Do people still believe in Hell?

I would imagine if someone ever had faith that to leave it or to no longer believe would involve much soul searching and it must feel right. Probably not the best choice of words there. I remember taking metaphysics and ethics at Uni and I preferred ethics. Took philosophy of science too, that went well, lol. However metaphysics was fascinating I just have never got passed knowing there is a presence that is with me. Sorry to make anyone feel uncomfortable or suggest I am preaching. It is only my personal truth. None of my family are religious. My mother is Atheist, liberal, all things not me. When I voted for a candidate she supported one year she almost cried. When my brother died last year she said she felt he had come back to her in a sense, just one day for just a moment. It was awkward for her and all I could think to tell her that would fit with her Atheism is that human beings have like a memory imprint. That when you die something might linger for a while even if it is born of deep emotional grief. I wanted to say it was his soul but it was not my place.

I don't see myself changing..

 

It's fine that you have faith, that's not a problem. Billions of people have some kind of faith. The problem is when you assume that because you have faith without needing evidence, that scientists work the same way, when it is the total opposite. Scientists form a hypothesis, they test, and they build evidence from that testing. If they find evidence, and review it with their peers, who will also study the data, along with the methodology used, then they may have it reviewed by their peers. It may become a theory, or it may end up being nothing, and the original hypothesis has to be scrapped. Religion is static and always true from the viewpoint of the believer, while science is falsifiable, which means hypotheses, theories, these things can be proven incorrect, or false.

It's the difference between "God created the earth in six days," and "the earth is roughly 3.7 billion years old." The first statement has no evidence whatsoever to support it. It is a statement of faith. The latter statement, about the age of the earth being billions of years old, can be supported through data, and a long history of methodology, trial and error, to reach the currently held conclusion. The thing is, in a hundred years, we may find the earth is even older, or the 3.7 billion number may still be accurate. The more tools that are made available due to research, the better refined the research.

This is why when someone says "science is a religion," or "scientists work on faith just like religious people do," it is so grossly misrepresentative of how science works, it immediately reflects poorly upon the person making the statement, because an even rudimentary grasp of science shows that statement to be false.

I didn't either, until I did. I'm not saying you will, only that should it come, it often happens like a bolt of lightning.

 

Really anyone who claims that science is based on faith or it's just as religious as religion can just be dismissed as not knowing what they're talking about.

People can be biased, that's human nature. But the scientific method is actually supposed to weed that out through repeat experiements and independent research.

 

Science is based on theory that is often proven wrong. Anyone who says otherwise can be dismissed as not knowing what they are talking about.

 

I struggle with that question every day, and do research nearly daily as part of the ongoing evaluation process. I can't speak for anyone else, but as much as my faith means to me, I still look at other points of view.

I agree that we humans lie to ourselves a lot as well.

 

"Science has been proven wrong before!"
You know what has ALWAYS proved it wrong? SCIENCE.
You know what found the correct answer? MORE FUCKING SCIENCE.

In a funny way, faith is almost LITERALLY "having no idea what you're talking about." That's why statements of faith tend to be full of phrases like "I don't know why" and "I just feel."

Now, it's okay not to know. It's okay to feel. Its when people confuse having faith with knowing that they screw up.

 

The oversimplification that "science ... is often proven wrong" creates the false impression that the utility of science is overrated.

A lot of scientific knowledge has a massive amount of empirical support. The instances where theories are being "proven wrong" define the cutting edge of science. Inside the cutting edge, theories enjoy repeated confirmation. We see this in our established technology, which basically functions as theorized. Each and every time you make a post on the Internet, a whole bunch of scientific theory gets confirmed, because the hardware has worked according to theory. That's literally billions and billions of confirmations of scientific theory per day, each and every day. The Internet is just one example. Driving your car is another. Taking a shower is a third.

When theories are "proven wrong," what generally happens is that a new wrinkle on the previously established understanding is discovered. That previous understanding is not itself completely invalidated, but rather its limits become better understood. It's not an all or nothing kind of right or wrong.

Bohr's correspondence principle and the Newtonian limit are two important examples in the physical sciences of how even revolutionary new theories did not completely prove the previous classical understanding wrong. On the contrary, respectively meeting those limits were important tests that the new theories in each case had to pass in order to be empirically successful themselves, given the empirical success of the old theories. Furthermore, there are many practical applications in which nothing useful is gained by working outside the classical limits, so the old theories remain not only broadly useful but also preferable in those cases, because they ignore complications that have no impact on the result.

In short, science is discovery. It does not know what is yet to be discovered. And, although what has been found may become overshadowed, it is not actually lost because of each new thing that is uncovered.

 

When i was a child, at a catholic primary school, were the whole catholic doctrine was ingrained into the whole school and the teaching proccess, yes, i believed totally 100% in it all, was not about until 12 that i started to break away from it all, probably because the secondary school i went to did not have the same degree of religious education as the primary school seemed to push, very little actually over my four years there, one thing i can now thank them for with hindsight.

 

It's also important to note that a LOT of incidents of "science being proven wrong" are nothing of the sort. Take one of the favorite examples of the Climate Change Denialists: The claim that in the 70's, "science said the Earth was cooling and we were headed for an ice age."

SCIENCE never said this. ONE paper, reported on in one or two popular magazines, said this, but the idea had little support in the scientific community, and only gained temporary popular attention due to a combination of a slight downward trend of temperatures from the 1940s to the early 1970s, and sensational journalism. It did not accurately reflect the full scope of the scientific climate literature, which showed a larger and faster-growing body of literature projecting future warming due to greenhouse gas emissions. (And this was before the effects of greenhouses gases like methane, nitrous oxide, and chlorofluorocarbons were even added to climate modeling.)

 

I don't science is every "proven wrong." I think that there are adjustments made based upon more information, which, honestly, is just logic.

I also feel no conflict between scientific methods and my personal faith.

 

Yep.

I've never found any reason in principle why personal faith should be in conflict with science. For those people who feel the need to believe something demonstrably counterfactual, I guess there's a problem, but I never had reason to do that in the first place, at least knowingly.

As I boy, I believed in Santa Claus, because I was taught to. I grew out of the literal belief. However, I don't feel like I've grown out of the spiritual belief, because the spirit of giving and the value of bringing joy to others are still things I believe in. As a piece of culture, I think Santa has value, even though he's not literally real. I don't believe that my parents were trying to mistreat me by teaching me to believe in Santa at a young age. I believe they were trying to instill respect for a positive role model, even if in somewhat of a vanilla way they ended up following the standard flowchart of American cultural transmission.

Nonscientific literal belief in the spiritual can certainly enhance peoples' lives. Not everyone feels the calling to be an atheist, shall we say. For example, I know that my mom did not, and I know that her faith brought her comfort. She was also highly educated and scientifically literate, and I know that she had confidence in the scientific method --- broadly, she "believed in science." And she believed in the Christian God. She had progressive social values, and I still respect her sense of right and wrong, even though I don't always live up to it. I can't ask her, because she's no longer with us, but I don't believe she would mind my sharing of that.

I don't know what the current accepted statistics are, but I'm pretty sure that a lot of practicing scientists believe in God. Is it most? I don't know, but even if it isn't, so what?

 

No, that's where you are getting it the wrong way round. Science is based on evidence which disproves hypotheses. Science and human understanding advance thanks to incorrect theories, not in spite of them.

A hypothesis is a model of how the world MIGHT work. Science is no more or less than a process to test that hypothesis. When people talk about "scientific theories" in strictest terms they are being disingenuous. Science is not the theories, science is the means by which the theories are formulated or discarded.

When you form a hypothesis, you come up with the simplest explanation for an observed phenomenon, an explanation which includes some manner of predictions about how the universe behaves under a given set of circumstances. You then try to find ways to disprove it (the "dis" is important, science proves nothing, nor does it truly try to). You propose testable scenarios in which the outcome will either be consistent with the predictions of that hypothesis or not. In the first instance all a scientist should conclude is that the hypothesis might be correct. In the second (s)he concludes it is false and moves on to another, typically more complex, hypothesis.

When said scientist has sequentially moved through increasingly complex hypotheses until one arrives which cannot currently be disproved, it is provisionally taken as the closest we can offer to "truth" as possible. It's a process of elimination.

At some point a hypothesis will hold up well enough to be tentatively termed a theory, which simply means that it is acknowledged as the status quo on our knowledge, the best we can currently offer, but is always going to be open to challenge should some new means of testing arrive, or some newly observed data not fit with it's predictions.

Science is never "false", nor is it ever "wrong" per se, it is simply open to adapting when new data presents. If a theory proves false, that is not an indictment of science itself, it is exactly the fuel science feeds on when moving forward

 

Scientific "facts" can be, and have been, proven false in the past. And as Doom Shephard so eloquently said, constant testing and refining of further scientific evidence have changed those previously "known facts."
For example, the observable evidence of the universe from the 18th to early 20th centuries "demonstrated" that there were lots and lots of stars and few (if any) galaxies outside our own.
With more and more powerful earth telescopes in the middle of the century, astronomical science started getting more and more complex. Astronomers had to formulate new 'theories' of our solar system, of our galaxy, of our universe at large because the new information kept expanding our depth of knowledge. And the technologies used to pioneer interstellar observations were turned back onto our own planet, revealing more and more precise and detailed information about earth.

 

Yeah, the realization that lots of "nebulae" were actually entirely different galaxies ("island universes"), very, very far away must have come as a huge shock - to the people capable of grasping it.

Meanwhile, we have people still "faithful" to the Geocentric model of the universe, and a "Flat Earth" that was disproven over 3000 years ago. SMH

 

Just watch Monty Python, you"ll feel a lot better!

 

Of course science gets it wrong. You guys can't be serious to think otherwise.

 

The (well, one) difference between science and faith is that science admits when it's wrong and changes in light of new or contradictory evidence.

 

Science is based on a formulation that premises came to the right conclusion, with the limited understanding it has. However at the time science thinks its premises and that conclusion are fact, when a good number of times it is still theory. I don't have a problem with the basics but I don't believe everything a scientist says because he is a scientist. They don't earn my faith based on that. Humans are fallible.