What scientific discoveries greatly weakened religion and the case of God ?
What scientific discoveries greatly weakened religion and the case of God ?
What scientific discoveries greatly weakened religion and the case of God ?
I'll quote Tim Minchin here
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"If you wanna watch telly, you should watch Scooby Doo That show was so cool Because every time there was a church with a ghoul Or a ghost in a school They looked beneath the mask and what was inside? The fucking janitor or the dude who ran the waterslide Because throughout history Every mystery Ever solved has turned out to be Not magic"
Like one of my faves of his
Do you know what they call alternative medicine that’s been proved to work? Medicine.
Germ Theory
Diseases used to be associated with paranormal powers or the wrath of gods in most cultures. The discovery of microorganisms and advancement of medicine may be our civilization's greatest achievement.
Science deals with the natural, gods are by definition supernatural.
Science can not either prove or disprove existence of supernatural. It may only erode the reasoning why supernatural should exist.
That reasoning is subjective, and as such, there are no definite answers to your question unless we add additional constraints.
Didn't some quantum nondeterminism prove the existence of effects without a natural cause? (being divil's advocate a bit here for the craic)
No
Slapping "quantum" in front of something does not make it magic.
Whatever we observe empirically is "natural" by definition. Causality is an assumption, not a law of nature.
The traditional notion of cause and effect is not something all philosophers even agree upon, I mean many materialist philosophers largely rejected the notion of simple cause-and-effect chains that go back to the "first cause" since the 1800s, and that idea is still pretty popular in some eastern countries.
For example, in China they teach "dialectical materialist" philosophy part of required "common core" in universities for any degree, and that philosophical school sees cause and effect as in a sense dependent upon point of view, that an effect being described as a particular cause is just a way of looking at things, and the same relationship under a different point of view may in fact reverse what is considered the cause and the effect, viewing the effect as the cause and vice-versa. Other points of view may even ascribe entirely different things as the cause.
It has a very holistic view of the material world so there really is no single cause to any effect, so what you choose to identify as the cause is more of a label placed by an individual based on causes that are relevant to them and not necessarily because those are truly the only causes. In a more holistic view of nature, Laplacian-style determinism doesn't even make sense because it implies nature is reducible down to separable causes which can all be isolated from the rest and their properties can then be fully accounted for, allowing one to predict the future with certainty.
However, in a more holistic view of nature, it makes no sense to speak of the universe being reducible to separable causes as, again, what we label as causes are human constructs and the universe is not actually separable. In fact, the physicists Dmitry Blokhintsev had written a paper in response to a paper Albert Einstein wrote criticizing Einstein's distaste for quantum mechanics as based on his adherence to the notion of separability which stems from Newtonian and Kantian philosophy, something which dialectical materialists, which Blokhintsev self-identified as, had rejected on philosophical grounds.
He wrote this paper many many years prior to the publication of Bell's theorem which showed that giving up on separability (and by extension absolute determinism) really is a necessity in quantum mechanics. Blokhintsev would then go on to write a whole book called The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics where in it he argues that separability in nature is an illusion and under a more holistic picture absolute determinism makes no sense, again, purely from materialistic grounds.
The point I'm making is ultimately just that a lot of the properties people try to ascribe to "materialists" or "naturalists" which then later try to show quantum mechanics is in contradiction with, they seem to forget that these are large umbrella philosophies with many different sects and there have been materialist philosophers criticizing absolute determinism as even being a meaningful concept since at least the 1800s.
Evolutionary biology was the main one
Which is a bit silly to me, in that any religious person could simply explain evolution away as the mechanism by which a god or gods created humanity (to iterate on form until creating their supposed "perfect image").
God being a human who was also his own father is fine, but the suggestion that evolution could be part of god's plan is where we draw the line?
They had to reject it because any religion with a creation myth specifically says how the god created people. To accept an alternative story would reject the notion of the book as truth.
The religious are not looking for answers, they already have all the answers by definition of their holy book or whatever. They're looking for confirmation bias and reject anything that goes against that.
any religious person could simply explain evolution away as the mechanism by which a god or gods created humanity
Many did, and this position is called Deism. In most versions, god(s) started the universe with initial conditions that would lead to the formation of intelligent life, and then withdrew.
Could be, but evolution makes God redundant, and then it is the whole simplest explanation thing that kicks in, right?
If you squint real hard, the first creation myth in Genisis is pretty close to evolution.
Religion is deliberately non-falsifiable. No matter what scientific proof you can come up with, at the end of the day they just say God is fucking with us burying skeletons of creatures that never existed and such.
The fact that it needs to be constructed that way is frankly all the proof I need to toss religion in the garbage, but everyone isn't so cavalier about the disposition of their "immortal soul."
Honestly immortality and the very nature of God are both abhorrent to me. If religion were true, the best I could hope for is to be cast into a lake of fire and be destroyed, so I kinda win either way. Worst case is all religion is wrong but so is atheism and I have to spend eternity with an entity who is less of a malicious cunt than the Abrahamic god.
Religion is deliberately non-falsifiable.
I think it would be more accurate to say that the non-falsifiablity of religion has evolved as a result of a sort of natural selection. Essentially all the falsifiable religious beliefs have been falsified, and thus have trouble propagating.
Hah! Fair enough.
Heliocentric model.
Cosmic distance and time. Light speed as a limit.
The geological age of the Earth.
Dinosaurs.
Evolutionary theory.
Continental drift.
The periodic table of the elements.
Quantum theory, including wave-particle duality.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
Black holes.
It's interesting, some theists would just say "that's how God built the universe" and be satisfied with that.
The halfway sensible ones would. But the ones that thing religious texts are magic books would burn the former as heretics if they were allowed to do so.
Well sure. There are religious people who want to know how the world works. After all, if there is a creator/God then one of the ways that being communicated with us for certain is the universe we live in.
Thats me over 15 years ago. Now I'm staunch atheist.
You should read the Quran. Or not.
What does the Quran say about black holes?
Letter from Charles Darwin to Asa Gray (22nd May 1860)
With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.— I am bewildered.— I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.
On that note, what's up with the obligate coprophagy of the koala? And their famously smooth brains? I'd make the koala, were it I in the high seat, but a kind and caring creator wouldn't.
Some herbivores can't digest their food all the way, cows get around it by having more than one stomach and also chewing their cud (vomiting up from first stomach and rechewing). Rabbits do the same thing as koalas, partially digest their food and eat their poop.
The scientific method itself considers any as yet unsubstantiated theory as hypothesis. Applying this to the idea of God would leave one agnostic on the issue.
A couple of prominent examples of religious dogmas disproved by scientific discoveries are the Copernican Revolution and evolution by means of natural selection.
God's an unfalsifiable claim, so there really isn't anything that could test that hypothesis.
Pretty much any scientific test/discovery that counters anything in a religious text whose adherents view the text as completely truthful and literal. But sciencey stuff might not have much of an effect on religious folks who view their texts less literally.
But anyways... heliocentrism, germ theory, gravity, evolution through natural selection, probably a huge chunk of the field of archeology, plate tectonics, radiometric dating, probably the written language at various points in human history (but that's not really a discovery), trans species organ transplants, decoding DNA, direct genetic engineering, CRISPR, radio telescopy.
Translative spoken word by the time a second hand account of the word of god becomes the word of the person speaking. Weird god never came back once we had verbatim recording techniques to address these inaccuracies.
But he works in mysterious ways
It wasn't any particular scientific discovery that weakened religion. It was the popularity of science fiction that did it. As Arthur C. Clarke put it, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." People can now imagine how miracles are done without invoking anything supernatural. We might not have the tech to do it yet, but we have a pretty good idea of potential methods. That has placed a lot of "creator god" religions under pressure. Create life? Tech will eventually do it. Create a world? Sure, tech again. Given enough tech, a solar system can be spawned. Water into wine? We're halfway there with Kool-Aid. We already have vimanas (those ancient Hindu flying vehicles). We call them airplanes or helicopters. We can destroy a whole city with a single weapon. So why should we worship a supreme being who supposedly did those things?
Assuming we can conquer poverty, religions that survive will be centered around improving the human condition. Worshipping dieties will eventually fall by the wayside. It will still be a long process. You can't dispel faith with reason and facts. And people in poverty tend to embrace religion because it gives them comfort and hope that things will be better in the afterlife.
Printing presses, industrialized education, and the industrial revolution.
Giving people en mass the time study and educate themselves.
You need to define God first.
We should definitely start with this.
If it's biblical sky daddy that influences our everyday lives, pretty much everything.
If it's just more or less self-conscious entity behind the curtain of reality that sparked the universe, it's pretty much unprovable and so undisprovable.
Sanitation.
Doesn't even take science to debunk religions, yet you can't prove the non existance of a god
Science and religion are often compatible, I know of some Hindu thinkers (for example) who say scientific knowledge is to be taken as truth and religious truth should not contradict it - just that this scientific knowledge cannot explain the whole mysteries of the cosmos. You might be aware of "the god of the gaps" and arguments like that, or that God somehow created the universe using the laws of physics as we understand them. Historically, scientific thought and religious thought were often united and people pursued science and philosophy due to attempting to understand God (like many Islamic scholars in the 7th century or like Renee Descartes who ultimately sought to prove the existence of God by pure reasoning). Science as a complete system of belief without some religious aspect is actually a fairly recent phenomenon that likely had very little to do with any particular scientific discovery.
Indeed, science can do very little to explain why things happen. It's great at explaining how - e.g. science is great at explaining how fire burns or how a calculator can display an answer but it can be iffy on why. Now, "why" fire burns is probably more of a malformed question like what's north of the north pole but we're human, we like to ask why and seek purpose. Meaning makers.
The decline of religiosity wasn't really driven by science showing biblical stories weren't real, it's a process driven by material reality and class relations. Although many people considered themselves Christian or religious in the west, they were very Deist and didn't think God had much influence with the world apart from answering paradoxes like what was the primum movens etc.
Going further back, religion wasn't a choice or something to reason to - it was just your life and your community. In medieval Europe, you didn't really reason your way into a system of beliefs they all tied together into an economic system called the feudal mode of production. You just were a Christian and so was everyone you knew. Maybe some monks debated some esoteric aspects of theology but most people just lived their lives. This lasted for a while through to the Enlightenment and the emergence of capitalism in the 17th century. Except for some malcontents and rebels, people still didn't reason towards being Christian, say. It was just your life - more like a hangover from that older mode of production and social cohesion than something necessary to maintaining capitalism.
Fast forward to the actual decline of religiosity and rise of spiritual none-of-the-aboves and nothing-in-particular. This was a process started in the mid 20th century (not really in WW1 which was conceived often as a holy or religious war by the soldiers and officer class including miracles and appearances of angels and so on). In reaction to the rise of consumerism and individualism - now religion became a choice or affectation! This is where we start to see the irreligious begin their massive growth but especially by the beginning of the 00s. It's tempting to say Quantum Mechanics, GR, a scientific basis for cosmological origins like the big bang are responsible for the loss of religion - but in my view, these just coincided due to a third cause (that of economic changes and the settling in of mature capitalism).
I'm curious as to how people toughed it out despite most christian religious institutions being so uniformly corrupt and plain irritating. Shit, the crowd FSTDT dunks on, american politicians, and internet theology were all it took for me to get so deeply disillusioned I wanted to just cut strike everything from my mind, regardless of who's right or wrong. Merely not having other options to a point where leaving is unthinkable? Fear of reprisal from legal and cultural consequences?
Then again, I suppose at that point they would've just shifted to a different, less institution-focused denomination instead of just saying "fuck the whole thing" like I did. It wasn't a matter of the facts, it was a matter of me being fucking sick of them.
religion is the hubris that is the expectation of an answer to 'why'
The most reliable way to lose faith isn't through science, it's reading their holy text.
In general, nothing about science ever shakes a theist's faith, and I doubt it ever will. Reason being: the moment science breaks new ground, religion retreats further back into the unknown. As long as there is an unknown, theists will have something to take shelter from.
I don't think it's taking shelter as much as trying to find an answer to something that has no answer.
For example Eistein I don't think was trying to take shelter from reality. He wanted to look at reality as deeply as possible and he managed to peek through and see more than almost anyone ever had before.
But he still believed in a God. This is one of those reasons I always call myself an agnostic instead of atheist.
In a practical sense, I'm an atheist. I don't think Jesus turned water into wine or the Buddha achieved enlightenment and entered a higher plane of existence or whatever.
But I acknowledge there might be supernatural or supranatural items / phenomenon/ or even beings that we can't ever fully understand.
Einstein believed in "Spinoza's god", which is essentially just nature and the laws that govern the universe. It's not the same as believing in an anthropomorphic God and putting faith in scripture.
This is one of those reasons I always call myself an agnostic instead of atheist.
Those aren't mutually exclusive terms. "Agnostic" answers whether you know a god exists, and "atheist" answers whether you believe a god exists.
I don't know of any gods, and I don't believe any exist, so I'm an agnostic atheist.
There aren't any. Some things will disprove specific religious ideas, but that's about it.
Depends on what exactly which kind of God.
I don't think it's possible for science to really weaken or strengthen the case for a God in its most simple form (some entity existing outside of the observable universe), but particular tangible claims from religious texts or beliefs can and have been disproven. Others can't be disproven because of the nature of the claim made.
Do we really need a scientific discovery to prove an existence that doesn't exist? I think the proof that's required is proof that God does exist and until that comes about, religion is clearly just a man made construct for the purpose of power and control.
Besides, I've given clear scientific examples to religious people before and they simply stated that it exists that way because god created it that way which is just the dumbest fucking thinking imaginable. You can't help those people.
What weakened religion is a long process going from the middle age to the modern world. It starts with the pope wars. It peaks with the religion wars in the XVIIth century. By this point the religious power was a political power like any other, but merely with a cultural hold on European populations. Which was the nail in the coffin.
During this period, the Church radicalised itself as a defense mode. Which solidified the laïcal mindset of the Lumières. Basically the church entered a cultural war against science because it feared it would lose controle.
Then the XIXth century happened. Monarchies got destroyed. And the Catholic Church got humiliated and destroyed as a political power. Socialism and communism appeared, and to state how progressive they were, they put the church in the same reactionary bag as the royalists.
In the middle of this are the liberals who don't care much about anything but profits. Si when democracy is on the rise, they are democrats. When royalty comes back, they praise the king. At least as long as they let them make good profits. And that's what the church doesn't let them do. Morale goes in the way of profit. It forbid slavery and exploitation. It's against science. It promotes charity. That sucks balls for the liberals. But order is good, so why not being a believer but without the problems?
It's not science that made religion recess. It's bad political decisions and alliances. Many renowned scientists were believers. Many still are. But somehow the religions are rejecting science because it doesn't go into litteraly what their old fantasy book wrote. It's a shame because religions could easily make a humanist evolution if they had the political will to do it.
You do realize you keep using the term, "religion" when you mean to use the term, "Christianity"... Not all religions are like Christianity. smh.
The title mention god with a capital G, which means it's the religions of the Bible, which means European history of things. Context in small details.
Nothing u cant prove a negative.
People should stop saying this.
Yes you absolutely can. Here's an extremely trivial example: 6 is not prime, which I can prove by simply saying 6 = 23. Bam, I've proved a negative.
While proving that 6 is not prime illustrates proving a negative in math, the caution arises in complex, real-world scenarios of non well defined domains. Demonstrating absences beyond math's clarity and definiteness can be challenging if not impossible to say the least.
You mean unfalsifiable claims right?
Your birth.
Molecular genetics.
Psalms 19:1-2
"The heavens are telling of the glory of God; And their expanse is declaring the work of His hands. Day to day pours forth speech, And night to night reveals knowledge."
##Old Testament
#####Exodus 21:20-21 (NIV):
"And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished. Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money."
##New Testament
#####Ephesians 6:5 (NIV):
"Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ"
#####1 Timothy 6:1 (NIV):
"All who are under the yoke of slavery should consider their masters worthy of full respect, so that God’s name and our teaching may not be slandered. Those who have believing masters should not show them disrespect just because they are fellow believers. Instead, they should serve them even better because their masters are dear to them as fellow believers and are devoted to the welfare of their slaves."
Yep. Real scripture, really in the Bible and needs to be understood.
Those scriptures are not really germane to the question though. I understand the scriptures you posted might seem strange.
Remember that the entire nation of Israel were slaves for hundreds of years in Egypt when they were brought out by God, rescued from that slavery, and set free.
1 Corinthians 7:21-23 NIV "Were you a slave when you were called? Don’t let it trouble you—although if you can gain your freedom, do so. For the one who was a slave when called to faith in the Lord is the Lord’s freed person; similarly, the one who was free when called is Christ’s slave. You were bought at a price; do not become slaves of human beings."
Galatians 5:1 "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery."
Then there's Philemon, an entire book of the Bible dedicated to Paul's letter to a slave owner looking for kindness when returning an escaped slave who converted to Christianity.
The Bible can be confusing and even contradictory at times when speaking from this or that person's point of view. We have Sunday schools where we wrestle with questions in an open forum, and I'm sure you'd be welcome as long as you were not antagonistic.