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Culture evolves, and people increasingly question tradition for tradition's sake. Belief in God is at odds with a scientific view of the world, the decision to

Culture evolves, and people increasingly question tradition for tradition's sake. Belief in God is at odds with a scientific view of the world, the decision to have children or not has many contributing factors (economic, for one), and it's hard to be patriotic when every country has so many skeletons in the closet you'd think it's perpetually Halloween.

superqwert 7y ago
> Belief in God is at odds with a scientific view of the world No, it's not. > it's hard to be patriotic when every country has so many skeletons in the closet you'd think it's perpetually Halloween When did nations not have skeletons in their closets?
baud147258 7y ago
> Belief in God is at odds with a scientific view of the world I'd say both are orthogonal to each other. The religious view of the world explain the "why do we exist?" and the scientific view the "how do we exist?".
- krapp 7y ago
  Religion lays claim to both the why and the how. The belief that "religion explains why and science explains how" is entirely modern. For most of human history (until secular science arose as a concept,) every aspect of the material world was seen as having been created and controlled by divine powers. Even when "natural laws" were discovered, those laws were divine in origin, and thus could conceivably be arbitrarily suspended or changed under divine will. God created the heavens and the earth, created man from the dust of the earth, and woman from man's rib. There's no room in that for the big bang, modern cosmology or evolution - one cannot accept the latter while believing the former to be anything but prose, which would make it no longer religion. Thus religion can only coexist with science as long as religion isn't taken seriously.
  - deogeo 7y ago
    Sure, if you define religion as literal interpretation of the Bible, stuck in the 9th century, while allowing science the full benefit of modern understanding. For example, you probably didn't have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinozism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinozism in mind when you said religion. > Even when "natural laws" were discovered, those laws were divine in origin, and thus could conceivably be arbitrarily suspended or changed under divine will. We still don't know the origin of natural laws. It's very probable that such knowledge is unattainable.
    - skissane 7y ago
      > literal interpretation of the Bible, stuck in the 9th century I have to speak up in defence of people who lived in the 9th century. In the Middle Ages, allegorical approaches to Bible interpretation were popular, and they weren't wedded to literal readings of it – e.g. Augustine of Hippo (4th/5th century) argued that the six days in Genesis 1 were not meant to be understood as six literal days – and Augustine's views on this were very influential in the centuries that followed. People sometimes seem to back-project 19th/20th/21st century American fundamentalism on to the Middle Ages, when that sort of wooden literalism was very alien to the mediaeval spirit.
      - deogeo 7y ago
        I'll admit, I picked "9th century" at random, without knowing much about it.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  Why and how can contradict. Easiest example is “god made people this way” vs “people are the result of random processes that came about due to happenstance”.
  - deogeo 7y ago
    An omniscient god can guide random processes as it wishes. Or it can create a system where the desired outcome will come to pass, without controlling every detail. Like how each molecule of water moves randomly and unpredictably, but the river flows downhill and to the ocean.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      But then if Occam's razor tells you the random process[0] will manage just fine, you have to push God's guidance further away still. At some point you might ask yourself, if increasingly sophisticated phenomena keep turning out to be explainable without any reference to God, if anything science touches turns out to be devoid of God, then why should we expect to find Him? -- [0] - an important realization is that evolution isn't a completely random process - it has state in form of environment and path dependence, both of which concentrate the probability mass.
      - baud147258 7y ago
        > if anything science touches turns out to be devoid of God, then why should we expect to find Him I don't think science can be used to find any proof of the existence of God
        Intermernet 7y ago
        >I don't think science can be used to find any proof of the existence of God Can anything be used to provide any proof of the existence of God? If not, why continue to argue for the existence of God?
      - lotsofpulp 7y ago
- adrianN 7y ago
  You can credibly be a theist and believe in science, but it's a lot harder to really believe in one of the big religions and also believe in science.
  - baud147258 7y ago
    Why? I'm a believing Catholic and believe in science too.
    - Intermernet 7y ago
      What, in this instance, defines "Catholic" and "science"? Science relies more on disbelief than belief. Faith is anathema to the scientific method. You can disagree, but you should be able to make a cogent argument as to why what I just typed is incorrect.
      - baud147258 7y ago
        I don't like the term belied when applied to science, but I still used since it was the term the parent comment used. In that context, it's faith in the scientific method, not blind faith in anything that science has to say
        Intermernet 7y ago
        Yes, but faith in scientific method can be re-written as "I've seen the scientific method demonstrated in the past, and I will continue to see it demonstrated in the future, because it strictly follows rules that define it". It's a "faith" that things will continue to be tested to be false, and, if not found to be false, slightly more founded in the the way we understand and correlate the observable universe. Those who define science as truth are being lazy with the definition. Science is a series of experiments to determine what doesn't seem to be true, so we can narrow down what might be true. I'm not meaning to be oblique or argumentative, and I actually respect the right of anyone to believe anything they find to be personally gratifying to believe (otherwise science wouldn't progress). I just tend to get entrenched in these discussions because I find religion (and faith) so fascinating. I see "faith" as the birth of a hypothesis, but without experimentation, it's only a hypothesis.
- Intermernet 7y ago
  Most religions purport to explain both, and science has little interest in the former, as it has traditionally been impossible to come up with falsifiable experiments as to "why do we exist". This is, like your comment, taking strict definitions for both "why" and "how". "why" we exist can have answers ranging from "we're the current latest bunch of mutants resulting from this whole evolution thing" all the way to "as self-realized, intelligent beings, we inevitably ask this question, and asking this question is the only predictable outcome of being intelligent and self-realized." "how" we exist can be answered anywhere from "with a whole lot of luck" to "badly". You need to specify what you mean by "why" and "how" for your distinction to have any debatable qualities.
  - baud147258 7y ago
    > "why" we exist can have answers ranging from "we're the current latest bunch of mutants resulting from this whole evolution thing" all the way to "as self-realized, intelligent beings, we inevitably ask this question, and asking this question is the only predictable outcome of being intelligent and self-realized." To this range of answers, I'd add "because God created us (because of reasons outside the scope of this answer)" "how we exist" is how does the universe works, which is explored and explained by the various scientific fields
    - Intermernet 7y ago
      > To this range of answers, I'd add "because God created us (because of reasons outside the scope of this answer)" Yes, but which god, and why does this explanation get any greater credence than Douglas Adams' writing "the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI believe that the entire Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure. The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they call The Coming of The Great White Handkerchief, are small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel." The religions of the world disagree with each other on the "why", and none of them seem to be interested in demonstrating the veracity of their theory. This is why science generally ignores the "why". No-one has come up with a reasonable way to show, one way or another, which theory may be truer (or more aptly, falser) than any other, and therefore the question currently has no meaningful answer. If this changes, it will show that all, some, one, or none of the current religions are correct, but thousands of years of discussion haven't produced anything close to solving this problem, and this discussion has been going on since before Akhenaten.

superqwert 7y ago

> Belief in God is at odds with a scientific view of the world No, it's not. > it's hard to be patriotic when every country has so many skeletons in the closet you'd think it's perpetually Halloween When did nations not have skeletons in their closets?

baud147258 7y ago

> Belief in God is at odds with a scientific view of the world I'd say both are orthogonal to each other. The religious view of the world explain the "why do we exist?" and the scientific view the "how do we exist?".

krapp 7y ago
Religion lays claim to both the why and the how. The belief that "religion explains why and science explains how" is entirely modern. For most of human history (until secular science arose as a concept,) every aspect of the material world was seen as having been created and controlled by divine powers. Even when "natural laws" were discovered, those laws were divine in origin, and thus could conceivably be arbitrarily suspended or changed under divine will. God created the heavens and the earth, created man from the dust of the earth, and woman from man's rib. There's no room in that for the big bang, modern cosmology or evolution - one cannot accept the latter while believing the former to be anything but prose, which would make it no longer religion. Thus religion can only coexist with science as long as religion isn't taken seriously.
- deogeo 7y ago
  Sure, if you define religion as literal interpretation of the Bible, stuck in the 9th century, while allowing science the full benefit of modern understanding. For example, you probably didn't have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinozism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinozism in mind when you said religion. > Even when "natural laws" were discovered, those laws were divine in origin, and thus could conceivably be arbitrarily suspended or changed under divine will. We still don't know the origin of natural laws. It's very probable that such knowledge is unattainable.
  - skissane 7y ago
    > literal interpretation of the Bible, stuck in the 9th century I have to speak up in defence of people who lived in the 9th century. In the Middle Ages, allegorical approaches to Bible interpretation were popular, and they weren't wedded to literal readings of it – e.g. Augustine of Hippo (4th/5th century) argued that the six days in Genesis 1 were not meant to be understood as six literal days – and Augustine's views on this were very influential in the centuries that followed. People sometimes seem to back-project 19th/20th/21st century American fundamentalism on to the Middle Ages, when that sort of wooden literalism was very alien to the mediaeval spirit.
    - deogeo 7y ago
      I'll admit, I picked "9th century" at random, without knowing much about it.
lotsofpulp 7y ago
Why and how can contradict. Easiest example is “god made people this way” vs “people are the result of random processes that came about due to happenstance”.
- deogeo 7y ago
  An omniscient god can guide random processes as it wishes. Or it can create a system where the desired outcome will come to pass, without controlling every detail. Like how each molecule of water moves randomly and unpredictably, but the river flows downhill and to the ocean.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    But then if Occam's razor tells you the random process[0] will manage just fine, you have to push God's guidance further away still. At some point you might ask yourself, if increasingly sophisticated phenomena keep turning out to be explainable without any reference to God, if anything science touches turns out to be devoid of God, then why should we expect to find Him? -- [0] - an important realization is that evolution isn't a completely random process - it has state in form of environment and path dependence, both of which concentrate the probability mass.
    - baud147258 7y ago
      > if anything science touches turns out to be devoid of God, then why should we expect to find Him I don't think science can be used to find any proof of the existence of God
      - Intermernet 7y ago
        >I don't think science can be used to find any proof of the existence of God Can anything be used to provide any proof of the existence of God? If not, why continue to argue for the existence of God?
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
adrianN 7y ago
You can credibly be a theist and believe in science, but it's a lot harder to really believe in one of the big religions and also believe in science.
- baud147258 7y ago
  Why? I'm a believing Catholic and believe in science too.
  - Intermernet 7y ago
    What, in this instance, defines "Catholic" and "science"? Science relies more on disbelief than belief. Faith is anathema to the scientific method. You can disagree, but you should be able to make a cogent argument as to why what I just typed is incorrect.
    - baud147258 7y ago
      I don't like the term belied when applied to science, but I still used since it was the term the parent comment used. In that context, it's faith in the scientific method, not blind faith in anything that science has to say
      - Intermernet 7y ago
        Yes, but faith in scientific method can be re-written as "I've seen the scientific method demonstrated in the past, and I will continue to see it demonstrated in the future, because it strictly follows rules that define it". It's a "faith" that things will continue to be tested to be false, and, if not found to be false, slightly more founded in the the way we understand and correlate the observable universe. Those who define science as truth are being lazy with the definition. Science is a series of experiments to determine what doesn't seem to be true, so we can narrow down what might be true. I'm not meaning to be oblique or argumentative, and I actually respect the right of anyone to believe anything they find to be personally gratifying to believe (otherwise science wouldn't progress). I just tend to get entrenched in these discussions because I find religion (and faith) so fascinating. I see "faith" as the birth of a hypothesis, but without experimentation, it's only a hypothesis.
Intermernet 7y ago
Most religions purport to explain both, and science has little interest in the former, as it has traditionally been impossible to come up with falsifiable experiments as to "why do we exist". This is, like your comment, taking strict definitions for both "why" and "how". "why" we exist can have answers ranging from "we're the current latest bunch of mutants resulting from this whole evolution thing" all the way to "as self-realized, intelligent beings, we inevitably ask this question, and asking this question is the only predictable outcome of being intelligent and self-realized." "how" we exist can be answered anywhere from "with a whole lot of luck" to "badly". You need to specify what you mean by "why" and "how" for your distinction to have any debatable qualities.
- baud147258 7y ago
  > "why" we exist can have answers ranging from "we're the current latest bunch of mutants resulting from this whole evolution thing" all the way to "as self-realized, intelligent beings, we inevitably ask this question, and asking this question is the only predictable outcome of being intelligent and self-realized." To this range of answers, I'd add "because God created us (because of reasons outside the scope of this answer)" "how we exist" is how does the universe works, which is explored and explained by the various scientific fields
  - Intermernet 7y ago
    > To this range of answers, I'd add "because God created us (because of reasons outside the scope of this answer)" Yes, but which god, and why does this explanation get any greater credence than Douglas Adams' writing "the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI believe that the entire Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure. The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they call The Coming of The Great White Handkerchief, are small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel." The religions of the world disagree with each other on the "why", and none of them seem to be interested in demonstrating the veracity of their theory. This is why science generally ignores the "why". No-one has come up with a reasonable way to show, one way or another, which theory may be truer (or more aptly, falser) than any other, and therefore the question currently has no meaningful answer. If this changes, it will show that all, some, one, or none of the current religions are correct, but thousands of years of discussion haven't produced anything close to solving this problem, and this discussion has been going on since before Akhenaten.