Thanks!

The reference I gave above at 20 was actually to do with afterlife investigations in general by Professor David Fontana. Him and his colleagues certainly were not “oddballs” but serious academics. I would advise you to read the book below and follow up the extensive references before making such comments. You will also find some interesting phenomena there, many multi-witnessed.

http://www.amazon.com/There-Afterlife-Comprehensive-Overview-Evidence/dp/1903816904

Regarding NDEs I think you should follow up the ref. I gave in 74 very closely and corresponding studies before this work. Also there is a very large study, the international AWARE study, which has collected data and soon will evaluate this.

The point in many previous studies is veridicality and there are many cases. How does an NDEer get precise information? You should look at these cases but combine this with studying Prof. Fontana’s book and others which investigate very different independent and multiply-witnessed physical phenomena. I also recommend the Cardiff case by Fontana.

Finally it is important to remember that experimental data (such as early measurements of magnetic fields) precede the theoretical model and certainly this kind of data above needs one.
I don’t know how information can be stored outside the brain, I think Stuart Hameroff in particular is working on this, but to reject good data just because you are not able to fit it in to the biochemical model of the brain is not scientific.

As I tried to explain in an earlier post, the concept of a necessary chain of causation originating with God or whatever may be fallacious. There is no need to have any point of origination just as there is no highest number.

#77 Rosemary

This is a rather tired old argument. Mind in the bigger sense of the word, not its localized manifestation in neurology, may exist outside the the body in a sort of participatory field that includes observer and observed. This isn’t the same as some individual personality fragment existing outside the body and surviving death but is a recognition that there is no point where an objective observer can exist – that observer and observed are like poles of a magnet (I mean this in a highly metaphoric sense) where each require the other. Whether we as individuals can tap into this greater field is an interesting question and not quite as closed.

Near death experiences have been thoroughly debunked. The oddballs who continue to believe in this kind of thing can only quote anecdotal evidence and studies done in the past that have failed to be repeated. I cannot think of any one of my licensed or academic colleagues who believes that such a phenomena is evidence for an”after-life”.

We commonly watch minds that die piecemeal as the brain cells die in clumps. Cases of cementia such as Alzheimers, Picks and Korsakov’s syndrome, kill off parts of the mind bit by bit: memory, language, thinking, moral activity and consciousness. There is no evidence that these progressively lost parts of the mind exist in a disembodied state apart from the deteriorating person or that they recombine at some point after the person’s brain ceases to function and the cortical cells begin to break down. There is no evidence that a decerebrate body that is kept alive by machines has deposited its previous mind in the ether somewhere.

Then there is the problem of how to account for the fact that disorders and surgeries that result in the separation of the right and left brains can be shown to have two separate personalities, one of which believes in the existence of a god and the other of which does not. {There are records of such cases.} Does this individual have two “souls”, one of which will be “saved” in an after life and one of which will not be? If so, would the resulting separated personalities be identical with the previous fully integrated mind of that person?

And again, Al-lah is unknown and unknowable.

It may be possible to trip up christians with science pretty easily because their concept of god is crude, mechanistic and primitive…unsophisticated. A god that mucks about with cell biology?
Please.

@Tyro

“Francis Galton analyzed the health of the British Royals since the nation prayed for their health and found no evidence of efficacy”

Yet there is an emergent body of scientific evidence seemingly showing that thought can affect matter in studies of meditation increasing the volumne of grey matter in the brain. Perhaps the efficacy of prayer only works when one prays for the in-house system.

Hey, if you’ve got an experiment or an observation which shows the non-existence of God, terrific! Put an end to a lot of speculation and strife. It would be great!

Surely this has been published in a peer reviewed article? Would you mind citing the reference?

Euthyphro’s dilemma is the obvious one which showed that the observations of suffering/evil are not consistent with the existence of a powerful, benevolent god (certainly not with an omnimax god). Christians today make this even worse by describing their god as “Love” which highlights the conflict between claims and observation even more.

Sean also commented on the Kolmogorov complexity of a god which was something Dawkins dealt with in TGD in more depth. You can see the responses on UD: simply reject the science and declare that God is described as simple and therefore is simple, QED.

And since you seem to be giddily anticipating some stats, Francis Galton analyzed the health of the British Royals since the nation prayed for their health and found no evidence of efficacy. There have been many subsequent studies, and still no demonstrable effect. Again this shows that, despite the claims and beliefs of many religion folk, God is not listening to prayers and responding to us as we’d expect (or rather, if God is, the effect is bounded and minimal). Again, the most common response has been to reject the evidence out of hand.

There are probably many more examples but I think the general thrust is clear – wherever God is said to interact with the world, we can study it scientifically. When we do, no effect is detected. This shows some conceptions of God do not exist. People can and do redefine their god so that it doesn’t interact with the world. Just because people will call physics “god”, it doesn’t mean it is and at some point the honest thing to do is to say that we have shown that gods (by any reasonable definition of the word) do not exist.

“I think there have been many observations which have already shown the non-existence of God.”

I think you may be wrong because there is evidence that perception occurs beyond the brain. Why could this lead to God? Well, how about saying that the universe is God-like, in that it “looks after you” at the end of life. The universe is structured this way.
One must seriously consider other ways of perception as a key tool for investigating this question of God, God-like etc. properties of the universe. See radiation oncologist Dr. Jeff. Long’s huge studies re this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mptGAc3XWPs

Another scientist Dr. Pim van Lommel talks about skeptics on this issue and the “acceptance by the medical community” – “The gap is not as big as you presume. It just looks that way because the skeptics are very active. The skeptics have their own truth and they don’t listen to somebody else who has a different opinion. So there’s a gap and there will always be a gap. There is no discussion possible with skeptics because they have the truth. But a lot of physicians are a little bit more open, but they won’t write articles. They won’t write or tell about it in public. I know some physicians who have had a near-death experience. They said to me and wrote to me that, what happened to me now I’ve always said this is impossible, and now it happened to me”.

I think these are fair comments but they do fascinate me because there seems to be a perception negating some of these findings among science in general. Yet this is crucial – medical personnel at the hard end of these observations see another interpretation.

Also the problem with these kinds of “observations” is that they are anecdotal but when they are also evidential you move beyond the anecdote. So valid data.

I also have no problem with the concept that living things were created by God. In fact in my example, something would have to be initially created to get evolution going. If the programmer programmed every possible mutation that evolution eventually catalogs as must have occurred could you not say that the resulting creature was created by the programmer (albeit indirectly) through creation of the code? Now the account of this happening is being explained to primitive lifeforms… do you explain the C++ programming language or do you simply tell them you made it all?

In your final thought you bring in the idea of religion, striking a difference in how science vs. religion attempt to answer our questions:
First let me say that I separate the idea of God and the idea of religion. I think that religion is not really concerned with explanations of the physical world as its purpose (as you implied by comparing it to science). I think religion is fully concerned with morality. And further I’d say that science is completely unconcerned with morality. In short they answer different sets of questions.

That begs the question: why then does the Bible cover creation at all?
It must. It must, because it is conveying a moral code. The only reason the Bible spends any time talking about creation is that it’s a beginning and the basis for where the authority for the morality the rest of the religion conveys originates. The entire rest of the Bible is chiefly concerned with morality for societies.
A code of morals must be rooted in some authority… otherwise there is no reason for any one person to agree with them and follow them. Religion does this by assuming that God created our existence. For the non-religious, those individuals make themselves the authority for their moral code or make the government the authority for their moral code.

You asked:
For the source of the Big Bang, anyone can say “God is my answer”, but how certain are you of that answer?
I am certain, but it really doesn’t matter whether I am certain. It seems a more plausible answer to me that our universe, which had a beginning, also had a creator who started this program.

How are you going to convince anyone else that that answer is correct?
I cannot. Since I live inside our universe I cannot prove the existence of anything outside it… your question is like asking a fish in a pond in Hawaii to prove the existence of Niagara Falls.

A case of “it feels right”:
It’s not a feeling, it’s that the moment science proved the universe had a beginning with the Big Bang, and is expanding, there had to be a creator somewhere to start it off.
The first explanation from Sean above is regarding Simplicity… citing “God + the natural world” is less simple than “the natural world.”… the problem with this is: of course it is… but this is like saying “Solar System + Earth” is less simple than “Earth”. One does not then proceed to conclude that the solar system does not exist.

As the universe expands, what is it sitting in which gets displaced by expanding universe?

We can only observe the inside of our universe… so why does science dismiss the concept of a creator which sits outside the universe… in that same space that gets displaced as the universe expands?

Just as “turtles all the way down” was an insufficient explanation for gravity, infinite bubble or infinite universe containers does not suffice; there must be an origin, there must be a creator for existence.

If all that a religion asserts is that God created the universe, then there indeed isn’t much of a conflict. However, I don’t know what, if anything, follows from this belief. In my view it doesn’t even solve the creation problem, since then you have to explain how God and his world is created. In the example you gave, the little guys in the computer program will, after believing that you created them, have to confront the problem of how your world is created. So believing that the universe is created by a sentient God only makes the creation problem much bigger. (and if you assert that God can exist a priori, then why can’t I assert that the universe can exist a priori?)

A bigger problem is that most religions today assert much more than that. Most Christians believe that living things are specifically created by God, instead of emerging through evolution as a result of the environment on Earth (which is, by the way, the crowd Sean wrote the article to). Most believe that the human mind works in mysterious ways outside science, instead of by the interactions among molecules in the brain. Many still believe that the Earth is 6000 years old, and that God is still affecting today’s world through miracles. If you read through the above again, you’ll see that all issues raised there are directly within the purview of the natural sciences, and that science gives quite different answers to these questions.

In my view, the main difference between science and religion is not even on those issues. The main difference is the attitude toward how to answer the questions we have. Science purposes that we try to answer them using empirical data and logical deduction. Religion purposes that we answer them by directly claiming certain things to be true, perhaps those supported by intuition. Sure, that will answer more questions than science will, but how certain are you in those answers? For the source of the Big Bang, anyone can say “God is my answer”, but how certain are you of that answer? How are you going to convince anyone else that that answer is correct? If you are certain of that answer because it “feels right”, be aware that at one time it “feels right” that time is absolute, and that particles always have a well defined location and momentum. Those are two big ones. I don’t think it is necessary to list the many other ways “feelings” have already led us astray. (This is not to say we never use intuition in science. As Sean probably has already said, we use them to formulate hypotheses, not to reach conclusions).

I certainly agree that people should reach their own conclusions, especially considering that I believe there is no God to punish you for reaching the wrong ones. Looking at the current political climate in the US, I can just hope that the Christians can do more of this in return.

“@David Derbes

There is no experiment yet devised (or in my opinion, capable of being devised) that could prove the non-existence of God. Maybe God exists, but that’s outside of science, period.

Why do you say that?

I think there have been many observations which have already shown the non-existence of God.”

Hey, if you’ve got an experiment or an observation which shows the non-existence of God, terrific! Put an end to a lot of speculation and strife. It would be great!

Surely this has been published in a peer reviewed article? Would you mind citing the reference?

Science in this system would be concerned with explaining why the processor of the machine that all “life” lives in only processed 4 lives at a time (or however many cores the processor of that machine has) in slices and also science would be concerned with the dynamics of why the Operating System runs the way it does and also trying to understand and predict the results of “actions” in the system.

Meanwhile I am watching my program run, entertained by the “life” on my screen.

Now take it to a mind blowing new level of complexity where the life is 3D; the creator of the program lives in extra-dimensions (just as I lived in a dimension outside the computer) and the creator interacts at rare times to encourage the frequency at which certain actions are chosen by the decision algorithm.

That’s an illustration of how I see this divide… there’s no conflict because God is outside the system that science is concerned with. Essentially God created science; Science can derive explanations for everything within the system because it IS the system… but nothing outside the system. Science itself suggests a beginning to the universe, but it really cannot suggest where the singularity of the Big Bang came from. God is my answer.

Where’s the conflict?

The individual often doesn’t have personal knowledge of either the miracles and wonders that support god belief or the scientific experiments that support a scientific worldview. Accounts of both, indeed, are sometimes falsified. We live in a world where some individuals in every endeavor are liars, or pass on lies that they believe to be true uncritically from someone who did lie.

For the individual, who may have no special form of expertise of any kind, the question often presents itself as “do I trust one group of highly professionally educated people who say that they are experts or another group of highly professionally educated people who say that they are experts?” Do I believe mom, dad and my pastor, or some people I see on TV who say that they are scientists. Generally, it is beyond the reasonably available resources of the individual to even confirm that people really have the expertise and credentials that they say that they do.

When the issue comes down to who to trust as the popularizer of discoveries and conclusions admittedly made by others, the resolution of that issue for the individual trying to figure out what to believe is much less obvious than it is if one simple accepts mainstream science or mainstream theology as logical and rational.

Sean addresses this point in his essay.

States of affairs only require an explanation if we have some contrary expectation, some reason to be surprised that they hold. Is there any reason to be surprised that the universe exists, continues to exist, or exhibits regularities? When it comes to the universe, we don’t have any broader context in which to develop expectations.
…
There is no reason, within anything we currently understand about the ultimate structure of reality, to think of the existence and persistence and regularity of the universe as things that require external explanation.

The question you’re asking is really something like “Why does existence exist?” and that simply doesn’t make sense, despite our ability to phrase it in language. Existence is the context in which everything exists; it’s not just another thing.

Humbly submitted to you by Michael York
“If a butterfly flaps its wings?”