Anonymous #1 3w

It’s called “faith” for a reason, because you have to believe without direct scientific proof. Many intelligent people throughout history have been deeply religious.

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Anonymous OP 3w

“Faith” being belief without evidence is contradictory to everything modern science is based upon. Plenty of intelligent religious people existed in the past when religion still made some semblance of sense, or when they had to lie to you sheep to avoid being denounced as a godless heretic.

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Anonymous OP 3w

Read the above

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Anonymous #1 3w

So you believe religion still made sense in the 20th century?

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Anonymous OP 3w

No, I believe that our “sometimes practicing” Roman Catholic was either lying to himself or everyone else

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Anonymous #1 3w

What about Werner Heisenberg?

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Anonymous OP 3w

Yes. Either lying to himself or others.

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Anonymous #1 3w

He believed it. Lying to yourself implies you know something is wrong but kept saying it. He never indicated the contrary. My point is someone being religious isn’t itself a decider of intelligence.

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Anonymous OP 3w

And my point is that it is. As many contributions a religious scientist may make, at the end of the day he is either clearly operating under significant cognitive dissonance, or is lying to avoid their valuable findings being denounced as “atheist drivel”

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Anonymous #2 3w

Not necessarily. You have a set of axioms you operate from, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t opening to challenging things or processing new information. I am an adherent of old Earth creationism, for example, which accepts the fossil record and the age of the Earth.

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Anonymous #1 3w

That’s not a very good argument. What part of quantum mechanics is not compatible with Christianity?

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Anonymous #1 3w

I lie all the time about believing in god to my family and peers because I have to. Religion is a social construct but a powerful one.

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Anonymous #1 3w

Okay, saying you lie all the time doesn’t mean Heisenberg was lying. And you didn’t answer my question about compatibility of quantum mechanics.

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Anonymous OP 3w

It’s incompatible because it requires complete disregard for the foundational importance of scientific evidence in forming outlooks on the material world. That’s why. He, as a scientist, would know that.

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Anonymous OP 3w

Sure it doesn’t prove it, but what does proof matter if you believe in an all powerful creator despite the complete lack of evidence?

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Anonymous #1 3w

Quantum mechanics can easily be compatible because you can just see it as the “code” by which God operates the world. Math and physics therefore would be divinely created methods of reality. It’s completely compatible.

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Anonymous OP 3w

lol, you don’t understand quantum mechanics it’s probably best you sit this out

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Anonymous OP 3w

Quantum mechanics simply is the study of the smallest particles that make up our universe on a quantum scale. Not code for the man upstairs on his laptop

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Anonymous #1 3w

But you cannot conclusively disprove the existence of God or the supernatural either.

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Anonymous #1 3w

This is at least as close minded as the faith OP has. Certainty is the enemy of intelligence. One cannot say with certainty that there is no god and to dismiss the possibility out of hand is lazy. I don’t believe. I have no faith whatsoever. But I also don’t pretend to be certain.

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Anonymous #3 3w

One can never be truly certain no, one cannot be certain that the universe wasn’t created by a magic invisible teapot that is unobservable to scientific testing. But we can still explicitly reject this notion by the mere fact it contradicts all observable evidence

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Anonymous #1 3w

But what does it contradict? The universe is here, is it not? And if the teapot is unobservable, then of course we wouldn’t be able to observe it. You can’t necessarily scientifically accept it, but neither can you conclusively reject it, as it is not testable with the scientific method. Spirituality itself is outside the material world, and therefore can’t be conclusively disproved with science, which relates to the material world.

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Anonymous OP 3w

Yet you cannot challenge the fundamental truths that you build your worldview around, that’s harmful to scientific progress. As an agnostic I am open to the possibility that everything just goes dark after I die, but I’m also open to the possibility that there is some sort of afterlife. If you must force yourself to believe one of these things under threat of eternal torture in the afterlife if you don’t believe the right thing then you can’t fairly consider both possibilities.

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Anonymous #2 3w

How old do you believe the earth to be?

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Anonymous OP 3w

That’s my exact point. Spirituality is incompatible with science, and there is no evidence or proof involved. If something is completely outside of the material world and doesn’t interact, it doesn’t exist in our world at all. Our world is material. It’s the enemy of a worldview grounded in materialism, which science and logic are.

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Anonymous #2 3w

Obviously I have doubts, if that’s what you’re saying. But I don’t see how religion is harmful to scientific progress. Science itself is the discovery of God’s created universe, so it is a divine endeavor. Even when things contradict the Bible, like evolution, God has divinely ordained those contradictions, so there is absolutely a purpose in studying them.

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Anonymous #1 3w

Dude I happen to be more on your side of this but ‘best you sit this out’ type shit is cooked and not helpful. There are many valid conversations going on around OP’s point here and I don’t think any of us are experts on quantum mechanics or need to pretend to be in order to have a conversation

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Anonymous #2 3w

Billions of years old.

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Anonymous #2 3w

Exactly, we aren’t experts on quantum mechanics. But I think I’m qualified to reject the claim “quantum mechanics is gods code of the universe” because that’s ridiculous lmao

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Anonymous OP 3w

Ah ok cool, I’ve talked to people who think it’s about 6,000 years old and that’s wild to me. I’d agree on the billions figure though

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Anonymous OP 3w

Sure, and we can’t disprove the universe didn’t pop into existence last Thursday, with us all retaining memories of a false past. But we reject this both with Occam‘s razor and the fact it’s contradictory to all observable evidence. If you want to go the solipsism/fideism route we can have that argument but it’s pointless.

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Anonymous #2 3w

That’s what the “Old Earth creationism” is. It’s reconciling God’s word with God’s natural world. I believe in evolution and the age of the Earth, because God has revealed them in the natural world. He wants us to think about these contradictions, or else He wouldn’t have created them.

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Anonymous OP 3w

Because the scientific process requires one to consider all possibilities and the evidence presented without favor for one outcome. Most religions are systems where you are punished for eternity if you don’t believe the right thing, evidence or not. Often not seeing any evidence to point to a conclusion is all the more reason to have faith in it for the religious person. That mindset just undermines the scientific process

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Anonymous #2 3w

I think there are countless scientists who are Christian but to do that I believe they have severe cognitive dissonance and systems in place to allow themselves to violate tenets of their religious doctrine or scientific doctrine. People can interpret religious values and beliefs differently just like people can pull very different lessons from the Bible if they want to

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Anonymous #1 3w

Sure, I’m just asking for more than “thats ridiculous” as a reason for why you disagree. That’s what people said to Galileo

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Anonymous #2 3w

Bc some people take religion very far to the scientific side of things, saying that god (or some similar entity) simply started the Big Bang and the rest is his machine just doing its thing that he designed it to do. At that point it’s hard to say how physics and math aren’t his creation. However to me that’s a cheap argument that conveniently separates itself from what’s written in the Bible

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Anonymous OP 3w

So why in your view would god create this church and faith based around the Bible which he knows to be a lie?

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Anonymous #2 3w

Galileo had scientific evidence to back his discoveries. As previously agreed upon by both of us religion doesn’t have this at all. Thus I don’t believe

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Anonymous #2 3w

The bible write about lots of things like talking goats and resurrected men. There’s no scientific evidence in these claims and to believe them requires the abandonment of logic.

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Anonymous #1 3w

Some people (evangelical naturalists I think? Could be totally wrong on that) would disagree. They interpret the Bible as a work of many genres. There’s poetry, apocalyptic fiction, history…etc. they’d say that books like revelation aren’t trying to describe reality and shouldn’t be taken as such

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Anonymous #2 3w

And sure “it’s all just a metaphor” is fine, but then you aren’t really even believing, just desperate to reconcile one’s faith with the observable world it contradicts

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Anonymous #1 3w

Well they would say that some books describe things that absolutely did happen historically. I’m not religious myself so I’m not intimately familiar with this belief system, I’m just saying it’s not always so straightforward depending on who you talk to

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Anonymous #2 3w

But personally I agree, I don’t think there are many ways to be a vanilla Cristian with normal Christian beliefs and also be a diligent scientist without bias towards your unscientific beliefs

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