Religion in Science-Fiction?

[McCoy]

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction?

 

I also would handle Mohammed' date=' Buddha, Zeus, Thor, and every other deity in the same way. Christianity doesn't get any special consideration in this regard.[/quote']

Some would disagree with your classification of Mohamed and Buddha as deities. Mohamed, anyway. It is -- interesting that the Buddha is not deified in Buddhism, but has been in some other religions.

 

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

--some guy in 1941, Albert Something, I think.

Have you ever looked that up in context? He met something different that what most people who use that quote seem to think.

[Christopher]

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction?

 

Have you ever looked that up in context? He met something different that what most people who use that quote seem to think.

I looked that up, found it here:

http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm#TWO (4th Paragaph, 2nd chapter)

Now, even though the realms of religion and science in themselves are clearly marked off from each other, nevertheless there exist between the two strong reciprocal relationships and dependencies. Though religion may be that which determines the goal, it has, nevertheless, learned from science, in the broadest sense, what means will contribute to the attainment of the goals it has set up. But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

[Christopher]

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction?

 

But here is jet anotehr things from him, to set even that in a different context:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/may/12/peopleinscience.religion

[McCoy]

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction?

 

I looked that up, found it here:

http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm#TWO (4th Paragaph, 2nd chapter)

Now, even though the realms of religion and science in themselves are clearly marked off from each other, nevertheless there exist between the two strong reciprocal relationships and dependencies. Though religion may be that which determines the goal, it has, nevertheless, learned from science, in the broadest sense, what means will contribute to the attainment of the goals it has set up. But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

[Emphasis altered]

 

That's the context. "But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason."

 

Didn't mean what most people mean when he said "religion," but his own definition of faith in truth, understanding, and rationality.

[megaplayboy]

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction?

 

[Emphasis altered]

 

That's the context. "But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason."

 

Didn't mean what most people mean when he said "religion," but his own definition of faith in truth, understanding, and rationality.

 

But, of course, it reinforces my earlier point, that there is a sort of faith involved in the belief that "the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason." To some degree, that's a has-yet-to-be-proven belief system. There's a vast amount of stuff about the "regulations" we don't know about, and some of what we think we know could be overturned at any moment(case in point: the LHC and the search for the Higgs boson--if one isn't found in the next year, we'll have to revise a bunch of theories).

[McCoy]

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction?

 

But' date=' of course, it reinforces my earlier point, that there is a sort of faith involved in the belief that "the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason." To some degree, that's a has-yet-to-be-proven belief system. There's a vast amount of stuff about the "regulations" we don't know about, and some of what we think we know could be overturned at any moment(case in point: the LHC and the search for the Higgs boson--if one isn't found in the next year, we'll have to revise a bunch of theories).[/quote']

The belief that what we perceive as reality has an actual existence and is not merely a dream of sleeping Vishnu is not only a has-yet-to-be-proven belief system, it's a can-never-be-proven belief system. Once we acknowledge that all we know is filtered through imperfect senses and imperfect thought processes, we can never be certain of anything.

 

But consider the alternative, if you and I and Kara and Rachel do not have an actual objective existence, nothing we do matters. So we may as well act as if we do exist.

[Orion]

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction?

 

Some would disagree with your classification of Mohamed and Buddha as deities. Mohamed' date=' anyway. It is -- interesting that the Buddha is not deified in Buddhism, but has been in some other religions.[/quote']

 

I suppose I didn't write the sentence clear enough, as I didn't mean to say Mohammed and Buddha were deities, but that I would handle any historical figure of religious importance, as well as deities in general, in the same manner. That is, you probably wouldn't be able to find the person, and if you did, it's very unlikely that they would appear as the current belief claims them to have been. Depending on my mood at the moment, I might treat them with respect, or make them a raving lunatic. Either way, I would never show that they are an actual deity or a true prophet, but wouldn't come out and directly say they were not. Sort of a "here he is, make of it what you will" thing.

 

Related to this, has anyone read The Light of Other Days by Arthur C Clarke? People are able to use wormhole technology to view any place or time. Along with the affect on society from a total lack of privacy, there's the affect of the religious viewing how their religious started. The way that Christianity was handled in that novel is how I'd likely handle time travel and religious events.

[megaplayboy]

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction?

 

The belief that what we perceive as reality has an actual existence and is not merely a dream of sleeping Vishnu is not only a has-yet-to-be-proven belief system, it's a can-never-be-proven belief system. Once we acknowledge that all we know is filtered through imperfect senses and imperfect thought processes, we can never be certain of anything.

 

But consider the alternative, if you and I and Kara and Rachel do not have an actual objective existence, nothing we do matters. So we may as well act as if we do exist.

 

Well, that's a bit of a different level than what I'm talking about. I guess I'm mostly referring to the notion that we'll finally formulate some Theory of Everything that will enable us to "do the math" and essentially "explain" all physical phenomena in the universe in a comprehensible manner. I just took a gander at wiki's entry for "unsolved problems in physics" and it could have been subtitled, "We still don't know a damn thing for sure about anything".

[Tom Carman]

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction?

 

Chapter 6

 

"The Babel fish" said The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quietly, "is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.

 

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this:

"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"But," says Man, "The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."

"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.

 

"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

 

Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his bestselling book Well That About Wraps It Up For God.

Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

 

Quotes from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

[McCoy]

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction?

 

Well' date=' that's a bit of a different level than what I'm talking about. I guess I'm mostly referring to the notion that we'll finally formulate some Theory of Everything that will enable us to "do the math" and essentially "explain" all physical phenomena in the universe in a comprehensible manner. I just took a gander at wiki's entry for "unsolved problems in physics" and it could have been subtitled, "We still don't know a damn thing for sure about anything". [/quote']

Yep. Gravity. What could be simpler? Except we have two major theories and an upstart that looks like a crackpot idea except that no one's been able to disprove it yet. And if Modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) does work out, dark matter/energy drop out of the equation, which IIRC changes everything from the Standard Model of particle physics to the very shape of the universe itself.

 

Before the final exam in my freshman physics course, my Professor told the class "I have some Bad News and some worse news for you. The Bad News, at least half of what I taught you this year is wrong. The Worse News, I don't know what half, and neither does anyone else. So never decide something is impossible and dismiss it unexamined because it contradicts something I taught you. Enjoy your test."

[dmjalund]

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction?

 

It is a supposition or hypothesis until proven or disproven.

[Ragitsu]

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction?

 

It is a supposition or hypothesis until proven or disproven.

 

What is?

[Christopher]

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction?

 

That's the context. "But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling' date=' however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason."[/quote']

Here I must disagree with Albert. For me there is no believe in a "Truth" or the "believe that the Laws of Physics are rational" nessesary. The world is at is it. And every fact only stays, until it is disprooven and replaced by a new fact.

When some part of the laws of Physics are not Rational, then they ARE not rational. But nothing else happens. This is just another fact, that stands until disprooven like every other fact we have uncovered so far.

[Midas]

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction?

 

Originally Posted by Midas

Bit of a thread jack here, but how would world buiders handle such inquiries. The simplest, and cheesiest, way is to say that "Nobody knows why, but time travel to the classical era of Earth doesn't work. And no, neither does travelling to the same year on Alpha Centauri then FTL to Earth."

 

I also would handle Mohammed' date=' Buddha, Zeus, Thor, and every other deity in the same way. Christianity doesn't get any special consideration in this regard.[/quote']

 

(Reversing the order of your paragraphs here)

Let me try this again (everyone should be good at something. I'm good at incoherence).

 

I used Christianity because it would be the easiest religion to check.

 

Compare the Old Testament: Some guy in the late neolithic or early bronze age, who'se name has come down to us as Joseph, was sold into slavery, and wound up working for somebody with the title "Pharoah."

 

Sometime later, Some indeterminent time later, some other guy, who's name has come down to us as "Moses" was working for a different guy with the title "Pharoah." All we are told about the later one is "He knew not Joseph." NEway, "Moses" became the leader of a group of unhappy laborers who packed up and headed east. So this group of otherwise anonymous goatherders crossed into the Sinai, and four decades later got to Mount Nebo. Your temporal archeologist is going to have a lot of stuff to keep track of, here.

 

OTOH:

In the court of the historical figure Pontius Pilate:

Is there a Schismatic Miracle Worker being tried for promoting sedition?

Y/N

Found guilty and executed under Roman Law?

Y/N

Empty tomb three days later?

Y/N

 

See where I'm coming from? The place should be more overrun with time travellers than Hitler's chalet.

 

I could never do it that way. They might find a delusional rabble rouser' date=' a genuinely wise religious person, or nothing at all. If found, very few, if any, people of that time would think he was a deity, and general society would consider all such believers to be nutjobs. I would play the early Christians as they are known to historians, and not as claimed to be by many faithful. In short, time travel always is portrayed historically correct.[/quote']

 

It would be interesting to see my players' reaction if they were watching the events and Joshua ben Joseph turned to them and spoke in perfect Anglic: "Oh there you are! That little weasel Judas betrayed me. He took the thirty pieces of silver and ran like a scaled cat. So, thank Me, I had a contingency, which is you. See, what you need to do is put the Libsmack of Death on me in a little while, so we can get this story to the fore ordained end. OBTW" (and he really says "Oh Be Te Dubbleyu") that 'some here' remark, that was directed at you, bubba."

 

See the thing is, nobody knows what truly happened. Even as a believer, I consider the biblical narratives...unlikely. But hey, if you want absurd, consider God's prank on biology: The duckbilled platypus. Then Satan got into the act and created something equally absurd, and demonic as well - The College Professor.

[Christopher]

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction?

 

See the thing is' date=' nobody knows what truly happened. Even as a believer, I consider the biblical narratives...unlikely.[/quote']

I certainly do not believe what is written in the bible, or any other book written by man claiming to be from god. The problem is that there was a lot of tales and then a comitee of normal humans, not even those guys who actually claim to have ever seen him, decided what of all those stories to write down and call "The Bible".

I mean if god existed, he created the entire universe. He would certainly not have told stuff like "the sun rotates around the earth" when it is obviously not what is happening. It could be very well that he said: "There was the Big Bang. Before it I aligned the Qantums (or the stuff below them) in a way that, among other planets, earth would bring forth intelligent life". And they just didn't have the knowledge to understand it, translate it properly (across 2.000 Years), keep the rights stuff in, etc. Maybe the important stuff was even left out or never even recorded, because it sounded like the ravings of a lunatic to them in that time.

 

I even heard (third level knowledge) there is evidence that the earlier bibles never said "Suicide get's you into hell". Only in the middle age, when religion was used to support the sataus quo as godly mandate, it was changed: Apparently too many peasants decided it was easier to go straigh to heaven instead of suffering on earth. So suicide was added to the list of "things that get you to hell".

[bigbywolfe]

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction?

 

What is?

Anything. Everything. As opposed to Christopher's claim that certain things are facts until disproven.

[Christopher]

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction?

 

Anything. Everything. As opposed to Christopher's claim that certain things are facts until disproven.

Would you say that the existence of gravity is a sceintiffically prooven fact?

 

If the anwser is yes:

How? There is no direct evidence that gravity exists. Sure, there are a lot of observations that so far only leave the coclusion that gravity exists. We can observe effects and attribute them to gravity. But there is no proof that gravity (or that what we understand it to be) exists and really behaves that way we know it today. So it was never prooven that gravity exists.*

 

The chance to succesfully disprove that gravity exists, as well as prooving me the existance of god, is at least 1 : X, where X is the number of facts in the universe (a number smaler than infinite but larger than 0). And it could be better, because more than one fact could apply (making it a W : X, where W is any number smaller than X and larger than 0).

The chance to ever proof to a beliver that god does not exists, is 0 : X.

That is why I said:

Things are either a fact, that is only valid until disprooven.

Or a believe, that cannot be disprooven.

 

________

*For example: In the 'Discworld' series the creator placed fake dinosaur skelletons in the earth, "to misguide the archeologists". So, what if a potentially all powerfull, omniscient being created an equally onmiscient Computer with a Infnite Powersource and gave him the "Specification for my newest project. It's called G.R.A.V.I.T.Y. You have the invisible forcfields, processign power and energy to make it happen. But let it look like a force of nature, not something artificial."

And why this? Well, it's a practical joke. because you feel really dumb when you find that Computer and realise Gravity is somethign totally different.

[bigbywolfe]

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction?

 

The effects of gravity are observable and factual. It's a fact that crap doesn't generally randomly fly upwards or off the planet without outside forces involved. There is a Law of Gravity. "Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation states: F=Gm1m2/d2". However, why gravity works the way it does is a theory. The law of Gravity is a fact, unless it gets disproven. Yes, things we think are facts can get disproven when new information is gathered. That doesn't mean that everything is a "fact" until it is disproven.

[McCoy]

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction?

 

The effects of gravity are observable and factual. It's a fact that crap doesn't generally randomly fly upwards or off the planet without outside forces involved. There is a Law of Gravity. "Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation states: F=Gm1m2/d2".

So if that's the law, why does the math not work out for the perihelion precession of Mercury's orbit?

 

Newton's "Law" describes about 99% of the data we have. General Relativity, 99.9%, almost to the limits of our instruments, almost to the point that any observed discrepancies are more likely due to limitations on the precision of the measurements than actual discrepancies. Almost. MOND, if test confirm the theory, would explain 99.99% of our observations without relying on Dark Matter/Energy. Science can be thought of as a process of adopting then discarding increasingly accurate models.

[bigbywolfe]

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction?

 

So perhaps it was a bad example. Earlier someone pointed out that evolution was a theory, then he stated it is a fact until proven wrong. That's not what the worf "fact" means and it is not how the scientific method works. I'm not saying that pointing out that something is "just" a theory is a legitimate arguement against it, just that Christopher definition is wrong both semantically and scientifically. This was pointed out, yet his responses have insisted his definition is right in the face of the "fact" that it is not and has done so rather harshly and rudely to anyone who disaggrees with him.

[Clonus]

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction?

 

. Science can be thought of as a process of adopting then discarding increasingly accurate models.

 

However our model of things is not the fact of things. "Gravity exists" is a fact. Our laws and theories of gravitation are imperfect attempts to figure out how it works and what it is, but we will never discover that gravity does not exist. "Evolution happens" is a fact. But it is not a fact that we entirely understand.

[McCoy]

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction?

 

However our model of things is not the fact of things. "Gravity exists" is a fact. Our laws and theories of gravitation are imperfect attempts to figure out how it works and what it is' date=' but we will never discover that gravity does not exist. "Evolution happens" is a fact. But it is not a fact that we entirely understand.[/quote']

No, "Gravity exist" is a hypothesis/theory that fits current observed data. For all we know, there is no such thing as gravity and tiny invisible angels push things large and small to simulate gravity. "Evolution happens," little different. Evolution is a change in allele frequency in a population over time. We can look at a population and say "Evolution has happened" as a fact because we can measure it. However, the implied "and will continue to happen" is a theory.

 

Mind you, the theories that gravity exist and evolution will continue to happen are PROBABLY correct, certainly I wouldn't bet against them, but they are not facts. And we do have a much more complete understanding of the nuts and bolts of evolution than gravity.

[dmjalund]

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction?

 

Gravity as a phenomenon consists of an overwhelming number of observations, and thus is a fact. The reason behind gravity, isn't.

 

even if gravity is an employment program for angels, it still is.

[Clonus]

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction?

 

No' date=' "Gravity exist" is a hypothesis/theory that fits current observed data. For all we know, there is no such thing as gravity and tiny invisible angels push things large and small to simulate gravity. [/quote'] "

 

 

How would that not be gravity?

[McCoy]

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction?

 

"

 

 

How would that not be gravity?

Because it would be a simulation of gravity that would stop when/if the tiny angels got tired/changed their minds/got different orders.