They can if they believe that god was a scientist.

@IAJO163 Not on his best day !! They are lots of other gods and more people believe in other religions than christ !! Still a POS FAIRY TALE !! NOT REAL never has been ! SCIENCE is the only one true answer to EVERYTHING !1 PRAY ALL YOU WANT IT WON"T CURE CANCER but SCIENCE WILL !!

@Ricky64 Are you trying to sway me to a hard side? lol. The world isn't black and white and as long as the only factual thing that exists is belief, we can continue to be open minded about things.

I wonder that same damned thing...

Brain damage !!!

I would caution you about using quantum anything in this context. If electrons are not "classical particles" then what is? I do agree that a rationalist assumes that the model is correct, and that an empiricist is more inclined to assume that it is not. Both sides have benefits and drawbacks. For example what is an "outlier" in a data set. Do such things exist?

@RavenMunnin Not to worry, there is no quantum woo here. An electron is a quantum “particle” I say particle simply out of linguistic convenience. An electron exhibits wave-like behavior as well as particle-like behavior: it just depends on what interactions the electron goes. The true nature of the electron is much more complicated than a little ball which has classical circular orbits around a proton in the hydrogen atom. Classical particles obey Newton’s Law but quantum “particles” obey Schrödinger’s equation which by its nature is a wave equation: the solutions it emits depends on both the boundary conditions imposed on the Schrödinger equation and the given potential under consideration. Also the solutions that newton’s 2nd emits are actual positions of a given particle whereas he solutions of the Schrödinger equation represent a probability density once you multiply the solution by its complex conjugate.That is the main difference between classical particles and quantum particles.

Also it isn’t that an empiricist assumes the model is incorrect so much as they tend to be more skeptical and need justifications for assuming certain premises are true before continuing on. Basically what I mean here is that an empiricist won’t say “okay let’s just assume p is true, what follows is the proof of [insert whatever thing]” there will always be a reason why that assumption is used.

The answer to that question depends on any number of things in an experiment: did you control for all possible other variables? Is this outlier reproducible? What factors lead up to the manifestion of this outlier? It could be that it was simply a malfunction or it could be a new phenomenon that takes place under special conditions: special in that they are not everyday circumstances which leads to the phenomena being outliers according to a dataset. Of course the outlier itself might worth study even if it is just a mistake.

@Wavefunction what I meant was it sounds like you question the existence of matter when you say the electrons are not particles. The issue I am trying to point out is that the concept of 'classical' and 'quantum' are convenient ideological boxes we created so that we can still talk about these things. The ideas in quantum physics is so new and shaky that using them in this example is not going to help things as neither side really has anything more then a story to explain observations. I will try and restate my comment so it makes a bit more sense.
Quantum reality seems to be so different from the reality we experience that trying to describe it with the concepts we understand fails miserably. For this reason scientific thought around this realm has not been on solid ground with no good reasons to reject or accept very strange theories.
This brings me to why I started to talk about outliers. In essence you must either accept them as part of the model or reject them. The decision to do so is usually based on how accurate the model you are using predicts an outcome. Today Newtons laws still predict 99.99% of scenarios just fine. It was deposed because we eventually realized that the outliers were not outliers but actually part of a more complex model. This decision happened because we could grasp how they fit into a new model, and take measurements that allowed us to see that this model was more then just a story. So for me weather you stay with a model (what I am taking as a rationalist mindset) depends on if you can see the outliers as something else, it is not a mindset, rather a view that inevitably happens on a case by case basis. Religious people see the world as an exciting place where humans can't grasp what the causes for things are so they can treat outliers as part of the religious model (think miracles), they don't seek an alternate explanations. Its lazy but that is how I see them (to be fair we all do this with some things). Wanting to explain the outliers will force you to discard the old model as happens in science all the time. I will stop here its already to long.

@RavenMunnin

“what I meant was it sounds like you question the existence of matter when you say the electrons are not particles.”

It might sound that way but that’s not what I am I’m fact saying: the nature of matter just simply isn’t as simple as matter existing a little point particles.

“The issue I am trying to point out is that the concept of 'classical' and 'quantum' are convenient ideological boxes we created so that we can still talk about these things.”

No they aren’t ideological boxes, they are separate physical theories that describe how matter behaves at different mass scales. If you perhaps meant that they are man made categories made to describe nature then sure that’s true, but they are natural distinctions to make: they aren’t arbitrary categories.

“The ideas in quantum physics is so new and shaky that using them in this example is not going to help things as neither side really has anything more then a story to explain observations.”

Well being almost a century old is not really that new in terms of physics unless you’re talking about field theory which emerged in the 50s-60s (you could really maybe push it to the 30s if you want to count Dirac’s attempts at QFT). The ideas are unusual yes but not shaky. A theory is much more than a story: a story can’t make predictions whereas a theory can. Also the whole point was that a classical picture of electron behavior in the context of explaining electrical resistance is logically self consistent, but the issue is that the premises upon which this model rest are incorrect: individual electrons are not governed by newton’s law, they are governed by the Schrödinger equation (at least those that aren’t relativistic anyway). This is why despite being a self consistent explanation of electrical resistance, it doesn’t correspond to other knowledge gained by science; thus, it is not a scientifically accurate description. This means that it’s predictive capability is rather limited and not as useful as the quantum description. Quantum perturbation theory will yield much more information about the system than treating the electrons as little bouncy balls that collide with the material.

“Quantum reality seems to be so different from the reality we experience that trying to describe it with the concepts we understand fails miserably.”

It doesn’t just seem that way, it is that way. I disagree with your assertion that trying to describe QM with any concepts we understand fails miserably. Describing QM using the language of math works quite well and gives insight that can’t imparted by watching a pop-sci program. If you’d like a decent introduction to QM, then Griffiths is a good introductory text and in fact is what I used in my undergraduate QM courses.

“For this reason scientific thought around this realm has not been on solid ground with no good reasons to reject or accept very strange theories.”

Umm what do you mean by this? While there are some unresolved issues with quantum theory, it is on pretty solid ground overall.

“This brings me to why I started to talk about outliers. In essence you must either accept them as part of the model or reject them. The decision to do so is usually based on how accurate the model you are using predicts an outcome. Today Newtons laws still predict 99.99% of scenarios just fine. It was deposed because we eventually realized that the outliers were not outliers but actually part of a more complex model”

Yes, and for a well established model a more general model is sought out to explain outliers: a model such that when appropriate limits are taken we can recover the old model. I’m not sure what you mean by Newton’s laws predict 99.99 percent of scenarios but yes Newton’s laws are still accurate in their regime. Newton’s laws weren’t deposed, their boundary of application was simply found and it was recognized that we needed a more general theory.

“This decision happened because we could grasp how they fit into a new model, and take measurements that allowed us to see that this model was more then just a story. So for me weather you stay with a model (what I am taking as a rationalist mindset) depends on if you can see the outliers as something else, it is not a mindset, rather a view that inevitably happens on a case by case basis.”

As I said outliers could simply be methodological errors, or they could be new avenues of investigation leading to the need for a more general theory( maybe even both!): it just depends on the specifics of the situation.

“Religious people see the world as an exciting place where humans can't grasp what the causes for things are so they can treat outliers as part of the religious model (think miracles), they don't seek an alternate explanations. Its lazy but that is how I see them (to be fair we all do this with some things). Wanting to explain the outliers will force you to discard the old model as happens in science all the time. I will stop here its already to long.”

Right, this is exactly why some religious people are pure rationalists. I disagree that we all don’t seek alternative explanations for some things. I always try to entertain alternative ideas because that’s how you discover truth: dialectics are a wonderful tool for seeking out alternative explanations. As far as science goes, you don’t discard a theory: you simply recognize its limitations and attempt to come up with a model that reduces to other models in certain limits (correspondence principal).

Edit: apologies for block quoting but there was a lot to respond to here and I had to organize my thoughts.

@Wavefunction this is an interesting conversation, unfortunately I feel like this is a bit cumbersome for what we require to explain ourselves correctly. I feel we are talking past each other a bit perhaps another time we can continue this discussion.

@RavenMunnin That is fine and understandable, good chat though.

HA !!!

Double HA!

If you continue to engage in god stuff I will report you & you will be blocked. If you want this to happen then do it again this is my last warning. gods are not permitted on this site.

I’m a 50/50 agnostic with a PhD in philosophy and I know many PhDs in philosophy who are theists, although perhaps the atheists in the field do predominate. I suspect what so many of this list find unbelievable is some popular version of Christianity (or Islam) that reads like a fairy tale, and surely no Phd in philosophy subscribes to it. Of course, there’s lots of room on the continuum between the concepts of “an old man in the sky” and “a being than which a greater is not possible"; and it is (something like) this latter that I understand the philosopher-theists believe in and that I am uncertain of.

@Wallace
I have a bachelors in math and philosophy, but this guy was a card carrying Jesuit. I really don’t think he believed in some higher interpretation of the Bible. I’ve met other fairly well educated scientists, philosophers and historians who believe in this bs. I find it farcical that a historian would believe this bs. But they do.

@Gatovicolo Math and philosophy! Great! It is interesting that so many great thinkers were mathematicians and philosophers, such as Leibnitz, Russell, Whitehead, and others.

I taught at Mississippi State U. for 30+years and there I, too, became acquainted with many professors in other fields who were biblical literalists. And after I wrote the note above I remembered a PhD in philosophy who also was, but I still think it is probably rarer in philosophy than in most other academic areas. (This guy was an older Church of Christ preach who, I always cynically thought, came to graduate school in philosophy in hopes the degree would give more authority to his pronouncements.) Best.

@Wallace
I came to study math through symbolic logic. That’s an odd path, I believe. I’ve always admired Russell, Whitehead, Frege and Wittgenstein.

Ouch! You said "better" and signified a norm on a competitive scale.

@IAJO163 Thank you, I think ?!

@IceManBNice420 I refrain from using the word "better" these days as it creates a standard that must be met. There's no better, just different.