needimprovement

Some people said the word "practical" has widely know definitions that don't require philosophy to be understood while some people asserted that anything and everything is philosophical. I look at this in two points -- the definition of the word didn't just appear in nature. Secondly, it's not the definition but the application of the word. Is abortion practical? Science cannot tell us. Nor can the dictionary. What are your thoughts on this?

If tachyons can't be directly observed, but must necessarily exist so that the rest of a model works, are they supernatural? Shouldn't a distinction be made between uncaused and cause unknown?

There are philosophers of science, Bas van Fraassen for one, who are empiricists; they say science is just a game, in which scientists construct models or pictures to try to make sense of the world around them, but the models bear no relation to what reality is. I don't hold to this view, by the way. (The empiricists cite history and how physical "laws" (theories) change, e.g. no more caloric, no more ether, etc.)

That's why there has to be a certain sense of order dictated beyond what man has control over. In a way, it's not supernatural, but natural in the sense that God oversees everything.

Can any human do anything peculiar only to humans without any kind of intelligent thinking involved, or according to any criteria of intelligent thinking involved?

Your question asking what is bluer than blue? is it a meaningless question? Like what Hawking is supposed to have said: Asking what comes before the Big Bang: ...is like asking, what is north of North Pole? which is a meaningless question To my thinking, no it is not a meaningless question, unless your idea of meaningful questions is a priori limited to a self-chosen field of questions which does not admit of any questions outside; like for example the world of the Big Bang, so that the world of the Big Bang is the only world you want to think about, and nothing outside should engage your intelligence -- which is to my thinking very unintelligent. Is there a world outside the Big Bang world? Of course there is, on intelligent thinking alone, because experts of the Big Bang world tell us that it has a beginning, that is why. Is there a north beyond the north pole? Of course yes, because there is a point that is more farther north of the north pole. Simple intelligent thinking. Unless you have reached the last frontier of the north pole beyond which you cannot anymore not even in your imagination conjure a point more north, so that you can say non plus ultra. In regard to something more blue than another thing that depends on your eye. But in regard to what is north of the north pole that depends upon your intelligent thinking.

Blue can also mean "sad" in English, so bluer than blue can mean "depressed". Yes, it is not. And dominate will not exist if there is no dominance. The cause is dominance. and homosapiens means "wise man"? wise and wisecrackers

Please share your experience...

and miracle is quantum mechanics?

To believe in the truly random is to believe in the supernatural. By definition the supernatural is "beyond natural law". Supernatural adjective 1. of, pertaining to, or being above or beyond what is natural; unexplainable by natural law or phenomena; abnormal.

It is impossible that only finite things exist because then everything would have undetermined limitations, which is a contradiction. Therefore, if anything at all exists, and it is apparent that something does, then there must be at least one infinite being that determined all other things.

Isn't it radatio active decay a statistically determined? Would you ask the question, "What letter comes before the letter 'A' in the alphabet?" Obviously 'A' is the first letter, it's the beginning, nothing comes before it We can't really apply our universe's laws of physics (time, causality, etc.) to something outside our universe. This is hard for us to understand because we are so immersed in this universe and its systems. What's it like to be outside of time? Can a fish who's spent his whole life at the bottom of the sea imagine what it's like to be dry?

Events CANNOT occur without a cause, however, it is impossible to represent absolute nothingness in real life - and hence, there will always be a cause for something to happen. I find it highly unlikely that, if the universe itself has a fundamental structure that causes things to happen even in its most reduced form, then it is very likely that the structure of the universe causes minute things to happen all the time...things that are not caused entirely by other particles/waves/strings. Perhaps this is the reason that we see uncertainty in QM...not because it is non-deterministic, but because the very fabric of the universe imposes an ever-present non-local deterministic influence.

Please move this thread to philosophy section. I think it's valuable to link the study of philosophy to the study of physics. Thank you.

Can you think of any reason excluding the concepts of space, time and cause and effect?

What does the subject question imply? That things can happen magically/accidentally without cause? That micro events can flit in and out of existence based on zero history, nor initial conditions? If all events do in fact have causes, then does this require one to accept an objective reality? If we accept the well known response of: 'the Universe makes a choice', does this not require an objective reality that is making the choice?

I always like the quote from Einstein - there are two ways to live, one as if there are no miracles and the other is if everything is a miracle. I think a tree or a car or a cloud are all miraculous and therefore supernatural (adjective) in that the 'elementary particles' that make them up are a projection from a reality beyond our 3 dimensional space. Current science suggests a similar thing by positing the String Theory and 14 dimensions to describe all reality. So i would see everything as supernatural. I would also make the distinction between matter behaving due to given laws (autopilot) and matter behaving through the expressed will and personal choice of God, but as we have seen in Quantum physics, at the smallest level, because of our limitations to only 3 dimensions, we cannot know for sure (in a scientific way) when the second has trumped the first.

Ideas???

How do you define supernatural? Supernatural Order Let me use evolution as an example and pick one branch of science. Evolution is an explanation of the origin of species, no more. Chemistry does not explain the origin of the chemicals it studies, it merely describes their interactions. The origin of chemicals is explained by astrophysics and cosmology, not by chemistry.

AzurePhoenix, Thank for the private messages. As for the rest of your comments, I'm not going to reply. Here are the links that explains my stand on the subject. http://www.catholic.com/thisrock/2004/0401bt.asp http://www.catholic.com/thisrock/1997/9703fea2.asp

With space tourism becoming a real possibility in the near future, brewers are trying to figure out how to provide a good beer in space. The non-profit space research corporation Astronauts4Hire will begin testing an Australian brew created to be enjoyed in microgravity.

That post was with regard to the notion that "humans are apes". The species problem indicates that the question of what a species is, is not a question of science. As the article points out -- it's philosophical in nature. The problem with your claim that this supports evolution is that the idea that there are distinct species was claimed as evidence supporting evolution. Then, the contrary idea that there are no species is claimes as evidence supporting evolution. That's one of the biggest problems with evolutionary theory itself. It's an ambiguous collection of claims which are often contradictory.

Species Problem The species problem is a mixture of difficult, related questions that often come up when biologists identify species and when they define the word "species". One common but sometimes difficult question is how best to decide just which particular species an organism belongs to. Another challenge is deciding when to recognize a new species. Many of the debates on species touch on philosophical issues, such as nominalism and realism, as well as on issues of language and cognition. Realism and Nominalism are philosophical subjects that come up in debates over whether or not species literally exist. From one perspective, each species is a kind of organism and each species is based on a set of characteristics that are shared by all the organisms in the species. This usage of "species" refers to the taxonomic sense of the word, and under this kind of meaning a species is a category, or a type, or a natural kind. For example, the species that we call giraffe is a category of things that people have recognized have a lot in common with each other and to which we have given the name "giraffe". This is a category in the same sense that the words "mountain" and "snowflake" identify categories of things in nature. This view of a species as a type, or natural kind, raises the question of whether such things are real. The question is not whether the organisms exist, but whether the kinds of organisms exist. There is a school of philosophical thought, called realism that says that natural kinds and other so called universals do exist. But what kind of existence would this be? It is one thing to say that a particular giraffe exists, but in what way does the giraffe category exist? This question is the opening for Nominalism which is a philosophical view that types and kinds, and universals in general, do not literally exist. If the nominalist view is correct then kinds of things, that people have given names to, do not literally exist. It would follow then that because species are named types of organisms, that species do not literally exist. This can be a troubling idea, particularly to a biologist who studies species. If species are not real, then it would not be sensible to talk about "the origin of a species" or the "evolution of a species". As recently at least as the 1950s, some authors adopted this view and wrote of species as not being real.[34][35]

Invincible ignorance fallacy

Transplanting organs from animals to humans. I would say that the first in no way precludes Intelligent Design. For example, we all agree that cars are designed and do not spring out of nowhere, right? And yet I can take a tire off one car and put it on another, no? (I have done this even when the tire didn't fit--it makes the car hard to drive, but got me to a garage where I could get my original tire fixed.) Evidence in science that connect the animals and humans. The second doesn't really make sense, because taking the Chinese peasant family, if one of the far descendants ran into a 23rd cousin from China, yes, they would be very different, but they would still be the same species, no? Whereas evolution posits that at some point the descendants become so different they can (or will, in some cases) not longer mate. The theory says that wheat and corn descended from the same plant species zillions of years ago, and if you plant wheat next to corn, there will be no cross-pollination. OTOH, if you plant curcubits (squash, pumpknins, melons, cucumbers) near each other, there can be cross-pollination, but there are problems with the resulting offspring. However, even this in no way precludes an Intelligent Designer. In fact, evolution itself in no way precludes an ID, and to me evolution does not even make any sense at all without an ID. It is perfectly believable that species evolved, but a-theistic or materialist evolution leaves a lot of questions, like how did life begin in the first place? How did very different species evolve? What did they evolve from? Your scenario attempts (but fails) to answer the second question. There are two ideas about this: one that changes occurred very rapidly and entirely, the other that they occurred slowly over the generations. If you really consider a complex organism like the eye, tho, this last makes no sense because how would random mutation over the generations work to create something like the eye? But at the same time, how could something as complex as an eye result from random mutation? And this is just the beginning, because then you run across even more complex situations such as species which are interdependant... how did that come about through random mutation? From my point of view, either there is an Intelligent Designer (one of the attributes of God) or there is not. If there is, then whether things evolved or not is beside the point, because the ID could have created the different species via evolution or He could have created different species individually. It really doesn't matter, if the ID exists, does it? If there is no ID, then there are a host of unresolved problems, as I mentioned before, and there is no proof that, say, platypuses evolved from any other animal.