Science describes reliable models of reality. Its language is mathematics.
Religion wonders about the ultimate meaning of such models. Its language is philosophy.
The first religions bundled model and meaning out of necessity. However, post-Roman Christians were keen logicians and experimenters who laid the foundation of the modern sciences. They would be ashamed of creationists' shallowness.
>The Old Testament is a stream-of-consciousness culture dump: history, law, moral parables, and yes, models of how the universe works. In not one single passage of the Old Testament will you find anyone talking about a transcendent wonder at the complexity of the universe. But you will find plenty of scientific claims, like the universe being created in six days (which is a metaphor for the Big Bang), or rabbits chewing their cud. (Which is a metaphor for...)
>Back in the old days, saying the local religion "could not be proven" would have gotten you burned at the stake. One of the core beliefs of Orthodox Judaism is that God appeared at Mount Sinai and said in a thundering voice, "Yeah, it's all true." From a Bayesian perspective that's some darned unambiguous evidence of a superhumanly powerful entity... The vast majority of religions in human history - excepting only those invented extremely recently - tell stories of events that would constitute completely unmistakable evidence if they'd actually happened. The orthogonality of religion and factual questions is a recent and strictly Western concept. The people who wrote the original scriptures didn't even know the difference.
Sorry for the late reply. I like your choice of words, proto-philosophy. I think of religions of the past as proto-philosophy and proto-science (the world is flat and at the center of the universe, Heaven is structured so and so, ...). But you're right, my framework does not fully reflect the complexity of modern faith. Unlike trained priests, the overwhelming majority of believers don't learn philosophy to challenge their own beliefs.
imho too many people consume religion like painkillers for the big questions. Without a critical eye, faith becomes anti-philosophy.
The problem with religion is that it describes facets of human mental, cultural, and emotional processes (as all fictions do,) but attributes them to non-human parts of reality. Thus it is, in any rational sense, a terrible model of anything.
Your mistake is in claiming that religion is about 'meaning' where science and mathematics aren't. Anywhere you use language, you study meaning. Meaning is a feature of language, and religion tends to use the least reliable and most inconsistent language of any of those subjects. If religion is a search for meaning, it is an incredibly stupid way of doing so.
So the one thing you've claimed it is useful for is something that it is demonstrably bad at.
Religions evolve to self propagate, that's about all they have in common. Ex: The shakers died out for fairly obvious reasons.
Ps: The have been a lot of tiny or dead religions some of which where vary odd by modern standards. But, if you limit yourself to religions with say 20,000,000+ followers today then clearly there going to need to be able to spread.
That's not the important distinction. Religion is also trying to figure out reality. If science thought it could detect fairies, then science would study fairies. The distinction is rather in method; science uses (hopefully) well-designed experiments and peer review; religion uses...other methods.
This is an important point which I think many miss. I'm not remotely religious, and I see the errors in the so called truths of each religion. I used to consider people of faith to be either stupid or brainwashed, but then I watched The Day The Universe Changed[1], a beautifully written BBC documentary by James Burke from 1985. It's much easier to watch it[2] than me try to replicate everything said on there. But the essence is the point that dropit_sphere made, and that is both religion and science are trying to figure out the truth. But use different methods to acquire it.
The difference is that the scientific truth is always changing. The scientific truth today is different from the truth 300 years ago. And will be different again in 300 years time. So how true is that 'truth'? If the things we believe to be true today are untrue tomorrow, then how can people of science be so hostile to the 'truths' of religion? And what's the end-game? When will we finally know the truth?
People of faith get their absolute unchanging truths from their religion, not that the religions themselves are truth seeking in the same way as science.
Anyway, it's definitely worth a watch and very thought provoking. He also predicts the potential totalitarian use of the internet, along with the ideas of global communities sharing knowledge and ultimately each person's own truths.
I have since stopped being quite so brutal in my opinions about people of faith.
I disagree here. For example, relativity and quantum mechanics explain how our world behave but we have no idea why these theories are true or even why can the universe be described with mathematical equations ?
What kind of answer would satisfy your questions of why these theories are true anyway. I am not sure I can even imagine an ideal answer and this might be a clue that we are asking the completely wrong question.
I don't have answer on the "Why". I think that this question is not a scientific question because the answer could no be proved/invalidated by experiments. It's a philosophical question and some people find the answer in religion or philosophy, some just admit they don't know and others just don't care.
In my experience, religion is usually answering scientific questions, not non-scientific ones. And the explanations they give hardly explain anything at all.
I don't know. Some religions don't seem so hung up on prime movers and anthropomorphizing any "higher being(s)". Buddhism, for instance (just my impression).
And more importantly, religion has never actually answered a "why" question in a reasonable manner. So it is objectively useless. It is not how you answer "why" questions.
Assuming your distinction is actually meaningful, here's a question for you: "How do you properly answer 'why' questions?"
Maybe the answer is that there is no scientific answer to a "why" question ? The question has no scientific answer. In maths, some equations have no solution, some proposition are not provable with common axioms. The "why questions" are just question without scientific answer.
Every question you ask is going to be manifest in relationships between subsets of observable states of reality. Even if you ask a nonsensical question, it is possible to determine that the question is nonsense by observing the context of the question. There is nothing here that prevents science from working to answer the question.
If you have a question with no possible scientific answer, then it has no answer at all. You do not get better results by refusing to use the best tools.
Religion wonders about the ultimate meaning of such models. Its language is philosophy.
The first religions bundled model and meaning out of necessity. However, post-Roman Christians were keen logicians and experimenters who laid the foundation of the modern sciences. They would be ashamed of creationists' shallowness.