“Does god have to be a deity? Every time I look up I see god and so does every member of humanity.”

Jus, although I believe God the and not ‘a” deity, your point is valid too. Even with the Hubble we aren’t able to see the other side or to the ends of the great Universe. Here we sit on the outer part of our galaxy with so many other star systems and yet to travel to the other side of our galaxy is inconceivable in our lifetimes. We have billions of these enormous galaxies in our universe. How could one not see God, history, marvels beyond imagination and inspiration by looking up?

Wonderful blog BA! And thanks for a splendid picture!

BTW… notice the hat…. do you work there?

There is the Pantheist notion, that takes the universe as a whole and applies religious terminology in a somewhat metaphoric sense in order to describe the sense of wonder and awe. I do take issue with this view, too, mostly because I don’t see the point.

“God” is a descriptive term for an anthropomorphized concept. While individual beliefs about this concept differ, that specific term in that form has taken on a somewhat specific connotation. That connotation is so culturally inundated that I find many people have difficulty identifying in conversations when the other party holds different beliefs from their own.

Just as an example I know someone who was a member in good standing of a Southern Baptist church, even a deacon. Most people would never know to talk to him, because he refrains from expressing his own opinions and beliefs on just about any topic, be it religion, politics, whatever. But once in a private conversation I gleaned enough material from his comments to determine he’s an agnostic Deist, though he wouldn’t describe himself in those terms. Unfortunately, I didn’t get out of him his beliefs on the nature of Jesus’s divinity. He doesn’t believe in miracles per se, and doesn’t agree with praying for little daily things or that God addresses unimportant trivialities such as which sports team will win the ballgame. But he describes himself as a Christian, even though his notion of Christianity is almost Jeffersonian.

Back on topic, I just don’t see the value is mystifying the universe, in wrapping it up in metaphoric God language. Why describe the universe as “God”? What point does it serve, other than to try to make people with traditional religious views more comfortable with you? To me, it seems to foster confusion rather than clarity. It misleads others into thinking you’re saying one thing (what the language means to them) rather than what you are really saying (what the language means to you). I think it is entirely possible to appreciate the sense of wonder at the grand scale of the universe, appreciate the beauty of the wilderness or a beach, without having to worship it. Of course, that requires us to define “worship”. It’s a neverending process to actually communicate, versus pretending we’re communicating but really just misleading each other.

>Look at the heavens though there’s so much more than we can ever hope to understand but there has to be a reason WHY WE CAN REASON.

Why must there be a reason? Why must there be “a meaning” to things? Why can’t they just exist, happen, be? The “reason” why we can reason is because our ancestors’ brains developed in an environment where the right combination of genetic developments and environmental pressures gave advantage to creative reasoning. It is entangled with our sense of self. We see events, we see connections and patterns, we learn there are causes, we learn that we are causes. We develop our sense of self as an active moral agent, able to make choices, take actions, and reap the benefits of the consequences (good or bad). We learn from our choices and the outcomes, and change behaviors based upon past experience. We are able to do this because it conveyed advantage to our ancestors who could over their relatives who couldn’t. It increased the survivability of the species as a whole through improved survival of individuals and groups.

This need for a “reason” in the sense of a meaning, a purpose, is a consequence of our psyche. We see ourselves as thoughtful agents, as acting upon motivations and needs. Thus we attribute that sense of motivations and needs to the events occurring around us, and try to determine what is the source of motivations and needs that drive the naturalistic processes of the world. But that sense is an illusion.

A tree is not a conscious entity, deciding it needs more light and growing toward the openings in the trees around it. That’s an unconscious growth process inherent in the tree’s nature. A rock doesn’t decide it needs to fall off a cliff face to smash into bits on the canyon floor below, it just steadily weakens under the constant pull of gravity and weathering until the dirt, soil, and rock is not strong enough to support its weight, at which point it separates from the cliff face and falls. A glacier doesn’t decide it would be nice to head south for the winter to a warmer climate, it just moves depending on the climatary forces affecting it. Purpose is an act of consciousness.

BA, I know you can comment on this much better than I can but what I find enlightening is that science is always revising itself with discovery and new theary, compared to rigid beliefs that are afraid to evolve….guess that whole idea of evolving works against ID….lol
clear skies

Link edited by The Bad Astronomer (it was causing a formatting error on this page).

Yes, perhaps, but a good deal of evidence suggests that the majority of the human race can’t, or chooses not to, reason.

Did you just describe the Bible as a “peer-reviewed journal”? What are you smoking?

Was CS Lewis an apologetic? I thought he was secure enough in his faith not to need proof.

Also, when you point out:
“Speaking in tongues is one example: I have heard country bumpkins with no foreign language experience or training suddenly begin praying in a particular dialect of German. That’s my observation, the only theory/hypothesis I’m aware of that supports these events is a supernatural one.”
I don’t think the available evidence is enough to rule out these two possibilities: (a) the dialetic or language may have been misidentified, or (b) the person did actually have knowledge of the language but chose to conceal it. If the occasion had been recorded (such as, for instance, with a video camera), the evidence could be examined in more detail. As it is, all we have are eyewitness accounts. If you read much of the psychology literature, you will know how unreliable eyewitness accounts are in terms of recalling / recording details correctly. This is why science does not generally acknowledge anecdotal evidence.

Please notice that I am not rejecting your explanation, I am pointing out that there are other possibilities.

Having said that, I disagree with you when you say:
“The scientific and religious communities have both dogmatically staked out paradigms which, if either of them is true, invalidate the worldview of the other”
Dogma is defined as belief from accepted authority (i.e. “Authority X says this, therefore it is true”), with a heavy connotation of a basis in a priori assumptions. This is the antithesis of science. There is no authority in science: a long-held scientific theory can be overturned by just a few well-performed experiments or observations (if that theory is shown by these experiments to have a fatal flaw). Science is always checking itself against the real world. This is far from dogmatic. Individual scientists may, from time to time, be dogmatic in certain situations, but that is not the same thing.

Also, there is no conflict between science and religion. Religion deals with aspects of the human condition that are beyond the realm of science to assess. Science deals with evidence and how the world works. There is no conflict, unless someone insists on interpreting a religious text literally. This is a matter of personal choice, and I have no problem with someone doing that, as long as they don’t try to then persuade everyone else that the literal interpretation is the only valid one.

Which brings me back to my earlier comment. BA, thanks for your well-stated reply. The point I was trying to make is that your charges that “religion tends to induce non-scientific conclusions” means as much to the religious as their charges that “science is anti-theistic” means to you. The scientific and religious communities have both dogmatically staked out paradigms which, if either of them is true, invalidate the worldview of the other. So it’s not really an argument about what’s right or accurate, it’s an argument over which group has to give up their comfort zone to settle the debate.

In my own experience, I have observed religious phenomena that as far as I know have never been explained by science. Speaking in tongues is one example: I have heard country bumpkins with no foreign language experience or training suddenly begin praying in a particular dialect of German. That’s my observation, the only theory/hypothesis I’m aware of that supports these events is a supernatural one. To someone without a background in and understanding of the 2nd Chapter of Acts, it sounds absurd. Is it repeatable? While not “on demand”, such occurences have been reported many times throughout the centuries, and in such peer-reviewed journals as, well, The Bible.

Similarly (as you stated), to someone without training in astronomy or astrophysics, your description of the stellar nursery would sound like just as much “wild speculation”.

Both sides of the argument are too quick to dismiss the perspective of the other side. An old maxim I picked up somewhere claims that until you can present a well-stated argument that supports a viewpoint you personally oppose, you really don’t understand the issue. I’d suggest some of us skeptics (and I do mean “us”) spend a little less time being dismissive and a little more time thinking the whole thing through a bit more.

/compliment

weee!!!!

as for the stars, excellent article. has anything more been heard about P1 and P2? i hear one of the proposed name-sets is “Screwtape” and “Wormwood” of C.S. Lewis fame, though I can’t find a link. i was wondering what you think of that?

When I look at an astronomical image, I am analyzing it scientifically, knowing that I can be fooled by the data. I also have a long history of experience in analyzing images, and I know what to look for, what to ignore, what to be not so sure about, and what to expect in certain types of objects.

That doesn’t mean I am always right. It just means that I could be considered an expert at this; meaning I have lots of experience in the field, including writing or participating in several scientific journal papers. I’m more likely to be closer to the mark when looking at this image than a random person plucked off the street.

I’ll note that I outlined several features in the image that also do support the idea we are seeing young stars, including the disks, the jets, and the copious IR emission. This also dovetails with many other stellar nurseries observed all over the sky at different wavelengths.

And this is different from people who are used to looking for an image of Jesus on their toast, just how exactly?

Arensb, I think the jets come out at the star’s poles, because the equator is surounded by an accretion disc of dust and gas (and planetesimals?). It is probably a similar mechanism to what occurs near black holes, but I’m very vague and hazy on the details.

Due to some pretty complex physics (that, to be honest, is not entirely worked out) the gas near the center can be blown out as twin beams, like a light house.

Do you mean along the axis of rotation, or in the plane of rotation? That is, do the beams come out of the star’s poles, or its equator?

I suspect the former, but it’s not entirely clear to me from the text. For that matter, it’s not at all clear to me how you could have jets coming out of the poles.