Dragons are (supposed to be) physical creatures, therefore can be proved or disproved by science. If a situation is inescapable, logic dictates that it is futile to try and escape it. Not being remembered; remembering. Once we are dead, we have no memory of our life. We have no awareness. We will not exist, and from our point of view that will be no different from never having existed. Whatever meaning we attach to our lives, however rational, is based in first axioms, which are basically beliefs. You are basically saying that the experiences that lead people to have a faith somehow have less substance than the experiences that lead people to become atheists. I respectfully assert that is bollocks. Still based in first axioms: beliefs. It has survival value, therefore I posit that it can be a good thing. I posit that all beliefs basically function in the same way. We are taught them or we formulate them based on our (flawed, subjective) perceptions and interpretations of our experiences, and then we selectively perceive and interpret subsequent experiences to fit within and reinforce those beliefs, whole we ignore experiences that don't. Basically, once we believe, we just believe.
Im going to focus on this as its the main thing that we differ on. You act like no one can change their mind, to hear contrary evidence and then change their mind to fit to reality. There are religious claims that are false and provable false, having all the faith in the world will not make them true. You can if you wish live a life not caring about what is really true, i say its better not to. if god has a hand in our universe then he to is a least in part physical and therefore testable. This will most likely be poor wording from me. Its not that it has less substance but rather its just assigned wrongly. Someone close to you has a life threatening accident but they survive against all odds. Some people assign this to god, only he could of saved this person. Some of us would rather assign it to years and years of medical research and the dedication of medical professionals. Both are interpretations of the same event but both of them are not true.
I'd be interested in seeing the evidence "Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill." Matthew 5:17
Of course they can, but for good reasons it is not something that happens easily. And a lot of reality is in the eye of the beholder. What is really true is that we live less than a century; we struggle, we grow old and weak and then we die and we are gone. That is if we are lucky. Cancer can get you, or a random accident can just wipe you out. We are a dim, short flicker in a cold darkness unimaginably vast and indifferent. That's really true. Or: we area species uniquely capable of understanding the physical universe and controlling it. We may die, but our species may live on and develop, and one day spread amongst the stars. One day in an unimaginably distant future we may become what we would regard as gods now. That is also true. We are chemical chance. True. We are beings with meaning and purpose. True. We are meat machines. True. We are loving, dreaming, creative, spiritual creatures. True. Everything is true, for a given value of 'true'. If He plays within the rules of physics, His actions are going to be pretty hard to tell apart. Both are true for a given value of 'true'. The faithful would say that God gave us the brains to develop medicine and save lives; that He inspired people to dedicate their lives to medicine. Some doctors even believe so. Are you going to say that they are acting from a delusion? That this belief is irrational and unproductive? And yet it motivated them to study medicine and save lives.
You could always go consult with the local college's department of Biblical archaeology. Fascinating discipline, that. Don't forget, Nexxo, you could get really lucky and be like me. No cure, no real treatment. Just a pat on the shoulder and lots and lots of opiates. Cancer patients get hope. AIDS patients get hope. I get a disease with no real name, even. They know the locations of the Marfan spectrum-and where my family's issue lies there is no real understanding why it happens or how we survive the womb. When my son's neurosurgeon and neurologist read my son's genetic array, one said a prayer in Latin and the other exclaimed (in a ward full of children and their parents) "Jesus ****-dancing Christ!" My geneticist feels we'd find much the same in my genetics-a triplication of the distal portion of the q arm of chromosome 3. So yeah, pancreatic cancer gets hope. I tear muscles walking. My lungs bleed when I cough. And my heart grows weaker from trying to carry an entire body full of problems like that. But I have no fear about where I am going. In fact, I spend my time worrying about others-they have hope. My hope is for a swift end. Whether I'm right or wrong, I'll finally know. Faith leaves me able to anticipate the end (which should only be two or three more years of constant decline away) instead of fearing it. It keeps me more interested in my fellow man, believing that the end is taken care of, one way or the other. I mean, if I just blip out, well, dead people don't hurt. Dead people don't miss their deceased children. Until then, I deal with those who aren't ready yet. Faith keeps me levelheaded and able to operate in such conditions-just as Nexxo pointed out. Though if you have a reason for why my child was without a heartbeat for an hour and a half and woke back up and recognized everyone, please, the scientific world would love to know. Or why I've been declared dead three times and I'm still typing this. Science is still an incomplete discipline. It does not hold all the answers. It doesn't even hold the important ones. Use it for what it's worth, but don't ascribe to it that it can't answer.
No, not ever. Because it is outside of the domain of science, which is the physical universe. Anything outside of that: the meaning of life, morals and ethics, the aesthetic experience of beauty, science does not concern itself with.
I was actually replying to KB's post and his experience with medicine and illness which is very much in the physical world. Just because science hadn't explained what happened doesn't mean it can't/won't ever.
You're misunderstanding his post. Science understands pretty well how Kayin is screwed by his genetics, how his son was screwed, etc. It has no treatment or cure yet, but one day it may deliver. Science also understands how it psychologically affects him to live with his condition and experience his son's death. What science cannot offer him an answer on, is how he is going to still derive a meaningful and fulfilling life out of these circumstances. How is he going to live with all this crap and accept a painful and early death of himself and of his son? Again, science can explain the psychological process of adjustment, but cannot give him the answers to what makes his life, or that of his son, meaningful and fulfilling to him. That is the domain of philosophy and spirituality.
No I'm not but thanks for letting me know I'm wrong. He said his Sons heart stopped for over an hour (on phone so can't quote exactly) and regained consciousness without a medical explanation. That's the episode I'm referring to. If that is the case then just because this cannot currently be explained does not lead me to a conclusion of a higher power but an acceptance that science doesn't claim to currently know the answers for everything. Science has throughout human history though turned many unexplained and unknowns into theory and scientific fact. (I would ask for more details but don't want to pry)
OK, I think you may be misunderstanding his post, but I could be wrong, sorry. Thing is: his son's heart stops for 90 minutes and against (scientific) expectation he comes back to life without apparent brain damage. So how does Kayin make sense of what happened? What meaning does he attach to this death-defying event? If you read his post back, you'll note that he asks for a reason: a why, not a scientific explanation about how. That stuff lies outside of the scientific domain.
I think most people value security over freedom, and agnosticism is the new opiate of the masses. It is indicative of the same desire not to think as religion. It just has the additional benefit of making you feel open minded, when in fact you are closing your mind to many difficult and troublesome questions by blindly accepting the possibility of any and all solutions. Religion is useful and comforting. This does not make it true. There are things it seems we cannot know. This does not make the answers we invent true.
so because it is hard then we shouldn't bother and just settle for less? Reality is reality, wishing for something does not make it true. why the "Or"? all the above is true and does not contradict each other, also importantly its all based on facts motivated by a fairy tale yes. Does it mean that their life is not worthwhile? Far from it. I believe the doctors in question should give themselves more credit for their actions. Crediting god with all their hard work, determination, blood, sweat and tears just seems so . You can't prove theres anything outside of science as you need science to prove things... bringing such personal things into a discussion makes it very hard to reply
No, but sometimes making something come true starts by wishing for it. Arguing for a strict adherence to 'reality' (and we could go on for ages about the true nature of that) rules out imagination, dreams, "what if" questions. One hundred and fifty years ago, 'reality' was dying from infectious diseases, one in four women dying in childbirth, one in three children not making it past five, surgery being a mad dream. You may think it is unproductive escapism, but humanity got where it did by wishful thinking and imagination --even with science and technology. Indeed. Do you know better what they should believe than they do? It's all fairy tales, dude, whether you believe in God or in humanity conquering death and disease, or in the fantasy of saving lives and helping people. As long as they save lives, what does it matter? What gives my life meaning, or yours, is not scientifically provable. But it feels pretty damn real, no? That's because you recognise that there is more than just the scientific response. There's the human one too.
But that's the point-we're talking about emotion here. We are talking about the concepts such as love, faith, and a sense pf purpose. Personally, I'm not at all concerned with how it happened. Either I understand it as well as science can explain or it doesn't matter. Believe it or not, most of the time science is irrevelant. The questions most people want answered science doesn't touch. Most people walk around in a world of philosophical constructs. Ethics isn't science. Family dynamics isn't science. And dealing with the **** life throws our way isn't really science. You could try to do it scientifically, but you wouldn't be too successful. Because what faith is meant to answer is the stuff above, and leave how the universe formed and such to others. They are complementary, not competitive. I know the universe is here. Now why was I born where I am, when I am, with the issues I have, and why do I have these questions in the first place? Science can offer only a curt, cursory answer of "because." Or I can turn to faith, which may tell me, "because you have something to do only you can do. And maybe it's nothing bigger than to make a child happy one time down the road. But that matters. Because that child will go on to spread it to others, and one day, even after you're gone, your act will still help people." You could arrive at that possibly by science, but it wouldn't be an inspiring thought. We are still creatures of instinct, of action, of raw passions (used in the classical sense.) Science cannot adequately explain us, let alone everything else. Ever acted on a hunch? That's not very scientific. Ever gotten a bad feeling about something, and it be true? We're still only quasi-scientific at best. You like somebody you just met? We're still in the realm of emotion and by extension, faith. We run on it. Discounting it is foolish, and those that learn to manipulate it are rich as Croesus. Scientists don't get rich doing science because mostly nobody cares. Faith healers get rich because they directly manipulate what people want. Science actually spends a fair amount of time clearing its playing field as to what it does and doesn't do, if you read your original scientists. Me? I'm really a theologian, which is just a specialized philosopher. I've been a man of science (working in physics and materials design) but I always went back to my original work of making sense of very complex situations that science doesn't answer. Why do bad things happen to good people? Science says "just does." Or a person can use a framework of faith to include a belief that bad things happen to good people anyway, and each thing that happens is a very personal lesson they can choose to learn from and grow, or ignore and stagnate. And maybe, that person decides that bad thing wasn't bad at all to them-such as the people that credit terminal diseases with showing them what is truly important. Or the tragedies that bring families closer. I mentioned my son because science was at a loss with him most of the time. Well, let me share faith's answer. Why was my son sick? To teach doctors about something they'd never seen before. And we gladly let them. Why us? Because we could handle it. And for one year and three hundred and sixty-four days, we did. Every day, without turning away. We did it because we believed that we had a source of help to turn to in God, and when we felt we weren't strong enough we relied on the idea that God was with us. When the end came, we felt that we had done all we could and God chose to end it to end his suffering. And we found peace and solace in that. We gained the strength to endure the most crushing thing a parent can endure. And against the odds, our marriage was not destroyed by it. We may be even closer. We routinely defied the odds in our marriage relating to sickness. Faith helped us keep it together. If we had followed simple science, I don't think anyone there would have fared as well. Simple science told us to kill him as he was being born. In fact, they tried anyway, without our approval. Called us irrational. We had to threaten legal repercussions as well as publicly outing their actions on TV and in print. We are happier for having known him. Even though we miss him. And that is completely counter to what logic would say. Because there is still more to this life than logic.
this is where i back out, replying to things like this is just to risky, discussing religion tends to upset people as it is, without having to comment and disagree on things that are very close to peoples hearts.
That's because you recognise that there is more to this than just a scientific rational perspective. You don't have to agree. You just need to understand that imagination: the ability to conceive of things that are beyond physical reality, is important to the human condition. It is the wellspring of human progress. One of its products happens to be religious and spiritual beliefs. You can reject that and say that we should just focus on reality, but that is killing off the human spirit altogether. And anyway, only fundamentalists tell other people what they should believe, no?
Yup This is all nonsense. You are implying that if we focus only on things that are real we lose the human spirit. (which I am assuming is some sort of raison d'etre.) There are many wonderful things in life that don't require the assistance of fairy tales to be any more or less wonderful. The fact (if it actually is one) that trying to conceive of things which are outside of a physical reality (and worse still, trying to explain away things in such manner) is important to the human condition only highlights the fact that we are inherently irrational as a species. Its not a quality its a limitation.
