Unless you're getting tried in China or something...

Nice way of ignoring all the contributions religion has made over the years, such as the Islamic institutions that were very advanced in mathematics. Hell, they were more advanced than European institutions at the time.

You also forget religious charities.

And you wonder why people don't like debating religion with you.

Actually, we could prove/disprove that. Science claims only to know what it can observe, and if the (popular, I will assume) claim is made that God is outside of the observable universe, then it would follow there is no way to prove/disprove God's existence. Cybertron, according to what we know, is inside the observable universe, though we may not have the technology available yet to see as far as the robot-planet might be.

I can't believe I just made a Goki-esque post

P-C may come off as a bit abrasive, but you shouldn't argue with him just to argue with him.

The fact is he's not wrong within the context of the discussion he was having about proofs of existence. The good done by people of religious faith is irrelevant to the point he was making.

The point he was making is the same exact point that he makes in every single religion based thread he's ever posted in on this forum. Religion is nothing but lies, and we should all belittle it. He then proceeds to belittle it himself.

Don't believe me? Look at his post history.

P-C may come off as a bit abrasive, but you shouldn't argue with him just to argue with him.

The fact is he's not wrong within the context of the discussion he was having about proofs of existence. The good done by people of religious faith is irrelevant to the point he was making.

(excerpted from)
Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?
by Bertrand Russell

My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others.
....

The objections to religion are of two sorts -- intellectual and moral. The intellectual objection is that there is no reason to suppose any religion true; the moral objection is that religious precepts date from a time when men were more cruel than they are and therefore tend to perpetuate inhumanities which the moral conscience of the age would otherwise outgrow.

To take the intellectual objection first: there is a certain tendency in our practical age to consider that it does not much matter whether religious teaching is true or not, since the important question is whether it is useful. One question cannot, however, well be decided without the other. If we believe the Christian religion, our notions of what is good will be different from what they will be if we do not believe it. Therefore, to Christians, the effects of Christianity may seem good, while to unbelievers they may seem bad. Moreover, the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.

A certain kind of scientific candor is a very important quality, and it is one which can hardly exist in a man who imagines that there are things which it is his duty to believe. We cannot, therefore, really decide whether religion does good without investigating the question whether religion is true.

How scientists really feel about God

Some thinkers reconcile science and an all mighty being

By Robin Lloyd

LiveScience
updated 2:08 p.m. CT, Fri., May. 16, 2008

WASHINGTON - Scientists hate God. Or find God very disturbing. In fact, modern science has found no evidence of God and so it's stupid anymore to think God exists.

The above statements are often presented as conventional wisdom, but are they true?

A new collection of short essays, discussed here Thursday at an event at the American Enterprise Institute, responds to that question with a more diverse set of voices than is usually offered. Edited by "Skeptic" magazine publisher Michael Shermer and backed by the John Templeton Foundation, the booklet features replies by 13 scholars and thinkers to the question "Does science make belief in God obsolete?"

The practical answer is, "Of course not." Many people worldwide believe. In the United States, the percentage of the population without a religious affiliation is increasing but the majority still have one, according to American Religious Identification Survey 2001. The faithful aren't going away despite a golden age of scientific descriptions of the mysteries of life and the secularizing, culture-draining force of consumerism.

The answers offered by the booklet's two theologians, eight scientists, two cultural commentators and one philosopher are more creative and sophisticated than the mind-numbing "culture wars" portrayed on television. Some of the thinkers even find ways to synthesize or reconcile God and science without throwing up their hands.

The standard scientific line on God is well-represented in the booklet by several of the writers:

• Science has failed to find natural evidence of God. Natural evidence is all there is. No God. Case closed.
• Slightly softer is this line of reasoning: Science erases the "need" for God as an explanation of our experiences, and God either doesn't exist or is at best a hypothesis (to the agnostic).
• And then there's the view expressed in the title of University of Hawaii physicist and astronomer Victor Stenger's new book, "God: The Failed Hypothesis — How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist." Stenger also contributed to the new booklet.

These arguments are old news.

Shermer, who describes himself as spiritual and agnostic, adds a cosmic twist, casting doubt on our ability to recognize God. He claims that any encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence, should we go looking, is statistically likely to turn up civilizations that are far more medically advanced than ours and would have the ability to create life, so they will be indistinguishable from God.

"Science does not make belief in God obsolete, but it may make obsolete the reality of God, depending on how far we are able to push the science," Shermer writes in the booklet.

Yet many scientists — 40 percent according to a 1997 poll cited by Shermer — believe in God. This isn't big news to scientists, but might surprise people who rely on mainstream views of science. A handful of those folks — including Jerome Groopman, a professor of medicine at Harvard, and William D. Phillips, Nobel laureate in physics and a fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute of the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology — are also represented in the booklet, arguing that the natural world and the world of faith are relatively separate, yet personally reconcilable domains.

"I think that we are all comfortable with the idea there are plenty of things in our lives that we will deal with outside of the scientific paradigm," Phillips told about 70 members of the public who attended the discussion of these issues between himself, Shermer and AEI theologian Michael Novak. "And while I think faith is a particularly important part of our lives that we should deal with outside of the scientific paradigm, it is certainly not the only one."

Phillips, a Methodist, also drew from science to make his argument in favor of God's relevance, saying physicists know there are things that are "really, really improbable, but they are not really impossible according to the laws of physics ... From what I know about physics, it's not impossible to imagine a world in which God acts but we never can prove it."

In the booklet, philosopher Mary Midgley, who was not at the AEI event, states that science is just one worldview that has come to prevail. Science and religion need not be at odds.

"What is now seen as a universal cold war between science and religion is, I think, really a more local clash between a particular scientistic worldview, much favored recently in the West, and most other people's worldviews at most other times," she writes.

"Scientism ... by contrast, cuts [the setting of human life in] context off altogether and looks for the meaning of life in Science itself. It is this claim to a monopoly of meaning ... that makes science and religion look like competitors today."

Worldviews that transcend that competition or dichotomy are offered in the booklet by Kenneth Miller, Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy and Stuart Kauffman.

Miller, the lead witness for the plaintiffs in the Dover trial of 2005 (in which Judge John E. Jones III barred intelligent design from being taught in a Pennsylvania public school district's science classes), takes the classic Darwinian "grandeur in this view of life" approach. God is behind it all.

He rejects claims that the God hypothesis makes no sense, stating that "... to reject God because of the admitted self-contradictions and logical failings of organized religion would be like rejecting physics because of the inherent contradictions of quantum theory and general relativity."

Kauffman, director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary, takes a slightly New Age tack, saying we must "heal" the schism between science and religion by "reinventing the sacred" and evolving from a supernatural God to a "new sense of a fully natural God as our chosen symbol for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe."

In other words, he suggests that we can get around the divide between science and God if we come up with a new concept for God that focuses on the wonders of nature, among other things.

This new concept is a global cultural imperative, Kauffman writes, if we are to overcome fundamentalist fears and reunite reason with humanity and the mysteries of life.

A middle ground that incorporates science more than the other God-friendly writers is offered by Hoodbhoy, a physicist at Quaid-e-Azam University in Pakistan.

Science hasn't necessarily made belief obsolete, "but you must find a science-friendly, science-compatible God," he writes. And that is possible, he claims, calling this entity a "scientific Creator."

Hoodbhoy thinks that God can be seen as operating within the laws of physics, tweaking outcomes in small ways that have big impacts by relying on phenomena we have observed already in the universe, such as the butterfly effect (in which the flapping of a butterfly's wings alters the atmosphere in a way that ultimately alters the path of a tornado).

In his own words, here are some things She (yes, Hoodbhoy uses the female pronoun) could do, Hoodbhoy writes:

"Extraordinary, but legitimate, interventions in the physical world permit quantum tunneling through cosmic wormholes or certain symmetries to snap spontaneously. It would be perfectly fair for a science-savvy God to use nonlinear dynamics so that tiny fluctuations quickly build up to earthshaking results — the famous 'butterfly effect' of deterministic chaos theory."

Hoodbhoy ends by saying that God is neither dead nor about to die. There is still plenty of "space for a science-friendly God as well as for 'deeply religious non-believers' like Einstein ... Unsure of why they happen to exist, humans are likely to scour the heavens forever in search of meaning."

A total of 5,000 copies of the booklet became available on May 2. Free copies can be obtained at http://www.templeton.org/.

A religious colleague of mine once argued that the notion of "God is impossible" is itself a silly argument since we cannot disprove God. She once asked me how I could possibly believe that God is impossible.

My answer was, "I don't believe that God is impossible, but I do believe that he is highly improbable."

And she accepted that.

I'm going to keep plugging those essays I linked to... that question is also directly addressed.

2) The early Christians did what they could to distance themselves from the Jews. In the minds of the Romans Christianity was just a subset of Judaism. That's why many of the New Testament's passages take an unfavourable stance when it came to Jews. The early Christians were trying to convince the Romans that they were in fact not Jewish. So the change in the demeanour of G-d would be in keeping with that practise.

edit: I really do think they are worth reading... they directly impact this discussion. Christopher Hitchens' essay made me realize that oftentimes, the existence of "God" and the truthfulness of religion are argued against as though they were one and the same. When in reality (I would claim that) religion is simply a record of ancient peoples' attempts to comprehend the transcendent / divine / spiritual / what have you. They had the same questions we have, and what we see in the Bible or the Koran or the Upanishads are just different examples of this human quest. We don't need to cling to their words; but I do think that there is something universal that these early religious writers were trying to apprehend. Of course they used language that we would not use today; their experience of life is thousands of years removed from our own. But I think it is important to look at what they said, in their own cultural and historical context, to examine the questions they raised as well as the answers they came up with. Again, not that one needs to cling to their words as though they were the utterances of God; but I think that there is value in seeking a wider perspective on the human condition.

I posted a link to some cool articles in case anyone's interested <_<

"How can I believe in God?" and "Why do I believe in God?"

On the first question: a scientist can believe in God because such belief is not a scientific matter.

Scientific statements must be "falsifiable." That is, there must be some outcome that at least in principle could show that the statement is false. I might say, "Einstein's theory of relativity correctly describes the behavior of visible objects in our solar system." So far, extremely careful measurements have failed to prove that statement false, but they could (and some people have invested careers in trying to see if they will).

By contrast, religious statements are not necessarily falsifiable. I might say, "God loves us and wants us to love one another." I cannot think of anything that could prove that statement false.

What about the second question: why do I believe in God? As a physicist, I look at nature from a particular perspective. I see an orderly, beautiful universe in which nearly all physical phenomena can be understood from a few simple mathematical equations.

I see a universe that, had it been constructed slightly differently, would never have given birth to stars and planets, let alone bacteria and people. And there is no good scientific reason for why the universe should not have been different. Many good scientists have concluded from these observations that an intelligent God must have chosen to create the universe with such beautiful, simple, and life-giving properties.

Many other equally good scientists are nevertheless atheists. Both conclusions are positions of faith.

I believe in God because I can feel God's presence in my life,

because I can see the evidence of God's goodness in the world,

because I believe in Love and because I believe that God is Love.

unless you take the position that this "god" is really not anything like the book and is kind of amused by all the killing in his name.

Well, what if I asked you, as I have asked many in this thread, why a God who "loves us and wants us to love one another" would create a situation wherein multiple holy texts exist which contradict each other and cause us to do battle in His name. If He loves us, he certainly doesn't want to watch us fight, and if He wants us to love each other, then a standard set of holy texts readily available to us all would go a long way to making that happen.

"Loving" as a descriptor of God, therefore, is pretty falsifiable. In order to believe someone loves you, they need to show it. God does not show it.

Unless you think of 'love' in the same way a good parent loves their kids. I think most parents would agree that they would like their kids to be happy and joyous 24/7. BUT people seem to learn most effectively by screwing up a few times first. So a parent would let the kid fail and then help them figure out why it didn't work.

For your analogy to work, you would have to consider it good parenting to give your one kid a set of household rules, give your other kid a set of different household rules, and then hide yourself away, forever, so they're forced to fend for themselves and figure out what the "truth" is.

That'll build some character, won't it?

We would take children away from any parent that behaved like God. And rightly so. To be a good parent, you have to be present and communicative with your children.

What if God did give a bunch of people the same set of rules, but they were interpreted differently by whoever wrote them down?

You know, this is funny seeing as how he was a Jew.

So your saying that God is a political construct? I love hate it when religious folks claim that God is Unchanging he's just different now than he was.

What matters IMO is that people are attempting to apprehend God.

*snip*

but I believe that we are reaching in the right direction, so to speak, when we desire to move beyond ourselves, beyond our animal natures, towards a more outward, others-focused reality. I think that we fail spiritually when we regress in our evolution and rely on our baser instincts, and we grow when we try to push our own evolution forward... so to speak. Towards ideals such as love and forgiveness and selflessness.

Again, I'll be willing to talk with you when you're willing to actually listen to what I have to say, rather then assuming we're (Jews) all ignorant war-mongers patting ourselves on the back for being the "chosen people."

I'm not trying to internet zing you but, to the best of my knowledge, there is no archaeological or historical evidence of any kind for the Exodus, or even the Jewish people having been enslaved by the Egyptians at all, outside of Torah/Bible. You think a people wander around in the desert for 40 years and don't leave some evidence of themselves behind?

If I'm wrong, please link me to the evidence and you'll have my most sincere apologies. It should be readily available on the internets, right?

Come on, no one has said that about your people in this thread. Especially not Hunter.

SHHHHHHHHH! The chosen people haven't figured this out yet.

He thrives on ambiguity.
Its the best way to keep his children fighting for thousands of years.

Yahweh was a Babylonian WAR God when Abraham smuggled him out into the desert, and if you look around at the accomplishments of his followers - hes doing a pretty fine job of it too.

That only matters if there is a God to apprehend.

I think that the failing of religion is that it codifies itself. Meaning that one person's search for meaning becomes another person's dogma, and before you know it you have an institution. It has happened throughout human history. I think it would be much more beneficial if we were to strip away the artifice and ritual and theology and tradition, and honestly look at what these various people were really trying to say.

This is all JMO.

There is nothing accidental about this difference between a church and its founder. As soon as absolute truth is supposed to be contained in the sayings of a certain man, there is a body of experts to interpret his sayings, and these experts infallibly acquire power, since they hold the key to truth. Like any other privileged caste, they use their power for their own advantage. They are, however, in one respect worse than any other privileged caste, since it is their business to expound an unchanging truth, revealed once for all in utter perfection, so that they become necessarily opponents of all intellectual and moral progress. The church opposed Galileo and Darwin; in our own day it opposes Freud. In the days of its greatest power it went further in its opposition to the intellectual life. Pope Gregory the Great wrote to a certain bishop a letter beginning: "A report has reached us which we cannot mention without a blush, that thou expoundest grammar to certain friends." The bishop was compelled by pontifical authority to desist from this wicked labor, and Latinity did not recover until the Renaissance.

I also want to reiterate my belief that morality is morality, no matter how it is expressed. We have created IMO a false dichotomy between religious morality and secular morality, when what we are really describing is the difference between the cultural language of ancient civilizations, and that of our own. We speak of "pre-scientific" cultures as if there was ever a time when mankind didn't base its beliefs on what it understood of reality. All religions were "scientific" when they came into being, because they were based on the knowledge -- scientia -- of the day. The fact that we know more now should not cause us to throw out everything these people ever said. We should carefully evaluate the meaning of their words, not getting caught up in the minutiae of rules and regulations but really unearthing what they saw to be a) the problem of humanity and b) the solution as they see it. This and similar gleanings from other religious traditions should be taken into consideration as part of the basis for what I would call a modern morality. And not just from religion, but philosophy and classic works from other disciplines. JMO

All this stuff Pete just said...

Strangely the Church of NLTAG only asks that you give us money and believe whatever you like.

LM,

Let me start by saying that I'm sorry if you interpret anything I say to you as an attack. I'm certainly not attempting to be argumentative for argument's sake.

I definitely recognize that you are not the Christian (or any other) Church. But you do seem to see value in the metaphor that the churches use, where I find it dangerous and counterproductive. That is, in all honesty, probably the only difference between you and I in this particular matter.

If you feel at all targeted it is probably the result of: 1) I do feel the metaphor of God is really, really dangerous. 2) I think that, by holding to the metaphor, you (unintentionally) misrepresent "nature." 3) I really want to understand why you see the metaphor as useful, and why you think the discussion can't be had without it.

No hard feelings.
-Hobbes

If either of you are feeling "targeted" - I think it's because the two of you are discussing the topic on a higher level than anyone else.
Would it be inappropriate for me to say that the two of you are probably the smartest people in the thread?