The split between religion and science does not exist

[Cargést]

"Always be aware of the macrocosm"?

[scourge]

It appears science is in serious trouble. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer?currentPage=all

As some thought from antiquity would have it, declension goes from Being to being and finally to nothingness as starlight from a sun past the planets and out into cold deep space, or water from a wellspring to delta to deep sea. Science still has no handle on this ancient understanding save for perhaps the Second Law of Thermodynamics if it were applicable to all existence.

[scourge]

Metaphysics as the foundation of science, philosophy as an exact method to discover this foundation: These are central themes in the Kant-Friesian philosophy which, at the beginning of the 20th century, Leonard Nelson, using the methods of mathematical axiomatics, further developed into interdisciplinary research programmes. Nelson carried out this research programme in his ethics but his untimely death prevented a systematic presentation of his natural philosophy and his doctrine of method.

http://www.friesian.com/nelson.htm

[BillHopkins]

It appears science is in serious trouble. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer?currentPage=all

As some thought from antiquity would have it, declension goes from Being to being and finally to nothingness as starlight from a sun past the planets and out into cold deep space, or water from a wellspring to delta to deep sea. Science still has no handle on this ancient understanding save for perhaps the Second Law of Thermodynamics if it were applicable to all existence.

This statement is rediculous. Science has as much of a handle on this 'ancient understanding' as you do. I.e. it is a hypothesis. It may or may not be true (you can't know for sure). However it is one that science cannot test, because science is, low and behold, empirical and you can't observe Being going to being and fanally to nothingness, as that would include the observer.

So you're basically saying something like: "Ha! suck shit science, you can't test something that can't be tested! Got you there!". As far as *entertaining the proposition* "Being to being and finally to nothingness as starlight from a sun past the planets and out into cold deep space, or water from a wellspring to delta to deep sea", science can entertain it, as a thought, just as well as you can. It just can't prove it or disprove it due to the nature of its own methodology. But like I said, you can't either, so please get down of your high horse, to be crude.

It is an empty proposition, valuable for its artistic/poetic content, at most.

[scourge]

The world we see is an illusion, albeit a highly persistent one. We have gradually got used to the idea that nature’s true reality is one of uncertain quantum fields; that what we see is not necessarily what is. Dark matter is a profound extension of this concept. It appears that the majority of matter in the universe has been hidden from us. That puts physicists and the general public alike in an uneasy place. Physicists worry that they can’t point to an unequivocal confirmed prediction or a positive detection of the stuff itself. The wider audience finds it hard to accept something that is necessarily so shadowy and elusive. The situation, in fact, bears an ominous resemblance to the aether controversy of more than a century ago.

http://www.deathmetal.org/forum/index.php?action=post;topic=8809.165;last_msg=77769

Nothing can be properly conclusive until we understand everything as if omniscient which isn't going to happen because of our acute human limitations.

[crow]

Maybe these acute human limitations are not acute, and not limitations, at all.
What if they are what they are, in order to enable us to live in a highly unlikely medium.
I mean, what would life be like if we were able to see, smell, touch and hear charged particles, x-rays, and antimatter?
Perhaps the desire to understand everything is a form of insanity.
What if - and I realize this is a bizarre concept - we were actually perfectly designed to simply live in this abundant and mysterious medium, without necessarily having to understand it all, and how it works?

[scourge]

Our optical limitations, with the eyes as passive sensors from an engineering design standpoint, can be attributed partly to the spectral type of our local star. The rest is natural selection optimizing one of our senses along with the wavelength to which it is best attuned to spotting predators, food, or quality mates within what for us is the visible light range.

Around another star perhaps, our vision may have ended up a bit more into the infrared or ultraviolet ranges. Things like terrestrial atmospheric pressure tuned our auditory senses into a specific range. But also, how much incoming data can our brains parse into helpful information before turning into detrimental overload? Neurology is probably the best reason for even having such a tightly restricted range.

So yes, we have evolutionary results from natural history but no indication of any deliberate underlying reasons for them. The results are all incidental necessities with all of the other results filtered out as unfit or at least less fit for competition within the given environment.

[crow]

I suppose that religion and science are generally not very different from each other, in that both are obsessed with the desire to understand. They just go about it in different ways.
Humans seem very prone to seek understanding, even when history shows, again and again, that understanding is a double-edged sword.
And what is understanding, anyway? The shuffling of observations into something that appears to make more sense than it did before the shuffling?
How does anyone actually know when understanding has been reached, or whether it is just an intermediate stage along the way?
I don't really care, any more, about understanding anything, preferring to stand-under, and observe from a point of humility, the mystery above.
 

[scourge]

Throw out the unnecessary methodological tautology and we have the thread's thesis in a nutshell. But what's more is the impossibility for us to determine which side is going to take us to that forever distant ultimate conclusion. Last, quantitative conclusions to these ends are unreachable in the same way as our ages old questing for first cause along the infinite regress of reasons.