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You are right that they aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. But I really dislike the idea that religion is somehow "beyond science". That's a very modern ide

You are right that they aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. But I really dislike the idea that religion is somehow "beyond science". That's a very modern idea that isn't really compatible with most real religious beliefs through most of history, or even the present day. http://lesswrong.com/lw/i8/religions_claim_to_be_nondisprovable/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/i8/religions_claim_to_be_nondisprova... >Back in the old days, there was no concept of religion being a separate magisterium. The Old Testament is a stream-of-consciousness culture dump: history, law, moral parables, and yes, models of how the universe works. In not one single passage of the Old Testament will you find anyone talking about a transcendent wonder at the complexity of the universe. But you will find plenty of scientific claims, like the universe being created in six days (which is a metaphor for the Big Bang), or rabbits chewing their cud. (Which is a metaphor for...) >Back in the old days, saying the local religion "could not be proven" would have gotten you burned at the stake. One of the core beliefs of Orthodox Judaism is that God appeared at Mount Sinai and said in a thundering voice, "Yeah, it's all true." From a Bayesian perspective that's some darned unambiguous evidence of a superhumanly powerful entity... The vast majority of religions in human history - excepting only those invented extremely recently - tell stories of events that would constitute completely unmistakable evidence if they'd actually happened. The orthogonality of religion and factual questions is a recent and strictly Western concept. The people who wrote the original scriptures didn't even know the difference. ... >The idea that religion is a separate magisterium which cannot be proven or disproven is a Big Lie... It is a wild distortion of how religion happened historically, of how all scriptures present their beliefs, of what children are told to persuade them, and of what the majority of religious people on Earth still believe.

gonvaled 11y ago
Religion was at the center of everything when human knowledge was very limited, and religious claims could not be proved or disproved. While knowledge progresses, religion is still in the business of making claims about non-falsifiable things, but the amount of things non-falsifiable has been dramatically reduced; they have been pushed out of the center to the margin, where they can still keep on making non-falsifiable claims. They have been in a slippery slope since immemorial times: once they are caught red-handed, they adapt the message, even accepting newly established facts as an expression of their god of choice. So yes, religion can not be disproved, since once you find out a fact which could disprove it, they basically say "you did not understand what we meant, we meant exactly this, and this how our god is responsible for this newly found fact".

gonvaled 11y ago

Religion was at the center of everything when human knowledge was very limited, and religious claims could not be proved or disproved. While knowledge progresses, religion is still in the business of making claims about non-falsifiable things, but the amount of things non-falsifiable has been dramatically reduced; they have been pushed out of the center to the margin, where they can still keep on making non-falsifiable claims. They have been in a slippery slope since immemorial times: once they are caught red-handed, they adapt the message, even accepting newly established facts as an expression of their god of choice. So yes, religion can not be disproved, since once you find out a fact which could disprove it, they basically say "you did not understand what we meant, we meant exactly this, and this how our god is responsible for this newly found fact".