Scientists and Atheism.

Great Debates
21

I concede various historical religious figures may have made random bullshit claims regarding the objective nature of reality, but do you suggest that is (a main) characteristic of religion, and what is the evidence that when religious figures talk about the nature of reality they conceive of falsifiable objective claims? Some claims may coincidentally turn out to be testable, but when they talk about the world being formed by the mixing of the waters of Abzu and Tiamat, or that the lives of men are chosen by maidens who live by a lake underneath a tree that supports the world, I do not get the impression that the people who wrote those things envisioned that they should be concretely tested by measuring the spherical harmonics of cosmic background radiation.

Do theologians today pore over scripture to argue what should be the mass of a proton, or, in the old days, did they conceive of such things to debate? After the Buddha famously achieved enlightenment, did he go around lecturing people on ways to improve crop yields because now he knew something about it? And to the extent that philosophers like Aristotle did sit down and come up with loads of falsifiable bullshit, I do not see what it had to do with their being religious or irreligious.

I suppose modern religion must carefully avoid any falsifiable claims of truth- to do otherwise would be ridiculous- but if anything that forces them to a non-overlapping path to knowledge. Not scientific knowledge, anyway. I do not see the conflict.

It is interesting to read that 50% of American scientists believe in God, compared to 90% generally, and that 50% of Icelanders believe in elves. Makes one want to quiz some of them to find out what they really really believe and what led them to think that way, beyond a simple multiple-choice poll.

22

I absolutely think that religions make many many concrete truth claims, and only when the falsifiable claims are falsified do they withdraw and claim that they were obviously intended as allegories or poetic imagery all along.

I think virtually everyone now accept thats religious accounts of creation are at best myths. But that was not certainly not the case historically. Many people (Newton among them!) spent long hours poring over the bible trying to figure out the exact historical date of creation. And the biblical account is no less preposterous than the accounts that you cite above that you suggest are obviously myths.

A the great majority of modern Christians believe that Jesus was a real historical figure, that was the son of a deity, and that he rose from the dead. Many believe in a future day of judgment, the Second Coming, that that heaven and hell are real places. These may in practice be unfalsifiable claims, but there are still substantial and significant truth claims about the nature of reality, not just vague spiritual allegories.

If you don’t see the conflict, I think you have some idealized fantasy version of what you think is the only way religious belief could possibly exist in the modern world to an intelligent well-educated person. It’s the same criticism that was leveled at Dawkins for writing his notorious book.

23

Certainly uneducated and illiterate people tended to take the bible literally, but educated people, and many of the greatest and most influential theologians didn’t.

For Jews, allegorical interpretations of the scriptures go back even to the 5th century BC, and Philo in the 1st century AD said, “It would be a sign of great naivety to think that the world was created in six days, or indeed at all in time.”

For Christians, Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Ambrose, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and other theologians stated that many aspects of the scriptures should not be taken literally. This was the accepted, mainstream view throughout the medieval period.

Really it was only with the rise of Protestantism that some Christians started to think that the scriptures should be taken literally.

24

I guess I should have said evidence not proof.

25

Thomas Brodie marks around 1500 of when all hell started breaking loose with literalism. Some were taking creation week literally well before then. I think Augustine’s view changed over time over this, I’d need to refresh my memory.

But weren’t some earlier Jews going with a literal creation week also? Seems like Josephus was indicating this in his commentary on Moses, that the world was made in just six days, and the seventh day was rest from the labor of such operations.

26

I work for a research institute that’s affiliated with a Catholic university. On occasion I have worked with scientists & researchers on the university side, and some of them are Marianist. One example is this guy. His lab was… spooky. He was injecting plants with radioactive stuff if I recall correctly.

27

Now, the guy may or may not have been a poor scientist, but radioactive tracers are legitimate enough.

28

There’s a really excellent discussion in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

See

The development of biblical exegesis and hermeneutics in Judaism

and below it

The development of biblical exegesis and hermeneutics in Christianity

29

On the one hand, no one has ever taken everything in the Bible literally, because parts of the Bible are clearly symbolic or allegorical, and it would be very hard to read them any other way:

But on the other hand, from Book XVI, Chapter 9 of The City of God by Augustine, we have:

That’s a pretty literal interpretation of the Bible. It’s not that Augustine was a Flat Earther, but he found it hard to believe men could live all the way on the other side of the world, because how could the descendants of Adam have made it all that way? And I think Christians, even very learned theologians, tended to take “we are all descended from Adam” pretty literally for several reasons. First of all, the actual flesh and blood existence of Jesus is definitely not something that Christians would historically have considered to be a questionable matter. And Luke 3:23-38 gives the direct line of descent from Adam to Jesus:

It’s kind of hard to see how a person who really existed could be the direct descendant of an allegorical or symbolic abstract representation of some kind (with an allegedly complete male-line genealogical table provided for us).

Even more importantly, there is that whole “Original Sin” idea, something pretty central to the historical Christian belief-system. The issue of how exactly the sin of one man (Adam) was transmitted to all his descendants–that is, to the whole human race–is taken quite seriously by Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica.

And of course Augustine and Thomas Aquinas are definitely not fringe characters in the history of Christianity.

30

I appreciate the link. It says on Augustine, he * composed both literal and allegorical commentaries and expository homilies on many parts of scripture…* This is why I find him a bit confusing. But that’s how Wiki covers him as well. It also gives a pretty good account of earlier Christians who were divided on how to take Genesis.

Augustine does say in one area, that everything in the universe was created simultaneously by god, not in the seven days laid out in Genesis.

But with his literal version, he says: Let us, then, omit the conjectures of men who know not what they say, when they speak of the nature and origin of the human race. For some hold the same opinion regarding men that they hold regarding the world itself, that they have always been… They are deceived, too, by those highly mendacious documents which profess to give the history of many thousand years, though, reckoning by the sacred writings, we find that not 6000 years have yet passed.

And he also adds this: But simultaneously with time the world was made, if in the world’s creation change and motion were created, as seems evident from the order of the first six or seven days. For in these days the morning and evening are counted, until, on the sixth day, all things which God then made were finished, and on the seventh the rest of God was mysteriously and sublimely signalized. What kind of days these were it is extremely difficult, or perhaps impossible for us to conceive, and how much more to say!

In layman’s terms, I think he is having his cake and eating it too. But I’m no authority on any of it.

31

That’s weird. I’ve been to many engineering conferences, and run a bunch also, and this is never the case. The last half day of a conference is light as people leave early for flights, and you schedule accordingly.
Now, attendance at some talks is a lot higher than others based on interest and the speaker. But that’s different.

32

True, and while some scientists manage to compartmentalize the way they come to religious beliefs from the way they do science, I’d say the high percentage of scientist nonbelievers come from applying logical thinking to religious questions, as well as a better than average knowledge of how the universe works.
MIT has one tiny chapel for the entire student body. Very few of my classmates were the slightest bit religious.

33

The thread I linked to in post # 5, has the survey I linked to that is no longer valid, so found another that is concerning Leading Scientists Still Reject God

34

That survey seems to date from 1998 and refers to a ~50% return rate from 517 members of the US National Academy of Sciences. Do only those members qualify as “scientists”? Have we anything newer?

I’ll ask again: Do surveys exist by disciplines? Are psychologists or geologists more believing than chemists or cosmologists? (Not cosmetologists. ;))

35

I’d be interested how many scientists believe “This is it, and after you die its oblivion.”

36

This is the kind of glib comment that sounds…not exactly wrong, I suppose, but…okay, screw that: I think that application of Pareto is wrong - full stop. If you have some actual data - publication metrics, historical analysis, hell even a survey of scientists who would agree with this statement, please share it.

I’ve lost count of how many scientific conferences I’ve been to - from the small (<100 participants) to the very large (>10k) - and this is exactly what I would have written had Voyager not done so already. Either am77494 goes to particularly unusual conferences, or…they’re mistaken.

Also, the random potshot at professors is pretty obnoxious. Got any data to cite for that one?

Hang on, so only the “best” 20% of scientists even count for anything now? You’ll forgive me if I don’t hold my breath waiting to see what justification appears for that statement.

37

But surely this is obvious.

Highly educated people in general tend to be far less likely to be literalist religious and more likely to lean toward agnostic or atheist views.
And scientists, especially leading scientists, are generally very highly educated. So you would expect them to lean even more toward atheism.

38

Damn, and I was getting all ready to supply data about beauticians’ religious beliefs [here- a letter supporting the Prime Minister of Australia’s ongoing desire to protect homophobes from being expected to do their job without being homophobic about it].

There are a number of surveys of student attitudes in archaeology / anthropology, particularly focussing on belief in creation vs evolution. Being surveys of undergrads their main purpose is to track whether they are beginning to understand the evidence for evolution and assess progress in teaching. Should not be extrapolated without due care due to usually small sample sizes.

Most archaeologists I know are atheist, and most of the rest are agnostic. The small proportion who are neither practice a faith - which I would call a conscious adherence to a specific moral code that guides their social and personal behaviour - but they do not necessarily have belief as some earlier posters have articulated it, and so would not count as ‘believers’ in the OP’s terms. I’d basically share much the same beliefs, except without the referral back to the Bible.

As well as personal faith and belief there are people you’d have to classify as crazy mixed up scientists, such as the geologists and biologists who advocate Young Earth Creationism. They call themselves scientists, but at the same time refute evolutionary mechanics or earth-time or physics that are the basis for their disciplines’ common basis of shared knowledge. Sorry, but to me if you want to call yourself a geologist, you can’t also say that all the Earth’s rocks formed as a result of the Noachian flood. Just like with Santa - no believe, no receive.

39

Only 10% of scientific papers published receive a citation and only 50% are even read.

Cite : https://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0701/0701012.pdf
Why do you think that the application of Pareto principles to scientific achievement is wrong ?

40

My father was a civil engineer–closer to “garden variety” than “top scientist,” I suppose–and quite religious. Educated by Jesuits, he was also a better-than-average critical thinker. I don’t think he was particularly conflicted. He could compartmentalize.

One thing I notice on these boards is that atheists believe they have a monopoly on reason, and militant Christians believe they have cornered the market on morality. Both are mistaken. The current Pope has an MA in Chemistry.