Philosophy, science and religion and their current disagreements

Great Debates
1

I’m upset at the anti-spiritual / religious attitude taken by many Scientists today. You only have to open New Scientist to read how some bit of research or other has put paid to the existence of God. Now maybe this isn’t representative of the Scientific community as a whole, but I detect a similar tone throughout the media.

The fact is that there is no evidence that has ever been produced that disproves the existence of God beyond all reasonable doubt, or casts any defensible aspersions on that same theistic proposition.

IMHO quite the converse is true; with every bit of new Scientific research I see greater evidence of the underlying logic of nature. Who could argue that logic is a feature of anything but mind?

Scientific attitudes just now attack a literal interpretation of scripture (with respect to creationism) but is in danger of attacking any kind of faith given license. This is something I find quite worrying the more I see.

In actual fact the modern monotheist is forced to defend his faith not because of the content of modern Scientific research (which can easily be reconciled with a philosophically monotheistic view), but from the attacking spirit in which it is presented.

I think its the role of Philosophy here to reconcile these views as it has the advantage of not being biased by a subordination to industry like Science, or the need to validate scripture in its arguments like Religion.

2

Agreed. One cannot prove the non-existence of any entity if it is not necessarily observable.

I disagree. The existence of Zeus, garden faeries, Santa Claus or abducting aliens have never been disproven. However, I contend that defensible aspersions have been cast upon these propositions which furthermore apply equally well to any other supernatural entity.

Anyone who thinks anthropomorphism is quaintly myopic.

Are you not attacking science’s “attitude” yourself, prompting me to adopt a defensive stance? Come, let us all take our knocks and not succumb to paranoia.

Science tries to present a natural explanation for the universe and everything in it. Outside the natural (the supernatural) is outwith the scope of science. Having read all the literature, everyone is free to move the needle on their belief-o-meter accordingly. There need be no conflict.

3

it seems to me that explaining nature logically ought to yield a logical view of nature. i don’t see how this lends one to the view that it is necessarily designed by a conscious anthropomorphic deity.

much of current religious mythology is being explained away by more natural and feasible explanations. i guess that’s what you mean by saying science is engaging in an “attack on literal interpretation of scripture.” but consider how we now believe ancient greek, and egyptian, and roman, etc., pantheons to be more than slightly absurd. this is because all their attributes have been explained by more parsimonious means. i assume a worshipper of athena would probably be upset by that news.

but just because the scripture is being shown to be less and less realistic in light of reality every day doesn’t mean the goal of science is to attack religion.

having said all that, i don’t feel that belief in a single creator is necessarily at odds with science. rather, the mythology behind certain presumed creators is being dispelled. it is the goal of science to dispel myth. i see no malice there. and essentially, as SentientMeat said, religion just isn’t part of the scope of science.

4

SentientMeat:

I have to take offence to the term “supernatural”. If God exists s/he is as much as a part of nature as not.

Perhaps you would think twice about applying your defensible aspersions if you took that into account.

Anthropomorphosism? Quaintly myopic? Why naturally, but who is being antropomorphic?

Ramanujan:

I’m certainly in agreement with what you’re saying, except:

I never said it was, but i’ve yet to see logic without mind.

5

The “classical” (Christian or otherwise) monotheistic view posits the existence of both a mystical entity called the soul, and, a mystical force called free will.

Science has not been able to identify the location nor the nature of either. Indeed, it seems science can get on perfectly well without either. There are no questions of science for which the answer is “we must have free will”, or, “we must have a soul”.

Same goes for the notion of a god itself – what question is it that science could ask for which the answer is “there exists a god”?

Do you get that? What is the explanatory power of the notion of a god? If the answer is none, then it isn’t science – you may see this as a conceit of science, but it’s just definitional.

6

You wouldn’t happen to have a link to any of these New Scientist articles, would you? I’m interested in how they’ve disproved God.

7

I cannot see the point in dwelling on the differences between scientific and Christian (since I assume Christianity is the religion in question) cosmogonies. It seems to be an impoverished viewpoint that gets hung up on a few chapters in Genesis, and can’t move on. Does the age of the earth have an impact on the validity of the parable of the prodigal son? Does evolution negate the ten commandments?

There is no solace in science, and most everybody knows it. Your religion, and everybody else’s, is safe.

8

That may well be, but what you see in nature is not “logic”, but “order” (or, at least, a perception of what we deem to be “order”). And we use logic to discern or decipher that order. That, however, does not in any way necessitate that said order was arrived at through logic. The order of nature can be explained by completely non-intelligent mechanisms.

9

or, perhaps, by intelligent but completely natural means. we look at the chaotic nature of, well, nature, and try to make some sense out of it. we are in fact searching for order, trying to put things in order, and so what we find will likely be pretty well-ordered.

10

Why one god? Why not three gods? Why not infinite gods?

Is modern monotheism more prone to inspiring faith than ancient polytheistic religions? Or is it just that as we learned more of the world we saw that they were clearly stories intended to promote order. Did the people back then not believe just as strongly as people today in their belief system? Didn’t they have visions and religious experiences involving their gods which they pointed at to support their claims?

And if there is a god or multiple deities, how did it come to be? Oh, god has always been, or he was created from nothing. It simply requires a leap of faith right? Well then, how much more of a leap of faith would it be to remove the human anthropomorphic tendencies from it and just say the universe itself has always been or it was created from nothing?

You can’t argue for the case of one god by saying there is no evidence against it. There is no evidence that Zeus doesn’t exist either, so I propose that Zeus and the Olympian gods exist. There is plenty of evidence that the precepts behind those gods was just based on folk tales and stories, sure. Can you not say the same for any religion?

11

It would be a literally impossible leap of faith to believe the universe was created from nothing. There has never been “nothing”, whether a deity exists or not.

12

Scientists are supposed to provide us with accurate and unbiased descriptions of the workings of the universe, free from influence of ideology, Christian or otherwise. Nor should they have to applogize for it.

13

Of course, “nothing” is a fairly nebulous term in this case. But literally impossible leap of faith? That seems like an oxymoron to me. A leap of faith is to discard lack of knowledge or even contradictory knowledge and believe in something else based on “feelings”. Impossibilities are facets of knowledge. So if I say I feel that the universe was created from nothing, you can’t attack it. Its a leap of faith to say that nothing can be defined.

For example, how bout I say nothingness was the state or lack thereof before the universe as we know it (14 billion years or so) was around.

I digress though, my main point here is that spirituality is anthropomorphic, lending itself against the theory of inherent ineffability. Any of the major religions now or in the past showcase this clearly. There is no reason why it should be anthropomorphic (i.e. deifying the creation as a conscious action of a being without source) over anything else (i.e. the universe is simply without source) though.

14

First, you need to define your God in such a way that it can be disproved. Currently, the orthodox Christian description of YHWH is not falsifible, thus you are just not making any sense at all.

What is this logic you speak of? Where is the logic for the Ebola virus, say?

Why? Science is necessarily based on naturalism, while religions are based on things supernatural. They are fundamentally in conflict.

How is science attacking Judeo-Christianity in general, except to dispel myths and misunderstandings the latter has been spreading?

15

Well you can actually say anything you want and consider it a leap of faith, but there are some things that are so completely impossible that it is ridiculous to ignore the facts. Kind of like saying that you believe you can hold your breath for 3 hours. We don’t need to hold you under wanter for 3 hours to disprove it.

You can say it, but it won’t be true.

If G-d created everything out of supposed “nothingness”, well there wasn’t really total nothingness anyway, because there was G-d. If there is no G-d, there had to be “something” to get things started. The First Law of Thermodynamics makes anything else kind of like you holding your breath for 3 hours.

As for the OP, I guess I would have to see examples of these attacks or aspersions. It doesn’t seem particularly wrong to me, that science up to this point denies any evidence of G-d’s existence. There is none. Religion can’t prove him either. I believe in G-d and I can’t prove anything. I would actually be more concerned if science made any special allowances or qualifications for G-d’s existence. That’s not science.

16

Interesting hypothesis. Pray, which of the four fundamental forces is God affected by? Does God curve spacetime? Does God have a complete lifecycle, like a butterfly, or an incomplete one like a praying mantis? What is God’s pH?

Come now, it is absurd to propose that God is a natural phenomenon.

Consider two explanations for why heavy objects fall to Earth:
i) Under Newton’s law of universal gravitation, two bodies will experience a mutually attractive force equal to the product of their masses divided by the square of their separation, and will accelerate towards each other at a rate inversely proportional to their mass.
ii) An angry sky god pushes things away from him.

I contend that one of these is a natural explanation, while the other is supernatural in essence. Do you consider them both to be natural?

Basic OR, AND, NOT and NOR processes occur all over the natural world: even the action of a lowly amoeba seeking less acidic/alkaline conditions can be summarised logically as
if (pH<6 OR pH>8) then move flagellae
else rest

As Finch suggested, perhaps the word you are looking for is order. Note that Earth is effectively an “oasis of order” paid for by a massive increase in disorder elsewhere in eg. the sun, and you therefore definitely do see more order on Earth than elsewhere.

P.S. to sybil: There was never a “state of nothingness” because there was no “before the universe”. The universe has always existed.

17

Logic, order, whatever. Minds create explanations for other minds. This has nothing to do with a god’s existence.

18

The Universe behaves in a “logical” manner (IOW, consitant with it’s own laws of nature). That does not mean that some old man with a beard in heaven drafted out a blueprint of the universe and set it in in motion.

Since the universe is logical, it is MORE likely to disprove the existance of God (as defined as a sentient, omnipontent being). If we continued to witness phenomenon that acted counter what could be explained by the laws of nature, that would be evidence of some sort of (presumably) divine intervention. Ancient people called these events “miracles”. Obviously, we know a lot more about how nature works so we witness far fewer miracles.

Science can only explain what exists in nature. It falls short when trying to explain “why”. That’s where religeon and philosophy come in.

It is as foolish to use religeon to explain how nature works as it is to use science as a moral compass.

19

Just to clarify: before the universe’s initial point is a concept that’s absurd. It’s like “north of the north pole”. No such beast exists.

Nothing, however, does exist in the form of the spatial vacuum. We think that space, in the empty universe (Milne Universe) has a definite physical property. Contrast that with the anything less than t=0 when there was no “spacetime”. That’s not really “nothing”. It’s “not even nothing”.

That said, there are cyclic models, ekpyrotic models, etc. which deal with the issues of how a self-consistent universe that has an ab initio point in space time could come to exist. This basically puts a rigorous “naturalistic” set of models on the table that are wholly without the need for theistic interpretation. Scientists are, on the whole, used to looking and seeing: that is, they’re used to believing in things for which there is scientific evidence. As it is, there isn’t scientific evidence one way or the other for God and the interpretative spin that is put on scientific discoveries by theists are basically as untestable from the get-go.

History seems to lend itself to comparisons. When Deism was first proposed as a solution to the discoveries of physics that made a supernatural deity obsolete in terms of most natural phenomenon (God was no longer required for rain or lightning or earthquakes, etc.), it was done in such a way as to preserve a non-obseverable nature to theism. This allowed for “practical atheism” of the scientist which didn’t have to worry about such things as God coming round and totally messing up experiments. One of the fundamental assumptions (that is, by the way, tested frequently) in science is that physical laws do not change depending upon time or place: there is a universality to them. If that’s the case, then “God” is not allowed to violate them which basically puts a damper on any omnipotence features you’d like to apply to her. That’s what made Deism clever because it offered God a way out of being confined by natural laws. God could have CREATED said laws and then sat back and watched it all unfold. A little neat bit of metaphysics, if you ask me.

So that, I think, is the answer to the OP. The reason there is a sort of atheism in the scientific community is because, in the practical application of science, atheism is what is used to actually do the work of science.

The thing is, there is a whole realm of unknowable things (metaphysics) which science doesn’t touch on. That’s the origin of theistic scientists. Fact is, a lot of scientists have their blinders on and don’t care about the metaphysics of situations. Those that do worry about such things (“those that think deep thoughts” as Freeman Dyson would say), often find themselves in the unfortunate position of treading on the toes of people who have spent their whole lives working out (maybe not rigorously) the ways metaphysics can work.

The dialog is not over, but as science becomes more and more descriptive, there will continue to be people who just don’t care about the things that are “unknowable”. They’ll stick to the solvable problems and leave the rest up to others.