A woman that used to work with my wife posted this on FB yesterday, and I couldn't help but wonder how her kids would feel if they saw this years from now when they find out that their mom had every chance to remove the tumor that killed her, but rather than listening to the people that can see inside her skull, she decided to invest in a magical fantasy for the chances of her survival. No conflict here...

He'll take care of it all right...

By the way, are doctors bound not to say anything about religion, professionally?

I really don't like the whole idea of 'science and faith can coexist and even compliment each other', or conicsely, the idea of NOMA.

A more accurate version of the 'science and faith can coexist' argument would be:

Science and faith can coexist if that faith makes absolutely no claims that can be tested and verified and measured by science, because every religious or supernatural claim that we have been able to investigate so far has not been anything supernatural at all. If at any point faith and science are in conflict (age of the earth, evolution, prayer as healthcare, etc) science has been shown over and over to be the one that is actually accurate. Religion has had to give up so much of its declarative authority over the state and functions of reality and our world that only after it's been shoved into the most untouchable of corners of the unsovled (as of now) mysteries of the universe can it puff its chest out and make its old bald assertions.

(May 21, 2015 at 9:05 am)Alex K Wrote: He'll take care of it all right...

By the way, are doctors bound not to say anything about religion, professionally?

They can only offer recommendations, but ultimately they have to oblige the patient's superstitious wishes. For example, it is strictly prohibited for Jehovah's witnesses to receive blood transfusions, and when they die due to a loss of blood, they become martyrs for their church and are celebrated for their devotion to their faith.

So if I were a doctor, I could say - "I can't recommend prayer as a substitute for surgery because, looking at the cancer deaths, it doesn't seem to work for most people"?

I don't know. Good question...

My opinion of the "non-overlapping magisteria" (NOMA) idea (the idea that science and religion are different subjects that do not overlap) is that it is a pragmatic position that people take, to try to get the religious fools to accept any science at all.  In other words, I think it is a lie, told to try to get religionists to accept some science.  The practical alternative is for the religious nuts to totally reject science, as they are not going to just give up their religious beliefs.

If you go for an all or nothing approach, with most religionists, you get nothing.

If a religion is willing to 'bet the farm' on articles of faith subject to falsifiability, more power to them. That's why we're here.

{cough, cough}LDS{cough, cough}

There doesn't have to be.  There are definitely some articles of some faiths that simply cannot exist with science as truth (even though we are obviously capable of holding contrary positions to be true).  This doesn't have much to do with the fact that they are articles of faith so much as that they are factually incorrect.  If they were not articles of faith they would still be factually correct, being articles of faith don't make them more or less factually correct.  

NOMA is not always true with respect to any given faith, it is true in principle - of an as-yet unrealized and purely hypothetical faith...lol


Carl Sagan famously opined upon a religion of nature.  He says it better than I could-

Quote:A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.

This particular type of conflict tends to resolve itself quickly.