but, like, obviously someone like Shakey thinks different qualities make something a religion.
what makes one thing a religion and one thing not might be an interesting conversation, but I think it is, in the end, irrelevant.
Sure, and I think this sort of gets to the core of it. Regardless of whether you call it a religion or not, there are qualities of science that make it preferable to what are more conventionally called religions.
I'm kinda with inamilist here. The line of "what is a religion" can be drawn at many different points, so the answer likely lies with the individual. Semantic discussions are usually boring though, and fruitless.
"Yes, because they are both beliefs," is a valid answer to me.
"No, because they arrive at their conclusions via different means," is a valid answer to me.
"No, science is a process, not a set of beliefs," is valid imo.
...I'm sure I could think of others, but you get the idea.
The fact that science is provisional and based off of empirical evidence is what separates it for me, and that doesn't change with a label of "religion."
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Wow! I go away for an hour and this pops up.
When humans first looked around them, they wanted to understand the universe. Their first attempt to understand was religion. Now we call it science, but it is the same thing; the need to understand the world around us. You can point to all kinds of ways we humans have screwed up this endeavor, but it is all part of the same question.
While it's true that many of the early practitioners of what we now call science were religious men (there was a time when the Jesuit Order was the equivalent of CERN, NASA, or IBM) organized religion is not the precursor to modern science, philosophy is.
Unlike religion, and more like science, philosophy requires as a rule some means of supporting your theory beyond--now this isn't to say "excluding"--just shouting loudest from the highest mountain top.
__________________
“Where the longleaf pines are whispering
to him who loved them so.
Where the faint murmurs now dwindling
echo o’er tide and shore."
-A Grave Epitaph in Santa Rosa County, Florida; I wish I could remember the man's name.
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I don't know a lot about philosophy in general.
Who was the first person to use or create philosophy?
Why did this person create philosophy?
I think that philosophy came from religion in the same way and for the same reasons that science did much later, but I don't really know that for sure.
yes but how many trivial examples of human inquiry can also be described as 'trying to understand the world around us,' alongside the more lofty cosmic examples?
the more mundane details of science are no less scientific. but they're much harder to picture as part of a religious doctrine. i think that's because they're less awe inspiring, which has always been priority number 1 for religious narratives.
in addition to the myths religions used to try to explain the world around us, they also served people in other ways that science does not. they served as a source of symbolic inspiration, of moral authority, of cultural unity, etc.
should we classify non-religious sources of symbolism, morality, or cultural unity as religion simply because they share one of its traditional functions? i think these overlapping areas of interest merely indicate how ambitious these religions have traditionally been.
Science answers the question "how," religion answers the question "why."
To elaborate: When creating a scientific model for a natural phenomena the purpose of that model is to explain how the phenomena will manifest itself in regards to certain conditions. Not to explain why the phenomena exists.
In my mind a religion has to answer the question why. Why said phenomena exists when you break it down to its most elementary level.
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Jun 6th, 2012 07:04 PM
