Religious people studying Science, Please explain (1 Viewer)

Ethicks

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Doing a science degree one can assume that you are going to come across content that goes against your faith, for example one of my lecturers makes it quite clear he is an Atheist and believes the whole God situation is rubbish.

Looking around I find several people with covered heads and probably even more with other beliefs. If these people are so offended by the Science that goes against the religion which they strongly believe in (We can assume they have strong beliefs if they are covering their heads thinking I want to rape them) then why the hell are they doing a Science degree? It's beyond me and I don't think these people make good scientists.

Discuss
 

kast

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It's not always that clear-cut. For some religious people, science actually doesn't seem to contradict their beliefs at all. Sometimes religious people are not really following organised religion, or it's more about cultural traditions than belief, or they're secretly questioning their faith, etc. They may appear more fundamentalist than they actually are.

However, something I did find baffling was a student in a lecture for a brain, behaviour and evolution unit who believed in creation, not evolution. That's a pretty clear contradiction... I can only assume they are masochistic and want to crush their own belief system.
 

dan964

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Re: ^
Food for thought: "Since when did evolution become a belief?"

I personally, generally see no conflict between religion and science. Q.E.D. (actually not really demonstrated but ok)
 
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Amundies

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We can assume they have strong beliefs if they are covering their heads thinking I want to rape them
Are we really discussing this in a thread where the opening post has this? Seems like the start of a very one-sided argument.
 

Ethicks

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Are we really discussing this in a thread where the opening post has this? Seems like the start of a very one-sided argument.
No one has blocked the reply section have they? Prove me wrong.
 

Queenroot

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Because science and religion can go hand in hand sometimes.... obviously they deny evolution from a single celled organism to multi-cellular....BUT some religions (the greek orthodox church), have accepted that evolution of a species occurs through natural selection...but not to the scale that a species can become another species..
Wat
 

Queenroot

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That is an example of someone who is religious and trying to justify their interest in science.
Tbh it's more that they haven't studied evolution in depth, cos what he said doesn't make sense. I'm guessing his HSC biology or high school sciences haven't done much for him to come to that conclusion. Uni evolutionary bio is where it's at, it really opens up your eyes to the world.
 

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Ethicks said:
If these people are so offended by the Science that goes against the religion which they strongly believe in (We can assume they have strong beliefs if they are covering their heads thinking I want to rape them)
What is the basis of your assumption? Can you prove that a) they have strong beliefs and b) they think you "want to rape them"? Did you speak to them? Or did you take this information from your pre-existing beliefs? What is your scientific rationale?

The point I am trying to make is that you should focus on improving your own rationale and challenge your pre-existing conceptions. Yes, you asked a question, but as Amundies suggested, it was seemed rather one-sided. The language you presented it in was not unbiased, scientific manner. It was also based on an assumption. If you are going to make a strong statement, you should have good evidence.

It doesn't matter what you believe, provided that the applied scientific methodology and analysis is sound.
 

Queenroot

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Queenroot - Ok..I stated that wrong, it doesn't make sense what I said ..what I meant to say is that when people say the church doesn't believe in evolution they are correct...HOEWEVER, some people think the orthodox church denies natural selection as well (not all people).


OP - In regards to the initial question here is an article by the Greek Orthodox Church of Australia...and i am by no means saying that God is real..people can believe what they want, what this is saying is WHY religious people still study science..because to them not all parts of it contradict with their religion

"Some of you may be thinking that the beauty of nature etc does not prove that God exists, because science has been able to explain how this diversity and order came about. It is true that science has offered explanations for a lot of phenomena, however as science progresses it has introduced new questions, and some scientists feel that science has if anything increased their faith in God. For example, in recent years physicists have realised that the universe contains some very basic constants, for example the speed of light, the force that binds protons and neutrons together, and if these were even a fraction of a percent different then there would be no solar system, no life. The probability of all these constants being “just right” to enable planets to go around the sun, to enable the formation of carbon, and ultimately to make life possible is so incredibly unlikely that it seems absurd to believe that it all happened without a creator. The most remarkable molecule in the universe is without a doubt DNA.

Evolution cannot explain the formation of DNA, this molecule, and the fact that it very occasionally makes a mistake when it replicates, is the basis of evolution. It has been worked out by scientists that the chance of random chemical reactions forming DNA is 10^40,000. This number is really huge! The number of atoms in the universe is about 10^80!

Orthodoxy has no problem with evolution as a scientific theory, only with evolution—as some people may view it—eliminating the need for God as Creator of All.

If you are an atheist then you would have to believe that the mind is explained only by the electrical circuits that occur in your brain, you would not believe in the soul. In recent times philosophers and brain scientists have increasingly delved into this difficult area. They have identified what they call the “hard problem.” Aspects of the mind such as memory, the ability to play chess, etc, are not trivial but not “hard”. For example computers can play chess and have memory. What is “hard” to understand, and what no computer can do, is aspects of the mind such as self awareness. What we can be more sure about than anything else is the fact that we are aware of our own selves, we can not only think and love and feel, we are also aware of ourselves thinking and feeling these things. No computer can do this. Is this self awareness due to physical circuits in my brain? If we think deeply about these things - think about our own thinking - then we can come to a conviction that surely we have inside us something that is beyond the physical, what we in the Church call soul."

Content Copyright © 2007 – 2015 Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia
Ok there's a lot of stuff in that post that I want to discuss but I won't
 

Queenroot

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I am not saying any of that is true (obviously that article is trying to prove existence of God)...but that is example of why some religious people still find it ok to study science....

OP you can't assume im sorry...."We can assume they have strong beliefs if they are covering their heads......"
I wasn't picking on you, there's just some things in that quote that don't make sense lol
 

Queenroot

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I'm guessing that "Evolution cannot explain the formation of DNA, this molecule, and the fact that it very occasionally makes a mistake when it replicates, is the basis of evolution. It has been worked out by scientists that the chance of random chemical reactions forming DNA is 10^40,000. This number is really huge! The number of atoms in the universe is about 10^80!"
doesn't make sense???

and don't ask me where they pulled those numbers from..i have no clue.
SCientifically- not very valid
Nah that's ok. It was more so the part about comparing a computer to a human brain and something about electrical circuits generating human emotion and thought.
 

phamtom44

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Galileo, Kepler, Pascal, Boyle, Newton, Faraday, Babbage, Mendel, Pasteur, Kelvin, Clerk Maxwell -> All believed in God? Most of them were Christians and their belief in God was often the main inspiration for studying science. Galileo said that his driving force was that he had an inner conviction that the Creator 'had endowed us with senses, reason and intellect'. 'The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order which has been imposed on it by God, and which he revealed to us in the language of Mathematics.' Kepler basically said science was 'thinking God's thoughts after him.' The 'conflict' between Christianity and science appears because of Genesis literalists who take everything in the Bible as scientific fact. Francis Bacon (basically the father of modern science) said that "God provided us with two books - the book of nature and the bible and that to be properly educated, one should give one's mind to studying both."
 

Simorgh

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Science and religion are fully compatible but they are based on different aspects of human experience, intellect and understanding.

Science tends to explain matters based on measurable evidence when examining different subjects. Religious faith, in contrast, does not depend on such empirical evidence because religion attempts to explain supernatural world which cannot be investigated by science. Hence science and religion can not be incompatible because science and religion are separate and address different questions of humans.

In fact many believe science and religion are complementary as they both can complete each other. Science is so much focused on explaining the “hows” or “whys” but religion is focused on the ultimate purpose and wisdom of creating, many believe that both could lead to perfection of humanity and human experience.
 

Librah

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Would just like to point out, that evolution by natural selection is not the only evolutionary mechanism. So i don't know why people keep mentioning it when referring to evolution.
 

Librah

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Science tends to explain matters based on measurable evidence when examining different subjects. Religious faith, in contrast, does not depend on such empirical evidence because religion attempts to explain supernatural world which cannot be investigated by science. Hence science and religion can not be incompatible because science and religion are separate and address different questions of humans.
This is self-contradictory. You explained how they are incompatible in the first two sentences, then come to the conclusion they are compatible.
 

Queenroot

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Would just like to point out, that evolution by natural selection is not the only evolutionary mechanism. So i don't know why people keep mentioning it when referring to evolution.
Because nobody here has studied it in that much depth but you are right
 

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