Posted: Mar 23, 2017 6:49 pm
by Thommo
ProgrammingGodJordan wrote:
Thommo wrote:Astronomy became scientific in the same way that medicine, physics, biology and other sciences did: Keep the bits that fit evidence, throw out the mythology and develop a rigorous method of inquiry.


If you do that to theology there's nothing left.


(A)
If we do that to typical archaic gods, entities with particular abilities remain:

(1) create universes
(2) create non-trivial intelligence


Those are not qualities common to gods actually. Thor didn't do either of those things, Hades didn't do those things.

Also, it's worth attention that the correct analogue of "astronomy" is "theology" and not gods. If you look at some element of astronomy that survived the pre-scientific to scientific transition, it's usually some observable like a star, moon or planet or some feature of the periodic behaviour of those observables.

There are no analogous features of gods, the closest we can get is conventions of things that the divine has in common, which does not in fact include the capacity for universe creation.

It thus seems likely that redefining the language of theology to describe a "cause of the universe" (if there is one) or somesuch to be a "god" is more likely to obfuscate than clarify.

ProgrammingGodJordan wrote:(B)
Modern neuroscience shows that humans can create non-trivial intelligence by learning tasks etc.


I don't think it does. Machine learning hasn't sprung out of neuroscience and it's far from clear that calling that "non-trivial intelligence" is accurate.

ProgrammingGodJordan wrote:Modern events show humans creating sophisticated simulations of our cosmos.

So, universe yielding abilities are not separate from science.


Simulations, by definition are not universe yielding, so that seems to be an error.

Again, it might also be worth mentioning the difference in sophistication between any simulation of our cosmos and the actual cosmos. There's an enormous amount of ground covered in the equivocation over treating them both with the label of "sophisticated".

It's always worth contextualising these sorts of comparison and humans can't actually simulate anything as complex in terms of intelligence as an ant brain. Let alone a planet of trillions of intelligent organisms, or the solar system of thousands of massive objects in which it resides or the galaxy of tens of billions of stars in which that resides or the observable universe of tens of billions of galaxies, or whatever larger structure that resides in.