Kellerman

It's not something I can or try to prove.

I don't understand this question, and I already addressed this in my last post about the concept of incompatibility. I don't think that something being untestable makes it incompatible with science. Perhaps you do. If so, we're debating apples and oranges.

Well, since it's me who was quoted, I might as well comment. The context of that comment comes from the brainwaves of people experiencing awe being measured. My response is that to me, and to many others, spirituality is beyond just the individual perception of it. I/we perceive it as a vast interconnectedness. Something that exists regardless of the perceptions of the individuals. Obviously, not everyone agrees with that, and obviously each person has their own take, but for me, spirituality goes well beyond just my personal neural responses.

I feel like this is getting circular and that I've already answered all of this in my previous responses. It's okay if you disagree with me, we don't have to have the same perspective. I have no problem with people seeing the world differently than I do, even fundamentally. Many things aren't testable or aren't yet testable and we don't call them incompatible with science. Also, I think we have different perspectives on what "incompatible" means. I perceive it as things that cannot logically coexist. Much of medicine isn't scientific, and yet science and medicine are downright synergistic. Anyway, as I said, I think I've been very clear what my perspective is. Feel free to disagree or disregard if you don't glean any value from it.

Level of skill and knowledge *of the particular surgeon* has shockingly little impact. Of course knowledge and skill matter, but I completely disagree with your previous assertion that your surgeons knowledge and skill were the only thing that mattered for your outcomes. As someone who has cut A LOT of people, we simply cannot take that level of credit, or that level of blame. I can't give examples of whole religions that are compatible with science vs whole religions that aren't because religions are not monolithic. Religions are made up of countless smaller groups of people who engage in their own social constructs. For example, some Baptists hold beliefs that are wholly incompatible with science; however, technically all Baptist churches are entitled to define their religion for themselves. They can choose to be part of a larger order, but if they disagree with that larger order, they can choose to be independent. This means, that technically, you could have a Baptist congregation that believes in literally anything, as long as the congregation is in agreement. So I can't make a generalization about what Baptists believe in and whether or not it's compatible with science. The Baptists churches in my city aren't, at all, but they could be if they wanted to. Many religious people are pretty selective about what parts they believe and what they leave behind. They then try to find a cohort of like minded people and congregate with them. It's easy for me to find like-minded, science-minded religious folks because *I am* a scientist, and that's most of who I know, and many of them are religious. Granted, I spent most of my career agnostic at best, but I've always been deeply interested in religion, so I've had many long conversations with them about their faith and how it intersects with their careers. I also don't live in the US, so there isn't a huge presence of anti-science religious culture here, so the two being incompatible just doesn't occur to me as an obvious issue, since it never has been in the science world within which I've circulated for a long time. In my world, scientists just aren't anti religion, and religion, except for fringe groups, isn't anti science.

Awe is a human experience, spirituality is a broader concept that many of us perceive as something that goes beyond just individual human experience. Re: outcomes and surgical knowledge and skill- yes, knowledge and skill matter, but level of skill and knowledge has shockingly little impact on individual outcomes. Re: trust vs faith, the point I was trying to make is that patients trust doctors and think that it's rational, but really, the faith in doctors is just a societal faith instilled in them, not a fact-based decision to trust that they can actually produce good outcomes. As opposed to someone like myself who has seen and experienced so much bad medicine that I'm extremely cautious about doctors. So to me, the general public level of trust in doctors in general looks a heck of a lot like faith. Re: religious surgeon- I never said that a religious surgeon would depend on God for good outcomes, again, many religious people don't believe that whatever God is even cares about their personal outcomes. However, if your surgeon is a religious person, that may be the thing that comforts them in the face of doing a notoriously psychologically challenging job. Your surgeon might need their faith to keep walking into a room every day and having people die. Re: appendix surgery- An appendix is generally simple, as it was 50 years ago. The straightforward appendix surgeries have always been easy. It's not removing an apendix that's ever been a challenge, it's managing a complicated infection that is, and that's still risky today. Knowledge and technology have gotten better for dealing with the complicated, dangerously infected cases. At no point did I ever say that our knowledge and technology doesn't improve. I don't understand at all what you mean about the volume vs the surface. From your responses though, I do recognize that you and I come at this from very different perspectives. Re: religions claiming to have answer: As for what *some* religions claim, absolutely, I agree with you 100% that some religions are incompatible with science. I never said otherwise. Re: laser surgeons- the joke was not that they're hated because of their knowledge and skill, the joke is that they only do a rather predictable procedure that almost always turns out well, that provides a change that is obvious and dramatically improves people's day to day lives. The patients are happy because they consistently get something they really want. Meanwhile, an orthopedic surgeon who mostly does spinal fusions is going to have largely unhappy patients because they aren't saving lives and aren't improving anyone's state of health, they're just trying to stop things from getting worse, and often actually making the patient's day to day life more difficult. I was just making a joke. FWIW, I'm a former staunch atheist who spent most of my life hating religion with a pretty fiery passion, so I quite understand the basis of your statements.

Psychology, which is absolutely a science, has

Testing people's physiological responses to "awe" is not the same as testing spirituality IMO. But yes, we can absolutely test human physiological responses to things, and it is interesting. As for you quoting me about the human brain, the "yet" is built into the statement, but that doesn't mean that we will ever understand it. We may, we may not. As for you depending on your surgeon's knowledge and skill, as someone who has performed thousands and thousands of surgeries, I can tell you that there's a lot more to outcomes than just knowledge and skill. Every cutter out there wishes it was that predictable, but it isn't. I have only so much control over my outcomes, no matter how much I study and practice. My skill matters to a shockingly small degree, but it isn't anywhere close to the determining factor of success. Again, the more someone is an expert in anything, the more they understand how little is known. Putting faith in the skill of doctors is still faith. A lot of people put WAY more faith into their doctors than those doctors actually deserve. Now, if there is a God, does putting faith in God mean better surgical results? Maybe, maybe not. Who says this version of God wants or cares about surgical results? Also, if your surgeon was religious, then religion had a role in your surgery, whether you consent to it or not. A surgeons religion might be what they lean on not to choke. All I know is that none of us have much control over the outcome of surgeries. The biggest predictor of how likely you are to survive a surgery is how simple the surgery is, because once it gets complicated, who knows what will happen. That's why most people who have more complicated health issues actually hate doctors, because the illusion of their skill and ability quickly fades when the problem to be solved isn't something simple like an appendix. It's more like we're all just muddling through, doing what we believe has the best probability of working out and sometimes it does, and when it does, everyone is happy. A lot of the time though, depending on your specialty, people don't end up happy. Unless you're a laser eye surgeon, those folks have almost entirely happy patients. We hate those guys, lol.

I was a research scientist, and then I was a doctor. Truthfully, I don't give it much thought because I don't see much utility in it. I've studied a few subject matters to the very extreme limit of understanding and learned that that's where everyone shrugs and says "we have no idea". So I have a rather different relationship with "evidence" than most do, and quite a bit more comfort in total cluelessness. I can't define God and I can't even begin to answer this question, and I feel absolutely no discomfort with either. I long ago stopped trying to psychologically control what I can't understand with information and education. Don't get me wrong, I still study constantly. I love knowledge and information, but I seek more to understand what is knowable, not navel gaze about what isn't. There's so much that is known and knowable in this world, and I spend a lot of time immersing myself in that. I find that more I understand, the more connected with the world and at ease with it I feel, but it does nothing to address what I can't know, and I'm okay with that. ETA: of course, when I say "known and knowable" I mean those things that are comprehensible within our existing construct, which is painfully limited.

I'm quite confused by this. I don't understand how any of the above indicates that religion and science are not compatible. Is spirituality testable according to known human metrics? Not really, but that doesn't make it incompatible with science. We have absolutely no known ways to understand how the human brain works to any real, appreciable degree, but that doesn't make the human mind incompatible with science. It means that as of yet, we can't understand it, and that makes it a darling of the scientific world. I'm not sure how religion or spirituality are any different? We observe what we can, quantify what we can, examine what we can, interpret as best we can whatever results we can glean, and make the most of it. But that's the messy, inconvenient, truth of all science. It's largely limited and awkward and yields difficult to interpret results that scientists just wade through as best they can with a TON of research conclusions essentially being "*shrug* no one really knows", which scientists write as "more research is needed in this area". Any scientist worth their salt won't give much credence to any individual study as it is. They're essentially worthless in isolation until there's a massive volume of confirming and differing results for meta-analysis, and even that is fraught with limitations and challenges for interpretation. I often say that most surefire way to identify that you are talking to a scientist is that they will rarely state anything with certainty. The more truly knowledgeable someone about a complex subject, the more humble they become about how well they understand it. In my medical training I was constantly exasperated by everything being taught as "fact" because "science". It was perverse, and made my understand why so many doctors are so blindly dogmatic, despite having *terrible* scientific basis for most of what they do. The unknowability of God does not make it incompatible with science, it makes it the ultimate scientific question, because that's all science is, the asking and investigating of questions, whether meaningful or actionable answers result or not. Most research produces no significant results, and that absence of evidence is as important as the rare research that indicates clear effects. One of the most elegant aspects of research is the null hypothesis. All research starts with a hypothesis that they will prove nothing, statistically significant results don't prove anything in and of themselves, they mathematically *fail* to prove that nothing happened. So if the fundamental hypothesis of all research is that it will prove nothing, then isn't that fundamentally aligned with trying to understand something unknowable??? It sounds semantic, but it isn't. It's the very cornerstone of the scientific method and the mathematics behind the analysis of data. No controlled study has ever proven anything, ever. They've only ever failed to prove that there's nothing there. For me personally, it all ties together in terms of examining my own faith. If the statement is more than research science doesn't have much utility compared to other disciplines in terms of understanding God and faith, then yeah, sure, I'll buy that, but that's not incompatibility, just ineffectiveness. But as I said, science is by design pretty ineffective at understanding MOST of what it looks at...so...

Agreed on the points about climate change, we're barreling pretty quickly into humanitarian crises that we're totally unprepared for due to it. However, I want to rewind a bit to that whole post WWII peace concept that a lot of people cite when they talk about how the world has gotten "better" for people. However, the last 70 years hasn't exactly looked peaceful and humane for large swaths of the world. The middle East, much of Asia, India, huge chunks of Africa, some of Latin America, and even chunks of eastern Europe haven't exactly fared well in the human rights and violent conflict departments, regardless of what was agreed upon after WWII. Much of the atrocities directly *caused* by the actions of the very nations purporting to be all about peace, democracy, and human rights. The perception of post WWII peace and progress really depends on where in the world someone was born.

Well, I don't want to get into a geopolitical debate or analysis of global economic interdependent systems and human rights issues, especially as they relate to supply chains to first world countries, as I am not a subject matter expert on it. I live with one, but I am not one myself. I will just have to agree to disagree.

Oh, I understand what they are trying to do, I still roll my eyes until they hurt though. This is said as a former research scientist.

Barf. I'm genuinely sorry if I offend anyone with what I say, but this is some serious hubris garbage right here. Living humans are supposed to "prove" the existence of "the afterlife" through writing essays? Which will be then judged by 5 other living humans, who somehow hold some degree of authority on the matter? From what I can tell, the only authority these people have to judge is that they're the ones holding the cash, so they can ask people to do whatever they want. Such utter nonsense. Cool for the person who wins $500,000 from people who apparently don't have better things to do with their money... Hopefully some poor underemployed MDiv grad gets the money, because we all know they could use it.

I draw a lot from Canadian Indigenous "ways of knowing", which have been passed down through oral tradition for tens of thousands of years. I really enjoy a concept of divinity from before humans gathered in large societies. Because nature was the biggest force they dealt with, not other people, the spirituality revolves primarily around nature. They also have a profound tradition of forgiveness and restorative justice. Obviously this has been heavily eroded over the past few hundred years, but I still see current day accounts that can bring me to tears. I recently listened to an entire podcast about Indigenous men offering support and friendship to other Indigenous men in prison who had committed violent crimes against them and their families. The victims were helping the convicted offenders, and by the time they had finished their prison sentence, they were like brothers, and sometimes chose to live together after the release so that the offenders could be best supported in their post prison transition. Forgiveness and love. Isn't that the whole point of why we're all here?

I don't disagree with you at all on that front.

But what about the fact that the state of the first world being "progressed" depends on the continued oppression suffering of people in other parts of the world? It's not like everyone is on the same path and we are just lucky to have gotten here first. The amount of people who suffer to keep us as comfortable as we are is profound. Just by living in this "progressed" society we contribute more to keeping people oppressed than we ever could to lifting them out of oppression, even if that's what we want. That's a fact we like to stay ignorant of, but it remains an ugly truth of our very existence. And a difficult one to reconcile.

^again, this is not my experience as a scientist or as a doctor or as someone who is married to the person who wrote my country's Public Health pandemic response policy *twenty years ago* after SARS. Yes, there is corruption in every single human organization. There is no doubt of that, but corruption is far more nuanced than that. It's far less blunt and far more woven through the entire fabric of how a system works. As is the same with every organization once it gets large enough. One must also always be aware of the profound corruption of the world that reports on science and medicine. Over the decades, my colleagues and I are frequently gobsmacked by how our professions are viewed by the public and how these perceptions are crafted...and why. I've spent my career railing against corruption in my own industry, but no one will report on it because actual corruption is boring. Instead, the media caught fire with a series of stories and documentaries slamming conspiracy level corruption in my industry that...well, frankly doesn't exist. At all. Not even a little bit. The public doesn't care about actual, boring, run of the mill rampant corruption, so we very, very rarely ever hear about it.

Lol, well, we're always moving somewhere. The wealthiest in society tend to see us as making positive progress, because within the very, very wealthiest of social environments, such as middle class North America, measurable progress in terms of equality and safety have been achieved. The bulk of the world doesn't really have that benefit though. People who talk about how much progress has been made aren't speaking for the bulk of the world's people who are experiencing unspeakable atrocities daily. That tenuous "peace" and security among the wealthy is also obtained at the expense of all of those other people in the world. Wealthy societies are 100% dependent on the atrocities in other countries continuing. We're totally complicit. So how valuable is our supposed "progress" when it's won at the expense of helpless people suffering just far enough away that we don't think about them or even know about them? When I look at the day to day realities across the world, which are in many ways worse than in years past, I question the position that we have come a long way, overall, as humans. Where *I* live, yes, we have come a LONG way in terms of dignity for far more groups of people, not all, but some are able to live relatively safely out in public now. That's a great thing. Is that indicative of an overall positive growth of human kind though? No, not at all. It's a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the ongoing absolute horrors of what humans willingly do to one another and to the planet. Not to be a downer about it, but I do think it's very important not to generalize local progress with global progress. It's too easy to get distracted by our own realities and lose awareness of the vast humanity outside our peripheral vision, but that's exactly how atrocities and inhumanity continues, by not being looked at by those with the power to do something. It's also critical never to rest on our laurels and pat ourselves on the back for being so much better than in the past, when reality, on the whole, we aren't. We can't be like "yay, women got the vote a hundred years ago" and feel like the world is more respectful of women overall when there are millions of women in the world still being literally bought and sold as property. Frequently by and TO Americans! As I said previously, progress really just means change. Progressives support change, conservatives resist it, regressives want to reverse it. Who is right and who is wrong? That's really, really hard to say, especially when examining it with a much, much broader, global lense. I think Christ is found in any position that comes from a place of love and respect for ALL life. Evil is found in any position that promotes hate. Of course, that sounds simple, but obviously isn't, since for a lot of people, their twisted version of love, especially in defense of a group of people, can look a lot like hate for another group, and feel totally righteous. People feeling righteous in hate is one of the most dangerous powers in the world, and it's been the language of politics and a lot of religion for a very, very long time.

I'm happy to share. I do really have a wonderful life. I've done so many things that most people never get to do. I've helped so many people out of pain and through their own suffering, which is one of the greatest joys and privilege a person can experience. I've been pushed so far out of my own comfort zone that I had no choice but to confront everything I have ever believed about...well...everything. This is what lead me here. I'm seriously considering ministry, as I know that my profound understanding of suffering and light is somehow what I'm supposed to do with my time and energy. No idea how, but I figure that will become clear over time...maybe, lol

Let me speak to this as someone who has a genetic disease that causes constant, severe pain. And as someone who has studied the neurology, physiology, and psychology of pain for years. Pain isn't suffering. Suffering is suffering. Pain is just a sensation. It's what it prevents you from being able to do that hurts. When I was a doctor, in a giant pile of student debt, and my field was doing procedures with my hands, a pain in my arm, shoulder, neck or back was terrifying as an injury could (and did) destroy my career. Meanwhile, I had an incident that caused severe internal bleeding, which is horrifically painful, 10/10 painful, but as soon as I found out that it would heal on its own with no lasting damage, and all I needed was rest, I was fine. I incidentally had already booked two weeks off of work, so didn't even need to cancel patients or lose income. All I had to do was rest on the couch and eat pizza and watch trashy tv, which is really what my body and spirit needed at that point anyway. They offered me powerful drugs and I declined because I know pain and I know that it is not suffering. The pain would keep me immobile on the couch and unable to focus much. That's what I needed, so the pain was fine. That's not to say that pain and suffering can always be separated. I later developed a pain that was impossible not to suffer from. It left me curled up in a ball, frequently crying or screaming and wanting to die. Literally, I knew that if I couldn't improve my suffering, I would have no choice but to kill myself within the year. That's when I left my career that I loved. The cost was enormous, but the suffering demanded it. That pain was inextricable from suffering because it prevented me from doing literally anything and there was no end in sight. The suffering came from having no concept of when it might end. Had I been told it was guaranteed to end in a month, I would have been fine, but there was no end, and it has never ended since. Seriously, for years I have been in the kind of pain that would stop any normal person from doing anything. Every day is a sick day for me. I am what they call "profoundly disabled". Granted, it's not as bad since I retired. The pain is still terrible, but I'm able to do a lot more than I used to. Most days I can read and walk, and that's more than enough for me to enjoy my days. I'm not really suffering much anymore. I'm actually a very happy person with a very rich sense of life and going through this is how I rediscovered Christ (much to my own shock) which has been pretty cool. Life is never perfect. Life is never flawless. Life would be utterly pointless if nothing was hard. My life has been hard. My illness has not even been the hardest part, it's just been a very strong force in shaping my path. Divinity isn't about being comfortable and feeling "good". A good life is not one that is free from pain or suffering. It is not a gift to have an easy life. There's a reason the most quoted person on happiness and meaning in life was a Jew who survived a concentration camp. It's not that you need life to be horrific to find meaning, the point is just that suffering doesn't in any way make life *less* meaningful, or make people *less* connected with God. I am blessed because I feel connected to my sense of divinity. Did my suffering help with that? Absolutely. Was it necessary? Who knows, maybe? Maybe it doesn't matter. All I know is that I go through this garbage and it makes me want to give more to the world.

Not being American, I don't quite see media the same way as Americans. I really enjoyed Chomsky's "Who Rules The World?" It helped me understand a lot of American power structures.

Well...technically, evolution does suggest that we basically came from dirt. So I really don't see any conflict here. The bible is a human document written by human beings with a human interpretation of divine concepts, which then went through thousands of years of translations and evolution of language according to human history and cultures at the time. Many important aspects as taught by many sects of Christianity have historically been determined by which group won which war, and which dialect of which language became dominant and therefore set the meaning of certain words. A bible, not "the bible" because there is no THE bible, is no more precise to the divine message than the oral histories of indigenous people passed down through tens of thousands of years. You could have an exact quote from someone 2000 years ago, and even if it is absolutely, factually accurate to what they said, the meaning will change over time because humans and language change over time. A scripture is a glimpse into an idea. It's a testament to the idea that the scripture remains so relevant over thousands of years. Just as the indigenous story of Sky Woman has for much, much longer.

I don't like putting words to it, but I'll explain with as little detail as I can. For me, KOG or divinity, or whatever one wants to call it is the connectedness of all life. Living things are all connected, and capable of great destruction (aka sin), but we are still all connected in divinity. Giving of oneself to lessen the suffering of another taps us into it. Reminds us that they are us and we are them. This is why humans are as self destructive as they are destructive to others. Destruction/sin is universal. KOG/divinity is fundamental to our very existence. Destruction/sin is what we do in this world. Nobody has children with the expectation or hope of them being perfect. Them doing destructive crap along the way doesn't make them less worth having, it's a fundamental part of having them. We exist for the same reason that anyone or anything has children. Life is the whole point.

"mainstream science" isn't a monolith. Science is like any other body of information, it's a collection of data collected and interpreted by humans motivated by a variety of factors, divided into numerous factions, based on endless ideological lines. Then there's the entirely separate world of science reporting, which is a completely separate beast of its own, with even more complex motivators and delineations. "Science" isn't denying anything. It technically can't.