quote:Originally posted by Zoh: He will never know that he's spent a good portion of his precious time alive preaching ridiculous views to people who know better, people who are smart enough to question the disease that is religion.
That view is ever bit as distasteful, and untruthful, as Jay's are, and I would be ashamed to agree with either of you.
How would you know? Moreover, if there is no afterlife, then indeed Jay will never know that he is wrong, which admittedly is a little unfortunate.
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Zoh is basically saying, if there's no afterlife, the guy won't ever know how much of his life he wasted on something wrong, and furthermore, telling people who know better, and understand science, and perhaps sometimes even scientists who work with the evidence, that they're wrong, when even that's false.
Isn't working for a falsehood, spending your life telling believing falsehood, and telling other people falsehood, a bit of a waste?
If, indeed, there is no afterlife, and if, indeed, science is right. (the latter is definitely true. Can't disprove the former, of course)
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quote:One is that, as I have reported previously, teeth are not great diagnostic material for phylogeny. They are very adaptable, and if a species finds itself in a similar environment with a similar diet, the teeth will tend to evolve rapidly to a particular morphology similar to that of relatives who later evolve in the same situation.
It's possible that the conclusions based on this particular fossil find will eventually turn out to be wrong, particularly since it contradicts molecular evidence. I'll be interested to see where this whole thing goes.
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I love the scientific method. I’ve always felt that it is a pretty good way of learning about stuff. I’ve always been fascinated by scientific discovery. I have a healthy respect for scientists (most of the time). Like in the example mentioned at the start of this thread. They’ve found some new data and are willing to adjust their ideas accordingly. This is a good thing. It is how the scientific method is supposed to work.
But one of the things that really bugs me and makes me start to lose respect is when some scientific types try to use evolution and other theories as a bludgeon against God. They often come across with a condescending, gloating, snotty altitude like, “See there, all you bonehead believers in god, we just proved there is no god. You are all idiots. God is dead. We’re right and you’re wrong. Na na, so there.”
Another thing that bugs me is that I often detect an certain tone of arrogance in some scientific types. They seem so sure of themselves, and will not admit to any kind of uncertainty until some new data comes along and then they are quick to trot out the scientific method and say they were never really absolutely sure after all. And next month they will be mired back into their old arrogance again, admitting to no uncertainty. (Maybe appearing uncertain is not conducive to winning grants.) But in fairness to scientists, maybe what I’m describing here is the attitude of some of the folks who explain science and stuff to the rest of us and not the attitude of some actual scientists. Who knows?
But I think what bugs me the most are examples I’ve read about where some old and reputable scientist has tried to destroy the career of some other scientist who disagreed with him. That’s where they start be indistinguishable from medieval religious fanatics - complete with their inquisition type tactics. They give lip service to the scientific method but their treatment of heretics and pronouncements of Truth have a familiar religious fanaticesk ring to them. These modern-day keepers of the flame of Truth have even adopted their own vestments and rituals to keep them separate from the rest of us unwashed masses.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not supporting certain Creationism philosophies either. Some of them have tried to adorn themselves with the trappings and jargon of science - presumably to give themselves an air of credibility in a world that respects science and has largely come to question certain traditional religious creeds.
On the other hand, though, I have detected a certain note of scorn here toward religious folks. The notion has been expressed that religious types are so sure of themselves that they will not change their ideas when new data comes along. That is actually not true in a lot of cases.
I know a lot of people of faith who have let go of the old traditional belief of a literal reading of the Bible in that God created the earth in a literal 6 days as we reckon days.
Ministers (mostly males) used to preach against women using any kind of anesthetic to ease the pain of childbirth. They preached that it was ordained of God that women were supposed to suffer and that it was evil to try to prevent it. They would even trot out Biblical scriptures to support these notions. Yet how many religious people do you know today who still believe such nonsense?
A similar thing happened with lightning rods.
Then there is the old evil of slavery. There used to be lots of ministers and other hymn singing folks who preached and believed (or at least claimed to believe) that slavery was justified by the Bible. I think most of us have kind rejected that nonsense by now.
Also a whole bunch of us readily embrace new technologies that come along like phones, jet airplanes, TV, computers, internet. Even though all of these things can be used for evil purposes.
So yes, we can change our ideas too.
I guess my own attitude can be summed up by what writer Madeleine L’Engle said in a TV interview several years ago. She said something to the effect that, “Science and religion does not have to be in conflict. Science is attempting to figure out HOW the world was created, and religion is attempting to figure out WHY the world was created.”
That is why a lot of folks can love and respect science and the scientific method and, at the same time, have deep and abiding faith in God. They know that they haven’t yet arrived at a knowledge of all Truth, but they find the journey fascinating.
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quote:Originally posted by 0Megabyte: Isn't working for a falsehood, spending your life telling believing falsehood, and telling other people falsehood, a bit of a waste?
I suppose that depends in large part on what the time would have been spent on instead, and on whether there were any benefits other than the ones that are false.
For example, I don't believe that most of the central tenets of Christianity are true. However, I don't think most Christians are wasting their lives, either.
In any case, not only is Zoh (and I have to say, I find that SN incredibly amusing) wrong, he was incredibly rude. And in direct violation of the TOS.
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What Sam and Rivka said, substituting a different religion for Christianity in the latter's post.
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quote: I know a lot of people of faith who have let go of the old traditional belief of a literal reading of the Bible in that God created the earth in a literal 6 days as we reckon days.
You know a lot of religious people who were Creationists but no longer are? Of all the religious people I know, about seven of them fit this description.
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Porter: yes. Bev's on the fence regarding the issue, right?
It's worth noting I'm also not counting people who were "Creationists" in their childhood but grew out of it before they turned 20; like the number of people who believed in Santa Claus, that'd screw with the statistics a little.
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(BTW, I really dislike the old argument that religion is about "why" things happen, and science is about "how." If you'd like, Sam, I'll go into more detail about why that particular assertion bugs me.)
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quote: I know a lot of people of faith who have let go of the old traditional belief of a literal reading of the Bible in that God created the earth in a literal 6 days as we reckon days.
You know a lot of religious people who were Creationists but no longer are? Of all the religious people I know, about seven of them fit this description.
I think I'd fit that description.
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quote:A similar thing happened with lightning rods.
Then there is the old evil of slavery. There used to be lots of ministers and other hymn singing folks who preached and believed (or at least claimed to believe) that slavery was justified by the Bible. I think most of us have kind rejected that nonsense by now.
Also a whole bunch of us readily embrace new technologies that come along like phones, jet airplanes, TV, computers, internet. Even though all of these things can be used for evil purposes.
So yes, we can change our ideas too.
I think, however, that few of the individuals who held those ideas changed, except by dying, which is a bit of a cheat in this context. As for accepting new technologies, colour me highly non-impressed, since very few religions actually object to technology or innovation. And of those that do, well, how many ex-Amish do you know?
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: It's worth noting I'm also not counting people who were "Creationists" in their childhood but grew out of it before they turned 20; like the number of people who believed in Santa Claus, that'd screw with the statistics a little.
How about if it was a process that began before I was 20, but took over 10 years for me to come to a firm conclusion on? (To the degree that my conclusion is firm, which it mostly is.)
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quote: I know a lot of people of faith who have let go of the old traditional belief of a literal reading of the Bible in that God created the earth in a literal 6 days as we reckon days.
You know a lot of religious people who were Creationists but no longer are? Of all the religious people I know, about seven of them fit this description.
Do I count as one of those 7? I want to hang with Porter and Jonboy.
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I was also including Jon Boy. I was not, however, including Rivka, so you can bump that number up to eight depending on your interpretation of her status. Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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OK, I asked Beverly, and no, she's no more a creationist than I am.
You can tell by how in-tune I am to my wifes' beliefs on this subject how important it is to me.
That's not to say that I haven't thought about it much. I've thought about it a lot, and Beverly and I have had many discussions about it. In fact, one of the first discussions we had was about Genesis and evolution.
But what's not not important to me is what individual conclusions people come to on the topic. Some believers examine the available information and come to one conclusion, some come to another. As long as they aren't obnoxious about other people agreeing or disagreeing with them, I'm happy for people to come to either conclusion.
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quote:Some believers examine the available information and come to one conclusion, some come to another.
See, that's the part I don't believe. I think some believers examine the available information and come to one conclusion, while other believers do not examine the available information and come to their choice of two conclusions.
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: (BTW, I really dislike the old argument that religion is about "why" things happen, and science is about "how." If you'd like, Sam, I'll go into more detail about why that particular assertion bugs me.)
If you don't mind sharing, I'd be interested to hear your take on this.
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I think he's talking about the fact that I am mildly wishy-washy on the subject, not whether I outgrew it.
But I'm really not all that wishy-washy. I just agree with Porter that it doesn't MATTER very much. (I do get annoyed when people attempt to claim that there is scientific support for things there isn't, but that's actually a slightly different issue, IMO.)
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: I think some believers examine the available information and come to one conclusion, while other believers do not examine the available information and come to their choice of two conclusions.
While I certainly know plenty of people like that, I also know people like Porter described.
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quote:(I do get annoyed when people attempt to claim that there is scientific support for things there isn't, but that's actually a slightly different issue, IMO.)
I'm right there with you, except that I think that's a very different issue. Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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1) First off, religion does pretend to address the "how;" it only claims otherwise when yet another "how" has been disproved. This actually leads to the classic "God of the Gaps" problem: as more and more religious explanations are rejected, there's less and less left for religion to do. God used to push the sun across the sky; now, religion can at most claim that they can tell us why the sun bothers to rise.
2) The assertion that religion also tells us why things happen is flawed in a variety of ways. For one thing, philosophy also addresses the "why," and does not require the baggage expected of most religion; the difference between religion and philosophy is that religion is able to arbitrarily appeal to a higher -- if uncommunicative -- moral authority to "resolve" its ethical dilemmas. For another, the claim itself begs the question. There may very well be no single, authoritative "why;" saying that a religious epistemology actually offers such a "why" might (if indeed none do) be like pushing a "holistic" remedy at a cancer sufferer.
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I agree in theory, but there does tend to be some overlap. Quite a bit of late, on another board I frequent. Which is probably why I'm feeling that way [edit: in general] at the moment.
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I remember when I was taught about evolution in school, read about it in books. I remember particularly Zoobooks magazines showing all the fossil-found relatives of the horse, a dramatized illustration of a dinosaur becoming a bird. It all made a lot of sense to me.
I remember going to Genesis to see if evolution would mesh with what I saw there. It seemed to me that in the account of the creation, there was stages of complexities of life, as there are in evolution. It said that the oceans brought forth abundantly of life and seemed to suggest that birds came from the ocean as well. Evolution says all life came from the ocean, more or less.
I came away with the conclusion that evolution was the tool God used to create life on earth. And since I believe that God is strongly pro-free-agency, is immensely patient, and believes in working through natural laws, evolution seemed to gracefully match the God I already believed in.
I agree that there are lots of religious evolutionists out there. And since most of the religious start out believing scripture to be literal, I'd say there are plenty of religious who have "converted" to evolutionism.
To this day I watch my chickens, ducks, and guinea fowl and imagine little flocks of mini-dinosaurs running around on our property. I love thinking of them that way. Posts: 7050 | Registered: Feb 2004
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quote:And since most of the religious start out believing scripture to be literal...
This is actually why I mentioned the 20-year-old cut-off. Most American religious traditions do not teach that scripture is literal, but even the children in more liberal religious traditions often believe in a literal scripture; it's only once they've become more consciously familiar with their own theology that they move away from it.
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quote:1) First off, religion does pretend to address the "how;" it only claims otherwise when yet another "how" has been disproved. This actually leads to the classic "God of the Gaps" problem: as more and more religious explanations are rejected, there's less and less left for religion to do. God used to push the sun across the sky; now, religion can at most claim that they can tell us why the sun bothers to rise.
But there are so many ways to look at this. I could claim that God does still push the sun across the sky with all that we know about science included. When that is so vastly unimportant to our soul's salvation, I see no problem with a primitive people seeing things this way.
What matters to the believer that if there were no God, there would be no sun to begin with, no earth, and no rotating, no beings to observe all this. What matters to the believer is that since there is a God and since He has told us that our souls will exist eternally, everything that we are doing now has much further reaching consequences than the span of our mortal lives, and we need to act accordingly.
In light of this, I have no problem with a creation story being a vastly simplified, symbolic version of the real thing. Why waste precious time and energy (not God's, the people's) explaining something as irrelevant as evolution to a people completely unprepared to appreciate it?
So, when we discover things about the universe, instead of coming to the conclusion, "Aha! God LIED to us!" I come to the conclusion that we didn't understand things before because it wasn't important to understand them. Our ability to see the universe better has made us extremely arrogant, as we continue to grope at the legs, trunk, and tail of the elephant.
As several people have emphasised, it is quite unimportant in the Big Picture. Fascinating to be sure, but unimportant.
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quote:Most American religious traditions do not teach that scripture is literal, but even the children in more liberal religious traditions often believe in a literal scripture; it's only once they've become more consciously familiar with their own theology that they move away from it.
Agreed. When my children take the scriptures to be %100 literal, I am tempted to offer another point of view. But then I remember that my daughter still believes there are Care Bears hiding in the clouds, and I grin good-naturedly to myself and just let things take their natural course.
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quote:So, when we discover things about the universe, instead of coming to the conclusion, "Aha! God LIED to us!" I come to the conclusion that we didn't understand things before because it wasn't important to understand them.
I'll be the first to agree that it's possible -- even beneficial -- to incorporate elements of truth into a religious worldview, albeit with some effort. I don't find religious belief to be inherently incompatible with the scientific method; I prefer to think that those believers have had personal experiences which they are willing to interpret as evidence of the rightness of their belief.
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It is generally part of LDS belief to accept all truth wherever it is found. And I have long felt that many things that appear to be contradictory are only so because we don't have a clear view of the full picture.
I figure that is the case with quantum physics and relativity. Posts: 7050 | Registered: Feb 2004
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I was always a believer in evolution, and in science. I got religion kind of late in life, around age 35 or so. But I see no conflict at all. That is, science doesn't know everything, and neither does the religion that has been revealed thus far. Any points of seeming conflict are a matter of lack of full understanding in one or the other camp, or, as is most likely, both. We're not terribly developed yet, as a species. I think we have a long way to go.
I just heard a very shocking statistic, that something like 40% of all college graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives after they get out of school. 40%! I think rather than argue about all the things we do know that are in conflict, our time would be much more fruitfully spent just learning a whole lot more... about science and about religion too. 40%, wow! That blows me away.
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According to the poll, 75% of Americans read one or more books last year.
I would expect the statistics for college graduates to be the same or higher than that of the general population.
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quote:Originally posted by 0Megabyte: Zoh is basically saying, if there's no afterlife, the guy won't ever know how much of his life he wasted on something wrong, and furthermore, telling people who know better, and understand science, and perhaps sometimes even scientists who work with the evidence, that they're wrong, when even that's false.
Isn't working for a falsehood, spending your life telling believing falsehood, and telling other people falsehood, a bit of a waste?
If, indeed, there is no afterlife, and if, indeed, science is right. (the latter is definitely true. Can't disprove the former, of course)
Honey, I am generally willing to admit that religion often "gets it wrong" and I agree with Jay on pretty much nothing, but, seriously, wasting their lives?
I can think of plenty of people (and you probably could as well*) who spent their lives on what they would consider religious work who, even if they are wrong, could not be said to have wasted their lives.
*But if you can't, some examples just off the top of my head:
The Rev. William Sloane Coffin The Rev. Martin Luther King Dorothy Day Mother Teresa The thousands of religious who have taught, nursed, cared for the poor, worked for peace and social justice The American Friends Service Committee Kathy Kelly The scores of people from my parish alone who are rebuilding a town in Mississippi after Katrina.
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I'm not sure it's fair to say that she lost her faith, although it certainly is true that she wrestled with her faith and doubts for many years.
Of course, I think that's true to one extent or another for the majority of believers.
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quote:Originally posted by The Pixiest: Mother Theresa lost her faith and still continued to do good works.
I'm not sure if that backs you up or contridicts you, Boots.
Why do you think Mother Teresa lost her faith Pixiest? From my understanding she was a faithful Roman Catholic all her life.
The only thing I can conjure up that you might be talking about was her decisions to leave her convent, so that she could be more mobile in her missionary labors.
edit: Or what Porter and kmbboots said.
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I'm under the age of 20, which means I'm still rather wishy-washy...
I was a creationist, than an apathetilutionist (A word of my own making), then a creationist again, and then a divine theist evolutionist, and now I'm back to being an apathetilutionist.
And that was in the past two years.
However, I do believe that this time, the apathy will stick. <Grin>
Besides, correct me if I'm wrong, but there can never be a conclusive law regarding our origins, since our origins can't (As of yet) be repeated. So, everything is going to remain a theory anyway, right?
Oh, and by the way:
I've never much corresponded with Jay, but I do believe I would be a bit put off by the reaction of the group as a whole were I in his place.
You're all rather scary as a group. I got a migraine just from reading the thread (Along with some rather unpleasant flashbacks)
And, another BTW, excellent post Samuel Bush (I'm sure my praise means the world to you)
quote:Originally posted by 0Megabyte: Zoh is basically saying, if there's no afterlife, the guy won't ever know how much of his life he wasted on something wrong, and furthermore, telling people who know better, and understand science, and perhaps sometimes even scientists who work with the evidence, that they're wrong, when even that's false.
Isn't working for a falsehood, spending your life telling believing falsehood, and telling other people falsehood, a bit of a waste?
If, indeed, there is no afterlife, and if, indeed, science is right. (the latter is definitely true. Can't disprove the former, of course)
Honey, I am generally willing to admit that religion often "gets it wrong" and I agree with Jay on pretty much nothing, but, seriously, wasting their lives?
I can think of plenty of people (and you probably could as well*) who spent their lives on what they would consider religious work who, even if they are wrong, could not be said to have wasted their lives.
*But if you can't, some examples just off the top of my head:
The Rev. William Sloane Coffin The Rev. Martin Luther King Dorothy Day Mother Teresa The thousands of religious who have taught, nursed, cared for the poor, worked for peace and social justice The American Friends Service Committee Kathy Kelly The scores of people from my parish alone who are rebuilding a town in Mississippi after Katrina.
I generally agree with you kmbboots. I say "generally" because I don't know everybody on that list. At least not until I hit up Wikipedia later.
But I think the "wasting your life" part implies all the religious activities that help no one. The hours of prayer, ceremonies and scripture study that, you could argue as a non-believer, is a waste of time.
(Just to be sure, I'm just saying that I think that's what he meant...not that I necessarily agree.)
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