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Comment by sixQuarks | Hacker News Reader

Are you saying you're religious, yet love science? I'd like to have a discussion with you.

maybe you're just being nice, but this comes across as "how can you be a religious scientist?". and if that's how it was intended, well, many people are both religious and scientific. religion is a social thing - a community with common moral ideas. it can be very useful / rewarding and it certianly doesn't have to mean anti-scientific beliefs.

> it certianly doesn't have to mean anti-scientific beliefs.

Disagree. Name one religion that doesn't have anti-scientific beliefs. The whole concept of religions is based on believing without asking any questions, which is totally opposite from what science is.

This is too broad an assessment. People who claim to be "Christian" for example have varying degrees of interpretation. There's young earth creationist fundamentalists->people quite a bit less crazy.

Sure, faith is central to religion as a whole. But the author of the parent post says it's possible for a religious person to also not hold anti-scientific beliefs. Like Christians who believe in evolution and who are generally pro-scientific.

That is the stupidest goddamn description of religion I've ever heard. "[B]elieving without asking any questions" is literally the exact opposite of the concept of faith, which in every religion I know of requires believers to confront their own beliefs with frequent doubt. Faith is meant to put you in a frequent state of crisis in which you reexamine what you think you believe, in order to find something truer and more real.

Some of the brightest scientists I know are Christian, and absolutely they use the same methodology to investigate their faith as they do to investigate their work. It took me a little while to realize that, as an atheist, every criticism of their religion I'd come up with to bother them was a criticism they'd been grappling with for about twice as long. There are fanatics and idiots, sure, but assuming those idiots are at the center of every major religion is giving far too much credits to loudmouthed assholes and their blather.

you're taking religion to be this very clearly defined thing. for most religious people it's not like that. they don't sign up to an exact set of rules; they live within a society that shares certain ideas and they make their own personal choices and compromises.

so it's impossible to name "a religion" because every person's religion is slightly different. but if you are looking for examples of religions where people are particularly non-prescriptive then the quakers and the unitarians are pretty cool. see, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarian_Universalism - a "free and responsible search for truth and meaning" sounds pretty compatible with science to me....

[disclaimer: i'm an atheist (and have a PhD in SCIENCE). but i can see the advantages of community and even, at one particularly hard point in my life, talked to a bunch (what's the collective noun? vibrational mode?) of quakers to see if they would accept me. and frankly they would accept anyone (you gotta love em ;o), but it just didn't feel right...]

Most religious people believe that stories from thousands of years ago are basically reliable accounts of what happened. Atheists believe they are not.

Both sides have evidence for their beliefs, it depends on which evidence you find most compelling.

Science shouldn't be thought of as a noun that you believe in, but as a verb that you do. You don't need to hold a certain belief to be able practice "science" you only need to be able to conduct a repeatable experiment.

A person could believe with all his heart that he is 10,000 year old alien, and still be able to form a testable hypothesis and design and conduct a repeatable experiment. You don't have to be a strict empiricist to realize that empiricism is directly useful in day to day life.

A theist can use the scientific process even if it means working with models he doesn't believe are wholly correct. Just like you can use Newtonian physics even if you realize it isn't a correct explanation of how things really work--because it is a useful model.

The vast majority of C19 science was created by Christians. Much of what they achieved had already been achieved by Muslim scientists a century earlier. Science does not preclude religion. Religion does not preclude science. Although there have been times and places where questioning the religious hegemony has been a bad idea, that's got nothing to do with religion per se.

Not sure if this leads to trolling, but yes, extremely, on both accounts. I'm both a Christian (even something of a creationist) and manage to love science. I admit it's not a common combination (hence my post), but it does exist. :)

I'm curious. What does "something of a creationist" entail? Is this a Deist sort of creationism, or are you closer to biblical literalism?

It means I believe at the very least, a creator was responsible for initial life. I also believe that evolution is either a guided process or that the existing evidence can also point to creation. Do not believe in young earth. Do not believe the creator started it and has not intervened since.

Curious! I can't say I agree with that – at least, not the way you just phrased it; could just be linguistic ambiguity – but it's interesting nonetheless. I have to say, that's a mindset I don't usually expect on Hacker News; now I'm wondering just how diverse the beliefset of this community is.

My personal belief is that the earth was created as if it were much older than it actually is, although their really wouldn't be much of a difference to us.

For example, if God created the first tree, just snapped his fingers and poof, there it is full sized. Would that tree have tree rings? I think it would.

What would be the point of creating something and then faking its age? Is it a test, for us to ignore empirical evidence and determine that God made it anyway? Or are you suggesting that, perhaps, the world began with us humans, and that the universe pre-humanity was manufactured to seem like it gave rise to is (but it couldn't have, because it started with us)?

I'm interested in where such a belief comes from.

I don't think that is was manufactured to trick us, but that for whatever reason the simulation needed a past. Imagine the world is a recursive algorithm and it start running at n = 1, you need to define n = 0 for it to make any sense.

Tree rings are needed to support the tree and would occur once the simulation started running anyway, so God could either create two classes of tree, or use the more elegant solution (to my mind) of having that tree appear the same as if it had grown.

My reason for believing this is that I think it's a more elegant solution (that is just based on my personal perception of elegance) and that God decided the world should be in a certain state before humans arrived, so either he could run the simulation for billions of years, or he could just fast forward as if it had ran for billions of years. Either one works, but since there were no people around to experience time why bother with actually running it (or the opposite argument, why not actually run it).

Another reason why I think the simulation was needed in the first place, because it moves the limits of our knowledge further away, and gives us more room to explore.

Imagine if God decided humans needed an energy source, so he put a magic black liquid under the ground with no explanation. We'd find it, and that would pretty much be the end of it--we could go no further. However, if he instead ran set up a simulation and ran it(or skipped ahead) to create oil, we can try to figure out where oil came from.

Basically we have a whole rich and complex simulated past to explore before we hit the brick wall of--God did it.

I'm Catholic and I think this is much more common than you think.

I asked because I'm fascinated about this subject. I'm an atheist, but I try to keep an open mind about everything, so I'm always looking to hear alternative viewpoints from other intelligent people.

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