Man of Science or Religion? Come discuss.

A reason why it seems that more 'Scientists' are non-religious is because anyone who demonstrates an inkling of faith or even religion for that matter (two distinct things) in ANY scientific field will find their lives to become miserable in that field. I'm not saying there aren't Christians or people of other faiths in the Scientific community, but if they are, they probably aren't open about it. Anyone wishing to refute that can try.

 

@Nosirrom Mij

While it's true that we're responsible for creating a great many large things...such as the pyramids, countless towers, even a few canals and many many cities...

We will never be more powerful creators than Nature. Because nature doesn't even have to think about creating things, it just does. Between Glaciers, Oceans, mountains, Gorges, and everything else in between, Nature is pretty bad ass when it comes to creating things.

Though again, that has remarkably little to do with religion.

There have been a select few scientists that have been open about their religion, though overall your point is correct, revealing any sort of faith normally leads to persecution from ones peers in a field of scientific study.

 

Wow. From being an somewhat interesting debate about science vs religion in terms of human intelligence, to a typical argument about what religion does what.

Interesting facts about Hitler though.

But aside from that I think this thread can be closed without the risk of losing any important or relevant information.

 

It has moved off topic way to much. I wouldn't say this debate should be about Religion vs Science, it's more so about are men of science smarter than men of religion. I gave a valid link to a site a few pages back that showed countries with a higher GDP are more likely to get a higher education, thus allowing them to pursue science. IQ has no relevance with Religion.

 

Nature is weak. It can't create anything, in the sense that there is no creativity behind its actions. Glaciers, waterfalls, mountains, and canyons aren't a result of anything more than nature's strict adherence to the governing rules of physics (and by extent, chemistry and biology). Nature has no direction other than that of complete entropy. Its only aim is to destroy itself.

Humans, and any other intelligent life, are vastly superior to the forces of nature. Even though we cannot break nature's rules, we bend them in such ways that we completely overcome them. Nature 'dictated' that man needed to for nourishment, so we created agriculture. Nature 'dictated' that man needed to fight amongst themselves to survive, so we created economy to regulate our wants and needs peacefully. Nature 'dictated' that man needed to walk to travel, so we created cars and airplanes to do the travelling for us.

Our six simple machines of physics - the ramp, the wedge, the screw, the pulley, the wheel, and the lever - occur in nature only by accident, and serve no purpose for the universe other than to be another object to be destroyed in the mindless march towards heat death. Only through intelligent life are these machines applied and focused to one goal - the continued existence and welfare of intelligent life.

 

DUDE. The principles you are applying are just wronggggg.

You cannot over-simplify nature (weather, tectonic, thermal, dna, bacteria, events in space) to that extent, and then not touch Humans.

For all we know we follow the same basic principles and limitations. You realized you just compared glaciers to economy. And then talked about physics. What the **** do you think a physicist would choose in terms of technical brilliance? Glaciers.


I agree with your arguement in a way... but your just attacking nature when it has infinitely more to understand about it.. Nature exists everywhere.

 

You brought it up, good sir.

 

***** i knew what a surfactant was.

You could also look at how scientists are using hydrogen cyanide (yes the highly poisonous kind) to put organisms into suspended animation, which reduces their heart rate, oxygen intake and metabolism by about 30-fold. Think of the usage on people in critical conditions who need to be transported.

 

I don't disregard the fact that humans are a part of nature. I disregard the idea that nature and creative intelligence are one and the same.

You could argue that intelligent life is all just pre-programmed from nature, but that's quite a slippery slope. What's to stop me from arguing, then, that any of mankind's products - our cities, our dams, our pyramids and our satellites - aren't also part of nature? Of course, the very idea that nature includes some of our less benign creations - namely fossil-fuel pollution and our weapons of warfare - would make many naturalists to keel over.

In any case - if you aim to convince me that nature is a better creator than we are, I ask that you argue further on the concept of creation. To me, creation doesn't mean '**** happens'; it means 'someone wanted something done, and this is the result of that.'

Yes, I did; however, you imply that I did so in an extremely simplified (and naive) manner.
Allow me to elaborate. Glaciers are a 'creation' of nature; it's what happens when water freezes (again, simplified). Economy, on the other hand, is the creation of man; it is an attempt to curb man's voracious need for destruction by attempting to mete out resources in as fair of a fashion as possible. One of these has a distinct purpose - the other does not.
You make it seem as if I simply said, "Glaciers are like economy because they're both created."

My point is, there's a big difference between nature's glaciers and mankind's economy, and that is that nature is dumb (in the sense that it has no intelligence), while mankind has intelligence. A glacier is the side-effect of nature's laws. Economy is intelligently designed (for the most part) to achieve certain goals.


As for the 'what would a physicist use to analogize technical brilliance?', sure, maybe he could use a glacier. I don't understand at all what you mean.

The fact that we can even understand nature shows we are more capable than it. Humans once were dominated by the capricious whims of nature. Her rains put out our meager attempts at fire; her storms terrorized us into submission; our food supply was dependent on her moods. But humans have become smarter. We have grown - and nature hasn't. It remains fixed; a rulebook that we humans can bend using the awesome power of our own ingenuity.

 

At first glance this seems to be simply a problem of how you define 'nature', but I think that even if you define it as 'as opposed to artifice, which is created by man', than you are already on said slippery slope. There's no way to avoid it.

The logical conclusion is that yes, all these things you mentioned, cities, satellites, economies, creative intelligence, are extensions of nature. We certainly aren't capable of anything supernatural, are we? I think the problem could be that you over-rate intelligence. It's just a phenomenon of nature, like photosynthesis.

 

Arguing about the definition of nature guys, seriously? How is this even relevant? Is there even one person in this thread that honestly does not understand the distinction between naturally occurring and man-made things? This is just pointless semantic argument for the sake of argument.

 

The definition of "Nature" is not as clear as Natural.

Some might say nature is defined as only life, others might say the Universe is a part of nature.

Others might say mother nature is an almost sentient, sort-of-deity.

 

But as I said, intelligence can subvert nature's laws by finding loopholes and exploiting them.

Photosynthesis is itself pretty amazing. It converts sunlight into chemical energy that the organism can use. That being said, it's hardly efficient; most plants convert only 3-6% of sunlight into biomass. The rest is either converted into heat or reflected.

On the other hand, we have photovoltaic cells - solar panels. The first solar panels in the late 19th century were only 1% efficient. Today, we have solar panels that are 41.1% efficient - in comparison, the theoretical upper limit on photosynthesis's efficiency is 25% (11% in sunlight). Even lower-efficiency, mass-produced versions of photo cells are still at 24.2%.


It's unsurprising, though. Photosynthesis evolved slowly through brute-force trial and error. Photovoltaics, on the other hand, were developed, designed, and refined to constantly improve at a prodigious rate. After a billion years, photosynthesis is only at 3-6% efficiency. After 100 years, humans have made photovoltaic cells 40% efficient.


And that's why I don't think I'm overrating intelligence - or that if I am, not by much. Whereas I hardly think nature (loose terminology) would be able to do anything that we have accomplished through blind evolution.




Define 'supernatural'. Isn't it supernatural that we've almost more than doubled our lifespan? That we've traveled to the moon? That we've sent probes to explore the reaches of our solar system? I think it's pretty darn neat, what we've done. GPS? Cell phones? The Internet? I think if we tried explaining that to our ancestors even just 100 years ago, they'd have flipped out.

 

Gamma ray bursts, neutron stars, quasars, supermassive black holes, micro black holes, quark gluon plasma, gravity, heat fusion of ice, standard air pressure and temperature, the origins of time, the nuclear valley and atomic instability, the specific frequencies of electrons, entropy, the laws of thermodynamics, the mass energy equivalence (namely momentum energy equivalance), light, Cherenkov radiation, black hole radiation...

We don't fundamentally understand any of these aspects of nature.

Sorry, i thought it would look pretty. Nothing assertive or jumpy implied.

Plants don't need to be any more efficient to survive. It's a human trait to be efficient. We know from just looking out into the space how rare our planet is in comparison to very inhospitable majority of the visible universe. Now you take into account the thousands of possible things that could annialte a large proportion of our civilization in one stroke, and you think, how succeptable are we? All of our knowledge, technology and science is passed on through teaching. We haven't got it in our dna, we have to rely on those before us to continue the trend and pass it down.

Many of the immensely complex aspects of nature that we do not yet understand are programmed. Think of all of the research and technology to completely artificially replicate and grow a plant, from genes that we manufacture, when a plant can just do it. Were not so amazing if you ask me. Well were lucky at least.

 

Oh god...that's terribly hard to quote lol.


In any case, your list is more or less moot.

Refinement: My point is, we have the ability to be able to understand them. Just because we don't understand them now doesn't mean that within ten or fifty years we won't. That's the thing about intelligent beings. We get smart. And then we get smarter. And then when we finally reach a point where our biological wetware prevents us from progressing further, we shift onto a new paradigm, like computers, to become even more smart.

I actually brought up the bit about photosynthesis simply to compare it to a similar, but man-made version. The point was less about efficiency and more that humans developed it much faster than nature's blind selection evolved it.

But how would that make nature more powerful than us? Whatever killed us - the meteorite, the gamma ray burst, the black hole, whatever - did so because those events were set into motion billions and billions of years ago. That just goes to show that nature is inherently blind and dumb. There's no mysterious external force that thinks, "Hm, these humans think they're such hot ****, huh?" and decides to give us an earthquake. And I don't think that random chance deserves to be thought of as a powerful creator - or in this case, destroyer.

Great example of plants just 'doing' it. Tried raising a farm of plants lately without using pesticides, fertilizer, or genetic modification? Because of the scalability of disease, that's practically impossible. But thanks to modern advances in agriculture, we can and do accomplish this.

A plant could just do it, but it would do so sloppily - an inherent flaw of evolution, which only creates adequate species. An artificial, designed plant could do several things; perhaps it's designed to be highly disease-resistant? Or maybe its fruits are twice as nutritious and delicious as any other fruit? Or maybe it requires less soil, water, and nutrients to grow in?

Sure, you could do this with GM, but by building a species from scratch, we would be able to 'debug' it far more easily, versus hacking on 'patches' like cold resistance and such.

 

the issue here is that i agree with you, it's just i think you make it seem like its going to happen, regardless of how much we try to do it. I think that right now this planet is too chaotic for any kind of major advancements.

You say we will understand the origins of gravity in 50 years, when people have studied it for thousands? I know i agree with you on the ridiculous exponential increase in understanding, with the mass majority of it coming from the last 50 years. But im just saying it wont happen without some supernatural feat of intelligence.

 

Oh, of course not! Hardly. Technology doesn't grow from people sitting around watching TV; it comes from the thinkers and the doers. If, for no particular reason, every human on Earth decides to not do anything for the next 10 years, nothing would happen. I don't believe I came off that way, however; my points were mainly to illustrate that nature is static but man can improve on itself.

Too chaotic, though? Science still progresses even if there's tons of **** going on with the modern world. We still have institutes like CERN and NASA and whatnot (not to mention the private sector) researching and experimenting, so I don't believe that anything short of a full-on worldwide disaster (perhaps one of your gamma ray bursts ) would be able to completely halt human development.

Perhaps not super-close to 50 years, but certainly not thousands more.

But besides, we already agree on the law of accelerating returns, so why bother arguing further on this one point? Sooner, rather than later, we will uncover the secrets of the universe. We'd just be arguing on how much sooner.

 

I do agree with you, and i think that at the tremendous rate that we uncover more about our universe, it wont be long before we have some good conslusions.

The point is though, we can never explain them fundamentally. Whenever we apply knowledge to these principles (laws of gravity, equations of motion, mass/energy equivalence, laws of thermodynamics) we always have to apply a constant. And this constant is rarely explained. Boltzmanns constant, the gravitational constant etc.

We dont understand these things. We just applied logic to a trend using simple algebra.

We wont understand gravity or light in this way. And although we endeavour to manipulate such things, we will never fully control them, because we can never fully understand them.

 

To say that we're better at creating things than nature is well...asinine, in all honesty. Sure, we may be able to construct things, but can we create something as beautiful as forests, or rivers, or waterfalls? I've seen some beautiful cities. Timesquare at night was simply awestriking... But compared to say, the thousands of rock structures in South Dakota, the lush hills, valleys and rivers of wisconsin, and the forests of new york. Well, mankind pales in comparison to these things. Just because we have the ability to think about what we create doesn't make what we're creating any better. We certainly can't do it more efficiently.

Cities ARE extensions of Nature, as are anything that results from them. Because no matter what argument you have against me, you cannot argue this; Everything we make is made out of things from nature...


After that rant, I really have to say, this thread should probably be closed. We're so far off topic, and while I didn't help, I don't think that many would. So unless there is some dramatic way to get back on to the topic of Intelligence vs Religion, this thread has reached it's end.

Of course, the topic it self has little meaning. To imply that people who have a faith based belief system are of little intelligence is simply asinine. If you took a sample of say, 10,000 people, gave them all a survey and an IQ test, and on that survey, have a single very simple that asks of their belief in a higher power, I can guarantee, that the average IQ for those who believe in a higher power and those who don't would be relatively the same, obvious plus or minus a few points for sample size, extenuating data, etc.