Can Science Explain Religion?

Aniihya · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **Aniihya** on Mon Jul 23, 2012 11:09 am

I don't like how monotheistic religions rival each other in "what would be THE religion". Nobody should care and as long as there is free will, people should be able to freely decide if they want to believe in a particular religion or be part of a secular movement. I was actually baptized Maronite (mother is Catholic, dad is atheist) and I decided it was not for me and adopted the belief of my great grandfather.

TheFinalOne · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **TheFinalOne** on Mon Jul 23, 2012 11:33 am

The main values (brotherhood, love, peace, kindness, etc) taught by most, if not all, religions (my definition of religion is pretty much "keeping science from doing sick stuff using philosophy, ethics and morality, and explaining scientific stuff in a way that normal people can understand properly because not everyone is a nuclear physicist*) are the same. The way they teach it is different. And since the people following each religion are different (in their experiences of the world they live in), their interpretation of the work by the scholars is different. This causes the fighting we see today.

*-I like to think that these people, these scholars, looked at the amazing feats man could do with simple tools and realized that shit will hit the fan the moment man turns on itself. And we all know that when good intentions masks censorship, corruption is not far behind.

Aniihya · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **Aniihya** on Mon Jul 23, 2012 2:48 pm

TheFinalOne: Sorry but my religion has no dogma making it different to other religions. Some religions have rules, some don't and with some morals and ethics aren't based in the religion itself but rather from the society (depending on the region).

dealing with it · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **dealing with it** on Mon Jul 23, 2012 6:02 pm

Is dogma a bad thing? In my understanding, Catholics don't associate anything negative with dogma. It basically just means "true belief": a kind of revealed insight (revelation) that doesn't need to be justified by anything more than faith. An unjustified belief looks ugly, and certainly is not scientific, but should we allow for some of those?

Aniihya · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **Aniihya** on Tue Jul 24, 2012 12:22 am

"True belief" or dogma, is often negative due to it leading people to war with people of other beliefs because people think others need to heed to the "true belief" (i.e. the Crusades: Muslims conquer an area where Christians and Jews live, Europeans go there kill Jews and Muslims unwilling to convert and massacre a part of the population, btw the Muslims sort of did the same before the Europeans came).

dealing with it · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **dealing with it** on Wed Aug 01, 2012 12:39 am

I think if there was some genuine, true, dogma, that would be a pretty good argument against not only all other beliefs, but also against lack of any belief (that is to say, Agnosticism). I'm not trying to justify violence in the name of truth, but it would be interesting if truth could be dogmatic and still worth spit.

cucumbersome · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **cucumbersome** on Wed Aug 01, 2012 2:23 am

Sorry I didn't read the whole thread...

The conflict between science and religion is caused by mixing up the different definitions of "why?".

"Why" can mean "What caused this?", this is science.
"Why" can mean "What intention is behind this?", this is religion (though intention can be talked about outside religion).

I'll bet science can explain the cause of us having intentions (and I'm sure there can be religious intentions that cause one to want to do science).

Would it matter if our intentions were caused by something other than magic? To some it would, because they think it means they don't have free will. But free will is a funny thing: from the perspective of a character in a story or roleplay, that character does have free will. From the perspective of the author, it does not. So it seems that for practical purposes we have free will even when our intentions are caused by physical processes that are both deterministic and random but definitely without intention themselves.

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