Science and religion as one?

sniper4life · Post by **sniper4life** » 06 Apr 2007 20:22

I would just like to pose a question of what people might think about this, especially to any atheists out there. My personal point of view is that science shows a truth in religion based on how complex everything is. Also, the whole big bang theory seems to as well. Where would matter ever come from. It is impossible for science to ever explain this. There is the law (forget what called) that says matter can not be created or destroyed. Just interested in other people's opinion on this.

QuantumBalance · Post by **QuantumBalance** » 06 Apr 2007 21:24

You are a true "Post modernist". Yes, an open mind will comprehend the nature of both science and spirituality. Namaste.

LoL (lots of love)

cammel · Post by **cammel** » 06 Apr 2007 23:39

Science will never show there is or is not religion (in my opinion). Science can take us back to the big bang but as of right now it cant tell us how it happened. Creationists can say it was God, atheists can say that science just cant explain it yet.

I think if science were able to prove religion without any doubt it would defeat the purpose of religion which seems to be faith without reason.

Whatever.

Jeremy · Post by **Jeremy** » 07 Apr 2007 00:37

sniper4life wrote:I would just like to pose a question of what people might think about this, especially to any atheists out there. My personal point of view is that science shows a truth in religion based on how complex everything is. Also, the whole big bang theory seems to as well. Where would matter ever come from. It is impossible for science to ever explain this. There is the law (forget what called) that says matter can not be created or destroyed. Just interested in other people's opinion on this.

Which religion does science support? There is no religion that claims that the universe is 13.7 billion years old and that life evolved from singled celled life all the way to life we see today without direction in about 3.5 billion years. The science, in fact, shows that all religion is false.

History shows that whenever humanity does not have an answer for a question, they make one up. You could certainly make up your own reason as to why the big bang occurred although I would be careful to remove the assertion that the big bang began by breaking the laws of thermodynamics by creating matter from no matter; the big bang doesn't violate those laws.

I think, rather than making up our own answers to questions that we don't know the answer to, we should wait and see. Lets try and live our lives based on what we actually know is true, not what we'd like to be true.

junkyardjew · Post by **junkyardjew** » 07 Apr 2007 06:50

There's a good book from the CBC (canadian broadcasting corporation) Massey Lectures called Biology as Ideology that talks about science as a religion. Its very good. i haven't read it in a couple of years, but it points out how DNA has been grabbed onto to 'prove' all kinds of things that are actually taken on faith, and aren't proved at all by DNA analysis.

cammel · Post by **cammel** » 08 Apr 2007 00:38

I agree with everything you said Jeremy except that science shows religion doesnt exist.

Religions essentialy just attribute unknown things like the creation of the universe to a creator, while science just says it is as of now unexplained. How can science disprove an etherial all-powerful god?

dazza · Post by **dazza** » 08 Apr 2007 03:21

If anyone is seriously interested in the correlation of science and "religion", grab a book called " the marriage of sense and soul"
by Ken Wilber.
In this book Wilber integrates premodern religious/spiritual truths
that are found in all wisdom traditions ( Plotin, Sufism, Christianity,
Buddhism and so on ) with the empirical, (post)modern truths of
science .

no matter how many books you've read and understood, no matter
what school of thought you favour, reading Wilber will be interesting
and surprising, without having to agree with everything he says.

Jeremy · Post by **Jeremy** » 08 Apr 2007 05:52

cammel wrote:I agree with everything you said Jeremy except that science shows religion doesnt exist.

Religions essentialy just attribute unknown things like the creation of the universe to a creator, while science just says it is as of now unexplained. How can science disprove an etherial all-powerful god?

Firstly, I didn't say that religion does not exist, it clearly does. I said that the things religion teaches are false.

You state "how can science disprove an etherial[sic] all powerful god?"

And you're right, science cannot disprove such an existence, but which God is the true one, because there have been literally millions of Gods that people have believed in over the history of humanity, and most religions hold that their gods are the only ones that are true. Christianity claims that it's God is the only god that exists and Jainism claims the same thing. Both these beliefs cannot be correct, only one can be, and the rest are false. Science cannot disprove religion, but it can say that there is as much likelihood that Zeus exists as that the Christian God exists, or any other God. From there, based on the evidence of these hundreds of contradicting beliefs, all with no evidence supporting them, the clear assumption is that they all must be false, since we know that at least all of them bar one must be false anyway.

BainbridgeShred · Post by **BainbridgeShred** » 08 Apr 2007 09:25

Posted two days earlier by mwah in the Dialectic Discourse thread.

Do any of you guys know Ken Wilber? I'm curious to know what you guys would think of his "Transmodernism" because I find myself agreeing with it a lot of times, and he seems like a pretty smart dude. I'm no Philosoph though, so I'd be real curious to hear you guys opinions especially on the All Quadrants/All Levels part of his work.

Please respond in that thread if you get an opportunity Nurs.

Blue_turnip · Post by **Blue_turnip** » 02 May 2007 00:30

sniper4life wrote:It is impossible for science to ever explain this.

I cbf getting into this discussion or simply fully focusing on what its about but regardless... thats a pretty big statement for you to make there.

Lol it already has been explained. Read some new scientist or something. Sure, it may not be proven, or even strongly supported, but explained it has been.

Jeremy · Post by **Jeremy** » 02 May 2007 03:13

There's a new book that I bought today called; "God; The Failed Hypothesis" By Victor J Stenger, who is a physicist. The claim made on the cover of the book (I obviously haven't read it yet) is that we now know enough about the world to use science to prove that the literal God of the 3 Abrahamic religions is false.

alex · Post by **alex** » 02 May 2007 16:03

Jeremy. I do not consider myself an expert by any means. But I am a philosophy major, a theist, and I did just spend an entire semester taking a course called "The Philosophy of Religion". I read this:
http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vste ... ummary.htm

I don't find it too difficult to reconcile any of these arguments with my own theistic beliefs. The ability to counter these claims comes not from my own intelligence, but from arguments that I have already read in class. I disagree with anyone who tells you, one way or the other, that they can prove or disprove God.

On the topic of science and religion, this lecture is pretty interesting if you have the time to listen to it:
mms://stream.simpletoremember.com/simpletoremember/misc/Dr_Gerald_Schroeder-Genesis_and_the_Big_Bang.mp3

Jeremy · Post by **Jeremy** » 02 May 2007 18:29

Do you also disagree with anybody who can prove or disprove Zeus?

What about the Tooth Fairy?

Do you accept that neither Zeus, nor the Tooth Fairy actually exist? Why? How does the same logic not apply to "God."

I think you're failing to understand science and failing to understand atheism. Science is not mathematics. Atheists do not claim that they have disproved the existence of God. Victor J Strenger does not claim to have disproved the existence of God. What they claim, and what I claim, is that there is absolutely no reason to think that the God hypothesis is true, and many reasons to think that it's not true. If we are open minded, we have to accept in that situation that the hypothesis is not true, until new evidence comes up. We also have to accept that the metahypothesis, that new evidence will come up, is false, until new evidence for that comes up etc.

I love this quote from Francis Crick about philosophy.

"Well we have an established series of jokes about philosophers which I don't have to give! Essentially philosophers often ask good questions, but they have no techniques for getting the answers. Therefore you should not pay too much attention to their discussions. And we can ask what progress have they made. A lot of problems which were once regarded as philosophical, such as what is an atom, are now regarded as part of physics. Some people have argued that the main purpose of a philosopher is to deal with the unsolved problems, but the problems eventually get solved, and they get solved in a scientific way. If you ask how many cases in the past has a philosopher been successful at solving a problem, as we can say there are no such cases."

Conversations on Consciousness Susan Blackmore, Oxford University Press, page 74.

alex · Post by **alex** » 02 May 2007 19:50

Do you also disagree with anybody who can prove or disprove Zeus?

What about the Tooth Fairy?

Do you accept that neither Zeus, nor the Tooth Fairy actually exist? Why? How does the same logic not apply to "God."

I dont believe in the tooth fairy or Zeus either. Does that make me an atheist? Why? Because I have never observed these things personally, I shouldn't believe in them? That doesn't make any sense. We believe plenty of things we cannot observe with our immediate senses, Electrons, radio waves, etc... Belief is not based on experience alone. But I dont know if you are necessarily advocating that sort of argument.

What they claim, and what I claim, is that there is absolutely no reason to think that the God hypothesis is true, and many reasons to think that it's not true.

As I said in my original post. I feel confident that any argument which would favor the above claim could be countered without much difficulty.

If we are open minded, we have to accept in that situation that the hypothesis is not true, until new evidence comes up. We also have to accept that the metahypothesis, that new evidence will come up, is false, until new evidence for that comes up etc.

This I completely disagree with. If we are open minded, we should not believe in God? Why? An argument like "Pascal's Wager" would claim just the opposite. We have, potentially, infinitely more to gain by being a theist.

As for the knock on philosophy, thats cool. You are entitled to your opinion. But I want to go to law school and make arguments for a living.

PegLegHolly · Post by **PegLegHolly** » 02 May 2007 20:01

i think an openminded person would accept that there are thousands of beliefs in the world and that science and spirituality could combine. i dont feel that i fall under a certain religion... at least not that i know of. i feel like i have a good mixture of morals, ideals, beliefs, and opinions.

i guess a lot of what i just said was off topic. i dont understand how christians can mix science into their beliefs. maybe i should be reading instead of posting.

Jeremy · Post by **Jeremy** » 03 May 2007 03:46

An open minded person surely doesn't believe things that there isn't evidence to support. An open minded person looks at a hypothesis, and rather than judging it, then looks at the evidence supporting that hypothesis.

Pascal's wager is clearly not the work of an open minded person, because there is as much evidence to support Islamic beliefs as there is to support Christian beliefs and those beliefs clearly contradict each other. How could any open minded person arbitrarily decide that one was right and the other was wrong? If they didn't do that, and one was right, believing in both would, according to their scriptures, send you to Hell, and the wager would have failed.

An open minded person does not accept made up answers to questions that they don't know the answer to.

alex · Post by **alex** » 03 May 2007 09:44

the question of which theistic doctrine one should subscribe to is a seperate issue.
It is true that we should not necessarily believe in things we do not have evidence for. But what makes you so sure that you have been exposed to all of the evidence? People change their minds all of the time when exposed to new evidence. People like Antony Flew (former renouned atheist). Czech it: http://www.sciencefindsgod.com/

Tsiangkun · Post by **Tsiangkun** » 03 May 2007 12:59

LINK

NEW YORK, May 3 (UPI) -- Actor Kirk Cameron and author Ray Comfort will square off in New York with two atheists to debate the existence of God live on ABC.com.

The debate will be Wednesday after the network rescheduled it from Saturday to capture a larger audience, Comfort said in a news release.

Comfort, who says he can prove God exists scientifically, said ABC originally offered him four minutes to present his case. After conferring with Cameron and the atheists, the time was raised to 13 minutes.

"I'm ecstatic. I can prove the existence of God in that amount of time," Comfort said.

james · Post by **james** » 03 May 2007 14:49

I can disprove the existence of god in one sentence. Whether you understand or accept it is another story entirely.

I am however, not going to waste any more of my time.

PegLegHolly · Post by **PegLegHolly** » 03 May 2007 16:04

An open minded person surely doesn't believe things that there isn't evidence to support. An open minded person looks at a hypothesis, and rather than judging it, then looks at the evidence supporting that hypothesis.

An open minded person does not accept made up answers to questions that they don't know the answer to.

youre describing a logical person, rather than an openminded person. me being an openminded person but not a logical person, i accept that there are many beliefs and that i cant prove anyone right or wrong in their beliefs. if its their belief, then its right for them... but doesnt necessarily mean that its right for me.

Science and religion as one?

Science and religion as one?

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