Science and Religion Can and Do Mix, Mostly 1345
coondoggie writes "A recent Rice University study found that in one of the more vitriolic social (and increasingly political) battlegrounds, science v. religion, there is more common ground that most folks believe. In fact, according to the study, only 15% of scientists at major U.S. research universities see religion and science as always in conflict."
This just makes sense (Score:3, Insightful)
Discarding the moral teachings that have been handed down over thousands of years is equally ridiculous.
Well, 85% of scientists are wrong, then. (Score:2, Insightful)
There is always a conflict between religion and science. It's just that it's mostly irrelevant for scientists in the USA. And even more irrelevant in Eastern Europe.
Now try to teach evolution in Muslim countries like Pakistan. Go on, try it. We'll pay for your funeral.
Absolutist statements = No-No (Score:5, Insightful)
ALWAYS in conflict? ALWAYS? To anyone who has ever been part of the educational system, and has gotten used to taking multiple choice tests, the word "ALWAYS" when applied to something like science/religion is a big red flag.
Finding that 15% agree with an "always" statement in that context is rather an amazing find.
Ask the question in terms of "overwhelming frequency" or some other next-to-absolutist statement, and you'll get more honest answers. But this report on the study, at least, only presented the "ALWAYS(15)/SOMETIMES(70)/NEVER(15)" range, which doesn't seem useful at all.
With the statement presented, and the specific granularity of statements allowed, this seems more like quote-mining to minimize the perception of conflict than an honest study.
Ryan Fenton
Re:This just makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not the "moral teachiings" that cause conflict, it's the historic mythology that science disagrees with.
Re:This just makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This just makes sense (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed.
- Women are their husband's property.
- Homosexuals should be stoned.
- Unruly children should be stoned.
- When ordered by God we should kill not just men but also women and children when invading a country.
- Eat a lobster and die.
- Divorce and be stoned.
- Etc...
I mean, discarding all of the scientific nonsense is a no-brainer. But we really need to get back to the good book as a source of moral authority.
Re:This just makes sense (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:This just makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Moral teachings that have largely been proven to work in building relatively peaceful and successful societies and individuals. So I'd include some religions and not others, perhaps, if you want to draw a fine line.
The only people that believe science and religion are fundamentally in conflict are religious fundamentalists and the militant positivists you find here on Slashdot. For *everyone else* (as the study shows) they coexist in harmony.
Science is the empirical study of how things are.
Religion is the normative study of how things should be.
There's no inherent conflict between these two things, because they discuss two very different things.
While the logical positivists on here will say the study how things should be is uninteresting, for most people, well, it's interesting. (Which is why logical positivism is a failure of a philosophy.)
Re:This just makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure the moral teachings cause conflict.
If a voice in your head told you to kill your own child, would you do it? Let's say at the last minute, the voice says "just joking!", but you were *really* gonna do it. Am I supposed to think you did a morally righteous thing by fully intending to kill your own child to prove your loyalty to someone?
Or what if there was an angry mob outside your house, about to rape some guy? If you instead convinced the mob to rape your own daughters, and let the guy go, am I supposed to look at you like a role model?
Morality has been awfully fluid over the period of human existence...
Re:This just makes sense (Score:1, Insightful)
"Discarding the moral teachings that have been handed down over thousands of years is equally ridiculous."
Yes, society would go bust if it wouldn't have things like:
Leviticus 3:17
The eating of fat is prohibited forever
Deuteronomy 22:28-29
If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay the girl's father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the girl, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives
Exodus 21:20-21
If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies as a direct result, he must be punished, but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, since the slave is his property
Deuteronomy 25:11-12
If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity.
Leviticus 20:9
Any person who curseth his father or mother must be killed
Leviticus 21:17-18
People who have flat noses, or are blind or lame, cannot go to an altar of God
etc
Re:This just makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
And now we have those examples to add to our historical knowledge too!
Isn't this fun?
Oh, you meant that some people tried something new and ran up against (major) problems to do with abuse of power and other nasty aspects of human nature, so we should (obviously!) go back two millenia in our thinking.
Re:This just makes sense (Score:2, Insightful)
Religion is the normative study of how things should be.
Popular religion as it is practised in the west is not the study of anything. It's all about being part of the crowd and proclaiming your own righteousness above others.
And yes, I include Islam as practiced in the west in this.
Re:This just makes sense (Score:3, Insightful)
s/some guy/an angel
s/a voice in your head/the god you've seen do many wonders and miracles during all your life, he's even anticipated the destruction of cities to you (and then it happened, told you you were going to have a son with your ancient wife and then it happened) /
if you are going to criticize a text, take it within it's surrounding context. Picking Abraham's decision to take Isaac to the altar on itself is not rigurous, at all.
Re:This just makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
I've heard this interpretation before, but an awful lot of Christians still cite Leviticus whenever it suits, often while eating a bacon cheeseburger.
I realize that hypocrisy is far from limited to Christians, but this one is a regular on the evening news:
"Hey, how about some gay marriage?"
"Nuh uh, Leviticus."
A just universe would follow that up with a serious punching.
Re:They mostly have (Score:5, Insightful)
The example that I always like to use is the Big Bang, which was first formulated by Monsignor Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian priest. At the time that it was proposed, it received significant disdain from the astronomical community, since most astronomers at that time believed that the Universe was eternal and static (the so-called "steady state") -- they felt that a beginning of space and time at some point in the finite past crossed over into the realm of religion and philosophy. On the other hand, the religious community (by and large) welcomed the Big Bang with open arms, since it was in accordance with the creation accounts of their particular belief systems.
But in the 80 years or so since the advent of the Big Bang theory, a funny (and depending on your point of view, sad) thing has happened: The two camps have almost completely switched sides. As the evidence came in, most astronomers and cosmologists came to accept the Big Bang. They saw the confirmation of Hubble's observations regarding the redshift of distant galaxies, the discovery of the CMBR, the evidence that the distribution of baryonic matter in the Universe is consistent with what is predicted by Big Bang nucleosynthesis, etc.
Unfortunately, for those segments of the religious community that have been hijacked by the rise of fundamentalism / fanaticism in the last 50 years or so, the Big Bang was no longer "good enough". The idea that the Universe came about in a dramatic cataclysm ("in the beginning...") became unacceptable since the timescale called for billions of years, rather than the six thousand or so that are dictated by a rigid literalist interpretation of the appropriate holy writ. It's not good enough that the prevailing scientific theory on the origin of the Universe calls for a beginning -- it's not fundamentalist enough.
The idea that science and religion are incompatible is poisonous and civilization-threatening. Getting back to the example, the idea that religious folks, of all people, should be opposed to the Big Bang theory is completely baffling. If I live to be a thousand years old, I'll never understand it. There's no shortage of beauty in modern science or ancient teachings; the conflicts (such as they are) are largely manufactured. And as you mention, the rising fundamentalist movement is a major player in this enterprise.
Re:This just makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd say religion and science are pretty orthogonal.
Science kinda just tells you what is likely to happen when you do X. That's it.
Religion is simply your own personal reason that you do X. Maybe it's because everyone else is doing it. Or maybe you have some system of beliefs, founded in scientific observation or some other social aspect of your upbringing. But it doesn't really matter.
Religion is kinda like an operating system... it doesn't really matter which one you run. Some are more susceptible to viruses and botnets than others, some interoperate better other operating systems. But generally it's great that there's some diversity.
Re:This just makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, I went to catholic school. Jesuits, to be more precise. Out science lab teacher was a priest (quite an old one, 70+ years old). He used to say:
"It is not the duty of religion to say HOW things happen, but WHO is behind it. Science, on the other hand, will tell you HOW, but now WHO is behind it. I see no conflict whatsoever between the Big Bang and my faith. Between evolution and my faith. When I see Darwin's evolution, I see God's hand behind it."
Re:This just makes sense (Score:2, Insightful)
The difference between that "holy" book and most others is that it takes a definitive viewpoint that all men are flawed and the ONLY redemption is by faith. Science doesn't deal, ever, with how flawed man really is. Science assumes that we can "fix" whatever flaws we have with science, where that book makes the exact opposite case.
And from EMPIRICAL evidence, the book is 100% accurate on that point, while science is 0%. I guess we just need to give science more time to catch up. huh?
I'd explain the two stories to you, but I doubt you'd even care as to why they are important to the whole narrative.
Re:This just makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
dammit, now I want a bacon cheesburger.
Re:This just makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, if an alien came down from the sky in a spaceship, performed all sorts of wonders and miracles, and predicted the future with uncanny accuracy, and even helped me and my wife conceive when we thought it was impossible, sorry, but if they ask me to kill my kid, they're evil. Not just "not good", but pure evil.
Similarly, if an alien was about to be raped at my doorstep by an angry mob, I might be willing to try to fight the mob off and risk my life, but sacrificing my daughter to be raped instead is simply not moral. Heck, I might even be able to understand it if to fend the mob off I had to offer *myself* up for a good raping, but to sacrifice my *daughters*? Not okay.
Abraham's decision to take Issac to the altar should be universally condemned - killing your own child to appease a powerful figure in your life is never justifiable.
Re:This just makes sense (Score:1, Insightful)
Not to feed the troll, but official government run segregation ended a lot more recently then 150 years ago.
Generational poverty is hard to escape no matter what the skin color (and personal anecdotes that prove it's possible don't mean it's easy, or not a disadvantage), and a government actively working to maintain said poverty for multiple generations (after being recognized as people rather than chattel) is apparently capable of doing so.
I will not defend the actions of individuals that act like poor white trash because that is the easy thing to do, but as a group of people, African Americans are more likely to act like white trash than white people, due to the long-term and active effort to make sure they maintained their generational poverty. It can be argued that said effort is no longer being made, but if you associate with the broad population you'd be pretty stupid to make it.
Re:This just makes sense (Score:3, Insightful)
Funny, but that is exactly what that old book written by nomads basically teaches. Men are flawed. Hmmmm Funny that!
Re:You demonstrate the flaw in the article. (Score:5, Insightful)
>>It is the RELIGIOUS people who have a problem with science. Because it contradicts their religion.
As I said in another post, the two groups that feel science and religion are in conflict are fundies (which you'll see all over the place on sites like The Blaze) and logical positivists (found on sites like Slashdot). Most educated people do not.
>>Their statements of fact contradict yours.
It's not my problem if they're wrong. =)
Well, I've made it something of a personal mission to correct the fundies' misapprehensions about science, and positivists misapprehensions about religion, but that's just a hobby.
Re:This just makes sense (Score:1, Insightful)
not "a powerful figure in your life" but the creator of your life, your child, etc...
what makes you say that those acts are or are not moral? What is the foundation upon which you reason morality? (Assuming you are posing it in terms of reason, and not just of emotional rejection)
I'm not saying those acts are understandable, nor that I can empathize with them. "My thoughts are higher than your thoughts" Is 40. The upside of it, is that He's the only one that can claim that. Accepting His superiority means the devaluation of all other sources of "absolute". That thought made men like Bonhoeffer and Kolbe stand against nazism.
Re:really? (Score:4, Insightful)
The article didn't say "scientists and religious people can mix" it said "Science and religion can and do mix, mostly". I find the whole idea of answering if that's true via a survey as showing the exact wooly thinking which shows the difficulty of mixing science with religion. This is a
Science and religion can mix if, for example:
Fortunately it seems that for most religious scientists in most circumstances those things are true. Unfortunately there are some specific areas of cosmology and evolution where it seems many religious people are unable to follow scientific methods.
Thanks for proving it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. They're "wrong" because YOU already "know" what is "right".
And if they don't agree with you ...
And yet around 50% of the US population thinks that "intelligent design" should be taught in schools along with evolution.
It's not the "fundies" who are the problem.
It's anyone who believes that his personal religion is "right" and that others are "wrong".
Re:This just makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, I've read the NIV, King James, New American, Book of Mormon, Quran, and even the Pearl of Great Price (I skipped Dianetcs and just watched SouthPark instead). I understand the whole narrative. I even agree with some of it. But make no doubt about it, there is no post hoc explanation that makes Abraham a good person for almost killing his son by the demand of his powerful benefactor. None. Nada. No excuses for killing your kid, period.
As for how flawed man really is, that's an argument of philosophy that can be had without resorting to sacrificing your own daughters up for rape, or slitting your son's throat. Certainly, I've had my flaws and I've overcome them without resorting to faith, so your citation of empirical evidence is already refuted :)
As for your continued education on the Bible, I refer you to the illustrious Bart Erhman: http://www.bartdehrman.com/books.htm [bartdehrman.com]
Re:This just makes sense (Score:3, Insightful)
i'll give you that the lingering effects of segregation and the civil rights movement are present today - but as for slavery in the US, other than taught in history and referenced by groups, no one alive today has any actual memory or experience of it from either side.
something that someone did to someone else 4+ generations ago is not an excuse for your failings/situation today.
hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This just makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
If my mother, who created me, happened to be some fertility doctor that helped me and my wife create a child, and then told me I had to *kill* that child, I'd spit in her face. No matter how wonderful and powerful and generous she had ever been to me, asking for human sacrifice is simply not a moral action.
As to what makes me say that those acts aren't moral, you can derive it in any number of ways without resorting to some otherworldly figure. Philosophers of all sorts have extolled all sorts of rational foundations for morality over the years.
As for "higher thoughts", I'd be awfully skeptical of any being that demanded absolute obedience - after all, what mortal could discern between the word of God and the word of Satan?
Re:This just makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Religion is kinda like an operating system... it doesn't really matter which one you run. Some are more susceptible to viruses and botnets than others, some interoperate better other operating systems. But generally it's great that there's some diversity.
The next time a woman is stoned to death for adultery, a child is driven to suicide for being gay, a man is murdered for "sorcery" or a family is destroyed for being apostates, I'll be sure to cheerfully remind every involved that it doesn't matter what you believe, and that we should value this diversity.
Re:This just makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This just makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This just makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
So hospitality trumps having your daughters raped? Look, no doubt Lot had a bunch of bad options (maybe he'd have been better off if he had sufficient weapons and allies to fight the mob directly), but can we really say he picked the best out of the bunch?
Of course the story is supposed to be simple, and counterfactuals kind of miss the point, but if the moral of the story was to emphasize how a good host should behave, shouldn't it have been more about sharing the best cut of meat with his guests, or letting them have the nice blanket? Instead, the story treats women as chattel, denigrates any idea of a noble martial defense of ones' guests or ones' family, and begs the question, if the mob was so powerful that it could get Lot to offer his daughters up for rape, why didn't they just take the women, and the angels, and Lot for good measure? Are we supposed to infer that Lot's daughters were just really good at tuckering the mob out with wild sex, that their appetites had been satisfied? Or are we supposed to believe that the mob, while completely irrational in their need for rape, figured that hey, we got the girls, let's not push our luck?
When I say morality is awfully fluid, of course I refer to the fact that back when the story of Abraham, or even Lot, was written, there were probably a bunch of otherwise normal, average people who just didn't see anything offensive about the stories (although frankly, that's speculation on my part - maybe most people thought it was egregiously offensive, but those indoctrinated into it at a young age came to accept it).
Re:This just makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if my mother *was* The Creator, that wouldn't make child sacrifice proper, or even a willingness to sacrifice a child proper.
Sure, Hobbes, Kant.
Generally enlightened self interest and attachment - as a tool, cooperation brings more benefits than conflict, and so one tries to treat others as one would like to be treated, but we can't ignore the fact that we have stronger and weaker relationships with people (and animals and things for that matter), that make some connections and responsibilities more important than others.
Can I assume that you don't have any rational foundation for your morality, and that it is simply communicated to you through authorities you consider superior to your own intellect?
Re:This just makes sense (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Create rules which, by his own admission, are so strict that they cannot be followed.
2. Decree that anyone who violates these rules will be punished by nothing less than eternal torture. Unimaginable agony inflicted upon them without rest as hours become days, days become years, and years become millenia for ever and ever. Even for something so tiny as saying 'no, your bum doesn't look big in that.'
3. Proudly proclaim that you don't want to torture everyone for eternity, but he is a just god and sinners must be punished.
4. Create a loophole by which a person can escape all punishment, but only by agreeing to worship him. For added dick-points, base the loophole around punishing the one completly innocent person in their place.
There is evil, and there is.... holy fucking shit evil. Hitler had *nothing* on that guy. God is every human evil combined, and multiplied by infinite time. I can't even find a good analogy for how evil that it, because nothing else even comes close.
Re:Thanks for proving it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Give up, you have no hope. You must already know this, but in an argument between science and religion, science can never win because it's constrained by provable facts, whereas religion has the entire depth of the human imagination to come up with a response.
But you have pointed out the key bit - why should the Bible be any more a source of authority than, say, Dianetics? I think one of the secret reasons people are against Scientology (besides the brainwashing and slavery bits) is that it so obviously shows - in a nice, condensed 60 year history - how a major religion can basically be manufactured whole cloth and accepted by millions...
Re:This just makes sense (Score:2, Insightful)
Or when we pretend it ended 150 years ago?
It's not too long since blacks had to ride in the back of the bus and weren't allowed in through the front door. Even less since there was rioting because a black was let into a university.
Re:This just makes sense (Score:2, Insightful)
What "terrible act"? Are you implying that the story is historical fact? That would be ironic.
Re:Thanks for proving it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Whoa, human rights? Christianity is responsible for more torture and death in the first 19 centuries AD than almost any other human cause, and probably stunted development of "civilization" by several hundred years. Scientology, fortunately, has managed to do little more than steal some disposable income from gullible celebrities.
Anyway, you seem to be applying a logical argument ("2000 years of ...") as some sort of validation. If you applied length of belief to science, we'd still be studying the four elements...
And, I just don't see how philosophy and ethics need any requirement of religion, since religion has no requirement but faith. In fact, I never understood why "religion" needed to exist at all even for those who have that faith in a higher power. And IMO, personal faith in a few positive tenets doesn't really sound like a bad thing. If, as you say, the whole Bible should now be reduced to 2 concepts, why does there need to be such a massive infrastructure around it all? Why not just make it a personal thing that doesn't have to involve people who already understand the basic concepts of right and wrong?
Re:This just makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
Religion has advanced by discarding the moral teachings that have been handed down over thousands of years. And mainly because it has been forced to.
Re:This just makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
I take Jesus as described in the Bible as basis for my morality.
And how is that any less arbitrary than the GP, particularly in the absence of reliable evidence that there was anything special about Jesus? I agree that metaphysical questions about the origin of morality are hard, but falling back on religion only pushes back the question one more step.
Re:This just makes sense (Score:1, Insightful)
Do you believe that people can only be affected by things of which they have "actual memory or experience"?
You really don't believe someone's life can be significantly changed because of something that happened generations ago?
You might want to ask Mark Fitler Rockefeller (born 1967). He has no "actual memory or experience" of John D Rockefeller (born 1839) and all the things he did in the days of slavery, but boy is his life different because of those things.
To think that a human blot like slavery just fades after 150 years is ridiculous. I'll take the opposite position and say that if the United States of America lasts another 250 years, it will still bear scars of slavery. America was born as a slave state. It doesn't wash out.
Re:This just makes sense (Score:1, Insightful)
Or, it is about slavishly following your religion and that voice in your head claiming to be god and telling you to kill your kid to appease it. I think my view is closer to the text that yours which is appears to your own interpretation to make your god out to be not such a psychopathic dick.
In the story, the god demands a human sacrifice of Abraham to test his loyalty. God says "Abraham, make a burn offering of your son." and Abraham makes no protest, doesn't cry, and takes his son out to kill him with no remorse. Not only does your god come off as a mean-spirited asshole, but Abraham comes off as a vicious sociopath willing to do anything the voice in his head tells him to do.
Everything in you post is post-hoc justification for the evil actions taken in the story by Abraham and his purported god.
Just because people are worshiping a god doesn't mean you have to worship it too like lemmings jumping over a cliff
Oh, and your analogy is completely false.