The basic bridge between "God", or mysticism as such, and science, is a truth, that energy is conscious. Various aspects of energy responds to various aspects of conscious activity. "Energy" and "spirit" are the same thing.
When scientists will realize this, there will be no problem in defining what is God, soul, the life itself. Such knowledge will open entirely new possibilities for manipulation with energy, (and thus a matter too) because a human body is very well equipped for this kind of activity. It's very effective input, output, source, detector, refinery, transformer, blender, shaper, and so on, for various kinds of energy. Studying these properties of energy will allow us to express many of them in technical solutions.

I heard that David Bohm, one of very respected scientists (worked also on Manhattan project) had some impressive theories in quantum physics. He was also a friend of Jiddu Krishnamurti, the Indian saint for 25 years. And he was, in fact, what is today derogatorily called "quantum mystic". We'd need more of such scientists.

Treating science as religion would just lead to bad science.

Religion starts with an assertion, and either puts off or ignores phenomenology. If it started with the phenomenon, then tried to explain it systematically, through data and theory, it would be science. To apply the general template of religion would damage science. If you simply leave science unchanged, calling it something else is redundant and misleading.

I doubt many people would wake up early on Sunday mornings, put on a suit and tie and go down to the local science center with 10% of their paycheck for a Chemistry lesson.

True shelley, but of course, a government of a better informed educated people, would demand much more science funding.

God has granted us longer lives as we have come to know him more and more... It is not unlikely that those who seek eternal life would be able to achieve it with enough understanding in god. Yes, people are too lazy and greedy to personaly seek their own truths about god, but if we started properly educating people in the way of god, most would be able to explore their desireds. It is sad how many people ignore the standing theories of god in everyday life, but I beleive everyone loves god in their own way, even without realizing it.

I am a dreamer... I am nowhere near the elite in understanding and have quite a bit of problems with the way I think. I am lazy and often nothing more than an observer. Most people I meet are quicker than me yet they are tied down with concepts of reality that are not real.

My mind is in chaotic as of now... Perhaps greed is the motivator for it all...
I want the world to be a better place, I want people to be smarter... I want to suffer less and watch less people suffer.
 

All I hope for in these posts is to get someone who is better able to put this idea together and further it so that it benefits all of us. Allot of people think of atheism as a religeon anyways. If science and god were switched a basic school/comunity for inteligence would gain respect with the religious crowd with tax cuts and all, and probably a good chance to convert people to thinkers instead of beleivers... Im not sure if I am making sense...
 

Elvithrarr    

You make alot of sense to me, and I like your alter use / definition of the g-o-d word,  which I like to spell g-awe-d. For me the god word has always been a science word,  not a religious one, and so explains the style behind my posts, so often not understood. 

Umm, the universities, schools, science labs, are my church of choice ! 

Wow, your reasoning took a major nosedive.

Jello ,  try telling the other half of the world that. So stuck in the west we are. Hey, of course I know what you mean being a westerner myself, but do you know what I mean? 

Fuck that definition of god. Fuck god of abe and that kind of thinking. Take them religious loons definition and do more than say NO.  I AM GOD, just as the dirt is god. OH , such mystery the dirt ! Gawedly....  

Why do you even need God to begin with except to answer the question, "Why are we here?"  Couldn't it be that we're just here for no reason at all? We simply exist and that's it. The need to know why we're here is a human thing. A monkey doesn't ask why he's here and we're just a few neurons and genes away from being monkeys. And the universe doesn't give a damn why we're here.

The only reason we want to know why we exist is because that's how our brain works. It's always asking questions. Here's my answer. We're born, we exist, we die, we don't exist. And in a hundred years nobody living will give a damn. So relax, have a beer and watch the game. And try to live as long as you can because this is all there is.

This is too vague to be meaningful. Energy is a scalar potential, which means by definition it can be assigned as a modulus to every point in an arbitrary n-dimensional space  from R^n into R (contrast with something like, say, force, with can be assigned as an arbitrary bijective parameterization with n vector components in R^n, and is a function from R^n onto R^n). That is a meaningful statement. Since energy is merely a scalar potential, the question must be raised as to why you picked this one. You could pick another scalar potential. You might say "mass is conscious", or "temperature is conscious", etc. The reason you picked this particular scalar potential is because it has taken on a very different meaning than its correct meaning (which I just provided above), in less-than-informed circles.

Never before did I think it was possible to mangle so many concepts in so few words. Tell me, have you ever listened to a serious and qualified discussion on quantum mechanics? If you have, you should know that we don't talk about the mystical or connected nature of reality. The terms of discussion are far less whimsical, and since they are understood by much fewer people, dare I say, more esoteric. We talk about the generalization of vector fields in complex Hilbert Space, the evolution of state functions, contour integrals over complex vector fields and injection mappings into real-valued probability spaces. I am curious as to how you can have the sheer gall to claim that quantum mechanics or a discipline as complex as Chaos Theory as an arm of mathematics validates whatever principle you are attempting to explicate when you would truly be utterly lost in a serious discussion on the matter. I will calmly state, as I have stated before, with absolutely no change in my previous position, that a lack of sufficient mathematical ability to explicate and grasp the principles of quantum mechanics properly completely bars anyone from having a serious opinion on the matter. This group of people hence barred includes you. This statement probably sounds harsh and elitist, but I don't care. The cold truth is that without sufficient ability to explicate the principles just mentioned, you will invariably mangle whatever you are attempting to elucidate, as you just did above.

EDIT: Actually, you could just read my signature

This sounds like wishful thinking combined with a post hoc fallacy.

Whatever imperfection there is in our perceptions of 'reality' thru our senses, augmented by the instruments and techniques of science, it gets us much closer to truth than the fantasies of our untrammelled thoughts, subject as they are to all our irrational urges and desires and wishes. The best such more unrestrained forms of thinking can do is come up with potential new insights, by the random re-association of ideas, which can then be tested against reality.

The best form of thinking to generate useful new insights needs to be a balance between keeping in mind our current best insights from science, while letting our thoughts explore the space of ideas beyond the bounds of the 'known'. Einstein and his 'thought experiments' is a wonderful example, and we see what fantastic insights that lead to.

I agree with the Elvithrarr's sentiments and think he's sincere. The basic idea is a good one, to develop a philosophy or way of life which could help a) displace religion, and b) spread the ideas of rationality, reason, and science.

However, care needs to be taken in this mapping from science to 'religious' thinking, precisely because there is so much baggage attached to various words, such as God, religion, truth, belief, faith, etc.

For instance, in your mapping, you state that God = Science. There are many interpretations of 'god' that would contradict this idea. However, there is a better mapping, and that is that God = The Unknown. Science is just our way of studying God The Unknown, of transforming the unknown into the known. Some may shrink from this, saying it puts science in opposition to god, but in fact when you learn something about the unknown, you end up with more unknowns than you started with. When you answer a question, you have learned the answer, but now you have two or more additional questions. The more you know, the more you know that you don't know.

Science is more like theology than god. It is the study of the unknown. Now here's an interesting application of this metaphor: Well, if science is like theology, and Christians have their Bible, and Muslims their Quran, what's the bible of the scientist? Well, it's the universe itself. The universe is our book.

Why bother? What advantage does this orientation toward science offer? Several, but the most important one is wonder. The natural response of a human in the face of The Unknown is awe. Awe has two primary expressions, wonder and terror. Fear-based awe is called terror: The fear of hell, the fear of god's wrath, etc. Love-based awe is called wonder: The experience of the sublime, wonder at the universe, etc.

A naturalist and scientist can fully embrace wonder, without attributing anything supernatural or mystical to it. Mystery without mysticism. This philosophy, I call wonderism. Wonder has several complementary meanings that are relevant: To wonder is to explore our imaginations, to tentatively believe to see where it might lead, like a thought-experiment; To wonder also means to doubt and be somewhat skeptical, to ask questions and never be satisfied with incomplete answers; Wonder is a natural sense we have as intelligent animals, it is not something supernatural; A wonder is some great and impressive work that inspires us further, going to the moon was a wonder of science, for example.

One of the most useful things about this orientation is that it completely disables and dismantles all religious claims to being 'special'. The argument from religious experience, or the argument from wonder, is the only argument left for the intellectual theist to retreat into. "My religion fills me with wonder, so it must be true." Answer: "Wait a minute, you don't have a monopoly on wonder. The more I learn about science and the natural universe, the more I'm filled with wonder as well. In fact, having previously experienced religious wonder, I can compare the two, and I find that the wonder of the scientific worldview is far greater than the narrow mysterianism of religion."

Regarding God = The Unknown. This is also a very powerful idea for many reasons, but I wanted to mention one of those reasons specifically. All Gods are fundamentally based on The Unknown. This is the ultimate God of the Gaps. A typical theist argument goes something like this: "But we don't know why X happens, therefore God must have done it". This is leaping from The Unknown to an assumption about the unknown. It is the equivalent of We don't know, therefore we know. By saying that God = The Unknown, it is easy to point this out to a theist and stick to it, forcing them to admit that they don't really know. E.g. "You claim that we humans can't know God's plan, but then you state that you know something about God's plan."

Here is where it gets interesting. You can start picking out common themes about what theists claim. They claim things about God's plan, about the origin of the universe, about human emotions like love, etc. For each theme, you can postulate that there are different gods for each. There is God The Unknown Destiny, God The Unknown Origin, God The Unknown Person, etc. Each of these all fall under the umbrella of being The Unknown, but they can be postulated to be distinct from each other. It is like a hierarchical mix of monotheism and polytheism, and it can help to map out and understand what exactly it is that theists *want* to know something about. In effect, it is mapping out the desires of the human unconscious mind. Not coincidentally, it is also a map of common human fallacies of reasoning. For instance, God The Unknown Person persists in people's minds because humans have a natural tendency to anthropomorphize everything.

So, basically, you can see the word 'god' as a placeholder for "something I think exists, but which is mostly or completely unknown to me". And here's where it gets really interesting. Some of these 'gods' really do exist. They are real, natural phenomena. I'll give you one concrete example that pretty much blew my mind when I realized it.

If you believe that memes are real, as I do, and that memes are shared and believed in by many people, then it's not too hard to see people who share specific memes as belonging to a real group. For example, the obvious one is Christians. The more memes they share, the more specific the group identity is. So, if there are 30 people who share a very specific doctrine, they might have a specific name for themselves, whereas 'all the people who believe Jesus existed and died for their sins' might be a huge group of people.

By analogy, the same is more-or-less true of cells and their DNA. The more closely related the DNA, the more sense it makes to say that the cells that share that DNA are part of the same species. In a human body, the cells share more-or-less identical DNA, but they differ in their interpretation of it, based on the development of the embryo to the fetus, to the child, etc. Thus, your heart cells, and liver cells and brain cells all share the same DNA, but with a different interpretation. Does it make sense to say that 'the heart' exists? Does 'the brain' exist? Does 'the liver' exist? Yes, by scientific standards, these organs exist, even though they are really just made of individual cells. The same explanation works for why 'species' exist, even though they are merely made of organisms that share a common gene pool.

So, if a person has a belief and that belief influences the person's behaviour in a consistent way, which is what a meme is, then it makes sense to say that the group of people who hold a common meme (or memeplex) belong to a real group. For example, if a group of Christians share a common idea of Yahweh, and this concept influences them in a more-or-less consistent way, then we can say that the group is real.

Thus, just like 'the heart' exists, and 'the brain' exists, we can say that 'Yahweh' exists, in the sense that he exists as a common meme shared by a group of people who behave consistently in accordance with the Yahweh meme. We can say that the 'God' Yahweh exists, if we accept the idea that God just means The Unknown, and that he doesn't exist as Yahweh-believers think he exists, but he does exist nonetheless. He is God The Unknown Yahweh. Likewise, there is God The Unknown Jesus, God the Unknown Allah, etc. These are memeplexes that influence the behaviour of their believers in more-or-less consistent ways.

This is at the same time: blindingly obvious, incredibly amazing, and downright terrifying. We really are at war with the gods, just not the gods the believers think they are.

As Jung conceived them, no, archetypes are not memes. Archetypes are more like features of the landscape of the human mind. They are not learned, they are inherent in your mind.

No, I do not mean gods are archetypes. I mean that if genetic similarity and common function shows that individual cells compose an organism, then memetic similarity and common function shows that individual minds compose a super-mind, i.e. a 'god'. To summarize, if organisms exist as a 'thing', then gods exist as a 'thing', not just as an idea, but as a coherent entity in the real natural world.