Science=religion and the meaning of life

Great Debates
81

Ah, but I don’t believe in hope. Hope is merely the opposite of despair – one is the source of the other in a yin-yang fashion. Why hope when it is simpler just to believe?

I suppose in regards to God I am in denial. I think there is love, but I want no part of it. I burned out. The cares of this world have choked me. A Christ will return again, and throw it down, someday. I simply doubt man’s capacity for love and wisdom. There are so many false Christs in this world conversion is almost impossible. So what would be the point?

82

It may be simpler to believe, but in my humble opinion it is truer to hope. I daresay you likely do not desire my sympathy, but I would give you some of my security in love and hope for humanity if it were mine to give and yours to accept.

83

Math is not a science in that it is not based upon observation of the natural world; that is, even if there were no matter in the universe, two plus two would still be four (there just wouldn’t be anyone around to say so).

Math is a form of pure logic: its results are always correct because it is infinitely precise.

Science is a form of reason, that is, logic applied to observed facts, and therefore its results can be proven wrong by observation of facts that contradict the results.

84

Clarification.

Math is defined by its own results; science is not.

That is, if the mathematic process says that 0,9999… = 1, that’s all there is to it and we just have to accept it.

However, if scientific reason gives the result that a vacuum has no mass, and then we turn around and find a vacuum that does have mass, we have to accept the observed fact, not the concluded result.

Math is *self-*defined; science is *other-*defined.

85

Matt

Well, it was nice while it lasted. :slight_smile:

Gaudere, JMullaney

What are y’all talking about, please? (Yes, I’ve read it, but I don’t get it.)

86

I guess we were going over (metaphorically, at times):

Do you have to believe in the objective existence of Perfect Love to be perfectly loving, or loving at all? Will a lack of belief in the objective existence of Perfect Love necessarily impair one’s desire and ability to be perfectly loving, or loving at all? Could a belief in the objective existence of Perfect Love impair one’s desire to be perfectly loving? Could the objective existence of Perfect Love be only as effectual in guiding behavior as the concept of Perfect Love?

87

Hey. I’m back.

This thread has long since gone way over my head. Again, no background in classical philosophy is a major hurdle.

Love is. Just as life is. If you want to take it a step further, just as the universe is. Religion and science try to explain that “is.” (No, this doesn’t depend on what your definition of the word “is” is.)

Science does very well at observing that brain chemicals change when you are in love. It does well at explaining the citric acid cycle and how our cells live. These are observable phenomena. We exist, therefore there must be a logical answer to how we exist.

Note that there are no observable phenomena for why we exist. As said before, science can impose no absolute moral. When you insert a force that can explain the “why,” you have a religion. And it was evening, and it was morning, the sixth day. And the heaven and earth and all their host were created and made. And God looked upon his work which he had created and made and he hallowed it.

Again, to reiterate my above views : Everything operates on ground rules inherent within a system. Science has a set of rules which always limit it to observable phenomena. Religion does not. They are both systems, they both explain things.

Back to the meaning of life. The human brain implies a structure, function, or a meaning on all it observes. A cloud looks like a dog’s head. Science can not do so. The human brain is built to receive input, analyze it, and group it. These groupings are always dependent on the input. I tell people in science and medicine, spooky things happen when n=1 – people develop connective tissue disease with breast implants, vaccine reactions, etc. When n=1x10^6, these things disappear (another topic all together). But, the brain can’t dismiss those spooky events, and will always group the two powerful stimuli. Breast implants get grouped with CT disease. The same holds true with any phenomenon in life that can not be rapidly explained away :

  1. I am far from my home and I know no one here
  2. Oh look, it is someone I know well, how very strange.
    I see my best friend’s sister while on vacation in Israel - must be the work of God because no science can explain how we both ended up here.

Grand Unified Theories can never give us a visceral sense of connectivity as religion can. A GUT will never tell us why we exist. We look again for that why.

If we believe another system besides science exists, anything we can’t immediately dismiss using scientific/logical reasoning must fall outside of the science system, even if it is a spooky n=1 occurence. With the brain of a believer built to readily accept this idea, the work of God can be implied in all types of things. A believer can then see a structure in the universe which is not obvious to a non-believer (and even may not exist), and since he is operating with a religious system in place, is a structure which truly exists for the believer. This is the answer the brain strives for – the answer of why we are here.

Long, long, long.

88

Wumpus,

Basically you are right. I was glossing over some issues to shorten an overlong post. There are assumptions in doing science, but these assumptions are so basic to our nature, that they are only questioned by the most painstaking philosophers.

The first assumption: Phenomena exist. I use the word phenomena in a Knatian sense, to mean sense impressions. That renders unneccessary all talk of the “real world,” whatever that is. Science, and everyday life deal with the impressions that our senses absorb as if they are real, and why shouldn’t they? I mean you don’t walk in front of trucks or jump off buildings on the off chance that trucks do not exist or plummeting does not occur. Similarly, science is perfectly justified in assuming the existence of phenomena.

2: Phenomena are common. A bit trickier, but again we seem to use the same words for the same things. The sky is blue, fur is soft etc. even when interpretations of phenomena differ, as in, say, color blindness, explanations for the differences occur.

3: Phenomena are regular. That is the same set of events will lead to the same results. If I put a pot of water over fire, it will boil, eventually. If I have a given conserved quantity in an isolated system, the quantity will remain constant. Again, this is an assumption, but it is fundamental in our experience. We do not see cats suddenly become rabbits, Or galaxies suddenly start flapping their arms like cheerleaders. Even religious people, who take on faith that the miracles of the Bible are true, admit that these miracles are rare events with supernatural causes.

3’: the laws of science are the same as they always were. This allows us to discuss the big bang, the origin of the solar system, and the evolution of life on earth. This being the land of the free, one may doubt this, and many creationists fall back on this doubt when other weapons fail. But if you do doubt this, you are in danger of falling into a radical meaningless skepticism. As Bertrand Russell put it, "How do you know that the earth wasn’t created 5 minutes ago, along with all your memories of the past. I think I will maintain my beliefs.

Lbertarian,

I think we may be equivocating. I am using the word “science” to talk about the process of theory formation from empirical data I described above. (As Humpty Dumpty said, "When I use a word it means what I want it to mean, Niether more nor less.) Looked at in this light, math is not a science, as it does not rely on empirical data, does not form theories, and relies on a set of arbitrary assumptions and the laws of logic for its development. Euclidiean geometry is as valid now as it was 2500 years ago. Non-Euclidean geometry did not displace it, it merely showed that one of the assumptions of Euclid (the parallel postulate) was arbitrary, which was borne out by the impossibility of its proof. On the other hand, Even recent scientific theories are cast aside when better explanations arise. Who remembers phlogiston, Lamarkianism, or the Ether?

Edwino,

Please do not abandon this discussion merely because you “lack background.” I’m not a professional philosopher. I would be interested in what you, as a “specimen scientist” have to say. If there is any term I’m using that you don’t get, it is probably more to do with my clumsy usage than with any lack of knowledge or training on your part, so please ask me to clarify.

I am not quite certain what you are getting at with your “n=1” argument. I assume you are talking about probability, but I don’t know what the numbers refer to in your discussion of disease. Please explain further, if you have the time. Are you saying that belief in God is strengthened by improbable occurences? I don’t want to reply unless I am confident I understand your argument.

JM mullaney,

I’m afraid I don’t find your argument about angels convincing. Isn’t it possible that God sent angels to some people and not others? Calvin proposed the cruel argument that God arbitrarily picks out the individuals to be saved. On a gentler note, some Buddhists (I think; Buddhist posters, please correct me if I’m wrong) believe that salvation (enlightenment) is a goal we must work for, rather than a free gift from God. Of course the wheel of Karma gives us an infinite number of lifetimes to achieve this goal. Even some early christians believed that suffering and prayer were pre-requisits for salvation.

89

Yet every science that measures, quantifies, or groups uses the exact same set of arbitrary assumptions and the laws of logic to calculate and express its quantities, measures, and sets.

90

Well, I was under the impression that we evolved. Perhaps you mean “for what purpose” do we exist? But this immediately gets to a very individualistic answer lest we gloss over a lot.

I agree with your reasoning. But, if I have conducted an experiment and you have not, you can not dismiss my results off hand without repeating my experiment. The interpretation of results are always open to differing theories, perhaps entirely pedestrian ones.

If Gaudere can grok my meaning regarding God as a gestalt being generated by those who love (a corporation, if you will) even if she dismisses the abilities of such a gestalt, she will never-the-less admit to an aspect of “god”, pedestrain though that interpretation may be.

This reminds me of a section of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead:

I hope we can all agree I am being metaphorical with the use of this word. The problem lies that we can communicate words, and words have meaning only due to shared experience otherwise communication is impossible. So if there are those who can not concieve of love having never experienced it, then they essentially can not be saved.

True, true. A lot of Americans are essentially Calvanistic in their beliefs – Calvanism is essentially capitalism with a veil of “god” thrown over it. Pretty twisted IMHO.

Xtianity teaches the same thing (again I should point out, I’m going by the original text). I don’t think suffering is strictly required – this is a later Catholic teaching.

91

There are two types of people in the world, those who create dichotomies, and those who don’t.

Science and Religion are not quite the right polar opposites we are expecting. Academe and Religion might be closer, were it not for all those liberal arts, and the fuzzy stuff. Science is only a method. It has more in common (or opposition depending on your view) with faith than with religion. Religion is a very public face to faith, and is much entangled in every other public interaction that we find among people.

Most science never gets published. Most of it gets filed in a cabinet, and forgotten. Science is collecting and sorting, measuring and comparing. Most of it turns out to be wrong, and usually it never even gets mentioned. Even the stuff that gets published is chosen on the basis of a lot more complicated criteria than the hard numbers of mathematical analysis of the observations. However much we might wish that it were not so, there is real science behind such things as eugenics, and racial dimorphism. Why those sciences are different is not a matter of evidence or proof from the scientific point of view. Science is a tool, not a philosophy.

The method called science is somewhat confused with the social phenomenon of our times called Science. That Science is an authoritarian academic hierarchy established in Universities to control and allocate funding from governments and industry. Here the comparison with Religion is much more viable. Religion is the authoritarian hierarchy established in churches to control and allocate funding from the faithful. However, it should be mentioned that Religion in this sense is no more related to faith than is Science to the tool of learning.

Tools are useful things. So useful, in fact, that when you have one, it seems likely that it can solve all your problems. Everything looks like a nail, to a guy with a hammer. But the fact is that screws and rosebuds are not nails, and hitting them with hammers doesn’t accomplish what you want. The method of science cannot examine things that are not directly perceivable. What you cannot measure, you cannot examine with science. The universe of science is limited by its greatest strength, the requirement of demonstrable proof. What cannot be defined cannot be predicted. Definition is not a prerequisite for human experience, but it is a requirement for scientific understanding. Misapplying it to such things is simply bad science.

You cannot smell a tau neutrino, and please don’t homogenize my rosebud. The difference isn’t that science is wrong, or religion is right, it is that each must be applied in the area of human experience where it has relevance. No, thanks, I don’t want a milliliter of your quantified love, nor is your frenzied faith in the purity cotton candy sufficient to convince me to walk across your sugar bridge.

Tris

92

I think Gaudere’s post defining a religion as a full-fledged metaphysic, etc., was very much on target. And no, science is not a religion; it is a means of determining the truth, or as much of it as we can comprehend.

However, there are a lot of questions that are left to beg for themselves here.

First, I’d suggest that Lib.'s assertion that he is not religious is not a case of English vs. Old High Libbish, as various of us are fond of teasing Lib. for redefining, but quite a valid statement. JMullaney can back me on the assertion that “Most Catholics are not religious” – there is a quite specific usage, albeit contrary to the everyday connotation of the term, to mean “a person committed to an explicit Rule of Life,” such as a Benedictine monk, a nun, or a Franciscan Tertiary. Lib. does not see his personal commitment to God conceived as perfect Love and exemplified in Jesus Christ as the practice of a religion, and in some ways he is correct in saying so. Virtually every religion combines a fixed doxos – the metaphysic of which Gaudere spoke – with a fixed praxis – the activities which one performs as a member of that religion. For example, virtually every committed Christian would concur with most of the major positive tenets of Islam (as opposed to those restrictive items which serve to distinguish it from Judaism, Jainism, Christianity, etc.). But none of them fast during Ramadan, pray in the proper qiblah, etc. as all good Muslims do.

And for some people science is a religion by Gaudere’s definition. I would like to suggest that there is a dogmatic philosophy underlying the worldviews of many people spanning the (un)belief spectrum. When I first began posting here, I had mistaken David B.'s views for those of a person so subscribing. A strict Materialist is convinced, on extrarational grounds, that nothing in the world exists but that which we can observe through the medium of science, if not in our daily life. He therefore rejects the idea of a supernatural entity or entities altogether. One distinguishes this from the skeptical “soft” or pragmatic atheism of our moderators and many board members, whose challenge to us theists is, “Okay, if there is an immortal soul, a omnieverythingous God, angels, an actual Incarnation and/or Resurrection, show us proof that will stand up under skeptical analysis, and we’ll accept it.” Which is only fair.

I myself am a theist but not dogmatic. I have faith, which I define as complete personal trust, in the entity who manifested himself to me as the Christian God, and whom I am certain loves me (and whom I love). But I am not convinced of anybody’s particular theological explanations which underpin the metaphysic this presupposes. To cite my view more accurately, though I am fairly certain I’m off in jargonland to most people in doing so, I completely accept the economic Trinity but am dubious about the traditional dogmas of the structural Trinity.

In short, I am presupposing that one’s views regarding the question of a god fit on a four-segment set, one grid being yes/no as regards the question, “Is there a god, or gods?” and the other being “Is there a metaphysic that I accept on other than rational grounds which defines the world to me?” Lib. and I would be nondogmatic theists. David and Gaudere would be nondogmatic atheists. Isaac Asimov would be a dogmatic atheist, he being the best example I can give of how a reasonable man could adopt a metaphysic that requires the absence of a god. And people ranging from Desmond Tutu to John Paul II to Jerry Falwell to the Ayatollah Khomeini would be dogmatic theists.

93

I should’ve thought to post this before, but didn’t 'til just now. It’s a quote from the opening chapter of Stephen Jay Gould’s book, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life:

“Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts. Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings, and values – subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve. Similarly, while scientists must operate with ethical principles, some specific to their practice, the validity of these principles can never be inferred from the factual discoveries of science.”

94

Yes, this is true. Catholic “religious” take oaths of poverty – even though Jesus taught that oaths come from Satan, and even though, these days, priests especially get housing, a car, and a 20K a year salary quite contrary to the whole poverty thing. Protestants, like rats fleeing a sinking ship, have largely gotten rid of the male dominated hierarchy and satanic oaths of the Catholic church, but also almost all dominations got rid of the only thing that gave the Catholic church any appearance of validity – the commitment to poverty. Sic transit gloria munda. Anyway – if Lib is saying he is rejecting the whole scam of most established religions, I understand.

95

(Definition --> Politician: a person who will use any expedient means to bend the will of peaceful honest people to his own ends)

Scam seems to be a perfectly appropriate term. As I think of it, every discipline that becomes infested with politicians — religion, government, science, the arts — turns into a scam.

96

What I was trying to state by the n=1 thing is this :

I believe there is a valid scientific explanation for all worldly events. Science and probability usually tend to favor Occam’s Razor, but to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, when the probable is ruled out, all that is left is the improbable.

The human brain on the other hand, tends to group powerful stimuli together : A 25 year old woman presents 2 months post saline implant breast enlargement surgery with new onset arthritis, pleuritis, fever, nephritis, and skin rashes. She is ANA+ and RPR+ and a presumptive diagnosis of systemic lupus erythematosus is made. No amount of science so far can correlate the two, and therefore the lupus/implants correlation as is dismissed as coincidence. The powerful stimuli still get grouped by the mind.

The same holds true with “unexplainables” in the world which people hold as sacred events. Two long lost friends meet on the street when one is near suicide and the other has recently been “reborn.” Well, obviously God meant for these two to meet.

For me, science can explain all of these events. For a believer, however, the system is different. Given the ground rules of religion, there is an invisible scaffolding of the universe provided and maintained by God. Since nonobservable phenomena are nontestable (and we should not have the chutzpah to try and test God anyway), the invisible scaffold can not be dismissed. So, the believer’s viewpoint in this instance is every bit as valid as the one of the scientist/logician etc. This is of course a bit of pretzel logic. But I defy any scientist to propose a natural event which disproves religion, or even the Bible.

Again, I play devil’s advocate. I don’t actually believe most of this stuff. But, at least I have an answer for my divine creator on Judgement Day, if it should come to that. I would simply say that in doing science, I was in fact, only following his wishes. He gave us curiosity, and he gave us all the cool stuff at which to look, so he must have had it in mind that we would use the curiosity to look at the neat stuff. If we were indeed put here by God, our purpose here should not solely be to thank God for putting us here.

97

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by edwino *
**

I feel compelled to point out, in the off chance you would like this Judgement to be in your favor, that the Lord God’s wishes for you are that you be a follower of the teachings of Christ. But, oh well, see ya in hell.

98

Oh well, off topic but OK.

Point taken, jmullaney. But, if I remember the bits of Jewish mysticism we did in Sunday school at my synogogue, the Kabbalah talks about a judgement day with ascent to the heavenly throne (Merkabah), after the coming of the Moshiach (messiah). Can’t remember completely though. The Kabbalah talks about a lot of things, many of which were meant as satire. My learned knowledge of the Kabbalah is also being replaced by the subplots of Gravity’s Rainbow. Doesn’t help…

Doesn’t Islam also have a bit about heaven also?

Anyway, the Hell thing doesn’t bother me that much. Most of my friends will be there. Of course, I’d much rather Dante’s Inferno bit about Limbo with the righteous nonbelievers or whatever he called them. Seemed like a groovy bunch, what with Aristotle, Plato, Moses, Abraham, Einstein, Lenny Bruce, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Marx, Chairman Mao, etc. etc. No comment if those guys would be downstairs. Of course, Mendel, Newton, Gallileo, and Darwin would all be upstairs. But who cares about Newton, he died a virgin.

99

Triskademus,

I agree with you that religion and science are not polar opposites. They are merely different, and one can be a scientist and still believe in God, or in any religion. Look at Newton

Problems arise occasionlly when the findings of science question specific religious revelations. This happened with heliocentrism in the 16th and 17th centuries and is happening now with evolution. However, religion came to peace with heliocentism, and, I believe, will eventually come to peace with evolution.

The real dichotomy is between religion and philosophy. Religion begins with faith, philosophy begins with doubt. To be religious you must unquestioningly believe certain points of Dogma. To be a philosopher you must doubt everything, perhaps even your own existence. It is and was philosophers, not scientists, who have always been the most vocal critics of religion.

Edwino,

I think I hvae a better idea of what you mean. thanks. Humans do tend to see causation when there’s only coincidence. However, a rational religious person can place their faith on stronger grounds than strange events. I guess a lot of it has to do with how you choose to interpret reality. It seems to me that a truly religious person would see the hand of God in everything, even the most mudane occurences.

Libertarian,

I think we are equivocating. You are defining “science” much more broadly than I was, so perhaps by your definition math would be a science. BTW, I never said that science doesn’t rely on math. Science relies on lots of things, including math language technology observation etc.

JM Mullaney,

I knew you were speaking metaphorically, but your post seemed to imply that religion had to be evident to everyone, or absurd. I’m not sure if this is what you meant.

100

Hm… Here I thought that my religion was a religion. I guess it’s a philosophy.