Science and Religion

[Damorith]

My view is as; Religion has been around to explain what we dont understand, an example being the greeks thought a huge chariot carried the sun across the horizon until figured otherwise. While science is farther behind then the questions religion currently answers (this is where the question comes in) where do you think the two will compromise. Is science the opposite of religion or is there a point where they both meet. I got the ideas from a book im sure many of you have read, or maybe not. But I was still curious to what you guys think. Can Science eventually prove god exists? Or are we not meant to know?

[Bandit]

Originally Posted by Damorith

My view is as; Religion has been around to explain what we dont understand, an example being the greeks thought a huge chariot carried the sun across the horizon until figured otherwise. While science is farther behind then the questions religion currently answers (this is where the question comes in) where do you think the two will compromise. Is science the opposite of religion or is there a point where they both meet. I got the ideas from a book im sure many of you have read, or maybe not. But I was still curious to what you guys think. Can Science eventually prove god exists? Or are we not meant to know?

i know God exists because i have seen him work in my life and others. He touches me in so many ways I cannot express His fulness and greatness.
i think some people are expecting one of those greek chariots to fall out of the sky for proof. God is a spirit.
we cant look for physical proof of a spirit(s) except through manifestations. So I dont think science will ever prove or disprove it and neither will religion.



i have a friend who is so wrapped up in technooology that he thinks it will one day be able to seperate the spirit of a man from its body .
there really is no compromise for me and i dont see it as opposites. science and religion both make big mistakes and sometimes theories that is all they are.

Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear. But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.
but hey..to each his own in theory.

and welcome to the boards Damorith

[Awaiting_the_fifth]

As a buddhist I dont believe that anything around me is actually real, form is emptiness and emptiness is form. (Im sure you've heard the sound bites before) Think what morpheus said in The Matrix.

"What is real? If you are talking about what you can see, what you can feel and smell then real is just electrical impulses interpreted by your brain."

The whole universe that we measure through science is actually just a physicality projected by ourselves onto an ultimately formless spiritual plane. We only interact with it in our minds. Because of this (and this is extrapolation on my part, no spiritual teacher has told me this) science could measure the entire universe, from the smallest particle to the hugest galaxies, from the big bang to the death of the final star, but unless spirituality is in your mind, you will never find it in a text book.

Thats the way I see it anyway.

[Ciel]

Perception of the world around us changes through our state of consciousness. A meditator enters a doorway where time is transcended, there is no universal motion pulling and swaying, mind is stilled in peace. and balance.
I wonder how many scientists are also meditators.

[I, Brian]

Religion: Why God did it
Science: How God did it.




Of course, science cannot quantify God, so God cannot be addressed by science - but if we consider the universe, religion has (IMO) always tried to address the "why" while science as the "how".

Whether it is the "why" and "how" of God is entirely up to a person's theological perspective, obviously.

[LNM]

From the Islamic perspective (not arabism most believe to be Islam), `Ali, the cousin of Muhammad, who was the son of Muhammad's foster parents and who Muhammad raised basically from infancy - this same `Ali about whom all Muslims accept that Muhammad said "You are my brother in this world and the next" said that Islam can ONLY be understood through Reason (`Aql) and Scientific Knowledge (`Ilm). Likewise he (Imam `Ali) also said that if one wished to, they could think of God as a "Thing" since that would prevent them of anthropomorphizing God and attributing qualities of the creation to the Creator.

Here is the historical narration:

A man asked the Imam- ‘Can I think of Him (the creator) as a thing?’"

The Imam replied, "Yes, but not as something well understood and clearly defined with in limits. What may become a subject of your thoughts is different from Him. Nothing resembles Him and the thoughts and imaginations can not reach Him. He is different from what can become the subject of thoughts and is different from whatever that can be perceived in ones thoughts. You can think of Him as some thing but not well understood and clearly defined (under certain limits)."

So we see the problem is not with science, rather with mankinds understanding of God. God is not a man, an angel or any anthropomorphic creature. God is the force of energy that gives life to this planet and all that exists.

If anyone would like more knowledge on the matter here's my address: yashuah12@yahoo.com

Shalom, Salaam, Peace...

[Bandit]

Originally Posted by I, Brian

Religion: Why God did it
Science: How God did it.




Of course, science cannot quantify God, so God cannot be addressed by science - but if we consider the universe, religion has (IMO) always tried to address the "why" while science as the "how".

Whether it is the "why" and "how" of God is entirely up to a person's theological perspective, obviously.

very nice Brian.
so who gets the what & when & how much?

[brucegdc]

Originally Posted by Bandit

very nice Brian.
so who gets the what & when & how much?

Well the first two are sciences... the third...well...

What: Taxonomy
When: Archaeology
How Much: Accountants

[Visitor]

Originally Posted by Damorith

My view is as; Religion has been around to explain what we dont understand, an example being the greeks thought a huge chariot carried the sun across the horizon until figured otherwise. While science is farther behind then the questions religion currently answers (this is where the question comes in) where do you think the two will compromise. Is science the opposite of religion or is there a point where they both meet. I got the ideas from a book im sure many of you have read, or maybe not. But I was still curious to what you guys think. Can Science eventually prove god exists? Or are we not meant to know?

To think of religion as a way of explaining something that we cannot yet understand is basically reducing it to the level of a stop gap to fill in the pieces until 'Science' rescues us, which is a typically modernist perspective as far as science being the ultimate solution for all our problems goes. I do think though that science has an important, indeed integral, part to play in the relationship between faith and contemporary society. I believe that science is a method for better understanding the world and the universe in which God has placed us. Science has enabled us to alleviate suffering in terms of disease and in many cases can provide the solution for environmental and medical problems that wreak havoc with humanity. But ultimately, science is merely an outworking of the intelligence that God has gifted us with, therefore it is a tool for our lives, not a replacement for religion or for God. In response to your penultimate sentence regarding science's ability to prove God's existence: I tend to subscribe to the idea that if we can prove God exists then He ceases to be God.

[ryan_miller80]

science and religion do not disagree, science is simply too young to understand.

[truthseeker]

Why is there rivalry between religion and science anyhow? Because science would try to prove there is a God? Because religion thinks that man just shouldn't seek to understand the wisdom of God?

It's like the father and the son - the son will always try to catch up to the wisdom of the father. I'm not talking about academic matters, I'm talking about spiritual matters. By the time the son catches up to the father in understanding, the father will still have bypassed the son by years of knowledge. My point is, for those who believe in God, humankind will forever be playing 'catch up' to the wisdom of God. We are just now uncovering how the world was created and the minerals that the universe, the world, and man consists of. Didn't God do all this stuff like millions of years ago? And we are just now figuring it out? Both sides have a point.

[human1111]

Originally Posted by Damorith

Can Science eventually prove god exists? Or are we not meant to know?

Doubtfully...

good article that I've found at:
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:V1_DevGPY7cJ:www.bswa.org/publications/topdf.php%3Fhtml%3DBuddhism_The_Only_Real_Science. html+buddhism+is+the+only+science&hl=en
I used to be a scientist. I did Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University, hanging out in the same building as the later-to-be-famous Professor Stephen Hawking. I became disillusioned with such science when, as an insider, I saw how dogmatic some scientists could be. A dogma, according to the dictionary, is an arrogant declaration of an opinion. This was a fitting description of the science that I saw in the labs of Cambridge. Science had lost its sense of humility. Egotistical opinion prevailed over the impartial search for Truth. My favourite aphorism from that time was: "The eminence of a great scientist, is measured by the length of timethat they OBSTRUCT PROGRESS in their field"!
To understand real science, one can go back to one of its founding fathers, the English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561 - 1628). He established the framework on which science was to progress, namely "the greater force of the negative instance". This meant that, having proposed a theory to explain some natural phenomenon, then one should try one's best to disprove it! One should test the theory with challenging experiments. One must put it on trial with rigorous argument. When a flaw appears in the theory, only then does science advance. A new discovery has been made enabling the theory to be adjusted and refined. This fundamental and original methodology of science understood that it is impossible to prove anything with absolute certainty. One can only disprove with absolute certainty. For example, how can one prove the basic law of gravity that "what goes up comes down, eventually"? One may throw objects up one million times and see them fall one million times. But that still does not prove "what goes up comes down". For NASA might then 'throw' a Saturn rocket up into space to explore Mars, and that never comes down to earth again. One negative instance is enough to disprove the theory with absolute certainty.

Some misguided scientists maintain the theory that there is no rebirth, that this stream of consciousness is incapable of returning to a successive human existence. All one needs to disprove this theory, according to science, is to find one instance of rebirth, just one! Professor Ian Stevenson, as some of you would know, has already demonstrated many instances of rebirth. The theory of no rebirth has been disproved. Rebirth is now a scientific fact!
Modern science gives a low priority to any efforts to disprove its pet theories. There is too much vested interest in power, prestige and research grants. A courageous commitment to truth takes too many scientists out of their comfort zone. Scientists are, for the most part, brainwashed by their education and their in-group conferences to see the world in a very narrow, microscopic, way. The very worst scientists are those who behave like eccentric evangelists, claiming that they alone have the whole truth, and then demanding the right to impose their views on everyone else.
Ordinary people know so little about science that they can hardly even understand the jargon. Yet, if they read in a newspaper or magazine "a scientist says that?", then they automatically take it to be true. Compare this to our reaction when we read in the same journal "a politician says that?"! Why do scientists have such unchallenged credibility? Perhaps it is because the language and ritual of science has become so far removed from the common people, that scientists have become today's revered and mystical priesthood. Dressed in their ceremonial white lab coats, chanting incomprehensible mumbo jumbo about multi-dimensional fractal parallel universes, and performing magical rituals that transubstantiate metal and plastic into TV's and computers, these modern day alchemists are so awesome we'll believe anything they say. Elitist science, as once was the Pope, is now infallible.

Some know better. Much of what I learnt 30 years ago has now been proved wrong. There are, fortunately, many scientists with integrity and humility who affirm that science is, at best, a work still in progress. They know that science can only suggest a truth, but can never claim a truth. I was once told by a Buddhist G.P. that, on his first day at a medical school in Sydney, the famous Professor, head of the Medical School, began his welcoming address by stating "Half of what we are going to teach you in the next few years is wrong. Our problem is that we do not know which half it is!" Those were the words of a real scientist.

Some evangelical scientists would do well to reflect on the (amended) old saying "Scientists rush in where angels fear to tread" and stop pontificating about the nature of the mind, happiness and even Nirvana. Neurologists are especially prone to such neuroses (Neurosis: an undue adherence to unrealistic ideas of things). They are claiming that the mind, awareness and will, is now adequately explained by activity in the brain. This theory was disproved over 20 years ago by Prof. Lorber's discovery of the student at Sheffield University with and IQ of 126, a First Class degree in mathematics, but with virtually no brain (Science, Vol. 210, 12 Dec 1980)! More recently, it was disproved by Prof. Pim Van Lommel, who demonstrated the existence of consciousness activity after clinical death, i.e. when all brain activity has ceased (Lancet, Vol. 358, 15 December 2001, p 2039).

Although there may be correlation between a measurable activity in part of the brain and a mental impression, such co-occurrence doesn't always imply that one is the cause of the other. For instance, some years ago, research showed a clear correlation between cigarette smoking and the non-occurrence of Alzheimer's disease. It was not that smoking cigarettes somehow caused immunity from Alzheimer's, as much as the tobacco companies might have wished, it was only that many smokers did not live long enough to get Alzheimer's disease! Thus a co-incidence of two phenomena, even when repeated, does not mean that one phenomenon is the cause of the other. To claim that activity in the brain causes awareness, or mind, is plainly unscientific.

Science claims to rely not only on clear and objective observation, but also on measurement. But what is measurement in science? To measure something, according to the pure science of Quantum Theory, is to collapse the Schroedinger Wave Equation through an act of observation. Moreover, the "un-collapsed" form of the Schroedinger Wave Equation, that is before any measurement is made, is, perhaps, science's most perfect description of the world. That description is weird! Reality, according to pure science, does not consist of well ordered matter with precise massed, energies and positions in space, all just waiting to be measured. Reality is the broadest of smudges of all possibilities, only some being more probable than others. Even basic 'measurable' qualities as 'alive' or 'dead' have been demonstrated by science to be invalid sometimes. In the notorious 'Schroedinger's Cat' thought experiment, Prof. Schroedinger's cat was ingeniously placed in a real situation where it was neither dead nor alive, where such measurements became meaningless. Reality, according to Quantum Theory, is beyond measurements. Measuring disturbs reality, it never describes it perfectly. It was Heisenberg's famous 'Uncertainty Principle' that showed the inevitable error between the real Quantum world and the measured world of pseudo-science.
Anyway, how can anyone measure the measurer, the mind? At a recent seminar on Science and Religion, at which I was a speaker, a Catholic in the audience bravely announced that whenever she looks through a telescope at the stars, she feels uncomfortable because her religion is threatened. I commented that whenever a scientist looks the other way round through a telescope, to observe the one who is watching, then they feel uncomfortable because their science is threatened by what is doing the seeing! So what is doing the seeing, what is this mind that eludes modern science?
A Grade-One teacher once asked her class "What is the biggest thing in the world?" One little girl answered "My daddy". A little boy said "An elephant", since he'd recently been to the zoo. Another girl suggested "A mountain". The six-year-old daughter of a close friend of mine replied, "My eye is the biggest thing in the world"! The class stopped. Even the teacher didn't understand her answer. So the little philosopher explained "Well, my eye can see her daddy, an elephant, and a mountain too. It can also see so much else. If all of that can fit into my eye, then my eye must be the biggest thing in the world"! Brilliant.
However, she was not quite right. The mind can see everything that one's eye can see, and it can also imagine so much more. It can also hear, smell, taste and touch, as well as think. In fact, everything that can be known can fit into the mind. Therefore, the mind must be the biggest thing in the world. Science's mistake is obvious now. The mind is not in the brain, nor in the body. The brain, the body and the rest of the world, are in the mind!
Ajahn Brahmavamso
8th February 2004

[Hels]

Science shows us the world is rational. Physics has produced some astounding mathematical formulas about the nature of the universe (theory of relativity etc.) But these mathematical formulas already existed before scientists, such as Einstein, came along to see them. Einstein didn't invent the theory of relativity, he didn't apply it to our reality - the mathematical relationship existed before he came along - he just saw it.

So what does that prove? To me, it proves that the world is rational and chance cannot produce mathematical formulas, chance cannot be rational. Only a rational mind can be rational.

As was said, science is our way of understanding the 'how.' But, if you ask me, all science can ever prove is that the world is rational and therefore 'designed.' But all that may suggest/prove is the existence of an architect, not a God. I suppose the rest is up to us.

[dauer]

I think religion is willing to fill in the blanks where science hasn't yet based both on pragmatic outcomes and our own most deep seated yearnings.

When science comes a little closer to understanding the nature of the cosmos the mythos gets a facelift. That's why we don't believe the earth is flat, or that it was created in a literal seven days, or that it's surrounded by a dome on which sits the throne of God. But we can't blame our ancestors for these ideas. This was the science of the time and so they integrated it into their system of self-Other understanding. Medieval theology integrated the current philosophy into its understanding of God.

Dauer

[Postmaster]

an example being the greeks thought a huge chariot carried the sun across the horizon until figured otherwise.

Damorith did you go back in time and speak with the Greeks to understand how they all felt about that? There was a point when people used to tell me the moon is made out of Cheese, but up until the age of 10 I realised that it was made out something different. Not even science has all the questions, sometimes even science's most fundamental understandings of things can turn out to be totally wrong and up until present this happens all the time. Even science is a philosophy The only difference is it needs material proof to varify it as solid undisputed fact. But what science doesn't tell you is, the mind has the ability to go beyond that