RE: No conflict between faith and science, eh?
May 21, 2015 at 1:07 pm
(This post was last modified: May 21, 2015 at 1:09 pm by Pyrrho.)
(May 21, 2015 at 12:10 pm)FatAndFaithless Wrote: Dogmatic faith-based assertions as a way of describing reality are in conflict with the critical examination of reality, could be one way of putting it.
Hypothetical:
What if there were a sect of Christianity that pared away all the obviously false crap from the Old and New Testament, all the miracles and magic and prophecy and shit like that, and was literally only the acceptance of Jesus Christ as your savior to achieve immortal life, and that's it.
The members of this sect used science, skepticism, and empiricism to discover and inform their ideas about all other aspects of their lives.
Would this religion be 'in conflict' with science? I guess...technically not? But that's only beacuse their claim (Jesus = immortailty) cannot be tested at all by science, and has no possible way (right now) of being verified. I find the cognitive dissonance and the clashing methodologies of discovering things about the world to be more in conflict than any specific claim or set of claims.
If you strip away everything that conflicts with science and reason, you will totally eliminate the religion. For example, believing things without proper evidence is unreasonable. So no faith about anything would be possible in this imaginary "religion."
Further, your examples about Jesus and immortality very much conflict with modern science. First of all, it is far from clear that Jesus ever existed. (That is discussed in multiple other threads, for a start, see this.) And even if a man named Jesus did exist, upon what basis would one worship him? Why not worship your uncle Bob instead? Additionally, the best idea for what the mind is, is that it is simply a subset of the processes of the brain. Once the brains stops doing stuff, you are gone. So no immortality.
Really, religion without bullshit is not religion.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
