They do need knowledge of theology or philosophy to competently comment on those topics. Many ignore those topics because they are too busy with other things, and have no more authority on them than any other average person. Of course, someone unlearned in theology could potentially have a much stronger Christian faith than someone who has extensively studied theology, but they probably wouldn’t be able to discuss the academic issues relating to faith very well just out of ignorance of the terminology and of what issues are of academic focus.
In general, someone who claims not to have theology or philosophy simply has a naïve and unexamined theology or philosophy. The militant atheists who respond to being informed that they are pushing bad philosophy by attacking philosophy are not being rational.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
42
Please demonstrate that claim for eminent scientists and philosophers. What knowledge of theology do scientists need? And what knowledge of philosophy do they lack? What do you know of philosophy that scientists don’t?
Most scientists have not particularly studied philosophy or theology. They can be perfectly good scientists without doing so, and may even have some advantages within science from a single-minded focus on their field of research. But that leaves them poorly equipped to deal with theological or philosophical questions. In particular, they are likely to not realize the assumptions that they are making about theology or philosophy when those come up.
Unsurprisingly, some of the militant atheists provide particularly glaring errors. “My viewpoint sounds good to me, so it is clearly the epitome of rationality” is their usual underlying reasoning, inherited from “Enlightenment” thinking. As Hume (on the is-ought problem) and Kant (Critique of Pure Reason) noted, that doesn’t hold up. Philosophical materialism does not provide solid grounds for “ought”. If they had some knowledge about the history of philosophy, they wouldn’t be promoting errors that were debunked a couple centuries ago.
A specific case would be the claim that detecting brain activity before a person articulates their decision proves determinism and disproves the existence of a dualistic spirit independent of the body. All it proved was a modest ability (the computer was 60% right when random should have been 50% right) of the brain scan to detect and interpret activity quicker than the person articulated the decision. It doesn’t tell us anything one way or the other about determinism nor the existence of a material-independent spiritual component to humans. (Incidentally, I would be inclined to a more deterministic view and suspect that our spiritual component is not independent of the material; the problem is that these are bad arguments.)
Another example would be the claims that either the more sociobiological, deterministic viewpoint or Gouldian radical indeterminism are better in keeping with a Marxist-influenced view. One could find parallels between either eisegesis of the biological patterns and the equally imaginary patterns claimed by Marx. In reality, evolution has some aspects that appear more constrained and others that appear more unpredictable, in part depending on how broadly you define your constraints. This tells us nothing whatsoever about whether determinism or free-will views are fundamentally more accurate; the determinist and the indeterminist can equally put their interpretations onto any aspect of reality. For example, a major textbook on evolution claimed that evolution shows that we are masters of our own fate. Just like the dinosaurs clobbered by the asteroid? No, it shows no such thing. It doesn’t prove that we aren’t, either; after all, we do have some mental advantage over the dinos and could perhaps do more self-determination.
Knowledge of theology and philosophy would also improve claims about the history of science, especially in relation to religion. For example, people were not claiming that the Flood was a significant source of fossils (in the modern use of the term) until the 1500’s, as the influence of Greek philosophy started to be questioned. Before that, academic thought on fossils was dominated by Platonic and Aristotelian thinking, viewing fossils as formed in the rocks somehow by natural patterns, and anyway the Flood was so long ago that surely anything buried by it was long ago broken down. Simplistic ideas of religion and philosophy cause people to overlook the many was that modern creation science and ID are not good theologically.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
44
What’s one of those?
[That epitomizes your glaring error. Science and reason don’t have to address spurious imparsimonious (my word) nonsense.
The rest is meaningless rhetoric.
What theological ‘questions’ are scientists or any one else ill equipped to deal with? You’ve had plenty of opportunity since I asked you the first time to come up with one.
Your militant atheist straw men are knocked down by invoking Hume and Kant. Who apply just as much to militant theists including yourself.
No good arguments are necessary to refute the nonsense of ‘the existence of a dualistic spirit independent of the body’. I haven’t the faintest idea of what free will is. Does God have it? Classical determinism emerges [stochastically, like matter and life and mind and ‘choice’] from quantum indeterminism. Where is the ‘ultimate responsibility’ in that?
Modern creation ‘science’, ID and God the Designer are all bad. Period. Bad logic, bad reason, bad philosophy including the absence of the practical philosophy of phenomenology. Scientists, uniformitarians, rationalists don’t need Hume’s and Kant’s limitations on morality or existence or meaning to know this. Hume’s wonderful aphorism notwithstanding.
I watched a debate about whether or not there is a God. Brian Green was the atheist that argued that there is no God. At the end of the debate, Brian ended by saying, “I don’t believe in God.” That is an opinion and has no scientific backing.
But what I find interesting is that we use the word God to describe a diety, but we have never given a thought what it means to be “God”. I submit to you these 4 thoughts. A God must have a WILL. He must have the ability to carry out his WILL, and his WILL must ALWAYS bare fruit. This means no event can cause God’s WILL from coming to pass. If anything can prevent God’s WILL from baring fruit, then he’s not God.
This means, there cannot BE more than one God. For how can a God go against another God and succeed?
Actually, yes these are my thoughts based on scripture. But no, they’re not entirely on your question, but they’re connected to it based on scientific analysis.
For instance, how can you search for something if you don’t know what your searching for? What I’m doing is giving us the parameters for the search for God.
In scripture, God gives us his own definition of who he is. He calls himself the I AM, which suggests awareness. So like us, God is a thinking being. Jesus said, he does the Will of God. He is also called God’s word, and so Christ is the action of God. The Spirit is the force behind the action. So all three of these parts make up God. They also make up us to an extent. The only thing is, we don’t have the control that God has, so our will is weak. My point is, The thing is, our universe is almost 15 billion years old. So in that time frame what kind of entity can exist, and what would it be able to do? I mean, if you believe the science, we’re only 300,000 years old and we’ve been to the moon and sent satellites to the edge of our solar system. Think on what we could do if we had 10 billion years under our belt.
Some don’t question their faith but they measure up their faith according to science. That is how Christians have arrived at Evolutionary Creationism.
And it is not only Christians. The Dalai Lama said that if science came up with anything that didn’t measure up to what the Buddha had said, then we accept the science and throw away whatever it was the Buddha had said. Dalai Lama says if scientific method finds Buddhist principles wrong, Buddhism must change. – Uncommon Descent
Some good thoughts in your post. But the sun is projected to last 5 billion more years before it turns into a red giant. And we don’t send satellites to the edge of the solar system.
Actually, we have! Not only have we sent 1, we’ve sent 2. The idea is, each satellite will continue on their journey into the vast regions of interstellar space, where they will continue to send back data until they run out of energy. This will happen around 2025. By then NASA will have launched one or 2 updated modules that will be able to send more data and last longer.
The problem that NASA has found is that there’s more solar radiation coming into our solar system than first thought and it’s slowing down the probes. So will the probes be able to carry out NASA’s plan? Maybe.
It would be unwise to put your eggs in science. Lately in the world of physics, The scientist have been working with Muons. According to the standard model, Muons are supposed to be 200 times more massive than an electron. But physicists have found that the Muon, is not behaving the way they thought it would. Now, the physicists believe that there’s a new unknown force that goes with the 4 forces and when found, it could rewrite the standard model.
I agree. After all as you have indicated, science is a work in progress. There is nothing that is certain for all time. In any case I put God before everything.
The biggest problem with what the OP is suggesting is the reduction of an enormously complex reality to simplistic measures. For example polling ages does not equal an age effect but most likely has a great deal more to do with changing attitudes because age correlates with the time when people grew up and thus the cultural impacts on their thinking. The most the numbers can give you is a reason to suggest an hypothesis… coming up with a way to test that hypothesis is where these things tend to fall flat.
From the Wikipedia article on “religiosity and intelligence” you can see how many different things are going on…
A 2016 Pew Center global study on religion and education around the world ranked Jews as the most educated (13.4 years of schooling) followed by Christians (9.3 years of schooling). The religiously unaffiliated—a category which includes atheists, agnostics and those who describe their religion as “nothing in particular”—ranked overall as the third most educated religious group (8.8 years of schooling) followed by Buddhists (7.9 years of schooling), Muslims (5.6 years of schooling), and Hindus (5.6 years of schooling). In the youngest age (25-34) group surveyed, Jews averaged 13.8 years of schooling, the unaffiliated group averaged 10.3 years of schooling, Christians averaged 9.9 years of schooling, Buddhists averaged 9.7 years of schooling, Hindus averaged 7.1 years of schooling, and Muslims averaged 6.7 years of schooling. 61% of Jews, 20% of Christians, 16% of the unaffiliated, 12% of Buddhists, 10% of Hindus, and 8% of Muslims have graduate and post-graduate degrees. The study observed that the probability of having a college degree in the U.S. is higher for all religious minorities surveyed (perhaps partly due to selective immigration policies that favor highly skilled applicants), including the unaffiliated group which ranks in the fifth place, being higher than the national average of 39%.
According to a 2016 Pew Center study, there is correlation between education and income in the United States. About 77% of Hindus, 67% to 11% (depending on the denominational group) of Christians, 59% of Jews, 47% of Buddhists, 43% of Atheists, 42% of Agnostics, 39% of Muslims, and 24% of those who say their religion is “nothing in particular”; have a college degree.
I can see the basis for a dozen hypotheses based on these numbers, but again the real trick is coming up with a way to test them. Perhaps in the end all we have is questions to ponder. Why are the religiously unaffiliated overtaking Christians in education? I have long observed the intelligence/education gap between Jews and the rest of the world which I think stems largely from a much longer history of valuing education compared to other groups. I suspect that wealth and poverty has considerable impact on these numbers also – probably the single most important factor in the case of Hindus.
A satellite, whether artificial or natural, orbits a planet. Our moon is a natural satellite. Jupiter has many natural satellites–60+. Europa is one
The first artificial satellite, Sputnik, was launched by the Soviets during the Cold War. There have been many other artificial satellites, of course (used for spying and communications mostly), but the launch of Sputnik shocked the U.S. and precipitated a major overhaul of science education in the U.S.
You misunderstand my point; I should explain better. The people interpreting the neuropsychological experiment claimed that they disproved a dualistic model of human nature, in which humans have a spirit that is independent of the physical body. It was the atheists, not me, who claimed that the science was addressing what you consider to be nonsense. This is an example of being ill-equipped to deal with a non-science question. “Do humans have a spirit independent of the physical body?” is a philosophical / religious question. The experiment does not give any evidence one way or the other. If such a spirit exists, then it must interact with the physical body in some way. The brain signals detected could in principle be the working of such a spirit. Or such a spirit might not bother giving guidance on such a trivial matter as “will you add or subtract the two numbers popping up on a computer screen in a psychology experiment?” Of course, the experiment does not give any reason to believe in such spirits, either; the experiment is totally irrelevant to the question. If we are to answer such a question, it is first necessary to describe what properties the hypothetical spirits in question have and then see if we can find evidence one way or another. In fact, the evidence is so limited that it’s doubtful whether we can answer the question.
Hume pointed out the is-ought problem. People argue “here is the way things are, therefore this is how they ought to be”. This is an unjustified logical jump. The way things are could be good, bad, or indifferent. Theists invoke God’s direction as to what ought to be, and thus avoid that problem. Likewise, Kant pointed out that you can’t just reason your way to everything; what one person thinks is “reasonable” may not seem that reasonable to someone else. Again, the theist avoids the problem by invoking a higher source. Of course, that doesn’t prove that the higher source exists or has been correctly represented, but it does prove that Hume and Kant’s critiques do not equally apply to theists.
“Classical determinism emerges [stochastically, like matter and life and mind and ‘choice’] from quantum indeterminism.” is an example of not understanding philosophy well. People claim that quantum indeterminancy proves indeterminism. In fact, scientific examples of predictability and unpredictability do not tell us anything about the existence of free will. (If you don’t know what free will is, that makes it difficult to credibly critique it - an important part of philosophy is thinking how to critique one’s own arguments.) Maybe there’s an underlying, scientifically undetected determinism behind quantum and other unpredictability. Maybe the complexity of the human mind is sufficient to enable free will to emerge from a deterministic background. Maybe there exists a deity or other supernatural entity that is able to transcend the physical to produce free will or to impose determinism. Science simply doesn’t answer the question.