Cartollomew wrote:First up, calling BS.
I assume this is your way of saying "I do not agree that what you are saying is true". Assuming this to be so, I do not see where the following refutes anything I have explicitly claimed.
Most people aren't atheists. If anything, the pull away from religion has more to do with the lack of willingness for faith leaders to enact social change at a comparable rate to society itself.
Nowhere did I claim that the majority of people are atheists - in fact, your wikipedia page reinforces the point that even in the modern world most of humanity agrees with history on the question of deity. I do take issue however with your second statement. The "pull away from religion" is refuted by your own first sentence - there is no "pull away from religion" in the sense that the number of people actively rejecting any form of metaphysical belief is increasing, the only thing that has changed is the object of their belief. Where once people happily adhered to a detailed, systematic theology they are now more keen to craft metaphysical systems of their own design (often by cherry-picking established systems), but most people are certainly not pure materialists, and the number of pure materialists is certainly not increasing.
So, to use your terms, "calling BS".
Next, the claim that this "pull away from religion" (perhaps shorthand for "no longer adhering to traditional religions but instead following or forming alternative expressions of religious practice"?) is based on the "lack of willingness for faith leaders to enact social change at a comparable rate to society itself". What is it that makes "social change" an objectively good thing in the first place? Is "social change" always and everywhere something to be embraced? The 20th century alone is brimming with examples of "social change" that were readily embraced, and now regretted.
Then we must consider the implications of the statement - if the "faith leaders" were unwilling to enact social change, what was it that prompted society to do so? Did people just stop doing things the way they had always been doing them and change tracks spontaneously? Were the tracks changed for them by some other, non-faith-leader influence?
Your average schmo doesn't give a good Goddamn about science or Dawkins (particularly Dawkins - even if you know or care not a jot about science or faith, you can still know that Dawkins is an ass), they care about themselves and the environment in which they live.
If the first half of this statement were even partly true, then we would not be having this discussion at all. Dawkins would be just another biologist whose name is recognised only by peers in the field, nobody would even bother publishing books on God by scientists, and the topic would not be raised on a daily basis in the pages of newspapers. The evidence of the everyday man's world demonstrates that this claim, as it stands, is BS. Yes, anyone with a clue about science and/or philosophy recognises that Dawkins is a clown talking out of his arse, but that does not change the fact that he is an influential clown selling millions of books about whom the average schmo cares. There are only so many books a man can sell before he has to start reaching the average schmo, after all. Voices like Dawkins' influence more than merely those people who know who he is.
I claimed that it had become fashionable to disparage the study of immaterial things, first religion in particular and then philosophy in general. In no way could this mean "everyone became atheist". Rather, it points out that the voices of influence in society had moved to a position particularly hostile to metaphysics (especially in France during the time of the Revolution) and that this hostility was carried under the banner of "science". The unnatural and unprecedented conflict between reason and religion has never been resolved, and continues to fuel the confusion we see today.
BS again. There are multiple fields of science or hypotheses which don't "immediately" stand up to scrutiny from empirical measurement, or which simply cannot be even thought to be proven until later times.
String theory, gravity, loop gravity - many of the thought experiments and theories put together by great minds from the 18th through to the 20th century have been unprovable, untestable (through empirical means) or useless in the time in which they were created.
You must have grown up in a fascinating world if those fields of scientific study had even a modest impact on your youth. The influence of String Theory on pre-teen popular culture! Gravitational theory on boy bands! Thought experiments and Captain Planet!
These things go straight over the heads of "the average schmo" you mentioned before, and have no impact on him. He will flip on the television and see "scientists find a cure for cancer!" every three days, think "isn't that nice" and move on. Once in a while the papers will print "Large Hadron Collider could destroy the planet", he will chuckle at this on his train ride to work and forget about it. In short, introducing a number of purely mathematical fields to the discussion doesn't even scratch the claim that the culture of the world has unduly shifted towards the materialistic.
And if you're suggesting I live in a world which will not even
entertain the
notion of a God, I have to wonder where you've grown up.
Your first link is fascinating. Why does a country with constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion need a constitutional amendment to guarantee the free practice of religion in schools? Indeed, how does this in any way support your point?
You may also recall some of
the media coverage from that second event, which conveniently took place in Sydney last year. For those who were actually in Sydney at the time, many will recall the Police Commissioner's statement that Sydney's crime rates had dropped, that there had been no disturbances of the peace, and that the atmosphere of the city was overwhelmingly positive. For those who relied on newspapers, however, World Youth Day was a wasteful, expensive, dangerous, dirty and noisy adventure permitted by the Federal and State governments to indulge a bunch of hypocritical old men in dresses. Hardly the liberal spirit.
Sparton wrote:
Consider the attempts of, say, biologist Richard Dawkins to create a "materialist ethics". Hit utter distrust of philosophy and crippling dependance on the methods of scientific experiment mean that as soon as he attempts to solve problems outside the material realm (eg ethical behaviour) he is forced to either plagiarise materialist philosophers (whose ethical systems, unbeknownst to Dawkins, have already been demonstrated untenable) or make recommendations which fly in the face of history.
Morality, objective morality and the foundation on which we create our social expectations of behaviour/what is acceptable and so on, has merely a nodding acquaintance with the foundations of science.
For starters, science has a foundation.
You appear to imply that morality has no foundation. Please demonstrate this.
What Dawkins attempts to do as an atheistic ethicist has nothing to do with the what Dawkins attempts to do as a biologist and scientist - philosophy is not science.
We are in agreement here.
I suspect you could just say that
philosophers classically make poor scientists and that scientists often make bad philosophers, but I suspect that's not particularly true, nor does it have any bearing on why people insist on buying little bottles of expensive water to cure their colds.
As here, though even the statement you tentatively reject is biased. The first scientists (at least in the Western world) were all philosophers, and usually proficient ones at that. We must not forget however that those philosophers who pioneered science did so by gaining a foundation in scientific methods (such as empirical observation). Dawkins served merely as an example of a fellow who attempted to go the other way without bothering with the foundation. He makes philosophical and metaphysical claims with pontifical certainty, but has never attempted to gain a solid foundation upon which to make those claims. Thus he serves as an excellent example of the social plague, where people of all stripes who know how to do one thing will attempt to apply it to anything, regardless of whether it is appropriate.
Your argument is being poorly expressed here. Fix it.
I would be glad to clarify, though this imperative is entirely useless. Perhaps you could tell me what you think I have said, and compare with what you think I meant to say?
Additionally, there is no "banishment of religion" in the west.
The evidence betrays you. See above the treatment of a major, public religious event in Sydney last year by Sydney's largest
newspaper. Or even the example you gave of the American
School Prayer Amendment.
People are perfectly capable of finding the divine in ways other than "channeling the dead", "telepathy", or "spiritual healing". I hear this "prayer" thing is reasonably common in pretty much any given faith. Also, some form of meditation (which is often approximate to a form of prayer) is usually present.
Of course people are capable, this wouldn't be relevant if they weren't. What interests us here is why they do these things despite their capability. What would drive them to do the abnormal if the normal is available to them?
These things are a way of reaching or communing with a sense of the divine - and these are not areas in which science itself is leading some kind of assault.
Of course not. Science is the systematic collection and study of material knowledge. It is incapable of an agenda, let alone an assault. The issue at hand is the way people
use "science", as you mention here...
Dickheads like Dawkins, who have an axe to grind, will no doubt continue being smug, but honestly - Dawkins is preaching to his choir, he's not converting anyone into atheists.
The sad truth. With this said, he still does great damage to society at large by militarising otherwise peaceful atheists, turning himself into a sort of atheist pope about whom they rally in their anti-crusade to crush what he calls the "plague of religion".
On the other side of the coin, the damage done by fundamentalist demagogues insisting that we replace science with
their translation of a
bronze age mythology is far greater than the tiny proportion of atheists who feel left out.
Nonsense. First, because you have inverted the proportions both in number and influence. How much influence do the people you disparage as "fundamentalist demagogues" have over science, really? How much influence can they possibly exert, on a global scale, over the perceptions of the general public towards it? Of the media? Of government or industry? How many major newspapers push a radical anti-science agenda onto their vast metropolitan circulations?
Second, because the link you provided was thoroughly irrelevant to the point you failed to make. A bunch of baptists calling one of many Bible translations "satanic", and then ritually burning it on a barbecue to
Finlandia has nothing to do with the relative harm of religious fanatics versus atheist fanatics. I did find it thoroughly amusing though, because I happen to be familiar with the deep flaws of the NIV translation from both a linguistic and eisegetical perspective.
Science and religion are not mutually exclusive. Any sensible preacher/scientist/atheist admits as much. Give people enough credit to know this - it's only a
fringe who believe it has to be one or the other.
I'm sorry, but no. After running the full cycle of state education, as well as teaching some of its products myself, I cannot admit that the average young adult is capable of this realisation any longer. They have been formed in a way that demands an exclusive disjunction between the two, favouring the latter. I agree that the sensible are capable of knowing this, but I respond that the sensible are just as likely not to because of the way they have been formed.
Furthermore, it's both fringes. I see your link to Creationism, and raise you (again) Richard Dawkins. Christopher Hitchens. The ABC (and worse, the BBC).
What people aren't armed with is a concrete knowledge about what science really is.
Amen! Especially tertiary students of science.
As far as your average high school graduate is concerned, the big words they hear from the reiki practitioner is science.
I disagree. I think you need to give people enough credit to distinguish technobable from mystical babble. When my aikido instructor was explaining his Reiki technique to me, he didn't attempt to cite peer-reviewed studies or epidemiological statistics in support of his methods. He told me that he would push his ki into my body to heal my ki.
They haven't been taught critical thought, they haven't been taught to apply scientific skepticism.
On the first half we are agreed, but the second half only demonstrates my point. You have equated "critical thought" with "scientific skepticism" rather than the more sensible "logical progression". Science is not the exclusive domain of critical thought, and it was by making that claim that we began this entire exchange.
Far from science being over-emphasised, science is considered a special area for nerds and "boffins", practising mysterious things in their ivory towers.
I think the second phrase is one of the very fundamental reasons it is over-emphasised. People see science as archaic and set apart, it is only for those other, special people I have never met to understand. Whatever is claimed to be "scientific" must be true, and worthy of belief. In fact, this would appear to agree with your claim above that the reiki practitioner may gain the patient's confidence by assuring him that reiki is "scientific".
It is this very distance and mystery that contributes to the blind trust of "science" as the sole road to universal truth.
Do people need to learn philosophy and logic in school? Sure.
Do people need to learn how to apply critical thought, and the foundation of science (it was sure never taught to me)? Yes.
Philosophy without science isn't going to give anyone the power to assess whether a given treatment has a sound foundation. Science without philosophy isn't going to give anyone a hint on how to determine society's values.
My position precisely. What we need is a return to balance in emphasis of the two complementary fields. We need to properly consider both the material and the immaterial in order to function as humans, individually and as a society.
Also:
Philosophy is a very poor substitute for faith or mysticism - it won't be the silver bullet you are after in that regard.
Once more, I never claimed anything of the sort. Indeed, I couldn't honestly make any sort of claim. A basic respect for philosophy is necessary, but on equal footing with science. As it stands, people revere scientists as near-demigods, mightily forging a better tomorrow. Philosophers, on the other hand, are dismissed as useless daydreamers who contribute nothing but meaningless platitudes. This is why so many have fallen into the trap of attempting to form ethical models on materialist principles.
In short, my position is that people have been robbed of the ability to reason well. They are no longer taught how to connect sensible premisses with sensible conclusions. They are no longer taught to value truth, real truth, and to seek what is true over what is convenient. They are no longer taught how to decide what they can believe is true, and what is worthy of believing. Is something worthy of belief because it was said by someone famous? By someone on television? By someone whose life has been spent in the study of the field?
That's what I want to see. I want people given the opportunity to really decide things for themselves in a sensible, rational way. Whether they are asking if homeopathy can cure their cold better than Lemsip or if there really is a single, personal God who created all matter and time, I just want people to be taught how to look at evidence and arguments before making decisions.
