Aquagem

Science, as a living evolutionary process, does not change overnight. The Copernican worldview became accepted over a century or so as more and more good testing showed it to be literally true. In the meantime, those who stuck with Ptolemy (including Tycho's hybrid view) sought to disprove it, failed, and finally gave up (probably died, actually). If we were to accept a new theory immediately, especially about things as unsubstantiated as the outer reaches of cosmology, we would be making "leaps of faith", not incremental advances, in our knowledge. If a scientific principle becomes dogma, true dogma - promulgated by and enforced by a priesthood of believers who have lost all contact with the truth of the principle - then it might be considered a religious decision. But hanging onto Newtonian mechanics, say, is not such a dogma -- it works, and it's far too valuable to dump it in favor of relativistic mechanics, which would be like cutting butter with a chainsaw at earthly dimensions. The old guys have their arguments in favor of old ideas. They (the ideas) have to be displaced one by one through better observation and better support for an alternate theory. Religion allows no such peaceful change -- blood flows, pillories are lit -- and no progress is made.

As I've written before, ID and evolutionary science would be perfectly appropriate to be taught in a class on comparative mythology, where we could profitably study their differences. ID satisfies a deep emotional craving to have a special place in the universe, and science satisfies a deep emotional craving to understand the truth of the universe in which we live. By understanding the fundamental differences at their root, we can better recognize where each might be appropriately applied. And in that light, ID has NO PLACE in SCIENTIFIC EDUCATION, except as a cautionary tale about where we've been and why our understanding of nature has been so late coming in our own evolution.

Bucky Fuller was more like Archimedes than Plato -- more interested in seeing things work in the real world than philosophizing about the underlying conceptualizations. Carbon nanotubes and Buckyballs trace directly to the lens he provided us with to see something new, which is one of the two or three most important things about scientific theory. The laser was predicted for several years (about ten?) before somebody was able to make one -- in that case, theory preceded implementation. A lot of Fuller's stuff is like that -- ahead of its time. But in the end, if he can change some of our overall world view, I'd say we have a better, though still slim, chance to survive into the next century.

Speciation is widely misunderstood, a fact that allows room for creationists to claim that there are no evidences of its occurrence. The problem is that speciation is not a single event. No matter how much you know about the world system (which is never much, in comparison to everything that's going on), you could not, for example, look at a litter of puppies, coyotes, say, and be able to point to one and say, "Here's our new species!" Instead, if you could follow all members of a single litter through all their many generations for thousands of years, or thousands of generations, you might finally be able say, based on genetic and behavioral evidence, that a new species, worthy of the name, had arrived. Let's say one of the pups had a mutation, one that, like many, go unnoticed because they don't show up in any obvious way (i.e., genetic "drift"). Genes like these may disappear by chance or competition in later generations, or just lurk around in the genome with nothing to do and with no outward expression that would cause them to be selected out. Much later, something changes. Maybe a volcano chokes the atmosphere with dust and the temperature drops; maybe rainfall patterns shift; or UV radiation increases because another species is so shortsighted and so deep in denial that it won't believe good evidence when it's available to help them guide their behavior... As this change manifests, the rules are modified for the coyotes in this corner of the world, e.g., food sources diminish. Starvation encroaches, and social groups of these predators have to change their habits to survive. This stressor may decimate the population as a whole, but under these conditions, the mutation that came about a hundred generations back may prove to be advantageous in subtle, indirect, and unexpected ways. Maybe the animals with this gene pattern need a bit more sleep and save a tiny increment of energy by not wasting on fruitless hunts (now that prey are less common). Maybe they are less susceptible to a disease and manage therefore to propagate more reliably (the sickle-cell example, which brings about earlier death, but increased reproduction). It's not that an animal is necessarily better adapted at the time a mutation occurs, and it's a known fact that we carry huge amounts of seemingly redundant information in our DNA. Typical of our immature view, we call it "junk DNA". But if there's one thing we can say about evolution, it is that it is productive of diversity, and by time something new hits the fan, there's a pretty good chance that there will be pre-adaptations galore in the genome to foster survival for at least some of the members of a species. (In this, I'm thinking about less drastic events than a major comet collision, which I call a "lawnmower" event, effective, but not particularly selective.) Preadapted genes would, and probably do, speed the process up by orders of magnitude over sitting around waiting for cosmic rays to do the work. The accumulation of diversity may be the most vital aspect of evolution, paired with the blade-edge of selection. This picture of speciation, which has risen out of our new understanding of the complex interaction of genetics and environment, replaces the narrow and simplified picture of a new species popping fully formed from the head of Zeus. Now, in answer to the question, "Where are all the intermediate species?" you can say, "They're all around us; the world teems with them. You may be one of them!" And, to your question about how fast speciation can occur, I don't think anyone has offered a simple, or even a complicated, answer. Too many variables; not enough solid genetic evidence quite yet. A massively disruptive event like the comet that deposited iridium around the globe about 65 million years ago might hasten speciation for some and destroy it completely for others. Animals and plants have very different habits and habitats, and based on the stressor, might drive many to extinction and offer up new opportunities to survivors that will change their reproductive success (Darwin's finches; isolated populations; epidemic diseases, and on and on). I'd expect the time span to be at least thousands of years, but I know of one ancestral fish species that was blocked into a limited area no more than four thousand years ago and has blossomed into many new, very different species (cichlids, as I remember). So, this is a long post with an easy summary: :( :(

I can't resist this one. Religion is masterful and unparalleled in its ability to make us feel good about ourselves because there's somebody upstairs who just thinks we're ducky, no matter how badly we screw things up. Science, with its devotion to facing the truth, shrieks, "You're blowing it! You're melting the polar ice cap! You're driving life to extinction! You're overpopulating the planet!" Not at all good for soothing those uncomfortable thoughts that you really should be doing something about these problems. But religion -- religion is just MADE for that kind of thing.

Good catch! I almost mentioned the butterfly effect, but hadn't thought about the basic principle being the instability itself. Hmmm... but we see the BE everywhere -- so it seems to be stable... :)

An unstable equilibrium is a situation in which all forces on an object resolve to zero, but if any one of the forces is changed slightly, the object will fall over, dash off in some direction, etc., and come to rest in a different place. A "pure" example from my physics book is shows a hollow hemishpherical bowl and a marble. In one configuration, the bowl is placed with its open side upward (like a U) and the marble is inside the bowl at rest at the geometric center of the bottom. Any force displacing the marble from center, then released, will result in the marble returning to the center. That's a stable equlibrium. Turn the bowl over and balance the marble on the very top, and you have an unstable equilibrium, in which the slightest displacement from center results in a catastrophic disequlibrium and marble lost in your shag carpet (where it's stable again). Using the bowl explanation as a metaphor, you can see that a playground swing at rest is a stable equlibrium situation. Unstable equilibriums, in the pure sense, would not last long enough, generally, to be detected in the chaotic Earth environment. A wind, earthquake, temperature change, snow accumulation, etc., would produce an acceleration in some direction and upset the delicate balance. Many natural phenomena approach a position of unstable equilibrium for a while. Big boulders balanced precariously atop slender columns of eroding sandstone in the ancient seabed areas of the American West come to mind; trees (high center of gravity, small cross-section, limited root systems; skyscrapers (same logic); towering thunderstorms (really brief lifetime); etc. But there's a hybrid situation of stable/unstable equilibriums that is to me the most interesting. Picture the bowl again, placed with rounded side up, and a small indentation in the very top. Now the marble sits in the indent with good stability, and will stay there until a perturbing force exceeds the restorative force of the marbles mass and gravitational field holding it in place. At that point, the system goes unstable, just like before. Nature if full of examples of this kind of conditionally unstable systems, in which a relatively gentle, or small, sharp input of energy kicks off an avalanche-like reaction. Moving a pebble can send a boulder down an incline; hot air convecting upward off a runway can touch off a thunderstorm; a single match lights a forest fire. Two more examples: chlorophyll stores sunlight in glucose, a conditionally unstable molecule, which can be cracked to release the energy again by catalyzed reactions in a cell, or in a forest fire, or a termites gut. And explosives, which store huge amounts of energy, including the oxygen necessary to combine with other chemicals to burn even underwater. The first (glucose) is an unstable equilibrium that powers all of life. Explosives are a human value-added product, putting a very powerful genie in a bottle for later use and abuse. Is this what you wanted to know?

As an easily-entertained eye-crosser in my younger years, I have a hint about the independent eye cross trick. Start out by stretching your arm out in front of you with a plain background, like a bare wall. Hold your index finger straight up (or the finger of your choice...) and focus on it. Start crossing your eyes, but just a tiny bit. I you do that right, you'll see the image of your finger split and become two. Stop right there, with both images in sight. Holding your eyes just a bit crossed, move your gaze to one or the other of the images of your finger. Don't uncross - you'll probably have to fight the reflex that automatically accommodates (focuses) and converges your eyes on an object. You'll still be able to see both images of your finger, but now one of your eyes will be focused one of the images, and your other eye will be off in space and you can ignore it. Now continue to cross your eyes slowly, but keep your attention on the one finger. It's easy to do that because the finger is an easily discernible contrasting image against the plain background. As your eyes continue to cross, if you keep the finger in the center of view of one eye, it means that one of your eyes isn't moving, i.e., it's still looking straight ahead, while your eye muscles pull the other eye to your nose. When you get that to work, try it the other way, i.e., start by looking at the other image of your finger. With a little practice, it becomes automatic to do this. After you're accomplished at that, you can do the same thing to a person you are looking at several feet away. Start crossing, switch your concentration to one image of their face, and the rest is just the same. It's guaranteed to get comments like, "Ew, gross!" as you do repeated one-eye push-ups to the left, right, left, right.

First, I'm wondering if the bolded passages above were aimed at me. If so, maybe I wasn't clear enough. Whether life means something to US is beyond question -- we prove it in our every move. The question, as it's often phrased, is whether there is a cosmic consciousness to whom our lives have meaning, or whether said cosmic consciousness invested our lives with special meaning by special creation. In neither case is "the phrasing of this question beneath me". If you didn't direct that to me, it's still an interesting take, although I didn't get this sense from reading what others have written here. I agree that science won't answer what is ultimately an unanswerable question (says this agnostic = "we probably don't have the capacity to grasp the answer if it bit us on the leg"). That's why it's so much fun to try to prove that last statement wrong. :) But we have learned huge new lessons about how we think, how we know things about the world, how the world works, as machine, as organism, as island of life in the vastness of spacetime -- and these fundamentally new sets of knowledge should cause us to question EVERYTHING we've always thought was true, including our devotion to the supernatural, ideas like a 6,000-year-old Earth, and the absolute set of behaviors dictated to us by a man in a pulpit who has voluntarily blinded himself to all that new knowledge. Science has a LOT to say about these questions. It isn't going to give you a yes/no answer to the existence of God, but it can throw a bright light on your further searches in this long night of our very young evolution. And, concerning your comment about philosophy -- a new term I've encountered and really like is "empirically responsible philosphy" (Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, (2002)). In brief, it says, "If you're pushing your religion based on the assertion that the world is flat, you're fooling yourself and others". And I have to ask, "At what point does remaining ignorant by choice become bearing false witness?"

Sure -- I agree that all of those glowing adjectives I mentioned are available to non-religious people (also, morality, altruism and a host of other positive affective traits that religious people deny we infidels can ever attain). But I would have to say from experience and other studies, neuroscience among them, that, unfortunately, the "grandeur in this view of life" that fills me to overflowing from scientific knowledge won't reach a lot of them. Ever. In that, I've become a pessimist/realist (These two are never far apart). This could be one of the "extended post" topics I'd like to investigate more, maybe in the Lounge. I use the term "the Great Divide of the Human Mind" to describe the collective cranial split between those who need, and others (like you and me, FT, and others) who don't need the supernatural to be able to face the world. I stare at deeply religious people with wonderment -- they live in a world utterly alien to me despite years of churchgoing and spiritual meditations. They stare back at me in wonderment, and about half the time consign me to Hell... I have a chapter from a recent sociology book on which I've been preparing notes, anxious to post them or to write a paper from them, because the evidence, good evidence, echoes what I said above - most people seek a release from the fear of death, hope for a life hereafter, and spend large amounts of life energy loving or supplicating a supernatural being not be smitten. And apparently we have been doing it, since Neanderthal days 100,000 years ago, at least. I would seek out those with a mind more like mine, and I suspect, like yours, to open their eyes to the wonder of science. If others prefer religion, I don't object until their religion impinges on my freedom. Unfortunately, it is impinging a LOT over the last 30 years or so, and I find myself objecting a LOT to their political, economic, and pseudoscientific intrusions. I feel the Age is Darkening rapidly -- I would say twenty years, tops, before the rack is back in style. But I prefer NOT to be like them by saying there is only one way to truth, and it's mine. 'Tis a puzzlement. :) By the bye - I'd like to see that treatise you've mentioned several times about diachronic linguistics someday - either in the Lounge, or a digest post in the main forum area. Linguistics would be a great addition to the new Social Sciences forum!

I agree. Religion, like other collective human artifacts, serves a wide variety of purposes in human experience, some of them noble, edifying, expanding, and exalting to its adherents. It can also turn malignant like any other bit of flesh, probably for as many reasons as flesh does. One of its major failings is the seemingly unquenchable desire to be right about everything, and not to understand that it, like every other human activity, has limits. And I don't see very religious people looking very hard for where they might be limited, but rather inventing ad hoc explanations for why they were right, all along. In science, you'd get laughed off the stage of history for that attitude, which, I'm sorry to say, many scientists have had. The foundation of science, though, is constructed to root out individual ego worship and get back to the study of nature! :)

First, thanks for your thoughtful replies. There is nothing like an able correspondent to get me to re-examine my thinking. I appreciate it. I have little time right now, and want to do your work justice, so I'll get down what I can and finish it later. :) Could you please explain this a bit more? I have my criticisms of Russell from a philosophical standpoint, but I haven't seen any reference to the principia "failing miserably". It is, after all, the intellecutal basis of cybernetics, systems theory, and modern computing. Conjecturing on the nature of ultimate reality is the greatest of all conjectures. In my mind, we are so steeped in a tradition of accepting without question that all things trace to our particular culture's god, or some god, that it takes extraordinary effort to look out side of that to see whether other explanations hold up to rational investigation. That's the vital role of science, to provide an independent evaluation of the natural world. Religion has fared abysmally in making sense of nature, although it makes great sense of our limited human perspectives on ourselves and our own desires. (Feel free to challenge that - it's a major part of my entire thesis.) From the beginning, science and religion split along the lines of explanations of natural phenomena, and history since the Reneaissance is nothing if not a panoramic rendering of "miserable failures" of religious world views to contribute anything meaningful to that understanding. I believe that's a big part of why the rift between is so great today, and widening with every new discovery, despite attempts of many to force them into reconciliation. I'm not saying that purpose does not exist. The question is whether there is an outside entity that has created us or anything else with a purpose, e.g., perfection, salvation, world domination, all of the above. We certainly have attibutes that result in our frontal lobes and limbic systems lighting up with a sense of purpose. This says nothing necessarily about whether we are taking our cue from the supernatural, the universe, or just our own evolutionary history. My claim is that we have always assumed it to be supernatural in origin, and that this piece of tradition blinds us to other alternatives. I'm trying to research the other alternatives, one of which could be that there is ample evidence that our sense of purpose is a function of our biology, not the supernatural. It certainly does, if it's part of the script! ("Script" isn't the way I'd describe life - more on that later -- but I wanted to use your term in your context.:D ) I would suggest that neither you nor I could just turn our backs on the idea that we can do better, be better, learn better, and leave a better world to our kids. On the other hand, I would say that if we didn't have some pretty highly evolved brain capacities, this would be something we couldn't do, any more than we can see UV radiation. This needs more time than I can give it right now, and is one of the real key pieces in what I think we are both trying to get at. If I understand you correctly here, I would draw a distinction between "expounding" on something and "taking it literally". I would happily expound on the meaning and significance of the Tower of Babel, the Book of Job, or the parting of the Red Sea, but would argue that all of these stories are far too important to take them literally. That's one of my major problems with fundamentalism, whether Christian, Islamic, or scientific. Joseph Campbell made the point in several of his works and personal interviews that the tendency to take metaphors literally was a major cause of religious war and a loss of important truth. Science is prone to the same error -- trying to make its symbolic, metaphorical paradigms a literal truth, e.g., the billiard ball atom. One nice thing about science is that further research normally renders these narrow interpretations untenable. More later -- thanks again!

Let me restate the question to show the fallacy behind it. "What is the purpose of the unicorn in the ecology of Atlantis?" See the problem? The question, to make sense, demands that the unicorn and Atlantis exist. (I've used "purpose" instead of "meaning" -- same argument exactly - I just started at a later post...) Which brings me to two responses. 1) You almost never see people asking the proper question that precedes "What is the purpose..." (unless they're getting ready to give you a sermon on it), which should be, "Does life have a purpose?" The reason we don't dwell on the question stated this way is emerging from current neuroscientific research into the survival mechanisms in our brains. They don't ask whether life has a purpose because we, as animals, have purpose, aka biological functions, built in at birth (in the LIMBIC SYSTEM), ready to be trained by the scribes who like to write on our tabula rasa (thanks, Tinny) to tell us why we're so special. Since we feel purpose throughout all of our human goals and actions, we see what we think is purpose in all of nature, and don't stop to think that our sense of purpose is an artifact of life, not of the universe. (Please see my post in Explain Your Avatars for a better description of this human attribute - my avatar is a symbol of what we do. It's Post #30 in Watercooler/Explain Your Avatars.) 2) Even before asking the question in 1, above, we should ask, "What do we mean by purpose?", rather than assuming purpose exists. We know what purpose feels like, because we are cybernetic (self-organizing, self-replicating, self-maintaining) organisms, and we have a powerful sense when we are acting out our hardwired purposes as programmed by our software culture. To remove some of the confusion, we could susbstitute other words for purpose that are less prone to misunderstanding, like "function", as one of my biology books suggests. This puts a different spin on it altogether, though it doesn't have the same mystical ring to it. Asked "What are the functions of life", we can get to something concrete. Aristotle was the first to write them into his works (as far as I know), and they are: to survive to reproduce. These mundane functions are what we feel and experience as purpose, although, as mentioned in an earlier post, we don't love someone or have kids in full awareness that we are fulfilling a biological function. The important point of this is that our purposes reside in us, not as an intention in the universe. We share these functions/purposes with all living things, but Moon probably doesn't share them with us, any more than a dead man shares them with us. It's a LIFE thing. (That is, I disagree with the consciousness of all matter, which lacks perceptual organs and brains to sort them out.) One more comment, this one about Tinny's Islamic example. Given our innate sense of purpose, every culture fashions its own version of what our purpose really is. Then they go to war with one another to prove who's right (apparently another artifact of limbic system evolution). Of course, the versions all come out differently, since every culture evolves in a different environment and has its tabula written on by different scribes. Not surprisingly, Tinny's viceregents, an extrapolation of a human metaphor like most of the rest of them in different traditions, is a case in point of my avatar -- interpreting the world as though it has our characteristics, our emotions, our offices, our PURPOSES. We take our metaphor, and make it LITERAL. Same as we do with the Bible. And THAT, ladies, gentlemen, and others, is why we so desperately need SCIENCE to get us out of that headspace and into one where we ask nature to explain itself, rather than forcing it to be like us.

For years I kept a copy of a Back to Godhead (Krishna) magazine from the early 70's with a cover article entitled, "We never went to the Moon". I kept it because it shows how religious thinkers often come to their conclusions about reality. Being from a different culture, the story didn't raise hackles like confronting your own dominant culture's ideas. How did they know the whole thing was a fake? Simple. The holy Vedas state that the moon is seven (or so) times farther away from Earth than the Sun. We know the Sun is 93 million miles away, so the moon is much too far for us to have reached it. Good deductive reasoning from an unimpeachable source. (Good example of "begging the question" - reasoning logically from an unsupportable position to an irrelevant conclusion.) What really interested most about the article, though, was that the author went on, now armed with the "truth", to elaborate on what it meant. To make the sociocultural context, the picture of America and the rest of the world, fit with this interpretation of events surrounding the Moon landing (backed up, as it was, by holy scripture), forced him into a grand, worldwide conspiracy, which, of course, was also highly secret, but which was being used by politicians to rob us blind. Having the wrong theory really matters.

Thank, Tomod! This should be a great addition to Hypography. I'm interested in trying to pull together strands from several forums, e.g., Evolution, Philosophy & Humanities - lots of threads - and weaving them together into more finished wholes. I hope some of the discussions turn into hypographies -- this should be fun!

I've experienced entoptic forms as various patterns for as long as I have experienced the waves, or swirling clouds. I discovered very early that several of the shapes traced to the pattern of blood vessels in the retina, and later, observed them to change over time due to what I interpreted to be loss of neural tissue in micro-macula due to aging. Though it's tempting to think that all optical phenomena are effects traceable to the same cause, I'm doubtful, and not long ago found one example reported in Discover (maybe two years ago) about the visual disturbance of migraine. This is another one I'm familiar with personally. Long story short, the visual distubance of migraine is a "storm" on the visual cortex, not a change in the eye. This doesn't say anything specific about the waves I attribute to the cortex, but I've long felt that they (the waves) are much more like migraine than they are the entoptic phenomena I've seen. I'll watch for later research. :D

I've been an avid color-swirl watcher since I was a little kid. I suspect strongly that it's noise in the primary visual cortex, and when you get good at paying attention to it while you're falling asleep, you'll see the colors begin to form into the images of dreaming. In fact, when I'm having trouble getting to sleep, I shift my concentration to the "green clouds" and find it to be a great soporific. It doesn't have to be dark for the clouds to form -- it's just easier to notice. Watch for it some day when you're just lying in the bathtub with minimal sensory interruptions and they'll well up spontaneously even in brightly lit room. A phone ringing or a loud noise will erase them in a second. Mine have about an eight-second period between waves, and I've also noticed that after very close to fifteen minutes after onset, I'll have nearly a full minute during which the waves form around the periphery of my visual field and close in around the center of sight. Eventually that pattern goes unstable, and I'm back to random fluctuations. I think of it as "the brain's dial tone". I've polled many people through my life, and I've found about 1 in 3 are aware of seeing things in the dark. Quite a few of those who initially say they never see anything come back later and affirm that they do -- they had just never noticed it before. I often use the green clouds as an example of how much is going on in our brains that we don't see, or, worse, see and take to be something literally true. Happy clouds to you. (Are you a fan of "The Wall" by P. Floyd? I notice "Don't give in without a fight...")

Thanks for the update - citing real science is refreshing!

In a day when there were little groups of people in little communities separated by large distances, they had local gods that presumably kept track of local events. Very old Bronze Age stories told tales of gods getting into fights over their territories, and the winner advanced his piece on the board by giving his people a lift (farmland, hunting grounds, slaves). That set of beliefs probably had a several-million-year history by the time the big empires of the late Bronze Age began to arise and move out like army ants to consume the world around them. Now it could be the god of an entire city state, like Babylon, say, taking on the god of the Jews, Yahweh, in a fight to the finish. Beat them down; take them into exile -- that'll show that desert deity a thing or two. But then, along comes the Zoroastrian (probably carved Z into stuff on the way by) and knocks Babylon down, freeing the followers of Yaweh, who go back home confident in their victory, that He has finally prevailed. (We'll skip the Diaspora for now.) So, what started out as a simple, country (i.e., pagan) approach to indwelling spirits only moderately bigger and badder than the people who believed in them, now had moved into the city, later the empire, and as it stands now, a very few, very big, dominant cultures with very big weapons and very big axes to grind. The hubris of the small tribe, which might affect a few hundreds in battle, is now writ large like huge graffiti across whole continents, and threatens the extinction of millions. Driven by the same competitive, murderous intent that evolved with us from the days we lived in remote villages in the Rift Valley, we went wandering in search of new places, new lives. Our wandering ancestors told their tales of victory, survival, and the triumphs of their gods, right up until the day they were wiped out by other, bigger, badder gods. And so it will be someday still ahead of us, as the deadlier legacy of our DNA emerges once again to prove that our god is bigger than theirs. Who knows? Maybe he is - or so we'll think, if there are enough of us left to appreciate it. Till then, we'd just better hunker down, hold hands, build bombs, make babies, cover our eyes to keep out the light, and cry, "God bless America!" (OK - that one got away from me a bit... you never can foresee just where these will end up when you start out.)

These two sentences are in conflict in this case. I have now checked with about ten sources, and only one of them defines "atheist" the way FT does. And that one is FT himself. I would like to track the etymology back further to see if there EVER was a time when most speakers used atheism in the sense FT proposes, which is very close to the definition given for "agnosticism" in those same sources (as I understand his use of the word). And, while I think quibbling over words is generally pusillanimous and unproductive, meaning is important to communication. Like DNA, language needs a significant base of slowly-changing elements and others that are free to roam. We still love Shakespearean English, in part for its wonderful similarity and for its splendiferous differences from English today. How about, "nontheistic" as way of describing those people who do not wish for, or depend on the idea of, a supernatural order and being to live their lives or to give their lives meaning? Just a thought. It isn't a word in use today (in the OED, anyway), and lacks the sense of a decisive declaration concerning the existence or nonexistence of any particular god in any particular cultural setting. It isn't likely to obfuscate prior writings by modifying a longstanding definition. And, like "atheism" in its time, it (or another newly-coined term of your choice) serves a necessary linguistic purpose, that of expressing a new idea. And with that, I'd prefer to get back to the discussion of this thread, recognizing the difference in definitions we have over a couple of very key concepts in the interchange. ;)

Here's the quote from Gould referenced in my last post: http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Stephen_Jay_Gould/ In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms. Stephen Jay Gould

I would just as soon see "proof" expunged from our everyday scientific lexicon. Creationists demand "proof" because they know we will say, "Of course I can't prove every single tiny little trivial point of evolution theory", at which they cry, "SEE? Gotcha! That's why you have to teach Itelligent Design!" "Proof" is a weapon, like a crude club wielded by a barbarian in a laboratory of test tubes and lasers. While reading about "reason" not long ago, I found a reference to "abductive" reasoning, which in the 19th century enjoyed some popularity along with inductive and deductive reasoning. Abductive reasoning is, approximately, "using the best available evidence to arrive at the best (but always conditional) theory". The article went on to say that this fits scientific reasoning better than the other two in most cases, but that abductive had since been absorbed into inductive reasoning. I figure that happened so we wouldn't have to say, "Science is the process of abduction of truth". :D NOTHING in science or any other discipline is PROVEN. (Even a mathematical proof is conditional. What do the three angles of a triangle add up to? The answer and the proof depend on whether you're talking plane or spherical trig. cf. non-Euclidian geometry, the irreducibly statistical propositions of chaos theory, etc.) While this might sound like postmodernist palaver, it isn't, because there's another dimension to science that creationists try constantly to downplay. Scientific knowledge has solidity, robustness, because, together with scientific theory, it is built as an interlocking WEB of observation, fact, testing, and conceptualization. In that environment, proposed knowledge that doesn't fit with the whole stands out like a sore thumb and demands attention. If its hypothetical structure can be supported with new evidence, the whole web needs to shift, e.g., Einstein's famous prediction that Sun's gravitation would deflect starlight. When it did, we had some shifting to do, and lots of followup to solidify the position of relativity in the scientific world view. This is different from postmodernism because postmodernism implies that things are true only according to the model (concept, theory, paradigm) you're comparing them to, and those conceptual pictures are culturally determined and therefore equal in stature. Creationists love that. It just doesn't happen to be true. I wish I could find Stephen Jay Gould's half-facetious definition of fact (I'll look around for it and post it here asap) -- something like, "a fact is something so firmly supported that it would irresponsible not to grant it our conditional approval". Much better approach than "proof", which I consider an anachronistic term. And to respond to creationists, challenge them to construct any kind of an integrated web out of their "theory" that in any way fits the observable world, that is, anything that doesn't come down to, "Cause God did it, and that's REAL science!" ;)

Your "gay" example is exactly why I object. The "gay romancer" of the 18th century will draw titters, instead of tits. I will check with my OED tonight at home, but consulting two very good dictionaries here trace the meaning of "atheism" as a definite denial of the metaphysical and any purported forces to about 1565. Just like changing the definition of "gay" to mean "homosexual", changing "atheism" to mean exactly what "agnostic" has meant for centuries LOSES meaning, and introduces misunderstanding into our reading of, say, 17th century texts. Logically, rather than co-opting the meaning of agnostic, I'd think, in the name of historical continuity, you'd come up with new word, just like they did about 1565. I'll look further to see if I can locate when this got redefined, but don't see why us agnostics should give up just cuz somebody stole our definition.:hyper: To me, it looks like non-lethal, but deleterious mutation.

I was about to change my definition too, but then I did a bit more digging. a-moral - without morals a-political - no party affiliation and don't vote a-septic - without infection a-theist - without a god a-gnostic - without knowing From the Word Book Dictionary -- two levels of definition: atheist... A person who believes that there is no God...[or] who ignores his duty to God. agnostic .. a person who believes that nothing is known or can be known about the existence of God or about things outside of human experience. SYN: skeptic, unbeliever, freethinker (!! not gloating -- just coincidence.) I also checked a reputable sociological source, which made the same point, that in common use, atheism denies the existence of a "higher power", which would be anything supernatural. Agnositc (which, as a self-proclaimed agnostic, I have been using for a long time) connotes NOT KNOWING whether or not there is a supernatural entity, and being sincerely doubtful that any of us can prove it one way or another due to our relatively primitive brain and short time (million years) discussing the issue. To this list, I'd add another -- a-pathetic - not really caring one way or the other, which covers a lot of people, but gets overlooked. If I'm getting shoved into the "believer but can't prove it", I'll take that one to mat! :D

Please forgive me for repeating an already long post of many weeks ago. I put it here because it addresses directly the idea that people have contacted, or been contacted by, spiritual presences. Yes, it's happened through the ages, as noted below. But while an individual, especially pre-science, is likely to take the experience literally, we have good hard evidence that it's probably not the case. I think it's important enough to give this serious thought in any like-minded discussion that I'll include the body of the post here. The idea that altered states of consciousness are due to contact with a "higher mind", or other similar terms is the common response of people experiencing them. The counter-idea, that altered states of consciousness are due to the brain's attempt to reinterpret the remnants of consciousness with some centers removed from the equation, is radically different and bound to be unpopular with the first group. But there is some very interesting experimental evidence that the second idea is much closer to the truth, oddly enough, provided by research done by someone very much in the "higher consciousness" camp. You may have heard about a book written by Dr. Andrew Newberg entitled Why God Won't Go Away, subtitled "Brain Science and the Biology of Belief". It's become the darling of religious apologists because, in it, Newberg does his best to legitimate mystical experiences by detailing neuroscientific research he has conducted with people who meditate deeply. The book has much more in it and is a good read for information about mythology, some evolution theory, and most important, about some late research on brain centers and their possible integration. I bring up this book, because Newberg combed through historical writings from various religious traditions and times to show that deep mystical experiences are described with remarkable uniformity, including an "oceanic" sense of unity with all creation, absolute bliss, a lack of anxiety or fear, and complete peace and love. He goes on to show that major aspects of these experiences match his own research with a Tibetan Buddhist meditator, who was able to signal when he reached the depth of his session, was injected with tracer, and then given an MRI to see which brain centers were affected by the meditative state. The results were most revealing. (The description of the testing is the subject of Chapter 1, entitled, "A Photograph of God?" This is available in full text online: Excerpt & Reviews of 'Why God Won't Go Away' by Andrew Newberg, MD ...... Excerpt: Printable Excerpt Printer Friendly Version Contents: A Photograph of God? ... Chapter One A Photograph of God? An introduction to the Biology of Belief. ... www.bookbrowse.com/index.cfm?page=title& titleID=788&view=excerpt - 34k - It was through the online post that I first heard about the book. I recommend reading this, if nothing else.) The results of Newberg's testing on the meditator were initially surprising. The main difference in the MRI of his subject while in the deep state was one particular area "going dark", that is, experiencing much less activity that in a waking brain. The area is the posterior parietal cortex, located in the sensory half of the cerebrum (behind the central fissure, aft of the primary sensory cortical area, and bounded in the rear by the visual cortex). Newberg refers to the posterior parietal cortex as the "orientation association area", which is the primary system that integrates body placement, position, and awarness of surroundings. I've read more about this area in neuroscience texts, because I wanted to cross check what Newberg said and get another perspectives on what this system does. That's where it gets interesting. The orientation association area has significantly different functions between left and right lobes. The left area keeps track of the body; tells you where your body ends, how it's oriented in space; how big it is. The right area, in contrast, is the locus of your awareness of the environment around you. It registers everything that your body is not, the "not you". The intersection between these two functions allows you to be aware of yourself in your surroundings, and requires a constant flow of data to maintain that awareness. When you walk through a tight door, for example, the left orientation association area tells you how big you are, the right estimates how big the door is, and the two together tell you you have to turn sideways to make it through. What, then, happens when you shut that system down? Well, if you were in a waking state, you'd walk into walls, fail to step over curbs, and probably feel vertiginous, like a pilot flying in a cloud without visual reference to the ground. In the meditative state, you would lose the sense of the extent of your self. You would no longer feel the "differentness" of who you are and all that surrounds you. Lacking that sense of separation from your environment, your brain would experience the feeling of being undifferentiated, of being separate, of being unitary. You would feel as though you and the universe are one. I have become acutely aware of my own orientation association area as I move through life, riding my bike, skiing down a hill, or being aware of a rectilinear surrounding frame of reference in a dark room. I believe that it will be shown soon (if it hasn't already) that our metaphors for orientation originate in this section of the brain (e.g., "I'm feeling up today" or "she was a fallen woman"). If I were a monk who spent hours a day in a balanced posture, intent upon decreasing the constant chatter of bodily sensations, quieting my spinal cord traffic until the orientation association area fell (relatively) silent, I can easily imagine the sense of wonder, relief, lack of anxiety, etc., attending mystical states. If I had no idea what was happening (which I had, before reading Newberg's book), I might take it literally. Rather than saying, "In my compromised state, I have lost my sense of separation from my environment", I might well say, "The universe and I are one. My fear is gone. I am cloaked in peace and wonder. Surely I am one with God." Good book to read. I've written a lot about this in my spare time. One last point I'm sure you're aware of is that split-brain research has shown that the brain goes to extreme lengths to invent rational explanations for anything it experiences. For example, the left brain will make up elaborate excuses for things the right brain is doing and which the left brain has not been privy to. It cranks out ad hoc explanations ad infinitum in a total vacuum of knowledge. This puts the individual in danger of taking something literally that has no basis whatsoever. Oddly, Newberg not only doesn't seem to realize this aspect of his research, and in fact cranks out ad hoc explanations for why the mystics might be right (one with universe and God), despite the much simpler explanation his own data strongly suggests. But, in a different vein, Newberg states clearly that it is these rare individuals, the ones who get to the deep mystical state, who create religions. This is a major insight. One who has experienced the deep state comes back with glowing tales of wonder, underpinned by powerful emotional insistence that this is TRUE, not that it emerged from a compromised brain state. It radiates with charisma, delivers a message we all long to hear and offers hope of another world, a better world, a world of light and peace. St. Augustine described that world brilliantly in the last chapter of his Confessions, and sold the whole western world on it. It lives with us still. Since reading his book, I have become very aware of politicians and virtually everyone else making up rationalizations for things they do that are completely out of touch with reality. We call that "spin", and it seems to be much greater motivation than truth in directing human affairs.