Faith vs. Science

[dgs49]

In one sense Faith is the opposite of Science, since one need not have any faith to believe that which can be proven empirically, and in fact having faith is having the willingness to believe that which cannot be proven.

"Believers" believe that God created the universe, that Christ rose from the dead, that Mohammed moved a mountain (is that just a song lyric, or is in the Quran?), and that our bodies are infested with thetans.

There are many "scientists" who are faithful believers in any number of religious denominations, because they accept the fact that many things cannot be explained by science, and they are content to accept supernatural explanations, at least until science is able to prove otherwise.

But in my view, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints goes a couple steps BEYOND faith. And here is why: LDS believers believe things which can (and have been) categorically DIS-proven. You cannot PROVE that God didn't create the universe, you can just mount counter-arguments that rebut the arguments of believers. But you can prove that Joseph Smith was a fraud.

Joseph Smith claimed to have been visited by Jesus Christ as well as the Angel Moroni, and he claims to have found, buried in upstate New York, a sacred book written on golden plates, and to have translated that book from "reformed Egyptian" into English. (Where he learned "reformed Egyptian," what "reformed Egyptian" is, and why ancient Hebrews - who already had a fairly serviceable language - would have written their most important book in "reformed Egyptian" remain mysteries). Claims of people who corroborate the existence of the book of Mormon are - shall we say - worthy of extreme skepticism, but who's to say they are all liars?

However...

The Book of Mormon makes some very specific claims about two separate migrations of semitic peoples to the land mass we now know of as the Americas, people whose population grew to hundreds of thousands, who had livestock, cities, battles, and so forth while here, and who ultimately were either killed in battle or later became known to Columbus and his explorer-followers as "Injuns."

While it is sometimes impossible to prove a negative, I think the scientific community has pretty much debunked the historicity of the Book of Mormon (according to Smith "the most perfect book ever written"), concluding without any doubt whatsoever that it is fiction. Indeed,the erroneous belief that the Injuns were the descendants of the "Lost Tribes of Israel" was a fairly common belief in Smith's time, so there is nothing remarkable about the fact that he would make this up and incorporate it into his book. But the natives of the Americas (the Injuns) have no Semitic genetic lines, the cows, sheep, oxen, and so forth that are described in the BOM were unknown in pre-Columbian America, and so on. Archaeologists and geneticists from BYU have been searching the Americas in vain for decades, hoping to find SOME artifact of the BOM information, but have found NOTHING. The negative has been proven.

We also have the Mormon "Book of Abraham." This scroll was shown to Mr. Smith and he proceeded to translate it into the Book of Abraham, much as he translated the BOM, but unfortunately for his legacy, Egyptologists who actually could read the scroll translated it as a funerary tract, having nothing to do with Abraham or anything else in the Smith "translation."

So Mormon believers are in the perverse position of having absolute faith in documents and at least one person (the founder of their sect) who have been proven to be full of beans. The Christian differences with LDS are not just theological disagreements (which are many and profound), but are based on Christians' disdain for a totally and demonstrably fraudulent basis of faith.

Can you vote for someone whose faith (which he acknowledges is central to his character) is demonstrably false?

I intend to.

[Gob]

Hell, otherwise sane and rational Americans voted for a certifiable idiot, and a hair brained pig in lipstick, why would voting for someone who believes such idiotic fairy tales be a problem?

[MajGenl.Meade]

That's no way to speak of the Reverend Carter and Hilary "Moscow Control" thingie!

[dgs49]

Mr. Gob:

No subject of the British Monarch can say anything at all about the American choice of Chief Executive. You have voluntarily subjected yourselves to profoundly mediocre soverigns for eons, for no reason other than the bona fides of the owner of the crotch from which they were pulled.

And I probably should not mention that the two Americans alluded to in your post have both accomplished more in a good weekend than you likely have in your entire life. Unless you would care to prove otherwise.

[Gob]

The Queen (gawd bless her,) does not make decisions on my behalf. Though, if the choice was mandated, I would elect her over the certifiable morons I alluded to.

Can you tell me what you think they have; "accomplished more in a good weekend than you likely have in your entire life", so I may make a comparison?

I think I must have hit a nerve there, it cannot be easy being a supporter of a party which would choose GWB as its leader, Palin as its deputy leader, and now has chosen someone who wears religious underpants for its next leader.

[rubato]

And we're back to the "my invisible sky-god makes sense and yours is crazy".


Stupid.


We, meaning science, can prove the humans first evolved in Africa and then spread across the rest of the world. Christians all say that they began in the middle east someplace. Thousands of miles wrong and genetically diversity wrong. Nothing about the creation-garden of eden myth makes a grain of sense. You're all a bunch of credulous liars and fools.

yrs,
rubato

[dgs49]

Being elected governor of a State - even a less-populous one - is a huge accomplishment. Executing the office successfully, which both of them did, even greater.

As any adult understands, the book of Genesis is not to be taken literally, and is allegorical in nature. But then, the poster is demonstrably not an adult.

[Gob]

Being elected governor of a State - even a less-populous one - is a huge accomplishment.

If GWB could be elected as governor, then so could my blind and stupid dog. No achievement whatsoever.

[rubato]

If the world was destroyed by a flood and all the animals and all the humans were saved in the ark then how did they get to the new world? Australia? new Guinea? How are there species in the new world that don't exist anywhere in-between? Where did all the animals come from which are unique to Madagascar? Why is there no skeletal evidence of them in the ME either?

If only the humans in the ark were saved, which the bible says, how do we have the largest genetic diversity of humans in Africa? It is scientifically impossible for humans to have migrated from Mt Ararat to Africa and then developed a genetic diversity which is wider than anywhere else.


"My sky gods beats your sky god, because I'm an ignorant bigot!" (sung to the tune of "Iko Iko")


yrs,
rubato

[Sean]

I don't know "Iko Iko" but "Camptown Races" fits that nicely. :lol

[dgs49]

Allegory is a device used to present an idea, principle or meaning, which can be presented in literary form, such as a poem or novel, in musical form, such as composition or lyric, or in visual form, such as in painting or drawing. It is also seen in scriptural passage. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation. Allegory is generally treated as a figure of rhetoric; a rhetorical allegory is a demonstrative form of representation conveying meaning other than the words that are spoken.

As a literary device, an allegory in its most general sense is an extended metaphor. As an artistic device, an allegory is a visual symbolic representation. An example of a simple visual allegory is the image of the grim reaper. Viewers understand that the image of the grim reaper is a symbolic representation of death.

Concentrate, rube...consult with an adult...eventually you will get it.

Maybe.

[Sean]

My issue with the bible is that believers tell us that it part fact and part allegory. These two also seem to be interchangeable.
For example, the Catholic school I went to taught the Garden of Eden, the flood etc as fact.

I've also never heard a creationist mention any more than two people in the beginning. I would genuinely like to hear the views of a creationist who doesn't believe that the whole Adam & Eve, snake & apple thing didn't really happen like that.

[Crackpot]

What apple?

[rubato]

So when YOUR irrational cult says something which is later proven to be false its an <<allegory>> but when some other cult talks about magic glasses and gold plates its not?

Proving that bigots reason at about the level of small children.

yrs,
rubato

[Lord Jim]

There are many "scientists" who are faithful believers in any number of religious denominations,

This looks like it could be an interesting study on that topic:

Are Top Scientists Really So Atheistic? Look at the Data

by Chris Mooney

Elaine Howard Ecklund is a sociologist at Rice University; we cited her work on the topic of science and religion in Unscientific America. Now, she is out with a book that is going to seriously undercut some widespread assumptions out there concerning the science religion relationship.

The book, soon to be out from Oxford University press, is entitled Science vs. Religion: What Scientists REcklund Bookeally Think. And let me give you just a taste of her answers, from the book jacket (I haven’t dug in yet):

In the course of her research, Ecklund surveyed nearly 1,700 scientists and interviewed 275 of them. She finds that most of what we believe about the faith lives of elite scientists is wrong. Nearly 50 percent of them are religious. Many others are what she calls “spiritual entrepreneurs,” seeking creative ways to work with the tensions between science and faith outside the constraints of traditional religion…..only a small minority are actively hostile to religion. Ecklund reveals how scientists–believers and skeptics alike–are struggling to engage the increasing number of religious students in their classrooms and argues that many scientists are searching for “boundary pioneers” to cross the picket lines separating science and religion.

You can learn more about Ecklund’s book here, and order it here.

Incidentally, the universities whose scientists were surveyed for the book are: Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, Penn, U.C. Berkeley, UCLA, U. of Chicago, University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, U. Michigan, U. Minnesota, UNC Chapel Hill, U. Washington-Seattle, U. Wisconsin-Madison, U.S.C., Washington University, and Yale.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/inter ... -the-data/

This pretty well tracks with my own anecdotal experience with scientist friends over the years...

I suspect that "actively hostile towards religion" is more the purview of bigoted pseudo wannabe "scientists"...

Folks who's poor understanding of the nature science and the scientific community is such that they believe that hating on religion will somehow ingratiate them to real scientists...

[rubato]

__________________________________
http://freethoughtpedia.com/wiki/Percentage_of_atheists
Among scientists

The popular media balyhoo the fiction that science is supportive of religion. One issue of Newsweek (July 20, 1998) featured a cover story "Science finds God" which gave many innocent readers the impression that scientists in droves were finding scientific "evidence" allowing for God and an afterlife and were jumping on the religion bandwagon. Some of these 1998 reports were stimulated by a June 1998 Science and the Spiritual Quest Conference organized by Robert John Russell, and sponsored by The Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (CTNS) at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Since this is an organization devoted to the reconciliation of science and religion it's no surprise the the speakers were supportive of the idea of the possibility of god and/or an afterlife, though some of the papers were so speculative and abstruse that it's hard to tell whether they were profound philosophy or mere moonshine. One wonders whether some speakers came just for the stipend provided by the John Templeton Foundation. Several Nobel-Prize winning scientists gave papers at this meeting. The papers were mostly philosophical and speculative. No new hard evidence was produced. News reports failed to put these wishful speculations in perspective by pointing out that most scientists are, in fact, not religious. And the percent of "leading" scientists who hold religious beliefs has been declining from around 30% in 1914 to less than 10% in 1998.

[Summary of a paper that appeared in the 23 July 1998 issue of Nature by Edward J. Larson and Larry Witham: "Leading Scientists Still Reject God." Nature, 1998; 394, 313.]

Larson and Witham present the results of a replication of 1913 and 1933 surveys by James H. Leuba. In those surveys, Leuba mailed a questionnaire to leading scientists asking about their belief in "a God in intellectual and affective communication with humankind" and in "personal immortality". Larson and Witham used the same wording [as in the Leuba studies], and sent their questionnaire to 517 members of the [U.S.] National Academy of Sciences from the biological and physical sciences (the latter including mathematicians, physicists and astronomers). The return rate was slightly over 50%.

The results were as follows (figures in %):

BELIEF IN PERSONAL GOD 1914 1933 1998

Personal belief 27.7 15 7.0
Personal disbelief 52.7 68 72.2
Doubt or agnosticism 20.9 17 20.8

BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY 1914 1933 1998

Personal belief 35.2 18 7.9
Personal disbelief 25.4 53 76.7
Doubt or agnosticism 43.7 29 23.3

Note: The 1998 immortality figures add up to more than 100%. The misprint is in the original. The 76.7% is likely too high.

The authors elaborated on these figures:

Disbelief in God and immortality among NAS biological scientists was 65.2% and 69.0%, respectively, and among NAS physical scientists it was 79.0% and 76.3%. Most of the rest were agnostics on both issues, with few believers. We found the highest percentage of belief among NAS mathematicians (14.3% in God, 15.0% in immortality). Biological scientists had the lowest rate of belief (5.5% in God, 7.1% in immortality), with physicists and astronomers slightly higher (7.5% in God, 7.5% in immortality).

Larson and Witham close their report with the following remarks:

As we compiled our findings, the NAS issued a booklet encouraging the teaching of evolution in public schools.... The booklet assures readers, 'Whether God exists or not is a question about which science is neutral'. NAS president Bruce Alberts said: 'There are many very outstanding members of this academy who are very religious people, people who believe in evolution, many of them biologists.' Our survey suggests otherwise."

There is a review of earlier studies of the religiosity of scientists at pp 180ff of:

Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi and Michael Argyle. The Psychology of Religious Behaviour, Belief and Experience. London & New York: Routledge, 1997. ISBN: 0-415-12330-5 (hbk) or 0-415-12331-3 (pbk).

On the subject of eminent scientists, they mention unpublished data collected by one of the co-authors: "Beit-Hallahmi (1988) found that among Nobel Prize laureates in the sciences, as well as those in literature, there was a remarkable degree of irreligiosity, as compared to the populations they came from." The reference is to: Beit-Hallahmi, B. (1988). The religiosity and religious affiliation of Nobel prize winners. Unpublished data.
_____________________________


yrs,
rubato

[dgs49]

Dear Sean:

Have you considered that it is appropriate to teach Grade Schoolers the same things in a way that is different from the way you would teach adults? How do you explain to an 8-year-old the concept of allegory?

Amongst drinkers and smokers, the most obnoxious people in the world are those who have previously been addicted to their substance or choice, but have reformed.

Among Catholics, the most obnoxious (other than bigots like rubato) are the ones who went to Catholic Grade School and had no further Catholic education. They go through life thinking that Catholic theology conceives of the human soul as a milk bottle, which can be either pure white, black as night, or dirty. Catholic children are taught as though they were...children.

When addressing ADULTS, the Catholic Church teaches that there are three types of "truth" in the Bible: the Allegorical, the Prophetic, and the Historical. It is not much of a challenge to read the various books and ascertain which is which. Genesis is allegorical. It may contain a grain of truth here and there, and it certainly contains subject material from other cultures that were known to Moses and incorporated into his narrative, but it is not to be taken literally. It illustrates the nature of God, the nature of Man, and the proper relationship between them. The Prophetic books are proven true with reference to the facts at the time and later. Some true prophets were right about some things and wrong about others. Sometimes later history is distorted so that an apparently twisted prophecy can be seen as correct.

The historical books are to be understood in the context of the times. The writers were not scientists and wrote only what they perceived. They were not terribly concerned about details - they were not investigative journalists - but wanted to portray more or less what happened. Their perceptions and writings were also colored by their positions, viewpoints, and what they were trying to get across.

The Bible is not a history book. It is an anthology of cultural literature, some being more or less factual, and some being fictional.

People who believe in the literal accuracy of the Bible are quite rare, and theologically are a tiny minority of Christians. They probably comprise about the same percentage of the population as those who believe that everything in nature, including the existence of the universe, is the result of completely random natural processes, with no "intelligent" influence whatsoever.

On another point raised above, surveys of "scientists" are usually drastically skewed to favor "scientists" in academe and government, who in fact comprise only a small percentage of the total.

[Grim Reaper]

People who believe in the literal accuracy of the Bible are quite rare

If you can consider one third of Americans to be "quite rare", then I wonder what you would consider "common".

[Sean]

I was about to quote that same line Grimmy and suggest that Dave needs to get out more.

BTW Dave, at what age do you think that Catholics stop teaching children as 'children' and start teaching them as adults?

[MajGenl.Meade]

People who believe in the literal accuracy of the Bible are quite rare

If you can consider one third of Americans to be "quite rare", then I wonder what you would consider "common".

I suspect that as with most things, those who espouse a particular thing do so from varying shades of understanding, learning and reasoning skill. Surely, many of those who responded to the survey have in mind an English language Bible, printed in (perhaps) AD 1611 and they believe consciously or otherwise that "literal" means a wooden word-for-word direct correspondence with reality.

That of course has never been the claim of Christianity, although one can doubtless find 'churchmen' who also believed it. Christianity claims that the Bible, in its original autograph, is inerrant and infallible and is 100% inspired by God, written through fallible men (and perhaps women) - not dictated but written according to their style and purpose. Thus Matthew is addressed primarily to a very Jewish audience - Luke to Greek-speaking gentiles. Judges seeks to relate God's dealings with Israel in history; Proverbs collects wisdom; Psalms consist of man's reactions to God and attempts to understand His nature and so on.

A "literalist" is and should be dumbfounded when confronted by passages indicating that God has feathers (Ps 91:4), that Jesus is a door (John 10:7) and so on through multiple examples of imagery which are symbols of "truth" but not physical facts. Truth is expressed though many forms of media and within the written word there are many ways to teach truth. It is expressed through and in spite of cultural norms. Thus, I have little patience with one who says that the six 'days' of creation MUST be understood as 6 x 24 hours, which ignores Hebrew usage of idiom in stating periods of time and has the additional problem of maintaining that the 7th day - the day on which God rested from Creation - was only 24 hours (in which case God is now creating again - very unbiblical) or that the 7th day consists of at the very least several thousands of years (but the other 6 do not).

That same literalist is usually horrified to learn that Mark 16:9-20 was added at a much later date - these may be people who want to kiss snakes etc. and have a vested interest in maintaining the fiction. (I'm sure that some here will apply that statement to the entire spectrum of faith, book and church!).

It does suit critics to pretend that the lowest common denominator understanding of the literal truth of the Bible is that which is held by the entirety of Christianity as such. As Peter said, "There are some things in them (Paul's letters) that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures". Sadly this twisting of scripture is as likely to happen within the churches as without - witness the entire Roman church fictions about Mary, the Pope, purgatory and so on without end.

I would be interested in a survey which asked Christians (self-identified) to describe the difference beteween miracles and Providence

Meade

PS to save Sean et al the bother - miracles don't exist but Providence is in Rhode Island