Film short: Why It's So Hard for Scientists to Believe in God

Umm. Except that it isn't false at all. It's much as exchemist has said and more. Do you get out of the lab much? The vast majority of people in the world believe in one religion or another. They believe when there is a flood or drought that the victims are being punished, even if they don't quite get why. They believe a god is watching them constantly. They see things like more frequent earthquakes or those holes in Siberia and are sure it's the end of days No use reminding them they thought way back on 9/11 2001 it was the end times. I myself am not that, what to call it, "superstitious", but most people I know are. And yet - and yet, these same people program computers, use cell phones, drive cars, fly in air planes and have surgery should they need it and can afford it and they believe that germs, carcinogens and viruses, but not they are demons. They also believe science has and will solve most of world civilization's problems. This is all very self-contradictory, but there you go. I can't believe I even have to tell you this. Even the Amish will fly to a big city for surgery if they need it. They may be devout and set in their ways, but they're not stupid or impratical.

I myself, grew up fully aware and even taught about modern science while at the same time I was "indoctrinated" into the Catholic Church. No priest or nun or especially devout church person I have ever met has never felt any conflict nor were they "biased to deny, automatically, new information that conflicts with whatever they have come to believe is the basis of their received religious wisdom." (as you say) I have also lived among Buddhists, Moslems and devout Jews. I have yet to see someone slam their mobile against the wall and declare it the work of the devil.

So I really don't know where you get this stuff.

My problem is not with science, technology or scientists and the scientific method or scientific thought. It is with condescending SciForum members who think everyone who doesn't see things their way and agree with their supposed unassailable "scientific" views is a primitive "Fundie" that hopefully can be rehabilitated and brought around to rational thought - or if they can't, why then they can burn in their hell of ignorance and scientific illiteracy.

Who do you think you're talking to? You seem to think your debating with The Clampetts!

... Gotta go now, Jethro wants his vittles.

 

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I'm not buying what he's selling. In 25 words he could have said "insert God as needed to explain phenomena for which there is no science." I find it disturbing that a person in his office never even mentions the long history of religious interference in science and public policy, to include agencies like his. I presume Obama gave him that job as an effort to turn the harshest fundamentalists around, since he obviously accepts evolution. But it doesn't get to the larger issue you are raising here. As you see, he nowhere mentions that his own religion is merely a derivative--at least in part--of the older religion river posted the text from (Sumerian/Akkadian/Babylonian), which effectively renders the premises of evangelical Christianity null and void. It is not what it purports to be.

The ontological questions Collins says science can not answer, and which justify faith, do not begin to justify Christian faith. Such a conclusion ignores the totality of historical evidence which any scientist not damaged in some way would conclude renders religion, and esp. Christianity, as an absurdity.

As you see, it does not take much fluency in history (referencing archaeology, anthropology) to be an outstanding geneticist and physician. And therein lies the rub. He doesn't even explain why he chose evangelical Christianity over the thousands of alternatives, which paints him as a little less than honest here.

That's the real question. ND Tyson approaches this with the historical perspective Dr Collins lacks. Since Tyson isn't just attacking Christianity, although he was evidently confronted by it in his career, we don't get to the more obvious discussion that it's just another variation on older mythology. He does touch on the weakness that MD Collins expressed (of the trauma of death--at the loss of patients) and the emotional damage done to those who wish to think the dead will live in a magical spirit world forever. That is, ND Tyson makes it clear we are not special. which is the main psychological premise of religions that dole out rewards after death. Since Dr Collins already knows that things like emotion are biologically endowed ("raging bulls" or the ink of a provoked octopus, e.g.) it's pretty strange that he took that plunge into evangelical Christianity just to cling to the possibility that all experience is not just that of the quasi-illusory machinations of the automatons that he actually knows we are.

 

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I never said religious people are stupid. Certainly not Isaac Newton, for example. What I said was that almost all religious people hold beliefs in direct conflict with basic, fundamental, standard modern science - as did Newton (with much better justification). In other words, exchemist is wrong to claim they do not. Am I being condescending to Newton?

I get it from reading posts by religious people - always and only - who think because religious people use cell phones and drive cars and generally enjoy the benefits they are OK with all basic scientific theory and discovery. I get it from looking at a farming community that has covered the landscape with GMOs and still thinks evolutionary theory is wrong because it contradicts the Bible, or the Koran. I get it by hearing from people whose entire national economies are based on fossil fuels and think angels dictated the inerrant story of Noah's Ark to be written down by an illiterate warlord, or people whose direct ancestors brought horses to North America nevertheless believing that angels handed the story of the Nephilim battles inscribed on golden tablets to a chosen prophet, or people who depend on all the findings of biology and medicine to help them through pregnancy but believe that an angel told a Palestinian virgin girl her baby was fathered by a deity and that was the truth, and simultaneously that always and only a human egg fertilized by human sperm has acquired a soul. Those last, btw, are some of the nuns and priests you claim hold no beliefs in conflict with basic scientific theory and discovery.

Your problem starts with your confusion of "fundie" with "everyone", as if the attribute acquiring that label is any old disagreement with somebody. Fundies are an identifiable category of people with specific intellectual characteristics, and that after a few years on forums like this others can smell them coming around a corner, so to speak, is just an awkward fact looming around theistic religion whose latest illustration you find distressing for some reason

I'm debating someone who read sscully's posts and then posted - in the same thread - that there were no fundamentalist Christians on this forum.

 

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The main reason scientists have a tough time discussing religion, is because science is processed primarily in the left side of the brain, while religion and concepts like God, are processed in the right side of the brain. The left brain is differential and attempts to find the slope of the curves of knowledge at specific points; specialization. The right brain is the opposite and attempts to integrate the area under the same curves from A to B; generalizations. God is not easy to discuss with the left brain because one expects a specialty slope relationship; hard data points. This is not how an integral phenomena works. It is designed as a unification concept that integrates from atom (a) to the universe (u). In religion, God touches all via the holistic right brain.

What science would first need to do is develop more conscious use of the right brain, so it can use the right tools. A good analogy is the left brain uses a microscope to see the tiniest details. A PhD is often about a tiny detail under the microscope. The right brain uses a telescope to see large things far away like the moon. These mind tools are not interchangeable, with the microscope not able to look at the moon as a holistic entity, because it is too close and will lose track of the forest because of the details in the trees.

The answer is simple and clear, but looking through the right brain, at God, is not as common in science. They use the wrong mental tools, which tells them nothing of the phenomena as it should be seen. The moon under the microscope could be anywhere; inconclusive confusion.

I was trained as a scientists and engineer. But later in life I became interested in psychology and learned how to become more conscious of the right brain. I use both sides and can relate to both POV, and attempt to build bridges. My early research did encounter a wall between the two sides of the brain that makes it harder to be conscious of both. This was placed centuries ago. Getting through the wall is not an easy thing since it is culturally taboo from both sides. it is needed to empathize with both sides; microscope and telescope.

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How would you test your faith?
Don't most religions forbid such a testing?

I am familiar with asking God for help and guidance.
I am convinced that prayer is useful.
But is this God some invention of my own making, or does it have an existence independent of my mind?
Perhaps I am somehow contacting my own subconscious, giving it a task to solve, or healing it of some hidden hurt.

How would I get the answer to this question?

 

A survey of scientists who are members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press in May and June 2009, finds that members of this group are, on the whole, much less religious than the general public. Indeed, the survey shows that scientists are roughly half as likely as the general public to believe in God or a higher power. According to the poll, just over half of scientists (51%) believe in some form of deity or higher power; specifically, 33% of scientists say they believe in God, while 18% believe in a universal spirit or higher power. By contrast, 95% of Americans believe in some form of deity or higher power, according to a survey of the general public conducted by the Pew Research Center in July 2006. Specifically, more than eight-in-ten Americans (83%) say they believe in God and 12% believe in a universal spirit or higher power. Finally, the poll of scientists finds that four-in-ten scientists (41%) say they do not believe in God or a higher power, while the poll of the public finds that only 4% of Americans share this view.
http://www.pewforum.org/2009/11/05/scientists-and-belief/

So, being good at reason leads to less religiosity.

 

The right brain by being spatial, uses a different language compared to the left brain. The left brain uses words from language which have specific meaning under specific context. This is useful to isolate meaning but can be cumbersome for right brain spatial concepts. The analogy is drawing a 3-D image on 2-D paper. It may look 3-D to the eyes, but if you use the sense of touch it is still flat to the screen and appears to lack something. It does not fully express the third dimension. This is often used as a 3-D trick, to create illusions of 3-D which cannot exist in the real world. Below is a stairway to nowhere, which looks 3-D, but is physically impossible. You need the right brain to see this.

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The third dimension of the right brain is intuitive, which is complex language all to itself, based on feeling and sensation having meaning. These feeling tones ni specific places of the body appear that way because data is processed extremely fast and appears as a blur. As an analogy, say we played a ten minute speech in 10 seconds it sounds like a buzz. Consciousness is not trained for this speed without practice. It expects slower language.

Even with practice, a 3-D representation will often get esoteric. A good analogy is the image below. This is a 3-D movie image that needs 3-D glasses to interpret correctly. Without those glasses, the image appears different from 2-D reality in a bizarre type of way.

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“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” - Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

 

Doesn't mean we should encourage cognitive dissonance.

 

However, it does mean we should encourage poetry and wonder.

 

I think that it's accurate to say that religion speaks more directly to people's aesthetic and ethical sensibilities than natural science does. Religion is about giving people the sense that the events of their lives are meaningful and that it all has some larger context, purpose and goal.

Science seems to be more about finding predictable regularities in sensory experience and about reducing complex wholes to dynamic interactive systems of simpler parts.

I think that I agree with exchemist, by and large. Most religious people that I interact with seem to have experience divided into two categories: descriptions and predictions concerning objective physical reality, which is best addressed by the methods of natural science, and subjective psychological personal reality where things like ethics, meaning and beauty are more in the forefront.

As I suggested earlier, there's usually still an ontological component to most religious belief. Religious people really do want to believe that reality is such as to justify their hopes and intuitions. But many religious believers don't seem to have much trouble assigning the religious stuff to a supernatural realm that isn't to be confused with the physical universe of natural science.

I'm certainly not convinced that religion must always be in conflict with science. It might turn out that the so-called 'incompatibility thesis' is a doctrine of what we might label fundamentalist faith, found among both religious fundies and atheist fundies.

It seems to me that the vast majority of discourse in the modern west has nothing to do with religion or religious ideas at all. People talk about their jobs, shopping, current events, sports... where to go for lunch. Even ostensibly religious people often don't think about religion very much except on Sunday morning, before football.

We live in a thoroughly secular age.

That's a caricature.

Dawkins is (or at least was) a very good evolutionary biologist. But somehow he's turned himself into a supposed atheist authority on the subject of religion, without having any formal education in the subject at all that I'm aware of. Some of the things that he says about religion seem almost as crude and ill-informed to my eye as what fundy creationists' proclaim about evolutionary biology.

 

The only way that scientists will ever understand that scientists , were the the essence of our intellectual abilities is to explore our very ancient past

Starting with the Sumerians

Simple as that

 

If our universe is any good maybe, just maybe it was imagined and known as it was created. Then again we take shits and eat our beast! I think for happiness to be literal it needs to be free of the mind, but still one with it if you see what I am getting at. Also, knowledge, and conciousnes is sentient.

 

I think you miswrote your post. This makes no sense. Care to clarify?

 

I'm glad you wrote 'most religions' instead of 'all'.

The famous Kalama sutta (from Theravada Buddhism's Pali canon) includes this:

As they sat there, the Kalamas of Kesaputta said to the Blessed One, "Lord, there are some brahmans & contemplatives who come to Kesaputta. They expound & glorify their own doctrines, but as for the doctrines of others, they deprecate them, revile them, show contempt for them, & disparage them. And then other brahmans & contemplatives come to Kesaputta. They expound & glorify their own doctrines, but as for the doctrines of others, they deprecate them, revile them, show contempt for them, & disparage them. They leave us absolutely uncertain & in doubt: Which of these venerable brahmans & contemplatives are speaking the truth, and which ones are lying?"

"Of course you are uncertain, Kalamas. Of course you are in doubt. When there are reasons for doubt, uncertainty is born. So in this case, Kalamas, don't go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, 'This contemplative is our teacher.' When you know for yourselves that, 'These qualities are unskillful; these qualities are blameworthy; these qualities are criticized by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to harm & to suffering' — then you should abandon them.​

In other words, according to the Buddha the truth (in his psychologistic religious sense) is what actually works in lived experience.

People shouldn't assume that the truth is whatever is written in scripture (including the Pali canon) or what respected teachers teach (including the Buddha himself). Interestingly, it isn't the result of philosophical reasoning or logical inference either.

The early Buddhist system is all about dukkha (traditionally translated as 'suffering') and the elimination of dukkha. So the Buddha seems to be saying that the way somebody really and finally comes to know that his path works isn't that they have unshakeable faith that it must, or that they have logically concluded that it must, but simply because they aren't suffering any more.

 

How is that incompatible with science?

 

the Anunnaki were the ones that genetically altered our genome for the purpose of making us workers to mine gold , Ninmah was the geneticist , who changed our genome

 

I believe that this is a reference to the ancient-astronaut theories of Zecharia Sitchin and his followers.

Kind of reminiscent of the Stargate-mythos, except that its believers take it very seriously.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anunnaki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zecharia_Sitchin

 

Its not a myth at all , the Anunnaki were real advanced beings