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Aswad -> RE: Any atheists here? (11/22/2008 2:33:46 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: meatcleaver
Science makes no claims beyond it being a human construction, it is religion that claims it knows what some supernatural being says on the hotline.
Hardly. Religion need not deal with a supernatural being, nor claim certain knowledge of the will of such a being.
For that matter, belief in entropy is little more than a substantiated claim about a "supernatural" (i.e. above nature) power. From a scientific point of view, entropy itself is not causally affected by events in the universe, yet affects essentially everything in it, is omnipresent, controls human destiny, progresses in a definite direction, is opposed by the force of order (which can reach stalemate only, by leaving no viable route for a part of a system to a state of higher entropy, at the expense of deadlocking the potential in that part of the system). So we have an omnipresent unmoved mover directing our lives toward a definite goal (maximum entropy) plus an opponent, and it's not a part of nature. Sounds almost Zoroastrian, in the abstract, and fits the definition of something a religion can believe in. Science does, if memory serves. Like other religions, science hopes to understand entropy better, but has little to go on.
You should perhaps consider a bit more flexibility in your perspective.
Non-secular religions in their modern form, in the West, are overwhelmingly either humanist clubs with a hippie touch, or convoluted affairs which deal primarily with repression, tradition and deference of both authority and responsibility onto an organization with strong financial and political interests at stake. That is not to say that this is the only form of religion out there, and certainly not the only form possible. To shut out the other options from your perspective makes no more sense than refusing to consider black people individually on the grounds that their average intelligence is below 100, or to refuse to accept the existence of women who are physically stronger than the average man on the grounds that women must work twice as hard to get and maintain muscle mass.
In short, it commits the same basic error that underlies discrimination and -ism's.
Rational thought is correlated with the capacity for abstract thinking, a consequence of both being heavily dependent on prefrontal cortical function. The ability to see a general principle behind abolition of black slavery, women's suffrage, freedom of religion, acceptance of LGBT orientations and so forth is an inference from the concrete to the abstract that has implications for the capacity to think rationally. Your refusal to consider a wider scope than the "tell me where god touched you" has similar implications, for the same reasons, except insofar as one is to appeal to aversive conditioning overcoming rational thought. Which has been the case for a lot of otherwise brilliant atheists whose aversions arise from being reared in an environment where some religion was causal, instrumental or peripheral to one or more negative experiences, or a general trend of such experiences.
You're leaving few options here, and I think it's time you rationally examine your prejudices.
Health,
al-Aswad.
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