Religious mode and scientific mode

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
22

It makes sense to me, although in my head the analogy I use is inspired by David Duchovny’s character of Fox Mulder from the X-files. He has a poster with the quote “I want to believe”. That’s how my brain is divided. There’s the part the actually believes, and it believes in all the scientific stuff. Then there’s the part that wants to believe in the other stuff, but is unable to convince the part of my brain that actually believes.

OK, maybe the “I want to believe” part of my brain sometimes wins. I don’t always decide things based on a 100% scientifically rational basis. I’ve been known to occasionally make decisions based on wishful thinking.

23

That is what I mean. I do not mean that neuropsychology and the cognitive sciences are not valid; on the contrary.

24

The entire issue boils down to the one, worst word in the English language.

“Belief”.

Definitions of belief

noun
any cognitive content held as true
see more
noun
a vague idea in which some confidence is placed
“it strengthened my belief in his sincerity”

See the problem?

One word–OPPOSITE MEANINGS .

25

I don’t think so. At least, not how I’m trying to talk about it.

I’m talking about something more like a passion; or like a sense of essential connection that works whether belief in any or all attempts to translate it exists or not.

Sorry for rare responses to the thread I started — for me trying to say anything on this subject requires concentration (possibly inadequate attempts at translation going on inside my head as I write!) and I have other things also going on in my life that require concentration. And sometimes I need to let what I want to say percolate in the back of my head a while.

I don’t really see what this sermon has to do with the issue of understanding and having a strong sense of sacredness/holiness while recognizing in scientific mode that all particular expressions of it aren’t factual. You seem to me to be assuming that your audience accepts Christianity, and also maybe to be claiming that a two thousand year old story about someone else’s unreplicable claimed experience counts as scientific proof.

And I think everybody knows, or at least ought to, that a “pound”, or a kilo or whatever, is an arbitrary thing made up by humans, because we need such a thing to use in trade or recipes. We have to agree on it to be able to use it, but we could easily agree that the word “pound” means some other weight altogether; or to use something other than pounds for the same purpose.

-– maybe I do see a connection to that analogy, though I don’t know that it’s the one you were going for. In scientific mode, we know that “pound” or “kilo” or “ser” or “catty” or whatever are things we made up. Weight is something that we didn’t make up, but those particular expressions of it are certainly made up. They do something useful in human society, and sometimes do harmful things in human society; but that doesn’t mean we didn’t make them up; and it certainly doesn’t mean that one of them is “true” and that others are false.

In that fashion: humans are part of the universe. Many of us feel a strong sense of connection to whatever name we hang on that. But we understand the universe far more poorly than we understand human-scale weights. And we understand that sense of connection equally poorly. So, being what we are, we make up stories to try to explain the universe, and to try to explain the sense of connection.

The universe is real. And the sense of connection, for many but I think not all humans, is also real. But the stories aren’t real; not in scientific mode. They can be very useful, to individuals and to communities. They can also be very harmful. Often they’re both at once. But they’re not, in scientific mode, true.

I think a lot of the harm could be reduced if people stopped insisting that they’re true in scientific mode; partly because a lot of harm is done by people refusing to act on scientific knowledge because their religious story appears to disagree with it, and even more because of people insisting that because they think their story is True other’s stories must be False, and those others are therefore either essentially lesser or in a state of delusion they should be forced out of.

But I also think a lot of harm would be reduced if people functioning in, or thinking they’re functioning in, strictly scientific mode would recognize the force and importance of sacred places and sacred/holy connections.

I think that’s true, to an extent. They’re very often combined, and in many people are sensed as a whole. But it’s possible, and probably frequent, to have either one without the other.

Coming back to this: That’s interesting, the way we have different images for what I think is the same concept, or set of concepts. Yours reminds me of the cultures that have the self centered in the heart; as ours also sometimes does.

26

I’m with the concept quoted in the first post, some people have spirituality/religion, some have none. I have none. When I did believe in god, when I was a kid, it was only because everyone just assumed it was true (and being Jewish I never, ever, believed in Jesus.) When I found out about the accepted theory of when the Bible was written, not by Moses, I became an atheist that very minute with zero trauma.
My maternal grandfather was an atheist, though it was a word not expressed. My mother certainly was - she never set foot in a temple except when my brother and I were being bar mitzvahed. My father was involved, but only because he liked to run things, not to go to services.
I reject all known religions because I can model the world I’d expect if they were true, and that world is not what we see.
I accept that some people have the spiritual gene. That’s what drives the claims that we all know god deep in our heart, and that we don’t accept Jesus because we want to sin. That is of course, hogwash. And if I’m an atheist because I want to sin, I’ve really fallen behind on my sinning the past 55 years.

27

Man, I know, I know. All those wasted years while I’ve tried to lead a good life with my wife of 53 year without a single religious tenet or belief. Now I’m too old to do any of the classic sins. About the only major awful sin possible is to start a crypto or vote Republican.

28

I meant to reply to this. I was differentiating the two in the modern sense. Here’s a Wiki definition.

Historically, the words religious and spiritual have been used synonymously to describe all the various aspects of the concept of religion, but in contemporary usage spirituality has often become associated with the interior life of the individual, placing an emphasis upon the well-being of the “mind-body-spirit”, while religion refers to organizational or communal dimensions.

We need a word to distinguish wanting to believe in something larger without associating it with an existing religion. Spirituality seems to have become that word. As that article starts, “'Spiritual but not religious” (SBNR), also known as ‘spiritual but not affiliated’ (SBNA)…" I think that the separation is useful in a discussion like this even if it’s not a perfect hard line.

29

Ah. I think I see what you mean.

But I think it’s also possible to be religious but not spiritual — to believe in the truth of a particular religion (with or without believing in the literal truth of all of its details) without ever having that sense of spiritual connectedness, that real sense of holiness. I think that’s what @Voyager is describing of their childhood; but I think it also happens with adults.

30

It doesn’t directly, but there is an aspect of spirituality that includes holy/sacred (being set apart from the profane, or common) based on spiritual faith that can be confounded with rationality (including scientific thought). And, yes, I was assuming that my audience was Christian, because it was a sermon delivered to the Christian congregation I serve.

The point I was making was that the figure of Doubting Thomas was looking for rational proof of something that was rather to be understood from a spiritual perspective. Both Jesus’ words about faith and the author of the Gospel of John make that point as Thomas is redirected from rational proof to a spiritual understanding that results in a statement of faith. The illustration I gave of defining a pound was to show that even rational (i.e. scientific) thought boils down to the same origin that spirituality and holy/sacred comes from: I define X to be thus, and thus it shall be. I would not read into my mention of defining a pound any more that that.

A second underlying point I was making in my sermon was that the account of Jesus’ resurrection is best understood from a spiritual perspective, because that is how it was written. To try to understand it from a rational or scientific perspective is to miss what the author(s) were trying to convey. My religious education included the understanding that Judaic and Christian scripture was written as a theological interpretation of history and as a theological work in itself. To attempt to use scientific reasoning to validate spiritual writing, or to use spirituality to prove or disprove scientific reasoning indicates to me a misunderstanding the roles of science and spirituality in understanding ourselves and how we relate to the world we live in.

31

If you mean what I think you mean, then we’re in agreement about that.

32

My definitions:

Spiritual Experience – the subjective and impossible to describe experience of sensing “God’s presence”, or achieving “enlightened mind”, or whatever you want to call it. I agree with the OP that some people seem to have an innately greater capacity for and/or interest in such experiences.

Faith – the belief that the spiritual experience has valuable lessons to teach us and is not just a pleasant surge of dopamine. Unfortunately, this word is often used to mean “unthinking belief in the literal truth of religious dogma”, but I don’t know a better one to use here.

Religion – a system of practices, usually communal, designed to help people have a spiritual experience. (Not to deny the importance of the more sociological definitions)

Religious dogma – a metaphoric belief system which serves the purpose of religion. Can easily be mistaken for objective reality, with terrible results.

Science – a way of looking at the world which helps us see when our religious dogma has gone off the rails, but is not well suited to analyzing the spiritual experience itself.

33

This is a splendid illustration of the difference between the religious and scientific worldviews. From a scientific view, the first question about the resurrection is “did it happen?” The spiritual perspective is a bit orthogonal to this. Those of us who don’t think it happened can find a spiritual meaning to the story, but we can do that for the Iliad and Aesop’s fables also. If you do think it happened, the spiritual perspective might be important. Plenty of science writers talk about the quasi-spiritual impact of things like the size of the universe, but they are working from an evidenced view of it.
The NY Times, which I love, is annoying to me because in every review of books on atheism the writer only talks about the spiritual implications, and never discusses the root problem - can any religion demonstrate the existence of a particular god? That determines if we think we are talking about fiction or fact.

34

I have balanced science and religion as science asks how and why, while religion asks what does this mean, and what do I do with this knowledge? So, as we go through scripture and theology, our faith is shaped by answering the religious questions. I read scripture this way, with the how and why the Judaic and Christian bibles came into existence in the background. So, for the resurrection, the question to ask is “what does this mean to me and the world?” and I answer it here:

Does it matter how we define the resurrection, and then define the faith that justifies that definition? Or does it matter more that our faith gives us hope and a way to find peace in a broken community or nation? Or hope in the face of death? Where the facts of the world fail us, hope from faith in the resurrection sustains us.

Another quote from my sermon about this:

Thomas stands for us in this passage, asking what we ask naturally in our rational, technological, scientific time. Thomas struggles with what he just knows is impossible [Jesus coming back to life], falling into the hole of wanting to explain [rationally] how this resurrection happened. I sometimes start to fall into that hole myself when reading the miraculous healings, trying to figure out medically how it could happen, and I fail. John wants us to hear that we haven’t failed through Jesus’ words, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” John adds his voice in his postlude of, “But these are written so that you may come to believe” We don’t need to be present in the upper room to see with our own eyes what we are called to believe through faith. We rely on faith to claim that Jesus lives and we do not need to prove or justify that to anyone.

Proving the existence of God misses the point, that like defining a pound, it is done as a statement that requires no proof. It is where we (or I) begin, building on it to create a theology that is expressed through spirituality. It may look rational because it is carefully laid out to avoid internal contradictions, but it is still built on faith. To accept the existence of God is to take a leap of faith personally, and once that is done, building a theology can start. The facts of a theology or scriptural interpretation exist as faith statements of meaning, and I think that is where confusion with scientific facts happens, both to believers and non-believers.

35

I don’t think that’s a great analogy, because material objects do objectively have mass. It’s true that the exact definition of a pound is arbitrary, and no that actual object will ever weigh exactly a pound. But two, or any number of, independent observers can always agree on the weight of any object, within a reasonable degree of precision. In the area of theology, there is absolutely nothing at all that everyone can agree is obviously true. And arbitrarily assuming the existence of God doesn’t really get you anywhere useful, because then you need to define God’s characteristics, which can’t be logically extrapolated just from the assumed fact of God’s existence.

36

Well, no, obviously God’s existence can’t be demonstrated. But as we have been discussing in another thread, it is not the case that all texts can be adequately described as “fact” or “fiction”.

37

By that reasoning, measuring mass as the equivalent cubic centimeters of water is more (or less) superior than defining it as acceleration of 1 foot/second squared. It isn’t, because how we refer to mass (or weight) is arbitrary, and that was my point.

The first principle that God exists does not have to be the only first principle. God’s characteristics can also be first principles themselves until you have enough to extrapolate further. We have thousands of years of defining divine beings that we can include or reject as we build a definition of the Judeo-Christian God. We don’t have to re-invent the wheel for every question of existence throughout history.

38

I think a discussion of whether any god, or some particular God, exists in the scientific-mode sense of existence is somewhat sideways of the intent of this thread; which at least started off to be about the experience of having spiritual experiences while not believing that their subjects exist in scientific mode.

I think that’s a useful set of distinctions.

I think religion at least some of the time does more things than just helping people have a spiritual experience, though. I think it also provides interpretation for such experiences, and provides a set of rules for people to live by. And I think that for some people that last turns into the whole of the matter, and the spiritual experience may not be there at all.

And that may include some of the people who insist that spiritual experiences described by their religion must have happened in scientific mode. Belief in that sense may not be based on their having any spiritual experience; but it’s still belief.

39

Let me add that not all spiritual experiences involve anything usually understood as “God”.

40

If I were a Hebrew sitting at the foot of Mt. Sinai during the Exodus, I think the existence of God would be very well established. I agree that I don’t want to get into a debate about his existence, just different ways of looking at the problem.
I don’t think there is any reason God can’t be demonstrated in a scientific mode.
Ted Chiang, the author of the story that got made into the movie Arrival, has an interesting story about a world in which the story of the Bible matches scientific findings exactly.