I'm the Religious Left!Follow

You're kidding, right?

What you said was that people who simultaneously accept both religion and science are being dishonest to themselves.



However, even if I accept your revision, I don't know of a religion that has a completely undetectable deity. Many Christian belief systems include a deity who manifests himself or herself to humans. In Hinduism, the gods' avatars appear to people -- and the gods are not omnipotent. I could go on. The point is we have different conceptions of faith and so not enough common ground from which to debate.



I don't understand the final question. Perhaps, here, the difficulty is how you define faith. I have beliefs based on faith. I do not contend that those beliefs cannot be wrong ... only that I choose to believe them until something causes me to reconsider and adjust my beliefs. Obviously some people hold their faith-based beliefs so strongly that the whole fails if some part fails. However, that's specific to them, not generic to faith. Faith doesn't necessarily say "I cannot be wrong." It says, "I choose to believe." Reasonable intelligent people adjust their beliefs all the time.

Again, if your assumptions are so strongly held that you can't adjust, Anna is obviously correct -- no point in discussion.

Edited, Apr 6th 2009 4:26pm by Ahkuraj

I never really regarded the story itself as important, exactly. More the idea that god can and will destroy the earth at any time.

It's far more likely that the flood story exists in the bible purely because virtually all early cultures have some sort of historical flood myth. This is because prior to developing writing (which is the only way we'd know any stories at all) those cultures passed stories along via oral tradition. The cultures which developed writing virtually all came from ancestors who settled along rivers and/or coastlines, since those were the best places to settle. Thus, their oral tradition would certainly include a flood event.

The bible story exists because if it didn't, people would have asked "But what about the great flood?". More correctly it exists because they did. Well gee. God made the flood to punish the wicked folks of the world. Oh? Why are we still here? Cause he warned one guy, and he built a boat... The animals? Um... Well... It was a really big boat...

They are.

Does religion, ever even once, require making a claim about a matter of fact which is simply beyond what you can comprehend through your various means of biting onto the world?

If it does, even once, then it conflicts with the intention and purpose of science. Science requires an exhaustive appraisal of the epistemic faculties of the human mind, and there is very little that can actually be considered science after all is said and done.

But really, living in the world and going through my daily activities is similarly dishonest with my acceptance of science as is religion's dishonesty.

I'm not contesting that people who practices science can also be people who practice religion, but there are at least severe tensions in doing so. It requires two hats; a religious and a scientific, and you can't wear them both at the same time.

Science as a discipline cannot exist unless we have a very strict framework of what it is possible for the human mind to know, and how we go about knowing them. This doesn't mean we come to know apples through sight and taste. This means we come to know concepts of red and shiny through our faculties of spatial awareness and property relation, before we ever actually see an apple.

Science is the process of formulating concepts concerning the world, and then seeing how your logic works as a matter of fact. It is for this reason that science is not merely randomly groping around in the dark of human experience and trying to find some truth. If you set forth the bounds of what a human experience can be then you can suddenly make claims about your experiences that are integral parts of being a human, rather than just contingent observations of stuff.

Some theology is like this. Aquinas is my poster boy for stuff like this.

The practice of religion isn't. It's a totally different way to appraise the world. It sometimes involves faith regarding metaphysics, and often involves ethics, which aren't scientific anyway.

And nowhere have I stated or implied that the religious prospect is bad.

Thats the wonder of evolution, variety!

Another generalization about all religion based on one belief specific to some religions.



You seem to be talking about where one gets their beliefs, rather than the beliefs themselves.

Are you really saying that having a belief about a matter of fact that conflicts with the "intention and purpose of science" -- but doesn't conflict with scientifically derived facts -- is dishonest?

Are you really saying to simultaneously believe something you can't prove and believe in the value of the scientific method is dishonest?

If so, as usual, I disagree with you.

Holding a belief from a perspective that conflicts with the intention and purpose of science doesn't make me dishonest in believing it.

There's not a single scientific fact that conflicts with my faith-based beliefs.

Argue all you want about whether a person is conflicted in merging beliefs arrived at through two different approaches to the world, but holding such views =/= dishonesty as long as the beliefs themselves don't conflict.

That's the @#%^ing point



Having any belief about anything without examining your epistemic ability to have that belief is dishonest.

Science derives facts as a byproduct of a method. Religion conflicts with the method. Whether or not religion conflicts with the facts is irrelevant.




I really don't care. If you haven't examined your ability to gain knowledge, then you aren't doing science, nor do you understand any of the scientific facts that your pretend to embrace.


Okay then.

Science cannot ever accept the fact that god exists; it has nothing to do with burden of proof, or the impossibility of proving a negative, the preponderance of teleological or cosmological evidence for or against god. It is the fact that god is necessarily beyond our comprehension.

Let me elucidate that last point further. It's not as if god is beyond our comprehension in the same way that descrite mathematics is beyond mine. It is that our existences (sein, consciousness, phenomenology, self, whatever you want to call it) does not have to necessary equipment available to make claims about god one way or the other.

There is very little that we can make scientific observations about. They are almost all descriptions of the various abilities of our consciousness, and what the world must be like for us to have consciousness at all. But the defining characteristic of science is that science sets forth norms and rules, and then watches how those rules manifest themselves in the world presented to our consciousness. Science isn't allowed to say anything about the world itself, only those things which conform to our expectations or do not conform to our expectations and the meanings of whether or not they do.

Gos is an objects of thought. All objects in themselves are completely and eternally unknowable to us.

Therefore, making any claim about the nature of god (though not necessarily his existence) is dead in the water in ever achieving status as a legitimate science.

Edited, Apr 7th 2009 12:26pm by Pensive

I love DOING science.

She's a kinky *****.

Do you have scientific proof for that statement? Or do you just believe it?

Bull.