Question for KevinSim- biblical gospel articulation request

[Rivendale]

Doctor Cam and Chap have made the point well, I think. You can use the word faith anyway you like. no one will stop you. But to think what science does is the same as what religion does in their quests for truth is completely wrong, no matter from which angle we look at it. Not in the same ballpark at all.

Faith, especially in Mormonism is the belief in unseen things that are true. That is not the faith of science. Perhaps Dillahunty's common phrase "levels of confidence" would be a better statement of scientific claims and paradigms. Another difference is demonstrability. Sure you have to assume a specific claim like evolution is "true" because others have demonstrated it. But I can go out into the world and study the change in allele frequency. I can't go out and study God in the same way. Stephen Gould's NOMA is just wrong. I think many people are terrified of the word dogma as much as some are terrified of the word faith.

[dastardly stem]

Faith, especially in Mormonism is the belief in unseen things that are true. That is not the faith of science. Perhaps Dillahunty's common phrase "levels of confidence" would be a better statement of scientific claims and paradigms. Another difference is demonstrability. Sure you have to assume a specific claim like evolution is "true" because others have demonstrated it. But I can go out into the world and study the change in allele frequency. I can't go out and study God in the same way. Stephen Gould's NOMA is just wrong. I think many people are terrified of the word dogma as much as some are terrified of the word faith.

They're sketchy concepts. Its understandable that people over-react to them. Admittedly I'm not a fan of either.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Stephen Gould's NOMA is just wrong.

Wait. Are you suggesting there’s overlap?

- Doc

[Rivendale]

Stephen Gould's NOMA is just wrong.

Wait. Are you suggesting there’s overlap?

- Doc

Yes. The believer will take religious convictions and warp the science around them to ease cognitive tension.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Wait. Are you suggesting there’s overlap?

- Doc

Yes. The believer will take religious convictions and warp the science around them to ease cognitive tension.

I’m not trying to be adversarial, but isn’t NOMA literally stating there’s no overlap? I dunno, wikipedia and googling may be too cursory to form an opinion.

- Doc

[Rivendale]

Yes. The believer will take religious convictions and warp the science around them to ease cognitive tension.

I’m not trying to be adversarial, but isn’t NOMA literally stating there’s no overlap? I dunno, wikipedia and googling may be too cursory to form an opinion.

- Doc

Yes. It is the classic war between ought and is. Moral values versus empirical facts. In that sense I would agree. I am just saying in practice people tend to adjust their religious world views to fit certain aspects of empiricism. That is the overlap. If we are addressing subjective values then one could take the Sam Harris approach in his book The Moral Landscape and try to use the empiricism of least harm to construct moral values. I don't necessarily agree with that either. Believing in gods, angels , witches, goblins is not the same as studying gravity waves nor the accompanying science one needs to study the natural world.

[dastardly stem]

Gould's NOMA suggest truth can't contradict truth. If one says it's true there is a spirit inside us, science can't be used to show that's likely not the case on such reasoning. Its true scientifically there is no spirit, and it's true spiritual there is a spirit. This suggests you can be a scientist doing science and a Christian doing Christianity, simultaneously even if there appears to be conflict with conclusions or teachings.

Gould seems to have been willing to go a bit post modern and speak as if since the spirit or God is true to many people, and we can't detect such through science, indeed on science those propositions look untrue, so many believe unscientific things, we simply can't dismiss their beliefs because they make no sense (of course he'd have said they make complete sense somehow). On that I'd think he'd say, it's completely logical to believe nonsense because it's not science. It's religion, which is true, metaphorically, at least.

I don't think popular belief is a good rubric to run with. I'm with Rivendale that it's simply not an interesting or helpful way to view things. If there's a God and he's definitely there but we have no way to detect him, to me, that's as good as there not being a God at all. If we can't detect him, then he has no voice outside of the head of those who presume he's there. He has no action outside the presumed imagination of those who think God does miracles that amount to natural processes.

[huckelberry]

from Scientific American,
https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... g-of-life/

Harvard University paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who died in 2002, was a tough-minded skeptic who did not suffer fools gladly when it came to pseudoscience and superstition. Gould was a secular Jew who did not believe in God, but he had a soft spot for religion, expressed most famously in his principle of NOMA—nonoverlapping magisteria. The magisterium (domain of authority) of science “covers the empirical realm: what is the universe made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory),” he wrote in his 1999 book Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life. “The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value.”

In part, Gould's motivations were personal (he told me on many occasions how much respect he had for religion and for his many religious friends and colleagues). But in his book, he claimed that “NOMA represents a principled position on moralintellectual grounds, not a merely diplomatic solution.” For NOMA to work, however, Gould insisted that just as “religion can no longer dictate the nature of factual conclusions residing properly within the magisterium of science, then scientists cannot claim higher insight into moral truth from any superior knowledge of the world's empirical constitution.”

Initially I embraced NOMA because a peaceful concordat is usually more desirable .......

The article continues noting how people do not observer this boundary very accurately in practice.

[Philo Sofee]

The faith scientists have in the universe is that it is comprehensible, that it remains having the same effects with the same laws, otherwise there is no point in doing mathematics and science. You appear to me to be terrified of the word faith, when in fact, it is an everyday word we all use all the time. It is from the Latin word Fides which means trust.

Nope. You are trying hard to equate what scientists do to what religious believers do, and it is not working.

I continue to use the scientific approach to the universe simply because it has worked well so far. If it suddenly stops working, and the universe behaves with mere caprice, I'll stop. That's just a matter of practical judgement.

Religious faiths (and there are a LOT of them, very different in content and at times hostile to one another) are another matter altogether, and as commonly practiced they are surrounded (unlike a scientific theory) with all kinds of buffers and protections against any event whatsoever having the power to make the believer say "My faith is not consistent with the way things appear to be." Science, on the other hand deliberately sets out to make itself as vulnerable as possible to disproof.

I am not terrified of any word, including "faith". But I think your attempt at claiming "scientists exercise faith just like religious people do" is to unreasonable as to make me wonder how you can continue it in the face of the reactions you have had so far.

Your argument is with Einstein, I simply follow his lead on this...

[Philo Sofee]

Rivendale
Perhaps Dillahunty's common phrase "levels of confidence" would be a better statement of scientific claims and paradigms.

Yes, same thing. Faith from FIDES means trust, "Fidelity" is literally from the word. The universe has fidelity with its laws, and our measurements of them, so we trust it and we can do our science, trust it that it will not change drastically so we can continue to do our sciences.
We trust the chemicals of stars out there because the light spectral lines behaves the same at all times, we trust that, so we learn the chemistry of the stars form the light spectrum of chemical elements. If one day a star showed nitrogen, the next day just carbon and the next day just magnesium, we'd find a better method to trust, since we would lose faith in one that leads to chaos, not order as we have faith in. We have faith in the order we have discovered, because it is still working for us. That is not a religious faith, it is a normal everyday faith. Faith is not just a religious term. The New Atheists have done a lousy job in attempting to redefine it as a religious term only. They didn't succeed. Einstein did not have faith in religion or God, he had faith in the comprehensibility of the universe and it stunned him it was so, very properly.