Awesome video IMO
I really like Richard Dawkins' stand on religion. It resonates with my own. But I began to see in the clip on enemies of reason a rigidness that is endemic in science. Science is a new religion. Its commonality is steeped in black or white. Neither seems capable of perceiving gray areas.
My perceptions of spirituality are based on the science of quantum physics and mechanics. I believe that we are spiritual beings because science cannot find material, just energy. That energy is intelligent; has a consciousness, is creative and is the basis of what we perceive as reality. But physical reality, as we see it, is nothing more than a belief system that has been refined over many millennium by our exclusive focus on material reality.
That is the problem I have with most scientists. They only focuses on the material and fail to consider the intelligent energy behind it: that props it up.
A rock may seem solid, but it is made up of atomic structures that are almost entirely made up of empty space.
The energy that holds together the neutrons and protons that make up that rock have a certain intelligence required to accomplish that task.
On the other hand, scientists "see" only the material structure because they focus entirely on observable evidence. They can't see the energy that holds it together and therefore ignore it, except when they get into the quantum aspects of particle colliders.
I guess what I am getting at is that if you or I were not conscious beings, we would be nothing but masses of protoplasm. It takes "intelligence" or consciousness to be human. I am suggesting that it also takes some form of intelligence to be a tree or a rock. Something holds it together. Some call it god, I call it intelligence. You might call it something else. I think the problem is semantics.
I don't know if you have ever experienced seeing the energy of a living thing like a tree. There are various ways to attain such vision (meditation, yoga, certain drugs) but it not an uncommon occurrence. In that frame of mind, one can experience a state of oneness with the object. In that state, the "intelligence" is perceived, felt, experienced... add your own definition. Rocks can be experienced in the same way.
I call it the strong and weak interactions together with electromagnetism and gravitation.
Therein lies the problem. If your going to say its gravity then why not just say it's god? Since you don't know what gravity is then you cannot say it isn't. You want proof of God - then look to gravity! There is God and there is your proof!
Don't get me wrong I don't think there is a god, I'm just saying we have been lucky on this forum that the religionists are not better at argument but that does not mean we can rely on the same superstition.
I disagree...gravity can be demonstrated in a controlled test environment, god cannot...
Just because we can't see it all around us with the naked eye does not mean that we must use faith to determine it's validity...
No we don't! We know that it exists and that it works. The why and how is not known.
This is where I very much agree with Cliffy and see similarity to religion and science in that both make presumptions. I know science would argue its presumptions are better but I would argue that they aren't really aware of all the presumptions they have made so science doesn't really know if theirs are better or not.
So we don't know that gravity is the force that exists between two bodies of different mass, and that the effect is greater when the differnce of mass is greater?
While there are some tricky questions about gravity that have yet to be answered fully, it's the best model we have for explaining the nature of bodies of mass in our universe...
This follows creationism into the hollow pit of pseudoscience, and neither serve to increase our understanding of the universe...
"gravity can be demonstrated in a controlled test environment"
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Equations for a falling body near the surface of the Earth
Ball falling freely under gravity. See text for description.
Main article: Equations for a falling body
Under an assumption of constant gravity, Newton’s law of gravitation simplifies to F = mg, where m is the mass of the body and g is a constant vector with an average magnitude of 9.81 m/s². The acceleration due to gravity is equal to this g. An initially-stationary object which is allowed to fall freely under gravity drops a distance which is proportional to the square of the elapsed time. The image on the right, spanning half a second, was...
That's right "a model," which is very different than saying what it is - which we don't know.
Pseudoscience you say? How so? Because I am speculating on a different model away from that which is established in wikipedia!!! OH THE HERESY!!! I blasphemed! Next I'll be saying Einstein and Plato were wrong! Just who do I think I am!!!!!!!
The gravitational model is well established, meaning that we do know what it is and how it works...we wouldn't have any idea of particle physics without knowing this.
No, I'm saying you're wrong. Newton said gravity was a force like no other. You're saying you know that it exists which means therefore that you know what it is, and that is wrong - you don't know.
Maybe you should try reading what I posted. You'll see that I made no such claim.
So you're agreeing with Cliffy in principle, but not in practice...I get that...
Still doesn't excuse you from denying science that we already know...
There is no faith involved in gravity...just a lot of math, without which we never would have been able to calculate escape velocity for any of the NASA launches...
The Enemies Of Reason Part 1 (external - login to view)
The Enemies Of Reason Part 2 (external - login to view)
30 seconds into #1 and I have a question. When they mention what science has done they bring up 3 'useful things'. Science is also behind some things that have resulted in many deaths. Science is behind every weapon ever made since they stopped throwing rocks at each other. Eradicated small-pox, maybe after they were done using it for a 'weapon'. Once it made it around the world everybody left should have immune to it anyway, the very back of the 'unexplored' world was the last place it was taken. Oddly enough that is where the 'vaccine' was first used and declared to be the cure/prevention. Then the rest of the world was charged $10 each for a shot that was as effective against small-pox as distilled water is against anything.Quote has been trimmed, See full post:
60billion thoughts/sec on a computer but not everybody has a pair of shoes or a book to read. Has science always taken the right direction in terms of what it focuses on? Is that direction controlled, if so then science is a tool, nothing else and tools are there to do brute force work with no morality entering the decision making process.
Science will spend (and demand even more) 60 billion to go to Mars but they will not spend 1/10 of that on projects that are more important to the needs of people that are alive, let alone the whole 60. Take away the money that is given to science that goes to something that harms man (or just has no immediate benefit) and apply it to projects that take care of some woes then explore the...
The absence of an identifiable gravitron does not negate what we know about gravity or how it works, just as the absence of an indentifiable Higgs boson does not negate what we already know about .wave-particle duality
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Some scientific explanations are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them. The explanation becomes a scientific theory. In everyday language a theory means a hunch or speculation. Not so in science. In science, the word theory refers to a comprehensive explanation of an important feature of nature supported by facts gathered over time. Theories also allow scientists to make predictions about as yet unobserved phenomena, 
A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment. Such fact-supported theories are not "guesses" but reliable accounts of the real world. The theory of biological evolution is more than "just a theory." It is as factual an explanation of the universe as the atomic theory of matter or the germ theory of disease. Our understanding of gravity is still a work in progress. But the phenomenon of gravity, like evolution, is an accepted fact.
The laws of science are various established scientific laws (external - login to view), or physical laws (external - login to view) as they are sometimes called, that are considered universal and invariable facts of the physical world. Laws of science may, however, be disproved if new facts or evidence contradicts them. A "law" differs from hypotheses (external - login to view), theories (external - login to view), postulates (external - login to view), principles (external - login to view), etc., in that a law is an analytic statement, usually with an empirically determined constant. A theory may contain a set of laws, or a theory may be implied from an empirically determined law.