In your opinion what causes christians to believe in Jesus

[Thumpalumpacus]

Precisely, Newtonian physics describes gravity as a force between two objects and Relativity describes gravity as a curvature in spacetime. Both describe and predict the same phenomenon, but it would be nonsensical to say they both determine the phenomenon.

Relativity is actually an add-on to Newtonian physics. We humans use the latter for slinging spacecraft around the solar system, and the former for analyzing things like how light is affected passing through a gravitational field or how atoms behave under pressure. Newtonian physics is really a subset of relativity, as the latter is a more-comprehensive description of what we see.

It's not that Newton was wrong, it's that his formulation was incomplete in describing the Universe, as what we saw became more detailed. As data was gathered and added to the dataset, Faraday and more importantly Einstein saw that our descriptive formulation had too much wiggle-room. Saying both Newton and Einstein describe the same phenomena isn't really accurate. Newton describes a subset of relativistic physics.

[The Grand Nudger]

None of this matters to John. He's a full on mind over matter loon.

[Thumpalumpacus]

None of this matters to John.  He's a full on mind over matter loon.

I like that he's pretty much jettisoned fine-tuning arguments, because if the laws of physics are not prescriptive, then there's no prescriber. Can't eat your cake and have it, too.

[John 6IX Breezy]

Relativity is actually an add-on to Newtonian physics.

Gravity barely even exists under Einstein, and certainly not in the way Newton thought of it. For Einstein what exists is spacetime, and what we call gravity is nothing more than a curvature in it's fabric.

[The Grand Nudger]

It was nice for a minute. Weird, but nice. Why are you self censoring John?

[Sheldon]

Let's not be hasty, there's still credo quia absurdum.  Christians often find themselves either believing or compelled to believe in things that don't make sense to them.  Magic book even tells them that, in these moments, leaning on their own understanding would be a mistake.  Even more fundamentally, no believer in a miraculous god actually thinks that the miraculous things are in the realm of our mundane possibilities.  They are impossible, they are paradoxical, and that is exactly what makes them miraculous and mysterious.

The problem that bothers here, is one could use credo quia absurdum to literally believe anything, what would be one's criteria for all the absurd ideas one must inevitably discard? It would be more honest to say I believe X because I want to, and admit it is an entirely subjective belief. This idea that the world makes sense through the lens of belief, whilst partially true, does not mean individual beliefs are objectively true. 

Of course one can deny any objective fact, and use those denials to believe anything one wished, for example the absurdity of trying to make sound rational arguments, when all the time it is to deny that the earth is 4.543 billion years old, and pretend it is a few thousand years old, was in fact created millennia after humans first evolved.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Relativity is actually an add-on to Newtonian physics.

Gravity barely even exists under Einstein, and certainly not in the way Newton thought of it. For Einstein what exists is spacetime, and what we call gravity is nothing more than a curvature in it's fabric.

Gravity exists for everyone, and both Einstein and Newton endeavor to explain it. That relativity addresses much different forces as well, and in much smaller scales, doesn't take away from how it aided further understanding of gravity.

[Alan V]

Physics not only determines what a machine can do they categorize what kind of machine a thing is.  A machine analogy in considering brain is the notion that brains are, essentially, machines like any other.

Model based control is a way to get a machine to behave like we behave.  To notice things we notice, and report things we report.  To produce what we then call autonomous behaviors.  Now, here's the trick.  Machine autonomy is not, generally, believed to be free will.  Not in the usual sense of it, or the specifically christian ghost based explanation.  There are other ways to produce behaviors like the ones we associate with our freely willed whatsits, ofc.  Plants use a type of chemical analog control.

So you don't recognize the role of chance in evolution?

My analogy comparing human brains to machines was obviously incomplete, just as you say.  We can build machines only to imitate the effects of consciousness.

My opinion is that consciousness can evolve only in living creatures because they were already evolved to be goal-driven.

Anyway, this discussion has wandered too far off topic, so I will stop here.

[The Grand Nudger]

It's spot on topic, actually. If a person believes that physics are subordinate to psychology since consciousness is the/a fundamental force or unit of the universe...and this is why they actually believe in gods.... then this speaks to how and why a given belief set then makes sense™ or..more accurately, fits within their web of beliefs. Consciousness, then, cannot be evolutionary or mechanistic. I say cannot in the sense of whether a person with that web of beliefs can accept it, mind you, not whether it accurately reflects reality.

You'll find it very easy for me to believe that evolutionary biology determined the nature of our consciousness as the function or range of biological machinery. If our brains can make it, though, it stands to reason that any comparable structure could as well, whether it's of biological or evolutionary origin or not. Bernoulli's principle explains why birds and planes fly, for example, and it makes little sense (to me) to say that planes are only imitating flight or can only imitate flight. I think things fly or think insomuch as their structure and composition enables them to leverage underlying physics to similar effect. That's what I mean about quality rather than kind. Free will...whether we're talking classical free will or compatibilist volition, to bring this neatly together, would be just another function in a range of functions.

It's not that I'm opposed to the idea in principle. I would very much like to have me as much of that as possible. If it's a/the fundamental force or unit of the universe this is all a sideshow. Evolutionary biology isn't doing consciousness and volition, consciousness and volition are doing evolutionary biology.

[John 6IX Breezy]

The question that needs to be asked is if information follows the same laws as the physical world and if there are any additional rules that might change the behaviours. A computer is pretty inert until it's fed just the right pattern of information. If we view the mind similarly, then it's reaction to external information might not be expected to conform to physical laws.

I like that you bring up information, because I do lean heavily in the direction of informational realism. I view all reality as fundamentally informational, so that things like matter arise from informational structures and informational states.

So if I were to give a rough description of how I interpret reality, I would argue it goes something like this:

1. Information is the foundation.
2. Integrated information creates consciousness.
3. Consciousness abstracts or instantiates the physical world from information.