RE: Science and Religion not in direct conflict?
December 15, 2015 at 11:05 pm
(This post was last modified: December 15, 2015 at 11:06 pm by God of Mr. Hanky.)
(December 15, 2015 at 12:20 am)maestroanth Wrote: I just signed up on curiositystream and it seems pretty good so far except I had to do the HD if I wanted to chromecast it without it looking like blobs ;P
Anyway, after watching some of the god vs science show, there's a few christians in there saying that science and god aren't against each other rather that science is the 'how' god does his 'miracles'....or something of that nature.
I; however, do not understand this viewpoint. Mainly because every story that is claimed in the bible has already been debunked by science and there is no evidence that correlates with anything in the bible. To me, I don't see how that's NOT a conflict.
Is there some weird thing about the bible I'm not understanding?
I mean take genesis for example, God make adam and eve from adam's rib yadda...yadda...yadda...., and then science discovers fossils of homo habilus, homo erectus, homo neanderthalsus, etc., of our past evolution and closely related species.
How in this universe do these fossils found give a 'scientific explanation' or 'how god did it' for the adam and eve story? That's ludicrous!! They don't correlate at all. It simply proves that it never happened period.
I mean, a rational scientific discovery to show the 'how' of the adam of eve story I'd imagine something along the lines of 2 fossilized human skeletons being found in what was once a tropical but isolated area (eden). And a peculiar rib found in the female skeleton (eve) was very unusual because it didn't matched the dna of the rest of the female's skeleton, but somehow it that matched the male's skeleton (adam's) DNA exactly, so how did the male rib somehow get in the female's body? Then they find evidence of surgical tools that showed adam of eve were once siamese twins that were connected at the rib, and through some weird chance they *knew* how to use those tools to separate their conjoined bodies with the use of some silicon sentient dirt/rock to fill the holes for missing body parts (since I think they were supposed to be made out of dirt or something in the bible).... Then boom...that's a scientific explanation that correlates with the bible story. <-- but that's not what was found in reality....
Only dumb American Christians (and I am American) really believe this, which is how the Xtian right has managed to keep Americans religious while Europe moves ahead.
If it smells like bullshit, then it probably is, but anyway let's unpack it:
Religious ideas are of supernatural people and things which cannot even be observed, but one is expected to believe in them anyway.
Science is based on observational study, and if a claim is made that something real exists, then it demands a demonstration which can be observed.
Religious ideas are accepted by the believer without question.
Science questions all beliefs, and wants to know why in fuck people believe that religious crap.
Religious apologists resort to very convoluted, circular argumentation, and barely relevant anecdote in their attempts to explain why we should believe their ideas instead of call them out for the outright liars which they are.
Science demands nothing short of empirical evidence for any idea which is asserted, otherwise it will call a spade a spade!
Therefore, the fortunately late and not so great Stephen Jay Gould's proposal that science and religion are "non-overlapping magisteria" stands only on the premise that science does not look at religion, and the other way around. Read the news if you think this condition is reality! Don't forget the vice-versa of Xians trying to hijack science by using the legal system to force their way into science classrooms with unscientifically convoluted curricula in support of "design theory" (aka creationism).
Science is such a bitter enemy of religion that the first thing the early priests did when they brought Xtianity to Europe was find all the libraries and destroy all the books which they found to be even slightly disagreeable with their new doctrine. This included anything scientific, and the Byzantine empire which they overran was so rich with scientific progress that the Dark Ages never would have happened, and we would probably be colonizing other star systems had all that knowledge survived.
Mr. Hanky loves you!