Science makes testable claims about reproducibly observable phenomenon. Religion makes untestable claims about irreproducible events and entities. There is no overlap; reconciliation is the recognition of this. Just as religion should not claim that the earth resides on the back of giant turtle (a testable and false statement), science should not claim they can disprove the existence of an intangible, invisible unicorn (an untestable statement).
In my Christian opinion, the act of inquiry is mandated[
Here is the on-line Webster’s definition of religion:
Definition 4 might be what you are talking about, but I think it is clear that this sense of religion is by analogy with definition b(1). if your definition of religion has nothing to do with God and the supernatural, what word do you use to refer to beliefs around a god or gods? Perhaps the OP can tell us what he or she means by religion.
By your definition, science is a religion also, so there can be no conflict. Clearly your non-sked definition leaves something to be desired, and I suspect it is a minority definition.
Cults around god are definitely religions, and I agree with your remark on scale. That is more respect and power than a big difference. Perhaps a cult becomes a religion when they elect someone to a position of mundane power.
Buddhism seems a religion based on claims of the supernatural, and various forms treat the many Buddhas as kind of gods. Some forms do not. I think we’ve had debates here on whether Buddhism is a religion or not. In any case, we have an answer to the question for at least one form. The Dalai Lama said that if science contradicts Buddhism, Buddhism has to change. So there is no conflict in his version.
This was just an example. I can make the same argument about the law from the Aztec god about cutting the hearts out of prisoners. Plus, the Jewish God, five minutes after giving the commandment not to murder, ordered his people to slaughter a tribe that got in their way. He can hair-split pretty well, obviously.
And the real problem is that your definition of religion is so broad as to be useless. Certainly too broad to say anything meaningful about the question in the OP. I’m betting western religions are meant - not sure who cares whether Cargo Cultism and science can be reconciled.
Sure, which demonstrates the conflict. Science has a mechanism which can tell us that some hypothesis is provisionally correct, to a certain probability. We don’t see a sect of physics traditionalists denying relativity. Even when scientists refuse to change their minds (think Fred Hoyle) the next generation converges on the demonstrated view of the world. Since you have no way of testing how wet a baby should get when baptized, you can get schisms. Now, if the factions claimed that their method led to a better and more lawful life, say, we could take a population of baptized babies, follow them through life to see their criminal records, correct for socioeconomic factors, and come to some conclusion.
First of all, I’m not limiting my discussion to Judeo-Christian religions. I think I was pretty clear about talking on truth claims and claims of morality, not any particular ones.
You say truth is truth. How do you determine if something is true or not? Is it true because the Buddha said it? Is it true because it was handed down for 3,000 years? Is it true because a lot of people believe it? Is it true because you believe it? Is it a truth only when it is unfalsifiable?
I got married in the Ethical Culture Society in Philadelphia. It had a place which might have passed for a church, and we got married by a guy who could have passed for a minister. It might be officially classified as a religion for the tax break. But it was definitely not a religion, having absolutely no supernatural component.
Science comes in only when religions make claims about truth and facts. Science does not enter when the claim is that the universe is god, say. When religion says God flooded the world, then science can check this assertion. And if a particular religion says that we must obey the laws in some holy book or other because God flooded the world, science by refuting this can also refute the reason to obey the laws.
It is not a matter of agreeing, I’m just asking questions.
It seems you believe in a moral absolute. Any thoughts on how this came to be? Who does it apply to? Clearly, animals kill each other in cold blood all the time, since they evolved to have to. Is that wrong?
I do agree that morals and ethics are independent of beliefs, since there must be some rational justification for them beyond simple belief in them. But that is different from the existence of some Platonic moral template or set of rules, which can be accessed somehow.
Is your universal moral set dependent on us being human? Might some other intelligent species have some very different rules?
I agree that morals are absolute and that ethics aren’t, but I don’t agree that ethics are a form of etiquette. When I took Ethics my freshman year of college we didn’t discuss place settings once. We did discuss the same kinds of things that are covered by morals, but also gave the philosophical justification for them.
I don’t mind anthropomorphising - it’s useful. The computer programs I write “want” things all the time, because that’s a reasonably accurate way of describing and explaining the behavior, even if the cognitive/calulation processes involved are not mechanically similar to those in humans.
And I ‘get’ the Catholic angle. My position here defends itself by recognizing that there are different categories of religion and religious people (and different reactions from a single person on different subjects), and dividing them by type of reaction prior to responding to them.
The liberal bias thing only has merit if and when the liberal journalists actually allow liberal bias to pervert their unbiased reporting of the facts. But that’s another thread’s debate.
Science doesn’t report on the material, it reports on the observable, including the things we can observe through the third eye imbedded in the core of our mind (should such a thing exist). That being the case, if anyone can be aware of it in any way, it’s under the purview of science.
I will concede that things that are entirely outside of everyone’s ability to observe in any way directly or indirectly, are outside the reach of science.
And we likely all agree about lots of things; we just don’t bother to debate about them!
Few religions are wholly opposed to science - you don’t see many of they denying newtonian notions of gravity on general principle.
Of course, people don’t focus much on the bits where science and religion agree, any more than you and me debate about points of accord. The things that get the press are the arguments and the conflicts. So 99% agreement is all well and good but if that 1% is enough to bother people (contraception usage?), then public relations between science-types and the religion-types in question will go straight to the shitter.
And this is another example of playing up the problems more than the successes - science is certainly not wrong"far more often than they are right". Science is right, and genereates functional proof of the thing’s it’s right about, all the time. And then it sells those things to you. That computer screen you’re looking at? That’s science being right about a lot of things, or it wouldn’t work. Same thing for everyting from your car to your toaster.
The places where scientific concensus turns out to be wrong are pressworthy because they are unusual.
Note that I already stated that religion (generally speaking) has no problem with science if it doesn’t percieve there to be a conflict between the particular science in question and the religion in question. Given that Catholocism doesn’t mantain as a precept that spires are unconstructable, there’s no reason to be surprised that they accepted and used the science of spire construction.
If religion really was as anti-science as it itself* sometimes makes itself out to be, all religious people (and thus, all of humanity) would probably be dead by now, for ignoring things like the scientifically verified negative effects of walking off cliffs. And yes, that’s science; the division between ‘intituive’ verified knowledge that everyone knows, and ‘unintuitive’ verified knowledge that few people know (aka science), is entirely imaginary.
Okay, as it’s members themselves do, you antianthromorphosization pedant.
What if science showed beyond a reasonable doubt that human “religious experiences” are attributable to specific neurochemical reactions?
Religion (or rather, specific religions) make lots of testable claims about reproducibly observable phenomenon, particularly if you count indirect observation, which science habitually does. It’s the whole source of the conflicts under discussion.
To say that religion doesn’t do this smells of True Scotsmanning to me.
That’s only true from the viewpoint of someone trying to defend religion, who therefore doesn’t want to hear the verdict of science on the matter; “there’s no evidence for gods of any kind.” To someone who is more interested in being right, that’s very useful. And science isn’t going to ever have much more to say on the matter, for the simple reason that there’s nothing there for science to discover. The fact that science has little to say about the nature of Sauron doesn’t mean that Sauron is beyond science; it is because he’s fictional. Just like religion.
Yes, there is. Religion is based on faith; science is a rational process based on evidence. The very thought processes involved in doing science are hostile to religion, which is why believers tend to be inferior scientists even with the human tendency to compartmentalize.
Oh, yes it does. You are engaging in revisionism. Religion has been driven back and back in the claims it makes about the world by science, to the point it now tends to restrict itself to nonexistent things that science can’t study and disprove, and to giving people orders. Rather than admit that, you are claiming that making claims about such things and giving people “values” was the point of religion all along.
Your definition of religion is a defensive one; one evolved by religion in its attempt to defend itself against science. You are basically the equivalent of someone in the last fortress under seige of a once vast empire claiming that the fortress is and always was the entire empire.
As long as it isn’t actual truth; something religion is hostile to since any attempt to discover truth goes against faith. Faith is the central defining feature of religion. That’s the difference between philosophy and religion; not that religion teaches values, philosophy can do that. It’s that a philosophy is based on axioms that it takes as assumptions, and admits that they are assumptions instead as asserting them as true in an act of faith.
I know. I just figured I’d throw that in there in case anybody felt like arguing with me.
Animals do not have the same amount of intelligence we do and do not have the concept of morals, values, ethics, and so on. They’re primarily driven by instinct, emotion, and conditioning, and rarely, if ever, use reason and logic in their decisions, therefore, morality does not apply to animals.
As to where morality came from, where did the rules of mathematics come from?
“My” moral set? Also, I believe in both absolute morals, and relative morals. Sadly, I’m too lazy to get into a discussion about what constitutes which. But to answer your question, I believe that morality applies to any being with a minimum of our (human) intelligence and sentience (or sapience, I guess is technically the correct term).
There’s a famous personality who I use to like, but now can’t stand, but when I did like him he said something to the effect of “Morality stays the same, it’s our understanding of it that changes.” I personally believe that.
The rules of math are made-up. They happen to form an extremely self-consident model from which can be deduced a huge number of useful extrapolations, many of which can be usefully (if not perfectly accurately) analogized to reality, but it’s all still an abstract construct. In terms of situational vs. objective morality it would be considered only situationally true - however, once you accept its premises (which is prerequisite and implied the moment you start doing math) the extrapolations become absolute truth, in that context.
Numbers don’t really exist? There is no such thing a one item, or two, or more? Adding a single item to a single item really doesn’t leave you with two items? It’s all just an illusion? Wow, that’s a new one on me.
“One item” exists. “One” doesn’t. I’m aware that the distinction can be a little subtle.
And reality only matches up to math if you’re in situations where the reality happens to match up with the math. Which it does rather a lot, which makes math so handy, but sometimes it doesn’t work. For example, if you add one single puddle to one single puddle you just get one single bigger puddle.
We use 1+1=2 because that is the most useful system in our day to day life. Add a cloud to another cloud, and you have one cloud not two; but we normally aren’t concerned with the numbers of clouds, we are concerned with the number of coins or the number of tons in a load. In other words, it is mathematics that is being matched to reality, not the other way around. There’s a huge amount of mathematics that has no neat physical counterpart like 1 rock + 1 rock = 2 rocks. Which we therefore don’t use to describe the behavior of objects.
Yes, the word “one” is part of a made up language. But it describes something that actually exists.
Yes, I’m aware that certain items absorb each other. However, I figured that it was implied that I was limiting my example to solid items that don’t merge together.
But if morality is an inherent property of the universe, why should intelligence have anything to do with it? If morals are derived by humans, based on reason (and some genetically imprinted sense of morality) then intelligence does count.
Your moral set in the sense of the absolute morals you believe in, not morals you made up.
As for universal morals, consider this. Not killing our babies is pretty basic right? Some sociopaths do it, but I think not killing an innocent baby, especially ours, would fall into your absolute moral set.
But what about a species who produced big litters, from a period in their evolutionary history when their children were subject to major predation. Say they became more intelligent, and were able to severely reduce the level of predation. But at this point they became severely overpopulated, and subpopulations not doing anything died out from hunger. One isolated population developed the habit of selecting the most fit couple of children from the litter and killing the rest. This happened long enough in the past to be engrained in their genes, because tribes backsliding soon died of starvation as they outran their food supply. They’d find our single children, two at most, perfectly moral, but they’d be deeply offended that the Octamom let all her children survive.
How would they fit into your absolute morality? As for cold-blooded murder, it was the rule more than the exception through most of our history. It seems more plausible that our rejection of it today is more a matter of more sophisticated ethical reasoning than a sudden connection to some font of morals.
I think maybe there should be a different thread if this debate continues. This thread is supposed to be about reconciling science and religion, and I seem to be in a debate about morality.
The notion of an “item” is a convenient abstraction we use to speak of particular arrangements of matter, however there is nothing essential about it.
Consider “one chair”. If I take a saw and cut an eighth of an inch off the bottom of all four legs, I still have “one chair” even though I’ve subtracted something from it. The chair as a fixed solid object that I can perform mathematical operations on is a theoretical construct that is well-behaved only under a particular limited set of circumstances.
My position here defends itself by recognizing that there are different categories of religion and religious people (and different reactions from a single person on different subjects), and dividing them by type of reaction prior to responding to them.
