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Originally posted by Alex Well I just thought the remark about "you're not religious because it's logical". See, I don't think that is really true at all. Yes I agree Science is logical but I also think that Science has made some of it's most significant advances in trying to reveal God's plan so to speak. From Galileo to Bacon this is obvious in my opinion. To say religion is not logical and that Science is (I can only assume this statement is meant to somehow be scientific) is itself illogical because to compare the two is in itself not logical. You answered all the other questions in a manner that doesn't seem to draw battle lines between Science and Religion therefore why compare them in the manner you did I don't know, it just didn't make much sense to me.

That would be true if I held religion in opposition to science, which I don't.

Like you said, many scientists believed they were unveiling the truth behind God's work with science. This is not what I'm getting at, though. To me, whether or not a scientist is religious is something as relevant as their taste in music. It could be part of the motivation behind their scientific enterprise, but science and religion are part of different games, so to speak.

For example, when a scientist proposes the big bang theory as an explanation of how the world came into being, their opinion is based solely on empirical observation and a fair amount of rigorous interpretation. But, when a religious text/figure mentions the existence of a supernatural entity (e.g. God), and give this supernatural entity a set of attributes (e.g. the omnipresence of the Christian God), this is based on empirical observation as well - I don't think any religion has ever come up with a concept that was completely irrelevant to its members (i.e. a deity that makes a catalogue of every living ant on Earth out of sheer boredom, and has no impact whatsoever on the life of these ants). But, there's no firm foundation, and there needn't be one.

A religious believe should be true to its followers not because of what they're told, but because they intimately believe it is true, even when there's no proof that this is the case.

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Originally posted by Alex Concerning your last remarks about religions in the plural and canonical texts... There are 3 "religions" (more specifically denominations) that use the canon, none of which consider all the texts in the canon to be infallible. (Anglicans, Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholics) It is a misconception that Jews have a canon, Protestants do to an extent but theirs has been changed from that which was adopted by the ecumenical councils.

I'm sorry for having messed up with the terminology (I thought "canonical texts" could be used for non-Christian religions). Actually, I need to ask you something: are we talking exclusively about Christianity here? Or only monotheistic religions, for that matter?

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Well we can talk about whichever you like, my understandings are limited to the desert religions though mostly, as those are the ones I study the most.

P.S.

Thanks for clarifying the other bit, I understand what you mean now.

It's just that I'm acquainted with the so-called "Eastern Religions", so whenever I say "Religion", I'm not only talking about Christianity/Islam/Judaism, but also about Buddhism/Daoism/Shinto.

Anyway, regarding my views on religion, do you know Kierkegaard? He's the person who has influenced me the most, and whose system of thought I butchered in the previous posts Look him up if you've got some free time. It'll make my views look a tad bit less weird, I guess.

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I am very familiar with him, actually. But to base a lot of your views on his work might be a bit sketchy, because he was so controversial in a lot of respects. His leap of faith theory is an interesting one and I think it is correct in application towards "complete" faith, but you seemed to take it a step further in that you felt faith in God itself is not logical.

But ya, Kierkegaard is amazing, he totally took the Danish Church to school on the bull shit they were shoving down people's throats.

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Originally posted by Alex I am very familiar with him, actually. But to base a lot of your views on his work might be a bit sketchy, because he was so controversial in a lot of respects. His leap of faith theory is an interesting one and I think it is correct in application towards "complete" faith, but you seemed to take it a step further in that you felt faith in God itself is not logical.

That's because didn't stand a chance against Buddhism in my world, not to mention the natural inclination I've had since early childhood to defy theist ideas in general

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It's the old story - you wait hours for an atheist bus and then 26 of them come along at once. Every bus trundling along London's Euston Road at the moment seems to have the advice offered by Richard Dawkins and the Humanists on its side, that God probably does not exist so you should enjoy your life. I can imagine that loads of religious people, charmed by the none-too-subtle implication that they are miserable swine, are converted by this poster into radical secularists. I, on the other hand, find my atheism seriously challenged by the anxiety that I may be just as self-regarding as the promoters of this poster. Apart from anything else, the Dawkins view encourages a caricature of the history of science. It dramatises a clash between scientific reason and religious superstition that is supposedly as intense today as it was in the age of Galileo. But this is a schoolchild's version of the history of science. It is simplistic and inaccurate to imagine that scientific discovery has ever been either the fruit, or the seed, of pure reason. Science, like art, is imaginative. And the imaginative pictures of the universe created by the great scientists have rarely been free of ideas that in the nouveau atheist view are irrational. Galileo is in the news - it's his 400th anniversary, so naturally scientific historians in Florence want to exhume his body and examine its DNA. In the modern imagination, Galileo was a man of reason who defied the Catholic church with his courageous defence of Copernicus's sun-centred solar system. But was he a modern secularist? To believe this you have to ignore the fact that he was influenced by Renaissance hermeticism, an occult philosophy in which the sun is a source of spiritual vitality - in other words, his heliocentrism is partly mystical. Galileo was tragic, ultimately capitulating to the church to avoid the fate of his contemporary Giordano Bruno, burned alive for his beliefs. Bruno's statue stands on the site of his execution on Rome's Campo dei Fiori. But Bruno was not martyred for the defence of pure science: he promoted magic, as well as hypothesising multiple universes. Galileo and Bruno were makers of modern science who were - as we all are - shaped by the assumptions of their age. The list goes on. Isaac Newton was fascinated by alchemy. The makers of modern natural history include not just Darwin, but eccentrics like Buckland and Owen who tried to reconcile fossils with religious faith. Richard Owen was a religious bigot, but he named the dinosaurs and founded the Natural History Museum. And Einstein said that God does not play dice. The mind does not think in a vacuum, and science never has existed in a God-free zone. Reason will probably always have to live with unreason. Now enjoy impurity.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddes...science-atheism

Edit: I think this articles summarises some of the points brought up earlier in this thread... and I think it's nice to show the opinion of another moderate atheist.

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Last edited by Lira on Jan-23-2009 at 18:56