I recall a list of some criteria of science, maybe not the best list, but at least as a point of reference that there exists such a list, whatever the actual list be as may be agreed or as have been agreed by the science community.

“ The following 32 concepts include SOME of the key ideas used in the ENSI/SENSI program.
1. Science deals only with natural patterns and mechanisms.
2. Understanding science enables one to differentiate it from pseudoscience and non- science.
3. Scientific knowledge is uncertain, tentative and subject to revision.
4. Scientific explanations and interpretations can neither be proven nor disproven with certainty.
5. Scientists use a variety of criteria to compare explanations and select the better ones.
6. Human values deeply influence science (its terminology, the questions asked, and the criteria used for choosing among theories).”

I took 1-6 from http://www.indiana.edu/~ensiweb/info.fs.html where the 32 are located. I reproduce 6 as they are sufficient to outline the scientific method to determine when it is applied to other fields.
If we cursorily glance at Christian Science, do Christian Scientists apply the scientific method? Do their method hold up to the list (whatever agreed list) of science methodology? Does Mary Baker Eddy’s claim that it is Christian Science and their Christian Monitor paper and their Christian Science Reading Room, make Mary Baker Eddy’s method a scientific method?
Any field or fields that claims to follow the scientific methodology should be able to back up their claim and assessment by impartial philosophers of science.

What is philosophy?

“1. Love and pursuit of wisdom by intellectual means and moral self-discipline.
2. Investigation of the nature, causes, or principles of reality, knowledge, or values, based on logical reasoning rather than empirical methods.
3. A system of thought based on or involving such inquiry: the philosophy of Hume.
4. The critical analysis of fundamental assumptions or beliefs.
5. The disciplines presented in university curriculums of science and the liberal arts, except medicine, law, and theology.
6. The discipline comprising logic, ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and epistemology.
7. A set of ideas or beliefs relating to a particular field or activity; an underlying theory: an original philosophy of advertising.
8. A system of values by which one lives: has an unusual philosophy of life.
[Middle English philosophie, from Old French, from Latin philosophia, from Greek philosophiā, from philosophos, lover of wisdom, philosopher. See philosopher.]” http://www.answers.com/topic/philosophy

Taking the cue from ‘wisdom’ what then is wisdom?

“Wisdom (Wis”dom) (-ducr/m), n.
[AS. wi¯sdo¯m. See Wise, a., and -dom.]

1. The quality of being wise; knowledge, and the capacity to make due use of it; knowledge of the best ends and the best means; discernment and judgment; discretion; sagacity; skill; dexterity. “We speak also not in wise words of man’s wisdom, but in the doctrine of the spirit.” Wyclif (1 Cor. ii. 13). ” Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.” Job xxviii. 28. “It is hoped that our rulers will act with dignity and wisdom that they will yield everything to reason, and refuse everything to force.” Ames. “Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.” Coleridge.
2. The results of wise judgments; scientific or practical truth; acquired knowledge; erudition. “Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and in deeds.” Acts vii. 22.

Synonyms — Prudence; knowledge. Wisdom, Prudence, Knowledge. Wisdom has been defined to be “the use of the best means for attaining the best ends.” “We conceive,” says Whewell, ” prudence as the virtue by which we select right means for given ends, while wisdom implies the selection of right ends as well as of right means.” Hence, wisdom implies the union of high mental and moral excellence. Prudence (that is, providence, or forecast) is of a more negative character; it rather consists in avoiding danger than in taking decisive measures for the accomplishment of an object. Sir Robert Walpole was in many respects a prudent statesman, but he was far from being a wise one. Burke has said that prudence, when carried too far, degenerates into a “reptile virtue,” which is the more dangerous for its plausible appearance. Knowledge, a more comprehensive term, signifies the simple apprehension of facts or relations. “In strictness of language,” says Paley, ” there is a difference between knowledge and wisdom; wisdom always supposing action, and action directed by it.” “Knowledge and wisdom, far from being one, Have ofttimes no connection. Knowledge dwells In heads replete with thoughts of other men; Wisdom, in minds attentive to their own. Knowledge, a rude, unprofitable mass, The mere materials with which wisdom builds, Till smoothed, and squared, and fitted to its place, Does but encumber whom it seems to enrich. Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much; Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.” Cowper.”

http://www.selfknowledge.com/108259.htm

Does it then suggest that knowledge is not equivalent to wisdom? Or at least to Cowper above.

What is understanding?

Is it closer to knowledge or wisdom? If used in context of closer to knowledge, then it is not necessarily closer to wisdom. If by greater understanding be greater knowledge, then, we have faster computers every year the world wide web where we did not before, because knowledge has become greater, our understanding of such technology has increased. While there maybe overlap between knowledge and wisdom, they are not mirror image of the other.

We make assumptions to live. We assume we do not exist before we were born and we cease to exist when we die. Our language and concepts embrace such a clear division, and we allocate some space to ideas of rebirth or reincarnation and eternal life in heaven, to areas we call religion. We make such assumptions about commencement and end of life, human life, to define infanticide and homicide, and thus there are no contradictions or un-necessary need of reflection or contemplation.

What answers do we look for? Answers that help us to

(a) Survive and thrive
(b) Grow and develop where we are with other humans , other sentient life and nature
(c) Make sense of our life, human life, other sentient life , nature, earth, solar system and universe, and our place in it, and our life span whenever it may end (of that we are unable to tell)
What assumptions do we make when we seek those answers –
(a) We assume the world is material
(b) We assume the world has no inherent existence
(c) ….
(d) ….
(e) ….
(f) ….
(g) ….
(h) ….
(i) ….

For (a), science and its criteria of “1. Science deals only with natural patterns and mechanisms.” tends to lend credence that world is material or matter. (fine distinction of energy, wave aside)

For (b) the assumption can be derived in either of or both ways
(i) Analytical reasoning
(ii) Quieting the analytical mind and allowing the intuitive mind to surface and operate and comprehend the world or reality

It seems Dalai Lama uses (b) (i) and (b) (ii)
Are we ever devoid of assumptions? Can we ever be? Is it a human trait to exist with assumptions and an uncommon human trait to be without assumptions?

However, these tools must exist, because otherwise how would eddie justify the claim that reliable ways of finding answers are important for a knowledge-generating enterprise?

The scientific method can be applied in a lot of fields. Whatever your method of finding an answer in Philosophy, it’s always accompanied by a comparison to the world outside your head. If your method is useful in leading to greater understanding, that may be used as evidence of the method’s correctness.

Some I think see it the other way, in which “…reliable ways of finding answers are important…” is an a priori assumption. but this has only developed in response to it’s being a useful assumption and one that doesn’t lead to contradictions further down the line. If it wasn’t so, it’d have been discarded.

It’s when you don’t do this that religion sets in.

Recently I find that some of Dalai Lama’s explanation, helped fill some gap in my understanding of my life, and of life, even as I think atheists should be atheists, and agnostics should be agnostics and Christians be Christians.

On the one hand, if memory does not fail me, there are projections ( whether scientific or not) that

#(a) the universe will one day come to an end

#(b) our species will one day be extinct or die out.

I cannot vouch for these, except that ( if memory does not fail me) I think I read them in an article or two, and have tugged these articles in a kitchen drawer for future re-reading or reference. Incidentally, if one is not concerned about personal mortality, and whither after, would one ponder over the mortality of (a) and of (b) ( assuming of ‘mortality’ can borrowed and used in these other context, and if not, then at least for this isolated occasion).

On the other hand, my Catholic cousin, forwarded me one of those types of emails that circulates from friends to friends, and some even travel quite far. It was a made up story of a man in long black gown who entered a Church one day and told everyone, he was going to take them down, if anyone of them was willing to stay and take a bullet for Jesus Christ. He elaborated that those who would not take a bullet for Christ could leave unharmed. So 2000 people left, leaving 20 standing in Church. He then told the pastor, he could begin the service now for the real believers. I did not have to ask my cousin, but I knew she and her husband, would have been among the 20. I also thought I would have done the same for Buddhism. Later I thought, only if I knew it was more probable than not, that such act would have more probable than not helped in some way to preserve Buddhism for others ( not specifically but subsumed in the latter mentioned after this as a mode I happen to know) and more probable than not in some way helped the evolutionary progress of our species.

Though I have not read Hegel, the skimpy third or fifth or hundred account of some of his ideas interpreted by others ( unless cross checked in many ways, an interpretation is but an interpretation and limited to the understanding of the interpreter, seems to suggest to me, that there are striking points of convergence between Hegel’s analysis of perception of reality and of reality, and buddhism’s and Dalai Lama’s perception of reality and of reality. Constraints prevent an attempt to match the two different analysis to see how and where they converge and why they converge. But my inclination is that such comparative work could or would be done or undertaken one day in the far future, as one part of our species evolutionary progress for our evolutionary progress, before we become extinct in (b).

Selenadreamy@aol.com

Speaking only for myself, these are my favorite sort of posts, because I understand them better than I do QM or General Relativity, agree with them thoroughly, and feel that they are a necessary and useful counterpart to all the contrary opinions I am surrounded with (such as three full-time religion channels in my “basic cable” package).

However, his need to find “meaning” in why we are we, in particular, this infamous contingency, confuses me to no end. It’s just spontaneous symmetry breaking. Evolution could have gone this way or that. It went this way, and that’s all there is to it. The notion that it’s “unlikely” is simply silly. Any single given outcome is unlikely. It’s just another ludicrous restatement of the anthropic fallacy.

However, the hillbilly senator with his corny superstition is just another straw man. Of course we should be concerned about fools like him in power, and we are. Very nice, we are all on the same page there.

Before I address spirituality itself, another word about emergence. There is a lot of debate about whether new scientific principles emerge, ones that override the more fundamental levels, or whether the emergent principles are just complex statistical behaviors that could *in principle* be reduced to physics. Certainly there is no proof of the former, but for the line of reasoning I am about to follow, the latter will do just as well.

If physics in the aggregate leads to chemistry,
and chemistry in the aggregate leads to biology,
and biology in the aggregate leads to evolution,
and evolution has led us to a global human society,
then what does that global human society lead to?

Well, not necessarily anything. It could just lead to global environmental collapse. But I postulate, for my own understanding, that there are emergent mass psychological effects within the human species. Human mass psychology is a funny thing and poorly understood, even in statistical models. But I think over human history, something has emerged from humanity, that is real, but is not simply reduceable to any single person; and that people who experience it directly tend to label it Spirit because they don’t know what to call it. What exactly it is I have no more idea than anyone else.

So that, for me, is how I reconcile a scientific worldview with the various spiritual experiences I have had. I think they’re real, and have meaning, but that both the reality and the meaning are created by us.

Obviously this is not itself a scientific idea, as it makes no predictions and can’t be falsified. It’s a conjecture based on a desire to reconcile personal experience with rational thought. It’s the only idea I have yet found that can encompass both.

F. J. Tipler, “The structure of the world from pure numbers,” Reports on Progress in Physics, Vol. 68, No. 4 (April 2005), pp. 897-964; available on Prof. Tipler’s website. Also released as “Feynman-Weinberg Quantum Gravity and the Extended Standard Model as a Theory of Everything,” arXiv:0704.3276, April 24, 2007.

Out of 50 articles, Prof. Tipler’s above paper was selected as one of 12 for the “Highlights of 2005″ accolade as “the very best articles published in Reports on Progress in Physics in 2005 [Vol. 68]. Articles were selected by the Editorial Board for their outstanding reviews of the field. They all received the highest praise from our international referees and a high number of downloads from the journal Website.” (See Richard Palmer, Publisher, “Highlights of 2005,” Reports on Progress in Physics website.)

Reports on Progress in Physics is the leading journal of the Institute of Physics, Britain’s main professional body for physicists. Further, Reports on Progress in Physics has a higher impact factor (according to Journal Citation Reports) than Physical Review Letters, which is the most prestigious American physics journal (one, incidently, which Prof. Tipler has been published in more than once). A journal’s impact factor reflects the importance the science community places in that journal in the sense of actually citing its papers in their own papers. (And just to point out, Tipler’s 2005 Reports on Progress in Physics paper could not have been published in Physical Review Letters since said paper is nearly book-length, and hence not a “letter” as defined by the latter journal.)

See also the below resource for further information on the Omega Point Theory:

Theophysics: God is the Ultimate Physicist (a website on GeoCities).

Tipler is Professor of Mathematics and Physics (joint appointment) at Tulane University. His Ph.D. is in the field of global general relativity (the same rarefied field that Profs. Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking developed), and he is also an expert in particle physics and computer science. His Omega Point Theory has been published in a number of prestigious peer-reviewed physics and science journals in addition to Reports on Progress in Physics, such as Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (one of the world’s leading astrophysics journals), Physics Letters B, the International Journal of Theoretical Physics, etc.

Prof. John A. Wheeler (the father of most relativity research in the U.S.) wrote that “Frank Tipler is widely known for important concepts and theorems in general relativity and gravitation physics” on pg. viii in the “Foreword” to The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986) by cosmologist Prof. John D. Barrow and Tipler, which was the first book wherein Tipler’s Omega Point Theory was described. On pg. ix of said book, Prof. Wheeler wrote that Chapter 10 of the book, which concerns the Omega Point Theory, “rivals in thought-provoking power any of the [other chapters].”

The leading quantum physicist in the world, Prof. David Deutsch (inventor of the quantum computer, being the first person to mathematically describe the workings of such a device, and winner of the Institute of Physics’ 1998 Paul Dirac Medal and Prize for his work), endorses the physics of the Omega Point Theory in his book The Fabric of Reality (1997). For that, see:

David Deutsch, extracts from Chapter 14: “The Ends of the Universe” of The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes–and Its Implications (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1997), ISBN: 0713990619; with additional comments by Frank J. Tipler. Available on the Theophysics website.

The only way to avoid the Omega Point cosmology is to resort to physical theories which have no experimental support and which violate the known laws of physics, such as with Prof. Stephen Hawking’s paper on the black hole information issue which is dependent on the conjectured string theory-based anti-de Sitter space/conformal field theory correspondence (AdS/CFT correspondence). See S. W. Hawking, “Information loss in black holes,” Physical Review D, Vol. 72, No. 8, 084013 (October 2005); also at arXiv:hep-th/0507171, July 18, 2005.

That is, Prof. Hawking’s paper is based upon empirically unconfirmed physics which violate the known laws of physics. It’s an impressive testament to the Omega Point Theory’s correctness, as Hawking implicitly confirms that the known laws of physics require the universe to collapse in finite time. Hawking realizes that the black hole information issue must be resolved without violating unitarity, yet he’s forced to abandon the known laws of physics in order to avoid unitarity violation without the universe collapsing.

Some have suggested that the universe’s current acceleration of its expansion obviates the universe collapsing (and therefore obviates the Omega Point). But as Profs. Lawrence M. Krauss and Michael S. Turner point out in “Geometry and Destiny” (General Relativity and Gravitation, Vol. 31, No. 10 [October 1999], pp. 1453-1459; also at arXiv:astro-ph/9904020, April 1, 1999), there is no set of cosmological observations which can tell us whether the universe will expand forever or eventually collapse.

There’s a very good reason for that, because that is dependant on the actions of intelligent life. The known laws of physics provide the mechanism for the universe’s collapse. As required by the Standard Model, the net baryon number was created in the early universe by baryogenesis via electroweak quantum tunneling. This necessarily forces the Higgs field to be in a vacuum state that is not its absolute vacuum, which is the cause of the positive cosmological constant. But if the baryons in the universe were to be annihilated by the inverse of baryogenesis, again via electroweak quantum tunneling (which is allowed in the Standard Model, as B – L is conserved), then this would force the Higgs field toward its absolute vacuum, cancelling the positive cosmological constant and thereby forcing the universe to collapse. Moreover, this process would provide the ideal form of energy resource and rocket propulsion during the colonization phase of the universe.

Prof. Tipler’s above 2005 Reports on Progress in Physics paper also demonstrates that the correct quantum gravity theory has existed since 1962, first discovered by Richard Feynman in that year, and independently discovered by Steven Weinberg and Bryce DeWitt, among others. But because these physicists were looking for equations with a finite number of terms (i.e., derivatives no higher than second order), they abandoned this qualitatively unique quantum gravity theory since in order for it to be consistent it requires an arbitrarily higher number of terms. Further, they didn’t realize that this proper theory of quantum gravity is consistent only with a certain set of boundary conditions imposed (which includes the initial Big Bang, and the final Omega Point, cosmological singularities). The equations for this theory of quantum gravity are term-by-term finite, but the same mechanism that forces each term in the series to be finite also forces the entire series to be infinite (i.e., infinities that would otherwise occur in spacetime, consequently destabilizing it, are transferred to the cosmological singularities, thereby preventing the universe from immediately collapsing into nonexistence). As Tipler notes in his 2007 book The Physics of Christianity (pp. 49 and 279), “It is a fundamental mathematical fact that this [infinite series] is the best that we can do. … This is somewhat analogous to Liouville’s theorem in complex analysis, which says that all analytic functions other than constants have singularities either a finite distance from the origin of coordinates or at infinity.”

When combined with the Standard Model, the result is the Theory of Everything (TOE) correctly describing and unifying all the forces in physics.

Agreed. The Center for Naturalism spends a good deal of time on exactly this. See for instance http://www.naturalism.org/applied.htm .

“…if you really want to rehabilitate those words in the eyes of a cheerful naturalist such as myself, your task is clear: give very specific examples and contexts in which we gain some sort of understanding by using that vocabulary that we would not gain by sticking to words without those unfortunate connotations.”

Only the vocabulary of spirituality and religion, not “literature, anthropology, psychology the arts,” captures the range and depth of existential concerns that naturalists have, along with everyone else. So it’s well worth naturalizing this vocabulary (naturalistic spirituality, religious naturalism) which is easily done, see http://www.naturalism.org/spiritua.htm . Nothing about spirituality or religion necessarily involves theism or dualism, as certain variants of Buddhism show. Modern day naturalists can and should lay claim to religion and spirituality divorced from the supernatural. If you doubt this, please please read The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality by Andre Comte-Sponville, The Sacred Depths of Nature by Ursula Goodenough, and Skeptics and True Believers by Chet Raymo. Thanks!

Tom Clark
Center for Naturalism
http://www.naturalism.org

And it should go without saying that religious faith is NOT an essential part of being human. The mere presence of many non-religious people and whole countries that are virtually free of religion illustrates that beyond any doubt.

Cosmically, I seem to be of two minds. The power of materialist science to explain everything — from the behavior of the galaxies to that of molecules, atoms and their sub-microscopic components — seems to be inarguable and the principal glory of the modern mind. On the other hand, the reality of subjective sensations, desires and — may we even say — illusions, composes the basic substance of our existence, and religion alone, in its many forms, attempts to address, organize and placate these. I believe, then, that religious faith will continue to be an essential part of being human, as it has been for me.
—— John Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009)

And it would indeed be nice if atheist/materialist thinkers spent more time putting forward a positive agenda of living human life…

Hmmm. I view the casting off of outdated and harmful dogma as positive.