Hawking says there are no gods

[JoeMorgue]

+1.

Why this fact is being generally ignored in this thread is beyond me.

It's not being ignored, just that even if we agree that science (strawman or otherwise) has limits absent even a token attempt to explain how other methodologies explain it it's just... noise.

Again "Science can't explain everything!" isn't a description or proof of all this mythical, magical ways we're supposed to use in its place.

So we get to the "end of science" however anyone wants to define or conceptualize it. It seems people think that's the end of the discussion.

We get to "Science ends here, and from that point on I can make stuff up without rhyme, reason, or framework."

I've been screaming this question into the void for pages now and all I get back is Tommy's word salad.

Somebody please answer me. I'll hit the "I agree" button for the sake of the argument.

Science has a limit. Fine. We'll accept that for argumentative purposes. I'll even let anyone who wants to define what that limit is for now.

What do we do then? What do we use? How does it work? How is it tested or QAed? Give me a question it's answered and the steps it took to get that answer.

An answer that isn't just "Science doesn't know everything" reworded or invoking magic or randomness.

It really does seem more and more like people are using "Science can't explain everything" as thinly veiled code for "We don't want certain things explained" and are getting annoyed that other people aren't picking up on their meaning. There's a distinct air of "Stop asking these questions" in the margins to a lot of this.

I think there's more of the old "Somethings man is just not meant to know / Don't explain it you'll ruin the magic" in at least some of this then is being admitted.

That's the only way all this passion and effort being put into telling science what its limits are turning off when we get to the "So what do now?" part makes any sense.

 

[BadBoy]

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:

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.

Is it just me, or does this sound like a load of gibberish. You appear to being doing a lot of appealing to authority there.

In fact I have no idea what your position on Morality is now. Do you think Morality doesn't actually exist at all? It doesn't sound like you are supporting a universal or an objective moral foundation provided by a deity.

When I talk about morality, and I think when people through the ages have been talking about morality, they are really talking about well being. If we agree that morality is really about well being then objective moral truths can be derived from any given situation based on that foundation, and that can be done scientifically

That does not mean all human beings care about well being - or even have to care about well being - and in fact some don't appear to care about well being as much as some others. But when people talk about morality and if a particular action is moral or not they are really talking about well being.

There is no Nirvana and I was never suggesting my view on this was leading to one, in fact on the contrary. It's complex and messy and sometimes hard to know what is the moral thing to do in any given situation.

 

[BadBoy]

Why does the absence of time mean there can be no possibility of a creator?

events happen in time? In order for a creator to not do something and then do it, and then be in the state of done it, implies an order of events.

A creator to exist outside of space and time isn't even coherent.

Just saying that perhaps we are not intelligent enough to understand that it is possible is a non answer. You have to describe how it is possible, otherwise I could just make up any old rubbish and say it's possible unless you can prove it isn't.

 

[psionl0]

Again "Science can't explain everything!" isn't a description or proof of all this mythical, magical ways we're supposed to use in its place.

Who said it is?

Beyond what "science" can answer, all we have is postulates, theories and hypotheses. We might have reason to prefer one theory over another (being the "most likely" explanation) but we can't rule out alternatives without proof.

And that is just about scientific theories. You can't sprout a bunch of philosophies and rationalizations and call them science.

 

[BadBoy]

It's not being ignored, just that even if we agree that science (strawman or otherwise) has limits absent even a token attempt to explain how other methodologies explain it it's just... noise.

Again "Science can't explain everything!" isn't a description or proof of all this mythical, magical ways we're supposed to use in its place.

So we get to the "end of science" however anyone wants to define or conceptualize it. It seems people think that's the end of the discussion.

We get to "Science ends here, and from that point on I can make stuff up without rhyme, reason, or framework."

I've been screaming this question into the void for pages now and all I get back is Tommy's word salad.

Somebody please answer me. I'll hit the "I agree" button for the sake of the argument.

Science has a limit. Fine. We'll accept that for argumentative purposes. I'll even let anyone who wants to define what that limit is for now.

What do we do then? What do we use? How does it work? How is it tested or QAed? Give me a question it's answered and the steps it took to get that answer.

An answer that isn't just "Science doesn't know everything" reworded or invoking magic or randomness.

It really does seem more and more like people are using "Science can't explain everything" as thinly veiled code for "We don't want certain things explained" and are getting annoyed that other people aren't picking up on their meaning. There's a distinct air of "Stop asking these questions" in the margins to a lot of this.

I think there's more of the old "Somethings man is just not meant to know / Don't explain it you'll ruin the magic" in at least some of this then is being admitted.

That's the only way all this passion and effort being put into telling science what its limits are turning off when we get to the "So what do now?" part makes any sense.

I'm not even sure I would say science has a limit as such. I mean it's not like a multi tool that's missing some functionality so it can't drill square holes and never will be able to.

What can be discovered and what is knowable maybe limited, but possibly only due to physical laws of the universe and limits to our technology etc. If we could travel back in time to before the big bang we could use science to figure out what was going on. But we can't, but thats not a failing of science IMO.

 

[BadBoy]

Who said it is?

Beyond what "science" can answer, all we have is postulates, theories and hypotheses. We might have reason to prefer one theory over another (being the "most likely" explanation) but we can't rule out alternatives without proof but we can't rule IN alternatives without evidence.

And that is just about scientific theories. You can't sprout a bunch of philosophies and rationalizations and call them science.

Fixed that for you

 

[psionl0]

Fixed that for you

So we can't consider models where time existed before there was a big bang?

BTW I'm not "ruling IN" anything.

 

[ynot]

Again, Hawking was not an expert on god,

How does one become an expert on a purely fictional character? Is it like being an expert on Superman or Spiderman? Can you name such an expert?

 

[ynot]

My "best guess" is that existence and time are eternal.

I don't accept many theoretical science theories, but I don't claim they're wrong.

 

[BadBoy]

So we can't consider models where time existed before there was a big bang?

BTW I'm not "ruling IN" anything.

I kind of meant that we don't want to go down the road of "we don't know what caused the big bang, so universe creating pixies may have done it". We-don't-know is the default position, until evidence for a theory presents itself or is found.

Plus, science doesn't produce proofs, but models of reality that support the current evidence, at least not proof in the mathematical sense. I could just be a brain in a vat and you're a figment of my imagination.

At least that's what I have been led to understand.

 

[BadBoy]

How does one become an expert on a purely fictional character? Is it like being an expert on Superman or Spiderman? Can you name such an expert?

it's possible to be an expert on a fictional character. I would consider some Christian Theologians to be experts on Jesus. I would say my brothers son is quite the expert on Spiderman.

 

[kellyb]

My "best guess" is that existence and time are eternal.

I don't accept many theoretical science theories, but I don't claim they're wrong.

Pretty much where I'm at.

Re: time being eternal - I think it's a "sort of" thing there. Events or movements within the 4th dimension have to happen for time to...progress. So, if nothing exists, there is no time, and if nothing happens, there is no time.

Something like that. lol

 

[Tommy Jeppesen]

...

What do we do then? What do we use? How does it work? How is it tested or QAed? Give me a question it's answered and the steps it took to get that answer.
...

The short answer is that there is no "we" in the moral sense for all humanity. But check it yourself.

If you say, that you accept a claim must falsifiable to be science, then you must be able to accept that there is no "we"?
Ask the question: Is there a moral "we" for all of humanity?
Ask it and find the answer, JoeMorgue!!!

Don't trust anybody else, figure it out yourself by checking.
You can ask others for input and so on, but you answer it.
Science is also the ability to replicate, so you can also answer.
Is there a moral "we" for all of humanity?

Then if you find that "we", then you have your answer, as you want it.
If there is no "we", then you have to do something else. That is your problem now, because if there is no "we", then there are individuals and you as one have to figure out, what you want to do.

That is it. If there is a "we", you will have a list of instructions to follow.
If there is no "we", then you do it yourself. You are on your own, you can find others, who agree with you, but you don't have the answers given to you. You have to find themselves.

 

[Roboramma]

It's not being ignored, just that even if we agree that science (strawman or otherwise) has limits absent even a token attempt to explain how other methodologies explain it it's just... noise.

Again "Science can't explain everything!" isn't a description or proof of all this mythical, magical ways we're supposed to use in its place.

So we get to the "end of science" however anyone wants to define or conceptualize it. It seems people think that's the end of the discussion.

We get to "Science ends here, and from that point on I can make stuff up without rhyme, reason, or framework."

I've been screaming this question into the void for pages now and all I get back is Tommy's word salad.

Personally I haven't addressed it because I agree with you. I said that what I was saying was being ignored mostly because people have brought up Hawking's statement about there not being a time before the big bang as a fact several times after I pointed out that this is a model that isn't part of the standard view of cosmology yet.

But as to your point, I agree. We only have science to use to understand the world, it's limitations are the underlying limitations of knowledge. With regard to Hawking's model, I don't think our knowledge is fundamentally limited there, we just don't have the answer yet, and if we do get an answer to what (if anything) happened before the big bang, it will be through science that we get that answer, not though psychedelics or prayer or reading poetry or something.

I also think that there are fundamental limits to our knowledge, many of which we probably don't know about yet (that is, it's not yet clear where the limits are, but they exist), but again as you say that doesn't mean we're justified in just making up stuff to fit into those gaps. And I agree that in general nowadays that's what much of religion (or at least the justifications for religion) amount to.

The religious argument is often far too close to "We don't know, therefore God" which equals "We don't know, therefore we know", which when put in those words sounds obviously stupid, but "Science doesn't know how the universe began, so I think that the god of the bible was the source of creation" basically amounts to the same thing.

I think we can say that there is no good reason to think that a god of any definition was involved in creation (or anything else), and there is good reason to believe that the idea of a god was invented by humans without any divine inspiration, so we can safely discard the idea. That doesn't demonstrate that it's false, but the credence that we can reasonably put in it is very low.

 

[BadBoy]

The short answer is that there is no "we" in the moral sense for all humanity.

I don't accept your premise here. There clearly is a "we"

We don't live in a vacuum, many things I do on a day to day basis affect other people, and the things they do affect me. The interaction between individuals is where the "we" comes from.

Out it this way, if morality exists, in any way you want to define it, it is at the very least concerned with how actions may affect other people.

Morality quite obviously exists - whatever you want to define it as - because we have a word for it and I think most people understand and agree what the concept is, even if we don't accept where morals come from.

You don't appear to be arguing for where morals come from. You seem to be arguing that morals don't exist at all. And without wanting to straw man you, if that is your position then I think you are wrong, and quite clearly wrong.

 

[Roboramma]

Pretty much where I'm at.

Re: time being eternal - I think it's a "sort of" thing there. Events or movements within the 4th dimension have to happen for time to...progress. So, if nothing exists, there is no time, and if nothing happens, there is no time.

Something like that. lol

Penrose* has this idea that after some enormous amount of time everything in the universe decays into radiation, and in a universe with only radiation in some sense time doesn't exist, then this incredibly diffuse cold radiation is someone (this part I don't get) mathematically identical to the incredibly dense hot state of the big bang, and so you get these cycles of the universe where it expands from the big bang, everything diffuses and decays into radiation and then time sort of stops having meaning and then the state is equivalent to the big bang, and then repeat.

This idea of his isn't particularly popular among cosmologists, and I have to admit I don't fully understand it in spite of reading his book, but it has inspired some other, more popular, ideas about pre-big bang evolution of the universe.

*Penrose has some crackpot ideas about QM and the brain, but he is a legit and well respected physicist who has done ground breaking work in general relativity.

 

[ynot]

Pretty much where I'm at.

Re: time being eternal - I think it's a "sort of" thing there. Events or movements within the 4th dimension have to happen for time to...progress. So, if nothing exists, there is no time, and if nothing happens, there is no time.

Something like that. lol

I don't accept time being either a thing or dimension.

Once again, I don't claim to know they aren't.

 

[psionl0]

I kind of meant that we don't want to go down the road of "we don't know what caused the big bang, so universe creating pixies may have done it".

That is not a scientific conclusion.

We can't scientifically test for supernatural causes but that doesn't mean that we can rule out their existence. We can only start with a basic position which in science is that everything has a natural cause (with some randomness thrown in for good measure).

 

[Tommy Jeppesen]

I don't accept your premise here. There clearly is a "we"

We don't live in a vacuum, many things I do on a day to day basis affect other people, and the things they do affect me. The interaction between individuals is where the "we" comes from.

Out it this way, if morality exists, in any way you want to define it, it is at the very least concerned with how actions may affect other people.

Morality quite obviously exists - whatever you want to define it as - because we have a word for it and I think most people understand and agree what the concept is, even if we don't accept where morals come from.

You don't appear to be arguing for where morals come from. You seem to be arguing that morals don't exist at all. And without wanting to straw man you, if that is your position then I think you are wrong, and quite clearly wrong.

Okay, meta-ethics, it is.
This can be answered using basic science.
Can it be observed that humans make choices based on values? Yes.
Can these values be observed to be independent of human cognition and feelings/emotions? No!

There are no objective moral values in the same sense as gravity is common to all humans.
You have 2 categories:
Takes place independent of human cognition and feelings/emotions; i.e. e.g. gravity.
Takes place dependent on human feelings/emotions and sometimes influenced by cognition; i.e. e.g. whether it is wrong to kill another human.

Now because we can share cognition and feelings/emotions, 2 or more humans can share the same moral values, but that doesn't make it independent of human cognition and feelings/emotions.

As to interaction, if someone helps someone else, that is a "we". If someone hurts someone else, that is a "we", right?!!
There is no "we" independent of shared values, trading, voluntary cooperation or forced cooperation.

Now morality and ethics are several categories:
The moral value assigned to a behavior.
The set of moral values a person holds.
The idea that we should include others in moral consideration.
The attempt with reason, logic, evidence and/or faith to make a system of how to arrive correct moral answers.

I need water, if I don't get that, I die, but you don't die, if I don't get water. There is no "we" in biology, evolution takes place at the level of the duplication/replication of genes. Some species form some form of cooperation, but that doesn't mean that there is an uniform species, which survives at the level of the species.
Humans are a social species; i.e. individuals, which rely on groups. But there is no overall group in the human species.

Now to arrive at a universal "we" requires, that you believe in that. That you hold a set of values, which include all humans. There are other sets of values out there. Just look at the world and you will see them.

So back to another post:
Lawrence Kohlberg:

Stage 6. Universal Principles. People at this stage have developed their own set of moral guidelines which may or may not fit the law. The principles apply to everyone.
E.g., human rights, justice, and equality. The person will be prepared to act to defend these principles even if it means going against the rest of society in the process and having to pay the consequences of disapproval and or imprisonment. Kohlberg doubted few people reached this stage.

https://www.simplypsychology.org/simplypsychology.org-Kohlberg.pdf

Morality as universal is not born into humans. It is learned and is connected to cognition as it requires the combination of reason, logic, evidence and feelings/emotions.
But it still doesn't make it universal/common as e.g. gravity. It just means that a given person holds a set of universal values. Note that it is practice properly not possible, but rather stage 6 is an ideal to shoot for.
Further for the 10 to 15% of humans, who can do this in principle, because of the required cognition, they don't share an exact set. The individual sets only overlap to a certain degree.

So here is an example of such a set of principles. Note they are not rules, they are guiding principles.
https://www.uua.org/beliefs/what-we-believe/principles
Notice in the link: What we believe!!!

Regards

 

[ynot]

it's possible to be an expert on a fictional character. I would consider some Christian Theologians to be experts on Jesus. I would say my brothers son is quite the expert on Spiderman.

If Hawking had an interest in and spent time reading and thinking about the concepts and beliefs relating to gods (as he may have done) then he would also be an expert on gods?

Are Christian Theologians that conclude Jesus actually was the son of a god any more of a "Jesus expert" than those that conclude he wasn't (even if he existed at all)?