RE: Is God a logical contradiction?
July 31, 2019 at 11:48 pm
(This post was last modified: August 1, 2019 at 12:08 am by Anomalocaris.)
(July 31, 2019 at 7:43 am)mordant Wrote: Religion has never invented or innovated anything, and its explanations and predictions are no more accurate than random happenstance.
Religion can’t invent or innovate, but it can motivate people to do so. This is all any human institution or ideology can possibly do to contribute to increasing the rate of innovation or invention.
Religion can certainly motivate people to high level of innovation and invention when such innovation directly serve to aggrandize itself, such as advancements in architectural engineering to facilitate more awe inspiring cathedrals.
Religion can also indirectly motivate people to higher level of innovation and invention when it’s doctrine promotes diligence, studiousness, and reflection, as it did early Muslim era, and in parts of Protestant world after the reformation.
Where religion falls down is in its Bronze Age origin of its foundational myths, and its life or death stake in preventing the transparent baselessness of myth from being exposed as fictional. So religion must limit human endeavor to broaden and deepen its understanding of how reality works if it were to not be revealed as a self-aggrandizing fabrication. This limitation it must place on the scope of collective human understanding of the world also deny humanity of the inventions and innovation based on such understanding.
Because human understanding of reality is deepening and broadening all the time, while the fundamental basis of religious legitimacy remains rooted in the same past age in which it was fabricated, the farther time moves forward, the more widespread and extensive must the effort of religion to block further depending and deepen our knowledge base, so the more would religion act as a force that attempts to,subvert the very basis of further inventions and innovations.