Hawking says there are no gods

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JoeMorgue said:
Everyday you come closer to just admitting you are doing nothing but outright trolling.
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No! In philosophy we "play" with words. That is short for testing how words work. And how words are connected to the rest of reality.

This one is old, here in Denmark. If I remember correct, from the 60's.
Imagine a lake. Of course it is not a real lake, but it is real that you can imagine it. In it are 2 ducks, a real duck and an unreal duck, which is a decoy duck, but it is a real decoy duck.

To do this you have take it seriously, but not to seriously, because the feelings might cloud you judgment, hence "play".
 
Tommy Jeppesen said:
No! In philosophy we "play" with words. That is short for testing how words work. And how words are connected to the rest of reality.

This one is old, here in Denmark. If I remember correct, from the 60's.
Imagine a lake. Of course it is not a real lake, but it is real that you can imagine it. In it are 2 ducks, a real duck and an unreal duck, which is a decoy duck, but it is a real decoy duck.

To do this you have take it seriously, but not to seriously, because the feelings might cloud you judgment, hence "play".
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That sounds exactly like trolling to me.

Go toss your own word salad, don't expect others to do it.
 
Tommy Jeppesen said:
No! In philosophy we "play" with words. That is short for testing how words work. And how words are connected to the rest of reality.

This one is old, here in Denmark. If I remember correct, from the 60's.
Imagine a lake. ...snip....
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What do you mean by "imagine" a lake? Do you see the lake in front of you or what?
 
Porpoise of Life said:
we can 'do morality' with science just as we can 'do psychology' with science.
There is no need for morality to be as absolute and abstract as gravity in order for science to be able to take a look at it...
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Yes, but that is not morality, in the sense that at least one poster use it here. The claim is that science answer a moral question of what we ought to do. Or even remove the "ought" and replace it with how as a how question science can answer.
 
Tommy Jeppesen said:
Yes, but that is not morality, in the sense that at least one poster use it here. The claim is that science answer a moral question of what we ought to do. Or even remove the "ought" and replace it with how as a how question science can answer.
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Sure, but using that definition, science can't say anything about medicine, because it doesn't say whether we ought to cure people...
 
Still feels like arguing that science can't tell us anything about nutrition, because it can't force me to find sugar delicious, or tell me I shouldn't want to get diabetes...

But back to the thread, sort of... Religion can't tell me anything more about morality than science can. Their only argument is 'because we tell you so'.
Religion has co-opted the naturally occuring morality in humanity and claimed it as a product of either itself, or its god. Same as they tried to do with natural phenomena like lightning, earthquakes, flowers, and so on.

There is no more room for a god in the answer to 'How should I treat people?' than there is in the question 'why does the Sun rise every morning?'
 
It seems like science can only "not answer" questions that only try-hard edge-lords feel the need to ask.

And again "God's" record of telling us how we should treat people isn't exactly stellar.

And, for the umpteenth time, nobody has told us how any other process/system/methodology/epistimologies answers those questions either.

It's all "SQUAWK... Science can't answer everything... SQUAWK" and just... leaves it there like that's an answer.
 
Porpoise of Life said:
Still feels like arguing that science can't tell us anything about nutrition, because it can't force me to find sugar delicious, or tell me I shouldn't want to get diabetes...

But back to the thread, sort of... Religion can't tell me anything more about morality than science can. Their only argument is 'because we tell you so'.
Religion has co-opted the naturally occuring morality in humanity and claimed it as a product of either itself, or its god. Same as they tried to do with natural phenomena like lightning, earthquakes, flowers, and so on.

There is no more room for a god in the answer to 'How should I treat people?' than there is in the question 'why does the Sun rise every morning?'
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Well, yes. Religion as an organized set of rules, which must be followed, is bad. Some forms of religion are early forms of psychology and politics about how we ought to live life.
The former has won over the latter for now.
 
JoeMorgue said:
It seems like science can only "not answer" questions that only try-hard edge-lords feel the need to ask.

And again "God's" record of telling us how we should treat people isn't exactly stellar.

And, for the umpteenth time, nobody has told us how any other process/system/methodology/epistimologies answers those questions either.

It's all "SQUAWK... Science can't answer everything... SQUAWK" and just... leaves it there like that's an answer.
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Okay, take Jean Piaget. Now branch out and study meta-cognition both as tool for thinking and how to understand your feelings/emotions. Combine it with cognitive psychology. Now add Lawrence Kohlberg and volia. You get an idea of how cognition is connected to morality.
Then add Leon Festinger and go back to Piaget and how people cope with new information, which doesn't fit their current schemata and you are set to go to have an idea of what can happen in a debate about morality.

There are 2 forms of critical thinking, formal and emotional. They are connected but not quite the same.
Then throw in the g- and s-factor in intelligence and it gets weird.

But you don't have to learn this, because you know it already and if you don't, then it is nothing but gibberish.

There is no one answer.
There is a lot of factors and the nature/nurture of the single individual, the culture it takes place in and so on.
My wife is a social worker and nursing assistant. There is no single answer. There are a lot of different tools and how to use them vary based on context.
So, yes, there is no one plan, but you can find a lot of theory and tools and the more you combine, general the better you are off, doing ethics in practice.
There are generalities, but no short answer as like how gravity works. (Edit - even that is not a really short answer)
And the longer you study it, the more you get away from hard science alone.

Edit: At the really soft end you get this:
Trust is not of our own making; it is given. Our life is so constituted that it cannot be lived except as one person lays him or herself open to another person and puts him or herself into that person’s hands either by showing or claiming trust. By our very attitude to another we help to shape that person’s world. By our attitude to the other person we help to determine the scope and hue of his or her world; we make it large or small, bright or drab, rich or dull, threatening or secure. We help to shape his or her world not by theories and views but by our very attitude towards him or her. Herein lies the unarticulated and one might say anonymous demand that we take care of the life which trust has placed in our hands.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knud_Ejler_Løgstrup

Now combine that with this out in the territory/landscape:
2 nursing assistants are talk and the one says: "I am busy, I have a lot of things to do." Then the thing in the bed says: "Am I a thing?"
That is connected.
 
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JoeMorgue said:
Ah... thought you could sneak a goal post move past us there did ya?

I see now it's "The hard sciences" that can't answer every question.
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Not even the soft sciences can do that:

Trust is not of our own making; it is given. Our life is so constituted that it cannot be lived except as one person lays him or herself open to another person and puts him or herself into that person’s hands either by showing or claiming trust. By our very attitude to another we help to shape that person’s world. By our attitude to the other person we help to determine the scope and hue of his or her world; we make it large or small, bright or drab, rich or dull, threatening or secure. We help to shape his or her world not by theories and views but by our very attitude towards him or her. Herein lies the unarticulated and one might say anonymous demand that we take care of the life which trust has placed in our hands.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knud_Ejler_Løgstrup

That is philosophy about ethics.
 
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Minoosh said:
If I understand cosmology at all, which is doubtful, theories are proposed and tested, sometimes in an observational way, but sometimes more indirectly. You don't so much determine if something's true, but whether it's possible. Determining something to be possible doesn't tell you that it's true, but it does tell you it's not impossible.

A universe from nothing sounds impossible to me, but not to people who have a vastly superior understanding of how it could occur mathematically.
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There are plenty of ideas in cosmology which are being explored, many of them because they make sense in some theoretical context, but no one claims that those ideas are necessarily correct, just that they are worth exploring.

There are other ideas that have been tested very rigorously (like the fact that the universe is expanding), often from multiple different directions. Dark Matter was first implied by galactic rotation curves (things were orbiting faster than predicted by our understanding of gravity given the known masses of the galaxies, so it was posited that there was more mass there than was known), but there are multiple other data sets that also lead to the same conclusion (including gravitational lensing for instance). The observational data that is used to test theoretical ideas in cosmology has become immensely more precise over the last few decades.
 
Thor 2 said:
You persist with this approach about science not being able to test the existence of gods. Hawking gave us a new angle on this if you would take note. With his in depth insight into his scientific speciality he observed there was no time for a creator to exist in.
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RecoveringYuppy said:
And that isn't supported by science. That goes way beyond what are current theories are capable of explaining. It's almost like Hawking was confused by some pop-sci TV show.
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Roboramma said:
+1.

Why this fact is being generally ignored in this thread is beyond me.
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Oh dear, we have to explain what the scientific method is ....... yet again.:(
 
Why does the absence of time mean there can be no possibility of a creator?
 
Thor 2 said:
Oh dear, we have to explain what the scientific method is ....... yet again.:(
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As I have said multiple times in this thread, Hawking has a model that is consistent with what is known, in which there is no time before the Big Bang. His model is certainly not ruled out by data. There are other models that do include times before the Big Bang, which are equally consistent with the data. We simply don't know which class of models is correct yet.

Maybe you need to tell Sean Carroll (an expert on this particular area of early universe cosmology) what the scientific method is?

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2017/01/25/what-happened-at-the-big-bang/

So what I did to fill my time was two things. First, I talked about different ways the universe could have existed before the Big Bang, classifying models into four possibilities (see Slide 7):

1.Bouncing (the universe collapses to a Big Crunch, then re-expands with a Big Bang)
2. Cyclic (a series of bounces and crunches, extending forever)
3. Hibernating (a universe that sits quiescently for a long time, before the Bang begins)
4. Reproducing (a background empty universe that spits off babies, each of which begins with a Bang)

I don’t claim this is a logically exhaustive set of possibilities, but most semi-popular models I know fit into one of the above categories. Given my own way of thinking about the problem, I emphasized that any decent cosmological model should try to explain why the early universe had a low entropy, and suggested that the Reproducing models did the best job.
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ETA To be clear, you say that Hawking showed that there was no time for a creator to exist in, I assume you are talking about the fact that in his model there is no time prior to the big bang. But his model may or may not be correct, there are other models that are just as good in which there is a time before the big bang. As RecoveringYuppy says, science can't yet tell us which of those is correct, so to take his model and say that it can lead us to conclude something is wrong because his model is speculative. It's great and insightful work because he at least showed that such a model is possible, and if someone's argument for God is that something must have existed prior to the big bang to create the universe then the existence of his model does show that that's wrong, but it doesn't show that nothing could have existed prior to the big bang.
 
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