I'll quote Tim Minchin here
"If you wanna watch telly, you should watch Scooby Doo That show was so cool Because every time there was a church with a ghoul Or a ghost in a school They looked beneath the mask and what was inside? The fucking janitor or the dude who ran the waterslide Because throughout history Every mystery Ever solved has turned out to be Not magic"Like one of my faves of his
Do you know what they call alternative medicine that’s been proved to work? Medicine.
Germ Theory
Diseases used to be associated with paranormal powers or the wrath of gods in most cultures. The discovery of microorganisms and advancement of medicine may be our civilization's greatest achievement.
Science deals with the natural, gods are by definition supernatural.
Science can not either prove or disprove existence of supernatural. It may only erode the reasoning why supernatural should exist.
That reasoning is subjective, and as such, there are no definite answers to your question unless we add additional constraints.
Didn't some quantum nondeterminism prove the existence of effects without a natural cause? (being divil's advocate a bit here for the craic)
The traditional notion of cause and effect is not something all philosophers even agree upon, I mean many materialist philosophers largely rejected the notion of simple cause-and-effect chains that go back to the "first cause" since the 1800s, and that idea is still pretty popular in some eastern countries.
For example, in China they teach "dialectical materialist" philosophy part of required "common core" in universities for any degree, and that philosophical school sees cause and effect as in a sense dependent upon point of view, that an effect being described as a particular cause is just a way of looking at things, and the same relationship under a different point of view may in fact reverse what is considered the cause and the effect, viewing the effect as the cause and vice-versa. Other points of view may even ascribe entirely different things as the cause.
It has a very holistic view of the material world so there really is no single cause to any effect, so what you choose to identify as the cause is more of a label placed by an individual based on causes that are relevant to them and not necessarily because those are truly the only causes. In a more holistic view of nature, Laplacian-style determinism doesn't even make sense because it implies nature is reducible down to separable causes which can all be isolated from the rest and their properties can then be fully accounted for, allowing one to predict the future with certainty.
However, in a more holistic view of nature, it makes no sense to speak of the universe being reducible to separable causes as, again, what we label as causes are human constructs and the universe is not actually separable. In fact, the physicists Dmitry Blokhintsev had written a paper in response to a paper Albert Einstein wrote criticizing Einstein's distaste for quantum mechanics as based on his adherence to the notion of separability which stems from Newtonian and Kantian philosophy, something which dialectical materialists, which Blokhintsev self-identified as, had rejected on philosophical grounds.
He wrote this paper many many years prior to the publication of Bell's theorem which showed that giving up on separability (and by extension absolute determinism) really is a necessity in quantum mechanics. Blokhintsev would then go on to write a whole book called The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics where in it he argues that separability in nature is an illusion and under a more holistic picture absolute determinism makes no sense, again, purely from materialistic grounds.
The point I'm making is ultimately just that a lot of the properties people try to ascribe to "materialists" or "naturalists" which then later try to show quantum mechanics is in contradiction with, they seem to forget that these are large umbrella philosophies with many different sects and there have been materialist philosophers criticizing absolute determinism as even being a meaningful concept since at least the 1800s.
Evolutionary biology was the main one
Which is a bit silly to me, in that any religious person could simply explain evolution away as the mechanism by which a god or gods created humanity (to iterate on form until creating their supposed "perfect image").
God being a human who was also his own father is fine, but the suggestion that evolution could be part of god's plan is where we draw the line?
They had to reject it because any religion with a creation myth specifically says how the god created people. To accept an alternative story would reject the notion of the book as truth.
The religious are not looking for answers, they already have all the answers by definition of their holy book or whatever. They're looking for confirmation bias and reject anything that goes against that.
any religious person could simply explain evolution away as the mechanism by which a god or gods created humanity
Many did, and this position is called Deism. In most versions, god(s) started the universe with initial conditions that would lead to the formation of intelligent life, and then withdrew.
If you squint real hard, the first creation myth in Genisis is pretty close to evolution.
Heliocentric model.
Cosmic distance and time. Light speed as a limit.
The geological age of the Earth.
Dinosaurs.
Evolutionary theory.
Continental drift.
The periodic table of the elements.
Quantum theory, including wave-particle duality.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
Black holes.
It's interesting, some theists would just say "that's how God built the universe" and be satisfied with that.
The halfway sensible ones would. But the ones that thing religious texts are magic books would burn the former as heretics if they were allowed to do so.
Well sure. There are religious people who want to know how the world works. After all, if there is a creator/God then one of the ways that being communicated with us for certain is the universe we live in.
Thats me over 15 years ago. Now I'm staunch atheist.
Religion is deliberately non-falsifiable. No matter what scientific proof you can come up with, at the end of the day they just say God is fucking with us burying skeletons of creatures that never existed and such.
The fact that it needs to be constructed that way is frankly all the proof I need to toss religion in the garbage, but everyone isn't so cavalier about the disposition of their "immortal soul."
Honestly immortality and the very nature of God are both abhorrent to me. If religion were true, the best I could hope for is to be cast into a lake of fire and be destroyed, so I kinda win either way. Worst case is all religion is wrong but so is atheism and I have to spend eternity with an entity who is less of a malicious cunt than the Abrahamic god.
Religion is deliberately non-falsifiable.
I think it would be more accurate to say that the non-falsifiablity of religion has evolved as a result of a sort of natural selection. Essentially all the falsifiable religious beliefs have been falsified, and thus have trouble propagating.
Hah! Fair enough.
The scientific method itself considers any as yet unsubstantiated theory as hypothesis. Applying this to the idea of God would leave one agnostic on the issue.
A couple of prominent examples of religious dogmas disproved by scientific discoveries are the Copernican Revolution and evolution by means of natural selection.
Letter from Charles Darwin to Asa Gray (22nd May 1860)
With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.— I am bewildered.— I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.
Translative spoken word by the time a second hand account of the word of god becomes the word of the person speaking. Weird god never came back once we had verbatim recording techniques to address these inaccuracies.
But he works in mysterious ways
Religion exists for a number of reasons, but the primary purpose it serves an individual is as a foundation for their overall worldview.
"Faith" as many call it, serves to answer questions we don't have answers to.
Where did we come from? Why are we here? What happens after we die?
Religion gives us comforting answers to these questions, and as these questions are ultimately unanswerable, can do so in perpetuity.
Religion has also tried to answer questions that we didn't yet have answers for.
What are the sun, moon, and stars? Why are there tides? Why does it rain?
God was long accepted as the source of these things, and prayer was thought to be the best way have any influence.
But today we have answered basically all the major questions. We have a working model of the entire solar system, down to the weather on other planets. We figured out how to turn rocks into computers. All that's left is the unanswerable.
As for where we come from, we've filled in a lot of gaps. Evolution is now the accepted answer for where Humans came from, now the question is where life itself came from, and if there's life outside of Earth (and how much).
Philosophy has given us plenty of options for what our purpose is. There are plenty of ways to wrap your mind around your own identity without turning to the supernatural.
And our study of anatomy and neurology suggests that our conscious self ceases to exist after death, the only thing standing in the way of that belief is the very human tendency to be in denial of our own mortality.
It wasn't any particular scientific discovery that weakened religion. It was the popularity of science fiction that did it. As Arthur C. Clarke put it, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." People can now imagine how miracles are done without invoking anything supernatural. We might not have the tech to do it yet, but we have a pretty good idea of potential methods. That has placed a lot of "creator god" religions under pressure. Create life? Tech will eventually do it. Create a world? Sure, tech again. Given enough tech, a solar system can be spawned. Water into wine? We're halfway there with Kool-Aid. We already have vimanas (those ancient Hindu flying vehicles). We call them airplanes or helicopters. We can destroy a whole city with a single weapon. So why should we worship a supreme being who supposedly did those things?
Assuming we can conquer poverty, religions that survive will be centered around improving the human condition. Worshipping dieties will eventually fall by the wayside. It will still be a long process. You can't dispel faith with reason and facts. And people in poverty tend to embrace religion because it gives them comfort and hope that things will be better in the afterlife.
Printing presses, industrialized education, and the industrial revolution.
Giving people en mass the time study and educate themselves.
You need to define God first.
We should definitely start with this.
If it's biblical sky daddy that influences our everyday lives, pretty much everything.
If it's just more or less self-conscious entity behind the curtain of reality that sparked the universe, it's pretty much unprovable and so undisprovable.
Sanitation.
Doesn't even take science to debunk religions, yet you can't prove the non existance of a god
The most reliable way to lose faith isn't through science, it's reading their holy text.
In general, nothing about science ever shakes a theist's faith, and I doubt it ever will. Reason being: the moment science breaks new ground, religion retreats further back into the unknown. As long as there is an unknown, theists will have something to take shelter from.
I don't think it's taking shelter as much as trying to find an answer to something that has no answer.
For example Eistein I don't think was trying to take shelter from reality. He wanted to look at reality as deeply as possible and he managed to peek through and see more than almost anyone ever had before.
But he still believed in a God. This is one of those reasons I always call myself an agnostic instead of atheist.
In a practical sense, I'm an atheist. I don't think Jesus turned water into wine or the Buddha achieved enlightenment and entered a higher plane of existence or whatever.
But I acknowledge there might be supernatural or supranatural items / phenomenon/ or even beings that we can't ever fully understand.
Einstein believed in "Spinoza's god", which is essentially just nature and the laws that govern the universe. It's not the same as believing in an anthropomorphic God and putting faith in scripture.
This is one of those reasons I always call myself an agnostic instead of atheist.
Those aren't mutually exclusive terms. "Agnostic" answers whether you know a god exists, and "atheist" answers whether you believe a god exists.
I don't know of any gods, and I don't believe any exist, so I'm an agnostic atheist.
Depends on what exactly which kind of God.
I don't think it's possible for science to really weaken or strengthen the case for a God in its most simple form (some entity existing outside of the observable universe), but particular tangible claims from religious texts or beliefs can and have been disproven. Others can't be disproven because of the nature of the claim made.
Do we really need a scientific discovery to prove an existence that doesn't exist? I think the proof that's required is proof that God does exist and until that comes about, religion is clearly just a man made construct for the purpose of power and control.
Besides, I've given clear scientific examples to religious people before and they simply stated that it exists that way because god created it that way which is just the dumbest fucking thinking imaginable. You can't help those people.
What weakened religion is a long process going from the middle age to the modern world. It starts with the pope wars. It peaks with the religion wars in the XVIIth century. By this point the religious power was a political power like any other, but merely with a cultural hold on European populations. Which was the nail in the coffin.
During this period, the Church radicalised itself as a defense mode. Which solidified the laïcal mindset of the Lumières. Basically the church entered a cultural war against science because it feared it would lose controle.
Then the XIXth century happened. Monarchies got destroyed. And the Catholic Church got humiliated and destroyed as a political power. Socialism and communism appeared, and to state how progressive they were, they put the church in the same reactionary bag as the royalists.
In the middle of this are the liberals who don't care much about anything but profits. Si when democracy is on the rise, they are democrats. When royalty comes back, they praise the king. At least as long as they let them make good profits. And that's what the church doesn't let them do. Morale goes in the way of profit. It forbid slavery and exploitation. It's against science. It promotes charity. That sucks balls for the liberals. But order is good, so why not being a believer but without the problems?
It's not science that made religion recess. It's bad political decisions and alliances. Many renowned scientists were believers. Many still are. But somehow the religions are rejecting science because it doesn't go into litteraly what their old fantasy book wrote. It's a shame because religions could easily make a humanist evolution if they had the political will to do it.
Molecular genetics.
There aren't any. Some things will disprove specific religious ideas, but that's about it.
Psalms 19:1-2
"The heavens are telling of the glory of God; And their expanse is declaring the work of His hands. Day to day pours forth speech, And night to night reveals knowledge."
##Old Testament
#####Exodus 21:20-21 (NIV):
"And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished. Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money."
##New Testament
#####Ephesians 6:5 (NIV):
"Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ"
#####1 Timothy 6:1 (NIV):
"All who are under the yoke of slavery should consider their masters worthy of full respect, so that God’s name and our teaching may not be slandered. Those who have believing masters should not show them disrespect just because they are fellow believers. Instead, they should serve them even better because their masters are dear to them as fellow believers and are devoted to the welfare of their slaves."
Yep. Real scripture, really in the Bible and needs to be understood.
Those scriptures are not really germane to the question though. I understand the scriptures you posted might seem strange.
Remember that the entire nation of Israel were slaves for hundreds of years in Egypt when they were brought out by God, rescued from that slavery, and set free.
1 Corinthians 7:21-23 NIV "Were you a slave when you were called? Don’t let it trouble you—although if you can gain your freedom, do so. For the one who was a slave when called to faith in the Lord is the Lord’s freed person; similarly, the one who was free when called is Christ’s slave. You were bought at a price; do not become slaves of human beings."
Galatians 5:1 "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery."
Then there's Philemon, an entire book of the Bible dedicated to Paul's letter to a slave owner looking for kindness when returning an escaped slave who converted to Christianity.
The Bible can be confusing and even contradictory at times when speaking from this or that person's point of view. We have Sunday schools where we wrestle with questions in an open forum, and I'm sure you'd be welcome as long as you were not antagonistic.
