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Science Text Attempts to Reconcile Religion and Science
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Sat Jan 05, 2008 06:30 AM
from the something-for-both-sides-to-hate dept.
from the something-for-both-sides-to-hate dept.
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.'"
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Trying to bring a god in classroom (Score:3, Insightful)
The limits of science (Score:5, Insightful)
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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Re:The limits of science (Score:5, Insightful)
True, but it has absolutely no relevance to cult beliefs. The solution to limited scientific knowledge is better science, not to give up and invent a god of the gaps.
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Re:The limits of science (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Mod parent up (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, yeah, I get that some people read the western religious canon as allegory--it counts as an advance, I guess, that very few people believe Jonah was literally in a whale. But it is hard to see how assertions about, e.g., Jesus doing magic (water to wine, walking on water, coming back to life) is anything other than "Magic Man Dunnit".
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Re:The limits of science (Score:5, Insightful)
There are a number of what I consider to be mistakes in the current debate. The first is to identify scientific truth with the kind of absolutist claims that are made by religion. Scientific truth is a much more humble concept. The second mistake is when people who understand the two are different, nevertheless believe that the religious conception of truth is viable. It isn't. We just need to face up to the fact that we appear to be epistemically limited creatures.
Justification by evidence isn't going to work, because science will just eat it up. Justification by faith is an oxymoron. The only sorts of proofs left are metaphysical arguments, and even if they work, they never result in the kind of god that anyone other than a Deist would want to believe in.
I don't have a moral problem with people believing in God. But that doesn't mean that their beliefs should not be challenged in public, and that they should not be called on to defend them (and likewise for the opposition). That's pretty much what we do on other topics. Someone makes a claim and people ask for reasons why we should believe it. It beats fighting about it. There are many reasons we should debate religion, but the best one is probably because we want to know whether its claims are true or not. That's really the value that underpins most of science.
The recent prominence of people like Dawkins is evidence that the prejudice against the critical discussion of religion in public is on the wane. That's a good thing. We also have public places where this sort of thing is debated formally: they are called philosophy classes.
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Re:The limits of science (mod parent up) (Score:4, Insightful)
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".
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Re:The limits of science (Score:5, Interesting)
No offense intended, but the prevalence of this fallacy makes it one of my pet peeves.
:-)
First, and most importantly, this position is inherently false because it is self-refuting. It is a serious and far-reaching claim, requiring justification. However, the claim itself falls outside the limitations of science. It cannot meet its own standard of justification. To state that "Only scientific claims are knowable" is equivalent to stating, "Only ten-word sentences are true."
At worst, the claim proves its own falsehood. At best, it suggests its own unknowability. So, in the best case, you should neither expect anyone to believe you, nor complain when they don't.
This idea is a form of positivism. Positivism enjoyed remarkable popularity for an remarkably short span in the early 20th century. Many hailed positivism as the end of religion, just before it died a rapid death at its own hands... though not before the scientific community had adopted it as -- oops! -- unquestioned dogma. It is a myth, perpetuated from generation to generation by those who don't know better. (Hey, that sounds a lot like Dawkins! Fancy that.)
Second, this position is also incidentally false. One could hold that a rational person shouldn't accept any non-scientific claim, even if that claim somehow happens to be correct. But no one actually does this. There are plenty of propositions that most of us accept, though they lie outside the limitations of science. The clearest example is the claim that the universe exists. Is that silly? Let me rephrase: the claim that the universe, rather than the Matrix, exists. By definition, this question can never be addressed scientifically. But that doesn't prevent it from being true, and one is hardly considered irrational or unscientific for believing in a real universe.
Other examples abound, including logic, ethics, human rights, and (of course) the principles of science itself. You are free to claim that we can't know if science works, but then you can hardly make the recommendation that you are making.
It is quite clear that we have epistemic limitations. But it is also quite clear that those limits aren't quite as narrow as you propose. Any epistemology that's too limited will probably be self-refuting.
Even if it's possible to doubt some of the things I've mentioned, like an objective physical world, (1) there is no obligation to do so, and (2) no one actually does so, including full-fledged skeptics (as Hume himself admits). In a many cases, perhaps most cases, doubting has no epistemic superiority over not doubting. This leads philosopher Dallas Willard to quip, "You can't just doubt your beliefs and believe your doubts. Sometimes you have to doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs."
But it is the prevailing intellectual fashion to doubt. This is really too bad, because unjustified doubt is no more intelligent than unjustified belief, a.k.a. gullibility. And it is no more accurate.
It seems to me that I could just as well suggest, "We just need to face up to the fact that it is sometimes rational to accept unprovable truths." Even if, say, the principles of science don't possess epistemic certainty, they are suffici
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Re:Trying to bring a god in classroom (Score:5, Interesting)
My wife teaches science in public schools, by the way. She takes 15-20 minutes early in the school year to address why religion and science don't have to be at odds, and why students don't need to jump in with comments about God every chance they get. It makes a huge difference in how these kids behave, and even in how they accept the material presented.
She's also a devout Southern Baptist. So much for stereotypes, huh?
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Re:Trying to bring a god in classroom (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. It is called mass delusion.
You believe it because so many others believe it. After all, how can all these people be wrong, eh?
Use examples from the past. Greek gods and Roman gods would be one. Egyptian gods another. Also Japanese emperor is a god figure as well. No one believes any of these anymore, yet not so long ago, A LOT of people believed it and you would be killed for saying different. A LOT of people can't be wrong. All current religions are just a natural continuation of the past religions. As people outgrew their deities, we needed to create more powerful ones.
Why do we believe? People can't accept futility of their lives. They think they are special and try to justify it with religion (eg. afterlife and "god's will").
Finally, people do not just start to believe in a religion. 95%+ percent, they are indoctrinated into that religion from a little kid that can't think for themselves. Then they stay in that religion mostly out of fear - leave and maybe get the wrath of god as preached by almost every religion so most don't want to take risk like that. This explains the lack of mobility from one religion to another.
Aside: Santa has a basis in historical events that are a lot closer than 2000 years yet look what happened to that. Santa now lives in the North Pole, sports a Coca Cola suit (yes, they made it red), and eats cookies and milk. Santa, from real facts to current myth seems to mimic the so called "religious historical facts" quite well.
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Re:Trying to bring a god in classroom (Score:5, Funny)
Just as long as it's one of the Elder Gods of H. P. Lovecraft.
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Re:Trying to bring a god in classroom (Score:4, Funny)
[Some whimpering and gasping is heard among the students.]
Teacher: "Cthulhu fhtagn!"
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Why make concessions? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The evolution of gods (Score:4, Interesting)
God is a product of man, not the other way around.
Oh goodie. (Score:5, Interesting)
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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Two Baskets (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Two Baskets (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: Two Baskets (Score:5, Insightful)
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I call bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
How vs. Why (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Two Baskets (Score:5, Informative)
If the only interaction with organised religion is through what the media reports, then yes it seems that it brings nothing good. However, for every pedophile priest, there will be 10,000 quietly busting their guts out for their parishioners.
what happened to helping the poor?
Again, what have you done for the poor in the last year? Most church members I know give a massive amount of cash and time for the poor. Who is giving the homeless meals and a place to stay? In my town it is the church. The government won't feed or home anyone who cannot pass random drug tests, which is basically all the homeless in the west. (At least here in Europe, if you are not on drugs and have half a brain then you can easily earn enough to eat at least).
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Not requires, allowes (Score:5, Insightful)
Science and God (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Education is the Solution, Religion is the Problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Secularist Country? (Score:4, Funny)
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.
I have only one question... (Score:4, Insightful)
Odds are that they're only promoting one (or a handful of) major religions. Aren't there laws against that sort of thing?
One scientist's perspective on God (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:Logic vs Faith (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Logic vs Faith (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Logic vs Faith (Score:5, Interesting)
>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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Re:Orthogonal concepts (Score:5, Interesting)
It's easy to imagine that the proto-humans came up with ideas of various super-powers not to explain how or why something is happening, but simply to give a name to a concept. How do you describe the world in the most simple way in a proto-language? You just name everything.
Imagine you are a proto-human (difficult, but probably possible.) You see that the wind blows dust in the air. Somehow over thousands of years this concept receives a name, and this name is a name just like a human name 'Wind' (obviously not in English, but we have to understand each other here.) Does this mean that Wind is a god? Not necessarily, but it looks like Wind is a living creature with powers that no human possesses. The power to move many objects in the air for whatever reason. Is this a useful description of why the wind blows or how it blows? Not really, but it is a description that the Wind blows.
Everything gets a name, most things have powers that humans do not. Organized religions come much later, they combine many powers into single names. Zeus has many powers, but not all. Super organized religions come later yet, they try to reduce the powers to fewer names yet.
You can see the Occam's razor at work even in organization of religions. Why use many gods to explain things, when fewer gods with more powers is just as sufficient, and very much more efficient. You only need to talk to 3, 2 or even 1 god for all your needs, you don't need to talk to the Wind god about wind and to the Sun god about the Sun. If it wasn't for the human ability to reduce ideas into a smaller set we could not have come up with any science.
The Super organized religions started doing what the proto-religions were not - they were used to control the population for economic reasons rather than to simply name the unknown. They came up with various stories about how the gods created things and even with some 'why' questions to give meaning to various terrible events that humans have experienced in their lives.
But really there is no explanation in religion as to 'why' gods do anything, only reasoning as to 'why' bad things happen.
Where do religions explain why god created everything?
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Re:Orthogonal concepts (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Does that make any sense?
I see logic and faith as two totally opposite concepts. One relies on rational thinking while the other relies on two thousand year old myths. One of the memorable parts of Neil deGrasse Tyson's [wikipedia.org] speech on Beyond Belief 2006 [thesciencenetwork.org] was the fact that 15% of scientists believe in God, and he thought that this 15% was the biggest worry of science. Because he, and many other scientist can't reconcile the belief in God with science because explaining something complex and unlikely by something even more complex and even more unlikely doesn't make any sense.
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Re: Orthogonal concepts (Score:5, Insightful)
Why didn't God just create us all as souls in Heaven? Everyone sings happily ever after, end of story.
But no, he has to create us with bodies in a material world and leave us unattended so we can fall prey to temptations we don't understand and get condemned to Hell for it, so he can show how much he loves all of us by saving a tiny, tiny fraction of us from eternal torture.
The factual errors in the bible can be swept under the rug if you're so motivated, but the theology is stupid beyond belief.
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Re:Orthogonal concepts (Score:4, Insightful)
Overall I think science education has done a poor job of differentiating between science and faith. This has been exacerbated by the exclusion of any discussion of religion in public education, as you need to talk about religion and faith to understand the difference.
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Re:Orthogonal concepts (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Orthogonal concepts (Score:4, Insightful)
You may not want to talk about it, but the most powerful country on Earth is electing Presidents on the basis of this stupidity. So we'd better start "talking about it."
Why people insist on giving religion a free pass in public discourse is something I'll never understand.
I guess it's just my Aspergers acting up, huh.
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Re:Orthogonal concepts (Score:4, Interesting)
The reason we keep electing Presidents that seem to have such a connection to religion is 1.) nobody does their homework and figures out that all these assholes pay lip service to everything and only believe in themselves and 2.) nobody fucking votes. If enough people got off their ass and voted, this country could be a lot different.
We need to come up with some way to just 'appoint' a random person who meets a minimum set of qualifications for president. To many ways to game such a system means it will never be feasible until we have computer overlords with no soul, no 'bugs', and definied values (opinions) on politics and religions. In that case, the concept of a 'President' is moot anyway. Plus we all know (or should) where that leads... the ultimate truth from AI even with Asimovs laws, humans are too much of a danger to themselves to exist.
Cheers.
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Re:Orthogonal concepts (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Orthogonal concepts (Score:5, Insightful)
Oooh, a challenge! Shiny, shiney new toy. Thanks Santa!
Now let's break it, fast.
Our abilities to plan into the future, remember the past, recognize patterns, abstract thought, and infer by analogy are survival traits. Right?
Now, parallel research on split-brain patients and in AI have arrived to a similar model of the mind. It is a group of agents, each specializing in one task. What split-brain research has demonstrated is that the inference module is not accurate : it infer an explanation for anything, as long as it can apply a pattern that's been memorized before.
For example, paranoia seems to work by forcing the inference module to find scary explanations to ordinary events. Agents are interacting, but independent. A paranoid person may know full well that there isn't, say, a sniper hiding just there in the bushes, but will have to go see to be sure, even if that's several times.
Religion is an explanation for things that science has figured out by now. It appeared as primitive explanations to
But someone finally decided that they'd seen enough the pattern of "the world around me seems to work in a consistent ways" and inferred "maybe I can figure out all the rules". Now that is an other way to get the answers, and it's better, because it yields perfect results when everything is right (ie, you test an hypothese that happens to be correct). The scientific method is a better tool than religion, so it will supplant it some day.
What's frustrating is knowing there is a reason why people still believe in God : the ssurvival trait to find new ideas dangerous, weird, strange. It is a group-survival trait : if we didn't have it, the genuinely dangerous new ideas would kill us all off damn fast.
Now you know the mechanisms by which both religion and science appeared, and because of which there is a fight between them memes. Happy?
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Re:Orthogonal concepts (Score:4, Interesting)
People are religous not because they have thought about it, concluded that it is correct, and chosen a sect to suit themselves. They are religous because they don't go around kicking wolves, eating the bright red berries, or running over the freeway without looking because it's a handy shortcut. They have been told that this is how the world works from an early age, and they simply accepted it as fact, as a by-product of a useful behaviour which has been evolved.
If we started from a clean slate, and had all children raised in a secular society, taught equally about all religions *and* science, then which do you think the children would choose? Even if they chose to be religous (and if taught properly about science and reason, I think that most would be atheist), the odds are that they wouldn't make the same choice as their parents (there are just so many sects to choose from).
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Re:Orthogonal concepts (Score:4, Insightful)
It might come as a big surprise for you, but the Pope was Catholic, and it has always been the position of the Catholic Church, like it has been for all educated Christians, that the Bible requires interpretation.
This is quite unlike the certain inbreed American hillbillies, who has never read a book in their life, who therefore believe the King James Bible is God's words which can somehow be read directly without interpretation.
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Re:Orthogonal concepts (Score:4, Insightful)
Credulity (or gullability, if you'd like) was probably evolutionarily beneficial because belief, in itself, can have positive health implications (ie the placebo effect). Individuals who "believe" tend to recover from disease more than people who don't. What you believe in doesn't seem to matter.
This was fine and good during most of our civilization's childhood, because frankly we didn't know anything about anything. But in the modern age, when science has far more beautiful, predicive and elegant explainations, we need to feed that desire to "believe" with analysis of facts. It is harder, for sure, but more rewarding. Religion knows it is being phased out slowly, and therefore fights science and free thought every step of the way.
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Re:Logic vs Faith (Score:5, Funny)
u = monkey++;
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Re:Logic vs Faith (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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Re:Sellouts (Score:5, Insightful)
Who's the hypocrite?
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Re:Sellouts (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Sellouts (Score:4, Insightful)
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The standards of truth are entirely different. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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