While I’m sure that this has a factual answer, I’m also sure it wil engender some debate, so I’m going to open this up here in GD. Mods, feel free to move as you think best depending on answers/tone.
Basically, my question is this: how do non-Christian religions answer the question about the existence of dinosaurs?
Fundamentalist Christians typically subscribe to the Young-Earth Creation; that the Earth was created ~6,000 years ago by God, and dinosaur bones indicate either that dino’s coexisted with man 1,000’s of years ago, or are tricks of Satan, or whatever.
More mainstream Christians don’t take the Bible literally, and reconcile the moral/metaphysical aspects of the Bible with science, and therefore accept evolution and dinosaurs with little trouble.
As a lapsed Christian/borderline agnostic, I have zero problem with science, dinos, or evolution.
But what do the Hindus, Bhuddists, Muslims, or Jews have to say about dinosaurs? Other religions? I’m sure I’m leaving plenty of religions out, but out of ignorance, not spite.
Is there consensus amongst the various religion’s hierarchies? Is it left to individual belief? Is there conflict/disputes within certain religions?
A huge swath is cut right out seeing as Muslims accept the “Old Testament” as foundational to their own communion, regarding themselves as inheritors of the Hebrew and Christian traditions. New! Improved! so to speak. Of course, the same holds true even more so for actual Jews.
My impression is that the other major faiths take their creation myths rather less literally than do fundamentalist Christians, who make up a minority within their own faith as well.
There’s a continuum, just like there is in Christianity. So, for instance, a lot of Orthodox Jews and fundamentalist Muslims are young earth or old earth creationists. Other Jews and Muslims are more accepting of evolution.
The same is true for Hindus and Buddhists.
There is, I think, a tendency, both on this board and elsewhere, to assume a kind of uniformity of belief among non-Christian religions that doesn’t really exist. People are quite willing to accept that Pat Robertson, the Pope, and the Archbishop of Canterbury all have different religious beliefs, but that there’s a single Jewish view, or a single Muslim view on religious matters.
There’s lots of ways. First of all is to dispute the accuracy of carbon dating. Second is to simply claim God put them there that way. In other words if God made them, he could certainly make them appear older than they are. Why would he do this? Why does he do anything?
Muslims have a bit harder time reconcilling this because the Koran isn’t God’s words, it is EXACTLY the word of God. It isn’t an allegory or anything like that it is what God said period. Of course this means that only people that speak the correct dialect of Arabic can “truly” understand since something is always lost in translation.
What ? Of course it’s full of allegories. The whole thing’s a giant poem, full of stylistic musings, florid imagery, complex rhymes etc… Just because it’s the direct word of God doesn’t mean God’s always being crystal clear. All attempts to contact him for clarifications have thus far proven unsuccessful. He’s like a holy Lou Reed.
In fact, there’s a whole body of Muslim theology trying to figure out what the book means, why it says *this *and not that, what God meant by *this *image ; and just like Christians no two denominations can agree on a single interpretation of any given passage of the text (although, as you noted, at least Muslims don’t have to deal with which translation of their scripture to run with)
If I was being cynical, I would say priests are, as a general rule, against definite and easily understood holy scriptures and myths - for they’d be out of a job
Hindu here- no problems with evolution.
Universe being in constant cycles of creation and rebirth is fine with me- easily allows me to accept parallel universes, quantum physics, evolution, Big Bang and most other sciency things.
Course the problem with Hinduism is that for every person for an idea, there’s gotta be two others with their own ideas and someone against my own. But in the end, it’s all the same, and no one’s “the right one” so it’s cool. Conflicting beliefs can work out.
The principles of science are at odds with all superstitions and supernatural beliefs.
All the religions and believers I have seen use similar strategies for reconciling this difficulty, including the rather silly notion that “conflicting beliefs can work out.” I don’t see a difference between the fundamentalist struggling with their dinosaur dilemma and the Bhuddist pretending that reincarnation can be reconciled with science or the Hindu resolving Hanuman and science.
In the end some atavistic need to accept a Great Cause of some sort or other seems to supercede any drive to accept reality.
Carbon-14 has a half-life of just 5730 years and so carbon dating can only establish the date of carboniferous material from plants or organisms which were alive in the last 60,000 years or so.
Since the dinosaurs lived tens of millions of years ago, carbon dating is useless, and radioactive isotopes with a much longer half-life are used instead. Which brings us to a fact even YECs can’t answer: There are still plenty of radioactive isotopes with half-lives of billions of years since there hasn’t been time for them to decay away. But there are no isotopes left with half-lives of even millions of years - they have decayed away. And if they did so quickly, the decay would have released enough energy to boil all the oceans and melt the Earth’s crust.
Here is a NYT article on islamic creationism. It claims “young earth” creationism is very rare. but “old earth” creationism has quite a following in Islam.
Why is that silly? Einsteinian relativity conflicts with quantum mechanics for example, yet both those conflicting beliefs work out don’t they? Yes, we assume that there is some undiscovered unifying theory that will reconcile the conflict, but why can’t we equally assume that about conflicts between religion and science?
Not so far, although I hope to get the Nobel when my TOE is fully worked out.*
I am taking the term “conflicting beliefs” to mean two opposite beliefs which cannot both be true. Incomplete understanding is not a “conflicting belief” and the core principle of science–the universe is not subject to arbitrary mysterious powers intermittently and capriciously violating natural law–is at odds with all religion.
As an example of conflicting beliefs:
The world works according to underlying physical principles undisturbed by Arbitrary Powers.
The world works according to Arbitrary Power(s), sometimes.
*Hey; Mr. Obama has really given me HOPE in this regard…
I disagree with you on that point, but only slightly.
As far as we understand the universe is not subject to those things.
Why can’t this be true to the extent that we have discovered and understood and have a belief in a religious system that says that too? What if there was a religion that said God exists, created the Universe, set the laws, and left it pretty much alone for it to govern itself by those natural laws until it pretty much died out when all matter/life was depleted?
I agree with you in that the idea of a God acting on OUR behalf in our daily life seems contrary, but the idea of a God that would simply set things in motion and then leave it be would not seem at odds with Science. Basically, science assumes we are a closed system, religion feels that we are not a closed system. If there was a religion that states that God CREATED a closed system then shouldn’t it fit the bill of the science in that system?
By this definition GR and QM are conflicting beliefs. That doesn’t stop them from both working.
Right, just as the core beliefs of QM are at odds with all relativity. I’m still not seeing any difference here. We have two mutually exclusive belief systems concerning how the universe works. The universe obviously does work, therefore either one or both of the two belief systems must be based on incomplete knowledge.
How is this any different to:
The world works according to underlying physical principles based upon variations in space-time
The world works according to underlying physical principles unaffected by variations in space-time, sometimes.
Well, I won’t beat this up here, but basically QM and relativity are at odds with each other because they are incomplete mathmatical descriptions of physical processes, and not because they are both correct and somehow co-exist. The one (QM) is good for the tiny world; the other (relativity) is good for the big world. They are conflicting models that coexist; not conflicting truths that coexist. Neither is exactly true. This idea that conflicting beliefs can co-exist–i.e. not cancel one another out–is silliness. One or the other, or neither, but not both.
They are both interesting mathematical models, useful for predictions about physical behaviour. Neither is “correct” in a full description of nature, and for that reason it’s much better to say they are both wrong than to say they are both correct but that the conflict is somehow not a paradox. It is, and scientists agree that we need a Theory of Everything precisely because those two models cannot be correct. Right now we don’t have that TOE.
On the “God is just the Prime-Mover” front: Sure. Go with that. It has been used as an argument for God. However no religion stops there. They all want ongoing magic processes, from incarnation to miracles to various fantastical deities all mucking around capriciously with physical processes. And that does not happen.
Both science and revealed religion are also incomplete descriptions of the universe. I’ve never heard a theologist argue that mankind understands the nature of God and the universe with perfect clarity, or even that we ever could. And science works by falsification, IOW by definition science is an imperfect model that could be proven wrong/incomplete at any time.
So we’re right back where we started. To the extent that any belief can be said to “work out”, then conflicting beliefs can work out. We all agree that both science and religion and incomplete models, and all the subsets of science and religion are similarly incomplete models.
Which was precisely toejam’s point: Both are imperfect, neither one’s “the right one” so it’s cool. Conflicting beliefs can work out whether that conflict is between GR and QM or between Buddhism and the Scientific Method. All we need to do is bear in mind that “work out” means that the beliefs are interesting and useful, not they are a full description of nature. And in reality I can;t see what other possible definition of “work out” could be applied here.
Correction: that does not happen in a manner that is objectively detectable. Claiming that it doesn’t happen requires that you’ve found a method that would infallibly detect such events if they did occur.
Why would Hindus or Buddhists have a problem with evolution or an old Earth? Hindus have always believed the universe is very old, and but the latest, and not the last, in a long line of universes. Buddhists, I believe, would probably agree, but in any case pay little attention to cosmogony (or theology) at all; it’s irrelevant to what their religion is about.
