h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What if they measured the doppler shifts with their own telescopes?

Sometimes, and I'm not suggesting this for the Big Bang, but sometimes the evidence is a lot stronger than just eyes.

Playing devil's advocate here...

It's like electrons. As students in physics, we are told they exist. We are given evidence from the past, yet we can't see them. A lot of science students believe electrons believe, because we are told to.

Same with planets. We believed Pluto was a planet despite never having seen it, because we were told by a few scientists. Scientists who now say Pluto isn't a planet...

The Pluto analogy is a bit off.

Scientists believed that Pluto was a lump of rock orbiting the sun. They continue to believe this. They've just reclassified it.

TRiG.

Yeah but, who's ever seen an electron?


az

sorry... Its just that when I was taught about the planets, I was told that Pluto was for a planet by my teachers. I know now that its not correct, but its what i was taught and believed for a while until I learned the truth.

I saw it.

az

Pluto is a lump of rock orbiting the sun. Some big lumps of rock are called planets. Smaller lumps aren't. The division is largely arbitary. It's not a question of scientific fact one way or the other. It's just a classification. Really, quite unimportant. There are no 'real world' repercussions.

You were taught, correctly, that Pluto was classified as a planet. It is now no longer classified as such. Big deal. Unimportant.

Now, this is a side-topic to this conversation. You introduced the reclassification of Pluto as an analogy. I'm just explaining why that analogy doesn't work. Your electrons analogy is better, because you're there talking about questions of how the world *is*, not merely of how it's *classified*.

Do you get the distinction?



TRiG.

"personal beliefs are not laws. You are assuming that Catholics must follow each tenet of the Church or else (insert some horrible thing like torture or excommunication or someone reading you from the pulpit)."

You're either a Catholic or you're not, IMHO. But what I hear you saying is that you can choose to accept as much or as little of the church's teachings and tenets as you like and still consider yourself a Catholic, am I right? So say, just as an example, that you choose to accept 60 percent of the church's teachings and find the other 40 percent inconvinient or otherwise unacceptable. Does that mean that when you die 60 percent of you gets to go to heaven, assuming of course that you qualify (by whatever arcane accounting system would be used to make that determination) and the other 40 percent of you doesn't? Or do you spend 60 percent of your afterlife in heaven and the other 40 percent in hell? I'm just curious about the details of how this all works.

Incidentally, the limbo story finally hit our news reports in the US this evening, and it was hysterical to hear the commentators talking in very serious tones about whether the souls of the deceased unbaptized babies would go to heaven, hell, or limbo. It was like listening to someone talking very seriously about whether leprechauns prefer sitting under toad stools or under holly bushes.

Do these people have oatmeal for brains, or what? How can otherwise intelligent people take this sort of thing seriously?

Or maybe it would work more along the lines that if you accepted 60 percent of the church's teachings, your chances of getting into heaven would be only 60 percent as good as if you'd accepted 100 percent of the teachings? The thing I guess I'm trying to get at here is this: suppose that you just accepted a measly one percent of church teachings, should you still then expect to receive 100 percent of the "benefits" (whatever they may be, i.e., entry into heaven after you die, or whatever) of being a believer? What exactly is the point or the goal of being a believer, and how does being a "selective" believer affect the outcome?

"Does that mean that when you die 60 percent of you gets to go to heaven, assuming of course that you qualify (by whatever arcane accounting system would be used to make that determination) and the other 40 percent of you doesn't?"

Er, no. All it means is that there is a tacit acceptance within Catholicism that people are allowed to have personal beliefs, some of which accords with the belief system they grew up with. Catholicism contains a lot of stuff that many people, religious or non-religious, would agree with - being nice to others, being generous to those less fortunate, respecting people irrespective of their circumstances, treating nature with respect, accepting that we can't be in total control of everything, etc. Some of the other stuff, of course, is utter nonsense.

So, if you accept that some of the teachings are good and valuable and are a guidance in your life, but you have problems in believing in the existence of angels and transubstantiation etc, and if you realise that no-body is going to give you a hard time anyway, what is the problem with calling yourself a Catholic if that is what you want to call yourself?

'should you still then expect to receive 100 percent of the "benefits"'

This sounds like some sort of pre-quarter sales meeting than in any belief system I am aware of. People normally believe that if they are true to themselves then that's all anyone can ask of them. They don't think in terms of quotas, objectives, or "belief targets".

The Pope, as far as I know, does not dictate exactly what people need to believe in order to go to heaven. You're trying to construct a straw-man here.

Woodpigeon, I think you've happened across a common ground between Catholics and quantum physicists.



It's like that aspect of subatomic particles where the bits are both particles and waves, depending on whether they're just doin' what comes naturally and people are talking about them based on the effects they're supposed to be causing or if they are observed at an inopportune time, caught in an act.

Ok. Maybe not, exactly. But both are equally belief-laden ways of looking at the universe. Science just has a better track record when it comes to prediction.

I'll crawl back in my hole now.

Do scientists believe in electrons? I suppose there's the image of a little ball of negative charge whizzing around, but that's certainly subject to change and its not the important bit. The maths that go with it are.

http://www.almaden.ibm.com/vis/stm/images/stm.gif

THere's an electron for all to see.

from:
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/vis/stm/

Arnie, that's a lovely image, but it's *not* an electron. Silly man. Can't you tell by looing at it that it's a map to heaven? Limbo is the donger outside the circle to the top right (irrefutable proof that Limbo really *does* exist) and the chute straight to hell is in the donger towards the bottom left.

"what is the problem with calling yourself a Catholic if that is what you want to call yourself? "

I suppose there's no problem with it at all, other than the fact that it makes a total mockery and joke of what it means to be a Catholic. It makes being a Catholic a bit like going to a flea market and choosing from among the odds and ends there which things you want to bring home at the end of the day.

And exactly how do the "selective" Catholics decide which of the church's teachings they'll accept and which they won't? Do they just accept the things that are easy and convenient and reject the things that are difficult and inconvenient? And if not, why not? Seeing as how it apparently doesn't really matter anyway what you accept or reject. It all seems like such a very curious and fuzzy concept.

I further strongly suspect that in the "good old days" of the Catholic church, back in the days when the church fathers still had some real clout, this concept of selective belief would have gotten you excommunicated in a heartbeat, if not burned at the stake.

There's also the issue for people who can't quite believe what they're told, yet have guilt about that because the church has such a strong authority in their lives. I'm imagining the psychological torment of paying lip service to something which one doesn't really believe, yet feras the possible consequences of that non-belief.

"the issue for people who can't quite believe what they're told, yet have guilt about that"

This is an excellent point. As a "survivor" (barely) of a strict and rigorous religious educational system, I experienced this phenomenon during my withdrawal and recovery from a youth spent being brainwashed into believing all sorts of bizarre religious mumbo jumbo. Eventually, however, some people decide they can't live with the logical inconsistencies and irrationality of their religious teachings; some of these people finally reach a point at which they decide it's worth risking burning in hell for all eternity (or whatever other dire threat has been imposed to discourage disbelief) for the sake of being intellectually honest with themselves. Running this psychological gauntlet is a natural part of recovery from irrational beliefs.

Back to the "selective" Catholics for a moment. In a world in which everyone is free to believe whatever they chose, and also free to call themselves whatever they chose, what does this do to the value of, and connections between, beliefs and labels?

And anyway, who'd want to go to a "heaven" to worship a god who demanded that one be intellectually dishonest as part of the bargain for getting there?