Religion and scuba

[dfx]

So just as we should perhaps not idealize the monk, we shouldn't idealize the scientist either. Stereotypes are tricky business but I hope you understand the point I'm trying to make.

TBH, I'm not sure I do. Perhaps you're mixing up science and the scientific process with individual scientists. Sure, scientists often disagree with each other about all kinds of things. But that's usually because there's not enough evidence yet. Or sometimes, conclusions are open to interpretations. But then again, each different conclusion leads to different predictions and these can be tested. Some will work out, others won't, and this is how we determine what's true and what isn't.

And then of course there's the fact that scientists are human and sometimes make mistakes or are biased in some way. But that doesn't say anything about science itself or the scientific process. The fact remains that science is a tool. As of yet, it's the best tool we have to figure out things about the universe. And as a tool, there are right ways to use and wrong ways to use it. If someone uses it wrong, then that's hardly the fault of the tool. So yeah, don't listen to what individual scientists have to say. Listen to what science as a whole has to say, which is based on the scientific community. Even if you don't understand the science behind some claim yourself, if there's an overwhelming consensus among the scientific community (which is comprised of people who do understand the science) then there's a pretty good chance that what they're saying is true.

Compare this to your monk. Your monk may make claims about the universe that are just made up. Wild guesses. OK, so an individual scientist may do the same. But does your monk provide any process through which his claim could be validated or falsified? If there are other monks who make different and incompatible claims, do they have a way to figure out who is more correct than the other? What do you think happens to claims made by scientists that haven't been validated yet, or perhaps can't even be validated?

Your monk's claim may be made up, but it may make sense. The rest of the community may hear the claim and it may make sense to them as well. They may then accept it as the truth. But to science, this isn't good enough.

 

[Diver0001]

Oooohhh, but the bible most certainly did say that the earth was flat! In fact, it still does! Not only once, but many many times over. And don't forget that the bible wasn't written based on scientific knowledge at that time. Instead it's supposed to be the inspired word of god. Somehow, your god wanted people to believe that the earth was flat.

I'll respond to this in a separate post. The Modern English translation from the Old English translation from the Gothic translation from the Greek translation from the Latin translation of the Hebrew folk lore about various topics is a bit of a game of "whisper to your neighbour".

To give you a vague idea, I'm completely fluent in English and Dutch. If I read..... dunno... let's say the Da Vinci code in English and in Dutch there are literally different numbers of pages. Some sentences in Dutch are shorter, or longer, and some phrases, even with our modern understanding of each others languages, are not semantically identical. Certain words don't quite match up. For example, the Dutch word "zin" like in "zin hebben in iets" literally has no semantically identical English counter part.

Likewise, the Hebrew word for "young woman" cannot be translated semantically into an identical word in Greek. So the Greeks used "virgin" since virgins are often young women (or visa versa). And then, of course, you have to go about explaining that, which leads to a waterfall of issues and modern translations that have little coherence with the ancient texts or what the poor monk who put it to paper was really trying to convey.

I don't know if you've studied Old or Middle English in university but I did and even in the context of this one language words can change from meaning. For example, the word "quell" in modern English means to "calm" or "suppress". IN old English, it meant to "kill". So if God says, "quell", what are we supposed to think that means? Nobody can know. The entire English language didn't exist when God was supposed to be talking to Moses and with round about 6000 years of oral and written history between Moses and the King James version, we would be silly to accept that God meant *anything* by it.

Translations of the Bible have have to navigate through history in a flux of changing languages and languages from different roots. My assumption, therefore is that our modern translations -- because they are works of man -- can bear little resemblance to what was ACTUALLY put to paper in the 3rd and 4th century and before that 3 or 4 hundred years of oral history that preceded the first Bible that we know about.

As for the world being flat, we still use the "four corners of the earth" in our modern idioms to refer to compass points. In Roman times it may have referred to something similar. North to Germania, South to Carthage, East to Persia and West to Gaul. I'm just speculating but the point is that a similar idiom may have been in circulation at the time of the writing of the Bible. Some monk may have found it clear enough to write down. Does it mean it's the word of God? Of course not. It doesn't mean God wants people to believe for ever and ever that the world is flat. It means that they guy who wrote it thought that the borders of the Roman Empire were the borders of the "known world" and therefore it could be described as above having 4 corners.....

I could go on about this at length but this example shows how language plays a role in what we think the Bible might have said and how history plays a role in how it was written down.

R..

 

[dfx]

Translations of the Bible have have to navigate through history in a flux of changing languages and languages from different roots. My assumption, therefore is that our modern translations -- because they are works of man -- can bear little resemblance to what was ACTUALLY put to paper in the 3rd and 4th century and before that 3 or 4 hundred years of oral history that preceded the first Bible that we know about.

Which leads me to a point I already made earlier. If there's a supreme being which has this kind of important message for all of humanity, why does it give this message only to a small fraction of the global population (at that time) and in a language that nobody else speaks and that in fact will soon die out? And then have the rest of humanity, both at present and future, rely on ambiguous translations of texts that nobody knows who wrote, or when or even where they were written? All this does is make for an extremely incompetent god.

Both of these possibilities (either the original texts were factually wrong, or the translations became factually wrong) should lead every reasonable person to at least seriously doubt the whole story.

 

[Diver0001]

Your monk's claim may be made up, but it may make sense. The rest of the community may hear the claim and it may make sense to them as well. They may then accept it as the truth. But to science, this isn't good enough.

I would strongly advise you to read more about history. What you're saying is absolutely consistent with our modern thinking but has no relevance at all with the going paradigms even 400 or 500 years ago, let alone 1400 or 1700 years ago.

Don't forget, scientific method didn't start to emerge even in its most neonate state until well into the Renaissance. It wasn't until the 19th century that we had anything resembling modern science. Before that, there is roughly 6000 years of written and oral history and another 150,000 years of human existence to account for that is not subject to Renaissance (or post Renaissance) thinking.

I'm not saying you're wrong if we're talking about a contemporary monk. A contemporary monk can and therefore should, know better. I'll this I'll meet you. I'm saying you fail to understand your history if you think that the paradigms we've lived with for *only* the last 200 or so years can be projected over the entire history of human kind. You have to zoom out if you want to really get it.

The difference between us in this debate would appear to be just that. I seem to have you at a severe disadvantage in understanding older and ancient cultures because I've been reading voraciously about it for 30-odd years. History is a hobby outside of diving that I'm passionate about. It's not coming across though because you want to see everything in a modern context -- even though it did not occur in a modern context. You're zoomed in too close to see how things got to where they are.

R..

---------- Post added July 20th, 2015 at 04:29 PM ----------

Which leads me to a point I already made earlier. If there's a supreme being which has this kind of important message for all of humanity, why does it give this message only to a small fraction of the global population (at that time) and in a language that nobody else speaks and that in fact will soon die out? And then have the rest of humanity, both at present and future, rely on ambiguous translations of texts that nobody knows who wrote, or when or even where they were written? All this does is make for an extremely incompetent god.

Both of these possibilities (either the original texts were factually wrong, or the translations became factually wrong) should lead every reasonable person to at least seriously doubt the whole story.

Well.... as I said earlier in the thread as well, I'm not a religious man. I view it in an historical context. I don't believe a Christian God is very likely. If I have "faith" in anything then I have faith in the fact that at any given point in time people were doing their level best to understand the world around them and their role in it.

And that's it. That's all I got. I've read the Bible, the Koran and several other religious texts as part of my literature studies but where I can't personally bridge the gap is to get past the context in which it was written.

If you want to debate the inconsistencies of God then you should debate it with a believer. I'm more likely to agree with you. All I've been trying to tell you is that your thinking is very modern but not applicable to the historical context in which the texts arose.

R..

 

[dfx]

I would strongly advise you to read more about history. What you're saying is absolutely consistent with our modern thinking but has no relevance at all with the going paradigms even 400 or 500 years ago, let alone 1400 or 1700 years ago.

Don't forget, scientific method didn't start to emerge even in its most neonate state until well into the Renaissance. It wasn't until the 19th century that we had anything resembling modern science. Before that, there is roughly 6000 years of written and oral history and another 150,000 years of human existence to account for that is not subject to Renaissance (or post Renaissance) thinking.

I'm not saying you're wrong if we're talking about a contemporary monk. A contemporary monk can and therefore should, know better. I'll this I'll meet you. I'm saying you fail to understand your history if you think that the paradigms we've lived with for *only* the last 200 or so years can be projected over the entire history of human kind. You have to zoom out if you want to really get it.

The difference between us in this debate would appear to be just that. I seem to have you at a severe disadvantage in understanding older and ancient cultures because I've been reading voraciously about it for 30-odd years. History is a hobby outside of diving that I'm passionate about. It's not coming across though because you want to see everything in a modern context -- even though it did not occur in a modern context. You're zoomed in too close to see how things got to where they are.

R..

You seem to be missing the point I'm making by a long shot. I'm not condemning ancient peoples by not having figured stuff out scientifically. They didn't know any better. Can't blame them. (Even though, historically, there were people who did figure stuff out scientifically, despite modern science not having been defined properly. And in so many cases, religion in its infinite ignorance tried to suppress them.)

What I'm condemning is the effect that this still has on our modern world. Today, we do have science. Today, we know that the ideas coming from these past periods were just wild guesses, made up stories or other myths. Yet, there's still people today who are under the impression that these ancient people had access to some kind of divine truth. That somehow they knew things that today we don't know. There's even still people today who insist that the earth is the centre of the universe, all because it says so in the bible, even though we clearly know that this is nonsense and that the original idea was just a wild guess. And this kind of insanity has serious negative effects on our world today.

 

[NAM001]

Well you just keep on doing ther same thing over and over again. """"science only makes claims that can be demonstrated to be true""""" What you always just happen to leave out is that,,,,,,,,, science ignores or denounces anything they can't demonstrate. Its either impossible or verifiable, with no in between. Faith is what falls in betwen the two, and as such, science is illequiped to deal with it. Science can only prove, they cant disprove because of things yet unknown. Science can not find noah's arch, then it doesnt exist and the flood did not happen. Yet there are people that have been cancer diagnosed with short remianing life expectancy's and over night the cancer is gone. Things like that baffel both people of faith and science. The result is usually that faith is reinforced and science says either there was an error somewhere and cancer never was there and drops it quickly, or it was a staged event. What ever allows science to sleep at night is fine with just about everyone. Mostly I think because science deals with anything but what matters to those with religous faith. Are religons superior to science. I would say no as far as common grounds go. What i will agree with you is in the area of, ( and this is an issue of exactness of wording) Relligion is the practice of .. as understood by man. It is not claimed to be dictation or word for word direct from god. It (the bible) is the written word as recalled by the authors. Are there contradictions? Yes there are many. Is the bible the original text. No it is not. Right or wrong it has been edited and trnslated to sometimes make things easier for those who demanded the reveision. Every translation looses exactness. As such it is inpossible for science to take a multi generation translation and either prove or disprove the contents. The best that can be done is to disprute the translation. An example of that is in the first 4 books of the NT the baptism of Jesus says a dove flew and god said (to the effect) this is my son..... the the other book says the reverse as far as order goes. Is that a contradiction, perhaps is it a meaning full one ? NO... Once again it is an example of disputing the specific to downplay the overlying message.

I guess it is much like having a OW card from a non recognized agency and being denied services. One side claims being wronged and the other claims proper vetting/screening of certifications. Neither side will budge neither side will say the other has a point, neither side sees things from the others point of view. So you either pull out your padi card or go home.

good nite

Wow, you really believe that this is how it went? OK, I'll play along. Let's say that this is really what happened.

So eventually it was discovered that the earth was not flat. How was this discovered? Through science. OK. What did science do with this new found discovery? It gladly accepted it as truth. Some people may have needed some convincing, but that's a great part about science: its claims can be demonstrated to be true. If someone didn't believe you, you simply showed it to them.

What did the church do with this new found discovery? It fought against it. It declared it heresy. It insisted that its old beliefs, the ones now known to be false, are still true.

Religion claims that it has all the truths already. Religion tells people: stop looking for answers, we already have the answers. All you ever need to know is in this book. Religion stifles progress. Religion doesn't challenge science because religion isn't science. It doesn't make any new discoveries. It doesn't change its stance based on new evidence. It only changes its stance when forced to do so by the secular world.

Now to refute your claim, see what I just wrote above: science only makes claims that can be demonstrated to be true. I don't know how the flatness of the earth could ever be demonstrated, other than "just look at it, it looks flat." Which isn't really science at all.


Oooohhh, but the bible most certainly did say that the earth was flat! In fact, it still does! Not only once, but many many times over. And don't forget that the bible wasn't written based on scientific knowledge at that time. Instead it's supposed to be the inspired word of god. Somehow, your god wanted people to believe that the earth was flat.

Now of course, in some of the more modern translations, the "circle of the earth" and other instances clearly indicating a flat earth were suddenly translated away, perhaps "circle" has been translated as "sphere" or perhaps the whole thing was just rephrased to make it sound more plausible. Or, as a last resort, believers can claim that it's all just metaphorical! But all these translations were done after we've figured out that the earth isn't flat and after the churches finally gave in to this fact. These are just more attempts at squaring the circle (or in this case, globing the disk). And we've only figured all this out through science. Not by religion insisting that the earth is flat and making people stop claiming otherwise.

 

[JohnN]

good nite

Promise?

And a small but significant point, science doesn't "prove" anything. It confirms the observed results are consistent with the theory. Whenever they diverge, the theory is modified to fit the observation. e.g. Newton's LAWS of motion didn't adequately describe observed events and were replaced by the THEORY of relativity

 

[agilis]

I'm not sure why monks are being singled out in any way. Gregor Mendel, the founder of modern genetics, was a Catholic monk.

Despite my being a lapsed Roman Catholic with no religious beliefs at all one of my best friends is a monk who teaches inner city kids in a Catholic high school with an almost perfect college admission and college graduation record. He and his brother monks are some brilliant, humble, dedicated men. None of them ever attempts to convert anyone. Very few of their students are Catholic. They follow their own deeply personal inner calling.

They manifest their religious beliefs only through what they do. Those who claim to have religious beliefs should do the same by keeping them private while living exemplary lives. I find it impossible to respect anyone who follows religious doctrines in order to secure some reward after death. This is the ultimate self-serving cowardice.

 

[tursiops]

Well you just keep on doing ther same thing over and over again. """"science only makes claims that can be demonstrated to be true""""" What you always just happen to leave out is that,,,,,,,,, science ignores or denounces anything they can't demonstrate. Its either impossible or verifiable, with no in between. Faith is what falls in betwen the two, and as such, science is illequiped to deal with it. Science can only prove, they cant disprove because of things yet unknown. Science can not find noah's arch, then it doesnt exist and the flood did not happen. Yet there are people that have been cancer diagnosed with short remianing life expectancy's and over night the cancer is gone. Things like that baffel both people of faith and science. The result is usually that faith is reinforced and science says either there was an error somewhere and cancer never was there and drops it quickly, or it was a staged event. What ever allows science to sleep at night is fine with just about everyone. Mostly I think because science deals with anything but what matters to those with religous faith. Are religons superior to science. I would say no as far as common grounds go. What i will agree with you is in the area of, ( and this is an issue of exactness of wording) Relligion is the practice of .. as understood by man. It is not claimed to be dictation or word for word direct from god. It (the bible) is the written word as recalled by the authors. Are there contradictions? Yes there are many. Is the bible the original text. No it is not. Right or wrong it has been edited and trnslated to sometimes make things easier for those who demanded the reveision. Every translation looses exactness. As such it is inpossible for science to take a multi generation translation and either prove or disprove the contents. The best that can be done is to disprute the translation. An example of that is in the first 4 books of the NT the baptism of Jesus says a dove flew and god said (to the effect) this is my son..... the the other book says the reverse as far as order goes. Is that a contradiction, perhaps is it a meaning full one ? NO... Once again it is an example of disputing the specific to downplay the overlying message.

I guess it is much like having a OW card from a non recognized agency and being denied services. One side claims being wronged and the other claims proper vetting/screening of certifications. Neither side will budge neither side will say the other has a point, neither side sees things from the others point of view. So you either pull out your padi card or go home.

good nite

KWS, are you a scientist, or trained in the sciences? You write like someone who has decided scientists are evil and often wrong, and therefore science is bad. Your only example is a medical event with a cancer remission. Aside from the fact that some would argue that medicine is more an art than science, that is a pretty weak anecdote upon which to base d world view! Your statement that: "Science can not find noah's arch, then it doesnt exist and the flood did not happen." is just ludicrous. Where do you get this stuff, or do you just make it up?

 

[dfx]

What you always just happen to leave out is that,,,,,,,,, science ignores or denounces anything they can't demonstrate. Its either impossible or verifiable, with no in between.

This is a gross misrepresentation. If a claim has been made that has not yet been demonstrated or verified, then scientists will try to do just that. Sometimes we don't have the means to actually do it yet, in which case the claim remains an untested hypothesis. It may or may not be true, we don't know.

Other times, claims have been tested and verified, but perhaps the results weren't all that conclusive. It looks like the claim may be true, but more testing is required to be sure. That's your "in between" right there.

Yet other times, scientists did test the claim and the claim turned out to be false. The predictions made don't match the real world results. Well, in that case, the claim most definitely is dismissed as false. Of course, why wouldn't they! That's the whole point!

Now here's the kicker. Some claims, and religious claims very frequently fall into this category, are made in a way that they can't be tested, and especially can't be proven wrong. Science does indeed ignore these kinds of claims, because science requires that claims must be falsifiable. See Russell's teapot. Also see Hitchen's razor. There's no way around this and if you don't understand this, then you don't understand science.

Faith is what falls in betwen the two, and as such, science is illequiped to deal with it. Science can only prove, they cant disprove because of things yet unknown. Science can not find noah's arch, then it doesnt exist and the flood did not happen.

Another gross misrepresentation. Absence of evidence is not evidence for absence. The fact that Noah's ark was never found doesn't disprove the flood story in any way. Every good scientist will tell you that. However, the flood story makes a large number of other claims. We can say that if the flood story were true, our world today would look a certain way. And what we see in the world today doesn't match this prediction at all. Not even close. It's not that we just don't have evidence for the flood story being true. It's rather that we do have evidence, but the evidence points into a completely different direction.

Yet there are people that have been cancer diagnosed with short remianing life expectancy's and over night the cancer is gone. Things like that baffel both people of faith and science. The result is usually that faith is reinforced and science says either there was an error somewhere and cancer never was there and drops it quickly, or it was a staged event. What ever allows science to sleep at night is fine with just about everyone.

You see, science doesn't claim that cancer can't "miraculously" disappear. Science is well aware of spontaneous remission or even misdiagnoses. However, there are a few things that science does claim are impossible (as much as anyone can claim that, anyway). For example, lost limbs never spontaneously grow back. Not in humans, anyway. Never. We know that it can't happen, it just doesn't work. So where's your god in these cases? Why doesn't god heal amputees? Not even a single one? This is one of the most important questions you can ask about your god, in fact there's a whole website dedicated to this question.