This should not be taken as an anti-science attack. On the contrary, I'm all for scientific advancement, rationality and logic. What I'm not for is a certain self-assured dismissal of religious systems or non-rational belief. I fully believe one can be a scientist and religious simultaneously, and indeed a great many leading scientific minds over the centuries have been.
Fair enough, but saying one can be both a scientist and religious is not the same as saying science is a religion.
True enough, and that wasn't my intent. My intent by that statement was to illustrate not merely that science and religion can co-exist but that they can do so in the same mind without, presumably, a crippling level of cognitive dissonance. It's not an either/or prospect.
I utterly disagree. Science, as the vast majority of humanity experiences it on a daily basis, relies heavily on faith in authority. Have you ever actually seen Pluto? Do you believe it's out there? Why? Do you believe it is as distant as textbooks say it is? Have you personally measured the distance? If you had the appropriate tools to measure such a distance, how do you know the tool is accurate?
At some point, all science relies on suppositions which are taken as true on the basis of prior authority. Yes, if you really want you could go back and duplicate effort and prove each step of the chain of supposition, but in practice no one does (and for a non-Ph.D., most wouldn't even know how).
Well you have to differentiate a little bit in between the principles of science and what is pragmatically possible in practice. Of course I can not go back and check by hand the evidence for every single possible scientific theory out there, and yes, that means as a human I need to sometimes take statements 'on good faith'. You're also mixing up issues of science itself with issues of human capabilities and communication. Of course, when I read a book about the evidence that Pluto exists but hat book is full of lies, I will come to the wrong conclusions, but that is not an inherent problem with science.
The difference in between science and religion as a human endeavour is that the former seeks to be true to the evidence in principle. Of course, this principle can still be violated in practice. And the difference in between a scientific statement and a statement based on faith is that the former can be verified or falsified at least in principle.
I understand what you're saiyng here, and this is classically the argument of science's advantage, is that it can be verified or disproven by observation, reproduceability, and/or logic. But to a certain extent, there is no universal baseline that can be used to determine what constitutes a "true" verification.
In other words, you look in a microscope and see Y happen. You call me over, I look in the microscope, I also see Y happen. A week later, someone else duplicates the conditions and they see Y happen. Y is now a scientifically "true" occurrence. We may have theoretical explanations that say X causes Y, but we cannot say with 100% certainty as to what caused Y. Over time, with more data and more advanced theoretical tools, we may approach 100% but never quite get there (Zeno's paradox). It's always possible that something else altogether (which approximates X) is causing Y.
Practical example: For a long time it was assumed that space was Euclidean in geometry. General relativity causes that to break down in areas of intense gravity. The reworked "truth" is that space-time is not in fact, Euclidean but in most areas, absent a strong gravity well, the curvature of space-time approximates zero and so, approximates a Euclidean geometry.
It's worth remembering that less than 150 years ago, scientific consensus was that empty space was filled with an imperceptible form of matter called aether. Or that 600 years ago, the Earth was the center of the universe.
As I stated earlier in this thread, the latter was never anything "scientific", as proper science didn't exist back then. But even then, I don't see how what you're saying matters because all you're describing is that scientific theories are being revised over time.
As is theology. I guess what I'm trying to get at is not that science is fallible because it has been wrong in the past, but rather that it is a model of how existence works. One which assumedly becomes more and more accurate over time, but again will never be 100% accurate. This doesn't necessarily invalidate earlier models in a practical sense. It's not that Newtonian mechanics are "wrong", it's that they're insufficiently accurate at the extremes (at the subatomic and cosmic scales, for instances). They're perfectly fine for calculating the descent vector of a ball dropped off out of a window.
I'm also with what I think Phmcw is saying in that science is not about truths, it's about continually finding better descriptions of reality.
Which agrees with what I was getting at just above. And the reason that we typically formulate newer, more precise models of reality is that our existing models break down at the extremes. In this manner, I propose that theology is a model of reality which exists precisely for some of the extremes under which science breaks down. For the most part, these extremes are not ones of heat or pressure or distance, but extremes of perception and the human spirit.
I apologize in advance for this next portion, because it might seem rather flowery and rhetorical, but bear with me. Religious theory--and I'm talking proper theology here, not the sort of "the earth is 6000 years old and God put extra carbon in the ground to test us" kind of claptrap--asks fundamental questions which science cannot sufficiently answer. Things like:
How did we come to be? Is there a purpose to our having intelligence, or was it purely a random quirk of amino acids combining in random patterns for billions of years? And either way, what does that mean for us? What about death? Is there any form of existence after the neurons in our brain cease electrical activity? Indeed, is that all we essentially are--a pattern of electrical impluses stored in a few pounds of neural tissue? These are questions which intersect with the hard sciences, but don't have to contradict them. In the same way that quantum mechanics is an *extension* to handle those conditions under which classical mechanics is insufficient but does not negate classical mechanics, I think of theology as an extension to handle the questions for which scientific explanation is insufficient, but does not negate science.
It asks the questions:
What causes--indeed, what *allows*--a human being to seek to inflict pain and suffering on another for no material benefit? Likewise, what causes some human beings to voluntarily sacrifice their own existence in order to aid strangers? We have social sciences to help understand the psychology and sociology of violence, and all the way in which a person can be conditioned towards different responses, but when those sciences still fail to provide an answer, especially at the extremes, it is religion which provides a toolset to arrive at an answer.
Different religions may arrive at different answers. Even different theological models of the same religion can arrive at different answers. That doesn't negate their utility in understand fundamental questions of human existence any more than differing models of stellar formation negate their utility in attempting to understand the universe.
I guess what I'm getting at is that science and theology (the more this goes on, the more I think I should use that term to distinguish true religious thought from the sort of pop-culture religion found around the world) are not opposites nor need be exclusive--rather they augment each other. Science gives us
how, theology gives us
why.
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