Slashdot Mirror
Science Text Attempts to Reconcile Religion and Science
terrymaster69 writes "The New York Times reports that the National Academy of Sciences has just published their third book outlining guidelines for the teaching of evolution. 'But this volume is unusual, people who worked on it say, because it is intended specifically for the lay public and because it devotes much of its space to explaining the differences between science and religion, and asserting that acceptance of evolution does not require abandoning belief in God.'"
Public education, science education in particular, should not mention gods at all. This may be an attempt to bring a god into the classroom.
"... because the scientific method can never be used on god"
Richard dawkins disagree's with you.
I once used to think that making concessions to people who oppose this branch of science because of their religious sensitivities was a decent and reasonable thing to do.
Public figures like Sam Harris help me realise that they simply don't deserve it. Their position and the means they used to arrive at that position have no merit what-so-ever.
You see logic and faith as orthogonal concepts that supplement each other, rather than as competing concepts.
Or as the old Pope hold, science provides a description of how God created the world, while religion provides a description of why God created the world.
Logic is something mostly objective, and provable in a mathematical sense.
Faith is subjective, mystical, and can have the appearance of utter hogwash to someone not participating therein.
The casual observer of one of my more meaningful experiences would have said: "Dude: you were parking the car".
Yet, at that time, in that context, I got a very deep message out of it.
The trick to peaceful existence is to keep a weather eye on the line of demarcation between faith an logic, and be respectful, if not accepting, of both sides.
And don't try to use elements of one to assail the other. Such is a quick trip to unhappy land.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
There is no logic in faith, and there is no need to reconcile the two.
Who's the hypocrite?
The problem some religious people have with Evolution is that it allows disbelief in god. Without Evolution, you need the watchmaker, and this is one of the best arguments for the existence of a creator. Logically, there is not much different between the spontaneous creation of simple and complex mechanisms (if its creation, there is a great difference when we're talking about evolving mechanisms), but in the human mind there is a great difference. Many might accept the Big Bang with no creator, only few would accept spontaneous creation of earth as it is now. So, although Evolution "does not require abandoning belief in God" it allows it, and this is bad enough for those who choose religious dogma over scientific discoveries.
I'm pretty tolerant against people with any kind of religion, mostly because it is the only way to get along. But trying to reconcile science and religion? They are both trying to describe how the world works, from two opposite sides. All the important things that religious persons believe in are completely outside the laws of nature. Saying that they can go together because one is about belief and the other about reason? These concepts are not exclusive if you try and describe the same thing.
Now I might be flagged as some kind of extremist. If that's true, it's because I don't want to "belief" as some people want me to. I try and describe things in a logical matter. Fortunately you can be a extremist atheist without having to harm people. Especially if you see from history that polarization is sure not to work.
Human beings are rarely aware of much of what drives them to think or act or feel what they do. Science attempts to explain it all, but its answers aren't very reassuring and when it comes to it, religion is much better at satisfying people's feelings of emptiness and lack of direction.
So it's no surprise that, given the inadequacies of the current state of science, people are still believing in the supernatural.
Also, it's not a question of logic but probability. I mean, even science has basic assumptions, mantras and anecdotes here and there which occasionally turn out to be false and lead to radical rethinking on basic ideas.
Essentially, I think we needn't care too much about whether people choose to see everything as fitting into 'God's Plan' or being just 'Stuff that happens' or whatever, as long as everybody is committed to uncovering the truth, whatever it turns out to be.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
Public education *should* include the limitation of science. Too many lay people see scientists as modern priests, and take our models as gospel. It is important to realize that unlike fundamentalist interpretation of religious texts, scientific laws and theories are mutable (they change whenever conflicting observations are made) and limited in scope (they are only really trustworthy within the scope of the measurements they are based on).
Much of the creationist/ID nonsense is due to people not understanding how science should be hold to different standards than religious texts. "The theory of Evolution" is very much different today than what Darwin proposed. This would have been a weakness in a religion, but is a strength for a scientific theory.
Well, i think a God setting a few universal constants and booting up His Great World Simulation is definitely an plausible God to me.
:)
A God (or gods) sweating on putting all the dinosaur bones into the soil just to 'trick us' is plain pathetic.
I'm not a believer in any of these 'gods', but i can live with the former
People who deny evolution based on their god fantasy need to wake up.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
So what's left in the god basket?
take a look at the sectarian violence in the middle east now between shias and sunnis over minor interpretation of gods will (tho i suspect religion is just an excuse for racial hate that we are seeing, nowhere in the koran does it say killing innocents is ok)
nowadays religion brings nothing good it seems, what happened to compassion and love thy neighbour? instead we get peadophile priests and sexual abuse cases,
what happened to helping the poor? last i checked the Vatican is rich beyond belief and is rung better than most corporations out there
Finally someone out there is making some sense: Science is not fit (nor was it ever meant to be fit) to answer the question of God. Science requires that its hypothesis made are provable (or disprovable) and neither can be applied towards the question of God.
As the article states: "Asserting that acceptance of evolution does not require abandoning belief in God."
P.S. IAC
My page.
It's about time teachers in the US stopped pandering to these idiotic demands for the discussion of religious dogma in science classes. It doesn't matter if the theory of evolution is consistent with any belief systems. If it's not science, then it doesn't belong in a science lesson. Period.
U1NCaVpYUWdlVzkxSUhkcGMyZ2dlVzkx SUdoaFpHNG5kQ0JpYjNSb1pYSmxaQT09
Well, that's a good idea since it doesn't explain anything. As the original poster pointed out, as more and more evidence is collected the need for gods, ghosts, and goblins declines and never increases. That is because it was an incorrect hypothesis to begin with.
The reality is that the "gods of the gaps" argument is the only argument for the existance of these fantasy beings and if you don't accept that then there is no other reason to believe they exist other than "it says so in a book I read once".
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
> So what's left in the god basket?
Every question asking for meanings ("why") rather than mechanisms ("how").
I'm an atheist, I believe the only meaning that exists is what we create ourself. But that is a philosophical position, not a scientific position. There are excellent philosophical arguments for why I'm right and the theists are wrong. But they are philosophical, not scientific. Those who believe science can disprove God is as delusioned as the ID people who believe science can prove God.
Those religions that has a well-educated clergy, such as the Catholic Church, have long ago decided to leave the Emperor (science) what is his, namely the mechanisms, and leave God (religion) what is his, namely the meanings. Only, Those churches that mainly consist of in-breed hillbillies, mostly some US Protestant groupings and some Arab Sunni-Islamic groups, still want religion to describe mechanisms, despite the overwhelming evidence that religion sucks at mechanism.
In science class, don't ask why it rains, ask how it rains. Mechanism, not meanings.
Science is based on the idea that all phenomena are explainable and endeavours to find explanations through observation, experimentation and the progressive incremental refinement of theories. Religion is based on the idea that some things are beyond explanation, and must be accepted as Mysteries by believers. These two premises are about as irreconcilable as you can get. Either Science will progress to a point where all religious Mysteries can be explained in scientific terms, or a proof will be established that shows why certain things are beyond explanation. (Cf. how you cannot determine five variables given a system of four simultaneous equations.)
Evolution provides such a good explanation for biodiversity that it becomes unnecessary to invoke God, except for the awkward questions of the origin of the universe and the origin of life. You can bodge in a kind of "wind it up and let it go", deist God, but this still ends up leaving unanswered questions: If a God could come spontaneously into existence from nowhere, why couldn't a ready-made, non-God-requiring universe come spontaneously into existence from nowhere? And if a highly complex living entity such as God could could come spontaneously into existence from nowhere, why couldn't a few single-cell organisms come spontaneously into existence from a suitable already-existing environment rich in carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur and trace elements, with pure energy available in the form of radioactivity or electrical storms? (Evolutionary theory suggests that you only need single-cell organisms to begin with. All the rest will then take care of itself.)
And trying to teach biology without mentioning evolution is a bit like trying to teach electronics without mentioning Ohm's Law. (And Ohm's Law cannot be proven or disproven experimentally, because every voltmeter and ammeter fundamentally depends on Ohm's Law being true for its operation.)
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
karma to burn, so here goes.
the God basket is not empty if the science basket is inside it...
They will never stop until somebody makes the
It's not evidence, it's anecdote. If we'd apply the same standard of proof to god that we would apply to a shoplifting then religion would be out of business pretty quickly. The funny thing is that religion should be held to a *HIGHER* standard because of all the outrageous claims they make and the wisdom they claim to profess.
MP3 Search Engine
Most of us who are religious have known that Evolution and belief in God are not exclusive. It's just that mainstream culture does not find us interesting, and so we do not get put on TV, nor do we get much time in [mostly evangelical] churches. This is really unfortunate, to make an understatement.
:(
For the Christian Scientist, all theories of the "natural" world as identified by the set of sciences that interest us are a subset of a larger, engaging reality. For the Christian layperson, having a theory on the working of one mechanism or another, buttressed by direct observation, if not by yourself then at least by others who have established themselves as trustworthy, should be convincing enough for most material at hand. To put this on topic: "evolution" contains robust models and should be seen as both able to provide useful explanations for our own natural history as well as provide insight into our future. And we can safely stop short of the drama right there.
Part of what has gone wrong in the highlighted subculture is that people who are not qualified will sometimes speak authoritatively on topics and end up with moronic conclusions. Sometimes this is how I feel when I read slashdot comments from naturalists that really feel that there is a conflict of interests between religion and science; and it is exactly what grates on me when I hear religious people espouse the same. Both persons will go away from what they fear and toward what they trust, and this is a bad process in general when it comes to advancing knowledge, no matter who does it.
And let me point out the great irony of culturally conservative Christianity: an in-depth attention to the Bible, particularly the Genesis creation myth will reveal that it is *nothing* about actual physical "creation". One thing that conservative theologians like to claim is understanding the historical and cultural significance of the Bible (this is a good thing). In my opinion, it is jettisoned frequently on this single topic for the purpose of funding a culture war.
Briefly, let me summarize that it is common practice among ancient near eastern cultures to take the dominant mythology, particularly the creation myth, and to retell it from the perspective of the current Monarch who uses this retelling to establish their role in the world, specifically their fitness for rule as it is often retold to highlight the character traits this Monarch possesses. In the Genesis creation account, what we see happening is a retelling of the dominant Sumerian/Akkadian creation myths (check out the Enuma Elis cf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enuma_Elish for an example) from the perspective of the God of Israel: the major changes are a shift away from chaos and randomness toward order and predictability. The Israelites, safely said, were concerned by things such as established, powerful people groups in the same region, and basic things like sustaining a crop or herd of livestock; living through a winter and avoiding things like being enslaved again were definitely on the mind.
What the Genesis creation myth does say is basically this, if I can grossly oversimplify in a paraphrase: "The God who has lead you out of Egypt is greater than the gods and the people whom you face next; where the world is random and unpredictable, this God establishes order and sustains the land; have no fear."
And *that* is what a conservative pastor should be telling their congregations about creation and the meaning of the stories in Genesis.
Making this conflict with "science" is obviously left as an exercise from an aggressive or intentionally ignorant mind. Or maybe both
"Man has always been his own most vexing problem." --Reinhold Niebuhr, "The Nature and Destiny of Man"
Don't kid yourself, religion and science use entirely different standards to decide what is true. Science uses logic and evidence, religion uses faith and dogma. Dogma is defined as "a religious doctrine that is proclaimed as true without proof."
Science may not have an answer for everything, science has made mistakes, not every accepted theory can be 100% proven. But religion does not even try to prove anything, religion requires you to accept what is proclaimed without any attempt of evidence, or logic, what-so-ever. With religion, it's true just because somebody said so - no other reason.
Don't let yourself be fooled by an argument of ignorance. Don't think "if science doesn't have every answer that proves religion to be true." Because that is just illogical.
What is known about science is backed by hard evidence - religion has no such standard.
To put it another way, I don't believe in God in order to explain anything. I believe in God because I think all the evidence points that being true. - I am an atheist because there is not a single piece of evidence that points to a god being true.
I can't fathom how your post got voted as Insightful.
You can't handle the truth.
On first sight, it won't harm to, while accepting Evolution, believe in God, the easter bunny or anything else nobody has ever seen and nobody has ever come up with any indication for existince.
However, this would really be totally schizophrenic: it would require somebody to base his acceptance about what is on something that is completely without any logical cause (God) and something that has been derived from many pieces of unrelated evidence (Science). I don't see how this can go together in any reasonable way. How should one decide when to believe and when to require evidence? Somebody who believes in God could just as well believe in Creationism or some other silly fairy tale.
The argument of some religious people, some of them calling themselves scientists is that science cannot answer all questions and religion comes in then: why was there the big bang etc.
Of course science cannot and will never be able to answer all question. But what good is it to believe in some fairy tale answer for those unanswerable questions instead of just accepting that we simply dont know? Isn't it evident that "answering" the question about why there was a big bang with "God did it" makes everything just more complicated instead of easier? Why is there "God" then? We do not gain anything by this "answer" but we lose a lot.
I think it is evident that there simply is no place for religion to answer the wonders of what is anymore. None of the explanations for how stuff works thousands of religions came up with ever turned out to be true or remotely sensible.
That leaves religion as some kind of ethical instance: maybe it cannot explain nature and reality, but it tells us how to behave ethically, no?
I think, this is actually not true either, on the contrary: ethical behavior comes from the human ability of compassion. It is biologically built into us. No need for God here either. It is no coincidence that practically all mahir rules of ethics, save some details about sexual behavior, are identical between religions: you dont kill, you dont cause pain, you dont steal etc.
The role of religions here is to make it unnecessary to *think* about ethics. After all God told us the does and donts. And that is the problem: when it is not necessary to think about ethics any more, compassion can be switched off. Yes, it is not right to kill, but its ok to kill that criminal. Yes it is not ok to cause pain, but it is ok with that slave or that member of another religion.
Religion is opium, because its sole purpose is to make thinking unnecessary and make people feel comfy in their self-rightous ignorance.
Which God are they promoting as being compatible with their science curriculum? Because I'm pretty sure that they can't be claiming all religions are compatible with it - there are sure to be some which just aren't.
Odds are that they're only promoting one (or a handful of) major religions. Aren't there laws against that sort of thing?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If they had each been Indian they would have belived in Rama, Shiva etc. but their work would have been the same, or at least of the same quality. That's because science and rational thought are striving towards a truth, whereas religion, having no basis in reality, is arbitrary and whimsical with no need to strive towards any particular thing. Indeed, it is one of the defining characteristics of religion that it avoids striving towards any truth since that would require an admitance that the current dogma is not the final word. Such admitance is suicide for something as paper-thin as religious "thought".
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Some things can not be proven at the moment, because we lack the necessary resources or because the theory has not yet progressed to the point of making a testable prediction.
Some things are inherently unprovable. That is a large distinction.
I might have some theory that makes a prediction of the behavior of matter at extremely high temperatures. Maybe I can't test it right now because there is no way (yet) to generate that temperature, but it is still testable in principal.
If I speculate about the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient entity that regularly alters reality without leaving behind any evidence then this will always be untestable. No experiment will every be able to conclude: "the result was X, therefore god doesn't exist", because the answer to that will always be, "your result X happened that way because god wanted it to happen that way"
If you believe that somehow the thoughts in our head caused by our neurons and synapses reach God then he must be in contact with nature somehow. If God sends his magical wishes into our world to be written down in a book then it must also be so. If you claim that God affects our world then he must be part of nature or extend somehow into the physical world and science is the only possible successful method at discovering it. If you reject science you reject the only possibility of ever truly finding a god.
You can say that your idea of a god isn't related to science but the Christian God most certainly is and it's absurdly false.
Stop confusing your redefined vague new age bullshit god with the vengeful, jealous and petulant God of the desert.
Ok please answer the following.
> Faith is defined as, because of objective past experience of God's action, trusting his promises of future action.
How do you know it was God? Why not the purple people eater monster?
Ah yes, you take it on faith that it was God and not some purple people eater. In other words...
> Faith is subjective, mystical, and can have the appearance of utter hogwash to someone not participating therein.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Nope, but I'd like it if they were taught that war (like religion) can be the cause of great human suffering and that for this reason it (like religion) must be analyzed with every ounce of critical thinking we can muster.
I know it's optimistic to hope for critical thinking in schools, but the alternative -- simply not discussing such topics -- amounts not to education, but vocational prep.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
No, arrogance is what keeps the people ignorant, uncritical, and divided. Faith in and of itself can keep an individual sane. I guess its along the lines of an individual being smart, but that same individual in a large group can be very dumb. Its got nothing to do with faith in and of itself, its the outside influences and self inspired arrogance that brings those things about.
Proclaiming that its a tool shows you either haven't really considered what faith is, have had negative experiences with someone who was using their faith as a justification for an argument, or just don't give a shit what faith at its core is and what its can be. I will agree that arrogant faith can be worse that arrogant 'unfaith'. But don't blanket the idea of faith as a negative, its disrespectful. Do unto others and all that jazz.
Cheers.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Mod parent up. Science has limitations, but the only way around it is more scientific research, not substitution with religion. In fact, if you view religious beliefs from a scientific view point, there is no evidence to back religious claims (including the God hypothesis) and there is no reason to believe in God more than in a celestial teapot revolving around the earth (Bertrand Russell) or in the Flying Spagetti Monster.
As HL Mencken says "We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart." I think it is a good thing that religious belief should be questioned in the classroom and what better forum than a science class.
Dawkins makes all these points and more in his book "The God Delusion".
Why do I have to believe or disbelieve in God? Some religious views I find repugnant, in the sense that I would not consider such a God as deserving of worship, but that is not disbelief. I don't have any personal emotional need for "meaning," nor do I have any emotional need for everything in the universe to be explained to me right now. I am comfortable with mystery, and am more interested in the process of discovery and puzzling out the answers than in what the final answers might be. If everything were explained to me tomorrow, it would spoil all the fun, like somebody telling me the end of a movie when I walk in the door. What would be left for me do?
God as a general concept is just not interesting. It is too vague too be testable, so it falls into the category of ideas like solipsism or the notion that the entire universe and all of our memories were created 10 seconds ago. It certainly could be right, but so what? It is an intellectual blind alley that does not lead anywhere interesting. It is boring. You take it as far as it goes (not very far) and then you look for something more interesting to think about.
If somebody wants to propose a testable God hypothesis, fine. I'll give it the thought that it merits. God created all of the species at one time a few thousand years ago? OK, that one's been tested and it's wrong. Next?
religion has come a long way from "Magic Man dunnit"
The complexity of someone's fantasy does not make it any less fiction.
The core of science is to figure out how.
No. Why should there be any need for a creation? Time being, as it is, part of the struture of the universe, it is senseless to talk about a time before it, or even the universe changing. It doesn't. The universe _is_. It always has been.
There is science and there is metaphysics. There's no need for magic sky men.
Would you like a slice of toast?
I don't think one can be both religious and scientific. The reason is that science tells you to believe that which the evidence shows to be true, and religions give the answers up front and then tell you not to even do the experiments.
'Do not test the Lord your God' is what we're told when we seek to investigate the existence of gods.
'Faith is the belief in things not seen' is what the religious man tells us as he waves his hand in the manner of a jedi after experiments and analysis fail to show the Almighty.
Religions seek an exception to the scientific method, specifically the parts where you do any science. Experimentation is forbidden, doubt is sin, and failure to believe can result in eternal damnation.
Religion and science are not simply two ways of looking to the universe for answers to our questions. They are absolute opposites of each other. If I were a boy asking his parents a question about something I observed, such as the growth of a plant from a seed, a scientific parent would have to encourage me to experiment on seeds, dissect them, and find out when a seed becomes a tree. A religious parent would simply hand me a book and tell me that if my answer wasn't in there, it probably wasn't important, and may be heretical.
Heresy. A concept foreign to science, but present in all the world's major religions. Freedom to think as you choose, to ask questions without being burned alive at the stake, hung, tortured, stretched or beheaded is a part of science and not a part of religion.
The choice between science and religion is the same one as the choice between trial by peers or simple lynching.
As if hypothetical examples of non-repeatable events for which no evidence exists and a naive definition of "knowledge" aren't begging the question. Your experience isn't knowledge. Your experience isn't even necessarily real. Please quit invoking Godel, or I'm going to ask you to demonstrate how his theories are germane to this discussion.
No.
No.
No, no, no.
The universe-as-a-whole (which contains time) is different from the universe-within-time. The difference is equivalent to the difference between the set of positive integers and the sequence 1,2,3,... . The latter begins at 1, while the former merely has a lower limit at 1.
We clearly need to distinguish between the atemporal universe and its temporal counterparts, since by 'universe' I mean the former and you don't. Let us, for now, call the latter the cosmos.
Whether or not a singularity ocurred at the big bang is both debated and irrelevant, since this would merely be a beginning for the cosmos and not the universe. For the universe, the big bang is simply the lower corner of some parameters.
Is this now understood?
Would you like a slice of toast?
You think religion counts as an explanation? Seriously? Faith is an explanation now? Screw that.
Would you like a slice of toast?
You're kind of missing the point of the basket analogy . . . in fact, you're actually /reinforcing/ the analogy. The point of it was that science /has/ peeled away the onion, continually and inexorablyy. /Nothing/ has gone the other way. To destroy the analogy, you need to present some valid reason why science might /stop/ being able to peel away at the onion.
/necessary/? The only possible reason for invoking God is to justify your belief.
/can't/ explain. Given that, why is there any need for God?
Your second point, the question of why having a scientific explanation should preclude God doing it, is where the question of faith/belief/whatever comes in. You're free to believe whatever you want, but you shouldn't be surprised (or offended) if someone thinks you're a little odd for believing that God caused some phenomenon, even though there's a good scientific explanation for it. Why would you invoke God in such a circumstance? Why would it be
Science has proven to be a vastly powerful tool for explaining the universe, and there hasn't been any evidence presented to suggest that there are any phenomena it
himi
My very own DeCSS mirror.