Yoshie wrote
"It is not necessary to share Newton's religious belief in order to study the calculus, three laws of motion, theory of gravity, and so on."
I didn't say it was. What I was bringing up was that there was a connection between "religious/metaphysical" inquiry and scientific creativity. ___________________ Autoplectic writes
"We can't know if we'll ever experience another scientific revolution as that's simply one analytical-rhetorical strategy for conceptualizing changes in scientific praxis/theory. We don't *need* the concept of a scientific revolution. Indeed, the term as been overhyped to the gills and no longer facilitates creativity in scientific work, imo."
The concept is neither here nor there. The fact is that every once in a while there really are overwhelming changes in the way that science is done and thought of. These changes seem to run on a parallel track with cultural/historic/religious/economic changes, which lead many to suspect that science is hardly the neutral project it currently advertizes itself to be.
"What kind of evidence could possibly be presented that religion should be seen as meaningful in order to gain better understandings of disease, space-time dynamics, genetic drift, the chemical composition of the oceans, earthquake prediction etc.?"
It depends on what you mean by "religion." If "religion" means some form of orthodoxy -- then, we should be careful about the way its notions (whether scientists are religioius or not) affect what we classify as "diseases" such as "homosexuality," "melancholia," "promiscuity," "consumption," etc. _________________________
Carrol writes:
"But you haven't given us any reason for believing that the question is either interesting or complicated. I can easily say that the question of the large five-legged invisible frog sitting in my kitchen is complicated and interesting, but I doubt that anyone would pay much attention to me."
Well, if God = brainwashing/idiocy/hysterical-acting-out, and "science" = an unprejudiced and open examination of things, then certainly there's nothing much interesting to say about God or religion.
"And why can't you say "atheists" rather than "rabid atheists"? Are atheists "rabid" by definition? If not, what is the difference between an "ordinary atheist" and a "rabid atheist"? You are throwing pejorative labels around without making any serious attempt to lay out, even crudely, the grounds for that kind of labelling."
I said "rabid" because nearly all the atheists writing on this list have basically used outright insults or insults by inuendo in arguing their case. To quote an article that asserts that "scientists by and large don't believe in God" is the same as saying that anyone with intelligence is too "smart" for God. That's what finally made me write something, to remind people that modern science basically started with a religious reform movement.
Miles writes:
"Theological debate is nothing more than a symptom of and a distraction from the sensual-practical problems that plague workers in a capitalist society. --If all the energy people have devoted to "the question of God" were redirected to organizing workers and dealing with tangible social problems like poverty, the world would be an immensely better place."
One of the things that can alleviate poverty is science, and one of the things that science depends on is mathematics, and two of the basic concepts that a complex mathematics depends on is zero and infinity. Neither zero nor infinity are things that one can point to: a lot of energy devoted to thinking about impractical stuff like "nothing" and "infinity" had to be expended in order to make these concepts seamlessly merge into the universe of finite things we can point to. In some ages the finite is dignified by being merged with the infinite (late middle ages); in other ages we are at pains to find excuses for concepts like the infinite (modern times). At any time, man must make some kind of peace with these two realms because he is sensitive to both. This peace cannot be made through experiment because there is no such thing as an experiment without a prior metaphysics. Every expriment assumes and infers how we cut up reality, which are the important variables, and which are the unimportant. Sience seeks to carve at the joints; but where the joints are exactly is not something that can be determined scientifically. Where the joints are depends on how things hang together; how things are tied together: res ligio (things tied) ---> religion.
"The question of God/Religion/Metaphysics" includes a ton of questions: for example, "What is the good?" "Is it possible to be good without also being free?" "Is there such thing as evil?" "Can we step out of our own conditioning?" "Is there intelligence without language?" "Is happiness nothing other than the satisfaction of material needs?" "What is the relationship between the finite and the infinite?" "What is the relationship between the one and the many?" "What is the relationship between life and death?" "What is consciousness?" These are all very, very important questions. The fact that these questions exist does not necessarily mean that they must also have answers. Let's say most of them are koans.
These are not trivial or contrived questions because the deeper and more pregnant problem is not whether there is or is not God, but how [if there is God] man may discover God. An atheist may tell me that there is no God: "There is no god because children die of leukemia"; "There is no god because societies that struggle less against nature don't believe in god;" "There is no god because it's just a word and just because there is a word, doesn't mean there must be something that corresponds to it." None of these assertions, however,demonstrate the absence of God. They just demonstrate some silly ways the people try to think about this stuff.
And, since, it is not possible to prove that there is no God, the question of how man may find God (of how he may perceive reality without the veil of conditioning) is both a religious and a scientific question. It's religious because it asks whether we may, as finite, particular beings, be able to perceive something that transcends the particular. It's scientific because it asks how we may be sure, or rather, what it is that might serve for certainty in this particular situation. It's scientific because it wants to _investigate_ the possibility of an unconditioned realm.
I'm not very good at writing about this; it's not easy to put into words. But I'll leave the last thought to Jeff Fisher, with whom I agree:
"but if we think of science and religion as essentially addressing overlapping (not identical, but not mutually exclusive) sets of concerns in different ways, then much of the conflict here evaporates. the conflict continues mainly, afaict, because so many atheists and religionists want it to continue: the former to destroy religion, the latter to destroy science. this approach seems wrong-headed to me."
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