Comment by judah | Hacker News Reader

Comment by judah | Hacker News Reader

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Religion speaks of something beyond measure, and this is a reason some perceive religion as unscientific.

Atheism too speaks of something that can't be measured: the certain non-existence of the thing every human culture has sensed, longed for, believed in some form or another since the beginning of humanity.

Science itself is full of things that can't be measured. The Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter are examples of this: we theorize about why earth -- despite 100 billion-billion other planets like it -- appears to contain the only life in the universe. The theories include those of super-intelligent life beyond our measure, which really isn't that far intellectually from the idea of God.

The article does not claim Christians are better scientists than atheists. Rather, it corrects the idea that these thinkers' religion was an incidental primitive flaw in an otherwise great mind, when in fact, these men's insights into and pioneering in their scientific fields were driven by philosophical commitments to the divine origin of the universe.

There is a lot of common ground between religion and science, both attempt to explain and both originate from man. Religion goes one step further than science and sees itself as an end-run around all requirements for evidence by being 'self evident' and 'self proving'. Science sees limits to its power and that alone makes me more comfortable with science.

To see Maxwell and contemporaries trotted out to try to prove some point in the present about these men's dedication without letting them speak for themselves (they can't, they're safely dead) is to me just as much a heresy as claiming that Johann S. Bach would have composed all his works if he had been an atheist, rather than that he took a lot of inspiration (if not most of it) from his deeply religious nature.

It's really not fair to put words in the mouths of men long dead and gone, we can not know of their motivations if they had lived in the present because they didn't so all we can do is see that work within context. So I suggest that we just be grateful for the work they did, whatever their motivations were.

Keep in mind that priest-natural philosopher was a pre-cursor to our current day scientist and recognize that evolution of thinking is pretty much a given taking into account the march of scientific progress (if we can call it progress, I wished that that was more clear cut but it unfortunately isn't always, perhaps in a few thousand years or so we can answer that one with clarity).

So, being religious isn't a primitive flaw in anybodies mind, great or not. But it can be detrimental, especially when it counteracts the truth with great (but ultimately misplaced) authority.

It's really not fair to put words in the mouths of men long dead and gone, we can not know of their motivations if they had lived in the present because they didn't so all we can do is see that work within context.

In your worldview, it is quite fair to do that. One of modern science's favorite, yet unhealthy, past-times is to attempt to describe the inner workings of men (and other events) which are "long dead and gone." So no, you don't get to casually discard it here, because science has repeatedly demonstrated it is highly interested in using empiricism to form presently observable models and also use those present models to conjecture about the past -- regardless of whether those present empirical models can be rationally extrapolated in that direction.

Hopefully this brings you to a greater understanding why the portion of science which addresses the past is really a "religion" in it's own right, relying on plenty of faith to give any sort of credence to its claims about a truly unknowable past.

Would you mind elaborating on this with specific examples?

> Atheism too speaks of something that can't be measured: the certain non-existence of the thing every human culture has sensed, longed for, believed in some form or another since the beginning of humanity.

Not at all. It simply states that our desire for something isn't sufficient evidence for its existence.

For example: I really want ice cream. Therefore I have ice cream. If you assert that I do not have ice cream you're clearly wrong because I really want ice cream.

> The theories include those of super-intelligent life beyond our measure, which really isn't that far intellectually from the idea of God.

Morally and ontologically it is. Or we can just call the tallest building in the city God.

> these men's insights into and pioneering in their scientific fields were driven by philosophical commitments to the divine origin of the universe

They were. And Soviet scientists were driven by a commitment to the revolution.

The constant in religion and philosophy and science and commerce and art is human beings and their psychology.

Religion now speaks of something beyond measure. It used to be much more specific. This changed once people had the tools to investigate and discovered that none of the specificity was actually correct.

I can't speak for all religions, but the Judeo-Christian tradition has always believed God is beyond measure.

Some examples are from the Jewish/Christian Bible[0]:

"Who has measured the Spirit of the Lord? Who has been his counselor, instructing him? Whom did he consult, to gain understanding?"

And again[1]:

"O the depth of the riches, and the wisdom and knowledge of God! How inscrutable are his judgments! How unsearchable are his ways! Who has known the mind of the Lord? Who has been his counselor?"

Jews and Christians have always believed that God is beyond measure. As we see it, God is outside of the natural world, beyond human comprehension or measure by science.

[0]: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah+40&versi...

[1]: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+11&versi...

However, both the Hebrew scriptures of the Old Testament and the Greek scriptures have always asserted that God is active in history and actively intervened to change the course of history for his chosen people. My process of discovering that the specific parts of the Bible are not verifiable, while the verifiable parts of the Bible are not specific, involved learning all the original languages of the Bible, reading through the Bible in its entirety in those original languages, and meanwhile learning about the verifiable history of the times and places described in the Bible. Simply put, whoever wrote the Bible was not infallible, but sadly very fallible indeed. And that shows that the Bible is not God's word revealed to us, as I was taught in my youth, but rather a collection of human stories and speculation about God, which anyone has the right to disagree with, as the overall description of God and his attributes is not even consistent among the various Biblical writings.

There's a whole lot more to the Judeo-Christian tradition than the part where God is beyond measure. Said tradition also has a lot of specific elements in it. Those specific elements are now being abandoned, because as it becomes possible to examine them, they're found to be untrue.

So yes, religion has always spoken of things beyond measure, but it used to speak of a lot more than just that.

It's frequently said that there is no conflict between religion and science. The only reason this appears to be true is because when they do conflict, religion has no choice but to retreat. Histories become metaphors. Prophesies get reinterpreted. Specific claims become ever more vague when they fail to stand up to the test.

That stance has only become mainstream since the enlightenment. Before then, people thought God was clearly active in everyday life. After all, who else could visit droughts on lands that didn't worship him enough? Or send plagues to towns of the unfaithful? Or destroy false churches and temples with earthquakes and lightning? As late as the 1700's, people were advised to stay away from churches during thunderstorms so as to avoid divine retribution.

This isn't just historical fact. The Bible itself contains multiple instances of people successfully testing Yahweh's existence. In fact, one of the earliest documentations of a scientific experiment is the story of Elijah and the priests of Baal.[1] In it, Elijah and the priests both try to set fire to piles of wood by praying to their gods. Elijah makes it more challenging for himself by having his pile soaked with water. The 450 priests of Baal are unable to summon fire for their dry pile, but Yahweh lights Elijah's water-soaked pile. This being the old testament, Elijah has all the priests of Baal killed afterwards.

Why the change in views today? It's not that complicated. Religions have been forced to change in response to challenges from science. The reason people say God is unmeasurable today is because we tried to measure him and found nothing.

1. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+kings+18%3A21...

So discovering the laws of motion, universal gravitation, etc means we understand fully the ways of God? As if the scripture text you quoted meant that such knowledge was hidden from us. Well, what is hidden from science (but explained in the Bible by a God who's hiding every piece of information) is our purpose here, why we grow old and die, how our universe came into existence, how life began, and how to gain salvation. Don't get me wrong, how crops grow in the field is a fascinating question to answer but materially less important.

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