Category: philosophy/religion topics
I was having a discussion the other day with a religious person. They weren't religious enough to go to church every sunday, but they prayed and read the bible, and believed they were going to heaven. Now, a few years ago, they were trying to have children with their husband. they went to four doctors and they all siad it was impossible. They tried medical solutions including surgery, none of twhch seemed to work. Finally, they gave up on having children, except to pray for them. Six months later she was pregnant. She now has three children from her husband.
Now, she believes this was the power of faith. That it was her prayers that gained her a child. I think it was simply a mistake, that the doctors were either wrong, or were saying it would be hard for her to have children, but not totally impossible, or some other scientific explanation. I don't think that faith has anything to do with science.
What are all your thoughts on the subject? Is faith all you need? Can you pray to god for everything? Is going to the doctor a form of faith, or is it aainst god's will to try to use scientific methods to heal yourself? Does science stand on its own, true science that is, completely separated from faith?
hmmm. if it is true, each and everyone will keep on praying for their needs, though?
each their own...
I personally feel that happened due to some changes in their body or something. or, luck. may be?
Why even the highly devosional blindies are still not having sight? likewise, we can keep on asking questions.
I do believe there is a superior power than to human. and I'll be believing that until the scientists are fixing a turn off and turning on switch for the sun and wind. and, we're naming that superior power as Jesus, Krishna, Halla or whatever.
This is what I feel personally.
I'm sure this topic will prolong.
Raaj
Cody you know where I stand on topics such as these. I dont believe in god and I believe in science. However, the human mind is a powerful thing. Perhaps if you believe in something soooo much it may happen. Perhaps if someone believes strongly enough that something will happen, then it will. As for god, i think that science and religion cannot stand hand in hand. There are too many things that science can prove wrong in the multiple holy books. Science is tangible, religion and faith are not. Maybe the doctors were wrong. I know a woman with the same issue. Doctors told her she would never have children. She wasnt a "believer" in god, she didn't pray. And now she has 2 beautiful children. Doctors make mistakes all the time. to just chock it up to god is some people's way of feeling more comfortable. Because how horrible would that be, if people had to admit that god doesnt controll everything, and things do change, and doctors arent always right.
I think there's a time to rely on faith, whether religious or otherwise, and there's a time to rely on science. In this case, I believe the doctors were just wrong. Raajy could very well have been correct in suggesting a change in the body could have taken place.
I'd say it's a little bit of both. Praying for something and wanting it can, I believe, have an affect on the outcome. But it can't be denied that there were also biological factors at work. Perhaps, it was her deity helping her out plus her body being ready for children, both mentally and physically.
I, too, would say the doctors were wrong.
most already know I'm an atheist, so of course I take the stance that science rules.
It's a well known phenominon that couples who have given up on havin kids and start to relax and just live together, often get pregnant in a short time. Also it is much easier to get pregnant after you've already had a child (in many cases), so there could be a perfectly rational explanation for this.
But may be their faith helped them. It does not always have to be some super magic, why is it magical to turn water into wine by waving your hand and not medical to use sunlight, grapes, wooden casks and hard work to do it, the water from the rain or the river is turned into wine. Isn't that magical? I think it is, just because we used hard work and some thought to do it doesn't mean it isn't.
People just like the tv version of maic and take everything too literally. I think there's a space where faith and science can coexist.
That being said I am going out to enjoy some of that magical wine (or beer) so I won't ellaborate further for now.
Cheers
-B
To Post 1, you raise an interesting question:
I for one don't think it's wrong to question outcomes. After all if one asserts there's a Creator, and we created, then the fact remains some of us, at least, constantly take things apart, figure out how they work, and find the underlying principles for why.
First I find the whole idea of setting faith against science as rather silly. You don't 'believe' in science, science has no disciples, no holy book. It is simply a method to prove concepts in the natural world. It's the best method yet for taking things apart, figuring out how they work, and finding the underlying principles that explain why.
On other boards you can see how I've pointed out technical errors, even within my own faith's scriptures, but they were written long before technical accuracy at the level we're accustomed to was even thought of.
Like you, I tend to look to practical explanations to how stuff works and why. But that by definition doesn't really neutralize the possibility of a Creator. If you're curious, I suggest you look on Bookshare and get the book by Francis Collins called 'A Case For Belief'. Unlike so many of the apologetics type works, this is not a lawyer's defense or a soft-science treatise filled with argumentation, but it's the description of the journey Dr. Francis Collins, human geneticist who oversaw the Human Genome Project, went through.
I tend to agree with him: any faith worth having doesn't really have to compromise what we know to be real (proven by ... you guessed it ... the scientific method), because that makes God out to be a trickster.
How does the prayer 'mechanism' (no disrespect) work? I don't have any idea, but a majority of time it yields very little practical results IMHO. Buy practical I mean results in the natural world. I realize it's marketed differently, but say in this case, psychologists know that fertility can be hindered by the stress of infertility, creating a negative feedback loop: the infertile are upset about being infertile, so their infertility continues because they're upset, at least in part, because stressful conditions keep fertility down, a rather positive benefit from an evolutionary perspective. You wouldn't want a species in crisis producing pregnant members who, by nature of being pregnant, are now weakened against the current crisis.
I can only say for what I've learned by observation since becoming a Christian, not postulating myself as any form of authority: I believe the result of Christian prayer is basically for lack of a better term, 'be ok with' or accept as divinely providential whatever it is that's happening, not necessarily to expect a pragmatic outcome like you or I as engineers deliver.
In these people's case anyway, this would reduce stress which may be acting as a fertility inhibitor which then could in part render them fertile. In other words: "We prayed about it, it's in God's hands," maybe some elevated excitement because God is "bigger than their circumstance".
I think more often than not it's the clarity or de-stressor that people really get, or having done so, perhaps an almost placebo effect.
More often, it's an acceptance of a lesser solution as sufficient, again accepted as divine providence.
I don't think we can expect answers the way you or I as engineers deliver answers: Person X wants us to deliver a solution to a broken server farm. So we rectify the conflicts, upgrade the hardware, fix the bugs in the software, instantiate a maintenance schedule and the list goes on.
If we delivered this solution by faith, it would look very different:
First, we'd miss their deadline, likely they'd be scrambling and dealing with dependents / peers / colleagues, note that since it's by faith, we don't deal with those, the user does.
The user may be convinced that a lower-grade set of servers, fewer online bots, is sufficient and may even arrive at the conclusion it's good. Note it's all on the user here and not on us. Their reliance on us is only that they take what it is we give them, or what they perceive we give them, and as problems continue to happen, we may get the user onto the maintenance schedule, but the hardware may or may not get the upgrades necessary, or we may wait long enough so that a cheaper hardware upgrade which is ultimately less efficient is installed but because the net effect is either greater than it was previously, or greater than the cataclysm that ensued in the interim, the user is assumed to be satisfied with the results, not just satisfied but quite overwhelmed. Perhaps even the user is assumed to assert that there is a higher purpose for this downgraded system which may or may not ever be visible to them.
Now this isn't a trash on prayer, but perhaps the way it is marketed. It's all about the pray-er and the one prayed to, but you can't measure the results the way you or I measure things as engineers. In other words, since the answer can technically be 'yes' 'no' or any number of other responses / outcomes, I don't think we can really measure the effects of prayer, we can't scientifically analyze it, because it basically is operating in parallel to the physical universe. For every instance where you have people pray and get help you have countless others who pray and don't get help, in the practical sense you or I would provide it as humans. This is probably much easier for those involved in the softer sciences, who spend their lives defending actions, coming up with justifications, and basically convincing people of things, rather than for those of us who live our lives to build and create better solutions for people.
But basically I think the outcomes of prayer are personal more than material. So, in this case, the 'user' - the couple in question, got a complete solution, they became fertile. But most probably a greater number of people in the same situation get no outcome at all when they pray. Is that really any different? After all, this isn't hard science like you and I are accustomed to where on is on and off is off, where 2+2=4 and e=MC squared. Basically a null outcome in this instance could cause the user to return 'Maybe we should adopt.' So the material solution was applied. They themselves arrived at a different conclusion, which no doubt had practical benefit to someone else, the adoptee. But equally possible, perhaps more so, the user could return 'we would adopt, but the costs are too prohibitive'. Pray again, no response, return result = 'I guess we're not supposed to have kids' + grieve the process + move on.
As to the higher purpose? It is asserted by the user, most often never proven out, but at least potentially renders the user more stable / happier if you will.
Hard to take for those of us dedicated to providing real dead-on answers for people, material responses to material problems, perhaps.
But the reality is, the reason you heard about this story is because it's extremely rare. Nobody would come to you and excitedly report the mundane.
In fact, while family members / friends of mine may be happy when I fix something of theirs, it's not worth tweeting the universe or writing pamphlets over, because it's very normal for someone of my skills to do that, and normal to possess an ethos that would guide me to do that.
I suggest the reason these inspirational type stories get out are precisely because they are so exceptionally rare. They even get memorialized. One could argue their memorialization extends their benefit to those who benefit from them, because the benefit in most cases is largely nonmaterial and impractical in nature.
It's basically the marketing which raises the question you raised. In most cases, it's simply between the one praying and the one being prayed to, the acceptance of things that one can't change, the strength to change what one can, and perhaps most important, the wisdom to know the difference.
The mindset of these people is that if for example they say "God, if you exist, make my football team win tomorrow" and their football team wins, they believe they have the proof that God exists.
If God does make certain things happen, he doesn't make sure we have proof beyond doubt that it was him. Therefore we cannot be certain that god is making people who apparently couldn't have children get pregnant etc. We can't be certain that he wasn't involved either.
So the answer to this question is that I don't know, but I don't feel that I need to know. I just need to focus on doing good, and so does everybody else.
First, anything can have disciples. In its purest connotation, a disciple is simply one who learns from a teacher. It does not follow that one is blindly loyal to anyone or anything. Now to the original question. As far as I'm concerned, it could have been psychological for the mother. It's already been pointed out, doctors can be, and are often wrong. Not to go too far on a tangent, but the same applies to science--the difference being when we find what we thought previously was wrong, we work on finding the real answer, rather than clinging to blind faith in a known incorrect supposition. Getting back to the question, , if we go to a doctor, we have to trust to some degree that they know what they're talking about. So possibly, it just stressed her, sad thing wanting kids and being told it won't happen by a trusted authority. It's been pretty well-documented that the body does respond more favorably in less stressful situations. So for whatever reason, she prayed about it, left it alone, and it happened. Perhaps it was just a matter of getting her body in that state where it wasn't bothered, and if faith helped her to do that, there you go. So in that sense, I would have to say that it helps, even if only to ease the mind, and the end result is the same.
Try to compare faith to science is like trying to compare a lemon to a toaster. It doesn't make sense, because they're two completely different monsters.
Faith exists, and has always existed, to ease people's minds about what they can't understand or to answer moral questions that people, individually, aren't comfortable answering. It bonds people to other people through a common belief system and rituals.
Science exists to answer tangible questions in the world, to improve living conditions, to better understand the workings of everything we see around us, and to show us more efficient ways of completing tasks.
You can believe in both, you can believe in one, or you can believe in neither. However, if your belief in one of them completely walls off your willingness to see the beliefs and answers offered by the other side, then you've completely missed the point of what it is to be a productive human.
doctors are known as practitioners. noone could be perfect. even a very famous surgeon will blame the god after finishing his operation.
Most of the doctors here say, Let's wait and see. pray god. if he's getting back his contiousness in another 3 hours, he'll be alright. if not, it's in the hands of god.
So as per that, we're got used with blaming others for each and every activity of ours. if that gives us success, we'll proudly say it's my effort. rather if that goes wrong, they may blame it on god or someone else.
and again, in this Hurry Burry world, most of them are not giving time to their family. most of them are either keeping themselves busy with their business. and many are addicted to something like drinks, drug or ... and few others are even not staying with their partners. they may come and go once in a week time or few of them are even visit his or her partner on anual basis. like an anual edition of a magazine.
So I guess these are all could be the problem for not having kids for many kids wanting parents.
I dono englis. so deal with my grammer. hmmm?
Raaj.
I've never really bought into this whole idea that science disproves the existence of God, or that believing in a god means that science is baseless. In fact I don't agree that the 2 things, faith and science, can't coexist along side each other which seems to be the prevailing wisdom.
It makes perfect sense to me that if a God does exist, and he wakes up one morning and thinks "hmm, I've just had an interesting idea, why not create a universe?" that he would also create properties that govern the things that happen in that universe. Those properties would be what we now know as science. LeoGuardian rightly points out that without those governing properties we'd be faced with incomprehensible chaos so if there is a God, it seems highly plausible to me that he/she, or it, if you'd prefer, would also come to such a conclusion. So science doesn't necessarily disprove God at all. Science is nothing more or less than a road map for how things will work and if it isn't a creators job to define how something will work, then I don't know who's job it is.
And of course by the same logic how can God disprove science when it's science that makes everything work.
In short the faith verses science argument is a totally pointless one, though of course I'm sure that isn't going to stop either side trying to disprove the other. Still, there are less interesting ways of wasting time than pointlessly arguing I suppose. Opera for example...
Dan.
I personally think faith & relaxation as opposed to the tension of one medical appointment after another helped this couple have children. Congratulations to 'em. Physicians are human and human beings err. I understand not wanting to give false hope, but even this practice is erroneous as I also believe the human body more resilient than some give it credit. Years ago I knew someone who was given 30% chance of surviving a paralyzing auto accident. She survived paralyzed from the waist down and got a degree in foreign languages & went for a program, I believe in computer programming, set up for disabled students. Perhaps family faith & prayer for this young woman had a hand?
To Harp: Many times, I've heard my fellow Hellenic Polytheists say that faith and science can easily go hand in hand and that our religion has no problem excepting science. But I've never understood it until now. Thanks for the enlightenment!
Very interesting question Cody. Both are very real. Now god has given the doctors, etc in Science the knowledge in which they know. God has control of everything. If you believe in god, and put your full faith and trust in him miracles happen. I've been told I can't have kids. now despite what doctors say it is up to God. If I'm ment to have kids then God will grant them. If not he'll provide me with other ways. :D I'm still here today because of God.
If you believe that, that may very well influence the outcome. some say it's all psychological, and others say it's supernatural. Personally, I can see both sides of that coin, depending on the situation. I do believe that there's a sort of supernatural energy beyond our understanding, but I don't believe it's a God, but something in nature. that could start a whole topic altogether.
OK one more post before I stay here all night...relating to faith vs medicine or science, is anyone here familiar with Joni Ereackson Tada, the Christian evangelist?
This amazing woman was paralyzed from the neck down in a diving accident several months before I was born in '67. Someone years ago gave me an average life expectancy of 13 years post accident for quadriplegics as we knew a guy who was paralyzed during military service.
Well, I'm quite a bit older than 13, and this lady is still alive, close to 60, and her accident took place the summer of her high school graduation. She learned to draw & paint with her mouth & became Christian while being turned up & down on a Stryker frame. She is not only an artist, but evangelist with her husband Ken Tada, and runs an agency that helps disabled children & adults. This lady has quite a bit of family support, at least one sister, and many Christian friends. She & her husband have even preached in Malaysia (I suspect all you can do there is sing to the choir as proselityzing faiths other than Islam isn't permitted), but still they made it there. I suspect treatment for spinal cord injury patients in '67 wasn't quite at the level it is today, and at first she was hoping to walk again & bitter at her plight. Could faith have played more of a hand here? She has made a movie, "Joni", and authored three books for anyone interested in learning about her.
They told a friend of mine that hasHe'd not live passed sixteen. He's now twenty.
But just because something didn't happen as science said it did, doesn't mean that its god. The weather man may say its going to rain tomorrow, the sun coming out is not a work of god, it means that there was something the weather forecast didn't know about. That is the major difference between faith and science, science will openly admit that they are not always right and have the ability to be wrong, that they do not know everything. Faith on the other hand, will simply twist everything so that they're right. For example, prayer. It says in the bible ask and ye shall receive, that means, if you ask you get it, that's what those words mean, we're talking dictionary definition here, not hard words. However, if you pray for say, your dying sister to be cured of her cancer, and she isn't, I can find you several preachers who will say, "god answers all prayers, but sometimes the answers no". But that's not what it said, it said ask and ye shall receive, so something is wrong there, obviously, but good luck finding a ppreacher who will admit that. They will say that any way they spin the story is right, and the next time they will spin it another way, and be right again.
The lady in the wheelchair probably lived because the human body is able to do amazing things. Now if she'd survived that diving accident without medical treatment at all. If a priest had come to the pool and prayed her back to health, then that would be a miracle. God didn't teach her to do all those things, she taught herself, most likely out of a desire to not have a boring life in which she couldn't do anything. To give all the credit to god is to deminish the courage and personal strength it took for her to do that, even for her to give credit to god. And for her to give credit to god, is belittling every doctor she's ever gone to for help.
I couldn't agree more with Silver Lightning's post. that lady was able to do what she did because she's a strong person. I'm sure she prayed, but if she hadn't wanted to keep fighting, she probably wouldn't have. Her faith probably kept her from giving up, but if her body had given up on her, faith wouldn't have helped her there.
Faith is the excersizing of a belief which we know to be true, but which is not seen. Science is the physical understanding of that which is studied in the here and now. Both faith and science have their place in the world God has created for us. The two "can" co-exist and compliment one another very well. Unfortunately as a general rule, they don't. Not everything can be answered by science. Not all the mysteries of the universe will be ours to know until we are ready. In the case of this mother getting pregnant, it is certainly possible the doctors made a mistake. It happens more than it should. But I have encountered some truly miraculous recoveries in my life - ones which left doctors scratching their heads. In each case, true faith andthe the power of authoritive prayer were excersised.
I just want to say this. We take on faith nearly everything, both biblically and scientifically. How many of us truly understand the world of science? How many of us just here something which sounds plausible and take it as truth? That, my friends is simply another kind of faith. I'm not saying science is wrong. It isn't (at least so far as it is understood). But there will be things which science can not explain. And that's where God comes in. They are two sides of the same coin.
But, since science is continually researching, doesn't that mean that god gets smaller and smaller? If god is an all entity, meaning that he is everywhere, can do all things, knows all things, and all that, how can he not be where science has explained? Let me see if I can phrase it better.
We once believed that clouds were the dust thrown up by god walking across the sky; (look it up, its in the bible). Now, obviously we now know about condensation and all that, and we can state definitively about how clouds are made. Does this mean that god once kicked up dust to make clouds, or that it was always condensation, but we didn't know that it was, so we created the god story to explain it. And if the latter is true, doesn't that mean that god isn't?
That is at least the logic I got from your post, perhaps I misunderstood you, but by that logic, god does not exist, he is just a synonym for the phrase, "I don't know".
If Atheists do not believe In God, then why do you continuously make reference to the Bible? From all of the posts I have read, it sounds as though you are on some mission to disprove the Bible, and convert anyone who believes in it into an Atheist. Now, I have never once tried to disprove your religion, or lack thereof, so why must you feel to somehow disprove mine? I have never once tried to convert you to my religion, and yet it seems as though you are constantly trying to convert me to your religion, or lack of religion, whatever the correct terminology may be. If you choose to be an Atheist, that is fine by me, but I ask you to give me the same respect in allowing me to choose whatever religion I wish to choose as well. If I am not trying to convert you to my religion, then please stop trying to convert me to your religion, or lack thereof, whatever the correct terminology may be.
I constantly refer to the bible because christianity is defined by the bible. Its like, if your writing an essay on American government, your gonna include the constitution; same basic idea.
As for converting, I don't care what people believe, it makes no difference to me on a normal standpoint, save for a few things. First, I have to point out that this is a discussion board, that's the purpose, if you don't want to see people with opinions that differ from yours, and you don't want people to point out things about your opinion which don't make any sense or are simply wrong, then don't come on here, and don't publish your opinions. You can't blame someone else for posting their opinion, simply because you don't like it. I don't like your opinions, but you've never once heard me whining about it, have you?
Now then, as I said, I don't care what you believe, it does not effect my life at all. However, when christians try to force their believes onto our children by having intelligent design taught in schools, and when they try to have prayers in schools and court rooms, when the ten commandments are taught as the basis for law, when a political office seeker uses tax payer dollars to fund a prayer meeting, when the direction of our country is shepherded by religious leaders, and when the decisions and actions of our government are based on religious thought, then it effects my life.
You will never hear an Atheist saying you have to make a law because of Atheism. Now, certainly, atheists run at the forefront of a few political battles, banning prayer in schools for instance, but that is based on the constitution and human rights, not on atheism. To say that gays shouldn't marry, or people shouldn't be allowed to have an abhortion because it is an abomination before the lord, is religious, and has no place in government. Those are but a few examples, there are hundreds more of them.
That is why I speak out against your religion, because your religion is trying to encroach on my life. Of course, your probably thinking, but I don't think like that, I don't want to control your life; to which I ask, so why aren't you speaking out as much as I am? If you are not willing to speak out against those who use your religion to propogate something you disagree with, then you can't criticize those of us who have strong enough convictions to do so. Just because you are happy to sit back in your own little world and let the rest of the world float by you without a second glance, doesn't mean that everyone is. You can't decry someone for speaking out about their beliefs, even if they disagree with your beliefs.
As I have said in numerous posts, I do not care what you believe, this is a discussion board and if the topic is religious, I'll discuss religion and I'll poke holes in your argument whenever possible, you are more than welcome to do the same to mine, its called debating. However, I also do not care if your insulted or offended, it is not my job, nor my responsibility to coddle you and make sure that everything I say doesn't hurt somebody's feelings. The only person in control of your feelings is you, if you don't want them hurt, don't put them in jeopardy. If you don't like what I'm saying, you are more than welcome to move to the next link.
I still assert that science, being what it is, is not something you 'believe in'.
It is a method used to explain phenomena using natural tools and techniques.
Many religious people will claim science is often wrong, and everyone who has fixed a bug in programming even knows that is true. Difference is, as was stated in Post 10, once something is proven wrong, development happens: there is a premise for why it was proven wrong, what conclusions were used to begin with and what principles may need revisiting.
Faith is frequently threatened to be disproven (if one can even attempt a disproof of the improvable), because it does not explain concept using any of the tangible tools that science does.
What becomes very dangerous is when one begins to use the pieces of the scientific method that arae convenient to prove a faith-based belief. The problem is faith never ever starts where science does, even when the so-called apologists attempt to do so in a lecture. They cannot, because they cannot objectively look at their own belief like we objectively look at quantum mechanics, racetrack memory, nanotechnologies, etc.
There's no way to prove that thinking happy thoughts, praying, singing, extending hands in a particular direction, or anything else, affects someone's physical condition. One reason is there is no connection between the condition and the faith-based action: they are completely separate. That is like trying to prove that eating carrots causes traffic accidents. Once you get past the fact that carrots carry no narcotic or other mentally debilitating effect, you have no way to control the experiment.
If any of you read a scientific paper, what you will read is not just a discussion about how x makes y happen, and how wonderful or terrible it is: you read about the principles which cause something in x to affect something in y, and the steps taken to demonstrate this.
The two are entirely different.
One fundamental difference which you only slightly touched on though is that science can be wrong. Not that it is wrong, that is clear, but that it can be wrong. I'll explain.
We once thought that there was only two or three planets, because its all we could see. Science said, "there's three planets", and science was wrong. Now, science didn't say, "No, I'm not wrong, your wrong, and you should accept what I say because I wrote it", they said, "well look at that, another planet, wonderful". Science takes a mistake, learns from it, and moves on.
Faith cannot be wrong, nothing in it can be wrong, or it all completely falls apart. If you have one thing in it that is completely wrong, than the entire thing crumbles. If you have conclussive proof that the garden of edin story never happened, everything falls apart, or at least is questioned.
We can see an example of this in the argument over whether the earth orbits around the sun. Now, of course, we all know today that it does, we've been taught that since we were children, but that's not what the bible says. If you look at the bible, the earth is a flat plate which rests upon four pillars, the sky is a dome that arches over the earth, and the sun moves across the surface of the dome. That, as we know in elementary schools now, is wrong. You'd think anyone who told you the earth looked like that was an idiot, but if you lived just a few hundred years ago, you wouldn't call them an idiot, you'd call them a priest.
Now today we largely ignore this fact. we also ignore the fact that the church put people to death over this argument. More than a few scientists have been put to death because the discoveries they made went against what was taught in the bible.
That is the major difference between science and faith. Science makes mistakes, admits them, moves on; faith can never admit to a mistake, or it completely crumbles.
You people who bitch and whine about religious persecution, hurry up and die already. Go meet your 'god. That's your ultimate goal anyway, is it not?
We have all, at one point or another, relied on faith in our lives. But aside from religious faith, if our faith is proven wrong, well, my bad. Let's move on. I have faith that I'm going to wake up tomorrow morning and my phone will still work. Why do I believe that? because my phone hasn't been behaving in such a way that would make me believe it shouldn't work tomorrow. But, strange things happen, and if my phone does not work tomorrow morning, then my faith has been proven wrong, and I'm not going to continue to have the faith that when I wake up the next morning, my phone will work. Now, let's take something a little less black and white. I believe that my best friend does not shit talk me behind my back, and that everything she tells me is true. why? because her actions towards me lead me to believe this is the case. However, if the signs started to point in the other direction, would I completely deny them and follow my faith? Well, I'm not gullible enough to take the first negative comment I hear and run with it, but if I saw enough evidence disproving the faith that my friend is loyal to me, I would start to question it. Even now, as much as I still have faith in this, am I going to deny the very slight possibility that I could be wrong? No, because belief without fact is *never* guaranteed. Now, let's gravitate towards books for a minute, shall we? Moving a little more towards the realm of religious faith, let's say I pick up a health book and read that coffee is about as horrible for your body as poison. Never, ever drink it again. Yes, you're still alive now, but you won't be for long if you keep drinking coffee. Well, first, I'm going to question who wrote this. Is it a credible source like a certified doctor or scientist, or is it written by a journalist who read it somewhere else? If it turns out this was written by an actual doctor or scientist, then I'm going to wonder; ok. How did they come up with this conclusion? did they conduct a thurrough, well thought out and well carried out study? Or did they see one person get poisoned after drinking coffee? If this was done right, and it's likely this could be a ligitament claim about poisonous coffee, I would probably compare it to the other side of the argument. I'll find a credible source that claims coffee is not unhealthy, and attempt to determine how they came up with this conclusion. At the end of the day, I'll tend to believe the more credible source, although I may still be skeptical. After all, at one point, humans used DDT, leaded gasoline, and other harmful chemicals on a daily basis and never thought anything of it. Now, I'm sure some people are thinking, wow. why go to all that trouble just to find out whether or not coffee is really poisonous. But, then again, why would I deny myself a cup of fresh coffee if that claim turned out to be false? for all you religious people, why should you deny the love you might feel for a member of the same gender if there's no doubt you feel it? Why should you have to sign a marriage contract first if you really feel, in your heart of hearts, that you've found the person you feel comfortable making love to? Because the bible says it's a sin, right? But, is the bible a credible source? what proof do you have that the men who wrote it really wrote it through God? Did these men think about the fact that times may change, and in hundreds and thousands of years from now, the world may be a very different place? How did you know that the people who translated the bible didn't make errors along the way?
Cody, right on about Science and its error handling.
When it is wrong, it corrects itself once new evidence arrives. The compounding effect is not only an admission of a mistake, but newfound principles or, in some cases, correction of misguided primciples, which allow for further developments.
The so-called junk DNA is one great example, because there is now a vast difference in what we know of DNA than there was 15 or more years ago. People now understand it is a lot more like bit code than binary, meaning traits or characteristics are not just turned on or off by one single gene, but by a set of patterns described by the on/off state of any number of genes, more like a dword in programming.
The old belief that all mutations tended towards the negative also underwent significant refactor once we could accurately sequence DNA, and now even plot human migrations using the genetic shift, all digitally understood. And because of these changes, not only were prior premises dismissed, but new principles now understood and great potential awaits us for understanding and manipulation of our world.
Obviously faith has been proven wrong in some instances, the belief that the deaf were eternally damned because they couldn't hear the Word, for instance. These weren't monsters who believed this, they were ordinary citizens. What faith appears to lack, though, is the capacity to revisit principles the way science and engineering does. For the non-scientific and non-engineering folks, that just means science is at least as interested in the why as the what. Faith, to my understanding now at least, appears to be far more interested in the who than the why.
If faith were science, and again this is a preposterous leap, its experts would have concluded that an underlying principle which drew them to the conclusion about deaf people was wrong. Because of that conclusion and tests to prove it, they would not again wrongly apply that principle. However, as we've seen over the years, they must relearn over and over and over again: racial intermixing, disabled people, and now we may be close to a resolution on the gay community and faith.
But here again, the lesson must be learned over and over and over again, because whatever underlying principle in faith that an engineer or scientist would have to label in error, is never properly dissected.
If it were, prior mistakes and mis-applied principles would prevent faiths from making the same mistakes over again.
That means, lessons learned from the war between Irish protestants and Catholics could have affected Jihadists in the middle East today. Which, of course, it hasn't.
So-called faith healers in my home state are prosecuted again and again for medically negligent homicide because they refuse medical treatment for their children. Yet that community as a body is apparently stunted in some way that prevents them from basic cause/effect relationships.
But, since faith is primarily interested in the who, it can be used to drive the ethics behind scientific exploration. I'm not talking here about things like the Flat Earth society of today or the Christians of the 16th century, but modern discussions of what discoveries may be deemed beneficial to humanity.
To a scientific mind, all discovery is ultimately beneficial, and I don't think faith-based organizations should ever be given the power to arrest this. Primarily because they are severely lacking in the logical capacity to consider non-ethical ramifications. But it is possible they can provide a sounding board for reflection on the impact of some things.
As to the last post, I would say, there are some basic principles which would tell you why your phone will work tomorrow, no need for faith at all. If it does not, there is a completely plausible explanation, even if the front-line technician at your carrier doesn't know. I think the instance of the phone, or the sun rising, is just one of taking certain things for granted. We usually think of that as a bad thing, but it isn't: it just means the principles work, and the curious can find out how they work, but for most, they can carry on. You needn't ask your phone to please work tomorrow, thank it for the electrons coursing through its circuitry that allow you to sleep-text, or anything else. The principles behind it work with or without your involvement.
You know it works based on cumulative experience, if nothing else. Which is why you can depend on it even though you probably lack the electronics background to verify the parts work, and the telecom background to verify the cellular uplink is OK, and the satellites background to monitor the satellites it uses for long-distance calls. But there is nothing at all mystical about any of this.
I would say the situation with your friend is closer to that, but still, it's based on what you have already experienced with that person.
Silver Lightning's comment about faith not being wrong reminds me of te comments made by Mr. HaroldCamping back when he said the world would end in May. He said he wasn't going to discuss what would happen if he was wrong because he wasn't. He also said that "I know it's absolutely true because the Bible is absolutely true." And if you believe his predictions (I don't imagine many people here do if any, we're now exactly eleven days away from the date of his latest Rapture prediction.
Wow, i forgot about that. I need to start planning my jesus is here party.
Not all religion flounders when new information arises. My religion for instance believes in continuing revelation by a God who is still with us. If we suddenly discovered an intelligent species, it would certainly raise some interesting questions but it wouldn't crumble the faith in God. After all, in scripture it clearly states "worlds without number have I created". Or maybe he's only the orchestrator of us, not another species. WHo knows? I sure don't.
Of course there are aspects of some religion that are wrong too. Much of the bible has been translated. Translated by men no less into dozens of different translations. It takes almost as much research and study to understand religion as it does science. I still suggest that science and religion are two sides of the same coin. Supporting partners if you will. Why people insist on seperating them so much is beyond me. Science helps us understand the fundimental principles of ourselves, and our universe. But where did those principles come from? God? Chaos? That's where faith comes in. Religion helps us with what we do not yet understand from science. Science can no more disprove the existence of God than religion can ignore the progress of science. If we look around, we can see the intricate beauty and incredible complexity of the world around us. To me personally, I find it absolutely inconceivable to think that it all came about by an expansion of molicules in space (the big bang). Did such a big bang happen? why not? I don't know how God created the universe. But I'm betting to believe he didn't just snap his fingers and it all magically appeared. it took him six days to create the heavens and the earth. Biblically, a day as God experiences it is at least a thousand earth years. The math might be inaccurate, but it does suggest the creation was quite a process. Science is, I believe merely our expanding understanding of many of the miracles of god, and his universe. We need both, science to improve our understanding of our own existence, and religion to give us mural grounding, comfort, the occasional currently unexplainable miracle and the hope that life will continue well beyond the bonds of death.
Matter cannot be destroyed, it can only change forms. Therefore, it could not have been created either. It just is, and always has been.
If what your saying is true, than science is then able to explain miracles. After all, you claim that they are different sides to the same coin, so God should be able to do something, and science should be able to say how he did it. Thus, I submit that miracles do not exist. In order for a miracle to be miraculous, it must be inexplicable, for it to be inexplicable, it must not be explainable, make it explainable and its no longer a miracle. You take away miracles from the religious dogma and what have you got?
Lets just make a short list here, no burning bush, no mystical ten commandments, no laws of physics defying flood, no landing of noah miraculously in the exact region he started from despite months of floating aimlessly, no profits being able to prove God by use of miracles, no chariots of fire, no saving people from lions or furnaces or other torture devices, no miraculous battle tactics like stalling the sun or sending rain to blind the enemy, no fall of jerico. Now, lets see about the new testament. No virgin birth... um... that's about it, you kill that one and there's really nothing left. No virgin birth, no jesus as the son of god, no profit, no christianity.
You really sure you want science to be explaining miracles? And please, lets be real, religion and science can't be different sides of the same coin. Thousands of years ago I would agree with you, they were the same coin, but not anymore. Science is eating away at religion because religion, as you said, is a way to explain what we don't know. This means that as science continues to make discoveries, religion continues to get smaller. If your theory were true, we wouldn't have people arguing over things like gay marriage, or using religion to enslave people, because those kinds of things have been proven by science to be complete and utter idiocy.
Science is continuing to grow and change and develope, evolve if you will. Religion hasn't changed much in the past two thousand years, its the same book, same stories, same stupid beliefs that I'm surprised adults don't realize sound exactly like the bed time stories you tell your kids. When science explains something that religion has held dear, or does something that religion equated only to god, (test tube babies to name but one thing), religion throws a hissy fit.
So please, stop acting like religion and science are the same thing nowadays. Science is based on fact and observation, religion is based on childish belief in completely out dated myths.
Yeah, I don't believe in God and think it was just that, she had babies because the doctors were wrong?
and what happened to respecting and loving each other why does it have to be either or, it's a propaganda device, forgot the name, but seriously, there's more than two answers in life, it's not just god or science, and that's it. there's a theory that both exist, that god created science, and allows us to use science, if I become relious again, maybe likely, I've been thinking about it that would be what I believe, both god and science, and I don't believe in looking at the Bible for truths, it may be important but so does a relation with God, no book can tell us anything. as atheist has said it's written from the perspective of humans lead by god, and thus is imperfect. yes, I am crossing the line and crossing back over but because I've been both, really religious and not at all.