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

OK, I'll clarify,

From experience so far, I'd have to say that I don't believe my brain is wired up to experience what *I'd* call faith in real life, at least in any religion, or for any sustained period.

I never experienced any religious faith, even as a child, but once, many years ago, when I was feeling very low and highly stressed for a long time, I was repeatedly buoyed up by a particular close friend who always seemed to appear just when I most needed them. One day, I experienced the nearest thing to absolute belief I have ever felt. I actually truly beleived (to the point of *knowing*) that if I was feeling down, they would somehow know, and would appear to comfort me. The feeling of absolute peace generated by that utter lack of doubt was very alluring, but after a day or so, reality took over and I realised my friend was just a great human after all. Though it may sound silly to some (or even sad), that lack of doubt isn't a feeling I ever want to experience again in any form, as from my point of view, it's just a form of delusion.

(That's not to say I don't place an immense amount of faith in other people on occasion - my particular sport involves many activities where I and my friends frequently have to trust our lives to each other's actions. It's simply that the feeling that there is *anything* out there powerful enough to abdicate all my responsibility to isn't something I (or my subconscious) wishes or intends to experience again, however superficially alluring it may be.)

That's roughly what I meant by the comment in my earlier posting. If someone's going to start buggering around with my neurons, I dare say they could conjure up various hallucinations, but I don't think they'd last long after the machine was turned off.
I presume I could probably get a similar effect to many you describe by ingestion of various shamanic plant materials?

Looking on the bright side, I guess this means that fundamentalism may now stand some chance of becoming a curable medical condition. Isn't science wonderful?

PH, on the "Shamanic" subject, Shamen apparently can train themselves to achieve the effects I described by a form of self-hypnosis - I have seen CAT (PET?) scan images of brain activity immediately after the performance of (drug-free) shamanic rituals, and there is a tremendous amount of activity in the temporal lobes and amygdala - the same regions Persinger is stimulating externally. Interestingly enough, there are quite a few documented cases of people who have been recognised by their church as having a "genuine religous experience" later being diagnosed as temporal-lobe epileptics.

The rituals used to facilitate this state often involve extremely loud and fast "jungle rhythms", not dissimilar to the those used in popular music culture to achieve a dissociated state, with or without the use of drugs.

Shamanic use of ritual drugs are more often used to achieve a radically different state, where the Shaman doesn't just bask in the percieved "presence" of a greater force, but is attempting to mould, shape and "control" that force to achieve an end which would otherwise be outwith their normal physical/mental capabilities.

PLEASE, can someone start a new line or whatever, this is beginning to take ages to download

Is it "faith" or a kind of mass hysteria, i.e. feeling everyone else's feelings around you, generating some kind of electricity, making you feel OK. I'm not a scientist, so find it difficult to put into words what I am trying to say. Also, can it be brainwashing? From the time we begin to understand, "God" is preached to us by someone: parents, teachers even the media.

Very early civilisations appear to have had to believe in something too, so may be it is just mankind's instinct to have a "faith", although then they seemed to believe in thing's they could definitely identify with, e.g. the sun, stars, earth & animals. However, we have this mysterious "figure" God and only one!!

Science happens. I don't think we need to find out how it happens. Photosynthesis? Who cares how it happens, it just does.

Hi there,
Surely, if you find out how "it" happens then more uses can be made of it, e.g. electricity. Think how the use of this is being used, which would never have happened if someone hadn't found out how it happened - if you get my drift!

What can i say? I'm a frustrated student.

How so? What subject? Where at?

Say what you want ....

Please someone start a "Science is Crap II" !!!!!! Just so I can practice reading & writing!!

If every society, even when they were isolated, had some type of religion, doesn't it make sense that there is a God, just that no one can really understand what form He (or to some people, they) takes?
God is only evident to the people who need Him, which is why some people who think they can figure it all out on their own are so sure that God isn't there. People who can't comprehend omnipotence (the ones that come up with the questions like "Can God make a mountain so big He can't move it Himself??"), the same people who have to be able to understand every atom of something before it can be considered real, are the ones who are happy with a purely mechanical world. The basic question, in my opinion, is whether or not there are some things that can't be explained.

Personally, I reckon that Science *should* say "we don't know - but we are going to find out". But all too often it
doesn't. There are gaping holes in many theories, - the cracks are merely plastered over with stubborn pride. But
of course, Christians don't escape this accustaion either ! But there must be a true answer to the questions we ask of
both science and religion. (It may be arrogant to think we'll understand the answers - but we should continue looking -
in all humility.)
My own thoughts on such things... I don't believe in "classical" evolution. AND I don't believe in simplistic
interpretations of the scriptures either... (Although I am a Christian.) I just beleive we should seek the truth,
and not think that we already have it.

For some provocatively exploding myths see: http://www.khouse.org/articles/technical

*Science* does say 'we are going to find out'. *People* sometimes don't, and stick to theories even after they have been shown to be less than supportable. Personally, I decide whether someone is a worthwhile scientist by whether thay appear to be practising science or not, not by what they claim to be.
Stubbornness and pride are dangerous wherever they occur, but the only way to truly say whether a scientist is right or wrong is by understanding the science they claim to be practising, and not simply by whether their conclusions fail to square with what we'd like to believe, whether our beliefs are political, religious or scientific.

I'm sure many good Catholics throughout the world wouldn't consider their brethren in southern Africa who maintain that the use of condoms is a crime against God (even in the face of an horrific epidemic of HIV infection) to be acting in a terribly Christian manner.

Personally, I *like* having cracks in some theories - there's nothing more boring than a smoothly plastered wall, however aesthetically pleasing it may be to some. I *like* doubt, as it is a great springboard for new learning.

However, for science, religion, politics, or any other endeavour, we must always remember that self-confidence does impress the masses more than honest doubt - a scientist who's convinced he's a genius may well convince others to believe the same, just as a fire-and-brimstone preacher can often get many more avid followers than one who shows modesty and humility.
We *may* have moved a long way from the other apes, but I fear there's a strong element of the sheep mentality in many of us.

If there was *a* God, I'd find it hard to explain the great variety of contradictory religions with massively varying, yet locally understandable, creation myths, and the practice of all kinds of often mutually incompatible rites. I'd suggest religions are a result of an innate human desire for comprehension of the world, and are a human, rather than divine construct.

Any coherent system of understanding such as science, which is so complicated and detailed that it is hard for any one person to understand, remember, or teach it all, can only really develop once written language has emerged after a very long process of human development. In the interim, it is only to be expected that people will develop belief systems that offer some kind of more or less consistent explanation of the world around them.

The fact that people living in a rainforest develop religions based on forest animals and plants, early argicultural peoples worship earth fertility godesses, native Australians develop a religion based on the animals they hunt and the large areas of land they walk across seems quite understandable from that point of view, as does the fact that biblical references to areas of the world outside the common knowledge of the eastern Mediterranean authors don't seem terribly common.

Indeed, I'd strongly suggest that the development of myths and superstitions is a natural, even useful human mental process - even doing repair work on computers or other complex machines, I've found it very easy to develop a few weird beliefs and procedures myself that, if not actually counterintuitive, are at least not solidly supported by irrefutable evidence - they may be logically uncertain, but they have worked for me (so far) as short cuts. It's not possible for a single person to be scientific about everything, as in a finite life, we can't experiment to the point of proving all our ideas beyond reasonable doubt, and many situations are not entirely repeatable.
However, I accept my technical mythology only to the point where it stops working, when I will then be forced to take the time to formulate a more accurate world model that will explain both previous successes of my myths, and any current failures. If I didn't maintain a sense of humour and perspective, and if I expended my mental effort on creating more complicated excuses for my failures, rather than on a sceptical self-awareness, I suspect it would be easy to enter into a spiral of increasing self-delusion. (I suspect that's what happens to the inventors of perpetual motion machines)

That really isn't meant as an attack on religion, and less on decent religious people, but as an explanation of what I see from an external perspective as the *reason* for the existence of religions. As a source of social cohesiveness, I'm sure that on numerous occasions throughout history, various religions have played a great part in the continuation and development of human society. I doubt even the strongest atheist could say with certainty that the total effect of religions through the ages has been negative, even if there are aspects of modern religion they may find quite disturbing.

Of course, all the above ignores the important point of religion being a political, as well as a spiritual entity. Once it becomes a route to power or money, it is very much in the interests of some people to aggressively promote it (Seen many *poor* televangelists recently?)

Mavy religious edicts come from past practical necessity, too. The Jain faith (a centuries-old religion founded around the Punjab region of India) dictates that only boiled water be drunk by its followers - at some point in the past, their people would have been dying from typhoid and its ilk, and the population at large were too ill-educated to understand the link between boiling the water and eradicating the source of disease. The priests, who were on the whole better educated and had access to archives of information inaccessable to the public probably tried to explain this, but got nowhere. So, it was added to the doctrine of their faith "You must boil the water you drink, because God says so!".

This improved the survival rate of their followers against non-followers (probably a good "unique selling point" at the time...), but once they had moved to cities with regulated, clean water supplies it wouldn't have been so straightforward to deliver an edict to the effect "Oops - sorry - God's changed his mind!", so the practice continues to this day.

Dr. Michael Persinger (cited in an earlier post) has suggested that the brain's "mechanism for faith" evolved to cope with survival situations where a whole population needed to follow a leader's instructions to the exclusion of their own individual urges and preferences - a sort of mental "master override". Any instruction which can be phrased to trigger this response will override ANY logical input - witness "death cults" such as "Heaven's Gate"...

I'd suggest there are two different effects involved - one is a matter of cohesiveness, cooperation and/or obedience, which I'd suggest is the social/political side of religion, and there's the matter of the intensely personal mystical, spiritual and explanation-seeking side of individual human nature.

The first effect covers taboos and pronouncements from God of the quite understandable 'Thou shalt not eat pork or shellfish' kind, for which good solid hygeine reasons are available.
The second effect would explain creation myths, and the like.

I agree that there is allot of junk science out there, Scientist trying to make a name for them-selves by making absurd claims under the name of theory. I believe in evolution (change), but I think that the way science presents it is a load of Dingo kidneys. It makes no sense, that the highly complex animals roaming the planet today evolved from a single cell organism. PLEASE. If evolution is survival of the fittest then why did the saber-tooth cat died out, a supreme hunter even by today’s "super predators" standards. The evolution theory has many gaping holes in it.

Someday our descendents will understand the true nature of evolution and will laugh at our silly ideas, the way we laugh at people who once believed that the world was flat or was the center of the universe.

*Science* doesn't present anything - people do. If someone is innumerate, we shouldn't blame mathematics.

The observable fact that some component parts of the more complex unicellular organisms (eukaryotic cells) clearly resemble distinct simpler organisms in their own right is very strong evidence for the theory that eukaryotes in fact originated from the merging of simpler organisms.

Some kinds of colonies of single-celled organisms such as slime moulds are capable of organisation and differentiation to assist in reproduction.

Once you get to multicellular organisms and permanently specialised cells, which does seem to have taken more than 3 billion years and so is presumably far from inevitable, things seem to have sped up considerably. Still the last 6 or 700 million years allows for quite a few cycles of mutate-and-select.

The problem with the phrase 'Survival of the fittest' is that it is very easy to misunderstand. Because there is no intelligently determined direction, 'fitness' is generally something that can only be determined with confidence in retrospect where the complex environments of the real world are concerned.
If we design an experiment (for instance by exposing bacteria to antibiotics in order to promote the evolution of resistance), we have a pretty good idea of the kinds of properties that will emerge. In a complex natural environment, things will be less simple and much harder to understand with confidence.

Taking the example of the sabre-toothed tiger, let's *speculate* about a situation where large prey animals reduce in number due to environmental change (and severe changes have certainly happened innumerable times throughout the many millions of years of earth history.) A point *could* easily be reached where the amount of sutitable prey is not really sufficient to sustain a healthy number of large cats. Another little push, possibly a disease exacerbated by ill health resulting from poor nutrition, *could* be enough to finish off the whole sabre-toothed population, yet an apparently less 'fit' small carnivore *might* still thrive on a diet of insects or small rodents. Big cats may be stronger than small ones, but the more specialised they become to eat only large prey, the more vulnerable to change, and thus the less 'fit' they risk becoming as conditions alter.

If a dodo had any specific gut flora or parasites, they're clearly extinct now, and through no fault of their own making, just bad luck. It might not sound very deep or mystical, but it's true.

The bottom line is, *WE* don't determine what is fit by reference to our own perceptions of which animals seem mightier. Nature in all its complexity does the determination, and we need the humility to accept that sometimes the major agent of change could be something we never considered. Fitness as far as natural selection is concerned is nothing to do with how fast a given animal can cover a quarter-mile from a standing start, or how large its teeth are.

Another example - I'm sure no decent person would suggest the original inhabitants of the Americas were obviously less 'fit' in a muscular power-to-weight ratio sense than the European invaders were. The fact that many of the native people had little or no specific resistance to the infectious diseases we exported had zero relevance right up to the point where we turned up and whole societies were destroyed by our illnesses. The environment changed, as environments do, and the people who survived were generally the ones who happened (by chance, rather than design) to have disease resistance genes that gave them some head start in fighing the diseases. (Though general health and immune competence were clearly factors that played some part)

In any field awash with speculation and partial historical evidence, there *are* some people who think they *know* what all the answers are. There are others who suggest various possibilities, and will seek out evidence to decide which of those possibilities are likelier. The latter people are certainly the more scientific. I find paleontology and anthropology interesting, but I certainly don't *believe* much of what I hear and often, the more certain the speaker, the more doubt I feel.

We understand the basic nature of the processes of evolution, as those processes themselves are not too complicated.
However, it is certain that our descendents will never understand the full history of terrestrial evolution, as the interaction of the innumerable *instances* of those basic processes is ridiculously complex, and so much information has been irretrievably lost.

There are scientists studying fossilised crap at the Royal Tyrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta. Faithfully.

Copracites!

Is there a reason people can't just accept things on blind faith and not try to nitpick it apart? What's the logical reason behind all those miracles we hear about--even if some are publicity stunts, they can't all be! There are some things that science can't explain and probably won't ever be able to. Besides, isn't it nice to always know that you're not alone in this mess we call a world?