Should science be secular?

I am not excluding God or God(s) from possibilities by simply saying that Science should be secular.

The following two definitions are from wikipedia,

"Secularity is the state of being separate from religion."

"Religion is any systematic approach to living that involves beliefs about one's origins, one's place in the world, or a responsibility to live and act in the world in particular ways. Religion is often equated with faith and belief in a higher power or truth"

As you can see arguing that Science should be secular is not saying that science should be free from the possibility of God(s). I am simply asking if you agree that science should be separate from organized sets of beliefs that are simply not based on facts but instead on faith.

 

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Should people stop trying to refute religion via scientific arguments when clearly it is a philosophical issue and should be addressed as such? Yes, should people stop arguing under this false dichotomy/paradigm of Science vs. Religion? Yes.

 

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Science is a tool, or an action.

Your question is like asking if a lit candle should be secular...

i.e. it all depends on what use you want to put it to.

Can you stop people using science for whatever reason they wish? No.

And there are more aspects to religion than merely the existence (or lack thereof) of God.

 

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Science itself never sets out to refute religion. It just goes on searching for the truth through observations, thoeries and maths. It's the religious fundamentalists who are frightened stiff of science because they feel in threatens their beliefs and undermines their assertions of where we came from. The Creationists came up with the idea of an Intelligent Designer in an attempt to invade the science community and claim religion was a science. It worked for while but is now discredited too. Leave science alone, it's no threat to religion unless you want it to be.

 

Nor should religious people try to inject religion into areas of natural history and science. Speaking of dichotomies, I recommend Rocks of ages by SJ Gould and the accompanying doctrine of NOMA.

 

Man, do I ever get sick of hearing this line of bullshit. What religion confines itself to philosophical issues and doesn't make claims about objective, empirical reality? With the possible exception of Confucianism, none that I have ever heard of. If you did actually manage to start a religion that didn't make any ANY empirical claims and truly confined itself to purely philosophical issues, I doubt that most people would even recognize it as a religion - it would probably be considered a secular ethical code or something.

 

"Man, do I ever get sick of hearing this line of bullshit. What religion confines itself to philosophical issues and doesn't make claims about objective, empirical reality?"

But that's exactly what it does do hence the apparent conflict with science. God exists, so accept it. That's what they say

 

I think science is a secular enterprise and has been since its origins in the ancient Greeks. Science in my view is closer to philosophy than to religion, since science tries to find a rational explanation for natural phenomena. Religion on the other hand, has always explained natural phenomena and the world in mythical or supernatural terms. Thunder was the wrath of the deity for example, while science explains thunder as sound waves travelling through air following a violent electrical discharge explicable in the laws of physics (provided you can work the math and test the idea experimentally).

Theologians, at least the Christian variety, agree the existence of God is not something you can test in a scientific sense (creationist and intelligent design beliefs left to the side for a moment). This is because unlike the universe, the nature of God transcends human understanding, and is thus not knowable as it is in itself by human cognition and also human methods of acquiring scientific knowledge, like observation and experiment. So unlike the universe and its laws, which seem to be at least partly knowable to human reason, the true nature of God will always escape human reason. God can't be described or quantified using mathematical equations whose predictions can then be tested by observation and experiment. This is totally in contrast with the modern scientific method, whose methodology is based on testing ideas against reality.

I think it is possible to be religious and also a scientist. But I don't think you can inject religion into science without seriously undermining the rational basis of science itself, and also in my view, things like creationism are based on bad theology.

 

No, they always say "I know my god exists because he appeared to persons X, Y, and Z and performed miracles A, B, and C." Those aren't philosophical claims, they're objective empirical claims. If a religion actually stuck to purely philosophical claims, there wouldn't be any conflict with science. But they don't. All the people like Ja'far at-Tahir who claim that science and religion "address different domains" etc. are simply ignoring the reality of what the world's religions teach.

 

Science is secular. If you believe in God, you aren't doing your science right.

 

Religious claims can certainly be the subject of scientific inquiry. Religious claim that require faith are fundamentally different than the methods of science which require evidence.

 

Addendum to the definition above:

Secularism must be distinguished from secularization. Secularization is the praiseworthy contribution of modern man which avoids the primitive temptation to explain all mysterious and unknown forces in terms of spirits, gods, or some other supernatural power. Due to secularization, modern man is aware of his mastery over life and of the fact that the future of the world is, in a very real sense, in his hands.

Secularism is something quite different. Secularism is an attitude or philosophy of life which holds that only secular values are real and that all religious values are nothing more than superstition.

 

To some extent, one has to define "science".

If we merely mean science as a systematized search for truth, or somewhat more rigorously, a systematiced search for knowledge that allows us to make correct predictions about the future or inferences about the pact and present, then religion need not necessarily be excluded from that. Under these definitions "science" is an ancient pursuit.

We could also define science as a system of acquiring knowledge through the use of the scientific method, which I think is the more generally accepted definition. Under this definition, science is only a few hundred years old.

The philosophical underpinnings of this sort of science require it to look for non-supernatural explanations to questions arising about reality, and that necessarily rules out the use of God and theistic explanations. That said, one can believe in God and still be a scientist (that is, contrary to phlogistician's comment, I think you can both believe in God and "do science right"), but you need to assiduously avoid any temptation to introduce modes of thought that do not comport wth the scientific method--and which are common in religious thinking--when conducting that science.

It may we be, to simply things that "God did it" is the right answer to certain questions. It's possible that God created Adam and Eve 6,000 years ago just as the Bible describes (and then made it merely "look" like the universe if far older and that life on this planet evolved), but even if that explanation were true, it would not be a "scientific" explanation since it is necessary to invoke God as a supernatural actor. In that sense, science is not merely a search for truth, but a search for a particular kind of naturalistic truth, that as a matter of logic may or may not comport with reality.

It just so happens that: (i) purely imo, science is far more useful in providing answers that can be used to improve our quality of life than religion and (ii) humans seem, on average, to be predisposed to accepting empirical evidence as a basis for understanding over "revealed truth" or ideas generated in non-empirical ways. The latter results in a great deal of cognitive dissonance in people, when empirical evidence conflicts with deeply ingrained non-empirically-based beliefs, often resulting in a somewhat tortured attempt to show that the empirical evidence is wrong or needs to be reinterpreted, or to concoct alternative empirical evidence that could back their preferred belief system.

 

I think this is messy because science cannot be secular or religious. It is a methodology or set of methodologies. As someone said about candles....

Should deductive reasoning be secular?
Shoud inductive reasoning be secular?

I don't think that makes any sense, despite what the awkward noun 'secularity' might lead us to believe.

Should scientists be secular?

is a question that makes more sense. And the answer is no.

 

There goes Newton, for example. I would say your second sentence above does not match the empirical evidence.

 

Science is secular.
Take for example, the simple matter of counting from one to ten.
No matter what the rules of Religion say, you cannot leave out a number.
Where religion is contrary to science and to reason, religion is wrong.


On the other hand.
I can't agree with Dawkins when he says that anything other than living by complete reason, thereby enjoying the sublime purity of ideas, is the only way to live authentically.

I prefer life's rich and inauthentic pageant, as we progress to some understanding of the mystery of our existence.

I don't think that scientific formulae will do the job adequately.

 

Newton's beliefs would be contrary to Christian Dogma of his day and ours. But his Mathematics reasoning and logic? No. Well not until Einstein anyway.

Religion is a matter of faith and discipleship.
It is a way of living.
Maybe religious people could take a lesson from the people of science.

 

Most religious ideas are contrary to most others.

His math and reasoning was still good even after E.

Sure and perhaps vice versa.

 

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relegion is relegion, and science is science, relegion can't be science, and science can't be relegion.

 

Agreed.