Salaams, Kossacks.
Last week we discussed religion and evangelism. My position is that religion is intrinsically a fitness adaption for homo sapiens sapiens, in that religion confers consanguinous kinship benefits on a larger memetic "tribe". We talked about religions that do not proselytize, and about atheists that do. It is my hypothesis that religion itself does not cause problems, but evangelism and proselytizing do.
As a Sufi I regard proselytizing as a kind of intellectual molestation.
Commenter RandomActsofReason strenuously objected to my use of science to validate religious belief. I think....RAoR is an evangelist of atheism himself.
One of the best things about my reversion to Sufism, is that I had fought all my life against the Catholic church's war on science. Sufism offers me a synchronous treaty between believing and thinking.
So I was pretty astonished by RAoR's attack.
Some excerpts.
With all due respect, you throw around scientific terms in ways that make clear that you have no understanding of their actual meaning. In particular, as an alleged math/physics grad student, your ignorance of biology and evolutionary science is rather frightening. You don't even seem to understand what different disciplines actually study.
Cognitive anthropology is not a scientific discipline, it is a particular, by no means mainstream, approach to explaining culture using the tools of cognitive sciences. It similarly has no "opinion" on religious belief.
No.
Social brain hypothesis is an even less mainstream - and pretty definitively debunked - hypothesis that merely states that brain capacity in primates is larger relative to body size as an adaptation to the needs of social group interaction. It turns out that the data does not support the hypothesis; relative brain size correlates to social group complexity only in apes and humans; in other primates, it does not, and there are other factors that do. Social brain hypothesis certainly has absolutely nothing to do with "supporting" religious belief.
No.
As for "quantum consciousness", now you have strayed utterly from the realm of legitimate science to the arena of hucksters like Deepak Chopra and other folks pushing ID or straight Creationist bullshit.
No.
Finally, Godelian Incompleteness has absolutely no relevance to religious belief. It simply proves that no axiomatic mathematical system can be complete, thus demonstrating the futility of Hubert's Program.
But religious belief is based on mathematics....because everything is.
Number is the ruler of forms and ideas and the cause of gods and demons.--Pythagoras
I believe there is a biological basis for all behavior.
This kind of basis-->
basis: In linear algebra, a basis is a set of vectors that, in a linear combination, can represent every vector in a given vector space or free module, and such that no element of the set can be represented as a linear combination of the others. In other words, a basis is a linearly independent spanning set, or more simply put a “coordinate system”.
Take it away Dr. Hameroff.
We also don't know if our conscious perceptions accurately portray the external world. At its base, the universe follows the seemingly bizarre and paradoxical laws of quantum mechanics, with particles being in multiple places simultaneously, connected over distance, and with time not existing. But the “classical” world we perceive is definite, with a flow of time. The boundary or edge (quantum state reduction, or ‘collapse of the wave function”) between the quantum and classical worlds somehow involves consciousness.
I spent twenty years studying how computer-like structures called microtubules inside neurons and other cells could process information related to consciousness. But when I read The emperor’s new mind by Sir Roger Penrose in 1991 I realized that consciousness may be a specific process on the edge between the quantum and classical worlds. Roger and I teamed up to develop a theory of consciousness based on quantum computation in microtubules within neurons. Roger’s mechanism for an objective threshold for quantum state reduction connects us to the most basic, “funda-mental” level of the universe at the Planck scale, and is called objective reduction (OR). Our suggestion for biological feedback to microtubule quantum states is orchestration (Orch), hence our model is called orchestrated objective reduction, Orch OR.
In recent years I have considered that such a connection to the basic proto-conscious level of reality where Platonic values are embedded is strikingly similar to Buddhist and other spiritual concepts.
I think no good scientist can absolutely discount the possibility of the existence of god. It seems to me that science and faith are converging, and perhaps the god-in-the-gaps is live on the border of the quantum and classical worlds.