The illogic of Atheism

For my purpose in that post it doesn't matter really if Heisenberg said it, the point I was making just quoted him for brevity's sake. It goes back to the Lewontin quote I mentioned twice in this thread about how there is a desire to take non-theisitic claims at face value in order to keep science academia divorced from God. 

I've used the Lewontin article so many times, both here and Skeptiko, that I started to think that everyone would soon know it by heart. Nevertheless, it bears repeating and reminding often because he states what we all know to be true of atheists and materialists. So, for the uninitiated, here once again is the unadulterated truth:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.

I find it somewhat mystifying and yet somewhat gratifying that people on this forum are prepared to not only tolerate Steve without banning him but also continue to engage with him even though he is clueless. He doesn't undertand the philosophy so dismisses it out of hand, he doesn't understand the science so he relies on those who have become famous for their atheism or skepticism rather than actually attempting to comprehend. He complains about people not being nice to him while he imagines he has the intellectual high ground and can therefore patronise people who are clearly streets ahead of him in both intellect and knowledge. Yet, after years and years of this he is still posting the same old crap daily.

Out of interest, I wondered what would happen to the equivalent - a religious fundamentalist - on an atheist forum. The first search I did came up with what looks like a typical example: appropriately named "Atheist Forums" (they ask for donations, by the way, so we should be ever grateful for Laird's generosity). This forum actually has a "Hall of Shame" for those they have kicked out. Here are a few comments about the people so dismissed - consider Steve while reading them.

"Doesn't realise that all atheists are at least 10 times smarter than him."



I'm thinking we handle disagreement a bit better here.

I'm thinking we handle disagreement a bit better here.

Yeah, that was my point, really. That's what I meant by finding it gratifying.

[Laird]

they ask for donations, by the way, so we should be ever grateful for Laird's generosity

It's kind of you to say that, Kamarling, but hosting Psience Quest costs me no more than I was already paying for my pre-existing hosting package. Ian did contribute money that he otherwise wouldn't otherwise have had to spend (on domain name registration, and, later, on DMCA registration), and I know that you attempted to contribute money towards that too but the international banking system wouldn't oblige (or maybe that got resolved in the end).

[Laird]

Ian did contribute money that he otherwise wouldn't otherwise have had to spend (on domain name registration, and, later, on DMCA registration), and I know that you attempted to contribute money towards that too but the international banking system wouldn't oblige (or maybe that got resolved in the end).

I should also have mentioned that Doug put up the original money for domain name registration before Ian reimbursed him. Sorry for excluding you, Doug!

Thanks to all of you

Re: laws as discoveries - I'd agree there are just regularities that still have no explanation save for being brute facts. Why do the regularities hold enough to be thought of as inviolate laws?

CPT symmetry.

CPT symmetry.

Could you elaborate?

CPT symmetry.

Anybody who cites CPT symmetry gets a hearty "hello" from me.  My limited and humble understanding of change, parity and time reversal - is modeled as computational output within deterministic processes.  However, jumping from CPT to it being a root cause of Universality is a far, far leap.  

The first counter-factual observation is that not all processes are shown to be time reversible! (humpty dumpty in thermodynamics)
From Wiki

 Relation to thermodynamics
As was first argued by Rolf Landauer of IBM,[5] in order for a computational process to be physically reversible, it must also be logically reversible. Landauer's principleis the rigorously valid observation that the oblivious erasure of n bits of known information must always incur a cost of nkT ln(2) in thermodynamic entropy. A discrete, deterministic computational process is said to be logically reversible if the transition function that maps old computational states to new ones is a one-to-one function; i.e. the output logical states uniquely determine the input logical states of the computational operation.
For computational processes that are nondeterministic (in the sense of being probabilistic or random), the relation between old and new states is not a single-valued function, and the requirement needed to obtain physical reversibility becomes a slightly weaker condition, namely that the size of a given ensemble of possible initial computational states does not decrease, on average, as the computation proceeds forwards. 

Anybody who cites CPT symmetry gets a hearty "hello" from me.  My limited and humble understanding of change, parity and time reversal - is modeled as computational output within deterministic processes.  However, jumping from CPT to it being a root cause of Universality is a far, far leap.  

The first counter-factual observation is that not all processes are shown to be time reversible! (humpty dumpty in thermodynamics)
From Wiki

You may want to brush up on what "CPT symmetry" means.

Linda