Your religion

Squeek said:

I know I've certainly heard of it. Like most people, I've heard it explained too, but not to the point that I can say I really understand it. Not to the extent that I understand most other things, anyway.
That's not to say I don't believe it can be completely understood. Judging from your confidence, I imagine you probably undoubtedly have that kind of uderstanding and could explain how it in detail.
Just for the sake of argument, let's assume for a minute that you really don't and really can't. Then aren't you expressing faith in it? Couldn't that be considered a kind of worship?

Click to expand...

The point with DNA is that it is a fruit of the theory of evolution. Without the theory you cannot use DNA in the way we do today. Judge a tree on it's fruit.

JemyM said:

The point with DNA is that it is a fruit of the theory of evolution. Without the theory you cannot use DNA in the way we do today. Judge a tree on it's fruit.

Click to expand...

That's probably a good idea. Is that how science works?

Squeek said:

That's probably a good idea. Is that how science works?

Click to expand...

No. Science at it's core is about accumulating knowledge through the scientific method. The scientific method is a very strict set of rules. Science in turn have created many scientific theories that is used to explain observations seen in nature such as the theory of evolution. Much of modern medicine simply makes no sense without knowing this theory. It's thanks to evolution alone that we can fight many diseases, tracking criminals and finding out who's the father of a baby.

Anyway, the reason I "believe" in science is because I trust that the scientific method is the best way to find information that can actually be used for something good. All I need to watch is it's fruit and I see that it is good.
That does not mean I believe every paper labeled "scientific results" there is in this world. I am willing to let such papers pass without more personal analysis since I assume that even when one scientist do wrong (and they do) others will make sure to correct him/her.

JemyM said:

No. Science at it's core is about accumulating knowledge through the scientific method.

Click to expand...

Well, then why aren't you applying the scientific method in this instance? Is there an advantage to not being scientific about it in this particular case?

Squeek said:

Well, then why aren't you applying the scientific method in this instance? Is there an advantage to not being scientific about it in this particular case?

Click to expand...

Yes, not being scientific allows you to quickly accumulate power and wealth.

JemyM said:

Yes, not being scientific allows you to quickly accumulate power and wealth.

Click to expand...

OK. Now I understand.

Science is an evolving process of explanation, and as such it beats religion (to me) as a system of arriving at the truth, since it does, as JemyM says tend to correct itself over time as more information is processed. That doesn't mean it can't present a lot of conflicting and contradictory results at times, but it does have a sound basis in logic and fact in requiring proof that stands up to scrutiny from a variety of perspectives.

Religion is more a field of dreams, hopes, and emotionalizations from the spiritual side of the psyche, and as such it's pretty much the antithesis of logic and fact. (Again, imo) It exists in spite of logic and fact, and that is one of its strengths, perhaps. I think humans need both logic and spirituality, science and faith-- it's just that the questions they ask and answer should be different.

Squeek said:

OK. Now I understand.

Click to expand...

Sorry, had a few beers. I have to get back when I reconquered my brain.

magerette said:

Religion is more a field of dreams, hopes, and emotionalizations from the spiritual side of the psyche, and as such it's pretty much the antithesis of logic and fact. (Again, imo) It exists in spite of logic and fact, and that is one of its strengths, perhaps. I think humans need both logic and spirituality, science and faith-- it's just that the questions they ask and answer should be different.

Click to expand...

Science is very good at discovering and explaining what things are. However, it can't do much to answer questions about what they mean. For that, we need... other things.

Prime Junta said:

Science is very good at discovering and explaining what things are. However, it can't do much to answer questions about what they mean. For that, we need... other things.

Click to expand...

Imagination and free speech?

Squeek said:

Well, then why aren't you applying the scientific method in this instance? Is there an advantage to not being scientific about it in this particular case?

Click to expand...

What do you mean with not applying the scientific method in this instance?

I'm referring to your point about judging a tree by its fruit and agreeing that it's not how science works. Come to think of it, isn't that how religion works?

Do you remember this part from the movie, Conan the Barbarian?

Conan: What gods do you pray to?
Subotai: I pray to the four winds... and you?
Conan: To Crom... but I seldom pray to him, he doesn't listen.
Subotai: [chuckles] What good is he then? Ah, it's just as I've always said.
Conan: He is strong! If I die, I have to go before him, and he will ask me, "What is the riddle of steel?" If I don't know it, he will cast me out of Valhalla and laugh at me. That's Crom, strong on his mountain!
Subotai: Ah, my god is greater.
Conan: [chuckles] Crom laughs at your four winds. He laughs from his mountain.
Subotai: My god is stronger. He is the everlasting sky! Your god lives underneath him.

Click to expand...

To some, I think, science must seem like the most powerful god of all.

Squeek said:

That's probably a good idea. Is that how science works?

Click to expand...

Science is more or less about fitting as simple a model as possible to our observations. I think JemyM:s reference was to the fact that in the case of DNA and biology there is so much similarity between organisms (say between humans and yeast) that we can start the process of developing a new human drug by looking at how yeast or E-coli bacteria react, and later bother with testing the drug on mice, rats, or even fish. my standard good natured comment to creationists is that if intelligent design happened then the designer used copy and paste

Shared ancestry is among the more straightforward explanations we can think of and we can build models that take it into account and fit our observations. Of course that doesnt necessarily mean that this is the correct model, but it is what we work with until we find something that fits better or is simpler.

It is OTOH rather useless for answering theological/philosophical questions, or as PJ call it "what they mean", so I dont really see much of a conceptual conflict between religion and science per se. The conflict surface is rather over specific claims of actual events having occurred according to certain holy texts. That we can examine and see if it matches observable data.

What if there is no Spoon, er... I mean observable data!!

Corwin said:

What if there is no Spoon, er... I mean observable data!!

Click to expand...

Two cases here.

One is that we dont have anything to build a first model on. Then we simply tick the "dont know, save for investigation once a more sensitive spoonometer is available"-box.

The other case is where we had built a model on existing observations and didnt find anything where it predicted us to do so. This testing of predictive power is pretty much a cornerstone of how we evaluate scientific theories. You submit an article about the model you built from your own measurements with enough detail for others to reproduce the experiment, and your peers first reproduce the results on your measurements and later try to apply it to other data sets. Of course it is quite common to find that something is iffy and that is perfectly normal. Scientific theories are revised all the time.

The initial model might be wrong, incomplete (like Newtonian physics that work adequately in our scale but not on a subatomic level) or the spoon might be missing due to some external influence. In practice it often boils down to statistical evaluation (if we find the spoon 95% of the time then probably something outside our control messed with it the remaining times), but there are naturally different practical obstacles in different disciplines. Often it might not be feasible to repeat a process from scratch (evolutionary biology in mammals would for instance take a tad too long to "repeat" given the timescale involved). Then we usually validate our models on "historical" data that hasnt been "poisoned" by the building of the model. If one scientist has found a special cancer gene among US cancer patients we might for instance look for the same gene in Icelandic or Japanese patients.

Corwin said:

What if there is no Spoon, er... I mean observable data!!

Click to expand...

If there's no observable data *at all,* then the scientific method will come up with nothing -- "no comment."

OTOH if there is no *directly* observable data, it may still be possible to infer a lot of things indirectly. A lot of science works this way -- say, a physicist is trying to work out what, exactly, happens in the center of the Sun. She can't observe it directly; however, she can observe the particles and radiation coming from the sun and the composition of the surface of the Sun. She can then take accumulated knowledge about fluid dynamics to make a hypothesis about the composition of the center of the Sun. Then she can take accumulated knowledge about nuclear physics to create a hypothesis about the interactions of elements in her model of the center of the Sun. Because we know what kinds of radiation and particles get emitted from the specific interactions in her hypothesis (we can do those experiments in the lab), her hypothesis will make predictions about what particles and radiation the Sun should be emitting. Then we can compare these predictions against what we observe the Sun to radiate.

If her hypothesis matches the observed radiation well, then we have good reasons to assume that it, in fact, describes the actual conditions in the center of the sun. Until, of course, someone else comes up with another model that matches observation even better.

So, that way, science can claim to know what's going on in the center of the Sun, even though nobody has ever observed it directly. In fact, direct observation by itself can be enormously misleading -- humans are not particularly good observers; we're quite easy to fool into seeing something that isn't there. Just ask David Copperfield, or any performing magician for that matter.

You guys should sit down, drink some wine and talk it out.

There was a very nice series on a German TV channel some time ago. Harald Lesch, a theoretical astrophysicist and nature philosopher, and his friend Thomas Schwartz, a theologian, priest and honorary professor of applied ethics, would do just that: stroll through calm settings like museums or nature and talk about theological questions from both viewpoints. Only in German, unfortunately, but it was very interesting.

Something like Richard Dawkins' chat with bishop Harries?

One of the best debates I have seen for some time is Sam Harris and Rabbi David Wolpe. It's kind, friendly and very intellectual. It's easy to respect both persons. Some of the arguments will make you laugh out loud.

Another of my heroes, Bill Moyers, created a series called "On Faith and Reason" that stands as one of the best things I've seen on TV. He interviewed a variety of writers from the PEN World Voices Festival with a wide range of opinion about faith and reason. The conversations were gentle, thought provoking and never devolved into dogma. I recommend this program highly. You can find the individual interviews on YouTube as well.