Roots, again!!!

Kesher at 2 — if you have a substantive comment to make, please do so. But do not use the comments section to blogwhore. Thanks.

fitz

Peterr — thanks so much for such a thoughtful post. This is truly a topic that needs so much more discussion — and so much more understanding of real respect and understanding versus an attempt at manipulation and obfuscation. Really appreciate you doing this post!

Thanks, Peterr. Reading about string theory, or looking at photographs of distant galaxies, or – yes – reading one of DarkSyde’s diaries at dKos about the evolutionary process – can be an awe-inspiring thing for me, not at all unlike the feelings I sometimes have in church. There is no (good) reason for faith and science to be hostile to one another.

Great Post Peterr

Thanks for the timely topic

Larry

Christy,

Thanks, but between the Joe ‘n Ned show last night and the Bush presser right now, something tells me the comments will be slow getting started here. Maybe the NSA let Bush know this thread was coming, and he quickly scheduled the press conference to distract attention from it.

(ducking back to the last thread. . .)

Peterr, a little OT, but I hope you won’t mind. Noon is coming up in the Eastern Time Zone, and Juan Cole has asked that each of us observe two minutes of silence @ 12:00 out of respect for the victims of last year’s 7/7 London bombings. I’ll be doing so myself here in the PDT later.

With that out of the way, thanks for an interesting post! I’ve gone the rounds (in a good way) with religious friends of mine about the question of free will and its role in God’s intrumentality. I don’t have any answers, but failing to care about this question leads down the slippery slope to Auchwitz. That’s nowhere I ever want to be, whether as inmate or captor.

Steven J Gould gave it his all, and was basically right, I think. Religion and science can easily co-exist, if science answers the “how?” and religion answers the “why?”

One way to approach religion and science is to tie them together as ways of explaining the mystery of the world as we apprehend it. Religion came first because the philosophical tools were available to the inquisitive mind long before the scientific tools were well defined/refined enough to approach the mystery.

How to get beyond the fixed notion that the scripture (of choice, since there is always plenty of scripture that categorically does not support the chosen notion) frames the discussion is the issue, and that takes patience, caring and the will to work at the resistance.

Tillich can be one answer: The religious impulse arises from the apprehension of the mystery. If you approach the mystery of God/spirit and try to leave the words of man out of it, it is possible to make headway. Baby steps, maybe, but headway none the less.

This is easier for me than, perhaps, an atheist. I am unchurched but I do believe in God (even though I am scientifically trained as an engineer).

Tommy Yum at 9 — I love that, and am going to use it.

Today’s Micheal Kinsley column on stem cell research: “Moral sincerity is not impressive if it depends on willful ignorance and indifference to logic.”

It seems to me that for many people, especially students of theology, intellectual sincerity results in a world view of increasing complexity, rather than easy, rote recitations touted by so-called moralists.

In the recent Pennsylvania school creationist case, the judge warned, be careful of making children choose between God and science. Kitzmiller v. Dover

I come from a family where religion and science happily live together. You can study the details of the universe with science and then stand in awe of how amazing it is.

It’s not necessary to believe the world is only 6,000 years old to be a religious person. I would venture to say that a MAJORITY of Americans believe in God -and- science.

So, how do you talk religion and science with those of a more TheoCon mindset?

One request: let’s hold off on discussing religion…

Nothing lke a preemptive stike designed to neuter discussion

That old rule, “Never discuss religion and politics in polite company” undoubtedly sprang from the desire to remain friends despite differing BS (Belief Systems).

cupholder –

I’m not trying to neuter a discussion, so to speak, but simply focus this one and let sex and religion and science have a full thread of its own.

Last winter, when one of the nearby school districts was under assault by the ID folks, I took a shot at thinking through in writing my own views on the matter. Amazingly enough, the local weekly paper published it unedited except for chopoping it up into many more paragraphs. FWIW you can find it at the link below.

http://tinyurl.com/on9db

Christy @11,

Not my idea, but use it all you want!

Esaund -

I liked the Kinsley piece also – link here.

My gap-filled reading of history tends to make me believe that the friction occurs when religion is used as a tool to maintain social stability (i.e., the status quo) rather than as the means to honor the Creator. When science adds to our knowledge, the folks who ritualized the now-outdated set of facts have nowhere to go intellectually, so other means have to be found to keep the flock together in one place.

It’s truly saddening to me that all of these battles that were fought through the Enlightenment have to be re-fought today.

Religion is for those that insist on prematurely filling the gaps. I find it interesting that scientists would abandon reason and take things on faith. For me, it’s one or the other. I’ll take facts and evidence, thanks.

Minnesotachuck @ 17

Gut sehr! Sehr Gut!

This was a great post, Peterr – really just hits all the right points.

How I talk with people who are more on the Theocon side of the fence depends to a great deal on whether I think they are even interested in my point of view. I am always careful to assert that I respect everyone’s right to believe what they want, and expect that same respect in return.

Sometimes I tell the story that a colleague of mine told years ago. My colleague was Jewish, and her 6 year old daughter came home from the public school one day going on and on about Christmas. My friend patiently tried to explain some of the differences between Jewish and Christian beliefs, with many questions from her daughter. Finally, after going into one more explanation, her daughter paused for a minute, and finally said, “But, Mommy, what if they’re right?” To me, that pretty much sums up the importance of being open to all points of view.

I think Doonesbury summed it all up pretty well, too, in a recent cartoon that had a man in his doctor’s office, being told he had TB. The patient asks how the doctor will treat it, and the doctor asks whether the patient is a creationist. The patient responds that he is, and asks why the doctor wants to know. Doctor says he needs to know whether the patient wants him to treat the TB like they did before antibiotics, or as the strain of TB has mutated and evolved over time. “Evolved?” the patient asks? Doctor responds by saying that if patient wants the Noah’s Ark version, he’ll just give him streptomycin. When the patient asks what the newer drugs are like, the doctor responds that they are “intelligently designed.”

Gentle humor goes a long way to helping people understand that sometimes their adherence to a fixed position ignores a huge chunk of reality.

Peterr,

Have you read “The End of Faith” by Sam Harris?

Harris argues that science, which is based on empirical evidence, and religion, which is based on faith in the absence of evidence, are at odds and ultimately irreconcilable.

Here’s a link to the first ten pages of the book:

http://www.samharris.org/index…..apter-one/

Peterr,

“TheoCons” are absolutists; fundamentalists whose binary mode of thinking doesn’t admit the nuance of science. There’s no point in attempting a discussion of the role of science with these people.

They are vastly outnumbered by religious people of every stripe who happily accept scientific principles, inquiries and findings.

If you think it’s possible to go into, say, the Creationist Museum and reason with that crowd, you’re a better man than I.

peterr- thanks for another thought provoking post. o/t what are your perspectives on rabbi michael lerner and his book “the left hand of God”

Nice to see a post like this. Fact of the matter is, there is not all that much contradiction between scientists and so-called religious types or creationists. Philosophical history is wrought with mathematicians being very concerned over the belief in a “Higher Being”. One of my particular faves along these lines, is Rene Descartes, 16th. century French math, philosophy and science guy who is generally credited with founding analytic geometry, which is absolutely essential to the development of calculus. One of Descartes main objectives was, through his Ontological Argument, etc. to lay to rest the skeptics view on the non-existence of “something” which set “things” in motion. It has been said that a majority of scientists are in sympathy with the concept of “God”. If one tries to grapple with the idea of infinity, keeping in mind the concept of “limits”, then the predictibility of some sort of God seems not so far fetched. I think.

it is always most humorus reading or listening to someone trying to justify or quantify their faith and how it relates to reality.
Psychology shows how people find justification for anything. The idea that the two could be involved renders both ridiculous.
you might want to consider hiding one or the other from your mind, as it makes you look and sound absoluteley absurd

xyz @ 24

Haven’t read it, but folks have been saying that religion is dead for quite some time – see the Allen comment in NG above about Galileo.

From a fast glance at the link you sent, it seems to me that Harris could use a good course in biblical interpretation before asserting some of the things he does about how “everyone” reads the Bible.

In fact, biblical interpreters work much like secular scientists. When something is observed that does not square with the prevailing understanding of it, both begin to look for new avenues to explain the differences. That’s how science grows, and religious understandings as well.

Pictures of the Scopes trial fly through their minds

flying monkeys!

pete @ 26

I’m generally impressed with Lerner, though I haven’t read that book.

One of the most delightful discussions on how to talk about evolution occurred on Carl Zimmer’s site back in February. It starts when Randy Olson pens a short essay on what evolutionary biologists can learn from filmmakers. This led to a “vigorous” back and forth about the role of style and substance when talking science. Check it out:
http://scienceblogs.com/loom/2…..e.php#more

There is no way of reconciling the bible with anything for those who choose to read Genesis as a newspaper story written by God.

Their view, I think, is a result of fear. If they were to agree that Genesis is a collection of religious stories- not an eye witness account of history- they would be on a slippery slope- leading to religious chaos.

Of course the fact that the editors of Genesis put two contradictory accounts of creation side by side with no embarassment shows pretty clearly that it’s authors knew full well that they were not compiling history. This point is always lost on the zealots.

Descartes and the Ontological argument?

Actually that argument precedes Descartes by centuries- St. Anselm.

Peterr @ 22:
Danka Schoen! (blushing in embarrassment). Your piece was sehr gut as well. Since writing that I’ve filled in at least one of the many gaping holes in my cultural awareness, by reading the late Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. If I’d had that under my hat in January the piece would have emerged quite differently. Kuhn delves deeply into the fact that science education, unlike that of, say, literature, music, visual arts, etc., largely ignores the original sources of the work of scientists past whose paradigmatic bases have since been superseded. I think many of the points Kuhn made are important to the ID/creationism controversy.

Sorry. I’m one of the edjibicated knuckle draggers affiliated with the mindset of Carl Sagan (requiescat in pace). His PBS series “Cosmos” made very clear that all of the advances in scientific thought result from a rejection of theology. It was, is & will be a war & the theocons & neocons clearly recognize this. Dr. Sagan was a scholarly, genteel man who made nice while he firmly destroyed every vestige of religiosity in all the fields of thought that he presented in the series. I’m not like that. I’ll roll up my sleeves & drag you to the parking lot if any of that idiotic religious drivel comes out of your mouth. I’ve been called an intellectual bully by the dimwits who take their views of the Cosmos from one of those fairy tale books that are deemed sacred. Screw ‘em. Bu$hInc is correct about this: it’s a culture war.

Here’s an episode of Charlie Rose with James Watson and E.O. Wilson.

http://video.google.com/videop…..;q=charlie rose evolution&time=70000

Those two guys have made amazing break throughs and revelations in science/biology. But in that interview, they talk about scientists and God and they speak with such disdain and contempt where they make some pretty sweeping claims. Personally, I think both of them are stuck on themselves and need to get off their horses. Smart men, but arrogant, pompous asses.

I really only see targeting the science/religion as conflicting issues as a tool to enhance one’s agenda. It’s about sounds bites, constituents, money, and greed. Pope John Paul II was so on the money when it came to religion and science. I partially think that’s why he hung on as long as he did because he knew there would be a mess between the two after he was gone. (And a mess among other topics, but those are for that other thread Peterr mentioned)

OT– Silvio Berlusconi has to stand trial for fraud…

yay!

pheidole @ 32

Wow! What a great item. No time to read the lengthy back and forth in the comments there at the moment, but it looks interesting.

This issue came to a head with Copernicus-(and Galileo) and the church LOST- big time. Since then most catholic theologians have tried to keep their holy paws out of science. It’s mostly protestant primitives who are fighting these battles now.

Wise Christians learn not to hold their faith hostage to obviously mistaken views about scientific facts.

http://www.sacred-texts.com/ao……htm#TIMES

It never hurts to read Einstein!

Walt at 36 — you are more than entitled to your opinion, and to argue your case on the merits. But please try to refrain from a rude tone. I’ve had to deal with more than enough rudeness today in prior threads and I’ve had just about enough of it. (That goes for everyone — play nice, folks.)

Peterr–
I shouldn’t be, but I’m astounded that people can’t grasp that a scientist and a minister could be happily married. I guess it shows the extent to which the fundamentlaists have hijacked the debate.

I have an academic interest in the Romantic period and am starting a research project on liberal clergy preaching and doing what we’d call social justice work on the liberal side of the equation, with the basic assumption that God created everyone with equal rights. Another example of a clergyman scientist besides Bayes would of course be Joseph Priestly, who was a minister and political activist in addition to being a chemist. Nerdy fact: did you know his house was burned down by a mob who opposed his support of the French revolution? The more things change…

Unlike science, religion is imbued with substance only to the extent that humans give it that substance. There really is nothing there on which to hang your hat, let alone an argument or a discussion. So how do you have a substantive discussion about a mythology that is taken seriously? Religions that were once fundamental to civilizations, that people fought and died for, have come and gone. The religions of today will eventually follow these into obscurity, and if mankind does not detroy itself first, will be a source of endless wonderment centuries from now, in the same way we look at Zeus or Isis. We can only agree to disagree because we have no equivalent of the scientific method to apply to religion. And until we do, it is all a moot point. I think religion would be hugely amusing if it weren’t so deadly to humanity’s progress and evolution. With any discussion that involves reigion, there is an elephant in the room, and unless people begin to acknowledge this elephant, we will undoubtedly destroy ourselves in the name of our ‘beliefs’ rather than bring about a better world based on what we know and will continue to discover.

rwcole…34

Respectfully, I would submit that Anselm’s thoughts on the ontology of God differ radically from the Descartes position.

For the folks want to catch this last Sunday’s Doonesbury cartoon.

Personally, all that I’ve read of science suggests that as Albert Einstein said, “God is in the details”. The very concept of “spooky action at a distance” or entanglement in terms of quantum physics suggests there is something more going on. Will science determine it’s merely a mechanical detail, or is this a sign of some other force or entity at work? Who knows? Perhaps we never will and are not meant to as humans — and that’s okay with me, but I’ll be just as happy to keep looking.

Stephen Wolfram’s “A New Kind of Science” was relevatory to me as well. What if everything we know and understand around us, here and across the cosmos, is really part of one large self-computing system…? Can any single cell in our body understand and comprehend the magnitude of the body within which it resides? Can we ever understand and grasp the entirety of the system or entity in which we are a part? What if the very process of trying to compute that answer is as computationally challenging as constructing the system itself?

In other words, what if God is computationally irreducible?

I think I’ll hedge my bets.

I hesitate to post this, for it appears to be quite hostile to religion, and that is not my intent. But it is “on topic”; today’s front page article at salon.com:

The disbeliever

Sam Harris, author of “The End of Faith,” on why religious moderates are worse than fundamentalists, 9/11 led us into a deranged holy war, and believers should be treated like alien-abduction kooks.

By Steve Paulson

…

Two years ago, when the 39-year-old launched a full-scale attack on religious belief in his provocative book “The End of Faith,” he was an unknown. That changed overnight when his book shot up the New York Times bestseller list and later went on to win the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Since then, “The End of Faith” has earned an avid following among atheists and lapsed churchgoers; it’s the kind of book that gets passed around from one friend to another to another. Here, finally, was someone willing to do the unthinkable: to denounce religious faith as irrational — murderous, even.

…

In perhaps his most daring rhetorical gambit, Harris seeks to undermine religion by denouncing not just jihadis and fundamentalists, but moderates. “Religious moderates are, in large part, responsible for the religious conflict in our world,” he writes, “because their beliefs provide the context in which scriptural literalism and religious violence can never be adequately opposed.” Harris especially chastises moderates for refusing to criticize scripture-quoting extremists; for him, they are basically guilty of legitimizing fundamentalism.

rwcole @ 40

What Copernicus and Galileo taught most catholic theologians is to leave the mathematics to the mathematicians, including the catholic ones. These clergy – and their protestant colleagues – learned a bit more respect for the intellectual gifts of the laity.

Once upon a time, the clergy were among the most educated in society. Thankfully for everyone, the church included, that is no longer the case. The sooner clergy of all stripes give up a hierarchical view of themselves at the top of the intellectual pyramid, the sooner this pseudo-debate will disappear.

Oklahoma-

Yes- I agree. I have never heard Descarte’s position described as an “Ontological Argument”.

tommy yum @9 Steven J Gould gave it his all, and was basically right, I think. Religion and science can easily co-exist, if science answers the “how?” and religion answers the “why?”

Well, that might work if there were clear guidelines and general agreement about which questions should be answered by evidence/rationality/experiment and which questions should be approached through faith. Unfortunately, there are no rules here, and so nothing to stop zealots of all stripes from crossing some ill-defined (impossible to draw?) line.

The inevitable result is religious zealotry and extremism, and supression of science/rationality — but it is not just one person’s view that is being forwarded. Once this occurs, we are told that “My God has ordained this view,” whether it is Bush’s view that God has ordained him to impose democracy on other cultures, or the religious right’s conviction that their view should be imposed on all Americans and that public institutions should be harnessed to that effort, or the radical islamist view that their view must be imposed on all others as a way to save civilized society — and there is no hope of further discussion with either goup, let alone between them. That is the danger that is not being aknowledged here, and why I cringe when I wade into these discussions. Mercutio was right.

Peterr:

A very thoughtful post. However it all comes down to the fact that faith is based not on observation of the world and then a rational evaluation of the facts as known. Faith, in fact, is based on a lack of proof. That is the nature of faith whether it is faith in a deity or faith that the cars coming to a red light will really stop. The very idea that you need or want proof negates faith and it’s supposed benefits.

Science is based on facts. It is reproducible and falsifiable. It is constantly reviewed for inconsistencies and is altered if new data is made available. This is how we “know” anything. What is unsatisfying about science, to many people, is that it only tells us what has happened and how. It never addresses why things happen. This need for context is, I feel, a large part of the reason that people cling to their faith. However, faith does not effect the physical reality that we all live in.

The choice to believe without data is one that every person has, but it does not make their world view an accurate one. That, to me, is the problem with faith. As long as we say that it is okay for anyone can live by rules that are not based on the physical reality that we share, we will never be able to address the challenges that face our spices.

Cheers,

Without trying to get into anything which will upset either the evangelical religious or the evangelical atheists – they’re around, and threads like this tend to bring them out of the woodwork – I think creation is, in one sense, continuous: time is continuously created. Every day, hour, second: completely new and unused. Beyond that, I won’t go. But I don’t have a problem with science, which is a search for the rules of the universe, not a search for God or any other supreme being.

If one believes in God, then God endowed humans with free will, critical thinking, reasoning and the ability to develop and learn science (and all other things). He gave humans all the tools to make sense of their environment and their lives.

If one does not believe, then humans have evolved with those same capabilities.

It seems pretty simple to me.

The problem is that humans act so badly and unevolved so much of the time.

Some choose to ignore science and our own human history– we do it at our own peril. Neither science nor religion can save us from ourselves.

Thank you so much for clearly defining a reasonable and concise position in this delicate mater. I wish it could bridge the divide on this issue, an I intend to use it to further that goal.

Kudos to you, Peterr.

“How to read the Bible” does a pretty good job of addressing the issues of Genesis and other parts of the Bible. It’s a little oversimplified- but the point is well made.

The disconnect between spirit and science is mirrored in the disconnect between love and social justice. It is all part of one good thing that is somehow insufficiently solipsistic to keep our attention. On the theocracy front, I am stumping for “the Progressive Protestant Church of America” — just a tiny attempt to take back the night theologically.

Anne @ 23:
Your anecdote hits close to home. When I was no more than 8 or 10 I was sitting through either a Sunday school or vacation bible school class in which a missionary on furlough from China was expounding on how far off base their religious beliefs were. I vividly recall thinking to myself (the shy child I was would never have raised the point openly) ‘How do we know for sure that we’re right and they’re wrong?’ At the time I felt guilty even entertaining the question but it wouldn’t go away. But several years later the questioning of religious authority was implicitly legitimized for me when my mother questioned the actions of the new, bigoted pastor who had recently come to our parish. A friend of my sister became engaged to the Catholic boyfriend she’d been going with since highschool, and the pastor strongly recommended that the family shun her. Mom, who up until then had always given the impression that she thought a preacher’s views were divinely inspired, rebelled at that. That was the beginning of my journey to where I am now, which is somewhere near the fuzzy border between deism and agnosticism.

Great post Peterr!

When the Terri Schiavo brouhaha hit the airwaves, I was completely oblivious to it — as I was with most of my family camped out in the waiting room of an ICU unit (where there was no TV, interestingly) trying to figure out how to handle the situation of an elderly family member. In the end, per her written wishes, and with much consultation with doctors, clergy and family, the decision was made to remove her from a ventilator. She died about 3 hours later surrounded by 14 members of her family. Science and religion were both essential during that time.

About a week later, after the funeral and sitting shiva, we turned on the TV to the Terri Schiavo tragedy — and it was so personally horrifying to think that if these people had their way, they would have the “right” to interfer in what is a very private and personal decision.

Peterr,

Thanks for a wonderfully thought-provoking post.

Real debate requires a common language and a basic respect for the beliefs of the other party in the debate. A big part of the problem in the Science v Religion wars is that those things are lacking on both sides in many cases.

I hold E.O. Wilson’s work, Ernst Mayr’s work (and others) in high regard. But they helped to create the war by rejecting religious viewpoints out of hand. They’re arrogant, and maybe I’d be arrogant too if I’d accomplished the sorts of things they have. But it doesn’t help move the discussion forward.

On the other hand, you have people like Josh McDowell who reject the science and substitute their own facts. As Mark Kleiman accurately put it, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but no one is entitled to their own facts.

I’m perfectly happy to talk science and religion with anyone who will accept the common body of facts. I can’t discuss science and religion with anyone who insists that they can reject reality and susbstitute their own.

BC

Ned coming up next on Air America. Just FYI.

I don’t have much occassion to engage in this intersection. The religious friends I have don’t see an opposition between religion and science. Nonetheless the question Peterr asks in his really excellent post is extremely important, thank you much.

I would strongly second the issue of exegetical practices. How one reads scripture is crucial.

I would add that a factor that inhibits a meta-discussion of how one reads scripture is fear, and that is a political and ideological problem. If a person starts to question how they read scripture, it can be terrifying in that it throughs almost anything into doubt.

So, if I may, can we also consider how to deal with fear of reading differently as a part of the impasse some see between science and religion?

OT – Sharkbabe, 55, Rubes.

I’m trying to get docs done today while being interrupted with calls from everyone wanting to “conference” like they are going to get free tupperware with each call.

So I put my “yeah, yeah” on autopilot and started scrolling through the thread.

Note to self – don’t do this again.
ROFL

Me @ 62: “throws” not “throughs”

A minister married to a scientist is no stranger than a Democrat married to a Republican…and I am the Democrat married to the Republican for almost 26 years and two kids.

It isn’t always easy, but it can be done!

Peterr,

I am in complete agreement about the danger of absolutism and fundamentalism.

I’m not sure that the impossibility of carving out the respective territories for religion and science leads to zealotry and extremism. Both of those modes of belief predate science.

There have always been, and always will be, people who believe their “tribe” to be chosen by god to have dominion. The best solution, IMO, was offered by the Framers: a relentlessly secular, tolerant government. Seems to me that theocracies are by nature imperialistic.

“It matters not if my neighbor worships one god or eight; it neither breaks my leg nor empties my bank account.”

By the way, I hope that my dope slap of the concern troll in a previous thread was not considered one of the uncivil posts. Despite his howls of protest, I feel I made the right call. Nevertheless, I apologize if I crossed a line.

anybody looking for a progressive congregation in the Oakland area – I can recommend two. I don’t attend, but the husband and wife pastors are good friends of ours.

Montclair Presbyterian Church
First Presbyterian Church of Oakland

I love reading about religion, string theory, language and music. All of these things sort of give me the sense of hearing “the music of the spheres,” as an old hymn puts it. A very peaceful, meditative feeling.
I don’t understand string theory, don’t get me wrong. I just enjoy it. It’s something so…I don’t know how to put it.

I still believe that the answer my Hebrew school teacher gave me in fifth grade is the most sensible thing I’ve heard on the topic.

“Well, the sun and moon weren’t created until the 4th day, right? So how do you know how long a day was before that? Perhaps the word is being used to mean another length of time instead.”

Peterr, your response to xyz in #29. I find myself embarrassed for you. Biblical interpretation? You mean God wrote a book, but kind of a poorly written, confusing, muddled one open to various interpretations? Have the courage to read the Sam Harris book.

On a different note, the consequences of the supposed opposition between science and religion are dire. To opposing things like a cure for cervical cancer (which is amazing to me, both the treatment and the opposition) is horrifying.

And as I have said on other threads, the opposition can be incoherent. We are in a world that depends on science utterly. There is no going back. The same people who rail against evolution are dependent on vaccines made possible due to advances in biology which is completely based on evolutionary science. But “evolution” in many anti-science tracts amounts to “dinosaurs.”

Cordelia at 70 — God didn’t write the book, he inspired it. Various “prophets” and “adherent faithful” wrote the Bible, as indicated by the names of the various books of the Bible. If you are going to adopt a condescending tone toward Peterr and his faith, you might want to be accurate in your attempt at snark. I’m just sayin’.

OT

Ned’s on Air America now

Ned’s handling himself much better with Sam Seder than he did last night.

BC

Ned’ has ‘afterglow’ last night was pretty successful.

BC at 74 — Ned is kicking ass this morning. Sam does a great interview. :)

Hope & BC, come back to the last thread.

Ned is really articulate and on fire today. Sounds as though he got a lot of confidence from last nite.

OT but it’s good to hear Lamont on AirAmerica today. Cspan replaying debate at 2pm ET.
Also, just heard Bayh is in Iowa defending his vote for the flag desecration ammendment and his continued support for Lieberman.

One of the divisions that are commonly thought of in the faith vs. science question is the notion that faith and reason are opposed. This is an incorrect assumption.

Faith and reason are functionally synonymous with awareness and will, heart and mind, they are the binary components of thinking beings.

We reason from our beliefs, and adjust our beliefs according to reason. But the two must co-exist.

To dispense with faith altogether is like saying human emotions are destructive, therefore we should get rid of them. Each of us ‘believes’ things we cannot see, or have not bothered to prove to ourselves. Faith is an operation of the mind, belief, not a construct of a particular religion.

In the context of Theo-Con dialogue, I would say there are two hurdles.

Firstly a doctrinal literalist view of scripture that often ignores exigetical analysis, for example contrasting accounts of creation contained within the first couple of chapters of Genesis.

Secondly the tendency for people to behave with a tribal ‘us vs. them’ tendency and operate from a position of arguing to re-inforce natively held predjudices, rather than arguing to arrive at the truth.

The socratic dialogues are a great example of dealing with this, as well as the conceit of making a committment prior to arguig to be willing to admit error for the sake of arriving at the truth of a discussion.

Establishing this conceit in discussion needs to be habitually brought to dialogue, but it carries a price, that both parties must be willing to concede error, something not always easy to do. Especially given our collective capacity to argue based on motives that are often very subjectively irrational.

I’m not suggesting that rational dialogue isn’t possible, but without establishing the main pitfalls to dialogue, and making a mutual committment to avoid them, what results tends to be a contest of intellectual bullying, rather than a real rational pursuit of the truest-best outcome of a discussion.

Let me re-iterate, those pitfalls tend to arise from each parties subjective motivation for arguing a particular issue. The remedy to this is of course to be able to aknowledge those subjective motivations, set them to the side, and overcome this shortcoming.

Going back to the faith and reason congnitive duality, understanding and agreement are again synonymous with faith, and reason. Faith and reason, are representative of the subjective and objective experience in human life.

One of the key problems in the ‘modern’ world is actually fundamentalism, religious and secular fundamentalism as manifested by christian, jewish, muslim, extremists, and on the secular side by political idealogues who like luddites all look back to ‘the good ole days’ of wilson, or who espouse dehumanizing machiavellian theories of foreign and domestic policy.

Fundamentalism is itself a pendulum swing away from modernism, which was/is itself the unbalanced tendency to throw away the past on the basis of not needing it because we’re modern.

We are at a period in history were millenialism has run rampant, technological changes and social change have shifted the axis of the world, population density in the east and decline in the west threatens to dimish the power and grandeur of the west.

The new world becomes the old.

In the face of all this change, and modern history-hysteria there is a lemming-like compulsion to look back instead of looking ahead.

It is fitting that we have a resurfacing of mythologies in modern context through Lord of the Rings epics, and comic book heroes. They are age ending stories. These stories resonate at this time because people fear the precipice of uncertainty we are now on at this stage of history.

What these ‘age ending stories reflect however is not ‘The end has come!’, but more to say ‘The age is dead. Long live the age.’.

What is fundamentalism, simply put it is people looking for their foundations, most often out of a sense of having gone astray, and trying to ‘get back to the path’. It’s wrong headed and pessimistic.

Sure the modern world has lots of scary bogeymen in it, George of the Bungle, numbering among them, but every one of us that innately feels the joy and comfort of good time shared, the joy of sunrise, or tranquility of sunset, the pure ebullient innocence of childhood need only have ‘faith’ in new life, and carry on.

The literal biblical quote that should resonate here for Christians is ‘Sufficient for the day are the troubles therein.” Basically Jesus telling people to live in the moment, instead of worry what tomorrow might bring.

That I suppose is the answer to the fundamentalists, that their fundamentalism actually reflects a lack of faith in their founding vision, and they’re reasoning their way to their roots, but forgetting the faith that has brought them to where they are.

Apologies for the long post.

Seder brings up Droney’s unbelievable statement and rape gurney Joe.

Oh YeaH!

Christy;

Isn’t that a logical fallacy? If God inspired the books, doesn’t he have responsibility for the contents and in fact the translations of it after the fact? It is supposed to be the explanation of our existence after all.

If he is not responsible for how it was written then your statement says that the idea of a god inspired these writings. That means they have as much or as little to say about how the world really is as any other text religious or not.

I am not trying to be argument, but Cornelia’s point is still valid. That said, she probably could have been less condescending in making it.

When I read posts like Peterr’s, I am reminded of a song in Jesus Christ Superstar…“Why did you choose such as backward time and such a strange land” (to spread your message)….

Cordelia,

Agreed.

Various “prophets” and “adherent faithful” wrote the Bible

It should be mentioned that they also often mistranslated, embellished, inserted and fabricated along the way

The Dinosaurs vs. The Bible. A few times I’ve debated/discussed the strict creationists folks. I always ask them to explain the dinosaurs. Usually, they get kind of doe-eyed. A few will mention that the 7 days are allegorical…a day might be millions of years. But they never can explain the existence of dinosaurs. Oh well.

My Christian belief is that Genesis, and the early books, were written by men, under the guidance of God, but with the men’s own understanding of how the world worked at their time. They wrote as best as they could, given their base of knowledge. Why didn’t God correct them…if God was involved?

Well…I’ve always looked to doctors, and leeches. (I’m just a bundle of fun this morning, huh!) Long ago, doctors thought leeches were an ok form of medical treatment. They were wrong. But I think many of those doctors acted in good faith…faith to science and personal religious belief. They acted under God’s hand…but as they saw and understood things back then. And why didn’t God correct the docors as well? Eventually, he did!

So, now that I’ve been totally obtuse, I’ll shut up. Morning Reverend, liked the article!

Ghostman

Bill E. — I’m just saying that is my understanding from years of attending my grandpa’s Methodist church and all my comparative religion and philosophy classes in college. I’m not saying that the faith doesn’t require a leap across a logical divide that often cannot be reconciled by people who do not share that desire to take the leap — that’s a whole post on its own, though, I think. *g* (And that’s above and beyond what rwcole was saying about there being contradictory “mythology” in the Bible itself on the genesis story alone. “The Babylonian Genesis” was a great book that I read in college on the development of the flood/creation belief system prior to Christianity and into the Christian faith. Interesting stuff just in that one, tiny segment of research. Wish Chicago Dyke were on — she’d have a LOT more background on this than I do…)

Angie…54

“…then God endowed humans with free will, critical thinking, reasoning and the ability to…learn science…”

I like it. Can we then say: ‘we think, therefore, we are’? Or is that a philosophical leap?

If you want to take some abstract metaphysical concept and call it ‘God’ just so you can feel like you are a true believer, go ahead. But if you talk to a ‘personal’ God and think this being has any influence on what happens in the world, you have a serious mental health problem.

C’mon, Christy. #72. If God only inspired the Bible, and did not oversee the content, why is there any discussion at all? You or I or Peterr could write something just as easily to confuse and muddle future generations of the faithful.

cordelia @ 70

It’s not a lack of courage, but a lack of time, that’s kept me from Harris’ book. If you’ve been around FDL for any length of time, you know that it’s easy to see how one’s reading list can grow exponentially.

As for embarrassment, please don’t be so on my behalf. I’ve been embarrassed for myself on more than a few occasions, for a wide variety of reasons that usually have little to do with religion. I’ve gotten used to it, and I’ll live. . .

But if you’re going to let a fringe fundie approach to scripture speak on behalf of all believers, then surely you’ll let pre-Copernican cosmologists represent science.

To borrow from your language, we should also note that the world itself, and the human societies that inhabit it, are pretty confusing and muddled themselves. Both science and religion are needed, in my book, to help to make sense of it, and mend it where broken.

OT Chertoff horning in on FBI presser now on live on CNN. Will anybody ask him why his Homeland Security Dept CUT funding for NYC all the while the FBI was actively tracking this group that allegedly plotted to destroy NYC tunnel/s.

Bill E., Cornelia: I am not sure I have you right, but a more basic question is, it scripture open to interpretation? If yes, then it is like any other text in that basic way. What it speaks to is certainly unique, but this is the problem of exegesis: do we treat scripture as a special form or written language which operates on different rules than the words we are all typing? I have a feeling I missing the point of contention.

Also OT: hugs for HopeSaT

And call me chynical, but would there be all this bluster about the tunnel threat if Lie-berman had managed to pre-emptively take down Lamont last night?

Bush’s fave Dem must be protected by Rovian orchestrated diversion????

ooops. Make that cynical.

Christy at 87;

I get what you’re saying. To me this is the problem. Faith is boundless in that it is based in the individual. That is where is de-rails discussion whether it is between atheist and believer or believer and believer.

We all make that leap or don’t, but the documents of faith can’t be compared to the documents of science. Why? Because one requires a belief the other relies on testable evidence.

But as you say that is probably for another whole post and thread. 8-)

I am of the opinion that the Bible was not written by God or inspired by God. It was written by humans and inspired in part by the idea of God. The idea of “God” turns out to be false, just as the belief in Zeus was.

If you read the Bible as a blend of history and fiction written by multiple authors over thousands of years, it will make a lot more sense to you than if you try to make sense of it as a divinely guided text. It just isn’t. Nothing is. There is no such thing as God.

I read
Anne 23: “But, Mommy, what if they’re right?”
and
BC 60: “As Mark Kleiman accurately put it, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but no one is entitled to their own facts”

somewhat together.

The interesting thing about facts, is that they are not always easy to clearly and plainly identify as such – independent from opinion. For one thing, as many scientists will agree, a great deal of “things proven” are actually a hypothesis that hasn’t been disproven and has withstood many tests. That doesn’t mean it’s not still up for grabs in some aspects.

The other thing is that facts change other facts, knowledge or a greater system of facts changes the knowledge of a smaller system. The act of observation can change what is observed and it all goes on and on in ideologic loop. Of course, you can’t live life like that- you have to operate taking certain facts to heart. Like: if I stick my hand on the hot oven burner, it will hurt. If you want, you can draw that out and out – what if you have nerve damage, what if you are unconscious (does it hurt if you don’t feel it?) etc. but at some point we have to say – ENOUGH. This is how I’m going to live.

But with the awareness that for others, they may have very good reasons to live differently. It may be fact, it may be belief, it may be that we think we know which — and we may be wrong.

Some Guy @ 93;

You lay the whole problem of faith out with your question. For those that believe, then yes the Bible or the Quran, or the Bahatvabagita (sp?) have a special status in that they are revealed wisdom from the deity.

If you don’t believe or even insist on proof, then they are the same and have as much or little to say about how our lives should be lead as the works of Plato. What I mean by that is that they were written by people in a time that had nowhere near our level of knowledge about the Universe, and so they are not as relevant to our daily lives and problems.

Hope that cleared things up.

Cheers

OT What’s up with NPR? They just had a story on about AIPAC with Dennis Ross. Somehow it was not thought relevant to point out that the neocon Ross is currently a fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy which was founded by the former research director for AIPAC. Or that he’s on the board of Scooter Libby’s legal defense fund.

This was immediately followed by a report on the Lieberman/Lamont debate. It seemed pretty Lieberman friendly to me. They chose more and better bites for Lieberman that made him sound calm and reasonable and included some zingers. The report’s bottomline was that it’s all about the war, with some halfhearted (and largely unsuccessful) attempts by Lamont to widen the debate into other issues. This did not sound even remotely like the debate that was discussed here last night.

Drive by post.

Thanks Peterr and Christy for bringing up the topic of faith in a positive way.

It’s very unfortunate that the most vocal “proponents” of faith expouse a view many of us vehemntly oppose. Our dissatisfaction of their methods and prejudices doesn’t mean we don’t believe.

I believe my God would never do/condone half the shit “they” do in “his” name.

To quote Bono ” My God aint short of cash, mister”

I, for one, believe very much in God, and accept my place as just another bozo trying to stay right sized and bring a little good. I might even say on some days that I strive to do his/her will.

There is a lot of faith on this side of the aisle too. While I condemn Barack’s simple statement as a unconstructive talking point which will be used against us, I do believe the portrayal of us as “godless” needs to be rebutted strongly.

I only scanned the article pretty quickly, and it makes reasonable points, but I’d like to pick up on Bill E. @ 52:

Peterr seems to be making primarily *sociological* point, and one that (even) a resolutely atheist scientist would concede — just because a few self-avowed evangelicals don’t like teaching evolution, or any scientific information that conflicts with their world view, that doesn’t mean that all religious people must have a problem with modern/contemporary science. As a practical social matter, the religious and non-religious can and should get along on matters of science and faith, and we can still have a conversation with “those of a more TheoCon mindset”.

However, there is, at least to me, a more interesting epistemological or ontological issue here, namely, the demarcation between faith and fact. Nearly any religion, it seems, has to make some sort of minimal assumption about how the world *is*, the domain of fact. And to the extent that those factual assumptions are tied into matters of faith, i.e., existence of a deity (and isn’t existence a factual predicate?), religion is in the playing field of scientific inquiry.

This issue is nothing new, of course — just a variation on the late Stephen Jay Gould’s concept of “separate magisteria,” with Dan Dennett and Richard Dawkins on the other side saying that the concept doesn’t work. This is a somewhat abstract philosophical problem, but I think it also informs the sociological issue, because (some) religious people commit themselves to doctrines that have empirical content, and bring out the weaknesses in the “separate magisteria” concept quite explicitly.

OT: a “say what?” kind of headline, from cnn.com

Unaware of pregnancy, mom births in Wal-Mart

For me religion is more of a poetic attempt to discuss the same issues as science, an intuition. I once saw a scientist on cable news who was investigating the start of life, not the evolution thing, but how the earth went from inert matter to living, moving matter. One of his theories was about “living mud”. In my mind, one of the creation stories in Genesis where God forms man and woman out of the dust touches on this not in a thesis way but through poetic suggestion.

Peterr, this is a great essay that challenges us all to think…and express ourselves as thoughtfully as possible.

Having said that, wxyz’s comment reminds me of that old comment, “it’s okay if you don’t believe in God, She believes in you.”

We all bring to the table the backstory of our own rearing…or not…inside some religious tradition. That begins before the science in the classroom. But even that is subject to change.

Raised a Lutheran, I consider myself a spiritual person now, not a dogmatic one. Could have something to do with my dying m-i-l’s pastor telling her she had a bad attitude and she should in so many words snap out of it or find another church. Never have gotten over that one.

But it is a story I’ll tell to my dying day, because it speaks so strongly to me of the dangers of the closed religious mind that brooks no belief, no attitude–no science?–that contradicts its own worldview.

Here at FDL we bridge that judgementalness in so many ways on diverse topics…and that’s the cultural health and hope of us all.

speaking of shopping, Aisle B seeing ya. time to run some errands.

Please correct me if I am wrong,IIRC, The Vatican has it’s own scientist and astrologists.They have embraced science and are using their results without trying to subvert their own message. If I also recall, The pope has come out and said that the creationist timeilne should not be taken so literally.

Urban Pirate @101,

But some of us are godless, and like it that way. I get that we need to make common ground with people of faith that are moderate, but your statement alienates me and others like me that accept no world but the physical testable one.

Why would I be inspired to work with the Progressives if one of our main ideas is that we need to repudiate what I stand for? Why is my choice less relevant than that of believer?

Peterr #91. Religion has had centuries to make sense of things. But instead, it brought us the Dark Ages and more torture, murder and mayhem than any other single idea in recorded history. And still, based on nothing whatever beyond ephemeral “personal belief”, there are those who defend it to the detriment of us all. I find it both sad and embarrassing. That is not meant to be condescending, Christy. I am simply stating my ‘belief’.

Bill E. @ 99: I agree, and it raises an issue I mentioned earlier which is fear, but more clearly. To relate scriptural text to factual investigation creates great fear. I would argue that a figural form or exegesis can allow for factual investigation in dialogue with scripture, and I think that is what Peterr is saying. This entails both a sociological and epistemological set of issues, to put in terms of eulenspiegel @ 102.

Bustednuckles at 107

Its a pretty solidly established facet of catholic theology that in the timeline of creation, Jesus is the ‘eighth day’, the ‘new creation’, etc. After he had ‘rested’, God became flesh in order to ‘walk the walk’ and show us our share in divinity.

Guess that theology pretty clearly challengins the timeline of the ‘days of creation’ literalists.

Before my parents turned into SuperFundies,when I was young,science and math were encouraged,even towards us girly types.And never once do I remember the two conflicting.Ever.My parents were staunch supporters of education,until their religion veered off into the abyss.I was lucky,being the oldest,I figured out what was going on,and I had several good years allowed to learn and explore all my interests.So I knew how to think for myself when conservative fundamentalism infected my family.It’s why I’m the black sheep now,lol.

I was a little nerdy kid.I had a large shell collection with a catalog of all the latin and common names,where they came from(who gave them to me AND their native home),with everything numbered and cross referenced.I won a prize at school for it,I think I was around 8 or 9 yrs old.I studied bugs,made notes about them,studied the stars and planets,geology,ancient cultures,all that stuff.Any time I asked for a book as a kid I got it,it was the only way I was ever really indulged.I didn’t have a bunch of toys,but I had tons of books.

And never once did that cause a conflict with all the stuff I was taught about religion.I kinda just thought I was exploring the vastness and abundance of all the gifts God laid out on this planet for us.God gave us brains to learn stuff.Not being curious is freaking BORING,not to mention right on the verge of sinful,it’s waste of a life.Science vs religion only became a problem later on in my family,coincidentally about the time my parents and their religious buddies starting going postal with politics and wanting to get in and make the schools a weapon-in the early ’70s.Amway was mixed in that mess(oh the stories I could tell about that,lol.We were An Amway Family,with a red white and blue van with logos all over it.Yes,it was embarassing),local politicians,and of course the church folks.And my parents wonder why I rebelled,lol.

…err thats challenges the timeline…

Cordelia at 109.

Well said. I again encourage Peterr and others in the FDL community to read The End of Faith by Sam Harris. It is a very readable book that sets forth the reasons (i) why religion is incompatible with science and (ii) how religion has done, and will continue to do, far more harm than good to the human race. Sorry to harp on the book, but I think it is well worth reading.

Bill E. at 108 — After reading your comment, I went back and read UP’s comment, and it seems to me that it is UP’s personal faith manifesto, but doesn’t infringe on or imply a need for every other progressive to adopt that same stance. One of the things that I have trouble understanding on both ends of this debate is why fundamentalist or evangelical Christians (or other religious fundamentalists) insist that everyone believe their way and only THEIR way. While, at the same time, non-believers, athiests, agnostics, what-have-you (because there are a LOT of varying degrees on this end of the scale as well) are offended sometimes at the very mention of religion at all.

But because Republicans have dragged religion into politics over the last 20 years or so, Democrats absolutely need to find some means of discussing these issues without it descending into a “you’re touching my belief (or non-belief) circle.” Can anyone explain to me how we get beyond just that one point? Because every time we try to have a conversation about this at all, that’s an area where the conversation always seems to get mired and, maybe it’s just all those philosophy classes I took in college that make me want to chew on a lot of points of view all at once, but something just disconnects there and I can’t figure out why. Anyone?

Cordelia at 109 — I’m glad you clarified. It’s so tough to tell “tone” from written words, sometimes, isn’t it? *g*

Christy @ 115 –

Re your first paragraph, here’s a quick story on variety among religious folks on how God acts:

Just prior to the election of Pope John Paul I, a journalist interviewed a number of Cardinals about the pre-conclave activities that individual cardinals go through before electing a new pope. One of them, speaking on deep background and without attribution, said (paraphrasing here) “The Italian cardinals will gather over coffee and meals and discuss the needs of the church and – obliquely – the various candidates who might best serve her. The Americans, in contrast, tend to sit quietly alone in prayer, waiting for illumination. To the Italians, the Americans are engaged in spiritual laziness; to the Americans, the Italians are engaged in crass politics; to everyone, though, it is the work of God.”

Even folks in the same little group of Christians – the 120 or so members of the Roman Catholic college of Cardinals – don’t agree on how God works.

If people would keep in mind that religion was created by man (trust me, God did not create religion) it could be argued much like scientists argue, no god in the mix, conflicting theories about the whys and wherefores of phenomena. (The arguments between so-called believers and non-believers are about as useful as arguing which tastes better, vanilla ice cream or chocolate ice cream. Somebody said for one who believes no argument is necessary and for someone who does not believe no argument is possible.) Arguing religion, leaving out believing or not believing rarely engenders animosity and sometimes might even lead to enlightment.

Mary,

The interesting thing about facts, is that they are not always easy to clearly and plainly identify as such – independent from opinion. For one thing, as many scientists will agree, a great deal of “things proven” are actually a hypothesis that hasn’t been disproven and has withstood many tests. That doesn’t mean it’s not still up for grabs in some aspects.

There is a distinction between facts and theories. These are facts:

Fact: Radioactive isotopes decay at a characteristic rate.

Fact: This phenomenon is invariant in space, at least out as far as we can observe supernovae.

Fact: Because the speed of light is finite, we also know (from observing supernovae) that the process is invariant in time.

From these facts we reach a conclusion:

We can use radioisotopic decay ratios to date things of an appropriate age.

If the facts are open to question, there is no debate. God changes the physical laws to suit Her whim and we’re f***ed as far as understanding the Universe is concerned. However, there is no evidence to support that position.

BC

Hello, “what-have-you” here. These ARE those conversations, Christy, and we are finding our way. I don’t expect the progressive movement to resolve this dilemma in 120 comments on a Friday noontime (excellent) post by Peterr. I hope no one does.

But I read them respectfully and am encouraged by the participation of those who un-believe like me but are more articulate than I.

Keep this dialogue going. We are learning how to talk with one another. Surely, engagement between those of faith and those not — that is the goal here, yes?

Teddy at 120 — Thanks, I wasn’t sure the point of just having the conversations was making it through. Feeling better now. :) (Off to take some Excedrin for this headache…)

cordelia @ 109: I am an atheist and I too shudder when thinking of the many horrors unleashed in the name of different gods over the millenia. But you present a very simple picture. Relative to the idea of interpretation, literature and literary critique are the descendents of religious writing. Philosophy and rhetoric are inextricably entwined with the history of religion. Peace movements have also been grounded in different faiths, that is incontestable. I am not saying you aren’t entitled to your belief, but religion isn’t a single idea and despite the many atrocities committed in the name of faith, that is not all religion has brought to the world. And I don’t believe in god at all. Again, I am not attacking you, you have a point, but it there is more one can consider on the balance sheet in jugding religion writ large.

If you only get a headache from a discussion of religion, Christy, you’re way ahead of most of the world’s citizens down the corridors of time!

me, I’m making another pot of coffee….

Teddy at 123 — Nah, I’ve had this headache all morning. It’s been one of those days, I’m afraid…

OT/4
Ghostman

your halo chuckle was over my head..maybe my java this morn was ground differently… or just could be my machine is breakin down…

BTW.. I once knew a CS named Ghostman

ever been here ?
http://www.stiftungleostrauss……itemid=235

Larry

Christy:

The way to resolve this is not to play into the frame that the Conservatives have placed on this issue.

Religion does not and should not matter in public policy and governance. What we want is for ALL Americans to have a place where they are safe to believe or not, to practice a faith or not, to have a spiritual life or not. The only way to do that is to stay neutral on religion. We should not make it okay for a Congressman or Senator to say “My vote was completely influenced by my religious beliefs”. When they say that, what they have said is “I do not care about what my constituents want or even what is best for them, I place my personal belief ahead of the welfare of my State and Country”

To get out of this mess we are in we need to act on facts, not wishful thinking or faith. Prayer will not fix the deficit, or get us out of Iraq. Governments deal with real world issues, they can not and should not dabble in faith.

If you have faith, then God’s will gets done anyway, if you don’t have faith, then there is no issue.

IMHO this is the way we get to the common ground with those moderates that have faith. Leave the God work to the religions, and have the Government do the Peoples work.

It is a tad daunting, though, when you have tax free houses of worship preaching politics to the masses…

>>>>>>>>>

In battlegrounds such as Ohio, scores of clergy members attended legal sessions explaining how they could talk about the election from the pulpit. Hundreds of churches launched registration drives, thousands of churchgoers registered to vote, and millions of voter guides were distributed by Christian and antiabortion groups.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/…..4Nov7.html

Christy @ 115: I would chalk up the hostility to power issues. I don’t want laws passed under the name of one sect’s view of a god criminalizing my personal like and I suppose the opposite is living under laws which contradict one’s tenets of faith. That is surely too simple, but it is a powerful source of animosity and suspicion.

Some Guy,

All of the good and evil done in the name of religion are expressions of the basic good and evil tendencies that exist within the spectrum of human nature. After all, religion was created by humans. Good acts and evil acts would exist with or without religion.

What religion allows humans to do is create vast organizational movements based on “faith” in a supernatural being and beliefs about what that being wants us humans to do, rather than a reasoned approach of what is in the best interest of humanity.

Unfortunately, religion and the very idea of faith stand as obstacles to the reasoned evaluation of what is best for humanity. They also serve as justification for much of the great evils that have been perpetrated against humanity.

“I like it. Can we then say: ‘we think, therefore, we are’? Or is that a philosophical leap?”
Rene Descartes: “I think therefore I am.”

Is it a WATB-hangover from watching Rape Gurney Joe talk about his “fighting for reproductive rights for women” last night?

Here’s the thing: one of the most false moments for me in the debate last night was in Joe’s closing statement when he said to his fellow citizens of Connecticut “I’ve prayed with you….” I appreciate and respect his faith and faithfulness, but I find its mention in the public square, during a debate about his suitability to continue in office, wrong-headed and jarring. By interjecting his co-praying, he seemed to ask for votes because he’s done so. And that’s where I draw the line.

Apparently, my line’s got some footprints blurring it these last few decades. I’m still a big fan of the “establishment” clause with regard to no religion, and I wish our public square could be a religion-free zone as was intended.

=========
Had Enough?
=========
PS See how incredibly versatile this slogan is?

John Casper@ 130

Quick joke. Descartes walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Hey Buddy, how about a beer?”
Descartes is offended. In a tight voice he says “I think not!” Bam! Descartes vanishes.

ahahahahahahah!

wxyz @ 129: I differ. As I mentioned earlier, the very traditoins of giving reasons, philosphy and rhetoric (and science has always drawn on those to do its work) are also intertwined with religion. Religion is not anti-rationality. I am sorry, that is just historically false. You are assuming science sprung from some other kind of tradition of reasoning. It didn’t. Newton was quite devout and that did not inhibit him, for instance, nor Boyle who pioneered the experimental method that is crucial to today’s science. I am not trying to be hostile, but I strongly disagree with your characterization. The history of reason is not superable from the history of religion.

I am pretty sure, in addition to my bad typing, I just misused “superable.”

#12: Today’s Micheal Kinsley column on stem cell research: “Moral sincerity is not impressive if it depends on willful ignorance and indifference to logic.”

Moral sincerity is particularly not impressive when it depends on a willful indifference to the suffering of others. Those people who oppose stem-cell research may very well be extending the suffering, or even hastening the deaths, of both my diabetic brothers. Their experience is multiplied by millions in this country alone. Such a situation is neither tolerable nor negotiable.

#36: I’ll roll up my sleeves & drag you to the parking lot if any of that idiotic religious drivel comes out of your mouth. I’ve been called an intellectual bully by the dimwits who take their views of the Cosmos from one of those fairy tale books that are deemed sacred. Screw ‘em. Bu$hInc is correct about this: it’s a culture war.

I understand the feeling … but in so doing, aren’t you alienating a lot of religious people who might otherwise be your allies in support of important issues of science, fact and logic?

And I will just apologize for my typing. Every time I try to preview to check, I lose the post and I have a hard time editing in this text box. That and I have always been a sloppy, self-taught typist.

Christy 10:16 am — we’ve been wrestling with this very issue in the PDA Spirituality/Values task force; how do we write a position paper that encompasses the “big tent” of Democratic Party and progressives? Our own task force is comprised of Christians, atheists and everything in between.

IMO, we need to step back and agree on common ground. All humans share the same eight basic values, no matter the faith tradition (or absence of one) from which we arrived at these. How we arrived at these is a mystery, but there they are, and perhaps the discussions we should have are more to do with how we live within that common framework for the common good, rather than for any one belief system, and how we inform the rest of the folks within our religious community where applicable about the nature of their role within this framework. Outside-inward, rather than effort from the inside-out.

Another commonality we share is science. No one group can hold it hostage; it is the sum of human knowledge apart from that of culture and religion. Perhaps we can all agree in theory, whether participants in an organized religion or not, that if there were a fingerprint of a Creator or Superior Being, it would look a lot like this.

While the history of faith and science may be intertwined, that does not changes the facts at hand. One is fundamentally premised on making a virtue of belief in something that cannot be proven, “faith”, while the other is committed to evidence-based understanding based on falsifiable research. The bedrock principles of religion and science are fundamentally opposed to one another.

BC

These are facts only in our current frame. Scientific fact are very useful for manipulation this gross motor plane that we interact with, but they too are creations of the mind, the observer. Ultimately there is no “there” when it comes to the mind considering itself, whether it be the facts of science or the faith of religion.

The problem with facts is that religion can come in and co-opt them, as they are starting to do. They are starting to get wise to the fact that Darwin’s natural selection may not be the best explanation of variation, in fact many are looking at naturally occuring variation as a prime driver. There is order for free in the universe, self-originating. Is this intelligent design or just the magic every mathematician and scientist has always look for, that the world makes sense, with or without us in it.

Some find that hard to believe, so it may be helpful to tell you a little more about our beliefs. We have evidence that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. None of us, of course, were around to see it, but we have written accounts of it. We have several lengthy volumes explaining all details of His power. Also, you may be surprised to hear that there are over 10 million of us, and growing. We tend to be very secretive, as many people claim our beliefs are not substantiated by observable evidence. What these people don’t understand is that He built the world to make us think the earth is older than it really is. For example, a scientist may perform a carbon-dating process on an artifact. He finds that approximately 75% of the Carbon-14 has decayed by electron emission to Nitrogen-14, and infers that this artifact is approximately 10,000 years old, as the half-life of Carbon-14 appears to be 5,730 years. But what our scientist does not realize is that every time he makes a measurement, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is there changing the results with His Noodly Appendage. We have numerous texts that describe in detail how this can be possible and the reasons why He does this. He is of course invisible and can pass through normal matter with ease.

I’m sure you now realize how important it is that your students are taught this alternate theory. It is absolutely imperative that they realize that observable evidence is at the discretion of a Flying Spaghetti Monster. Furthermore, it is disrespectful to teach our beliefs without wearing His chosen outfit, which of course is full pirate regalia. I cannot stress the importance of this enough, and unfortunately cannot describe in detail why this must be done as I fear this letter is already becoming too long. The concise explanation is that He becomes angry if we don’t.

http://www.venganza.org/

Strangely, Dr. Jeff Trent of the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen)appears to be a fundamentalist Christian. I can understand how one can be a Christian and believe in evolution but I cannot comprehend how someone can believe in the literal truth of the Bible and be a genetic scientist. How could this possibly work.

Some Guy @133:

I agree with you, with this one change. The history of science has been intertwined with religion, until now.

We now have such a large body of knowledge that science and religious thought are becoming too divergent. Isn’t that what this whole thread is talking about?

We can respect where science came from, and say that religion has had some benefit to our species, without maintaining that it still is a net good going forward.

Religious fundamentalist’s all have one thing in common and that is that they resist the findings of science. Why? Because more and more it forces them from the comfortable literalism. They have to start saying (as people have done in this thread) that the words of their holy book are allegory or metaphors. That admission degrades the omnipotence of their deity. I think that is where the hostility comes from.

Lex says
July 7th, 2006 at 10:37 am

#12: Today’s Micheal Kinsley column on stem cell research: “Moral sincerity is not impressive if it depends on willful ignorance and indifference to logic.”

Moral sincerity is particularly not impressive when it depends on a willful indifference to the suffering of others. Those people who oppose stem-cell research may very well be extending the suffering, or even hastening the deaths, of both my diabetic brothers. Their experience is multiplied by millions in this country alone. Such a situation is neither tolerable nor negotiable.

Ditto!!!

Thanks OK Kiddo, for your 88!

BC 119 – I understand your point, but I still say that it is not always as easy to nail down facts as we might think.

These are facts:

Fact: Radioactive isotopes decay at a characteristic rate.

We “know” that from obervation, over time. But no observation is absolute – so whether we have observed all aspects necessary to make a determination is a question. It may be a “greater” or “lesser” question, depending on the use of the data or the needs of the data, or the other strings of data necessary to reach a conclusion, but it is always, theoretically at least, a question.

Observation is not infinite and so observed data will never be completely pure.

You pretty much recognize this as you go on:

Fact: This phenomenon is invariant in space, at least out as far as we can observe supernovae.

So when you say, “From these facts we reach a conclusion:” you mean, from observations. Which are not infinite.

That’s my only point. And it’s one of those points that gets in the way of having directed conversation, but I think it is worth making as a contextual overlay. “Facts” do tend to be “observational” to some extent. So there is a bit of a leap of trust even with “facts” – trust that observations are “correct enough” for action.

FWIW, IMO, YMMV

For me…This post and thread is truly a very different and fascinating read…Thanks to all here for your comments…very helpful and spot on to my current journeys leg.
Larry

Ghostman @ 86: Actually, leeches have made a comeback in scientific medicine. They are now used to remove pooling blood following such surgeries as severed limb re-attachments.

wxyz — heh. Some of His/Her Noodly Appendages for us to view in awe of His/Her Glory.

It is lunch time in the Rockies, but I want to say that this has been a very fun and interesting conversation. Thanks all!

B-

Bill E. @ 142: You have a point. But the reverse can also happen, at least I believe it should be possible, for theology to incorporate the knowledge of science and grow with it. Not literalist fundamentalisms, but they are not the only faiths around. Do you think that isn’t plausible? Relative to wxyz’s comment, science cannot explain everything. Some things cannot be measured or tested. Now, I am a materialist so I don’t believe in souls. But I cannot prove they don’t exist, something rigorous logic would second. You cannot prove a negative.

Its been fun but I am off, so apologies in advance for not answering any queries put to me.

So, how do you talk religion and science with those of a more TheoCon mindset?

You don’t. You are trying to fit a square peg into a non-existent hole. You speak of having a “rational” discussion with people who don’t want to have a rational discussion, who wouldn’t believe your arguments or rationals regardless of the evidence presented.

And they are not going to want to have a rational discussion not just b/c it might conflict with their views of god, but ALSO BECAUSE it conflicts with their power and ability to make money.

Now, you and I may define who is or is not a Theocon differently, but to me, the Theocons are the Robertsons and Dobsens of the world, and there is very little that is religious about their beliefs, other than a “religious” belief in money, power and influence, and in some documented cases (e.g. Ralph Reed) a great deal of hypocrisy.

You give the Theocons way too much credit in thinking that their views of religion are, like yours, sincere – actually about a true belief in god.

Whether important science was conducted by men of faith in the past is meaningless – we don’t live in the past. We live in a time when Theocons and others try to revise the religious beliefs and intentions of the Founding Fathers to advance their agenda.

Larry, if you’re still around….oh, just an old cadence, sung on the quick-quick. Haven’t checked out your link yet, but I will. You have my word.

Ghostman

Thanks, rayne, for sharing pictures of the neighborhood. Truly spectacular, especially if faked on black velvet in the old Apollo XI studios!

Hundreds of churches launched registration drives, thousands of churchgoers registered to vote

I don’t have a problem with this, as long as the voters can register for any party *they* choose. Churches shouldn’t be endorsing any political party. That’s separation: the churches stay out of government, and the government stays out of churches.

The great Xtian theologian, Paul Tillich “defines and explores faith as ultimate concern. Faith is a centered act of being ultimately concerned.”
Paul Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1957).
Tillich illuminates the “creative tension,” between faith and reason, on the one hand and science and the content of faith on the other.

“Ultimate concerns,” are not just about theism, but it is a popular topic. The content of our “religious faith,” drives us (evangelicals) to check it out against the world of facts as they appear, to try to “convert” people to what we believe is the truth. That’s the beginning of science, people want “proof,” (think of the “doubting Thomas,” wanting to put his hands on Jesus’ wounds). As Mary “observed” at 9:58, the observations inimical to the scientific method, literally changes the facts. (Galileo was right, “it moved.”) That in turn drives us back to the religious documents with new questions and the process repeats itself.

a whimsical take on facts that adds nothing to this particular discussion, perhaps.
Talking Heads “Crosseyed and Painless”

…
The feeling returns Whenever we close out eyes
Lifting my head Looking around inside.

Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don’t do what I want them to
Facts just twist the truth around
Facts are living turned inside out
Facts are getting the best of them
Facts are nothing on the face of things

I’m still waiting I..I..I’m still waiting
I’m still waiting I..I..I’m still waiting
I’m still waiting I..I..I’m still waiting
I’m still waiting I..I..I’m still waiting

Some guy,

I agree, you cannot prove a negative. Does this make is acceptable to believe that an invisible monkey is sitting on my desk right now that cannot be seen, touched or detected by any scientific instruments? That is where your logic is leading us.

Thanks thanks thanks. For those of us who try to marry both views within ourselves, and to add to them a left outlook on things political, it really helps to see this kind of discussion once in awhile.

That’s it for now. I’ve a train to catch to go watch some Whales… I don’t think Jonah figures. (I’m going to watch the whales from a boat, lest one think I’ve lost all my marbles).

Darwin’s natural selection may not be the best explanation of variation, in fact many are looking at naturally occuring variation as a prime driver.

Darwin’s natural selection isn’t natural, you’re implying? Or what exactly is the difference between “Darwin’s natural selection” and “naturally occurring variation”, because I never saw that difference in my biology classes.

Mary,

Thanks for the clarification. We’re finite beings, so we can’t observe in all times and all places.

However, if God changes the rules to suit Her whim we’re hosed. What’s more, the available evidence does not point in that direction.

BC

So, how do you talk religion and science with those of a more TheoCon mindset?

I don’t. Those I come across cannot be reasoned with. Think Terminator here.

OT: TeddySanFran – in today’s mail I received a bumper sticker from Sen. Kennedy:

“Had Enough?
Vote Democrat in ‘06″

hope you’re getting royalties on that…

EPU

Maybe I’m splitting hairs, but there’s a difference between Dobson, Phelps, and Robertson on the one hand, and many of the folks who follow them on the other. THOSE are the people I believe are reachable, generally by people with whom they already have some kind of relationship.

Progressive people of faith cannot cede the field of discussion to the TheoCons. We can’t as progressives, and we can’t as people of faith either.

And EPU, I’m surprised at your last paragraph. It sounds like you are rejecting past evidence (the existence of scientific men of faith in the past) that this conversation is possible, based on your (religious?) belief that this conversation isn’t possible. ;)

Radioactive isotopes decay at a characteristic rate.

We “know” that from obervation, over time. But no observation is absolute

Go take a class in measuring radioactivity, and meet radioactive decay up close. It does in fact work like that. Each isotope has its own rate – thousands of different ones. Look in the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, there’s a nice table of isotopes that will give you numbers. It’s run by the same rules of physics and chemistry as candles and microwave ovens.

Bargain Countertenor #119

Fact: Radioactive isotopes decay at a characteristic rate.

Quantum mechanics is not my thing but I think that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle would have something to say about that statement.

Also I have no idea of what invariant in time means if you are talking about a temporal process. Time is path dependent and is highly variable.

I am a humanist. I found God through science. The closer I am to the facts, the closer I am to God. Truth/God, one and the same for me…with the awareness that my humanity (the emotional part of my brain, my judgments treated as fact, my identification errors in regard to judgment and fact)necessitate the need for deliverance. It is not deliverance from sin but deliverance from un-reality.

I personally have never committed a sin that wasn’t tied to my emotions, cognitive errors (judgments) and impulse control. My impulse control issues all have to do with my desire to calm an emotion or feeling. chocolate cake…hmmmm. I want it. Want is an emotion. Desires are generated by the hypothalumus.

It’s not that my emotions are not important it’s that I have led with them for too long. I have at times treated my emotions as facts. Just because I feel it…doesn’t mean it is. I have learned to accept my emotions more fully and assess their attachment to facts instead of just acting on them. The truth has set me free!!

If all human beings learned how to look for the kernal of truth in what is happening, if they learned how to distinguish judgments from facts some of the greatest sins of humanity could be avoided (sins…another term for ineffective behavior…self destructive behavior…short term gain over long term adaptation).

My continued dream for a more effective way to gather people in the name of “religion” would be one in which all the religions of the universe were studied and whereever there is a similar custom or belief (invariantly with all religions), that custom or belief would become part of this “religion”. So only the things we all agree on as human beings become part of the religion…and this is all gathered in the name of facts.

For instance, all cultures have “love”. All cultures have human beings living together in community. All human being have a need to get along and work together. All human beings need to develop coping for disagreements. All human beings demonstrate a reponsibility in rearing their young. ETC…

Thanks for the great post and all the spirited discussion. I wish the dems would do more of this. We have to stop fearing discussions about God because without the discussion it facilitates a silence that moves from reverence to suppression.

For me…God is a fact.

according to STOE, science and faith (as opposed to organized religion which is a perverted abuse of faith) are complimentary. Faith provides explanation for all we do not know, science provides empiracal evidence of all we do know. Together, all we know and all we do not know, the possible universe is defined.
.

New thread, everyone – http://www.firedoglake.com/200…..pin-im-in/

My, but this one’s been lively! Thanks, all!

I disagree with the notion that science and religion can exist within the same person. There is a fundamental either-or with regards to this “duality”. Either you are a spiritualist or you are a materialist. If you are a materialist, you know that the laws of physics CANNOT BE BROKEN in this universe. Such phonomena as miracles, prophecies, and incorporeal entities cannot exist EVER, under any circumstances. All phonomena that we observe must be explained solely in terms of matter in motion. Anyone who professes to be both a scientist and religious is deep in denial and rationalization and has committed intellectual suicide.

BTW – when EPU says at 151 “You don’t”

that’s been my observation too – may not be fact, but …

BC – with absolutly no observation to back me up, I’m going with God being a her. *g*

Sometimes you get lucky on the facts. ;-)

Darwin’s natural selection may not be the best explanation of variation, in fact many are looking at naturally occuring variation as a prime driver.

Darwin’s natural selection isn’t natural, you’re implying? Or what exactly is the difference between “Darwin’s natural selection” and “naturally occurring variation”, because I never saw that difference in my biology classes.

The key word is “selection”, not “natural.” Recent scientific thought (Dynamical Systems Theory) postulates variation happens whether or not it is selected by the environment.

PhDs in religion are never dogmatic “true believers”. You can’t be.

I remember reading that the majority of religion professors in England do not believe in a God.

This is entirely consistent with my observation that most atheists and agnostics know a *LOT* about religion, far more than the average churchgoer.

“However, if God changes the rules to suit Her whim we’re hosed. What’s more, the available evidence does not point in that direction.”

IMHO, you just described very well what the Hebrew scriptures tried to describe when God threw Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden.

A lot of us don’t realize we are in the “Garden of Eden,” until suddenly, the “rules change.”

I agree with you BC, that the rules of physics do not change, but I think a common human experience is that our understanding of the rules do. When it happens, and it always does, it tests our faith. Everyone has faith in something, whether it’s atheism or theism, we all need some kind of ultimately organizing principle.

OT, imho, we are all “evangelicals,” in a sense. We are all trying to “convert” one another to our point of view. What’s nice about this thread is that people are willing to respect other positions. Unfortunately “evangelical” has become a “dirty word,” because so many of the people who use it, have a sub human view of God and try to shove it/him down our throats.

Also, to criticise a very common comment here:

Religion != Blind Faith.

You can’t be a scientist and a supporter of blind faith without serious cognitive dissonance. However, blind faith is absolutely unnecessary for a religion. Look up the essay “Is Blind Faith Immoral?” The author, a rabbi, concludes that it is immoral, and also that it is unnecessary for his religion.

Science is perfectly compatible with religion, as long as the religion does not demand blind faith.

Katharine Jefferts Schori, the Presiding Bishop Elect of the Episcopal Church, is trained as a scientist. From a recent interview on NPR:

Diane Rehm asks about KJS’s career change from oceanography to the priesthood.

Katharine Jefferts Schori: Well, when people ask about that, I say that I’m still fishing, I’m still working “in the depths”. I struggled with that transition for a good while. I think that some of the skills that I learned as an oceanographer, especially having to do with looking carefully at the world around me, and a scientific approach to the wonders of creation have been a blessing in my work in the church.

You know, I come to a situation usually without a preconceived notion of what ought to result, I’m willing to make a hypothesis and test it, and gather data, and make the best informed decision that I can.

More of that interview here
http://realreligiousleft.blogspot.com

The quote above is from the part I titled,
“KJS on inclusiveness and diversity”

I really like her humpbacked whales analogy.

In the “I think, therefore I am”: Je pense, donc je suis. The conclusion “I = I am” is contained in the premise, a classic case of begging the question.

Peterr -

Me thinks you are splitting hairs. Either that or misusing the term TheoCon.

I still wouldn’t agree with what you write anyway.

I noted on an earlier post of yours where you mentioned the S. Ct. decision concerning ritualized peyote use by Native Americans. And I pointed out there was nothing new or original in the opinion, that the leading case, Reynolds, from the 1860’s drew a clear line between religious belief and religious practice. And I’ve always thought that for the US of A that that Reynolds was a very smart decision based on our Constitution.

I don’t care what a TheoCon (or an actually religious person for that matter) believes, but I do care when they try to convert those beliefs into what what everyone else must, even if in part, practice.

So to me, the discussions you suggest miss the point, since your discussion is about belief, and that is one step way too far for me to begin with.

#122. I agree with you. . . “despite the many atrocities committed in the name of faith, that is not all religion has brought to the world.” The Union of Concerned Scientists has, over the years, made the case that one of the top 5 or so issues that holds humanity back from acheiving a safer, better world, is the status of women in most of the world. This can be laid at the door of religion as well. Nothing has served to subjugate, brutalize and deprive women through the centuries like religion. Again, until a discussion that involves religion can be honest, it will not move us forward.

wxzy: (OK

And EPU, I’m surprised at your last paragraph. It sounds like you are rejecting past evidence (the existence of scientific men of faith in the past) that this conversation is possible, based on your (religious?) belief that this conversation isn’t possible. ;)

Surprised? Really. I thought my point was very clear – that the men of science and religion or religion and science (whichever way you want), didn’t have political agendas similar to the Theocon’s of today.

And my only religious belief is that Rupert Murdoch is the devil, although I love Fox Soccer Channel, which I guess in part makes me a devil worshiper.

Please correct me if I am wrong,IIRC, The Vatican has it’s own scientist and astrologists.

Perish the thought! (Or is it “parish the thought”?) The Vatican does have astronomers, and astronomers are scientists. Astrologers, on the other hand, are in no way, shape, or form part of the scientific endeavor. Quite the opposite, in fact. I understand that this was a typo, but it made me spew coffee on my keyboard.

Small yet big type:

So to me, the discussions you suggest miss the point, since your discussion is about belief practice, and that is one step way too far for me to begin with.

Christy at 10:16 am – I think the problem is that anytime progressives engage the “religion” issue, we end up engaging the fundamentalists. The religious moderates are not the problem, and I suspect such believers would be happy to go back to the good old days of seperation of church and state if not for the religious right constantly fanning the flames of hellfire.

It’s the fundamentalist right wing that’s the problem. A vocal minority. So anytime progressives engage the idea of religion in the public square, those are the people we necessarily engage, and that’s when we start to get comments like Obama’s about how we should lighten up on keeping religion out of the public school system.

That’s why I think it’s just a bad idea generally to suggest that progressives get into that game. It’s rigged.

I suppose the bottom line for me is: if I have any faith at all, it’s that the enlightenment will prevail.

PJEvans
when you tell me to -
Go take a class in measuring radioactivity, and meet radioactive decay up close.
you kind of manage to be rude and miss the point, as an observed and no doubt intended (or fact based) twofer.

It does in fact work like that. Each isotope has its own rate – thousands of different ones.

Like no two snowflakes are alike? And someone would have absolute knowledge of this from one class? *g*

In heat, in cold, in extremes of heat and cold, under vibration, under subsonic vibration, under pressure, in a vacumn, in an absolute vacumn, in the presence of a, b, c, d, e, etc. – all substances, all combinations, in the the library with a candlestick … oh, sorry, that last part was Clue, not radioactive isotopes.

Look in the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, there’s a nice table of isotopes that will give you numbers.

ROFLMAO – yep, those Handbook things NEVER change, not even, when, over time, “new” elements are added to tables, or Quantum theories are proffered that both explain anomalies but also take observation into different areas and sets of focus, so that the heretofore unobserved has an impact on the “tofore” (or in your case,perhaps twofer).

I think I’ve observed enough, though, to make a “fact based” decision about further conversation with you on this topic – here I thought EPU was our only source of omniscience- obviously my observations were incomplete.

Great discussion- sorry I missed much of it.

A couple of points:

1) Can a person be a christian and still respect science? Of course- most christians do. Many see a conflict (fundamentalist believers and their opponents) both of them share a belief in an incorrect premise about how Genesis is to be read.

2) Is religious belief irrational? Well perhaps in some cases- in most cases it is non-rational- that is- it has nothing to do with rationality. “Belief” is used in an odd way in the religious case. “I believe my redeemer liveth” is a VERY different kind of statement than “I believe that there are adequate petroleum reserves on earth to sustain our current needs for the next 100 years. One “belief” is based on “evidence” the other has nothing at all to do with evidence.

It is sometimes helpful to forget about the “beliefs” that are seen as the foundation of some western religions and see “religion” as the practice of certain ACTIVITIES (participation in sacraments and rituals- including VERBAL rituals such as saying the words “I believe in the father, the son, and the holy spirit”. What do these phrases mean? That can only be understood in the context of the rituals that give them life.

3) In the US, religious thought and practice is a right guaranteed to all. Religious people certainly have a protected right to practice their religion- and if their religious views cause them to vote a certain way- that is protected too- as is all their speech about those subjects. What is NOT protected- or even allowed- is for the govt to officially embrace the religious views of any group. There we draw the line.

I apologize in advance for espousing a point of view that is sure to be insulting to many here.

My position is that there are no words more dangerous than “I believe” and none more destructive than “God said”. Think for a moment about the weight and authority these words carry with them. These statements are not in the same category as “I have evidence” or “I postulate” which are the province of science. They, as a lawyer might say, assume facts not in evidence. I have no wish to censor people in their expressions of faith but I insist that a sensible person can say that there is no logical basis for the particulars of most tenets of faith. For example when you look at the diversity of creation stories you can distill much of what is contained in these stories into more general concepts. But drill down into the details of these stories and you won’t have to go very far before the stories become mutually exclusive, in other words if X is true then Y and the rest cannot be true. Then ask yourself this question; which is more likely? 1. one of these stories based on faith and no evidence is true or 2. none of them are. And yet if we ascribe the authority of a supreme being to these assertions they become, in the minds of the faithful, a matter of enlightenment vs ignorance, piety vs heresy and eventually obedience vs criminality. I don’t mean to say that individual people act on this level but get enough people together who “believe” the same way, trouble can’t be far behind.

Christy @ 115,

“But because Republicans have dragged religion into politics over the last 20 years or so, Democrats absolutely need to find some means of discussing these issues without it descending into a “you’re touching my belief (or non-belief) circle.” Can anyone explain to me how we get beyond just that one point?”

Reading all the comments here, I noticed that sometimes people are taking the thread to argue science vs. religion (tastes great! less filling!), and some people are staking out sides. There are some vocal skeptics (why are we even talking about religion?) and some fuzzy Kumbayahists (of course we can all get along!).

Obviously, we’re not going to solve the problems in a thread.

However, I would suggest that in the Democrats’ Big Tent, we can accept everyone’s varying motivations for the public policies we’ll support, but the bedrock reasoning can never rely on an appeal to religious authority.

That’s why I didn’t like Obama’s comments, which made it sound like Democrats are hostile to religion, and we have to learn how not to be. I have no problem with people being motivated by religion, but if they cannot prove the rightness of their position using logic grounded in a principle of the common good (which is a tricky definition game, I know), then I see no reason to buy or support or endorse their argument.

The genius of America is that we pioneered an approach that asked people to decide what is best by appealing, in a sense, to doubt; there simply is no absolute authority enshrined except an individual’s right to believe in his/her own way. No divine right of kings to rule, no absolute right of a clergy to hand down commandments and compel obedience; in the Western traditions, the absolutism of pretty much all variants of Christianity implies that this sect has got something right that everyone else got wrong, which all-too-often leads to an impulse to enforce orthodoxy.

The Founders got it right when they said that you may absolutely believe in your absolutism, but you can’t enforce it on everyone. On one level, this implies something akin to doubt: I may believe (passionately) that I am right, but I will allow that I might be wrong, and it is in our common ground we shall form a government. The fundamentalists’ refusal to exercise restraint and agree only to govern where we can all find common ground is a major source of the problem.

Unfortunately, absolutists usually won’t listen to logic. The real question is, behind the stereotype of a “fundamentalist” that we’re all aghast at, how can we peel moderates and those-willing-to-be-persuaded to accept a restraint on trying to legislate their personal morality onto the public sphere?

The importance of tribalism and emotion also cannot be overstated … some who claim to be motivated by religious belief may actually just be clinging to their tribal identity.

After months of lurking I have to comment on this thread. In this intersection it is important to reflect on how the documents of the Hebrew Scriptures came about. Take that first creation account found in the book of Genesis. Most scholars believe it was written in the Babylonian Captivity of Israel. In this instance Israel is trying to define itself in contrast to the Babylonian creation accounts. They were writing their own theology of nature to answer the claims of the accounts in the Enuma Elish. By this act they are trying to define the ways in which they experienced why they were in exile. At least in one regard they are of interest because the world does not arise from violent struggle of Marduk and Tiamet, it emerges from the creative act of God. There are certainly many other things that could be said about the structure of the story, but anyone trying to use it for history or science does violence to its origins. I’m just saying.

rwcole – the only thing that is protected is religious belief. Religious practice is not absolutely protected. Reynolds v. United States was 1878, so I was off by a few years, and it states that religious practice is not absolutely protected. Here is the link:

http://www.law.umkc.edu/facult…..dsvus.html

As for the political aspect of your post – you are free to vote your religious beliefs, but the tax exempt status of religious organizations (which is based on the first amendment) is supposed to go away if the organization “endorses candidates.” Of course, that is its own political football, but that is what the law says is supposed to happen.

Cordelia @ 70, Peter @ 91 & Mary @ 98,

First, re Sam Harris’ book. It, along with at least half a dozen other wait-listed books, were waiting for me when I returned from vacation about a week and a half ago. I started on it but found his strident position on the moderate Christians stuck in my craw somewhat, so I picked up another one. It happened to be Misquoting Jesus, by Bart Ehrman, which is very germane to this thread. It’s a layperson’s introduction to textual criticism, the science (or is it an art) of trying to determine exactly what the original text as written was of documents that are now available only as manuscripts that have been copied, and copied and copied again over the centuries. I found Ehrman’s book much more compelling and thus threw The End of Faith back into the library lake, with the intention of baiting a hook for it in the future. To do justice to Ehrman’s book in a brief summary would be impossible.

Also pertinent is Thomas Kuhns The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which I mentioned above in comment #35, especially to Mary’s observation that getting at the facts is often not as simple a matter as it should seem to be. Kuhn introduced the concept of the paradigm, which in his usage is sort of a prevailing world view regarding a specific branch or specialty of science which informs the work being done at a given time in that branch or specialty. The Revolutions of his title, and for which he develops an analysis of the processes through which they happen, are those occasions when a prevailing paradigm is overthrown by a successor. Examples are when Newtonian mechanics was superseded by quantum mechanics, and when the concept of fixed continents in geology was replaced by plate techtonics. He cites and elaborates on many others, many of which were well before the modern era.

One point Kuhn dwells on is how an anomalous observation or fact that may seem inconsequentially quaint in the currently prevailing paradigm sometimes turns out either to be the pivotal factor in overturning that paradigm, or becomes extremely important if that paradigm is overturned because of other factors. As aspect of Kuhns book that I found rather unsettling (being the deist/agnostic that I am) is that I could see analogies between Kuhns concept of the paradigm and the various belief systems of conventional religions.

All in all I highly recommend both of these books.

“I don’t care what a TheoCon (or an actually religious person for that matter) believes, but I do care when they try to convert those beliefs into what what everyone else must, even if in part, practice.”

The still classic treatment of this is the 7th chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans on the relationship between “faith” and “works.”

IMHO, you are defining religion as the content of its beliefs, as though they are separate from how we live our lives. Gnostics were declared heretical by early Xtians just for such beliefs. Gnostics thought God’s salvation was based on the content of what they believed, and they thought it was a “secret,” that only they had.

I am sympathetic to your position here, EPU. I don’t want some bible banger telling me abortion is wrong, because God told them either. To use Tillich’s language which I cited above, you have certain “ultimate concerns.” You may not call them “religious,” and they may be unrecognizeable as faith statements, but they animate (or inform) your actions as surely as the ultimate concerns of Dobson, Falwell….

I think you know, I am a lot more comfortable with your “ultimate concerns,” than I am with Dobson’s and Falwell’s, but I just wanted to make this point.

#186 Amen, brother.

REspectful.Dissadent – It’s been sooooo long since I’ve heard anyone say, in a discussion, “Well, that’s a really interesting point. Here’s how I look at it.” I really think we need people, like you if you’re willing, to write LTE’s and maybe even op-eds to place this once-upon-a-time notion back into the public discourse. We preach here, for the most part, to the choir. My new refrain is “The tipping point is nigh.” (she said, hopefully)

When I was growing up, “You can’t legislate morality” was an absolute. I had an evangelical friend in high school (who, ironically, was one of the most ammoral people I knew at the time) who was forever preaching her brand of religiosity. I came to see that, for her, the words were a shield she used to justify whatever she wanted to do.

There is no contradiction between religion (Christian) and science. There is, however, a strong contradiction between those Christian heretics who profess to believe in Biblical Inerrancy and take the so-called literal word of the Bible as God’s truth, to the extent that they profess that the Bible contains all science and history, and can be used as a basis for prophecy.

Biblical Inerrancy as practiced by the anti-Evolutionists is pure heresy. More so than was Arianism or Gnosticism.

Darwin’s natural selection may not be the best explanation of variation, in fact many are looking at naturally occuring variation as a prime driver

Because Darwin’s natural selection is a description of how life responds to variation in genetic information. Natural Selection has nothing to do with actual variation, per se, only on how species evolve using the basic material of nature (genetic variation caused by replication error, chemical decay and erroneous repair, environmental chemical or radiation altering DNA…plus erroneous repair). The variation exists. Period. In the DNA. It is inevitable.

There are 6,000,000,000 bases of DNA per cell in a human (some plants and animals have much more). There are about 1,000,000 cells per gram of human tissue. An average adult weighs 77,111 grams. So, there are a total of 77,111,000,000 cells per adult human. The error rate of DNA replication in a normal human is 1 error for every 100,000,000,000 bases copied. 77,111,000,000 x 6,000,000,000 =
462,666,000,000,000,000,000 bases of DNA in an adult human body. At 1 in 10^11 errors per base, that gives you a total of 4,626,660,000 errors, or baseline points of genetic variation. Add to that errors due to mutagens in the environment coupled with erroneous repair and the number is higher. THAT is the source of variation.

That number of errors holds for most eukaryotes (you, me, dogs, birds, jelly fish, earthworms, etc) and is within an order of magnitude for that of prokaryotes (bacteria). Variation is, was, and always shall be. Darwin, without knowing the molecular details of it, merely described what he saw (undisputed evolution) and came up with a mechanism: natural selection. Natural selection today is not in any way, shape, or form under dispute. It is fact. The precise mechanism in which it acts in concert with the de facto genetic variation that exist IS a matter of ongoing study. Variation is. Evolution is. The only question is the precise how of evolution.

Maven @ 141

All I can say about Jeff Trent is that he’s considered a first-class scientist by the people who have collaborated with him at NIH. (Including myself.)

Peterr@ 49

You say:
“Once upon a time, the clergy were among the most educated in society. Thankfully for everyone, the church included, that is no longer the case.”

Because education’s a bad thing….? We don’t want the clergy to be educated?

The fact that this post is so comforting to many people avoids the reality that the vast majority of scientists are not religious at all (myself included). If somebody wants to follow a religion that’s not dogmatic, doesn’t insist on being anti-empirical, doesn’t use afterlife as a stick or carrot for people, and is open to advances made by science, then I wouldn’t have a huge objection to it. But, as Pierre Laplace said, “I have no need of this hypothesis.”

All I want to say on the religion side of the topic (you’ll see I have plenty on the science side) is that I personally draw the line at literal interpretation of Genesis. If someone really takes that as the literal truth, there’s just no point in conversation in anything other than the great weather we’re finally having after all that rain.

Hugh 165–quantum mechanics is my thing, and BC is entirely right. (I also think it’s his thing.) The “rate” to which BC is referring is technically proportional to the square of the quantum mechanical amplitude. Time is observer dependent, but (and this is key) in a very regular and well-understood way. The observer dependence of time is taken into account in the rules of QM (and radioactive decays).

One thing I think many people don’t realize is the extent to which scientists (or, at least physicists, in my experience) never use the phrase “scientific fact” in their professional lives. Personally I cringe at the adjective “scientific” in general. As usual Einstein put it best (but I shall paraphrase from memory): science is nothing but common sense, consistently applied. For myself I would have simply said, science as a practice is simply drawing conclusions from systematic observation.

Facts (scientific or otherwise) are simply statements with a quantitative chain of reasoning from observation, demonstrating a very high likelihood of being true. Things we all agree are facts come with a ridiculous number of nines attached. That there is gravity on earth, for instance, comes with many googols of nines. (But it is not 100%. It is possible that all the gravitational phenomena observed by all humans to date have been unlikely quantum mechanical fluctuations. That’s possible, but insanely unlikely.)

Physicists tend to wait for about four nines (99.99%) before calling something a fact. Doctors tend to wait for one (90%) or rarely two (99%). My understanding is that legal “no reasonable doubt” corresponds to 90%.

Some things are also known (to a certain degree) not to be true. Earth 6k years old? Offhand I’d guess this has a likelihood of about .000..(insert a million zeros)…001 or so. (And that’s not a rhetorical million. I came up with a quantitative chain of reasoning that yields about a million.)

It’s well and good to say something is, for instance, only proven out to a certain distance or with a certain level of knowledge, so there’s no absolute certainty. But this inability to reach exactly 100% unnecessarily taints our knowledge of gravity and blurs its uncertainty together with our uncertainty about whether it will rain tomorrow. Sure, both fall under the English word “uncertain”, but they are really just completely different.

The ability to quantify and limit the uncertainty of facts is a huge leap forward in human understanding. It is not a weakness of interpreting observations, it’s a triumph.

rwcole – the only thing that is protected is religious belief. Religious practice is not absolutely protected. Reynolds v. United States was 1878, so I was off by a few years, and it states that religious practice is not absolutely protected.

A good thing too since otherwise “honor killings”, stonings, the stocks, etc, would be legal as protected religious practice.

“TritoneSubstitution”
You, flat out, do not understand science.
Those creation stories are not mutually exclusive, but they sure are different. That was science as it was practiced 8,000 years ago. Were were they wrong about the earth’s relationship to the universe, hell yes.
Were they very observant about the “facts” of their world, hell yes. That’s what science is, observing, measuring, looking for reproducible, accurate, and precise information.
Please by all means list all the immutable facts that all scientists, everywhere agree on.
“I believe” is what drives scientists to invent more tests to prove their theory.
People who interpret the entire Bible literally are not any more dangerous than people who do not understand the limitations of science. Stalin’s and Mao’s genocides were veiled behind the fallacy that science is some pure way of knowing. Nothing in this world is pure. It’s observation and reflection, rinse, lather and repeat.

John Casper – I disagree in that I don’t think my “concerns” are informed by whatever informs the Dobsen’s, Falwell’s etc. of the world. Especially since I am not tyring to force my “concerns” on others, and my beliefs are not “informed” by my alleged conversations with a god or the alleged words of a god in a book.

As for belief and practice – they are distinct in the juresprudence of this country. Otherwise, anyone could do anything in the name of a god and get a free pass, and peyote would just be the starting point.

Does religion relate to what people practice in life? I am sure it does. But should it go beyond the Golden Rule, which is a secular a belief as a religious one? I don’t think so.

At the risk of being labeled rude, I’m going to go with PZ Myers:

Faith is a hole in your brain. Faith stops critical thinking. Faith is a failure point inculcated into people’s minds, an unguarded weak point that allows all kinds of nasty, maggoty, wretched ideas to crawl into their heads and take up occupancy. Supporting faith is like supporting people who refuse to be vaccinated: they’re harmless in and of themselves, they may be perfectly healthy right now, but they represent fertile ground for disease, and they represent potential severe damage to the social compact. When you’re in a culture that worships Abraham’s insanity, you’re fostering the nonsense that enables the Son of Sam.

O’Brien misses the big flaw. She says, “somehow, we’ve allowed religion to be defined by the stupid and the warped,” but there’s no “somehow” about it. It’s intrinsic to the nature of the beast. When the core of the institution is an acceptance of irrational, the ones who will climb to the top are those most able to exploit the delusions of the masses, or who are most earnest and unhesitating in their endorsement of foolishness. This is what religion does best: build a hierarchy of clowns and tyrants on the wishful thinking of the innocent. Why should we want that to be a model for a democratic political system?

Sadly, those who believe science and religion don’t have to conflict are either wrong or tacitly admitting that any time the two come into conflict religion will have to give way.

That seems mighty weak tea, to me.

Nor can religion be said to “explain” or “answer” the question “why”; there’s no reason to assume those ruminations have any more basis in reality than any verifiable religious-based claim.

And I wanted to say a word about Kuhn. An overlooked requirement of new scientific theories is: the new ones must look just like the old ones in the previously observed regimes.

The revolutions take place because someone starts making observations in a new regime. For instance, fast EM waves for Einstein once electromagneticsm was understood; atomic behavior in the early 1900’s as spectrometry became widespread; high-resolution planetary observations in Kepler’s time.

But the old and new frameworks have to agree in the old regime, since the observations there were well known. So, for slow objects, relativity makes essentially the same predictions as Newtonian physics. For “large” objects, quantum mechanics generally makes the same predictions as classical mechanics. For low-resolution stellar observations, the difference between heliocentric and geocentric frameworks is small.

Even as the scientific revolutions happen, they leave the observations in place. They also tend to leave the old frameworks in place! (And hence intro physics students start out learning Newton and not relativity.)

“I personally draw the line at literal interpretation of Genesis.”
You are of course correct. Genesis as an astronomical document is just plain wrong. I just want to point that the author of Genesis was a MORAL genius of his day. He was surrounded by tribes, Hittites, Cannanites, Philistines,… who practiced ritual child sacrifice. They did it, because they were naturally afraid of famine and they thought the sacrifice placated the gods. The author of genesis took a very moral position on this, which is remarkable since they were as familiar with famine as everyone else.
I only know these facts about the author of Genesis, because of Science. Someone had to go back and read all the surviving texts on the religions surrounding the Hebrews. Gradually, because of the disciplined application of the scientific method and scientific techniques, some Judaeo-Xtians came to a better understanding of who Genesis was.

#190 You put the book down too soon. A central premise of the book is that religion is not a benign influence in this world and that moderate Christians must bear responsibility for enabling the more strident elements of their faith. It is an inconvenient, uncomfortable idea, but one that is difficult to disagree with after reading the entire book.

Mary: not intended as rudeness, it’s a matter of having done an experiment in isotopic decay with one that had a 90 minute half-life in a lafe scheduled for two hours and a request to get two half-lives in. Yeah, it ran overtime (but nobody needed the room right then, either).

It’s fun looking at the list of isotopes, from the ones that go bang immediately (or close to it) to the ones with an estimated (truly) half life that’s older than the known universe (why it’s an estimate: your chances of seeing one atom of it go bang are very small). The universe is fascinating and weird, and science is about exploring it. (I always did like the lab classes best.) To me, religion is about why people are here, our purpose, and not about how we got here. (And why I have trouble with the idea that “Darwin’s natural selection” is at all different from “naturally occurring variation”.)

For those who like facts along with their religion, I can’t believe nobody’s yet mentioned the Five Gospels from the Jesus Seminar.

Or, for that matter, Jefferson’s Bible.

Deep in EPU territory, but I couldn’t let them go unmentioned.

“But should it go beyond the Golden Rule, which is a secular a belief as a religious one?”
EPU, I want to emphasize, Dobson and Falwell are simply sub-human in the content of their beliefs imo. Your’s are not.
IMO, however, once you cite the “golden rule,” you let the genie out of the bottle. That’s religious content. I think you want to be able to say discussion about religious contents are irrelevant and can be avoided. I think that’s a really cool position, I just don’t think it works.
I think what I am saying is that discussions of religious content necessary, but it is possible to say that the religious content of Dobson and Falwell objectively contradicts the scriptures they claim to revere. It doesn’t matter whether you are a Xtian or not, what matters is that they are “selective” literalists about the religious texts that they deem sacred. I think it’s possible to show that they simply elevate certain texts and ignore others. That’s where they are simply wrong.
IMO it is the Xtian religions in the U.S. who have let the Republicans and the Neoncon steal religion. The responsibility is primarily on priests and ministers to educate their “flocks” about Xtianity. If we had done that over the last 100 years, Falwell and Dobson and others could not have “hijacked” Xtianity.

“Sadly, those who believe science and religion don’t have to conflict are either wrong or tacitly admitting that any time the two come into conflict religion will have to give way.”

(Lettuce)

This presumes that science and religion are doing the same thing- but in a different way. As if religion were primitive science done with crystal balls rather than test tubes. That, of course, is not the case.

Religion is not in the business of explaining the physical nature of light- or predicting eclipses. It’s in the business of revealing another aspect to daily life and experience. The two are not offering competing explanations.

“I know that my redeemer liveth” has, as far as I can see, absolutely NO observable scientific implications- and E=MC2 offers no spiritual insight.

Absolutely Professor Foland.
In a religious sense, imo the Jesus Seminar is “God’s ongoing revelation.”
There’s no incense, no smoke, no mirrors, just a lot of terrific scientists, doing very difficult work.
It’s also very dangerous work in a spiritual sense.
The Jesus seminar could find evidence that Jesus was every bit as bad as Dobson and Falwell. IMO, that’s why science and religion need each other, reality (God?) demands that we go where the evidence takes us. We’re all performing (searching) without a net.

Carl Sagan once made the most eloquent connection between God and science when dicussing his book COSMOS and unfortunately I don’t remember his exact words and I don’t want to misquote him. I’m hoping someone else will know what I’m referring to.

Otherwise, anyone could do anything in the name of a god and get a free pass

Invade a foreign country, for example.

John Casper – The golden rule does not let the genie out of the bottle. It is NOT ONLY a western religious belief – it is at the heart of Confucianism and probably predates Confucianism as a tenet of Chinese beliefs, which would put it on a par with Judiasm, and predating Xtianity and Islam, and did not come from western (and I include Islam in that) relevatory religion.

I think that what matters is, selective or not, that the Theocon’s of the world want to force me to believe in what they believe or live in a society whose laws are based on what they believe. I’m NOT arguing the details of whether they are selective or not – to me that misses the point of the debate, since I would not care if they weren’t selective, or if they were truly sincere in their beliefs.

Mommybrain @ 193,

Why, thank you. *ears turn red.*

My larger point about this thread in particular is that Peterr posted about how he sees religion and science coexisting, and then asked a question: how to talk about religion and science with TheoCons? The thread quickly turned into a discussion of faith vs. science, different interpretations of faith (literal or not), and “common sense” (but discordant) pronouncements like “faith tells us why!” and “faith and science are fundamentally incompatible,” etc.

I personally am an atheist, but I think a lot of this discussion got away from Peterr’s original question: how to talk faith and science with a TheoCon? With a true TheoCon, I think it’s impossible; with everyone else who is open to persuasion (and that includes, hopefully, all of us on this site), we come up with groundrules that allow for religious motivation but not religious justification in the public sphere. I think every good Democrat policy could be sold to some demographics through analogies and references to religious principles, but the basic argument must, MUST be solidly based in the secular and rational principles that will convince atheists as well.

Athenae at First Draft today or yesterday had a fantastic rant on the subject, btw.

EPU, thanks. I do not find you arguments persuasive, but I do very much appreciate your taking the time to respond.

John – That’s ok. I don’t find your arguments persuasive either.

I am not confused at all. My father has a PhD. My brother has a PhD. My mother has an MA. I have a lowly BA. I was raised in Oklahoma. Our parents took us to church (in Oklahoma!) every week — even on vacation. My whole family believes in science. (My brother’s PhD is in microbiology.)

There is no problem. I cannot believe how some see there is. Not ALL Christians are non-science fundies.

(Catching up after a grocery trip)

RickD @ 196

My point wasn’t about having educated clergy (a good thing!), but a more educated populace generally. Way back in the day, most folks other than the monks and clergy were illiterate – glad those days are gone!

EPU @ 212 … interesting point about the Confucian version of the Golden Rule: it’s about NOT doing to others as you would NOT have them to do you, so it’s subtly different than the other versions. Still very close to other versions, of course, and very relevent.

I more and more find myself thinking about “Confucianism” as a workable alternative … especially the Confucian Humanism espoused by the Boston Confucianists (cf. Tu Wei-ming), not the moribund social control, patriarchal aspects, but more along the fantastic lines that Master Kong said, like:

“I don’t understand life, how can I understand death?”

“I don’t understand man, how can I understand Heaven?”

His point? Focus on how to live correctly and treat each other well in this life, not worry about the next.

Oh, I forgot this: “So, how do you talk religion and science with those of a more TheoCon mindset?”

Answer: I don’t. There is no changing their “minds.” I don’t have enough patience.

Professor Foland #197

If you take a single atom of a radioactive isotope and look at it again at it half life, will it have decayed or not? Taking the same atom and looking at it again after its next half life, will it have decayed or not? While what happens over a large number of events is predictable, what happens for any single event is not. Describing a statistical likelihood as a fact in the context’s absolutist terms seems to me to be an impermissible leap in logic.

“I know that my redeemer liveth” has, as far as I can see, absolutely NO observable scientific implications- and E=MC2 offers no spiritual insight.

The problem is, “you” don’t know the redeemer liveth, and believeing the redeemer liveth hasn’t worked out all that well for society of science.

You can’t test the redeemer liveth, you can’t “prove” the redeemer liveth, you can only assert the redeemer liveth and that’s the hole in the brain.

That’s the weak point Professor Myers describes that lets all the nasty stuff in.

What I see here is a kind of cynicism. One of the reasons George W. Bush made it to the top is by exploiting the religion loophole in people’s thinking, and by playing up his supposed god-fearing nature, he won over the least rational people…which, I admit, is a huge and powerful demographic. What the religious Left wants to do is simply replace the worm called “Bush & God” that is eating voter’s brains with a new worm called “Democratic Candidate & God,” which will have the same diet but might be coaxed into chewing up slightly different parts of the cortex. ‘Their disease is scabrous and filthy, but my disease is sweet and lovely and smells like fresh flowers’ is not an argument to sway me.

Frankly, all the hand waving about the tender sensibilities of those who apparently have an omnipotent being on their side feels to this atheist like marginalization.

I don’t like it, and the Democratic Party, and liberals in general, might want to think long and hard before they go down that road.

I’m not suggesting going out of one’s way to challange the well-meaning religious; I’m suggesting that once appeals based on our friendliness to supernaturality are doomed to fail because there isn’t anything there to prove, and we ought to let it go.

Yes: freedom of religion.

No: appeals to our religiosity or our superior and kinder supernaturalism.

That’s all.

All this stuff about what we need to do for those of faith to prove our bones DOES marginalize atheists.

Is that what we’re for now?

Hugh–The “half-life of an isotope” is a different concept from “the decay time of an individual atom”. But these are starting to be deep quantum mechanical waters which the thread is not meant for. I’ll just say, the “half-life of an isotope” is an exceedingly well-defined (and for most isotopes, well-measured) concept.

Prof Foland, I hope you get this,

quantum mechanics is my thing, and BC is entirely right. (I also think it’s his thing.) The “rate” to which BC is referring is technically proportional to the square of the quantum mechanical amplitude. Time is observer dependent, but (and this is key) in a very regular and well-understood way. The observer dependence of time is taken into account in the rules of QM (and radioactive decays).

Actually, I’m a probabilist and statistician. My background is all over the map: music, biology, chemistry, math and statistics. I’ve always found physics (especially 20th C physics) fascinating. Unfortunately I didn’t get far enough in physics as an undergrad (one year of engineering physics) to penetrate the notational thicket of your mathematics.

I’m working through Penrose’s book on physics, but it’s really tough sledding.

BC

Professor Foland, really appreciate your comments, as per usual. In case you missed it Jane asked Mary to write a post. It seems to me Jane and Christy are always looking for talented posters. If Jane or Christy hasn’t asked and you are interested, I hope you would let them know.

Hugh,

Radioactive decay is a statistical process. All statistical processes discuss the behavior of the ensemble, not the behavior of the individual.

Let me change your example slightly. Roll a fair (cubic*) die in a box, where you can’t see which face is showing. What is the probability that a 6 shows? (Ans: 1/6)

Now look in the box. What is the probability that a six is showing? (Ans: 0, if any value other than a 6 is showing, and 1 if a 6 shows.)

Probability is a prospective notion, and you discuss it when the facts (observations) are in evidence doesn’t make sense.

BC

Professor Foland #222

I appreciate the difference and realize they aren’t contradictory. It’s just that recently I’ve been looking at some of these issues about how we understand the universe from the other end, cosmology and general relativity. It will probably take a few years to work through it all but my impression is that things here are just as quirky as they are in QCM and yes, I know there is a considerable overlap.

TritoneSubstitution, I want to dilute some of the “tone” from my response to you at 11:50. My response to you was a lot more “strident” than it should have been. Sorry.

Bargain Countertenor 1:06 pm — agh. Penrose.

Tougher sledding yet when he covers human consciousness. Love the topic, but when he’s on it my eyes roll back into my head. Give me Searle or better yet, Chalmers.

PJ – ;-) I am only a lawyer, but I was 20 years back an Honors Chem student and aced organic, so I like (pretty close to love) chemistry and physics. And it has been really interesting to observe from my now unrelated world, where the observations by those who are structuring the observations have taken us.

Prof Foland – lovely pieces – good info, well written.

Re:
It’s well and good to say something is, for instance, only proven out to a certain distance or with a certain level of knowledge, so there’s no absolute certainty. But this inability to reach exactly 100% unnecessarily taints our knowledge of gravity and blurs its uncertainty together with our uncertainty about whether it will rain tomorrow. Sure, both fall under the English word “uncertain”, but they are really just completely different.

I agree.

It is impossible to have meaningful iscussion without characterizing and differentiating between the kinds of “certainty” or “probability” etc.; my point was just that to have an intelligent discussion about “facts” it needs to recognize the basic premise of what we call a fact often being observationally relatedand at times being subject to some reasonable disagreement as to degrees of certainty. fwiw

A couple of the recommendations for reading on the thread sound very interesting.

Rayne,

Penrose is way, way, way out in speculation-land (Cloud Cuckoo Land???) when he starts talking about human consciousness. I read Penrose on human consciousness for amusement. But I don’t have the background to really hold an opinion on the matter.

As I understand Searle’s stance, it’s that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. That jibes better with me. Basically, it’s a Turing position … if I can carry on an intelligent conversation with the Chinese box, then yeah, the box understands Chinese. That doesn’t mean that the dude shuffling the abacus inside the box understands Chinese, any more than one of my neurons understands this post.

BC

BTW – second what John C said at 224 and it would be fantastic if a lot of these commenters were available when & if that happens.

Thanks all

For a good explanation of the nature of religion and how it fits into the same mind a science, I recommend Stewart Guthrie’s book,
“Faces in the Clouds”.
Science and religion are not at odds in their purpose, which is to come to terms with the world and ourselves. relgion arises out of an evolutionary adaptation to look for more, or a higher level of organization in the phenomena that surrond us in order to be or feel safe or acquire what we need.
Not only human do this but also animals, though generally in animals it does not attain a religious expression. there is some evidence that in some primates, there is behaior that does rise to the level of attributing intent or life to bad weather.
The book os thorough and sufficient to explain the existence of religion but actually goes a great deal farther.

Sorry I don’t have time to read all the comments first before putting in my 2 cents (although this looks like a great thread to save and read later when there IS time).

Just want to mention a point I like to raise with fundamentalists/literalists I have known, in particular those who give evidence of being quite bright and not so totally defensive.

I ask them to choose between creationism and the story of Noah and the Ark, getting them somewhat intrigued by saying they have to choose one of those stories over the other — they cannot both be true.

How so? Well, if there is no such thing as evolution, then Noah had quite a job on his hands. How did he get to the North Pole to pick up the polar bears? How did he get to what is now known as Australia to pick up pairs of the extraordinary animals which exist only there — the kangaroo being just the most famous among many. And clearly he had to get to North and South America to pick up species which are indigenous to those regions. Noah must have picked up quite a few “frequent flyer miles” to get all around the world, picking up all these creatures and getting them safely home to what is now the Middle East in time for the start of the Deluge.

Then I ask how large the Ark really was. Did it contain insects too? How about worms? How many species of insects and worms, etc. ARE there on the face of the earth? And if there is no evolution, then they ALL were necessary to save before the Deluge, weren’t they? How did Noah manage to sex the insects without a microscope? And these are just the tiny creatures. How many species of animals ARE there?

In other words, the size of the Ark (if the story is believed to have happened “literally”) would have to be at least the size of the State of Delaware, no?

Now, belief in the biblical story of the Ark can be maintained, to SOME degree, if one either accepts that the flood was just regional in scope, OR that the creatures saved by Noah then later EVOLVED into all the varieties we see today — or both.

But you can’t believe in both stories as literally true unless you’re committing yourself to massive amounts of cognitive dissonance and flat-out denial.

Interestingly, the smarter of the “fundamentalist” folks seem to get this. I’ve actually seen the metaphorical (but real) phenomenon occur of “the lightbulb going off” in my presence. Light dawns.

This is just a small anecdote. I have lots of thoughts on this whole topic [for instance: EVOLUTION is a much, much greater compliment to the infinite Intelligence of a Creator than any scenario involving God “snapping his fingers” like a magician], and wish I had more time to engage here now. [I’m also curious if anyone’s brought up Teilhard de Chardin in this context!] Will definitely read the comments later, for I’m certain there’s great substance, nuance, intelligence, and sensitivity to be found on an FDL thread like this one.

And thanks so much for your post, Peterr! These discussions are SO important.

No, Mrs. K8, no one brought up Teilhard. If you are interested, Schubert Ogden wrote about a seventy-page article, The Reality of God, in the 1970’s. It is very technical, but smart people I knew said it was a lot better than anything Teilhard wrote. Ogden was a “Process” Philosopher Theologian. He basically blew up the whole Aritstotle/Thomas Aquinas, God as the “prime mover, unchanging, immutable being. For Ogden the being of God was eternally changing, evolving,….
I agree with your patience with fundamentalists, imo as long as they are really willing to read the scriptures, they are eventually forced into some kind of pluralism. Even the synoptic Gospels, Mark, Matt, Luke, have significant differences.
Regards.

Most folks fail to realize that religion and science are just tools that allow humans to grapple with the wide forces of existence on planet earth.

Religion was a stepping stone to Science.

Religion will slowly fade, as it is doing now, as science eclipses it.

Always remember that Science is a verification process while Religion is not. Religion takes a starting position on Faith; But Science has the Power to verify if that religious starting position is valid for future use.

That’s why they are no religions on the flat-earth position.

Religion is being squeezed into an ever smaller area where faith can exist. One day that area will shrink to zero.

But don’t be sad for that day. If it wasn’t for the concept of religion we wouldn’t have science to make life better for the future.

“Always remember that Science is a verification process while Religion is not.”
History is the verification of religion. Just as science has to justify itself through experimentation and reproducibility, religious texts have to survive the test of history. Mein Kampf, while not explicity a religious text, didn’t survive very well. A lot of religions don’t survive, the one’s that do, have to satisfy the demands of history to be logical, coherent, and intelligible to their followers.

I agree that our first glimpse of science was in religious texts. The idea that science is simply extinguishing religion is unsustainable.
I think a lot of the mush that passes for religion these days can give people that impression, but the awareness of our own mortality and the fragility of our world mean that faith statements are a permanent existenital of the human condition that give rise to a vocabulary and a language. Religion, philosophy, and medicine are where that vocabulary and that language gets modified, changed, and hopefully updated.

At the risk of incoherence I should like to suggest that religion (the religious) should be distinguished from theology, which is rather a science. Religion I define as there where an object (e.g. God) is coincident with its bracketing (’God’), while science considers a fact, a given, without reference to an external context. The difference between a science of nature and a science of theology is then in their differing theories of revelation, that is, proof.

Guthrie’s theory of religion covers that distinction and explains why theology does not offer proof of anything but rather stems from an adaptation in which the organism, humans and other animals, automatically view the world throgh a filter in which higher organization is looked for. In other words, “knowing” becomes a bet in the face of uncertainty. As he puts it, if you see a bolder and mistake it for a bear, you lose nothing if you are wrong and gain a great deal if you are right.
This is not a conscious facility though it can be used consciously and can certainly be exploited and is from insects that use camouflage to ad agencies that appeal to audiences by raising the level of organzation to a higher level by anthropomorphizing inanimate objects or animals.
The key is anthropomorphism and animism.
it is central to religion and without it none exist.

Peterr:
I used to think I did not believe in God. Then my son was born. I certainly know most of the science behind that (having studied 9 years of biology), but suddenly, standing in the delivery room, holding my newborn son in my arms, I became a believer, and I see no contradiction in that, or in that we probably descend from a long line of apes, but the very act of birth and the (how many years of evolution does the newborn go through in the first few months…I forget) proves the existance of God to me. Not one that I pray to, not one that I can blame the concentration camps on as a basis for denial, not one whom I can petition through prayer, but God. And not the one who is on anyone’s “side.” To me, God “is” and that is all there is too it.

There is no contradiction. As Rabbi Janet Marder once said “does that mean I disagree with Leviticus, it does!” as I say, the most wisdom you will ever find is in the bible….ours…..and everyone elses, and that includes everyone. There are some days when all that gets me through life is the book of Ecclesiastes.

Those who use God as a justification for what they want to do, are political, and that’s all. As a character I once wrote said (and I have said this elsewhere),

“Ach, God,” of course God. Since when has God ever come down from on high and said to the people who claim an excluseive pipeline to him ‘you are wrong?’ Never. It is the perfect justification, wrong as it is!”

Gregor Mendel the father of genetics, was an Augustinian Abbot.

But whether the objects of theology or natural science are in fact ‘proven’ or not is not germane. What we have in both natural and theological science is an appropriation of authority, the ‘higher organization’. This has no necessarily intrinsic relationship with the religious since the successful conflation of an object and its context, its bracketing, by the willful religious subject — nevermind whose will — I would understand to be necessarily independant of a stipulated authority of a given science. That is, religion is pragmatic, science is prescriptive.

Hmm. Do I really like where this is going to, or better to write Twainish German?

if one accepts that more is revealed about what we do not know with every scientific discovery, than what is actually added to humanity’s body of knowledge/explanation of existence, one can accept that the body of information that humanity does not know is infinite. If the body of information explaining existence is infinite, faith of some kind becomes essential for most to manage the unease and insecurity of not understanding one’s own existence. Also, science and faith become absolutely complimentary because with the unknown being infinite no matter how much knowledge/explanation of existence humanity compiles, the quantity of unknown information remains the same – infinite.

To Ither 241
The mistake is in taking the naturally adaptive inclination and “hard wiring” that automatically causes us(orany organism in which the adaptation is present) to look for more organization than may actually be present, as an authority.
It is no more an authority or indicative of an authority than any other attribute that defines an organism. As it happens, the highest organization that humans know of are humans and therefore we see human attributes in nature where there are none.
That is pragmatic only in that is may be safer to bet that it is there than not if we have insufficient information to think otherwise and so act to keep ourselves alive.
The more pragmatic course, however, is to become as aware of the objective world as we can be, thus mitigating the anthropomorphizing or animising of the world where it does not belong and therefore allowing our responses to become both more meaningful and appropriate.
As an evolutionary adaptation, it is with us regardless of the state of our knowlege though we can overcome the initial impulse by becoming more knowlegeable of the world. That endeavor is the pervue of science.
Unfortunately, the experience of “knowing” does not require actual knowlege so we are easily fooled into thinking we have when we don’t. There is nothing pragmatic about that.

minnesotachuck,

I read Thomas Kuhn as part of a book club run by a professor emeritus from Penn State. A book of great importance and the concept of paradigm very helpful.

This professor used a card series lecture to teach us about how we are trained to look for symmetry in patterns by the hard sciences. The student struggling the most with this lecture was the daughter of the head of the biology department.

At any rate the professor would sit in a chair and read us facts as we tried to solve a card problem. Three cards on the board and we were to predict the next card. This was our only work. Each week we would come in and work on the solution. As we did this a microcosm of society developed. The teacher would “validate” or “attend” to the students who were developing predictions and theories closer to the answer or solution. He would sit and spew stories, anecdotes and facts and call himself Nature.

As he would attend to a student who was “getting hotter”, the class would attack that student. In this setting I was the student solving the problem. It was fascinating. As he would spend time talking to me the other students would get restless and even hostile. The daughter of the physics student actually assailed me in the restroom stating “I don’t know why he keeps talking to you.” Eventually I solved the problem and the class was incredulus. The solution was simply that the following care would have asymmetrical. That is it would not fit the pattern that the three on the board established and this would happen every third time. It was amazing because as I began to theorize the solution the class would not follow.

I was not a science student per se, and had not had years of drilling about the process of gathering data and the use of math in sequences. These students had been so trained that they could not “get outside the box”. And it was horribly stressful for them.

At any rate it paralled Kuhns discussion about paradigm shifts and the back lash and precursory denial.

Bateson described loose thinking and hard thinking and that all sciences benefit from both.

And then Thomas Kuhns work led into discussion about Chaos theory.

Truth…validity is my God.

John Casper–
Not a problem. I think you are misinterpreting my point. Creation myths, even considering their similarities, absolutely become mutually exclusive of each other and no appeal to the relative strengths and weakenesses of their science at the time they are formulated can change this. Both Judeo-Christian creation and Japanese creation stories feature an omnipotent being and a formless void but soon thereafter they exclude each other in their details. By this I mean that one cannot fairly say that both of them can be correct. I appreciate your erudition and concede that in all likelihood it is greater than mine but your arguments against my opinions miss the mark in that they either are, in my opinion, incorrect as in regard to my exclusivity argument or simply don’t really address them. I appreciate the feedback. It is true that I need to express myself more clearly.

John Casper 236–
To a great extent I agree with you. This is why I don’t advocate silencing the “magical thinking” of the human mind. I am still of the opinion that faith’s logical conclusions (built on illogical assumptions) are dangerous and not just to apostates such as myself.

day late and a dollar short to this conversation…but fwiw: christy’s point @87 is spot on. most people have no idea just how much of the bible comes from older pagan traditions. a good place to start is hallo’s “the context of scripture” which does a line by line comparison of biblical texts and the nonbiblical older source material. short version: by the time the bible was being written, most of the “good ideas” in it were already very established by other religious traditions. i don’t want to say that the OT authors had nothing original to say, but they certainly weren’t shy about adopting mythology from other traditions.

TritoneSubstitution
Huge apologies!
Thank you for your comments.

spek says:
July 7th, 2006 at 7:44 pm
Beautifully, economically said spek.

James, 235 said,
“Always remember that Science is a verification process while Religion is not.”

John Casper, 236, said,
>>“Always remember that Science is a verification process while Religion is not.”
>”History is the verification of religion.”

Um. History doesn’t do verification. That’s not History’s job.

Science verifies what people think is history.

What is being overlooked is the word “process”.

History is not a process. Religion is not a process.

Only Science is a process.

John Casper, 236 also said,

>…religious texts have to survive the test of history.

But to what purpose. What does that mean? There are religious text from the ancient Greeks and Egyptians.

Surviving does not give them accuracy in any shape or form.

Religious text survive if people find them useful, as in tools.

But tools are picked up, modified and discarded over time. (Some wind up in muesums.)

The Test of History is meaningless for religion. History can’t save religious faith.

Remember religious faith is about declared unverified starting positions.

Those unverified starting positions are what are vulnerable to the Science process.

Which is what scares Faith so much.

Science process has the Power to destroy the starting positions. Destroy enough starting positions and you destroy the faith, hence the religion.

Which was unintended by people of faith exploring their world around them long ago. Theologians did not see the power in science they were uncorking as they explored the world around them. Indeed, They had no idea that the
process they were engaged in would in the end would have the ability to destroy faith systems.

However, The impact of the Science process on Spirituality is something completely different.

Religious faith is doomed; Spirituality is not.