The conflict between science and religion

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by paddoboy, Mar 23, 2016.

  1. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    The conflict between science and religion lies in our brains, researchers say:


    The conflict between science and religion may have its origins in the structure of our brains, researchers at Case Western Reserve University and Babson College have found.

    Clashes between the use of faith vs. scientific evidence to explain the world around us dates back centuries and is perhaps most visible today in the arguments between evolution and creationism.

    To believe in a supernatural god or universal spirit, people appear to suppress the brain network used for analytical thinking and engage the empathetic network, the scientists say. When thinking analytically about the physical world, people appear to do the opposite.

    "When there's a question of faith, from the analytic point of view, it may seem absurd," said Tony Jack, who led the research. "But, from what we understand about the brain, the leap of faith to belief in the supernatural amounts to pushing aside the critical/analytical way of thinking to help us achieve greater social and emotional




    Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-03-conflict-science-religion-lies-brains.html#jCp
     
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  3. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    There is no need for any conflict between factual and mystical thinking in an individual. We're quite capable of doing both and of deciding which mode is appropriate in which situation.

    The conflict is between loyalties. The church establishment - which very often represents our community and its acceptance of us - tells you to abandon common sense for its sake - to believe improbable, implausible statements. You can't entirely do that, and still function at all effectively in the physical world.
    If you are conflicted, it's because you're being asked to do the impossible - or forfeit immortality.
     
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  5. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    OK
    Did Soren Kierkegaard nail it 173 years ago

    "Faith is a marvel, and yet no human being is excluded from it; for that which unites all human life is passion, and faith is a passion."
    (as opposed to an intellectual pursuit).
    Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling1843, Hong p. 66-67
     
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  7. Beer w/Straw Transcendental Ignorance! Valued Senior Member

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    Curiousity and wonderment can also be passions that faith could be guilty of ruining.
     
  8. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    I find the whole article an example of naive question-begging.

    The assumed premiss is that there is a conflict in the first place. Such a conflict, in the terms of this article, depends on the religious believer relying on religion "to explain the world around us". But most religions of any sophistication are not primarily about that. Religions are primarily about providing meaning to existence and a guide to living your life. They are not rivals to physics, cosmology or biology.

    It seems tedious to have to reiterate this but creationism , which DOES purport to offer a rival explanation of how the world works, is a fringe belief system, followed by minor and extreme sects, at least as far as Christianity is concerned.
     
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  9. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Totally agree.....and also that there need not be any conflict at all:
    Science/cosmology certainly does not preclude any religious person.
    From the article....
    "You can be religious and be a very good scientist," Jack said
    Issac Newton of course, and another notable of more recent times Father George La-Maitre

    Agreed again, and in fact a good guide in most circumstances we could all do with......eg: Love your neighbour as yourself....Be charitable, don't be a bully, be kind, etc etc
    Totally agree again, and we have our fair share of them on this forum, that are forever trying their best to diss science at every opportunity, although some do try and disguise the object of their mission.
     
  10. Beer w/Straw Transcendental Ignorance! Valued Senior Member

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  11. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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  12. Beer w/Straw Transcendental Ignorance! Valued Senior Member

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    I was torn between watching a movie - bigfoot vs zombies - and reading this thread.

    My bad

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  13. brucep Valued Senior Member

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    I agree with your comments. The real problem is fundamentalism. Religious and otherwise. Fundamentalists believe they're absolutely right about everything. So it's their way or the highway. We have fundamentalist ideologue Christians touting rounding up and putting gay folks to death. And a seditionist running for president and accepting that fundamentalist preachers endorsement. For the Republicans it's coming down to a lying narcistic demagogue or a psychotic evangelical.
     
  14. brucep Valued Senior Member

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    This works somewhat. You put all the purveyors of nonsense on ignore then you selectively read what's left.
     
  15. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    It doesn't take any critical thinking to believe in science. Just accept what some other guys in history have told you is true. Just swallow whole what some musty old book says is the case. Same as religion. Same as any culturally programmed version of the reality. No thinking required.
     
  16. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    I suppose it is futile to ask that you try, once in a while, not to be such a bell end.

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  17. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Yet the leaders of most of the world's major religions, including the Pope, have accepted science right down to the first nanoseconds after the Big Bang. Since we have no evidence of how and why that happened, we're free to argue about it.

    The Second Law of Thermodynamics reminds us that spatially and temporally local reversals of entropy can occur, with no limit on their size or duration, but this does not prove that this is how the universe sprang into existence, only that it is a good hypothesis worth exploring. We cannot dismiss the Biblical creation story, although Occam's Razor reminds us that the much simpler Big Bang hypothesis should be investigated first. Only once it has been disproven, should we begin to wallow in fairytales,
    Huh? The essence of science is that it is all repeatable. The last thing any respectable scientist would do is tell someone to take something he has said on faith!

    Science classes devote considerable time to the repetitions of experiments whose results, in the past, were presented as evidence for one or another scientific principle.

    Anyone who has earned the title "scientist" has repeated (or at least witnessed) virtually all of the experiments whose results led to the principles of the discipline he studied: physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, paleontology, geology, psychology, etc.

    The only faith we have is in the scientific method, which has been tested thousands of times every day for several centuries, and has never come close to being falsified.
     
  18. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

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    That is really not even close to how science is taught. In a university you will have to run experiments in all of your science and technical classes. You must then write lab reports showing how the results of the experiment agree or disagree with the principles that you learned in class.

    I suppose that for someone like you science can seem like religion or magic because you do not have the educational background to understand a reasonably detailed explanation of a concept and so must just accept (or not) the interpretation of the scientists.
     
  19. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    In the modern era (starting in the late 1800s) we are, almost literally, surrounded by science. You'd have to scrupulously turn the sound off on half of the commercials on TV, to avoid being given a 30-second science lesson.

    Then there are the myriad shows about cops and hospitals. In every episode they show us how to gather evidence, how to assess it, and how to determine which conclusions can be accurately drawn from it.

    Religion, on the other hand, provides absolutely no techniques for examining data and determining whether it agrees with or conflicts with a statement in the particular faith's holy book. Instead, we are told to simply trust our elders. This is laughable, considering the near-daily news reports about the latest escapades of our elders--in our civilian governments, our churches, our military services, our banks, and for that matter, our own family members.

    The reason so many otherwise halfway intelligent people cling to religion is simply that it makes promises that they desperately want to be true.

    And of course this is not limited to religion. Con men make their living by convincing people to believe something preposterous, such as, "Give me a hundred dollars today and my investment strategy is so amazing that I'll give you back a thousand dollars next month."

    Obviously, politicians do exactly the same thing. Donald Trump's presidential campaign is a textbook example of a con game. His favorite trick is to repeat something several times and then skip right past it, creating the illusion that the evidence was presented earlier, but we missed it.
     
  20. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    It is often forgotten that a large proportion of the scholars at our ancient universities, right up to the c.19th, either were, or were training to become, clergymen. So the early scientists were, virtually ipso facto, men of religion. That did change of course as advanced secular education become more widespread as science hit its stride in the late c.19th, but even then a large proportion would have been religious believers - it was just socially normal. And that meant, also, that organised religion learnt from science and adjusted its teachings in the light of the new learning. I have somewhere a copy of the lectures given in Rome by Cardinal Wiseman, about the new advances in geology (extreme age of the Earth, fossils etc) in the 1840s, 20 years before Origin of Species. He was enthusiastically extolling the newly discovered wonders of what he saw as God's creation and advocating how to interpret scripture accordingly. Not a word of rejection of the new ideas. The ideas about life in Origin of Species itself were accepted by the Archbishop of Canterbury (Church of England) within about 20 years of its publication.
     
  21. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    In all your lab experiments, when did you ever prove the existence of DNA, an electron, black holes. dark energy, or the Big Bang. You didn't. The bulk of science consists of assertions one is constrained to take on faith--faith that someone else has done the critical thinking to know what they're talking about. That's not critical thinking on your part at all. It's believing what someone else tells you is so, just as we do with religion.

    “The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.”
    Noam Chomsky


    LOL! So this is where you start boasting about your long hours spent in science class having people tell you what to think and conclude? How impressive! Have you ever had an original thought in your whole life?.Would you know what one even looked like?
     
    Last edited: Mar 24, 2016
  22. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

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    DNA - I did not show this in experimentation (I am too old). My son did though and discussed the experiment with me, quite cool really, it had to do with replicating his DNA and then determining if he had the gene to taste a certain bitter compound. The test to see if you had done the experiment correctly was to taste the compound and see if it tasted bitter to you. He determined he did not have the gene and he tasted nothing, others in the class who had the gene said the taste was disgusting.
    Electrons - yes I did do experimentation on that, specifcally measuring the mass of the electron.
    Black holes - I did experiments with gravity and my with my limited understanding of GR, I understand the basics of black holes.
    Dark energy - no experiments available. I do understand the basis for dark energy.
    I took an astronomy course and while we did not do an experiment on the big bang we did cover the observational evidence for the big bang and calculated the age of the observable universe.

    No one told me what to think or what to conclude.
    Yes, I have original thoughts. I even have recored IP for my company so they certainly think my ideas were original.

    I was simply trying put forth an idea why you are so anti-science and how you could come up with the crazy idea that science is like religion, when they are actually the antithesis of each other. No need to get hostile.
     
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  23. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Obviously false. Perhaps you are somewhat confused in your own lack of critical thinking that you have continuously shown throughout this forum, on such imaginary aspects as ghosts, goblins, UFO's of Alien origin, Bigfoot etc.
    Or is it a possibility that you only push those fairy tales on a science forum just to get a raise out of people?
    I think they call that trolling.
     

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