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LadyEllen -> RE: Hawking: Religion will be defeated by science (6/9/2010 5:03:42 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Brain
"There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, (and) science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works."
Hmmm. I would have to disagree since this appears to assume that people are reasonable creatures who eventually might see the error of their ways in being swayed by their emotional response to one another and the world around them.
It is clear that all religion, even in the displaced forms in which it is often today found, is the product of mankind's earliest attempts at reasoning out an understanding of himself and his world - including his emotional relationships with others and the environment.
Whilst science has impacted on religion and obliged it to either adapt to what is demonstrably true or persist in ridicule to the contrary, and whilst science can equally tell us that our emotions are actually the consequence of chemcial reactions, science has had little impact on helping us to deal with our emotions as we experience them and it is in this arena that religion will persist indefinitely or until science can engineer emotional bypasses that shall render us little more than machines, and overcoming emotional resistance to the application thereof render us each something no longer human.
Science will not lose, but it shall also never win in the sense of removing religion from the human condition. Indeed any attempt by science to do so, along the lines of the above, should inevitably lead to the destruction of science in a human emotional response so violent that its very existence, quite apart from its utility, should be called into question.
E
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