Okay, this one has to come with a disclaimer...and I hate disclaimers...I have a lot of friends who have a wide variety of beliefs. I respect their beliefs and generally have a high tolerance for the religious activities of other folks...but I'm about to come down hard on people who can't tell the difference between what they believe and what they know. So if you have a delicate belief structure then be warned...there be squalls ahead, and Davey Jones waiting for them what don't obey...You ever watch Scooby Doo? I remember watching the first episodes when I was maybe six or seven years old. Every episode had the same format: the Scooby Gang stops their perpetual road trip at some tourist attraction that turns out to be haunted. They investigate, get chased by monsters, use some logic (or, failing that, a hidden plot device; Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera didn't have a Disney imagination) and eventually expose the monsters as some evil, money-hungry, con artist trying to get rid of the property owners so they can extract some hidden value from the place. Every episode ends with words to the effect of "And I would have gotten away with it, if it weren't for those kids and that dog!"
Well that's how it used to be...the Scoobys taught me that if I have a little intelligence and a little courage I can eventually learn what's really behind the haunting or the curse or whatever mystery I was facing. I had an example! Forget that I could never stand the sniggering, cowardly mooch-hound and his equally repulsive beatnik owner (already an anachronism in 1969)...in fact, I never liked any of them much...I thought Fred was gay before I knew what gay was (there's a lesson here: don't wear an ascot around me unless you're over 70 with a turkey neck to hide or want to be mentally catalogued into the same drawer as Truman Capote...not that there's anything wrong with that). Daphne and Velma...well...they're okay as cartoon chicks go, but I've seen better; I'm kind of partial to those anime girls in the sailor suits.
Anyway, despite the fact that I was never what you might call a Scooby Doo fan, a few years ago I was surprisingly upset at the release of a new Scooby show where the monsters are real. It seemed like the new-agers and fundamentalists had won a victory over rational thought. See, real monsters can't be explained by science, you can't destroy them even if you have the help of the Harlem Globetrotters (the only approved method of zombie extermination (decapitation, preferably by shotgun) is denied to Saturday morning cartoon characters thanks to the same government meddling that took the word sugar off all the cereal boxes and pulled Johnny Eagle toy guns from the market. By god when I was a kid we had our own toy guns, we didn't need action-figure minions with micro-lasers...we did our own dirty work. GI-Joe was more of a practice target than an action-figure. But I digress...) and when you pull their masks off...well let's just say they don't have masks and leave it to the reader's imagination what it looks like.
The same thing is happening everywhere we turn...no, the monsters haven't become real; we've just stopped looking for the real cause. Even worse is a seemingly growing attitude that looking for explanations using rigorous scientific methods and natural explanations is somehow disrespectful to those who have faith-based explanations for the same phenomenon.
I'm not going to address the con-men...the people who use pseudo-science, rhetoric, bad logic and popular opinions to try and force their belief structure on others. The Kansas School Board, The Discovery Institute, Institute for Creation Research, Church of Scientology, Free Energy nut-jobs, conspiracy theorists and all the rest are receipted and filed for liars and frauds. Anyone that thinks there's a higher power authorizing them to do evil to other people... I'll probably rant about them at some point, but for right now I'll limit this to those of us that are not sociopaths.
I won't even ask you to challenge your beliefs; I'm just asking that you not treat your personal beliefs as if they are as practical as rational, evidence-based explanations that have survived empirical testing. You want to believe God built the whole shebang in six days...go right ahead. But don't tell me...and especially don't tell our children...that your explanation is scientific, sound or useful.
God may decide to heal everyone of cancer tomorrow...he hasn't done it yet, but there's nothing stopping him from doing it tomorrow. For some people it is enough to just keep asking God to do it, but for others we want to go out and see what's under the masks ourselves...we don't believe in monsters and we believe that we can solve the mysteries ourselves.
We've been pulling the masks off for a long time and we have yet to actually find a real zombie or vampire. We've ripped the mask off of diseases like smallpox and polio, we've looked at atoms and galaxies, calculated the speed of light, the volume of the sun and the nature of thought...all without resorting to powers we could not actually measure for ourselves. So far we have no reason to believe that there's anything we can't unmask...there are still lots of things out there to learn and I'm sure we'll find were some things we'd thought we'd learned are wrong, but even the Scooby Gang was known to make a few mistakes.
Don't let your beliefs blind you to what is really happening around you. Depending on your belief structure this may require challenging your beliefs or at least sticking them in a separate compartment that is safe from all this critical thinking activity. There's nothing in science that is in opposition to religion or philosophy as long as you can understand where one begins and the other ends. The Scooby Gang didn't include an exorcist, or a demonologist, witch doctor, faith healer, psychic or parapsychologist. Just a gang of kids who could think and reason; even if they did run away every time something said boo; they always came back and solved the mystery.
The universe is our mystery...one greater than our real ability to comprehend. We can never know the absolute truth behind it, but we can pull the masks off one at a time as long as we can...a belief that there are no masks to remove shows both a lack of intelligence and a lack of courage. We are brave enough to see as much truth as our intelligence can discover...there is nothing that man was not meant to know. That's a belief worth sharing with children again.
6 comments:
Depending on your belief structure this may require challenging your beliefs or at least sticking them in a separate compartment that is safe from all this critical thinking activity.
Easier said than done for many folks. But definitely something that would make the whole debate a lot easier.
There's nothing in science that is in opposition to religion or philosophy as long as you can understand where one begins and the other ends.
You, sir, are correct. However, too often we find those who embrace religion hostile to science because those who embrace science are hostile to religion. And vice versa. Nasty little cycle, there. There's frequently no mutual respect, as though one must exist without the other. Both sides have their scientific evidence, and ironically, both sides require a degree of faith since neither side has ALL the answers.
Good post, I like it!
It's not about having all the answers as much as it's about having a valid method for answering questions. It's the difference between seeing something for yourself and taking someone else's word. No matter how outlandish a scientific finding is, I should be able to go back to the original research and perform the observations for myself.
Yeah, there's animosity on both sides, but I'm specifically avoiding the bomb throwers in this post. Richard Dawkins is a brilliant man who's had an amazing career; he's also a very vocal athiest and skeptic. He can rub folks the wrong way, but he has one advantage over the other side: he has evidence to support his position. That doesn't make him a nice guy...just more convincing.
Saying religious people are hostile to science because those on the science side are hostile to religion begs the question. I'm not talking about personality clashes and bickering...I'm sure even Mother Teresa managed to piss off some folks...but about the actual institutions; religion and science are not mutually exclusive. If Pat Robertson or Richard Dawkins want to be assholes, let them; we have logic to filter the noise from the signal...if we care to use it.
I'll point out (politely) what I see as a flaw in your post though...science does not require a degree of faith; in fact it works better if you have no faith in previous findings. Science does not claim to have all the answers, nor does it claim that the answers it has are true by conventional definition. Science thrives when people challenge current theory; but mostly science gives us a valid process of critical examination and discovery.
Sure, there can be as much prejudice and dishonesty in a laboratory as anywhere else, but that dishonesty does not have to touch us personally.
My previous comment about even science requiring a degree of faith refers mainly to many gaping holes in the theory of evolution.
The first, and biggest, is the concept of spontaneous generation. What caused life to occur? Even the Big Bang theory has to have some arbitrary point of origin, before which is some kind of indeterminate nothingness. What existed before there was matter? And how can life come from nonliving matter? There aren't scientific answers to this, thus requiring faith (even with a healthy dose of skepticism).
In the supposed early stages of the Earth, when everything was evolving in some kind of primordial "soup," there are still many scientific questions that don't have answers that support evolution. If the early Earth had oxygen in its atmosphere, compounds (amino acids) needed for life to evolve would have been destroyed by oxidation. But if there had been no oxygen, there would have been no ozone in the upper atmosphere. Without ozone to shield the Earth, the sun’s ultraviolet radiation would quickly destroy life. The only known way for both ozone and life to be here is for both to come into existence simultaneously. That takes some faith right there, too.
Also, there's the fact that evolution flies in the face of the concept of entropy, the natural state of things to break down rather than improve. The related issue to that is, why is it that macroevolution doesn't still occur? (we don't have the millions of transitional species that should have occurred in evolutionary progress) There are many examples of microevolution—changes in size, shape, and color—or minor genetic alterations. But it is not macroevolution: an upward, beneficial increase in complexity, as evolutionists claim happened millions of times between bacteria and man. Macroevolution has never been observed in any breeding experiment. Thus, requiring faith in the theory of evolution in order to believe it in the absence of scientific data.
There's an interesting evolution vs. creation/intelligent design debate going on you may be interested in (they've got 128 comments so far... it's a pretty lively discussion). Although it may be a bit too far into the spiritual end of the discussion for your tastes. Just wanted to pass it along.
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/181908.php
Well, we're going to have plenty to talk about Saturday! (grin)
At this point I'll say this: Most of your points have been thoroughly addressed. To sum up:
1. The Theory of Evolution says nothing about abiogenisis or the origin of the universe.
2. The entropy argument refers specifically to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Since the 2ndLoT only applies to isolated systems and the Earth is not an isolated thermodynamic system it really doesn't apply.
Please go peruse www.talkorigins.org
Oh...I checked out the blog comment war you mentioned...woosh! It's going way too fast to keep up. I'll let the arguments come to me for the moment.
Definitely some good stuff there at talkorigins, thanks for the link. I still don't buy some of it, and I think several points are too conveniently dismissed (which goes right back to my point that even those who embrace evolution have some unanswered questions that wind up being taken on faith, however skeptically). But that's what makes it such a deep subject and so vigorously debated. This entire subject isn't exactly my cuppa. But it sure is interesting.
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