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JD
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virus: Why do so many scientists believe in God?
« on: 2003-09-09 11:53:52 » |
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Hot on the heels of the Fred Reed article, here is another tester for
the congregation with a strikingly similar theme...
Remember, no need to attack ME, it is just for fun!
---START---
Science cannot provide all the answers'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1034872,00.html
Why do so many scientists believe in God? Tim Radford reports
Thursday September 4, 2003
The Guardian
C olin Humphreys is a dyed-in-the-wool materialist. That is, he is
professor of materials science at Cambridge. He believes in the power of
science to explain the nature of matter. He believes that humans - like
all other living things - evolved through the action of natural
selection upon random mutation. He is also a Baptist. He believes in the
story of Moses, as recounted in the biblical book of Exodus. He believes
in it enough to have explored Egypt and the Holy Land in search of
natural or scientific explanations for the story of the burning bush,
the 10 plagues of Egypt, the crossing of the Red Sea and the manna that
fell in the wilderness -and then written a book about it.
"I believe that the scientific world view can explain almost anything,"
he says. "But I just think there is another world view as well."
Tom McLeish is professor of polymer physics at Leeds. Supermarket
plastic bags are polymers, but so are spider's silk, sheep's wool, sinew
and flesh and bone. His is the intricate world of what is, and how it
works, down to the molecular level. He delights in the clarity and power
of science, precisely because it is questioning rather than dogmatic.
"But the questions that arise, and the methods we use to ask them, can
be traced back to the religious tradition in which I find myself. Doing
science is part of what it means in that tradition to be human. Because
we find ourselves in this puzzling, extraordinary universe of pain and
beauty, we will also find ourselves able to explore it, by adopting the
very successful methods of science," he says.
Russell Stannard is now emeritus professor of physics at the Open
University. He is one of the atom-smashers, picking apart the properties
of matter, energy, space and time, and the author of a delightful series
of children's books about tough concepts such as relativity theory. He
believes in the power of science. He not only believes in God, he
believes in the Church of England. He, like Tom McLeish, is a lay
reader. He has con tributed Thoughts for the Day to Radio 4, those
morning homilies on the mysteries of existence. Does it worry him that
science - his science - could be about to explain the whole story of
space, time matter and energy without any need for a Creator? "No,
because a starting point you can have is: why is there something rather
than nothing? Why is there a world? Now I cannot see how science could
ever provide an answer," he says.
Stannard will be one of a small group of scientists and theologians,
having a go at the question next week in Birmingham. The Science and
Religion Forum, founded by a group of scientists 25 years ago, meets on
Monday to discuss questions such as the place of humans in the universe.
They are not likely to actually come up with an answer, but they will
certainly give the question a bashing. The forum embraces what one of
its begetters, Arthur Peacocke, pioneer of DNA research in Britain,
called "wistful agnostics" and sceptics, as well as Christians and
people from other faiths. "It's about how we can worship a creator God
who is creating now, and still hold on to the scientific world view as
we understand it," says Phil Edwards, who trained in physics but is now
a chaplain to the Bolton Institute.
The subject - the place of humans in the universe - is a challenge. To
the scientific way of thinking, humans no more have a "place" in the
scheme of things than hamsters or harp seals. The universe itself may be
an incomprehensible event, and life a so far unexplained one, but
scientists see no ladder of creation with humans at the pinnacle. They
can see no "purpose" in being. We are here because we are here, a lucky
accident - lucky for us - but there was nothing inevitable about the
evolution of humanity, or its survival. God is not part of the
explanation.
That is how scientists have grown to think, whether they come from a
religious background or not. But modern science did not emerge 400 years
ago to challenge religion, the orthodoxy of the past 2,000 years.
Generations of thinkers and experimenters and observers - often
themselves churchmen - wanted to explain how God worked his wonders.
Modern physics began with a desire to explain the clockwork of God's
creation. Modern geology grew at least partly out of searches for
evidence of Noah's flood. Modern biology owes much to the urge to marvel
at the intricacy of Divine providence.
But the scientists - a word coined only in 1833 - who hoped to find God
somehow painted Him out of the picture. By the late 20th century,
physicists were confident of the history of the universe back to the
first thousandth of a second, and geneticists and biochemists were
certain that all living things could be traced back to some last
universal common ancestor that lived perhaps 3.5bn years ago. A few
things - what actually happened in the Big Bang; how living, replicating
things emerged from a muddle of organic compounds - remain riddles. But
few now consider these riddles to be incapable of solutions. So although
the debate did not start out as science versus religion, that is how
many people now see it.
Paradoxically, this is not how many scientists see it. In the US,
according to a survey published in Nature in 1997, four out of 10
scientists believe in God. Just over 45% said they did not believe, and
14.5% described themselves as doubters or agnostics. This ratio of
believers to non-believers had not changed in 80 years. Should anybody
be surprised?
"A lot of people are surprised. I think people have grown up to believe
that science and Christianity are at loggerheads, and that is what the
average man in the street believes," says Colin Humphreys. "I think you
can explain the universe without invoking God at all. And you can
explain humans without invoking God at all, I think. But where I differ
from the people who say, OK, the universe started with a big bang - if
it did, it's not too sure but let's say it did - and everything else was
chance event, then I would say that God is the God of chance and He had
His plan and purpose, which is working out very subtly, but through
these chance events."
He, like most scientists do in this debate, mentions Richard Dawkins,
the Oxford zoologist and professor of the public understanding of
science, whose rationalist stance is well known, and vigorously argued.
The real argument here is not about the importance of science, or its
value to humanity. "You have to recognise that science is enormously
powerful in going for the jugular, reducing complexity to its simple
structures," says Tom McLeish. "But it puts it back together again, and
that is important to stress, because, from Keats onwards, we have been
accused of unweaving the rainbow, and never weaving it back again. That
is not true."
Doubt, expressed most potently 3,000 years ago in the biblical book of
Job, is the greatest scientific tool ever invented, he says. To do good
science, you have to doubt everything, including your ideas, your
experiments and your conclusions. "People like Richard Dawkins
characterise religion as doubtless, tub-thumping, blind certainty. But
it isn't like that; he knows it is not like that. There is Job, on his
ash-heap, doubting everything, but wondering where the light comes from,
and how the hail forms."
Russell Stannard says that when he became a reader in the Church of
England 40 years ago, he was considered a bit of an oddball. But things
have changed. "You get a few scientists like Richard Dawkins and Peter
Atkins [professor of chemistry at Oxford] who at least talk as though
they cannot understand how a scientist could possibly be religious. But
I would say that, generally speaking, throughout the scientific
community there is considerable acceptance that, OK, although one might
not be a religious person oneself, one's fellow scientist can be."
Colin Humphreys says that quite a number of his colleagues at Cambridge
are also believers. "My impression is - and it is just an impression -
that there are many more scientists on the academic staff who are
believers than arts people."
Tom McLeish says something similar. He cheerfully offers several reasons
why that might be so, one of which might be called the postmodernist
effect. "Our dear friends in the humanities do get themselves awfully
confused about whether the world exists, about whether each other
exists, about whether words mean anything. Until they have sorted out
whether cats and dogs exist or not, or are only figments in the mind of
the reader, let alone the writer, then they are going to have problems
talking about God."
Within biology itself, there is an intense argument about evolutionary
origins of qualities such as altruism -the sacrifice of self for others
- and the enduring belief in God or gods, and an afterlife, with the
possibility of some kind of calling to account. Robert Winston, the
fertility pioneer, Labour peer and professor at Hammersmith Hospital is
Jewish. This represents a huge tradition of values that are important to
him. At the age of 30 he went back to the synagogue because, he felt, he
needed the discipline of Judaism, although this is not quite the same as
believing in God, and he confesses to having been through various phases
of observance. In the last chapter of his book The Human Instinct he
said he felt it was very likely that spirituality - the feeling of
something beyond mortal life - had been important in survival during the
Ice Age, and through periods of great deprivation.
"The great question is whether or not that spirituality is God-given, or
whether it actually evolved because it was needed," he says. "I'm still
sitting on the fence."
Stannard has fewer doubts. "I would say that God does take a personal
interest in us. If you were allowed one word to describe God by, that
word would be love. That does not come from evolution by natural
selection, it seems to come from somewhere else, and the whole idea of
morals does not naturally arise out of evolution. Biologists will talk
about altruism, but they are using it in a very technical sense, which
is not the religious idea of altruism. It is more a case of you scratch
my back and I will scratch yours."
Richard Dawkins, however, remains unmoved. Is there a limit to what
science can explain? Very possibly. But in that case, what on earth
makes anyone think religion can do any better? "I once reached this
point when I asked the then professor of astrophysics at Oxford to
explain the origin of the universe to me," he says. "He did so, and I
posed my supplementary: 'Where did the laws of physics come from in the
first place?' He smiled: 'Ah, now we move beyond the realm of science.
This is where I have to hand over to our good friend the chaplain.' My
immediate thought was, 'But why the chaplain? Why not the gardener or
the chef?' If science itself cannot say where the laws of physics
ultimately come from, there is no reason to expect that religion will do
any better and rather good reasons to think it will do worse."
The place of humans in the universe - world faith perspectives, at the
University of Birmingham Selly Oak campus, September 8-10.
www.srforum.org
Further reading
A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love by
Richard Dawkins (Houghton Mifflin 2003) ISBN 0618335404
The Miracles of Exodus: A Scientist's Discovery of the Extraordinary
Natural Causes of the Biblical Stories by Colin J Humphreys (Continuum
2003) ISBN 0826469523
The God Experiment: Can Science Prove the Existence of God? by Russell
Stannard (Hidden Spring 2000) ISBN 1587680076
---END---
Regards
Jonathan
---
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Hermit
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Re:virus: Why do so many scientists believe in God?
« Reply #1 on: 2003-09-09 13:47:20 » |
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I suggest that this is a highly misleading title, and should read, "Why do so many scientists not believe in gods?"
After all, given the articles own dubiously sourced and I would suggest, seriously suspect numbers, four times as many "scientists" reject belief in godsas in the "general public". But the sources are not named and run counter to studies even in the very religious United States, where repeated analysis has shown that published scientists (i.e. those recognized by their peers) contain at most 20% believers, almost the inverse pattern to the general public, and among the members of the National Acadamy of Sciences (leading peer recognized scientists), the percentage drops to below 10%*.
I changed it from "God" to gods" as disbelief is not culturally bigoted. In other words, disbelievers tend to reject belief in all gods, not just the moderm monotheistic gods of a small cultural minority.
Interesting though how despite ostensibly rejecting science, religion continuously appears to find it importartant to claim the support of "scientists" no matter how dishonest a definition of that community is required to show such reports.
Hermit
*
Quote:| The latest survey involved 517 members of the National Academy of Sciences; half replied. When queried about belief in "personal god," only 7% responded in the affirmative, while 72.2% expressed "personal disbelief," and 20.8% expressed "doubt or agnosticism." Belief in the concept of human immortality, i.e. life after death declined from the 35.2% measured in 1914 to just 7.9%. 76.7% reject the "human immortality" tenet, compared with 25.4% in 1914, and 23.2% claimed "doubt or agnosticism" on the question, compared with 43.7% in Leuba's original measurement. Again, though, the highest rate of belief in a god was found among mathematicians (14.3%), while the lowest was found among those in the life sciences fields -- only 5.5%. |
http://www.atheists.org/flash.line/atheism1.htm
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
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RE: virus: Why do so many scientists believe in God?
« Reply #2 on: 2003-09-09 15:44:40 » |
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OK Jonathan - you've got me going again. Here at least we find some
definitions of this 'god' thing:
"But I just think there is another world view as well." > Colin
Humphreys
[Bl.]Colin Humphreys is free to think whatever he pleases. Whether he
can demonstrate any reasonable basis, other than his own preference, for
this fantasy is, of course, highly improbable.
"a Creator" Russell Stannard
[Bl.]Said it before. Say it again. Nothing from nothing. Therefore no
creator possible.
"God is the God of chance and He had His plan and purpose, which is
working out very subtly, but through these chance events." Colin
Humphreys.
[Bl.]Planned chance? Moving on...
I would say that God does take a personal interest in us. If you were
allowed one word to describe God by, that word would be love. Stannard
[Bl.]Aha! The semantic Mesada of theists, the last redoubt. Of course,
if god is love then god might reasonably be said to exist. Oddly, this
god of love that takes a personal interest in us seems to leave a lot of
'bones in the wake' (Tom Waits). Why does this love find it necessary to
create so many victims? Are we to take it that, say, cancer, is evidence
of this love? Or war? Or evil in general? If so, then this must be some
strange new usage of the word love with which I am not familiar. The
theist retort is usually that it doesn't matter because all good people
go to heaven anyway. So this love doesn't always look like love right
now but it all works out ok in the end. Snake-oil is what I say. I'd
rather buy time-share holidays.
Ironically, in the film "Contact", the Jodie Foster character (atheist)
is (supposedly) refuted by her religious lover when she asks him how he
can prove that god exists. He replies "Did you love your father?" She
replies "yes". He retorts "Prove it". At which she is speechless.
The import of this is, I gather, is that some things are intrinsically
un-provable. It is my view that she could have made a strong case for
her 'love' based on an appropriate definition of 'love', her own
observable behavior at the time and her own report of her subjective
state. Perhaps it would not amount to proof, but it certainly would
amount at least to a credible body of evidence for the proposition,
which is more than can be said for the theistic case.
Interesting that theists (so often) resort to this 'proof' of god (the
existence of love) and then (so often) deny their own proof by claiming
it be un-provable. I believe this is what is known technically as
'having your cake and eating it'. At bottom, though, this definition of
god is specious: one might as well say that god is a baby's smile, or
for that matter, a full bottle of whiskey and a starry night.
Fact is, everybody (well, mostly) dislikes the idea of dying and many
people leap at the chance, however slim, that it might not actually
happen to them like a trout leaps at a fly. With similar results.
Fond Regards
Blunderov
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Kharin
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Re:virus: Why do so many scientists believe in God?
« Reply #3 on: 2003-09-09 16:01:13 » |
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Quote:"Russell Stannard is now emeritus professor of physics at the Open
University." |
One is tempted to observe that the only sensible thing to do when faced with employment at the Open University is to turn to either drink or religion. On the whole, I feel the individual in question made a poor choice between the two.
Quote:| "He believes in the story of Moses, as recounted in the biblical book of Exodus. He believes in it enough to have explored Egypt and the Holy Land in search of natural or scientific explanations for the story of the burning bush, the 10 plagues of Egypt, the crossing of the Red Sea and the manna that fell in the wilderness -and then written a book about it. " |
The above neglects to mention that this author, who has no qualification in archaeology or history, expects us to believe that the parting of the Red Sea manifested itself by means of a constant eighty-mile-per-hour wind that held the sea back for several hours while the Israelite nation (including, one presumes, small children and elderly people, flocks, herds and supplies) ambled across across, presumably while enjoying the pleasant weather.
Such lunacies are, of course, not uncommon. Arguably the leading exponent of them was William Buckland, Prof of Geology at Oxford and later Dean of Westminster, who sought to reconcile geology and the biblical account of creation by arguing that each of the days mentioned in the Genesis account was an epoch, a geological period covering countless millions of years. Naturally, the geological record failed to support this rather tenuous theory and, not to put too fine a point on it, he was rewarded for his efforts with a stay in the asylum from which he never recovered.
Quote:| "He not only believes in God, he believes in the Church of England." |
Good grief! We must have him dissected, pickled and studied. A rare specimen indeed!
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Hermit
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Re:virus: Why do so many scientists believe in God?
« Reply #4 on: 2003-09-09 16:41:25 » |
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Thanks-for the open University pickling, I'll probably quote it.
Apropos the Moses thing, I can't off-hand think of any recognized archeologist who accepts the idea that any large group of Jews ever were in Egypt, nevermind accepting the clearly fabulous and undoubtedly derivitive stories of "Moses". After all, the following all predate "Moses":
Rama (Ramayana):
Was of royal blood
Led his people on a journey through the heart of Asia finally to reach India prior to 3000BCE (which points indubitably to the Harrapans).
Was a lawgiver.
Had extraordinary (magical) powers.
Caused springs gush (ref Ex: 17:6) forth in the deserts through which he led his people
Provided his followers with manna (Ex: 16:3-35).
Suppressed a virulent plague with "soma", India's "water of life" (although, according to Maharishi "Mahesh" Yogi, "soma" is semen.)
Conquered the 'promised land' (Sri Lanka) by marching through a sea. The land bridge used to launch the attack is still called the Bridge of Rama.
Bacchus (Spenta Mainyu):
Rescued as an infant from water,
Crossed the Red Sea on foot,
Wrote laws on stone tablets,
Armies were led by columns of fire,
Zarathustra (aka Zoroaster) (Aristotle, Eudoxus and Hermodoros)
Was of royal blood
Possessed the secret of "sacred fire"
Taken from his mother and exposed to the elements
Became the prophet of a new religion at 30.
Invoked a God of the mountains on Albordj/Albruz
This God of fire and thunder gave him a set of sacred Laws.
Lead his followers to a remote promised land.
On the way, his God parted the water of a sea allowing the "chosen" to walk across it.
Kind Regards
Hermit
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Kalkor
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RE: virus: Why do so many scientists believe in God?
« Reply #5 on: 2003-09-09 22:40:32 » |
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[Blunderov]
[snip]
Fact is, everybody (well, mostly) dislikes the idea of dying and many
people leap at the chance, however slim, that it might not actually
happen to them like a trout leaps at a fly. With similar results.
[Kalkor]
Very well put! I've always had a problem with Pascal's Wager, since it's the
only argument my father could come up with when the subject of religion
reared its ugly head around the dinner table...
Kalkor
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Walter Watts
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Re: virus: Why do so many scientists believe in God?
« Reply #6 on: 2003-09-10 04:36:55 » |
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Written by David Hill:
The classical attributes of a deity are singularity ("there can only be one")
omnicience (all-knowing), omnipotence (all-powerful), omnipresence ('(S)He's
everywhere!"), omnibeneficence (all-good), and omnisoothience (all-true). One can
immediately see that the attributes of omniscience and omnipotence cannot
simultaneously inhere in a single universe. If a deity were omniscient (knew
everything), then it would know the future and thus be powerless to change it, but if
it were omnipotent (all-powerful), then it could change the future, and therefore
could not know it for certain. It's like the simultaneous impossibility of an
irresistable force and an immoveable object; if one of these two deific properties
exists (and they are considered to be the most important two), then the other
logically cannot. Furthermore, If deity were everywhere, it could perceive nothing,
for perception requires a point of view, that is, a spatiotemporal perspective other
than that of the perceived object from which to perceive that object. Deity being
omnipresent (everywhere), there is nowhere that deity would not be, thus nothing it
could perceive. It gets even worse. Deity must be perfect; in fact, perfection is
what is broken down into all those 'omni' subcategories. thus, a perfect deity could
not even think. Thought is dynamic, that is, to think, one's thought must move
between conceptions. Now, thought could conceiveably move in three directions; from
perfect to imperfect, from imperfect to perfect, and from imperfect to imperfect
(from perfect to perfect is not an alternative, perfection being singular and
movement requiring distinguishable prior and posterior). But all of the three
possible alternatives contain either prior or posterior imperfection or both, which
are not allowably entertained in the mind of a perfect deity.
There's much, much more that I could add, but this should more than suffice to
demonstrate that asserting the existence of a deity possessing the attributes that
most consider essential to it deserving the deific appelation mires one in a miasmic
quagmire of irretrieveable contradiction, once one journeys beyond emotion-driven
faith and uses one's noggin to divine (Luvzda pun!) the nonsensical and absurd
consequences necessarily entailed.
Show the proposition to be false or accept its possibility.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
[Everyone calm down]
;-'>
Walter
------------------------------------------------------------------
Blunderov wrote:
> OK Jonathan - you've got me going again. Here at least we find some
> definitions of this 'god' thing:
>
> "But I just think there is another world view as well." > Colin
> Humphreys
>
> [Bl.]Colin Humphreys is free to think whatever he pleases. Whether he
> can demonstrate any reasonable basis, other than his own preference, for
> this fantasy is, of course, highly improbable.
>
> "a Creator" Russell Stannard
> [Bl.]Said it before. Say it again. Nothing from nothing. Therefore no
> creator possible.
>
> "God is the God of chance and He had His plan and purpose, which is
> working out very subtly, but through these chance events." Colin
> Humphreys.
> [Bl.]Planned chance? Moving on...
>
> I would say that God does take a personal interest in us. If you were
> allowed one word to describe God by, that word would be love. Stannard
>
> [Bl.]Aha! The semantic Mesada of theists, the last redoubt. Of course,
> if god is love then god might reasonably be said to exist. Oddly, this
> god of love that takes a personal interest in us seems to leave a lot of
> 'bones in the wake' (Tom Waits). Why does this love find it necessary to
> create so many victims? Are we to take it that, say, cancer, is evidence
> of this love? Or war? Or evil in general? If so, then this must be some
> strange new usage of the word love with which I am not familiar. The
> theist retort is usually that it doesn't matter because all good people
> go to heaven anyway. So this love doesn't always look like love right
> now but it all works out ok in the end. Snake-oil is what I say. I'd
> rather buy time-share holidays.
>
> Ironically, in the film "Contact", the Jodie Foster character (atheist)
> is (supposedly) refuted by her religious lover when she asks him how he
> can prove that god exists. He replies "Did you love your father?" She
> replies "yes". He retorts "Prove it". At which she is speechless.
>
> The import of this is, I gather, is that some things are intrinsically
> un-provable. It is my view that she could have made a strong case for
> her 'love' based on an appropriate definition of 'love', her own
> observable behavior at the time and her own report of her subjective
> state. Perhaps it would not amount to proof, but it certainly would
> amount at least to a credible body of evidence for the proposition,
> which is more than can be said for the theistic case.
>
> Interesting that theists (so often) resort to this 'proof' of god (the
> existence of love) and then (so often) deny their own proof by claiming
> it be un-provable. I believe this is what is known technically as
> 'having your cake and eating it'. At bottom, though, this definition of
> god is specious: one might as well say that god is a baby's smile, or
> for that matter, a full bottle of whiskey and a starry night.
>
> Fact is, everybody (well, mostly) dislikes the idea of dying and many
> people leap at the chance, however slim, that it might not actually
> happen to them like a trout leaps at a fly. With similar results.
>
> Fond Regards
> Blunderov
>
> ---
> To unsubscribe from the Virus list go to <http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/virus-l>
--
Walter Watts
Tulsa Network Solutions, Inc.
"Reminding you to help control the human population. Have your sexual partner spayed
or neutered."
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JD
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RE: virus: Why do so many scientists believe in God?
« Reply #7 on: 2003-09-10 04:52:07 » |
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Thanks Kharin, Hermit and Blunderlov for nailing this article. Good work.
What struck me when I read the headline of this article was: Because
scientists are human too. We know that there is fairly strong and growing
evidence that religious experiences are biologically explicable. The
irrationality that drives it is easily explained in terms of uncontrolled
impulses from the sub-neocortex. Personally it would not change my belief if
every scientist (including Hermit) were to suddenly announce their
commitment to God.
Regards
Jonathan
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-virus@lucifer.com [mailto:owner-virus@lucifer.com] On Behalf Of
Hermit
Sent: 09 September 2003 18:47
To: virus@lucifer.com
Subject: Re:virus: Why do so many scientists believe in God?
I suggest that this is a highly misleading title, and should read, "Why do
so many scientists not believe in gods?"
After all, given the articles own dubiously sourced and I would suggest,
seriously suspect numbers, four times as many "scientists" reject belief in
godsas in the "general public". But the sources are not named and run
counter to studies even in the very religious United States, where repeated
analysis has shown that published scientists (i.e. those recognized by
their peers) contain at most 20% believers, almost the inverse pattern to
the general public, and among the members of the National Acadamy of
Sciences (leading peer recognized scientists), the percentage drops to below
10%*.
I changed it from "God" to gods" as disbelief is not culturally bigoted. In
other words, disbelievers tend to reject belief in all gods, not just the
moderm monotheistic gods of a small cultural minority.
Interesting though how despite ostensibly rejecting science, religion
continuously appears to find it importartant to claim the support of
"scientists" no matter how dishonest a definition of that community is
required to show such reports.
Hermit
*The latest survey involved 517 members of the National Academy of Sciences;
half replied. When queried about belief in "personal god," only 7% responded
in the affirmative, while 72.2% expressed "personal disbelief," and 20.8%
expressed "doubt or agnosticism." Belief in the concept of human
immortality, i.e. life after death declined from the 35.2% measured in 1914
to just 7.9%. 76.7% reject the "human immortality" tenet, compared with
25.4% in 1914, and 23.2% claimed "doubt or agnosticism" on the question,
compared with 43.7% in Leuba's original measurement. Again, though, the
highest rate of belief in a god was found among mathematicians (14.3%),
while the lowest was found among those in the life sciences fields -- only
5.5%. http://www.atheists.org/flash.line/atheism1.htm
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Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
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RE: virus: Why do so many scientists believe in God?
« Reply #9 on: 2003-09-10 16:26:38 » |
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> [Blunderov]
> [snip]
> Fact is, everybody (well, mostly) dislikes the idea of dying and many
> people leap at the chance, however slim, that it might not actually
> happen to them like a trout leaps at a fly. With similar results.
>
> [Kalkor]
> Very well put! I've always had a problem with Pascal's Wager, since
it's
> the
> only argument my father could come up with when the subject of
religion
> reared its ugly head around the dinner table...
[Bl.]Thank you. The problem that I have with Pascal's Wager is that it
presumes that one can choose what to believe. I seriously doubt whether
this is possible. One is persuaded. One is convinced. Or one is not
sure.
The Red Queen might find it possible to believe sixteen impossible
things before breakfast but I feel reasonably certain that most people
would find even one beyond their capacity.
Fond Regards
Blunderov
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