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Re: Science!=Religion

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Posted by S.H. Le on September 29, 1999 03:51:53 UTC

:In reply to Science!=Religion, I think that you're mistaken. Granted, religion is composed of philosopy and explanation, where science lacks the former. However, at one time religion served as a science (and still does for some people), and was taken for absolute truth. Historically, religion has been implemented as a tool of explanation. Consider early humans. They likely had difficulty distinguishing their dreams from reality. Thus when they entered a dream and saw deceased relatives and friends, they might assume that they had travelled to some supernatural realm. He would awake, find his surroundings to be exactly as he left them; why, he'd even be well rested. He might then conclude that his soul had travelled some great distance to meet his lost loved ones. Here's another example. Perhaps that same man had the misfortune of having to bury his father (a practice that dates back nearly as far as humans have existed). Suppose that the man returned to the gravesite a few months later. He would be astonished to find that the entire area has benefited from an inexplicable increase in plant life. Of course today, science would say that nutrients were released from his fathers decomposing body, which enriched the surrounding soil. But how would primitive man explain such an event? Could it not be perfectly logical to the man that the spirit of his father had come to help humans, by increasing the vegetation? From this point, it's not a huge leap to see how early religions often employed human sacrifices to improve their harvests. All I'm trying to say is that religion has once served as the prestigious role that science now occupies. As for your argument: "God is not a scientific object, you can not use scientific methods on him. Since the Bible is not a scientific book, you cannot explain scientific issues from it (like how and when the universe came to existence)."

Well, why do you think that God cannot be proven? The very concept of God has been repeatedly revised so that any type of scientific experimentation is impossible. Take this mock-conversation as an example. "There are goblins dancing around my head." [believer] "Well, I don't see anything. How do you know they exist?" [skeptic] "Ha! Faithless one. They're invisible." "Gee, there must be some way to test your theory. Perhaps these goblins emitt some kind of odor, or you physically feel them dancing on your head?" "Nope, these goblins are invisible to the senses. But I know they're there. I have faith!"

So what exactly is faith? It seems to me that faith is the insistence in clinging to a concept that makes you feel good; something that serves as a crutch.

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