this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
150 points (79.8% liked)
Asklemmy
44151 readers
2342 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Nope, if I’m wrong and there is a god I plan to kick their dick instead out for all the anguish and suffering that could have been avoided. god cannot be both omnipotent and all loving. Only one or the other.
Also, in the loosely remembered words of Ricky Gervais, “if all recorded history of religion, and of science were suddenly erased from the earth; in a thousand years you’d have all the science back exactly the same, but the religions would be totally different.” Which I find very compelling.
In regards to that quote, there is at least one exception though.
The Naassenes died out in the 4th-5th centuries CE and their two written works were lost until one was recovered in 1945 and they remain largely unknown by lay audiences.
And yet a number of their beliefs are quite alive and well today with no direct influence on that modern resurgence, such as the idea that we are in a non-physical recreation of an earlier world where life occurred spontaneously, that the creator of that recreation was itself brought forth by an original humanity, and that the proof for this lies in the study of motion and rest - particularly around the existence of indivisible parts of matter.
None of that was scientifically indicated in antiquity.
And yet today we see many of those ideas among theology/philosophy inspired by modern science and technology.
The idea that we are in a recreated non-physical simulation of an earlier evolved physical world.
The idea that AI, brought forth by an original humanity, could be running such a simulation.
And many proponents of that theory look to physics (the subject which studies motion and rest) for potential evidence, with many incorporating the now scientifically proven evidence of quantum mechanics (indivisible parts of matter) to support that theory.
So the quote is factually incorrect. There was a set of religious beliefs that was effectively eradicated from public consciousness for nearly two millennia yet has ended up resurging again independent of the original set of beliefs.
(And frankly given developments in just the past 5 years, this rare exception to that quote probably should get a closer look then it has to date.)
I think this case is far too micro in scale when the question looks at the concept of religion and science as a whole. Of course you’ll have similar ideas across centuries that trend up and down like everything else does. If humanity just went back to have no idea what religion or science is, when they rebuilt their understanding of the world, science would be entirely the same. All of science. Not a handful of theories. The whole thing. People will make new gods though. The planet is completely different now. The reasons religion was even thought about will no longer be the same. The quote really pushes the stance that religion as a concept and whole is made up, and science is not.
If Ricky Gervais ends up in mastodon I’d want to hear their reasoning.
There's no reason to believe that the second round of science would still arrive at earlier theories such as the pudding model of the atom.
That was very much a part of science. But it isn't any longer as a result of experimental evidence.
So your rebuttal glosses over the many failed scientific theories but then uses the failed religious ideas to invalidate any religious ideas.
When in truth, both science and religion have historically attempted to explain the unexplained. The methodology of science is much better, but they have both had many examples of dumb ideas in retrospect.
The reason why the Naassenes had such interesting ideas was that they ended up having incorporated the ideas of Leucretius, who in 50 BCE had written the only extant work from antiquity to describe survival of the fittest in detail.
At the time, there was no experimental evidence to support or falsify such theories. But at the time a religious group working on extrapolating theories built on top of naturalism ended up landing on very similar ideas to what we currently come up with having experimentally landed on evolutionary theory and having turned Plato's eventual creator of worlds (another philosophical influence on the Naassenes) from theory to practice.
So while science is more likely to be right more often as a result of far better methodology, the problem with the quote is that it's a "heuristic that almost always works" and fails to consider the edge cases when religious thought had attached itself to natural explanations which later turned out to be correct.
Effectively, any ideas predicated on concepts which will eventually be experimentally validated should be expected to arise again even after erasing earlier theorizing, as it's the replicability of experimental results that drives that reproduction. And any ideas, whether a part of science or outside of it, which are predicated on eventually falsified ideas have no guarantee of reproduction.
The mistake the quote embodies is the assumption that it's impossible for theological ideas to have attached themselves to experimentally reproducible concepts. But that has happened before, and it meant that the extrapolated theological concepts were also reproduced.
And that's to say nothing for the many reproduced beliefs on other reproducible foundations such as dying and rising gods or katabasis that occurred in completely separate communities. In those cases it was a result of watching the stars and observing the orbit of Venus dropping down below the ground to arise again days later. So you had a central American God navigating the underworld and resurrecting the dead associated with Venus independent and parallel to Ianna in the Mediterranean navigating the underworld and associated with Venus. Or the common beliefs about the immortality of snakes because of their shedding.
The quote is the kind of thing that seems clever but is factually incorrect and betrays the one offering it up as uninformed of what they are talking about despite their self-assuredness in borrowed pithiness.
The quote is not mistaken. It simply states that religion is made up by humans, and science is not. That’s all I think it tries to say and anyone with an understanding of science can see that too. An exception or two where religion and science lined up doesn’t change that religion is divisive and a human creation.