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Here’s a book on what you’re talking about - African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design
Yeah I legitimately understand - I’m being critical of the arguments for science here, and normally the only people who do that are not arguing in good faith.
Great! My only defense is that I tend to have very little time to post - and what started as casual disagreement turned into something I wanted to see through.
Speaking of, I still disagree - and more specifically I’ll say that both are epistemic communities, engaged in epistemic debates, using agreed upon epistemic practices and techniques for members of those communities.
Again, just because you (and I!) have problems with those epistemic practices is no reason to describe their debates as foundationally different. Unless I’m wrong, you and others in the thread have argued that the debates - on the basis of the forms and types of evidence being mobilized - are problematic compared to those in science. If we’re talking about the evidence as the problem, we’re talking about epistemology, not controversy.
While my core point here is (admittedly!) relatively tiny and pedantic, the argument here highlights what I see as the bigger problem, which is that many atheists are willing to count the lived messiness of epistemic communities against the religious, while they raise science to be some gleaming, monolithic, purely logical practice. It’s not, making shared knowledge is messy, and saying so does not make science any less legitimate.
Edited and responded to. Was also busy with a larger response.
What evidence is there for the fundamental assertion within Christianity that the Christian god exists in the first place?
None, as far as I’m aware! I’m not defending the religion.
What room is there for questioning that assertion?
In some factions, plenty. In others, not so much. I’ve met plenty of Christian folks that don’t believe in intelligent design, and it’s not like they’re immediately ejected from the church - and this appears to even be true among Catholic leadership. It’s a controversy.
And don’t give me that “intelligent design” bullshit
I think you have the wrong idea about me, which is understandable, given how annoying I’m being.
No, this is just the end to a side discussion about objectivity - my main critique is that disagreement among adherents to a given religion should not be a reason to dismiss them.
But I’ll admit I’m having more fun than I am trying to really educate, and agree with your assessment that I am doing a mediocre job at best.
As for making people angry (or, more likely, annoyed) - apologies! My aim is to challenge, not annoy. Mostly.
Yeah! Check it out.
No, I’m just slow. An academic with small kids.
Well, let’s start with Wikipedia:
"Lindberg, David C.; Numbers, Ronald L. (1986), “Introduction”, God & Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 5, 12, ISBN 978-0-520-05538-4, ‘It would be indefensible to maintain, with Hooykaas and Jaki, that Christianity was fundamentally responsible for the successes of seventeenth-century science. It would be a mistake of equal magnitude, however, to overlook the intricate interlocking of scientific and religious concerns throughout the century.’
Then let’s go to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is really all I’m trying to say anyway:
“…authors from the late 1980s to the 2000s developed contextual approaches, including detailed historical examinations of the relationship between science and religion (e.g., Brooke 1991). Peter Harrison (1998) challenged the warfare model by arguing that Protestant theological conceptions of nature and humanity helped to give rise to science in the seventeenth century. Peter Bowler (2001, 2009) drew attention to a broad movement of liberal Christians and evolutionists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who aimed to reconcile evolutionary theory with religious belief… Several historians (e.g., Hooykaas 1972) have argued that Christianity was instrumental to the development of Western science. Peter Harrison (2007) maintains that the doctrine of original sin played a crucial role in this, arguing there was a widespread belief in the early modern period that Adam, prior to the Fall, had superior senses, intellect, and understanding. As a result of the Fall, human senses became duller, our ability to make correct inferences was diminished, and nature itself became less intelligible. Postlapsarian humans (i.e., humans after the Fall) are no longer able to exclusively rely on their a priori reasoning to understand nature. They must supplement their reasoning and senses with observation through specialized instruments, such as microscopes and telescopes.”
Finally - the reason I say some of this in the first place - is from my familiarity with Foucault, and his history of the emergence of the “disciplines”. While Foucault is more specifically focused on what might be briefly described as the human sciences (or sciences aimed at the control of populations), he describes:
“…the modern Western state has integrated in a new political shape an old power technique which originated in Christian institutions. We can call this power technique the pastoral power… the multiplication of the aims and agents of pastoral power focused the development of knowledge of man around two roles: one, globalizing and quantitative, concerning the population; the other, analytical, concerning the individual. And this implies that power of a pastoral type, which over centuries —for more than a millennium— had been linked to a defined religious institution, suddenly spread out into the whole social body; it found support in a multitude of institutions. And, instead of a pastoral power and a political power, more or less linked to each other, more or less rival, there was an individualizing “tactic” which characterized a series of powers: those of the family, medicine, psychiatry, education, and employers.”
Then similarly in The Subject of Power:
“Given this, in the Western world I think the real history of the pastorate as the source of a specific type of power over men, as a model and matrix of procedures for the government of men, really only begins with Christianity” (pp. 147–48). I’d bet that if this was a little more my subject area I could dig up more on discourses of truth and the relationship to Western science within his work - but even here the sheer number of scientific disciplines this touches is significant.
Beyond that, no - science is not a meritocracy. I can tell you that from the inside, or I can point you a huge literature on the ways that science is anything but - start with the concept of the Matthew Effect.
Again, when you talk about what “religion is based on” you’re taking up an epistemic criticism. Same when you flat call religion bullshit. You’re talking about making decisions between the different ways that people form knowledge. Fine, have at it. But don’t start claiming that people disagreeing with one another within a social group is somehow cause for that entire social group and their ideas to be dismissed.
You can, in fact, make evidence up or make claims completely without evidence, and both of these things happen in science all the time.
Religion is dirty, inconsistent, and biased Science is dirty, inconsistent, and biased - that doesn’t mean science is diminished by our knowing and acknowledging that.
We shouldn’t make arguments that pretend science is anything but what it is, or we’re engaging in the same polemics that religious zealots do.
So you have an epistemic issue, not one of disagreement at all - again, my point.
Yeah, I know you’re getting bad faith vibes, I get it. No. Fellow athiest, overly educated, social scientist and critical theorist. I’ve read all of my sources - but I’ll admit that one of them (whatever Christian site I liked to) was a quick skim to confirm that yes, this was a long discussion about the different factions and their disagreements, and that was exactly the point I was looking to make.
The original post - the image itself - demonstrates a genuine lack of understanding of the history and philosophy of science. I’ve cited Fleck elsewhere in the comments. It’s just a meme community, I can let that slide.
The comments that seem to be suggesting that disagreement among members of a religion is sufficient to dismiss their ideas is, however, more worrying. Disagreements and their resolutions (or lack thereof) are key features of scientific discovery - we need diverse perspectives, we need people who disagree, we need people who argue their positions in compelling and challenging ways. To call out those disagreements as epistemic flaws in contrast to science dismisses the incredible importance of disagreement and controversy in not just science but in all areas of human and social life.
As I’ve said elsewhere in the comments - both science and religion are messy, problematic, lack internal consistency, and have caused great human and environmental harms. That doesn’t mean science isn’t useful, and science isn’t diminished by our frank discussion of it.
edit: reviewer @fkn has requested a revision of paragraph two, and the author acknowledges that all of the above was written in haste (and surrounded by loud children)
*edit 2: apologies, I was replying from my inbox, didn’t get the context. Yes, I’ve read Epistemic Cultures on many, many occasions, and probably have suggested others read it as many times.
No, it actually makes no sense that a relgion can simultaneously believe that the earth is 6000 years old AND that it’s billions of years old based on how they interpret canon.
Again, to you. That makes sense to the people who do believe that. It’s just simply that you have - literally - different ways of making sense.
The OP on this thread only says “That’s a 100% true observations. Most religions can’t even agree with themselves.” and I’m (being a giant pain in the ass and) responding specifically to your emphasis that it is this disagreement that invalidates religious thought. I still hold that there’s no issue with disagreement within or among religious groups, in terms of the validity of their worldviews.
Religions have come up with ways of determining who is “right” under various conditions of dispute, just as science and other fields (like law), have. I am by no means a Catholic scholar, but I am very much under the impression that the religious texts Christianity are based on require translation efforts, and that those translation efforts can lose meaning in translation, not just between languages but between historical contexts - like many other historical texts. As such, they require study and interpretation - something that even those most fervent and uneducated of followers seem to understand.
The biggest difference, however, is that you can test a scientific interpretation, repeat a study, etc. You can be proven wrong or validated as right.
As it turns out, not all the time. In fact, not even all that frequently. Popper criticized the idea of verification, Kuhn criticized the idea of falsification, and neither idea solves the demarcation (between science and non-science) problem. For a quick reference that won’t require a number of books, try this.
You see, it really doesn’t make any sense…
It doesn’t make sense to you based on what your ideas of legitimate knowledge are - and you’re making some major generalizations about how religion operates. For some religions there is a monotheistic deity, and for some of those religions the word of that deity is immutable law. But even in those cases, there is significant debate over what exactly constitutes the “word of God” - I mean, it’s why there’s so many different sects and factions (and even those argue internally). Just like in science, there are different interpretations of our observed world, and some interpretations become more dominant than others - and not always because they best align with our observations of the physical world.
That’s just decidedly false.
Even ignoring the fact that Western science has roots in Catholicism, seems to me like most religions are fairly explicit about what they believe, and generally agree on what those beliefs are. The biggest religions in the world seem to have quite a bit of hierarchy and structure, with enough organization and agreement to produce large-scale structures and institutions. Sure there are disagreements - but those disagreements, again, are no reason to discount religion as a whole.
If it was just personal opinions without evidence they just pulled out their behinds then yes absolutely.
So again you’ve proved my point. It’s not the disagreement you have a problem with, it’s something else entirely.
There can be many interpretations of all texts, including both religious and scientific texts. Those multiple interpretations come from being different people with different backgrounds, experiences, and cultural upbringing - rather than convenience or zealotry by necessity.
Scientists read the same texts, and study the same subjects all the time and come to different conclusions and that’s seen as a positive - arguably because the only way to deeply understand anything is from multiple perspectives. Some of the most important scientific breakthroughs happen when alternatives to deeply established ideas emerge.
Religious folks believe a whole diversity of things, just like atheists and scientific folks do.
We don’t need to argue the legitimacy of atheism as a position by making science into something it’s not - namely an unbiased, entirely monolithic, entirely perfect way of understanding the world.
Religion is not silly, its sets of cultural practices and beliefs that a huge majority of the population finds meaningful in some way - and for that reason deserves some form of respect even by non religious folks. Religion isn’t the problem. Many forms of dominant religious practice, however, have shown to have real, human, social, and environmental harms. That’s the problem.
Scientific innovation that occurs at multiple places coincidentally is not an indicator that there’s some grand and unbiased truth to the world, it’s an indicator that our shared ideas about the world lead to the same conclusions.
My point being is that scientists disagree with each other as much as religious groups disagree with each other. Disagreement within a group isn’t a valid reason to dismiss that group’s ideas, nor should we treat it as such.
Religions are as coherent and formal as scientific disciplines, if not even more so in many cases, especially within the same religion/tradition.
Would you then turn around and say that an entire scientific discipline is bunk simply because the outgoing president of an academic association disagreed with or had different views from the incoming president?
I agree with you that some religious folks argue in bad faith/polemics, and one of their tactics is to highlight the fact that science is not a monolith. I see that as a science communication problem, not as a reason to pretend that science actually is monolithic. It’s tremendously important to embrace the ways in which science could change, the ways that science is intended to be flexible, the ways that science actually produces a kind of knowledge among other ways of producing knowledge. But it’s silly to proclaim science as the only way of knowing things in the world, and then to say that it’s entirely (or even mostly) internally consistent and without debate. Science is debate.
Agreed! Vaguely. I’m not sure I’m sure of that - but only because I personally just don’t know enough religion to confirm.
Disagreed, following on from Kuhn and Lakatos (not exactly a high-quality source, but it’s a reasonably to the point overview of the criticisms of falsifiability).
In a broadly over-general way, people who adhere to both science and religion attempt to make sense of their experiences as everyday practice. Both lay-persons and experts (across both science and religion) attempt to mobilize what they understand as the shared practices by which valid knowledge is produced. Those shared practices can be different across science and religion - but not always, note the adherence to formal academic practices and traditions among Western religious experts, and the study of religion in academia - but they are both epistemic practices differently structured, if often incommensurable.