Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
>
> apologies: this is entirely too long. i recommend skimming. or deleting. :)
I read it straight through (and agree with much of it) but my responses are going to be a bit here, a bit there. (I was tempted to change the subject line to "An Appeal to Ignorance: Nibbles"). Disagreement with any particular point implies nothing about response to other (not quoted) parts of the post.
> my point about scientists rejecting religion, which
> was not that it's all western religion, but that to reject ""religion"
> is utterly non-sensical, especially when no one on this list has --
> unless i missed it, which i admit is possible -- satisfactorily
> defined religion. and i'll bet those scientists can't, either.
Agreed, one cannot define religions -- it is too miscellaneous a category. But I think one can give a fairly precise definition of one form -- the most important form -- of "rejecting religion." What most people mean when they say they have "rejected religion" is that they never had any "religion" to begin with. And "rejecting religion" in this context means "not being interested in any form of thought they had encountered socially which called itself religion." I'm describing myself, but I'm also describing many I have known who did at one time nominally ascribe to some religion (church). I'm remembering a conversation with a friend whose father had been a methodist missionary in India in the 1930s. I mentioned to him that he didn't have the hang-ups of someone who had "lost" his/her "faith," and I wondered how he had escaped that fate, since he took the same distant perspective on "religion" that I did. His answer was that it had never seemed to him that he had lost anything worth keeping. Edith Hamilton noted long ago that philosophical systems were never refuted, they were simply abandoned. And it is from this historical perspective (i.e., the perspective of the "humanities"?) that I would explain the intersection of science and religion (and of the tendency of so many scientists to "reject" religion). The early roads in the west away from Christianity were mortalism, deism, and politics! By the last I simply mean that political and economic activity began to push a focus on religion aside, so that more and more religion became merely a way of expressing one's political or economic position. Mortalism (the doctrine that the soul dies with the body and that both are resurrected together at the last judgment) was a capital crime in the 16th and 17th centuries, it being recognized even then that the belief in the temporary death of the soul could easily morph in to the belief in the death of the soul, period.
So science never _replaced_ religion; science was merely one of many currents which simply more and more nudged religion aside as not of that much importance. One early and minor but interesting symptom of that shoving aside may be seen in the contrast between Milton's superb "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" and his wretched fragment, "The Passion." It's impossible not to be impressed by the power of Herbert's poetry, but I also find it a bit icky. Milton, as "The Passion" shows, had gotten beyond such ickyness, even when he tried to make himself produce it.
An additional point. Most of the "religious views" that surround scientists as social individuals _are_ the kind of views which purport to answer scientific questions. Hawkins notes that one of the Pope's (the one who just died?) proclaimed that the Big Bang theory was acceptable because it presumed an absolute beginning. In other words, though you are right that one cannot define "religion" very precisely, the social fact is that the religion most of us rub up against is some form of theism, and usually forms that imply some sort of interference with nature from "beyond nature." Science does not disprove "religion" for reasons you give. But on the whole the last few hundred years have provide more exciting things to think about than god or spirit.
> [clip]
> > At 01:59 PM 6/14/2005, Carl Remick wrote:
> > >>From: "Dennis Perrin" <dperrin at comcast.net>
> > >>
> > >>Personally, atheist disdain doesn't really bother me. I view it as a form
> > >>of despair, esp when it's expressed through insults or, if one is feeling
> > >>generous, condescension.
> > >
> > >How interesting. IMO, it's *religion* that is a form of despair
> >
>
> and how condescending both of these approaches are. ahh, armchair
> psychoanalysis, especially when bolstered with sociology!
Agreed. And it was this sort of thing that spoiled this thread.
Enough for now. A final note: this subject heading points back to a debate preceding any theism/atheism debate. It was a debate between two atheists, one of whom called himself an agnostic, over agnosticism. :-)
Carrol