I was hoping I would get a response from Siquo before I got responses from multiple people who missed the reference and/or warned that a mod might intervene for my rampant flaming, but such is the internet.
I got the reference, I was merely questioning your style of beginning your sentence with "fuck you". Silly internet people, always ranting about politeness!
I was, in a sense, backing up Siquo's statement that science is not settled in a concrete foundation, and that what we know about it can change at any time, by referencing the popular Aristotelian theory of everything in the universe being held together by a series of crystal spheres that revolve around the Earth, which was disproved by Galileo and is a perfect example of the fallacies of being too arrogant in what we think we've nailed down as fact.
That is an exceptionally bad example to base critique of science on (also, the spheres sound more like Ptolemaeus than Aristotle to me, but it doesn't matter).
a perfect example of the fallacies of being too arrogant in what we think we've nailed down as fact.
1. At that time, the world view of Aristotle/Ptolemaeus was put forward and defended aggressively
by the catholic church. The Inquisition forced Galileo to
recant his views. This is a perfect example of people ignoring evidence because it doesn't fit with their religious beliefs, demonstrating the problems with dogma based religions, not with science!
2. You're not going to be able to criticize science with examples from that time anyway, because science
as we now know it was only in its infancy back then. In particularly,
Aristotle wasn't a scientist in the modern sense:
His writings provide an account of many scientific observations, a mixture of precocious accuracy and curious errors. For example, in his History of Animals he claimed that human males have more teeth than females and in the Generation of Animals he said the female is as it were a deformed male.
[...]
In places, Aristotle goes too far in deriving 'laws of the universe' from simple observation and over-stretched reason. Today's scientific method assumes that such thinking without sufficient facts is ineffective, and that discerning the validity of one's hypothesis requires far more rigorous experimentation than that which Aristotle used to support his laws.
3.
science is not settled in a concrete foundation, and that what we know about it can change at any time
Current scientific theories being replaced with new ones in the light of new evidence is in the very spirit of science. That's a
good thing.
This thread is taking an interesting turn. This is not to say a productive one. It seems as though most of us aren't actually reading any of the pages that come before where we decide to post, judging by how new definitions of religion keep popping up whenever a new person joins into the discussion (which would be okay, except that the definitions we were originally debating over aren't being addressed).
I'm sorry that people weren't discussing what you want them to discuss in you absence. As for that topic, I think everything has been said in that regard. I for my part am simply of the opinion is that the definition is wrong/incomplete. I'm perfectly fine with the full definition of religion as given by the dictionary, but you guys insisted on using only the first quarter of the sentence. Which is an issue you have not further addressed after I put it forward.
However, even if we go by that definition (religion is "a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe"), I still think everyone has stated their opinion by now.
To summarize my own position: The question is whether that definition implies that all three things need to be addressed (I would say it's unclear, but probably no given examples of religions that might not address all three things), or otherwise the question becomes what purpose exactly means or whether saying there is no purpose counts or not and the endless semantic arguments that follow. But yes, in my opinion, given that definition and certain assumptions, certain realizations of atheism and scientific theories are a set of beliefs concerning the nature and potentially cause of the universe, and can thus, by that definition,
be regarded as religions.
Happy now? But again, the definition is incomplete, so it doesn't matter.
Anything else there is to discuss about this?
What I find disappointing though (and this was touched on before) is the absolute faith most physicists place on Einstein's every word. It's almost a religion on it's own, and it's as if the man couldn't be wrong in anything.
Who does that. I'm a physicist. I'm not aware of that happening.
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