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Do you believe in God?
- Thread starter Patrik
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Accepting that we don't know everything.
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- Bratvegas
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That doesn't mean we should stop trying to find out. Positing "accepting we don't know everything" sounds like a weasel way to slip in the God of the gaps fallacy.
Yeah, we don't know everything, that's why we continue to investigate.
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- GBO-Possum
That's how "science" works.
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OK.
But he is talking in terms of faith, and how a crisis of faith can be a good thing. See his example with the Dunning-Kruger effect.
From his use of the story of Adam and Eve I'm not sure where his position is on the pursuit of knowledge in a more general sense.
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I read this WaPo article by Kate Cohen, however, I recommend the listening experience instead. Her story is very calm, very clear and very compelling. Click on "Read by the Author"...
UKMikey
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I did both at the same time. That way I got her emphasis and enunciation without trying to remember what she said in the paragraph before last.
Having listened to and read the article, I won't say the outsized influence of religion on everyday life in secular democracies is a solely American problem. Here in England we have a permanent contingent of priests in our unelected second chamber of parliament known as the Lords Spiritual.
But that influence certainly seems to me to be more overt in the United States. It doesn't surprise me that so many nonbelievers are necessarily closeted over there. And it does seem to be at the root of so many authoritarian rights infringements of late. Those people who support those infringements seem to be pretty terrible at justifying or explaining them using earthly logic too.
I'm not surprised those with a deep belief in the Almighty are more likely to swallow nonsense and oppose science.
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If you don't understand God, you don't fully understand science.
And vice-versa.
And vice-versa.
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Humour me; I understand neither so would you please explain?
Danoff
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I'm happy to see the vice versa there. But science is antithetical to faith.
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Gatekeeping bull****.
The implication is those that favour science can't fully understand it without accepting God, with the vice-versa implying that only those that accept God can understand science.
In the real world, those that accept god need to get their water checked for lead and change out the batteries in their carbon monoxide detectors.
The implication is those that favour science can't fully understand it without accepting God, with the vice-versa implying that only those that accept God can understand science.
In the real world, those that accept god need to get their water checked for lead and change out the batteries in their carbon monoxide detectors.
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My observations have been quite the opposite. I keep seeing people just give up on things in the name of faith, and it's disturbing. Is there a difficult choice to make with no obvious answer? Then some people decide to "trust in God", freeing themselves of responsibility and possibly the chance to learn anything. Religion also loves to promote confirmation bias in place of fact checking. Any time something negative is on the news there is a good chance that I can hear a comment on how bad things are these days, despite the crime rate falling. It's because the Bible implies people will become more and more corrupt, especially when God is close to returning. Which of course has been a near future event in Christianity forever.
Religion is a road block to understanding.
Well spoken. Though I'm an atheist and a combat vet I do believe in the right to worship who and what you will. Don't change for anyone.
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Is there no room for an alternative view?
This paper is quite interesting:
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Honestly, the alternative view is (most of) the replies to my comment.
I am not saying that you can't understand either.
However, in my life, throwing out science in the name of God is hypocritical. And throwing out God in the name of science is, as well.
I have come to understand some things because of my belief in God, and some of that has been science, while others hasn't.
Mostly I have found that accepting a lot of science takes some faith in what others are saying.
After all, there is more to do than can ever be done, more to see than can ever be seen, and more to know than can ever be known.
Some science simply has to be accepted. Just like God.
Look at the constants. Do you want to go through a proof every time you use Pi? (or any other constant?)
No. We accept it on faith.
There are MANY things that we simply accept. Why not God?
And why can't belief in God help amplify our faith in science?
And, yes, understanding both helps in understanding both.
Look at the end of the "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull". (Horrible movie, yes.)
When the lady asks to know everything, it's exciting at first. Then it becomes too much.
How much of our lives goes the same way?
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Accepting centuries of proofs for convenience is not faith.
And constants are regularly challenged (and occasionally refined).
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It's not faith. You use them and they work. Pi comes up very often in math and science. The evidence that we understand pi is all around us. Modern society wouldn't exist if our understanding wasn't at least fairly close to the truth.
@Famine also makes a great point that we also challenge even some of the most tested and established ideas. Newtonian gravity was used for hundreds of years, but found to be incomplete and revised with Relativity. Geocentricism was replaced with Heliocentrism, despite the anger of the church. Anger that was very likely inspired by faith, because faith opposes evidence.
There may be things we accept, but those things are usually either not worth testing or not obviously false. The gods of religions texts are all very obviously false. A god cannot be ruled out, but if one exists, it doesn't seem to interact with this world in any meaningful way.
The human mind can be very strange, so I don't think that's impossible, but the best case is understanding science through evidence. Faith is not a good thing.
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Not really. Anyone into religion and science has to cherry pick their scientists at some point.
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- Neomone
Congratulations on so succinctly demonstrating that you do not understand science.
No scientist accepts constants on faith. At best they accept them as information from a reputable source that can be fact checked later if it proves to be unreliable. That's not faith, that's rational skepticism.
But realistically, any working scientist has gone through where the constants they're using come from at least once. And once is all you need, the idea that you need to do it every time you use a constant is insane. Do you need to be taught how a car works again every time you get into one? Of course not, you already know.
Because science doesn't need or want your faith.
Science is not served by people who accept things without questioning. That is not an attribute of a good scientist. It's an attribute of a very bad scientist, or someone who is not a scientist at all.
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We shall see. 
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Not really. You're doing it here - you're relying on everyone else accepting on faith that you're correct instead of doing the scientific thing which would be to provide evidence and observations for your conclusions. You've assumed that the answer is correct before you even started, and assumed that everyone else will play along and not ask questions.We shall see.
We've already established that you don't understand science, but one of the most fundamental things is that at any time you should be able to ask why something is so. You might disagree with the conclusion, but you should be able to see the evidence and follow the logic.
If I ask you to explain how faith amplifies science, can you? Or is this just something that you'd like to be true? It seems to me that you're adding this non-scientific method in and then immediately using it to justify it's own existence.
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