Supreme Being: A intelligent being that is made up of every living being on the worlds and in the heavens, the spirit of everything that is also a single being in total knowledge and power. One in Spirit with all.
God: in the entirety the Surpreme Being or a ‘subpart’ of the Supreme Being, if acting in Love, is in oneness with the Supreme Being. Also a child of the Supreme Being (including people).
Science: Mankind’s discipline of studying creation
Religion: Learning tool, Simulation of mankind’s relationship with the spiritual being, and other ‘gods’ for the purpose of learning a personal relationship to those beings.
See post #12. You are accepting the claims of science when you use your computer. Is it by faith? I’d say not, since your computer works. You many not understand how it works, but you don’t have to have faith that it does work.
Contrast that to the power of prayer. Turn on your prayer machine and what do you get? Random output, far as I can tell.
I don’t know what you mean by hope for humanity. If it is making everyone feel good, that isn’t what science does. If it means feeding them and increasing their life span and making their life more comfortable, science has done a damn good job. A lot better than religion did in the 1500 years or so when it was in charge.
I accept proven claims from scientists. Your generalization to science/believing in science doesnt make sense to me. Science is a catch-all term, which does nothing except encapsule the work of many people under a common name. I dont understand what you mean when you ask if I believe in science.
If I assume by creation you mean “our experiences,” then I notice your definition of science would include such things as “thinking about the world.”
What do you mean specifically by “mankinds discipline of studying creation?”
the ambiguous terms I want to understand are discippline and studying.
Hope in terms of what? I could hope for many things for humanity, you havent specified a subject.
I accept claims made by science because I can, if I choose to do so, verify the evidence that supports its claims. That’s the key difference between science and religion - science is based on observable verifiable evidence and religion is based on faith.
Just a thought experiment on the computer. As your computer could be, in theory, a movie made by a psychic, who would mysteriously tell exactly what you are going to do with the computer and have the movie display the appropriate screen. The movie would be snyce’d to your life so accurately that even letters you press would appear on the screen at the exact right time. But it is a matter of faith that a computer is what it is claimed to be, unless you understand it to the chip/microprocessor level. In this though experiment the science is false and psychic ability is real, your experience is the same.
So to me, yes a computer is a piece of technology, which I know i can use for certain things, just as I can use a hammer, or just how I can use meditation. They are tools of known value to me, and many have other uses to be discovered by me personally and by mankind as we push the limits of all mentioned.
I would disagree with this. I believe I get clear direction most of the time. Even when things don’t make sense initially, following it has never steered me wrong, and i would compare it to a small child asking instructions of a loving parent. Things initially don’t make sense (how is flipping that switch on the wall going to turn on that light), and it takes a long time for a child to understand why it works, but till then prayer has gotten the light to turn on consistently.
It is more the second, and possibly having humanity travel to the stars. If you look at my definition science is the study of creation, religion is a simulation experience and of no value except to learn to move past religion with the relationship with God and the spiritual. It is a learning tool.
When we move away from the major world religions (or before the major religions), we get to more tribal spirituality, which did have answers for disease through natural remedies, It is spirituality that man used to life himself out of the muck.
Science is to me our tools of creation, Spirituality is help and assistance from advanced beings that we were made to work with. I believe both are made to work together.
I argue this point, while you could attempt to verify some claims, you can not verify all, and you personally will never be able to verify some, perhaps due to not being able to access certain equipment, funding locations or a disinterest in pursuing a subject.
You accept that you can verify, and that is a error in assumption, you simply can not verify most, perhaps 99.999% of scientific claims and must take them on faith.
I use the term creation, because I believe what we physically observe (this planet, our bodies, etc.) was created by God for us, much like a parent will set up a child’s play room. It is for us to learn things. The study of science is the playing with all the things that God wants us to play (nicely) with and learn how to learn.
Religion you can test. You can see what time a mass is being held on Sunday and go there and their will be a mass then. Sunday after Sunday, repeatable and verifiable. Though religion has nothing to do with God.
A relationship with God or spiritual beings, which I call spirituality is exactly what it sounds like, a relationship, just as you had with your parents, guardians, she-wolf, whatever. It is not repeatable in a scientific because you are dealing with a intelligent and higher level being. It is at the level of a child’s dawning understanding that certain people take care of you. That realization however is confirmed over time.
I can’t completely agree with that, but it depends on what your definition of religion is. There are certainly some matters of religion that are purely a matter of faith, but there also parts that stand up to some matter of observation. For instance, one of the key aspects of most religions is a moral framework, and this moral framework is easily observable and testable to whether or not it achieves its ends. Afterall, religion is ultimately a philosophy explaining why we’re here and how we should behave and interact but its basis arises from cultural traditions and beliefs.
Science is ammoral, it doesn’t set forth a moral framework nor does it tells us why we’re here anymore than explaining the anatomy of my birth gives purpose to my life as an individual. Science can, given a specific goal work towards defining a set of rules to achieve it or, given a set of rules determine what end they might achieve, but there’s no goal to science anymore than there’s a goal to evolution.
But there are plenty of scientific claims that are disputed like, say, the Higgs Boson. People will argue to varying degrees about that and the values of various arguments for its existence not too much unlike how ones will argue about philosophy or religion. The only difference is that the manner of settling a scientific argument comes to a matter of being able to produce tangible evidence where as philosophical and religious arguments rely on an end state that is impossible to observe within our lifetimes.
Well, since I am involved in microprocessor design, I do understand it to that level. Your example is precisely the amount of faith you have that you don’t live in the Matrix. In any case, you can pick up books on computer architecture and computer design, while I am unaware of anyone claiming psychic computers.
Computers aren’t discovered, they are invented.
Care to participate in a scientific study of this? It would be fairly simple to design. Are you sure you are not praying for X, get Y, and convince yourself that either Y is really X or that God wants you to have Y which is better for you. We are all efficient at deluding ourselves, theists and atheists alike. That is why experimentation has to be rigorous.
Spirituality and quinine prevent malaria no better than quinine without spirituality. These invisible advanced beings don’t seem to have gotten their story straight or provided much in the way of consistent ethical guidance. If I were an advanced being and wanted to help people, I’d do it in a way that was clearly distinct from me being a hallucination.
You guys are confusing different parts of science. There are hard proven testable facts, and then there are hypothesis. While they arent necessarily testable or proven yet, they are posited in a way that makes them testable and disprovable.
The higgs boson is taken on faith because it is expected if we are correct about our current understanding it should exist. If we dont find it at some point we will have to alter our explanation. Anything past a hypothesis is generally correct, or at least if it is incorrect it must be in a way which any further modifications must explain everything that we already know to be true.
To say that we take proven facts on faith only because we havent personally researched them is silly, since we could at any time research the answer. The same is not possible with faith in religion because the very things you are putting your faith in are largely untestable and no research can prove them correct.
Sure religion produces a moral framework, but that is not much of a claim. National Socialism produced a moral framework also, just not a very good one. The claim of religion is that the moral framework so produced is better than other moral frameworks because it comes from the source of all morals, God. Now that is not a testable claim both because the actual source is a bit cloudy, and because it provides no method of evaluation of the moral claims. If the so-called morals are evil by our ethical standards, it is no matter because God sets the rules. If God’s supposed actions contradict the moral principles he has laid down, it doesn’t matter because he is not subject to his own morality.
The difference between secular ethics and religious morality is that in ethics all conclusions are provisional, while in morality all conclusions are absolute assuming you heard God right and he didn’t change his mind.
What I am claiming, is for what I need to do, which is God’s work for me here on earth, it doesn’t matter if the computer was produced by microprocessor designers, psychics, or elves for that matter. It is simply a tool given to me by God for certain thing that He wants me to do and learn from (which has not included learning how they work, at least not so far). So, and here is the critical point, it is not faith in science that i use a computer, it is faith in God who gave me this tool called a computer for certain tasks. How it works has been largely irrelevant.
The problem with this, and the like offers, is it’s backwards, and at it’s worst is a attempt to bribe God to be your circus puppet (such as the Randy whatever prize). I believe the order is we are lead from above (spirituality) to make discoveries (science) about the world we are put in. So science and the like is simply not designed to prove spirituality, but spirituality was made to lead us in science.
If you took quinine by chance it should have the same effects, but my belief is we were lead to take quinine via spiritual guidance.
The future of humanity, quality of live, survivability of humanity, life span of humans, will we achieve interstellar travel. Do you believe that science will be the driving force for humanity as the generations of humans continue?
So your definition of science is to learn how to learn?
Or is it the “discipline” (undefined by you, do you mean job, act? discipline has no meaning alone here) of studying our environment?
This is why Im asking for clarification, this definition makes no sense.
Yes I believe our futures will be affected by science… I dont have hopes for things so to speak. I hope they will always improve, and that could be through worldview changes or scientific progress and invention.
Mr. Furious: Okay, am I the only one who finds these sayings just a little bit formulaic? “If you want to push something down, you have to pull it up. If you want to go left, you have to go right.” It’s…
The Sphinx: Your temper is very quick, my friend. But until you learn to master your rage…
Mr. Furious: …your rage will become your master? That’s what you were going to say. Right? Right?
Believe what you will, but I’ve been in computer architecture and IC design for almost 40 years and God is nowhere to be found. I assure you that when our technology and reliability guys are figuring out new design rules, prayer books are not in evidence. In any case, given the make up of the average engineering department, the gods involved would not be Western ones. Thank God for your computer and your food if you want, but you might want to spare some thanks for engineers and farmers. Anyhow, the level of atheism in the groups I’ve been in is a lot higher than in the country as a whole.
Isn’t odd that many churches think that God commands them to send out missionaries to convert the heathen, while refusing to do simple miracles (which he did do in the Bible) which would be far more effective in winning souls?
Like my father used to say, your belief and fifteen cents will get you on the subway. (He said it a long time ago.)