Is science a religion?

Discussion in 'Religion' started by Yazata, Jan 4, 2020.

  1. Hipparchia Registered Senior Member

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    And scientists conspired to implement the Piltdown hoax. That should lead to the condemnation of some scientists,not science.
     
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  3. gmilam Valued Senior Member

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    Who is condemning anything. I'm just pointing out that religion does not keep people stable... Ask any ex-members of Heaven's Gate or Jim Jones Peoples' Temple. If you can find any that survived.

    I've known many unstable people who found religion... They are still unstable.
     
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  5. Hipparchia Registered Senior Member

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    I thought it was obvious who was condeming anything.
    • I am explicitly condemning scientists who manipulate data.
    • You are implicitly condemning religion for its perceived failures.
    And you are stretching things to call Heaven's Gate or the Jim Jones nonsense religion. They were analagous to pseudoscience, pseudoreligions of a sort.
     
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  7. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    My thoughts are well know by now....Let me sum it up again....
    There are genuine religious people out there who mean well, respect others and conduct themselves in a reasonable law abiding fashion that society in general dictates as appropriate. There are others who are nothing but pretentious hypocritical arseholes.
    Most scientists are well meaning and struggle to do their best to promote science and the benefits obtained for mankind in general.
    Some others are selfish manipulative blights on the discipline they supposedly represent.


    On the title of the thread, its as plain as day that science isn't a religion and is the furthest thing from that. Obviously the thread proposer had other things in mind, with regards to the pasting that the forum in general, see the need to dish out to religious propagandists, who try and belittle science and its benefits with their holier then thou attitude.
    All I'll say is that if any person was faced with a choice of giving up all science and all its benefits, as opposed to giving up all their religious dogma and so called benefits, what choice would be made?
     
  8. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Yes maybe "stable" was a poor choice of words. No psychiatrist would recommend religion as a treatment, after all.

    I suspect what may have been meant was that religion serves as a source of stability in many people's lives, in the sense of an anchor, a source of solace and membership of a community.
     
  9. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    No scientist "conspired to implement" the Piltdown hoax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man

    Scientists have of course committed frauds - disturbingly many - but not that one. Note that even a brief summary of the Piltdown Man hoax includes a list of several other frauds committed by people attempting to injure science and damage the reputations of individual scientists - many of them motivated by religious beliefs. These frauds were seldom - if ever? - exposed by religious people; as with Piltdown Man, the exposure of frauds in general (as well as the identification of honest errors and honestly mistaken beliefs) is commonly left to people capable of setting their religious beliefs aside or even correcting them in the light of careful and thoroughly examined argument based on evidence.

    Religious officials and establishments are not reliable exposers of frauds. They are not even reliable exposers of frauds committed by scientists or intellectual critics of religion. They rely on scientists, policemen, journalists, and other such folk, for that.

    The condemnation of formal and institutionalized religions or religion itself by some scientifically educated people is not based on individual frauds, but on large scale patterns of (allegedly) questionable or downright bad behaviors broadly characteristic of religions or religion itself, behaviors which are commonly defended - not exposed or condemned - by religious officials and public spokesmen.

    That pattern - religious institutions defending rather than uprooting and evicting their bad behavior - is so pervasive and ubiquitous that those attempting to make a secular case for the value and benefit of religious belief quickly find themselves (as I have found myself, here and elsewhere) attempting something quite difficult and complex, and in the face of opposition from believers as strenuous and strongly motivated as the opposition from nonbelievers.

    The attempts by so many of religion's defenders to label "science" a "religion" - which amounts to defending religion by tarring science with the label - is just one more manifestation of the weirdness of so much formalized religious belief. The question is not whether "science" is a religion (it would have to be several religions, for starters), but why anyone would want to assert that it was.
     
  10. gmilam Valued Senior Member

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    I was not condemning anyone or anything. I was simply pointing out to Ethernos that religion does not keep people stable. And I used my cousin as an example - despite his belief that he will burn in hell, he still cannot manage to control his internal demons and keeps finding himself on the wrong side of the legal system.
     
  11. Hipparchia Registered Senior Member

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    648
    While I am firm supporter of the value of Wikipedia it typically should be, for serious study, no more than an entree to the subject. There are several books, some admittedly less scholarly than others that lay out sound arguments that scientists "conspired to implement" the Piltdown hoax. You will need more than a link to a wikipedia article to counter that.
    Strawman. Nicely written, but irrelevant.
    I get it. Your distaste for religion colours your attitude to it. Duly noted. It's ironic that you employ techniques of cherry picking and the infamous Gish Gallop that are normally associated with Creationists. But since it serves as a neat illustration of part of my view, thank you.
     
  12. Hipparchia Registered Senior Member

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    648
    Thus, you describe the failure of religion to deliver a supposed benefit. You assert that religion fails in this way, your cousin being an example. That is an implicit criticism. Perhaps you do not believe that criticisms are equivalent to condemnations. I suppose you can do that if you wish, but it seems overly pedantic to me.
    What disturbs you about the possibility that your views are seen as a condemnation of aspects of religion? Why are you apparently happy, in contrast, to be seen as criticising religion? Or do you also deny you are criticising it? Puzzling.
     
  13. (Q) Encephaloid Martini Valued Senior Member

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    That's very interesting, I think Dawson was just an amateur archeologist and Woodward was a Curator. What scientists actually conspired with them?
     
  14. Hipparchia Registered Senior Member

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    648
    There is considerable debate on the matter. It is some time since I have read on the subject. Tielhard de Chardin has been accussed by at least one author.
    Also, I don't necessarily exclude Dawson just because of his amateur status. At the time of the discovery we are only half a century away from the time when many (most) scientists were "amateurs".
    I may have one or two books on the subject, though I think most that I read were from the local library. If I can dig something out I shall try to answer fmore fully.
     
  15. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    I don't know what all the confusion is about.

    Why don't people just stay with the accepted definition and meaning of words instead of corrupting the actual literary symbolization in order to make some philosophical point.

    Nowhere in the etymology of "religion" is there any mention of science or the practice of science.

    religion (n.)
    https://www.etymonline.com/word/religion

    I can understand the use of the word "religiously" as a description of "consistent and conscientious regularity", but that does not in any way suggest a "state of life bound by monastic vows" or "conduct indicating a belief in a divine power".

    If anything, the term "religion" is in direct opposition to the etymology of the term "science"

    science (n.)
    https://www.etymonline.com/word/science
     
  16. gmilam Valued Senior Member

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    3,522
    It was an observation. I generally find observations to be obvious. My observations have shown me that religious people suffer from the same problems and hang ups that non-religious people do. If they didn't, then we wouldn't have so many priests messing around with altar boys.
     
  17. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Not at all. Not in a world featuring the Mormon religion, and dozens of Cargo Cults.
    He was excluded at the time - he had to co-opt a recognized scientist (by deception) to front for him in scientific circles, and even there his available choices did not include experts in the field involved.
    This particular subject in relation to this thread is imho well and thoroughly covered by the Wiki entry.
    Real books? Oh wow.
    If you have a name or two, or some other hint of the identities of the scientists who conspired (to do what. exactly?), that would allow a less sarcastic reply.
    Not at all. Try comprehension, on top of reading.
    The point was that fraud is fairly common in science, but widespread or large scale or long lasting conspiracy is not. That is a characteristic difference between formal or institutionalized religion and formal or institutionalized science.
    If he "conspired", it would have been with Dawson and possibly the mostly absent Woodward - not any "scientists". At the time of his working at Dawson's dig site his major intellectual background was his training as a theologian and Jesuit priest - he had only just begun his study of evolution.

    His thorough religious education did not help him spot Dawson's hoax - meanwhile, very few people whose scientific education equaled Chardin's religious one were taken in.
    ?
    You read - without registering, apparently - a brief reference to my stance in favor of religion and my arguments for it meeting discouraging circumstances, in the post you are quoting.
    (To add weight: I am also favorably disposed toward Chardin's recognition of the core importance of complexity, an example if I am not mistaken of a scientific benefit from a theological or religious education. Unfortunately it also seems to have biased his assumptions toward purpose and/or design, sticking him with complexity as a kind of built in goal).

    You are making mistakes here, and they seem to have in common an abandonment of the thread topic. That makes them avoidable.
     
  18. Hipparchia Registered Senior Member

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    648
    Well, unless you were to approve of messing around with altar boys -which you seemingly don't - the observation is equally a condemnation of bad practices by the religious and the non-religious.
    When I read post replete with sarcasm amd lacking in courtesy I can't help but wonder if I have touched a raw spot. Since your view appears to be entrenched it will take some time to assemble sufficient material to dismantle it, at least to the satisfaction of others.

    In the meantime Straus in "The Great Piltdown Hoax", Science, New Series, Vol. 119, No. 3087 (Feb. 26, 1954), pp. 265-269 observes that Weiner, Oakley, and Clark conclude that "the distinguished palaeontologists and archaeologists who took part in the excavations at Piltdown were the victims of a most elaborate and carefully prepared hoax" that was "so extraordinarily skilful" and which "appears to have been so entirely unscrupulous and inexplicable, as to find no parallel in the history of palaeontological discovery."

    Perhaps you think that an elaborate and carefully prepared hoax, so extraordinarily skilful, could be be conducted by non-scientists. I don't.
     
  19. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    20,069
    How many participants does it take to form a grand conspiracy to commit a "grand hoax" by the scientific world?

    We hear such "grand hoaxes" (loaves and fishes) everyday by televangelists in the theological world!
    Who is complicit in those hoaxes?
     
    Last edited: Oct 10, 2020
  20. kx000 Valued Senior Member

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    5,134
    I say belief in God without science, but coexisting with it in Heaven, with its nature completely in tact. You can leave space for science and still be absolutley faithful. God is omnipotent after all.
     
  21. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    I rest my case......

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  22. river

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    It is Now . Science is on the verge of being a religion . Knowledge a religion .

    Because of the disparity between the People that know and the People that don't .
     
  23. river

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    17,307
    And Because of ovid-19 .

    Science the Integrity of Science in ALL Fields of Science Matters . The Real Truth is important . Thinking by Us All is based in the Real Truth of Scientific Investigation .
     

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