Science disproves some specific claims of some religions. But most of religion’s more important claims are nonfalsifiable, even where they touch on strictly scientific questions, such as whether God does or does not exist.
There is no evidence that there is a spiritual realm, and religion exists in opposition to morality more often than not. Doing something or not because “God” told you to isn’t morality; it’s obeying orders, and amoral at best. And as others have pointed out religion makes claims about the physical all the time; it’s just almost always wrong. Religion is pretty much wrong by definition; if it was right, after all, it wouldn’t need faith to believe, and if it didn’t need faith it wouldn’t be religion.
Religon tends to avoid making statements about the physical world not because it’s a seperate realm from science ( it’s not; religion by nature always trys to subsume everything else into itself, and science tries to study everything ), but because when it does science keeps proving it wrong. Religion survives by denying science or going into areas it can’t say anything about yet.
That’s because due to the power of religion in our society, religiosity strong enough to make you see things that aren’t there isn’t usually called mental illness, even though it should be.
Or they were just lying.
First, as humans are physical creatures nothing involving humans can be a “purely spiritual event”, even assuming the term spiritual has any meaning beyond “It’s holy ! Turn off your mind !”
Second, science is perfectly capable of studying “spiritual” events, via scanning the brain of the person experiencing it. So far there’s no evidence it’s anything other than a brain dysfunction.
Science attempts to describe “how” things happen. religion attempts to describe “why” things happen. When the explaination of “How” a rainbow happens does not line up with the religious explination of “why” a rainbow happens, the scientists shrug, but the religionists often go NUTS.
They KNOW (Based upon “divine revalation” that rainbows are painted by invisible pink unicorns, as directed by God, the almighty spagetti monster) - they CAN NOT accept any other explaination… Do do so would be an offense unto GOD… and they don’t want to be a victim of God’s wrath, so they decide that ignoring the evidence of their sense and sensibility is preferable to risking a thump on the noggen from God.
“Why” stuff happens is an always open feild, and anyone wishing to start a religion can always come up with a new “why”… Coming up with a new “how”, however, only leads to a Nobel Prize…
Regards
FML
True, but say we have Religion A and Religion B. Religion A claims that God exists, but has never interacted with the world in any detectable way. You may or may not accept Religion A, but you cannot falsify it.
Religion B says God exists, and interacted with the world, historically, in cases X, Y and Z. If science, history, or archeology determines that none of these events happened, these particular claims have been falsified, and Religion B’s claim on our belief has been weakened.
Now, adherents of Religon B can do three things. First, they can argue that X, Y and Z haven’t been disproven. They can say that God really interacted with us in cases U, V and W. Or, they can say that while we did claim this, we’re really like Reigion A, and stop trying to mix science and religion.
Which might be fine, except if the religion doctrinally depends on X Y and Z happening. Example: the Fall never happened, but we’re all condemned because of it.
Many or most religions made specific predictions about events in the past. (Like they happened.) They also claim to have special knowledge. What this debate (and countless others) is really about is how to think about a religion when its claims have been falsified.
The notion that science and religion properly have no overlap, and that only benighted religious fundamentalists and “fundamentalist atheists” claim otherwise, is a very popular one among many believers and nonbelievers alike these days; it was vigorously advocated by the late Stephen Jay Gould under the label “Non-Overlapping Magisteria”. But I think (at least in the Western world of the Abrahamic monotheistic religions) it’s a pretty modern innovation which doesn’t really capture the ancient and, well, fundamental, grounding of Judeo-Christian and Islamic religions in claims about historic persons and events.
I read Gould’s Rocks of Ages some years back; if I recall correctly he talked about the creation stories in Genesis, and how there was a very long-standing tradition within Christianity, dating back to Augustine, of not interpreting them literally; but Gould was silent about the Resurrection–I looked for that pretty carefully.
Certainly modern believers may seek to redefine their faith in such a way that it can’t possibly conflict with science (and modern non-believers may accept that redefinition and argue against religion on wholly metaphysical grounds); and together they may even make the world a less contentious place. But it is a new idea, and one which would likely have been widely condemned by the faithful of a century or two back.
This is a thorny issue because ideas about “chance and known physical laws” may inherently bump up against spiritual matters. For instance, if a person flips a coin one hundred times and gets ‘heads’ on the 56th flip, that would seem of no particular significance to someone analyzing the event by laws of chance. On the other hand, if the person doing the flipping receives a spiritual message saying that the 56th flip of special significance, then they may regard the result as evidence of something spiritual even that it has no importance when analyzed from the perspective of random chance.
That’s a highly arbitrary example, of course, but the same principle is at work if, for instance, a person sees their life influenced in a big way by an event that looks like chance to outsiders. Let’s say that a driver drives a particular route to work every day. One morning a freak weather event delays the driver by one minute, and the resulting delay saves them from ending up in a fatal car wreck. To the driver involved it’s an event of high significance, in which they may have reason to see a spiritual power at work. To an outside observer looking only at the laws of chance, chance can explain away the whole sequence of events.
But to analyze it in terms of chance, you have to give up analyzing the event alone and instead analzye a general class of events. You’d have to observe perhaps a thousand drivers, calculate the probability of all weather events that might affect driving patterns, calculate the probability of a change in driving patterns keeping a person alive, etc… etc… If you do all this and do it all correctly, you’re no longer making a statement about the singular event that happened to the singular driver described in the paragraph above.
I know what you’re saying, but I’d word things slightly different: There is something which is called the “spiritual realm”. Some people claim this is not part of the physical realm. I suspect they are wrong.
I can’t think of a single religion, other than possibly some form of Buddhism , that does not stand on science’s turf in at least one fundamental way. The claim that what we call the spiritual realm is separate from the physical realm is itself a claim about the physical realm. Hence, every religion that makes such a claim runs the risk of having its foundation undercut by scientific progress.
I don’t think it’s fair to say that “science has disproved religion”, or even that “science has disproved this particular religion” (except in a handful of cases). However, the two systems are always potentially at odds.
A system that does not make the claim that the spiritual is not physical would avoid this, but many people would not consider that a religion at all.
Firstly, I was responding to Pliny, who said that any spiritual experience results froms “drugs or disease”; if he’s wrong then it was an atheist trick, not a religion trick.
Now on the main point, there are many explanations for hallucinations out there. Freud believed that they arose from repressed sexual urges, in mid-century physical disorders of the brain were the preferred explanation, today many psychologists believe they’re a projection of an internal state that the subject has trouble expressing by other means, and God alone (ahem) knows what they’ll believe fifty years from now.
My reading and experience has no led me to be satisfied by any of these explanations accounting for spiritual experience. Freud, for instance, wrote principally by assembling short descriptions of cases from his own career. Oftentimes his link between the psychological phenomenon and the supposed cause seems quite tenuous to me. The disorder of the brain explanation has declined because the cures associated with it (lobotomy and electroshock, for instance) were notorious failures.
For a psiritual experience, we can take the example of the minister who led the on-campus congregation while I was in college. He explained that he knew his calling from God had happened at age 25 when he was discussing his future with the area supervisor for the Methodist Church. The supervisor had two positions to offer, one at a large suburban church, the other being the on-campus ministry. At precisely the moment when he had to make the choice, he felt a sense of total calm throughout his mind and body and then he simply knew which one God wanted him to choose. (And God was right, at least as much as thirty years of successful ministry can testify.) That’s the type of spiritual experience that I don’t see accounted for by scientific explanations. It did not result from epilepsy, mental illness, migraine coma, sleep deprivation, or any other common explanation.
I’m perfectly open to further debate on this. If someone has written a comprehensive study on spiritual experience, purpoting to show that none of it is real, I’d be delighted to know where it is.
How about he had good judgement, or he got lucky ? To the extent that it’s “not accounted for by scientific explanations”, it’s because there’s not a whole lot there for science to explain, frankly ( but there are probably psychological studies on it anyway ). If I’m sure that I’m going to enjoy a new video game, and I do enjoy it, does that mean God is giving me divine guidence on video game purchases ?
He said “side effect of disease.” I’m not sure I’d agree, unless disease is interpreted very broadly.
However would you do this? I’m quite sure they are real in the sense you could detect measurable changes in the brain during them. But how could you tell if these were induced internally or from God?
The only way would be to write down predictions, and see if they pan out. But how often are these experiences predictions? If the experience is “you should do this,” how can you tell if it is god, the devil, or your subconscious talking?
I’ve often had flashes of insight, but I’ve never thought they came from anywhere but inside me.
You’ve claimed that the spiritual realm can exist without the physical realm having access to it, and you’ve carefully constructed your view of this, but in your construction, there is a link that can be accessed by physics. If humans can interact with the spiritual beings, then we can test that.
So you would extrapolate that the god helmet is evidence for god by the fact it works? And aliens? And dead relatives speaking to us? Personally, I would think it’s more likely that this is yet another peculiar characteristic of our our peculiar and imperfect brains. We are all drug addicts in a sense. I guess YMMV.
What exactly needs to be explained here? What’s remarkable about a guy making a decision? To be really pedantic about it, it’s just a guy saying he felt all spirity when he made the decision. Making a big decision, in itself, can have a calming effect. Big deal? This is a guy interpreting a normal series of emotions through a spiritual lens, but I’ve had similar moments amd put them down to nothing but relief at having put a decision behind me, especially if I feel like I’m following my conscience in some way. I don’t see anything extraordinary in this anecdote, even assuming he wasn’t embellishing, which is more than possible. It’s also possible to edit and polish memories over the years to idealize certain moments.
In any case, I don’t see anything beyond the range of normal human cognition here. That’s not to say God couldn’t have talked to him. I can even understand why people feel that way at certain moments (and I can’t technically refute them), but nothing in this story requires anything beyond the natural workings of the brain.
But we don’t know that “God was right”–maybe he would have been just as happy in the other ministry. Or even happier. Perhaps in the large suburban church he would have led some great spiritual revival that would have brought about interracial harmony or world peace or something like that. Maybe the young heir to a Saudi construction fortune would have read in Time magazine about this mighty American man of God and pastor of a large suburban church and said to himself “Gee, these American Christians aren’t so bad after all”, and Osama bin Laden would have dedicated his life to inter-faith coexistence.
It’s hardly definitive proof of anything for someone to say “I had to choose between two alternatives which both had a perfectly reasonable expectation of success, and when I did I had a totally subjective feeling of peace, and the alternative with a reasonable expectation of success that I did in fact choose has turned out OK.” That’s far weaker even than all those “Thanks to the Holy Spirit I overslept and missed my flight, and sure enough the plane crashed and everyone on board died” stories.
How about simply intuition? That is, he knew, perhaps without consciously knowing that he knew, that with his talents and personality he’d be much better suited to the campus ministry position, and the feeling of peace was his unconscious mind telling him that he was right.
I’m not saying God wasn’t involved. Perhaps God was speaking to him through his unconscious mind; maybe that’s one of the ways God communicates with people.
I’ve heard/read quite a few accounts like this before, some of them more impressive than this one. If you start from a position of believing in a God who sometimes communicates with people, it’s not hard to see such incidents as examples of that. But if you don’t start from such a position, most of them are not all that difficult to explain away.
To continue in the same vein as the others, the first thing you need to do is to demonstrate that there is something there to explain, and that God had anything to do with it. You might start by seeing how many people who believe in different gods, or no gods at all, had similar experiences. Second you need to figure out how to write down these spiritual choices, at the time they are made, and come back later to see if they worked out better than chance. (And it isn’t easy to figure out what is good or bad.) Third, you need to correct for intuition and just plain logic. How to do that is unclear.
Remember, George Bush claimed that his choices were inspired by God in just this way. How did that work out?
All religions can’t be right because they teach contradictory things.
It’s not likely that a given one is right…(which one)? If any of the major Religions is wrong, it’s likely that they are all wrong.
Religion (I’m generalizing here) has decided it “deals with the moral and spiritual realm” because it has been so utterly wrong, historically, about the scientific realm. Most established religions have a great tradition of things (such as Creation stories) that deal directly with Science. Religion was so badly wrong it had to abandon dealing with the Scientific realm. Religion has retreated to the moral and ethical realm precisely because matters of opinion are so much more difficult to make testable.
If Science has proved Religion wrong about the Scientific realm, it’s unlikely Religion is going to end up with much of a leg to stand on with regard to the “moral and spiritual realm” other than opinion and derivatives of scientific reasoning. That is to say, there won’t be any discovery of a priori truths which somehow have existed before the beginning of life.
The notion that you can’t use Science to prove there is no God sounds superficially attractive until you start substituting Thor or the Tooth Fairy for “God.”
Then it starts to sound kind of vapid.
Science cannot disprove religion and no real scientist has ever attempted any such cockamamie project. What science has accomplished is taking away the single most powerful argument for religious belief that has ever existed: the apparent design of the living creatures we see on Earth. Prior to the existence of evolutionary theory, all it took to vanquish the would-be atheists was to say, “Look at the world around you! How can you say it’s just random coincidence when the world is filled with all these animals and plants whose structrures go far beyond those of the most intricately designed watch ever created? If you were to walk upon the sands of a beach and come across a finely designed watch sitting on shore, would you imagine it had come about through the random actions of wind and wave on water? Of course not. You would see a watch and you would have to assume a watchmaker, some intelligent being who designed it. How can we not look at the incredible precision of the flesh and blood mechanisms that fill the world, and not imagine that they, too had their makers?”
This argument was called Paley’s Watch and it was a killer. I would have been a Deist at the very least in a world when there was no scientific answer to that argument. What could I have said, lacking knowlege of the billions of years the Earth has existed, much less the mechanism of natural selection? “Uh, the rocks and waves can do tricky things, sometimes.” It would have made more sense to be a Deist, which is why so many of our Founding Fathers were Deists.
But evolutionary theory did that argument in, crushingly, which is why religious types are still mad about it. That’s what Intelligent Design and Scientific Creationism are all about, looking for an end-run around evolution so they can have Paley’s Watch back. They can’t have it, they won’t succeed on scientific grounds, so they are trying to use cultural forces and the law to win by force that which they can no longer win through reason: the allegiance of rational men.
Actually, that is a misunderstanding of religion and myth that arose in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as people who were encountering the new disciplines of science misunderstood the writings of peoples from whose cultures they were separated by time and distance. There really is no evidence that older myths were ever seen as “scientific” explanations of events. (Note that many cultures had multiple creation myths that actually contradicted each other. Such contradictions are easily understood when the myths are seen as Story used to explain a people’s place in the cosmos, but make no sense as seen as “scientific” explanations of origins. Ancient people were no dumber than we are and they did not see myth as an explanation of physical facts.) Some people find it comforting to look at the “errors” of our ancestors and believe that we are so much more advanced in our actual thinking, but there really is no evidence that such is the case.
I agree that myths weren’t seen as “scientific” explanations, but the notion of a scientific explanation didn’t exist. I’m speaking of pre-Aristotle. Do you have any evidence that these cultures looked for alternate explanations? Or that they weren’t interested in why things were the way they were?
I agree that they believed in sometimes contradictory myths, but plenty of people in these here United States do the same thing. Perhaps they had their own brand of apologetics.
This is not to say they were dumb - with the technology they had, they had no way of coming up with more plausible explanations than those the myths gave. if you believe in a god, whyever would it be so strange to believe that the god or gods set up the world? The only reason we don’t (some of us, at least) is that science has found things contradicting the story, and provides an explanation better suited to reality.
If one of my ancestors from 2500 years ago was told the Biblical explanation of the universe, and the Big Bang one, he’d be dumb to pick the Big Bang one. It goes against all common sense, and no one would be able to provide him evidence for it. So I think you are underestimating our ancestors.