Replies

Thank you for your reply, dear kosta50! And thank you, dear sisters in Christ, for all of your insights!

me: The scientific method likewise can only measure the physical effects of the mind.

kosta50:That's not correct. Scientific method also involves human inquiry which deals with verbal descriptions and definitions of mental phenomena in "real" terms. It is the so-called "spiritual" terminology that departs from the reality of this world.

Science proceeds under the principle of methodological naturalism, i.e. the assumption that nature is knowable and predictable and therefore, whatever the explanation for a thing is, it will be natural, or material, or physical.

This is evidently the extent of the “real” terms to which you claim verbal descriptions or definitions would apply, e.g. taxonomy.

In practice, methodological naturalism entails the exclusion of psyche, mind, soul and spirit. Which is to say, such things are beyond the reach of natural, material or physical explanation.

The consequence - which spirited irish keeps trying to drive home - is that such things are considered by science to be epiphenomena, secondary phenomena which cannot cause anything to happen. By this of course it means physical causation.

Being beyond the reach of the scientific method, the appeal to epiphenomena is tantamount to denying they exist - despite all of the experiential evidence they do exist.

kosta50: 'Mind' is a collective concept that represents an observed characteristic way a person appears to operate in the world to given situations, how he or she answers questions, reacts, etc. It falls in the same category as 'experience,' which is another general conceptual term. We can observe how someone does things and we can conclude that he or she has 'experience.'…

But the soul or spirit cannot be described in real terms, cannot be detected (it ain't the breath!), so we really don't know what the 'spirit' is; it's neither mental nor subjective, nor is there a consensus about it in terms of real life experience. Rather, it appears that the spirit is a human invention to explain some things ancients couldn't explain.

The experiential evidence for soul and spirit is every bit as strong as the experiential evidence for mind. Indeed, they all share in common the same information theory we see in molecular biology – namely in discerning life v. non-life/death in nature. And the same metaphors apply, e.g. transmitter/receiver, computer.

Lurkers might be interested in the Hebrew delineation of the terms for life, soul, mind, spirit:

1. nephesh – the will to live, the animal soul, or the soul of all living things (Genesis 1:20) which by Jewish tradition returns to the “earth” after death. In Romans 8, this is seen as a whole, the creation longing for the children of God to be revealed.

2. ruach - the self-will or free will peculiar to man (abstraction, anticipation, intention, etc.) – by Jewish tradition, the pivot wherein a man decides to be Godly minded or earthy minded (also related to Romans 8, choosing)

3. neshama - the breath of God given to Adam (Genesis 2:7) which may also be seen as the “ears to hear” (John 10) - a sense of belonging beyond space/time, a predisposition to seek God and seek answers to the deep questions such as “what is the meaning of life?"

4. ruach Elohim - the Holy Spirit (Genesis 1:2) which indwells Christians (I Cor 2, John 3) – the presently existing in the “beyond” while still in the flesh. (Col 3:3) This is the life in passage : "In him was life, and the life was the light of men..." (John 1)

You continued.

me: science admits to such things as massless particles which have no direct or indirect measureable affects, i.e. they cannot be said to not exist.

kosta50: Sure they do. They balance out the formula.

There is no balancing involved with a massless particle which has no direct or indirect measurable affects.

kosta50: Save for cosmology, science deals with practical matters that make our lives more comfortable, safer, etc. by providing working models and inventions that makes use of the world as we see it, and the world we live in. That's a heck of a lot more that what the 'spiritualists' or cosmological prima donna physicists have to offer.

You just put betty boop, spirited irish and me in the same league with Einstein, deSitter, Lemaître, Penrose, Hawking, Tegmark, Steinhardt, Turok and other cosmologists. Thank you.

Of course, you evidently exclude yourself…

Physical 'laws' are just concepts how the real world works based on our observations. Does that mean they are generally/universally true? Of course not.

Physical laws are universal by definition. If one were invalidated, it would no longer be called a physical law.

spirited irish: The notion of ‘collective mind’ is the particular gibberish of evolutionary monism, which today has three permutations: atheist-materialism, idealist-pantheism, and the highly developed materialist pantheism known as Buddhism. At bottom, all are based on the scientifically discredited notion that life and consciousness somehow magically emerged from nonlife. All three deny ‘being’ as well.

So very true!

betty boop: I'd like to point out that, without the Christian tradition, it is highly unlikely that science as we know it could have arisen in the first place. Notice that systematic science is a legacy of the Christian West; it did not arise in the pantheist East; for pantheism offers no rational principle on which science could be founded. Thus kosta is abusing science to destroy the very tradition that makes science possible.

Oh, the irony!

There is no balancing involved with a massless particle which has no direct or indirect measurable affects.

Really? Which massless particles? Photons have no measurable effects? Gluons? But they are never observed as independent particles. Neutrinos used to considered massless.

But it is all a matter of balancing out the formula. Since they have no mass, they must move at the speed of light. Take the formula E = mc² , where c = speed of light and m = mass. It's obvious that 'massless" particles are not massless or else the Energy would be zero. Anything multiplied by zero is zero.

So, a physicist would say that a 'massless' particle does have a mass after all, equal to unity (m= 1), conveniently, but only when it moves at the speed of light, or else its mass is zero. Thus at lower speeds the mass is presumed to be zero which then makes E = 0 and with zero energy a particle has no measurable effect and indeed doesn't even exist! (i.e. the energy is absorbed)

The formula, however, doesn't explain how the light passes trough glass and remains visible because Einstein's famous formula "works" only in a vacuum!

Assuming that the space is really a "vacuum" (it was when it was convenient to balance out the formula!), obviously 'universal' physical laws 'change' on earth, and photons "morph" into different energy species, so to say, and are no longer 'massless' at lower speeds because obviously we can see the light refracting through glass!

But of course it's much more mysterious when one reads about 'massless particles' and all sorts of imagery wells up in human fancy. When scientific observations show that vacuum could not account for the necessary mass of the universe, they invented dark matter an dark energy to balance out their formula. Thirty years from now they will be laughing at these theories the way they laugh at the Steady State theory, or at the luminescent aether as the invisible interspace 'medium'.

I could respond to the rest of your post but it's getting old, sorry nothing personal.