Science and religion

[Scattered]

>>How does one reason from the finite to the infinite?
How does one reason from disorder to order? Evolution.
>>Does it not always involve a leap of faith?
Knowledge and reason are an important part as well.
Rest assured that if you followed the path of science that I did, that the story would look different than the one told by religion. It is clearly recognizable as what appears to be the same story, but necessarily being based on science, it is missing the magical component of the story. My story does not start with religion, it starts with biology. As such it does not take much literally. My work led a very high probability of God(s) and heavens which looked looked similar enough to the story of Christianity that I compared them. It did not at all start with religion.
If there is Original Sin, it is that we started as animals and must become more.
Remember the purpose of the pyramids. You mention death. What if I told you that there is probably a simple way to beat death? Wasn't that the purpose of the pyramids? That is an old old drive. If I tell you a way to beat death, a practical way (which means does not endanger survival of the human race as most methods of physical immortatlity would), do you think humans will use it? Simple, we make heaven... as had been done many times before.

[Didymos Thomas]

I hope these comments do not go too far back into the topic. Reading through all of this has been interesting.

Uhhhh.... Is that a useful truth?
My kids come up with things like that and it is my responsibility to make sure they don't confuse truth with thought.
I looked up truth on Wikipedia and didn't find anything corrosponding to anything like truth being equivelant to imagination... Quite the contrary in fact.
If you want to say that any random thought is truth, then please suggest another word I can use to indicate thoughts that are generally factual as opposed to imaginary.

Well, it's true that mental states can be about cows jumping over the moon. At the same time, there is no physical state in which a cow jumps over the moon.

de Silento - You say that "here is a lot of faith in what we call science. For example, we cannot know about the beginning of mankind, or life in general. It takes just as much faith to believe in this as it does to believe in God."

The problem here is that we can investigate matters such as the beginning of mankind and life through scientific investigation. At least, scientists seem to think they can, and have, and continue to do so, presenting a great deal of supposed physical evidence and interesting theories. Is all of this research worthless?
You admit that "there can be no 'science', as we understand it, about God because science has to do with what we can know about the world around us." You go on to admit that God is essentially different from the "world around us" which science is concerned with. Obviously, then, belief in God and evidence from the world around us have very different support.
Why does science require just as much faith as God?

We do have a couple of things to work with. If God exists, it seems that he is interested in humans. Can that help us? It suggests against the idea that God is toatally apart from this world.

I would agree that no is not totally apart from us, but my particular notions of God are a different subject, I'm just curious about God's supposed interest in humans.
If we can go so far as to say God is interested in man, is there any reason to think his interest in man exceeds anything else that exists?

[Aedes]

Scattered, I've spent the last 3 years as a post-doctoral clinical fellow in Infectious Diseases at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health, and I did two years of research on inheritable determinants of human disease. Heredity is not "forbidden" in science, it's one of the most important and common subjects of study in all of science and particularly medicine.

If your idea of "heredity" is limited to the racial theories of Julius Streicher and Joseph Goebbels, then I'd strongly suggest you reexpose yourself to it.

[Scattered]

How about you ask Dr. Watson about it. He might disagree.
Heredity is still a very touchy subject, because like it or not it leads to Social Darwinism which has led to some very ugly stuff including Joseph Goebbels. Currently there is no alternative conclusion.
It is examined in medicine and elsewhere. They ignore some of the inconvenient logical conclusions. I hear that The Bell Curve is very considered in universities, but anyway you cut it the conclusions are such that the politically correct can get very rightously indignant.
A new way of looking at it that has a different conclusion from the win-lose results of Social Darwinism is required. I came up with a win win view, but that is just another part.

[Didymos Thomas]

I'm not sure how heredity leads to Social Darwinism. If you mean people will misunderstand the science and seriously adopt social Darwinism, this may very well be the case, but otherwise, I don't see the issue. I'm not very well versed on the subject, but what I do not see is social Darwinism gaining any real ground.

[Scattered]

Social Darwinism is just the concept tht societies are involved in a form of Darwinian competition. The study of heredity strenthens that concept by defining racial based social groups. Social Darwinism is seriously enough accepted. By default, it is the foundation of any race war of which there are many, including to a large extent WWII. Durfur is a great example as is most conflict in the Middle East. Social Darwinism is generally not gaining ground though there are more wars currently than is usual in the modern world, but with population pressures, global warming and other pressures, it very well could. Part of the reason it is not gaining ground is that it is a forbidden subject in academia.
I mentioned that I found a way to modify the arguement from win lose to win win.

[Fido]

Originally Posted by Scattered

Social Darwinism is just the concept tht societies are involved in a form of Darwinian competition. The study of heredity strenthens that concept by defining racial based social groups. Social Darwinism is seriously enough accepted. By default, it is the foundation of any race war of which there are many, including to a large extent WWII. Durfur is a great example as is most conflict in the Middle East. Social Darwinism is generally not gaining ground though there are more wars currently than is usual in the modern world, but with population pressures, global warming and other pressures, it very well could. Part of the reason it is not gaining ground is that it is a forbidden subject in academia.
I mentioned that I found a way to modify the arguement from win lose to win win.

Social darwanism has always been one excuse the rich have used to feed upon the poor. Plato, among others, seem to suggest that the wealthy are wealthy because they are worthy. This may be true of societies, that they do better as a result of some inovation, or intelligence; but within a society it is an excuse for the society destroying itself. Humanity as a rule has limited adaptation to environment by limiting the environment. Our technology allows us to adapt to environments so that we do not have to evolve to them.

In the example of WWII we can see how darwanism in the hands of crackpots can result in great misery and destruction. Even in small ways the theory was proved wrong. Among my father's generation, the best and the brightest became pilots, and they suffered much more death. Great numbers did not live to breed, or pass their intelligence. Others, smarter yet, who were engineers and physics students may have lived because they were better, and essential to war production. I do not doubt that many of these suffered more from occupational illness. I think there is some evidence to show that when societies are stressed that they are more likely to produce homosexuals and schizophrenics, which may demonstrate sort of genetic logic, but as neither is likely to pass on what ever traits they possess directly the 'benefit' if there is one is not widespread.

[Scattered]

Uh... Fido,
Your first paragraph seemed to relate to classes in a society. I didn't mention that and class warfare tends to be covered by economists, not biologists.
I think in your second paragraph you laid out a very good basic defense and support of the idea of Social Darwinism. Some of the best and brightest died, but the society survived and the opponents society perished. (of course something very unusual happened in history and we rebuilt their nations and peoples, but their culture definately perished.)
What is a more clear cut case is the war on Jews, Gypsys, Slavs and some other ethnic groups in WWII. Consider the Hutus and Tutsis. Consider the Africans and Arabs of Durfur. Think of the Christians and Muslims of Checkslovokia. That is Social Darwinism in action today. It is a current deadly affair. The reasoning is simple. I found a way to change the reasoning, but that is another story.

[Aedes]

Originally Posted by Scattered

How about you ask Dr. Watson about it. He might disagree.

How about I not ask someone who basically plagiarized his way to a Nobel Prize, and who has been reviled for his ethics within the scientific community for the last half century.

Heredity is still a very touchy subject, because like it or not it leads to Social Darwinism which has led to some very ugly stuff including Joseph Goebbels. Currently there is no alternative conclusion. It is examined in medicine and elsewhere. They ignore some of the inconvenient logical conclusions. I hear that The Bell Curve is very considered in universities, but anyway you cut it the conclusions are such that the politically correct can get very rightously indignant.

1. Heredity is not taboo by any measure. In the National Library of Medicine there are more than 1.6 million scientific articles that have the word heredity as a keyword -- and this doesn't count all the others that study heredity without using the word (as it's rather imprecise -- very few articles use the word biology either). Then you go on to acknowledge that heredity is "examined in medicine and elsewhere." Darn right it is -- there are billions of dollars of funding that go to investigate questions of heredity.

2. The "Bell Curve" is sometimes used for data sets with a normal distribution, which can be Gaussian, Poisson, or several others, and which can be confirmed by tests of normality such as skewness/kurtosis and the Shapiro-Wilk test. Bell curves are not used for data sets that are not normally distributed. It's as simple as that. If policymakers want to pick cutoffs on normally distributed data sets, like implementing policy based on x standard deviations from a normally distributed mean, that's only a statement about the policy and not about the underlying data set. A bell curve is merely a description of a set of data that has certain statistical symmetry -- there is no inherent value judgement in it.

3. Social Darwinism is not the result of heredity research. It's simply a way that modern antisemites (and others) have rationalized their policies. But racial antisemitism unambiguously existed in the 15th century, when the Inquisition in Spain became convinced that conversos (Jews who had converted to Christianity) were still racially Jewish, and were a social contaminant. The Nazis adopted the language of Darwinism, but there was little difference -- it was just a rationalization to justify purging what they deemed a social contaminant.

4. You worry that Social Darwinism is an unavoidable implication of heredity research. I beg to differ. With heredity research we are able to screen children for cystic fibrosis, phenylketonuria, and sickle cell anemia, thereby implementing life-saving interventions during infancy. With heredity research we can match you for a bone marrow transplant for your leukemia. This is the EXACT OPPOSITE of Social Darwinism, because we're allowing the "weak" to survive and take part in our society.

[dpmartin]

The use of social value to justify superiority of one man over another has been man’s own desire as far back as recorded. It has been man’s nature to dominated one another like a dog pack for a larger share of the kill, and bring one in servitude to the other, using the mind set of the society, has not changed. And unfortunately, will not. One who is gifted is gifted, not superior. But that does not stop those who are gifted from using their gift to dominate his neighbor. Where as he could use the gift to help his neighbor.

It’s what a society values most that it shall follow, or pursue.
Man is trained to impose his will on another, look at the game of football. A game like most sports that illustrates despite bad calls by refs or the bounce of the ball and team member mistakes you are able to over come the will of the opponent and dominate. Which is rewarded and admired by others.

To use "superior race" or scientific data and know how, or religion, or tell them what they want hear, or fear of death and suffering one can cause the other, or even a simple bunch in the face, to justify superiority to dominate the face of the planet, is nothing new at all.
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If your looking for where science and the bible meet you might look to the first verse of Genesis.
It’s seems apparent that religion and science have nothing in common other than proclamation of what is according to those who see what they believe as true for what ever reasons. Science approaches it with life is the result of existence and the bible says that existence is the result of will of eternal life.
According to the prevailing paradigm of the science community there are five basic parts, or elements, of the cosmos/existence, (all things). Time, energy, space, matter, and something that started it (now being considered the big bang). The first verse in Genesis.

In the beginning (time).
God (something that started it).
Created (energy).
The heaven (space).
And the earth (matter).

So does existence exist because of the reason for it, or does the reason exit because there is existence? Surly the reason can exist without existence but existence can not exist without the reason for it’s existence. If existence had no reason then how could it exist? For existence is merely the manifestation of the reason.

There must be purpose; for life acts with purpose, which is, to live. If there where no purpose there would be no order at all. Thus an environment that could not execute life or respond to the presents of life nor act to continue living, or give life.

It seems that science says knowledge is acquired through experience and only exists in that which has learned. Believers say knowledge is given and was always there, and is revealed by the will of eternal Life which is to live and give life. So does knowledge exist because is was learned by existence? Or was knowledge always there, and can be learned by the living?