nameandnature (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
nameandnature) wrote2006-10-29 12:31 pm
nameandnature) wrote2006-10-29 12:31 pm
Entry tags:
The Two Cultures
I was part of an interesting discussion last night at a party. We got onto science and religion, and one of our number, who I'll call F, was pretty steadfast in asserting that science and religion were the same sort of thing. Her reasons were partly that science grew out of religion, I think, and partly that both are engaged in a search for truth.
We got side-tracked a bit by trying to define religion in a way which doesn't include ballroom dancing, say (funny clothes, weekly meetings, rituals... hmmm). Like the judge asked to adjudicate between erotica and pornography, we know religion when we see it, so we agreed that Christianity was a religion, say, so we could talk about that rather than religion in the abstract.
The scientists (or at least, people who'd studied science as undergraduates) argued that the methods that religion and science were the key difference between them. Christianity typically begins with the statements of the church or of the Bible, science typically begins with a hypothesis which is confirmed (or refuted) by experiment. While it's not true to say that there's no valid knowledge outside the scientific process, where Christianity does make claims about things happening outside people's heads, those claims are susceptible to science, per Dawkins.
F made the point that we might eventually supersede the scientific method with something else, and that science might lead us to evidence for the existence of God. Both of these are things which are possible but haven't happened yet, I suppose.
She also pointed out that people like Dawkins would want to exclude bad or fraudulent scientists from our definition of science, but were happy to rail at the worst of Christianity, people who most Christians think are crazy. In other words, Dawkins is aiming at straw men. I didn't get a chance to think about this properly, but in the Dawkins case, his argument in The God Delusion is intentionally very broad, and takes in the mainstream version of Christianity as well as the fundamentalists. I'd also add that science is better at correcting for bad science than Christianity is at correcting for bad Christians, precisely because it is actually possible to show someone's science to be wrong.
We then talked about reality as a construct and F said that maybe there wouldn't be gravity if people didn't believe in it. Nobody was willing to jump out of the window and try this, although someone did drop a cracker on the table to confirm that they even keep it on at weekends. We did say that it was easy to see how that might be the case if solipsism were true, but it was hard to see how many minds agreed on a reality if each of them had the power to change it (which sort of begs the question, since we were assuming that people do agree). I mentioned that people on uk.religion.christian who think that matter arises from consciousness, and not vice-versa, who might believe something similar to F.
At the end of it all,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
scribb1e and I were struck by the failure of the majority, who were scientists or mathematicians by education, to connect with F, a liberal arts person, and vice-versa. I hope F didn't feel too put upon. More than that, though, I wondered how many people hold similar sort of views to hers, who I never meet because I mainly have these sorts of discussions with scientists.
[Poll #855650]
We got side-tracked a bit by trying to define religion in a way which doesn't include ballroom dancing, say (funny clothes, weekly meetings, rituals... hmmm). Like the judge asked to adjudicate between erotica and pornography, we know religion when we see it, so we agreed that Christianity was a religion, say, so we could talk about that rather than religion in the abstract.
The scientists (or at least, people who'd studied science as undergraduates) argued that the methods that religion and science were the key difference between them. Christianity typically begins with the statements of the church or of the Bible, science typically begins with a hypothesis which is confirmed (or refuted) by experiment. While it's not true to say that there's no valid knowledge outside the scientific process, where Christianity does make claims about things happening outside people's heads, those claims are susceptible to science, per Dawkins.
F made the point that we might eventually supersede the scientific method with something else, and that science might lead us to evidence for the existence of God. Both of these are things which are possible but haven't happened yet, I suppose.
She also pointed out that people like Dawkins would want to exclude bad or fraudulent scientists from our definition of science, but were happy to rail at the worst of Christianity, people who most Christians think are crazy. In other words, Dawkins is aiming at straw men. I didn't get a chance to think about this properly, but in the Dawkins case, his argument in The God Delusion is intentionally very broad, and takes in the mainstream version of Christianity as well as the fundamentalists. I'd also add that science is better at correcting for bad science than Christianity is at correcting for bad Christians, precisely because it is actually possible to show someone's science to be wrong.
We then talked about reality as a construct and F said that maybe there wouldn't be gravity if people didn't believe in it. Nobody was willing to jump out of the window and try this, although someone did drop a cracker on the table to confirm that they even keep it on at weekends. We did say that it was easy to see how that might be the case if solipsism were true, but it was hard to see how many minds agreed on a reality if each of them had the power to change it (which sort of begs the question, since we were assuming that people do agree). I mentioned that people on uk.religion.christian who think that matter arises from consciousness, and not vice-versa, who might believe something similar to F.
At the end of it all,
scribb1e and I were struck by the failure of the majority, who were scientists or mathematicians by education, to connect with F, a liberal arts person, and vice-versa. I hope F didn't feel too put upon. More than that, though, I wondered how many people hold similar sort of views to hers, who I never meet because I mainly have these sorts of discussions with scientists.[Poll #855650]
no subject
(Anonymous) 2006-11-02 10:29 pm (UTC)(link)These are the views which do try to describe the entirety of human experience so can at least trying to do the same thing, so can be compared.
But I would argue they are quite fundamentally different as one requires a leap of faith, the other doesn't.
Secular Humanism starts, as Carl Sagan says, with "The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be" which is not a statement with any basis which could possibly justify it - it is just stated as an axiom from which to start working, so is effectively a leap of faith with no basis. It can't be questioned.
Whereas when historic Christianity states "And God did......" it is describing historic events which we can then investigate and seek to disprove or verify. Here belief in the Bible is always based in God's revelation, so there is at least some basis for the Christian claims - and the faith required is not a blind leap of faith, but a faith expressing trust in the source of those revelations.
Or course you could then throw the post-modernist view into the mix and say we can't know anything about history, science, etc.. it is all just made up stories to explain the world. So believing anything is true is a leap of faith - but that's another issue altogether....
no subject
I'm not sure of your assertion that secular humanism claims to describe the entirety of human experience. I don't claim to be a secular humanist (although it's possible I am one without knowing it, I suppose), so I've not researched the matter, however, if you can find such a claim in secular humanist literature I'd be interested in seeing it.
According to the Council for Secular Humanism, among the main aims of secular humanism are questioning and testing things, applying reason, and looking for ethical principles. The page does go on to mention naturalism, I'll agree, but also says that while they'd be sceptical about claims which seemed to be supernatural, they would not dismiss them out of hand. I bet they'd want to question and test such claims, in fact.
I'd suggest that what's axiomatic to a secular humanist view is that belief should be backed by evidence, and be proportional to the evidence.
Sagan's statement is certainly popular with the "why Christianity is right" websites. If you've been reading these people, you realise they're nutters, right? Anyway, it sounds like a definition of what he means by cosmos, not an assertion of materialism (another page I read claimed the statement was inserted into the Cosmos series because it sounded poetic, not as a great philosophical statement). What about it do you disagree with?
Your definition of historic Christianity (which sort is that a euphemism for, by the way? It sound like evangelicalism in practice) requires God's existence as an axiom, and also the idea that the Bible is God's revelation. Both of these are huge leaps of faith on very scant evidence.
If God does exist, he's pretty reticent about it, and so I conclude that either he doesn't exist or maybe doesn't want to be disturbed. He certainly doesn't look like the Christian God, anyway.
The Bible is an interesting book, but I really do hope that a book in which, to take one example, someone becomes a hero of the faith after sacrificing his daughter to God is not, in fact, God's revelation. (I've also addressed another, factual, problem with the idea that the Bible is inerrant, in this thread, though it's not clear you're claiming that).