Great Bible verses!

I agree that religion does bring with it a communal spirit and comfort for those who are members of the church or synagogue or mosque. It also has elements that at their extremes are harmful. People who closely follow religious doctrine can engage in dogmatic thinking, can be impervious to that doctrine's refutation, and possess an unyielding belief in their own moral superiority.

The answer for a believer can never be that the text is wrong. So, they engage in these mind-bending exercises of re-interpretation to avoid saying they are being commanded to do something immoral. They say it's not to be taken literally, or it's not our doctrine, or that piece has outlived its usefulness. But the problem is that if it's the word of God it should be timeless.

So people who are devout cannot really admit that some of what is said is unreasonable and immoral. They cannot adapt their views to evolving community standards because they feel stuck with the word of God, an unchanging, inexplicable set of commandments that frequently conflict with what we have learned since that doctrine was set down.

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Originally Posted by Stavros

But you will agree I hope, that love and fellowship also go way back in human history and that what you call 'superstition and the delusional thinking of religion' was the set of beliefs people had about why we are here, what we should do to live a good life, and what will happen when we die, none of which need be dismissed as 'delusional' as they are also parts of science.

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The questions are within the domains of science. But if a scientist works on a theory his entire life and at the end of his life finds out it has been refuted, what would be the honorable thing for him/her to do? They should look at the new evidence and admit that it contradicts what they have been saying and thereby changes their conclusions.

The origin of religious doctrine does not permit a believer to do that. The existence of that doctrine presumes that everything there is to be known about why we are here and how we should go about living a good life is known. A scientist who did that would be dismissed as arrogant and dogmatic. New facts can always come to light, and when they do, wouldn't it be nice to be able to say that you did the best with the information you had but are blessed to learn from experience?

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Originally Posted by broncofan

The questions are within the domains of science. But if a scientist works on a theory his entire life and at the end of his life finds out it has been refuted, what would be the honorable thing for him/her to do? They should look at the new evidence and admit that it contradicts what they have been saying and thereby changes their conclusions.

The origin of religious doctrine does not permit a believer to do that. The existence of that doctrine presumes that everything there is to be known about why we are here and how we should go about living a good life is known. A scientist who did that would be dismissed as arrogant and dogmatic. New facts can always come to light, and when they do, wouldn't it be nice to be able to say that you did the best with the information you had but are blessed to learn from experience?

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Not sure of how you define doctrine. Some of it is just about believing in a certain Biblical state of fact, like Jesus rose from the tomb on the third day. There are people that feel that anyone who does not believe that is doomed. However as I see it, the best interpretation are guidelines of how to live fairly and humanely. Often times a Bible story, is really about illustrating principles, not something to be taken literally for all times. Here's one story as an example: Israel was at war with a certain tribe. "God" instructed a leader, to tel them that when they won the battle, to not leave a living thing, nor take any spoils. Some did not listen, and when the battle was over the Israelites began to quarrel among themselves over the remains. The moral of the story had to do with following authority, and understand that there are deeper reasons, behind things we are told to do. My point is those instructions from God were not meant as rule in every war and battle. There are some people who might read that story and believe that it was meant to be literal, for all times. That is the wrong interpretation. Likewise, others hear that same story,and say. "God was wrong". A person cannot judge what was 'right' for that particular circumstance. Did the Israelites have the capacity to manage prisoners of war, at that specific time? That's just one of many unknowns about the particular environment of the story. We have the choice to understand, what ever the particular lesson is. If someone discover a book about a human society, that was lost 2,000 years ago, and just discovered today, it would help us understand more about the issues we currently face. The same is true, for the Bible. There invaluable lessons that humanity still hasn't learned.

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If someone discover a book about a human society, that was lost 2,000 years ago, and just discovered today, it would help us understand more about the issues we currently face. The same is true, for the Bible. There invaluable lessons that humanity still hasn't learned.

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Any lesson maintaining that we obey authority to the letter of the law, even if we don't understand it's "deeper" reasons, or even if the authority is very likely a fiction is not an invaluable lesson, but rather is a lesson that devalues human intellectual engagement.

What we can learn from such a book is how people lived, what they thought, the stories they took to heart, the paths they took, We learn about and modify ourselves when we examine how we relate to those histories. But giving any interpretation of any ancient text authority over our moral beliefs and behavior is beyond the pale.

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Originally Posted by trish

Agreed. Many religions endeavor to instruct us on our purpose within the cosmic scheme of things, and on how to lead a good and rewarding life. But this doesn’t mean their recommendations are always advisable nor does it mean their recommendations are not based on superstition and delusion. Moreover, some of those recommendations are violent and based on hatred and ignorance.

Yes. It is in fact right to separate science from religion. This doesn’t mean scientist can look upon the world with wonder, or be motivated in her work by the elation that accompanies such work. Nor does it mean a scientist cannot to the thrill of discovery and the awesome aspect of the cosmos to motivate his students.

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I think the problem with critics of religion, and they exist within and without them, is the belief that we are dealing not just with 'systems' but 'closed systems' whereas religions as I understand them by origin are not really systems at all, and only survive if they are adapted over time.

If you take the Greek myths, the oral poems The Iliad and the Odyssey and the plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides in particular, you have an expression of belief that is both scientific and artistic: for example in Antigone there is a contrast between obedience to public law and fidelity to personal belief, with burial rituals the key point of competition -Antigone believes a decent burial is superior to obedience to the law -a theme which in its variants can be found across history where religion clashes with politics creating martyrs, prisoners or conscience and so on. In Antigone's case there is also the health/science of what to do with dead bodies, burial in some cases, cremation in others (mostly Asian I think although I did once see an Amazonian tribe in a documentary cremating their dead).

The Greek Myths represent human society attempting to explain both average events and what today we would call 'extreme weather events' which were not uncommon in ancient times: it is now believed a volcanic eruption on mainland Greece created the Tsunami which destroyed the Minoan civilisation on Crete and probably Atlantis too. The powers of the Gods are said to determine human behaviour and nature continues to overwhelm humans as we have seen in Asia in the last 10 years or so; or in New Orleans (even if more precautionary action could have prevented the worst effects of the Hurricane on that city).

I do not think either the expression of Jesus or Mohammed amounted to a system, let alone a closed one, yet that is how early reactions attempted to preserve the messages, which relate to life on earth in the here and now and the hereafter. Jesus developed over time, and presumably would have continued to had he not been crucified; Mohammed initially received a revelation of the 'one God' but did so in a region where monotheism was already in competition with polytheism and it is one of the great arguments of history as to why the Arabs converted to Islam rather than to Christianity or Judaism, given that all three communities lived amongst each other at the time.

The creation of the 'Christian church' by Paul can be seen as a diversion from the core of Jesus's ministry, just as attempts to create a single systematic view of Islam have either failed, or in the case of the 18th century ideology of Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahab, have created a political monstrosity that not only departs from basic Islam but which repudiates its history as having any value. The result is a 'closed system' which in practical terms has attempted, quite successfully so far, to rub out of Arabia all trace of Jewish and Christian realities, and to deny that any other interpretation of Islam is valid.

And yet for religions to survive these new interpretations of ancient texts will always happen, even if the idolators claim they have rescued Islam or Christianity from the 'imperfections' accrued over time. Alternative interpretations of religions do exist, but seem to exist at a local level, possibly also at an individual level and so are not as well known as the more dramatic examples which perhaps because they engage with political acts attract more followers, but there have been reformers in modern Islam whose views were wholly different from the Saudi and Salafi views, and there are also Christians whose pacifism is closer to the message of Christ than the disgraceful betrayal of it by George W Bush and Tony Blair.

At some point, science replaced religion as an explanation of why we are here and what our future holds, and in science there are the same attempts to create definitive explanations of reality which are then overturned or 're-interpeted' by the Galileos, the Copenicus, Newton, Einstein of the ages.

It is wrong to claim religious belief is merely 'superstition' as at its core a lot of superstitious belief is either true or was believed to be true at the time. It is only 'superstitious mumb-jumbo' in retrospect. Many scientifics theories which were once respectable, such as concepts of 'race' have been shown to be rubbish, science is not exempt from the rules that criticise religion, and as the controversy over Climate Change science shows, even well educated contemporaries of ours can insist that what is there is not what is being explained.

First let me apologize for all the careless errors in my first post which render it almost unreadable.

I think we agree that most “closed” systems of thought are easily shown to be untenable, or eventually become untenable as civilizations evolve past them. Today’s living Judeo, Christian and Islamic communities survive and are influential because they themselves have been open to influence and reinterpretation.

I agree too that it is wrong to claim religious belief is merely superstitious. However, some beliefs still strong among modern practitioners of the Judeo, Christian and Islamic traditions are superstitious. Belief in an actual God. Belief in a soul. Belief in an afterlife. Belief in a literal Heaven and a literal Hell. Belief in eternal punishment. These highly mutable, ambiguous, religio-metaphysical concepts, however once widely believed or still believed, never had and could never have the standing of a testable hypothesis like that of the phlogiston theory of combustion which is today regarded as rubbish.

I can agree with the spirit of the passage...

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At some point, science replaced religion as an explanation of why we are here and what our future holds, and in science there are the same attempts to create definitive explanations of reality which are then overturned or 're-interpeted' by the Galileos, the Copenicus, Newton, Einstein of the ages.

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...but I have reservations about some of the wording. I’m not at all sure that science can ever answer the “whys” that stir religious and philosophical curiosity. But some of those “whys” have been pushed back by scientific advances to other “whys.” I’m also uneasy with the claim that scientists attempt to create definitive explanations. True, it would be nice to come up with, say, the definitive explanation of how single celled life got its start on this planet; but we all know that human understanding is never definitive, never absolute, never without error bars, always restricted by a domain of application and always in danger of conflict with some new discovery.

Trish -a fair point at the end, I probably expect too much of science than scientists would accept. And also on the 'why' questions.

What puzzles me is why people do not believe in the soul, or the mind- do you really think like danthepoetman that we are just machines? What then, is thought? 'Merely' instinct? How do you explain poetry?

I think the problem Beethoven had was not length -concerts went on for hours even in Mozart's day -it was that his contemporaries thought his music was incomprehensible noise.

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Originally Posted by Stavros

What puzzles me is why people do not believe in the soul, or the mind- do you really think like danthepoetman that we are just machines? What then, is thought? 'Merely' instinct? How do you explain poetry?

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I read a chapter or two of a book by a neuroscientist named Stanislas Dehaene called Reading on the Brain. One of things he discussed was the enormous amount of neural real estate that is taken up simply by the act of reading words on a page. He performed brain scans on illiterate and literate people and found significant structural changes in the brain based on the learned ability to read. He also found evidence that the ability to read displaces other abilities, such as spatial reasoning.

Maybe as a species we required a greater ability to reason than other organisms, and greater brain plasticity to adjust to novel circumstances. As society became more modernized and we required less rigorous use of our spatial ability we have found alternate uses for our extra neural capacity. Perhaps the ability to appreciate literature or poetry was never selected for but was a collateral consequence of having significant brain plasticity and good executive function. Once we developed the ability to read and transmit ideas, something that became valuable in the last several thousand years, we could then appreciate the novelty of uncommon combinations of words that appeal to some sense of aesthetic.

I'm not sure we need a soul to appreciate poetry but it is an activity whose utility is not easy to explain unless you believe it arose collateral to something else.

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Originally Posted by Stavros

Trish -a fair point at the end, I probably expect too much of science than scientists would accept. And also on the 'why' questions.

What puzzles me is why people do not believe in the soul, or the mind- do you really think like danthepoetman that we are just machines? What then, is thought? 'Merely' instinct? How do you explain poetry?

I think the problem Beethoven had was not length -concerts went on for hours even in Mozart's day -it was that his contemporaries thought his music was incomprehensible noise.

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Can there be machines that think? I’m inclined to answer, “Yes, for we ourselves instantiate the claim.” One must, I think, be careful to point out that we are neither digital like a Turing machine nor isolated like Searle’s Chinese room. It would appear that we are hybrid, electro-chemical neural nets intiimately connected to the world. This is intented, however, as a description, not an explanation. Because we are hybid, we may be every bit as complex as the world in which we are situated, a point some AI experts (e.g. Herbert Simon) have contested. Though your mind might survive being uploaded to a functionally isomorphic structure, it requires a physical system to manifest itself, just like a fist cannnot exist without a hand. When the brain ceases to function the mind vanishes. When the hand is destroyed, the fist doesn’t go to Heaven. Mind is physical phenomenon supported by physical structure. Thoughts are able to initiate electro-chemical signals to our muscles “instructing” them to contract or relax. Conversely, electrical signals applied to various structures in the brain can initiate specific thoughts and sensations.

I don’t know what a person’s soul is supposed to be. A specific platonic ideal corresponding to a specific person’s mind? A mind dies, but the plationic ideal lives on in the world of ideals forever? Can a platonic ideal be sinful? Would it be subject to eternal punishment? I don’t know any use for the notion of an eternal soul. So I tend to stay away from it. Does it explain poetry? If so, how does that explanation work?

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Originally Posted by broncofan

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Maybe as a species we required a greater ability to reason than other organisms, and greater brain plasticity to adjust to novel circumstances. As society became more modernized and we required less rigorous use of our spatial ability we have found alternate uses for our extra neural capacity. Perhaps the ability to appreciate literature or poetry was never selected for but was a collateral consequence of having significant brain plasticity and good executive function. Once we developed the ability to read and transmit ideas, something that became valuable in the last several thousand years, we could then appreciate the novelty of uncommon combinations of words that appeal to some sense of aesthetic.

I'm not sure we need a soul to appreciate poetry but it is an activity whose utility is not easy to explain unless you believe it arose collateral to something else.

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Turing machines are a creation of Alan Turing. They are idealized automatons. They were invented to circumscribe the notion of an algorithmic procedure. Every mathematical algorithm can be performed by an appropriately designed Turing machine. Conversely every Turning machine describes a mathematical algorithm. So there are potentially infinitely many Turing machines; one for each possible algorithm. Turing, however, made a wonderful discovery. He designed one Turning machine (called a universal Turing machine) that can be programmed to do whatever any other Turing machine can do; i.e. a universal machine can be programmed to execute any algorthm whatsoever. It’s as if there’s a threshold of complexity beyond which a Turing machine becomes a general, programmable computer.

I’ll go out on a limb here and speculate that there are also a universal, hybrid, electro-chemical neural nets: that before the evolution of Sapiens, animal brains were ordinary hybrid, electro-chemical neural nets analogous to ordinary Turing machines; but with humans brain complexity rose past the threshold of specificity. We became universal, capable of being programmed by our environment; i.e. capable of general learning. But this is speculation; not science. I currently have no idea how to make the proposal more specific or testable. So maybe I’m not out on a limb after all.

What you are saying makes a great deal of sense to me Trish, though I don't know enough about neurology to make any analogies. Even if various regions of the brain have fairly specific functions, the ability of the brain to re-wire itself so that regions of the brain interact with one another creates the possibility of new, emergent properties that arise from these interactions.

This might require a certain threshold both of plasticity and overall capacity. One thing in the book indicates to me that though our ability to learn is much more general than that of other organisms it is not entirely general: that is the fact that a complex activity like reading already begins to crowd out other functions. Maybe complex functions of the brain begin competing with one another placing an upper limit on how many such functions we can develop at a given point in time because they are both drawing on some of the same functions. Could someone be a great surveyor and fastidious fact-checker at the same time? Reading crowded out spatial activity because it is itself a spatially oriented activity, but one requiring more acuity for arrangements of symbols than we would see in nature.

So, it could be that we have a more general learning ability, but that there are natural constraints, such as the speed and ability or our brain to form new connections, the number of permutations resulting from the interactions of specialized brain regions, and total capacity.

Another interesting thing I read about reading is that when we read something that is descriptive we activate regions of the brain that would be involved in experiencing whatever it is we read about. So, a very vivid description of a flower, or of a taste may activate the part of our brain that would ordinarily process that experience. It could be that we have evolved certain behaviors that make us seek out novelty and even require some novelty in our environments, and that some of us read for pleasure because we stimulate these same pathways when we are not able to experience them first hand. So, if for instance someone is in prison, or is relatively sedentary, they are able to satisfy this human requirement to seek out novelty by reading because their brain isn't able to tell the difference between experiences conjured by vivid writing and actual experience.