Should science replace religion?

That's a good one. I need people to climb with and her husband is a climbing partner (and she knows I'm not religious I think). If I wasn't in need of climbing partners I would post that since she asked for it.

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(edit) Update- I now have the answer and all I can say is, way to bring God and the internet into this.

He has two daughters from a previous marriage. They live with the mom for part of the week and with him and his new wife (the prayer) the other part of the time.

I just contacted him and it turns out the eldest daughter has been lying and playing one household against the other. They are have a "pow wow" tonight. Everyone please pray for them.

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Not

Once dead there is not knowing anyfink

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I think belief in a so called higher power came long before organised religion

Cavemen were probably thinking "There goes bloody Thor again with his bloody hammer and throwing down his bloody lightening"

And right there is the major problem with religion and especially organised religion

ANTHROPOMORPHISM

Get rid of that from religion and many of the problems almost vanish and become ordinary mundane human problems

There is still room for wonder and mystery over the Universe but I guess boring Physics with all the mind numbing calculations involved not quite as easy as thinking about a warm cuddly Sky Daddy

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There are rock climbing gyms here and I’ve been to one, a couple of times. Helped me get over my fear of heights.

Prayer should never be a crutch to not do anything more. The “pow wow” will probably not help much.

But you’ll know soon enough, since it’ll be broadcasted on FB tomorrow

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No, no, no -- no need to say "true" at all -- as far as what that limitedly seems to apply to there. I might not be religious, but the last thing I'd want is, say, the elimination of Christianity from the past.

We'd probably be as ensnarled in civilization's usual ancient pattern of "progress and a bit but then collapse into backwardness again" as ever today, without both the positive and negative contributions of religion working on and shaping the population of Europe in ways never occurring [successfully] before. Our world is the product of both good and bad movements -- remove the historical influence of either and it's like a time-traveler "stepping on a butterfly" in the past scenario returning to a radically altered present day. Only this would be crushing something severely bigger than a blue whale in terms of effects.

Church scholars maintained literacy and the lingering remnants of academic disciplines after the Empire's demise. In the turbulent political and feudal warlord chaos which ensued, the church itself was a key integrating and regulating influence across differing cultures, governments, and languages.

Architectural prowess endured and engineering solutions accelerated from the construction of elaborate cathedrals. The continents progenitor learning institutions were implanted by the church, and from all that pejoratively labeled philosophical "silliness" of intellectual wrangling in scholasticism arose the the intellectual momentum that matured critical thinking and spawned the Enlightenment. Religious passion to elevate art to the level of the divine drove the creation of masterpieces.

The very adversarial nature of the Church in trying to uphold its prohibitions and doctrines against facts spurred rebellious thought, action, and strategies to challenge and overcome it. The selective pressure of the conflict evolved and propelled investigation and knowledge acquisition in a way it never had in previous eras and civilizations, where it had eventually fizzled out or aborted (China, Greece, Islamic golden age, etc). Many scientists (back when they were polymath philosophers) were theologians, including Newton. Who's to say some of that religious craziness going on in his head (and others) interacting with quantitative pursuits didn't rattle loose some insights that otherwise would have been rusted shut?

The fate of individuals in ancient Greco-Roman culture was determined by their birth status or social position, extending all the way to that being maintained in their version of an afterlife. The reference manuscripts and the raging discourses in Christianity gradually trounced that old view to pieces, including slaves and the poor acquiring exalted status over the rich in its afterlife. As it entangled itself with Protestant insurrection and the complexities of society, Christian "freewill" evolved from a cosmological doctrine to a "...a liberating message of freedom. It was a revolution in the rules of behavior ... the human being as a sexual being, free, frail and awesomely responsible for one's own self to God alone. It was a revolution in the nature of society's claims on the moral agent." The self-responsible agent of morality in turn burgeoned into philosophical declarations of liberty, the all-around free individual.

 

The pow wow came from an email to my friend (the husband). The internet won't know much unless it's a second round of requests for prayers.

The pow wow will probably be (should be) "quit lying and playing your mother against your father, go to your room"

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But it was the same empire made the turbulence, disrupted all the existing societies, subsumed or wiped out the local religions, destabilized the relationships, treaties and trade that previously existed, and imposed this new, punitive, pleasure-hating, self-abasing religion on everybody.
Kind of like how the USA is the only of hope of restoring peace and structure to the Middle East, by remaking it American and exporting its own brand of political schizophrenia.

 

I’ll come back to this later but my “true” was in response to his first point in that post.

 

I can see why you replied ''no no...'' You're right, perhaps, I didn't examine his question as I should have. You bring up excellent points, and I wonder if Goldtop would find them satisfactory to his line of questioning, earlier in the thread.

Recently, I read an article about how/why/when science and religion decided to divorce. At one point in history, some of the great Greek philosophers like Aristotle, believed that science, religion and philosophy were beautifully intertwined. Of course, they also believed that science helped humankind understand ''the mind of the gods.'' No one kicked up a fuss over this line of reasoning. It was pointed out in the article, that science and religion started to disconnect around the time when evolution and creationism started to compete for first place. Stem cell research and other scientific advancements started to become concepts that became debate fodder in politics. Politics gave rise to a lot of spirited conversations surrounding ethics and morality of science advancements. Many conservatives feel that scientists often ''play God,'' and moral issues arise when we talk about euthanasia, abortion, and Catholic affiliated hospitals being mandated to provide contraception.

I think that the rise of religious fundamentalism has been the main catalyst for the divide between science and religion, in a broader sense. Religious ''fundies'' tend to be those who are more prone to believing in pseudo and junk science, and passing it off as fact, either because they don't understand science, or because it allows them to reconcile their spiritual beliefs with those of science. Of course, there are mainstream scientists who also identify as religious, to varying degrees. And there are also atheists/agnostics who are intrigued by woo.

We could go on and on, but we didn't get here, overnight. I think that religious fundamentalists want to convert the world to their way of thinking, while scientists feel that without evidence, there's no worthwhile reason to ''convert.'' And so the struggle will always exist, and maybe the better question at this point of the thread is, could science replace religion? For me, no. It's never been a matter of choosing one over the other.

 

And if it wasn't? You end up in the hell of another's religion. Or you wasted your life. Or worse, made other people suffer. And what's the point of a God honoring someone for a lucky guess?

I don't know, is it virtuous to save lives from crippling disease? Or predict natural disasters and avoid them? Or recognize when something is poisonous?

 

I think that science came from philosophy and once the scientific method began to be employed then philosophy began to take a backseat (in things scientific).

Plato visualized an ideal world, Socrates just wanted man to think and ask questions, Aristotle was more about going with where the facts lead.

After the scientific method came about it no longer mattered what philosophers thought (in this area). Evidence lead the day.

Religion began to have a problem with science once science advanced to the point where it showed religious teachings to be wrong. The Universe didn't revolve around Earth. Physics and Evolution were at odds with Creationism.

 

For example:
The Tragedy Of The Commons can only be explained, described, etc, by science. It cannot be "solved".

It can be - has been - "solved" by religion. Even quite barbaric religions have "solved" it, one way or another.

Ecological tragedies in general - the disasters that follow destruction or misuse of natural resources by a human community - can only be described, warned against, explained, identified, etc, by science. Not solved, in general. To solve them one needs a religion or something akin to a religion.

 

Haha. There is a certain irony in now finding myself quote-mined by someone who wants to attack creationism, and seems determined to pretend that all Christianity is, or ought to be, creationist so that he can attack that in the same breath.

 

If god didn't create the universe what good is he?

 

"he" ?

 

Nowhere did I imply or state all Christianity is Creationism, please stop putting words in my mouth.

No, you weren't quote-mined, either. Try reading what I wrote as opposed to what you want to read.

 

I should have manually added the whole item you were responding were to, which touches upon my annoyance of this forum not automatically providing nested quotes or leaving the objects of replies out. In turn, the following reminds me that all I really did by trying to supplement that was encourage or contribute to the overall derailing of the specific scope or setting of the original topic. Premature absent-mindedness geriatrically creeping in, I guess. Yeah, like I wish it could slot as "premature".

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I think that the 'divorce' between science and religion was a slow and complex process in European thought. In order to understand it, it's necessary to look at the history of philosophy. A nutshell overview...

There have always been highly rational strands within Christian theology. It's never really been 'just trust the Bible' the way so many atheists want to portray it. If you study patristic theology in late antiquity, you see them using many of the ideas and much of the vocabulary of late antique Platonism (the dominant "pagan" philosophy of the time). The christological and trinitarian controversies are filled with it. Or on another more peculiar note, look at some of the things Augustine wrote.

In early medieval times, this philosophical theology declined along with the general decline in learning and literacy after the Roman empire collapsed but didn't dissappear entirely. We still see it in writers like Eriugena and many of the Byzantines. It was strongest in the east where the earliest Muslims inherited it, leading to their short-lived intellectual leadership during their golden years as they took the inherited Greek ideas in new directions.

Then in the high medieval period we see the rise of the medieval universities, and along with it some very sophisticated work in logic (that's still underappreciated today). There was an interest in physical problems as well, especially in England it seems, with productive work in areas like geometrical optics. We start seeing eyeglasses coming into use in this period. In Germany it was clockmakers, and lots of experience was gained in geared mechanisms.

And it was a period noted for the struggles for and against Aristotle, whose works had been recently rediscovered (from the Arabs and Byzantines). At first the church tried to outlaw Aristotle, which naturally turned his writings into an underground sensation in all of the hippest 12th century Paris cafes. All the intellectuals were reading Aristotle, even on pain of ex-communication. So Thomas Aquinas produced a definitive synthesis of Christianity and Aristotle, that later became the official philosophy of the Roman Catholic church.

Once Aristotle became the philosopher officially taught in all the universities, intellectuals started seeing him as a cold dead hand suppressing free thought. (We still see a bit of that kind of hostility to Aristotle in some writings today.) But this little history has arrived in the Renaissance, when recovering ancient classical texts became Europe's(or at least Italy's) fascination. Pretty much all of the surviving ancient Greek and Roman texts that we have today were recovered by this time. They included all kinds of things, most notably the more mystical Neoplatonists and the Skeptics, who set European intellectuals on their ear. Most of European thought from the Renaissance to now has been a giant reaction to the Skeptics.

At first, religious thinkers typically embraced the skeptics, arguing that if the skeptics were right that no knowledge can have secure foundations, then we should go with the ideas that have the strongest basis in tradition and everyday life, namely the deeply entrenched religious beliefs and the traditional teachings of the church.

Then along came the 16th century and the protestant reformation. The reformers turned the new skepticism on Mary and the saints, on miracles and on all of the familiar side of catholic popular religiosity. All in favor of a "reformed" Bible-only, "sola-scriptura" religiosity. In a way, the protestants were the anti-"woo" skeptics of their day, laughing at all the village Catholics who believed that praying to saints or to Mary could bring about miracles. Superstition! The medieval monasteries were torn down and all of the monks practicing their contemplative disciplines dispersed. Religious art was condemned and a new austere aesthetic appeared of bare churches and black and white.

Of course it only took a few years for European intellectuals to turn that same skepticism towards the protestants' sacred Bible, and in the 17th century we arrive at Deism, a generalized skepticism about any form of revealed religion. The only credible basis for religious belief as they saw it was Natural Theology, the ancient (they pre-date Christianity) first-cause and design arguments, and all of their cousins. That was the strand of thinking that was later to loosen the grip of Christianity on western thought and turned into full-frontal atheism in the 18th and 19th centuries as natural theology was abandoned, capped off by Darwin and the damage that many thought that he had done to the design argument.

But the protestant reformation wasn't the only effect of the new skepticism on European thought. Many thinkers started thinking that if all of the old authorities don't suffice to support the intellectual edifice, new foundations must be found. In many cases, that strand of thinking was essentially a search for some alternative to Aristotle (who was still taught in the universities). So we see things like Descartes' Meditations, rhetorically accepting the skeptics' arguments that pretty much anything can be doubted, and searching for something... anything... that seemed indubitable. Descartes found his 'cogito' (I think, therefore I am) and ultimately tried to use it to justify his faith in mathematics (he was a mathematician) through 'clear and distinct ideas' (an idea that Descartes had lifted from the ancient stoics whose writing had been recovered in the Renaissance). So modern philosophy was off and running.

Meanwhile, around the same time, people like Galileo, Kepler, Descartes and ultimately Newton were responding to the universal skepticism by searching for new and more secure methods and foundations in natural philosophy to replace Aristotle's physics. They began applying mathematics to a class of simple physical problems, motion down inclined planes, falling objects, pendulums, and (strangely enough) the motions of the planets in the sky. And sure enough, they found regularities that they could describe and model with the mathematics that they had available. (Or they could expand that mathematics in interesting ways, as Newton and Leibniz did with their new calculus.) That news created an intellectual sensation in the early 18th century when Newton was elevated into a demi-god, the "Einstein" of his day.

So in the Enlightenment, everyone wanted to figure out what wonderful new method had been discovered that enabled such impressive achievements in natural philosophy. How had skepticism been defeated? (If only seemingly...) By the time of the French revolution we see reformers insisting that if the new methods could only be applied to society, then all sorts of obscurantism could be swept away, truth revealed and a secular paradise constructed. We are only slowly moving away from that idea today, since (as always) it isn't really clear what will replace it. It's the faith that I still sense motivates some of the participants right here on Sciforums. It's what lies behind your original question in the OP.

 

I reread this just now, and can't thank you enough for articulating this as best can be done, on a forum like this. See? The question isn't silly. lol In light of what you posted here, would you say that as humankind grew in scientific and mathematical ''knowledge,'' there seemed to be this distancing from religion. I see that as being an obvious possibility, but spirituality is still growing strong, globally. In fact, in the US, a recent study came out that a majority of citizens, identify with labeling themselves as spiritual, but not ''religious.'' What do you make of that? In the era of incredible opportunity, and more information available to us than ever before, we are still interested in what lurks in the mysteries of the universe, and even within ourselves, that science is unable to answer.

Science will never be able to answer the existential questions of our time. It's not designed to do so, but this would point to that science isn't ''enough,'' in terms of our personal evaluation of the world around us.

 

Has any creationist posited a creator of any other pronoun?