Senate Is there a conflict between Religion and Science?

No. Luke 1:35 speaks the plain truth about how Jesus' birth came about- that Mary was a virgin and her conception and Jesus' birth was the work of God the Father, whereby God the Son came down to Earth to live His life as a sinless mortal. Just my view, of course. You're welcome to believe whatever you want, but timmioshere is wrong.

 

The problem with that is that when you talk about religion, you are also inherently involving a discussion of the past. Most of the atheists I've known that actively argue against the existence of God on the basis of lack of evidence keep trying to apply the principles of the hard sciences to historical events associated with religion, rather than applying the principles used for studying any other historical event. That is a misapplication of the scientific method.

The simple fact is that just because you haven't seen "proof" that God exists doesn't mean that no one else has. What is "proof" for one person can be "hearsay" for another. Just because you can't directly share in the experiences that I've had doesn't invalidate those experiences as evidence for me. While I know that they are accurate, because they are my own experience, for you there are merely hearsay because you have only my word that they happened.

Yes, that is somewhat subjective, but there's nothing wrong with that. That sort of subjectivity is part of life, and is reflected in everything from how we study the past to how our justice system works on a day-to-day basis. It's only really in the physical sciences where we start to see a lot more focus on actual objectivity. But religion isn't part of the hard sciences, and it shouldn't be treated as if it were.

 

While there is certainly a lot to be discussed about the past, I don't think is necessary. I think one can simply look at that very often, religious is treated to have some effect on reality now. In some sense, there is an interventionist god. If that is the case, then there should be some difference between how the universe works with a god vs how the universe works without a god. However, there is no inconsistency between the universe as it works according to our understanding and how it actually appears to work that can be solved by the introduction of a god. In that sense, adding a god doesn't do anything to help understand the universe. A good example of this is that studies on prayer show that it doesn't work in blind tests, for example.

However, there is still a widespread pattern of people that behave as though prayer has an effect. And that is taken on faith and anecdote, rather than objective evidence. And that inherent conflict carries on, imo, into how people will ignore objective evidence to side with what they 'believe' and prefer. It's not a pattern that is exclusive to religion, but is certainly present with a large swath of religion.

 

The problem is that those studies don't disprove the existence of God. At best, again, they only only continue a lack of proof that God exists.

To bring it back around to the actual topic (conflict between Religion and Science), what I am trying to say is that whether they actually conflict basically comes down to individual interpretations of both. You can interpret scientific beliefs and theories such that they conflict with religious teachings, and you can interpret religious teachings such that they conflict with scientific beliefs and theories. However, you can also interpret both religious teachings and scientific theories such that they are consistent with each other.

As such, there is no inherent conflict between Science and Religion. There are only conflicts between specific interpretations of each.

 

Except, again, you're talking about the results of science vs results of religion, and my point is that they have conflicting methodologies. One is beginning with observations and trying to explain them in a way that gives greater understanding to those observations, while the other starts with statements of faith and attempts to find ways to make observations 'fit' those statements if at all possible.

 

I guess Jabba's on a plane right now, so I'll just shelter his argument here:

 

Why am I wrong? Why are you right? Why does that passage in Luke get to be the absolute truth? Instead of just saying "you're wrong," why don't you actually show some evidence?

Please look up the stories of the older gods I mentioned. You'll be amazed at how much Christianity borrowed from other myths. And when you say "why would Luke lie about that?", ask yourself why any author would "lie" about the characters he's writing about. Did George Lucas lie when he said Star Wars takes place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away? Did Tolkien lie about Frodo's journey to Mount Doom?

Using the Bible to prove the Bible is a futile endeavor. It's circular logic, it doesn't get you anywhere. It's basically saying "The Bible is true because the Bible says so!" I'm sure you can see the logical flaw in that sort of statement. I could just as easily claim that Hogwarts is real because the Harry Potter books say so.

 

". Just because you can't directly share in the experiences that I've had doesn't invalidate those experiences as evidence for me. While I know that they are accurate, because they are my own experience, for you there are merely hearsay because you have only my word that they happened."

Good for you. It does not mean you are right. The problem with allowing such mentality beyond the fact that you can go to your church for it is that education and policy are wrongfully being manipulated by it. You want to believe and go to church? No one is stopping you. The line is drawn there. Your beliefs will not dicate what is taught in school as fact. Your beliefs will not effect the laws of th eland. Your beliefs are beaneath the laws of the land.

"But religion isn't part of the hard sciences, and it shouldn't be treated as if it were."

Yes it should be. It deserves no special treatment. This is nothing more than an argument for placing magic man in the sky mentality above reality, research, reason, and facts.

Of course there is a conflict between religion and science. The conflict happens when the non-facts of religion try to dictate the facts of reality.

 

For what it's worth, personal experiences are not, and never shall be, evidence for a thing existing. Personal experiences are unreliable at best. You could be hallucinating, you could be misinterpreting what you see, or you could be seeing things through the lens of confirmation bias.

I mean, would you trust a person whose "personal experience" had them encountering ghosts or UFOs or the Loch Ness Monster?

 

There can be no conflict where there is no interest. So this photo proves there is no conflict.

OK, if I can be serious now, I have never felt any conflict between my own faith and my understanding of science (which was always one of my best subjects in school). I believe God created the universe and everything in it including us, and I believe that science helps us better understand the wonders of creation. I also believe many scientists who don't believe in God tend to interpret scientific evidence in ways that "disprove" God and they ridicule interpretations of the same evidence that support the existence of God. Sadly, many Christians respond to that by attacking science and adding to the ill will. So it's really a conflict between people who refuse to see things from any other point of view, not a conflict between the concepts themselves.

 

Science doesn't have an interest in destroying God. Science simply wants to understand more. However, that understanding has increasingly indicated that there is no guiding hand behind the origins of the universe.

Science doesn't need to disprove God, because it is hardly necessary to disprove that which has never been proven.

 

I'd be exceptionally interested in seeing what evidence there is that indicates a god that science is ignoring.

Not necessarily. Religion isn't strictly discussing the realm that science provides insight for (although it can, and frequently does). Religion also contains a philosophical side, and that can't be put to the tests of a science simply because it's a whole different beast.

 

+1. Religion in general terms, and Christianity for much of its run excepting the past five hundred years or so, has had much, much more in common with the appreciation of music or art than it has science, if you look at the theological engine powering it. Thomas Aquinas would hardly recognise Christianity in its present terms as compared with how he understood it at a fundamental level when he first wrote his seminal theological works. Complicating this is the fact that the very meaning of words has changed; the very word 'belief' some centuries ago had a meaning consistent with 'commitment' rather than 'intellectual assertion of a set of facts.' That change alone has vast implications for the way we read every religious text in the Christian sphere. The model of God which is currently mainstream in Christianity is a relatively new and very different form to that which monotheistic Judaeo-Christian religions have revered for the past few thousand years.

For me, that is why religion and science don't conflict. When someone asks you to prove the existence of God, the first question is: define the model of God you are seeking to pin down. There have been several over religion's history, and there are likely to be more over time. In general, trying or demanding proof of the existence of God is as silly an exercise as shouting that "Weeping Woman" by Picasso does not accord with human physiology and is therefore not a woman: it is utterly missing the point. It is why George's Lemaitre got annoyed with Pius XII when he said the Big Bang proved creationism; as both scientist and theologian he knew the two branches of knowledge had nothing to do with each other, and said so.

 

Skywalker8921, you do realize that there's more people who claim they saw the Jabba scene in the original Star Wars film in 1977 than that there are people who actually saw Jesus when he lived and wrote about it?

Do you believe the Jabba scene was in the original Star Wars film in 1977?

 

Some authors of the New Testament are unknown, but it's conceivable that some of them met Jesus. Remember that Jesus died around 35 AD, not 1 AD. So when people say things like "the gospels were written 80 years after Jesus died," it's really more like 30 years later. Also, it's accepted that the stories of the Gospels were passed along both orally and in writing before being formally composed into the Gospels.

 

I'd say 30 years is pretty misleading.
Mark would have been 30-35 years after Jesus would have died. Matthew is written about 50 years after Jesus died, Luke is 55 to 65 years after Jesus died, and John is around 60 years after.

The point isn't that the stories were created out of whole cloth then, but that's a lot of time for all sorts of other embellishments to be added. And people's testimony after the fact can be bad. For example, in 1987 when Halley's Comet was approaching, there were a lot of interviews with people that were alive to have seen Halley's Comet in 1910. And a huge portion of them didn't describe Halley's Comet, and it wasn't consistent with what happened in 1910. They were describing a different comet. So even someone's own testimony isn't reliable after a lot of time.

 

Personal testimony of a religious experience or just about any other experience is the exact opposite of peer review. I know which side I want to place bets on for accuracy and reliability.

In just a generation or two a lot of myth-building around charismatic individuals can take place. Look at some of our presidents and some of the myth-building that has gone on in just a few generations. Time and human memory is not kind to accuracy.

 

The authors of the Gospels are unknown. They were originally written in Greek. The language of the followers of Jesus was not Greek it was Aramaic and they were most likely illiterate (as were around 90% of all of the people in those days). It is conceivable that some of the authors of the gospels met Jesus but it is highly, highly unlikely. The originals are lost, so all biblical scholars have to go on are copies and the earliest copy of Mark (which is the first of the Gospels) is dated around 200 which is approximately 150 years after the original was first thought to be written. So you are talking about an oral tradition which was passed on from person to person for around 30 to 40 years, before it was ever documented in the first Gospel of Mark. Then the first Gospel of Mark was hand copied from scribe to scribe for decades and decades. The earliest copy is a copy of copies which had been in copy circulation for 150 years! The other Gospels were written even later. There is no reputable biblical scholar who disputes this.

The probability that the Gospels accurately reflect the events that they purport to depict is so remote that they they are meaningless from an historical perspective.

 

Quick question on that, with the first gospels not something we have, do you know how they conclude that they were originally written in Greek with that 150 year gap between when they would've been written and the age of the first copies?

 

I have no idea about how they conclude they were originally written in Greek but this seems to be something all biblical scholars agree on. In terms of the gap, that is determined by handwriting analysis. Ancient handwriting experts, called paleographers, can apparently date a manuscript according to its handwriting with a 50 year margin of error. This all comes from Bart Ehrman's book "Misquoting Jesus" and the lecture I linked to in the other thread on christianity - I've posted the link before and can again if you think you'd find it worthwhile. None of this is particularly relevant to the topic of the thread. On that point, I would just say that there is no inherent 'conflict' just that religion and science are two completely different ways of looking at the same phenomena. The former is a methodology whilst the latter is more of a philosophy I guess.

 

Been doing some digging, turns out the original versions of the Gospels are assumed to have been written in koine, because that was the common language in Meditteranean countries in that era. It's a watered-down version of Ancient Greek. The oldest copies of the Gospels are written in koine.



Koine entry from Encyclopedia Brittanica
The term comes from the Greek koine (“common” or “shared”), although the variety was based chiefly on the Attic Greek dialect. A compromise variety, this original koine consisted of features easily recognizable to speakers of most Greek dialects and dispensed with those that most often impeded mutual intelligibility. In linguistics, the term koine is now applied to any modified language variety that has developed from contact between dialects of the same language or, in some cases, between languages that are genetically or typologically related.

 

It is unlikely that NO ONE ever wrote anything about Jesus until Mark did.

Source: Common sense.