An explanation is either right, or it is wrong, if it pertains to items that are Fact–i.e. they are decidable based on evidence. It’s not as if there is a religious explanation for origins (our “place in the cosmos”) which is different from the “Scientific” explanation for origins, but which is equally correct somehow.
All traditional religious explanations of origins are just wrong. Add whatever other adjective pleases you, but don’t leave out “wrong.” Many Scientific explanations have also been wrong. What makes them “scientific” is that they are based on the discovery of evidence and not a priori assertions that have no basis in any evidence.
Depending on how you define “ancient,” ancient people were dumber than we are. Intelligence has evolved. More importantly, they were much more ignorant. That’s why their religious explanations were wrong; they were not yet in possession of key evidence. On average their cosmology did not have much understanding of the physicial world, which is why their religions were wrong.
Well yeah, but only because the whole idea of science is to form and adapt theories as more evidence becomes available. Religion, when used to try and explain things in the real world, is basically just guesswork, and very often involves actively ignoring evidence.
Scientific discovery does undermine many of the claims made in religious texts (e.g., the earth was formed in six days.) As scientific explanations are made and commonly accepted for natural phenomena that had previously been attributed to God, believers have accommodated both science and religion by compartmentalizing, as **ITR champion ** did, and saying to themselves that one does not affect the other. But the analogy of science/religion being like music/painting is a faulty one because the tension between religion and science is unlike any other comparison in human experience.
For me, and I speak only for myself, science and religion are two explanations for the same thing – why we are here, how we got here, why things happen to us. So many of the scriptural explanations to these questions have been scientifically disproved to my satisfaction that I have turned completely away from religion as having anything credible to offer to my life. So in that sense, yes, science has disproven religion to me.
As far as morality is concerned, I was raised in a household that believed is a commonly held community value that certainly is shared by religion, but not dictated by it. Over time, my need for religious belief has waned to the point that I no longer have any. Did science disprove my religious belief? Yes, it did. But that’s just for me.
The Paley’s Watch argument was (and is) popular, but it’s hardly persuasive when you realize how it’s set up.
First, he describes a natural scene of water, sand, and wind. Then, he contrasts that with a watch. If you immediately see the watch and think, “Aha! That stands out as obviously designed!” then you’ve just accepted that the background (the wind, water, and sand) is not designed. How often do you walk down a watch-less beach, look at the sand, water, and wind and think, “Aha! That obviously stands out as designed!” You don’t. We all know very well that natural processes create things like beaches.
The argument relies on our intuitions being accurate guages of design in one instance, and inaccurate gauges of design in another.
There’s another issue around “Intelligent Design” that bothers me: For most life–perhaps the average human life, and certainly most animal life–this existence is capricious, fragile, fraught with uncertainty and pain, and subject to a variety of uncomfortable vicissitudes. I’ve never quite made the connection between “Design” and “Intelligent.” Unless the Intelligence is malicious, in which case it ain’t much to trumpet about…
The question “why were you born?” can only be answered with the response “a sperm in some random human made its way to an egg in some other random human and generated a zygote”?
You cannot possibly answer that same question with “my parents wanted to have and raise children”?
You seem to live in an odd, one-dimensional world. You criticize religion for attempting to answer a question that you cannot ask and pretend that religion is only answering the question that you feel limited to ask when I doubt that any of those religions were even very concerned with your question, if they thought of it at all.
As for your faith that you are smarter than your ancestors: there is no evidence for that claim. Whatever the Flynn Effect demonstrates, (and neither Flynn nor anyone else who is a serious scientist claims to really know), it does not actually assert that we are really smarter in 2007 than people were in 1947 or 1887, much less extending back into distant time. The point regarding ignorance is true, but it becomes irrelevant when one notes that the issues being “studied” are different.
Oh, good grief. You’re overlooking the overloading of the word “why”. The first usage is the mechanistic, biological one, the second is the human intention one, and there is no problem with either. That doesn’t mean that the answer “the stork brought you” isn’t wrong, even if it appears in a holy book somewhere.
Genetically? Probably not. However improvements in nutrition during pregnancy no doubt have reduced damage to fetal brains in utero. So I wouldn’t be surprised if on average we are smarter, though the extremes, who probably matter more than averages, are the same.
The point, however, is that there is no evidence outside various seventeenth through ninteenth century misunderstandings that any of the earlier societies even considered the mechanistic question worth asking. It only became an issue when a few religious types bought into that misunderstanding and began insisting (without evidence on their part, either, but in response to the more recent challenges) that the earlier questions were mechanistic.
I thought I had said the same thing upthread. Before then people were creationists by default, for lack of any other explanation and lack of any evidence that contradicted the Biblical explanation and the cosmology that sprung up from it (modified by the Greeks.) I’d say that the first doubts were introduced by the Copernican Revolution, a bit early than what you give, but well within the margin of error.
It’s interesting that some Biblical cosmological mistakes - like the flat earth - never became dogma when they went against Greek science. No one ever went up against the Inquisition for thinking the Earth round - even Dante knew this.
I suspect that you and I are in substantial agreement on this point (even if we could bicker over the details for several more pages).
What I was particularly reacting against was the notion, (popular, but “wrong” to use Chief Pedant’s language), that the various myths, even creation myths, were ever intended by their authors to explain natural phenomena in anything resembling a scientific manner, or in any mechanistic way.
I was thinking more on the order of 100,000 years rather than 100 years on the “smarter” claim; sorry I didn’t make that more clear. It doesn’t seem very likely we are measurably smarter than 5,000 years ago, say.
I do live in “one-dimensional world,” I suppose, when it comes to religious versus scientific explanations. Of course there may be multiple facets to the way a question is approached, as in the example you give above. But where the issue involved is not opinion but Fact, and explanations are mutually exlusive, only the scientifically based one–i.e the one based on an analysis of relevant evidence–has any merit. Religion might invoke The Great Turtle while Science invokes evolution, for example. It’s true the scientific explanation could turn out to be wrong. But of the two mutually exclusive explanations it’s the only one worth considering because of the process it uses.
Ultimately religion is going to be reduced to just rendering opinions. It’s pretty much there now. Good for prattling on at teatime but pretty far removed from its original goal of supplying Absolute Truth.
I would actually agree with you on this point. The larger issue, however, is that very few (possibly no) religions ever created their explanations with an intent to provide “facts,” and only a tiny number of religious groups (and generally only in the last couple of hundred years) have chosen to re-interpret their mythology as “fact.” Asserting that “religion” is “wrong” when it is not addressing the same issues is a strawman argument unless you are careful to limit “religion” to the rather small number of groups (even if disproportionately loud in the U.S.) who actually buy into your definition, ignoring their own traditional beliefs.
Explain it yes. Scientifically, no. They had no concept of that. Mechanistically, no. God said it, and things poofed into existence.
And I suspect creationists today would be no more scientific if they hadn’t tried to pretend to be doing science to fool the courts. Poofing is very satisfying for some people.
Ultimately it’s religion , and not science, that disproves religion for those things in the “moral and spiritual” realm. Multiple mutually exclusive concepts cannot all be right. The existence of so many explanations and so many different positions for so many thousands of years suggests that religion is either incapable of finding out the truth, or that no a priori Truths exist, or that any Source of that Truth has no interest in mankind uncovering it.
I do not deny that it’s a disconcerting conclusion.
That is clearly an argument that can be put forth. It is certainly a more legitimate argument than comparing unlike purposes of Myth and Science and implying that one has disproved the other.
True, of course. And yet, while multiple mutually exclusive concepts cannot all be right, this doesn’t even begin to show that they are all wrong. (Not that I need to tell you that.)
All you really need to show Tom’s point about “no doctinally anti-scientific religion exists before the rise of science”* is silly is the vast number of professing, self-identifying Xians who, right this second, in an age of overwhelming scientific information, choose to believe in the literal Bible myths of creation and flooding, etc.
It’s simply common sense to extrapolate that, absent that scientific knowledge and methodology, the percentage of Xians who accepted Biblical (and other religious) explanations was much, much, much higher than it is today. As **Evil Captor ** says, in a time before scientific evidence was available, the Bible, being the only game in town, seems at least plausible. Now, not so much.
If churchmen before the rise of science were busily denouncing literal belief in the Bible’s authority on matters we now categorize under “science” (not just your stray passage from Augustine, but the Church, and churches themselves), that would form a basis for Tom’s argument, but as it stands, this religion has thrived for centuries with the mass of its followers (not necessarily its leaders, though they too have professed literalism) being, at best, deceived into a literal reading of the Bible. The past three centuries of scientific thought has nudged some Xians into conceding that maybe the Bible isn’t the be-all, end-all authority on some piddling matters, but nothing will erase the previous centuries in which they said little, and did nothing, to distinguish between Xian dogma and any other valid way of reading the universe.
*note to Gotcha squad: this is a paraphrased summary, not a quote
No. What is silly is taking current beliefs by people who have actually modified theology in the last 180 years and attempting to extrapolate back 2,000 years or 2,500 years or further.
There is no evidence that people hundreds or thousands of years ago actually believed that their myths were “scientific” or “mechanistically explanatory” and there is substantial evidence that they did not believe their myths in that way.
It may give you a warm feeling to dismiss facts based on anachronistically flawed premises, but it does not make your claim true.
Based on your “logic,” people have “always” believed that space aliens were small, child-like “grays”–look at how many people believe in them, now–even though we actually have a pretty clear date (ca 1964) when that picture of aliens was first introduced to Western society and we can see and document the development and spread of that belief. Early ethnographers made similar unfounded assumptions about ancient peoples based on their contacts with pre-literate peoples of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Anthropologists have now recognized that sort of reasononing as flawed. If one wishes to exalt science, one should study and learn from the lessons of science.
If I’m understanding you correctly (and there’s every chance I’m not), no one is arguing that point, certainly not me.
What I am arguing is that saying “I don’t know” has been within people’s capacities since well before 1964 or the rise of science or the birth of Christ. What was keeping Xian authorities, between the first century and the eighteenth, from issung a stern denounciement of literal belief in the Bible and affirming that, say, “No one really knows how the world was created, or many of the other mysteries which a literal reading of the Bible claims to explain. There are so many improbable, mythic elements in the Old and New Testaments that certainly not every word can be interpreted as literal and accurate explanations, and we certainly do not endorse anyone seeking answers in this confusing and flawed document to suggest that definitive answers to every mundane problem can found there” ?
But they didn’t. Why? Because they were the only game in town, and wanted to hang onto their turf for as long as possible.
Such arrant claims of knowledge and authority where there was none to be had undermines their every claim of present and future knowledge and authority.