science vs religion

[northwest]

I guess I'm interested in whether you ponder stuff like "why is the universe here?, why does anything exist?" or do you just not waste your time?

I worked it out, now I just play golf.

[weed_G]

I think I was born an atheist (wasn't everybody ?)

don't be ridiculous, you and everyone else was born blind, mute, disabled, soiling yourself ...you certainly weren't born thinking 'does God exist?..no by jolly I believe he doesn't'

[Guest bazzad9]

I think I was born an atheist (wasn't everybody ?)

don't be ridiculous, you and everyone else was born blind, mute, disabled, soiling yourself ...you certainly weren't born thinking 'does God exist?..no by jolly I believe he doesn't'

And by the same token we are not born beleiving, most beleivers simply follow there parents

There's no thought proccess they simply believe the religion of there parents(not all cases of course).

[troy]

I think I was born an atheist (wasn't everybody ?)

don't be ridiculous, you and everyone else was born blind, mute, disabled, soiling yourself ...you certainly weren't born thinking 'does God exist?..no by jolly I believe he doesn't'

Atheism is a lack of belief in god, when I was born I had no belief in god, however thats not what I meant. I have never believed in god and never will I suspect. I hope that is a little clearer for you.

[redtilidie]

I guess I'm interested in whether you ponder stuff like "why is the universe here?, why does anything exist?" or do you just not waste your time?

I worked it out, now I just play golf.

Me too

[troy]

Religion and science make incompatible claims about the way the world is

sam harris

[troy]

Faster than light story highlights the difference between science and religion

'Belief' means something different to scientists and the faithful … we're open to the idea Einstein may have been wrong

Most physicists believe, as Einstein proposed, that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. You might say that some, like Jim Al-Khalili who promised to eat his shorts if this was proved untrue, hold this belief religiously. But the recent fuss over the possible existence of faster-than-light neutrinos illustrates precisely how different science and religion are when it comes to questions of "belief" or "knowledge".

As a science teacher, I have met a number of students who have questioned whether scientists simply "believe" in science in the same way religious people "believe" in God. It's easy to see why they might think this. Children encounter ideas about how the world works from both religion and science and they are often presented with these ideas as "truths" from figures of authority – priests, imams and science teachers – who in turn claim to be informed by even greater sources of authority such as the bible, Qur'an or science textbooks.

But there is a key difference between the way we teach science and religious teachings. Students of science can, at least in principle, test the claims made by science in a way they cannot do for religion. For example, most high school physics courses require students to know that all objects accelerate towards the ground at the same rate, regardless of their mass (providing we ignore air resistance). This is counterintuitive: most people assume that "heavier" objects fall faster. As a teacher, I get my students to find evidence for this claim by designing and carrying out their own experiments. They do not have to take my word for it, or the word of any other authority figure.

We cannot do this easily for all the claims science makes. For example, it's quite difficult to prove that atoms and electrons exist. In fact, many prominent scientists refused to believe atoms existed well into the late 19th century and it took Einstein to come up with a proof that was widely accepted. However, even if my students cannot prove for themselves that atoms and electrons exist, even if they cannot grasp the mathematics of Einstein's proof, I can point them to the fact that the physical world behaves as if our theories about these entities were true. For example, modern telecommunications would not work if what science tells us about electrons were not true in some sense. We cannot say the same for that other invisible thing so many people are asked to believe in, God.

Of course, we do not usually go out and test every single scientific claim we encounter (it would be impractical) and so, in that sense, you could argue that scientists and science teachers have "faith" in science, but it is certainly not the same kind of faith that is demanded of people who believe in God.

One of the things that appeals to me about science is that, unlike religion, science is not dogmatic. It does not say: "This is the way things are, and it can be no other way." Instead it says something like: "Based on the evidence we have so far, this is how things probably are; if clear and solid evidence is discovered that shows this is not how things are, then we will need to change our minds."

Science can seem rather weak in comparison to the certainties religion offers. But it is this very "weakness", this refusal to issue absolute statements of truth, that allows science to progress, and to come up with increasingly better ways of explaining the world.

This is why, even though their existence might mean that "the foundations of science would crumble", science will not shy away from considering the possibility that faster-than-light neutrinos are real. The issue will not be settled by consulting some supposedly infallible text but rather by close scrutiny of the controversial data and further experimentation if necessary.

And anyone who is capable of doing that work is entitled to put forward their conclusions: there are no hierarchies that absolutely must be respected, there is no single person who will have the final say. If, after scientists have done their work, we find that faster-than-light neutrinos do indeed exist, science may go through some kind of crisis, but it will emerge stronger, with even better ideas about the true nature of the universe.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2011/sep/28/faster-than-light-science-religion

[hightime54]

I am God

h ttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccb2GsnOoBM

now shurly you can see the humor in that or in cuneiform if you like.

[troy]

“Does Science Make Belief in God Obsolete?”

No, But it Should

by Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011). Photo by Christian Witkin.

Does science make belief in god obsolete? No, but it should. Until about 1832, when it first seems to have become established as a noun and a concept, the term “scientist” had no really independent meaning. “Science” meant “knowledge” in much the same way as “physic” meant medicine, and those who conducted experiments or organized field expeditions or managed laboratories were known as “natural philosophers.” To these gentlemen (for they were mainly gentlemen) the belief in a divine presence or inspiration was often merely assumed to be a part of the natural order, in rather the same way as it was assumed—or actually insisted upon—that a teacher at Cambridge University swear an oath to be an ordained Christian minister. For Sir Isaac Newton—an enthusiastic alchemist, a despiser of the doctrine of the Trinity and a fanatical anti-Papist—the main clues to the cosmos were to be found in Scripture. Joseph Priestley, discoverer of oxygen, was a devout Unitarian as well as a believer in the phlogiston theory. Alfred Russel Wallace, to whom we owe much of what we know about biogeography and natural selection, delighted in nothing more than a session of ectoplasmic or spiritual communion with the departed.

And thus it could be argued—though if I were a believer in god I would not myself attempt to argue it—that a commitment to science by no means contradicts a belief in the supernatural. The best known statement of this opinion in our own time comes from the late Stephen Jay Gould, who tactfully proposed that the worlds of science and religion commanded “non-overlapping magisteria.” How true is this on a second look, or even on a first glance? Would we have adopted monotheism in the first place if we had known:

That our species is at most 200,000 years old, and very nearly joined the 98.9 percent of all other species on our planet by becoming extinct, in Africa, 60,000 years ago, when our numbers seemingly fell below 2,000 before we embarked on our true “exodus” from the savannah?

That the universe, originally discovered by Edwin Hubble to be expanding away from itself in a flash of red light, is now known to be expanding away from itself even more rapidly, so that soon even the evidence of the original “big bang” will be unobservable?

That the Andromeda galaxy is on a direct collision course with our own, the ominous but beautiful premonition of which can already be seen with a naked eye in the night sky?

These are very recent examples, post-Darwinian and post-Einsteinian, and they make pathetic nonsense of any idea that our presence on this planet, let alone in this of so many billion galaxies, is part of a plan. Which design, or designer, made so sure that absolutely nothing (see above) will come out of our fragile current “something”? What plan, or planner, determined that millions of humans would die without even a grave-marker, for our first 200,000 years of struggling and desperate existence, and that there would only then at last be a “revelation” to save us, about 3,000 years ago, but disclosed only to gaping peasants in remote and violent and illiterate areas of the Middle East?

To say that there is little “scientific” evidence for the last proposition is to invite a laugh. There is no evidence for it, period. And if by some strenuous and improbable revelation there was to be any evidence, it would only argue that the creator or designer of all things was either (a) very laborious, roundabout, tinkering and incompetent and/or (b) extremely capricious and callous, and even cruel. It will not do to say, in reply to this, that the lord moves in mysterious ways. Those who dare to claim to be his understudies and votaries and interpreters must either accept the cruelty and the chaos or disown it: they cannot pick and choose between the warmly benign and the frigidly indifferent. Nor can the religious claim to be in possession of secret sources of information that are denied to the rest of us. That claim was, once, the prerogative of the Pope and the witch-doctor, but now it’s gone. This is as much as to say that reason and logic reject god, which (without being conclusive) would be a fairly close approach to a scientific rebuttal. It would also be quite near to saying something that lies just outside the scope of this essay, which is that morality shudders at the idea of god, as well.

Religion, remember, is theism not deism. Faith cannot rest itself on the argument that there might or might not be a prime mover. Faith must believe in answered prayers, divinely-ordained morality, heavenly warrant for circumcision, the occurrence of miracles or what you will. Physics and chemistry and biology and palaeontology and archaeology have, at a minimum, given us explanations for what used to be mysterious, and furnished us with hypotheses that are at least as good as, or very much better than, the ones offered by any believers in other and inexplicable dimensions.

Does this mean that the inexplicable or superstitious has become “obsolete”? I myself would wish to say no, if only because I believe that the human capacity for wonder neither will nor should be destroyed or superseded. But the original problem with religion is that it is our first, and our worst, attempt at explanation. It is how we came up with answers before we had any evidence. It belongs to the terrified childhood of our species, before we knew about germs or could account for earthquakes. It belongs to our childhood, too, in the less charming sense of demanding a tyrannical authority: a protective parent who demands compulsory love even as he exacts a tithe of fear. This unalterable and eternal despot is the origin of totalitarianism, and represents the first cringing human attempt to refer all difficult questions to the smoking and forbidding altar of a Big Brother. This of course is why one desires that science and humanism would make faith obsolete, even as one sadly realizes that as long as we remain insecure primates we shall remain very fearful of breaking the chain.

[roundsquare]

Great little passage there troy. Is that from a paper or a book?

Reminds me of something i read a long time ago that stayed with me. A bit of ancient Greek philosophy, The Riddle of Epicurus:

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?

Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"

[Guest heavensabove]

Hello,

Edited January 5, 2012 by heavensabove

[troy]

Sorry legal I forgot to put the link in :

http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/12-01-04/

Good poem, thats the problem of evil argument, nice one.

Happy new year to you and hi to heavensabove

[no2schwag]

Of course it is acceptable to be a scientist and be religious. As long as it doesn't impinge on your scientific method, if you start discounting or covering up facts because it doesn't perpetuate your religious beliefs then it's a problem.

Deists I have no problem with, it's Theism that is reproachable and unacceptable to me. The fact that theists think they can command you, in the material world, with the power of a supernatural being behind them is what I find abhorrent.

[thisUncoliingMortal]

“Science” meant “knowledge” in much the same way as “physic” meant medicine, and those who conducted experiments or organized field expeditions or managed laboratories were known as “natural philosophers.”

For Sir Isaac Newton—an enthusiastic alchemist, a despiser of the doctrine of the Trinity and a fanatical anti-Papist—the main clues to the cosmos were to be found in Scripture."

hey Troy..

have just finished "The System of the World" by Neal Stephenson..

It's the third tome in a trilogy..i missed the first two because the library didn't have them when i came across the third and i was impatient..it is a 1,000 pages in itself but i loved it..Sir Isaac features as a major character in what is a historical romp really..

thought you might be interested mate..

Edited January 9, 2012 by thisUncoliingMortal

[roundsquare]

Sorry legal I forgot to put the link in :

http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/12-01-04/

Good poem, thats the problem of evil argument, nice one.

Happy new year to you and hi to heavensabove

Happy new year to you mate too. Will check that link out when i get a little time also, looks interesting that