Religion

[DannyF1966]

I mean I can understand parents telling the odd porky pie to their kids about santa claus etc to help the kiddies toe the line

To me, this is the entire reason for religion. It's boogieman stories told to scare kids into behaving a certain way, and for the life of me I can't work out why so many people still believe them.

Thousands of years ago, if there was a flood or the crops failed and no-one knew why, I can understand people saying "it must be a punishment for something bad we did". But the time for thinking like that is long, long gone.

[NickyBoy]

Probably because you're ignorant. The more we learn, the more we discover there is TO learn. There are probably more questions now than 100 years ago, and science is definitely no closer to answering "Why?"

Finding out there is more to learn doesn't actually increase what there is to learn.The sum total of all there is to learn in the universe stays constant, regardless of our awareness of its scale.

Our scientific advancement isn't relative nor is our knowledge shrinking.

The more we learn, the more certain we become that the answer to "Why" is "Why not?"*


*That is, of course, a very trite way of summing up the argument that existence has no reason and no meaning. Existence just exists.

[NotAllThere]

I've merged the religious argument from this thread http://forums.contractoruk.com/gener...-shooting.html into here.

Plus Godel's argument is moronic.

It's possible that Gödel's argument is moronic, but the balance of probabilities suggest that, having made such a statement, it's SpontaneousOrder who is moronic, and that he hasn't the intellectual capacity to understand Gödel's argument. It seems he's one of those morons who, if they can't understand something, are incapable of comprehending that it's because they're a bit fick.

[NickyBoy]

Santa Claus is a story made up to get kids to behave.
God is a story made up to get adults to behave.

[FatLazyContractor]

Santa Claus is a story made up to get kids to behave.
God is a story made up to get adults to behave.

And pope is a name made up for adults to misbehave with kids ?

[DannyF1966]

And pope is a name made up for adults to misbehave with kids ?

... aaaaand now I've got Tim Minchin's Pope Song in my head.

[d000hg]

No one with any credibility would say that, other than to suggest that science allows us to figure most things out rather than needing to make things up. Science is the opposite of religion, i.e. scientific method vs faith.
If they are opposites of each other in that sense, than it's logically impossible for one to disprove the other.

That's rather what I meant. Learning more about science doesn't make the idea of a creator more or less believable. If you believe in a god to fill in the gaps in our knowledge things are different but that's exactly the kind of ignorance I am referring to. The two are on different planes.[/quote]

Excuse me? Just because science doesn't know all the answers, and in fact it never claims to know all the answers, you'd rather turn to a [1]1000+year-old book that claims it does know all the answers? [2]What's wrong with saying "we don't know the answer to that, but we're trying to find out?"

I didn't say [1] and as for [2]: that's a good attitude to have.

If they learned stuff that exposed more questions, then they are - by definition - closer to understanding 'everything'.

Alright, fair enough. But I think you know what I meant - at the time it seemed like nearly all the pieces were in place so as far as scientists were/are concerned, there is more left to learn than there was because the universe turned out to be much more complex.

[DodgyAgent]

Learning more about science doesn't make the idea of a creator more or less believable. If

I didn't say [1] and as for [2]: that's a good attitude to have.
[/QUOTE]

I am afraid it does. The more religious superstition is debunked by Science the less credibility it holds. Religious extremism in the west becomes marginalised and religion to be taken seriously has to apply the practical application of spiritual morality. Religion in the Western world is no longer the sacrosanct purveyor of how humans should be controlled

[d000hg]

I think your quote is messed up?

Any part of religion which can be disproved is clearly not true, conversely any part which is true cannot be disproved. The problem is more that large parts of religion are by their very nature unprovable either way.

[original PM]

Interestingly enough I seemed to have gained a Jehovah's witness friend after he came door stepping and I explained that as a scientist I could not really put any faith in any god as it went against my logically principles.

He did question about quantum physics etc and how we do not understand that - which I agree with however we can observe things and then make up a hypothesis that can be tested in the quantum world and be proved or disproved.

With god there is nothing you can observe and make a rational test for which is why religion is more about belief than fact.

However none of this is a problem as each individual is entitled to believe in what they believe in.