The truth is, that the assumption that all religious and mystical people do not believe in the laws of physics is entirely false.
Oh, I completely agree!
In fact, that was my point, which I took to be an elaboration or variation of Viliam’s.
It wasn’t about scientific people versus religious people. It was about the wide diversity of religious belief versus the relative unity of physical belief.
Christians, Hindus, and atheists may completely disagree on matters of theology or metaphysics, but may completely agree on matters of everyday physical reality. (I say “may” because of course there are exceptions, such as young-earth creationists.) The same is pretty much true for, say, elementary mathematics.
We are all more-or-less equally capable of getting on with the physical world, even if we believe things about gods or spirituality that completely contradict one another.
I suggest that this is precisely because we all interact with the same everyday physical reality, and our physical beliefs are constantly tested by that interaction. If we come up with a wrong belief about everyday physical reality, we will encounter contrary evidence. If we come up with a belief that implies that airplanes shouldn’t be able to fly, we can look up and notice that in fact they do.
The sorts of beliefs that we call exclusively religious (as opposed to, say, beliefs about psychology that we happen to have learned in religious terms) are pretty much those which are not tested by our interactions with everyday reality. That is why they are able to drift so far from one another, from person to person, or culture to culture.
If the likes and dislikes of the gods were as testable as the composition of rocks, then theology would have the degree of consensus that geology does.
I’m not really sure where you are going with this. For one thing, it sounds like we need Viliam to clarify what it is that he was trying to prove in his statement:
“In the world of science, I can reason by the results. My microwave oven works. What is the chance it would work, if we got physics wrong?”
Regarding the rest, you’re making a lot of generalizations about religion and religious people, which I don’t personally find to be on the same topic that I was speaking about. That said, apparently I was nowhere near as clear as I thought I was in my writing, so I perhaps do not have room to judge about this.
I was talking about the concepts of what you choose personally regarding beliefs/faith/perspectives/point of view. I was not advocating any organizations religious or not, or even speaking much about them. Only personal choices.
Religion is the connection people make when you use the word faith, but I was actually trying to draw different connections, and advocating a deep level of personal understanding rather than accepting anything on faith—be it a religious notion or an atheist one.
Personally I find the more modern things going on in the spiritual communities a lot more interesting than what has been going on in the past few hundred years.
I find that individuals seeking truth get much farther than organizations. Organizations are collections of people, and I find that the multiplication of bias with the interactions of multiple people tends to outweigh the multiplication of the positive attributes of brain capacity. I don’t think this will always be true in the future, but I think has been true in most cases to this point.
Oh, I completely agree!
In fact, that was my point, which I took to be an elaboration or variation of Viliam’s.
It wasn’t about scientific people versus religious people. It was about the wide diversity of religious belief versus the relative unity of physical belief.
Christians, Hindus, and atheists may completely disagree on matters of theology or metaphysics, but may completely agree on matters of everyday physical reality. (I say “may” because of course there are exceptions, such as young-earth creationists.) The same is pretty much true for, say, elementary mathematics.
We are all more-or-less equally capable of getting on with the physical world, even if we believe things about gods or spirituality that completely contradict one another.
I suggest that this is precisely because we all interact with the same everyday physical reality, and our physical beliefs are constantly tested by that interaction. If we come up with a wrong belief about everyday physical reality, we will encounter contrary evidence. If we come up with a belief that implies that airplanes shouldn’t be able to fly, we can look up and notice that in fact they do.
The sorts of beliefs that we call exclusively religious (as opposed to, say, beliefs about psychology that we happen to have learned in religious terms) are pretty much those which are not tested by our interactions with everyday reality. That is why they are able to drift so far from one another, from person to person, or culture to culture.
If the likes and dislikes of the gods were as testable as the composition of rocks, then theology would have the degree of consensus that geology does.
I’m not really sure where you are going with this. For one thing, it sounds like we need Viliam to clarify what it is that he was trying to prove in his statement:
“In the world of science, I can reason by the results. My microwave oven works. What is the chance it would work, if we got physics wrong?”
Regarding the rest, you’re making a lot of generalizations about religion and religious people, which I don’t personally find to be on the same topic that I was speaking about. That said, apparently I was nowhere near as clear as I thought I was in my writing, so I perhaps do not have room to judge about this.
I was talking about the concepts of what you choose personally regarding beliefs/faith/perspectives/point of view. I was not advocating any organizations religious or not, or even speaking much about them. Only personal choices.
Religion is the connection people make when you use the word faith, but I was actually trying to draw different connections, and advocating a deep level of personal understanding rather than accepting anything on faith—be it a religious notion or an atheist one.
Personally I find the more modern things going on in the spiritual communities a lot more interesting than what has been going on in the past few hundred years.
I find that individuals seeking truth get much farther than organizations. Organizations are collections of people, and I find that the multiplication of bias with the interactions of multiple people tends to outweigh the multiplication of the positive attributes of brain capacity. I don’t think this will always be true in the future, but I think has been true in most cases to this point.