How will you react if the Klingon War Arc isn't wrapped up?

[eltel99uk]

That was Battlestar Galactica. People lost their shit at the end when it turned out God was real and affecting events.

I swore I wouldn't get into this debate but your comment enticed me. I don't have a problem with a show that did science and faith per se. What seemed annoying (to me and others anyway) was that BSG gave the appearance of doing a bait-and-switch: a lot of us thought we were getting harder sci-fi with the "unexplained" events to be explained later scientifically. Now this might just be because we didn't pick up (enough) on stuff Ron Moore said...in which case it's our fault - he gave us what he said he would - and I'd welcome a reference to him saying the show would have faith/God in there as an equally big element all through. (Well I'd not welcome it, but at least I'd know he gave us what he promised.)

To those who could counter that any such statement at the outset would have spoilt things, I'm not so sure. You look on reddit and various boards and people avoided The Leftovers on TV not because the showrunners told people explicitly that there'd be no definitive scientific nor religious explanation but because those showrunners were the people responsible for Lost and they swore they'd never touch any more shows by those people. (It was a brilliant show BTW and lots of media outlets list it as one of those amazing shows that far too few people watched.)

Spoiler: Spoiler(ish) for the Leftovers finale

As it was, its ending was critically acclaimed and did exactly what it said on the tin - it refused to make clear as to whether "the scientific explanation" was correct, it was, as the showrunners said from the outset, all about the journey people took in the face of immense loss.

 

[Spider]

God, Jesus, other gods, vampires, werewolves, whatever, all make for good stories. But they aren't real, they're entertainment at best, man's stupidity on display at worst if people think they're real.

 

[DaddlerTheDalek]

How will you react if the Klingon War Arc isn't wrapped up?

How I would react? "Let's see what happens next."

 

[Mark 2000]

Then you are showing a lack of grounding in the scientific technique

As I ended our last conversation so I end this one: If you say so.

 

[rahullak]

Loathe as I am to wade, I feel like a bit of fun.

Forgive me, dear mods.

And religion which is used as a justification.

War represents the worst of human nature deployed en masse and the time we most often misuse all the tools at our disposal, including science and religion

Some wars take the worst of both worlds: the tools brought about by science, and the fervor brought about by religion.

Some jobs take the best of both.

And what I’m saying is that you can’t reconcile faith and science without giving up parts of faith or science. Whether you are cherry picking or going all in , one or the other has to be tossed out to make the other work. That’s the definition of mutually exclusive.

You're taking it as a belief that you can't reconcile it. Have you tried it? Have you kept trying until some scientific method or instrument proved absolutely conclusively otherwise? Or are you just taking some fixed definition of "science" and "God" in your head and saying "Nope, those two definitions, they can't be reconciled and that's that."

You’re still trying to misrepresent science as an entity and not a tool. People misuse science, but religion’s problems are written on the page.

Which religion? What page? Whose reading? Whose interpretation?

These are two contradictory sentences. Science is not incompatible with faith, but god is conveniently outside of science’s reach. That, again, is the definition of mutually exclusive. Compatibility is working together. Where does god work in science? By your own words it doesn’t. Scientists can believe in god, but science works without the assumption or consideration of god. Humans can force faith and science to work together in their minds through compromise of each one’s concepts and values, but that’s not compatibility.

What's the definition of God?

Why? Nothing in the definition of either requires exclusivity.

They are two separate concepts with separate remits and purposes. Failing to understand that leads to the common fallacy they are in conflict or opposition because sometimes even the most educated people fail to grasp the inherent limitations of each. On the subject of God the scientific method is silent and can only ever be so, by definition it cannot comment on that which occurs outside of the system it is a part of. If you understand the scientific method you realise this is implicit in it's role and use.

Personally I am an atheist, but I understand the limitations of science to realise this is every bit as much a faith as any other. God, or the lack thereof cannot be empirically demonstrated and the efficacy of the scientific method stops at the point an hypothesis becomes untestable. I believe there is no God, but that belief has no more basis in science than any other belief.

What's your definition of God, I wonder? What makes you so sure that Science cannot find the answers of or to God?

Equally I understand that faith could never explain the workings of our universe, that is an objective process of eliminating hypotheses which draws us closer to a complete picture we will never reach. Faith can prove nothing nor can it reasonably dispute objective evidence, although ultimately that evidence is always itself open to doubt. That doubt is an essential part of the process of science and the very reason in it's pure form can also prove nothing, merely accept that a thing has not yet been disproven.

So Faith cannot prove anything, Science cannot prove anything. Yet we use some beliefs to develop ourselves and our technology, both of which to a lesser or greater degree do work in this universe.

The idea that science can and will eventually explain everything, that understanding the universe in it's entirety is simply a case of doing sufficient empirical research is commonplace in the broader population and pretty forgivable, that so many in the scientific community seem to forget why this isn't true is sometimes lamentable. Likewise the narrow mindedness of many within various religious communities hardly bears reiterating.

It is my belief that Science can and will eventually explain everything. But not on its own. I cannot fully describe in words as to why I have this belief. Let's just say it is born of certain...experiences.

Gods existence can’t be tested because it is an artificial construct that denies examination. You’ve defined it as something that can’t be examined so it can’t be. What you’re basically saying is any fantastic assertion than can’t be tested is valid. That’s just nonsense. God is not a perceivable Force in the observable universe. It is not a scienticfic consideration. And five paragraphs of pointlessly flowery language and personal definitions of terms doesn’t change that. This is the same thing as when you started the conversation about violence in Discovery and then strawmanned the discussion into what you wanted It to be.

God's existence can be tested. But not by geiger counters and particle accelerators. What if God is a perceivable force in the observable Universe. Perceived to different degrees by different people (which is not determined racially, or religiously, or skin-color or any of a dozen superficial characteristics)? What if the only instrument we know of now to detect this Force is only people? Are you willing to dismiss the beliefs or perhaps knowledge of billions, because some scientific instrument did not pick up its existence?

And what if your science which you love so much itself depends on faith? After all, you haven't conducted all the experiments for all the science facts that you believe yourself, have you? You believe, because others believe. Because you believe they have conducted the experiments. Because you believe there are yet others who compete and may wish to disprove them, and since it has not been disproven, it must therefore be scientific fact. In other words, you have faith. In your scientific friends.

Science depends on faith depends on science depends on....ad infinitum.

I'm not high. Really.

 

[Spot261]

Some jobs take the worst of both.

FTFY

 

[rahullak]

FTFY

And some jobs take the best of both.

 

[DigificWriter]

For me, this question is moot because we know that the Klingon War is ending tonight, so I'm replying here mainly in response to somebody bringing up Battlestar Galactica.

If you were caught off guard by BSG bringing in the literal concept of Gods and Creation-based mysticism, you were really watching the series with the wrong perspective, because those concepts were baked directly into the very DNA and foundations of the property as a whole, both in its original incarnation and in the RDM/David Eick reimagining, and were blatantly seeded throughout the entire four-season run of the latter.

 

[Spot261]

And some jobs take the best of both.

woops!

 

[Mark 2000]

You're taking it as a belief that you can't reconcile it.

That's not a belief. Even if you're vaguefaithing a general spirituality of the universe you are stating there are some things science can't and shouldn't touch. That's an act of faith. Science examines the things that matter. The things that effect other things. If there is something in the universe that doesn't interact with it in any observable or tangible way then what's the point in even thinking about it? If the spirit moves the universe in some way that matters, you can be sure I'll pay attention.

Which religion? What page? Whose reading? Whose interpretation?

All of them. Pick a page, then we can discuss it.

What's the definition of God?

Does it matter? Who's holding the world in your avatar? You're trying vaguefaith a clever argument, but you clearly have a very specific anthropomorphized intelligent creator in mind as we all do because, say it with me, we all create god in our own image.

What if the only instrument we know of now to detect this Force is only people? Are you willing to dismiss the beliefs or perhaps knowledge of billions, because some scientific instrument did not pick up its existence?

Patriarchy is a pretty universal aspect of religion. Is that really the wavelength we're all tuned into? Is the universal vaguespirit telling women to get in the kitchen and make a sandwich?

 

[Hythlodeus]

And what if your science which you love so much itself depends on faith? After all, you haven't conducted all the experiments for all the science facts that you believe yourself, have you? You believe, because others believe. Because you believe they have conducted the experiments. Because you believe there are yet others who compete and may wish to disprove them, and since it has not been disproven, it must therefore be scientific fact. In other words, you have faith. In your scientific friends.

This is where I call bullshit.

Little thought experiment here: Destroy ALL scientific books, all evidence of science. Wipe the Earth clear of it.
Then do the same with religious texts and religion.
Start from scratch.
Give it 2.000 years, both will be back, religion and science. But guess what? only one of them will look exactly the same as it is now: science
It is fact based, it is logic based, there is no believe involved. the law of gravity doesn't change, the speed of light doesn't change. science is constant.
religion? it is based on the time a specific religious system is developed, culture, history, stories and nurseries. the religious texts in 2.000 years will lokk very different that they do now

 

[lawman]

On the topic of religion and science, let us be clear about something: we're not actually talking about religion or faith in any generic sense. In this discussion we've zeroed in pretty quickly on discussing monotheism, and Christianity in particular... just like pretty much everyone in America and Western culture more broadly (which is to say, the vast majority of Star Trek's audience) is prone to do.

Trek itself, like much SF, has historically avoided that kind of tunnel vision; when it's tackled these topics it has been in the form of some ancient belief system (as in "Who Mourns..."), or some invented alien religion (as in DS9). As with other political and social topics, it uses allegory as an effective tool to get past people's mental defense mechanisms.

That'll only get you so far, however. Religious believers are always more than ready to dismiss other belief systems as outdated, as illogical, as mere mythology... but they'll bend over backwards to rationalize exceptions for their own.

What I'm trying to say is that you can believe in God and scientific truth. It's not mutually exclusive. This is why I used Bakker as an example. The guy factually knows that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old and completely accepts it but also preaches about God on the weekend. Religion and science coexist perfectly for him.

...I know that you cannot tar and feather religion as being solely oppressive or restrictive nor can you tar all religious people as backwards thinking science deniers. For a lot of people Religion and Science is not a binary situation, they make it work and it's not a matter of one over the other.

I don't doubt that many people "make it work." Bakker, for instance, is a proponent of "theistic evolution," the notion that evolution is a tool used and directed by God to achieve certain ends in the natural world.

The problem is, evolutionary theory has no need of that hypothesis. It works just fine in a completely natural context, with no supernatural intervention. Efforts along these lines inevitably involve some sort of awkward synthesis of frankly unrelated ideas. Heck, three centuries ago Isaac Newton of all people was a devout believer who maintained that God had to intervene periodically to keep the cosmos running smoothly, because his work showed that otherwise it would run down. He was wrong; brilliant though he was, his calculations simply weren't quite accurate.

Bottom line, look at the roles of religion and science throughout human history. What do we get when we have religion without science? The Dark Ages. What do we get when we have science without religion? Well, strictly speaking we've never tried it, but we're getting asymptotically closer over time, and it's fair to say that the answer is modern civilization, and all the progress and quality of life that comes with it.

Faith and science are far from incompatible and the false dichotomy between the two is based on ignorance as much as are the worst excesses of each. The issue comes from the false premise that each seeks or should seek the same purpose, they don't...

Science is the (supposedly, but in reality not always) objective process of analysis of that which is testable, that which exists within the framework of the observable universe.

...One cannot prove or disprove the existence of god because he/she is by definition outside of the rules of the universe which is his/her creation, outside of that framework of testable processes of which we are a part. Science can have nothing to say here. Religions's role is largely about the values it assigns to behaviours and attitudes...

What you're offering here is a variation on what I mentioned upthread, Gould's notion of non-overlapping magisteria.

It doesn't really hold up. "That which exists within the framework of the observable universe" is another way of saying "everything." Logically speaking, nothing is "outside the natural universe"; whatever exists in any way that affects or interacts with the natural universe is ipso facto part of the natural universe.

It is, of course, possible to have a conversation about human behaviors and attitudes and values that's not strictly about empirical observations (although it should certainly be grounded in them). That's what psychology and philosophy are for, moral philosophy in particular. Those are secular endeavors as well, however; they have no need of any supernatural considerations. Whenever religion attempts to tackle the same questions, it merely tacks on extraneous superfluities.

...God, or the lack thereof cannot be empirically demonstrated and the efficacy of the scientific method stops at the point an hypothesis becomes untestable. ...

Equally I understand that faith could never explain the workings of our universe...

All you're doing here is defining "God" down to something that's so insignificant that he/she/it has no bearing whatsoever on humanity or the universe we live in.

It doesn't really work, though. The hypothesis "God does not exist" is not one that requires testing. It's the null hypothesis. The affirmative claim is that "God exists." If it's not testable, it's a useless hypothesis and should be rejected.

Moreover, even if you manage to insulate God in this way, what you've managed to preserve is at best a sort of abstract Deism. It's not the concept of God most believers (certainly most Christians) actually believe in. That God, the God of the Bible, the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God who created humanity and our world; who intervenes in it regularly; who plays favorites with us; who tests us, judges us, forgives us; who communicates with us; who answers our prayers; who controls our fates... that version of God is another matter entirely. The proposition that such a God exists is one that very much can be tested empirically... and it fails every test.

Biblical Christianity, and the body of doctrines that has accumulated around it, make loads of truth claims about the workings of our universe. The vast majority of them don't hold up, which is no surprise, because they were devised in the Iron Age by people who lacked the scientific method. We can abandon all those claims, of course, and argue that God and Christianity are really only whatever's left over... but that's basically just an exercise in No-True-Scotsmanism, and honestly, what's the point of it?

 

[Hythlodeus]

On the topic of religion and science, let us be clear about something: we're not actually talking about religion or faith in any generic sense. In this discussion we've zeroed in pretty quickly on discussing monotheism, and Christianity in particular... just like pretty much everyone in America and Western culture more broadly (which is to say, the vast majority of Star Trek's audience) is prone to do.

stop right there. I talk about any religion in the broadest sense. spiritualism, polytheism, esoteric stuff, weird yoga shit and yes , also Abrahamitic monotheism. I don't zero in on any of those equally ridiculous thoughts

 

[DaveyNY]

The "WAR" can't actually end tonight.
Just the actual outright pew-pew fighting will.
Otherwise there'd be no reason for the conflict with the Klingons in TOS.

I don't expect anything but the Klingons being forced to pull back to the border, to be shown.
They'll end up with a 'bloody nose' and a deeper respect for the Federations ability to fight back.
<shrug>

 

[Spot261]

Even if you're vaguefaithing a general spirituality of the universe you are stating there are some things science can't and shouldn't touch. That's an act of faith. Science examines the things that matter.

Science examines the things that can be tested, that's what science is, the process of testing that which can be tested. Religion explicitly deals with that which cannot. Devaluing that does not alter the fact that they do not inherently contradict each other. The point isn't whether God is likely to exist, the point is regardless of whether he/she exists or not that existence is neither provable by science nor mutually exclusive with it. The scientific method will work regardless of god's existence, equally science will never be a tool which can disprove that existence.

Does it matter? Who's holding the world in your avatar? You're trying vaguefaith a clever argument, but you clearly have a very specific anthropomorphized intelligent creator in mind as we all do because, say it with me, we all create god in our own image.

Does it matter one jot what image we create god in? Does it make the slightest difference to the question of religion being compatible with science? I could create god in the image of the flying spaghetti monster, it would no more or less valid that Buddha or the Judeo Christian god. It would make no difference one way or the other to the validity of science and religion co existing because nothing in either precludes the other.

Patriarchy is a pretty universal aspect of religion. Is that really the wavelength we're all tuned into? Is the universal vaguespirit telling women to get in the kitchen and make a sandwich?

Again, does this make the slightest difference to the question of religion's compatibility with science? Different religions present different values, some are highly matriarchal. Whether we personally disagree with a given religion's values (and I largely do) is meaningless to the scientific method, it still has nothing to say on the matter because such statements are value loaded. Science deals in hypotheses and available evidence, not values.

 

[lawman]

What if God is a perceivable force in the observable Universe. Perceived to different degrees by different people...? What if the only instrument we know of now to detect this Force is only people? Are you willing to dismiss the beliefs or perhaps knowledge of billions, because some scientific instrument did not pick up its existence?

Short answer? Yes.

Elaborating a bit: first of all, I reject your proposition that "billions" of people have ever claimed to have any personal experience of God, in any form, even as just a vague "force in the universe." I think you're off by several orders of magnitude there. But whatever the actual number... anecdotal, unreproducible human experience is not evidence. Of anything. Humans are famously susceptible to delusions of all kinds.

And what if your science which you love so much itself depends on faith? After all, you haven't conducted all the experiments for all the science facts that you believe yourself, have you? ... In other words, you have faith. In your scientific friends.

Pure sophistry, expressing an idea that fundamentally misunderstands how science works. It involves taking propositions about reality and testing them. Nothing says you have to do the testing yourself. On the contrary, the privileging of personal subjective experience is part of what you described as the basis of faith... it's not part of science. If two people tell me what they think, and the first can explain logically exactly why and how he thinks that, and the second can only say "I know because I know, believe me, I felt it," I'm going to believe the first one. That's as true in a courtroom or on the job or in a personal relationship as it is in a scientific lab or in a church.

Context matters. Evidence matters. Reasoning matters. Otherwise, you're taking every single instance of trust in human communication, and reducing it to nothing but the word "faith," conveniently redefined. So like I said, sophistry.

And now, for a bit of a digression...

If you were caught off guard by BSG bringing in the literal concept of Gods and Creation-based mysticism, you were really watching the series with the wrong perspective, because those concepts were baked directly into the very DNA and foundations of the property as a whole, both in its original incarnation and in the RDM/David Eick reimagining, and were blatantly seeded throughout the entire four-season run of the latter.

For what it's worth, then, I guess I had the "wrong" perspective, because I watched and enjoyed the first three seasons of that show without ever thinking it required me to swallow anything supernatural or mystical. It's only in the fourth season that it swerved into nonsense.

 

[Mark 2000]

Again, does this make the slightest difference to the question of religion's compatibility with science?

This is what I mean by you shaping the argument to fit your needs. This was a specific reaction to something someone said and you've removed it from it's context to make... what point? I'm not sure. But, again: If you say so.

 

[EnderAKH]

I swore I wouldn't get into this debate but your comment enticed me. I don't have a problem with a show that did science and faith per se. What seemed annoying (to me and others anyway) was that BSG gave the appearance of doing a bait-and-switch: a lot of us thought we were getting harder sci-fi with the "unexplained" events to be explained later scientifically. Now this might just be because we didn't pick up (enough) on stuff Ron Moore said...in which case it's our fault - he gave us what he said he would - and I'd welcome a reference to him saying the show would have faith/God in there as an equally big element all through. (Well I'd not welcome it, but at least I'd know he gave us what he promised.)

I would argue it was explicitly stated throughout all the seasons. Head Six throughout the entire show was quite clear with Baltar that everything was the work of God, and that she, and Baltar because of her, was an agent of God. She was aware of upcoming events, she was almost completely aware of things that Baltar wasn't. Many viewers ASSUMED it was some kind of Cylon trickery, that she was a chip or a mental projection or what have you because they did not want to think in a space opera God and faith was the right answer, but the character was clear throughout the show who she was and what was going on.

 

[Agony_Boothb]

.


I don't doubt that many people "make it work." Bakker, for instance, is a proponent of "theistic evolution," the notion that evolution is a tool used and directed by God to achieve certain ends in the natural world.

The problem is, evolutionary theory has no need of that hypothesis. It works just fine in a completely natural context, with no supernatural intervention. Efforts along these lines inevitably involve some sort of awkward synthesis of frankly unrelated ideas. Heck, three centuries ago Isaac Newton of all people was a devout believer who maintained that God had to intervene periodically to keep the cosmos running smoothly, because his work showed that otherwise it would run down. He was wrong; brilliant though he was, his calculations simply weren't quite accurate.

Bottom line, look at the roles of religion and science throughout human history. What do we get when we have religion without science? The Dark Ages. What do we get when we have science without religion? Well, strictly speaking we've never tried it, but we're getting asymptotically closer over time, and it's fair to say that the answer is modern civilization, and all the progress and quality of life that comes with it.

And 'people making it work' is literally what I have been arguing for. I'm arguing for the individuals right to choose how they interpret two very different systems and how they incorporate these systems into their lives. An individual can believe in God without needing to deny science and one can accept scientific truth without needing to deny the existence of God.

Religion in of itself didn't cause the Dark Ages, and that period wasn't wholly without philosophical and scientific progress. They were however overshadowed by a powerful and corrupt religious institution, i'm not denying that. As for science, of course it has lead to progress, but it has also lead to us finding new ways to kill ourselves. Science is full of potential dangers that could be exploited by the wrong individuals just as religion was exploited to control society.

 

[Spot261]

This is what I mean by you shaping the argument to fit your needs. This was a specific reaction to something someone said and you've removed it from it's context to make... what point? I'm not sure. But, again: If you say so.

The point is the one I've reiterated throughout the thread, science and religion aren't incompatible, the dichotomy is a false one based on people's ignorance and misconception, it's a fallacy based on human nature rather than the concepts themselves.

I don't doubt that many people "make it work." Bakker, for instance, is a proponent of "theistic evolution," the notion that evolution is a tool used and directed by God to achieve certain ends in the natural world.

Bakker is not alone in such a position, if god were to exist it (I'm rolling with that as less clumsy than he/she which presumes the validity of gender as a concept) would act via some mechanism and many have argued that the process of creation would most likely look like the process of writing code, a set of rules which would set the conditions for life, much as a programmer writes code which define the physics in a game. For an omnipotent being such a process would essentially be synonymous with establishing the underlying laws of physics. I prefer the idea of that certainly to an image of a bearded man waving his hand and watching Eden spring forth.

The problem is, evolutionary theory has no need of that hypothesis. It works just fine in a completely natural context, with no supernatural intervention. Efforts along these lines inevitably involve some sort of awkward synthesis of frankly unrelated ideas.

Evolutionary theory has no direct need of it, this is true, but it is a theory which operates within a broader context of other theories and even they only take us so far. Each and every theory has an end point and causality has to break down somewhere, typically at the moment of the Big Bang. That is where science has taken us as far as it can and what comes next is always going to be a matter of conjecture. That conjecture is by it's very nature individual and thus will involve disparate, or in your words "unrelated" ideas. Some people will mentally insert a higher power, other will not. Where that conjecture becomes certainty for any given individual it becomes faith, no matter how irrational. Thus we have science and faith in perfect harmony, each entirely untroubled by the other.

Well, strictly speaking we've never tried it, but we're getting asymptotically closer over time, and it's fair to say that the answer is modern civilization, and all the progress and quality of life that comes with it.

As essentially humanist I'd love to think such a situation would be to the benefit of all. As a cynic I suspect increasing our capabilities rarely equates to increasing our wisdom.

It doesn't really hold up. "That which exists within the framework of the observable universe" is another way of saying "everything." Logically speaking, nothing is "outside the natural universe"; whatever exists in any way that affects or interacts with the natural universe is ipso facto part of the natural universe.

That, though, is part of the definition of god, or at least "creator", an intelligence which guided (in so far as the idea of a "past tense" makes sense at all) the creation of that system and therefore not a part of it. That system contains all of the familiar underlying rules of causality, entropy and the very logic you are applying and therefore there is no reason to presuppose they would apply to that being. On the contrary, using the code analogy from above such a presupposition would be akin to expecting you or I to be restricted by the limitations inherent in a piece of software we happened to write.

That's what psychology and philosophy are for, moral philosophy in particular.

I know a lot of research psychologists who would be very offended to read this . Psychology generally strives to be as objective as possible given the limitations of statistical analysis, but that's another question altogether.

All you're doing here is defining "God" down to something that's so insignificant that he/she/it has no bearing whatsoever on humanity or the universe we live in.

It doesn't really work, though. The hypothesis "God does not exist" is not one that requires testing. It's the null hypothesis. The affirmative claim is that "God exists." If it's not testable, it's a useless hypothesis and should be rejected.

Isn't that the point though? That either hypothesis is untestable and thus useless is consistent with the idea that
the scientific method which is based on them has nothing to add to the question. It becomes unprovable and that's the definition of faith. That faith has bearing on an individual level, it has meaning for the believer. I'm happy without it personally but significant numbers of others feel differently.

Moreover, even if you manage to insulate God in this way, what you've managed to preserve is at best a sort of abstract Deism. It's not the concept of God most believers (certainly most Christians) actually believe in. That God, the God of the Bible, the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God who created humanity and our world; who intervenes in it regularly; who plays favorites with us; who tests us, judges us, forgives us; who communicates with us; who answers our prayers; who controls our fates... that version of God is another matter entirely. The proposition that such a God exists is one that very much can be tested empirically... and it fails every test.

Hence my atheism.