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Science

Freeman Dyson Wins Templeton Prize For Religion 406

Posted by emmett from the a-world-apart dept.
Cy Guy writes "Quantum physicist Freeman Dyson, (father of the Dyson Sphere and Esther Dyson) who has written about religion's role in modern culture, won the $940,000 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. 'Religion has a much more important role in human destiny than science.' Here's a link to the wire story."
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Freeman Dyson Wins Templeton Prize For Religion

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  • Actually a majority of them. But does it mean that death is "better", and all others should kill themselves?
  • I can't imagine what you're talking about. My best guess is that your preacher neglected to tell you how much of the supposedly Christian value system actually predates Christianity by centuries, if not millenia.

    Sigh. Such a shame that you are so effectively programmed as to instantly assume I was talking about Christianity.

    What on earth gave you the idea that I'm talking about Christianity, or in fact *any particular* religion at all?

    Hey, here's a though, try and get this novel new idea into your head:

    "Religion" != Christianity.

    Here's another one:

    "Religion" != Worship of God.

    I'm not, in fact, a Christian or Catholic. My religious ideals and practices do not in fact have *anything* to do with this - that's strictly my business. If I wanted a flame war, I'd have stated what my religious preferences are, but frankly I'd prefer to keep that to myself, as is my right.

    I'm simply trying to point out that religions, as a whole, from Christianity all the way back to Paganism and beyond, have had an *organizational* role in the development of Man's civilization over the years.

    I would even go so far as to posit that the modern practice of pure rejection of religion for the sake of rejecting religion is naive and misguided, mostly due to ... wait for it ... an anti-Christian perspective that's been carefully cultivated (as well as being a direct result of people wrongly calling themselves "Christians" while engaged in harmful acts, i.e. wars) over the last few hundred years.

    So, please get a religious clue. There is more to religion than the worship of one god/deity, more to a religious body of knowledge than can be imparted in simple ritual. Christianity and its offshoots may have the modern religious limelight, but it by no means represents the entire show...

    Early religions, such as those found in the cults of Mesopotamia, might even be considered to be indistinguishable from science by todays standards... its just a pity that the severely limited Anti-Christian/Worship=Religion perspective propagated in our modern culture is preventing intelligent people with a degree of literacy such as (I'm assuming, given your participation in this forum) yourself, from being able to learn this.

    Look closely, ignore the Christian stigma, and you will see that there is more to religious contribution to the culture of Man than meets the eye...
  • Here's an example of the influence religion has on people's lives:

    http://www.paganteahouse.com/malleus_maleficarum /mm00a.html
  • For Catholicism, try 1943 as the year that an allegorical reading became the party line. And for some Protestant groups, further back than that . . .

    (OK, and for some, not even close today :)

    hawk
  • The relationship is one-way. R is a subset of F.

    (As with the meteorite example, we take an enormous amount on trust every second of every day, but we don't usually obsess over it, or feel the desire to pray over it.)

    Goals-based reasoning would work well if we were ants, but humans think using pattern-matching, rather than IF/THEN/ELSE constructs. This is why genuine AI research is getting nowhere, fast - it is very much easier to stick to rules, but rules complex enough to give the same power as fuzzy pattern-based systems would be impractical to utilise.

    Philosophy is a better bet, and many philosophical systems have proven very effective, to the point that many "religions" are really a mixture of religion and philsophy. (Zen Buddhism, for example, has very little to do with actual religion.)

    Politics are a fiasco. Current political systems are far too inflexible and dogmatic. They make the Roman Catholic Church look like the epitomy of dynamic, flexible, post-modern culture. (A quick example - know any British politicians who have acknowledged the truth of the General Belgrano? Or who confessed to the mistreatment of Peter Wright? Or who have worried about the alleged "Shoot To Kill" policy in Northern Ireland?)

    Psychology is a mess. Most psychologists could write as many text books on their own problems as they have studied to become a qualified psychologist in the first place. Psychology attracts seriously dysfunctional, emotionally disturbed individuals. (It also attracts many religious cults, as it's a handy way to track escapees.)

    Most of modern psychology is derived from, or inspired by, Sigmund Freud, who's work was more to justify his sexual addiction as "normal" than to study the nature of the mind. I don't have much time for people who need to invent an entire profession to excuse their habits. If they are THAT disturbed by what they're doing, there are easier alternatives - such as stopping whatever it is.

  • I should post more often.

    Naw. ;-)

    Thanks for your help.

    -Billy
  • <i>"To me, religion is a way of life, not a belief,"

    I am an Atheist, but I suspect that this is the optimal religious view for many people.</i>

    I am a Christian, and I think you're entirely right. Pardon my appeal to authority here ;-), but: "True religion is this: to help the widow and orphan in their need." One very good definition of religion is "faith in action."

    <i>There is actually an order of Anglican Priest who do not believe in God. They view religion as a social thing. I think we will find that religions like Judism which accept people being "cluturally Jewish but religiously Atheist/Agnostic" may have a real survival advnatage in the future. (Note: I am not Jewish, but I have many friends who it the above description)</i>

    I don't think so, not really. Culture is fine, but as you yourself phrase it, different religions really are different. I admire a person who is unwilling to claim absolute truth; a creed which claims to be false, on the other hand, is not even worth looking at.

    <i>"In this country, churches are the organizations that hold the community together"

    This is just flat wrong. It is true in many places, but religion hardly provides the culture that many modern people need period.</i>

    Correct. However, he wasn't talking about culture. Churches form a social fabric which serves two purposes: it provides a cultural philosophical basis and it defends against cultism.

    The first purpose, providing a philosophical basis, allows even dissidents to express their views. Of course, this can be abused -- but so can any other construction involving people. the solution isn't to outlaw the construction (or kill the people), but rather for each and every one of us to continually work to make sure that the abuse is never, never repeated.

    The second use, as a defence against cultism, is just as important: churches (of every kind) provide an open forum, where the views of a church can be openly discussed and debugged, and the views of individuals may be made clear (to themselves and others). Cultism occurs when a solitary group takes any philosophy and attempts to elaborate on it "secretly", without the peer review of the church. The result is most often obviously false, but is always socially false.

    <i>Religion has not provided the "integrating" force needed to bond people of diffrent races and religions. Art, music, clubs, economics, food, sex, etc. provide far far more influence then religion.</i>

    Don't know where you get that, quite simply. It's not true.

    <i>scientists should realize that "religion has a much more important role in human destiny than science."

    This is flat wrong too. The printing press has probable had more "tangible" influence then all of religious history combined, i.e. people who never invented religion would have used other social binding systems (as I mentioned before religion is justy one of many such systems), but without the printing press we would not have much of our current world.</i>

    Including our current religions, of course. But that works both ways -- remember what the first book printed on the printing press was?

    "People who had never invented religion," huh? Who would that be?

    <i>BTW> [this is regarding my .sig] Russel was a mathematician and the quote below is a tautology (if you narow your definition of christian to include only people who do not believe moral progress is possible because God layed down all the rules). It is funny to see a mathematician make subtilly veiled tautological statments. :)</i>

    Christian or not, I believe that no moral progress is possible (except as brought about by actual changes in people). No great moral teacher ever taught anything new; all they did was paraphrase and emphasise something we already knew. Anyone who taught "new" stuff was and remains a crackpot.

    -Billy
  • It is interesting how many physicists turn to religion of some sort, or at least write about it to some extent.

    Here's my theory on why this happens. Pure speculation of course, but perhaps feasible.

    1. The physicist spends years studying the intricacies and mysteries of the universe in an effort to gain some measure of understanding of its nature.
    2. Each time a mystery is de-mystified, another exposes itself, thereby presenting a further intellectual challenge.
    3. The physicist's confidence that all things may be explained and understood increases with each discovery.
    4. As more mysteries become apparent, the physicist begins to change his views, ever so slightly. Such that, although all things exist for a reason and can be explained by physics, the infinite complexity of the universe precludes any one being from understanding it all, unless that one being is omniscient. Aha!

  • This is a false definition of Faith, and is not compatible with the Biblical use of the word. Unfortunately, it is exceedingly common false definition.

    --

  • May I refer you to the work of David Hume (probably the best recognized rationalist philosopher) wherein he uses a very similar example regarding an Indian Prince who does not believe in Snow (having never seen it)?

    --

  • Well isn't that convenient! You'll hold Christians reponsible for every flu bug passed on by every Christian since Irenaus, yet repudiate the work of prior rationalists.

    It must be nice to have an agenda set in silly putty.

    --

  • It's evangelical because all of the core team are evangelicals. The solution? Submit stories that go in the direction you want to go. This site has literally been up for less than a week: there's plenty of room to make it what you want it to be.

    At this stage of the game, I think we (being the editors) will post most anything reasonable.

    --

  • That was admittedly the general "you". But, then again, you repudiate the work of other rationalists, so you can skinny out of this if you so choose.

    --

  • Oh no... I never claimed to accept Christianity on a scientific basis! Please document this claim if you want to pursue it.

    I may have said (I've posted loads of posts on this thread) that I have rational evidence that seems sufficient to me to accept Christianity. However, that does not make my basis "scientific": it makes it rational. Scientific depends on reproducibility -- which is why the scientific method doesn't seem to have done very well when it comes to the "human sciences". (Or do you really think drugging 10% of elementary school students is a step forward? Another argument for another day)

    The thing is that people and personalities are generally not entirely reliable. People can react differently to different stimuli, depending on many things which are not immediately apparent. It's called free will. And I happen to think (not believe) that this is the way in which humans are most like God: he has free will, which means that he may respond to exactly the same stimuli in different ways according to principles that are not immediately apparent.

    Repeat after me: Amphigory is not a deist, and God is not a computer you can program.

    However, let me respond to you this way: if you pray for something... for help when things seem hopeless, for a glimmer of light at the end of tunnel. And you can always see a way in which that prayer was answered, would you believe in God?

    If you were on the verge of suicide from the despair of your life, if you were making $4.35 an hour, and hadn't been on a date in 5 years... And you came, in a flash of realization, after years of exploring eastern mysticism, including being a Hindu monk for 2 years, to realize that "Jesus is the answer"... and, after making a decision to abandon your friends, abandon your idea systems to start over, swallow your pride and join the Christians you had mocked in following this Jesus... And, after all this, watched your life in a matter of less than a year be transformed (Married to a wonderful woman, working as a Senior UNIX geek, out of the parents house)... In short: healed. Would you then believe in God?

    There 'ya go. I believe in God because he has never failed me... What led me to first believe? I believe that I was first led to believe by direct divine intervention. You have no idea how much I used to hate Christians -- for me to accept Jesus was a miracle on its own. Which asks more questions than it asks: but that's okay, I'm not trying to solve the universe -- if I were, I'd use math and science.

    --

  • Err... Actually, Christian interpretation of scripture as metaphorical in nature goes back at least to the third century. See the writings of Origen (http://www.ccel.org/fathers2/ANF-04/TOC .htm [ccel.org]).

    --

  • You seem to think I'm making an argument for Christianity or the existence of God. I'm not. I'm simply trying to correct some of the gross slanders that are commonly directed against Christians and people of faith.

    and you still haven't answered the question. What distinguishes your Christian experience from similar ones involving different religions? You do agree that people have experiences of other religions, and that these people must be in some way deluded or mistaken, right? We do agree that the majority of religious believers are deluded, right? What makes you different?
    What makes me different is this: I am not trying to correct my life under my own power. My salvation is a gift from God. And Judeo-Islamo-Christian is the only religious system and world view that deals acceptably with the undeniable fact of human fallability.

    I happen to think that Christianity offers the best and most complete structure of the JIC faiths. And I happen to think that the New Testament is "true". So, I am a Christian. I happen to think that Christianity -- in it's original form, as revealed in the Bible -- is a better approximation of the truth found in God than any other faith.

    This is not to say that Hinduism or Shinto or Bahai or Buddhism or even Judaism or Islam are correct. I think they are all missing various parts of the picture -- and in some cases have missed the picture altogether. But its not a boolean thing: Christians are not right about everything, and everyone else is wrong about everything. So, Muslims are right to believe in Allah (who is, in their view, the same as Jehovah) but are incorrect to reject the New Testament and it's message of grace. Buddhists are right to emphasize self-realization through moral behaviour, but are wrong to think that people can do it under their own power and they are wrong (in the Mahayanan) to reject God as God. Hindus are correct to worship God, but are incorrect about his nature.

    On Slashdot, I am not trying to make converts (although I would welcome any that come). I am engaging in an apologetic aimed to correct false accusations leveled at Christians within the Slashdot community.

    I just noticed this line in your post:

    Besides being equally applicable to all religions, the problem with your argument is that it leads right to the atheological arguments from evil and disbelief. Why has god failed so many others? And if god always answers prayers, why would anyone ever stop being a Christian? And why are there so many non-Christians? The evidence you cite, were it to exist, WOULD be available to all. Unless god only answers your prayers and not others'?
    My exact point is that he may, or may not answer prayers. Possibly I spoke casually earlier: when I pray, I don't say "God, I want $100,000". I ask him, as a personality, to attend to a need. He attends to it in his way, in his wisdom. It is his choice -- He's a father, not a cosmic vending machine! You are trying to shove God in a box, and he won't fit, so you claim he doesn't exist. As some people have put it, every prayer is answered, but sometimes the answer is "no". Even Christ had to lean on God's wisdom rather than his own ... Luke 22:42.

    I'm rambling now. But the point is that you are trying to shove me and God into a box -- and so you can't understand either one.

    --

  • Well... Let me say up front that I have never seen a statistical analysis of frequency of prayer response across faiths. Have you? Do you have a reference?

    In fact, I suspect such an analysis would be entirely invalid, even if everything I say is true. Why? Because God is not a circus clown: He's not going to answer prayer to satisfy your scientific curiosity. Or at least he doesn't have to. It seems like you still haven't got a handle on the fact that God is fundamentally different in quantity and quality. It's the fallacy of the Greeks all over again -- they couldn't imagine a God any different from what they knew.

    Look... There are 5 different first-century accounts that report Christ dying, then being raised from the dead. Each is obviously from a different person. Matthew dates to around 60AD according to recent carbon-14 dating done on fragments of it. Mark is also believed to be in the 60's, with Luke in the 70's and John in the 70-80's. Paul wrote as early as 45 in some of his letters by some estimates. I'll leave out Josephus since many try to claim it's a forgery (without evidence).

    And there is no record of anyone questioning the basic historical fact of the resurrection prior to the third century -- despite the fact that there are numerous public records of Christians as early as 66.

    But all these are just excuses. My basic evidence is my experience.

    Tell me something: Why do you accept that man has landed on the moon? Did you see it? Or just the video-tapes? They can fake ANYTHING on video-tape nowadays. Why not try applying your sceptic philosophy towards that question and see what you come up with? Once you're done with that, please prove the earth is round. And, while you're at it, I'd like you to prove that Newton was not invented to glorify England by Queen Mary I -- And prove that Leibniz shouldn't get full credit for the laws of motion instead of a foot-note.

    I doubt you can prove any of those.

    --

  • Actually, no they aren't. I believe in Christianity because the best evidence I have available suggests to me that it is true. Now, granted some of this evidence isn't objectively observable. but that does not mean it's not there.

    The problem with rationalism (as defined, for example, by David Hume) is that you can only accept that which is part of your "ordinary experience". You run a profound risk of being placed in the position of the hick, who, upon being offered the chance to ride an elephant, said "there ain't no sich animal".

    Minds are like parachutes -- they function best when open. But it's amazing how many people who quote that saying in fact have very closed minds vis a vis certain subjects such as religion.

    --

  • Oh come. You've rejected 5 definitions that don't support your assertion in favor of a secondary one that does. Let's do the whole entry:
    faith (fth) n. Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, an idea, or a thing. Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence. See Synonyms at trust. Loyalty to a person or thing; allegiance: keeping faith with one's supporters. Often Faith. Theology. The theological virtue defined as secure belief in God and a trusting acceptance of God's will. The body of dogma of a religion: the Muslim faith. A set of principles or beliefs.
    I deny, specifically, that religious conviction requires "faith" in the definition you used. Why? Because that's not wwhat I beleive, or how I cam to believe.

    To me, Faith is a certainty in something ultimately unproveable sufficient to provoke action. Especially in a Christian context, you cannot separate faith from action. I should also observe that everything is unproveable in the ultimate sense, so everything requires faith.

    The question, even with your definition, is where one should put faith. You would appear to put faith in rationalism, and in the American Heritage dictionary. I put faith in my experience of interaction with an admittedly invisible entity I call God. God has never failed me -- he has changed my life and my character 180 degrees. I can see the results of his hand - in myself and in Christians I know.

    Others, on the other hand, put faith in "Reason". They suppose that they can think their way out of anything, because of this rather nebulous quality of rationality they claim to possess. Like God, it is invisible and ineffable.

    I put faith in God because I have seen Him work for the problems I care about. You put your faith elsewhere because it seems to fix the problems you care about. I honestly think that you are mistaken: but time will tell.

    --

  • Both positive and negative.
    Religion has sparked some of the longest, bloodiest wars in the history of mankind. Probably killed just as many people as it's ever helped. Like the man said though, the problem is the people who are too arrogant to admit that they could be wrong. Why do those people always end up in charge? :)
  • No, I just can't resist:


    We have no reason to believe that a resurrection of any kind has ever taken place, or even in the historicity of this Christ,


    And I submit that you have herewith exemplified a form of religious faith, in that you believe either that sufficient evidence has been provided to make this sort of statement, or (more likely) you simply believe that no evidence is needed.

    The historicity of Jesus of Nazareth is in no more dispute than that of Julius Caesar. Though these days it seems to be a badge of distinction to disbelieve in something dear to the unwashed masses. Maybe that's why we get fellows that profess to disbelieve in William Shakespeare or the Holocaust. Whatever. Thought is free. Who says it has to make sense as well?
  • How many don't realize that their own beliefs are based on a sort of faith, that is, a faith in scientific results that they haven't personally witnessed or belief in events too far back in time to personally witness. To me, all of us have some degree of faith. Those who deny it haven't fully looked at their own faith.

  • People can be religeous if they like, doesn't bother me.

    Christianity does bother me.

    Morality and christianity are irreconcilable. Christianity turns morality into obedience, and makes true virtue impossible.

    Christianity make vices out of virtues and virtues of vices. For the christian, pity, obedience, meekness, modesty: these are virtues. This is upside down and sick. Compare to aristotle's conception of virtue through moderation, which depends on no dogmas and no fantasies. How much healthier and human this is!

    Christianity is anti life; it contains a latent hatred for reality. The real world is god's kingdom: the fantasy. The material world is actually false. What an absurdity! How does a person come to believe such nonsense? I agree wih Nietzsche that christianity is perhaps the lowest conception of the divine, ever.

    Indeed, for many christains life is simply a curse to be endured. No wonder christains hate sex and other natural healthy human instincts.

    The christian god is a vampire that sucks the life and strength out of humanity. It makes humans obedient and weak. The Romans did wrong by nailing him up, they should've driven a stake through his stinking black heart.

  • Although Freeman Dyson's known in geek circles mainly for his scientific pursuits, the story's about an award in the field of religion.

    The story's not about science, so why use the Einstein-head "Science" icon?

    Whatcha really need is an icon for "Religion." I'd like to propose the yin and yang, since it'll seem more innocuous to antireligious geeks than a cross, a crescent-and-star, a magen David, etc.

    As I press "Submit," I have the horrible sinking feeling that this'll get moderated as a troll...

  • "Most people do not associate god with getting a million dollars."
    Announcer: You've just won a *million dollars*!
    Recipient: Thank you Jesus!
    : )
  • Think what you like about Dyson and the religion v. science issue, but from what I know of him he deserves the recognition.

    He spent the spring semester of 1999 as a visitor at my alma mater, Gustavus Adolphus College. I attended a couple sessions of the weekly seminar he participated in. In that arena, and when I saw him (almost every day) in the cafeteria, he always struck me as being contemplative and humble.

    I didn't agree with everything I read in his book Imagined Worlds, but you have to tip your cap to him for having the pluck to talk about religion and science openly, something that very few of his peers are wont to do.
  • Lastly, ANY "Christian" who knocks on the door to "convert" you has broken a dozen laws laid down by Christ, not least of which is the commandment to tolerate others and not judge them. Christians are STRICTLY forbidden from judging or condemning others, other views and other ways of life. If those religious sects involved -lived- the life they claim to profess, everyone would be a great deal happier. And the non-Christians would greatly profit from learning that commandment, too.

    That's a bit of an overstatement of Christ's statements on judgement. The oft quoted: "Judge not least ye be judged" is part of the Sermon on the Mount. It is immediately followed by the results of judgement: Mainly that the judgement used by you shall be used to judge you. Next comes the metaphor of the splinter and the mote, directing one to judge oneselve before judging others. This section of the sermon concludes with the statement "Cast not your pearls before swine." Fulfilment of that commandment clearly requires judgement.

    An equally valid (more valid IMHO) interpretation of this section is not to avoid judgement, but to:

    1. Understand the consequences of it.
    2. Temper any and all judgement with understanding and mercy.
    3. Not avoid judgement when no other option is availible.
    Clearly this is a better descrption of the actions of both Christ and the Aposoles.

    Finally, any Christian who would follow the example of the aposoles should try to spread the Good News. This in and of itself shouldn't be viewed as a wrong. Where many modern Christians fail in following the hospitality of Christ is not in preaching the word, but in understanding the meaning of 'NO.'

  • That's still not a tautology, it's simply an assertion, at without your rather stretched definition of a christian, which Russell simply did not assert in that statement. You want tautologies, go read Rand ... somehow she managed to make a whole philosophy out of them.

    (BTW, I'm an atheist, find something else to club me with in response)
  • For all the good parts of that movie, the constant harping on religion irritated the shit out of me. I'm sorry, but I don't remember religion being a great part of the moon landing missions, nor do I think rabbies and priests are going to be mission critical in any future Mars landings. I grew up in a very religiously conservative household, so I've seen all the pros and cons. Frankly, people that take the strict scientific view of the universe (Big Bang, Evolution, etc) and still try to bring it in harmony with the Bible make me sick. Even sicker make me religious people that try to reinterpret the Bible in scientific terms.

    You take the one or the other. The Bible says the Earth was created in six days, while science has a completely different view on that, period. All that creationist science crap is just that, people that are too repressed to recognize their religion as the crutch it is, and who with each transgression of God's law relive shades of the past where their parents would smack them over the head for blasphemy or other sins. Organized religion is the most successful example of Pavlovian learning ever. Achieving obedience through the induction of guilt.

    Uwe Wolfgang Radu

  • What you have to realize is that most readily accesable parallel universes will be very similar to our universe. Thus we would expect that similar events would occur in each. So this is not as great a plot hole as it may first appear.

    I thought the business model of the time travel company (name?) didn't make any sense, and that bugged me more than the speculative physics. I also thought that the technology was rather advanced for the time period, it should have been set 20 or so years into the future.

    I agree that Timeline was a light weight novel. More of a snack then a whole meal. And I didn't feel that all of the characters really worked. Still I enjoyed it and it made a flight from LA to Philly seem a bit faster.

    Steve M

  • Good read, but not very scientifically correct.

    Actually, the book is based on real, if highly speculative, science.

    The part about time travel and multiple universes is based on the book, The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch, a physicist from Oxford University. I don't believe that Deutsch proves his case but the book is quite interesting (and quite out there).

    You can get this book at Fatbrain [fatbrain.com] or at your local library.

    Steve M

  • When we speak of religion, we usually imply the belief in some sort of Super Being, usually a god. I feel that religion is really a "handle" describing an underlying API in human behaviour, the need to belong and the willingness to follow. I find religion every day, in people that champion vi over emacs, GNOME over KDE, Ford over Chevy, Us against Them, etc etc.

    People need to find a cause to champion, it helps them define their boundries of existance. Yes, religion plays a vital role in human existance, and yes, religion is a way of life, not simply a belief. Having said that, religion has little to do with a god, as much as it has to do with personal identity. Even athiests have need to champion a cause, perhaps the absolute denial of a god, or whatever else they find important to their existance.

    Science, as with anything, can be turned into a religion; there certantly are opposing camps of thought in many areas of science. Whether or not the players see this as religion, is simply a matter of personal perspective. What it is, in my opinion, is a manifestation of a very real human need to belong to a seemingly well defined group, whatever that may be.

    What I also find interesting is the human tendency to believe without fully understanding the belief itself. Very few practitioners of the various religions are true masters of their respective religion. Once people grab onto a belief system, they are reluctant to let go, despite any logical arguments. Humans are much less individual than we would like to think. We are slave to the herd mentality, it's just a matter of what herd you follow.
  • The big diffrence between logic and neutonian mechanics is that we have seen the execptions to newtonian mechanics and built better theories.

    Eh, no, the big difference between logic and newtonian mechanics is that logic is provably correct (given your axioms), whereas newtonian mechanics (or quantum, or any other physical theory you care to mention) seems to describe what happens and predict what will happen. If your theory's predictions don't match your results, then you need to go and get a better theory. This is, you'll note, all empirical, but logic involves a concept of proof.

    Social Darwinism is a good example. There is little doubt that natural sellection plays *some* role in our culture...

    I'd say there is quite a lot of doubt about the role of natural selection in culture. Bear in mind that natural selection is a mechanism which tries to explain the huge diversity of life. There is no particular reason why it should have any applicability to culture at all (real question - has anyone got any real evidence for natural selection-like mechanisms operating in culture?). Certainly not in the way it has been used in the past, with "survival of the fittest" as a misused slogan - 'fit' here is not talking about the person who spends the most time at the gym... We are now at Godwin - 1 ;-)

  • Yes, any sufficiently complex formal system will in principle have true statements that are not theorems. So what? That doesn't imply that there are no theorems, and it certainly doesn't imply that we formed a set of rules of logic based on our experience of the world. If the rules we use were influenced by our experience of the world, then different experiences would lead to different sets of rules. That doesn't seem to be the case, obviously.

    To go back to the original post I replied to:

    We have only one real theory of logic, we test the hypothosis frequently, it works out frequently, so we continue to use it

    It works out all the time, but we'll let that slide. Our rules of logic aren't falsifiable in the way that newtonian mechanics (or any other physical theory) is. If we happen to nip off somewhere close to a black hole and notice that some things that the theory predicts are not the case, then we know the theory is at best incomplete, and we have some work to do. I don't think you can falsify a rule of logic in the same way. You can't (by definition!) arrive at a false result by following your rules. You may in due course find that there are true results that you can't get to by following your rules, and we're back to Goedel again, but that fact doesn't prove your rule wrong.
  • There was a great interview with Freeman Dyson [npr.org] on NPR [npr.org]'s All Things Considered [npr.org] last night. Well worth the listen.

  • The dictionary definition of "faith" [dictionary.com] says: "2. Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence".


  • Dyson opines that "In this country, churches are the organizations that hold the community together" but that has never been true anywhere that I have ever lived. Maybe in other, less urban parts of the country, and maybe among a different generation, this is true. Dyson's views are really out of step with most of the country, especially younger people today. Even regular churchgoers in my acquaintance consider their church only one community to which they belong... they do not consider the church to represent the entire community.
  • I hate to start a flame war or anything, but when exactly was slavery outlawed in Virginia?
  • "Probably killed just as many people as it's ever helped.

    Wow... again, sounds like science! "

    There's a very fundamental difference between the idea of a religion killing someone, and one of the products of science killing someone: aside from indirect influences (like people contracting HIV because contraceptives are `against God's word'), when a religion kills someone, it's by actually coming out and saying "kill this person/group of people". Aside from a _very_ small lunatic fringe, scientists _never_ say "you should kill this person because science says so". That's the difference - most religions have very little problem (though not so much these days) with condemning people to death on religious grounds, while science as a discipline says nothing about that sort of thing.

    Please, don't think of science as a way of living or a code of ethics or anything like that - all that science is is a tool for learning about and describing the world. It's pretty much identical to the thing with guns - "guns don't kill people, people do". Science doesn't kill people, even though it may provide tools that allow people to. Religious leaders and their followers, on the other hand, _do_ kill in the name of their religion, and some religious sects actually require killing in some circumstances. That's what people mean when they talk about religion killing people - it's the conscious decision to take a life, rather than the indirect result someone developing a tool.

    himi
    --
  • I have a fairly serious problem with those people who argue that religion and science aren't incompatible. The thing is, pretty much all of those arguments basically reduce to "religion is just a way of living/code of ethics/whatever". And this is fundamentally wrong - religions contain those things, but they also have other baggage that they carry along, and which (arguably) form the core of the religion. I'm talking about things like the vengeful God of the Catholics, who'll send you to hell if you don't stop right now!, or the Jewish God who thinks eating pork is disgusting, or any of a million other almost completely stupid tenets of faith.

    Religions do provide some foundations for a system of morals, by defining some things to be acceptable and some to be unacceptable, and so forth. Those morals provide a framework for thinking about ethics. But at the most fundamental level, religion actually has very little to do with ethics in the sense that people think about them now, and just about everything to do with commandments - "Thou shalt not kill!" might be a foundation for the idea that it's unethical to kill people, but the religious side of it is nothing deeper or more meaningful than your parent's telling you to take you elbows off the table.

    Science doesn't do anything like that - in fact, science doesn't tell you to do anything at all. Science is simply a method for learning about and describing the world - there are no commandments of science, no morality, no tenets of faith: all you get is a method for looking at the world, and if you're lucky the results of other people's work. Now, I know that the scientific community (the people who actually do science) is less pure than this, but that community and it's culture is still very strongly informed by the scientific method and it's lack of dogma. Good scientists take considerable delight in considering the possibility that the foundations of their understanding are completely and utterly wrong - this is about as far as it's possible to get from the tenets of faith that religions wave around like banners.

    Now, by those descriptions you'd think that the `let's get all cuddly with religion' people are pretty much on the ball - after all, if science is so agnostic, where's the clash? Well, you have to consider the foundations of the two things. Science is founded on questioning the workings of the world - "Does this theory really work? If not, then what kind of theory would work?". Religions, on the other hand, are founded on that faith thing - you're not supposed to question these things, because if you don't believe them on faith, you're obviously not part of this religion. See the problem?

    The point where scientists tend to screw up this kind of debate is where they either don't see, or just ignore the bits of whatever religion they're looking at which are dogmatic and completely reliant on faith. It's very easy to do, particularly in the western world today, because most western religions are really watered down and seem to minimise the leaps of faith required for membership. So a scientist looking at the Anglican Church would probably think "this God stuff's not important, let's look at their ethical thinking . . . " thereby missing the bit that makes the difference between an academic discussion group and a religion - faith.

    Recapping (hopefully slightly more clearly ;-), the problem with linking science and religion is that religion without faith is no longer religion, and a scientific method which incorporates blind faith in anything is no longer science. It doesn't matter how much of a religion's morality is sensible and workable, the religion is still founded on something that is fundamentally antagonistic to the scientific method. Ethics and morality are orthogonal to scientific enquiry, but faith is not. Science and religion are fundamentally contradictory, and no amount of award money or `mind of god' books will ever change that.

    /rant

    himi

    --

  • If R.S=0 then R=0 or S=0. Now which one is it?

    Oh, really? You mean the product does not work this way?

  • Well, Origen is Christian but he was also anathematised. So he's not exactly a stellar interpretation.

    IMHO the whole allegorical vs. literal argument is a little bit silly. To take the Creation bit--which is often the most contested--the words used in the Greek and the Hebrew are not necessarily 'day'; it is more 'period of time.' Thus it could mean billions of years.

    People who argue philosophical points based on close readings of translations amuse me. You can only properly argue from the original. In my opinion, of course. But so much of the Christian Scriptures and the faith makes much more sense when it is read in the original. Translators make mistakes, add their own biases and in various ways mess things up.

    I'm reminded of the Congressman who said 'If English was good enough for Jesus it's good enough for me.'

  • This just isn't correct. There are very serious differences.

    First, religions generally claim to know the absolute truth. Science does no do this. A belief in the validity of science is not a belief in anything beyond the idea that it's possible to form theories that can explain how or why things work. Any current theory is nothing more than a 'best guess' that will be revised as necessary.

    Second, think of science as open source software. Open source software tends to be (or so the theory goes) more secure than closed source software because there are thousands of people who all have access to the source and can spot bugs. You benefit from this even if you have no idea how to program.

    Science is the same. You can be reasonably sure that anything accepted as scientific fact is the best available model even if you don't understand it, because thousands of people who do understand it, accept it. And if you put the effort in, you could understand it yourself.

    Religion isn't like that. Religion is usually based on unverifiable claims. When religion states something that can actually be disproven, it usually is (e.g. the world is ~6000 years old). You must accept the word of some person or text as truth, and there is no method by which you or any other person can test the validity of it.

    Of course, you could go on about how it's possible past conditions were different, but you'd have no real reason to ever think they were if the conclusions drawn from thinking they were the same didn't conflict with your religion. That's not a logically valid reason. It's just as valid to accept that the universe was created five minutes ago and that all memories from any point before that were simply put into our heads at that time. There's no way to prove it, no way to disprove it, it doesn't explain anything, it doesn't allow for the prediction of anything. It's useless, even if it's actually true.

    Science starts by assuming nothing (except, as I note above, that it's possible to build models based on observations), and builds from there, making no unfounded assumptions.

    --
  • Allow me to first mention that I'm not religious and that most of my friends aren't either.

    however...

    I think that the single most dangerous pheonomina in modern society is the destruction of religious based values. This probably sounds a bit outlandish to most, but hear me out.

    Do you, the reader, personally consider yourself an exceptionally intelligent, well-adjusted person? If so, do you often find yourself disgusted with the general lack of common sense exhibited by those around you? I do too. So how does it make you feel that these people are free to go out and purchase fire arms, knives, drink too much and jump behind the wheel of a car? Personally, I find it a little unnerving. I cannot find it in myself to advocate that we revoke these basic rights, but what happens when the intellectually underprivilidged or passionately psychotic don't understand the ramifications of their actions or simply don't care?

    Let's start again with a theoretical example. It's a terrifing world out there, and I have a fairly difficult time dealing with it. Does it unnerve you to think that I am an athiest and a gun owner? I have no god to fear, and no diety to tell me that killing people at random is wrong. Wouldn't it be nice if I were smart enough to see that life is worth living and worthy of respect? I'm not. Wouldn't it be nice if our society, absent of religion, cherished these basic values? It doesn't. *bang* *bang*

    Some might assert that there must be a better solution than religion. In American society, I fear that this is not the case. Our societies' fundamental values are founded in religion. As religion decays, it takes those values with it.

    Perhaps a better provider for ethical foundation is just around the corner, but until we get there, I take comfort in the knowledge that the redneck with the 10-gauge down the hall is an ardent catholic.

    Sincerely,

    Ryan Taylor

    -rt
    ======
    Now, I think it would be GOOD to buy FIVE or SIX STUDEBAKERS
    and CRUISE for ARTIFICIAL FLAVORING!!

  • pfft (Score:2)

    by / ( 33804 )
    If you want proven and reliable, why not go with Judaism instead. It has those extra three and a half thousand years of field-testing and extensive bug-reports (talmud).

    Of course they're both plagued with a monolithic kernel design.... ;)
  • You're right, it wasn't against religion. It was more like an observation that religion is not accustomed to being the basis for monetary rewards. Most people do not associate god with getting a million dollars.

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • Wow (Score:2)

    by Foogle ( 35117 )
    Is it just me or is that a real lot of money? I mean, in todays world of internet IPOs it's not a tremendous amount, but how often do you see people awarded anything in the vicinity of $940,000? Especially for Religion :)

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • I don't know, the Templeton page says that their prize is worth more than the Nobel...

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • You missed another good one:

    "In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God."

    I highly recommend the Sept 1999 Sci. Am. article (page 88-93) "Scientists and Religion in America."

    Here's a good juicy Darwin quote out of there:

    "A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can."

    A great topic to struggle with, but ya might as well go for a BA in philosophy instead of just some karma on /.
  • This is not the first time a scientist has become famous and then starts spouting about areas of opinion and everyone listens to him, because hey, that's so an so. If you actually go to the Templeton site and read about what he had to say... well I'll show you:

    Dyson opposed funding for the now-defunct $8 billion Supercollider atom smasher and has consistently spoken out against "big science" projects whose costs are out of proportion to their scientific value. In particular, he opposes the International Space Station, which he describes as a welfare program for the middle class.

    ...

    he has chastised science for concentrating too much technology in "making toys for the rich" -- cellular phones, ever-smaller laptop computers, and the like -- rather than helping to spread knowledge, well-being, and wealth around the world so that one day "every Egyptian village can be as wealthy as Princeton."

    This "long-range moral and social fallout of today's scientific miracles" which fail "to produce benefits for the poor in recent decades is due to two factors working in combination," he wrote in Imagined Worlds. "The pure scientists have become more detached from the mundane needs of humanity, and the applied scientists have become more attached to immediate profitability." New medical technologies, he adds, "too attractive to forbid and too expensive to be made generally available, will exacerbate the inequalities that now exist within and between societies."


    I mean come on. Really. And this isn't the first scientist whose ideas have been held up because he is a famous scientist in some other completely different field.

    Incidentally, I don't think most of the science vs. religioun posts on here don't really apply to what Dyson is getting at here.
  • faith and reason are in complete opposition at all times.

    You have a very narrow definition of reason, and an equally narrow definition of faith. What is reasonable to someone is largely a function of that person's presupposition. And what someone has faith in is not necessarily without reason.

    Either one supposes that their is a God or one does not. There is not a particularly good evidential reason for believing either. So, whether one believes in God or not is largely a matter of what you call "faith" in either case.

    If on believes in God, then it might be reasonable to believe also in miracles. Otherwise, believing in miracles would be quite unreasonable. Both conclusions rely on reason, but they are based on different presuppositions. Just because something can't be subjected to repeatable experimentation does not mean that there is no reason to believe it.

    If you have a reasonable argument for believing in something (as in: there it is, I can see/touch/hear it), you don't require any faith.

    Perhaps, but I doubt that you have ever seen/touched/heard the origin of life. Yet you probably believe that there was one. Perhaps the sum of your reason for believing this is the fact that there is life now, and the (perfectly reasonable) assumption that there must have been a time when there was no life. The logical conclusion is of course that, somewhere in between, something happened that marked the beginning of life as we know it. So what was that something? If you believe in God, then God could be that something. If you don't believe in God, then it must be something else; maybe it was random molecular recombination, or another thing. You're arguing that one requires faith while the other does not. Which is likely to be true is a matter of opinion and presupposition, not science, and not reason.

    And if you rely on faith to believe in something, it is only because you have no good reason (I can't see/touch/hear/measure/understand it, but the bible tells me so).

    I'm not going to belabor my argument. But I find it interesting that you included understanding in this second list. Do you perhaps reason that if you can't understand something that someone else believes, then they must also have no understanding of it?

    --

  • If the rules we use were influenced by our experience of the world, then different experiences would lead to different sets of rules.

    There is no reason to assume that we would have noticed this effect. We all have pretty simillar experences. Especially, when you consider a million years of physical evolution to be experence.

    My question is "what makes you think the universe follows our rules of logic?" The only correct answer from your point of view is "we evolved brains which recognise something close enough to the universe's logic rules to allow us to create a software version of the actual rules." I just think we should not be too confident that we have logic all figured out.

    It works out all the time, but we'll let that slide.

    The people who study linear logic would not agree with you.

    Our rules of logic aren't falsifiable in the way that newtonian mechanics (or any other physical theory) is

    We many not see them as falsifiable when we use them, but they could stop giving good results someplace and we would notice. This may not seems like proper scientific falsifiability, but it is a kind of falsifiability.

    Example: Technically, calculous would be on a firmer footing for physics purposes if we based it on probability or quantum mechancs despit the fact that we need a seperate traditional development of calculous to build the probablility theory or quantum mechanics, i.e. this mess we call the real numnbers is not a physical model. The only reason it works so well is probablistic parts of quantum mechanics smooth things out.

    Personally, I think things like "and", "or", "not", and modus pones are realitivly universal, i.e. you need them to build your theories of the world, but the quantifiers are a whole new critter. They produce too much weird shit and they have too many alternatives (first-order, second-order, infinitary logics, etc.)

    I guess I can say I would not really be that surprised to discover that an alien race had a vastly diffrent mathematics. They might not care about first-order logic, they might have tried to develope a theory without cardinality (Skolem proved the donward Lowenheim-Skolem Theorems to get people to stop studing cardinality), they might have developed a diffrent method of formalising calculous based on a Libnetz view of the world instead of an epsilon-delta view of the world (i.e. our formal logic was developed to make epsilon-delta argumentes, but you could possably work directly towards a non-standard analysis without formalising quantifiers).

    You can't (by definition!) arrive at a false result by following your rules.

    This is not even correct for mathematics. We can prove that we can not prove the consistancy of set theory (I think this is Godel's other big theorem). Technically, it is possible to find a contradiction in the foundations of mathematics tomarrow! Now most of mathematics would survive because it can be made independent of the foundations were this to be necissary.

    This is also not correct in physics. There are so many things floating arround in physics and the rules of logic are vague enough that we could very well find contradictions (like time travel).. and just work our way arround them.

    Maybe you mean that you can not find a false result by following yuor rules with no axioms? that would be useless.

    Maybe you mean that you can not find a false result if the axioms are true? We must *formally* claim this to do mathematics, but I expect we have axiom systems which are consistant for first-order logic some logics and contradictory for higher-oder logics (one needs to be careful how one formulates this question). The diffrences in logics and the formal vs. real make this difficult to claim philosophically (or as a fact prior to physics).
  • It is interesting how many physicists turn to religion of some sort

    I have heard that no more then 10% of physicist believe in a god. The precentage is higher for Mathematicians, Chemists, and Biologists.

    I want to reply to some quotes from the article and I don't want to write another post, so I will do it here:

    "To me, religion is a way of life, not a belief,"

    I am an Atheist, but I suspect that this is the optimal religious view for many people. There is actually an order of Anglican Priest who do not believe in God. They view religion as a social thing. I think we will find that religions like Judism which accept people being "cluturally Jewish but religiously Atheist/Agnostic" may have a real survival advnatage in the future. (Note: I am not Jewish, but I have many friends who it the above description)

    "In this country, churches are the organizations that hold the community together"

    This is just flat wrong. It is true in many places, but religion hardly provides the culture that many modern people need period. Religion has not provided the "integrating" force needed to bond people of diffrent races and religions. Art, music, clubs, economics, food, sex, etc. provide far far more influence then religion.

    scientists should realize that "religion has a much more important role in human destiny than science."

    This is flat wrong too. The printing press has probable had more "tangible" influence then all of religious history combined, i.e. people who never invented religion would have used other social binding systems (as I mentioned before religion is justy one of many such systems), but without the printing press we would not have much of our current world.

    I think it is safe to say that religion will play a smaller and smaller role in the future too unless it can really reinvent it's self. The New Agers *might* be a big enough revolution to remain importent to people, but not our traditional churchs. We are experencing a religious revival now, but a variety of factors could prevent these massive christian revivals in the future.

    BTW> [this si regarding my .sig] Russel was a mathematician and the quote below is a tautology (if you narow your definition of christian to include only people who do not believe moral progress is possible because God layed down all the rules). It is funny to see a mathematician make subtilly veiled tautological statments. :)
  • When was the last time you looked it up in a dictionary? Faith is NOT definitively belief without reason. Faith is a synonym for confidence and belief. It says nothing about whether the belief is unfounded or not. Why should a guy have faith in something without a reason?? There's this stupid idea going around that faith is blind confidence.

    -JD
  • Where are these laws?? Eh? Chapter and verse, buddy. I dare you. I do not think that knocking on doors is a very good way to convert people at all. But you invite criticism and laughter when you allege that Christ forbade his followers to win other people to Christianity. What did they do after the ascension but preach everywhere they went?

    Allow me a quotation or two, you open minded people, you. Jesus Christ in fact condemned all other religions when he said "I am the way, the truth, and the light, and no man comes to the Father but by me." "Many shall say to me in that day, Lord, Lord...and I will say to them, I never knew you: depart from me, you workers of iniquity."

    Anybody with a greek lexicon and a dictionary can figure this out. The greeks have three words relating to judgment, english just has one, the word "judge". In one place it says, "judge not!" in another place it says "Judge righteous judgment!"

    In that ubiquitous verse (people know nothing about Christianity but they invariably know this verse) "Judge not" refers to pre-judging a person, passing sentence on his/her character. When a Christian witnesses to another person, he is not condemning them. That's a conclusion you leap to on your own. Consider the following example: your house is burning. I'm walking by and notice this. I'm a little nervous about interrupting your leisure time to tell you, but hey, your house is burning. "What?? Are you saying my house isn't good enough? You just think your house is better than mine. 'Judge not!' That's what I say mister, leave me alone."

    -JD
  • Your dictionary is not very authentic...dictionary.com?? never heard of 'em. But of course that definition is listed there because it is a connotation which has become attached to the word in recent years. Our 1912 unabridged Webster Dictionary has no such clause. For hundreds of years, "faith" was used in everyday language, and only in the context of confidence and firm belief.
  • Hmm...none of those have anything to do with witnessing. You are assuming that when a Christian witnesses, his primary purpose is always only to condemn someone's way of life. Witnessing has nothing to do with telling a person to shape his life up and everything to do with saving his soul. Every time I have seen a person become a Christian, their life changes for the better without any winking and hinting from anyone. Also, you are right that the judgment belongs to God, but that judgment isn't some holy mystery. He put it in the Bible so evryone would know.

    "Couple that with the parable of the tax collector, and you see that your activities are not "sins" in the eyes of the Christian God, but your ATTITUDE. THAT is what the Bible is all about."

    Ah, well, you're singing a different tune now. Before you were saying that the act of witnessing was a violation of a dozen commands of Christ. Now you say it's their attitude that matters, which goes without saying.
    -JD
  • Does anyone remember a Babylon 5 episode called "Gethsemene" or somesuch? The central character was a serial killer that had been subjected to the 24th century's ultimate punishment; mindwipe and a new personality wired in, and committed to a monastery to spend his life bringing service to the community. He's a character who comes across as a nice guy, evoking honest sympathy when forcibly brought up to face his past by a vengeful relatives of his victims who hires a telepath to revive ghosts of his memories. Despite Sheridan's efforts the vengeance seeksers kill the monk. At the closing scene, Sheridan is introduced to the monk's newest brother, the killer from the last scene who's been tried, convicted, and sentenced, now also a monk earnestly working to serve.

    The episode brought up questions of punishment and forgiveness which aren't easily answered. There are religions, including Christianity which don't close the possibility of forgiveness to ANYONE, given honest and sincere repentence.

    There are lots of things and issues which go beyond the model of scientific logic. When it comes to the thorny issues of human cloning and designer genes? How are you going to view the "products" of these new technologies? The cloning of the sheep Dolly involved some 300 or more "failures". What are our responsiblities to the "failures" incurred when we try this with people?

    Religion and science are tools in our individual searches for truth. But the truths we discover will reflect the effort we put into doing so. Sunday churches, Saturday temples, Discover magazine, serve those who aren't able or willing to make that effort and we should place them in proper context when judging.
  • Yes, but the problem is the people, not the religion. The real problem with the christian relgion is that people have adapted and used it as an excuse to do bad things. Examples of this are nothern ireland over the past 30 years, and the southern US prior to the 70's (its still happening there, but it has gotten much better since then). Religion is something that each person has, and is molded around who they are.
    What I am saying is while some people may use their religion for evil, most of us only use it for good.
  • The following post is controversial, but it is neither flamebait or troll. Further, it is entirely on topic.

    >Look guys: being religious (including, specifically, Christian) does not mean checking
    >your brain at the door.

    I'm sorry, but I'll have to disagree here, at least regarding Christianity. I will quote you as evidence:

    >It means (broadly speaking) acceptance of...
    >Christ as the risen savior.

    So a person who has NOT checked his or her brain at the door accepts that blood sacrifice was required to absolve him or her of something called _sins,_ and this choice is logical and sane? We have no reason to believe that a resurrection of any kind has ever taken place, or even in the historicity of this Christ, but we willing suspend our disbelief to make ourselves feel better? We choose to believe in a God who is so barbaric and impotent that His best trick is punishing beings whom He created for a crime that He staged?

    Catholics believe that they are literally consuming the blood and flesh of this Christ in a mystery they name transubstantiation, but which the rest of the world would consider proxy cannibalism. And, protests from protestants aside (pun intended), Catholics ARE Christians. And they didn't check their brains at the door? Other Christians believe that unless you are immersed in water that you end up being tortured eternally, and these Christians didn't check their brains at the door? What about the Christians who believe that loving someone of the same gender is a heinous evil, and they didn't check their brains at the door, either? Every ridiculous belief can demand respect once it is labeled a _religious_ belief, regardless of the fact that most religions (Christianity especially) exist largely due to FUD much worse than any Microsoft has ever fostered.

  • An insightful man who represents the 10% of us who see the forces of the cosmos as a combination of religion and science. Watch the matrix again, religion plays an important role in the beauty that is technology and science. From Taoism to Christianity, each belief seeks to speak of the marvel of life. For an interesting read pick up Disturbing the Universe by Freeman Dyson and Genius by James Gleik.

    It is a well known fact that all scientists proclaim themselves as atheists(bad spelling I know), but Freeman Dyson is a cut above the rest. True genius is not about conformity but about individuality. Remember that when its easy to incur that religion should take a backseat to technology.
    The Ex Electrical Engineer
  • The scientist is only supposed to build and test theories, but the engener actually needs to figure out what to use. The science provides the engeners with something concreate to argue over the relivance to a specific problem. ...

    This stands in contrast to religion where there is no science side (or they are combined in the case of new religions and cults which can change their rules). The divide between science and engenering helps both stay more objective.. and religion lacks this divide. ...

    Actually, some religions have a flavor of this natural-world-objectivity check&balance scheme. With Christianity, there is the principle that, besides examining scripture, you shall know (judge) a false teacher and false teaching by examining its fruits. A false teacher bears bad fruit, a good teacher bears good fruit. Philosophically, this proposition alone is obviously not airtight, ("define good fruit") but it does form a type of hedge against extremism which has clearly negative effects. And it's useful for Christians to keep in mind as they examine their own history.

    Other Christian appeals to real-world objectivity might include the passage "you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

    --LP

  • nowhere.

    Of course, if you were to look for Arthur C Clarke's "The Nine Billion Names of God" you might get a result...

    Try http://loki.sacredheart.e du/cas/math/mattej/godnames.html [sacredheart.edu] :-)

  • Few people doubt the sincerity of Colson's conversion. Even people who hated Nixon work with him now. Unlike many people, he lives out his beliefs in a ministry to some of the "lowest" people in society. His prison ministry has changed the lives of thousands who most people would have written of as hopeless scum of the earth. I wish you'd offer some examples of his "hate and condemnation." Maybe you're right and he's an evil bastard - who knows? But he is doing more good than most people in America.
  • ...And the long-time Communist dictator of Yugoslavia, Tito (no, not the Jackson 5 Tito), was an altar boy in his youth.

    It's important to remember two things. First, most people in these countries were raised to be religious, so spotting religion in the youth of an evil adult is no great surprise. Second, the religious outlook is not that different from the Marx/Lenin/Stalin/etcetera outlook. (Stalin bragged of creating a secular Vatican in Moscow.) Their ideologies can be seen as a sort of Christian heresy gone mad - a totally secularized monastacism of sorts, with a Nationalistic God (the Party, the State, the Leader) and a great purpose, the "good of the many" as the goal. This does not indict religion, but is a sort of offhand compliment to it. The most successful lies are the actual Truth, with some strange corrupting twist.

    Of course, this all breaks down when you see that monastacism must not be coercive, but must arise through a specific vocation in the heart, and also, that God cannot be replaced so easily - not in a way that will succeed. How often has man been made happy by dethroning God and putting another in His place?

  • Well, cosmology is not accessible to the average suburbanite. Even other physicists with another speciality wouldn't necessarily be able to judge competing cosmological models. In any case, cosmology is not transcendant to most people. But, like it or not (and you obviously don't), religion is transcendant to most people. It matters to them, and is immediate. To a believer, what happened in gas clouds 15 billion years ago is not nearly so important as following the will of God in your everyday life.

    Please try not to be so snotty. You're giving atheists a bad rep.

  • The killing in the 20th century has been without parallel.



    That's the killing we reccorded. I think that violence per se was a lot higher in the past. That's why people started to band together in times past and that's why nation states were created.

    First Bismarck's effort to remake the world, then Hitler's efforts for the higher man. Stalin "knew" the world would be wonderful without the Kulaks (Jews, for those of you with a government degree) and didn't stop until he killed 40 million. Mao purified China, adding another 80 million to the toll. Not to mention Pol Pot and dozens of other reformers.



    It was my understanding that the USSR in fact banned most religions because of Marx's comment that religion was an opiate of the masses. I may be incorrect. Considering that Stalin was really a deranged xenophobe I doubt he would have wanted a powerful clergy.

    And not a single one was religious. All of them blamed religion for killing, and thought if they could just eliminate the religious, the killing would stop.


    People kill for a lot of reasons. Revenge killing gets old after a while however if you can justify the killing for god it goes a lot further. See usually god dosn't speak much (he's kind of a loner) and so the killing can happen because of some rather unsubstiantiated rumor of the past that said that god wanted such and such done.

    I remember watching a documentary about the affairs of the inhabitants of the Kosovo region. Largely their entire culture is based on violence and doing the work of Alah. Now don't get me wrong about Islam. The initial statements of Islam, Judiasm, and Christianity are all pretty peaceful coexistience type things but these people come across as rather bloodthirsty and ruthless.

    The killing didn't stop because usually you don't want to submit to some uber-authorty figure and most of the time people don't like having their most intimate beliefs made crimes.
  • How many don't realize that their own beliefs are based on a sort of faith, that is, a faith in scientific results that they haven't personally witnessed or belief in events too far back in time to personally witness. To me, all of us have some degree of faith. Those who deny it haven't fully looked at their own faith.



    Everything has a proof of some sort. Each and every discovery if you are verbose enough is can become extremely well documented. Take for example a discovery of various extrasolar planetoids. Various laws of gravitation that can be mathmetically proven influence these happenings. The math involved can also be proven right down the the smallest things. There are given things however these are not "faith".

  • Don't forget that without religious groundwork, a lot of what we take for granted today would be without basis.

    I think you are being rather far reaching with a statement like that.

    You have to look at what people have been able to think about. People like Voltaire wrote various works that were able to coutner the concept of letting everyting that was ever done be attributed to an unseen source and for said source to be accepted.

    Later the concept of free will and other things have essentially countered the religious stance in many ways. Most of our current system is based on these philosophies not on current religious memes.

    The principles of most modern humanities can find allegiance to a lot of the fundamental principles of most of the modern religion bodies that have dominated the world for the past few thousand years. Without these fundamental principles, we may not have come so far.



    Yes and no. Essentially people developed religions and other systems because they were unable to use logic to solve any of their current set of problems (why did my wife die so suddently, my corps are doing poorly this year, etc). When people couldn't figure things out they developed a method of giving their problems a face. Bam religion was born.

    Definitely, you must account for the destructive elements in religious movements over the years, but you cannot honestly do this without also asessing the positives.



    Logically because for something to be defined as "good" something also has to correspondingly has to be "wrong" or "evil"

    And I believe that this is one of the foundations for Dyson having been awarded this prize - that he was willing and able intellectually and morally to look at the issue of religion in modern life and present an honest view that brings value to those that read it.



    How does allowing for more primal and base interpretations of various events we cannot currently explain give your life any value? That's about like talking about the tooth fairy, the boogyman, or saying that teddy will protect you. This really does nothing but give you warm fizzies.

    Too often, various world religions are lambasted for the harm they have caused (holy wars, etc), unfairly and with shadowed intent...



    And what exactly is "shadowed intent". It almost seems like someone is looking for the Anti-Christ :)

  • Even if Bob didn't exist,Stang would have created him.

  • You're in luck. According to the rules laid down by Aristotle and expanded throughout the years, it is widely known that proving a negative is not possible. Prove that elephants do not exist. You can't do it, even if there are no elephants. The burden on proof is on the OTHER side, the people who claim that elephants or God DOES exist. The closest anyone has come was Kierkegaard I think, he just said you have to take a leap of faith and believe it. If you read his argument, however, you will realize that it takes a leap of faith to accept his reasoning! His reasoning is that since God is beyond the human capacity of reason to figure him out, you have to take a leap of faith. Well, think about it, how do you know that your reason is limited? The only way you can believe that there are things that exist that your mind simply cannot grasp is by taking a leap of faith!

    Esperandi
  • Interestingly, the bible seems to contrast faith with fear, not with reason. There are many accounts in the bible of those who experience God in some profound way. In many cases, their reaction is to be really afraid. Good examples is in Mark 5 where Jesus performs miracles to save people from fearful situations. Many of those involved seem more afraid (of Jesus) after this than before, despite his advice "not to fear, but to believe". Interesting.. many non-believing friends of mine have said that they could rationally believe in the christian God if he would show himself to them. But not everyone written about in the bible seems to behaves rationally in the presence of God. Ian
  • That is my problem with religion. All those people who think they're so important that they NEED to win me over.

    That's funny...that is my problem with people who are anti-religion. All those people who think they're so important, smart, possessed with an "infinitely-meta"-understanding of the human condition, that they need to win me over to their position of rejecting religion.

    As someone with a strong scientific bent, I understand many of their concerns about blindly adopting any set of religious beliefs.

    But as someone with a strong moral bent, I also understand many of the concerns of the religious about the likely realities of any government or society that officially eschews religious beliefs of any kind.

    After all, the most effective, concentrated killings of millions of peoples in this century alone have generally been perpetrated by those professing atheist beliefs against those they perceived to hold dangerously religious beliefs. "Religion is poison", and all. (Yes, I know that was -- presumably -- a fictional quote, from "Seven Years in Tibet", but it certainly sums up -- along with the corresponding actions of the Chinese government -- the attitude I see many atheist/non-religious people in the "free world" demonstrate.)

    So, please, the next time an obnoxious, clueless "know-it-all" tries to ridicule your beliefs, impose his belief system on you, etc., and happens to be using religion to do it...

    ...please consider that the problem there might not be the "religion" aspect. In such a context, "religion" may well be just a tool, just as "atheism", "science", or "non-religious" is in the hands of another person who is equally obnoxious, clueless, etc.

  • Thirdly, yes, religion WILL have a bigger impact on the future. Science has no power in the moral and ethical realms. It may never have. It was never built to. But morals and ethics ARE essential for a society to function. Without those, you have no laws, you have no structure, you have nothing. We'd all wind up back in the Stone Age, pronto, with no way out, because with nothing to build on, there'd be no means of progressing.
    OF COURSE! Without religion there could be no morality. We'd all be baby-eating communist Nazis!! Indeed, even if religion is false, it is necessary to maintain order. There's no reason to question the TRUTH of religion, because the world is better off believing in it, true or not.

    For Christ's sake, look at any atheist! You'll never meet a single one that doesn't:

    • rape children
    • shoplift
    • eat the dead
    • have pre-marital homosexual sodomy
    • pray to Satan
    (Once in a while will you find an atheist that hasn't been caught doing one or all of the above... YET. But can KNOW that he DOES. He has on reason not to.)
  • As opposed to all those physicsts who are still doing work, unaware of the existence of quantum mechanics? For the record, "quantum physicist" is a silly, psuedo-science fiction sounding term. Nobody in physics calls themselves a "quantum physicist" any more than anybody would call themselves a "classical physicsist."
    * mild mannered physics grad student by day *

  • Impact of religion versus science! (Score:3)

    by Kaz Kylheku ( 1484 ) on Thursday March 23, 2000 @03:27PM (#1178468) Homepage
    Doh, of course religion has a bigger impact. That's because of religious fanatics who push their outlandish ideas onto everyone in sight, and this practice has been going on worldwide for millennia.

    When was the last time you were visited by a door-to-door astrophysicist insisting that you take a copy of his papers and attend some lectures so that you could be converted to his view of cosmology?

    ;)
  • Start with Acts 11, with Peter's vision of the tablecloth, descending from heaven.

    Then, turn to Matthew, and one of Jesus' other semons.

    "What goes into a man's mouth does not make him unclean... ...What comes out of a man's mouth can make him unclean. For what comes out of a man's mouth comes out of his heart."

    These two tell the same thing -- you have NO right to tell another that what they eat or do, or how they live, is "unclean". That judgement belongs to God, not man.

    Couple that with the parable of the tax collector, and you see that your activities are not "sins" in the eyes of the Christian God, but your ATTITUDE. THAT is what the Bible is all about.

  • Re:Dare we hope? (Score:3)

    by Amphigory ( 2375 ) on Thursday March 23, 2000 @04:57PM (#1178470) Homepage
    That's a legitimate question. In fact, it's one I struggle with, daily. I'm very serious about this: I probably average 5 hours a week just thinking about that.

    At some level of my thought, I can sense a solution. For example, let me take an assumption that you make and pick on it. You say:

    If the Creation and original sin (and therefore the need of mankind to be saved) are metaphorical, doesn't that pave the way to portrary all of Christianity as metaphorical? If so, what is its worth?
    Here, you assume that "metaphorical" and 'false' are equivalent. It is perfectly permissible, at least to me, to find great truth in something that is metaphorical. Did you ever see that Star Trek TNG (entitled 'Darmok') episode where they ran into a race that spoke in metaphor? If not, it is highly recommended reading.

    There are other ways to communicate truth than the propositional. Now, I would hesitate to say that all of Genesis is metaphorical: but if it is, I don't think we've lost much. How relevant are the precise details of how God created the universe to our day to day life? Answer is they're not. The story, which presents a metaphor for the fall of man from God's perfect creation, is still a valid source of truth.

    An awful lot of philosophy and religion has been created using unabashed fiction (from Plato to Boethius to the Bhagvad Gita to Camus) and the thought has not lost any validity in the process. Why, with the Bible, and only with the Bible, do we assume that if it's propositional assertions are not accepted, we must reject the whole?

    Of course, this raises other problems. How do we decide what is metaphor and what is not? For example, I am quite convinced that the Resurrection of Christ was not a metaphor. But upon what basis can I determine that it was not, and hold that Genesis is?

    Can I have my cake and eat it to?

    For the record: I'm not prepared to write Genesis off as metaphorical at this time. I give that issue a big "I don't know" and leave it there.

    --

  • Re:Dare we hope? (Score:3)

    by Amphigory ( 2375 ) on Thursday March 23, 2000 @06:46PM (#1178471) Homepage
    From what I got (and keep getting is that), following the teachings of Jesus Christ (or whomever is the spokesperson for the religion) will enhance your life. In this mix is the notion that worshiping a higher entity that created all the universe is needed. To me, this feels extremely "tacked on". I get great pleasure in helping others and being just-all-round nice to people. I really fail to see how belief in a higher being will make it any better
    I think, here, you have nailed the problem with the "Social Gospel" and the "Self Realization Gospel" all at once. A third false gospel could be the "Gospel of sin management", which is a particularly virulent form.

    Look: being a Christian is not about getting better for your own sake (although we should all strive to be good). It is about joining the kingdom of God.

    The kingdom of God is not quite like the "army of God" you mention. Simply, it is an already achieved reality of all things that place themselves under God's controlled. And it is growing. I believe that it will eventually grow to subsume almost all creation -- at which time Jesus will return.

    And it is worth joining because it is good and right -- and no other reason.

    --

  • Re:Churches Create Communities? (Score:3)

    by Amphigory ( 2375 ) on Thursday March 23, 2000 @04:01PM (#1178472) Homepage
    Hmm... Maybe he would've better said "Churches should be the organizations that hold communities together". Church, when done "right", can be a very powerful thing. Problem is that not many churches really take their job seriously anymore.

    --

  • Re:Sure religion has had an impact ... (Score:3)

    by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Thursday March 23, 2000 @05:41PM (#1178473)
    > Our societies' fundamental values are founded in religion.

    And we live in a very sick society. Cause and effect?

    But let's back up and question your claim. Which fundamental values are you speaking of? Marriage and family? The ban on murder and cannibalism? Property ownership?

    I suspect that any truly fundamental value we could name actually predates any religion now being practiced in our society. And many of our more sophisticated values were current among our pagan ancestors as well.

    > As religion decays, it takes those values with it.

    And the supporting evidence is...?

    For that matter, is religion decaying?

    > until we get there, I take comfort in the knowledge that the redneck with the 10-gauge down the hall is an ardent catholic.

    I gave up religion a quarter of a century ago. D'ya suppose I'm more likely to shoot someone now than I was then?

    Do the increasingly atheistic nations of Europe have a higher rate of random murder than the over-religious (and exceedingly self-righteous) USofA?

    Please, question your assumptions.

    --

  • Re:Religion has a big impact today (Score:3)

    by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Thursday March 23, 2000 @03:49PM (#1178474)
    > Religion has a great impact on society today, whether we see it or not.

    So do crime, warfare, starvation, and economic exploitation. But where's my money for pointing that out?

    --
  • > Don't forget that without religious groundwork, a lot of what we take for granted today would be without basis.

    The principles of most modern humanities can find allegiance to a lot of the fundamental principles of most of the modern religion bodies that have dominated the world for the past few thousand years. Without these fundamental principles, we may not have come so far.

    I can't imagine what you're talking about. My best guess is that your preacher neglected to tell you how much of the supposedly Christian value system actually predates Christianity by centuries, if not millenia.

    > Too often, various world religions are lambasted for the harm they have caused (holy wars, etc), unfairly

    Sorry, but it's the One True Way mentality of world religions that causes those wars (along with witch hunts, judicial murders, and imprisonment of pot smokers). It's hardly unfair to lambast a system for the effects arising directly from its fundamental principles.

    --

  • Re: Dare we hope? (Score:3)

    by Bob Uhl ( 30977 ) on Friday March 24, 2000 @06:38AM (#1178476)
    I can understand your problem. I went through a phase like that several years back. Here's the set of conclusions which I reached and which helped me work things out for myself. I'll state up front that I happen to be very religious; anyone who dislikes this should probably page down.

    The first thing is that IMHO religion is not a scheme for making anyone a better person. It is a set of statements of fact--true or false, but statements nonetheless. Following the advice of these statements may or may not help improve one's life, much like following the advice of the statement 'Don't drink the bleach' tends to improve one's lot, but that is not the primary point.

    Concerning your second point--would a good nonbeliever still be allowed into Heaven--there's a lot of groundwork I have to do to answer that. Let me state that I do not believe in the common 'cloud and harp' view of Heaven. Rather, I believe that Heaven is being in the presence of God and enjoying it. I believe that Hell is being in the presence of God and hating it.

    One's actions in life determine one's personality. After death, this personality determines whether one enjoys God's presence or loathes it. Life is the Tuesday-Thursday practice; the Afterlife is the game on Saturday. God does not damn us; we damn ourselves. He loves us, but He has given us the freedom to not love Him. It's our choice.

    Sin is another topic of contention. There are two important things to bear in mind. The first is aptly illustrated by the Greek word for sin. Translated literally, it means 'missing the mark.' Sin is not so much the active doing of something worng (although it is), but the failure to be the best possible. It's like aiming at a bullseye and missing. But you don't quit shoting when you miss: you continue, and get better. No-one is a perfect shot. But with practice we can all be decent. That's part of how sin should be perceived. You fall short of the glory of God, you pick yourself up and try again. You do a little better, but still not perfect. You try again.

    The second part has to do with the 'wages of sin.' What are the stages of forgiveness and redemption--for anything, secular or religious? Well, first one must be sorry and ask forgiveness. God has already forgiven us for our sins. But we cannot stop with being forgiven. If I break your window and you forgive me, I still need to fix your window. But that price has already been paid on the Cross. So God has already done two things for us. There is a third though: to repent. The word 'repent' comes from the Latin for 'rethink.' Repentance means rethinking your life. To use the earlier broken window example, maybe you should stop playing baseball near glass buildings. The spiritual life is like that as well. We need to rise above our failings, but with the knowledge that we cannot completely conquer them in this life.

    And the reason for worshipping God? Well, partly out of thankfulness. Worship should not be focused on us (this is one of my big problems with many 'worship services'--they are entertainment for an audience); worship should be focused on God, out of gratitude. Partly we worship to learn what to do in Heaven. We're going to spend eternity in God's presence; might as well learn how to behave now.

    Those are my opinions, anyway. I hope that I addressed some of your concerns. If you have more you may email me (remove the no-spams).

  • Re:Sure religion has had an impact ... (Score:3)

    by Weezul ( 52464 ) on Thursday March 23, 2000 @04:46PM (#1178477)
    I hate to be pedantic, but you're surely you don't mean to define a irrational system as one which doesn't use the scientific method? What about math?

    Yes, "irrational" is tricky to define and mathematics is a sticky point, but I think it is safe to think of our rules of logic as a "physical" theory based on our experence. We have only one real theory of logic, we test the hypothosis frequently, it works out frequently, so we continue to use it. The big diffrence between logic and neutonian mechanics is that we have seen the execptions to newtonian mechanics and built better theories. We don't really know what an expetion to our logic would look like (some people claim that things like quantum mechanics are execptions need new logics, but we really don't know). Anyway, I'd say mathematics is really a physical thing.. we just don't understand how the physics works very well (note: I am a graduate student in mathematics).

    the fact that people understand the distiction between a scientific theory and a social interpretation of it makes this harder to do.

    Do they? What is it?

    I guess it's like the diffrence between a scientist and an engener. The scientist is only supposed to build and test theories, but the engener actually needs to figure out what to use. The science provides the engeners with something concreate to argue over the relivance to a specific problem.

    Social Darwinism is a good example. There is little doubt that natural sellection plays *some* role in our culture, but one must ask how efficent it is AND if a specific move to increase it's effectivness is worth the cost. The engenering side has a whole diffrent set of problems from the science side.

    This stands in contrast to religion where there is no science side (or they are combined in the case of new religions and cults which can change their rules). The divide between science and engenering helps both stay more objective.. and religion lacks this divide.

    I agree the above ideas are not water-tight. It was a psychology professor who first pointed this out to me.. he used it to prevent people from discussing religion and public policy in his classes.. execpt when he wanted them to talk about those things.

  • Re:Sure religion has had an impact ... (Score:3)

    by Weezul ( 52464 ) on Thursday March 23, 2000 @03:36PM (#1178478)
    the problem is the people, not the religion. The real problem with the christian relgion is that people have adapted and used it as an excuse to do bad things.

    People will try to do this with any belief system, but an irrational system (i.e. not using the scientific method) will make it much easier. People still abuse the social interpretation of scientific theories (extreams of social darwinism for example), but the fact that people understand the distiction between a scientific theory and a social interpretation of it makes this harder to do.

    I think the optimal belief system for an individual is Atheism, Agnosticism, or a vague philosophical new ageish believ while the optimal belief enviroment for an individual (what the people arround them believe) would be for very few people to agree on anything religious, i.e. it's hard for one religious group to oppress another when there are no religious groups because no one agrees. This is essentially the normal arguement that a personal religion is ok, but an organised religion is very bad.

    the southern US prior to the 70's

    You know why we have the bible belt today? Slave owners wanted a way to justify slavery. This is exactly what I mean by an irrational belief system allowing you to justify whatever you want.

  • Re:The Dancing Wu Li Masters (Score:3)

    by Pike ( 52876 ) on Thursday March 23, 2000 @05:34PM (#1178479) Journal
    Hmm...the Wu Li Dancers seem to know a lot. The rest of us know that the true love of Wu Li dancers is coming up with witty truisms.

  • Re:Dare we hope? (Score:3)

    by FireWhenRady ( 83135 ) on Thursday March 23, 2000 @05:05PM (#1178480) Homepage
    Science and reason are built on faith. Not faith in a remote intelligence that somehow orders everything, but faith that the laws and order that we observe on this small planet also apply over all time and all space. You have not been to IO to personally observe the volcano's. You have faith that the instruments that returned photographs's were not doctored. Saying that you only believe what you can see/touch/hear/measure/understand means that you don't belive in science in a field where you are not an expert. We believe in science because it is consistent and open to change. As Karl Popper has said, things can only really be scientifically true if they could also be false with different data, but that is not the reality of most work in science. You don't see much published that says some experiment didn't prove our hyposthesis. But more great science has come of experiments that failed than those that just confirmed prevailing wisdom (Michelson-Morley, Darwin's finches etc.)
    Science has faith in Occam's Razor, science has faith in the laws of thermodynamics, science has faith that mathematics can adequately describe physical phenomena.
    The difference between scientific faith and relgious faith is that science is willing to change its dogma if it finds a counter example, but most religions will deny the counter example if it disagrees with dogma. But even religions gradually change belief over time, witness the Catholic churces acceptance of evolution.

  • Re:Sure religion has had an impact ... (Score:3)

    by slashdot-terminal ( 83882 ) on Thursday March 23, 2000 @04:23PM (#1178481) Homepage
    Both positive and negative.
    Religion has sparked some of the longest, bloodiest wars in the history of mankind. Probably killed just as many people as it's ever helped. Like the man said though, the problem is the people who are too arrogant to admit that they could be wrong. Why do those people always end up in charge? :)



    Religion's impact is only good if you believe it and have reason to think it will change things for the better. One could put an argument that all of religion's effects and in fact anything that changes the actual implimentation of reality from what it really is based on laws of physics and such.

    For example reading fiction can be considered detrimential because it distorts our ability to think and model reality.

    I think the sweeping statement that religion being more important than science is rather stupid and shortsighted. I would much rather have science to give my penicilin when I have an infection than making some sacrifice, praying in front of a stone tower, or doing various strange chants/rights.

  • Father of . . (Score:3)

    by Money__ ( 87045 ) on Thursday March 23, 2000 @03:42PM (#1178482)
    I had to laugh when reading this in the story:"(father of the Dyson Sphere and Esther Dyson)

    Did he read a story to his shell theory before tucking it into bed?

    "Good night F = (GMm/2R)(1/2r^2)[sqrt(R^2-r^2+2ru)-(r^2-R^2)/sqrt( R^2- r^2+2ru)]_{r-R}^{r+R} "

    :)
    _________________________

  • Science is religion (Score:3)

    by yuriwho ( 103805 ) on Thursday March 23, 2000 @05:06PM (#1178483)
    To quote Dyson"religion has a much more important role in human destiny than science"

    I know this is a sound bite, I would love to see the context within which this comment was made but since I don't have that info, I'll knee jerk respond:

    Perhaps Freeman dosen't think that his work has had much impact, perhaps he believes that physics has not, and will not have much impact on human destiny.

    How could he make such a shortsighted statement? First, physics is the ground rules for biology via chemistry. Biology is the study of all life and therefore is all impt for for human destiny. I will agree that religion has had a much greater impact on human life thus far but 100,000 years from now, Science (Physics, Chemistry, Biology) will have played a determing role in human destiny. It has/will provide the means to anhialate(sp?) ourseves, pollute our planet beyond habitability, or whether we manage to colonize human life beyond this planet before destruction. Religion itself dosen't help much here as it tends to promote wars through belief systems that cannot accept views that violate said religious dogma and thus tends to promote destruction.

    OTOH Science itself is a religion, a belief system that changes according to what can be reproducibly demonstrated through experiment. A religion that rapidly adapts to current knowlege and one that holds the keys to the both the methods of destruction and the salvation of our species. Perhaps this is what he meant in that quote. Science is religion?!

  • ick, religion (Score:3)

    by RaZ0r ( 145723 ) on Thursday March 23, 2000 @03:45PM (#1178484) Homepage
    I'd use this space to bash religion, but I just don't feel like it. I simply don't agree with the notion of any type of religion. I do like what religion has done for us as a species in some ways. It has brought order in the world and has set up a set of morals. I see past this and I see the real world. I see no god, I see no after life, I see no heaven, I see no hell. Life is NOW. If you don't try and enjoy what we have now, you won't ever get a chane to enjoy it ever again. I think it's interesting that a quantum physicyst won a $940,000 prize for progress in religion. It doesn't mean much to me. Religion will eventually fade into the background and people will se what is really out there. Nothing. I do, and will continue to let people worship whatever they want as long as they leave me alone and let me be atheist. Oh well. Back to my little world.


    - Stop praying for someone to save you, and save yourself.-
    KMFDM
  • Don't forget that without religious groundwork, a lot of what we take for granted today would be without basis.

    The principles of most modern humanities can find allegiance to a lot of the fundamental principles of most of the modern religion bodies that have dominated the world for the past few thousand years. Without these fundamental principles, we may not have come so far.

    Definitely, you must account for the destructive elements in religious movements over the years, but you cannot honestly do this without also asessing the positives.

    And I believe that this is one of the foundations for Dyson having been awarded this prize - that he was willing and able intellectually and morally to look at the issue of religion in modern life and present an honest view that brings value to those that read it.

    Too often, various world religions are lambasted for the harm they have caused (holy wars, etc), unfairly and with shadowed intent...

  • My 2 cents worth (Score:4)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak AT yahoo DOT com> on Thursday March 23, 2000 @03:55PM (#1178486) Homepage Journal
    First, religion and science are two utterly unconnected fields. In mathematical terms, R.S=0

    Secondly, religion is not about "simplistic beliefs", no matter what anyone says. There are many millions of religions in existance, ranging from a basic faith that it's safe to walk out the door without being struck by a meteorite, through to more advanced systems, such as Christianity, Buddhism, the Celtic Wyrd system, etc.

    (Yes, you can mathematically prove that the odds are very small that you will be struck by a meteorite, but unless you do the maths and carry out the observations EACH TIME, you're still relying on faith that your numbers are valid for that time. And faith is the foundation of all religion.)

    Thirdly, yes, religion WILL have a bigger impact on the future. Science has no power in the moral and ethical realms. It may never have. It was never built to. But morals and ethics ARE essential for a society to function. Without those, you have no laws, you have no structure, you have nothing. We'd all wind up back in the Stone Age, pronto, with no way out, because with nothing to build on, there'd be no means of progressing.

    Lastly, ANY "Christian" who knocks on the door to "convert" you has broken a dozen laws laid down by Christ, not least of which is the commandment to tolerate others and not judge them. Christians are STRICTLY forbidden from judging or condemning others, other views and other ways of life. If those religious sects involved -lived- the life they claim to profess, everyone would be a great deal happier. And the non-Christians would greatly profit from learning that commandment, too.

  • Re:Dare we hope? (Score:4)

    by Jonathan ( 5011 ) on Thursday March 23, 2000 @03:53PM (#1178487) Homepage
    Er, Thomas Huxley, a "obnoxious pseudo-scientist" -- hardly -- he was probably the most important 19th century biologist next to Darwin himself. And it is a quite recent development that it was okay for religious people to consider the Bible merely allegorical rather than divine truth. There really was a conflict between science and religion. Scientists were persecuted and even in some cases executed by religious officials.

    As for cults, the only objective difference between them and religions is size. Consider: in the 19th century Mormonism was considered a cult by most Americans, but now that it is more popular it is considered a religion. Heck, in Roman times, normal Christianity was considered to be a cult.

  • Re:Dare we hope? (Score:4)

    by Nagash ( 6945 ) on Thursday March 23, 2000 @06:23PM (#1178488)
    Let me explain why I do not follow/practice any religion but agree with a good chunk of what you are saying. From experience, many people share this view to some degree.

    First of all, let me make it clear that I am not opposed to the following of religious beliefs and I do not hold it against people when they say they are. I hold things against people when they are bull-headed and just plain assholes about their beliefs. You do not sound like that type of person.

    You are correct that there are many strawmen in the science vs. religion debate. You are correct that signing up for a religion (Christianity) is not necessarily voluteering for the "Army of Jesus". You are also correct that there are many thought provoking theological, philosophical and scientific books written from a Christian point of view, that following a religion has you accepting a set of principles and devoting your life to them.

    I grew up a Lutheran, going to church, getting confirmed - the whole bit. I was kind of forced into it and resented it because of that. However, maturity and reflection made me forgive my grandmother/parents for that (there's a complicated story I'll avoid here). I also believe that the morals instilled in me from my church-going youth are very good things. I think they are fundamentally sound beliefs that transcend most different types of religions and is something most humans tend to follow (don't kill, steal, hurt others, be malicious, take your neighbour's wife, etc.).

    From what I got (and keep getting is that), following the teachings of Jesus Christ (or whomever is the spokesperson for the religion) will enhance your life. In this mix is the notion that worshiping a higher entity that created all the universe is needed. To me, this feels extremely "tacked on". I get great pleasure in helping others and being just-all-round nice to people. I really fail to see how belief in a higher being will make it any better.

    If there is no God, per se, the point of worship is moot. It doesn't matter if you have faith in whether or not he exists - you won't be going to His Kingdom, as there is not one. If there is a God, then will I go to Hell if I am a general all round good person but just didn't believe in Him? If belief in God is required for enterance into His Kingdom, that sounds awfully self-righteous.

    Perhaps this is the faith thing I'm supposed to have for God. Regardless, I still find this egotisical. Am I just very well grounded and happy with myself, not needing guidance from belief that there is something out there far more powerful than I could ever hope to be that can help, nay, is needed by me to feel better? I don't know - it would take a lifetime to answer a question like that. I've always noticed that for those who don't wish to think, a higher entity makes things easier to explain. For those who want to discover the workings of complex things outside our current knowledge, belief in a God makes it seem more attainable, that is, God can inspire and perhaps guide.

    Quite frankly, I don't need that kind of inspiration or guidance. I do quite well with the belief in myself (not that religious people don't belive in themselves, just probably not as much as I do).

    That's probably the real irony here - God is what you make of Him... and He's having a good laugh about it :)

  • Nonsense! (Score:4)

    by Skald ( 140034 ) on Thursday March 23, 2000 @04:25PM (#1178489)
    Like it or not, there's no real reason to prefer christianity over islam, scientology, or greek mythology.

    Ok, first of all, in Islam you can have 4 wives, in Christianity you can only have one. Islam beats Christianity.

    Homer's Greek is better than God's, but it's not God's first language. Hades isn't as bad as Hell, but it's more inevitable. Tough call. I'm going to give the nod to Christianity, because I'd rather piss off Zeus than Jehovah.

    John Travolta is a Scientologist. Greek Mythology is better than Scientology.

    There. You just can't take the shallow view of these things.

    Further, they conflict with each other, so no, they 'cant all just be friends'

    Greek Mythology conflicts with Scientology? Damn. I wonder if you can be a Unitarian Druid?

  • "Cliffs Notes" for replies to this article. (Score:5)

    by emerson ( 419 ) on Thursday March 23, 2000 @04:54PM (#1178490)
    Here we go again. Based on past stories, here's my breakdown of how the commentary will go:

    30% -- Comment threads defending religion's place in society, ranging from clever, well-spoken, impassioned defenses of spirituality and religion as necessary to a well-balanced life, on down through "GOD LOVS ME AND SIENTIST SINERS WILL GO TO HELL!" Interesting subflavors include "Some of the most reknowned scientists in history were religious," and "Scientific method isn't the only way to gain knowledge."

    35% -- Comment threads alleging that any belief system based in faith is worthless because there's no empirical repeatability, ranging from graduate-level epistomological essays down through "SIENCE MAKES SENSE RILIGION DOSNT." Interesting subflavors include the issue that science is typically learned from elders with no empirical repeatability on the part of the learner and is therefore also based in faith, and oh-yeah?-yeah exchanges about the provability of (math|god|intelligence|grits)

    15% -- Pot-calling-kettle-black posts, where someone makes an allegation about science or religion that's also true of the other. Typically starts with history of deaths, progresses through history of art, stalls out somewhere about the time the invention of Tang is being compared to televangelists.

    10% -- Topical trolls. "Jesus was an idiot and so are you." "Scientists are all atheists." "Freeman Dyson naked and petrified."

    5% -- Typical trolls. "First post." "Grits." Stupid repressed-homosexual Katz/Columbine stories.

    3% -- Meta-posts. Commentary on the nature of the story. Ponderings about the makeup of Slashdot's readership. This post.

    1% -- Posts that crept in from other threads. Slashdot bug? Posters losing track of multiple browser windows? It's a mystery. In any case, posts about Paying Bills Online, Chili!Soft, and whatever story gets posted next.

    1% -- People karma whoring by posting mirror links, pasted text from the wire story, and other bloat that inexplicably keeps getting moderated up as 'informative.' See my .sig....

    Predictions for final count of comments: 500-600.

    Predictions for final count of comments that have anything new or interesting to say (and no, this one doesn't make that count): 5.

    In any case, this whole story should be moderated (-1, Known-Controversial Ad-Banner-Revenue-Generation Flamebait).

    --

  • Dare we hope? (Score:5)

    by Amphigory ( 2375 ) on Thursday March 23, 2000 @03:29PM (#1178491) Homepage
    Dare I hope that we are in the start of the end of this "religion opposed to science" idiocy triggered by the monkey trials? In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, there was a horrible conflation of some loud-mouthed, obnoxious pseudo-scientists (e.g. Huxley) and some loud-mouthed, obnoxious religionists (e.g. Dwight L. Moody, Bob Jones). They setup a bogus opposition between religion and science, that is not really based in fact.

    The net effect is that a whole lot of straw men have set up and both sides have a great time knocking them down. For more (from an unabashedly religious perspective) see http://www.cornerstonemag .com/features/iss112/baloney.htm [cornerstonemag.com].

    Look guys: being religious (including, specifically, Christian) does not mean checking your brain at the door. And it never has. It means (broadly speaking) acceptance of a setup of principles, a world view, and a decision to devote your life to it. In Christianity, this is expressed by (to oversimplify) the Ten Commandments, Christ as the risen savior, and (of course) the decision to act on this information -- we call that decision faith.

    It also doesn't mean (in most cases) that you are signing up for some militant crusade -- whatever Pat Robertson or the Pope would have you believe. You still have the one natural right God gave you: self-determination as a free moral agent. FWIW, I regard most "cults" (e.g. the Heavens Gate bit) as more a psychological experiment than a religious one.

    Also, let me comment that anyone who thinks religion, esp. Christianity, is for the simple minded should read Karl Barth or George Fox sometime (to pick a couple of examples among many).

    Also, if you're interested, check out Geeks for Christ [geeks4christ.org]. We're still in a fledgeling state, but one of the purposes of the site is precisely to be open to intelligent discussion of Christianity.

    --

  • The Dancing Wu Li Masters (Score:5)

    by kingsquab ( 143871 ) on Thursday March 23, 2000 @03:15PM (#1178492)
    I first read this book, by Gary Zukav, quite a few years ago. A quote:

    "The Wu Li Masters know that 'science' and 'religion' are only dances, and that those who follow them are dancers. The dancers may claim to follow 'truth' or claim to seek 'reality', but the Wu Li Masters know better. They know that the true love of all dancers is dancing."

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