Quite right! It’s precisely the opposite, really. It was the fallibility of man that caused God to appear in the first place. For it was our weaknesses, fears, and ignorance that made us feel the need to manufacture the myth of God.
Fortunately, over time, humankind grows stronger, becomes braver, and learns evermore of the Universe around us. This will eventually render our manufactured God-Myths completely unnecessary. Indeed for many of us, it already is unnecessary, and furthermore, considered to be counter-productive (at best).
As for the rest of humankind catching on, “It’s Taking Longer Than We Thought.”
Science has already disproven God as far as the idea needs to be disproven; there’s no evidence for it, and the claims about god violate both the laws of physics and logic. If it was any other belief, that would count as “disproven” - but belief in god is given a pass, a special privileged status.
And yes, science and religion are by nature enemies. Science is the enemy of religion, because it is an attempt using reasoning and observation to discover the truth while religion is a delusion. Religion is opposed to reason, to facts, to truth; it is therefore opposed to science.
That’s an exaggeration, as pointed out. And to the extent that there’s truth to it, it’s because most of religion has been destroyed, in the more advanced nations at least. It was overcome and replaced with science and knowledge derived from science. Progress is impossible without religion being destroyed in the process, since progress requires understanding the reality that religion denies. What religion exists now, powerful and destructive as it still is, is only a shadow of what it was.
You’d hope so. From what I’ve seen, in the US efforts to discourage the teaching and understanding of evolution have increased notably in the last 5 or 10 years (see especially “Intelligent Design” - even if it doesn’t get taught in school, IMHO it was fairly successful in muddling the waters).
I hope that’s selection bias on my part, but I’m not so sure.
well, after recent events in TX and the success of the selective editing of text books I think you have a point. I know when I was in school evolution was touched on but not stressed. I hope now that we have even more information most schools are spending more time on it.
Whatever was the cause, Darwin’s publication certainly wasn’t it. For a start, great thinkers had already pretty much started jumping ship from religion by the mid-nineteenth century, and this had been going on from at least the Enlightenment, if not before.
For two, it subscribes to the great man of science syndrome. The Origin of the Species didn’t come out of nowhere, there had been rumblings about evolution for decades before. Darwin’s achievement wasn’t in formulating the theory, but in fastidiously collecting supporting evidence.
Another reason, Darwin’s original theory was problematic, because modern genetics hadn’t yet been discovered. Though his evidence was persuasive, it still wasn’t watertight. The Huxley-Wilberforce debate wasn’t a debate between science and religion, but between two competing scientists: there simply wasn’t the killer evidence to demonstrate that Darwin’s notion of evolution was the origin of our species, and many scientists knew it. Science didn’t “kick off” in late Victorian Britain because everybody collectively had an “aha!” moment after Darwin’s publication. Rather, the reason science really got going as an independent field was more to do with internal social changes, and class battles, within British society.
Lastly, it gives an absurdly prominent view to the theory of evolution (something I’ve noticed a lot in these debates). Why would you place the formulation of Darwin’s theory above Hutton’s realisation that the rocks he was looking at in Edinburgh were billions of years old, rather than thousands, as the Bible claimed? Clearly, Darwinism was working in a framework that regarded the idea that life on the planet had been around for hundreds of millions of years. This was the fundamental advance in shifting us away from religion and towards a more naturalistic view of the history of the Earth, and that happened during the 18th century.
And yet they claim to follow the same religions that a few centuries ago would gladly see people put to death for daring to voice such ungodly theories? That’s not religion, that’s hypocrisy: clinging on to some kind of nebulous belief in a creator while picking and choosing the few remaining bits of myth and superstition that haven’t yet been thoroughly discredited by science.
Better we should establish totalitarian secular states which execute those deemed to be counterrevolutionary or of the wrong social class. Damned kulaks.
Not exactly, religions don’t kill people, people kill people. Those in power a few centuries ago wanted ultimate power and killed to get it. In the present power is not given to the head preacher, and the Pope knows it is against the law to kill anyone. So it is different with people, not religion.
How many Aids deaths has the pope been responsible for? The pope has less power because more people have thrown off the yoke of religion. I’m sure if he had the same measure of power he did in the middle ages, he’d be making similar savage decisions.
None at all. People having promiscuous, unsafe sex are responsible for most of the AIDS cases. Good condom-shunning Catholics don’t do that. There may be the occasional good condom-shunning Catholic wife getting AIDS from her hounddog husband, but I’ll wager they’re few & far between.
Our understanding of religion has advanced over the centuries just as our understanding of science has. We don’t use leeches to bleed people to balance their humours anymore either, do we? Yes, religion has been misused to justify evil in the past, including the recent past. There are also wacko scientists out there as well who do more harm than good. Nobody’s hands are clean.
We’re talking about Great Thinkers in this thread, not the rabid fundies who take over school boards to get evolution out of the curriculum and not snake-oil salesmen or science quacks either.
Welcome to Earth. On your stay here you might like to note that the populace doesn’t behave like you think they do. Please attempt to understand the planet and its inhabitants during your say.
First: They create a system where condoms are demonized so that Africans think they are bad. Even non Catholic ones.
Second: People have illicit sex. Even Catholics. Even people you know. Even people you love.
Third: Even if it were “Just a few wives” it is a loss for no gain. The pope continuing his policies towards contraception gains the universe exactly nothing and costs untold misery. And condoms are one issue.
Why don’t we let this derailment end here since I’ve shown that you’re completely wrong?
Darwin’s theory depended on the existence of descent with variations, not the mechanism for it (which he got wrong.) He demonstrated the existence of descent with variation by appeal to the well known breeding practices for plants and animals. The discovery of genetics gave us the mechanism for how these variations arise, and the wonder of it is that what was found supported Darwin far more strongly than his hypothesis of a somewhat Lamarckian mechanism.
The reason for the impact of evolution is that the major teaching of religion viz man’s relationship to God is that God created us specially - that we are fundamentally different from the beasts. The age of rocks did tell us that the Bible was not literally true, but there was a major segment of Christianity for which this was not a problem. In fact, during the early part of the 19th century many churchmen got involved with science (which was a bit of a fad) in the expectation that Bible would demonstrate if not the literal truth of the Bible than the fundamental truth of it.
Darwin, by demonstrating that we were one with animals and that special creation was not necessary and unlikely, blew a big hole in the position of the moderate Christians. There was a group of Christians who mistrusted science as being something against the Bible as it stood, and they became dominant after the Origin was published, because many people felt it easier to reject evolution than modify their religious beliefs. Some of the moderates dropped out of the clergy, some hung on, and some became more fundamentalist.
The source for this, by the way, is a dissertation on the impact of science on religion in the early 19th century - sorry, no cite. Got it from the library years ago.
