How I Belive in God

I find it amazing that people are basically split into two groups, those that believe in God and those that believe in science. I, for one, believe in both. Here is how:

1. The Bible can not be taken literally. There are many places in which Bible experts explain confusing or seemingly contradictory passages by looking at what these passages mean for the people of the times of the Bible. They use the culture and the language of the era to show what each passage means when taken in context. Now why we must abandon this sort of interpretation (from the standpoint of somebody with a 1AD understanding of science) when it comes to matters of science is beyond my comprehension. Was the world made in seven days? No –that goes against the laws of the universe, God doesn’t need to break his own rules to make earth. Were seven days figurative to represent to cycle of the formation of earth and life? That seems more reasonable. We should not use a book given to us as a work of religion as a text for science. God gave us the ability to perform experiments, to think the results that we get from science are there to intentionally mislead us is tomfoolery.

2. Miracles are in the timing. For some reason when "miracles" are explained by natural phenomenon this ruffles some feathers of the devout. I think that we need to stop thinking about miracles as the action but instead as the timing. I find the idea of God needing miracles to direct human history as a bit degrading to his power. Think about it -there are thousands of parameters that need to be set to make the whole universe contain matter that doesn't just degenerate into a soup of energy waves, yet we are to believe that he didn't plan ahead enough to part the Red Sea at the right time? God has already set into motion every miracle that will happen, and they will play out through provable science techniques. Saying that God has to change the rules of the universe just because of actions of people is mighty arrogant of our part. The miracle not that the Red Sea was parted, the miracle is that it parted when it did.

3. Science only leads to more questions. When it comes to the nature of the universe science is very good at opening doors but very terrible at closing them. Instead of four elements (earth, fire, wind, air) we now have 117 elements, which can be broken down into subatomic particles which have anti-particles, which are possibly all made up of infinity thin quantum strings which adhere to quantum mechanics that dictate that every possible outcome does actually happen. ...Right... Currently science is saying we have no idea how the basic building blocks of the universe work. Even when we figure out a unified theory of everything it will just lead to a pile of new questions that need to be answered, which in turn will lead to even more questions. I don't understand why learning about the universe that God placed us in is somehow a violation of God. I trust that if there is something that he does not want us to know about he would have the ability to hide it from us. Heck, there might be all the puppet masters in a parallel universe pulling their strings into this one, and we have no way to detect it. This point is that for me science does not make God worthless, instead it shows us how much there actually is to all of this, it makes God all the more needed to make the ends meet. There are true answers to the questions- however the more we learn about our surroundings the less we “know” the answers.

4. God can not be proven/disproven. It seems to be quite obvious that God can not be proven or disproven by science. And to think that we can do so is akin to thinking that we can prove that there is a city named Boston by measuring the temperature that water boils at. The nature of science is so far away from being able to disprove God that to think that we could through experiment is vastly overestimating our abilities as humans, and quite arrogant.

You will see that I have shied away from the topics of why I should believe in God and all the stuff like that that normal discussion of God turns to. That is really quite another subject, and one of even more faith. The bottom line of this post is just to point out that science and God can co-exist, much like a car and a driver. Figuring out how the car works has no relation as to why it does.

Variance in Time machine

I started to think about things one morning when Aaron texted everyone about getting shipped off to Hawaii and about how seemingly small decisions made huge outcomes in his life, like how a certain session of Star War Galaxies lead to him meeting his future wife. I got to thinking about how it would be neat if there was a machine that you could look through that would show how important each action that we are doing is for changing our future. So someone eating cereal wouldn't be changing their future much because most of the decisions they make during that time will result in the same outcome. While a person that is flipping a coin to decide what restaurant to eat at would show up as a pivotal decision about to be made.

I started to think about how such a machine would work, and I think I have it figured out: Suppose we exist in the "superposition" universe where each possibility can and does happen, so if a coin is flipped it lands on heads in some universes and tails in others, however we only experience one instance of the universe, so we only see one outcome of the flip. Now also assume that we can find a particle that can travel faster than light and when reflected travels back through time (yeah, that is a tall order, but it is what would make this machine work.) The Variance in Time machine emits these very fast particles which goes out forward in time through all possible future universes given the current one we are in, and then gets reflected back to the machine. The machine then displays the areas where the biggest variations in the future are found (where the particles reflected back come from the most directions, or change in some manner). The results are normalized so that only the decisions that have the biggest effect on the future would show up and also you could tune the time to hear back from the reflecting particles to that you can "see" different times into the future.

So looking through the machine in a restaurant we see no significant changes to a person reading the newspaper, but a huge red dot on a waitress that may or may not drop a plate of food. The question that this machine brings up is that even though we know that there is a pivotal event to happen, we don't know if it is good or not. Say we are driving on an icy road and the machine picks up that a huge pivotal event is about to occur, the first reaction would be to stop since it might be that you have a wreck, however it could have been that you saved the life of a future president if you would have kept on going. However it could be useful when picking lottery numbers.

Obviously if we had the machine and used it when I was deciding to write this post or not it would have been going off the charts, because by me posting this I have laid the blueprints to what will make me billions of dollars. The Variance in Time machine.

Triumph

I have to say that the most successful recent mission that the NASA has undertaken in terms of PR is the Phoenix Mars Lander. Besides the amazing discovery of actual water ice on Mars, the Lander had a twitter account with a following of almost 39,000 people. It was enjoyable to get up to the minute results from the Phoenix Lander as it happened on my phone, and it was very sad when recently the Lander sent out it's final goodbyes thanking everyone for their support.

Gizmodo has the final words from the Phoenix Mars Lander.

If you are reading this, then my mission is probably over.

This final entry is one that I asked be posted after my mission team announces they’ve lost contact with me. Today is that day and I must say good-bye, but I do it in triumph and not in grief.

As I’ve said before, there’s no other place I’d rather be than here. My mission lasted five months instead of three, and I’m content knowing that I worked hard and accomplished great things during that time. My work here is done, but I leave behind a legacy of images and data.

In that sense, you haven’t heard the end of me. Scientists will be releasing findings based on my data for months, possibly years, to come and today’s children will read of my discoveries in their textbooks. Engineers will use my experience during landing and surface operations to aid in designing future robotic missions.
...

(read the full note here)

I am glad that NASA has stepped up and used new technology that is freely available to increase the awareness of the projects that they are doing. This keeps interest in space exploration up and it also lets us know that the money we are spending on the projects are actually going to something useful. I will miss my daily tweets from the Phoenix Lander, and maybe when Martian summer rolls around in 2010 the Phoenix will have more updates to give us.

(There are some more NASA missions on Twitter: The Cassini Space Probe, The Mars Rovers, and The Mars Science Lab which will be launched in the fall of 2009)

Large Hadron Collider

The big story in science news these days is the start of experiments with the Large Hardron Collider. I had a general idea about what a particle accelerator did, but here is an excellent video that explains how the LHC works:


Knowing that it is real makes me fell like we are living in the future; A future that is void of hovering cars.

Check out the Large Hadron Collider webcams here.

Something Strange This Way Comes

Got 5 minutes? Watch this video, it will blow your mind. If you already know about the experiment skip a minute or two, but don't miss the end of the video. I did this experiment in a physics class at K-State, but I never heard of taking the experiment one step further:



After a couple minutes of thinking the best answer I came up with was that the world is based on infinite approximations, and so things that should happen, do happen. However, when we observe something, it isn't an approximation anymore and we see one instance of the process that is usually approximated. So there is something to us that is different than the rest of matter, there has to be, it's not like putting a coffee cup next to the slits makes light act different...

I need to know more about this. I would assume they tested this with the machine that was used for observations turned on and off, and that gave them different results. But what if the data is collected and then immediately destroyed so that no-one can ever see it, then how does the light act? What if the recording machine has a random number generator that turns it off and on, but no one knows the number that it picks, or if the machine is ever off or on. Can we observe how the light particle acted to tell if the machine was on or off?

Some people think that science will at some point eliminate the need for God, to me the more we learn about science the more it proves that there is God.

The universe is more amazing than we can imagine, and we barely know anything about it.