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

[ArcadiaGP]

Man, I wish there was an agenda for this thread. It would keep people focused.

The chair invites a Motion to close discussion on topic #4.

(Except we don't HAVE any agenda, so we don't know what topic #4 is!)

I said I'd do it. Now I'm gonna do it.

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

 

[steveh_131]

Man, I wish there was an agenda for this thread. It would keep people focused.

you can't tell me what to do

 

[T.Lex]

you can't tell me what to do

Exactly! If there were an agenda, we'd ALL know what to do!

 

[CathyInBlue]

Indeed. So, from a cognitive perspective, do you agree that there's little (perhaps not any) difference between belief in religion and belief in science? Cognitively, both are trust in something that is not fully understood.

Or, to perhaps put it another way, do you believe that at any point in the future, human beings will scientifically know everything? Truly, have an explanation for every natural occurrence? I'll even concede that randomness/entropy/chaos counts as scientific knowledge.

Wholeheartedly. I'm quite confident that a religious believer gets the same sense of satisfaction that the universe makes sense from their reading of scripture as I get from my reading of a science textbook. The difference is in how those understandings of the universe are supported and in what they themselves support. Scientific knowledge is supported first and foremost by experimentation, secondarily by cogitation, and tertiarily by revelation. Scientific knowledge thereby supports prediction of future events with a high degree of precision and confidence. Religious knowledge is supported first and foremost by revelation, secondarily by a constricted form of cogitation, and utterly rejects experimentation into the nature of that religious knowledge. No looking into the Holy of Holies, or god will turn you to stone and the cotton cord tied to your dead body will turn red. Because you can't make reliable predictions based on religious knowledge, the future and the results of your actions are whatever the religious authorities decree them to be.

 

[jamil]

My agenda is to expose the needless depths to which people give-a-**** about what other people believe, and suggest that people curtail their giving-a-****, and worry about their own beliefs. Less butthurt all the way around, though, admittedly, at the expense of not getting to cause others butthurt.

Let the school board decide what is taught and how, and if you don't like it, vote the *****es out, or get yourself elected to the school board, or find a school that teaches what you want your kids to learn, or home school. <gasp/> But then our kids aren't learning all the same thing!!! OMFG!

So?

 

[T.Lex]

Wholeheartedly. I'm quite confident that a religious believer gets the same sense of satisfaction that the universe makes sense from their reading of scripture as I get from my reading of a science textbook.

w00t! Common ground!

More later.

 

[DoggyDaddy]

I said I'd do it. Now I'm gonna do it.

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

Interesting. The Alchemist guy (I guess?) says, "Science is the answer to everything." Yet he acknowledges that it hasn't found all the answers yet, but will eventually. He believes it's only a matter of time until technology develops to alow it to be so. He has no proof that that will be the case, yet he believes it. Hmmm... believing in something without proof... golly, that sounds an awful lot like faith, doesn't it?

 

[CathyInBlue]

In the first rendition of Fullmetal Alchemist, the series ends with Ed and Al transported to our universe where their alchemy doesn't work, but science still does.

 

[CathyInBlue]

w00t! Common ground!

More later.

I am a proponent of rationality, not an opponent of emotion.

 

[DoggyDaddy]

My agenda is to expose the needless depths to which people give-a-**** about what other people believe, and suggest that people curtail their giving-a-****, and worry about their own beliefs. Less butthurt all the way around, though, admittedly, at the expense of not getting to cause others butthurt.

Let the school board decide what is taught and how, and if you don't like it, vote the *****es out, or get yourself elected to the school board, or find a school that teaches what you want your kids to learn, or home school. <gasp/> But then our kids aren't learning all the same thing!!! OMFG!

So?

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to jamil again.

 

[DoggyDaddy]

In the first rendition of Fullmetal Alchemist, the series ends with Ed and Al transported to our universe where their alchemy doesn't work, but science still does.

You mean like how Newtonian physics "doesn't work" when it tries to predict the orbit of Mercury? So science and alchemy have that in common... they don't "work" in all circumstances?

 

[jamil]

Interesting. The Alchemist guy (I guess?) says, "Science is the answer to everything." Yet he acknowledges that it hasn't found all the answers yet, but will eventually. He believes it's only a matter of time until technology develops to alow it to be so. He has no proof that that will be the case, yet he believes it. Hmmm... believing in something without proof... golly, that sounds an awful lot like faith, doesn't it?

I don't see it as faith, I see more like an inevitability to learn more than we would have otherwise, to through observation and inquiry. We didn't learn the knowledge required to put men on the moon through scripture or praying our way there. Learned scientists and engineers put their slide rules to work and figured it out. That said, science isn't the answer to everything. It's the most efficient way we've designed so far to learn more about what we didn't know before.

 

[DoggyDaddy]

I don't see it as faith, I see more like an inevitability to learn more than we would have otherwise, to through observation and inquiry. We didn't learn the knowledge required to put men on the moon through scripture or praying our way there. Learned scientists and engineers put their slide rules to work and figured it out. That said, science isn't the answer to everything. It's the most efficient way we've designed so far to learn more about what we didn't know before.

Fair enough. And I realize it is only a cartoon, but I still believe that human knowledge is asymptotic. We know more every day, perhaps even exponentially so, yet I don't believe we will ever have the answers to everything.

ETA... things like going to the moon are certainly in science's baliwick.

 

[ATM]

If everything we learn unlocks more that we didn't realize we didn't know, how will we ever make progress toward knowing everything, or even more of the total that can be known rather than less?

 

[DoggyDaddy]

If everything we learn unlocks more that we didn't realize we didn't know, how will we ever make progress toward knowing everything, or even more of the total that can be known rather than less?

Good point. And science (especially the science of medicine and nutrition) is often a 2 steps up, 1 step back process. Just look at nutritional "truth" as it has evolved. What's good today will be bad tomorrow, and then good again the next day. Butter is bad, switch to margarine. Margarine has trans fats, which is bad. Switch back to butter.

And medicine... Do you know that some doctors are even reverting to the use of leeches (for bruising) and maggots (for wound cleaning)? Nothing is static, that is apparent.

 

[eldirector]

If everything we learn unlocks more that we didn't realize we didn't know, how will we ever make progress toward knowing everything, or even more of the total that can be known rather than less?

The more I know, the more I realize I don't know.

Personally, that is a good thing.

 

[jamil]

Fair enough. And I realize it is only a cartoon, but I still believe that human knowledge is asymptotic. We know more every day, perhaps even exponentially so, yet I don't believe we will ever have the answers to everything.

ETA... things like going to the moon are certainly in science's baliwick.

I don't think there are all that many people who seriously think science will eventually show us everything there is to know everywhere. Those that do are truly placing their faith in the science god.

BTW, I don't think human knowledge is asymptotic because I don't believe what we know can be compared to everything. 1) can we ever test every thing in the set of everything? 2) given an unknown domain, can we ever know what we don't know? [ETA: forgot to mention the paradoxical nature of that] 3) I'm pretty sure the variations of everything are probably infinite.

So, because I think the denominator is infinite, I think the ratio of [what we know]:[everything] is NaN. I also think that it's often better to know and accept your limitations.

 

[ArcadiaGP]

Watching a small discussion sparked from my FMA contribution.

 

[D-Ric902]

If everything we learn unlocks more that we didn't realize we didn't know, how will we ever make progress toward knowing everything, or even more of the total that can be known rather than less?

An ever expanding pie.
the bigger the bite we take the more we realize how small our mouth is

 

[jamil]

An ever expanding pie.
the bigger the bite we take the more we realize how small our mouth is

I don't know about you, but the bigger the bite I take, the more pie I want. That tends to expand my ever expanding waistline.