Science and Religion

[mmaestro]

"One cannot ask whether a theory reflects reality, just whether it agrees with observations."
-Professor Stephen Hawking

That was from an interview with Professor Hawking broadcast by the BBC on Thursday (hear the whole thing as an mp3 download here, it's fascinating). He was talking about the prospect of other dimensions, not really relevant here

Comments

[sharp_blue]

My issue with this way to resolve any conflict between science and religion is this: religious insights into the nature of reality ultimately reduce to whatever makes the person doing the believing feel warm and fuzzy inside. This might tell us quite a lot about the person in question but it tells us nothing whatsoever about the nature of reality. Indeed, the fact that there are a large number of competing and mutually exclusive religious accounts of the ultimate nature of reality suggests that religion doesn't even tend to converge on a common picture to the limited degree that science does (at least scientists tend to agree on the experimental data even if they have wildly varying explanations of those data).

If science isn't able to see right into the deepest, most profound level of reality that doesn't by default mean that religion can do so. It might simply mean that the deepest reality is unknowable.

[mmaestro]

religious insights into the nature of reality ultimately reduce to whatever makes the person doing the believing feel warm and fuzzy inside.

I'm afraid I really don't buy that. Simply because many in the scientific community wish to boil religion down into something which makes people feel warm and fuzzy inside doesn't necessarily make it so. While our experience of religion may be internal, that it isn't concrete in no way makes it less relevant to our existance, nor somehow worth of belittlement. That's a judgement call, nothing more. And frankly, a pretty offensive one in my opinion.
The need to reduce everything into one universally agreed upon experience and vision is, in and of itself, a scientific one at its heart. You're asking for a religious experience to be presented in a scientific way and, of course, it cannot be. The whole idea is coming at religion from the wrong place. If we can just get all religions to agree upon the same thing then maybe we can test it? That's the antithesis of what I'm saying in the first place.

[palliddreamer]

Finally someone gets it right. Well said.

[wingsrising]

I don't know. I know a lot of scientists and "it's not science" seems to me to pretty much be what the anti-religion thing boils down to.

There have been a lot of very smart people over the ages who feel they've had an experience of God. Why is believing in God because you feel you've seen him irrational, when believing in the Grand Canyon because you feel you've seen it rational?

Of course, most of the people who believe in God don't feel they've experienced him. On the other hand, I've never seen the Grand Canyon but believe in it on the strength of other people's testimony and no one considers that irrational.

[mmaestro]

If they're not testable or observable, how do we know they exist at all?

Personal experience. As a wholly individual, almost exclusively internal experience, this just isn't something which can be "proven" in the way science works (or, really, in any way at all).

Dawkins is a particularly frustrating individual, I agree. He's a good example of what I'm talking about (perhaps fundamentalist atheist would have been a better way to describe what I'm talking about), but there are others, like Steve Jones for instance.