:smack: My apologies to Trinopus.
Science can’t directly test for a soul unless the soul is actually something that does something. That has some properties, that exists in some way, that has an effect in the world.
The minute you assert specific properties, science can examine it. What does the soul do? Is it the store of your personality? Then why can we modify behavior attaching electrodes to certain parts of the brain? Why can brain injuries change a person’s personality?
How does the soul communicate with neurons in order to influence your thoughts or feelings or reactions? What are the physical methods used? Are they electrical? Chemical? Do they happen all over the brain, or in certain parts? Does the soul have a physical presence in some part of the brain?
Religion’s answer to such questions is to simply increasing pull back their assertions. Oh, you have a soul, but it doesn’t directly determine your personality. It’s some vague magical essence that doesn’t physically exist or interact with your brain.
But at that point, what’s the point of a soul? If it’s so subtle and non-interacting with the world, what does it do? Does it matter if you have one? Does it affect you in some way?
In order to be a useful belief, it has to do something. It has to exist, it has to influence something. If it doesn’t, if it’s just this invisible, undetectable thing that does nothing - how would thinking it exists or it doesn’t exist really differ?
And such is the way of religious claims about things that actually affect the world. Evolution? Oh, sure, we have a huge fossil record, and we can chart which species became which species, and we understand the mechanism behind natural selection… but God did it. With an infinitely subtle hand that looks exactly like what it would look like if life evolved under natural selection.
At that point, if God is so infinitely subtle that you can never detect what he did in the world, what use is that belief? It’s like the non-interacting, non-descript soul. Then you just start saying “Okay, so it’s just like you scientists say, but God did it in a way that looks just like it would if it happened naturally and without God”
If you accept scientific observations, and simply tack “…but God did it” on the end of everything, then that belief is useless. It doesn’t explain anything. And a belief that has no explanatory power has no purpose.
So religion is compatible with science in so much that you just keep making it more infinitely subtle and not involved in our world as we learn more about how the universe works. You just tack a useless “Okay… but god did it” to the end of every observation.
That’s only useless if you define “useful” in terms of the class of questions that science seeks to answer, which is confined to questions about empirically observable material entities. If you define “use” in terms of, say, elucidating ethical or other metaphysical questions, then religious techniques generally have more to offer than scientific techniques.
You can, of course, decide that metaphysical questions are of no interest to you, and therefore that religion is still useless, at least to you. But that’s nothing more than a subjective personal preference; it may tell us something about you, but it doesn’t tell us much about religion.
I disagree. Religious techniques can offer far more assertions of answers, but in order to actually demonstrate them, they need science. You can argue all day about, say, an animal’s right not to suffer, but unless you can actually demonstrate that animals can suffer, it won’t get you anywhere. I’m reminded of presuppositionalist apologetics; specifically, the “debate” (if you can even call it that - it was pathetic) between Sye Bruggencate and Matt Dillahunty, where Sye claimed that Matt couldn’t solve hard solipsism, then gave his answer to it… but never even attempted to justify it. That’s the issue here - in religion, you get answers - answers you cannot even attempt to demonstrate. Science is infinitely more valuable than religion in discussions of ethics and morality.
Genuine question here, what metaphysical questions are uniquely useful?
We are pattern-seeking, problem-solving sentient creatures with self-awareness. I think metaphysical questions are merely a by-product of that.
Evolution gave us the tools to critically examine and mould our world and when such tools are not keeping us alive they keep themselves busy by pondering such issues. Mental doodling.
What tools might these be? Superstitions? Blind suppositions? Proclamations? Legends?
That’s kind of orthogonal to UDS’s point, though. Sure, when religion is talking about specific empirical phenomena such as animals feeling pain, it needs science to determine (to the best of our ability, at least) what those phenomena are.
But those scientific determinations don’t address the non-scientific questions of, say, whether an animal has a “right” not to suffer, or what amount of suffering should be considered acceptable.
You may feel that since such questions can’t be answered scientifically, they can’t be meaningfully answered at all, at least not in a way that is objectively valid for everybody (which is science’s chief methodological strength). Fine, but for people who feel that answers to ethical questions are important even if they’re not universal or objective, it’s necessary to look beyond science to get them.
Beyond science? Maybe.
Towards religion? Why? What particular tools does religion bring to the table that can answer these questions any better than any other random philosophical system?
I’m not arguing that a non-scientific “philosophical system” necessarily has to be religious, if by “religious” you mean “theistic”.
As a matter of historical fact, though, most philosophical systems that humans have evolved to address non-scientific questions of rights, ethics, etc. have been embedded in religious cultural and intellectual frameworks. That’s just the way it is. But it doesn’t mean that people who want to explore non-scientific questions have to accept any particular religious beliefs in order to do so.
But it wasn’t OK for him to say that - that’s the whole problem with the religious approach. Descartes took the approach that religions have always taken, take something you don’t know the answer to, and make shit up to explain it. That’s the opposite of science.
That’s the crux of the reason for why religion and science are not compatible. Religion makes shit up and declares it to be true, whereas science tests ideas in an effort to try to disprove them.
Just because there are some scientists who are also religious doesn’t mean they’re compatible. We have the concept of “cognitive dissonance” for a reason. Scientists who are religious simply haven’t applied the tools of science to their religious beliefs.
Religion has to be compared to two things. For facts about the world, its assertions need to be compared to science - and here if falls quite short. For ethical questions it has to be compared to secular philosophy which deals with these things, unlike science.
Even philosophy has roots in the real world. If you claim torture is acceptable because the tortured don’t feel pain, that can be falsified. The trouble with religion is that its consideration of moral issues appeals to something that does not exist. Plus, I agree that it tends to assert things, since God supposedly wants them, without working through the reasoning behind them the way secular philosophy does.
Unfortunately, it tends to be the same approach that a lot of people use for naively discussing topics in the history of science.
Descartes wasn’t just “making shit up” in his hypotheses about the pineal gland, and if you think you can reduce centuries of the complex interplay between scientific and philosophical and theological speculations to such a crude dichotomy, you don’t really know what you’re talking about.
In the history of ideas, there is not a rigid binary division between “investigating something scientifically” and “making shit up”. In modern science you might be able to insist on such a distinction, at least in fields that are methodologically very rigorous. But such a binary division doesn’t make historical sense for the science of earlier periods.
No, religion has nothing at all to offer but baseless assertions, or outright falsehoods. It has no “techniques”, it just claims it does.
It’s much worse than plain old non-religious philosophy, for the simply reason that regular philosophy insists on adherence to logic and allows debate, while religion ignores logic and insists its claims be taken on faith.
And science can actually handle many of those “metaphysical questions” just fine, it’s just that many people don’t like the answers it gives. According to all the evidence gathered by science there are no souls, no afterlife, and no gods, nor is there room in the laws of physics for those things. But people don’t want to hear that so they claim those questions are “beyond science”, instead of accepting “no, there’s no reason to believe they exist” as the answer.
And as for questions like ethics, while science can’t objectively answer them it can at least provide objective evidence with which to think on the matter; religion can’t. Religion doesn’t provide meaningful answers to ethical questions; at best it makes yet more baseless assertions, and often it insists that ethical questions be decided based on outright falsehoods. “We need to convert people by the sword to save them from Hell”, “Let him suffer he’s being punished for something he did in a previous life”, “Kill them all, God will sort them out”.
But the second point makes the first one kind of meaningless. Certainly, you’re right that there is “no room in the laws of physics” for any hypothesized supernatural entity that somehow allegedly transcends the laws of physics, nor should there be. The laws of physics concern only rational analysis of empirical evidence of material phenomena.
But that restriction intrinsically implies that even if there were such truly supernatural entities, science wouldn’t find any evidence of them or be able to incorporate them meaningfully into its model of the natural world.
Trying to use science to determine whether any form of truly supernatural entity exists is kind of like looking for unicorns with a metal detector. The problem is not just that there aren’t any unicorns, but that even if there were any unicorns your equipment wouldn’t perceive them.
To assume that, just because science cannot find gods, religion can is a baseless assumption. What tools do you use to find unicorns and/or gods…and how do you test these tools to see if they are effective?
Sure. Myth-making. “Just-So Stories.” Fables.
These offer significant comfort to some people. That’s one of religion’s legitimate jobs.
Then they should label them as such. Doing anything other than that is a lie.
No; if there actually were gods and souls and so forth, there would be room in the laws of physics for them. If there actually were “supernatural entities”, there’s no reason to think that they would be any more “beyond science” than electromagnetism is.
And why should we assume that? Technology in the real world can’t detect the supernatural because there is no supernatural, not because the supernatural is inherently indetectable. The latter claim is a reaction to the consistent failure of the supernatural to produce any evidence of its existence.
That’s not a “legitimate job”, that’s taking advantage of people by deceiving them. Like a “psychic” conning people out of their money by claiming to be in contact with their dead relatives. The only real difference is that religion is old and established enough that most people aren’t willing to condemn it for doing the same sort of thing the psychic is doing.
It’s not an assumption I’m making.
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What tools do you use to find unicorns and/or gods…and how do you test these tools to see if they are effective?
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I think you’re still approaching this with an inapplicable “science” mindset. If there were any cognitive “tools” for “finding” supernatural beings/entities whose “effectiveness” could be “tested” in a rational, objective, empirical way, then their “findings” wouldn’t be supernatural.
Except that that completely contradicts the fundamental meaning of “supernatural”.
You seem to be thinking of the notion of “supernatural” as meaning no more than something like “super advanced” or “super obscure” or “super complicated”. I.e., if there were any kind of natural entities possessing properties that might seem magical to us nowadays because our scientific comprehension of them is imperfect, science would eventually be able to explain them scientifically. And you’re quite right, it would.
However, if there were any entities that were genuinely supernatural, science would never be able to detect or explain them.
It also means that no one could have any clue that these supernatural entities actually exist. They are indistinguishable from non-existent entities.
No, because we could always detect unicorns with other methods, such as looking at them. By saying that supernatural entities are beyond the capabilities of all science, you’re saying that it’s impossible to have any awareness of their existence.
The undetectable and the nonexistent look very much alike.