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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.
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.
Over time, as man has evolved, he has reduced his need of gods from many (Sun God, God of Love, etc.) down to one - though, not necessarily the same one. The more fully evolved on the planet have made the final step and eliminated that one, too.
God is a product of man, not the other way around.
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
Who's the hypocrite?
Okay. I have just one question though. Are they also going to come out with a guide "explaining the differences between science and religion, and asserting that acceptance of chemistry does not require abandoning belief in God".
I guess I have to reluctantly agree, ok it's "good" that they came out with a guide explaining there is no conflict between evolution and God, but it's really-really-sad and really-really-wrong that they had to do so. Evolution, chemistry, either one it's just plain silly.
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Imagine two baskets.
One contains all the things explained by the phrase "god did it". The other contains all the things explained by "science".
A long time ago, everything was in the god basket, and nothing at all was in the science basket. The weather? God did it. Pregnancy? God did it. Disease? God did it. Where does stuff come from? God did it.
Then, as humanity learned more stuff, things got taken out of the god basket and put into the science basket. The weather. Pregnancy. Disease. Where stuff comes from, right back until a few billionths of a second before the big bang, getting closer all the time.
So what's left in the god basket? Good question -- but that's not where I'm going with this, because actually that's irrelevant.
The point is this: there has never -- never ever ever -- been a single thing that has been taken out of the science basket and put back in the god basket. Not one. Ever.
The traffic is all one way.
So I choose the basket that contains all human knowledge. I choose the basket that keeps getting new and fantastic stuff put in it. I choose the search for truth over the abrogation of understanding.
The god basket? You believers are welcome to that. It's basically empty, getting emptier all the time. But you're welcome to keep hanging on to it. The moment something is taken out of the science basket and put back into the god basket, you let me know, ok?
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.
Faith can be tempered by logic, and logical explanations can often be translated back into faith frameworks without loss.
It's like what happened at the turn of the 20th century where society began to discover psychopharmacology. There was an initial crisis that it would reduce the human experience to nothing more than a set of chemical interactions, which brought religion entirely into question. Similarly, again, was the discovery that "religious experiences" can be reliably induced by stimulating certain areas of the brain. Now, I don't see why the theory that consciousness and the soul are nothing more than functions of chemical reactions invalidates them from having a higher meaning, at least in a subjective sense; it simply requires a slight adjustment in thinking.
It's one thing to decide to adhere strictly to a faith-based approach or a science-based approach, but in my opinion, only a narrow mind sees the impossibility in rationalizing the two. I'm a philosophical Taoist mathematician with a good interest in science and I've never had any problems. My dad is a fairly devout protestant from a moderately conservative denomination (by Canadian standards), and holds a PhD in physics; he also doesn't find that there needs to be any clash between his scientific knowledge and his religious beliefs.
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.
If you believe in science AND god then your a bloody hypocrite because the scientific method can never be used on god.
No! That's what some creationists say, but it is a fallacy. It is well known that science makes the materialistic assumption that everything has a natural cause, and this obviously excludes supernatural things such as God. However, that doesn't mean that scientists must believe in ontological materialism in order to be scientists. They just need to understand it. It is perfectly possible for someone to "think like a scientist" and also have strong religious faith, and there is a long list of scientists who have done so, including the "father of physics" Isaac Newton.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
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.
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The notion that 'God' is an explanation for all the things that science and reason has not yet adequately explained is a common one, but rather out-dated. It is a mistake that has been made by Christians and non-Christians alike.
It has been given the moniker 'God of the gaps' and there is a description on Wikipedia.
Suffice it to say that most Christians who have given any significant thought to the matter do not believe in 'God of the gaps', so the argument that the traffic is all one way from 'religious explanations' to scientific explanations is simply not relevant.
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.
If the National Academy of Sciences feels the urge to make such a statement, then this is another shocking sign of how far religious thinking has permeated the US of A.
I keep looking forward to the time when people proclaiming to get their commands from god have to pay the same price as people proclaiming that elvis is still alive looking like a happy man/ in the snow with Rosebud/ and King of the mountain.
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.
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Evolution itself may not be totally incompatible some religious ideas (except creationism), but any rational, logically thinking person should realise that all religions are complete nonsense.
By reading this signature, you hereby agree with the content of the above comment.
> 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!
I was reamed out last evolution post here on Slashdot because I thought speciation needed to happen for evolution to work. Now that I know that natural selection is even considered as one form of evolution, I'm down with the idea of evolution. I'm not even arguing against speciation. Evolution has a large number of concepts though and it infers a Big Bang and a Spark of Life for it to work. While you won't get me biting on those two tickets, I know evolution is solid science. I think a lot of Creationists would bite on evolution if the spark of life wasn't part of the equation. I mean Creationism says how it all started, and evolution says how everything is changing since it began. Just looking at it that way it makes sense. While I can't tell you how old the world is, I can rest assuredly say that evolution works in this post fall of man world.
God spoke to me.
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.
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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"
> ? Evolution does not have a target or a final destination. It keeps on going.
Evolution is a general concept meaning slow/gradual change, as opposed to revolution which mean sudden/large change.
Biological evolution is only one kind of evolution. Clearly, the GP wasn't talking about biological evolution when he talked about the evolution of gods.
There is a trend to limit the number of gods:
Hunter/Gathers: animism, spirits of nature, every tree and stone has its own spirit..
Agriculture: Polytheism, gods are associated with concepts, such as love, war, fertility.
City states: Monotheism, we have the omnipotent create God.
Industrialism: God is dead.
As we can't really have fewer than zero Gods, that would seem to be the endpoint.
Of course, one could argue that humanism, materialism, and liberalism makes every one of us our own god, multiplying the number again.
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.
Reconcile?
Logic is a system of rules which let you take truths (which may be axioms or derived truths) and manipulate them into (i.e., derive) other truths.
Faith is those axioms.
Maybe I have an overly broad definition of faith.
But as far as I know, there is no proof that 1+1=2 without including some definitions first like 1 is successor to 0 and 2 is successor to 1 (and we take 0 as an assumption).
My understanding is that the definitions of 0, 1, and 2 are outside of the framework of number theory, and hence illogical. They are taken on faith, with the assumption that it will be beneficial to have made these assumptions down the line. Just like most religions. I can't think of any major religions that promise, "Just stick with us, and when you die you'll say to yourself 'What a fucking waste of time that was'". Even the Church of the Subgenius offers camaraderie!
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.
> Indeed, Darwin was a practicing Anglican most of his life, and the fact he could not
> reconcile his scientific observations with the theological thought of his day was a
> short-term bug.
According to Wikipedia, Darwin lost his faith when his daughter died, which is very much a "why" rather than a "how" question (the problem of pain).
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?
>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.
I think the problem is that some people aren't committed to finding out the truth, whatever it turns out to be. There are some religious organizations, such as those promoting creationism that are using intellectually dishonest arguments and some outright lies to spread a world view that has been thoroughly disproven for hundreds of years.
I think it is true that science and religion can easily coexist in general. However, science cannot coexist with people who are not committed to discovering the truth. A person cannot be a scientist or understand science without a commitment to the truth.
This creates great stress on our society, because on the one hand people need science both to survive and to provide a reasonable explanation of the objective truths of the world. On the other and people also need help understanding the things that science doesn't have very good explanations of, like morality, or their subjective experience of the world.
Modern science and philosophy don't give clear guidelines on what sort of things a person should do, and they don't provide any sort of explanation on what our experiences of the world are. For instance, modern science provides an explanation of how light works, and how the brain works (to some degree), but there is no explanation of our experience of the color red, since red is not quantitatively defined. Note by the color red, I am not referring to a particular frequency of light, but our experience *of* that frequency of light. These are important aspects of how we partake in the world that have yet to be tackled.
Since psychologically people have a strong desire for explanations and reasons for both the things that we have explanations to, and the things we have yet to find explanations to, there is a strong need for belief in addition to knowledge. Religion typically fulfills this role in society with supernatural explanations of aspects of reality that our knowledge of the natural world falls short of. Unfortunately, people offering supernatural explanations for the things that we don't understand will sometimes try to offer supernatural explanations for the things we *do* already understand and those two explanations will stand at odds with one another.
In my mind is is clearly the responsibility of any religious organization to mend their religious doctrine so that it does not conflict with facts that are known about the world. Indeed, most major modern sects do so to some degree. The catholic church for instance has changed many of its stances on various issues to correspond with scientific understanding. Ideas like the big band theory and evolution are accepted and taught at catholic institutions, and of course there is no mention of a geocentric model of the universe anymore. Many protestant denominations have made similar changes.
Unfortunately, some religious groups feel that their beliefs about supernatural matters are on par or superior to knowledge about the physical world. They ask, why should we have to change our beliefs just because we know otherwise? Instead, these groups ask their members to believe one thing and know another. This is not a healthy attitude, and causes psychological and social strife I feel pretty strongly that such religious organizations are doing their members a disservice and should be called to task for the harm they are doing.
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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"
Faith has logic, based on axioms such as the existence of God and so forth.
I disagree. There have been incredible minds in history that NEEDED to apply logic to the basis of their existence, so they BROUGHT logic to Religion. But religion was free of logic long before and after their collective contributions.
Religion is, quite frankly the father telling his son a bed-time story.. The story is NOT intended to be logical, but to convey significance. It is meant to be remembered, it is meant to impart guidelines, it is meant to bring race-pride (to foster loyalty, etc). I'm generalizing all religions.
In the bed-time saga, the target audience is the inquisitive youth - religion is always the 'master speaking to his flock', or the elder speaking to the community, or the parents/grand-parents teaching their children. In this, there is an implicit respect (otherwise there wouldn't have been a conversation), such that we 'trust' our elders and that what they have to say was important for their survival, and thus is likely important in our own.
Further, elders don't just spout the history of the bible.. They impart useful info - dating advice, how to cook, how to hunt. My great great grand-daddy built this farm with this bare two hands.. And don't worry about lying to your wife just then.. God will forgive you.. See Jesus sacrificed himself knowing that each of us is flawed, but he loved us so much.. And so on.
It's all part of a cultural acceptance for each successive generation. It's not:
1) God created the world
2) God gets angry
3) God punishes bad people
4) The first person was bad
5) God punished all his children
6) God gets over his anger and makes promises to avoid punishing us in the future
7) Jesus's sacrifice represented a new covanant where God will not punish those that honor the sacrifice
8) You should do whatever the f*#k I say because I've accepted Jesus, so I'm going to heaven, and you might not.
That's a logical progression (with a LOT of assumptions of course). But who in church ever talks like this? People would tune out the pastor. Religion, is a series of unrelated assertions - where you trust the lecturer. Dawkins book talks about this phenomena. Basically that it is biologically important for children to absorb their parent's instructions without question (at least until a certain age). It is also biologically important for us to work as a team (group-think). This combination leads to a meta-life-form. Legends, rituals, etc. Religion is one of the ultimate forms of meta-life-forms that Hawking describes (quite offensively) as a parasite, living entirely off it's hosts; surviving from generation to generation.. Slightly evolving to fit the environmental changes, or dieing, in the face of natural selection.
What I find significant about this meta-life-form perspective is that we can never be free of such parasites entirely.. Look at Christmas - it is now expected of us to act crazy on Black-Friday through past new years in the US. It's a culturalism that has grown out of a complex series of unrelated historical events and will likely continue to evolve for another thousand years into something as yet unrecognizable. The ramifications have extended to most countries around the world, because need to be part of the economic event. We are in a generation that can not ignore the phenomena (if you are a business owner at least). Much like the founding generations of other religions. If the whole community necessitated a cultural series of actions (for weddings, funerals, child-bearing, what-have-you), you couldn't afford to isolate yourself... Judeo-Islamo-Christianity is getting the hard stuff now because it's actually possible to live in non-religious communities. It's possible to not baptize your children now or what-ever, and not be effectively stoned to death or burned at the stake. How many thousands of years did that take? 5?
Further, I rather loved the Segan movie 'contact', for the part wher
-Michael
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
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
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.
Just because you're good at math doesn't mean everything you believe is true.
You can't take the sky from me...
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.
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.
I'm not a Monkey, but an Ape, last time I looked I didn't have a tail.
Sigh... No. Time - well, Space-Time, since you bring Einstein into it - is an internal part of the universe's structure. The Big Bang is not where the universe began, it is merely a subdomain in which some parameters approach zero from our perspective. It is no more true to say that the universe began there than to say the unit circle began at (-1,0). You might want to google 'block universe' and stop referring to the bible everytime you're in danger of having to think logically.
Would you like a slice of toast?
> The problem with the "public should be taught the limitations of science" model is that the limitations of science should be seen as the limitations of human knowledge.
Ridiculous. We know plenty of things we cannot hold to scientific rigor. Not that there aren't people like you trying to exclude them from being called "knowledge" by various means.
You're thinking of "science" in the most limited sense, results obtained through the simple scientific method. We can "know" an awful lot more than that still using a scientific approach, just with differing levels of certainty. Here, this may help:
science n.
1a. The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena.
1b. Such activities restricted to a class of natural phenomena.
1c. Such activities applied to an object of inquiry or study.
2. Methodological activity, discipline, or study: I've got packing a suitcase down to a science.
3. An activity that appears to require study and method: the science of purchasing.
4. Knowledge, especially that gained through experience.
Note #4 in particular, which still does not admit any religion-based "knowledge".
I know that my mother loved me.
You know she acted in a way you'd expect from someone who loved you. So yeah, it's quite probable that she did. "Love" is a mushy thing to define, but it's one of those words that does have meaning even though it's very blurry at the edges.
I know that other minds exist.
Sure, though what "minds" means exactly is tough to say. We can more or less assume that our interior lives have their parallels in the other people we see around, anyway, though the exact experience is going to be different for everybody.
I know who gave me those shirts.
Was it God? No, seriously, "science" agrees that your memory of this kind of event is probably true, though you'd be surprised by the tricks memory will play on you.
I know a lot of things that will never be repeated and for which little if any evidence remains, putting them well outside the possibility of scientific rigor.
Your level of certainty on those things is thus far below where you might consider putting them in a textbook or publishing a scientific paper, but well above the level of certainty where you can take them mostly as "assumed" to go about your everyday life.
Even *you* are not placing that much certainty in them. Take one of those shirts. Wait a few years, then have a conversation with someone who says "Gift? No -- you're thinking of the one with gray stripes.. *that* was the birthday present. This shirt was one you already had that was similar." And you'll be uncertain, then they'll pull out the video you have from your party, and sure enough, it's a gray-striped shirt you're unwrapping. And you'll update this particular "fact", just like that.
Please quit with the "only science can produce true knowledge" bit. Otherwise, I'm going to have to ask how you know that, because I've yet to hear someone who doesn't beg the question when answering that. And yes, I really do mean "beg the question" because they work out complex ways to assume precisely what they're trying to prove in ways that would make baby Godel cry.
I'm not sure who you're arguing with, but how exactly are they defining "true knowledge"? Basically, there's pure science, where we state some things are as close to "true facts" as we can know because they've been tested in a million different ways, then there's an extremely long tail after that from laws to very-well-supported theories (plate tectonics, evolution and suchlike) to less-researched theories, up through various types of memories of perceived events and histories and interpretations of those... Area of
My old high school science teacher was religious, and was heavily involved with his local church (as I was shocked to find out). He taught us the theory evolution without caveat, without overemphasis on the word "theory", and with only one mention of any controversy on the topic. Even then, he only mentioned that he had no trouble resolving science and faith, that faith is something you believe in despite all scientific evidence, that science is done by the scientific method, and that no matter what his faith is, the scientific method delivers the same results, and that he can learn them, and teach them.
I think he was right. If you are truly faithful to your God and his teachings, then no amount of scientific evidence or reasoning should really make a difference to that. Science shouldn't really threaten religion.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and speak for the religious fundamentalists who profess to not believe in evolution.
I believe the problem these folks have with evolution has nothing to do with what they're complaining about. Religious people believe God created Man with a Soul. But when evolution came along it suddenly appeared that science contradicted that belief. Where in the chain of evolution did Man get his Soul? It is simply much easier for these religious fundamentalists to believe that God created Man whole-cloth and hence Soul came in there. Or that God directly tampered with evolution (ID) and Soul came in there. To believe that somewhere between Australopithecus and Homo Sapiens the soul jumped in is apparently too much for these people to believe.
Until these religious fundamentalists come clean with themselves and realize that THIS is the heart of their problem with evolution, this debate will unfortunately continue to rage on and on.