Science vs. Religion: (Chapter Two) (Humans)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Saturday, February 19, 2011, 22:53 (4821 days ago) @ xeno6696

In the grand scheme of things, the question over design or not comes down to whether or not you feel a non-empirical inference is valid. A problem I have with a design inference is also this kind of reasoning. I haven't read your chapter yet on odds, but you discuss many of them in Chapter 2, and I chuckle a bit as I recall our first discussions. How can anyone offer valid statistics when we don't have a complete picture? We have a good model (Standard Model) but an incomplete picture. -As a mathematician I think all the physicists you quote shoot themselves in the foot when we still have a great deal of work to go before we really have a grand picture of everything. Many of the whys you bring up aren't really resolvable unless gravity can be reconciled with quantum mechanics. -Speaking of which, you seem to doubt quantum mechanics here. You make mention that the only way we've known anything here is in terms of calculating probabilities. -That's exactly the point; at that level determinism doesn't exist. A quantum system is always in a state of both wave and particle until some interaction causes it to take one form or another. This isn't an inadequacy of science, it's simply how reality works. On the quantum level, information can literally be created from nothing at all--hence Seth Lloyd's book "Programming the Universe." -You make several comments about us gaining a good "how" about the universe but not the "why." -Personally, I don't understand the seduction of "why" questions. It must be something uniquely Western that I simply managed to miss altogether while growing up. -Why are we here? 
"What does it matter?"
Why is the universe the way it is?
"Why does it matter?" 
Why something rather than nothing?
"Nothing is something itself. False dichotomy. An answer from physics."-I fail to see the relevancy of these questions. Especially in the discussion of evolution. These questions are fallaciously loaded so that man needs an outside explanation to justify his place in the cosmos, that we're somehow so important that we need our own special explanation as to why we exist as opposed to not exist. Man's hubris. -An odd observation I have about Man is that he is never good enough for himself; it's not enough to have free will and be the master of your own destiny, you need to have higher justifications. This inferiority complex is one of many reasons that I believe causes the creation of religions.-But then... "Why free will...?" I swear we suffer a seduction to words...-We don't know, and we never can know the answers to these questions.

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"