness of ridiculous beliefs in a friendly conversation that somebody chose to engage in is not the same thing as ridiculing. 

Resorting to the Appeal to Ridicule fallacy is nothing but ridiculing. 

Thanks,

-Smac

[Kevin Christensen]

3 hours ago, Analytics said:

I understand that, but by the same token, you can't see out the window if you don't have eyes. In principle it is conceivable that a spirit could leave your body and be floating in another realm. It is inconceivable that a spirit can read what's written on the side of a van in this realm--doing so requires a mechanism to gather, focus, and intercept light. 

It's more likely that your experience is the result of imagination and misremembering.

In Patterns of Discovery, N. R. Hanson famously observed that "all data is theory laden."   This recasting of rodheadlee's report is an exceptionally clear demonstration of how an ideological filter works.   If the report does not fit the paradigm, does not fit the ideology, imagine another account of the experience that does fit the paradigm.  The important thing here is that what Analytics has imagined really happend is not based personal experience or eye-witness, or experiment, but an ideologically conditioned imagination.

The problem is not that this sort of thing happens.  We all do it all the time, one way or another.  The problem is that unless you personally acknowledge that you do also it, by considering the existence of that beam in your own eye, being self critical enough to recognize its existence, you cannot then critically account for the effects of those ideological filters in your own experience of life.  You cannot, as Jesus says, "see clearly."  

Quote

Positivism began its intellectual decline when the main criterion of logical positivists (any proposition that is neither analytical—that is, true by definition—nor based on empirical observations is non-sense) was shown to be self-refuting. This claim itself is not based on empirical inputs. Yet those innocent of philosophy still adhere to this simplistic way of sorting what is valid proof from invalid evidence. The entire positivistic program began to collapse once this primary support was undermined.

From Alan Goff, page 150, here: https://journal.interpreterfoundation.org/the-inevitability-of-epistemology-in-historiography-theory-history-and-zombie-mormon-history/

FWIW,

Kevin Christen

[Ahab]

24 minutes ago, Analytics said:

If a spirit left your body, could hover in the air, and could read words painted on a police van, that would mean that there would be one or two spiritual "eyes" that could block out light except that which went into some sort of spiritual aperture. And then there would be a spiritual lens to focus the light onto a spiritual retina. All of these mechanisms that meddle with the light would necessarily be quite visible. This is what it means to "see".

If you think there is some other mechanism by which spirits can see, don't you find it odd that it doesn't work until after you are dead?

Odd?  Why odd?  Are you wondering why a blind mortal man can't see when he has spiritual eyes to see with, in addition to the eyes of his mortal body?  Do you find that to be odd?  I think it's a lot like a man with mortal eyes not being able to see with his spiritual eyes the truth that is right there in front of his face.  Some kind of disconnect at work, obviously.  Our Lord often referred to those who had eyes to see and still did not see.  To see truth we need to use all 4 of our eyes, or I suppose 6 if we need bifocal eyeglasses.  Apparently our spirit needs to be able to connect with our mortal eyes for us to be able to see while our spirit is connected to our mortal body but once our spirit separates from our mortal body we can still manage to see with only 2 of our eyes.

Like, duh.  Why weren't you able to see this obvious truth before I explained it to you.  At least you can now see and understand, though... I hope.