PeterJ

That seems right to me also. This would be why Lao tsu does not saying that the universe has or does not have a beginning, but, rather, that true words seem paradoxical. The subtlety issue here would be the assumption that something began. If there is something, then it began. But what if there is no 'something'? What if Buddhist philosophers are right, and nothing really exists and nothing ever really happens? What if the world does not have a beginning because by reduction it isn't there? For a less than fundamental view it is definitely there, obviously, and must have a beginning. But a beginning makes no sense. It cannot be a fundamental view. There must be 'more' fundamental view, for which it is not there.

That's not vey helpful to me. What contradictions are you referring to?

Regarding pattern and randomness here's how I would look at it, at the level of the basic principles. I can see an argument for various points of view. The primes are an artefact of a simple mechanical process that can be described very easily. The primes, being the 'atoms' of the number line, create a combination wave of products that will determine where further primes will occur. This allows us to make basic predictions such as the 6n+/-1 rule, or predict that the products of each successive prime will reduce the density of primes higher up the line by 1/3p. This process seems to be about as deterministic and predictable as a process could be. Nobody argues that the products of the primes are unpredictable. The unpredictability arises when we try to predict the location of the null points in the combination wave of the products. The individual wave-shape is identical for every prime, (if we calculate it to be so), but in combination there are so many overlapping waves, each with a unique frequency, that predicting where the gaps will occur very quickly becomes impractical. In this sense the primes would be unpredictable. This is what I'd call weak unpredictability, since it is just a computational problem. Because the primes are not causally linked, (p has no effect on the location of next-p), but are the output of an overarching process, it seems to me that there can never be an algorithm to predict the next one. They obviously conform to a pattern on large scales, at a statistical level, but locally they might as well be random. This would be a stronger unpredictability. While I'd never expect to see a pattern in the primes besides the obvious statistical trends, I'd suggest that 'might as well be random' is not quite the same thing as 'random'. Whatever pattern they make must always be evolving and there could be no repetition of shapes for us to see, but I still feel that 'pseudorandom' (or some such word) would be a more accurate use of language than 'random'. If the product of the primes are not random, then it seems incorrect to say that the gaps in their wave-shape is random. The trouble is that 'random' has various meanings, so it is difficult to say anything definite.

I'd highly recommend Hermann Weil for a discussion of the void in the form of the intuitive continuum, the continuum of experience, as opposed to the void of mathematics and conceptual imagination, which is, as you say Hoopla, a numerical phenomenon and thus not a true void. A true void would be inconceivable, since the categories of thought would not apply. Robert Kaplan talks about this in his book on the history of zero, and concludes that the universe may be more simple than we can think. .

I would not disagree with your scepetical approach, but it is not true that you know God does not exist. Such a claim is no different from a claim to have met him. To paraphrase the OP: What question would you ask someone who claims to know that God does not exist?

Most I people I know find him a poisonous writer and speaker. His dogmatism and ignorance, coupled with an apparent desire to offend people wherever possible, and his focus on the worst aspects of all the most naive religious views, make him simply a trouble-maker. I would have thought that even those who agree with him would be able to see the unhelpfulness, offensiveness and hatefulness of his approach. He is a fanatic and it shows. But please, I didn't mean to start arguing about Dawkins. I was just suggesting this is one book that is not worth putting on the list. There are many good ones, but this contirbutes nothing.

It's also my impression, Mondie, that on average fervent believers can be more disagreeable than fervent atheists. However, I must say, with complete honesty, that as a student of comparative religion I have never come across a more ignorant or poisonous book than the one we are discussing. I really cannot think of anything that compares to it. This is just one reader's reaction, but I have never before had to give up on a book before getting through the introduction. After sampling a few pages, checking the index to see how many important topics were missing, I gave up all hope for the entire debate. Strangely, though, the extreme stupidity of this book seems to have lent some impetus to a sensible discussion. I think many atheists are worried about being associated with this approach to the issues, and may be more willing to be involved in a serious debate in order to make this obvious. At the same time, people with profound and subtle religious beliefs have become very keen to disassociate religion from the author's idea of it. This is task long overdue. The Buddha told us that God was a delusion before paper was invented, and this claim is thoroughly proved by a later Buddhist philosopher in a very famous metaphysical text. Any well-informed attempt to falsify theism would make use of the same argument. If we know Nagarjuna's argument, then we can logically prove that God is a delusion. We would not have put a dent in religion, just placed a difficult constraint on our interpretation of the literature. Now we have to make sense of it even though God is a delusion. This is not a insurmountable problem, but it is not something that can be done without opening our minds to some extremely ancient and weird ideas about the nature of Reality and the possibility of their verification in our own experience. My recommendation would be not bother reading any books on atheism before reading Keith Ward's God: A Guide for the Perplexed. He explains how it is possible to be a Christian yet believe that God is a delusion. Indeed, he explains that this idea may once have been the orthodoxy in Christianity, before it became a religion of the book. You might not think much of it, but he explains the potential subtlety of the idea of God and the meaning of religion, and this may put any book on atheism in its proper context, as a disbelief in what many would say is a naïve interpretation of the scriptures. . .

Yes. If you mean that the argument gets lost in a flurry of emotion and fear, and proceeds by an Hegelian process of semi-conscious action and reaction, I'm with you all the way iNow. But this is an excuse for laymen. A professional should not be falling, or should I say leaping, into all these traps, and where they do we should all be pointing out the problem. Maybe we needn't be dwelling on it though in a thread asking for book recommendations. We ought to stick to talking about the scholarly books that make a reasoned case.

I think if we want to argue against an idea we have to define it in the same way that the people who promote it. The opening list of features is all over the place. There would be no person, no soul, no ego travelling from life to life, and karma is about rebirth, not reincarnation. It is a more subtle and defensible idea than the bowdlerised idea presented here. There may well be good objections that are possible, but these objections would not touch on the most common form of these doctrines so are rather toothless. .

I would ask, 'Are you sure?'. It makes no sense that God can be seen, and when He is seen, as in Attar's famous 'Conference of the Birds, 'He' turns out to be 'Me'. This idea that God is something apart from us, or apart from anything at all, is logically incoherent in my view. Having said this, I do believe that it is possible to genuinely and almost justifiably believe that one has met God due to the extreme nature of some 'spiritual' experiences. But in the end I'd be with the Buddhists, for whom God would be a misinterpreted meditative experience.

I think I have them marked down as taking a certain approach, one that is ridiculous. I will always leap to the defence of religion, but really it is can be very difficult in the face of such nonsense. My bookshelves are full of books on religion, and lately I asked a visiting posse of five (five!) Jehovah's Witnesses in for tea, I'm sure I saw one of them make the sign of the cross when he saw my bookshelf. I mentioned Buddhism. A day later one of them dropped off a sheet of A4 paper on which there was a half-page photocopied argument against Buddhism. I despair. The idea that we are a rational species is not plausible.

It would be wonderful if the man himself realised that he is just a biologist. There are some excellent books arguing for atheism, many mentioned here, but there are also some really dire and shallow attempts that are best avoided. Still, even the bad ones stimulate debate.

Regrettably, despite all his bluster, Richard Dawkins knows almost nothing about religion, His ignorance is astonishing. As Ophiolite says, he brings both science and atheism into disrepute. For a final and definitive argument against theism I would recommend The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way by the 2nd century Buddhist sage Nagarjuna. There is no waffle, just logical argument. Dawkins refuses to see that all the best arguments against God come from within religion, presumable because it would be inconvenient. His book has no index entry for mysticism, which tells us about all we need to know about its value. It is a naïve rant against a naïve doctrine. It is like a book arguing that Father Christmas doesn't exist. I don't why he wastes his time or ours with such unscholarly stuff. Another good one would be Bradley's metaphysical essay Appearance and Reality, which dismisses commonplace theism as easily as materialism.

Yeah. I can understand that of course. But I think what you mean is that religion as you know it gives you the creeps. Who was running the school? If it was the Catholics you have my sympathies. I taught guitar in a Catholic girls school for a while and it was a frightening mixture of dogma, guilt, fear, discipline and lust. (I remember one of the girls (at 15) was expelled for playing hookie and plying her wares in the city centre). Some dogmatic religious approaches are, as you say, a bit creepy, and can scar a young person for life.

Perushka - I feel you have missed a trick. Some religion is theistic, some is not. So, we could say that what religion has to offer the professed atheist is Buddhism and Taoism. I am a professed atheist and am convinced of the truth of Buddhism's philosophical scheme. This muddles the issues a bit. If an atheist approaches the Bible with the idea that theism is often a personification of natural forces, and can be interpreted as such, then I think such writings have much to offer, or at least more than they would otherwise. It just means working hard to clear the text of its overlay of folk-divinities and hyperbolic propaganda, and seeing through the simplified explanations, which are often of the kind that has babies being delivered by storks and found under goosebury bushes. A capable scientist should be able to see through the teachings for the masses after a bit of detective work in comparative religion. Hell, even many Christians say that it would be wrong to state that God exists. We have to get past bashing the imagery and metaphors and get at the message itself.

I rather think the jury is out on the survival advantages of modern technological civilisation. It may turn out to be the death of us. Hopefully not, but it is a possible scenario. The comments about religion here seem a bit too broad. Religion can be the search for truth, but it can also be a way to bury our head in the sand. It can be highly organised method for discovering profound knowledge, but it can also be an excuse for never having to learn anything at all. It can be a real benefit to science, but can also be the rejection of the scientific method and even of reason itself. It can be a motivation to turn the other cheek, and it can be a motive for taking an eye for an eye. Religion can be pretty much whatever we want to make of it. It can include the idea that we should take things on faith, and it can be the complete refusal to take anything on faith. It will depend on what sort of person we are, and especially on how rational and scientific our approach is to the teachings and practices. Science, with its surrounding halo of speculative metaphysics and pseudo-science, can be most of these things also. So I always worry about arguing for or against religion. It's a bit like arguing for or against politics. On that last point about progress in science and religion - Where religion teaches a particular philosophical position and soteriological doctrine it will never change. It is supposed to be true and the truth never changes. It would be nice to see some progress in the monotheistic religious sects, wherever faith is given as much credence as realisation and all sorts of fundamentally incoherent ideas circulate, but we cannot expect progress in, say, Taoism, where what Lao Tsu said is still supposed to be true. In these more philosophically sound religions any progress would be more about improving the language, explaining things better, finding better methods and so on, not in changes to the world-description, which will never change.

I think it is not religion that is the problem. It is people who are able to believe that they know what is true when they do not. This approach is encouraged in some religious schools and confused with faith, and it is also common characteristic of critics of religion, but not all religion takes this anti-intellectual approach. In the end I'd say the problem is with dogmatism on all sides, and not with religion per se. I must say, though, that while I believe that the Islam of the Sufi's is a true doctrine, and while I could hardly be a more sympathetic interpreter of the book, I find much of the Quran distasteful. There is a serious clash of cultures going on in my head. I try to like it, but the language is very difficult. For the same reason I find the Old Testament difficult. We have to appreciate the context in which these texts were written, however, which for many of us might as well be another planet. As for the current violence in Islamic countries, it could be argued that it is mostly caused by Christians. I wouldn't want to have that argument, (definitely not), but it could be argued. And then, when a religious fundamentalist like Tony Blair is prominently involved in the relevant political processes in Islamic countries it does not fill one with hope. I blame him personally for most of the current violence and chaos, and thus would accuse Christians of causing at least as much of the recent troubles as Muslims. As to the OP, I think the best hope for Islam in the West is that scientists and rational philosophers start to study religion more carefully in order to sort the wheat from the chaff on behalf of the rest of us. The current blanket dismissal leads to a lack of scholarship, is not getting us anywhere and works against any meaningful dialogue. It seems very impressive that this thread did not immediately descend into chaos.

In that case pardon my paranoia. It was a good idea to cut it all out.

My hijack? I never hijacked anything. It was other people who started banging on about consciousness. I just wanted to keep the discussion away from the realms of fantasy. This forum is fascinating. It is the only place I've ever been where it is impossible to have a sensible conversation. One mention of a trigger-word and all hell breaks loose. It's like an evangelist rally. Anyway, removing my comments seems to have had the effect of banning me from the discussion, since I can't see it anymore. I assume this is intentional. Sorry that I cannot take part to reply to the endless barrage of daft comments directed at the imaginary person that is being attacked here.

This is odd. I'm receiving notifications of new posts in this thread, but when I come here I can now only see the first four posts and nothing else. I used to see the whole thread. Maybe my browser is misbehaving. .

I see. So we can say any old thing in this discussion. This approach would seem to render the discussion useless. At no time did I promote any particular view of consciousness, and I had no desire to discuss it. When someone makes an unscientific and untestable claim about the world we should all object to it, even if it is about consciousness. I was amazed that nobody else agreed with me on a science forum. I completely agree about getting back to the OP's interesting question. But let's do it with some precision.

Thanks Imatfaal. The Wikki article I already knew, but that FAQ link was exactly what I was after. That's the level at which I like to study these things, and you will be amazed to hear that it covers all I wanted to know. I didn't meant to be rude about your philosophical remarks, by the way, but I was asking only about the science, and both you and I know that you have no idea whether idealism is true or false. As it happens, I suspect that your view is on the way out, and I'd enjoy discussing this with you since you usually talk good sense. But I have learnt to stick to science here. Anyway, thanks, my question has been answered. \

I'll ignore the personal opinions on philosophy, Imatfaal, but thanks for the link. I'll check it out. It seems from what you say that I am confusing a Bose-Einstein condensate with an ideal condensate, while I had thought one was an example of the other. My mistake.

Hi folks. I recently posted the following on my blog more or less as is, in the hope that somebody who knows about such things would be around, but no luck. So I thought I repost it here. Please ignore the idealism references - no need to argue about that. I just want to get a better handle on the properties of an ideal condensate. Thanks for any replies. I have been wondering about the properties of an ‘ideal gas’ in relation to idealism, specifically a ‘Bose-Einstein condensate’. It was a thought put into my head by Schrodinger, who speaks of the mystics as ‘particles in an ideal gas’. It seems that the Pauli-exclusion principle usually limits the number of bosons that can occupy the same energy level. But if the bosons form an ideal condensate then they can all occupy exactly the same energy level. They would no longer interact with each other. That is, they would no longer behave as a multitude of discrete entities causally linked. They would now be in a state of quantum entanglement such that they might as well all be the same boson, a choir in perfect harmony. Or something like this. I wish I had a better grasp of the science. There is some talk of the early universe being a condensate of such a kind. What I am wondering is whether it would be accurate to say, in some sense at least, that a truly perfect Bose-Einstein condensate could be said to be a multitude of things and a singular phenomenon at the same time, depending on how we look at it. If so, then it seems very likely that an ideal condensate would be a useful idea in discussions of global consciousness. This would be a turn up. I’m way out my depths here and wouldn’t dare say much more. Still, I have a feeling this is the right way to go for a physical description of an Idealist universe. But I do not know enough about these condensates. Anyone care to help me understand this better? No need to engage with the idealism topic, which is idle speculation at this point. When I go looking for info it tends to be highly mathematical, which is far more detail than I want and over my head.

Strange - it is irrelevant what evidence I have. I did not make the claim. I was complaining about lack of rigour. Reaper - I agree completely. To the extent I might be guilty I apologise. I would also like to hear more about the original question.