and to think there are still religious fundamentalist idiots who claim there is no such thing as atoms, or that quantum mechanics is "just a theory"

fucking braindead morons.

These were one millimeter! HUmans can SEE one millimeter!!!

Yeah, pretty cool Rob. Someone uploaded Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives onto youtube a few days ago, it's in 6 parts. Really good documentary with mr E on an adventure for the BBC, finding out about his father Hugh Everett and his fathers theory on parallel universes.
Here is the first part, the other five are easy to find, any Eel fans?

http://youtube.com/watch?v=XBiNzzYoBpA

Cool thoughts and illustrations from Freeman Dyson, physicist/mathematician.
http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jun...-freeman-dyson

I like Dyson, one of the last positive mathematicians left in the world, from the same vein as Newton.

how many mathematicians do you know? and what do you mean by "positive"?

quite a few, and by positive I mean not trying to use his math to disprove the unprovable, that is divinity. Dyson is like Newton, he uses math in a more positive direction rather then to simply prop atheism, which is the fashionable use of science these days.

Dyson interview

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0701083522.htm

Spiritual Effects Of Hallucinogens Persist, Researchers Report
ScienceDaily (July 2, 2008) — In a follow-up to research showing that psilocybin, a substance contained in "sacred mushrooms," produces substantial spiritual effects, a Johns Hopkins team reports that those beneficial effects appear to last more than a year.

what mathematician wastes time tying to "prop atheism"? math doesn't prove or disprove that. do you understand math?

here's a quote from dyson himself:


dyson understands science, but you don't. you sound like a jihadist. jihad for jesus!

he's a witch!!!!!!

dude, do you even know me?

no, but i read what you write.

science is not about proving or disproving the supernatural.

science is and has been from its origins a natural philosophy-- it deals with nature.

the development of the scientific method reduced the speculative side of this philosophia naturalis and emphasized experimentation. so, more than ever, questions of religion may be parallel to science, but not directly related to it.

for example, the big bang theory has been used by some religious people to say "aha! that's the moment when god created the universe!", but the theory neither proves nor disproves this. the theory is concerned with physics, that is all, and is proven or disproven within physics.

now, the reason why there is an opposition of science vs. religion in the minds of the masses, is because they misunderstand both science and religion.

it is true that science has demonstrated the natural causes of what once were deemed "miracles", and removed the mystic veil from many natural phenomena, but again, science deals with the physical realm, not the spirit realm where the deities supposedly exist. in other words, science is not concerned with spiritual phenomena, only with physical ones.

so science has provided us with an alternative explanation to the world other than "kukumatz made the people from corn", but it does not concern itself with kukumatz.

that's why freeman says that what he knows of the universe is consistent with his theology, but it neither proves nor disproves it. even if the mind of the universe were to be a natural phenomenon, we can only speculate, but we cannot conduct experiments nor make measurements nor make mathematical extrapolations of it.

when you artificially oppose science vs. religion, then you are thinking like an ayatollah or a medieval pope who says that this or that scientific theory must not be true because it is inconsistent with the scriptures.

and when you value mathematicians not for their mathematical work but for their religious tendencies, you're missing the point of mathematics by a million metaphorical light-years.

Atheism and Science

Atheists have appealed to science in defence of their atheism since the first avowedly atheistic manuscripts of the mid seventeenth century. However, as the German expert on atheism Winfried Schroeder has shown, the relationship between early modern atheism and science tended to embarrass rather than strengthen the fledgling atheism's case.

This was partly due to the fact that the early atheist critiques of scientific theories which were recruited into the service of defending religious belief were often merely destructive and could not put anything in the place of the current scientific explanations which they attacked. In the field of cosmology, for example, the early clandestine atheists sought to prove that the model of creation from nothing was contradictory. However, despite much criticism they were poorly equipped to provide any scientifically serious counter-theories to the preferred theistic one. The atheist Meslier, for example, was cautious about arguing for the scientific superiority of atheism, and limited himself to the mere observation that both theism and atheism have a problem explaining the origin of the cosmos.

With respect to atheism and science, theism is widely regarded by historians as having had the best scientific arguments on its side well into the eighteenth century. The renowned Denis Diderot, atheist and deist in turns, could still say in 1746 that science posed a greater threat to atheism than metaphysics.[3] Well into the eighteenth century it could be argued that it was atheism and not theism which required a sacrifice of the intellect. As Schroeder has pointed out, atheists were scientifically retrograde until at least the mid eighteenth century, and suffered from their reputation as scientifically unserious.

Some modern atheists, including the New Atheists, while accepting the adequacy of this historical portrayal of the relationship between science and atheism until the late eighteenth century, still tend to insist that this all changed from the nineteenth century onwards. The determinism of classical physics which appeared to dispense with free will and the possibility of divine action, the fossil record in geology in the decades prior to Darwin's Origin of the Species which undermined the Genesis narrative of creation, and pre-eminently the publication of Darwin's Origin in 1859 and the establishment of evolutionary theory which dispensed with the traditional argument from design appeared thoroughly to undermine religion. Dawkins' himself commented that Darwin made it possible for the first time to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist (The Blind Watchmaker p. 6).[5] Furthermore, the nineteenth century saw the birth of the social sciences, which in their classical form at least would offer powerful reductionist explanations of religion in social and psychological terms.


However, historians now broadly concur that any simple story of the supposed conflict between science and religion (and for that matter any simple story of their harmony) is problematic.[6] As John Hedley Brooke has pointed out, for every nineteenth century person considering these issues who followed figures such as Thomas Henry Huxley or Francis Galton in regarding evolution as devastating for religious belief, there were others, such as the Oxford theologian Aubrey Moore, who regarded Darwin's evolutionary theory as an opportunity for religion.[7]

At the beginning of the twenty first century the situation remains very similar: for every atheistic scientist who supposes that science supports (or does not undermine) their atheism, there is a religiously inclined scientist who supposes that science supports (or does not undermine) their theism. Thus the atheist simplifies the very complicated and much contended question of the relationship between science and atheism/religion if they suppose that the evidence provided by the scientific study of the natural and social world unequivocally points to atheism. This is evident in each of the main branches of science, both natural and social, which have some relevance to the issue of the truth or falsity of atheism/religion.

if someone asked me, do you believe in the christian god?
i'd say no.
if someone asked me, do you believe in methaphysics?
how can i say no (like atheists) or that is unknowable (like agnostics)?
i believe in reality and scientific truth, atheism and agnosticism are scientific errors.

^^ well copypasted, jesuit.

and that line about aubrey moore explains also why jesuits are not afraid of science-- because every and all scientific discovery can be easily subsumed under religious dogma for all practical purposes. that's what the jesuist started to do in the counterreformation-- they said, "let's not fear this shit, let's appropriate it". smart bastards.

hence the XX century jesuits gave a medal to hawking for the big bang, and another jesuit, teilhard de chardin, was, of all things, a paleontologist digging up for primate bones, and who argued for god's hand in the evolutionary process. sort of like "the 7 days of creation are longass days, not human days". the pope opposed him, but such is the history of the jesuits-- too smart for the mainstream church. and that's why they have the best universities too-- well, sorta.

anyway. etc. etc.

yeah idiot, i used italic just for fun.

i did not mean it in irony, titbrains, regardless of what your low self-esteem told you.

it was a well chosen text to quote.

but now-- bah!

I didn't say I value Dyson for his "religious tendencies" I said for his positive perspective. In this time, many scientists use their expertise in a negative, dogmatic and izm/schizm kind of way, and that is not science. That is politics, an entirely different ball game. I appreciate not that Dyson promotes any kind of deism/theism, rather, that he DOES NOT try to use all his good math skills to DISPROVE deism/theism. You sir, should brush up on your observation skills, or try to read my post with less obvious bias.

you are positing the existence of mathematicians who use their profession to attempt to disprove theism.

show me where they are. show me one. show me.

Right here.

ha ha ha ha

damn those atheist equations!