I find this an oft repeated meme. The men to whom we own our scientific understanding were all deeply religious (not just lived in a time when everyone went to church)
For example - Darwin had trained to be an Anglican vikar prior to his journey on the Beagle and wrote to his future wife letters full of discussion of divinity.
Newton was obviously deeply religious and wrote more about religion than about physics. In fact his view of gd as singular was considered to be heretical by the Anglican church but was perfectly aligned to the old testament - what I am getting at here is that he didn't just happen to have faith by default but had a very deep and personal one. At the conclusion of principia Mathematica he wrote tons friend that he believed this work would make it obvious to a thinking man that presence of gd.
Georges lemaitre who came up with the big bang theory was a Belgian Catholic priest. The secular science at the time was adamant about the Greek model of the eternal universe, and we owe our modern view of it to someone who came into the situation already believing a moment of creation.
Einstein was famously a non practicing jew who nonetheless at age 11 had taught himself Judaism and later in life advocated for he study of talmud. I can't claim him to be a practitioner but his own writing speaks to a certain expectation of how the universe ought to be (that was later proven out in math) and a belief in a sort of spirit of the universe. The point isn't that he was an orthodox jew but that he is very far from a modern atheist.
So I don't actually agree with this idea that religion is non scientific when we owe our deepest scientific understanding to men who saw themselves and the universe through a religious lens.
That's not to say that there's no ignorance in some religions and among some practitioners but rather that religion at its best can claim really significant contributions that I don't think are matched by atheism at its best.
I do science and mathematics, and I am 'religious' - I believe in God, which I define simply as the universal consciousness - in other words, I believe the universe has a soul.
Much as how Erdos talked about 'proofs from the book', I believe that mathematical and scientific truths exist 'in the mind of God', ie, the universal consciousness, which, by definition, is aware of everything, already knows the truth that we seek, and the process of mathematical and scientific discovery is therefore simply a process of learning more about God. The flow state that one enters into when working is, in my mind, a sort of communion with the divine, which leads to the creation of great work.
This is similar, in my mind, to Michelangelo's quote about "seeing David in the marble and setting him free" - the statue already existed in the universal consciousness, and this consciousness guided Michelangelo into bringing it into being.
The proof of $THEOREM exists, your job is to find it, and the universe will gently nudge you in the right direction.
But obviously, that's just my opinion/point of view.
You could just as easily believe that the universe is not conscious, and truth is discovered simply by a combination of luck and effort, and that would probably work just as well ^^
>> They were scientific in spite of being religious. Not because of it.
Can you justify that claim?
>> plenty of scientists including Feynman and Hawkings.
Feynman is a good example of that. He was raised in a religious family and went to synagogue every week. His dad challenged him to continuously challenge the orthodox knowledge which I suspect the father himself saw within the talmudic tradition etc.
As feynman rejected Judaism and religion in general he nonetheless hung on and hugely benefited from the approach his religious father instilled on him. Similar to what I said about Einstein above I am not trying to claim feynman for religion but I think he's very far from "today's atheists" if that makes sense. If feynman didn't have his father (for whom religion was integral) I doubt he'd turn out who he was.
"Do you call yourself an agnostic or an atheist? Feynman: An atheist. Agnostic for me would be trying to weasel out and sound a little nicer than I am about this."
> > If feynman didn't have his father (for whom religion was integral) I doubt he'd turn out who he was.
Right. If we are just gonna reach for stuff like this then I'm gonna say Feynman wouldn't turn out to be who he was if he believed in religion.
No the claim that religion is a major reason for science.
> How could there have ever been religious men of science?
Oh I have no problem with this. There will be religious scientists and non religious scientists. Just like there will be scientists who like red vs scientists who like blue. Being a scientist doesn't mean they are immune to broader cultural trends.
Turing, Higgs, Curie. All atheists. Religion has no bearing on whether or not someone achieves greatness in their life. In the past, people often were "religious" simply just to get the public to listen to them. They almost threw out Newton's life work just because he didn't believe in the "trinity" of the christian god (note: he was very deeply religious/spiritual and believed his work was proof of intelligent design.) Bottom line, we're moving away from religion in our world because it provides increasingly less social value and causes more and more issues. The way I see it, religion is a terrible curse on our world that only brings war and distrust. If you can't keep it in your chapel then you're an evangelist and your morals are fundamentally no different than the colonizers of old.
> If you can't keep it in your chapel then you're an evangelist and your morals are fundamentally no different than the colonizers of old.
disagree.
Colonization is done by force, evangelism is, in theory, consensual.
If I tell you "hey, have you tried the Emacs text editor? It's great, I love it, I recommend it to everyone looking for a great text editor, if you'd like I can show you how to set it up", that's not the same thing as saying "I claim your computer in the name of King Stallman, use Emacs or die".
Evangelism just achieves their violence societally and incentivizes via positive reinforcement vs negative. It's more like telling a starving person "Come to the dark side, we have cake" when the reason they're starving is because you only do equitable business with your in-group.
The resurgence of religion is happening in lockstep with the rise of Nationalism in the US. The rich and powerful are using it like a tool to manufacture compliance, which is literally the reason religion was invented. A multi cultural society cannot be a religious society. A society that values everyone equally cannot be a religious society. This has been proven again and again.
Probably the most obvious lesson you learn from studying religion(s) is that the word itself is functionally useless. It’s so broad a term that includes basically all intellectual history up to the present, political history, across all countries, civilizations, etc.
Which is why if anyone starts claiming that “religion is good/bad” in simplistic terms, they probably don’t know what they’re talking about. It is far too broad a label to make such declarations.
Just wanted to say I agree. The thing that caused a savage to throw a virgin into a volcano and the thing that caused newton to seek deep into the construction of the universe shouldn't be explained by the same word.
Religion is fundamentally against scientific ideas because it presents a bunch of frankly unlikely ideas and then says we cannot test them. Christ rising from the dead cannot be tested and it lives outside of science. Also a lot of religious people in past have poined to Bible as reasons for why sceientific ideas like heliocentrism were correct and it ended up being completley wrong! You are cherry picking the few examples were Religion actually helped science when most of the time it was fought every revelation. Also 90% of people were religious back in the day that doesn't mean 90% of all inventions have religion to thank for it. The fact is that many religions are not testable and though they bring tremendous happiness to its users are not true.
Of course you can cherry pick famous scientists from the past to support your point, especially when it's an historical fact that theism was the default for centuries.
But this is a straightforwardly transparent attempt at apologetics. It looks weak when it goes up against answersingenesis.org, and a rabidly (maybe not literally, yet, but give it time...) culture of opposition to basic science, such as vaccination, among many evangelicals.
Ultimately the claims of religion are moral, and they're on very thin ice when religion has such an appalling history of support for slavery, torture, murder, exploitation, grift, war, paedophilia, and biblical literalism.
The usual argument at this point is a No True Scotsman. All those other religions do these things. Never the claimant's own.
But for every Pope Leo - who seems like an unusually decent example - there are five Kenneth Copelands, and an apparently endless series of scandals and court cases featuring youth pastors and grifting megachurch multimillionaires.
Personally I'd rather not be in any community that trades comfort for complicity and/or denial, no matter how nice its social events feel.
Community in practice should be wider than that.
There's some extra stress involved in finding your own way, especially in a culture of forced competition.
But you're far more likely to see atheists trying to progress public ethics than religious believers, especially in the US.
> It looks weak when it goes up against answersingenesis.org, and a rabidly (maybe not literally, yet, but give it time...) culture of opposition to basic science, such as vaccination, among many evangelicals.
But that's a problem with American evangelicals, not religion as a whole. The earliest universities were sponsored by the church; and the works of ancient scholars were preserved by Catholics and Muslims.
> Ultimately the claims of religion are moral, and they're on very thin ice when religion has such an appalling history of support for slavery, torture, murder, exploitation, grift, war, paedophilia, and biblical literalism.
Sure, but religion also has a long history of fighting against those claims; a lot of slaves adopted Christianity, and used it as a tool to fight against oppression. It was also a large part of the civil rights movement; Martin Luther King Jr was a Baptist Minister, and Malcolm X was a Muslim.
> and an apparently endless series of scandals and court cases featuring youth pastors and grifting megachurch multimillionaires.
Plenty of grift among the sciences too. Look at the replication crisis, or companies like Theranos and FTX. In the United States, medical malpractice is the third leading cause of death.
> Personally I'd rather not be in any community that trades comfort for complicity and/or denial, no matter how nice its social events feel.
You should probably stay off Hacker News then. For example, plenty of people here celebrate electrification, even though the raw materials needed for that are mined by children and slaves.
> But you're far more likely to see atheists trying to progress public ethics than religious believers, especially in the US.
> In the United States, medical malpractice is the third leading cause of death.
No it's not; this claim comes from a flawed study that even the BMJ's then-editor-in-chief has admitted was poorly researched. And even if the numbers were accurate, the number is for medical errors, not malpractice. It's an important distinction that matters to your point.
I'll go further. Oppenheimer and Whitehead (neither Christian) have stated, in their respective histories of science, that the Judeo-Christian world view was absolutely necessary for the start of real science, that it could not have originated in a society with a different worldview.
Why? Because the Christian view was that God was a reasonable God, and He made the universe. And because He also gave us reason when He made us, we should be able to understand the universe by reason. All these men, from Newton down to Faraday, looked at the universe and expected to be able to find out how it worked, because of their religion.
Their religion didn't lead them to a non-scientific worldview. Their religion led them to create the scientific worldview.
A huge surprise to the ancient Greeks, who outlined the concept of reason centuries before Christianity appeared, and invented a fair amount of math and the foundations of empiricism while they were at it.
In fact Christianity halted scientific progress in the West for around a millennium. Before the Renaissance rediscovered Greek philosophy, the Christian world operated on hierarchy, rhetoric, scholasticism, and violence.
They did. But they never developed it into science in the modern sense.
They had a universe in which the gods did random things for random reasons. That didn't lead them to expect a rational basis for the construction of the whole universe, and so they never investigated in the way that early modern science did.
> As we’ll see, the Roman Empire was never close to an industrial revolution – a great many of the preconditions were missing – but the idea that it might have been on the cusp of being something like a modern economy did once have its day in the scholarship
I was talking about the Greeks, not the Romans, entirely different civilisation(s) the Romans conquered. Look up "aeolipile" or "Hero's Engine". The ancient Greek steam powered device. Not sure why I'm voted down for stating historical fact. The Greeks had the beginning of steam power but never took it to the levels of the industrial revolution. If we look at ancient China too, they had a number of brilliant inventions but did not always follow through on them either.
> Early tinkering with the idea of using heat to create steam to power rotary motion – the core function of a steam-engine – go all the way back to Vitruvius (c. 80 BC -15 AD) and Heron of Alexandria (c. 10-70 AD). With the benefit of hindsight we can see they were tinkering with an importance principle but the devices they actually produced – the aeolipile – had no practical use – it’s fearsomely fuel inefficient, produces little power and has to be refilled with water (that then has to be heated again from room temperature to enable operation).
> Apart from the use of steam pressure, the aeolipile shares very little in common with practical steam engine designs and the need to continually refill and heat the water reservoir would have limited its utility in any case.
It could have easily been improved as later models were. It would require large amounts of fuel and water... Which the UK did centuries later I suppose. But one would not expect good fuel efficiency in early prototypes.
Reddit would be that way.
> In fact Christianity halted scientific progress in the West for around a millennium. Before the Renaissance rediscovered Greek philosophy, the Christian world operated on hierarchy, rhetoric, scholasticism, and violence.
I'm surprised anyone is still repeating such a laughable myth. Almost everything from classical antiquity would've been lost if not for Christians copying texts.
> Before the Renaissance rediscovered Greek philosophy, the Christian world operated on hierarchy, rhetoric, scholasticism, and violence.
Do you know what scholasticism means?
That's an interesting take. Many years ago, I was chatting with a coworker who had emigrated from China; we got into topics like these, and something he said stuck with me all these years. He basically lamented that Chinese civilization is so deeply driven by Confucius thought, and expressed envy at the Western world's Christian underpinnings saying that it was better at driving people to search for "the truth."
Fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding) is almost literally a millennium old at this point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fides_quaerens_intellectum (and much older if you take it back to Saint John's response to the resurrection John 20:8-9)
Also: Jesus' response to Apostle Thomas after his resurrection from the dead is recited during every Easter mass: "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."
Yes, on the surface the religion is the textbook antithesis of free thought. And yet I think my friend was getting at something deeper I can't quite pin down easily. Maybe it was just a lucky combination of aristocrat philosophers justifying their pursuits? Then there was the Enlightenment thing...
On the surface the religion is the antithesis of free thought? Where does persecution of scientists during the Medieval Age belong to? Is it below the surface? Above the surface?
Enlightenment runs contrary to Christian Dogma - Enlightenment advocates for the separation of Church and State.
Sorry pal, but Christianity is firmly against free thought....
Jesus says, "I am the way and the truth and the life". And to Thomas He says _first_ (two verses earlier), "Put in thy finger hither, and see my hands; and bring hither thy hand, and put it into my side; and be not faithless, but believing".
And to add another famous example: Galileo Galilei 500 years ago was persecuted by the Christian Church because he (Galileo) defended helio-centrism. [0]
> that the Judeo-Christian world view was absolutely necessary for the start of real science
That's ridiculous.
> Because the Christian view was that God was a reasonable God, and He made the universe. And because He also gave us reason when He made us, we should be able to understand the universe by reason. All these men, from Newton down to Faraday, looked at the universe and expected to be able to find out how it worked, because of their religion.
That may be true, but that doesn't suggest that people who were secular could not have been curious about how the universe worked. Sure, that's a neat path for the religious to decide to embark on a scientific journey, but I expect if there was no religion at all, that scientific journey would have started earlier, and progressed faster. History is littered with scientists unable to publish their work (through threat of pain and death) because it conflicted with church doctrine.
I find this an oft repeated meme. The men to whom we own our scientific understanding were all deeply religious (not just lived in a time when everyone went to church)
For example - Darwin had trained to be an Anglican vikar prior to his journey on the Beagle and wrote to his future wife letters full of discussion of divinity.
Newton was obviously deeply religious and wrote more about religion than about physics. In fact his view of gd as singular was considered to be heretical by the Anglican church but was perfectly aligned to the old testament - what I am getting at here is that he didn't just happen to have faith by default but had a very deep and personal one. At the conclusion of principia Mathematica he wrote tons friend that he believed this work would make it obvious to a thinking man that presence of gd.
Georges lemaitre who came up with the big bang theory was a Belgian Catholic priest. The secular science at the time was adamant about the Greek model of the eternal universe, and we owe our modern view of it to someone who came into the situation already believing a moment of creation.
Einstein was famously a non practicing jew who nonetheless at age 11 had taught himself Judaism and later in life advocated for he study of talmud. I can't claim him to be a practitioner but his own writing speaks to a certain expectation of how the universe ought to be (that was later proven out in math) and a belief in a sort of spirit of the universe. The point isn't that he was an orthodox jew but that he is very far from a modern atheist.
So I don't actually agree with this idea that religion is non scientific when we owe our deepest scientific understanding to men who saw themselves and the universe through a religious lens.
That's not to say that there's no ignorance in some religions and among some practitioners but rather that religion at its best can claim really significant contributions that I don't think are matched by atheism at its best.