3.14159265358979323
Registered Senior Member
Neverfly: "Hijackers, AWAY!
Here, we come, to save the day.... "
Lolwut.
Here, we come, to save the day.... "
Lolwut.
Science and Religion
- Thread starter haereticum135
- Start date
Evidence will decide the matter
In our modern world, nothing has kept religion on the defensive more than the theodicy question and the failure or ability of religion to offer any direct evidence for a God to support its claims. That may all be about to change with a new interpretation of the moral teaching of Christ spreading on the web. But it's not coming from any known religious source or tradition and they won't like it. Quoting from a review:
"Here then is the first ever viable religious conception capable of leading reason, by faith, to observable consequences which can be tested and judged. This new teaching delivers the first ever religious claim of insight into the human condition, that meets the Enlightenment criteria of verifiable and 'extraordinary' evidence* based truth embodied in action. For the first time in history, however unexpected, the world must now measure for itself, the reality of a new claim to revealed truth, a moral tenet not of human intellectual origin, offering access by faith, to absolute proof, an objective basis for moral principle and a fully rational and justifiable belief!"
Revolutionary stuff for those who will test this material for themselves. As I'm not yet allowed to offer active links, here it is in long hand. After the www stuff and the period is energon and a period and org and a period and uk
In our modern world, nothing has kept religion on the defensive more than the theodicy question and the failure or ability of religion to offer any direct evidence for a God to support its claims. That may all be about to change with a new interpretation of the moral teaching of Christ spreading on the web. But it's not coming from any known religious source or tradition and they won't like it. Quoting from a review:
"Here then is the first ever viable religious conception capable of leading reason, by faith, to observable consequences which can be tested and judged. This new teaching delivers the first ever religious claim of insight into the human condition, that meets the Enlightenment criteria of verifiable and 'extraordinary' evidence* based truth embodied in action. For the first time in history, however unexpected, the world must now measure for itself, the reality of a new claim to revealed truth, a moral tenet not of human intellectual origin, offering access by faith, to absolute proof, an objective basis for moral principle and a fully rational and justifiable belief!"
Revolutionary stuff for those who will test this material for themselves. As I'm not yet allowed to offer active links, here it is in long hand. After the www stuff and the period is energon and a period and org and a period and uk
Apart from the extensive references to the bible...
(Oh, and a smattering of Milton and the M People
).There's a reason you're not allowed to post links yet. It cuts down on the drivel that gets spammed here. Oh wait, you've skirted that objective.
And whoever wrote that "review" seems to know little about what constitutes verifiability or what proof actually is. You cannot obtain proof by faith. By definition.
Riight...
Sheer nonsense.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
It says right at the bottom of the home page that this crap is "for dreamers and fools only." At least they're honest!
roger_pearse
Registered Member
Two short observations:
1. Science was invented in modern times, say from the 17th century on. So by "throughout the history of mankind" we mean "NOT throughout the history of mankind", unless we propose to redefine science to mean something other than it means today.
2. This narrative is a stock piece of late 19th century anti-Christian rhetoric. Wouldn't it be better to think for oneself, rather than trotting out these tired old slogans.
Perhaps we could rewrite this in a somewhat more accurate form:
Throughout the history of mankind, the two greatest guides for personal beliefs have been a convenient conformity to some subset of whatever values were current in the society at the time; or Christianity.
The first half of that is certainly true; but the second?
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Religion, at least in the Jungian model, is an instinct that has been with us since at least our MRMCA (most recent matrilineal common ancestor), Mitochondrial Eve ca. 120KYA. Science as we know it is a product of the Renaissance, 1/2 KYA. Modern science with its rigor, peer review, canon of very-unlikely-to-be-disproved theories, etc, only goes back about 350 years.
E.g., the persecution of Galileo and the current Religious Redneck Retard Revival in the United States with its Creation "Science" Museum in Kentucky, America's outhouse.
Most of these people are Americans and Americans are abysmally poor at understanding probability and statistics. We have no reason to doubt that the space-time continuum is infinite in all spatial and temporal directions; therefore any event with a non-zero probability can occur, and could even occur more than once. The fact that we happen to be standing here in a place where one of those events occurred is merely a corollary of the fact that we could hardly be standing anywhere else now, could we?
That is different only in its minutiae from the creationist argument: some lifeform existed, and it created the universe. The problem with that argument is the Fallacy of Circular Reasoning, which is arguably the cornerstone of religion's so-called "philosophy." The definition of the word "universe" is "everything that exists." If that earliest lifeform existed, then by definition it was part of the universe. So we're left with the unanswered question, "Where the f*** did IT come from?"
Thinking for oneself does not require one to discard the thinking of those who came before; merely to regard it critically.
I'm not sure what you present as the difference between those two halves. Except during the time of its founding, when it took advantage of the collapse of Roman civilization to offer irrational hope to hopeless people, Christianity has been "the values that were current in society at the time" in (at various times) all, most or much of Western civilization.
Even today in the increasingly secularized portions of the West, many tenets of Christian philosophy are widely accepted without argument. Perhaps most notoriously but generally overlooked, the notion that what one contributes to civilization need not correlate with one takes out of it--the founding principle of communism--is a Christian principle based on the belief that supernatural forces interfere with the workings of the natural world and of human society. Marx's slogan, "To each according to his need, from each according to his ability," is a reworking of a passage from the Book of Acts. Can you imagine a self-respecting member of a Hindu, Jewish or Confucian society becoming famous for saying something so totally ridiculous that one of the largest nations in history collapsed by trying to make it work?
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Maybe what they meant was empirical observation, which has existed throughout time. Historians speak of Chinese, Persian and Hindu science, none of which had a relationship with whatever happened in Europe in the XVIIth century.
That is so eurocentric. Also, Archimedes and Roger Bacon were empirical researchers, one lived in classical times, and another was a medieval friar. "Modern science" refers to something more sociological than epistemological: the time when scientists stopped bowing down to the Roman Catholic Church. But you must recognize that the whole world was not under the RCC.
CrystalineGoddess
Registered Member
Wow! How chicken and egg! No one can really say what the case is, yet so many get p'd off over it. :shrug: