What’s up with this assertion, made in many recent threads, that science disproves the claims of religion? Obviously many different types of human experience exist; that’s why universities have many departments and grant degrees in many different fields and why libraries divide their collections into different sections. Some fields may overlap at their edges; others are entirely separate. For example, music deals with audio experience, while painting deals with visual experience. Similarly, religion deals with the moral and spiritual realm while science deals with the physical. Hence one can’t say that science disproves religion. You might as well say that Mozart disproves Van Gogh.
It’s only something that ignorant people say. Everyone else knows better.
This won’t end well.
Yeah, what is this shit? I’d like to see the fucker who claims that science disproves religion. Everyone knows that it’s religion that disproves science.
I guess the problem is when religion tries to dictamine the course of science or when science is used to determine the veracity of religious statements.
I think it has a lot to do with some religions trying to make assertions about the physical world and then running into science. Think of Mozart trying to dictamine what colours Van Gogh can use. Vincent is not pleased.
If religion deals with the physical (e.g., by making the claim that the woirld was literally created in 6 days a few thousand years ago), then science can disprove religion. However, if they keep to their respective areas, there is less likely to be trouble.
In your book (and mine, and in an ideal world). Sadly, this isn’t the case for some religious types.
If one thinks of a God that put things in motion and then stood back, then you can not disprove religion . If on the other hand one asserts that God takes an active role in determining what happens now, then it is reasonable (IMHO) to say that science could disprove that.
You would expect to see some evidence of actual physical phenomenon that varies from what would be expected through chance and known physical laws, and is consistent with what the religion claims could happen.
bolding mine.
Until it claims otherwise. Young Earth theory and Creationism, just to mention the two most obvious, make claims about the physical world that are demonstrably falsifiable by scientific methods. The fact that they make some claims with are absolutely false means people start to doubt their other (potentially true) claims.
I agree that Science can’t answer the questions that Religion can. But, in return, Religion should stay the hell out of Science’s domain.
I’d say that religion deals with the ‘physical’ world every time a person claims to personally interact with god in some way.
Most religions are concerned with ‘spirits’ or ‘souls’ and what happens to them after we die. What we know about embryology, genetics, and the workings of the brain put a heavy strain on this hypothesis of how the world operates, or at least certain models of souls.
Hopefully within my lifetime we will learn to make true AI, which will have an interesting side effect I think of really creating some sparks with the theists and their view of the afterlife.
Religion is not needed to deal with moral questions. Moreover, I would argue that religion puts the brakes on moral progression; afterall, it’s written in the book that God himself dictated or inspired. That kind of faith is damaging to the acceptance of new ideas.
As an example of one moral question, I think women should have the same rights as men and I don’t believe their sexuality should be shamed or covered up. Compare and contrast the responses to that from Western secularists, liberal Christians (i.e. ignore the bits that don’t suit them), and fundamental Christians (i.e. read the plain text) with their equivalents in the Islamic and Jewish worlds. Will we find a trend?
While the claim that science disproves the central claims of religion is one that I occassionally see made by uneducated or neophyte atheists, I can’t say it’s anything I’ve seen around here very much. It can be said that science can disprove some very specific religious claims about the physical universe or the history of the earth or literal historical claims in some religious literature, but even most atheistic Dopers seem to able to grasp that science cannot disprove such things as the existence of God or souls or karma or any number of other non-physical, untestable beliefs.
Maybe I missed the threads, but if someone were to say something like “evolution proves there’s no God,” I’m pretty sure the atheists would set that person straight before the theists ever had to lift a finger.
I don’t see why. Different religions may stake out different positions on precisely how physical their deities are, but certainly many people understand interaction with God as a purely spiritual event. For instance, the Bible often says that God appeared to a certain person, or that an angel appeared to a certain person, or that a devil tempted a certain person. In some cases it’s clear that no one other than the intended viewer could sense the God/angel/devil in question. Hence the appearance of the God/angel/devil is not a subject that science can deal with, since science can only deal with subjects that are based on empirical evidence (i.e. provable by repeated trials or visible to different observers.)
As mainstream Christians and Jews see it, there’s a Cosmos which contains everything. God shaped a portion of that Cosmos into the universe, but not the entire thing. There are spiritual beings existing within the Cosmos, not generally bound to the universe or subject to physical laws. Within the universe everything obeys purely physical laws. The only exception is humans, who obey physical laws but have some ability to interact with the spiritual beings. Hence that spiritual sense is not subject to scientific study, which concerns only the physical universe.
You don’t need Science to disprove religion.
“Obviously many different types of human experience exist” Yes, and virtually all of them disprove religion.
The ones that don’t, like hearing voices and seeing snakes in the air, were once mystical but now recognizable as drug or disease side effects.
I started this thread is response to threads such as the recent one by feli8, where he asserts that scientific evidence proves that religion is “a bunch of hocus-pocus” made up by ancient tribes because they were afraid and blah, blah, blah. So there are people making claims that science has disproved all religion.
Now as for creation science and other such nonsense, I oppose it and I always have. I have a proven record of doing so on this board. But I fear some people are trying to take the logic of “you hit me, I’ll hit you” to “you made claims about my field, I’ll make claims about your field”: obviously invalid reasoning.
Really? Let’s look at it this way. The Dewey decimal system breaks human knowledge down into the following broad categories.
Philosophy & psychology
Religion
Social sciences
Language
Natural sciences & mathematics
Technology (Applied sciences)
The arts
Literature & rhetoric
Geography & history
Are you claiming that “virtually all” of these categories “disprove” religion? That German grammar, or ethernet cables, or the French Impressionists contain some disproof not just of certain religions, but of all of them? If so, is it possible for you to explain what these disproofs are, or am I expected to merely accept your word that they exist?
This statement is false, assuming that it’s implying that all observation of the supernatural results from drug-induced hallucinations or mental illness. Every week at church I meet several dozen people who are willing to testify to miracles; none of them are drug addicts or mentally ill, or (to my knowledge) ever were. For further debunking of your statement, I recommend you Salvation on Sand Mountain, by Dennis Covington. Synopsis: a thoroughly secular journalist goes to sneer at the snake-handling cults in Appalachia. Instead of finding a bunch of insane hicks like he expected, he comes to respect and eventually join in their spiritual experience.
Then you should have said so in your OP. You did say you disagreed with the statement that science disproves the claims of religions. It clearly disproves some claims of some religions, and just as clearly does not disprove (or say anything about) some other claims of some religions.
The interesting part is which claims of religion are physical and tend to support the spiritual claims. Anyone can construct spiritual claims - but is there any more reason to think that the path to salvation is through Jesus than that we come back as hamsters if we’re naughty. Clearly the writers of the Bible thought this claim needed some evidence, and said that the resurrection proved it. If we could demonstrate that the resurrection, a physical claim, did not happen, wouldn’t that wipe out the legitmacy of the other claims?
For the benefit of Liberal and cosmosdan, the claim that we should love one another doesn’t need a lot of physical evidence to support it, since I’ll state that we can come to them through ethical reasoning alone. I’d say it was just as true whether Jesus said it or Howdy Doody said it. But if you make an ethical or moral claim that can’t be supported this way, and which you claim should be follwed because god said so, I want to see a Hairy Thunderer and some lightning bolts before I listen.
False dichotomy. Plenty of people see hallucinations without drugs or mental illness. I get them sitting in a boring meeting after a night without enough sleep. UFO abduction experiences (and the earlier experience of succubi) come from a well understood cause which is not mental illness. Can these people do miracles in front of Randi? Do the miracles involve anything verifiable? We’ve had almost 2,000 years of miracles with precious little to show for it. These people are no doubt honest and convinced that these things are happening, but that doesn’t mean that they’re right.
The “you must believe them or call them insane” ploy is dishonest religion trick #27.
I agree! Religion would never ever try to cross that line. :smack:
Clearly, since there are many religions and each of them make many claims, it is silly to say that science has disproved all of them. However when religions have made claims that have been tested by science, they have not generally done well.
Further, just because something is “spiritual” doesn’t mean it can’t be addressed by science. If people make prophecies based on spiritual experiences, these can be checked. If people try to influence events by means of prayer, that can be checked. If the spiritual and physical worlds interact, and there is some meaningful claim about how that works, there is potential for scientific methods to address those claims.