Religion vs Science

But of course that is what I am suggesting. But it wouldn't exactly make sense if I were younger than you now would it.

 

I haven't got the time to psychoanalyse your suggestions and motivations, Paedo-mitage.

 

Buh, this was all based on Chi and his devious ways. Told me many a lie I did not believe but wanted to test.

But I showed that bastard! Unfortunately it also involved blowing up most of the castle in minecraft.

 

Good, that bastard needs taking down.

 

Think nothing of what has transpired here Monsly, I have nothing against you, and I was just having a bit of fun while trying to see if Chi was indeed lying to me.

 

You bastard.

 

you bastards just ruined this thread.

 

I thought the problem would be we have no real religious counterpoint here, really. Maybe you'll smoke someone out. EM was good value at times on this subject. Torq and TheBlackCat got into some long debates at times.

I quite enjoy playing Devils advocate in these things; from experience, I think their can be striking arrogance on both sides. Use to have some right trollololols against religious pro-lifers back in the day.

 

I am not sure if I want to go through all this again but yes, there have been long discussions.

And the passion and commitment from both sides would easily justify your observation that both science and religion are just set of beliefs (even if scientists think the science is not). The problem is that each experiment, even if it's absolutely repeatable, has to be interpreted to get a valid conclusion. And interpretation is (or could be) far from "truth".

So science is about undeniable facts which lead to speculations about the general nature. Religion on the other hand is about the general nature but is based on subjective (deniable) facts. It's just a different approach, neither is better or worse.

 

I've always felt that religion was an imperfect attempt at explaining something that is ultimately beyond human comprehension. In other words, if a supreme being does exist, then all of the various religion's attempts at pigeon-holing that being into a certain narrow ideology where one type of believer attains heaven and another type of believer goes to hell is probably wrong.

I like the Buddhist approach myself, i.e., there's no point in saying whether god does or doesn't exist. That was the one question that the original Buddha refused to answer.

 

Science and religion are both flawed because of human nature. At least science aims to separate itself from human emotion, the problem is the collective contributes and "followers" are hardly an equally stable and logical bunch.

To have faith in science is flawed. Literally anything you "know" because of science is really just the most logical answer based on the evidence presented. Theory's like The Big Bang and Evolution of Species are criticised by religious groups because they only understand having complete faith in something. Personally, I think having half the evidence makes something more likely than having no evidence at all and outright believing it anyway.

 

This is one of the examples where religion works almost exactly like science. Because, like in science, you have various models of what happens after you die. Christians have probably one of less complicated models, you die, left or right, heaven or damned forever. Other religions, especially these assuming some kind of reincarnation, are probably closer to the truth and, what's worth of pointing out, these models with reincarnation are "backwards compatible" in a sense that they contain all these models without reincarnation.

In science it works exactly the same. You learn now Newton's model work and then, when you are ready, you learn that "you know, in fact the true model is somewhat more complicated and this is Einstein's model".

What's most interesting is that even the larger, more complicated model can still be imperfect and is probably to be extended in the future. In religion, when you learn how reincarnation works you can accept it or stick with the simpler model. However, it's pointless to criticize the simple model after you learn how the complicated one works. Would you criticize Newton's? No, you'd probably rather say that it's simplified, works in many interesting cases and a lot of people do not need to know that it sometimes doesn't work.

I think then that most people do not need to think of whether or not there's something beyond your current life here on earth. You have your mission, your goal to realize and learning how reincarnation works can easily distract you which is not intended.

That's why Christ came and established a simple but yet understantable model which fits so many people.

To be frank, I do not even think that the model involving reincarnation is the ultimate truth - it's probably not as it's too easy understandable by humans. And the ultimate truth is probably too complicated to be expressed with our language and our set of notions.

But still, having only the half of the evidence can position you far, far away from the truth. Would you today accept the state of science as it was 1000 years ago? Probably not.

And do you imagine the science in 1000 years starting from today? What would they think of our state of knowledge? It's highly probable that many of today's ideas will just be laughable.

On the other hand, I believe that both science and religion deal with the same thing - the God's Great Creation.

And while the religion asks "why", science asks "how".

These two have to ultimately came to similar conclusions and when science will accept the fact that everything around has been created by God, it will finally end the "Middle Ages of Science".

 

Torq, I don't mean to offend you by this comment but, how much do you actually know about science? Have you ever studied any disciplines of science in an institution such as university? I ask these questions because you seem to lack a bit of understanding of how science operates. For example ideas in science are not touted as truth until rigorously shown as so, that is also why newer ideas can replace older theories. This is the complete opposite of religion, where what is said is considered truth and requires no proof.

Furthermore there seems to be a bit of bias in your last paragraph where you say that there is indeed a god. I am not saying I am above any form of bias and bias isn't necessarily a bad thing but what you have said there is very extreme and goes against huge swaths of data.

 

That's not quite true. There are examples where some approved theories turned out to be false, based on fake data crafted by purpose to make money or to stop someone else from making money. It's not common but still.

Also science assumes that "truth" is based on "repeatable experiment" however, is it really "repeatable"? Can you repeat scientific experiments on our own? And if not, isn't science merely a set of imposed beliefs?

Also, what about such things like homeopathy? They follow the precise, rigorous scientific methodology, have their own conferences, publications and still the other, large group of scientists blame them for believing in fairytales. How many of such controversies exist in other sciences like physics, chemistry, history where there coexists mutually exclusive theories and no side of the dispute is able to easily convince the other?

I am a PhD in mathematics but I guess this positions me highly biased. In math nothing based solely on experiments would ever be considered "true" or even "acceptable".

Yes, I am biased, I strongly believe in God but do not accept simple models given by major religions. Rather, I am trying to synthesize what sounds mostly reasonable and came up with my custom conclusions. And I do not think this discussion would be interesting if a group of skeptics would just share their common skepticism.

What specific sentence you found so "extreme" and going against the data?

 

I don't need know what the answer is to know what the answer is not. One side of the argument has some factual evidence as that is all us humans have discovered to this point, the other has none. Simple.

I'm not saying I know the answer, nor should I claim to and nor should I need to. I merely know which path is more likely; the one with some evidence as opposed to the one with none. The exact conclusion that is made at the end of this incomplete trail of evidence is irrelevant to this argument.

 

That has nothing to do what I have said. I said that theories are not accepted as truth until rigorously shown as so, obviously these theories based on fraudulent evidence are proven as false. For example during an attempted application of the new theory, inconstancies would arise and the mathematics describing it would not produce results that match with what is observed.

Yes, you can repeat them, maybe not exactly (e.g. not the very same instant of time nor area of space), but you can control most variables that would have a noticeable effect on the results (e.g. temperature, pressure, reagents, etc.). Under these almost identical conditions the results would almost be identical and thus still fit with the aim of the experiment and show that experiment to be valid and reliable.

I dislike homeopathy, it's no substitute for real medical care, and being told that everything is a-ok doesn't always cause an improvement in the patients. Homeopathy is not rigorous either, nothing is tested it is just accepted. They make no attempt to understand why it works in some instances and not others.

Then I have much admiration for you if you are indeed telling the truth Torq. I know that mathematics isn't empirical, but like physical sciences you must be able to prove your results. Using things like mathematical induction to show something is true for all values in a given domain for a simple example. Furthermore some mathematical concepts we take for granted now were noticed empirically; for example Pascal’s numbers and their relationship to combinations.

That is true and fair enough, it would be boring without some objection, or trolling on monslys part. I your sentence of "...when science will accept the fact that everything around has been created by God, it will finally end the "Middle Ages of Science"." extreme because it goes against all current data and seems to be based on nothing but your own un-substantiated claims.

 

I've always been an atheist. I just don't believe that some supreme being that's everywhere created everything. I think it's kind of arrogant of us to invent a character and assume our "creation" was the cause of everything that has ever happened everywhere. I'm sure it must be nice to beleive in God and think that you'll go to heaven (or hell) to be reunited with your loved ones but I just don't buy it. People preaching stuff like "Jesus loves and will save you" pisses me off. Some hustler from back in the day will save you from an eternity in hell simply by saying you beleive in him and be a good person? I believe once you're dead, that's it, you're dead, nothing. For you (i.e. your consciousness) to exist there has to be chemical signals which requires energy, unfortunately when you die such energy ceases to be created. Sorry, the end is the end.