Phil’s Diary - [Blog @ http://www.philsdiary.net/]
There’s an intersting article here on a new archaelogical discovery and how it may influence religeon. While it is indeed possible that it’ll have some effect, I think the author over states the implications on religeon.
From what I’ve seen, genearlly speaking religeon is based and driven purely on belief, faith and myths.
It is not founded on scientific principles such as fact, proof or evidence.
So while it’s entirely possible that this discovery could be used to disprove various religeous statements, I think it’s probably the case that this won’t rock the boat too much, as religeon has never needed, nor used proof.
I guess where it becomes difficult to ignore is when it is proof against, rather than just lack of proof. For example, there is nothing in scientific eyes to prove the existance of a omnipotent all powerful deity. Nor of an eternal blissful afterlife. But faith makes up for that. However proof that something doesn’t exist leaves less room for it to be ignored.
Time and time again though religeon has survived scientific discoveries, often in the past branding the scientists as heretics. But it has survived, and more likely will continue to do so. At least until the really key things are actually disproved.
Posted by Phil on October 28, 2004 10:31 PM | Categories: Thoughts
One problem with religion is that it is based on believe. The idea of proof is alien so if you prove one of the basis of the religion to be false most believers will not understand nor accept that proof.
Believe is something strangely innate in people. So much so that you 'believe in Godly creation or believe in evolution'. As if evolution is something you can 'believe' in.
Actually both religious people and scientists refuse to see evidence in much the same way. If it doesn't fit the current believes or Theories the evidence is swept under the rug. Either by blandly ignoring it or by burying it under a heap of other, better suited evidence and facts.
Religion is easy, if there are facts you don't understand you can point to the ultimate expert -god- and shrug them off. Science is, for most people -including the average scientist-, only a little bit more difficult. For facts you don't understand you point to experts. If they don't know they point to other experts. And if there is no expert who knows, the usual answer applies. "We don't know yet but we are looking for an answer." With the firm believe that the answer will be found. (Notice that word is cropping up again?). Yep, for most people Science has become a form of religion. And why not?
What is religion but the human desire to explain uncertainty away.
We started with gods for every thing. Every unexplained fact got its own God. Gods in trees, Gods for clouds, rivers, hills, rocks. Don't know how lightning works? Just put a God behind it. Don't know what the sun is? Just call it a God.
Slowly we learned to understand how things work we moved on from gods being all over the place to a smaller set of gods, each doing more than one thing. But all together doing less than the whole crowd did before, cause, after all water just flows down from the hills, you don't need a god for that. Religion fares well with fewer gods needed to do the explaining.
With less and less things remaining incomprehensible religion got by with less gods to attribute the vague mysterious things to. And so we get to the point that only one god remains. One god that does everything. Except rotating the planet, physics with it's conservation of momentum takes care of that, or making things grow, all nicely explained by bio-chemistry and thermodynamics. Only one god remains and explains everything that science doesn't.
And now science explains everything or promises to explain everything. Science
explains away our uncertainties. No god is needed anymore.
We started with countless gods and, dropping them one by one we've now done with them. We don't need gods to explain things anymore. Science does that now.
Science has become our religion.
Posted by: sjon at November 2, 2004 4:00 PM