Nicker on 9/9/2010 at 08:08
Quote Posted by Kolya
Science is not a force of nature (like trees growing), it doesn't happen without scientists and funding. These scientists can be held responsible for how their results will presumably be used. That includes who they are working for and get their funding from and the methods they use.
This isn't something I just made up or my wishful thinking. Your view of science as a pure quest for knowledge removed from any earthly strings and responsibilities is naive at best and dangerous at worst.
Again, in fairness, you introduced the terms
religion and
science to this thread as general, representative and simplified categories of knowledge acquisition and interpretation, tackling questions like, "How did things come to be the way they are?"
The topic is not (for instance) "can liberation theology and plate tectonics achieve a peaceful coexistence on the matter of gender roles in medieval agrarian societies"? There is no such specificity in your question and introducing the moral complexities of comparative culpability can only drive us away from resolution, rather than towards it.
Pardoner already said it but I'll rephrase it... Do priests and scientists have moral responsibilities? Yes. Have religion and science contributed both curses and blessings? Yes. Can we move beyond this pissing contest now?
Science is not a force of nature but it is, at this time, the best method we have to properly harness a force of nature - human intellect and creativity. Humanity has achieved a level of technological and informational sophistication utterly unmatched in our history. More raw knowledge of our universe was generated last month than in the entire time between the fall of Rome and the First World War (hyperbole alert! - but I'm not far off...).
Religion / superstition may be the seed of our modern comprehension of the world, its earliest groping for understanding, but for a seed to do its part it must give up its constraining form and allow something far greater to emerge.
Religion can no longer function as an explainer. Lightening is discharges of static electricity, not magical spears thrown by Zeus. The best explanation of this universe is not as the sandbox project of an emotionally juvenile deity who couldn't get enough burnt offerings from his faulty creations so he tortured and murderd his own child as a work-around.
If religion has a place in our future, it is as ART. It is to nurture the human spirit, to inspire, refresh and to synthesize new understanding of what we KNOW, not what we wish was true. It cannot benefit us while it remains addicted to being right without evidence. It has nothing to tell us while it pretends to know what happens after we die. It cannot be trusted while it insists that it has exclusive understanding of the mind and will of an invisible being.
Kolya on 9/9/2010 at 11:38
I guess we got on a sideroad there when Queue stated science had never instigated fear and hatred (and war) in people, unlike religion, but yeah, I mostly agree with the above.
The only objection I have is what you're reducing religion to. For one thing there is a lot that science has yet to explain and religion can and does function as an explainer there until science gets around to it.
More importantly there are some questions of the Why?-category that science doesn't tackle and doesn't plan to. To take your example: While science can state and explain what happens when someone dies, it doesn't help to explain what that means for that person, who may ask:
Why was I born with a mind that longs for eternity into a mortal body? And what will happen to this mind?
You might say that religion cannot explain this either, at least not in a scientific way, but that's not its purpose. And unlike science religion does tackle these questions. And that goes beyond decorative church-paintings or a fresh look at things we already KNOW because science explained them.
The questions about death are very basic and common, since we all have to die. But there are way more such questions that crop up in everyday life for some people, eg Why can I not be grateful for what I got? Which is basically questioning free will.
The Christian answer to that (Because you're a bad person.) is of course hilariously simple and obviously aimed at taking control of these people instead of helping. But there are other religions and I'm sure some give a better answer. In any case, science's got nothing on that.
Thirith on 9/9/2010 at 11:49
Quote Posted by Kolya
The only objection I have is what you're reducing religion to. For one thing there is a lot that science has yet to explain and religion can and does function as an explainer there until science gets around to it.
Sorry to pick out one point from a longer post, but this is something I disagree with. I would consider myself as having at least an affinity for faith, but I think we'd be doing both religion and science a disfavour if we said that the former was there to fill in the gaps left by the latter
for now. Wouldn't it be massively dishonest, and in fact stupid, to say that questions that aren't fully answered by science yet can be answered by religion? You'd basically be saying that we're not ready for the truth yet so until we are we should be mollified by a comfortable lie.
I think that science and religion address very different questions, and every time the latter tries to answer questions that are in the realm of science, religion comes away with egg on its face. If religion competes with anything, it's philosophy and ethics, but seeing it trying to compete with science is like watching a quadruple amputee competing in an athletics competition.
Kolya on 9/9/2010 at 11:53
If you read a bit further:
Quote Posted by Kolya
You might say that religion cannot explain this either, at least not in a scientific way, but that's not its purpose.
So "mollified by a comfortable lie" is a rather cynical description. I would describe it as helping us over the uncanny feeling of not knowing. It's like they wrote "Here be lions" on old maps. Because just white space was a bit too scary.
EDIT: As long as religion doesn't hold on to such positions after they've been explained sufficiently by science, religion doesn't end with egg on its face. That's why it has to be dynamic, eg say:
This was a point in the journey of enlightenment we passed. We're smarter now but there's still a long way to go.Religion and science would then both be ways to enlightenment. And since the questions are usually there long before science gets around to answer them, religion might function as a guide, to ask the right questions.
DDL on 9/9/2010 at 12:14
Quote Posted by Kolya
Why was I born with a mind that longs for eternity into a mortal body?
Because striving for continued existence is a very very positively selected trait. The more you want to live, the more you're likely to try to survive, the more likely you are to breed and produce offspring that share those traits.
Quote:
And what will happen to this mind?
It will cease to be.
Quote:
Why can I not be grateful for what I got?
Again, because striving for more/better things (food, shelter, sex) is a very positively selected trait. In most evolutionary arms races, you essentially have to "sprint constantly just to stand still": if everything else is striving for more/better things, and you're not, you'll be left behind (and thus are less likely to survive). Evolution selects for those that want MORE MORE MORE.
An example I always like is yeast growing in glucose medium: glucose can be glycolytically broken down to provide two energy units (but this is fast) or oxidatively broken down to provide 36-odd energy units (but this is slow). What do yeast do? UNIVERSALLY the former, even though it is vastly less efficient. Because it's faster: if they don't grab all the glucose and burn it up quickly (albeit wastefully), some other fucker will. Being content with what you have is a poor survival trait.
Thirith on 9/9/2010 at 12:18
Nah, sorry, I still disagree. Either religion can address some questions that science cannot address - to put it in a simplistic way, questions along the lines of Why are we here? What's the meaning of life? Where should we have lunch? - or it has no function. I cannot see "helping us over the uncanny feeling of not knowing" as anything other than a comfortable lie.
Now, I think there are times when a comfortable lie is called for, but religion wields too much power to be safely used as a comfort blanket and nothing else. People kill and die for religion, so it's a comfort blanket lined with razor blades that has C4 sewn into it.
Kolya on 9/9/2010 at 12:22
DDL, I hope you excuse me for finding these answers insufficient.
Any animal will strive for its continued existence, without so much as an idea what death or eternity are. Similarly the drive to want more is well explained for yeast, but yeast has no consciousness, no free will.
DDL on 9/9/2010 at 12:55
Well..how do you know YOU have free will?
We're all just organic machines of varying complexity, governed by slightly sloppy programming. You might think that you do what you want, when you want..but what determines what you want, and when you want it?
Giving a word to a concept, such as "death" or "eternity", doesn't make it our exclusive intellectual property. Animals mourn: hell, chimpanzees have been documented holding deathbed vigils.
To get away from primate territory, both elephants and dolphins have a sense of 'self', and will recognize themselves in mirrors. Consciousness is not a uniquely human phenomenon. And yet, all these things are 'mere animals'. To strive for survival and procreation is pretty much a universal phenomenon, albeit in many different forms (worker bees strive not for their individual reproductive success, but survival of their genes, via the proxy of the queen bee).
Ok, lets put it more simply. What would society be like if nobody cared about living as long as possible? What would it be like if everybody was content with what they had, no matter how meagre?
Now what would happen if you injected into that society someone who was keen to live as long as possible, and accumulate as much stuff as possible? Would they be more or less successful than everyone else?
What would society then look like a hundred years later?
Fearing death and wanting more just plain WORKS. No greater explanation is needed.
Sulphur on 9/9/2010 at 13:05
Yeah, see, that's because humanity's an aberrant freak mutation that had a one in a billion chance of occurring the way it did because of some cosmic accident. It did, though, and the freaks became the most aggressive entropic force on the planet. Thus the in-built drive to destroy itself is nature's way of compensating for it to regain ecological balance. We're all just a bunch of walking talking thumb twiddling abominations that happened to inherit a whole lot of biological detritus from our past which won't amount to much because we've forked off way too far on the branches in the evolutionary tree.
Your thoughts on death and infinity are unwarranted, because they were never supposed to come about.
Kolya on 9/9/2010 at 13:08
If I have enough to be happy and yet still want more, making myself and others unhappy in the progress, it stops working, for me and society. When the glucose is used up the yeast dies. It could not foresee this, because it has no eyes and no rational thought.
And the human longing for eternity, to transcend death, is unique to the conscious human mind. Primates may notice their buddy doesn't react any more and hence something must be wrong with him. But no animal ever wrote a book or created a piece of art to ensure its influence on others past its own death. This isn't explained by survival instinct.
Sulphur: You're getting awfully close to a religious explanation there. ;)
