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Originally Posted by KnifeMissile
It depends on what you mean by "paradigm." Can you please exemplify this? As far as I can tell, what you are saying is that scientists are only open to ideas that are real. Surely you don't mean this or, at least, can clarify this claim some more?
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That would seem to depend: you are using the term "real" in a way which seems to make it synonymous with "provable in a laboratory," which is the scientific way. I am suggesting that there are other ways to interact with the universe, which present different criteria for the realness of phenomena.
Let me first of all clarify that when I use the term paradigm in this context, I mean "a framework for understanding and interacting with the universe." The scientific paradigm is that which establishes parameters requiring that nothing is real save that it be proven by certain rules, and nothing is acceptable for use in one's system of reasoning save that it be rational. The alternative paradigm that I am referring to has different parameters for gauging realia, and is founded to one degree or another in systems that combine the rational and the arational.
In other words, science interacts with the universe by gauging all truth in reproducible effects that can be measured and recorded in ways deemed reliable by current technologies. Religion permits truths that are not always reproducible, nor are always measurable by technology, but are able to be experienced nonetheless through spiritual awareness and faith.
I am in no way suggesting that science ought to change or be different, or that it ought to be in any way subservient to religion, or that public schools should teach religion alongside science, or any kind of crap like that. I am only saying that it might benefit scientists to realize that there are other ways out there to approach asking questions of the universe, and some of those ways can lead to truths.
What is important-- and I would never say otherwise-- is for all concerned to be clear that for the most part, science and religion are useful for answering different questions, and they tend not to do well when their areas of inquiry are made to overlap. So for example, if you want to know how to calculate centrifugal force or know what happens when you mix certain chemicals, religion will prove singularly unhelpful, and science will give you answers with no trouble at all. But if you want to know what spiritual or moral meaning there can be in experiences of joy or suffering, science will prove just as unhelpful, and religion will offer you answers (though a wider range of answers than those to chemistry or physics problems).
I have always said, and will say again, religion is not supposed to be science. The bible is not a textbook, and the people who attempt to use it as a textbook-- be it of geology, physics, biology, sociology, or what have you-- are simply misusing it. Religion is supposed to be a spiritual guide to help you deal with living in the universe, and to bring you closer to God. For religion to be successful presumes other education, because the Bible is really mostly concerned with a comparative narrow range of interests: ethics, morals, law, and ritual practice. Not even the last two, if one is a Christian.
But that said, presuming that one is not equating religion with fundamentalism, I do think that there is value in religion, and in systems founded in the arational in general, and the truths that they can help us perceive are, if different than those we come to through science, in many ways no less valuable.
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I don't think this is a good comparison. We know that the televangelist believes things that weren't allegedly told to him by Jesus. Thus his denial of evolution is unjustified by the lack of endorsement by his deity of choice.
On the other hand, scientists use the same reasoning and logic that the televangelists accept except when the results of those things contradict their fundamentalist beliefs.
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OK, maybe it wasn't the ideal analogy. But let me put it this way: the kind of scientist I was referring to in that analogy would, if he had a sudden experience of spiritual awareness and connectedness, dismiss said experience as a momentary hallucination, or the effects of transient hypoxia, or, in the words of Scrooge disdaining Marley's ghost, "a bit of undigested beef," the ill-effects of a bad lunch. Such a scientist, if he heard a silent voice urging him to a more moral life, would instantly diagnose himself as a latent schizophrenic, and submit himself to a psychopharmacologist for a prescription for anti-psychotics. In other words, these individuals are so enmeshed in the idea that their paradigm is the only way to interact with the universe that, faced with phenomena that are clearly not duplicable nor are they rational, they will dismiss them as illusion or illness rather than confront the possibility that, as Hamlet chides, "there are more things...in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of your philosophies."
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Most people claim that their religion makes accurate claims on reality and thus their religion and science are not so apples and oranges since they are used to describe the same thing. Every time this has happened, science has always proven to be more accurate...
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This is entirely dependent upon what "claims on reality" people are making in the name of their religion. For example, if they are saying that because they choose to read the Bible literally, that must mean the Earth is precisely 5759 years old, then they are wrong. If, however, they are saying (for example) that their religion has taught them greater spiritual awareness, and they have been able to experience God, then perhaps they are right.
Religion is not supposed to be science, and more than science should be religion. God is not a chemical experiment or an electron field effect: the experience of God is not something one can have and duplicate in a laboratory, nor will His existence be proved by a handy set of equations. Not because God is not real or because we don't have adequate technology, but because that is using the wrong paradigm: it is like trying to do algebra by baking brownies, or paint a still life using a microscope instead of a paintbrush. By the same token, those who use the Bible as a geology or physics textbook are behaving just as sensibly as anyone trying to get orange juice by milking a cow, or seeking out a mathematics professor for pastoral counseling about one's bioethics quandary.
What I am saying is that for 90% or more of the time, religion and science are either asking different questions, or they are seeking different answers, and it is not fair to try to make them overlap. The different questions are best addressed in their different paradigms.
A religious person can believe whatever they like, but when they step into a geology classroom and say that the universe is 6000 years old, they are grossly in error, and should expect to be told so. And the religious person should be content with that, since it is not right for them to tell others to believe otherwise, based only on their understanding of their own sacred scriptures.
But by the same token, a skeptical person can believe whatever they like about the existence of God, but when it comes to the beliefs of others, IMO the most one ought to be prepared to say is, "I have not yet experienced anything to make me believe similarly."