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I'm sure you're playing devil's advocate to an extent here Lira, but I can't in good faith let all this slip by unopposed. 
| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
Some do. Craig (Moral Hazard) knows his theology very well, for example, and it'd be an unfair mistake to say he's clueless when compared to a passive atheist that dismisses religions "because they're all wrong whereas science is sound and swell". |
Of course. I'd be worried if the average theist were not more familiar with theology than the average atheist, but that's beside the point. I'm sure that the average numerologist knows more about numerology than the average non-numerologist, but that surely tells us nothing about the efficacy of numerology as applied to the world we all share? The failure of theology is not that it is incapable of sophistication, but that it lacks any real application to the world-in-itself - what can theology teach us that any other system of thought cannot teach us in a far more parsimonious (or - better yet - more accurate) way?
Fwiw, I'm actually quite capable of appreciating theology on its own terms. For reasons I don't really understand, I actually enjoy reading scholarship concerning - say - what the Biblical authors thought concerning the nature of Jesus. Did they consider him the Son of God? If so, what was their understanding of when this "sonship" was "appointed"? What it with his resurrection (Rom 1:3-4), his baptism (Mk. 1:11), his conception (Mt. 1:18, Lk. 1:26-35) or was he the logos that pre-exists existence itself (John 1:1-2)? These are interesting debates on their own terms, but they still have ultimately no bearing on anything meaningful: deciding in which sense we can call Jesus the "Son of God" surely won't change our understanding of the universe or the means by which we should live our lives.
Theology has the potential to be sophisticated and interesting, but let's call a spade a spade: it's still bullshit from top to bottom.
| quote: | | I hate to break it to you but religion is based on facts too. How do you think a religion that preached that humans breathe underwater and fly would fare? |
Well, religion is ultimately based on "minimally counterintuitive" facts - i.e. facts that are slightly incredible, but not so incredible as to defy all belief (see this link - I've posted it before but it deserves to be reposted). You won't find religions predicated on the fact that humans can breathe underwater, but you will find religions which assert that certain, special human beings can walk on water, or survive in the belly of a large fish underwater for three days. You won't find religions predicated on the fact that human beings can fly, but you will find religions predicated on the fact that the human soul can fly to certain places under certain circumstances, say in a dream or after death.
In any case, the fact that certain beliefs are universally present within all theologies - and others universally absent - is surely evidence of their cognitive origins. I can think of no other way that supposedly ineffable truths would have made themselves known to such a distinct array of religious traditions.
| quote: | | Religion (and science, for that matter) is an answer to a problem. And it must be related to the facts in a way or another. Christians think miracles happen because of what they perceive as facts: an unlikely cure, a fluke you prayed for, and so on. The difference between science and religion is not that science alone is based on facts. Science is just more reliable. |
I think you're giving theology more credit than it deserves here. The universal inefficacy of prayer is not hard to demonstrate, nor is the universal non-violation of natural laws - can differences in perception really account for that fact?
| quote: | | By the way, since we're bashing "mental masturbation" (of which philosophy seems to be a member) |
Haha, steady... 
Philosophy often lends itself to "insights" that scarcely improve our understanding of the world or our capacity to engage with it, but at least there's a certain intellectual rigour behind it. The analogy that Dan Dennett used - and that I'm going to badly paraphrase because I can't be bothered looking it up - is that if philosophy is a game of tennis, then theology is a game of tennis with the net removed and all the court lines scrubbed off: they're both playing by a set of somewhat arbitrary and self-contained rules, but at least there are ways of "losing" at philosophy. Can you think of a theological idea that was ever rejected for anything other than decretal or otherwise arbitrary reasons?
| quote: | Religions aren't closed... and they change  |
Religious practice changes quite fluidly, but theology really doesn't - at least not once a central dogma's been laid down. One can trace the trajectory of Christian thought almost by the decade for the first century or so, but it comes to a standstill pretty soon after that. I mean, can you find me a Christian who disagrees strongly with anything St. Augustine had to say in the 4th century? Can you find me a scientific discipline that looks to 4th century ideas as an equivalent source of inspiration?
| quote: | | That's a very very very bad idea. Scientists are not infallible, and the scientific community is not always the apex of rationality: Phrenology had got almost everything wrong (their idea that some parts of the brain had specific functions proved to be useful though), and Lysenkoism had disastrous effects. |
Well I agree with you about placing unwarranted faith in any epistemic method (scientific or otherwise), but Lysenkoism isn't an example of what happens when you place to much faith in the scientific method, it's an example of what happens when you completely ignore the scientific method and go off searching for whatever method happens to validate your world view. Millions of people died basically because the Marxists couldn't accept the fact that Lamarckism is bullshit - science can't justly wear the blame for that one.
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