Are science and religion incompatible?

Religion, for me, is not being told what to do. It is trying to figure out what God wants me to do, but that isn't quite the same as being told what to do.

You absolutely do need to think hard about religious concepts. The more you are sure the religion is true, the more you DO think about the concepts, as a matter of fact. That's what popes and priests and nuns and vicars and ministers and monks and preachers DO. With their entire lives.

Not sure what you mean by "the promise of perfection," but I don't believe religion offers that.

I believe the scientific level of religion is not zero, but 100. However, at this stage of science, we all can only see it through a glass darkly.

coco

Hahahahahahaha! Love it. Now that IS perfection! Perfect writing. Totally and absolutely perfect.

coco

Actually, I got the site wrong. It's not cycorp, it's cyc.com.

http://www.cyc.com/

If they succeed, there is a good chance that an Ulrika 2.0 will join us in the forums.

Well, an abiological 2.0, I should say.

No black and red cube? Maybe, say, a self replicating one (when in the chat range of someone mentioning any religion)?

Maybe we should start a thread of cube color tints and their abilities

I think this is an interesting bit of text on the subject. From my experience professor Winston is a very stable and calm mind, and he sheds light on this topic:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4488328.stm

Eek! I'll be obsolete. I hope they program 2.0 well.


~Ulrika~

I would hope that 2.0 will at least be in OO logic. The top down model should have been replaced well over a decade ago...

I had to learn Python just for this humorous addendum.

class Belief:
	def __init__(self, number, flavor, afterlife):
		self.god = number
		self.flavor = flavor
		self.afterlife = afterlife

my_belief = Belief()
my_belief.god = 0 
my_belief.flavor = "atheist"
my_belief.afterlife = "none"

while 1:
       if my_belief.god:
              belief_text = "does"
       else:
              belief_text = "does not"
       print "God ", belief_text, " exist"

~Ulrika~

Who says discussing religion can't be educational!

And, BTW, the programmer has introduced a flaw into your program; God does exist...

Which one? There's a list of about 450 deities from 75 past and present religions here.

To save you a little typing, my guess is that you're probably referring to that mysterious unified triplet, the Groovy Threeness. Being a fan of Christian mythology myself, I just love what he did with that big tower, the floods, and the three Wise Men. It's as good as any Greek mythology I've read.

~Ulrika~

Glad to hear that you accept He exists

*note that He in this instance would refer to King James.

As a work of fiction, Christian mythology and its cast of characters do exist and do entertain, much like the ensemble from Greek mythology (Jupiter, Saturn, etc.) and Scientology (Xenu, OT levels, etc.) do.

However, just like Scientology, Christianity loses its appeal when folks attempt to force their fiction on others. *cough* ID *cough*

~Ulrika~

Perhaps in your post, however, the He in my post referred to YHWH.

King James was not even thought of in Earthly terms when YHWH was first mentioned...

Agreed, religions should not be forced on anyone... Other things that modern religions should not do (to name a few):

1. Start wars
   
2. Promote hatred
   
3. Promote disenfranchisement
   
4. Allow themselves to be diminished by society
   
5. Allow themselves to be diminished by hijackers of said religion (for money, power, etc.)
   
6. Allow themselves to be diminished by re-writers of said religion
   

You state that religion should not be forced on anyone, however you imply that religion should exert force nonetheless. Do the last three items on your list not imply affecting those who are external to your religion in order to prevent it from "being diminished", much like Scientologists go after those who attempt to disparage their religion publicly?

Don't oppress me with your mythology -- Christian, Scientologist, Wiccan or otherwise.

~Ulrika~

It has nothing to do with the public, it is an internal conflict... by conforming to societal ideals or following someone who says they are of the religion but who want power or want to change the religion to their own...

No oppression for you Ulrika (at least not from me)

Do you think Harry Potter is real?

Hopefully not. The author is still alive and would TELL you it's fiction.

Now accepting that, we move on to other mythology where the authors were also humans, with motives, many of which involved their own agenda at the time. Some of which was probably profit, politics, or exploration/philosophy of the natural world.

The reason I say King James is that I doubt you have your understanding of your religion from any other version than from through his viewpoint, as an author. Much like Scientology gets it's information from L. Ron Hubbard.

Unless of course you want to go farther back to the Latin, or the Hebrew or the collected works from which the bible is composed and plagarized from. Now if you want to state which particular splinter religion you are that uses this literature, we could probably look into just which set of lies they're telling you on Sunday about said literature.

Fascinating. I've never heard this stated quite this way before! I'll have to look into it.

~Ulrika~

The bible is prose, poetry story. Yes, while it is also history, it is history in the form of art (literature). There are metaphores and elaborations. The people who started the bible (Hebrews-Jewish) had a very different world view and interpretation than the people who finished it (christians).

In short, the bible doesn't speak for itself. It is a great work of art which can be percieved differently by everyone, and there is no credible authority that can "prove" what it all means. Yes you can say that such and such a phrase meant such and such durring such and such time period at such and such location from whence it was writen. But still after all the technical, symantec, cultural, and lingual interpretations are done, it could still be viewed diferently by different eyes.

I think it's fine to have beliefs, but a healthy mind should modify it's beliefs when it encounters new knowledge. To do otherwise is not faith, but stuborness and blindness. Let us remember that science can not prove theories, it can only disprove them. Science does not create new paradigms of possibilities, or world views. These already exist in the imagination. What science does is eliminate them... narrows them down to the ones which are hardest to disprove, more specifically ones which haven't been disproven... yet. We start with as many possibilities and explainations as we can imagine then via the scientific method we narrow them down. Perhaps there are correct theories which we haven't imagined yet, and it's fine to wonder about them, that's why people love science fiction so much. But for the ones already disproven, we should let them go.

Case in point: I can't think of a lot of good examples (can you?) but here is one. According to the bible the earth created by God is only about 4000 years old. However science has many times over disproven this through carbon dating and other methods. Yet many creationists ignore this and pig headedly decided that the carbon dating methods must simply be wrong. A trick of the Devil perhaps. While it's true that the carbon dating methods could be based on an incorrect theory which hasn't been disproven yet, believing this without empirical prof is nothing more than fantasy.

Many fanatics get faith and fantasy confused. That's how you can end up with an entire religion based on the musings of a science fiction writer. However if you can avoid this, then science and spirituality do not need to be incompatible. However religions being the strict ruling and slow changing organizations which they are, could never keep up with science, never mind compliment it.

Science is a method, which produces theories while religions on the other hand are theories without method.

Interesting you should bring up carbon dating. Wouldn't you think it odd that you should hand me a board and ask for a measurement only to be told I can't give that to you until you tell me what you expect it to be? Or worse, if the same board was known to be 6 feet long by you, and I gave you a measurement of 36 feet? Or, what if I made a measurement for you, but threw out all the 'bad' measurements that didn't fit within your specified tolerance of what you where expecting?

Carbon dating (and like half-life methods) has both of the above in its history. Don't you think it odd that coal (that is supposed to be millions of years old) still has C-14 in it? Further, don't you find it odd that living trees (seen living in modern times) that were engulfed by a lava flow now measure in the millions of years old? Radio carbon dating is a faith all on its own.

If you have a proof positive way to give something quantitative values, it better darn well work in all cases, whether you have a guesstimate or not.

I actually do try to go back well before KJV. [post=734371]Here[/post] is a list of most of the study aids I use.

I believe that this has been hashed out already in that thread, but we could do it again if you like.

Which one bible or collection of bibles do you base your faith on. Many of them conflict on specific points. Some are also based on others. However, they're still all written by humans. Now if you JUST use them as study aids, for which version of the bible are you using them as aids, and why do you think you need aids? Is your religion or faith deficient? Why stop short at older bibles and investigate the literature, stories, and basic information that the bible was founded on and how it was collated and the meaning of those rather than the cherry picked mangled quotes from over 60 different versions of the same thing? Remember, you're studying literature.

The biggest problem I see is so many people judge what the Bible says without actually reading it for themselves.

The Bible does not say the Earth is 4000 years old.

SOME people claim by counting the generations we can figure out the age of the Earth, and that may or may not be correct. But that in no way suggests all Bible believers believe the Earth is 4000 years old (I think it's believed to be 6000-10,000 actually by those who believe that).

We can read the direct translation of the Greek and Hebrew texts from which all translations come.

Some people actually learn Hebrew for the Old Testement and Greek for the New Testement so they don't have to read any translation.