• mkwt@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I’ve met a lot of people who don’t seem to understand this important concept from epistemology, which is the philosophy of knowledge.

      To demonstrate the concept of “non-falsifiability” I will now produce a short fictitious dialog between a made up Scientist, S, and a Religionist, R.

      Topic: how old is the earth? Is it 6,000 years old or more than 4 billion years old?

      S: The earth must be more than 4 billion years old, because I found these rocks. These rocks have isotopes in them and they definitely look like they’ve been around for more than 4 billion years. If the rocks are really old, then the earth must be really old too.

      R: No. The is only 6,000 years old, because the holy Bible has a list of human descendants from Adam, the first man, to Jesus, who we know was born in 4 BC. If you count it all up, you can find the exact year that the earth was created, as described in Genesis 1, and it’s about 6,000 years.

      S: But these rocks… They’re really old…

      R: God must have created those rocks with the isotopes already set up in the correct ratios to look like they are 4 billion years old, when He separated the firmament from the heavens 6,000 years ago.

      S: But how could God create rocks with different isotopes? When minerals solidify from molten lava, lead isotopes naturally form in this ratio. (I don’t actually know how initial lead composition was established for this)

      R: God is omnipotent! Any miracle is within his grasp.

      S: But why would God want to make the earth appear to be much older than it really is? What purpose does it serve?

      R: I do not pretend to understand the ways of God.

      • Jilanico@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        One of my favorite quotes from Blood Meridian:

        God dont lie. No, said the judge. He does not. And these are his words. He held up a chunk of rock. He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things.

        As an aside, it’s worth noting not every religion conflicts with science.

    • MehBlah@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      True it just keeps invalidating the garbage piled up around someones faith. They could accept it was false and move on with no hindrance to their belief in god but because they can’t burn someone as a witch because we know why milk goes bad they reject it all.

    • cows_are_underrated@discuss.tchncs.de
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      6 months ago

      Also, its literally impossible to prove, that something doesntvexist. You can be very sure about the not existence of something, but you can’t be 100% sure.

  • Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Religion is against science. It teaches that you must have faith unsupported by evidence, which is incompatible with progress and is just an excuse for making up rules in the name of an unseen authority.

    Edit: Religion is also vile: whenever they are winning, they try to squash science and its methods. Whenever they are losing, they play the martyr.

    • Papergeist@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Idk. My dad has always liked going to church. My family is catholic, I don’t really engage in any of it anymore. But my dad has always been a proponent of science. His opinion is that religion and science can inform each other.

      He believes in evolution. He knows vaccines work. And he certainly is not a trumper. He also likes to tell the story of how the big bang was initially hypothesized by a catholic priest.

      • Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        That priest, Lemaitre, was opposed to mixing science and religion and said that there was no contraddiction between his theory and what the bible says about the origin of the universe. This is a 1984-level cognitive dissonance event imo, and shows that mixing something ever growing like science with something immutable like religious establishment is very difficult especially in one direction.

      • Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        This is a brilliant example of anecdotal example, which has no statistical value. I’m sure your dad is a great person.

        • letsgo@lemm.ee
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          6 months ago

          It’s a single example that disproves the hypothesis “science and religion must always oppose”. Only one example is needed, in the same way that the Riemann hypothesis only needs a single zero off the critical line to prove it’s false.

          • Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            Lol, no. I’m talking of a general trend of the religious establishment against innovation and understanding.

            Edit: Also i never said “science and religion must always oppose”. I said religion is against science. The hate is mostly unidirectional as science has mostly just indifference towards religion.

    • yukijoou@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      6 months ago

      i mean, the main issue is that theologues base their beliefs on the belief that some old texts hold universal truths

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.net
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    If you believe in God and science empirically proved God didn’t exist, would you still believe?

    If you don’t believe in God, and science empirically proved God exists, would you start to worship it?

    I don’t believe God exists. But if he was proven to exist, I would believe. I would not, however, worship him. Dude’s a prick.

      • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
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        6 months ago

        I mean, if Yahweh exists it’s not that the story is full of holes so much as that he was part of the Canaanite pantheon and the stories were never originally meant to describe the actions of a singular god.

        There is likely a whole mythological cycle that we simply do not have because it was destroyed by zealots for disproving their weird monotheistic fan fiction.

        It’s like trying to make sense of the Norse sagas if cultists merged all the other gods into Odin, including Loki.

    • Sam_Bass@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      The bible should be considered a book of gossip, like an old hollywood rag and accorded such due respect

    • lunarul@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      God’s existence, by definition, cannot be proven or disproven. That’s the nature of faith and free will (in the theological sense). And that’s why there are scientists who believe in God. This American idea that religion and science are opposites makes no sense.

        • robotica@lemmy.world
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          And what would be the evidence for God’s existence? I don’t think there’ll ever be scientific evidence for God because all events can be explained by science as having occurred naturally, but what if the natural part is made by God?

          • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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            6 months ago

            In science, anything you can measure is real.

            If this god affects nothing measurable on the universe, it might as well not exist

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            If “God” is indistinguishable from the natural world, unable to be differentiated from it, to formulate or express thoughts or to influence existence in any way, it is a redundant idea, a zero to the left, and something so alienated from what the vast majority of people consider God is, that the meaning of the concept has already been twisted. It doesn’t deserve epistemological effort, because our understanding of the world wouldn’t change one bit: rather than it being a wilful intelligence, it would be a carcass over which we happen to live in, which the Universe already is. Even if you were to prove the existence of such a devoid concept, it would be equal to asserting “The Universe exists”.

      • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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        6 months ago

        God’s existence, by definition, cannot be proven or disproven. […] This American idea that religion and science are opposites makes no sense.

        What? It sounds like you’re contradicting yourself there. Also not sure how that’s an “American” idea lol.

        • lunarul@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          sounds like you’re contradicting yourself there

          Where’s the contradiction?

          not sure how that’s an “American” idea

          That’s where I heard this perspective from. That you either believe in science or in God, not both. I guess it’s because of all the weird Christian denominations in the US that say crazy things and seem to have never actually read the bible, but use it to justify their anti-science ideas.

    • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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      6 months ago

      it depends which god we ended up proving the existence of, if it’s prometheus i’d join the movement to free him from his eternal punishment for gifting humanity the fire of innovation.

  • Nithanim@programming.dev
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    6 months ago

    I had a teacher that taught both religion and chemistry. People who learned about that often made comments about it being weird. But he insisted that both topics are not exclusive to each other. It has been a long time since school but I think his reasoning (if that is the correct word) has been that one is philosophical and the other scientific which are separate worlds. You can’t prove stuff in faith scientifically but neither has religion a place in the " real" world. And, to be completely honest, he was by far one of the best teachers I have ever had.

    • dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de
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      I had a similar experience when I started my first job as a software developer and the owner / lead engineer, probably the most intelligent person I’ve ever met, told me about how is religious.

      I just couldn’t compute, particularly as I’d be radicalised against religion online.

      We have had many discussions and it become clear that he had thought more about his faith than I ever could and who was I to judge his position if he isn’t hurting people then he can believe what he likes.

      As you said, its a philosophical belief and not that he believes in a being per se, but that there is something deeper to the universe.

    • uis@lemm.ee
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      6 months ago

      There are phylosophy of science, sociology and psycology. They aren’t completely disconnected.

    • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      At it’s most basic concept, there’s nothing stopping a God from creating all this and giving us the free will to explore it. It’s the specific doctrine of man made organized religion that contradicts itself and science.

    • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
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      6 months ago

      One of my favourite biochemistry tutors at university was also a reverend. We never spoke about the overlap but I’ve read his books since graduating and it’s interesting to see how his faith augments his science and vice versa.

  • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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    It’s not that science and scientists set out to prove god doesn’t exists. It’s that the word of god as written down by men is contradicted directly and often by proven fact, and that belief in God is associated with a strong ignorance of reality.

    People didn’t live to 800. Goat blood doesn’t protect you from plagues. The earth is not just 5 millennia old. Humans have not existed since the dawn of time.

    • TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I remember someone asking what are good documentaries on evolution that doesn’t say “this is why religion is BS”. I cannot recall a time having watched a documentary on evolution that blatantly says that. Religion on the other hand…

      Anyone with two thinking brain cells would already put two and two together and see the contradiction. When I first learned about evolution in school, I thought to myself that it contradicts what the Bible said, and my teacher and the book never even said anything explicitly. However, I somehow rationalised that god must have created beings first and evolution took course after. It is in my later formative years, through education and more reading, which made up my mind that religion overall is nonsense and the denial of reality.

    • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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      6 months ago

      People take this to mean evangelizing, but still don’t see anything wrong with passing laws about their religion’s morality.

      • rainynight65@feddit.de
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        6 months ago

        Freedom of religion also means freedom from religion. If legal and moral standard of society are dominated by the tenets of one religion, that’s not freedom of religion.

    • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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      6 months ago

      and don’t insist that every part of the holy texts are literally 100% undiluted word of god, which generally makes religion way easier to integrate with a scientific worldview.

      no, god did not create eve from adam’s rib, that’s just evocative storytelling initially written by people in the middle east 2000 years ago and repeatedly altered and translated since then.

      • retrospectology@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        The problem is, the Abrahamic religions will always seed new fundementalists because, regardless of how people with a modern mindset might interpret it as allegory etc. to make it more palletable, the texts were intended to be read and believed literally. They were written by people in the bronze age, based on made up stories that go who knows how far back.

        It’s what makes them so toxic, the belief virus of fundementalism is always there in a latent state waiting to be activated by some new context (usually a particularly charismatic leader or radical change in society).

        You see a great example with the current pope – people thought from his language of “acceptance” towards lgbt people that the church was becoming more progressive, but then recently you see him using slurs that pretty clearly contradict that sentiment, because he understands the text is unequivocally anti-lgbt. The Abrahamic religions will always betray people in this way.

  • RedEye FlightControl@lemmy.world
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    Victim complex / projection

    I’ve never seen science try to take away people’s rights, let alone thoughts.

    I’ve seen religion do both, though.

    • Phegan@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I think the point is that science by existing works to disprove the existence of God. For example, Darwin was not trying to disprove the existence of God when he wrote about evolution, but by doing so he supported the case that god does not exist.

          • gwen@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            6 months ago

            i was referring to the adam and eve story from the quran (i am muslim), but i will give it a read :}

            honestly, a lot of the stories that appear to ‘not make sense’ make much more if you consider the metaphor aspect.

  • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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    You do not need to take away their faith for your own personal gain.

    When faith is for your own gain? Science doesn’t get $ if people don’t believe in Jesus. Faiths certainly get more $ if people don’t believe in science.

    • letsgo@lemm.ee
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      Oh I don’t know. Healthy people, kept healthy by science, live longer, earn more, tithe more; some even get to reverse tithe (where they keep 10% and give the rest away).

  • NutWrench@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    If you want to believe that illness is caused by demons and witchcraft, fine, knock yourself out. But that’s not how the real world works. If you’re going to make extraordinary claims about reality, then you have to provide extraordinary proof. “I believe” isn’t going to cut it in the reality-based community.