"Does the Empirical Nature of Science Contradict the Revalatory Nature of Faith?"

[Mookie_Magnus]

Personally, I take a somewhat Deistic view on things..meaning that, I think that God created the universe..and then just sat back and watched.. like a kid with an aquarium, only interfering whenever he put in a new fish or changed the filter.

SO WHAT? What's the damn point? Science and religion don't mix well because of people's inability to compromise. Evolution is mostly theoretical anyhow.
Yes the question, "if we evolved from apes, why are there still apes?" is beyond ridiculous, but evolution (not natural selection) still leaves a bit of a gap. I won't pretend to know the full information behind the "missing link", but there is a point where we stop being able to trace ourselves isn't there? If you can prove we evolved from apes then there are a plethora of questions that science still can't answer.

To the thing about the missing link, We already found that, her name was Lucy..anyone recognize that name? She was a female Australopinthecus afarensis found in Africa, which scientists believe was the first Homonid genus.

And to those people who do not believe in evolution, I offer this nugget of wisdom.
Evolution does not just mean people evolving from apes..as that never happened, we evolved from a common ancestor that we share with apes..
Evolution is just animals changing to their environment.
If you set up two VERY LARGE fish tanks starting with the same type of fish (say in this case Mollies as they are livebearers and have many offspring) with mostly similar genetic qualities and put one group in an environment in which the larger specimens are eaten and die and the smaller ones live, and the other group you do the same thing except the smaller ones are eaten.. within about ten or twenty generations you will notice that the fish from Tank A are smaller, and reach maturity faster than the larger, slower-maturing fish from Tank B.

Same exact fish populations, producing quite different end results. Though this is a hypothetical situation, and almost everything works on paper.(except for dividing by zero)

 

[Labyrinth]

Why not? Like I said, what about someone who believes there is benevolent paternal figure, but doesn't think it would make a difference when it comes to morality if there wasn't? What if that person also believed in a morality "based around making it easier for people to live together"

If your morals aren't held to be absolute truths, then they're not morals: they're preferences.

If they believe that a god exist, that is a different moral to me. If you can introduce me to someone with my morals who does believe in a god, I will name you the lord-high-magician of Bullshitia. However, if you manage to, they'd have to be the type who entirely disregard any kind of political, social, religious or physical traits to lay down a base standard of living for everyone. Oh, and they can't believe in a god. That's another part of my morals in case I didn't make it clear.

In response to your point about morals being 'absolute truths' that is bullshit pure and simple. They are opinions. For example one of my morals is that everyone ought to be equal. Hitler's morals were vastly different to that, but they were still morals.

 

[101194]

Creationisim=FTL
Evolution=FTL
FSM?=FTEW!!!!!!!!!

http://www.venganza.org/


Untill you have been touched by his Noodly Apedage you are an infedel good day.

Edit: This is completly Scarcastic it just shows how much people shove shit down your thoat and force you to swallow.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

If we take Faith to be the belief in the existence of something we cannot prove, then I see no reason to have it. Because of my scientific nature, I cannot reconcile such a thing with my need for evidence and reasonable support.

Here's the sticking point. Reason.

Agnostics, like myself, would point out that the reason Religion exists is that it's a boundary for the worst excesses of a rapidly growing society, and most religions put rules oh humanity to keep it from descending into Anarchy.

Theists would argue that Reason itself is separate from Faith, and as such, cannot enforce it's rules onto the other.

Atheists/Scientists just have their own faith in Science. Why should a ball dropped towards Earth accelerate at about 9.8 m/s? Because it's been proven? How is that different to the word of .

 

[lazerwolf]

I'm sure we can all agree that Scientology is a crock of shit. they believe in an alien named "zeul" or something. Wasn't he the bad guy in ghostbusters 1?

Ghostbusters 2 and Scientology has nothing to do with actual Science (i.e. theory of evolution etc.) Leave your ignorance out of this thread.

On the subject of Morality first. Morality is a term created by man and therefore should not even be included in this discussion. Do you think a newborn tiger shark thinks about the moral repercussions of devouring his unborn siblings in the womb? No its the survival of the fittest instinct kicking in. Morality was just a term created to define why you couldn't bludgeon your neighbor and steal his stuff and to help shape a functioning society with laws and rules to govern the people to prevent occurrence A from happening

I'm a scientist myself and I for one believe in a higher power of some sorts whether its Mother Nature, God, Vishnu, Allah or whatever you want to call him or her or it. The biggest thing about my belief and why I believe said beliefs is a matter of balance. How intricate and how perfect the human body is for example suggests, to me at least, that there has to be something greater in a way. Sure we've been on a long evolutionary trail with many failed adaptations and mutations being weeded out of the population over many a millennia but there just seems such a perfect balance that goes unexplained.

Now let me clarify, I do not by into any of this organized religion bullshit. A lot of the teachings in the Good Book (whichever it is you prefer) are good life lessons and are still relative in meaning today. The practice is where all of these teachings lose their meanings and become bastardized.

 

[Labyrinth]

Why?

Because I don't.

I'm talking about morals themselves, not any particular set of beliefs that an individual may have about what morals actually are.

Maybe I was unclear, so, let me put it more clearly, I hope: you don't consider Hitler's morals to be of equal value as your own, do you? That's what I mean by morals being objective: we don't think ours are better just because they are ours. We think of them as better because we consider them to be in closer correspondence to the truth than any other.

And as Necros said above, morals are subjective because they are a personal thing. My morals are my own. Hence they are subjective. It's not a matter of saying "My morals are true" it's a matter of saying "My morals are not yours." To say it is true is to remove any possibility of grey between moral and immoral, and that just does not work.

 

[Izakflashman]

Many others commented, and I'd suggest you go and read both the comments made and the original article. They are quite thought provoking.

It was rather, I find Howards thoughts to be a very typical school of thought though, "I don't care, each to his own." world view that lots have these days, in some cases good, in others they just don't care enough. But thats the way the world works, no one can agree if or even where the grey area is.

If we take Faith to be the belief in the existence of something we cannot prove, then I see no reason to have it. Because of my scientific nature, I cannot reconcile such a thing with my need for evidence and reasonable support. In this a primary difference between Science and Religion is found.

We must of course take it in faith that evolution is the truth and nothing but the truth.

Science, when it theorises that it has something which may exist but there is no proof for yet, goes out and conducts experiments. The Hadron Collider is a prime example of this, built to find out if there is a theorised Higgs boson. I have yet to see the same level of scrutiny being put amongst religious circles to whether their God/s exist. They have Faith, ergo they do not need to examine it apparently.

Untrue, All the churches are getting together to build a gun which shoots bullets outside of time and space. The bullet is made from designs found in the pyramids, which shows how to bend light on such an angle that it slips in a fold in reality, transporting the bullet into Gods undimension. Although our main problem at the moment is trying to figure out which direction to point it in.
Lol, sorry, being a noob there. Many people have scrutinized the bible, things they have heard, facts which have popped out of history, things that have happened to them personally, You can't put this things in a petri dish of course, but they still need to scrutinize what they have in front of them. People don't just contract religiousness right? You could put it down to idiots believing whatever they're told, but over the past year I have met some brilliant minds, and you could never put them down to being idiots.

Another point raised in a later comment was that many people hold to their beliefs as a matter of pride. They may well feel that, having held them as long as they have, it would be an admittance of utter stupidity and loss of faith to say "Well, after much thought, I've decided that I was wrong." This, I imagine, would be a particular problem amongst highly religious peers who may then seek to ostracise the person in question due to their sudden crisis of faith. It becomes a social defence mechanism along with a matter of pride in such circumstances.

This as well, does not need to be applied to the "religious" people. When you have been taught through high school, and then through university, the same idea, You tend to drink it in. You have to take as a given that its the truth. The last thing your gonna want is to get your masters degree and then some person with a pamphlet and a pony tail to tell you that you really just got a masters degree in "big lie". And then be told that your entire schooling has been based on a huge foundation of holey theories.

 

[Labyrinth]

No, it's not their morality. It's their actions. That doesn't mean they think that rules are meant to be broken, just that they've decided to break the rules on this occasion.

And actions are of course in no way driven by morals. No. Bullshit. They made a conscious decision that they are above the speed limit regulations set down as a standard, which relied on that moral difference.

 

[The Great Fa]

If you ask me, the reason Science and religion can't get along is because they both attempt to define Absolute Truth, yet each has a different version. As people have said, most things discovered by Science can't be refuted or confirmed by Religion and therefore can be accepted by everyone to be Absolute Truth.

The crux of the division seems to be evolution. Religion says one thing, Science says something completely different. Since both believe they are on the side of Absolute Truth, they just can't play nicely together. Now here's where things start to get confusing for me.

Why do each of these factions care so much about what Absolute Truth is? As a devout Catholic, I can attest to the mentality that those adhering to Religion believe they are living they way God commanded them to. For those of us in the Religion faction, God is the end all be all, the Master, the Lord, the Father, all that stuff. We have a subservient relationship with Him complete with all the old fashioned connotations associated with being a servant, only more so. For the Religion faction, it is anathema to believe anything other than what God has told us is Absolute Truth.

But what about the Science people? What drives them to profess their version of Absolute Truth? Do they simply try to oppose a way of life that they see as having too many restrictions? Or are they impassioned by nothing more than evidence? When I hear someone say "I believe in nothing that cannot be proven" or "Religion and faith are a pointless waste of time", it's like they just said "5+banana=Thursday."

I just don't understand.