immortal

My point is its not as simple as that, Inow seems to have studied only the organized religions which outer masses practice, you don't really have to believe in God to give thanksgiving and yet society has blindly following these religious holidays and has accepted it but as Sam Harris says "A kernel of truth lurks at the heart of religion." which deserves a serious discussion and an investigation without being dismissed as childish or wishful-thinking. Ah, the jewel thing, you seem to have taken it too literally, actually its mystical. Please understand the concept of it, if you had seen pearls, diamonds and other gem stones you will see the bright lustre that emanates from it, now when I talk about the jewels of God I don't mean god is just wearing these jewels instead each and every different light rays that emanates from him are the different manifestations as to how the lesser gods have been created and how this cosmos is working. Vedas looks at Him in two ways. They are the Vishrutha(diffused or spread out form) and Samasthi. Looking at each ray of that mass of lustre is the former way(Vishrutha) and looking at it as a whole (yeka) is the latter way (Samasthi). So this isn't something which I have made it up myself, its in the Vedas and the Upanishads and that's how traditional scholars study and view it. Please kindly understand that. Pushan is one of the highest manifestations of the light rays that exists in the intelligible realm or Platonic realm or Mandala, whatever you might want to call it. No, it can be a litmus test for yourself and the second person who also knows about it but it can never be a litmus test for the third person. If I claimed I visited hell and came back without offering any shadow of evidence then would you believe me? No right. Empirical evidence is always the correct evidence to figure out the truth of something. St. Theresa of Avila almost shattered the whole room so much that the nuns came running to see what happened to her. This is the kind of phenomena which I like to empirically study it. As I said you seem to have taken the colored jewels too literally, see above to realize how esoteric is that.

"It is reasonable to agree that when there is a core agreement in the religious experiences of people in different times, places, and traditions, and when they have the same rational interpretations of the experiences; it makes sense to conclude that they are all in contact with some objective aspect of reality, unless there is positive evidence otherwise." - Broad C.D Broad.The Argument From Religious Experience, 1930.

Even I have not read it but I saw a couple of threads about his claim in the philosophy forums(SFN). At Google's Zeitgeist Conference in 2011, Hawking said that "philosophy is dead." He believes philosophers "have not kept up with modern developments in science" and that scientists "have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge." He said that philosophical problems can be answered by science, particularly new scientific theories which "lead us to a new and very different picture of the universe and our place in it". He must be really crazy, irrespective of in what form he has expressed it, its quite evident that he is saying philosophy is dead. As far as I know philosophers are being hired in every new research field of science from consciousness studies to interpret the results of quantum experiments and if there were no philosophers I wonder what erroneous claims scientists would have made while interpreting their results. Has science explained the ontology of space and time, does science know what space and time are really made of? Has the problem of universals been solved or has science solved it? http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/66219-hawkings-and-philosophy/ No, scientists cannot act as though they cannot see the history of mankind and think that only modern science exists. When making claims about religion and philosophy they should consider other phenomena as well and also what disciplines other than the exact sciences have discovered. If the existence of God turns out to be a well established fact then science will indeed turn out to be a study of one of his creations. That's the reason I said scientists reject a God hypothesis and not science.

This is the point where science and religion converges. Quantum weirdness: What we call 'reality' is just a state of mind So you just don't have to keep hoping, its actually happening, both science and advaita can be reconciled and when scientists begin to realize that the universe doesn't exist when no one is looking at it then they will start taking advaita seriously. Your mind disagrees with this first, its so hard to swallow, you hate this, you desperately try to keep an objective external reality of the world but once you investigate it and as you said contemplate it then you will realize that advaita is indeed true as experiments from quantum mechanics have shattered our cornerstone beliefs. Once you arrive to this conclusion then next advaita says there is a Mind(Manas), behind the mind an Intellect (Buddhi), behind the Intellect the totality of divine powers(the Pleroma of God/Agnisoma Mandala) and behind this is the infinite (unity, Brahman, Ein Sof) or whatever you might want to call it. We can reach up to the Pleroma of God and discuss it through intellect and its affable but anything beyond it is ineffable and therefore should not be spoken. (On a side note there is no word called Pleroma in advaita, its actually a Gnostic concept but they just called the same thing by different names for example:- the Brahmins called the infinite as Brahman and the Kabbalahists called it the Ein Sof.) As I told I don't understand what you're trying to say here.

Not only the comparison is silly but also there are unequal amounts of supportive evidence.

For example his claim that philosophy is dead. Steven Weinberg: "Against Philosophy" (from "Dreams of a Final Theory"). I do find that there is a strong social influence on what constitutes as scientific consensus and which hypotheses gets more funding and media hype. I do think that the discipline of science should work under the positivist philosophy of science but there are things which are unobservable for example:- quarks, one cannot find an isolated quark no matter what but we can see that it exists by observing its effects through a phenomena known as bremsstrahlung. In the same way even God and the numinous is unobservable but its effects can be empirically studied. So if we can accept that quarks exist why can't we accept that the numinous exists too. Why such double standards? I know what science is but most religious people see science as the study of God's creations while scientists often try to reject a God hypothesis by applying Occam's razor. Scientists should be more matured while making claims about religion and philosophy. They even go on to say that God is dead.

This is a much more substantive argument compared to your past arguments and if you concentrate on this one keeping aside god and dimensionless awareness which are vague terms then there will be much point in what you're arguing.

I have argued with him in the past and he explicitly states in this very thread that... How is this different from Talibanization? It sounds great when you read his post for the first time but I think its a very extreme position like "I am going to decide what's accepted and what's not", "I am going to decide which hypothesis gets a pass and which don't", "I am going to decide what's childish and what's mature". I find such vitriolic positions often unnecessary and unfounded. The first strawman which he makes is by placing the concept of God on the same grounds as the concept of Santa Claus, unicorns etc. To be honest if the whole of religion was just about Santa Claus, unicorns and puff the magic dragon then obviously no theist would have come to SFN claiming that these entities exist but the majority of religious doctrines are highly philosophical, intellectual and quite rational and he thinks all concepts of God are like belief in unicorns without noticing the genuine differences between the different concepts of God that exists out there in the literature and he concludes all theists are like this and that they only accept things by blind faith and never allow criticism by others and demand respect for their beliefs. On the whole it is just a too narrow of a position to apply for such a broad topic. What are his standards to decide what should be acceptable by the society and what not? How reasonable it is? What makes him think that he is not showing double standards himself? That's the same problem with you too. Unfortunately the majority of the literature in religion doesn't really address either about the Santa or the tooth fairy. If that was the case then there was no point in arguing for almost 60+ pages for this thread topic. As I said things are not as simple as both of you guys are thinking. I am not reading any minds, its a claim which he explicitly stated earlier. IMHO, there is no need for such extremism as no true religions encourage hatred as Barack Obama said, "But no matter what we choose to believe, let us remember that there is no religion whose central tenet is hate." All religions argue that everything came from the Self.

I think DrDNA made a few very good points in the beginning of the thread. So I really find your extreme intolerance towards religion quite unnecessary and claiming that people who believe in God are broken is definitely a dishonesty on your part. Religion <=> Deities <=> Consciousness are all interconnected.

The conclusion of Stephen Hawking is ill founded and he is intellectually dishonest. Scientists are basically asking the wrong questions, all scientific evidence is pointing towards the existence of a God owing to the belief that science is the study of God's creations. "The message would be that the purpose of life is not to eat and drink, watch television and so on. Consuming is not the aim of life. Earning as much money as one can is not the real purpose of life. There is a superior entity, a divinity, le divin as we say in French that is worth thinking about, as are our feelings of wholeness, respect and love, if we can. A society in which these feelings are widespread would be more reasonable than the society the West presently lives in." - Bernard D'Espagnat, theoretical physicist and philosopher of science.

Go ahead. Simply stating that a published paper is garbage without making any valid points adds no value to the discussion.

Yes and I have also heard that if someone brings concrete evidence against one's views then they should simply accept it.

Now an appeal to authority so that you can continue holding on to your false views. Anyone who thinks that there are no gods in Buddhism is inexcusably ignorant. You definitely need to read about eastern religions before questioning about my authority. Your views are blatantly wrong and not true at all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandala Do you know why Upanishads have no authors? Its because they knew that everything belongs to God - "Covet nothing, everything belongs to God" - Isha Upanishad. You just study it but I live by it. I don't believe in the Intellectual property rights. Yes, I have studied it and many scholars in the field are reconsidering their views and questioning the epistemology of Advaita and Science. I am quite happy to see that you're views are turning out to be wrong. “QUANTUMPHYSICS AND VEDANTA”: A PERSPECTIVE FROM BERNARD D'ESPAGNAT'SSCIENTIFICREALISM – Jonathon Duquette. Towards aphilosophical reconstruction of the dialogue between modern physics and AdvaitaVedanta: an inquiry into the concepts of akasa, vacuum and reality –Jonathon Duquette. Why is that much of what I say is correct? Its simply because of the reliability of my sources and how authoritative they are. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devudu_Narasimha_Sastri "Hewas chosen for the honour of being ‘worshipped’ in the ceremonial way, as oneamong the hundred traditional scholars, by the first president of India, BabuRajendra Prasad, in the sacred Varanasi. He hailed from a family of royalpriests in Mysore, but the stature that he had as a traditional scholar wasacquired by him as a result of his systematic study of the shastras for 20years." Your views are self-refuting and has no support from these traditions and these works are evidence of it. We all have to believe you just because you think you have a higher authority over these issues? Do you? Really? Its not my ideas, its the orthodox and the correct view of the Acharays who gave the doctrine of Advaita to the world. What makes you think I am not doing that, metaphysics is useless and its a dead end. I don't have to defend myself for your strawman arguments. Yeah, you never learn.

Those are facts established from experiments. Kant was right after all. "Kant taught that space and time are not part of external reality but are rather preexisting structures in our minds that allow us to relate objects and events."

I don't know how many times I have to state this, those who think that there are no gods in Buddhism don't really know how esoteric Buddhism really is. One should understand these religions in their own milieu and the strength of their doctrines lies in following their methodologies and their views about the cosmos. The Buddhist Mandala - Sacred Geometry and Art I would be grateful if meta-physicians and philosophers keep themselves away from this and stop distorting these sensitive religious doctrines and ideas.

LoL. The link address is from Templeton but the original paper is from Scientific American. http://www.scientificamerican.com/media/pdf/197911_0158.pdf The reason I linked it to the former address is simple because its free from unrelated ads.

Sure. http://www.templeton...20Am%201979.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf...h/9802046v2.pdf http://catdir.loc.go...31/88003658.pdf "An 'ultimate reality' exists which is not embedded in space or time" - Bernard D'Espagnat Our cosmos doesn't obey this proof and hence this whole thread is pointless.

Nope, experiments prove that there is a reality not embedded in space-time.

There are various types of genetic mutations, point mutations are one type of mutation where a change of base occurs at one of the three places of a Codon and hence in these type of mutations DNA sequence is altered but there are other type of mutations like regulatory mutations which doesn't change the sequence of the target gene but instead try suppress or express the gene expression and and these genetic changes are normally induced by environment factors. Mutations cannot be reversible but it is indeed possible to reverse a gene expression just like you can switch on or switch off a light bulb. To know more read about RNA interference and how prions regulate phenotypes in certain microbes at different times of the seasons.

I had the opportunity to take pictures of a Kingfisher from my living room and was fascinated by its beak design solution and the Japanese Bullet Train which was designed is a form of Bio-mimicry in engineering and the train travelled 10 percent faster, consuming 15 percent less energy and it no longer created a sonic boom after adopting this design into the Bullet Trains. Birds have always been an interesting genera of organisms to study evolution from Ring species on how mating songs among a population change over time and induce reproductive barriers and there by speciation to their adaptations of beaks for different environmental niches. These examples of finches show that evolution can occur in our life time which we call as micro-evolution. Even though everyone agrees that evolution is happening there are minor disagreements on how it happens and what are the mechanisms that underlie it and this brought me to The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time This seems to be an important study for both neo-darwinists as well as proponents of punctuated equilibrium theory and I think both the 'gene-selectionist view' as well as many of the tenets of the punctuated equilibrium view of the palaeontologists should be considered seriously because natural selection acts at both the gene level as well as at the ecological level and also on local scales and also on longer time scales of hierarchical evolution. The current battle between these two different schools of thought can be right summed up as Dawkins vs Gould and Sterelny clearly summarizes the different points of view of these two evolutionary biologists where Dawkins identifies more with the gene-selectionist view and Gould and others identifying themselves with punctuated equilibrium. This particular study like some of the many other studies seem to question the cumulative nature(cumulative selection) of how evolution was normally thought to operate by the neo-darwinists i.e. a gradual series of accumulation of good designs but as said there are cases where this normally not how evolution seem to work and this is where species selection comes into picture for the accumulation of novel design solutions. One such case is this - Kim Sterelny (2007) cites this rapid natural selection as illustrating an important point about periods of relative stasis in the punctuated equilibrium hypothesis of Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould: "In claiming that species typically undergo no further evolutionary change once speciation is complete, they are not claiming that there is no change at all between one generation and the next. Lineages do change. But the change between generations does not accumulate. Instead, over time, the species wobbles about its phenotypic mean. Jonathan Weiner's The Beak of the Finch describes this very process". The Grants observed that drought conditions led to larger average weight, wingspan, and bill size, whereas flooding experienced a few years later resulted in reduced measurements: "Everything the drought had preferred in size large . . . the aftermath of the flood favored in size small" (Weiner, p. 104). Rather than continuing "to shoot like an arrow in the same direction" (p. 104), evolution had turned back. "Natural selection had swung around against the birds from the other side. . . . Selection had flipped. . . . Not only can evolution push a species fast in one direction. Evolution can reverse direction and push it back just as swiftly" (pp. 104, 106). It is indeed an wobbling over its phenotypic mean within a generations of species lineages where suddenly the large beak sizes where replaced by smaller ones and hence showing that novel designs doesn't necessarily accumulate over time with in a species and that certain species specific characteristics need to be transferred to daughter species and only then the novel design might have a chance that it gets accumulated over time. I think species selection, non-adaptive change, uncoupling of macroevolution and microevolution and species stasis and mosaic evolution which are some of the main views of Gould on evolutionary biology along with the functional constraints of the phenotypes in developmental biology should be seen as well accepted tenets of evolutionary biology. And there will always be people who still doubt evolution by natural selection without understanding how it works. "Darwinism in the West is in much the same condition as was Soviet Marxism in its last days. Its power and prestige rest not on any real scientific accomplishments but on the theory's role in upholding the ruling philosophy. Obscure scientists who go to a remote island to measure finch beaks can become the subjects of television documentaries and Pulitzer Prize-winning books, because the intellectual elite relies on finch-beak variation to convince the public that materialism is true." - Philip Johnson, a proponent of ID

That doesn't mean the idea of God is a pure imagination either. Its simply because of your vitriolic position on religion. If you had really investigated it, the conclusion should have been a little more honest.

No, its not. What's silly is how you dismiss the whole of religion as pure human imagination and fantasies of a feeble mind and state that a group of people are broken based on this pre-existing belief of yours. Its definitely not as simple as that. Religious experiences even though its rare induce an irrevocable change in people lives which cannot be explained using natural causes. These religious experiences are not evidence of anything but evidence of empirical effects itself. If you remain agnostic and if you investigate such cases by being in their shoes and look at things from their perspective you will realize that its not as simple as you think it is to conclude that they are somehow broken.

Its something which I have argued in the past where I question the origin of religion and religious acts itself and argue that both evolution by natural selection and cultural evolution cannot account for such behaviours and an external divine force is acting in keeping such memes in the meme pool and also of their origins. See #86, #89 from a different thread and also this.

Oops sorry, it should have been. "I have argued these religious acts defy evolutionary psychology and raises doubts about the natural origin of such memes through evolutionary mechanisms."

I still have problems with the Argument from religious experiences, the common structure of the experiences experienced by different religious people following different religions like Gnostic Christianity, Tantric Buddhism, Vedic Aryans, oral traditions of Judaism shows that the idea of God cannot be dismissed so easily, even though the empirical effects of the experiences cannot prove that a particular God exists, the sense of oneness in these empirical effects proves that a numinous exists. I would very much be happy to call this divinity as a God. Also as I have argued these religious acts defy evolutionary psychology and raises the natural origin of such memes through evolutionary mechanisms. "These experiences often have very significant effects on people's lives, frequently inducing in them acts of extreme self-sacrifice well beyond what could be expected from evolutionary arguments. "