Does religion slow down scientific progress?

[longview]

15 minutes ago, TheSkepticChristian said:

and you think his statement was brilliant? 

 

See Volgadon's post above.  It is obvious he is a deeper thinker, a more seasoned philosopher, and wise.  You would greatly benefit if you were to listen and ponder carefully his ponderings.

[thesometimesaint]

Galileo was a Theist. His Theism certainly didn't slow down his science; Sir Issac Newton was a Theist. His Theism certainly didn't slow down his science; Dr. Henry Eyring was a Theist. His Theism certain didn't slow down his science; Dr. Kenneth Miller is a Theist his Theism certainly doesn't slow down his science; Dr. Francis Collins is a Theist. His Theism certainly doesn't slow down his science. The list of scientists that were/are also Theists is very long. It would appear that religiosity is unrelated to the ability to do science.

[volgadon]

Of course, there is art.  A bomb in the National Gallery would make some noise.  But it would not be serious enough.  Art has never been their fetish.  It’s like breaking a few back windows in a man’s house; whereas, if you want to make him really sit up, you must try at least to raise the roof.  There would be some screaming of course, but from whom?  Artists—art critics and such like—people of no account.  Nobody minds what they say.  But there is learning—science.  Any imbecile that has got an income believes in that.  He does not know why, but he believes it matters somehow.  It is the sacrosanct fetish.  All the damned professors are radicals at heart.  Let them know that their great panjandrum has got to go too, to make room for the Future of the Proletariat.  A howl from all these intellectual idiots is bound to help forward the labours of the Milan Conference.  They will be writing to the papers.  Their indignation would be above suspicion, no material interests being openly at stake, and it will alarm every selfishness of the class which should be impressed.  They believe that in some mysterious way science is at the source of their material prosperity.  They do.  And the absurd ferocity of such a demonstration will affect them more profoundly than the mangling of a whole street—or theatre—full of their own kind.  To that last they can always say: ‘Oh! it’s mere class hate.’  But what is one to say to an act of destructive ferocity so absurd as to be incomprehensible, inexplicable, almost unthinkable; in fact, mad?  Madness alone is truly terrifying, inasmuch as you cannot placate it either by threats, persuasion, or bribes.

[TheSkepticChristian]

9 minutes ago, thesometimesaint said:

Galileo was a Theist. His Theism certainly didn't slow down his science; Sir Issac Newton was a Theist. \

They lived in the 17th century, of course they were Theist. Most scientists in the 17th century were religious, but not today. 

9 minutes ago, thesometimesaint said:

Dr. Kenneth Miller is a Theist his Theism certainly doesn't slow down his science; Dr. Francis Collins is a Theist. His Theism certainly doesn't slow down his science. The list of scientists that were/are also Theists is very long. It would appear that religiosity is unrelated to the ability to do science.

I agree there are many good religious scientists today, but most scientists are not religious.  You still need to explain how religion is not slowing down scientific progress, why MOST religious people are not interested in studying a scientific field? Let alone becoming a NAS scientist. 

Edited February 18, 2016 by TheSkepticChristian

[volgadon]

31 minutes ago, TheSkepticChristian said:

They lived in the 17th century, of course they were Theist. Most scientists in the 17th century were religious, but not today. 

I agree there are many good religious scientists today, but most scientists are not religious.  You still need to explain how religion is not slowing down scientific progress, why MOST religious people are not interested in studying a scientific field? Let alone becoming a NAS scientist. 

Theists probably don't feel a need to fill a gap in the meaning of life, mystery, and the object of progress in quite the same way that atheists do.

Edited February 18, 2016 by volgadon
left out a word

[TheSkepticChristian]

9 minutes ago, volgadon said:

Theists probably don't feel a need to fill a gap in the meaning of life, mystery, and the object of progress in quite the same way that atheists do.

So you agree with the theory that religion is slowing scientific progress? 

49 minutes ago, thesometimesaint said:

 It would appear that religiosity is unrelated to the ability to do science.

I agree, but let me put it this way. Imagine that all Atheists and Agnostics go away, that would decrease the number of scientists a lot, in fact most most scientists would go away. Without the Atheists and Agnostics we would probably be like 30 years behind. 

In fact, imagine our progress if religious people had the same passion for Science like the atheists. 

[thesometimesaint]

35 minutes ago, TheSkepticChristian said:

They lived in the 17th century, of course they were Theist. Most scientists in the 17th century were religious, but not today. 

I agree there are many good religious scientists today, but most scientists are not religious.  You still need to explain how religion is not slowing down scientific progress, why MOST religious people are not interested in studying a scientific field? Let alone becoming a NAS scientist. 

I keep telling you, but you aren't accepting of what I'm saying . In sociology there is the phenomenon of "All Indians walk in single file".

SEE https://books.google.com/books?id=4qhiCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT154&lpg=PT154&dq=%22All+Indians+walk+in+single+file%22&source=bl&ots=OkpDrRxL83&sig=jPI_3Yzn7ZmHqs61dKl9o1znJDE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjyuoyT94HLAhVDymMKHfshA34Q6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q=%22All%20Indians%20walk%20in%20single%20file%22&f=false

Most people have more than enough to do just to keep food on the table, and a roof over their heads. It doesn't mean they're not interested in science, just that other things have a much higher priority for them.

[volgadon]

If we are to assign blame for a supposed slowing-down of scientific progress, then shouldn't some of it go to people like Neil de Grasse Tyson (see the quote below) who foster an image and narrative of science as antithetical to religion? Isn't that likely discouraging brilliant but religious individuals from becoming scientists?

“I want to put on the table, not why 85% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences reject God, I want to know why 15% of the National Academy don’t.”

[volgadon]

3 minutes ago, TheSkepticChristian said:

So you agree with the theory that religion is slowing scientific progress? 

I agree, but let me put it this way. Imagine that all Atheists and Agnostics go away, that would decrease the number of scientists a lot, in fact most most scientists would go away. Without the Atheists and Agnostics we would probably be like 30 years behind. 

In fact, imagine our progress if religious people had the same passion for Science like the atheists. 

No, not at all. In fact, I believe that you keep missing the point. You are assuming that if atheists suddenly all disappeared, then a vacuum would remain. No, my remark has to do with the role of science as an alternative religion for many atheists, and to suggest that you are asking the wrong questions.

[mfbukowski]

17 minutes ago, volgadon said:

If we are to assign blame for a supposed slowing-down of scientific progress, then shouldn't some of it go to people like Neil de Grasse Tyson (see the quote below) who foster an image and narrative of science as antithetical to religion? Isn't that likely discouraging brilliant but religious individuals from becoming scientists?

“I want to put on the table, not why 85% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences reject God, I want to know why 15% of the National Academy don’t.”

The 15 % that don't have taken philosophy 101 by accident, and have the capacity to think in shades of grey.  Scientists are fundamentalists. Literal thinking only is permitted

 

Edited February 18, 2016 by mfbukowski

[thesometimesaint]

12 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

The 15 % that don't have taken philosophy 101 by accident, and have the capacity to think in shades of grey.  Scientists are fundamentalists. Literal thinking only is permitted

 

I wouldn't go that far either. I think a better explanation is that science can't posit any God or Godlike force and still be science. Individual scientists can believe anything they want.

Edited February 18, 2016 by thesometimesaint

[USU78]

1 hour ago, TheSkepticChristian said:

They lived in the 17th century, of course they were Theist. Most scientists in the 17th century were religious, but not today. 

I agree there are many good religious scientists today, but most scientists are not religious.  You still need to explain how religion is not slowing down scientific progress, why MOST religious people are not interested in studying a scientific field? Let alone becoming a NAS scientist. 

Einstein not only believed in so irrational a thing as G-d, he also believed in the irrationality of Schiller, whose wholesale theft of Hegel's dialectical system led Einstein to believe and publicly tout Schiller's irrational notion of Spieltrieb as a descriptor of the creative process.  Or is Einstein too oldfashioned for you?  Too steeped i XVIIIth Century thought?

[Gray]

2 hours ago, TheSkepticChristian said:

It is not

I think that's still pretty high, but that's really only a single issue. 

[Kemara]

3 hours ago, TheSkepticChristian said:

It does. The fact that most scientists are not religious proves that the nonreligious have a greater passion for Science. Of course there are many Theists that also have a high passion for Science, but stats prove that it is mostly secular people. 

To study a scientific field means you need to have a high passion for Science. Science courses at the university are hard. 

So, it does because you say it does, brilliant! The statistical data you use does not support your position. You have refused to answer my questions on three occasions even after being specifically asked too. You have refused to answer every request for data and reasoning to back up your claims. You have refused to engage my reasoning on the topic unless of course you believe that "it is because I say it is" constitutes meaningful engagement. To continue making the claims you do based on the data you have provided is a simple case of intellectual dishonesty.

My final question - does being a sceptical Christian slow down intellectual rigour?

Edited February 18, 2016 by Kemara

[mfbukowski]

29 minutes ago, USU78 said:

Einstein not only believed in so irrational a thing as G-d, he also believed in the irrationality of Schiller, whose wholesale theft of Hegel's dialectical system led Einstein to believe and publicly tout Schiller's irrational notion of Spieltrieb as a descriptor of the creative process.  Or is Einstein too oldfashioned for you?  Too steeped i XVIIIth Century thought?

No just too difficult! ; )

Seriously though we owe the German philosophers the way out of this Western maze of literalism.  They give us a new Weltanschauung quite harmonious with our gospel in which human perception creates the world as we know it.

Once you see that, how could it be otherwise?

Science is created by the human brain.  Why scientists cannot see that is beyond me.

[thesometimesaint]

1 minute ago, mfbukowski said:

Science is created by the human brain.  Why scientists cannot see that is beyond me.

But they do. Science by definition is the human ability to understand and make accurate predictions about the world/universe.

[mfbukowski]

10 minutes ago, thesometimesaint said:

But they do. Science by definition is the human ability to understand and make accurate predictions about the world/universe.

But you confirm the exact problem. You have the human being vs the world instead of the world inside the human being

The world/universe as perceived and therefore created by the human brain.  That is the part you do not get.  You think you are looking out, all you see is a mirror of the way your brain organizes "reality"

Of course I am saying that in a non-spiritual way.  We LDS say that a Human God organizes the world through the Word.  To me, that is just another way of saying the same thing as the first sentence.

Edited February 18, 2016 by mfbukowski

[thesometimesaint]

That is true only in a very limited sense of the word. We all do invent our own reality until it conflicts with what others think is reality. However If you think there isn't an objective reality then try jumping off of a high cliff sans parachute.

I think the LDS would say that the Word is Jesus the Christ, and that he used very objective reality to assemble our world/universe.

[USU78]

23 hours ago, TheSkepticChristian said:

I am glad our church says that Scientific evidence shows dinosaurs lived on this earth before man. 

I am glad our church published that because only 33% of scientists believe in a personal God. That means agnostics/atheists  have a greater passion for Science than Christians, data shows 

 

 

Back to the beginning:  nowhere here or in the rest of this thread has the OP or anybody else really sought to narrow down what is meant by grow, increase, higher, or anything else related to the notion of science being somehow slowed down by the deadwood of believers amongst scientiests.  Reminds me of this little bit of sendup fluff by early Dylan:

Well, my telephone rang it would not stop
It’s President Kennedy callin’ me up
He said, “My friend, Bob, what do we need to make the country grow?”
I said, “My friend, John, Brigitte Bardot, Anita Ekberg, Sophia Loren, country'll grow.”

 

[mfbukowski]

2 hours ago, thesometimesaint said:

That is true only in a very limited sense of the word. We all do invent our own reality until it conflicts with what others think is reality. However If you think there isn't an objective reality then try jumping off of a high cliff sans parachute.

I think the LDS would say that the Word is Jesus the Christ, and that he used very objective reality to assemble our world/universe.

Again and again you miss the point

If I jumped off what my brain told me was a high mountain, I would feel what my brain was "falling" for a long time while my brain was in fear and my brain saw the rocks rushing up to me, until I felt what my brain feels as it is dying.

After that, it would get interesting.

Or not.  But now we are talking about "hope for things unseen".

If you know how to escape a human body with a human brain, please let me be the first to know, ok?  And astral projection doesn't count, because all the reports of it come from- guess what- a human brain.  All reports of spiritual experience come from a human brain.  All predictions about future human brain experiences come from a human brain.  My human brain tells me that my human brain will perceive a thermometer reading "212 degrees F" at the same time that water "bubbles" denoting what my brain  calls "boiling".

Science predicts what human brains will experience under given conditions but discounts many aspects of the experience while doing so, like the fact that one is hungry or tired or perhaps distracted while writing down data.  While observing the water boiling, my brain can be telling me many other things totally ignored by science, like how cute the lab assistant is, or why my knee hurts, or the feeling that I better stand up now, or gosh I wonder who will win the primary next week.  But all that is part of the experience, and was not predicted by science.  My brain may be worrying about not getting that grant money if the thermometer does not read 212, or just throwing out the data as an "outlier" if the data does not match my expectation, but all  of it comes out of a human brain.

Because I am talking to you I used the word "Brain", but in a spiritual context one could use "mind" or "spirit" just as easily

Instead of saying "My brain organizes reality as I know it"  we could just as easily use a religious vocabulary to say that "my mind" or "my spirit" or "my consciousness" organizes the world around me

Or in a faith mode, I could say "I believe that God, who is a glorified human, organizes the world through his intelligence".   Not much difference.

But until you realize that you cannot get out of your human body, you will always think you can "KNOW" what's "out there".

The experience of jumping off a cliff will just be the same problem- you will know what it feels like to be a human jumping off a cliff- for a few seconds- nothing more or nothing less.

Personally I don't think I want to know that.  No curiosity whatsoever.

But I do not know how anyone can deny any of this.  It is as true as A=A.   It is a tautology.  A human brain can only know what a human brain can know.

And yet again and again we speak of human brains knowing something beyond what they can experience and worse, call  that strange unknowable world "reality"

It is a total mystery to me how anyone could believe that.

 I guess scientists who think that way need to develop critical thinking skills.

Edited February 18, 2016 by mfbukowski

[Gray]

The fact that 18% believe in a higher power but can't bring themselves to call that God tells me we have a problem with the word God. 

[mfbukowski]

56 minutes ago, Gray said:

The fact that 18% believe in a higher power but can't bring themselves to call that God tells me we have a problem with the word God. 

No question about it.  And I propose that the restored gospel- if we get rid of the sectarian "substance" garbage - has great potential.

I propose "The Ideal Human" to speak to these people- or some kind of "archetype" or "Ideal Human Paradigm".  You can say what you want about "New Age" stuff but the fact is that they have co-opted the language as EV's have now co-opted the term "Christian" to mean their own little fundamentalist view.

Secularists might not be ready for Joseph Smith's God with body parts and passions, visions and gold plates, but an ideal human being is something they can understand as a paradigm for ethical behavior

The can understand prayer as "meditation" and the still small voice as "getting in touch with your inner ideal being"

When they understand that we need to treasure ALL parts of human experience- objective AND subjective, feelings, emotions, intuitions and hunches- in their proper sphere- we will be getting somewhere.

I can even envision a kind of secular preparatory "religion" that parallels ours in every way- until they get clobbered by the spirit and realize there really IS an "intelligence" out there guiding us and loving us.

Add it up.  18+33= 51%, a majority who could probably accept it as I see it.

Edited February 18, 2016 by mfbukowski

[The Nehor]

20 hours ago, TheSkepticChristian said:

83% of Americans believe in a personal God, but only 33% of scientists believe in God, why? and only 10% of NAS scientists believe in God, why?

Does that mean that without Atheists there would have been far fewer scientists? How is that not slowing down scientific progress? 

Define scientist in this survey. It has been my experience that in the purer sciences (physics, astronomy, and the like) you get a strong dose of theists. When you wander into more nebulous fields like sociology and psychiatry and the like you get more atheists (almost purely atheist). Can I take this anecdotal evidence to suggest that atheists are drawn more to pseudoscience?

How does this go with the LDS faith. How do we rate?

[The Nehor]

9 hours ago, TheSkepticChristian said:

So you agree with the theory that religion is slowing scientific progress? 

I agree, but let me put it this way. Imagine that all Atheists and Agnostics go away, that would decrease the number of scientists a lot, in fact most most scientists would go away. Without the Atheists and Agnostics we would probably be like 30 years behind. 

In fact, imagine our progress if religious people had the same passion for Science like the atheists. 

You are drawing a lot of conclusions from results that are vague and with an unexplored methodology. Do you also fall for a lot of pyramid schemes?

[thesometimesaint]

6 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Again and again you miss the point

If I jumped off what my brain told me was a high mountain, I would feel what my brain was "falling" for a long time while my brain was in fear and my brain saw the rocks rushing up to me, until I felt what my brain feels as it is dying.

After that, it would get interesting.

Or not.  But now we are talking about "hope for things unseen".

If you know how to escape a human body with a human brain, please let me be the first to know, ok?  And astral projection doesn't count, because all the reports of it come from- guess what- a human brain.  All reports of spiritual experience come from a human brain.  All predictions about future human brain experiences come from a human brain.  My human brain tells me that my human brain will perceive a thermometer reading "212 degrees F" at the same time that water "bubbles" denoting what my brain  calls "boiling".

Science predicts what human brains will experience under given conditions but discounts many aspects of the experience while doing so, like the fact that one is hungry or tired or perhaps distracted while writing down data.  While observing the water boiling, my brain can be telling me many other things totally ignored by science, like how cute the lab assistant is, or why my knee hurts, or the feeling that I better stand up now, or gosh I wonder who will win the primary next week.  But all that is part of the experience, and was not predicted by science.  My brain may be worrying about not getting that grant money if the thermometer does not read 212, or just throwing out the data as an "outlier" if the data does not match my expectation, but all  of it comes out of a human brain.

Because I am talking to you I used the word "Brain", but in a spiritual context one could use "mind" or "spirit" just as easily

Instead of saying "My brain organizes reality as I know it"  we could just as easily use a religious vocabulary to say that "my mind" or "my spirit" or "my consciousness" organizes the world around me

Or in a faith mode, I could say "I believe that God, who is a glorified human, organizes the world through his intelligence".   Not much difference.

But until you realize that you cannot get out of your human body, you will always think you can "KNOW" what's "out there".

The experience of jumping off a cliff will just be the same problem- you will know what it feels like to be a human jumping off a cliff- for a few seconds- nothing more or nothing less.

Personally I don't think I want to know that.  No curiosity whatsoever.

But I do not know how anyone can deny any of this.  It is as true as A=A.   It is a tautology.  A human brain can only know what a human brain can know.

And yet again and again we speak of human brains knowing something beyond what they can experience and worse, call  that strange unknowable world "reality"

It is a total mystery to me how anyone could believe that.

 I guess scientists who think that way need to develop critical thinking skills.

If I want to know at what temperature water boils at normal sea level atmospheric pressure. Admiring my lab assistants figure, while entertaining, is not relevant to that study.

Interestingly with small children it takes them experience and time to determine actual falling from an optical allusion. 

There are limits to which our unaided brain, and senses can "know" something. But for at least the last 400 years or so our inventions have greatly expanded that knowledge. I foresee no real limits on that ability.