Community
How much should I care about Homeopathy?
AFA Forums - 1 hour 32 min ago
Hi All,
I'm an atheist, but more generally, i'm a skeptic, a fan of science and the need for evidence.
Therefore, whenever I see Homeopathic remedies being sold proudly in pharmacies all around, I just feel a little bothered.
Maybe its hard to pin down any direct harm caused by such things being sold - but its hard to see any real benefit either. To a degree, the sale of such products is a tacit endorsement by the pharmacy, that bothers me.
For an example, I was in a Pulse Pharmacy the other day, I said to the Chemist lady "I see you sell Homeopathic products".
She said "Yes, we have a Naturopath come in on Wednesdays", would you like to see her?
I said "No, I just meant that Homeopathy is a controversial form of medicine".
I left it at that - i didn't want to attack that person.
Does anyone else feel similarly about things like Homeopathy or Prayer in public places? Bothers you but hard to broach as a topic?
Daniel V
Categories: Community
Hello all
AFA Forums - 4 hours 17 min ago
A new member - well actually I was a member some time back and I'm back again :)
sorry I cant recall my old username but it'll come to me.
I'm a 36 yr old psychology student living in Australia and just love reading the interesting discussions on here. Yes I am an atheist. Very much so and finally officially joined AFA as a member. Looking forward to my sticker :) I thought it was time to put my money where my mouth is (um and the student discount helps lol).
hope everyone's having a nice day :D
Categories: Community
PM Hoolia
AFA Forums - 5 hours 16 min ago
i am utterly sickened that religious groups around this country have begun to attack the current PM's lack of faith. these vile organisations are whipping up fear and lies, claiming that if the people of Aus choose Gillard at the upcoming election she will destroy this country. i am not a ALP supporter and i certainly hate with a strong passion that other truly repulsive and despicable party beginning and ending with an L. in my opinion, Gillards only redeeming feature is that she is one of us but is she really? she says she's a 'respecter' of all religions. a hardcore atheist like myself and hopefully many of this sites members, passionately despise all religions due to their evil and extremely toxic nature. are punters on this site willing to stand up for Hoolia? just because she is an atheist does'nt instantly warrant her a vote. i thought she was a leftie, like myself but i'm shattered that she's not. i did'nt know she was an atheist until she became PM. what do you think of these attacks on Hoolia by our enemies?
Categories: Community
Devil made me have sex with donkey!
AFA Forums - 5 hours 25 min ago
The devil appears to be live and well and living in Kenya.
Quote:
A MAN jailed for having sex with a donkey says the devil made him do it.
Stephen Kipkemoi Rono was convicted and sentenced to 14 years' jail after pleading guilty before a court in the southern town of Narok in Kenya.
The father of two was charged with having "carnal knowledge of an animal, namely a donkey, which is against the order of nature."
Rono pleaded for leniency claiming that he had been deceived by the devil. He has two weeks to appeal the sentence.
"I am sorry. I plead for leniency because it's the devil who sent me. I have been living alone since my wife left me to marry another man," he told the court.
See: See: http://tinyurl.com/2dovhh2
You've got to feel sorry for the poor chap.
I mean, how could he help himself if he was under the influence of the devil and I've no doubt the devil made the donkey look especially sexy and desirable.
Categories: Community
Jim Wallace re filter in SMH
AFA Forums - 7 hours 40 min ago
Jim Wallace has an opinion piece today Friday 31 July. Have a go ... here
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/contri...729-10x38.html
Categories: Community
"Odd" speed limits?
AFA Forums - Thu, 2010-07-29 23:30
Has anybody here seen strange speed limits of 5km/h or 8km/h anywhere in parking lots/entrances/etc? I have seen a few 8km/h speed limits in parking lots, as well as a few 5km/h ones.
The interesting thing is that who the hell thinks of it? I've seen a few speedos which can't keep track of anything below 10km/h for example. My old 1980 Honda CB250RS had a speedo like this.
One could use a GPS to track it down, but not everybody has one.
Very, very bizarre. Especially the 8km/h speed limit.
Now while we're on about speed limits, how about SCHOOL ZONES being placed in places with default 40km/h limits?
Categories: Community
Miracle Cure Sister Breaks Legs and Dies
AFA Forums - Thu, 2010-07-29 23:09
A report in the UK Mirror by Jeremy Armstong on 28/07/2010 reads as follows:
Quote:
Lourdes Pilgrim in Holy water Lift Fall
A devout Catholic who made a pilgrimage to Lourdes seeking a miracle cure for her cerebral palsy came back with two broken legs.
Wheelchair-bound Patricia Mitchell fell from a hoist before she could take the holy waters
She suffered FOUR broken bones including a fractured femur - but they went unnoticed because she was a paraplegic.
The frail widow then made the 850-mile journey home from France by air and road before going to hospital when her family noticed her pain, nausea and dizziness. Stunned surgeons discovered the right femur had been broken in two and her left leg was fractured in three places.
They feared they would have to amputate Patricia's left leg.
Patricia, from Bowburn, Co Durham, died earlier this year.
Her sisters Pauline Scarr and Terry Featherstone say she never recovered from her fall in 2005 and are suing trip organiser HCPT, The Pilgrimage Trust, who are believed to be denying liability.
Pauline, 62, of Co Durham, said: "She was in and out of hospital and we are convinced that is what led to her death. We have been trying for years to get justice, and are determined to get it now she has died. She must be the only person to go looking for a miracle and come back in a worse condition."
She added: "It is so sad.
She was disabled, but if it was not for the fall, she would still be here today."
Hcpt declined to comment because the matter is in the hands of their insurers.
See: http://tinyurl.com/285qtsg
No disrespect to the deceased intended but I can't help laughing!
She went to Lourdes in the hope of a miracle that would cure her paraplegia and came back with broken bones when she was dropped from a hoist that was supposed to dip her in the miraculous waters.
I wouldn't be surprised if the defendent's insurance company claim that her injuries were "an act of God"!
Categories: Community
Modify FireFox Headers to spoof an IP
AFA Forums - Thu, 2010-07-29 20:25
This is clever.
If you've ever been sent to Hulu to watch a video and got the "We're sorry, currently our video library can only be streamed in the United States" message, this trick will allow you to modify the headers in Firefox to spoof your IP so you can watch their content.
It could be used to spoof any IP so I thought it worth sharing...
Categories: Community
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attacks Octopus Paul
AFA Forums - Thu, 2010-07-29 18:45
I'm not sure if this has been already posted...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...opus-Paul.html
Hilarious! I think someone needs to reassure Ahmadinejad that the Western leaders don't use octopuses to make important decisions. And the fact that he is complaining about others following superstition is priceless.
Poor Paul...
Categories: Community
Losing my religion
AFA Forums - Thu, 2010-07-29 16:54
I have not bothered with this story before because I thought it rather mundane, but having watched some goddists ask questions similar to mine so long ago, and go absolutely nowhere with it, I decided to set it down.
I was brought up in a conventional middle class household near a northern beach in Sydney, conventionally anglican. I had the unquestioned routine of baptism, regular church, in the choir (unfondled, happily) and confirmation after which I tried being pretty devout for a couple of years until about age 15 when things were starting to fall apart. By the time I entered university at 17, I was privately a disbeliever and not too much later publicly so.
A flaw in my upbringing which helped things go wrong, so to speak, was probably (and unwittingly) my father who was an engineer. With private hopes I would enter medicine or science, or law as a last resort, he happily fed me books on science including one by Julian Huxley on geology, palaeontology and evolution. I was an avid reader anyway and devoured books on science and technology as well as history and common boys' fantasies. My father was also a rather careless believer although careful not to offend social niceties, except on the occasion he not only fell asleep in church again but started snoring loudly.
None of that should underplay the immersion in automatic belief, right down to an expectation in my early years that I might actually be struck dead if I allowed myself to swear using the name of god. We were a very conventional family, in a John Howardesque sense.
I was not especially well read in the bible, accepting the bits pointed out to me and giving up early with boredom on the one occasion I decided to read it through. I accepted also the normal anglican contradictions that all science was true while all the bible was also true, except where it conflicted with science when it was symbolic, or said something a bit nasty when some human had misunderstood what god meant to write. Eventually, I noticed these contradictions and asked myself the questions I have often asked of theists here, "On what basis or rule do we distinguish these?" "How do you know which is which?" I could not think of a satisfactory answer other than that science always seemed to do better even when it was later superseded by more science, and nothing else was improving our understanding of "biblical symbolism". No-one had remembered at that point to tell me my belief need not be logical and by the time they did, it was too late.
Some time in these years I read in a 1904 encyclopaedia a neat summary of Kant on the subject of what we can know rationally. This helped to resolve earliest questions of cosmology for me (in the sense of what we can know rather than the science of course), understanding that we have only this universe and our senses in it, and no magical capacity to go "outside" this universe and apply our rationality to that "outside".
Another strand of thought related to god's Unholy Put Option, or gUPO. Sorry if you don't know what a put option is in finance but basically I am talking about how everything was apples for adam and eve until the wrong apple, so now we were all going to be tortured in hell forever if that was what god felt like at the time we happened to die; the way the sins of the fathers get visited upon the sons unto the fourth generation; how we could die unexpectedly with no opportunity to get a quick bit of forgiveness at the end; how a quick bit of forgiveness at the end seemed adequate to this god chap with the funny moral code.
Then I wondered what happened to people who had never heard of our particular god. Were they heading for heaven or hell, and why? Was god nicer to people who had never heard of god than he was to those who had, or nastier to people who through no fault of their own had never heard about god? Still no consistent answers arrived.
What about animals? I understood evolution so where and when, exactly, did a soul pop into things, somewhere between the slime and the human? If I could not answer it, did this mean there in fact was no soul to save, or that plankton had souls as well? Who was evangelising to the plankton?
Unable to answer these questions rationally, I had one final go at faith but that broke, too. If (as I was told) the sensible way to have faith in god was first to have faith in god so then I would have faith in god, then, um, fuck off stupid.
So god did.
I had already read enough to know that other god-beliefs had similar characteristics, and thus failures, to the one I had abandoned, bible or not, so I did not bother turning to them.
Before I "went public" so to speak, beyond friends, I worked through questions of ethics and their source , and a few other things, wanting to make sure the structure was coherent and that I could counter the obvious arguments against my atheism. If someone wants to change my view, I want them to have a damn good argument. I also started noticing things more, like the steady retreat of god into more distant and smaller gaps over the entire history of science since the ancient Greeks and the way "advanced" believers typically operated about a generation behind science in updating their understanding of their holy book.
All gods were otiose, and I have led a life personally untroubled by any god or religion for more than forty years since, and learned to face life and death with equanimity (not with resignation). During that time I have found a few interesting challenges to the coherence of my position, sometimes requiring further reading on my part, but the outcome has always been to give me new arguments or understanding to destroy the goddist idea, a practice which now affords me some entertainment.
Categories: Community
Christians may ignore government policy proposals and vote based on religious beliefs
AFA Forums - Thu, 2010-07-29 15:43
29 July 10
Today Barry Hickey, Catholic Archbishop of Perth, declared that Julia Gillards Atheism could influence Christian voters not to vote Labor.
This statement is of grave concern given that the two competing leaders standpoints on social welfare, economic policy and a multitude of other factors would be completely ignored on the basis of personal beliefs.
David Nicholls, President of the Atheist Foundation of Australia stated This kind of action represents the polar opposite of making an educated, informed and balanced choice on Election Day. Private and personal philosophy about the existence of a god should not affect a persons ability to govern a country effectively, especially one made up of people with many faiths and none.
What a shame that the group Archbishop Hickey speaks for shows intolerance for people with differing personal beliefs and philosophies. I wonder what this group would state should a Hindu or Muslim candidate for PM be put forward for example? Mr Nicholls said.
There should be no place for this kind of intolerance in Australia.
Perhaps this radical idea to vote for a candidate solely based on religion comes from fears that the
Prime Minister will undermine the special privileges that churches enjoy
as stated by Archbishop Hickey. This comes off the back of a recent Senate inquiry into tax breaks provided to religious groups that amassed combined earnings in excess of 30 billion tax free dollars last year (much of which was not ploughed back into charitable works).
Julia Gillard has outwardly stated that "In terms of the work that the Catholic Church does, that other churches and religious groups do in our society I am a big respecter. This should be sufficient for the Australian community, especially coming from a leader operating at this level of government.
The Atheist Foundation of Australia urges all of its members, along with the Australian public to closely examine each partys policy statements and commitments before making their choice, rather than choosing based on religious beliefs or non-beliefs.
Media Contact:
David Nicholls
President
Atheist Foundation of Australia Inc
Phone (08) 8835 2269
Email info@atheistfoundation.org.au
Website http://www.atheistfoundation.org.au
Forum http://atheistfoundation.org.au/forums/index.php
Convention http://www.atheistconvention.org.au
Categories: Community
Atheist Gillard says she respects church
AFA Forums - Thu, 2010-07-29 15:38
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-electi...729-10x3o.html
Quote:
"While there is no indication that the present Prime Minister will undermine the special privileges that churches enjoy, some wonder what the future will bring,"
Quote:
"Many Christians are concerned that someone who does not believe in God may not endorse the Christian traditions of respect for human life, for the sanctity of marriage and the independence of churches, church schools and church social welfare agencies."
Quote:
"Long term I am concerned about a secularist viewpoint."
Categories: Community
14 years for some donkey lerve
AFA Forums - Thu, 2010-07-29 14:50
Apparently the devil made him do it... :rolleyes:
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/world/793...ex-with-donkey
Categories: Community
In NSW? Get your P&C to pass this for the Ethics classes
AFA Forums - Thu, 2010-07-29 12:53
This is from the parents4ethics who want children at public schools to learn something meaningful (ie ethics) when scripture is being offered.
What they need to do in the next couple of months is to get lots of NSW public schools to pass the following motion at their school's P&C. This motion is supported by the NSW Federation of P&C Associations.
That the NSW Minister for Education changes DET policy to allow secular ethics classes to operate as a complement to scripture/SRE classes in NSW primary schools.
Their FAQ says:
Q. How can I let other parents in the school know about the ethics program?
A. You might like to use the following paragraph in the school newsletter.The NSW Federation of P&C Associations is asking the government to change the Department of Educations policy on the treatment of children who opt out of SRE/scripture. It has joined with St James Ethics Centre to develop a secular ethics program for children who do not attend SRE. The program is being piloted in ten NSW schools in Term 2, 2010. There is absolutely no desire or intention on behalf of the P&C Federation or St James Ethics Centre to remove SRE from its current position, protected under the NSW Education Act. The issue lies solely in the policy. It is hoped the Minister will change the policy to allow those who dont attend SRE to have the option to attend secular ethics classes. You can find out all about the initiative at http://www.specialethicseducation.com.au
Categories: Community
Quick! to the bat poll!
AFA Forums - Thu, 2010-07-29 08:51
Do you believe faith healers can offer legitimate help to sick people?
So asks A Current Affair in its online poll.
Vote here! http://aca.ninemsn.com.au/
Categories: Community
Alt. Genesis Beggining
AFA Forums - Thu, 2010-07-29 01:00
I reckon this one makes more sense
Quote:
"In the beginning God created the Heavens and a transvestite who pooped mozzarella dinosaurs."
:D
Categories: Community
Black Stories - Barley
AFA Forums - Wed, 2010-07-28 23:54
Softie's church was a haven for loons. You may have read, in Stretch Of The Imagination, how I eventually slunk away after a bullshit healing session, and both Father's Little Helpers and Dust In The (Mighty) Wind showed just how crazy things can get.
You'd think that with "miracle gold dust", "divine healing technicians", fat men "birthing in the spirit", godly ghostbusters settling the Eevul of an imaginary murder done In Days Of Yore, and a loopy pastor chopping up demonic influences with a farking great wooden sword, and the other hooey already chronicled, that perhaps I'd be done with them.
Nah. Though the Heeeeealer's little piece of charlatanry was the last time I went to that church, it was by no means the first time I walked out.
The first time was kind of familiar to me. As it happened, Softie's mob had bought the complex where Pastor Jollyfella was holding meetings when I first came to town. The same lunacy as witnessed in Playing With Knobs And Carrots once again reared its ugly head, this time with a twist!
Along comes a bloke I shall call Monty Banque, just for the heck of it, and for identification in the narrative.
Now Monty had apparently had a terminal cancer in an unusual location, and, even more unusually, said cancer had supposedly vanished.
I don't know what medical procedures were involved, as Monty was only a bird of passage, rather than one of the flock, but of course the role of Worldly Medicine was played down when Monty began his spiel.
Not for him the Hallelujah Diet, oh no! Monty had another god-ordained cure-all, responsible for his mackerel-arsed recovery... Green Barley!
Now apparently, in the myth, old Jay Hoover, while preventing the first couple from scrumping his apples, had said the following:
Quote:
29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.
Genesis 1:29-30 (King James Version)
Somehow this came down to being a recommendation that humanity should eat this fucking vile, tooth-staining moosh of green barley.
If you can't follow the bloke's reasoning, you're not Robinson Crusoe.
Of course, seeing this comes after my time as Bible-Basher Black, Combat Theologian, I was mulling over the words in my mind, trying to make some sense of 'em in the context of christianity. I couldn't.
Even worse, I'd come up with a couple of verses from later on in the same myth, where Noah and the lads come out of that Big Boat Of Impossibility, and The Big Voice From The Clouds supposedly says:
Quote:
3 Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.
4 But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.
Genesis 9:3-4 (King James Version)
Now, okay, this is the same divine tergiversating despot who later says pig and shellfish are off the menu, and don't even start me with Peter on the roof of Cornelius's house, and the apparent abolition of kosher law among the early christians...
Point is, I so wanted to ask Monty why one lot of biblical hooey was okay and the other wasn't. I could hardly contain my curiosity, and I didn't trust that wild mob not to seize me and exorcise the very breath out of me if I interrupted, so I walked out and went home.
I guess I'll never get to ask Monty... the sneaky ol' cancer apparently jumped out from behind a barley stalk and metastatised all over the joint: he died less than a year later, I was told.
I guess the other two B's: Banners and Beelzebub's Bacon, will need to wait till next time.
Categories: Community
New debate win-attempt scheme for theists
AFA Forums - Wed, 2010-07-28 22:46
Recently I've been debating theists, with things like "If god was so loving and what not, then everybody would be my friend" and "How come god gives other people loads of friends and an excellent life, where as I do not have a lot of good friends, and I find a lot of things in life hard, that people find easy" as examples of the ways God singles people out, and how God is a prick.
The response is somewhere in the line of "It is not like you cannot make friends easily. I am your friend" or something similar.
Please note that I do not usually know the fella for more than approximately ten minutes, and he/she doesn't know me for much longer, yet alone know anything other than the screen name and that I am an atheist. And these people tend to focus on that.
I've noticed a similar trait with a few Muslims I debated after a few comments on Youtube channels (I can't help myself: stupidity pisses me off also when it enters the "religion is peaceful - blame the media" department) and what not.
They tell me eventually, that I should pray, and that they will remember me in their prayers, Allah/God be with you, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Makes me wonder how they'll manage this new debate win-attempt scheme of theirs when they enter in sajda or in their prayers: "Dear (<god>|<goddess>)*: I was having a chat to this guy on Youtube and I really want him to accept you into his heart. Please make him get better and forgive him for his sins, and also note that he is now my best friend even though I have only had conversations with him using the private messaging system on internet sites and have known him for approximately ten minutes. I really want him to feel your love. Amen|Ameen
Of course, I am at least 95% sure that they don't actually give a flying fuck about their new "best friend" and if they do, this must be some bizarre method religious people use to attempt to win atheist debates and make friends at the same time.
:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D
NOTE: I do use the examples that are more extreme too, after that, such as cancer sufferers, and some people I have seen with severe genetic defects (a billion times more severe than what I've ever encountered: I'm talking about people who look like beachballs with a head: very snowman like and no arms or legs because jebus didn't give them any) and how god clearly enjoys seeing people suffer, since he makes lame excuses like "it is because of sin" and, like a politician, doesn't bother fixing things up.
The response to this ranges from "God knows what is best, and he knows sin is going to kill you" (ie. missing the point)
Categories: Community
Moving forward and multiplying
AFA Forums - Wed, 2010-07-28 21:58
My wife is pregnant and our second child is due in February.
Full story in the lounge bar.
Categories: Community
How Many Universes Are Enough?
AFA Forums - Wed, 2010-07-28 20:09
(A Brain Grenade, courtesy of Mr P)
Either there is far more Universe to the Universe than we ever expected or the frontiers of physics may be wandering into a mathematically beautiful but ultimately sterile aether of dubious substance.
"The scientist should treasure the riddles he can't solve, not explain them away at the outset" That is what Roberto Unger a Harvard philosopher told me when I interviewed him for a piece I was writing on alternative approaches to "fundamental physics". The story, which appears in this month's DISCOVER, was born from questions I ran up against as I prepared to teach a graduate cosmology course last year. While cosmology is not my own research area I have, for years, watched from the sidelines as the field evolved. And like a number of colleagues I have been puzzled by developments that seem potentially troubling.
Fundamental physics is a catchall term for our bedrock understanding of reality's bedrock -- Space, Time, Matter, and Energy. Increasingly, fundamental physics has grown to include Cosmology, the study of the origin and structure of the Universe, as particle physicists and astrophysicists came to see their problems linked. This mixing led to spectacular successes in understanding the evolution of the Universe. But pushing backwards towards the bare instant of the Big Bang, it has also led to a strange development -- research fields where the details of potentially unobservable parts of reality shape what we can observe and experimentally test.
For critics, these new domains of theory are less solid science than mathematical allegory. They are "fictions" created in response to some challenge posed by the real world, the world we directly see and test. String Theory contains these kinds of elements. Physicists have struggled for years to develop a workable description of Quantum Gravity -- a marriage of the curved Space-time of Einstein's relativity with the discontinuous microworld of quantum physics. Early on String Theory - which swaps point particles for microscopic vibrating strings - looked like an attractive solution. But the theory failed in a world of only 3 space dimensions. In response String Theorists opened space up, adding an extra 7 dimensions that are hidden from us. A mathematically abstract but workable framework for quantum gravity emerged from this construction but a steep price was paid in terms of 7 invisible dimensions added to reality.
Another potential theoretical allegory comes in response an enigma hidden in the decades old, highly successful "Standard Model of Particle Physics". The Standard Model captures the behavior of all known kinds of matter. It has been verified thousands of times in particle accelerator experiments over the last 40 years. But to match theory with experiments physicists need 20 different numbers, 20 different "constants of nature" that must first be measured in experiments. Needing precise values of 20 separate numbers before you even start making predictions seems less than elegant. Shouldn't a fundamental theory be a lot more fundamental? The problem got worse when physicists recognized those numbers needed to be very finely tuned. Change any of the numbers by a tiny fraction and the details of cosmic evolution change so dramatically that humans would never appear the Universe. Our existence seemed to depend on this "fine-tuning". Ouch.
In response many researchers began to explore so-called Multiverse Cosmologies. The multiverse is a universe of universes. What we think of as the cosmos becomes, in this theoretical framework, just one of many pocket universes each with their own form of the laws of physics. The multiverse first gained widespread attention in the context of inflationary cosmology, a theory of the very, very, early Universe that appeared to solve a growing list of problems with the Big Bang. At first the multiverse was met with raised eyebrows as in "that's a weird idea". But in time it become more attractive, particularly as a response to the dilemma posed by the standard model and its 20 constants.
In a Universe of Universes the values of the constants we see in our cosmos are simply an accident. Instead of needing a fundamental physics explanation, the values of the constants become just a matter of the statistics of universes. The values we see in our universe are perhaps nothing more than the average ones occurring across the many incarnations of the standard model in the many "pocket universes" comprising the multiverse. No fine-tuning is required.
In both these cases -- the multiverses' pocket universes and String Theory's hidden dimensions -- critics content the new theories don't explain, they explain away. For philosophers like Roberto Unger and physicists like Lee Smolin, George Ellis and my co-blogger Marcelo Glieser, both the unseen universes and the hidden dimensions are fictions that drain the reality out of the only reality we actually experience.
The core problem is that, as of this writing, there is no experimental evidence that hidden dimensions or alternate universe exist. Proponents will justifiably point to the rich theoretical insights that a field like String Theory has provided. They also rightly argue that Einstein's relativity seemed overly mathematical and abstract when it was first introduced and took time before people figured out how to test its veracity. These are valid points but it seems to me there is more at work here than simply technical abstraction. There is an unspoken metaphysics in the new theories that manifests itself as shift in the focus of science. That shift needs to be brought out in the open as part of the debate lest we end up in a very dead end. As Unger says "When we imagine our Universe to be just one out of a multitude of possible worlds we devalue this world, the one we see, the one we should be trying to explain."
I think I would have to agree. There might, indeed, be a multiverse and I like alternative universes as much as the next science fiction groupie. But I wonder how long we should wait before a field yields real, experimentally verifiable fruit. It may well be that String Theory's hidden dimension's are real. Still how much effort do we put into explorations based on the potentially unobservable while shifting away from the tradition of exploring only the actual? More importantly what do we make of the ontological status of theories that need what might be permanently hidden to explain what is always visible?
How many universes, ultimately, are enough?
Adam Frank
Categories: Community