That's a far cry from claiming that he came up with the idea.

Fortunately, thanks to a whole host of things which scientists have no way to understand or describe and which terrify them to the point of hatred and invective, ...

... I was actually talking about love, emotion and simple compassion.

Once again, your prejudice is showing through loud and clear.

Fortunately, thanks to a whole host of things which scientists have no way to understand or describe and which terrify them to the point of hatred and invective, ...

... I was actually talking about love, emotion and simple compassion.

You're not even content to label scientists as incapable[i/i] of "love, emotion and simple compassion" - no, according to you we react to these emotions with "hatred and invective".

An article on string theory in a recent New Yorker casts new light on what "science has taught us."

JL

The sociological aspects considered, descibed as "surprising" by the author, are so clear to me as an insider, that I don't understand what they haven't been talked about more by scientists.

I thought an interesting idea presented in the New Yorker article was that Sociologists consider science to be no more accurate or "true" than any other viable field of study carried out by us humanos. I'll have to look into that--I never read much if any sociology.

Per the discusions of Christianity, I think it's a slightly sketchy note to think of any religion as "creating" a particular ethos or philosophy. Most religions--evn those that have become terribly distorted over time--were founded by folks or a single sage who had direct experience of the divine--and that sage did not invent or create the divine, but rather did his best to explain his experiences from his particular perspective. And that's mainly what we get from religions: a glance at the divine, colord by the personality, time, and social constructs of the person who had the original experiences. So-called sacred texts (like the Bible) allow people get attuned to the spirit of the thing with less of the accretions society has stacked on over time--but even here the map (the texts) is not the territory (ther divine experiences).

That much said, a honest and thorough examination of the Bible will divulge a whole lot of wisdom and heart to someone open to it. If your mind is such that it cannot process anything but facts and figures you might find the text devoid of "content," but that doesn't necessarly mean it actually is. This is simply another perspective, likely saying moe about the person who said it than anything else.

JL

This image has about the same angular diameter as a dime placed 75 feet away.

Blondy decreed:

"vivalargo wrote: I thought an interesting idea presented in the New Yorker article was that Sociologists consider science to be no more accurate or "true" than any other viable field of study carried out by us humanos. I'll have to look into that--I never read much if any sociology.

That's because sociology is a pseudo-science."

That's pretty funny, actually. But judging from the one and only class I ever took in sociology, it was no so much a psydo-science as (seemingly) utter s---. But that's not fair. Smarts are spread over many fields, and each field has it's stars. Also, I understand that statistics play a huge role in sociology these days, and even while a crafty dude can cook the data this way and that, the field must have some good stuff in there somewhere.

But more interesting still is Blondy's use of the word "psudo-science."

The aim was to diss sociology as so much jive by virtue of being faux science, the implication being that science itself is the benchmark of The Truth.

Funny thing is that this assumption is the very thing the sociologists are saying is a sham, that science is just another mode of inquiry with no more claim to the plain truth than any other serious study. In this sense a sociologist wanting to diss science might call science psudo-sociology.

I suspect--but don't know--that the sociologists point is that most every serious mode of inquiry has it's own definitions and criteria for what constitutes truth, and that one mode's criteria is almost certainly no more or no less valid and rigorous than another. The tendency to favor one mode over another is likely more a statement about one person's personality and basic nature than about what is actually "true."

Blondy wrote: "Truth is what you subscribe to. What you're talking about calls to mind a search for something "greater"..."

What you subscribe to is, in fact, what you subscribe to. It might be true, sweet pea, and it might not. Moreover, there ain't nothing greater than the truth. And there's a strata of truth (also know as objective reality in the esoteric tradition) that remains unshakably true regardles of what we humans think about that truth, or feel about it, or sense or imagine or say or communicate with each other or to the dog on the sofa or the partridge in the pear tree. In other words, truth is far more than a rhetorical or mental construct or a "performance" by-product. We run the risk of playing God when we harbor beliefs that in some way we create what is true.

Look long and hard into that remarkable photo of that strip of stars and sense what's true other there. What do you find in that place beyond your thoughts?

Its funny, that particular image, coupled with the first public release of the Hubble Deep Field led me to perhaps my only experience of the numinous, what some might call a religious experience. After seeing those, I felt so blessed (I use the term in the most secular way imaginable) to even exist, let alone exist in such a way that I can know just how small I am. Can you imagine the odds that we might survive the cosmic maelstrom to reach where we are today? Whether by the hand of God or the hand of probability, we have been given something amazing, sacred and unfathomably rare. It seems incredibly foolish, to me, to squander that gift killing each other, or the only planet we've got because we're convinced that one species (indeed, one subset of that species) on that microscopic, insignifcant dot has meaning in the universe to the point of destroying the only material gift ever given us.

...Sagan, btw, besides being one of the greatest scientific minds of our time, also had very strong religious beliefs...

They are both internally consistent ways of explaining different facets of our existence.

This is my favorite discussion to have.. the one where the "hard fact" scientist can't accept that religion has consistency and value, but will take great leaps of faith to accept scientific theories that may eventually be disproven.

I'm chuckling already.