Religous philosophy?

[Lithium_joe]

As my 'long post' now has annotated at the bottom - Edited by Lithium Joe - I feel duty bound to point out I have edited (and extended) some of my arguments from before for anyone out there who is interested.

[mattie]

I don't really have a well-defined religious philosophy. Although I'd count myself as a Christian, I would not say that my beliefs can easily be categorised by any existing Christian denomination/way of thinking. Put simply, I have a strong faith in God but I find a few of the religious teachings hard to swallow. I, therefore, have a tendency to form my own opinions on topics such as the origin of the universe, many of the Bible stories (i.e. I believe them to be mere parables, designed to advise us on morality) etc.

[Lithium_joe]

I'm just curious Mattie, as an atheist I lack any belief in a god I'm just wondering how do you experience your faith?

I would say finding religion hard to swallow is the sign of an enquiring mind and I'm naturally all for that; so would you mind saying what some of your opinions are and how you reached them?

Thanks.


LJ - not going to or

[mattie]

"I'm just curious Mattie, as an atheist I lack any belief in a god I'm just wondering how do you experience your faith?

I would say finding religion hard to swallow is the sign of an enquiring mind and I'm naturally all for that; so would you mind saying what some of your opinions are and how you reached them?"

My faith is based on a mixture of 'gut feeling' and scientific reasoning.

I would summarise some of my religious beliefs as follows:-

1) Although I believe in the theory of evolution, the complexity of the natural world - whereby whole ecosystems are delicately balanced - leads me to the conclusion that some form of 'intelligent design' is required. Without a creator, it is very difficult to see how a 'chaotic universe' could have encouraged the evolutionary patterns necessary to support the natural world.

2) Despite finding the Big Bang theory highly credible, it poses more questions than it answers. If, for example, the universe was created by the big bang, what/who created the materials/conditions necessary to create the mega explosion in the first place? You cannot create something from nothing - in which case, something must have existed before the universe .

3) I believe that the Bible is full of parables, designed to provide some moral guidance and advice on how to live our lives.

4) As the Bible was written by men, it naturally reflects the ideas and cultural biases of the era in which it was written.

5) Many of the world's religions are interlinked: they tend to have many ideological similarities and a few differences.

[cat27]

Clever argument Matt, I'm with you!

what convinced me also was the scriptures that described the world as shaped like a sphere, and hanging on nothing, which
was written years before the birth of Jesus, when the common belief was that the world was flat!
However i don't believe in Adam and eve (otherwise we would all look rather similar, and their children would have had to had committed incest!) I agree that a lot of the stories in the bible are parables, that were designed to give us a better understanding ,and some good examples of what god does, or doesn't require of us

[Lithium_joe]

Okay a slew of points to tackle there I'll take them on one at a time....

1) Although I believe in the theory of evolution, the complexity of the natural world - whereby whole ecosystems are delicately balanced - leads me to the conclusion that some form of 'intelligent design' is required. Without a creator, it is very difficult to see how a 'chaotic universe' could have encouraged the evolutionary patterns necessary to support the natural world.

1) Belief in evolution is not required, it is a matter of accepting the evidence for evolution, followed by understanding it.
I mean you no disrespect but I think you may have faltered at the last stage so allow me to point out your error as I see it.

If I may paraphrase: The world is very complex therefore it was designed and I think it was intelligently designed (by a God)

There is a premise missing in this argument and it goes like this.

Life in the world is very complex
Complexity implies design.
I cannot think of a way that complexity can have arisen naturally
Therefore I conclude that the world was intelligently designed (by a God)

I stuck that last bit in parenthesis because you might well conclude that the intelligence was not a God but without wanting to play with semantics here, the intelligence - whatever it was - would still need to be explained without assumption.

So let's pick this apart bit by bit.

Life in the world is very complex.We agree; well done for noticing. This is not in contention.

Complexity implies design. Stop right there. There is no evidence that is true, in fact it's flatly contradicted by the evidence. Take just one example: in known design, form typically follows function but what do we find when we examine life in the world? Not only are there different forms with the same function eg different structures of the wing between birds, insects and mammals but there are also similar forms with different functions eg the bones in the human hand, the whale flipper, a horse's leg or another example might be the structures of the jaw bone in fishes and reptiles, that in humans now form part of the middle ear. Topping this off there are forms with no function such as vestigial organs, a mole's eyes for instance; an ostrich wings; the hip bones inside whales or the human coccyx (tailbone)

If this is design it is a spectacularly bad one by he measure of form and function! And let us add that these features are all explicable and anticipated if life is interconnected and has diversified and adapted over time, in short: has evolved.

If you have concluded that complexity requires a designer then you have committed what is known to most atheists and biologists alike, as the fallacy of personal incredulity. This is what I meant when I said of your argument 'I cannot think of a way that complexity can have arisen naturally

This is the genius of what Darwin realised and wrote about: complexity can and does arise naturally and from simple beginnings, and which modern scientific inquiry can properly describe right down to the genetic and molecular level.
If you find it 'difficult to see' then allow me to explain it for you.

Artificial selection has been practised for thousands of years, it is what gives pigeon fancier's their flocks, race-horse throughbreds and just about every breed of dog going. What Darwin recognised was that competition for resources (be they predatory or environmental) was sufficient to be the driving force behind the elimination of weaker forms and the survival of successful forms in nature without the presence or influence of an artificial selector (us), hence "natural selection".

Where species compete with each other in predatory relationships the surviving adaptations are those that for example let the antelope escape by running faster or allow the tiger to creep closer to the herd without being detected because of more effective camouflage. Alternatively where they are isolated with limited resources on islands such as Madagascar or Australia, the process of natural selection has led to a vast diversification of forms, eg. the marsupial rather than placental mammals. The trend if you like, is toward complexity through natural selection. These processes are in balance because they evolved together. You only have to look at examples when species are artificially introduced into eco-systems where there is no corresponding balance to see the damage wrought on local populations. Historically I could cite the extinction of The Dodo; more recently the Africnaised ('killer') bee is an example of an extremely aggressive insect which has spread incessantly since it's accidental introduction (The killer bees seek out and kill queens of rival hives and breed prodigiously making them a genuine threat to existing hives on native bees in America. Although it has been shown that killer bees can be domesticated, which is an example of artificial selection.

Therefore I conclude that the world was intelligently designed (by a God)
So the point is that complex, diverse and balanced system in nature can arise naturally. If you have concluded this requires intelligence or a designer then you have in my opinion not understood the theory which you claim to believe in.
And this is where I disagree with you: I not only accept the evidence of evolution, I hope and I strive to understand it. It is an unnecessary step for me to infer a designer or creator from that which the evidence shows is neither designed or created.
The parsimonious route (assuming the least number of variables) is to see the natural process and self-sustaining and the introduction of an undefined and extra-complex creative force as an additional structure for which there is no evidence.

You said that your faith was a mixture of gut feeling and scientific reasoning. I hope what I have demonstrated is that intelligent design by it's own premises fails to counter the genuine scientific understanding which, were that it could be considered as valid science, a genuine and competing scientific theory of intelligent design would be able to do. Hence, I conclude that your faith in this particular instance is driven by gut feeling alone, and it just remains to be pointed out that gut feeling is not a sufficient reason that would convince me that gods either exist or that one or several are responsible for the complexity of life we see around us, which to end on a note of equanimity, is the one thing we do agree about.

LJ.

[The Lurker]

What triggered tbe Big Bang LJ? Assuming that everything in the universe was in equillibrium before the Big Bang, what knocked it out of equillibrium and allowed the Big Bang to occur? Where did the components which allowed the Big Bang to occur come from?

[Lithium_joe]

I'll try to be briefer on this one but we'll see how I do and then I may have to stop and resume tomorrow.

So switching from biology to physics

You said:

2.) Despite finding the Big Bang theory highly credible, it poses more questions than it answers. If, for example, the universe was created by the big bang, what/who created the materials/conditions necessary to create the mega explosion in the first place? You cannot create something from nothing - in which case, something must have existed before the universe

The Big Bang theory is highly credible.
It is supported by multiple streams of evidence. Again we agree. This is good.


It poses more questions than it answers.
Yes, I fear you may have misunderstood the scientific method.

Just look at this quote from Wikipedia. Okay not the greatest or most reliable source but it'll do in a pinch:

The scientific method seeks to explain the events of nature in a reproducible way, and to use these reproductions to make useful predictions. It is done through observation of natural phenomena, and/or through experimentation that tries to simulate natural events under controlled conditions. It provides an objective process to find solutions to problems in a number of scientific and technological fields.[6]
Based on observations of a phenomenon, a scientist may generate a model. This is an attempt to describe or depict the phenomenon in terms of a logical physical or mathematical representation. As empirical evidence is gathered, a scientist can suggest a hypothesis to explain the phenomenon. This description can be used to make predictions that are testable by experiment or observation using the scientific method. When a hypothesis proves unsatisfactory, it is either modified or discarded.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science#Scientific_method

In cosmology there observations being made are about the universe, the model in cosmology is the big bang, through theory and experiment (about which I'll talk a bit more in a moment) natural events are simulated, empirical data is gathered, hypothesis are made and falsified or reinforced. The model can be used to make predictions which are testable

That is the important part. It is not a failure for the Big Bang model to present us with more questions. If by 'posing more questions than it answers' you mean it sets up testable hypothesis than may describe reality. Then I would agree and do not see this as conflicting in any way with sound scientific principles.

Now, if you want to suggest that ' god did it' is a valid scientific theory with valid and testable hypothesis backed up with empirical data then I'm afraid you and I are just going to have to disagree.

What created the materials necessary for an explosion.

I suspect you are operating under a misunderstanding. There are different kinds of explosions. All things that burn, combust. The kind of combustion that spreads by conducting heat to other objects until they ignite (which is how most fires propagate) is known as deflagration - as in conflagration: which is a word meaning uncontrolled burning. The important distinction between deflagration and the other kind of explosion is the speed at which the chemical reaction happens. Below the speed of sound (sub-sonic) all kinds of burning are deflagration, above the speed of sound (super-sonic) forms of combustion are known as detonations.

This is how hand grenades kill you: The explosive charge inside detonates, shatters the casing. The super-sonic effect creates a shock-wave just as jet planes flying at super-sonic speeds eventually catch up with the shock-wave created when they passed the sound barrier and hence create the 'sonic-boom' effect. The shock wave is a sudden and violent compaction of air particles caused by the compressive effect of the detonation, it will effectively remove limbs and shatter glass windows etc. Following just behind the shockwave is the photo-chemical combustive element which is what creates the fire and the flash. Mixed into all of this is the shrapnel created by the shattered hand grenade which is ejected outwards and will also do a pretty effective job of removing parts of bodies or creative massive internal bleeding. All in all very nasty: but worth pointing this out as one kind of explosion.

Another kind are nuclear explosions. This is where following the principle that mass is a special form of energy and that amounts of mass are in fact equal to amounts of energy; quite a lot of energy as it happens: e=mc^2, e being the energy released being equal to the amount of (m) matter converted multiplied by the speed of light, (c) and take that number and square it. That's a lot. And nuclear bombs only convert a tiny fraction (atomic) amounts of mass, and the energy released in those explosions is magnitudes greater than any simple chemical reaction.

That's Fission taken care of high temperature fusion is the process that goes on inside stars where atomic elements are actually combined and the effect is a massive release of energy which is how the sun can shine for billions of years. They are currently trying to build a fusion reactor in France, I believe.

Why bother telling you all of this? Because the Big Bang is not technically an explosion. It's often called one but that's a common misunderstanding. The only really common feature that the Big Bang shares with an explosion as set out above, is the expansion the universe underwent which is analogous to the kind of explosive, supersonic, expansion that the shockwaves created by a detonation undergo as they expand in all directions. The evidence for the expansion (and some other features) is what is observed in the current universe (by, amongst others, Edwin Hubble - who had a telescope named after him) and is what gives credibility to the theory, which by the way was called 'The Big Bang' because Fred Hoyle, the man who worked out how stars can generate the heavy element in the periodic table, and who despite his undoubted brilliance and like you, had difficulty accepting that this was how the universe formed, thought that it would help ridicule the theory if it was given a silly name.
At the very least this striking image for which he is directly responsible has stuck and by which it is now commonly called but not often fully understood.

So away from what is known to what is not. I trust for your own self-esteem if nothing else, that you don't believe in a god-of-the-gaps, which is one that occupies and does the things which are not yet fully understood. Because if you do, it's depressing situation, for as more things are understood your god shrinks. Hardly a dignified end for for supreme and creative super-being. Assuming that is not what you believe but that you believe in a god that exists somehow outside of space and time, this begs the question how is that god supposed to perform miracles, heal the sick and telepathically hear our thoughts or anything else with which they are credited. This also sets up alogical fallacy that god would have to somehow predate the universe, so where did god come from? This forms an infinite regression which doesn't actually explain anything least of all the observed characteristics (such as expanding space, microwave background radiation etc.).

What Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose collectively proved was that mathematically the universe began as a point of infinite density called a singularity, which then (see above) expanded.

Inside of the singularity lie space and time. It is the space which is doing the expanding (and it's not expanding 'into' anything - this of it like the a surface of a baloon, with a marker pen mark two dots on the baloon then inflate it. As the materail exapnds so the dots move away from each other. This is what we observe - imagining if that dot was the earth and you were underneath a telescope looking up, we see thigns moving away from us. This is because the space between galaxies is literally expanding just as the material of the baloon is stretching. This is only an analogy: space is space and balloons are made out of rubber so the process is not identical but I make mention of this anticipating the objection about expansion.

Ever since Einstein proved that space and time were related (hence why the rate at which an astronaut appears to fall into a black hole differs depending on whether or not you are the astronaut doing the falling or the hapless crew-member watching your death from the orbiting spaceship, marking the point at which time ceased being considered as independent and absolute.

Where all this is headed is towards explaining what happened to the singularity at the start of the universe, part of the problem is that ever since quantum physics really got going, there has been a split between the science of the very large (planets, galaxies, Einstein and Newton etc) and the physics of the very small (Rutherford, Geiger, Heisenberg, Shrodinger, Bohr etc)

In order for the physics as described by Hawking and Penrose to be right, operative as they are on the principles of Einsteinian relativity, some theory still yet to be found which is able to explain all of the physics of the universe are both levels. Since the universe which later became very big, dispersed and cold but started off very small, dense and hot questions like 'how did matter and energy not annihilate each other?' or 'how did the fundamental forces derive their values?' (The sticking point is how does gravity work at the sub-atomic level. Figure that out and the Nobel Prize is yours. None of these questions have answer. Yet. Hence I can say with confidence that things are still not properly understood. And this is why there are controversies such as the existence of Dark Matter as well as research projects questions such as 'how do some sub-atomic particles acquire their mass?' (A question directly related to the problem of sub-atomic gravity) In pursuance of the answer to which The Large Hadron Collider was recently built and switched on. The great hope is that the still-being-developed- mathematics of String Theory may be the best candidate yet found for unifying both halves of modern physics and holds out the possibility of explaining how the singularity could have formed.

We live, as they say, in interesting times.

Arguing for a first-cause is really just a reformulation of the design argument which I tried to refute above.
It is like saying: 'I personally cannot imagine how all of this complexity (vis a vis The Universe) could have come about naturally so I find it necessary to imagine a prior and supernatural cause to supplement my incredulity.'
Now that I feel I've briefed you in so far as I am willing at this late hour on the current state of cosmological inquiry, which I hope you will agree is far more interesting than subscribing to the origin of everything the rather uninteresting assertion that 'god did it', but if that is your position and you are sticking to it, let me now point out why that contradicts the current scientific understanding which you claim to find highly credible.

By definition, if a cause must come before an event and if time began with the universe (as Einstein, Hawking and Penrose agree that it does) then saying "something must have existed before the universe" is nonsensical because the category "before" does not even apply.

Now anticipating your reaction to that, if you want to place your god 'outside' of space and time (i.e the Universe) - which is logically perverse but let's just run with the idea for now - then how is it supposed to interact with the universe? I presume that if your god is one that exists outside of space and time that you believe that it cannot. But Deists of course believe that god started the universe but takes no further part in it. For theists it's much more complicated because they have to contend with a god that does all sorts of miracles and listens to prayers ad heals the sick and dying, and on television too!

And now we come to the infinite regress. If god is going to be the first casue of the universe, it raises the question of what caused God? and what caused the cause that caused god and what caused that cause and so on ad infinitum. And this is why the god hypothesis is so funamentally weak on this point becuase you may think the big bang theory poses more questions it answers but positing god as a first casue answers preciisely nothing.

And it gets worse: this is a logical mess and despite being an infinite regression, also results in a fit of circular reasoning, thus:

If a cause comes before an event, and the creation of god is an event which had a cause then this had to take place inside the universe where there is time with linear directionality in which it makes sense to talk about causes preceding events) and this contradicts your belief that god pre-dates the universe. therefore, a god or the infinite regression of causes that lie behind it cannot be assumed as first cause.

There are discoveries yet to be made about how the universe began and why it is like the way that it is.
And therein lies the power of the scientific approach: it will be possible one day to explain, for instance, why gravity is weaker than electromagnetism because how those forces came to be in the furnace of the early universe will be known. Creationism, the argumnt from design and first causes alike have no such explanatory power because their 'whys' are never the result of knowing 'how' something was rather than the alternative possibility of how it wasn't. Creationism accommodates all possibilities and rests the decisive and creative moment in the hands of a deity which is placed, safely beyond reach beyond nature.

That is as much unsatisfactory intellectually as it is logically incoherent and in denial of all available evidence.

You cannot create something from nothing - in which case, something must have existed before the universe

As such your conclusion, if that something is god, simply cannot reasonably be deduced from your premise.

LJ

[Lithium_joe]

I've got a book on string theory* I'll have to get back to you on that. The best explanation I can give you lurker at the moment is String theory deals instead of points (as in particles like atoms and electrons) being dots but as elongated strings extending through higher dimensions. Points like atoms and electrons appear as vibrations along the string, and this in part is why things like photons (a particle without mass) can be treated as both a point and a wave, because it's expression as a point is the vibration of the super-string as it operates in this 3-dimensional reality.


The Big Bang as it occurred in this set of dimensions may have been a disturbance in one of these higher dimensions, And this exauts pretty much all I currently know about String Theory.


If you want a bit of help imagining higher dimensions, these videos may help
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkxieS-6WuA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySBaYMESb8o

But bear in mind this conception may not be identical with the kind of dimensions in which string theory is supposed to operate.


*see contrary to appearances: do I know everything? No. Can I read books? Yes.

[Lithium_joe]

I'll have a go at 3), 4), 5) tomorrow but I do want to respond to Cat 27 before I go.

what convinced me also was the scriptures that described the world as shaped like a sphere, and hanging on nothing, which
was written years before the birth of Jesus, when the common belief was that the world was flat!
However i don't believe in Adam and eve (otherwise we would all look rather similar, and their children would have had to had committed incest!) I agree that a lot of the stories in the bible are parables, that were designed to give us a better understanding ,and some good examples of what god does, or doesn't require of us

I just don't understand this:

You are convinced by some astronomical observation in the bible so therefore the entire thing must be true, except for the parts with which you personally disagree? By what standard are you making this judgement?

Leaving aside the confused nature what we hold to true and what not for a moment; 'The Bible says the earth is round, showing that its authors were inspired to understand science beyond their time.' I assume you are referring to Isaiah 40:22?

Bit mundane isn't it? The shape of the Earth can be deduced by observing the Earth's shadow as it passes across the moon during a lunar eclipse. There is some evidence that this was known to Pythagoras (the man who invented the triangle - no, I'm kidding) who lived in between 580 and 572 BC, and died between 500 and 490 BC. There is even something to suggest the Ancient Egyptian civilisation new something about the shape of the world as far back as 2550 B.C , more thousand years before Moses is supposed to have existed. If this is so, the fact that whoever wrote this part of the bible included it does nothing to advance the argument that it is divinely inspired word of god. Which I can ignore all I like because I don't think it is the divine words of a god, but since you do, I'd be urging caution about cherry-picking the bits you don't like from his autobiographical life-manual. Seems an inherently risky activity , if you ask me.

Even so, for every Isiah 40:22, however, you can find a Joshua 10:1-15 or a 2 Kings 20:1 - 11 , wherein The entire planet Earth is made to resverse it's orbit around the sun (something which is counter-intuitive - it appears to go around us - something which even the brightest old testament scholar couldn't have worked out.) Thus by the power of god is the sun made not to set, (His munificence even extends to crushing to death the armies threatening his envoy by pelting them with hailstones.) and my absolute favourite bit of biblical nonsese is when the sickly and ailing kind suffers a death bed conversion and as proof that god has healed him for this the shadow cast by the sun dial goes into reverse. Just pause for a moment and consider what that means. And if you don't belive me, go look it up.

Absolute drivel if you ask me. But you're welcome to believe in that if that's what floats your boat. Personally I'll stick to Archimedes principle.

Finally, if the bible is so accurate why didn't it tell us anything useful, like for example the germ theory of disease? How many millions of lives could have been spared if the divinely inspired authors of that great book had had an angel impart to them the saintly and necessary duty to wash their hands before they ate, cook thoroughly all meats and thou shalt keep separate your water supply from your effluence. Such clarity would present potentially quite a persuasive case of a benevolant god who had all of our best interests at heart.



I am at a loss to see how this convinces anyone of anything other than the Bible shouldn't be used as a guide to anything, least of all reality.

[The Lurker]

Your blinding us with science LJ but just for the record, I spent 4 years at Uni studying Science.

Where did the electrons, photons, call it what you will, come from?

[Lithium_joe]

Well then you may well have the edge on me here. Which discipline Lurker?

To respond to that charge: Honestly I'm not trying to blind with science it's rather I've encountered this kind of thinking before, so when people say their reasons for faith are intelligent design and first cause, well sorry those are philosophically poor arguments - and I spent 4 years at uni studying that - and that's more what I'm trying to point out: that if faith is justified on those grounds then faith isn't justified at all.

It just so happens that the weight of evidence is also on my - (our?) side, because if intelligent design, for example, is used to explain biological diversity, then it's clear to me that that theory of evolution has not been understood. If that's it - a clear case of misunderstanding - then I hope all I've tried to do has been to demonstrate that the scientific picture is the valid one. Even where the answers aren't fully known yet, it is the scientific method - not faith - that is the means by which we will uncover the truth.

Now to try and answer your question. This is going to test my knowledge of particle and quantum physics. I suppose this question is really asking about conditions in the very early universe, I think I've already conceded the point that most of what is known about this period of universal history is not yet fully understood and is mostly based on educated inducements yet to be proven. What has been largely understood and has been an emerging picture ever since the 1920's is sub-atomic structure of atoms and particles in this age of the universe.

That really is the reason behind building large colliders like the LHC and before that I think it was Fermilab. Those grand experiments are capable of reproducing conditions of heat and pressures which can reveal the basic building blocks of the universe unavailable at lower temperatures and pressures. So you will agree with me, I hope, that basic building blocks of matter are atoms which are composed of principally a lot of not very much at all and then a few electrons, protons and neutrons. The later two of these are themselves actually composed of more fundamental particles called quarks. Electrons orbit the nucleus of the atom of an element, except that the orbiting electrons aren't really in orbit in the same way the moon is in orbit around the Earth and strictly speaking, electrons aren't particles either, existing as they seem to in an indeterminate and probabilistic state.

To understand this is to try and attempt to understand quantum theory (not the mechanics - that's the where the real weirdness lurks), however the basic physics is relatively straight forward.

The electrons that surround atomic nuclei existed in quantised states, that is discrete packets of energy. If electrons are sufficiently excited they can leap up the energy well and escape the nucleus all together. This is how electricity is able to flow through wires: The current is conducted down a metal rod inside an insulted tube. That metal rod is composed of atoms of a particular element or possibly a composite. What makes those elements conductive is the structure of their atomic nuclei will have free electrons ready and willing to be excited and liberated so that the now liberated electrons which carry the electromagnetic field leap from atom to atom of the conductive metal in the wire, which is usually something like copper which has a number of free electrons ('free radicals')which are able to be easily freed. This, by the way also explain how magnetism works: magnetism is a property only noticeably seen in three elements, iron, nickel and cobalt, because those are the elements whose arrangement of electrons form electromagnetic bonds by similarly sharing electrons.

So, electromagnetism is quantised and the electromagnetic wave has multiple frequencies, including the fequencies that make up visible light, so light too is a form of electromagnetic radiation and is also is therefore quantised. Those packets of energy (or quanta) are what are called photons. When an atom absorbs a photon the electrons can become excited, conversely electrons may also decrease to a lower energy state, giving up a quanta of energy and emitting a photon of their own. The energy of the photon that is emitted in this way is equal to the energy state of the descending electron. So atoms either absorb or radiate photons in discrete packets of energy states.

This is how colour works: All materials in the world are made of elements or composites that have electrons around atoms composed at discrete states of energy. When photons of light interact with that material the photons which are reflected and scattered are the photons who energies excite the electrons. The photon whose quantised state corresponds to the quantised electrons of the atomic structure of the material are instead absorbed. When this happens the electron of the material moves to a lower energy states, releasing energy as it does so and so emitting photons (a quanta of electromagnetic radiation) of their own. It is these photons which we we see when they impact on the light collecting cells in our eyes which because they are oscillating at a specific frequency to appear coloured.

This is just an example of how quantised energy states of electrons and photons can be used to explain everyday phenomena. In fact evolution explains how we see in colour, but quantum physics explains why there are colours at all.
Well you all might see in colour. My genome, however, carries a mutation on my x chromosome that I inherited from my mother which relates to the building of eyes, specifically the photoreceptive cone cells in my retinas. I am what is known a dichromatic protanope, that is I am red-green colourblind, my red's appear dark and easy to confuse with black.

In some ways wanting to understading my faulty colour vision is what has led me into reading about biology and physics given that at this point the two are very much related.

But the physics of quanta, elctrons and photons goes much further than that. It's also part of the principles that underlie some of the less mundane discoveries like the expansion of the universe (red-shift) the chemical composition of our star as well as stars on the other side of the galaxy (spectroscopy) not to mention the successful prediction of the magnetic moment of the electron which has been confirmed by experiment to be accurate to one part in 10-billion. A breath-taking level of agreement between theory and experiment that means however weird it is, there probably is something to this quantum theory.

And your question was, if I understood it correctly, about quantised states in the very early universe and the proposed super-symmetry of the initial state (I think I understand your questions a bit better now) essentially I suppose the simplicity of the question belies a greater complexity about which a full understanding has yet to be reached. The answer to which is really on the bleeding side of the cutting edge of modern physics research. I do not doubt that scientific enquiry which has brought us this far will will not one day solve these riddles. Even if the hypotheses of string theory and super symmetry turn out to be wrong; wrong ideas are typically the spur to new, potentially more valid ones. The point I guess is that not enough is yet known about the origin of these phenomena to say with certainty how they originated. The very early universe wherein the current laws of physics break down and the physics of the very small come to predominate is still in many ways a closed book

However it would be an incredible step to argue from this basis that what science has not yet answered therefore means religious explanations are correct. This is not a picture of a supernatural process of creation but what remains, at present, an incomplete picture of natural processes.

As a scientist yourself, I expect you understand that.

LJ.

[Lithium_joe]

3) I believe that the Bible is full of parables, designed to provide some moral guidance and advice on how to live our lives.

4) As the Bible was written by men, it naturally reflects the ideas and cultural biases of the era in which it was written.

5) Many of the world's religions are interlinked: they tend to have many ideological similarities and a few differences.

I promised I'd respond to all five of Mattie's points, and having done so at length for 1 and 2, I really will try to keep this last reply short, so to do that I'm going to try and adress 3, 4 & 5 one reply and so that there is something for you to directly respond to in the interest of debate, I think I'll try and stick to asking questions and making a few observations.

The Bible and moral guidance:
You say you consider the bible to be full of parables. How does a parable differ then from say a fairy tale or fable which often contain similar themes of moral choice and consequence? The point I'm trying to make is that it is not a property found only in parables to be able to stir the conscience to see a moral messages.

Which rather neatly brings me to the point about what sort of morality are we being guided to obey?
Of the famous 10 commandments, depending on which sect you feel is most representative of your faith, several ways of counting the 10 commandments are permitted so that the first four or five amount to a kind of religious regulation for the devout (I am the Lord thou god; thou shalt have no other gods before me; thou shalt not worship false idols,; do not take the lord's name in vain; remember the sabbath and keep it holy) only then followed by admonishments against dishonouring parents, murder,adultery , theft, lying and covetousness. There is not a legal system that has ever existed that hasn't outlawed those most serious crimes and sound ethical systems which have nothing to do with divine authority can be devised which make the case equally well. It doesn't seem necessary to invoke religion in order to be moral.

And it is divine authority that is the sticking point for presumably what makes these actions immoral is not anything inherently wrong with them but that they are in conflict with what god wants of us?

This problem was first framed by socrates in Plato's dialogue Euthyphrom hence it is known as Eurthyphro's dillema, I will pose it for you and allow you to answer:

“Are morally good acts willed by God because they are morally good, or are they morally good because they are willed by God?”

Let me know what you think about that question.

Meanwhile, and keeping this brief as I can, I presume your are deriving your moral guidance from the bible as a whole since you make mention of parables and which clearly are not part of the 10 commandments so what is your reaction to how the bible treats the subject of human slavery? There are parts of this book which seek to regulate slavery rather than point out the sheer immorality of the condition, (for example Exodus 21: 1-11, particularly 7 onwards which is a passage about the commandments placed upon men folk about how to sell their daughters into slavery) I ask, is this what you mean when you say in (4) the bible reflects cultural biases of the era?

Well that's fine as far as moral relativism goes but if as I do, you find human slavery morally objectionable you cannot derive that objection from the religious text, to do so would be contradictory. I pose the dilemma therefore like this:

If we agree slavery is morally wrong, we are deciding this against a modern moral standard which is non-biblical. I say this because in order to find the passage in Exodus to be morally perverse, I certainly, and I presume you too, cannot only make that judgement if the moral authority upon which it is based is not taken from the bible. To do otherwise would amount to a tautology.

5)

The similarity that exists between the three abrahamic faiths (Christianity, Islam and Judaism) is no surprise at all when considered historically how monotheism has developed over the last couple of thousand years: I would argue the difference are pretty stark however: Is Jesus the son of God (Christianity) or a prophet (Islam) is a pretty big one to be getting on with.
I mean they can't both be right (and I would venture to suggest that neither of them are) but even this is to miss a more fundamental point which is this: even if if religions differ wildly or converge almost identically this does not have any bearing on whether or not those religions are true.

Right I've tried to keep that as short as possible so this is the end.

I've tried to set out the the counter arguments to what Mattie and Cat 27 said were the reasons that underpinned their faith. I await the responses I may get with interest, and certainly hope I've not scared anyone off or 'blinded them with science'.

LJ - not going to or

[Liz944]

Think you all maybe in need of a swift or not so swift pint!

[Lithium_joe]

Thanks. Don't mind if I do.

All this philosophising leaves one a bit parched y'know?