AGNOSTICS INTERNATIONAL (Agnosticism)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Sunday, November 27, 2011, 18:49 (4755 days ago) @ George Jelliss

This seems to be Julian Baggini's continuation of his argument:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/oct/21/science-atheism-humanism-rel...

But I can't say he has reinvigorated the "god wars". He appears to argue that secular humanists and atheists may have as much trouble with science in future as religious believers have had. However as a rationalist-empiricist whose views are based on the scientific evidence I can't see how there can be any conflict for me. Baggini himself is to me a fluffy-minded philosopher who thinks in vague general concepts. I suspect that if he defined his terms precisely in the first place he would find that there is no problem.

I'm quite late to this discussion, but here's my 2 pence...

As someone who works with Godel's incompleteness theorem on my back, the resounding implication for science is this:

1. Einstein is right and all attempts at a "Theory of Everything" are flawed from the beginning. Russell & Whitehead's failure in axiomatically defining and unifying all of mathematics coupled with the incompleteness theorem that explained why the endeavor failed point to the inevitable conclusion that physics is doomed as well.

This means that there will always be a divide between relativistic & quantum mechanics due to the limits of experiment. As a case in point there's some consternation in computational biology that some systems are so incredibly complex that humans might eventually have to simply *trust* computers are giving them the right answers. (One equation for a cell is a linear sequence of 1.5M terms.) One scientist would take a lifetime understanding a relationship THAT dense. The problem for atheists and agnostics like myself is that faith will eventually creep in--as long as mathematical correctness proofs don't exist for each computational scenario. (Which at least, might make mathematics a lucrative profession outside of military uses...) But the direct challenge is that science itself will be faith based for all those not initiated into the esoteric world of program-correctness and theorem-proving.

As to Baggini's defining his concepts succinctly... I have yet to see a succinctly worded concept that actually explained the concept wholly. We need to learn to live with a certain amount of ambiguity...

--
\"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.\"