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Svafa

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Re: Atheists
« Reply #2730 on: March 23, 2010, 02:36:57 pm »

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I just realized however that this does not apply to science: In principle, I can be a scientist and not believe in anything whatsoever.
I would disagree to an extent.  I do not disagree with what I believe is your intention, but with what your words literally imply.  One must believe in something, especially if they wish to endeavour in the sciences.

At the very least, if one wishes to pursue science, they must believe in an ordered universe.  Without the belief in an ordered universe, any attempt at studying order is utterly foolish.
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Science doesn't have to be about truth.
I believe you will find that hard to prove in light of its definition.  Science is the pursuit and ordering of knowledge, that is, truth.
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The hypothesis that the bible is god's word and that the earth is only six thousand years old is not unscientific as such. It's just pretty bad at matching up with evidence, and there are better explanations out there. That's all.

Unscientific, or at least unjustified by science, would be to pick this hypothesis over those other explanations.
You speak well, but you miss the point of my argument and examples.  Who decides which explanation is better suited to reality?  And on what basis does he decide?

I propose that each man decides for himself and that he does so on his faith.
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Micro102

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Re: Atheists
« Reply #2731 on: March 23, 2010, 02:39:39 pm »

The thing is, we have a way of proving it. If someone wanted to to pay for a shuttle to be built and for him/her to be sent to Pluto and back (which would take decades by the way) or to be able to observe atoms through an advanced microscope, then they can do that. However the closest thing I can think of being able to "experience" god is through hypnotism, hallucinations, or sever head trauma. And i he WANTED to communicate with you he could do so before you bought harm to yourself. So chances are it is only your imagination.
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Svafa

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Re: Atheists
« Reply #2732 on: March 23, 2010, 02:46:45 pm »

Sorry, but i won't answer anything else than the boring : the only way it is not there is a world conspiracy. So I apply my own version of Occam's razor : If something is utterly ridiculous and have no chance to happen, then I can make the bet it is not happening. I also make the bed that the sun doesn't need a human sacrifice to rise an shine tomorrow. You are speaking no odds against a lot.
Then could I not argue in the same manner that the only way a God does not exist is that there is a worldwide conspiracy?

You have offered no proof for the existence of Pluto beyond what wise men have said.  A tradition of wise men that has only existed some eighty years.  Could I not then apply that even more wise men over an ever more extensive tradition have stated the existence of a God?

If the existence of Pluto simply must be accepted based on the words of many, then what of the existence of a God?  If Pluto simply is, then what of God?  I would apply your own version of Occam's Razor: the belief that there is a worldwide conspiracy stating the existence of God is utterly ridiculous and has no chance of happening, thus there must be no conspiracy.
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Svafa

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Re: Atheists
« Reply #2733 on: March 23, 2010, 02:56:57 pm »

The thing is, we have a way of proving it. If someone wanted to to pay for a shuttle to be built and for him/her to be sent to Pluto and back (which would take decades by the way) or to be able to observe atoms through an advanced microscope, then they can do that. However the closest thing I can think of being able to "experience" god is through hypnotism, hallucinations, or sever head trauma. And i he WANTED to communicate with you he could do so before you bought harm to yourself. So chances are it is only your imagination.
These are all assumptions.

How do you know that there is not an easier way to communicate or experience God?  How do you know that one can believe what they see through a microscope or a trip through space?

There are still those who debate whether man has landed on the moon.  I may call them foolish, the same way I might call a man foolish who claims London does not exist.  And while I have been to one, and not the other, I still cannot prove that either exists even to myself.  I must accept on faith that both exist - even if that faith is my own experience.

I would propose that proving Pluto through experience is much more difficult than you surmise.  Not only does experiencing Pluto require decades, but even then, how would one know it really is the place they were told?  Or if they are truly faithful, they could simply rely on their vision through the smoke and mirrors of a telescope.  But both methods lean heavily on faith.
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dreiche2

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Re: Atheists
« Reply #2734 on: March 23, 2010, 03:09:58 pm »

One must believe in something, especially if they wish to endeavour in the sciences.

At the very least, if one wishes to pursue science, they must believe in an ordered universe.  Without the belief in an ordered universe, any attempt at studying order is utterly foolish.

Foolish, but not impossible. Moreover, that I have personal beliefs (about an ordered reality etc.) that make me pursue science does not mean science itself is really based on beliefs. But let's not get bogged down too much with details. The main point here is that science per se is very distinct from religion.

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Science doesn't have to be about truth.
I believe you will find that hard to prove in light of its definition.  Science is the pursuit and ordering of knowledge, that is, truth.

There is no clear definition of science. However, when I look up philosophy of science, I find at least two schools of thoughts that seem to agree with me (emphasis mine):

Quote from: wikipedia
Critical rationalism argues for the ability of science to increase the scope of testable knowledge, but at the same time against its authority, by emphasizing its inherent fallibility. It proposes that science should be content with the rational elimination of errors in its theories, not in seeking for their verification (such as claiming certain or probable proof or disproof; both the proposal and falsification of a theory are only of methodological, conjectural, and tentative character in critical rationalism).[28] Instrumentalism rejects the concept of truth and emphasizes merely the utility of theories as instruments for explaining and predicting phenomena.

You speak well, but you miss the point of my argument and examples.  Who decides which explanation is better suited to reality?  And on what basis does he decide?

In science, there are criteria for this (of course, everything is debatable). For individuals, it's at some point a personal choice, yes.

I propose that each man decides for himself and that he does so on his faith.

As I have stated before in this thread, I'm all up for people having their personal beliefs. However, the question is what to do when it comes to the interaction in between people.

For example, the example I gave before is children being killed as witches in Africa. The people who do this do the right thing according to their belief. How would you stop this without either, taking their belief, or, taking their freedom?

Or what about laws against homosexuals being passed on the basis on divine scripture? If those texts are really divine, then that's the right thing to do. How to oppose such laws without questioning the belief in these scriptures?

There are still those who debate whether man has landed on the moon.  I may call them foolish, the same way I might call a man foolish who claims London does not exist.  And while I have been to one, and not the other, I still cannot prove that either exists even to myself.  I must accept on faith that both exist - even if that faith is my own experience.

You can never truly know anything. Any attempt at interacting with the world rely on some  pragmatic assumptions that you might as well regard to be based on 'faith'. But once you made that step, the question then becomes how to evaluate different hypotheses about the world.
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RedKing

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Re: Atheists
« Reply #2735 on: March 23, 2010, 03:11:00 pm »

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.

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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.

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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.

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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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G-Flex

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Re: Atheists
« Reply #2736 on: March 23, 2010, 03:11:38 pm »

The thing is, we have a way of proving it. If someone wanted to to pay for a shuttle to be built and for him/her to be sent to Pluto and back (which would take decades by the way) or to be able to observe atoms through an advanced microscope, then they can do that. However the closest thing I can think of being able to "experience" god is through hypnotism, hallucinations, or sever head trauma. And i he WANTED to communicate with you he could do so before you bought harm to yourself. So chances are it is only your imagination.

The thing is, we don't need to rely on personal experience to know that London, the Moon, or atoms exist, because those things are verifiable. There are countless people who have also experienced those things, and in roughly the same way each, and there hasn't been any significant number of people saying "So, I tried to go to London last week, and what do you know, it just wasn't there!"
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Re: Atheists
« Reply #2737 on: March 23, 2010, 03:17:28 pm »

@Sava Now I can only say that you make no sense.
I mean, you claim that it work both way. It's obviously false.
If you observe the motion of Uranus, you can deduce the location and size of pluto.
I believe in the pertinence of the data (which would take the above-mentioned conspiracy to be false), the theory is really simple and valid (newton law are enough) The math have been done and redone, telescope have detected he plane, we found it a satellite... that would take a big miracle to be false, not to be true.

God has not been taken in picture, not been detected, the theory on his existence contradic everything that has been observed, and there is a lot of contradictory report on what he is, what he want and what he does.

Same thing?

@RedKing Yes indeed, you should not believe in a scientific theory. Science is not about belief.And theology don't give you how. It just claim to do it. I say one should never believe in a religious sense.
Just my opinion.
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RedKing

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Re: Atheists
« Reply #2738 on: March 23, 2010, 03:19:15 pm »


The hypothesis that the bible is god's word and that the earth is only six thousand years old is not unscientific as such. It's just pretty bad at matching up with evidence, and there are better explanations out there. That's all.

Unscientific, or at least unjustified by science, would be to pick this hypothesis over those other explanations.

This gets picked on quite a bit, so I have to ask this: Is it a requirement of Christianity to believe in a 6000-year old Earth? Even among devout Christians, that's a very rare belief.

What about fundamentalist Hindus who claim that the universe is 158.7 trillion years old? Are Hindus astrophysicists who reject this portion of their religion's tradition somehow irreligious?
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Svafa

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Re: Atheists
« Reply #2739 on: March 23, 2010, 03:23:35 pm »

The thing is, we have a way of proving it. If someone wanted to to pay for a shuttle to be built and for him/her to be sent to Pluto and back (which would take decades by the way) or to be able to observe atoms through an advanced microscope, then they can do that. However the closest thing I can think of being able to "experience" god is through hypnotism, hallucinations, or sever head trauma. And i he WANTED to communicate with you he could do so before you bought harm to yourself. So chances are it is only your imagination.
The thing is, we don't need to rely on personal experience to know that London, the Moon, or atoms exist, because those things are verifiable. There are countless people who have also experienced those things, and in roughly the same way each, and there hasn't been any significant number of people saying "So, I tried to go to London last week, and what do you know, it just wasn't there!"
The same way there are countless people who have also experienced God?  And in roughly the same way each?

The purpose was not to make you question the existence of London or the moon, but to question your criteria for proof.  You are willing to state that London, the moon, and atoms exist based solely on the witness of a "significant number of people".  Are you willing to state that God exists based on the same criteria?  Why or why not?
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Svafa

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Re: Atheists
« Reply #2740 on: March 23, 2010, 03:35:10 pm »

If you observe the motion of Uranus, you can deduce the location and size of pluto.
I believe in the pertinence of the data (which would take the above-mentioned conspiracy to be false), the theory is really simple and valid (newton law are enough) The math have been done and redone, telescope have detected he plane, we found it a satellite... that would take a big miracle to be false, not to be true.
Except everything you have stated there is also subject to the same skepticism as Pluto itself.  How do you propose to prove the existence of Uranus?  How do you propose to prove that the telescope reads true?  How do you propose to prove that the math is accurate?
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God has not been taken in picture, not been detected, the theory on his existence contradic everything that has been observed, and there is a lot of contradictory report on what he is, what he want and what he does.
You claim this, but there are many who might counter your claim.  There are those who would claim that his existence fulfills everything that has been observed, that he has been detected, that we have his image, and so on.  You claim this is not the case, because you do not believe it to be so, but I do not see that you have proof to prove it so.

You are making a universal claim for which there is no means to verification.
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G-Flex

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Re: Atheists
« Reply #2741 on: March 23, 2010, 03:46:15 pm »

The thing is, we have a way of proving it. If someone wanted to to pay for a shuttle to be built and for him/her to be sent to Pluto and back (which would take decades by the way) or to be able to observe atoms through an advanced microscope, then they can do that. However the closest thing I can think of being able to "experience" god is through hypnotism, hallucinations, or sever head trauma. And i he WANTED to communicate with you he could do so before you bought harm to yourself. So chances are it is only your imagination.
The thing is, we don't need to rely on personal experience to know that London, the Moon, or atoms exist, because those things are verifiable. There are countless people who have also experienced those things, and in roughly the same way each, and there hasn't been any significant number of people saying "So, I tried to go to London last week, and what do you know, it just wasn't there!"
The same way there are countless people who have also experienced God?  And in roughly the same way each?

Not really. Religious experiences differ quite dramatically. Plenty of people say God has spoken to them, but he seems to want to say something different each time. This isn't even considering alternative (and more likely) explanations for it.
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Micro102

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Re: Atheists
« Reply #2742 on: March 23, 2010, 03:46:55 pm »

The thing is, we have a way of proving it. If someone wanted to to pay for a shuttle to be built and for him/her to be sent to Pluto and back (which would take decades by the way) or to be able to observe atoms through an advanced microscope, then they can do that. However the closest thing I can think of being able to "experience" god is through hypnotism, hallucinations, or sever head trauma. And i he WANTED to communicate with you he could do so before you bought harm to yourself. So chances are it is only your imagination.
These are all assumptions.

How do you know that there is not an easier way to communicate or experience God?  How do you know that one can believe what they see through a microscope or a trip through space?

There are still those who debate whether man has landed on the moon.  I may call them foolish, the same way I might call a man foolish who claims London does not exist.  And while I have been to one, and not the other, I still cannot prove that either exists even to myself.  I must accept on faith that both exist - even if that faith is my own experience.

I would propose that proving Pluto through experience is much more difficult than you surmise.  Not only does experiencing Pluto require decades, but even then, how would one know it really is the place they were told?  Or if they are truly faithful, they could simply rely on their vision through the smoke and mirrors of a telescope.  But both methods lean heavily on faith.

That is the same logic as saying God can't be proven wrong because he is omnipotent and omnipresent. Seriously your going down to saying that traveling to Pluto on a spaceship and looking at it with your own eyes still might not exists. That's the same as saying the sun doesn't exist. It has no merit and even some hardcore religious people would say it's nonsense.
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dreiche2

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Re: Atheists
« Reply #2743 on: March 23, 2010, 03:54:21 pm »

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 agree.

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.
[...]

See my later comment on science and truth.

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.

A lot of the questions you bring up I would regard more philosophical than theological. And I agree that there are valid philosophical issues that are beyond science; either beyond current science, or beyond science in principle.

And indeed, you're moving further and further away from what religion commonly means:

(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)

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

But it's these kinds of "claptraps" that often characterize religions. And then morals and laws are derived from these claptraps, all while being claimed to be based on divine word and thus in essence assumed to be true a priori. If religion would just mean, let's sit down and philosophize about the universe, much fewer people would have an issues with it (and it would just be philosophy more or less anyway).

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.

That's exactly the thing: Science provides toolsets. Religions, usually, don't provide toolsets to arrive at an answer, they provide answers.

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 don't want to sound polemic, but: Religions, different theological 'models', disagree. But then, how are these disagreements resolved? How can they be resolved when religions usually claim to promote absolute, divine truth? It's no wonder that people wage war over religious disagreement. I'm not saying that wars cannot be fought over non-religious reasons, but I have yet to see a war being fought over scientific disagreement. Where is this difference coming from?

This gets picked on quite a bit, so I have to ask this: Is it a requirement of Christianity to believe in a 6000-year old Earth? Even among devout Christians, that's a very rare belief.

What is a requirement of Christianity?

If you apply the same logic to all other statements of Christianity, i.e. reject them if there are better or simpler explanations out there, than all that will remain will be some vague notion about a divine purpose or a role of god that is not falsifiable. And again, I'm perfectly happy with people having arbitrary personal beliefs.

Of course, better or simpler here is meant in scientific terms, and you might disagree with them.

But again, in the end it's a pragmatic thing. If three people disagree based on different notions about reality, two of which are based on conflicting religious beliefs, one based on science: How would you resolve this situation?
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RedKing

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Re: Atheists
« Reply #2744 on: March 23, 2010, 04:03:30 pm »

As I have stated before in this thread, I'm all up for people having their personal beliefs. However, the question is what to do when it comes to the interaction in between people.

For example, the example I gave before is children being killed as witches in Africa. The people who do this do the right thing according to their belief. How would you stop this without either, taking their belief, or, taking their freedom?

Or what about laws against homosexuals being passed on the basis on divine scripture? If those texts are really divine, then that's the right thing to do. How to oppose such laws without questioning the belief in these scriptures?

Ahh, now here you're getting into normative application of knowledge, which is a whole 'nother ball of wax.

Yes, religion often has strong normative tendencies based on suppositions of the tradition. Though it works both ways--there are often strong normative prescriptions in religion to protect the poor and the weak, to show mercy, to respect living things, etc.

There are also potential normative applications of science which could be highly questionable. For instance, common sense and epidemiology would tell us that the most effective way to deal with HIV (or any transmissible disease without a sufficient non-human reservoir) would be to ruthlessly quarantine all infected individuals and wait for the human vector population to die out. From a cold, hard, logical point of view, that's the most sensible solution. But our sense of morality (informed in no small part by religion) discourages that.

The whole field of bioethics deals with the potentially negative normative application of science unfettered by ethics. (Religions would likely benefit from a similar attention to ethics, but it's harder to get some religious authorities to take "human-constructed" ethics into consideration).
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