this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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I've never understood why people so often keep the two separated. Like, if you already believe in a god, why not interpret things like physics and chemistry as how your god set the world up to run? I totally get that religion is complex and divisive, but at an individual level, it seems like such an easy "problem" to resolve.
Because often enough, results in science contradict religious belief. Heliocentric model, for example.
I think a big problem is many people aren't wired to appreciate the difference between knowledge and belief. Knowledge and science are the realm of the empirical. Belief is about the unknowable.
Something that can be known cannot be believed, and something that can be believed cannot be known. That separation should be complete, so belief and knowledge never conflict.
Where did you get this definition? You can absolutely have concrete proof of something, therefore knowledge of it, and still believe it. I believe in gravity. Do you know why? Because there is a lot of proof out there for it. I do not believe things I have no proof of. You can also have faith in something you know, due to proof, is true.
You can also believe, and/or have faith in, things that have no proof.
I think chilliedogg may have hit the bong one too many times before replying. I don't really smoke anymore, but absolutely remember thinking I was being profound while just spouting garbledygoop.
This comment included?
No, that was a pretty coherent comment.
And the definition above doesn't cater to the fact that we change what is known, based on fact. With the definition above, any belief about the this that was unknown is suddenly, magically erased once the fact emerges.
My take is instead that if you believe in something that hasn't yet been proven which turns out to be true, you should still rightly believe in it. If you believe in something that is proven wrong, you should change your belief.
I'd rather say that beliefs are internal and facts external. We don't know (and can't know) all facts. The problem here is you first have to believe that something is a fact, in order to change your other beliefs.
Science is the process of allowing - trusting - others to state facts rather than having to find out all the facts yourself. If we don't trust in science, anything can be true because you can still believe that something is a fact, even if you are wrong.
Faith is "complete trust or confidence in someone or something". Gravity is essentially a statement of a physical phenomena where things with mass are attracted to other things with mass. You can have faith in that physical phenomena, but that is no more useful than having faith that the number 1 exists. It just is, whether or not you believe it.
Then there's Newton's theory of gravity, which exists as a mathematical model of gravity, where the force of attraction of gravity can be modeled as a proportion of their masses. That works great in certain cases but break down elsewhere, and not until Einstein's General Relativity did we have a model that more accurately explained other things about gravity such that time itself behaves different around different sized masses, and also the speed of those masses has an effect on the way that they experience time, and changes in gravity take time to be communicated with other things that can experience that gravity: they are not instantaneous. Time matters. None of that is covered in Newton's model.
So, if you have faith in gravity, what do you have faith in? Newton's model, or Einstein's Model? If you have 'faith' then you have completely trust or confidence, by the definition of faith. So if you have complete confidence in Newton's model, you're wrong. Newton's model doesn't accurately explain many of the gravitation things we can observe. So say you want to change your mind and don't want to 'believe' in Newton's model anymore. You're a follower of Einstein now, because his model is better. Well that means you didn't actually have 'faith' in Newton's model in the first place. You didn't have complete trust or confidence.
When people talk about faith having no place in science, this is what they mean. Believing one thing to be true does not matter. All that matters is which model fits the evidence the best. And which model best fits will change over time. So a good scientist should change as well.
I have faith that there is an attractive force tied to mass
Great. Again though, that's about as useful as saying you have faith that the number 1 exists.
The question of whether it's the mass that causes the force, or the force that causes the mass, or even if is a force in the first place are all open questions. It can be modeled as a force tied to the proportionality of the masses involved and their distance separated. It can also be modeled as a warping of spacetime, where objects moving closer to each other over time is just the result of of objects moving in straight lines through a curved spacetime. Whether it's a force or not is a question of if it can be modeled to have a force carrying particle as part of the standard model, just like we have the photon for the electromagnetic force, the W and Z bosons for the weak force, and the gluon for the strong force.
If you have faith in any of those interpretations, it means you're ignoring observational evidence supporting any other interpretations, which is just bad science.
Then my faith will change
Then that's not faith.
Its okay. You can say that.
You can also say "well my definition of faith isn't the same as what everyone else's definition of faith is, and my definition of faith allows me not be faithful to my previous faith and change my faith beliefs whenever I choose". That's fine. Just don't expect everyone else to have the same definition.
People change faith all the time. In fact if you type into google "does faith change" the first several things I get are papers discussing that faith does change and why, including the introduction of new information on a subject. So you are wrong.
So we call them a cult instead?
I am much less familiar with religions other than christianity, but I don't think what what Pete90 said was technically wrong, given my limited understanding. I do however agree with you that we should use language more precisely.
I agree with his generic statement too, when applied to most religions. The one I studied the most is Islam and this does not apply. For instance it got the planetary model right around year 640, at a time when science was wrong about it (see reference below).
I copied the comment about not conflating all religions with Christianity from someone in a different thread because this is unfortunately what I see over and over again not only here on Lemmy but on "the other site" too, I guess because of the demographic typically using them and certainly the lack of awareness regarding other religions.
https://quran.com/13/2
I get where you're coming from on this.
For example: why not believe that "god" used physics and science to create all of this. Gently manipulating everything as it developed to create humanity and the universe the way they wanted it to be?
The religious issue with this idea is that it undermines the very idea of their belief. God created the heavens and the earth. Period. God didn't create a bunch of stuff then shape it to become the heavens and the earth.... No, he thought it, and it happened.
The difference being that in a more reasonable interpretation, using physics and whatnot to create everything, would be a slow and not very profound process. Under the premise that God basically snapped his fingers and poof, earth... That's incredible. Impossible by any other measure.
By inviting a more measured approach, you diminish the perceived power of God, making the entire concept less awesome (in the sense of inspiring awe), and wondrous. This is the root of faith. Speaking more generally "my Deity can do all this with the snap of a finger, we are nothing compared to them"
By putting people into this subdued mindset of being so much less powerful than God, you can basically exert full control over them "in the name of our Lord". You really only need to convince them that what you want them to do is "the will of God" and they'll be mentally servile to whatever it is.
That's the root of religion. Control. Not eternal salvation. Not saving your soul from damnation. Not doing good for goodness sake.... Control.
Simply, making god seem less wondrous, even by a small amount, makes people less malleable to suggestion, for what God "commands" of them.
God choosing the exact mass of the electron vs the proton, and gravitational constants that support life is pretty awesome.
But it also opens up the idea that "god" is an alien child with a supercomputer playing The Sims. He picked the constants for the universe and hit "run", which seems less impressive.
I like imagining him trying lots of other combinations and being very disappointed.
If you belive in your own understanding of god, than there's no conflict, it's pandering in my opinion, inserting something somewhere just for the sake of it without being promoted to, but the point is that it's not conflicting. The problem is that most religious people cling to some select dogmas from their respective texts that directly conflict with the scientific method.
But in a way you are correct, the original western "scientist" were usually christian and were looking for God or God's perfect work through the observable world (and were occasionally quite disappointed with their discoveries of the mess they found).
Cause then you'd be a Catholic.