Can Religion Overturn Science?

Of course there are! Many and many! Or, are you behind on your astronomy news? Don’t you know that the Bible proves the heliocentric model wrong and that the Sun orbits Earth?

http://www.geocentricity.com/

Big Science has just been systematically silencing these religious proofs for fear of embarrassment. 😛

Since science is a self correcting system of obtaining knowledge about nature, can the present understanding through science ever be ‘wrong?’

Kinda eerie that this question would be asked on the anniversary of the day Galileo was sentenced for believing the Earth wasn’t the centre of the universe. Of course he turned out to be wrong as well, since he thought the Sun was the centre of the universe, but he was right about the Earth moving at least.

Well, certain theists will point out:

big bang
evolution
germ theory
psychology
age of the earth
age of the universe

Of course, I still can’t think of any valid ones.

To my mind, the following conditions would have to be met before you could safely say that ‘religion proved science wrong’:

The ‘science’ in question would need to be a conclusion arrived at with the modern scientific method, not by some early ‘scientists’ who didn’t conduct experiments or rely on empirical evidence.

The specific scientific theory in question would need to be overturned by science and found to be in accordance with long-standing religious belief. For example, let’s say we find out tomorrow that the Universe is, in fact, six thousand years old; how else do we know that our previous estimates were wrong and that religion was right all along unless science itself has demonstrated it? Religion contains no mechanism by which to determine the validity of a hypothesis; that job would still rest with the scientific method, unless we’re assuming that religion has undergone some sort of drastic metamorphis.

The religious belief in question would have to have existed from the religion’s early days, not something that was ‘added in’ later.

Anyone else want to criticise/add to this list?

Good point, but it can never be “right” in any absolute sense either.

Experiment is never wrong. It always goes exactly according to reality. However, sometimes reality includes faulty parts which fail in a realistic way, people who forget, misstep and/or mislead in exactly the way people are likely to do and so forth,.

The whole idea of science is to study reality and distill an understanding from that study, but for a variety of reasons, the wrong conclusions can be made. At least reality is always there for a second check.

There was some talk in the 60s I think that physics “proved” the universe was subject to collapse and reexpansion every some odd billion years. Some version of (I think) Hinduism or Buddism made the same claim. So, it was argued that that religion had been right all along.
If anyone else has heard of this, I’d be interested in hearing more. I’ve forgotten the details.

bc,

Experiment is never wrong. It always goes exactly according to reality. However, sometimes reality includes faulty parts which fail in a realistic way, people who forget, misstep and/or mislead in exactly the way people are likely to do and so forth,.

We do not seem to be in disagreement. If I’m understanding your meaning, I would prefer to say “An experiment is never a failure,” and then continue with the rest of your statement. My only point in my previous comment is that the terms “right” or “wrong” are thrown about so casually that in the minds of the general public they have picked up connotations of absoluteness which science tries to avoid. Add to that the moral definitions of “right and wrong” and we get muddled misconceptions.

Just as when we try to eliminate confusing variables in an experiment, we should also try to eliminate the confusing variables of ambiguous terminology when we educate the public about science. We really need to help society understand how science works, not just what it tells us, and at least in the U.S. we are failing badly.

…lots of religious people have commented on how [the Big Bang] seems to confirm the Christian creation story…
…hope springs eternal among the religious, and many will still talk about the Big Bang as a fantastic confirmation of dogma.

I think that if reliable astronomical observations showed that the universe is a ball of giant goat shit that religionists would somehow find a way to say it fits their creation dogma.

I can imagine two possible routes for a theist response.

One would be to point out that science has disproved specific claims from specific religious dogmas. That might mean that one or another specific religious story is unrealistic, but does not prove the basic premise of theism: simply that a deity exists. A broad sort of theism, unrestricted by a particular religious text or ideology, could be defended against any particular scientific facts.

The second would be to reject the premise of the attack. Who cares what has been proved or disproved? Religious belief is not about logic or facts. In fact, it’s sometimes argued that proof lessens faith, because it makes it less challenging and less of a spiritual commitment.

A supernatural, all-powerful god could create any evidence, supposedly proving any claim, and it’s impossible to prove or disprove the existence of an entity definitionally outside of the realm in which we can make direct observations. If you don’t believe in a god, it’s not because you have concrete proof that no god exists — it’s because of some sort of Occam’s-razor-type approach you’re applying. The question of what’s been proved wrong really highlights the different mindsets at play in the debate.

Eliza,

Thanks for that link. That sounds like what I’ve heard. So, it was both religions. No wonder I was a little confused.

I’m not a believer of any kind, but if I was, I think the best defence I could find would be this one :

None of the factual statements refuted by science are central to religion. For instance, the core of Christian faith is comprised of unprovable statements: God exists, God is the cause that the universe exists, God loves you, do the right things and you’ll go to heaven… All the pseudo-factual stuff, the refutable one (the 6 days of creation etc.) is metaphores, morality lessons disguised as ancient history, poetry, or just remnants from a primitive worldview.

Drew is right. Religion can’t *prove* anything by definition because its whole point is that it is based on faith. Would religion prove anything, it would need science to do so.

“What did theologians discover first that scientists had to rediscover by correcting earlier misconceptions that they had had?”

I am not sure this resolves the issue. The object is not the issue here, it is the process of substantiating the claim that is. Although I have to admit I am not sure what this is other than a new theory to explain a discovery that already happened. It’s not like saying “Hey I found my keys!” only to lose them and then say “Hey I found my keys, but they no longer start my car :-(” That would be wierd for sure, but a different “thing” than what the challenge raises to which this post references.

So let me do my service to atheist arguments by assisting you to tighten this up and get rid of the argument which Hemant’s post addresses, as it is an absurd claim as I have stated. Don’t try to re-phrase it, just dump it.

Issue is this: If God is real, then what theory other than religious experience can substantiate that claim? Science has offered other such theories, religion really cannot (even if it tries). When religious people try to do so they often do and look foolish and stupid because they are trying to stay within scientific discourse. It’s as failed a mission as the current Iraq conflict because it does not have the proper equipment to manage the conflict religion has with scientific evidence just as this Iraq conflict never had the proper equipment to deal with sectarian chaos and the powerful force and interpretation of Shar’ia Law in the region when left to explode.

So the end-game with this is that scientific explanation is at least more rational since it allows for multiple theories of why God most likely does not exist from multiple disciplines. Religion has to stay home by resting its laurels on previous claims of experience and present re-articulations of similar experiences.

So try this line of argument with religious folk instead and thank me later 😉

How could religion ever prove Science wrong? If something from religion is found to be correct while the corresponding claim held by the scientific community is shown to be wrong, the finding would be a scientific finding – and/or a historical finding. It would instantly become a part of our rational worldview, as Sam Harris might phrase it.

Has religion ever accomplished this? Well, I’m not a scripture scholar but I would imagine that the scriptures of all world religions are replete with scientifically accurate statements. But since the religions we talk about are so old, these accurate statements are probably always considered by us to be very mundane – so obvious that we just wiz right by them. Perhaps some of these accurate statements might have been new and interesting when they were first written in the scriptures. But I would imagine that most of them were mundane to the original writers (e.g., describing that things fall down, that the sun rises and sets).

A relatively recent non-mundane example of a religious community advancing human understanding and wellbeing is the Westernization of Eastern meditation. Over the past few decades mindfulness meditation, which has its roots in Eastern mystic and philosophical schools of thought like Buddhism, has received a rich body of scientific support for its efficacy in aiding in managing depression and anxiety, improving one’s focus, relaxing people, and so forth. Buddhism, however, is often practiced not as a religion but as a school of thought and philosophy. The religious beliefs (i.e., beliefs without evidence) such as literal belief in reincarnation and karma are not subscribed to by all Buddhists.

One example of religionists proving science wrong involves the Newton equations of motion. During the much of the 18th and 19th centuries these formulations of Newton were believed to describe everything about the motion of matter and were given the title of “laws”. They implied an inexorable destiny determined by the exactly predictable position and velocity of every irreducible bit of matter at any instant of absolute time in absolute space. This presumed certainty of prediction left no place for God except as the winder of the clockwork universe or a breaker of God’s own law.

The great mathematian Laplace expressed the idea that a being of sufficient mental capacity could know the position and velocity of all matter at one time and therefore could predict exact physical conditions at any future time. The exsistance of a mentally endowed being is not necessary for this argument. According to Newton’s theory, all bits of matter have a position and velocity at a moment in time whether these parameters are known by a mind or not. The equations then predict any future position and velocity, exactly. This implies choice is irrelevant since the state of all matter is predetermined by the state in the past. Religionists, however, refuted the validity of these equations because they denied the possibility of free will.

Physical theory now holds that there is not absolute time and space, and furthermore the exact position and velocity cannot be known. Free will is then possible and the religionists were proved correct and the science proved wrong.

There is no historic trend away from religion at all. It is a fabrication.
Such pronouncements are totally assumed to be true perhaps because folks like Harris give their books titles like The End of Faith. Sells books, but there is no data to support it – at all.

There is a huge amount of “data” but its validity is questionable. In books, articles, reports, studies and surveys, predictions about the future of religion and secularism are all over the map.

One bit of “data” I have noticed is that there seems to be a strong positive correlation between what the authors’ roots, background, religious affiliation or sponsoring organization suggest is their bias, and the predictions they make. Generally they predict whatever they hope will happen. So religiously sponsored/authored analyses usually predict the growth of religion while non- or anti-religiously sponsored/authored analyses usually predict its decline. It is frustrating that the bias effect is so strong that a simple glance at the authors’ background or sponsor immediately makes both the “data” and the conclusions suspect.

Not just the analysts’ bias, but sampling problems and ambiguity of terms plague even the most rigorously designed surveys. For instance the assumption that affiliation implies adherence is a sadly common flaw. People are classified by surveyors and even by themselves as “affiliated” with a religion merely by their membership in their family or their community. Even when a survey includes follow-up questions which attempt to measure the individual’s personal commitment, there are problems with reliability due to the ambiguity of terms in those questions.

In predictions about such things the larger the area described and the longer the time period of the prediction, the less likely it is to turn out to be accurate. Saying something about the near future of a small region is more likely to be proven accurate by the passage of time but where the whole world is going over the next five to ten generations is literally anybody’s guess.

Blah blah blah. Numbers. Statistically significant data is all that matters here. I could care less about the speculative assertions of a few unless of course those assertions have a basis in statistically significant data. If something’s validity in this regard is questionable, then make it more rigorous and statistically significant or toss it out. The statistics of religious patterns of behavior suggest strongly that it is in no danger of ending anytime soon but that it continually finds energy in enough people to sustain itself and be maintained by often very flexible systems overall.

“One bit of “data” I have noticed is that there seems to be a strong positive correlation between what the authors’ roots, background, religious affiliation or sponsoring organization suggest is their bias, and the predictions they make.”

So is this true of journals such as The Scientific Study of Religion, The American Journal of Sociology, The National Study of Religion and Youth, Pew Research, Social Forces, etc.? You are offering a Red Herring rather than significant data. Don’t throw the sociology of religion under a bus because it doing so makes a flawed assertion work or appear to work.

“For instance the assumption that affiliation implies adherence is a sadly common flaw.”

Where? I have read over a dozen studies on attendance which has been validated externally as a significant measure of adherance. Check studies by Roozen, Chaves, Hoge, Hout, etc. Here’s a reference: Hout, M., & Greeley, A. M. (1987). The center doesn’t hold: Church attendance in the united states, 1940-1984. American Sociological Review, 52(June), 325-345. This was later supported in: Hout, M., Greeley, A., & Wilde, M. (2001). The demographic imperative in religious change in the united states. American Journal of Sociology, 107(2), 468-500. See for yourself. Religious involvement is quite steady in the US and this is not an assertion, it has viable statistically significant results to substantiate it.

Richard said,

…the assumption that affiliation implies adherence is a sadly common flaw.

I agree, at times affiliation may indicate nothing more than funeral perferences and say nothing about what the adhere to in the everyday. Flaws in data collection can also arise from only giving people one option in surveys. In Japan for instance it is perfectly acceptable for people to claim affiliation to both Shinto and Buddhism simultaneously. And there are plenty of people here in the west who practice split level religion too, affiliating with Christianity for rites of passage stuff while affiliating with spiritualism for crisis stuff like seeking spiritual guidance, protection and empowerment.

There is also the thing that what is true locally may not be true globally. Christianity seems very much on the wane in the west, particularly Europe, England and Australia. But not so globally, it is booming in the southern hemisphere overall. And even in the west the situation is patchy. So every peice of data needs a context. What is true in one context may not be true for another. Unfortunately journalists rarely pay attention to such things.

I think religion poses some challenges here for science in terms of how social scientists actually measure it.

The most famous example was the biblical claim that the universe and time itself came into existence at the hand of God. Until less than 100 years ago, science assumed the Bible was wrong and that the universe was eternal. Now science has proved that the universe (and even time) came into existence 13.7 billion years ago. In 1985, Carl Sagan proposed that science could distinguish between two competing religious claims (Bible vs. Hindu scriptures) regarding the nature of the universe. He was right, but the answer probably wasn’t what he expected, since the reincarnating universe model lost:

General Introduction for Non-Believers, Part 3: Why Christianity?

Now science has proved that the universe (and even time) came into existence 13.7 billion years ago.

Rich, with respect I think the phrase “science has proved that…” should be avoided like the phrase, “never go out of style,” or the phrase “the ultimate in…” It doesn’t reflect the spirit of science, which is to keep looking for better explanations than the ones that some folks have claimed are “proven.” There are plenty of “proven” ideas that are now in the dumpster. Scientists usually shy away from saying “proven” because they know that other scientists may get the chance to laugh at them.

I think a better way to express what you are saying would be to say that the universe as we see it now, or space-time as we see it now apparently began expanding from a super dense, super hot point way back then.

I don’t want to sound too spacey, but that does not necessarily rule out some other kind of space-time that contained that event. There may come a time when we will have to give some space for this possibility and to expand our concepts of space and time. They might be called “overtime” or “time-and-a-half,” or “double time.” Rather than just the conventional “outer space” and “inner space” we might also have to work with concepts such as “extra space,” or “crawl space,” or “rented space,” or dare I say it, “parking space.” but getting one of those could take quite some time. Since space seems to be extremely compressible it may not be actually taking up that much space, which is good, since I’m often running out of space and always running out of time. If I run out of space, where have I run to? We all know that time can fly when your’e having a good time or time can drag when you’re not, and depending on who is enjoying the show and who is not, those good times and bad times can be happening in the same space at the same time. You know, time after time I tell myself that I’m so lucky to have the time I do, cause how you gonna make some time if all you got is one thin dime and that won’t even shine your shoes? I have often found that I have time on my hands but I have never found that I have time on my feet, or any other part of my body for that matter. I don’t really understand them, but some cosmologists are spending a lot of time talking about being able to study the “time before time.” They could be spaced out, but I suppose whether or not they are wasting their time, only time will tell.

Well, I don’t want to take up any more space. Thank you for your time.

So every peice of data needs a context. What is true in one context may not be true for another. Unfortunately journalists rarely pay attention to such things.

Your opinion. Many fine journalists pay strict attention to such things.

“Ladies and Gentleman, give it up for Richard Wade, he’ll be here all week!”