Those would be decisions, though, rather than discoveries, wouldn’t they?
But I think a valuable question at this stage of the discussion woud be: are there any things that fit all of these criteria?:
-Meaningful to explore
-Not under the purview of science (i.e. not amenable to natural observation)
-External to the person exploring them
If there are such things, what are they and how can they actually be explored?
I would suggest that science is the search for fact, not truth. Truth is best left to the philosophers.
To get back to the OP, I get what Siege is saying. I believe that life evolved through the process of evolution, and I believe that God was behind abiogenesis. So in my mind, both are right.
Are we quibbling now about what it means to answer a question? Not even science can say “such and such a thing is absolutely true.” You make a decision based on the best evidence to accept it as true. Or, the things that are true are so narrowly defined as to strain at the qualification “meaningful.”
I believe that all things are physical in nature. I cannot prove it. I have made a decision to believe it, based on what I consider to be overwhelming evidence. I cannot imagine that anything would change my mind. However, I do not believe that other ways of searching for truth are without meaning, or that the answers to the question posed by such searches are any more arbitrary than any of those arrived at by any other epistemology. You can’t use science to prove science, after all.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
This is the sort of absolute derclaration, based on equivocation and misunderstanding, that you enjoy hurling into discussions that makes it so easy to ignore the rest of your postings and make me wonder why anyone bothers to engage you, at all.
Good questions all. Pithy and on point. I’m pondering. It may take a while.
While you’re chewing on that, let me say that i completely agree that you can discover things about yourself that you did not know, or did not realise you know, so yes, exploration of your feelings, through introspection, could, IMO, reveal that you love your mother, if for some reason you failed to realise it before.
Actually, it can in an fMRI since it “lights” up different pathways in the brain than lying or psychosis. In fact, the “God spot” is now fairly well known (Ramachandran & Blakeslee’s “Phantoms in the Brain”) although you can’t conclude that there is or isn’t a God, just that we’ve evolved a sense of spirituality, if you will. Makes sense when you realize the first real leisure class were priests and shamans.
So revelatory experiences are objectively real, however they are pure qualia-- ie, so subjective that there is no good way to measure the person’s experience objectively.
This is where positivists and athiests fall off the boat (and mind you, I am a scientist; I don’t just play one on the internet): subjective realms of experience are very real for the person involved. Where the sincere Christian fundamentalist stumbles is trying to reconcile their subjective experience with the fact that natural history and biblical history clash. But the rationalist discounts subjective experience as worthless, with the exception of a few bones thrown to the arts.
I think the OP’s title would probably be more appropriate as “Double Truth”, Christianity and Science since, at least in this discussion, science seems to be the companion truth the OP contends, as evolution is merely mentioned.
It seems to me that in order for any single religious (or spiritual) assertion to be true they all must be. If the god of Islam/Judaism/Christianity exists, then all deities and all other non-corporeal, mythical entities of all the religions that have ever been practiced, such as Pele, Domfe, Zeus, and Ra, exist as well, or none do. In other words, we either live in a world where the empirical defines our complete existence, or a world where, in addition to the empirical, every possible mental construct is real. The willingness to discount the potentiality of any single non-empirical assertion invalidates all of them, including one’s own.
I’m in the camp of those who believe only that which can be proven, and its hypotheses ultimately replicated by the scientific method, can exist. Anything that exists, yet its mechanisms not appropriately theorized, is not a deficiency of science, but rather our inability to ask the right questions at present. Does this discount the existence of angels, or a place known as Heaven? No it doesn’t. Nor does it discount the phenomena of alien abductions, or the existence of Yog-Sothoth. It does, however, raise certain mathematical challenges, such as the dichotomy of the known governing laws of physics having to be applied differently for one entity than for another.
In my opinion, that there’s no single consensus, even among adherents, as to the characteristics and attributes that define their purported theistic/philosophical/ideological representative, in conjunction with the lack of any empirical data, pretty much screams for the application of Occam’s razor.
That is truly amazing ! Learned scholars of the day who believed the universe existed forever in the past, opposed by those of faith, have been “proven” wrong by modern scientists who are now analyzing the nanoseconds of the “Big Bang”.
Who’d have thunk. No need of “double truth” there. Chaulk one up for faith !
Well, Aristotle believed a lot of things that weren’t true. (And the Church didn’t have any scientific reason to believe the universe had a beginning either) The point is, people like Siger of Brabant said it was possible to both believe the universe had a beginning and that it did not.
But there is something fundamentally different between these two statements. Life evolving through evolution is something we can falsify, and thus confirm to a certain extent. I’d agree that this was a truth.
God being behind abiogenesis is a statement of faith, and is unfalsifiable. Even if we had a time viewer, and could see the first self replicating molecule form ( or RNA, or DNA, or cell) we would not be able to disprove that God was behind it. If we could see a cell poof into existence, we might think of that as evidence, but even if what was viewed matched the expectations of Richard Dawkins, we couldn’t prove God was not involved. Call it a truth of faith, though I sort of consider that an oxymoron.
Consider the statement “God loves us.” Besides the problem of the existence of god, we’ve seen that faith makes theists consider this true no matter the evidence against it. If we consider this a truth, we are overloading the word truth so that the two types of truths have almost nothing to do with one another.
Thanks for this example, by the way. I think this is far more the kind of truth Siege was considering than if I love my mommy.
I can’t argue this one as well as SentientMeat, who I picked it up from, but if the origin of time and space are one (as the BB posits, I believe), then the universe did exist ‘forever’ in the past; that is to say that it has existed for all time - there was no ‘before’ in which the universe did not exist.
And I personally suspect that, if there were such thing as a working time machine, you couldn’t ever actually get right back to the origin - it would be a bit like accelerating to light speed; the nearer you get, the harder it becomes to get there, but in any case; the universe has existed forever in the past.
Nope. Chalk one up for the observation that philosophical proofs that ignore the scientific method don’t result in correct conclusions. Note that theology is a lot closer to Aristotle than it is to Michaelson and Morley.
And before you get too excited, other religions had the universe beginning also, and some got the time of its origin a lot more accurately than Christianity. If you think this is important, time to convert!
Thankyou for that very sobering response. Musn’t get carried away.
Seige saying she holds certain beliefs is not irrational. Her holding certain beliefs is. Also putting her “religious truths” on equal footing with “scientific truths” is irrational, and IMO a bit dishonest. People can talk about truths being different from facts but I don’t make that distinction. It seems that Seige does not either, as it appears here and in past conversations, that she believes her religious beliefs are factually true, though she has admitted she holds them for no good reason and indeed uses them as a crutch. She did so in this thread:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=3644663#post3644663
“Religious truth” are generally not truths at all but are merely assertions. I see others on this thread trying to say that science and religion applies to different things. Separate magisteria has been brought up, but this is a load of crap. Religion has held true, many things that science has shown to be false. Science continually advances and religion continually retreats. The only “truths” which have held up over time have done so only because they are generally phrased or conceived such that they are still unexplorable by observation of any kind. These quote “truths” are still nothing more than assertions, assertions that if we explore with our scientific advancements turn out to be highly improbable to be true.
As for proving Seige’s “truths” false, one need not prove an idea false to show it irrational. Carl Sagan wrote that while it is true that we can not prove whether or not there is a teacup orbiting the planet Pluto, that does not mean that the theory that there is, is on equal footing with the theory that their isn’t. This analogie holds up with regards to the probability of a deist god. However, Seige’s god, nominally Christian, has characteristics (all powerful and all loving) which are incompatible with this world we live in (full of evil) and is therefore logically impossible. There are more problems as I recall them with her beliefs but that’s one of the biggest.
Also as Der Trihs pointed out there are problems with her statement “should not be proven.” That just reeks of having something to hide.
I don’t know that I have been insulting, I think I have just been blunt. I think even Seige would admit she has a tendency to believe things because she wishes them true. She has admitted no great supernatural revelation causing her belief, and she has admitted her religion a crutch. I just reminded her of that. I did not call her any names.
I have pondered that before. I was talking to a friend about it, who had read some of my earlier discussions with Polycarp years ago and we both agreed that Godzillatemple’s way of arguing, when he joined my threads, was very good and very effective. I thought maybe I should try to be more like that, and my friend said he though by doing so I would not be able to get my opponents to admit as much as they have to me. I sort of goad it out of them. Roughly the equivalent of a good cop, bad cop debating style where the bad cop style fits me. If more polite folks wants to take up my cause and thereby make my voice superfluous I will cease and desist.
I would say that is probably true. However to say that faith picks up where science leaves off is a bit of a joke. Christian faith, essentially defined in the bible as belief in thing hoped for and unseen, does not discover anything. It just believes things. It generally believes things unsupportable by any evidence whatsoever; else we would appeal to said beliefs by reason and not faith.
Again, faith does not explore anything. It just believes things, without any evidence, and sadly, often in spite of mountains of contrary evidence. Faith not only does not encourage exploration, but by claiming to have the answers already discourages exploration. Seige herself, in the OP stressed that we should not even try to prove religious “truths.”
Historically they have overlapped quite a bit (remember Galileo). Faith doesn’t deal with questions, it does not even try to answer them. That is what reason, logic, and observation are for. Faith at most just gives a warm comfy feeling to help assuage fears of questions hitherto unanswered, at best. At worst it makes a nice tool to turn people into martyrs A.K.A human bombs and guided missiles.
I realize this post doesn’t address the OP at all, but I still want to babble here.
Let’s remove the definition that religion = Abrahamic religions only, and that their historical assertions are “truths” because they obviously aren’t. Instead, redefine religion as “the individual’s subjective relation to Creation.” This actually has much more of a basis in Vedantic religions, and is outrightly expressed in Sufism, Sikhism, Bhakti, Transcendentalism and quite a few other religious paths.
In this case, the relationship between God and the human comtemplating/loving the Creation/Creator becomes a deeply personal one. Can I prove that there is a God? No, and in fact my creed says that it is impossible to prove God objectively. Is it a matter of faith alone? No, the subjective experience of mysticism is open to everyone. Why do I choose to attribute this Divine Love I feel to God? Because the particular religious/spiritual path I took was, in fact, a religious one. Why this God and not, say, Pele or Waukea or Papa? Because-- they are all one and the same. The Wiccans and Hindis teach that all gods and goddesses are but aspects of the unfathomable Infinite. The Sufis and Sikhs understand that all who love the Universal Creation/Creator worship the same God.
The point here is that if religious experience reveals any “objective” truths, it is that (a) certain people took certain paths and came in contact with something that they consider The Divine, and (2) that other truths realized are so personal and subjective that even communicating them is difficult. It is no coincidence that most mystics are poets.
You don’t really need the concept of a “God” to contemplate the universe and feel a profound wonder at its complexity and intensity. However, to experience the feeling of a powerful love (for lack of a better word; our definitions of what love is can all too easily become a limiting concept) that seemingly emanated from all of creation-- how could I not feel that there is something at work larger than we can even concieve?
Here I am at odds with some Christians; I don’t think you need religion. I don’t think it makes you a better person. I don’t know (or care) what happens after death; I honestly don’t think my “conciousness” will live in any form; I’ll be happy if my organs or chemistry comes into use (yeah, I’ve been contemplating being rendered into biodiesel upon death). What I love about the “religious” experience is this feeling of the universe unfolding, learning its secrets and seeing its beauty and its mystery. To you perhaps you need not label it “God.” But to me, it is one of the most beautiful aspects of The Infinite.
Now that’s the root of my love of science, right there. But it is NOT my approach to science by any means. Science is a tool that teaches us about objective reality and gives us means to manipulate and understand that reality. I don’t “feel” science; I do science. But there’s one moment I had, when I was working in clinical AIDS trials, and the nurse practitioner came in and said that we could unblind this trial that we were doing, this drug we’d been testing helped prolong lives. At that moment, that feeling of joy, relief and sadness, that’s where science and religion intersected for me-- the doing and the feeling came together. We wield this tool science because we are curious, we have compassion, we want to do spectacular and novel things, we want to solve problems.
If this sounds like a too broad definition of “religion”, so be it. Most people would use the term “spirituality” instead, but as my UU minister pointed out, we need to reclaim that word from the fundamentalists who use it as a weapon of manipulation. Once people understand the completely subjective nature of religion, they will have lost this weapon.