Should religion and science be regarded as NOMA (non-overlapping magisteria)?

As Lt. Cmdr. Data said [and I don't have the exact quote at hand],

The most elementary statement of science, in fact the very basis of science, is "I don't know."​

Jung insists (using modern language) that they are instincts that we are all born with, passed down in our DNA. Motifs common to our entire species, or "archetypes" as he calls them. Each culture dresses them up with accretions from their own experiences so they end up looking like different "religions," but they all come from the same place. And this is why they are so powerful. Something which we have "known" since birth feels more true than anything we come to know later in life through learning and reasoning.

It won't go away until people like my family, who were born without that gene, become more numerous and those who are born with it die off.

Considering that the primary goal of the religious is obviously to kill people whose religions are slightly different from each other, I wish we had a way to send them off to their own planet where they could do just that and not catch us in the crossfire or the fallout. Maybe one with no oxygen.

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Science is merely a search for the truth using logical reasoning and empirical observation. Since we all have brains and various sense organs, I don't understand why that's not the best way to approach the entire universe.

Sounds like they need the help of a musician. We have to be able to use both hemispheres expertly.

 

Even the historical veracity of the "slavery" in Egypt and the "exodus" therefrom has recently been called into question. It's now asserted that the Jews and other peoples who were brought in to staff the Pharaoh's projects were simply guest-workers who sent their salary home to their families or brought their families with them.

This challenges one of the foundations of Judaism and, to a lesser extent the other Abrahamic religions: Christianity, Islam and perhaps Baha'i and Rasta. The Covenant, which defines much of Jewish faith, culture and attitude, is said to be a contract the Israelites made with God in order to escape from "bondage" in Egypt.

 

Atheism is not one of our "most cherished ideals." Except for those of us who are professional philosophers like Dawkins, we never think about religion until someone brings it up. My wife and I go through elaborate, heartwarming family Christmas and Easter celebrations with scarcely a moment's thought to the origin of those now-secular festivals.

I go for weeks on end during which the only times I think about religion are when I log onto this website.

Absence of an ideal is not equivalent to absence as an ideal.

Your logic is sound, but that's not how the Abrahamic religions are practiced. Abrahamists believe in the miracles recounted in the Bible, in which the fantastic creature known as God emerges from his invisible, illogical supernatural universe and uses his fantastic powers to disrupt the behavior of the natural universe. This is usually out of sheer petulance.

This god spent millennia strewing evidence all over the landscape. Where is that evidence? We've found fossils of the first cultivated plants, the DNA of the first domesticated wolves, cats and horses, the foundations of the first cities, the arrowheads of the first humans in the Americas, even the detritus of settlements at the depths of the Ice Age which are now twenty miles offshore under a hundred feet of seawater. But there's no evidence of the remarkable Flood, which BTW covered the earth with more water than exists. The Romans were the most compulsive recordkeepers of the Ancient World, yet none of their journalists recorded any of Jesus's miraculous doings, including his recovery from the brief illness we now call "death."

Abrahamists believe that all these things occurred. For a scientist, or any scholar for that matter, to believe these claims invokes the Rule of Laplace. These are extraordinary assertions, to put it mildly, and they must be supported by extraordinary evidence before we are under any obligation to treat the claims themselves, or the people who present them, with respect.

The claim itself is nothing more than an annoyance. Trash talkin' like "cut your hair, hippie." The offense comes when they assume because we are destined for Hell that they are better than us, and therefore have not just a right but a God-given duty to save us from that fate. Ban rock'n'roll, burn down the taverns, run the hookers out of town, throw the drug dealers in jail, re-educate the gay people out of their perversions, deny women control over their own bodies--or better yet, keep them wrapped up like mummies and always in the company of a male relative.

When Christians, Muslims and Jews start advocating for laws to be enacted that require me to live according to their religious laws because this is the only way they can save me from going to Hell, that is when I begin hating them.

And this started on the day I was born.

This is what several Jewish friends have told me, but apparently they slept through those lessons. Sorry.

No. They are based on belief in an invisible, illogical supernatural universe from which fantastic creatures emerge to disrupt the behavior of the natural universe. There is no way this sort of Stone Age bullshit can be called "just fine" in the 21st century.

 

To be civilized does not require that we love each other. We're allowed to have our feelings for the very good reason that there's no way to repress them--except for drugs, which don't always work, especially in the long run. We can try to change them but that's a slow process at best and a vain one at worst.

Hatred is often justified. I hate the man who shot my cat. I hate the man who alienated the affections of my first wife and ran off with her. I hate the man who lied about me and got me fired from a good job. I hate the man who lied to America and told us that the people of Afghanistan and Iraq were to blame for 9/11 instead of his family's business partners, the people of Saudi Arabia.

There's nothing wrong with that. All of those people harmed me (or in one case my entire nation and two other nations in the bargain) in major, life-changing ways that can never be atoned.

All that civilization requires is that we tolerate each other and in addition afford each other the minimal care and respect that members of a herd-social species must exchange in order for the herd to prosper. (As I have written in these pages, I suggest that we transcended our gorilla/chimpanzee pack-social instinct and became herd-social in the Electronic Era, if not the Industrial Era or even the Iron Age.) Paramount in that list is the First Rule Of Civilization: You may never kill anyone except in defense against an immediate lethal or near-lethal threat--in other words, the other guy voluntarily seceded from civilization first. Without that rule we'd all have to put so much attention, effort and other resources into protecting ourselves from each other that the surplus resources that make civilization possible would not exist.

But we also don't get to steal each other's stuff, impair each other's ability to care for themselves and their family and other colleagues, to earn a living and in various other ways to contribute to civilization. In other words, members of a herd don't knock each other down when looking for tasty leaves to graze on, they all cooperate to protect the young when the lions show up, and when they get in a quarrel they don't inflict serious injuries.

We don't have to like each other. We certainly don't have to like people who think they have an obligation to change us.

The worst of the Christians and Muslims believe that they have an obligation to make everyone behave according to their own standards, because they were handed down from a supernatural creature of whose existence no respectable evidence exists. These people are not only rude to us, they are deluded and proud of it. This is certainly hateful.

But we still don't get to shoot them. Even though every three or four generations they go on a rampage and start shooting everyone who disagrees with them.

 

I'm not sure "necessary" is the right word. Hatred is a natural emotional response to, among other things, people who deliberately harm us. We already know what happens when we attempt to repress emotions. They fester inside us until they build up enough pressure to explode.

So a more correct way to restate the premise you question is: "Hatred is a natural emotion, and it is necessary to tolerate natural emotions because the alternative is always worse.

I'm positive that I have never said that hatred is good, so you're asking that question of the wrong person. But what I did just say above is that tolerance of hatred is better than its repression.

Of course if we can educate young people to understand each other and the world, we can often forestall hatred as they learn that the things their parents taught them to hate are actually not evil. For example, teaching children that people who don't look like them aren't really a whole lot different from them has proven to be a very effective way to greatly reduce the incidence of racial hatred.

But not all hatred can be so easily mitigated--if the word "easily" is even appropriate considering how long we've been working on racism and how much further we have yet to go. If someone kills your cat, runs off with your wife, gets you fired under false pretenses, or starts a war against the wrong people in order to protect his favorite petro-despots, I don't think there's any reason to try to talk you out of hating him.

The Christian principle that we should turn the other cheek and forgive our enemies was formulated to attenuate the blood feuds and tribal rivalries that endured for generations to the point that the people didn't quite know what they were fighting over anymore. But at the level of hatred as a direct response to an experience, rather than something taught by one's parents, it's a lot easier--and a hell of a lot more sensible--to forgive someone for the "sin" of hating some asshole who did permanent damage to his life, than to forgive the asshole himself.

Or in my case, the "sin" of hating people who believe they have the right and the duty to force everyone to live according to the rules of their own religion.

BTW: going back to my contention that we must not repress emotions. I regard religious faith as an emotion since it is the result of instinctive programming. (Putatively; we may have to wait a few more decades before our brains are completely mapped and correlated with our DNA.

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) This is why I have never suggested repressing people's religion, i.e., why I support Freedom Of Religion no matter how angry it makes me. Over the course of human history we have seen plenty of attempts by people to stifle one religion or another, or even all religion, and they always end up worse than they started.

The Europeans and the people of the Antipodes seem to be making enormous progress toward freeing themselves from religion by perfectly peaceful means. Somehow, some day, we'll find their secret and accomplish the same thing over here.

 

GeoffP:

It doesn't much matter at what level God is operating. If there's no way to distinguish his actions from what we'd expect in the normal course of events as determined by entirely naturalistic processes, then there seems to be no need to posit the existence of God as an extra hypothesis. Occam's razor.

Returning to the previous example I gave, if your claim is that being prayed for helps sick people because God answers those prayers, then it is relatively straightforward to test whether prayed-for people have statistically better health outcomes than non-prayed-for people.

The same approach is applicable to just about any claimed influence of God in the world.

Don't you find it strange that God just happens to decide to answer or not answer prayers in such a way that the outcomes are indistinguishable from what we'd expect if there was no God?

Apparently, neither factor comes into play. Bad things happen to good people. Those most in need have no better "luck" than those who have the least need.

I agree with you that theists always have the ad hoc escape clause of "God moves in mysterious ways". That does nothing to prove God, of course. What it does is to make God non-falsifiable. It is an attempt to exempt God from the usual standards of scientific proof and disproof. However, this doesn't really put God outside of scientific inquiry. We come back to question matter of evidence for God. If there isn't any, then Science doesn't require the maintenance of the God hypothesis; in fact, Occam's razor rules it out as unhelpful.

In other words "Believe in God despite a complete lack of evidence for his existence. Replace Reason with Faith. Just Believe, and don't worry that you're believing in something without any evidentiary grounds for your belief. Trust The Church (or whoever tells you to Believe in God)."

It seems to me that we're almost on the same race track here, except when it comes to the last hurdle.

Why do you think its a good idea to believe in a God for whom there is no reliable evidence?

Is it that you claim there is some kind of evidence that you regard as convincing, other than evidence that a scientist would find convincing? If so, what is that evidence? Personal gut feeling?

It depends what you value in life, and that's a somewhat individual thing. I guess some people can live with the cognitive dissonance that goes with having certain ideas about what counts of evidence in science and other ideas about what counts when it comes to religion. Personally, I have issues with that. How about you?

Then we're reduced to arguing about whether religion is a net positive or negative influence on people and/or societies. And that is a question that doesn't turn on whether there is a God or not.

When it comes to individuals, maybe it doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things whether they want to spend their time parasailing or praying or writing symphonies. But in terms of net human happiness, some activities seem to me to be more useful than others. So, I guess I'm arguing for a general increase in happiness, which is probably not the same thing as an increase in "efficiency". I'm far from convinced that religion is a net positive for happiness; worse - I fear it is a net negative.

I think the notion of Hell is a tremendous drain on the human psyche. Maybe not yours, but then I think you probably don't really believe in Hell.

Such tests have been done. It's just an ordinary scientific test, best done with a double-blind, randomised protocol. Select random groups of people. Group A is the control group - nobody prays from them. Group B is the test group - people pray for their good fortune (or whatever). Obviously, some reasonable time limit must be imposed so we don't have to wait an indeterminate amount of time for God to respond (or not). Compare the outcomes of Group A with Group B. Apply normal statistical methods.

I don't understand this question. Philosophical distinction between what and what else? Why is there a supposition? Why is that fundamental? What's the point of what?

I'd like to think that people are reasonable beings. You don't think that's the case?

It might be very important to win the "war", either way. If our aim is to maximise human happiness and minimise suffering, then we need to ask whether religiosity is likely to help or hinder that aim. And we need to ask the same question about science, of course.

We do have the benefit of some history to refer to already. So we may ask "What good has science/religion done for us so far?"

Coming back to the point of this thread, on your view we can have our cake and eat it too, keeping both science and religion as separate areas of human activity. But even if you're right and science has no business stepping on religion's turf, we still need to evaluate whether religion is a net positive to society. It's the only rational thing to do.

I'm aware that my own biases are showing clearly here. You might argue that maximising happiness is not a worthy goal (i.e. utilitarianism is bad), or at least not the foremost goal we ought to pursue. You might also argue that rationality itself is not all it's cracked up to be. In both cases, I can only say that you're likely to have an uphill battle convincing me if you want to make these arguments. But who knows? I have changed my mind about a number of things in the past. These ones are fairly fundamental to who I am right now, though.