Why is it not acceptable to question or even ridicule someone's belief in a fairy tale ? It has no special place or meaning. Threaten me with eternal damnation of you like but that has as much meaning as threatening to punch me in my Aura. Not my line but i like it.
I may believe that my wife is beautiful and children are brilliant. Everyone else may think those beliefs are patently nonsensical, which is fine - except that I do not expect to be personally ridiculed or punished for holding them. People are perfectly entitled, as a matter of human rights, to hold whatever religious beliefs they please. And other people are perfectly entitled to disagree with them, and to say so.
Yep think how long the school holidays seemed when you were 8 and getting the 10 years from 15 to 25 was an immense amount of time 40 to 50 in the blink of an eye I feel like I've only just taken last years Xmas tree down
Two centuries ago, our ancestors lived in a world which was awash with radio waves, viruses, magnetic fields, radioactive materials, etc just as it is today, but they knew nothing whatever about any of this stuff. All sorts of mysterious, inexplicable things kept happening which nobody could understand - not even extremely clever chaps like Michael Faraday. So it was hard to deny that God existed, and interfered with the world around us. Today, a lot of subtle and invisible forces have been discovered, studied, and brought under control. Most of the things God was invoked to 'explain' now have real explanations. I am prepared to believe that there are probably several further forces or effects which are unknown in 2014, but which will be discovered and mastered in future centuries. God's envelope will become smaller and smaller.
While I agree, I disagree when challenging becomes ridicule. its simply not needed. But applies equally the other way too. Some simply donot have the capacity to understand how a light bulb works, or indeed a ECU on a Ducati Multistrada, somehow can you expect them to understand religion or quantum physics?
Pete I suspect no one would be likely to ridicule your belief in your religion of choice. Unless, in the light of further knowledge you clung to those beliefs to the exclusion of all reason. It is this position that we find ourselves in now because we have the benefit of hindsight. Hindsight that compress's the two parts of that story into one.
I think this is an important point. If something happens which you don't understand, saying "God did it" is no explanation at all. It is just a way of implicitly admitting ignorance whilst avoiding actually saying so. It is a way of pretending to have answer. The objective of science is to discover real answers which actually work, not pretends.
I think Hawking's point is that so far all our eggs are in one basket. Two baskets would be better. He is not implying that trashing earth is OK. I agree with him.
Again, ignorant blind faith in science is acceptable. Ignorant blind faith in the church is not. It beggars belief that highly intelligent and articulate peolpe can miss the duplicitous and hypocrisy of this point of view
That's not strange at all. So people whose ethical world-view is rooted in the real world can be less unpleasant that people who accept ethical rules imposed on them by religious leaders and based on ancient books. Nothing surprising about that, is there?
indeed he did, but he implied that given the countless billions of stars in the universe, and the billions upon billions of planet, the chances of their being life were probably enormous. The point he was indeed making was that it was very unlikely for these intelligences to ever meet each other because (a) they only exist - like us - for a flash in cosmological terms and (b) the universe is so immense that the chances of bumping into an intelligence in the right place and the right time are miniscule. This all makes sense to me. We haven't been visited by aliens and we won't be. Just as well in my book. We are marooned on our planet. Cool.
Bradders , are you seriously saying that you believe there is nothing more to science than faith ? If i or anyone else i care about is ever in an emergency casualty ward needing urgent help i know where my allegience is going.
What really beggars belief is that an intelligent guy like you can fail the grasp the point. What do you understand about electricity? Have you ever seen an electron? What do you KNOW about it? You just believe what you've been told. But you also know it's probably true, because it makes your Ducati work and turns on the lights in your house. I'd be pretty worried about you if you started pretending that electricity was a figment of everyone's imagination and had no more reality than the stories in the Bible. Just because you haven't ever studied quantum mechanics and know next to diddly squat about it, you reckon that the thousands of highly intelligent people in universities around the world who spend their lives studying it have no more credibility than a load of imams who spend their lives studying the Koran. Science and religion are not comparable in this way, no matter how many times you say they are.
T shirt slogan time "Too stupid for science ? Give religion a try" Or "Theory, it doesn't mean guess" Those that try to equate the theory of the 6000 year old earth with the theory of evolution need a reality check.
I take your point that he doesn't think that trashing the Earth is acceptable. But you will remember the CND position at the beginning of the 80s when it was deemed unacceptable to build nuclear fall-out shelters as this made nuclear war thinkable and thus supposedly survivable. Hawking's view falls into the same category. We will not be around to see the Sun burn the Earth to a crisp, so trying to avoid this catastrophe by buggering off to a different planet will achieve nothing. In any case, going to Mars really would be "out of the frying pan and into the fire". If you start planning to give up on the Earth, then suddenly it will become "expendable". Unlike the other planets we know about, the Earth is a jewel. What would you want to be doing on Mars? Living in the middle of a desert with no blue sky? That isn't life. That's existence. It is of no interest to me.
Again still missing the point. Electricty can be experienced, tested, replicated and proven. Most quantum type sciences cant. Its assumption and tests built from hypothetical results. And in case it was missed, science is where I sit, I am simply attemtping to balance an argument, which it has developed into alas, whereby if you be,ive in religio at all yiu ae somehow less intelligent, stupid, ignorant whatever than those who consider no religion to be worth considering. Ie atheist.
That's a fair point. The thing is, all of science is based on a method. The scientific method is based on observation and experiment, on creating hypotheses and verifying or falsifying them to turn them into theories (i.e. facts). For nearly four centuries now, thousands of scientists have built up a body of knowledge by painstakingly establishing millions of facts each one of which advances the frontiers of knowledge. Every PhD advances knowledge by a tiny bit. And every fact is susceptible of being disproved, if new evidence comes along. Religion by contrast is based on assertion. Nothing is provable, nothing is falsifiable, hypotheses remain no more than hypotheses. Any religion can make any number of fantastic assertions, unconnected with the real world. No-one can conclusively disprove that god is the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or that there is a chocolate teapot orbiting Jupiter; that these nonsense assertions cannot be disproved is no reason for taking them seriously, nor for regarding them as equivalent to facts which actually have been proved. That would be balancing facts against fantasies. Sit on the fence if you like - but it is a notoriously uncomfortable position to stay in for long
