Can science and religion mix?

lol nice. sport eh? I'll learn to enjoy it~

While that may not be a real insult in this case, then I maintain that unless your actually sucking cock on a regular basis, or I can light your ass up and smoke you, then fag is still an insult :)

and stop confusing me, it is confusing

I agree, and i'm not saying that religion created it, it only defined it to a specific set of principles (which i do not necessarily agree with). Religion just gave right and wrong clear definitions. Even though they are far to strict in many areas, it is the job of people to derive how they feel they should react to a moral gray area.

Science and religion cannot mix when we still have bullshit like this going on:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1001.blake.html

(article is long, but basically Texan members of the Board of Education want to rewrite the theory of evolution out of the school books - or put in bullshit about it being wrong ect)


Perhaps someday if religion adapts and changes to accept, and not interfere with scientific advancement then maybe.... but today it is still just a wish.

They can co exist among enlightened people, which sad most of the USA now a days are not. If I remember correctly then 7 out of 10 top universities are located in the US, but outside these institutions it seems like people get shitty educations, and what is worse it that they seem to be proud of it.

So among ignorant people science and religion cannot co exist, but then again.. science can never really do well with ignorant people

Sigh... I just wish that religion could simply fade away to oblivion and be forgotten. But it just refuses to accept the facts and keeps on struggling and degrading. I think it's really sad. I mean, if everyone would stop teaching their kids that god is absolutely true and insted presented the option joining to a religion when they would be old enough to think for themselfs (like, 15) then how long do you think ANY religion would last?

People are largely emotional/spiritual beings, often more than logical, so even if you managed to get rid of all current religions then something similar would replace them. We quite simply need something to believe in, and while some people have basically adopted science as a religion, then science just does not answer most of the "meaning of life", "why are we here", etc. philosophical kind of questions.

Still, in today's society religion is far too forced upon people in my opinion. And maybe someday we will understand that there are plenty more important things in the world then all these 'big' questions. Or at least come up with better of an excuse for an answer, then what we have today. Oops, that was kind of rude. I apologize.

lolwut?

P.S.: If someone thinks that was too short for an SD response, I'll gladly write out a full sentence basically asking the exact same thing.

I DEMAND a full answer!!!! :P

Many people today (and especially many of the ones I know) which claim they do not believe in God, do so because it cannot be proven or substantiated. While this stance in it self seems reasonable, then they often adopt science as their new religion, basically claiming that if science cannot explain or prove it, then it is not right. They simply start explaining everything with religion (or try to)

Doesn't seem like they're using it like a religion to me. They just seem like hardcore empiricists. They're simply putting all their reliance on science for the answer (let's not forget science is a method, not a set of beliefs).

I think it was best said "Religion without science is blind, Science without Religion is lame"

i am not a religious person. in this case i do think there are lines that science should not cross, but they wont ever be able to mix simply because religious masses rely simply on blind faith nothing more

OMG the most misquoted person about religion is probably Einstein

Nah, Einstein has more credibility than that.

Anyway, to answer the topic: Most religions claim to some authority over how this world works. For instance, miracles would definitely destroy laws of physics; virgin birth will drastically redefine biology; god talking into your head will distort psychology. If religion is true and the laws of science could be so easily altered and bent, the study of science is basically rendered meaningless. Why the hell study this ephemeral thing, when we can just let God do his thing?

Science is NOT a religion, because science does not demand absolute and baseless faith in it. In fact, it is the exact opposite: it demands constant scrutiny and scepticism so that we can destroy incorrect views of the world, and edge closer to how the world really is. If, for instace, you can prove that god can alter reality, then I am sure that most scientist will eventually give up their endeavors and becomes monks or something.

Because religion will collapse under careful scrutiny, indoctrination is an absolute must for any religion hoping to survive for a decent amount of time. From young, the concept of religion is drilled into people's heads, so when they grow up, this concept becomes unshakable to the extent that all evidence to the contrary will be automatically discarded without any consideration, no matter how damning. An interesting case was a young passionate geologist, who was at the same time very faithful. At one point, his knowledge as a geologist conflicted with his religion so much that he had to resolve this. he took out his bible and began cutting away the portions that cannot be true if his science is true. What he ended up with simply scraps of paper left, that cannot even be called a book. Either science or religion must go, he decided. Being extremely faithful, he gave up his endeavors in geology that he loved so much.

As for religion giving clear definitions of morals, I find it very far from the truth. Lets take christianty for instance. The bible is obviously the most authoritarian piece of work that christians have. Let's look at the story of Sodom. Angels visited our man in the town full of gays/bis to warn him to leave. (We may wonder why omnipotent god cannot just leave him and his family out without making him leave physically, or just transport him out by His own power). The townfolks asked to "know" the beautiful males guest our man has received. Being a gracious host, he instead offered to let his neighbours know his two virgin daughters. Moral #1: women are indefinitely less important than men/their will is of no importance.

I do not remember most of such stories (since i am not religious), but i do know that the bible is full of similar stuff, including endosring murder, genocide, racial and sexual discrimination, etc. Granted, there are proper morals which we accpet today. The point is this, religious authorities select the stories which pertain to our current trend of morality to talk about. The others they ignore. Religion does not provide any objective standard on morality at all. It simply follows what the current trend is.

Miracles does in no way have to destroy the laws of physics, they are just phenomenons that we have yet to be able to explain, and which may/may not be explainable by our current understanding of the laws of physics.
Virgin birth happens in many animals, and it is not impossible to have human virgin birth, in fact this has been studied and proven possible, we have just not had an actual proven case of it happening yet.
different kind of wavelenghts can make you hear specific sounds (not talking sound wavelenghts) so given a good enough understanding a person could talk inside another persons head, so why should god speaking in someones head distort science?...




Science does actually require absolute faith in it. it is, like religion, based on a set of basic principles which it requires you to accept completely. Allot of religion is based on some "facts" which then makes the rest sensible and accepteble, as long as you believe the basic facts. And another thing: how much of science do you think you actually understand? I guess not much, most of the time you will just believe something because some on has used a scientific method to discover it.



You advocate science, and yet only tell us a story... source/proof/correctly formed arguments are all things I would like to see from someone taking your position.




sigh... you have just with you own example shown a prime example of how the bible contains lots of stories with a quite clear moral. It is true that they are not always as clear as the example you give, but that is why priest take ~5 years of education. And you still have to remember that one of the most important duties of religious scholars (like priests) is interpretations of the stories of the holy books, so we "regular people" get the moral. So it may not alway be clear, but it is there.




True, and this is why proper interpretation is very important, since the stories reflect the time they were written, and you therefor need religious scholars with proper understanding of context to distill the moral for you. If you just read the bible, it will mostly be a barbaric tale of war, violence, and abuse, and this is not really what Christianity is about..


Lastly, to put my "defense" of religion, as this may seem, I will just add that I am a scientist (well officially I am not hired until September) and I do not practice any religion.

You have to consider miracles to be unknown things, so in that sense, it is entirely possible that we just dont have the knowledge to understand why those so called miracles happen. Teh virgin birth is actually common, in rotifers, for example, one species actually undergoes parthogenesis, which is when the female lays an unfertilized egg that develops into a female. Additionally some species lay seperate male and female eggs. The answer to the first question is that studying science is in essence pointless. Even from the point of a nonreligious person, what has science done for us? We learn more about living things great...We have more medicine that saves more people which will eventually lead to over population. Plus, our technology is screwing up most of this generation...Obesity is rising at an incredible rate, people are lazier than ever...we have increasingly complex machines that do everything for us...sooner or later someones going to create a robot. What is geology going to do for us? What is knowing about animals going to do for us? How is knowing that the dinosarus were killed by a meteor going to help us in the future? How is knowing that a reptile is cold blooded, or that there are 6 living kingdoms going to help us?

Science is a sort of religion. Some things do require absolute faith, thats what a law requires...such as the law of gravitiation, they call it a law because it is supposed to happen all the time. What you are probably thinking of, blacktornado, are theories, which, admittedly, are considered to not be absolute. If god came out and proved that he could distort reality, Im sure that there would be many scientists that will spend their whole lives trying to disprove it somehow. And in fact, religion does require constant scrutiny. Even the bible needs to be constantly scrutinized by each person, because it is open to different interpretations, and new things are said, and new thoughts are always out there. I cannot deny the fact that there are some unshakable things in religion though, there are certain absolute truths.

Can you tell me how religion will collapse under close scrutiny? Additionally, i would not call indoctrination. I don't know what kind of people you talk to, but most people are more open minded than you think. I, for one, will consider new evidence and think about it deeply, not just discard it. And as a matter of fact, your story is inaccurate, if you really did take out everything in the bible that contradicted science, there would still be quite a few pages left... a lot in fact. Also, there are many religious people that have turned aside their religion and become hardcore scientists, i knwo because i know quite a few.

Yes, Christianity does have a lot of bad stuff in it. Why didn't god just transport them? He has his reasons. He might want to wipe out the whole of Sodom, or could consider it too troublesome to exclude him. Or his power could be so great that no one could possibly be saved under his raging anger. In terms of the two daughters, first i would like to say that they are not exactly goodytwo shoes, infact, they got their father drunk and slept with him and so their kids father was also their granddad. Also, this is something that Lot did, not God. Everyone sins, there is no person in the bible who did not sin, but God has great love and forgives. Additionally, in that time period, yes people did consider women less. Thats why we have the new Testament, because it wipes the slate clean from the old Testament, and shows a new set of rules for a new age. Because God is so good, he goes along with a few of our whims, because if he didn't, we would sin to the point of no return/

Yes, the bible is filled with that stuff, but like i said above, he forgives us our sins. Plus, im not saying that what pastors say is all correct. There are plenty of corrupt bastard priests out there, and even the good willed ones say things that I consider to be ridiculous, and thats because humans arent perfect.

For the original post question, yes i do think that science and religion can mix, I think one of the most heated debated topics is evolution, if one is religious, then one can say that God could have manipulated certain animals to grow better than other animals. Different people i know have different ways of coping with both science and their religion.

This science/religion shit again. I don't know if you rationalized science into some kind of religion, but there's no faith involved. You know those principles you mentioned, it's not like they made that shit up like religions do. The scientific method makes sure people back their shit up. There's one word you're avoiding here: TRUST. Big difference. People trust the scientific method because it has proven itself again and again as a good way of examining our universe. People trust that the experts know what they're are talking about. Let's say some religious figure makes a public claim. Why should anyone trust him? Does he have a good track record? With nothing to back him up, people would just take his word on faith. Btw, what facts is religion based on?


Again with the bullshit retrofitting. This "interpretation" shit is a very lame excuse to forget the fact that the moral of the story was in fact immoral by today's standards. Putting a positive spin on the story to reconcile it with today is obvious bullshit. Heard of nostradamus? He made some ambiguous fucking predictions, yet, people find a way to make it seem like they came true. How? With the bullshit technique of retrofitting. I don't care how long the priests trained for, turning an obviously deplorable moral story into something positive just because we won't tolerate that kind of behavior today is a fucking rationalization to avoid cognitive dissonance.


Right, even though it's based on a book which is mostly "a barbaric tale of war, violence, and abuse."


Your post eventually leaves the realm of reasoned logic, but this claim early on is just ridiculous.

Well, if you can prove some mystery of the world with cold hard fact(data and stuff), i might believe that religion will not able to mix with science.
However, if you cannot give the prove yet. Then, i still believe in God.

Science is still growing, so does people's mind and understanding. Some thing is still cannot be explain by science in this time line, maybe someday when science is a little older it may be solve some of the world secret.

We need to be open minded about something to accept something. That something is important to achieve ourselves and evolve. All thing have reason to exist in this world, from the giant tree to the smallest bacteria. Without reason then there is no meaning to existence.

In math, there is a small probability that a greater existence may exists. There is also a small chances, that earth might not existed. Nether the less, I cannot doubt there is something out there that human being that still cannot be solve. However, it is not that human cannot solve it, it just that it is not the time to get the answer you are looking for.

The mystery will be a mystery for now, there is no solid fact to support that there is God, as to there is no God. Given time, and hard work, we might able to find the truths.