Religious belief

[Elok]

I don't even get that far.  I find all but the most basic physics rather overwhelming.  To think that people who study that stuff for a living find a certain subset thereof bewildering makes me want to write the whole thing off and look for a scotch.  Sadly, I don't have the budget for scotch these days, so I stick to the first part.

[Buster's Uncle]

I think it's as much a problem of being a generalist as my mental blocks and education.  Lori's writing for himself, there, and I don't have the specialized focus needed to follow well.  He's certainly demonstrated a talent for dumbing things down to my level when I ask questions.

Your blog, I have more background to comprehend, and was able to actually binge-read the whole thing. 


You'd agree, wouldn't you Elok, that Lori's hard science insights are on-topic for the thread, not drifty, not just because of Mart's musings in the OP, but because discussions of the nature of Creation are rather inherently relevant to religion?

[Elok]

Depends on the religion, I suppose.  It's not something I have direct interest in; my feeling is, if the car runs, I don't need to know how the engine works.  But it seems to be of compelling interest to both of you, and that's fine by me.

[Buster's Uncle]

(I've asserted to him on his blog that the answer to questions of predestination and how real reality is is 'It don't matter" - but yes.  I'm also trying to make a subtle point to Valka that science doesn't have to be any more inherently hostile to religion than religion must be to science.  Both are attempts to get at the big truths, if wildly different.)

[vonbach]

  I'm also trying to make a subtle point to Valka that science doesn't have to be any more inherently hostile to religion

Newton was very religious  and many monks and nuns in the middle ages were what we would call scientists.
Including Hildegard Von Bingen and Roger Bacon.

[Buster's Uncle]

Yessir; exactly. 

[Lorizael]

To think that people who study that stuff for a living find a certain subset thereof bewildering makes me want to write the whole thing off and look for a scotch.

It's not something I have direct interest in; my feeling is, if the car runs, I don't need to know how the engine works.

Following on the car metaphor, my understanding is that most scientists who study quantum mechanics view themselves to be (I'm sorry) quantum mechanics. So an auto mechanic knows exactly what to do with a car, how to make it work, and can make predictions about it (how long it will keep going before exploding if you don't fix X). But an auto mechanic might not be able to say anything deeper about a car, whether it concerns the physical laws governing a car's operation or what the true essence of car-ness is...

Similarly, a quantum physicist can make a huge range of accurate predictions about how the quantum world works (if they couldn't, we wouldn't have lasers, electronics, MRIs, etc.), but might be entirely agnostic about what QM is actually all about. Thus, they might not be at all troubled by some of the weird things in QM or what that weirdness says about the world.

If you read up on the history of quantum theory, you'll hear about the Solvay conferences and the epic battles between Einstein and Bohr for the soul of physics... except that's apparently some historical revisionism. At the time, most physicists in the room didn't understand why Einstein cared about these problems, and didn't understand Bohr at all. It wasn't until Bell came along and Aspect and others began testing Bell's theorem that interest in quantum weirdness was piqued again for actual scientists. Philosophers cared all along, but who cares what philosophers think, amirite?

[Buster's Uncle]

Again, it's an intricate universe, and I don't find discussing different lines of attack towards Understanding How It Works and What It's All About together inappropriate at all.

[Elok]

I think the glib summary is generally true, that science is about how while religion is about why.  The two necessarily overlap at some points, but the main thing they have in common is a tendency to provoke endless big questions--and a corresponding tendency to cause large numbers of people to plead indifference to one or the other, depending on their individual temperaments.  Lori and I are sort of mirror images on that score, I think . . .

[Buster's Uncle]

Well sure - but both of you deeply thoughtful and articulate, and always worth listening to.

-Glib, but very much exactly how I feel.

[Valka]

...Christianity has had a far stronger influence on Western culture than Plato or Aristotle.  Of course, the former had ample influence on Christianity itself, because plenty of the early philosophers were religious or quasi-religious.

They go hand-in-hand. There's a good reason why Copernicus waited until he was on his deathbed to publish his book that dared to say that the Sun is at the centre of the solar system and not Earth: He'd have been executed for heresy, in one of the many gruesome ways employed by the Catholic church/Inquisition.

This is the standard church-and-state-conflict narrative we've been telling since the Enlightenment, one which blurs the truth considerably.  Galileo and Copernicus got in trouble not for contradicting the Bible or patristic teaching (neither of which says much of anything about what goes around what), but for feuding with an academic orthodoxy based on the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition.  It was called heresy because the RCC had a monopoly or near-monopoly on education back then, and heresy was a catch-all for PO'ing the RCC, but they were refuting Aristotle and Ptolemy, not St. Paul or Jesus.  The Church had spent the past several centuries adopting pagan classical teachers into a synthesis with Christian teaching--Thomas Aquinas basically baptized Aristotle--and didn't appreciate all that work getting undone.

The only reason academic snits today don't turn similarly violent is that today's academics don't have the power to arrest, punish and suppress their opponents.  If you don't believe they'd be tempted to do so given the opportunity, I'm guessing you don't have much experience with the tone of contemporary academia.  Read any book by a scholar in a controversial field; s/he will spend at least a chapter on "my opponents, and why they are stupid and biased."  Heck, you'll find it in books about paleontology: "Jack Horner thinks T. Rex couldn't be a predator because it was slow?  Please!  Given that its prey animals had to have been equally slow, this is a perfectly ridiculous position to take.  And furthermore, Horner fails to recognize blah blah blah . . ."

Yes, I know that Galileo's real "sin" was that he mocked the then-current Pope, rather than what the science portions of his book said. Galileo was not a tactful or diplomatic person, and that's what got him into trouble. But I understand his impatience with the requirement that he wasn't supposed to state "this is how it is" and instead was supposed to do a tapdance around the Church's feelings and say instead that his observations were not fact but only some sort of hypothetical idea that wasn't real.

Whatever the real "sin" was, the outcome was the same, though: the Church had the say as to whether the individual would be let go, executed, or merely tortured. Does it matter exactly who felt insulted by Giordano Bruno? He still suffered torture and an excruciating, undignified death. This "they didn't insult Jesus, they insulted Aristotle" is still no excuse for what happened. The Church felt that it was being disobeyed, and disobedience could not be tolerated.

I've had to tapdance around science. I was a student teacher, teaching an astronomy class to a group of Grade 3-4 kids, in a class where their regular teacher conducted mandatory morning prayer - in a public school - and ordered me to participate in that.

So when the kids asked me how the universe started, I was in a quandary: Did I tell them the current scientific theory and knowledge, or did I fudge things a bit because I didn't trust their teacher not to retaliate in my evaluation as a student teacher, if I didn't parrot Genesis to the kids? You need to understand that religion has NO place in science classes in public schools in Canada, and she had no business enforcing mandatory prayer. But this all happened before we had the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which would have guaranteed that I (and any of the non-Christian students) could not be discriminated against for our religious/non-religious beliefs.

No, I didn't face burning at the stake or hanging or being drawn and quartered or anything else. But that teacher had the say as to whether or not I could continue in the B.Ed. program, and after she ordered me to participate in prayers against my will and conscience, I no longer trusted her.

Therefore I compromised the lesson I was teaching, and didn't say everything I would have said if there hadn't been a teacher listening who had no qualms about forcing an atheist to take part in Christian rituals.

Well, never again. At least years later, when I gave talks on astronomy at the interpretive centre I worked for (we have a wildlife sanctuary in the city), I never skirted around it.


And yeah, I get the impression that if burning at the stake were still a thing that goes on in the UK, Richard Dawkins would have been a pile of ashes years ago, and the same with people like Hitchens, Krauss, and numerous others.

[Elok]

Giordano Bruno was in fact a straight-up heretic--he was charged with denying most of the major RCC doctrines, including the Trinity, divinity of Christ, Transubstantiation, and Virgin Birth, plus teaching reincarnation and dabbling in sorcery--and has no real relevance to a discussion of science-religion conflicts.  His belief in exoplanets, etc. seems trivial by comparison, and unlikely to have earned the stake if he had stuck to them without adopting the combined teachings of Gnostics and Arians (and then some).

Galileo, having won the patronage of the Pope (who liked him so much that he had a servant read portions of Galileo's work aloud when he sat down to meals), mishandled a delicate situation atrociously and put the Pope's words in the mouth of a character whose name sounds suspiciously like the Italian for "idiot."  For this he was forced to recant, then given lifelong house arrest.  He wasn't even prevented from publishing.  His treatment was remarkably lenient.  What do you suppose what would have happened if he'd done the same thing to some Italian prince?  Or even one of the later secularized despots of the Enlightenment, like Frederick or Peter?  Even the relatively gentle Catherine would have given him similar treatment for his impudence, assuming a lower minister didn't take the matter on himself and hang the man.

Expectations of freedom of conscience and/or expression, in any sphere, are quite simply not reasonable for the seventeenth century--the age of the Thirty Years' War and English Civil War.  Even in the eighteenth there were sharp limits on what you could get away with.  As for the stake, who would burn at it would depend on who had the power to tie people to it.  I'm given to understand that Dawkins has said the children of religious people should be taken from them and raised as atheists, while the late Hitchens praised the Soviet repression of the Russian Church and played cheerleader for the Iraq War as a way to suppress Islam.  Really, I don't trust anyone to have that power for long and not use it.

[Valka]

Giordano Bruno was in fact a straight-up heretic--he was charged with denying most of the major RCC doctrines, including the Trinity, divinity of Christ, Transubstantiation, and Virgin Birth, plus teaching reincarnation and dabbling in sorcery--and has no real relevance to a discussion of science-religion conflicts.  His belief in exoplanets, etc. seems trivial by comparison, and unlikely to have earned the stake if he had stuck to them without adopting the combined teachings of Gnostics and Arians (and then some).

Galileo, having won the patronage of the Pope (who liked him so much that he had a servant read portions of Galileo's work aloud when he sat down to meals), mishandled a delicate situation atrociously and put the Pope's words in the mouth of a character whose name sounds suspiciously like the Italian for "idiot."  For this he was forced to recant, then given lifelong house arrest.  He wasn't even prevented from publishing.  His treatment was remarkably lenient.  What do you suppose what would have happened if he'd done the same thing to some Italian prince?  Or even one of the later secularized despots of the Enlightenment, like Frederick or Peter?  Even the relatively gentle Catherine would have given him similar treatment for his impudence, assuming a lower minister didn't take the matter on himself and hang the man.

Expectations of freedom of conscience and/or expression, in any sphere, are quite simply not reasonable for the seventeenth century--the age of the Thirty Years' War and English Civil War.  Even in the eighteenth there were sharp limits on what you could get away with.  As for the stake, who would burn at it would depend on who had the power to tie people to it.  I'm given to understand that Dawkins has said the children of religious people should be taken from them and raised as atheists, while the late Hitchens praised the Soviet repression of the Russian Church and played cheerleader for the Iraq War as a way to suppress Islam.  Really, I don't trust anyone to have that power for long and not use it.

You're missing my point. I don't think ANY church (or the equivalent, in other faiths) should have the right to execute ANYONE for refusing to accept what they teach, or at least questioning it. It's irrelevant what others would have done to Giordano Bruno; that's not how history went. The church authorities are the ones who decided to execute him.

I'm not familiar with Hitchens' writings or speeches except for what he had to say about Mother Teresa (despised her). I do know that I'm really sick and tired of having the historical events in Russia and various places in Asia thrown in my face. I'm tired of being compared to Hitler.

I am not what I would call a "militant atheist." Even Dawkins isn't what I would consider one - someone gung-ho to burn churches/mosques/temples/other places of worship and destroy the writings used by the people involved. At least I've never heard him say anything like that.

If you can find any link to Dawkins saying that religious peoples' children should be taken from them and raised as atheists, please post it.

I do admit that there are certain kinds of indoctrination that I'd consider child abuse, and I've mentioned it before when talking about the Jesus Camp videos.

[Elok]

Oh, don't get me wrong.  I don't mean to suggest that Bruno (or anyone) should have been burned alive, nor that Galileo should have been imprisoned.  My point is that you can't realistically paint either as some kind of martyr for science without drastically distorting the truth.  If you don't like being told about Stalin et al, imagine how much folks like me enjoy the endless parade of Spanish Inquisition, Crusades, pogroms, etc. from your set.

Dawkins supposedly said the thing about child abduction somewhere in The God Delusion--I read about it in an online column by an atheist some time ago.  I don't actually read Dawkins's writing if I can help it.  I do not believe that he, or any other human being, would be able to resist using the power to repress all criticism for long if he had it.

[Valka]

Oh, don't get me wrong.  I don't mean to suggest that Bruno (or anyone) should have been burned alive, nor that Galileo should have been imprisoned.  My point is that you can't realistically paint either as some kind of martyr for science without drastically distorting the truth.  If you don't like being told about Stalin et al, imagine how much folks like me enjoy the endless parade of Spanish Inquisition, Crusades, pogroms, etc. from your set.

Dawkins supposedly said the thing about child abduction somewhere in The God Delusion--I read about it in an online column by an atheist some time ago.  I don't actually read Dawkins's writing if I can help it.  I do not believe that he, or any other human being, would be able to resist using the power to repress all criticism for long if he had it.

Thing is, I would never accuse you of strapping on a suit of armor and galloping off to kill Muslims for the glory of God (or whatever their line of propaganda was to justify it), or wanting to burn me at the stake because I deny all the doctrine that I consider to be nonsense. But I've been accused of being like Stalin, and those other genocidal tyrants, and told I've got no morality because I'm not religious.

I haven't read any of Dawkins' books, but they're on my "read someday" list. Since I get accused of worshiping him, I might as well find out what I supposedly believe in.

But I will say this: If you're going by hearsay instead of reading it yourself (or at least listening to an audio version), you're not really making up your own mind, are you?

Kevin J. Anderson once asked me why, if I hate his Dune books so much, do I continue to read them? One reason is that I honestly hoped they'd improve over time. (They mostly didn't.) The most important reason, though, is that I can't logically criticize someone's writing unless I've actually read it. I don't let critics decide for me if a book or movie or TV show is good. I prefer to make up my own mind.

As for Galileo, Bruno, et. al: It's irrelevant as to whether or not they're martyrs to science. What matters is that they were charged because the church objected to what they said, period.