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I think that I can see what Mystic's getting at here. It is the oft heard argument about the validity of human knowledge. That, in fact, was one of the Matrix arguments and a false one because logic and empirical evidence is so consistently shown to be valid that it should now be considered to be the best tools to use to get at facts. The burden of doubt should be directed at those beliefs for which there is no logical or evidential support such as any and all the theisms. This was just one of the Matrix erors - 'doubt' was aimed the wrong way. Especially as the argument for flawed human perception was based on the findings of empirical evidence (1).
Thus the distinction made between validated science and what Mystic refers to as 'belief' is a largely artificial one. The evidence and logic indicates that the view of everything being down to natural forces (and I am not going to be drawn on semantic dickering about natural schmatural) is the evidentially supported view (or belief) and that unsupported belief based on no scientific validation that there is some intelligence behind it is not supported by any credible science. Nobody from Einstein to the Creationists have been able to adduce any logical of evidential support for that idea, and from all the posts I have seen neither does Mystic.
He has a very involved model for an intelligent cosmos if there is such a thing, but it does not do squat to show that there is and science does a lot of squat to show that that there isn't. All the chat about beliefs only serves to confuse the issue.
You raised my hopes with that first sentence then thoroughly dashed them with this reiterated ignorance of our reality. Perhaps you will provide even ONE piece of this "squat" that you assert where science shows that the universe is NOT intelligent. You seem not to comprehend the inevitable connection of intelligibility with intellect and intelligence. Based on your failure to penetrate the material presented by Matrix . . . it is clear you don't have the vaguest idea what the real philosophical issues are. I don't have the time to educate you sufficiently for you to even be aware of the nuances that exist. But a brief synopsis (this taken from a Catholic source) might help to shake your certainty based on a one-sided materialistic bias and ignorance. Some excerpts to get you started:
The view that the cognitive powers of the mind, or faculties of knowledge, are of a double order — the one lower, grosser, more intimately depending on bodily organs, the other higher and of a more refined and spiritual nature — appeared very early, though at first confusedly, in Greek thought.
The universe of being, as reported by reason, is one, eternal, immutable; as revealed by sense, it is a series of multiple changing phenomena. Which is the truly real? For Plato there are in a sense two worlds, that of the intellect (noeton) and that of sense (horaton).Sense can give only an imperfect knowledge of its object, which he calls belief (pistis) or conjecture (eikasia). The faculties by which we apprehend the noeton, "the intelligible world" are two: nous, "intuitive reason", which reaches the ideas (see IDEA); and logos, "discursive reason", which by its proper process, viz. episteme "demonstration", attains only to dianoia "conception". Plato thus sets up two distinct intellectual faculties attaining to different sets of objects. But the world of ideas is for Plato the real world, that of sense is only a poor shadowy imitation.
Aristotle's doctrine on the intellect in its main outline is clear. The soul is possessed of two orders of cognitive faculty, to aisthetikon, "sensuous cognition", and to dianoetikon "rational cognition" . The sensuous faculty includes aisthesis, sensuous perception", phantasia, "imagination", and mneme, memory". The faculty of rational cognition includes nous and dianoia. These, however, are not so much two faculties as two functions of the same power. They roughly correspond to intellect and ratiocinative reason. For intellect to operate, previous sense perception is required. The function of the intellect is to divest the object presented by sense of its material and individualizing conditions, and apprehend the universal and intelligible form embodied in the concrete physical reality. The outcome of the process is the generalization in the intellect of an intellectual form or representation of the intelligible being of the object (eidos, noeton). This act constitutes the intellect cognizant of the object in its universal nature.
In this process intellect appears in a double character. On the one hand it exhibits itself as an active agent, in that it operates on the object presented by the sensuous faculty rendering it intelligible. On the other hand, as subject of the intellectual representation evolved, it manifests passivity, modifiability, and susceptibility to the reception of different forms. There is thus revealed in Aristotle's theory of intellectual cognition an active intellect (nous poietikos) and a passive intellect (nous pathetikos). But how these are to be conceived, and what precisely is the nature of the distinction and relation between them, is one of the most irritatingly obscure points in the whole of Aristotle's works.
The active intellect "illuminates" the object of sense, rendering it intelligible somewhat as light renders colours visible. It is pure energy without any potentiality, and its activity is continuous. It is separate, immortal, and eternal. The passive intellect, on the other hand, receives the forms abstracted by the active intellect and ideally becomes the object.
The great commentator, Alexander of Aphrodisias, interprets the nous poietikos as the activity of the Divine intelligence. This view was adopted by many of the Arabian philosophers of the Middle Ages, who conceived it in a pantheistic sense. For many of them the active intellect is one universal reason illuminating all men.
Read the rest at the link . . . including your precious materialism . . . and come back and see if we can have a proper philosophical debate about what you are failing to consider.
You raised my hopes with that first sentence then thoroughly dashed them with this reiterated ignorance of our reality. Perhaps you will provide even ONE piece of this "squat" that you assert where science shows that the universe is NOT intelligent. You seem not to comprehend the inevitable connection of intelligibility with intellect and intelligence. Based on your failure to penetrate the material presented by Matrix . . . it is clear you don't have the vaguest idea what the real philosophical issues are. I don't have the time to educate you sufficiently for you to even be aware of the nuances that exist. But a brief synopsis (this taken from a Catholic source) might help to shake your certainty based on a one-sided materialistic bias and ignorance. Some excerpts to get you started:
The view that the cognitive powers of the mind, or faculties of knowledge, are of a double order — the one lower, grosser, more intimately depending on bodily organs, the other higher and of a more refined and spiritual nature — appeared very early, though at first confusedly, in Greek thought.
The universe of being, as reported by reason, is one, eternal, immutable; as revealed by sense, it is a series of multiple changing phenomena. Which is the truly real? For Plato there are in a sense two worlds, that of the intellect (noeton) and that of sense (horaton).Sense can give only an imperfect knowledge of its object, which he calls belief (pistis) or conjecture (eikasia). The faculties by which we apprehend the noeton, "the intelligible world" are two: nous, "intuitive reason", which reaches the ideas (see IDEA); and logos, "discursive reason", which by its proper process, viz. episteme "demonstration", attains only to dianoia "conception". Plato thus sets up two distinct intellectual faculties attaining to different sets of objects. But the world of ideas is for Plato the real world, that of sense is only a poor shadowy imitation.
Aristotle's doctrine on the intellect in its main outline is clear. The soul is possessed of two orders of cognitive faculty, to aisthetikon, "sensuous cognition", and to dianoetikon "rational cognition" . The sensuous faculty includes aisthesis, sensuous perception", phantasia, "imagination", and mneme, memory". The faculty of rational cognition includes nous and dianoia. These, however, are not so much two faculties as two functions of the same power. They roughly correspond to intellect and ratiocinative reason. For intellect to operate, previous sense perception is required. The function of the intellect is to divest the object presented by sense of its material and individualizing conditions, and apprehend the universal and intelligible form embodied in the concrete physical reality. The outcome of the process is the generalization in the intellect of an intellectual form or representation of the intelligible being of the object (eidos, noeton). This act constitutes the intellect cognizant of the object in its universal nature.
In this process intellect appears in a double character. On the one hand it exhibits itself as an active agent, in that it operates on the object presented by the sensuous faculty rendering it intelligible. On the other hand, as subject of the intellectual representation evolved, it manifests passivity, modifiability, and susceptibility to the reception of different forms. There is thus revealed in Aristotle's theory of intellectual cognition an active intellect (nous poietikos) and a passive intellect (nous pathetikos). But how these are to be conceived, and what precisely is the nature of the distinction and relation between them, is one of the most irritatingly obscure points in the whole of Aristotle's works.
The active intellect "illuminates" the object of sense, rendering it intelligible somewhat as light renders colours visible. It is pure energy without any potentiality, and its activity is continuous. It is separate, immortal, and eternal. The passive intellect, on the other hand, receives the forms abstracted by the active intellect and ideally becomes the object.
The great commentator, Alexander of Aphrodisias, interprets the nous poietikos as the activity of the Divine intelligence. This view was adopted by many of the Arabian philosophers of the Middle Ages, who conceived it in a pantheistic sense. For many of them the active intellect is one universal reason illuminating all men.
Read the rest at the link . . . including your precious materialism . . . and come back and see if we can have a proper philosophical debate about what you are failing to consider.
Yet again I see that I was a fool to try to get through to you. We have repeated this argument again and every one of your demands have been met many, many times. You deny the evidence for a natural rather than supernatural universe and you then deny that it has even been presented.
You deny (by implication) that the burden of proof is on you to prove your case. That you have denied that disbelief is the logical default shows that your whole proposition is illogical.
That you deny that Plantinga's proposition was full of logical fallacies shows that it is you who failed to penetrate the argument - his or mine - or the fact the Matrix did not disprove a single point I made, but denied one, admitted one and ignored the rest.
Spare me in this scientific age the speculations of Alexandrian platonists presented as evidence for anything. As I say, go and get your theory accepted by credible science and I will then believe it.
You know that's not true. Examples were given, including examples of living scientists.
There's even a scientist who is a member of Opus Dei.
Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe - Robert E. Horton Medal and William Bowie Medal winner.
Well, I must say that you have made me think a bit better of catholic scientists but then again, it's like Copernicus or Newton. God - believers all but they did their work using science, not the Bible (1). In a way counting up scientists of faith is a bit like a reverse of the great atrocity count. It proves nothing one way or the other about the validity of faith, even if that was intended by the OP and I gather from an un -nameable source that it wasn't.
If it was to make it look more science - friendly, then you have done something to that end, though the Vatican will never live Galileo down and the list of catholic scientists fades in the last two centuries other than for Jesuit siesmologists (I wonder why they were so interested? ).
I still have a concern about scientists with faith as faith is not really as skeptical as it ought to be and is not really compatible with the scientific method. So it is a concern, if not a worry.
(1) though of course Newton wasted a lot of effort on decoding Daniel
I was looking through a statistic forum, and found this link to religious/science statistics section. The link is included for those who want to read the whole article. I think it gives a good view of how science feels about religion, and the steady growth of non religious scientist. It also covers religion’s continuing attempts to twist public view.
Among scientists
The popular media balyhoo the fiction that science is supportive of religion. One issue of Newsweek (July 20, 1998) featured a cover story "Science finds God" which gave many innocent readers the impression that scientists in droves were finding scientific "evidence" allowing for God and an afterlife and were jumping on the religion bandwagon. Some of these 1998 reports were stimulated by a June 1998 Science and the Spiritual Quest Conference organized by Robert John Russell, and sponsored by The Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (CTNS) at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Since this is an organization devoted to the reconciliation of science and religion it's no surprise the speakers were supportive of the idea of the possibility of god and/or an afterlife, though some of the papers were so speculative and abstruse that it's hard to tell whether they were profound philosophy or mere moonshine. One wonders whether some speakers came just for the stipend provided by the John Templeton Foundation. Several Nobel-Prize winning scientists gave papers at this meeting. The papers were mostly philosophical and speculative. No new hard evidence was produced. News reports failed to put these wishful speculations in perspective by pointing out that most scientists are, in fact, not religious. And the percent of "leading" scientists who hold religious beliefs has been declining from around 30% in 1914 to less than 10% in 1998.
[Summary of a paper that appeared in the 23 July 1998 issue of Nature by Edward J. Larson and Larry Witham: "Leading Scientists Still Reject God." Nature, 1998; 394, 313.]
Yet again I see that I was a fool to try to get through to you. We have repeated this argument again and every one of your demands have been met many, many times. You deny the evidence for a natural rather than supernatural universe and you then deny that it has even been presented.
You're not trying . . . you still make the stupid artificial distinction between natural and supernatural. There is no such thing!
Quote:
You deny (by implication) that the burden of proof is on you to prove your case. That you have denied that disbelief is the logical default shows that your whole proposition is illogical.
It is NOT disbelief . . . it is your belief that there is something other than God (our inscrutable Creator) called "Nature." THAT belief in a distinction is false and it is YOUR BELIEF . . . not a default disbelief.
Quote:
That you deny that Plantinga's proposition was full of logical fallacies shows that it is you who failed to penetrate the argument - his or mine - or the fact the Matrix did not disprove a single point I made, but denied one, admitted one and ignored the rest.
Selective perception at its worst. Matrix hammered your irrational self-defeating position. You do not have the depth of intellect to recognize it.
Quote:
Spare me in this scientific age the speculations of Alexandrian platonists presented as evidence for anything. As I say, go and get your theory accepted by credible science and I will then believe it.
You would prefer no hypothesis and an irrational fraudulent default . . . to a scientifically plausible but untested hypothesis? Go figure.
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Perhaps you will provide even ONE piece of this "squat" that you assert where science shows that the universe is NOT intelligent. You seem not to comprehend the inevitable connection of intelligibility with intellect and intelligence. Based on your failure to penetrate the material presented by Matrix . . . it is clear you don't have the vaguest idea what the real philosophical issues are. I don't have the time to educate you sufficiently for you to even be aware of the nuances that exist. But a 
WHAT? Wait. I gotta sit down to read this one.....
Guess he showed you, huh, AREQUIPA! It's a literal SET THEORY array of 50¢ words, with even a few 75¢ words thrown in for dramatic effect....* 
).
