Just because science has not figured God out, does not deny His existence.
Science isn't trying to figure god out any more than it's trying to figure fairies out. Science focuses its efforts on understanding reality.
Science isn't trying to figure god out any more than it's trying to figure fairies out. Science focuses its efforts on understanding reality.
Religion wonders about the ultimate meaning of such models. Its language is philosophy.
The first religions bundled model and meaning out of necessity. However, post-Roman Christians were keen logicians and experimenters who laid the foundation of the modern sciences. They would be ashamed of creationists' shallowness.
Ps: The have been a lot of tiny or dead religions some of which where vary odd by modern standards. But, if you limit yourself to religions with say 20,000,000+ followers today then clearly there going to need to be able to spread.
That's not right. It's language is... well, language. Including, but not limited to, mathematics.
> Religion wonders about the ultimate meaning of such models. Its language is philosophy.
I don't think this is really being fair to philosophy. I do view religion as a kind of proto-philosophy. Philosophy is what religion should have been.
imho too many people consume religion like painkillers for the big questions. Without a critical eye, faith becomes anti-philosophy.
Your mistake is in claiming that religion is about 'meaning' where science and mathematics aren't. Anywhere you use language, you study meaning. Meaning is a feature of language, and religion tends to use the least reliable and most inconsistent language of any of those subjects. If religion is a search for meaning, it is an incredibly stupid way of doing so.
So the one thing you've claimed it is useful for is something that it is demonstrably bad at.
>The Old Testament is a stream-of-consciousness culture dump: history, law, moral parables, and yes, models of how the universe works. In not one single passage of the Old Testament will you find anyone talking about a transcendent wonder at the complexity of the universe. But you will find plenty of scientific claims, like the universe being created in six days (which is a metaphor for the Big Bang), or rabbits chewing their cud. (Which is a metaphor for...)
>Back in the old days, saying the local religion "could not be proven" would have gotten you burned at the stake. One of the core beliefs of Orthodox Judaism is that God appeared at Mount Sinai and said in a thundering voice, "Yeah, it's all true." From a Bayesian perspective that's some darned unambiguous evidence of a superhumanly powerful entity... The vast majority of religions in human history - excepting only those invented extremely recently - tell stories of events that would constitute completely unmistakable evidence if they'd actually happened. The orthogonality of religion and factual questions is a recent and strictly Western concept. The people who wrote the original scriptures didn't even know the difference.
The difference is that the scientific truth is always changing. The scientific truth today is different from the truth 300 years ago. And will be different again in 300 years time. So how true is that 'truth'? If the things we believe to be true today are untrue tomorrow, then how can people of science be so hostile to the 'truths' of religion? And what's the end-game? When will we finally know the truth?
People of faith get their absolute unchanging truths from their religion, not that the religions themselves are truth seeking in the same way as science.
Anyway, it's definitely worth a watch and very thought provoking. He also predicts the potential totalitarian use of the internet, along with the ideas of global communities sharing knowledge and ultimately each person's own truths.
I have since stopped being quite so brutal in my opinions about people of faith.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Universe_Changed
The big question of science is "How ... ?"
The big question of religion is "Why ... ?"
The two solve different problems and could coexist without so many animosity on each side.
The big question of religion is "Who...?"
And more importantly, religion has never actually answered a "why" question in a reasonable manner. So it is objectively useless. It is not how you answer "why" questions.
Assuming your distinction is actually meaningful, here's a question for you: "How do you properly answer 'why' questions?"
Maybe the answer is that there is no scientific answer to a "why" question ? The question has no scientific answer. In maths, some equations have no solution, some proposition are not provable with common axioms. The "why questions" are just question without scientific answer.
If you have a question with no possible scientific answer, then it has no answer at all. You do not get better results by refusing to use the best tools.
Religious flamewars aren't ok on HN. Please don't.