Science & Religion

[Epimetheus]

magic = religion = democracy = quantum physics = coffee = teevee = internets

don't know what exactly you meant, but i like it.

[P3nT4gR4m]

magic = religion = democracy = quantum physics = coffee = teevee = internets

don't know what exactly you meant, but i like it.

Wasn't complicated or anything. What I meant was that all of the above were fucking brilliant ideas until mainstream humanity adopted them and turned them into a steaming pile-o-shit

Call me a cynic if ya like but IMO this is mainstream humanity's sole function in the universe - to convert anything it finds (including, ultimately, the universe itself) into a steaming pile-o-shit 

[Epimetheus]

Wasn't complicated or anything. What I meant was that all of the above were fucking brilliant ideas until mainstream humanity adopted them and turned them into a steaming pile-o-shit
Call me a cynic if ya like but IMO this is mainstream humanity's sole function in the universe - to convert anything it finds (including, ultimately, the universe itself) into a steaming pile-o-shit 

Got it. But in my opinion, the ones that ever were brilliant ideas still are brilliant ideas, because the original concepts don't change - interpretations do, and in that context I agree that mainstream humanity's interpretations have been steaming piles-o-shit.
The way human civilization tends to organize itself and its society can get so frustrating and annoying sometimes - and then when one gets annoyed enough, it becomes clear that the whole thing is actually full of lulz.
The essence of  .

[Honey]

Here's another guy I like:

The Need for Religion in Our Present Lives.

One reason for the pursuit of religion is that material progress alone will not give lasting pleasure of satisfaction.  It seems, indeed, that the more we progress materially, the more we have to live under constant fear.  Scientific technology has made marvelous advances, and no doubt will continue to develop.  Man may reach the moon and try to exploit its resources for the advantage of human beings-the moon which some ancient believers regarded as the home of their god; and planets may also be conquered.  Perhaps in the end, this progress will reveal potential enemies outside our world.  But in any case, it cannot possibly bring ultimate and permanent pleasure to human beings, for material progress always stimulates desire for even further progress, so that such pleasure as it brings is only ephemeral.  But on the other hand, when the mind enjoys pleasure and satisfaction, mere material hardships are easy to bear; and if a pleasure is derived purely from the mind itself, it will be a real and lasting pleasure.

No other pleasure can be compared with that derived from spiritual practice.  This is the greatest pleasure, and it is ultimate in nature.  Different religions have each shown their way to attain it.

One of the Many Religions of the World: Buddhism and Its Founder
Just as a particular disease in the world is treated by various medical methods, so there are many religions to bring happiness to human beings and others.  Different doctrines have been introduced by different exponents at different periods and in different ways.  But I believe they all fundamentally aim at the same noble goal, in teaching moral precepts to mould the functions of mind, body, and speech.  They all teach us not to tell lies, or bear false witness, or steal, or take others' lives, and so on.  Therefore, it would be better if disunity among the followers of different religions could come to an end.  Unity among religions is not an impossible idea.  It is possible and in the present state of the world, it is especially important.  Mutual respect would be helpful to all believers; and unity between them would also bring benefit to unbelievers; for the unanimous flood of light would show them the way out of their ignorance.  I strongly emphasize the urgent need of flawless unity among all religions.  To this end, the followers of each religion should know something of other religions, and that is why I want to try to explain a little of the Buddhism of Tibet.  . . .
-Dalai Lama of Tibet

& Ramakrishna too:

Mother, Mother, Mother!  Everyone foolishly assumes that his clock alone tells correct time.  Christians claim to possess exclusive truth. . . . . Countless varieties of Hindus insist that their sect, no matter how small and insignificant, expresses the ultimate position.  Devout Muslims maintain that Koranic revelation supersedes all others.  The entire world is being driven insane by this single phrase: "My religion alone is true."  O Mother, you have shown me that no clock is entirely accurate.  Only the transcendent sun of knowledge remains on time.  Who can make a system from Divine Mystery?  But if any sincere practitioner, within whatever culture or religion, prays and meditates with great devotion and commitment to Truth alone, your Grace will flood his mind and heart, O Mother.  His particular sacred tradition will be opened and illuminated.  He will reach the one goal of spiritual evolution.  Mother, Mother, Mother!  How I long to pray with sincere Christians in their churches and to bow and prostrate with devoted Muslims in their mosques!  All religions are glorious!
-Ramakrishna

A tad naïve maybe?  but then again, soami.

[Thurnez Isa]

A little off topic, but the way my thinking is currently on the subject.

Science and Religion to me seem similar in only one fashion.
They guide themselves without a moral compass

In terms of Science this is easy to see. All science, when you get down to, is a means to solve specific questions using the method of analysis, problem solving, and peer review. It can be beneficial, as most of the time it is. We don't starve to death in times of poor harvest, we develop technology to add varies comforts, and not having tooth decay kill us after child hood owes a lot of thanks to the scientific method. Also almost everything we know about our environment, our universe and the make up of life is thanks in part at least to this method.
But science can also turn against both minority segments and larger segments of the population because it generates knowledge, which is enriching to most people, but can also be used by others who have little care for the well being of others.
A moral compass can generate through using this method when used, but only by those who are already predisposed for the betterment of others, and in the end it's a method where morality is irrelevant

Religion (and Im speaking about good old classic religion, not faith, or spiritual fuckfests, or hippie bullshit) seems to be also a way to solve specific questions, by a complete different method, by the generation of a spiritual narrative. Is aim is to make the individual feel special in some communal way.
I'm not even sure it's about adherence to a spiritual idea. For example look at the few rules that Jesus actually laid down for his followers and then ask yourself if any Christian actually follows them... Let me put it this way, Jesus wasn't too hot on owning possessions - especially owning, or even desiring a lot them.
Now I don't have to lay out the good and bad things religion has done socially, though I suspect socially there is more bad then good, but just think of the concept as a moral compass. It actually doesn't offer anything and like science the religious method can be beneficial for some people and detrimental for others

and I'm not surprised. Morality is a complex thing that is both ingrained and taught.. the whole nature, nurture argument. Biologically, and especially with primates, it seems to be a combination of both, with a long run weeded process where traits generally beneficial to a specific group are passed down genetically and through some communal teachings.

Thats my thoughts on the subject now, though like most people who have been even slightly interested in what seems to be an ever consuming topic my thoughts are ever evolving.

[Honey]

"Thats my thoughts on the subject now, though like most people who have been even slightly interested in what seems to be an ever consuming topic my thoughts are ever evolving."
-Thurnez Isa

I like WHAT you said (the whole thing) & HOW you said it!

Brought to mind my long time obsession with the notion of Time & how that fits into all of this.  Also reminded me where I got the quote in my sig.

This is from Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:  An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig:

Author's Note:  What follows is based on actual occurrences. Although much has been changed for rhetorical purposes, it must be regarded in its essence as fact. However, it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It's not very factual on motorcycles, either.

And what is good, Phædrus,
And what is not good...
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

(^from beginning & then many pages later)

In the temple of science are many mansions -- and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them there.

Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were an angel of the Lord to come and drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, it would be noticeably emptier but there would still be some men of both present and past times left inside -- . If the types we have just expelled were the only types there were, the temple would never have existed any more than one can have a wood consisting of nothing but creepers -- those who have found favor with the angel -- are somewhat odd, uncommunicative, solitary fellows, really less like each other than the hosts of the rejected.

What has brought them to the temple -- no single answer will cover -- escape from everyday life, with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from his noisy cramped surroundings into the silence of the high mountains where the eye ranges freely through the still pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity.

The passage is from a 1918 speech by a young German scientist named Albert Einstein.

Phædrus had finished his first year of University science at the age of fifteen. His field was already biochemistry, and he intended to specialize at the interface between the organic and inorganic worlds now known as molecular biology. He didn't think of this as a career for his own personal advancement. He was very young and it was a kind of noble idealistic goal.

The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshipper or lover. The daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.
If Phædrus had entered science for ambitious or utilitarian purposes it might never have occurred to him to ask questions about the nature of a scientific hypothesis as an entity in itself. But he did ask them, and was unsatisfied with the answers.

The formation of hypotheses is the most mysterious of all the categories of scientific method. Where they come from, no one knows. A person is sitting somewhere, minding his own business, and suddenly...flash!...he understands something he didn't understand before. Until it's tested the hypothesis isn't truth. For the tests aren't its source. Its source is somewhere else.

Einstein had said:

Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world. He then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it -- He makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life in order to find in this way the peace and serenity which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience -- .The supreme task -- is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them --.

Intuition? Sympathy? Strange words for the origin of scientific knowledge.

A lesser scientist than Einstein might have said, "But scientific knowledge comes from nature. Nature provides the hypotheses." But Einstein understood that nature does not. Nature provides only experimental data.
A lesser mind might then have said, "Well then, man provides the hypotheses." But Einstein denied this too. "Nobody," he said, "who has really gone into the matter will deny that in practice the world of phenomena uniquely determines the theoretical system, in spite of the fact that there is no theoretical bridge between phenomena and their theoretical principles."

Phædrus' break occurred when, as a result of laboratory experience, he became interested in hypotheses as entities in themselves. He had noticed again and again in his lab work that what might seem to be the hardest part of scientific work, thinking up the hypotheses, was invariably the easiest. The act of formally writing everything down precisely and clearly seemed to suggest them. As he was testing hypothesis number one by experimental method a flood of other hypotheses would come to mind, and as he was testing these, some more came to mind, and as he was testing these, still more came to mind until it became painfully evident that as he continued testing hypotheses and eliminating them or confirming them their number did not decrease. It actually increased as he went along.

At first he found it amusing. He coined a law intended to have the humor of a Parkinson's law that "The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite." It pleased him never to run out of hypotheses. Even when his experimental work seemed dead-end in every conceivable way, he knew that if he just sat down and muddled about it long enough, sure enough, another hypothesis would come along. And it always did. It was only months after he had coined the law that he began to have some doubts about the humor or benefits of it.

If true, that law is not a minor flaw in scientific reasoning. The law is completely nihilistic. It is a catastrophic logical disproof of the general validity of all scientific method!

If the purpose of scientific method is to select from among a multitude of hypotheses, and if the number of hypotheses grows faster than experimental method can handle, then it is clear that all hypotheses can never be tested. If all hypotheses cannot be tested, then the results of any experiment are inconclusive and the entire scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven knowledge.

About this Einstein had said, "Evolution has shown that at any given moment out of all conceivable constructions a single one has always proved itself absolutely superior to the rest," and let it go at that. But to Phædrus that was an incredibly weak answer. The phrase "at any given moment" really shook him. Did Einstein really mean to state that truth was a function of time? To state that would annihilate the most basic presumption of all science!

But there it was, the whole history of science, a clear story of continuously new and changing explanations of old facts. The time spans of permanence seemed completely random he could see no order in them. Some scientific truths seemed to last for centuries, others for less than a year. Scientific truth was not dogma, good for eternity, but a temporal quantitative entity that could be studied like anything else.

He studied scientific truths, then became upset even more by the apparent cause of their temporal condition. It looked as though the time spans of scientific truths are an inverse function of the intensity of scientific effort. Thus the scientific truths of the twentieth century seem to have a much shorter life-span than those of the last century because scientific activity is now much greater. If, in the next century, scientific activity increases tenfold, then the life expectancy of any scientific truth can be expected to drop to perhaps one-tenth as long as now. What shortens the life-span of the existing truth is the volume of hypotheses offered to replace it; the more the hypotheses, the shorter the time span of the truth. And what seems to be causing the number of hypotheses to grow in recent decades seems to be nothing other than scientific method itself. The more you look, the more you see. Instead of selecting one truth from a multitude you are increasing the multitude. What this means logically is that as you try to move toward unchanging truth through the application of scientific method, you actually do not move toward it at all. You move away from it! It is your application of scientific method that is causing it to change!

What Phædrus observed on a personal level was a phenomenon, profoundly characteristic of the history of science, which has been swept under the carpet for years. The predicted results of scientific enquiry and the actual results of scientific enquiry are diametrically opposed here, and no one seems to pay too much attention to the fact. The purpose of scientific method is to select a single truth from among many hypothetical truths. That, more than anything else, is what science is all about. But historically science has done exactly the opposite. Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple, indeterminate, relative ones. The major producer of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thought and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself. And what Phædrus saw in the isolation of his own laboratory work years ago is now seen everywhere in the technological world today. Scientifically produced antiscience...chaos.
http://virtualschool.edu/mon/Quality/PirsigZen/part2.html

[Kai]

I'd dissagree with Einstein's bolded statement if it is indeed about biological evolution. There's no inferior or superior in evolutionary biology. Whatever works, is more the doctrine. Heh, "god plays dice".

[Thurnez Isa]

keep in mind Einstein was working before punctured equilibrium became the more widely accepted mechanism for evolutionary change... he was probably still working under the assumption of gradualism

[Arafelis]

I'd dissagree with Einstein's bolded statement if it is indeed about biological evolution. There's no inferior or superior in evolutionary biology. Whatever works, is more the doctrine. Heh, "god plays dice".

keep in mind Einstein was working before punctured equilibrium became the more widely accepted mechanism for evolutionary change... he was probably still working under the assumption of gradualism

Given the context of Einstein's statement, this exchange is amusing.

[Kai]

keep in mind Einstein was working before punctured equilibrium became the more widely accepted mechanism for evolutionary change... he was probably still working under the assumption of gradualism

Gradualism or not, the idea of one biological "answer" being uniquely superior to all others was discarded 150 years ago. This is why we have such a grand diversity of life, cause many "answers" work equally well.

[Thurnez Isa]

I'd dissagree with Einstein's bolded statement if it is indeed about biological evolution. There's no inferior or superior in evolutionary biology. Whatever works, is more the doctrine. Heh, "god plays dice".

keep in mind Einstein was working before punctured equilibrium became the more widely accepted mechanism for evolutionary change... he was probably still working under the assumption of gradualism

Given the context of Einstein's statement, this exchange is amusing.

shut the fuck up

grown ups are talking now

[Thurnez Isa]

Kai: I was agree with your original statement, but offering a little bit of a defense for a man who died in the 50's

[Adios]

Honey, I do just fine with joining science and religionspirituality, just letting you know.

There is nothing at all saying they have to be mutually exclusive.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

keep in mind Einstein was working before punctured equilibrium became the more widely accepted mechanism for evolutionary change... he was probably still working under the assumption of gradualism

Gradualism or not, the idea of one biological "answer" being uniquely superior to all others was discarded 150 years ago. This is why we have such a grand diversity of life, cause many "answers" work equally well.

Stepping into an area where I'm an idiot... not at all uncommon for me

"Evolution has shown that at any given moment out of all conceivable constructions a single one has always proved itself absolutely superior to the rest."

It seems to me that we have to determine Einstein's context here. Is he saying that a single one (Lifeform) has always proven superior, or is he saying that a single one (configuration for a given species) has always proven superior for a given moment in space-time.

One configuration of species X is most fit for Y time at Z location. The current configuration of humans seems the most fit set of options for now, but we probably wouldn't be the most fit in Europe 30,000 years ago. Perhaps Cro-Magnon was the most fit configuration for that time, in that place... at least when compared to us.

I dunno if that's true or false, but that's how I read Einstein's comment there...

[Thurnez Isa]

It seems to me that we have to determine Einstein's context here. Is he saying that a single one (Lifeform) has always proven superior, or is he saying that a single one (configuration for a given species) has always proven superior for a given moment in space-time.

One configuration of species X is most fit for Y time at Z location. The current configuration of humans seems the most fit set of options for now, but we probably wouldn't be the most fit in Europe 30,000 years ago. Perhaps Cro-Magnon was the most fit configuration for that time, in that place... at least when compared to us.

I dunno if that's true or false, but that's how I read Einstein's comment there...

your probably right rat


I still have a problem with the use of "superior" in this situation, as it seems the classic situation of evolving into new niches has more to do with extinction and inferiority then superiority... and even then I have problem with the terms cause the terms are subjective unless put in a specific situation, time and place as you so hinted

One of the situations I could think of currently where it superiority clearly won out against inferiority is when Central America collided into South America, introducing for the first time the big cats into South America. The Big Cats did what the local large predator did, the Terror Birds, but due to how they evolved, the Big Cats just did it better. How much this drove the big birds into extinction is debatable, but it definitely put enough stress on the populations to put it on the path of extinction

What happens, probably most often, is an environmental change puts stress on a population, and enough stress could break it, creating a niche, which given enough time is fulled by something else, which given enough time, evolves just slightly enough to give themselves an edge in their new environment. In other words, nothing is just better, something is, using a modern term, "obsolete"

If one wants to bring this to a religious outlook (which I would advise against, but lets do anyways) it would mean concluding things that are uncomfortable to most people. The idea of benevolence, fate, even possibly the singularity of a spiritual force would be called into question.
Bringing into a spiritual outlook would possibly be different, but to be honest I know nothing about spirituality and could only judge religious teachings and texts.