Christianity etc… *does *rigorously apply the same rules of reason, logic and evidence. You don’t seem to be using these words correctly, in the context given.
Reason and logic do not mean “A ‘scientist’ proved it and published it in ‘Nature’”. As a general idea, reason and logic mean “Do the events as described follow accepted patterns, such as ‘If A then B’ and here is A; ergo, there must be B”. i.e., does the accepted result conform to the given premise.
Evidence requires different kinds of proof for different claims. The quote you linked to sounds snappy, but, it’s author, Sagan, was, in reality, quite a dildo, and only a ‘scientist’. His word isn’t necessarily law in the context of reson, evidence and/or logic.
Sigene, what you’re saying is that any scientist who is a Christian engages in cognitive dissonance. You’re asking for someone to explain why they are so scientifically smart but so functionally stupid that they believe ridiculous things. The problem is that you’re defining your own philosophical/religious/political/economic/social/cultural/artistic/etc. beliefs as being the only ones that any intelligent person who applies his intelligence to the world could accept. That’s blatantly false for any such set of beliefs. It’s time to learn that about the world. There is no absolute correlation between a person’s core beliefs and their intelligence. (You may find a medium amount of correlation in certain times and certain populations, but you don’t find an absolute correlation ever.) Everybody believes that they are analyzing the world as best as possible. No one ever admits that they are falling prey to cognitive dissonance or any similar psychological trap. You’re never going to get an answer to this question on this forum. Why don’t you ask it on Great Debates, where the posters there will be happy to endlessly debate the issue.
Respectfully, no. I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying I am the one who is experiencing cognitive dissonance, and I’m absolutely willing to admit that (in opposition to your later statement that no one is willing to admit it). Nor am I wanting someone to explain why they are “so scientifically smart…etc…” I’m fairly confident that research scientists often realize that they are quite the opposite.
I’m also fairly confident that many Christians are extremely brilliant, so to characterize me as thinking Christians are functionally stupid is totally incorrect. Additionally I have no problem with your statement that there is no correlation between a persons core beliefs and their intelligence, and to think I may believe this is to make a large incorrect assumption.
At least for me, I’m very uneducated in many things, and make no claim about being smart.
I thought my quest was relatively simple. Is there a research scientist out there who is a Christian (in the sense that they believe In the divinity of Jesus), who can help me clear up the problems I’m having?
You’re unlikely to find such a person on the SDMB who will answer your question. You’d need to find a message board with lots of Christians on it who are willing to thoroughly debate their beliefs. It’s possible, I suppose, that you could get some poster on our Great Debates forum to answer your question. You’d need to start a thread there with a title similar to “Are you a Christian and a scientist who is willing to explain your beliefs?”. This is really a Great Debates question and not a In My Humble Opinion question.
Maybe I’m the exception. I’m a scientist. An honest to god (no pun intended) latex glove wearing, pipetting, cell culturing, mouse injecting scientist. I run a lab group and have been doing this for some time. And I think I require evidence for damn near everything in my life. Drives my wife nuts, though I have gotten her to stop saying “theory” when she means “hypothesis”.
Among the people I know, who are mostly scientists too, it would be a safe assumption that most are at the very least agnostic for similar reasons; lack of evidence. I could, on any given day, accept that there might possibly be some force unknown to man that is responsible for setting this whole thing in motion. But the idea that this force is in any resemblance to any of the religions that man has come up with is so far fetched that I just can’t consider them realistic hypotheses.
(That said, I do know a scientist who left science for the priesthood recently. This caused enough of a stir around those of us in this circle that it underscores how unusual this is!)
Nitpick: Sagan popularized the expression, but he wasn’t its first author. And his dildo-esque quality is irrelevant to this discussion.
OK, so under what circumstances should an extraordinary claim not require extraordinary evidence?
Mary claimed to have been made pregnant by God instead of a man. Is this not an extraordinary claim? What evidence should a reasonable person require before believing this claim?
The big bang theory seems to fit with much of what we know about the universe today. Yet, at it’s core, an explosion of any kind requires that there be both mass and energy - neither of which, as we understand things today, can be logically created from nothing. So to posit that there was mass and energy to trigger a big explosion that started our universe is an extraordinary claim with no evidence, yet one that is widely accepted (believed) in the scientific community. A scientist may say “But we are working toward putting ourselves in a position to fully understand this in the future”. A Christian would likely say the same.
I’m not debating the validity of the big bang theory, but at some point one must take something on faith. The difference is where one puts their faith.
I’ve taken your suggestion and have started such a thread.
Debating is over there…someone who can identify themselves as Christian and a Research Scientist to help me understand; is over here.
The BBT is generally accepted because it seems to fit our observations. And there certainly ought to be some tentativeness to anyone’s belief in it, given that it rests on some speculation. A scientist may indeed say they believe the BBT, but a good one wouldn’t say they have unshakeable faith in it. The virgin birth of Jesus does not fit at all with any of our other observations about human reproduction; the only evidence we have is her claim that she didn’t sleep with anyone. But Christians accept it unquestioningly as an article of faith.
Rather than putting baseless faith in something, it’s entirely reasonable to say “I don’t know.” Our observations do seem to indicate that the universe expanded out of a singularity a long time ago, but I would not put my faith in anyone’s claim that they know what existed before that moment - unless they somehow possessed extraordinary evidence to support their claim.
One of the seminal figures in my subfield of math is Eliyahu Rips, who did some fantastic work on geometric group theory and hyperbolic groups. He also came up with the Bible Code, the idea that lines of equally spaced (Hebrew) letters in the Torah spell out secret messages and prophecies. (The popular book with that title was written by a journalist and isn’t quite identical to Rips’ original idea, but doesn’t make the latter any less ridiculous.) Even very smart, competent people can believe silly things if it’s not in their particular area of expertise.
There’s lots of evidence for the Big Bang: cosmic background radiation, Hubble’s law, distribution of light elements, and so on. It’s not a complete, set-in-stone theory (and hardly anything in science is), but it’s certainly not something that needs to be arbitrarily taken on faith, and it is not equivalent to religious doctrine or Christian faith.
I mentioned Sagan’s dildoism just to get into the conversation that, although he is a highly touted astrophysicist, that he doesn’t hold the final say over what is truth, and/or what determines it.
So, what evidence would you require for a virgin birth? Let’s see…no men going near Mary for X number of months, etc…*standard *evidence would work.
I’m not wanting to go down that whole path of ‘what proof is there of Mary’s virginity’, just saying that *conventional *evidence would work, and that any calls for ‘extraordinary evidence’ are quite aside from the point.
Given what we know about sexual reproduction, and the fact that virgin birth has never been seen before or since, it would take more than the word of one minder who swore up and down, "nope, she was never out of my sight for a moment during the past six months. It would take, IMHO, an extraordinary level of scrutiny to confirm no male contribution whatsoever before the claim of virgin birth could be held to be true.
Maybe we’re not on the same page when it comes to understanding what “extraordinary” means in this context. I’m talking about evidence that has an unusual degree of reliability, is unusually difficult to misinterpret, and/or has been thoroughly examined by independent experts with relevant training. Absent that, any truth claim which completely defies everything we’ve learned about that particularly aspect of nature, based on centuries of experiment, observation, and experience, is properly treated with skepticism.
The OP seems to think that there is a hard science for lots of things, from the basics of the natural world to questions of religion.
That is really naive.
Hard science provides a wonderful form of knowledge but applies, as we know it, to a rather restricted range of natural phenomenon.
We have scientific understanding of physics, chemistry, et al., but not of a vast number of key everyday human concerns – Why do people vote the way they do? How can we avoid economic disasters? What is happiness? What is consciousness? Is there a difference between the mind and brain?
Hard science as we have it is not giving us anything to operate on for many such things, and in fact there may be good reason to believe that it cannot give us good information for a fair amount of it.
So my answer to the OP is why do you think contemporary science precludes religion? Science has nothing important to say regarding vast portions of human life nowadays so why should we expect it to have anything to do with religion? I mean, damn there is no hard science in the style of, say, physics, that explains why some people love each other, why a marriage could not last, or why nations go to war or any of a million things.
And – lest someone wants to bring up the social sciences – let me just say that the gap between hard scientific knowledge and the kinds of knowledge the social sciences seek to establish shows that they deal with completely different things.
So I’d say that scientists, so long as they are doing hard science style things, operate according to science. But most of their lives involve things for which there is no such science, and that happens to include religious belief too – so why would you expect there to be some tension between science and religion given that religion is but one of a host of things in human life to which our hard science disciplines do not apply?
again, I must be clear here. I’m really looking for a research scientist who can help explain some aspects of their being Christian.
Note, too that I’m not talking about Religion or Spirituality in general. To think that I am discounting the value of spirituality or religion or to think it is invalid in some way in explaining things is not my purpose.
So I would counter that while I admit to being naive in many subjects (which is why I’m here), you may also be naive in what I’m thinking.
I get the distinct impression that there is some underlying hostility to my question, for which I’m clueless why.
I’m simply looking for a research scientist who deals with empiricism as a matter of course who also believes in the divinity of Jesus.
So far, with the exception of Hector, who I haven’t heard back from, I’m not really getting anywhere.
Also I direct you to the Great Debates thread I’ve opened, if you want to discuss other such things.
I don’t see why being religious or not necessarily affects one’s Scientific views.
E.g., in my field, Computer Science, one of the core tenets is Church’s Thesis: that everything that can be algorithmically computed can be done using a Turing Machine or equivalent. This was initially greeted positively my Marxists, until they realized that it put machines ahead of humans. And Labor is King in that world. So you end up with gibberish like this. All from a completely atheistic point of view.
‘Independent experts, with relevant training’ would pretty difficult to find in re a virgin birth.
Depending upon the size of the town where Mary lived, and other circumstances, it doesn’t need an extraordinary level of scrutiny to confirm no male donor, to a reasonable, even *above *reasonable level. Also, a virgin birth tale is a pretty remarkable tale to tell, and people, even back then, knew that it was outside of the bounds of the natural. For children, they knew that generally the time and manner of conception could be diagnosed with a reasonable certainty. The ‘centures of experiment…skepticism’ is irrelevant, since anybody and their dog knows that. That is why it is called a ‘miracle’. Or, if you prefer, a fraud.