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/sci/ - Science & Math

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3557932 No.3557932 [Reply] [Original]

/sci/ I was wondering if faith and science go hand in hand? I have been in Catholic school all my life and now I'm going to a very liberal, anti-Christian school. I wish to discuss rationale behind faith and how to defend it despite science. I've been taught that it goes hand in hand, but how so? Do fellow /sci/entists agree here?

tl;dr
Is God real?

>> No.3557939
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3557939

Hark! I prithee!

>> No.3557945

No, faith is the antithesis or reason. By definition, faith asks you to take as absolute truth something which has no evidence whatsoever. In order for science and religion to be compatible, religion has to give up on faith utterly.

>> No.3557950

>>3557932
Eh, good luck.

You pretty much have to start any argument with:

"Do you understand how Any sociologic or psychologic axiom is only valid if it produces useful definitions and possible and testable outcomes?"

If they can't answer that, you'll find no rational argument about religion.

>> No.3557951

There are far more contradictions just in the bible itself. If you can brush those off than I don't see why you can't do the same for those that contradict science.

>> No.3557960

Not /sci/ related, but please define this ``God''.
If it includes omnipotence, it doesn't exist.
If it includes omniscience, its existence requires certain things which are very questionable.
If it includes omnibenevolence, whence comes evil?

Actually the real problem lies in wether you accept that mathematical truth is unchangable. If you think your deity can change it, that would be bad epistemiology, but I can't argue with that (as it's irrational). If it cannot change mathematical truth, then it can be shown that an interventionist god is highly unlikely to exist or be experienced by anyone (not to mention contradicts the usual omnipotence axiom).

>> No.3557958

>>3557945
that's not what faith is

>> No.3557967

Faith=Believing in something, especially without much evidence. Trying to fit blind beliefs in.

Science=Accepting facts and evidence. Testing the world and drawing conclusions from those tests.

You can either have one or the other. For instance, if God was proven to exist, he would become scientific.

>> No.3557978

>>3557967
Poe's corrallary:

"You can't tell the difference between a parrot of truth and a critical thinker deriving truth."

>> No.3557994

>>3557967
Yes, but is science in a way faith? You can only determine the origin of the universe to a certain point.

I recently watched something by PBS related around string theory and I realized when you hit the big bang there is no real... well... explanation behind it's creation that can be proven with our current state. Could it be possible that, to that extent of science, faith can be applied? Mathematical sequences begin to melt down when you try to reach a specific point of existence so would it be, to a point, irrational as well? I may need to have laymen terms with these things but I feel like I got a jist that theist and nontheist beliefs have to have faith that a specific theory i.e. string theory or Heaven works to what we expect it.

>> No.3557996

>>3557994
>>3557967
>>3557960
As I said OP, no rational argument unless you make people understand the basic axioms of the bible.

>> No.3558002

Faith is the antithesis of scientific reasoning. To be scientifically minded you must acknowledge your fallibility and always take steps to be unbiased and rational in your evaluation of events. Faith requires you to hold an idea in confidence even if it flies in the face of your reasoning.

Faith is entirely unscientific.

It is also the sign of an idiot,

>> No.3558005

>>3558002
Faith is an axiom.

>> No.3558015

>>3557994
Science is not based on faith at all.

You're a scientist and you find something out. Good! Oh, but years later, you discover something that contradicts your last finding. Instead of personally choosing which one you believe, you put both to the text and find out which one has more evidence to support it and/or which one is more "genuine".

A scientist's ultimate goal is to find out the ultimate truth to the universe, not to assume the universe works a specific way. If scientists knew everything, or at least assumed everything, they wouldn't be scientists any more.

tl;dr: Scientists literally exist to find shit out. Faith on the other hand, exists to assume something and hold onto it no matter what evidence is out there.

>> No.3558021

>>3557994
There are some things rational people take as axiomatic (these are various philosophical considerations). There are also some things you take as axiomatic (those from your religion). The problem is that popular religion's axioms can be shown inconsistent easily, unless you also deny logic.
Such axioms can be considered as faith, but that's actually wrong as such positions tend to be consistent within itself and they make certain assumptions that reality will keep on confirming. The problem with popular religion's assumptions is that they don't make assumptions about things that have value in reality (or can be verified in this particular shared reality we all live in). It's also worse that sometimes you have to protect a bad belief and to do so, you may very well have to reject rational thinking entirely ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/uy/dark_side_epistemology/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/uw/entangled_truths_contagious_lies/ ).

>> No.3558022

What is it that makes your school "anti-Christian" OP?

I think that's your persecution complex acting up.

>> No.3558023

>>3558005
If

>> No.3558028

>>3558023
Axioms are taken because they derive something useful.

Feel free to argue that religion hasn't gotten us to this stage of evolution.

see:
>>3557950

>> No.3558029

>>3558015
I'm not OP, but science does actually make certain assumptions, strangely scientists even forget the assumptions (as they're not always philosophers).
Common assumptions are realism (assuming reality exists) or the fact that reality can be described/modeled mathematically.
I find such assumptions sound myself, but they are nonetheless somewhat axiomatic.
(You assume reality exists and then try to find out how it works.)

>> No.3558037

we'll never actually know if there was a creator so we can't answer that question

everyone else who actually thinks they can say yes or no is just a fucking moron

>> No.3558036

>>3557958
What is faith?

>> No.3558035

>>3558028

>Feel free to argue that religion hasn't gotten us to this stage of evolution.

Okay. Religion hasn't gotten us to this stage of evolution. We have gotten to this stage of evolution in spite of religion.

>> No.3558045

>>3558035
Ok, so your claim is religion is vestigial? Why would culture evolve something that would hinder it?

>> No.3558044

>>3558022

This. Answer it OP.

>> No.3558042

STOP IT

God can not be proved or disproved.

>> No.3558050

>>3558037
The question is rather complicated, but I don't think it's unanswerable. It's just not something science can be applied to, unless there is physical evidence (and without it, assume null hypothesis). It is however a question that philosophy is quite equiped to tackle and given certain assumptions, one can make such statements. Of course, any premises to such arguments must be examined very carefully (they tend to be poisoned)

>> No.3558053

>>3558042
You didn't even define ``God''.
Instead of parroting a cached thought, try defining it and then you can talk about its existence.

>> No.3558070

I really want to know what makes OP's school "anti Christian".

These kinds of persecution complexes tend to have hilarious rationales. Since this is not science we might at least get some entertainment from it in the form of OP being a faggot.

>> No.3558068

>>3558053
A non-temporal being that controls our world to some extent.

>> No.3558073

>>3558045
Are you fucking stupid? Are you honestly trying to say that religion hasn't hindered human progress? Maybe you should brush up on a little something called the Dark Age.

I hope I've just been trolled.

>> No.3558082

>>3558073
Dark ages were caused by the collapse of the Roman empire. You fell for atheist propaganda.

>> No.3558086
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3558086

>>3558070
except OP is a faggot, so you'll never see the truth.

>mfw

>> No.3558093

>>3558073
Perhaps you confuse stupidity with ideology. Should we argue about whether ghenghis kahn was a religious zealot?

>> No.3558092

>>3558045

Religion is too recent for it's effect on evolution to be well established, but if I had to tend either way, yes, it is negative.

It's a curious consequence of our curious species developing our curiosities before equipping ourselves to adequately answer our own questions. Knowing of our own mortality drove us insane, and as insane people do, we concocted delusions.

>> No.3558095

>>3558045
Evolution is an adaptation executor, not a fitness maximizer.

>> No.3558101

>>3558092
It's impressive how you can come up with excuses to explain away things you don't like.

>> No.3558099

>>3558073
If by trolled you mean being absolute in your belief about indeterminate things, then yes, you've been trolled.

>Also, you've demonstrated no matter the ideology, one can be absolutely certain about completely uncertain causal events in human-cultural events.

>> No.3558106

The God that goes "hand in hand" with science is called God of the Gaps, which is the single most fallacious concept ever conceived since my duck got cancer.

>> No.3558109

>>3558092
Except we're talking about cultural evolution, which as our memes suggest, happens much quicker than physiological evolution.

If you don't understand how human psychology necessitates choosing baseless axioms to interact with reality, then you failed:

>>3557950

>> No.3558114

>>3558101
It's not impressive, really. As the things he don't like are coincidentally all bullshit, it's easy to find things wrong with it all.

>> No.3558117

>>3557945

Logic is grounded in postulates. Postulates are grounded in assumption and adhered to by faith.

>> No.3558121

>>3558095
Sure, tell that to the 6 billion people who derive their existence from the 95+% belief in religion of all kinds.

Clearly, theres a need for religious belief to overcome cultural self destruction.

You're telling me that 5% is optimum, when shear numbers should tell you that generation after generation has benefited from religious belief.

>> No.3558130

>>3558114
It's impressive creatively, in that he made it all up.

>> No.3558131

>>3558121
A tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny.

>> No.3558135

>>3558131
A believer will always find a reason for his belief.

>> No.3558141
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3558141

>>3558130
All the while deriding his own imagination in the result.

Quite impressive indeed.

>image of his incoherent powers

>> No.3558142

>>3558028
It doesn't really matter what the past is, only what the present is. That there were religious people who made discoveries only shows that religious belief as those people practiced it did not interfere with their capacity for discovery.

But there are definitely instances where religious organizations did hinder such progress: Galileo's trial happened right at the time Descartes was writing Le Monde, and in reading it there is an unmistakeable impression that he deliberately refused to go near heliocentrism because of the trial. It took Newton to undo the damage that did.

But notice how our arguments are working: you assert that religion was good for progress, I assert that religion can be an obstacle to progress. We're both talking about progress as a thing that is valued and that is fundamentally an aesthetic judgment and not a rational one. If someone cared not for progress in the slightest neither of our arguments would move him towards religious or irreligious belief.

>> No.3558145

>>3558142
Eh?

You're basically saying "Trust me, I know the future..I mean..I can't PROVE it to you, but just trust me. It may be imaginary, but I tell you, I know human psychology."

Sorry, If I believed your argument, I couldn't believe your defense.

ITT: Cognitive disassociation.

>> No.3558157

>>3558142
It also shows that some humans are able to compartmentalize belief. However, it seems that people that are good at compartmentalization may be worse at more general mental intuition (skipping levels of mental deduction to reach a result).

>> No.3558162

>>3558045

You answered your own question. Religion is vestigial to culture in the same way wings are vestigial wings are vestige to the emu. At one time the vestigial wings of the emu had a function; they do not any more.

At one time religion was something culture viewed as necessary to survive. It is not so anymore.

>> No.3558167

>>3558142
So religion is detrimental, and you know this because sometimes it is obviously detrimental but when it isn't obviously detrimental that just means it wasn't detrimental enough to overcome the progressive force. Yeah, no.

>>3558162
Just a happy coincidence that this matches up with your personal preferences.

>> No.3558168

>>3558157
Which is exactly what he's doing. He's attempting to rationalize his abhorrence to what he believes are illogical beliefs.

He's ignoring that all humans have irrational beliefs because the state of the universe doesn't yield reality to anyone easily.

So at the end of the day, his abhorrence really is with his ownself, as he hates having to hide how little he really knows about other people.

>> No.3558185
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3558185

>>3558162
You fail when you start anthropomophizing culture.

I appologize, I can't hear your argument over this laughter.

>> No.3558187

>>3558167
He's also neglecting that this 'vestigial' thing is 95% of the population.

But whatever, let the atheists eat cake.

>> No.3558193

>>3558185
To avoid anthropomorphism is to anthropomorphize. You are still casting the thing in the flavor to which a human has decided it should be. The human idea of impersonal mechanism is no less anthropomorphic than the idea of a personal culture.

>> No.3558207

>>3558193
culture doesn't choose, evolution doesn't choose, your word salad doesn't choose.

It exists because it was/is beneficial to society. Sure you could say that atheism is more beneficial, but you have not documentation of any civilization in current existence to support that.

Thus, if we're being rational here, religion is a beneficial adaptation to an environment filled with unknowns.

But thats not all. It also demonstrates that human psychology cannot handle axioms of human behavior without some greater axiom to support them.

Whether it is god or a scientist, people do not generally want to believe something unless there is a authority claiming it.

At the end of the day, you'll have to get used to how arbitrary ideology is, but that does not make it needless, as the ideology allows one to set aside pointless circular logic and converse on a upwardly mobile timeline.

Sure, your future may be without theism, but it is not happening anytime soon.

>> No.3558212

I'm not even sure what this thread is about anymore.

>> No.3558217

micro evolution is natural. religious people deny macro-evolution for obvious reasons. It's complete bullshit. You'd have to be mentally insane to believe such a thing. That alone requires more faith than God.

Like any evolutionist will tell you, it's complicated. Macro-evolution uses examples of micro-evolution to prove most of it's points which is ludicrous. But you have to understand where they're coming from. They have nothing to support it.

So what it comes down to, is that in order for evolution to be taught and make 'sense' of anything, they need to teach that macroevolution is true, whilst providing no evidence. If they don't, it's just like teaching intelligent designs in school. Evolution is a very subtle troll. It really is.

>> No.3558218

>>3558207
>culture doesn't choose, evolution doesn't choose, your word salad doesn't choose.

Unsupported assertions, all.

>Sure, your future may be without theism

Unlikely. Atheism was in my past. My future has been become more theistic ever since.

>> No.3558227

>>3558082
derpdederptydederpdedo

yeah because executing people fopr contradicting the church for centuries on end had NOTHING to do with the stagnation of science for those same centuries and thats why theists themselves totally didnt coin the phrase the dark ages, except that they did
ITS ALL PROPAGANDA BY ATHEISTS AKA SATANISTS

timetyravelling athiests

those sons of bitches

>> No.3558230

>>3557945
Read some Kierkegaard them come back to me.

>> No.3558231
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3558231

god was an idea created 1000s of years ago, it shouldnt exist anymore

>> No.3558233

>>3557958
I still want to know what Philosopher's scone thinks faith is.

>> No.3558239

>>3558231
Yeah, like breathing. That's too old, let's move on to not breathing.

>> No.3558244

I'm just amazed that religion still exists. I can understand that the weak need a belief in an afterlife, and so Deism might still be relevant, but organized religion with tons of obviously false myths, outdated morals and laws, and dubious accuracy when it comes to EVERYTHING? How does it still exist?

>> No.3558245

>>3558145
No I'm not.

>>3558157
Well, yeah. But given that the other people I'm responding to are really bad at persuasive argument, I didn't want to make any implications that would put them off trying to understand me. It looks like that happened anyway.

>>3558167
I didn't say it was bad for progress, I said it can be an obstacle to progress. A similar culture that can avoid placing those obstacles would be better at it, but that is not a condemnation of everything that isn't as good, only a preference for selecting more optimal methods. I should hope that it is obvious even to the most flamboyantly annoying internet atheist that societies with a religious culture can get better. You'd have to be a fool with no understanding of history to not see that.

>>3558187
Not the same person. Not even an atheist.

>> No.3558248

if god created everything and sends you to six flags when you die then it is simply reality. and with enough science we eventually know more and more about the douche.
if these things aren't true then they aren't reality.
in either of the two mutually exclusive cases all we can ever hope to do is to learn more about reality. faith has nothing to do with anything

>> No.3558261

Since when does "it exists, therefore it's good" form a valid argument? That religion has propagated throughout the human population only shows that we are likely to find value in it. Suggesting that this means that it actually has value is a blatant fallacy that could be used to justify any number of ridiculous common myths. To be correct it would require human judgement to be perfect. If that's the case why don't you too think you're a goddamn retard?

>> No.3558262
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3558262

>> No.3558371

OP, this might help you or totally mindfuck you. I'm agnostic so eh.. dunno what this will do for you. Link and abstract.

http://brainmind.com/BrainReligion.html

THE LIMBIC SYSTEM AND THE SOUL

Evolution and the Neuroanatomy of Religious Experience1

R. Joseph, Ph.D.

Brain Research Laboratory

ABSTRACT

Humans have been burying and preparing their dead for the "Great Beyond" for over 100,000 years. These behaviors and beliefs are related to activation of the amygdala, hippocampus, and temporal lobe, which are responsible for religious, spiritual, and mystical trance-like states, dreaming, astral projection, near death and out-of-body experience, and the "hallucination" of ghosts, demons, angels, and gods. Case studies and the evolutionary neurological foundations are presented and it is postulated that these structures evolved in order to make spiritual experience possible, and account for the sexual and violent aspects of religious behavior. Abraham, Moses, Mohammed, and Jesus Christ, and others who've communed with angels or "gods," display limbic system hyperactivity. Patients report religious "hallucinations" or out-of-body experiences when limbic structures are stimulated. As over 96% of human DNA is dormant, whereas 50% of activated DNA is devoted to the brain, these capacities may continue to evolve.

>> No.3558969

>>3558244
oh you.

>> No.3558973

>>3557932
Faith - believing things apart from evidence or in spite of evidence.
Science - believing things because of evidence.

So no, they're about as contradictory as you can get.