Impossibillity?

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By religion as a survival instinct, I meant that self-aware organisms might not try to live without something to drive them to live. It's just natural selection. Of course it gets far too complex to make sense when you involve high-level behaviors like fighting a war.
closed account (iw0XoG1T)
Religion can not be replaced by science--they are not interchangable. Everyone needs has a philosophy they live by. You may find it easier not to refer to it as your religion or prefer to call it a philosophy, but you still have one.

I can imagine a person who lives for nothing but self--but I have never met a person like that. I have met people who live for country, I have met people who live for family, I have met people who live to better society, and I have met people who live for god, but I never met anyone who lives for science.

In my opinion if you say that religion will be replaced by science you understand neither the purpose of science nor religion. Science can prove a philosphy/religion false but it is not a replacemnt for a philosophy/religion.
1. Exceeding the speed of light.

that statement made me chuckle, considering we use to think that Exceeding the speed of sound was impossible... in fact, we didn't even know it had a measurable speed.

Seems that humans are a stupid specie, as we never learn from our past. We continually prove impossible things to be possible, yet we keep arguing blindly that certain things are impossible

I will not really take part of the religious conversations. As I consider myself a logical and rational individual, yet I am a faithful christian without shame. I think people all have different belief and everyone should have the right to believe in what they wish without prejudice from others. Religion (or the lack of) has always turned into heated debates in most forums.
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closed account (iw0XoG1T)
oria wrote:
I will not really take part of the religious conversations.
You already have. I am Christian also--but I believe people don't have to respect me or my beliefs.
I believe that people who do not question authority and systems keep things from becoming better.
Oria wrote:
I think people all have different belief and everyone should have the right to believe in what they wish without prejudice from others

I half-agree. Everyone may believe what they want, be it rationally justified or not, but we shouldn't believe things that aren't rationally justified. Nor should we delude ourselves into thinking that all opinions are of equal value like those horrible relativists. It's perfectly reasonable to judge a person negatively for holding irrational beliefs, because a person who holds a lot of irrational beliefs is likely to be an irrational person. Rationality being something we should desire, it's fair to hold prejudice against the irrational. Now, of course, no-one is perfectly rational and everyone holds some rational beliefs (often without realisation), but a rational person, upon discovering the irrationality of their beliefs, would discard them. An irrational person would either ignore the evidence that their beliefs were irrational, maybe coming up with weak arguments like "race is a social construct" or "why isn't there a crocoduck?", or they would actually accept that their beliefs were irrational, but choose to hold them anyway (what is "cognitive dissonance", Alex). The second is actually worse.
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thats cool chwsks, i was just reading something on rs on yahoo about someone who thinks atheist cant be swayed to believe in christ with logic and reason 'cos atheists don't have any'

faith and logic rarely co-exist

I like it when you meet an open minded christian, because it gives me pointless hope in living after im dead, and a liscence to ponder a bit deeper than logic would let me.

I dont like being told someone died for my sins though, I will tae it as verbal assault next time I hear it
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Religion can not be replaced by science--they are not interchangable. Everyone needs has a philosophy they live by. You may find it easier not to refer to it as your religion or prefer to call it a philosophy, but you still have one.

I can imagine a person who lives for nothing but self--but I have never met a person like that. I have met people who live for country, I have met people who live for family, I have met people who live to better society, and I have met people who live for god, but I never met anyone who lives for science.

In my opinion if you say that religion will be replaced by science you understand neither the purpose of science nor religion. Science can prove a philosphy/religion false but it is not a replacemnt for a philosophy/religion.
I wish I had said that myself. It's sad how many atheists don't get this. It's even sadder how many religious people don't get this either.
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Some aspects of religion and philosophy are replaced by science - those that attempt to describe reality. Don't forget that science was once called natural philosophy.
closed account (iw0XoG1T)
chrisname wrote:
those that attempt to describe reality


Which religion are you talking about?

Judeo/Christianity has within its scriptures two creations stories (which contradict each other) so it was obvious that when these stories were choosen to be included in the cannon that describing creation was not the purpose.
In fact both creation stories were borrowed from other cultures. Many theologians believe that the reason for their inclusion was not to describe or answer how we were created but to describe the nature of God.

If you read a transalation of other versions of the creation stories as they were told in other cultures you should note how they were changed. Because that will give you more insight as to why they were included than looking at how they are the same.

I really doubt that the ancients were stupid enough two include to contradicting stories side-by-side and still believe that both were accurate and correct desriptions of the beginning of time.
@chris,
I wouldn't say that religion attempts to describe something. Rather, in absence of science, religion took up its job.

Philosophy is a bit different thing. When chwsks said it, he meant the way you live your life[1]. When you say it you mean dudes sitting around and thinking[2]. In the sense of [2], science is a branch of philosophy (the one branch which bothers to check if it's spouting nonsense). In the sense of [1], they are not directly related (I guess then philosophy[1] is amongst the things philosophy[2] is trying to think about).
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@chwsks
Two creation stories? I'm only aware of the story of Genesis; what's the other one?

hamsterman wrote:
I wouldn't say that religion attempts to describe something. Rather, in absence of science, religion took up its job.

If science is doing the job that religion used to do, then science replaced religion, which you just said was not true by agreeing with chwsks.

the one branch which bothers to check if it's spouting nonsense

That's a very anti-philosophical sentiment, and it's very wrong. Logic is a branch of philosophy, too, and all good philosophical arguments rely on it. Logic can be misused: Aristotle himself made a lot of bad arguments with logic, but that was because he was starting from false premises. He believed that humans were born with some innate knowledge of truths and that he could derive new truths from them, which we now know is wrong.
closed account (iw0XoG1T)
They're both in Genesis.

1.) Seven days of Creation
2.) Adam and Eve

Google two creations stories of the bible--look for legitmate articles written by theologians and not nut cases. After you read them both you will realize that they contradict each other.
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Interesting. One of the articles I read points out that Jesus confirms the first creation story in the New Testament:
Jesus settled it in Mark 10:6, "From the beginning of the creation God made them male and female."

From http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/accounts.html
I always thought Adam and Eve was the story about people moving from a hunter/gatherer society to agriculture (Adam was forced to work the land for food). The interesting about it is that it was a punishment, allowing us to think that it was the hunter/gatherers who wrote the story.

Google two creations stories of the bible--look for legitmate articles written by theologians and not nut cases. After you read them both you will realize that they contradict each other.


Just get a Bible and read it (as in, why use google?).

I think religion and science are the same. They both attempt to fill that gap of our basic non-understanding of ourselves and our universe. Philosophy, that is for people with too much time on their hand (who can think about what's right instead of actually having to do something).
@chris,
I was trying to point out a more slight distinction. Religion definitely was used to explain things, there is little question about it. However. Reading your post it seems as if religion was bested by science in a competition. The way I see it is that religion never was in that competition - in absence of science it turned out to get the job but now that there is science it can be relieved of this burden entirely irrelevant to its purpose.

About philosophy. My remark was overly harsh just for extra color, but it is not wrong. When you talk about nature of the world, you're a philosopher, when you start measuring things, you slowly turn into a physicist. There is hardly any other distinction (and even then, that distinction is not so clear, in particular with early philosophers).
I'm not sure what your point about Aristotle was. We seem to agree that he spouted nonsense because he didn't (because he couldn't, most likely. I'm not trying to attack Aristotle here. Is the word "spout" obscuring that?) check his assumptions. Hence he is more of a philosopher and less of a physicist (though there is no reason not to call him both).
science is a branch of philosophy

It's like saying C++ is a dialect of C.
Considering we've got C++11 and C11 both moving away from each-other, I would say it's more like they have a common ancestor.
hamsterman wrote:
Reading your post it seems as if religion was bested by science in a competition

That's not what I was trying to say. Although there are some religious people (and atheists) who think that way.

it is not wrong. When you talk about nature of the world, you're a philosopher, when you start measuring things, you slowly turn into a physicist. There is hardly any other distinction

You're conflating "philosophy" and "metaphysics". There is also aesthetics, ethics, epistemology and, of course, logic. You don't need to (and can't) measure things for those, nor can you for many problems in metaphysics. If the problem of philosophy is that philosophers don't measure things, then the problem of science is that scientists assume that measurements are meaningful.

I'm not sure what your point about Aristotle was

The only reason Aristotle was wrong was because he started from false premises. If he hadn't then he wouldn't have "spouted nonsense". The same applies to philosophers in general.

LowestOne wrote:
Philosophy, that is for people with too much time on their hand

It is useful, though. Mostly for developing critical thinking and logical skills.
@Cubbi, no, it's actually a lot more like saying that C++ is a kind of programming language. I wonder how you define philosophy. I suggest looking at its etymology - it's not a misnomer. Though it might be that philosophy now and before scientific revolution means different things.
No, science is not a kind of philosophy. It certainly evolved out of metaphysics, combined with many other sources and influences, but for at least a century it has been moving in its own direction, and the philosophers have been scrambling to describe it. Pragmatism, logical positivism, critical rationalism, entity realism, whatever -- science just moves on (and off-handedly turns the whole metaphysics upside-down every few decades). I certainly never once thought about Kuhn, Popper or Lakatos while running SDS-PAGEs or analyzing 4D NMR spectra.
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