Understanding/evaluating religious/theistic claims.

So some sciforums have to going on and on about how science [or rather, the scientific method] is an inadequate way of knowing, understanding or evaluating religious or theistic claims. When asked, the give vague answers and irrelevant analogies.

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I've had it with this marthaflowering evasions on this marthaflowering site!
Come on, proponents of the 'science not for God' ideology,

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Now, you know full well that Wynn and LG are just going to saunter in here and spout their same, old, tired shit again.

 

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I'm not convinced that science has any single method that's followed by all scientists in all instances. Scientists employ a whole variety of methods.

I think that I basically agree with that. I don't think that science is a particularly relevant or informative way of understanding or evaluating religious claims.

Or maybe you just don't like the answers that you get.

The most obvious problem is that many/most religious claims concern what are supposed to be 'transcendent' objects. Natural science appears to lack the necessary epistemological access to these supposed non-natural realms of being.

Science, particularly physics, often seems to be interested in subsuming individual observed events as instances of general "laws". But the alleged actions of religion's supposed transcental being(s) are typically more along the lines of one-offs and don't appear to be law-governed in the same way that physical events appear to be. The actions of these hypothetical religious objects seem to be captured more naturally in a narrative story line than by a mathematical equation.

And third, science just seems to miss the point of religion somehow. The goal in religion typically isn't conventional propositional understanding of anything, even supposedly divine things, or forming predictive theories about them. Religions seem to offer rather different sorts of psychological benefits, such as a feeling of meaning and beauty amidst the chaos of life.

And ultimately, many/most religions point themselves toward some sort of consummation that transcends sense and reason entirely -- salvation, the beatific vision, re-merging with the ultimate principle, nibbana. It's typically imagined as a direct unmediated awareness or even as a union, in which the goal isn't simply to believe something but rather to finally be it. This ultimate end-point typically isn't believed to be obtainable through sensory experience or by rational calculation at all. Rather, it's reached through some kind of extraordinary state of consciousness or perhaps by divine grace.

 

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In one sense, religion is essentially a matter of how to acknowledge and approach someone who is vastly more powerful than oneself.

The oft-mentioned example with the President can serve as an analogy.

If one is an ordinary Joe, then President Obama is vastly more powerful than oneself.
In order to get a private audience with him, one would normally have to go through a lengthy procedure of acquiring permissions and also having something to offer him that he would be personally interested in.

All along, the President in directly and indirectly in charge that the country functions - that there is a steady electricity supply, running water, that the transportation infrastructure is functional, that criminals are caught and punished etc. etc. etc.

 

Arioch

Let them, I've got a rhetorical hammer and I am not afraid to use it.

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Yazata

Don't confuse methods with standards. No matter the method used in the various sciences they all are subject to the same verification process as described by Popper, called the scientific method.

Science certainly can evaluate the realty of such claims. It may have nothing to say of claims about the relationship between two unevidenced spiritual entities, but it can evaluate claims of such entitie's effects on reality.

Because they are vague and irrelivant.

Because they probably do not actually exist. It's really hard to study the breeding habits of the wild Unicorn, you know.

We call those story lines "fiction". The whole Universe follows laws that we can understand, everything that can be shown to be real does the same. Those things that do not follow those laws are not called real, most of them emerge from the imagination of man, and our imagination is incapable of creating anything real which violates the laws of the Universe(even our imaginary gods can not be shown to do so).

There are sciences that study these things, generally in the Psychological and Anthropological fields. That's hardly missing the point, it's just not attributing these things to unevidenced things.

The question is are these all illusary goals leading people into imaginary worlds.

wynn

The difference is that the President can actually be shown to exist, so meeting with him is at least possible. Gods are probably not real so you are probably deluding yourself.

Grumpy

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Not true. Many religious people make claims about the natural world based on their belief. They even try to shove their mythology into the science class. (And then they whine about discrimination when the scientifically minded shove back.)

 

And your intention is, with 100% probability, to insult me.

:bugeye:

 

@wynn --

So you're claiming omniscience now are you?

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wynn

My intent is to get you to discuss things on the merits and not construct defensive strawmen or spurious arguments. And avoid the ad hom.

Grumpy

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Apparently when I posted this :

A:
Does the investigation/direct perception of the planets and stars require that the stars want to see you first (or that you see the planets and stars on terms dictated by the planets and stars), or is it primarily a subject dictated by how eager one is to investigate/perceive such things( assuming the candidate has the adequate resources of education, training etc to grant the powers of analysis to pursue such investigation)?


B:
Does the investigation/direct perception of the president require that the president want to see you first (or that you see the president on terms dictated by the president), or is it primarily a subject dictated by how eager one is to investigate/perceive such things( assuming the candidate has the adequate resources of education, training etc to grant the powers of analysis to pursue such investigation)?


C:
Does the investigation/direct perception of molecules require that the molecules want to see you first (or that you see the molecules on terms dictated by the molecules), or is it primarily a subject dictated by how eager one is to investigate/perceive such things( assuming the candidate has the adequate resources of education, training etc to grant the powers of analysis to pursue such investigation)?


D:
Does the investigation/direct perception of god require that god wants to see you first (or that you see god on terms dictated by god), or is it primarily a subject dictated by how eager one is to investigate/perceive such things( assuming the candidate has the adequate resources of education, training etc to grant the powers of analysis to pursue such investigation)?

.. and requested that you place the statements in two categories based on similar qualities it suddenly got too vague and irrelevant for you guys to continue

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:shrug:

 

@LG --

Why are you trying to build a false dichotomy?

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=5wV_REEdvxo&NR=1
or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlaCq3dKvvI&feature=relmfu

 

Both videos pretty much refute any bs that Wynn or LG spam out, it's odd..i've only read their quotes but for some odd reason i don't become angry or infuriated by them but entertained by their belifes guess i just find theists like those two fucking hilarious.

 

You must be mistaken
I am not

 

similarly hearing atheist ideas attempting to dress up as rational is also a big joke

:shrug:

 

Claims can be handled with logic, even if the scientific method cannot avail itself of empirical evidence. Can logic be 100% conclusive? Depends on who you ask and what arguments are accepted.

 

Not for an ordinary Joe.

An ordinary Joe has to do with faith in second-hand or third-hand information about the person the media present and call "The President."

Strong atheism, when spelled out, does sound a little absurd, so even you need to modify your statements with possibility qualifiers.
Unfortunately, that sometimes leads to nothing but passive-aggressiveness.

 

Determining whether there's a scientific method, and if so what that method is, is still an active area of debate in the philosophy of science. Just as a sample, there's discussion of Euclidean-style axiomatic systems, deductive-nomological covering-law models, hypothetical-deductive schemes (of which Popper's is only one), there are taxonomies, classification schemes and cladistics, there's the instrumentalism vs scientific realism controversies, causal explanations, probabilistic explantations, functional and teleological explanations, there's problems of discovery and induction, concilience of inductions, C.S. Pierce's logic of abduction, mathematical modeling, thought experiments...

It something from outside nature was interfering with nature, those interventions might just look like causal anomalies to science. Conceivably, science might not even be able to detect interventions from outside, if the interventions involve classes of events that people already feel confident that they understand.

It's rare that people fully understand the causation that goes into a particular event. Scientists come closest in carefully controlled experiments where there's only a small number of significant variables. But in everyday life we don't have that kind of knowledge. So we end up classifying perceived events into classes and then feel confident that a particular event in question isn't problematic if it's a member of a class of events that one would expect given the prevailing conditions.

If there was a 'miraculous' intervention from outside nature, about all that science could say about it is that an event happened whose cause is still unknown and as yet not fully understood. And unless the intervention was a dramatic attention-grabbing violation of our expectations of what the natural order is, probably nobody would even notice.

The issue is whether or not natural science has any epistemological access to non-natural being. If science doesn't have that access, then it wouldn't seem to be of very much use in describing, explaining or even determining whether or not such being exists.

Or if they're true, we might call them 'history'. There's a vast critical literature on the applicability of physics-style 'covering law' or 'deductive-nomological' models in history. There are questions about what kind of general laws supposedly govern history. And it's been noted that these idealized nomological philosophies of history bear no resemblance to what historians actually do and to how they go about their work.

Problems multiply tremendously if we turn our attention to a hypothetical transcendent creator whose existence is said to be prior to whatever laws of nature exist. Simply by definition, the laws of nature would only apply in the created realm of nature and wouldn't even apply to such a being. So all the models that have science subsuming particular events as instances of general laws wouldn't even apply in this situation.

Somebody can approach music by studying the psychology and anthropology of music if they like. I prefer to listen to it. It's a very different psychological process and a very different experience.

This suggests Frank Jackson's famous 'Mary black-and-white' argument published in the 'Philosophical Review' in 1982. He imagined a scientist becoming the world's greatest authority on the science of visual perception. But unfortunately, she was totally colorblind and could only see in black and white. So no matter how many details of the science of color vision she learned, she still didn't know what color looks like.

 

Option 2

Option 2. We dont wanna see or meet god. We just wanna know if he exists. And we dont need to meet the president to do that, we have enough proof as it is.

Option 2.

Sorry, you aint getting that cop out. Even if God doesnt want to see me, if he is to matter to you at all, he has to influence and intervene, and by such secondary observions I can acertain if there is a probabilistic anomaly or not, which would indicate a God.

Not playing into your false dicotomy - agenticity/intentionality is not an important factor for the empirical observation of anything that actually affects us or is relevant to us.

So, is the pancake for lunch or the hamster?