# When did religion jump the shark for great thinkers? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [May 31, 2010, 11:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-religion-jump-the-shark-for-great-thinkers/541373 "2010-05-31T11:07:11Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![cosmosdan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a6a055/32.png) [@cosmosdan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cosmosdan)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2010, 6:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-religion-jump-the-shark-for-great-thinkers/541373/81 "2010-06-01T18:22:51Z")
> [@Apollo](#): > > An interesting perspective on the religiosity of scientists. > [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQIXMxbzFEQ&feature=related](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQIXMxbzFEQ&feature=related) > > I recommend watching the entire talk. That is interesting. according to the speaker around 40% of all scientists believe in a personal God and if we consider only those in the national Academy of Sciences, which might be argued to be the most brilliant minds, the number drops to 15%. I’d be interested in knowing how many entertain the possibility for something more beyond current science that would not be considered a personal God, as in seperate all powerful being. ---
**Author:** ![cosmosdan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a6a055/32.png) [@cosmosdan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cosmosdan)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2010, 6:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-religion-jump-the-shark-for-great-thinkers/541373/82 "2010-06-01T18:29:27Z")
> [@Bryan\_Ekers](#): > > Try living without it for a week. Give up anything invented since 1600 and go fend for yourself in the woods. No thanks. I don’t have the proper training. Was there a point? Mine was that it is in the human application of science that we find things we might call good or not so good. ---
**Author:** ![Skammer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/skammer/32/143_2.png) [@Skammer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skammer)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2010, 6:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-religion-jump-the-shark-for-great-thinkers/541373/83 "2010-06-01T18:31:56Z")
It’s pretty closed minded to fall into the trap of beliveing that science and religion are somehow incapatible or adversary to each other. We may see fewer religious scientists today, but we see fewer religious people in general (especially in places like Europe), so that makes sense in terms of numbers. But it’s a fallacy to think that more science = less religion. They’re unrelated. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2010, 6:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-religion-jump-the-shark-for-great-thinkers/541373/84 "2010-06-01T18:38:10Z")
> [@Damuri\_Ajashi](#): > > I think a lot of the morals we hold dear today were made popular through religion. Would slavery have disappeared as quickly as it did without religion? Quickly? In 6,000 years of human history, slavery has been seen as an evil in the last 200 or so. And it still persists in some places. I’d hardly call that quickly. While some religious people fought slavery, others supported it, since it is clearly considered morally legitimate in the Bible. Perhaps slavery would have been defeated more quickly if the slave holders didn’t get told by their ministers that they were doing God’s work. > [@](#): > > Would Civil Rights have succeeded as a purely secular movement without the powerful language of religion? Would helping the poor be such a societal imperitive without religion? Perhaps we have no use for it today, perhaps religion is like unions, something that we don’t need until we need it. MLK Jr. did not invent religion. Though he did use religious language, religion was also directly responsible for the removal of the civil rights of others, like Jews - or Protestants under Mary and Catholics under Elizabeth. Remember, Civil Rights did not get implemented by people listening to religious leaders, but by the secular government passing laws. ---
**Author:** ![cosmosdan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a6a055/32.png) [@cosmosdan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cosmosdan)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2010, 6:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-religion-jump-the-shark-for-great-thinkers/541373/85 "2010-06-01T18:42:49Z")
> [@ITR\_champion](#): > > As for the OP, I question the premise. In the year 1700, only about 5%-10% of the American people participated in organized religion. Today the percentage is much higher. So we should be looking for reasons to explain the increasing interest in religion over the past three centuries, not the decreasing interest. That’s interesting. Have a cite for that? What constitutes participating in organized religion? My impression was that a huge % were Christians. and at least attended regularly but I never looked it up. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2010, 6:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-religion-jump-the-shark-for-great-thinkers/541373/86 "2010-06-01T18:45:39Z")
> [@Skammer](#): > > We may see fewer religious scientists today, but we see fewer religious people in general (especially in places like Europe), so that makes sense in terms of numbers. But it’s a fallacy to think that more science = less religion. They’re unrelated. Only if religion refrains from making scientific claims - or, as it seems to have turned out, nearly any claim that can be verified. Say you are thinking of taking financial advice from a guy who claims he knows more about the markets and economics than anyone on Earth. Just take his advice, and you’ll do fine. However, when you look up his previous predictions about the market, 90% of them are dead wrong, and he isn’t able to even define the terms correctly. Do you treat his former sayings as metaphors and have faith that his current ones are correct, or do you dump the chump, even if his general financial philosophy matches yours? Religions claim to have at least some pipeline from a deity which they say means we should take their dogma more seriously than others. And yet when we check the accuracy of those items which can be checked, it comes out wrong. That is the relevance of science (and history) to religion. ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2010, 6:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-religion-jump-the-shark-for-great-thinkers/541373/87 "2010-06-01T18:48:56Z")
> [@cosmosdan](#): > > Was there a point? Mine was that it is in the human application of science that we find things we might call good or not so good. Mine was that you sneer at the very thing that ensures your survival. ---
**Author:** ![cosmosdan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a6a055/32.png) [@cosmosdan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cosmosdan)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2010, 6:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-religion-jump-the-shark-for-great-thinkers/541373/88 "2010-06-01T18:50:53Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > MLK Jr. did not invent religion. Though he did use religious language, religion was also directly responsible for the removal of the civil rights of others, like Jews - or Protestants under Mary and Catholics under Elizabeth. Remember, Civil Rights did not get implemented by people listening to religious leaders, but by the secular government passing laws. Again we come back to humans being human. When the enitre human populatiuon are believers by a huge majority I think we can expect the gamut of the human condition to be expressed in that %. Would those secular governments have passed those laws on civil rights without the efforts of people like MLK and Gandhi? ---
**Author:** ![cosmosdan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a6a055/32.png) [@cosmosdan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cosmosdan)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2010, 7:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-religion-jump-the-shark-for-great-thinkers/541373/89 "2010-06-01T19:04:05Z")
> [@Bryan\_Ekers](#): > > Mine was that you sneer at the very thing that ensures your survival. I see. I was actually sneering at a point being made that I saw as a gross oversimplification, not science as a whole. Usually in these discussions we wind up comparing science and religion in completely inappropriate ways. While rigid dogmatic religion squelches critical thinking that is not the only brand or only facet of the religious spiritual life. Much of it is about our values as humans and our relationship to each other. It’s more along the lines of philosophy than science. A comparison of the moral philosophies of religion and science is an invalid comparison. So, science helps us to be able to feed the word but it is in the philospohical arena conained within religious beliefs about brotherhood, that we find out why we should care about that. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2010, 7:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-religion-jump-the-shark-for-great-thinkers/541373/90 "2010-06-01T19:06:56Z")
> [@Damuri\_Ajashi](#): > > I don’t think science has not chipped away at religion, it has just deepened our understanding of God. :rolleyes: It’s demonstrated that God is unnecessary and impossible. That’s “deepening our understanding” in a sense, but I doubt you meant it that way. > [@Skammer](#): > > It’s pretty closed minded to fall into the trap of beliveing that science and religion are somehow incapatible or adversary to each other. No, it’s acknowledging reality. Science is an attempt to understand objective reality; religion is an attempt to declare fantasy real. They are innately enemies. > [@Damuri\_Ajashi](#): > > I think a lot of the morals we hold dear today were made popular through religion. More like in spite of religion. The first step to civilized behavior is to cast out or marginalize religion. > [@Damuri\_Ajashi](#): > > Would slavery have disappeared as quickly as it did without religion? Religion imposed and encouraged it with great enthusiasm, so I see no reason to think it shortened the existence of slavery. Imposing Christianity on “heathens” was one motive for slavery in fact. Religion is the enemy of freedom and an excuse for cruelty, so it would naturally tend to support slavery. > [@Damuri\_Ajashi](#): > > Would Civil Rights have succeeded as a purely secular movement without the powerful language of religion? Why not? It would probably have succeeded faster without religion encouraging and excusing bigotry. Something it is still doing. It’s silly to pretend that religion is a force for social justice when most of the fight against justice is from believers trying to impose their god on everyone. > [@Damuri\_Ajashi](#): > > Would helping the poor be such a societal imperitive without religion? More so, if anything. We wouldn’t have people telling each other that the poor are poor because God hates them or because they were evil in a past life. ---
**Author:** ![SteveG1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/bb73d2/32.png) [@SteveG1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SteveG1)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2010, 7:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-religion-jump-the-shark-for-great-thinkers/541373/91 "2010-06-01T19:26:36Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > Religion is the enemy of freedom and an excuse for cruelty, so it would naturally tend to support slavery. I believe I touched on that, briefly. > [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > Why not? It would probably have succeeded faster without religion encouraging and excusing bigotry. Something it is still doing. It’s silly to pretend that religion is a force for social justice when most of the fight against justice is from believers trying to impose their god on everyone. As I also said, much of what we see as being just and right, was brought about by force - by open warfare, at the point of a sword or the business end of a cannon. > [@](#): > > More so, if anything. We wouldn’t have people telling each other that the poor are poor because God hates them or because they were evil in a past life. Or in anotehr way, that they should be cheerful and content with their lot - no matter how horrific it is. Or, that (from Pius IX) any attempt to rise obove that determine your own fate is somehow wrong. Well shit, how about the Untouchables of India? How evil would you have to be, for how many consecutive lives, to deserve that? The more I think about it, the more I think religion is there to pay lip service (if even that - not always), but the real work of gaining freedom is done by those willing to kill for it. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2010, 7:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-religion-jump-the-shark-for-great-thinkers/541373/92 "2010-06-01T19:47:10Z")
> [@cosmosdan](#): > > Again we come back to humans being human. When the enitre human populatiuon are believers by a huge majority I think we can expect the gamut of the human condition to be expressed in that %. > > Would those secular governments have passed those laws on civil rights without the efforts of people like MLK and Gandhi? How about if there were no religion and MLK and Gandhi were equally eloquent atheists? King may have come from a religious tradition (but so does Al Sharpton) but his message didn’t depend on Christianity or even god-belief. ---
**Author:** ![Skammer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/skammer/32/143_2.png) [@Skammer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skammer)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2010, 8:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-religion-jump-the-shark-for-great-thinkers/541373/93 "2010-06-01T20:35:47Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > Science is an attempt to understand objective reality; religion is an attempt to declare fantasy real. They are innately enemies. You couldn’t be more wrong. Science is the method by which we understand the physical world. It is completely uninterested and agnostic about the non-material world on which religion focuses. Saying that science and religion are enemies is like saying science and philosophy are enemies. ---
**Author:** ![Odesio](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/odesio/32/20003_2.png) [@Odesio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Odesio)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2010, 8:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-religion-jump-the-shark-for-great-thinkers/541373/94 "2010-06-01T20:36:08Z")
> [@SteveG1](#): > > Slavery was not ended by religion. It was ended by the Civil War. In short, at the point of a bayonet, by force. Civil rights in the 60s was brought by force too - the FBI and the government. Many abolitionist of the 19th century were motivated by their religion. The Grimké sisters, John Brown, and father and daughter Stowe are just a few of the more prominent abolitionist I can think of off the top of my head who were motivated by their religious beliefs. The Civil War doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It resulted from years of abolitionist agitation. As for the 1960s, sorry. The FBI weren’t exactly the champions of the Civil Rights movement. ---
**Author:** ![cosmosdan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a6a055/32.png) [@cosmosdan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cosmosdan)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2010, 8:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-religion-jump-the-shark-for-great-thinkers/541373/95 "2010-06-01T20:37:25Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > How about if there were no religion and MLK and Gandhi were equally eloquent atheists? King may have come from a religious tradition (but so does Al Sharpton) but his message didn’t depend on Christianity or even god-belief. It didn’t? How would you know that? We can’t really say that either Gandhi or MLK would have been the same people and accomplished similar goals without thier beliefs can we? I get that the issues of social justice , equality and other moral issues do not depend on God belief but religious belief, the sense of something more, a higher power and purpose for man, has been the vehicle for a lot of people interested in those things up to now. Perhaps, little by little, we’re evolving away from it. Time will tell. The question here is {I think} about great thinkers who address these issues from a place of religious or spiritual belief. I think recent history such as MLK and Gandhi as well as others , shows the answer is that there are still great thinkers among believers. ---
**Author:** ![Skammer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/skammer/32/143_2.png) [@Skammer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skammer)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2010, 8:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-religion-jump-the-shark-for-great-thinkers/541373/96 "2010-06-01T20:43:46Z")
Also I notice that the OP refers to “great thinkers” as “scholars, philosophers and general thinkers” but we seem to have focused on the hard sciences. There are a handful of theologians and religious scholars who fit the OP and are religious pretty much by definition. ---
**Author:** ![begbert2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/begbert2/32/3357_2.png) [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2010, 8:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-religion-jump-the-shark-for-great-thinkers/541373/97 "2010-06-01T20:45:51Z")
> [@Skammer](#): > > You couldn’t be more wrong. Science is the method by which we understand the physical world. It is completely uninterested and agnostic about the non-material world on which religion focuses. > > Saying that science and religion are enemies is like saying science and philosophy are enemies. You couldn’t be more wrong - science doesn’t so much as _recognize_ a division between physical stuff and anything else. If something exists, if it can be observed, if it’s interesting enough to get grant money for studying it, then science is more than happy to point its lens of scrutiny at it and snap away. Science of the study of that which exists. Nothing is outside its purview - except things that don’t exist. About such things it is indeed mostly uninterested and agnostic - it just flatly asserts that you oughtn’t be believing in the impossible and then moves on to subjects where there are sufficient demonstrable facts to foster intelligent discussion. ---
**Author:** ![RadicalPi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/radicalpi/32/9806_2.png) [@RadicalPi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RadicalPi)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2010, 9:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-religion-jump-the-shark-for-great-thinkers/541373/98 "2010-06-01T21:24:51Z")
> [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](#): > > So your argument is that it happened at _ **exactly** _ the right moment to make us philosophically opt for a moral shift to more prosaic conclusions? Almost as if – :eek: > > 😉 If you mean that the earthquake was the moment the dam broke, so to speak, then yes. The circumstances had come to the point where something had to give, and the Lisbon disaster was it. I did leave off one key point though in my post which is that the scientific advances of the seventeenth century gave rise in the eighteenth to the idea that suffering and pain were not inevitable and that it was not necessary to stoically inure oneself to them in order to get by. A similar disaster in 1655 would have been considered par for the course, more or less. Starting in the eighteenth century, natural disasters and the like became contraindications of the idea that humanity could control nature (all earlier times saw themselves as completely subject to nature’s vicissitudes), and thus shocking, and thus more likely to lead to a change in perspective. ---
**Author:** ![cosmosdan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a6a055/32.png) [@cosmosdan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cosmosdan)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2010, 9:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-religion-jump-the-shark-for-great-thinkers/541373/99 "2010-06-01T21:27:44Z")
> [@begbert2](#): > > You couldn’t be more wrong Oh I bet he could. I doubt he was half trying. > [@](#): > > science doesn’t so much as _recognize_ a division between physical stuff and anything else. If something exists, if it can be observed, if it’s interesting enough to get grant money for studying it, then science is more than happy to point its lens of scrutiny at it and snap away. > > Science of the study of that which exists. Nothing is outside its purview - except things that don’t exist. About such things it is indeed mostly uninterested and agnostic - it just flatly asserts that you oughtn’t be believing in the impossible and then moves on to subjects where there are sufficient demonstrable facts to foster intelligent discussion. Science is willing to study anything but I’d say it recognizes the difference between studying more subjective sociological conditions and something that can be studied from an objective point of view. The nature of the sun is a little easier to pin down with specifics than the nature of brotherly love. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Hamster\_King](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/8edcca/32.png) [@The\_Hamster\_King](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Hamster_King)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2010, 9:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-religion-jump-the-shark-for-great-thinkers/541373/100 "2010-06-01T21:30:30Z")
Back to the OP … maybe it would be helpful to look for important breakthroughs to identify great religious thinkers. For example, if we want to justify Einstein as a great thinker, we can point to his work on relativity. He came up with a brilliant new idea that revolutionized the world. What was the most important recent breakthrough in theology? What new, creative work by a great religious thinker has changed the way we think about God, or creation, or man’s purpose in the universe? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-religion-jump-the-shark-for-great-thinkers/541373.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-religion-jump-the-shark-for-great-thinkers/541373.md?page=6)