Do you believe in the power of prayer?

[unimackpass]

I'll throw you a bone.
There is, so far as I know, precisely NO evidence for anything supernatural. Lots of stories that are neat. Lots of cool sci fi concepts.

But nothing concrete.
Put this way: quantum effects are impossibly small, by our everyday conceptualization, nearly non existent. But for that, and the difficulty in constructing devices that allow us to observe them, evidence that they exist can be seen. We know they must be happening according to our physics, and we can observe evidence that they are by looking carefully. There's an observation, and a theory to explain it.

The supernatural offers us none of that.

Until there is evidence, and a theory to explain that evidence, what are we left to discuss? Some neat stories.
I'm ready to see the evidence when it arrives.
It has failed to appear for many thousands of years. I suspect that will continue to be the case.

"There is, so far as I know, precisely NO evidence for anything supernatural."

Can appreciate this. Sounds a bit less omniscient and a bit more human.


Interesting how science has run into its limits of observation and is trying to figure out how to blend philosophy and science for excepted theories.
Coming up with string theory and multiverses just highlights where we are at.

 

[Trotsky]

I believe in its power to make the praying person feel better about themselves while doing absolutely nothing to address conflict and suffering in the world.

Also, I believe in its ability to provide security and confidence to people who need it.

 

[Fawlty]

I believe there's sometimes a short-term utility in people bullshitting themselves.

 

[unimackpass]

My daughter was a bit cross eyed when she was about a year and a half old and I took her to the eye doctor to get a diagnosis. I cannot remember what the diagnosis was but he said it was something that cant be fixed and gets worse over time. Her sight in that eye was also very bad due to the problem.

I took her home and began nightly prayer on her after she would fall asleep. A couple of times I could feel the power VERY strong and even in her sleep she would move and try to sort of shake it off.

After a few months I took her back to the eye doctor and the problem was gone completely. She still needed glasses but that problem was utterly gone. Her eyes now have a normal diagnosis.

I asked a different eye doctor what they thought about the two diagnosis and could they be mistaken for one another and she said the are not similar in any way and could not have been mistaken.

I could name ten other things like that. My fist spiritual director was exceptionally powerful at transmitting very intense spiritual awakenings in people. He was a mountain of spiritual power.

Unimackpass-- does this name ring a bell to you? Red Don?

Awesome story bro. Cant imagine how you feel every time you think about that concerning your daughter.
Native people and their natural surroundings seem to be more conducive to spiritual encounters somehow, not unlike a university being more stimulating academically.
One time when we pulled into Kodiak to pick up some fishing equipment I had a dream about someone I had never seen before and what they were going through. Didn't think much of it but a guy working at the cannery dock looked exactly like him, set me back a bit. Turned out he was going through some serious despair. Message seems to be the same many times,
tough guys will turn to the bottle or drugs to not deal with things, faith gives you the power and courage to face and walk through them.

Something like that Changes how you see things.
When people try and talk you out of it I am reminded of The Country of the Blind.

"
Nuñez descends into the valley and finds an unusual village with windowless houses and a network of paths, all bordered by kerbs. Upon discovering that everyone is blind, Nuñez begins reciting to himself the refrain, "In the Country of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is King". He realises that he can teach and rule them, but the villagers have no concept of sight, and do not understand his attempts to explain this fifth sense to them. Frustrated, Nuñez becomes angry, but the villagers calm him, and he reluctantly submits to their way of life, because returning to the outside world seems impossible.

Nuñez is assigned to work for a villager named Yacob. He becomes attracted to Yacob's youngest daughter, Medina-Saroté. Nuñez and Medina-Saroté soon fall in love with one another, and having won her confidence, Nuñez slowly starts trying to explain sight to her. Medina-Saroté, however, simply dismisses it as his imagination. When Nuñez asks for her hand in marriage, he is turned down by the village elders on account of his "unstable" obsession with "sight". The village doctor suggests that Nuñez's eyes be removed, claiming that they are diseased and are affecting his brain. Nuñez reluctantly consents to the operation because of his love for Medina-Saroté. However, at sunrise on the day of the operation, while all the villagers are asleep, Nuñez, the failed King of the Blind, sets off for the mountains (without provisions or equipment), hoping to find a passage to the outside world, and escape the valley."

 

[all caps]

Yes, I do.

When they tell you "you can do whatever you set your mind to" they arent lying. All that matters is how long it takes you to buy in.

 

[OverCoronavirus Pressure]

"There is, so far as I know, precisely NO evidence for anything supernatural."

Can appreciate this. Sounds a bit less omniscient and a bit more human.


Interesting how science has run into its limits of observation and is trying to figure out how to blend philosophy and science for excepted theories.
Coming up with string theory and multiverses just highlights where we are at.

LOL, "science has run into its limits of observation"?
I don't quite know what you mean.
I'm not sure you do either, so re- state that idea for me.
Science most certainly hasn't run into such a limitation. At the risk of quoting Tom Cruise, you're being glib.

 

[unimackpass]

"As we approach the practical limits of our ability to probe nature’s underlying principles, the minds of theorists have wandered far beyond the tiniest observable distances and highest possible energies. Strong clues indicate that the truly fundamental constituents of the universe lie at a distance scale 10 million billion times smaller than the resolving power of the LHC. This is the domain of nature that string theory, a candidate “theory of everything,” attempts to describe. But it’s a domain that no one has the faintest idea how to access."...

Whether the fault lies with theorists for getting carried away, or with nature, for burying its best secrets, the conclusion is the same: Theory has detached itself from experiment. The objects of theoretical speculation are now too far away, too small, too energetic or too far in the past to reach or rule out with our earthly instruments. So, what is to be done? As Ellis and Silk wrote, “Physicists, philosophers and other scientists should hammer out a new narrative for the scientific method that can deal with the scope of modern physics.”

LOL, "science has run into its limits of observation"?
I don't quite know what you mean.
I'm not sure you do either, so re- state that idea for me.
Science most certainly hasn't run into such a limitation. At the risk of quoting Tom Cruise, you're being glib.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/12/physics-philosophy-string-theory/421569/

Physicists typically think they “need philosophers and historians of science like birds need ornithologists,” the Nobel laureate David Gross told a roomful of philosophers, historians, and physicists in Munich, Germany, paraphrasing Richard Feynman.

But desperate times call for desperate measures.

Fundamental physics faces a problem, Gross explained—one dire enough to call for outsiders’ perspectives. “I’m not sure that we don’t need each other at this point in time,” he said.

It was the opening session of a three-day workshop, held on December 7 in a Romanesque-style lecture hall at Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU Munich) one year after George Ellis and Joe Silk, two white-haired physicists now sitting in the front row, called for such a conference in an incendiary opinion piece in Nature. One hundred attendees had descended on a land with a celebrated tradition in both physics and the philosophy of science to wage what Ellis and Silk declared a “battle for the heart and soul of physics.”

The crisis, as Ellis and Silk tell it, is the wildly speculative nature of modern physics theories, which they say reflects a dangerous departure from the scientific method. Many of today’s theorists—chief among them the proponents of string theory and the multiverse hypothesis—appear convinced of their ideas on the grounds that they are beautiful or logically compelling, despite the impossibility of testing them.......



They were reacting, in part, to the controversial ideas of Richard Dawid, an Austrian philosopher whose 2013 book String Theory and the Scientific Methodidentified three kinds of “non-empirical” evidence that Dawid says can help build trust in scientific theories without empirical data. Dawid, a researcher at LMU Munich, answered Ellis and Silk’s battle cry and assembled far-flung scholars anchoring all sides of the argument for the high-profile event......

The dogged pursuit of a fundamental theory governing all forces of nature requires physicists to inspect the universe more and more closely—to examine, for instance, the atoms within matter, the protons and neutrons within those atoms, and the quarks within those protons and neutrons. But this zooming in demands evermore energy, and the difficulty and cost of building new machines increases exponentially relative to the energy requirement, Gross said. “It hasn’t been a problem so much for the last 400 years, where we’ve gone from centimeters to millionths of a millionth of a millionth of a centimeter”—the current resolving power of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, he said. “We’ve gone very far, but this energy-squared is killing us.”.....

s we approach the practical limits of our ability to probe nature’s underlying principles, the minds of theorists have wandered far beyond the tiniest observable distances and highest possible energies. Strong clues indicate that the truly fundamental constituents of the universe lie at a distance scale 10 million billion times smaller than the resolving power of the LHC. This is the domain of nature that string theory, a candidate “theory of everything,” attempts to describe. But it’s a domain that no one has the faintest idea how to access.

The problem also hampers physicists’ quest to understand the universe on a cosmic scale: No telescope will ever manage to peer past our universe’s cosmic horizon and glimpse the other universes posited by the multiverse hypothesis. Yet modern theories of cosmology lead logically to the possibility that our universe is just one of many.

 

[unimackpass]

LOL, "science has run into its limits of observation"?
I don't quite know what you mean.
I'm not sure you do either, so re- state that idea for me.
Science most certainly hasn't run into such a limitation. At the risk of quoting Tom Cruise, you're being glib.

"These unprovable hypotheses are quite different from those that relate directly to the real world and that are testable through observations — such as the standard model of particle physics and the existence of dark matter and dark energy. As we see it, theoretical physics risks becoming a no-man's-land between mathematics, physics and philosophy that does not truly meet the requirements of any.

LISTEN
Comment editor Joanne Baker discusses the call for theoretical physics to be backed up by evidence

00:00


The issue of testability has been lurking for a decade. String theory and multiverse theory have been criticized in popular books1, 2, 3 and articles, including some by one of us (G.E.)4. In March, theorist Paul Steinhardt wrote5 in this journal that the theory of inflationary cosmology is no longer scientific because it is so flexible that it can accommodate any observational result. Theorist and philosopher Richard Dawid6 and cosmologist Sean Carroll7 have countered those criticisms with a philosophical case to weaken the testability requirement for fundamental physics."


http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-method-defend-the-integrity-of-physics-1.16535


n our opinion, this is moving the goalposts. Instead of belief in a scientific theory increasing when observational evidence arises to support it, he suggests that theoretical discoveries bolster belief. But conclusions arising logically from mathematics need not apply to the real world. Experiments have proved many beautiful and simple theories wrong, from the steady-state theory of cosmology to the SU(5) Grand Unified Theory of particle physics, which aimed to unify the electroweak force and the strong force. The idea that preconceived truths about the world can be inferred beyond established facts (inductivism) was overturned by Popper and other twentieth-century philosophers.

We cannot know that there are no alternative theories. We may not have found them yet. Or the premise might be wrong. There may be no need for an overarching theory of four fundamental forces and particles if gravity, an effect of space-time curvature, differs from the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces that govern particles. And with its many variants, string theory is not even well defined: in our view, it is a promissory note that there might be such a unified theory.

Many multiverses
The multiverse is motivated by a puzzle: why fundamental constants of nature, such as the fine-structure constant that characterizes the strength of electromagnetic interactions between particles and the cosmological constant associated with the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe, have values that lie in the small range that allows life to exist. Multiverse theory claims that there are billions of unobservable sister universes out there in which all possible values of these constants can occur. So somewhere there will be a bio-friendly universe like ours, however improbable that is.

Some physicists consider that the multiverse has no challenger as an explanation of many otherwise bizarre coincidences. The low value of the cosmological constant — known to be 120 factors of 10 smaller than the value predicted by quantum field theory — is difficult to explain, for instance......


Billions of universes — and of galaxies and copies of each of us — accumulate with no possibility of communication between them or of testing their reality. But if a duplicate self exists in every multiverse domain and there are infinitely many, which is the real 'me' that I experience now? Is any version of oneself preferred over any other? How could 'I' ever know what the 'true' nature of reality is if one self favours the multiverse and another does not?

In our view, cosmologists should heed mathematician David Hilbert's warning: although infinity is needed to complete mathematics, it occurs nowhere in the physical Universe.

Pass the test
We agree with theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder: post-empirical science is an oxymoron (see go.nature.com/p3upwp and go.nature.com/68rijj). Theories such as quantum mechanics and relativity turned out well because they made predictions that survived testing. Yet numerous historical examples point to how, in the absence of adequate data, elegant and compelling ideas led researchers in the wrong direction, from Ptolemy's geocentric theories of the cosmos to Lord Kelvin's 'vortex theory' of the atom and Fred Hoyle's perpetual steady-state Universe.

The consequences of overclaiming the significance of certain theories are profound — the scientific method is at stake (see go.nature.com/hh7mm6). To state that a theory is so good that its existence supplants the need for data and testing in our opinion risks misleading students and the public as to how science should be done and could open the door for pseudoscientists to claim that their ideas meet similar requirements.

What to do about it? Physicists, philosophers and other scientists should hammer out a new narrative for the scientific method that can deal with the scope of modern physics. In our view, the issue boils down to clarifying one question: what potential observational or experimental evidence is there that would persuade you that the theory is wrong and lead you to abandoning it? If there is none, it is not a scientific theory.

 

[franklinstower]

"These unprovable hypotheses are quite different from those that relate directly to the real world and that are testable through observations — such as the standard model of particle physics and the existence of dark matter and dark energy. As we see it, theoretical physics risks becoming a no-man's-land between mathematics, physics and philosophy that does not truly meet the requirements of any.

LISTEN
Comment editor Joanne Baker discusses the call for theoretical physics to be backed up by evidence

00:00


The issue of testability has been lurking for a decade. String theory and multiverse theory have been criticized in popular books1, 2, 3 and articles, including some by one of us (G.E.)4. In March, theorist Paul Steinhardt wrote5 in this journal that the theory of inflationary cosmology is no longer scientific because it is so flexible that it can accommodate any observational result. Theorist and philosopher Richard Dawid6 and cosmologist Sean Carroll7 have countered those criticisms with a philosophical case to weaken the testability requirement for fundamental physics."


http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-method-defend-the-integrity-of-physics-1.16535


n our opinion, this is moving the goalposts. Instead of belief in a scientific theory increasing when observational evidence arises to support it, he suggests that theoretical discoveries bolster belief. But conclusions arising logically from mathematics need not apply to the real world. Experiments have proved many beautiful and simple theories wrong, from the steady-state theory of cosmology to the SU(5) Grand Unified Theory of particle physics, which aimed to unify the electroweak force and the strong force. The idea that preconceived truths about the world can be inferred beyond established facts (inductivism) was overturned by Popper and other twentieth-century philosophers.

We cannot know that there are no alternative theories. We may not have found them yet. Or the premise might be wrong. There may be no need for an overarching theory of four fundamental forces and particles if gravity, an effect of space-time curvature, differs from the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces that govern particles. And with its many variants, string theory is not even well defined: in our view, it is a promissory note that there might be such a unified theory.

Many multiverses
The multiverse is motivated by a puzzle: why fundamental constants of nature, such as the fine-structure constant that characterizes the strength of electromagnetic interactions between particles and the cosmological constant associated with the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe, have values that lie in the small range that allows life to exist. Multiverse theory claims that there are billions of unobservable sister universes out there in which all possible values of these constants can occur. So somewhere there will be a bio-friendly universe like ours, however improbable that is.

Some physicists consider that the multiverse has no challenger as an explanation of many otherwise bizarre coincidences. The low value of the cosmological constant — known to be 120 factors of 10 smaller than the value predicted by quantum field theory — is difficult to explain, for instance......


Billions of universes — and of galaxies and copies of each of us — accumulate with no possibility of communication between them or of testing their reality. But if a duplicate self exists in every multiverse domain and there are infinitely many, which is the real 'me' that I experience now? Is any version of oneself preferred over any other? How could 'I' ever know what the 'true' nature of reality is if one self favours the multiverse and another does not?

In our view, cosmologists should heed mathematician David Hilbert's warning: although infinity is needed to complete mathematics, it occurs nowhere in the physical Universe.

Pass the test
We agree with theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder: post-empirical science is an oxymoron (see go.nature.com/p3upwp and go.nature.com/68rijj). Theories such as quantum mechanics and relativity turned out well because they made predictions that survived testing. Yet numerous historical examples point to how, in the absence of adequate data, elegant and compelling ideas led researchers in the wrong direction, from Ptolemy's geocentric theories of the cosmos to Lord Kelvin's 'vortex theory' of the atom and Fred Hoyle's perpetual steady-state Universe.

The consequences of overclaiming the significance of certain theories are profound — the scientific method is at stake (see go.nature.com/hh7mm6). To state that a theory is so good that its existence supplants the need for data and testing in our opinion risks misleading students and the public as to how science should be done and could open the door for pseudoscientists to claim that their ideas meet similar requirements.

What to do about it? Physicists, philosophers and other scientists should hammer out a new narrative for the scientific method that can deal with the scope of modern physics. In our view, the issue boils down to clarifying one question: what potential observational or experimental evidence is there that would persuade you that the theory is wrong and lead you to abandoning it? If there is none, it is not a scientific theory.

I really like this post and have been aware of this issue for a while now. As a Christian I have watched with great interest the theological debates between atheist scientists and religious leaders of many kinds. I have learned a lot from both sides and often felt a bit dejected that personal experience cannot be brought into these types of debates even though I respect the need in that setting.

There have been times when the absolute requirement for tangible physical evidence demanded by the atheist side has been met with credulity on the side of the theist and sometimes the moderators of the debate at the very loose and inaccurate philosophical positions made on the part of the atheist

One such example came from Richard Dawkins who seemed quite incensed when told by the moderator that the positions he held were not scientific but philosophical AND inaccurate.

Jacques Maritain wrote a book called "The Degrees of knowledge" where he maps all of human knowledge from the most basic to the most sublime. He especially notes the terms and limits of human types of knowledge hierarchically.

At the low end of the summit he placed theoretical mathematics then philosophy then revelation and finally at the very pinnacle, contemplative knowledge, the kind of knowledge which surpasses bits and pieces and is had in total silence, darkness, and ignorance whereby the great reality of God is experienced beyond all terms, definitions and dualities in a simple but profound intuition of the infinite God.

It is this knowledge had in the height of mystical experience, in total darkness and ignorance that interests me the most personally.

Your post reminded me of this book and how each form of knowledge and inquiry so precious and wonderful must also stay in its lane so to speak.

 

[TheGreatA]

Will-power is definitely a very real thing. A man or a woman with strong belief, in anything, will receive greater strength of will than that who does not believe in anything.

Has nothing to do with the super-natural though.

To put aside your individual ego, and believe with all your heart in the plan that has been crafted by the creator of the universe, is no easy feat. A feat impossible to myself, yet I can see its benefit, and respect those who honestly have "faith", where I possess only cynicism and distrust.

 

[unimackpass]

Will-power is definitely a very real thing. A man or a woman with strong belief, in anything, will receive greater strength of will than that who does not believe in anything.

Has nothing to do with the super-natural though.

To put aside your individual ego, and believe with all your heart in the plan that has been crafted by the creator of the universe, is no easy feat. A feat impossible to myself, yet I can see its benefit, and respect those who honestly have "faith", where I possess only cynicism and distrust.

This is a awesome post. I respect people that honestly don't believe and those that do. Unfortunately the fundamentalist atheists and bible thumpers don't know how to have a honest conversation concerning "faith" and have nothing but hollowed out strawman arguments to hurl at each other.

A friend told me once that he thought he was a atheist. When I told him I understood why people would be he started telling me all the things that challenged his atheism he didn't know how to deal with. It was the beginning of a great conversation. Was not interested in changing his mind but having a honest conversation and comparing notes.

Sometimes I learn a lot more hanging out with people I don't agree with than otherwise, it all depends on attitude with the people involved. Sadly there is a climate that isn't about intellectual curiosity but rather a hyper cynical persona that presupposes intellectual superiority if perfected. Nothing is gained and much is lost.

 

[TheGreatA]

This is a awesome post. I respect people that honestly don't believe and those that do. Unfortunately the fundamentalist atheists and bible thumpers don't know how to have a honest conversation concerning "faith" and have nothing but hollowed out strawman arguments to hurl at each other.

A friend told me once that he thought he was a atheist. When I told him I understood why people would be he started telling me all the things that challenged his atheism he didn't know how to deal with. It was the beginning of a great conversation. Was not interested in changing his mind but having a honest conversation and comparing notes.

Sometimes I learn a lot more hanging out with people I don't agree with than otherwise, it all depends on attitude with the people involved. Sadly there is a climate that isn't about intellectual curiosity but rather a hyper cynical persona that presupposes intellectual superiority if perfected. Nothing is gained and much is lost.

I cannot honestly deny other people's experiences. I can certainly attempt to rationalize that perhaps these experiences are not as they seem to the observer, but at the end of the day, I cannot deem myself certain of the absence (or presence) something that I have never experienced, and likely never will. I could just as easily be spiritually blind, as I could be visually blind. Science itself has taught me of the many driving forces in the universe that I cannot sense, as a human.

I personally have never felt any kind of an outside influence on my life, other than my own, and obviously that of the society and the people around me. However, in a universe with a seemingly infinite amount of possibilities and discoveries to make, of which we can only observe and (so far) discover a very finite amount, a guiding principle being behind the actions of mankind would be far from the most mind-blowing of discoveries.

I do not believe in changing minds through arguments either. I believe in relaying information that I've acquired, questioning beliefs (no matter how strongly or weakly supported) and critically evaluating them in a manner that's constructive and informative, rather than openly hostile and polarizing. The destruction of other people's beliefs and the pushing of my own agenda down another person's throat, is not something that I'm interested in. If my arguments only serve to strengthen another man's beliefs, I do not feel a personal loss of face but rather a gain. The only "war" that I'm waging, is against apathy and nihilism. I would rather live in a world filled with people that believe in an opposite cause to my own, than in a world filled with people who do not believe in anything, not even themselves.

To fill a void, is a respectable enough achievement, in my view.

 

[unimackpass]

I really like this post and have been aware of this issue for a while now. As a Christian I have watched with great interest the theological debates between atheist scientists and religious leaders of many kinds. I have learned a lot from both sides and often felt a bit dejected that personal experience cannot be brought into these types of debates even though I respect the need in that setting.

There have been times when the absolute requirement for tangible physical evidence demanded by the atheist side has been met with credulity on the side of the theist and sometimes the moderators of the debate at the very loose and inaccurate philosophical positions made on the part of the atheist

One such example came from Richard Dawkins who seemed quite incensed when told by the moderator that the positions he held were not scientific but philosophical AND inaccurate.

Jacques Maritain wrote a book called "The Degrees of knowledge" where he maps all of human knowledge from the most basic to the most sublime. He especially notes the terms and limits of human types of knowledge hierarchically.

At the low end of the summit he placed theoretical mathematics then philosophy then revelation and finally at the very pinnacle, contemplative knowledge, the kind of knowledge which surpasses bits and pieces and is had in total silence, darkness, and ignorance whereby the great reality of God is experienced beyond all terms, definitions and dualities in a simple but profound intuition of the infinite God.

It is this knowledge had in the height of mystical experience, in total darkness and ignorance that interests me the most personally.

Your post reminded me of this book and how each form of knowledge and inquiry so precious and wonderful must also stay in its lane so to speak.

"As a Christian I have watched with great interest the theological debates between atheist scientists and religious leaders of many kinds."

I very much relate to this. Started out in life not exposed to any kind of faith, rather the opposite. It was the condescending sneer heading off any possibility of dignifying even the thought of a conversation concerning Christianity which which marked the tribe.

Ironically it was while studding such things as Plato and evolution that sparked a insatiable appetite for "what the heck!"
The complexity of the universe and development of life slayed me completely.

Fast forward I ended up hanging out with Antiocian Orthodox Christians, who as a whole are some of the most brilliant people I know. Professors and authors in almost every field. Could go on about this alone for a long time. Evolution? Of course.

Interesting going to a church potluck where people are discussing science being stuck on the unobservable universe and all the implications. You start thinking everyone is talking about such things and then you realize these guys teach philosophy/science and some are medical doctors. Ok, I've bin spoiled. Now I have to go deal with people that think their sophisticated.

Nature-
"Some physicists consider that the multiverse has no challenger as an explanation of many otherwise bizarre coincidences. The low value of the cosmological constant — known to be 120 factors of 10 smaller than the valuepredicted by quantum field theory — is difficult to explain, "

The far reaching implications of this little jewel of a sentence is impossible to over exaggerate .

 

[unimackpass]

Now with all that in mind look at Dawkins trying to deal with this issue. I'm almost embarrassed for the guy. For one thing it's almost like he doesn't realize the multivers theory itself makes one sound desperate according to many of his own pears.
Doesn't he read Nature?
"I'm not really a physicist."

 

[BOWHUNTER]

Yes

 

[franklinstower]

"As a Christian I have watched with great interest the theological debates between atheist scientists and religious leaders of many kinds."

I very much relate to this. Started out in life not exposed to any kind of faith, rather the opposite. It was the condescending sneer heading off any possibility of dignifying even the thought of a conversation concerning Christianity which which marked the tribe.

Ironically it was while studding such things as Plato and evolution that sparked a insatiable appetite for "what the heck!"
The complexity of the universe and development of life slayed me completely.

Fast forward I ended up hanging out with Antiocian Orthodox Christians, who as a whole are some of the most brilliant people I know. Professors and authors in almost every field. Could go on about this alone for a long time. Evolution? Of course.

Interesting going to a church potluck where people are discussing science being stuck on the unobservable universe and all the implications. You start thinking everyone is talking about such things and then you realize these guys teach philosophy/science and some are medical doctors. Ok, I've bin spoiled. Now I have to go deal with people that think their sophisticated.

Nature-
"Some physicists consider that the multiverse has no challenger as an explanation of many otherwise bizarre coincidences. The low value of the cosmological constant — known to be 120 factors of 10 smaller than the valuepredicted by quantum field theory — is difficult to explain, "

The far reaching implications of this little jewel of a sentence is impossible to over exaggerate .

You mentioned the Orthodox Church which is one of my very favorite of all time. I am basically split between the Orthodox Church and Catholicism. My mind is Orthodox but my spirituality is more inclined towards Catholic.

I dont recommend books but if you have not read The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church by Vladimir Losskey I cannot recommend it highly enough. It is the most important book I have ever read.

It is written at the scholarly level so it wont feed you any candy at all. But it is also dripping with the spiritual power of Christianity. It is dripping with the deep contemplative end of Christian spirituality.

This book also expertly and respectfully explains the theological differences between Catholicism and the Eastern Church and shows the necessary differences in mystical experience that result from these theological differences. Because of this you get a really wide view of contemplative reality within the Christian Church.

I was lucky in that my introduction into Christianity was by a priest scholar with multiple degrees so that it was very rich and deep and penetrating in its insight.

I will say this though, of the many quality Christians I have been lucky enough to learn from it is the contemplative saints that have made the deepest impression and who have what I truly want-- and what Jesus gives.

My spiritual adviser is a Catholic Monk and the monastery where he has lived for 60 years was being closed and I thought he was going to have to move to another state. I have been with him for 15 years.

I got onto a Catholic forum and stared asking for recommendations for a spiritual director who was advanced in the life of prayer. I did not say where I was from but did say I was willing to travel to see him. I asked that it be someone who had been through all of the nights as described by John of the Cross.

I received a PM from a man who said he knew a very advance monk who could read souls. It was my spiritual advisor!!!! I took that as a message to stop seeking a replacement so I did.

Turned out that my advisor ended up not having to leave the state and I still am currently working with him.



On the fine tuning of the universe. I like the the videos you posted and they have helped me because I sort of decided on my own that the reason for the multiverse theory HAD to be ideological but had never heard that many educated people think this way.

But even if there is a multiverse or even if we find out that some other unknown energy or physical law is responsible for the fine tuning it will still be just another link in the chain that terminates in the Infinite God.

 

[unimackpass]

I cannot honestly deny other people's experiences. I can certainly attempt to rationalize that perhaps these experiences are not as they seem to the observer, but at the end of the day, I cannot deem myself certain of the absence (or presence) something that I have never experienced, and likely never will. I could just as easily be spiritually blind, as I could be visually blind. Science itself has taught me of the many driving forces in the universe that I cannot sense, as a human.

I personally have never felt any kind of an outside influence on my life, other than my own, and obviously that of the society and the people around me. However, in a universe with a seemingly infinite amount of possibilities and discoveries to make, of which we can only observe and (so far) discover a very finite amount, a guiding principle being behind the actions of mankind would be far from the most mind-blowing of discoveries.

I do not believe in changing minds through arguments either. I believe in relaying information that I've acquired, questioning beliefs (no matter how strongly or weakly supported) and critically evaluating them in a manner that's constructive and informative, rather than openly hostile and polarizing. The destruction of other people's beliefs and the pushing of my own agenda down another person's throat, is not something that I'm interested in. If my arguments only serve to strengthen another man's beliefs, I do not feel a personal loss of face but rather a gain. The only "war" that I'm waging, is against apathy and nihilism. I would rather live in a world filled with people that believe in an opposite cause to my own, than in a world filled with people who do not believe in anything, not even themselves.

To fill a void, is a respectable enough achievement, in my view.

I aproach experience very cautiously, especially my own. Something's I just ended up not being able to deny no matter how hard I tried. There are groups that thrive on experience and manufacture it as needed. It's almost the same principle of destroying a currency, put enough counterfeit out there and no one knows what to trust. I understand skepticism.

I have a cousin that is a total concrete sequential. Built a small empire from nothing, animal worker and natural money maker in a commercial fishing world that is brutal. It's like he was born to do what he does. Grew up literally in a log cabin with a dirt floor and rose to the top through shear will power and toughness. Deadliest Catch reveals what kind of world he came up through.
As far as having a spiritual dimension it's not a concern whatsoever for him.

My sister, now that's another story altogether. It seems when things are working right everyone's strengths and weaknesses benefit each other.
It's almost like some people look at a piano and instinctively know how to play it and others have a common sense knowledge of how the world works.

Seems that there is some 5d chess going on, and just because I don't understand every move, doesn't mean I have to discount the possibility all together. Like you said, mans knowledge is very finite.

 

[unimackpass]

You mentioned the Orthodox Church which is one of my very favorite of all time. I am basically split between the Orthodox Church and Catholicism. My mind is Orthodox but my spirituality is more inclined towards Catholic.

I dont recommend books but if you have not read The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church by Vladimir Losskey I cannot recommend it highly enough. It is the most important book I have ever read.

It is written at the scholarly level so it wont feed you any candy at all. But it is also dripping with the spiritual power of Christianity. It is dripping with the deep contemplative end of Christian spirituality.

This book also expertly and respectfully explains the theological differences between Catholicism and the Eastern Church and shows the necessary differences in mystical experience that result from these theological differences. Because of this you get a really wide view of contemplative reality within the Christian Church.

I was lucky in that my introduction into Christianity was by a priest scholar with multiple degrees so that it was very rich and deep and penetrating in its insight.

I will say this though, of the many quality Christians I have been lucky enough to learn from it is the contemplative saints that have made the deepest impression and who have what I truly want-- and what Jesus gives.

My spiritual adviser is a Catholic Monk and the monastery where he has lived for 60 years was being closed and I thought he was going to have to move to another state. I have been with him for 15 years.

I got onto a Catholic forum and stared asking for recommendations for a spiritual director who was advanced in the life of prayer. I did not say where I was from but did say I was willing to travel to see him. I asked that it be someone who had been through all of the nights as described by John of the Cross.

I received a PM from a man who said he knew a very advance monk who could read souls. It was my spiritual advisor!!!! I took that as a message to stop seeking a replacement so I did.

Turned out that my advisor ended up not having to leave the state and I still am currently working with him.



On the fine tuning of the universe. I like the the videos you posted and they have helped me because I sort of decided on my own that the reason for the multiverse theory HAD to be ideological but had never heard that many educated people think this way.

But even if there is a multiverse or even if we find out that some other unknown energy or physical law is responsible for the fine tuning it will still be just another link in the chain that terminates in the Infinite God.

Wow, this is getting more interesting all the time. Orthodox / Catholic is basically where I'm at. I've heard it expressed as two lungs need for the fullest picture which has bin my experience. I love and need both expressions of spirituality. I love that book by the way. Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church has become part of a persons mind/experience.

Mystery/knowledge/experience. The blended fullness in a seamless way can only be learned and experienced through the living historic church. Seen all the other attempts,and while partly right, instinctively one knew something else was still to be found.

Fantastic you found some great spiritual mentors. Contemplative prayer is becoming more and more a focus in my life. Some orthodox friends want me to go to mount Athos with them. Also on Kodiak island there is a monastery I'm looking forward to visiting.

My iPad is dying so I better sign off. Would love to meet some of the people you're talking about. Will check in later.

 

[Xhizors]

I'll throw you a bone.
There is, so far as I know, precisely NO evidence for anything supernatural. Lots of stories that are neat. Lots of cool sci fi concepts.

But nothing concrete.
Put this way: quantum effects are impossibly small, by our everyday conceptualization, nearly non existent. But for that, and the difficulty in constructing devices that allow us to observe them, evidence that they exist can be seen. We know they must be happening according to our physics, and we can observe evidence that they are by looking carefully. There's an observation, and a theory to explain it.

The supernatural offers us none of that.

Until there is evidence, and a theory to explain that evidence, what are we left to discuss? Some neat stories.
I'm ready to see the evidence when it arrives.
It has failed to appear for many thousands of years. I suspect that will continue to be the case.

Sorry, but there is. But at the same time the supernatural does not exist, because there is an explanation for everything. Things are always natural, but sometimes some strange events occur and we don't have an explanation for it. Science can't explain these things and sometimes can't even begin to address the issue, because these events can't be replicate and science is about repetition.

 

[esdoornblad]

"As we approach the practical limits of our ability to probe nature’s underlying principles, the minds of theorists have wandered far beyond the tiniest observable distances and highest possible energies. Strong clues indicate that the truly fundamental constituents of the universe lie at a distance scale 10 million billion times smaller than the resolving power of the LHC. This is the domain of nature that string theory, a candidate “theory of everything,” attempts to describe. But it’s a domain that no one has the faintest idea how to access."...

Whether the fault lies with theorists for getting carried away, or with nature, for burying its best secrets, the conclusion is the same: Theory has detached itself from experiment. The objects of theoretical speculation are now too far away, too small, too energetic or too far in the past to reach or rule out with our earthly instruments. So, what is to be done? As Ellis and Silk wrote, “Physicists, philosophers and other scientists should hammer out a new narrative for the scientific method that can deal with the scope of modern physics.”





https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/12/physics-philosophy-string-theory/421569/

Physicists typically think they “need philosophers and historians of science like birds need ornithologists,” the Nobel laureate David Gross told a roomful of philosophers, historians, and physicists in Munich, Germany, paraphrasing Richard Feynman.

But desperate times call for desperate measures.

Fundamental physics faces a problem, Gross explained—one dire enough to call for outsiders’ perspectives. “I’m not sure that we don’t need each other at this point in time,” he said.

It was the opening session of a three-day workshop, held on December 7 in a Romanesque-style lecture hall at Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU Munich) one year after George Ellis and Joe Silk, two white-haired physicists now sitting in the front row, called for such a conference in an incendiary opinion piece in Nature. One hundred attendees had descended on a land with a celebrated tradition in both physics and the philosophy of science to wage what Ellis and Silk declared a “battle for the heart and soul of physics.”

The crisis, as Ellis and Silk tell it, is the wildly speculative nature of modern physics theories, which they say reflects a dangerous departure from the scientific method. Many of today’s theorists—chief among them the proponents of string theory and the multiverse hypothesis—appear convinced of their ideas on the grounds that they are beautiful or logically compelling, despite the impossibility of testing them.......



They were reacting, in part, to the controversial ideas of Richard Dawid, an Austrian philosopher whose 2013 book String Theory and the Scientific Methodidentified three kinds of “non-empirical” evidence that Dawid says can help build trust in scientific theories without empirical data. Dawid, a researcher at LMU Munich, answered Ellis and Silk’s battle cry and assembled far-flung scholars anchoring all sides of the argument for the high-profile event......

The dogged pursuit of a fundamental theory governing all forces of nature requires physicists to inspect the universe more and more closely—to examine, for instance, the atoms within matter, the protons and neutrons within those atoms, and the quarks within those protons and neutrons. But this zooming in demands evermore energy, and the difficulty and cost of building new machines increases exponentially relative to the energy requirement, Gross said. “It hasn’t been a problem so much for the last 400 years, where we’ve gone from centimeters to millionths of a millionth of a millionth of a centimeter”—the current resolving power of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, he said. “We’ve gone very far, but this energy-squared is killing us.”.....

s we approach the practical limits of our ability to probe nature’s underlying principles, the minds of theorists have wandered far beyond the tiniest observable distances and highest possible energies. Strong clues indicate that the truly fundamental constituents of the universe lie at a distance scale 10 million billion times smaller than the resolving power of the LHC. This is the domain of nature that string theory, a candidate “theory of everything,” attempts to describe. But it’s a domain that no one has the faintest idea how to access.

The problem also hampers physicists’ quest to understand the universe on a cosmic scale: No telescope will ever manage to peer past our universe’s cosmic horizon and glimpse the other universes posited by the multiverse hypothesis. Yet modern theories of cosmology lead logically to the possibility that our universe is just one of many.

Can you summarize, in a sentence or two, what the point is here?