Earlier quoted context omitted.
What?
Nautilus, the publisher, is funded by the John Templeton foundation which is a evangelical fundamentalist organization.
.....Ok? It's still good content.
A defense of Christianity helped unlock the secrets of the brain
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Re: A defense of Christianity helped unlock the secrets of the brain
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
What?
Nautilus, the publisher, is funded by the John Templeton foundation which is a evangelical fundamentalist organization.
Interesting, I didn't know that.
But they don't seem to be fundamentalist in the same sense as the churches I grew up near as a kid, from reading their website: https://www.templeton.org/who-we-are/about-the-foundation/mi...
> The John Templeton Foundation serves as a philanthropic catalyst for discoveries relating to the Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality. We support research on subjects ranging from complexity, evolution, and infinity to creativity, forgiveness, love, and free will. We encourage civil, informed dialogue among scientists, philosophers, and theologians and between such experts and the public at large, for the purposes of definitional clarity and new insights.
> Our vision is derived from the late Sir John Templeton's optimism about the possibility of acquiring “new spiritual information” and from his commitment to rigorous scientific research and related scholarship. The Foundation's motto, "How little we know, how eager to learn," exemplifies our support for open-minded inquiry and our hope for advancing human progress through breakthrough discoveries.
Re: A defense of Christianity helped unlock the secrets of the brain
#13Clickbait title. A great deal of science is rooted in the works of individuals who held a variety of religious beliefs, and in many of those cases, their works were directly motivated by those beliefs. So the fact that Bayes came up with his theorem because of a desire to justify a belief in the resurrection of Christ is, I suppose, somewhat interesting, but not so much so that it needed to be the headline of the sto…
It's not clickbait; this is the angle the article took to present the material. Whether or not it is novel or particularly good may be up for debate, but it's not clickbait.
I agree. As someone who probably wouldn't normally have read an entire article on bayesian probability, the angle the author took to present the material kept me interested for the entire thing. Maybe you can call it article bait? I found this a great history lesson followed up by very interesting links to how the human brain might work. The title seemed completely relevant to me.
Re: A defense of Christianity helped unlock the secrets of the brain
#14Clickbait title. A great deal of science is rooted in the works of individuals who held a variety of religious beliefs, and in many of those cases, their works were directly motivated by those beliefs. So the fact that Bayes came up with his theorem because of a desire to justify a belief in the resurrection of Christ is, I suppose, somewhat interesting, but not so much so that it needed to be the headline of the sto…
It's not clickbait; this is the angle the article took to present the material. Whether or not it is novel or particularly good may be up for debate, but it's not clickbait.
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Re: A defense of Christianity helped unlock the secrets of the brain
#15"Hume, the probability of people inaccurately claiming that they’d seen Jesus’ resurrection far outweighed the probability that the event had occurred in the first place." Is there any evidence that anyone mentioned in the bible actually ever existed? What is the point of examining the claims of fictional characters about a fictional event?
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Re: A defense of Christianity helped unlock the secrets of the brain
#16Re: A defense of Christianity helped unlock the secrets of the brain
#17Clickbait title. A great deal of science is rooted in the works of individuals who held a variety of religious beliefs, and in many of those cases, their works were directly motivated by those beliefs. So the fact that Bayes came up with his theorem because of a desire to justify a belief in the resurrection of Christ is, I suppose, somewhat interesting, but not so much so that it needed to be the headline of the sto…
Clickbait or not, many of the great scientists and mathematicians of the past thought that the existence of a benevolent God meant that the universe might be understandable and that there may be elegant laws underpinning how the universe works.
To me its sort of a mystery why the universe is understandable at all -- e.g., the elegance and compactness of Maxwell's Equations for the complicated phenomenon of electromagnetism is one such example.
Re: A defense of Christianity helped unlock the secrets of the brain
#18"Hume, the probability of people inaccurately claiming that they’d seen Jesus’ resurrection far outweighed the probability that the event had occurred in the first place." Is there any evidence that anyone mentioned in the bible actually ever existed? What is the point of examining the claims of fictional characters about a fictional event?
One of the most memorable I have read about is the recently found Tel Dan inscription: some writing on a 9th-century-B.C. stone slab about King David. Archaeologists say it is particularly strong because it was by an enemy. http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-artifacts/...
Re: A defense of Christianity helped unlock the secrets of the brain
#19Clickbait title. A great deal of science is rooted in the works of individuals who held a variety of religious beliefs, and in many of those cases, their works were directly motivated by those beliefs. So the fact that Bayes came up with his theorem because of a desire to justify a belief in the resurrection of Christ is, I suppose, somewhat interesting, but not so much so that it needed to be the headline of the sto…
The fact that Bayes' work, which is more popular and possibly relevant than ever, answers a serious philosophical challenges to claims about the nature of reality (a consequence of any claims of divinity) is a mere historical accident worthy of overlooking? I am reminded of Fulton Sheen's comments on Jesus - a man that claimed to be God is either a liar, a lunatic, or God; to say such a man is a great teacher but not…
> I am reminded of Fulton Sheen's comments on Jesus - a man that claimed to be God is either a liar, a lunatic, or God; to say such a man is a great teacher but not God stretches the limit of rationality.
That always sounded like an unimaginative argument. Another possibility is that his followers exaggerated his words and deeds after his death.
Re: A defense of Christianity helped unlock the secrets of the brain
#20Clickbait title. A great deal of science is rooted in the works of individuals who held a variety of religious beliefs, and in many of those cases, their works were directly motivated by those beliefs. So the fact that Bayes came up with his theorem because of a desire to justify a belief in the resurrection of Christ is, I suppose, somewhat interesting, but not so much so that it needed to be the headline of the sto…
The fact that Bayes' work, which is more popular and possibly relevant than ever, answers a serious philosophical challenges to claims about the nature of reality (a consequence of any claims of divinity) is a mere historical accident worthy of overlooking? I am reminded of Fulton Sheen's comments on Jesus - a man that claimed to be God is either a liar, a lunatic, or God; to say such a man is a great teacher but not…
The value of Bayes' work is somewhat orthogonal to his use of it to prove the truth of the Resurrection.
It was valuable to show that Hume's approach was flawed but limited value to prove the truth per se. To apply probabilities to the events you'd have to make an awful lot of assumptions about the accuracy of the, non-eye witness, reporting. However, it was an excellent approach for such an evaluation.
As to the Fulton Sheen quote. I's a bit unfair. I mean, if you're going to be picky about it you can lose the lunatic option: someone who claims to be God is either God or a liar, by definition. But you can be a liar by deliberate act, by diminished faculty or by being mistaken. And plenty of great teachers have been mistaken about important things.
And of course, in both the Bayes and Fulton cases, there is the implicit assumption that what was recorded about Jesus had no systemic bias i.e. any errors while recording what He said and did were mistakes, not deliberate misrepresentations. Given the strong requirement to show that He fulfilled scripture, this is a highly dubious assumption.