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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mine was that you sneer at the very thing that ensures your survival.
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?
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.
: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.
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.
More like in spite of religion. The first step to civilized behavior is to cast out or marginalize 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.
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.
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.
I believe I touched on that, briefly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh I bet he could. I doubt he was half trying.
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.
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?