CIVIL RELIGIOUS DISCUSSION: The "Science -vs- Religion" debate...

[Roadie]

Roadie is dark matter.


There...it's settled.

Oh believe me, I can be seen lol

 

[mbills2223]

Oh believe me, I can be seen lol

That's exactly what dark matter would say.

 

[Roadie]

 

[BugI02]

OK, I agree to your point. However, to date, no one has brought forward any proof that God exists to be scientifically studied. His existence is supported by faith alone.

And I believe it always will be so. It wouldn't require the 'leap of faith' if you could wait for proof.

 

[jamil]

I'm just going to leave this here

[video=youtube;AekFGksvuDU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AekFGksvuDU[/video]

Cat fight!

 

[EvilKidsMeal]

I would say that it is going somewhere. Up to this point, for the most part, our personal beliefs have been hidden while we have become known to each other in most other regards. My hope and belief is that having a great deal of disclosure prior to revelation of each other's beliefs will help to demonstrate the validity of the sentiment best expressed by Jefferson who said (as best I remember the quote) that whether another man believes in one god, many gods, or no god neither picks my pockets nor breaks my limbs.

I certainly hope that this open discussion of religion leads not only to treatment of current events which affect us in full honesty, but also to a better understanding of each other such as to overcome the mistrust of people who are different but not true threats which is inherent to human nature.

As you might discern, I would be happy to see you come to faith. I am not going to badger you, belittle you, or think less of you because you do not. I see this as the foundation for the strength we need in our society which has suffered greatly from the politics of division personally, locally, regionally, and nationally. From what you have said, I feel comfortable in the understanding that our positions on the matter are compatible.

See this is nice. No sarcasm intended.

I do agree with you on this way of looking at the discussion. It is nice to be open with each other in polite discussion that provides opinions from both sides.

I hardly ever tell anyone I'm an atheist, mostly because of the sames reasons religious discussion here were not allowed, but also because I generally prefer not to let discussion get into the subject of religion. I am not a "practicing" atheist, if you will. I generally prefer not to really think about the subject entirely, because its not something I deem important in my life.

I certainly respect everyones opinions (mostly why I avoid religious discussion all together) and i certainly appreciate you saying you respect my beliefs/disbelief, by not badgering, belittling me, and I would certainly never do that to anyone else.

I can absolutley respect that, and i do feel like our beliefs are based in the same thought process.

 

[squirrelhntr]

" If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him. " James 1:5 KJV

 

[seedubs1]

It's just oust awesome to watch people force politeness when you can tell they both want to choke each other.

Also, that lady sounds extremely uneducated with her blatant denial of evidence.

Cat fight!

 

[EvilKidsMeal]

It's just oust awesome to watch people force politeness when you can tell they both want to choke each other.

Also, that lady sounds extremely uneducated with her blatant denial of evidence.

EDIT: reading this again it appears you're taking about the video haha....either way

 

[CathyInBlue]

What science can not do for man is help him to come to a deeper understanding of the spiritual realm - that is the real of religion and theology.

Indeed not, for science is only useful in the realms of the physical and material. Science only works where there can be experiment, objective observation, and ultimately repetition of those experiments where the same objective observations can be made wholly independent of those prior. The spiritual, the divine, the religious, all reject these premises, and so are orthogonal to science. The very words "supernatural" and "paranormal" are evidence for this divorce.

True science will not contradict the spiritual,

This sounds dangerously close to the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. We see time and time again where the spiritual, the divine, the religious authority has laid down a "true fact" about the universe, which scientific inquiry has come along and performed experiments, collected evidence, and drawn conclusions which diametricly oppose those religious facts. So, it comes down, I suppose, to the the question of what you would call a "true" science as opposed to a "false" science, which, I'm sure, you would admit there are many. So many, in fact that a word had to be coined, pseudoscience, which literally means false science, to give a single verbal handle on them all. Astral projection, phrenology, aural photography, basicly the whole supernatural and paranormal playbook.

I would like to interject here an epiphany I had just now from watching the Dawkins/Wright video above, and like all epiphanies, it was such a tiny, tiny thing that I realized that it wonders me why I didn't realize it long before now, that I think if we could get religionists of all stripes to admit to would clear up the whole science <predicate> religion debate once and for all and allow everyone to get on with their lives.

Wendy Wright mentioned "moral laws". By this, I'm sure, she meant the revealed law of the Bible for how man is meant to live, at least those of mankind who subscribe to the Bible as the true revealed word of god. I mentioned that there have been numerous religious "facts" that have been shown by scientific inquiry into natural law to be false. Might it simply be that proponents of Creationism and Intelligent Design (one and the same) that they fear that if enough of their religious facts and laws are shown to be scientificly untenable that it will be used as evidence to cast the entire Biblical baby out with the geocentric bathwater?

I think Richard was quite fair with her in saying that the society that Wendy wants, where the individual is respected, even if they have no meaningful intelligence to speak of, and the needs of all are met, is the society that he wants to build and nurture as well. Why then are Wright and her like so adamant that evolution, functioning on a purely scientific basis with no input from religion whatsoever, cannot possibly be accepted by society, especially because they cannot find it personally acceptable, as natural law? Is it because if evolution is accepted natural law, then their particular creation myth, not to mention the hundreds of other creation myths, must then be rejected as representing natural law? And if Wendy Wright's creation myth cannot be accepted natural law, then to Wendy Wright, that means that the whole of the Bible cannot be accepted moral law.

I believe that this is the core fear of those opposed to the teaching of evolution as science or who want religion taught in the science classroom under the exceedingly thinly veiled mask of Intelligent Design, for which they have been routinely smacked down in court.

This fear is completely unfounded and unnecessary. I think it's trivially demonstrated by the throngs of devout Christians who not only believe in science of evolution, but are themselves scientists, doing good science in labs across the world on a daily basis, science which is predicated on the truth of Darwinian evolution. I think it's trivially demonstrated by the throngs of devout Christians who believe in the science of evolution, but are able to neatly compartmentalize the moral laws of their faith, as received from their holy book, the Bible, from their rational acceptance of natural laws of the universe as evinced by millennia of scientific inquiry and research without a hint of cognitive dissonance.

To believe that scientific discovery of true natural laws undermining errant religious dicta about the natural universe undermines religious dicta about moral laws is logicly equivalent to believing that a legal assault on the laws criminalizing marijuana imperil the laws governing highway safety. The same core governmental authority may be used to craft both, but the dissolution of one set of laws is orthogonal to the continued enforcement of the other. They are unrelated.

I think this conflation of the contraction of belief in religious laws that conflict with scientific discovery with a rejection of religious moral authority is why Creationists and evolution-deniers in general attempt to clamp the label of Religion around the neck of the study of evolution. It's an attempt to draw a false equivalency. "My religion may be faulty where it describes the natural world, but look here, evolution is just a different form of religion, so it can't have any special imprimatur of belief either!" Except there is a clear delineation between science and religion. Science uses the Scientific Method. Religion does not. Evolution uses the Scientific Method, hence it is science, not religion.

 

[ModernGunner]

And scientific theory is just that: Theory.

If it cannot be proven empirically, it's theory... opinion. And MOST of science is, indeed, theory.

That puts ALL non-empirical science in the same corner as religion: Theory, and one's belief in that theory. Which is called...

Faith.

 

[CathyInBlue]

Excellent point. I have a much easier time with someone who tells me that he doubts the existence, does not believe God to exist than someone who tries to tell me that there is no such thing as if it were an established fact.

I can make two statements:

God does not exist.

This sheet of paper weighs 5 g.

Both are making statements about the universe. The second one of scientific and factual. It can be measured, tested, and its veracity verified. The first one is a statement of my religious faith. It is religion. Be definition, it succumbs to no measurement or experimentation and is wholly unverifiable. I am always careful to delineate religious statements from scientific ones. Not everyone else is.

 

[CathyInBlue]

And scientific theory is just that: Theory.

If it cannot be proven empirically, it's theory... opinion. And MOST of science is, indeed, theory.

That puts ALL non-empirical science in the same corner as religion: Theory, and one's belief in that theory. Which is called...

Faith.

I think you're woefully misapprehended the nature of a scientific theory. All theories are true until they are proven false. To say that something is a theory is to admit that it is true, for if it is ever proven false, it ceases to be a theory and becomes, unscientific intellectual flotsam. Cold Fusion was a theory. It was tested and found lacking. No one calls Cold Fusion a theory any more, except those still toiling away in vain attempts to prove the unprovable. String Theory is still called a theory, but it's only its last legs as far as I can tell. It's made some predictions which have been tested and found lacking, but the whole of the theory is so intricate and convoluted in its machinations, there may be parts of it that will never be testable with the engineering and technology of the 21st century.

Opinions are statements that can never be tested or proved. My favourite color is blue. I like blueberry waffles. I can't prove that I like blueberry waffles. You can't disprove that my favourite color is blue.

To conflate theory with opinion is to do violence to both.

 

[warthog]

May I ask you a question Cathy? *which is asking you a question anyway) Are you a "scientist" as in employed or educated in the sciences or have you simply educated yourself because you hate God? Whoops! You don't hate God. You can't hate what isn't there in your opinion, you just don't believe he is there.....

 

[warthog]

Opinions are statements that can never be tested or proved. My favourite color is blue. I like blueberry waffles. I can't prove that I like blueberry waffles. You can't disprove that my favourite color is blue.

To conflate theory with opinion is to do violence to both.

Well, an opinion is a theory by definition. You postulate an opinion/theory in an attempt to explain a problem. No need to make a big deal about this if it is true. If that is what we are going to do then we need a new thread so this one doesn't wind up locked for getting confusing as well.

OK, I have yet to review this thread all the way due to my seeing a lot of the usual nonsense that talks more about the thread's topic than the actual topic of the thread itself. I wish the old thread had not been closed when it was since I had just posted a very salient point and video that proved my point but maybe things will come around for me to do so again.

 

[DoggyDaddy]

Something that has always occurred to me in the discussion of God and science...

Using science, we can, through gas chromatography, completely burn say, an earthworm, and determine its exact chemical makeup. What we cannot do, is to take those chemicals, and put them together in the exact same proportions, and end up with an earthworm. All we end up with is a bunch of chemical "glop". What is the "essence" that we cannot reproduce, that makes a bunch of chemicals an earthworm? From whence comes that which is missing? That "spark of life" so to speak? If science is truly "all there is", why can't we make a living, functioning earthworm?

 

[CathyInBlue]

I am a college-educated physicist up through and including the masters degree level.

No. I did not postulate "My favourite color is blue." in order to solve a problem, and an opinion is not a theory by definition. I would love to know what dictionary you are getting those definitions from and say otherwise.

I believe what you may now be conflating are opinion and hypothesis, from the Greek hypo- meaning underneath. A hypothesis is something less than full theory, because it has yet to be experimented upon and tested and proven true. The formation of an hypothesis is the first step in the application of the Scientific Method. From there, you go on to desire your experiment to test the hypothesis, which is a statement of fact that can be proven true or false. That experimental procedure has to include objective observations that can be recorded. Once the data has been collected and analyzed, it will either confirm or not confirm the expected findings as predicted by the hypothesis, and from these results, conclusion is drawn that the hypothesis is either reinforced, or it is not reinforced. Either way, the expected next course of action within the Scientific Method is to have someone else somewhere else repeat the experiment on different apparatus to offer a scientific "second opinion". If both experiments fail to bear out the hypothesis and its predictions, it's looking grim for the possibility of the hypothesis making it to theory status. If both bear out that the predictions the hypothesis makes are true, then it's looking very good for the hypothesis making it to theory status.

If the hypothesis is tested repeatedly and survives all attempts to refute it, even multiple different experiments, then it becomes a theory. If the theory then is tested repeatedly and survives all attempts to refute it, the theory becomes a law. This is why we speak of the Law of Gravity, not the Theory of Gravity, which is to say, under many different starting conditions and variable values, the equation F = G m[SUB]1[/SUB] m[SUB]2[/SUB] / r[SUP]2[/SUP]
had correctly predicted the force of two masses spaced r distance apart due to gravity.

 

[findingZzero]

I made an earth worm with a 3-D printer, but it just sits there....

Scientific questions are useless in comprehending "GOD." The left side of the brain wants 'proof.' The right side feels it. Marvelous thing is the brain.

Hypothesis: The (new) POPE is a democrat/socialist. He's the POPE fer Christ sakes.. Proof? Yes. Therefore it's anti Christian to not be a Democrat/socialist. Will take this to the lab. Next?

 

[ViperJock]

God cannot be proved. Some use this as an excuse to claim, therefore God does not exist. Yet so many things exist that cannot be proved beyond doubt. And perhaps God prefers it that way. The Christian religion places a great deal of importance on "faith." Faith being the a belief in that which is true but lacks evidence.

Some suffering from an over abundance in confidence forget 2 things. 1. Every few years a ton of stuff that we have "proved." is found to be only partially true, untrue, or faked by the "research" team. and 2. God cannot be proved but He cannot be disproved either.

What really interests me is why Atheists get so upset about seeing Christian things and hearing Christian prayers. When hear someone talking about something that I consider to be a fairy tale, I roll my eyes and move on. I don't claim offense, I don't try to have their speech banned, I don't even care if they sing about it in public schools. What I believe is going on here is complex --but in many cases, I think these people (who claim to be offended by everything Christian) really do believe that there is a God (subconsciously, perhaps) and they know that they are acting against His will or they desire to act against His will, and thus they use these behaviours as a defense mechanism. Seriously, if you really didn't believe, how can it be that offensive to you? Hmmmm. Paging Dr. Freud....

My opinion, as a highly educated scientist and a Christian, is that God and religion are not necessarily at odds and those who think they are (from either camp,) are no where near as smart as they think they are.

 

[beehunter]

This thread is making me want to go to the classifieds and bump a whole bunch of threads, LOL.....