From: Scott Roberts (jse885@earthlink.net)
Date: Mon Aug 23 2004 - 07:16:25 BST
MSH,
> BTW, Popper's idea of Falsification applies to every religious
> "theory" you can think of. If the baby dies it God's will; if the
> baby lives it's by the grace of God. One of the reasons I drifted
> away from Catholicism at an early age.
Well, I drifted away too, but found reasons to drift back.
The falsifiability criterion is, of course, only applicable to religion for
those who think religion is supposed to make sense the same way science
does. For example, there is a web site that supposedly tests one logic, and
accuses you of being illogical if you don't believe in the Loch Ness
Monster, but do believe in God. You are being illogical, they say, because
there is no physical evidence for either. This ignores that the LNM, if it
existed, would be visible and tangible, but God is assumed to not be. So
they are stacking the deck by assuming that only physical evidence counts.
The main difference between science and religion is that science has to
work for everybody, but religion works individually. That is why a
scientific theory has to be falsifiable. A religion, on the other hand has
to work for one person at a time. This can range widely from people who
make inane statements like the ones you mentioned, to Zen, which says that
meditation will lead you to be insight. Spend several years doing so, and
you may get that insight (as Wilber points out, on average it takes about
the same time as it takes to get a doctorate in physics.). Hence Zen is not
falsifiable, but it is verifiable for oneself, if one is willing to put in
the effort.
It is very easy to see the faults in religion as practiced, but one should
bear in mind that most all those who call themselves Christian are
idolators or heretics of some kind or other. The doctrine of the Trinity,
for example, pretty much boils down to "God is a triunity, and if you think
you understand it, you have fallen into some heresy or other." Definitely
not science, but a powerful koan.
Of course, one can just forget about the Trinity, but I have found the same
sort of mystery in human consciousness. The main answers to the mystery
(idealism and materialism) are understandable, and wrong, since they
attempt to solve the mystery by redefining one half or the other of
consciousness phenomena out of existence.
Anyway, I find religious thinking to be fascinating, because it's task is
to think about the unthinkable.
- Scott
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