Post
by ZAROVE » Sat Oct 09, 2010 3:07 pm
Agreed. I’ve told people before that everyone has a Religion, and no one believes me. Religion really is not “Belief without evidence in supernatural powers”, but simply a set of beliefs that regards the Fundamental Nature of our existence. In this way, even Adamant Anti-Religious zealots like Richard Dawkins really aren’t attempting to posit Reason against Faith and science against Religion, but simply trying to replace one Religion with another.
Its also of note that Religion is not all about belief without evidence, and Faith is not itself belief without evidence.
Propositions such as Hawking recent newsmaker are rooted as much in Philosophical Presumptions as they are in Scientific Fact, and are followed y men like him, or Dawkins who promoted the same idea in “The God Delusion”, simply because they create a way to visualise the Creation of the Universe without referring to God. If you start with the proposition that God cannot exist, then you must find explanations for those sorts of things, and this provides a vehicle for that, and a vehicle that allows you to keep the quaint Culturally erected delusion that Religion is about spiritual matters and gods, and Science is its antithesis. You can believe in this absolutely unprovable and undemonstrateable Hypothesis and claim to be Scientific. it’s a “Scientific” view, because a Scientist said so, and we are conditioned to think of Scientists as cold, calculating individuals who pursue Truth for the purpose of Truth, out of sheer Altruism, and who use Logic and Reason and have no predisposed ideas and no Prejudices.
But this is not True, any more than All Scientists are Atheists.
Fred Hoyle, himself an Atheist, even acknowledged this. He said that People Imagine that in Science each new discovery and all new ideas and Theories are accepted as soon as evidence is given, but this view is simply wrong. Science doesn’t advance by people giving up only assumptions with new evidence, it works by a Younger Generation embracing he new idea, and the older generation clinging fiercely to its assumptions till it dies out.
Scientists are as Human as the rest of us, and in a way Science is just another Facet of Religion, rather than its opposite. Science is about explaining our world that we live in, as is Religion. As I’ve said, Religion is really just a set of beefs that serve to give us a basic understanding of the Fundamental Nature of our existence. Anything that covers Foundational matters is a religion, which is why I say Secular Humanists are Religious, though they become angry with me on this.
Famously, when on message Boards Science VS Religion coems up somehow the argument becomes a Creationsit one with the posters assuming Creationism is Religion and Evolution Science. Never midn that this is a dull witted way of approaching the topic or that not all “Religious people” are Creationists, I want to focus on what both of those beliefs do for the believers in them.
They both explain our Origins.
A Young Earth Creationist may think the Genesis Account of Creation is 100% True, and thus God created the Heavens and Earth, and in one Week our world was fashioned and Humanity created on the Sixth Day. An Evolutionist will hold to live Evolving slowly on our Planet over its 4.4 Billion year History, and most also adhere to the Big Bang Theory. (Itself Ironically a Creationist Theory that dislodged accepted Atheistic assumptions.) In the Mind of the modern Humanist who accepts a godless Big Bang and a godless Evolution, the world can be explained as emerging via these undirected Natural Processes, and to the Young Earth Creationist God created everything about 6000 years ago or so. We see them, because of the stark contrast in what the beliefs hold, as very different. But in the most important way they aren’t. They are both beliefs about how life on Earth emerged and how we got here. The Big Bang Theory is no less a Creation Myth than the Genesis Creation Account, and neither is Evolutionary Theory. Both are also no different from the Creation of the Universe by Brahman in the Veda’s, or the Hopi Indian Creation Myths. They are in the end stories that explain were we came from, narratives that help shape how we understand our life and the meaning it holds to us, that help us to interpret our world and find a place in it.
In that way, they really aren’t different at all. They serve the same basic purpose in the minds of those who believe in them, and they fill the same basic need that we have of knowing where we came form and how all this came to be, and how we relate to our world.
Moreover, what we believe will be dependant upon several factors, not just education level as some thing. I have known highly intelligent and highly educated men who are Creationists, and I have known idiots who are Evolutionists. What people believe and why depends on more than just being educated, but also in how your education was delivered to you, and what, exactly, you were taught.
If you attend Liberty University your most likely to end up taught from an Evangelical Christian perspective and as a result will likely pick up those philosophical assumptions, especially if you are Young and unwary of the Biases inherent in education. No one will doubt me when I say this. However, the same is true if you go to a venerable Ivy League college like Princeton or Harvard. Those institutions are notoriously biased in Favour of a Humanist perspective and a Liberal Political View, just like Liberty is biased in Favour of a Conservative political view and an Evangelical Christian bias.
The University of Colorado is even worse in being Liberal and Humanistic than Harvard or Princeton, and has garnered massive complaints regarding its treatment of Students how do not tow this line, unlike either Harvard or Princeton.
The University of Tennessee on the other hand is officially Secular but is not really Hostile to Christianity, as it sin the Bible Belt, and many of its teachers are Christian themselves.
A Young Student at any of those schools is likely to pick up the political and religious biases inherent in the Institution, and the beliefs they inherit form this education will seem logical and natural to them, as few will reflect upon why they hold their views or how they really differ.
But the end is always the same, they acquire a sort of intellectual framework by which everything else is filtered through. They have a Narrative in their head that acts as an overarching story that tells them how the world works and what to expect in life and who they are.
In the end, this is all Religion itself is. The Overarching Narrative we use in life to tell us who we are, were we came from, and were we are going, the story that tells us how we are relate to the world we live in and that gives us our values, our morals, and our ethics, the story that tells us the meaning of our life.
And everyone has this the end.
And everyone adds to or builds form that Story.
Which is what men like Hawking are doing, simply trying to complete the gaps n the story by giving us a Creation account without God that solves that dilemma. It doesn’t matter that there’s no proof, they need this, and need it to be void of God.
But it will be seen a Science and Not Religion, and completely more Rational to believe in, thanks to the other great narrative of Science VS Religion we have in our society.