(I haven’t read every post in this subthread, or the original post, so at least some of the following may be redundant or addressed elsewhere.)
(The following is a tangent.)
It rather begs the question to point to a statistic about what 93% of the National Academy of Sciences believe—who says that theirs is the most elite and informed opinion about God? Would the person the street say that, or point you to the prestigious academies of theologians, or perhaps the ancient Catholic Church?
I’m not sure of the answer to that, but it seems like there’s an important difference between a question within the domain of a field and the question of whether the field as a whole is valid. Are doctors the experts on whether it’s right (not whether it’s effective) to treat illness rather than “letting nature run its course”? Are farmers the experts on whether breeding animals for meat is ethically or environmentally defensible? Would the person on the street be convinced by arguments that SIAI or MIRI were the experts on whether AI research was beneficial?
(The following is a ramble/vent, with no particular point, stating things you probably already know.)
7% of top scientists is still a lot of people. To my knowledge, people with the highest credentials in every relevant field argue for theism; they aren’t all the degree-mill fakers some atheists portray. You can find cosmologists whose expert judgment on the origin of the universe is that it was deliberately created, neurobiologists who’ll explain how the physical structure of the brain isn’t enough to account for the human mind, archaeologists and historians who’ll show you a wealth of corroborating evidence for the religious text of your choice, and biologists who’ll explain why Earth’s life forms can’t have evolved wholly by chance.
(From The Hidden Face of God, by Gerald Schroeder, Ph.D.: “The more knowledge one has, the harder it becomes to be fooled. Those diagrams that in ten steps evolve from a random spread of lines into people-like outlines, and in a few hundred steps simulate a light-sensitive patch on skin evolving into an eye, once had me fooled. They are so impressively convincing. Then I studied molecular biology.”)
These people have thought about theism for decades. They’re people, not evil mutants or cartoon idiots. They’ve considered more than once the possibility that they might be wrong; each time, they’ve determined that they aren’t. Any argument you could make against their position, they’ve probably heard enough times to memorize.
And yet so-called “rationalists”, many with no relevant education of their own, have the ridiculous idea that they’re entitled to dismiss everything those experts say on the grounds of a few informal arguments they read on the Internet. Edit: more than ridiculous—it’s irrational, contagious and damaging.
(Disclaimer: This isn’t about your quantum physics sequence in particular, which I haven’t actually read.)
(I haven’t read every post in this subthread, or the original post, so at least some of the following may be redundant or addressed elsewhere.)
(The following is a tangent.)
I’m not sure of the answer to that, but it seems like there’s an important difference between a question within the domain of a field and the question of whether the field as a whole is valid. Are doctors the experts on whether it’s right (not whether it’s effective) to treat illness rather than “letting nature run its course”? Are farmers the experts on whether breeding animals for meat is ethically or environmentally defensible? Would the person on the street be convinced by arguments that SIAI or MIRI were the experts on whether AI research was beneficial?
(The following is a ramble/vent, with no particular point, stating things you probably already know.)
7% of top scientists is still a lot of people. To my knowledge, people with the highest credentials in every relevant field argue for theism; they aren’t all the degree-mill fakers some atheists portray. You can find cosmologists whose expert judgment on the origin of the universe is that it was deliberately created, neurobiologists who’ll explain how the physical structure of the brain isn’t enough to account for the human mind, archaeologists and historians who’ll show you a wealth of corroborating evidence for the religious text of your choice, and biologists who’ll explain why Earth’s life forms can’t have evolved wholly by chance.
(From The Hidden Face of God, by Gerald Schroeder, Ph.D.: “The more knowledge one has, the harder it becomes to be fooled. Those diagrams that in ten steps evolve from a random spread of lines into people-like outlines, and in a few hundred steps simulate a light-sensitive patch on skin evolving into an eye, once had me fooled. They are so impressively convincing. Then I studied molecular biology.”)
These people have thought about theism for decades. They’re people, not evil mutants or cartoon idiots. They’ve considered more than once the possibility that they might be wrong; each time, they’ve determined that they aren’t. Any argument you could make against their position, they’ve probably heard enough times to memorize.
And yet so-called “rationalists”, many with no relevant education of their own, have the ridiculous idea that they’re entitled to dismiss everything those experts say on the grounds of a few informal arguments they read on the Internet. Edit: more than ridiculous—it’s irrational, contagious and damaging.
(Disclaimer: This isn’t about your quantum physics sequence in particular, which I haven’t actually read.)