Luckily for me my parents supported my constant questioning of nearly everything. Neither were very religious, but my mom did go to church and made me go to Sunday school and church. Eventually I was thrown out of Sunday school for asking too many questions [1], and at that point laid out a pretty good argument why it was a waste of time for me to continue to go to church. That was the last time I was a part of any organized religion.
[1] "The bible says so" is simply not a good enough answer - ever. To me a much better answer is simply that a person wants something beyond themselves to believe in even though they know they will not ever prove it to be true. I may disagree with that, but I can respect a person who is honest with themselves.
My parents are not religious at all, but for some reason (proximity of home and their work places mainly) I attended a religious-school for two years when I was 6 and 7. At the beginning I was constantly "punished" during religious-courses because of my questions, but the punition was to be in the library while the other kids had religious classes, so I can't disturb the class and make everyone questionning what the teacher says. Soon they didn't wait for me to ask an embarassing questions they'd just make me go to the library during religious-courses.
You could think that people at this school were rather clever to have me "punished" by being in the library. But they also sent me to the "school director class" when I was talking too much in class, and the school director class was for kids 3 years older than me, and they were doing way more interesting stuff. Even if I was not allowed to ask questions there, I often managed to get punished on purpose (it was really not difficult for me ^^) and it seems they never understood that.
>Soon they didn't wait for me to ask an embarassing questions they'd just make me go to the library during religious-courses.
You assume it was embarrassment. It was probably [also] simply disruptive. Teachers do not generally (depending on where you are of course) have free rein, they have a curriculum to wade through with proscriptions on the manner of it's transmission.
I was disruptive in science classes at 16-17 by being a smart-ass.
That reminds me of a Bill Cosby sketch. "So she sent me to my room. Which is where I wanted to be in the first place!"
I was fortunate enough, for the most part, to have very good Sunday School teachers, of the sort who were not afraid to say "I don't know", or "why don't you try to find out yourself?" As a result, I am still active in organized religion, and well acquainted with theology.
I have occasionally accidentally caused some people to assume that I'm a atheist in awkward circumstances; but that is usually resolved by explaining that I actually do agree with their religion, just not their justification )or lack thereof) for it. I found my own justification.
While judging a science fair last year, I was talking to a student who had come to a definite conclusion about his hypothesis based on exactly three data points. I asked him if there was any other possible outcome from an experiment besides "I have proved my hypothesis" and "I have disproved my hypothesis", and he said those were the only two options. When I told him that "I can't conclude anything because I don't have enough information" is sometimes a perfectly valid conclusion, he didn't understand how or why.
Not sure if that's a personal misunderstanding about the philosophy of science or he was never taught it, but I sure hope that concept is not missing from school curriculum.
In my experience, it is. I went to a Sci/Tech magnet school, and it still never came up. The 'correct' answer is always either yes or no; 'I don't know' is not acceptable in a paper or on a test.
At least they were good about generating your own conclusions, and not just trying to make your observations fit with what the teacher thought they ought to be. Most of the time.
Argument from ignorance, also known as argumentum ad ignorantiam or "appeal to ignorance", is a fallacy in informal logic. It asserts that a proposition is true because it has not been proven false (or vice versa). This represents a type of false dichotomy in that it excludes a third option, which is that there is insufficient investigation and therefore insufficient information to satisfactorily prove the proposition to be either true or false.
I don't know would have been a fine answer. The problem is that I was never told I don't know and was told either the bible says so or I says so and your going hell.
Keep in mind some of my friends (who also went to church with me) went to a Metalical concert (showing my age lol) and were immediately condemned. Even as a teen at this point I realized what BS this was. How could a God who is supposed to be all great, all knowing, and all powerful condemn someone for going to a musical concert. (metalica? really, I've been to more tame Slayer concerts lol).
I dated girl in college and watched her and her friends get sucked into religion because they had never seen how it worked before. I went to a couple of services with her and LOLed at the preacher when I knew more about the bible than he did (those years of sunday school paid off). I don't have a problem with religion except when it's complete BS.
I definitely sympathize. My Sunday school teachers were a bit anti-intellectual and could rarely answer the questions a smart kid might have. It didn't take me long to realize that the teachers weren't the people best qualified to teach kids on religious subjects. They were just the people who were willing to babysit for an hour every Sunday.
Though I probably wouldn't have reached this realization if my parents didn't have some fairly intellectual theology/religious books on the shelves that I could pick up and read.
In defense of organized religion, I know people who have had the opposite experience; i.e., whose teachers, pastors, and priests were very encouraging of questions and did their best to answer them. I have heard that the Catholic Church in particular is much more welcoming of this (or was for one person, anyway) than I had expected.
I wish those people were more forthcoming. I am deeply and devoutly religious, but I don't blame many for their reactions to religion given its common course. I was always taught to ask questions. My teachers, parents, and other role models were generally welcoming and did not seem afraid of inquisition (in fact, they would invite it, and invite us to explore other religions -- the opposite occurs in most Christian denominations), and I think that played a big role in my continuance in the faith.
There is a deep, endless reality to pure religion, found in many sects. Most, however, follow their religion because it's part of their tradition, and it's something that makes them comfortable. They have a very superficial understanding of its components and mainly practice (to the extent that they do practice) to help themselves feel better. Of course, when challenged, they take the intellectually lazy out of belittling and discrediting the source instead of ever considering their questions on a philosophical level.
That is not pure religion. Pure religion is a rigorous, demanding, constant program of self-improvement, discipline, learning, and love. It can be found in many sects to the degree that its practitioners embrace and internalize the principles espoused. Pure religionists love inquisition and they love learning. They are also generally more intellectually active and less likely to tout religion as a badge when pursuing political office (not that that happens very often either), etc.
To you atheists, we know you've had bad experiences, and we know that there are a lot of people out there trying to embarrass religionists, but please remember that there is a non-vocal minority, much smaller than the general religious population but still not insignificant, for whom religion is deep and serious, and not a matter of silencing curiosity to make way for comfortable lies about ourselves.
I found a book at my local library that I really loved. "The Faith of a Scientist" by Henry Eyring [1], a brilliant chemist and devout Mormon who has a beautiful, refreshingly rational take on religion. The chapters are succinct and cover specific scientific principles that often receive a lot of undeserved friction from religious people - the age of the earth, evolution, etc. There doesn't have to be a discrepancy between intellectual curiosity and religion. I recommend it to all of my friends who are religious but find the general attitude of those within their faith intellectually unsatisfying.
>[1] "The bible says so" is simply not a good enough answer - ever.
Axioms are fine in logic, mathematics, physics, ... so why not elsewhere?
It's certainly an unsatisfying answer.
If however you assume for a moment that it portrays the will of the Creator then The Bible saying so is no worse (or better) than the fine-structure constant not having a logical derivation as to it's value.
People trying to give a reason for a Biblical injunction have, I suspect, often not discovered the reason the Creator made things one way or another but are really just speculating. Like one might speculate why a universe might have a fixed light speed in vacuo.
>The fine structure constant is not axiomatic; its value and its contantness are experimentally testable.
Yeah, I plucked a little too randomly perhaps - the point there is not that it is axiomatic (which I didn't claim) but that it is an arbitrary value; indeed it is a complex of arbitrary values that apparently define the physics of our universe somewhat.
Why is it that value, well, er, just because (or some version of the anthropic principle if you swing that way).
"...arbitrary values that apparently define the physics of our universe somewhat."
In other words, this constant is a piece of a model, fitted to observable behaviour, subject to refinement based on empirical data. And the model may at some point be able to offer insight as to why things are as they are; "just because" is not viewed by most physicists as a permanent explanation.
This is the exact opposite of religious thinking which offers conclusions in advance of, and regardless of, any empirical data.
My point is that the parallel you're trying to draw between religious prescription and the things that scientists call "axioms" is not valid.
>"just because" is not viewed by most physicists as a permanent explanation
Why do you suppose this is any different for a Christian physicist, say, than for any other physicist? That aside I imagine that many physicists hold to a form of Anthropic Principle which almost fits the definition of "just because".
As an agnostic I always felt that God was the cop-out answer that replaced "we don't know". As a Christian not knowing everything still frustrates me but knowing now that within our current knowledge it is provable that not everything is knowable softens the blow of that somewhat (Godel, Church-Turing, etc.).
>religious thinking which offers conclusions in advance of, and regardless of, any empirical data
You suppose that religion is false to state your position, of course you do, but if you suspend your supposition then you see that religion 'offers truth in advance of reason'.
Christians generally, IME, don't say that God exists as the conclusion of a logical argument it's presuppositional in the same way as assumption of the validity of ones own sense data, or the assumption of ones actual self or of an external world.
Christians take that 'Christ died for our sins and was resurrected to heaven' and live by it and find that it works. Physicists take that 'c is constant for all observers' and live by it and find that it works. Obviously 'it works' means many different things both to the Christian and to the scientist (coherentism, instrumentalism, etc.).
"...if you suspend your supposition then you see that religion 'offers truth in advance of reason'"
This statement is a tautology, and also completely beside the point. It matters not whether a belief held religiously is actually true. By definition, a belief held religiously is held without regard to reason or evidence. The extent to which reason and evidence intrude is the extent to which faith is obviated.
This entire process, this way of thinking, is and should be entirely alien to science. And the anthropic principle is not science. It's not even a principle -- it's conjecture. It's not testable, not falsifiable, and it has no material effect on any scientific research, influential though it may in philosophical terms.
Your last statement is ..., it's ... no. Just, no. There is nothing alike about those two things. The constant c is, again, eminently isolatable in experiment, quite testable, and part of part of a quite falsifiable theory. The statement that following Christ has worked well for your life, even if true in whatever sense you like, is everything science is not: anecdotal, unfalsifiable, and untestable if only for the presence of millions of variables that cannot be isolated, controlled, or even known. You're conflating two completely separate things.
btw, I'm a big fan of this anthropic jazz. It is aesthetically pleasing to me, like the thought of any finely crafted machine, but it is in no way shape or form scientific.
Yes. Do you have a conclusion to that thought or more to add? I'd like to read it.
Alternative logical axioms are something I find interesting but I've only really studied a couple of alternative axiomatic systems of arithmetic (Peano - limited as it is by Godel's incompleteness theorem, Robinson, ZFC, can't think of any others of the top of my head).
Axioms are fine in logic, mathematics, physics, ... so why not elsewhere?
The axioms that I believe in are provable. Things like 1+1=2. There is no proof that <insert your god here> created the world in <insert your days here>.
So tell me an axiom, preferably religiously based, that I can go out and prove.
Religion by its very definition is faith based. As soon as you start proving/disproving it, religion simply doesn't exist anymore.
>Because those axioms work, and are verifiable independently
Can you expand on what you mean by this. Are you saying, for example, that you've proven GR without axioms - you've verified independently that a specific constant c is a necessary condition based on other axioms (or somesuch)? I take it you're a foundationalist?
An attempt at an example: The Bible says excessive greed is wrong. One can argue that it is a simple consequence of other more elementary moral statements within. Lets assume here that it's an axiomatic moral statement anyhow (I don't think it matters for these purposes). It works; it's independently verifiable that excessive greed is destructive. In Biblical terms such destructiveness is wrong (another axiom) whilst clearly wrong is not a scientifically determinable position.
I don't understand your "hint" it sounds like an attempt at snarky humour from a position of petitio principii but I really can't unravel the intention inside the gag.
I don't know what a foundationalist is. I think the difference comes down to what you demand from your knowledge of reality. Every time I use the GPS on my phone to see where I am, I am relying on the axioms underpinning GR to hold true within the precision required to correct the atomic clocks on the satellites for time dilation.
The principles of GR may not model reality completely -- and it would be really unusual and surprising if they did -- but they're good enough for me because they're testable.
I don't understand your "hint" it sounds like an attempt at snarky humour from a position of petitio principii but I really can't unravel the intention inside the gag.
Here, I'm poking fun at you because (assuming you're not just adopting a religious POV as a rhetorical exercise) you have to die to find out if you're right, while all I have to do is open my eyes and compare my location to what my GPS tells me. To the extent these locations differ, I can ask questions and eventually understand why.
I see no need to consider the supernatural until I have perfected my understanding of the natural... which ain't gonna happen anytime soon. If that makes me a 'foundationalist,' then so be it.
[1] "The bible says so" is simply not a good enough answer - ever. To me a much better answer is simply that a person wants something beyond themselves to believe in even though they know they will not ever prove it to be true. I may disagree with that, but I can respect a person who is honest with themselves.