Science sees man as purely material
Nonsense. Science doesn't see anything in any particular way. Science is a method of discovery by which we learn more about the world around us.
Science is right in its details, but wrong in its direction
by exWTslave 51 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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jws
Science provides things like modern medicine. Without it, my daughter would have died at 6 weeks of age. And with the infant mortality rates of the past, my son probably would have had a 50/50 chance of still being around today. And they don't run the risk of getting polio or a bunch of other diseases thanks to vaccinations.
I love my kids. They make me happy. Without science, one of them would be dead and there's a fair chance the other could be too. With them gone, I would be very sad. I'm so happy for science!
In fact, without modern medicine, I would be dead right now. Leaving my kids without a father, both younger than 2 and their mother without work. I'm sure that would have been happy times for them.
Science also helped me stay in touch with my dad when I had to move 1000 miles away for work. I was able to have conversations with him every week up until he died. Able to hear his voice, have conversations. So much better than writing letters.
My kids and my brother's kids can stay in touch and even see each other on Skype. Isn't science awesome!
And you know what? When we want to see them, they're only about 3 hours away by plane, not a month's journey by wagon. Damn! That's great!
With the internet, my kids and I can learn about things rather quickly. I remember the old days when I would have to ask people, go to libraries, look up things in books. So time consuming. Knowledge is at my fingertips thanks to science.
Remember the days of being lost? People could actually die from being lost and not being able to find food and water. Now we have cell phones to help us locate our exact postion and/or call for help. Isn't science awesome!
Because of science, we don't have cookware that's made out of lead, or lead pipes, leading to brain damage.
Yeah, I guess science really sucks. Maybe low-tech is better. Then I can be like those areas where they're so happy they need crystal meth labs dotting the back woods.
You know what? Stop reading the propaganda about how great times were before and think about things. Who says people were happier? Did you ever see them smiling in old pictures?
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HowTheBibleWasCreated
First of all I find this thread hard to read to the circle it keeps gong in.
Materilism is outdated and unscientific for the reason that this philosephy belives there is nothing beyond the things you can touch or see... since this is against scientici obervation or things like energy and quarks and the multiverse we must trash it.
In the same trash can goes theology though!
Now PHYSICALISM is more open a philoshephy that keeps up with science.
I am not a Physicalist and like me not all athests are physicalists. However I understand the philosephy.
As for spirit this is ignorance of Hebrew and Greek.
Spirit as used in Genesis 1:2 and onwards means breath or wind. I think you need to redifine spirit. lol
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prologos
Science is right in it's details, one step at a time, and it's direction, into every niche of the unknown. For example;
The human brain our minds, that we work with, our thoughts, emotions;-- not stuff, but information, influenced by chemicals, embodied in the grey & white matter, but really vibrations, charges, radiation that they are working to capture, record, define.
Scientific Knowledge is empowering.
The right stuff.
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cofty
Science sees man as purely material
Science works on the principle of methodological naturalism. That means they proceed on the assumption that non-magical answers do exist. It is the method that works. It has improved our lives in ways that our grandparents could hardly dream possible.
Outlaw - If you must keep launching unprovoked rants do it by PM. That way you don't make a fool of yourself in public and interrupt grown up conversations.
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Kalos
Cofty,
Scientific community works almost like JWs. Yet more and more scientists are becoming apostates.
Here is one who wrote his ground-breaking article in PSYCHOLOGY TODAY:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/biocentrism/201112/does-the-soul-exist-evidence-says-yes
Does The Soul Exist? Evidence Says ‘Yes’
New scientific theory recognizes life’s spiritual dimension
Published on December 21, 2011 by Robert Lanza, M.D. in Biocentrism
The reality of the soul is among the most important questions of life. Although religions go on and on about its existence, how do we know if souls really exist? A string of new scientific experiments helps answer this ancient spiritual question.
The idea of the soul is bound up with the idea of a future life and our belief in a continued existence after death. It's said to be the ultimate animating principle by which we think and feel, but isn't dependent on the body. Many infer its existence without scientific analysis or reflection. Indeed, the mysteries of birth and death, the play of consciousness during dreams (or after a few martinis), and even the commonest mental operations – such as imagination and memory – suggest the existence of a vital life force – an élan vital – that exists independent of the body.
Yet, the current scientific paradigm doesn't recognize this spiritual dimension of life. We're told we're just the activity of carbon and some proteins; we live awhile and die. And the universe? It too has no meaning. It has all been worked out in the equations – no need for a soul. But biocentrism – a new ‘theory of everything' – challenges this traditional, materialistic model of reality. In all directions, this outdated paradigm leads to insoluble enigmas, to ideas that are ultimately irrational. But knowledge is the prelude to wisdom, and soon our worldview will catch up with the facts.
Of course, most spiritual people view the soul as emphatically more definitive than the scientific concept. It's considered the incorporeal essence of a person, and is said to be immortal and transcendent of material existence. But when scientists speak of the soul (if at all), it's usually in a materialistic context, or treated as a poetic synonym for the mind. Everything knowable about the "soul" can be learned by studying the functioning of the brain. In their view, neuroscience is the only branch of scientific study relevant to understanding the soul.
Traditionally, science has dismissed the soul as an object of human belief, or reduced it to a psychological concept that shapes our cognitionof the observable natural world. The terms "life" and "death" are thus nothing more than the common concepts of "biological life" and "biological death." The animating principle is simply the laws of chemistry and physics. You (and all the poets and philosophers that ever lived) are just dust orbiting the core of the Milky Way galaxy.
As I sit here in my office surrounded by piles of scientific books, I can't find a single reference to the soul, or any notion of an immaterial, eternal essence that occupies our being. Indeed, a soul has never been seen under an electron microscope, nor spun in the laboratory in a test tube or ultra-centrifuge. According to these books, nothing appears to survive the human body after death.
While neuroscience has made tremendous progress illuminating the functioning of the brain, why we have a subjective experience remains mysterious. The problem of the soul lies exactly here, in understanding the nature of the self, the "I" in existence that feels and lives life. But this isn't just a problem for biology and cognitive science, but for the whole of Western natural philosophy itself.
Our current worldview – the world of objectivity and naïve realism – is beginning to show fatal cracks. Of course, this will not surprise many of the philosophers and other readers who, contemplating the works of men such as Plato, Socrates and Kant, and of Buddha and other great spiritual teachers, kept wondering about the relationship between the universe and the mind of man.
Recently, biocentrism and other scientific theories have also started to challenge the old physico-chemical paradigm, and to ask some of the difficult questions about life: Is there a soul? Does anything endure the ravages of time?
Life and consciousness are central to this new view of being, reality and the cosmos. Although the current scientific paradigm is based on the belief that the world has an objective observer-independent existence, real experiments suggest just the opposite. We think life is just the activity of atoms and particles, which spin around for a while and then dissipate into nothingness. But if we add life to the equation, we can explain some of the major puzzles of modern science, including the uncertainty principle, entanglement, and the fine-tuning of the laws that shape the universe.
Consider the famous two-slit experiment. When you watch a particle go through the holes, it behaves like a bullet, passing through one slit or the other. But if no one observes the particle, it exhibits the behavior of a wave and can pass through both slits at the same time. This and other experiments tell us that unobserved particles exist only as ‘waves of probability' as the great Nobel laureate Max Born demonstrated in 1926. They're statistical predictions – nothing but a likely outcome. Until observed, they have no real existence; only when the mind sets the scaffolding in place, can they be thought of as having duration or a position in space. Experiments make it increasingly clear that even mere knowledge in the experimenter's mind is sufficient to convert possibility to reality.
Many scientists dismiss the implications of these experiments, because until recently, this observer-dependent behavior was thought to be confined to the subatomic world. However, this is being challenged by researchers around the world. In fact, just this year a team of physicists (Gerlich et al, Nature Communications 2:263, 2011) showed that quantum weirdness also occurs in the human-scale world. They studied huge compounds composed of up to 430 atoms, and confirmed that this strange quantum behavior extends into the larger world we live in.
Importantly, this has a direct bearing on the question of whether humans and other living creatures have souls. As Kant pointed out over 200 years ago, everything we experience – including all the colors, sensations and objects we perceive – are nothing but representations in our mind. Space and time are simply the mind's tools for putting it all together. Now, to the amusement of idealists, scientists are beginning dimly to recognize that those rules make existence itself possible. Indeed, the experiments above suggest that objects only exist with real properties if they are observed. The results not only defy our classical intuition, but suggest that a part of the mind – the soul – is immortal and exists outside of space and time.
"The hope of another life" wrote Will Durant "gives us courage to meet our own death, and to bear with the death of our loved ones; we are twice armed if we fight with faith."
And we are thrice armed if we fight with science.
You can learn more about Biocentrism atwww.robertlanzabiocentrism.com and www.robertlanza.com
If you want more:
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cofty
Kalos That is hardly a "groundbreaking" article. The really interesting progress is being made by neuroscience not by psychologists who are free to fantasise without evidence. Our minds are commensurate with our functioning brains.
Life is a process not a thing.
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Kalos
Cofty,
I send you my good wishes.
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M*A*S*H
Psychology Today has managed to get itself listed on QuackWatch ... http://www.quackwatch.org/04ConsumerEducation/nonrecperiodicals.html not a good sign really.
Some other great articles from the totally quack free journal Psychology Today.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/biocentrism/201203/when-you-die-do-you-wake-in-the-morning
At death, we all know, there is a break in consciousness, and so too, a break in the continuity in the connection of times and places. Without space and time, Newtonian conceptions of order and secure prediction have no meaning. In reality you can take any time, past or future, as your new frame of reference, and estimate all other events relative to it
This artical IMO takes a lack of understanding of what an 'observer' is and somehow ends up concluding " When you die, you will wake up in the present—just like you did this morning."
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/biocentrism/201301/commentary-the-nature-life
Our science is so far off the mark that we might just as well be reading comic books instead of textbooks on evolutionary biology or quantum physics. However, recently some scientists have started to challenge a worldview that stretches back—beyond Sir Isaac Newton and Aristotle—to the first thinkers of civilized consciousness.
Comic books I tell you... don't read physics text books no... spiderman is just as good! Plus, if Aristotle does not qualify as a "first thinker" who the bloody hell does?
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/biocentrism/201208/trip-through-time-and-beyond
So say goodbye to death, and fasten your seatbelt for a mind-blowing ride through space and time … and beyond.
In this artical quantum entanglement and the double slit experiment are somehow used to draw the above conclusion.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/biocentrism/201312/the-myth-death
But physics tells us that energy is never ever lost, and that our brains, minds, and hence the feeling of life operates by electrical energy, and therefore this energy like all others simply can’t vanish, period. The biocentric view of the timeless, spaceless cosmos of consciousness allows for no true death in any real sense. When a body dies, it does so not in the random billiard-ball matrix but in the all-is-still-inescapably-life matrix.
Sign me up for the " all-is-still-inescapably-life matrix".
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/biocentrism/201205/you-really-are-the-center-the-universe
Biocentrism provides the explanation for why all the shots missed. If the universe is created by us, then no universe that didn’t allow for life could possibly exist. The mystery of the goldilocks universe goes away, and the critical role of life and consciousness in shaping the universe becomes clear.
In this artical we examine how we created the universe with our brains.
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cofty
Cofty, I send you my good wishes. - Kalos
I would prefer you send me some objective evidence to back up your grandiose claims. That would be far more interesting than faux politeness.
M*A*S*H thanks for that information on Psychology Today.