Well, yes, the answer religion gives you will be one that was made up by humans, somewhere along the line. It won’t be divinely inspired. All ethical systems are made up.
Scientists can and do give moral advice, sure, but science does not.
I didn’t mean that the ethical / moral guidance of religion is superior to other sources (philosophy, for instance), just that it is possible to use religion for moral guidance, while it isn’t possible to (correctly) use science for this purpose. Thus, pchaos was correct to write:
He’s right, science doesn’t provide answers to ethical questions, and religion is a possible source of those answers. However, pchaos seems to have extended this reasoning to questions about the creation of the universe, the evolution of the human body, and other non-ethical matters.
If you accept that summary, does that mean that you accept that questions of the origin or the universe or the biology of man are not ethical questions, and are the realm of science, where evidence doesn’t vary based on one’s beliefs?
Trinopus said the same kind of thing back on page 6, by the way. The stuff about experiments is still wrong, and while science itself doesn’t answer moral questions, I do think we can use information gained through the scientific process to inform our judgments.
You misunderstand science, I think. Is it moral to dump sludge into the river? Science can tell you that doing so will produce 2,000 instances of cancer over the next ten years (p < 0.05) but does not even attempt to say if this is wrong or not.
Religion or ethics can both give you an answer. The difference is that ethics also gives you a logical justification for the answer, while religion just says “God says so.” And you are just as likely to get the answer that it is ok as not ok, since some believers think god gave us the earth. If you think Jesus is coming back in five years, all bets are off, right? And we both know of Republicans whose policy on the environment seems to be based around this notion.
Which is my point. On such a question a religious person can say “God says so”, but a scientist can say “science says so” as well; it doesn’t, but then their god isn’t actually telling the religious what to do, either. In both cases the person doing the talking is just making an unsupported statement and falsely using a respected authority to make it look like something more than their personal opinion.
The difference is, that’s all religion has, while science actually does has questions it can authoritatively answer.
No, but you didn’t expect to, did you? The summary is reasonable and rational. But then so is the argument that God always existed. In a way, that’s part of the reason I decided to treat logical as a higher standard than rational. Once again, the change is for my own convenience only and I will try to avoid my personal usage of the terms in the future.
The Great Antibob perceived the problem. It depends on the premises you start your rational argument with and you will end up with different conclusions. Also, we have not been able to agree on a vantage that will help resolve the differences.
Part of the problem is the different weights we give the same evidence. I assume the atheists use mostly empirical evidence, whereas I believe it to be inadequate. To me intuition and revelation is just as valid. For instance, to me it is intuitive that humans are intelligent because God had the foresight to make us this way. An empiricist would say this argument is inadequate because they narrowly define the appropriate senses.
Can you explain how we are supposed to know the difference between revelation, intuition, being mistaken, or even just making stuff up? If we can say any opinion is “intuitive,” how are we supposed to have the foggiest idea what is true and what isn’t?
Well, that and there is absolutely no evidence that God or the gods had a hand in making us intelligent. After all, humans and proto-humans have been intelligent for hundreds of thousands or millions of years now, yet God as you are defining it has only been with us for a few thousand years at most.
You are correct in that atheists and folks with a scientific bent are going to give more weight to empirical evidence (or, simply say EVIDENCE), while you are basically saying that we should give equal weight to intuition and revelation. Should we also give equal weight to magic and sorcery? Intuition and revelation are all constructs of our minds, as is magic and sorcery after all, so why not give equal weight to those as well?
What if I make up answers that I feel are inspired by a god-are they equally valid?
What if your god and somebody elses’ god give answers that are directly opposed to each other-are they equally valid even if both answers can’t be true at the same time?
But science doesn’t say so on these issues, science doesn’t even pretend to say so. If you are talking about statements on the world, such as the age of the earth, then you are right - science does say so there.
If there was a god, then we could debate whether that god has authority to dictate morals. I wouldn’t want Zeus to tell us about faithfulness to your spouse! But as it stands religious morality is like Jo Rowling telling us we should live an ethical life based on what Dumbledore says.
For a Christian intuition is valid. Look, for all of mankind’s brilliance, the prosthetic hand that they made so far is pretty bad. Now you expect me to believe that my right hand just accidentally evolved without any intellectual guidance. And although I consider that a rational argument, I’m far from being convinced.
This doesn’t answer the question I asked you. How are we supposed to tell the difference between revelation, intuition, being wrong, and making stuff up?
