There are no limits on science.
How will you react if the Klingon War Arc isn't wrapped up?
- Thread starter Mark 2000
- Start date
There are no limits on science.
In everything that I've ever read or seen by Bakker on Dinosaurs he has never dimissed the impact of an organisms environment on it's evolution in favour of 'god guides it'. In fact he believed that environmental pressures were the key driver in dinosaur evolution. For example, Bakker pushed the theory that Dinosaurs had an impact on the evolution of flowering plants and vice versa. Bakker also put to bed the belief that Sauropod and Hadrosaur dinosaurs lived in swamps and ate aquatic plants. It was clear from studying their teeth and skeletons that both Dinosaur groups had evolved to eat tough vegetation and therefore lived in relatively dry environments. He also posited the theory that the reason the Jurassic Morrison Formation was so predator heavy was due to each having their own ecological niche preventing competition. He compared the fossils of Ceratosaurus and Allosaurus and saw that Ceratosaurus had specialised adaptations for an aquatic environment and Allosaurus showed specialised adaptations to living in an open plains environment. He then compared them to earlier more primitive Jurassic theropods that were less specialised and had qualities that indicated that were generalists. Bakker was able to show that predatory dinosaurs had evolved to exploit different environments over time and didn't come about ex nihilo. Doesn't sound like he's ignoring the heart of evolution to me.
Finally, here is a quote from the man himself regarding his religious beliefs "Even though I don’t believe them literally anymore, the first five books of the Old Testament still have a lot of meaning for me. My mother is still a creationist, but she has accepted that I can be an evolutionist and still have a spiritual side"
I'm sorry but statements like this do lead to questions about how informed you really are. Of course there are limits on science, both in principle and practise. This is only one of them. Understanding those limits is crucial to understanding what science can and cannot do and what it's role in society is.
Then he's not a evolutionary creationist. He's a vaguefaither who has dumped large swathes of the bible to reconcile his scientific work. That's still not coexistence. I'll never understand people who are picky and choosy about their religious texts. The old testament is not an allegory. No book that spends a dozen pages on the exact way to divide up a cow if it falls in a hole in your neighbor's yard (Exodus) is anything but unambiguously specific about what it wants you to get out of it. Either you live like a iron age shepherd or you don't.
Tell me I'm ignorant. Make a vague, broad, verbose statement. Have no supporting examples. Rinse. Repeat.
You sure you're an atheist, dude? Because the only people I've ever heard talk about the inherent limits of science are intelligent design folks. Their methods are usually also vague and filled with lots of jargon that enables doubt in the scientific process. "We can never fully understand the eye" I heard one say who was pushing a new book on the subject.
The eye was a seen as a difficult problem in certain quarters because the question was always "how does one go from a state of having no eye to having a fully functional one?". This might seem a trivial point but it was seen as a sticking point because obviously natural selection cannot simply create a fully functioning organ in it's modern form without intermediate stages and the argument was that intermediate stages for the eye simply wouldn't work, it requires all the pieces in place to function and a process of gradual selection based incremental improvements wouldn't explain how the basic structures all came to be in the first place in order to be improved upon.
It's the blind watch maker argument, chance cannot create a complex mechanism from scratch, therefore there must be intelligent design. It has to exist in it's fully realised form to carry a selective advantage, or so the argument went, and thus is hard to explain in terms of incremental improvements, therefore it must have been designed.
Of course this is total nonsense, selective light sensitive cells can carry an advantage even for deep ocean dwelling organisms and once you have those everything else is a series of refinements. We go from being able to distinguish a day/night pattern to identifying when a predator is looming overhead and casting a shadow to being able to monitor the direction that predator is moving and thus how best to avoid it and so on and so forth, but what you have heard will doubtless have been some variation on the theme.
He's not a 'vaguefeather' ,Bakker has just made room for both religion and science in his life. Why is that such an issue for you? Another poster, @XCV330 said that his religion teaches him that when scientific truth outweighs religious belief you go with the scientific truth or something to that effect. Bakker and others like him basically do the same thing. I think it's ironic that you're being dogmatic about a religious text that you don't believe in and believe to be dogmatic in order to prove your point.
That's called "The God of Gaps" and it's a pointless exercise. Science will continually grow to fill the gaps. "Either God is in the whole of Nature, with no gaps, or He's not there at all."
I don't have an issue with people believing whatever they want as long it doesn't interfere with my life. I am not dogmatic. I do not proselytize. But the subject at hand is: is science compatible with faith or are they polar opposites. I don't care if some people can smash these two concepts together. Science is reason, faith is not. They are two separate concepts and you can only reconcile them by tossing bits of one or the other out. You have not provided one single example otherwise, only more examples of people having to compromise one or the other or both.
Not once have i claimed that Science and Religion can be successfully integrated without making compromises so stop insinuating that is what I am doing. I've repeatedly argued that Science and Faith can coexist in the sense that people use their critical thinking skills and decide for themselves what they choose to take from the bible and then integrate that into their lives as they see fit. For example, people can think that Genesis isn't literal but can believe that Jesus was a real man who hung out with prostitutes and societies rejects and spoke out against the political authorities of his time. Christian Scholars argued in favour of reason and critical thinking for centuries. Not all christians follow the bible to the letter and to believe otherwise is terribly ignorant. Why is it any issue of yours if people decide to 'pick and choose' what they want to take out of a religious text?
Intelligence is.
This statement is false.
Then what are we talking about? Frankly, it changes by the minute. Example:
Dude, what are you on about? This is a different argument altogether. Deciding there was a historical Jesus who had good points about life is way different than having faith that he died and was resurrected for your sins. How can you not tell the difference? Ethical philosophy isn't the same as religion.
Co-existing and awareness are key. In our own history the greatest scholars, theists and scientists have harnessed education (and have needed sponsorship, 'favour' and resources to do so). Philosophy fathered most branches of what are now separate subjects - including science and ethics. The wealth of those representing religion and privilege afforded much of the elite to have the luxury of developing the Arts as well as scientific research. Bacon, Galileo, Newton, Pasteur, in a list as long as TWO arms (lol) are those with both a religious belief and achievement in the sciences.
One doesn't have to dance on the grave of the other. It's compartmentalising to suggest that religion is not something both of faith and learning. That science doesn't require a little faith in hypothesis.
If Discovery can be realistic in examining the human or alien condition whereby spirituality, metaphysics and physics play a part in life, then it might make for self-reflection. Though for me, I'm still in it (Star Trek) for the adventure, the gadgets, and strange new worlds...
Isn't that part of the discovery process? The idea that by using science you can use it to learn more about the whole of creation, if that is part of religious belief?
This isn't cut and dry and black and white. It is quite messy when it gets in to real life. Which is why we still have to study Plato, and Aristotle, Socrates and Thomas Aquinas and the like.
I've consistently argued from the start that for some individuals, Science and Faith are not binary and they are able to resolve the two for themselves, in their own way, regardless of what you or I may think. Why you seem unable to understand this isn't my issue. But I'd appreciate you not trying to gaslight by insinuating that I don't what I'm talking about or that i'm being inconsistent.
How is it a different argument? I'm using as a way to illustrate that people can and do choose what they want to take away from the bible. A quarter of Christians don't believe that Jesus was actually resurrected according to a UK study. They believe that Jesus was a real person but that the resurrection was a metaphor, but they still consider themselves christian and follow his teachings. Why is this? Because they employ, critical thinking and reason and resolve their religious beliefs with modern philosophical and scientific thought. Any decent priest or theological scholar will say that as society evolves, religion should evolve with it. I'm arguing that this evolution can occur on an individual level as well. Hence why people can make peace with their religious beliefs and scientific truth. Why insist that religious belief is some static, immovable system that cannot coexist with science when even religious scholars and religious people within this very thread insist that it can?
Gaslighting you? Really?
This is a discussion about faith. Ethics are not faith based. It's not the same thing, period.
Then there's no faith involved here either. So, is that all you've got?
The Gaslighting bit was not the right thing to say, I apologise unreservedly.
Nope. People can have faith in some things and not others, particularly where the bible is concerned.
There is Faith involved. As i explained people still had faith in the teachings of christ/bible.
Well, of course holding (or expressing) a religious belief can serve all sorts of purposes on a personal level. It can be about social networking. It can be about service to the community. It can be about moral precepts. It can be about political positioning. It can be about family tradition. It can be a psychological coping mechanism to deal with grief or trauma. It can be lots of things for lots of reasons with lots of different kinds of values (and it is in fact perfectly valid for us to theorize and speculate about such reasons and values). But none of those things are relevant to the core, inescapable question of whether the belief is true.
I suspect Mark2000 is familiar with the history of the argument. I know I am. The thing is, that argument — that there are some things we observe in nature that science simply can't explain — is and always was wrong. "Total nonsense," as you put it. In the case of the eye, natural selection has actually solved this "problem" more than once completely independently! But it's wrong in every other case, too. There are things science hasn't explained yet, of course... but to frame those things as "limits" of science is like waving a red flag saying you're looking for a logical gap into which to insert divine intervention.
As Richard Dawkins once put it, "it is completely unrealistic to claim, as Gould and many others do, that religion keeps itself away from science's turf, restricting itself to morals and values. A universe with a supernatural presence would be a fundamentally and qualitatively different kind of universe from one without. The difference is, inescapably, a scientific difference. Religions make existence claims, and this means scientific claims."
So, in other words, he hasn't actually squared this circle in the way you posited earlier... instead, he claims to be religious while explicitly not taking his religion's claims literally. Based on this quote, one might speculate that his main reason for holding such beliefs in the first place was that he was brought up with them, and once he was grown wanted to keep peace within the family.
Seriously, "a lot of meaning for me" is an impossibly broad and ambiguous statement. I've read countless books that have a lot of meaning for me, but I don't think any of them should be the basis of a global belief system, much less one that gets special tax exemptions and constitutional protections.
In other words, even in the fairly secular UK, 75% of Christians take the supernatural aspects of Christianity seriously. In the markedly more devout U.S., I'm sure the percentage is even higher.
What's more... some priests and theologians will say that "religion should evolve," that people can and should "choose what they want to take away from it." A few. Far more will say the exact opposite, and many will argue it very strenuously. Indeed, one of the big selling points for religion, for a lot of people, is that it is constant and unchanging. They will argue — and most of religious history is on their side, although the modern world is not — that those who cherry pick their beliefs and merely "consider themselves Christian" are not actually believers.
In past centuries, in fact, countless people were brutally killed for doing that sort of thing. The only reason that's no longer the case today is that we had a scientific revolution and subsequently an Enlightenment in secular philosophy. Religious authorities steadfastly opposed those things at the time, of course. The fact that religion's role in modern life is considerably less threatening (most of the time, in most places) is no reason to think it has been tamed and domesticated. It has merely been caged. It is, fundamentally, an irrational creature.
Well yes, obviously Liberal theologians would argue that religion should evolve and obviously there are plenty who would disagree. I'm just saying that we cannot and should not insinuate that people who incorporate science into their religious belief and make their own synthesis between the two are of questionable faith and in need of choosing one or the other. I don't see why it has to be an either or situation and that is what I am arguing against and I do this a gay man, who is completely non-religious.
I'm fully aware of the scientific and philosophical enlightenment and it's role in elevating society. As a gay man, i'm fully aware of how irrational religion and religious people can be. I'm not denying that at all. But not all religious people are irrational and it's not irrational for religious people to want to retain their religious beliefs whilst also accepting scientific truth, people have been doing that for centuries as well.
At the end of the day I don't really have a dog in this fight. Maybe one of the posters in this thread who is religious and believes that Science and Faith can coexist can do a better job of explaining this point of view.
The situation between the Federation and Klingon has turn into North Korea and South Korea situation after this season finale. They don't have any peace treaty, but also not in a hot war.
And neither is anything else we can offer logically, that is the whole point, we can never truly know. That's what faith means and is also why my atheism is as much about faith as any other stance. That we can never know means we can only believe, or not.
But there are logical gaps, whether we like it or not. Idealising science is a mistake just as much as rejecting it. Causality is part of a framework that we call the universe, entropy is part of that framework, logic is part of that framework. As long as that universe has limits then so do they. Whether there is something beyond or outside that universe (aka "god") is and will remain an unknown, precisely because we cannot apply our analytic tools outside of the realm they themselves are a part of. Therefore any statements outside of that realm are based on that which we call faith.
