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Why don't Theist's admit that there's no evidence for God?
- Thread starter Philomath
- Start date
Sleeppy
Fatalist. Christian. Pacifist.
Right. Randomess is defined.. Not surprisingly different for each subject. None of which are random in reality, only in definition and procedure.
Sha'irullah
رسول الآلهة
I am fairly certain this is not what Riverwolf was stating but I could be wrong.
I already know about the nature of physics and their exclusiveness to the Universe though. This has been proposed in the Multi Verse theory numerous times
Enai de a lukal
Well-Known Member
Well, not because I say so, but it is certainly true that those were not examples of ontological commitments, and thus your response missed the mark. Examples of ontological commitments of various religions would be: God, Satan, angels, Allah, YHWH, Zeus, Brahma, Ra, Dagon, and so on. And notice that Buddhism alone, of all the major world religions, has no commitment to the existence of any such entities.
As the guy with the pickle avatar pointed out, ALL theistic religions have at least one ontological commitment- to the existence of a god. If any did not have such a commitment, it would not be a theistic religion, by definition (since holding to the existence of a god is precisely what theism is). But this is what makes Buddhism particularly interesting- it is a truly novel religion, in that it is not only non-theistic, but it is also a very positivistic religion; metaphysical speculation is rejected, not because it is false, but because it is superfluous- it does not tend towards edification. In Buddhism one thing alone is needful, and that is the annihilation of suffering.
It is because of this absence of ontological commitment that one can find Buddhist atheists, Buddhist Christians, and so on, because Buddhism doesn't conflict with the ontological requirements of other faiths.
SheikhHorusFromTheSky
Active Member
WE have the God power within us. Since we have God in us, we also have the Devil in ourselves because God and the Devil are the same thing.
Enai de a lukal
Well-Known Member
Lol...
SheikhHorusFromTheSky
Active Member
Anything funny about my post?
1) The multiverse theory is an equivalent to the many-world theory and is one of several relative state formulations which have been proposed as interpretations of quantum mechanics (see e.g. Multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics and Born in an infinite universe: A cosmological interpretation of quantum mechanics; for a vastly more comprehensive review of multiverse cosmology see e.g. Carr's edited volume Universe or Multiverse? and for relative state interpretations of QM see e.g., Entanglement, Information, and the Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics)
2) Multiverse and other cosmological theories were not what I was referring to. What I was referring to was quantum physics. As I don't find multiverse interpretations to be either necessary or useful, and as they are not the standard interpretation/orthodox interpretation, neither do most physicists.
Enai de a lukal
Well-Known Member
SheikhHorusFromTheSky
Active Member
Are you an Atheist?
Enai de a lukal
Well-Known Member
As it happens, yes, but that isn't why your post struck me as funny. "God power"? Is this like super powers, or what? And how is it that we have God, the Christian deity who purportedly created the universe ex nihilo, who transcends space and time but periodically intervenes in the universe, "in us"? Where, exactly, is he "in us"? In our lungs, or stomach perhaps?
Enai de a lukal
Well-Known Member
Lol... In the pineal gland? Wow. Is it 1641?
SheikhHorusFromTheSky
Active Member
No, it's actually a scientific gland that resides above and between our two eyes. It regulates skin pigmentation, and melatonin production. Once activated, it is said that you can develop good intuition skills and such.
I won't get any deeper into this. You just have to search it up and see what I mean.
Enai de a lukal
Well-Known Member
I know what the pineal gland is. And the reason I ask whether its 1641 is because good ol' Descartes ("cogito ergo sum") once reasoned that the pineal gland was the seat of the soul. Needless to say, this is not regarded as a credible idea several centuries later. The pineal gland is a pretty ordinary biological organ, all told. Nothing to see here.
SheikhHorusFromTheSky
Active Member
Whatever. Just thought about giving you some information. No debate nor argument coming from me.
How are the Four Noble Truths not ontological claims?
"Contrary to the prerequisite in classical physics, it is not true that objects posses definite properties at all times. In general, we can only make probabilistic predictions. In fact, the quantum mechanical wave function, or state, which is associated with a physical system is precisely a catalog of information about it and, at the same time, the complete (albeit probabilistic) description of all possible outcomes in future experiments.
An immediate consequence of this is objective randomness." (italics in original; emphasis added)
Quantum Information and Randomness, p. 2
"The world most probably is indeterministic, meaning that there are particular events which lack a sufficient cause. Once we grant that there are such events, and that at least some of them are caused, we then require an account of causation that gives the conditions in which they are to count as caused. This is the problem of indeterministic causality. Providing for indeterministic causality has been a major motivation for the development of probabilistic accounts of causation." from the introductory opening of the volume Cause and Chance: Causation in an Indeterministic World (Routledge, 2004).
"The dominant paradigm of quantum physics, Orthodox Quantum Theory (also known, for historical reasons, as the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics) is a broad interpretive framework adhered to by a majority of physicists (Jammer 1966, 361; Baggott 1992, 82; Stapp 1993, 49 and 234; Cushing 1994b, 289; Beller 1999, 2). Orthodox Quantum Theory came about, in part, from the abandonment of a number of previously held physical concepts and principles. Examples of such abandoned principles include: event-by-event causality; deterministic evolution of physical systems; continuity of processes; and (occasionally) energy conservation (Cushing 1998, 284; Kragh 1999, 209)."
p. 2 of Quantum Causality: Conceptual Issues in the Causal Theory of Quantum Mechanics (Springer, 2009).
I can continue on adding sources and quotes on things like "the emergence of the notion that certain quantum processes, such as the decay of an excited quantum state, occur principally and irreducibly at random" ("Quantum Randomness and Value Indefiniteness") but hopefully this and the others suffice. When the physicists in QM talk about randomness, it differs radically from the use of the term in classical physics (as in e.g., statistical mechanics), because we aren't talking about epistemic indeterminacy or randomness defined probabilistically and used to describe a system too complex to be treated deterministically, but both truly, irreducibly, and utter randomness as well as ontological indeterminstic physical systems.
The idea of determinism sort of crept into physics through a side-door. Mechanics, the "original" physics, was about motion and the development of mathematical formalisms (like those of the calculus) to model how things moved. As physicists got better and better at creating such deterministic models, the idea that Laplace was correct, and one could in principle predict anything and everything, gained increasingly greater ground. But not only was it wrong, we don't know exactly how wrong it is. For most of the 20th century, quantum physics was, if anything, the only realm in which randomness actually existed. "Chaos theory" randomness and indeterminism were originally purely epistemic barriers, not ontological ones (and for a great many scientists they still are). However, as our technology has vastly increased our ability to determine the conditions under which quantum processes, like randomness, superposition states, entanglement, etc., cohere, the divide between the quantum mechanical world of Bohr (a complete mechanics that describes a fundamentally separate world forever safely divided from our own) has broken down. And while our knowledge of non-living systems and our ability to understand them has tremendously increased, the same is not true in the life sciences, and the concept of emergence has been used to refer to a fundamentally irreducibility of certain complex systems that may not involve QM and still involve fundamental, ontological indeterminism and thus at least a probabilistic element. Either way, the definitions of randomness within quantum physics are descriptions of physical systems, not just definitions.
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"For the male authors of medieval Japanese Buddhist literature, the female body was an endless source of fear and fascination. "Women," according to the oft-quoted sutra passage, "are the emissaries of hell; they cut off forever the seed of buddhahood. On the outside they have the faces of bodhiattvas, but on the inside they have the hearts of demons." Buddhist demonology includes many ferocious females but perhaps few more terrifying than the rasetsu 羅刹 (Skt. rakçasï), orectic shape-shifting cannibals who seduce men and then literally eat them alive. Rasetsukoku 羅刹国, the land of these horrific man-eaters, is an isolated realm: an island to the south of the world continent on which we dwell"
from Max Moerman, D. (2009). Demonology and Eroticism: Islands of Women in the Japanese Buddhist Imagination Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 36(2): 351-380.
"What many Americans and Europeans often understand by the term Buddhism, however, is actually a modern hybrid tradition with roots in the European Enlightenment no less than the Buddhas enlightenment, in Romanticism and transcendentalism as much as the Pali canon, and in the clash of Asian cultures and colonial powers as much as in mindfulness and meditation. Most non-Asian Americans tend to see Buddhism as a religion whose most important elements are meditation, rigorous philosophical analysis, and an ethic of compassion combined with a highly empirical psychological science that encourages reliance on individual experience. It discourages blindly following authority and dogma, has little place for superstition, magic, image worship, and gods, and is largely compatible with the findings of modern science and liberal democratic values. While this picture draws on elements of traditional forms of Buddhism that have existed in Asia for centuries, it is in many respects quite distinct from what Buddhism has meant to Asian Buddhists throughout its long and varied history. The popular western picture of Buddhism is neither unambiguously there in ancient Buddhist texts and lived traditions nor merely a fantasy of an educated elite population in the West, an image with no corresponding object. It is, rather, an actual new form of Buddhism that is the result of a process of modernization, westernization, reinterpretation, image-making, revitalization, and reform that has been taking place not only in the West but also in Asian countries for over a century. This new form of Buddhism has been fashioned by modernizing Asian Buddhists and western enthusiasts deeply engaged in creating Buddhist responses to the dominant problems and questions of modernity, such as epistemic uncertainty, religious pluralism, the threat of nihilism, conflicts between science and religion, war, and environmental destruction."
When you speak of Buddhism, what Buddhism are you speaking of, and why do you speak of it as singular?
Sleeppy
Fatalist. Christian. Pacifist.
I'm impressed. I'll say that. However, most of what I read went clear over my head. Too many unnecessarily long words and explanations. Is it not able for simplicity?
Here's my question: Do you think it possible that there are causes behind quantum randomness that are not being seen? Why is its observance limited to the quantum level?
It's just a matter of wasting too many resources studying rather than engaging in normal human endeavors that even grad students usually do. When one looks up some reference material to answer a relatively simple question they forgot about, and then finds that they have spent over 36 hours delving into a research topic they never intended to, one is not impressive, but obsessive.
This was a very friendly jest, by one I respect and who has been kind enough to put up with a great many of my incredibly long posts that are too often tangential.OMG... You actually replied to something in under 1000 words.
As it turns out, we don't know what the "quantum level" is. That's why currently physicists in quantum mechanics have fundamentally changed their approach. Instead of preparing some quantum system, letting it run, and then measuring it (i.e., not interfering with the system until measurement), they see how different kinds of interference can enable macromolecules to exist in superposition states and things like that. Basically, they test the conditions under which the "weirdness" of quantum physics can exist or can't. We can, for example, make hundreds of atoms exist in a superposition state (2 or more distinct and mutually exclusive states), but we can only do so under certain conditions. This is called the quantum-to-classical transition, and it involves the way in which the world as we experience it (in which cats aren't both alive and dead at the same time) is "recovered" or "transformed from" the quantum realm.
As for whether the randomness has causes that aren't being seen, that used to be a much more common view. Time was that we "thought experiments" (Wheeler's delayed choice experiment, Schrödinger's infamous dead/alive cat, etc.) were only thought experiments. Now they have actually been carried out in some form. I got into quantum physics from neuroscience just to show that quantum theories of consciousness were wrong. 2+ years of study later, I still can't answer this. Most physicists who work in a field of quantum physics would say it's highly unlikely that randomness doesn't play a role in physical systems. The problem is that we're dealing with systems that cannot be observed by any technology without altering them in non-trivial ways. But quantum mechanics has proved to be incredibly successful, and is fundamentally based on a mathematical representation of physical systems that entails randomness and indeterminism.