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Re: Are Science and Religion Incompatible?
| quote: | Originally posted by Renegade
I think the article makes an important point here, and it's one that many in this conciliatory age seem reluctant to make. Both science and religion address issues of epistemology (how we "know" what we "know"), ontology (the nature of being and beings) and human nature (our fundamental facticity, our reasons for certain behaviour, our origins etc.) and, as such, I believe, they should be held to similar logical and empirical constraints. |
I partially disagree with you here. While it is obvious that science and religion are and were at odds regarding "lower-level" puzzles like human behaviour or the behaviour of the universe, and while science regularly won on these issues, the ultimate questions like "why anything exists" still cannot, and maybe will not, be answered using scientific means. Although, to be fair, such questions may not be answered through religious means either. Additionally, however, all of science is based on approximations and observations. All of those approximations and observations seem to work, so we seem to know how and why some things happen. On a basic level like the question of evolution or the roundness of the earth, such suggestions are sort of silly. But on the essential level, they are not. Like, can you prove to me with 100% certainty that you really exis? We both know you can't. You can only establish relations between processes that already seem to happen around you, so you can say you exist because I see you and I see you because you exist. Such an implication, though, requires that my perception is fundamentally flawless and omniscient. But why they are happening the way they are happening, or why anything is happening at all, is a different question entirely, and so far I haven't seen anyone come close to answering it.
| quote: | The existence of an interventionalist God (that is, a God that is actively engaged in the workings of the world), for instance, should produce quantifiable phenomena. If we do identify quantifiable phenomena that could have only come from a being as powerful as a God, then these phenomena should be as readily addressed by science as by religion. The manifested God, under these circumstances, immediately becomes a scientific issue and the tennets of science would have to change to accomodate his existence. If God could be proven, it would change the nature of science as drastically - if not more so - as it would the nature of religion.
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It is not necessarry that an interventionist god produces immediately quantifiable phenomena. For example, quantum effects are completely random and although you can statistically determine the general behavior of particles, there's no way you can predict what will happen to a single particle. Parralel to that is a butterfly effect which basically says that small disturbances in the beginning can cause large disturbances in the end. Ultimately the position of few electrons may end up causing a storm killing thousands of people. Let alone what can be done by manipulating the position of every subatomic particle in the universe. And the funny thing is that with a same statistical distribution of particle behaviours you can achieve dramatically different large-scale effects. So such actions are both interventionist and unobservable.
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1+1=10
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Anti-Purple Alliance.
