Contradictions

Jonah,

I'm surprised by your assertion that a "scientist believing in
God" is a contradiction. Let alone an obvious one.

Would you elaborate on that?

Recently I ran into an essay discussing Benedict de Spinoza which laid
out the most persuasive argument against the existence of God that I've
ever seen, but I don't think most scientists have even heard of Spinoza
let alone know the argument.

See http://www.etherealland.com/cheiftainofseir/index.php?paged=2

But one can easily be a scientist without agreeing with Spinoza.

Is his reasoning yours?

I certainly have no problem with scientists believing in God, as long as it doesn't affect their science. I subscribe to the version of scientific history in which the birth of modern science is intertwined with religion, and I believe that our early attempts to decipher reality (15th-18th century) were merely attempts to understand the work of God. Nature was just another book of the Bible, another divine text to be decoded. So I think it's a little silly to insist that modern, 21st century science is at war with anything that isn't utterly secular.

My off-hand comment was merely an attempt to avoid the predictable avalanche of comments about God and science. Thanks for letting me clarify.

I would expect that whether "modern, 21st century science" conflicts with anything depends upon what we know now, in the twenty-first century, rather than what Newton knew in 1700.

Well, I agree with you Blake. That still leaves open the question
of whether "modern, 21st century science" does conflict with a
belief in God.

I am very flattered by Mr. Mandrewa's assessment of my essay.

All credit should really go to Spinoza though. All I did in the first part of my essay was lay out Spinoza's arguments as I understood them and why I thought that Spinoza anticipated modern thought on the nature of reality and how one should use reason to perceive truth.

The second part of my essay was devoted to showing how Spinoza (and by extension modern thought) was mistaken.

I am not going to bore you all with the details of my argument. I just did not want Mr. Mandrew's comment to lead people to believe that I was an atheist. That is giving me too much credit. In reality, I am an ignorant fundamentalist hillbilly who happens to have a passing familiarity with some of the better atheistic arguments out there.

Chieftain of Seir,

I apologize for this delayed response.

You understate your achievement. Yes, I realize that Spinoza
is a genius and that basically what you have done in your essay is
to understand what he said and relate and interprete some part of
these ideas to the modern world.

Yes. But it's a particularly small set of people that have done
any such thing.

I could have put in a link to Spinoza's texts and if a thousand
people went to those texts I'd know ahead of time that not one would
get it.

I put in a link to yours, and the odds of understanding are significantly
increased.

It's also possible -- I don't know -- that your interpretation, your
lucid reasoning about what Spinoza means, is unique.

Here are the nails that you drove that particularly jumped out at me.

a. Spinoza is arguably the beginning of the modern era. Many of
his propositions are now taken as default assumptions. These
propositions seem ordinary and unexceptional today because we assume
them, but at the time they were disturbing.

b. The shoe is still dropping. Although many of Spinoza's ideas
are now the unexamined assumptions of modern man, some parts have still
not been appreciated.

c. Spinoza's work is in part a proof that God (in the sense that is
normally meant) does not exist.

d. We now know that one of Spinoza's basic assumptions has been peculiarly
falsified.

e. Since Spinoza's reasoning is a good part of the foundation of science
and many other things, all these things now have a hole at their
foundation.

f. No solution to the problem is in sight. The universe seems a wilder
and stranger place than what was at one time believed. In particular
the possibility of the existence of some kind of God has been reopened.

Ok.

Moving on to your self-deprecrating assertion above that you are a "ignorant
fundamentalist hillbilly," I think I understand what you're saying.

By "ignorant" you mean in the trivial and ordinary sense that of all the
possible things to know you know hardly any, while in the particular
sense it's a political comment that you don't necessarily believe what
the in-clique -- the right sort of people -- believe. It means you're
proud you flunked Political Conformity 101.

By "hillbilly" you mean you were raised in the Appalachians.

By "fundamentalist" you mean you're parents were fundamentalist and
you yourself were raised in that tradition, and you don't believe that
fundamentalists are the monsters that those who major in Conformity
believe. But I refuse to believe that you yourself think that the Bible
is to be taken literally.

I realize that you're a very smart person and it's possible you're
going to take my disbelief as a challenge to make the implausible sound
plausible, but I'll tell you already I'm not buying it.

Thinking over that comment I made just above, I realized I left out
something important, a particularly important nail that the Chieftain
of Seir drove.

Namely that Spinoza uniquely or almost uniquely among philosphers
made something like falsifiable assertions about the universe.

Odd assertions that have been tested and amazingly proven true.

We know this because of Einstein, in particular, because Einstein took
Spinoza not just as a guide, as a reasonable approximation of what the
universe must be like, but he took him literally, as an exact description
of how the universe the worked. Since that implausible assumption turned out
to be amazingly productive we know that Spinozan metaphysics has to to
some degree of precision correspond to the real universe.

There is a sense in which it cannot be discredited.

In the same way Newtonian physics cannot be discredited. It may be
an approximation and in some domains in fact very wrong, but in many
other contexts it will always be a very good approximation.

The following table describes these methods. ,