Show me how one multiplies fishes.
There are 2 differents questions when it comes to religion.
One is philosophical : "Does a moral god exist?"
The other is historical: "Who wrote the bible or the coran the torah and co, and do these prophets who claim they have seen or talked to the divine told the truth?"
These are 2 separated questions. Science obviously can't answer the first one, it's purely philosophical, but science can absolutely answer the second one.
Finally, a last question. Does following a religion means believing in "god" or believing in the vision of god from another man?
edit: I'm focusing on what I know, AKA Abrahamic religions, and I'm not talking about the morality of religious texts nor whatever wisdom they contain. So don't take my comment as a personal attack against your faith.
Not to detract from your argument, I think you're generally correct, but in this case: Two fish and 5 loafs of bread are enough to start a fish farm. Of course, I doubt this is what really happened, but this particular miracle is very easy to explain..
I was not making a statement about my own opinion. I'm sure you can pout forth powerful arguments against religion, so can I. I'm just saying that in my experience, they don't work against religious believers. Does your experience differ?
Like that time when Moses hacked the Matrix to open the sea?
Gender roles are to a very large extent made up of "arbitrary cultural baggage" but reasoning like that provokes almost an allergic reaction for people who after all base their identity and personality on them.
I imagine there are quite a lot of people who, if you insist on the argument that their male identity is an arbitrary construction, would literally hurt you rather than accept your argument... which probably says more about the specific nature of the male gender construct, but still.
Cultural constructs are extremely important and fundamental for people's identities, communities, narratives, etc. If you strip away enough cultural baggage, there is a reasonable fear that you would end up with no recogngizable human mind, no basis for any action or thought.
Christianity went through a phase of rational universalism, scholasticism etc, but now it doesn't seem to want to engage in the arena of global universal truth. Instead Christians are either "nationalistic", "pluralistically tolerant", or "individually mystical", I would say.
The concept of divinity is also extremely abstract, nuanced, slippery, and multifaceted; there are a lot of different theological theories, and they change over time.
My major point is that religions tend to have a privileged position as the root or ground of a whole cultural complex, and that makes them really hard to be rational about; you'd first have to convince someone that they ought to subject the very root of their identity and community to rational scrutiny, which does appear risky; that's why Camus said "to begin to think is to begin to be undermined."
Why not?
> There is no point in either party trying to shut down the other.
Agreed! There's definitely plenty of room for tolerance and appreciation of diverse perspectives.
I'd go the other way and say that religions that have little effect on believers' lives don't mean much. They are just more fluid tribal associations.
> ...religions do not generally change fundamentally, let alone fall, if their beliefs about the physical world are found to be unrealistic
I think they do. I think Christian Science (not actually a type of Christianity, by the way) has been limited in popularity because of the failure of its beliefs to work in reality (1). So there's probably a lot of survivor bias going on.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Science#Child_deaths...
Christian Science's biological beliefs may be an exception, but only an exception, and a small one at that. Roman Catholicism, for example, thrives despite its nominal (and once actual) cosmological beliefs being divorced from reality. Few, if any, lifestyle changes follow from abandoning a literal reading of the cosmological aspects of Genesis.
You're right that in and of themselves, the cosmology of Genesis don't amount to much. But there's a real concern that if parts of the Bible are not trustworthy, other parts may also be untrustworthy. And a Bible you can pick your favorite parts from is practically dangerous. This is how things like chattel slavery were justified by "Christians".
There are also theological implications to editing your own holy book. You end up editing the book down to the God you want (who, strangely, thinks like you and has the same friends and enemies) instead of the God who exists. Of course, you can make those objections to the various canonical versions of the Bible. That's an interesting digression with good answers, but a digression nonetheless.
The point is lifestyle change. I'm saying ignoring this part of the Bible may not affect much there, but ignoring certain parts of the Bible certainly does. And how do we resolve the "who watches the watchers" problem? I guess you could say "only cosmological stuff doesn't matter too much" and be pretty much in line with a lot of Christians.
On the contrary, you end up agreeing with me, but you are attempting to draw a line at cosmology, so lets talk about biology, an area where religion actually is trying to suppress science.
A lot of the conflict there comes down to misunderstanding (on all sides) which issues are scientific and which issues are metaphysical and theological. Can you describe where you see the conflict between biology and theism?
That's an impossible goal to set because you are pretty much asking for "a purpose" which is an utterly human concept completely alien to the universe and its mechanics. It's a philosophical question that can never be really answered by hard science.
We can ask how something happens on a mechanical level, but there is no bigger purpose, there is no "grand plan" behind all of it (which would assume a planer exists with a goal in mind) stuff just exists without any ultimate designs.
In my experience, it's that whole notion a lot of religious people struggle with, they can't let go of the idea that there always has to be a "why" a "bigger purpose" to their suffering or happiness, when in all actuality it's more often than not these emotions are the result of individual circumstances and/or pure chance.
Ultimately, all that science can tell us on this matter is that it is possible that God does not exist, and it is also possible that God does exist. The matter is outside the scope of science, but atheism (as opposed to agnosticism) is just as (if not more) arbitrary a belief as any mainstream religion.
On the contrary, while all claim to believe in the God of Abraham, the characteristics of each God are different enough to describe different gods.
For example, Jews and Muslims do not believe Jesus is God and existed before the world was created. Both consider the Christian Trinity to be heretical.
Except for each describes salvation differently and each describes its method to salvation to be mutually exclusive from the others. Those aren't details. Not about the religion itself and not about the character of God.
I could believe in "medicine" which is filling a pool with water, adding a milligram of penicillin, then drinking a gulp from the pool. You could believe in medicine that is taking penicillin in doses as prescribed by a qualified physician. We both self-identify as believing in "medicine".
What counts as an "important" detail?
Christianity entirely builds upon Judaism, and Judaism doesn't provide a path to salvation that Christianity doesn't (not the opposite though). Islam is more distantly related, but they still believe in the same God.
It's more like I believe the US is free, democratic, and on the whole a good place to live, while someone in North Korea believes the US is a hellhole. (I live in Europe and haven't spent any significant time in the US, so my perspective isn't inherently superior to the North Korean's.) We have very different conceptions of the US, but we're still talking about the same US.
I'm having a hard time parsing your answer to this question. You seem to agree that salvation matters but think they all have compatible salvation messages?
You reiterate that it's all the same God but ignore my point about Christ and the Christian Trinity. Is that an unimportant detail? Why?
Why are these three religions special? Rastafarians and Mormons claim Abraham as well. Zoroastrians and Sikhs also believe in one god.
One could believe in a form of Hinduism or Bahá'í, thinking that various gods could count in some way, but that's clearly different than Judaism, say.
> Why are these three religions special? I didn't claim they were a complete set (they're not, you have to include Mormonism and other non-trinitarian religions that believe in Christ, then to a lesser extent you have Baha'i (which it turns out is literally answering this question) and the Yazidi faith, and probably more). Once you get to monotheistic religions that aren't descended from Abraham, it's a more philosophical question. If there were a tribe in South America that believed in a god that revealed himself to Atik and chose the Inca as his chosen people, on the other hand, would obviously be believing in a different god. Polytheistic or pantheistic (nature is God) faiths are quite clearly not believing in the same god.
You've listed your thoughts in a lot of cases. Can you boil that down to some guidelines for how to decide? I'm not sure I'm picking up a clear way to distinguish.
If they say it's the same God, it's enough? If I praise Bill Gates for:
* founding Microsoft
* his ability to bench press 500 pounds
* his waist-length, beautiful hair
* his ability to fly
* his willingness to pay anybody 500 euros for a hug
...am I still talking about Bill Gates? Or am I talking about something else and just reusing Bill Gates' name?
One way is to say no religion is any more or less convincing than any other, therefore any of them could be true. Also man of them share common features, so maybe they do encapsulate some underlying truth. That leads to Agnosticism.
Alternatively we could demand a higher standard and require proof. None of the religions is able to prove any of their theological beliefs or tenets. Therefore we reject every single one of them. That leaves you with Atheism, because all religions and theological positions are discarded as having no reliable explanatory power, leaving you with no theology at all.
Arguably the atheist position is just more rigorous and demanding, but I don't see how you can claim it is more arbitrary.
Of course some religions are more convincing than others. The Graeco-Roman pantheon for instance, is trivially disprovable. The Abrahamic religions as a whole are more credible than the others.
> Alternatively we could demand a higher standard and require proof. None of the religions is able to prove any of their theological beliefs or tenets. Therefore we reject every single one of them. That leaves you with Atheism
You're still stuck at agnosticism, I'm afraid. Atheism is the positive belief that no god exists. If you require proof (or strong evidence, I suppose, since things can only be proven in mathematics) of your religious beliefs then this belief too needs proof.
I suppose you could argue that the probability that the nature of God is precisely as described in your chosen sacred text is zero, but that presupposes that the text is simply uniformly sampled from the set of all possible natures of God, which isn't really a valid assumption.
Well if it wasn't for Science, we wouldn't even know a universe exists.
However what that series never seems to really tackle head on, and which I would have expected to be a much more powerful argument, is that although religious philosophers and theologians can always come up with some justification for believing in a universal creator, they never seem to come up with any argument as to what that creator is like. If the universe was created by god, what is that god like and why should I be a Christian rather than a Muslim, or Hindu, or Budhist? If Christian, why a Catholic, say, rather than a Methodist, or Calvinist, etc.
Science, or at least rational philosophy, can strip away much of the cultural detritus of religion. Ultimately though until it can answer why the universe exists, not just how, it can't land a fatal blow.
So to me the argument of science versus religion is kind of secondary. The real question is can't religious people see that they're just projecting arbitrary cultural baggage they happen to have been born into, that keeps changing generation by generation anyway, on a philosophical emperor that inherently has no clothes?