Posted on 08/17/2011 6:57:10 AM PDT by Todd Kinsey
The next time I read the Heisenberg uncertainty principle it will be the first. I have been upfront about being unschooled in the sciences. I function with limited intellectual capacity and intuitive reasoning. I reason from street level rather than Ivory Tower heights. That is the best I can do. Sometimes I hit, sometimes I miss.
. . . Professor Richard Dawkins, Debate/Interview excerpt between Professor Dawkins and Dr Collins, conducted at the Time & Life Building in New York City on Sept. 30, 2006.
And in his frequent public statements, Professor Dawkins has been conscientious in crediting the Theory of Evolution for his certainty.
To see, one must look.
From those words, it sounds like Professor Dawkins (whom I've never heard of, nor know anything about) is a devout atheist who uses the fact of the theory of evolution as "proof" of the non-existence of God. In reality, it is not.
In that, he is the exact opposite side of the coin from the literal creationists, in that both sides take the ToE as "proof" that God does not exist. But he is happy to have such "proof" while the literal creationists must grasp at anything to try to invalidate the theory because if they can't discredit it, then they must accept as truth the unpleasant idea that God does not exist.
In reality, the ToE is no more and no less than any other theory, in that it provides an excellent framework within which to design and conduct scientific research, but is useless for trying to ascertain whether or not God exists.
That professor does a huge disservice to science by trying to claim that the ToE is definitive proof that there is no God. Science simply can't be used to answer metaphysical questions.
Wiki Professor Dawkins. He is worth a look. Instructive.
You account the Professor a “devout” Atheist. He places himself anywhere from devout Agnostic to fervent Atheist, depending on the headwinds he is bucking.
Yeah. Scarcely an eve on the computer goes by that I don't spend ten minutes or so on the old rug sweeper picking up all the spitwads.
I looked over the wiki (I don't want to read the whole thing). My previous assessment was correct: his atheism absolutely takes the form of a religious faith. He certainly does the cause of increasing scientific literacy no favors, when he states as fact his pure opinion that science can somehow disprove the existence of God.
I don’t blame you.
”his atheism absolutely takes the form of a religious faith.”
I would say so, yes.
”He certainly does the cause of increasing scientific literacy no favors, when he states as fact his pure opinion that science can somehow disprove the existence of God.”
Yet, Dawkins’ opinion, as you correctly characterize it, is loudly trumpeted as indisputable fact. That Dawkins does no favors for the cause of scientific literacy has been my contention from the start, but you should hear some of the heinous misdeeds of which I am accused, when I raise the issue of the misrepresentations of Dawkins & co (LOL).
“Well the word delusion means a falsehood which is widely believed, and I think that is true of religion. It is remarkably widely believed, it’s as though almost all of the population or a substantial proportion of the population believed that they had been abducted by aliens in flying saucers. You’d call that a delusion. I think God is a similar delusion.”
. . . from the same Debate/Interview
The very title of Dawkins’ latest book (The God Delusion) is as clear a demonstration as one would want that Dawkins deems religious people (most particularly Christians) to be delusional, or worse (misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, and capriciously malevolent), and he charges the same in his book. The book’s title likewise makes it manifest that the existence of a god is what he considers Christians to be delusional about.
Just a small preview of what has been going on, apparently unbeknownst to you.
Most of the supposed battle between Science and Christians would not even be necessary if Christians did not find themselves trapped in a culture increasingly composed of an obscene filth that threatens them and their children at every turn.
It’s a chimera to believe it possible to achieve a values-free education where no one’s culture preferences predominate. If we chose to surrender education to government, then we will get the education that government believes is in its own best interest, and it would seem that this is what we have done. Right now government appears to believe its interest to be an education controlled by unions like the SEIU, ACORN, GLBT, the ACLU, environmental crazies, Liberation Theologists, Marxist/Socialist thugs, NAMBLA, and illegal immigrants (my apologies to any radical leftwing nutjob I’ve omitted). Are these the influences you prefer?
I think likely not.
LOLOL!
A similar point is being raised over here. Perhaps Plantinga's thoughts and your insights should be mentioned there as well?
Don't worry about that overmuch, dear MNR: In all likelihood LeGrande is also "unschooled" in the matter.
Evidently he invokes the Heisenberg uncertainty principle as some great magical mantra, the sheer invocation of which disposes of the very possibility of any following debate. Which has the added side benefit of precluding any question about his understanding of that self-same principle.
Heisenberg isolated multiple "uncertainty relations" that pertain to observations of the quantum world. What has come to be known as the uncertainty principle is a sort of logical summing up of these various uncertainties.
But Heisenberg did not like that term "uncertainty." He preferred the term "inexactness." His colleague Niels Bohr further weighed in with the suggestions of "unsureness," or even better, "indeterminacy."
Thus the "uncertainty principle" is more accurately described (logically) as the "indeterminacy principle." And the reason for that is "uncertainty" implies something that we could know, but don't; while "indeterminacy" implies something that we can't know, in principle.
Thus concepts based on direct experience do not apply in the quantum world. We are led to appreciate Bohr's realization that natural science is not nature itself. Rather it expresses the relation between man and nature and thus in some critical sense is dependent on man....
I imagine in LeGrande's world, if two descriptions of a natural phenomenon are mutually exclusive, then at least one of them must be wrong.
Which is to fail to grasp the principle of complementarity. Complementarity describes the situation where both of two seemingly mutually exclusive quantum behaviors — particle or wave — are necessary to completely understand the properties of the object under observation.
The problem that cannot be overcome is that one cannot see BOTH at once; so you have to choose which to see. And the really weird thing is, whether an object behaves as a particle or a wave basically depends on the apparatus you choose to view it with. AND the apparatus, the object, and the observer of same are all part of one overall quantum system; and thus as parts mutually affect one another....
That sort of insight must bear hard on "know-it-alls"....
Glad to see you're still not taking any wooden nickels, dear MNR!
Thank you so very much for writing!
heheheheheheh ... I see you’ve figured out the little man who calls himself ‘Grande’.
Thank you so very much for that beautiful summary of the issue, dearest sister in Christ!
Thanks for sharing.
My wife has been a NASA contractor for most of her career, so I’ve been fortunate enough to see a lot of amazing things.
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