Balancing Skepticism and Faith

[kellyb]

From a 2013 study of world wide religion trends, comparing 1910 to 2010:
https://web.archive.org/web/2013092...t_data/excerpt/47/04706745/0470674547-196.pdf

... the world as a whole now has more people with traditional religious views than ever before – and they constitute a growing proportion of the world’s population.”​

It also says :

Fourth, agnostics and atheists grew from less than 1% of the world’s population to well over 11%.

It's the people classified as "Other religionists" who shrank in numbers, from almost 32% to 12%. Christianity and the other major religions stayed about the same, and Islam grew from 12% to 22%.

The religious landscape has also changed significantly since 2010. For example:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/...cans-with-no-religious-affiliation-is-rising/

A 2015 Pew Research Center poll reported that 34 to 36 percent of millennials (those born after 1980) are nones and corroborated the 23 percent figure, adding that this was a dramatic increase from 2007, when only 16 percent of Americans said they were affiliated with no religion.

 

[dann]

I don't know anyone who believes in "sky daddy," Islam is growing like crazy and atheists are by far and away the worst monsters in the last 100 years.

most atheism is the antithesis of skepticism because they are sneering bigots.

Christians managed to kill millions in Indochina in the 1960s and '70s, but the millions weren't Christians, of course. Christians also killed millions in WW1 and WW2. In WW1 most of the victims were probably also Christians, but that was now more than 100 years ago, of course.
Are you saying that atheists killed and tortured more people than Christians did? Or is it because your definition of monsters is a different one? People who aren't Christian, maybe?
(And if you don't like sneering bigots, how come you're so fond of Trump?!)

 

[David Mo]

It certainly is NOT clear. Otherwise people wouldn't keep using the same two "usual suspects": evolution and Galileo. If increasing science led to more religious conflicts, then you'd expect that there would be more conflicts in the (for example) last 25 years than in the same period before that. It just isn't there.


Most religious beliefs have nothing to do with science. Sin, grace, forgiveness, indulgences, the after-life, etc. Some people speculate on how science may or may not prove or disprove such ideas, but dogma rarely is specific enough to be testable.

People use the examples of evolution and heliocentrism to try to extrapolate from that there is a broader conflict, but struggle to find examples beyond that, despite how science has increased so dramatically in the last 100 years. Why? Shouldn't there be more conflicts as science increases?

I had misunderstood you. You mean "conflict between science and religion". Is it not?

The struggle of religion against heliocentrism was not against Galileo only. The same with evolution. They were a broad battle against every idea with any hint of going against the churches' Sacred Magisterium. It lasted four centuries and caused countless victims not so famous as Galileo or Darwin.
Besides this, the fight was not limited only to heliocentrism or evolution. Miquel Servet was burned alive in Geneva for his ideas about the blood circulation; Giordano Bruno because of his defence of the infinity of the universe. The churches also chased the atomism, the scientific method and even mathematics as devil works.

Even when it was absolutely discredited, the Catholic church promoted the sacred-finalist version of evolution by Teilhard de Chardin. In the twentieth century!

Nowadays it seems that the pockets of religious resistance to science are reduced to fundamentalism . This is a victory of science, not a gracious churches' gift. Efforts of intelligent religious people are directed now to maintain private grounds and churches attack basically in the field of morality. But nothing assure us that an involution cannot be possible. The times are turbulent and rampant-far right. And extreme right wing and Inquisition are close friends.

 

[kellyb]

Since I'm aware that a large majority of Americans are religious, I'm sometimes surprised by the response of audiences to stand-up comedians' jokes about religion, but I guess that these comedians may cater to the 23% minority.

A lot of Christians can laugh at the absurdity of their belief, and many feel very negatively towards "organized" religion.

Carlin's "religion is BS" skit was kind of instrumental in my own leaving Christianity, tho. I remember thinking after watching it, that it was only the tip of the iceburg he touched upon, because I actually believed there's was an invisible man who lived in the sky who had to become his own child, and killed himself as a sacrifice to himself to appease his own bloodlust, AND after death he came back as a sort of functional zombie before floating away into the sky, AND now all of us followers regularly ate his symbolic flesh and drank his symbolic blood as part of a weird "symbolic cannibalism" ritual.

 

[dann]

Yes, I am seriously asking that question. "In the last 100 years, science says X, which conflicts with religion that says Y." If increasing science leads to increasing conflict, then you should be able to find examples, with more recent examples given that science grows exponentially.


From a 2013 study of world wide religion trends, comparing 1910 to 2010:
https://web.archive.org/web/2013092...t_data/excerpt/47/04706745/0470674547-196.pdf

... the world as a whole now has more people with traditional religious views than ever before – and they constitute a growing proportion of the world’s population.”​

Like I said: If people learn science and get better living conditions, religion loses its grip on people. However, an awful lot of people don't!

According to the Pew Research Center's 2012 global study of 230 countries and territories, 16% of the world's population is not affiliated with a religion, while 84% are affiliated. By 2060, according to their projections, the number of unaffiliated will increase by over 35 million, but the percentage will decrease to 13% because the total population will grow faster
Irreligion (Wikipedia)

Atheism (not irreligion) in the USA (Wikipedia)
List of countries by irreligion (Wikipedia)

I guess that deprivation is the best way to keep religion alive and well:
The Death of Religion thread.

 

[David Mo]

... and atheists are by far and away the worst monsters in the last 100 years.
.

And Christians killed hundred of thousands children in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Balkans, Ireland, etc., etc. Add the First World War and the Christian-Nazis killers in the Second World War. You can add the millions of Americans, Asians and Africans killed under the Christian colonialism and the apartheid regime. All Criminal Christians.
Now we can pass to the Shintoist criminals in China, Korea, the Philippines, etc.
And we cannot forgot the populated variety of Islam criminals with the extermination of Armenian people in first place.
If we added the Hinduist criminals, etc., etc., etc., the "Atheist crimes" are in the caboose. Theist criminals won by a landslide.

And I don't count the victims of Christian capitalism, because the recountsum would never end.

 

[dann]

I had misunderstood you. You mean "conflict between science and religion". Is it not?

Yes, that appears to be what he means. However, in my own country the death of religion didn't mean that there was any big conflict the way that GDon seems to believe. On the contrary: What has happened is that people are slowly losing their need to believe. They actually stay in church (it's where you get married and buried), they just don't go to church:

In January 2017, 75.9% of the population of Denmark were registered members of the Church of Denmark (Den Danske Folkekirke), the officially established church, which is Protestant in classification and Lutheran in orientation. This is down 1.0% compared to the year earlier and 1.9% down compared to two years earlier. Despite the high membership figures, only 3% of the population regularly attend Sunday services and only 19% of Danes consider religion to be an important part of their life.
Religion in Denmark (Wikipedia)

 

[dann]

Add the First World War and the Christian-Nazis killers in the Second World War.

I also mentioned the Vietnam War and WW1+2, but even though you had Christian countries killing millions, it needs to be said that these wars weren't really about religion.

 

[dann]

I actually believed there's was an invisible man who lived in the sky who had to become his own child, and killed himself as a sacrifice to himself to appease his own bloodlust, AND after death he came back as a sort of functional zombie before floating away into the sky, AND now all of us followers regularly ate his symbolic flesh and drank his symbolic blood as part of a weird "symbolic cannibalism" ritual.

Only an insignificant number of contemporary Danes believe in that kind of Christianity. I personally don't know any.

 

[kellyb]

As such, there is inevitable (and increasing over the last number of years) tension/conflict between my faith and my skepticism.

What I kind of "came to" with that was beginning to see faith (in the strictly religious sense) as a vice and skepticism as a virtue. It was incredible painful and darkly surreal, but I'd been suffering from significant cognitive dissonance trying to hold the "truths" of Christianity in my head and chase objective reality at the same time.

I realized that I'd been indoctrinated into Christianity (to the point of brainwashing,) and I felt that if god was real, I'd need to figure that out on different terms other than the "faith" method of getting in touch with the truth. I knew from watching others that people can fully believe anything if they're determined to believe it. I couldn't shake the suspicion that I was doing that same thing myself with Christianity.

I still kind of hope to one day discover something like god. It seems less and less likely as the years pass, though. When I first said a sort of "goodbye prayer" to god and took the cognitive dive into agnostic-atheism, I really expected to be Christian again within a year. Or a deist, at least. Heh. But nope! While I have days where I feel like a deist, I'm always aware that it's likely just a strange mood, and it passes quickly. I am somewhat intrigued by some of the arguments about cosmological fine-tuning, though. That's as close as I get to theism.

There are certain...neural networks leftover from my former Christian mind which are permanent fixtures in my psychology, though, and I'm ok with that. When I look at someone needing my help, my mind goes right to seeing them as "sacred", a la "I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me...". And when I think about stuff like the altruistic instincts the various social species have, it strikes me as a sort of "divinity" (just sans any connection to deities or anything supernatural. )

 

[kellyb]

Only an insignificant number of contemporary Danes believe in that kind of Christianity. I personally don't know any.

It's over half of Americans.

Weird stuff. LOL

 

[dann]

Perhaps you don't know what finite means or is it you have not been following the conversation?

I was replying to a post by GDon where he was suggesting that scientific refutations of things religious was pretty much confined to the evolution and heliocentric topics. My post was suggesting the number of religious utterances were finite, (talking about the past here ...... get it?), and many so ridiculous nobody would feel compelled to refute them.

Yes, I get it, but you don't, apparently. You are talking about religion as if it was all over! It isn't. New religious utterances are added every day, and so are new interpretations of the old ones, get it?

 

[kellyb]

Yes, I get it, but you don't, apparently. You are talking about religion as if it was all over! It isn't. New religious utterances are added every day, and so are new interpretations of the old ones, get it?

Well, religions are unlikely to come up with their own new theories of weather, cosmology, and the origins of humanity now. Those particular types of truth claims were finite. I guess some new age religion could take off looking at the "spirituality of quantum physics" or whatever, tho (like Deepak Chopra tries to do.)

 

[dann]

Science method - "Science is not a religion, or even an opinion. Science is a method for discovering facts."

You are both wrong: Science is not a way of discovering facts. Newton didn't discover the fact of gravity. He explained gravity. People had actually already noticed that apples don't fall upwards: "he discovered the laws of gravity" (ignore the title; they get it right in the article).
And Darwin may have discovered a lot of fossils and new species, but his major contribution to the knowledge of mankind was that he explained how they were connected, evolution.
Which he did, of course, by using scientific reasoning, the scientific method ...

 

[GDon]

People use the examples of evolution and heliocentrism to try to extrapolate from that there is a broader conflict, but struggle to find examples beyond that, despite how science has increased so dramatically in the last 100 years. Why? Shouldn't there be more conflicts as science increases?

I had misunderstood you. You mean "conflict between science and religion". Is it not?

That's right. Since science has increased so dramatically in the last 100 years, if science conflicts with religion is true, then we should be seeing increasing conflicts. Instead, people have to go back hundreds to a thousand years to find examples.

The struggle of religion against heliocentrism was not against Galileo only. The same with evolution. They were a broad battle against every idea with any hint of going against the churches' Sacred Magisterium. It lasted four centuries and caused countless victims not so famous as Galileo or Darwin.

No it didn't cause countless victims. Darwin was not a victim by any means. Galileo would have been allowed to teach heliocentrism as a theory in universities except that he tried convincing the church that they were interpreting scripture incorrectly. You need to read Tim O'Neill's excellent blog series "History for Athiests", where he goes through topics about history to show that some atheists are simply repeating myths rather than history. Tim is an atheist historian, and he is even more annoyed than me on how these myths keep getting repeated uncritically.
https://historyforatheists.com/

Besides this, the fight was not limited only to heliocentrism or evolution. Miquel Servet was burned alive in Geneva for his ideas about the blood circulation; Giordano Bruno because of his defence of the infinity of the universe. The churches also chased the atomism, the scientific method and even mathematics as devil works.

Even when it was absolutely discredited, the Catholic church promoted the sacred-finalist version of evolution by Teilhard de Chardin. In the twentieth century!

Okay.

Nowadays it seems that the pockets of religious resistance to science are reduced to fundamentalism.

Pretty much, yes.

 

[kellyb]

You are both wrong

..and I think you are all correct in different ways. People mean different things when they say "science". The totality of the topic of "what is science?" is not something most people ever really think about comprehensively, and it's really more complex than you'd guess right off the bat.

You're all describing different aspects of science, IMO.

 

[David Mo]

Since science has increased so dramatically in the last 100 years, if science conflicts with religion is true, then we should be seeing increasing conflicts. Instead, people have to go back hundreds to a thousand years to find examples.


No it didn't cause countless victims. Darwin was not a victim by any means. Galileo would have been allowed to teach heliocentrism as a theory in universities except that he tried convincing the church that they were interpreting scripture incorrectly. You need to read Tim O'Neill's excellent blog series "History for Athiests", where he goes through topics about history to show that some atheists are simply repeating myths rather than history. Tim is an atheist historian, and he is even more annoyed than me on how these myths keep getting repeated uncritically.
https://historyforatheists.com/

The increase in science in the 20th century has been accompanied by a decline in ecclesiastical pressure in the Western world. It would be necessary to discuss which is the cause and which is the effect. I believe that the decisive factor has been an increase in secularism in civil society. It is relatively much less in the Muslim or Hindu, where the conflict is still strong.

When I speak of victims, I do not mean victims of physical attacks alone. The victims have been also teachers expelled from their chairs, intellectuals ostracized and exiled or even those who have had to censor themselves, such as Darwin.

 

[David Mo]

You need to read Tim O'Neill's excellent blog series "History for Athiests", where he goes through topics about history to show that some atheists are simply repeating myths rather than history. Tim is an atheist historian, and he is even more annoyed than me on how these myths keep getting repeated uncritically.
https://historyforatheists.com/.

I don't think Tim O'Neill's blog is excellent. He says he's an atheist, although I don't think so. What he's trying to do is a work of historical revisionism denying what he calls "myths" of atheism. The ones I've read are a ceremony of confusion.
To demystify the persecutions against Copernicus is fine, but it cannot be ignored that Copernicus was not persecuted because he published his masterpiece in the same year of his death and because he did everything possible to link it to the Scholastic Authority. And whatever happened to Copernicus, it would be foolish to deny the fierce persecution of heliocentrism by the church. Without these important facts, O'Neill's demystification is the creation of a new myth.

Something similar happens with his "demystification" of Hypatia.

If you want you can call him a "historian". He defines himself as an amateur historian. He fits better.

 

[P.J. Denyer]

Hi P.J. Thanks for the welcome and the response, including the synopsis of your own background.

I realize my OP came across like "my experience is good, so it must be true", as you and others have understandably interpreted. I meant it more as an explanation of why it's very hard for me to simply discount it all, and why the process of re-evaluating my faith and experiences more critically is something I am doing carefully and gradually.

You're spot-on on your assertion though that I have historically believed Christian accounts of miracles, while discounting those of other religions. And I've even been more readily skeptical of Christians from other denominations than of my immediate community. Some other recent events have helped me recognize, and begin to change this way of thinking and I'm making progress. As others have pointed out in this thread, it's not easy to recognize, let alone change, all of one's own prejudices, whether religious or other. (I could make a dig at the politics of my beloved neighbours to the south here, but I'll refrain).

Regarding dividing lines, those are in flux at present, and I wouldn't say there are things I believe that I don't think are true, so much as things things I recognize I cannot prove, or even test in a meaningful way, which I've tried to express as best I can throughout the thread. Sorry, that's not a thorough response to a very good question and I'll try to articulate more later if I can.

Thank you for taking the time to respond, you've had a lot of responses so it is appreciated. If you can settle on an example that you think has sufficient 'legs' to discuss specifically I for one would definitely be interested, although you might like to start a fresh thread for it, I think it could be a productive discussion. Either way, I look forward to hearing your perspective on some of our on going religious discussions.

 

[GDon]

Yes, that appears to be what he means. However, in my own country the death of religion didn't mean that there was any big conflict the way that GDon seems to believe. On the contrary: What has happened is that people are slowly losing their need to believe.

It's not a question of what I believe, but of what some claim: that increasing science conflicts increasingly with belief, therefore people stop believing. But there is simply no evidence for that particular claim. Religious dogma says nothing about cloning, nuclear physics, etc, so scientific discoveries in the last 100 years have no direct impact on religion.

Instead, I think it is along the lines you propose: there is no need to attend church and no need to adopt religious dogma, so people drift away; but I'd put that down to social conventions -- e.g. less pressure to be seen as religious due to declining social power by religions. Part of that may indeed be the idea that we have science, so we don't need religion. But that is due more to fashion rather than any particular scientific discovery.