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Lawrence Krauss On the Pope's Encyclical: Not Even Close?
Lasrick writes: Lawrence Krauss muses on the hoopla surrounding Pope Francis' encyclical on climate change, and finds the document lacking: 'It is ironic that while the scientific community has long tried to raise warning signals and induce action to address human-induced climate change, an encyclical from the pope on this subject is being taken by many as an ultimate call to action on this urgent issue.'
I guarantee it will be filled with fact-free posts denouncing AGW as a pseudo scientific conspiracy fronting a socialist takeover of humanity.
Any time the topic is breached, within minutes the paid troll army swings into action, manufacturing a political consensus on the orders of their paymasters.
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
It certainly can be — faith operates in a different plane, so to speak. It neither contradicts nor supports science, nor is it contradicted nor supported by science in return.
The Lord's ways are neither known, nor even knowable — in the very principle, there can be no "evidence" supporting nor denying His existence and power. Unlike Science, Religion does not need to offer predictions nor make falsifiable statements. Some ancient bishop is on record with the famous "Credo quia absurdum" — whether the sentiment is beautiful or stupid in your opinion, it is decidedly not scientific, nor purports to be.
True that — in the way "yellow" is irreconcilable with "soft". The two are from completely orthogonal domains.
The interesting bit here — and what the down-modded OP was, probably, hinting at, is that "Climate Science" is, in fact, a religion now. Unable to come up with any materialized predictions, and all of their falsifiable statements ending up getting falsified indeed, the proponents of the idea, that humanity is guilty and must right its ways or be punished (with extinction) sound more and more like the preachers and less like scientists.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Furthermore religions have very detailed books and laws and traditions built around their faith and how it should dictate behavior. If there was no impact on the material world (the domain of science) then there would be no need for organized religion.
Since when is "dictating behavior" the domain of science? It may be the domain of ethics or morality or philosophy... or perhaps religion. But most "scientists" who have tried to declare that their personal ethical systems were superior have often ended up committing as many atrocities (or more so) than organized religion -- see racial classification schemes and how they claimed to tie into intelligence, or various eugenics projects, for example.
other than stomping out ignorance about how religion actually works.) I'm not saying that religion has superior answers to moral or ethical problems. But science certainly has no greater claim in this area either. Any philosophy -- whether derived from religion or political beliefs or some "gut instinct" about morals -- is going to influence human behavior. And many of the questions raised in ethics are not easily resolved by science.
And yet religion regularly does make claims about things that clearly are falsifiable.
Since this discussion is about the pope, please provide examples of current OFFICIAL Catholic dogma which are "clearly falsifiable" and which you have clear empirical evidence to disprove. (Note that this is a serious philosophical/logical standard I'm asking for here -- you can't extrapolate and say some particular Catholic dogma is "very unlikely" or nonsensical in your worldview or whatever -- you have to ACTUALLY falsify it using clear empirical evidence, obeying strict scientific criteria.)
I'll wait.
(P.S. Said this in another reply, but I'm not a Catholic. I don't have anything invested in this argument; I could care less about Catholic dogma. But I want to see examples of your claims.)
(P.P.S. If you're tempted to go after miracles, as many people might, I'd suggest you read this article about the Catholic Church's official procedure to determine accredited miracles. Basically -- most "miracles" are medical in nature, and they are only approved by the church when scientific authorities conclude that there is no known scientific explanation. You might suggest that these "miracles" are simply errors of statistical analysis in evaluating improbable events, but that's only a guess -- it's not clear falsifiable evidence that the church's interpretation of miracles is incorrect. I personally don't believe in the Catholic Church's interpretative of statistically improbable events as "miracles." You may not personally believe it. But that doesn't mean we have empirical evidence to disprove it.)