From Nothing to Nothing

a reply to: Ghost147

I cant say that I tested it as in a test to see if it works . Let me explain .I had bought a property out in the country and was building a camp there . At the same time I was golfing in a league and my partner one night was a guy that worked for CNCP telecommunication . We got to talking and asked what he did there . He told me he was a dowser . I didn't even know what it was at the time but he explained it something like the guys you seen in the movies with the Y stick looking for water . I laughed of course as I had thought that was just plain BS .

I asked if he found much water and joked with him for a bit . He said that his job involved finding berried cables . He said that things had changed over the time he was there and they had machines to find them but that he still got called to go look from time to time . He said it was probably more about the guy using or not using the machine correctly .

He had been on the pay roll for over 20 years at that time .Anyway he was a good guy and we became good golfing buddies . One day I decided to get a well dug at the camp . I called a well driller and he came out to see me . He asked where I wanted it dug and I said well dont you just drill anywhere ? He said he could but sometimes they didn't hit water and brought up that I should get it witched . Well at the time I didnt know that witching and dowsing were the same things and so I got over that little bit . He said he had a cousin that could do it but I said I knew someone else ,thinking about my new golf buddy .

So I get my friend to come over and do his thing . He told me that its not a 100% deal but he would have a look and see what he could find . He spent about 3/4 of a hour waking around the small clearing with a bent coat hanger .He would stop every once in awhile and stick a stick into the ground . He finally stuck one in this one place and called me over . Now I cant remember the exact number as its been over 30 years but it went like this .

Get the guy to drill hear he says .There is some water down there at about 53 feet ,but not much .Go down to 95 feet and there should be all kinds . I kept that under my hat and the next week called the driller up . He showed up real early in the morning when I was heading for work and expected it to be a days job setting up and all that stuff . I got home that night and he was tearing down the rig . Got some water for you he say's . I hit a bit at 53 feet but it wasnt much so I kept going and at 95 feet there was all kinds . just what my bud had said .

Now if the 2 guys would have known each other I might have been suspect about the whole thing but these guys were far apart .Now you could say it was just a fluke and that could be . I talked with other people about that and they were like "well yea that works and would tell me about their experiences in the past that were similar .

The thing that got me about this guy was that he worked as a dowser for a large corporation in Canada for over 20 years and was paid to use his little bent wire to look for buried cables . Its not about a if but about a why it works .Anyhow that was my experience and how I became a believer in dowsing .

a reply to: the2ofusr1

That's a good story. I can see why the experience convinced you about dowsing.

a reply to: the2ofusr1

I just got done reading 'The Serpent and the Rainbow', authored by him (Wade Davis). Fantastic book!

a reply to: WakeUpBeer

I loved that book.

A bit off topic but I thought that was a great page turner



I think it took me something like 3 days to finish. I used to be a avid book reader. Not so much lately

a reply to: Astyanax

The old well driller and I had a beer that day and got to talking . Nowadays its a big truck with a rotating bit but his dad had a old pounder . Prior to that and this is where the story kind of made sense was that they used to dig the well by hand . Fair enough I said .He says well did you ever wonder why they dug where they did ? He said it was standard practice back in his grandfathers day and they didn't have time to dig dry wells . If it wasn't witched ,they wouldn't dig .

Now its more about how big and deep you can put a pipe in the ground and get the $$ ..it wasn't always that way though.

originally posted by: Krazysh0t
Ending it early isn't "making it count."

Sometimes it's the most reasonable course of action. If you're reasonably sure that what remains of your life is going to be nothing much more than extreme pain or confusion and terror ending in death, then there's no reason to stick around for that crap.

a reply to: Blue Shift

I can agree to this. Not everyone has an equal chance at life, afterall. Nevertheless, it shouldn't be a go to option without exploring every possible angle.

Then again, even that may have its complications. It's circumstantial

originally posted by: Barcs
a reply to: dismanrc

A few folks have already explained this, but science is not even close to religion and to suggest they both require blind belief, is downright silly.

Most religions lay out a dogma that has no evidence to back it, and proclaim it as absolute truth. They do not update it when conflicting evidence is found. Science lays out a hypothesis and determines what experiments and tests can be done to confirm or deny it. These experiments are made public so others can duplicate and verify them and if conflicting evidence is found, it is updated accordingly. To equate these 2 concepts is ludicrous and insulting to scientists. I don't blindly believe that scientists and their research exists. I trust them to do their job because they are qualified experts in what they study. For religion, blind belief in unverified mythology and their version of god is a requirement. Blind belief is not required when you have public experiments that anybody with the means and know-how can repeat and test for themselves.

I agree that science and religion shouldn't have to conflict, but this isn't the fault of science or scientists. The problem is really with the religious extremists that fight science tooth and nail with ignorance every time something conflicts with their literal interpretation of ancient stories (ie the "war" on evolution, big bang theory, etc). I also agree that science, evolution, big bang, etc could be tools of god. There is no reason to think that any of that disproves a creator and I would never argue that. I just argue that the evidence of that said creator has not yet been found. Maybe science will discover god one day. I certainly can't rule it out, but in the same light, when there is no evidence that something exists, the logical default is that it does not exist.

You just suggested that religion has no evidence to back it up. Do you have proof of this?

I would counter with mathematical proofs of the attributes of a God like being such as Godels Ontological proof, many philosophical arguments such as; 'Anslem's', or 'First Cause', or the 'Cosmological Argument from Contingency', or that consciousness itself indicates the possibility of the existence of immaterial beings, or the 'Design Argument' not to mention the many subjective evidences of God.

One could argue that Science is founded upon some precepts that cannot be tested and, is in fact, a house of cards built on hypotheses. Nor does science have any compunction to redact its scaffold when the foundation is proven to be vaporous.

Astronomy, Geology and Psychology are areas where theory is assumed to be fact but experiment often cannot be carried out adequately to actually apply scientific method.

For instance, is stellar redshift indicative of optical doppler shift? Could it have another source? How do we explain extreme blueshift, then in an expanding universe? What forces changed the direction of enourmously vast masses (like whole galaxies) travelling the opposite direction, at almost the speed limit of which matter can travel?

I could go on - Cosmic Superluminal Inflation - how is that scientific. It's less believable than magical rainbow coloured unicorns. And there's stacks more, especially when you notice that the Laws of Thermodynamics themselves are on dodgy ground (in regard to falsifiability and therefore testability).

Science doesn't tell us all truth, religion doesn't tell us all truth. We only see a finite bit of a picture in a sea of the infinite. The argument itself is pointless because both sides are blind.

a reply to: chr0naut

That part about both sides being blind is so true .If either side sets up a dogma, they are constrained and not likely to pass past their blinkers . I enjoy finding old ideas that may even be true today despite the status quo and consensuses of the thing . At the end of the day it doesn't change much except for maybe the stock exchange .

a reply to: chr0naut

Speaking as a theistic person.... you can't attribute "what ifs" as proof. They are speculation. Thus you can say something might be a sign of deity, can you show it IS a sign of a deity? If you are going to play in the realm of science, you need to follow those rules. Significantly if you play in the realm of theology, you play by those rules.

originally posted by: Noinden
a reply to: chr0naut

Speaking as a theistic person.... you can't attribute "what ifs" as proof. They are speculation. Thus you can say something might be a sign of deity, can you show it IS a sign of a deity? If you are going to play in the realm of science, you need to follow those rules. Significantly if you play in the realm of theology, you play by those rules.

And you percieve that the proofs I offered were "what if's"?

If you define things loosly enough, nothing can ever be proved. Certainly, Godels proof is rigourous in a mathematical sense. It's about as 'hard' as any proof is going to get, but it itself is built on five axioms and three theories. Its weak points are not the theories, but the axioms.

There is an online attempt to formalize Godels Ontological argument further to allow it to be definitively be resolved by computer. The project page is here.

a reply to: chr0naut

Well to begin with you have posted hypotheses (vs theories). Show me the quantifiable data to proove god.

Would it help you to know I work in the physical sciences (Chemsitry, Biochemistry etc) where you can measure things?

Sorry neighnour all you have posted are things verging on Hitchen's Razor.

Faith only requires belief.
Science only requires evidence.

Neither require the other. To try, is to miss the poing.

Again I opened with "speaking as a theistic person" in my reply. I believe in gods, many of them. I don't need to have evidence, my faith is strong. Mind you my deities also don't require me to show faith in public

a reply to: chr0naut

Can you give us a breakdown of Godel's proof and why you say it is a good proof of what you say it is???

a reply to: Noinden

I find it very interesting that you, being a scientist and all, believe in many Gods.

Which Gods do you believe in??? Any that we'd be familiar with???

What sort of Gods are they??? By that I mean are they Elemental Gods, Gods of Natural Events, Gods of certain attributes, etc. or all powerful Gods like the ones the bible speaks of???

a reply to: mOjOm

I am a polytheistic follower of the pre-Christian gods of Ireland. They are not all powerful, I've never seen evidence for that, Nd I've looked (in the spiritual sense). They are of several types. The "Shinning ones" who are Gods in the classical pagan sense, but then there are the divine ancestors (Don is an example, the first Gael to die in EIre), and then there are spirits of place.

I'm also a hard polytheist, I believe in all gods. Including Jehovah, he(?) is just not preeminent, omni anything. He is a successful tribal deity of the Semetic people.

There are many theistic scientists, which is why I get in the face of any posters who are "all who believe in evolution are atheists" its a fallacy.

originally posted by: Noinden
a reply to: chr0naut

Well to begin with you have posted hypotheses (vs theories). Show me the quantifiable data to proove god.

Would it help you to know I work in the physical sciences (Chemsitry, Biochemistry etc) where you can measure things?

Sorry neighnour all you have posted are things verging on Hitchen's Razor.

Faith only requires belief.
Science only requires evidence.

Neither require the other. To try, is to miss the poing.

Again I opened with "speaking as a theistic person" in my reply. I believe in gods, many of them. I don't need to have evidence, my faith is strong. Mind you my deities also don't require me to show faith in public

One could argue that everything in existence, which has high-order complexity and interdependence is proof of a creator with intelligence, as Hoyle famously pointed out.

The idea that such an improbably complex and and varied system could arise from randomness is fairly hard to justify.

The very order of nature, which seems to seek towards the lowest energy state in all things, shows that something is directing things against what we know of the principles of physics (a singular result rather than a variety). Even a many worlds interpretation does not adequately answer the questions raised by the current state of this one.

Energy, matter, time and space ARE order. If an alternate world exists with those properties, then what are the ordering force/s? If a world does not have those attributes, or any others, does it even exist? If it cannot exist, surely it cannot then be one of the possibilities from which our one is a unique example. So all the infinte alternate worlds that do exist must all have to have an ordering principle of some type, already. The logic of the many worlds argument circularly opposes itself, in that regard.

It would seem that there are various 'proofs' of God but that the alternate view hangs its case upon a supposed absence of proof, which is itself absent in the face those proofs (as nebulous as they may be, depending upon worldview).

One even 'slightly possible' proof is stronger than nothing, which is all the atheist case has to offer.

a reply to: chr0naut

I am sure one could argue that. One would not be talking as a scientist, or one who is literate in the sciences however. One would be talking as a philosopher.

So I return to stating, this is not science. Nor is Gödel's ontological proof, and the axioms on which it is based are simply deconstructed, thus invalidating it as "proof".

I return to "show me the evidence".

Again I have no issue with points of belief, as long as they are acknowledged as unprovable personal or shared gnosis. WHich they are.

a reply to: Noinden

I find that very interesting. Why is it that you choose to believe in them??? Is it from some experience you've had that you attribute to them being real?? Or is it rooted in something other than practical experience and more of some emotional fulfillment??

How do you reconcile the conflicts between belief in so many many Gods when some are said to be in conflict with others or some having been defined as having authority over others???

Is this something that effects the way you deal with practical things in life?? Like perhaps do you attribute certain events in your daily life to the workings of some god rather than just it being of natural causes???

The reason I ask is because I think I know you're posts to some degree, if my memory is correct which is like a 50/50 at best usually, and you always seem to be very intelligent and have solid verifiable answers and reasons for what you say. You're a scientist after all which would make sense. So I find it interesting that you'd not only be religious but very liberally religious as well. None of which I have a problem with, but such an liberal acceptance of Religious Gods while being so grounded in Science does make you somewhat unique in how you think. Wouldn't you agree??

a reply to: mOjOm

I base my beliefs on my experiences. I'm not really going to go into that too deeply here, its not on topic. But in short, I've experienced death and near death too many times (personally and in others) to ignore what my soul tells me

Asd for these gods being in conflict? *Shrug* So what? That does not reduce my belief in their existence. Similarly what man believes to be so about "gods" is a matter of faith, and as such, can not be verified.

Lets take Jehovah saying "he is the only god" or "the god over all". Did he(?) say that, or did some fragile ego of a high priest write that down (if even that) to show supremacy against the competition? Does it matter>

My interactions with them are in the form of Unverifiable personal gnosis (UPG) rather than quantifiable. I have an alter at home and at work. I make offerings, I look for signs. I carry a set of Ogam to read those interactions if I can be bothered.

Most of my posts here on on the matter of science, archaeology etc. These are real world (as opposed to mystical/spiritual world) matters. I speak to my training as a scientist. I hold a Phd and Bachelors in Chemistry and Biochemistry, post graduate diplomas in others sciences, and a masters in Business. I've been involved in the Pharmaceutical industry for ... 16 years. Work wise, I'm a scientist.

Spiritually I've been a pagan (if one needs a broad label, there are better terms, and Polytheist is one of them) longer. I went to a Christian School, but I was an atheist and my family either that or agnostic. All that did was push me to the Pagan path I've been part of the second largest Neopagan Druid organization sine 2000, and I've passed their training. In that organization there is a senior clergy person who is a fellow Chemist, he and I are not unique.

The path called Neopagan Druidry has the inherent benefit of a scientist for being named after the intellectuals of my ancestors, the Druids. We are not Druids , but it is a simple word. So where Christianity is the "search for redemption through Christ" on many levels. "Druidy/Druidism" is the search through knowledge through inspiration. I'll leave that there too its complex and off topic.

So am I unique in my thinking ? I don't know, my faith is not a topic at work. My faith is not one that is required to be shouted out loud, or forced on others. It is between me and my gods of worship (that is the thing, I only hold fealty to a few, but I recognize them all, but if they are not MY gods, they are of no real importance to me). I don't have a missionary imperative. Hells my symbols of faith are not easily recognized either, I wear torcs (google is your friend), not a pentacle, not a cross etc. Like I said, it is between me, and my gods.

originally posted by: mOjOm
a reply to: chr0naut

Can you give us a breakdown of Godel's proof and why you say it is a good proof of what you say it is???

Short answer: Wikipedia.