Not exactly on faith. New experiments are constantly being devised to test the old
ones; either they withstand the test or they do not.
I didn't make myself clear. I wasn't saying that scientists have to take any given experiment on faith. I was saying that they have to take on faith the whole concept that the process of experimentation in and of itself is a valid way of searching for truth. There's no way to prove that. It's just something you have to believe or not believe.
The basic incompatibility between science and religion is that science views knowledge
as a dynamic thing that must expand and grow, and which expands and grows best
when continuously challenged. Most religious organizations view their own principles as
fixed facts, and see any effort to expand or challenge them as a hostile attack.
That's partly true. But partly not. In religion, when challenges to belief are mounted and the challenges become validated by a significant number of people the most frequent thing that happens is that the challenged religion doesn't change (at least not right away), but those who want it to change go off and found a new religion or a new branch of the existing religion. Look at the whole Protestant revolution. Look at the various forms of Buddhism. On and on. Christianity was an offshoot of Judaism. Islam was an offshoot of Christianity. It isn't that there aren't challenges to religious thought; there are. It's that the way religion grows and expands is more often by schism than adoption of ideas. Different way than with science, but same basic concept--challenge, test, change. And as for dynamic, well, just look at the Lutherans and Episcopalians now rejoining forces in liturgy. Look at the dynamic changes in the Catholic church over the past 30 years. Religion isn't a static thing at all. It is dynamic, and expanding, and contracting, and changing all the time. Even the "fixed facts" are changing dramatically. Look at the issue of women in the pulpit for just one example.
I think that's part of the problem with religion today -- just as Snow (?) talked about the great divide between those who understood science and those who didn't, there is a great divide between those who truly understand religion and those who don't. I grant that many religious people give religion a bad name (unlike, say, politics or law!), but that doesn't make religion itself bad or evil. (The Ask God thread is NOT representative of modern religious thought!)
X criticized me for talking about evolution when she thought I wasn't up on the latest discoveries and research in the field. Yet you and she have no problem talking about/criticizing religious expression when you admit that you haven't, and I'm sure she hasn't, read a major theological journal in the past five years. Not that I object to your writing -- as always, I greatly enjoy discussing issues with you--it is a tossup as to whether I appreciate your cogent insights or your unfailing gentlemanliness more. But I think you also have to accept that perhaps you aren't an expert in contemporary theological principles and scholarship. |
