The map of ideas how the universe appeared from nothing [pdf]
immortality-roadmap.com
immortality-roadmap.com
But if and when you go there and read the work in which these old people said what they believed you got convinced -- and you barely know that you are convinced of the same points you in the past found ridiculous under the guidance of your primary teacher.
For example, the failire of the Michelson-Morley experiment is the basis for relativity and their test equipment was essential for QM!
LIGO, for all its complexity, is just the Michelson-Morley experiment again, this time sensitive enough to detect waves in the ether rather than drag from our motion. Of course we've switched a lot of terminology around since then, but the idea is the same.
Similarly, interferometery is integral to QM studies, and is a critical tool of modern science.
Thousands of people of equal brilliance have come up with vastly different explanations for what appears to be the same thing. As a conclusion they must all be vastly overconfident.
I also think there are a lot of people who say more than they know, on both sides of the argument, but that's true of any subject.
It seems you already discounted most of them and chose the one most comfortable to you.
And since all the intelligence and conciousness on Earth is part of this reality we experience, and Earth is such a small part of this reality, being more stars in the universe than sand on Earth, this reality is very intelligent and conscious. And this only illuminates and reflects the eternal and infinite power of God, the One, the most High.
This same question can of course be asked of any explanation of how the universe came to be (religious, scientific, or otherwise)... which is what makes this question so fascinating to me.
It makes me realize that some things just can't be understood by causal logic alone.
It's fairly straight forward to build the other numbers from a starting value, 1, but defining 1 itself requires a full understanding of the infinite structure, and the other things it can build. So you can view 1 as both more basic than the other numbers and also more complex than any of them.
Similarly, the argument would be that God is both things: nothing but the fundamental notion that the universe does stuff (or is), and also the full complexity of structure built from that fundamental doing.
In the same way that mathematics ultimately tried to eat its own tail -- using advanced theory and structures to loop back and define its base structure -- science is attempting to tell the story of how a singular type of fundamental perturbation self-acting can give rise to the plethora of structures and phenomena we see, and must inevitably do so.
That we keep running in to the same sorts of definitional loops, fractal structures, notions of duality, etc across both efforts suggests something of the nature of God -- or at least the computational structure of the universe we live in, as it is built atop a singularity.
Getting a little further afield -- modern physics suggests that reality can be interpreted as a quantum computer operating on universal scale and timelimes, so in a very real sense, we're just a subset of the singularity computing. I would argue that many primitive people intuited this fact before we had the terminology to really articulate it, and that we see this splashed across religion, covered by later political additions.
The same analysis applied to god had the opposite result. It shrink the idea of god, so much, that now no one defends the notion of god directly causing earthquakes any more, certainly no one on this thread, as you are all too smart to try to back that up. God has been at most, relegated to the position you just voiced. Certainly that is the only position left to retreat, because you have stripped god of so much, it has become so vague, an almost synonym with everything and truth, whatever that means, that you can't really refute an idea that is barely an idea.
The two are not really alike.
Earthquakes are caused by the ultimate God, and mediated by various other dieties or angels, depending on your preferred terminology. You seem to be assuming that God thinks like us or is interested in us, and I would point out that is the younger, more recent idea, which I regard as nothing but ego and politics masking the original idea for reasons of memetic potency in human thinking.
Our understanding of why and our ability to predict them has changed, but what you describe is a confusion rather than a retreat: just because we can give two names to something doesn't mean one stopped applying.
That confusion underlies your comment: people still say that God directly causes earthquakes, we just dropped the political nonsense about it being because leader said not to do X and we did it.
If anything, that's viewing God as larger, not lesser, and reflects us letting go of our own ego, and returning to the base idea, rather than our own nonsense atop it.
> Earthquakes might be caused by the ultimate god, and might be mediated by various other deities or angels.
That might is what has been retreating, time and time again.
And I don't know how you can claim both, confusion and a larger understanding of god at the same time. But I guess that is part of the confusion...
The terminology I used can be backed by repeated demonstration and is exactly equivalent to the scientific theory that you likely subscribe to. It's the choice of words that it's expressed in, not the actual structure of what's being said that differs between "scientific" and "religious" explanations. No more use of the word "might" is involve than had I said it was caused by fluid dynamics of the mantel causing collisions between plates of the crust -- you're simply ignorant of the translation between vocabularies.
Which brings me to my next point... The confusion I mentioned was in people like you belieiving that because one language articulated an idea first, it's the only or most sensible language to articulate that idea in. That's false, of course. Just because we came to be able to articulate a lot of things in the language of science, that doesnt mean we stopped being able to in the language of theology.
The way I can claim a confusion and larger understanding at the same time is because I wasn't applying them to the same people -- you and many others are confused by linguistics and syntax, while the actual theory has grown significantly.
Though, for a quick definition, you can roughly say that a deity or angel is equivalent (in definition) to a quasiparticle.
Using this (rough) definition, we can see that I didn't claim to know anything about earthquakes that geologists dont -- merely that I use different terminology (and slightly different strategy) when decomposing the model in to parts.
Your reply entirely skipped over the thrust of mine: that you're strawmanning what others are saying by pretending a difference in language is a different claim. You then immediately made up a new strawman about earthquakes rather than address that.
Have you considered that you're not actually trying to understand what Im saying, and just making self-assured ignorant comments?
> you can roughly say that a deity or angel is equivalent (in definition) to a quasiparticle.
As I said, claiming understanding while showing only confusion. I really, really, really hope your so-called explanation makes sense inside your head, otherwise I'll be forced to think you are being dishonest, taking terms that have been used in one way for probably a millennia, if not more, and twisting them to cause controversy where there is none. Either way, there is nothing more I could add without being mean, so I'm gonna stop answering.
I would argue that my definition is perfectly in line with the historic view of those terms and how they're used by people who model their worldview with them.
Similarly, what part of my definition do you not feel is fair -- they're not any more real than protons, another ficticious entity, but they're not any less useful as a conceptual entity. Ill note you only claimed I was confused, but didn't actually explain how and have demonstrated zero knowledge of the idea Im trying to convey. Have you considered you're simply confused, not me?
Again, you seem genuinely unwilling to consider that maybe people have a more nuanced and sophisticated view than your pop-culture based caricature, and insisting that we can only mean that nonsense by the words, despite the several millennia of them being used the way Im using them.
EDIT: removed imaginary it was distracting the point
I prefer "complete numbers", cause they're the algebraic closure of the reals.
Not all of them did :). Also I understand you are not trying to proselytize, we have the same motivation in commenting.
I am still curious about the other possibility - If you travelled 1000 years into the future and found no one believed in God anymore than we believe in Zeus:
Would it bother you to live a lifetime of staying silent, or being discriminated against by nearly everyone as being a crackpot?
You should had predicted this if you were actually gave a sincere thought to the matter instead of just repeating this atheistic arguments.
Also, I didn't say anything about atheism.
Finally, I do give sincere thought to these matters and try not to ever be disrespectful of anyone's belief system. Sorry if you felt that way.
I'm sorry if I offended (and keep offending) you, also.
Also, although you didn't say anything about atheism, you surely are an atheist, right?
That is his point, why would you choose a christian point of view instead of a greek one, besides personal preference?
"The life of the unmoved mover is self-contemplative thought ("νοήσεως νόησις (noeseos noesis)", i.e. "thought of thought").[1][2] According to Aristotle, the gods cannot potentially be distracted from this eternal self-contemplation because, in that instant, they would cease to exist." from Wikipedia on Aristotle's Metaphysics
Also, while they clearly pre-date modern ideas of science, the thoughts of a person like Aristotle are worthy of consideration.
And no one is discounting Aristotle, I don't know where you are getting that idea.
Universe, uni verse, one song.
Not to mention that we "know" what "nothing" is... we have no examples of "nothing". Not sure how we could really define it properly to begin with.
Hindu cosmology is based on religion and supernatural concepts, it is not science. It's interesting that Hindu mythology included references to a multiverse and other concepts that sound similar to modern theories. It's also interesting that science fiction writers have foreshadowed future achievements, but Jules Verne is not a scientist.
A lot of scientists are inspired by fiction, that doesn't mean you start putting their accomplishments in quotes.
The specific thing I am talking about is not based on supernatural concepts, as @DougN7 said, turns out half the Science that comes out has to be revised when they realise its not true.
There was a time when Scientists said in the 60s that smoking was good for you, then there were the Harvard Scientists that were bought out to say that sugar has no effect on our weight. Now tell me, if such great scientists can get it wrong, how can you be insulted?
Comparing ideas that great scientists read up on as fiction is insulting to both their theories and you're only fooling people.
Please cite evidence that Hindu cosmology is falsifiable. If it's not falsifiable it's supernatural.
Science doesn't always have to be right, it just has to be willing to be proven wrong. That's how it's supposed to work.
>that great scientists read up on as fiction is insulting
Read a little history, this happens all the time.
That my friend is the ultimate cop out clause, its like saying "oh we can bash religion for when its wrong but you cant bash science".
This is something that always intrigues me. People that believe in science (me included) don't see how much faith they too have in what they are taught. And that over time and with more understanding, what they were taught also ends up being false. For example, I was taught the ultimate truth by scientists that electrons orbited an atomic nucleus. I had blind faith. Turns out we were all wrong.
And to continue on your point about religion - just because someone somewhere thought up of some idea, that translated to modern language and interpreted in modern knowledge framework sound similar to some of the obscure theories that are not yet falsified is nothing but unexpected. It would be hard to believe that from countless works of fiction that were produced during thousands of years around the world, none of them gad anything that resembles some strange theory. It literally shows nothing - neither that these unverified theories are right, nor that some ancient people had some superior cosmological knowledge we are just discovering right now.
Ignoring that difference is the mistake.
Let me share some examples
In Varahavatar, Earth was submerged into ocean. You realise that ancients for a long time had idea of Earth as flat. How do you expect them to make concrete theories about universe? Not until Ramayana does reference to Earth as a ball appears. But even that text (which is relatively new) has Sun circling the Earth. Ancient texts are great and give us glimpse into creative capacity of human mind. But let's not try to pass them as scientific
No, thats confirmation bias. That is not what Hindu texts are saying at all, keep in mind these scriptures were spoken tens of thousands of years ago and then written down, whilst Scientists are only understanding our solar system well enough over the last 1000 years. Planets like Shani (Saturn) etc were well known in Hindu texts long before telescopes existed.