something like that, Eric? It doesn’t work for it to be snarkladen, it has to be factually inaccurate while being convinced of superiority.

should be

“Dark energy is no mystery at all, if we are simply willing to accept listening time and time again to clueless folk arguing that the cosmological constant is 120 orders of magnitude smaller than its natural value.”

http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.3966

Wow, what a great question! If you aren’t a physicist you should have been. All you professionals out there, start thinking about this if you haven’t already.

isn’t all of our knowledge predicated, ultimately, on fundamental axioms that ‘are true because they are true’, and then we work out/build up from there? eg. Euclid’s axioms

if so, then perhaps Physicists are/will be running up against these fundamental axioms when figuring out aspects of universe? like fine tuning, where does universe come from, etc?

[ I was too eager to get an H2G2 reference in there to spot the subject-verb disagreement! ]

Apologies for a tardy response; I’ve been travelling on business.

But why should there be a need to incorporate the findings of Greek philosophy in the formulation of the triune nature of God? How did the Bishops who attended that council make a “discovery”? Why should Plato, from a Hellenic tradition whose theology I presume you would not hesitate to dismiss as myth, have anything meaningful to say about the Abrahamic God? Absent any empirical evidence, they certainly did “make it up.”

I don’t think we have to agree to disagree about mathematics’ being immaterial; it’s a mental construct. My initial remark was only that numbers and arithmetic, as reifications of counting, are empirical.

Epicurus refutes Anslem, I think.

Regarding NDEs, the whole thing hinges on the claim that the patient saw certain things that they couldn’t possibly have seen – or known about in some other way. That hasn’t been established. I don’t mean to suggest that further study isn’t warranted, but a naturalistic explanation seems (according to the studies that have been done) far more likely than a supernatural one.

Materialism isn’t an assumption, but a working hypothesis that has not been falsified in hundreds of years. If reality includes the purely mental (i.e., if minds can exist independent of material bodies: mind-brain dualism), then why should the evidence for it not be as easily accessible and as clear as all the evidence we have for our materialist theories? The world of fermions (matter) and bosons (forces) that quantum field theory describes would seem like the wildest fantasy to a medieval theologian or Hellenic philosopher, yet it is intricately supported by experimental evidence, in exactly the same way that the crudest ideas of dualism aren’t.

What’s more, if dualism is true, how does the mental interact with the material? We’re back to the conclusions from Sean’s Skepticon 5 presentation: If our minds are discrete and distinct from our brains, they cannot interact with our brains via anything but one of the known forces, which is empirically not observed.

This conclusion is strong wrt God, too. You state that an omnipotent God could use a force unknown to science to communicate with us? Well, I suppose He could use whatever He wants, but we are very much material and anything that interacts with us can do so only via the known forces. So God could be “shouting” at us, but we’re completely “deaf” to that. The only other option for an omnipotent God is that He somehow hides this “sixth” force (I’m not counting things strictly; it’s more analogous to the idiomatic “sixth sense”) from the LHC results, that He somehow prevents this force that can interact with our protons from being seen when we smash those protons together at near-the-beginning-of-the-universe energies.

But I don’t think that such a deceitful God is anything like Anselm’s greatest of all beings with His inherent moral goodness.

/@

Best,