Religulous

[Winston Legthigh]

I could interpret lightning as evidence of god

[Good Old Neon]

Exactly, just like the bloody shoelace is used as evidence in a murder trial, but doesn't prove the crime committed.

 

But to suggest that no evidence exists?

 

A friend with a PhD in physics (author of "Interactions of polarizable media in water solutions: A molecular dynamics model") remarked that some of the older professors he works with are amongst the most existence-of-god-believing people he's met - and it's because of their work and research.

 

I don't understand why some think that science and belief in God can't co-exist.

 

 

Science is rational; scientists are not

 

Category: Science

Posted on: September 3, 2008 11:41 AM, by Razib

 

Just a small point. I do not believe scientists are particularly rational people as compared to the normal human. Because the average scientist has a higher IQ than the average artist I am willing to grant marginally higher rationality to an average scientist. Their ability to decompose and abstract any given conceptual system is greater. That being said, the contrast between the disciplines of art and science are far greater than those of individual artists and scientists. Why?

 

Because at the end of the day science does not rely on the rationality of a scientist. It relies on the cumulative and self-correcting rationality of the scientific community. It is the "wisdom of the crowds" at its apotheosis. Additionally, the domain which science addresses is generally skewed toward those which are amenable to abstraction and decomposition. I do not believe that physics is such an awe inspiring science in comparison to biology simply because physicists are more intelligent. They are more intelligent, on average, but that in an of itself does not explain the ability of physics to predict at such a fine grained level. Rather, it is the subject matter of physics which is the variable that makes it so.

 

I bring this up because many scientists believe that because science is such a superior method of extracting information about the world around us, and constructing predictive models which have been shown to have great utility, that that means that they as scientists can simply transfer their godlike powers to other domains with the greatest of ease. But as the above should make clear I believe this is a false perception, because the power of science arises from the intersection of the communal wisdom of tens of thousands of individuals over decades with the nature of the subject at hand. Granted, there are individual geniuses of great brilliance such as the great Isaac Newton, but the outcomes of his dabbling in alchemy and scriptural hermeneutics should go to illustrate that cognition applied to a fool's errand only results in glorious foolery.

 

More modestly, this of course applies to the problems that evolutionary biologists have with experts from other scientific disciplines, especially engineers. Engineering is a magnificent profession which serves as one of the bases of our civilization. It is constructed upon tried & true science of the first caliber. Standing upon the shoulders of the geniuses of the past some engineers with little knowledge outside of their domain, great sincerity, and ideological convictions of extra-rational origin, confuse their facility with the tools of their trade with a general ability to conquer any systematic body of knowledge. But of course the power of engineering is due to the centuries of accumulated wisdom on the part of scientists and engineers, not the acuity of any given individual.

 

source - http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2008/09/scien..._scientists.php

 

This is why I don't get worried when a biologist believes in god, or a chemist rejects natural selection, or a cosmologist is superstitious. I trust in science, not scientists.

[Good Old Neon]

i would agree. that's why i don't claim to know what god's plan is, but i do believe he exists and he has one. as far as sam harris goes...for him to tell me i can't 'take a proper seat at the banquet of human understanding in the present' because of my belief in god is ludicrous, pandering and seems based on that stereotype i forgo all science for blind faith. life is more complex than that and so am i. what an ass.

 

As noted previously, the mere suggestion that you believe there is a plan at all strikes me as deeply arrogant. Your making an assumption for which no evidence exists - and even if it did, what makes you informed enough to believe you could peer into the mind of god and decide it has a plan?

[Winston Legthigh]

This is why I don't get worried when a biologist believes in God, or a chemist rejects natural selection, or a cosmologist is superstitious. I trust in science, not scientists.

You lost me, but your copying and pasting skillz are unparalleled.

[Guest Jules]

what makes you informed enough to believe you could peer into the mind of god and decide it has a plan?

you obviously have never met him.

[Good Old Neon]

You lost me, but your copying and pasting skillz are unparalleled.

 

My point, is that it matters not that individual scientists believe in god - is what I was getting at. Science, as a whole, is entirely agnostic on the subject of god, regardless of what a few individuals may believe.

[EL the Famous]

what makes you informed enough to believe you could peer into the mind of god and decide it has a plan?

 

what the fuck are you talking about?! who said i was 'peering into the mind of god'? i can be arrogant alright, but i'm no fucking mind-reader (that's your job). do i actually have to read someone's mind to believe they may have a plan for something?

[Winston Legthigh]

Science, as a whole, is entirely agnostic on the subject of god, regardless of what a few individuals may believe.

Right, but there are both agnostic theists and agnostic athiests.

A person can acknowledge the lack of proof of the existence of God, yet still have faith that one exists.

[Good Old Neon]

what the fuck are you talking about?! who said i was 'peering into the mind of god'? i can be arrogant alright, but i'm no fucking mind-reader (that's your job). do i actually have to read someone's mind to believe they may have a plan for something?

 

You

[markosis]

You people are fucking ridiculous.

 

Potato vs potahto. Who gives a shit? Its the same fucking thing!

 

God's mind?! What the fuck?

[Good Old Neon]

You people are fucking ridiculous.

 

Potato vs potahto. Who gives a shit? Its the same fucking thing!

 

God's mind?! What the fuck?

 

Ummmm.....ok, I agree, it is ridiculous, but probably for different reasons....anyways....

 

The following interview with Maher was just posted on Salon, and I couldn't agree more - I have bolded the interviewer's questions:

 

I guess that brings us to the topic of "Religulous," which I read as this effort to get agnostics and atheists out of the closet in American society.

 

That's certainly one of the goals. I don't use the word "atheist" about myself, because I think it mirrors the certitude I'm so opposed to in religion. What I say in the film is that I don't know. I don't know what happens when you die, and all the religious people who claim they do know are being ridiculous. I know that they don't know any more than I do. They do not have special powers that I don't possess. When they speak about the afterlife with such certainty and so many specifics, it just makes me laugh.

 

People can tell you, "Oh yes, when you get to Paradise there are 72 virgins, not 70, not 75." Or they say, "Jesus will be there sitting at the right hand of the Father, wearing a white robe with red piping. There will be three angels playing trumpets." Well, how do you know this? It's just so preposterous. So, yes, I would like to say to the atheists and agnostics, the people who I call rationalists, let's stop ceding the moral high ground to the people who believe in the talking snake. Let's have our voices heard and be in the debate. Let's stand up and say we're not ready to let the country be given over to the Sarah Palins of the world.

 

It seems like your major target in this movie are the religious extremists, those who belong to the fundamentalist camps of various different religions.

 

That's not really true, that's not really true. I mean, take Sen. Pryor -- I don't think he'd consider himself a fundamentalist. I think he's like a majority of Americans. I mean, 60 percent of Americans believe the Noah's ark story to be literally true. To me, that's mainstream. When people say, "You're going after extremists," I say, well, to be religious at all is to be an extremist. It's to be extremely irrational. Not that everybody believes in Noah's ark, or the guy who lived to be 900 years old. But even to believe the central story of Christianity -- a lot of people would say, "I'm not like those kooks out in Kansas who believe the Earth is 5,000 years old. But I do believe God has a son, who he sent down to earth on a suicide mission, and he said, 'Hey, Jesus, I'm sending you on this suicide mission, but don't worry, they can't kill you because you're really me.' I, God the father -- wink, wink -- let's split up the work! OK? Because there's two of us, but not really! I'll go down to Earth first and I'll see if I can't impregnate a Palestinian woman so she can give birth to you." It's just as silly a story. We're just used to it.

 

Right, well, it's pretty funny when you argue that that story is every bit as ridiculous as the space-alien gods and billion-year-old beings and volcanoes of Scientology. But you could find liberal theologians, sophisticated intellectuals, who are not fundamentalists and who could argue their way out of any corner you try to paint them into.

 

I disagree again. This is the idea that people have in their heads, that somehow you can have a person who sounds very rational and can hold his own in a conversation about whether religion is silly or not. And I just disagree with that premise. If you're defending the story I just described, you are going to come out sounding ridiculous no matter who you are and no matter how intelligent you are. We interviewed Francis Collins in the film. He's the man who mapped the human genome, he's a brilliant scientist. But he says some pretty cuckoo things, some things that are just factually wrong and make him look foolish.

 

I said, "We don't even know for sure whether Jesus lived," and he said, "We have eyewitness accounts." I said, "No, every scholar agrees that the gospels were written from 40 to 70 years after Jesus died." And he said, "Well, that's close." That's close to an eyewitness account? Forty years after somebody dies, 2,000 years ago? This idea that there's somebody out there who can make a case for this and make it sound reasonable, that just doesn't exist.

 

Well, you've got these two Vatican priests in the film, and one of them, Reginald Foster, is this very funny guy who is totally not defending the most ridiculous aspects of Christianity.

 

He's actually debunking them! Here's a guy who lives down the hall from the pope. We saw where the pope lives. And he's just saying, "Ah, they're all just stories." It gave us a real insight that perhaps some of these people who are in the hierarchies of the religions -- they don't really believe it. But they understand that you can't tear it all down for the common man, that people need their stories. It's just amazing that he would say it to me publicly, and on camera.

 

Well, that raises a philosophical question, which maybe a 100-minute comedy film can't deal with. Do these stories serve a purpose in human life that isn't entirely negative, even if it's foolish to take them at face value? It seems to me you're arguing that they don't.

 

That's a good question, and of course no one can argue that religion hasn't done some good. Even in the world today, the Catholic Church certainly organizes a lot of anti-poverty programs. It feeds the poor, runs soup kitchens, and so forth. I would argue that all that can be accomplished without the bells and whistles of religion. People behave ethically all the time without relying on myths. And I would argue that when you bring religion into it, yes, the comfort that religion brings comes at a terrible price. Probably the majority of wars in our history have been fought over religion.

 

Of course we're now involved in Iraq, and the main reason that conflict has been so difficult to solve is that there are two sects of Islam who have a disagreement about who succeeded the prophet Muhammad in the 7th century. This is the reason they're ethnically cleansing each other! Not to mention the Crusades and, you know, keeping women in their place and the repression of minorities and exorcism and burning witches and honor killings and suicide bombings and having sex with children. I mean, I could go on. Does religion have a place? Yeah, you kind of have to balance that against all the bad it does.

 

You deal with Christianity and Judaism, and toward the end of the film you wrestle with Islam a little bit. But there's no mention of Hinduism or Buddhism -- a religion that allows for considerable doubt and isn't so sure about the existence of God, for example.

 

We made the decision early on that in a 90-minute movie we weren't going to be able to delve into the Eastern religions. First of all, Americans -- and I'm one of them -- don't know that much about them. We don't have that intimate lifelong relationship with them, the way we do with Judaism and Christianity and, in recent years, with Islam. We go into Mormonism and Scientology, but people know a little about them because this is America. If we were going to go into Shintoism and Buddhism and Hinduism, that's another movie, and one I'm not going to make.

 

You've been pretty consistent on TV and in your stand-up routines in criticizing Islam, in arguing that the religion and its followers really have a problem they don't seem to be dealing with. You go after Islam again in this film, and you aren't especially delicate about it.

 

No, you can't be. You can't pull your punches, and you wouldn't be respected if you did. We show a little of the Theo van Gogh film ["Submission," which apparently led to the Dutch filmmaker's murder by an Islamic radical], which is pretty rough stuff. You see that woman with her face all beat up, saying, "This is what my husband does to me in the name of his religion." And we talk to a number of Muslim people and you hear me saying that I think when they talk amongst each other they're more honest about the predicament of their religion, but they won't say it to a stranger. I'm sure some of this is going to ruffle feathers, but you know what? The Christians don't love what we say about them either.

 

You've been called anti-Muslim from time to time. How careful are you, do you think, about raising criticisms that don't cross the line into prejudice and stereotype?

 

I don't think I'm involved with prejudice. Prejudice comes from the words "pre" and "judge," and I don't think I'm prejudging. I'm judging. I reserve the right to make judgments. We all have to make judgments.

 

The entire interview, including a mini-review of the film, can be read here - http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/btm/featur...08/10/02/maher/

[Winston Legthigh]

Well, you've got these two Vatican priests in the film, and one of them, Reginald Foster, is this very funny guy who is totally not defending the most ridiculous aspects of Christianity.

 

He's actually debunking them! Here's a guy who lives down the hall from the pope. We saw where the pope lives. And he's just saying, "Ah, they're all just stories." It gave us a real insight that perhaps some of these people who are in the hierarchies of the religions -- they don't really believe it. But they understand that you can't tear it all down for the common man, that people need their stories. It's just amazing that he would say it to me publicly, and on camera.

I would like to see where he gets the stat that 60% believe in Noah's Ark. Come on! I was like 5 years old when I figured out that was bullshit.

 

Also - regarding the story above - and based on Mahers reaction, he seems to have a misconception, because I went to a Catholic high school, and they taught us evolution, not creationism. In religion class, they taught us that a literal interpretation of the Bible was not the correct approach and that it the book of Genesis was merely Hebrew mythology. Were my priest teachers not "tearing it all down for the common man" in a classroom? The only thing amazing about Maher's experience it is that Maher is incredulous that his lid was flipped.

[markosis]

I really like Bill Maher, but for him to say "I don't use the word "atheist" about myself, because I think it mirrors the certitude I'm so opposed to in religion." is pretty ridiculous, when I've seen him bash his guests for even having a hint of spiritual ideas, and he does it with absolute certainty. So its obvious he exercises plenty of certitude in his own beliefs.

[Good Old Neon]

I would like to see where he gets the stat that 60% believe in Noah's Ark. Come on! I was like 5 years old when I figured out that was bullshit.

 

Also - regarding the story above - and based on Mahers reaction, he seems to have a misconception, because I went to a Catholic high school, and they taught us evolution, not creationism. In religion class, they taught us that a literal interpretation of the Bible was not the correct approach and that it the book of Genesis was merely Hebrew mythology. Were my priest teachers not "tearing it all down for the common man" in a classroom? The only thing amazing about Maher's experience it is that Maher is incredulous that his lid was flipped.

 

http://www.washtimes.com/news/2004/feb/16/...6-113955-2061r/

 

Tons of interesting, often disturbing stats can be found here as well - http://religions.pewforum.org/

 

Perhaps you should wait until you actually see the movie before you judge what may not, in fact, be a misconception.

[bjorn_skurj]

The Washington Times is owned by the Moonies. It can't be trusted, least of all by atheists.

[Good Old Neon]

I really like Bill Maher, but for him to say "I don't use the word "atheist" about myself, because I think it mirrors the certitude I'm so opposed to in religion." is pretty ridiculous, when I've seen him bash his guests for even having a hint of spiritual ideas, and he does it with absolute certainty. So its obvious he exercises plenty of certitude in his own beliefs.

 

Many of which, unlike his

[myboyblue]

jnick - honestly, do you ever get tired of this?

[Good Old Neon]

jnick - honestly, do you ever get tired of this?

 

Sure, but I do enjoy discussing the topic, it

[myboyblue]

Sure, but I do enjoy discussing the topic, it

[Good Old Neon]

Have at it... just seems like it's a full-time job for you... with overtime. I was merely asking. Not sure who you are referring to in the political threads but I'm sure your post count within the threads is up there with the best of 'em.

 

Naw, though I find politics every bit the equal of science/religion oriented debate, at this point and for the most part, I have dropped out of that topic. There are plenty of folks who post just as often as I do, have you also pointed out to them that you view their posting habits as a full time job

[EL the Famous]

You

[kwall]

my faith in god and my faith in science go hand in hand...

i agree. science seeks to explain how the universe works the way it does. faith seeks to explain why.

 

...at least until the next time you lump me into some generalization that pegs me as an idiot or murderer.

i'm sure we won't have to wait long . . .

[Good Old Neon]

my faith and personal experiences that established it. for the record, if anything, my faith in god has humbled me way more than breeding any sort of arrogance. i don't claim to know what it's all about, nor do i think anyone else does. my faith in god and my faith in science go hand in hand...you may think that you can't have both, but i do. as much as i actually enjoy debating that as well, i'm 100% certain we'll never change each other's mind.

 

I agree, unlike Gould, who believed science and religion are non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA), meaning, science can be used to explain the empirical universe, while religion is more adept at explaining the meaning of life, morals, etc

[EL the Famous]

Could you please direct me to the post in which I

[Good Old Neon]

go back to some of your old posts and quote youself.

 

you've made plenty of passive-agressive correalation to one's intelligence and their belief in a higher power and when you dicuss the merits/evils of religion it always seems to boil down to 'oh yeah, but people flying planes into buildings or oppressing gays'.

 

True, but I