Science v. Religion

[QUOTE]

Thank you I learned something. Was it GAlileo who concieved of flight long before the Wright brothers and Kitty Hawk?

I see. Someone would have to concieve of the existance of this unseen force before there would be any need to invent a solar cell. Like radio waves or our TV signal.

I agree with you on this point. In fact , we are compelled to believe something, and those beliefs reflect in our choices.

That particular belief doesn’t make the world better. It is negative energy.
ISn’t science responsible for global warming? One thing science has done is to help dispell some of the religous myths. I see the search for truth in science and spiritual as parallel. Different labs. Both have created monsters.
If God is not then everything else is not as well since God is the unseen force that binds everything together. {just a theory}
If God is then we cannot make things better while denying that truth.

And yet these spiritual scientists insist it was God. Gandhi actually tells of hearing the voice of God. {That crazy bastard} If a scientist tells me of the results of his experiment how do I verify or negate those findings?

Here again I agree to a point. I believe truth , scientific and spiritual, logic and reason are completely compatible. the discovery of truth hasn’t progressed as much as our egos would like to think. I too am frustrated by those who claim some commitment to the truth, and then reufse to acknowledge the evidence before them and continue to embrace tradition and myth.
it is serving the search for truth to toss out certain concepts of God but not every concept of God. Do we look at the world and say. Hooray for science, it certainly has made things a lot better? I believe the search for truth on both fronts is imperative.

Cute. An Essene cite for nonbiased intellectual reference.

Very little controversy remains over the Tel Dan due chiefly to the work of actual experts in archeology and language, like George Athas, who did his doctoral dissertation on the Tel Dan. The find is authentic. The only controversy that remains is over whether the reference in question is to an established or fledgling kingdom. As Athas writes: “I interpret all this as saying that we haven’t found David’s corpse, but we’ve found his fingerprint.” He dates the find to around 795 BC.

No one has said that this is conclusive proof of the Davidic Empire, but merely that it contradicts the categorical assertion that there is zero evidence of it. The prior sentence is the sort of thing that seems to fly over your head, so I recommend you reread it several times.

[QUOTE=cosmosdan]

No, take penicillin. Alexander Fleming did not conceive of what the mold was secreting, but instead had to find how to harness it. He did so without haveing envisioned what it result in.

You perform the same experiment and see if the same things happen.

Hooray for science!

I did not say no evidence for the existence of David - I am aware of that discovery. However that is much different from the great empire that I learned about in Hebrew School. Though the artifact does not prove David’s existence, I think that there being a real king named David is the most likely case. However, he did not rule both Judea and Israel.

If you wish to call a few villages an empire, however, I stand corrected.

I think that we can be reasonable men and meet somewhere in the middle. The data may interpreted either conservatively (as in your case) or liberally (as in my case), but it is neither the case that the kingdom (which, by the way is the Biblical term) has been proved to exist, nor that there is no evidence of any kingdom.

[QUOTE=cosmosdan]

You’re probably thinking of Leonardo da Vinci. But even the myth of Icarus conceived of flight.
Figuring out how to do it is the tough part, and in Leonardo’s time the technology was probably not up to it.

Right. But the conception of this can be done mathematically. I’m really, really bad about EM theory, but Maxwell came up with his equations before there was radio or TV. We can see light, we can understand about the frequency of light, so conceiving of “light” at other frequencies is not too hard.

Science and its application to technology. All we do has consequences. We invent cars that eliminate the horse poop problem, and we get a pollution problem. I think most people agree we are better off than we were 1,000 years ago, in terms of quality of life, length of life, etc., but we have to keep inventing to counteract the side effects. Keeps all of us engineers employed, at least.

And if God is not and everything is, your theory is falsified. So we’re back to figuring out if God is or is not.

For a scientific experiment, the answer is reproducibility. A paper describing the experiment should have enough detail so that someone else can rerun the experiment to see if they get the same results, and perhaps check for errors. Now, 99% of published papers are not significant enough for anyone to bother doing this. Consider cold fusion. They published enough of a description of their work so others could reproduce it, and discover that the effect Pons and Fleischman saw came from not stirring.

Several theists on SDMB report direct interaction with God. This of course can’t be reproduced in the same way as a cold fusion experiment, but if this was a real interaction, we can expect several things. First, their reports of god should match in some way. If one person says God says thou shalt do X, and another says God shalt not do X, then at least one is wrong. But how can we tell? Isn’t it more likely that both are wrong.

The other thing we might expect is that God will tell something the person or people in general do not know. I ask those who claim to be in contact with god to ask if P = NP (a major open question in the complexity of algorithms) and give either a counterexample or proof. I got this idea from Carl Sagan, who wondered why those who claimed to be in contact with space aliens never had anything scientifically interesting and verifiable to report. However, all I get is that God says love thy neighbor, which I can pick up from a fortune cookie. So, while I don’t doubt that those who talk to god have something going on in their heads (and are not nuts) I fail to see any evidence for a god outside their subjective experience.

Well, I do! Especially when medical science does things like save my young daughter from dying of fever or dehydration, or replacing the broken shoulder and hip of my mother-in-law so she can walk and not be confined to a wheelchair. The search for truth on the spirtual front is not going too well, as far as I can tell. Are those who are religious today more tolerant than, say, Alexander the Great? Have we made any progress at all in spirituality? I don’t begrudge the spiritual, but the Goddess never cured any plagues, never made glasses so I can see, and never helped my allergies. As for me, I get more pleasure out of a well written sentence, a discovery of how something works, or my kids than I did from any prayer I ever said.

I’ll go further than that. Since there is evidence that that region was populated, and that I would assume it was a kingdom, and that there is no reason to believe David was not a king at the time, I fully accept that there was a Davidic kingdom. The extent of it is the only issue. Since Judah already had its mythical founder, there was no reason for them to invent one. There was plenty of reason for slightly overstating his power - my ancestors were somewhat on the braggart side, I must admit. :slight_smile:

BTW, because of my name IRL, David was always my favorite Biblical character. I believed in the empire long after I became an atheist, and finding that it probably didn’t exist was more disturbing to me than deciding that God probably doesn’t exist.

Okay, I can stand beside you at that place. :slight_smile: Just a smidgeon of mumbling and grumbling, but nothing that a mint julep won’t cure. :smiley:

It is, however, interesting that “David,” which means, effectively, “beloved,” is theorized by some scholars to have been his throne name, and an epithet for later kings, generally as “ben David” in the same sense as “ben Adam,” “son of man,” is used. By this theory his actual given name would be Elhanan, who is mentioned in passing as having been the slayer of Goliath in Samuel a few chapters after David is noted as having done it, referred to “backwards” by his throne name in the same way as the “Berties” who became Edward VII and George VI are usually referenced by those names in modern histories even prior to ascending the throne and not as “Prince Albert,” which is what their contemporaries would have known them as.

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Da Vinci, thank you.

Did these things exist before the matmatical equation made them useable?
Isn’t science just the discovery of details about what has always been there?

Agreed. As well as the things we choose not to do.

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Probably a good subject for a seperate thread. Is the pollution problem an improvement over the horse poop problem? Does science and its application improve quality of life. It’s debatable.

Or perhaps the question of whether continued seeking in this area is worthwhile.

Perhaps. I have tried to find the common thread in these encounters and consider the influence of the individuals. What is consistently present. What varies? Like energy and different conductors. How do you gauge the purity of a substance when you’ve only seen it poured through different filters?

Funny, I thought thats exactly what God has been doing and in order of priority.
Perhaps when we do actually Love thy neighbor" we will be told something else.

And it was medical science that was able to revive my mother from her coma so that she could linger on in pain for a while longer. There is good and bad in how and when our medical advances are applied. More good? Yes. Since there is inconsistancy, which seems to be important to science, we might consider that we are missing something.

Again it comes down to how the world really is and how important is that discovery. You are sadly true about intolerance on the religous front. Religion may or may not contain the search for truth. Claiming to be a scientist doesn’t make you one if you are consistently unscientific. However,nothing prevents you from continuing to claim to be a sceientist.

Medicine, in my opinion, is half a hair away from being a pseudoscience in the Popperian sense. Drugs, as I understand it, are put together pretty much in the same manner that perfumes are concocted (or at least used to be, until Luca Turin advanced his olfactory theory) — basically, let’s mix up some of this stuff and see if it works. It’s scientific in a sense, I suppose. I mean they do test it, so that puts it a step ahead of astrology. And the doctoring side of medicine isn’t that much further along than the drug side. They more or less stumble onto discoveries, but have no real underpinning theories that assist them in making advances. I’m not blaming them per se. It can’t be all their fault. There are a lot of variables and whatnot. So they end up sounding more like meteorologists than doctors when they talk to patients about their health. You have a 20% chance of developing diabetes and a 40% chance of improvement if you do this, but a 70% chance if you do this more expensive thing, and at any rate, a 2% chance of dying or causing my malpractice premiums to increase. Yes, yes, I know, doctors study a ton of biology, anatomy, and other pertinent sciences. And although it might not sound like it, I do respect them for what they do. But they have a long way to go before they have a genuine and falsifiable science. That’s my opinion, anyway.

Lib, you know I love you. And I know you explicitly said it’s you opinion. Still . . .

Why do you think this? I will accept that’s been the case with some drugs, but I can’t think it’s all of them, or even most.

Um, huh? You know there’s a load of basic research going on in medicine, right?

Doctors are not scientists, true. They’re physicians. But are you really of the opinion that there are no scientific underpinnings in what they do?

This belongs in IMHO, if even there as it is nothing but ignorance. You need to read a book on pharmacology or two instead of just making stuff up out of thin air.

I love you too, Andros. :slight_smile: And I tried to be very clear about what I meant. I didn’t say there are no scientific underpinnings, but that there are no real underpinning theories — nothing that physics’ gravity, or biology’s evolution. I also made it clear that what I said was my understanding only. I am certainly open to being corrected. But on preview, I see that Epithemus is going the “go read a book” route. When I do that on philosophical matters, I’m told I am unreasonable. Perhaps I am a different kind of human being than he, meriting a different set of standards and expectations.

I think the reason why some people are able to see medicine as other than a science is that they saw through bone. They open chest cavities. They don’t sit in laboratories look at diffrent test tubes. They do not know what the reaction will be to the above, since each peson is diffrent, and so, thoise who here them at work, saying, “I can only hope it works” might draw the conclusion that it is more guess work then science.

Not that I believe that. I am just saying how someone could draw that conclusion.

Not by me you don’t. If I want to talk about philosphy and you tell me to read a book on the subject, you would be in the right. I have had Zero philosphy courses, and the sum of my knowledge is due to you on this message board. Feel good about that. :smiley: So no, I don’t merit different standards.

There are many more sciences involved in pharmaceutical development and research. Chemistry, Physiology, neurology. All of them have “theories” attached, they just aren’t well known because they aren’t sexy or controversial. Cell theory for starters, and they certainly don’t just throw a bunch of chemicals together and inject it into a rat to see what happens. There is a lot of theoretical research done before the physical research is performed.

Disclaimer:

(I am not a pharmacology scientist, but I am going the biochemistry route and plan on applying for grad school in pharmacology)

Yes, since we receive radio waves from sources billions of light years away, so radio waves must have existed billions of years ago. So, while in general this is “does a tree falling in the forest make a sound if no one hears it” but in this particular case we can answer it.

There are various statistical techniques for this.

I’m having a Mel Brooks moment here. “Oh great God, tell us the secret of life!”
God: Eat three meals a day. Get enough sleep. Exercise.

Now, I can be cynical and say that God says love thy neighbor so long as he isn’t a Canaanite. But perhaps we’d pay more attention to the love thy neighbor part if God shows, through a verifiable piece of information, that he isn’t a character in a book.

Medical science enabled your mother being revived. Some person did it. (I signed a new version of my medical power of attorney yesterday, so I’m up on this.) Science and technology is not the same as ethics.

Too true, as some of our creationist friends demonstrate all the time.

You understand it wrong. I have friends who work in the pharmaceutical industry, and there is a lot of theory behind what they do. What do you think biochemistry is, anyway?

Do you think anything that has to be analyzed statistically is not science? I’m sure you don’t mean that. Drug tests predict efficacy rates, and they get falsified all the time, to the chagrin of the drug companies. There is a lot of experimentation, and falsification, in the process of developing drugs. Yes, a lot of the metabolic pathways and such are not totally understood yet, but surely you don’t think that makes this unscientific? New ulcer cures came from falsifying the old theory that ulcers were caused by stress, not bacteria. That’s science, isn’t it?

Doctors are practitioners, not necessarily scientists. Much of medicine in general may be heuristic. But there is plenty of science involved, even in a strict Popplerian sense.

Very well, then. I appreciate the information, and I do indeed stand corrected.

Thank you. I will agree that for most of its history, medicine was unscientific. IIRC many of the advances in sanitation made at the end of the 19th century were not scientifically motivated or tested. I also believe that your model for the development of drugs was correct until fairly recently also.

Not in the sense of rightness or wrongness, but in understanding what is meant by “scientific”, do you consider collecting and testing plants for efficacy against certain diseases, possibly guided by folk knowledge of remedies, scientific? Let’s assume that the testing is rigorously done, but even if the cure proves effective the mechanism of the cure is unknown.