Science Text Attempts to Reconcile Religion and Science 1071
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.'"
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: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.
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.
Education is the Solution, Religion is the Problem (Score:5, Interesting)
God of the Gaps (Score:2, Interesting)
It has been given the moniker 'God of the gaps' and there is a description on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].
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.
Re:Trying to bring a god in classroom (Score:2, Interesting)
1) Creation by God (ID) - not the Christian God
2) Spontaneous Evolution
3) Pre-existing life
4) Evolution
It stated simply that 2, and 3 were dis-proved by the following experiment, and then went on to explain evolution in detail. No more fuss about ID. Of course no statements that Evolution is *just* a theory either.
I think that such a mention of theories is very valuable in explaining the rise of evolution as a theory that is the prevalent scientific consensus.
You're wrong (Score:1, Interesting)
The number of gods (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Two Baskets (Score:1, Interesting)
10,000? Where did you get that figure from? I went to a Catholic boarding school when I was younger. Of the dozen or so monks who taught there, two are in prison right now after being convicted of fiddling with little boys.
(Fortunately I wasn't one of them)
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?
Re:Logic vs Faith (Score:2, Interesting)
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!
Darwin (Score:2, Interesting)
> 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).
Re:Weasel Words (Score:3, Interesting)
Even if you accept, for the sake of argument, that incorrect definition of religion, there's still no problem. You just have to remember that not all "things" are "phenomena". If it's a phenomenon, it's in the magisterium of science. If it's not, then it's in the magisterium of philosophy (of which religion is but one flavour).
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?
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.
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
Re:God of the Gaps (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sellouts (Score:3, Interesting)
Just because you're good at math doesn't mean everything you believe is true.
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.
No Matter What You Think (Score:1, Interesting)
Belief in God and His son Jesus Christ is widely held throughout the world. There are those that take the name of God and his son for their own benefit and they are wrong in doing so. Believing in the Lord doesn't have to be in a big church, run by a bunch of men with questionable backgrounds. It can be nothing more than living your life by a set of moral standards; for example, the Ten Commandments and quietly saying "thank you for this day" while in the shower, or in your car on the way to work. The Lord will hear you.
I'm not here to convince you that any of you are wrong by being non-believers. God may show you that in His own time. But, as you continue to post comments assuring yourself and others that religion is all just BS, please consider the question of how science came to be. How did all of those things in the universe get there? How did the fabulous human mind become the powerhouse that it is? Was it truly just a happy coincidence that all of the right amino acids and proteins came together? Are you really certain that God didn't have a hand in it all? Would it be so terrible that you acknowledge that God may exist, and may have had a plan for the human race that we just can't understand yet?
I enjoy technology and science as much as anyone here and often wonder how it all came to be. I do acknowledge the existence of God because even if we somehow can prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that it's all BS, I won't be any worse off. And, since I believe that God does exist and I see proof of it every day, on the day when I draw my last breath, I'll do so believing I'm going home, and hope that my years as a living, breathing human made a difference, even in a small way. Having helped bring three kids into the world was all the evidence I needed that God is real, and as they live their lives, maybe that's how I'll have made a difference.
Re:Trying to bring a god in classroom (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, human intellectual abilities are limited. Unfortunately, in our time, at the present state of civilization development, issues leading to understanding of religion still pose a real challenge to the mind. It's challenging enough that a good fraction of people fail to understand despite the effort.
Ask a five-years old whether he thinks Santa is real, and why. A few children of this age will say he is, and offer explanations, which may be based on a critical evaluation according to their present level of understanding the world (e.g., Christmas gifts do appear below the tree in the night, NORAD tracks Santa's flight, you can go to Finland and meet Santa, I've seen a Santa in the shopping mall).
Regarding religion, some people never mature their understanding of the world to the point of cracking it -- even though the information is available.
To get nearly everyone in adult population believe something, that something should be present in daily life and be absolutely impossible to ignore. To give an example, two millennia ago nearly everyone believed the earth was flat. It was flat, according to all people's daily life. They didn't travel far enough to notice earth roundness, they didn't have accurate maps, they didn't use clocks accurate enough and didn't travel fast enough to notice difference between "time zones" (sundials don't count, as they are tied to sun's position in the sky). Poeple didn't have instant communication between different locations of earth. To sum up, the flatness of earth was a fact of daily life. Some sailors surely noticed that the masts of an approaching ship appeared in sight before the hull, but -- who knew for sure why this was. Some did look at Sun elevation angles. Some did astronomy. But those were few.
Fast forward to the present day. You get reminded that Earth is round literally every day. Travel, news, politics, global issues, communication, business, culture. It's in your daily thoughts. You CANNOT miss this -- this is a part of your life. Aside of a few aboriginal people and a few retards, nobody misses the fact.
Now, what would it take to make religion such obvious a fact as the flatness of earth is today? I'm speculating, but perhaps one possibility is that in the future brains get scanned, converted into digital information and run on another hardware in virtual reality, thus becoming the state of intelligent life. It may come with realities of life that make religion obvious. Or something else enters our daily life that makes religion obvious. Things sufficient to understand religion have to be ever-present in everyone's life if this understanding is to happen.
Cheer, this is the progress of civilization.
As a side note, it seems to me that today the only near-guaranteed recipe to understand religion is to be a top-notch physicist. Any other occupation does not necessarily make it obvious.
Re:Two Baskets (Score:1, Interesting)
It's a question of *certainty* (Score:3, Interesting)
> 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
Re:The limits of science (Score:3, Interesting)
Jonas asks his father, "Do you love me?"
His father laughs at him and gives him a lecture on precision of language, and how Jonas probably meant "Do you care for me?" or something similar.
Re:Science and Religion are incompatible. (Score:1, Interesting)
That may be true of some religions, but that doesn't make it true of all religions. Catholics are encouraged to question not only the world around them but their own religion and faith as well. If science is about dispelling ignorance, it has failed for you.
The problem with Evolution is it has no Soul (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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
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).